This is a short story I wrote fifteen or twenty years ago.
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ALL SWELL THAT END SWELL
Rhett Lobster and his pal, "Shrimp" Scampi, were walking down the street one day when suddenly a blizzard of watermelons, bowling balls, and rotten eggs began to rain down upon their hometown of Howdyville, and several famous television newscasters and their families came creeping out of every doorway in sight, lurking around in scary monster poses just like the ones that I, The Author, used to assume in order to terrify my nieces and nephews whenever I was forced to babysit for them against my will. Shrimp was eating a popsicle at the time.
"You're slurping that popsicle," Rhett scolded.
"No, I'm not," countered Shrimp. "Besides, I could slurp the living moose crap out of this popsicle and you wouldn't be able to hear it above the deafening cacophony of objects that happen to be pelting the streets at present." For good measure, he enjoyed a particularly loud slurp which, sure enough, was completely drowned out by the sound of twelve bowling balls, three watermelons, and two dozen rotten eggs descending from a height of thirty-three thousand feet and crashing violently into Rhett's brand new cherry-red Corvette with all the accessories, just as Dan Rather and his seventy-two wives and their eight hundred and fifty children went creeping by imitating the Wolf Man. Impulsively, Shrimp finished his popsicle in one teeth-chattering bite.
"Well, looks like we'll be taking the bus," Rhett observed with some consternation as he surveyed the mangled wreckage that was once his new car. "Here it comes now." At that moment, the big Citybus Gordocruiser rounded the corner of Pancreas Street and North Swine Flu Avenue, conveying a compliment of one hundred passengers all travelling to and fro as they lived out their everyday lives and went about their everyday business as citizens of Howdyville and members of the human race itself. In abstract terms, they were passengers not only of that big Citybus Gordocruiser but also of the great vessel known as Planet Earth as it sped majestically through the vast reaches of deep, dark space, traversing the heavens, so stupifying and unchanging in their unfathomable grandeur, as had thus been so since the dawn of time itself. Two seconds later the bus was pelted by a grand total of eighty-seven bowling balls which ripped through the roof and laid waste to the entire rolling structure as it careened haphazardly through the streets and crashed into Dr. Mel's Poodle Plastic-Surgery Emporium, shearing off a healthy chunk from the storefront of Edna's Stout 'n' Spindly Undieworld as well. Broken glass and other assorted shrapnel cascaded through the air for several seconds as a host of short/fat and tall/skinny ladies in their underwear and poodles in various stages of cosmetic surgery came swarming out of the crumbling ruins along with the dazed bus-crash survivors themselves, who somehow had the presence of mind to feel lucky at having come through such a catastrophic ordeal alive and in one-to-three pieces.
The final phase of their lives began with a generous pelting of rotten eggs. The poodles barked at them; the fat ladies took most of them due to their more widespread bodily areas, with squeals of disgust such as "Gaa!" and "Ooky-wooky!"; the skinny ladies were spared most of the chicken eggs, although a few of the duck eggs found their marks with alarming accuracy; and the bus passengers considered being rained upon by rotten eggs to be a veritable paradise after having come through such a catastrophic ordeal alive and in one-to-three pieces. Next came the watermelons. The poodles still barked at them, right up until the moment that each poodle came into contact with the particular watermelon that happened to have its name on it. Some of the poodles survived even the watermelons, but they were knocked considerably out of shape, some resembling aardvarks or protozoa, others taking on the appearance of my aunt Vera's meatloaf the day the oven blew up back in '57. The fat ladies became well-acquainted with what it feels like to be hit over the head by lots and lots of watermelons falling from a great height at speeds of well over one hundred miles per hour, while the skinny ladies found themselves able to dodge most of the descending fruit so long as they weren't afraid to leap around crazily and look stupid. The bus passengers, of course, were still so grateful to have survived such a catastrophic ordeal that they considered it an honor to be alive and to have watermelons plummeting out of the sky and smashing them relentlessly over their heads. Then the bowling balls came and bashed them all to smithereens.
The bus passengers didn't consider themselves lucky any longer; in fact, they were too dead to consider themselves anything. The skinny ladies kept dodging and leaping right up until the end, still grasping at the insane belief that they might just come out of this whole thing alive, when a highly coincidental pattern of falling bowling balls came down at the same time and seemed uncannily to anticipate their every leap and dodge, taking them all out at once. The fat ladies lived just long enough to experience a strange, though guilty, satisfaction at this turn of events just before they, too, were pummelled out of existence. The remaining poodles were smashed flat, no questions asked.
"Okay, so we won't be taking the bus," said Rhett, a hint of resignation in his voice. He took out his pocket watch. "Looks as though we might miss Joe's birthday party, too."
JOE! In all the confusion, they had forgotten about JOE!
"Who's Joe?" said Shrimp as he consulted his own pocket watch, which had been running backwards ever since the Bentsen-Quayle debate. In the split second between his inquiry and Rhett's impending reply, Shrimp's eyes were drawn by the theater marquee across the street. It proudly boasted an upcoming Bozo the Clown-a-thon, which would have been a pretty cute idea except for the fact that no one had ever taken the time and effort to produce a single full-length motion picture about Bozo the Clown. Shrimp, an avowed film buff, was well aware of this, but somewhere in the back of his mind he was also well aware of the fact that Rhett had told him less than five minutes ago exactly who or what Joe was. Gradually it dawned upon him. Joe was that herd of rogue elephants he and Rhett had discovered skulking around the city dump twenty years ago, wildly stamping and blundering about the festering heaps of garbage that Howdyville churned out with alarming regularity ever since that Dairy Queen franchise had come to town. They'd stumbled upon the mighty pachyderms sniffling around the empty styrofoam burger containers searching for yummy morsels of sustenance, and since there were simply too many of them to name individually, Rhett and Shrimp had just named them all Joe. That was exactly twenty years ago, and today it was Joe's birthday. Shrimp remembered all of this about three quarters of the way through the split-second between his inquiry and Rhett's impending reply, so he waited patiently through the remaining quarter of a split-second, using the extra time to work on his Shakespeare corrections. Recently he had finally sat down and read the entire works of William Shakespeare all the way through, and had discovered several mistakes, mainly in the area of punctuation, which he had vowed to correct in his spare time. For example, the famous quote in "Romeo and Juliet" in which Juliet asks, "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" should have read, according to Shrimp, "Romeo...(Romeo)/wherefore art thou! Romeo?" and should actually have been attributed to Juliet's cousin Buster, who was visiting from out of town at the time. And, of course, "To be or not to be" was all wrong; Shrimp was certain it had no meaning whatsoever unless it read "To be! Or? Not...to be: (that) 'Is' the -- question?! @**?##@!!!??" Shrimp was sure that someday he would gain worldwide recognition for his efforts in this area, and then the awards would start rolling in. But in the meantime, here he was standing in the middle of downtown Howdyville as Rhett's lips began to move, forming words of reply in response to his interrogative regarding the identity of a large herd of rogue elephants which operated collectively under the name of Joe. And since he had already managed to fathom the answer to this question entirely on his own, he realized with sudden clarity that it would take the patience of a saint in order to sit through Rhett's interminable and utterly redundant reply unless he had something, some random and totally unrelated element, to take his mind off of it until at last he managed to live through it without losing every last vestige of sanity he had held onto so tenuously for lo, these many years since graduating from the "Vestige of Sanity" correspondence course he'd signed up for after seeing the ad on the back of a copy of "Puppy Man" comics he'd been reading while undergoing routine root-canal work over in Siler City during the great cable-TV blackout of '72. And so, without missing a beat, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out another popsicle, grape this time. It tasted good. Darn good.
" -- a herd of rogue elephants," Rhett was saying, augmenting his words with the appropriate hand gestures. Shrimp nodded absently, slurping his popsicle. Presently a yellow cab pulled up to the curb. The driver stuck his head out the window just in time for a watermelon to break over it with a resounding splat. "Ride?" he offered dizzily.
" -- and today is Joe's birthday," Rhett finished at last. "Ride sounds good," he added as he and Shrimp hustled into the cab just as a hail of bowling balls demolished the very spot where they had been standing. Rotten eggs noisily pelted the roof of the cab, but Rhett and Shrimp didn't care, because they each had a window seat. If Shrimp's brother Shemp had been with them, then one of them probably would've missed out. As fate would have it, however, Shemp had disappeared the day before, shortly after his attempt to become the first man in history to cross the Atlantic Ocean by bicycle. But Shrimp wasn't worried, because Shemp always came back. Strangely enough, though, he always came back as someone else.
It was fun to think about Shemp and his many attempts to cross the Atlantic Ocean by bicycle, but Rhett and Shrimp's reveries were broken as Tom Brokaw came creeping past the cab followed by his hundred and sixty-three wives and their eight thousand, four hundred and ninety-five children, all imitating the Bela Lugosi portrayal of Dracula. Across town at that very moment, Barbara Walters and her two hundred and eleven husbands were doing the Christopher Lee version of Dracula as their four thousand children gamely kept up with them. At one point, one of the older males became the Creature from the Black Lagoon and went off on his own. It was time for him to leave the nest, and no one questioned this -- it was just a natural part of the cycle of human existence -- but they had no way of knowing that the boy would gradually evolve into the Frankenstein Monster and fall in love with one of the brides of Dracula, and that one day they would become the Munsters.
The cab driver turned around in his seat with a friendly smile. "Where to, boys?" he asked airily. His cabbie hat was smashed flat on his head, and great globs of watermelon oozed down his round face, which was still dotted with seeds, but by now his senses were returning in steady gradations that had well surpassed the Cro-Magnon level. He was dimly aware of the fact that this strange moving cave belonged to him and that he possessed the ability to make it travel from place to place, which seemed to be his purpose in life. It would be a while, however, before he would once again be capable of piloting a helicopter.
"City dump," replied Rhett. "And there's an extra fiver in it for you if you can get us there without our being totally flattened."
The driver's intelligence had now reached the Senatorial level, so without delay he put the cab into gear and rammed the accelerator to the floor. "City dump, it is!" he cried gaily as they all flew backward in their seats and the cab lunged forward.
Unfortunately, Rhett had failed to specify exactly which city dump they wanted to go to, and soon the cab was speeding headlong out of Howdyville on its way to Cincinatti, Ohio. Trees and fenceposts flew by as the cabbie relaxed in his seat and cavalierly switched on the radio. The only sound which emanated from it was the far-off din of a radio station being smashed to pieces by a hail of bowling balls. That didn't seem to bother him, though, as he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time with the somewhat discordant rhythms. Every now and then the dull splat of watermelons or rotten eggs could be heard; this he attempted to whistle along with.
The weather seemed to be clearing up considerably as they got farther away from town, and the cabbie turned to face them once again. "Name's Finkle," he said cheerily, "but you can call me Ed." He paused for a moment, then added, "Or Jim." Rhett smiled politely in response, but out of curiosity he glanced around the cab for some sort of positive identification. His eyes lit upon an ID card mounted on the dashboard. The cabbie's full name, apparently, was Edward James Finkle, Junior. This, reasoned Rhett, indicated that somewhere out there a person by the name of Edward James Finkle, Senior was walking the earth, perhaps even driving another cab. He found the idea somewhat unsettling, although he couldn't specify exactly why.
"Nice to meet you, Ed," answered Rhett.
"Yes, how do you do, Jim," said Shrimp, shaking the man's hand. When the situation called for it, Shrimp could be the very soul of courtesy and good manners. After all, the Scampi's weren't raised in a barn.
Ed smiled pleasantly, considering the question. "How do I do," he repeated. "Well, I've been doing very well recently, thank you. Couldn't have said the same last year at this time, though. Spent most of my time staring at prison bars."
Rhett was taken aback. "You were behind bars?"
"No, I was in front of them," Ed replied. "In fact, I was a professional bar polisher." His eyes took on a faraway look. "You know, people rarely think about how those babies stay so nicely polished all the time, or who actually does the polishing. But somebody has to." He tossed his head nonchalantly to dismiss the subject, then added, "Steady work if you can get it." A burst of hysterical laughter barked from his lips, then ceased abruptly.
Shrimp nodded. "I suppose that driving a cab must be a more pleasant way of earning a living than spending each day around a bunch of hardened criminals," he surmised.
"Oh, yes," said Ed. "But in prison the hardened criminals all wear uniforms. Here on the outside they're much harder to identify, what with all the different fashions of clothing and whatnot. In fact, just last week I was knocked over the head and robbed by a fellow who was dressed as a mailman. Boy, did he ever fool me. If he'd been dressed as a convict, of course, I would've been on my guard."
Rhett furrowed his brow in thought. "You know, I don't believe I recall ever seeing a mailman taking a taxi," he intoned. "Seems the postal service usually provides them with their own transportation. So that should've been the tip-off right there."
Shrimp snapped his fingers. "Same goes for milkmen, too!" he said excitedly. "Man, if I were you I'd never pick up a milkman!"
"Or another mailman!" Rhett joked. They all laughed, getting into the spirit. As the cab sped onward down the deserted highway, it emitted gay cries of "Or a fireman! Or a policeman! Or two mailmen! Or a mailman and a milkman carrying machine guns!" until at one point in the festivities Ed came up with "Or a Chinese poodle-groomer!" and they all fell silent. With this, Rhett found time to reflect upon their situation.
For the last forty minutes, they had been travelling at a speed of one hundred and fifty miles per hour, during which time Ed had been turned completely around in his seat, facing them. "Listen, Ed..." he began to say.
"You can call me Ted!" Ed cried. "Or Jeff!"
"I want to call you Ralph!" Shrimp broke in gleefully. "And then I want to call you Vanna White! And then -- "
Rhett cut them both off as politely as he could manage under the circumstances. "Look Jeff, Ted, or Ed," he interjected. "I wouldn't begin to cast aspersions on your navigatory skills, and we've certainly enjoyed the ride and the nice conversation and everything, but -- "
"Well, here we are!" Shrimp grandly announced as the cab came to a stop in front of the Howdyville city dump. As it turned out, they had been travelling in a series of wide arcs throughout the surrounding interstate highway system and through fortuitous happenstance had now arrived safely at their destination. With a satisfied smile Ed put the cab in neutral and flicked off the meter, according to which Rhett and Shrimp now owed the Howdyville Yellow Cab Company a grand total of eight hundred and forty-nine dollars. Plus five, including the tip Rhett had promised earlier.
Rhett and Shrimp stood beside the cab as Ed put it into gear once again and stuck his head out the window. "Well, it was nice riding with you boys but I'd better get cracking if I want to make it back to Howdyville before nightfall," he said pleasantly. "Enjoy your stay in Cincinatti." Before Rhett or Shrimp could offer any sort of inquiry regarding this last statement, a stray watermelon dropped out of the sky without warning and splattered squarely on Ed's head. A few awkward moments dragged by until finally Ed said to himself, "This strange moving cave -- I will make it go to another place." Rhett and Shrimp stood and waved as the cab inched slowly away, gradually picking up speed until as last it went screaming over the horizon in a cloud of dust. Shrimp reached into his back pocket and pulled out another popsicle. Boysenberry, this time. And darn good.
Since there were no longer any bowling balls, watermelons, or rotten eggs raining down from above, or at least not enough to speak of, Shrimp's slurping noises could be heard distinctly for a radius of several yards. Rhett crossed his arms with a disapproving look. "You're slurping that popsicle," he scolded, "and this time you can't deny it."
"Perhaps," said Shrimp. "But let's face it -- we're standing in the middle of the city dump. I don't see Martha Stewart or Ivana Trump hanging around anywhere."
"Well, wouldn't you be embarrassed if they suddenly popped up behind you?"
"Nope. I'd slurp my popsicle at 'em."
There was a resolute look on Shrimp's face after this remark. Rhett rubbed his chin, thinking. "What about Suzanne Somers and Barbra Streisand?"
"Slurp my popsicle at 'em."
Rhett thought harder. Then he snapped his fingers. "What about Geraldo Rivera, his five hundred and ten wives, and their eleven thousand, six hundred and ninety-nine children, all creeping by behind you imitating the Anthony Hopkins version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame?"
"Slurp my -- " Shrimp began, then stopped. He whipped around quickly. A moment later he turned back around, his popsicle by his side. "Okay, you got me on that one," he admitted grudgingly. "But now, I have one for you," he added with a devious smile.
"Do your worst," challenged Rhett.
"Okay!" Shrimp rubbed his hands together giddily, choosing his words with care. "How would you feel...wouldn't you be embarrassed if...if, say, your fly was open, and...and..." He smiled broadly, ecstatic. "And the Queen of England rode up behind you on a bicycle with a fish on her head! Wouldn't you be embarrassed? Huh? Wouldn't you, huh?"
Rhett shook his head with a smirk. He wasn't about to let Shrimp fool him with the old "fly open/Queen of England" routine again. But as he gazed at Shrimp's beaming face, a trace of doubt began to settle slowly into his mind. He lowered his eyes, ever so nonchalantly, as Shrimp observed with barely-contained glee. Then he couldn't stand it any longer. He looked down at his fly. It was open!
"Ha!" cried Shrimp.
Mortified, Rhett made a sudden grab for his zipper. Then all at once it hit him. If Shrimp had been telling the truth about his fly, then maybe...just maybe...
"I say, young man!" came a haughty, British-accented voice from behind. "You'd best close that barn door at once, unless of course you have a license to peddle frankfurters!"
Rhett whipped around in shock, eyes bulging. It was the Queen of England on a bicycle with a fish on her head. Or was it? He looked back at Shrimp and they both collapsed into gales of helpless, unrestrained laughter.
Shemp always came back. But he always came back as someone else.
Happily the three of them joined arms and danced around the dump, whooping and hollering like a bunch of cheese-crazed bagel thieves. Then they began to notice a low, rolling thunder in the distance. They stood motionless in their tracks and listened, watching the sky for any sign of falling objects.
All at once Shrimp exclaimed, "Wait a minute! That's not thunder! It's...it's..."
"It's JOE!" cried Rhett. "Ice cream! Birthday cake! Party hats!"
With that, the three of them set off as fast as they could across the dump, flailing their arms and singing "Happy Birthday to Joe" at the top of their lungs as Shrimp, taking advantage of the rising din of rogue elephants stomping around on styrofoam burger containers, slurped his popsicle as loud as he possibly could and a dense hail of urban shopping malls, Dairy Queen franchises, and Empire State Buildings began to rain down upon the surrounding countryside just as hundreds of film crews converged on the area to start production on competing Bozo the Clown motion pictures which will be opening this summer at a theater near you.
THE END
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Legend, oh legend, the third wheel legend...always in the way.
