which revealed the source where the Coca Cola made with real cane syrup could be found. Stanhouse, knowing how much Alvin wanted to taste Coke made with cane syrup again, called Alvin, who arabesqued in delight and immediately called Johnson. Alvin and Johnson immediately began planning their road trip to find Coca Cola made with real cane syrup. Meanwhile, Stanhouse took 77R and…
…put it in his wallet, satisfied that it had been scrutinized enough.
Alvin Stanhouse went to a small Italian restraurant, Luigi’s, which was ignored by the critics but popular just the same. He ordered…
…spaghetti and meatballs. The meal took over half an hour to arrive, and was only lukewarm when it did. But it was plentiful and inexpensive. This was the secret of Luigi’s popularity. This, and the extended openng hours. And the addictive coffee. And the off-menu specialties.
Stanhouse decided to order one of the off-menu specialties…
…spumoni. Not the cheap knock-off spumoni sold commercially everywhere, but the real pistachio-vanilla-strawberry spumoni–green, white, and red, matching the colors of the Italian flag–sold only in Italian delicatessens and restaurants. But after about ten minutes, the waiter came out of the kitchen and told Stanhouse:
You see this thread is inherantly racist in that we British can’t contribute because…
Us UK dopers are totally discumknockerferated by such expressions as: Spumoni,Antique Coke, Wheresgeorge to name just a few.
These are things we, or at least I, have never bloody heard of.
Carry on
“I’m sorry but we’re out of the Spumoni. Can I get you anything else?”
“I really wanted the Spumoni ice cream,” said a disappointed Stanhouse. “Are you sure you’re out?”
“Absolutely,” replied the waiter. “We won’t be getting a new batch of it until tomorrow afternoon.”
“‘Getting a new batch’?” repeated Stanhouse. “You mean you don’t make it here?”
“No,” explained the waiter. “We get it from Guglielmo’s–a small candy and ice cream shop halfway across town.”
For a few seconds, Stanhouse silently contemplated the situation while the increasingly impatient waiter stood by the table. Finally, Stanhouse began an inquiry.
“Is Guglielmo’s still open?” he asked.
“I think so,” the waiter answered. “I believe they close in another 45 minutes or so.”
“Would you be willing to run down to Guglielmo’s and get a batch of Spumoni?” Stanhouse proposed.
“I’m afraid I can’t sir since my shift doesn’t end for another four hours,” the waiter said concealing his exasperation with the suggestion that he sneak out of work and drive halfway across town just to get some ice cream. Why couldn’t Stanhouse do it himself?
“Let me make it worth your while,” said a smiling Stanhouse holding up a $20 bill (77R).
The waiter stared at the worn $20 and replied…
“The last customer to bribe me to drive over to Guglielmo’s for spumoni offered me fifty.” Stanhouse, who was really jonesing for some spumoni, coughed up another thirty dollars and the waiter snuck out to Guglielmo’s for the spumoni. Antonio Squdacelli, the waiter, stuffed the money in the front pocket of his pants on his way out the back door. On his way to Guglielmo’s, Antonio passed by his favorite comic book store and to his surprise, on display in the store window, was a rare vintage copy of his favorite all time comic book…
…The Horny Goof by Jean Giraud. It was the first English translation, The one that established the translated name, which was somewhat inaccurate. It had only been printed in a quantity of 500 and exhibited such a bad translation that Giraud immediately moved to recall and destroy all copies. Only three surviving copies were known to exist, and they were accounted for.
This was a fourth copy. In the right hands, it could fetch a pretty penny.
Antonio peered in the store window. The marked price was $49.99. He had his bribe money; other than that, it was the day before payday and he was broke.
He had a decision to make.
As luck would have it, however, the store was closed and would not reopen for two days–as Antonio noted on a sign he’d ignored before. Good. That meant that he would be flush again before going after the prized comic. Besides, he knew that the store would also get a shipment including Groo the Wanderer by Sergio Aragonés, in two days, so he decided to kill two birds with one stone the day after payday.
Now he went to Guglielmo’s and asked for the spumoni.
“That’ll be $8.75 a gallon,” said the cashierf.
“That’s pretty expensive,” Antonio co,mmented.
“Yes, but this is first quality–spumoni made with imported ingredients,” said the cashier. Antonio shrugged and paid, with 77R.
The bill stayed in the till until Guglielmo himself, a comics fan, took it out, putting another twenty in its place. (He was a wheresgeorge fan too; for the benefit of Chowder, wheresgeorge.com is a website for tracking American and Canadian currency.)
Guglielmo and Antonio both went to the store the day it reopened–and, as luck would have it, Alvin Stanhouse–who got (and liked) the spumoni ice cream he wanted, was also there. He had given Antonio a big tip as well.
Antonio noted Stanhouse and commented to his dessert supplier:
" ‘Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.’ "
Guglielmo nodded sagely and replied," ‘I have a bad feeling about this.’ "
Antonio and Guglielmo watched as Stanhpuse entered the comics store. The entered a few moments later, and diod not notice the motion in the store window as a certain item was removed from display.
…it was a reprint of Groo the Wanderer. A first-edition reprint, no less. Stanhouse paid for it and left the store, waving to the Italian restaurant people. Antonio noted the title of “Groo the Wanderer” on Alvin’s purchase and commented,“I’ll bet that was the only one in the store, too.”
As for 77R…
Guglielmo used it to buy a blowjob by Frieda Brownell, a curvy Jersey girl with veyr short hair and a bad complexion. She’d fallen on hard times and turned to prostitution to pay her bills. Despite the low cost, it was the best blowjob Guglielmo had had since moving to New York from Palermo, and smiling, he asked for her cellphone number. She spat copiously, wiped her mouth and told him the number. He left her there in the alley behind the comic book store.
Back in her ratty apartment, Frieda gargled with Listerine and vodka, and then went to get some groceries at her neighborhood bodega. She used 77R to buy a orange juice, potato chips and gum. 77R sat in the till under the watchful eye of Maria Luisa Gonzales, the proprietor, until…
…there was a commotion outside. Someone screamed. An instant later, a motor scooter smashed bodily through the front window of the bodega, ripping the window bars free, smashing one end of the cash desk, and scattering the nearest shelves of merchandise. Luckily, Maria was at the other end of the cash desk and was not struck directly.
The cash register containing 77R was upended and thrown onto the floor; the closed cash drawer did not open under the impact. It was, however, buried under a pile of books, videos, and Chef Boy-Ar-Dee brand canned pasta.
For a shocked moment, all became silent in the bodega. Then there was the sound of a siren from the outside…
“I really wish that old man would quit making those siren sounds again,” thought Maria. She then went over to to the upturned cash register to set it up right and make sure it was working. However, it was too heavy for Maria to lift by herself so she called out to her 2nd cousin Triphowser, who was in the bodega to help out that day, to come and assist her in lifting the register and seeing if it was ok after the crash. Triphowser, who had been at the back of the bodega pricing jars of pickled goat tripe came out and together he and Maria were able to get the cash register into an upright position. Unfortunately the cash register…
…had been damaged in the fall, so badly it would no longer function.
“Damn,” said the proprietor. “And I didn’t have it insured.”
He closed the store and put the cash from the wrecked register in a lockbox that stayed in his office for three days until he got a new register and reopened. The first customer was a statuesque platinum blond woman named Jeanette Strong, who swiveled into the store to buy a carton of beer for herself and her two boyfriends, Jerry and Johnny. She was a musician–a gutarist with The Cigar Band. She bought a case of Bud Lite and gave a hundred in payment, getting change which included 77R. The next day, Jeanette…
split up with Jerry due to his penchant for farting in bed, and flew to Los Angeles with her other boyfriend, Dr. John “Johnny” DiFalco. On the flight there, she gave Johnny 77R, which she owed him from a nightclub visit a few days earlier; they were always careful to keep track of their money separately.
Dr. DiFalco, a scientist for YoyodynePrime (“Bringing you the future tomorrow… today!”), was hard at work on Brightstar, a classified Defense Department satellite. He and his coworkers and friends, Drs. Sarah Morgenstern and Ali Afez, were just putting the finishing touches on the exquisite device when they realized, upon weighing it, that it was just a little bit too light.
“What should we do?” Dr. Afez asked, scratching his head.
“If it’s even half a gram underweight, our orbital calculations will be thrown off,” Dr. Morgenstern said with a frown. “The DoD specs are quite specific.”
“We just need to add something…” Dr. DiFalco said. He looked around the assembly bay. The smallest, lightest thing he saw was a titanium screw on a nearby table. He hefted it in his hand and realized at once it would be too heavy. Then inspiration struck. He pulled out his wallet and withdrew 77R, then folded it and carefully inserted it under the aft baffle plate. It would be out of the way there but supply the needed weight, they all agreed. They reweighed Brightstar and found, with smiles all around, that it was now the precise weight which the Pentagon wanted.
The next day, it was launched atop an Atlas V 401 rocket, soon reaching a stable synchronous orbit over Tehran. It stayed there for the better part of two months, silently obeying its programming and supplying data that was discussed, among other places, in the Oval Office itself, before firing its tiny retrorockets and falling into the mountains of the Hindu Kush in northern Afghanistan. A U.S. Special Ops platoon, tracking it by its beacon, recovered it, and it was whisked to a secure National Reconnaissance Office facility near Kabul. There, Cmdr. Josefina Ruiz, a Navy engineer on special assignment, painstakingly opened it in an NRO clean room. She found…
…mould. Mildew. Mutant space fungus, even. Yes, 77R had brought a gift to space, and in the unshielded environment of the orbiting satellite, under the genetic hammerblows of radiation and speeding subatomic particles, reproducing itself from one spore, generation after brief generation, it had blossomed.
“Well, this explains where the noise in the later pics was coming from. But where did the mould come from?” Commander Ruiz dismantled the satellite a little further. Then she found it. Underneath the aft baffle plate was a folded piece of paper. She cautiously pulled it free.
It was a ragged, stained, and mould-scarred twenty-dollar bill. “What the fuck is this doing here? It would have thrown off all the mass and balance calculations!”
She picked up the clean-room phone.
She called Dr. DiFalco (who had an alias, Johnny Goss).
“What the devil is a twenty-dollar bill doing in the module?” she asked when he came on the line.
“Ballast,” he said. “The bill weighed just enough.”
She sighed over this. Then her CO came on the line.
“You’re getting two months’ leave,” he said. “You earned it.” She thanked him and got off the line.
She cleared the bill, 77R, with NASA security. Declassified, it was released to her and she put it in her wallet.
That afternoon she went to London for de-briefing; then took another plane to St. Louis, her place of residence and birthplace. Once out of the airport, she went to a Starbucks, where she took out 77R and…
handed it to a homeless guy named Malfcom Footboil who was panhandling outside the Starbuck’s. Malfcom, overjoyed with his new found wealth, ran across the street to the 7-Eleven to buy a bottle of MD 2020 and a corndog. However, since he was not looking where he was going, he was hit by a bus. 77R, which was clutched in his hands, was freed and caught up in a stiff wind where it soared high above St. Louis finally landing…
on Eighth Street just outside of Gate 3 for Busch Stadium. There, 77R was picked up by…