Urban Fables.
By
The Cyclops
1.
“Fizzle”
One day two drunks named Elroy and Wilt were sorting through rubbish and found a strange looking pistol with a note attached saying, “This is a Death Ray. With it you can conquer the world.”
Rather than the world, they decided to settle for a fifth of cheap whisky. Since it looked approximately like a gun, it might be worth something at the neighborhood pawn shop. The pawn shop operator laughed at them—pushing the pistol back through the hole in the cashier’s cage.
“Who do you think I am? It’s a goddamned toy.”
He said this with a bit of a chuckle and a dismissive wave at the door, for he wasn’t a bad sort, really. Wilt pointed the gun at him, pressed the trigger, there was a soft buzz, and the pawn shop owner shrank to the size of a hamster or good sized rat, gave a little scream—emitted a wiff of smoke and dissolved.
Wilt and Elroy could only find a bit of ash—but that was all.
“Hey, this thing has possibilities.”
Next they went down to the liquor store and this time without fanfare or introduction shot the clerk, and after the poor devil shrank away and went up in a narrow ribbon of smoke, they had the entire store to themselves.
They loaded up with good eight-year old bourbon, cigars from the Dominican Republic, which were almost as good as Cuban, and six tins of cashews, some hot rod magazines for later that night (they both were into cars), and then took all the cash in the till.
“What in hell do you guys think you’re doing?”
They were leaving when they met a has-been pickpocket named Al from the neighborhood.
“Nobody is here, so we cleaned it out, what does it look like?”
And they walked off leaving Al sorting through an empty till, his priorities being different than their’s.
Within an hour they were on a full-fire drunk in the back of an abandoned warehouse. They had liquor, snacks, some magazines and the death ray, and all the time to figure out what to do with the latter. It didn’t get much better than this.
“It said we could rule the world with it.”
“Don’t believe everything you read.”
Elroy always seemed to talk down to Wilt, even though he was usually the one who came up with most of the ideas. After all, he’d been the one who actually thought of using the death ray.
They began arguing, drank more whisky and the discussion became increasingly acrimonious. Finally Wilt decided—and it doesn’t make any difference which one, but Wilt was the thinker —that he thought of a definitive use.
“Eliminate all the assholes. One by one.”
“Oh, just brilliant. And who will determine who are the assholes and who aren’t. You!?”
“Goddamned rights. Starting now.”
Tired of Elroy’s arrogance, he aimed and let go. He immediately went up in smoke, but not before uttering a tiny, pathetic little squeak while receding to nothing.
“Som’bitch asked for it.”
After all, Wilt knew he was at center a peaceful sort, but when one had a good, strong idea it was difficult to hear it belittled by someone who was little more than a professional street drunk.
It was night now, and there was no light in the warehouse, save for a snippet leaking in from a streetlamp outside. He had lots of whisky, and they had’nt even touched the cashews yet. He opened a can of nuts and picked at them, repeating,
“Som’bitch asked for it.”
Lighting up a cigar, he brooded and smoked. With life, it was always this way. First, you would have something, then it was gone. Wilt reflected back on the years and how these reverses always happened to him.
Lighting up and enjoying the first puffs of a Dominican stogie he reflected that after he winnowed down all the assholes with this death ray, his life’s work would be complete. This good work would refute everyone who predicted he’d amount of nothing, which was most people. Actually, thinking about it a bit, most of them had been nasty bits of work.
“For once,” he observed aloud, taking a hefty drink, “.. . we can do something constructive about all these walking garbage heads running society.”
Setting the bottle down, he drew a luxurious breath, then realized he was alone at the time of his greatest triumph. This gave him pause. He wouldn’t have zapped Elroy if he hadn’t of been so consistently negative—Elroy always was a mean drunk. This wasn’t Wilt’s style, who was known, on those occasions when he’d drank too much, as being a weeping, maudlin drunk. But better that than becoming, like Elroy, a public menace.
“Ho there! How’s it going, motherfuckers!”
Al the pickpocket, now very unsteady on his feet and cradling a half-gallon of whisky in the crook of an arm, stumbled into the lair, almost falling. He leaned against the wall and looked around.
“Where’s Little Mary Sunshine?”
“I zapped him, and if you give me any crap, I’ll zap you too.”
Wilt picked up the death ray, brandished it a bit, then cradled it back in his lap. Al allowed himself to sink down the wall until his buttocks met the cement; he unscrewed the top off the jug, drank and made an ugly face. Wilt noticed he’d taken the cheapest stuff, typical low-class rock-gut.
Al looked at the array of store booty between them.
Wilt would be damned if he’d share cashews or cigars with Al—if the drunken bastard wanted them, he should have helped himself. But Al fell into something of a stupor, and Wilt experienced a revelation while struggling to open a packet of pepperonis. He chewed thoughtfully, and realized that the death ray’s potential for rectifying so many problems gave him enormous optimism.
For instance, a piece of walking refuse like Al the pickpocket: Just the idea—the ability—that Wilt had the option to instantly eliminate someone like Al gave measureless relief without actually doing so. Perhaps he had been hasty to death-ray Elroy. He’d always have it in his power to get rid of Elroy, and this would make tolerating him easier.
The sense of this setup was beautiful as Wilt reflected on it: It was easier to tolerate something, in this case somebody, if you had the absolute option to simply fizzle them away to a bit of smoke? You could threaten it, of course—but the chances of anyone believing you would be slim to non-existent. No, he’d either do it or no; it was up to him. This knowledge—knowing he could follow through, was itself limitless relief from a life that, for Wilt, had been not good.
Wilt set aside the second pepperoni, and decided to celebrate this central truth of the death ray with a fresh Dominican cigar and a drink. Tomorrow life was going to take on an entirely more satisfactory direction. He tossed aside the half-smoked cigar, and opened the tiny, metal canister of a new one, for he had a dozen cigars. With a full supply of liquor and snacks to hold his stomach steady, everything had taken an upswing.
He looked smugly at Al now sleeping, and sniffed the unwrapped cigar. Beautiful--the simple luxury of getting into the aroma of fresh leaf—was there a better way to start life over? A good cigar and a death ray, and time to enjoy both.
ab C.B.
A "'Looking Back' Contemplation:
People live for a hell of a long time, in fact there are not many mammals who live as long as we do, nor that many birds or reptiles. Nowadays, it isn't all that strange to find one-hundred year olds around; that is five generations. Because of this--even without writing--oral tradition can pass along quite a lot of information. But with writing, it has gotten really "out there", has it not?
So just about any of us live long enough to see drastic changes--to become, in a sense, walking historians. When I first came to Alaska in 1963, Kodiak had not yet been erased by the '64 tidal wave, oil was not significant at all, and it was still a state that operated generally in the spring, summer and early fall, especially in the fishing industry. In a generation that was completely changed--20 years.
Twenty years is not a long time. And, I'm out to 67 years now! I have been blessed or cursed with a long, unusually detailed memory for places, people and events. Horrible things, years behind me, come back with such strength as to make me shake; friends decades gone seem like they only just recently sat across the room, called on the phone--wrote me a letter. Loves, hates and humiliations scramble around inside me never seeming to lose their original impact. I can't remember numbers or non-human facts long at all, but I can describe to you in detail V-J Day, in August 1945.
I knew this poor devil in San Francisco who was terribly addled. And in the late nights when we'd wander the streets, he would break into this hysterical giggle, toss his hand into the air--jabbing it in time to his words, "This is a Weird World, Warner." (iw, 9/05/08)
≈
Coming up soon, will be a subscription button where you will subscribe for a monthly non-fiction memory piece. Subscribers and subscribers alone will get monthly memory pieces not available on-line, and in fact not previously published.
I promise not to disappoint my subscribers, and indeed those who read my complimentary memory pieces in this SAMPLER.
So, this is all under construct, and I would appreciate a comment about what you think? When it comes to layout and such, I can always use good ideas/observations.
Thank you.
Irving Warner
irvingwarner@olympus.net
October, 2008
From "Fat Boy Memories"
vi.
It is 1960; I'm 19 years old and working as a substitute postman in Sacramento, California. I am following behind another fat person, Gordon, the Raunchy Postman who I will replace for his two week vacation.
He calls me "Fat Boy", and the postmen at downtown dispatch refer to him affectionately as "Fat Ass". Gordon sees grand humor in everything.
Gordon's decision on my informal designation remains one of the few times I felt no malice whatsoever in such a terrible act of nick-naming. Was it, that Gordon, being Fat Ass, rather had a right?
It is the third day of our teacher/student relationship.
Somewhat bored with the routine, Gordon follows one outlandishly coarse joke with another, yet interspersed with the necessary information so I can successfully survive his route. Occasionally, he'll fall back, and confide one scandalous fact or another about females along the route.
Then, we carry on – our uniforms now beginning to soak through with sweat as late morning temperatures begin to approach 100.
It is a downtown route—littered with old rooming houses, older Victorians divided into two and four-plexes, the streets thick with shade trees. A block or more away, is the State Capital building, which is on our route.
Gordon is shorter than I am, but about as heavy. It is only a year or so after my rejection from the draft, and I am heavier now. I don't know by how much. And, care less.
I do care that it takes so much energy to pack the weight around in this heat. Once again, Gordon stops, backs up a step—almost causing me to collide with him.
Another gross story or lunatic inflated fable about some female? But I'm wrong. He looks down at my feet, and using the next stop's mail as a pointer, follows my form from ground to head. And in a low voice offers,
"Fat Boy, let me tell you something about being a fat boy: You're everybody's friend and nobody's lover."
At that moment, I thought how unusual the word lover was coming from Gordon. In the previous days, he'd had at least two dozen other words that functioned approximately like it.
When the years had driven that day far behind me, I still remember his words, especially when rejected by a woman—or actually, not even in the "race" substantially enough to be rejected.
Yet I'll always be a good friend to women, sometimes married women, less to unattached women. The term is confidant. I’m sweet and understanding.
So that morning—-at age 19-- trailing behind possibly one of the most impeachable sources of human wisdom possible, I'd suddenly and undeniably been allowed the keenest preview of the nearly half-century before me.
I haven't been everybody's friend, by any stretch of the facts; likewise, I haven't been nobody's lover, but I'd done an admirable job of defining each.
I've decided on Gordon's words for my epitaph, if I have one.
#
September, 2008
“Burning of the ‘Harry B’ ”
Irving Warner
The power scow "Harry B" caught fire in the early morning. The day was fair and seas calm but after the fire got into the engine room there wasn't a chance of saving it.
Boats worked in close, fighting the growing fire with desultory sprays of water. Soon there were several other fishing boats, then the big sea-going tug "Kodiak King". From my vantage point a half mile off, the flames grew a rich orange and reached towards the sky in increasingly chaotic patterns--wisps of black smoke peeling from the tops of them.
The boats moved further off.
There was considerable fuel oil on board the "Harry B" that morning, for it was headed north with supplies for the herring fleet in Togiak. That's what some said--maybe it was the south end of Kodiak Island, but in the end it was the same fire. Hot, sure and insistent.
The tug prodded the old wooden scow through the Woody Island Passage--coming within a few hundred yards of the old FAA dock, eventually grounding it on a beach southeast of there. Then it pulled away and watched it burn.
Through the day the flames ate down through its old wooden beams and planks finally meeting the water. Now, joining the black smoke, billowing crests of white steam mixed in. From two miles off the conflagration was seen by the entire town, including the Coast Guard Base. Aircraft passing overhead dipped their wings a bit for a better view.
It was an old boat and a done boat, and it was ending its long Alaskan life by fire. Not that unusual of a story.
That night the sounds of increasing weather woke me. Though the day had been clear, now the sky had become a solid mass of fat ebony clouds. The wind had come up from the southwest. Looking out my window, what I saw made me draw back.
Across the Woody Island passage, the night sky around the "Harry B" alternated between a dull, vague crimson--only to be whipped abruptly by the wind into a bright, irascible red. The smoke was now black as the undersides of the clouds, and it drifted upwards in giant combs, sooting up the bellies of passing clouds.
I watched as the wind had its way with the "Harry B" --at its peak the glow illuminated the old FAA dock against the night sky, and with the particularly strong gusts, the fire's anger was reflected from the passing clouds.
Then it occurred to me that it was no ordinary passing I was watching.
This boat, the "Harry B", had been burning for 21 hours but it hadn't died yet. Down in its incinerating planks were the spirits of countless storms, thousands of salmon deliveries, and the stories and words of innumerable men and women who'd crossed her decks. Most of the pre-statehood Alaska it knew was gone, and the spirit of that old scow was making as strong and memorable a farewell as possible.
The wind, which had battered the "Harry B" for decades, now held the old scow in a weathered fist and with the help of the fire they were closing it down.
Towards dawn, fatigue forced me to bed, and as I fell asleep it struck me that the "Harry B's" fate could very well serve as an emblem of Alaska, its fisheries and the fate which too often all of us experience. The big years; the great seasons, the years when it falls off.
In a fishing community, the winds, clouds and years all join together to usher its people through the decades--the countless seasons, the many plans and hopes fishing people place on the harvests from the sea.
For the "Harry B" these ended by fire that day and night. Its passing was seen by all of us here, and for the coming days, there was a persistent song of farewell in the air.
#
iw
