19...

“No I don’t know you!”
“Are you sure?” The guy looked like central casting sent down a homeless guy, too perfectly grotesque. He began shaking just slightly as Frank stared at him.
“Yes, I’m sure. Get out of here before I brain you with this ashtray!”
The man began to shake harder. His head snapped and his eyes appeared to be rolled back into his head. His right hand flew to his face and looked as if it were attempting to send a message via morse code through his cheek.
“Dude?” Frank lowered the ashtray just a little bit. He gripped it just a little tighter though, not sure if this was some sort of psychotic trick.
The man’s head began to roll from side to side and spittle flew from his mouth in wholesale chunks. A low, stuttering grunt began to issue from his throat.
“I do not want to fucking deal with this!” Frank practically whined. What do I do? Shove a wallet in his mouth or something right? Frank lowered the ashtray completely and looked fervently around the room for something he could use to keep this freak from biting off his own tongue.
“Mairn...” Frank heard the man moan. He winced as if seeing somebody break a bone. “Honey post orange!”
The man’s head was no longer lolling about, but he was still shaking fiercely.
“Surprised eye tree and falling gone eternity!”
Frank felt like crying. He was stuck in a mire of frustration, confusion and fear.
“Saving you. Purple lotus board are five... Rounded... Bare light...”
The man opened his mouth in a great, silent chasm.
“Purple lotus...”
His shaking quickly slowed to a nervous shuffle, his eyes opened and focused on Frank. Frank stared with gaping mouthed amazement, slowly moving his head back and forth as if timing the movements of a cobra.
The man took a deep breath and let loose an ugly, choking laugh that hurt; a long and wicked laugh.
Frank hurled the ashtray at the man and missed by a good foot and a half.
“Get the fuck out of here!”
The man stopped laughing abruptly and nodded his head.
“I’ll go.”
And as if it were all a put on, the man in the ragged and reeking clothes, the man who smelled of piss and rancid sweat opened up Frank’s front door and walked out.
Frank fell to his knees without ceremony and laid his head on the floor.

18...

The man was dirty. And I mean not your standard out rolling around on the ground dirty, not even your typical homeless guy dirty, this guy was his own freaking element.
“Hey man! Nice place,” he said with a voice that sounded like it came through cracking gravel. “Yeah, yeah, niiiice place.”
He smiled with gums that were brown and cracking. The lines of his skin were caked in grime like some experimental art project. Hair that resembled the pelt of a long dead animal stuck up in mangy forts of resistance against gravity. His clothes were almost comically dirty if it wasn’t so sad; so oiled and stained that it was impossible to tell the original color without the aid of machines.
Frank watched with wild, disbelieving eyes as this man stood in the doorway and examined the walls of the living room. He pointed at a framed picture of Bryan and his sister with a fingernail that was a color not usually seen in daylight, and tittered.
“What the fuck are you doing in my house?” Frank bellowed.
The man turned to look at him as if noticing him for the first time.
“Don’t play games with me, man.”
“Seriously!” Frank yelled, hoping to attract a little attention from elsewhere in the building. “Get the fuck out of here!”
The man moved a little closer with a shambling, sliding step. Frank was physically hit by the smell coming off of the guy; an acrid reek of urine and human musk left to bake in sweat and alcohol. He gagged and slapped a hand over his nose and mouth, a dull pain exploded from his lip.
“Are you scared?” the man asked.
Frank quickly searched the kitchen table for some sort of weapon to grab onto. He frantically wrapped his fingers around a glass ashtray that Bryan had stolen from a Hotel 12 during one of his film shoots.
“You’re scared, huh? Your little balls done crawled up into your body and your prick is almost hard.” The man said with a seriousness that seemed to have some sort of physicality.
Frank looked down at himself in bewilderment. The white flash shock of realizing he was naked was overtaken by the understanding that he was almost half mast, adrenaline playing havoc with his cock. He lifted high the ashtray in one hand and covered his protruding package with the other.
“I’m not gonna tell you again pig fucker! Get out of my house!”
“Don’t you know me?” the man asked with a smile.
Frank looked deeply and purposefully into this wreck’s eyes and saw nothing but a dancing and mirthful danger.

17...

Frank hung up the phone quickly and with an unmistakable sense of relief. His hand hung limply over the dead contraption for a moment before going to his forehead. He stood quietly for a minute or two with his eyes closed, slowly rubbing his forehead.
“What the fuck?”
He looked up at the bedroom door as if he expected someone to enter; someone with an answer for him. He imagined some sort of falling apart clown with clumped and cracking make up, fourth hand clothes barely holding together and a comically high voice warbling, ‘wrong number, that’s all’.
“Seriously dude, what the fuck?”
Frank sat back on his bed with a hard luck thump. His heart was beating way too fast for him to go back to sleep right now. A deep and rattling cough struck him and shook him. He half-stood, leaning over to grab the smokes out of his desk drawer and light one. He let out another cough; short, sharp and dry.
Brushing ash off of his thigh, Frank gave a perfunctory exam of his naked body. Not bad, he thought, I could do with some exercise. His unit looked a little ridiculous, as it always did, just sitting there. And, as if his mouth ran via a different brain:
“Seriously! Are you going to do anything about that phone call?”
He looked at the door once again. Did he really want to deal with this? Where did he even start?
“Why is this my fucking issue?”
He stood with a rapid fury and stamped out the cigarette on the empty coke can on the way to the telephone. He yanked up the receiver and began to automatically dial. As if performing a comic routine only he could see, his left hand reached over and pushed the right one down, receiver and all.
“If I call Mary, I’ll never get back to bed.”
He once again picked up the telephone and began dialing. There were a series of hollow clicks that seemed to get a little further away with each...
“City and state?” A horrendously, nasal voice bleated.
“Davis, California.” Frank could hear is voice as if it were coming from somewhere else.
“Listing?”
“Lou Deeds,” he said with a certain finality.
“Here’s that number.”
Frank wrote the number down and hung up the phone. He was about to dial when he heard the front door to the apartment open. He suddenly felt sure that he wanted Bryan’s take on this action.
“Hey Bry?” Frank was asking as he charged out of the bedroom, but his voice suddenly all but dried up.
The shambles of a man standing at the front door of the apartment was certainly not Bryan

16...

“Hello?” Frank’s voice creaked and dropped out. He cleared his throat, painfully.
"Hello?” He tried again.
That low laughter continued like a transmission from some other time, so seemingly incongruous with everything else in Frank’s world that it was difficult to accept as real. The sound was held below waves of static, ghosts of other voices and conversations floated across like flashes of light on water.
Frank listened to that distant laughter and felt his balls crawl up inside his body. It made him feel rubbery. Something was not right. He was reminded of his Uncle Hutchence and the forced visits to the county asylum; the smell of industrial cleansers and piss, the hollow sound of dripping water.
An involuntary shudder passed through Frank.
“Who is this?” he managed to get out. He felt like he was going to vomit.
The static on the line took on the sounds of conspiratorial whispers. Frank could not hang up some reason, compelled despite his irrational fear. At any moment there would be the voice behind that grating laughter that would let out some gem of wisdom that would turn Frank’s life around.
Something suddenly snapped slightly in his mind and he sat frozen in concentration. He could no longer tell if it was laughter he was hearing, or crying.
And then just as suddenly he knew it was the sound of tears.
“Alexis?” he asked carefully.
The line clicked dead.