On ANIMAL SHELTER

February 10th
On ANIMAL SHELTER
Memoirs – Part VII
Upon arrival in New York Penelope got a job with the F.B.I. and I looked up one of my old communist associates, B.F. Ingleman, who was now the CEO of a very large sugar company. While Penelope, on her first day as the F.B.I.’s receptionist, shredded and burned all the F.B.I.’s documents relating to me and my murder and arson charges, and we had had our faces changed in Denver to disguise ourselves, I still didn’t feel completely secure. I asked Mr. Ingleman to give me a job in the sugar factory, which I complemented by volunteering at the local animal shelter. At the factory I met one of the children I had befriended in the sewers below Washington, Stella Cruise-Cruz, who had run away from home at the age of sixteen. One of her eyes was twice as large as the other, as a result of the battle under the World War II Monument.
At the animal shelter I was surprised to meet Jorge Sanchez, the artist who had created the giant lizard’s foot in Central Park. He was creating a new art project by painting all the former pets in the animal shelter the same colour: a slate grey.
A wise man (who I assume lived in New York) once said “Everyone ends up in New York.” If these first two encounters with characters from my past hadn’t convinced me, the next dozen or so would. Many of them I had presumed dead: Wally, the Lambs’ hyperintelligent dog, had escaped the Lambs’ basement and travelled to New York, only to find himself in Jorge Sanchez’s animal shelter and painted grey. Gwendolyn, my love from my teenage years, was a co-worker of Penelope’s at the F.B.I., and they immediately became rivals. Gwendolyn didn’t know Penelope and I were common-law married, but her personality was naturally antipathetic to my lady love. The foreman at the sugar factory was none other than the man I had though died in the avalanche in the Rockies, who had offered to adopt me and whose house I had burnt down. The Mayor of New York was John Mortimer, writer of Rumpole of the Bailey and presumed dead. He was living under the alias of Willowcrisp O’Hara. Our next-door neighbour in our brownstone house was none other than the former Dean of the Constabulary University in Salem Oregon, who, unbeknownst to me, had only accepted my application because he had planned to murder me and eat me upon my arrival.
With all these former friends and enemies revealing themselves in different aspects of my life, it was only a matter of time before things came to a head. Seven weeks after we had been re-introduced to New York society, Gwendolyn, the former object of my teenage affections in Louisiana, who had meanwhile become a powerful witch, attempted to poison Penelope in her morning coffee at work. Penelope detected the poison and realized something was up. She immediately called my former secretary, Thea, who used her psychic powers to see that the old man from the mountains and Wally the dog were travelling to my house, where I was sleeping. They were disguised as motorcycle enthusiasts and accompanied by an army of middle-class dads who felt ripped of from buying “Bayou Treats” from me at the State Fair when I was young. They weren’t that angry themselves, but felt they had to prove something to their wives, who didn’t respect them. The former Dean of Constabulary University let them into the tunnel that led from his house to mine. Immediately Penelope phoned Stella Cruz-Cruise, and Stella lit a beacon above the sugar factory, calling all the former Spider Children from around the globe to assemble for war. Meanwhile, Jorge Sanchez got his army of grey-painted former pets to hunt and kill all the snakes that had been trained by the one-eyed Bolivian whom I had thrown from the top of the Metropolitan Opera house so many years ago.
Because Wally and the old man and their retinue were delayed by a series of traps I had lain in the tunnel to prevent this very occurance, the spider children were able to arrive in time and stop them. Penelope arrived home from the F.B.I. just in time to fight Gwendolyn to the death in our living room, where she had teleported. Soon, Willowcrisp O’Hara, the mayor of New York, arrived on the scene, just in time to stop Isabelle Devereaux, who had been my old boss at Salisbury-Wigginton, and coincidentally had run against me for mayor of Washington under the name Teapot Faraday. I didn’t even know she disliked me, but she wanted to kill me. The battle continued in this way, in a series of lethal duels, to an incomprehensible level of complexity.
When I woke up from my mid-day nap that day, I walked down to my living room to find the corpses of all of my most dread enemies, and several of my friends. There was much weeping, and conflicting stories, and it was impossible to sort out who had been trying to kill me and who had been defending me, mostly because so many whom I thought were my friends were my enemies, and vice-versa. It’s one of those moments where you feel the need to sit down and take stock of your life, and so I did, composing my memoirs, which you are holding in your hands. I am pleased to say that Penelope and I are still together, and, due to an 11th-hour conversion on his part, we have adopted Wally the dog. We have renamed him Benedict Arnold, for obvious reasons.

On SPINACH DIP

January 21st

On SPINACH DIP

Memoirs - Part VI

It was right around the time when I was killing the Lambs that I got into Spinach Dip and was reading this fascinating biography of Abraham Lincoln. Funny how, once you settle down in the suburbs, your life becomes largely about other people.

I first discovered a recipe for Spinach Dip on the internet when I was looking up how to reconfigure the Lambs' billiards room into a gas chamber. It may seem obvious to the seasoned suburbanite that spinach dip can be served in a pumpernickel bread bowl, but at the time this was quite a revelation to me.

I had no job at this time, so I spent my days balancing experiments in spinach dip with plotting to kill the neighbours and reading an excellent biography of Abraham Lincoln. Everyone knows that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin, but few know the logs were from silverbirch trees, and the bark was left on the logs to give the cabin a glowing, futuristic look. I was also surprised to learn that Lincoln's wartime cabinet included a dog, three antique compasses and the President of Chile.

I developed a good relationship with my local baker, who made extra round pumpernickel loaves for me, enabling my new obsession. The main problem I had was that, after a day of eating spinach dip form pumpernickel bowls and reading about Lincoln, I would reek of spinach, which almost gave me away when I was in the Lamb's basement and boobytrapping their rec room. I had to bribe their dog, Wally, with enticing sports magazines which he would calmly read while I went about my business, despite the fact that my stench must have been overwhelming to his sensitive nose.

Like all personal fads of this nature, my addiction to experimenting with Spinach Dip petered out. The last dip I attempted to make was the difficult spinachless spinach dip, which I made while reading the final chapter about Lincoln's assassination, in which the author concluded that, based on new information he had unearthed in the course of his research, the assassination was not conducted by John Wilkes Booth but instead by a trained frog in a top hat that was paid by the President of Chile. As I read these words I looked up to see Mr. Lamb emerging from his basement into his living room, which was visible to me through a bay window that faced my kitchen. He was screaming very loudly and clutching his face, which was melting. Mrs. Lamb and Wally were already dead. Penelope later asked me why I had killed the Lambs, and I told her that I found their way of life insulting. It wasn't the real reason, but the one that made the most sense to me at the time. In retrospect, it was clichéd.

With the Lambs killed, my book on Lincoln finished and my spinach dip enthusiasm lost, I decided it was time to move on. This life didn't agree with me, and a wider world beckoned. We left our house under the cover of nightfall and traveled to a plastic surgeon's in Denver, who changed our faces so that we could move back to New York without anyone recognizing us.

On THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

January 17th

On THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Memoirs – Part V

Once again in hiding, I travelled to Des Moines, Iowa and adopted the name Jacksonville Florida. I got a job as a tax advisor and took up with a 39-year-old widow named Penelope and moved into a quiet suburban neighbourhood. Our next door neighbours were Adam and Trudy Lamb, an architect and a housewife, respectively. On our first day in our new neighbourhood, the Lambs invited us over for a dinner party.
Soon after we sat down to dinner, which was pork tenderloin, the Lambs initiated a conversation.
“Now do you two plan on having kids?” asked Mrs. Lamb, innocently.
At the same time, Penelope confirmed and I denied our desire to procreate.
“I had a recent bad experience with children,” I added to support my assertion.
“Yeah, they’re nasty, huh?” agreed Mr. Lamb. “We had a couple of our own, but they’re all grown up now.”
“Ever heard of Rumpole of the Bailey?” asked Mr. Lamb.
“No,” I replied, “That sounds like a string of nonsense words.” I knew what Rumpole of the Bailey was, of course, but I didn’t want to blow my cover.
“It’s a British TV show,” explained Mr. Lamb.
“We love British TV,” explained Mrs. Lamb.
“Anyway,” continued Mr. Lamb, “the guy who wrote that, John Mortimer, had two wives named Penelope. Isn’t that weird?”
“And he cheated on both of them,” added Mrs. Lamb, “and the first one used to write books about it. He didn’t care though, he just shrugged it off. Although they did divorce, so maybe not. The first Penelope was a lot older than him, and married when they met. They had to hire a private investigator on her husband’s behalf, and then give him evidence of their…”
She paused, partly searching for the word, partly for effect.
“Philandering!” She concluded, “Anyway, what could she expect, right? He clearly had no respect for the institution of marriage in the first place. What an odd way to go about living your life.”
Mr. Lamb stepped in, “The reason I brought it up is because your name is Penelope, isn’t that right?”
Penelope nodded.
“Not that I’m suggesting either of you is an affair-haver. It just brought that to mind, your name, which was the same as the guy’s wives names,” Mr. Lamb overexplained. “Maybe it’s more common in England. Are you English, Penelope?”
Penelope shook her head.
“And what was your name again, sir?” Mrs. Lamb asked me.
“Jacksonville Florida,” I answered.
The Lambs said nothing. They wanted to say many things, like “That’s not a name, it’s a city,” or “That is a bizarre name!” or “That sounds made up to me,” But they didn’t. They didn’t want to offend the new neighbour, even though any of these questions may have started a conversation much more interesting than the one we’d just had about John Mortimer’s wives. These conversation would have had stakes, implications, would have raised the possibility that I would someday soon murder the Lambs in their sleep. If they had called attention to the fictitious nature of my name, Jacksonville Florida, then they may have considered moving after that dinner party, which would have saved their lives. Instead the Lambs were silent. And the silence, as they say, was deafening.

On MITTENS

On MITTENS
Memoirs – Part IV
The night after the day I was officially ousted from office as the mayor of Washington, D.C., I was walking the street and trying to think of what to do next, and I saw a pair of tiny pink mittens lying in the street, wet and old and disgusting. They were in the middle of a gasoline and urine filled flow that travelled along the street and into a nearby ravine. I thought of Gwendolyn and the children I’d never have. Just then I heard a faint cry, and I followed the stream into the ravine and into a long concrete tunnel. The cries grew louder, and after another fifteen minutes of wading through filth I found a tiny girl curled up by a grate and weeping.
She told me her story: her parents had traded her to a pawn shop for a new television set. The pawn shop owner flipped her over to a illegal darkroom using child labour to mass-produce photos of puppies to be placed in keychains. She had run away and this is the farthest places she could get to. I vowed to protect her, and we established a lair down in the Washington sewers. My long legs served me well in wading through the dreck, and I constructed a pair of stilts for her that she never took off and she soon felt like they were a part of her body. She made new ones for her arms as well, and would travel around the sewers using all four of her elongated limbs.
More abandoned children joined us over time, and we gave them stilt limbs and taught them how to move through the underground tunnels that covered the underside of the city. The more talented children were soon able to move up and down vertical shafts, and one particularly talented boy appended his stilts with claws that affixed themselves to the gunk that hung on the top of the tunnels.
Soon rumours spread through Washington of the Sewer King and his army of Spider Children. An initial reaction of curiosity and excitement soon gave way to fear, and inevitably a mob was gathered to go down into the tunnels and flush out the oddities.
A triad of girls that we had labeled Listeners was crouching under the grates in the Mall, where they overheard the mob gathering. They quickly travelled to my lair and all of the children were called together. A plan was hastily concocted and, through a series of traps and misdirections, the mob was led on a wild goose chase around the underbelly of the city until they finally trapped us underneath the World War II memorial. Several of the children died when the police condoned the use of a flame thrower, but then the ground collapsed and the golden eagles and stars of the monument mixed with the tar and the sewage and the bodies of dead children.
I hoped to see Jesus again, but he left me to figure out the situation on my own. Some of the children, including the first girl I had discovered all those weeks ago, had protected themselves from the destruction by removing their stilts and creating a canopy out of discarded ceramic tiles that fused with a trove of “I Heart DC” t-shirts to create a strong web. When these children were discovered, they had lost their spiderlike quality with their stilts and were recognized as human children. They were all adopted by Hollywood actors. I got away.

On GODZILLA

January 9th

On GODZILLA
Memoirs – Part III
For the next eight years I associated with the Jewish and Latin American communist communities in New York City. I started writing freelance articles for the two communist newspapers in the city, The Little Havana Hammer and the Hebrew Sickle. All of this was under the cover of complete secrecy, according to the police I was an employee of an imaginary water treatment plant known as Water Treatment Plant 801. I had to pay off the police to keep my identity secret, we all did. We would raise money for our bribes with coffee houses where we would read poetry that were thinly disguised analogies of economic ideas. Then we would pass the hat around, also a lot of money was donated by the Irish community by mistake, because we named our coffee house events “IRA”, which stood for International Revolution Association.
My first assignment for the Little Havana Hammer was an article on sculptor Jorge Sanchez, who worked in large scale papier mache. When I interviewed him he was creating a full-scale papier mache statue of Godzilla in Central Park, and he had created a giant lizard foot that was ten feet tall. It was meant to represent capitalism, but it was never finished, and he ended up living in the foot for several years.
A few years later I got an assignment from the Hebrew Sickle to go to different factories in New Jersey and interview factory workers who moonlit as musicians. I met a chemical plant worker who played the tuba, and a textiles worker who sang falsetto. I introduced them to one another, and they became the communist community’s most popular jazz duo until they both died in a lightning storm caused by a nuclear plant in Hoboken.
Eventually I became vice-secretary of the Manhattan chapter of Comintern, after a brutal struggle with a 60-year-old Bolivian man with one eye. We both had gangs of thugs who we indoctrinated in communist theory by day and set upon each other by night. 305 men and women died in the street war until I threw the Bolivian off of a catwalk at the Metropolitan Opera House.
When I reached the age of 24 I became disillusioned with communism and started work in the mail room for Salisbury-Wigginton, an investment firm on Wall Street. I started in the basement and every year I was promoted to the floor above me, like clockwork, until I was 35 years old and the vice-president of marketing on the ninth floor.
At that time the F.B.I. had gathered enough evidence to convict me for arson and the murder of the old man in the Rockies. As they came up the elevator, my assistant Thea warned me using her extra-sensory perception, and I escaped using the back stairs. I caught a cab and traveled to Washington D.C. where I disguised myself by running for mayor. Under the pseudonym Hatter Johnson, I was mayor for three years until I had to resign as a result of a corruption scandal. It turned out that the Narcotics division had been paying Columbians to import cocaine into the city to increase the department’s budget, which was foolish because those drugs would have been imported without the illegal incentives provided by the police. I was the one who took the fall.

On HOT COCOA

January 8th

On HOT COCOA
Memoirs – Part II
It turned out I was the only passenger on the train to Salem. The Baton Rouge-Salem line was only created as an economy-stimulating make-work project in the 1930s, and train service continued because a corrupt politician had a mistress that he would train in from Oregon. She wasn’t on the train that day.
Somewhere in the mountains between Utah and Colorado, on the ninth day of my trip, and unbeknownst to either the train engineer or me, the train derailed. It was late January and a heavy snowfall had reduced visibility to zero. The train travelled for another half hour on ice formations that, by odd chance, had naturally taken the form of rails, until finally the train tumbled into a small gully. The train engineer died instantly, but I was thrown from a window and then into a twenty foot snowdrift. I made a makeshift sling out of snow and pine needles for my broken arm, and walked for 78 miles until I came upon a small cabin on top of a ledge.
An old man in a top hat answered the door. His eyes were red and watery, and he was quite stout. He took pity on me and gave me warm clothes, which were large in the torso and short in the leg, and a blanket. He made us both a mug of Hot Cocoa. On my mug was the official logo of the 1904 World’s Fair/Olympics in St. Louis, and on his was the face of a sad clown.
“What is your name, son?” asked the gentleman.
“Jack Rabbit,” I answered.
“Jackrabbit?” He asked.
“No, Jack,” and I paused to indicate the space, “Rabbit.”
“Like John Updike?” he said, confused.
“No, that was just ‘Rabbit’.” I would have said, if I had known who John Updike was. In reality I said, “What?”
We had gotten off to a bad start, and it got worse when he offered to adopt me. One thing led to another and by the time the cocoa was finished, a fire had started that would consume the entire house. For the next three days I wandered through the mountains while the old man followed me with a gun. To disguise myself, I rolled in bird dung on some bare rocks, making my black cloak white. Finally we were both caught in an avalanche, and I watched a large falling tree decapitate the old man and I was trapped in a small cave. I slept for four hours, exhausted.
When I opened my eyes Jesus was before me, a two-dimensional Jesus that looked like it had been literally ripped from an illuminated manuscript, with edges of torn paper. When Jesus spoke to me, his mouth moved up and down like a Steinbach nutcracker, and sunbeams emerged from the square void between his teeth. He blurted out a series of nonsense words which at the time I thought were Aramaic and I wrote them down on a piece of parchment I had kept in my cloak for emergencies. Later, when I researched the meaning of these words, I found they corresponded to no known language. After about five hours, He started to sing the Alphabet over and over. That lasted for another seven hours, and then he disappeared and I was lying in a gutter in New York City, completely naked.

On JACKRABBIT

January 7th
Hanged again. Fuck this game.

On JACKRABBIT
Memoirs – Part I
Dear reader, I was not always the man you see handsomely displayed on the dust jacket of this book. If you flip to that photo, you’ll see a man in a violet valeur cape tied above the sternum, a cigarette holder tightly wedged between 30 foot teeth, with facial hair that looks like it was drawn on with a calligraphy pen, a top hat precariously perched on his head like a medieval tenement, his eyes burning red like smouldering embers at the bottom of black pits. Even my name, proudly emblazoned on the cover of this memoir, is not the moniker I was given when I was born.
When I was born, I was named Georges St. Pierre Beaulieu Clemenceau IV, in the Louisiana Bayou. But because of my unusual physical features, I was known as Jackrabbit. My shins were twice as long as my thighs, which were twice as long as my torso, and my knees were bulbous fists, looking like bloated, pus engorged cysts. My arms were normal sized. My hair was a brown mop of curls like Terry Fox, and I was always wearing green short shorts with bright yellow piping. My parents were taken away from me when I was four years old by a mysterious mist. I survived by selling raw hot dog wieners at the state fair, calling them “Bayou Treats”. I could only attend school on days when the tide was low enough for me to cross the Bog. I taught myself to read using three issues of Playboy from 1959.
When I reached the age of 12 puberty struck with the urgency of a careening cement truck. I grew a full beard in one day, and lost my virginity to the daughter of the owner of the Riverboat Gambler, a local saloon. She was blind in one eye and had seven fingers on one hand, which she would run through my overgrown chest hair. I refused to shave and by the age of 13 I looked like a young Rasputin and took to wearing black robes. I changed my name from Jackrabbit to Jack Rabbit. I was accepted with a full scholarship to Constabulary University in Salem, Oregon, but deferred my acceptance for two years in order to finish a Popsicle stick art project that I gave to Gwendolyn, a local girl that I had fallen in love with.
She asked me why I was wearing robes when it was 120 degrees out. She said she missed the old Jackrabbit, and that if I was trying to hide my unusual shins and knees, I should show them proudly, for they were given me by our Lord our God. She thought the popsicle art piece was an oil refinery, but I had intended it to be a sewage treatment plant, after the treatment plant where we had first met, hiding from a gang of marauding toughs who were posing as racists but were really just homophobes.
I flinched when she misidentified the piece, and walked to the train station without speaking to her. I boarded the 10:23 train to Salem, Oregon, and never saw Louisiana again.