Delirium and Debris

Yes, I'm Old-Fashioned.

2008-10-28T17:54:16Z

Very excited today! At 4 PM I go for my new triple-tier eyebags.

I've been scrimping and saving for this operation for months, even to the point of curtailing my windsock expenditures. I had to get a second job, as a reglazer of day-old donuts at the "Donut Make You HAPPY" Drive-Through Donut Emporium. You know what my favorite part of the job is? Taste my hand! It's still sweet, and I finished reglazing six hours ago. Which helps with my food budget. To save money, I pretty much just eat couscous and lick my hand.

I have been having a lot of difficulty with the new fashion, to tell you the truth. With the 2 jobs it's hard to find the time I now have to spend every day penciling in worry lines and eye crinkles, maintaining the grey highlights in my beard, encouraging my ear hairs to grow, putting rheum-drops in my eyes. And sometimes, when I'm in a hurry, I forget to stoop and shamble like I should. I've been wearing dentures, but sometimes they slip, and people see that I'm not actually missing my natural teeth, which is SO embarrassing. Oh, for a pure pink set of plain gums, like the very-very-harridan Milvie Spinkle-Thorpe was seen chortling carelessly through at the Premiere of "NOUGAT!!!" at Cannes.

The real problem is that it's just not possible for an ordinary person on a fixed budget to keep up with the cutting edge of couture right now. That punk Hoofer Squills can't be a day over 24 years old, but with hundreds of thousands of dollars at his disposal, he suddenly looks like the most fabulously decrepit codger imaginable, almost overnight. I'm no expert, but it looks like he's had his back humped, a total ass removal, distressed knee and hip replacements, rheumatiz injections, and a full face drop. Wanda Limpe-Forque definitely has new wattles, and from her everplunging cleavage, I suspect she's had extensive increased-gravity treatments. You just don't see natural early droopage like that here on Earth. I hear Wiwi Norplebower was actually flown to Jupiter for a month to attain the wondrous haglicious pendulousity that was so prominently on display last month at the Glorioski Awards.

And the clothes! The price of Sans-A-Belt polyester slacks has skyrocketed. Housecoats, gravy-stained tweed jackets, sock garters, big white underpants, scuffed loafers, dingy askew wigs and unblocked fedoras are flying off the racks. Bags of cat hair and lint to roll in before you go out to dinner cost like $40, and you only get like an ounce per bag, barely three applications.

I have to shave thrice daily or I get stubble where my male-pattern baldness should be. And there’s no way for me to make my knuckles as knobby as I’d like to, although I can inexpensively accent my hand (and ankle!) veins with an ordinary blue ball-point pen. Check out this stance though: I’m proud of this. I have almost perfected my spinal S-Curve, and my chest grows more concave daily. Here’s my secret: I’ve been sleeping every night in the clothes dryer with a bowling-ball on my chest.

I hear noted FauxGeezer Horbert Morton had a murder of real crows paid to squat on his face for two months to acquire his lauded crow’s-feet. You know how much a whole murder of crows costs? I can barely afford a mugging of crows.

If I had to say which of the celebrities I personally find most stunning recently, I have to give it up to Miss Sophia Pemberly as the hottest prematurely geriatric starlet of the year. Her chin hair implants, the constellations of liver spots on her shriveled chest, the deflated and crepey biceps and buttocks, the cracked and puckered sphincter of her lips, the hook of her nose, the way her eyelids drape suggestively over her glittery little eyes, the dandruff, that sexy totter. That babe is a Stone-Cold Crone. I’m slightly engorged just thinking about it, which reminds me, I gotta go take my Erectile Dysfunction pill. Nothing blows the look like an erection in your Sans-A-Belt Polyester Slacks.

....Except for the Epilogue.

2008-10-09T11:00:57Z

Epilogue

I snapped awake and the digital clock across the room read 11:34 PM. Vampirella, Natasha and Tibor were all deeply asleep still, but I had a feeling that I’d heard something. I lay there for a moment, and the sound came again, a creaking, and a rattle of some sort. It seemed to be coming from the turret. I crept out of bed and grabbed a hammer from my toolbox, then snuck up the spiral staircase to the turret quietly. There was a trap door at the top of the staircase, and I opened it just an inch and looked around. There was nothing that I could see, so I opened it fully and went out on the turret to look over the crenellations and make sure nobody was on the roof or something.

I looked in all directions, but saw nothing but the bleak weather and dark sky above. It was very cold. I turned to go back down into the Quonset, and they were hovering above the trapdoor, staring at me balefully.

Sam Handwich and Brick Marrow were floating, just four inches above the trapdoor. They were slightly transparent; I could see some of the brighter stars on the horizon clearly right through Brick Marrow’s shredded yellow smoking jacket. Both of them were dressed in the clothing I’d eaten them in, and it was torn and tattered from the wolf’s teeth and claws. They themselves were intact again, but they looked very pale, -in Sam’s case a light pastel orange-, and they had dark circles under their eyes, and both of them were hung with heavy linked chains, that swung and clinked in the November wind.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I called this meeting, woooooooooo,” intoned the ghost of Handwich.

“No,” I said, “I’m going back to bed. Fuck off both of you.”

“I suppose you think that was a pretty brilliant business maneuver, eating us, boooooooo,” moaned Brick Marrow, bitterly.

“No, I regret it. I mean, I admit I came after you under false pretenses, but the main reason I regret it is that I still have indigestion.”

“Our spirits will haunt you always…” howled Sam, “I’ve already entered it in my Weekly Planner for the next 10,000 years, oooooooh,”

“You will never rest for our souls are unquiet, and we’re very motivated to dynamically haunt you not only in person, but also by fax and email, woooooooooooo…..” wailed Brick Marrow.

“Seriously, I’m going back to bed,” I walked to the trapdoor and opened it. They followed me down into the house.

“Booo, know that I was innocent of the boning of your wife for which you ate me….”

“Ooooooooooooooooooh, repent, for I was thy employer and thou didst unnaturally consume me as well,” groaned Sam Handwich loudly, rolling his eyes and gnashing his teeth.

“It wasn’t unnatural. Really, it wasn’t even personal. Wolves are hungry,” I explained.

Tibor, Natasha and Vampirella all came stumbling sleepily out into the living room.

“Cool! Ghosts!” said Natasha.

“Dumb looking ghosts, though,” said Tibor, doubtfully.

“I’ll get the vacuum,” said Vampirella.

“Noooooo!” screamed Brick and Sam together, but Vampirella had them both in the bag within moments. Sam was sucked in first. Brick tried to escape by diving into a heating vent, but it was no good. Here’s a valuable tip: ghosts are utterly vulnerable to vacuuming. When the ectoplasm hits the dust in the bag, it gets tangled up with all the dead skin cells (70 percent of household dust is powdered flesh), and can’t extricate itself. People wonder why they rarely see ghosts anymore: The reason is that modern vacuuming technology has almost totally eliminated haunts in general.

I made some cocoa, and we all sat around drinking it for a little while, listening to the diminishing squeaks from the vacuum cleaner bag until they became inaudible. Then we went back to bed.

I hate it when something you ate keeps you up at night.

end

copyright2008nitrovonborax

Piggleyland: Chapter 13 is THE END

2008-10-09T10:58:47Z

13.

The next morning I woke up in Forest Hills Cemetery, under a bush, naked. My cuts and bruises had mostly healed, like they always do when I turn into a wolf, but I was covered in blood. Not mine, mostly. Shivering, I used some handfuls of snow to wash off the worst of it, and clothed myself by wrapping a blanket of wilting frozen flowers from a recent grave around me like a toga.

It was very early in the morning. The sun was just coming up, and there was a fuzzy silver frost on everything. It was about 26 degrees. My feet were cold, but I was still flushed from the transformation, so I wasn’t freezing. My stomach was slightly distended, and when I burped, I tasted expensive cologne. I started walking towards my home, trying to sort things out. I had only the faintest memories from the time after I saw the moon, as usual.

But I did remember seeing Brick Marrow’s ex-wife, Madisonne. There had been a minor prenumbral lunar eclipse that night, far too late to save Sam and Brick, but when Madisonne (who had reunited with him the previous evening when she heard about his new job) walked through the broken front door, the wolf was sleepy from overeating and weak from the eclipse. There wasn’t much left of the two businessmen, by then, but enough for her to scream at, which brought Skeetch out into the hallway.

“What the fut!” he said as he looked into Brick’s apartment, at the wolf, and the blood, but primarily into Madisonne’s open Philippe Bloomphier trenchcoat, because all she was wearing beneath it was about five yellow post-it notes.

The wolf had lazily leapt out of the third-story window in a shower of broken glass and loped off silently into the city.

I shuffled the three miles back to our house, looking at the pavement, leaving a trail of wilted roses, trying to piece things together. Now I understood that it probably had been Brick and Madisonne keeping Skeetch awake the night before. I had a terrible hopeful feeling that I was about to find out that there had been some other profound misunderstandings.

The moment I reached the front step of the Quonset, the door opened and I got hit hard and low. Flowers went everywhere, and I was flat out on my back in the front yard. The kids were laughing and hugging me, and then Vampirella came floating out through the door and as soon as I could get up she was giving me a big kiss and I already knew that I was stupid, stupid, but everything was just perfect.

“I was so worried when you didn’t make it back by last night,” she said, looking at my much-reduced floral toga with bemusement, “Did you end up in the cemetery again? When did your flight get in?”

“You didn’t hear about the flight?” I said. She was pulling me into the warm, candle-lit interior of the house. There was a fire burning in the fireplace, and the futon mattress, pillows and blankets from the bedroom had been brought out so that they could sleep by the fire the previous evening.

“Well, Moe told me Sam said you’d be back by late Tuesday, and the powers’ been out, so we were over at my Mom and Dad’s. Dad had the kids demolish that old barn near the cliff in the backyard, to pay him back for the TV that Tibor destroyed, and I’ve been putting together a portfolio, um, because I quit my job, sorry!”

She told me about Brick’s big meltdown at the Quonset. They’d just completely missed the news of the plane crash, my demise, and the memorial concert featuring vocal stylings of Lulu Bricious, spending a peaceful couple of days with the Grandparents, waiting for me to come get them, cut off from electronic media by the simple power of a glass of milk.

I was holding the kids and Vampirella all at once. I was so glad to be home, “I’m so glad to be home.” I said, weepily.

“How was Sam?” she asked, and kissed me again. With the tongue, even. It was heaven.

“Can’t you still taste him, a little?” I said.

Vampirella put her hand to her lips and looked me deep in the eyes, narrowly, “You didn’t.”
“I’m afraid so. Also, Brick Marrow. Not that it matters,” I said, breezily.

“You ate Brick Marrow? That’s…terrible.” I think she was trying not to laugh, “how did that happen?”

“Oh, well, just a misunderstanding,” I smiled, “…it’s really pretty funny, ha, I went over there because I thought maybe you were… having an affair with him, because…”

Vampirella wasn’t smiling anymore, “you thought I was what?”

I had to apologize a lot, real fast, then, to keep her from throwing me back out of the house. If the kids hadn’t been watching I’m sure she would have broken my nose before I had a chance to explain how deeply confusing and disorienting the last few days had been. As it was she just drew back, coolly, one eyebrow arched, and breathed evenly through her nose while simmering down and reconciling herself to the fact that I was far less intelligent that she’d previously thought, while I roughly sketched out the sequence of misunderstandings.

Tibor and Natasha had come off suspension temporarily and needed to be driven to school, so I showered quickly, changed into warm clothes, scraped the ice off the car and we drove them to school and dropped them off.

When we were a block from the school, she asked me to pull over for a moment, and when I pulled to the curb she punched me very hard in the bicep.

“Ow!” I said.

“Now let’s go get some pie, and you can tell me the stuff that you didn’t want to say in front of the kids, you jerk,” she snarled. I held my arm.

It wasn’t far to the pie and coffee at the Donut shop, where the smokin’ waitress now had a nametag that read “Paula.” Maybe she was triplets. I wondered if she had to share the one lung with her sisters.

I told Vampirella everything, and by the end of it she was somewhat more amused than angry.

“I’m sorry I punched you,” she said, “but Brick Marrow? Honestly, I think that your job, your coworkers, your hostile indifference to your job and coworkers, has contaminated you with some kind brain-eating virus. If you could seriously think that I’d sleep with that poor disgusting dead idiot- oh, fuck it. I’m glad you’re OK.” she smiled, but I could tell she was still a little mad. I gave her a kiss, and she took it, but there would be no tongue available.

I had to see what was going on back at Retro Cab, and I needed my last check for our mortgage payment, plus I had a number of personal effects to pick up from my office; books, promotional items, yo-yos, playing cards, CDs, extra shoes and gloves, and so forth. We parked our car in the lot, and things looked fairly normal. Monk was in his garage with the bay door open, pissing on the engine of a car to extinguish a small fire. A number of cabs in various stages of disrepair were parked or stalled around the lot, and a couple of coughing vehicles were just leaving the lot for their shift.

Vampirella and I went into the office, and it was like I’d never left. Ralph was behind his computer in his office, and there was a large framed picture behind him, and I could see his monitor reflected in the glass of the picture, and I could see that he was that he was looking at an eggplant on his computer, and I hate to say what the eggplant was being used for. I went ahead and punched in at the time clock, just for the heck of it.

Skeetch was unconscious face-down on the dispatch desk, as usual. Moe had an ear to the phone and his mouth to a bottle of guava-raspberry schnapps. Juanet was on the other phone, ordering food, I assume. Both Moe and Juanet hung up on whomever they were talking to as soon as they saw me.

Moe said, “Holy shit it’s the dead patriot.”

Juanet said “I tole you it was the dead patriot? When he called yesterday and talked to Skeetch? But Skeetch? He tole me he dreamed the whole thing? And I thought that was weird? ‘Cause if he dreamed it how come I had to talk to his dream? And then you tole me just to shut the fuck up? But you hadn’t even tole me what you wanted from Cap’n Salty’s? ‘Cause you said you didn’t like Mush Puppies? So they were recommending the Salted Herring Stix? But you said just shut the fuck up Juanet like five times more? And then you drank that stuff like you’re drinking now? And soon you and Skeetch were both asleep? And then I went home early without I ever did order from Cap’n Salty’s before I left? Because I figured if anyone wanted a cab yesterday they could just wait until tomorrow because I was so HONGARY? So I stopped at the drive through at the Puddin’ Haus on my way home? And I got their new Hellraisin Mint Puddin’ with Embedded Pork Ribs? And a side of Puddin’-Stuffed Snackaroni and some Corntato Puddin’ with extra Butt’r-Flav’r Puddin’ Skwirts? And I got two o’ them Malted Chocolette Puddin’ Drinks, which is really just like regular Puddin’, but kinda watery and served in a cup not a bowl? And when I got home?”

Moe crumpled back into his chair and took a long pull of schnapps.

“I was sitting in my chair? On the vinyl furniture prophylactic so’s I don’t soil the fabric? Which has this pattern of like flowers or plants? I was watching my fourteenth favorite show? Which is Seven People One Bathroom? Where there is just one bathroom in the spooky boarding house? With a scary butler who is quite mysterious? Seven People, One Bathroom, and it’s a zany scene? ‘Cause they all have to shave and poop and pee and none of them is clean? Seven People, One Bathroom, you should flush your mind, with seven anxious quirky goofs all waiting in a line? There’s a Glamorous Dame, a Spy with no name, a Shmendrick to blame, a Scientist famed, a Slut that’s untamed, a Poor Child that’s lame and a Girl that eats flame? And every episode someone has to pee themselves because the line’s too long? And Ohmygod that’s soo funny every time? But the Butler never needs to use the bathroom? So it’s mysterious, too? And I had all my food on the tray in front of the TV? And I was halfway through my Hellraisin Mint Puddin’ with Embedded Pork Ribs? And it was saaaavory,” Juanet paused to salivate and smack her lips lustily.

Moe interjected, “Handwich was saying he was looking to hire someone for your job. Have you seen Handwich yet, since you been back?”

Vampirella and I looked at each other.

“This is the first time I’ve been back to the office. Has he not been in today?” I said, innocently.

“Naw,” said Moe. The phone started to ring, like anyone cared, “he was in yesterday and he was all saying you’d fucked up in Florida and might not gonna be part of the Retro Cab team even before you were a dead patriot, and he had some big surprise new manager that was s’posed to start today that he said was really…I don’t know, enactivdynamothusiastic or some shit like that.”

The ringing of the phone woke Skeetch up. He picked up the receiver and replaced it in the cradle so that it would stop ringing, and accidentally opened his eyes while he did it. When he saw me, he almost woke up entirely.

“What the fut! What the fut!” he sputtered, “It’s the dead patriot! Shit! I’m dreaming again!” now that he was sitting up, I could see a big blue handprint on his cheek where someone had smacked him.

“You’re not dreaming, Skeetch, I missed the flight, like I said yesterday on the phone. Thanks for telling my family. …That was sarcasm…Have you see Handwich?”

“I…yeah, he said he was gonna fire you. I ain’t seen him today though, but he coulda passed through while I was sleepin’ because I am so fuckin’ tired…” he yawned, “so if I wasn’t dreaming yesterday I already told you about that prick Brick and his ho’ next do’ din’t I?” I nodded, “So last night I’m fallin’ asleep listening to SkullMuthuhh’s Lullabye for a Diseased Spleen cd, and I hear all this banging again from next door and I’m like fuck this, I can’t listen to him dipping his dork another night and I’m GONNA KICK HIS MOTHERFUCKIN’ASS!” Skeetch grew red in the face remembering his righteous fury, but then the blood drained out again, as he said, “so I go next door and him and some other guy had just been eaten by a dog, but listen! There is this totally hot nude NAKED blonde babe, I mean she’s wearing just a trenchcoat, and underneath it she’s about naked except she’s just got like a couple little yellow pieces of paper stuck like to her tasty tits and over her…”

“Is that her handprint on your cheek?” Vampirella asked, astutely.

“Yeah, I asked her if she was the hot dirty bitch I that I heard banging Brick, and she slapped me, and this dog jumped out a window, and then the cops got there before I could really put the serious moves on her and offer her a moustache ride, because she was upset with the death and all. I had to run back in my apartment to eat all my weed in case the cops searched me, but they just knocked and asked me if I knew who the other dead dude was. I told them I didn’t know the prick next door at all, and they left me alone, so I totally didn’t ate my last three grams of Ypsi Dirtbox Green Supreme for nothin’ …fuckin’ pigs.”

“Saaaavory…” said Juanet again, “them Embedded Pork Ribs were…succulent…and on Seven People, One Bathroom? The spooky Butler is in the shower when the Glamorous Dame pulls the curtain back? And he asks if she requires crème rinse Madame? But it made me jump, ‘cause he’s so SPOOKY? And I upset my Puddin’s? And Hellraisin Mint Puddin’ spills in my lap? So I’m reaching for a Dinner-Size Wipe from my Wipe Caddy? And suddenly…I realize that actually, it feels good to have warm Puddin’ on me, ‘cause it’s warm, so I pour a little more of the Hellraisin Mint Puddin’ down the neck of my Seasonal Sweatshirt with the blinking light Turkey? And I squirt Butt’r-Flav’r Puddin’ Skwirts behind my ears? And it feels soo good?”

We were all looking at Juanet, appalled. Ralph surfaced from his office and jumped when he saw me.

“I missed the plane, Ralph. Could I have my check?” I said. Ralph went back in his office and started ruffling papers on his desk.

“And I know it seems weird? Because mostly I just eat my Puddin’s? But it turns out I reeeaally like it when it spills on me, too, now, ‘cause, I think, it kind of brings me… closer to my food? And I’m starting to think I might like to try spilling warm gravies on myself too? Or even gravies and Puddin’s both, at once?” beads of sweat appeared on her forehead, “I gotta buy more wipes, though?”

Ralph came out and said, “Here’s your check, are you fired? Handwich said some other guy was gonna have your job, but he didn’t say who.”

“I couldn’t tell you, Ralph,” I said, “we’ll just have to wait for Handwich to return,” I burped, a little, as if on cue. I wished I had an antacid.

“So the commercial break comes on? From Seven People, One Bathroom? Right after the part where the Girl that eats flame ignites the Schmendrick’s flatulations? Which startles the Scientist, who pees himself? And he says Gadzooks? Which is allus FunNEE? So the commercials are some of my favorites, there’s that VideoSpasm! ad where the thin pimply kid’s head explodes from happiness when he gets the digital fellatios? Then, suddenly I see the King of Gravy Cafeteria where the woman is anointed Princess of Gravy and baptized by the King himself in delectable Beef ‘n’ Onion Rosemary Gravy? And that’s so strange, how this special commercial comes on just as I’m thinking of how nice warm gravy would be nice to pour in my lap and down my shirt like my Puddin’s was? So here’s the thing? I think that commercial was a SIGN? Like a sign from God that I could myself be as delicious as the wide variety of prepared convenience foods that I subsist upon? And even more there’s a second holy sign for me because just then, there’s a choir and white light from the TV? And it’s the debut of the Piggleyland BBQ Pit and Play Trough’s newest commercial for their newest culinary development? Thanks to a generous grant from the American Pork Consortium of America? Endorsed by the Department of Homeland Security as a Terrorist-Fee Food Chain Solution for Americans? Have you heard?” Juanet looked twitchily back and forth at the others of us in the office. I had no idea what she was talking about.

Skeetch said, “You mean that new Personal Intimate Ham? They was advertising that at the Tlatchtli Match, right before the losing team was sacrificed. I love it when they cut those losin’ Tlachtli player’s tiny heads off.”

“What the hell is a Personal Intimate Ham?” asked Vampirella. I didn’t want to hear about anything more from the American Pork Consortium, personally, so I was tugging on her sleeve to get her to go.

“Oh! It is My American Dream come true? The Personal Intimate Ham is an exciting new Piggleyland development? Where you have your own ten pound LivingHam surgically attached to your body for a Personal Intimate Meal/Snackin’ Lifestyle Option? And payment plans are available or you can use your Ubercard?” Juanet said dreamily, her eyes glittering in the fluorescent light, “It’s totally a nerveless ham? You can have it installed on your shoulder, or to your leg, or anywhere? And it’s rich an’ meaty because it’s sooo fresh. And it regenerates as fast as you can eat it? And you can make your own Personal Intimate Ham Steaks? Or thin slice it for Personal Intimate Samwiches? Or lop off chunks for Personal Intimate Ham Salad? And so I’m pouring a little more warm Puddin’ on myself and watching the ad and I sudden knew God was talking right to me, and spurting his own holy gravy all over me? And I have never known such a pure and radiant and succulent happiness?” a tear traced its way down Juanet’s cheek, “And I am so proud of America and God Bless the American Pork Consortium of America for allowing me the religious choice to be my own ham, and not have to worry anymore about terrorists or Orientals touching my personal meats? I scheduled my personal installation at the Piggleyland BBQ Surgical Center for this afternoon, so I gotta go early and start basting?”

Juanet started gathering up her air fresheners and packing them in her purse. Skeetch smirked, “So what kind you getting, Juanet? And where you having them put it? They say you can have your LivingHam positioned to satisfy your other intimate needs as well...” he nudged Moe.

Juanet looked offended. “Positioning is so totally personal between me and my hams? But I don’t mind telling you? That they have a two for one special? So I’m getting a smoked and a honeyglazed both? Which also gets me nine free cases of Gravies ‘n’ Fixin’s such as Candied Carrot Pellets and Stuffin’ Puffs?” she was breathing thickly, “And all those Fixin’s ‘n’ Gravies are guaranteed safety-sealed by Homeland Security? And your Fixin’s ‘n’ Gravies then come by contract subscription monthly? At reasonable rates for the Homeland Safe Antibiotic ‘n’ Hormone-Rich Sides ‘n’ Sauces and that you can eat safely with the safe ham you grow yourself? Ooo- I really gotta go baste ‘n’ get ready?” she waddled out.

Skeetch said, “Moe, gimme back that schnapps.” The phone was ringing again, and neither of them could even hear it. They were immune to the phone. “Maan, Fang, I learned a lesson last night…watch out for dogs. Those animals are a lot more dangerous than I realized. My aunt used to have a terrier, and I used to kick it sometimes and it would bite me a little, but now I got new respect, I realize it coulda just snuck up on me and eaten my legs anytime it wanted to,” he shuddered, “I hated that fag motherfucker Marrow, but shit…all that I saw left was three feet and a couple ribs. Joo know dogs can eat you? You think cats are dangerous, too?”

“Oh, sure, I think you should be careful with any animal, no matter how apparently domesticated, especially if they feel threatened. Even hamsters can pose a serious threat if properly organized,” I told him, seriously.

Moe said, “Skeetch, you asshole, that whole story is bullshit. Dogs don’t fuckin’ eat people, bones and all. You probably drunk-dreamed the whole dog thing. The news this morning said the cops think it was probably Al Qaeda, targeting Brick Marrow as a symbol of American Capitalist Success. That other dead guy was obviously the Arab suicide bomber. You were drunk off your ass. I bet that babe had her clothes blown off by the blast, too.”

“Naw, I was drunk off my ass and all but I still saw a fuckin’ big grayish dog, and it was too swallowing a hand with a big gold watch on the wrist when I first saw it. And then I saw that babes’ big beautiful swingin’ tits and oh man think I her pubes were trimmed in the shape of a dollar sign, but I couldn’t quite see all her pubes because of this yellow sticky note she had stuck there, so it might have been a snake or even a butterfly. If those cops hadn’t got there so fast I woulda totally been all like wooaah, babe, harsh luck! Whyncha come into my pad and can I console you with some Old Leathersock Whiskey and a delicious bong hit or two? And she woulda been all like oh yes it’s been a real shock to be expecting to get banged again and then find my dude dead instead, and she’d get real drunk and weepy and show me how she’s shaved her pubes special, and I coulda been all supportive and like that’s sure a nice dollar sign or snake or butterfly or whatever and there there, just slip this in your mouth and suck on it for comfort…”

“Stop it…” I said. Vampirella had her hand over her eyes and she was shaking her head.

“…Thass the problem with these rich bitches, they dunno even what they’re missing when they just slap some guy when he asks if they’re the hot dirty bitch that was heard getting banged through the wall ‘cause they go through their lives having to bang weak limp pricks like Brick Marrow, and they never get to try a good mouthful of blue-collar cock.”

Ralph said, “You wear a collar on your cock? Really? Does that help? Does it really turn blue?”

I pulled Vampirella by the arm, “So, Ralph, since I worked through the Weekend in Florida at the Conference/Fiesta, I’m taking my Weekend now. Handwich can call me if he comes back and wants to fire me or whatever. See you later- bye Skeetch, Moe-” Vampirella and I turned to walk out. I coughed up the gold watch when we got back in the car. Bones I can digest, but metal comes back up. It’s a good thing Sam never liked silver jewelry. I hacked again and a gold class ring fell in my hand. That would be Brick’s.

“Are you OK?” Vampirella asked.

“Yeah, fine. I’m just not used to such rich food. Can we swing out to Bunky’s Pawn Shop on the way home?”

Bunky gave me $250 for the jewelry, and I told him I might have more coming up soon. Vampirella and I bought a bunch of groceries, including a turkey, since the next day was Thanksgiving, and we picked up a local newspaper for the classifieds and went home. The telephone and electricity had finally been restored. The kids would be home in a few hours, so we began to plan our exciting new careers in the business world.

I was looking at retail, maybe. It was a very pleasant afternoon. It had occurred to me that since Sam Handwich never put the paperwork through to Ralph to fire me, I’d be continuing to draw my salary until Retro Cab went entirely out of business, It was difficult to project how long that could take. Maybe months, if I was lucky.

We got the kids and had dinner, and we rolled around the Quonset for a long time until we were all tired, and at some point we all fell asleep in a big pile.

Piggleyland: Chapter 12

2008-10-09T10:55:56Z

12.

I had to run about six blocks and then I came to an apparently abandoned factory building, surrounded by drooping rusty walls of barbed–wire fencing. I hadn’t been able to call ahead, but the fresh motorcycle tracks that rutted the muddy ground around the factory told me that my old friend Max was still in residence.

Max was the drummer in a punk band that I used to do sound for back in the eighties. He had since renounced music, and meat, and all gainful employment, and lived on the top floor of an old deserted slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant. He cared for little company save the company of the hundreds of thousands of bovine ghosts, and listened to little music save the mournful music of their moos.

He’d been a really great drummer, until the hamburger started talking to him one night after a gig in a bar in Wyandotte. Me and Max and Greg, the singer, were at this diner and I was talking to Greg, when suddenly Max said, “Wow. My hamburger forgives me,” then he looked at Greg and said, “Well, at first I thought it was my hamburger talking, but that’s crazy. It’s one of the contributing cows from my hamburger. This cow had the most beautiful eyes. I can see her, you know, standing right there behind you. And she forgives me!”

Greg looked over his shoulder. I also looked in the direction Max had indicated, but neither of us could see the ghost cow. Max flipped his long blonde tresses over one shoulder, and brushed a French fry crumb off the bosom of his red satin gown, and fluffed up his feather boa and said, “There must be five thousand ghost cows standing around this diner. Inside, outside the windows, looking in, pale and transparent and silvery under the streetlamps, all of them looking straight at us and our hamburgers. Nothing moving but the swish of their tails. And sometimes they blink -do you hear the cowbells? Faintly?”

Greg and I looked at each other and then back at him.

“You know, they mix the flesh of thousands of cows together in vats during the industrial …hamburgering process. Every mouthful is like a hundred scraps of soul,” said Max, powdering his chest, “They sure can stare at you, cows. It’s hard to tell what they’re thinking.”

“So, can I have your hamburger, then?” Greg asked.

“I’m moving to Chicago,” Max said, and pushed his way through the herd of cows out to his motorcycle. That was how he quit the band.

I walked into the factory, calling his name. He jumped from some dark rafter, landing directly on top of me like a bag of bricks, and held a huge knife to my throat. His hair was in two ponytails, tied with blue ribbon, and he wore a blue gingham schoolgirl’s pinafore with white tights and sparkly red shoes. Kind of like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, but 270 lbs and not so well shaved.

“Hi, Max. Can I borrow your motorcycle? I gotta get back to Ann Arbor,” I said, calmly.

“Oh, hey, Fang! Great to see you! How’s Vampirella?” he picked me up.

“I don’t know. I gotta get back to Ann Arbor and find out. I’m sorry Max, but I’ve got no time to lose. Can you loan me your bike? I’ll make it up to you.”

“Can’t! Gotta be in New York City tomorrow for the annual Transvestite Vegan Anarchist Motorcyclists Communing with Cow Ghosts support group. There’s only three of us, so I can’t miss it. I could drop you off on the way, though, I suppose. Here, have a coat. It’s twenty-seven degrees outside, and you’re dressed like you’re in Florida or something,” he gave me a hot pink narrow chinchilla coat with a big fluffy collar and cuffs.

“Can we go right now? Otherwise I have to go steal a car. I’m sorry to impose on you.”

“I ain’t doin’ nothin’ special that I can’t leave now. Lemme just grab some negligees and ball gowns,” he pulled a big armload of silk and taffeta from a closet, “…and I’ll just say goodbye to the cow ghosts. Goodbye, Elsie! Goodbye, Clarabelle! Goodbye Mabel! Farewell Glossie! Goodbye…”
“Max, right now, please,” I said.

“Goodbye, all the rest of you! Especially Helga!” he yelled, and escorted me to his motorcycle. He loaded his saddlebags with clothes and got on. I climbed on behind him and he started the engine up and we roared out through the city streets and back up onto the freeway. The motorcycle was huge and earsplittingly loud and it shook like crazy. I held on with freezing hands as best I could, while Max’s long blonde hair lashed me savagely across the face.

I have never made it from Chicago to Ann Arbor faster. It was just over three hours later when Max brought his motorcycle to a halt in front of my Quonset. The sun had set behind us as we travelled between Battle Creek and Jackson at 110 MPH, and the darkness was deepening.

My guts felt like a prune-flavored milkshake. Not only because of the tremendous sustained vibration of the motorcycle’s engine, but also because I was looking up and down my street for the yellow Penetrator. I didn’t see it. Nor did I see our car. Sprinting up to the door, it was evident that nobody was home at all. A yellow post-it note was stuck to the welcome mat at the front door, and I picked it up and read it.

“4:30 PM seriously need your services again, you’re the best “The Boss” Brick. Will pay for babysitter or whatever,” my stomach lurched like I’d just fallen down an elevator shaft. I think I actually said “AAARGH!”

Max walked up behind me, “Everything OK, Fang?” he said, concerned, and applying new lipstick.

“I have to go somewhere Max. Thanks for the ride.”
He surveyed me doubtfully, “You look like hell, you know. With the clothes all shredded and filthy, your hair looks like a tortured tumbleweed, your sideburns don’t match. You’re covered in bruises and dirt and cuts, you’ve got a black eye and a long scratch down one cheek. You look starved and insane. Stop and rest and clean up for a minute. What are you, nuts? What’s going on? Have you seen yourself?” he held up a compact mirror. I looked a lot worse than he made it sound. I gave him back his fur coat.

I still had my house key in my wallet. I opened the door and looked into my dark and empty house. The kid’s toys were scattered around, I looked at the red velvet curtains that Vampirella had stolen from an abandoned theatre, the coffee table where we’d often had sex. It seemed cold in there.

It was cold, because the electricity was still out, which was why Vampirella and the kids had gone to her parents house to sleep, first thing in the Morning after Brick Marrow’s Penetrator took out the telephone pole. But I wasn’t smart enough to notice that, nor the note on the coffee table from Vampirella that read:

“Fang, darling, Moe stopped by to tell us that Handwich had your flight changed. I asked him when you were supposed to get back, and he said “maybe sometime by Tuesday night, or something, probably.” I sure hope he’s right! Seemed drunk. Whenever you get home, come over to get your beautiful kids and me from my Mom & Dad’s house (power’s out-long story). We love you! –V.”

There was also a P.S., wherein she made a delightfully indecent proposal.

But it was dark, and I didn’t see the note. I walked in, opened the door of the fridge, barely noticed that the light was out in the fridge, and handed Max a beer. I grabbed my leather jacket, and went back out the door to my bike.

“I’ll lock up your house, Fang! Take it easy, man! I gotta keep goin’ East!” I waved over my shoulder, and pedaled hard into the cold and dark, through a thin veneer of slush towards Brick Marrow’s apartment.

I knew where Skeetch lived, of course, because I’d often had to send drivers around to his apartment to pound on the door until he woke up from one or another type of stupor. It was only two miles away. I was no more than a block and a half from my house, riding downhill fast on the sidewalk, when I noticed the idling cement mixer at the curb ahead of me and I realized, too late, that the sidewalk ahead was wet cement. My front wheel plunged into it, the bike stopped, and I went soaring directly through a large and spiky juniper bush, then rolled through a patio, somersaulting through a pile of smashing terracotta flowerpots, then I fell through another juniper bush at the other side of the patio, to land on my back in a rock garden. I got up, covered in scores of small fresh cuts and gashes, and ran back to my bike, half submerged in wet cement. I don’t think the guy in the cement mixer expected me back so soon, but when he saw me he gunned the engine and backed up so he could roar up on the sidewalk. By the time his front wheels were plowing through the wet sidewalk I was running back through the patio, with the dripping, heavy bike held over my head. I ran through the juniper bushes again and wished I had taken the time to change into long pants. I shook the wet cement off the bike as best I could and climbed back onto it in the rock garden, and got it rolling back down the hill and then back on the sidewalk, beyond the wet part. The Cement truck blasted through the patio, front grille full of juniper branches, but then swerved, toppled and fell over with a terrible noise on its left side in the rock garden, which was steeply pitched.

The bike was sluggish, with all the cement caked in the treads and gears and spokes, but as I pedaled harder some of it was loosening up a little. I turned a corner and coasted for a moment, still on a downhill, catching my breath. I was coming up to an intersection and I saw two dumptrucks full of asphalt emerging fast from both directions on the crossing street to block my path.

I leaned down over the front fender and pedaled hard to make it through the intersection first, as the gap narrowed between the two huge cabs. The drivers, seeing that they weren’t going to be able to get in front of me, both steered to the center of the road to try to sandwich me, and so collided head-on noisily just as my rear wheel cleared their bumpers. Hot asphalt rained down on me, but I kept going and turned another corner on my bike. Only about a mile to the apartment building now.

I turned another corner, now in the downtown of Ann Arbor, and a metermaid was waiting there and nailed me in the chest with a hurled bucket full of coins. It knocked me over, but I kept ahold of the bike and rolled over with it down the road a little piece. When I slid to a stop, lying in the street on back with my bike, I found myself directly behind a salt truck, promptly dumping its full load of salt directly over me, and my bike, and my one thousand lacerations. I swam forward, trying not to scream, through the avalanche of salt to emerge under the truck. I dragged my bike after me and crawled out between the wheels on the passenger side of the truck. I remounted and was rolling again before the truckdriver and the metermaid realized I wasn’t buried in the pile of salt.

I was somewhat invigorated because of all the salt packed into my wounds, and covered the last seven blocks in very little time, dodging through alleys and the wrong way up one way streets to lose any further pursuit.

The apartment building was a nondescript three-story rectangular brick building from the 1970’s. I examined the mail boxes in the vestibule of the building: B. Marrow Apt. 317. I threw my bike through the plate glass window next to the locked security door and ran up the stairs.

My heart was going BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM like it was trying to punch its way out as I took the three flights three stairs at a time. My throat was dry, my eyes were wet, I was probably in excruciating pain but I couldn’t tell from the roaring in my ears, my vision was down to pinpricks and bursts of fireworks, my teeth were clenched.

I could hear some kind of pop metal band blasting from behind Skeetch’s door, 315. He was probably trying to drown out the sex noises from Brick Marrow’s apartment, I assumed. I stopped at the door to 317 and raised my fist to pound on it. I froze, suddenly, terrified.

Then I kicked the door in. Well, first I ran into it with my shoulder, which just hurt my shoulder, but several kicks split the hollow-core door in half, and I burst through it, wild eyed, covered in blood and salt.

“Aha!” I screamed.

Brick Marrow stood agape before me, dressed in slippers and a smoking jacket. He had a highball in his hand. Then the highball was hanging there alone in the air as Brick Marrow’s body followed the face that I’d just punched back into the living room.

I ran over his fallen body to search the apartment for Vampirella, but almost immediately came up short when Sam Handwich walked out of the bathroom, in a lime green leisure suit.

“Sam? What are you doing here?”

“Fang?” he said, doubtfully, “Fang! You’re alive? How did you find out about this? Holy Christ, what have you done to Marrow?”

“Jealousy, that’s all it is, Sam,” said Brick, crawling up the side of a chrome and black leather chair and holding his jaw, “he had it, and now I got it, and he’s lost it, and he can’t accept it, but he didn’t deserve it, because he’s not actualized in excellence like you and I. You’re a SUPERLOSER, mister!” he shouted, pointing a finger at me.

Sam went extremely orange very fast, “Marrow’s right, Fang. I don’t know what kind of shenanigans resulted in your shirking the mantle of tragically dead patriot, but I can’t approve of it. There’s something mighty fishy about this whole thing, and I’m reporting you to the Department of Homeland Security as soon as I get done firing you!”

“Firing? Where is…” I said, disoriented.

“Yes, firing! You’re fired! Frankly, ever since you refused to fuck and eat that sexy pig I’ve been deeply, deeply disappointed in your work performance. I need team players only on my team, which is why I called Brick Marrow and gave him your job last night, just before I heard on the radio that you were dead. I’m really happy you’re not dead, because now I can fire you. You’re fired!” he was delighted.

Brick Marrow was still pointing a finger at me, “Yeah! And you can bet I will totally do whatever perverse bonding exercise my supervisor chooses, with relish, because of the team! I hope you enjoyed knocking me down, but I’m taking consolation in everything I just took from you, you superloser. Because of you, I’ve got an exciting new career, working for a dynamic boss, and a new car, and soon I’ll have my house back, and between you and me, I spent last night getting some mighty good lovin’ from a hot little woman who appreciates a man for his business acumen! Yeah! I’ve got it all! I’m the Boss! It’s my Birthday! You’ve been majorly marginalized! Slam Dunk!”

There was this building crescendo of rage screaming in my ears. My left eye was twitching, my fang cut into my lower lip, my hands were contorted into two claws, electric shocks were radiating from the bundle of nerves at the base of my skull, I said, “Where is…”

“Look at him go, Fang! He’s an excellated businessman at a level that you could never hope to achieve, full of dynamical energy and vigorosity, as I’m sure your wife will confirm.” Sam waggled his eyebrows at me, “I gotta tell ya, Fang, when I had to fill your position, I figured I should go for a spunk-pumped leader that I knew wouldn’t mind stepping in and taking the carnal opportunitiative, eh, Brick? How is she, anyway?” He winked at Brick, and put up his hand for a high five. Brick looked at him strangely. He was confused by the reference to my wife, but he still high-fived him. It was not in Brick’s nature to fail to high-five.

“Where is my wife?” I growled through my teeth. Really growled. Barked, even. And then I looked out the window of the apartment building, at the night sky, and the full moon just coming up over the treeline in the distance.

“It’s not Tuesday already, is it?” I asked Brick and Sam, who were regarding me with new respect and increasing apprehension.

Was it Tuesday already? I’d kind of lost track of time, which turned out badly for Sam Handwich and Brick Marrow both.

I ate them.

Piggleyland: Chapter 11

2008-10-09T10:50:21Z

11.

The next morning was hard to take. The truck slammed on the brakes and I hit the wall of the trailer, and it hurt me awake. It was light out, and I crawled up and peeked out from under the tarp just in time to see a billboard that placed me in the city of Memphis.

The truck was at a stop light. I scrambled out of the back of it in a shower of rhinestones, to the surprise of the people in the station wagon waiting behind, and strolled nonchalantly down the nearest alley as the truck rumbled off continuing East. I had to go North from Memphis, somehow.

I stopped at a pay phone in a strip mall and tried to place a collect call home, to let them know I was OK, but the phone to the Quonset was still out, and I couldn’t get through. I tried to place a collect call to Retro Cab. Moe answered the phone.

“Thank you for calling Retro Taxi where Good Ol’ Fashioned Taxi Service is New Taxi Solutions for the Future. This is Moe.”

“We have a collect call from Retro Cab Terminal Manager Fang, will you accept the charges?” asked the operator.

There was a moments’ pause, then Moe burst out laughing, “Aw, Skeetch, you fuckin’ jerk. That’s sooo rude, when you’re talking about a tragically dead patriot. Handwich was just in here talking about some new asshole he’s hiring as Terminal Manager. I think he’s pissed that he didn’t get to fire Fang, ” he hissed, “when are you coming back from the store? I could really use that shnapps. Juanet’s driving me batshit.”

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t…” interjected the operator.

“Shit, here comes Handwich back again!” Moe hung up. I was sorry I’d called.

There was a Checkerz 24 Hour Pizza place in the strip mall, and a delivery driver pulled up his car in front of the store and left it running while he ran in. Exhaust was visible coming from the pipe. Behind the plate glass window of the store I saw the driver and the pizza-flipper talking, and they didn’t seem like they were being attentive to the idling car. The operator said, “I’m sorry sir, do you want me to try that call again?” I hung up the phone, ran across the lot, and stole the car, a small and ancient Japanese sedan with a large decorative plastic slice of pizza on top.

Two miles away I realized there were still a couple of Breakfast Pizzas in his warming box, too. I ate a quick couple slices of the egg and cheese one, but the bacon on the other one put me off, and I threw it in a dumpster as I parked in a narrow alley and ran into a hardware store, buying three cans of spraypaint on sale, which left me with 67 cents.

It took me all of thirteen minutes to kick the big plastic slice of pizza off the top of the car and paint it blotchy matte black over the checkered logos. I switched the Tennessee license plate for an Ohio plate I found on a car parked behind the hardware store, and was on my way North in morning rush hour traffic on I-57.

I wanted to keep close to the speed limit because I couldn’t afford to be pulled over, but I was so pissed and freaked out that every time I wasn’t paying attention the speedometer would creep up to 95 miles an hour. Once the car hit 95 it would remind me to slow down by shaking so violently it almost lost contact with the road.

And so that was it for a long time. I just drove toward Chicago, listening to the radio. Freeways rarely make for interesting driving anyway, but I don’t remember anything at all from the next three-and-a-half hours except the back bumpers of the cars that were ahead of me until they were behind me. The radio played excerpts from and commentary about the instant tribute to the heroic lost passengers of flight 734 that had aired the previous night, within just 3 hours of the reported crash of the plane. It was generally agreed to have been a tremendous comeback vehicle for Lulu Bricious, following the twin tragedies of her Wattle Plight and Merkin Infestation. Her retailored song, “My Bush Will Fly Free (From the Air to the Sea): the Patriotic Tragedy of Flight 734”, -formerly titled “My Bush Will Fly Free (From Each Flagpole I See)”- was expected to sell millions.

There was no news about the actual plane crash in Crawford, Texas, and I did hope some of the other airplane passengers had escaped the clowns.

I was fortunate enough to have over three-quarters of a tank of gas, and that got me almost 300 miles before the tank was bone-dry in Salem, Illinois, and I drifted to a stop in the parking lot of a strip mall right off the highway featuring a Pump-R-Nickel’s gas station/convenience store, a Rubba Tire Dealership, a VideoSpasm! and a Stuff Your Own Taco and Glaze Your Own Donut, which was doing a brisk lunchtime business.

I heard a slight clinking sound as the sedan coughed and lurched one last time, and when I opened the glove compartment and looked under some coffee-stained napkins, I found $4.39 in nickels, dimes and pennies. I took it into the Pump-R-Nickel’s pay phone. I called home again, but the line was now “being checked for trouble.” I tried to call another couple of friends I knew in Ann Arbor, and then Vampirella’s parents, but no-one was home in the middle of the day, and so I had to try Retro Cab again. Juanet answered after seventeen rings.

“Thank you for calling Retro Taxi where Good Ol’ Fashioned Taxi Service is New Taxi Solutions for the Future?”

“Juanet. I need to talk to Horst.”

“Horst?” she said, like she’d never heard of him.

“Juanet, it’s Fang. Give me Horst.”

“Fang the dead patriot?”

“I’m not. Is Horst there?”

“You’re not Fang?”

“I’m not the other two things. Is Horst there?”

“Horst is the night Terminal Manager? And he’s not here in the daytime? If you’re Fang, wouldn’t you know that? Why aren’t you dead? I saw this show once? On TV? And there was this dead guy who was really alive? But his wife thought he was dead? And so she got married? But he was on a desert island? Until he came back?”

“Juanet, have you heard from my wife?”

“What wife?”

“Oh, Fuck! Juanet, give the phone to Skeetch.”

“He’s sleeping right now? Can you call back later?”

“Wake him up,” I said, through my teeth.

There was a lengthy pause while Juanet poked Skeetch with a mop until he woke up.

“What the fut?” slurred Skeetch into the phone, “who the fut is this?”

“Skeetch, it’s Fang. I need you to help me out.”

“Fang the dead patriot?”
“I’m not a dead patriot. I missed the flight. I need you to tell my wife and kids that I’m OK. Have you heard from them?”

“Naw, man, I ain’t heard from nobody. Dude, you’re a… dead patriot. I musht be dreaming. It wash on the news at what, like, sheven night before last, I was having some tequila and beef jerky, and everybody knows about it. It’s been on TV, and the radio... then the Preshident announshed the inshtant memorial concert for flight 734 at 10 PM, with that bitch Lulu Bricioushh. You don’t like Lulu Bricioushh, do you? I think she’s …a dyke or… shomething. She read every dead patriot’sh name. They read your real name, not Fang, of coursh, but I remembered it from shchool. There were interviewsh with a number of the other widowsh, but I don’t remember sheeing your… red-haired widow, though. Sshe’s a hot little number, your widow,” he was even less coherent than usual.

“Shut up. She’s not a widow. I missed the flight.”

“ ‘shfunny kind of dream… I fell ashleep about 10:45 from the tequila, though, so I misshed the big ending, with the shong about you all being… tragically dead patriots and how that… makesh her bush… free or something. I think she’s shome kine a dyke or shomething, you know? Lulu Bricioushhh? Do you find her kind of , like, shcary? How she’s all tough about her.. you know, her…?”

“Skeetch, the phone is out at my house. Can you go over there and see if you can tell them I’m alive and I’m on my way back?”

“Awwwwwman, I was jusht about to go… YAAWWW… home early myself. I’m fucking exhausted. You member that fucking rich prick Brick from Junior High School? He moved into the apartment nexht to mine about two months ago. Die tell you that?”

“What? No, you didn’t mention it. Brick Marrow lives in your apartment building?”

Skeetch was suddenly pissed off enough to sound half-sober for a moment, “I hate that prick, and his haircuts and his cellphones. Sho last night, just as I’m going to shleep around midnight, after Horst woke me up at eleven to tell me to come in early ‘cause you’re dead, that fucking prick comes in and he’s fucking picked up some slut somewhere, which never happened before unless I was too drunk to wake up, and he turns up this fucking “shmooth jazz” that makesh my teeth ache and then I hear them just goin’ at it off and on for hours, all night long the headboard banging on the fucking thin drywall, and she’s moooaaning and whimpering, and he’s moaning and going Yeah! like he’s high fiving someone, and I can hear fucking everything through those fucking thin walls, even with the pillow over my head, this slapping sound, and I’m lying there trying to figure out if he’s fucking her or spanking her, and Dude you know I don’t want to think about Brick Marrow fucking because I’m not a fag, but I have to admit this bitch he was fucking sounded fucking hot, it was like… lishtening to shome kind of a… porn movie, and I’m lying there lishtening and… hating that fucking prick YAAAAWWWWN and not getting any shleep… shleeeep…shleee…” the sobriety wore off.

“Shut up,” I said, horrified (it’s not, I told myself), “did you… see her? Or, did you hear her name?”

“…Uh, no, but I heard him shpecifically mention that she had… that he liked the way her long hair felt… on his shtomach while she shucked on his…”

“Stop,” I said, “Jesus…” it’s not, I told myself.

“…And I get… no fucking shleep and so even thish morning… they were back at it again, and I could hear him and he’sh actually, he’sh actually calling her his little bitch- you ever try, you ever ever try calling a girl bitch and not get your face shmacked? I alwaysh get my face shmacked even when I shay it real nice- and she’s….YYAAWW… making theshe little meowing noises, kind of, and I presshed my ear… to the wall for awhile while I…. ate my bacon cheese pouches and he’sh telling her… AAAAWWWWN… that he’sh going to tie her up and show her who’sh the bossh, and she’s shaying, oh, yesh, you’re the bossh! You’re the….YOOOOWWWRN… bossh… firsht fucking thing in the morning, Oh! You’re the bossh…”

“Shut up, Skeetch. Shut…” It’s not Vampirella. I told myself. It’s not Vampirella. That sounded nothing like her. She didn’t meow. At least, I never made her meow, exactly. Oh, shit, could Brick Marrow make her meow? No, no, no. The veins in my temples were pounding so hard that small sparks were visible in my peripheral vision. It’s not Vampirella, you ass.

“…Oh, bossh! and I was sho… fucking tired that I almost called in to work but I couldn’t listen to that…YYYEEEAAAWWRN…. prick getting his pole polished any more, I fucking hate that prick, and I had to come in early becaushe you’re aallll dead. Dead, dead. Shfunny kine a dream. Sho now, now, now… I’m going home early ‘caushe I’m fucking tired. Did you want shumpin’? Thish ish a …shtoopid dream. I’m sho fucking…. YYEEEAAAAAUUN…. tired. Plush, Moe keepsh giving me shschschchnappschh…” he was falling asleep again.

“Skeetch! I need you to tell my kids, and my wife, that I’m alright. I need you to go to my house, now, and tell them I’m all right, and I’m on my way back home…”

“Please deposit two dollars and forty-five cents for the next two minutes,” said a sudden robot on the line.

“Shit! Skeetch, please tell my family…”

“Please deposit two dollars and forty-five cents for the next two minutes,” said the robot.

“Skeetch, can you hear me?” I said, but he couldn’t.

“Please deposit two dollars and forty-five cents for the next two minutes,” said the robot, mercilessly.

There was a truck pulling up at the Rubba Tire warehouse, coming off the freeway from the South. I watched the driver get out and open the back of his truck and bounce a bunch of tires through the warehouse door.

I hung up the phone, smoothed my hair down, and walked across the parking lot. The driver of the truck went inside the warehouse and closed the door, leaving the truck locked and idling outside. The truck door was locked, but I could see his manifests and logbook on the passenger seat through the window, and, reading them, I could see that he was working his way up to Chicago with stops in Teutopolis and Kankakee along the way. I hopped down and leaned nonchalantly against the passengers’ side of the truck. After a few minutes the driver came back out with a tiny styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand. He eyed me warily. The reds of his eyes were watery, and he was big but bedraggled, like he’d recently been drowned. He had impressive, well-groomed, healthy muttonchop sideburns, though.

“Horchinson,” I said, presenting the very impressive DHS business card, embossed with a gold seal and a hologram of an eagle, that Horchinson had given back me at the at the Conference/Fiesta. “Department of Homeland Security. You’re Paul, right?” Paul was the name on the logsheets in the truck, of course. The last name wasn’t really legible. I handed him the card of one of the Rubba Tire suitboys I’d met at the conference/fiesta, “your man Ronald…” I snatched the card back from him and looked at it again, “…Ronald Winslow said that you’d be expecting me for the escort?”

“What?” he said, looking back and forth between the two cards.

“The escort? The threat? The terrorists? Wait a minute,” I pulled another Rubba Tire business card from my pocket, “Here we go. Pete Zuckerman. That’s the guy who would have contacted you from corporate, right?”

“What terrists?” he said, slowly.

“The ones with the plan for the tire bomb? Look, we have to get moving or we’ll both be killed. We’re not safe until we get to Chicago. You didn’t tell the guys in the warehouse here anything, did you?”

“Anything about what? What tire bomb? What’s a tire bomb?”

“It’s a bomb made of tires, of course. All they need is about as many as you have on board right now, and our sources say they’ve targeted your route to be hit today, and so I’m supposed to escort you for your protection?” I pulled the final Rubba Tire business card from my pocket.

“Ah! Dave Malone? He must have called you last night, right?”

“Nobody called me,” he said, but he looked worried, with all those cards in his hands, “you’re supposed to protect me?” he looked doubtful. He had about a hundred pounds of muscle on me. He looked like a pile of cantaloupes strung together with twine, “You look like you’ve been being beat up all day. And dragged through a ditch or something.”

“I’m undercover,” I said breezily, and pulled the gun from my pocket, holding it between thumb and forefinger. “look, I have a gun issued for your protection. And the helicopter.”

“Helicopter?” He said looking up.

“Don’t look up, please. Can we get going? I can explain more on the way. The noose is tightening.”

“Gosh,” he said. He was very twitchy, but he slowly opened the passenger door. I pushed past him and climbed in.

“Please hurry up and get back on the freeway headed to the North, just like you’re doing your route like normal.”

He started rolling out of the lot, and reached for his CB radio, “look, I gotta check this with my dispatcher. I’m not sposed to have passengers,”

“OHMYGOD don’t key that mike. Didn’t they tell you about the triggering device?”

Paul looked at me miserably, “Mister Horchinson, nobody told me nothing.”

“How many transmissions have you made from that microphone since the terrorists installed the detonation devices last night?”

“What detona…Gosh, I don’t know, five, or, maybe nine times I called in so far.”

I whistled and shook my head, “that button on the microphone is a one way ticket to a front-row seat for the biggest explosion that ever took out a major commercial road in Illinois history. Put it carefully back on the hook,” he did, but his hand was shaking.

“Look, Mister Horchinson, I’ll just pull over and get out and you can take over. I can’t take this kind o’ stress. Bombs? Terrists? I’m just a truck driver…”

“You’re an American, aren’t you?”

He looked indignant, “”Din’t you see all my bumperstickers? ‘Course I am.”

“Well, Paul, your country needs you now. If we don’t make it to Chicago in 3 hours, the flow of American commerce could be severely disrupted. You heard about flight 734, didn’t you?”

“The new tragic patriots from that Lulu Bricious song?”

“This is all part of the same plot,” I hissed, socking him on the left bicep for emphasis, “and you can’t stop again now anyway until we’re well North of Gary Indiana or the latitudinal gyroscopes will ignite the C4 fuses. Actually, you’d better speed up a little.”

“Oh, sweet baby Jesus,” Paul muttered, “I allus have hated terrists ever since the President tole me to.”

“We all hate them, Paul. A little faster, please.”

“I got two stops to make before Chicago, though,” he said.

“Not anymore, Paul. But don’t worry, Ronald Zuckerman has arranged everything. Now, I’ll tell you more, if you feel you need to know, but I could be waterboarded already for telling you as much as I have. As one American to another, are you ready to do your part for your country with no more questions asked?”

I think there was a tear in his eye, “Yessir, Mr. Horchinson. I don’t need to know no more than that someone from the Gummint says there’s terrist activity, and I guess I’ll make any sacrifice I’m supposed to. What civil rights can I relinquish at this moment?”

“Thank you, Paul, just drive to Chicago. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to pay close attention to the road ahead and the cars around us.” I held the gun ready in my lap.

It was tedious pretending to be looking around for terrorists for the next three hours, but it got me there. Paul turned up a country music station and ground his teeth audibly the whole way, with both hands clenched on the wheel. As we entered Chicago, I directed Paul to exit the freeway in a terrible neighborhood on the South Side. I pulled my wallet out and spoke into it, “Horchinson here, ready to bail out and proceed to phase 9,” I turned to Paul, “Thank you, citizen. You and the interstate are safe. The positronic filaments of the wiring will have safely degraded by now, and you can go back about your business. Here, you shouldn’t need it, but take this gun, just in case.” I left it with him. He looked at it in his hand. It was still unloaded, of course. I figured it would help the schlep explain things to his supervisor. When the truck stopped at a traffic light, I jumped out and ran away.

The darkest secret of Piggleyland

2008-10-09T10:30:53Z

I woke up to an enormous roaring wind and screaming from the passengers on all sides of me, but it wasn’t the emergency exit. The window next to the pale man who had been sleeping next to me was entirely broken out, and loose objects were flying all around me in the air and whisking out the window; plastic cups, in-flight magazines, cellophane bags containing three miniature pretzels each. The oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, and the stewardesses were staggering around.

I noticed, suddenly, that the pale guy in the window seat was holding a red and yellow-polka dotted Mauser pistol. He was also holding onto his seat and struggling to keep from being sucked through the window, and now that his face was clearly visible, I could see that he wasn’t just pale, but bright white, except for his nose, which was bright red. He was a Nazi Klown. He had used his gun to shoot out the window, probably accidentally, because clowns are clumsy.

I got hit in the head with a small plaid carry-on bag, but it bounced off my head and stuck in the window like a cork. There was still a lot of noise from the screaming passengers, but the wind died down. The carry-on bag crumpled slightly, but it looked like it might hold for awhile. The Nazi Klown sprang out of his seat, across me and the kid with the earphones, to land in the aisle, and screamed:
“Do ve haff your attention? Atchung! You vill not schtruggle und you vill follow mein orders und nobody vill be hurt! Zis is der hijakking, und ve haff kontrol of zis plane!”

Other Nazi Klowns emerged along the aisle of the plane, waving weapons. The pilot and copilot, colorful guns in their backs, were marched down the aisle to the back of the plane, and though I couldn’t see all the way to the front from my economy seat, I was pretty sure that there was a Nazi Klown in the cockpit. The plane banked sharply to the right, changing course.

“Ve are goink to der top-schecret location but zere iss no daencher unless you rezischt. Zere vill be schielenche, und no tokking.”

The Nazi Klowns were shedding the trenchcoats and hats that had concealed their colorful outfits. Hundreds of colorful balloons inflated spontaneously, making it difficult to see down the length of the plane. I had no idea how the clowns made it through security, as they were all heavily armed with candy-colored World War II weaponry, but now I was less surprised that the gun in my pocket hadn’t been noticed. It was pretty small potatoes compared to the rifles and grenades that the clowns were holding.

There were a couple of minor outbursts from excitable passengers, but nothing that required more than a cream pie to suppress, and there ensued a long silence, broken only by the beeps and toots of the clowns.

We seemed to be heading West, now, and continued so for about an hour. The kid next to me, who was in his early twenties and dressed in lots of shaggy layers of Earth tones, apparently could pick up radio stations on his earphone apparatus.

After conspicuously checking to make sure the Nazi Klowns were far enough down the aisle that he wouldn’t be heard, he whispered to me, “The radio says that flight 734 out of Florida has been hijacked by confirmed Al Qaeda agents.”

“Oh, sure, anyone could tell that these clowns are Al Qaeda,” I replied, quietly.

“No, seriously,” the kid said seriously, “The radio says they have footage of the hijackers and they’re bearded and swarthy and they’re probably Islamical…”

“I have never seen a swarthy clown,” I said thoughtfully, “bearded clowns are also rare...”

He blanched suddenly, “now the radio says that the President has just issued a statement indicating that flight 734 just went down… in the Atlantic as brave civilian patriots battled the terrorists with bare knuckles …sacrificing ourselves so that no more innocents should die in buildings hit by hijacked airplanes like on nineleven. …And Lulu Bricious will be singing a song at the memorial tonight on TV.”

“Well, we are descending. But we’ve been heading away from the Atlantic for quite awhile…” we were flying right at the sun, which had almost completely set. I could see, over the seat ahead of me, through the window in the next row forward, a dry desert landscape. Texas, somewhere, I expected.

The clowns got excited as the plane erratically dropped altitude in short dives and swoops. The passengers screamed and the clowns beeped and whistled. Suddenly the Nazi Klown who had been seated next to me started running for the front of the plane, pushing balloons out of the way, yelling, “Vich Klown ist doink der flyink? Don’t be tellink me it’s Blitzo again! Blitzo vill not be able to land vissout kraschink!”

That was about when we hit the ground. I don’t think the landing gear was down, because there was a horrible shock, and then the plane bounced up and did a sideways cartwheel, and the cockpit, wings, and tail of the plane were all torn off, and then we hit the ground again, a tube full of people open at both ends and rolling over and over at about 90 miles an hour over what seemed like very bumpy ground, with balloons popping all around. After a while the rolling tube slowed down, then stopped, and we were hanging upside down in our seats. I managed to resist throwing up, but a lot of people didn’t.

The Nazi Klowns, none of whom had been belted, were battered senseless by being flung around the plane, those that hadn’t been forcibly ejected from the holes at either end of the plane. I don’t know where the cockpit of the plane and Blitzo ended up, either.

I got my belt off then helped others down for awhile. It didn’t take too long, and there were remarkably few injuries, unless you counted crumpled Nazi Klowns scattered back along the furrowed marks that the plane had left in the ground. It was dark now, and getting cold. There was a complete cloud cover, so it grew blacker by the moment. Soon everyone was out of the plane, huddled in a mass of about a hundred people, looking out over a barren desert landscape. There were some small fires burning in the distance, where the engines had landed. I started walking Northeast.

“Hey…wait!” yelled the informative kid with the earphones, “Somebody’s sure to come to rescue us out here!”

“That’s exactly what you should worry about, considering that you’re supposed to be at the bottom of the Atlantic,” I replied, “I expect that there were more clowns waiting for this plane,” and I started running. I looked back, and saw him start running off in another direction. And other people started running, too. Most of the crowd scattered out into the desert.

I hadn’t covered much more than a mile when I saw lights popping up over the horizon directly ahead of me. Some kind of vehicles were headed in the direction of the plane crash. There was a small rocky outcropping nearby, and I dove behind it as the headlights grew closer.

Five clown fire engines, seven clown ambulances and eleven clown military Jeeps roared out of the black night and sped bumpily across the desert, weaving and honking, absolutely covered in screaming clowns. Twenty-three clown vehicles can carry like 275 clowns.

As they passed within fifty yards of the rocks I was hiding behind, a couple of clowns jumped or fell off a fire engine, and began circling around in clumsy reconnaissance, bumping into each other and falling down with little provocation. Both had old German brass-crested firefighter’s helmets on, and long yellow raincoats with big swastikas and iron crosses. One carried a lime-green Thompson machine gun, the other had an oversized axe. In the dark of night, the darker accents of mouth, nose and eyes were reduced to black holes in their ghostly white faces.

I moved around the outcropping and found, to my surprise, that I was crouching on a metal grate. Quietly, I hooked my fingers through the grate and pulled. There was a little resistance, but then, with a very small scraping sound, I managed to lift it. I couldn’t see what was below. It seemed to be some kind of a shaft. I couldn’t see anything but blackness down there. It didn’t seem to be a sewer, from the smell. There was a steady draft of air coming from inside, bearing with it an antiseptic scent. Some kind of ventilation shaft, I supposed.

The Nazi Klown firefighters were circling closer. I lowered myself into the shaft and crawled into the tunnel in the direction that the draft was coming from, so that I wouldn’t be visible directly under the grate. The tunnel was about two feet square, so it was not spacious but easy to crawl through. I didn’t go far at first, but then the clowns ended up standing directly on the grate, telling knock-knock jokes to each other and trying out various hand buzzers, whoopee cushions and squirting flowers and I knew that they might keep it up for hours. I crawled further along the shaft, intrigued by the distant sound of voices now echoing toward me. It was so black, and I was careful to feel ahead of me to make sure there were no sudden drops. The shaft slanted steeply down into the earth, and I had crawled what seemed like a hundred yards before I began to see a faint gray light ahead of me.

The light came through a grate in the side of the shaft. I was looking through into a large laboratory room, where four Nazi Klown doctors were fumbling around with smoking beakers of colorful fluids. There were big vats inset into the walls, and weird thin forms, like long, slightly fleshed skeletons were suspended within them in blue liquid.

“You put too musch of der giraffe leg in der lascht von. Der proper ratio should be just offer shixty perschent of total height iss leg. You left no rhoom for der schkinny malnourished torso. Iss legsh right up to der tits, und no tiny belly, vich cannot be vorking for der low-rise jeans in dis sheasons’ runvay show. Phillipe Bloomphier vill be verklempt! Ve muscht make another.”

“Vell, der gnu eyes zat you shplisched into her triangular head ver alscho far too big und vet.”

“Zey are schupposhed to be vet, for der schmeary teary addict maschkara look zat iss all der rage in Milan zis year.”

“Bot zey are scho large zat zey had to be mounted on der schides of der head like der lizard or fisch.”

“Zees detailsch isch schlowing ush down too musch! Ve schtill muscht produce drei more Tlatchtli players, und fifteen more models. Also der news anchhors. At leascht vis ze news anchhors, ve only haff to vorry about der area from der solar plexus up.”

“Are ve goink to giff ze anchhors der legs of der caterpiggle like lascht time? Zat vas scho funn-ee!”

“Ven does der new plane off subjects arrive? Ve are short on shpleens, also thighs.”

A third doctor entered the room, and smiled broadly at the others. “I am pleashed to announce dat der new brood off Schuclklin’ Lascheyhocksh haff been shcucessfully implanted in der vomb of der Fuehrer. Vould zat mine own boddy vould accept der grafting off der schwein vomb, so zat I vould schpare our beloffed Fuehrer der agony off der birfingk proschess.”

“Ja! All off us vould gladly do it, but only der Fuehrer’s boddy doss not rejeckt der grafting. He is der perfeckt clown, pure off mind und boddy, vater to uss all und now also he iss der Holy Schweinmutter, Heil!”

I was going to go back, but I just had to look a little further. The room that the third doctor had come from should also be vented into the shaft, up ahead another thirty feet or so. I crawled ahead, quietly, and peered through the next grate..

The room was dark, and it took a moment or two for my eyes to adjust after the strong lights of the laboratory. There were just two clowns in the room. One was bald on top with a fringe of green hair, and small glasses, wearing an electric blue SS outfit. The other was a wiry clown in a neat purple uniform with a peaked visor cap, riding boots and jodhpurs, which he was pushing down around his knees. He was easy to recognise, even with the uniform, and the greasepaint, and the toothbrush moustache and nose. His stomach seemed to be swelling as I watched, and he hunkered down on the linoleum and grunted, and small wet squeaking things began to drop from his ass, as the other clown bent down to gather them up in a pail. They looked like piglets, but with pink tufts of hair, and their skeletal structure was anthropomorphized. It was a new development. The President of the United States breathed heavily as he birthed around twenty of the little oinking things.

“Dammit, Dick, -ooof.- I appreciate the importance of this service –unk- that our administration provides the business community- phhooof- but let’s get the Pork Consortium to jack the price up on these Sucklin’ Laceyhocks, if demand keeps up, and production remains limited to just what I can put out -Awk!- all by myself.”

“Yes, yes. We’ll see. I’ll try to call Moreau this afternoon to see how the last round of swine womb grafts went. He had three new prominent clowns that he thought were likely candidates for successful transplant, but I haven’t heard from him in a couple days.. I wish he’d work faster, but how do you tell that to a man that’s a hundred and sixty years old? He’s very set in his ways. I can barely get him to wear the rubber nose. I’ll be back in a minute for the second litter, George, these are maturing so fast that they’ll be too big for the bucket in a moment.” He went out through another door with the bucket.

I just turned around carefully, and crawled back the way I’d come. The dark tunnel was not comforting, and I could hear bad noises behind me, and I felt bad and creepy about things in general.

When I reached the grate that led outside the firefighter clowns were nowhere in sight. The night was black, black, and starless. I set off again in a direction which I hoped was Northeast, and after about five miles I came to a road and began to follow that.

The signs on the road indicated that I was just outside of Crawford, Texas, heading West towards Waco. I kept going, ducking out of sight when cars went by, and eventually there was a busy little rest area with a gas station, a Mo’ Nuts Donuts, a Sloppy SlurpDawg Drive-Threw, and a Ye Bacony Grille. I went into the restroom to clean up as best I could. One of my sleeves was torn at the shoulder seam, and my hands and knees were black with dirt from the crawl through the ventilator shaft. I washed up, put my head under the faucet for a few minutes, then dried my hair a little under the electric dryer, until a truckdriver came in and looked at me funny. I was very tired. The adrenaline from earlier in the evening had drained away, leaving me shaky and frail.

I went and slid a cafeteria tray down the counter at Ye Bacony Grille, delicately groping at shredded carrot and cherry tomatoes with tiny tongs behind a cloudy plastic sneezeguard to assemble a large green salad from their salad bar. I got an iced tea, and nine Kornbread Muffettes.

“Whut kine o’ meat ‘n’ gravy yuh want with thet?” asked the counter jockey at the gravy bar, resplendent in his visor and striped apron. I declined both meat and gravy, and paid. I was back down to $8.75 left in my wallet.

I sat at a booth, and shoved the food mechanically down my throat. There was a clock on the wall: it was a little after Midnight. I wondered if Vampirella and the kids had heard about the flight going down. I wondered if Brick Marrow was over at the Quonset consoling them. I wondered if I was about to throw up.

I wanted to call home from a pay phone, but under the circumstances, with the stuff I’d seen, I thought it best not to establish an electronic trail so close to the site of the plane crash. A cop car pulled up outside, and I got up and walked out one door as the cops entered from the other side of the food court. Out in the parking lot I headed for the big trucks idling out towards the dark perimeter of the halogen lights that illuminated the rest area, and found a double-trailer tarped truck with no-one in the cab. I hoisted myself up and slipped under the tarp unobserved, expecting to find gravel or dirt, but the freight was sparkly. It was rhinestones, so I was fairly sure the truck would be headed towards Nashville.

I heard the door of the truck slam just then, and the truck lurched away from the rest stop, quickly reaching excessive speeds on the highway going, as I hoped, North and then East. The noise was amazing, and the ride was bouncy, but after a while I burrowed down into the rhinestones and fell into a fitful sleep, or maybe I just passed out. No dreams, anyway.

It's almost over, but this is going to hurt a little: Piggleyland

2008-10-09T10:27:00Z

The hangovers of the two previous days were nothing compared to the hangover I awoke with the following morning. The walls of my room were visibly pulsing. My eyes were not eyes but hot red salted boiled eggs. My head was enormous and soft, I had a thin brittle candy skull, my tongue was a big old wool sock. My hands shook wildly as I poured a bag of colorful candy-covered chocolates into a cup of coffee. The multicolored shells melted and turned the coffee at first a horrifying shade of nuclear olive green, but it only stayed green for a moment. Once the chocolate centers melted it went dark brown. Well, maybe a little green. I choked it down, and took another shower to wash off the fumes of whiskey, dragged a razor around on my face.

Looked at the clock, it was almost 8 AM, and Sam Handwich was knocking at the door. I threw on a pair of striped shorts, a black shirt with a repeating pattern of small bird skulls, and my sandals and reeled out of the door to drive him to the Convention/Fiesta for breakfast and the days’ activities.

Breakfast was gruesome, until I managed to get a waiter to bring me a bloody Mary. That backed the hangover off by a couple of degrees, and I was able to eat a little of an omelet and some bacon, and soon was conversing with Mac Asquith and Sam Handwich in a fairly realistic manner, like a really dumb and twitchy version of myself.

As the plates were cleared from the pies, The Chairman of the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta! Stepped to his podium and cleared his throat, “The board of the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta! is pleased to announce this years’ amazing super special Convention surprise: we’re taking all of you luuucky truck, taxi courier and limo executives you for an all-expense-paid trip to Piggleyland for a day of rides, food and pork-flavored fun! Please file to the front door, where buses wait to ferry you over through the magical gates of Piggleyland!”

The room erupted in applause. Sam Handwich and Mac Asquith leapt to their feet and high-fived each other, then both held up a hand for me to slap. I looked at them for a couple beats and then smacked their hands limply. There was no escape. Sam and Mac frogmarched me out to the bus, and I was wedged into a seat between two sweaty trucking executives comparing notes on truck-stop prostitutes.

The front gates of Piggleyland are giant fiberglass pork ribs, five stories tall, with flowing barbeque sauce fountains, surmounted by a neon sign screaming: “The American Pork Consortium of America Welcomes Americans to Piggleyland!” The buses roared through and we were ejected into a simulated town square, with cottagey shoppes and plastic Tudor-style houses: Glazed Hamlet, the setting for the cannibalistic antics of Li’l Saucy Jess, the clever Pork Chopper and his dramatic friend Ham Raisingravy, the overripe Miss Sucklin’ Lacyhocks, stolid Sergeant Bacon, the snooty Madame and Monsieur Loin D’Porc, the feisty Rindy Scrapple, and the other minor characters.

As I stood there, a guy dressed as Ham Raisingravy, in striped turtleneck with a beret, raced past with a meat cleaver, in hot pursuit of Li’l Saucy Jess, yelling, “Come back here, you succulent little sow! I have a couple of lonely eggs that need an escort!”

Sergeant Bacon, in his bright blue Keystone Kop uniform, appeared at the door of the Porky Pokey and roared, “Raisingravy, ye scalawag, I’ll nowt have ye disturbin’ the porcine peace of Glazed Hamlet! Put doon that meat cleaver or I’ll make a haggis of ye!” He ran after Ham Raisingravy, surprisingly fast considering that the pig costume, with police accoutrements, had to weigh 90 pounds. The three of them ran around and through our group of hundreds of leaders of the transportation industry, a spectacle that some of our group found hilarious.

Everyone was issued an all-inclusive pass, cunningly devised to resemble a strip of bacon, a strap-on pig snout and a curly clip-on tail, and we joined the throngs of people already queuing up for the various attractions.

Sam Handwich and Mac Asquith insisted on taking me on some of the rides. I was hoisted in a bucket and hurled into a trough of potato peelings and corn cobs, I had a long wallow in a sty full of mud, I was cram-stuffed cheek-by-jowl with two hundred other snouted tourists into a truck and driven down a simulated bumpy road to a slaughterhouse where I was hung by my feet and tickled mercilessly with rubber knives, I was run on conveyor belts through a giant sausage-making machine where I was smooshed together with various scraps of meat and spices and extruded into a casing, I was tossed repeatedly in a frying pan, I was wrapped in a pancake and served with maple syrup to be eaten by a giant laughing robot pig. Afterwards, Sam and Mac dragged me to a bar called the Down a Snoutful where I diligently put away a pitcher of mint juleps. It was difficult to drink with the snout on, until I asked the pig waitress for a straw.

“Fang!” said Sam suddenly, causing me to spill a little mint julep on my shirt, “you’re too quiet for a man living the American dream! You’re not still upset that your wife is bangin’ her boss, are you? Come on!”

“So his wife is banging her boss? What’s he care? He’s banging McWainscoting, innie?” said Mac Asquith.

“I did not bang McWainscoting. I have always been true to Vampirella.” I said, blearily.

“Vampirella? What the hell is that?” said Asquith.

“That’s his wife’s name. She’s from Transylvania,” said Sam Handwich, “but recently she’s been sucking more than just the blood of the innocents...”

“Fucking Hell, Sam…”

“…She’s also been sucking some other guy’s cock!” he finished tediously.

MacAsquith almost blew his strap-on snout off with mirth. I quashed the urge to throttle them only with difficulty, I just let it go by, and smoldered drunkenly, grinding my teeth. Five and a half hours until our flight out.

Sam stood up, fumbled in his pocket, left some cash and an insulting tip on the table for the pig-costumed waitress, and said, “Come on, Fang, we’ll take care of you. I know just what you need.”

He and Mac dragged me down the main street of Glazed Hamlet, then down a darkened service alley beside a souvenir shop selling Piggleyland t-shirts and baseball caps and cutlery. At the end of the alley was a narrow door. Mac knocked and a low mutter came from inside, I couldn’t hear what the question was, but Mac replied, “Three for the blue plate!”

The door swung open and we filed into the dark opening. There was a heavy smell of baconfat overlaid with floral overtones. A squat Warthog in a purple zoot suit pulled aside a curtain, and we found ourselves in a frilly sitting room with overstuffed velvet chairs, fat gold cherubs and lacy lampshades. A curving staircase descended from rooms above, and as I watched, one of the doors upstairs opened and I knew what was coming.

Miss Sucklin’ Laceyhocks descended the stairs slowly, batting long, thick eyelashes coquettishly. Her snout wiggled with interest above an insouciantly slack wet lipsticked lower lip. She had red high-heel cloven hooves with the eponymous lace cuffs at the hock, and was displaying large naked hams caught in fishnet stockings, her fourteen breasts provocatively waggled in a rainbow of seven see-through sets of brassieres above a voluminous pair of black lace panties. Sam and Mac were speechless with delight.

“Howdy, boys,” she drawled, “wanna pork?”

“Let’s talk terms first,” said the porcine pimp, “at corporate rates, we got a $9500 minimum, that pays for a straight hour B.Y.E.”

“B.Y.E?” whispered Sam to Mac.

“Barn Yard Experience,” explicated Mac, salivating visibly.

“OO!” squealed Miss Sucklin’ Laceyhocks, “For an extra $550, you can hogtie me! And that’s just one of the ala carte options on my menu…Wheeee-Onk! My loins are getting soo hot and juicy! Which one of you big hungry mans wants the first taste?”

Sam and Mac both gave me a shove, and I drunkenly reeled forward. She pulled a pin from her coiffed bun of pink hair and shook it down around her shoulders. She snorted and reached for me. I was transfixed by the quality of the costume. The ample visible pink flesh didn’t look like plastic and fake fur at all, like the costumes of the Security Warthogs and the entertainers back in Glazed Hamlet’s town square. She smelled like a pan full of pork chops in a peony garden. Her eyes were large and moist, and I could see the pupils contract as she looked me up and down.

“You have got to be kidding me.” I said weakly. I ducked her grasp, straightarmed Mac Asquith aside and ran directly for the door. There was a chain lock and a deadbolt and a hook latch and a bolt and the doorknob, which gave Sam time to say, “Oh, come back, Fang, this is a very exclusive new Piggleyland luxury service that Mac has facilitated for us. It’s an amazing sex opportunity for someone at your level of management…” I was through the door and running down the alley.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so horrified in my life.

I kept running until I came out to the town square, where I had to break stride so as to avoid the notice of several large Security Warthogs standing at a stall drinking Pigmilkshakes.

I showed my bacon pass to a pig taking tickets for a kiddie ride called Madame D’Porcs’ Tea and Crumpet Waltz, where I sat in a teacup and was spun past various precious scenes of Madame and Monsieur Loin D’Porc and their high society pig tea party and ballroom waltz. It was very peaceful for the first two thirds of the ride, robot pigs in tuxedos and hoop skirts waltzing in a mirrored ballroom, playing croquet and badminton in a simulated English country garden, eating watercress and cucumber sandwiches and pouring tea, then abruptly the anarchic Li’l Saucy Jess sets the house afire, pours a punchbowl of lemonade over Monsieur Loin D’Porc’s head, pelts the guests with cupcakes, and finally captures Madame D’Porc with a lasso. The final scene reenacted the beheading of Marie Antoinette with Madame D’Porc in the unfortunate role, and Pork Chopper as the laughing executioner.

I rode through four times, altogether, with my eyes closed much of the time, holding my head like a shiny round black bomb with a lit fuse. I just kept waving my bacon pass at the ticket pig when I got to the end, and he’d send me around again.

After the ride, I bought another mint julep with my dwindling cash supply and sat drinking it and thinking about Vampirella at a bench in the Glazed Hamlet town square, watching the throngs of snouted people wandering around eating pork rinds, watching the corny staged escapades of the costumed performers.

Eventually Sam and Mac emerged from the crowd, looking somewhat rumpled and uncharacteristically stunned. Sam spotted me and they came over. They didn’t say anything at first, just stood there clearing their throats and adjusting their ties.

“Hey!” I said, “sorry, but I have to say that sex pig costume just was a thousand steps too far over on the weird side for me.”

“It’s not exactly a costume, it’s more like a… new development.” said Sam.

“Yeah…Miss Sucklin’s Hoggystyle Bordello is an exclusive new development for premium corporate sponsors only,”” said Mac, “it’s an erotic luxury experience reserved for only the most discriminating tastes,” he said accusatorily if queasily, and wiped his forehead.

Sam was looking at his watch, “Mac, it’s time for our reservation at the Piggleyland BBQ Pit. Come along, Fang, dinners’ on us, although your performance was most disappointing for midlevel management. I expect you to apply yourself more rigorously to these team-building exercises in the future.” Sam was mad at me.

We were seated at the Piggleyland BBQ Pit in a private room in the back with silver and linen on the table and a warthog dressed as a waiter started hauling in big plates full of ribs, chops, loin, sausages, hocks, tripe, you name it. Just as he removed the cover on the final platter I recognised him as being the pimp warthog from Miss Sucklin’s Hoggystyle Bordello, and then I saw what appeared to be the cooked head of Miss Sucklin’ Laceyhocks on the platter, an apple jammed in her mouth. I jumped up.

“Jesus, that’s disturbing.” I said.

“It’s an erotic luxury experience reserved for only the most discriminating tastes,” Mac said again, and forked in a forkful of chop.

Sam was looking kind of doubtfully at a rib, “Help yourself, Fang, you’ll rarely taste pork this fresh. It’s a new development,” he took a bite and looked at me expectantly.

I pushed my plate away. Mac snorted, in his snout, “Grow up, kid. She was begging us to eat her the whole time we were going round the barnyard. We paid extra to eat her, and let me tell you, it really turned her on to know that we were going to eat her after we fucked her. She was totally hot to be eaten, wasn’t she, Sam?”

“Yes, very enthusiastic. Great customer service,” said Sam, chewing thoughtfully, “I can’t decide if she tasted better raw,” he wasn’t talking to me anymore.

I silently watched them eat their fill and waited for the meal to end. They each took a big greasy Hoggie Bag with them when they left.

Finally, the time had come to close out the Conference/Fiesta, get our luggage together and get to the airport. We rode the bus back to the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort, then Sam and I said our goodbyes to Hugo and Mac and Morvis and other assorted executives. I broke down the folding table of rates and services and threw all of it out in a dumpster in the parking lot instead of packing it up, to save time. Pam McWainscoting blew me a kiss from across the Carved Fudge Forest Conference Room as I took Sam’s arm to lead him out the door so that we could make our flights on time.

Back at Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound I drained the remaining Irish Whiskey from the bottle, changed into a new shirt and my drip-dried shorts from the previous day and threw all my other stuff into my suitcase quickly and slammed out of the damp room and sat outside Sam’s Deluxe Bridal Cabana tapping my fingers and revving the engine until he emerged driving his seven bags of luggage. I crammed them in the trunk and drove with all possible speed to the airport. It seemed like weeks since I’d seen my beautiful children, and what the hell was up with Vampirella, and I was just frantic to escape Orlando.

Sam was unusually quiet on the drive, mercifully. I knew he was seething mad at me because of the way I‘d let him down in front of Mac Asquith. I knew there’d be repercussions, and they started as soon as we reached the airport. As I pulled up to the terminal, Sam called back to Retro Cab and said, “Moe! Handwich here! Cancel the cab from the airport for Fang tonight. He’s going on a different plane, and will have to coordinate with you on his new arrival time later. What? No, not Thursday, Today. No, cancel tonight’s pick up…”

In classic passive-aggressive retaliation for my job performance, Sam had, at the last minute, apparently switched me onto a flight 734, with connecting flights in Boston and Bangor, Maine along the way, which saved Sam money on the airfare and sucked for me.

“Sam,” I interjected, while he still had Moe on the phone, “you gotta have someone stop by my house to let my wife know I’ve been delayed, then, at least? I’ve been trying to call her, but I can’t get through on the phone.”

He put his hand lightly over the receiver and said sweetly to me, “She probably just doesn’t want to answer the phone with her mouth full, Fang. -Moe! Take a cab over to Fang’s, tell his wife he’ll be later today. I’m sure she’ll appreciate the warning. No, not Tuesday, today. Sunday. No, not someday, today, OK? OK? OK? Are you there? What’s that gurgling sound? You got a communiconnectivity problem?”

Moe had a schnapps problem, more likely.

“Regardless of when your flight gets in tonight, Fang, I’ve pencilled you in for a meeting at 11AM tomorrow morning, Fang, a debriefing, some oversight, hindsight, foresight, perspectives from other directions like above and below, on your application of managerial modalities as postpercieved at the Conference/Fiesta, maybe a pop job performance review, too.”

I was in trouble, if I cared, which I wouldn’t until other things were off my mind. He didn’t even say goodbye, just drove off on his luggage to check in. So I was going to be home later than I anticipated, but at least I was rid of Sam Handwich until I was back in Ann Arbor. Sam himself was still taking the first class nonstop flight, of course.

After I turned in the rental car, my check-in at the airport went mercifully quickly, as most of the Homeland Security Guards were out by the cab stand, stomping on geckos and laughing.

I was wedged in the economy section on the plane when I realized that I still had the pistol in the pocket of my shorts. The Homeland Security Guard at the metal detector in the airport had insisted on confiscating a promotional staple remover from me, but he’d overlooked the gun. I don’t know why I had drunkenly picked the gun up in the first place; I didn’t want it at all. I considered trying to ditch it in the lavatory, but I decided that I’d better just wait and lose it after the flight.

Peacefully jammed between a kid in the aisle seat with earphones and a pale guy who was already sleeping in the windowseat, soon after the plane bounced off the runway and became airborne, I fell into a drunken doze, and had a bad dream.

I saw myself as if from above, sleeping twitchily in the airplane. My clothes were rumpled, my shock of hair looked like I’d just driven two hundred hot miles in a convertible, my sideburns were uneven, my skin was gray from days of abuse. As I watched myself, my hair grew shorter, and neater, like my head was sucking it back in. The sideburns receded by 2.5 inches. My pants grew longer and turned into a neatly pressed pair of blue trousers, my patterned shirt faded to white and a red tie unfurled below my chin, the flesh on my face became pinker, but also softer, like I’d just gained 40 pounds or so. My combat boots turned into neat oxford shoes, and I grew a watch on my left wrist and a blue suitjacket. I had transformed into a completely ordinary looking suitboy. Then, horribly, the eyes of this false Fang opened, and he was looking right at me.

“I need to call an important business contact! Can I get a fax line around here?!” said the doppleganger, “What are you, some kind of teenager? What the hell do you think you’re playing at? What are you, a pizza delivery boy? A video store clerk? You’re thirty-seven years old. You need to make more important business contacts. Network, motherfucker! Get your resume out there! Get a better job, get a second job, get three jobs if that’s what it takes! You’re pathetic. You’ve got tremendous opportunities in the business world awaiting you, if you can just bring yourself to quit pretending that there’s other things more important than making money. I need to call a important business contact RIGHT NOW.” a cellphone appeared in his hand, he pushed buttons, but it didn’t work on the plane. “Also, you slob, you waste, you make me sick, the way you whine about your wife being unfaithful. It’s pathetic. Firstly, why should she be faithful to a losing slob slacker like you when she could use her assets to secure a more lucrative meal ticket, and B. who cares about their wife sleeping around anyway? It keeps her out of your hair, so you can make more important business calls to important business contacts! If it bothers you, get a little something on the side yourself- maybe with an important business contact! Or you get a different wife. Divorce, also a great option. Whatever. It’s not pertinent to what you need to be doing. Making money. I’d talk to you more about this, but I have to call an important business contact, and my cellphone doesn’t work on the plane, so I have to jump out here and try to find a phone booth,” he squeezed past the kid with earphones and walked to the emergency exit, pulled the handle on the door and the door shot outwards, pulling him along with it. There was an enormous roaring wind and screaming from the passengers on all sides of me.

I felt relieved. That guy was really tedious.

(PGLYLND)

2008-10-06T15:33:07Z

Chapter 10: A Giant Albino Alligator, for one thing

10.

The alligator was easily the size of a school bus, and a pearly iridescent white. The cop that had slapped me was already completely consumed, and all that I could see of the kicking cop was the leg that had kicked me, sticking out from between two giant teeth like a cigar. The Alligators’ head turned to the side and its slitted eye, as large as a bowling ball, regarded me coldly.

“I’m sorry, were you saving them to eat yourself?” she said. She snapped down the remaining leg. My retreat was blocked by a mountain of smoking tires, and I was still sitting down, all of seven feet from her nose. I stood up briskly.

“…No, thanks, already ate, earlier, help yourself, by all means. Must be getting along, now, hope you enjoy your cops.” I went to walk directly past her, but she swung around entirely and blocked my path.

“I don’t meet others often,” she said, and continued to look at me. I could see my reflection in her green crescent eyeball. I straightened my collar and smoothed my hair self-consciously.

“Well, I’m glad to meet you,” I said. What else could I say? “My name’s Fang. I’m attending the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta! At the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort. It’s absolutely awful.”

“I don’t really remember my name,” she said, “ and that business stuff bores me. I could never have a job like that. Even if it does get a little repetitive just haunting these wastelands and eating people. Oof…that second cop was too chewy. I should have stuffed him under an underwater log for a couple of weeks to tenderize.”

“How’s the hunting? You must get a lot of the overflow from Piggleyland over here, I suppose,” I said.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t really get over in the Orlando area often…I prefer to stay in less developed areas, but every once in a while I feel like I really should come into the city to wreak a little of the awesome vengeance of nature on these motherfuckers. Phoo,” she said, spitting out a pistol, “Say, speaking of the awesome vengeance of nature, you haven’t heard anything about a swarm of hamster-sized killer bees, have you? I owe those guys five bucks.”

“I haven’t run across them, but if I do I’ll let them know you’re looking for them. Look, I gotta go. I’m drunk and miserable and I think my wife might be cheating on me. I mean, probably not. She wouldn’t do that. I don’t think. I mean, I’m sure she wouldn’t. I’m going to call her.”

“If you’re drunk and she’s cheating on you, the last thing you want to do is call her on the phone. Wait until you see her face to face and can talk it out…”

“Thanks, that’s probably good advice.”

“…and if she’s really cheating on you, eat her quickly so you don’t have a lot of leftovers in the fridge reminding you of the relationship.”

“Thanks again, good luck wreaking the awesome vengeance.”

“Same to you, businessman!” she laughed, spinning her bus-sized body around and diving into the drainage ditch..

I picked up the cops’ pistol. It took me about five minutes to figure out how to spring the cartridge out of it and eject the shell in the chamber. Once I was sure it was empty, I put it in my pocket. The bullets I tossed into the ditch. I looked up on the freeway and noticed that the police car was sitting there, abandoned. I climbed up to it and found that they’d actually left the doors unlocked, and my eighteen bucks was in the change holder in the console. I also got a cool pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses.

I hopped back down the embankment from the freeway. I had nowhere in particular to go, so I just set off towards a cluster of buildings in the distance to the North, walking the whiskey off as the sun glared down on me like the naked eye of a merciless God, and then the crisscrossing freeways and highways overhead would cut the sunlight off for dark, dead intervals, and now that I’d been walking around in these areas for a couple of days, I knew how much more there was going on down here than was immediately evident. I saw other people occasionally, dodging this way or that, giving each other a wide berth. Most of them looked fairly dangerous or demented in one way or another.

There were a lot of lost and desperate looking people, like the fat lady in the leotard with the stuffed poodle and the dwarf with a spiked football helmet and the reciprocating saw. I was kind of glad to see a couple Lost Pigs running off in another direction at one point: apparently they hadn’t all been eliminated by the Piggleyland Security Warthogs. I saw a large band of roving Cuban cyborgs but I was not seen by them. I was walking towards downtown Orlando, but I was probably ten miles from it, if Orlando still had a downtown.

I came to a fifteen-foot wall with spikes on top of it and climbed over to find myself in a suburban neighborhood. A guy watering his lawn looked concerned when I jumped to the sidewalk, but I gave him a big smile and just sauntered up the street and he kept watering.

The houses were all pastel cinderblock, ranch-style, close together. It was just getting to be rush hour, and the first cars were docking in their driveways, kids getting out of the cars, people with bags of groceries, bags from fast-food joints. The whir of traffic from the encircling freeways had been rising in volume steadily for 45 minutes. After a few blocks I found a playground, had a long drink from a water fountain and sat down on a bench to relax for a few minutes and get my bearings. Looking down the street I watched the choreography of the suburban evening, car after car nesting in garages, kids back and forth on various colorful wheeled devices, some guy listening to rock and roll while he swapped out the alternator on his car, people gardening. It was hot, but I was in the shade of a large flowering bush, and the yells of the kids on the merry-go-round did not keep me from falling asleep pretty quickly.

When I awoke it was dark, probably 10 PM, with a fat gibbous moon, and there were just two kids left on the playground, pale, scrawny specimens, one boy and one girl who surveyed me dispassionately from their perch atop a metal slide. I stood up and stretched, feeling old but not as drunk as earlier, “Hey, kids, it’s late. Why aren’t you at home?” I asked the kids.

“Aw! Mom’s having an affair with her boss,” said the boy. The girl added “… She has to have sex with him before Dad gets home, so we have to stay out here until she calls us. It won’t take long!” at that moment a blowsy woman wearing a feathered muu-muu opened the back door of a nearby house. A man ran out of the door, tying his tie and hopped into a big red Dodge Penetrator parked at the curb. He squealed off down the street.

“See!” they said and ran happily towards the house. The screen door slammed them in.

I stared blankly after them just long enough to see the Dad come home, looking daft and happy, riding on a bike. Now I was wearing my delicate new sobriety like a hair shirt full of beetles. I set off to try to make my way back to Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound. I came across a few old brick storefronts just before I had to climb back over the wall out of the residential neighborhood, and one of them was a party store and I bought a pint of more whiskey for six bucks and climbed over the wall, drinking.

Now it was real dark, absolutely black under the Freeway overpasses. The swelling moon was rarely visible for scraps of cloud, moving fast and looking like torn black rags. Small fires burned here and there, and I kept to the shadows and moved slowly, concentrating on staying unseen by the tattered shapes that stumbled around out there in the dark.

I took a shortcut through an abandoned cemetery. It was very peaceful, with the shiny white stones under the black underbelly of the Freeway. There was a small gang of Goth kids having a party by a mausoleum, and I was petrified for a time watching a girl with long red hair and a lacy bustier dancing in the firelight. She looked just like Vampirella, albeit with more piercings, straps and zippers. I kept going before they saw me.

I finished the pint of whiskey in the parking lot of Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound and left the bottle on the antenna of Sam Handwichs’ Gold Cadillac. There were four sullen teens in the hot tub. I staggered up and stepped into the tub fully clothed, and submerged up to my chin. After a minute, I remembered the gun in my pocket, pulled it out and put it on the side of the hot tub to drain out. Almost immediately, there weren’t four sullen teens in the hot tub anymore, or anywhere in sight. I soaked in the hot tub for a good 45 minutes, then got out, kicked off my shoes, stripped to my boxers and started swimming laps in the murky pool, keeping my head well out of the sludgy water. Once I had exhausted myself I gathered up my stuff and the gun and dripped back to my room, where I turned the TV on and took a long hot shower to scrub the nearly lethal levels of chlorine off my burning skin.

I sat up for a long time looking angry at the phone, but I didn’t try to use it, I just did push-ups and sit-ups until I threw up, and then I fell asleep, looking forward just ever so much to the final day of the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta!

PIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGLLLLLLEEEEEYYYYYYYYLLLLAAAAANNNNDDDD

2008-10-03T15:28:09Z

What the hell was going on? Seriously, Vampirella couldn’t cheat on me, anymore than I could cheat on her. We had one of those giant legendary loves that shattered moons and set the skies aflame, and adorable kids, too. I knew there was some explanation. Brick could be at my house for some completely innocent work-related reason. So why had she lied to me? Maybe she was afraid I’d get mad about him being there alone with her, even though it really was a completely innocent work-related thing, and I caught her off guard and she didn’t want to worry me because she knew how desperately lonely and vulnerable I felt being so far away from her and Natasha and Tibor. That was probably it. Sure.

The guy seated ahead of me at the presentation had hung his coat on the back of his chair. I quietly lifted his cellphone out of his pocket and dialed my home number. The phone just rang, and rang. I dropped the phone back into his pocket after a while.

So my scheduled flight back left in 31 hours, which would have me back in Ann Arbor by maybe 9:30 PM the following evening. One more night. I sank low in my chair and closed my eyes.

I saw myself as if from above, sitting in a crowd of a hundred fifty people at varying levels of inattention to Horchinson. I saw the Carved Fudge Conference room, then the mountainous sculpted ice-cream scoop roof façade of the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort, and I was rising up to see the grotesque network of freeways and parking lots that formed Orlando, then higher still until I could see the peninsula of Florida projecting into the blue ocean, rimmed around with the solid wall of hotels and condos, and as I rose the Earth was spinning faster, the Sun was setting, and as it grew dark I was descending again one thousand, one hundred and thirty four miles North into the simple flat patchwork of Southeast Michigan and the South side of Ann Arbor and I could see the Quonset park, then my own Quonset from above, covered in the dormant winter ivies that Vampirella had planted, and I saw the yellow Dodge Penetrator parking on the street in front of it, and Brick Marrow strutting to the door and the windows glowing with a red pulsing light, and the door opened and he was inside and then I was inside and the red light was all around me, beating like a heart, the beat of the blood pounding in my ears, and I saw Brick Marrow loosening his silk tie to expose his shiny chest and kicking his expensive shoes off and one of them broke the toy guillotine into pieces again and he was looking over my shoulder in a hungry kind of way, and I turned slowly and Vampirella was standing there, as perfect and naked as Botticellis’ Venus, with some kind of wind lifting and moving her red hair in serpentine coils and the red light all around pulsing and pounding and she was moving through me to him and I saw her head tilt back and her wet mouth open slightly as his head bent down to hers and I could smell her delicious perfume overwhelmed by oily sharp cologne and his briefcase popped open in his hand and hundred-dollar bills were cascading to the floor, and a pair of handcuffs, and a huge babyduck yellow rubber phallus and some divorce papers and extra-small condoms and more hundred-dollar bills and the front door was opening again and I could see Tibor and Natasha tumbling through it in the red light pulsing pounding and I was screaming, standing up in the middle of the conference room in the middle of the afternoon and screaming at the top of my lungs, with tears pouring down my cheeks. I stopped screaming.

I had everybody’s undivided attention. Horchinson looked like he was about to bolt from the stage.

“Oh! Sorry!” I said. That wasn’t enough, so I added, “I guess… I just… got real scared of the… terrorists, just then,” there were some uncertain sympathetic noises. I slunk out of the room to the hotel bar and charged three large whiskeys to whomever was in room 2343.

I sat at the bar, which was made of peanut brittle, and got the first two whiskeys down quickly, then took all of a minute and forty seconds to drink the third while pondering my lack of options.

If I stole a car, I could be home in eighteen hours, if I could steal the gas for it along the way. It would, however, take me considerably more than eighteen hours if I had to spend time in jail for stealing stuff along the way, so that was a gamble.

I’d have used a credit card to buy an immediate flight back right after I’d hung up the phone the previous night if I had a credit card, but my credit was destroyed eight years ago, before I had health insurance, when I chose to enjoy a luxurious broken leg and subsequent absence from work. I still owed UberKard around $3400, for that, technically.

I was stuck until my flight left. And I didn’t know what was happening.

The whiskey hit me really hard, like whiskey does. I actually barely ever drank more than a couple beers or glasses of wine, or maybe a few tokes of weed or something. My days of sustained committed inebriation were long behind me. I think there were three years, working as a sound man around Detroit in my early twenties, when I drank fairly heavily, but I’ve lost those years and can’t find them anymore. Additionally, being drunk or stoned around my kids was deeply depressing, and dangerous, too, because I need my wits about me when they choose to attack. I was completely out of practice. I drank one more whiskey on room 2343, for practice.

Was it my lack of work ethic and material ambition that had made Vampirella stray? It was the major difference between the two of us. We had similar interests in music, politics, similar worldviews, similar senses of humor, the sex was objectively fantastic, we adored the kids equally, but she always took what she did for money seriously and I was just marking time and collecting the checks, and I knew that it bothered her sometimes. Vampirella felt guilty when she wasn’t able to accomplish objectives at work. My only objective was to stay employed. I’d work to sustain the perception that I was working, but nothing beyond that. I could imagine jobs where I would care about what I was doing, and like the people I worked with, but I sure didn’t feel that way about Retro Cab.

Vampirella had said to me, only a couple weeks previous, “I understand you loathe the owner and your coworkers, and don’t care about the customers, but wouldn’t your day pass faster if you actually tried to do the work they’re paying you for?”

“You mean the work they think they’re paying me for? Jesus, I can’t even imagine how much they’d have to pay me to really try to accomplish something in that environment. No, the whole point is that I’m being paid for, for instance, today, I built a pretty good Eiffel Tower out of paperclips.”

She rolled her eyes, “Well, I just can’t help but feel that you’re contributing to the general gradual descent into cultural mediocrity. It can’t be good for you to care so little about what you do eight hours a day.”

“Sure, but remember, I only actually work like a couple hours a day at most, not eight. For a couple hours I can bear to not care.”

She laughed and changed the subject. But did she really deeply disapprove of my lackadaisical attitude towards work, and complete indifference to career advancement? Maybe?

Maybe a go-getter guy like Brick Marrow, jam-packed with desire for career advancement, extra vehicles, larger houses, expensive watches and electronics with unnecessary functions, connected in the local networking and social scenes, hanging out at golf course bars or stopping off for a quick exfoliation and cuticle transplant on his way to a very important meeting with a dynamic new client and then power-lunching on a fragile tower of fennel and mahi-mahi in a pineapple cilantro salsa looked like a nice change from a slacker like me, who only really cared about barely paying the bills?

We had been lowest middle class, at best, for the whole time we’d been together, with not much expensive food and accoutrements, no jetting off to Mozambique or Micronesia for a quick holiday, just one beat up car at most, not much equity in the Quonset, not much merchandise and not many glitzy events. Maybe Vampirella was tired of living on the lower margin. Living with her and the kids was just so much more wonderful a life than I had ever hoped for, after my childhood, that maybe I forgot that other people might have aspirations beyond being able to afford ice cream sodas and the phone bill. Did Vampirella really want to trade up for frequent truffles and expensive boxy cars and plastic surgery and nannies and a personal trainer named Sven?

My vivid hallucinations aside, it was hard for me to imagine a world where my amazing Vampirella would really leave me for a mere Brick Marrow. It seemed fake, wrong. Something else was going on; an evil twin, an alternate universe, poltergeists, gremlins, something.

Jesus.

So I lurched to my feet and weaved back out of the Bar, left the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort and wandered out into blistering heat and asphalt of Orlando in the afternoon. I was stumbling across a dirt lot near a smoldering hill of discarded tires when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the cop that had decked me the previous day, and another beefy-looking cop directly behind her.

“What the hell are you doing out here now? Where’s your car today?” she demanded, “These areas outside aren’t for walking around. You want to walk around, you go to a mall, right?”

“Oh, sure. Shorry,” I muttered, drunk, reaching for my empty wallet, “I was jusht on my way…” she hit me open-handed across the face, and for a moment I looked completely in back of me, and then the rest of my body turned to catch up with my head, and I kind of spiraled down into a heap. The big cop behind her stepped forward to offer a solid kick to my ribs, which I accepted with a fair amount of equanimity, being full of self-loathing and despair. And whiskey, which made it all much more bearable. But then I heard the first cop unsnapping her holster, which kind of brought my attention back.

I looked up, but she wasn’t looking at me any more. She and her companion were looking at a fifty-foot pure white albino alligator that was coming up out of a drainage ditch very fast and before they could get their guns out it just ate them, snap, scream, snap snap.

Piggleyland: Now halfway done, and gaining speed downhill.

2008-09-25T18:10:42Z

This week: a Speech from the Department of Homeland Security.

After the tedious seminars, I was horrified to find myself suddenly standing in the line at the lunch buffet with Pam McWainscoting. She was stunningly attired in a hot pink hotpantsuit with an enormous lime-green ruffled collar, which reminded me of the clowns, and she was glaring at me like she might bite.

I was struggling to come up with something to say, when she hissed, “Listen, I don’t remember much from last night, but I can barely walk today, so I trust you satisfied yourself, you pig,” she winked, which couldn’t have been easy with all that mascara on. I could hear the eyelashes click together.

“What?” I said, befuddled.

“Everyone saw us leave together. You got me drunk and took advantage of my delicate condition, you bad boy,” she stage-whispered, and reached into her purse. She handed me a snorkel, “here. You left this in the sheets.” I remembered the Germans on the elevator.

“Look, Pam, I have to tell you. I’m married. Last night…”

“Shh!” she shushed, putting a clawed finger to my lips, “What happens at the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta! stays at the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta! I’m married too. I hate the impotent bastard,” she said, confidentially, “this will just be our little secret. And now, I must go. Au revoir!” she whirled on her heel and stalked bravely away, hard shiny head held high. I stood there looking after her like some kind of an idiot until Sam Handwich came up and slapped me on the back painfully.

“So you nailed McWainscoting! You lucky motherfucker. Every year we take bets on who’ll get to pork Pam. It’s your first year here- that’s what I call beginners’ fuck!” he almost fell down laughing.

“Sam, I didn’t fuck her. I ditched her on the elevator and she met someone else.”

“Don’t worry, Fang! Mum’s the word! You’re worried that your wife will find out, I know, but even if she does- and she won’t hear it from me-” he winked, “…after the first few affairs, wives get used to it. Hell, look on the bright side. How do you know that wife of yours is faithful anyway? I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but under the circumstances…you know, I saw that guy she works for, that coupon guy Marrow, sitting, smoking and waiting for someone at the Gorilla Wharf Fare Restaurant with a tableful of bananas and oysters just the night before I told you about the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta! He comes in and orders the full Lewdy Fruity Sexy Sushi Platter for two and a bottle of champagne and he’s checking his watch, several times. He makes the waiter change the wilting floral arrangement on the table. I was just at the bar for a drink, but as I’m leaving, I gotta tell you, Fang, I found myself walking right past that red-haired wife of yours as she was coming in, and heading straight for his table. But she works for him, right? So it was probably just a business meeting, though. Just like your productive meeting with McWainscoting,” wink.

It was like a second fist to the solar plexus. I’m sure I winced visibly. I tried to remember how long it had been that Vampirella had been working extra hours and going in late. It was a several weeks, at least. I needed a drink, and continued to deny myself one. I had a hot roast beef sandwich with squishy white bread and black gravy and instant mashed potatoes instead.

I was sitting at a pie with Sam Handwich and this really dim guy named Horchinson who made me add his impressive flashy business card to the others in my pocket. He was with Border & Transportation Security at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Also seated at the table was Morvis Spontaine of BVR Nextday Delivery, a haunted-looking rectangle of fury and resentment that I’d just been introduced to, and Hugo Bfori, who was leering at me and waggling his one eyebrow in a most unwholesome manner.

Hugo said, “Is it true you muff-dive so deep you actually use a snorkel?”

“Oh, fuck me,” I muttered.

“What, you got some left after all night with your dick in McWainscoting?”

Morvis said, viciously, “What makes you rate McWainscoting, you fuckin’ upstart? I been tryin’ to stuff her squirrel with sausage since you were in Junior High School.”

“I didn’t stuff her sq… I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” I said, halfheartedly.

“OOO, he’s gonna be a gennleman about it,” mocked Morvis, “He’s gonna spare the lady’s honor by denying that he spent a couple hours pretending his face was Pam’s bicycle seat.”

Sam kindly interjected, “Did you hear about the special Convention/Fiesta surprise? I wonder what the Board has planned this year? Tomorrow right after breakfast it’s gonna be announced. Last year,” he said to me, “when the Convention/Fiesta was in New Jersey, they gave everybody an all-terrain vehicle and an automatic weapon and we all had a blast tearing around shooting giant rats in a landfill all day.”

Horchinson said, “You guys should come down to the Mexican border some day if you like driving ATVs and shooting at things. I’ll keep you busy.” Hugo, Sam and Morvis all broke up laughing.

“No, seriously,” said Horchinson.

Horchinson was the keynote speaker directly after lunch, with a presentation regarding the new regulations on cross-border transportation of goods and persons. Operating around Detroit, Retro Cabs went over the bridge or through the tunnel to Windsor with some regularity. Customs had always been more rigorous than necessary at the border, and increased security since nineleven had increased the waiting to enter the U.S. tenfold. The Department of Homeland Security had added several layers of pointless complexity to what used to be a simple transaction. Before a commercial vehicle could approach the border to enter the U.S., Homeland Security’s Border Control Department had to be first notified by phone that you were preparing to notify them electronically through their slow-moving Neolithic webpage that you were faxing over the information on the trip. After you did all that, you had to call again to confirm that they got the fax, and when they picked the phone up, after thirty-three rings, you could literally hear them crumpling the fax up and throwing it away. Then they’d charge you fifteen bucks on your credit card for running a “Quick Threat Assessment,” tell you to hang on for a moment and you could hear them calling a pizza place on the other line and asking them how many items they could get on a large pizza for fifteen bucks. Once they placed their order, they’d assure you that the driver was cleared to cross the border.

Then customs would stop the driver anyway, because Border Control hadn’t sent through the proper release codes.

Horchinson droned on and on about how safe we all were because of the additional security measures.

“Since we instituted the Border Control Initiative, we have had tremendous success in limiting the transport of dangerous persons and goods into the U.S. For instance, not a single giant man-eating voodoo chicken has entered our country!” there was scattered applause, “No radioactive poison disguised as wholesome cans of ham substitute have been intercepted. Not even a single busload of chainsaw-wielding, smallpox-infected terrorists has successfully crossed the border! Not even one seven-foot tentacled cyclops has come in from Canada-or even Mexico! No trucks that transform into killer robots make it past our tightly clenched border! No giant bales of anthrax, no deceptively pretty women with decorative exploding hats, no crates full of neutron bombs, no dumptrucks full of angry cobras, nothing like that. Ladies and Gentlemen, either the Border Control Initiative is working splendidly, or there never was a threat at all!” there was more scattered applause, and Morvis, Sam and Hugo unobtrusively went off to golf more.

I continued to sit attentively on the horehound candy folding chair, and Horchinson’s words blurred and subsided into a rhythmic drone in the background as my mind was sucked back into the vortex of the Vampirella/Marrow situation.

Chapter 8 of Piggleyland begins.

2008-09-19T17:41:57Z

This Week: featuring Nazi Clowns.

I woke up and at first I thought I’d just had bad dreams, but then I remembered the really bad thing that had happened before the bad dreams. I had two days of the Conference/Fiesta still ahead of me, but my return flight was in the evening of the second day, so I’d only have one more night before I could get back and sort things out. It was 6:17 AM. 38 hours and I’d be home. I called my Quonset again, but the phone just rang, like someone had taken it off the hook because they didn’t want to be interrupted. Fury and despair.

I drank coffee and fizzy water but not the Irish whiskey that was kind of asking for it. I felt terrible from days of weird bad food and drink. I numbly went through Doc Savage’s secret choreographed sequence of advanced yoga poses and brutal isometric exercises coupled with simultaneous mental gymnastics and meditation but I was far too heavy to levitate.

On the way back to the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort I was preoccupied and took a wrong turn through a culvert, and before I could turn around there was a clown blocking my path poking my sternum with a bayonet attached to a polka-dotted Karabiner 98 Kurz bolt-action rifle.

“Atchung! Pink Svine. Vas ist doink here?” screamed the clown angrily through a merry red painted smile, beneath a blue toothbrush moustache, below a red nose, under a metal WWII German helmet emblazoned with a big silly-looking purple swastika.

“What?” I said, “I’m going to the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort for the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta, clown. What are you doing?”

“Das is der reschtricted area, and you haff trespassed. You vill komm mit me for der intrerrogation!” he brought his rifle to his shoulder. I wondered if it was a water gun, but I didn’t feel confident enough about it to take the chance. I just sighed, put up my hands and marched ahead of him as he led me to his Nazi Klown Kamp. At least it took my mind off Vampirella.

I had heard of these Nazi Klowns. They were vicious racists, who believed in really, really white supremacy. They hated all pigment in skin color, except for bright accent colors around the noses, mouth and eyes. They often would have the clown white actually tattooed all over their bodies. They traveled around in caravans of small cars that could contain surprising amounts of Nazi Klowns, spouting their hateful rhetoric and performing offensive skits at shopping malls to try to recruit new members. Some bands were as large as several hundred clowns, but there were only about thirty in this group, from what I could see in the dry dirt lot where they had set up their Kamp, with polka-dotted and striped small big top tents in a circle around a cozily burning cross.

The male clowns were all dressed in exaggerated Nazi uniforms in clown colors and patterns. The clown who’d captured me wore striped Jodhpurs and tall red boots with extra long feet under a polka-dotted trenchcoat with a swastika armband. He bristled with swords, knives, grenades, a Panzerfaust, two baby-duck yellow Lugers, and a pink MP40 submachine gun, besides the rifle with the bayonet that he had between my shoulder blades. There were a number of small kid or midget clowns running around dressed in nuclear-colored Nazi youth summer outfits, with shorts and kneesocks and peaked caps, and most of the females wore long multicolored braids and bright biergarten girl outfits, although I did see one nurse. There was a small group of purple Waffen SS officers painting swastikas on a baby elephant, another clown in what looked to be some kind of bright red vinyl Stormtrooper outfit was driving a plaid WWII BMW motorcycle with a sidecar full of yapping poodles around and around in circles, and a small stage was being erected next to the burning cross by nine frilly fraulein clown girls.

Few of the clowns paid much attention as I was led into the Kamp, but two very, very fat Luftwaffe officers waddled over and helped my captor to lead me up onto the stage. There was already a small audience of local Nazi Klown enthusiasts sitting there waiting for the show, wearing really amateurish smeary clown makeup, t-shirts with swastikas drawn on them with magic markers, cheap foam rubber noses, that sort of thing. It was only 7:30 in the morning, and many of the Nazi Klowns were just coming out of their small big top tents, yawning and stretching, wearing Nazi nightshirts and floppy nightcaps, carrying teddy bears.

They manacled my leg to a wooden chair and both of the fat Luftwaffe officers started pulling whistles and horns and triangles and cymbals from their pockets and blowing and beating them furiously, until the curtains on the largest tent were pulled aside by two Nazi kid/midgets and a white horse and rider leapt rearing and snorting out of the tent. The rider was dressed in bright white robes with one of those stupid KKK pointy white hoods on, but with a perfect round redrubber nose stuck to the front of it. The horse was huge and magnificent, but the rider was having a little trouble controlling him. He galloped over, vaulted up onto the stage and reared up directly over me as the soldier clown and the two Luftwaffe officers dove off the stage. The clown in the white robes lost his grip and fell painfully on his ass right in front of where I was sitting. The horse calmly walked down the stage stairs and ambled back into the tent.

“GODFUCKINGDAMNFUCKINGHORSE!” howled the pointy-headed man, leaping to his feet and adjusting the rumpled hood so that he could see from the eyeholes again, then he turned sharply around, holding his ass, and said “Vhat is das dishgusting pink schvien doing polluting mein stage vis hiss impure filthy pigment???”

“I was just…” I started, but the soldier clown poked his head back up and interrupted, “He vas in der verboten zone, schpying. I apprehended him und brought him beck for der interrogations!”

“Did schomvhon say interrogations?” said a Nazi doctor clown, springing suddenly from a black tent. He was dressed in white and hospital green, with bottle-thick glasses balanced on a long thin red nose and one of those mirror-on-a-headband things. He had needles and saws and scalpels and drills dangling from his belt and a bandoleer of evil-looking fluids in test tubes. “Ve vill exschract der invormation from der subject! Let me! Let me!” he began filling a hypodermic with something green and viscous.

I sighed heavily, “I gotta go, guys. Thanks. I’m sure it’s a great show.”

“SCHIELENCE, PIGMENTED SCHVEINHUND, ve vill torture you until you reveal der names off der secret cabal that hass sent you here to learn our schecrets,” said the pointy-headed clown.

“What secrets?” I said, genuinely interested.

“SEE? He eefen iss to ask boldly about der schecrets. Only der schpy vould ask.” he announced to the bemused audience.

“No, I’m just curious. I mean, since you mentioned that you have secrets. Clowns don’t usually have secrets, just jolly surprises,” I said, gently.

“Oh, ve haff schecrets, Pinky. DAAAARRK schecrets. Schomtimes…” said the Doctor, then whispered, “schomtimes I dress up as an Epischkopalian.”

“VHAT!” thundered the pointy-headed one, evidently the leader, “Schut upp! I vas schpeeking off schecrets like der plan to schecretly introduce schkin bleaching agents into der wasser schupply, or der coordinated pie attacks ve’re planning on der Oh! Tan–and-Balm tanning booth franchise locations.”

“Oh! Dose schecrets. Off course!” said the Doctor, looking abashed, and throwing the hypodermic like a dart at my bicep. I moved my arm and the needle whizzed past and embedded itself in the wooden back of the chair.

“Yes, I really do have to be going.” I said, and started to stand up. The Doctor hit me on the head with an oversize rubber mallet, and I sat down again.

“Who schent you here? Vhat do dey vant? How much do you know? Did dey tell you dat eefen der President off your Schtates off Amerika und der members off hiss kabinet isch all Nazi Klowns off der purest schtock?” The Doctor hit me with the mallet four more times as the leader in the sheet barked questions. It didn’t really hurt, but it was annoying.

“What, G.W. Bush? No, they didn’t tell me that, but I can’t say as I’m surprised to hear it.”

“Das ist also der ekschellent ekschample off der kind off schecret vich muscht not effer be schpoken off, Herr Kommandant!” nodded the Doctor clown to the leader, and pulled out a large pair of pliers.

The Kommandant spat, “Your pinkisch hue fills me vis verabscheuen. Your puny colorless nose und pale floppy hair are der marks of der genetically inferior mongrel, schuited only to serve der pure clown vhite race in der moscht menial and depressching jobsch, as whores und Schnellimbißsekretärinnen.”

“You’re not a race, you’re clowns. Anyone can be a clown. Ow!” the Doctor had my nose in the pliers.

“SCHIELENCE, PIGMENTED FUSSEL!” screamed the Kommandant, “Ve are reborn vhen ve vear der vhiteface. Den ve are pure und clean, cleansed off der schmutz. Und, ja, so anyvhon can be reborn- but dere are dose who vill not vear der vhitefase,” this last was hissed for the benefit of the small audience of Nazi Klown enthusiasts, who were watching the proceedings with interest, “Dose who choose to dischplay their filthy colored schkin vill be kroshed beneath der vheels off der Nazi Klown empire! Dey vill be our schlaves. Ve vill be moscht dischreschpektful of them. Und vonce ve haff rissen, after der blodd off der mongrels hass been shed, vhen der Nazi Klowns take kontrol, effryvon vill haff to vear der vhiteface at all times, alvays to be der klown vhen in publik, or be terminated by der Nazi Klown Party und fed to der poodles,” a small crowd of poodles had in fact gathered by the side of the stage, and were looking hopefully in my direction and licking their lips, “Ve vill be der nation of der Nazi Klowns! Liffing und vorking mit der great realization off der Nazi Klown deschtiny! Und den ve vill conquer der vorld mit merciless guns und our bombs und our pies und rule for der ten sousand years!” he was really getting worked up.

“Ve muscht make der ekschample off dis filthy schpy,” said one of the very fat Luftwaffe officers.

“Ve muscht peel him like der banana!” said the other Luftwaffe officer.

“Ve mucht schplatt him like der cream pie!” said the first one.

“Ve muscht drop der flowerpotz on hiss head!” said the other.

“Ve muscht schpray him mit der firehose!”

“Ve muscht schlap him mit der rubber chicken!”

“Ve muscht put der firecracker in hiss shoess!”

“Ve muscht dunk him in der pink lemonade!”

“Ve muscht giff him der box mit der boxing gluff on der schpring!”

“Ve muscht schvirt him in der eye mit der flower in mein lapel”

“Ve muscht cause der scheat of hiss pants to burscht into flame!”

“Ve muscht honk und beep until he hass der awfful headache!”

“Ve muscht suffocate him in der hot kotton kandy!”

“Ve muscht cut hiss head off mit der giant schizzors!”

“Ve muscht make him schmoke der ekschploding schigar!”

“Ve muscht put him in der phone booth mit der schtinkbomb!”

“Ve muscht pull out hiss intestines like der schurprisingly long schcarf!

“Ve muscht brosch hiss teeth painfully mit der giant toothbrosch!”

“Ve muscht pop him like der popcorn in der popcorn popper!”

“Ve muscht juggle mit hiss liffer, hiss heart und hiss schpleen!”

“Ve muscht pepper hiss nose until he schneezes!”

“Ve muscht schoot him from der kannon!”

“Ve muscht giff him many paper cuts mit der confetti!”

“Ve muscht schpear him like der corndog!”

“Ve muscht schpin him on der merry-go-round until he iss verry dizzy und nauseated!”

“Ve muscht drown him mit der scheltzer bottle!”

“Ve muscht pelt him mit der bean bags!”

All the clowns were fascinated with the options presented by the fat Luftwaffe officers. While they were arguing back and forth, with their backs to me, I stood up, took a large saw off the back of the Doctor’s belt, sawed through the leg of the wooden chair, and, with the manacle dragging from my ankle, walked across the stage and down the stairs. By the time they noticed I was no longer in the chair, I was unhooking a bouquet of about 5000 swastika balloons from the popcorn trolley they were moored to.

“Atchung! Der prissoner iss eschkapingk!” said the soldier who’d captured me initially, but he was too late. I was already 30 feet in the air. He fired his rifle at me, but all that happened was that a small flag popped out of the gun barrel and unrolled. “Bang!” said the flag.

The Nazi Klown Kamp burst into furious activity, A fire engine and a paddy wagon both burst out of tents, sirens howling, covered in screaming clowns, but they immediately collided head-on, and the clowns were all thrown to the ground. Clowns slipped on banana peels and fell into unexpectedly deep puddles, or ran full-tilt into one another. A tent full of fireworks exploded, and rockets shot in every direction as colored smoke obscured the camp in a thick haze.

The hot morning wind was blowing in the direction of the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort, and I still had the clown doctor’s saw. I started cutting the balloon strings once I was sure that the clowns had failed to pursue me. I was a couple hundred yards up in the air as I drifted over a couple freeways, releasing swastika balloons steadily and descending towards the parking lot of the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort. I touched down on the hood of a yellow SUV, and thought of Brick Marrow. The clowns had been a pleasant respite from thinking about him and my Vampirella. I was in time for breakfast, but wasn’t really able to eat, and in fact I was so depressed that I accidentally attended seminars on strategic marketing and innovations in global logistics.

Piggleyland: All is not well at home, either.

2008-09-12T12:47:04Z

The Plot is to twist at this point!

I went walking back though some dry culverts and ditches and stopped for awhile in the dark dead orange orchard under the raised freeway, near the burned and leveled camp of the Lost Pigs. I drank from a bottle of mineral water and listened to the hot night wind rustling through the dead branches, hung with scraps of paper and discarded plastic sheeting. Some dim stars were visible through the haze of exhaust, in patches of sky visible between the ramps and loops of the freeway overhead.

It was only just after 9 PM, but I was beat. My back was up against the trunk of a dead orange tree, and I thought I’d just close my eyes for a minute, but then I saw an alligator eyeing me balefully from a pile of soft-drink cups in a drainage ditch, and I got up and started walking again. I gave Piggleyland’s loading docks a wide berth, which turned out to add about an extra mile to the trip back to Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound, but it was worth avoiding.

I dragged back into my Motel Room, showered off the woodsmoke from the barbecues and remaining traces of Pam’s cloying Tygermusk perfume, then sat down on the squashy motel bed to call home. I felt just lousy about the whole Pam McWainscoting spectacle, but I was sure that Vampirella would find it hilarious. Probably. Unless she found it despicable. It was a little after 10 PM and I hoped I wouldn’t wake anyone up, but it had been three nights since I’d spoken to Vampirella and I missed her and my kids dreadfully.

The phone connection clicked through, but it didn’t ring because the phone was picked up at just that moment for an outgoing call: beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep. I waited a second to make sure the dialing had stopped and said, “Hello?”

I did not at first recognise the voice that came over the phone to say, “Is this Hunan Resources? I’d like to order some food to be delivered? Chop chop!”

And then I did recognise the voice, when he said “Chop chop!” like some kind of asshole. It was Vampirella’s loathsome suitboy boss, Brick Marrow. “Hello?” he said again, peevishly, “are you there?”

I was still kind of drunk, and easily confused. What was Brick Marrow doing in my Quonset hut, ordering Chinese food? The question intrigued and unsettled me. I could have asked him outright, but I decided to jerk his chain a little and slyly switched into the most reprehensible lousy Chinese accent I could muster, “excruse prease. Had roose wonton on sripper. Wha you want?”

“One Mongolian beef, extra spicy, one order of sweet and sour pork. A spring roll…hey, you want a spring roll? They’re dynamite! Yeah? OK, two spring rolls, and a quart of wonton soup. How long will it take your delivery guy to get it here?”

“Ahh, I carrot say unress you shoord choose to tear me whel you aull.”

“What?”

“Whel to Derivel to?”

“1134 Quidproquonset. So how long?”
“Ereventhiltyfoal Quirldplockronset shoord be thel in foalty five mirruts. How many foalchun coorkie?”

“What?”

“FOALTY FIVE MIRRUT. HOW MANY FOALCHUN COORKIE? HOW MANY EAT?”

“What? Two.”

“Tank roo foal caurring Hunan Lesoulces. Goorbye.” I hung up the phone. I called the actual Hunan Resources restaurant and placed the order for delivery, then sat back with my drunkenness to think it over.

It was 10:25. The kids were likely to be asleep, unless they were over at their grandparents again.

I dialed again. The phone rang once, and Vampirella answered and I knew that she’d tell me what was going on as soon as I heard her beautiful voice.

“Oh, hi, sweetheart. It’s so good to hear from you, finally. I’m sorry I missed your calls. Work’s been a bitch. I guess you heard that from my Dad, right?” she did sound a little stiff.

“Yeah, I hear you’ve got a lot going on…so what’s happening? What are you doing now?” I should have just asked her what Brick was doing there.

“What?” She said, startled, “Now? Now? You woke me up, actually. I was just going to sleep in front of the TV. I sure have been busy at work though. You know Brick. He’s really been pushing me hard.”

My scalp tingled and all the blood withdrew from my extremities. I lost 70 percent of my lung capacity. My eyes and tongue swelled up. A hole opened up in my chest, and small loose objects nearby were tugged toward the vacuum. I should have just asked her what Brick was doing there, but again I didn’t.

“Oh? Well, fuck him.” I said. There was a long pause, “I mean, quit, already. You don’t need that lousy job. I’ve got enough lousy job for both of us until you find some other lousy job. I don’t like Brick, you know? Are the kids there?”

“Y-no. They’re at my parents. I was working up until after their bedtime.”

“So you’re alone?” I asked, just to clarify the issue.

“Yeah. I wish you were here,” she said, softly. I wished that, also. “So how’s Orlando? Is it hot there?”
My throat was starting to close up, “It’s terrible here. Look, Vampirella, I have to go. I had too much to drink tonight, and I gotta get up early tomorrow morning. So, um, goodnight.”

She knew something was wrong. “What’s the matter, Fang, honey?” I could imagine Brick Marrow watching her lying to me and it made the veins in my wrists and temples pound. And my eyes were actually tearing a little. OK, I was sure there was some reason she was lying to me. Some reason that was really reasonable. I felt suddenly drunker, or mildly concussed.

“Oh, uh, nothing, nothing. I’ll be home in a couple days and we can talk then.” I said.

“OK, then,” she said, “Well, goodnight. I love y…”

“G’night.” I said and put down the phone, delicately.

I sat there for about another two hours, trying to think of reasonable explanations, and I wasn’t really getting anywhere. I’d never known Vampirella to lie to me before, and while she often hid the soup spoons or my shaving cream, she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, hide something like this from me. I was almost out of my mind with worry. And I just kept drinking, which did little to clear my mind.

I understand that Americans take affairs too seriously. It’s no big deal if your spouse fools around a little. We’re all animals, right? It’s only natural. If I was more Worldly, if I was French, I’d probably be delighted to discover that my wife was having an affair. I’d probably have several mistresses myself. I’d probably buy the guy a celebratory baguette or something. She couldn’t be having an affair with Brick Marrow, anyway. Not him. He was unworthy of Vampirella, in his four-hundred dollar shirts and tanning-booth tans and shiny shoes and with his hair full of styling mousse, driving his bloated yellow SUV to go high-fiving people while talking on his cellphone while his beeper went off, drinking frappuchinos and eating nouvelle cuisine in restaurants where they give you the big square plates with delicate piles of wilted leaves, listening to tinkly new age music while reading books called Inflate Your Ego and Be Rich!

Finally I fell over miserably asleep, and I dreamed that Brick Marrow and I were racing bikes in the Tour De France. I was on my same old brakeless, beat-up black mountain bike, dressed like an organ grinder’s monkey, while Brick wore fancy yellow spandex covered with endorsements from condom companies, with a yellow helmet, and was on a yellow racing bike so thin it was practically invisible from behind, which was where I was, struggling to push my heavy bike through picturesque European villages, where beautiful red-haired girls waved from windows and bistros, trailing farther behind as he sailed up an Alp, pedaling so fast that his legs were a blur, effortlessly gliding to the crest of the mountain and starting down, and he was drawing away but now I was going down too, faster and faster, and the pitch of the road grew steeper and steeper until I suddenly realized that I was on an almost completely vertical surface, losing contact with the ground, falling into space, and as I fell Brick Marrow sailed past on a yellow hang glider and said, “Get the memo! Did you get my email? Make a copy! Get the memo! You owe me $2000! Get the memo, smartie?”

It wasn’t a brilliant dream or anything, and I can’t interpret the $2000 part, but I found it deeply disturbing. There were other dreams, and in all of them I was dressed like an organ grinder’s monkey, right down to the little red cap.

Piggleyland plunges to new depths of squalor.

2008-09-09T14:46:54Z

The Safari Luau! And a dance sequence!

The miniature rhinestone grandfather clock that projected from the dashboard showed the time to be 3:45, and Sam might be back at Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound anytime to change for dinner, so I hastened to return to awful, sweltering Orlando. Traffic was heavy, but the Cadillac handled well, despite the back of my shirt getting soaked by the sloshing hot tub. At 4:49 PM I parked the Cadillac and had just made it fifteen feet away from its door when Morvis Spontaines’ purple limo glided to a halt in front of the Delux Bridal Cabana. I greeted Sam innocently, like I was just going to play some shuffleboard or something, and dropped his carkeys neatly into the pocket of his pink sportcoat while he unlocked the door. He told me to meet him in half an hour and he’d give me a lift to the Safari Luau Dinner. He looked a little tired from his time among the pygmies.

I went back to the dank cinderblock mausoleum of my own room, showered and changed into a different pair of cargo shorts and a shirt with vibrant vertical stripes, then met Sam at the Cadillac. He threw me the keys, and I drove us back to the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort, stopping along the way for gas on Sam’s credit card, as the tank was about bone dry after my trip to the beach.

I was rather sleepy from a long day of swimming and sunshine. Sam Handwich, resplendent in his zebra-striped velvet suit in the passenger seat, would not shut up. “Morvis Spontaine and I are in complete agreement that an enactivational model for any business is to ziggurat your staff’s duty podules according to upper managements’ contextual convenience,” he announced through the window as I stood in the heat, pumping gallon after gallon of gasoline into the Cadillac.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ve always said that.”

“Hugo Bfori says it’s important to ask yourself these three key questions before making any management decision: 1. Who’s in trouble for this? 2. What if I do nothing? 3. AM I NOT A GOD???”

“That’s very pithy.”

“I told Hugo and Morvis that at Retro Cab, we choose to achieve hypereffectivable staffing solutions primarily through the leveraging of staff despair incentives, like my arbitrary firings and frequent unfavorable formal performance reviews designed to make employees and drivers feel small and overpaid. Additionally, we find it’s best to have staff overdocument everything on multiple spreadsheets which they know damn well are never reviewed by anyone. The third tine of the Retro Cab trident of Staffing Controlutions is, of course, the drug testing, which sends a valuable message to staff as well: it says, the company owns your genitalia. I used to have to make that point through overt sexual harassment.”

“Yes, I remember. We still don’t have many women on the staff. Or lithe young men.”

“What do you think is the most important new focus you can bring to Retro Cab from this Conference/Fiesta so far, Fang?”
“Oh. Well, I haven’t really called sunset on my industransactional absorbtion yet, but I do feel totally hot for the seismic opportunities in the application of usurious spurious security surcharges.”

“How does that impactualize us?”

“Well, for instance, we can charge customers more for the drivers who don’t have beards, because a lot of terrorists have beards. Or we can mandate that the drivers check their trunks for hidden terrorists at the beginning and end of their shifts, then charge a trunk check fee. That kind of thing. It’d be unpatriotic to object. In fact they’re supposed to be all proud to be an American because it costs more.”

“Would we charge that trunk check fee to the driver or the customer?”

“Um, both, I suppose?”

“Both! Terrific!” He beamed at me. I finished fueling the car up and ran Sam’s credit card inside to pay. It was just a short hop down the road to the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort, so I didn’t have to pretend to have had any other brilliant ideas, fortunately.

As soon as we parked the car, I could hear the drums: a furious rhythmic tribal tattoo, reverberating from inside the giant sundae-shaped mountainous buildings of the Hotel and Resort. The peppermint lozenge door was open, but it was dark inside. The light from the doorway reached halfway through the Rainbow Sorbet reception area, and then you could dimly see dancing firelight up ahead in the Fudge Forest Conference Room.

Sam said, “You’ll love this, Fang, the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta! Has been throwing this Safari Luau Cookout Dinner every year, and every year they outdo themselves! It’s partially sponsored by Constolid Trucking, Bfori’s Company, who do a lot of exotic animal transport, for zoos, circuses, Hollywood, pet stores, whatever. They really lay on a spread.”

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the firelight in the Carved Fudge Forest Conference Room. Then I could see hundreds of bodies, dimly gyrating and leaping about in the smoky darkness. An enormous bonfire was directly in front of us as we entered the room, and a shirtless insurance salesman was using a four-foot ladle to baste a spitted giraffe. Two of the Rubba Tire Dealership suitboys were required to turn the handle to rotate the carcass on the spit. A small, savage-looking ape ran up to me, bared its teeth, and thrust a rough wooden bowl into my hand. It was full of grilled tarantulas with cilantro and lemongrass. I offered Sam one, and nibbled a leg a little as we advanced into the room.

The giraffe and tarantula were only the beginning of the Safari Luau cookouts’ offerings. An orangutan gave me a deep-fried rhinoceros drumstick, which weighed 215 pounds, served in a rickshaw. Sam was picking at a colorful kebab of newts and canaries, and drinking from a coconut filled with a kava-kava cocktail. The smoke from the barbecue fires was mixed with heavy colored smoke from copper incense braziers, and the drumming was loud and insistent. It was very dark, and people wandered dreamily through the haze, or huddled crouching in small groups, tearing at a roasted komodo dragon here, pan-fried penguin there. Toward the smoky center of the Carved Fudge Forest, the largest fire of all burned low and hot with piled red coals under a massive turning elephant roast, as a ring of limo managers, air freight expeditors, IT support teams and a credit card salesman formed a samba line around the fire.

Every time you turned around, some shrieking chimp would be trying to shove some weird tropical drink in your hand, served in a pineapple or a skull or a volcano, and those chimps would get very agitated if you didn’t take the drinks. The usual wait staff were not in attendance, replaced for the night with various trained simians, who were not required to dress in outfits reminiscent of an organ-grinder’s monkey. I felt sure this would add to the sad resentment of the usual waiters, if they were to find out.

Representatives from the transportation industry were preparing most of the dishes, and Hugo Bfori was scuttling back and forth overseeing the cooking, dressed in a grass skirt. He stopped between the sautéed orca and the cayenne-crusted porcupines to grab me by the arm.

“Hey! Fang, isn’t it? Sam’s main man? Whaddaya think of our Safari Luau? Pretty impressive, right? I got the best network of exotic meat suppliers in the world. Zoos, pet stores, animal research labs, they all end up with extra animals now and again- you know, the old ones, or maybe they got a couple cougars that got the mange and they maybe ain’t so attractive? There’s good eating on a freshly dead anteater as long as you freeze ‘em quick. I get a lot of this stuff free, do you believe it? Some of it I gotta kill myself. I use a tire iron. I got a freezer warehouse, and all year long we end up with an expired emu, a mess of extra guinea pigs, some yaks and camels or whatever and I freeze ‘em, or kill ‘em and freeze ‘em, and we work out the recipes for preparing them at this Conference/Fiesta. Have a kangaroo rib,” the sweat ran in rivulets from the summit of his bald head down into the tangled thicket of chest and back hair that he wore on his chest and back.

It was a pretty good kangaroo rib. Hugo Bfori dragged me with him from fire to fire, checking on the dishes. Mac Asquith of Lavender Limos was hunkered down in a circle of small fires with iron woks, stir-frying platypus and wolverine meat with bell peppers and shitake mushrooms, served on a banana leaf.

“Good platypus this year, Bfori,” said Mac, holding up a furry billed head from the pile of heads and webbed feet next to him. “The wolverine seems a little stringy, though I marinated it all night.”

“I’m sure it’s delicious, Mac. You met Fang? He’s Handwiches’ Terminal Manager.”

I shook Mac’s greasy hand. A team of spider monkeys gave me an ostrich egg full of rum. I took a deep draught. Pam McWainscoting and her huge shiny helmet of hair emerged at a distance from a plume of purple smoke billowing from a brazier , dressed in a leopard-print bikini and carrying a spear and a strawberry watermelon daiquiri. Mac and Hugo both stood up straighter and attempted to suck their bellies in somewhat but I was horrified to see that she was coming for me.

She handed her spear to Hugo and put five half-inch nails a quarter of an inch into my pectoral and said, after an openmouthed gulp that drained her strawberry-watermelon daiquiri, “Sam Handwich told me I should see you privately to talk over Pharma-Go-Go’s service requirements…” she gazed in the latitude of my zipper significantly, “at some length.”

“You know, I’ll be right back, Ms. McWainscoting. I have to check on a thing.” I said, starting to back away delicately, but Hugo Bfori gave me a poke in the kidney and stage-whispered, “Go for it, kid! Don’t be a wussy!” Over Pam’s left shoulder I saw Handwich briefly, gliding out and then back into a deep orange haze of smoke. He winked, gave me the thumbs up, then made the OK circle of thumb and forefinger, then, horribly, poked his other forefinger through it. The orange fog rolled over him, and he was gone.

My eyes snapped back to lock with Pam’s huge blue eyes. One pupil was very small, and the other was so big that the eye looked almost black, but I suppose that’s normal for a pharmaceutical representative. She blinked slowly once, then let out a startling short ululating mating cry and lunged at me, pressing her lipsticked mouth against mine ferociously, her tongue slapping against my clenched lips. She gasped and drew back, having cut her lower lip slightly on my fang. Her skin was shiny with sweat, eyes thick with mascara, hair hard and shiny, and the trickle of blood that now ran from the smeary corner of her mouth down to her chin made her look like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

The drums stopped abruptly for five beats, then started up again, a new rhythm this time, faster, wilder. Pam McWainscoting leapt up into the air, ululating again and spreading her arms wide. She dropped into a deep awkward squat and then leapt up again, then went into a leap-and-shuffle faux-tribal dance consisting primarily of pelvic thrusts and shaky shaky shoulders. The drumming and the haze of smoke and the ostrich egg full of rum and this weird hard glossy woman’s embarrassing dance made my head swim, and sweat ran into my eyes as I tried to figure out a gracious escape.

The drums beat harder, and I threw the empty ostrich egg to the side and tried to signal a passing proboscis monkey for another drink as Pam McWainscoting mimed being a tiger, raking at my torso lightly with her clawlike fingers. She snarled, with teeth bared and pushed her pelvis against mine. Hugo Bfori said, “Sweet Baby Jesus.”

There was no polite way to run away. I had no choice but to start dancing or stand still and be mercilessly humped, so I started whirling and leaping around in time with the furious drumming, rising now to a tremendous crescendo. I grapevined around the various fires and spits of roasting exotic meats, glissade, circled the drummers, maneuvering now in quick samba towards the exit with Pam McWainscoting in hot jungle pursuit. I did a featherstep, entrechat and a quick reverse turn, and she almost lost her balance. Other people joined in, until the floors were full of half-naked, leaping, dancing bodies in wild abandon. Now executing a dangerous barrel roll, I tried to lose Pam in the crowd repeatedly, but she was on me like a mad octopus. I did a jazz run into a somewhat less than grand jeté, landing in a halfway decent arabesque. It was a delicate situation. If Sam saw me offend a potential client by refusing a simple, honest, sexual advance, he’d probably fire me. But of course I wasn’t going to let Sam pimp me out to potential clients. He had no end of potential clients that needed persuading.

I danced as I have never danced before, a series of flamenco taps, faster and faster, interspersed with wild kicks and windmilling arms, a coup de pique, and then faster yet, with knee slides, a sissoné, pencil turn, coffee grinder, chassé, chassé, stag leap and karate chops. Pam was panting with exertion, but I don’t think she could feel the pain like I could, because of the drugs. I was exhausted. I had to take a different approach.

The proboscis monkey was shambling past with a fresh tray of pina coladas and I grabbed the whole tray from him and gave Pam two drinks. She drank one straight off and the glass dropped nervelessly from a hand that went on to stray toward my belt buckle. I put another pina colada in that hand, and leaned against a huge fudge column.

“Wooah! Listen, I’m a little winded, Pam. What gives you such amazing energy?” I gasped. I handed her another pina colada from the tray. Her blue eyes displayed green lids briefly, coyly.

“Come back to my room here and we can discuss my products… and your services,” she panted, still with the blue movie dialogue, and she shoved me into an elevator. Sam, Mac and Hugo were looking on with a mixture of envy and amusement as the big licorice doors of the elevator closed to take us up to her room on the twelfth floor. I kept her from mauling me on the elevator by handing her the tray of drinks while pretending to tie my shoe. She had drunk two more pina coladas within four floors when the doors dinged open to admit more passengers, five fat men speaking German with swimming suits and snorkels going up for a dip in the red pop rooftop pool. I sprang off the elevator as the doors were closing on them, then turned around to look back at Pam McWainscoting, trapped behind the five round pink men, swaying drunkenly with the tray of pina coladas.

“Isn’t this your floor?” I said innocently as the doors closed. I left the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort on the double, running through the parking lot and diving over the embankment, free.

Piggleyland; The Lost Lagoon

2008-09-05T15:20:18Z

It was a difficult stagger back to Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound, because I was extremely drunk. I do recall falling painfully from the top of a concrete wall behind a stripmall. I paused for a moment to assess the damage, lying on my back next to a dumpster, and gradually became aware of five ancient prostitutes chainsmoking out behind their massage parlor and glaring at me through narrowed eyes.

I looked at them, they looked at me, and then the one packed uncomfortably into a purple corset said doubtfully, “You lookin’ for a good time, Sweetie?”

“Parm me,” I said, “Tearbly nishe of you…ladiesh…but I have a preshing gagement elshwhere. Rilly musht be goan. Mosht regretble,” I lurched to my feet and started walking uneasily backwards, bowing like some kind of imbecile.

“He’s a drunk! Let’s roll him!” yelled the one with the big yellow feathered panties. They were on me before I could turn and run. One of them held each limb while the fifth one, the one in the latex lederhosen, went through my pockets, until she found my wallet and found it empty, tossed it back to me and contented herself with taking my promotional pen. Then she kicked me once in the stomach and the five of them filed back into the back door of the massage parlor. I threw up a little, which was probably all for the best after all the drinks and the awful dinner, and crawled off.

I don’t remember the rest of the trip back to my room at Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound, but I must have made it because that was where I found myself when I woke up in the morning, lying facedown on the coffee table wearing one sandal and my boxer shorts. A trail of ruined clothes, torn and muddied, led across the dismal anciently-stained carpet from the door. My head felt like it was two feet wide and fuzzy around the edges. I had one bloodied knee and a slightly blackened eye, probably from the police officers’ slap. The sun was pouring through the window, and the digital clock on the nightstand next to the bed I hadn’t used read 8 AM, so I was too late to make the Conference/Fiesta breakfast, but I’d been planning to skip out on the Conference/Fiesta until dinnertime anyway.

I had a warmish shower and shaved my giant face. I made some coffee and ate a grapefruit and felt a little tiny bit better. I tried to call home but no-one answered, so I set off to try to make it over to the ocean. From Orlando you have to drive a little over an hour either East towards Daytona Beach or West towards Tampa to get to an ocean. I’d heard that Tampa was known for its stripclubs and adult entertainment, so I decided to head East, because my stomach still hurt from the prostitutes’ kick.

Morvis Spontaine had picked Sam Handwich up in one of Mac Asquith’s big purple limousines, which left Sam’s rented gold-fleck Cadillac sitting lonely outside his Delux Bridal Cabana, which had a sliding glass door on the second floor balcony, which Sam had not secured, which allowed me to obtain his rental car key ring from the table in the dining nook, which is where I found them after a quick run through five of the seven luxurious rooms of the cabana. I was thankful to be able to avoid the spooky-looking white lace bridal bedroom, designed for soothing deflorations, and the indecently pink plastic bathroom, where every surface was heaped with Sam’s yellow prescription bottles and embarrassing hygiene/medical devices.

With the car keys catburgled, I vaulted neatly back over the balcony rail and then wished intensely that I’d lowered myself gently, because I can’t take those fourteen-foot drops the way I used to when I was in my twenties. I had to lie in a shrubbery for a few minutes clutching my knee and swearing, while small multicolored geckos surveyed me suspiciously.

I lurched to my feet and stumbled to the Cadillac. The hot tub had steamed up the windshield, so I rolled the windows down and I rolled away from Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound. I took the Driveway to a Parkway to the Freeway, and after a half an hour I had cleared Orlando’s asphalt and was heading East, with swamps and tropical foliage on either side of the Freeway. It was a great relief to see that not all of central Florida had been paved. The ride was uneventful, save for the hot tub sloshing over a little on curves. I drank a lot of lemonade and enjoyed the hot blast of air coming through the windows. I found a crazy mariachi station on the radio. The sun shouldered its way out of the greasy haze that hovered around the city and beat down on the gold Cadillac. I did not turn on the air conditioner, but absorbed the heat. I’d need it back in Michigan for the remaining five months of winter.

Once I began to approach the coast, the asphalt came back. I think I was near the ocean when I got to Daytona Beach, but you couldn’t see it because of the solid wall of continuous hotel that had been built, fourteen to thirty stories high, all along the beach. I drove South, following the road that the map showed as running along the coast, and waited for a break between the buildings, but it never came. I considered attempting to bluff my way through a hotel lobby to the beach, but all the parking lots were gated and guarded for registered guests only. Across the street from the great wall of hotels was a repeating stripmall of the same twenty-seven chain businesses, cycling over and over again like the moving backdrop of a Hanna-Barbera film.

I drove for mile after mile down the coast, trying to find some public access. Finally, a battered sign pointed me toward the city beach. Again, I couldn’t park because the beach had gated, guarded, paid parking only, but I could see the beach from the street, and it wasn’t appealing. A massive packed parking lot, then thirty by seventy feet of beach and a similarly-sized rectangle of ocean buoyed off. There were fifteen hundred people miserably milling around, shoulder to shoulder, overseen by screaming life guards in tall chairs with megaphones. Large, armed hotel security men were stationed on either side of the public beach to keep the public from straying over onto the clean white empty private hotel beaches that stretched to the vanishing point on the horizon in either direction. I kept driving South. Now and again the street would turn away from the ocean and I’d have to find my way back, but whenever I approached the ocean the wall of hotels would loom up, visible from miles away. I was about to give up when I realized that I had just traversed a two mile interval of raised freeways where no roads cut off in the direction of the coast.

I stashed the car in a grocery store parking lot and ran across the freeway, then jumped the rail and went down an embankment, into a swamp filled with ejected debris from the cars that passed overhead. Fast food wrappers, cans, bottles, televisions, styrofoam packaging forms, sheets of plastic, air conditioners, dishwashers, scraps of clothing, disposable diapers made an impromptu landfill of the area for about a mile and a half beyond the Freeway, as I squelched East and the sounds of traffic gradually faded behind me. After a while, trees started to rise out of the swamp, and the litter was replaced with fragile greenery. The ground was soft, sometimes I sank to the knee, but I was able to keep out of the deep water. Occasional alligators cruised slowly through the open channels of water, and various long-legged birds stood around looking tense. I followed a slow-moving river for about a half an hour and found myself emerging onto a beautiful beach of white sand, where the river emptied into a horseshoe-shaped lagoon of clear, deep water.

I looked up and down the coast. Rocky promontories bracketed the lagoon on either side, and the now lush swampy jungle rose up behind me. There was no sign of human habitation except for one human, a shaggy-looking woman in a fringey dress who was sitting on the beach with her back to me, feet in the small surf, looking out at the flat line of the horizon. I didn’t want to startle her, so I cleared my throat gently, which made her leap to her feet, whirl around, scream at the top of her lungs and crumple forward onto the beach in a dead faint.

I had some time to look at her more closely as I dragged her into the shade of a palm tree and waited for her to wake up. She was about, I don’t know, 38-48 years old. I was pretty sure she had at least a couple of years on me. Her hair was blondish, matted into scruffy dreadlocks, and her nose had been broken at some point, and healed crooked. Her dress was, upon closer examination, a large cloth coffee bag with strings of small shells in decorative patterns. Her skin was tanned to a point approaching beef jerky. Her eyes, when they snapped open with horror, were very light blue.

“Oh, fuck!” she said.

“Hi!” I replied cheerfully. “Nice beach! Sorry if I startled you.”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to kill you,” she said ruefully, and produced a huge serrated military-surplus hunting knife for my appraisal. I took five steps back.

“I think you don’t. What, you need to be alone with your beach?”

“It’s not supposed to be here,” she said, “If this beach was here, there would be fifty hotels here. When the new Freeway was put in, thirty years ago, they never built a planned exit ramp and access road, because my father, who worked for the road commission, smeared jelly from his donut across that part of the blueprints when nobody was looking. The competing hotels on either side of the lagoon each think the other’s property starts just around the cliff and have big barbed wire fences to keep their guests from climbing around. And so I have to kill you.”

“I assure you, you should not kill me. I’m remarkably trustworthy. I have two kids and a lovely wife who would be unhappy if I didn’t return. I have always hated hotels and highways both. All I wanted was to see the ocean. I can keep your secret. So you can step back, a little,” I had her at the kids- I could see her flinch when I mentioned them. Frankly, her threats lacked all conviction from the beginning. She dropped the knife in the sand. I offered her a bottle of lemonade, and she took it.

“It’s a rubber knife anyway. It would have been really hard to kill you with it. It’s just…this might be the last unfucked beach in Florida. I’ve lived here ever since they finished the freeway. My father’s buried right over there.” She nodded in the direction of a simple marker, adorned with seashells, sheltered in a small stand of palm trees. “This was his retirement plan, and now I’m just seeing how long I can hold out before they come in with the bulldozers and the nondairy frozen confections. Have a swim, if you like. I’m going to be working on a macramé hammock.”

We introduced ourselves- her name was Susie. I admired her macramé politely, and took her up on her proposition. I stripped to the trunks I had under my shorts, and rode the gentle warm current from the river into the cooler center of the lagoon and spent an hour clumsily swimming back and forth in the salty crystalline water, with the fat sun beaming down on me like everything was OK. Then I laid on the beach for awhile, then went out for another swim, and I felt completely great.

I was just heading back towards shore, swimming in deep water with foot-high waves when I saw a large dark orange mass in the water, drifting with the tide toward the beach. At first I was afraid it was some kind of monster jellyfish, as it had an uncertain and tentacular outline. As it got nearer, I could see that it was some kind of garbage- a hairy fabric, mottled with blotches of purple and green on a background of orange, and it reminded me of something but I couldn’t put my finger on it until two bleary red eyes turned to regard me and the Bob said, “Help, Fang, tow me to shore. I been fuckin’ swimming since fuckin’ yesterday, and carpets ain’t made to swim.” He coughed pathetically. I grabbed a chunk of him and dragged him through the surf up on to the beach, where he crawled up on some rocks to dry off.

I had to say, the Bob had never looked better in all the time I’d known him at Retro Cab. The long swim had shampooed much of his thirty years worth of accumulated ashes, coffee and dirt out of his shag, and as he dried, his colors, though still in muted tones of marmalade vomit, were much brighter. Susie dropped her macramé and came across the beach to where the Bob sat, wheezing and snuffling. “What the hell is that?” she asked.

“Susie, the Bob. He’s a carpet. The FBI had arrested him for Terrorizing Lulu Bricious. What happened with that, the Bob?”

“Fuckin’ Feds. They beat me and kicked me for hours. They poured water on me. They threw me to the floor and stepped on me repeatedly. They wanted me to confess to being Al Qaeda. They burned me with cigarettes. Fortunately, I’d gotten used to all that stuff at Retro Cab. I spat in their lousy cop eyes. To hell with Lulu Bricious.” He said viciously, “She’s making a mockery of rugs everywhere with her fascistic merkins! It’s my fuckin’ first amendment thing that I should be able to protest, right? Then these other guys came in- C.I.A. They said they were takin’ me to fuckin’ Guatanamo to meet some specialist with a lot of small scissors. I was in the plane for four hours, and there was four C.I.A. guys playing cards, when one of them reached into his pocket to get his wallet, and he pulled it out along with out the fuckin’ pin of a grenade- I recognised it from my time in ‘Nam-, and everyone looked at the pin of the grenade dangling on his finger and wondered where the grenade was for a couple seconds. Then he exploded. I got sucked out of the hole in the side of the plane, and parachuted down into the fuckin’ ocean,” he coughed wetly again. Susie looked at him sympathetically.

“Does either of you have a cigarette?” he asked, desperately. We didn’t. “Jesus. It’s all over for me. They’ll track me down again, I just know it.”

“Stay here if you want,” said Susie. “No guarantees on how long it’ll last, but nobody except Fang and you have come to this beach for decades. You’ll have to build your own hut, over that way somewhere. You play badminton? I haven’t had anyone to play with since my dad died.”

The Bob looked at Susie through eyes suddenly filled with tears, “I’d love to play badminton with you. And don’t worry, I won’t be underfoot around here. Look at me! I can walk! I can walk!” indeed, the Bob reared up and stood now, like a shaggy orange haystack, swaying back and forth. It really agreed with him to not be nailed down. He shook out his folds, and several large fish flopped onto the beach. Susie got a fire going, I killed and cleaned the fish and we cooked them over coals on the beach, and we all sat around eating and talking for awhile until I had to get Sam’s car back and attend the dinner in Orlando.

The last time I saw the Bob he was building himself a teepee out of driftwood, waving an orange tentacle in farewell. “Fight the power, Fang!” Susie escorted me along a better path back to the grocery store parking lot, said a quick goodbye and disappeared to forage in one of the grocery store dumpsters. As I drove away in the gold Cadillac, I could see her running back across the freeway toward the swamp, waving goodbye with a large bunch of beets.

PIGGLEYLAND Bigger, Faster and Weirder yet.

2008-08-28T13:37:53Z

Things are heating up at the Conference/Fiesta. Check out the Hobo Kwisine!

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.

it's Pigg Pigg Piggley, Piggleyland!

2008-08-18T18:56:42Z

This weeks installment: Vampirella's Job, in case you were wondering...

Her Conference/Fiesta name tag announced her as Pam McWainscoting, Senior Transportation Coordinator for Pharma-Go-Go Field Agents, and she looked varnished. She had the biggest shoulderpads that I’d seen since 1985 and a frosted motorcycle helmet of hair. Her eyes were the same color as the one I had just flushed, which rattled me.

Pharma-Go-Go was expanding their operations from their traditional storefront superpharmacies to hot dog-style vending carts, with popular pharmaceuticals available in tiny waffle cones, and they wanted a taxi service in Michigan to drive their representatives from cart to cart around Detroit and its suburbs restocking the supplies, as most of the representatives were too heavily sedated to drive themselves. I lied and lied and lied to that poor woman about the quality of our vehicles and the trustworthiness of our drivers and most of all about my own participation in customer satisfaction. After three minutes of lying my time was up, and I had to go to a different and much longer interview, with a representative from a national chain of funeral homes that were quietly eliminating their hearse budget by sending the corpses to cemetaries and wherever else they had to go in taxis. It would be very important for the cabdrivers to pretend to be talking animatedly to the corpses, and quickly prop them back up if they started to slump over, so that no-one would notice and think it was weird.

Then there were several other scheduled interviews, so I kept lying and trying not to fall asleep, then a massive lunch was served. An insurance agencies’ vendor booth was handing out free tote bags, emblazoned with their logo. I surreptitiously filled one of the bags with food and drinks and scampered out through the service entrance to blow off the rest of the days’ interviews and two crucial seminars. I walked back to Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound.

Back in the room, I unloaded my bag. I had almost enough food and bottled beverages to last me the rest of the three and a half days remaining. I had 4 bottles of lemonade and one of champagne and a baguette and nineteen individually wrapped mini-cheese wheels and five grapefruits, three kiwi, four bags of pretzels, fifteen assorted teabags, a salami and a lot of miniature chocolate bars, a couple apples and bananas, some dates and figs and four blueberry muffins. I considered just holing up in the room for the remainder of the trip. I missed my kids so much it was driving me crazy. I called home, and Natasha answered.

“Hlo?”
“Natasha, it’s Daddy! How are you?”

“Tibor says his eyes can shoot paralyzing rays.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s useful. What are you doing this afternoon?”

“Grandma and Grandpa are bringing us home ‘cause we spent the night and this morning.”

“At your Grandparents?”

“Yep…watched a lot, LOT, LOT of TV. We saw this one dead guy in a tank, but it wasn’t a cartoon, it was just on the news after a cartoon when Grandpa was asleep. Tibor said it looked like a dragon attack victim, but Grandma came in and turned on the Buyables cartoon show, and Wonky had the croup.”

“Fun. I love you, Natasha: is Tibor there?”

I talked to Tibor for a couple of minutes and managed to glean that Vampirella had been called in to work the previous night, and that Wonky needed to eat his Pocket Strudel when he felt blue.

“Then I poured my milk into the TV to slake Wonky’s ferocious thirst, dad, which was sposed to only be slaked with Exxxtreme Kwench Kiwi-Kornsyrup Phizz, so it broke the TV.”

Then Vampirella’s Dad Tiberiu got on the phone.

“Ve are vaiting for your vife. Cheeldren are vonderful.”

“Yeah, I like them. I’m sorry about your TV. I’ll pay for it, of course. Is Vampirella back at work again today? Couldn’t she get whatever it was done last night?”

“Forget zee TV, eet vas old and I vant to go visout von for a vile, eef only to avoid haffing to see zose deesgosting Buyables again. Your Vife, I sink maybe zshe ees steel vorking ztrait zhrough from las night. Bot zshe says zshe veal be here vischin zhe hour. Ees a spacial eedition of zat coupon book for your American Szanksgeefing.”

I thanked Tiberiu for watching the kids and told him to tell Vampirella that I missed her. Then I rang off, put on a Tiki-style bathing suit and went outside to sip some lemonade by the murky pool. It was bothering me that Vampirella had to be at work so much recently. She’d taken the job as a part-time thing just to make a little extra cash and Mrs. PriceThrottler’s kept making her do more and more work for that same amount of money. Vampirella wasn’t anywhere near my class of slacker. In fact, she actually applied herself to her work with a remarkable amount of dedication and care. Inevitably, eventually, an employer would piss her off and she’d quit, and usually defenestrate someone or something in the process, but up until then she’d keep completing the projects as given.

I’d had hopes that the part-time nature of her work would keep her job low stress, so she could stay with one employer for awhile; Vampirella had had about forty-two jobs in the seven years we were together before the kids were born. She had little patience for jerks and imbeciles, which cripples you in the business world.

Her resignations were usually impressive. When she quit working for the bank, it took them two days to convince her immediate supervisor that he was safe to emerge from the vault. When she resigned from the Haus of Yarn, she spent a week of eight-hour shifts tying knots first. When she quit working as a realtor for Kuntry Kondos, she filled the carpets of the showpiece model condo with grass seed and water and turned the heat up before the long labor day weekend, and by Tuesday the grass was ankle deep all over the condo. She had a job painting murals for awhile, and the mural of her supervisor being buggered by a pack of orangutans was one of her finest works, appearing as it did on the side of his house the day she quit working there. She had a very short stint as a waitress at an upscale restaurant, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t really urinate in the zinfandel, she just told all her tables that she did. She worked for the Ann Arbor News at one point and people still talk about the day the paper came out with the headline: “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK.” I will never forget coming to pick her up from the interior decorating job. Both of her coworkers were wallpapered to the wall, and their worried faces appealed to me silently, sticking out of a garish sunflower print. Her coworkers at the ice cream shop were fortunate that their frostbite was not acute enough to warrant any amputations. Her former boss at the Laff-a-Minnit novelty shop still can’t get the joy buzzer out of his nose, and it goes off when he sneezes. She worked for the local phone book company, and the Yellow Pages came out black when she quit. She worked for a pet supply place until she filled it waist-deep with water and ordered a thousand piranhas.

Vampirella’s coworkers, blissfully unaware of the risks they were taking, did little to take the pressure off her. Unlike me, she had no-one to delegate tasks to. The franchise owner was a revolting salesman suitboy named Brick Marrow, responsible primarily for obtaining the contracts from local businesses to run their ads and coupons. Oily, arrogant and obsequious, with his expensive pink shirt unbuttoned so that you could tell he waxed his chest, he tooled around in his bloated SUV, a babyduck yellow Dodge Penetrator, was rarely at the office, and was the primary contact for the mysterious corporate owners in Salt Lake City, who rarely spoke to any of the other workers. There was a blank little round lady named Sylvia Cowmeadow who did the billing and accounting for the office, and Frank Grizell, a 60ish barrel of unfiltered cigarettes and five o’clock shadows who wrote the local ad copy and Mrs. PriceThrottler’s signature feature column, Mrs. PriceThrottler’s Restaurant & Digestive Reviews.

Written from the point of view of the completely fictitious Mrs. PriceThrottler, a

feisty septuagenarian who rejoiced excessively at the prospect of modest discounts on items of dubious value, the first half of the two-part food review column was a standard local restaurant food and service review, but the second part, the part that set it apart from ordinary restaurant reviews, went on to evaluate the eventual intestinal repercussions of the meal, with exquisite descriptions of any resulting eructation and/or flatulence, and a lengthy forensic dissection of the ultimate stool sample. Many restaurants sailed through the first half of the review with high ratings only to lose points for loose stool texture or, worse, constipation. The restaurants that chose to advertise in Mrs. PriceThrottlers Val-U Bonanza, coincidentally, always got great reviews. If Brick Marrow couldn’t land an account, he’d let Frank know, and if Frank couldn’t insult their food enough, he’d also have Mrs. PriceThrottler complain about being unable to control her multitudinous farts at the Church Social. The Restaurant & Digestive Review column was very popular, though more commonly known as the Chew ‘n’ Poo Review.

Vampirella was the only one who could actually design the ads and format the copy, put the coupon book together and send it to the printer, so she was stuck with actual work. It was very different from my job at Retro Cab.

OH MY GOD WILL IT EVER END...(not soon) Piggleyland

2008-08-14T17:28:56Z

Yes, it's a novel. It's not, like, a giant huge monstrous overwhelmingly large novel, but it absolutely meets the basic over 50,000 words prerequisite so don't expect me to shut up about Piggleyland for a couple few months at least. I'm honestly sorry.

I wound my way though a series of dry culverts and eventually found myself looking at a shantytown, in the deepest and most remote area, a dead grove of orange trees, covered in garbage, that hadn’t seen the sun in twenty years, shaded by the layered freeways. There were about twenty shacks, made of cardboard and plywood and old billboards and plastic garbage bags. No-one was visible, but I could smell something cooking, and I turned to quietly avoid the area, but found my way blocked by two enormous razorback hogs holding rusty spears. At first I was afraid that they were from Piggleyland, and then I was afraid because I could see that they weren’t. Their pigsuits were as ripped up and dirty as mine, held together with scraps of wire and accessorized with loincloths fashioned from roadkill pelts and bone jewelry.

“Oh,” I said, “Hi.”

“Another Pig has been cast out of the Promised Land, Pickles,” said one of the hogs to the other.

“Oh ye foolish pig!” Pickles the razorback said to me, “What hast thou done to be ejected thus like sausage unfit for consumption?”

I wasn’t sure how to play this yet, so I stayed silent and raised my shoulders and upturned palms in a woebegone shrug.

“Wast thou seen without thy head? Didst thou kick the children? Didst ask for the forbidden pay increase or take breaks like a wastrel?” Pickles continued.

“I…who are you?” I asked.

“WE ARE THE LOST PIGS!” screamed the first hog. At the sound of his voice, thirty more filthy, tattered pigs silently emerged from the shanties or rose up from behind the dunes of drifting fast food garbage. Each of the razorbacks grabbed one of my arms and they marched me down into the cluster of shacks.

A stooped old pig, black with soot and ashes, festooned with tufts of rat fur and a necklace of alligator teeth and bird bones, shambled up to me and laid his hand on my forehead, saying, “As thou art so are all of us. All were cast out from that happy land where pig eats pig in innocence. The Consortium will not let us back in, and so now we seek to atone for our porcine sins. Come and take the sacrament.”

The crowd of pigs hustled me around the corner, where I was sad to see a fat man in a pigsuit roasting on a spit over a fire. The meaty smell was pretty good, but the scent of burning fabric overwhelmed it somewhat. The old blackened pig hacked out a couple of ribs with difficulty and thrust them towards me, saying, “Eat, and know that thou wouldst be delicious also, with barbecue sauce or perhaps a honey glaze.”

At that moment, there was a huge explosion as several of the shacks were blown apart and two Jeeps full of Piggleyland Security Warthogs rammed directly into the crowd of pigs, firing automatic weapons in all directions, mowing them down mercilessly. There were pigs dropping on all sides of me, screaming that Hamageddon had come. I threw off my pig head and ran like hell between the dead trunks and brittle branches of the orange trees. From the gunshots and dwindling screams, I could tell that the Warthogs had made short work of the little colony, and it was all my fault, as they had probably come looking for me. My guilt was somewhat mitigated by the lingering image of the fat man on the spit, however. I ran back into a culvert and shortly had made my way back up to the sunlit parking lots that led me over to the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort, shedding the last scraps of pink pig costume as I approached the peppermint lozenge front door.

That detour had made me slightly late for the breakfast buffet, which was pretty picked over, so I had to content myself with some rum raisin end table and part of a strudel loveseat, while a different waiter, also sad about his organ-grinders’ monkey outfit, poured coffee. Frankly, I wasn’t all that hungry, after seeing the spitted man in the pigsuit.

I was seated at a cherry pie today, with two well-groomed identical representatives from a limousine company in Boston, an insurance specialist and three soft auto insurance salesmen. The banter around the table was lively, sports figures and celebrities, traffic complaints and the price of gasoline, amusing transportation anecdotes galore, but I got the idea that something about my appearance was off, from the way they kept glancing away from me.

I excused myself and stepped into the tutti-frutti restroom to freshen up. My clothes were slightly rumpled and damp from the long hot time in the pigsuit, but were essentially presentable; black jeans, black canvas tennis shoes, red bowling shirt with black stenciled flames and the name “Carlos” embroidered on the pocket. My mop of hair was a little matted, and there were some small smears and spatters of dirt and blood across one cheek, but it could have been fudge and strawberry jelly for all anyone could tell. Harder to explain was the blue eyeball, sitting on my shoulder, peeking out shyly from under my collar.

I brushed it off into a toilet and flushed it quickly, grimacing, and splashed my face with club soda from the tap. I went back to the cherry pie, but no-one was seated there anymore. In fact, all six of them seemed now to be on the other side of the Carved Fudge Forest altogether. A grey man stepped to the podium at the far end of the room and began to read minutes from various meetings, and show overhead projector slides of budgets, and read lists of sponsors and supporters until it was evident that I had to leave or die a horrible death. I slid out of one of the wintergreen side doors of the conference center, and climbed over the tall stucco wall to sneak into the hotel outdoor pool and bar area, where I had to strip to my underwear and charge a drink in a coconut to room 223 so that I’d look like I was supposed to be there. I had a Hot Fudge Jacuzzi, then a brisk and invigorating swim in Pink Champagne, then reclined my white Northern body on a licorice lounge chair in the sun and fell asleep. I woke up an hour and a half later, not yet acutely sunburned and aware that I was fifteen minutes late for a scheduled twenty minute interview with a potential client. I hopped back into my pants and over the wall, and stumbled to Retro Cab’s flimsy folding table, made of hardened meringue, just as she was beginning to stand up and leave in disgust. I apologized skillfully- apology is my most-utilized management skill, working for Retro Cab.

PIGG...oh, you know.

2008-08-06T12:12:23Z

OK, so, a mere 20 episodes in, and now we will begin to approach the titular phenomenon: PIGGLEYLAND.

I'm so excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’d gone to sleep around 8:50, so I was fully awake again by 5:30 in the morning. The Conference/Fiesta didn’t kick off until breakfast service at 8 AM, to be followed by tightly scheduled meetings with vendors, then seminars until around 7 PM.

Sam Handwich was scheduled to be somewhere off Tampa with Morvis Spontaine on an exclusive charter fishing boat, hunting manatees and dolphins with grenades. So I had about an extra hour free besides the walking time back to the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort. I walked out of the driveway of Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound and up the dirt shoulder of the boulevard street, up about a half mile to a stripmall. There was a Mo’ Nuts Donuts, a Sloppy SlurpDawg Drive-Threw, a PhatBurgerz, a Family Tub, a Ye Bacony Grille, a Pinkly-Shrinkly Weight Loss Klinic, and four musty gift shops that all offered the same nine trademarked items for sale at the same price. I looked for a funny postcard, or a tin of canned sunshine, or a good rubber alligator or something, but everything was overpriced and covered with revolting corporate logos for awful products and uninspired cartoons. I bought nothing, and was despised for it. I climbed the cinderblock wall behind the stripmall and cut across a long dead block of dirt, broken cement and dying weeds where something like a parking garage had been demolished. There was a narrow, muddy creek that cut diagonally across the lot at the bottom of a ditch, and as I leapt over it I saw a dead alligator, floating belly up. There was a dead armadillo on the shoulder of the next interstate that I had to run across, and a dead flamingo on the grill of the truck that narrowly missed me as I ran across it.

I was returning to the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort from a different direction than I had come yesterday, through some dry culverts under stripmalls and roads, which took me into a shadowy dead place, at the extreme end of the bustling service docks for the amusement park Piggleyland, underneath multiple layers of freeway overpass, looping overhead, supported on monumental legs of white concrete. I bent back a loose corner of the wire fence, topped with razorwire, to cut through a field of boxcar-sized storage containers and rusting machinery that took up an area of about four city blocks , behind the dumpsters. There were about a thousand dumpsters, each the size of a dump truck, and a steady stream of dump trucks were hauling away the garbage, and returning with empty dumpsters, as hundreds of pink golf-cart sized garbagetrucks swarmed out of the park, filling the dumpsters the day’s first binfuls of waxpaper wrappers and plastic bags and bottles and half-eaten Breakfast Pouches and Bacon Dunkerz.

I took pains not to be seen, as Piggleyland was legendary for its fascistic security, but the trucks were driven by people in pink pig costumes, as were the workers on the distant loading docks, so their vision was impaired anyway. I was more concerned about the pole-mounted security cameras that twitched and rotated here and there around the vast yard.

By the time I had dodged a quarter of the way across the field, I realized I’d made a mistake. I was sorry I hadn’t tried to walk the extra mile-and-a-half around. There were times when I was totally exposed when running from storage container to storage container, and everyone else working in the vicinity was dressed as a pig. Plus, when I got to the other side, I’d have to get through the other side of the fence.

Piggleyland started as a chain of Piggleyland BBQ Pit & Play Trough restaurants, owned by the American Pork Consortium, that served only pork: porkburgers, pork fries, milkshakes made with real pig milk. The restaurant and their marketing concept of a village of cute cartoon pigs with disturbing cannibalistic tendencies, perpetually scheming to eat one another, salivating excessively over the luscious hams of their neighbors and coworkers, had really resonated with the American public, and there were now tens of thousands of Piggleyland BBQ Pit & Play Trough restaurants and four theme parks.

I almost stumbled out right in front of three huge swine with tophats who were wrestling a huge plastic display ham out of a storage container, but I dodged back and hid behind a rusting forklift until they carried the ham away, grunting and swearing in their hot, heavy pink pig suits. They had left the storage container door open, and I took a quick look inside. There were piles of gears, a slightly smaller plastic display ham, bags full of plush stuffed hams and small ham pendant necklaces and earrings. Also, back in a corner, there was a dingy pink lumpy pile that turned out to be a discarded cowboy pig costume, in some disrepair. I zipped myself into the mildewed coverall pigsuit and leather fringed vest and chaps, and regretfully lowered the huge spidery pig head over my own. I clumped out of the storage container on clumsy cloven feet and tried to look natural as I sauntered on towards the distant fence. The head obscured all peripheral vision, and it was awfully hot immediately. I made it within a hundred yards before a quartet of hogs dressed like ballerinas passed by, with wheelbarrows full of bacon, and looked me up and down with some suspicion. My costume was filthy, with smears of black oil on the belly and tangles of spiderwebs under the arms and between the legs. I tipped my dusty cowboy hat at them nonchalantly and continued on, walking faster while trying not to look like I was walking faster. One of them yelled something after me, and I clicked my pig heels together in a devil-may-care fashion and kept going. With my limited vision, I now noticed that several of the security cameras were moving to point in my general direction, and I broke into a full-out run as a siren began howling from the vicinity of the loading docks.

The suit probably added 60 pounds to my weight, so I doubt that the run appeared graceful. My cowboy hat flew off as I climbed up onto the roof of a storage container in hopes of leaping over the twelve foot fence from there, but it was too great a distance to the fence. Three Jeeps full of tough-looking Security Warthogs were now speeding towards me from the docks, more and bettter sirens were going off, and pigs were running everywhere. I ran down the length of the container and jumped the six foot distance to the next one, then the next, then the next, until I found one where I thought I could make the leap to the top of the fence and climb down. It was a jump of about nine feet, which would have been easy without the pig suit, but I did it with the suit, which was hard. I was happy to be wearing the pig suit once I had jumped into the razorwire, because it kept me from being sliced to ribbons. I climbed/fell down the other side of the fence and jumped up running again. The Jeeps pulled up on the other side of the fence, but the Security Warthogs didn’t attempt to scale the fence, they just yelled at me and into ham-shaped walkie-talkies.

I figured they’d have more pigs coming for me, maybe in pink helicopters or something, pretty quick, so I made haste to get away, dodging behind the concrete freeway support pillars and sticking to the black shadows cast by the endless swirls and ramps of freeway layered above me. The pigsuit was now dirty and shredded by razorwire, but I didn’t want to take it off yet so that I wouldn’t be identifiable if seen.

If you say "Piggleyland" 3 times into a mirror you see a bloody pig, I hear.

2008-08-04T16:49:59Z

I walked through a quarter mile of parking lot, and pushed through a pink plastic hedge into another parking lot, then down an embankment and ran across eight lanes of a highway, which was exciting for me and a number of drivers. I followed a dry drainage ditch for awhile, drinking from a large bottle of lemonade that I’d taken from the conference. There was no-one else on foot that I could see, which was kind of peaceful except for the thousands of cars and trucks roaring and squealing around and above me on twisting freeways and overpasses and exit and entrance ramps. The sun had set, but it was actually brighter out under the multitudinous freeway streetlamps than it had been during the daytime, a vibrating greenish light with sharp areas of shadow. A neon-blue coupe ejected a bag of half-eaten debris from a Sloppy SlurpDawg Drive-Threw and narrowly missed my head. There was so much fast food garbage in the drainage ditch that it was difficult to tell that there was dead brown grass underneath. There was an unholy smell of exhaust all around. I climbed a fifteen-foot wall and dashed across another interstate, then wove my way through twelve more parking lots until I heard the horrible screech and saw the blast of flame from the volcano, and found myself walking through the parking lot of Alligator Al’s.

The clock told me it was 8:30 PM. I used the phone to call home, but nobody but the answering machine was available. I told the machine that I’d made it safely to Hell, and missed my family desperately. Eventually it said “Beep,” which was little consolation. I went back out and looked at the sullen teenagers stewing in the hot tub. I looked at the cloudy pool water, the volcano exploded again, and then a gecko looked back at me from a greasy plastic shrub, and that was the evening’s entertainment. I went back into my room and managed to fall into a fitful sleep, where I dreamed of Vampirella swimming in a caramel river swarming with robot homeland security alligators. Four days to go.

BACK TO PIGGLEYLAND!

2008-07-30T16:24:58Z

The Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort is herein described.

We were pulling up in front of the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort of Orlando, a huge complex with buildings shaped like giant stucco ice cream sundaes, famous for its opulent dessert-based accommodations. The fabulously expensive hotel rooms were actually freezers, and each item of furniture was a different flavor of ice cream: the bed was strawberry with sheets of vanilla fondant, the dresser was pistachio with drawers of butterscotch, boysenberry and rocky road, the ottoman was mint chocolate chip, etc. The taps in the bathtub ran with cold soda water and hot chocolate. There were swimming pools full of pink champagne , red pop, cream soda, and hot fudge Jacuzzi tubs. The mostly morbidly obese guests all were issued oversized thermal PJs with feet and bibs upon check-in, to prevent frostbite and unsightly drips.

There was, in fact, an obscene lot of food for the conference/fiesta. Great buffet tables made of rock candy in the exquisitely carved fudge forest conference rooms were laden with giant hard candy platters of iced crab legs and shrimp, marinated portobello mushrooms and olives and colorful peppers, cheeses and breads and a guy in a paper hat cutting slabs of beef, ham, nutria and alligator meat. There were 250 transportation industry people furiously, desperately feeding, pirhana-style, and I dove in with enthusiasm. I really hadn’t yet eaten at all, and it was almost 6PM. I had a dicey couple of minutes wrestling but emerged victorious, carrying three plates of food. I rejoined Sam Handwich, who was drinking at a giant steaming mince pie table with a hill-shaped man who was shiny at the summit above one tangled eyebrow , and had either a bad moustache or impressive nosehair. I drew up a slightly delicate pretzel chair and sat down at the pie.

“Hugo Bfori, this is Fang, my Terminal Manager. He’ll be making the rounds at the Conference/Fiesta, so you and I will have more time for the links!” Sam said. I was afraid for a moment that I had missed the sausage links at the buffet, but then I realised he’d be talking about golf. I nodded and smiled at Hugo with a crab leg sticking out of the corner of my mouth. They kept talking about golf, so I just stayed out of it.

A waiter unhappy at being dressed like an organ-grinders’ monkey came by and poured me a glass of wine the size of my head. I ate efficiently and with cool determination, and within eight minutes I had cleared the plates except for shells, bones, rinds and the occasional olive. I felt much improved. The sad waiter came and gave me a huge piece of coconut cream pie, or something, and I ate it and a little bit of the table slowly while surveying the vast conference room. Massive pillars of different flavors of fudge had been carved into a forest of trees, laden with marzipan fruit and multicolored transparent leaves made of thinly pressed fruit leather. It was most painful not to have the kids with me in a place like this, of course. They loved climbing trees.

There were hundreds of people in the room. The average transportation-industry executive was male, 55 years old, a hundred pounds overweight, deep circles under his eyes, thinning brush-cut, poorly shaved, chainsmoking, tie loosened, and pretty drunk already. They weren’t beautiful. They were clustered in small groups, exchanging business cards and slapping each other on the shoulders and yelling for more drinks from the monkeys.

I told Handwich I was going to go set up our folding table of rates and services and then “circulate” to “network” with “potential contacts”. Fortunately, he said he was going to a Latvian Prostate Massage Parlor with Hugo and I should find my own way back to Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound. It was only about three miles, so I figured I’d spare myself the cabfare and just walk.

After they left, I assembled our display table: a loose pile of brochures and some free but mostly inkless pens in the shadow of a standing cardboard photo of a shiny Retro-Cab, with a smiling driver opening the back door. The driver in the picture was a model. None of our actual drivers opened doors for passengers, or smiled. Then I wandered around for a very few moments, talking to no-one, and then blew off my first two scheduled seminars: (Billing Me Softly and Sabotaging the Personnel Files of Model Employees that You Secretly Despise) and walked out through a giant swirled peppermint door into the heat and glaring light of a reluctantly setting sun. I could hear the roar and feel an additional furnaceblast of heat from the field of the ten thousand air conditioning units that it took to keep the candy centers of the Hotel and Resort from melting into the asphalt parking lots that stretched interminably in all directions.

re:Piggleyland

2008-07-11T15:38:45Z

I'd just like to point out that 17 episodes means I'm halfway to 34 episodes. I may take a week or two off to soak my head.

Piggleyland: today featuring Alligator Al's Central Florida Fun Compound

2008-07-11T13:45:18Z

Pavement, nineteen-story pink stucco motels, asphalt, billboards for sticky amusement parks, freeways, road construction, twenty-four story pink stucco motels, blacktop, a city truck with a water cannon watering the weak, smoked palm trees in the dry median of the freeway. Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound was just off exit 68, off 4, South of Orlando, near a Chikkin Bisky! and five other fast food drive-thrus, and a gas station, and a liquor store, and some cement. There was a miniature golf course in the compound with a pink stucco volcano in the middle of it. As I stepped out of the Cadillac, a ball of flame the size of a two-car garage exploded from the top of the volcano with a tremendous screeching sound, and small sparks showered down over the parking lot. Sam walked into the lobby dripping in his Speedo and checked us into the compound: he had a Delux Bridal Cabana, I had an Ekonomy Hut in the row of cinderblock beach huts that lined the cloudy pool at the base of the volcano, on the opposite side from the miniature golf course.

Sam said he’d drive me over for the opening night conference reception and buffet at the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort in an hour and a half, and suggested that I use the time to enjoy the pool, steam room, shuffleboard and other leisure amenities available at Alligator Al’s.

I dragged my molested luggage to the dingy pastel green door of my cinderblock hut and entered using a key card emblazoned with Alligator Al’s logo: a happy alligator, holding both a drink and a crudely-rendered blonde in a bikini. The room was dank, like only a cinderblock room can be, and smelled of powerful industrial cleansers fighting a losing battle. There weren’t more than three large bloodstains on the patterned greenish carpet. There was a large television that could be seen from all corners of the room, presumably so you could sustain the illusion that you were somewhere else. The bed took up most of the room, one corner had been drywalled off for the bathroom, the toilet had been Sanitized! For my protection, which I appreciated. There was a counter/dresser along one wall with a plastic coffeemaker, a couple plastic cups shaped like oranges, and an ice bucket with a plastic liner. The minifridge below the counter contained a large variety of small bottles of liquor and alligator jerky, with the usual hilarious price sheet. I tuned in an old horror movie on the TV, and set my suitcase precariously on a flimsy aluminum suitcase stand.

The bathtub was clean enough to shower in, and the water was lukewarm, so I washed off the flight and drank a couple thin cups of complimentary coffee, then went out to look around the compound.

As I left the room the volcano exploded again, as it apparently did every 20 minutes, and I involuntarily flinched at the horrible noise and furnace-blast of dry heat. There were twelve sullen teenagers conspiring in one end of the kidneybean shaped pool, and nine enormous Germans in an adjacent hot tub. Hundreds of small geckos skittered nervously around the ground, picking up cigarette butts, hiding under plastic bushes, sunning themselves on many concrete surfaces. I beat a bitter old lady at shuffleboard, which was fun. It was about ninety degrees and the sun was an angry one, which was great after the snow and bitter winter winds of Michigan. I walked over to the liquor store and bought a can of coffee, as I’d already used all Alligator Al’s complimentary coffee, if that weak brown stuff had in fact been coffee. I got some real cream and sugar, and some fizzy water, and a half-pint of Irish Whiskey for emergencies. Sam was almost due to come pick me up, which constituted an emergency, and so I had a short snort of the whiskey on the way back to the room, then made some proper coffee in the wheezing, decrepit coffeemaker and dressed for the Reception.

There was to be a strictly enforced dresscode at the conference/fiesta, defined mysteriously as “Elegant Business-Smart -no sandals, jeans, or tubetops.” That left a lot of leeway for things like grass skirts or suits of armor, but in the end I got dressed in a pair of purple leather wingtips that I got at a thriftshop, some black khakis covered with pockets, a subdued grey and olive palm-patterned Hawaiian shirt, and a string tie with a silver cowskull clasp. I combed my unruly mop of shoulder-length dirty blonde-turning-white hair back and trimmed my pointy sideburns carefully, and then Sam was beeping his Cadillac outside. I walked out into the stunning sunlight and dropped into the passenger seat next to Sam, who smelled strongly of a reapplication of his signature Olde Englishe Vinyle Spicede Cologne.

“Fang, the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta is a very prestigious affair, Networkingwise. Keep your ear to the ground, and you’ll learn many valuable ways for us to pay our drivers and dispatch staff even less while maintaining lousy service, how to avoid compliance with costly vehicle licensing and inconvenient Government regulations, lots of crafty methods to gouge customers with delightfully unexpected assessorial surcharges…it was at the TTTICF just two years ago that I established my contact with Mr. Lung, who now supplies us with our retro-styled taxidriver uniform kits, which save us $1478 per year now that the drivers have to sew their own uniforms together with thread they have to buy themselves. I couldn’t believe how much cheaper those Korean Uniform Kits were than the wasteful fully-assembled shirts and pants we used to buy. But year after year, I find that my social obligations with other industry leaders take me more and more away from the nuts and bolts of the TTTICF; the seminars, the vendor booths, and so that’s where you come in. I need a discriminating, professional representative of Retro Cab here to dive in and comb the moneymaking meatballs out of this big bowl of transportation-industry spaghetti.”

“That’s me, Sam. There is nothing I relish more than combing spaghetti. Speaking of which, is there supposed to be food at this thing?”

Sound ye horns, Varlets! TAN-TARAAA-TARAAAAA! !! (piggleyland)

2008-07-07T13:05:12Z

Thanks for attending: You look magnificent today. In today's episode, our winsome protagonist "Fang" avoids unusually intrusive scrutiny by Homeland Security during an absolutely average modern airport experience. At length, an arrival is effected in Orlando.

Immediately a security guard stepped in front of me. He was tall, black, with sunglasses, a utility belt to equal the Batmans’, a Taser in one hand, a tank of tear gas on his back, ears full of electronics, “What are you doing here?” he said, pushing a forefinger into my sternum.

“Is this where they keep the airplanes that fly places? I was going to do that,” I said.

“What’s your confirmation number? Type it into that terminal right there, NOW,” he said, and shoved me backwards twenty-five feet into a kiosk with a keypad. I dutifully typed my number into the system- 8453BNU-459666666FF5T76HJ-45-769K-78458239P383874743-04 – and was rewarded with a flashing screen that said “APPROVED MINIMAL SEARCH FACTOR 765,” which meant that the security guard merely cut my suitcase open with a giant bowie knife, held up my underwear for the lingering appraisal of the eighty-six people in line ahead of me, and confiscated my jam. From the shredded clothes and bowlegged stance of many of the people in line, I was thankful that I qualified for Factor 765. “You are cleared to proceed through the Homeland Security Portal. Step to your left and get in line,” he turned and clicked away.

Gradually over the next hour and fifteen minutes the line inched towards the security station. The guards at the metal detectors made you remove your shoes, belt and everything in your pockets, and then you had to spin a giant roulette wheel. Again, I was fortunate and the wheel spun to “Nasal Cavity Search.” The guard shone a flashlight disinterestedly up my nose, swabbed it for traces of explosives, and summarily released me. The guy right after me spun “Bone Marrow Analysis,” and I hurried to get my shoes back on before they got the drill out. The floor was covered with scraps of underwear and greasy rubber gloves, and the air was full of the surprised exclamations of people experiencing undesired intimacies.

I saw a couple of security guards leading a worried swarthy man with a beard into a room marked “EXTREMELY PAINFUL RUDE AND INVASIVE BUT REGRETTABLY NECESSARY FOR THE HOMELAND PROCEDURES.” In fact, most bearded men were being methodically plucked from the line and marched into that room. When the door swung open to admit more people you could hear screaming and a rhythmic squelching noise.

I sat in an airport bar on the way to the gate and tried to drink a fifteen-dollar Bloody Mary. It was difficult at 8:30 in the Morning, but I managed it finally when I overheard some fat blonde jerk telling his wife how darn safe and happy it made him feel to see them Arabs and them finally getting treated poorly after what they did on NineEleven. Sam Handwich was already at the gate when I got there.

“You’re just in time, Fang! They’re just about to board the plane. Of course, I’ll be going in ahead of you, as I’m flying first class, and you’re in the economy seats, as befits our respective status.”

“Naturally, Sam. I’m just glad you haven’t asked me to be shipped as cargo in your luggage.” Sam laughed at that, but I could tell that he was truly disappointed not to have thought of the option.

The loudspeaker crackled and a voice screamed over it, “Homeland Security Level has just increased to Tangerine! All citizens in the Terminal will presently be asked to drop to all fours for and prepare for crowd anal examinations. The Department of Homeland Security would like to remind you that we can take you away anytime you choose discompliance and your family will never know what horrible inhuman things we’re doing to you for years until you beg for death as a sweet release.” Sam Handwich, the fat blonde jerk and his wife and about eighty percent of the other people burst into spontaneous applause.

Handwich was disappointed that the plane boarded before the security procedure commenced- I could see, revoltingly, that he’d been positioning himself to observe the anal examinations of a threesome of teenaged girls.

We were herded onto the plane with excruciating slowness. By the time I got down the long, cold exhaust-filled accordion ramp into the plane, Handwich was seated in a massive lounger in the third row back of first class, sipping his second glass of Champagne while a beautiful stewardess massaged fragrant oils into his temples and sang him a soothing lullaby.

The wodge of people, festooned with zippery carryons, pushed deeper into the plane’s sausage-casing, stuffing it gradually it to capacity with nervous meaty filling. The fat blonde jerk, predictably wedged into the seat next to my assigned seat 46F (a window seat of minimalist proportions), was particularly meaty, flowing generously into the seats on either side of him, and particularly nervous now that he was in the plane, with beads of perspiration on his upper lip. I vaulted over him and his substantial spouse, and smooshed up against the window, looking out at a guy with big earmuffs assaulting some luggage on the tarmac.

I watched the earmuff guy beat suitcases for the next hour and a half, while the plane inexplicably failed to show signs of life. The Stewardesses, stringy women who appeared to have been freeze-dried and salted, did their little disaster pantomime at one point, which was very entertaining, but I was the only one who applauded. Finally the engines started up, and we disengaged from the gate and began to drive aimlessly around the runways of Detroit Metropolitan Airport for the next forty minutes, then we stopped somewhere else , with a nice view of a drainage ditch and a blinking light, where we waited for another twenty-five minutes, and then there was a lot of muttering and twitching from the next seat as the plane accelerated and wrenched itself up into the air. The sky was thick with cloud, and the plane tunneled through ten thousand feet of wooly grey before bursting out into the blue sky above the clouds, levelling out around 35,000 feet. One of the freeze-dried Stewardesses came down the aisle with a cart, and relieved me of another fifteen dollars for two teeny bottles of vodka, which I drank quickly while staring out at the pure white cloudscapes of castles and valleys and cliffs and dragons. Nobody’s figured out how to advertise on the clouds yet, which is a great mercy.

I was fairly tipsy by this time, actually, having had three drinks and no food whatsoever -I probably should have paid another ten bucks for the small bag of Salted Snackshop Sweepings. I climbed the fat blonde jerk and his wife, both now apparently unconscious or faking it, and went into the lavatory to look closely at my aging drunken face under grey florescent light.

I looked like hell in there, but I didn’t take it too personally because I think they do that on purpose so that people don’t get too turned on in the airplane lavatory.

I missed Vampirella and Natasha and Tibor so much. I pissed miserably into the tiny toilet and washed my pouchy face and stumbled back to my seat, stepping rather hard on the abdomen of the blonde man on the way in. The seatbelt sign came back on, and the plane began a rather bumpy and precipitous descent, which caused the blonde man to grab my knee in a way that I found overfamiliar, so I delicately speared him in the back of the hand with a ball-point pen. Then we had tense words that killed a lot of the two hours waiting for the plane to disembark. Gradually I pretty much stopped being drunk and started feeling simply wretched all over.

Emerging through another accordion ramp, this one hot with exhaust-filled air, I walked into the Orlando Airport, enjoying the feeling of not pressing against other people. I met the well-rested Handwich at the baggage claim, pulling seven big expensive bags from the conveyor belt. Amazingly, my bag had also successfully made it to its destination, with only a couple of footprints on it, and the long rip from the bowie knife, which I’d roughly stitched shut with a shoelace back in Detroit. Sam looked disparagingly at my disheveled appearance. He strapped his seven bags together into a giant wheeled motorized cart, climbed on top and drove it off toward the rental car area, as I trotted behind. Sam had rented himself another gold-fleck Cadillac, this one with a small Jacuzzi in the back seat, which Sam immediately had to try out. He stripped down to a gold Speedo in the rental car parking lot and eased into the hot water, and I had to drive to Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound while Sam splashed and bubbled behind me.

Piggleyland OH MY GOD NOT MORE PIGGLEYLAND

2008-06-30T17:38:02Z

I woke up at 4:30 AM. I mean, I actually woke up around 3 AM and watched the clock for an hour and a half, and then crawled out of bed. I called Retro Cab to tell them to send me a cab, because I’d put in a timed order for one and I knew they’d ignore it. Juanet answered on the twenty-third ring, “Thank you for calling Retro Taxi where Good Ol’ Fashioned Taxi Service is New Taxi Solutions for the Future?”

“Juanet. It’s Fang. Where’s my cab, Juanet?”

“Whaaat…?” she said, like she didn’t even know what a cab was. Her technique was admirable.

“I need a cab at my house now, Juanet. 1134 Quidproquonset, Ann Arbor. To take me to DTW.”

“Whaaat…?” she said, again, brilliantly.

“Juanet. Let me talk to Skeetch.”

“I would? But he’s asleep?”

“Wake him up, for just a moment.”

There was a noisy pause while Juanet roused Skeetch out of his postalcoholic stupor by pouring a little cold coffee into his ear, “Bleeaaarghhh! What the fut! What the fut!” he yelled into the phone.

“Skeetch. I need a cab to my house, now, like the order says. Handwich is going to be really pissed with you guys if you blow me off like one of our customers and I miss my plane like our customers always do.”

“Jesus motherfucking A. Chill out, Fang, I’ll have Mincely over there in four minutes. You lucked out- he’s just dropping off up the street from you now. So… have a lot of fun on your vacation.” There was a low tone of resentment in Skeech’s voice, and I knew he was thinking about smoking stinky cigars and drinking beers while eating deep fried pig maws on a grimy motel bed, switching the TV giddily back and forth between Pro Football and “HOT WET LAWYERETTES.”

“It’s not a vacation, Skeetch. It’s a valuable business networking opportunity.”

“Whatever, dude, we’ll be thinking of you baskin’ in the sun in Florida while we slave away here in the cold ‘n’ frozen.”

“Skeetch, slaves have to work for a living. You need to find a different metaphor.”

Amazingly, “Meat” Mincely did in fact pull up in a smoking Retro Cab at the Quonset’s front door just fifteen minutes later. I’d be running very late by now, except that I’d already planned for all these delays. If only all of Retro Cab’s customers would plan an extra hour to hour-and-a-half into their trips, they’d be much happier with the quality of service. I ran into the bedroom and kissed my three sleeping honeys goodbye as Mincely blew his horn repeatedly outside. I was weeping like a jilted teenager, and I put my sunglasses on so Mincely wouldn’t mock me for my weakness.

“Meat” Mincely was a grizzled old drunk who hated me for my youth and vigor. He’d worked for General Motors, installing some widget in a frammitz shaft 432 times a day for twenty-seven years, then he was laid off six years before retirement age, and had to start driving cab to supplement his partial pension and support his really large wife and family. I was 20 years younger than him, and he looked 56 years older than me. “Meat’s” face hung thinly on the front of his skull like a wrinkled grey washcloth. His hands were enormous and knotty on the steering wheel, his scrawny torso bulged in the middle like he’d had his daily quarter-keg installed. It rankled him to no end that a stripling like myself was his immediate supervisor, and he blamed me directly for Handwiches’ abhorrent staff policies and low pay.

“Where ya goin’….Boss,” he sneered.

“To Metro Airport, Mincely. I’ve got to meet Handwich there and catch a flight,”

“Thass what Skeetch said. You pay us drivers fucking less and less and blow our money on Airline Flights to exotic locations where you smoke stinky cigars and drink beers while eating deep fried pig maws on a grimy motel bed, switching the TV giddily back and forth between Pro Football and “HOT WET LAWYERETTES.” We do all the work, and you go and fucking wank it all away.”

I paused for a moment to admire his complete lack of restraint, “Yeah, Mincely,” I said slowly, “you’ve figured it all out. Jesus.”

“Meat” Mincely squealed away from the curb, spouting a nonstop freeform stream of accusations, invective and lists of injustices. It drowned out the antics of the Wacky Kooky Mornin’ Zoo Crew on the radio, so that was nice, anyway.

He blamed the UAW and the UN for a lot of his personal problems, but I had notable mention on his list of predatory villains. He was right, so it was difficult to get to worked up about it. I mean, from my perspective I could clearly see that Handwich really was getting fabulously wealthy whereas I was just barely able to pay the bills. But from “Meat’s” perspective, I was actually able to pay the bills whereas he was about four years behind on the rent at the trailer park, and his whole family lived on bags of Monkey Chow that he stole from the dock at the Animal Research Facility at the University of Michigan Hospital.

Mincely drove quickly to the Airport, but took the longest route he could contrive to take, so it took a long time. I signed off on the usurious meter charge and added a 5% tip, which was as much as Handwich would allow. He tipped waitresses like that, too, so you never wanted to go to restaurants with Handwich where he’d been previously, unless you desired spit in your entrée. I tossed Mincely another ten bucks from my own pocket, because I really had enjoyed the thirty-seven minutes of insults and thinly-veiled proletariat threats. He sneered at me again, said “I hope the terrorists get you, you son-of-a-bitch,” and peeled away from the curb, leaving a fat cloud of black smoke that clung to my shirt in oily floating threads as I shoved through the door of the airport terminal.

..."Meat" Mincely takes Fang to the Airport