Billy Drago: The New Paradigm

It was a warm summer afternoon - the sort that swelters just above the pores. With an industrial haze glimmering in the sky, this was the day when the real and the abstract would dive into each other. It would be a collision, a mighty explosion of juxtaposition, metamorphosis and amalgamation. The atmosphere was pregnant with oozing lust for the cataclysm to come, and wholly marvellous it was when it arrived.

The setting for this odd event was Belfast. That focal of commerce gives this story the objects it needs to be anything beyond the pale deserts of an empty word document. The subject for this odd event is Billy Drago, sometime actor and regular top hat wearer.

He was in the city under the auspices of employment. He had attained a role in a new BBC-financed horror film called Killer Choc-Ice. The synopsis of this particular schlock revolved around a group of young Hells Angels just back from Altamont, who are absolutely flummoxed to discover that the hive of violence and grime they left behind some thirty years prior has permutated into a nest of Starbucks’ and cigarette-butt-less cobblestones. But the utopian exterior belies a dark secret, which is that the city is now under the governorship of a renegade cabal of Orphic monks, who worship a god in the shape of a chocolate encrusted square of ice-cream. The film ends with the prophesised advent of the eponymous choc-ice, who, as a gigantic monolith, floats around central Belfast, eyeing up the DVD sale in HMV and crushing hapless shoppers; and it is up to the leather-clad biker folk to stop its totalitarian reign.

Drago plays a box of detergent in a scene where a wife of one Hells Angel peels potatoes.

After his ardour on set, Drago went for a walk up to Waterstones. Finding himself angled between romantic fiction and business for dummies, he quickly stepped out the backdoor. Here he ambled upon a very curious happening, for the air seemed to be dipping into itself. What was more unusual was that Drago could see the ethereal ravine reverberating, unaided by externality, hovering with no hang-ups as to how the sentimental delicacies of gravity might feel towards this insolence.

Drago stood for a moment, his optics encasing the proceedings with cartographic proficiency. Turning back only to notice the one-way nature of the gateway he just exited, he let out a great yelp, “Damnnnn youuuu!”

Following this bout of rare weakness, he revolved once again to the adjacent spectacle. It seemed to be reacting to his outburst. The formerly-straight sides of the airy pit were now morphing out in the direction of Drago. His good sense suddenly playing truant from his mind, he stumbled towards it. Almost instantly he was engulfed in the dance of atoms long corrupted; a smouldering globule of quintessence cascading behind the Waterstones just off Belfast city centre.

Being psychologically putrefied with nary cognition of the ordeal, his organic frame oscillated in spasms of discomfort within the whirlwind. His long grey locks became as fire, his high cheekbones transmogrified into the liquid rebellion of water, his vocals were subverted into a vacuum of air, while his spinal fluid solidified into a rigid compound of earth. His being was decimated as he stood; molecules ripped apart and raped of hitherto dimensional stability.

The visual pandemonium, now in arabesque, was the sort of blocky assembly that would be stabbed with the swords of CGI were it to appear on an IMAX. Paper cuts of ambience swam around that alley as Billy Drago ceased to be Billy Drago. The ashes of familiarity were blown away as a new creation took shape in the vortex.

A swish of gust and the guillotine of time sharply truncated the ever-procrastinating mutation. The gaseous convolution faded off into the sky like the steam arisen from off the nose of pacing itself.

What remained in the wake of this bizarre occurrence was a fleshy blob nodding acquiescence at the foetal stance. This slowly-congealing goop began to move around, first giving itself vertiginous motion, then discovering its own limbs like a pupating Marco Polo. This primordial genesis soon assumed the vertical, where its final mucosal took form.

Why the figure that was now aloft biologically, it was none other than Billy Drago by fuck!

But this was a new Billy Drago, a fresh Billy Drago, a renovated and rejuvenated Billy Drago. Gone were the shackles of neuroses, the hex of self-esteem, the burden of desire and ambition. All superficialities were abjured into one large negation, discharged from the anus of what was then to become known as The New Paradigm.

The void left behind after the refurbishing of the senses Billy Drago filled with miraculous powers, such abilities as to gift him envy of an entire humanity. He had a duo of core powers, the first being the skill to glance forward into the future, to break the bounds of the exfoliating present, the second being the skill to perceive what another person is thinking, to enter a foreign intuition and to apprehend it. Both had been built-up by a history of fiction, by an antiquity of creative want, and it is now thought that Drago chose these particular capabilities in a mindset of spite for all those years where he was relegated to reruns of Charmed. This hypothesis is underlined by the fact that he made it very clear in the mainstream media that he used neither power, not even once.

His smirking face, often painted on walls and broadcast on QVC, was subjected to much jealousy and hatred over the years. Eventually Jihads were orchestrated against Billy Drago, but since he was considered the new messiah by many on the conservative right, these movements failed to even dent his top hat.

In the end, on the rising noontide of his acclaim and detestation, he was murdered by a flaming spear to the guts hurled by a Deus ex machina. And thus came to an end the tale of Billy Drago, a man who may or may not have been a deity, a man who may or may not have been a good actor, but a man who certainly did wear a top hat and certainly was predisposed to yelling “Damnnnn Youuuu” at all who wronged him.