Rabbits

I first heard about the Game in the summer of ‘96 at the Beehive coffee house in Pittsburgh. I’d followed the lead of so many others before me and dropped out of Pitt, becoming something of a fixture in the early BoHo scene in the Oakland neighborhood of the ‘Burgh, and the Hive was the epicenter of that particular waste of brain cells. Hipsters weren’t really a thing yet, but I was kinda one of them before it was uncool to be one… I don’t mean that I was wearing flannel and beanies, but I really did listen to music that you’d only heard whispered about, smoked a pipe with actual tobacco in it, and drank French philosopher amounts of coffee in an effort to get the molecular structure of my body to vibrate so fast I could pass through solid objects. I also did a full on kaleidoscope of recreational substances, so I’m warning you right off that I might not be the most reliable narrator. I can only relay what I perceived or learned later through the accounts of others.

I don’t mean to keep digressing but I need to give you some background… set the stage so to speak, so that what I tell you at least has some frame of reference.

So to digress further, I spent a lot of time at the ‘Hive. Like I was there any time I wasn’t working, and a lot of the time I was unemployed, and paying rent solely by selling plasma. I helped out around the place in the mornings when my favorite coffee jockey (barista didn’t really enter common parlance for a couple more years, and I still think it’s fucking pretentious) was working. I admit I may have been trying to get into her pants but was too dumb to know how. Anyway I sort of gradually drifted into employment there. I became the janitor.

The next part of the set up requires that I back off a bit and focus on one of the regulars. We called him Handjob for reasons that should be pretty apparent after I give you a description. He was in his late forties or early fifties, tall and thin. He always wore a denim vest with the words “Thank God It’s Indian Summer” embroidered on the back. And he built weird little contraptions from rubber bands and paper clips that he wore on his hands and would use for a variety of things like holding his cigarette. The guy seriously wore an entire fucking utility belt strapped to the backs of his knuckles, like Freddy Krueger had a love child with a Swiss Army knife. He would spend hours just sitting there, smoking, and fiddling with his weird little inventions.

One time… early morning… Kelly was slinging joe and I was sitting at the end of the black Bakelite counter failing to flirt with her when in walks Handjob with what looked like one of those old time Thermos bottles, except it was fucking huge, and asked Kel if he could get it filled. Well, she tells him that she has to charge him by the cup for it. He says that’s no problem and she proceeds to start doing so, filling a large mug to start pouring it in. As she pours the first cup she hesitates as a look of fear crosses her face, and she makes like she’s not going to finish pouring, but some of the Ethiopian yirgacheffe has already slopped into it. Her hesitation disappears after a second, and her expression changes to relief. It takes 12 mugs to fill.

Later she tells me that at the bottom of the jug she saw a whole bunch of wires and that she was pretty sure she was looking at a bomb. The fact that neither of us were surprised by this should give you all the rest of the information you need on Handjob.

So it was about a month later that I clocked in for my shift, made myself a Raspberry Alarm Clock (five shots of espresso, two shots of raspberry Touranni syrup, and an ounce of heavy cream) and set about cleaning the bathrooms so I could take my break in time to score Midnight Madness on the new Junk Yard machine we’d just gotten in.

It wasn’t unusual to find weird shit when I was doing my rounds. I’d once found in the space of a single night a brand new $100 camera, a nice hand blown glass bowl, a quarter of ditch weed, an 8-ball of coke, three pairs of gloves, and a wool scarf. So seeing what I thought was a promotional poster for a band sticky-tacked to the wall of one of the stalls in the mens restroom wasn’t all that odd. It was only as I pulled it off the wall, thinking maybe I’d just move it to the cork board out in the stairwell, that I got a look at it.

It was a Xerox collage of what appeared to be a bunch of photographs. Weird shit that didn’t seem to make any sense. What looked like a page from some scholarly work on Egyptian mythology say in the background, a depiction of Wenet, possibly Thoth’s consort, a goddess with the head of a Hare. An old copy of a Tenniel White Rabbit illustration, a photo of Grace Slick in concert, and at the center of it all a copy of a photo of what looked like a Chinese takeout menu. I decided that this bore looking into later and folded it up, sticking it in my pocket. Behind it, in blood red Sharpie, someone had scrawled the words “THE DOOR IS OPEN” in serial killer handwriting.

The rest of the night passed by pretty uneventfully, I missed Midnight Madness by about 10 minutes, finished my shift, and waited for Kelly to show up to open. I had completely forgotten about the weird art project in my pocket and was trying to make time with her when Handjob walked in, tacked something to the cork board, and without a word headed down the stairs toward the basement. It was 10 minutes later we heard an ear splitting shriek from downstairs. I ran down right away and Kelly called 911.

I found Handjob in the stall curled up in front of the red graffiti and rocking back and forth muttering “It’s Rabbits… It’s Rabbits…It’s Rabbits…” over and over.

As the EMT’s carted him away with a healthy injection of Thorazine, I took a look at what he’d tacked to the cork board. It was another Xerox collage, this one of what looked like a library book’s punch card and a photo of graffiti from somewhere. In the center was scrawled that same phrase.

“THE DOOT IS OPEN”