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from Pope Dun the Incredible

3/24/2022

“I’ll have what he’s having,” Benny informed the waitress.

The waitress cast a gaze in Dennis Bright’s direction and quizzically lifted a well-penciled eyebrow and wondered aloud what he was having. Bright, after some reflection, said he was having the small shrimp salad with French dressing and a cup of decaf.

Benny frowned and announced that he was reconsidering.

He would begin with the large turkey salad (Italian dressing), accompanied by a milk shake (chocolate). From there he would move on to the large sirloin (rare). He would finish with the apple pie, topped off with a generous portion of ice cream (tutti frutti, if possible; if not, strawberry). He also suggested that the waitress put a bottle of bubbles on ice, explaining that he and his friend were there to celebrate a great moment.

“We’re not allowed to serve alcoholic beverages,” said the waitress, as if repeating a mantra. “Kansas law.”

Benny feigned disbelief. “What? The State of Kansas discourages the celebration of great moments?”

The waitress ignored this question, glumly plucked the menus from their hands, and shuffled off with their orders.

from Just Another Dead White Male

3/23/2022

She buzzed around the patient, dressed in a tiny pink pant suit, armed with a line of floss.

“Open wide,” she sang.

He opened wide.

She accidentally rubbed up against him.

He flinched.

“Relax, Rabbi Scheinblum,” she said gaily. “I’m not going to hurt you. That’s Dr. Digby’s job.”

He flinched again.

“Just kidding,” she reassured him. “My job is to take your mind off the coming pain.”

A major flinch.

She ignored this response and launched into her assignment. One of the questions she’d been asking people as she flossed them up for Dr. Digby was, what did they like best about Kirkland? If they were to name her the one thing they liked best about living in Kirkland, Kansas, one thing and one thing only, what would that one thing be?

They’d been saying it’s a nice conservative town. Still too much crime in the streets, maybe, and it was getting a little too big, in terms of population, but basically it was still a nice conservative town, knock on wood. They’d been mentioning the friendliness of the people. They’d been saying Kirkland was the kind of a place where family values were allowed to shine through, which accounted for the friendliness. They’d also been saying it was a big happy church-going community where everybody was free to go to the religion of his own choice and there were no Liberals—she guessed that maybe now they were called Socialists (this brought an indisputable flinch)—and very, very few atheists, just a few scraggly professors out at the University, and nobody paid any attention to them anyway, except for maybe a few Sophomores, who’d grow out of it just about the time they started applying for jobs in the appliance department at Best Buy.

from Just Another Dead White Male

3/22/2022

As he considered his own wisdom, he felt a strange but unmistakable relief. The weight of passing Western Culture to the next generation no longer rested on his substantial shoulders. Now that for all practical purposes he was no longer Chairman of Language Arts, he was finally free to do what he had been hoping and planning to do for the last ten years: leave philistine, prosaic Kirkland, move to the West Coast, and compose his memoirs for the benefit of a distant posterity that would, in time, come to appreciate the fact that for thirty-odd years Edward Budwieser, M.A., had wasted his fragrance on the Kansas air.

from Crazy Were We in the Head

3/21/2022

While I was coming back to Inverness on business, I checked in at a motel after a long day’s drive. I thought I was in Pocatello, but at dinner, just as I was finishing my glass of Chablis, it struck me that I was actually in Gomorrah. When the waitress came with the bill, I tried to make a joke about this, but she’d never heard of Gomorrah. So I dropped the subject, paid for my meal, went back to my room, and got ready for bed. Being tired but not sleepy, I decided to watch a movie. I picked a comedy that was advertised as having “brief flashes of nudity,” but it turned out that the flashes were too brief to keep me awake. As I dozed off I remember wondering what Uncle Edgar would have thought about his oldest nephew spending a night in Sin City. Would enjoying a glass of wine and watching a slightly naughty movie be enough to cancel my reservation for the last reunion?
While I was driving to Inverness the next morning, I got to thinking of those bygone Reisender reunions and about Snake and the orchard and the goats in the backyard and the ghosts in the attic and about all us cousins gathered around Great-grandma, singing her an old German hymn to ease the pain of going home to the Fatherland. Then, as I crossed the dam at Beaver Falls and headed north, I got to thinking about the family secret of what Great-grandma had been doing out in the middle of Asia back in the 1880s and why she’d been married in that mosque. When I graduated from high school and left town, Grandpa finally presented me with the key to the puzzle. So after Aunt Lena filled me in on the details, I finally got the point.

from Alone in a Dark Wood

3/19/2022

Across the bay he could see San Francisco through the heavy fog. The hills of the city were obscurely outlined by its night lights. Black water below, black sky above—these extremities defined the scene. Jerusalem of the West, he thought as he wandered along the shore; Rome on the Bay. Had he not come here for a reason, had he been like those grizzled conventioneers who’d brought their spouses, this week he would have climbed its hills and sauntered along the paths of its extensive park. But a desperation born of need is not a friend of leisure, so he had been forced to his affair with molded chairs and hard data. This was his first real look at the town.

He came to near the end of the shore, to the place where it curved sharply to the left and formed a cove. Here the rise of land above the water hid the city from his view. Along the shore there was a boardwalk and several waterfront buildings, one of which bore a lonely neon sign. Valhalla. A bar for local salts, he guessed. Valhalla? The hall where Odin, the chief Germanic god, received the souls of heroes fallen in battle. He was tempted to walk over to it, tempted to enter and announce himself as one of them. But he could count himself only half eligible: fallen in battle, certainly, but hardly because of having performed some intrepid feat. Daring acts do not always spell courage; they spring from idiocy as often as from valor.

from Sacred Books & Sky Hooks

3/18/2022

What does Corky Ra allege happened on the day he was relaxing on his girlfriend’s couch? What is he asking us to believe?

Corky’s account of his first and defining revelation appears twice on the labyrinthine summum.us website, once in a written essay, the other in an informal question-and-answer session on the subject of his first encounter with the Summa Individuals.

“References to encounters with Beings not of this planet can be found in all major philosophies and religions dating back to the beginning of recorded history,” Corky’s essay begins, though he gives no examples or arguments for this claim. He then recounts his own encounter, taking care to say that before the event, he had always supposed that those who had reported having had personal revelations were “either lying or mentally ill.”

Several months into his meditative regimen, he says, “I began to notice a ‘ringing’ in my ears.” Then, on October 28, 1975, it happened. The noise in Corky’s ears “became very intense.” His body began to vibrate; he opened his eyes and found himself alongside “an enormous pyramid,” made of something like graphite, half a mile long at the base but without doors. Everything was quiet and perfect. Then he noticed another structure, with “a round, convex shape, like a flattened ball” and a hundred yards in diameter. He walked through its wall and found himself in a large room full of beautiful, elegant, divine humanoids of both genders. “They established a high-level telepathic link with my mind,” he said, “and instantaneously I understood them.” These Beings were what he came to call the “Summa Individuals,” meaning, he informs his Latin-deficient readers, the “Highest Individuals.”

from Hotel Adios

3/17/2022

I couldn’t see the priest’s face, but I could smell the alcohol. He wanted to steer our little chat in the direction of sins, mine in particular, but I had this gnawin’ curiosity ’bout hell and purgatory and the differences betwixt. About the time my curiosity got the best of me, he quick excused himself, so instead of givin’ me an up-front answer he gave me an assignment. “Don’t come back,” he barked at me as he stood up, “until you’ve read all about hell and purgatory in The Catholic Encyclopedia!

At which point he skedaddled.

Well, this ol’ gal followed his cue. I got the hell out of that hot, cramped box and watched him go pigeon-toein’ off to the little boys’ room in the garb his business called for, lookin’ like one of them wind-up soldier dolls that were big back in the days of my youth. Right-left-right-left-right-left, swishin’ back and forth at pronto velocity in zig-zag mode.

Oops! Sorry. That’s one way to get the ball rollin’, or so your higher class of writers would tell you, but I should prolly start from day one. That’d be logical. Biblical, too, goin’ by that yarn startin’ with In the Beginnin’ and endin’ up with that bit about apples bein’ not good for your health, and I mean no disrespect, honest to God I don’t. It’s not the way I was brought up.

from Dancing Over the Rays of Light

3/16/2022

If I wished to sally forth into the world beyond this bedroom, I told myself, I should get dressed.

And so I arose with the aid of my cane and, resting a goodly portion of my weight on the duck’s head, limped—there is no other word for it—back to the chest of drawers. Opening it, I withdrew a change of underwear (a ribbed top, a pair of boxer shorts) and a set of athletic socks adorned by the Nike swish, and laid them neatly upon the bed.

Author’s note to the reader:

I sense your impatience. I can only assure you that all these descriptions are necessary to the story. This book is a mystery. (There will be a body. Maybe as many as three or four! But there won’t be a massacre.) There are clues scattered throughout these pages. See if you can spot them.

Next I gazed out the window and observed that it was snowing, a fact from which I was able to infer that it was winter.

Author’s note to the reader, beginning with a brief catechism and ending with a warning:

Q. In the finer class of literature, winter is often taken to be a symbol of what?

A. Death.

See how easy it is when you pay attention?

Warning: Don’t overdo it. The boxer shorts, for example. They don’t mean a thing. The athletic socks? They may or may not be significant. (If you believe they are, the Nike swish could be a splendid subject for a discussion in a graduate school seminar on the dependence of the contemporary novel on Greek mythology.)

But on with the old man’s story.

from The Church of the Comic Spirit

3/15/2022

Prince: We’re back, and we’re speaking with Father Al Lustlieb here. Mind if I call you Al?

Lustlieb: That’s what my mother used to call me, Larry.

Prince: So how’d it happen, Al? How’d you run across the Bear Lake Scrolls?

Lustlieb: You want the whole shtick?

Prince: That’s what we’re here for.

Lustlieb: Well, it goes all the way back to 1968, March 31 to be exact.

King: That’s, let’s see, thirty-one years ago yesterday.

Lustlieb: Right. At that time I was driving around this great land of ours, taking an early summer vacation from Hebrew Theological Seminary, up in Buffalo on the shores of Lake Erie, and I happened to stop for the night at this little town called Bliss Beach on the shore of Bear Lake, when--

Prince: Some of our viewers might not know the whereabouts of Bear Lake.

Lustlieb: It’s on the border between Utah and Idaho.

Prince: So what’s a Jewish kid from Buffalo doing in Mormon country?

Lustlieb: I was in a state of great spiritual anguish, because of my “inadequate progress in the Hebrew language,” to quote the good rabbi, and the thought crossed my mind that it’d be a great time to head out to the West Coast, where I had this uncle in Beverly Hills. Anyway, Uncle Jerry was gonna set me up with a screen test, and if that didn’t pan out I thought I’d sell a screenplay or two, and if worse came to worst I ﬁgured God’d show up and put me back on track, get me out of this major funk I was in, due, as I mentioned, to the lack of a basic background in Holyspeak, plus not having my special brand of humor appreciated by the rabbis.

Prince: Which is what happened. God came through for you.

Lustlieb: Did he! The story is, I enrolled for the night at this establishment in Bliss Beach—. . . no, check that, ﬁrst I had a bite to eat, etcetera, maybe a coupla beers, and then I went over to this sleeping establishment, I cannot for the life of me remember its name, except that the word Motel ﬁgured prominently, and checked in.

Prince: You could buy beer in Utah?

Lustlieb: This was on the Idaho side.

Prince: And that’s where the divine revelation took place? On the Idaho side?

Lustlieb: Right.

Prince: In case anybody’s wondering, these details are important. Lots of tourists dish out big bucks to be at the site where the Almighty has been known to surface.

from Pope Dun the Incredible

3/14/2022

Benny Good had enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a truck driver. He had roamed the interstate highway system of America, transported a wide selection of its products from east to west and back again, eaten in a high percentage of its better truck stops, made the acquaintance of many of its friendliest truck stop waitresses, and talked his way out of more than his share of speeding tickets.

If, a short month ago, he had been asked to reflect on his life, Benny would have said that he had found happiness in his chosen profession. There were times when he missed Lucy, of course, but in his view the bliss of married life was overestimated by a small but vocal minority of the American public. Besides, he enjoyed the camaraderie of the other truckers, and the truck stop waitresses more than made up for the slight hole he felt in what may or may not have been a heart. As for the long hours he spent in the cab, they were not always solitary. There was of course the radio, with the country music and the talk shows that provide a trucker’s main source of entertainment. But there were also the occasional waifs who would accept his invitation to use his cab as a temporary home away from home.