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By LONN PHILLIPS SULLIVAN
That night, as I drove through the dark, hazy desert toward the land of Las Vegas, our Nissan Altima became a time traveling shell from the outside world, flying past desolate hillsides where men we'll never meet found their end, zooming past packs of leperous desert people & cave dwellers, gawking at our headlights as if witnessing the flight of an intergalactic spaceship driven by King Solomon himself....
Marooned eyes withdrawn inside wounded, misshapen skulls begged at us as they peered on all fours behind their favorite rocks, long withered radioactive fingers clutching them in place.
Watching. Waiting for us to hit one of their traps.
Stalking the vehicle as a clan, we drove past these shadowy wanderers with calculated speed....but you could not outrun their twilight pact....or this neverending forsaken land.....theirs was an energy that darkened & haunted the echo of our every tire roll.....
As I've always done my entire life, I broke my own silence against our stereo pounding out Rush's A Passage To Bangkok:
"If we crash right now....if there's a box of twisted nails and deer antlers lying across the road, if this engine clicks off for some novel inopportune reason, if this goddamn battery lights up in a fiery immolation......we will be left out here among the shadows of Nevada "hill people"....until their darkness, their radiating teeth, and their grand conjuration consumed us entirely..."
We were among the darklands....shining a little beacon of light on a pathway paved by broken bone and twisted soul....
That macabre thought stung around inside my fiery skull until I decided to start recording an episode of our show on the phone. Grabbing the phone quickly and, without daring to even take a glance from the isolated, completely barren road ahead of me, I opened our camera app, then pressed record:
"LSU Odyssey transmitting from somewhere on the outskirts of Las Vegas, we are about 100 miles away, we have lost all GPS functions, all contact with the outside world, we have just over 34 miles of gas left, we have a bloody nose from continuous and incessant cough drop consumption, our "flower" supply is hearty, however the water resources are waining.....hallucination has begun to rule the roost, my people.....ghostly fable is taking over. As you fly 10,000 feet above us, staring down like artisan gods at this subterranean wasteland we have conquered, you may see us starsailing below on a real street level....next to the brush, among the sand, the dilapidated eyes of the hills watching us, but unable or unwilling to catch us......they know we're running down a dream....and nothing, not even a group of bloodthirsty, inbred, cannibalistic, necrophile mongoloid lepers will get in our way..."
About an hour later of voodoo ranting & The Stones' Exile On Main Street, the final hill of Don Henley darkness toppled over and revealed Las Vegas for the electric pornographic Christmas that it always was.....the Golden Ticket City In the Sky beckoning us forth.....a Jeff Epstein Fantasia.........images of Dorothy marching towards fields of green glass & dead flowers, off to claim the ruby slippers, while confronting the Grand Wizard as well as destiny itself.
Brian Kelly, LSU's own Wizard of Oz is the great CEO and politician of Louisiana State University....but behind the curtain (Year III signifying the curtain being pulled back), what would be revealed before our gasping, bejeweled expressions???
Will he please, for the love of God, kick Lincoln Riley's ass???
We would find out in Vegas, right at the climax of our LSU Odyssey....but before that, just a few hours after our arrival within the psychedelic electricity, before we'd even really laid our eyes upon our surroundings, we'd already been beaten so badly it would've made a casual sadist such as Kirby Smart change his pants:
They surrounded me in a North Las Vegas parking lot....a crew of LSU media folks....staring me down, eyeing me with bloodthirsty intent....I didn't recognize them....except for one.
The raven-eyed Matthew Scarbarlow.
His ominous presence, wearing a purple cloak, a bizarre crown made of glued bark and leafy twigs, adorned with a neon pink fanny pack.....this wasn't good.
"What's up y'all?" I asked as I flashed a smile, my cigarette billowing into their mechanically stoic faces.....mentally preparing for a 7 v 1 fight that would make Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises look tame.
"Don't say that again Mr Phillips Sullivan....you're not from Louisiana...." Scarbarlow ordered through his lisping rasp, the white hot parking lot light cascading a silhouette of vengeance upon him.
"Whats up everyone? Back from the orgy at the buffet?" I asked, making sure my rings of smoke plumed the air around us...perhaps forcing these non-smokers back like hissing fauna.
They stared unmoved...the smoke enhancing their Aryan features against the darkness...suddenly, I felt an intense fight or flight motivation, and right as I said, "fuck you!" and mashed my lit cigarette into the cornea of the nearest robot fiend, I was grabbed by three of the men from behind, clasping my arms apart, my chest left naked....vulnerable.
The man, who's eye I'd blinded with my cigarette, continued to scream in agony, dragging himself towards a dumpster in the parking lot's extreme corner.
As the other 5 men held me down and began to fondle my scalp suggestively, I looked on as the disgusted Scarbarlow summarily marched over towards his wounded, billowing "soldier", annoyed at his interruption of his "ceremony", and silenced him for good with a quick shot from his Berretta 9mm.
I gulped....and looked at the road....these fuckers are crazier than me...
Emerging as this faceless crew's ringleader, Scarbarlow shook his head gently as he fashioned a pair of gold brass knuckles, emblazoned with an insane-O-Mike the Tiger emblem.
I knew my fate was decided....my ribs were in for a disturbance unlike anything John Travolta's mind could create or Max Toscano could tweet...this would be pain unbridled.
We would have to taste the filth.
"You just don't seem to learn, Mr. Phillips Sullivan," Scarbarlow warned, feeling the steel against his fingers....his leather boots talking to my face with their each sauntered step, "this is our turf....whether in Baton Rouge, the desert or even in your own backyard, wherever LSU go, we will be...and wherever we will be will be ours....and ours only.....OURS...ONLY!" A punch smashed my chest with the last two words, punctuating each word via a violent socking to my chest.
I could taste the blood, feel the lacerated lungs swelling & spilling, another punch rocking my guts into a maelstrom, "this....will be....your last Odyssey..."
Scarbarlow mercifully kissed me on the forehead, licking my sweat through longing eyes as he then punched me in the left cheek bone....the brass crunching my face into a uniform distortion of dilapidated muscle, swollen skin, and purpling decay.
My face was giving birth out of my burning, dying, screaming mouth....I couldn't even make a noise, the sharpness of each breath....I'm just a college football writer....
I fell to my knees, and as I was about to topple on to my head, a member of the unknown media faces clutched me by the shirt, neatly caressing me to the ground and letting my head softly gel into the pavement pillow below....an empathy of annihilation.
"Alright boys, your turn first, Micah," Scarbarlow challenged one of his proteges.
I heard steps walk forward, someone turning on a boom box that blasted "You've Got Another Thing Comin'" by Judas Priest, followed by the crackling sound of a zipper, then a loud stream of thick liquid splashing against me.... a puddling, seeping aftermath that let me know I was now being pissed on as I bled...crawling a centimeter at a time with a broken finger, destroyed face, possibly two teeth missing....yup, those are my teeth right there, forlornly staring back at me...glistening against the translucent parking lot lights....
"....William...next...." Scarbarlow ordered like a coach.
This was his team...and every good team personifies their head coach.
The zipper went down with a creeping buzz and then a sipping stream of poisonous, noxious urine came tumbling down, half missing me as I crawled.
"Terrible form...what's wrong with you, William?" Scarbarlow barked.
"It's the....the diabetes..." he stammered.
"Put that thing away before you give me a seizure, it looks like a dead baby hamster...Jesus that's disgusting..." Scarbarlow blared on & on as his firm gaze never left the man's groin area.
After 2 more media members used a funnel to aim, police sirens forced the media gang to leave, taunting me with their own personal business cards as they left, laying them down next to me, one by one with a laugh or even a weird apology and a 100 dollar bill.
I could barely move, but somehow, after 25 minutes of laying there and not wanting to be assaulted by a pack of raging meth head UNLV media members, I got to my feet, and dragged my shattered, still breathing, piss-soaked, blood-stained body back to the hotel....
Limping my way to the hotel via the strip, I passed laughing frat boy onlookers, naked Robin Williams impersonators carrying snakes, a group of raging, mask-wearing USC fans screaming in my face about "condemning the evil Johnny Carson", and concerned women with massive breasts trying to comfort me.....but despite all the insanity around, the only thought that rolled around my skull was how I'd get my vengeance.
By LONN PHILLIPS SULLIVAN
©️ 2024 Uninterrupted Writings Inc
MADD Maxx got nothing on you. There is no law in the desert wasteland.