Cheaply Made Dreamland by j. lucow

Good ol’ General Tso.  The military strong arm of the Qing Dynasty forever immortalized in glazed chicken.  Were they his chickens? Did he make it himself?  Is this why it’s so expensive? And how does the broccoli fit in to all of this?  What would he have thought of the Colonel’s recipe?  These are the kinds of things you think about while concussed.

“Were you leaving me to die or something?” I half joked, holding back most of the blood with a napkin.

“Come now, no one wants to see you dead for the things you’ve done.” Gail said.

“Yes, that’s nonsense! We didn’t even know you were out there!” Alan defended.

“For the things I’ve done?” I asked, furthering my confusion.

Five minutes earlier I was pulling myself off the floor in front of Gail’s apartment with a formidable gash across my forehead.  Everyone was laughing and clinking glasses and chewing noodles when I stumbled through the door.

“There’s still some rice if you’re hungry.” Paul offered, gesturing to the delivery bag on the table.

I was planning on spending the afternoon with three good friends. At least, I think they’re good.  I think they’re my friends.

I remember standing in the lobby, hitting the button to Gail’s apartment. 7C.  I remember hearing the buzzer.  I walked up the stairs to the door with a 7 and a C on it.  I must have knocked…

“I hit my head on something,” I assumed.

“Pretty hard, I guess,” Paul said, offering me a handful of clean napkins.

“Yeah, I guess.”  I picked up one of the take-out containers.  “This is very warm,” I said, not making eye contact with anyone.

“The Emperor’s Wok is right next door.  It takes ten minutes,” Alan said, immediately wishing he could stuff the words back in his mouth.  Paul shot him a deadly stare.

“So,” I reasoned, “it takes the food ten minutes to get here.” I looked at my watch. “I arrived at the door about thirty minutes ago…and regained consciousness about five minutes ago.”

I felt the back of my head for any other injuries and found something stuck there.  It was a take-out menu from The Emperor’s Wok, secured to my scalp with cellophane tape.

Everyone was quiet.  Finally, Alan broke the silence.

“So are you going to eat that rice?”

It is a scientifically proven fact that if you put Keith Richards next to a standard sixty watt light bulb, it will dim slightly.  Considering this study and others performed on members of Procol Harum, the scientific community has committed itself to developing the electromagnetic potential of pop icons.

Laws pertaining to magnetic orientation seem to have a direct relation to the musical elite.  Some entertainers retain a negative charge while others, like Phil Collins, are positive.  Since being considered a body at rest since the early nineties, Collins’ store of potential energy could generate enough power for a small village. Indeed, the Atlantic province of Saintonge in France has been using the hit “You Can’t Hurry Love” to provide electricity for the last five years.

The problem, of course, lies in transferring the concept to a working device.  Getting two unlike performers on the same tour requires an immense marketing budget, not to mention the amount of copper wire it takes to keep the performers in place (Ed. note:  please review the accounting forecast spreadsheet for the recently canceled Kanye West/Lady Gaga tour.)

A recently constructed generator consisting of a brushless wound-rotor turbine and Australian diva Kylie Minogue has so far not violated Taylor Swift’s Law of Thermodynamics.  Further testing will need to be done before tee shirts are available.

I taught myself how to play by listening to the airwaves.  I didn’t even have a horn back then.  Hell, being tone deaf didn’t stop me either.  I would sit in front of our Silvertone radio and scream and yell along with the melodies of New Orleans pouring out like honey.

I’d yell and scream along with every tune all day, searching for the right key until someone told me to stop.  I never did find it.  After a while, they took the knob off the radio. Later, they took the radio and left the knob.

One day, my aunt Agnes asked me what I wanted for my birthday.  I told her cheese.

After I finished the cheese, she asked me if I wanted anything else.  I told her I wanted a trumpet.

She laughed and said, “Little Man, if you had asked me for the trumpet first, I would’ve had just enough money to buy one.  Cheese is expensive these days.”

Thirty-two years later, she asked me that same question.  I was thinking trumpet, but I said cheese again.

I sat on the porch eating my gruyère.  I couldn’t complain.  The cheese was good and even more expensive than it had been three decades ago.  Just as I was getting ready to scream out a rendition of St. James Infirmary, a scrap metal truck barreled around the corner and nearly crashed into the steps of my aunt’s house.

It kicked up such a storm of dust! The old rickety truck rocked itself steady and sped down the road with a clankity clank.  When the dust cleared, I noticed something had fallen out of the back of the truck.  It was a trumpet.  My trumpet.  And I still had a little bit of cheese left too.  I shoved it in the horn and ran to the radio.

CHAPTER 2

I played that trumpet for days at a time, not even stopping for the smallest amount of cheddar.  Not for swiss.  Not for gouda.

I played that horn till my lips bled.  I played it till most of my teeth fell out.  I played it till I fractured my jaw in three places.  Then I met Old Joe.

Old Joe was walking by the porch one day while I was playing my heart out.  More blood than usual was running down my cheeks.

“Wrong way, Suskind,” he said.

I stopped playing and looked up at him. He was blocking the noon day sun and around his head was a halo of light.  He looked just like an angel.  Or an eclipse.

“How’s that?” I asked, squinting to see anything.

“You’re holding it the wrong way, Suskind.  You blow into the little end.”

I had found my mentor.

This was a sketch that never saw the light of day.

(Scene opens in an interrogation room.  A detective sits opposite a man accused of human trafficking.)

Detective- You do realize you’re being charged with a federal offense, don’t you?

Jimmy- No, see that’s where you’re wrong.  The man I work for said this is perfectly legit.  These aliens aren’t illegal.

Detective- OK, well, maybe you can tell me where they are from.

Jimmy- Zeta Reticuli, mostly.  I get a few from Alpha Centauri around the holidays, but it’s usually Reticulans.

Detective-  I’m sorry?

Jimmy- From space.  They aren’t Earth aliens; they’re space aliens.  There’s no law against bringing space aliens across the border.  Haven’t you taken a look at them?

Detective- Yes, we have.  They speak Spanish.

Jimmy- Well, yeah.  All they can pick up in space in Telemundo.

Detective- And they’re covered in green makeup.

Jimmy- That must be some multi-dimensional thing.

Detective- Yeah, fine.  Why don’t you give us the name of the guy you work for and we’ll see about getting you a reduced sentence.

Jimmy- That’s not going to be easy.

Detective- Why is that?

Jimmy- Forty-eight syllables.  Very difficult to pronounce.

Detective- Listen, pal…

(Suddenly there’s an explosion.  The detective falls to the ground, unconscious.  A tall man dressed in white with a green face walks through the rubble left by the explosion.)

Man In White- Jimmy, let’s get out of here.  We’ve got a busload Reticulans waiting.

Jimmy- Sorry, Mr. Haasat-Machnaa-Kunookto…

Man In White-  Knock it off, Jimmy, and get in the van.

My web browser said it was having trouble running an unresponsive script.  I can sympathize.  I sent a script to my agent a year ago and still haven’t heard anything.

Pop Icon.

Popeye Con.

Pop Icon.

Popeye Con.

Pop Icon.

Popeye Con.

I keep picturing a gathering of lanky sailors with bulging forearms and spinach addictions.  I won’t be able to get anything done today.

Shit.

I ran into a old friend who decided to change careers and go back to school. He’s studying Hotel Management. I told him, by a strange coincidence, I was studying Hotel Guest so maybe we’d run into each other in the lobby in a few years. I’d tap the service bell, he’d hand me a key.  We’d both have mustaches.

He didn’t think it was funny.

He was studying for his Ice Availability exam.

I was having a very high-minded conversation with a well respected member of the local intelligentsia when at the worst possible time, my brain crapped out on me.

“I can’t stand the minutiae,” the amply IQ’ed woman said, expecting a witty retort.

But it was no good.  I couldn’t respond.  My brain was gone.  It went on a little trip to Shop Rite for wax paper and left me alone in the middle of this meaningful rapport.  I started to drool.  Not much, but it was enough.

Minutiae.  Minutiae?  All I could picture was a team of tiny bears in purple jumpsuits, stacking little crates of sunshine in a happy green meadow.  Yes, Minutiae!  They were singing a song.  It was about their friends, the jellyfish.  One day in May they will visit them for a picnic on the Raspberry Shoreline.  They’ll eat pies and frolic in the foamy sea.  For now, they will stack sunshine boxes until they reach the sky so little Tommy NumNum can wake up before he is late for school.  Oh yes, Minutiae!

“How can you not like the little bears?!” I yelled. “They’re genious!  They’re going to wake up Tommy NumNum and then go to the beach for a jellyfish picnic!  What’s wrong with Minutiae?!”

Just then my brain got back, juggling some grocery bags.

“Sorry I’m late,” he apoligized.  “I needed to get a few things besides wax paper.  Got so much I even forgot the wax paper altogether! Ha! OK, so where were we?  Minutiae?”

But it was too late.  She was gone and my chance to join the intellectual elite went with her.  I was alone in a green meadow.  I sat on a bright orange box and wept.  Suddenly, I heard tiny, but rough voice.

“Move it, buddy!” shouted a little bear in a purple jumpsuit.  “If I don’t get this last freaking box of sunshine stacked, Tommy’s gonna have my fuzzy nuts for breakfast.”

Still, I don’t mind the Minutiae.

I dated a belly dancer a few years back.  It was disgusting; bile and all sorts of liquids squirting all over the place.  But she was never happier than when she was twirling across the dance floor with a bloated stomach flopping around in her hands.

“Why can’t you do some proper form of dance like ballet,” I would ask her, “or that clowing/crumping thing they do in that movie I can’t remember the name of?”

“Shut up,” she would reply, “and hand me that plate of spaghetti.  I go on in ten minutes and it’s nowhere near digested.”

She ended up marrying a butcher.  I ran into him one day when I was buying a kielbasa.  He said she died in Beunos Aires, performing a tango with a haggis.  He gave me a discount.

I think his name was Henry.