Followed by a Parade of Useful Subheads
Revealing The Damned Fool, Toma Bed Lamb, and Tamo Shatterd, and the Things They Carried… from the Pulaski Skyway…
Wherein Bizarre is Embroidered into the Tapestry
And wherein Antipolex, Hudson County, New Jersey, USA, is given its first rough sketching
And whereby we once again ask: How does John Smith know?
I don’t know what to call it… queer, perhaps… that I, John Smith, who stand behind this anti-frame, am putting the question in the immediately preceding subhead as though I were not John Smith, but someone else, altogether another narrator filing this as John Smith rather than as himself, as though John Smith were a fictional character, raising the inarguably legitimate concern of why I would refer to myself in the third person, as though I were someone else rather than John Smith, in turn raising the potentially legitimately inarguable irrefutably worrisome prospect that there really is no John Smith, who is but the product of the real narrator’s whimsical musings
However, I assure you I am indeed John Smith. I got my poetic license a couple years ago. It was never suspended or revoked, and recently I had it renewed
“A nonce – for I am The Damned Fool, otherwise known as aka Trickney Prancer, alias Prichard Riser, nom de gest Sir Sirrah Motley, et cetera, and so forth, Incognito Sobriquets, Unlimited, et al… And now, with your kind permission, which I don’t need, I will relate the altogether fantastic, unlikely but true, as well as additionally damnably tragic, angel-infested and star-festered –”
“Hey, Fool, do you have to go through that silly introduction every time?” speaks the rousing Toma Bed Lamb, a couple of screws loose, huge breasts straining against latex jammies.
“Aye, brazen strumpet, for we can speak of introductions, or we can speak of insertion-like inductions, but there can be no show without the self-referential what for, which is to say, the I am me!”
“Fool, you posit yourself as the justification for the story you’re going to tell, when all we want is bedtime entertainment.” This says Tamo Shatterd, breasts even larger than Bed Lamb’s, also straining against latex jammies, except even more (how else could it be?), mind completely gone.
“No, my dire beauty of consequence, for it is no fault to worship talk of myself, especially if it be the unranked cards and benighted pawns of my own mouth’s playing, seeing as I’m a necessary part of any story I round, wet tongue kneeling behind the perverted pews of my teeth, lolling naked before you in obsequies of objectification. Thus, if I made you, I will fun it with you, too. It is the least of the services I can offer. Indeed, before you, I am more than obliged.”
Toma Bed Lamb and Tamo Shatterd sit close together on a torn couch, their delectable limbs as if accidently touching, like little children, listening with impatient anticipation to The Damned Fool, as he prepares them a story, like one’s mother might prepare her child a midnight snack – a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, say, or some blueberry waffles in hot chocolate syrup topped by a dollop of ice cream – fresh out of the toaster.
Speaking of snacks, the mass-titted vixens are treating themselves to bites salvaged intact and perfectly preserved in a 7-Eleven bag dragged out of the Passaic River, including
Nacho Chips
Honey Wheat Braided Pretzels
M and M Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chocolate Chunk Cookies…
Toma Bed Lamb daintily slurps a
Peaches and Cream Cappuccino
while the
Mocha Iced Coffee
is savored by Tamo Shatterd, who says:
“You know, I was me almost a franchisee…”
“What – 7-Eleven?”
“Yep!”
“Were not, Tamo!”
“Was too, Toma!”
“Not…”
“Was…”
“Not…”
“Wa-as…”
“No-ot…”
“Sufficient – anomalous waywardresses, misfits of fortune and fits of misfortune, Fillets of Flimflammery, fallen fishies and fishy net stockings, fallen net stockings and fishy fallens, confidence callers and my idyll’s twilight bitches, dawn-to-dusk doxies, and imitation dikes! For would it not please The Damned Fool better if you don’t relate, which is to say, if you do relate, sans cocked motormouth, extraneous eloquence nixed yet missing null, improved riotously less the complexations, by simply relating, that is, if you simply relate, which is not to say that you relate it simply, for I have ground-covered that sufficient, but simply that you relate it, at all, and withal, altogether whatsoever notwithstanding therefore forthwith nevertheless touché, for the sake of our intrigued but behind schedule and insufficiently provoked audience, with no undue prevarication, preferably by way of verbalized vernacular, that is to say, provide a narrative, that is, at least aptly apply the skill of adumbration to the story and not the lie, that is, without:
mincing words, double-talking, flip-flopping, shilly-shallying, passing the buck, blowing hot and cold, skirting yourselves while giving us the slip, hemming and hawing, dodging, pussyfooting (although I wouldn’t mind that), hedging, or beating around your bushes, stonewalling being even worse, copping pleas or feels, fencing, by either sitting on fences or falling off them, in addition to waffling, shuffling, phonying up or down, giving the run-around to, tiptoeing or sidestepping the issues while dragging your feet, or, for that matter, ducking them, quacking them, goosing them, or gaggling them, tarrying while lurking about while taking off and-or trying to outrun us, playing for time, playing dumb, or playing the girdle close to your breasts, shirking, shucking, shunning, staying shy or steering clear of…
just how you saved those dead toys in that chair from drowning…
“I will also request there be no fudging (I just have to get this in, I say in a secretive aside to you, my reading audience, wink and nod, for it is I telling you this, and not some John Smith, back in the States, or what’s left of them, on some or other business, as he says), let alone syrup, confectionary powder, and grape jelly, yet getting into no jam…
“But mostly, do not beg the question, and by no means cover up!”
“You made us do it, Fool,” replies one, being Bed Lamb.
“Ble-e-e-e-eccchhhhh…,” emotes the other, Shatterd.
“The night was pitch black, we were rained on, drenched, and flooded, the Passaic River was ooze-thick, dark, and foul, yet you prodded us off the Pulaski Skyway after a fallen car. We couldn’t see anything, Fool! In the water we were blind. It was by mere chance we dredged up this 7-Eleven bag and those two horrible little play things there in the armchair – ooohh!”
“Methinks thou art hell-spawned hags. You lacked nothing for the dive. You had goggles, lights, and air-filled lungs – and what lungs at that, I’ll add. Picked you up no diseases? If you had, consider yourselves cured. Feel you not the excess weight of your too many words on your tongues? Idle words. Irresponsible words. Over-wordy words. Of reckless complaint. Of nothing and of naught. Would not the surfeit of them be better spent relieved from your heads onto mine?”
We are left to wonder what the two eruptive women reply to this brazen oral breaching, or how, for that matter, they reply at all, if anything, if we allow that, as The Damned Fool perhaps so accurately suggested, their mouths are quite full and in need of vacating, if not flushing out. It is I, John Smith, telling you this.
This is because we have reached the precise moment in our story when we are told that the thrilling threesome is lounging in their underground getaway, haven and haunt – the long-abandoned and all but forgotten ancient tunnel network of Antipolex, where the trilling trio are clandestine cloak-and-dagger, hole-and-corner squatters renegade of the high towers’ lord.
It was this underground network and its rebel American denizens that, together with the extensive labyrinth of ramparts and battlements on the heights – largely still intact though strangely off-limits to the public – adjoining two fortress towers on the city’s dizzying pinnacles, one at either end of its broad pincer sprawl northward into the Hudson, wrought devastating carnage through the British, ripping them to shreds and boiling them in whale oil, keeping them off and out, even while the same made minced meat of Paulus Hook, Jersey City, quite nearby, and occupied Wall Street and the Island of Manhattan for the entirety of the American Revolutionary War.
Much of the old history of Antipolex has, seemingly, been buried, if not completely erased from the record, and no one who knows, knows why. Scholars have stayed away, at best quickly glossing over events in their books and papers, or mentioning them not at all. Almost nothing of this can be found on the Internet, while singular and rare discussions of the city’s past are from time to time unburied by that equally singular and rare enthusiast – always something of an obsessive, freak-like nut – digging away like some truant mole in the basements of old and unfunded derelict libraries moldering in their funk, looked after by bifocaled custodians harboring deep secrets and unspoken fears, raising up with barely stifled yelps of joy, coughing through the dust, blurred, faded and ink-smeared passages on Antipolex’s past from musty, yellowed, brittle-paged tomes.
Returning to the present, on a torn armchair diagonally askew of the torn couch upon which Toma Bed Lamb and Tamo Shatterd lounge in their latex nightwear, their limbs intertwined following a long correctional, though not altogether punitive, interlude conducted for their benefit and edification by The Damned Fool, sit the two human-based objects – each hideous in its way but together both repulsive and terrifying the pair – rescued by the gals along with the 7-Eleven bag of goodies out of the ’71 Cadillac Eldorado sinking in the muck of the Passaic River beneath the Pulaski Skyway. Together, the inanimate figures bear silent helpless witness, for now, to the mad narrative The Damned Fool is about to tell.
One figure is Dead Little Welsh Losser – a stuffed PR puppet toy. Seeing it, one immediately draws a comparison with a comedic W.C. Fields-like alcoholic confidence man, and yet, one is also immediately put off by a feeling of creeping unease as one begins to make out the stirring hellishness beneath the stout fireplug plumpness, the fedora-topped round glaring bald head with cheery sickly-pink cheeks, the fake friendly grin of almost unreal fraud, guile, artifice, imposture, and deceit, the grotesque glint of the deformed eyes behind a pair of gleaming granny glasses; even the sexual depravity and implied pedophile perversion, particularly toward little boys, the psychological monstrosity of the thing, the manufacture of some sick mind – all of which, if given to a child as a toy to play with, would cause him irreparable psychological scarring for life.
The other, the manufacture of the same sick mind, or worse, is a vicious-looking Anti Olifko Writer Wood Dummy. The angles into which it has been cut are severe. The rounds of red paint given its cheeks look out of context and altogether completely wrong, yet it becomes apparent that their cynical and mocking placement heightens the puppet’s malice, resentment, and deep burning hatred. It is dressed in a balloonish clown outfit frilled and ruffled by simulacra of newspaper and book print, a dunce’s cap donning its head. Its eyes are black diamond-shaped and vacant. Every time you look at it, the costume’s headlines and the text print seem to have changed.
“And were there no people to be found in the salon – dead, dying, or otherwise,” asks The Damned Fool.
“No, Fool, I pulled that fat one in the cheap PR suit from behind the wheel,” protests Bed Lamb.
“And I got that… that… wood thing… from the passenger side,” remonstrates Shatterd.
“He looks rather vicious,” The Damned Fool rejoins.
“Downright sinister,” Shatterd replies.
“So be it. For and now, my little girlies, our eclogue takes a turn – into another Part… Part 3, that is…”
Filed by John Smith, October 11, 2015