Thursday, December 30, 2010
Jesus in Art
The mere creation of a work of art does not obligate any gallery to display it or any viewer to appreciate it. Sometimes art is just bad, no matter how important or noble its intentions.
The National Portrait Gallery in DC recently found itself under fire for choosing to display a 4-minute video by the late artist David Wojnarowicz entitled “A Fire in My Belly”, which showed Jesus on the cross swarming with ants. The piece was supposedly intended to compare Jesus’ suffering on the cross with the pain of AIDS sufferers. Several religious groups and GOP leaders led by John Boehner and Eric Cantor crusaded to have the piece removed due to its inflammatory nature, citing a misuse of taxpayer funds both in creating and displaying the video. The gallery caved in, pulling the video from the exhibit after Boehner and Cantor threatened to “review the [gallery’s] funding” in a ridiculous power move more offensive than the video itself.
Maybe the video was inflammatory; maybe too it was just bad art.
Locked horns between an artist’s creation and a hostile viewing public boil down to freedom of expression. The artist is always free (and encouraged) to create controversial works that expresses personal concerns for social issues, including the impact of AIDS. No one denies that right – art history is built around controversial art, just ask anyone who has studied Picasso’s “Guernica” or Marcus Harvey’s “Myra”, a giant portrait of murderer Myra Hindley, created using children’s handprints.
A dissenting public exercises their freedom of expression by protesting a controversial piece, even demanding that it be taken down; a measure as distasteful to the artist as the piece may be to the public. The artist should not have sole domain over freedom of expression; one does not automatically override the other.
A gallery exercises its freedom by agreeing to display a work, in this case deeming “Fire in My Belly” “brave” and “important”. Thrust into the position of arbitrator and torn between protecting the artist’s freedom to express and the public’s freedom to protest, they removed Wojnarowicz’s piece, saying “. . . some reports . . . have created an impression that the video is intentionally sacrilegious. In fact, the artist’s intention was to depict the suffering of an AIDS victim. It was not the museum’s intention to offend.”
In fact, the gallery received almost no complaints about the video until an article about it showed up on CNSNews.com, a conservative news site.
There is ultimately little difference in a piece that is rejected for display by an uncomprehending judge (called “juried selection”) and one that is removed afterward by an equally uncomprehending public (called “censorship”), other than a little inflamed publicity and a possible mention on Sean Hannity. Both are judged on their fitness for exhibition, whether it’s before or after display, and the losers in both cases go into storage.
The wrench in the gearing is Christianity, which seems to be the preferred religion of ridicule in today’s media. Choosing to use the Christ figure in art work not intended as purely religious expression is a deliberate provocation, with artists certain they can wring publicity from the challenging imagery with little worries of long-term consequence. In fact, a condemnation by a religious organization or the Family Foundation can be the artists’ 15 minutes of fame.
Recently the objectionable use of Jesus in non-religious art prompted some opposing “art” of its own. In August, Enrique Chagoya’s lithograph “The Misadventures of Romantic Cannibals”, depicting a Christ figure receiving oral gratification, was destroyed by a female truck driver expressing her artistic integrity with a crowbar. Was this not a performance piece of its own? Does art really just depend on “who turns over the trash can” as the late Richmond artist Gerald Donato testified in a 1980s handbill trial?
Artists and art patrons may cry “censorship!” when a gallery removes a controversial or inflammatory piece due to public outcry, but if an artist chooses to splatter a statue of the Virgin Mary in cow dung or submerge a crucifix in urine then that artist and the galleries must be prepared for the inevitable blowback that will ensue. Christian imagery and taxpayer dollars mix like oils and watercolors.
Using a Christ-centered piece within a gallery managed by the U.S. Government should also provoke cries from the Church-and-state-separation crowd, but they seem to be more interested in protecting the rights of the artist and cherry-picking constitutional law. In their world, art praising Christ should be privately funded and displayed only in church, but only art ridiculing Christ is worthy of public funding and display in museums.
And a political party that threatens a gallery’s funding due to one 4-minute video is nothing more than an insecure bully.
Secular art using religious figures then called “brave” or “important”, however, rarely is – and the usually gratuitous use of Christ and other Christian figures is the path of least resistance for igniting controversy. If Chagoya or the late Wojnarowicz wanted to truly be controversial and put their artistic sensibilities and necks on the line and draw strong reactions they should have portrayed Mohammed in their work instead of Jesus.
Now that would be brave.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Friday, December 24, 2010
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
The Zenas Trilogy: part III
The Zenas Trilogy" was a compendium of three related works submitted to a literary magazine of much renown. Somewhat understandably, they were soundly rejected with much aplomb.
Tonight’s episode:
A Nip up the Shanks
Adventure number 3 of 3 Featuring Helmut Grosbeak, the single-nostrilled detective
Pudding is usually so fluffy and innocent, so what in heaven's name went wrong? Nobody meant for it to happen. Especially not Marcel and his seven backpacking antelopes. But so it was on that fateful day when hair care products and herbicide mixed with such tragic results. The juggler got the worst of it, but then, jugglers always did. No sense trying to rationalize what you can't even care about. It's best to dwell on the aftermath, or on something completely unrelated. Like Amish Electricians.
“Beasts of Burden -- HAH!” Marcel exclaimed, his thoughts broken as he lay down his spoon, wiped the bitter chocolate miasma from his mouth with the only clean corner of his nylon sock left unsullied by that cursed clown's untimely explosion of hexochloromethathiazolinone and malathion arsenate, then watched in a combination of bemusement and pity as the only seven pack Antelopes left bounded lemming-like in single file off the glacier precipice into the sulphur pits below the wobbly two-by-four walkway he was now left stranded on.
“Visitation for the juggler will be at 7:00 pm sharp.” Cornflake the Clown announced in that dead serious monotone he always used when stressed out as he pulled Marcel's walkboard back to relative safety. He had a knack for organizing memoriams lightning-quick.
“Curse this topography,” thought Marcel as he dipped a morsel of crumb cake into the plastic cup and smeared away the last traces of brown before he was helped to the ground by the humorless clown. “So hard to plant azaleas.”
By the time he finished his research on this topic, it was 7:00 and Marcel stumbled into the makeshift funeral parlor, still dizzy from the sulphur fumes and the steam of his bath. The wigwam was high-class and low-ceilinged but accommodating. The Byzantine murals gave it a sort of overdone feeling that partly made up for the otherwise unbearable squalor.
Cornflake was already droning to the Belgian ambassador about how he would miss the antelopes just as much as the juggler, and how no juggler ever carried his dirty clown laundry without complaining, and His Excellency, who spoke only Flemish and a bit of Frisian, frowned and nodded sympathetically at every word he thought he understood.
Olga, the ambassador’s wife, caught Marcel’s eye for a moment as he peered over the assembled visitors. “She’s enjoying herself,” he thought. “Some women enjoy tragedy. Gives them a chance to show off their quiet strength and see men reduced to blubbering fools.” Then he remembered the whale.
It was delicious. “Speaking of blubbering,” he commented loudly and arrogantly to Olga, who initially took great offense at the comment because as the 400-pound Avon lady was the biggest business in all of Belgium. She soon relaxed as her dresser sponged her chin -- emptying her drool cup always cheered her up. “Have you tried the canapes?” he added, “They're endangered, you know”.
Cornflake approached the two as Marcel winked a leering, eerie wink at Olga while he scraped away a lingering fragment of fin and quietly announced in his most solemn clown dialect that the maitre'd had already signaled the conclusion of visitation. Marcel was desperate to renew his conversation with Olga and her husband, but the ambassador succumbed to one of his obsessive-compulsive disorders and was off leveling one of the murals painted by the noted Byzantium artist Fred “Casio” Fernandez.
Marcel noted with regret that as he popped the cold-water canape into his mouth that he had not even expressed his sympathies to the juggler's pet Bloodhound -- but there were much larger fish to fry here, and even though Olga was holding her nose in a futile attempt to stave off the rotten egg smell, she was entranced with the diminuitive Frenchman and his beautiful Azaleas.
“He's enjoying himself” she thought, as the weight of her slowly-filling drool cup relentlessly bent her back into an osteopathic hump, “I like that in a man.”
Suddenly the wigwam inexplicably tumbled to the ground, draping itself grotesquely over its bewildered occupants. “You idiot!” Cornflake eventually shouted at the ambassador, after the initial confusion. “You can’t straighten a mural! Now look what you’ve done to our canopy!” His Excellency smiled and nodded, agreeing in Flemish that the canapes looked very well done indeed.
“What’s that lapping noise?” inquired Marcel.
“Oh, dear,” replied Olga. “The juggler’s bloodhound is drinking from my drool cup.” By that time Cornflake had regained his usual stressed-out composure and clambered out of the wreckage, and was now reaching back into it to throttle the ambassador.
“I’m enjoying myself,” thought the ambassador in Flemish, as he was almost as masochistic as he was obsessive-compulsive. “A clown shouldn’t choke you while he’s shouting, but afterwards it’s more of a nip up the shanks,” noted His Excellency to himself, in what can only be described as a Belgian idiom that doesn’t translate well.
Just as Cornflake was about to finish off the ambassador, he was reminded by the maitre'd that choking an ambassador before 5:00 pm was considered a lapse in taste, a faux pas that had escaped the grease-painted joker. Cursing, he let go and went looking for his tiny bicycle.
“I'm not finished with you yet!” he shouted, waving his fist as he veered wobbily down the cobblestones. While the collapsed canopy was being folded up very, very neatly by the OCD ambassador and stashed in the trunk of his 1963 Sunbeam, and the last of the guests filed away from the wreckage, Marcel hiked up his antigroples and slicked back his eyebrows, ready to woo his apple-shaped dumpling.
“I couldn't help but notice that a woman of your radius speaks in a Provencal-like dialect, 13th century I believe?” Marcel asked, desperately trying to impress Olga with not only his knowledge of azaleas but his semi-familiarity of Geometry and the romance languages.
“Actually,” Olga retorted, inadvertently tipping her drool cup into the punch bowl and picking a piece of stray whale from the heel of her shoe, “It's Phlegmish. Canape?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Marcel, wondering in the back of his mind when that stupid clown would realize that it was well after 5:00 p.m. Although the maitre d’ had already cleared away the hors d’oeuvre trays, Olga deftly extracted a canape from its hiding place in her jodhpurs.
Meanwhile, the ambassador, knowing his wife was pre-occupied with the dwarfish Frenchman, quickly drove the wigwam back to the embassy before the dorm mother called lights out. When he ducked in through the second-floor window, he heard a greeting from the floor. Looking down, he saw that an enormous bust had fallen off an old-fashioned secretary and pinned Babs the receptionist.
“You're just in time,” she exclaimed in a Frisian accent as he helped her to her feet, “That man with one nostril was here looking for you. The one with the edifice complex?”
Ah yes - Grosbeak, the private detective. His fear of large buildings was world-renowned in this part of the embassy. “He said it was about a shampoo and herbicide incident that killed a juggler.” Babs continued.
“A juggler?” the ambassador retorted with a flourish in articulated Flemish, “Hm...I thought he was a mime. Too bad.” He then pulled the wigwam into the room through the window. “Canopy?”
From the folds of the wigwam emerged a stout, mononostrillated man with trench mouth and coat. “Well, well,” Grosbeak welled, “What have we here?” He waited a moment for Babs to translate.
The ambassador’s response presently came back through the lately-pinned interpreter: “Grosbeak, what are you doing here? If it’s about the juggler, I can explain.”
“No need,” replied Grosbeak. “I heard everything through the window. You thought he was a mime. Nobody could prosecute you for that.” After another tedious round of Flemo-Frisian banter, Grosbeak heard the ambassador’s sincere expression of relief and gratitude. “No need to thank me,” the detective assured him. “I need that like I need a hole in the center of my face. By the way, how tall is this building?”
“How tall this building is not of concern to you at this point in time!” said a voice holding a small handgun that emerged from behind Sprinkler room number 2.
“Juggler!” Grosbeak exclaimed in complete surprise as the presumed-dead juggler jimmied the lock with great difficulty for several minutes then popped the door open. He was covered in rancid pudding. “I knew it was you. You were always the verbose one!”
“Sorry about your trench mouth,” the juggler answered, waving the handgun like a homecoming queen, “I had a bout with hoof-and-mouth myself. Swore me off jello for good.” Babs and the Ambassador, which also happened to be the name of a popular Phlegmish TV show, looked at each other in confusion and alarm, as neither knew what the other two were talking about.
“Why is he waving a gun?” the ambassador asked in a Flem-Fris mix.
“Because he has poor aim and would rather play the odds,” retorted Babs in kind. “And also because he understands Phlegmish every bit as well as Grosbeak, and he heard your confession.”
“But I confessed to nothing!” insisted the ambassador. “I didn’t formulate that chemical mixture that made Cornflake explode. All I did was wash his dirty clown laundry in the stuff, as usual. It would take a specialist to create that kind of explosive on purpose. Someone with a thorough knowledge of both horticulture and hair care. Someone, say, who would be capable of growing both long eyebrows and prize-winning azaleas in this inhospitable climate….”
Grosbeak, who had already put three and two together and was wondering what to do with the leftovers, hurriedly translated His Excellency’s insights for the juggler’s benefit. “Of course!” the performer sneered. “That besotted, gourmandizing little Frenchman! And that would explain why there was pudding in the mix!”
“...And if he were a true Frenchman, as he claimed,” a stunned Babs added from her reclining position on the floor, “He would never have confused 13th century Provencal French for Phlegmish!” Grosbeak smelled a rat, so he tore out the door to stop at a vendor turning the tasty varmints on a tiny spit.
“Two on a bun to go! And throw in a pair of sidewalk oysters!” the monovented dick yelled as he hot-wired the ambassador's Sunbeam with his free hand and sped back to the sight of the juggler's supposed visitation. There he found Marcel stuffing a loudly complaining Olga inside Cornflake's tiny car, with about seven of his clown friends.
“Ah HA!” Grosbeak chanted, picking rat teeth from his teeth “Marcel and the clown! How convenient! Planning to roll the ambassador's wife in a delicious dairy dessert?”
“In boiled crow and sour grapes is more like it.” Marcel complained as Grosbeak cuffed him. “How did you know it was us?”
“Easy.” Grosbeak said, triumphantly, “The proof is in the pudding. Plus a real clown can tell time!” He held out a spoonful and Marcel could plainly see it was tainted with greasepaint.
“You Bozo!” Marcel blurted.
“Actually, I go by Cornflake,” the clown said dejectedly as Marcel cuffed him also, “Well if this isn't a real nip up the shanks.”
Fin
“Beasts of Burden -- HAH!” Marcel exclaimed, his thoughts broken as he lay down his spoon, wiped the bitter chocolate miasma from his mouth with the only clean corner of his nylon sock left unsullied by that cursed clown's untimely explosion of hexochloromethathiazolinone and malathion arsenate, then watched in a combination of bemusement and pity as the only seven pack Antelopes left bounded lemming-like in single file off the glacier precipice into the sulphur pits below the wobbly two-by-four walkway he was now left stranded on.
“Visitation for the juggler will be at 7:00 pm sharp.” Cornflake the Clown announced in that dead serious monotone he always used when stressed out as he pulled Marcel's walkboard back to relative safety. He had a knack for organizing memoriams lightning-quick.
“Curse this topography,” thought Marcel as he dipped a morsel of crumb cake into the plastic cup and smeared away the last traces of brown before he was helped to the ground by the humorless clown. “So hard to plant azaleas.”
By the time he finished his research on this topic, it was 7:00 and Marcel stumbled into the makeshift funeral parlor, still dizzy from the sulphur fumes and the steam of his bath. The wigwam was high-class and low-ceilinged but accommodating. The Byzantine murals gave it a sort of overdone feeling that partly made up for the otherwise unbearable squalor.
Cornflake was already droning to the Belgian ambassador about how he would miss the antelopes just as much as the juggler, and how no juggler ever carried his dirty clown laundry without complaining, and His Excellency, who spoke only Flemish and a bit of Frisian, frowned and nodded sympathetically at every word he thought he understood.
Olga, the ambassador’s wife, caught Marcel’s eye for a moment as he peered over the assembled visitors. “She’s enjoying herself,” he thought. “Some women enjoy tragedy. Gives them a chance to show off their quiet strength and see men reduced to blubbering fools.” Then he remembered the whale.
It was delicious. “Speaking of blubbering,” he commented loudly and arrogantly to Olga, who initially took great offense at the comment because as the 400-pound Avon lady was the biggest business in all of Belgium. She soon relaxed as her dresser sponged her chin -- emptying her drool cup always cheered her up. “Have you tried the canapes?” he added, “They're endangered, you know”.
Cornflake approached the two as Marcel winked a leering, eerie wink at Olga while he scraped away a lingering fragment of fin and quietly announced in his most solemn clown dialect that the maitre'd had already signaled the conclusion of visitation. Marcel was desperate to renew his conversation with Olga and her husband, but the ambassador succumbed to one of his obsessive-compulsive disorders and was off leveling one of the murals painted by the noted Byzantium artist Fred “Casio” Fernandez.
Marcel noted with regret that as he popped the cold-water canape into his mouth that he had not even expressed his sympathies to the juggler's pet Bloodhound -- but there were much larger fish to fry here, and even though Olga was holding her nose in a futile attempt to stave off the rotten egg smell, she was entranced with the diminuitive Frenchman and his beautiful Azaleas.
“He's enjoying himself” she thought, as the weight of her slowly-filling drool cup relentlessly bent her back into an osteopathic hump, “I like that in a man.”
Suddenly the wigwam inexplicably tumbled to the ground, draping itself grotesquely over its bewildered occupants. “You idiot!” Cornflake eventually shouted at the ambassador, after the initial confusion. “You can’t straighten a mural! Now look what you’ve done to our canopy!” His Excellency smiled and nodded, agreeing in Flemish that the canapes looked very well done indeed.
“What’s that lapping noise?” inquired Marcel.
“Oh, dear,” replied Olga. “The juggler’s bloodhound is drinking from my drool cup.” By that time Cornflake had regained his usual stressed-out composure and clambered out of the wreckage, and was now reaching back into it to throttle the ambassador.
“I’m enjoying myself,” thought the ambassador in Flemish, as he was almost as masochistic as he was obsessive-compulsive. “A clown shouldn’t choke you while he’s shouting, but afterwards it’s more of a nip up the shanks,” noted His Excellency to himself, in what can only be described as a Belgian idiom that doesn’t translate well.
Just as Cornflake was about to finish off the ambassador, he was reminded by the maitre'd that choking an ambassador before 5:00 pm was considered a lapse in taste, a faux pas that had escaped the grease-painted joker. Cursing, he let go and went looking for his tiny bicycle.
“I'm not finished with you yet!” he shouted, waving his fist as he veered wobbily down the cobblestones. While the collapsed canopy was being folded up very, very neatly by the OCD ambassador and stashed in the trunk of his 1963 Sunbeam, and the last of the guests filed away from the wreckage, Marcel hiked up his antigroples and slicked back his eyebrows, ready to woo his apple-shaped dumpling.
“I couldn't help but notice that a woman of your radius speaks in a Provencal-like dialect, 13th century I believe?” Marcel asked, desperately trying to impress Olga with not only his knowledge of azaleas but his semi-familiarity of Geometry and the romance languages.
“Actually,” Olga retorted, inadvertently tipping her drool cup into the punch bowl and picking a piece of stray whale from the heel of her shoe, “It's Phlegmish. Canape?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Marcel, wondering in the back of his mind when that stupid clown would realize that it was well after 5:00 p.m. Although the maitre d’ had already cleared away the hors d’oeuvre trays, Olga deftly extracted a canape from its hiding place in her jodhpurs.
Meanwhile, the ambassador, knowing his wife was pre-occupied with the dwarfish Frenchman, quickly drove the wigwam back to the embassy before the dorm mother called lights out. When he ducked in through the second-floor window, he heard a greeting from the floor. Looking down, he saw that an enormous bust had fallen off an old-fashioned secretary and pinned Babs the receptionist.
“You're just in time,” she exclaimed in a Frisian accent as he helped her to her feet, “That man with one nostril was here looking for you. The one with the edifice complex?”
Ah yes - Grosbeak, the private detective. His fear of large buildings was world-renowned in this part of the embassy. “He said it was about a shampoo and herbicide incident that killed a juggler.” Babs continued.
“A juggler?” the ambassador retorted with a flourish in articulated Flemish, “Hm...I thought he was a mime. Too bad.” He then pulled the wigwam into the room through the window. “Canopy?”
From the folds of the wigwam emerged a stout, mononostrillated man with trench mouth and coat. “Well, well,” Grosbeak welled, “What have we here?” He waited a moment for Babs to translate.
The ambassador’s response presently came back through the lately-pinned interpreter: “Grosbeak, what are you doing here? If it’s about the juggler, I can explain.”
“No need,” replied Grosbeak. “I heard everything through the window. You thought he was a mime. Nobody could prosecute you for that.” After another tedious round of Flemo-Frisian banter, Grosbeak heard the ambassador’s sincere expression of relief and gratitude. “No need to thank me,” the detective assured him. “I need that like I need a hole in the center of my face. By the way, how tall is this building?”
“How tall this building is not of concern to you at this point in time!” said a voice holding a small handgun that emerged from behind Sprinkler room number 2.
“Juggler!” Grosbeak exclaimed in complete surprise as the presumed-dead juggler jimmied the lock with great difficulty for several minutes then popped the door open. He was covered in rancid pudding. “I knew it was you. You were always the verbose one!”
“Sorry about your trench mouth,” the juggler answered, waving the handgun like a homecoming queen, “I had a bout with hoof-and-mouth myself. Swore me off jello for good.” Babs and the Ambassador, which also happened to be the name of a popular Phlegmish TV show, looked at each other in confusion and alarm, as neither knew what the other two were talking about.
“Why is he waving a gun?” the ambassador asked in a Flem-Fris mix.
“Because he has poor aim and would rather play the odds,” retorted Babs in kind. “And also because he understands Phlegmish every bit as well as Grosbeak, and he heard your confession.”
“But I confessed to nothing!” insisted the ambassador. “I didn’t formulate that chemical mixture that made Cornflake explode. All I did was wash his dirty clown laundry in the stuff, as usual. It would take a specialist to create that kind of explosive on purpose. Someone with a thorough knowledge of both horticulture and hair care. Someone, say, who would be capable of growing both long eyebrows and prize-winning azaleas in this inhospitable climate….”
Grosbeak, who had already put three and two together and was wondering what to do with the leftovers, hurriedly translated His Excellency’s insights for the juggler’s benefit. “Of course!” the performer sneered. “That besotted, gourmandizing little Frenchman! And that would explain why there was pudding in the mix!”
“...And if he were a true Frenchman, as he claimed,” a stunned Babs added from her reclining position on the floor, “He would never have confused 13th century Provencal French for Phlegmish!” Grosbeak smelled a rat, so he tore out the door to stop at a vendor turning the tasty varmints on a tiny spit.
“Two on a bun to go! And throw in a pair of sidewalk oysters!” the monovented dick yelled as he hot-wired the ambassador's Sunbeam with his free hand and sped back to the sight of the juggler's supposed visitation. There he found Marcel stuffing a loudly complaining Olga inside Cornflake's tiny car, with about seven of his clown friends.
“Ah HA!” Grosbeak chanted, picking rat teeth from his teeth “Marcel and the clown! How convenient! Planning to roll the ambassador's wife in a delicious dairy dessert?”
“In boiled crow and sour grapes is more like it.” Marcel complained as Grosbeak cuffed him. “How did you know it was us?”
“Easy.” Grosbeak said, triumphantly, “The proof is in the pudding. Plus a real clown can tell time!” He held out a spoonful and Marcel could plainly see it was tainted with greasepaint.
“You Bozo!” Marcel blurted.
“Actually, I go by Cornflake,” the clown said dejectedly as Marcel cuffed him also, “Well if this isn't a real nip up the shanks.”
Fin
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The Zenas Trilogy: part II
The Zenas Trilogy" was a compendium of three related works submitted to a literary magazine of much renown. Somewhat understandably, they were soundly rejected with much aplomb.
Tonight’s episode:
One Last Oyster for Luck
Adventure number 2 of 3 Featuring Helmut Grosbeak, the single-nostrilled detective
“You know,” Marcel, the hirsute Frenchman wryly observed as he fluttered his brushy eyebrows up and down rapidly at his giggling dumpling Olga in the front row while the imposter Priest, Father Wonka, repeatedly smacked the bottom of the Monstrance with the palm of his hand, mistakenly believing he could force it open, “We rarely see 93-year-olds confirmed in the Phlegmish rite.”
“I beg your pardon?” the pseudo-celebrant retorted, taking a break from his tasks while men in ties scurried to and fro, adjusting microphones and re-arranging Olga, who wore the most expensive drool cup in town due to overactive salivaries.
“Oh nothing” Marcel answered, rejectedly, “It was just a little Catechumor to lighten the mood.”
“Marcel! What a terrible pun!” admonished his mother Fifi, who was not above some bad jokes herself and also was not above three spans in height. Cornflake the Clown had not been invited to the Confirmation, as clown Masses were less than de rigeur in the liturgy of the Beastly Fraternity of St. Fritzi, whose pseudo-priests had generously offered to fill in for the FSSP pastor they had kidnapped earlier that day.
“Turn the music down!” implored the ambassador in Frisian, but the Gregorian Kwire, only about half of whom spoke Frisian and then only on alternate Thursdays, continued loudly belting out the propers with apathetic verve. Crouched in the loft, Helmut Grosbeak, the famous one-nostrilled detective, monitored the proceedings with suspicion and searched the floor for spare cartilage.
Shifting in his pew, Marcel reflected on the onerous chain of events that led him to this moment when it dawned on him he had shifted into reverse and collided with the Kwire loft, scattering the chanters and copies of their hymnal, “Hooked on Polyphonics” like acapella duck pins. Luckily, a Frisian Magician in attendance sensed an awkward lull in the collects and quickly embarked on a banjo solo.
The quasi-priest, meanwhile, wearing his pseudo-many color vestments and wracking his brain trying to remember the secrets, decided that he would instead do the Hokey-Pokey, thinking that Marcel, Fifi, Grosbeak, Olga, the ambassador and the rest of the beastly fraternity couldn’t tell the difference anyway.
“Hey, the song is correct: this is what it’s all about!” he exclaimed as he substituted “Turn yourself about” for Orate Fratres. Marcel, meanwhile, recovered from his collision with the Kwire choir and resumed his reflection of his nine days of community service he had served for the pudding explosion, explained next time in Adventure 3.
“Funny how teaching cormorants to read gives you a perspective on what’s really worthwhile,” he mused. “A good strong pair of leather gloves.” Then, in the loft rubble, Marcel noticed a univented proboscis protruding from between two hymnals.
“Hey, Grosbeak, is that you?” the erstwhile misdemeanant inquired, recognizing the single blowhole.
“Who else?” retorted the mono-nostrillated gumshoe as he sat up and shook off the splintered boards and stray Solesmes neumes from his body parts. “Still engaged in destructive behavior, I see. And may I ask what is your involvement with this kidnapping?”
“Kidnapping?” said the phony Frenchman, raising his eyebrows to brush a bit of dust off the Gothic ceiling.
“The pastor was abducted today,” Grosbeak confided. “This is supposed to be a Tridentine Mass.”
“Yes, I know,” admitted Marcel. “I thought these proceedings were looking a little too familiar.”
One befuddled altar boy began the Suscipiat Dominus and tried to ignore the banjo, as the other server pulled himself off the floor of the sanctuary, where he had sprawled after being facially pummeled by Fr. Wonka’s left foot while the ersatz cleric had been “shaking it all about”.
“Don't forget,” the false cleric announced as he put his backside in then put his backside out, “Tonight is 'Neophyte Stunt Nite' for all you Catechumens. Mandatory attendance for the rest of you.”
“So tell me, Grosbeak,” Marcel asked after he placed either his 27” or his 4'-5” Mother in the back seat of his car and the Frisian Magician plucked out a reasonable Ita, Missa Est before bowing grandly, “What's a private dick with an edifice complex doing in a choir loft, anyway? Your fear of large buildings is legion in these parts.”
“It’s my medication!” the suspicious monobeaked former metal-chair folder announced with pride, “Tiny pills called claustrophobium. They make everything appear close to the ground. Found ‘em in a bus station toilet.”
Everyone gathered forcefully later that evening for the “Parade of folding chairs” at the St. Fritzi Josquin des Prez Memorial Rumpus Room for Neophyte Stunt Nite. Sister Schlemmerstein sternly reminded the catechumens as she tugged at her inordinately snug swan leotard that participation was a requisite for joining St. Fritzi, then kicked off the festivities with what she time and again insisted was the hatching scene from “the Nutcracker”.
“Everyone grab a chair,” suggested Babs, who helped the Ambassador with the complicated folding process. Cornflake had arrived eight hours too early and snoozed in the corner, a trickle of saliva from the corner of his mouth causing his clown makeup to erode and stain his Pagliacci outfit.
“Blast!” thought the Ambassador in Phlegmish as he paraded by the inert buffoon. “Now I’ll have to get some more stain remover.”
Grosbeak, a two-time Olympic chair-folding medalist, followed close behind, holding his chair aloft and hoping nobody would touch his phylacteries, which were wired. Marcel tried to carry Fifi perched on top of his chair, but that arrangement was soon reversed. Babs executed a perfect triple axle across the threshold and Sister Schlemmerstein led the parade out of the rumpus room into the newspaper-lined streets. Nobody noticed the Marechal du Feu taking notes.
Once the maitre d' signaled the conclusion of the “Parade of Folding Chairs”, it was time to clap on the house lights and start the festivities. The mysterious Marechal du Feu carefully folded a sheet of paper ten times -- in violation of the law of physics -- and inserted it in a zippered pocket in the wattles of his own neck (a surgical procedure he had performed in Uzbeckistan).
During the first act, a Pentecostal ventriloquist who could throw his voice in tongues, the Ambassador went out to his '63 Sunbeam to fetch a drum of rubber cement thinner and attempted to clean the spittle and greasepaint from Cornflake's huge, frilly collar. He peered closely at his face. “Why this isn't Cornflake at all!” he exclaimed in perfect English, which he was prone to do around rubber cement thinner fumes. He furiously scrubbed the clowned puss with the pungent thinner and a cheese grater then stood back in alarm.
“Why, it's the formerly-kidnapped Father Vitus!” screeched Fifi, just before she and a dozen others passed out from the fumes. Meanwhile, the second act, a faith-healing veterinarian, healed the juggler's pet bloodhound, which had not urinated in over a year.
“Out of my way!” ordered Grosbeak as he stumbled over prone catechumens, their equally prone sponsors and a pet stain the size of North Carolina, “Since I only have one nostril I have no olfactory depth perception. The fumes can't hurt me.”
After a perfunctory examination, Grosbeak turned to the assembled. “He's not dead yet!” he announced, tipping his pork-pie hat at a jaunty angle and stapling it there, “But everyone in here is a suspect!”
The third entry on the bill was a relay fire-eating act, with several acrobatic pyrovores stationed strategically around the room, lobbing incendiary missiles into each other’s expectant gobs. “They’re quite good,” noted Grosbeak as they began their routine, momentarily distracted by the hurtling balls of flame and his fears of igniting any lingering rubber cement residue.
As he followed one of the many interoral trails of fire around the room, he mistakenly turned his back on Fr. Vitus. One of the fireballs landed directly on the misgarbed pastor’s frilly solvent-soaked collar, and the highly inflammable garment swiftly ignited his face.
“Water! We need some water!” exclaimed Grosbeak, looking wildly about the room like a disorientated orangutan. His eyes lit upon Olga’s almost-overflowing drool cup and his hands soon followed, discharging its gelatinous contents into the face of the flaming flamen, now fully conscious to his great regret.
“Whaaaaa!?” burbled Fr. Vitus, just before lapsing into a spittle-induced coma.
Sister Schlemmerstein, who found an oily tarpaulin in sprinkler room 7 in which to wrap herself, tried to signal to the fire-eaters that it was time to stop the act and let the detective work ensue. “Weren’t they wonderful?” she cried to those still conscious, laboriously trying to slip into the past tense and the tarp at the same time. Unfortunately, an errant flame nugget struck her at that instant and the oily tarp went up like an oily tarp.
“All right!” shouted Marcel from the doorway, feeling a little too important over his newly deputized status. “Nobody leaves this rumpus room until you talk to the man with the one nostril! I’m guarding the only exit. And stop the fireworks!” Just then, Marcel had to dodge one of the blazing chunks himself as it whizzed past him into the street. The Marechal du Feu unzipped his neck and began the long process of unfolding his paper to take more notes.
“By the way,” Marcel wondered, half to himself, half to the distraught ex- Vice President Quayle, who had wandered in by mistake, “if the juggler’s bloodhound is here, where’s the juggler?”
“I don't know, but his car's on fire.” observed Quayle, acting not nearly as dense as his administration led many to believe. Looking in the parking lot, Marcel saw that the errant fireball had indeed landed under a lone car at the edge of the parking lot, and the car, a honey-buttermilk sunset 1956 Meitzinger, was slowly being consumed in a honey-buttermilk conflagration. Inside, a man in a colorful, pointy hat beat on the windows, unable to get out. With the Parish’s only fire extinguisher exhausted by an incense inferno at last Saturday vespers, Marcel had to run to fetch Olga's drool bucket as many groggy catechumens stood wistfully around the not-quite-dead Father Vitus, planning his impending memorium.
“The man is a saint!” exclaimed Fifi.
“And he can sure dance!” answered Olga, who had just re-attached her recently-emptied drool bucket for another round.
Anxious to return to normalcy, the fourth act, a guy named Stumpy who did a chainsaw juggling act, stepped up to the plate. Marcel grabbed the drool bucket and passed it around, asking everyone to spit in it so the juggler could be rescued from his burning car, now the color of yesterday's clabber. As the bucket was passed the rumpus room filled with oil fumes from the chainsaws and visibility was reduced to the point that everyone could only hear Stumpy screaming.
Regardless, Marcel manhandled the heavy, sloshing bucket and, adding a final generous dollop from Olga and one last oyster from himself for luck, jogged out to the flaming Meitzinger with a couple dozen gagging catechumens in tow. He doused the car with the viscous fluid as the juggler tumbled out onto the newspapers, twisting and twitching like a glazed japanese beetle in a bucket of the Ambassador’s rubber cement thinner.
“The trunk!” he coughed, his brush with fire filling him with guilt, “Cornflake's in the trunk!”
Quayle took the juggler’s keys and fiddled with the lock. “I can’t seem to open it,” he said. “There must be some trick to it.”
His confidence in the former Vice President eroding like so many urinal cakes, the Juggler staggered to his feet and pushed Quayle out of the way to reach the Meitzinger. “Here, let me.” With no effort the trunk lid flew open and a spring-loaded cream pie slapped the juggler square in the face.
“Impossible!” said the juggler as he scooped dripping pawfuls of the slightly-soured whipped cream from his eye sockets. “That phony clown did it to me again! But how did he escape?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” crowed Cornflake as he peeled off his Dan Quayle mask and capered lithely away to an all-night donut shop down the street.
An ambulance careened by, carrying what was left of the mangled Stumpy. “It’s always the same: jugglers get the worst of it,” Marcel editorialized as the Meitzinger’s owner crumpled back to the ground, complaining that he never voted for President Bush.
“And if you mix the water in your humidifier with sweetened Kool-Aid,” Babs informed an inattentive Grosbeak, “you can make delicious fruit-flavored wallpaper and furniture for just pennies a room!” Tugging absently at Fr. Vitus’ charred skin, Grosbeak noticed that it was not skin at all, but a flaky black substance that he instantly recognized from his accident reconstruction work: burnt rubber.
“Fruit-flavored wallpaper my asthma!” was his first thought, but it made no sense, so he tried another one: “Let’s see what we have under this Cajun priest mask!” He pulled away the blackened fake face fragments to reveal the slightly scorched real face of Gerald Ford. “Mr. President,” he exclaimed, “what are you doing in that getup? We thought you were dead! And where are your eyebrows?”
Ford shook the cobwebs out of his head, an operation that took several minutes as Grosbeak waited patiently. Finally Ford said, “They told me it was part of the St. Fritzi initiation. They told me I’d be eating fire later, but I didn’t think it would be so soon.”
“Eating fire? No eyebrows?” yelled Grosbeak with such alarm that he popped the staples from his hat. “Then that can only mean one thing! Olga, go backstage and bring those fire-eaters out here!” Olga, sipping on her Kool-Aid Big Gulp with one side of her mouth as fast as she could drool back into the cup on the other side, ran off and retrieved the third act performers, narrowly avoiding slipping on the mixture of hound water and bar and chain oil that coated the floor.
“What a sorry lineup. Now let’s remove the masks one more time!” Grosbeak trumpeted through his abbreviated trunk. One by one, the fire-eaters pulled the rubber slipcovers off their heads to reveal their real faces, each bearing the distinctive bontebok tattoo of the Beastly Fraternity of St. Fritzi. The last to unmask was Fr. Vitus himself.
“Fr. Vitus!” cried Fifi. “You’re not a saint after all! You’re just a hypocrite, faking your own kidnapping and using a poor, feckless ex-President for your own personal doppelganger!”
“Trippelganger, actually,” corrected Fr. Vitus. “Remember, he was disguised as me disguised as a clown. And yes, I didn’t have the heart to break it to my parishioners, but I have left the FSSP to join the BFSF. But you’ve got to admit, I still can dance.”
“Well,” said Grosbeak, “I guess that about wraps up this case. I’ve got nobody to arrest.”
“But I have,” said a zipper-necked figure stepping from the shadows and undoing an impossible series of folds in a sheet of paper. “It is I, the Marechal du Feu. As you say in English, the Fire Marshal. You, pseudo-priests, are under arrest for indoor fire-eating and recklessly igniting an ex-nun and an ex-President. And you, Grosbeak, and your deputy Marcel, are under arrest for opening the door to a fire-eating rumpus room with knowledge that the streets outside are lined with newspaper.”
It looked as if Grosbeak’s crime-fighting career were over, but then God intervened ex machina and arrested the Marechal du Feu for violating the laws of physics by folding a sheet of paper in half ten times. Then he permanently disbanded the BFSF and sent Fr. Vitus to a safe parish on a desert island. The remainder of the Fraternity became Shriners and nobody noticed the difference. Marcel and Grosbeak became fast friends and did 10-kilometer sprints together. Olga and Babs opened a custom dog-breeding parlor. The Ambassador bought a supply of rubber cement thinner and took an accelerated course in English. Fifi devoted the rest of her short life to promoting the cause for the canonization of Gerald Ford.
Fin
Next week's episode: A nip up the Shanks
Monday, December 13, 2010
The Zenas Trilogy
"The Zenas Trilogy" was a compendium of three related works submitted to a literary magazine of much renown. Somewhat understandably, they were soundly rejected with much aplomb.
After giving his prize emu a sitz bath, private dick Helmut Grosbeak extricated the wet feathers from his smoking jacket and limped to the restaurant. The persnickety fowl bit off three toes, straight through the shoe leather, causing the semi-discalced Grand Teuton to merely grimace in recognition to Skeeter de Pujol, the aristocratic bouncer, who tugged his shiny pate where a forelock might have been in a kinder world.
“Un peu tardie, monsieur,” Skeeter drawled in a pidgin Provençal with a dash of Worcestershire. “Ze lady, she waits for some time.” He scraped out some earwax with a sterling shoehorn as he noticed Helmut’s foot. “Mais bien sûr!” he snorted, “This eez a high-class establishment! We will have no open wounds!” The restaurant indeed was high-class, but with dirty floors and Lasceaux-style cave paintings.
Helmut shook the remaining loose toe from his decimated shoebox and gingerly flicked it with his clubbed foot under an antique secretary. “Yea, yea, Pujol – drips with class. Where’s the dame? She sounded distant on the phone.”
His beak in the air, Pujol eyed him warily. “Another engagement with a flightless, foraging Australian land bird? Did monsieur learn nothing from the Cassowary catastrophe of 1957?” He sighed and motioned stiffly with his waxed eyebrows into a smoky dovecote populated by old coots practicing speaking in accents for their upcoming trip to the Canary Islands.
“There’s your bird.” Skeeter pointed to the lady.
Helmut gave his shredded bowtie an anticipatory spin. Sipping her aperitif, she reclined with the grace of a thousand stampeding gazelles. She was five foot five foot five, in every direction, with wire-like hair, ankle-length shorts and a grimly engaging demeanor. She eyed Helmut surreally as she crossed her drumsticks.
“Gwendolyn, I’m so sorry I’m late,” Helmut kowtowed beefily, altering his pheromones to emit a semblance of Old Spice as he slipped Pujol a fin. “There was something of an avian altercation”. A waiter minced ingratiatingly toward the table. “No need for a menu. Bring me the Le canard frit a étouffé en mayonnaise.” the largish Slav sputtered, “And keep the spittle where it belongs this time.”
Gwen geared up her piehole. “My pathetic German Titwillow – still losing your battles with the phalanges, the Emus and Habsburg chin?” she chirped, gently chucking the inept Teutonic on his massive mandible before flicking a folded note into Helmut's single nostril as Pujol priggishly twittered back to fetch the requested fried duck.
Nicely chagrined, Helmut plucked the projectile and carelessly read it, smarting from the chin crack. She could have knocked him over with a 10-pound feather.
“This is impossible!” he cried in husky Tyrolean shock, “I just saw Dr. Schnorkmann this morning! What happened?”
“Attic fan accident,” Gwendolyn huffed, her lips and eyelids a buttery purple from a disobedient and tainted 1957 Chateaucrouteux proffered in a paper courtesy cup. “Very mysterious. Ugh!” She suddenly grimaced, “This wine is a bitter joke!” She howled at the bartender, a stoop-shouldered giant named “Casio” Fernandez. “Bring me a Blind Hillbilly or I'll blow this house down!”
While Casio whomped up the drink – a pint of whiskey and a teaspoon of anti-freeze filtered through a rusty tractor radiator – Helmut smiled smugly as he smeared dollops of complimentary rhubarb marmalade on his tongue with a rusty X-acto blade; he knew not only that Gwendolyn had poor lung capacity and a sightless bumpkin for a boyfriend, but that her liver would eventually implode and that Diesel Philosophy apprenticeship would pay off. “Attic fan accident my aunty Roo. Schnorkmann was murdered. I will get to the bottom of this.”
Gwendolyn leaned forward. Her breath was an oily blend of tunafish, fermented fruit and spoiled dairy products. “You’re hoeing a hazardous path, Grosbeak. Schnorkmann left a dubious legacy.” she whispered over the blasting refrain of ‘Tennessee Birdwalk’ on the restaurant loudspeaker, “It was no fluke he invented midget basketball – the sport of Kings made many enemies. I fear something dreadful will happen at tonight’s game.”
“Poppycock.” scoffed the jelly-filled Berliner as his fried duck arrived. He opened his five-star Rubbermaid flatware, gave the curtsying waiter a perfunctory kick and sampled the crusty mallard. It was foul. Disappointed, Helmut flung up onto his wobbly stork gams and goose-stepped over to the bar. As Casio garnished a drink with a slab of meatloaf on a toothpick, Helmut ventured, “Say, didn’t you work in motion pictures?”
Casio smiled the joyless smile of a carpenter who has seen too many houses collapse about his head. “I was a stunt triple in ‘Runaway Hayride’,” he warbled, wielding a Roadrunner oven mitt as he lifted the blind hillbilly from the broiler before rising up to his extended height of 7’-9”. “Sorry about Schnorkmann. It’s a sad day for midget basketball.”
Helmut emitted an über-smirk at the pluck of the misshapen leviathan as he strangled Gwen’s hillbilly with a corrugated rind of lemon zest. He vowed to find out, however, how Casio knew about Schnorkmann. He bid the newly unconscious Gwen adieu and commandeered a rickshaw back to his flat.
That night was a special memorial game of midget basketball at the Josquin des Prez Rumpus Room. After a carnivorous buffet from Marty Allen’s Rib Tickler Dinner Theater, Helmut leaned back, burped up a wad of wet grass and ruminated about Schnorkmann. The Cassowary catastrophe of 1957 brought the shameful coach back to John Wilkes Booth Middle School, where the “Barn Burners” forfeited a heart-breaker to L’il Dickens Child Care in the second quarter of the consolation game when the team left the floor with a severe case of lactose intolerance.
“Ladies and gentlemen . . .” Helmut’s ruminations were interrupted by the amplified gravelly voice of actor Verne Troyer. “. . . We have some sad news. Dr. Igor Schnorkmann, who invented midget basketball while trying to perfect prune wine, was regrettably found dead today . . .” A hush fell on the room, punctuated by groans from those spectators who had consumed too many greasy ribs to think comfortably about a kraut corpse.
After the maître d’ signaled the conclusion of a moment of silence. Helmut’s eye saw him deposit himself next to none other than “Casio” Fernandez.
As Verne Troyer introduced the starting lineups, Helmut flagged down a hawking vendor and bought some tubercular comestibles. As he gnawed into a grapefruit, slurped down a sardine and took a bitter swig of gently-curdled, room-temperature white milk, the ponderously-chinned Tyrol noticed the two oddball restaurateurs seemed a little too suspicious for casual midget b-ball onlooking.
As the soporific encomium to Schnorkmann ended, a piercing shriek rent the air as a banshee appeared, hovering over the court.
“Bogey at 12 O’Clock!” screeched Troyer, but he was just loudly reminding himself that “Casablanca” was the noon matinee tomorrow on channel 13, because he could not see the wailing Welsh apparition dangling from the Dr. Pepper scoreboard clock.
At the sight of the screeching phantasm, the acromegalic Casio Fernandez unfolded himself and turned in horror to Skeeter de Pujol, who stood equally horrified at half-court, prepared to perform the national anthem.
Exhaling like an extended bassoon dischord, Pujol jerked up his pants and waddled across the floor like so many angry penguins as Helmut, smelling a furry rodent, dove from his nose-bleed perch and body-surfed across dozens of empty seats, his massive chin striking every one with machine-gun-like repetition. He somersaulted over the bottom row, nimbly landing on the handy spatulas he rubber-cemented to his sneakers and capered out of the arena as cartoon sparrows twittered over his head. He found Sprinkler room 8 and threw open the door.
Inside was a sight that would have made a grown warthog cry. Pujol, Fernandez, and the maître d’ were surrounded by Rosicrucians disguised as unsuccessful presidential candidates: Adlai Stevenson, Lyndon LaRouche, Samuel Tilden, among others. Then, from between William Wirt and Eugene V. Debs, a female figure shoved into the foreground and posed with melodramatic sarcasm, pointing a handgun.
“Gwendolyn!” exclaimed Helmut. “I thought you were cataleptic! I should have known a woman of your magnitude could hold more rotgut than that. You lured me here deliberately with those tempting hints of disaster at the game, eh?”
“You oaf,” Gwen jeered. “You were bound to figure out it was Casio that killed Schnorkmann; I remember you were the halftime floor mopper before he performed that experimental leg transplant. I just couldn’t let that little wooden legacy disappear.”
“Attic fan accident, my mangled foot,” scoffed Helmut. Outside he could hear the banshee screaming that Schnorkmann’s killer was in Sprinkler Room 8, if anyone was interested.
All the Presidential candidates looked at one another with alacrity just as the reproduction Adlai Stevenson shrieked, clutched his chest and dropped to the floor, soon followed by Walter Mondale, Barry Goldwater and Wendell Wilkie. With drink in hand, Gwen and Helmut watched in alarm as they all dropped, apparently of some massive contagious coronary, until the only ones standing were they, Casio, Pujol, the maître d’, and finally, a smirking Marty Allen, wearing a sequin dinner jacket, seated uncomfortably in the slop sink.
“Marty Allen! As I live and breathe in short, gasping breaths!” Helmut cried, his chest also heaving and tightening as the emus bolted from the closet and scampered out into the torpid air. “It was your fatty meats, wasn’t it? You knew no one would survive past halftime after chowing down on deliciously deadly Emu ribs!”
“You won't be living and breathing much longer, you mononostrillated goose-stepping gumshoe!” Marty smirked. “Yes, Schnorkmann was a regular down at the Rib Tickler – serves him right for booting my good friend Casio! And he thought chicken tasted just like Emu!”
“And it was you, Casio Fernandez, that posed as a midget to hand the ‘Barn Burners’ that suffocating forfeit!” Helmut shouted, wagging an accusing finger at the gnarled giant as his blood curdled and slowed in an agonizing slurry. “You all were using the team illegally to bankroll your arteriosclerotic restaurant after the failure of your film career, then Schnorkmann threw a pair of rib spreaders into your plans!”
“And we certainly did not need Schnorkmann’s prune wine liquefying all our efforts,” Marty sneered, his bushy black mane bristling, “You know a lot, Helmut – too bad your arteries are clogging like a toilet at a Chinese Buffet!”
Thinking fast, Helmut grabbed Gwen’s drink and tossed it back. Immediately his blood thinned and his heart resumed a normal beat. “So Gwen,” he barked, his formerly twisting face returning to normal, “The blind Hillbillies are an antidote to Marty’s deadly ribs!”
Gwen, Marty and Fernandez exchanged concerned smells as Pujol emitted a high E-flat. “Yes, but how did you know we were here?” Gwen asked meekly.
“Ah! An intricate combination of simple arithmetic and implausible coincidences. I remembered at the restaurant how your breath smelled like old fish, bad fruit and spoiled milk. After buying a snack here, my breath smelled exactly the same – and I bought the food from a hawking vendor who bore a passing resemblance to Marty Allen! I counted the number of ball players on the floor – a total of ten – subtracted the number of drinks I saw Casio mix last night, which was two. I got eight – Sprinkler room 8, to be exact! You forget I have an inexplicable preoccupation with numerical precision!” Helmut turned to Verne Troyer, who just arrived to verify the banshee’s accusation. “Mr. Troyer, arrest men one, two and three! In that order! And this woman next!”
Eager to be exonerated, Gwen cozied up to Helmut. But as they met face-to-face their breaths collided and generated a spontaneous malodorous meltdown. Protected by his sequin dinner jacket, Marty Allen was the only one left standing from the rancid devastation.
“Good night” he mumbled, stripping off the spent jacket to reveal the hawking vendor uniform underneath as he walked off to round up the Emus, “Don't forget to drive carefully.”
Fin
Tonight’s episode:
Drinking Spoiled Meat
Adventure number 1 of 3 Featuring Helmut Grosbeak, the single-nostrilled detective
After giving his prize emu a sitz bath, private dick Helmut Grosbeak extricated the wet feathers from his smoking jacket and limped to the restaurant. The persnickety fowl bit off three toes, straight through the shoe leather, causing the semi-discalced Grand Teuton to merely grimace in recognition to Skeeter de Pujol, the aristocratic bouncer, who tugged his shiny pate where a forelock might have been in a kinder world.
“Un peu tardie, monsieur,” Skeeter drawled in a pidgin Provençal with a dash of Worcestershire. “Ze lady, she waits for some time.” He scraped out some earwax with a sterling shoehorn as he noticed Helmut’s foot. “Mais bien sûr!” he snorted, “This eez a high-class establishment! We will have no open wounds!” The restaurant indeed was high-class, but with dirty floors and Lasceaux-style cave paintings.
Helmut shook the remaining loose toe from his decimated shoebox and gingerly flicked it with his clubbed foot under an antique secretary. “Yea, yea, Pujol – drips with class. Where’s the dame? She sounded distant on the phone.”
His beak in the air, Pujol eyed him warily. “Another engagement with a flightless, foraging Australian land bird? Did monsieur learn nothing from the Cassowary catastrophe of 1957?” He sighed and motioned stiffly with his waxed eyebrows into a smoky dovecote populated by old coots practicing speaking in accents for their upcoming trip to the Canary Islands.
“There’s your bird.” Skeeter pointed to the lady.
Helmut gave his shredded bowtie an anticipatory spin. Sipping her aperitif, she reclined with the grace of a thousand stampeding gazelles. She was five foot five foot five, in every direction, with wire-like hair, ankle-length shorts and a grimly engaging demeanor. She eyed Helmut surreally as she crossed her drumsticks.
“Gwendolyn, I’m so sorry I’m late,” Helmut kowtowed beefily, altering his pheromones to emit a semblance of Old Spice as he slipped Pujol a fin. “There was something of an avian altercation”. A waiter minced ingratiatingly toward the table. “No need for a menu. Bring me the Le canard frit a étouffé en mayonnaise.” the largish Slav sputtered, “And keep the spittle where it belongs this time.”
Gwen geared up her piehole. “My pathetic German Titwillow – still losing your battles with the phalanges, the Emus and Habsburg chin?” she chirped, gently chucking the inept Teutonic on his massive mandible before flicking a folded note into Helmut's single nostril as Pujol priggishly twittered back to fetch the requested fried duck.
Nicely chagrined, Helmut plucked the projectile and carelessly read it, smarting from the chin crack. She could have knocked him over with a 10-pound feather.
“This is impossible!” he cried in husky Tyrolean shock, “I just saw Dr. Schnorkmann this morning! What happened?”
“Attic fan accident,” Gwendolyn huffed, her lips and eyelids a buttery purple from a disobedient and tainted 1957 Chateaucrouteux proffered in a paper courtesy cup. “Very mysterious. Ugh!” She suddenly grimaced, “This wine is a bitter joke!” She howled at the bartender, a stoop-shouldered giant named “Casio” Fernandez. “Bring me a Blind Hillbilly or I'll blow this house down!”
While Casio whomped up the drink – a pint of whiskey and a teaspoon of anti-freeze filtered through a rusty tractor radiator – Helmut smiled smugly as he smeared dollops of complimentary rhubarb marmalade on his tongue with a rusty X-acto blade; he knew not only that Gwendolyn had poor lung capacity and a sightless bumpkin for a boyfriend, but that her liver would eventually implode and that Diesel Philosophy apprenticeship would pay off. “Attic fan accident my aunty Roo. Schnorkmann was murdered. I will get to the bottom of this.”
Gwendolyn leaned forward. Her breath was an oily blend of tunafish, fermented fruit and spoiled dairy products. “You’re hoeing a hazardous path, Grosbeak. Schnorkmann left a dubious legacy.” she whispered over the blasting refrain of ‘Tennessee Birdwalk’ on the restaurant loudspeaker, “It was no fluke he invented midget basketball – the sport of Kings made many enemies. I fear something dreadful will happen at tonight’s game.”
“Poppycock.” scoffed the jelly-filled Berliner as his fried duck arrived. He opened his five-star Rubbermaid flatware, gave the curtsying waiter a perfunctory kick and sampled the crusty mallard. It was foul. Disappointed, Helmut flung up onto his wobbly stork gams and goose-stepped over to the bar. As Casio garnished a drink with a slab of meatloaf on a toothpick, Helmut ventured, “Say, didn’t you work in motion pictures?”
Casio smiled the joyless smile of a carpenter who has seen too many houses collapse about his head. “I was a stunt triple in ‘Runaway Hayride’,” he warbled, wielding a Roadrunner oven mitt as he lifted the blind hillbilly from the broiler before rising up to his extended height of 7’-9”. “Sorry about Schnorkmann. It’s a sad day for midget basketball.”
Helmut emitted an über-smirk at the pluck of the misshapen leviathan as he strangled Gwen’s hillbilly with a corrugated rind of lemon zest. He vowed to find out, however, how Casio knew about Schnorkmann. He bid the newly unconscious Gwen adieu and commandeered a rickshaw back to his flat.
That night was a special memorial game of midget basketball at the Josquin des Prez Rumpus Room. After a carnivorous buffet from Marty Allen’s Rib Tickler Dinner Theater, Helmut leaned back, burped up a wad of wet grass and ruminated about Schnorkmann. The Cassowary catastrophe of 1957 brought the shameful coach back to John Wilkes Booth Middle School, where the “Barn Burners” forfeited a heart-breaker to L’il Dickens Child Care in the second quarter of the consolation game when the team left the floor with a severe case of lactose intolerance.
“Ladies and gentlemen . . .” Helmut’s ruminations were interrupted by the amplified gravelly voice of actor Verne Troyer. “. . . We have some sad news. Dr. Igor Schnorkmann, who invented midget basketball while trying to perfect prune wine, was regrettably found dead today . . .” A hush fell on the room, punctuated by groans from those spectators who had consumed too many greasy ribs to think comfortably about a kraut corpse.
After the maître d’ signaled the conclusion of a moment of silence. Helmut’s eye saw him deposit himself next to none other than “Casio” Fernandez.
As Verne Troyer introduced the starting lineups, Helmut flagged down a hawking vendor and bought some tubercular comestibles. As he gnawed into a grapefruit, slurped down a sardine and took a bitter swig of gently-curdled, room-temperature white milk, the ponderously-chinned Tyrol noticed the two oddball restaurateurs seemed a little too suspicious for casual midget b-ball onlooking.
As the soporific encomium to Schnorkmann ended, a piercing shriek rent the air as a banshee appeared, hovering over the court.
“Bogey at 12 O’Clock!” screeched Troyer, but he was just loudly reminding himself that “Casablanca” was the noon matinee tomorrow on channel 13, because he could not see the wailing Welsh apparition dangling from the Dr. Pepper scoreboard clock.
At the sight of the screeching phantasm, the acromegalic Casio Fernandez unfolded himself and turned in horror to Skeeter de Pujol, who stood equally horrified at half-court, prepared to perform the national anthem.
Exhaling like an extended bassoon dischord, Pujol jerked up his pants and waddled across the floor like so many angry penguins as Helmut, smelling a furry rodent, dove from his nose-bleed perch and body-surfed across dozens of empty seats, his massive chin striking every one with machine-gun-like repetition. He somersaulted over the bottom row, nimbly landing on the handy spatulas he rubber-cemented to his sneakers and capered out of the arena as cartoon sparrows twittered over his head. He found Sprinkler room 8 and threw open the door.
Inside was a sight that would have made a grown warthog cry. Pujol, Fernandez, and the maître d’ were surrounded by Rosicrucians disguised as unsuccessful presidential candidates: Adlai Stevenson, Lyndon LaRouche, Samuel Tilden, among others. Then, from between William Wirt and Eugene V. Debs, a female figure shoved into the foreground and posed with melodramatic sarcasm, pointing a handgun.
“Gwendolyn!” exclaimed Helmut. “I thought you were cataleptic! I should have known a woman of your magnitude could hold more rotgut than that. You lured me here deliberately with those tempting hints of disaster at the game, eh?”
“You oaf,” Gwen jeered. “You were bound to figure out it was Casio that killed Schnorkmann; I remember you were the halftime floor mopper before he performed that experimental leg transplant. I just couldn’t let that little wooden legacy disappear.”
“Attic fan accident, my mangled foot,” scoffed Helmut. Outside he could hear the banshee screaming that Schnorkmann’s killer was in Sprinkler Room 8, if anyone was interested.
All the Presidential candidates looked at one another with alacrity just as the reproduction Adlai Stevenson shrieked, clutched his chest and dropped to the floor, soon followed by Walter Mondale, Barry Goldwater and Wendell Wilkie. With drink in hand, Gwen and Helmut watched in alarm as they all dropped, apparently of some massive contagious coronary, until the only ones standing were they, Casio, Pujol, the maître d’, and finally, a smirking Marty Allen, wearing a sequin dinner jacket, seated uncomfortably in the slop sink.
“Marty Allen! As I live and breathe in short, gasping breaths!” Helmut cried, his chest also heaving and tightening as the emus bolted from the closet and scampered out into the torpid air. “It was your fatty meats, wasn’t it? You knew no one would survive past halftime after chowing down on deliciously deadly Emu ribs!”
“You won't be living and breathing much longer, you mononostrillated goose-stepping gumshoe!” Marty smirked. “Yes, Schnorkmann was a regular down at the Rib Tickler – serves him right for booting my good friend Casio! And he thought chicken tasted just like Emu!”
“And it was you, Casio Fernandez, that posed as a midget to hand the ‘Barn Burners’ that suffocating forfeit!” Helmut shouted, wagging an accusing finger at the gnarled giant as his blood curdled and slowed in an agonizing slurry. “You all were using the team illegally to bankroll your arteriosclerotic restaurant after the failure of your film career, then Schnorkmann threw a pair of rib spreaders into your plans!”
“And we certainly did not need Schnorkmann’s prune wine liquefying all our efforts,” Marty sneered, his bushy black mane bristling, “You know a lot, Helmut – too bad your arteries are clogging like a toilet at a Chinese Buffet!”
Thinking fast, Helmut grabbed Gwen’s drink and tossed it back. Immediately his blood thinned and his heart resumed a normal beat. “So Gwen,” he barked, his formerly twisting face returning to normal, “The blind Hillbillies are an antidote to Marty’s deadly ribs!”
Gwen, Marty and Fernandez exchanged concerned smells as Pujol emitted a high E-flat. “Yes, but how did you know we were here?” Gwen asked meekly.
“Ah! An intricate combination of simple arithmetic and implausible coincidences. I remembered at the restaurant how your breath smelled like old fish, bad fruit and spoiled milk. After buying a snack here, my breath smelled exactly the same – and I bought the food from a hawking vendor who bore a passing resemblance to Marty Allen! I counted the number of ball players on the floor – a total of ten – subtracted the number of drinks I saw Casio mix last night, which was two. I got eight – Sprinkler room 8, to be exact! You forget I have an inexplicable preoccupation with numerical precision!” Helmut turned to Verne Troyer, who just arrived to verify the banshee’s accusation. “Mr. Troyer, arrest men one, two and three! In that order! And this woman next!”
Eager to be exonerated, Gwen cozied up to Helmut. But as they met face-to-face their breaths collided and generated a spontaneous malodorous meltdown. Protected by his sequin dinner jacket, Marty Allen was the only one left standing from the rancid devastation.
“Good night” he mumbled, stripping off the spent jacket to reveal the hawking vendor uniform underneath as he walked off to round up the Emus, “Don't forget to drive carefully.”
Fin
Next week Part II: One Last Oyster for Luck.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Cormac McCarthy Film Festival to be held in Doswell
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| Cormac McCarthy |
Wingate said they began trying to locate the reclusive author almost two years ago. "He was a little skittish at first," she reports, "but eventually he agreed to come, with certain conditions -- including a preferred list of films that he wanted screened." Wingate admits she nor anyone else in Doswell have ever heard of the films McCathy listed, therefore the entire community eagerly awaits the cinematic treasures the Pulitzer Prize-winning author will bring!
Wingate admitted also to never having read any of McCarthy's novels. "I picked up one of his books called 'Outer Dark', but haven't cracked it open yet," she says, claiming she is looking forward to reading it next weekend.
After much back-and-forth discussion the list of films was finalized. Here is the schedule, with comments by Wingate:
Dec. 21:
9-11 am: "The Hills have Eyes" (2006) ("Apparently this is a film about simple country folk -- much like us here in Doswell!")
11 - 1 PM: "Two Thousand Maniacs" (1964) ("Another film about how those of us in rural areas treat our friends from the north -- come on down, ya'll!")
1 - 3 PM: "I Spit on your Grave" (1978) ("Sounded on the phone like a feminist classic, although I don't care for the title.")
3 - 5 PM: "Meat Grinder" (2009) ("I think this is about Thai Food! Mm -mm!")
5 - 6PM: Dinner (catered by Mr. Drippy Catering, served by the Doswell Ruriteens)
6 - 8 PM: "Men Behind the Sun" (1988) ("Another Asian film about war time - I hope it's as good as 'Saving Private Ryan', but without all that bloody stuff")
8 - 10 PM: "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) ("I am involved with a Pekingese rescue club, so I am always interested in a film about pet adoption")
Cormac McCarthy himself is scheduled to appear for a brief Q&A after the showing of Reservoir Dogs. Then he will open fire with a shotgun, ending the evening in a violent bloodbath.
Contact the Doswell Ruritan Center for ticket information. Advance tickets are $10.
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