Chapter 1

It was somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the anti-smoking drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel like total shit ... maybe I should pull over." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around me and the desert seemed to be full of what looked like brightly colored unicorns, all screeching and galloping around my old truck, which was just barely able to make the speed limit on the road to Las Vegas. My voice was screaming: "Holy Crap! What are these goddamn animals? Where's my gun?" Then everything was quiet again.

There was a diminutive fairy, barely a foot tall complete with little gossamer dragonfly wings on her back and a magic wand, now sitting on the passenger side of the truck's bench seat next to me. She had pulled the top of her gauze-like diaphanous dress down to her waist and was rubbing Estee Lauder moisturizer over her bare tits, to facilitate the tanning process.

"What the fuck are you yelling about?" She muttered, staring out the passenger window at the sun with her eyes closed and her small face covered with tiny Prada sunglasses.

"Never mind," I muttered. "I'm not driving anywhere and unless you want to drive shut the hell up for a minute." I hit the brakes and aimed the Little Red Rollerskate toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those unicorns, I thought. The silly little fairy twat will see them soon enough.

I had been desperately trying to stop smoking since I left the military about six months ago and was frankly having a very rough time accomplishing this goal. I had first started to smoke when I was a teenager and now a decade later I had finally decided that I really needed to stop. Spending two years with the Marines in a mountainous shithole called Afghanistan had jacked up my habit from two packs a week to nearly two packs a day. That was a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Like my life didn't already have enough of those already.

I came back home to San Diego after doing my service time to a faithless wife that had apparently pretty much already picked out a replacement sleeping partner even before my side of the bed had gotten cold. I hadn't been overseas for more than a few weeks before I got my first Dear John letter. I say first, because she'd start up a relationship with a new man, write me to say she wanted a divorce and then a month later break off the affair and then beg for reconciliation with me.

The first time, sure I guess I could forgive her, ok. The second time, well maybe ... but the third and fourth repeats of this cycle just began to piss me off royally. It took a year for the whoring slut to finally sign the gawddamn divorce papers, and that was only after I'd agreed to take sole responsibility for all our joint credit cards that she had maxed out while I was gone. A major and horrifically expensive mistake that ate up most of a year's worth of overseas combat pay by the time I finished settling the last bill.

She'd sorted out our stuff and put most my things into storage (paid for with my credit card of course) for the last year I was overseas. She needn't have bothered. There weren't ten things left out of any of my stuff that I would have paid anyone at a garage sale a dollar for. TV ... gone. Stereo ... gone. Dad's Morgan silver dollar collection, his old LP's and my CD collection ... you guessed it, all long gone.

Basically it looked like her revolving cast of boyfriends was able to cherry pick through my stuff in turn and each take their pick, leaving me with the leftovers no one else wanted. Thanks a fucking heap! One of the fucktards even had the balls to offer to sell me back some of my own stuff! I offered in return to bust up his kneecaps and kick his balls so far up into his body that he'd sneeze splooge instead of snot.

Fortunately, no one had wanted my nearly twenty year old small beat-up to heck red Toyota pickup truck I called my Little Red Roller Skate. It looked like a refugee from a scrap yard and had more Bond-O than original body metal and paint, but the engine ran like a dream. She wasn't a speed queen and hated to be driven on the freeway, but she had 200k miles on the odometer and was still purring. It was also now the only thing that I had left of my father.

I packed up about two small boxes of stuff barely worth rescuing and left the door open at the storage unit so that some of the local Mexicans could salvage whatever they wanted from the rest. Why not, everyone else had already had their pick.

As they say on TV, then I loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly. Hills that is ... swimming pools ... movie stars. And a crappy armed security job that paid peanuts guarding the rich, obscenely rich, and insanely and disgustingly rich. The rich also try hard to stay rich by stiffing their employees as much as possible and giving them endless amounts of insane crap, hoping you'll quit so they can hire someone even cheaper. Still it was better than shooting Taliban ragheads and I was slightly less likely to get shot back at.

The jobs sucked and my life was starting to suck even worse. I'd go home to my tiny efficiency apartment and drink a six-pack of beer for dinner (or breakfast) and crash. It wasn't much of a life, but it was at least one all of my own making. I started to seriously think about reenlisting. I could keep my three stripes and go back to the Middle East again ... and probably lose what little sanity I had left, but I was already going nuts as a civilian.

The stress didn't help my smoking and soon I was chain smoking like a freaking chimney, up to nearly three full packs a day before I made the decision that I had to stop. I tried and failed cold turkey repeatedly for over a month and gave that up as a bad idea. It shot my nerves completely to heck and made me jumpier than a Baptist preacher in a room full of trannie hookers. It also made the rage that I felt on a daily basis nearly uncontrollable and it cost me an almost decent job with a boss that I almost liked.

I hated the taste of the nicotine gum and using the nicotine patches soon gave my arm a violent allergic rash that I couldn't stop scratching. Nearly ready to give up, I checked over the crappy insurance coverage that my new employer offered to find a skid row general practioner or Doc-in-the-Box that I could go to get something to kill the constant overwhelming urges to chain smoke ... or else take up a new occupation killing other things. After talking it over with a few of my coworkers I found a Doc that they had liked and who would accept our grade Z health insurance plan. This fact alone meant that he was probably an utter quack, but I went anyway.

For the next three weeks he tried different prescriptions, starting off with relatively mild medications and then graduating up to the more aggressive drugs. Zyban and an alphabet soup of anti-depressants just seemed to do nothing at all no matter how we adjusted the dosage.

Paxil was the worse by far. It partially soothed my urges to smoke but made me hyper touchy and perpetually on a hair-trigger temper, and it gave me nightmares. Chantrix was even worse, giving me a constant feeling of rage I could just barely suppress. It was worse even than going cold turkey ... how I managed to avoid killing anyone I'll never know.

My dreams at night were even more unsettling and just made my waking hours even worse. I'd have vivid and violent nightmares of gleefully carving up my coworkers and employer into tiny pieces, of walls melting, and my cat turning into a giant snake that slowly choked me with its tail. Another night I dreamed I climbed endlessly up and down a gold brick staircase into the sky that ended up absolutely nowhere, while weird animated flying creatures and clouds laughed at me. Real crazy shit. I'd wake up in the morning if anything more tired and irritated than when I went to bed.

Add to this the weird sleepwalking & sleep-drinking side effects and I gave up and dumped the whole bottle of pills down the drain after just four nights. The last straw was when I suddenly woke up outside at 3:30 a.m., fully dressed, trying to unlock the door to my truck using my K-Bar combat knife.

The cure for smoking so far was much worse than the disease. The 'miracle' anti-smoking drugs all seemed to me to be just like the 'new and improved' anti-malaria drugs, Lariam and Mefloquine, which the docs had given to us when we got to Afghanistan the first time. Useless shit that give insane nightmares to half of my unit and guaranteed to get a soldier or jarhead a good head start on their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder long before they ever heard a bullet fired in anger.

The quack thought that I might have a bit of PTSD left over from my Marine service in Afghanistan (Duh!), and that combined with the anti-smoking drugs (and my habit of drinking dinner) were all making me just a bit unstable. No shit Sherlock!