Detailing a Brief Run-In with Satanists and a Discussion about the Trials and Tribulations of Tip-Serfs

“A Bloody Virgin, Buck?” the igor said as Sparkman pulled out the barstool at the Midnight Coven in downtown Hellsboro. Buck sat down, cracked open a vial of idiot, and tossed it back. 

“Sure thing,” the gravedigger said.

Not that Buck needed to tell the igor he wanted a Bloody Virgin. 

The igors. 

The rendfelds. 

All the good bartenders knew that. Buck had made sure of it.

However, making this happen wasn’t without some difficulty.

It was.

Between the rising prices at the grocery store, unexpected doctor’s visits, and the perpetual dread that the entire economy might commit seppuku, Buck wanted one constant in his life, and that one constant was a Bloody Virgin. 

It was his favorite drink.

And it never changed. 

Ever.

Except sometime between Part VIII and Part IX, when Sparkman was sleeping..

But we’re not there yet.

Although Sparkman has read it a couple of times. 

OK, four.

He even added a rib-tickling soliloquy about the men’s rights movement and its similarity to a soiled bassinet.  

I know, that doesn’t make any sense, but trust me, if you find yourself between Part VIII and Part IX of Tombstoned, you laugh until your pants piss themselves.

As for this Bloody Virgin business, Buck had initially thought about inserting an ad in every paper and magazine — one that stated his name, Buck Sparkman, and his favorite drink, a Bloody Virgin, and, when applicable, his disheveled and hairy-faced mug, so no one would mistake someone else for the gravedigger.

Most importantly, it would say, “Buck Sparkman drinks Bloody Virgins, exclusively, and you must serve him as soon as he sits down at the bar or face an eternity sniffing the dirty diapers of thousand screaming babies packed tightly into a Duggar family clown car.” 

But he knew that wasn’t going to work. 

One, no one reads newspapers. 

Two, no one reads magazines. 

And three, that clown car was now an old jalopy in the junkyard dreaming of neo-puritanism and multi-level marketing schemes..

Whatever any of those things were, Buck had forgotten.

And yet they still lingered in his mind. 

Even this many years after the incident at Peru Nicholas’ malignant snuff film home.

The truth is, he needed the law on his side. 

He needed the Founding Fathers. 

And so he put it right there in the preamble to the Constitution: 

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and declare that Buck Sparkman drinks Bloody Virgins and only Bloody Virgins. You must give him one upon request, for a reasonable fee. Oh, and we also, establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Now, changing the Constitution wasn’t difficult. 

It changed all the time, depending on what political party was in power, Team Demon Cats or Team Rebel Ants. 

The challenge was making sure that it didn’t change again. 

And that, my friends, involved more historical revision then most gravediggers were capable of. 

Fortunately, Buck was the best in the business. 

Or so that’s what his business card said.

Still Sparkman had some reservations about upending more than two centuries of American jurisprudence.

The last time he rewrote history, Donald Trump was inadvertently elected president.

And no one wants that again.

Initially, the gravedigger had thought about adding a clause declaring that every Bloody Virgin was on the house, but Buck decided against it. 

He knew any Bloody Virgin he sacrificed would come out of some tip-serf’s pocket. 

And if there was one group Sparkman could identify with, it was the tip-serfs.

Buck had been one himself, back when he could barely afford a cracked first-gen Tombstone that only spoke Klingon and which was, not so secretly, waiting to bludgeon him to death.

Which was a bit unnecessary. 

At the time, Sparkman was no one’s better.

In fact, for six long years he was only 15 percent of a person, or at least that’s what the Census department said. 

The IRS though, thought differently. He was 2.5.

But thanks to a career as a gravedigger, he paid off his debts and bought back his freedom. 

He was now a full person once again.

Albeit at an annual interest rate of 22.5%.

Sparkman wasn’t alone in this predicament. Sasha had been in the same tip-serf situation when she was younger, but she broke free from her shackles in only three years, thanks in part to a gig she landed as a sommelier. 

The training served her well, especially in social situations. 

And that was a good thing. 

Buck had never been to a dinner party he didn’t want to strangle. 

In fact, he’d been on Fodor’s Most Wanted for five years running.

They had yet to arrest him.

That said, Sasha’s skills were unparalleled for an amateur. 

Sometimes with only a simple sniff and sip, she could divine the dirt in which the grapes were grown:

The back alleys of Brooklyn.

The fetid and feverish shores of Okefenokee Swamp.

The sands of Yucca Mountain Nuclear Depository.

She also could tell you when it was bottled: 

A fruit-filled cooler in the back of Camaro Z28 following a Fourth of July weekend.

The newly found piss drawer in a toddler’s dinosaur-themed bedroom.

The bowl of a prison toilet. 

The delousing powder remnants in the prison wine gave off a slight, but pleasing, sourness, while the water fountain left a sharp hint of shame and cholera.

At one particular fancy dinner party, the kind at which Buck wore a sports coat and a muzzle, the entire table was convinced that the bottle contained hints of PTSD and off-label uses for oxycontin and klonopin, but Sasha knew better. 

More importantly, she knew to remain silent while the other guests amused themselves with grape-think, until they all agreed that they, yes, they could all taste the slight pepperiness of a good waterboarding. 

But then they turned to Sasha.

She smiled.

And she then said without malice or egotism that the pepperiness was marked by certain existential woe while the hints of cherry suggested a considerable fondness for auto-erotic asphyxiation. 

Sasha then listed off all the other tastes and smells: a semen-stained teddy bear, a tattered copy of Larry Flynt’s Crime and Punishment, two empty tubes of toothpaste, various and sundry animal parts, and a Fabregé egg that had once been used by Catherine the Great in preparation for a stallion ride. 

It was all bullshit, Sasha told Buck one night in the early days of dating. 

The trick she said was speaking with authority and opening yourself up to a word association session. 

Idiot helped too. 

It helped everybody. 

But sometimes, idiot wasn’t enough. 

“For Christ’s sake, what’s a dog got to do to get a bowl in this place?” Terry growled as he jumped up on the barstool. 

“I don’t know, beg,” Buck replied. 

The terrier growled.

“And to think there was a time when you used to roll over for belly rubs,” Sparkman said. “What happened to you, Terry?”

The bartender looked at the dog and the dog wagged his tail. Terry answered, “I got tired of wearing a collar.”

The cravedigger nodded and deflowered his Virgin. “I supposed that would do it,” he said.

“Want to go on a walk after this,” Terry asked, “Or does Sasha still have you on a leash?”

“Only in the bedroom,” Buck replied. 

He looked at Terry and then tilted his head back to the table behind them. 

Satanists. 

Four of them. 

And they were pounding Brimstone Lights. 

Five pitchers worth, by the looks of it.

Each one was wearing a hooded cloak, a pledge pentagram, and an Oozie Wulfsbane T-shirt, the resident rock star of Hellsboro. 

One T-shirt was new.

Two were faded, fake retros.

And one was a black market concert parking lot abortion where the different layers of color didn’t line up.

On top of the table, a lamb struggled and cried.

Everyone heard it, but no one cared. 

Buck had seen this movie one too many times to be surprised how it turned out. 

The lamb would be sacrificed on the pool table. 

Blood would squirt all over the place. 

The bartender would break out a mop, throw down a miniature caution sandwich board, and by the power of the Lord compel them out the door and into a gig-economy hearse.

The cravedigger rolled his eyes: “Jesus, can’t an adult drink in peace. I’ve had it with these kids.”

“I’m trying not to notice,” Terry replied. 

The bartender brought over a bowl of Meister Bow. He winced. 

“Ugh. This is bad,” Terry said. “Tastes like toilet water. 

“Ha,” Buck said. “I drank that shit once. We were at Sasha’s parents. I’d been doing idiot all day and I guess I passed out at the kitchen table. When I woke, I was parched as hell. So I did what any idiot hopped up on idiot did. I went to the john for a drink. I didn’t even taste the blue until the third or fourth swallow. 

“Not bad though, right,” Terry said. “Minity.”

Buck nodded.

Sparkman’s Tombstoned dinged. It was Sasha: “Howzit?”

He fumbled a quick epitaph.

“At the Midnight Coven. Satanists here. Again.” 

He hit send. He’d ranted to Sasha far too many times about Satanists for him to offer any additional explanation.

The Satanists had resumed. This time it was something considerably ominous: a school fight song, Sparkman surmised. 

He waited for Sasha to reply back.

The Satanists had stripped off their cloaks and were oiling up their bodies with lamb’s blood, all while they hissed strange incantations and alma maters. 

Sasha wrote back, “Sounds good, honey. Do you want me to put Sasha Jr. to bed or keep her up?”

Buck looked around the room. He did the math: Four Satanists, a lamb whose guts were splayed across the pool table, and a bartender who, judging by the mop he held in his hands, wished the four Satanists had not come to his coven to sit for a spell. 

“Nah,” Buck wrote. “I should be home in time to read to her before night night.”

He hit send and then put down his Tombstone.

“You want to head?” Terry asked. “It’s about to get messy here.”

Buck nodded absently, by habit perhaps. Or perhaps it was the idiot coursing through his veins.

It was then Sparkman remembered the silver bullet suppository. 

He had failed to take it.

He picked up the phone again and typed: “Actually, I’m going to leave in just a few.”

If he was going to transform into a wolf, he’d rather do it at home.

With Sasha dressed as Little Red Riding Hood.

But first, he’d need to drop by a wineshop. 

There was nothing quite like a merlot with big eyes and big teeth to set the stage for a trip to Grandma’s house.