Extracts
Break On Through - Americanized Version 1998

Written by LA VADE aka Rapsodomy © 1998
Chapter 24 - Fort Apache

One of my friends, who used to come up from Fort Lauderdale to party with me from time to time, was Apache, he was funny and very cool; a kinda hippie laid-back sorta dude with a penchant for Nine Inch Nails, beer and pot. He had beautiful long black hair and a lineage he could trace right back to the Choctaws of Alabama on his mother's side. We got on really well but he was actually an old flame of my sisters. We’d bonded through adversity as at the same time I discovered that if I wanted to stay slim I have to diet for the rest of my life, Apache was diagnosed with diabetes. We were united by our lousy luck, but again I was the lucky one. If I ate the wrong stuff I’d just get fat. If Apache ate the wrong stuff he could die.
He was originally from Miami Beach and, like anyone who grows up within a ten-mile radius of the place, was a fierce drinker.
I got a call from him, one Friday, saying he’d be arriving that afternoon for a visit but three days later, typically, he was still in Fort Lauderdale. There was a handy bar next to the station and to pass the time while he waited for his bus he’d gone into the bar and drank a few beers. He enjoyed the beers so much that he missed his bus. He hadn’t worried as he knew there’d be another a few hours later. Naturally, he went back to the bar.
He carried on drinking and carried on missing buses all night long. Twelve hours later, he did manage to catch a bus but he wasn’t on it for long. He was so stinking drunk by this time that the bus driver threw him off for being drunk and disorderly.
He woke up, the following day, in a police cell, assuming, he was in Dade County. After the police scolded him for getting so intoxicated, him being a diabetic, (he always wore an SOS talisman) they cautioned him for the stash of pot (which he always carried) which they’d confiscated the night before. While they processed his details and checked his record he was fed and fell back to sleep. When he finally got out of his cell it was around 5 o’clock on the Sunday afternoon. That’s when he found out he was actually in Pompano Beach; precisely seven miles from where he’d started out two days earlier.
Like I said, Apache was a very good friend. He was like a favourite cousin and everyone he met liked him too. Especially Manny. Manny thought Apache was a little too great. And, that, was his downfall. The end of his tyrannical reign as head puppeteer and supermarionator.
Apache guessed straight away and told me in no uncertain terms that I must stop at once my quest for this guy’s heart. Firstly, because Manny was gay, (part bisexual, maybe, but gay anyway) and secondly, because this guy didn’t have a heart. I hadn’t even noticed it but he’d been flirting outrageously with Apache since I’d introduced them, but anyway, he’d let it slip about Billy and then he’d confessed that he’d been juggling the two of us. He’d laughed as he’d pondered which one of us he would dump.
I was appalled. I could not believe it. Had I been in so deep that I couldn’t even see what was right in front of me? The penny dropped and my dreams were shattered. The light shone, and then blinded me. It should’ve been obvious, looking back, the way he’d always kept me at bay but given me just enough to keep me interested. The secrecy. The feeling I sometimes had that there was always another agenda, but it never crossed my mind that not only was he playing another set of rules, he also had another set of pawns to play with. So there it was, and there we were.
To this day I have never met anyone crueller, sneakier or more sadistic.
I couldn’t believe I could be so gullible either, so utterly naïve. It was like looking at one of those trick camera shots where you believe you’re looking at the actor but then the camera pulls back and you discover you’ve been looking at the actors reflection in a mirror. I was demoralised and disorientated. I knew right away that I’d have serious trouble walking away from this with my sanity in tact.
I never found out if Manny had enjoyed his work as I never spoke to him again. Maybe I should’ve done, instead, I bottled it all up and like a hungry child to the breast I turned destructively to the comfort of alcohol and the drugs I was dabbling with. I thought I could blot out my stupidity and I scurried eagerly down the long hard road to oblivion, where I could find excuses for falling for this heinous impostor.
The realisation that I could be so easily duped rocked my soul, it was annihilating. I was lost. I think that was when I began to hate myself. A dark chasm opened up and I was catapulted into it, arm in arm, with my bedfellows paranoia and nihilism. And, as by nature, I don’t usually do things by halves, I proceeded to destroy myself, perhaps in the vain hope that I would, one day, find myself again.

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Written by LA VADE aka Rapsodomy © 1998