A Date with the Seafood Lover

Doc Staley — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:30:20 +0000

The name’s Ulick,” wheezed a wet, icky voice that made me want to wipe off the telephone receiver, “Ulick McGooch, huh huh.”
“Er uh, and how can I help you?” I replied hesitantly.
“Ulick McGooch,” the speaker continued. “I’m a bit of a seafood lover. Clams. You like, huh, clams? Clams? I like clams … bearded clams, huh huh.”
“No. Nope, no,” I spoke quickly, “won’t do. Nope. I’m a lifelong Republican, see. Teabagging parties, that’s my thing. Stick to the Rocky Mountain oysters, me.”
“Huh, seafood. A bit of a seafood lover, me,” oozed the voice, “Red Lobster at eight then. Reservation’s under Ling-ling. Just to keep things, huh, discreet, you understand.”
Now normally, I’m not the type who willingly eats at a joint like the Red Lobster, but the Ling-ling angle had me intrigued. You see, ever since the disappearance of the eminent cryptozoologist Ray Shields while on assignment for Vex in the South Sandwich Islands, investigating the legend of the Bat Mandagon (a creature half bat, a third manatee, and a quarter dragon), it has been my tireless mission to learn the fate of this man, and the meaning of the final cryptic communiqué that he sent from Bologna Bay.
While as of yet, all leads have turned cold, there has been an odd recurring mention of a small dog (usually a Shih Tzu) named Ling-ling running through many of the rumors I have chased down. Thus it was with a mixture of anticipation and disgust that I made the Red Lobster at ten after eight.
McGooch was there waiting for me. A corpulent man in a gravy-stained unitard of the sort Russian weight lifters wore in the ’70s, Ulick wheezed heavily and absently fondled himself. As if in answer to my questioning look at his attire, he spoke up without introduction: “Coulda been a contendah, huh. Didn’t have what it took. The clean and jerk, huh huh. Shoulda gone with the snatch instead. Huh huh, the snatch.”
Once seated, Ulick McGooch ordered three lobsters, double butter on each. I got the popcorn shrimp. I attempted to bring the man round to the subject of Mr. Shields, but he just continued to mutter about the clean and jerk, and “the feculent Greek, Xylos Kakadutie,” whom I took it, had bested McGooch in some key clean and jerk-off.
When Ulick’s meal arrived, he started off by slurping down an entire bowl of clarified butter. As I looked on in horror, he then crushed a lobster tail in his great paw, and dunked it into the next bowl, licking bits of lobster and butter off his hand.
I excused myself, figuring to try the trick that so many of my dates had pulled on me: sneaking out the bathroom window.
I had just entered the gentlemen’s when a voice hissed at me from one of the stalls. I peered inside to see a midget in a beret and monocle. A single mustachio, long and waxed to a point, graced his left lip. He stood over the open toilet, feet on the rim of the bowl.
“I, ah, apologize for, er, Mr. McGooch,” said the man in a French accent, “but of course, it was the only way … well, I’m sure you understand how these things work.”
I didn’t, but I nodded and stepped into the stall.
“You are aware,” stated the midget, “that in the movie Trainspotting, when the unfortunate individual must dive into the toilet in the filthiest jacks in all Scotland, that the scene is a bit of an homage to a similar situation in Gravity’s Rainbow, where …”
“Yes yes,” I was getting impatient, “but it was a harmonica and not heroin …”
“Yes, and he was pushed.” There was something insinuating and insidious in the midget’s voice that made me turn around to see if someone had crept in behind me.
“Perhaps,” I said, “but I ain’t taking the plunge.”
The midget laughed. “Oh but your friend took the plunge, haha. There’s a world down there!” And with that, he leapt into the air, and –ZZOOOP!– down into the potty he went.
I rushed over to see what sort of trickery this was, but the fixture looked entirely normal, not big enough even for a midget to escape down. However, resting on the back of the toilet, I found a manila envelope addressed to me in a handwriting I recognized as that of Mr. Shields.
Folding the parcel and tucking it into the inner pocket of my jacket, I strode out of the gents to find that in my absence, Ulick McGooch had died, likely of a heart attack.
Well, the dead don’t mind picking up the tab, and the waitstaff had yet to notice, so I walked on out of the Red Lobster.
When I returned to the office, I opened the envelope. Inside was a typewritten missive that had been reproduced on an old ditto machine. As I read it, the smell brought back memories of my early school days.

Now I know you must’ve had some chemistry or physics inflicted on your squeamish wee butt back in high school – where, incidentally, I deem it very probable that the other kids kicked said butt on a regular basis for the punkass buttocks they is.
And in hypothetical high school back in Butt Crust, Delaware or High Crustacean-on-Sea, England, or wherever the fuck it is they churn out you defective Ken-dolls, you cornfed simpletons, you knuckleheads and grey-suited chumps who cover the good morning with rage-inducing bleating … they must have taught you a thing or two about the SCIENTIFIC METHOD. N’est-ce pas?
Yes-yes, I know they did. Back in Dickless High or the Crusty Grammar-school for Gentlemen, or whatever godforsaken institution shat you out like a pregnant jackal behind a dumpster, Mr. Prenderghast or old Doc Zucchini must’ve drilled it into you that any science experiment worth its urea proceeds: HYPOTHESIS (a question or suggestion) then METHOD (where you lay down however the hell you tested that hypothesis). RESULTS come next. Then there’s the CONCLUSION … then you hand it in, bicycle back home, jerk off, pass out, and wake up to find yourself the vice-corporal renderer’s engineer or some other preposterous occupation. You had sharp, bright ideas, you went forward with them, and most likely got what you were handed. I don’t know about that part, but I’m sure it’s something dumb.
Well, you can just forget all that now, because while you were so absorbed in that school experiment, I wasn’t in school. I was too cool for school. As a child I was found in the mangrove, left there in a canoe. And I have been playing jokes on you for years. I reside in the house of Solomon the Great, and I’ve been reincarnated more than five hundred times.
The house of Solomon is a cedar lodge on a deserted island so haunted that it doesn’t appear on any maps. The mansion and its grounds contain a carnival designed to distract freshly-dead souls, and these souls perform in “scenes,” which in turn distract the living, usually victims of shipwreck, who have found themselves on the jungle island. If you dig a hole in the road, people are going to look into it.
Let us examine a scene: young Chester, apple of the neighbourhood’s indulgent eye, runs up the street to the corner store for a toffee bar, a crossword puzzle or porn or something. Halfway there, near an alley, he is waylaid by a wino, who throws his pocket Bible in the gutter, steals his credit card, and drags him into the alley to beat him senseless back among the sealed-up warehouses, where you can make all the noise you want and it won’t matter. No special reason. Could be the wino’s just bored. Maybe he’s what they call CRAZY, crazy on all the terrible drugs they have these days. Chester sings a song of serious sixpence, screaming, begging, gurgling, before finally losing consciousness in filth and gore.
Do you know what that is? You know what that is? That’s music to my ears, that is. No-one’ll know what became of Chester. The truth – let’s face it – is that no-one cares; not with this breakup of the family we have these days, and the business with all this filth on the television and the internets. Chester’s shocking assault is just more entertainment. Everyone’s gone rotten, downright mean, and no-one really gives even the tiniest flake of a shit from the last square of toilet paper about Chester, least of all that wino, who spends all the lad’s pocket cash on cheap drugs, and beds down senseless underneath a model boat in the marina park.
These are the sorts of things that interest me; and here’s the secret: if I had not written this scene, it would never have occurred. Accidents happen, of course, but these inexplicable events with their serious, often brutal outcomes, are not accidents: I alone caused them. I was the one who wrote and painted the set, conjured the actors and created the scene, here on the hidden island of Solomon the mason, the builder of the most secret, ingenious palace imaginable to the human mind, where the Styx runs underneath the basement, and souls are locked away in the theatre, where the most secret of tunnels converge, and it is no more than a leisurely afternoon stroll to reach any location on Earth.
Listen. There is a hypothesis, but there’s no conclusion to it. There is a method, but the results, within these walls, precede it. The end is the beginning, and lies miles within.
It’s time for the experiment.

Vex Magazine Online » seafood

A Date with the Seafood Lover