And Jesus the Christ the Second of Nantucket, from atop the McKinley Memorial Bastille, told the following parable:
“Phil, Flad, Lhopper, and Jat were early thirtysomethings disinterested with their wives. They were all buds. They were all successful. They were all childhood buds. They got disinterested, incidentally, at Flad’s bachelor party three years back. At Paramour Noir’s Fop n’ Stop on Highway 14 across from the outlet mall. The girls there did some crazy shit with some crazy oblong objects for some crazy assloads of cash.
‘Take it off, take it all off,’ convicted sex offender Veil LaPraleude would yelp through his incisors.
Assloads. Tire irons. Assloads. Wire pliers.
The rest—Phil, Lhopper, and Jat—got married later to similar type wives after having bachelor parties at the Paramour Noir’s Fop n’ Stop on Highway 14 across from the outlet mall where the girls did some crazy shit with some crazy oblong objects, like tire irons and wire pliers, from some crazy assloads of cash.
Phil married Doris, Flad married Aggie, Lhopper married Packe, and Jat married Tellupulia. The wives looked like their husbands, so Doris was short, Aggie was tall, Packe was pretty, and Tellupulia had big tits.
Their honeymoons were all sub-par despite their exotic locales. The husbands got drunk on burgundy and French bread and had semis most of the night. It wasn’t whiskey dick, either. The wives were attractive and dolled up but couldn’t or wouldn’t do shit, which was perfectly reasonable, like the husbands saw at Paramour Noir’s Fop n’ Stop on Highway 14 across from the outlet mall.
And then? Dissssinnnntressssst.
So about three years after Phil, Flad, Lhopper, and Jat had been married, respectively, to Doris, Aggie, Packe, and Tellupulia, the boys were itchin’ for ass.
‘I’m itchin’ for some real ass,’ Lhopper would say.
The boys were successful and the girls were smart, so cheating was out of the question. Paramour Noir’s Fop n’ Stop on Highway 14 across from the outlet mall had largely lost its novelty and cost assloads of cash, anyway. And the crazy shit the girls would do with oblong objects like tire irons and wire pliers didn’t seem so crazy anymore.
Dissssinnnntressssst.
Phil and Jat were particularly successful MDs having started the family-oriented Phil & Jat’s Neighborhood Surgery Nook. They had a 74” big screen in the boiler room where Phil and Jat plus Flad and Lhopper could have Monday men’s night. Phil told Doris, Flad told Aggie, Lhopper told Packe, and Jat told Tellupulia that Monday men’s night would be a big old bore to them cuz they just did guy stuff there. Watch the game, smoke some stogies, talk cars. You know.
But that’s not what the four boys did. Nope. They’d stretch out on beanbag chairs with a communal bucket-o-goop and watch videos of women doing shit that even the girls at Noir’s Fop n’ Stop on Highway 14 across from the outlet mall wouldn’t do outside the VIP room. They never needed more than that one bucket-o-goop. Don’t ask.
Real ass.
Meanwhile, Doris, Aggie, Packe, and Tellupulia were swinging with local professional gymnasts, which was perfectly reasonable.
‘This is perfectly reasonable,’ Packe told Doris when the latter would get into a mean guilt streak.
Doris would straighten up from a compact hump and respond, ‘This is perfectly reasonable. Thank you.’
‘Thank yourself,’ Packe would say with her pretty eyes, making them serious as she gave Doris a side hug and waist squeeze.
Back to the boys.
After exhausting the adult video section of Family Video on North Andrew Boulevard, Phil, Flad, Lhopper, and Jat took turns in brining in the latest sensational video to the boiler room. This worked well for a few months, but, as they say, only the good die young and, again, they had vagabond erections.
Dissssinnnntressssst. Oh, boys. Boys, boys, boys.
Phil, however, remembered a fetish he’d heard about at Paramour Noir’s Fop n’ Stop on Highway 14 across from the outlet mall, so when it came his turn next he didn’t produce the latest sensational video. He passed around an oversized manila folder. Flad, Lhopper, and Jat were pissed, perplexed, and, then…grinning.
X-rays.
Back to the girls.
A few weeks later, guilty Doris brought a proposal to the other three. She proposed—out of guilt, obligation, and a smattering of hope—that they do something for their husbands. Something nice. This was perfectly reasonable, she said. Aggie, the mediator and the brain, quickly extracted from the rest that, like her marriage, the problem was rooted in sex. S-E-X. Sex.
So the girls planned a fancy shmancy dinner at Flad’s with a special dessert planned for afterwards.
Fast-forward to the dinner.
It was a nice dinner the wives put on at Flad’s and honestly more fancy than shmancy, but, nevertheless, they sat around afterwards with smiles—feeling bad about their marriages behind them.
But it was time for the desert, the wives said.
Okay, the husbands said apprehensively but with goodnaturedness.
The girls came out of the kitchen looking hot. H-O-T. Hot.
They were going to do a strip show for their husbands with the beats and yelps provided by N.W.A. from Aggie’s MP3 player. It went well. Very well. The boys and girls were getting into it.
The boys clapped and clapped and clapped and cheered. Everyone was drunk on burgundy.
There’s was one thing, though, the wives noticed quickly. The husbands kept encouraging them to strip even after all four of them were completely nude.
The wives laughed. The husbands didn’t.
The wives laughed some more, nervously this time. The husbands didn’t.
The husbands gathered around the wives like a protective herd of cattle around their young. Jat removed his surgical bag and selected a few blades.
‘Take it off, take it all off,’ he seethed through his incisors.”
The fourteen thousand crowd fizzed like sugary gelatinous champagne, but the only immediate response from Jesus the Christ the Second of Nantucket (atop the McKinley Memorial Bastille) was to break out his jazz hands and pull a Sammy Davis Jr. abbreviation.
Tlah-t-ta-ta. Ta-tlah-ta. T-ta-t-ta-tlahtlahtlahtlahtlah-te-te-ta.
Hey.
Then he told a second parable in the same quiet wry manner he told the first:
“Darren Bobbie’s eleventh birthday cel-o-bration, with the approval and funding of his mother, Page, was held at the La-zor Nightlight Red Arena and Arcade a week before Thanksgiving from 7 to 9 p.m. Page allowed Darren to invite eleven fellow fifth-graders, allotting them each 111 coins for arcade games—in addition to a group bout in the laser tag arena. This was an assload of cash but alimony was steady. Plus she and the other, likely, single mothers could eat double chocolate cake and drink Singapore Slings in the V.I.P. room.
‘Boys!’ they’d say before returning to their cake and drinks if/when (if? when? if when if when ifwhen ifwhen ifwhenifwhenifwhenifwhen) they heard a crash from the arcade.
The night came and the sons and mothers went their separate ways in the fluorescent planetarium.
‘Boom bom boom, ut ot ute,’ thrummed the German hateguitar dancemusic.
The nine mothers went to their brandy, Cointreau, and Benedictine, and the boys went to their artificial violence under artificial lights.
Boys boys boys. Boom bom boom.
Orko was playing ‘Freelance Dentist’ in the corner, an oh-so hilarious simulation of the travels of a schizophrenic hitchhiker. He was laughing.
Tylorre stomped on a slab of plastic that glowed with purple, yellow, and red floor lights. This game was called ‘If I Was a Giant and My Family Made Me MAD’. He also was laughing.
Jehb laughed, laughed, laughed. His game was funnier than Orko’s and Tylorre’s combined. ‘Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty’ focused on a group of young men who roamed alleys on Halloween night armed with an arsenal of fireworks, searching for unhoused pets. The games scored like this: the longer it takes for them to die, the more points you receive. No one cared if they won or not, though.
‘Boys!’ Page said with a father-knows-best grin to Jan in the V.I.P. room.
Boys boys boys. Boom bom boom.
Boys boys boys. Ut ot ute.
Other favorites included ‘No Means Yes’, ‘Prison Bitch Shiv’, and an educational snuff film cinematography game.
Since it was his birthday, however, Darren got first crack at ‘Nuclear 2’. ‘Nuclear 2’ was a five-tokener and at the center of the arcade and its waiting line was up (out?) the ass. ‘Boom bom boom’ went the shoving between the boys in the waiting line for ‘Nuclear 2’ which was up/out the ass.
The night manager of the La-zor Nightlight Red Arena and Arcade, in fact, had put a three-round limit on the game due to its wildass popularity. Boys would blow their respective fucking allowances evening/afternoons playing and replaying ‘Nuclear 2’.
Grown-up gaming insiders couldn’t, for the death of them, figure out the game’s appeal. When playing ‘Nuclear 2’, you didn’t really do much of anything. There was a screen, a hammock, and a hot chocolate dispenser and it went like this: the gamer would sit in the hammock, drink hot chocolate (with generous amounts of whipped cream, I must add), and watch the screen. The screen was more or less a video montage of fathers and sons doing father and son type
activities—playing catch, going out for ice cream, watching Chuck Norris flicks and drinking IBC root beer, etc. That’s it.
The three-round limit was strictly enforced. Not so much out of managerial muscle but by aggressive self-rule, so when Darren failed to set down his hot chocolate, rise from the hammock, and return to the end of the line at the closing of his third round of play, contractions of mummers tensed through the line.
‘That was three, wasn’t it?’…. ‘Hey, hey’… ‘Does he know?’ … ‘Somebody should…’
A chubby black-haired British exchange student crowed out, ‘Emm! Emm! Excuse me, chap, bot I believe yoh tern az finished, so af you’d step don—’
‘—fuck you and fuck your sister, Gary Glitter,’ Darren returned glassily.
Unfortunately for Darren, this was the closest compatriot he had in the bunch and the night manager arrived at the convergence only as quickly as he could.
Crash.
‘Page, did you hear something?’ Jan asked, already on her fourth Singapore Sling.
‘Hmm? Oh, it’s probably just the boys,’ Page returned.”
Jesus the Christ the Second of Nantucket didn’t ask the crowd what that or the previous parable meant, but they all agreed that the general gist of the shit was to love one another.
