It seems as though I’ve spent much of my life in search of a reliable narrator and they’re a lot less frequent than you’d think. It’s way past the point of Democrats and Republicans flailing in the dogshit of ideology; the narrative of TruthTM these days is less a dichotomy and more a smashed mirror, with various shards of divergent shapes and sizes all over the floor, precarious to touch and hard to pick up and sift through without cutting yourself to ribbons.
On any given day I might ask, father, what is the lesson? I might get nine hundred lessons from nine hundred mooks all presuming to be a father of one sort or another. Well, stand between the sun and me, douche…I might say, tell me a story, storyteller, and it’s anyone’s guess what that might invite….you might get the nice classic Jane Eyre or the nudge-nudge-wink-wink edition complete with flesh eating zombies. Or tomorrow’s grocery list. What passes for a story these days? Gone is the time when you could leaf open THE NEW YORKER and find the new literary lions cutting their teeth. THE NEW YORKER isn’t J.D. Salinger anymore.
“Then again,” I aside to my neighbor at the bar, “I don’t think J.D. Salinger is even J.D. Salinger anymore.” She gives me the side-eye and excuses herself.
They all seem to do that these days.
It’s a lively night, regardless. The noisy sons of bitches are engaged in their usual strip poker match over at the big table. Taggart ups the ante by throwing in a nine pound Silver Surfer doll. Pops throws all his cards down and demands a new hand. Turk lights the whole pot on fire and it’s all just in the middle of the table, burning merrily away, and it just makes my heart swell with Patriotic sentiment---that’s when the fire department bust in and hose the whole table down, and then everybody’s throwing punches. Time to hit the floor.
I know this isn’t an ordinary night when the reinforcements come in with the big hose. It’s about a foot wide and gushes gallons of mayonnaise at a high pressure----and when you see a big oak table like that collapse you realize how much damage mayonnaise can do.
It hits me that this isn’t the regular town fire department when Beggs decapitates the fire marshall. The big tip-off is when the fire marshall’s head sprouts wings and grows to the size of a big man’s torso.
Goddamn killer androids.
It flies around the bar cackling for a while and eventually seizes Elsie, the barkeep’s daughter, in its mouth---it flies around for a while before the real fire department shows up. They’re all armed and they start taking pot shots at the head.
At this point I feel torn from my role as terminal observer. “Watch out for Elsie,” I shout.
The fire department deserve the benefit of the doubt, of course; they are professionals, after all. Soon they’ve blown that confounded android head away and Elsie’s safe and Taggart has even offered to mop up all the mayonnaise. He’s a sport. It’s drinks on the house, and the barkeep’s two cats, the blue one, Hitler, and the pink one, Bill Clinton, come to the balcony, and the fire chief is pointing and laughing at the cats and the cats are pointing and laughing at the fire chief.
We all lose track of time. Old Spike starts hammering away on the piano like a speedfreak and Elsie leads everybody in a singalong of “Bonny Barbara Allen”. The Denby boys from across the lake arrive on horseback and everyone buys them a round---they buy their horses a round, too. And everyone’s singing and laughing and joking and the barkeep and Elsie are laughing and joking as are the crazy sons of bitches and the fire department and the cats and the Denby boys and their horses and a good time is had by all, and hell if I don’t even have a swell time.
And Bert, who works over at the Reactor, grew an eleventh finger---really just kind of a mini-finger….not utilitarian at all. Damndest thing.
