A Tame Turkey Ain't No Sport

Bub listened as the chimps played outside the caddyshack. The shrill screams and muffled moans meant that the chimps had caught yet another puttster who had wandered away from his foursome and suddenly found himself at the bottom of a particularly deep bunker, as stale melon rinds and old rubbers showered down from above. The chimps knew how to have a good time. Next to the games of blanket tag and rock 'em sock 'em nutjob, pinioning a golfer in a hole full of sand was big, big fun.

Bub contemplated the rug he was hooking. The orange stallion galloping through a field of pink just didn't look right. Had he bought the wrong yarn? What was wrong with his hooking? These questions rattled around Bub's brain like a high-octane-powered hen. Was it the palm tree in the corner that pained him so, or was there something else? Maybe the scene needed a baton twirler . . . maybe a baton twirler on the horse. Bub's fingers trembled as he rooted through the pile of ripped-open paper bags and searched for the stub of a golf pencil on which to work out his ideas.

His hand hit something wet and warm.

There were many things in Bub's bags. Scraps of wax paper covered in minute scribblings; the squeaker from a long-lost party horn; multicoloured tatters of yarn ends; a long-forgotten letter to Scott. Bub was aware of what was in his bags. True, there were times when he wouldn't be able to recall absolutely everything but he could come close. However, he certainly knew that there was nothing which would be both warm and wet.

Bub hesitated.

Should he pull it out?

With a steady nerve and rubber determination, Bub grasped the object and yanked. A wet paintbrush fell to the floor. Its contents of green paint immediately cutting a swath across the hardwood. Bub was flummoxed.

"Where the hell did that come from?" Bub questioned the brush.

A banging of the screen door announced that the chimps had finished with the golfer and had come into the caddy shack to tank up on more purple Freshie and Keebler Stonemasons. The chimps, enmasse, froze. Like some crazed ping-pong ball, their eyes bounced from clown to brush and back to clown. Their simian minds straining to make sense of the tableau. They had seen the cruel rendering left by hooligans by the Clubhouse turn. They had noted that the portrait had been done in green paint. They understood that the brush on the floor was covered in green paint. They knew that Bub's hand was green. But all they could do was chutter and clack at one another.

"Bub! Oh jeez! Aw! Bub!"

Bub stood motionless. He knew that the chimps would carry on like this for at least a few more hours. If he was going to get to the bottom of the matter, he would have to act fast. Someone had obviously planted the brush in his bag. That much was certain. But who and why and when?

"Forget it," Bub thought to himself. "I'm going to get ripped! You chimps stay here and keep the sterno can lit. If even so much as one of you tries to knit a mink, there'll be hell!"

The chimps cowered into a corner.

Bub scooped up the brush, the pencil stub, his rug, and all the paper bags. He stumbled over his shoes, the resulting ear-splitting "Wee-urp!" sent the chimps into a paroxysm of screeching and biting. They immediately crapped everywhere. Some started to hurl the feces at Bub. The clown's pancake make-up soon ran in rivulets of shit and Noxzema: it looked like Bub was weeping tears of monkey poop.

Bub sagged. This was it. The End. How could he carry on when even the simplest of his plans was soon turned to dog-food by the selfish, stupid chimps? How could he hang his head high when his primate roomates made every attempt at clown class end in crap? He needed to change...everything. The shrimp bucket had long since melted into a galvanized pail of rust. The tiny executive had not made a courtesy call in over a fortnight. The members of the club ignored Bub's attempts at chivalry. The Mayor had refused his request to upgrade his status. Life sucked. If he wasn't cleaning the members' balls, then he was sucking at the wizened teat of Old Man Moira.

Bub heard a group of golfers heading toward the caddyshack. He assumed they were soon going to hammer on the screen door and make some annoying request. Bub knew that he had to make a decision. Face (poop-smeared or not) the golfers or sneak out the back door and run like a bandit. Bub peeped through the window to see four plaid-clad golfer in flat caps, raccoons in hand, mounting the sagging porch. The raccoons slept peacefully in the golfers' arms. Their light snoring blending with the wind whipping through the dwarf maples. Bub understood that the napping raccoons meant nothing but trouble and more of it for everyone. He made up his mind. He quickly wiped a polka-dotted sleeve across his face, grimaced a threat to the chimps, dropped all his belongings on the floor, and made a bolt for the back door. The repeated bang-bang of the golfers at the screen door was the last thing Bub remembered as he ran head-first into Pete Trousers, the club's golf pro.

The Mayor

Mayor Dandy Brutish slowly ran his right index finger through the soggy coffee grounds scattered across the Irish linen tablecloth. His Haitian manservant, Jambon, was still flustered with the correct procedure to produce a steaming mug of quality Joe.

When Jambon was first unpacked from his crate and instructed to prepare a cup of coffee for his new task-master, his response was to upend the canister of coffee beans onto the kitchen floor, remove his pants, and then stamp over the beans, mumbling some kind of voodoo mumbo-jumbo under his breath. The results were not satisfactory. Six months later, Jambon now understood that water was somehow involved. Mayor Brutish had, over a series of breakfasts, endured such permutations as: one coffee bean on a plate with a glass of cold water on the side; pre-chewed beans floating in a saucer of left-over wiener water; a jug of carbonated water poured over finely-pummelled beans. All these offerings were met with either a polite decline or a violent hurl. This morning, Jambon's attempt resulted in piping hot, soggy, ground beans thrown from the pantry door onto the breakfast table. Mayor Brutish contemplated resting his chin on the damask and sucking up some of the grounds, but then thought better of it. He had enough to chew over this particular morning.

The Mayor leaned back in his cane chair and listened to the sounds of the house waking up. The mayoral residence was not only the grandest building in town but also the state's only licensed orphanage and within its damp walls Brutish was able to separate the general a.m. cacophony into its separate parts. The steady boopada bupuda of Mayoress Brutish’s compulsory 15 rounds with the speed bag -- its staccato beat like some sort of twisted Morse code, signalling the tiny charges of the Brisk Tick Orphanage to wake up; the incessant wailing coming from the Teen Time Room; the methodical cranking of the water heater; the wet slop of Jambon dropping another load onto the breakfast table.

Brutish checked his wristwatch. "Good God!" he thought, "It's past seven. I've got to get over to the Club to check on the arrangements." He knew that if the Annual Dinner Dance was going to go over right then he would have to personally lay all the flatware and straighten the bunting. This year the Saperstein triplets were going to be "coming out" and Brutish fully grasped the implications if Daddy Doggone was to feel even the slightest snub. Tonight was the night for feeling all right and, if Mayor Dandy Brutish had any say in the matter, it was going to be a whip-snorter.

Jambon had begun to clear the table of the breakfast things, his rubber pants squeaking as he leaned over to reach the sugar tongs.

The Mayor changed into his checkered seersucker suit, kissed the Mayoress good morning, threw a handful of bubblegum to the orphans, and headed to the garage. Sitting behind the wheel of his Horaseti muscle-car, he mentally mapped out the rest of his day at the Club.

Swallowing and dumping.

Bub’s jaw still hurt like hell from the pie-pasting he’d taken only a few minutes earlier. Sure, crouching in that hedge made a difference, but not enough that there wouldn’t be a bloopy, misshapen swelling distorting Bub’s pasty mug for at least a couple of days.

“Great,” Bub thought. “What am I going to do, some temp work in Slipknot’s road crew? I think not.” Bub meant he would endeavor not to think. It hurt too much, and his noggin throbbed horribly. Besides, Slipknot wasn’t Bub’s “bag,” as it were. He was more classically inclined for one thing. Second, he thought their clowning skills were sub-par. “That heavy metal headbanging? That’s it? Call that an act? Where are the tiny cars? Where are the seltzer bottles? The buckets full of confetti? Where are the cotton-candy goats and the other trappings of clowndom? Why, they profane the legacy of Emmett Kelly and Ellsworth Kelly and Kelly Girls everywhere . . . not to mention the work of every happy-sad joey ever to compress the sawdust and elephant manure under the big top. I’m amazed either of the Ringlings, Barnum or Bailey lets them get away with it.”

“Pie!” yelped a steward from somewhere near the clubhouse. Here came another one. The trajectory must’ve changed or this was a heavier pie than the others. It came low over the sycamores, stopping at the end of a deepening trench it dug in the rough in front of Bub’s caddy-shack porch.

Bub stared at the pie for a long moment. He scanned the horizon, looked left and right, then quickly fell off the porch, rolled over the pie and dropped it down the front of his baggy clown pants. Back on his feet, he hurried inside, putting the pie in the freezer with the Freshie-pops, black-and-white film and ham-hocks. Those pies were a menace — a delicious menace that had kept Bub’s capacious lower extremities widening on a pretty consistent basis when nothing else would.

“A clown with a spoon will always catch eyes, and there’s none can compare with my skeet-shooting pie,” Bub sang softly as he trudged out to the ball-swallower parked on the cracked concrete slab next to the shack.

He turned the crank on the front, silently urging the swallower to chug to life . . . which it did after some coughing hesitation.

“Sweet sphere-gulping behemoth, how I love your hunger,” Bub said, grinning and running an oversize foam finger along the lumpy outlines of the pilot’s cage. Easing his bulk onto the wobbly tractor seat, he ground the swallower into reverse and backed out onto the edge of the fairway. He’d start slow, combing for outliers at the edge of the woods, then work his way onto the course as the golfers drifted back to the clubhouse for the half-price Hot Fuzz Moment, lingering over a couple more of the rank concoctions as Lavender Scarface went into his second set, getting drunker and bitchier as he did every afternoon, until finally they had to sedate him before the dinner hour.

Bub’s ball-gobbling had barely begun when he noticed Danny and Dexter Divot, skulking along near the 13^th fairway in their father’s gold-plated golf cart. The ball-swallower’s pilot’s cage obscured Bub enough so that it was impossible for people outside to tell where he was looking — or, in fact if he was looking at anything, or where he was going. Bub started at the Divots. He could see them cutting the occasionally nervous glance at him. They were either about to perpetrate one of their assaults on the protocols, sensibilities or members of the Cinderbag Club, or they’d already done whatever nasty little “action” they’d concocted and were now trying to be nonchalant about fleeing the scene.

“Hey, isn’t that that clown swallowing balls?” Danny said. Dexter stared at him. “The clown,” Danny said again. “He’s following us. First that thing with the yeast and now this. Do you think he knows something?”

Dexter shrugged. “What could he know? And who’d care if he did? Is he going to stop us? We could do whatever we wanted right in front of that bozo and there wouldn’t be a damn thing he could do about it. Face it, man, here at the Cinderbag Club, we are princes . . . princes of darkness, perhaps, but princes just the same. Clowns? I care not for clowns. And I’d advise you to follow my lead.” He pronounced it “led,” which confused Danny further.

“Balloon?” Danny ventured.

“What balloon?” snapped Dexter. “Are you having another one of your episodes, Danny, is that what this is? Why does that clown get on top of you so badly?”

The idea of Bub even getting near him was enough to make Danny moan and quaver. The thought of Bub actually climbing on top of him was abhorrent. “No, no, no, no, no, no . . .” he muttered. “Not the clown.”

“Jeee-eeez,” Dexter moaned too dramatically. “It’s just a clown. Don’t you get it?”

“But all those chimps . . . and before, me and one of the Sapersteins, we were . . .” Danny stopped.

“You and a Sap were what,” Dexter demanded, his eyes narrowing. How dare Danny, damn it?

The Divots stared at each other, neither one daring to look away, each determined to hold his ground. Danny was thinking that Dexter’s pushing him around was going to stop now. Dexter was equally committed to finding out which one of the Sapersteins Danny was talking about. And so help him, if it was Murdstone, he’d—

There was a jerk, a grinding, and a splorp as the golf cart fell into a bunker. Both Divots were thrown out of the seat as it suddenly stopped. If the mayor was mad before, he’d throw a rod about this. They needed some way to haul or wobble or dislodge the vehicle and hoist it back onto the green.

Me voy a tierras extrañas.

The strains of Julio warbling drowned out the zizz of the frying mushrooms . . . Bub stood over the Sterno can, absentmindedly pushing the browning mushrooms around the frying pan. It had been a hell of a day. The shattered bits of beef pie had been raining down on the caddy shack since eleven that morning. Coupled with the bawlings and screechings of the half-naked golfers out on the green, the continued cacophony was driving Bub to the brink. A faint bleating outside the door alerted Bub to the sheep’s arrival. Bub reached below the sink to open the cupboard door. Pulling out a handful of grass clippings, he methodically beeped to the door. Bub swung the screen door wide and prepared to chuck the fist of mulch at the sheep. A whole beef pie struck him firmly in the jaw.

“My brave face...,” began Bub cautiously. Taking a deep breath, he shouldered his load into the wind and straightened the seventh-hole pin. Not knowing any better, he never stopped to consider the implications of his proclamations and exclamations to the uncaring wind. Unthinking and unknowing, Bub tightened the knots in his shoes and swore never to let go off the rope. He took a deep breath and began again.

“My brave and bully boys,” he breathed, then warbled queerly, “now we’re planning / The crime of the Seventies..." His singing snapped off suddenly. There was a bustle in his hedgerow. “Don’t be alarmed now,” he cautioned himself, squatting lower and lurching forward like a Cub Scout in too-tight shorts. A giggle emanated from the shrubs.

“Snnnnk-k-k-k-k,” came a snicker. Two figures were hunkered down like forgotten brooms, up to something, no doubt. There was a warm, metallic “clank,” then a feminine squeal of delight.

“Good God, Danny.” Cornpone was clearly pretending to be scandalized. But Bub knew the Saperstein was only making believe she was scandalized. Danny grunted, low and insinuating.

“Hush, Crunchy,” Danny said in a too-loud stage-whisper. Bub inched slowly forward, pinching his shoes to stop them from sounding like a pair of runaway squeaky toys.

“Sweet Pooter Pitamous,” Cornpone gasped. “If that’s the Mayor...”

“No sweat. My plastic cat can jump until after hours,” exclaimed Danny. “That tin-horn geezer in the ten-gallon hat might just be the cutest caddy on the course, but me and my younger brother will clean his clock! Mayor or mayn’tor, either way you say it makes me mad!”

Bub commando-crawled his way farther into the hedgerow. He wasn’t one for casual voyeurism, but if there was a chance for a glance at a pair of full pants, he wasn’t going to pass it up. He squeezed his head between the branches of the dwarf maples and watched intently as Danny and Cornpone rattled another one into the cup. The youngsters, unaware that their fun was being shared, continued the game.

“As the tiddles wink, thus the winks will tiddle, eh, kids?” Bub thought to himself. He desperately wanted to join their game. But that would never do. Even trying to make his presence known would be certain to frighten the two.

“A spraggler,” said Danny, pointing proudly at the hubcap into which they were flipping the rusty bottlecaps.

“I beg to differ,” Cornpone said through clenched teeth, fire in her bloodshot eyes and hot wind whistling from her flared nostrils.

“Yes way,” Danny asserted, becoming more assertive. “You think I don’t know when you’ve been spraggled?”

“Please, Dan-o — let’s not squabble,” Cornpone beseeched. “This afternoon has been so lovely. No preposterous insistence on Jungian analysis; no trembling hours in the dwarf maples; little — if any — butt-dragging. Isn’t this better than letting Dexter goad you into swinging wide?”

“Aw, Dexter isn’t so bad,” Danny began. “He’s just a tad more transitory. He’s got to go for all the gusto he can snag. You can dig that, can’t you, Cornpone?”

“Aw, stale beer wisdom from the bottom of the barrel — that won’t cut it back in the bus with the Whacky Show, you know, Danny. When you graduate from Patroon College, you’ll know that my dive’s a perfect ten. No smiling sandman will visit your twinkle on the morrow. If there’s one thing that Daddy Doggone always tells us, it’s let it lie where the good Log left it. And I plan to lay my log wherever it loafs. Dig, compadre?”

Danny rubbed his omni-brow and puzzled over Cornpone’s words of wisdom. How could such a doll-face fidget so much in her chair? Did the buckles bind? Did the straps chafe her muchly? What gave?

Bub, his mind reeling from the young Saperstein’s speech, felt one godawful teat rub against his rough tweed tunic. He was sinking. The soil beneath was giving way under his clownish bulk. If hewas to make his move, he would have to make it soon. He nosed his way out of the shrubbery and into the clearing.

“Whuzzup, kidlets?” he asked.

Danny and Cornpone saw what they took to be a large brown monkey slowly dragging itself out of the underbrush. Cornpone screamed. Danny, always quick with the wrist, cuffed Bub’s nose smartly. A quick Ha-honk issued from the clown.

Cornpone turned tail and fled through the thicket, leaving her stubs and stalks behind. Danny, pausing to consider the consequences of striking a Clubhouse Chimp while off duty, decided better to flee than flinch and took off after Cornpone.

Bub fell forward off his elbows, his white-painted face striking the ground with a plaintive Wheee-uurpp.

“Frabjabulous,” he thought to himself bitterly. “Even when I make the move — no disrespect intended — they bolt. Wherefore hast mine keen eye misperceived this scene? How could I have been so wrong?”

“Like you don’t know,” muttered one of the chimps, who’d been watching the entire misbegotten collision and unfolding from its treetop perch. “If I told you once, Bub, I told you a dozen times: don’t burn the locals. Have you heard the news? There’s good rockin’ tonight.”

“You can’t mean that,” Bub stammered. “They— They— All I wanted was to — ”

“Right. That’s you, Bub — always the injured party. It couldn’t be something you did, could it? Of course not. You’re much too kind-hearted, aren’t you? No way the ol’ Bubster’s ever going to hamper the members, is there? Get a grip, clown. Your stinking self-pity is starting to get on our nerves.”

That certainly gave Bub something to think about. He might even do that. Later. For now there was a loud bang and another pie wobbling over the horizon.

Underneath Joni Mitchell’s Autographed Picture

“Now, Francine — purr, purr Francine — don’t wibble too pathetically,” the steward whispered into Mrs. Doggone’s fleshy ear. “This type of shit it happens every day.” He pronounced each syllable of “every”: e-ver-ree.

“The day I take conga lessons from a yardarm-dangling valet-parker is the day they’ll pry my pistol from my cold dead fingers,” Mrs. Doggone snapped. She turned away from the unctuous liveried gigolo and shouldered her popgun. “Pull?” she barked quizzically.

The frozen beef pie shot from the launcher with a kind of high-pitched mechanical “snizzzz,” its trail of ice-crystals shimmering as they fell to earth in the morning sun. Mother Doggone (and there were those around the Cinderbag Club who said that if there ever was a mother, it was Mrs. Doggone) tracked the beef pie stoically, her steely squint screening out every other sensory impression, boring in, envisioning the gaudy rain of gravy-shards, rock-hard beef pellets, the hail of peas and carrots after she’d bagged another one for you.

The pie neared its apex.

Mrs. Doggone squeezed the trigger.

The cork “porped” out of the gun-barrel, chariot-racing across the high-noon desert sky for its rendezvous with crust. It caromed ineffectually off the frozen pie, which wobbled slightly, but continued on its path, rocketing straight toward the tennis courts.

“Pie!” screamed the steward, too late. There was a shriek, then the sound of the pie bouncing off the hurricane fencing and skittering around on the tennis court surface like a flaky pastry hubcap weighted with grapeshot.

“Now, Francine — purr, purr Francine — don’t you think we’ve had enough fun for one cycle of the sun?” the steward asked gently.

“Like I spent two tours in ‘Nam to be shooting goddamn corks,” Mrs. Doggone spat, tossing the pop-gun to the steward casually. She knew social prerogatives would dictate he’d have to catch the weapon. “Are we goddamn old ladies?” she asked of nobody in particular. “I’ll have my regular shooting-iron, if it isn’t too terribly much trouble.”

Well, the steward reasoned, at least that way there was a chance the pies would actually be stopped. And if he changed the nagle of the skeet-launcher, then at least there wouldn’t be another unpleasant incident like last month’s, when Frau Hasenpfeffer had been rendered ineffectual by the beaning she’d taken from that box of frozen perogies which had been slung into the Ladies Tuesday Tea Circle.

“Right away, purr Francine!” he chirped brightly, scuttling out to the locker where the 12-gauges were securely buttoned up.

Mother Doggone bit the end off one of the lumpy cheroots she’d rolled that morning, hunkered down with the purple section of USA Today and gnawing on a partially-thawed Eggo waffle while slurping up a beaker of warm peach nectar. She snapped her Zippo closed and dragged contentedly on the misshapen guano-zeppelin. “Mmmmmmm,” she thought. “Now that’s good huffin’.”

Her thoughts turned to Murdstone, Laverne and that other Saperstein triplet. How sad those three sophomore sycophants had been abandoned by their parents... Well, not abandoned, so much as suddenly left all alone, without a person on God’s green earth to depend on except each other. And how she and Daddy Doggone had cherished them, their chevron flashing bright across the gulf of compromise. And to think that now they all stood on the verge of getting it on ...though not with each other, of course — more in the social sense. Mother Doggone exhaled a thin, sibilant stream of smoke. The steward’s clangings meant the long Holland & Holland blunderbuss would soon be roaring doom from its steel snout at another of those firm little pies as it slipped the surly bonds of your grocer’s freezer. Yes, that would be sweet. And she, MDG would bring it down — tenderly, sweetly...torridly, weakly meeting with...

Destiny.

Her destiny — Diana, the Huntress. What matter that the quarry was trussed in flaky pastry and frozen harder than a snapper in the January crick-mud? It was still her quarry. And it would be hers — oh yes...it would be hers.

“Fast up with it, bag-biter,” she barked. “What manner of toiler are you, to be dawdling with my death-dealer...especially when there be PIES aloft?”

The steward stammered. “Cuh-cuh-cuh-coming, uh, purr Francine.”

“Well be quick about it! Our patient can’t wait all night, now, can she?”

Hole In One!

There it was again! Bub sat up, slamming his head on the upper bunk. He strained his ears, trying to place the curious noise coming from outside the caddy shack. Ichinisango... The noise came again, this time closer to the far corner of the shack. One of the chimps chortled in its sleep: “Slimy piece of shit...no more humpa-dumpa for you...” Bub never dared to peep inside the chimps dream book, that slim volume they kept guarded closely under the tent pegs. Only God knew into what sort of scribbling the chimps translated their dreams. The noise came again. Bub plucked his guitar string and bleated out a feeble, “Through goes where?” No answer.

“Hole in one!” someone shouted from the fairway. Most probably the Moors: late-night golf and wife-swapping was their speciality.

Bub leaned over the side of the bunk to retrieve his blunderbuss. If some no-good twizzler was “whizzing in his weeds”, he’d soon put a stop to it. He cautiously slipped from between the urine-hardened sheets: their tackiness causing his pajamas to stretch and squeak.

The tattoo gleamed eeriely with an almost fluorescent sheen. It was a gnarled piece of poke-and-dye: twisted; bent; the work of a madman. Bub had never really decided to get a tattoo — it was more a case of right place, right pants. Strolling the byways and highways of New Orleans in his younger days, Bub had known swarthier times. As you can imagine, life on a shrimping vessel is always full of fun and excitement and Bub had it, in spades. When he ruminated over those times, usually when full of too much cream soda and graham crackers, Bub would recall the hard work, good food, and great sex.

Tiptoeing softly towards the door, his shoes emitting a sombre “too-oot!” with each step, the hapless clown gathered his garters around his middle; his shaking hands doing their damndest to keep the trembling webley aimed at the door. The noise came again! Bub considered waking up the chimps: surely their caterwauling would scare off the most hardiest of golfers. But what if it proved to be nothing — maybe just a loose squirrel or a ring-bolt come free. If that were the case, then the chimps would beat on him like an old sock. Their pointy teeth shredding his paisely and upsetting the urn. No way was he going to interrupt the chimps.

He was at the door now. He turned the knob slowly and stepped out into the night gloom. A pale, waxing moon hung low over the greens. Its luminescence illuminating the pins with their little flags hanging limply, forgotten hankies, scattered Divots. Bub was always struck by the realization that the moon itself contained no light: its glow was simply the reflection of the sun. Strange to think that Bub’s view of the golf course was possible only because at that moment some Chinaman was pointing his little scrunched-up face up at the gleaming sun and thinking, “Stick of butter ... stick of butter.”

Bub shuffled around the shack, keeping one ear cocked for any alien noise. This wasn’t the first time that the clown had found himself creeping around his little hut on the prowl for interlopers. Last year, the Triceratops family had held a raffle at the clubhouse to raise money for Mr. Bhamjee’s ocelot farm. The prizes ranged from a ride in a hot-air balloon to a taste of leather from the personal cat-o-nine-tails of Mistress Murphy, the social director. One of the prizes consisted of a late-night hootnanny out at the eighth hole, complete with Mr. Triceratops’ own moonshine. The winners, a elderly couple from Mesquite, Wyoming, had consumed the entire still in about forty minutes, then spent the rest of the night taunting the regulars and defecating on the caddy shack. Their gastrointestinal shenanigans had awakened Bub suddenly and he was soon confronted by the awful sight of Mr. and Mrs. System’s back-ends. Horrid was the whiteness of their shining rears.

Bub steeled himself for such an eyeful now. If this nocturnal visit meant enduring more middle-class poop, Bub would go over the edge.

The Boathouse Incident

The Queen of Cherryhill made her way down the gangplank and onto the diving platform, her seguined leotard flashing and sparking the sunlight back onto the enraptured audience. There were audible oohs and aahs and faps as she lowered the ballast. Her ample bosom swayed ponderously with the lake’s waves. Suddenly Murdstone snapped to consciousness. What had been in that last glass of lemonade? Surely the persistent urgings of Dexter had not caused her to nod off; not when this was her night to putty.

Murdstone rolled over onto her left side and looked around the boathouse. There were the usual water-skis, snorkels, and sheep carcasses, strewn hither and thither about the small building. She cast her mind back over the evening. Dexter was always trying some new way to impress her with his ‘special talent’. This consisted of little more than Dexter setting his hair on fire, declawing the Barnipple’s cat, and pulling off the tablecloth without even the slightest tinkle from the champagne flutes. Sure, she liked to get her kicks, just like any other girl; but tonight was different; that busboy sure had yelled a lot.

Dates with Dexter were always the same dull-as-dishwater, quick-kick-and-a-kiss routine: a light beating with cocktails, spanking and nipping during dinner, and then a long bout throwing the teddy-bear back and forth. They must have tossed that thing for almost three hours. Once, as Murdstone ran behind the boathouse to retrieve an overthrow, she saw Bub cleaning his teeth. Her mind raced back to the early glimpse of his raucous tatto. What a clown! Her father hadn’t noticed her wet pants, and a good thing too; if Papa Doggone had had his way, she would be sitting over the pail right now. And, man oh man, did that tin get cold about three in the morning!

Murdstone knew that something had passed between her and Bub that day. It wasn’t the saliva stains on her tunic, or the way her head lolled crazily on her neck; no, it was something else. Something so close to her and yet so far. It was like that time that she had been whacked over the head with a melon. The noise had made her giggle, and when they finally replaced the patch of hair, she understood.

“Funny how life throws you against a brick wall now and again,” mumbled Murdstone, her elbow increasingly digging into Dexter’s solar plexus.

Dexter coughed once, twice, and then sat up. His dishevelled hair now perfectly in place thanks to the coating of salmon oil he had been soaking in. His breath was warm and reminiscent of cheese doodles and ginseng, testimony to the pig-swilling he had recently been party to. His pants fell about his ankles as he struggled to loosen the twine securely holding his wrists and ankles together.

“Come on, Muxy. Untie me so’s I can finish the maze.”

Murdstone looked over at him nonchalantly. “You, Dexter Divot, are a no-good creep! I never want to see or smell you ever again. You can slip some of the girls some of the tongue some of the time but you won’t be slipping over mine again! Kindly remove your prothesis from my petticoat.”

Dexter stared dumfoundedly. “Buggah . . . mushe . . . yummers . . .” he enunciated.

Muxy continued her harangue: “And furthermore, I happen to know that you never did like eels and that your brother is a chimp! Your mother told my mother that she won him in a crooked poker game! Good-bye Dexter Divot, you’ll never be the clown,...uh I mean chimp,...I mean man, for me!” So saying, Murdstone stumbled out of the boathouse. Her trailing shoelace caught one of the heaps of carrion and sent her headlong into a box of lettuce. Dexter giggled coyly. How could anyone stay angry at such an idiot?

Murdstone returned to vertical and disappeared into the night.

Meet The Divots

"If no one finds out, then how can anyone know? The nozzle's already covered over with paint, and you can't really tell what it is unless you stand about three feet away. Anyone coming around the clubhouse turn will be way too close to recognize the likeness. Trust me, that whizzing gas-bag will never find out. His wife's already three-months gone. She took all his buttons and trading stamps; he's as good as goitered."

Dexter Divot droned on. Danny, the less hairy of the two, let his brother's voice trail out. Sure, it seemed like a good idea to beg the Mayor for more fish nuggets, but now the Space-A-Twirl had broken down. Maybe it had been unwise to tank up on single malt whiskey and Pogo Dogs™ but they had to remove all possibility of being coherent and therefore cognizant of their actions.

As the boys went over "The Scheme" again, they watched Bub the Maintenance Clown over on the 18th hole. He appeared to be applying a thin layer of yeast to the apron surrounding the green. The clown would take a few tentative steps, bend at the knees, and spread something yellowish and rising on the close-cut grass. T'was ever thus: a clown with a pail will always catch eyes.

"That fucking clown has all the laughs," snarled Dexter. "What'ya bet he's raking in loads right now. Some life: mite-combing chimps and sneering at trees. What I wouldn't give not to have the life he doesn't."

"Huh?" uttered Danny.

"Okay, the portrait's finished. Let's stow this stuff out of sight and wait for the fireworks," chortled Dexter, heartthrob of many a moist teenybopper. The Divots made their way toward the chip bus. "Let's have some fun with the man in tights!"

As soon as Bub saw the Divot Duo approaching, he left his yeast laying. "Knowing those two, they're up to their baby-fuzz in no-good-noodling. I best make for the tent and grab all the Bavarian rolls I can fit in my face." So saying, Bub left the 18th hole to pursue matters breadular. Bub loved bread. There wasn't anything earth-shattering or egg-smearing about it; he just loved bread. He could almost always be found trimming the crust off a neglected slice of buttered Wonder. But Bub's bread fetish went far beyond mere decrusting or fondling; he had, carefully hidden behind his paint-by-number of Queen Victoria, a sheaf of papers covered in his musing and mumblings, the majority of which concerned bread, or bagels, or English muffins. Late at night, when the shrimps had ceased their maroon moanings and the chimps had commenced their phoning, Bub would light up a fresh batch of guano, fill his jar with weiner water, and peruse his scribblings.

Bub, working as a tee-jockey and rubbing the daughters of over-priced finance barons, found writing his only solace. His writing gave him a little niche of solace from the constant staggering and gaping of the golfers. The dimes and bus tokens they threw at him from the saloon porch came in handy when he ran out of crayon stubs, but it was their horrible, jaundiced laughter that cut Bub to the core. Oh, how they could posture and pose, with their joints hanging out and their females covered in Hollandaise! They knew nothing of Bub's dream: to lead the band at Carnegie Hall. This dream had taken him as far as the bus station. There they told him that, no, a piece of sausage casing could not be traded for a bus ticket to New York. Bub had learnt a lesson that day; a lesson that was hard to forget but somehow Bub had managed.

"So now here I sit, while some other jerk twirls his stick in front of all. What's a poor clown to do?"

Bub had always hoped that someday his self-pitying outbursts would be met with a reply, any reply, but the only reply he heard was the snoring and occasional fart of the chimps camped out on his bunkbed. The chimps would turn up at the caddy shack just as the sun sent its last simpering rays to twinkle in Bub's good eye, promising "lots of neat stuff and songs and snack food". Invariably, the apes would unearth some of the hapless clown's decantered gasahol, drink it off in thirty minutes and then trade off-colour knock-knock jokes until they passed out in a puddle of urine. Bub never had the heart to toss them out of his bed. "What's good for chimps, is good for me. Though the urine gets kind of tacky later on."

The moon rose above the golf course. Bub took one last thoughtful puff on his pipe and then bid the club goodnight. "Good night club. I hope you rest well this peaceful night. May I find you safe on the morrow."

"Shut the fuck up, clown!" someone hollered from the saloon.

Drunken laughter was Bub's only lullaby.

Three Sapersteins, Papa Doggone and One Tattoo

The endless snapping and clicking coming from the 3rd hole alerted Bub to the early-morning presence of Mr. and Mrs. Doggone and the Saperstein Triplets.

“Of course it would be they who first bespittled and besotted my virgin green,” snarled Bub. His shoes imperceptibly drooped another few inches. “Here I sit, enjoying my morning snifter and corn-cob pipe full of guano, just to have the mood broken by those guys. Can’t they allow a clown a frown away from town?”

Mrs. Doggone and her spouse were not new to the Cinderbag Club. Indeed, they had been members long before Bub had even donned his first three-sizes-too-large, red-and-white-polka-dotted diapers. In some less sanitary circles it was whispered that the Doggones first introduced the foul-smelling sheep to the office.

“Now pay close attention, girls,” Mr. Doggone declaimed with the air of the self-appointed expert he knew himself to be. “The first and most important matter is addressing the ball. You have to face it full-frontally, fraught with fun, not fright.”

“Ugh, daddy...” began Laverne, tentatively. As the youngest (by seventeen seconds) of the far-famed Saperstein triplets, Laverne was always ready to challenge authority, accustomed to squinting into the ears of the other club members.

“What is it, oh wobbling wombat of my quivering ventricle?” inquired Mr. Doggone solicitously, his single — left — bushy eyebrow shrinking his forehead in quizzical surprise. “Is this a question related to this here sweet sweat-soaked bucolic pastime in which we is currently engaged, or do you plan to digress in your usual shameless manner?”

Laverne clammed up. This was clearly the time and place to concentrate on matters golfular, not puzzle out the fatter conundra of existence.

“Oh, nothing,” stammered Laverne. “That is, it can wait. Never mind.”

“Very well then,” said Mr. Doggone. “As I was saying, my avid pupils, addressing the ball is the most important element in this game of altered agents. If you will please to be noticing how my voluminous butt thrusts outwards, thusly—” Here he pointing his hindquarters more forcefully toward the caddie shack, where Bub sat nursing his second snifter, his jolly grin and bulbous red nose bewreathed in a thickening fog of guano smoke.

“That’s a snazzy cap, sirrah!” yelled Bub. He wondered whether Mr. Doggone would know he was being sarcastic. Probably not. In the first place, that dork Doggone was subtlety-impaired. And in the second place, nobody ever expected a clown to be sarcastic — especially Bub. In addition to the fact that clown-joshing was usually of the straightforward “pie-in-the-kisser” variety, and not much given to irony or double-entendre, there was also Bub’s voice; somewhere between a child's piping squeak and a eunuch’s shriek: growling was something it didn’t carry well. Instead, Bub sounded like Mickey Mouse with laryngitis.

Mr. Doggone turned slowly, narrowing his eyes to focus in the early-morning sun, nonplused as he tried to establish the source of that “snazzy cap” yelp. He sighted Bub. “Why, thank you graciously, baggy-ass,” Mr. Doggone hollered, ostentatiously doffing his bloopy plaid disco-lid. “I’d like to respond in kind, but you’re a clown.”

“Great,” Bub muttered to himself, while simultaneously offering an ‘aw-shucks’ wave and big goofy grin.

“Clown-hating bastard...whyn’t you just poke your big butt at me some more.”

Mr. Doggone, who never missed an opportunity to spotlight his coccyx, did so obligingly. In spades.
With a screech and a slice, Papa Doggone blasted the ball heavenward. It bulleted toward the goggling gaggle of girls, caromed off Murdstone, and lodged itself in the jutting fascia just leeward of Bub’s uptilted cranium. Bub windmilled his arms spastically and toppled over in his chair; his halter-top sliding off his right shoulder fetchingly. The Saperstein Triplets, their until now chastity never chastened, stared slack-jawed at Bub’s alluring shoulder. To be exact, it was not Bub’s shoulder that locked their orbs, it was the salty-topped jester’s tattoo. It was tri-colored, oblong. Its shocking image seemed to besmear the hapless gals with lurid promises of guess-your-weight chicanery and quarter-mile-gas-guzzlers. The Saps moaned and quavered. Nothing at St. Buttwitcher’s had prepared them for such an unsettling spectacle. Not even Father Tween’s post-prandial benediction: the belching had caused their trifle to remain untasted.

“Buh...daah...urmp...wulp,” said Cornpone (the eldest — by 47 seconds).

“Duhrb...geevim-geevim...hurmph,” said Murdstone, the middle Saperstein.

“Oh, Lordy...somebody’s havin’ biscuits tonight,” murmured Laverne, the only Saperstein triplet whose speech hadn’t degenerated into nonsensical vocalizations.

“Girls! Eyes front! Now!” barked Daddy Doggone, bopping each one smartly on the noggin with his nine-iron for emphasis. “You’ve all seen a clown tattoo before, I’m sure. Show’s over.” The Saperstein triplets stared holes in their saddle-shoes, Cornpone fingering the frayed hem of the left leg of her shorts intently.

Murdstone’s newly flushed face glowed in the morning sun, tiny droplets of sweat having sprung delicately into bloom on her upper lip. She licked the sweat off, pursing her cupid’s-bow cake-hole primly. Laverne, however, took off for the caddie-shack at a trot, muttering, “Lordy...biscuits aplenty...betcher boots, baby-cakes...”

“Laverne!” Daddy Doggone yelped, half in disapproval and half in peevish disappointment. Laverne, as though waking from a short dream, stopped in her tracks, disoriented, then reluctantly changed direction and shuffled back toward the third green, dragging her scuffed saddle-shoes.

“Replace all divots,” Popsy Doggone admonished.

“Jeez, Puppy Pop, the Divots play here every week,” Laverne reminded him. “They’re not even missing. And as you well know, they’re practically irreplaceable — think of dashing Danny Divot, or dreamy Dexter Divot. Replace them? Why I’d sooner hammer a nail through my skull with a block of cheddar cheese. Dogstar, that clown’s ‘markings’ have you more shaken up than any of us. Why don’t you just head for the 19th hole for a relaxing beaker of hot fuzz with Lavender Scarface?”

“What, and leave you brazen hussies gaping at that harlequin’s pen-and-ink prurience? In a hog’s peeper, you little minx.”

Just at that moment, all three Sapersteins burst out laughing. Old Daddy Doggone looked so stern and imposing, his muumuu ballooning comically in the breeze. Even Mr. Doggone had to admit he was getting a little exercised about the whole thing, and it was only a clown’s tattoo. Yet beneath the bluff bluster and baggy buffoonery, there were troubling new stirrings of teen-town trouble.

Bub’s tattoo had been a window through which each Saperstein triplet had glimpsed her inevitable loss of innocence, the wider world of warped weirdness that lay beyond the sweater-clad confines of chocolate-malted falcons and the Cinderbag Club’s annual Debutante Demolition Derby — good clean fun, which everyone knew enough to bring to a halt before somebody lost an eye.

Bub hitched up his halter-top gloomily, stooped to right his rickety wooden chair and brushed the bracken from his baggy pants. He, too, felt all rubbery, wooden and electric as a result of the curious tattoo-to-eyeball connection he’d made with the Sapersteins. What was weirder was that Cinderbag social protocols would not allow any of the parties involved to acknowledge what they’d seen...and felt — even to each other. For the Sapersteins having seen his tattoo had also cranked open a window for Bub. Through it, he had gimpsed blond wooden crank-cases and chunky vases with sprays of delicate meat-pies, had whiffed the scent of scorched hamster and seen the shadowy figure of an elegant and gracious charioteer tending all with a smirk. It was a world Bub served daily, but into which he would never be admitted, unless of course the children needed entertaining or there was a sudden infestation of chimps that needed a burly clown to dispatch them.
But what could he say to snap the high-tension twine which bound them in a world of palpitating uncertainty?

“Scree, wuhhmph, wooga-wooga, eeee, eeee, eeeee!” A distressed chimp swung over the porch railing, and Bub’s gaze was wrenched away from the stunned Sapersteins and the blustering righteousness of Mr. Doggone.

“Bub, you’d better come quick,” bleated the chimp. He was tugging at the lower pants-leg of Bub’s baggy trousers, trying to get him to move faster. “The Divots just found out about the valet parking. And boy, was the mayor mad!” The chimp’s features furrowed into grave concern, and an anxious fear-grin spread across the lower half of his face. “Now! He’s loaded for clown, man, and unless I’m mistaken, your baggy butt is the main attraction for the Theater of Cruelty’s lunchtime show, and... Hey — cool tattoo.”

Bub started glumly at the chimp. The chimp, wondering what the reason was for this sudden clown catatonia, stamped his foot “Well, you, you...clown,” he stammered.

Chimps and Shrimps

"Isn't there a reason to re-examine your conclusions, donkey-boy?” asked Clarence with the pointed, angular voice he liked to use to assert his authority over underlings when there were more important people in the room.

“B-b-but sir...I didn't realize that you were actually going to use that wrinkled tire tube. It seemed that it would fit perfectly over my head, and there was that big office party coming up, and Larlene was going to do her act, and I needed a reason to ask for forgiveness. I figured that having my cranium wedged into a patch of rubber would be the perfect excuse to have her cover me in linseed oil. Did I know you needed it? Especially with all those bumps!?”

It was always this way on a Tuesday. If it wasn't the constant bickering between boss and prole, then it was the fishes demanding higher pay and more food-flakes.

Life was not very fun in the future. The clocks ran slow and the earth’s core was still runny. The war continued apace with no end in sight, and still no one had volunteered to fight. Even more depressing, halter tops were still all the rage.

Clarence continued his high-pitched caterwauling...until a faint bleating coming through the heating duct heralded the approach of the goats. Every lunch-hour they liked to move slowly among the desks, grazing in the trash-cans and occasionally gumming at the corners of the battered desks.

Initially, most people had thought the goats a nuisance; hardly the sort of thing that went along with the sleek modernity of life in the future. But things at Whorehound Brothers had been like this since before the Great Unwinding, and now they saw little reason to change. Besides, the bucolic agrarian mood was somehow restful, with the added advantage that the goats reminded people that pre-industrial life had been rife with smelly, insistent, not-very-bright creatures, and that in turn prevented people from romanticizing a past they had come to know only through the nostalgic moaning of authors who didn't have much of a clue about what it was really like either.

Bitsy twisted the exhaust manifold hanging from the chain around her neck nervously in her gummy fingers. Clarence and Ted looked to her expectantly. They were waiting, as the always did, for...for...what? This always happened. Bitsy would proclaim loudly that she had “found it,” and then pause for a dramatic, and oft-times gassy, moment. Everyone else in the office would look up at her upon the Weather Beater paint can and listen breathlessly for her pronouncement. And of course, Bitsy would clam up. It didn't help that she had a cleft palette, or that her stockings were full of runs; Bitsy simply reeked of philosophical ruminations and posturing. But then again, this was the girl who thought Jung was a type of easy-to-assemble Scandinavian furniture. People never change. But Bitsy liked to think that they did. She was always offering some little chunk of helpful advice regarding the perfectibility of one individual or another. She rarely shared these observations with the people who were supposed to be perfected, however. Instead, she’d tell everybody else in the entire firm that X was far too greedy, or that Y should try to be more assertive, but never tell X or Y those things. Everyone knew that was impossible. Bitsy herself was in need of much improvement. But it was her view that because she had such a keen, incisive view of everyone else's flaws that she was somehow exempted from having to follow any of her own advice.

Outside, the hot wind howled through the Spanish moss hanging from Bub, the maintenance clown. The toes of his floppy shoes stirred slightly as his massive frame swayed to and fro, stirred by climatic current which had spiraled through the stratosphere all the way from Africa. The night before, Bub had been unable to sleep. He thought of the refrain of an old Joni Mitchell song that had occurred in his life at a couple of portentous moments. Was its arrival now the harbinger of something portentous, or was it merely the random firing of a stray, wiggling synapse that had somehow triggered this sense-memory? Bub didn’t know. And with the shrimp calling softly to him from the galvanized tin tub of ice chips, he didn’t ponder the conundrum very long.

Instead he raised his pock marked face and spat out this question to the gods: “O mysterious veil that conceals all the cookie crumbs and wee rodents of our inner souls! Why must the bed springs squeak and the neighbors peak at all our crafty connivance? With the mothers and the brothers already gone to sleep, the stew bums down on the corner need never know of our twisted tryst. Please, lord, never pop a shim.”

With his plaintive plea already whipped away on the salt-seaed spray, Bub returned to his golf shed to while away the restless hours of dawn. He removed his bonnet and replaced his blue-tinged hair with a cruel and unusual twist of his wrist. It was always saddest at this time of night, when the sea birds called out over the sand bar and the garbage scows tooted past. Even a small plastic friend doesn’t help those long hours roll back and allow the green dawn to wink its wounded welcome to the day.

Bub had spent lord-knows-how-many seamless minutes effervescing at the joints. Not that he wasn't sad about misplacing his tiny plastic pal. That miniature executive had been better than nobody when the chimps were down. And the chimps were down more and more often these days, because they’d been unable to translate their opposable thumbs into dominance of the snack-bar. So instead, they hung around down at the filling station, drinking beers they had hidden in the coke machine for cooling, smoking Fanny Ovals and telling one “shoulda-coulda-woulda” story after another. Their bitterness towards the higher primates festered just below the surface of their furry, noseless faces.

Occasionally Bub would hire them at the beginning of the season to ready the course for the onslaught of golfers, waving their putters and screaming for pin-flags. Establishing troop-leadership among the chimps was tough. Bub had managed it. But he was often troubled by what that had done to the chimps — a weak and comparatively hairless ape telling them where to go and what to do. Sooner or later, they resented it and quit.

At times like that, Bub would agonize, often brooding until he began to weep, his tears fissuring the pasty white makeup with rivulets of grief. The miniature plastic executive would tell him to toughen up, that clowns couldn’t weep, that unless he was prepared to sing “Ridi pagliaccio” right now he could just stop that goddamn silly blubbering.

“You don’t have any idea what it’s like,” Bub would sob.

“Hey,” the tiny executive would say, waving his dinky cigar with a small, dismissive wave, “they have opposable thumbs. They could do more with it. But they’ve been seduced by too many screenings of Planet of The Apes. They think if they just bide their time, eventually they'll run things.”

“It's so pathetic,” Bub would moan. “If—”

“Enough,” the executive would bark. “Chimps is chimps, chumps is chumps, and yesterday’s bologna ain’t nothing to spill your guts on.”

“What?” Bub would stammer, growing annoyed by these elliptical korporate koans.
“Aw, what’sa use?” the executive would huff. “You’re just not corporal timber.”

“Or general mayhem,” Bub would add ruefully.