Sketch Read online




  SKETCH

  Marco Frazetta

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  From the Author

  Copyright © 2019 by Marco Frazetta and Tempest Books

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of satire and parody. Any resemblance to existing creative works is intended as such.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Chapter One

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... ah, who the fuck am I kidding—it was just the worst of times. All I had to eat for the last two days was Taco Bell salsa packets, I had to ride my skateboard to work because my car broke down, and now I was back at my shitty job power-washing concrete walls with enough chemicalized water pressure to strip the hide off an elephant’s hairy ass. Not that I’ve ever touched an elephant’s ass… but, you know, I imagine they’re really freaking tough.

  “Hey, Nerd Boy!” My coworker, Lenny.

  I ignored the call as I crouched a few feet from the concrete wall. The veins in my forearm were showing bright blue, as I really had to be careful when gripping the power washer. Human skin ruptures at 2900 pounds per square inch and the jet I was holding reached 10,000 pounds psi. And I wasn't taught those stats by, oh, I don't know, the guy who hired me or maybe the toothless old geezer who "trained" me. No, I learned those stats on day one when I opened up the jet too wide, it went loose, and caught me in the shin. 15 staples later and I had learned to never ever look away while I was washing. Hell of a thing to learn for a minimum wage job, but I had no choice. Even the dingy studio apartment I was renting put me in the red. That was LA for you.

  But things would change. They had to. LA was where dreams were made, and damn if I wasn’t a dreamer. I wasn't going back to Moliet, Wisconsin, and its total lack of creative outlets or career options. The last time I called my mom she said, "You need to move home. Get one'a dem jobs at that Amazon that opened up. Suzie Meisner's son makes $17 an hour operating a work lift over dere. And he's got dental," blah, blah, blah. I would show mom, dad, everyone, because in my back pocket was my cell phone and I had set it to ring, buzz, vibrate, flash, explode—every damn thing you could think of so I wouldn’t miss the call. THE call.

  I was thinking about that and laughing to myself, envisioning, “Based on the Comic by Eddie Vance” scrolling on a Marvel movie credits, when Lenny decided he would ignore safety regulations and lob a big, wet, dirty, nasty sponge at my head. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and started to turn my head to see what it was when it splatted against the side of my face, pushing aside my safety goggles and filling my nose with acrid chemicals and dirt.

  "What the hell?" I threw down my pressure jet. “Are you fucking serious? The power washer already stripped my skin off once, you trying to kill me, you jackass?!” My co-workers just stood around staring at me with smirks on their greasy faces.

  Then it happened. BUZZZ. BUZZZ. BUZZZ.

  I drew the phone out of my back pocket like I was in a damn Western movie.

  “Hello?!” I yelped.

  “Hey there,” the nasally voice came through, “this is Albert Jefferson. Marvel Comics (West Coast) Editor. Come in today at 4pm sharp. When you come into the front desk tell them you’re here to see me. They’ll have your name. I’m in room 4277. I have to get back to lunch now—they’re serving weiner fingers and Hulk-themed pizza.”

  Click.

  It was everything. Everything I had ever wanted. Hearing that nasally man’s voice practically gave me a freaking boner (no homo). I dropped the damn washer out of sheer mind-wiping joy.

  “Yessss!”

  “Hey!” The foreman, who usually ambled around the work site using his considerable heft to propel his body more side-to-side than forward in a wobbly sort of way, beelined toward me in a locomotive shuffle that I had never seen before. "You break another nozzle and you are in a world of hurt, Vance." He was super anal about work gear and I had chipped the nozzle of the pressure washer that caused my injury, and he never let me forget it. "Finish this up and then put your gear in Antonio's truck. We gotta hit one more site before we call it quits."

  That was not what I expected to hear him say. I saw my dreams of comic book superstardom crash to the ground before my eyes, dashed by his broken promise to let me off work on time for my meeting at Marvel. I don't normally stammer, but I was shaking with anger and fear and could barely get the words out. "Hey—hey, no, it's almost three o'clock. You—come on—you agreed that you wouldn’t make me stay late this week. We talked about it a couple days go. I have that… thing, to go to, remember?"

  "Oh, yeah.” He shifted his mass slightly away from me, somehow using the gravity well generated by his gut to draw the attention of the rest of the work crew. "Hey, everyone, did you know we been working with Stan friggin' Lee the whole time? We got ourselves a regular artiste over here."

  Laughs.

  "Stan Lee was a writer," I blurted out. I couldn't help but correct him, which was pretty much the equivalent of poking a sleeping bear that finally managed to pass out after eating a couple hippies strung out on bath salts.

  "I know who the fuck Stan Lee is, wise ass." The usually murky-eyed look of a man half-in-the-bag by noon quickly evaporated into laser focus as he set his beady, bloodshot eyes on me with what can only be described as pure hatred. I'm pretty sure if he could have killed me with his mind he would have at that point. "Fine, whatever. Tony will go to the other site. You go finish up his project. I think he has one wall left to do. Shouldn't take more than a half-hour. You get that done and you can leave."

  "But it's almost three…" I started to blurt out, but that crazed look in his eyes told me to shut up and be thankful he didn't just shit-can me right then and there. "Yup, got it, okay, thanks, boss."

  "That's right. I'm the fucking boss." I'm pretty sure he called me a bunch of terrible names after that, but his words faded away as I put my ear plugs back in and fired up the pressure jet.

  My life was going to change this day and nothing and no one was going to stop that from happening.

  I practically ran down the two blocks to the new site, to take Tony’s clean up job. The bucket of wash swished and sloshed, my hard hat bobbed on my head, my hands got sweaty in my gloves. Then when I got to the site, my work-boot steps slowed to a grinding halt. Looking at the wall, I realized… my life, my dream, was over.

  Chapter Two

  That one wall that I had left to clean was covered with a giant mural that was painted with glow paint—there was no way in hell I could clean it all and make it to Marvel. Glow wasn’t like regular paint. You gotta get in closer than usual and hold onto the nozzle with both hands and slowly wave it up and down using precise movements to spray an even jet that removes the paint but doesn't damage the wall. It took way longer than removing regular paint.

  Not only that, but the mural w
as…it was fucking beautiful and definitely the work of Jolita!

  “Jolita" always signed her work with a strange tag that looked like a person in a circle. She was a legend in this part of Los Angeles. Rumor had it that she lived on the streets and had an army of taggers and street people protecting her, which is why she has never been photographed, let alone caught by the police. I had heard a lot of stories about the daring lengths she would go to in her pursuit of spreading her vision of the world or to tell her political message with a mural. The stories were probably always exaggerated and filled with hype, but I always wished that they were true because I liked the idea of some hot girl crusading through the streets at night, spray can in hand, like a tagger vigilante, fighting the corporate overlords with art instead of violence. This mural was all kinds of trippy, with some butterflies swirling in the sky, two figures who looked like they were made of tin foil dancing with one another, a flock of little skull creatures reaching their hands out, crazy looking rainbow flames behind them—the whole thing looked like a Pink Floyd album or something.

  I swear, life was so fucked up sometimes. I finally got to see one of her pieces up close... and my job was to destroy it.

  I was so in awe of the painting and lost in my own thoughts about how I could remove it quickly enough to get to Studio City for my meeting at Marvel that I didn't even notice when a dozen people crept up around me and the wall, just on the other side of the flimsy orange plastic fence we used to cordon off the work site.

  "Fuck you, Nazi!" the words cut right through my ear plugs and brought me back to reality real quick. I turned around to see the dozen was now a mob of very angry people looking at me, fingers in the air, some shouting, one spitting in my direction. They were mostly tatted and pierced and wearing the oversized clothing that street artists wear to conceal their paints. They had a real rough look to them, like post-apocalyptic punkers from a Tank Girl graphic novel, so my initial reaction was fear, and I won’t lie, a tinge of hate—who were these assholes to call me a Nazi? But mostly, it was fear. I swiveled my head around, looking for someone, anyone, to back me up if they decided to murder me, but my coworkers busied themselves cleaning up their gear or had already left for the other work site.

  Instinctively, I pulled out my phone and took a picture of the mob. “I took pictures of you, assholes! The cops will be after you if you do anything stupid!” I hated sounding like a nark, but at that point I was trying anything to save my own ass. I decided to take a picture of the mural, too, and snapped off several shots of it before putting my phone away and picking up the pressure jet to do the nasty deed—I had to hurry the hell up too, no way Editor Guy Albert Jefferson would tolerate me being late.

  Out of the corner of my eye, something caught my attention, someone in the thick of the mob who was not shouting at me or flipping me off. A smoking hot Latina wearing an angry face, but with tears in her eyes.

  It was those eyes that stopped me.

  These were eyes that had something in them, even from twenty feet away could freeze me to the spot. They were big, dark, like the seeds of some exotic fruit. Big peacock lashes around them. She was something else, a tiny girl, not taller than five feet, skin the color of a luscious clay, a tiny little waist that showed through her white tank top, but a full heft of a chest pushing on the shirt, and real sharp curvy hips, the neon green strings of a thong rising up out of her really low-cut jeans. The way she stood, the green beanie that she wore lopsided on her thick, dark locks, the tats on her arms—it all told you that she was dripping with sexalicious awesomeness.

  Our eyes met and I knew in that instant that it was Jolita herself, had no logical way of knowing, but no doubt. She shook her head side to side just slightly while her perfect, plump lips spoke the words, “Don’t do it.” I was lost. The angry chants and jeers faded away to a low buzzing and then it almost sounded like the murmuring sounds of distant chanting and drums. Icy needles pricked their way up my back to the base of my skull and in that instant I felt almost compelled to put down the pressure washer. It was like she was asking me from some part of her, somewhere deep, some part that could yearn. Not want, not demand, but yearn.

  “Get the hell out of here, you punks!” The foreman dragged his girth between me and the plastic fencing and waved to a couple of the other workers to help him move the barriers back. I was a little freaked out when they first started yelling at me, but after sharing that moment with Jolita I kinda felt like she wouldn’t let anything happen to me and I was actually more concerned for her and her friends. “Hey, Stan Lee!” the foreman shouted back to me, “show these pricks what we think of their ‘art’ and blast that shit away.”

  I didn’t do anything, just stood there with the pressure washer in my hand, the nozzle closed tight. The situation had gotten out of control and I had somewhere else to be. The famous red block letter Marvel logo flashed before my eyes over and over again, strobing faster and faster as it receded away into oblivion, just as my dreams of being a comic book artist would if I didn’t get the job done quickly and get to my appointment.

  Jolita walked through the crowd, stood against the plastic barrier and addressed the foreman. “You don’t need to do this. Just leave this one mural and I promise you that we will leave, all of us, right now and we won’t come back. We just need time to work it out with the building owner. I give you my word, my word as a tagger.”

  “Hey, guys, get a load of this little piece,” the foreman jeered. He leaned forward so that his head and shoulders were over the plastic fence and directly above Jolita. “All due respect, little lady, but you and your delinquent friends better get the fuck outta our way. We have a right to be here—you don’t. You’re trespassing and you admitted to vandalism. I should call the cops right now, but who wants the fucking hassle. My boy Stan Lee over there has 10,000 psi of pressurized dragon piss that he is going to use to wipe away every single paint molecule on that wall, even your fancy glowing fairy shit.”

  Jolita started to respond, but the foreman just turned around nonchalantly and nodded to my burly co-workers, who proceeded to push the sand-filled barrels that held the fencing outward, against the crowd, inch by inch

  “Eddie! Wash that fucking wall! Now!” The sound of my real name coming out of the foreman’s mouth for the first time in seemingly forever jolted me into action. I lifted the rod in one hand and reached for the nozzle release in the other, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of the crazy scene playing out all around me and Jolita, who was staring at me again, this time so intensely that it made me feel very self-conscious, like I had accidentally forgotten to put on pants or something.

  I don’t know how I heard her through my ear plugs and over the yelling of the street kids and my co-workers, but I could clearly hear Jolita say, “Don’t do it, Eddie! Please, don’t destroy my art! It’s important to me! I know it’s important to you, too!”

  I was stunned. I lowered the power washer and took a few steps toward her. “You, you know who I am? How—?”

  Jolita kept her eyes locked on me, but her face broke into a wide toothy grin that was so beautiful and full of life that it felt like the first real smile I had seen in forever. “Your tool of a boss just said your name. Plus, we’ve been here for hours, hiding out in the parking garage across the street, just waiting to see if this wall was going to be destroyed, too.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry, this totally sucks, but I need this job.”

  She just continued to stare at me and her gaze withered my ability to maintain eye contact with her. I slowly turned away from her when she said, “You’re an artist, like me. I saw you looking at your portfolio when you were on your lunch break. ‘Eddie Vance.’ That’s you, right? I think I’ve seen your stuff on ArtHub. Superheroes, yeah? You should do more female characters.” She winked when she said that last part, proving she really had seen my page because drawing sexy powerful women is what I do best and what my online fans always want to see more of.

  I couldn’t b
elieve that Jolita, the Jolita, knew who I was and had actually seen my artwork.

  “I’m gonna work for Marvel,” I blurted out, realizing immediately after the words came out of my mouth that I had said it more to impress Jolita than because I believed it to be true. It scared me how much I wanted her to like me in that moment and to accept me as an artist. I didn’t even know her, not really.

  The street kids had continued shouting and throwing up obscene gestures, then two of the workers picked up a pair of the heavy barrels holding the fencing and charged into them. Jolita jumped back and to the side, pulling a young street girl out of harm’s way, but a punk teenager that looked like an extra from Trainspotting took the full brunt of one of the barrels and bounced back at least five feet and hit the gravel parking lot in a heap. “Fuck you!” he yelled as he lifted himself to his elbows, but he was wheezing really bad and had a hard time getting the words out. As they continued to charge forward, the plastic fencing between the barrels wrapped up or knocked over several others, including one anemic-looking kid in a hoodie that couldn’t have been more than nine or ten. It was like something out of a scene from a gladiator movie.

  Jolita helped a few of the others back up and then dashed toward the guy who had hit the punk with the barrel. The bruiser opened his mouth to say something to her, but before any words could slip from his cold sore-encrusted lips, she vaulted the fence and the barrel and landed a blade kick to his throat that jolted him backwards. A sheet of sweat broke out on his rapidly blueing face—he clawed and massaged his throat as he gasped for air. Everyone stood around stunned for several seconds and then two more of my uniformed co-workers rushed towards her while I just stared. Jolita dropped down, snatched two spray cans from her back pockets, and sprayed the oafs right in the face.