“Shameless whore!” I roar in my best Cornish pirate voice.
The other patrons of the petting zoo begin herding their children away from me, worried looks upon each and every well-fed yuppie face, bewilderment registering on the visages of their equally pudgy larvae. Dolly the llama (get it? Dolly. Llama. Dalai Lama? Haw! Ain’t I a riot?) beats a hasty retreat from the fence, and all the ducks, geese and alpacas follow suit.
“Can I help you with something, sir?” asks an attendant.
“Who are you, Albert Friggin’ Schweizer?” I snarl at him.
“Now, now, Mister … Jenkins,” he says, looking at my nametag for a moment.
“Name ain’t Jenkins, it’s Bean”, I say. “I just saw this jacket layin’ across a bench and took a likin’ to it. Now as for the matter of whether or not you can help me, lessee. What are your qualifications? How old are you? Is your wife screwing a co-worker on business trips? Do you reckon she’d screw me? If not, why? Is it the beard? Do you do charity work with transgendered Iraqi schizophrenics? Why not? Are you some kinda racist? Prejudiced against the mentally challenged? Do you throw eggs at the little school bus with the tinted windows? Did you ride the little schoolbus with the tinted windows when you were a kid? Have you ever flown planes for the now-defunct Eastern Airlines?
‘Help’ me? Help me indeed! Help me? Help you, buddy! What kinda mealy-mouthed, bullshit question is that, anyway? Don’t you really mean to ask: ‘What’s your problem, whackjob?’ Or -- hah!-- you’re trying to misdirect me and set me up for a wristlock, aren’t you? Well aren’t you, you sneaky bastard?”
“Let me warn you, sir,” I say, waving my half-eaten corndog in his face and flipping flecks of mustard onto his jacket, “ I know karate, and am descended from a long line of ancestors! Help me? You? Hah! I think not! Listen, you patronizing, bastard son of Alger Hiss and Tokyo Rose, I’ll knock your teeth out and bugger your maiden aunt! So arr, me hearty! Whaddaya think of that?”
A gent with a good, old-fashioned “ghetto blaster” walks by, the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” playing loudly thereupon. I nail him in the peroneal nerve with a short, sharp, roundhouse shin-kick. His leg buckles, and he collapses with a scream.
“Hot damn!” I holler, “high fiving” myself, “First ’white belt’ move they ever taught me, and it works like a charm! Now don’t go nowhere, OK? I love this tune!”
Doing the “red-eyed pogo” around his prostrate form, I begin to sing along with the tape.
“So you wanna help me?” I ask the now-terrified attendant, grabbing him by his lapels, “ Well get a load of this!” Leaping onto a nearby bench and assuming a crane stance, I begin quoting Shakespeare: “If music be the food of love, play on: Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die. That strain again! It had a dying fall…” at which point I leap from the bench.
“How best to help me?” I muse aloud. “What can you tell me about rejection, resurrection, insurrection and piteous tales of unrequited love? Do I dare to eat a peach? The answer, of course, is: ‘Only if it washes down there’. No, I really don‘t think you can help me, as I don‘t particularly want to change, and have repeatedly resisted the attempts of others to ply me with boxer shorts.”
“You’re-- you’re c-crazy!” he stammers, shaking like a leaf.
“Aha!” I howl in delight, “A reference to Joseph Conrad! You, sir, are unusually literate for a monkey-suited, sexually impotent factotum! So that’s why your wife cheats on you, is it? Ya can’t get one up? I thought as much, but back to the matter of my sanity, and to Conrad, whom I quote: ‘My hour of favor was over! I found myself lumped along with Kurtz as a partisan of methods for which the time was not yet ripe. I was unsound! Ah, but it was something at least to have a choice of nightmares.’, end quote! May your paralyzed peter rise to life once more, for the joy you’ve brought me, and may you be reconciled with your wayward harlot of a spouse!”
“Y-you, are insane!” he bleats. “I’m gonna call the police!”
“Oooh,“ I say in wide-eyed mock-fear. “They’re coming to take me away, ha ha! Call them and be damned with you!” I roar. “A call? ‘A voice! A voice! It ran deep to the very last! It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence and the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! He struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now -- images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his inextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression.’ That was more Conrad, numbnuts. I really dig his stuff. ”
“Alright, you! That’s enough!” snaps an angry female voice.
Turning around after the manner of a flamenco dancer, I find myself staring into the flinty eyes of the facility’s director. Momentarily reminded of a sundae I had one Sunday somewhere in the vicinity of Marlowe Heights when I was three years old, I point at her and burst forth with an off-color “jody call” I learned as a child: “See that lady dressed in black/ Makes a livin’ on her back!”
“Sometimes I am contemptibly childish,” I inform her, “but I see that you have large breasts and are endowed with both courage and inedibility, for all your obvious moral failings. I like that skirt, too. It accentuates the ampleness of your hips, which will probably run to fat in a few years. Therefore, time is of the essence, as I’m not looking for a long-term relationship. Marriage is old-fashioned, and would, I fear, cramp my style. Would you care for a bite of my corndog, as it does not share your inedibility? Are you a ‘bottle blonde’ or natural? Does the ‘carpet’, in fact, match the ‘curtains’ ?”
“I don’t know what you think is going on here--” she begins.
Rolling my eyes in exasperation, I sigh: “The corndog was a glaringly obvious penile metaphor, you dizzy broad! I was offering you the chance to fellate me. Must you be so obtuse? Must you always walk like an Egyptian? Could you not at least address me from a kneeling position, as befits my lofty station? It would also allow you to take up my offer with a minimum of strain to your neck and back muscles.”
“You should be hung!” she gasps in indignation and rage.
“Who told you I’m not?” I ask. “Was it that bastard Sluggo? The Tin Man? The unhappy shades of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? I’ll bet it was Sluggo, damn his eyes! Many a time and oft in the Rialto he has called me a pervert and implied that I reek abominably of cheap liquor and sawdust! But enough of this! Perhaps we should retire to your office, wherein I may bed you (or ‘desk‘ you, if you prefer), and you may discover -- empirically -- the degree to which I am hung.”
Her jaw drops in disbelief.
“Hold that thought!” I say, turning to the attendant, who is now huddled against the bench in a fetal position, muttering what sound like passages from the Diamond Sutra of Hui Neng. Kneeling down and favoring him with a lewd wink, I grab his collar and conspiratorially whisper: “She wants me baaad!”
“Your complexion is sallow” I inform him. “I recommend food and breathing for their curative properties. You actually remind me of great uncle Filbert, you know. He, too, was wall-eyed. Made him invaluable for shooting around corners. The rest of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade called him 'the Hazelnut' for reasons altogether unrelated to botany, horticulture or longhorn hood-ornaments. He was court-martialed for vegetarianism, onanism and witchcraft for forseeing the demise of disco while scrying in a bowl of alphabet soup. He was, however, acquitted due to lack of shoe polish. Whether or not the soup was made with beef broth has yet to be discovered.”
“Now you listen to me!” snaps the director.
“Speak into the mike,” I say, grabbing my crotch with my free hand. Before she can recover, I continue:
“As for you, madame,” I haughtily utter, returning my full attention to her and loosing the now-catatonic attendant‘s collar, “you remind me of a younger Jayne Mansfield, some years before her death, to be exact.” Abruptly seizing her, I kiss her passionately before dropping her to the ground.
“That concludes today’s demonstration. Just remember: 'wax on, wax off'. Tomorrow, I’ll show you ‘paint the fence’. If there are any telephone calls for me, tell the callers I’ll be at the bus station, attending a folkmote. I intend to foment discontent and plot rebellion. Today the Greyhound terminal, tomorrow the Bastille! It’s where they live, you see.”
“Where-- who--lives?” she stammers, evidently quite confused.
“Wouldn’t you just love to know?” I ask as I wave goodbye and scale the fence.
Yessiree, Bob! It’s just the kind of day that makes a man glad to be alive!
Note: the preceding was a work of fiction. Or was it?
© David Jefferson Bean, 2006
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