Chapter 3 of the GenX Storybook

Where's my lawyer?

'Boy, are you confused, my friend. Here I am; here, take off the sunglasses, maybe you'll see me better. See? It's me, Bill. Now, the only reason you ever come to see me, Calico, is because your old lady wants a divorce and wants to sue you - which you deserve - or because you want to borrow my car. So which is it, pal? Because you can forget about the car.'

"See you? You came to get me outta here! I'm in jail!!!"

'Well now, that's a different matter altogether, isn't it? Why didn't you say so; I thought these bars were to keep animals out. But if that's your predicament, then of course I shall get you out. Now where did I leave that chain saw . . . Officer! Eh yes, I'm trying to get my friend out - could you please fetch my chain saw from the boot of my car? It is parked just outside the building - here are my keys.'

"Hehe, just kidding! I crack myself up sometimes! Sorry, Officer. Now,Tommy, tell me how you got here."

"I was in bed with Snow White, or I mean the employee who's Snow White at Euro Disney. Her lips, Bill, were blistering cold and she wore jet black hair in her armpits. I kept telling her that her throat gave off a nagging sense of macho posturing. She told me that was because the Peruvian village she grew up in would give off puffs of smoke from the 17th century. I accepted that just like I accepted the long stare I was quietly receiving from her belly button. A pigeon landed on my left thigh when she gave me a hit off the laughing gas. There was this serum drooling off the pigeon's beak onto my little dangling participle. It started to ache like a black-eyed pee. And I don't mean to downplay, by saying all this, the full extent of the lean and tilt and plumly fetching pleading sweep of her breasts. They would reduce me to the baby I truly am, and my lips imported in from my first year of life this incredible nursing suckling action I couldn't really let go of, and didn't want to. Then I couldn't stop laughing. She turned to get a fingerful of peanut butter from the jar, and her butt cheeks started laughing. The pigeon laughed, Bill, even the goddam pigeon. At that point I would say I was getting down there into imbecile territory, I was REALLY confused. That's when I thought I heard her asking me stuff. Stuff like, 'Tommy, are you willing to pay for this?' 'Do you have something for me to remember you by, say like $100?' There were a few more, and to every one I couldn't stop laughing and saying what I thought she wanted to hear. That's when she pulled out the tape recorder, and about a half dozen whinnying no-necks burst outta the closet door. They cuffed me, read me my rights, and read the whole third act from King Lear, and then combed all my nose hairs in the same direction, and brought me here. All I ask of you, Bill, is that you don't look so down on me because of all this that you refuse to give me those long piggy-back rides in the backyard in the mornings and take me to the candy store in the afternoons. Bill, are you.....? Bill!! Wake up!!" "

"Huh?? Did you say something, pal? I'm sorry, I was just staring at a girl - see her? That one over there. This is going to sound ridiculous, but . . . but doesn't she somehow remind you of . . . well, Snow White - but with black hair under the armpits? How very odd. Oh no, look the hair is only under one armpit - isn't that a sign for the South African Women Freemason Corps?'

"I thought it was the all-seeing pyramid tattooed above there, well, you know... What? Are we going to get me outta here or not?"

"Depends . . . "

"Listen Bill, could you ask the jailer to come over here. Tell him there's something wrong with my eye. Tell him my left eye is bleeding." "Okay." The way Bill walks, his shoes touch the floor in the same way your tongue might lick the top of a wet mushroom in the woods. He lets how young he is be his outfit. Murderous impulses of the unconscious were removed from him when as a child he was punished by being sent to bed. He scopes out every tense scene for wine, women and desire, even when they're not there.....he still finds them.....quite easily. So as he was walking to the jailer, he'd pop his mouth with his fingers to perfect counterpoint to the other rhythms going on in his head. On his way back, with jailer in tow, he'd scrunch up into a ball to avoid being price-marked, then suddenly jum up into some amazing tangle-legged leaps, only to fall to the floor on his chest like a young innocent at play. His body was so charged with white heat, he could reveal truths about many sorts of love. He is as we see him, a wild-haired cleansing spirit whose heartbeat prowls the twisty corridors of the psyche and drops like snow on our pulse and sway and lilt and swing. And there they are, the two of them, standing at the holding cell where Tommy now faced the jailer. "Your eye is bleeding? What the.....?!!" exclaims the jailer "What? What do you see?" asks Tommy. "Why, your eyes, they're both bright green and they're both spinning!" "Yes....and your name....?" "My name is Jean-Claude." "Good, Jean-Claude. My name is Tommy Calico. Do you like Nancy in autumn?" "I like Nancy in autumn." "Good, Jean-Claude. My name is Tommy Calico. You will remove that name from all your paper files and all your computer files, and you will release me. Do you like Nancy in autumn?" "I like Nancy in autumn. Right this way, Tommy." "Good, Jean-Claude. Do you like Nancy in autumn?" "I like Nancy in autumn. Tommy Calico is removed from all our records now. You are free to go. And I'm sorry for the inconvenience." "Good, Jean-Claude. Do you like Nancy in autumn?" "I like Nancy in autumn. Bye now, Tommy." "What did you need me for?" asked Bill when they got outside. Tommy said, "Do you like Nancy in autumn, Bill?" Bill said, "I don't like Nancy and she doesn't like me, any time of the year." "Well that's not very nice." "I like Nice, but not Nancy. Want to go to Nice? Really, I just want to go home." "Yeah, I think I'll stay away from Nancy for quite a while, and Euro Disney. But I really like autumn, Bill." "Well so do I. A lot better'n I like summer." "Yeah, I like autumn more and more all the time."

"Especially in the spring..."

"I know! The flowers bloom, the grass is green, and

the air smells like the earth." "Hell, you're quite a poet, Bill, I didn't know you had it in you," needled Tommy. "Listen, are we going to Nice or what?" asked Bill impatiently.

"But the thing is, and I just remembered this, Nice is so girl-fueled. Next week more than a thousand of them will be released from prison. And the other thing is, I know most of them. But there's still one more other thing is, they used to tell me, "Tommy, you're so wrong, you're right." But now I hear the word is, they say this about me, "We cain't wait to have a laugh with you with our five knuckle chuckles and beaned up polkas and long hind legs and deathfall grinch probes!" "Sounds like you're one big inside joke with that prison population," Bill chips in." "Learn, forget, re-learn, slap a ham. Ho-boy. I got it, waddaya say we catch the next flight out to Baltimore?" "Baltimore! Now yer talkin', Tommy. Let's get after it. Never had anything but surefire great times there. It's just like My Lai." "I know. What about your tender testicle?" "Joanie 4 and Jackie 4 ever fixed it. C'mon let's go. We should hurry: the airport closes in 50 years."

Tommy and Bill headed up I-95 and finally arrived at BWI. When they approached the AirFrance counter, a bored ticket clerk wearing a blue polyester vest asked, "Ou allez-vous?" Bill chipped in, "A Nice. 2 billets, s'il vous plait." Tommy and Bill paid for the tickets, put on their berets, and prepared to board.

Once on the jet, a voice came over the PA system, "This is your captain. My name is Hook, what's yours? Our route will not take us near Halifax, so I am presently opening the release valves for the fuel. Of course I'm very sorry to have to do this, to come between you and your destination and to save your dismal expendable lives, but I might lose my job if I don't do it. You may disembark from the plane at your own convenience within, say, the next fraction of a second. Thank you for flying AirFrance nowhere. Please, if you will, enjoy Baltimore for the rest of your lives or longer. You may tell me your names as you deboard. I'm the guy at the door without the right hand. I used to be a Boy Scout and attempted to write a poem to get a merit badge. I enjoy watching Don Knotts try on voodoo glow skulls.....and what, pray tell, are your hobbies? Well, jot them on a piece of paper, why don't you, and toss them into my hat on your way out, alright?"

(Don Knotts? voodoo glow skulls? Where do you think this stuff up, Jim??) Tommy and Bill got busy with their pencils before they disembarked the airliner. "What did you write down?" queried Bill. "Why, spelunking," replied Tommy. "And you?" Bill gave Tommy a knowing look. "Body choir, of course!" he responded.

(Autumn, I don't think anymore. It got too hard to do. I read Edith Wharton novels, and in "The Age of Arrogance" there was that scene in Paris where Ellen and Newland were unaware of each other being in a crowd that was watching Don Knotts try on some choirbodied and spelunked voodoo glow skulls---so I just transplanted that very symbolic and key scene onto AirFrance, where it didn't fly)