Dan, ‘The Man’, Can: Volume 20 - Welcome to Hell

1

 Miley posed before a purplish Christmas tree holding her dog, Griblets, in the crook of her arm. Wearing a flannel suit that matched his mother’s, Griblets eyes were wide - his ears fallen back - in wretched shame. Daybo stood facing the color-coordinated pair and aimed a phone camera at them. He snapped a burst of photos, nodded, and handed the phone back to Miley. The imperative, utterly essential task now complete - Griblets disrobed, liberated at last from his disgraceful garment - the trio returned to the couch. Daybo resumed slipping trading cards into protective sleeves, and Miley began looking through the photos. She quickly snorted, lolling her head backward and limply raising her hands, apparently paralyzed by the hilarity which her phone contained. 

 “Look at my face!” Miley giggled atonally, showing Daybo the screen.

 Daybo dutifully nodded at the photo that he had just taken. Miley continued scrolling through her gallery until she was once again stricken with paralysis at the sight of another picture.

 “Look at Griblets’ face!” Miley chuckled, scouring Deebee’s face for its reaction.

 Daybo nodded at another photo that he had just taken.

 More cards were slid into plastic sleeves and more pictures crippled Miley with gaiety, until both Miley and Daybo’s phones buzzed simultaneously. Daybo paused his card filing to check his.

 “Aow,” Daybo groaned. “Looks like Gay sent us another story.”

 “I know,” Miley sighed as she skimmed through the text, seeking to find a line which seemed worth quoting back to Gay in order to give him the impression that she had actually read the tedious tale. 

 Daybo was halfway through the second paragraph when he groaned once again.

 “He’s writing about us reading the story he wrote,” Daybo said with an air of incredulous disgust. “Both our phones buzz and we read the story. In the story.” He shook his head and exhaled testily.

 “Ugh,” Miley groaned. “I hate being in these stories! I ha-ate it!”

 Daybo winced, closing the story and resuming his card archiving. One minute passed in peace until their phones buzzed once again.

 “Oh, my God.” Miley blurted. She tossed her phone onto the couch without looking at it. (Griblets sniffed it in hopes that it contained food.)

 “Ah-h,” Daybo sighed angrily, picking his phone back up and glaring at it. “Oh, shit.” He said, once he read the brief text in the notification bar. 

 “What?” Miley asked.

 “It’s my estranged brother. Nitebo.” Daybo said. “He says, ‘Dan The Man has expired.’”

 “Wait, what?” Miley asked again, thinking she might have misheard. 

 “Dan The Man has expired,” Daybo repeated.

 Shock rendered Miley mute. 

 Daybo reread the text and cackled thunderously. 

2

 Dan Jordana awoke in an unfamiliar room. Thick yellow paint coated the walls and an insectoid ceiling fan hummed above the tiny bed with an uncovered lightbulb; its grimy pull chains swayed and clattered rhythmically. Queasy late afternoon sunlight peeked in from the little bedside window, covered only partially by its ratty, battered blinds. Dan sat up and looked out, finding that he was many stories above a busy street. 

 “What the fuck,” Dan grumbled. 

 He shut the blinds and looked over the room again. He was alone with a bed, ceiling fan, and slanted dresser, which he discovered to be empty. He felt his pockets to find that he only had his wallet, which he also discovered to be empty, barring his license - only, he found, upon further inspection, that it no longer said ‘Driver License’, but ‘Identification Card’, and that it had even expired nearly seven years ago. 

 “Goddammit,” Dan said. “What the hell did that fuckin’ hospital do to me?”

 Dan left the room and found an open elevator waiting for him at the end of the hallway. Entering it, he pressed the ‘Lobby’ button and descended. Two floors down, a large party of Chinese folks entered the elevator, crowding Dan into a corner and cheerlessly shouting in Mandarin at each other. Dan looked down at the little sea of black hair for the entire ride to the lobby, positively fuming at their brazen non-whiteness, their glaring, open refusal to assimilate unconditionally to abject Western consumerism. The elevator dinged, and the black hair liquidly shuffled out into the lobby. Dan watched them leave the hotel as a harmonious unit as he blankly lumbered on behind them, looking like a mutated castaway of their otherwise homogenous flock. Dan stopped in the middle of the floor.

 “Where the hell am I?” He asked nobody in particular, before noticing a familiar man sitting in a dingy chair nearby. “Ryan?”

 Ryan stirred, apparently having drifted off some time ago.

 “Dan?” Ryan croaked groggily. “Where the hell is this?”

 “No idea. Was hopin’ you could tell me.”

 “Well, for starters, I got shot by a group of dogs and woke up here a couple hours ago and walked around and said, ‘forget it!’ I don’t know. No idea. Nobody here speaks English. Nobody,” Ryan whined direfully, halting to rub his face. “Not a one. Dumbest stuff ever.” (He neglected to mention that he was, in truth, both too timid and incompetent to actually ask anyone he didn't already know even the simplest question.)

 “Found that out in the fuckin’ elevator,” Dan said. “Let’s go eat somewhere.”

 “Okay,” Ryan said.

 “Oh shit,” Dan said, patting his wallet. “I got no money. We’ll have to go to the bank.”

 They left the hotel and started down the street, choosing their direction totally arbitrarily, as the bank which Dan used was nigh ubiquitous, and hazarding to ask for directions from the nonwhite hotel clerks would have dented Dan’s pride. Plodding further they passed by more Asians speaking various tongues, assertive white and black panhandlers, rows of tents, tarps, and shopping carts which blocked the sidewalks, Mexican families lugging groceries, and huddles of stinking, glowering crust punks that sported dung-like dreadlocks and leered pretentiously at Dan and Ryan. One group even spat at the pair’s feet after being denied change. 

 “Good fuckin’ lord,” Dan huffed after passing them. “Land of the free lunch anymore. Fuckin’ bullshit.”

 They found a bank and went inside. Dan, hoping to withdraw $300 from his checking account, was displeased to discover that he only had $58 in checking, and was even further displeased to discover that his savings account no longer existed. He withdrew $50, believing that it would be more than enough to feed the two of them for a week or more, as long as they only went to three-star restaurants. While pocketing his cash, Dan asked the clean-cut white man standing behind it where they were.

 “San Francisco,” the man laughed, believing that Dan was joking.

 “What,” Dan muttered gravely after a tense pause.

 “Uh, this is San Francisco, sir. Chinatown,” the man elaborated. 

 Dan stood erect, his eyes glazing over in abrupt recognition. He turned to face Ryan.

 “By God, Ryan,” Dan said. “I surmise that we have died and gone to Hell.”

 “I am overwhelmed with joy,” Ryan replied. 

 “Can I help you with anything else, sir?” The teller asked. 

 Dan and Ryan left in lieu of answering.

3

 Early the following Saturday morning, Miley and Daybo arrived at Dan’s estate to begin the absurd, arduous, and virtually eternal task of settling the late Dan Jordana’s post-life affairs. Daybo slurped the last bit of coffee through its green straw as Miley turned off the car. He gazed up at the big old house with an empty, compulsory sort of disdain, growling hatefully when he finally mustered the will to remove his seatbelt and leave the vehicle. Approaching Dan’s front door, they found some newspapers waiting on the porch and several ‘missed delivery’ slips posted on the face of the door itself.

 The stench of rotting food and trash greeted the couple when they entered the home, as did the stifling, claustrophobic heat of a house left with no circulating air. Vermin scattered, bats darted about in tight circles, various livestock howled and brayed, and a group of hobos crouched around a makeshift fire (the fuel of which was Dan’s dining room table). Miley and Dave hesitated in the entryway and winced. Instead of traversing the putrid, feral, and nigh-supernaturally blighted innards of the ransacked house, they opted to go back outside and swing around the side gate to sit in the shade of Dan’s renowned patio. Their grimaces remained. 

 “So uh, I guess Barbie hasn’t actually been back huh?” Miley said.

 Daybo responded by twisting his grimace even further, exponentially increasing the amount of contempt it expressed. Barbie, Dan’s (now ex) girlfriend, had previously promised Miley and Daybo that she would take care of the house until Dan’s return from the hospital, but, evidently, had determined that it was actually not in her best interest to do so. Miley peered down the yard to inspect Dan’s pool, now a mossy, stagnant green; a bloated sheep carcass floated in it like some macabre iceberg. Miley sighed angrily and her face fell into her hands. They sat like this for some time, stewing silently, envisioning what other grim horrors may await them on this sunny Saturday morn. A mellow breeze rocked Dan’s tall, dying palm trees; their dry, brown leaves rattled against each other languidly. 

 “Do we actually have to do this? I mean, can’t we just let Barbie take whatever?” Miley asked half-rhetorically.

 The wind suddenly picked up with enough gusto to veritably decapitate one of the moribund palm trees, and its head plunged into the pool with a cataclysmic splash. Gobs of rank greenness spattered across the entire patio, leaving Miley and Daybo appearing as though they had contracted a rare disease.  

 “Ok yeah let’s go.” Daybo aptly concluded.

 They exited back through the side gate and walked towards their car. A great rumbling began to materialize from the street, and into Dan’s driveway turned a hulking pickup truck, its diesel engine chugging abrasively. It careened into a spot close to Miley’s on the broad driveway, and the window ceremoniously rolled down. A colossal white cloud of vapor flew out from it, as did, simultaneously, charcoal-black plumes of smoke from the truck’s roaring exhaust as its driver gunned the engine. The ham-fisted cacophony of rap metal boomed out from the cab as the cloud of vapor dissipated in the wind and the figure thusly came into view.

 “Who the hell is that?” Miley inquired anxiously.

 “Oh God,” Dave sank. “That’s Nitebo.”

 Nitebo had driven all the way down to Dan’s stronghold from Arcadia, the city that he had relocated to under the mistaken notion that it was a haven for arcades. A short, gruff, pseudo-entrepreneurial Philistine, Nitebo was the polar opposite of his younger brother; and, in this instance, opposites did not attract. Miley and Daybo made frantic haste to escape his dreadful company. As Miley made a three-point turn in the driveway, Nitebo was seen holding his tattooed arms up in agitated disbelief at their swift departure. Daybo shook his head at him and they left. 

4

 Pan and Dick were heading home from the grocery store with their adult son, Gay, who pouted in the backseat with folded arms. He glared out the window and theatrically sighed, vainly hoping to hook his mother into a pity party. Gay’s parents stared straight ahead, ignoring their boy’s pathetic attempt at synthesizing sympathy. As they grew closer to home, Gay finally cracked and laid his cards on their table while he still had the chance.

 “Was it really all that big a deal?” Gay asked with angst. “Jesus Christ.”

 “It was going to be forty-eight dollars, Gay!” Pan cried, restraining herself from scolding her son for taking the Lord’s name in vain, which would inevitably result in the manipulative Gay’s moving the goalposts.

 “Yeah, come on!” Dick chided. “You’re thirty years old, Gay! If you want to spend that kind of money, get a job!”

 Dick abruptly rubbed his head in anxiety. Verbalizing an objectively true statement before Pan and Gay was a coin toss, and despite his authoritarian demeanor, Dick often cowered in the true face of conflict; he was both as fragile and hard-shelled as a big toe (which made his resemblance to one all the more fitting).

 “Yeah!” Pan agreed, thereby relieving Dick of the potential argument that he had already began running through in his head.

 “I’ve been looking for a damn job!” Gay lied. “Nobody’s hiring right now!”

 “Yeah, well,” Dick ominously murmured, knowing that Gay was lying but unwilling to press his luck by verbalizing a second truth so close to the first. He rubbed his head again. “You really should have finished your degree.”

 This statement was the type of provocative that Pan could get behind, but instead of reprimanding Gay with words, Pan slowly shook her head at the road ahead - sitting upright, tense - with a disaffected hatred. A heavy silence accompanied the family the remainder of the trip, and Gay made a point to lightly slam his door when exiting his parents vehicle. He huffed as he yanked bags of groceries from the trunk, sighing vengefully all the more. 

 “Forty-eight fuckin’ dollars,” Gay growled to himself, or so he thought; his father’s hand briskly met the back of his head, and he dropped the groceries.

 “Oh, come on Gay!” Dick jeered, believing that his son was, yet again, acting melodramatic in order to win points with his intermittently-enabling mother. “You’re gonna break the eggs!”

 Dick’s high-pitched whine sickeningly resonated somewhere behind Gay’s ears, chilling the back of his neck with unadulterated malice. Hundreds of images of Father Dick’s bloody demise flashed through his mind in one moment. Unbeknownst to Dick, (or Gay, who was readying to exact his retaliation against Dick upon the innocent, fallen eggs by way of his heel,) Pan had seen the discrepancy from the other side of their vehicle.

 “Well guy, Dick!” Pan yelled. 

 Dick’s eyebrows hoisted and he rubbed his head again, looking like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. There followed a three-way standoff, which was quashed only when Dick expertly relented and picked up the groceries that Gay had dropped. Dick pursed his lips and shook his head on the way into his house, harboring a hypertension so potent that, with the right eyes, one could almost see the impending fatal stroke budding from within him. Gay and Pan brought more of the bags inside and nobody spoke to each other when they passed. 

 A ludicrous concoction of lamentable genetics steeped for years in the tea of toxic stress, Gay was as optically repulsive as he was internally. He automatically ignored his parents’ looming hallway mirror whenever he passed it, and always had an emotional shield of hair of some sort growing out of his head, his face, or both - and now, since his premature balding, Gay grew a long, stringy beard, already chockfull of white hairs, and, as if to actively accelerate his untimely aging, as though to beat Time itself to the punch of his inevitable dissolution, Gay had fallen into the habit of nightly beer drinking since moving into the modified luxury toolshed in the O’Nays backyard, and appeared as of late to be pregnant. His skin somehow looked both swollen and wrinkled. Late into the night he would listen to records and stare into the wall, attempting to enjoy the old drunken warmth of his youth, but, like an old band shirt from high school, it no longer fit the (seldom) walking ruin that was Gay.

5

 “Sorry I couldn’t get that IPA variety pack, guys,” Gay told Miley and Daybo as they brought him into their home that afternoon. “My dad freaked out, then my mom did, and that was that.”

 “That’s fine,” Miley said, attempting to not visibly wince at Gay’s immaturity. “I don’t think we really wanted it anyways.”

 Gay tried to play it cool in order to betray his intense craving for the craft beer, and the fact that it was essentially the sole reason for his visiting Miley and Daybo - a woefully sad matter considering that they were the closest people that Gay had in his meager world, and, at this point, were the last people left. Gay slid his backpack beside Daybo’s recliner and sat on the couch. Griblets wagged his whole body. After briefly greeting the geriatric dog, Gay proceeded to ignore him - the demon Beer was calling his name too loudly.

 “So uh, you making margaritas, or...?” Gay asked Daybo, thinly (and unconvincingly) cloaking his growing anxiety with irony.

 “No,” Daybo said with a mock finality that, although clearly in jest, crushed Gay. 

 Daybo turned on the Nintento Pii and Gay grappled harder with his withdrawals, the inverted self disgust, the subterranean fire raging below the abandoned town of Gay’s psyche. Miley had begun retreating within herself as soon as this awful vibe walked into her door, an old behavior left over from her childhood under the neglectful watch of drug-addict parents. She curled up under a blanket and began looking through her phone. Gay was gazing at Miley and Daybo’s banister when a Pii-mote was slid into his hand, and a virtual bowling game was kicked off. Gay, endeavoring to burn away the disquiet of unanticipated sobriety with the catharsis of violent bowling, proceeded to throw his Pii-mote into Daybo and Miley’s TV like some unqualified softball pitcher - the screen cracked, flashed, and went dark. 

 “Gay,” Daybo said. “Why don’t you step outside with me.”

 “Holy shit, I’m so sorry,” Gay said, mortified.

 “Why don’t we step outside.”

 Gay was frozen with horror. Miley buried her face in her hands.

 “Let’s step ouside, Gay,” Daybo calmly implored.

 Gay followed Daybo through their sliding-glass backdoor and stopped on the patio. Dissociating, Gay stared at their gardenhose and stood, waiting to be reprimanded.

 “Why don’t we go in the grass?” Daybo said. “The grass is nice.”

 “What?” Gay blurted.

 “Follow me,” Daybo said. 

 Gay followed. On the far side of their property was a moderately-sized rectangular hole, and a muddy shovel propped against the wall. 

 “What is that?” Gay asked.

 “I’ve been digging a hole, Gay,” Daybo said. “Do you like it?”

 “Yeah!” Gay obsequiously squeaked, trying his best to save face after destroying the TV.

 “It took me almost six hours,” Daybo said.

 “Wow!”

 “Did you see the bottom yet?”

 “No, let me look.”

 Gay went closer to the hole and looked at the bottom.

 “Nice,” he said.

 “It’s pretty deep.”

 “Yeah, no kidding!”

 “Yeah,” Daybo said. “Why don’t you get in?”

 “What?”

 “Try it out!” Daybo said. “It’s actually really nice.”

 “Ok,” Gay hesitated, turning to stick a leg in the hole. He watched Daybo’s trusting smile as he descended. Gay obediently stood in the hole, which was almost neck-deep.

 “Why don't you lay down,” Daybo said softly.

 “I’d rather not,” Gay replied, thinking of his clothes getting dirty.

 “C’mon, try it out,” Daybo insisted. “It’s really nice.”

 Gay shyly laid down and looked up at the purple evening sky. The soil was damp and cold. A plane flew below the dim crescent moon and Daybo’s face came into view within the hole’s frame.

 “Isn’t it nice?” Daybo asked, an odd tone creeping into his voice. 

 “Yeah, it’s cool. Do you lay in here sometimes or something?” Gay asked.

 “Nope,” Daybo answered, picking up the shovel. He scooped dirt from the pile beside the hole and threw it in.

 “Hey! What the hell!” Gay cried.

 “Shh,” Daybo said, pouring another shovelful in. 

 “Stop!” Gay yelled, still unmoving. “What the hell!”

 “Shh!” Daybo hissed, pouring dirt onto Gay’s mouth.

 Gay was muffled now, and remained compliantly motionless, still reeling in guilt for breaking their TV.

 “Oh hi, honey!” Daybo said. Miley came into view at the foot-end of the hole. “Do you like what I’m doing?”

 “Heh-heh-heh,” Miley chuckled down at Gay while greedily rubbing her hands. “Bah Gay! Dumb Gay!”

 She handed Daybo the beer which she cradled in her arm.

 “Oh, look, Gay!” Daybo said. “A beer! Maybe it’s time for a break. Hah?”

 Gay remained still as death, his shouts muffled by dirt.

 “Sh!” Miley hushed Gay, kicking dirt down at him.

 Daybo took a hearty gulp from the brown bottle and continued burying Gay alive. Miley and Daybo’s continual heckling was still audible through the steadily piling dirt. Gay returned fire via screamed insults into the mask of earth that squelched his mouth. The earth grew heavier and Gay’s breath became short; the mounds of dirt entombing Gay still softly heaved with his desperate gasps. Nearly filled in now, it was beginning to look less and less like a hole. Even Griblets had come out to help dig, thrashing at the dirt pile and sending paw-ful after paw-ful onto Gay. 

 “Fuck you-hoo!” Griblits said.

 When the deed was done, Daybo patted the dirt with his shovel and erected a wooden tombstone at Gay’s head. It said, “Stupid Gay”.