Tales of Clark Seville When He Was a Bear, by Lance Ash
©2023, Lance Ash, Space Limited Accomplishments
Notebook Three: Supplementary Material, part one
Bookshop Apprentice Reluction in a Chromium State
To be apprenticed to a bookseller in those days was to be handed the key to a lifetime of security. One would always be sure of one’s next meal and, more importantly, one could be certain of the distinction between “would” and “could.” I, who worked at the shoe store across the street from the bookshop, should have been the one forever turning that key, but, much as I loved books and loved reading, was too taken in by Heavy Metal to make the necessary adjustments to my look and my attitude. It was some other guy who got the gig.
Yet, much as I disliked the shoe store, the other guy, about the same age as I, didn’t seem to like the bookshop or his place there. One day as I was making my way around the mall looking for a “shelf stretcher,” I happened to fall into a conversation with the other guy.
“So you like Heavy Metal too,” he observed.
“Yes, but…” I silently indicated his appearance, which was firmly conformist to the bookshop ideal.
“Oh, I am in the Iron Maiden camp,” he explained. “While you, I assume,” he smiled as he surveyed my person from head to foot, “Are on the Mötley Crüe side of the spectrum?” He looked back up at my eyes for confirmation.
“We cater to the West Coast motorcycle enthusiast demographic,” I retorted, but only feebly, for everyone knew that our real specialty was the dyeing of satin slip-ons to match women’s special occasion dress. Of course, I was never allowed near the dyeing station, but then why did I not just push the other guy into the fountain and walk away from all of it? Because none of the really cool people would hire me at a place with some definite connection to the Heavy Metal lifestyle. I didn’t have the guts to get a tattoo.
More Like a Piano than a Sax
For some reason I decided I wanted to play the saxophone. This was sixth grade. The school band director, Mr. Cox, agreed to let me join the band and I would somehow “pick it up” as we went along. I attended one rehearsal and realized I was in over my head like a sixth grader with an unflattering haircut. Maybe I went to two sessions, I don’t know. It couldn’t have been any more than that. I left the rented saxophone on the bus on the way home one day and my parents threw a fit. We had to drive over to Preacher Palmer’s church, where he parked the bus after school, and retrieve the damn thing just before dark. All this while fitting in an average of four hours of television every day. I quit the band shortly thereafter.
I had played piano as well. What was it that enabled my cousin Lynette to become a fairly proficient piano player while I remained mired in the-carefully-deliberate-placement-of-the-fingers state? I told my mother I wanted to learn to play “The Entertainer,” the theme song to the movie, The Sting. Well, you can’t just learn to play one song; you have to learn the piano. This lasted much longer than the saxophone misadventure. The piano was in the basement of the three-story house we lived in three years before the house of the saxophone days. My mother would sit beside me and make me practice, each of us crying and howling at the madness; me at the pain being inflicted on me; she at having to inflict it.
I don’t know what the difference was, but I bought a guitar with money I earned bagging groceries when I was sixteen and taught myself to play. I’ve never stopped playing. Sometimes I wish I’d never stopped playing the piano or the sax, but I’ve managed to write and record over twenty albums’ worth of guitar music over the years, so I guess everything worked out OK. I just remember that ride in the car to get the saxophone from the bus before something happened to it. It was just like the time when I was six years old and left my coat at school. We had to go get it in the dark of night before “some janitor takes it and gives it to his little boy.”
Extra: During the piano days we saw Liberace playing on some TV show and my mother observed: “He’s a multi-millionaire because he practiced playing the piano so much.”
Reversal in Hawaii
My father and I missed the first one or two seasons of Magnum P.I, but after that we were thoroughly devoted. Strange to think that it was The Simpsons, more than anything else, that destroyed the show. Well, what really destroyed it, or its legacy, anyway, was the last season with its silly “Higgins is Robin Masters, but, wait, no he isn’t” crap. And Magnum goes back in the Navy for fun. Simon and Simon was given the shot it needed to survive by being rescheduled just before Magnum, but I think my father and I started watching Magnum because it came on after Simon and Simon. Just thinking about it, writing the names down, makes me think of all that, the fun of watching those shows. Two solid hours of manly entertainment. The reason I think we were into Simon and Simon first is because I remember the original theme song from the first season, and the original cast, when they worked for that woman. Was she their mother? They don’t make shows like that anymore.
Well, maybe they do. Hawaii’s on fire now and The Epoch Times is telling us that climate experts are pooh-poohing “alarmist weather stories.” Good thing Christian Republicans are allied with shadowy Chinese billionaire adherents to Falun Gong.
However, the decline in Magnum’s fortunes must have started during my high school days, which preceded The Simpsons’ 1989 debut. I remember a kid asking “Doesn’t anybody watch Magnum anymore?” in response to the rest of us talking about some other show. (one of the first songs I ever wrote used his words as a starting point) He was the kid who bit my ear years earlier and, I believe, left a knot in it. One day I’m going to bite his ear or get one of my associates to do it for me.
Should I Get a Tattoo to Mark My Entry into the New Phase?
This is always a difficult question to answer. Although the entry into a new phase is an extremely important occasion and deserves acknowledgement, we also must acknowledge that one is always entering a new phase. Some people are so measured and even-keeled (stodgy) that their new phases are rare, sometimes once-in-a-lifetime events that shake them down to the core, encouraging them to become missionaries or send them to the gallows. For others, however, those who, like me, are sensitive enough to feel the daily, sometimes hourly, changes that we recognize make us, essentially, a subtly different person from the one we were yesterday, the entry into a new phase, while just as emotionally jolting –sometimes harrowing– happens so frequently that one wonders if such a radical (and expensive) act of alteration as a tattoo is really necessary. Most of the time, a mere notation in one’s diary suffices. Or a badge. I’ve got a homemade badge of Miles Davis made with a safety pin that I used to wear as a symbol of some bright new outlook or other. Whenever I come across it in my desk full of junk I think, Yes! Yes! A tattoo, especially one done professionally, is usually superfluous.
However, even such mercurial (some might say flighty!) folk as I are sometimes thrown so violently against the closed door of reality–or through the open door of fantasy– that a momentous turning point cannot be denied having been reached. One might think that such a turning point would mark itself in our minds, its memory and emotional aftershocks enough to remind us forever of its implications and bright new conceptual promise, but one wouldn’t be counting on the caprice of daily life. One good stubbed toe or the discovery of an older diary entry written with embarrassingly juvenile enthusiasm can be enough to overshadow even the birth of a child. So, tattoo? I say, if you have the money, do it. But no commonplace symbology.
How Quickly Will I Forget the New Phase or Lose the Feeling?
This can often be the most challenging question to answer, not just because I, as an outsider, don’t know precisely what you’re talking about, but also because I don’t want to answer with the kind of brutal honesty that has become one of my hallmarks. (So many hallmarks) You see, I don’t want to discourage you by telling you the truth. If you knew that hard evidence has shown that you will forget all about the “new phase” within an average of two days and/or “lose the feeling” even sooner than that, you might despair of ever making that great leap forward, attaining enlightenment, turning over a new leaf, or starting work on your life’s project. In your despair you might do something foolish like get into a fight with a loved one or, god forbid, indulge in drug-taking, hoping to find your lost inspiration there.
Don’t take drugs; wait and use them once you have established a routine. The disruption to your routine and fumbling back to it after a binge can be most beneficial to your work. But you must establish a routine first. And this is also very important: the new phase must be accompanied by a new routine, a new method; otherwise, it’s just a bright idea that dims with the dawning of yet another day.
You talk of “the feeling.” “The Feeling” is just that: a feeling. Emotions come and go. If you want the exact or nearly exact feeling on a regular basis, that’s what the drugs are for. But don’t depend on a feeling to feel good. Try depending on a concept. Often a symbol can help. Something you draw habitually in the margins of your new phase plans. Like a question mark.
In conclusion, all I can say is that your new phase is something only you understand and, without doing something about it, no one else ever will.
Physician’s Request
Going back a bit, paying heed to the words in the title, understanding that we are now, once again, dealing with Clark Seville when he was a bear, and also understanding that, as this is part of the supplementary material, we will not be limiting ourselves to Seville and his doings, nor indeed to anyone’s doings or anything done, we now join Clark Seville (when he was a bear) and his physician already in progress.
“Progress, Agent Seville,” Dr. Fudgeweight began, circling the examination table as if appraising a piece of sculpture, “Can be measured against a variety of benchmarks. Your integration into ‘human’ society, for example–”
“I think I’ve more than proven my abilities in that area,” Seville interjected. He held out one of his human hands and touched each fingertip to his thumb in turns as if demonstrating some uniquely societal trait.
“Yes, yes,” Dr. Fudgeweight nodded, smiling. He kept his eyes on the tiled floor for a good while, still smiling, before looking back at his patient. “You’re quite eager to get this all over with, aren’t you?” he asked.
The right corner of Clark Seville’s mouth twitched slightly. He considered only briefly before responding.
“Well, yes, of course; I’m eager to get on with my duties for the Suggestible Trapezoid, to be made use of to the fullest of my potential.”
“I need something from you,” Dr. Fudgeweight told Seville.
“Yes?”
“I need a stool sample.”
“OK,” Seville agreed without too much hesitation.
“But I need it after you’ve consumed a rather specific meal.” The doctor handed Seville a piece of paper containing a list of foods. “Give your body twelve hours to digest this.”
“At least he doesn’t want me to shit in the woods,” thought Seville.
The Final Concessions to their Country Rock Origins Were Swept Aside
With the release of their 1984 album, Post-Disco Dilemma, the Eagles untethered themselves of all lingering country elements and made the dance record that many observant critics had known they had it in them to make. Bassist Oakley Burr remembered, “Cocaine is a great motivator to shake your booty.” The first single from the record, “I Am a Testifying Robot,” released in time to see Ronald Reagan voted into office for a second term, preceded the rest of the collection by a month. “It’s always good to have your album come out around Christmas,” Don Henley advised at the time. “Recorded sound makes a great gift for a loved one.”
The drummer/singer’s words were soon eaten, however, for Post-Disco Dilemma went nowhere. Perhaps it was his own inability to play anything other than the simplest of Nashville foot-stompers on his studio trap set that led to the decision to use the same proto-Rob Zombie drum machine rhythm on every one of the album’s eleven tracks. “We thought it would lend the whole thing a rock opera unity,” perpetually doped-up accordionist Timothy Felder Frey explained to the recently defeated Walter Mondale in a contemporary exchange. What the former ambassador to Japan said in response is, unfortunately, unknown.
All of this is moot, however, for the fiasco was quickly forgotten. The Ziggy revival was just getting started; no one had time to worry about the fortunes of some cynical seventies songsters, nor wallow in their pitiable portion of pain. The little bald loser comic strip character was being critically re-evaluated in the light of his new-found status as a symbol of rapprochement between the cold war antagonists, the USA and the Soviet Union. “Sometimes the world looks better when seen through an aquarium,” Ziggy himself noted, his little goldfish hiding in a little plastic skull. What were the marketing phenomenon’s thoughts on the Eagles’ legacy? 47,000 Ziggy strips contain no hint of an answer.
Perturbation Follows Hourly
What perturbed Clark Seville? Well, Post-Disco Dilemma, for one thing.
“The Eagles?” he demanded of some internal audience. “Produced by Ted Templeman?”
But really he knew little of such things. His taste in music, if he had any interest at all, ran more to something like Shostakovich.
“My mother used to use the word ‘perturbed’ a lot,” Seville thought as he took up position on the hill overlooking the facility. He would wait here by the base of this tree until nightfall. “She usually used it to describe her feelings about her interactions with someone she met.” Seville checked his watch. “People were always getting her perturbed.”
Just as the sun was beginning to set behind the surrounding mountains the facility below took on new life. Evidently most of the work done there was done during the night shift. For each car that left through the checkpoint out front, another three entered by the same way. Seville noted a separate entrance for transfer trucks on the adjacent side of the facility lot.
“I keep calling it the ‘facility,’” Seville told himself. “That perturbs me.” He slid down the hill on the back of his coat as darkness took the valley. As he broke the neck of a guard in the booth at the checkpoint, he thought, “The word is clearly related to disturbed, but what then does the root ‘turb’ mean?”
He ran toward the enormous building, staying well within the shadows, dragging the guard’s lifeless body behind him.
“I keep thinking ‘petard,’” he thought, “As in ‘hoisted on his own petard.’ Or is that ‘by his own petard?’ Leotard? Leopard? Leo purred?”
No Record of Any Odor
The old man returned carrying a ledger the size of a pizza box. His fingers were clamped inside the book so that when he hefted it up on the counter he could open it to the exact page needed.
“No record of any odor,” he announced before the two halves of the ledger were fully apart. He turned the book slightly so that Clark Seville could see the lines of handwritten entries down which the old man’s fingers traced the days.
Seville considered.
“What about aromas?” he tried again.
The old man shook his head.
“Nor aromas either.”
“Stink?”
The old man sighed as he turned the book back towards himself. He started at the top of the page once more and moved down line by line.
“No record of any stink, smell, miasma, bouquet, fragrance, scent, aroma, or odor,” he reiterated, concluding by turning the ledger in its entirety over to the bear filling his window.
Seville sighed this time. His brows knitted together like David Lee Roth studying a Baptist hymnal. In fact, now that I’ve imagined such a thing, it occurs to me that there has been a distinct facial similarity between Roth and Seville this whole time. Let’s make that a recurring image; Clark Seville looks like David Lee Roth, but as a bear.
So, again, Seville sighed. He flipped back and forth a page of two before the old man retrieved the book.
“That’s it,” declared the old man, taking the ledger from Seville’s hands. “Only authorized to see those dates. But I can tell you from personal familiarity with the records, only the mightiest of rancidities would have been documented.”
“But the Trapezoid documents everything,” Seville countered.
“I’m the one behind the counter,” answered the old man, “I should know.” The warren behind him was a trove of books and filing implements.
Interview Yourself and Include that Interview with the Publicity Materials
“How do you feel about the new Rolling Stones album coming out next month?”
“Mmm… excited, I guess, but sad too. This is, most likely, the last album they’ll ever do.”
“Were the Stones a big influence on you?”
“Yeah. Mick was especially a big influence–his commitment to staying in shape. I wish I could stay that thin.”
“He turned eighty this year. What did you feel about that?”
“A little sad because it’s almost over. Even he can’t hold out forever. I just found out that the man who founded the private Christian school that I went to died almost two years ago. He was in his late nineties.”
“Didn’t you hate him?’
“I didn’t hate him when I went to that school, but I came to hate it and all that it stood for, and, by extension, I came to hate him.”
“How many enemies do you still have out there?”
“I don’t know; maybe a half-dozen people. Maybe ten. I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Do you feel that such talk detracts from your public image?”
“What public image?”
“Well, you are including this interview with the ‘publicity materials.’”
“What publicity materials?”
“The ones for your new project.”
Apparition Apart as My Professionalism Grows
“Now, just want do you mean by ‘apparition apart?’”
“Aside from the obvious alliteration, alligator, I mean that I am, on the one hand, surrounded by apparitions, such as yourself, but, on the other, ‘apart’ from them; that is to say that I don’t really see them, at least not clearly enough to confuse them for real, certainly not enough to be frightened by them.”
With this question I concluded my self-interview. Of course, it would only make sense to those familiar with my work, but I wanted to maintain my cult status. Part of my appeal, after all, was the long and complicated history of my development as an artist, with the many twists and turns and tangents my work had taken. The true fans prided themselves on their understanding of references reaching back through years, sometime decades. Who was Custer Underfund? What is the difference between Dr. Fungrous and Dr. Fungroid? Is the Creatures Collade the same as the Executive Fabricade?
Even that last one was hard enough for me to answer. Originally the Creatures Collade was some sort of street theater puppet troupe. Lately, however, it had come to mean the shadowy group at the summit of the Suggestible Trapezoid (perhaps the missing pyramid? –theoretical, obviously.)
I believe it is the Creatures Collade that demands a growing professionalism from me, even as I eschew the effort required to attain and maintain actual professional status. As I said, it is the cult status that means so much to me. Put it this way; when you’re a professional, you know who your audience is. You can see them. You (have to) interact with them. But when you’re at the center of a cult of selective appeal, you have no idea who “those wonderful people out there in the dark” are. Really, however, I think what we mean by professionalism is a more advanced, refined technique. A maturity both in execution and in conceptual acceptance.
College Office Building After Hours, Interior Lit
“Is it cheaper to leave the lights on?” wondered Clark Seville as he studied the building from the grounds below. The sun had long since gone down. A few people were walking about, but none close to where he stood. With only minor difficulty, caused by his voluminous coat, the big bear clambered up a tree whose branches extended to the side of the building. Seville straddled a branch until he was near enough to one of the window ledges to jump. After that it wasn’t too long before he was making his way into the building through a disabled vent.
Inside the only sounds were the hum of the vending machines and the idling of computers and a fan or two on some of the desks.
“Why are the lights on?” Seville wondered again.
As he walked around, he felt a mysterious peace come over him. Everything was so quiet and empty. The signs of human presence were all about, but no actual people. Seville didn’t touch anything. He passed by desks and looked at the photographs and homely touches their occupants had left behind. People’s children, he supposed. Plants. Sometimes the containers for the plants were just as beautiful and pleasing. He did reach out and let a leaf brush his hand as he walked past.
He was looking for something, but didn’t know what it was yet. This was usually the situation. All of Seville’s life was like a subjective scavenger hunt. “Bring back something that reminds you of rain.” Old-fashioned mainframe computers lined the back wall. They might be vending machines themselves. Vending machines for an alien species.
“I don’t fight enough monsters,” Seville mused as he pocketed a wind-up toy. A step or two later he decided against taking it and put it on a different desk. “Might start a fight vicariously,” he thought.
Outside it started to rain. The bear seriously considered staying the night.
Bicycally We All Must Balance on Two Wheels
During his visit to Berlin, Clark Seville learned to ride a bicycle.
“Hier in Deutschland sagen wir Fahrrad,” laughed Konrad, Seville’s companion during his time there.
“I’m going to need a hat,” Seville realized as he wobbled about the slaughterhouse courtyard on his bike.
“Hut,” corrected Konrad.
“I remember there was a mural of a man wearing a hat and a long coat riding a bicycle on the side of a building in the town where I was born,” Seville said, bringing himself to a stop as he concluded.
“Yellow Submarine,” Konrad decided.
“I wonder what that was all about.” Seville’s gaze turned inward, looking back through dozens of years.
“Magst du Wurst?” asked the German as an animal screamed nearby.
“Konrad, are there many murals in Berlin?” asked Seville, taking to pedalling again.
“Graffiti, insbesondere in öffentlichen Toiletten, sind ein bemerkenswerter Teil unserer Bürgerkunst.”
Seville braked hard in the dark entrance to the shed forming one side of the courtyard.
“Get your bike,” he enthused, turning his head, “And we’ll go exploring.”
“Ich muss ablehnen,” Konrad explained with a smile. “Heute ist Sonntag, der, wenn nicht wie in der Vergangenheit, als Tag für den christlichen Gottesdienst gilt, so doch als Familientag gilt, und deshalb sind alle Geschäfte geschlossen und wir müssen ruhig sein.”
“What about these animals?” Seville demanded, throwing out a hand.
“Sie rechnen nur mit einem arbeitsreichen Morgen,” Konrad answered, knowing that a hat would not suffice and yet no helmet would fit.
Bluto’s Retch
“Where does the name ‘Bluto’ come from?” asked Clark Seville. He and the concordant desperado sat on high chairs amid the clutter of the boxes spilled.
“I am of the opinion it is Germanic in origin,” the big cat-man replied. I say, “cat-man,” and it is true: in his whiskers there was something cat-like about him. But really he was more of a bull. The bull and bear imagery of the stock market was too much for the showcase photographer, however, what with so much of value strewn about. Thus, some hefty cat we see.
“Does it have something to do with this Bluto of the old Popeye cartoons?” Seville wanted answers.
“Everyone says that,” Bluto the bearcat-man spoke, “And yet I know nothing of such cartoons.”
“Nor I,” Seville agreed in a small voice. His bib was tied high about his neck. He had spilled a small amount of mashed peas on the bib, but otherwise was happily clean.
Bluto, on the other hand, had made quite the mess. His spaghetti sauce covered the high chair tray as well as his face around his mouth. He now gnawed his cookie indifferently. Should he throw it on the floor?
“Popeye,” Seville repeated dreamily. His own cookie he held aloft untouched, forgotten. He followed the movements of the photographer’s assistant. In the right light, her dress was transparent. Each half of her buttocks jiggled independently with each step she took among the debris.
Suddenly Bluto retched,.
“Heather!” yelled the photographer.
“Messy Bluto,” Linda commented with the universal warmth of woman.
Would You Like to Purchase an Egg?
The woman attending the display of produce approached Clark Seville.
“Would you like to purchase anything, sir?” she asked.
Seville pursed what lips he had.
“Thinking about an egg,” he replied.
“Yes sir,” the woman, wearing a long apron over her black bell-bottom slacks and black turtleneck pullover, nodded in agreement. “We have a wide assortment. Were you looking for a common chicken egg? Or perhaps something by a duck?”
“Mmm, do you have anything larger?” asked Seville. “What are those big ones there at the top?”
“Those are goose eggs,” the woman explained. “Very good for boiling–”
“Boiling?” Seville repeated, taken aback. “No, no, I need something that will hatch.”
The woman gaped at Seville, then laughed modestly.
“Oh, sir, these eggs are all for eating.”
“Eating?” rumbled Seville as the woman continued to talk.
“If you want hatching eggs, you need to see my husband down there.” She pointed towards the next tent.
Seville looked back and forth uncertainly. Encouraged by the woman’s smile and gestures, he moved along until he met her counterpart, a man in grubby attire who looked at Seville with curiosity.
“An egg?” Seville wondered.
The man nodded and got into place behind the tilted racks.
“See anything you like?” he asked.
“What do these hatch into?” Seville asked, pointing.
“Cantaloupe,” came the reply. “So you’ll have to pay for a church wedding.”
Lively Beans, Coffee and Teens
Costumed characters representing different varieties of edible seeds moved among the crowd. Clark Seville, nearly hallucinatory from lack of sleep, ignored them and made his way to the counter.
“Extra large coffee, please,” he told the youth on duty.
“Dark roast?” the young man asked.
Seville hesitated only a moment.
“Sure.”
“Room for cream?”
Again Seville hesitated, this time longer.
“Room for ice,” he decided.
“Ahh,” the young man nodded in comprehension
While Seville waited for his order to be filled, a smiling lima bean bumped into him from behind.
“Sorry, old man,” the inhabitant of the bean apologized with either ironic indifference or indifferent irony; it was hard to tell in that day and age.
“Not old or a man,” Seville growled, holding himself back from violent recompense out of habit, but only just.
“Kids,” the youth behind the counter made comment, passing Seville his coffee. As Seville counted out his payment, he wondered at the “kids” comment.
“How old are you, then?” he asked.
“Twenty-one,” came the answer. “Hey, has anyone ever told you you look like Till Lindemann?”
Seville’s eyes brightened.
“I’ve been told I look like David Lee Roth, but… where’s the ice?”
The twenty-one-year-old pointed at the dispenser.
This time a pinto bean bumped into Seville. Some of his coffee spilled onto his very human hand. Stifling a cry of pain, Seville cursed in German.
Her Slender Frame Laboring Under the Weight of Her Giant Bosom
“When Agent Seville arrives, I think it will be but a moment’s work for Belinda to distract him sufficiently for us to relieve him of the secret plans. Ah ha ha ha ha ha,” Stefaan Proviso laughed wickedly in conclusion, rubbing his hands together in an emotive pantomime of applying lotion to them.
“I think you will discover that Clark Seville isn’t quite so easily distracted from his appointed tasks” retorted Bertrand Quinn, the man in the bin.
Stefaan Proviso turned with a sneer towards Quinn.
“Nonsense!” he snorted. “Why, even I, with my academy-trained mind,” here he looked at Belinda, “Can barely keep my eyes from this young woman’s pulchritudinous assets!”
Belinda leaned against the old-fashioned television set and thumbed through an ancient issue of TV Guide as she tried to decide if her bubble gum was ready to be spat out.
A floorboard in the next room warned them with its tell-tale squeak that the bear had arrived.
“We’ve been waiting for you, Seville!” Proviso called delightedly.
The door to the inner room was flung open, but the first thing through it was not Agent Seville, but an electric lamp torn from its wall socket. Belinda jumped back in surprise, her treacherous rack bouncing provocatively beneath the t-shirt that served only to augment its contents’ volume and heft. The lamp, smashed into pieces against the far wall, was followed hard on by Clark Seville, stalking like an upright bus into the room. He gripped a fat briefcase containing the secret plans in his left hand.
“Proviso,” he growled. Noting the diminutive man in the waste basket, he added, “Quinn,” contemptuously. “Where is my lunch?”
“Girl!” Proviso hissed, glancing at Belinda. He shook his shoulders in indication of her job. But even had the young woman wits enough to shake her stuff in the face of this monstrous intrusion, such action would have meant nothing to Clark Seville, now hellbent on tearing the room apart.
A Fleeting Cowboy Turban
This is the real Old West, thought Clark Seville, bounding down the hillside on the back of a domesticated breed of rhinoceros. He felt a rush of adrenaline as he jerked at the reins and brought his mount to a stop just before the two splashed into the river. Seville patted the rhino’s neck and looked about at the wildflower-covered valley floor.
Now I’m a cowboy, he thought. He wore motorcycle boots and a turban made of the French flag. The rhino wanted to drink, so Seville dropped from his improvised saddle and allowed the beast to do so while he scoured the landscape with the binoculars.
This would be a good place for a picnic, Seville realized. He wished he had brought along the full picnic rig; red and white checkered blanket, old-fashioned thermos full of lemonade, and a wicker basket with a hinged lid full of sandwiches, pickles, potato salad, and pie. And then a nap, he added dreamily, his thoughts reaching back to some memory from his days as a cub.
A tumble of rocks from the crest of the dale alerted Seville to the presence of his pursuers.
They found me faster than expected. He had barely formulated the words in his head before he glimpsed a rifle barrel and a pair of sunglasses. He swatted the animal’s rump to send it on its way and dove into the river. The first cracks of the half dozen rifles followed him. His turban spiralled out behind him as he swam. Would the tri-color give his pursuers pause? He had heard one of them say “merde” during last week’s tussle. Too bad about the rhino. It was probably already dead.
Seville tried surfacing, but the rifles sent him under again, this time bare-headed. He hadn’t had time to check on his steed. He wouldn’t see the rhino again until it nuzzled at his unconscious form a mile down river, just like the horse in that Lord of the Rings movie. Viggo Mortensen was a cowboy.
If You Went by a Nickname that was an Adjective Ending in “y,” What Would it Be?
This question, like so many of the questions in the survey, is trickily worded. Note that it doesn’t ask, “What would you want it to be,” but rather, “What would it be,” thus calling for one’s analysis of one’s real life situation. For example, I might want to be called “Lucky,” but I know no one would ever think to do so. Inversely, there are those who might be inclined to call me “Stinky,” but an honest appraisal of the situation would admit that I would never allow such a thing to happen. Most likely, if I had a nickname (ending in ‘y’) imposed on me and actually went along with it, that nickname would be, “Squinty.” I thought about “Nearly,” but that’s an adverb, not an adjective.
Now, if we read the question as we would like to read it, and respond with our secret desires openly revealed, as we do secretly desire to reveal such secrets, I’d have to say my nickname in such a situation would be… “Grouchy.” When you sit down to come up with an adjective ending in ‘y,’ you think it’s going to be easy, but it isn’t. You’ve got the Seven Dwarves, but outside of “Doc,” they all have attributes that I don’t find very appealing. I remember reading a book for teens (was it Freckle Juice?) when I was in my pre-teen years about a girl who had some specific nickname in mind that she wanted to be called by and thinking, “You can’t choose your own nickname; it has to be bestowed upon you by your circle of friends.” I never had a “nickname.” I’ve had certain people want to address me in a certain way, but none of those appellations ever caught on with a wider set. “Sandy” is pretty good. It’s neutral, it’s seventies, it’s applicable to either gender. “Woody.” “Rocky.” Anything earthy. Hey, “Earthy!”
Four Angular Silhouettes Dancing
At first, I guess because I’d recently been listening to the Cars’ Panorama, I thought the shapes were like unto the shadows behind the pictures of Ric Ocasek and crew on the album cover, but, as I settled into the giant bean bag and let my eyes relax their focus, I began to see them differently. I now saw that there were four of them, not five as with the number of Cars members. Could it be some other band, like Cheap Trick, I wondered? It was at a time like this that I wished for the wise counsel of a Dr. Johnny Fever or a Super Hans, but they were just fictional TV characters. William Frawley and Steve Marriott were real, if dead.
Old Wretched Beguilement had me in its grip once again. I had to wait for the paint to dry. It wouldn’t take long, I knew from experience, but the time would have to be filled with something and this time, I was determined, it mustn’t be a fruitless nostalgia trip. My attention at this point was so weakened by sleepiness that I had either lost the silhouettes or, if I did find them, couldn’t make out if they were on the ceiling or on the opposite wall. Try translating all this into German, I laughed in a semi-conscious state.
One of the silhouettes had now made itself known as the leader. It had a tall, aristocratic bearing and probably went by the name “Dan,” a name which in ordinary circumstances would carry no weight, but which now seemed perfectly appropriate. The others, gradually becoming more resentful of Dan’s celebrity and nuance, would coalesce into a single shape that reminded me of a Japanese ideogram, probably one meaning “sleep.”
Heavy Nativity Barber
“Next!” the barber called. His chair had just been quitted by an alligator-like biped in astrojeans and a t-shirt with the slogan “Wax Wickedness” on it. At least, Clark Seville assumed it was a slogan. As he took his place as the barber’s next customer, he wondered aloud,
“What does ‘Wax Wickedness’ mean?”
“I think it’s a band,” the barber replied, throwing a sheet around Seville with the same practiced movements that one envies and puzzles over in a college kid working at a pizzeria, tossing the dough into the air.
Seville nodded. He watched the alligator-person exit the shop and pass by the front window on his way to a mollusk-shaped spaceship, no doubt. A band, eh? Well, well…
“You get a lot of off-worlders in here?” he asked.
“Well,” drawled the barber, “We don’t like to use that term around here–”
“Sorry,” Seville was quick to interject.
“--but, yes, not a lot of them– system-farers, we usually say–but, yes, a few.” The barber examined Seville’s head a moment, then proceeded to inquire what Seville wanted done to it.
“I need the sides shaved,” Seville told him.
The barber kept quiet after that, giving Seville opportunity to wonder about the alligator-like “system-farer” and his favorite band. It wasn’t until the barber had completed his work and handed him a mirror to inspect the damage that he thought to wonder how much hair could there really have been on the chair’s previous occupant.
Mule Feeder Rotary
The organization started small, just a half-dozen persons of rural derivation who enjoyed each other’s company and casual talk about acreage and fences. After the Muffardins began attending the monthly gatherings, however, the couple’s energy and purposeful nature had the effect of slowly formalizing the group and codifying its structure. Perhaps it was the establishment of a definite order as to who brought the dessert each time that marked the first step on the path towards empire.
By the time that Clark Seville began infiltrating the periphery of the Mule Feeder Rotary, the name the organization had chosen for itself one emotional New Year’s Eve, it had grown to encompass a five-county area and inspire the founding of competing associations in other parts of the state. But as Seville soon learned, it was the Mule Feeder Rotary that the smart farming families aspired to join. There were so many benefits to membership and so much prestige in belonging.
“Plus it gives people something to do,” Aaron Mone told Seville as they stood guard with a couple of other men outside the Rotary Hall. As auxiliary pledges, they served their time in this capacity, waiting for full acceptance.
“What do you produce?” Boop Karress asked Seville.
“Squash,” Seville replied, nodding in humble acknowledgement of his crop’s inferiority as he had been instructed.
Before Boop could question further as to varieties and scale of operation, headlights at the end of the driveway foretold the arrival of the doughnuts.
“This is fun,” one of the youngsters enthused, his shotgun open at the breach in the crook of his arm. Boxes of doughnuts and cups of coffee were passed around in the darkness. A roar of laughter from inside the hall followed the young man’s words.
“Just think what they’re having in there,” Aaron wondered.
“Carrot cake,” Boop suggested after a moment of fantasy.
Flash Over Flag
“The intended prematuration has been falsified too many times to stand as some random aberration,” clucked the trucker-pitted Puck. His hat, a relic from a relinquished reliquary relegated to the real “regatta de blanc,” fell off at this point, revealing not the tousled blond locks of yesteryear, but a fringe of white surrounding an injudiciously sun-tanned dome.
“Your hat,” Harold hissed, partially rising from his tortoise to retrieve the fallen headwear from the dusty earth.
“Leave it,” lordly Puck urged, dismissing such trifles like a trilogy of transvestism triumphant, but true. The trifle is plural, while what’s bridal is blue.
“Now, if we might return to the matter at hand,” Pony-faced Puck-in-Boots continued, as Harold resettled himself on his saddle-backed saurian, “I foresee a time when this maturity we hinted at earlier by way of its sallow antithesis will mean essentially the same thing as before, only without the unforeseen smack in the head.” He acted out his words as he spoke them, but with a force and a violence amplified by the thrill of speaking before this gathering of avid listeners. He actually punched his own head. Some laughed, but it hurt more than they realized.
“A hat would have spared him the brunt of his own assault,” Harold later told Marko, his breakfast companion of the next morning.
“Hat,” Marko repeated, watery oatmeal clinging in drops to the underside of his out-thrust lower lip.
“The Quaker Oats man wore a hat,” one of the Hensonite puppets on the portable TV commented, black and white glorious as those secret attempts at UHF on late nights long ago.
“Hat,” Marko acknowledged Wilson’s commentary. The antenna was an unravelled coat hanger jammed into the hollow, ragged end of the broken original. Harold watched an oat-laden droplet fall, but made no move to impede its table-ward topple.
Roughly Buggered
Clark Seville had seen some horrible things during his time with the Suggestible Trapezoid, but one of the worst was the sexual exploitation and assault of the homemade stuffed panda bear doll. Surely, he hadn’t actually seen the deed happen, but the knowledge alone had sent him into a manic episode, sequestering himself in a tumble dryer at the Holiday Inn on Autumn Turnpike with only a flashlight and a handful of pages torn from a 1977 issue of Woman’s Day to force solace onto his imagination.
“What became of the toy?” he asked Dense Damona a few days later, upon returning to work.
“I believe some up-and-coming lawyer-type took it with him to Maine,” Damona, dense, but not Denise, suggested, pausing in the act of stacking papers.
“Lawyer-type,” Seville repeated, shambling out of the room. He wanted to grind his teeth together and smash up a lonely men’s room in some place of business where men never go, like a Jo-Ann, but he controlled himself. He used his limited acting skills to pretend he was someone else, someone for whom one more crime in this world was just another lump of dog shit to step over.
“I’m worried about Seville,” Dr. Beanbaker told a colleague.
“Don’t be,” came the response.
“OK.”
In a few days Seville was apparently back to normal, though a scar glowed on his psyche. He accepted an assignment to recapture an escaped orca and carried out the assignment with ruthless determination in a vision of black and white.
Stinker Enterprising Replay
How, if we are to explore the extrapolations of this topic, should we proceed? The question suggests that we have the option of not pursuing such an exploration. Do we, indeed, have that option? Clearly now I remember the so-called “public” pool in Crawford, Georgia. I don’t know if it was truly “public” because we had to pay a membership fee and use a special key to gain entry, a key attached to a red plastic square with a number attached. I’d pay ten dollars to know where that red plastic square is now. I’d pay five to know what the number on it was. I think sometimes we think we are suddenly remembering things from long ago as if they were buried in our minds for decades, but in truth we just hadn’t thought about them in any serious way in forever. But, like I say, I can now see the whole thing in my mind, every detail. You’d think I wouldn’t have had the perspicacity (?) to have absorbed all those details at such a young age, but I did, apparently. I remember what the rope dividing the shallow end of the pool from the deep end felt like. I remember thinking it odd that there was such a large expanse of concrete away from the pool. This area was where many of the sun chairs or loungers were and that this was a socializing area for “teenagers,” that dreaded group.
It was a strange feeling when we were the only people at the pool. Out there at the end of the road, surrounded by a concrete pad, surrounded by a chain link fence, surrounded by the declevity of a grassy hill, surrounded by pine woods on one side and, further away, by some sort of softball field or something. Dead quiet. Made to feel like an ungrateful, demanding fool by everyone, just before I got too fat to go topless in public and we stopped going to the pool anyway. I’m glad some people still like me.
Nine Lives Lovely
Clark Seville entered the cat food store with the sure knowledge that he was, on the one hand, the type of person that other people would assume was a devoted cat owner, and, on the other, fated never to own a cat. There are, as I am sure you have by now heard, legends of Seville owning a cat named Qty:10. Expert though I am on the subject of Clark Seville, even I cannot confirm these legends nor definitively refute them. I can, however, assure you that the famous picture of Seville protectively, affectionately cradling a cat is a fake.
“May I help you, sir?” one of the dozens of employees in the store asked Seville.
“Doubt it,” Seville replied, not even deigning to make eye contact with the young man. He kept his hands in his pockets and looked around. He noted the young cardboard displays featuring photos of people and their cats. He imagined himself holding a cat in a similar manner. This is probably the source of the fake picture I mentioned above.
“Don’t you sell other cat-related products?” Seville asked. “Cat toys? Cat beds?”
“Ah, so I am able to help you,” the young man pounced. He looked a little cat-like himself, with his whiskers and coloration, his clothing and name-tag.
Seville growled wordlessly.
“No,” the young man was quick to continue. “Just the food.”
“Seems a strange business model,” Seville suggested.
“Not really. If you–”
“Have you seen this man?” Seville cut him off, pulling a photograph from his pocket and holding it in the young man’s face.
“Why do you want to know?” asked the young man, who wasn’t really all that young, considering eternal recurrence as a fact.
Sour Gone Hat Acceptable to My Wife
The big guy on the elevator wore a bucket hat. There are many varieties of bucket hats and there is much confusion as to what a bucket hat actually is. Firstly, I want to make it clear that I reject the notion that the hat Bob Denver wore portraying the character of Gilligan was a “bucket hat.” I hated the show and want nothing to do with it. When I say “bucket hat” I mean something like what McLean Stevenson wore on MASH, only without all the trout flies on it. I mean something you might have seen Walter Matthau wearing at times. Indeed, my wife, who hates my wearing such a hat, has called me “Walter” to emphasize her disdain by making such an association.
Now, the big guy on the elevator wore a bucket hat. He wore it so well, so perfectly, that it rekindled my desire to wear one. I had two, but neither was perfect. Neither fit my head the way I wanted it to. The way the big guy’s fit him. I wanted most of my head buried in it, eyes partially obscured.
“You mean a fishing hat?” someone down at the feed and seed asked. I guess he or she asked that. That’s what people usually ask. I guess that’s where he or she would probably be when asking. That’s where people who wear fishing hats used to hang out before baseball caps took over. What people wear at the fishing supply establishment I have no idea.
“If you want to wear a hat, go ahead and wear one,” my wife conceded. “It’s just you look idiotic in a bucket hat.”
“How about this?” I asked from under the expensive bowler I had only worn in public once in the fifteen years I had owned it.
“Now you look pretentious.”
What did the big guy on the elevator do? What was his role in life that allowed him the freedom to wear a bucket hat in public with such ruthless elan? I hadn’t looked too closely at him, just up at the hat and the eyes half shaded under its brim.
Batch of the Ether and Moon
In the fulfillment of my obligation to this page I almost turned to the external word-generating helper machine, but, being the purist I am, chose instead to read a little Nanos Valaoritis. Such inspiration suffices. Now, in the first batch I sampled I found only confusion, as at that time I had no understanding of the ether and moon. None. I didn’t even know if the ether and moon should be capitalized like a Roman emperor or some brand of bubble gum. In truth, I never did find out definitively and had to decide on my own, but, as I did find out that the “concept” of the ether and moon is beyond such distinctions as “capitalized” or “uncapitalized,” I see now that it makes no difference.
“You could just as easily have written, ‘I had no understanding of the Ether and Moon,’” one of you in the back of the lecture hall or on the top tier of the operating amphitheater cries and, indeed, my Thomas- Eakins-derived-fellow, that is true. However, we are dealing with the delicate and tricky interface of spoken and written language. There is no way to indicate to one’s interlocutor(s) if one is speaking with proper orthography, as that linguistic concern is exclusively the property of the written word. All or most of the properties of the spoken word, by the way, were cast off long ago; this is increasingly true of the written as well.
“How then,” (I am interrupting you who spoke earlier) “Did I know you had capitalized ‘Ether and Moon’ in your comment?”
Well, my friend, you must first understand that I am writing this. You know that. Good. But I am also reading it. When Man first developed narrative speech around the Fire, he not only had to contend with the confusion and hostility of those who ignorantly conflated story-telling with lies, but the fact that he could not hear himself speak with the same or nearly-same audience-nature as his audience. The invention of writing changed this to an extent. I hope that clarifies things for you (except for which is the ether and which “moon.”)
Disaster Annulment Prokofiev
“Champagne, alumnus?” Coburn offered, delighted as always to be out of the plastic cell that still dominated his mind.
“No thank you; don’t drink,” Rem Daleks returned heartily, each of his words an emphatic yes to life. He patted his saddle-bound biscuit and smiled like a menial at a lottery window. “Now, what I have in here is going to blow your mind.”
Coburn nodded. He poured himself a coffee mug full of the bubbling wine, mindful to keep his thumb slightly blocking the bottle’s spout so that each droplet knew his flesh before he knew its spirit. How did the people who worked at the factory producing those plastic cell units live with themselves? Of course, there was more than one factory, but that only made the question resound in his head more insistently. He heard Rem Daleks unbuckling his biscuit and the sound of papers being withdrawn in messy, uneven bunches.
“And what have you for me today?” he asked, downing a burp-a-gulp of his drink.
“Stories,” Rem Daleks answered, holding up handfuls of ink-covered pages, not all of it in words. Some of the information and narrative was in pictures. “Stories to fascinate and delight.” He spread the pages out on the champagne and coffee spattered table before Coburn. “All you have to do is tell me who you want the stories to be about. I’ve got Asger Jorn; I’ve got Fred Rogers; I’ve got Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, eternally at war; I’ve got Till Lindemann–”
Coburn interrupted.
“What about Clark Seville?” he asked. He poured more champagne.
Rem Daleks looked at him closely. And a big smile widened across his face.
“You want Clark Seville; I’ve got Clark Seville.” He held up a particularly promising piece of paper.
Input Usher
“The input usher directly contradicts the message of Daumier’s Man with the Candle Painting lithograph,” Robinson told Norman.
Clark Seville, standing before the same newsstand, wondered at these strange words, but kept his eyes on the array of print media before him. Which one to purchase? Should he even bother to purchase one? His ear implants allowed him to understand spoken French, but nothing as yet would allow him to read the language
“An usher isn’t a doorman,” Norman argued.
Seville glanced at the two men, then down the street. Should he take a bus? Did they have buses in Paris? Everything was so different.
“Mice aren’t people,” Robinson pointed out.
It was odd, Seville noted, that, to his taste anyway, the Germans produced such great painters and yet the French were so much better at cartooning. Had something happened after the war to bring about this situation? There were a number of cartoon-oriented publications on display. If he purchased one, what would be the point? What would he learn from such a publication? Did he have the ability to enjoy things for enjoyment’s sake?
“I am conflicted,” Norman admitted.
“So am I,” Seville muttered.
Robinson smiled, turning to the big bear-like man.
“You are an American?” he asked.
“More or less, I guess,” was Seville’s reply.
“Do you know Daumier?”
Seville dithered with his consideration.
Block Tanks are Green
Clark Seville owed nothing to the game. His opponent on the occasion of the Dr. Who anniversary gathering was a big Indian from Sweden. Seville played well and with honesty, but was indifferent to the outcome. The big Indian lost, but denounced Seville’s indifference.
“You have no passion,” he told Seville.
Behind them the Dr. Who fans laughed and cheered as a particularly well-loved scene played on the TV. Only a couple had watched Seville and the Indian’s contest, and then without interest. This was only fair, as Seville and the Indian had no interest in Dr. Who.
Seville saw the truth in the Indian’s words.
“Do you want to play again?” he asked.
“No,” the Indian decided. He looked over the board, the final placement of the counters; the men, the tanks occupying the cities of Europe. “You would win again.”
Seville studied his hands.
“You have no love for the game,” the Indian judged, standing upright. He stood on the other side of the table. Seville had his hands in his pockets now.
“I have no love for any game.”
The Indian smiled.
“You played well.” He thumped a counter so that it fell across a border it no longer defended.
Lynx Dander Doo-Dad
Clark Seville knew nothing about feline pillage when first he took on the job (although, of course, he had been thinking about getting a cat ever since making the acquaintance of his neighbor, an old lady who had a friendly cat and who painted Seville’s portrait, showing him holding the cat) but, slowly, over the weeks that he worked selling the Lynx Dander Doo-Dad, he gained enough knowledge of the subject to speak authoritatively to anyone questioning the product’s handling of such material.
“That thing don’t look strong enough to tackle my cat’s fur tangles,” one passerby (who may or may not have been a plant) to Seville’s booth at the New Products Expo observed.
However, Seville was ready.
“Sir, I assure you that the Lynx Dander Doo-Dad can handle even the mangiest of cats,” he replied forthrightly. His voice was lordly and practiced. His eyes took in both his interlocutor and the onlookers and passersby within range. In lieu of a smile he opened his mouth so that his bottom teeth were on full display.
“I’ll believe it when I see it!” the man in the now slightly larger crowd around Seville’s booth returned, folding his arms across his chest and taking up a wide-legged stance.
“You got it!” Seville told him. Holding up the product with one hand for all to see, he reached beneath the table and withdrew a toy cat covered in filth.
“Now, thanks to government regulations,” he pronounced with evident and winking disdain, “I’m not allowed to demonstrate with a live animal…”
“Damn Democrats,” his questioner commented loudly.
“...but this stuffed cat has been scientifically determined to mimic the same actions and reactions as a real one.” He ran the Doo-Dad a couple of times over the toy’s back until the fabric was completely denuded of fur.
A little girl among the crowd burst into hysterics, baffling Seville.
Psycho-Flapper Testament
When Clark Seville first read the Testament he was flabbergasted at the breadth of its inanity.
“This is supposedly an account of the Roaring Twenties?” he demanded, slapping the document with the back of his hand.
“Well,” clarified Sir Post, “Not the Roaring Twenties. This is revisionist history, this is history seen through the eyes of a superhuman lady–”
“I know all that,” Seville interrupted. “What I’m disputing is its correlation to anything we have ever associated with The Roaring Twenties.”
“So you’re saying it goes too far,” Sir Post suggested, shifting in his seat and glancing at his watch. This was taking too long. He had other, more important and, frankly, more fun matters to deal with. The evocative images were there, laid out on the table adjacent to his enormous leather chair. Only he dared not look. He must give the bear-man his due.
Seville took a breath.
“Yes, essentially, that is what I’m saying,” he admitted.
“Seville,” Sir Post addressed his guest, “You are well aware that the project cannot proceed without you. Obviously, I am obliged to cater to your preferences. However–”
“I dislike the idea of your ‘catering’ to me,” Seville growled.
Sir Post took a moment. He cast an eye over the pictures on the table to his right. Gestural abstraction, mostly, along with sloppily rendered faces in a skittering ink line.
“Would you prefer it if we used a stand-in?” he asked Seville.
“A stand-in?”
“A substitute,” Sir Post explained. “A proxy, a surrogate. Perhaps a series of surrogates.”
“A locum,” Seville seized on the idea. He looked into the distance. “But who would take the place of this ‘psycho-flapper?’”
Bagel Foyer Pan & Drip
The woman’s name was Cleana. Her job at the bagel shop was to powder the shaping trays with flour and rinse them off after the uncooked bagels had been removed for placement in the oven.
“It’s an interesting question, isn’t it?” proposed Sallie, one of Cleana’s co-workers. “Is an uncooked bagel actually a bagel?”
Cleana sighed heavily.
“Not that old debate,” she begged. The two women were standing in the alley behind the bagel shop, smoking cigarettes. Across the alley was a cheap storage building in which at least one of whose units someone was living. He lay on a pallet of blankets all day and listened to the radio surrounded by a surprising amount of personal possessions. The bagel shop owner didn’t like it any more than he liked his employees smoking behind his business, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do.
“You don’t like that kind of talk,” Sallie observed, smirking and blowing a cloud of smoke to the heavens. She crushed her butt underfoot and straightened her apron. “Is it because it reminds you of the abortion debate?”
“What?” Cleana barked, making a face. “No!”
“Alright, that’s enough,” Andy announced, putting a foot out the back door. “Break’s over.” He retreated, but immediately returned, this time exiting the building completely. “You!” he yelled, having caught sight of the man living in the storage unit. “I’m calling the owner! You can’t live in there!”
The man ignored him, shut the door on his unit, padlocked it, and walked around the corner.
“Jesus, Andy,” Cleana interjected, retying her apron and straightening her funny little triangular bandanna hat thing. “What do you care?”
The Boundaries of the Laundromat Exactly Overlap those of the Offshore Oil Rig
“So you see, when I put my clothes into the washer,” Cleana explained to Clark Seville, “What comes out are these oil-stained coveralls.” She pointed to the basket of clothes beside her. The coveralls bore name tags reading, “French,” “Thompson,” “Wyler,” and “Napski,” among others.
Cleana smiled at Seville’s use of the word “breast,” but nodded in agreement. “No, I can’t. I’ve been washing my last outfit in the kitchen sink.”
Seville held up a hand. He had heard enough. He bent to look into the washer.
“Hold my coat,” he directed the woman.
“What are you going to do?”
Seville began squeezing his head and one shoulder into the washer.
“You’re not going in there!”
“Close the door and turn on the machine,” Seville instructed once he had drawn the second and last of his enormous feet inside.
Despite her reservations, Cleana obeyed. After all, this was an agent of the Suggestible Trapezoid. He ought to know what he’s doing.
Seville clambered out from beneath a pile of clothes in a canvas hamper on an offshore oil rig in the North Sea.
“Dead men’s clothes,” explained one of the rig’s supervisors.
“And you’ve kept these deaths hidden from everyone?” Seville asked.
“To the extent that we can,” the other man answered. “But the men here maintain constant communications with their families back home.”
Radiant Heads on Stalks from the Palm
“What amazes me is the grouping,” Stan, the medical officer, commented as he examined the growths. “They’re arranged equidistant from each other. Can you not think of anything you touched, especially something with this tic-tac-toe shape?”
Seville sighed.
“No, I‘ve told you. Nothing. Nothing that I can recall.”
“Hang on a minute,” Stan cried as he took another look at Seville’s palm.
“Each stalk has a very human-like head on it,” he announced.
“Now we’ve got to cut them off,” Seville begged.
“No, this is even more reason not to cut them off,” Stan argued. “We don’t know anything about this yet. Disturbing them might release spores.”
“Spores?” Seville repeated with exasperation. “I don’t care about protocol, I–” He reached toward the growths with his left hand, as if to pluck them out, even though he knew how painful that had been the last time he tried it. Before he could grasp them, all nine heads on the stalks turned towards the approaching hand and smiled benevolently.
Then they began to sing;
“They called him saviour,
But to the east,
A duplicate waving a
Caulking Gun on Board with the Whole Green Thing Concept
“Is this all you have?” Clark Seville demanded. He was in the maintenance supply room arming himself with makeshift weapons.
“Only thing that comes close to being a ‘gun,’” Charlie Hurst told the bear-man.
Seville sighed heavily. He stuffed several spare tubes of caulk into his coat pocket and turned to the men gathered behind him. He held the caulking gun indifferently, as if it held no threat to anyone, yet most of the men shifted their stances as they followed its movements with their eyes.
“I won’t need any help. None of you has the specialized training anyway.” Seville turned to the oil rig’s commander, Fork Luftanshauung.
“Which way to the helipad?” he asked.
Fork pointed wordlessly up.
Clark Seville charged out the door and down the corridor. The places where the singing growths had been were rough and raw. He had a feeling they would try to grow back. Next time he would chew them off, like a real bear would. Seville smiled at the idea. “A real bear!”
The first of the now-overgrown fungal creatures that he met towering behind a fire extinguisher in the darkness at the end of the corridor, burbled “Boo!” at him with threat inserted. “Boo!”
Seville fired the caulking gun only inches from his adversary. The caulk feebly dribbled out and landed on the floor. Seville swore and kicked the caulk towards the creature.
“The latter actually screamed?” Cleana wondered over Seville’s tale once he had emerged from the washer she guarded and given her a rundown on his week of adventure. “And the spin cycle isn’t even complete!”
“It is for me,” Seville replied. He pulled a bra from his coat pocket and passed it to the woman.
Festoonery is the Point
Many have wondered if Clark Seville ever had a romantic relationship. Although the full details are too highly classified to be included even in such a comprehensive collection such as this, I am able to confirm that Seville did have at least one relationship; that it was with a woman; and that the woman was none other than Cleana, the woman who worked at the bakery and lost much of her wardrobe through an ill-placed washing machine. Seville had retrieved what he could, finding various socks, panties, and bandannas in his pockets over the course of the next few days.
On one of these visits to Cleana’s apartment to hand over yet another article of clothing, Cleana invited Seville to come to her Christmas party later that week.
“I don’t celebrate Christmas,” Seville informed the woman.
A rumple of worry marred Cleana’s forehead.
“Why not?” she asked Seville.
Seville took a breath.
“Well, I’m not a Christian, for one thing,” he began.
“Don’t worry,” Cleana held out her hand. “Neither am I. But I still like to celebrate Christmas.” She smiled.
Seville studied for a response.
“Modern Christmas, with its tinsel and tree, and all of the bizarre ‘traditions,’ has become so remote from the original intent anyway,” he brought out.
“That is so true,” Cleana agreed.
After promising to make his best effort to put in an appearance at the party, Seville received his instructions: wear something festive.
“What will you wear?” Seville asked as a joke. He felt he already had a comprehensive knowledge of the extent of Cleana’s clothing.
Cleana clutched her apron to her chest.
“That’ll be a surprise,” she assured him.
Lard Massage
Clark Seville was undergoing the therapeutic process of a lard massage when his communicator watch on the table adjacent began to sound its summons.
“Excuse me,” Seville told the blue-black wolverine-like centaur whose fingers had been working at the former’s knotted flesh. The bear-man rolled to one side and delicately picked up the watch.
“Here Seville. Outsider present. Go ahead.”
“Seville,” came the voice of Renzel Sock, the archivist down in the bowels of the Suggestible Trapezoid building.
“Speaking.”
“That odor you were asking about?” the old man prompted.
“Yes, what of it?”
“Yes,” Seville suddenly realized. “Yes,” he wanted to say more, but the presence of his masseur held him back. “Did you find something?”
“Tell you more when you get here. If I’m still alive by then.” Sock was serious. He had been contemplating suicide lately, more seriously than ever before.
“Understood,” replied Seville. He concluded the communication and dropped his watch on the table with his other things.
“A friend from work?” asked the masseur as he returned to the business at hand.
“A fellow employee,” Seville answered. “I don’t have friends at work.”
“Maybe tension is the reason,” the centaur suggested. “You should have less of that after today.”
Seville rolled his eyes.
“And don’t worry– lard doesn’t leave an odor.”
Vending Toilet
While seated on the toilet on the train back to the city, Clark Seville considered his options. For an extra fifty cents, the toilet paper would roll freely in its dispenser. For a dollar the flushing mechanism would accept a wider variety of items for disposal than the usual wastes. Seville assumed this meant guns, drugs, or dead animals.
He turned to some of the other offerings available at the push of a button and the insertion of a few coins. Ah, descentifying spray. That sounded good. Despite the centaur masseur’s assurances, the lard had left a definite aroma on his person. Perhaps only his enhanced bear nose could detect it, but the small was still there and it irritated him. Seville paid the money and pushed the button.
A cold mist filled the bowl beneath his bottom.
“Not that!” Seville shouted, twisting about as much as could in the tiny cubicle.
A rap on the door and the impatient words, “Are you nearly done?” brought a swift response from the bear-man.
“I’ll be done when I’m done!” he barked with all the savagery lurking in the depths of his always-hungry gullet.
There was no follow-up from outside.
Seville began tearing at the meager scraps of toilet paper on offer, each fingerling of which tore off with frustrating ease.
A sign inches from Seville’s eyes came alive with light.
“How about a soothing notion? Three healthful flavors. Strawberry–”
“Fine!” Seville growled, half-standing. He rummaged in his pocket for the money. He shoveled it into the awaiting mouth until the words, “Thank You” appeared.
When the train arrived at the station the rail personnel had to the call emergency services to pry the comatose Clark Seville out of the little room.
Umbilical Yeast
Cleana York wondered over Sallie’s new apron.
“What was wrong with the other one?” she asked
“Got swallowed up by the washing machine at the laundromat,” came Sallie’s answer matter-of-factly.
“You too!” Cleana gasped.
“I’ve quit smoking too,” Sallie admitted, watching her friend out of the corner of her eye,.
“This must have been quite a weekend,” Cleana suggested. She had also recently quit.
“Well, over the long weekend,” Sallie explained. “He’s a sort of bear-man–”
“Bear-man!” Cleana exploded.
“It’s not the same as your bear-man,” Sallie hurried to clarify.
“A lot more than you’d think, given the Christian fathers who run this city,” he said.
“His name’s Walter,” Sallie continued, dismissing Andy. He wears a bucket hat and he likes to ride the elevator in the university library.”
Sallie continued, but Cleana’s mind worked on other things.
“Bucket hat?” she mused. “Bucket hat? University library elevator? Could it be?” She cast her mind back over the previous year, then the next previous…
“Is he a student?” Cleana suddenly interrupted to ask.
“I’m not sure,” Sallie declared. “He’s a post-graduate in the Mycology Department. But doesn’t ‘post-grad’ mean he’s already graduated?”
Cleana wondered. What did “mycology” mean?
Both Guitars Need Names
Clark Seville and Walter hit it off like a professional golfer determined for a hole-in-one. Is that a good analogy? I’m not hip to golf.
At their first meeting the two bear-men wound up talking to each other more than their respective women.
“You know what we should do?” Walter proposed to Seville. “We should start a band.”
Seville nodded heavily on hearing these words. His mouth was full of some niche brand of soda pop. He swallowed.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, that is exactly what we should do.”
“What instruments do you play?” asked Walter.
“Ever since I got these hands I’ve been dying to play the guitar.”
“Really?” Walter pondered, looking them over. “I would have assumed the piano. As it is, I play guitar. I use one specially made for my paw-like mitts.” He held up one of strange bear-hands.
“Have you tried paw adapters?” Seville asked. “I used them for years. Not perfect, but then nothing is!” He looked meaningfully in the direction of the two women. He and Walter laughed together after a moment’s consideration.
“What are you two laughing about?” Sallie asked.
“We have decided to start a band,” Walter responded with great dignity.
“A band? And what are you going to call it?” Cleana asked.
Walter and Seville looked at each other.
“That is a good question,” Seville admitted.
“What about ‘Samantha’s Grunt?’” Walter offered.
“What about ‘the Two Bears?”’ Cleana suggested.
“No.” Seville was adamant.
“Goddammned right,” Walter seconded. “Too on point.”
Asthmatic Thistle, Fortnight in the Tanktop
During a break in one of Asthmatic Thistle’s rehearsals, Clark Seville showed Walter the nine rough scars in the middle of his right palm.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Walter examined Seville’s palm closely.
“It could be fungal in nature,” Walter supposed. He glanced up at Seville, fingers poised. “May I?”
Seville nodded his assent.
Walter ran his fingertips over the scars.
“They grow back?” he asked.
“They did, twice, but I kept chewing at them and they eventually stopped.”
Walter exhaled.
“So you’ve probably ingested some of the spores–if it is fungal in nature.”
“Could spores… alter me in some way?” Seville wondered.
“Well, some fungi are able to control the nervous systems of some insects. If you’re asking whether it’s due to mycological activity that you’ve gotten so good on the guitar so quickly, the answer is, I doubt it.”
Seville nodded. He had been looking for an explanation.
Within days of purchasing his Gibson Telecaster hybrid he was playing almost exactly like Andy Summers. Walter was amazed–and envious. His bear hands had limited mobility. His Osmbog’s Unique design helped a great deal, but, despite his years of practice, he was still little more than a Robert Fripp clone– and not happy with that comparison.
“Still,” Seville enthused, “We can do the third album that Summers and Fripp never got around to making.”
“Fortknight in the Tanktop?” Walter questioned.
“I’ll inform the Trapezoid tonight,” thought Seville. “This is my new mission.”
“One thing:” Walter asked. “Will we use a real drummer?”
Mimosas in Bloom on the Little Detour
After much pleading, Clark Seville and his bandmate Walter agreed to let Cleana and Sallie accompany the band on its whirlwind tour of the great Southern College Towns.
“We were going to let you come anyway,” Seville admitted.
“This’ll be fun,” said Sallie.
“How is the bakery going to get along without you?” asked Walter.
Cleana and Sallie looked at each other.
“Doesn’t matter now,” Cleana answered with a giggle. Sallie answered the giggle with her own.
“We quit.”
“You’re going to be such a huge success we won’t need to work at the bakery anymore.”
“We could sell t-shirts at your gigs.”
“I’m glad we splurged on the classic van,” Walter confided to Seville with a profound solemnity that the latter didn’t quite know how to interpret.
As the four people inside the van full of equipment drove around the corpse of the enormous flying thing splattered across both lanes of the road, Cleana noted the mimosas. They were in bloom. Horses in the distant field glimpsed through the trees. Too early for butterflies?
“We don’t want to get stuck,” Seville mentioned to Walter, who was driving.
“I’m being careful,” Walter tried to convince himself. His mind was more on his yet-again-delayed thesis than on his driving. Was being in this band really more important than his academic career? “I advance masked,” indeed.
“We don’t want to get stuck,” Seville repeated, but it was too late: they were more than stuck. They were being sucked into a sinkhole in the middle of the relatively small expanse of grass.
“Would you girls want to be in the band?” Walter asked, looking in the rearview mirror.
Fowl Pupae off the Grassy Edge of a Bedspread Valley
“Not to worry,” Clark Seville assured everyone. “I deal with this kind of thing all the time.”
“How so?” Cleana demanded.
The van, besmirched with both the red dirt of home and the white mud of this different place, and its four occupants now stood in the bottom of a deep valley whose sides sloped up at staggering, curving heights to pierce a sky full of daylit stars and wreaths of gold and purple stellar dust.
“What would we do in the band?” asked Sallie as she took out a cigarette.
“I thought you quit,” Cleana complained, just before Walter was about to make the same observation.
“Play drums?” Sallie wondered, cigarette bouncing between her lips, indifferent to any criticism of her actions.
Walter considered the idea blankly.
“You could play the drums, I guess,” he conceded.
Clark Seville stared into the sky, bringing his eyes down to the crest of the valley ridge, then following the ridge around in a circle. His face was set in a mask of determined absorption.
“What are you thinking?” Walter asked him, having taken up position next to him and looking where he looked.
“No way in and no way out,” Seville murmured. He sounded amazed, his words betraying respect, almost praise.
“What about the way we came in?” Walter wondered.
“Hmm?” Seville grunted, taking notice of his fellow bear-man.
“The way we came in?” Walter pointed at the ground beneath the van, “What about that?”
“No,” Seville shook his head slightly, returning to scanning the valley walls.
“What are those?” Cleana asked, fear in her voice. She was pointing at a pod of bus-sized gelatinous worm-things floating in the nethereal lake like balloons caught between up and down.
Sigmund Sigmund Freud Freud
“You girls are now officially members of Asthmatic Thistle,” Walter informed Cleana and Sallie. The latter two looked at each other; Cleana snorted in amused ambivalence.
“Might as well face our fate as a team,” Seville concurred. He stood at the back of the van, sorting through the band’s gear for essentials.
“What are those things floating in the nebulous nothing down there?” Cleana asked Seville.
Seville took a deep breath. He weighed a coiled length of instrument cable. Could it be used as rope?
“I… don’t know, but I would presume they are the infant stage of that big bird thing… up there,” he waved a hand at the ground, “down there, covering the road.”
Cleana gaped.
“How can you even begin to speculate such a thing with anything approaching authority?” she begged to know. She was about thirty, give or take a year or two. She had blond eyebrows and eyelashes. She was about twenty pounds overweight, with breasts that would be considered exactly normal by the average woman, but relatively small by the average man. She liked drawing and painting and dared to dream of showing her work professionally. Her parents were both still alive, but lived so far away that the intimate bond among them had faded to a shadow of vague worry and vestigial wonder. She studied Seville’s profile as he failed to answer. “Who are you, exactly?” She hissed.
Seville allowed his eyes to roll towards her, pulling the rest of his face and head along in their wake. He faced her with his head turned sideways.
“I… work for an organization that… often I find myself in situations like this.” Seville sounded as if he was confessing to his mother that he had smoked pot once.
“Do you smoke pot?” Cleana asked.
Pretty Girl and the Rest of It
Sallie, like Cleana, was tall. In contrast to Cleana, however, she was underweight. She had dark black hair that was only rarely washed with the kind of effort and attention that one might expect from such a pretty girl. At least, most people considered her pretty, if not gorgeous or, god forbid, ravishing. She had a slightly raspy voice and big feet. Her breasts, if you really want to know, were even smaller than Cleana’s. She and the latter woman had not known each other before working at the bakery, but had soon recognized each other as the kind of friend that only comes along perhaps three times in one’s life. Sallie had had several people occupy that position already, but had crossed each one off with a fat mental marker, one after another.
“Do you trust him?” Sallie asked Walter in an undertone.
Walter minimized a burp.
“Yes,” he responded. “Yes, I do.” He smiled, realizing the truth so blithe.
Sallie looked around,
“Where the hell are we?” she asked,
Walter smiled again.
“We’re on tour, baby!” he announced. He turned to see if Seville had heard him, but the bare-headed bear-man was talking closely and quietly with Cleana, just as Walter and Sallie were. Walter looked into Sallie’s eyes.
“I don’t know where we are,” he told Sallie. “But, yes, I do trust Clark. I believe he knows how to deal with this situation.”
“Something he said a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about music and he said, ‘I am a Testifying Robot.’”
“It’s the song the Eagles never recorded.”
Morphic Generator for Chocolate Tea
“Why can’t we take the van?” Sallie asked.
“We will,” Clark Seville told her. He turned back to the face on the device strapped to his wrist. “Then what?” he asked.
“If you do manage to secure one of the fowl pupae with the instrument cables, run your fuzz pedal through the van’s fan belt. That should provide the power to control the creature’s flotation.”
“OK,” Seville sighed. “If we make it back, I owe you a big debt of gratitude.”
“Don’t be so formal, Seville,” the face snapped and disappeared.
“Who was that on your watch?” Walter asked.
“Not really sure,” confessed Seville. “Somebody in one of the support labs. There are so many lab guys I can’t keep track of them.”
At Seville’s direction, the three other members of Asthmatic Thistle strung cables down to the lake of cosmic mist. Seville waded into the lake, carefully balanced between two nothings, himself clinging to the bristling proto-feathers that covered most of the pupa’s loose skin, he climbed atop one of them. The creature tried to roll over, to dislodge its rider or drown him in the sparkling ether, but Seville drove it towards the shore with a combination of bellowed commands and savage kicks, all the time Seville’s powerful hands tearing at the pupa’s skin.
Walter, Cleana, and Sallie each plunged the ends of their cables into the flesh of the pupa. Racing back to the van, Seville revved the motor and drew his fingers across the electric bongos. The pupa, inflated by involuntarily gulped heapings of air and solar breeze, began to float, rising from the lake and pulling its tethers taut.
“Get in! Get in! Quick!” Seville shouted from the van. His three companions had soon joined him inside. The van was hauled into the air by the inexorable rise of their biological balloon.
Chicken Scolex Wrap
“We’re still on tour, you know,” Clark Seville reminded Walter. The latter smiled as he bit into his chicken scolex wrap. The flying van had stopped at a satellite drive-in for a bite of lunch.
“Yeah, but we’re missing all those gigs we scheduled,” Cleana pointed out.
“We’ll make our own gigs,” Seville returned. “We’ll play where we can, like wandering troubadours.”
“How… familiar are you with flying through an ethereal ocean non-space?” Walter asked Seville nervously. The wrap had been good, but it really could have used some horseradish sauce.
“Well,” Seville began with a deep inhalation, “Familiar enough, as you see, to function in this type of environment, as far as it conforms to other areas of space that also bear the stamp of Earth or pseudo-terran civilization.”
“That’s a mouthful,” said Walter, wiping his fingers with the cloth rag provided with his food order. “Is that just a fancy way of saying you know how to order through the drive-in window of a satellite?”
Seville only grinned with half his face by way of answer.
“I’m actually only familiar with the Moon” Clark Seville admitted after a moment. The van/balloon suspended beneath the gigantic prickly magenta worm was passing through a fist of coffee gods twinkling with the lights of a miniature empire.
“The Moon?” Sallie repeated.
“Well, no the Moon as you know it,” Seville confessed, “but the Moon the reflects the other sun.”
Walter discreetly maneuvered so that he could stare at Sallie and tap his forehead.
“You’re going to need artwork for the album,” Cleana observed idly. She wondered how they were able to breathe in space, even this weird “space” they now found themselves in.
“Yes,” Seville agreed, monitoring their fuel consumption.
Towtruck Hobby with Little Boy Lipstick
Eventually, the search began, not so much for the ideal piece of artwork, but for the artist who would provide it. The original notion had been to do the supposedly forgotten collaboration by Andy Summers and Robert Fripp. As such, the album cover was to appear similar to I Advanced Masked and Bewitched. An abstraction surrounded by a large white area, the album title handwritten beneath. The idea was to choose the artist first, then the art.
“It’ll make it easier, believe me,” Sallie urged.
“It’ll help us conform to the snob appeal of a known artist,” Cleana observed.
Seville looked at her in the mirror.
“You’d like to do the cover art, wouldn’t you?” he asked.
“You’re damn right I would!” Cleana howled, slapping the back of Seville’s head with the local arts and entertainment newspaper. This was the most playful moment of Clark Seville’s life. He actually chuckled.
The local arts and entertainment newspaper, The Flapdoodle, was just the place they needed to be. A big article promoting their upcoming gig…
“Where are we playing?” Sallie asked.
“I’ve been giving that some thought,” Seville replied. He was at the wheel. Due to the strange refractive nature of the light in this universe, they could see the closest planets, planetoids, asteroids, and moons as if they were various roadside establishments seen from one’s van on a foggy night ride through Winder, GA.
“But without the madness of being tied to the road itself,” Cleana thought, lining her artwork up against that of Jimmy Rizzi and Antoni Tapies. It should form a progression, she thought.
Clark Seville headed for a big city. Bound to be universities in big cities.
Lemonade Harmonica, The Old General
“Not exactly Andy Summers and Robert Fripp, is it?” Buster Bort commented to his business partner, Vernon Verst.
“No, but still…” Vernon considered. “Something about them.”
Buster and Vernon owned The Old General, one of the premiere performance venues/bars in town. Legendary not just in the area, but across the country, The Old General was where Lemonade Harmonica first made their mark. Clark Seville was assured by Walter that Lemonade Harmonica was extremely overrated.
“Strange that their hometown is out here in ‘space,’” Walter noted as he and his bandmates set up their equipment for an afternoon audition.
“What do we do?” Cleana, nervous, asked, referring to herself and Sallie.
“Stand there and look pretty,” Walter replied.
“No,” Seville countered. “Cleana, make appropriate noises on this keyboard. Sallie, you’re the drummer. But we don’t have any drums. So, thump your fingers on this microphone.”
“Will that work?” Sallie demanded.
“What are ‘appropriate noises?’” Cleana asked.
“We call this one ‘Most Elegant Bean One Trip,’” Seville announced the next song to The Old General’s owners and the two other people in the place at noon.
“It’s like Andy Summers and Robert Fripp with some kind of amateur novelty group,” Vernon continued.
Buster nodded.
“Yeah,” he agreed. He moved towards the stage holding up his hands. “OK, guys, we’ve heard enough.”
Asthmatic Thistle thudded to a stop.
Seville stared at the man. Walter tipped his head back to get a good look.
“Yeah,” said Vernon Verst. “Yeah, you’re good. We can let you have the opening slot next Friday.”
“Friday?” Cleana repeated.
Rapidation Plainclothes Beat
So they found themselves stuck in town for almost a week. Seville deflated the fowl pupa and stored it, along with the van, in a rental unit. The man living in the unit next door didn’t like it, but there was nothing he could do about it. Sevill and his bandmates rented a hotel room for the duration.
“Breakfast included,” Walter observed with relief and delight as he entered the room.
“Mmm, waffle maker,” Sallie fantasized.
Seville went immediately to the window and looked down on their surroundings. Cleana joined him.
“Have you been here before?” she asked.
Seville shrugged.
“Hard to say. So many places. So many places that look the same. Places can be duplicated from one world to another. I may have been here before, or I might have been to a place just like it somewhere else.”
Cleana rubbed Seville’s right upper arm with her hand.
“What is the Suggestible Trapezoid?” she asked.
Seville glanced at her.
“Have you ever put something down somewhere and then went to sleep and when you wake up it’s gone, or been moved, or you just know that something is off? You wonder, just for a second, if you’ve somehow been translated to another world–one just a little bit off from the one you knew. The one you supposedly knew.” Seville drew the curtains shut and turned to find Walter and Sallie looking at him.
“Waffle maker,” Seville repeated. “Mmm.”
With days to kill before their big performance, Seville took to wandering about the hotel environs. He hunted for papers printed with evocative imagery or bizarre sentences bereft of their explanatory context. Sometimes Cleana went with him. Once they shared a leftover waffle.
Root Bags Straight Out of Earth Hole Catalog
“Not as many head shops here as when I was last here,” Clark Seville observed.
“So you have been here before,” Cleana prompted.
“In substance,” agreed Seville.
“I wish I could go back in time and see things as they were in the 80’s,” Cleana dreamed. She and Seville were walking down one of the downtown streets in the small college town.
“The 80’s?” Seville mused. “That’s not a decade most people would choose.”
“Yeah, but in this town I think the 80’s would be the time to see it at its height.”
“No,” Seville shook his head. “Time travel is an entirely different thing from transdimensional movement.”
“Everything is dangerous,” he said. The bear-man stopped walking suddenly. He stared at a battered wooden turquoise door leading into a small shop called Frontier.
“Frontier,” he read the shop’s sign aloud.
“Not really a ‘head shop,’” Cleana judged after taking a look around.
“I got a bottle of bay rum here,” Seville told her. “But, now that I think about it, wasn’t this store on the other side of the street?”
“Big sale on root bags,” announced Nancy, the owner of the shop.
“Root bags?” Cleana wondered.
Nancy smiled. “For putting your root in,” she explained. “Not that we need to worry about that.”
“Ah,” Seville grasped it. “Same thing as a wiener sock.”
Typical NPR Show
After talking his way into the offices of the university’s radio station, Clark Seville was disappointed to find out that this was the student-run independent station, not the other one on campus, which was an NPR affiliate.
“Damn,” Seville muttered. “Oh, well, listen, while I’m here maybe one of you can answer a question for me: There used to be this song that was occasionally played on this station. It was about this guy watching TV, switching channels. It ended with him talking about Knight RIder and the band played a snippet of the Knight RIder theme song. The band was called something like The Trenchcoat League. Does anybody know what I’m talking about?
The three students in the room looked at each other with complete befuddlement on their faces.
“How long ago was this?” one of them asked. His face was strangely lacking a beard.
“Oh, it was the late 80’s or very early 90’s,” considered Seville.
“Sorry,” the young man told Seville. “None of us has ever heard of anything like that.”
A skinny door leading to god-knows-what functionary archive opened.
“I have,” came a voice from within. Seville turned and saw a man in his late thirties or very early forties peering around the door. The man had the requisite beard. He beckoned Seville and Cleana inside. How they all managed to find space inside the cubbyhole remains unexplained.
“You’re not the first to ask about that song,” the man informed Seville.
A decades-long hunt had finally reached its conclusion, but not before Clark Seville had discovered the object of yet another of his endless quests: “You have the 1979 Black Sabbath sticker showing them as cartoon characters!” Seville enthused.
Second-Rate Has-Been Reads Story by Up and Coming Nobody
Over at the NPR station, it was time for New Voices, a weekly presentation of recently published literature by new and obscure writers. Today’s program featured Konrad Buntz reading Bluto Todrocket’s short story, “Grocer’s Humanism Skim Apocalypse.” The host, Delane Murgenthau, took a few moments to discuss the story with Buntz after its conclusion.
“Konrad, thank you for being with us on New Voices today.”
“Thank you, Delane. I’ve really enjoyed it.”
“Had you heard of Bluto Todrocket or his work before you read ‘Grocer’s Humanism Skim Apocalypse?’”
“Well, strangely enough, about a year ago I was filming an upcoming episode of Grossfarthing in Crete and while there I attended a poetry slam at one of the ouzo bars there. And Bluto was one of the participants. I didn’t really put two and two together before your producer asked me to read the story today on the show.”
“Do you remember what Bluto read at the poetry slam?”
“Not really. Something about aliens coming to earth and demanding welfare and food stamps?”
“I think I know what you’re talking about.”
The program was running over, so, unfortunately, Delane didn’t have time to allow Buntz to talk further about his guest appearance on Grossfarthing. The host moved on to the next and last story, while Buntz was handed a check for two hundred dollars and sent away. Mildly desperate, Buntz blurted out to one of the assistant producers how much he had enjoyed his appearance and how he would dearly love more of this kind of work.
“I’ll pass your name along,” promised the young man.
On the way out, Buntz saw Ronald Methcap through the recording booth window. He remembered him on TV every Saturday afternoon at his grandmother’s house. The King of the Zombie Cowboys, they used to call him.
Phenocycling through the Decleansants
During the course of their stay in the little university town, Asthmatic Thistle found it necessary to wash their clothes. As they approached the laundromat, however, Cleana drew back.
“Clark, does this look familiar to you?” she asked Seville.
Walter and Sallie studied their friends.
“What’s wrong with you two?” Sallie asked.
“Sallie, doesn’t this look like the laundromat where you lost your apron?” Cleana demanded of her friend.
Sallie turned and looked.
“No,” she decided. “It’s nothing like it.”
Five minutes later, Seville and Cleana stood before one of the washers.
“Is this the one?” Seville asked.
Cleana nodded, gulping slightly, which, truth be told, Clark Seville thought was sexy.
“We’ll have to use the detergent vending machine,” Sallie announced, coming towards them.
“I’ve got an idea,” Seville told Cleana. He took off his long coat and threw it into the washing machine. Instead of adding detergent, he tossed in a handful of guitar picks. As expected, the coat disappeared. “Now watch this,” Seville whispered. He climbed into the machine and instructed Cleana to turn it on, but open it halfway through its run.
“Which kind do you want?” Sallie asked Cleana, offering her tiny boxes of Rip and Neap. “Where’s Clark?”
“Now,” Cleana murmured and opened the door. The only thing inside was Sallie’s missing apron.
“Wow, just what I don’t need,” Sallie cracked. “It’s dry,” she noted, feeling the apron. “Hey, what’s this in the pocket?”
Cleana couldn’t believe it. She spent all of the band’s remaining quarters trying to get Clark Seville back.
Retired Person’s Cigar
“Where am I?” asked Clark Seville. He was lying on a pallet against a wall in a high-ceilinged hallway. A face bent over his.
“He’s awake, Doctor,” the face turned and called.
Seville tested his limbs. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. But he felt as if he had been asleep a long time.
“This yours?” a man standing over him asked.
Seville looked up. The man, dressed in some kind of uniform, was holding out Seville’s long coat. As Seville focussed, he saw that it was scuffed and stained.
“What happened to it?” the bear-man puzzled.
In lieu of an answer, the man in the uniform dropped the coat onto Seville’s face. With more effort than he had expected, Seville got to his feet. He kept the man in his sights as he drew the sleeves over his arms.
“Where am I?” Seville asked again. The uniformed man returned his stare unwaveringly.
“You are on the Moon, Agent Seville,” he answered.
At that moment came the sound of an explosion far in the distance. Seville patted his pockets. His paralyzer cone was missing. Suddenly he realized that his wristband communicator was gone too.
“Where’s my gear?” Seville demanded.
“None of your equipment survived the translation to the Moon,” the man told him.
“Who are you?” asked Seville, stepping unsteadily forward.
“What’s going on?”
Another sound of violence in the distance answered his question.
Seville ran his hands over his face.
“Let me guess: Giant Monkey?”
“If you think gorillas are monkeys,” the uniformed man proposed, taking time to sign something on a clipboard.
Moaning in Agreement
With nothing more than his long coat, Clark Seville jumped on the back of a jeep and rode out to where the giant gorilla was raising hell.
“Cooler McCrudd,” growled Seville.
“I think that’s been used,” the soldier in the jeep replied.
As McCrudd neared, Seville turned to the men in the jeep.
“I think I know what’s going on now,” Seville told them. “You men have no further role to play here. My… colleague and I can handle things.” Without waiting for acknowledgement or protest, Seville met McCrudd. He interrupted whatever smart-assed thing McCrudd had in mind to say.
“Did you bring a paralyzer cone?” Seville asked him peremptorily.
McCrudd stared into the bear-man’s eyes for a moment. He reached into a pocket of his long black coat and withdrew a spare cone.
“What good it’ll do against that thing, I don’t know,” the young man commented, slapping the weapon into Seville’s outstretched hand.
“You have one as well, I assume?” Seville asked.
“Well, when you assume, you ma–”
Seville jerked McCrudd up into his face with one violent gathering of the latter’s lapels and collar in a gallon-sized fist.
“Don’t,” Seville warned the man.
“I guess there’s only one ass here,” McCrudd calmly retorted before the continued presence of Kong, or whatever he was called, demanded the two agents do something.
Nor Oprah Before Her
“So,” Zusan gushed, “What did you do when you realized that your boyfriend wasn’t coming back?”
Cleana glanced nervously at the cameras.
“Well, we had to go ahead with the show as a three-piece,” she told the talk show host.
“We’ll get to the band in a moment,” Zusan directed, “But what I want to focus on first is your state of mind, your emotions, when Clark disappeared into that washing machine, never to return.”
Cleana smiled.
“I was heartbroken,” she revealed. “I was, obviously, worried about what had happened to him.”
“You didn’t know, you don’t know– forgive me for saying this– but you don’t know if he’s still alive,” Zusan, host of Zusan!, prompted Cleana.
Cleana took a breath.
“No, I don’t.”
Later in the program, the voice of doubt, Dr. Amon Snerk, while not challenging Cleana and her particular story directly, presented the view that Clark Seville was a fiendish con-man and that his organization called The Suggestible Trapezoid was actually a diabolical cult whose existence and actions were only beginning to be investigated by the government.
“It’s possible that the Suggestible Trapezoid that exists in this world is different from the one in the world which I come from,” Cleana offered when Zusan asked for her opinion on Dr. Snerk’s assertions,.
Groans from the crowd.
“Next week on the show we’ll talk with Mick Jagger’s ghost and spend some time with Ronald McDonald’s estranged children,” Zusan spoke to the audience at home. “Now, Cleana, how is your band doing? The cover of Rolling Stone; that’s quite an achievement.”
Cleana nodded.
“We’re very grateful to the fans.”
Bristlecone Bum Wash
“If I’m right,” Clark Seville shouted to Cooler McCrudd as the two raced towards the rampaging simian, “We are to fire our paralyzer cones simultaneously on either side of the ape’s backside!”
“If you’re right,” McCrudd shouted in response, “There’s something definitely wrong somewhere!” Still, McCrudd followed Seville’s lead, ducking, dodging, and weaving under and around the giant gorilla’s feet as the ape tried to tear out the climate control mechanism from the ventilation tower. His savage growls and howls mingled with the sounds of useless gunfire from the Moon Defense Forces.
“Hold your fire!” cried Seville. “You men get back!”
“When this monkey falls, he’s going to fall hard!” McCrudd told the soldiers.
“Who?”
“Clark Seville! The bear-man!”
“The bear-man? Where’s his hat?”
“That’s the other one! Cease fire! Fall back!”
As word of Seville’s presence and explanations of who he was made their way through the men, looks of awe and wonder appeared on their faces. Seville, paralyzer cone in hand, waited until McCrudd was exactly opposite him with the ape monster directly between them.
“NOW!” he shouted.
The two paralysis waves met with a crackle of energy, black Jack Kirby circles visible amid their combined aurae. The two agents were thrown backwards as Lord Kong began to fall. Afterwards, as the troops stood over Seville’s and McCrudd’s unconscious bodies, someone asked,\
Micromanatee
“Clark Seville,” Dr. Pumpf intoned the name as if he was finally seeing a famous work of art after admiring it in reproduction for many years. Pumpf paid Seville the great honor of rising from his chair, walking out from behind his desk, and taking the bear-man’s right hand in both of his.
“You don’t know how I have longed to meet you, my friend,” Pumpf told the agent.
Seville opened his eyes wide for a second.
“I’d love to be able to say the same about you,” he responded, “But honestly, I don’t know who you are.”
Dr. Pumpf smiled and turned to the other men in the room, together arranged like some civic organization painted by Frans Hals.
“Gentlemen, this is our finest agent, the premiere example of the kind of agent the Suggestible Trapezoid wants most desperately,” he told them.
Seville extricated his hand.
He sat for a while, moving his many-ringed fingers in a slow, writhing dance as if he found the source of what to say among them. Finally, just as Seville was about to say something, anything, Dr. Pumpf opened his mouth.
“Clark, do you know exactly what the Suggestible Trapezoid is?” he asked.
Seville did not hesitate in answering, keeping his gaze on the backs of his own hands.
Bone Salad Cube
“The Suggestible Trapezoid,” Clark Seville began, his voice soft and nearly-defeated in its softness, “Is like a great railway station that sits atop the intersection of an uncountable number of tangents within the space/time continuum.” Seville spoke slowly, vocalizing his suspicions and conclusions for the first time. “For some, these tangents correspond directly, exactly, precisely, with their own infinite existences. For others, they are nothing more than… mistakes to be corrected– or eliminated.”
“Go on,” Dr. Pumpf urged calmly, his tone ambivalent.
“At the direction of those who control the Trapezoid, if anyone can actually be said to be in ‘control’ of the Trapezoid, we agents attempt, not to correct any supposed temporal ‘mistakes,’ nor to strike a blow for some moral ‘code,’ but rather to adjust tangential reality so that it conforms to a…” he paused to think of the right word, “...rather vaguely defined aesthetic.” Seville took a breath and looked at the ceiling. “The Suggestible Trapezoid is some kind of attempt to elevate Art Itself above… Life.” He looked at Dr. Pumpf. “If you want to put it that way.”
It was evident that Seville had concluded his answer. Pumpf smiled, nodding. He glanced at the Frans Hals painting. Its gathered figures clapped appreciatively. Amid their applause, Pumpf said,
“Exactly right, Clark. Exactly right. More or less.”
He leaned forward on the desk.
“Just one thing, Clark: Do you really believe that no one is actually in control of the Suggestible Trapezoid?”
“I do. I believe that by its very nature, the Trapezoid is, on the one hand, a virtually sentient organism, and on the other, totally ungovernable– and probably all the better off for it.”
Dr. Pumpf leaned even further over the desk.
“What about Toadsgoboad, Clark? What about Toadsgoboad?”
Seville snorted. “What about him?”
“Isn’t he the ultimate head of the Trapezoid?”
Seville answered, “Aren’t I an avatar of Toadsgoboad?”
Staple Gun or Glue Gun?
“I understand you killed one of the fungal creatures with a caulking gun,” one of the lab guys solicited Clark Seville for more information on one of his now legendary adventures.
“Let’s get on with it,” Seville urged. “I just want this to be over.” He sat on the corner of a table in an overcrowded dispensary.
The two lab guys handling the hiberna-wave pump looked at each other. One smirked.
The officiating lab guy, Chris, took one more opportunity to test Seville’s resolve.
“So, once again, you completely absolve all other entities of responsibility for submitting to induced hibernation?”
Clark Seville held his chin even a little bit higher.
“I do,” he said.
“Trust to nature,” one of the lab guys told him in a very soft voice. Very soft.
Obviously, we cannot confirm or verify Seville’s claim that the dream-reality he experienced while in hibernation was as real as our waking, real, shared reality; in deference to his status within the organization and in furtherance of the academic study of his larger mythos, we will now and henceforth as of this writing present Seville’s version of events, such as they are.
The two lab guys, Kalvin and Douglas, mocked the pompous language of the assignation documents. They rolled Seville’s pod into a tube and left the room, turning out the lights.
“How far do the Trapezoid’s rights go in this case?” Kalvin asked.
“Absolute, as far as I’ve been told,” Douglas answered.
“Can we… could we end up like him?” Kalvin sounded worried, pointing with his thumb behind him.
“Never,” replied Douglas. “We’ll never be famous enough.”
Ethical Dopester on the Road to Nice Jugs
So, from here on out, you get to hear my, Clark Seville’s, thoughts. It might surprise you, therefore, that I must begin by confessing that, as an avatar-like thing (need to come up with a word for that thing) of Toadsgoboad, I may not actually be in control of the correct documentation of said “thoughts.” Oh, I love this sort of thing, don’t you?
Now, here’s the situation: Anyone trying to understand the entirety of my references must necessarily read the entirety of my work, both literary and comics. And that means doing some digging. The Tales of Clark Seville When He Was a Bear is a sequel of sorts to an earlier book of mine called At Home with the Gas Giants. Although Toadsgoboad was the star, Clark Seville was the most compelling character. The possibilities I saw there; when you learn that he was born a bear, but, in becoming a human, he had to pass through a phase as a woman. I don’t think I explored that enough.
However, let’s hand things back over to Clark Seville himself.
So you now you know that I once fought another giant gorilla on the Moon. The Trapezoid is written far in advance. I saw Cleana again. Once. Ran into her at a friend’s house. Didn’t even know what to say. Don’t remember what I did say. But she didn’t ask any questions. All of that had been cleared up years before through intermediaries.
A little advice: One practiced in the art of self-awareness reminders can observe the process of hibernation from within. It is suggested that such a procedure is similar to being high on cannabis, all the while understanding the mechanism and acknowledging its hoax. However, getting high has never been my thing. I am Clark Seville, not Toadsgoboad, nor Lance Ash. But, as the Germans say, ineinandergreifend.
So many parts of the brain, for lack of a better description, being forced to act at once.
Orson Welles and the Supreme Cinematic Genius
“There are myths that grow up around people– sometimes merely expressed or acknowledged in a phrase, or a truncated reference to some part of the person’s myth; many times some nickname or alternate monicker or descriptor is used.”
Clark Seville spoke candidly to the half-dozen members of the press who had responded to the official invitation. He wore a bow tie for the occasion. When it came time to take questions from the reporters, Seville was equally honest.
“Are you some kind of bear?” one young woman in a suede newsboy cap.
“Probably,” Seville replied. He had a glass of apple juice in one hand, misidentified as liquor by everyone in the room.
“Is that your basic identity, the shorthand reference to your myth and legend?” another reporter, this one dressed for action in a war zone, asked.
“You mean, ‘bear,’” Seville asked for classification. He took some time thinking it through. “I suppose, in some ways, that’s true.”
“What do you do here?” Irving Fisher Cooke, the seniormost member of the press at the gathering, asked.
“Personally? Or the organization to which I belong?”
“Both.”
“Create myths, promote legends, fulfill daydreams,” Seville responded.
“Are you then self-created?”
“Partially.”
Someone put his head into the room.
“Agent Seville, the film starts in five minutes,” the man called.
Seville led the way into the theater.
Butt Plug Fan Fiction
“I thought it was tasteless and entirely without merit,” Irving Ram Cooke announced as he joined his fellow journalists in the dark parking lot after the conclusion of the film.
“Save it for your review, Irv,” one of the others advised.
“You liked it?”
“I thought it was bold and refreshing,” the other reporter declared. “But I didn’t come here to review a movie. That’s not my job.”
“DId you find it pornographic at all?”
“It depends on what you mean by ‘pornographic.’”
“Still; free lunch,” one of Cooke’s fellow veterans found a bright spot in this seemingly wasted afternoon.
“Why did they show us that?” the woman in the hat wondered. “What correlation to all that blather about myth-making was there?”
The parking lot was wet from an earlier shower. Now it started to rain again. The little group broke up, each heading for his car.
Clark Seville and Durant watched them from a window high up on the wall.
“That certainly confused them,” Durant observed.
“Yes,” Seville agreed. “Too bad Topiary Totality wasn’t completed. I’d rather they have watched that. It would have given them a clearer idea of the image we’re trying to project.”
“That brings up a good point,” Durant told him. “How would you like to join the production as a kind of efficiency enforcer? Get the film back on track.”
“I’ll do whatever I’m told, of course,” replied Seville.
Topiary Totality Sweating through the Rug
The next day Clark Seville arrived by elephant beak balloon at the site of the filming of Topiary Totality, a joint production of the Suggestible Trapezoid and Mr. Penguin Comestibles. A turn-of-the-century New England village had been constructed amid the hills of Lunaros. Seville alit from the balloon next to the catering truck, his duffle bag over one shoulder.
“You there, boy,” he called to a young man moving electrical cables from there to over there. “Where’s Bard Beret?”
“The director?” the young man helpfully asked for our benefit. “He’s in his tent, but he doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“My friend, disturbance is all I know how to do,” Seville replied, already heading in the direction indicated.
He looked neither left nor right as he stalked down the replica town’s Main Street. A large, red-and-white striped tent had been erected behind the theater. Throwing back the flaps covering the tent’s opening, Seville stepped inside, finding himself standing on a floor of Persian rugs. Bard Beret was enjoying an afternoon glass of wine. Two of the main actors in the film as well as some of the members of the crew sat with Beret, chatting pleasantly.
“Who are you?” the director cried on catching sight of Seville.
The bear-man waited until he stepped within the circle of film people before replying.
“I am Clark Seville,” he said. “I’m sure you know why I’m here.”
Bard Beret quickly mastered himself. He turned to an assistant.
“Turn that music off,” he commanded.
They had been listening to the Cure’s Wild Mood Swings album.
An Elephant Engine Ear
Clark Seville did not interfere with Bard Beret’s directorial style or directorial decisions. He thought the idea of including his elephant beak balloon in the climatic scene in which young Proviso escapes from the strictures of his conservative upbringing a stupid one, but said nothing. He did, however, limit the amount of free coffee and doughnuts the crew could partake of.
“I’m not a penny pincher personally,” explained Seville, “But keeping on eye on the production expenditures falls under the purview of getting this shoot back under control.”
“Who said the shoot was out of control in the first place?” Beret demanded.
“You’re already three weeks behind schedule,” Seville retorted.
“What does Mr. Penguin say about this?” asked Amy Shoemaker, the main female actor in the film. She played Barbara, an awkward, homely girl with little self-esteem who has a charm on the Proviso character, unaware that he is, in actuality, the reincarnation of a cosmic being whose hidden mission is to destroy the whaling industry.
“Mr. Penguin is the minority shareholder in the production company,” Seville informed her. “He has no say in how things are run.”
Seville slept in a tiny camper. Amy tried to visit him at night, but was rebuffed.
“What are you, some kind of robot?” she hissed, standing in the darkness outside his door.
“No robot could appreciate your acting the way I do,” Seville told her gently.
“I can do other things, you know,” Amy tried one last time.
“Good night, Ms. Shoemaker. Remember, your big scene is tomorrow.”
Thrice Utterances
“Very little. Two cups of black tea.”
“You’re not supposed to have any caffeine.”
“I can’t function–”
“You’re not a robot, Barbara.”
Various shades of swamp green. Knotted tentacles and tendrils running around a body like a bloated whale, full of “drugs and shoes.” It rises from the sinkhole at this very moment, making Barbara wish she was a robot; a big one. We can see it in her eyes as she and Hargreaves (played by Paul Reubens in the original version) watch it rise.
“It’s not so much like a whale as it is a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.”
“Could it be an elephant beak balloon?”
“Not the way it moves.”
“We’d better get out of here.”
Squash and okra in radioactively mutated cartoon shapes follow it like attendants. It bellows its name and its mission, but in a galactic tongue, ancient as the light from Tympanum Altum. Barbara walks backwards, trips, and watches Hargreaves curse her clumsiness inside his mind. All of this is observed by unemotional clinicians on the viewscreen in their polka-dotted craft.
“Will it eat them?”
“‘It?’ She has a name, you know.”
“‘She?’ This is the future, Brokaw. This is science fiction.”
“This is horror, madness, addiction, Bookseller.”
This Shirt Will Be Perfect for My New Look
Clark Seville visited the wardrobe unit early the next day. Under the watchful eye of Enid Dine, he rummaged through the racks until he found what he needed.
“This shirt will be perfect for my new look,” he said, more to himself than anybody else. He held it up before him.
“You can’t have that,” Enid warned.
Seville slowly turned his head to look at the woman.
“You want to bet?” he challenged her.
“That belongs to the production company,” Enid cautioned.
Seville ignored her. He stepped outside into the daylight and examined the shirt more closely. It had a pattern of horses’ heads inside horseshoes on a navy blue background. Enid followed him outside. She tried to snatch the shirt back, but Seville was already changing into it. He threw his long coat in Enid’s face, removed his old shirt (a worn-out gray Henley), and drew the new one on. Onlookers were amazed at Seville’s torso. Take “amazed” however you want. It is of no consequence.
A couple of Bard Beret’s assistants approached Seville.
“Agent Seville, you’re needed at the water tank set,” they told him.
Seville nodded.
In an unremarked-upon cameo, Clark Seville wrestled with a man in a gorilla costume in the background while Barbara and her mother finally confronted each other. Seville’s new shirt was torn under the arms, but would later be imperfectly repaired by Seville’s own hands. The man in the gorilla costume was Boop Karress, but Seville was never to know that. Although the filming was hardly complete, the bear-man left the location the next day, determined to reach the hills. Something told him that nearby was the cave of his birth.
