The Culture Bunker
by William Ham
illustration by Space Jockey
Two Thumbs Up Part II: Electric Boogaloo
As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by the preceding month and the last 77 pages, I have finally accepted the fact that movies bear absolutely no relation and are completely and unequivocally irrelevant to my own life. This thought weighed so heavily on my mind that I didn’t pay much attention when a man known only as Mr. Burnt Sienna, carrying a top-secret document which could alter the course of history as we know it, gargled out his death rattle after being struck in the throat by a curare dart in the back seat of the cab we were sharing. Eventually, his bug-eyed, large-toothed sidekick, Mr. Puce. whose complex relationship with his colleague was offset by his quirky mannerisms and penchant for wry, post-modern one-liners, broke my train of thought by speaking.
“Hey, are you done with the exposition yet?”
“Ummm… yes, I believe so.”
“Good. Now what the fuck are we gonna do? Mr. Burnt Sienna’s fuckin’ dead! That means not only will he not be able to pay for his share of the cab ride, but now I’ll have no one to bounce my sarcastic pop-culture references off of!”
“How do you think I feel?” the cabbie interjected. “I’m friendly, likable, and two days away from retirement. That poison dart was meant for me! There’s not much point in anyone avenging my death and reciting a heart-rending monologue at my gravesite if I’m not fucking dead! I knew I should’ve taken that right at Elmblight Street. You can’t get poignant irony after ten in this part of town. Goddamn embargo.”
“All right, just calm down, everybody,” I said. “I’m sure we can handle this… um, say, did you know that in France, 7-Eleven is known as Sept-Onze and that their 64-oz. sodas are called Le Gulp Grande?”
“There’s no time for that,” hissed Mr. Puce. “We need to formulate an emergency plan, and fast. Driver – you got any tapes of cheesy ’70s pop songs, either originals or covers by heavily-hyped independent recording artists?”
“Shit. I left ’em all at my girlfriend’s apartment. Well, to be fair, I’m only pretending she’s my girlfriend so she can get that promotion and arouse the interest of that cute young executive who won’t go out with anybody unless they’re already taken or think he’s gay. She doesn’t know it yet, but if I can get her to marry, divorce and remarry me in the next 36 hours, I’ll get 26 million dollars from an anonymous benefactor who I suspect is secretly in love with me.”
“Okay, that’s important, I understand… how are you fixed for firearms?”
“I’ve got a 9-millimeter semi-automatic under the passenger’s seat. It holds one bullet in the chamber and six in the clip, but strangely, it’ll fire over thirty shots in the event of a standoff where you’re outnumbered ten-to-one.”
“No good. We need two, one in each hand for when you have to jackknife through a doorway, blazing away with your arms outstretched in an improbably graceful manner.”
Ah… I will never forget the summer I spent at Graceful Manor. After my father died, my mother thought it would do me some good to spend eight weeks on the palatial estate my dying great-uncle purchased with the green stamps he’d inherited. Little did I know it at the time, but I would leave there knowing just what it is to be a woman…
Slap! “Hey!” Slap! “Oh, Jesus, are you all right?”
“Wha…? Yeah, fine. What happened?”
“You lapsed into a flashback. God, I thought we’d lost you there for a second.” Slap! “Fag.”
“I think we’re in luck, you two,” the cabbie said. “As of that last intersection, we’ve crossed into a federally-regulated plot twist zone. Any minute now we should…”
The passenger-side door swung open and a short, fast-talking Italian jumped in, levelling a ring-laden pinky at the driver. “Don’t you make a sound, you muckin’ fook!”
“Or what?” Mr. Puce cracked. “You gonna kill us with good etiquette?”
“What the fun are you talkin’ about?… oh, Judas freak, I forgot my fuppin’ gun again, didn’t I? That just frippin’ figures.”
“There’s one under the seat if you need it,” I offered. “We’ve got no use for it now.”
“Oh. Great. Thank you.” He pulled the gun out, put it up against the cabbie’s temple, and quickly ran through a set of vocal exercises and breathing techniques. “Okay. To reiterate my earlier point, don’t you make a sound, you moogin’ fork. Just do as I say and everything’ll be just farkin’ dandy.”
“Excuse me,” I queried, “but who are you, what do you want, and why are you using such archaic Actors Studio techniques to get into character?”
“Dat’s a good freeblin’ question, my friend. I’m here to collect on an outstanding debt.”
“What do you mean? I don’t owe the mob any money,” the cabbie replied.
“Dat’s where you’re furkin’ wrong, pal. In 1066, your direct ancestor, Fortunato Kowalski, won a nice chunk of change correctly predicting the point spread in the Battle of Hastings. He decided to let it ride, and he put it all on the wager that, 931 years later, a genocidal madman would attempt to bring the world under his control using a large piece of salt pork and that the Packers would lose by three. Well, it didn’t come to fleckin’ pass, so I’m here to make sure you, his only living direct descendant, pay the flub up.”
“Oh, wait a second,” I said, “I know who you are. You’re part of that organized crime family that makes book on the outcome of cataclysmic world events and televised sporting matches several centuries in the future…”
“That’s right, mutterflocker, I belong to the Cosa Nostradamus. And the great scholar and prophet don’t like to be kept waitin’ for more than a millennium. Now hand over the money or I’ll do to you what we have reason to believe a frustrated greengrocer’s gonna do to the ecosystem in about twenty years or so.”
“May I ask you a question?” I asked.
“Go da frag ahead, wiseguy.”
“Why don’t you use any actual obscenities when you talk?”
“I’ve been wonderin’ that for fyckin’ years,” he sighed. “I keep tryin’ to get the boss to change company policy, but he’s got a contract out on him which stipulates dat it must remain a strictly PG-13 mob. No Anglo-Saxon expletives, no explicit sexual content – which really frugs up my social life, lemme tell ya – just mature themes and situations. Strictly speaking, I can’t even futzin’ shoot you. Ah, feck, I probably shouldn’t’ve told you that.”
“Sounds pretty oppressive,” I opined.
“It’s a fleckin’ pain in my backside is what it is. I’d get outta the life for good but there aren’t any fulltime positions left in the extortion and kneecap-shattering industries these days. I used to have a pretty sweet folkin’ deal goin’ with the Syndicate when I was a kid. Worked my way up through the ranks and was this close to bein’ a made man when I realized this Syndicate only distributed comic strips and advice columns to daily newspapers and had very little to do with organized crime. Whacked all those people for nothin’. I don’t regret it, though. That Art Buchwald fickhead got what he had comin’ to him.”
“God, I’m beginnin’ to wish that dart had gotten me instead,” Mr. Puce said. “May I make an observation at this juncture? We’ve been in this stinkin’ cab for the last twenty paragraphs or so and I’m startin’ to go stir crazy here. We gotta go somewhere with this dead-end narrative.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Any suggestions?”
“Hmmm… we could go to Vegas dressed as Elvis impersonators and eat ourselves to death,” the cabbie said. “Viva Leaving Las Vegas.”
“We could all take jobs as homosexual flight attendants on the make and call it Cruising at 40,000 Feet,” I offered.
“No, no, no,” the mobster said. “That’s all off the flackin’ point. I know what we can do.”
“What?”
“All in good frankin’ time,” he said. “Trust me. Driver, hang a louie at the bottom right-hand margin. I have a plan. It’s crazy…but it just might work.”
To be continued, regrettably.
