Without a Head

The Body

It wasn’t breathing that was so difficult, it was standing on my toes long enough to keep the noose from making breathing completely impossible. While I stood there wondering if it was worth the effort, I had gained a new respect for ballet dancers. Before today, I had spent life waiting for it to start, but at that moment my mere existence was in jeopardy I was wondering if I was alive by reason of insanity or was it just the absence of pride?

It all started because someone’s luck had run out for good. When the sun was still up I wasn’t in my usual bad mood because it was spring and I couldn’t wait to waste my evenings watching my team giving it’s all trying to shorten my life span, when a body that had no place to hang a hat on, flew through my window. I may not be the greatest detective, but I never forget a body without a face. Whoever it was, that landed on my floor, didn’t give a damn about gender or stereo types. It took me a few minutes to figure out that this was a guy that I could have easily beaten up with all my appendages tied behind my back. And it was certainly a guy I wouldn’t turn my back on in the shower or maybe I would, I’ve been told either side of me is the worst of two evils. The flabby stiff had no identification or a note from its parents excusing it from life, so I figured I’d let the cops figure out what dead guy had been thrown on my throw rug.

After a few hundred times of giving what the cops thought was the wrong answer, they bagged the body and carried it out of my house the way it might have come in if it had a head. By then I was envious of the headless dead guy because I had a head on my shoulders that now had one hell of a headache.

The Mobster

Detectives ask questions most of the time to themselves and most of those times they don’t get answers and if they do it’s usually the wrong answer which leads to more questions. This time I wasn’t getting any answers, right or wrong. And I wasn’t even sure that I was asking the right questions. I was hoping that someone would toss the dead guy’s head though the window so we could put both our heads together and maybe find a few answers. That’s when the home phone rang, and my cell, and my doorbell, and the tea kittle started to whistle. I knew where the front door and the tea kettle were, the other two I had to track down, my cordless must have ran off with the signal (I still haven’t found it), and I tracked down the cell phone a note too late, but I did manage to quiet the tea pot and arrived at the door before the big guy standing there pulled the trigger.

Unfortunately for him, he either forgot to put them in or couldn’t find any bullets. All he got out of the six-shooter was a click and all I got was a bad bout of angina. We stood there looking at each other, eye to eye, nose to nose, twitch to twitch. Since it was my door way he was surrounding, I figured, he wouldn’t think it was rude of me to say the first words. “I guess you’re not Avon calling.”
“Not exactly.”
“Hertz,” I said, letting him know I was familiar with commercial banter.
“We try harder,” Letting me he was not a commercial newbie.
“Avis,” I that pinned that down quickly.
“Fly the friendly skies.” He blurted out.
“United,” I spit out instantly.
“Nixon is the one,” he said proudly like a true “red state” Republican
“68 election.” I was on my game.
“Tippy Canoe and Tyler too.” I’d heard the phrase many times I was pretty sure it a was campaign slogan for John Tyler but I wasn’t sure and I wasn’t in the mood for a history lesson, so instead I said, “Tinker’s to Evers to Chance,” then before we both could admit we were stuck in clichés we couldn’t pin down I spun out, “If you planned ahead, your gun could have done its duty and we wouldn’t have had time for trivia.
“Yeah, well that ain’t my fault. My stupid roommate must have borrowed my gun last night and forgotten to reload it. I don’t know how many times I told the guy to leave my stuff alone. Last time it took me an hour to wipe the dried blood off my knife. Then the idiot cleaned his finger prints off but left mine. And forget about the knots he left in my piano wire. My lucky wire too. Six clean kills.”
“You just got to be more careful when you pick out a roommate.”
“You never know about a guy till you move in with him. The thing is he came highly recommended from his roommate in the can. That’s what I get for trusting a con who testified for the prosecution”
“Well, it was nice talking to you.” I said cheerfully as I started to shut the door, but the gun man stuck his size twelve-and-a-halfs in the door jam and said, “Maybe I should have phoned first but since I’m here already, I think I’ll come in.”



The Coffee

He was too big to push out of the way so I asked. “How about a cup of coffee, I grind my own beans?”
“Sure, I like my java black.”
“It’s the only way to taste the bean.” I let him in with a wave of my head. Sure he could have a shiv and could have sliced and diced me, but I had a feeling he wasn’t the stick and run type, besides I had my own gun only a few feet away. And I was pretty sure I loaded it earlier that day, but was not so positive about taking my blood pressure pills, or was it the other way around. Oh, well, I guess it was a good thing I didn’t need to use it.
“You know, I wasn’t supposed to leave here until you were a stiff.”
“Yeah, the gun in your hand gave me that impression.”
“I don’t meant to pry. But why are you trying to kill me?” I was hoping for an exact answer but not necessarily the truth.
“If I knew I’d only be telling you just loud enough to hear it over your last breath.”
That was the truth, so I pressed my luck. “So it was a contract hit?”
“Not exactly.”
“Without getting into commercial catch phrases again, what does not exactly mean?”
“I mean, it was sort of contract?” He said as he unbuttoned his jacket, took off his shirt, ginny-T and started to shave his chest, with an electric shaver that was doing a convincing job at pretending to run out of power.
“Sort of a contract? You mean I’d be alive, but in a coma.”
“I like that. Do you mind shaving my back, I might have a date later tonight? “
He saw me hesitate. “Come on, I promise I won’t come back and kill you.” Normally, I don’t do that sort of thing, but I needed him to keep talking.
“Who put the hit on me?”
“Hits usually come through certain channels but this was different. It was a gift certificate.” He waited for me say something, but instead I reached for my gun on the end table. “Hey, I’m not screwing with you. Whoever called in the hit got it in a gift bag. I was mailed the certificate with name and address of the guy I was supposed to whack.”
I thought the headless body flying through my window was gonna be the weird-light of my day. But the older the day got the stranger things were getting. “What do you mean a gift bag? Who gives a gift bag with a certificate for a free hit?” I raised the gun and said, “If you’re pulling my leg I’m going to blow your head off.” Maybe this is what happened to the stiff that flew through my window.
“I’m being straight with you. Scouts honor,” he said, raising a hand that held up two fingers.
I couldn’t believe a hit man just said scouts honor. He returned my smirk with “I was an eagle scout, I don’t take these things lightly.”
“An Eagle Scout? And I volunteered at a leper colony”
“Hey, if it wasn’t for dames and talent for killing I’d have made it to Explorer. Scout’s is where I learned to shoot and tie knots. You got a rope? I can tie a noose you won’t believe in less than a minute.”
“I believe you. Like I was saying before, who gives away hit certificates in a gift bag?”
“I guess you’re not too connected. Otherwise you would have known that the Gianco family was having the first annual Cosa awards ceremony: Recognition for outstanding work by wise guys. You know to build family spirit and loyalty, figuring maybe this would stop the guys from ratting each other out.”
I handed him a cup of steaming coffee which he fearlessly gulped down. “Like you’re doing now,” I shot out before I could pull in the reigns on my tongue.
“I’m not ratting out nobody!” He shouted spurts of coffee that fled the scene of his mouth. “The awards ceremony was common knowledge in my neck of the woods. Hey, even some cops on the take were there. My lucky ass roommate was nominated for best original hit. He whacked a guy using a tomato plant time bomb. He planted it in the garden and the thing sprouted tomatoes with nitro in them, soon as the guy plucked one, it exploded and he was his own meat sauce. Good coffee.”
“I got to admit that’s pretty original.”
“The guy who finished second offed a mark with a turtle neck sweater that had a piano wire in it. All he had to do was come up behind the guy and pull the hidden ends that blended into the wool’s pattern. The turtle part kept the guys head from falling off. Pretty clever.”
“Sit.”
I didn’t realize it before but the guy was big, too large for a shadow that fit. When he hit the couch the wake of his body sucked up most of it. This time he took an almost dainty sip of the Joe, “Man, this is one very good bean. Where did you buy it?”
“Thanks. I got it on Ebay. Before you leave I’ll give you the web site. But first tell me how I can find the guy who cashed in his hit certificate on me. Oh, and do you know anyone who lost his head lately?”
He really didn’t have any idea who ordered the hit and said it could have been one of those pot luck kind of things, but he gave me the certificate that was mailed to him. It was nicely done and if it wasn’t for the decorative bullet holes and blood stains, it could have been from Macy’s.
We finished a pot of coffee, and he left promising me that his attempted hit was all the certificate was worthy of and if I got whacked it wouldn’t be him rubbing me out. As parting gift I gave him a small bag of my best roast and he said, he’d nose around for anyone with a spare head. He thanks me the coffee beans like a mob kid who just stole every toy he ever wanted on Christmas.


The Girl

I was cleaning my French press when the phone rang. This time I found it right away, the female voice on the other end said, “Do you want some head?”
I knew what she meant and I knew it wasn’t going to be what I hoped it would mean. “Yeah, sure. How much?”
“This isn’t about money. I’ll be over in about fifteen minutes. Make a pot of coffee. We got some things to talk about.”
“Make it fifteen minutes, I grind my beans fresh.” Before I couldn’t ask for a name she hung up on me. My caller I.D. said, private number, so I had a hunch she was calling from her cell phone.
The fifteen minutes passed quickly and just as I poured the hot water into the French press, my door bell rang. When I opened the door I was stunned by what stood in front of me. Her hair was parted down the middle, one side was white blonde the other side dirty blonde. The eye on the white blonde side was gray blue almost identical to my complexion (when I’ve gotten too much sun), and the other side was as dark as a pile of rat droppings in an attic corner. Her lipstick was one color, but it must have taken most of the stick to cover them both.
She didn’t say hello, instead she said, “I’ll take mine black, no sugar.”
“Just give it a minute or two to sit. So who are you and why are you here? I know it ain’t because you heard about my beans”
She looked me up and down, before I had a chance to get up, despite already standing. “My name is Agnes, say it softly and is sounds like Agnes but quieter. Okay, let’s talk head.” She said, which made some more of me stand so I had to sit the rest in order to avoid embarrassment.
I caught up to myself and replied, “Who was the guy? And where’s his head?”
“Damn, I left it in the car. I knew I forgot something.”
“Left what?”
“The head, duh!”
I laughed and said, “I guess if it was attached to you, you wouldn’t have forgotten it.”
She wasn’t joking and didn’t find mine funny so she didn’t laugh. Okay maybe my reply wasn’t that witty, but not so bad that she’d be this upset with herself. “It’s the antidepressants mixed with sparkling vitamin water. I can’t remember anything. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“You don’t have to get it now.”
“I left it on the front seat. In this neighborhood they’d take it if it was still attached,“ she said sarcastically.
She turned around, and my eyes got suicidal when she closed the door. I hoped she returned, head or no head.


The Head

She was back in less than five minutes, holding a bloody head that would make a mirror question its value. Whoever the dead guy was he had more hair than he deserved but not long enough to cover a face that would make Picasso look like a realist. This broad had nerve, lots of nerve, to be walking down the street not even bothering to cover that mug in a bag. She was a brave broad probably with a stomach strong enough to make love to me with the lights on and one of her eyes open (okay maybe if it was covered by a patch).
“How did you know I had the matching body.” I said.
“I double parked and was running into Starbucks when I grabbed the head instead of my purse which is quite easy to mix up since the bag’s sides are made of long horse hair. I ordered a double cappuccino, dropped a couple bucks on the counter and then reached into my bag for some change. When I noticed I pulled the metal plate out of his head I knew I made a mistake. Before I could turn to run outside some big guy who was claiming that the coffee he just had was much better than the crap they sold here, tossed some coins on the counter and said, “I got it.” Then he told me about you and the headless body. He’s right about your coffee.
“Thanks, who was this dead guy? And why did one of his ends end up in my house,” I was proud of my play on words, but she didn’t notice.
“He’s….well he was my…--“
She hesitated so I finished her question.” Boyfriend?”
“No… he was my –“
“Husband?”
“No…he was –“
“Brother”
“No…he was my –“
“Political consultant?”
She looked at me strange like it was my head she was holding. “No.”
“Than who the hell was he?”
“He was my shrink.”
I had an image of her holding a shrunken shrink’s head and almost started to laugh, lucky I had the cup of coffee to hide my smile. “How did you end up with your shrink’s head ? You didn’t kill him?”
“Of course not, I wouldn’t never cut off his head, I looked up to him. Although now he would be shorter than me, especially without my heels.
“Sounds like he was more than your shrink?”
“Yes, besides, tiling my bathroom, he showed me how to stand on my head and still determine which was my upper lip, sometimes he’d even trap flies in my nostrils, moths too.”
“You sure that’s all he did?
“Okay, and small birds.”
I kept silent.
“And rodents when he stuffed cheese in one nostril.”
I knew there was something else. “You slept with him didn’t you?”
“Of course he neutered my cat twice. I’m pretty sure he found out about me and him. I should have never took off my blouse, my bra, my skirt, my thong and told him to go out and buy condoms. And I never should have yelled out, “Your time it up big boy!” He immediately asked me for a hundred and twenty-five bucks, told me to make the bed and demanded that I come back next week. Then he went back to sleep.
“I guess he nodded off before his head was cut off.” I blurted trying to hide my “I gotcha bitch grin” behind my coffee cup.
She gave me a look dirtier that any thought I could have had about her and three women sleeping together on a bed of women. “A few days later I went to his office. His door was open so I went in. I looked around and didn’t see anyone. Then I realized it was strange that he’d leave his door open, that’s when I looked and saw that the bottom corner of the door had his mouth around it and his head was being used as a door stop. I panicked, grabbed the head and ran out the door.”
“Why didn’t you call the cops, or just leave his head there.”
“Because my name was written on the back of his door and he was cute. Besides I like seeing my name in blood.”
“What was your name written in? Was it in blood?” I asked.
“It didn’t taste like blood.”
“You tasted it?”
“Why not, I hadn’t eaten all day and my own blood sugar was low. I was getting light headed,” she said not realizing she had set me up for a bad joke..
“Not as light as your shrinks,” I said. This time I was unable to hold back my laughter.”
She gave me a look that made me wish I didn’t have a head to see it. “Actually, I’m positive it wasn’t blood, it was too peppery definitely some kind of Tex Mex mix. And when I compared it to the color of the blood lying next to Rudolph’s head, it had an orange tint that matched my shoes.”
“So what did you do afterwards?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to pay for the complete hour, I had only been there for ten minutes. I left $35. I think that was plenty. I took Rudolph’s head, combed his hair and left. I’d seen his body naked, so I thought I might spot it somewhere. I went to all his usual haunts.”
I almost laughed at her unintentional ghost reference but killed it with a slug of java. “Did you carry the head around with you?”
“Duh! Of course, but I kept it covered, unless I had to ask someone if they’d seen this guy around. Then I’d pull it out and show them.”
“Weren’t you worried about them calling the cops?”
“No, not at all, before I put the head in the bag, I made sure it was smiling. Besides it was dark in most of the places and they couldn’t tell if it was real. Some of the guys still hit on me. There was this one cut one, tall, dark hair, nice suit. He tried to give me his card. But I told him I had a boy friend and introduced him to Rudolph’s head. He laughed and then bought me and Rudolph a round of drinks. When I poured the drink into Rudolph’s mouth and it spilled out his neck, the bar tender kicked me out.”
“Do you know anyone who would want to kill Rudolph?”
“Yeah, probably everyone he’s ever met, except me, because I was sleeping with him and he was paying for my podiatry lessons and teaching me how to lasso. He was a disgusting human being without any redeemable characteristics who hated his sense of smell. He made most of his therapy money on people who he said needed to analyze why they would even come to him and then kept coming. So it could have been anyone. And there was a group who like to dress up like animals but he kicked them out for not going on the papers. I was in that group for a week but they tossed me out saying my playboy bunny outfit wasn’t at all like a real rabbits, even after offered to having sex with all them.”
“You shrink boy friend probably didn’t like that.”
“Are you kidding, he wanted to start an X rated animal planet. Oh, he had a private patient he threatened with a blow torch, but he left therapy before the flames reached his face. ”
“Hmmm, uh, but is there anything unusual about Rudolph that you can remember? “
“He had eight-hundred and sixty five age spots, spent seven years stuck in the lotus position and he slept in separate beds.”
“You mean, when you were over you slept separately?” I asked, looking her up and down again, trying to convince myself that I had heard correctly.
“No, he always slept separately.”
“From whom?”
“The guy was a slob during the day but when he slept he was a cleanliness freak. He hated having to wake up to change his sheets, thus two beds.”
“Okay, besides being a vile human being and completely off his rocker, he’s your average over priced shrink, who got his head chopped off and his body thrown in my window, we still need to find his killer.” I said, feeling like I’d blown the case just by being involved in it.”
“I don’t mean to be negative but if we don’t find his killer do you think it would be alright if I really shrunk his head, I might be able to sell it at a garage sale. I hate to just throw things out,” she asked while running Q-tips through both his ears.

The Idea

“You just gave me an idea. We could put his head on Ebay.”
“I think we’ll get more for it if it’s shrunk or we can leave it like it as is and charge them more if they want it shrunk, “ she said as she brushed his teeth,.
“I don’t want to sell it at all,” I said as I handed her floss.
“I hate to just throw the damn thing out after all he’s been through a lot to get like this,’ she shouted as she turned his head upside down and put her keys in it.
“We’re not going to toss it either. We’ll take a picture of his head, put if up for sale on Ebay and if people bid on it, one of them could be the killer.”
“I bet if we take it to a tanning parlor we could get more for it. How much do you think it’ll go for?” she asked as her keys fell out his nose.
“I don’t know what do you think It’s worth?”
“I’m not sure, but I know we could over charge for shipping and handling, they always do that.” She picked up her keys, and then balanced his head on her head. “Now I’m a head taller than myself,” she joked.
“What am I thinking? We’ll just put it out there and let the market decide. All we need is a couple of bids and maybe we’ll find his killer.” She nodded her head yes, and his head fell off of hers. Fortunately I was able to catch it before she could punt it.

After several posses, hair styles, back drops, and lighting changes we had a picture we liked and posted it on Ebay and then waited. It wasn’t long before we had our first bid, which was just a nickel over our twenty dollar reserve. A few minutes later we had another bid this one beat out the bid by over a buck.
Using the doctor’s computer, Agnes put in counter bids driving the price up. The second bidder kept upping his price. When his bid reached four hundred we decided to stop bidding and take his offer. Using Pay Pal we made the deal and he gave us an address to send the head to.

We were pretty sure he was the killer not only did he live near bye but who else would have paid the extra dough for over night delivery. I had a friend who collected mail delivery services outfits and mail vans. I borrowed both and with Agnes hiding in the back in a large box surrounded in bubble wrap we were going to make this delivery extra special.

The Delivery

At eleven that morning, dressed like a man in a perfect fitting overnight delivery service outfit matching socks and all, I knocked on the door, holding a square box with the Doc’s head in it. There wasn’t any answer, while I debated if I should leave it with out getting a signature, the door opened and two people dressed as a horse emerged.
“Delivery for Kevin Aldridge,” I said with authority.
“This is him,” said a voice from inside the horse outfit, pretty sure it was from the front end.
“You need to sign for this,” I insisted.
“Okay, give me a minute.” He lifted his left hand out of the front hove and signed for the box.

Good thing, I’d had plenty of experience with people dressing as horses before, (I worked in costume store, (Equus Caballus being my specialty) because I was ready with a response. “I’ll need to see some I.D.”
“Okay, give me a minute. I left my wallet in my donkey outfit,” he said, as they galloped back into house. A few minutes later a vapor of man who looked better as a horse floated to the door, and with his hand shaking flipped open his wallet and the driver’s license skidded into view. It was him alright, but he didn’t look like the kind of man who dresses in a horses outfit, cuts off someone’s head and then tosses the body through a window, but nowadays who does? But looks can be deceiving especially when you’re licking a sugar cube.

I handed him the box, not even waiting for me to turn or leave, he tore off the ribbon, started to rip the cardboard apart, then after shaking the pop corn filler of its face, he spun it around a few times, before dribbling through a toothy smile. “Oh, yeah, this baby will look good on my resume,” he squealed.
“Resume?” Agnes shouted all the way from the truck.
“What’s with the head I asked? Who is it?” I said, hoping he’d trap himself.
“Who cares it’s perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.”
“Perfect. Perfect. Perfect for what?” I said, hoping to get an answer I can understand.
“Does it matter? Does it really matter? We’re all here for such a short time. ” He looked at me like I had answered the same true and false question wrong twice.
By now Agnes still trying to unwind the bubble wrap that was covering her face was standing next to me. “Did you kill him?” She asked subtly
“No, I was flossing, but I know who did? He said innocently as he scooped up a handful of sugar cubes from his girlfriend who just arrived, dressed like a male lion impersonator.
Maybe it was instinct, but I had a feeling something strange was going on here that some how seemed familiar, before I could express my inner confusion, I found a gun pointed at my head. “Inside.” the voice said without asking us to wipe our feet. It wasn’t the horse guy or his female male lion friend that was doing the talking. No, this guy was a bit strange. From above the waist he was dressed like Snoopy, below that he was all FDR, wheel chair with out arms rests and all.
“Step inside. Our casa is your casa, as long as we don’t have to blow your brains out with a nebulizer. You know I was never fond of Truman, he never once mentioned Peanuts during his 1948 campaign.”
I’m willing to give most guys a break, but this group was taking weird to the limit and testing my knowledge of presidential politics. While I was thinking that we were into something that wasn’t going to turn out well and I was also wondering what row in Ford’s theater Lincoln sat in and if it was up front, was he wearing his hat, Agnes was able to distract the bad beings by popping some of the plastic bubbles. She ran out of the house, into the van and barely made it away while she tried to attach her hands free phone cord to her cell.

The Noose

With a gun that rotated pointing at my face and then my forehead as they took me down a short flight of stairs that stopped at a landing, then they forced me to slide down the banister. Even as a kid I was never a banister boy, so I couldn’t stop myself and flew off onto a bookcase filled with heads. One fell but I was able to stop it from hitting the ground by catching an ear with my teeth. Before I could spit it out (my tongue got hung up on an ear ring) the Horse tore it away from me. Before adding my head to the collection, I was hoping they would wait for a new book case from Ikea. Somehow, I didn’t feel that was in their plans.
“What do you want from me?” I yelled figuring I knew the answer.
“You’re head, but we going to experiment with a less bloody method.” Peanuts said in FDR’s voice.
“Why me?” I asked, hoping to stall them.
“Because when we got rid of the body your window was open, everyone on the street had air conditioning” The former horse answered.
“Cheap bastard,” FDR answered.
“Why kill the shrink?” I stalled some more.
“Because he was no longer holding therapy groups for people in animal outfits. He was just like all the others animal cross dresser haters. He never appreciated my Manatee suite, okay the wheel chair killed the illusion, but a shrink should understand those things,” FDR said, while his Peanut eyes grew moist.
“So you cut off his head!” I shouted from the top of my bottom lip or was it the bottom of my top lip.
“We prefer to think of it as cutting off his body.” With that they all laughed.
“What about Agnes?” I asked hoping I just didn’t move up the schedule.
“What about her? She’s not headless, yet.” Lioness Boy asked.
“She’ll be back soon and she’ll bring the cops. You’ll all go to jail,” that was an idiotic way to try and slow things down.
“Oh, she may be back hopefully not wearing that stupid bunny outfit, but she won’t bring the cops. She hates authority figures in uniform, especially vampires.” FDR said like he was absolutely positive I was going to believe him. “You see, she brought you to us.”
“Why would she do that?” I phrased without a trace of wit.
“Not purposely, but no one ever believed she was carrying around a real head, except you. She’s also been diagnosed a schizophrenic with missing head delusions.” FDR waved his hands like a conductor and they all started singing, “Schizophrenic with missing head delusions.” And then went into a zydeco version of “Ava Maria.”

The Peanuts part of FDR tossed a noose over a pipe. And his pals The Horseman and the Lion Queen picked me up and stood me on top of a rocking chair, but had a difficult time putting the rope around my head. Finally, they figured it was easier if I wasn’t standing on my head. They flipped me over and after some debate settled on standing me on an elephant fetus hassock (definitely not something found at Ikea).

Then they started shaving me, which I thought was stupid timing since the noose kept getting in the way. While they lathered me up, and found some new blades, FDR/Peanuts tied my hands behind my back.
“This time we’re going to hang you till your dead, I love dead, especially clean shaven dead. And they we’ll cut off your head.”
“I bet you love head too. Giving it would be my guess,” I spit out, proud of retort, but not so happy with my circumstances.
FDR, rolled closer to me and pulled down on the rope, jerking my head up. Peanuts spoke. “This way when your heart stops beating the blood won’t pump out so it won’t be too messy. It’s the maid’s day off.”
“Like that matters, you should fire her and get someone who’ll do blood on windows,” The lioness said.
“Why don’t you just put a bib on me.” I spoke hoping they’d see my cooperation as a reason to let me go and pay for my cab home.
“Good idea, it’s an expensive garment, I could wear it when we go out to celebrate your beheading, after we dispose of your body. But I wouldn’t get caught dead in your pants, but you will. ” FDR laughed and then Peanuts announced in his best Roosevelt. “There’s nothing to fear, but fear itself!” Some how, that didn’t alleviate my anxiety, although it was a riveting impression. He immediately started into a fire side chat, but Mr. Horse nudged him, and pointed to a pocket watch that was strung above the ears and around a face so it was stuck in the middle of decapitated head like a third ticking eye. FDR, stopped talking, nodded realizing they had an appointment, hopefully it wasn’t finding a window to throw my leftovers through.

The Lioness tilted the elephant fetus on its edge, so I had to keep it balanced to stay alive. “We’ll say goodbye now, in case you’re dead when we return.” Lion lady-lad said. FDR interrupted her. “Think positive. You mean when he’s dead?”
They started up the stairs and I began to see my life flash before one of my eyes, the other one had a speck of dust and was blinking into the over head light, making half my final vision feel like it had been recorded in a disco. As clumsy as I am (I could trip over a shadow), I have very good balance. I figured that how long I could stay like this depended solely on how long I could actually stay like this.

The Rescue

I was about to start seeing my life pass before me a second time, this time backwards and with subtitles, when I heard a door bell (which rang to the theme of “The Commish”). A few seconds the door upstairs shattered, and there were gun shots, screams, and shouts for a time out! The refrigerator was opened, drinks poured, music played and there was dancing. Three minutes later silence, then glasses gathered and water ran in the sink. A piercing yell of, “Dry them yourself. This is your house!” The water stopped running, a few minutes after that there was more gun fire, screams, calls more for dish washing liquid and then for another time out and replies, “you have none left!” More gunfire, screams, and bodies landing on the floor.

I could feel one of my feet fall asleep, it was only a matter of minutes, maybe seconds, or maybe I was dead already, and my hell would be living out my life just long enough to pay my bills.

Just as my foot was about to slip off the tilted elephant fetus there was another shot and a dead body rolled and bounced down the stairs crashing into the giant fetus, knocking it away, and before I could choke to death. I got lucky. The dead man was FDR and his wheel chair landed under my feet.
Agnes slid down the banister, followed by the gift bag mobster (who broke the banister under his weight). She untied my hands and then started to lift the noose off my head and said, “I think you looked better with it on.” And made me keep it there until she could take a picture with her cell phone.

The Mobster, noticed all the heads on the shelf and scattered around the cement floor like a bad break on a pool table, and said “A collection like this should be cared for and put on the shelves and rearranged according to size, age, race, eye color, ear size, earth sign, nasal capacity and then cross referenced by the dates stamped on their chins.” As he started picking them up and rearranging them, I turned to Agnes who was trying to find her dead shrink’s noggin, but had stopped to comb a few heads and said, “How did you guys get together?”
“I drove by your house on the way to my health club.”
“Health club? Yeah, I figured you were dead and a good work out gets the endorphins going and makes my antidepressants work better. Besides this was the last day I could use my visitor’s pass,” she said as she smoothed out a guys eyebrows.
“You were just going to leave me here to die?” I swatted back at her.
“I was too upset to think about that. I was in pain I had just lost my shrink’s head and his body, even though I hated his tattoo of Freud in a hula skirt nursing on Adler’s mother’s surgically enhanced breasts. A good work out, a steam, fresh wheat grass and a couple of games of canasta calms me down and helps me think,” she spoke while sticking a blue tongue back in a mouth.
“I was waiting for you on your porch with a bag of Kopi Luwak coffee beans, the most expensive coffee in the world that just happed to fall off a truck. These are even more expensive than the beans that are digested by the ordinary Asian Palm Civet,” Looking at Agnes. “To you laymen, Toddy Cats.” Then the big guy turned back to me. “These were passed through Albino Asian Palm Civets with severe acid reflux and kidney failure, thus giving a unique even more complex slightly acidic flavor,” my new thug friend said as he was rearranging the heads.
“When I saw Sedgwick,” Agnes squat thrust in, as she was doing squat thrusts.
“Sedgwick?” I asked.
“Yeah, Sedgwick, that’s my name. Sedgwick Galileo Robestelliano.” He started to pull his gun out but stopped when he matched a broken tooth with the right mouth.
“I told him what had just happened and he offered his help, and gave me a week’s visitor’s pass to his health club,” she said, as she spotted her beloved shrink’s head. “There you are sweet cheeks!” She picked up the head kissed it and then gave it a hickey on what was left of the neck.
“Apparently, this crew has been cutting off people’s heads for years using only the finest silverware.” He said holding up glistening carving knife and head.” Like my old capo here who’s been missing for months. “What do you say we get out here?” the gunshots might have attracted some attention.
“Okay, I could really use a cup of coffee that was thrown up by Asian cats.”
“Defecated by Albino Asian Civets with acid reflux, week kidneys… and possibly a limp” he corrected me, while he bagged his old capo’s head.
“Whatever, as long as it’s not decaffeinated,” I joked, then drop kicked FDR’s head through the basement window as I started for the stairs.
“Sounds good to me.” Agnes turned to her ex shrink and hopefully ex lover. “How about you Rudolf? She asked demurely. Then she shook his head up and down indicating “yes.” We all laughed, side stepped a few skin and hair trophies and climbed the stairs, talking about drinking the most expensive coffee in the world, still no closer to the reason why a hit on me had been given in a mafia gift bag.

The End

The Perfect Christmas Gift

When I was a kid I used to love Christmas, especially the mornings when I opened up the gifts I found under the tree. I hadn’t experienced that kind of joy in years, that is, until the Christmas I found myself drinking eggnog and staring at my wife lying dead skewered by a Christmas tree, her decaying face and perfect bluing skin surrounded by tinsel like a gay Sitting Bull. When the cops came, the photographers took crime scene shots that I thought about sending out next year as Christmas cards. Just as I started to ask the photographer to email me a copy, the cops turned up the volume on the Christmas music, but when I started to sing along, they began hitting me with some nasty questions while they snapped their fingers to Jingle Bell Rock. It was good to see that these hard nose detectives still had some holiday spirit left. It didn’t matter anyway because I wasn’t going to let their badgering and the brutal murder of my wife ruin mine. While they question me, I rolled a joint, took a Xanax, did some ecstasy, inhaled lighter fluid and made eggnog spiked with a delicate blend of gin, vodka, tequila, scotch, vermouth, rye, peach snaps, valium, LSD, WD40 and Miracle Grow which I handed out to detectives and the forensic team.

Okay, you’re probably thinking that the murder of my wife should put a damper on my holiday and I was acting kind of detached cold blooded if you will. Like the killer maybe. Well, I’ll be honest I hated the broad’s guts and all she knelt for. It was a bad marriage that I stayed in way too long, six days too long to be exact. I was married a week ago to a woman I met earlier that night at a disco. It was her blue eyes that dared you to drown in that got me, all four of them, two on her face and the two that were reflected in the mirror she was snorting cocaine from. The white powder caked on her nostrils just highlighted a nose that would be a plastic surgeon’s silicone dream. For me broads and drugs usually don’t mix well, unless they were hooked on generic anti depressants I can get for free on my health insurance.

When she noticed me, she asked me if I wanted a bump? I could have made a sexist play on words, but instead I grabbed a hunk of her black hair and tried to pull her away from the coke, instead the wig came off and I flew backwards and I bumped into a guy who didn’t wait for me to say excuse me, and flattened my nose with an upper cut. I tilted backwards for a second, than counter punched until he threw up his daily requirement of vitamins, minerals and protein. When I turned around to find my true love, I thought she had gone, until I realized she was now the blonde who was adept enough to snort cocaine and tweeze her eye brows at the same time using a small mirror the size of a dauxhound’s urine stain. She had me on that next inhale. Yes, it was love at first snort. I was going to ask her to dance, but since I can only dance to new age vasectomy songs and I was wearing hip waders, instead I just asked her to marry me. I know what you’re thinking. Why would I wear hip waders into a disco? Well, I’ll tell you, I look good in hip waders and mine were top notch, they hid most of my over flowing body and the loose skin that looked like it was rolling down hill. My shoulder’s which were a mirage that looked broader if stood sideways were less of defect in my personally tailored double breasted camouflage sports jacket.

I could tell this broad was going to play hard to get when she ran out of the club and pushed the fire alarm. That didn’t end things it just put it off for a little while. I probably wouldn’t have caught up to her but someone knocked the mirror on the floor and she had to stop and bend over to finish her eyes. Her tight skirt wrapped her butt like cellophane. I spotted a one legged girl I had a met along time ago right after she had failed her audition for the Rockettes’ handicapped show because they were only looking for left footed dancers. As she hopped bye I easily stole a diamond engagement ring off her finger. She was petite, scared and had voice that couldn’t be heard over a blink. I screwed the ring off her finger and she fled like her life and my future wife depended upon it.

I caught up to my almost finance and popped the question again, this time holding the ring so she could see its reflection in the mirror. “Why should I marry you?” she asked.

I didn’t hesitate. “Because if you don’t I’ll kill every male on the planet till I’m the only one left.”
“What if I’m a lesbo.” She replied.
“Then I’ll kill every woman and female impersonator on earth and then I’ll get a sex change.” I screamed back.
“If you kill every man and woman on earth, than who will give you the sex change?” She questioned.
“I’ll take lessons,” I said not too cleverly.
“From who?” She snapped back
“Uh…I’ll temporarily leave one team of ugly sex change doctors alive.” I sailed back at her.
“What if I like ugly?”
“Then I’ll put bags over their heads,” I said thinking I was cleaver.
“What kind of bags?” She questioned me like it really meant something too her.
“Whatever bags you don’t like.”
“I like bags, all sorts of bags. The black garbage bags are my favorite, very sexy on the right kind of trash,” She said, almost cooing.
“I can be trash.” I said. “Put a wire twist tie on me and I’m awful pretty.”
“Okay, Yes.”
“Yes, what?” I said, not understanding her answer.
“Yes, I’ll marry you, you wild hunk of compost, but you have to promise me one thing.”
“Anything.”
“From now on I want you to only make hot air pop corn. No microwave, or oils. Just a very hot air popper,” she said seductively.
“I happened to have one that melts butter real easy,” I slid out like I was pretending not to be suggestive.
“I’ve love hot butter especially unsalted. Cross you heart and hope to die of a massive stroke or by stepping on a landmine”
“Cross my heat and I hope to die of a massive stroke, or by stepping on a landmine and I’ll add two cerebral hemorrhages in a pare tree, if I’m lying,” I said, as I crossed my heart (which she insisted I did in magic marker, which I so happen to have because I’m a collector). But I would have been better off if I had stepped on a landmine right there (or pushed her on it).
“Then, lets go back to your place and you can show me your popper,” she purred and growled at the same time.

We left a few minutes after she started the place on fire by breaking a bottle of vodka on a drunk couple and lighting them with a dozen matches, while reciting a poem about the wonders of third degree burns on inebriated (or shit faced) lovers in three languages.

In the confusion and smoke she took the tips off every table, even some as they burned and paddled out on her hands while I held her legs over my head.
After she insisted that she hot wire my car to make it more of a thrill, she peeled off. I didn’t have a heart to tell her that I took a cab there and we were on a bicycle.

Five minutes later we in my apartment, and five minutes later than that, we were popping corn. After the last pop we kissed for the first time, a long wiggly kiss our tongues like two blind eels trying to figure out how to mate. A few unpopped kernels pelted our faces, one sailing up my left nostril. It was a thrill I’d never forget (and one I’d eventually I had to have removed). Before we could go any further, she asked for the ring, so seductively I didn’t care that she was ripping the pocket out of my pants. “It’s beautiful, almost too big to swallow.” Then she tossed it in her mouth and pretended to swallow it, before I could react and tell her she could be arrested for digesting stolen property, she spit it out.

“Let’s get married,” she stamped.
“Right now?”
“Yes, now, there’s only a certain amount of times a girl can spit out an engagement ring before she gives up hope.”
“It’s done. I have a preacher on call.” I hit the speed dial button on my cell phone and the preacher picked up on the first ring. “Preach, I need to be married. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” And I hung up.
“Ten minutes! This is a moment a girl waits her whole life for! I need time to call my father on death row. That’s the least I can do for the man who raised me, drove me home from school everyday, and then took the rap for me for the mass murder at the orphanage, the clinic, the petting zoo, and my first engagement party. How do you feel about people throwing long grain rice?”
“First engagement,” I asked, startled.
“Yes. He was my first love,” she said, her puppy dog eyes had the sad look of an overlooked mutt in a pound.
“But you killed him?”
“Only after he told me that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. I was afraid that I might not able to do that and I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt him,” she said, so sincerely, I almost felt like she was the one who got whacked.
“How did you kill him? I asked, softly as I checked her for weapons.
“I shot him in the head,” she moaned at my touch. “He didn’t feel any pain. Then I thought his family was running out on the check and I knew my dad would be embarrassed if he didn’t have enough money, so I shot them too.”
“How many did you kill?”
“All of them. I’m a good shot and there were only twelve, not counting the kids,” she said almost too cutely while counting on her fingers and each breast.
“What about the other killings? The orphanage, the clinic etc.?” I tried to phrase it so she thought I was just showing interest in her life.
“I guess I was going through an angry experimental phase, plus the usual teenage hormones, but I’m way passed that now. I can’t remember when the last I killed more than six people. Can I use your cell phone to call my dad in the cell?” She laughed at her own play on words.“Uhhh okay.” I handed her the phone still shaken by what she told me.

She dialed the number and asked for her father. “He was. Oh, my God, I must have gotten the date wrong.” She dropped the phone tears swimming up and down her face mixed with cocaine like lumpy skim milk as she inhaled and exhaled quickly. “He was executed last week. I wanted to prepare his last meal from scratch. I bought a new food processor and all.”

When she put her had against my shoulder and I smelled her hair, inhaled her perfume, licked her neck, nibbled on her ear, bit her nose and chewed off her necklace, I forgot about all the family members, kids, doctors, and nurses she murdered. All the mattered was that she was about to be my wife. I’d just be careful that I’d never say I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

This time we took my car and we didn’t hot wire it, although she busted my window with a head butt to get in while I was searching my pocket for keys. She drove and handled the wheel like it was on a wobbly roulette table. The preacher was a hop, skip and a few run over bums away. He lived in a basement apartment in a neighborhood where gunshots screams and cries for help covered up the real bad things. There were so many severed fingers on the street it looks like the aftermath of a dozen lepers waving goodbye, but the area didn’t intimidate her in the least. The preacher’s apartment didn’t have a front entrance. When we walked around back, she didn’t cling close to me, no, instead she had fun and I went along with it so I carried her on my sloping shoulders and made horsey sounds.

The preacher didn’t have a bell so from atop my shoulders she pushed my head into his door a few times. The preacher answered just as blood spouted from my crown like I was bashed in fountain, so instead of waving us in, he called his twinkled tonned girlfriend to the door as a witness and pronounced us man and wife. My spouse leaned down and kissed me above my wound, while I slapped a hundred to the preach and he shoved a marriage license out the door, which took on a few drops of blood before I could pocket it. I should have taken the drops of blood as an omen and ripped the damn thing up.

We were on our way to the car when a gang of teenage hoods who’s age matched their IQs circled us showing off their ability to open a switch blade. I tried to reason with them. I told them that we were newly weds on our way to our honeymoon and they could tie tin cans to our car. One hood emerged from the pack, stared at us for a few scary seconds and then jumped into an edgy very funny ugly family routine. His first line had us in stitches. He delivered it like the perfect loser, opening and closing his switch blade as a timing device. He said, “My sister has such a bad complexion she could see her reflection in a bowl of oatmeal.” With that he had me and my spouse laughing so hard, I almost threw my new wife off my shoulders. The hood comic finished the bit and we called for an encore, which was a mistake because his relationship routine was so bad, my wife started to heckle him. A comic wielding a knife probably doesn’t get many hecklers so he hadn’t gotten the hang of it yet, and his comebacks were lame, so lame that his own crew starting booing him. He lost it and started cursing out his audience, which they didn’t appreciate and started after him, a few tossing their knives in his back. Tough crowd! When the kid ran we ran to our car and the beginning of our wedlock.

The honey moon, which we spent in my apartment, was all fire and a lot of wood (splinters my case), if you get my drift. She was different right from the beginning, she hated candles but liked to make love holding a blow torch. She also hated the mirror over the bed because she kept thinking she was dead and looking down at her own body. When she finally climaxed she didn’t scream out anyone’s name instead she yelled out the ingredients in key lime pie. Still it was exciting, she did things to me with baking soda, mouthwash, and apple cider vinegar that I never found in my collection of deviant behavioral magazines or catalogues. Like most honeymooners we spent most of our time in the sack, basically because we couldn’t find the keys to the handcuffs, neck lock, or the chain link fence surrounding the bed. Eventually, we called a locksmith who didn’t get to us for a few hours because he couldn’t find his car keys.

The next few days were spent planning our life together, by preparing our wills, insurance policies and making each other beneficiaries. It was the next day that the phone calls started. The first one came during lunch when I was brushing my teeth, which I did during a meal after every other bite. I have needy underappreciated teeth that tend to cling to food like it’s their last meal. My wife answered the phone and took it into the next room to talk. She said, it was just her old butcher who called to tell her that he was running a special on steak grizzle and was calling all his customers to see if they still ate meat. Another call came during dinner, I tried to answer it but in my haste I spit on my cordless phone and shorted it out.

The next morning she dropped me off to buy a phone and didn’t return to pick me up till eight that evening wearing noting but a fishnet negligee, smelling of bourbon. At first I was a little suspicious until she explained that she had gotten lost and decided to go home and start from there hoping she’d remember the route we took. Again she got lost and when she finally made it home three hours later she got drunk in order to forget about how bad she felt because she was going be so late to pick me up, unfortunately the booze which cheered her up made her forgot about me completely. She felt so good and was having so much fun until she strained her back trying to give herself a lap dance. She began to drink more to mask the pain when the Percodan, Vicodin, Oxycotton and the Morphine injections weren’t helping, A few hours later she sobered up and remembered about me. She didn’t want to take a chance on getting lost again so she decided to wear something sexy to the gas station so when she asked for directions to the phone store they’d take their time and tell her how to find the place in detail. Her story made sense in a stretched out way beyond belief so of way, so I forgave her immediately, but by then I was so light headed from not eating I couldn’t remember who she was.

That night, during dinner the new phone rang. My wife answered it immediately, this time, she didn’t take it into the other room to talk she just started breathing heavy. Again, I began to suspect something fishy, but felt ashamed of myself for not trusting her when she told me it was her doctor who was just checking her lung capacity.

The calls continued, she’d whisper, moan, tongue kiss the phone and even performed a bump and grind with the receiver. Each time she’d give me a different explanation; the whispers, because her friend was just checking out his new hearing device; the moans, because she was speaking in an alien language for a UFO magazine; the tongue kiss because she it was a wrong number, didn’t want to make the person feel bad and she liked the taste of mouth piece; and finally the bump and grind because she was taking at home phone exotic dancing lessons. I wanted to trust her, but as logical as her answers were, call it a hunch I felt she was hiding something.
Soon there were other signs that things were going amuck, at first it was just minor annoyances that I labeled practical jokes, like to finding the sugar bowl filled with rat poison, or spices laced with gun powder, and cooking oils spiked with nitro glycerin. When I found pieces of glass in my mouthwash, acid in my eye drops, and woke up with my head in a vice with her twisting the handle, I knew that the honeymoon was over. At first I just laughed but when she didn’t stop tightening the vice I playfully kicked two of her teeth out.

She was furious, I’d dislodged her two favorite teeth and would have broken her jaw if the blow hadn’t been buffered by the steak grizzle sandwich she was chewing on. She starting calling me names (some she even spelled out), threatening to leave me if I didn’t apologize and drive her to a dentist. Looking back I probably should have lost my temper and told her to go ahead and get out of my life, asked why she was trying to murder me instead I asked if she wanted to go to counseling.
I was surprised when she told me that she was herself was a counselor and we could save money by going to her, since I’d only have to pay for myself and if it was something we felt like continuing she’d accept insurance. I told her this was an emergency and asked her if she could fit us in that night. She said, she could, but first we’d have to clean out the spare bedroom and buy office furniture.
It turned out to be my lucky day, it just so happened that she also sold office furniture. I never knew that my new wife had such a diverse background, she was a regular renaissance femme fatale (or however it was spelled, although fatal was the vibe I should have paid attention to). I was begging to fall for her again. She ordered furniture from her warehouse, I paid her and it was delivered that afternoon. Normally, it wouldn’t have been so expensive, but I was paying extra for quick service. Of course she only took cash, because I couldn’t find my driver’s license.

Two huge thugs with arms the size of each other showed up with a truck, and carried in a couch, a few stuffed chairs, two lamps, a throw rug, an answering machine, and a box of tissues. At first I thought the furniture looked used but she assured me that the worn in look was the hottest thing in office interior design. I was going to give the movers a nice tip, but I didn’t appreciate the way one of the guys was glancing at my wife, lying on the floor starring up her dress. She was sensitive to the situation and to diffuse my anger after about five minutes she offered to put on underwear. I wanted to show her that I trusted her and not only told her to keep her underwear off, but said she should remove her skirt and blouse. She was into being subservient to her husband for the sake of the marriage and not only removed her clothing, but took the thugs rags off too. I was so impressed by not only her willingness to take my suggestions, but her effort to go the extra mile and even more, that when they started to make love and smiled at me I handed her my best condom. Before they finished she had given all a girl could and on every surface in the house to show that she was now the obedient wife.

When the thugs left I felt so good that I told her that I didn’t think we needed therapy and cancelled the session. Being the consummate professional she insisted that I pay for canceling at the last minute.

Things went smoothly for the next day or so, sure there were the phone calls at all hours of the night and the bear trap on the floor on my side of the bed, but for the sake of our relationship I was willing to over look her faults. I figured that little things like waking me in the morning by pounding my head with a black jack, or running over me in the driveway were her way to avoid intimacy. And that I would just work through these things, all I had to do was survive.

Christmas eve we bought a tree and spent the night decorating it. It was a fun night, eggnog, cookies, and listening to the Chipmunk Christmas album. It must have been the spell of Christmas that blinded us to the fact that we had bought and decorated a palm tree. When I realized our mistake, still in the festive mood I started taking down the decorations in order to exchange the palm tree for the real deal. My wife was not of a similar mind and insisted that her family and all her friends had always decorated palm trees for Christmas and told me that I was being a stickler for detail. The tree stayed but the mood had changed and we went to bed angry, my wife spitting at me until she fell asleep drooling her arsenal of saliva down her chin. When I woke a few hours later, unable to shake the feeling of being blasphemous to the true Christmas tradition, I decided to sneak out and buy a real Christmas tree. When push came to divorce court I chose Christmas over marriage.

I was on my way downstairs when the phone rang. I raced down and quickly grabbed it before a second ring, breathing heavily.
“Hi, baby!” spoke a male voice that sounded like vocal chords made of worn down shoe leather rubbing against Richard Nixon’s five O’clock shadow (which was more like a black out).
I just breathed back heavily like I’ve heard my wife do a dozen or so times on the phone.
“No more stalling. You need to off your hubby. Gift wrap him for me for Christmas baby.” the voice said and then let out a laugh that had less fun in it than an asthma attack.
This time I imitated her moan.
“I take it you like the idea!” he spoke like a Flem In A Box.
Now I was rubbing the phone against my shirt, letting out a moan, a high pitched sound that was in the squeaky door family.
“You’re getting me hot. Maybe I’ll come bye and we’ll kill the jerk together.” And then he hung up. And I knew what I had to do. But I was going to do it my way. Yes, you guessed it. I went out and bought a Christmas tree. I wasn’t going to let a murderous wife and her psychopathic boyfriend ruin my Christmas spirit.

I went to the 24 hour Christmas Tree Super Store in town. I found the perfect tree, seven feet tall, with a pointed top perfect for my home made pure sliver top piece (a rising star its points bent downward by gravity as it makes its ascent. They loaded the tree on the car and I was home in twenty minutes.
I grew up in a house with two brothers a sister, a mom, dad and a dog who all had ADD, so our home was long on short intentions spans. So I learned to decorate a tree faster than a bulimic Santa with an empty bag could be thrown down a greased chimney.

I ditched the palm tree out back and had just turned on the Christmas lights when my wife’s deadly beau entered holding a gun in his right hand, or maybe it was his left, or it could have been both, I didn’t have time to figure direction or count. It was the mover that she had unselfishly screwed the brains out of to show that she was all mine. When I saw him, see me, see him, he started to raise the gun or guns in either his right or left hand or both. I hated to do it but sometimes you have to make sacrifices in life. So I pushed my brand new just decorated perfect 7 foot Christmas tree with the pointy silver top piece into my wife’s misterress. I guess he thought I wasn’t the type of guy to sacrifice art for life, but I fooled him. I used both hands to push the tree toward its target which knocked the guy over and pinned him to the floor. A bullet blew a Christmas bulb apart and flew over my head like an intellectual joke. He started to lift himself up when my lovely homicidal soon to be ex as in expired wife ran down the stairs, screaming, “Will you guy’s shut up! I’m trying to sleep! And where the hell is my palm tree?”

By now her boyfriend and I were playing a grand game of tug of war with the Christmas tree, which was now horizontal. I was holding it just below the silver tip while her guy had firm grip on the trunk just as my wife reached the foot of our battlefield. I don’t know if her boyfriend over powered me or I just let go, but my tree, with its pointy tip adorned by and even pointier (sharper) sliver decoration went into my wife’s chest smoothly and emerged from her back adorned in Rudolf red. I’ll be honest I might have given the tree and an extra shove or two to help it along on its sinister course. My wifey didn’t go down easy. She wiggled, squirmed, and bounced around like she did when she spoke to her beau on the telephone. But unlike the phone line she was soon dead. Dead but decorated tastefully, although haphazardly but more importantly the tree lights worked beautifully.

Now you’re probably wondering what happened to the boyfriend who’s mission was to kill me forever and ever (I’m sure he didn’t believe in an after life, in my pursuit he crushed the ginger bread Christ child in my nativity scene). The beau whose name, I found out later was Nick Disanta, at the site of his skewered love, did not see it as a symbolic Cupid’s arrow and took off leaving his gun or guns with his fingers prints neatly pressed on the metal. The cops definitely saw the direct symbolism in his prints and arrested Nick Christmas night.

I was exonerated, in fact even congratulated by a few married cops who encouraged me to spike their eggnog with every bottle of alcohol, drug, or insecticide in the house. The crime scene photographer brought in a few extra lights and a make up kit, did her lips a bright red and even hung mistletoe over her head making the picture more ironic because she was never going to kiss DiSanta again. By the time the cops and forensic team split they were so bombed they left my dead wife splendidly skewered by my seven foot fully decorated tree. Yes, there before me was the prefect Christmas gift! My dead ex-wife. I hope all your Christmas’s are as happy as mine!

I Can See Alaska From Me (excerpts from the up coming Sarah Palin book)

FIRST MEETING WITH SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN
I met Senator John McCain (who on first site I deeply loved) today. For an old man he’s got wandering hands, let me tell ya. He sure liked my butt. He says because of being tortured he can’t raise his hands high enough to pat me on the back. He called me a fellow maverick and I didn’t have the heart to tell the old guy that I’m a Christian. He asked me if he can see me again. I said, you betcha your broken arthritic bones you can old feller.

PHONE CALL FROM JOHN MCCAIN
I was cutting out the intestines on a dead moose I shot before parachuting out of my air plane when my darn cell phone rang, I wiped the blood off my hands and lips (on the coat I bought at my favorite consignment store “Out of the Closet”) and answered it. It was Senator John McCain (the man I love more that this dead moose, even when it was alive, before I put two bullets between its sweet eyes). Senator McCain wanted me to fly to Arizona to talk about being his running mate. I told Todd and he didn’t like the way that mate thing sounded. I explained to him that me and the Vice President have a platonic relationship. Todd nodded his head, then went out and walked the dogs for a hundred miles.

SECOND MEETING WITH JOHN MCCAIN (ARIZONA)
Senator John McCain (who I love far more than any torture victim I’ll ever meet or would have tortured) flew me to his ranch today. We sat under a sycamore tree and he asked me if I’d be his Vice President. I told him to get down on one knee and ask me properly. He did and wouldn’t get up until I answered him. So I felt sorry for the old guy (who I truly love more than hunting moose with automatic weapons) and said yes. I found out later he wasn’t waiting for my answer, he just couldn’t get up by himself.

INTENSE VETTING
I started the vetting process today. I must have done a good job explaining the process to Todd because he stopped midway through telling me which dogs had their shots. Those vetters were darn thorough, faster than you can melt snow with a hundred gallons of oil, a blow torch and fifty greasy seals; they asked me what my favorite Bee Gee song was. I didn’t hesitate for an Eskimo second and told them it was “Satisfaction” by Aretha Franklin. Before I leave for the convention I have to remember to go through our stuff to look for suitcase bombs. Those Russians and Mr. Putin, when he rears his head and flies over our air space, could have lost their luggage right in my back yard. You betcha!

MY DAUGHTER’S PREGNANCY REVEALED
A few days later, when my seventeen year old daughter asked me to hold my son, Trig, Senator McCain (who I love more than drilling for oil on protected lands) noticed that she had quite a belly on her there. Before he could do any fat, or rape jokes (he’s good at them), I fessed up, and told Senator McCain that she was pregnant. Senator McCain jokingly offered to divorce his wife and marry her or me, or both. What a kidder that darn Senator McCain (who I love more then embryonic stem cells) is! I told him that we decided that it’s better that my daughter have the baby and marry the father. I believe that life begins at conception and conception starts with the first drink.

SPEECH FOR CONVENTION
I started working on my speech for the Republican convention today with Senator McCain’s writers. The speech was a doozey, let me tell ya, even though they wouldn’t let me call Brat Obama a darn socialist sand monkey. They wouldn’t even let me accuse him of getting my daughter pregnant. Supposedly than can tell who the real father is by doing some kind of T and A test.

RIGHT BEFORE CONVENTION
In a few hours I deliver a speech to the Republican convention on national TV and will be nominated for the Vice President of the United States. I’ll look beautiful and sexy wearing specially tailored, very expensive clothes. Let them try and call me a hockey mom now! Oh, I just had Botox treatments so I must remember to order more lipstick.

AFTER CONVENTION
The speech went great but it could have been better if they had let me call Saddam Hussein Obama a skinny commie community organizer who goes to gay bars with terrorist abortion doctors. I made up for it, by adding a few extra winks. They seemed to eat it up and I got to spend quality time with my family when I brought them up on stage (at midnight almost fully awake).

ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL WITH MCCAIN
Senator McCain (who I love more than a melting glacier falling on a polar bear) likes campaigning with me. The fat women in their jogging pants seem to think I’m a hockey mom. Some of them look like they swallowed the whole darn skating ring.

LIPSTICK ON A PIG
Barak He’s Insane Obamba used a lipstick on a pig reference. Senator McCain (who I love more than a starving sea lion sunbathing on an oil slick) said that the big city commie was saying that about me. Senator McCain said they can use those remarks to keep the media from talking about the dumb economy, whatever that is. Long as we keep giving me these clothes Obambi can call me any name he wants (except my little Wasilla honey bunny slut, which Todd likes me to call him).

STUMP SPEECHES.
They want me to keep saying that darn Hockey Mom stuff over and over again. They won’t even let me make fun of Obama’s ears! They never let me speak my mind. This here is America where we’re all hated equally, at least that’s what it says in the constitution, or maybe I saw it in a recipe. It’s time the American people know that pinko atheist Muslim Obammie wants them to change the book the Statue of Liberty is holding to The New York Times. Some one from the crowd yelled out “Kill him.” I ignored it. I really wanted to do the Christian thing and tell the guy that God helps those who help them selves.

CHARLE’S GIBSON
Charley asked me hard questions. It was unfair, they didn’t let me ask Charlie any. What kind of debate was that? So I didn’t know who the Bush doctor was. Who cares, like I need one. My water broke, I flew eleven hundred miles in coach, drove forty more with a stick shift, changed a flat, ran out of gas and walked six miles up hill through a foot of snow in high heels, got hungry so I strangled a deer, and field dressed the buck with my nail file, ate a raw thigh, and then had my baby while I was negotiating an oil deal. Oh, and I cut the umbilical chord with my teeth. And then Charley had the nerve to make a big deal out of me not meeting with any foreign heads of state. I‘ve had to deal personally when some very powerful people. Before Todd I dated two Eskimo chiefs, one of them a former witch doctor who fertilized barren female salmon. I’ve also done my share of traveling. I’ve been to six different colleges!

KATY K INTERVIEW
What’s with these interviews, all they want to talk about is politics? Katy Crocket even had the nerve to ask me what newspapers I read. Let her find her own garage sales! I’m Alaska’s most popular Governor. What other Alaska official gets two hundred emails everyday from Match.com. Good thing Todd doesn’t know my match.com name “Ambitious Petroleum Nympho Bitch.”

DEBATE PREPERATION
They started preparing me for my big debate with Senator Joe Biden. Boring! How do they expect me to get my waves, winks, and dawg-gone-its down if they keep throwing all these names and facts at me? Senator Biden can have his darn facts. When Joe says something that sounds smart, I’ll do what they first told me and look at camera, wink and respond with “Just say it ain’t so Biden.”

POST DEBATE
I thought I clearly won the debate. I’m much more photogenic than my sixty-something smart ass come over opponent. All Senator Biden did the whole time was answer the questions they gave with dumb snooze a minute facts. His answers didn’t take any imagination, not like me who just made up stuff on the spot. Stuff you had to try really hard to figure out.

JOE THE PLUMMER AND AMERICAN WORKERS
We’re not doing too good in the polls, but today I met with Joe the Plumber, Ken the cabinet maker, Frank the carpenter, Jane the decorator, Sam the contractor, and Carol the nurse. I’m not going to look at this as losing an election, I’m gonna look at it as finding people who’ll give me a deal to renovate my house.


CONCESSION SPEECH
Senator McCain (who I love more than selling natural gas to America for twice the price) gave a concession speech all by himself. I cried, I spent my whole day working on my own and all. My speech wouldn’t have taken away anything from Senator McCain, in fact I wouldn’t even have mentioned him once (by name). I would have just referred to him as that lovable old loser who walks like Frankenstein.

PROPOSITION 8
Well one good thing happened during the election. The people of California passed proposition 8 that prohibits gay people from getting married. Maybe I’ll propose one that wouldn’t allow them in Alaska then we wouldn’t have to worry about them getting married.

BACK IN ALASKA
My first day back in Alaska has been very busy. I’ve had my whole family going through their clothes and tearing off the Neiman Marcus and Sax Fifth Avenue labels and switching them with Sears, Wall Mart and Target. I told them to put on all the silk underwear they can. My pregnant daughter stuffed enough for a whole hockey team under her shirt (familiar territory for hockey players I’m afraid).

BLAME GAME
Some du-hickey from John McCain’s (an old loser that I love even more than the year 2012) camp leaked a story to the liberal news media that I thought African was a country. Let me tell ya, that’s ridiculous, first off, how could so many black people come from one little country? Africa is a continent, just like Alaska. Todd and I are planning on visiting Africa, in fact he’s been searching Map Quest for the fastest route. Even though he’s been training our dog team for a long trip, we’ll go in the summer when there’s less ice. Africa’s got a lot of different countries, like the Congo where Congoleezza Rice the Secretary of State comes from.

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO WITH JOE

When I force myself (with the help of powerful meds) to watch a McCain Palin rally and I hear them they talk about Joe the Plumber, Nancy the Nurse or Gene the Gynecologist (okay, I’m joking here, the McCain health plan wouldn’t include Gynecologists they’d be considered feminist terrorist cells), I don’t know if I’m watching a Frank Capra film that was too corny and too mean to be released or I stumbled into an arena during a professional wrestling match. The Republican ticket has managed to take the most serious and dangerous issues of our time and put them on the Jerry Springer Show.

Senator McCain who at one time was considered a vibrant 72 year old has deteriorated to the point that he now looks like he was hastily assembled by Dr. Frankenstein, who, by the way, after seeing his creation would have certainly yelled, “It’s not alive!” His running mate, Sarah Palin refers to herself as a hockey mom. After hearing her being interviewed I indeed believe she’s a hockey mom, one that got too close and got hit in the head with a puck. When I look at her, I don’t see lipstick on a bulldog, pit bull or a pig, I see Carl Rove in drag.

Over the last eight years we’ve seen a political party that pandered to the uneducated, uninformed, and continuously reached for the lowest common denominator are now stooping to scrap the bottom of the brain barrel to find an array of Village People surrogates who’d struggle to pronounce WMCA.

It’s time to stop rewarding ignorance and to make Joe the plumber look into the republican pedestal as we flush John McCain, Sarah Palin and the stench of their constipated politics away, .

Money Can't Buy Me Sex

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Right now, in New York City, every day, millions of people are having sex. And it makes me feel good to know that I’m personally bucking the odds. You see, sex has always been a difficult issue with me. It was at its worst right after my divorce. I ran an add in a local paper, that read, "Single White Male seeks attractive female with low self esteem, poor eyesight, and enjoys hearing the words, "I’m sorry this has never happened to me before."

It was a scary time; in fact I had briefly thought about having a homosexual experience. I figured this way at least one of us would have an erection. But I was always very attracted to woman and more then anything it was my shyness that got in my way. I was far too shy. If I was a necrophilliac I’d probably wait for the corpse to make the first move.

So I was now single again in a city with the most beautiful women in the world and I couldn’t even get to first base or out of the batter’s box when Larry David Co-Creator of “Seinfeld,” and star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” took me out to lunch for my birthday. And this is where our story begins.
"So John, are you seeing anyone?" My incredibly rich friend (Larry David) asked over a lunch that cost more then all the food that’s ever been in my stomach.

"Getting laid, are you kidding? The last time I had sex was when Micheal Jackson was still sleeping with kids his own age.” And I’m not exactly in the best shape now. My idea of being cut (or having muscle definition) is showing the marks from my belt digging into my waist."

My really really rich friend (Larry) scratched at an island of hair like he was trying to dig a thought out of his very wealthy brain. "I should buy you a hooker for your birthday

But I couldn’t let him do that, the reasons filling my mind's eye with nude pictures of myself. My skin never quite fit my properly. I looked as if my birthday suit was bought off the rack. When I’m naked is the one time I’m sure God is not watching!" I said, like a true neurotic. My very, very rich pal regrettably saw my point and dropped the subject.

We ended lunch and each went our separate ways: him in his finely tuned driving machine and me in a machine that when tuned I can barely drive without getting a fine.

A little later in the day I found myself at a fellow comic’s apartment surrounded by a few of my unsuccessful peers. I told them about the offer from our very, very rich friend and how I turned it down. What I said must have had an impact, because they barely had enough time to stop talking about themselves, before they responded angrily.

"You got to do it."

"Come on, do this for us, for all the starving comics."

"We’re never going to get this opportunity again."

"It won’t be just you in there with that girl, it’ll be every comic in America" Not exactly what I considered an enticement, but if I didn’t agree I’d never shut them up, which is near impossible anyway. Do you know how to keep a dying comic alive? On his death bed, throw him a microphone.

Now, I’d never been with a hooker before. You can’t count that one-time years ago that I tried to pick up a hooker near Times Square. That wound up being very embarrassing. It turned out to one of the guys I went to high school with. Anyway, when I told Larry I was going to take him up on the offer, he was surprised. “I was only joking,” he replied.

Before he had a chance to take the offer off the “night table,” so to speak, I explained to him that I talked it over with my comic peers who pressured me into taking the plunge. LD., never forgetting his stand-up roots, understood my dilemma and wish me luck.

Now it was time for me to find a hooker slash call girl, I didn’t have the slightest idea where to look. It was time to ask a friend, but who? Then it came to me. I had a friend who had to know where to find a hooker, after all he was a serious a jazz musician. I was wrong about one thing, he didn’t know any hookers, but he was a serious jazz musician. He offered to set me up with his girl friend’s identical twin sister, a four hundred pound knock out. I’d forgotten that this guy liked his women on the obese side. His last girl friend was blamed by Stephan Hawkins for the expanding universe.

The next guy I called was a hundred percent sure bet to know all about hookers; After all he was comic, an alcoholic and a degenerate gambler - The Hooker Trifecta. Unfortunately my timing was off; the only hookers he knew were now back in Texas and member of the House of Representatives (due to a last minute redistricting as payback for their many contributions to the Republican party).

My next call was out of desperation. I would give it one last try before throwing in the Kleenex. In order to make this call it took every ounce of my control. I had a comic friend, who frankly was not much a comic, but inherited tons of money from his deceased parents. Yes, myself and my comic brethren were very envious of him. After all he had what most struggling comics dreamed about, a large inheritance and dead parents.

Money in the hands of most men acts as an aphrodisiac, but in the hands of a comic it only enables you to get rejected by a higher class of woman. He had to be the one, the one who could find me my birthday hooker. I popped the question, then held my breath, and squeezed the phone so hard parts began to pour out the little holes in the receiver like chop meat through a grinder. Did he know? Was I going find an actual in the flesh, but hopefully not too fleshy, hooker? His answer squeaked through the receiver. And I yelled, Yes! Yes! Yes! -- the elation lasting longer then most of my sexual encounters. Usually women only have time enough to scream out my initials. In fact the only time I’d ever heard my name being yelled during sex it was quite loud and followed by, "Get your father an ashtray!" My mediocre comic friend had told me a fail-safe sure-fire way of finding my wet dream girl. All I had to do was buy a certain weekly newspaper and I’d have my pick.

And he was right; there were hundreds of them. Too many, most highly trained experts specializing in whips, chains, masochism, sadism, S&M, WD40 and other acts so low even agents and managers wouldn’t even consider representing.

But where were the average all America hooker next door types? That’s what I wanted, what I needed, what my fellow comics thirsted for. Then I turned to the last page and found it. Pictures of several naked beauties, many with black rectangles over their eyes. I deduced that they must be ashamed to show that they wore glasses.
After an hour or two of hormonal debates, I selected the picture of an adorable brunette, her right hip thrust poetically sideways as she leaned against the open lip of an over flowing trash can. I called her and when she quoted me a price her voice seemed pleasant and rather sexy. I was surprised that a woman of her spectacular qualities could be so inexpensive. At her rate I could afford two hours of her company, where I would show her my standup tape which would sweep her off her feet and then of course she would spend the night at no extra charge.

It wasn’t easy waiting a whole day for my date with the next Mrs. Pitiful. Of course, I was playing out the comic fantasy of my manly charms causing her to change her life, marry me, produce my films (with her saved up hooker money), while raising our children and managing to change my sheets every couple of months.

With a hooker coming over, it was only right that I spent the day cleaning my apartment, picking out my outfit, and choosing a wine with an expensive looking label. The man at the liquor store was not the most cooperative, I guess that could be blamed on the difficulty he had dialing 911, which was caused by the bullet hole he received from his last customers. After I paid him he was even less caring, when he put my wine in the bag I felt he should have at least wiped the blood from the twist off cap.

I was pacing nervously deciding whether the music I had chosen was hooker appropriate, when the bell rang. She was here. To cut my nervousness I took a huge swig from the wine bottle, there’s no sense dirtying the wineglasses yet, especially after I just dusted them off.

At the door, I thought of Frank, Dean and Sammy, and tried imagining their coolness soaking into my body. Then I suavely flung open the door, and which caught on the mat and opened about an inch. It pressed against her nose that was sticking through the opening like a carrot on a melting snowman, and I could feel my heart skip several beats and my pulse rise, as I wrestled with the mat. Finally I just tore it off, ripping it in two. I hoped it was an omen that the only letters remaining on the mat spelled the word "come."

The door opened and she stepped into my den of "inadequacy." My eyes flashed on her face, and then her body, then her face again and then her body. No! She was definitely not the girl in the picture! It had to be a mistake! She’s probably a scout sent to make sure I was not some pervert who actually read the magazine.
Then she said it. I’ll never forget those words. "Hi, I’m Shane, so what do you think?" What I was thinking was that either you take an amazing picture, or you killed Shane and took all her appointments.

It wasn’t that she was so horrible looking, I was expecting some sophisticated woman you’d imagine stalking only the finest hotels in Manhattan. She on the other hand looked like if she was ever found in a fancy hotel it would be on her knees scrubbing floors with her stringy hair.

When she smiled I was glad to see that she had teeth, although not all in a row, or the same height. I tried to find something that I liked about her. Her figure wasn’t bad, if you like the melting look. Well, at least her stockings didn’t have holes in them. Of course one was a slightly darker shade then the other with an irregular pattern. Then I had a few other terrible thoughts. What if they were the same stockings and one of her legs just wasn’t shaved or she wasn’t wearing stockings at all. I lifted my eyes away from her legs, and back to her face. Her eyes were large and brown, I think they were the same shade of brown, it was difficult to really know, you could never see them both at the same time. They hung on different sides of narrow face that wouldn’t have a front at all if it wasn’t for a flat nose that look like it was pressed against a pain of glass.

Now, if I were a real man, insensitive to the core, I would just send her home. Tell her that she makes me sick to my stomach, and then as she walked out broken hearted I’d ask what she’d give me for fifty bucks. But unfortunately I’m missing those red blooded American male genes.

There was only one thing to do... get so drunk I wouldn’t care nor would I be able to tell what she looked like. I had a friend who had gotten so drunk one night he decided to make it with a Gorilla. He woke up the next morning and was horrified to find out that he was indeed in bed with a Gorilla. The next day, in the hospital through what was left of him he swore it was female.

So I proceeded to get drunk. I had bought two bottles of wine. And I had already stuck the corkscrew in the top of the second bottle, so with my back towards what I thought would be a high-class hooker, she wouldn’t see me unscrew the metal top. Unfortunately this girl had never seen any thing that didn’t have a pop top on it and when she saw the cork screw, got frightened and sprayed mace at me. Her eyes not being able to see around the corners of her face caused her to miss me by several feet, but killed both of my gold fish.

After a few moments I calmed her down, stirred the tank with a hand mixer so the goldfish looked alive and I proceeded to get drunk. After several drinks she saw that I was no longer having the dry heaves at the sight of her, so she asked me for the money. I had seen enough hookers on TV to know that was part of the process to put the money in her car.

Over the years I have finally learned to hold my liquor…I throw up in my hands. When she returned, I tried to suavely catch my oral expulsion with one hand. She wisely grabbed my other hand and dragged me toward the bedroom. I tried every stalling tactic I could. In the hall I pointed to pictures of all my relatives, told her their names and correct spellings and then offered to run down to Kinko’s to make laser copies of their pictures for her, but she was stronger then me. And as I saw her flex her powerful legs, I wondered if it was appropriate to ask a woman if her father was a sumo wrestler.

Once in the bedroom she turned on my "made hastily in Taiwan" stereo and ordered me to take off my clothes. I was drunk, so it took me forever to remove a belt that had been stretched to the point where molecules were barely touching each other. Then I removed my shirt and pants and was lying there in my brand new underwear that perfectly matched my shoes and socks, not to mention the soon to be opened condom. I was drunk, color coordinated, and ready for love.

She stood before the bed my ninety-proof Aphrodite, the goddess of numbed inhibitions and started to remove her clothes slowly, like she was either teasing me or hoping she would lose weight before she got completely naked. Truthfully it did give me a thrill, but it wasn’t from her erotic movements. No, I felt the danger that she might not remove all her clothes before the alcohol wore off. When she was completely naked, she did the unconceivable -- she started dancing. I didn’t mind that her flattened nose made noise as air passed though her deformed nostrils when she swayed from left to right, or the tips of a stiff stringy hair scrapped paint off my wall, or the layers of fat wobbled so much she looked blurry. What got me was that she wouldn’t stop dancing.

At first I just waved for her to come onto the bed, then I pounded my mattress (which was actually less lumpy then her legs) with both hands and I even put one of the matching condoms on over my underwear. Figuring, I’d at least get a laugh. Nothing. She just stood there gyrating, like a pillar of moldless Jell-O floating in zero gravity. If she were older she could have been the model for the first lava lamp. Finally, I got up, sucked in my stomach, which was like trying to make mud in the desert by spitting, and shut off the stereo.

As drunk as I was, I had enough functioning brain cells to know that I was racing against the time clock of alcohol. I told her I was now ready and willing to indulge in her feminine gifts. That was not an exact quote. My use of language at the time was simpler and more to point. Then she sprung it on me. She said, and I quote "I only dance."

I told her I didn’t care if she did the Hully Gully or the Charleston as long as she did it while resting a certain part of her on a very small hardly used area of me. That was not an exact quote.

"I am a dancer, I don’t touch you."

"You think I’m paying you not to touch me. I can get girls to do that everyday for free." That was an exact quote, and unfortunately very true.

We went on like that for a few minutes before I took out the newspaper. After a difficult time of finding her supposed picture, she pointed out that I had selected her under the heading of nude exotic dancers. She was nude, she was exotic if you liked the victim of nuclear testing on a tropical island look, and she vibrated to music, so I guess that’s dance.

When I couldn’t talk her into the benefits of a quick career change, I asked for the half the money back. After all it was my friend’s money. Now that I look back on it, here I am half-naked arguing with someone who looked like a rodeo clown in drag in order to get a couple a hundred bucks back for a guy worth 200 or 300 hundred million! But it was the principle. No. In all honesty it was the alcohol.
She told me that the money was already taken from her car by a courier. I was angry and needed to vent my additional frustration. So I called the service that sends her out, and insisted I get my money back. Like I really had a chance, getting it back from a company that listed itself in a magazine printed on recycled tissues and whose cover was a woman with a mouth filled with at least two other human beings.
The doorbell rang and I remembered that it was my birthday and that it was probably my woman friends, either Lynn or Amy stopping bye to drop off presents. I couldn’t let them find me with a hooker. But then again, I was drunk and told myself to let the girls learn what kind of real inadequate man I really am.

I opened the door, and it was not Amy, or Lynn. No, it was a man, a very large man, who had to bend his shaved tattooed head in order to stand in my doorway. Of course, I knew what he was here for. Again I repeat that I was drunk and I stand all of five eight when I’m not cowering. I screamed at him. "I want my money back! And don’t worry I’m not going to hurt you!" He didn’t budge. I repeated. "I’m not going to hurt you. Just give me the damn money back!" As I gave him my meanest look which was slightly less menacing then a smile button.

This time he grinned and said in a voice deep voice that sounded like the rumble of an earthquake or a lion with serious acid reflux problems, "I can’t. The courier already took it."

I shot back pointing my tiny finger at him. "Okay, me and you are getting in your car and we’re going to get the money, right now! Now, I said. Move it! Come on, I promise I won’t hurt you."

When he finally stopped laughing, he turned to the hooker, I mean exotic dancer, who had already gotten dressed, I think the big guy and I were both pleased by that, and told to her they were leaving.
I jumped up and said, "No you’re not! I still have one hour left. She’s staying here!"

He looked at me, looked at her, nodded and said, "Okay, but I’ll be right outside."
When the door closed, it blocked his six pack belly laughs and she started dancing towards the bedroom. I stopped her and pointed toward the couch. I said, "Sit down. We’re gonna watch TV. And leave your clothes on!" I found the worst show I could possibly find. For a few minutes we watched the Fox sitcom about struggling Siamese twin hookers (attached at the crouch, which also made bending over impossible, thus limiting their income possibilities) who did tricks to pay for their separation, until she started to laugh. So I now I had an even bigger challenge find something worse then a Fox sitcom. So for the next hour we watched my stand-up tapes. She didn’t come close to laughing, and for once I was glad that my audience didn’t think I was funny.

The End?

P.S. When I told Larry what had not happened, he said with more enthusiasm than his character on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “This is the best money I ever spent.”

The End!

HEL-LENA

It was very hot and humid; the kind of day a person could spontaneously combust harmlessly because their sweat would put out the fire. Personally, I don’t sweat I flood, so on these kind of days I stayed away from crowds out of embarrassment because my under arms stains would spread to anyone near bye. When I entered the coffee shop, I wasn’t looking my best, which truth be told would require a black out during a total eclipse and an admirer with eye lids that were permanently rusted shut. I was one of the few people when taking a head shot the photographer would yell out “duck!”

The counter kid, who had a flat face with a complexion so bad it looked like a tray of French pastries, took my order, a large ice coffee. I was pounding my straw into the java bending it several times trying to jam it through the glacier (that couldn’t even be affected by global warming on the sun), when she came up to me and asked if she could sit at my table.

I hadn’t seen her yet, so I said, “Yes” without stammering, raising my voice a few octaves, or imploding my skeletal system so that it looked like I was standing sideways. But once I looked up and saw her gorgeous face I started blinking so hard the air blew away her fake eye lashes, contact lenses, than blew open her blouse, the skin of her breasts was forced so tight I could see the patent number on her implants. Her skirt finally lifted covering her face and blowing into her mouth and down her throat far enough that it wrapped around her G-string – chocking her. The counter boy called an ambulance, taking an order of two large mocha-chinos with skim milk (two Splenders in each, the New Jersey daily requirement for carcinogens) before he could tell them about the gagging woman.

I ran to her, ripped the skirt and the thong out of her mouth, tearing a few too perfect teeth loose, and almost ripping her tongue off which had been caught in a lace hem. Lucky for her the skirt was a cheap rip off and ripped off. Her eye’s twittered underneath her lids and then her body and face shook violently surrounding her head with a cloud of foundation and other make up, causing the arriving team of paramedics to give CPR to each other first. By the time they reached her she was dead, frozen with such a horrifying facial expression that it made the mortician place her in a closed coffin with a bag over her head. It was a topless funeral home so the place was still jammed with happy mourners.

I wished it happened like that, but unfortunately it didn’t. I wouldn’t have wasted so much time. Oh, the humidity and the coffee stuff were true but compared to what happened after that, I was putting a positive spin on things.
I hadn’t been able to penetrate the ice in my cup so out of frustration I had started drinking milk right out of the metal craft, when she said, “Is anyone sitting here?” I instinctively looked up; a funnel of milk coated my face and slid down my neck on to her feet. My white tong flapped like a flounder on a flagpole but only a moist gurgle climbed out.

She laughed and said, “I guess that means it’s okay for me to sit here.”
Sort of a “yes” came out, subject to that interpretation, but only if you had no particular language, body movements, or species (earthly or not) in mind. I’ve always been intimidated by pretty women, or women, or pictures of women, or pictures taken by women, or even female ends of on RCA plug. And as long as I can remember I’ve been attracted to the female body. In fact my first girlfriend was almost entirely female – and would have been if she weren’t such a slow healer (a black out during the operation). Just kidding. A few weeks back I had the good fortune of meeting a woman who couldn’t keep her hands off of me. Of course, she was drowning.

The woman who sat across from me had the kind of beauty that sucked men’s breath away along with their wallets. Which I wasn’t concerned about since the emptiness of my wallet created such a vacuum that when I raised my chair stuck it to me like it was magnetized. I felt myself falling for her, like I was sinking in quick sand made of super glue.

She tossed me a smile so sweet it would break your heart by clogging your arteries while at the same time it was so sexy it would make Viagra work in a cremation urn. “Hi, I’m Helena,” the way she accented the first syllable of her name it should have been a warning but like most males when it comes to pretty women we see warning signs like politician’s see ethics. We’ll over look a minus IQ, multiple boring personalities, a right hook, open bullet wounds, playful eye gouging, projectile vomiting, demonic possession, the humping of your dog’s leg or we’ll see our way past cannibalism, or early stages of leprosy (unless you have a foot fetish and insist on all ten toes), and with a shot or two of alcohol we’d probably pretend not to notice a Tony Orlando and Dawn CD collection (but not posters above her bed).

I splattered my name out, along with drops of milk, across the table. She slid her head sideways like a boxer, dodging the liquid jabs from a great white dope, but somehow managing to catch my name. “I like that. It fits you like a helmet or a wristband or a woolen scarf. I’m not going to tell you my last name is, so you’re going to just have to fill in the blanks with your imagination.” At the time my imagination was filled with images of me shooting blanks. Before I could let that discouragement develop into suicidal daydreams, she released her acting credits out like steam escaping from a broken pipe valve, turning the milk and coffee in my mouth to cappuccino.

If an actress was captured during a war, she’d give you her name, rank and every credit she ever head. You’d have to water board this one to stop her from talking about herself. I think her first word was, “Me.” Oh, she did say that she was a spiritual person in tune with nature. Right, this girl would only be one with the universe if she got top billing. Oh, she did eventually stop talking but that was only to ask me why I wasn’t taking notes.

I avoided that answer which was only made worse by my response. “You know, I’m director,” which was true. I had made a movie with enough Italian names in it I was surprised my contract didn’t include me putting a hit on someone or (maybe it did, that’s why it never made it into theaters, video, dvds or on any of the actor’s resumes). I’m being hard on myself; the film did win an award. I received the best director in a festival where the award was a cremation urn filled with my film which, instead of fireworks, or lights, or even a torch was burned as part of the opening ceremony.

Just the fact that my movie had been long enough so its ashes filled the urn seemed to impress her. “Would you like to go with me to a July 4th party tomorrow, they’ll be fire works and bottled water?” When she asked, she leaned over and pressing her chest against my face, revealing cleavage so deep that my voice echoed.
“Yes,” I said, once, but it reverberated itself repeatedly.
“Great, I’ll meet you here tomorrow at one,” she said as she handed me a business card with her face and phone number on both sides and in the centerfold.
I dug into my pocket and then handed her a business card which had my phone number on the side that said I owed the phone company one hundred and seventy-five bucks.
She laughed an actress laugh – parted lips, perfect white teeth, heightened cheekbones, twinkling eyes-- an involuntary reaction to words she hadn’t listened to. Then she turned and left sucking my eyes along with her.

That night I resisted calling her by pulling down the shades and putting all the lights out in my house so I couldn’t read her number, but just in case I couldn’t resist temptation I super glued my fingers to its twin on my other hand. I sat there in the dark, unable to twiddle my thumbs, hoping she would call. Shortly past midnight I was awakened by the phone ringing through my eardrums. “Hello,” I managed to sneak out between my mouth, drool, and the pillow.
“Hi,” bounced out of my phone like Santa Claus on speed laced with Xstacy. “I hope I didn’t wake you?” The ringing faded away and my ears were hearing what my eyes wished they could see.
“No, not at all. I was just reading a script for my next movie, “ I lied, knowing what she’d say next.
“I hope there’s a part for me,” she purred like a lion about to pounce on sheep and a horny Shepard.
“There’s a great one, that you’d be perfect for,” I lied to her face, via, the mouthpiece, transmitter, airways and a few hundred phone towers.
“What’s the script about?” she asked like she was about to place a bet after dealing from the bottom of the deck.
“It’s too complicated to tell you over the phone.”
“Oh, I love complicated. I’m great at it,” she love tapped back to me. “I can’t wait…Oh, I forgot to tell you why I called. Can you bring a bag of charcoal? We all have to bring something. I’m an awful cook, so I suggested we bring something that’s supposed to be burnt,” she said so innocently I had to remind mind myself that being beautiful trumps being dumb.
“Sure, how big a bag?”
“I don’t know, one that you can fit the charcoal in.” Once again I reminded myself that you can’t touch dumb, but you can rub, fondle, and lick beautiful.
“Bye, “ she said and hung up hearing her own voice, which to her was the equivalent of quitting while you’re on top.

I woke up early and spent the morning, ripping my hands apart, then drank three glasses of instant breakfast, which took me an hour just to open each package, repaired the missing skin tissue on my fingers tips with plumbers putty and waited for them to stop bleeding.

I arrived at the coffee shop at noon, but not wanting to seem too anxious I hid in the bathroom till 1:05. When I left the bathroom, an irritable line of people with irritable bowels and bursting bladders had formed around the block, so I couldn’t see where my princess was sitting and I was sure she couldn’t hear me scream her name (or help) through the shouts of the angry mob that pushed, shoved and kicked me into the room, lucky for me their movements were restricted by other restricted movements.

All of the tables were filled with customers who were either pretentiously reading west village newspapers, working on their computers, or making sure I didn’t have a place to sit. I figured she’d arrive any minute so I didn’t care if I had to stand. I put down the bag of charcoal and waited. And waited. And waited. At one thirty a table emptied and I took my charcoal date and sat and waited patiently for my human date. I got up at one-forty-five and ordered a tall iced coffee, which holds about as much actual coffee as a contact lens. Like the day before it was hot enough to fry an egg inside a chicken and the humidity was thick enough to lean against. She was now an hour and half late.

I had called her cell phone but it went directly to voice mail. I left message trying not to sound desperate or anxious so I kept it to under an hour. After another ninety-minutes I asked myself how long should I wait, but my answer, which was based on logic that must have had its roots in hormones and desperation, kept coming up forever. Then I started to worry that she had gotten in a bad accident. Or she got in an accident so bad that she was disfigured or even worse… she got in an accident was disfigured and still showed up!

I watched the clock in the coffee shop, the one on my cell phone, and even counted nervous twitches as the time passed crawling uphill. Finally, just when I was about to take a stand and had decided not to wait any longer than an additional week, my phone rang and it was my dream girl. She said that she had gone shopping, got her hair done, had a manicure, saw a play, cleaned her apartment, adopted a dog at the pound, took a practice pregnancy test, saw her shrink, her psychic, her lesbian watch group, her kettle cleaning class, shaved several of the Rockette’s left legs, or stole their shoes (she doesn’t remember which one) and ate three seedless grapes by mistake and she just lost track of time.

I accepted her apology by apologizing for expecting her to be on time and waited another hour when she turned up asking if I was her date or just some guy I’d hired to carry the charcoal. After I told her I’d forgotten, she poured milk on my face and then immediately recognized me from our first meeting. She asked if I had the directions. I reminded her that they were her friends and I had no idea where the party was. At first she thought I was using it as an excuse because I no longer felt that she was attractive, even though I was absent-mindedly unbuttoning her blouse. Before I never noticed that it didn't have buttons and I was trying to remove her nipples, she realized that I was telling the truth and slapped me several times for being too forward and a few more times for finishing my coffee before she arrived.

She called her friends for the directions and we were on our way. Just a few subway stops, a short cab ride, and quick stroll and we’d be at happening party, enjoying barbecue, drinks, watching amazing fire works and hopefully smooching (a word I thought I never use either in speech or writing).

Men, (especially former standup comics) when it comes to beautiful women become show offs, little kids who want to run the fastest, throw the farthest, lift the heaviest, see the most therapists, have the longest anxiety attacks or take the highest dose of antidepressants, thus I bought a hefty twenty-five pound bag of charcoal, thinking our travels would be confined to the city. Now if it wasn’t for the thick humidity, which the current administration was trying to privatize and sell to Pepsi and Coke as A Taste of New York, a refreshing smog flavored beverage aimed for a real man’s flemy pallet, my charcoal bag would have burst into flames and made both of us barbecue (well at least me since she didn’t think we knew each other well enough to have even our shadows touch). Carrying a twenty-five pound bag of smoking charcoal in this heat was like a roasting pig on your shoulder. I tried not to show the pain, did my best to douse the flames, and hide the burn marks on my shirt. Luckily for me there were plenty of places for Helena to see her own reflection in and she didn’t need me to help her talk about herself, so we walked to the train without her noticing my smoldering Hawaiian print (and it charred palm trees).

The train was full, so after paying for both us and a seat for the charcoal, (in which I failed to convince the conductor that I should pay a child’s fare for since the bag was short. He insisted that I pay full price since the charcoal was old enough to be smoking), the ride to Long Island went without further incident.

At one point during the trip she asked me about my new screen play, but before I could tell her anything about it, she said she could read my mind and started performing her part in the musical: a grief stricken beautiful one legged Croatian widow, who thought if she hopped backwards she’d never be close enough for anyone to notice that she had only one leg. She sang several Paleolithic show tunes, dance a lengthy Texas One step, and ended her performance keeping time with a conductors punch while she watched her imaginary elderly roommate do a strip tease to Mel Kiper Jr. giving you his first round NFL picks. Luckily, the train arrived at our stop before she could do an encore where she intended to sing a selection of classical lisp songs.

A small cab prevented her from continuing her performance because she felt that her act takes a back seat to no one. Thank God for Dumb. By the time we exited the cab she’d forgotten about her encore and was now loudly questioning my commitment to her and insisting that by being with her I was only thinking of myself. I wanted to defend myself and say that I was with her, not because she was the only beautiful woman who would ever go out with me (which was the truth), or that I that I’d like being with her even if she was shooting at me, and that I’d be honored to have my name on her restraining order, but instead I shouted, “Even if you were dead I’d still go out with you. In fact I’d dig you up and take your maggot filled bony remains to every twenty-four hour Greek diner in town and order everything on the menu, even the Bison burger deluxe twice and not get mad if you didn’t eat a thing, you wouldn’t leave the tip, or your face rotted on the plate. And then I’d run out on the check carry your dried out carcass back to the grave and bury myself along with you.”

At first she starred at me, taking my words in slowly, (its not easy when most of the English language you’ve heard spoken was out of your own mouth). She turned, opened her eyes wide and said, “That’s the sweetest thing a man carrying charcoal every said to me.” And then came the kiss, not on the lips of course, but it had a lot of tongue, and so what if it was on an elbow, that was close enough, even if it was her own.

We had to walk one short block, since the party was on a one-way street going in the opposite direction, but when we arrived, there was a police barrier. The cop standing guard smiled at Helena, who smiled back and said, “Get out of my way pig!” The cop didn’t expect that coming out of the man swallowing smile of a gorgeous woman and replied. “Uh.uh…uh…that sounds like the password. Go ahead.” And let us in.

Of course, I found out later there wasn’t a password, but Helena, of course claimed she was a psychic genius who does dialects. The party was on the twenty-seventh floor of a high rise, that no matter how high it ever got, the rent would still go through the roof. I was surprised that there wasn’t a doorman, but my heart had a panic attack, anticipating a massive heart attack, when we found out the elevator was out of service.

I should have thrown the charcoal at Helena and ran but instead I hoisted the bag over my shoulder and started to climb, drawn by the fantasy of looking up her dress for twenty-seven flights. For the first three flights my view was better than expected. She had long perfect legs the kind that looked liked she was always wearing high heels and a butt that jumped out like two bouncing soccer balls. By the time we had reached the fourth floor, my butt felt like two medicine balls and my eyes overflowed with so much sweat I could see more if I was looking through a windshield in a car wash. “Come on slow poke,” I heard her say between breaths that I couldn’t move fast enough to catch. I almost fell a few times, once hitting my face on the railing then sliding down a flight on my protruding tongue, which took on a shade of battle ship gray from the drying paint. On the 10th floor I fell when she stopped and I didn’t and bounced off her butt rolled down five steps and belly flopped onto the landing where a broken beer bottle sadistically punched a small hole in the bottom of the bag of charcoal.

The trip to the 27th floor took twice as long as it should have because Helena ordered me to retrieve the charcoal briquettes that kept slipping out of the hole in the bag. I’m not the type of guy who just does what some pretty face with a body who’s language only spoke one four letter word repeatedly, tells me. Nope, I drew a line in my testosorin and on the 25th floor I let the charcoal escape. I don’t think Helena was happy about my defiance but I had my pride and didn’t pick up the briquettes until I had rested for thirty or forty seconds and even then I didn’t scoop up all the ones that I had stepped on and crushed.

The apartment door was open so we took it upon ourselves to enter unannounced, which didn’t seem to disturb anyone since no one was there. Helena was unconcerned, figuring that her hoard of friends were going to barbecue on the terrace so they wouldn’t miss the fireworks display. If two’s company and three’s a crowd then we were a crowd. Sitting on the terrace floor because the pull of gravity seems to grow in proportion to the amount of alcohol that one consumes, was a fat guy, who seemed to widen in layers till his bottom seemed to flatten like wax that melted to the ground. A bottle of beer stuck out of his mouth like it was torpedoed into his face. His eyes, like most males recognized Helena immediately, the rest of him continued to look like it was spilling downward.

“This is my friend, he’s my director. Where’s everyone?” Helena asked the perpetual squatting male flesh, knowing that no man no matter how deteriorated he was would be able to refuse to answer her question.
The guy’s words streamed around the bottle like a leaky valve. “They’re at Frank’s on the fifteenth floor. Apartment 6B as in Bee,” which he cleverly ended with a buzzing sound.
“Great. Let’s go.” Helena shouted as she spun past me and out the door. I thought about staying with the fat flat guy, but there was something about the foam that started drooling out of his mouth and one of his nostrils and both his ears that made me think I was much better off walking or even falling down 12 flights of stairs.

I may not be the sharpest needle sticking in a junkie’s arm, but I knew in my heart of hearts attacks that going down was a lot easier than going up, unless you’re bulimic (which is a push). So I followed Helena, hoping that I could get another good look at her butt because she would fall face first down the 200 or so steps. These weren’t sexist thoughts they were vindictive, homicidal, sadomasochistic fantasy’s spurred on by my growing hatred toward this gorgeous creature who’s shadow was more woman than most men could handle. And the more I despised her the more I knew she was the gal I’ve been looking for all my life, even though she’d rather end my life then spend it with me.

Well, she didn’t fall, which was more than I could say for myself. Unfortunately I missed colliding with Helena and rolled past her finally stopping when my face smacked into the wall on the 10th floor (which in my fuzzy romantic brain I kept thinking that this was “our” floor). I picked up the charcoal which had spilled, wrapped what I could in what was left of the bag, and stuffed the rest in my pockets and into my shirt, then I walked, or more accurately crawled up seven more flights, where Helena was waiting for me rehearsing a Irish Jig version of Madame Butterfly in which she sneezed all the words in falsetto. When I finally applauded and she took her bows, three curtain calls, and wrote her autograph on my shirt in charcoal we proceeded up the hall.

There was music coming from inside apartment 6B as in Bee, so we weren’t at all disturbed when no one answered our knocks. Helena thought since we didn’t want stop anyone’s fun, it would be okay if I kicked in the door. My first dozen or so kicks didn’t break the lock or either of my feet, but pulled a muscle in my leg and widened the whole in on the bottom of my shoe when I missed my target and got my foot stuck on the door knob. Helena, who said she hated my shoes, especially the right one, by now had gotten discouraged. That was before she remembered that in her day job she was a locksmith. Using a set of picks, which she insisted I used first to clean between my teeth, she opened the door.

The apartment would have been empty if it wasn’t for the woman who was trying to remove her boyfriend’s tattoo with a cheese grater. The tattoo matched the one that was on his girlfriend’s cheek, which only destroyed the right side of their faces; still they weren’t a bad looking couple if you didn’t take their looks into consideration.

Helena ignored the guy’s moans and the blood that was spattering into the guacamole. I didn’t want any part of this scene, but Helena thought that after carrying the charcoal I’d be hungry and it would be polite for me to eat at least a few chips full. After she held my nose and I finally swallowed she asked where everyone was. They told us that the party had moved up to the 23rd floor because 2 and 3 added up to five. I couldn’t dispute their math, even though their logic seemed to elude me, so up we went.

I climbed and Helena danced, sang, mimed, and cart wheeled her way up. At this point I didn’t care if I could see up her dress or if her butt clanged to the whole catalogue of Stephan Foster’s songs, except for “I Dream Of Jeanie,” which was my high school fight song. We might not have won any games but we never let any team, no matter how big or intimidating, force us to sing Stephan Foster’s “Way Down Upon The Sewanee River,” or “Oh Susanna” although were willing to hum most of Gershwin’s, “Porgy and Bess.”

Helena made it to the 23rd floor before I did, but this time while she waited she didn’t rehearse because her agent had called and insisted that she sign a contract first.

This time the apartment door was open and there we several varieties of people, a couple of six packs of folks who looked like they had a couple of six packs each, and few guys and gals swollen from over compensation of their dietary needs, a half dozen sticks who looked shrink wrapped from under compensation of their metabolism’s needs, and a mass of humanity crowded so tightly together that their DNA was merging. Helena who announced her presence by pretending to milk a cow, which she cleverly segued into stabbing a famous loan shark, quickly became the life of the party, while I tried to find a barbecue to dump the charcoal in. None of the guests had any idea where it was and apparently the guy who was throwing the party had been sent to the hospital for almost burning his lips off because, he was so high, he thought a the steaming spout of a tea kettle was a water pipe.

In one of the bedrooms, I found a guy who was humping three-dozen hot dog and hamburger buns. I stopped him from doing the doughy deed by asking him where the barbecue is and tossing a few charcoal briquettes at his head. I was looking at him strangely when he told me that he was attracted to bleached wheat products, was in a support group and hadn’t even touched a slice of white bread or walked in the bakery aisle in years, but the sight of all those unattended buns was too much for him. I comforted him by telling him that my best friend had condiment fetish and ruined his marriage over a Heinz squeeze bottle, so who was I to judge. After discussing my own crush on disposable razors and garden sheers I again asked him where the barbecue was. He said that the last he heard was that it was on the 27th floor on the terrace. The guy with the hamburgers and hotdogs went looking for it but never returned or called. Depressed at the thought of climbing more stairs, I started putting the uncrushed buns into their plastic bags when Helena arrived and said to me.“Everyone’s starving. You’re not one of those white bread perverts are you?”
“Of course not. He is,” I said pointing to the man who lowered his head in disgrace.

“I played one of those freaks in an adaptation of The Merchant Of Venice that we changed to take place in a bakery. I was a female Shylock, who was part Jewish and part seedless rye bread, who in our version was being accused of charging too much for a perfect everything bagel (one that he was secretly in love with) and being chided for getting a new electric bread slicer.” I was about to say they didn’t have them back then when she started her monologue. “If you prick us while cutting bread, do we not bleed? If you leave us out, do we not go stale? If you poison us with yeast, do we not rise? And if you eat all our baked goods without paying (even the day old stuff), shall we not seek revenge or call a cop?”

She finally stopped, happy that she had brought the man to tears, and of course waited for my applause. Which I did because at that moment, I realized that she was the most beautiful least talented egocentric psychotic woman I’ve ever seen not in a mental institution, but yet she had something unique about her. I wanted to know what it was and what better way is there to find that out then to use the charcoal to the best of my ability and make her the greatest hamburger this party would ever see, and then maybe she’d open up and let me touch her breasts. I forgot where the door was and was searching for it, when she said.
“What are you looking at, that’s not me?”

Before I could respond, the fire works starting exploding. And she ran out the door. I raced after her. Instead of going onto the terrace with everyone else, she ran out of the apartment, up the stair well and climbed another twenty floors to the roof, screaming “I deserve the very best view!” I followed her, my heart beating louder than the fire works. “Sssssh, can’t you keep you that dam thing quiet for a minute” She yelled to me several times.

When we finally reached the roof, the Sun had gone down, but it didn’t feel any cooler. The humidity was overwhelming, like a demon trying to possess me. I wasn’t sweating I was melting into a puddle. Helena and I were alone on the roof and she was too caught up with the fireworks bursting over and around us to notice she was stepping in me. I looked up and than even I didn’t care if I stepped in me. I’d never seen so many colors, there were even ones that (as a kid) I’d been able to keep within the lines of my coloring book. For a few minutes Helena glowed with excitement and happiness, like she it was all a tribute to her, which I deducted by her wide smile, glistening eyes, and her excited voice, which kept yelling out. “They doing this for me, because I’m so beautiful and wonderful! So much better than everyone one else, especially you!” Unfortunately for me, at that moment, there was lull in the fire works display and she went on a downward spiral. “Why couldn’t you do something like this for me! You call yourself a director! You don’t love me! You never did! You just wanted me so I could act in your stupid movies! And where the hell is my hamburgers, I’m starved. Go make me one right now!”

That’s when it happened. I was drawn to Helena, like I was being sucked into a jet engine. I splashed into her with the force of a fire hose sending both of us to the edge of the building, where she teetered long enough to put on lipstick and eyeliner and then over she went! Luckily for me, at the last second she was able to kick me in the groin, knocking me backwards. I ran to the ledge holding my family costume jewels expecting to see her skirt being pulled off by gravity and the thick humidity slowing her decent long enough to get a last look at her legs and see her butt bouncing along the ground till all her curves flattened and her once voluptuous shape was now a thin line, instead I saw her fingers holding on, her other hand reaching for me yelling. “Hurry before I lose a nail.”

As I bent down to take hold of her hand there was an explosion, the fireworks scattered above us, the sky bursting, pulsating, scared with glittering rainbows. When I looked down she had lifted her hand off the wall pointing to the grand finale. “They must really love me.”

I reached and at the last moment caught her right hand and then she grabbed my wrist with her left. “I still won’t consider this holding hands.” I didn’t have time to debate the point, the humidity had made my skin as slippery as an agent’s tongue, and she slid off.

I watched her descend, gravity pulling her skirt, not off but up, so it covered her face, which was still screaming. “Some date, you are. Don’t call me again charcoal boy!” Right before she hit the ground feet first, (her butt for once didn’t bounce) I heard her yell, “I just got these shoes.”

I was leaving the roof when I noticed I had a charcoal briquette caught under my belt, so I walked back to the ledge leaned over and dropped it, watching it land in what was left of her wide open mouth. Call it lucky. Call me a liar. I call it fate.

My Dream Morning

I’m started the day in a very detached mood. I had just woke up from dreaming about another person dreaming. I wasn’t in the dream and I don’t know the people who were, although I felt that they all hated me, and were some how aware of my spying on them. Making me, although asleep, very self-conscious of moving, thus I spent the night lying in bed like a disappointed necrophilliac’s blind date. Usually my sleep is so restless I look like I’m in involved in an orgy with a dozen invisible people. I wanted to wake up, to will my twitching eyes to kick the sand out of my face and fly open, but since the original dream wasn’t mine, I had no control over the situation. Finally, I heard the alarm go off, not mine, the other dreamers. It was time to get up, which in my case, especially on this day, doesn’t always mean I'm awake.

Since I have few needs for human emotions (other than an occasional therapeutic outburst that results in reminding my shrink to say “your time is up.”) I tend to lend mine to inanimate objects. Thus my alarm clock has become as neurotic as I am, and it won’t wake me because it feels like I won’t like it anymore. (Its shrink thinks it has an inferiority complex because it doesn’t have a battery back up, nor is it self-winding like my wrist watch). Then I feel bad and after I wake up I turn on the alarm immediately so it feel’s better and will like me. Then I don’t know when to turn it off, because I want it to ring long enough to feel appreciated and yet not too long to feel taken advantage of. Today I shut if off rather quickly but I did so gently with a big warm smile (that at its best resembles a half melted Jack-O'Lantern), which of course made me worry that my early afternoon breath was probably horrible, and then I worried even more that I hadn’t shut the alarm off quick enough.

It took me awhile, but I’m began to think I was finally awake when I noticed that all I wanted to do was go back to sleep. But the thought of trespassing on another person’s dream nudged me towards facing the day.

Now that I was up, not to mistaken for conscious, I had to decide what to do first, shower, eat breakfast, answer natures call (which unlike my alarm, with each year has gotten pushier, angrier, more ambitious, resentful, and harder to control, thus once it’s answered it enjoys the attention, first teasing me and then taking its merry time). So in order to keep the peace and eliminate some others without suffering through a digestive war I gave in to mother nature.

There’s no way for you to know exactly what occurred during my bathroom visit, but I’ll give you a hint, it was rather quick, required standing, and aiming, since with the light, the over head fan came on I also had to adjust for wind and a shaky caffeine deprived hand. Despite, those handicaps, my aim was good since I managed to hit the lid dad center, before realized it should be lifted.

Morning is not the best time of life for me, thus I avoid it, and usually wake up when I can sense that half the day is gone, which means there’s less time to figure out how to waste it. Usually, I check for emails and since many mornings I don’t receive any, I use alternate email address and send myself bulk mail. If I’m lucky and I actually get real bulk mail I can send it back and forth, erasing a few at a time, thus feeling useful and in need of some energy validating my desire for coffee.

For a short while I used to grind my own beans but realized it was a waste because I can’t even taste the difference between coffee and scrambled eggs. Now I just dip a spoon or two into a container of any coffee as long as the can isn’t rusted, too badly dented, and has only a few moving parts that I can get out before I crush them.

Breakfast, I’m told is the most important meal of the day, so knowing that, the pressure to select what to eat is so unbearable I usually skip it.

After downing a cup of thick coffee that actually needs grinding after it’s made, which keeps me awake, from a combination of caffeine and the fumes that rise out of my nose from the acid that’s burning a not so secret passageway from my esophagus to my back pocket, I usually fruitlessly recheck to see if someone, or anyone has emailed me. As usual nothing, not even an email promising to enlarge my penis so no matter where I had sex part of it would occur across the state line. The other day I had one penis add that said, “Get one penis enlarged and a second one was free.”

It was time for my daily shower. I like showers once I’m in them, although the thought of removing my clothes under any circumstance seems unfair to God, like I’m purposely pointing out a mistake. Getting the water the right temperature is no easy task, especially for someone who not only has difficulty determining their right from their left, in from out or but also determining up from down. Clockwise and counter clockwise has become nearly impossible since the only time pieces I have are digital. Hot and cold just compounds the situation. At some point, usually when my wrists get tired from twisting I just jump in. Eventually my body will rationalize the scalding as a way of getting sunburn without light, or uses the shivering to add to the speed of my scrubbing technique.

If I can find soap (which I did) and prevent it from slipping out of my hands so I don’t have to bend down keeping the showering in prison fears in check, I lather up careful to leave a layer of suds between my hands and certain extremely eager body parts. That done, I rinse off, allowing water to go where no man will ever go! (and very few women have ventured near).

I usually keep the towel hanging on a hook at the rear of the shower. To me the towel is still fresh if doesn’t crack when I try to bend it, yet the aroma is just strong enough to illuminate any need for air freshener, though tripling my use of deodorant.

Drying off I quickly swatted away the beads of water off the hills of my bluish white goose bumps. Me being naked outside the confines of the shower for more than a few seconds is the equivalent of Sasquatch spending the day sun bathing on Coney Island. Naked, I feel like I’m showing off the irregular tag on my birthday suite.

I’ve never been able to, on a consistent basis, even with a pliable towel, figure out how to wrap it around my waist (which I usually have to locate by measuring up from the floor), tuck it in, and have it not be blown off from as little as dying mosquito’s last breath. So, while I’m drying off I perfected the technique of putting on my underwear by inhaling.

I hate shaving, thus I try to do it as quickly as possible, usually leaving mounds of cream sticking out of the sides of my head like my ears had rabies. Since my male patterned baldness stuck closely to my original genetic coding, I have to shave my head otherwise it would look like someone pounded an Ostrich egg half way into my skull.

Now this may sound boring to you, and it was, but somewhere in the midst of shaving my head, done with all the skill of an arthritic serial killer with ADD, hopped up on too much Ritalin trying to make the upper half of a mans torso into a last minute rain coat, I heard my front door open, which I knew was locked, because I haven’t been out since I lost my keys. I have a lock that locks from the inside because I occasionally sleep walk and recently I joined a late night Internet meet up group that discusses and then shares their contagious diseases. I was also sure it was my front door that opened since it’s the only door in my apartment that I’ve discovered other than the one’s holding my closets from regurgitating.

I immediately asked myself some questions, who would visit me in the middle of the afternoon? Who would want to see me in the first place? And who would break in unannounced? While I was pondering those thoughts, it came to me, that since I have no friends, no family and I was kicked out of the meet up group because I didn’t bring a disease I could spread, I might actually be in danger and the only weapon I had was the new Gillette super smooth Mach 7 turbo shaver with the swivel head and the no bleed ever blades.

There was only one thing to do, confront this invader, show no fear and, and scare him or her away, or I could beg for my life or trade my life for a few neighbor’s. I could look on the bright side, if it’s a senior citizen in a wheel chair it means the elevator is working.

When I approached the living room, I didn’t hear anything breaking, or noise except for a few choice curse words coming from a male voice. I turned the corner and there he was, although he was large and thick I could almost see through him. His huge head that looked like something that had landed on his shoulders during an avalanche then was dipped into a polluted swamp full of rancid sprinkles.

He was looking more perplexed than dangerous. His hair was partially covered with soap suds, as were his clothes which were soaked and his hands dirty with black grease like he had changed a tire in a car wash.
“Who are you?” he shouted, wiping suds away from his mouth.
“Who are you? And what are you doing in my apartment.” I demanded in warm vulnerable, gentle; okay, in a pathetic way.
“Your apartment?”
“Yeah, my apartment.” This time I was borderline firm.
“No wonder it looked different,” he answered suddenly bewildered.
And as I looked around he was right. It had many of the same cheap rip off things I’m still paying off, but there were other items, expensive stuff that I never could afford (even if I held onto every cent I’d ever made and then robbed a few banks several days in a row), like a score board size flat screen TV, a Blue Ray DVD player and a home surround sound theater stereo system. On my color TV I had one speaker on it, that if it was possible for me to surround, I could hear it.

Unfortunately the rheumatic couch, with cushions that were so worn down they could be slipped under the door of a safe, was still mine, as was the TV tray (that wobbles from fear of someone putting something on it), the coffee table with the steadiness and look of a hammock, and a sofa chair that looked like a half dead sheep that had been attacked by a pack of wolves that threw up on it.

I was in a space that was half my apartment and I assumed half the guy’s that just broke in. His face didn’t have the look of a thief as much as it had of someone who wanted to throw things out. He stared at my stuff like he couldn’t believe that a person actually owned it.
“My interior decorator is bi-polar. I guess, I caught her on the wrong pole,” I interrupted before he could call the Salvation Army.
“I want you and the stuff, that looks like you got it out of a garage sale in Iraq that ended because it was bombed, out of here.”
“I was thinking the same thing, only you could leave your stuff here.”
“What’s going on?”
Just as I was about to stammer out another incoherent answer another guy just appeared out of nowhere. And some of the furniture changed, every piece better than mine. He was a tiny very nervous, insane looking fellow wrapped in a bloody blanket. He looked like the type that if he heard voices in his head they probably stuttered.
“Hey, what are you guys doing here? Did I, by chance tell you guys you could move in?”
“This isn’t your apartment.” I said quickly.
“Did I leave a change of address?” The little guy rubbed his chin so hard I thought he was trying to give himself a cleft or at least make room for one.
“What the hell is going on here?” My first new roommate, yelled.
“I don’t know, I had just finished shaving when you showed up,” I replied.
“I was in a washing machine,” the big guy said.
“A washing machine?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
“What were you doing in a washing machine?”
“I was waiting for the rinse cycle. What else?”
I didn’t know how to respond so I turned to the little guy. “How about you?”
“I uh… I just gave birth to myself,” he chirped.
“Takes the guess work out of knowing whether you’re having a boy or girl.” I said, sarcastically.
“Not really, I thought I was having twins.” He said, looking disappointed. “I almost didn’t make it. I had to have a cesarean.”
“Have you named yourself yet,” the big guy joked.
“Not yet. If I was a boy I thinking of J --
Before he could find a name for himself, another person, appeared this time a woman. Not an ordinary woman but a Louisiana purchased sized gal big enough to have her own atmosphere. Her face looked like it was formed by an allergic reaction, to the rest of her. If her Prince Charming kissed her and he turned into a frog she’d still be getting the better of the deal. Like the others she was vaguely translucent, although to see completely through her would require an X ray machine attached to the Hubble Telescope.
“There you are, who ever you are. Who are you?” she thundered.
The big guy answered first. “I’m you.”
The little guy followed. “Then I must be you.”
Then they all turned to me. “Who the hell are you?”
At that point, I wasn’t sure, but before I looked for a picture ID I said, “I’m me.”
They all nodded their heads in agreement; the gigantic woman’s head kept bouncing up and down like a medicine ball with a kangaroo inside. With each rise of her head, another person would appear in the room, as would other pieces of furniture, in some cases they were one and the same. There was a convertible midget who opened up into a full size person. The room was soon cluttered with people fiercely debating the value of fennel seeds, while other complained about the under use of roasted coriander. The big guy, who by now was close enough to for his body odor to meet my bad breath thus causing a hideous smelling storm front, turned to me and spoke slowly. “Am I dreaming?”
That was it, I was dreaming. If that was the case then I could wake up. “Slap me,” I said to the guy.
“I’ll do better than that. How about I slug you?” With a fist that turned into a head, he head butted me in my glass chin, which knocked me and his fist unconscious.

When I woke, the place was dark and nearly empty, except for a room clogged with strange people all looking like they wanted to be my personal serial killer. Suddenly, (that means faster than I can make up an excuse to get out of work), two huge guys, each one getting larger than the other and back again, grabbed me and unfolded a skinny China men into a wicker chair (unfortunately it was similar to one of the chairs that I had owned, that sitting in was in violation of the Geneva conventions definition of torture.) They didn’t even have to tie me down. Before they could find a rope they noticed that I was caught on one of the chairs springs. At least I hope it was a spring, I couldn’t tell if the folding China man was crying in pleasure or pain.

The bigger guy at the moment started to spit or talk I don’t know which one he meant to do because neither of them made the kind of sound attributed to the other and sounded like it came out of a water logged violin. He finally managed to splash out, “What are you doing in our dreams?” Before he could hit, spit, or make me answer by strumming on my vocal chords with his elbow, I questioned him. “What makes you think this is your dream?”
“Yeah, what make you think this is your dream?” The China man chair repeated.

When someone is about to pound the hell out you it’s not smart to answer a question with a question, (not even if you’re part chair) and especially for someone like me who’s had a fifth grade education by mail order. He hit me with a fist big enough to be a middle- weight boxer. After he was sure I felt the blow and before I could bleed on who’s ever carpet I was standing on, (which wasn’t mine because it didn’t creak) he hoisted a an answer in my direction, “Because if it was that would have woken you up!”

Normally he would be right, but by all that I have experienced in bed that was a mere love tap. It’s not that I’m into S&M, it just that I pick hot headed strong women who get teed off because my distance makes like them feel like they’re cheating on me. Their anger is projected onto my face by way of anything they have their hands on, which in some cases causes me extreme pain in an area that thank God has never met my face.

As the thug’s pal, who was momentarily bigger, was about to raise his fist, not for purposes of claiming attendance, although to me it sure would have meant that he was present, I realized that his bucket sized spit should have waken me. Before his fist could make it’s decent and eventual contact with my face and do damage that I’m sure would have qualified as it being totaled, I answered, “You’re right, I should have woke up.”

He slammed the brakes on his fist which caused skids marks in the air. It did. I’m not exaggerating I saw them. Then pal number one, now the larger of the two, hosed me with, “Then, what the hell are you doing in my dream?”

I didn’t have an answer and waited for my unjust reward, which didn’t come. Pal number two said to Pal number one, “Who said this was your dream?” Without any prodding the other people stuffed in the room began to ask other similar questions or one’s that their mates didn’t like at all.

My two guys were less patient with themselves than they were with me. They started punching each other. An instant later (which is shorter than a moment, but longer than suddenly) everyone in the room started fighting. It was a ruckus, wilder that anything I could have dreamed of it this wasn’t my dream, but even through their madness, they managed to pick out only my pieces furniture to hit each other with.

Since, almost everyone was paired up, I was left stuck to my China man chair, hoping I could free myself from him before someone discovered that there was still a piece of my furniture left to destroy. I managed to detach myself by slipping off my pajamas, which I don’t remember putting on and I’m sure I haven’t worn since I could see. The China man free of me, stood up folded and somehow threw himself into a antagonistic antique armoire guy, who had accused him of scratching his finish. The China man was on target and hit Mr. Armoire in his glass drawer (so to speak) and he passed out.

I ran to my bedroom and was about to close the door when I heard a voice, definitely feminine, definitely sexy, and definitely not friendly (which meant she could have once rejected me). “Put on the light and close the door,” the sexy voice said (words I’ve never heard from a woman in my bedroom unless she was leaving) So I did as she ordered.

There on my bed, dressed in something that was nothing but added up to everything was this beautiful woman who’s floor length hair changed colors every few seconds (which is longer than an instant, a moment and suddenly but not longer that every couple of months). I couldn’t think of anything cleaver to say or to mess up so I just stuttered, “H-H-Hello Babby,” I said, trying to impress her with my out dated Big Bopper Impression.

“That’s all you got to say?” She ratcheted at me. My answer would have been stupid, even if I was talking to myself, especially saying it for the second time in the same night (and in the same story). “I’m me.”
“Of course you are, but you could have lied and let me down easy.” Then she laughed which had the effect of an uppercut to the jaw. I fell to the floor, and looked up at her as she leaned over the edge of the bed, her hair conveniently covering my face. “Would you mind telling me what the hell I’m doing in you’re bed, this is your bed?”
I wanted to lie hoping it would get me out of trouble, but macho pride wanted the credit, and so I confirmed her suspicion, even though the sheets looked too clean. “Yes, that is my bed,” I spit out along with a few feet of hair.
“Okay, that proves I’m stupid. Now to prove that I’m a complete moron with less taste then a maternity strip club, why am I in your bed?”
I didn’t have an answer that made sense so I went with the wildest one I could think of. “Because you find me attractive.”
I thought she was going to spit up her feet, but she caught herself in time to stuff her inside out legs back down her mouth. Suddenly, (which is almost as quick instantaneously, and a lot easier to spell) she quieted, then looked up at me and said softly, “Hmm, I seem to remember having strange taste in men. Okay, hop in and lets start up where we left off, where ever that was.” Before she could finish her wonderful speech I was in the air on the way down to best landing strip I’ve ever seen. I might have hurt myself but luckily my fall was broken by a two large mounds that softened my landing, although they did prompt my landing gear to come down a too little early. I know this is foolish, sophomoric, totally shallow, but I was in love. Yes, love. Okay, maybe my euphoria was causing me to use the wrong four letter word, but I’ll claim poetic license or more appropriately a learning permit.

Just as we about to get down to the business of things that are normally none of your business, the door crashed open. The two thugs who had been beating their war drums with each other and me, followed by everyone inside charged forward and filled my room. This time I was the one who was angry, I screamed, “Why now!”
The beautiful woman beneath broke my heart. “Okay guys, one at a time.”

Although I could tell every man wanted to lineup, none of them did. At first I thought maybe this was my dream, but then two other thoughts scratched their way out, what if it isn’t my dream and she was infested with a plethora of venereal diseases or might it be possible that I picked her up at the internet share your disease club. Before I could roll my last obsession into a deadly epidemic of venereal glaucoma, the one who was the biggest of the two presently said, “Sorry to disturb you, but we beat the hell out of each other and none of us woke up. We don’t know whose dream we’re trapped in?”

“Don’t look at me, if this was my dream I have some hunk on top of me instead of this chunk of poorly designed protoplasm,” she said as she kicked me off of her with such force, she made me think I was having a sex change without anesthesia. After the pain stopped, I didn’t feel rejected, at least not as much as I would have if I was truly the man of my own dreams. But here we were thirty of forty people stuck in someone else’s dream with no way out.

The new bigger thug spoke up. “We tried all the doors and windows, they’re locked from the outside. We’re stuck in here.”
“There’s got to me some way out.” I clichéd back at him.
“We tried everything,” out clicheing me.
“Maybe no one here is dreaming? Maybe we’re just players in one of our friend's dream,” I said which provoked the next question.
“If that’s true and that person wakes up then we’d all disappear,” the guy who first broke into the apartment worried out loud.
“Then we should be quiet.” I whispered back.
“What if that person never wakes up but dies in his or her sleep? We’ll all probably die,” I flung back at her. That statement didn’t win me any new friends.
“So, what do we do?” a guy in the crowd asked.
“We make the best of it. Who wants to go first?” my former soul mate swung with. I was about to swear off women for good or least this dream, when…
Suddenly (my limited vocabulary caused me to suddenly over use the word suddenly) an alarm went off, then another and another and another -- forty or more alarms jabbing at our ears. I grabbed the alarm next to my bed tried to shut it but it kept sticking its ring at me. Finally (more definitive than lastly, and way better than occasionally), I smashed the clock on floor and for good measure jumped on it several times. While I was jumping up and down, alarms were starting to silence. (I could have used suddenly here but chose not to. Being the writer that’s my prerogative) One by one people were disappearing, the thinner one first, a few dieting woman strugged to watch their refection in the mirror as they faded away.

The ring from my clock grew weaker as more people vanished. Realizing their fate many waved goodbye, some stopping to wipe their feet off on the mat. The two thugs disappeared together both the same size for the first time, although one was eating a ham sandwich. My early intruders despite the variance in their weights were the last to go, well almost the last. Next to me the beautiful woman, smiled, blew me the finger and disappeared, a ghost without form, an invisible wisp of nothing, only the mist of her final rejection clung to the air.

I found myself being pulled downward towards the head of a strange man who looked like your average run of the mill dry cleaner. He had just slapped down his alarm but wasn’t quite awake yet. I could feel myself shrinking while I was being sucked into his male pattern baldness. Then he fell asleep, snoring loudly, his lips pounding together with a force of a cannibal trying to eat himself. And I was free, no longer being pulled toward him, instead I was floating alone, without any prospects of a date, passing from bedroom to bedroom of sleeping men and women (all still alive, which as far as females are concerned, is out of my league). I hovered over king size beds, bunk beds, hospital beds, air mattresses, men and woman in comas, unconscious men with bullet holes, stab wounds, shark bites and several with helicopter blades sticking out of them trying to find comfortable sleeping positions.

Then a thought entered my head, as in most of my thoughts it had to duck down, remove its shoes and socks, (my brain is carpeted), and squeeze itself in. Maybe we are all part of someone else’s dream -- not a friend, but someone we don't know, someone very powerful! Maybe even God’s Dream (or the Devil’s, if not him any powerful republican will do). A dream that no one can escape from -- a never ending nightmare… that is our life. Or worse yet! (At least for you.) Maybe… just maybe, you’re part of THE WRITER'S DREAM! If that’s the case (which I feel is most likely)then email him, and someone will send you an address where you can pay to renew his Lunesta (prescription) so he can get a full year or two of sleep, which could result in your staying alive until you can figure out how to get yourself out of his dream, or the writer can come up with a better ending. (If you do get out of the dream, please don’t wake the writer till past noon.)

MURDER BULLETS AND BROADS

THE DETECTIVE

I was sore all over, especially in my rump from the sex change. It was nothing I hadn’t felt before. It was my third one the first two didn’t take. This baby had all the indications of sticking. The parts of me that weren’t there anymore weren’t coming back and the new parts were showing signs of not working anymore like the rest of me. I was gonna like being a guy. I knew from the very first stitch I was right for it. You see, I was a guy in girl’s body that was meant for a guy – an ugly broad, tall, flat chested, bow legged, hairy, with early signs of a five O’clock shadow; actually it was more like an eclipse. I decided to look at the change as menopause that really works. Layla, my secretary buzzed me. I couldn’t afford both a secretary and an intercom so I hired a cute gal who had a special talent for sound effects. After a minute of buzzing, a few ambulance sounds, and three kinds of ducks, Layla pretending to speak through a bull horn announced that my new client Ms. Harriet Barkley was on her way in.


THE MURDER

Not just being a top notch private investigator, but also a former broad gives me an edge in knowing exactly what another broad is not trying to hide. This dame was all woman which made me feel for the first time that I was all man. She was about to open her beautiful yapper when I asked “Do you want a cup of coffee?” She looked around and said. “Sure I like taking risks.” After her wise crack I was tempted to report her to the IRS instead I asked Layla to bring us two cups. Layla made her percolator sounds and used my old radiator to heat a milk carton of day old java that was a day old the first time I reheated it a few days back. Age gives coffee character I told myself hoping the stuff wouldn’t burn through my stitches and ruin my big boy underwear.

Layla handed Harriet a cup of coffee that now resembled quicksand. Before she could pour the deadly stuff into her deadly body she was shot dead. Harriet didn’t even have time to get nauseous, or vomit, or scream in pain. Although Layla did it for her at one point even moving Harriet’s lips. Harriet Barkly was now past tense. As I checked for a pulse that had already left the building, Layla called 911 or at least made it sound like she did. The bullet entered my room through a window without shattering any glass mainly because I left my window open so it would stick in a position that I someday hoped to fit an air conditioner in. Layla offered to make the sound of shattering glass for atmosphere when another shot that almost neutralized my sex change and hit a metal cabinet and ricocheted around the room destroying most of the stuff in my office which should have been destroyed along time ago.

I grabbed Layla’s hand and ran into my windowless reception room and asked her if she was okay. She said she’s just a little sore, but that was expected after all she was her gynecologist’s first patient since he went blind. Then she rested her head on my former broad’s shoulder and confessed to me that she loved me. And she would love me no matter what sex I became or would become. She’d love me for what ever I was at the time. She had even gone to the hospital and saved the parts they removed. I told her that they made me into a man and they didn’t remove any parts, they just added. She apologized and said that was another transsexual she was once in love with. She told me he or she or whatever had died in a leaf blower accident and then began imitating the machine. She was good. Real good. I even stopped to applaud and so did the cops as they entered my office.


THE BODY

The cops examined Harriet’s body closely, removing all her clothes and then dressing her in lingerie. After they were through it was determined that she was indeed dead, still very sexy, but like most corpses lacked passion. Oh, and it was suicide. “Suicide!” I shouted in surprise. When I asked them how she could have fired a shot through the window and hit herself while she was in my office. The detective said “she must have fired the shot from the other building ran across the street up six flights of stairs and into my office. How else would she know where to stand so the bullet would hit her?” He had a point there. Still, I asked him about the other bullet that entered through the window after she died. He said that must have been the second shot she fired before she left, in case she didn’t make it to the spot in time. Some how I wasn’t buying his explanation. My gut was saying something didn’t fit. I didn’t know what it was but I was gonna find out.

The police and the crime scene unit had left but I knew they were coming back. They forgot the body. This time I examined her and I didn’t dress her in lingerie. That was sick and in bad taste and besides Layla was now wearing it. And she looked good so good I asked Harriet if she wanted to get into a threesome. But then I remembered she was dead. Of course I slapped her around for while first, finally when she didn’t answer and I noticed every time I picked her up and slapped her she fell down, and that she wasn’t blue when she came in, and I remembered seeing her shot. Layla intrigued by the threesome idea offered to imitate the sound of her heart beating, but by then the passion had passed. I had work to do, a crime to solve, and a live girl in front of me in Victoria Secrets underwear. The kind of under wear that I wanted to wear when I was a woman but everyone including representatives of the company forbid me too. I had this urge to dive on top of Layla remove her lingerie put it on and parade in front of the window hoping to get shot, or a least some cat calls. But I knew nether was gong to happen. I was just having a small identity crisis. For a second I hated who I was and wanted to be shot, sliced up in tiny pieces and eaten by a starving dog team. What’s the big deal? We all feel like that at one time or another. Before I could chew on that, Layla jumped on top of me and we made whoopee. Yes, I had sex for the first time as a man to a woman lying on top of a dead woman. Life was full of surprises. While I was ravaging Layla I kept wondering. Am I compromising a crime scene? Okay, maybe I went a little too far when I tied Layla up in the yellow crime scene tape, or when I moved Harriet so I could make love to Layla while she was within the police outline of the body. Sometimes you just got to go with the flow. When it was over Layla and I lay exhausted, spent, in each others clothes and tangled up with in the limbs of a dead woman -- Layla’s beautiful blue eyes matching Harriet’s new skin tone. This was a moment I’d never forget. A moment of triumph. I had done the manly thing and all my stitches were in place except for the few that Layla was spitting out. I was now in a quandary. If I found the murderer, would I kill him myself, call the police or have him over for drinks. If it wasn’t for Harriet’s death my sex life would not have come to life that day. The only thing I knew for sure, except that Layla was a real blonde, her breasts were phonies, and I should have paid more and gotten a larger organ, was that I had to find the gun men.


THE CLUE

I needed a clue. Layla offered to imitate one but neither of us knew what a clue sounded like. So instead she made the sounds of several kinds of garage door openers. Despite not wanting to infringe on someone’s privacy I opened Harriet’s hand bag, which the police left on the body because it matched her outfit so perfectly. Except for identification she carried the usual things a gal carries around with her, lipstick, makeup, cell phone, genital electrodes, a list of North Korean double agents, and a small tube of plutonium, the only thing suspicious was a pen with a dentist’s address and phone number on it. Why was that so suspicious? High class broads like Harriet and starving P.I.’s like me didn’t go to the same dentist. Especially a dentist who lost his license for mal practice. About a year ago my dentist was seriously injured while piloting an old crop duster when he foolishly reached out with both hands to trim his nails using the airplane’s propeller. Despite temporarily not having the use of his arms continued to work. He started pulling teeth without using his hands. When patients awoke they were amazed, until he smiled and then spit their tooth out. Upon learning that his dentist license had been revoked he flipped out gassed the building his office was in and then pulled everyone’s teeth out. He was arrested two days later wearing a six thousand tooth necklace claiming he found the teeth that afternoon n the park after a hockey game. The police were about to let him walk when it was pointed out that it was July, 98 degrees and there’s no checking allowed in the park league. So why would Harriet have the pen of a defrocked dentist in her pocket, especially with teeth as perfect as hers. Teeth so beautiful that before we left Layla and me not only brushed them we also flossed and it’s not easy getting a dead girl to rinse and spit. There was only one logical thing to do and that was visit my old dentist.


THE DENTIST

I knew exactly where he lived because not only did I have his address, I was also his roommate. I live in a bad section of town in one bedroom run up where Doc Slattery sleeps uncomfortably on my couch. I had the key, but that didn’t stop Layla from making knocking sounds while I was opening the door. In my apartment tables had been turned over, draws emptied, and the couch slit opened. It was just as I left it. That’s one of the things I liked about Doc Slattery he put things back where he found them. Doc wasn’t under any of the debris, but I did find him shivering in the shower. He explained to me that the faucet was stuck and he couldn’t turn off the water, so rather than waste the rusty liquid he kept washing himself. By now the soap had dissolved and the wash rag was in threads and Doc was holding his mouth open under the shower head and drinking as much water as he could. I shut off the main valve in the kitchen and he opened his main valve over the toilet, which sounded somewhat like Niagara Falls. It took him several towels which stopped soaking up water and two burnt out hair dryers before he could put on his clothes.


Doc pushed off the card board boxes, the wooden crates, and the teeth he removed from a Chinese delivery guy and did a fanny hop onto the couch. I told him that Harriet had been murdered and asked him what he knew about her? Doc told me he didn’t know her other than having sex with her several times a day, fathering two of her children and tiling the bathroom in their summer home. I don’t know if it was my detective instincts or what I had left of my women’s intuition that told me he knew Harriet a lot better than he was letting on. I don’t like being lied to just as much as I don’t like being told the truth, so I slapped Layla across the face and said “tell him to stop holding back” I was about to slap her again when Doc knocked the wind out her with a punch to the belly. I wasn’t going to take that from him or anyone, even a shrimp in a wheel chair so I hit her with a round house to the jaw. Before I could get another shot in, Doc was on top of Layla throwing combinations to her face and midsection. I was getting angry now so I kept kicking her in the ribs until she imitated bones breaking. Nothing like the sound of a rib being shattered to make a guy laugh! And laugh we did. Doc and I were rolling on the floor when Layla broke into her clogged garbage disposal impression which sent us into laughing convulsions. We were praying she would stop, and after her imitation of a nun eating spaghetti she collapsed on the floor exhausted from the adrenaline rush and a punctured lung. That’s when Doc told us all about Harriet.


THE BROAD

Harriet was not what she appeared to be. She was a sick kid that had a rough start in life. She contracted Leprosy from a doctor who realized he had the disease when he lost his arm in Harriet’s mom’s uterus while delivering Harriet. Trying to hide his illness the doctor finally removed both Harriet and his arm and claimed that they were paternal twins. At first mom favored the doctor’s arm because it slept through the night and she could use it to scratch her back. Finally when it also slept through the day and would smell after she changed its diaper, her mom discovered the doctor’s deception. Before Harriet could drop any body parts in front of the other kids, fearing ridicule, she dropped out of school, As a teenager she earned a living as a leper pick pocket until a mark felt her hand on his wallet. Luckily she was a block away at the time. Still she found herself on the street, broke, alone, and with one hand. For the next two years desperate to keep the elements off what was still attached she lived in a revolving door. It was there that fate stepped in and she met her first husband, a plastic surgeon who specialized in wealthy woman who lost their right hand do to leprosy. He was taken by Harriet’s beauty, her easy laugh which was really a rare strain of the whopping cough, and her cute ears (he just wished that he’d had found the second one before he stepped on it). A shy man with his own handicap he stood in the shadows and admired Harriet, until one night when he finally got the nerve to follow her. By picking up the trail of her falling body parts he discovered where she lived, but not having a great sense of direction he didn’t realize that he was just walking in circles at the entrance to his own building. There, ready to propose, he got down on one knee, but because of his nervousness he’d forgotten that he’d lost that leg in a banjo stringing accident and fell to the ground. He never again forgot to take along his crutches. While lying on the floor with the revolving door rapidly pushing him in circles because an Ephedra support group was entering the building, he proposed to Harriet. She said, “No Never.” He thought she said, “Yo! Trevor!” which didn’t sound like Frank, his real name, but he decided it was as close as he’d ever get to a positive response. Harriet who was light headed from not eating for three hundred and seventy days (she liked to skip meals) forgot her answer and was too embarrassed to ask. The next day Frank took Harriet’s good hand in marriage, and on their honey moon he fixed the other.

After a good night’s sleep (at a Day’s Inn) and the promise of a meal, Harriet got out of bed and much to her surprise all of her parts went with her. She no longer had Leprosy. Frank was so thrilled he immediately replaced all of Harriet’s missing parts. Unfortunately, a day later, while sitting at her bedside Frank had a heart attack and died. The coroner proclaimed that his heart attack was caused by the shock of feeling a bullet enter his brain. Harriet said it was an accident and that she had learned a painful lesson and would never again clean a loaded gun so close to anyone’s temple, especially one with a silencer. Harriet was left a large sum of money from a life insurance policy that paid triple if Frank’s death was caused by a heart attack from the fear of bullet entering his brain as a result of a loaded gun (with a silencer) being cleaned so close to his temple. The insurance agent signed off on the policy saying that life was full of coincidences just like the five hundred grand deposited into his account on the day of the settlement.

Harriet sold her dead husband’s real estate and traveled all over our great country as a high class migrant worker, organic foods only. Harriet loved picking oranges, apples, corn and especially cotton. Then suddenly while removing the husk from a rotten corn cob and seeing the discolored and missing kernels, she realized that she hadn’t brushed her teeth in five years. The last year was not really her fault because only one back tooth remained which she never saw. It was because of that she was soon to hook up with Doc Slattery. She was admiring a mortally wounded lover’s dental work and upon closer she look she saw the doctor’s signature, office number, fax number, home number, cell phone number, address, favorite color and a prescription for Percadan chiseled on his upper molars.

THE THREAT


Harriet hijacked the next plane back here. She was never charged by the authorities when she claimed mental distress because the airplane food dissolved her teeth. Not only did she get away with the lie but was awarded several million dollars plus 20,000 frequent flier miles and a free up grade to first class. A few days later Doc Slattery and Harriet met at his office and although they soon had two children, co owned several houses, and had joining burial plots they decided not to get serious about each other. The last time Doc saw Harriet was a week ago when she threatened to kill him and anyone he knew if she ever saw his face or heard some one say a name that started or ended with the same letters as his. And that was before she pushed Doc out his office window. Luckily, there was a window washer outside and Doc fell into him which knocked the guy off the scaffold and sent him twenty stories to his death. The window washer would have been flattened like a pancake if he didn’t land on a man just released from ten years on death row because of DNA evidence who also would have died a more painful death if he didn’t get knocked into twin sisters who were separated at birth and reunited a few seconds earlier. Luckily for the sisters there were enough parts uncrushed to make one complete body for the coffin.

I asked Doc why Harriet was so mad at him, and he said it may have been because he jokingly removed two of her teeth through an opening other than her mouth. He couldn’t understand why she would still be upset after all he apologized for not using Novocain. I had a feeling there was something he was holding back, something that involved me.

When Doc finished telling his story, I woke up Layla who in her sleep was making sounds like a blender stuck on the pulverize setting. I thanked Doc for leveling with us and said I saw no reason to suspect him.


MURDER BULLETS AND BROADS PART 2


THE PIZZA BOY


It seems like every where Harriet went there were fresh corpses. Could this be just coincidence? And is it just a coinsodence that every case I get is unsolvable. I was beginning to have doubts about my talent as a private investigator when I noticed the elevator had stopped at my floor. That’s when it hit me. I hadn’t really been paying attention. Immediately I started to feel better about where I was at. Not because of the case, but because I never noticed that I had an elevator in my building. For years I walked up and down the same smelly stairs. I knew every step of those twenty-seven floors. Some times things just aren’t what they seem. In this case nothing was as it seems. Heck I’m not what I seem.
I let the pizza kid pass, but the smell of melted mozzarella cheese always gets me hot. I grabbed Layla’s hand and put it on my private part but nothing happened. Then I did the same with her other hand – still nothing. So I asked my big muscular neighbor to do the same. He gave me a sharp right to the head! Suddenly something started to swell. My face! I was back! Before Layla could go into a second chorus of moil sounds I lifted her up, French kissed her left nostril, I’m far sighted, then I pulled her back into my apartment. Thinking of Layla’s body gave me another question to ask Doc.


Doc had the pizza kid on the ground and was ripping one of his teeth out. I waited till he was finished and the kid stopped convulsing. It didn’t take long, the kid passed out when he saw Doc spit the tooth into his mouth along with a hunk of pepperoni. Doc said he didn’t have enough for a tip so he removed a tooth for the kid. Now he’ll have less teeth to worry about going bad.
Before Doc could do a root canal with his tongue, I asked him about Harriet’s body. Then Doc asked me about Layla’s body. I told him I asked first. Then Layla asked him about Doc’s body. No one wanted to budge so we stripped the pizza kid and looked at his body for no apparent reason. It didn’t turn any of us on, so after about five minutes of staring we had seen enough and put his clothes back on. Of course we tied his shoe laces together. We were a fun group. Finally I explained my question to Doc. I wanted to know if you could tell that most of Harriet’s body wasn’t real. The Doc said, of course anyone could. Her dead husband was not only a terrible plastic surgeon, but had this thing for Velcro. Before going to bed she’d tare the parts off and set them on the end table. To spice up their sex life Doc and Harriet put her body parts back in different places. The dead body at my office was perfect, no artificial parts, and no Velcro, which meant Harriet is still alive and probably the shooter. But who is the dead girl? There was only one way to find out.


THE MIX UP

We went back to my place and after about 15 minutes of grilling the dead girl didn’t tell us anything. I wasn’t taken anymore chances. I had to be sure. Either she was real stubborn, or really dead, or a really good actress or a really good dead actress, or a really good dead actress who was stubborn. Questions, questions and more questions. Unfortunately the answers came quickly after that. I was calling the cops to tell them to pick up the body, and a diet ice tea when I glanced at my appointment book and realized that Layla had got the appointments mixed up. This dead girl was Lenora Corndog. The heiress to the Corndog fortune. Then it all fit together perfectly like OJ’s leather glove.


I knew who the murderer was. The clue was right there in front of me in the form of a gun barrel pointed at my head. It wasn’t Doc, I knew that right away because the person holding the gun was a woman. It wasn’t Layla because she was wearing a blue dress, well dark blue, many of you might actually say its black but according the sales slip it was blue. And it wasn’t Harriet because it’s not the ending yet.


THE REDHEAD


This dame was another looker, like they all are in detective stories; only she had such a wide nose, that even though her big blue eyes were crossed, it made them look normal. With red finger nails long enough to rake leaves she pushed a pile of black hair away from her face and it fell to the floor. How and why she got that clump of black hair to stick to her face was just another mystery that would go unsolved. I’m not usually attracted to red heads or any size Doxhound but this carrot top had something extra something that would make me want her even when I was a woman and I was no lesbian. Okay, maybe for brief period in the eighties and nineties and most of 2002 but that was a time of experimentation. She had great long legs that I didn’t have to look down to see, but had to look up to see where they ended. I love legs more that I like air and I like air so much that I don’t exhale. She didn’t like my eyes on her gams and brought the gun closer to my head, but before she ever got a chance to pull the trigger Layla started to imitate a swat team which distracted her just enough for me to grab the pistil. It wasn’t much of a struggle, my superior strength and Layla’s impression of a bowl of salsa being poured into a Tupperware, cracked us both up. The gun fell to the floor mid belly laugh.


THE TRIPLE WHAMMY

The tables had been turned. I was now in control. Even though I let Layla slap her around awhile and I threatened to do her make up she wouldn’t tell me how that clump of hair got stuck to her face. So I asked her why she pointed the gun at me. That’s when I found out that the dead woman was still not who we thought she was. Just to make sure Layla and I checked the appointment book. It was the old triple whammy. Layla had written three appointments in reverse order. Layla had told me she had dyslexia but I thought it was just an excuse for wearing her clothes backwards and inside out. The living red head standing in front of me was Leona Corndog, the heir to the corndog fortune and the dead broad was her step sister Tracy Sarsaparilla a female Gene Rayburn impersonator, and heir to the Sarsaparilla last name, whose real dream was to have a husband, a family, and a whore house with a white picket fence around it (and if possible a F.E.M.A. trailor for over- night guests).

Was it just coincidence that the dead broad rotting at our feet used the same dentist as everyone in the room, or it was because Doc was the only dentist that also accepted auto insurance? And why didn’t the Doc recognize her? I needed a few more answers, especially since this time I intended to use multiple choice.


THE KILLER

The real Leona assured me that she really didn’t want to shoot me. She just wanted to pull the trigger a few times and see what kind of pattern my brains would leave on the wall. She was a performance artist and thought my brain splatter might qualify her for a government grant. Before she’d take my pop quiz she wanted me to answer her questions – like who killed her sister and if I could do it all over again would I still wear short sleeved shirts in the winter. I was about to tell her it depended on what sex I was at the time when I found another gun pointed at me. This time it was Harriet. And she had an itchy trigger finger, which required occasional scratching and calamine lotion. I could see my reflection in her shiny eyes, eyes that had murder in them, my murder. I don’t have much of memory especially for things that have happened already, but even a schmo like me can’t forget what happened next. With the barrel of her gun just a few inches from my nose which was running at the time and required Harriet to wipe it on the barrel, I got the nerve to ask her what this was all about. And why she killed that girl? With a snarl that made putting on lipstick difficult Harriet replied. “What girl?”
And I bounced back with an answer that would make all my transsexual detective peers proud, “The dead one lying on the floor.”


THE TARGET


Harriet tossed her lipstick at the dead broad and shot back, “Oh, that girl.” I was temped to fetch the lipstick since it was a shade I used back in my female days, but what she said next surprised me. She was actually smiling when she remarked, “I was trying to kill you.” Excuse me for being long winded, but I replied, “Me,” That’s when Harriet while tweezing an eye brow like she was an old lady picking at free hordeours explained to us that she was aiming at the girl because she thought she was me. She didn’t know I had gotten another sex change. According to Harriet me and the dame could have been twins if it wasn’t for our looks, height, and coloring. But most importantly the dead dame was wearing a dress like the one Harriet had seen in my closet while playing twister with Doc, which she won easily since her parts were removable. She didn’t think anyone else had the same bad taste in clothes, especially after taking one look at the ugly handbag.


THE MOTIVE


Sometimes I don’t know where my inspiration comes from but the next question just popped out of my mouth like a brat’s burp. “Why did you want to kill me.?” The answer I got was not one I wanted to be aired in public. Harriet smiled like a clown watching a kid getting spanked “I found out about the tumble in the debris you and Doc had last week.” She said and then pulled out a tooth and tossed it at Doc.
Doc was right I should never have bragged about it on my answering machine -- someday someone was bound to call me. Before Harriet could empty her gun into my current body I explained that it was the night before my third sex change, I was scared, and we had some wine, smoked a few joints, downed a couple of Quaaludes, popped some ecstasy, snorted some cocaine, ate a couple bowls of grape nuts, sang the Notre Dame fight song, and joined the Lucy Arnez fan club. She nodded like she understood what a romantic moment it was, but said it was too late. I had to keep her talking. So I asked her why the dead girl had one of Doc’s dentist pens in her pocket book. She had no idea and pointed the gun at Doc. I thought she was going to shoot when Layla interrupted. Harriet loosened her trigger finger, a little to much because it almost fell off, and listened to Layla while she placed Post Its to mark where she was going to shoot me. Layla explained that Tracy had asked her to borrow a pen and since we had been given a few thousand when Doc got the can from the Dental Association, she gave her one. Layla apologized for not telling us sooner, but didn’t want me to know that she pocketed the fifty cents she charged for the pen.

When Harriet let up on the trigger I breathed a sigh of relief until she pointed it at me. I quickly asked, “Why the second shot?” Harriet suddenly changed her mind and began rearranging the posteds as she spoke. “I realized I killed the wrong person when I saw you run to the body. I shot a second time but I’d already started to re apply my make up which caused me to miss. I won’t miss this time.” She squealed as she poked my fake Adam’s apple with the gun barrel. “Why would you want to kill me for a few badly exchanged fluids? I thought you and Doc were history. You just threw him out of building?”


THE LAST STRAW


Harriet explained that at the time she was just a little cranky from wearing high heals that didn’t account for a cast on her foot. She had broken her foot that morning trying to squeeze it into a shoe by using a vice. She really was in love with Doc and that week they even had phone sex at my place, which explained why both my cordless phones were sticky. That’s when she saw the ugly hand bag. Then she turned to Doc and said “Tell him doc…Tell him what you wrote to me, how you were in love with him, her or whatever it is” She stopped plucking her eye brow and pointed at me. Harriet then explained to us that she found the note a half hour ago. Luckily before she went to get her driver’s license picture she looked in the mirror and saw it duck taped to her forehead. That’s why she came back. She wanted to kill me face to face. There’d be no mistakes this time. Now when she spoke she didn’t move her lips which impressed Layla who asked for her autograph.
“Go ahead Doc read it to them. Okay if you won’t. I will.” Which she started to do, but suddenly decided singing it would be more effective. Unfortunately she liked opera and we couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Before our ear drums could burst she stopped her aurea and spoke. This time the message was very clear.


THE COPS

“You see… That’s why I have to kill you right now!” She leveled her gun at me which meant lowering it since I was now on my knees about to beg for my life and if that didn’t work do my Al Jolsen impression, when we heard banging on the door.
“Layla you’re good real good, but I’m no sucker, I‘m not falling for that trick.” Harriet said as she checked for wind and adjusted her aim
“It’s the police. You can keep the dead body but someone’s gotta pay for the ice tea.” A man’s voice proclaimed. At least I think it was a guy. You can never tell these days. Harriet still thought it was Layla even though by now Layla had fallen asleep. “Not only sound effects but impressons. You’re a talented kid. But I’m no dummy.”

We heard the door burst open and footsteps and “Drop it! Right now!”
Now Harriet was not only angry, she was jealous of Layla. “You’re even better that I thought. But can you do… “

The next and last thing Harriet heard was a shot. The bullet entered her back, the impact causing her left breast to tear lose from the Velcro and fall to the ground... The rest of Harriet followed. It was all over. Well, almost over.
Layla had awaken when Harriet’s breast fell on her breasts which made Layla feel like she finally had a rack, and showed us. That broke the tension and soon the room was filled with hugs-- Layla and Doc surrounding me, and Ms. Corndog squeezing her sister’s corpse so tight we could hear the dead girl’s stiff bones breaking. Layla, Doc and I and the cops started laughing hysterically. Broken bones, there’s nothing funnier. Even Ms. Corndog was smiling. They police put Tracy - the dead dame, and Ms. Corndog who refused to let go of the corpse, in the body bag, zipped it up and took them away, not before they made me pay for the ice tea and include a tip.


THE KISS-OFF

Since I now had a guy and gal in love with me, I was deciding what sex I’d end up being when Layla and Doc starting kissing. They were going at it pretty hard. When I tried to join in they slugged me, called me a pig and left still embraced. Doc proclaiming that he didn’t need me anymore, that Layla could do me and had a much better body. I had to agree, wished them well, and asked Layla to send me nude pictures, her exact measurements and X-rays. My future was coming clear to me. By some kind of freaky fate, the case had been solved, the murderer was dead, and I had brought two lonely people together. But as usual I was alone again. Maybe I had made a mistake. Maybe instead of being one sex or the other. I should be both. A hermaphrodite. Yeah, why not? Just one last sex change. This way worse case scenario, if my next relationship doesn’t work out I could always leave whoever it is for myself.


THE END

Lady In Moaning

Most of the guys in my business can perform in the sack, not me. Usually when I make love the girl only has time enough to yell out my initials. But not tonight. Sure, it was because of a couple a guys’ misfortune. But heck, you only live once, less if you're orthodox.


Jim Thompson was an unusual man. He was as thin as a politicians integrity and stood over seven foot in his stocking feet, which is misleading since he wore his stockings over his shoes. Jim Thompson never spoke much. His older brother was born without a mouth (it made getting fit for braces difficult) and he didn't want to draw attention to his yapper. Today, Jim Thompson said nothing at all. The good news was that Jim Thompson didn't have any appointments, the bad news: he was dead. It wasn't a matter of excellent scheduling. Jim Thompson was murdered.


Accidental death was ruled out after forensics examined the instrument that caused his death. They said, "Even if he could have handled that cheese grater himself...he certainly would have missed the spaghetti dish."


I'm not a cop. I'm a P.I, a private eye, a private dick, a gumshoe. And today I got lucky, real lucky. I was gonna make enough dough to collect unemployment. While I was in the middle of sexual fantasy one where I die and the end, I received a call on my service from Thompson's widow, but I had no idea what the call was about until I got her machine. It was a cute message, her three little kids saying that their daddy was dead and to leave your condolences after the beep.


It was eight PM when I showed up at Mrs. Thompson's house. I would have gotten there sooner, but I didn't know her address and I had to knock on doors... Luckily she only lived in the next town. She greeted me at the door wearing a dress so tight you could tell her blood type. Yeah it was the kind of snug where she wouldn’t have to go to her gynecologist, she just send him the dress. And she had one hell of a body. Yeah, when she died I bet her soul wouldn't leave without copping a feel.


She led me into the living room, and if you believe everything in the universe is
connected, she sat down on the couch. A non-believer would say she sat on my lap. Somehow this behavior didn't strike me as that of a grieving widow, but hey, maybe a certain part of me reminded her of her husband. It’s funny how even little things can trigger a memory.


Between you, me, and a lamppost, I'm not the type that can be choosy. To me sexual preference is being left handed if you get my drift. And I guess, you’d say I’m sort of self conscious of my body, when I masturbate I put a bag over my hand.


Anyway,when Mrs. Thompson and I were through doing our animal impressions, she told me that her husband was having an affair. She began to suspect he was cheating when he changed their life insurance policy's beneficiary to "Lilly's Massage Parlor." She wanted the killer. She couldn't wait for the cops. She wanted to know what kind of sick man would kill someone as worthless as her dear husband.


I asked if she did it. She slapped me across the face, her fake fingernails sailing
across the room, and sticking in a fake Picasso print. She screamed, "Do I look like the type of women who'd use a cheese grater on her husband, especially when I have a new cusinart." I told her it depended on what attachments she had and she showed me.

After a few more thirty-second grieving sessions, the last one with the slice and
dice, I left. Before I split I told her I'd be back with her husbands killer. She told me to call first, so she could get her hair set. She was my kind of widow; she was hot before her dead husband was even cold.


Meanwhile, I called a few friends at the station house. The cops didn't have any leads. They said the victim was grated over a thin linguini, with a light mushroom sauce. They were trying to find out where the pasta dish came from; hopefully before they sent out for supper, the sauce was delicious. They also told me the wife could pick up the linguini anytime she wanted, but she better hurry, otherwise she'd have to reheat it.


My next stop was Lilly's message parlor. Lilly was a large woman with a face that only a blind mother could love. At one time she was known for her large firm breasts, but now her breasts hung down like two mud flaps. And she was one strong willed broad. A year earlier she had a stroke and had to learn to walk all over again. She taught herself by going back to the basics and putting one breast in front of the other. Before I could chat about the weather or, ask her if she ever sucked up one of her breasts while vacuuming, a line of girls who just missed making it into every issue of Playboy magazine marched in. I told Lilly I wasn't interested in the girls, but first I prove to her I wasn't gay. She agreed, but needed to get a stronger prescription see the evidence.


While we waited out side Len Crafters I flashed her my Investigators ID, two major credit cards and picture of me the last time I had hair. I tell, you I really turned some heads in that communion out fit. Okay, it was in the other direction.


When we returned to Lilly’s place I told her about the Massage Parlor being the beneficiary on Jim Thompson's life insurance policy, and Mrs. Thompson suspicions that her husband was having an affair. Lilly, laughed, the girls laughed, I laughed. Heck,funny is funny.


She told me that Jim Thompson was her birth son. She'd given him away for adoption because he was a difficult baby. He was a shy kid and refused to come out of the womb. Her back had gone out, and she permanently stretched her breasts bending over trying to nurse him. Lilly showed me a baby picture. It wasn't a pretty sight, and I couldn't be sure that was Jim's leg dangling down. But I believed her.


Lilly said that she recently rectified things with her son. When Jim realized that the family he'd lived with was not his birth family, he started accepting his mouth. He began to talk more and for the first time he ate in public. He even started throwing up with his mouth open. Last month he started doing a comedy act.


If it wasn't Mrs. Thompson, or Lilly, then who killed Jim? Lilly told me that Jim was performing his comedy act on open mike night at Da Marino’s Italian restaurant. Da Marino’s was a local rodeo clown's hangout. I circulated a picture of Jim that his wife had given me. Several of the guys immediately recognized Jim and even more recognized his wife. I told myself; maybe it was just the leather mask, or the midget she was handcuffed to. I even thought I knew one of the singing nuns. It turns out that most of the rodeo clowns had seem Jim perform. Jim's act was my first solid clue. It seemed Jim was one of the pioneers of a new wave in stand up comedy --food impressions. Jim specialty was doing Cheese. I was told he could do a Locatelli, that would give you agida.


While a few of Jim's fans cracked each other up repeating his hysterical Feta
cheese bit, a Greek sailor was slamming his fist down on the bar. He failed to notice the unconscious face that was lying on the bar top. The sailor lifted the guy’s bloody head, put ten bucks under it, and left - a good tipper.

My PI's instincts took over and I ran out on my check and I followed the guy back to his place. I was good at following people, knowing instinctively to stay behind them. He lived only a block or two away from the restaurant, in the kind of building rotting people call home, and my dates call romantic.

I camped outside his door. About ten minutes later I heard a muted moan. I knew it wasn't a woman's moan because it was something I heard before. I ran back, and slammed into the door. It popped off it's hinges, a few seconds before my shoulder popped out of it's socket.


Inside the sailor, was pressing a bound and gagged guy through a garlic press. A young herb comic. I yelled for the maniac to stop, but he wouldn't. I had no choice. I fired my forty-five (I had a license to carry one - although I was still waiting for the license that would allow me to shoot it). It exploded... The death seeking bullet landed between the eyes, unfortunately it was between the comic’s eyes, putting him out of his misery. My next shot, hit the Greek’s dog. My next, his cat. The next, his canary. The next, sailed through the window and hit an old man who had just miraculously recovered from a heart attack and was now able to stand and look out the window. The maniac charged at me, wielding a potato peeler. Just as he was about to stick it through me, a shot was fired. The wife of the dead man, who'd just recovered from a heart attack, shot the Greek. He fell into me, crashing into my gun. The gun went off killing the old man's wife.


It was over. The man who killed Jim Thompson was dead, as were all his pets and a few of his neighbors. Sure, sometimes the innocent are accidentally killed, or maimed, or tortured, or eaten alive by a drunk in-law, but heck that's justice. A tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye, even it's the wrong eye.


I called Mrs. Thompson telling her I was coming over with her husband’s killer; she was upset. It was too late to get her hair done and only one of her breasts implants were in. When I arrived at Mrs. Thompson's door, she turned off the porch light and dove on me, tearing at my clothes. Even in the darkness, she was surprised how well endowed I'd suddenly gotten, at one point refusing to get on top because she was afraid of heights.


I didn't know what type of orgasm she was having, whether it was an inny or an outty or time released. I didn't have the heart to tell her that the private part she was going bananas over was the dead killer's. Besides, she was moaning!

That Last Burst Of Adolescence (Thank You, Richard, Chico and Lou)

(An unfunny true to life real non fiction essay)

Chico was seventeen, quick witted and even quicker with his feet. He was said to be the fastest kid in high school. Ritchie was also seventeen and the oldest of the three brothers there that night, all athletes; Jimmy, age fourteen, and Chet twelve going on fifty.

Much to our surprise Lou, made it there, after all he was seventeen-and-a-half and had his own car. During his younger days he was our player slash announcer - fast to laugh, praise, and anger. He possessed the kind of anger that would stain his face red, and make endless streams of complaints fire out his mouth so much so that it would cause us to laugh so hard, he’d either run off in a temper tantrum or he would join us in the laughing fit. Cousin Butch had also made it, sprinting a full three blocks from his house so he wouldn’t miss this historic moment. He was fifteen and the closest blood relative I had at the time. He was also the closest relative I had geographically, living across the street from me most of my childhood. There was others present Jamesie, Slats, maybe Rudy and a few who I just see as a blur. Oh, and Russell, how could I forget him, he was there boasting about himself as usual. They say that empty barrels make the most noise well in Russell’s case the barrel wasn’t empty, just full of pain for being born with slightly crushed hips the made it tough for him to run as fast as the rest of us. So he made up for it with his mouth and good football instincts.

The night was going to be special to all of us. It was the first touch football game ever played by our crew under the lights. Even though those lights were for the funeral parlor parking lot, to the guys they made the ones that stood over Yankees Stadium seem like fire flies.

Standing in the glow from those lights we felt like the Green Bay Packers playing in the very first Super Bowl. But what made this night really special was the older guys had returned to play our first night game. It had been a few years since Chico, Ritchie, and Lou had spent a weekend night on an activity other than pursuing girls. They were our local heroes, our role models, and sometimes I still feel that the pressure to impress them was the cause for my early hair loss.

Now, we weren’t your ordinary group of neighborhood touch-football players. We were the cream of the crop. Whenever we played a team from another block or neighborhood we’d slaughter them, make them wish they had played with dolls instead of the pigskin, even when we put our youngest players in key positions. Many a time those drubbings were so humiliating friendships were ended forever. I’ve often thought that the best thing about being an adult is that time moves so fast that the months between sports seasons is almost tolerable.

We picked sides, trying to make things as equal as we could but also making it so that most of us younger guys were on the same side. Before both teams departed for opposite ends of the field, it was time for the coin toss. Well it wasn’t really a toss; it was odd finger, best two out of three. I don’t remember who did the finger tossing for us, but we won and elected to receive.

As Lou held up the ball, arched his back and then reared back and fired it, yelling, “kick,” I could hear the marching band’s drums pounding. Oh, there was no marching band or any drums, just the thunderous beat of blood throbbing through my svelte body. All I know is as that ball started to spiral in my direction, I could hear those war drums and at the same time hear myself inwardly chanting, “Don’t drop it! Don’t drop it!” And I didn’t drop. I did it exactly as the older guy taught us. I used my hands to catch it, and then pulled it into my chest, and then I stuffed it in the crook of my left arm and took off. All my fears of failure were now blocked out by instincts grown from a thousand imaginary games – my body sensing everything that was happening on the field instantly, or better yet, like it all happened seconds before. Now, when kids return kickoffs in touch football, they usually don’t follow their blocks. And it’s not entirely the receiver’s fault because kids don’t block very well, if at all on kickoffs, so for the most part you’re on your own. So it’s best to catch the ball, and run and if you get a block count yourself blessed.

I remember heading down field with the sharp fall air slapping my face -- seeing guys running towards me at what I knew was full speed, but seemed oddly slower, then feeling an inner tug, no an electric charge that would made me change directions, several times, and not just on a dime but the thin side of a dime, and then explode past the shocked tacklers. I can still feel the swivel of my hips, the jitter steps, the feints, and the swoosh as I flew by futile waving hands. I can still see one kid; I think it was Ritchie directly in front of me then disappear like he’d never existed.

I danced and wiggled my way through several lines of defense, and then burst past the last row of defenders and sprinted towards the white parking line, which was our goal line, with Chico close enough to trample my shadow. I crossed the goal line just as Chico slapped the tag on me a hair too late. Did I tell you that Chico was the fastest guy in high school? Okay, I know I did. But I’m just adding this to show how spectacular the moment was. And it was. But that moment was just the beginning for me. I bobbed and weaved my way through the guys all night long. For the most part I was untouchable, ghostlike.

But the best part was not scoring all the touchdowns or making all the long runs or pass receptions. The best part was hearing Chico, Lou, and Ritchie talking during the game, no not just talking, but bragging about how fantastic I played - comparing me to the “Gale from Kansas,” the great broken field runner, Gale Sayers. Now I’m sure, Ritchie, Lou, or Chico wouldn’t even under hypnosis recall that night, and certainly were never aware of its impact on a fourteen year-old kid. But it’s a moment I can still feel, deep within in cells that I’m lucky to say haven’t abandoned this aging ship yet.

Sure there are other memories that might be more meaningful, a birth of a child, a mother’s last embrace, or a father’s proud smile when you say “Dad, I got lucky last night.” (Okay, I’m kidding here) But heck none of those evoke the muscle memory of a young body, so fluid, so full of promise, so full of, well, itself. I don’t think I was ever faster, quicker, smarter, or more illusive, or more free then that night under the funeral parlor lights, carrying a rubber street ball in the crook of my arm – running – running - and running, like I could run that way for forever. Thanks Chico, Lou, and Ritchie and all the guys and even those funeral parking lot lights. Thanks for making that last burst of adolescence a memory that will never be caught or diminished by the pragmatism of middle age and beyond. I still hear your praise and feel those slaps of approval on my back and know on that evening I was all that you guys taught me to be.

The Human Bomb (a post divorce syndrom flashback)

Happy Father’s Day?


Nowadays, I didn't wake up to birds chirping, or to the soft sunlight drifting through my blinds. I'd wake up to my eyelids being stretched over my headboard. And to "I-t's m-o-r-n-i-n-g!!!" being spit through my eardrums with enough force to send my wife flying off the bed, if she wasn't already weighted down with another potential human bomb. Yeah... I'm a father.

I should have known that being a dad wasn't gonna be all the fun it was cracked up to be when the joy of hearing my wife shout in pain ended with the arrival of a slimy ball of flesh, which had I found in a field I'd have called the SPCA in to destroy it. Then the Doc said, "Isn't she beautiful?" Sure, if you like bald toothless things that leak on your clothes.

Actually, it was an emotional moment for me. I couldn't believe that fluids from two people in halfway decent shape could make something so damn uncoordinated. Then the inevitable, "The baby looks just like you." Sure, I haven't slept in four days; I've eaten only candy bars that are so old the machine was built around them. I have bags under my eyes that on an airplane would be considered carry-ons. My skin resembles four-year-old white bread, my hair looks like it spent the night in a bucket of eels, and my lips could be mistaken for two pieces of moon rock. That's one good-looking baby I've got.

By the time the baby is ready to leave the hospital the mother has now inherited the baby's "wonderful" disposition not to mention thirty pounds of loose flesh that can tell you which way the wind is blowing.

My wife nursed the baby, which is good for the baby and makes it easier for the father. It gives your wife something to do while you make plans to abandon her.
Personally, if I were a woman I wouldn’t breast-feed a child. I don’t think they’re emotionally mature enough to appreciate it.

One of the most important things for a baby is sleep. Unfortunately, the baby puts little importance on the value of sleep for his or her parents. Actually, I’ve come to the conclusion that the baby only enjoys its sleep when it’s taking it away from you. It’s amazing how a baby can sleep silently for eighteen hours a day yet manage to keep you awake for twenty. The inability for one to stay a sleep with a baby in the house soon affected other living things in our home. My dog at the time was seriously ill and the vet came to our house and decided the dog had to be put permanently to sleep. I was jealous, until the dog woke up four hours later.

Before I had my first child I didn't know much about kids. I grew up an only child. My parents knew when to leave "bad" enough alone. I decided a long time ago that I would never have an only child. Disrupting your parent’s life is too much of a burden to put on one child. A kid has feelings. If he's not causing his folks to have a nervous breakdown it's going to make him feel inadequate. The last thing I want to do is raise an inadequate kid. I want a kid who'll have a great self-image that will someday be torn down by his children.

Kids need challenges. It's only when a kid has no one at home to destroy that he starts looking outside for trouble. Serial killers have parents with such low self-esteem that the kids out of frustration turn to ruining the lives of small animals, then later adults whom they are not related to (hopefully before they have kids). Don't get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against serial killers, (I don't want to offend any serial killer activist group), but they might contribute more to society if they practiced a little more self control and restricted their killing to undesirables like politicians, lawyers, and fertilization experts.

With babies there's so many things to learn. Over the years I picked up a few tricks; like how to change a diaper. The key is waiting till the diaper gets so full (sometimes days) that you can just shake the kid over a pail and the diaper will fall in. Then you hold the kid in the toilet and flush it, the force of the water wipes the kid clean without you ever having to touch his soggy bottom. My parents didn’t believe in the restrictions of diapers and allowed me to walk around naked on newspapers.

If your having trouble getting your kid to walk, I have an easy solution. Stand him in front of a puddle in new shoes. He'll be walking in minutes. Another tip. Don't hit your children. Why use all that energy on something that heals so fast.

If you still haven't gotten the picture of what being a father is really like, imagine yourself sitting in your office. You come up with an idea that'll make you rich and cure every decease that’s known to man and just before you can write it down your adorable child enters screaming non-stop, "Can I have a c-o-o-k-i-e!!!!" And suddenly that cookie takes precedent over an idea that will save the world. That's being a responsible parent!

They say having a kid stretches you as a person. Sure it stretches you. You have to bend all kinds of new ways to avoid them. It's also been said that people on their deathbeds say, "I should have spent more time with my kids." They're only saying that because if they’d spent more time with their children there’s a chance they could have given their children the same fatal decease, and with the kids faster metabolism they wouldn’t be alive to disrupt their final and only peaceful moments.

Don't get me wrong, I love my children more than life itself, especially since having kids I have less time for life.

For you people out there still considering having children, I have a better idea. Adopt an old person. They do the same things as babies and they'll be dead before you have to worry about college.

(This is dedicated to all you poor father's out there, young and old, that still don't have the nerve to get divorced.)

The Satan Diaries (Memoirs)

(as translated by several language scholars and experts in ancient slang)

edited by John DeBellis

Although the manuscript is titled, The Satan Diaries, our scholars have concluded that The Satan Diaries are more like a memoir than a diary. In fact in Satan’s introduction he tries to explain the hybrid.

SATAN’S PROLOGUE

“During my time in Heaven I started jotting down notes. I had pieces of stone everywhere. God hadn’t given the idea of making paper to humans yet. I almost lost a finger several times using that ancient chisel, thus my early notes originally lacked detail. After paper was finally given to me, which took a few hundred years longer, since by then my climate was combustible, an unburnable kind wasn’t invented till much later, I went in and filled in some thoughts and details. Hopefully, you’ll read this and say, “You know that Satan, for the absolute epitome of evil is not such a bad guy.”

BOOK ONE

PERIOD ONE (At this point there were no days, nights, time and thankfully a Sabbath yet. Ah, the good old days).

I’m God’s favorite angel, the first, the best, the brightest, a handsome devil, if you excuse the play on words. Even, now, after being tossed out of heaven into, and I’m not exaggerating, an inferno, without even a fan, an open window, or even an ice tea, for almost six thousand years I’m still considered a hunk (although a tad crispy). And it’s not just the tan. I have a great set of straight pointy horns, which indicates good breading, a long lively provocative tail, powerful (all weather) wings and hoofed feet that at the time made quite the fashion statement. Being immortal and not aging does help one look several millenniums younger.

God, for someone who claims to have always been, always would be and is all powerful, I feel is your classic underachiever. What had he done so far? He made a bunch of faggy goody-two shoes angels, and gave us a million miles of nothing to live in, (with zip to do except worship him), a few tall rocks (his the biggest of course) to perch on with no padding, pillows, or one that vibrates, and constant elevator music, with way too much harp. A billion years later some skinny kids from London wrote some real music, this beautiful sensitive love song to me, “Sympathy For The Devil.” If I ever do speaking engagements it will be my theme song. Between us, since I heard it, I’ve lowered the flames on Brian Jones.

Back to old Tin Ear. One day, before He actually officially invented days, (whoopee!) He got (what He calls) this flash of genius, he jumps up (almost falling off his perch) and said He was going to create a universe. What the hell is a universe! None of us had any idea what he was yapping about.

PERIOD TWO

I don’t know what he actually did to create the universe, but whatever it was, was very loud, especially to a guy with pointy ears. Then there was this bright light (almost blinded me remember this was a few million years before sun glasses) and the next thing you know, pow, there’s this huge weird looking place, (which looked like a cannibal just threw up Timothy Leary) with what he calls galaxies, planets and stars. As usual all the angles made a big deal out of it, twinkling, flapping their wings, and twanging on those annoying harps. I should wrapped a few strings around their pansy ass necks.

DAY ONE THROUGH SIX (Years haven’t been created yet, time was still a new concept that unfortunately severely effected my sleep patterns.)

So now he’s been bragging to us angel’s that he created the universe in six days. Big deal, I’m better looking, girls dig my bad boy image, and have a terrific sense of humor. You ask any angel, I’m a riot. No one does dumb Gabriel jokes better than old Lucifer, a name that sort of slides off the tongue forked or not. So what if I tossed in a few choice words that afterwards God, out of jealousy, proclaimed were curse words. Blank him!

DAY SEVEN

And what did he do on the seventh day? He rested. Rested. Bull! He passed out on His supreme ass! We played harps into each ear and I stuffed feathers up His nose and still we couldn’t wake him. I almost tied His ugly fungus infested feet (with huge big toes that looked like two breaed sea lions, a genetic trait he inherited from himself)together before a few brown halloed angels stopped me.

DAY EIGHT TO TEN

Okay, so now He’s got this huge eye-sore of a universe that just sitting there taking up space for a million years or so. Talk about self-indulgent.

So today, for some dumb reason, Mr. Always Was was really fixated on this dumpy planet called earth. By now, I’ve been around God for quite for a few billion years so I know when He gets frustrated. He starts wildly picking at his eyebrows, as if they weren’t bushy enough. So before he can have another one of his little tamper tantrums and makes an angel or two explode or disappear, (even though He’ll never admit it), I suggested that he make some creatures. (I made up that name up on the spot and made him think he thought of it, which isn’t hard to do with a monster ego like His.)

In His haste, He creates all these animals, weird smelly things, some of them without rhyme or reason like the platterpus (finally a name that made sense). The minute they were created half of them start eating the other half and God’s all smiles. And they call me the devil. Give me a break.

Anyway, big surprise, a few days later he decides he’s going to make a very special creature, a human being (why he named it with such stupid sounding words I have no idea), a man in His image. Another ego trip. And to tell you the truth, none of us even knew or cared that God was a man, like it really mattered up here. None of us was getting any!

Years after human beings inhabited the earth, one of my snitches told me God wound up making dinosaur bones and hiding them around the planet so it didn’t look like he mistakenly left the earth empty so long.

DAY ELEVEN

Again, always the showman, instead of just snapping His fingers or thinking of what He wants, He makes the guy from a piece of dust, and then He pretends to breath life into Him. We’ll talk about God’s eternity breath later.

* Note: Against my wishes my editor (who hasn’t seen the last of me) insisted that I capitalize God and any pronouns referring to Him.

I hate to burst your bubble, but for a deity who’s supposed to be all knowing, sometimes He can be a brain dead putts, as His chosen people would say. I mean what was He thinking? He creates the what He calls The Garden Of Eden, this lush patch of earth (not a weed or dog crap anywhere), roughly and acre and half, with the brightest, roundest, juiciest apples, you’d ever seem (I’d never seen or heard of one before but upon retrospect I stand on my first impression), where He puts this young good looking guy He just created (a dog compared to me), who He calls Adam. With all the names available He picks a simple two-syllable word that sounds more like a Buddist chant. The Buddhists arrived on earth a few thousand years later and boy were they a dull foul smelling ugly bunch. Talk about obsessive.

So now He’s got Adam, who for some stupid reason He gave hormones to (I don’t even want to get into what they are), all alone and naked, which Adam’s too dumb to even realize, sitting in this out door bachelor pad with nothing to do, bored out of his mind. Even if he was made dumber than he was, which even God couldn’t do, he couldn’t occupy his micro dot brain by watching things grow, because God, as usual, made things perfect already, so there’s was no upside, nothing to see change. I hate to shine my own horn, but I'm the first one who ever said this: absolute power corrupts absolutely! (Which in hell is a good thing!)

FIVE THOUSAND AND DAY ONE

So our genius Captain Cosmos, gets an idea, a good one for a change. He decides to create a broad, a chick, a dame, or as they say in your bible, (talk about propaganda), a woman. Now, why our Supreme being, as He likes to also call Himself, who can make a galaxy from squat has to use the poor guy’s rib to make her, is a question, even if He was still talking to me, He wouldn’t be able to answer. Personally, I think he wanted to be seen as some kind of majestically bohemian street artist (although we didn’t have streets in heaven. Who walked when you could fly?).

But I got to give the Old Dog credit, he’s got taste, even though I’d never seen a broad before, Eve, (yeah, another creative name) was a real knockout (And I’ve seen some, excuse the pun, hot ones in hell, extremely friendly, if you get my drift). Even for a guy with my class I felt like knocking her out and dragging her into a cave (that was way before there were motels). Everything about her was, as He likes to brag - perfect. Again He makes the mistake of giving her hormones, or maybe they were left over from the rib job.

Now they’re both hanging out there, naked (and she was stacked, she had a set on her that even back then they asked if they were real), which neither of the idiots notice. Most of the time they just sat there like two lumps on a log. I mean they didn’t even have a language, they sounded like two seals honking at each other. (I don’t get the point of seals. They’re pretty good swimmers, but why did He ever make them breathe air and live on rocks, he put fins where feet are supposed to be, it’s got to hurt just getting up to pee in the morning. And then he makes them talk like a baritone duck. I don’t even want to get into penguins.)

Then God decides to make some rules. He’s always got rules. Once a control freak always a control freak. First off, he calls the tree with the apples, The Tree Of Knowledge Of Good And Evil. Corny! Come on you’re God, you could have been more creative, called it the Joshua Tree, the Chrysler building, the Eiffel Tower, or the The Green Monster, or even Plato’s Retreat (an idea I picked up from the Greeks and gave to some human in exchange for his soul and several others that I had to wash before I tossed their smelly asses in my inferno).

God tells, and I quote, “his kids” that they are forbidden to eat the fruit from the tree or they will die. God’s all knowing, so He should have figured out human nature. If He would have listened to me, I would have warned him.

Now, God since He created the earth has been taking more time off. Making the universe took more out of him, which he’d never admit to, as if He’d admit to anything. According to Him He’s never made a mistake. He even claims no responsibility for the Republican party. Every time He does something wrong His excuse is (He’s always referring to Himself in the third person) “God works in mysterious ways.” Talk about one excuse fits all.

So, when The Boss (He hates being called that) decides to take His little siesta, He tells me to watch His kids. I’m an arch angle, the number one wing man, not His personal baby sitter. But what choice do I have, He’s God, so, I’m watching and nothing’s happening. The two don’t know what to do with each other, and they don’t realize it yet, but every time they look at an apple I can hear their stomachs rumbling. So I figure that these creatures haven’t eaten since they’ve been created. God didn’t even put water out for them.

Now I decide to have a little fun, so, I made myself look like a serpent, God was too high flatulent to use the word snake. And for some reason God threw a couple of them in the Garden Of Eden, maybe to keep down the rat population. The only time He explains himself it’s to brag.

Adam and Eve aren’t getting along very well and she wonders off by herself. I’m waiting there, all curled up in a tree, and when she walks bye I talk to her. I didn’t quack like a duck or honk like seal, I did my God impression. His voice is actually pretty high pitched and nasally (kind of feminine, there’s been rumors about Him for the last few billion of years), but still I’m got your Lord down to a T. Which has served me well in my future subterranean endeavors. Mosses, unbless his soul still believes the burning bush was God. I’ll give you a hint Mosses, Burning Bush, Fire! Didn’t that ring a bell!

Anyway (trying not to stare at her rack), I tell Eve that this apple is amazing stuff, just one bite and she’ll feel like she’s a princess, which draws a blank. Then I tell her she’ll feel like she’s in heaven, still nothing but empty face, but the salesman in me convinces her that chewing is quite attractive (as if she knew what attractive means. With broads it doesn’t matter as long as it sounds like a compliment).

If any one can be a chauvinist, the devil can. So she opens them luscious lips, and he starts to chew like she never ate before, which she hadn’t. Adam who returns, not for her, but because the dummy actually is lost, sees her chewing on the thing. Now in the bible it says that she offered him a bite. The truth is he grabbed the thing out of her mouth and ate it pits and all. I don’t know what was in that apple but finally they both notice that they’re buck naked, and the broad for some reason screams, (I’d learn to like that sound in the coming years) and they cover themselves up with leaves. Although Eve still showed some nice cleavage. I would have tossed in a little poison ivy, that would gotten some laughs from my angel buddies. Now God wakes up! First thing He does is look at His little paradise, notices what’s going on and explodes. And as usual He didn’t get my quirky sense of humor.

I’ve never seen The Big Guy so mad, once or twice He blew His stack when I wouldn’t bow down to Him. But this was a real temper tantrum. He lifts His rod in the air, I thought he was going to hit Adam and Eve with it (I would have liked to have seen that, I bet she would have enjoyed a spanking), instead the sky opened up and lightening hits the tree almost cooking my snake ass. Besides calling them a few choice names, He tosses them out on their butts. He tells the broad that she’s going to give birth to babies, which I correctly took to mean that small human beings would come out of her (at the time I didn’t know where they would emerge from and certainly think they’d come out that ugly), and that she’d be in great pain (duh!). He tells Adam that he’d have to get a job. Here I think God was getting ahead of himself and realized it and then explained that he’d have to grow fruits, vegetables and stuff to eat. (He never once offered a loan) And they were banished.

God, who claims to be so tough, didn’t have the nerve to tell them how they would make babies, so I being ever so observant I figured it out, it was a matter of inadvertently being pointed by Adam in the right direction, if you get my devilish drift. As Adam left I whispered the facts of life to him. “God wasn’t all bad,” he whispered back to me with a smile on his face. Bad brains, good hormones.

God, of course, cursed the serpent and made him crawl and eat dust (compared to the burnt food in hell would have been a delicacy), which was okay because by then I had substituted a real serpent and was long gone. Unfortunately I didn’t get very far.

I don’t know which Angle ratted on me. But God got in my face (Mr. Perfect never brushes his teeth or gargles so after a few million years of morning breath I was ready to pass out). He said I was blasphemous, which back then was worst then being called unpatriotic or week on defense. In truth He scared me half to death, which isn’t easy if you’re an immortal. When He stopped shouting. I gave him my sad feel sorry for Lucifer act, a little cowering, bowed head, wings over the eyes, but he wasn’t buying it. I even tried a couple of dumb Polish angel jokes. Next thing I know He grabs me by the throat and tosses me completely out of heaven. And even more surprising was that He heaved me with his left hand (although he threw like a sissy)!

I must have fell a few million feet. The way God was shouting at me I couldn’t wait to hit the ground. He ranted on and on, yelling out new orders. And I’m paraphrasing now but He said something like “You’re an %@@$!%$# **&&*$&&% ^%#$%^%& *&^%$#^&&%% and *%&$#@%&.” He knew his way around profanity, let me tell you. He also said, that I would remain in Hell, with a few of my angel buddies, who shall from hence forth, (He actually used those words), would be called demons. He also gave them names which honestly I can’t remember and don’t really give a damn, I never really liked any of them. For some laughs every once in a while I toss one inside some human.

More importantly I was to be known as the Devil, Shaitan, Satan (my personal favorite), Abbadon, Angra Mainyu, Asmodai, Beelzebub (my least favorite, believe me no one calls me that in hell), Lucifer (my stage name), Belial, Iblis and Milhouse. God, said that my gig was to lure souls away from him by making humans sin (if He only knew how easy my job was going to be, especially with Parisians) and that their punishment would be to spend 11 months to eternity or longer with me, which could’ve been a lot of laughs, if it wasn’t for the burning part, supposedly 70 times hotter than fire on earth, now with global warming it’s only 45 times hotter. If I can keep influencing corporations and help elect more leaders like Dick Chaney, pretty soon I can see Hell being a vacation spot.

Besides giving me a migraine headache, halfway down God stuck two horns in my head, which might explain the head ache, and by the time I landed, my wings, which lost their feathers and now looked like two halves of a broken umbrella, kept me from falling flat on my handsome face. I had grown a long pointy tail (which I still don’t have any use for except as a book mark) and cloven feet (which are difficult to find clogs that fit). Just as I was dusting myself off a pitchfork landed near bye, accompanied by God’s derisive laughter, which was intensified by the echoing (He uses the echo, to cover up His sissy voice and a slight lisp).

Being the devil has its good points. I can be rude, petty, and out right disgusting (disemboweling is a party favorite) without apologizing, or issue a signing statement or say (in a German accent), “ I was just following orders!” Not to mention the perks. I get to talk humans into doing bad stuff like, stealing (especially from helpless seniors and starving survivors of a tsunami), adultery (a personal favorite), murder(the more the merrier), eating their fellow man (fresh, frozen and with or without utensils), making cheap toys in China, and God hate me, inventing HMO’s! Of course, humans have done stuff on their own that I wouldn’t be able to think of without vomiting myself inside out! Which is great, since I get all the credit!

Now, a lot of former angles would look around see all the hot molten stone, the lava, and the out of control fires and would get a little down in the dumps, and think why me? Not old Satan here, ah, uh. I don’t see the glass half full or half empty I just see boiling water that I can throw in someone’s face.

FOR LEN MAXWELL

Len Maxwell died today. Len was a friend, a father figure of sorts and ultimately the only laugh that mattered. Len taught me more about comedy, than anyone else. He criticisms were harsh, ruthless, and in most cases true. What made it all bearable was that his compliments were magnificent, magical, you felt as if you were being knighted. His eyes sparked, his face rose rounded exploded and then quaked with the laughter of an approving God (one that Len felt he could have done a job better than), who just gifted you with the meaning of life, or in my case the meaning of comedy. I won’t miss Len because he’ll always be with me. Every joke I write or say will be graded on the Maxwell curve, which has little or no bend at all, other than inward. I’ll either hear, “John, that’s beneath you. You can do better than that!” Or if get it right, they’ll be no words, I’ll just be rewarded with the memory of his unbridled laugh. (below is a chapter I had dedicated to Len in “Standup Guys”)

“The Maxwell Factor”

It was only a few months ago, that I, a man who graduated high school by the skin of his teeth, with gum tissue that has now had reseeded as if global warming had focused it’s total effect in my mouth, was actually giving a lecture at Harvard, when I realized what I was saying was articulate and simple enough to be understood even through a microphone that was shorting out from shards of my saliva. Not only could I follow my own logic, which is like trying to find a contact lens during a tornado, but the students lowered their I-pods, talked quietly on their cell phones, some even stopped comparing body piercings, and the brilliant man who had hired me (with guarantee of no pay, while I laid out for my own meals, shelter and transportation at gas prices per gallon that rivaled the cost of my room, had it even been AAA approved) suddenly found himself listening intently.

What was I speaking about that had caused this Pulitzer prize nominated writer to find value in my crumpled words? Well, it was nothing profound, or could be interpreted as being even deep enough to have a surface to scratch. Not that anything I’d say could ever be misunderstood to possess multiple layers -- when I contradict myself I mean the same thing.
I was simply telling students, (who I’d otherwise would not have had the opportunity to even pass bye on the way to the men’s room, or see going to the restroom room during my set), how to structure a comedy routine, particularly one not thrust forward by the obvious inertia of a high concept and which included a beginning, middle, and an ending.

No one can make you funny they can only help you become funnier, or make you realize that you’re not funny at all. Writing jokes came as natural to me (and many comics) as hopelessness if the ratio of one successful attempt out of every hundred can be considered as nature intended. With myself and women, nature’s intentions were humiliation, embarrassment and financial ruin, that is, if you’re looking at the positive side, which I have never been known for, otherwise realistically speaking my success ration could not even be found or grasped using the plethora of variables in quantum physics.

During my usual comic’s day, which is mostly night, I spent four to six hours out of my normal 24 hours of negative obsessing (at home, at play, and at so called work), zeroed in on writing sophisticated jokes about my pathetic life hoping to get people to laugh at me, with me, against me, and possibly even during my act. I’m a comic, my goal is to universally get less respect than Rodney Dangerfield and eventually get paid handsomely for it. So far I’ve attained only the former.

Since my character was that of a loser (which nature encouraged, by making mirrors plentiful, my eyesight good, my teenage years pathetic and my confidence based on that evidence), the worst and more unsuccessful I felt, the more avenues I had for material. After a year or so of writing and inadequacy my funniness got better and the ratio went from one in twenty-five, and then eventually to one in ten, or better. At first my ratio of success with women worsened as did my ratio of believable excuses. But through determination, fueled by desperation (easily mistaken for drive), and the accumulation of disappointing experiences, my shortcomings became more pronounced in my writing, adding substance and attitude to my stage character. I even began to gain some success with women, although none would ever come forward to back my claims. But unfortunately my act remained as unfocused as my pictures on Match.com.

I was at the Improvisation and had just finished performing my usual 3AM slot, getting laughs in the same unfamiliar spots, racing past drunks who my jokes passed bye rather easily, when an older man, only a few years younger then I am now, with thicker hair that I had then, called me over. His name was Len Maxwell and he was known to us as the man who introduced Woody Allen to his manager’s Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe, and just as importantly for dating women half his age, but making up for it by dating two at a time. Len would eventually teach me more about comedy than anyone, even my prom night no shows. I hope that someday my work can reflect his gift to me. Or I can work enough to actually buy him a gift.

Len Maxwell was then, and even though he’s now confined to a wheel chair, still an intimidating presence, as opposed to me who is an intimidated presence. Len could stare at a guru and make him his inner-eye blink. He could look through the Hubble telescope and make other life forms find extinction less terrifying. If I was drowning he could make me feel guilty for coming up for air. I always had the feeling that Len would look at us new comics perform and wonder how we managed to avoid evolution, but when and if Len laughed at one of our jokes, he exploded like the birth of a universe and could make a whole generation of nerds stand up and feel, well… like we are actually standing.

Len had black hair as dark as the soul of comic friend who steals your jokes and light blue eyes as intense anything that could be imagined on a Van Gogh acid trip. Add that to an air of authority he wore like it was tailor made. Unlike me who wear confidence like it was tailor made for some one else. I’m sure when and if Len talked to God he was giving Him advice. So when Len spoke, as painful as it might be, which could make shaving by tearing your face off seem pleasurable, you listened. The Maxwell Factor!

As Len’s mouth opened I awaited my punishment, my lifetime ban from ever thinking I was funny again, but instead I was startled by the positive nature of what he said. I won’t quote him exactly or even inexactly not out of modesty but out of limited ability to withdraw from my bankrupt memory. He told me that he liked my lines (one liners, short quick setups and punch lines) and compared my joke writing capability to an old comic friend. Before I could let this reach my head (which shouldn’t have been that difficult since it naturally drooped, often resting itself on my stomach and was quite willing to release any hair follicles that blocked the way), he also told me that my act was just a bunch of unconnected jokes that weakened their believability, thus making my character less dimensional than a noon shadow on white pavement. I’m para-rephrasing here, which means I changed his words completely, but retained the meaning in a less degrading manner.

The next day I met Len for lunch, an early breakfast for me, and he told me the basics of how to string together one-liners that on their own may seem unconnected into a seamless story line, making my act sound conversational. He also taught me how to edit words out of my lines and lines completely out of my lines, obviously not out of my prose or semi-prose. Okay it’s a dumb joke, very dumb, even worse, a bad pun, one Len would have told me to eliminate entirely, even if it meant that I jump off a building holding my computer. That’s the point. Len is a ruthless editor. Years ago, I gave a him a plaque that reinforced that belief. It said, if “Len was God he would have made us with one lung and one kidney.” See how I used that dumb prose joke into segueing into Len teaching me to edit. He also told me that a joke should be strong enough not to need an explanation later, (which I won’t explain later).

Like most things with me, his wisdom (in my case it would have been wis-dumb, made obvious by the use of another bad pun) didn’t take right away. I have a learning curve so serve I need a helicopter to lift me to it’s top. But it eventually stuck. Thus in a slower less curvaceous manner I’m going to attempt to depart that knowledge, and what I managed to learn on my own with the help of God’s sick sense of humor to you the reader. I can only imagine the thrill that is racing, or more probably convulsing, through your body. Oh, and some how I’m going to end on Len again, so be prepared for some warm fuzziness, (emotional reference not to be mistaken for lint just out of a dryer).

Len told me, that if you listened to people talk, which comics only do when they hear their own echo, conversations don’t usually go in direct lines. People bounce in and out of the subjects and stories before returning to the story or the point they started out to make, hopefully. That’s the key! Or it’s a least the door knob to an unlocked room. Or a lose button on a woman’s blouse. Or the subway grid under Marilyn Monroe…Or…I’m sorry I’m getting carried away from left over male hormones, (ones that stayed behind out of laziness).

Len and I looked through my poorly printed act, at the time, written by the missing link between a pen and a typewriter, on various paper blends made from trees who if they could have seen what was scrawled on their remains would have preferred being burnt to ashes in a forest fire. Len and I found three of four lines that were related somewhat in subject matter, were deemed funny by the master, and made them the through line, spacing them out and then finding a strong joke to tie in and end the piece.

The next part was the most difficult, finding jokes that had nothing to do with the story or bit but make them fit by going off in tangents like we do in conversations and I have done in this piece.

Here’s a sample of part of a routine about a recent trip (in comic talk means a bit that the audience can’t see the told by date on references) to Los Angeles.
“I just returned from a business trip to LA. To begin with I’m not a big fan of Los Angeles. It’s too slow for me. LA is the only place where boredom is considered an ambition.” (LA joke)
“As I entered a studio lot I ran into an old girlfriend of mine, who I hated seeing. When we went out she used me the entire relationship! She broke up with me the minute she came out of the coma.” (girlfriend joke).

“We started to talk and she told me she had given up acting and was trying to make it as a singer, which I laughed at. She has the worst voice in the entire world, when she sings deaf people can’t even look at her lips.” (bad voice joke)
“She was once hired to sing the national anthem… after sporting events to clear the stands.”(bad voice joke)
“So, for old-times sake, she invited me back to her place for dinner where she prepared a vegetarian meal for me. I don’t eat meat under any circumstance. Not for any health reasons. I don’t believe that animals should be killed for food. I think they should be killed for fun.” (veggie joke).
“We had a few drinks with the meal and we started to fool around. It turns out she was on the rebound. The rebound! Her boyfriend died. He was an idiot, he was a detective and he was after some grave robbers so as a decoy he buried himself… but the robbers never showed up.” (idiot or dying joke)
“So we made love… and when we did she insisted on being on top… She said in case she wanted to leave… she didn’t want to disturb me.” (sex joke)
“Afterwards she dragged me to a party. Like I said, I’m not a fan of LA, especially Hollywood, which is the phoniest place on the planet. It’s the only place in the world where you can see people in wheel chairs wearing jogging outfits.” (LA joke)
“Babies are born there with blond hair and black roots.” (LA joke)
“When I entered the house where the party was, I was immediately greeted by this weird guy… Now in New York weird it’s different. Guys will claim to be God. Well this Guy was typical Hollywood. He claimed to be God’s child from a previous marriage.” (LA joke)
Do you know in LA when you make it with your wife it’s considered foreplay. (LA joke)
“Anyway after that some other guy walked up to me and tried to sell me vitamin enriched LSD.” (LA Joke)
“I said no. I tried LSD once and it was the worst experience I ever had. I looked in the mirror and there was no change.” (drug joke)
“Supposedly we’re all made in God’s image, I figure in my case it must have been shortly after he had a stroke.” (ugly joke)
“So, anyway, I make my way to the back of the room. Now, I’m minding my own business when this old gypsy lady approached me. She asked me if she could read my palm, which I should never have done. She told me my love life and financial status was going to take a turn for the worse and then she kicked me in the groin and robbed me.”(loser joke) The bit goes on from there ending with me being alone late a night in LA. Unlike now when I’m

alone in New Jersey desperately trying to remember the LA bit.

Not all comedians use this kind of mechanics and joke style, (in fact today most don’t) nor should they. No rules are unbreakable, and most are certainly bendable. Nothing is chiseled in stone except possibly you’re grave maker which by then you can’t change even if it were written with a chalk, but if it contained as many cliché’s as this paragraph your will should order it to be plowed over. The point being it’s okay to learn to do it this way as long as you eventually apply it your way.

There were other things that Lenny preached that, at first, seemed as unnatural to me as not taking antidepressants. One, was not to judge how my set was going or had gone, or to judge other comics by how the audience responds, because the audience doesn’t know (even if you hit the lottery with a member of the opposite, or similar sex if your gay, or adjacent sex if you’re a musician, especially a base player) Now don’t get me wrong, neither Lenny nor myself are anti audience, or audience immune, He’s just saying that there are (in my case very rare) times when you are good and the audience may be tired, may have been blown out by another comic, or they’re not educated enough in comedy to catch the subtleties, or you can’t bend over low enough for them to see their selves in you. However, there are a few cases, such as the one below, where it’s none of the above.

I was once conned by a few friends and the owner of the Baked Potato (the oldest Jazz club in LA) to perform while the band was on a break. My comic buddy, Vinny Marz, (who would have been a giant of a midget had he been an actual midget), worked nights as cook, and would feed me free giant potatoes, that were actually potatoes even though they were loaded with fried vegetables, chili peppers and enough cheese to also clog the arteries of the two guys sitting next to me. So when the owner asked me to do a set, I couldn’t refuse without risking losing my potato privileges and a possible law suit.

When I reached the stage the spot lights were so bright they could make a blind person see and sighted person blind. Most Jazz musicians I know play for themselves, or for the pure love of the music, or to dare each other to find the hidden melody, so seeing the audience would just be a distraction. I didn’t mind the radio active lights because performing without seeing the crowd fit my philosophy of bombing on my own terms, which I did. For twenty five minutes I didn’t hear a laugh, a grumble, a snicker, a cough, a boo or even some one asking for a check, or complaining that they were paying for Jazz not an act that might cause them to dislike sound. I tried to convince myself that the audience was either laughing at such a high pitch that only dogs could hear or that they were vaporized from the lights. I might not have cared what the crowd thought of my act but my sweat glands sure did. It was like the water in my body couldn’t get away from me fast enough - - guilt by perspiration. After twenty-five minutes I realized that no potato was worth this kind of humiliation, even bye a guy who supposedly didn’t meet an audience he couldn’t ignore. I left the stage to claps so soft they would have to turn the air conditioning off, stop the house cat from purring and cover the drinks to muffle the sound of ice melting, for me to really believe it wasn’t my imagination.

When I got to the bar my friends were laughing hysterically, like they were in a time warp hearing me have a good set, or another comic from a not so parallel a universe. About ten minutes later their laughter faded to silent gloating grins and I asked what was so damn funny, hoping it was me. And it was, well sort of. What they told me didn’t make me laugh, at first, in fact it didn’t make me want to kill them until it sunk in. The entire audience was made in China. They were there on some kind of junket and not a one could understand a word of English! In this instance Len was really right -- the audience doesn’t know, and they didn’t, (and thank God they didn’t care).

There were other times when I was bombing and the only laughs I heard were coming from disparaging parental voices in my head. Sure, I could have shouted out a few body function jokes or easy sex lines, accenting them with some choice four letter lingo, but instead I chose to go down with my ship. In Lenny’s words, I was succeeding or (mostly) failing on my own terms, throwing caution and cab fare to the wind. Lenny drilled it into my thick skull like a full frontal lobotomy delivered with an air hammer. To pander, is too have lost. It’s giving up on yourself, and possibly the ability to dig (or to scratch the surface) deep enough to find your own special road to a destination you will have truly earned (and hopefully it’ll be enough dough to avoid bankruptcy).

Len also politely suggested in his definitive, absolute, unequivocal way, that if a line needs to be punctuated by profanity in order to work, then it’s not a good joke! It’s like making love to a girl who puts a bag over your head, or vise versa. You and she can blanking do better, well maybe she could. (That was in my own words but not from personal experience.) I saw Len’s logic and to this day I’ve never used profanity on stage, but there were times when I was bombing that I felt like cursing out Lenny.

Len nudged me into a specific direction, which enabled me to figure out a few things on my own. One is that if you shut off a cheap easy avenue to laughter on stage, your mind will find better, smarter and funnier words to travel on, at least for me it did, I think. I’ve also learned that when I write a joke and I actually laugh at my words, it never, ever, works in front of any audience and they are making a correct assessment of its comedic merit. Most importantly I learned to actually listen to another human being without interrupting (too much), without being defensive (at least not till after they finish their first sentence), and without starting my answer before they get to the question).

If I led you to believe that Lenny was harsh, controlling, judgmental and self aggrandizing then your assessment is right, well part of it. The part that you missed, mainly because I didn’t tell you yet, was that Lenny was funny, generous, kind hearted, and a good friend, one that was willing to tell the truth (even if was just his opinion), and made me work, harder, and become much much better than I ever would have been if he had not taken the time, and energy to give me “His” all. To this day whenever I write anything, or come up with a cleaver retort to heckle on stage, I always think, would Lenny think this was funny?

The only Broadway plays I could ever afford to go to, back in those days, were the ones Len would pay for. He’d take me and Larry David, treat us to big dinner, an over doss of his philosophy, and stretch our wits with banter. But the highlight of most of those evenings was hearing Larry and Lenny ridiculously and hysterically arguing over something even if they agreed on it.

So the night, I stood at Harvard, with Richard Dreyfus, who I had the honor of doing the lecture with, and David Black, the wonderful writer who hired me, and has been a champion of my work, I brought Lenny with me (I still couldn’t afford to pay for him) in spirit which was like having a guilty angel standing on my shoulder screaming into my ear “it’s the artist’s job to educate the audience, not reflect it!” But without Len’s challenges and knowledge, I would never have spoken at the most prestigious university in our country, where for a change I purposely didn’t make a complete fool of myself…And they actually liked and understood what I think I said. David has even asked me to come back to do another lecture, of course without a raise in (no) pay. He did offer me the use of his AAA card so I could to pay for a better room (maybe one with two beds in case I had to stay another night). But what do they know they’re only Harvard students and David, has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize only once. I on the other hand graduated from the Len Maxwell school of comedy. And I can structure a funny routine, I’m pretty sure, Len would be proud of! I hope?

The Big Empty

CHAPTER ONE

The last time I actually felt good about myself, Michael Jackson was still sleeping with kids his own age. I think when God gave me life; he gave me something I didn’t have a chance in hell at being good at. Now, my old man, in one of his more chipper moments used to say, “Kid, I don’t mind life, it’s the hours I can’t stand.” And then my good old nurturing mother, rest her sour soul, had a more fatalistic view of life. She used to say that the good Lord put us here for a reason, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a good reason. Well I think the old dead broad hit the nail on the head. You see, if there is a God, I don’t think he ever said “thou shalt not kill,” because if we really are made in his likeness, then killing and murder are as deeply engrained in us as breathing. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the reason we’re here.

What happened of course, as in most of my troubles of late, it involved a beautiful woman, a bunch of bad guys with guns, bullets included, the cops, so much loose blood it would make a pack vampires reach for a pepsin, and a enough dead bodies that when they were alive I might have had chance to get lucky.

It was the hottest night of the year, and the air conditioning in my building was still in my landlord’s mind. I had a fan over my desk that with the help of a good stiff tornado might make it around once. Even ice cold drinks didn’t help. And when I drank liquid that didn’t evaporate before it reached my cracked lips, the sweat poured out of me faster then water through a tennis racket, making my cheap clothes stick to me, giving the illusion that they actually fit. I would have spent the day in the cool of movie-theater watching a Hollywood film and eating popcorn, which incidentally took more intellect to make than the picture, but I had a client who was foolish enough to buck the heat, and think that I could actually help him out.
“Hot enough for you?” an odd ugly duckling, said, as he waved himself through the cobwebs and into my office.
“I like it hot, but not so hot, that if I could afford to throw an egg out the window it would be hard boiled before it landed on the old lady collapsed on the sidewalk from heat stroke,” I slung back at him. Getting all those words out in one breath, I hoped would show him that I was shape.

Speaking of shape, if my new pal’s head had any shape to it at all, you wouldn’t confuse it with round. No, the closest thing organic that it resembled was a pumpkin bashed in by a troupe of midget Rockettes. He was tall so I couldn’t see if the splotches of red hair that stuck to his noodle formed a design or was just the topper for one of nature’s more tasteless jokes. Oh, yeah he had a good build if you women out there like your men to have that acid flashback look: flesh that wobbles, bones that bend, and a posture that twists so bad you’re never sure which direction he’s leaning towards.

“I guess you’re Ajax Mantle,” he spit out between white picket dentures. His blue eyes hopped when he spoke like they were a bouncing ball he sang along with.
“That’s me, the middle aged boy wonder. And you must be Francis Wallagreeno?”
“Yes, I am him,” he stated firmly, like only a fool would mistake him for someone else. And he was right.
“Take a seat,” I said as I threw him a rag to clean it off with. Before I could tell him what to do with the cloth he starting wiping down the wooden chair. I wouldn’t call him clairvoyant, just observant.
After the dust cleared I spoke up. “So what do you need my expert services for?”
“Well, you see there’s a contract out on my life.”
“What make’s you think that?”
“Oh, I don’t think it, I know it,” he said, leaning back in the chair.
“How do you know there’s a contract out on you?”
“From a very close source. You see, I put it on myself,” He said proudly as if he’d done something manly in front of a Boy Scout troop.
“And now you’re having problems calling it off and you want me to stop the guy.”
“I wish it were that simple, but that’s not it at all.”
“Then tell me what it is you want,” I shot out trying not to sound as clichéd as I was sounding.
“Well, through another different reliable source, I just discovered that the person who I hired to kill me –“
“Ran off with the dough!”
“No.”
“Backed out of the hit?”
“No.”
“Shot the wrong guy?”
“No…” He waited for me to shout out another answer, but being the kind of former minor league ball player who was used to getting three quick strikes and walking back to the dugout I shut my yapper.
“It seems that the…uh let’s say assassin, it gives it a more civilized appearance, I hired to kill me, has a contract out on…”
“him,” I interrupted.
“And I’m afraid may too dead to put me out of my misery.” He leaned back full of what was left of himself.
“Yeah, I never heard of a ghost coming back to finish up a contract. So what do you want me to do about it? Why don’t you just get another guy to kill you? And don’t look at me, what I kill is usually by mistake.”
“No, don’t worry Mr. Mantle I didn’t come to hire you to give me, as you in your profession might put it, the send off. And I don’t want anyone else to kill me. Only my death at the hands of that specific person will make me die happy.” He smiled, the kind of smile that tells you there’s more there and it’s only funny to the guy with the grin.”
“Why him?”
“Let’s just say I have my reasons.”
“Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be a good reason,” I said, repeating my mother’s words.
“Well my reason is a good one, for me anyhow,” he smiled and I wanted to put on a heavy sweater.
“So, what am I supposed to do?”
“Why keep my assassin alive of course,” another smile and another chill.
“And just how am I supposed to do that?” I smiled this time, and it didn’t warm me or him up.
“I’ll give you a picture of my assassin, a location, and a large bonus if I’m killed by only that person.”
“You’ll be dead, so how are you gonna know it was him, that did it, or if he’s still alive?”
“Let me handle those details. You’re job is to keep…” handing me the picture. “Her alive!”

Okay, here’s where I’m supposed to take one look at the snapshot of the gorgeous female assassin and fall head over gum shoes in love. Well, I hate to spoil it for my millions of readers out there, but that’s not going to happen that way. You see, I’m too evolved, and too sophisticated to fall for a dame in a photo. Especially in this tiny black and white square where I couldn’t see how lime her green eyes were, or the fullness of her lips, or how much her hair reminded me of Veronica Lake’s on a good day, and I could count all her curves which would look great even in a dress that I picked out. No the falling in love stuff wasn’t gonna happen even with my private eye magnifying glass hovering over the photo. It would have to wait till I got to know her, see what kind of person she was, what her religious beliefs were, or got my first clear look at her through my 2x pink Barbie binoculars. And then, well, I would be hooked and I wouldn’t care if she sacrificed babies in order to get half off on a video rental. Yeah, she was my kind of gal, sexy, dangerous, and would dump me like I was a stale cup of coffee.

We agreed on a fee and what the bonus was if I kept his assassin alive long enough to kill the old guy, and where and with whom I would collect my just desert from. I was told where to find his sexy killer. I figured for the first few days I would get to know her movements and stay close enough so if anyone tries to kill her I can interrupt their plans. I wondered why she didn’t just whack the old guy right away. I also felt myself between a rock and hard place morally. I should by rights tell the cops about the contract on the old man, but on the other hand I believe in pro choice especially if the one your choosing to do in is yourself.

(more to come in the future)