Chapter 3: Off the band Fringe fetishist Olney Garkle finally snags the waitress's attention, and not a moment too soon. An emergency council of self-appointed selves has just convened to hammer out plans for a looting and smashing spree. Armed with cup and pot, here she comes: eager, smiling Helga. "No, wait," says O., "I'll have tea, instead." Helga slams on the brakes, gears down frantically but it's too late, her duty shoes screeching in a cloud of burning rubber as she crash-lands against the counter. The cup flies into Olney's lap, while the pot, wrenching free of her grasp, goes into a perilous wobble on the arborite between them. Incredulously, their eyes fix on the pot's circular lip, over which a torrent of hot Java is threatening to flow. Reaching aphelion in what seems a desperate effort to achieve the willful breakdown of physical law, the pot leans on its ecliptic. The two stunned bystanders are suddenly all ears as a strange new sound washes over the background ingurgitations of the cafe. Their eyes meet with the awe of two extras on a Cecil B. De Mille soundstage as the mellifluous tones, faint, ethereal and majestical, cosset their hearts with the longing of All Things for Precious Life. Why, it's the Music of the Spheres interpreting that popular lament, "Gee, it's tough when you're insentient." Gobsmacked Helga breaks out of her boopic trance by sucking in such enormous amounts of air that her swelling cheeks nearly lift her off the floor. Pinch-hitting for God or Dizzy Gillespie, she voids her lungs at the striving Pot-thing, blowing it back into orbit to a round of cheers from Olney. The Music of the Spheres swiftly segues to a catchy rendition of "He failed the whole world in His Hands." Orbital velocity on the wane, the rotating menace senses the jig is up. Seizing on a chance mote of matter beneath its itinerant spin, it makes one last lurch. Flabbergasted onlookers, Helga and Olney, respond with an eruption of gasps as a tsunami of coffee Hiroshige's onto the counter before the pot gives up and the trial evolution is over. "Well heck, guess I'll have coffee after all." "You make up mind, huh, bub?" Helga swabs the counter, her eternal smile broken by pugnacious epithets mumbled to the dishrag. Riding the amplitudes from Big Maybelle to Bobby Breen, her voice is no longer the twittering tinkle of lands far distant to the hubbub and howdy of this town. She fills Olney's cup and huffs away, rolling her eyes like a Kowloon comedian in a zoot suit. The coffee is safe and in front of him at last. Now, for a cigarette. As if screwed on to one of those mechanical arms that dive for bijoux in the Fun Zone, his fingers pincer a king size Domino listing and alone in the dacron wilderness of his shirt pocket. Bought for a nickel at Slobodan's Fine Wines around the corner, this famous cigarette--unknown to particular smokers everywhere--is raised and appraised for a ritual as sacred as the slinging of frankincense. In cathedral veneration, Olney gulps a scalding dominus of coffee, pops his lips with a hearty vobiscum of satisfaction, lights the cigarette and leans forward to enjoy a lung-filled state of grace: his glorious offering to a day of no work well done. §§§ For nearly a month, now, the sidewalks have been passing underfoot as if in a dream, the job hunt becoming more and more of a way to pass time, to get a little fresh air and exercise. Loitering near the door of some prospective employer, he'd suddenly lose his nerve, an act of cowardice swiftly rationalized by brilliantly assessing the ramifications pursuant to a godawful future had he not stopped himself in time, to wit: the certain erosion of his noble character if confined daily to the ghostly bardos of that enterprise. Then he'd scuttle away, chin on chest, peeping earnestly at passersby as if to convince them he'd done the right thing, that he was a man with great potential, if only they knew. Certainly too rare and refined an individual to work in there, where the life force was so pale it couldn't even be Xeroxed. But now the day of reckoning has come. Something's got to give. He'll have exactly three cents to his name after paying for a cup of coffee. Three pennies in the pocket: a Ching's worth of assets. Olney's hand digs down deep to see if any more lucre has been slipped in by the miraculous Overseer of the pure of heart. His fingers pass over a few tufts of immortal lint, several deteriorating bus transfers, an old balloon, a toy car "borrowed" from his friend Denzil Hent's little boy, a bubble gum card with a picture of an axolotl, a plain book of matches with the cover missing, and a key to a house not his own. No hundred dolluh bill, though. "Fuck 'im," says God. Well, then! Is it time to buckle up for that final descent down the tubes? If so, what better place to celebrate ritual preparations than the Moon Food Cafe? He can't afford a last meal, but those time-honored props in battles with despair--thin robusta-bean coffee and a king-sized coffin nail--are well within his budget. Where better to pray for a mean end to a wretched world? He'd like it to start right now, thank you very much, by cresting those amber waves of grain higher and higher, right up to the spangled stars and back again to crumble those purple mountain majesties over the Fina Pumps of Flatland. And, ho-ho, while his vengeful spirit descends to the depths of a terrifying retribution, he'll rejoice because the polysaturated throngs will be getting theirs too. Caught unawares whilst seated at dinner before the Brain Eraser and mindlessly following its meandering vertical hold, they're primed for another forkful of mauve blastomata from the National News--ever preparing the Hebetudes for cancer and other disasters--as it preempts a few minutes of between-commercials filler for an avuncular message from the Leader of The People who wants to assure his subjects yet again that the corporations of their ruling elite are in the national interest and that his government will never give up on the war against drugs, or at least those drugs the government doesn't subsidize. And the silent majority applauds and cheers over mouthfuls of fried spork which inadvertently lodge in their throats and cause a mass outbreak of joyous choking, gagging and vomiting and they all miss the ensuing human mini-interest report on their imminent destruction. (Har-har-har, laughs O., falling upon the pitchfork that will impale him for eons.) He slams his fist on the counter, to the alarm of no one. Within the dayroom of his infinite mind, however, yet another manifestation of goofing wackos is roused. They've chosen sides over this one: a soppery of monarchists are carrying their own Leader of the People--King Fopdoodle of Ego--on their shoulders. Meanwhile, a sneer of mercenaries have slipped out the door to the nearest back-alley, where they commence to murmur in code about mobilizations and coups. "So, am I a failed cosmic experiment?" The words sneak warily through Olney's compressed lips, looking over their shoulders for evidence of the enemy. "Could be," answers the A1 sauce on the counter. "It's possible," agrees the napkin holder, returning the anthropomorphological ball. "Maybe the whole thing's been tits-up since Gilgamesh," says the pepper shaker, "even before." Back to your cells, bozos! yells O. with such silent vehemence that the royalist LOTHP-bearers, as well as a few alley cats rummaging for substance, are scared witless. Amidst screams and hisses, a burden of virtuous megalomania crashes to the floor while the sussurant cabal breaks up in a melee of flying fur and fleeing skinflints. I'm ok but they're not, Olney certifies, mouth shut. He means the Spork Majority and their LOTHP, the one who rules the country, or at least jerks in the noose of the ones hoodoo. Let's face it! he spits inwardly, the problem with ... uh-oh, now he's splattered the faces of parade-goers and plotters alike. They join forces in mutual outrage, jabbing their elbows into the conceptual air representing his ribs. No, but the thing is, he mourns, people have been eating shit all their numerous lives. You'd think it was as vital as air and water. Shit: it's on everyone's menu, only the condiments vary. Be that as it may, within a cup of coffee's worth of time (plus refills), Olney Garkle will no longer be a viable American citizen. Soon he will step from the Moon Food Cafe, not merely as the outsider he has always been, but now and forevermore as an outcast, stripped of Function's chevrons, his weakening signals slugging off the citizen's band to scud and scuff through retarding frequencies, his physical constituents morphosing into sullen clumps of rain-wasted debris to be kicked and stumbled over in some vacant lot, said clumps erroneously perceived by vacant-lot habitués as broken off pieces of torn down building or thrown away tampons hardened into sun blackened blood clots or clods of dirt nurturing Frankensteinian strands of grass ... "Oh, yeah? Well, fuck it" says he to the Moon Food Majority. He spins full circle on the stool. It shrieks like an ideology of fingernails raking a nation of empty slates. No one bats an eye. §§§ Chapter 4: Stalking the FMZ |