[Cont. from prev. post]
Humper Bunny sits down on the other side of me, so that I’m in the middle of him and Pig, under the palm tree. I drape my arms around both of my friends.
After about half an instant, Pig sez: “I’m hungry. Did we bring anything to eat?”
“I have honey pots galore,” I say; and then I rise to my feet and walk over and unlock the trunk of my 1952 Buick Roadmaster, which reveals my treasure: Once our eyes adjust to the amber glow, we note that the trunk is filled with pots of honey. Also strewn throughout the stash are various well-worn paperbacks. I toss a pot to Pig, and he fumbles it — it falls to the ground and smashes, and the honey oozes out. Now the ground is sticky and there are glass shards everywhere.
“Here, try again,” I say, tossing another pot. Pig fumbles this one as well. So I grab yet another and toss this third pot to Humper; but, like most businesspeople, he’s bad at everything, so he fumbles and drops it. I end up walking from the Buick to the tree while cradling a honey pot in either of my arms and handing them directly to my friends. They both thank me and then start to unscrew the tops of the jars but end up dropping them in the process.
“Let us just go without eating any meals today,” I say.
“Wait,” sez Pig; “can’t we just lick the honey from the ground where it has spilled?”
“Yes,” adds Humper Bunny, “we’ll be very careful, so as to avoid eating all of the glass shards.”
I think for a moment about these propositions, and then I answer:
“Let us just go without eating any meals today.”
Then, while my friends begin to cut their tongues on the ground-honey, I grab one of the paperbacks from the trunk and hold it up and wiggle it:
“How about I read this airplane novel aloud,” I say; “it’ll help us forget our hunger. As it is written: ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’”
“Is that written in the airplane novel you’re wiggling?” asks Pig.
“No. That last quote is from another book.”
“Ah, I see,” Pig looks crestfallen.
“Go ahead, open the novel and begin reading,” sez Humper Bunny; “we’ll listen patiently and try to ignore our hunger pangs.” (He licks up another shard of glass.)
Then I begin to read the first page of the book:
Happy Friends: Part one. Chapter one. Roman numeral one. We are mourning for Mother Nature, who died last winter; I am spending the springtime at a resort near the palm tree that grows on the edge of space, at the end of the mind. My friends are with me: Pig and Humper Bun, a human being and a businessperson, respectively. Humper’s family has also just arrived, after he called them on the phone — they consist of a litter of banksters and one extremely stern spouse.
It’s fun. We’re playing frisbee. We bought a dog and a Wolfman; and they, in turn, started a shampoo business and used the profits to purchase a cat-burglar. She came equipped with a shotgun, and every Tuesday and Thursday she robs her owners. Then all the rest of the week she cases them.
Now it comes to pass that a robotic owl named Bubo needed a new nest (for she befouled her other nest with diamond droppings), so the author allowed Bubo to commandeer Pig’s studio apartment; and Pig tried not to cry while informing our group of friends that I, the narrator, should now allow him to live with ME. But I laughed and informed him that I have no home either. I don’t even have a name. And he believed me. So we mostly now hang out under the palm and think thick thoughts.
Now all the housed populace grew jealous of the thoughts that we were thinking, cuz they were so thick; so they came out of their houses and asked to join us in our leaning and loafing. And we said yes, sure, have a seat. That’s how Humper Bunny and his extended family of banksters got a cameo in our production.
Then the climate began to grow chaotic, so we sewed clothes that covered our fur, and we also ate fruit from the forbidden tree of wisdom. This opened our eyes to our sustainability problems; so we learned to share.
Then we all lived happily ever after. The end.
“That was a great story,” sez Pig. “I like how you and I lived together so harmoniously, dear Bryan.”
Roman numeral two. “What do you mean?” asks Bryan. “I wasn’t even in the story.”
“I thought you were the narrator,” sez Pig.
“Or maybe the author?” sez the spouse of Humper Bun.
“Same thing,” sez Pig.
“Not necessarily,” I tap my chin while pondering hard. “But even if I WAS both the author AND the narrator, still the best characters in the story were homeless.”
“Maybe it was a documentary in the style of cinéma vérité,” sez one of Humper’s bankster kids.
“No,” I say. “Here, I’ll grab a different book to read instead, so that we can forget about our heated argument.”
I reach into the trunk of the 1953 Hudson Hornet.
“The Five Johns?” Humper Bunny reacts to the new paperback that I’m wiggling.
“Yeah,” I say, turning the book around and eyeing its back-cover blurb. “It looks like it deals with all the scandals that arose between John the Elder, John the Younger, John of the Third Epistle, John the Gospelist, and John the Favorite Disciple Whom Jesus Loved.”
There is silence in heaven for a moment, which Humper now breaks: “What about John of Patmos, who wrote the evil Book of Revelation?”
I make a confused face. Flipping the airplane novel around to the front cover again, I use the sleeve of my tunic to rub the words that are printed, and it turns out that there was graffiti vandalism obscuring the true title, which I now hold up for all to see: “The SIX Johns.”
“Hey,” sez Pig, “and what about the most famous John of all: The Big Dipper?”
“Yeah, John the Baptist!” say all the bankster kids in unison.
I hold the paperback super close and then very much farther away from my eyes, and I keep repeatedly moving it nearer and farrer in a dizzying way, while trying to focus on the lettering on its front cover, wondering why this title seems so damned wrong.
“Aye, there’s the rub,” sez Humper Bun’s mean spouse.
Hearing that last word, rub, causes me to remember what changed the title from Five Johns to Six — I simply rubbed one logos out. So this gives me an idea. I take my survival knife from the marsupium of my tunic; then I use this blade to cut away the extra characters of this scripture’s incorrect, ungodly title. Finally, after touching up my handiwork with a bit of red spray-paint, I reveal the correctly vandalized cover of the airport novel: The Seven Spirits of John.
“Are you satisfied?” I say, smiling serenely. “May I continue?”
“Yes, sorry about our negative criticism,” say all the above nitpickers who have been treating my book’s title harshly; “please begin reading. Do not stop the momentum of this current episode.”
[To be continued...]
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