Prologue.
This is a story about all the most important things in life: sex, beauty, art, romance, sequins, and, above all things love.
It is a story of innocence and betrayal, of revenge and forgiveness.
It is a story set in the darkest corner of the earth, behind an unmarked door, three steps below ground, off a narrow alleyway in city where the streets have no names. Behind this unassuming facade was housed one of the most notorious houses of sin, seduction, and glamour in that particular postal code: The Kowboi Klub. We will be there soon enough. But before we can begin this tale--a tale that tells us of one boy's fall from grace, and the redemption that came to him at such a terrible cost--we must first go far away to the little town of Toad Suck, Alabama, where that boy was about to have his heart broken by the only girl that he had ever loved.
The boy's name was Jack Kelly, and he was seventeen years old. He lived in a white house with black shutters and a meticulously kept garden with red and yellow tulips, and his mother seemed to spend more time tending to her beloved perennials than to her son. "Kevin!" she would say when he came home from school.
"My name's Jack, Mom," Jack would say.
His mother would look up at him in mild surprise. "Oh, I'm sorry, sweetie," she would say after a moment. "I was talking to the flower Kevin." And she would turn back to the garden and continue to coo over the rim of her red plastic watering can, taking no more notice of her son.
Jack Kelly wasn't thinking about that, though. He was in love with a girl named Darlene, and she had left him for a brown-eyed boy on the basketball team. Eventually she had gotten around to telling him, and he came home from school that day with his head hanging and his hair defying the gel he had applied, falling into his eyes. "Hey Mom," he had said in misery.
"Have you seen the new fertilizer I bought the other day?" his mother had asked absently.
That afternoon he had sat in the tulips in front of his house for hours, carefully plucking the petals off each beautiful, perfectly formed blossom. It was that day that Jack Kelly decided to run away.
Years later, the boy who loved him would muse that Jack himself was much like the marigolds and ranunculus his mother had loved so dearly: a bloom whose fragile beauty was destroyed by the harshness of the world. Of course, at that moment, he would have said almost anything to get into Jack's pants, which were leather, and so tight that they almost defied the laws of physics. On that fateful day in September, Jack looked at his life with poetry so seldom found in places like Toad Suck. He and Darlene had been like Romeo and Juliet, except that, instead of stabbing herself in the heart in grief over his death, she had broken off their relationship without even telling him, letting him find out for himself when he found her in the Home Economics room one afternoon, wearing nothing but a ruffled apron and making out with Larry-Pat, captain of the Toad Suck Grizzly Eels.
She had tried to comfort him when she found him, four hours later in the biology lab, sobbing and taking swigs from a bottle of hydrochloric acid. "Now, Jack," she said. "You know I loved our time together, and this ain't nothin' personal. A girl's just gotta trade up. And besides—we've been together for four months already. You knew it had to end soon."
Jack hiccupped miserably and turned to look at the Darlene. Even though she had betrayed him, he still loved her. "But didn't we have fun? Remember the time we did it in the back of Mike Tartakoff's Impala? Didn't that mean anything to you?"
"Yes, Jack, of course it did. And the time in the back of the Chick-Fil-A and in the gym showers and in the canned food aisle at the grocery store…but, well…"
"But what?"
"Larry-Pat's on the basketball team, Jack! And, well, he's just more popular than you are! I do care for you, Jack. I do. You're nice, you still have almost all of your teeth, and you're tremendous in bed…" at this, she sighed wistfully and trailed her hand, nails buffed and varnished in Sally Hansen Apricot Dream, down Jack's stomach, slipping it gracefully under the waistband of his blue jeans one last time in a move that had never failed to make him lose his cool during Mr. Ermentraut's Spanish class. "...but," she sighed, "everything has a season. Everything has its time."
Jack was at a loss for words for a moment. He couldn't believe it. His girlfriend was breaking up with him using the lyrics from Pippin. It was literally his worst nightmare, and it was coming true.
"Darlene, please," he begged. "You're the love of my life."
She smiled sadly, and put her hand back on his shoulder. "You don't really mean that. I'm sure you'll be fine, Jack. But I really have to go. Larry-Pat's still in the Home Ec room, and he'll need his pants back presently. Good-bye, Jack," she said. "Take care of yourself and your…gift." And without another word, she turned and walked out of his life forever.
Jack had always been an extremely romantic person, despite his reluctance to admit it in front of his sunburned, overly-masculine friends. He was the type of person who would seriously consider dying for love; and he did consider it, momentarily, while shredding the poor perennials in his mother's garden. In the end, however, he decided that he was above that.
"I'm above that," he told the last, rather limp tulip as he held its stem tightly in his fist. "I ain't gonna let one girl get the better of me! I can do better than that! I've got nice hair!"
The flower drooped unenthusiastically, but Jack didn't care. He stood up with determination and confidence, almost tripped over his mother's plastic watering can, righted himself, and walked smartly into the house. He grabbed his backpack from beside the door and entered the kitchen, where he chose the few necessary provisions he was sure he would need: a water bottle, a package of Fig Newtons, his The Phantom of the Opera DVD, and as much hair gel as he could carry.
And, without so much as a kiss goodbye to his mother, Jack Kelly left his beautiful white house with black shutters, deliberately marching through the ruined bed of tulips.
Where he was going he wasn't quite sure, but it hadn't occurred to him that this would be a problem. He made his way confidently down the street, turned the corner, and made his way confidently down another street, positively beaming. He was leaving, he was leaving Toad Suck and its dry heat and its clean lawns, he was leaving Darlene and his mother and the world he had known: the world of tulips and people with double names, like Mary-Lou and Bobby-Sue and Larry-Pat. He was leaving, just like that Beatles song!
Half an hour later, Jack was sitting down on the corner of yet another perfectly trimmed lawn and running both hands through his hair. "This," he said to no one in particular, "is going to suck."
--
DALTON: Bum bum bum bum BAH dum bum BAH dum!
DAKKI AND SATURDAY: Bum bum bum bum BAH dum bum BAH dum!
DAKKI AND SATURDAY AND DALTON: BUM bum bum BUM bum bah DUM-bah-DUM, bum BUM bum bah DUM-bah-DUM, bum BAH bum BAH-DUM, bum BAH-DUM!
DAKKI: What you just heardis the Imperial March, the very special theme song of Darth Vader, Dalton's first-ever crush.
DALTON: But we are not asking you to join the dark side.
SATURDAY: We are asking you to join…THE SLASH SIDE!
((thunder and lightning))
DAKKI: It has come to our attention that we, the Genii, have to post something completely insane every August. Last year, it was the pathos-driven, musical-theater-fueled romp through rural Alaska that we like to call TOXIC. This year, it is a slashy, borderline pornographic and very sparkly murder-mystery that we like to call…
SATURDAY: THE KOWBOI CLUB!
DALTON: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
SATURDAY: We're like bad pennies; we always turn up.
DALTON: We're gonna need a bigger boat.
DAKKI: Badges? We don't need no steenking badges!
DALTON: I HAVE RUN OUT OF MOVIE CLICHES!
DARTH VADER: ((breathes)) So please review.