Chapter 3
| The Story | The Authors |
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"I give up," said Jake, sadly shaking his head. It was just too much for the poor lad, bound to the soggy bed by stainless tendrils, drifting in and out of these hallucinations, now he was free, now he was in chains again, then free, then bound...If one could only control it, he thought, guide the ebb and flow of these visions with the firm hand of a Skipper at his trusty, seaworthy vessel, why, that would be like possessing the very Secret of Life! But alas, it was not to be. "I really am crazy," he muttered resignedly to no one in particular, punctuating the sentence with an ellipsis of short, shrill, barking laughs. "Come on then, ye lusty and humilating visions! Come all ye imps of the perverse, printer's devils and soul-drinking succubi! Come all ye Rhondas, ye vast porcine Berthas, ye anorexic Kates and Christies and Naomis with your lips of ice! For I give up, I throw myself into your starry collective maw..." Just then, as if in answer to his typically moronic and overdramatic rant, the air began once more to shimmer and harden into a form. And lo and behold, it was -- | |
| Gilligan. Sweatin' like K.D. Lang at a christian singles dance. | |
| No, just kidding...it was- Ginger. Sweatin' like Forrest Gump at a mensa meeting. No, just kidding...it was- Mr. Howell. Sweatin' like a queer in a bologna factory. | |
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No...wrong again -- it was Maryanne. "Your problem, as I see it, poor dear Jake," she said, sweetly, bending forward to brush the damp hair from his forehead, "has always been one of taste. While having always been the kind to set yourself apart from the crowd, to see yourself as having a Special Purpose in life, from elementary school on you were just like all the other boys. You'd look at Ginger till your eyes popped out of your head, you'd even give Mrs. Howell a second glance because of all her money, but girls like me you'd never even consider. Meanwhile, all the real men knew from they day they were born that it's girls like me -- they quiet, shy types -- who are the ones who really let loose in the sack. Librariennes with the fearless imaginations of geisha girls, as they clichˇ goes..." | |
| these last words whispered hotly into Jakes's reddening ear. A little butterfly flutter of Maryanne's tongue for a final bit of puncuation. Her hair smelled faintly and arousingly of straw and sun dappled meadows and illicit skinny dipping in local swimmin' holes. The embarassed cough of shared first cigarettes behind distant barns and the musky rut of Chevy pickups at the drive in. Her ample cleavage yawed mere inches from Jake's quivering nose. The blue gingham seemed straining to burst forth with its corn-fed Midwestern bounty. the heady promise of pastoral romps and deliciously sunburned backs hung achingly in the inch or so of heated air that seperated Jake and the floating spectre of Maryanne. Jake strained in his bond. Buford strained likewise in his. With a coy giggle Maryanne leaned even closer to Jake's ear and the breathily whispered, "You've missed out on a lot, Jake, and before I leave you I want to show you what it is." | |
| "It is... a $85 777 474 856 857 484 763 636.36 DIAMOND!!!!" She gave him the diamond and.., | |
| at that moment, Jake decided to quit looking for women to marry and just stay single. Dating was giving him nightmares. And it was very confusing. Now, he thought, if only I could get away from Maryanne and her phony diamond and these disgusting tentacles holding me down, I could start over. He began fantasizing... he could run away, get a job as a bank manager. He had always wanted to be a bank manager. Suddenly, he felt the weight on his chest disappear. He was free! Now it was time to do what he knew must be done. He started towards the door. Then he stopped. Maryanne was beckoning to him. And she had a butcher knife. | |
| "Dave its time to prepare dinner" Maryanne said, "The cat is tied down and I have a hankering for wonton". "I hate wonton", thought Jake as he submitted to Maryanne's request and butchered samantha the next door neighbor's pet. After a wonderful dinner, and a bottle of wine Jake began to tell Maryanne of his dreams. | |
| Sweet, wholesome, innocent little Maryanne was so horrified by what Jake was saying that she threw the empty wine bottle at him and then threw him out of her house. And how they got to Maranne's house in the first place was a mystery to Jake but like so many other things that had been happening in his life lately, he just accepted his situations without question and dealt with it as best he could. So now he found himself locked out of Maryanne's house. He sat himself down on the curb with a deep desparate sigh. He didn't even know what city he was in. As he realized that he had no place to sleep for the night and no one to turn to, he felt a tap on his shoulder. A large man stood over him but because he was backlit by the street light, Jake couldn't see his face. The large man put his hand on Jake's shoulder and knelt beside him. "Santa?" Jake said incredulously. "Yes, Jake. It's me, Santa. Have you learned your lesson?" the jolly man asked Jake. | |
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"No!" sputtered Jake, "Indubitably, emphatically, without a doubt NO! No no no no no! What lesson, you overfed KMart Kris Kringle? The only lesson here is to say No to that last drink and mind the Welsh Rarebit, elsewise your nights'll be plagued by dreams so crazy, so utterly bonkers, it's like A Christmas Carol rewritten by Chuang Tzu on uncut DMT... This is, like, the Book of Job as interpreted by Francis Farmer... Lesson my ass, chubby -- the only lesson here is that you people, figments or otherwise, are fucking NUTS!!! Are you reading me?" "Are you quite finished now?" replied Santa with a jolly (and not entirely unsympathetic) litle ho-ho-ho. "All through? Good. Now: ridddle me this: There are three men in a boat. They have four cigarettes and no matches. HOw do they smoke?" | |
| "Huh?" Jake said with a severely raised eyebrow. "Three men, one boat, four cigarettes, no matches. How-" "I heard you the first time, Fatty. I'm trying to figure out what the fuck you are talking about!" Jake said, poking Santa in the chest to punctuate his statement. "You know, Santa don't appreciate your shitty attitude." The big guy in red said. "It's a simple enough question, man. What you need to know is that the wrong answer just might cost your life. However, the right answer might be your ticket home." Santa explained. "Jesus Christ, why the hell didn't you say that in the first place? Now what was that question again?" Jake said. "Forget it, pal. I don't like you and I'm not going to waste any more of my time on an asshole like you. Buh-bye." said Santa, and he lay his finger to the side of his nose and quick as a flash he rose over the roof tops and was gone. "Oh, Goddamnit!" Jake shook his fist in the air and stamped his foot and cursed the day he was born. | |
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But he would curse it with still-fouler epithets before the night was through. At this moment George Michael reappeared, half-formed, shimmering in the cold night air for just long enough to wag his finger coquettishly at Jake and announce, "Looks like somebody's due for their next visitor..." "You told me only three, you effeminate, lying piece of Britpop excrement." "Looks like somebody's not gonna get to hear the rough mix of my new album, either." He shook his head sadly and disappeared. Jake fell into a Limbolike reverie which was only interrupted when the sound of those imminent boots began to crunch through the snow towards him. Lemme guess, thought Jake; the fucking Tooth Fairy... A shadow fell over him, long and sinuous and lithely swaying. He looked up. "I knew it!" he exclaimed, a noticeable note of madness now gracing his laughter. "The Tooth Fairy..." "Who you callin' the Tooth Fairy, sweet-pea? You lookin' at the one, the only, the original Tooth Bitch! | |
| Jake looked around frantically, there had to be a way out of this. His mind wandered back to the days of Dungeons and Dragons, how would he have escaped an impossible situation such as this. He tried to think but, he had always played the magic-user and as a consequence usually died early on in the campaign. He recalled all of the nerds and geeks at the table laughing their pathetic, superior little laughs. Jake had never fit in anywhere. The jocks, the nerds, the punks ... they all laughed at him. By this time the "Tooth Bitch" had removed the rusting dental hygienist tools from the doctors bag. | |
| She was six foot four and wearing spike heeled boots that brought her up to almost seven feet. The shining ebony of her leather corset and mini skirt blending into the deep chocolate of her skin so that she appeared almost naked. Jake watched warily as she brought forth the dental instruments. Her hands were emormous and strong looking. Masculine hands. From where she towered over Jake he could see that beneath the miniscule strip of dark leather that passed for her skirt a conspicuous bulge in the satin panties that suggested that what she possessed beneath it was not standard feminine equipment. "Hey!" she bellowed, "You keep your dirty little nose from outta where it don't belong. Yet." Jake shrank. Listen up, honeychile, this aint no Ru Paul bullshit for you. I don't got no make up or keep your man happy tips for you. We got some serious bidness to take care of." And she advanced towards the cowering Jake with a rather nasty set of dental pliers in her hand. "Now open wide hon, Mama's got to work to do. You just be still and open wide. and tell me baby," she giggled,"Is it safe yet?" | |
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"Now, you was warned, honeydoll, you can't say you wasn't warned from de day you was big enough to ho'd a toofbrush in yo hand, that you gots to take care of yo teef. You gots to brush 'em after ev'ry meal, you gots to avoid them pesky between-meal snacks (not to mention what they'll do to your hips, and believe me, child, I know!) and you gots to floss, ev'ry single day of yo life. Elseways you gets turned over to de Toof Bitch..." "But -- what does this have to do with masturbation? Can't we pleaseprettyplease at least be done with one aspect of my poor personal hygiene before going on to the next? Please," whined Jake. "Oooooh, the dirty parts -- my Favorite!" replied the Tooth Bitch. "Because you see --" and here she reached into the air and pulled down, from out of nowhere, a screen, which snapped right back up, like a frisky pull-shade, causing her to hiss "Bitch!," swaying in her stilletto heels in the broken snowcrust as she gave the pull-handle of the screen a savage yank! This time it stayed put. She looked up then, limping gesturing with her fingers in the night air. "Now, run that -- yes, that's right, you, over there, who did you think I was talking to, honey, Lana Turner? What do I pay you for? To sit on your fat midget ass and loaf? Now, roll it, the cute little film-loopy thing, there's a good slave..." | |
| Across the street Jake could see the stocky form of a dwarf grumpily busying itself at an ancient film projector. The astute reader has already, of course, recognized this as none other than the mysterious Mr. Tickles, occasional housecat and all-around Priapus-that-no-one-took-seriously-on-account-of-his-diminutive-size. Poor Mr. Tickles, wretched Fate! The monstrous genius of a 20th-Century Donatien-Alphonse-Fran¨ois Marquis de Sade trapped within the extremely limited proportions of a Hervˇ Villachaise. "Say it for your Mistress, dearie, say it!" the Tooth Bitch (whose real name was Esteban) would command halfway through the first of her 3 nightly bottles of Night Train, and poor Mr. Tickles would hang his head, cheeks burning with shame, and croak meekly, "De plane! De plaaane, boss, de plane!" Never had he fallen so low. Never had the fires of his hatred and misanthropy been stoked to so white-hot a glow. But he would wait... the Tooth Bitch would get hers, let there be no mistaking that. With the way she got to drinking by the time a tour had reached its midpoint, she was bound to slip up sonner or later. And when she, instead of proving himself the invaluable lifesaver of yore, he'd give it to her. Boy, would he give it to her. And but good. And as he thought these things to himself, he found that that malevolent little slice of a grin of his (for which we all so love him) had returned to his face. He even began to whistle, as he worked, and the tune he whistled was "Whistle While You Work," and when he realized this he didn't stop, but instead just whistled louder, as if to grace his future revenge with the fairest of winds and the most auspicious of omens. | |
| Mr. Tickles shifted grudgingly on his high stool and slowly reached over to start the ancient film projecter. "Bitch" he growled softly to himself. "I heard that you!" screamed the Tooth Bitch from the other side of the alley. "Don' ya'll think I dint. And believe you me, honeylam there gon' be hell to pay fer that, yes'ir. Hell to pay." The projecter kicked into life and the circle of light from the lens seemed for all the world to Jake like the cyclops eye of a speeding motorcycle come to run him down at last. He welcomed it. The Tooth Bitch gave him a little spike heeled kick. "Ya'll better pay attention swee'pea 'cuz this hea' what I gots to impart on yo' sorry ass." The numbers flashed past in reverse and the film began. | |
| "Isn't he just the cutest!" the Tooth Bitch was saying back on Jake's side of the street. "He was difficult at first, especially when I first gave him the outfit. But isn't he adorable, with the hat, and the curly-tip elf shoes, and the beard, I made him wear afake one until his real beard grew out, god, beards, reminds me, don't you just hate shaving your legs, girlfriend? Sigh. I simply loathe it. Shaving, waxing, electrolysis -- all the same. There ought to be a way to cut it off once so that it would never come back, don't you agree?" Jake gulped. "Anyway, you'll never believe where I found him -- the Circus! Isn't that just so darling and, oh, traditional? A gentleman visitor of mine, in town for a view days from Mi-lan, took little old moi to the Cirque d'Hiver, and behind one of the concession stands they're selling peanuts, popcorn, cotton candy, circus posters, animal crackers, and midgets. Well, dwarves, too. A few leprachauns, some brownies, pixies, nixies. For sale. I looked at my gentelman companion, Mr. Montalban he's called, very handsome and very wealthy, I said to him, 'Ricardo, Ricardo, wouldn't you feel more reassured about things if you knew there was a little dwarf with me, protecting me and taking care of me while you were gone?' How could he argue with that, girlfriend, how? Well he couldn't. Mr. Montalban he told me 'Angel, you just pick whichever of those little monkeys your heart desires.' And I already knew which one. | |
| As the film rolled, Jake was filled with a dark, moist, squishy sense of impending doom. | |
| "You might as well just kill yourself now." said a mysterious voice from over Jake's left shoulder. Jake glanced to his left to see from where the voice emanated and he was very surprised to see an 11 1/2 inch figure standing on his shoulder The figure was a woman wearing a hot pink vinyl mini dress and her strawberry blonde hair was done up into a beehive hairdo that was at least half her height. Jake was beginning to think that someone had slipped him a Mickey. "Wh- wh- who are you?" Jake stammered. "I am the ghost of Vashondra Du Lunchenette. And listen to me, honey. You don't want to be watching any film that the Tooth Bitch is showing. Trust me!" "But killing himself is not the answer!" Jake heard another voice from over his right shoulder and when he turned to look there was another 11 1/2 inch woman standing on his right shoulder. She also wore a beehive which was less fabulous than Vashondra's. "Bitzy Bootleg!" squealed Vashondra. "You're crashing my scene! Why don't you go make us some nice martinis?" "What are you two Bitches doin' here?" the Tooth Bitch said to Vash and Bitz with her hands firmly planted on her hips. "We are trying to save this poor boy from one of your lame ass films." Bitzy replied. "You mean I am, you're supposed to be making martinis." Vashondra responded. Jake was beginning to get a headache. Mr. Tickles was hoping he'd get to see a cat fight. | |
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But alas for poor Mr. Tickles it was not to be. The tiny ghostly figures blinked and faded into something akin to TV interference. A second passed. Then Vashondra's image returned, this time in a loose white gown. Her coiffure changed to two tight danish buns on the lateral portions of her head. The image skipped like a broken record. "Help me Obi Wan, You're our only hope" she repeated over and over to nobody in particular. From somewhere's further down the alley came a slightly British whine. Something resembling a movie theater trashcan on stubby wheels erupted from nearby shadows and lumbered away whistling and beeping in an odd and mechanical approximation of laughter. | |
| And with that (the Tooth Bitch all the while chain-smoking, tapping her size 13 feet and sighing with undisguised irritation) Mr. Tickles could take his finger off the Pause button and begin the movie. | |
| Why would he not? The reflection in the monitor confirmed yet another annoying link, the heat and smoke distorting the Bitch's image even further. | |
| Why would he not? The reflection in the monitor confirmed yet another annoying link, the heat and smoke distorting the Bitch's image even further. | |
| Jake, numb from a sleepless night of hallucinatory abominations, sat back on the folding chair the Tooth Bitch had so thoughtfully provided as the film began to roll... | |
| "Dental Hygiene and You" read the title of the dilapidated black and white film. "Presented by the American Dental Association". This looks pretty harmless, Jake thought and he made himself as comfortable as he could in the folding chair. The film started out showing healthy, smiling all-American high school kids sporting poodle skirts and dungarees eating healthful lunches and chatting cheerfully in their surrealistic cafeteria. The narrator discribed how happy and healthy and perfect the children were all thanks to their impeccable hygiene - brushing and flossing after every meal and eating lots of crunchy fruits and vegetables. But wait! There, in the back corner of the cafeteria sat a lonely disheveled boy. It was quite obvious that he didn't care about dental hygiene. His hair was messy and needed a trim, his shirt was wrinkled and untucked, his shoes were muddy and untied, and he was not smiling even though his lunch plate was filled only with twinkies and ding dongs. The narrator began to discribe how miserable little Johnny's life was because he never flossed or even brushed his teeth. He couldn't get a date to the dance because the girls would never talk to him. Johnny was a masturbator - all because of poor dental hygiene. Jake squirmed in his seat. The story was all to familiar and that little boy looked familiar too. Then the narrator began to describe what other horrible fates awaited the hygienically challenged boy. The film showed pictures of people whose teeth were rotting out of their heads, horrible disfiguring mouth cancers and - worst of all - hairy palms! | |
| The Tooth Bitch waved her magic wand at Mr. Tickles. "Wake up, Tattoo," she admonished him; "Pause it. Pause it, now! I have to give my little talk." | |
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"Bitch" muttered Mr Tickles again. "I got ears honeychile, I can hear. Don' think I aint got your numba l'il man. You get yours later. But fuhst I gotta give this one hea' a l'il lecture so's he knows what's up with stuff gon' happen to him. She turned and put a leering grin into Jake's face. "OK chile, you seen the impohtant part o'da movie. It all downhill f'um there. Madness an' a unhappy death f'um sifflus contracted f'um a Tia-joo-wana ho' 'cuz he dint brush and floss like a good honeychile. He too busy spankin' that l'il ole monkey to attend to propah dental hygiene. His pope beatin' gots in tha way o'his toofbrush. Wastin' all that time yankin' his chain to floss his gums an' aint no right woman gon' touch him 'cuz he gots bad teeth an' haly-toosis too! Soun' like someone you know, now don' it." Jake nodded weakly. "Weeeeell now, Hea' we is. The crossroads done been reach. Yo' time is a-comin' an' I'm hea' to delivah on the promise of the Tooth Bitch. If'n you can take proper care of'em, they gots to come out." The Tooth Bitch brandished the dental pliers anew. "The time is nigh and I am gon' take what's mine. Y'all my l'il puppy now. An' 'member this swee'pea, what one man's toofless pain turn into the Tooth Bitch ideal pleasure." The leering grin by now had spread so wide across the Tooth Bitch's face that it seemed likely that the top of her head was going to fall off. | |
| and her head did fall off leaving her without a head!! So the headless Tooth Bitch was toothless. What shame!!!!! She was very upset and tryed to cry and instead peed her pants. Poor poor girl. | |
| But, not to worry. There was plenty of TP in the john. | |
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"John!" gasped Jake in surprise, smacking himself on the forehead, "of course!" John Moriarty, the tall, athletic Junior Counselor in charge of Jake's cabin those last two summers at Camp Kamonawannalaya, who'd staged jerk-off contests among the boys, citing the shamanastic rite-of-passage roots of such ritual behavior and quoting Claude Levi-Strauss's observations of teenage boys among the hill tribes of Papaua, New Guinea as Jake and the others fiercely contested to see who could come first, who could hit the ceiling... That was where it had all begun... Thus lost in onanistic contemplation, he failed to notice events transpiring directly under his nose until it was too late for one of his hallucinations: Mr. Tickles had approached the Tooth Bitch from behind and doused her with a bucket of water. "I'm meeeellllllllllting...." she shrieked, and did just that, leaving only a pair of spiked heels and a gilded codpiece on the ground as testament to her misbegotten passage across the grey earth of Jake's guiltridden psyche. That left Mr. Tickles, whom Jake finally noticed on account of the dwarf's breath, which smelled of rancid boiled cabbage and stale cigar ash. "Jesus Christ, you killed her," he exclaimed, still lost in summercamp reverie. "Ah, she had it coming. C'mon kid -- let's go get a hotdog." | |
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They wandered off down the alley. Mr tickles affectionately placed a wee hand behind Jake's knee. "What kind are we going to get?" asked Jake peacefully. "A foot long, kid, I always want a foot long. All beef tube steak. Yes sir, that's the ticket for me." Whilst majestic music swelled to a glorious crescendo in the background mr tickles turned to Jake and said "Kid this could be the start of good things for both of us." | |
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"This looks like the start of a beautiful friendship," replied Jake, and they wandered westward, the lights of Nazi-occupied Casablanca gradually dwindling to nothing, in the growing distance, and darkness, behind them. But the night was not yet through with young Jake. | |
| Jake slipped an arm around his companion. "Christ, Jake," his companion cried, histrionically, "Get that thing off me, you asshole. You know I can't stand your little practical jokes." Jake dropped the arm back in the gutter where he had picked it up. | |
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"Christ not again," moaned Jake. "These visions, the world is once more but a magic-lantern show, mark how it slips away from me...the very air parteth before me, the bats of eventide are an army of devils, the fireflies are become whirling imps, and behind the fanglike moon there hide the great clouds of darkness, fiendish minds of antimatter and disgrace made flesh, while all around me the familiar shapes of dearly beloved friends and all that is familiar are as if new again, recombining with one another in a monstrous copulation, a living teratogenesis..." "Quit yer yammerin'," spat Mr. Tickles by way of reply, retrieving his fallen arm from the forest floor. "It's cybernetic. I lost the real one when I was still in the circus. Elephant stepped on it. You think you know about realpain, kiddo, think again. And by the way, I don't wanna hear you say 'copulation' again -- the word is 'fuck' -- got me?" | |
| Gendarme | |
| From his place in the shadows Gendarme Pencilthinmoustache eyed the pair as they wandered alon. there wa something very suspicious about the pair. The detatchable arm, for instance. Why did they have to wander into his Vichey controlled precinct. His face was briefly illuminated by a match while he lit a Gaulois before he slipped into a casual gait behind them. | |
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As if out of nowhere, the word gendarme had appeared. | |
| Suddenly there was a great earthquake which split a fissure open directly beneath Jake and Mr. Tickles and they fell to their deaths and they were buried by fallen trees which then caught fire. Then a tsunami came and washed away all the ashes. Then the ghost of the Tooth Bitch floated over the scene and said "That's what you get for not brushing your teeth!" and she disappeared forever. | |
| A girl named Mary came up onto the setting and stopped all of the action. "THIS MAKES NO SENSE!" She shouted. "NEW STORY!" | |
| "Hey Mary, bite me!" screamed Mr Tickles and quickly beat Mary to death with his clublike penis. | |
| All of this just aroused Gendarme Pencilthinmoustache's suspicions even more that something was not right about Jake and Mr Tickles. He decided to watch them a bit more closely. | |
| Putting his proverbial shoulder to the ethereal grindstone, so to speak, Officer Pencilthinmoustache, the very pride of Scotland Yard, broke camp, leaving so little a trace of himself that even Smokey Bear would have been proud, and, hoisting his rucksack back onto his shoulders, he set out into the humid jungle, following the trail of Jake and Mr. Tickles, his presence announced by the loud screeches of howler-monkeys. | |
| And here the detective's supreme, inscrutable cleverness must be noted: the previous day, when he first caught sight of those two rapscallions traipsing through the fecund rainforest, Officer Pencilthinmoustache, using a blowgun given him by his friend Fashocha, chief of the Tarahumara, had shot a strychnine breadcrumb generator into the rolled-up cuff of Mr. Tickles' left pantleg. This way, a breadcrumb trail would be generated behind them, which the brightly colored parrots of the jungle would fly down and devour, subsequently dying of strychnine poisoning within seconds, leaving a florid trail of dead parrots for Officer Pencilthinmoustache to follow the dastardly duo's progress by. | |
| Unfortunately, Officer P. had not counted on the fact that most of the parrots had been slowly building up an immunity to strychnine by constantly dropping bad acid laced with the substance. These were no ordinary parrots ... | |
| Nevertheless, enough of them died to leave him a followable, if intermittant, trail, accompanied by the demented hippy screechings of the still-living parrots in the trees above. "Arrrk! Don't take the brown acid," "Raaawk! 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy," and "The girl with colitis goes by" were his favorites. | |
| Officer Pencilthinmoustache decided to pause in his search for Jake and Mr. Tickles to arrest the parrots for dropping acid. It turned out they were not only drug dealers but also had broken into granaries and pecked security guards to death so many times that they deserved life in jail. He made a note in his notebook that once he had found the not-so-dastardly duo he should send freight helicopters to capture all the parrots in south america. Then he resumed following the trail of dead parrots (in the mean time writing his notebook that the sanitation department really should do something about those dead parrots after they had served their purpouse), trying to figure out what to arrest Jake and Mr. Tickles for when he caught up to them. Suddenly, he came to the end of the dead parrot trail. Oh no! he thought. The batteries on the strychnine breadcrumb generator must have ran out! | |
| He had no chioce but to stick his hand down his pants | |
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And pull his pipe from his pocket. These were a wily pair. He lit his pipe and stood thoughtfully for a moment contemplating his next move. They had won this round, perhaps. But nobody evades the steely gaze of Officer Pencilthinmoustache for long. He puffed pensively and waited for inspiration to strike him. Meanwhile Jake and Mr Tickles had reached a clearing in the jungle. There were a number of thatched huts and what appeared to be a crude landing strip. A roughly hewn road was swallowed by the lush jungle vegetation at the far end of the strip. Nobody seemed to be about so the pair set about investigating the huts. | |
| They walked into the first hut and met a pair of strange looking fellows. Actually, it was almost like looking into a mirror. Jake spoke up first. "Um, is that an airstrip out there?" he asked. "I swear!" replied the tall fellow in the hut. "People have no manners these days." he continued, rolling his eyes. "Aren't you even going to introduce yourself before you start questioning us? Nevermind, I know who you are. Jake and Mr. Tickles, I am Gurn Blansten and this is my friend Little Socco." "Charmed I'm sure." grunted Mr. Tickles with more than a touch of sarcasm. "And you two are nothing but a pile of ashes washed away by a tsunami." "Oh yeah," said Jake and he and Mr. Tickles vanished in a puff of smoke. "Don't worry!" Gurn Blansten called after them. "Little Socco and I will take it from here!" Little Socco looked up at Gurn and tugged at his shirt. "Gurn, what about Pencilthinmoustache?" "Fear not, my diminutive companion. He is just about to fall into my trap, hee hee hee." | |
| Taking up their Unicycles the two began pedaling furiously off toward Xanadu. Gurn dared not confide his misgivings to his sulking but devoted companion. Without a bi-phasic wave generator there was little hope that his idea to rig a gigantic dewy-petalled Rose above the surface of a virtual silvery reflective pond would ever fool Pencilthinmoustache into advancing to admire his own reflection. If he couldn't be lured close enough to spring the trap, what good would it do to produce a colossal 4 and 1/2 ton Rose in the first place? Hmm... Well, such details could wait! The thing was to get themselves to Jungakelchenborn before the Dextroids noticed they were on the move again. | |
| They rode their unicycles for 663.2503 miles andthen Little Socco fell off his unicycle. "Get up," said Gurn, "we are almost at Jungakelchenborn!" But it was too late, the Dextroids were there already! One dextroid, named Valetroeie, appeared to be the leader. "Lets take them ghiome ansd amalke them oiutr sklacxves!" she said. You see, the Dextroids had never really learned to talk right, and their speech was something like a child trying to type on a typewriter without looking at the keyboard. Well, a child who knew what general area each key was in. But still, it was pretty bad. "Talke them ptrisionetr," said Valetroeie, and Gurn and Little Socco wee dragged off to the secret laitr of the Dextroids! | |