I looked up at the sun, descending slightly now from its apex, hot and hazy, took another drink of the swiftly warming lemonade, and was almost bored enough to return to the Conference/Fiesta before Dinner. Vampirella was never bored at her job, but hers didn’t pay an eighth of what mine did. At my level of middle management if I did too much work and applied myself I’d be fired within three months. If you don’t do anything, you can’t do it wrong.

     I walked over to another stripmall in my bathing suit and sneakers, finding a Cap’n Salty’s, a PhatBurgerz, a Stuff Your Own Taco And Glaze Your Own Donut, a Piggleyland BBQ Pit & Play Trough, a Pinkly-Shrinkly Weight Loss Klinic and again no worthwhile souvenirs at the three identical fusty giftshops. I was a little tempted by the dried young alligator heads, but depressed at the sight of sixty of them piled on a shelf. I kept envisioning the little alligators all lined up at the guillotine, smoking their desperate last cigarettes. I figured if I wanted an alligator head enough I’d just go back and harvest the dead alligator in the ditch on the way back to the Conference/Fiesta. Also, I was pretty much out of money. I had about eighteen dollars to last me three more days. Sam Handwich had offered no additional stipend for expenditures on this trip, after shelling out for the luxurious accommodations at Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound, and all my meals were being provided by the organizers of the Conference/Fiesta. My next check had to cover the mortgage payment on the Quonset, so money was tight. I decided I’d try to get over to the coast the next day to see if I could find some seashells to bring back for the kids and to take a look at the ocean at least once before I had to return to November and the remainder of winter in Michigan.

 

     Back at Alligator Al’s, I got dressed for the dinner at The Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort, and called Sam Handwich on his cell phone to check in.

     “Fang! How’s the Conference/Fiesta? The grenade fishing was TREMENDOUS! There is nothing like sitting in a lounge chair on a yacht, sipping single malt Scotch whiskey straight out of a haggis while chunks of manatee and porpoise rain down out of that beautiful Florida sky! You should try it sometime, Fang, except that you’ll never be nearly wealthy enough. How’s the Conference/Fiesta?”

     “Dynamic, Sam. The frisson is palpable. I think we’ll experience some real engorgement from the synergy. It was a tsunami of commerce today, including very effectual and poignant meetings with Pharma-Go-Go and some guys who want our drivers to pretend to talk to their corpses. I have a tectonic day scheduled for tomorrow as well, interfacing with and exploring modalities of transportative perifery .” I didn’t mean anything by that.

   “Marvelous, Fang! I had a gut you were a prime Achievator! I’ll be golfing all day tomorrow: apparently Hugo and Morvis know an African-Themed course where the caddies are female pygmies! It takes three of them to drag each golf bag, and they’re nearly dead with exhaustion by the end of eighteen holes, which is hilarious! Plus…they’re nude pygmies. And, I understand, very accommodating, in their small way,” he laughed, and laughed, like that was funny. “I’ll probably see you at the Conference/Fiesta Dinner tomorrow. We’ll be back in Orlando by then, and tomorrow is the Famous Safari Luau Cookout! We wouldn’t want to miss that, would we, Morvis?” I heard Morvis Spontaine distantly saying, “Hell no would we miss the Safari Luau, Sam!”

     I told Sam that I wanted to go squeeze in a seminar on Leveraging Staff Despair before dinner and said goodbye. I locked the dank Motel room door behind me and started walking back to the Conference/Fiesta, again avoiding the vicinity of Piggleyland.

 

     I had just popped out of a culvert to run across the last freeway between me and the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort when a police cruiser spotted me and stopped, framing me dramatically in a spotlight as bright as a thousand suns, “Freeze!” said a mean woman’s voice from the source of the light. I had nowhere to dive for shelter, and I knew cops traditionally only said “Freeze!” when they were pointing a gun at you, so I raised my hands in surrender and tried to look like the sort of person cops like to have over for tea and crumpets.

     “I’m so happy to see you, officers!” I said, although I couldn’t see them at all because of the light. I did know that cops feel hurt when you’re not happy to see them.

     “Freeze!” said the cop again, though I hadn’t moved except for my lips. So I stopped talking and there was a long pause, and then the cop said, “What the hell are you doing out here on foot?”

     “I’m attending the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta, way over there at the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort. I was in the parking lot, and these two crazy men in a filthy pig costumes with a rusty spears took all of my money and then I just ran and hid in that culvert …” I tried to burst into tears but I couldn’t quite go that far, “...I mean all my money except for eighteen bucks. See?”  I opened my wallet for the viewing of the eighteen dollars.

     There was another pause. I heard the cops muttering to each other. Then the spotlight clicked off and a cop was walking towards me from the shoulder of the freeway, holstering her gun. She plucked the eighteen dollars from my wallet and gave me an openhanded slap across the face that laid me out flat on my back, then walked back to the cruiser and they drove away.

     It was the most straightforward transaction I’ve ever had with the Government.

 

     Rubbing my jaw gingerly, I made it back to the peppermint lozenge front door and through the spectacular Rainbow Sorbet reception area to the Carved Fudge Forest Conference Room, where dinner was being served. It was a formal dinner, so there were crisp white tablecloths on the pies and the appetizers were just being served. There was a menu at each place setting:

 

 

 

 

 

2002 Taxi-to-Trucking Conference/Fiesta Night II Formal Dinner

Tonite’s Theme: Klassic American Hobo Kwisine

Appetizer:

Beans Ala Can

Any Kind of Beans, served in the Scorched Tin Can they were cooked in.

Soup:

Kreme of Kondiments

A Simple Base Stock of Hosewater, Malt Liquor and some Half and Half is flavored with Packets of Ketchup, Mustard,  Salt, Pepper and Sugar, served in a Hubcap with One Crouton.

Salad:

One Dash through the Garden Salad

Fresh Wild Clover, Carrot Greens and Mrs. Finchleys’ Prize Pansies delicately sprinkled over a whole raw onion, or, if you’re not so lucky, a dirty turnip. Served with a Raspberry Vinaigrette. 

Palate Cleanser:

A Ol’ Brown Jug Full O’ Corn Likker

Warning: 180 Proof, may cause blindness.

Fish:

Ornamental Pond Fillets

One Coi or Twenty Goldfish, Seared on a Cedar Roof Shingle 

Meat:

Choice Of:

Hot Dog On A Stick:

One Raw Hot Dog, on a Stick, served with a Small Campfire of two-by-fours

Or:

Pigeon On A Stick

One Cage-Free Raw Pigeon, on a Stick, served with a Small Campfire of two-by-fours

Or:

Boiled Leather Boot

One Succulent Leather Boot, boiled until you can sort of chew it

Dessert:

Cooling Pie

 served on a Windowsill

 

   I sat down and started on the beans. They weren’t half bad, really. The only eating utensil at the place setting was a rusty bowie knife, which made it challenging. I was seated with several stupid suitboys from a Rubba Tire Dealership in Cleveland, whose business cards I had to accept and admire, an embalmed CEO & his nurse/secretary/ventriloquist from a courier company in Texas, and a small, lonely and desperate salesman from a dispatch software company. He gave me another business card, which I pocketed with the others. All of them were talking about some upcoming tlatchtli tournaments in a highly animated fashion. I never could talk sports, which is another of my significant flaws as a male American. I’ve tried to watch all those games where giant guys throw balls at each other, but my mind starts to drift after  a couple minutes and I just can’t get under it.

 

     Tlatchtli is some kind of old Aztec game with two teams where you have to hit a solid rubber ball through a hole in a wall using your knees and hips. The game had been gaining popularity for some time, because of the unusual group of athletes that had emerged to play it.. There were eight teams, and some of the guys looked fairly normal, but others had developed these enormous haunches and legs, that they used to finesse the ball. Some of the players also had very small heads, like about the size of a softball.    

   “You hear they’re trading Soblowski to the Frizz?” asked the mummified CEO.

     “He’s the number three Bender in the U.S.” added his nurse/secretary/ventriloquist. She was good- I could only barely see her lips moving when the CEO was talking.

     The salesman said, “Soblowski will never be the Bender his brother was, before he sent that tragic rebound off his inner thigh that got his whole team sacrificed. Did any of you see the thighs, drumsticks and ass on that new guy Wimsey, from the Crawfish? He must have three hundred pounds of ham on him”

     The CEO said, “I saw Wimsey on that show Hello, Homeland!…his head was only a little larger than Jeannie McFeeny’s fist, so she drew lips and a couple eyes on her fist and had her fist interview him. It was amusing, even if her technique was crude,” the nurse/secretary/ventriloquist blew a couple of smoke rings as he spoke.

     “The small head makes him aerodynamic,” said one of the Rubba Tire suitboys (I cannot tell suitboys apart), “I have fifty bucks on him to have the fastest offensive holes of the season.”

     “I have seventy bucks on Soblowski to hump and nuzzle the hardest balls,” said the Rubba Tire suitboy on the right.

     “The Denver Vibrators are way up, as far as possible, all available five and a half inches of ‘em, this season,” said the Rubba Tire suitboy on the left, “I was really hoping they could enlarge themselves and stuff a little more than that up there, but I guess their vacuum pump strategy has resulted in more girth than length. That’ll teach Coach Camaxtli to cut corners on the manual manipulation.”

     “Yeah, the Vibrators are mostly stimulating because of the prehensile nature of Borby’s invasive probing, and I think they’ll be totally exhausted after they put the Yams on the mat and rub themselves all over them.”

     “Do you really think Borby will even be able to accommodate the penetrating oblong thrusts of the Yams? My money’s on the Minnesota Yams, in that match, even if they don’t have a Swallower who won’t choke,” said the CEO. His nurse/secretary/ventriloquist was drinking steadily from a glass of Diet Aspartame Fizz while he spoke, which was just plain showing off. 

     “Yams! YAMS! YAMS!” chanted the three Rubba Tire suitboys, cleverly.

     “Yams ain’t got nothin on the Wallaces,” muttered the sweaty little salesman, to be answered with hoots of derision and five thrown croutons, as the soup had now arrived. Me,  I ate my crouton. It was the best part of the soup, actually.

     “Whaddayou think, Carlos? Wallaces or Yams?” said the salesman, desperately. It took me a moment to remember that I was still wearing my shirt with “Carlos” embroidered on the pocket.

     “I haven’t really been following sports for the last couple years, because I’ve been in a coma,” I said. It was about the only acceptable excuse I could offer, as an American male. They all made sympathetic noises and then went back to their gibberish.

 

     The evenings’ entertainment was provided by actual wild hobos, who’d been captured down by a nearby train trestle and soused on free Corn Likker. The Chairman of the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta had fourteen of them in a Plexiglas cube with fifty live chickens, the floor covered in thousands of banana peels as the Chairman, standing on a platform above, pelted them with pies and vicious blasts from a firehose. It was evidently hilarious. The hobos staggered drunkenly around, screaming obscenities and begging for mercy, soaking wet and covered in  pie and feathers, slipping and falling over and over again in a furious melee of frantic chickens and flying pastry.

     I was fortunate enough to get the onion in the salad- all three of the suitboys got dirty turnips- and I enjoyed the Corn Likker until the headache started to kick in. I declined the fish and meat courses and then ate a large portion of the pie (strawberry-rhubarb) with my hands. After dinner I lingered over espresso and cognac while I smoked a hobo-style cigar butt impaled on a toothpick. 

     The salesman made a faint, desperate bid to get me to consider his dispatch software. I cruelly pretended to be slightly interested in his product so that he’d give me one of his snazzy logo-embossed promotional pens. It had a built-in screwdriver, flashlight and digital alarm clock, and played a beepy klezmer tune. I have a real weakness for cheesy promotional items, especially when I’m drinking cognac. The waiters in simian attire made me drink too much by offering me more repeatedly. Also, I was depressed by the cube full of wet hobos, most of whom were now huddled in fetal position in one corner of the cube.

 

     I had initially been planning on leaving immediately after dinner, but there was nothing to do but watch TV back at Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound, and the spectacle at the Convention/Fiesta was getting really weird. The hobo Kwisine had all been cleared away, and drinks flowed freely. A 350 lb. office supply salesman had taken off his shirt and was standing on his pie challenging people to wrestle. The Rubba Tire suitboys made an extremely indecent drunken proposal to the nurse/secretary/ventriloquist, who coolly made the dead CEO tell them to go fuck themselves. They staggered off  to cruise the other chicks at the convention. Pam McWainscoting, who had achieved a foot-high shellacked beehive hairdo, had stripped to a polkadotted leotard and was demonstrating some kind of Jazzersize dance to the piped-in Muzak, yelling “Woo!”  frequently as a small crowd of limousine managers applauded halfheartedly. There were a number of small skirmishes around the room at all times, a chorus of truckers were howling patriotic anthems, a number of people were openly weeping as others tried to fondle them sympathetically. The district managers from two competing courier companies were taking turns slapping each other hard across the face with a couple of the leftover coi, to see who could take it the longest. A fog machine started up, and the lights were turned down low. And still the waiters poured the drinks, looking more and more apprehensive all the time. More pies were passed out and the hobos were released from the cube and driven out of the front door in a hail of pies.

     The Muzak got really loud, and the crowd went wild, hurling their shirts into the air and barking like dogs, for some reason. It was just too much.  I had to get out immediately before they turned on me, so I made a dash for the door and made it out just before the it closed behind the hobos, which left me alone in front of the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort with fourteen furious wet drunken humiliated hobos. Not at all intelligent, but I attribute that mostly to the cognac.

 

     The hobos encircled me quickly, and though they were much weakened by alcohol and the last two hours of mistreatment, they were a formidable and very angry crowd. 

     “Oh! Hi!” I said, tipsily, “anyone want a pro.. promotional pen? It playsh a little kleshmer tune.”

     At that moment an ice cream truck tinkled to a stop in front of the peppermint lozenge door, and the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort security officers leapt out, dressed in white uniforms and caps, with solid steel ice-cream cones that they wielded as billyclubs. They drove the hobos off across the parking lot, but backed off and left me alone when I fumbled my crumpled Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta! name badge from my back pocket, which was where I’d been keeping it. I moseyed off across the asphalt to trek back to Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound. I had to make a wide circle around so that my path wouldn’t intersect with that of the hobos, which took me past the roaring, hot field of air conditioners for the Hotel and Resort. A bird that had flown too low fell to the ground as I skirted the barbed-wire fence that encircled the field, and the scent of roasted fowl wafted up from its scorched corpse. The heat was pretty unbearable even fifty yards away- the asphalt was sticking to the soles of my sandals- and I hastened to make my way past and down an embankment to a cool dry irrigation ditch below a freeway overpass.