Three days later...
  J awoke to see a young lady standing above him. She was dressed all in white.
  “Don’t worry,” she panted, soft and lusty, “you’re in a hospital. You were attacked by a mob of skinheads. You were unconscious for three days.”
  Suddenly J felt something that he had felt before, a sense. A seventh sense. Germy was near, very near.

  At the same point in time in the very next room, Germy awoke to see an elderly man sucking on his dick. He had never felt this before, so he allowed the old guy to continue and blew his wad good and proper. A nurse walked in and caught the old man nursing a dribbling stiffy, lubricating it with Germy’s semen.
  “Now Mr Smith!” she exclaimed, “get back to the herpes ward right now!”
  Germy suddenly felt quite ill.

  Guided by his seventh sense, J got up out of bed, walked down the hall, opened a door and went up to Germy.
  “Hello Germy,” he said.
  A look of pure stupidity came over Germy. J was about to get hard.
  “Hello,” said Germy.
  “Hello,” said J.
  “Hello,” said Germy.
  “Did you brush your teeth this morning?” asked J, looking calm.
  “I think so,” said Germy.
  “Do you like to floss?” asked J.
  “Yes. But sometimes I forget.”
  “Do you like floral china?”
  “Yes.”
  “How many armchairs do you own?” asked J.
  “Two.”
  It was an odd moment.
  J had seen photos, but Germy was far more hideous in the flesh. J could see “straight edge” written all over him. And then “FAG” in brackets. He had a skinny pencil neck with a large Adams apple bulging midway and pasty unpleasant skin with traces of acne on his chin. His eyes were too far apart, separated by a big hook-nose full of blackheads.
  J felt sick.
  “Do you use spray or roll-on deodorant?”
  “Roll-on?”
  “Yes, roll-on, you twat!” J’s voice adopted a rather angry tone.
  “Well um... er... no,” responded Germy, unsure of where this was leading.
  “YOU HAVE TO USE ROLL-ON CUNT FUNGUS!” screamed J as he punched Germy in the face. Blood squirted out of Germy in a fashion that made J think of jelly pizzas. He clamped his hands around the throat of Germy.
  “Make no fuckin’ mistake, you half-eaten son of a butcher’s whore. I am going to fucking kill you!”
  Germy began to turn a purple grey colour as J intensified the hold on his throat. Unexpectedly, J was smashed across the back of the head.
  “Take that J, you arsehole,” yelled a floating mist of blubber. Grater floated above J. “I know that you had something to do with my death. The truth never came out. I am back to make your life a living hell!”
  J, frozen with shock, stared at the floating apparition of Grater.
  Germy, seeing his chance rose to his feet and quickly left. He staggered out the front of the hospital, walked over to a nearby bridge, and with great fatigue and pain, plummeted to the depths of the river below. J stared up at the pungent apparition. He was not actually sure at all if he had killed Grater or not. I mean, he had killed so many damn people it was all a drug-ridden blur.
  He did remember mourning the death of Grater, but not much else. Them was hedonistic days, he thought to himself. So he set about solving the murder conspiracy theory and sending himself to jail if need be. He was going to get to the bottom of the whole thing, even if it meant incriminating himself. He did not smoke a pipe or wear horn-rimmed glasses that often, but he felt the urge to do so, along with nice white suits and neat, short hair.
  He visited his long lost adversary, Never Turets. Turets was apparently one of the last people to ever speak to Grater. They had frequented the same bathhouse, The Steamworks. He could be found on the sixty-eighth floor of a dirty tenement building in New Fitzroy. J climbed the stairs past dirty filthy disgusting whores and priests and people who whispered “More” from between the cracks of their doors. He knocked on the door of Turet’s tiny apartment, the enamel of which crumbled at his touch. Never answered, in his usual ghastly short-sleeved shirt and skin tight pants. Saliva dribbled down his chin, a stupid grin plastered on his acker face. What was unusual was that he had apparently lost all of his hair and was using that hair-in-a-spray-can stuff that looked more like a fuzzy brown hat than a head of healthy hair. He had used it to replace his eyebrows as well and they looked rather silly.
  “J! How the fuck are ya?!” he sprayed.
  J hoped he would not catch conjunctivitis.
  “Not bad, Never,” replied J, “and how about yourself since I shot you last?”
  “Not as bad as the third time.”
  “Glad to hear it. Just wait ‘til next time huh?”
  Never laughed nervously.
  He was let into the apartment. All of the contents were violin-shaped. His bed, his iron, his table, his windows and even his Freudian Slit posters had been cut into the shapes of violins.
  “Weird,” said J to himself.
  J started probing Never about the last few hours of Grater’s life and where he had been. This set something off in Never and he stood up, pacing the room and chain-smoking. He let off a high-pitched riposte, covering almost everything with saliva. He began setting up an old 8mm projector.
  “You don’t know the fuckin’ half of it man! You are on track about as much as the Sylvestre Matuschka Express. You are in touch about as much as a deaf and dumb fundamentalist. You are as smart to this as fuckin’ Gomer Pyle with a lobotomy. There’s a conspiracy behind this bigger than Russ Hinze’s arse in a tub of collagen.”
  “Consider the fucking fact that the Bolivian Goat Army has stuck a maggot up the cunt of a democratic society and the Bowel Tactics Commission have eaten the face off of artistic freedom in this state,” he gasped, “the whole fuckin’ thing makes about as much sense as a schizophrenic on acid speaking tongues... like me... nebbershen bagel nivea.”
  There must have been a conspiracy, thought J, as it seemed that someone, possibly the BGA, had brainwashed him into thinking Grater had actually died of a heart attack all those years ago.
  J asked Never out of the blue: “So what is the date?”
  “Ahhhhh, the greatest mystery of all! No one who lives these days is truly sure. Several years ago a plague of calendar stealing occurred throughout the galaxy. You may have noticed that every single calendar you see has a different day, week, month and year. This has confused the fuck out of everyone. But hey if you ask me it is star date 36484.7, but that is a less than scientific guess. Anyhow, back to Grater; if you look at this film of his death I was handed by Time magazine, you can see the popular theory that he had a heart attack is a fucking lie! Look! Front and to the right, front and to the right. It’s clear that he has been shot! It is my theory that the gunman was in the chicken factory, if you look at this picture you can see a person leaving the building.”
  “So it wasn’t a heart attack after all,” thought J.
  “My god!” exclaimed J as he looked closer at the footage, “that’s Momma leaving the building. He’s the lone-shooting-chicken factory-shooting guy. I love that guy. I’ve met him on a number of occasions. He killed Grater, that bastard. He’s a bastard but I still love him. I want to touch his teeth. But he’s a bastard. What am I to do? I’m stuck in a conundrum.”
  J surmised that, since Momma was such a superb bassist, it was best not to incarcerate him and instead own up to it himself. Pure logic, he thought.
  “Oh and I spotted that ‘Star Fleet Pagan Ritual’ reference, buddy,” said J and shot Never in the head yet again.
  “See you next time J,” cheerioed Never as he reached for the Kleenex.
  The next day, J went to the police and admitted his guilt quite freely.
  He was booked and given the most thorough cavity search ever undertaken. It was performed by a small stocky man with a big grin called Mr Pompy Pompy. Mr Pompy Pompy wore clown makeup and laughed the entire time. J wondered if the man was even a member of the police force. Nevertheless, J happily smoked a cigarette after the procedure. Mr Pompy Pompy chuckled and quickly left the police station. J was fingerprinted and mug-shot.
  The brain-dead suburbanites were only vaguely aware of the case and didn’t really care. The story made page 632 of Posit magazine. J refused to deal with the media. No interviews. No pictures. Not that the media cared. They were not interested in an interview or taking any pictures. Only certain hip sections of the underground had ever managed to link J with The Jizzbuckets. In the eyes of at least six people, The Jizzbuckets had gained their very first inch of street cred.
  J was thrown into a cell in the bowels of the courthouse.