Someone Once Told Me Death Should Be More Important Than It Is These Days
"Casual Cannibalism Has Become An Epidemic," Bemoans Caprial Pence, Bureau Head In Charge Of Culinary Crimes
Chapter 9
Sean Locke is dead, and grief is the order of the day. He was an odd fellow, but he had endeared himself to the Palace populace long before the onset of the current ice age. To be frank about it, Wanda Japan and her irreverent band have been well-received, even harbored and protected by the righteous citizens. The Life Protector knows this. Materex know this. It is impossible to guess what President for Life Idi Amin Dada knows.
Sean Locke is dead and everyone misses him dearly. How can such things be? What God would allow even one Sean Locke to end up as fodder for Idi Amin?
***
Later that night, after Rapid Ray wound up cleaning recycled Chanello’s Vesuvian Footlong and Budweiser out of a booth (the return on the time and money he invested in Bernadette Odettediah, a freshman cheerleader) while a roommate escorted the erstwhile object of his affections home, after Paul Bare and Wanda Japan had carried Wayne to his corner booth where he snored as he dreamed of Jack E. Black manning a telescope on Mars, after the bar filled up and emptied and filled up and emptied so many times few people still knew who they were, Big Daddy Lipscomb heaved Willie Diebold through the plate glass window which faced the blue and yellow sign for Don’s Tires on the side of Judge Keller’s Hardware Store.
All this served to climax a discussion about Lyle Alzado.
“You think that fucker has it rough?” Big Daddy said, as he hefted Willie and tossed him over his right shoulder.
“He’s making good money. He went to college, didn’t he?”
Diebold’s hurtling body collided with Rama Moonweed Kirschner who was rounding the corner on his Moto Guzzi at the time, and they bounced in a tangle with the stop sign at the feet of Officer Cameron Seawell who said: “Now if this don’t beat all. Funniest blamed thing I ever saw.”
***
No one knows how Idi Amin managed to surprise Sean Locke in the women’s restroom at the Civic Auditorium. It seems doubtful a man of Idi’s bulk could have squeezed through the return air duct, but the vent cover was sitting in the middle of the gray tiled floor, according to the investigator’s report.
Locke had secreted a can of iridescent paint in his doublet and made his way to the women’s restroom to spray commando graffiti on the tiled walls. All Sean had time enough to write was: Remember the Wayne…
Sean Locke is dead, and the words of a song oozing from the walls of the Palace may help explain the confusion and mourning of the people on this grisly daybreak:
“I must have thought you’d always be around, Always keeping things real by playing the clown. Now you’re nowhere to be found.”
This last line is inaccurate, since Sean Locke was found, disemboweled, hanging by his heels from a stall in the women’s restroom at the Civic Auditorium, the dome of his skull lopped off, his brain, heart, and kidneys missing, a partially devoured testicle in the sink. Stella Noval found him, screamed, vomited, went into shock — her condition is presently listed as “guarded” by Materex.
Stella found Sean Locke at the First Annual Safety-In-Numbers Ball as the author was about to begin work on the lives and times of Gottlieb Goforth and Cindy Gnomoure. Dancers doing the New York Scuffle. The Different Drummer playing “I Can Do It.” The author hefted his mug — and Stella found Sean, and now Sean Locke is dead, and of all the commandos, none had less information in his file.
Sean Locke
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And yet, of all the commandos, Locke was best liked. He had rolled the Heart of Materex. He had pissed on Rapid Ray and crushed Cheeznibs in Fast Ed the Bartender’s bed. Sean Locke had made Wanda Japan cry. Even the Life Protector admitted: “Crazy son of a bitch. He’s got balls. Give him that.”
No one was sure what Sean Locke looked like — he was a master of disguises — no one, that is, until Stella found his carcass, carved out like a practice mutton at a butchering school. He was dressed in Elizabethan costume and had apparently gained access to the First Annual Safety-In-Numbers Ball by convincing the Palace Guard he was William Shakespeare.
“What, Hal! How now, mad wag!” said Sean, throwing his arm around a Palace Guard. “What a devil dost thou in Warwickshire? Hast thou seen my dear friend, W. H.?”
“What shit you talking man?” the Palace Guard asked.
“You know this dude?” asked Sam.
“Fuck, no,” said Dave. “Never seen the motherfucker.”
“Less kin than kind I assure you, Sir Dave,” said Shakespeare, “But marry do assure your friend thou dost recall me. Shakespeare, David, I am William Shakespeare. Verily, thou must with memory fond and true recall when thou didst call me Ol’ Cuz Bill. And thou auditioned for my play, upon the Queen’s frozen breast?” Bill said, doffing his hat and bowing.
“What the fuck wrong with you, man? You drunk or sniffing that cold cocaine?” asked Sam, poking his index finger at Shakespeare’s nose. “Ain’t no Shakespeare listed here. Ain’t that right, Dave?”
“No mofo Shakespeare here,” Dave concurred.
“What? No Shakespeare here! But of course!” Sean chuckled, “That proves an unforgivable rhyme,” he said, “And how could I be your Ol’ Cuz Bill, for surely this flesh would not cling so firmly to my bones? My very presence would render thee shallow of breath. I’d be dead, to crystallize it clear, were I not another, not thine Bill…”
“All right, motherfucker. I don’t care what shit you doing, you ax like a wise ass, and we got no truck with wise ass,” said Sam, fingering the boggler in his pocket, “And I axing you nice now: you a wise ass?”
“Accept my most humble apologies,” said Old Cuz Bill, eyeing the bulge in Sam’s pocket and raising his hands beside his ears, “I came to boogie, not to battle,” he said, his Elizabethan white face bobbing between his mime splayed hands, “Old babes are fools again, as they say,” he said, moving toward the door.
“Now hold right chair, dude,” said Sam, “Where you think you going?”
“To find a fair and honest maid,” Shakespeare replied. “This is the First Annual Safety-In-Numbers Balls, is it not? I have not misplaced my compass.”
“Listen, mofo,” said Sam, “You be going nowhere till we check your worthless ass off this list,” he said, tapping Dave’s clipboard with his boggler.
“No need for slings and arrows, Sam,” said Locke, “I’ve come to slam dance, not to banter. This is but a disguise, a role I play. You list me here as Stephen Trueblood. So let me pass.” And Sam and Dave did.
***
One night while Wayne was sitting at the bar not talking to anyone, Sean Locke came in and slammed a dollar on the counter and turned into Davey Crockett.
“Barkeep,” said Davey, “I got me an edge on fierce as a painter in rut, and I’d like to propose a friendly wager.”
“Listen, Sean,” said Rapid Ray, “I’ve got enough with the air conditioner on the fuck. Cowboys and Indians I can do without, thank you.”
“Frontiersman, your innkeepership,” Crockett said, “I’m rightly termed a frontiersman, sure as a lead dog and twicet as quick. Why, I swan today I been all over hell and half of Georgia treeing this here varmint,” he said, setting a full-grown raccoon on the bar and feeding it a Beer Nut. “But to recombobulate back to the pernt, I propose I can suck down this here tankard of horse piss in less time than it takes you to think to ten. And the name’s Davey. Crockett.”
“Sure it is. And just how do you propose to tell when I’ve thought to ten, cowboy?” smiled Rapid Ray, leaning over the bar, his chin in the palm of his hand.
“I can’t say much from hereabouts,” said Crockett, his right eye cocked like an eagle’s, his lips twitching like a wolverine’s, “but in my thick of the woods a man’s word’s his ownliest bond,” he said, “and I ain’t no cowboy. The name’s Davey. I don’t mean to be reminding you again.”
“Okay, Davey,” Ray said, “You’re on.”
“So here goes,” said Davey, lifting his mug, “as the boy said when he fun with hisself.”
“And there it went,” said Rapid Ray, sliding the dollar off the bar and into his pocket, “You lose.”
***
Later on that evening, while the bar filled up and emptied, Wayne was sitting next to the violinist who liked to tell vulgar jokes because he loved to blush. Some nights he told so many off-color jokes that his face seemed like a large tender bruise. “It’s one of my few vices,” he often said, “But when that blood rushes to my face and I feel truly embarrassed, I know how it feels to be alive.”
“Not really,” said Wayne.
Crockett was finishing his sixth or seventh beer as he crashed up to the bar and grumbled: “Your Raymondship, I have another little wager to propose,” he said, dropping two tightly crumpled dollar bills onto the counter.
“I witnessed the most curious scene this afternoon,” the violinist said. “There was a fellow in here with a frog, all green and shiny. He ordered a Michelob for himself, the man that is, and a plate of shrimp for his frog.”
“Mind if I sit here?” Wayne asked.
The violinist continued. “‘Madam,’ the fellow said — he was talking to Sugarporn, you know who I mean? ‘This frog gives the best damned head in Clemson. But I’ve fallen on hard times. I’ll let you have him for five bucks. No questions asked. Money back guarantee.’ And Sugarporn bought the frog.”
“Really?” asked Wayne.
“The name’s Davey,” Crockett said, “And here goes, as the lady said after she walked that mile to kiss the cow.”
“Some guys never learn,” said Ray, sliding the two dollars into his pocket.
“It couldn’t have been fifteen minutes later the phone rang,” the violinist went on, “It’s Sugarporn. She wants to talk to the frogman. He goes to the phone, says a couple of words, hangs up and leaves.
“An hour later he comes back with his frog and orders another Michelob and a dozen flies.”
“It was fucking crazy. I don’t hardly believe it,” said Ray, wiping down the counter. “I mean I tell this guy I guess his frog ain’t all it’s cracked up to be…”
The violinist said, “And then he said, I swear, that he’d been training frogs how to give head for ten years. Some of his frogs had gone on to find homes with the wealthy and powerful, but every now and then you have to expect an amphibious fuck-up.”
“And then,” Ray broke in, “He starts saying how when he got over to Sugarporn’s place, he finds her stretched out on this waterbed, and his frog is over in the corner in front of the closet, beating himself against the door.”
Sean Locke bellowed drunkenly from a booth near the jukebox that he had yet another wager to propose.
“Hold your coonskins, Davey,” Ray called.
“Sugarporn seemed thoroughly annoyed,” the violinist explained. “‘So there you are,’ she told the fellow, ‘I thought you said this frog gives head.’ And the fellow admitted how sometimes a new frog might get a little bashful, especially with so much woman to please. That’s what he said.
“‘But what about my money back guarantee?’ Sugarporn asked him,” the violinist was saying, when Ray interrupted and said: “And then this guy tells me how he convinced her to help him finish training his frog.”
“Well,” said Wayne, finishing his beer, “I guess I better go.”
“Don’t you want to hear the end of the story?” the violinist sputtered, his face beginning to flush.
“I’ve probably got some very important work to do,” said Wayne, got up and left.
“And then he said,” the violinist called, his voice rising to a shout as Wayne reached the door, “that he turned to that frog and pointed his finger at it and said: ‘Now looky here, you green-skinned freeloader. Watch me close. Keep an eye on this tongue. I’m just gonna show you this one more time…”
“I would have given anything to be there to see the look on her face,” Ray said, dreamily.
***
Later that night after Wayne had come and gone again, after the bar had filled up and emptied and filled up and emptied again, just before closing, while Pooh Bear raked cans out of the booths and Fast Ed hung steam-sanitized pitchers on the rack over the bar, when only the employees, refugees, regulars, and terminal alcoholics still remained, Crockett lurched up out of a booth and belched, “I got me one last wager to propose,” he said, slamming a twenty dollar bill on the bar.
Still later, Sean Locke perched on a bar stool fumbling with his fly, while Ray shoved a mug down the bar, but before Davey’s pecker cleared the buckskins, piss was flying everywhere, over the bar, the floor, the cash register, the draft cooler, over Rapid Ray himself, who was laughing so hard he was admitted to Anderson Memorial Hospital the same morning to have his appendix removed.
“Thunderation,” said Davey Crockett, tumbling off the stool, “Some days my aim ain’t worth shit,” he said, still tugging at his fly, leaving the bar, his twenty dollar bill on the counter.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph shit thirty pieces of Judas!” gasped the Rapid one, slipping the twenty into his pocket, “That Sean’s got to be the dumbest fuck I know.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Harriet Tupperells, getting up, taking her gloves from her purse, and walking past the author to the door, “He just bet a hundred dollars he could piss in your face in your own damn bar, and you’d laugh about it.”
***
One night the author sat at the bar not talking to anyone. During one of the filled up periods, Sean Locke crashed through the bar doors and “Voodoo Chile” skipped clean off the jukebox. Sean tromped up to the bar and became Big Daddy Lipscomb. It was Big Daddy Lipscomb who plopped onto a bar stool and said: “Gimme a Schlitz Light.”
“One Schlitz Light coming up,” said Fast Ed, popping the top.
“What you writing Jack?” Big Daddy asked, flopping his left shank on the author’s shoulder. “What’s this shit?” he continued, his hand engulfing the pad the way a whale envelops krill.
“Just some notes.”
—30—
Epilog In Media Res
It occurs to me that some straggler might want to read all of Trout’s Tale in its God-given order, assuming I live long enough to publish all of it. I guess I could start another stack and publish it in order there, but where’s the fun in that?
Instead, what I’ve currently decided to do is add this epilog as an index to previous posts in the order in which they were not written, but in the most recent order they have appeared in the Hall of Records. Links will become active as new URLs are generated.
Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.
Trout’s Tale thus far…
Frontal Matter And Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33