My father’s family name being Pimmip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pimp. So, I called myself Pimp, and came to be called Pimp.
I live in Heck now, under the benign but irritating rule of Fretful Porpentine who promenades streets of lead with Mervyn the toothless one-headed guard dog; muttering things like “Dodgy,” “Guv’nor” and “Quid.” It’s a not very pleasant place, this Heck, with its many lakes of tepid bathwater and soapstone, valleys that echo with the faint sighs of the darned, and electric fires giving off a moderate amount of warmth, but the rent is cheap and the buses are on time just often enough to give one a false sense of hope.
When I was younger I lived with my shrewish sister lucie, who used to highlight errors on company memos and pass them around for the amusement of her oh-so-superior friends; and her husband, SpinneZiege, who drove an SUV and worked at Joe’s Garage sucking fuel out of abandoned automobiles.
I thought it silly, but he called it a gas.
One day I happened to be cutting through the church graveyard on my way to a Doper’s BBQ when I was made to feel nearly uncomfortable with barely noticeable nausea in the stomach by the untidy appearance of a wide-eyed old man in a sailor suit two-sizes too small. He slobbered heavily and the front of the suit was damp and mossy. He stared and drooled–just stared and drooled, in a most peculiar way.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a $100,000.00 bar would ya kid, just to float me over ‘till Payday?”
“No, Good Sir.” I snickered. “But I have my lunch in my book bag, would you like that?”
“Gimme it,” he said, wiping his mug with his sleeve. “Gimme it now or I’ll launch a few nuclear missiles at ya and ruin your whole day! Ha ha haaaa ha haaaa! <Belch.>”
I pulled a sandwich from my pack and he grabbed it out of my hands. He sniffed it hungrily.
“Ah, yes, my favorite–felch, and fresh too!” In an instant it was mostly consumed and a big, huge, giant lecherous smile creeped across his face and he seemed intoxicated. He was interrupted by another sailor, Smeghead, who convinced the old man that he needed a manicure and the two began to file their nails. Suddenly and without forshadowment, Mnementh arrived with a quad of soldiers. He said ‘HOO-AH!’ and ‘OH YEEEAAAAAHHHHH!’ very loudly, and constantly and smacked the old man upside the head so that it’s mildly painful, but does no damage and is mostly just irritating. Then the soldiers, using whips of black licorice, flogged the old man until he confessed to stealing the sandwich.The soldiers carried him away by his manicles.
My Uncle Ice Wolf, who was Supreme Paisley of the Bell-Bottom Mythical Society for the Protection of Under Used Letters of the Alphabet, took me to meet Ms. Kallessa in exchange for something they did in the other room. She had a fantastic memory and could remember every date she ever had. Not that she had many, mind you, but she cut a wee notch in her headboard for each one, and she was now on her sixteenth piece of furniture.
Yes, one could say she was mildly infatuated with dates…and we did…but always behind her back. I met Ms. Kallessa’s alleged “companion,” known as Mermaid, who had just finished combing the cotton wool barbs of her tail and begun to apply starch to the tips of her magnificent breasts.
I just stared and drooled…stared and…drooled.
Ms. Kallessa wore her hair in a lime-green beehive, and had the look of someone who had died of fright…several days ago. She wore a wedding dress which was yellow from…ah…age; and roamed the room rearranging dead flowers in old coffee cans and humming “Delta Dawn.”
“Kmart, right?” said Mermaid to me.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Mermaid?” says I, suddenly realizing my zipper was at half-staff.
“Kmart. You shop at Kmart…and I bet I can tell ya where ya got dem shoes, too! Bet ya a buck I can tell ya where ya gots dem shoes!"
“Okay. It’s a bet.” I said, not wanting to appear like the pooper of parties.
Ya gots ‘em on your feet, dumbass!” Her magnificent breast shook as she laughed. “Gimme a buck! Geezus H. Kee-rist! No wonder you’re poor! A fool and his money, eh Ms. Kallessa?!”
I handed over a dollar in change I had from the porn parlor and wiped my chin with my sleeve. We had many parties at Ms. Kallessa’s, where I was often used as a coat rack when they played Strip Uno. I met many interesting people, including a lawyer named Doobious, who one day told me that I had Great Expectorations from an unknown benefactor, whose name wasn’t John Behrsford Tipton. I was always to be known as Pimp, and will be brought up as a gentleman. Doobious took me to Task, a big city on the far side of Heck where he bought me new clothes, and introduced me to Snooooopy, Ms. Kallessa’s cousin, who was to be my tutor. I knew Snooooopy from school where he used to make fun of my haircut and bum cigarettes. He was always jealous of me because I was always picked before him in baseball, as the other kids used me as second base. We shared a small flat of rooms at 210C Baker Street, where we became fiends.
Ms. Kallessa summoned me to another party to celebrate Mermaid’s return from France, where she had received an advanced degree in Rude. At the party I saw an old man who looked familiar, but I thought it was just one of the old Priests who used to fondle me after Mass when I was younger. As the familiar man and Mermaid snuck off into the closet, I looked longingly at Mermaid’s magnificent breasts and I came…to realize that I could be happy just to be in their presence forever, but she continued to make fun of my clothes and that made me feel sad. As sad as a man who had to order condoms from a children’s catalog.
One night I had a visitor, the familiar gentleman from the party. It made me slightly queasy in my stomach to further recognize the mossy sailor from my night in the graveyard! The old man introduced himself as Chief Scott, and he told me that it was he who provided me with Great Expectorations. He said he made a fortune from blackmailing sailors on his ship when he asked and threatened to tell. He needed a place to hide out for a while, so I took him to my flat where he and Snooooopy sat quietly looking through the lingerie ads in the Macy’s circular. I later confessed my love for starched ni…I mean Mermaid, but she wanted to shack up with Arden Ranger as the two were fond of leather devil outfits.
Just when Chief Scott and Snooooopy (who has entirely too many o’s in his name) decided to sneak out of town under the premise of a practice Honeymoon; Ms. Kallessa got a case of distemper over what she did to me and Mermaid. She told me that Mermaid was the daughter of Sue Duhnym, who killed some dude with a side-ways glance in a pick-up bar in Task and that Chief Scott was Mermaid’s illegitimate father! I got so freaked out at her half-baked story that I stuck her head in the oven and burned her to a crisp.
As if that wasn’t enough, Wastrel showed up at this imprudent juncture wearing a cape, mask and Cecil Adams pajamas, dressed as the “Guy-That-Has-To-Prove-You-Wrong-No-Matter-What.” As an assistant under-deputy junior dog-catcher…he was perusing Chief Scott on an old warrant of suspicion of attempted conspiracy to litter! He threatened to put his hands on his hips and laugh hauntingly until I succumbed and betrayed the whereabouts of the Chief, but I told him I had to take a leak and snuck out the bathroom window as he waited outside, mesmerized by the shine on the door knob.
I walked in modest haste–a gentleman never runs–to catch Chief Scott and Snooooopy to tell them about Wastrel. The two attempted to skip town (literally) and high-tailed it (also literally) to the river to catch a tramp steamer named the U.S.S Stanley. The pilot of that storied vessel was none other than Sassy, the Alpha Red <genuflect> who needed to make some extra scratch in a hurry to pay off an old library fine. Just as Sassy had maneuvered her boat out of the shallow end of the River of Not Remembering Very Much, some fool in a submarine surfaced and put the kibosh on the steaming tramp (the boat, not Sassy). Snooooopy is kilt when the periscope zoomed up through the deck and Chief Scott hit his funny bone, nearly laughed himself to death but not before I confessed to him that Mermaid was his daughter!
<Cue the Alfred Hitchcock music>
The Chief just stared and drooled, stared and drooled…blinked MIGHTILY!, and then smiled a big, huge, giant creepy smile as if he had just eaten a felch sandwich.
I was later diagnosed with chronic queasy stomach which required a long and not quite unbearably boring recovery at Sunny Brook Farms where I developed a rather heavy Tums habit; and engaged a correspondence course found on a match-book cover and thus, became an actuary. I gained successful employment in Task, becoming sufficiently well endowed to do most of my shopping at the GAP. Some years later I ran into a washed-out Mermaid who had become a topless dancer in a fish market after Arden Ranger dumped her for Charlie the Tuna.
Now we all live out our lives in Quiet Desperation, (a suburb of Task), where we make up fanciful personalities to inflict on others at the SDMB.
And through it all, I remain steadfastly,
Myself
(Notarized)
Do check out this linkage:
http://books.mirror.org/gb.dickens.html#expectations
