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Catch the
Buzz
The Ballad For An Angry
Fly A Philip Davetas Ride
(Punk
Noir), 109 pages, ©1998
Fly is
kidnapped by Kimo, a Hawaiian vigilante, to help find his
missing niece.
Fly
and his kidnapper, Kimo, and a pretty medium, Maggie, are
searching for Kimo’s lost niece while on the lam from cops,
lethal loan sharks and Russian mud pirates in this punk
noir.
FLY’s
having one of the worst days of his life and it’s gonna get
worse by midnight.
His rent is late, he lost his job, his car, his
neighbors are assholes, money and no way of replenishing his
body with carbo hydrates and the storm is coming in. Fly also has a
hankering for collecting bottle caps in case he ever wins the
$100,000.00 sweepstakes prize advertised on the label. But he never
wins.
His
only companion is a nine year-old figment of his imagination
who he calls Fly while everybody else assumes he’s referring
to himself in the third person. Apparently, Fly lost
any memory of his life before he was nine. He just woke up in an
orphange with a broken arm and several cuts and bruises and
never found his mother or father.
Fly has a thing for sticking
up for defenseless people especially smaller kids.
While
trying to grift his way through life, he finds his Westwood
neighbors loud, annoying and at this point in his life totally
unbareable. His
next door neighbors, WANI and BELTRAN, are always arguing and
his upstairs neighbors, SILICON and MICKEY, are always jacking
off the Internet porn that is monopolizing Fly’s illegal phone
splicing.
On
this particular day, Fly had to kick Beltran’s ass because he
was smacking on Wani and locks them both on Mickey and
Silicon’s patio balcony.
Beltran tries to climb down the side of the building,
but falls off and lands himself in the hospital.
Fly is finally at peace
until he hears gunshots upstairs and finds the jackoff boys
sprawled out all over the floor.
Curious, Fly moseys on upstairs and meets KIMO, a large
Hawaiian man, stuffing a snub nosed .38 special held together
by duct tape into his jacket pocket. Kimo reveals that he
is Beltran’s uncle.
Kimo talks to Fly like he
knows him, but Fly doesn’t know this asshole.
Kimo
then forces Fly to follow him around town to help him by
telling him he either helps him or he’ll have to execute the
only witness. Fly
figures he doesn’t want to die and he has nothing better to
do.
Kimo
tells him that he wants to find his long lost niece, Lakeka,
who has been missing for six years. Fly questions this
because he assumes she’s already dead or not coming back, but
Kimo refuses to believe it.
Kimo
then explains that the both of them were supposed to meet at
this very moment in time. When Kimo’s house boat
was raided six years ago by Russian mud pirates, Kimo woke up
in jail answering for the disappearence of his 13 year-old
niece, Lakeka.
Lakeka had a bad growing up and was getting worse with
her psycho father always belting her and her mom around. Lakeka went to her
uncle Kimo to help her get away.
It
was also around that time that a medium, MAGGIE McMASTERS, was
helping police search for the lost Lakeka and she had
interviewed the Russian mud pirates that were being questioned
for the boat robberies done by RUDOLPH, IVAN and
HEADCHEESE.
Maggie anticipated the worst is yet happen to Kimo and
his little monchichi, Lakeka. Kimo tried to help
Lakeka escape her father and mother, but the pirates stepped
in and changed his life forever.
The case went unsolved,
closed and quickly forgotten by the city.
Maggie has been helping Kimo find Fly ever since,
because it’s Fly that’s going to help Kimo on his quest.
Maggie’s premonitions are vague in places like
remembering a dream, but she’s always remembered Fly clearly
and has fallen in love with him over the years through her
premonitions. And
when Fly finally meets Maggie, they dig each other.
The Pacific storm arrives on
to the city.
Los
Angeles loan sharks, THE UNCLE SAMS (SAM, SLAPPY and SPIDER)
catch up to Kimo for borrowing money to purchase a house boat
for his beloved Lakeka.
Shit goes real bad and Kimo winds up catching a bullet
leaving Fly and Maggie with a key to a PO box and on their
own. Fly gives
Kimo a Mountain Dew before he kicks and checks the cap. Kimo says, “Ah, fuck
it. Nobody wins
this shit.” Kimo
is gone. Fly
pries Kimo’s fist open and checks the cap.
Spider survives the run-in
with Kimo and is on his way to the marina to catch up with the
mud pirates.
Fly is free, but
feeling that he has a moral responsibility to find Lakeka, he
continues on with Kimo’s quest becoming more and more like
Kimo along the way.
Fly
and Maggie stop at a liquor store to pick up a soda and check
the bottle cap -- not a winner. Maggie explains that,
“Nobody wins, ya know.”
The mud pirates spend their
free time surfing down the mudslides of mountains and patching
up gangsters and crime punks seeing that they don’t want to go
to hospitals and possibly run into the fuzz.
Fly
and Maggie stop at the PO box and take out a package left by
Kimo for Fly.
It’s a video tape and the un-opened evidence of the
house boat case six years ago. Apparently, Kimo never
looked at the case.
Fly
and Maggie take refuge in a motel. Fly questions why Kimo
never looked at the case. Maggie explains that
if the truth was that Lakeka was dead, he would have no reason
to live. His
niece was everything to him. The daughter he never
had.
Fly watches the tape
and sees Kimo talking to the camera addressing it as Fly. “Pretty spooky shit,
uh, Fly?” He
says. Kimo says
that he’s grown to love Fly like a son over the years based on
Maggie’s premonitions.
Kimo offers more clues and back story leading him
closer to the mud pirates.
Meanwhile, Spider is
getting a bullet extracted from his stomach and patched up
with dental floss.
The leader of the mud pirates, Rudolph, wants to know
who gave Spider the new belly button. The trick with the mud
pirates is that when ever poeple come to visit, the pirates
want to get in on some deal that’s going down. And this particular
venture is all the more appealing when the story sounds all
too familiar.
Rudolph remembers his interview with Maggie six years
ago. She told him
he has six years to live and he’s going to die bloody. The Fly prophecy is
upon them.
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