volume one IN THE D U D L E Y C L A R K - Ohio Vine Tours

general public, they almost made it all the way home—in fact,
they made as far as the alley out back of the Odd Duck Club where
Rick slid into phase three.
When the moon was full, Rick would often say he might turn
into a werewolf and slash Roy to ribbons. He said this because,
once, when he was on a really, really bad acid trip—the kind that
evaporated your brain—Rick thought he was Lon Chaney. He
had watched his hands in horror as they became covered with
hair. He stared for hours in the bathroom mirror at his hairy face
before it turned into Cherry Garcia ice cream and melted.
That was what Roy always thought of when his brother entered
phase three—that Rick would turn into a werewolf, not into
Cherry Garcia ice cream—and that was exactly what happened
that night out back of the Odd Duck Club, behind the Oddfellows
Hall on Capitol Hill.
He never saw it coming. His brother, who had just been puking
into the gutter, and onto Roy’s shoes, straightened up and grabbed
Roy by the lapels of his jacket and hurled him backwards into the
alley. A very surprised Roy slammed into the big, green dumpster
parked there, cracking his hairless head against the chain used to
lock down its heavy lid. The skin on the back of his bald dome
where he encountered the chain burst apart in an angry gash from
which black blood gushed.
Dazed, teetering on consciousness, Roy started to slide down
to rest in a rumpled, blood-soaked pile, but was stopped when his
brother grabbed two handfuls of him and jerked him back to his
feet. The fact of Roy’s knees buckling apparently really pissed
Rick off. To teach Roy a lesson, he socked him hard as he could
in the gut. Roy, his body racked with pain, only vaguely engaged
with the world, folded neatly in two and snapped forward with the
force of Rick’s fist. As his face shot forward and down, in synch
with his body, adrift in the timeless void that exists at the center
of intense pain, Roy heard Van Morrison’s gritty growl singing
about how his head was in a swirl, and that he was all wrapped up
in dreams and that was when Rick’s right knee popped up from
the darkness and encountered Roy’s face and drove the pain away,
and caused a starless night to descend—
ROY ROGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY 1