Chapter 3 read by Greg

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3

 

Carly grew tired of her own brazenness and of saying that I sucked. I knew she was really just a wuss with a heart of red. Dad and Old Man Spellman started throwing up every time we mentioned the Pope - that and they ran around like two disparate parts of the same torn-apart whole.

 

-¡Tranquilizers! ¡Stat! -Dad screamed.

 

-¡Depressants! ¡Give me depressants! -That was a gimme from Old Man Spellman.

 

Everyone I knew was crazy. And that included God and all his penis-heads... Excuse me, angels.

 

Dad was tiring of Carly’s brazenness also. He had one metal finger on his right hand and it had been corroding ever since Carly was born.

 

-¡God fucking dammit! ¡Look at this! -Dad said. I knew he was pissed. His metal finger had rusted to the point where it looked like the Baja Marimba Band.

 

-I can’t feel my own pulse -Dad announced. That shut up Carly. But she’d be back to disingenuous in a moment-. I have one metal finger and Carly wants to sack me like I’m a pocket full of spuds.

 

Both his hand and his brain were metallic. Kinda like a crayon denture embedded in a mouthful of sorbet.

 

-Stupid motherfucker -Carly grunted. I knew that she knew what she knew wasn’t meant to be known. That, or I didn’t want to have another frosty one.

 

I looked at everyone - especially Old Man Spellman. His eyes were white and so was his blanket. And then he started hissing.

 

And then Dad slapped me upside the head. It felt like I had been hit by a knight in shining armor.

 

-Watch this -He said.

 

I was right when I had said that Dad was a sack of shit. The last rays of the sun were ponying down to earth, shining off of Dad’s metallic finger and reflecting back as red as the sun - if the sun was asleep. Or if the sun was on an ass-free diet.

 

What I was talking about I didn’t know. And I didn’t know how I was going to segue into anything without breathing very heavily and screaming:

 

-¡God! ¡Fucking dammit!

 

Then Dad passed out the cat sauce. I couldn’t fishing believe it. And it was cold cat sauce. And it tasted metallicy. More like fish sauce. Except this fish sauce ¡had a guitar in it!

 

A shiver ran up and down my bald spot. Dad grabbed a sack of cat sauce - the kind where the protagonist parts the Red Sea with a fishing knife - like it was coffee - and downs it. It might as well’ve been a sack of carp for all the peace it brought.

 

Dad’s eyes opened wide. His metal hand looked like a mountain of tires made of paper mâché as he grabbed another piece of cat gut.

 

-This is new. A new opportunity for fame and fortune. It’s time that we saw our cat sauce as a major piece of the USA pie. We’ll take it from County Fairs to World Expos to Local Freak Shows. We won’t live on any Fear Street in Any Town, Bumfuck, USA. We’re going to sell this shit like there’s a party and it’s 1999...

 

His words refused to turn around and go back into his mouth. ¿Who did he think he was? ¿Al Franken, Sr.? His collar was the wrong color and so was his nose. After he moved his hands in front of his nose it stayed the same corrugated color. Good thing Dad was fond of coffee.

 

-¿Coffee, anyone? -Dad said as he sucked down the brew. His hands were brilliant and lustrous. The strange object rounding his head wasn’t collagen, but a large, dilapidated credenza.

 

Then it hit me like a gigantic bolt to the jugular - but there was an even stranger aspect to this tale than getting hit by imaginary lightning.

 

¡My teeth were on fire!

 

It was some species of human flame that spiraled and smoldered in my mouth.

 

Blue smoke. Blue flame. Blue clam sauce. It all poured from my mouth, leaping into the human condition like a teeny tiny furnace fire.

 

I put my hand in my mouth.

 

And so did Carly.

 

And so did Old Man Spellman.

 

But I was the first to scream.

 

-¡Son of a fucking bitch, get your hands OUT! -I thought I had said, but it sounded more like “¡OON AM EW LO NAH CUN DOH YAH TEN!” when it came out. I sounded a lot like my sour puss Uncle Basil-. Take all of your hands out so that I can take this opportunity to throw up. You don’t want cold goo all over you, it would be a bad contrast to your nice, white shirts.

 

Unbelievable, ¿right?

 

Dad commiserated with me, Carly beat on her tambourine. I don’t know what Old Man Spellman was doing. He was probably kissing his own cold goo because he liked me so much.

 

Oh, Old Man Spellman was taking out his dentures and passing them around.

 

-If you want my opinion -He said without teeth-, what we have here is a failure to lactate.

 

-¿Who axed you, old man? -I cracked.

 

Another failure to lactate.

 

It was high time that I went to New York because Dad would never go to New York - unless they were passing out free mannequins.

 

Everybody could see that Dad was going to die of caffeine poisoning. The reason he drank so much coffee was the same reason he never entered a kitchen: his metal finger.

 

Old Man Spellman and I threw pizzas at him. Pizza after pizza, until there was a mountain of pizzas that even Sir Thomas of New York couldn’t move.

 

Carly would ladle niceties on Dad, or throw cigarettes at him. She knew that he had a hard time smoking with his metal finger. And he could never handle a compliment.

 

When Dad dies and they pass around the plate, there’ll be enough dimes to wash all of our clothes and to dry them. For at least a year. That will be his legacy.

 

Sir Thomas’s armor looked more like my favorite professional wrestler, Hulk Hooligan. That guy ate anchovies made from full metal jackets. The penile area was round and solid. There was also a tree trunk growing out of the armor. And if you pet the armor three times you’d have no problems.

 

I couldn’t believe that with all the histories in all the books in all the worlds, I still believed in ghosts and goblins.

 

-¡Fan-fucking-tastic! -I pronounced the word even with the fire in my mouth still smoldering.

 

-¿You know an aspect of all of this that’s fantastic? ¿Is that what you’re saying? -Old Man Spellman tried to palm my bald spot.

 

Dad started snoring.

 

-Now the unique aspect we can take from all of this is that God is Great. If we behave ourselves we’ll all go to that big metal mountain in the sky, and, as hard as this is for me to believe, we’ll all be peeling potatoes.

 

The telephone rang and Dad thankfully stopped snoring. Old Man Spellman also stopped whatever it was he was doing. He said that he was “musing on creation”. When I asked her, Carly said that we were created to pony-up money to the millionaires.

 

-¿Do you believe that, Mickey? -Dad always showed off his poor memory by calling me Mickey-. ¿How astute can anyone be ¡who DOESN’T HAVE TO WALK AROUND WITH A METAL FINGER!?

 

-¡Hey! ¡I’m as astute as the next asswipe! -The girl with the Rapunzel hair said in her soft, nonsensical tone.

 

I was going to the kitchen, and I was NOT going to take the escalator.

 

     

 

I was smoking, but I was not going to smoke a cigar. I knew exactly what was going to happen: I’d have some macaroons with cheese, watch a comedy and then listen to Carly until I was nauseous.

 

Carly was already starting to limp. She tried to tell me that no one ate macaroons with cheese on them unless they were in a kitchen with a serial killer. From this side, Carly was just frothing at the mouth like a frog in a pagoda who was way too fond of Jean-Paul Sartre. Come to think of it, we had fun, fun, fun until our pagoda was put up for auction on eBay®.

 

We had to work our selves sober in those days because we were preparing for college. And we had to read our selves to sleep because we had insomnia. At the time, my favorite TV show was Monster Chiller Horror Theater, which I would wake up for at 9.

 

There was a lot of debris on TV, but nothing like Monster Chiller Horror Theater. It came with a side order of tremendous emotion and tremendous agitation. In fact, both the emotion and the agitation were tremendous.

 

I washed my teeth, took my pulse, put on my pajamas, and got ready for a night of “Dolemite” and “The Mack”.

 

But I had forgotten cologne. I got out of bed, washed my hands and feet and then my car. Then I watched a little of “Dolemite” and then I was transfixed by the light of the silvery moon, so I turned off the record player and got back into bed.

 

Then I felt a strange sensation that told me I had forgotten to worry about religious cults kidnapping me in the night. That and cologne. Oh well, it was more important to worry. I was so intent on worrying that I could see a circle of people circling me. One was Oral Roberts. He wanted to know where his 35¢ was. But I didn’t know. Another person wanted to know where my soul was, but I didn’t even know where that was either.

 

Without a ticket, you can’t claim your soul and, without a soul, you can’t go to sleep.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

I was snoring before I hit the pillow. I dreamed that God had a recording studio and that She was doing impressions of famous polar bears. Polar bears with beautiful blue eyes. And hats of armor.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

I heard “dum dum” again.

 

This time I opened my eyes to listen.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

It was definitely “dum dum” or “dumb dumb”. ¡Wait a minute! ¿What part of “dumb dumb” has to do with sleeping?

 

I listened to my body and I listened to my breathing.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

Now it was really pissing me off.

 

Just because I forgot my bedtime cologne, and just because I forgot to worry about my... stuff... It doesn’t mean that people can fuck with my head, no matter which way it is inclined. Okay, I’m listening again.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe the Museum of Race Rioting and Aquaman was behind this. It was a fucking rude museum.

 

Oh well, all things being rude, I’ll just go to sleep.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

This time I got up. This time I was a little nervous.

 

The Museum of Race Rioting and Aquaman wasn’t the only thing that could be rude.

 

So could the Spanish Inquisition.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

I tried to take a breath and I tried to take the escalator to the kitchen, but the museum’s kitchen stepped in my way as if this were its house. When I told it to get the fuck out of my way it told me to step the fuck off.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

I screamed and you screamed and we all screamed because I screamed. I was getting agitated, but a humiditous, palpable, blue mist was air-raiding my sinuses.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

I was going to go to the museum to look for the sound. But first I had to find my way out of the kitchen. It reminded me of the time in gym class when Mr. Sirk, our professor of physical education, didn’t know a hole in the ground from his ass.

 

¡Now that was an occasion! I had the opportunity to see a true fuck-up in action. I had the opportunity to see what it’s like to be an authentic enchilada.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

I couldn’t breathe out. I could only open the kitchen door.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

I had to get past my insecurities about breathing if I was ever going to amount to the hill of beans I aspired to.

 

Dumb dumb.

 

I opened my eyes to see I was shrouded in obscurity. And I was alive.

 

It was horrorable.

 

I couldn’t even light my own fire. Jesus H. Christ.

      -- on to chapter 4   or   back to Cab Driving --