Dear diary,
Now I walk to a deli and order a sandwich to-go. When the station chef holds up two pieces of bread that have nothing between them and asks me what I would like on my sandwich, I gaze upon all the possibilities that are displayed in the bar of ingredients before us and say: “Hmm… how about some grasses, some plants, some shrubs, and some trees.” Then I add: “and no bread — you can lose the bread.” The station chef looks up and confirms: “No bread?” “No bread,” I nod firmly. So the chef places my order in a takeout bag, being careful to remove the slices of bread before neatly folding closed its paper top.
Then I purchase a llama just to release it into the wild. Before I do so, however, I place the takeout bag containing the sandwich that I just bought (see the paragraph above) into the creature’s mouth and make sure that it is secure. Then I tap lightly on the beast’s haunch and proclaim:
“Hereby do I grant you freedom! Now run like an ode to the wind upon your two legs!”
I watch the llama flee to the purple hills.
Now I recline on a vast, smooth rock that is nearby. “Being a normal citizen of Ancient Egypt is much more funner than being the Emperor, that’s for sure,” I say with my head resting on my hands.
Then I fall asleep and dream that I am World King again. Then I awake and am saddened by the reality of my situation. I repeat this process several times.
“Would you like to borrow my kerchief, to dry your eyes?” sez a passing damozel who has noticed that I am crying.
“Thank you,” I say, “but no.”
The damozel leaves reluctantly. As she walks off, she keeps stopping and looking back at me, every couple meters, in case I change my mind (but I do not).
“There is no weeping on the set of a Herzog movie!” I bellow to the damozel when she’s almost out of sight. (She waves in acknowledgement, it seems.) I would have voiced this clever quote earlier, but I didn’t think of it till now. It’s something I heard the filmmaker Werner Herzog boast of telling his crew, in a video interview that I saw online the other day.
After another hour or two of moping, I leave my rock and visit a used car dealership. I purchase an ugly old beat-down rusty vehicle and begin to drive it to what I assume is France but is actually Canada. “This place is even better than I imagined,” I say, looking at all the trees and the clear streams. I park my car beside one of the rivulets and get out and cup water into my hands and draw it to my mouth, over and over again, in ecstasy. When the camera-frame that is filming me zooms out, it is revealed that my car is leaking antifreeze, motor oil, transmission fluid, and gasoline into the rivulet from upstream — so that’s what I’m actually enjoying. (This is a sight-gag. Now you may laugh.)
I climb back into the driver’s seat and carefully retrieve my handgun from the car’s glove box before I resume hightailing thu the Canadian wilderness. (There is no road where I am.) Gingerly I place the gun into my pants, positioning it directly underneath the buckle of my belt, and I accidentally discharge the firearm as I’m doing this. I lift the elastic of my underpants and observe the damage. I decide it’s probably too dangerous to keep the handgun lodged under my belt; so I write a reminder to myself on a sticky note that sez: “Dear soul, please remember to buy a holster at the next filling station.” Then I very cautiously set the firearm on the passenger seat, and, in the process, it accidentally discharges again, this time blowing a hole in the windscreen.
So I drive until I see a sign that has a picture of a bear, underneath which is written in all-caps: “BEAR”. — I pull over and hit a tree, causing my air-bag to inflate and bonk my glasses, leaving a smear on them that will never wash away.
I exit the vehicle and notice that I am surrounded by enormous grizzlies. But luckily there is a drug store located in the midst of the hungriest of these beasts. So I slide between the two most ferocious-looking grizzly bears and step inside the establishment.
“Can I help you?” the clerk sez while turning around (he was stocking the cigarette vending machine; and, the moment he sees me, he shrieks and sez: “You’re bleeding — did the grizzlies try to devour you?”
“No, I just shot myself accidentally after losing my Egyptian Kingship. Nothing that a little gin won’t fix. You do sell gin here, don’t you?”
The man straightens up and announces proudly: “Best gin available in these Canadian woods, unless you go to the shop across the road. How much do you want? One thimbleful? One and a half?”
“Two,” I hold up the figs, to clarify the amount of thimbles of gin that I desire.
The man leaves the cigarette vending machine’s security door wide open while he goes to brim a double thimble with gin. I steal several packs of cigarettes from the vending machine when the clerk’s back is turned, even tho I don’t smoke. I reason to myself that it’s never too late to start.
“I could only find one thimble,” the clerk sez while approaching me, holding the thing up at the level of my lips (I’m significantly taller than him); “so just let me pour this down your gullet and then I’ll return with your second serving in a jiff.”
“But what if I was planning on sipping and savoring?” I say sadly. “Who sez I wanted to chug it?”
“C’mon, just be a man, so that I can get back to resupplying the cig vendor.”
“Fine,” I say; then I poutingly receive my first gin ration.
The man heads back for seconds, and I steal some more packs of cigarettes, just to spite him.
“Down the hatch,” he sez, approaching with my second thimbleful.
“Thanks,” I say, after swallowing draught number two. “I guess I’ll bid you adieu now.”
“You’re not going to drink and drive, I hope,” the clerk looks concerned.
“No, I finished drinking a moment ago — I’m probably going to take up smoking while I drive away from here.”
The clerk gives no response to my answer — he apparently does not even hear me; for he is preoccupied with counting and recounting the number of cigarette packs that are in the vending machine and trying to figure out why the total does not match his inventory sheet. (My recent theft has thrown off all his numbers.)
“Bye-bye,” I say. And the door jingles open. I squeeze out between the two vicious, starving grizzly bears and climb back into my rusty deathtrap. At first the engine won’t start, but then I try it seven hundred more times and it finally coughs to life.
I coast away at a very low speed with all the bears chasing after me. They gallop slowly, so this is a very unexciting scene. Only when my vehicle stalls out and I need to try to start it sixty or seventy more times does the suspense begin to build.
Eventually I get the thing started again, but then I run out of gas, and the engine-temperature gauge reads “soon to explode”; so I climb out the rear passenger-window and place my cigarette stockpile on a plastic toboggan that I find inside the trunk. “Useless old rusty piece of trash,” I mutter, as I shuffle away on foot from the broken automobile, with the bears dispassionately slouching after me. Then the car explodes. After getting over our shock at the intensity of the boom, all the grizzlies and I huddle together and watch the fire burn itself out. Once there’s nothing more to look at but the sedan’s smoking frame, we all head south, to the CIA’s secret headquarters in Guatemala.
“Holy moly,” sez Agent Orange-Man when he answers the screen door on the porch and sees that I’ve been accompanied all the way from the Canadian wilderness by a large pack of grizzlies; “why’d you bring all these bears with you?”
“I didn’t bring them, they followed me,” I explain. “At first they wanted to eat me, so they chased me, but then they lost interest and we sorta became friends — you know how it goes on road trips: even your enemies start to seem like passable conversation partners, after months on the road. Haven’t you ever seen a single ‘buddy picture’?”
“I don’t watch talkies,” sez Agent Orange-Man.
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot,” I say. Then I make the “zipped lips” sign, semi-rationally.
Agent Orange-Man now walks from bear to bear and shoots each one between the eyes with his revolver. This takes upwards of twenty minutes, which is a long time on film, but we let the scene play without a cut, just to aggravate our audience (for we believe that the Russians are watching our every move).
Once the grizzlies are all in heaven with Jesus and the prophets, Agent Orange-Man and I enter the shack and take a seat on facing plastic sofas.
“Well, what brings you home, prodigal?” sez Agent Orange-Man.
“I got nowhere else to go,” I say, kicking my cowboy boots up onto the coffee table that stands between us (mud and blood ooze and drip from my boots onto the map that’s unfolded on the tabletop); “they stripped me of my empire — now I’ve returned here to beg THE EVIL to be my NEW GOOD.”
Agent Orange-Man stares hard at me for precisely ninety-six minutes; then he breaks into a wide smile and sez: “Welcome back, Agent Bryan!” We shake hands firmly and harbor instant misgivings.
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