They say home is where the heart is, but what if the feeling of that beating inside isn't your heart, but the world pounding away at you until all that is left is a hollow husk of what should have been a human being? Where is home then? Where the heart is? Where it was thrown by a world made of cold spit on a concrete curve?
His hand wrapped in cloth, his car battered in by a man now spread like batter across his trailer floor. Johnny stepped back until the slow pool of blood couldn't reach him, couldn't cake his white shoes. He used his wrapped hand to open the door and calmly, aimlessly wandered through the bitter streets of L.A., as far as those white shoes could take him.
The ghost lights that gazed down at him blinked at the black sheep, strayed from the wayward flock. They whispered to him and pierced his eyes from time to time, but never dared reach out to him. Even they shunned the darkness so far beneath them.
Somewhere beneath the glamour of Hollywood and the glitter of the name 'Los Angeles' is the marred flesh of a city for far in the depths of the hell a gasp for air is a death sentence ten thousand leagues beneath the bodies of a rotted society. So many people suffer so that so few can walk on their names on poorly maintained sidewalks. Thousands of humans decayed across the curbs of L.A. so the few can smile under faded lights poorly processed and shipped like dolls to the rest of the world in neatly packaged screens.
Johnny was one of them.
Now he is the many who suffer for the one.
As the light shined in the darkness and the harsh light of day scraped its claws across the land, Johnny awoke to the smell of shit and rot. Down the street, his people awaited him. The homeless, the forgotten, the spat on and the dead. Behind him, the streets you see on T.V. that pretended to be clean.
Amongst the nothing, he spotted a bald head, badly damaged by the raking of the sun across its flesh. It was the man that had watched the beginning of the end of Johnny Cage's career. The man he had almost run over because he too refused to see the soul for the curb.
The man looked worn out, as life had not worn him well over its shoulders. He was shirtless, his pants looked as though it had been dragged through the mud, the concrete, the dirt, and the spit of the world, but it still fit him. Johnny could see these men and women and how they may have come to this point in life, in tents and paper on the side of streets people dared not drive down.
Was he a child in L.A.? Was he a little boy passed around by Studio execs until every hollow cavern in his soul was filled with the filth of humanity? Was he a husband tossed aside by a wife that found better? Was he a D-Class actor who couldn't get a job to save his life because of an ego so big it refused to let him step down to reality?
"You made it." He greeted the man.
One glance and the others scattered. Johnny was new poor. New filth. He didn't know what it was like to be this way for eternity. This little flower had only just wilted, but he would learn to become a scar in the ground, just like them.
"The bus." He added, the man had ignored him at first, for a thousand yards ahead seemed like a more interesting sight to stare at.
The man never turned. Never acknowledged him. They were all just flesh posts stuck out of the ground that slowly rotted away as time went by. He could see the only home they had every reflected in their eyes was the hotel of death. He couldn't see himself reflected in those eyes. He couldn't see himself with those eyes. Johnny Cage, rot like driftwood in the flesh wound of L.A.?
He thought they too must have had the desire to fight. Who made it out? What told these men and women otherwise? Was the change not worth the struggle to fight?
He needed to fight.
Fighting is what Johnny Cage was known for.
Right?
A sound kicked up the dust on the shoulders of the living dead. They began to scatter, those that could still tear their limbs from the muck of the Earth. Others, too gone to understand, or too ignorant to flee stood and stared as a black limousine slowly cradled the sidewalk until it came to a dead stop. Johnny stared back at the black passenger window, his pale reflection as if he was inside that vehicle not long ago glared back at him.
Slowly the window began to roll down as he pulled the shades away from his own eyes to stare into those of the passenger. Who would bother to come down these broken streets so deep in the scarred heart of L.A.?
"Johnny Cage? Bloody hell." A deeply familiar voice reached out to him to check for a pulse through Johnny's ears.
He leaned down to check to find a star greater than the sun stare back at him.
"David Bowie?" Johnny tried to imagine the screen and what it would look like in the flesh. The man looked so human he couldn't understand it.
"I loved Ninja Mime." Bowie smiled and spoke in that deep cello voice with a soft chuckle after through those tight London lips. "You know, I started my career out as a mime?"
"No." Johnny stared. It sounded human, but it looked like David Bowie. He was struck.
"Get in." The door opened and a flicker of opportunity reached out to grab him.
He looked back. The cold real world stared blankly at him, but he knew what it was and knew where he stood. The nothing that lay ahead for him with open, broken arms would grant him comfort in the nothing he'd become, but that flicker of hope inside him couldn't let himself become a blooded root in the ground of dissonance. He took one foot from the puddle and into the limousine, then the other, and then the door shut on him.
"Where to?" Johnny slipped the shades back on, but Bowie snickered at this and took them off.
"I'm going to show you what you're really worth." Bowie smiled, eyes pierced through Johnny's shades.
The old man stared as the limousine peeled away. That thousand mile stare now adrift toward the back of the vehicle as it retreated from the muck.