Doodlenose 12-31-12

Mongoose Repellent

The Procurement Man
Volume Six, Serpent-Headed Monolith
Part One: Mongoose Repellent
By Toadsgoboad

The Seventh Sect Preceded the Eighth

Old Frazzler, who had been chairman of the Seventh Sect at the time of its unraveling (its defunctiture, as we used to call it), recalled recently the circumstances that gave rise to the Eighth Sect.
“All of us lived in an old bus boat that someone’s uncle had left tied up in Cootie Pond. Sumdium (Al Sumdium, chief of the sect’s Internal Discipline Committee) commandeered the captain’s quarters, claiming he needed the extra space for his mules. We all thought he meant his lady friends, but it turned out he really did have a couple of robotic, bipedal mules that stood about in the cabin with dirty clothes draped over them.”
The Eighth Sect, an attempt on the part of some of the younger members of the Seventh to recapture the spirit of fun supposedly embodied in the Sixth Sect and the legendary First, was headquartered in the trees on the north shore of Cootie Pond. Old Frazzler remembered visiting Todd Lu, chairman of the Eighth Sect, as the latter selected his personal tree.
“My mother had a half an orchard of pecan trees. A lot of people ask me, when I tell them that, ‘how can you have half an orchard?’ And I just say, well, you can halve an orchard, can’t you? I guess they think it’s like half a hole or something.”
The inevitable defunctiture of the Eighth Sect ended Sudsy County’s sect program. The following year the entire area was paved over and large aircraft filled with uniformed entertainers began landing there.
“It’s nothing like it used to be.” Admits Old Frazzler. “Even my own wife thinks I can’t sing. But I can too sing. When I’m alone I can sing fine. But when I sing in front of her, as I really long to do, I get self-conscious and screw up, because she sits there and winces. And she tries to sing along with me, to show me how it’s done. She doesn’t understand terms like “octave” and she throws them at me. ‘You’re an octave and a half off the recorded version of the song.’ And she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about.”
Now Old Frazzler just wants to eat. With his smoking teeth long gone, the joys of marijuana are denied him. He just wants to sit and eat until the cold of winter fills his room and memories of the Seventh Sect loom before him like a great felt hat.





Leftist Hood and Existential War Piece

Quiedac the Pillowian returned from his tour of duty with the phrase “dour of Tootie” resounding through his head like an electrical bell repeatedly rung by a pre-sentient child. The pre-sentient child just couldn’t get enough of that bell! “Dour of Tootie! Dour of Tootie!” Quiedac the Pillowian managed to relate a couple of anecdotes to his family before slipping off to bed, determined to discover who Tootie was in his dreams.
While he slept his mother and old Phil, who had taken care of the rance since the elder Pillowian had disappeared into the hills some years before, sat about the kitchen table with their oyster puppets and debated telling Quiedac the whole story behind the war.
“My oyster has a particularly large pearl concealed in his mouth.” Old Phil said in his puppeteer’s voice.
“You don’t understand.” The woman shook her head. “You have to give your oyster a name and then you have to pretend to be the oyster.”
The oyster that Quiedac’s mother had selected was named Stammy. He attended a local technical college and worked part-time at the children’s xylophone factory.
“Lies! Lies!” Stammy shouted as he tried to reach the flag exhibit. The sounds of his struggle and subsequent defunctiture seeped into Quiedac’s dream like diesel into an ant colony. Soft music and light reflected from a hundred large sequins played no small part in the mood Quiedac assumed as he summoned Tootie into his office.
“It says here that you’re very dour.” He began.
“Is that my 6138?” Tootie, a chicken by the looks of her, but one must make allowances for cultural bias.
“Mmm… yes.” Quiedac affirmed as he examined the tiny print at the bottom of the paper he held in his hand.
“The war wasn’t very kind to you, was it?” Tootie was blunt. Her question wasn’t really a question, but an egg of lasting brown savage.
Brown sausage and eggs. These were breakfast items. One didn’t get brown eggs in the army. Not marketable enough in the current cultural bias. Redeeming smells soon reached Quiedac as the farmhouse shruggled awakenly.

The Relief I Felt was Illusory

Having filled the notebook, I thought that my chore was over. I thought I had completed another “novel” of little stories. But on looking through it I discovered that several of the pages were nothing more than indecipherable gobbledygook and bizarre doodles.
“I can’t publish this!” I moaned within my wife’s hearing.
“Are you publishing something?” She wondered with sarcasm as boldly evident as the little plastic couple on top of a wedding cake.
“You know what I mean.” I growled. All of my work is self-published. Although one of my early college English teachers has encouraged me to seek legitimate organs of dissemination, I know that my work is unacceptable to anyone in the publishing fields. I would say, thank god for the internet, except that the internet is god, as you longers for universal brotherhood will soon find out, much to your regret and my loss of privacy. One of the things I was so happy about when I first realized there was no god was that no one was watching me in the bathroom any more. And you idiots are going to stick your collective digital eye in there after all.
But, as I said, I self-publish. If not on the web, then in crappy editions of a half-dozen printed up at Kinko’s. No remuneration but the satisfaction of self-proclaimed stardom.
“I’ve got several more stories to write.” I complained.
“Are you still talking about that?” My wife asked.
I nodded although she couldn’t see. Her eyes were on a webcam of somebody’s bathroom.
“And they’re not really stories, are they?” She added.
“Well, they’re pieces.” I admitted. “Pieces of writing.”
“Fragments. When are you going to write a whole?”
“They are a ‘whole’ when they’re assembled. And sometimes they are stories.”
“Just like a car.”
“What?”
“Assembled—just like a car. Only you’ll never get anywhere in it.”

Heftilump’s Highsteppers

Heftilump’s Highsteppers, a musical group consisting of six young men in anthropomorphic camel costumes, had taken the college circuit by storm. This phrase, “by storm,” was insisted upon by the group’s manager, another young man in an anthropomorphic pig costume.
“What exactly do you mean, ‘by storm?’” A reporter for a college newspaper asked the manager during an interview in connection with the Highsteppers’ appearance at the college’s student center auditorium.
“I mean the proverbial storm.” The manager grunted. He did his best to complete the pig illusion by acting the part as well.
“What proverb is that?”
The manager rooted through a bucketful of scraps spilled on the floor of the room. There were some potato skins and cabbage leaves, all as free of dirt as his own cloth nose.
“Uh, things always look darkest just before the storm.” He replied.
“That’s ‘dawn.’”
“Oh.” While he hunted for an explanation like a man looking for a lost ring in a bucket of slop, another reporter, this one for the local regular newspaper, asked a question of his own.
“What is this ‘college circuit?’”
The college newspaper reporter glanced at his elder with contempt.
“The college circuit,” the manager explained, “Is the many venues operated by the colleges themselves.”
“It’s for acts that can’t make it on the legitimate market.” The college reported added.
“That’s not true!” The manager piped up, abandoning the pig act. “The college circuit is for acts that are a little more… peculiar. Acts that your average person couldn’t get into.”
“Exactly what I said.”
“So Heftilump’s Highsteppers couldn’t play a regular club?” The regular reported wondered.
“Six guys in camel costumes sinking about burning their own dung for fuel?” The college reporter barked. “Don’t make me laugh!”

Horses of Strategic Disinfection (Flying in the Direction of the Sea)

“There they go, Don!” Phil pointed into the darkening sky.
“Yes, Phil. A magnificent sight.”
The two men stood on Attorney’s Bluff, overlooking the uninhabitable marshlands that led to the sea just over the horizon.
“I’ve waited a long time for this.” Phil reached down and pulled a bottle of champagne from the picnic basket. He poured a glass for his friend and one for himself.
“I’m glad you like it. I…” Don stopped and took the bottle from Phil’s hand. “This is American champagne.” He jabbed a finger at the label.”
“Yes?” Phil looked puzzled.
“It’s not champagne at all then!”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s just sparkling white wine!”
“Isn’t that what champagne is?”
“No.” Don started to pour his glass on the ground, thought better of it, and instead began carefully pouring it back into the bottle. “No,” he continued as he poured, “Champagne comes from the Champagne region of France. By law only sparkling white wine that comes from Champagne may be called Champagne. But Americans—“ he snorted derisively. “They think they can flout French law.”
A generous dollop of dung from one of the horses flying overhead landed on Don’s head.
“Do you think that’s some sort of statement on the part of the author?” Phil wondered with ill-concealed mirth. He downed his glass and took back his bottle.
“If you think that,” Don wiped himself clean with a special sponge purchased for just this purpose, “Then you don’t know Toadsgoboad.”
“Ah.” Phil intoned, enjoying the tang of his alcoholic drink.
“Toadsgoboad,” Don informed his friend, “Hates alcohol no matter where it comes from.”
“Have some brie?” Phil offered.

Stale Grackle in the Bracken of Remorse

With a caution learned at the side of master hunters, Peevoder approached the large box. It stood in the middle of an otherwise empty field. The grass in that field, he later observed to a roomful of interested old men, was not grass at all, but innumerable strips of green plastic secured to a neoprene net stretched over the scene.
“What was in the box?” One of the old men, whom the others had named Lucky for convenience, asked Peevoder urgently. The others bade him be quiet. They wanted to know more about the fake grass.
“I found a label near the edge of the field.” Peevoder told them. “According to it the grass was made by Frippoto.”
“Them Japanese are damn clever.” Another old man, known to the others only as Sergei, muttered with authority.
“Now, the box;” Peevoder continued as Lucky leaned forward, “There didn’t seem to be any way of getting into it.”
“So you used a crowbar.” Lucky suggested. He was shouted down immediately.
“No, not a crowbar.” Peevoder responded. The room seemed to grow close around them. Only the crackle of the fire behind them could be heard. “I used the only thing I had with me.” Peevoder reached into a pocket on the inside of his philosopher’s vest. He slowly withdrew a strange object on the end of a string.
“What’s that?” Someone demanded.
“I’ve seen something like it before.” Sergei tapped his chin and tried to think.
“This, gentlemen,” Peevoder said slowly as he dangled the object before them, “Is youth.”
A gasp went through the group.
“You’ve still got yours?” were the words on many a wrinkled old pair of lips.
“But what was in the box?” Lucky shouted. He was later revealed to be a Beatnik in disguise.

The Aping of the Disquieted Toodleoodler

Another good way to endanger the soft tissues is to magnetically alternate the dissonance by a third on each successive byplay. When I think of all the money I’ve wasted either enjoying the dissonance directly or, later, when I’d gotten too old to stagger into the defunctiture chamber by myself, alternating it by manual neutrality, I just get sick. Some of my friends at the Thermal Academy have accused my of faking this sickness and, despite numerous pieces of evidence (my infected blanket, receipts from rural healers, and the orange lesions on my elbows), refuse to grant my any leeway in the upcoming String Trials of Nebulous Numinosity.
I actually attended the Thermal Academy for a short time. It was during the making of Cross-Pollutant IV, a film on which I worked as a consultant. Foolishly, I thought that my association with the production might lead to a career in film, so my dedication to my studies at the Academy was less than single-minded. To be honest, I don’t think I could ever be single-minded. Even when I smoke pot, which is a great rarity, I have doubts and second thoughts and a discursive focus. True, these things are diminished to the level of little brightly-colored pixies, about the size of gnats, jittering about on the periphery of my vision, but they are still there, just waiting for the day when I get my hands on some magic insecticide.
Carey, one of the Thermal Academy guys, spotted my in Doubleton’s the other day. I hadn’t seen him in thirty years.
“Remember me?” He wasn’t so much curious as clichéd.
“Yes I do.” I returned in my customary (gewöhnlich) matter-of-fact manner. “You’re Carey.”
“Just like the Joni Mitchell song.” He guffawed as delicately as one can guffaw.
“Well…” I demurred.
“You never did like my name, did you?”
“I’ve known several Careys in my time.” I began, age having brought a measure of boldness to my personal interactions. “And not one of them could I look at without an irrational unease. I could explain in more detail,” I promised, “But I don’t owe you an explanation.”

The Poodle’s Kaputle

Triangulos, who was indeed a poodle if one took the time to examine him closely, obtained possession of the weatherwhip and a small box of psychic grenades from a street corner vending machine. He had expected a tube of soft drink powder to come tumbling out in exchange for his coin and was a little disappointed at first. A friend of his, Mrs. Merkel, explained to him the value of these items, however, and after that he felt better about the transaction.
“I’d still like a taste of soft drink powder.” Triangulos admitted as he stood up from Mrs. Merkel’s sofa.
“Well, I’ve got some. What kind did you want?” She was a typically kindly-looking old lady, but she had been quite a sexy little thing in her youth.
“Do you have any of that old brand they had when I was a kid—“
“You mean a puppy!” Mrs. Merkel interrupted.
“Oh, yes.” Triangulos laughed. “I forgot. It was called Progressionade,” he continued. “I remember the package had a little boy and girl on it. Their tongues were hanging out in an ecstasy of flavor.”
Mrs. Merkel made a face of pronounced pondering. “I don’t recall it. I believe all I have is the store brand.” She moved towards the small galley that served as both food preparation unit and pottery firing workshop.
“What store?” Asked Triangulos warily. With the old lady’s back turned to him he made a quick perusal of the objects within his reach. Were any of them worth stealing?
“Wal-Mart.”
Triangulos registered his distaste by loudly coughing. His natural barking voice came through when he did so. He pocketed a small figurine. As Mrs. Merkel rambled in the cupboard he wondered if he would bury it when he got home. Sometimes he couldn’t control himself. Even now he longed to dig around under the cushions on the sofa.
The weatherwhip, a powerful weapon born of billion dollar research laboratories, the kind that look like oil refineries on the outside and industrial bakeries on the inside, pulsed beside Triangulos, equally eager to act according to the dictates of its nature. The box of psychic grenades, on the other hand, was passive, the boy and girl decorating its exterior hiding their tongues in shame.

Tiglet Gets Tigger

It was a simple matter for Tiglet to assume a disguise and enter the House of Psychedelic Education unremarked. Old Manfred, who guarded the oblong portal, said nothing to Tiglet as the latter walked inside. Of course, thought Tiglet; who would acknowledge a mere coconut-headed lemur? Such creatures are beneath acknowledgement. He giggled to himself as he approached the central altar. This was going to be easy.
Under the gaze of the idol, however, Tiglet felt the old misgivings rise in his gullet. Was it wrong for him to give vent to his jealousy in this way? He had always been taught by the Fragrance Masters at the Macaronium that jealousy was akin to staring at the back of a mirror. One didn’t want to stare at the back of a mirror. Tiglet looked into the eyes of the idol. How had they managed to sew it all together, he found himself wondering.
“Magnificent, isn’t it, Brother?” Marveled a voice beside him.
Tiglet turned and beheld, though he did not know it at the time, the face of Inspector Burlapplander.
“The idol, you mean?” Tiglet asked, not forgetting to speak as all coconut-headed lemurs speak, in a sort of defeated, nasal tone, like Marty Feldman impersonating an unhappy goat. Subsequently Marty Feldman’s goat was challenged to a debate by Adam Sandler’s goat, but the outcome, while instructive to the most progressive of farmers, had no bearing on the election, which was carried by Veronica Cartwright’s sheep in a landslide.
“Of course, Brother.” Inspector Burlapplander replied. He was a devoted member of the House of Psychedelic Education and felt nothing but camaraderie towards his fellow members, even these lowly lemurs.
Tiglet looked to the left and to the right before turning his gaze back to the inspector.
“I’d like to cut its eyes out with these scissors,” here he revealed the iron, black-handled implement of the same name from beneath his threadbare lemur’s leotard, “And take a photograph of the blind tiger for my wall.”
“You do know that ‘blind tiger’ is an old slang term for speakeasy.” The Inspector looked closely at the lemur before him.
Tiglet’s aside: “I thought Tom Waits made that up.”

According to My Elapsed Indices

Most of the indices were agronomic in nature. They dealt with planting times and correlations among specific growing rooms within the brontosaural lab building. There were, however, a couple that listed esoteric things like my candidates for inclusion on a planned Sgt. Pepper-like album cover and interrelated references to places about town where certain stickers were to be seen. I was just going to throw all of these documents in the river when I caught sight of my reflection on the side of the Transhobbledehoop Building (it’s surfaced with highly polished oak).
“My god I’ve gotten fat. And just in the past two weeks too.” I remembered that I had worn one of my new pairs of pants to the grocer’s two weeks before. There was no way I could fit into any of them now.
“Which pair of pants were these?” Jerry Lancaster asked me after I had imparted the above information to him and as he attempted to fit my nearly drowned indices back into their original pickle drum.
“The red corduroy ones.” I answered. “The Sergio Valentes.” I emphasized with Mediterranean heat and eyebrows that lifted up and down like rustic fishing boats rocked by a particularly splashy wave.
“Ah.” Jerry nodded.
He pounded the lid onto the pickle drum with a rubber hammer and tossed the hammer into the foothills of the mountain range of garbage that surrounded us. He leaned on the pickle drum with one hand and looked at me.
“You know,” he began. “Sergio Valente is just a brand. There is no person named Sergio Valente at the head of some pants making corporation. There isn’t even a corporation. The brand is trotted out every few decades by various consortiums of the European garment industry and then packed away again like a particularly warm but ugly sweater.”
“You are unusually poetic today, Jerry.” I noted, warming my hands against the fire that, it was hoped, would one day consume the garbage and lead to freedom for all of us. “What’s up?”
“It’s just that I don’t think you should include ‘him’ on your Sgt. Pepper-like album cover.”
“My father had a Sergio Valente dopp kit.” I said. “It’s either him or the dopp kit.”

Identification with Authority Brings Tranquility of Mind

No matter how fat I had gotten, my tranquility of mind was not broken, for I maintained an identification with authority. For those who knew me in the old days, the days when we sat eating chips and salsa and drinking pitchers of margaritas at the old Mexicali Grill all afternoon, this must have come as something of a shock. Not that I had gotten fat: they had been waiting, even anticipating that for years. Not that I had achieved tranquility of mind: had I not written and sung “Tranquility of Mind” during my time with the band Bosstonn? No, it was my identification with authority that must have really astounded those long forgotten acquaintances of mine. I am assuming, of course. I hadn’t seen any of them in years. I don’t even know if any of them were aware of my newfound status as an identifier with authority.
“It troubles me, this change.” A former girlfriend of a friend, now turned lawyer, wrote to me over the summer. “You used to be such a rebel.”
Those last words, “You used to be such a rebel,” troubled me. I had them made into illuminated iron letters twenty-two feet tall and placed on the summit of Samosa Ridge as a sneering gift to the city, but during the subsequent flood no one had time to remark upon them.
So we return to the question first put to me by one of the panelists on the old Gifford Grange Show: What authority, turkey? I think the best way to answer this is with an anecdote. How I actually answered it on the show was with a series of yak-like movements to a tape of pre-recorded mineshaft noises. During my time with Bosstonn, I was but an employee. Had I not done as instructed by the guitarist, Hondo Yammer, I would have been fired and replaced. Yet I felt no discontent. I made the best of the situation, going so far as to wear a t-shirt with Hondo Yammer’s picture on it and allowing him to take credit for the song “Tranquility of Mind” even though I was the one who really wrote it.
One line alone in that song, “the patriarchal system is the most harmonious,” guaranteed that it became a hit in China, land of unquestioned authority. Of course, one becomes slightly insane having one’s will constantly balked, but this is a small price to pay for the resultant order. One must accept the bit in the mouth like a good horse. Eventually you will feel naked without the man on your back.




Disengaging the Gelatinous Symbiote

We had thrown an heirloom quilt over Aunt Dalla and hustled her into the truck. It was a rainy night. Dr. 6afti met us at the entrance to his house.
“Get her inside quickly.” He ordered, holding an electric torch in one hand and pointing with the other.
The entryway was hung with large paintings on either side. I didn’t have time to examine them closely, but the theme seemed to be “great monsters of the past.”
“Follow me.” Dr. 6afti directed. He led the way into the main part of the house, issuing instructions to a green-looking young man to “prepare the plumbing.” I saw many servants as we moved along, in contrast to the paucity of help usually found in the folklore of the mad scientist. They stared at our little group as we made our way to the large workroom, their eyes frightful, sometimes whispering to one another as we passed.
“Place the woman in the rebinding couch.” Dr. 6afti ordered. The green-looking young man helpfully showed us what 6afti meant. He indicated a long, padded piece of furniture with a receptacle large enough for us to place Aunt Dalla. Once she was inside, the rebinding couch was rotated on wheels so that the receptacle, formerly on the side, now faced up, towards the soot-covered ceiling. 6afti and his assistant filled the unoccupied portion of the receptacle with pink packing peanuts.
“She’ll be alright, won’t she?” Mandressa worried.
Dr. 6afti had no reply for her. His attention was now consumed by the jumping of the needle inside a large pressure gauge. His eyes, which one could occasionally glimpse around the corners of his heavy spectacles, were like cocktail onions under a strobe.
“Can I get any of you a cup of tea?” The green-looking young man asked.
“No time for that!” 6afti hissed. “Look!”
The fuzzy pipe that hovered over Aunt Dalla’s hidden form shuddered like the trunk of a wooly mammoth clogged with a golf ball. During the process I happened to glance over at the scientist’s desk. An itemized bill had already been drawn up, deepening my suspicions.

Bicentennial Phallus Remains Inoperable

“We still can’t get it to start,” Aardsen complained as the team approached the structure.
“Let me have a crack at it.” Louis drawled with the confidence of a man whose moustache bristled with a dozen strongmen hiding behind each strand.
“No, no.” Aardsen shook his head. “We want it working, not punished.” At these words Louis, never to be heard from again, shrank back into the group, the richly oiled black implement on his shoulder but a distant landmark of futility.
“Have you tried a mulitalismanic approach, perhaps a folkloric calendar linked to some dysponsive clonolect?” Tall Johnny suggested. His face begged for a wall of primly seated corrective eyewear, but this modern age had balked such stereotypical adornments.
“No we haven’t” Aardsen admitted. “How would we go about doing that?”
Tall Johnny snapped out his index finger like a man preparing to whip a dog, but was interrupted in answering by the arrival of Nurdix from headquarters.
“Aardsen,” called Nurdix from his egg-shaped craft atop the little monorail. “The Emperor commands you to make contact.”
“Excuse me, fellows.” Aardsen moved through the members of the team, looking left and right at each one. Did his face betray any fear, any anxiety about reporting to the dread emperor? An imaginary reporter interviewing the team afterwards would have discovered none that discerned these emotions.
“Of course,” The Yam might have said, “Aardsen’s face has always been but a mask.”
Several dozen paces away Aardsen had found a small clearing in the woods where he could lay out the blanket of stasis and the battery pack. He connected the two and knelt in the middle of the circular pattern on the blanket facing northeast towards Mount Synapseo. Within seconds of leaching his personal mental cue into the ether he felt the active aerograph about him.
“Master druggist Aardsen.” The emperor, glowing yellow and black in the void, addressed him.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“The celebration draws nigh.” The voice was noble, yet oddly rustic, as if the moon had rolled into a barbershop for the first time.

Relaxing with the Ed Muffin Quartet

One of the racquetball courts at the old Abteilung had been set aside for the use of the quartet. All the renovations and furnishings had been paid for by the group’s manager, Mr. Befehlsgewohnte.
“Nothing’s too good for these boys.” The would-be Texan was quoted as saying.
Ed Muffin himself, the group’s namesake, kettle drum player, and sometime singer, had long ago begun his slow slide into irrelevance. He sat in a corner of the room smoking cigarettes and staring at the wall as if there was a window before him, one in which a man was erecting a house of cards. The rest of the members of the group (there were more than the name suggested) were scattered about the big room, engaged in a variety of pursuits, including a rather desultory game of crazy eights.
At a knock on the door Merv Lungpit, trombonist, threw down his cards and rose to answer it. Just as his hand touched the handle, however, the door opened on the figure of Constance Loom, journalist with the music magazine Bunkie’s Nunker.
“Hello!” She trilled. “How’s everybody today?”
“I’m just fine.” Lungpit responded. He threw out his big hand in welcome, although his eyes, distorted behind thick glasses, did not match that posture. He looked, in fact, like the famous self-portrait of Chuck Close, but with thicker glasses and a more pronounced, hulking, Swedish face.
“How exactly does one get a Swedish face?” Constance wondered as she sat down at the little space cleared away for her at the refreshments table. She took out her little tape recorder and placed it on the table.
“Are you enjoying your new relaxation area?” She asked. “And how it recording coming along on your new album?” She continued when answers to her first question proved unworthy of quotation.
“There isn’t going to be a ‘next album.’” Came a voice from the back of the room.
“Why, Ed Muffin,” Constance brightened. “You spoke.”
The old man in the plaid slacks rose from his leatherette of self-consciousness and tottered past them all like a piece of driftwood come to threadbare, tenuous life.

Steering-Column-Shaped Potato

The potato, pulled from her garden by Mrs. Cresh, was put on exhibit in the town’s Hall of Commemoration—a singular honor, for until now the only things that had ever been exhibited there had been a statue of Mr. Microcephalic, a cartoon character created by the town’s most famous resident, Schmöd Enterribus. The amazing thing about this potato was that it was shaped exactly like the steering column on a 1973 Volkswagen Beetle. Mrs. Cresh, of course, did not recognize this similarity when she first harvested the potato, but upon being informed of it by her neighbor, Dr. Barnes, admitted that its novelty would prove most diverting to the public. She agreed to loan the potato to the Hall of Commemoration. Dr. Barnes smiled at his neighbor’s magnanimity and helped himself to another handful of mints.
Across town the Jeffords, whose carburetor-shaped onion had been rejected by the Hall only a month before, seethed in jealous anger.
“That old bitch!” Hasrus Jefford grumbled into the boot he held under his chin.
“She’s had her day in the sun!” Myrtonya added. “Remember? Several years ago she grew those peas, the ones that looked like the New Kids on the Block all snuggled up together in their little pod!” That last word she spat out like an Imperial probe droid falling into the snowy Hoth Landscape.
“Will you two stop whining!” Little Troy spoke up from his place among the metal shavings. “Why don’t we just kill her and be done with it?”
“That won’t get that potato out of sight.” Myrtonya explained, each word a step up a shaky ladder.
“Well, what would?” Hasrus wondered. His boot was full. Time to switch to the trash can.
Later that evening the three family members (Jonas stayed home) pried open the lid of the Hall of Commemoration and stepped inside. They had brought along knives and cooking oil. As they reached the Pedestal of Adulation the lights suddenly came on.
“I thought you stinkers might try something.” Schmöd Enterribus announced from his portable lectern. His drawing implements were inexpensive, the kinds of things children use, but effective in his practiced hand.

Acoustic Benefits

Obviously the first thing that comes to mind when one speaks of the benefits of the acoustic guitar is its portability. No electricity is needed. One can take it out in the backyard and strum in the sun. In actual practice, however, I rarely do this. 90% of the effects of aging on the skin are caused by sunlight. Also, playing outside in some rustic setting like a youth counselor at Bible camp just doesn’t appeal to me. As for playing downtown on the street corner: yes, I’ve thought about it many times, but I’m afraid people will steal my songs.
My acoustic guitar is called “Bumpy 1” to distinguish it from the earlier “Smooth 1,” my first guitar, which I smashed against the TV in a drunken fury. That first guitar was purchased out of jealousy. Another kid at school had one just like it. He got so much attention with it that I couldn’t stand it. I saved up my money from my job at the grocery store and bought a guitar to compete with him. But then I had to learn how to play. By the time I smashed it I had learned how to play, but I never sang along. A couple of years later my wife bought me a replacement, Bumpy 1. Suddenly I found that I could write songs on it.
Actually there was one memorable time when I took my guitar outside. It was the perfect day for it. The weather in the immediate vicinity of the backyard was indistinguishable from that indoors. I felt like Shel Silverstein in the picture on the back of Where the Sidewalk Ends. I sat down on a toppled tree and began to play a song of mine called “Rendezvous with the Cavalier Physician.” Slowly woodland creatures, small ones, began to gather before me, gazing up in wonder at this combination of man and instrument that made such a pleasing sound. One or two of the rabbits rocked their heads from side to side to the rhythm of my tune. As I approached the chorus (“George Clooney’s social conscience has been quantified”) it seemed to me that the eyes of my audience grew larger, more expressive of a sentience that I had thought possible only in a cartoon. As I neared the end of the song and was wondering what to play next, there came the distressing thump of a rap song’s bass line from a car passing by. All of the woodland creatures scattered back to their prickly places of concealment and their grubby pursuits. At least there were no sneering college students standing about.

The Regal Step as All Mermaids Canter

Some question my right to wear a therapeutic torso blind. The mermaids, in their elaborate headgear and cumbersome tail apparatus, have worked out a dance number in which I am mocked for my supposed impertinence.
“Or pretension, if you prefer.” I later added as I reviewed the case for my friends on the committee.
“You seem to place a great deal of importance on your appearance.” Don, sitting on the extreme left, interposed.
I shrugged as I admitted, “I like to look good.”
“But don’t you feel that there is too much emphasis placed on looks in our society?” Phyllis asked. She was from Eliminatron in the North and had only recently been added to the committee. I didn’t know her, hadn’t gone to school with her.
“As opposed to what?” I took a sip of my water and waited.
“Well… inner beauty, for lack of a better phrase.”
“Lady, I’ve seen pictures of my insides and, while I admit to a certain fascination, they’re not what I’d call—“
“OK, then, the soul.” The lady interrupted. I knew it must have pained her to bring that out in this group. I could see it about her ears. Something about her ears. They registered pain and embarrassment like a seismograph.
There were several chuckles at this from all over the room. I was just about to make a subtle rejoinder of devastating aplomb when the mermaids, hitherto confined to their aquaghetto on the south side of our mutual enclosure, clambered onstage and began their mocking, awkward dance.
“This is what I’m talking about!” I roared. I had to; my friends were all applauded. Phyllis had stood up and was shouting out her encouragement and approval.
“One for the soul!” She cheered. “One for the soul!”
“Ignorant, philosophically confused rabble!” I thought. I straightened the apron I wore over my therapeutic torso blind and crept out of the room. It was my intention to go directly to my van and detonate the explosives, but I was deterred by my personal physician, a man of much pride.
“You’re wearing a bow tie.” He reminded me, gesturing at my reflection in the eyes of a dog.

Franklin’s Trireme

Franklin built his trireme from advance point underlings in discarded expiry. It was long, as long as the jets that took his father to Korea every summer. Each deck held a hundred men gathered from the potato fields and vending machine supply houses of the Sow County indifference. The pilot’s cubicle, baffled in crisp lengths of saffron and Denver denim, molded itself to his buttocks like a wire bow tie about the neck of a happy snowman. As he put the old Genesis album on the turntable, Franklin knew that his trireme could best the tugboats and turnip scows of his enemies.
I sat in a makeshift chair by the river and waited for the trireme to come into view. It had been a long week. As I waited I thumbed through an old, much-beloved issue of National Geographic. So many ads for military schools!
“There she comes!” Announced Gruffnal, my canine companion. His wagging tail was an affront to my exhaustion.
“OK, OK.” I winced, cheeks filling with aging Huckleberry Finn.
“Ahoy, there!” Franklin called on espying me. I wasn’t hard to spot in my orange upon orange assembly in the midst of all that greenery.
“Get ready.” I made sour at the dog.
In the ensuing battle Franklin’s trireme proved itself a hardy vessel. It and its well-rehearsed crew stood up under the lizard tongues of my arsenal. I have sunk aircraft carriers with less effort. However, on the offensive side of the menu, the trireme, named Verwaltung by its master, betrayed poor design. The corresponding proportions of the beam and the trough were weighted too far to the yaw, and therefore whenever Franklin launched his loads of pitchman’s fire at me, the whole ship began to spin about, wrecking his aim for the next sortie. At the end of thirty minutes I stood on the shore untouched, my orange vestments, if anything, more radiant than ever.
Of course, as I have indicated, Franklin’s trireme was equally undamaged.
“Stalemate.” Gruffnal barked maliciously.
“Don’t worry.” I assured him as I gratefully sat back down. “We’ll get him at the boat show.”
Together we watched Franklin continue downstream, the plumes atop his protective headgear just visible amid the rows of sweaty backs.

With No More Gastropodal Illustrations From Tom

By chance I happened to have a snail’s shell in my pocket when the announcement came down from Tom’s office.
“Where is Tom’s office?” One of the wunderkind in the room asked with typical cussedness.
“Somewhere in Asia I think.” I haven’t really seen him in ten years.” I adjusted both my spectacles and bow tie with one daredevil gesture. “We were close once, but had a bit of a falling out, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry to hear this.” Mr. Lincoln remarked, referring to the announcement, a copy of which he held in his hand. We all were; Tom’s illustrations had long been a source of merriment among our little band. Now it seemed the band was breaking up. As leader (something the others might dispute) I felt forlorn, naturally.
Remember his last one? Minutely detailed in sepia and fat boy’s detritus, the conch, in all its glory, rising up to urge the ice queen to spread her legs for the bear-like woodsman just emerged from his carefully interlaced woods. The drawing hung over the rear of the makeshift stage we had erected in the officers’ canteen. We were all officers, of course; that’s what made the arrangement so appealing.
I was later asked why Tom had given up his career as our illustrator. Although I had no idea, being privy only to the secrets of those in my employ at the diary factory, I offered a plausible supposition.
“He’s moving on to something new before it’s too late.” I told the magic elephant. “I wish I could do the same. But, until the gears of the universal machine turn some lottery winnings my way, I guess I’m stuck.”
“I thought you preferred the metaphor of the game in describing your lot in life.”
“Actually, if you’re going to talk about preferences, I prefer the metaphor of the car on the highway as symbolic image of life, but again, until I win the fucking lottery, I can’t have my preferences.”
“As a magic elephant, I prefer circus peanuts to the real ones, but no one pays any attention to me.” These last words went unheeded by everyone, including the one who wrote them down.

Simple Art Projects for the Lachrymose Echidna

His name was Stanfred. His prickles each had its own grommet in the blue vest he wore each day about the control center. He was on the verge of tears, a condition indicated by the patch he had sewn over the right breast pocket.
“What’s that symbol?” I asked, pointing to this patch.
“Adelbert, the crying man.” He told me. His little snout twitched.
“And this one?” I pointed now to the patch over his left breast. No pocket there and perhaps breast in this instance is a funny word.
“Funny Language Brigade.”
“That’s nothing like the Anal Patrol, is it?”
“Nothing like it, no.” Stanfred the echidna replied. “Excuse me, I have to blow my nose!” He gasped, rushed to the restroom door.
“He doesn’t want you to see him crying.” My colleague at the control center, Mr. Beesonholiday, explained. I glanced at this fellow’s profile. We each were staring at the restroom door.
“Perhaps Art can be of help in this case.” I suggested.
“You mean Art with a capital ‘A?’”
“I feel uncomfortable calling something by a euphemism. For instance, I can’t call a room in which there is a toilet but no actual bath a bathroom.”
“Yours is a singular vision of purity.” Mr. Beesonholiday acknowledged.
When Stanfred returned I had a folding table laden with construction paper, crayons, glue, and, yes, toilet paper tubes available for his use.
“What do you expect me to do?” He asked as I helped him into a chair.
“I expect you to express yourself.” I smiled. My teeth are not as white as I should like them to be. For many years I failed to charm the people to the full extent of my ability for fear of displaying my lack of snow-like dentition, but finally decided that life was rapidly drawing to a close without its full measure of smiling.
“But why crying?” Mr. Beesonholiday demanded from the center of the control center and perfectly reasonable.

You Too Can See the Gravy Coalesce

I took it as a sign. OK, not a sign so much as a portent. My next story was to have the word “gravy” in the title and I was served gravy at breakfast (I work at night). This portent I interpreted as meaning that it was time that I started writing some more-or-less true stories in addition to all the wild nonsense that I’ve indulged in these past ten years.
Doomed to follow this line of work (it was a portent after all), I began trying to come up with a more-or-less true story to write. I went to the Caboose, my studio, to work out and set my mind on the task. It was Wednesday, aerobics day. I put Opeth’s Damnation album on the machine and began stepping up and down on my homemade box.
I made the box out of leftover 2x2’s from my canvases. It was on one of those nights when I was having trouble painting. I have to do something stupid sometimes to get my mind to focus. So I built an aerobics step-box. I hammered and hammered until I had amassed a great block of 2x2’s, each about six inches long. The box weighs about thirty pounds. I covered it in old house paint.
What story could I tell? I didn’t really wrack my brains over it. I’m a cautious man. I ease myself into things. I merely contemplated all the many stories I could tell. Once the mental levers have been thrown the brain will do the work eventually. It’s like when you’re trying to think of someone’s name. You don’t obsess over it; you just tell your brain to come up with the answer and then forget about it. (!) In a little while the name will pop into your head. That happened to me one time when I was a kid still attending church. I drew a comic strip about this a couple of years ago. I couldn’t think of Robert Shaw’s name. I had found out that he’d died a few years before and was stunned that I hadn’t been informed. In the middle of our nighttime Sunday school class I suddenly blurted out, “Robert Shaw!”\
His most celebrated performance, of course, is Quint in Jaws, but have you ever seen him as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin and Marian? It was good to see him and Sean Connery together again. I wish they could have made a third film together: Gravy Eaters of the Alien Monastery.

Skeletal Nomenclature

I remember begging the Christian god to spare me from leprosy and other diseases of an equally horrific nature as I lay in my bed one night. And I believed the next day that I had been given a divine immunity, just because I’d asked for it. Of course, this was about the age of seven, a period when I went around thinking, and telling people, “I’m going to live to be two million years old!” I guess I just couldn’t believe that I would ever die.
A couple of years later I swore to this same deity that I would never drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or take drugs. That lasted until I was nineteen, about seven or eight years, the time span I was isolated among the private schoolers and the churchgoers. Or until I was actually exposed to alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs, that is.
I stopped going to church primarily because I finally did get sick. I had to have a tumor on my pituitary gland removed. The night before the surgery I attended evening service at the weirdo church I was going to at the time. My surgery was mentioned, prayers and prophecies were made. The next day the David Gilmour-look-alike doctor cut into my mouth. One week later I was back in church and not a word was said. They didn’t like non-miracles. That was the last time I ever went.
However, there was a secondary reason I stopped going. I had begun my first serious sexual relationship. What with driving up to the girl’s house forty-five minutes away twice a day, I just didn’t have time to go any more.
By the time I became a non-believer I was a full-blown alcoholic. That was age twenty. It’s funny how eventful your life is when you’re young. A friend of mine used to say my life was like a soap opera. Every six months something new. I don’t think he’d say that now. It’s more like that endless series from the local PBS station about learning to play the banjo.
“Today we’re going to complete the hammer-on at the fifth fret that we began last time.” Thanks for stoppin’ by. See you next time on The Appalachian Daredevil.

How I Endure Scandal and Abuse

I always wanted to be a cartoonist, but I could never understand how the professionals went about it. In the instruction books they always said to pencil in the characters lightly using ovals to fashion the head, torso, and other body parts. Then flesh out the whole thing, ink it in, and erase the pencil lines. It seemed like a lot of work to me. I used to stare at old comic book characters like Batman and wonder how they knew where to place the thick lines to create shadows. And how did they know how thick to make them?
Now I am a cartoonist and I never pencil anything. I draw in ink straight off. The secret is shading. You can draw as crappy as you like as long as it’s then shaded properly. I would prefer to shade by thinning down some ink and brushing the shadows on, but my circumstances preclude leaving drawings around to dry, so I use cross-hatching. Also, I use copier paper to draw on, not being a rich man, so getting it wet is probably not a good idea. It would wrinkle up and not lend itself to optimum reproduction.
Looking at cartoons puts me in a good mood. Watching actors makes me jealous. Jealousy is one of the primary emotions in my life. The truth is, however, that, while I’ve no doubt that I could learn to be a performer, it isn’t what comes naturally to me. I’m more the type that hides in his room and amuses himself. I’m not comfortable showing my work to strangers or associating with other cartoonists or writers (jealousy again) because I don’t go for the whole COMPETITION thing. Maybe I’m TOO competitive and I can’t stand the fact that competitions are often won by the glad-hand and the inside connection, by the pretty face and the added dimension of performance, rather than a strict analysis of merit.
I’m happy that I finally became a real cartoonist before it was too late, though. I’m happy that I learned to do narrative comics with recurring characters because that is the sign of a real cartoonist to the big shots. Actually submitting my comics for the big shots’ approval would be one more sign of validity.

Abject Bishopric Enumerated

I showed up for work just before sunrise. The place was a natural gas pumping station out behind Colbert somewhere. I was one of three men the temp agency had sent. The others were two black guys named Eddie and the Reverend. The foreman handed me a shovel and told me to start digging a trench from the back of the office building to the pump house about half a football field away. “How far down?” I asked, pointing to the ground. He indicated the depth by holding his hand up to his eyebrows.
When I started digging I thought, this is impossible. But, over the course of three or four days, it got done. Eddie and the Reverend were less than fully engaged with the project. While I kept digging they would stop every ten to fifteen minutes to talk. I don’t know what I was busting my ass for; we were only getting paid five dollars an hour. The Reverend did most of the talking. Mostly it was about his problems with his wife. He said he waited all night outside a hotel room to catch her cheating on him.
“I don’t know why I have such trouble.” He complained. “I got all my teeth, my clothes fit me good, and I got a dick seven inches long.”
“He’s a real preacher.” Eddie told me later. “He can really do it.”
We were on break. Eddie encouraged the Reverend to give us a sample of his sermonizing skills. The Reverend placed his hands on top of his shovel as if it were a skinny lectern. Eddie and I stood before him as if we were waiting for the bride to arrive.
“Brothers,” The Reverend began, “We know that the world operates under two sets of laws. There is man’s law. And then there is God’s law. Now man’s law and God’s law intersect in the human heart. There are feelings, which are in the heart, and thoughts, which are in the brain. Man’s law—“ We were called back to work, to push wheelbarrows of cement over a 2”x6” straddling a pit twelve feet deep.
“He’s been fired from every black church in the area.” Eddie informed me. “Always carrying on with a woman.”
Once they invited me to sit with them in Eddie’s 1979 Monte Carlo on lunch break. It wasn’t as fun as I had expected it to be. Thereafter I returned to my habit of reading S.J. Perelman in my own car.

An Imperious Single Toot

The temp agency assignment at the natural gas pumping station only lasted a week. On the last day the foreman asked me if I wanted to apply for full-time work with his construction company, but I declined. My father always warned me that if I didn’t watch myself I’d wind up digging ditches and here I was doing just that.
As I pulled onto the road at the end of that day something told me not to take the same way home as Eddie and the Reverend. They were ahead of me in their Monte Carlo. Sure enough, they conked out and I felt obliged to give them a lift, especially since they’d seen me see them. One lived on one side of Athens and one lived on the other. And me without a dime and my tank sitting on empty.
Every time I’ve tried to talk to blacks to create a rapport based on a subject that I think they are interested in I’ve met with failure. It was the same on this occasion. I said something about how much I like “farm food,” but they didn’t care. I then said that I was tired of these crappy jobs. The Reverend explained to me that without education all I was going to get were crappy jobs. I dropped him off first. Eddie told me he envied the Revered because he lived in a nice house and his wife had a good job. Both of them claimed not to have a cent on them for gas.
A couple of months later I spotted the Reverend downtown. He was standing against a wall looking a forlorn. But then he always looked a little hangdog. I was with somebody at the time, probably Richard. I told him to excuse me for a moment. Now was my chance to get repaid for the ride.
“Hey, do you remember me? We worked together on that construction job. I gave you and Eddie a ride home that time?”
“Oh yeah. How you doing?” He had a deep voice. He reminds me of the central gravedigger at the end of Oh Brother Where Art Thou, only dressed in coveralls and a baseball cap.
“Oh, pretty good.” I told him. “I gave you and Eddie a ride that time?” I put my hand out encouragingly.
He mirrored my gesture.
“Say, would you happen to have five dollars?” He asked.

Ion Seal

Richard got me a job at Golden Pantry after I quit drinking. Golden Pantry is a chain of convenience stores in the Athens area. The one we worked at was located just across the street from our old high school. When the people who ran the school found I was working there they began to use me as an object lesson in their daily sermons.
“There is a very smart boy who graduated from this very school, but he didn’t apply himself and now he’s a failure, working right across the street at a convenience store.”
And the kids would come visit me after school. They’d come in and read my name tag and start giggling.
“Hey, do you do drugs?”
The son of the school’s founders, who was our football coach and history teacher, came over one day and pulled a neat little con job on me. He added a quart of oil to his gasoline purchase after I’d already rung up the gas. He fast talked me somehow out of a couple of bucks. He’ll go to his grave believing Adolf Hitler was an atheist.
Eventually Richard became the manager and I became assistant manager. I hadn’t realized the ramifications of that until just now. That means that I have worked in a supervisory position before. I’d been thinking for years that I hadn’t. Like it matters. I’m never going to be a CEO, except of my own, one-man business.
Richard said to me not long after my promotion,
“I get a bonus when the store is inventoried and everything checks out. I’ll split it with you.” He gave me a knowing look, but the money would never equal the amount of stuff that I could steal.
I stole everything I could while working for Golden Pantry. If I’d still been drinking, it would have been a perfect set-up. Food, gas, cigarettes, and even cash. I also didn’t get too rattled when the customers stole.
One night this druggie came in and brought two bottles of Robitussin up to the counter. He asked quite boldly, if in a pathetic, desperate voice,
“Can I have these?”
Disgusted, I said, “Yeah, go ahead.”

Analysis of the Furlong Has Begun

After I became assistant manager at the Golden Pantry I had to attend managers’ meetings at the company headquarters. This was the old headquarters in the back of Beechwood Shopping Center, before they moved outside of town into a new building. Come to think of it, the shopping center isn’t called Beechwood anymore. Since it’s renovation it’s been renamed Colonial Promenade. “His mama named him Clay, I’m gonna call him Clay.”
Richard and I were sitting in one meeting in which they reminded us not to allow anyone to dispense fuel into anything other than a proper container. Richard drew a cartoon of a negro holding a used soda bottle saying, “I got two dollar worth kerosene in here.”
Speaking of name changes, Richard used to be called Ricky. I’ve had to call him “Richard” for twenty-five years now and I still think of him as Ricky. Ever since he got back from naval boot camp he’s been Richard. I don’t know exactly how the change was effected, but I’m sure the motivation was an attempt to kill off the pathetic “Ricky” character from high school. Funny how when he and Mitch went into the navy reserve I was worried that all that time together off in the big world would make them closer than Mitch and I were. The funny part is that today I could not care less. Richard’s moved away to Ohio; I’ll never see him again. And Mitch is the Stormcrow, bringer of ill news. It took a long time for the old gang to break up. I wish I’d stuck with my original plan to go to Europe after high school. But my father told me, “That’s impossible,” and so I didn’t go.
I didn’t go anywhere.
I had to close the store at night and then open it the next day. That happened on a couple of occasions. I didn’t see the point in driving home, so I stayed in the storeroom, smoked a joint down to the point where it burned my lip, listened to Paul Weller’s Wild Wood and the Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication, and slept on the floor, a pile of towels for a pillow.
I also made a hundred long distance calls to Montana, trying to talk to Vanessa, my one-time girlfriend.
But she was in Alaska, fucking some guy she met at Rocky Mountain College, the same school her father went to.

Felectro and the Dominant Ice Cream

He loved to fart. When he thought about the phrase, “he loved to fart,” in reference to himself, he began to laugh. When he laughed about the phrase “he loved to fart” in reference to himself, a noise like New Years Eve part favors, razzers or buzzers or whatever they were called, went through his head. He tried to analyze why this happened, but could only put it down to air pressure.
As he lay under the blanket and farted he giggled, thinking, “He loved to fart,” and waited for the smell to rise up to his nose. Would it be a good one? Oh, it was! He wondered, from a scientific viewpoint, what factors went into giving this particular fart its unique aroma. As a scientist and a philosopher, which he felt himself to be, he knew that the different foods he ate must lend themselves to different fart smells.
Then there was another aspect to consider. As he rolled over he asked himself, “Why do I like to fart so much?” Is it the sound? Or is it the smell? Or, and he suspected this was the answer, is it because the sound and the smell combined make farts socially unacceptable? He didn’t want to probe too deeply into this. It might ruin the whole thing for him. It’s like when you really sit down and analyze the appeal of a naked woman, he told himself. Suffice to say, farts were subjectively disgusting. Other people’s farts were bad, but his own were both amusing and a source of relief.
As he drifted into sleep he vaguely wondered just how bad the room would smell to an outsider coming into it right now. He’d been farting in there for about an hour as he lay in bed reading In Our Time by Hemingway. Perhaps these thoughts, together with the book, were what gave rise to the disturbing dreams he later had. Perhaps, and this is what his wife later theorized, the fumes in the room had addled his brain.
At any rate, the question you’re probably asking is; why did the man and his wife have separate bedrooms in the first place? Well, aside from the fact that he farted and she snored and therefore were incompatible sleeping companions (and I mean just sleep here), not everybody adheres to your traditions, Mr. America, with your regular church attendance, your obsession with watching TV, and your room deodorizers.

Cleaning My Fingers

Richard was still married to Gail when I worked at the Golden Pantry. They had two sons. They were later to have a third, but then it turned out that only the first was actually Richard’s, but by then I didn’t hang out with them any more.
Gail was without a doubt one of the stupidest people I have ever met. When she was pregnant with the first kid, I got hold of the baby book she was filling in. Several times in it she mentioned that she had “expressed herself,” meaning, I suppose, that she was lactating. She thought Steven Tyler was hot. Everything in their house she referred to as “hers.”
“Did you scratch my washing machine?” She was likely to ask. “What have you done with my eggs?” “Where is my child?”
She had a job at JC Penney for a brief period. (All of her jobs were for brief periods.) It was there that she became acquainted with the person who sold her and Richard their mobile home. Her philosophical comment was, “First you work with someone, then you buy their trailer.”
I don’t know how many jobs she had. Hospital cleaning staff member; cab driver; receptionist; telemarketer salesperson; plastic hammerer. She was friendly, I’ll credit her there. Perhaps too friendly. Too easy to talk into the sack. She had an affair with some redneck during their marriage that led to the birth of the second boy. She passed that one off as Richard’s for a couple of years until it became obvious he came from somewhere else. The third one, though, was easier. It actually looked (and acted) like Richard. What a shock it was when the boys came home from a court-ordered visit to Gail and revealed that “Gramito” was the third boy’s father. Gramito was one of a crowd of Mexicans that Gail had living with her during the early days of her separation from Richard. She managed to get him to sleep with her so she could, again, pass off the baby as his.
When Mitch’s then wife found out that Richard had slept with Gail, she was aghast.
“How could you do that?” She demanded.
“Aw, Wyne, it aint nothing but a fuck.” Richard replied. Perhaps he was remembering the time he and Gail fucked in the mud beside their car.

The Chickens Busy Themselves with Conventional Manga

Before Richard took over as manager of the store I worked there with Tony and Yoshiki. Tony was the manager, brought in by the company because he had a reputation for running stores correctly. This consisted mainly in collecting as many paper cups as possible from the grounds outside and out of the garbage to turn in for credit. He was one of these men who are full of stories that show you just how iconoclastic they are. He told me some guys on the bus were harassing him one day and that he pulled out a gun to threaten them, claiming that, as a former MP in the army, he was allowed to brandish a gun on public transport.
Yoshiki was a plump black girl, rather attractive. She and I got along well. We were working together one day when an old woman came in, wandered about, and then left. Then an old man came in, hesitantly went up to the counter, whispered something to Yoshiki, and gave her a dollar. He left.
Yoshiki said to me, “Can you clean up a mess in the storage room?” I said sure. What was it?
“That old man’s wife came in here and couldn’t find the restroom. So she peed on the floor in the storage room.”
I went back there and found a cardboard box in the middle of the floor with wet napkins in it. I’m the one that had to clean it up, but Yoshiki got the dollar.
There was another black girl who worked with us named Michelle. She was stupid. She’d never read a book in her life, but one day she brought a paperback to work entitled Ebony Princess or something like that. Maybe it was Queen of the Congo. It had a picture on the front of a proud black woman in traditionally stereotypical African garments with scenes of epic lust, political upheaval, and human triumph behind her. Michelle said she’d heard it was good and was going to read it. She had the first page folded down.
“You’ll never finish that book.” I told her.
“Yes I will. I’m going read it.”
I shook my head. I turned towards the door through which the one that might come to kill me some night would walk.

The Vacant Separator

A story on the radio brings news that a writer is in trouble for writing a story in which things did not happen the way they actually did in life. This is from supposedly left-leaning NPR, which presumably likes Hunter S. Thompson and others of his kind, champions of Gonzo Journalism or the New Journalism, in which subjectivity is mingled with objectivity, fact with fiction. I don’t really understand what’s going on. Aren’t we forty years beyond this so-called controversy?
For instance, if I was to tell you that I don’t understand why people say “If I were” instead of “If I was,” would you believe me? I mean, just because I put “If” in front of the phrase we suddenly have to use past perfect executive or whatever it is? No, I think I’ll write the way I want to, thank you.
And further, if I was working at Golden Pantry and this old lady named Ruth was in charge would you get confused? I am. I can’t remember her name exactly, or when she was the manager. I think her husband’s name was Roger. I can see him, tall and rapidly aging, beard and crew cut, a strapping young man turned to sad inexorable decrepitude, standing in the dying embers of some party they had, whiskey bottle propped on his outstretched thigh like an ancient and valued trophy of an Indian chief just after photography was invented and used to document the last of the savages.
Ruth allowed me to take home a trash bag full of expired crackers and cookies. I was going to put them in my car and take them home at the end of the day, but the ice cream freezer broke and all those Dove bars were going to go to waste, so she gave me those too. I had to call my mother to come pick up all the stuff. You see the improperly connected phrases.
“Are you sure this is alright?” My mother worried as I loaded up her car. Jesus sighed for your din-din.
I then instructed the gang of Mexican boys who served as my eyes and ears to find out all they could about the doings of the mysterious Dr. Thompson. I had won some money in the lottery and wanted to use it to put an end to his perfidy. My mother wanted me to pay off my credit cards! Grandfather sinned for your deaths.
“Dr. Thompson keel himself with a shotgun.” Enrique informed me.
The clever bastard! He knew I was on to him and he did it five years early.

Tarmush Laserprop Circular

My father joined the Air Force during Vietnam. He knew he was probably going to be drafted anyway, so he decided to go in on his own terms. In fact, the day after he joined he received his draft notice from the Army. But it was too late. The Air Force already had him. He traded marching through the jungle with a rifle for working on airplane engines. Not bad. He became a mechanic at an airbase in Phan Rang. He and my mother got married just before he went overseas.
She told me that the day they got married that she did not really love him. She married him because she figured he was the best she was ever going to do. After he was gone, however, she grew to miss him, which is a kind of love, I guess.
He took lots of photos while overseas. Several of them showed him and his buddies jumping on a homemade trampoline. They made it from stuff the swiped around the base, parachute material and springs and so on. I asked him what happened to the trampoline.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess them gooks got it now.”
I remember him bitching at me one time for throwing my towel into the wash after each use.
“You hang the towel over the shower curtain rod and you can use it again the next day.”
“Is that something you learned in the Air Force?” I said.
“NO, it’s just common sense!”
He quit the Air Force before I was born. But then, when I was about six he joined the Army Reserve. The he quit and rejoined when I was in high school. He finally decided to put in enough years to get a second retirement check. He used to be gone for a couple of weeks every summer. Invariably he went to Korea. He always came back with eelskin wallets and cheap ties and all kinds of chintzy wall hangings.
The day he joined the Air Force he went down the recruitment office with a group of guys from his high school. All of them chickened out except for my father and one other guy. That same guy went through basic training with him and wound up at the same base in Vietnam.

Degranulated Dieselpork Forms the Basis of the Emulsifier Chain

My mother lived in a boardinghouse in Atlanta after graduation from high school. She was working as a telephone operator and taking modeling classes. This was an all girls’ boardinghouse. Someone was stealing money. My mother and a couple of the other girls concocted a plan. In the common room they made a loud scene in front of the girl they suspected about how one of them had just received a large amount of money and had left it in her room. My mother hid under the bed in the room and waited. Sure enough, the girl came into the room and stole the money. They confronted her about it. She started crying and told them how bad her life was. They girls didn’t do anything to her and she left the boardinghouse shortly thereafter.
I’m trying to think, but that was probably the most exciting thing she ever did. Her whole life was a pursuit of the mundane. She ate the same thing at the Chinese restaurant every time: sweet and sour chicken. It made me mad, not just because her choice betrayed a lack of adventure, but because I couldn’t stand the dish and therefore couldn’t have any when we brought the leftovers home. I loaned my parents a copy of Time Bandits. My father liked it, but my mother hated it. “All those ugly people!”
I loaned them a copy of Hidden Fortress and told them that it was one of the inspirations for Star Wars. “The two peasant characters are the models for R2-D2 and C-3PO.” So later, after they watched it and returned the movie to me, I asked her what she thought.
“Well, it was alright, but I kept waiting for the spaceship to land.”
She thought the Al Pacino movie Frankie and Johnny was “trashy.”
When I quit McDonald’s I kept my uniform. I thought it was a humorous memento of that tragic time. When I moved back in with my parents she found the uniform and returned it to the restaurant because keeping it was “wrong.” She also didn’t like it when I stole a pizza pan from Pizza Hut. My wife and I still have and use that pan today. I rented a copy of Purple Rain from Kroger back when Kroger rented movies and those movies were on VHS. I kept that tape for years. Kroger never demanded it back. Nothing. But when my mother found out the situation, she marched that thing straight back to the store.

Laile Aingewilles

Laile Aingewilles’ family was not happy with his changing his name from Anusniffer.
“What do you think my father would have done if I’d changed my name?” His father demanded.
“I don’t know. What?” Laile mocked.
“Well, I wouldn’t have done it, that’s what!” Byley Anusniffer was a working man whose outlook on life was based on nothing but work.
“Why do you have a problem with the Anusniffer name, Laile?” His mother asked.
“Because, Mom, it sounds like ‘anus sniffer:’ one who sniffs anuses!”
“Ohhh, only a person with a dirty mind would think that.”
“Well, everybody must have a dirty mind then, because I’ve been made fun of for as long as I can remember.” Laile was beginning to get tired of this conversation. He’d only stopped by his parents’ house to pick up his old year books.
“Laile, when I got married my name was Sweetwater.” Laile’s mother remembered. “But I didn’t have a problem with changing it to Anusniffer.”
“Don’t you have any pride?” Byley thundered.
A week later Laile was talking to his sister on the phone.
“How did you come up with this new name?” She asked.
“Well, actually, it’s sort of a French transliteration of Anusniffer.”
“French? You chose a French name over your own family?” Darla was a tracheotomist with Pepper Lake Memorial Hospital whose married name was Smith.
“You’re lucky being a woman. When you got married, nobody questioned your changing your name.”
“Laile, I took on my husband’s name. Like a woman is supposed to.”
Laile paused for effect before replying, though that effect was not remarked.
“Are you saying you had no choice?” He asked.
“What do you think John would have done it I had insisted on keeping my maiden name?”
“He probably would have insisted on your staying a maiden.”
Laile did not get the response he was aiming for.


The Big Book of Reptilian Spies

There were four Bathroom Girls in the class below me in high school. The name was bestowed upon them by Hayes Purdue, celebrated as a “real leader” by the teachers. He had the act down early on. Flashing his grown-up smile with the little dollar signs on each tooth. His father gave him a Christmas tree farm to get him started on the road to riches.
But enough about him. We’re here to talk about the Bathroom Girls. The original four were Wendy Cooper, Danielle Statiras, Kelly Harper, and the McClure girl. That last one got replaced. She was a teacher’s daughter and eventually didn’t fit in with the others. You have to understand that this is all public perception. There was no formal organization. Her replacement was Sherri Kiser.
I went out with Wendy about six times and Sherri once. I got nothing off either one of them. I was so stupid in those days. I spent money without regard to what it cost me to get it and wasn’t knowing enough to make the right kinds of moves on girls. I know I could have had done something with Wendy if I’d only had an ounce of wisdom. Or vision. Or some indefinable quality. You can call it “coolness” if you like, but I’ve gotten tired of the word “cool” and everything associated with it.
The Bathroom Girls were called that because they supposedly ran to the bathroom all the time in a group to check on their appearances. It’s funny how when you go to a private school you think everybody else is rich, but I know that the two Bathroom Girls I went out with lived in very modest circumstances despite their mien. Danielle certainly wasn’t rich.
Yet there was something about them. They were all pretty and had aspirations to elegance. Probably I’m dead wrong. If I was to go back in time today I probably wouldn’t see anything in any of them. I guess I just was at the age when I was first beginning to hang out with girls and found them fascinating.
The last time I saw Wendy was on the seventh floor of the UGA library. She was doing research for her art history degree. She became a museum curator or something like that. I used to gloat when I saw her picture or Sherri’s picture or some other girl’s picture in the paper, announcing her engagement.
“Ha ha,” I’d sneer. “They could have had me!”

Inexplicably Filthy

I wanted to start reading again, reading in earnest, but I couldn’t find anything that I really wanted to read. I didn’t seem to have the patience for anything anymore. Also, most things seemed to conform to ideas about literature, ideas about how a piece of writing is supposed to go, rather than being concerned with actually interesting me. I used to read so much… maybe I read too much.
Anyway, I decided that the only way I was going to get hold of something I wanted to read was to write it myself. My idea was that it be the written equivalent of the music I was listening to lately: short, intense, noisy, colorful. But my intellectual pretensions always threw enough grit into the works that my motorbike never quite zoomed as intended.
I sat atop an overturned Lincoln Continental, obtaining a commanding view of the back yard, and began writing in my notebook. Some time in the past I had written the title “Hemisphere of Resin” at the top of the page. I wasn’t much inspired by this title, so I looked to the next page. “Gifted Astronomer Appears Stingy on TV.” That was much more to my liking. But my penurious upbringing wouldn’t allow me to waste those words that a younger me had written. I decided to write the astronomer’s story on the hemisphere facing me.
Now, it is a curious thing: both my wife’s father and the father of my life’s next-most-serious-relationship-female are amateur astronomers. I didn’t know whether to take this as a sign when I began filling in the page with words, but on consideration, what would it be a sign of and how would it look in actual sign form? I paused in the act of having the astronomer arrive at the TV studio nervous and intoxicated and looked into the back yard. The first thing that caught my eye (if an eye can be said to be caught while still firmly snuggled into its accustomed socket and not being actively sought for throwing purposes by some violent prankster on Therapeuticus III, a planet in the orbital clutches of an invisible star, a star, by the way, that the astronomer had been invited to talk about) I quickly dismissed as boring.

Hemisphere of Resin

“I think you’ve had enough to eat!” Ferguson’s companion, the Duke, snapped as Ferguson started rambling through the pantry in search of something sweet.
Ferguson, a tall man no longer young and no longer exactly the rangy stud who had been the oblivious object of so many an older woman’s desire, sighed heavily as he pulled his head out of the pantry.
“I know.” He admitted. “I just feel I need dessert.”
“Well, you don’t.” The Duke turned the page in the gorilla zombie book he was reading. He had watched (and heard) Ferguson consume two packages of ramen and the rest of last night’s leftover garlic bread. “If you’re just eating because you don’t have anything better to do, then why don’t you go outside and take a walk?”
“I don’t like going outside.” Ferguson, whose nickname among the Rock People was Longtooth, returned. “But I’ll do it.” No one had called him Longtooth in years.
The Duke exhaled forcefully as the door closed on Ferguson’s tall frame. Now maybe he could get some reading done.
Outside Ferguson came across the old path that led to the lard works.
“I haven’t been down here since Misty’s puppies were born.” He said to himself, remembering that bizarre incident and a host of related matters, some of which actually involved the old lard works. “I wonder what happened to Donald’s scheme to turn the place into a patisserie?” He was surprised to see that the path was still so clear. Maybe Boy Scouts had adopted it.
The gorilla zombies stopped him just before he came within sight of the crumbling old walls.
“You Ferguson?” The one in the erasable pajamas demanded.
“That’s right.” The Longtooth in him resurfaced in that instant.
“They say you ride good the high stepping mobile.”
“I’m the best in the county.” Ferguson lied. While it was true he had been crowned best high stepping mobile rider at the Blackberry Jelly Festival, that had been before Jenny Flipp’s little brother had gotten old enough to compete.

My Pebble Must Flare

Abram and the Zednaught weren’t exactly friends, but they were associates of long acquaintance in the serious business of getting high and climbing behind the controls of a two-wheeled peckerpusher. Abram, tall and thin, with the bronzed skin and sun bleached hair of an indentured oarsman, he yet harbored a secret envy of the Zednaught, who in contrast was sallow and dark haired, with drooping mustachios like an evil monkey. Their preferred drug was porcosoma, a powerful engagative derived from a pig’s hypothalamus.
Abram, dressed in his customary outfit of suede vest and white cotton flares, no shirt, was already feeling the effects of the porcosoma as he pulled himself up the ladder on the side of the big machine. The Zednaught, waiting his turn at the base of the ladder in a black leather trenchcoat that nearly obscured his heavily booted feet, puffed on a hand-rolled cigarette and glanced about the hillside. From under his wide brimmed Puritan preacherman hat he watched for signs of Thrillbusters, those officially sanctioned killjoys who would rob a man of his liberty and his fun.
Once Abram was settled into his circular recess the Zednaught followed, climbing into his own adjacent recess. He would control one wheel of the peckerpusher while Abram controlled the other. As the machine’s big Flickschuster engine roared to life with a noise like a thundershower of mutant nightspawn, one of the farmers down in the valley complained to his cow, “It’s them damn kids again!”
Abram shouted to the Zednaught over the intercom as they began to move, “The fallen trees are slumbering giants!”
The Zednaught, absorbed in the play of hand on grip, wheel on sky, thought seconds later that he had replied, “A submissive trout endangers what engenders throat submerge,” but he couldn’t be sure.
Each time the hydraulic pecker beneath the fuselage rammed into the earth the vehicle was thrust forward, faster and faster. Soon the two young men, barely able to distinguish between the reality of their surroundings and the phantasms induced by their narcotized state, found it hard to control the mechanical beast. They, like many of their fellows in the scene, had deluded themselves that the taking of the porcosoma gave them a psychic connection; had it not been for the giant cushions that lined the horizon they would both be dead right now.

This Man’s Telekinesis

Some have suggested that I was less than fully sincere when I offered to babysit the Invisible Foreskin, that I was making a feeble joke or perhaps had been into the nutmeg again. True, I didn’t have a good enough understanding of all that my duties might entail, but I assure you I was as sincere in my offer as a man smuggling a bottle of port into the grocery store restroom. When a man smuggles a bottle of port into the grocery store restroom it is because he either has no money to buy the bottle or it is a Sunday in a state with blue laws. And he needs to drink that bottle urgently. You can’t get more sincere than that.
“Of course,” one of the moralists around the campfire intrudes, “Sincerity is a form of honesty. And shoplifting is a form of dishonesty.”
Go back to toasting your wienie. There’s an inherent duality (or hypocrisy, if you prefer) in all human endeavor caused by the discrepancy between reality as it is and our apprehension of it through language. Back to my story about the Invisible Foreskin.
Some have asked why the Invisible Foreskin was called that. Although only an amateur in the field of speculative nomenclature, I have formulated the following theory: the Invisible Foreskin, being by nature a reclusive individual, was perhaps a little disconcerted upon discovering that someone would be taking on the task of caretaker. Finding out that that someone would be a celebrity of my stature must have been most intimidating. Thus, where once we had an animatronic hot dog in boots and ten-gallon hat, now we had the Invisible Foreskin, a classic example of identification with one’s armoring. It happened to a cousin of mine. He borrowed his father’s Trans Am one night and went crazy.
I spoke to the Invisible Foreskin’s mother just after my momentary lapse of vigilance resulted in my charge’s horrible burns. Aside from her forgiveness, which I felicitously received, I gleaned something else from my interview: information.
“We named him Herbert.” She said, smiling through her tears.
“Did you.” I spoke as I glanced at my watch in the reflection on the toaster.
“We named him Herbert after the guidance counselor at my old high school.” The old woman was lean and frail, like a stick of gum in a package of Bay City Rollers trading cards. “The man later became a taxi driver.”

There Are No Numbers on the Ductile Auroch

Most authors would have attempted to obscure the Ductile Auroch’s motivation in sterilizing his own breadknife. I know this because I just read an article on currently hip writers which churned up such contempt in me for these obscurantist tendencies that I have broken with almost every author in existence, including my beloved Italo Calvino, because of his annoying habit of examining every possible permutation of a tiny situation. Obviously I’m not even considering standard, “plot-driven” writers. They wouldn’t understand what I’m talking about anyway.
However, the reason there are no numbers on the Ductile Auroch is because we’re trying to keep the whole project secret while we work out the details. Numbers attract government scrutiny. We’ve even gone so far as to use pictograms of our own invention to indicate the various parts of the Ductile Auroch and its attendant support systems. Words, now recognized by baboons in the employ of the National Oversight Agency, would easily penetrate the meanings behind “on,” “off,” “here,” and “hoof.”
For those of you unfamiliar with the Ductile Auroch project, let me explain. We felt that an auroch capable of eating grain or grass in one location while being milked in another would be such a boon to the dairy industry that we allocated several million dollars from our savings account and began work stretching out the one auroch at our disposal. Hence the Ductile Auroch, not Ductile Auroch’s three through thirty-five or what-have-you. Another reason for the lack of enumeration around here.
Further, it was imagined a good thing if the individual teats on an udder could be located on different floors of the research building. Obviously, the logical conclusion of this line of thinking was to position the auroch’s anus directly over the waste pit out in test lot #16 (although for obscurantist purposes we have labeled the lot with a stylized drawing of a snake encircling a pineapple). As of this writing, we have drawn the auroch’s various body parts all through the Wallace Langham Memorial Research and Development Facility, to the extent that Susie in Accounting can stroke the beast’s right ear in a friendly way as she adds up long columns of numeric symbols while Harrison in Maintenance can play chess with the tail as he waits out in the shed for something to break.
As for the sterilizing of the breadknife—well, our tests indicated the auroch is both self-aware and concerned about its health, two undesirable qualities that will have to be deleted if the milk is not to turn sour.

I Find Myself on Float’s Fruitilla

Old Float, who came from Scrabbledon originally, didn’t think I was so clever. He watched me contemptuously from the wheelhouse as we motored into the bay. Finally, he pulled an illustrated tunic over his bony, white-tufted frame and came out to talk to me, having turned over the steering of the vessel to Louis, the so-called “bum boy.”
“I’ve been watching you.” Old Float announced after he had stood over me for some seconds.
“Indeed.” I was sarcastic, concentrating on drawing a birthday card for the magic duck that lived in one of the vending machines on the sidewalk outside the Lamar Lewis shoe store. I say “magic,” although a more apt description would be, “habitually dressed in robes of purple satin bearing symbols in gold of a vaguely alchemical derivation.” Some of the college students used to tease him, try to get him drunk so he’d say something crazy. I chased them away a couple of times. It didn’t make me popular.
“You know the magic duck?” Float asked suddenly, his attitude changing from something akin to that of those college kids to manifest interest.
I paused in the act of crosshatching the eyes of Margaret Thatcher. I looked up at the old man.
“Yeah. Why?”
“He served with me on the old Gramercy Grabass.” Old Float remembered weightily. One can remember weightily, I assure you. Just think of a lost love from when you were young and thin. Feel the weight of those intervening years. Oh yes, one can remember weightily alright.
I nodded. Sarcastically, but not so obvious. In fact, it would have taken a pair of high-powered binoculars, like those in the hands of the men observing us from the surrounding boats, to spot it. I turned back to my drawing.
“Does he still do that thing with his beak?” Float asked.
I stopped drawing, this time with dramatic movements of the head and shoulders.
“What thing?” I demanded.
“Go ‘quack quack.’”

Another Story About the Smell of the Dentist’s Office

I asked around, trying to find out what brand of soap the dentist’s office used.
“It has a very specific smell.” I explained. I was dressed as a private detective and felt the part. I wore a miniature sombrero tied to the top of my head with red and black braided string, and a long, belted tunic which bore the image of Sitting Bull. Green suede shoes completed the outfit.
“What kind of smell?” The man behind the counter at the soap store begged.
“Well… a clean smell.”
The clerk sighed. He sighed as heavily as a man can sigh without breaking his foot.
“Sir,” he said, “In general, all soaps have a clean smell. I can think of only one that does not—Saul’s Mercuriatic Cleanser, and that’s specifically formulated for asthmatic elephants. So I ask you once again: what did the soap smell like apart from clean?”
“Well,” I fumbled at my memory like a wolf at a doorknob. “Maybe it was industrial in nature?”
“Do you recall seeing the soap? What color was it? What shape was the cake?”
“No, no, no.” I threw up my hands at these questions. “I don’t recall seeing any specific soap at all.”
“Then perhaps it isn’t a soap at all that made the smell.” The soap man suggested. “Perhaps it was some kind of disinfectant particular to dentists.”
“Wait a minute.” I looked closely at the other man. “Did you say ‘cake?’”
The clerk looked about for a moment before replying.
“Yes. A cake of soap.”
“What about a bar of soap?”
He sneered, exhaling sharply through his nose.
“We in the trade do not use the term ‘bar.’ Cake is more nearly appropriate.”
But my thoughts had already turned to cake—and tooth decay.

And I am Refreshed and Emboldened

As promised on the label, one serving of Abel Duber’s Revivalicious Concentrate proved just the thing to get me moving once again. Only minutes after knocking the vaguely citrus-flavored glassful down my gullet I was making big plans, getting out pieces of paper and writing down my intentions. I would make painting itself the theme of my painting from here on. I would begin taking photographs of small, staged scenes, photographs that I knew would inspire me. I would keep them in a little book that I would carry about with me. I would start writing in earnest again.
“Maybe I’ll make writing itself the theme of my writing from here on.” I said.
“Now I think you’re going too far.” My wife told me.
“What’s that?” I don’t think I realized that I had spoken aloud.
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself. Trying to do too much all at once.”
I jumped up from my chair.
“I can’t take it anymore!” I tried to keep from barking. “I’m going for a walk!”
Outside, feeling torn between worry that my wife would think I was angry at her or would be hurt at my outburst, and the terrific onrush of energy flowing through me, I set off at a tremendous pace.
“I’m the Walking Man!” I fantasized. I imagined walking from one end of Great Britain to the other. They have a phrase for just such imagery in Great Britain: from somewhere to somewhere else. I thought and thought, but couldn’t remember it exactly. From the Devil’s Anus to Joanna Lumley’s Tower. No, that wasn’t it.
Eventually I found myself back home.
“Boy, I need a glass of water.” I said as I limped to the kitchen sink. MY wife, sitting before the computer, watching some program about a team of paranormal crime fighters, did not respond. She was exactly where she had been when I left.
“You ought to try that stuff.” I gasped. “It really works.” The tap water tasted funny.

Interminably Folding Pressurecake

After negotiations between Clampoot Manufacturing and the Karen Carpenter estate broke down, I was asked to see what I could do to get things moving again. Clampoot, makers of interminably folding pressurecake, wanted to use a digitally reanimated Karen Carpenter as their spokesperson. Of course, Richard Carpenter and the later singer’s Uncle Zonotal wanted to ensure that the ads featuring Karen would be in the best of taste. This was made more difficult by the fact that, as no one at Clampoot could explain exactly what interminably folding pressurecake was, they also had no clear idea of what the ads would be like. There was also Zonotal’s haughty attitude. At one point during a meeting with Clampoot’s head of marketing, Zonotal contemptuously began picking his nose. He then wiped the results of his efforts on the surface of the executive’s desk.
“I believe it is called a ‘booger.’” Cub Cando, my contact at Clampoot, explained, his mouth puckered with distaste.
“Well,” I drawled, a mere uneducated country boy here to set everyone’s mind at ease, “Don’t worry about a thing. I think I can make the family see reason.”
“I do hope so, Mr. Toadsgoboad,” Cando fretted. “Our entire spring campaign is dependent on Karen Carpenter’s cheekbones being in perfect alignment with our new model.”
Secretly, I was plotting to get my cheekbones in something approaching perfect alignment with the new model of the interminably folding pressurecake.
“By the way,” I slyly asked, “What exactly is interminably folding pressurecake, anyway?”
Cando looked curiously at me across the expanse of moss, bonsai, and scale model railroad depot that separated us.
“You don’t know?” He seemed flabbergasted.
My smile was like that of the Queen of England upon being conducted through the home of a Wal-Mart employee.
“Not really.” I said as dispassionately as I could.
Cando considered briefly.
“Can you sing ‘We’ve Only Just Begun?’”

Funny Boots

On the thirtieth anniversary of the wintry reception to my public reading of “The Hippie and the Elephant” I returned to my old school and sought out Nils Bankard, the boatwright master who had guided me through the original ordeal.
“Whatever happened to that purple and black plaid shirt you wore?” he asked after we had remarked on the disparity between our current appearances and our memories of each other. “The Hands of Time,” we agreed.
“I either outgrew it or it shrank in the wash.” I replied, referring to the shirt. “In any case, I can’t remember exactly how or where it disappeared from my wardrobe.”
“Old Mrs. Buntings hated that shirt.” Bankard shook his head as he reminisced.
“That and my hair.” I added.
“Oh that’s right.” He looked up. “You had bleached your hair.”
“She’s dead now, right?” I asked, glancing towards the main school building, where a twenty foot bronze statue of the founders now greeted the students.
“Yes.” Bankard’s mouth became a line of barbed wire.
I looked at him with pity.
“I know what will cheer you up.” I declared as I bent to open my valise, little caring if he really needed cheering up or not. “Funny boots.”
“No, really… I—“
“Just watch.”
I withdrew a pair of waders whose tread left impressions of occult dread in the red dirt. The sign of a devil more recent in origin than that which Cole and Prissy Buntings had tried to warn us of.
“They’re not particularly ‘funny,’ are they?” Bankard betrayed no fear as I stood shod before him in the boots, four inches taller and in change of a need. Yet I knew that he must feel some anxiety. He must.
“You know what I’m going to do with these?” I teased.
“What’s that?” His anger was an unopened can of beer.
“I’m going to stomp through the lobby.” Which I proceeded to do, leaving innumerable images of Pee Wee Herman on the carpet in red mud.

Democtify through Stasis

Tortoisoda’s depilatory action works on the tiny hairs that line the esophagus. When these hairs have been thoroughly washed away (by drinking more Tortoisoda, of course!), the esophagus is now ready to be filled with the dark purple epoxy made by mixing the contents of packets 3 and 4 together. Unlike Tortoisoda, which is available in both original fig flavor and new mango, the epoxy tastes strongly of synthetic tar. Therefore, it is usually a good idea to have someone hold you down while the epoxy is introduced.
While the epoxy is setting up, a process that can take between one and two hours, depending on the humidity, breathing may be somewhat restricted. A garden hose with its metal end removed may be inserted into a secondary orifice to provide additional respiratory opportunities. Numerous species have these secondary, or even tertiary, orifices. Consult your doctor to see it you are a member of one of these.
Having articulated the above procedure to the satisfaction of all concerned parties, it is now the function of this informative lecture to provide you, the consumer, with an overview of the Flomofussuck Combine’s extensive line of individual mandates, subject to the needs of the service. Which is it to be: general exterior thrushmush or white gelatin fingercake? With our Advanced Notion Privacy Interface Kit #6 you get both! In fact, you get Christ’s Melanoma, the exciting innovation that has been the talk of fringe European prophylactic distributors for years. Once your application has been accepted by the Inner Council of the Penumbra and its subsidiary bureaucratic machine has received your one-time payment of $748, your name will be added to the next available brick on the Pyramid of Profits—guaranteed!
In closing, why not allow founder Normal “High Output” Position to speak directly to your heart?
“Friend, the Static Democtifical path the honest virtue is the easiest, most beneficial life plan since locomotives dominated our national psyche. It really is the secret of the Ancient Demon Astronauts made available to modern narcoslaves. I urge you to put aside your pianoforte fantasies and take up the Static Democtifical stocking—today!”

Polory

Vixley put his head into Phil Rammage’s office.
“Phil, you want to go with me downstairs?”
“For what?” Rammage returned, checking to see that the tip of his ballpoint pen was retracted before slipping it back into his shirt pocket.
“I’ve got to tell Polory he’s fired.” The signet ring on Don Vixley’s finger reflected the office lights as he grasped the door jamb.
“You think he might get violent?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. I just need emotional support. These terminations can be… a little embarrassing.”
“Well…” Rammage considered. He did have a lot of work to do. Old Gibbets had been hounding him for a rewrite of the Clumpagree contraction for weeks now. But how often did one get to watch a nine-foot-creature made of resin receive its termination notice?
“OK, sure.” Rammage smiled at his colleague. He closed the folder of Clumpagree-related material and rose from his chair.
“Thanks.” Vixley muttered as the two men got in the elevator at the end of the hall. “You know I had to fire Brenda Buggerbed last week?”
“What’s going on?” Rammage wondered. “I thought the Board decided to wait another six months on lay-offs.”
“I don’t know.” Vixley sighed. “She did have rather poor attendance last quarter.”
“Her sister was murdered!” Rammage objected. He didn’t really know the Buggerbed woman, but he felt she deserved some leeway.
“Murdered, Phil?” Vixley rolled his eyes. “I hardly think—“
The bell announcing their arrival at the sub-basement interrupted Vixley’s intended peroration. The doors opened. The cold, damp air snaked around them. Vixley did not continue. The two men stepped into the rude passageway like children at a birthday party for a hydrocephalic. A hundred steps more into the gloom they came on Polory, methodically feeding bricks of compressed insect matter into the furnace. He looked at them with his dead, amber-like eyes.
“Did you find my radio?” He asked.

Silent Classification

After being terminated from his job, Polory decided it was a good time to return to his native village. As he tramped along the old Skullpolisher road, he mentally classified the people he knew from various jobs over the years as either rednecks, academics, or jive-ass turkeys. Among the academics he included the would-be hippies.
“I’d like to call myself a hippie,” he thought as he passed by a particularly creepy swamp. “But I can’t honestly call myself one if I’m not willing to grow my hair out.” He also knew that he couldn’t grow a decent beard, but that thought stayed down below the threshold of interior vocalization as it greatly bothered him.
He turned to look at the swamp. A couple of days of constant rain and the water would spill over the road and slop up against the earthen rampart on the other side. Not a pleasant thought. In fact, it was far more unpleasant than the admission of his paucity of beardability. Polory feared water for two reasons: (1) in a large, moving mass it could sweep away all that stood in its way and (2) in a large, still body it could conceal anything beneath its surface. A whole dead city might be revealed if one could magically remove the water. He believed this latter fear stemmed from seeing a special globe as a child, one that showed what the earth would look like without any oceans. Polory wondered what might lie beneath the surface of the swamp.
“I bet there’s at least one old car somewhere in there.” He imagined. If the car was the hidden getaway vehicle from some heist a half-century ago and he knew that it still contained valuables, perhaps cash in an airtight container, would that be sufficient motivation to wade out into that morass, he wondered. A pile of gold ingots would surely overcome any creepiness. Of course, there was always the possibility that the waters were the home of dangerous creatures. There were no man-eating crocodilians in this area, be even blood-sucking worms could be classified as dangerous.
Polory had to admit that another factor keeping him from being a classic hippie was his lack of love for nature. He might sleep in a field tonight, but he would dream of an automated apartment in town.

Black and White and Carbonated: Helen’s Melon’s Lemon Ate It

The village in which Polory had been born was called Kaolinia. Far outside the boundaries of the Clooney Family’s empire, the Kaolinians were free to turn their vegetables into pets. Helen, who had known Polory as a child, kept a melon which she named Venus, even though, as far as she could tell, it was a boy. This melon, in turn, had adopted a lemon against all known laws of melon behavior. As the melon could not communicate its intentions to anyone (except possibly other melons, but no one knew for sure), Helen decided that the lemon’s name was Vulcan.
“I think that’s what Venus would have named him.” Helen explained to the old men sitting on the front porch of Potentotter’s store. She carried her pets in a basket. They lay in a bed of human hair.
“How do you know it’s a ‘him?’” Lump Grabber asked with a chuckle.
“She looked underneath.” Another man cackled.
“How do you tell which side is ‘underneath?’” A third, elderly layabout added his feeble wit to the discussion.
Helen smiled politely and stepped inside the store, half her mind wondering about the gender of the lemon. She hadn’t really thought about it before.
“What can I do for you today, Helen?” Mr. Potentotter asked with a friendly smile. He looked exactly like Mr. Drucker, the proprietor of the store on the old TV show “Green Acres.” No one remarked upon this similarity, however, because no one in Kaolinia had ever seen as much as a single episode of that critically reviled show, much less heard of it.
Helen put her basket down on the counter.
“A ten pound bag of beans.” She announced. “Polory’s come back to visit and I want to have him over for dinner one night.”
“Oh, Polory’s back, eh?” Mr. Potentotter asked as he bent to the bean bin and began filling a burlap bag. He remembered the time that Polory, then ten years old, had set fire to a magazine on a rack inside the store.
Unseen by either Helen or the aging storekeeper, Vulcan the lemon leaned over the side of the basket and grabbed a Mandy’s soda cookie. Before Venus could stop him, he stuffed the cookie into his little citrus mouth.

Anonymous Letters from a Man Outside the Salon

When Madame Tapenade established her salon in the calm before the storm of the Great War her only criterion for membership was that a person be interesting. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Higdon Willings was forever barred from entry. Even his publisher, Fuero Mantenga, had to admit that, despite being the brilliant author of several innovative novels, Willings was as boring as old socks in person.
“I don’t know how he does it.” Mantenga declared to a subset of Madame Tapenade’s collection huddled in the bathroom one evening. “He’s perfectly capable of writing a rapid fire exchange between a two-headed woman and her lizard creature lover from the planet Cabblerumpin, as he did on the opening page of Among the Hopeless, and yet he puts the clerk at the post office to sleep just buying a stamp.” Mantenga shook his head in puzzled mirth and knocked back another shot of one-hundred-year-old absinthe.
“Perhaps that’s the problem.” Captain Brow postulated. “He is uninspired by the people of the real world, only able to think of things to say between bizarre literary creations. Thus his true conversational abilities remain subsumed.” The captain, later to die in the mud of Telefonico, exhaled a gas giant’s worth of smoke and fell backwards into the tub.
Madame Tapenade heard the captain’s theory by way of the fragrant old cleric, Agomoises, who had been listening through the urine sample window. She decided to give Willings a chance.
“Provided we all don costumes and adopt outlandish personas, Mr. Willings should be able to say something witty and original.” Her plan, however, was formulated too late. The next day the salon was broken up by the police, acting under the orders of the Patriotic Morals Legation.
“We’re not going to arrest you, Madame Tapenade,” the legation’s chairman assured her, “But you can no longer engage in these… activities.” He tapped the stack of letters before him with his umbrella.
The lady was devastated. Despite her protests and denials her salon was no more. In those suspicious times the legation’s power, to be expanded into the Ministry of Precision during the war, was even then formidable. Try to pronounce the word “formidable” in the French manner when reading this story aloud.

Hard Vark’s Ovoid Kayak

“You won’t be able to steer properly.” Bagarbo warned his new acquaintance.
Hard Vark, who had only moved to the area a month before, had already completed construction of his experimental kayak and was ready to try it out in the currents of the mighty Frankopy river.
“It worked fine in my bathtub.” Hard Vark answered with a lop-sided grin.
“How’d you come up with this design anyway?” Bagarbo’s brother Tentt asked. The brothers belonged to the local kayak and whitewater club. Although they had seen Hard Vark around town, buying supplies and hurrying in and out of the library, until that day they had had no idea of his interest in kayaks. The newcomer had simply shown up at the embarkation point on the river with his crazy oval craft and strapped on a life jacket and helmet.
“I am a great connoisseur of eggs.” Hard Vark replied seriously.
The brothers looked at each other.
“If you think the kayak’s odd, take a look at my paddle.” Hard Vark reached into his homemade boat and withdrew a curved stick about five feet long with asymmetrical hand-shaped blades on either end. He handed it to Bagarbo.
“What the hell is this?” The whitewater enthusiast, who, despite his thirty-four years still maintained the boyish demeanor of a seventeen-year-old, asked.
“The human hand is the natural paddle for a human.” Hard Vark explained, holding up one of his own.
Tentt gave a short chuckled combined with a snort. Call it a snorkle or a chuct, as you will. “You’re crazy!” He declared.
His brother, however, was in earnest. As Hard Vark took back his paddle, picked up his kayak, and started for the water’s edge, Bagarbo grasped his shoulder.
“Let us come with you.” He begged. “That way, when you start to lose control—if you start to lose control, we can guide you back to shore.”
Hard Vark looked at the hand on his shoulder, then at its owner. He laughed.
“You boys act as if this is dangerous. Hell, I was in more danger jumping off the Methicillin bridge in my homemade hang glider!”

In the First Few Pages of Sphinctum’s Regret

The character of Little Seed, introduced in the first few pages of Sphinctum’s Regret, a novel of life in a sod house in turn-of-the-century Irvine, so captivated the American public that, although never mentioned again throughout the rest of the book (except for appearing in a dream sequence in chapter forty-seven), Don Wriggum, the author, was forced to write a sequel in which Little Seed figured more prominently, although he still was not the “hero.” I say “forced” to write a sequel, but a more accurate description would be to say that he was talked into it by his editor at Infection Books, who made Wriggum see just how financially remunerative it would be to write a book that had a ready-made audience.
“Unlike the readers of your last three books,” the editor, a large gravy boat-shaped centipede named Embarkus, added, “all of which introduced concepts that had to be explained with pages and pages of addenda and a glossary.”
“The Lord of the Rings and Dune both had such things.” Wriggum caviled, if I may use such a term without exactly knowing its implications.
“Yes, but both of those books fall into the science fiction and/or fantasy genres, genres which have a readership that eats up ‘such things.’” The editor used a prosthetic devices to make the quotation marks gesture over his desk, as the organs at the ends of his forelimbs were ill-equipped for such gesturing. “Your work, on the other hand, falls more into the philosophy and/or personal-reminiscence-disguised-as-mystery category. A category, by the way, that you seem to occupy, as far as I can tell, alone.”
“If you’re so dismissive of my work,” Wriggum bridled (yes!), “then why do you keep publishing it?”
The centipede smoothed an antenna with a digit seemingly made for the task.
“Because it sells. Not as much as I’d like, but enough.”
Wriggum nodded. He began to imagine what Little Seed would do in a similar situation. He saw a plucky young grass seed, all anthropomorphized into a suitably sexy young sidekick for a hard-boiled detective, climbing the steps of an ancient Mayan temple of vaguely extraterrestrial derivation.
“He’d face up to what was required of him.” He decided.

Amber Fruit on the Tree of Dubious Traditional Skills

Although visitors to historic Duchesstown are free to walk about its environs on their own, they will find that they get far more out of their visit if they explore the reconstructed village in the company of one of the many well-informed guides available fore hire at the Visitors’ Center, located in the old Hall of Judgment. Mac Welts and his family did just that, and found a wealth of information at their disposal, information that a more cost-conscious group might not discover on their own.
“Not everything’s in the pamphlet they hand out at the front gate.” Charles “Lucky” Lamegander told the Welts as he escorted them past the tiny pond in the center of Duchesstown. “For instance,” he pointed with a finger gnarled from thirty-two years at the auto parts factory in nearby Belinda, “You won’t read a thing about the ghost that haunts the well behind the Steeplefall House in that pamphlet.” He used his other hand to slap the tri-folded piece of paper Mrs. Welts held in her hand.
The two children gaped in awe in the direction indicated, while Mac Welts, a quality control inspector at the broomworks five hundred miles away, sneered unseen. He knew an extraordinary claim when he heard one.
“Now, here we have the old bottle waxing concern.” Lamegander explained as they stepped up onto the porch of a dilapidated shack. Inside the open doorway they could see three women in costumes lighting candles stuck in the ends of empty wine bottles and allowing the melted wax to run down the sides. A man in the heavy leather apron of a supervisor took over the narrative.
“Duchesstown,” he boomed, “Was once the leading supplier of waxed bottles to Italian restaurants in the upper northeast corner of this state. Now all that remains of this defunct industry are these three lazy wenches!” He cracked a bullwhip in the air and laughed satanically as the three women cried out in well-practiced fear, never moving from their seats.
“Let’s get out of here!” The Welts’ old guide urged with something approaching genuine acting. His urgency, however, evaporated once he and his charges were off the porch. Upon hearing Westy Welts, the son, tell his mother that he needed to go to the bathroom, Lucky Lamegander offered more information: “In the old days you’d go up against a tree. Want to give it a try?”

The Bones of the French-Speaking Youth

“Mr. Guiguigli! Come quick!” Mahoslo, one of the locals hired to help at the excavation, burst into the tent and delivered the summons.
Don Guiguigli and Phil Duder looked up from their game of shogi. Guiguigli, leader of the team, removed his pipe from his mouth and asked what the excitement was about. As he did a streamer of spit stretched from pipe to lip like one of the swaying rope bridges so common to this mountainous land. Phil Duder frowned in revulsion at the sight.
“Mr. Kompacton says he’s found something! He says for you to come quick!” Mahoslo wondered yet again at the coolness of Guiguigli’s tent. Perhaps it had something to so with the rumbling machine outside.]
“Quickly, Mahoslo; not quick.” Duder corrected the young man just as he would one of his sixth graders back home.
Guiguigli looked questioningly at his friend. “Well, I guess we’d better go,” he said.
“I suppose so.” Duder agreed. He pushed himself to his feet with his hands on his knees. The two men had been sitting on upended dynamite crates. He exhaled sharply out his nose in lieu of laughter. “I had you beat anyway.”
“Nonsense.” Guiguigli returned, buckling his belt of utilitarian intent about his pelvis. “We’ll see when we get back.”
But both men knew that by the time they got back from the site they wouldn’t feel like finishing their game.
“Mr. Kompacton, he say quick-ly.” Mahoslo repeated, quieter, more unsure of himself this time.
“I heard you, Mahoslo.” Guiguigli snapped irritably. It was a precipitous twenty minute clamber down to the site. No need to get in a panic.
“What do you suppose could be so damned urgent?” Duder wondered as they walked down the trail, squinting under the swollen orange sun.
“He’s probably found evidence of a race of miniature, land-dwelling whales.” Guiguigli joked.
“The builders of an advanced civilization.” Duder added. The two men laughed.
Weaver Kompacton, however, was far from laughter as he showed them the corpse, taking care that none of the locals see what he had found.


The Only Man I’ve Ever Met Who Could Wear a Paisley Tie

As part of my school’s literary elite, I was asked to participate in a gathering hosted by Stone Mountain Christian School. I call it a gathering because it really wasn’t a competition. I don’t remember any prizes being given. I do remember eating a belly full of black olives with Steve Heddin at the luncheon provided. He later joined the army, which has always puzzled me.
Some of our people and some of Stone Mountain’s people worked up a choral reading of “The Waste Land,” by T.S. Eliot. This puzzles me too, since one would think that the themes of that poem would be objectionable to patriotic American Christian fundamentalist right-wingers. I don’t know. Didn’t Eliot become a Catholic? I remember one a school trip to Philadelphia an old man approaching me in the street and handing me some anti-“papist” propaganda. After the man wandered off, Buhl Cummings, the school’s headmaster, asked me what the old man had given me. I showed him and Buhl said, “Well, at least he’s on our side.”
One reason for the trip to Stone Mountain was to meet other young people. As part of this process we were asked to interview one of the students from the other school and then introduce them to the group. I don’t remember whom I interviewed, but I do remember David Salmon introducing his person as “the only man I’ve ever met who could wear a paisley tie.” Paisleys were a big thing in 1985. They were a symbol of the most outlandish 1970’s attire somehow approved for use in the 1980’s, a decade antithetical to the hippie and the dandy. Prince adopted one as the logo for his record company, but later dropped it for something staid and unimaginative. No sense of continuity.
I have two other memories of that day. One is of my girlfriend at the time flirting with a guy from Stone Mountain who looked just like one of our classmates back home. The other if of going into the bathroom to pop a zit that had developed right on the edge of my upper lip. By one of those rare acts of benevolence from the forces of chance it resolved itself to perfection. I remember staring at myself in the mirror in wonder. I had known going into it that the odds were good that I’d create a red ragged sore on my face, one that any fool would be able to interpret as a mishandled zit. Then I would have spent the rest of the day in the agony of humiliation and ugliness.

A Classic of English Literature

A Gathering of Moongrasses, by B.C.B.B. Ranvelope, is, without question, a classic of English literature, if, by English literature, one includes the literary tradition of the islands of Bloog and Fleebinlob. Although the most famous writer to come from these islands is the mystery author Paulinda Peckinrigg, her standing among critics has never been very high and it is to the poems of B.C.B.B. Ranvelope that we must turn if we are to find quality work on those tiny disputed islands.
England and Belgium have long contested the ownership of Bloog and Fleebinlob. Although almost none of the inhabitants speak any of the recognized Belgian tongues, Belgium has maintained a presence on the islands in the form of the Anemone Guild, a trade association dating back to the heyday of the Hanseatic League, that has its headquarters in an old building in the center of Ynappisrap, the largest city on Bloog. One of the attributes that gives Ranvelope’s poetry its unique salty tang is this Belgian bastion of business buried in the bosom of his beloved home, as seen in the veiled references to it throughout A Gathering of Moongrasses. For instance, it is assumed by most reputable scholars that the elongated giraffe turd in the poem “Cotton Fixative Suspended in Hard Grease” is a symbol for the old guildhall.
In discussions with Dr. Merciwell about the best way to present this course in Ranvelope’s work, of which A Gathering of Moongrasses is the only example available for dissemination here in the United States due to the peculiarities of Bloogian copyright law, we have together worked out a scheme by which you students will attempt to act out the poems with the use of costumes, dolls, puppets, spray paint, and padlocks attached to wire spoke hubcaps. This is in keeping with the Bloogian/Belgian tradition of instruction through the intimidation of identity, a tradition that, paradoxically, was on that Ranvelope himself hated and sought to overthrow. In fact, I may as well tell you in advance that it is believed that Ranvelope’s infamous forty-year stay in the London suburb of Celtreacle was motivated by his desire to get away from such methods, known among the islanders as manual obesity.
In conclusion, I want to say that I hope we have a productive and fun semester exploring the work of this important author and I will now take questions from the floor. Yes, you in the Mello Yello t-shirt?

Bullfighter Motif and Nautical Theme

Don Erasmus and Phil Gauze, twins separated at birth, were reunited at the age of thirty-seven through the twins research program at the University of the Extremely Northern Pointy End of Idaho’s Department of Chemopsychology. Dr. Neshafan Zeryll, before he turned to a life of crime and terrorism, was the chief researcher. The following piece of writing is summarized from his notes.
It is well known that twins raised separately often show remarkable similarities in lifestyle choices. Such was the case with Don Erasmus and Phil Gauze. Don, who lived in Guam since his adoption at the age of two and a half months, married a woman named Wanda three years his junior. Phil, whose adoptive parents raised him in Trenton, New Jersey, although he later moved to Patterson, also married a woman named Wanda three years his junior. Each man built a treehouse in the backyard out of discarded auto parts for their children. Don had two boys named Carlos and Miguel, while Phil named his two boys Charles and Michael. Don worked as a personal assistant to the great Guamese writer Luis Almacenamiento. Phil, who managed a couple of rental properties, was an avid reader of Almacenamiento’s works, even going into a brief depression when word of the great man’s death was announced.
In studying the two men’s personal taste in interior design, however, distinct differences were noted. Whereas each man had insisted on establishing a home office in the top of the three story tower added to the rear of their A-frame house, Don’s was done up in a bullfighter motif, but Phil had decorated his in a nautical theme. Don’s office had black wrought iron trimmings and red velvet drapes, bullfight posters and statues of matadors in various poses. Phil’s had models of ships, a life preserver mounted on the wall, and a diorama of a harbor mounted outside a false window, so that when one looked into it, it appeared one was actually looking at a real wharf in a New England fishing village.
“It’s really amazing.” Don remarked on seeing the diorama after the two brothers had finally met and he had traveled to New Jersey for a visit. Phil shrugged off the praise as if to say, aw, that’s nothing.
“It’s more amazing to me that you actually knew and worked for Luis Almacenamiento. What was he like?” He asked.
“He was an asshole.” Don replied.

No Difference to Pretty Boy

The attendant, faultlessly attired in official attendant’s attire, bent himself to Brad’s ear.
“Well, sir?” He asked. “Which would you prefer?”
Brad, the pretty boy in question, looked at his reflection in the expensive, gold-framed mirror and frowned indifferently. He sighed.
“I don’t care.” He sighed again, this time with the force of conviction.
“He is well aware of his own image.” Colonel Luster, watching from across the room, commented approvingly to a visiting journalist. The Colonel had been Brad’s manager for eleven years now, virtually from the moment he had pulled the pretty boy from the egg of his birth in an extrasolar swamp. Brad emerged from the purple and gray shell a fully formed movie star, wanting only wardrobe and motivation. Luster had provided both.
“And now he needs a hairpiece.” The journalist, a faceless formulary from Fumble magazine, noted with a lilt in his voice that suggested; this is funny; this is ironic; this is sweet revenge for all of us faceless formularies.
“Brad believes in being honest about these things.” The Colonel replied. “Brad knows that it (meaning the business of making movies) is all an illusion. Brad, if I may again speak for him, knows his audience. They love his face.” He emphasized his syllables with a weathered, and surprisingly dirty, finger. “How it is framed only adds the spice of variety to its timeless appeal.”
“Colonel.” Brad called to his manager.
“Yes, Brad.” The Colonel did not bother excusing himself. He stepped over to the mirror.
“What do you think?” Brad asked.
The journalist wrote in his notebook: “Is it truly indifference—or indecision?”
“Brad,” the Colonel replied, laying a hand on the pretty boy’s shoulder and gazing into his reflected eyes, “If you’re asking me, I say go with the first one.” He glanced at the attendant, who looked at Brad, who nodded in agreement.
“The Tribute to Harpo Marx #5 it is,” confirmed the attendant. He boxed up the curly blond wig and handed it to a member of the entourage while the Colonel distributed one-hundred-dollar bills to everyone in the room.

Mr. Wagner’s 16 Cats

Pleskin’s arrival brought the total number of cats to sixteen. Mr. Wagner, consumed by his work for the Naval Treaty Theft and Nervous Breakdown committee, had no idea that his menagerie had grown so large. He had only a vague recollection of stopping to pick up the stray on his way home. Once he had put Pleskin down in the kitchen before a little bowl of food his focus was once again on his work. Mr. Wagner wandered upstairs where a pile of papers awaited him like a lonely pawn unmoved at endgame.
It was a couple of days before Pleskin made contact with the last of the other cats. Whistly, while far from being the “leader,” was, however, the most senior resident, both in terms of age and time in the house. She was also the most reclusive, rarely leaving the secret hollow under the bed. It was one of the last places that Pleskin explored.
“I’m sorry,” Pleskin said quickly, catching sight of Whistly. “I didn’t know anybody was under here.”
“You’re new?” Whistly asked.
“To this house, yes.” Pleskin glanced around at the bead curtains that covered three archway, enticingly leading to mystery and darkness. On the walls between them were posters of Peter Brötzmann, Shel Silverstein, and some actor who was known for his ugly films of the immediate pre-hippie era, but Pleskin couldn’t name this last person. Whistly was curled up on a bean bag cushion, reading a book about trains that could talk and get up and walk around and drink heavily; she had an unfinished sandwich beside her.
“Is that olive paste?” Pleskin wondered.
Whistly’s eyes widened.
“You know what that is?” She said amazed.
“Yes, it’s called…” Pleskin glanced at an old banjo in the corner while struggling to recall the word. Whistly let him struggle.
“You OK in here?” Dongar, another of Mr. Wagner’s cats, asked Whistly from behind Pleskin. He had thrown aside the dust ruffle and peered within, concerned. He wore the protective clothing of a post-apocalyptic adventurer, traveling the wastelands in a homemade vehicle, hunting, and in turn being hunted by, intelligent mutant apes.

Singleton Copley Cricket and the False Locomotive

“Dora,” Singleton Copley Cricket called to his secretary as he stepped out of his inner, or private, office. The whole suite of rented rooms was his “office,” but the room just behind Dora’s desk was his office within his office. When he was out and about Cricket would tell people he was going to his office and by that he meant he was going to the suite. But if someone was waiting for him in one of the chairs in front of Dora’s desk, Dora would often say to them, “he’s in his office,” meaning the room behind her. So, you see, the meaning of the word “office” changes depending on the context and that is why I have told you that Singleton Copley Cricket stepped out of his inner, or private, office.
After had had caught Dora’s attention by calling her name Cricket informed her that he was stepping out of the office for a while to get some lunch. And by that he meant the whole office suite. You get the idea.
It was a hot day in the city. This was back in the days before air conditioning had become the ubiquitous phenomenon it is today, back when people had to make do with fans. And all of this while remaining dressed up in “appropriate attire,” meaning a suit and tie for men, stockings and a dress for women. On top of all that Cricket was an actual cricket, a six foot tall, talking, humanoid cricket without the perspiration cooling mechanism that you and I as actual humans enjoy. I assume you are human.
Cricket decided to go to the darkest, coolest place he knew of: Henderson’s bar on Thorax Street. He could get a corned beef sandwich and a tall glass of beer there. It is not known whether the owner’s name was actually Henderson nor if he had an office somewhere within the establishment. Anyway, to speed things along, let me tell you that as Cricket was sitting there with his sandwich and beer a fellow sat down beside him and struck up a conversation with him. People are always “striking up” a conversation. Funny how they’re never “igniting” one of “knocking on into existence.” The fellow introduced himself as Carlo Menotti Smokestack and explained that he was a locomotive.
Cricket looked him up and down and said he didn’t look like a locomotive.
“Perhaps I’m a type of locomotive you’ve never seen before.” Smokestack countered. Cricket said nothing to this. He took a bite of his sandwich and decided to look up “locomotive” in his private detective’s guidebook when he got back to his office office office.

The Homemade Fence Straightener

In the enlarged crawlspace/beer drinker’s refuge beneath my old house, which used to belong to my grandparents, I found an unusual object. It was a couple of boards loosely bolted together with several metal rings attached to them. My father told me it was a fence straightener. My grandfather had made it. It was for pulling wire fencing straight. If you happened to be putting up a fence around a pasture, say, you attached the straightener to the end of the fencing and used chains and a tractor to pull the fencing against the posts neat and straight. My father said it worked amazingly well. What was amazing to me was that my grandfather, my mother’s father, had built it.
He built a lot of things. Simple household objects out of scraps. Mostly benches and wagons. A pigsty. He was an uncommunicative drunk, but he could do stuff like that. I never had any kind of relationship with him. My mother said he was very proud of me. I don’t know why exactly. I didn’t want anything to do with him while he was alive. Now he’s dead I feel sorry for him. I don’t know how we could ever have communicated anyway. He was fairly deaf. He seemed lost in a fog most of the time. My mother said he was drunk when he walked her down the aisle. In the wedding pictures from that day he looks pretty messed up, his suit a rumpled mess, his face a bewildered lump of suntanned dough. He did have beautiful skin. I think I got my olive complexion from him. I’m also hoping that what they say about men’s genetic legacy of hair retention is true. He had a full head of black hair to the day he died.
We lived next door to each other. He saw me walking by my house one day and called to me. He wanted help moving either a toilet or a bathtub, I don’t remember which exactly, that he was working on. I helped him and afterwards he said, “much obliged,” like a character in a Western. One of the few moments of interaction I ever had with him.
I used to work at the convenience store with an old man named Bill Sebald. He got sick and died and the death really shook me in a way that the dying of either of my grandfathers didn’t. Maybe it’s because I actually had normal human communication with him. Or maybe it’s because I only barely knew him.

A Foot Torn Off in the Scramble to Publish

Anders Macramé finally completed his novel. The book, Eisenhower Bristlecone Crawlspace, had been a joke to Macramé’s friends for years. “He’ll never complete it,” they said. “Him, write a book? He had bad grades in high school!”
Yet there it was, an unwieldy stack of papers carried about with Macramé wherever he went, getting more and more tattered and coffee stained each day.
“Now to get it published,” was the new thing for his friends to say.
“Yes, I know.” Macramé would reply. “I’m looking into it.”
“It’s not really a book until it’s published.”
“Well, would you like to read it in the meantime?”
“I… uh, I… um…” This said accompanied by reluctant turning over of a page or two. “Oh, there’s the word ‘custodian.’”
Macramé now began to get desperate. How many more books could he possibly write? This one had taken everything he had. No, he must see this one all the way to the bookstore shelf. After receiving no reply to his inquiries about publication from Random House, Nan Talese, and the local university press, he contacted a man whose advertisement ran in the back of The Writing Life.
“Meet me in the men’s room of the Waffle House off exit 27, and bring cash.” The man instructed Macramé over the phone in between coughs.
The night of the rendezvous Macramé was nervous. It was raining. The paper bag in which he carried his manuscript was wet. The pages of his book had begun to look like a child’s diorama of some woodland scene devoid of life. He started his car and thought of Jaime Sommers, freaking out in the phone booth.
Macramé was still far from the Waffle House when he crashed his car.
“How did he manage to get his foot torn off?” Captain Diagram of the highway patrol asked one of the EMTs as they loaded the would-be author into the ambulance.
“Can’t say for sure.” The other man shook his head. “He’s lucky he hit something soft.” He indicated the stand of stuffed rabbit trees with a wave of his coffee cup.
“Like his head.” Diagram chuckled as the pulpy mush of dreams slopped onto the road.

Tiki Totem Amplifiers

Don led Phil to the back room, a room that, to Phil’s peculiar aesthetic notions, reeked of mystery and alien doings, but that Don found as familiar and boring as brushing his teeth. This back room, by the way, was known as the Costner Chamber for reasons lost in the stagnant gelatin of history. Its walls were heavy, old-fashioned plaster, painted over many times until they had acquired the look of walls in some monastery on the Dalmatian coast. If you’ve ever seen a Dalmatian coast you’ll know that the fire department pays them too much.
“The floors are wood, but covered over with an ancient Persian rug.” Phil announced as he examined the room.
“I don’t know how ‘ancient’ it is,” Don caviled, “But it is old. I found it in the back of a K car.”
“But the main feature of the room, dominating it, one might say, are the Tiki Totem amplifiers.” Phil focused his attention on the reason they were there. “Seven of them in all,” he counted.
“Would you like to try one?” Don offered.
Phil scratched his nose carefully as he considered. The recording device was hidden inside. “What instrument should I plug in?”
“What about good, old-fashioned guitar?”
“Heavy?” Phil wondered.
Don sighed. “If you like.” He said. He went into another room, this one known as the Snoopy Suite, to select a guitar. Although only gone for a few seconds, he had time to reflect on the amplifiers and see them in his mind in a way somehow clearer than when he was staring at them. Despite variations, they were each designed to resemble a totem pole. However, instead of typical Pacific Northwest Indian imagery, they consisted of a series of Tiki heads stacked on top of each other. The lowest Tiki’s head’s mouth contained the big speaker while auxiliary ones were in the mouths of Tikis higher up. Don felt certain that they would sell well once they were endorsed by the appropriate celebrity.
On returning to the room in which he had left Phil, however, he found only a vortex swirling with elemental forces and the smell of bankruptcy.

Two Bananas and a Cracker

Feldstein restricted his lunch menu to two bananas and a cracker. Admittedly, the cracker was rather large, more in the style of a piece of Scandinavian flatbread than an addition to an American party platter, but still the lunch as a whole was looked on by his co-workers at the thumbtackworks as humorously insubstantial.
“He doesn’t even have a drink with his meals.” Deborah Psalmstress whispered with curled lips across the table as she and a couple of the other gals took time out from discussing what they had just been doing on the workroom floor not ten minutes earlier to stare at Feldstein.
“Supposedly, drinking with your meals dilutes the stomach’s digestive juices.” Carla gossiped freely, her source her daughter’s antiquated health textbook.
At the word “juices” Anna brought her knees firmly together under the table and flexed her thighs.
“Maybe so,” Deborah said with the peasant’s due submission to sorcery, “But I couldn’t eat without something to drink.” She took a careful swallow from her bottle of Lightbulb Containment Fluid, careful lest she smear her lipstick too much.
“Some amount of lipstick is bound to come off on the mouth of the bottle,” Feldstein noted as he watched the women through the complex array of tiny mirrors concealed behind the book he was reading, “Workmen’s Study in Contrasts Between Cher and Sade.” He particularly watched as Deborah’s small, but apparently apple-firm breasts caught at the material of her shirt as she drank, like two kids running their hands against sheets hanging on a line.
Grade Five Inspector Lyubveg, watching everyone in the breakroom from his secret vantage point behind the worker’s comp information poster, remembered the clothesline in his grandmother’s back yard. He realized he hadn’t thought it in years, perhaps decades. Could it be decades since he had actually thought of the way the sheets moved with the wind, the smell of the fresh laundry drying in the sun? It had been so long ago, long before he became a dirty little spy for management.

The Three Expectations

Dr. Mossflicker paced the limited area available to him behind the lectern. He was waiting for an answer to his question. The quarter had just begun (the college hadn’t moved to a semester system) and the class hadn’t yet gotten the feel of things. This was always the case the first few days. They had to get used to him, to each other, as well as the material.
“Come on now.” Dr. Mossflicker urged. His Australian accent was funny. His red moustache and glasses only made him funnier. “What are the three expectations that any citizen of Rabbit Town will have?” He turned and caught the eye of a short boy with a bleached mop top who looked on the verge of making the attempt at answering. His gaze and friendly smile were the needed impetus.
“Are-are the citizens of Rabbit Town actual rabbits?” The boy asked with a stammer.
“Oh yes,” Mossflicker sniffed, nodded, drew himself up straight. “I should have made that clear at the outset. The citizens of Rabbit Town are actual rabbits.”
The boy glanced around at his contemporaries.
“What their actual species or scientific name is I don’t know.” Mossflicker continued with a smile. “But they are rabbits. This isn’t some human urban environment that happens to have the name Rabbit Town.” He looked about the classroom since the bleached blond boy seemed to have disappeared behind the shoulders of the stern-looking redneck seated in front of him. A girl on the opposite side of the room held her hand more-or-less up. Mossflicker smiled and nodded.
“The rabbits can talk?” She asked. “They have intelligence and have formulated a society?”
“Oh yes,” Mossflicker was emphatic. “Else the concept of citizenship wouldn’t have much bearing on the topic.”
“How can rabbits talk?” The redneck demanded. His failure to wear overalls was his only concession to the collegiate milieu in which fate had inserted him like a drop of half-melted ice cream into a glass of beer.
“Perhaps we should be asking what the topic is exactly.” A boy whose hairline was already receding made this suggestion. Dr. Mossflicker looked at him pleasantly enough, but inside he withdrew his mental tongue in distaste. There was one of these would-be precocious smartasses in every class.

A Poorly Ventilated Dump

The fumes arising from the disordered pile of unwanted items in storage room #16 made it hard for Ellen to breathe. She and Brad stood on the tiny balcony high up on the wall overlooking the room. It was the only immediately available place they could talk without being overheard.
“Hurry up and tell me what you’ve got to tell me.” Ellen demanded. “I’m getting sick.” What she meant by “sick” was actually “dizzy,” buy you and I are tolerant people and will let that pass. She held the top of her shirt up over her nose.
Brad looked at her display of sensitivity with aversion. He called it weakness, but dared not criticize the woman to her face. She was his only reliable co-conspirator on the ship.
“I’ve just found out that Brainbird will be inspecting the ballast garden tomorrow.” Brad told her.
Ellen nodded behind her makeshift mask.
“So you want me to add the contaminants to his cheese locker then?” Her voice was muffled. Her eyes, seen in isolation from the rest of her face, were strangely compelling.
“God no.” Brad hissed. He glanced at the service door through which one gained access to this truly tiny balcony. “I want you to go through his pajamas container. See if what Don said is true.”
“What about the cheese locker?”
“Ellen, the time isn’t right for direct action.”
“When will it be? Oh—“ Ellen gasped, “I’ll do whatever you want! I’m not going to stand here and asphyxiate while we argue about it!”
“It’s not so bad!” Brad finally snapped. He gestured to the heap of objects below them. Complex thermodynamic reactions were taking place in that heap, causing dinosaur necks of steam to rise here and there.
“It is! It is!” Ellen insisted. “It’s nothing to you; you smoke! I’m getting out of here!”
“Not until we’ve made definite arrangements!” Brad stopped suddenly. He had heard something on the other side of the door. Could it be Brainbird himself, the giant anthropomorphic bird in silken robes who served as the ship’s director of anticipatory regret research?

Trust the Big Tusker

From the moment Phil and Don had accepted the ride on the elephant’s back Phil had been uneasy. Where was he taking them, he kept wondering. Don, however, had no such worries.
“Trust the big tusker.” He advised Phil confidently.
The two men had been running from Major Valentine and his rotary ducks when this elephant, identifiable only by his badge number and the distinctive penis-shaped notch in his left ear, had stopped to give them a lift. A recorded invitation issuing from a box strapped about his neck and a curiously beckoning look in his eye had been Don and Phil’s cues to climb aboard. Yet their destination remained a mystery.
“As long as the people chasing us don’t catch us I don’t care where we go.” Don breezily insisted as he stretched out in the sunshine.
“What if he’s taking us to those people?” Phil worried.
Eventually the elephant reached the island of Fripp’s Snobbery, where his brain was enhanced by flagella impendices, allowing him to communicate through his neck box. He and the two men took a break from their journey beneath an enormous umbrella on the veranda of the Fecalfix Hotel.
“So you don’t actually know the names of those people chasing you?” The elephant, who preferred to be called by his badge number, 103, asked Don and Phil.
“No idea.”
“Do you know why they’re after you?”
“Something to do with spices and the international trade thereof.” Don opined in frowning perplexity.
“Interesting.” 103 nodded and took a sip of his Lightbulb Containment Fluid.
“Why did you stop and pick us up?” Phil wanted to know.
103 put down his drink on the glass top of the poolside table.
“It’s my job.” He said simply. He then gazed out at the ocean with depths of painful history in his relatively tiny eyes. Don and Phil each considered the possibility of allying themselves with 103 on a more long-term basis, but doubted that the elephant knew anything about marketing.

Stroboscopically Induced Doughnut Tantrum

“Shut it off! Shut it off!” Bifcuitweep cried. He flapped his arms in the overly long sleeves of his lab coat at the interns behind the controls of the strobe. The two young men dutifully obeyed. Working with Bifcuitweep had been one of their most sincerely held goals since eighth grade. The other was to meet Fludge Macrosby, the voice of Vaporman’s camel Clam, but that one had gone unfulfilled.
“It’s clear that the strobe induces the doughnut to throw a tantrum.” Ruben observed to Bifcuitweep.
“That much was clear from the onset.” Bifcuitweep shot back irritably, referring to the title of this piece.
“Not necessarily.” Ruben, in full uniform as some kind of snail barber, insisted. “The possibility always exists that there is such a thing as a ‘doughnut tantrum,’ a tantrum in which one acts like a doughnut while under the maddening flicker of the strobe.”
Bifcuitweep admitted this possibility with a toss of his eyebrows up to the motivational posters tacked to the ceiling and reached for the doughnut on the platform. “I’ll put you out of your misery.” He thought as he took a bite.
He immediately spat it out into a receptacle purchased for just such a purpose.
“Who bought cinnamon?” He demanded. His anger was terrible to behold. The two interns were paralyzed with fear.
“That changes the whole parametric field of this test!” Bifcuitweep glared at the two young men. “Get a box of proper doughnuts in here right now!”
“Weren’t you a little hard on them?” Ruben asked after they had skedaddled out the door.
“Ruben,” Bifcuitweep sighed, never taking his eyes off the floor, where the opposite of motivational poster imagery might be found hidden in the random striations of the linoleum, “This research isn’t just about keeping the doughnut-buying public safe. It’s about using up every bit of our budget, both monetary and temporal.”

Barba Looty

“And so we come to Barba Looty.” The investigator, tired after a long day, had begun to look like Richard Belzer. He pinched his nose and put on a pair of glasses designed to emphasize this resemblance even further. He tossed a file onto the table between the woman identified as Barba Looty and himself. “The last of a nearly endless parade of witnesses.” He opened the file and looked at the woman. Her cheerful countenance and patient expectancy were a mouthful of sourball candies after a gallon of curdled milk.
“Sorry to keep you waiting so long.” He said, hoping to puncture her emotional umbrella.
“That’s alright. I’m always happy to help the police.” Her smile was corn-fed. Her accent southern of the most relentless variety.
The investigator turned over the first page of the file. “Well, strictly speaking, I’m not with the police.” He glanced at Barba Looty. A slight wrinkle of confusion gratifyingly appeared on her forehead. “None of these men are.” He gestured with his coffee cup towards the door.
“Oh, by the way,” he thought he’d better ask, “Did you want some?” He meant the dark water he had been drinking all evening.
“No, no thank you.” Barba Looty replied. “But, who then…?” Her eyes bounced around the room. This is a police station, they said.
“Oh, this is a police station,” the investigator affirmed. “But we’re just making use of it for our inquiries.” He took up the second page of the file. “Now, Mrs. Looty, it says here that you’ve been the wife of a beloved college football coach for fifty years.”
“That’s right.” The woman put her hands on the tabletop. “Who are you, if you’re not the police?”
The investigator glanced at her. “We investigate… incidents… like the one that took place today.”
“You mean… the paranormal?” Barba Looty’s eyes bounced around again.
The investigator ignored the question. “And it says here you hosted a radio show on a local station for years.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
The investigator suddenly dropped the paper and pushed the file to one side. He looked at the woman before him and asked, “Mrs. Looty, do you know the difference between your ass and a hole in the ground?”