UNFINISHED TALES

The Story of Charles (an unfinished fragment)

Cover for switch.blade Halloween issue

"Plumpy" (or Grignr) as Pharmakos in Amy Sterling Casil's "The Universe at the Bottom of A Cereal Box"

 submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for tenure at Miscacaphonic U.

    In a purely post-colonial milieu, outside certain validating frames of reference (mimetic in quite another sense, ironically), in full consideration of a signally high level of mimesis (vis-a-vis author to aucteur, as in acultural references to Authors-in-the-text), in fact, a veritable anagogic lexis of masques, all wearing, more or less comfortably, the Ur-concept of "ass-kicking."

   Call it motif, call it monad, call it mythos; one might very well call it "naive," but in the sense that term was used by Percy Lubbock, not in the contemporary sense, it is best exemplified by the ultimate Pharmakos, Plumpy the "alien" (or is he Grignr?) in the following exchange:

               "'I'm going to kick your big purple ass when I get the chance,' Shellie said. 'You'll see!'

                'I do not have an 'ass,'' Plumpy announced."

   In this, of course, "Plumpy" denies his role as Pharmakos, in quite possibly the most defining act of aphoria imaginable.  Truly, the clash between the self-subverting and the thundering horde of cultural memes evinced in Plumpy's tale amounts to literal, figural and rhetorical definitions of the infinitive:  to kick (ass).  Is it merely that Plumpy does not have an ass?  Yet he, as everything else in the text, is utterly unreliable, for in fact his ass is approximately the size of Cleveland.  Perhaps ur-Nostalgic Barney-style terms "big" and "purple" have been ironically applied to his bloated appendage.  Or is it that by exposing the autonomy and artificiality of "Plumpy-ness," as he is a character from the popular Western children's game "Candy Land," the aucteur has foregrounded the essence of a valid alternative to the episteme in all of its unmanageable glory.

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 In English:  Due to levels of taste and maturity, the term, "I'm gonna kick your ass!" does turn up in a few of our tales.  See: switch.blade: School's Out

http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook4388.htm

The Story of Charles (an unfinished fragment)

   This is the story of a man named Charles Cornell and why he buried every cent he ever had in coffee cans.  Charles never married; the thought of him having sex is too loathsome to be described to any reader, so it will not be described.  Charles' mother drank a quart of vodka each day.  His mother did believe in God.  Perhaps that is why she drank so much.

   Charles was quite ugly, but that wasn't his problem.  You might think that an angel blasted his mother on her nightly trek home from the Bide-A-Wee, but that is also not what happened.  Ethyl alcohol and myriad other toxins damaged young Charles' brain in his mother's womb, so that by the time he was born, he had a 98% chance of being schizophrenic.  By the time he was eighteen, the disease was a certainty, and Charles had been arrested seventeen times on charges of lewd behavior.  And that doesn't count the peeping tom raps.

    Miracles do happen, because a demon in the shape of a fifth of Smirnoff appeared to Charles one evening as he sweated in the drunk tank, bathed in light similar to that which can be seen through a vodka gimlet.  The demon spoke in the voice of Charles' mother, but he was not fooled.  He might have had scrambled eggs for brains, but he wasn't stupid.

   He also knew that if he said anything, the night officer would hear it over the intercom, and within a period of five to thirty-five seconds, depending on how far along in his donut the officer was, would come rampaging down the corridor, night stick slapping in his palm.  Having endured any number of severe beatings, for such is the lot of ugly, physically feeble, child-molesting schizophrenics who spend time in the general prison population, Charles knew that he did not want to experience this particular sensation yet again.

   "Listen, you crazy sonofabitch," the demonic Smirnoff bottle said, "You're not going to touch the sauce, are you?"

   Charles shook his head.

   "I'm sorry," he said, trying to slap his hands over his mouth, because one of the unbearable voices he heard constantly was just coming out.  "The person who is telling this story just can't take the plodding narration any more."

    "What?" the Smirnoff demon cried.  "Are you insane?"

    "Yes!" Charles said, speaking for himself, his tiny gray eyes darting around looking for the approaching cop and his big black nightstick. 

   "Well, look," the demon said.  "Just listen to me.  You must promise me you'll never drink alcohol.  Or do anything . . . else."

   Charles nodded, both hands clamped violently over his mouth. 

   "I want you to make a list," the demon said.  "Here's all the stuff you'll never do."

    In a blinding flash of hellfire, a yellow legal pad and a chewed yellow pencil appeared at Charles' side.  Not one of the other bums in the drunk tank moved.  They were all under the influence of alcohol or other controlled substances.

    The voice spoke again in Charles' head and he looked desperately at the security camera overhead.  It was a virtual certainty that the night officer was going to come. 

   "It's like sticking my foot in the microwave!" he cried.  "Her foot!  Her foot!  She means writing this way!"

    "Everybody's got their own private purgatory," the demon told him.  "What's a pronoun-antecedent agreement problem between pals? But you wouldn't understand that, Charles.  That can't happen considering the way your brain's made."

   Charles nodded.

   "Write this list," the demon demanded.  Then it unscrewed its plastic head and inundated the drunk tank with fumes to quiet Charles' cell-mates.  They smiled and stretched in their miserable slumber, even those whose heads rested in pools of fetid vomit.

   "I will not look anybody in the eye."

   Charles wrote it down.

   "I will save everything I find.  Newspapers, cans, string, soap, diapers, handi-wipes . . ." (this list continued for some time – this author has some mercy)

   Charles wrote it down.

   "You will write down your entire excruciatingly boring life in the most unrealistic possible terms."

   "No fucking way!" Charles blurted.  "That was . . . "

   "All right, what's the problem in there?"  The night officer had come.  "Writing your memoirs?" he asked when he had spotted the yellow pad.

   The Smirnoff bottle aimed its top at the officer and incinerated him in approximately 2.3 seconds, melting down the opposite wall of the jail and by coincidence, spontaneously combusting a young couple, Fredericka and Samuel Myers, as they enjoyed a brief necking session outside the police station following Samuel's release on his own recognizance, Fredericka having just posted his bail to clear him from an unfortunate, misplaced shoplifting charge.  Actually, the passenger side glass was defective, and a stray shard cut Fredericka's jugular vein and . . .

   While all this happened, Charles completed his list, and at the instruction of the Smirnoff demon, crossed each item off after reciting them to the demon's satisfaction.  When he had finished crossing items off his list, there was only one left:  bury all your money in coffee cans.

   Epilogue: 

   The only problem was, we never found out where.

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