GRAND THEFT AUTO

This is more or less the entire story of my life. I'll try to keep it as brief as its been and I'd like to start at the beginning of it all, but I can't truthfully do that since I don't remember it.

The first thing I can remember is being six or seven watching some Mexicans throw trees into a wood-chipper. I was truly quite astounded by the notion of taking something that may have been alive for a hundred years and having it be reduced it to nothing more than pulp at the hands of an unrelenting machine. It was like a magic act, huge tree goes in little machine and never comes out. It was almost like an illusion or mirage of some kind, to see something so large being stuck inside something so little just because of mechanical violence. I had been riding my bike around the parking lot the Mexicans were working on and I don't quite remember what it was that I hit, perhaps a large stone or the curb, but I do remember flying off of it in a sudden jolt, like Superman, face first into the wood-chipper. Its teeth were terrible and like another sober mirage I was able to see them grow larger and larger by the millisecond as I flew closer into its aluminum jaws.

It tore me into thousands of pulpy shreds, like the tree. However, my family had to pay the company for my blood staining their machine (apparently it can be pretty dismal to clean).

I don't remember much of my time in the machine, it was akin to being unborn but I honestly can't recall that too well either.


When I woke up, I was in a hospital, all stitched back together and I barely even had any scars. Those doctors were artists. Though, skilled as they were, they had to steal some more of my parents money for the overnight operation. No big deal though, at least I'm not still locked in the steel grave of black
magic and illusion.

My first airplane ride was also quite memorable. It was the 4th of July. I was asleep for much of it, but the moments I was awake for were pretty incredible. Something, who knows what, had torn some of the skin off of the airplane causing our needy earth to suck out the many of the plane's inhabitants and plummet them straight to the ground, like a fleshy rain. I had followed my prior instructions and put on my seat belt, so I wasn't sucked out of the sky. It didn't really matter to be honest because it didn't seem like very long after the skin of plane fell off that it all began to swell with enourmous gorgeous fire and eventually became an amazing 4th of July spectacle for anybody lucky enough to see it. There was alot of screaming, some baby making horrible noises and eventually an incredible 'POP.'

I awoke between hospital bed sheets in a place called Liberty City. How appropriate for the 4th of July. They took a little of my money for the quick fixer-upper as usual and I was let loose in Liberty. It's really an ugly place when you look at it. There were the ethnic tribes of drug dealers and hitmen, the Italians who prefered to dabble in prostotution and gambling, the Japanese who were generally up to something more batshit insane than the last thing they did (which turly says something about how batshit insane what they're probably doing now is).

The Italians hired me first, usually just to drive their bitches around from point A to B and occasionally C if I played my cards correctly. On my third week of work with them, my employer, who was named Luigi, had handed me a handsome wad of 100 dollar bills, wrapped together in a rubber band and told me that he wanted me to steal a gang-car from the Yakuza. He said to use some of the money to buy a weapon so as to be safe. I'm not sure what he was warning me to be safe from but a gun is a gun and guns are cool shit. I left his sex bar, saw a rather ugly station-wagon at a stop-light, opened the door, broke the nose of the woman driving and took my new car for a ride.

The first place I drove it to was the Ammu-Nation, a fantastic little gun store right on the edge of Chinatown. The logo of the place was a big neon American flag made of colored light bulbs and it bore the name of the franchise in neon brilliance. The clerk hid behind a fence with his register and I presume a few guns for himself. He was a real stand-up guy, sold me an Uzi at a good price and had the courtesy not to perform a background check. I took my new Uzi and new piece-of-shit car into Yakuza district and waited for one of the gang cars to come into eye-shot. Of course it wasn't long before I saw one, which the chinky driver parked on a curb and went into what I assume was a calculator store or a sushi resturant.

The whole situation was very badly timed, the moment I tried to open the door to the car a bullet, fast as the Japanese can divide, struck me square in the chest. Then another one. Before I knew it, I must have had at least 9 bullets in my chest and blood was all over the place, shooting out of me in little crimson ejaculations.

I shot one bullet into the Jap and he fell to the ground. I walked up to him to observe what was happening as I'd never seen anything really like it prior to this. His body was twitching and figeting and apparently forgot how to stand up or talk or do anything. I decided to shoot him again to see what else would change, and this time the shot came with a noise from his mouth that, if I were to type it out would look like this: GLUUUHHhhhhff accompanied by some throaty sounds. Some blood came from his mouth and shot out of the points of bullet entry. Quickly he began to smell terrible and I realized he had both shit and pissed in his pants. What a disgusting man, shitting and pissing all over himself. I thought the Japanese had ediquitte. He still made unpleasant noises so I shot him again, this time, right between his little eyes. His brain jumped out the back of his head and smeared all over the pavement. His noises and twitches eventually came to a stall. Though I couldn't fully comprehend what had just happened and he didn't really have a face left, he gave off an expression of peace and blissfulness. Eventually I took his car back to the Italians, they were pleased and seemed a little too concerned about the new holes in my chest. They didn't bother me very much, though I could just be jaded.


To say what exactly it was that came over me on this one particular day would prove difficult and possibily impossible or nonexistent, so rather than meander in the unexplainable motives that our shortening human marathon quarrels with, I suppose I could just cut straight to the meat of the incident.

By this time I had gone in and out of the hospital a few times, sometimes because of a car-bomb job going badly, sometimes because I'd forget that I can't swim. It's never as expensive as it seems though. One time I had no money and they even fixed me up for free. Sorry though, that's not exactly relevant right now.

I had built quite an impressive collection of firearms by this point of my life, including an Ak-47, my old uzi, a pistol, military frag grenades, a sniper-rifle and a rocket propelled grenade launcher (one hell of a toy). I had also aquired a most amazingly handy bag that could actually hold all of these weapons. The best thing about it is how concealable it is. Seriously, you can't ever even tell I have any of the weapons, let alone all of them. I found myself on the roof of Luigi's sex club (I never was allowed into it for some reason) adjusting the scope of my sniper rifle. There were alot of people a few stories below on the street that looked deeply in need of peace and blissfullness and who better than a man in a leather-jacket with a shitload of weapons to give it to them? I peered through the scope and through the thin green religious crosshair and saw a world far away become close. I took my eye off of the scope and looked around at the street. The first person to catch my attention was a prostitute. She was dressed whorishly, probably one Luigi's bitches, but oh my stars was she beautiful. I needed to bring her closer to me, I needed a more intricate look at her so I brought the scope back up to my eye. She looked even better through it, to no surprise of mine.

I could have sworn I had set the crosshairs to center on her head but when I pulled the trigger her arm flew off. I'm not joking, the bitch's arm actually detached from her body and blood went all over the sidewalk before she fell and drowned in it, it was hilarious. Shooting a gun around a large amount of people is a lot like shooting it around a herd of farm animals. There's the first few moments of chaos and screaming and running around, bumping into things and then eventually its forgotten. The walking pace is resumed, the conversations carry on and the chickens keep looking at the sky, waiting for the rain to kill them.

An ambulance came to the dead hooker at an impressive speed and instantly sewed her arm back onto her body and revived her. What bullshit, I thought.

I gave both of the paramedics a bullet to eat and re-fed the whore. Then, all three of them lay in the same red pool of peace and serenity. Of course it wasn't long after this that the joy-killing heretics called the Police had to show up and wave their dicks around. They have always been my least favorite gang, and for them out-do those smelly beaners really says something. The showed up in one of their squad cars at the bottom of the building and I already had a grenande prepared for them. I dropped, it bounced off the hood of their car right onto the street next to it. When the driver opened his door, he looked down and saw a live grenade rolling around by his foot. Like a moron, he got straight back into his car and then it eventually all went up in big beautiful firecrackers with the sound of burning metal and skin.

Some more things along those lines went on before the helicopter came. It seems intimdating the first time you encounter a police helicopter, but it really isn't shit if you have a bazooka. As soon as I heard those propeller blades spinning, I took out my rocket launcher, looked around and fired it straight into the belly of the chopper.

It flipped upside down and its spinning propellers flew off of its body, down the street. I watched them spin and bounce around, sharp with anti-gravity until they eventually were slowed down as they sliced their way through some girl who was probably 8 years old and her pimp. So it goes, I figured.

The walk back to the bottom of the building is gone from my memory, but I don't imagine I jumped down to the bottom. I remember finding myself ontop of one of the many police-car carcasses, firing bullets into every thing I saw, the buildings, the old women, the little girls, the little boys, the priests, the pimps, the whores, the pigs, the guineas, the japs, the spics, the homeless. It was glorious. Some other people had decided to join the party, I guess, because there were cars and buildings being blown up and apart that I didn't touch. All of it was spitting fire and ash and awesome noise into the heavens.

In Liberty City, every day is the 4th of July.