I was writing this in the bathtub when they stormed in. Right out of my story, plunging me into it. Just great. I was trying to take a bath. Now I gotta put up with this shit. And it never goes well – I’m always doing something unbelievably cruel to myself in these situations, these little splash fictions.
The brutish authoritarian assholes crashed into the moderately sized residential bathroom festooned in full black riot gear, helmets, ridiculous clubs they kept knocking shit off the counters with owing to the limited space, AR-16s locked and loaded. Four of them crowded into the cramped space and found themselves unable to move, which annoyed them with me, because I could have had only two storm in, or hell, they could even have tapped on the door and asked me to come out.
But no, I forced four of them into the unfortunate bathroom, and they were not happy about it, one of them tasing me three times just sitting there waist-deep in tepid water after another had busted the sliders into tub diamonds, covering me with thousands of nasty little cutting edges around my supple, naked flesh and fully exposed johnson. I thrashed around seizurely, but miraculously found my highly regarded nether regions unshredded, the word processor once again proving edgier than shower door safety glass.
A vicious smack to the face, followed by a black canvass bag slammed over my head. I was dragged out of the tub, dripping and naked, not a cut on me. As my head swam with punch-tasing, I heard one of the pigs say, “Man, look at the condition of that tub. Dude should really talk to his landlord.”
I pleaded with my oppressors through my hood, “Show some humanity. Let me put some pants on at least! It’s the middle of winter. I’ll freeze to death.” I had earlier noted some of them admiring my glistening, unclad Fiction BodTM, eight-pack abs, serious bulging guns (really smoking), and hoped their latent homosexual urges – along with Linda, who came along for diversity and that really hot look when she removes her helmet in slo-mo and her long black tresses cascade down around her steely, magnificent face – wouldn’t compel them to make me travel to my destination unclad for their own perverse amusement.
“It’s 75 degrees, ya fag. This is Los Angeles, for crissakes.” We all stiffened at the coarse and politically, socially, and religiously insensitive nature of Agent Flenderspitt’s inflammatory response. I mean I couldn’t see them stiffen, I had a bag over my head, but I made them stiffen right along there with me, and not just over my impossibly hot Fiction Bod. Flenderspitt persisted (in for a penny, in for a pounding), “You’re just gonna be naked in the next fucking paragraph. Are you really going to write that you put on some clothes, then took them off again immediately?”
I was furious. Who was this arrogant prick to think that just because I gave him a name – you don’t hear Linda popping off – it somehow gave him the right to make editorial judgements? See this, Flenderspitt? This is the next fucking paragraph. You didn’t even know it would be here, because you’re not a writer, you’re a god-damned character. Asshole.
Still naked, and hooded, so not 100% naked, my throbbing guns cuffed behind me, I rode silently in the back of the van with three of them, even more cramped than the bathroom, Linda at the wheel. As we jostled along I could feel them touching it, though I told myself it was just the tips of their dangerously inconvenient truncheons as the result of said jostling and not inappropriate official behavior.
But when Flenderspitt asked if he could sit on my lap I said, “No! Not in this story. We’re not going down that road.” That is a road we are not going down.
But, if we did…
Nope. Not doing it. You can bet Flenderspitt will think twice about piping up during my creative outbursts. That’s right Leon, now you got a first name and eternal life in the realm of this story. It will be told far and wide. Now you’re the pig that wanted to ride Art’s hammer.
God dammit, I said we weren’t going down there. Fucking stream of consciousness bullshit.
After what seemed like hours – but was really only a couple of minutes for me to wash my face – we arrived at the destination: the White House. Again. The same dark, empty room as from To Know Trump. I keep fucking ending up here in these stories. Be nice if somebody in some other sector would do something interesting enough to allow me to set my stories in their reality, but no, it’s all politics all the time with these god-damned celebrity pols. They can’t act, they can’ even play themselves convincingly. A bunch of useless hacks. What the fuck is the matter with this country?
The room was familiar. Perhaps too familiar. Once again I had handcuffed myself to a folding chair, but of course when you sport an awe-inspiring Fiction Bod you display it at every possible opportunity, so I was still naked. Seven paragraphs, Flenderspitt. Seven. A blanket would have been nice, ya asshole.
The hood was violently jerked from my head, but as the room was dark, the effect was negligible, beyond it rubbing my nose and causing a mildly unpleasant chafing. Then, in the distant blackness a door opened – the very same door from To Know Trump (I gotta hire a set designer) – and silhouetted in the light stood the Old Man. His tired, frail body stood pumped up in the illumination of the room behind him, and he looked needlessly expensive in his $40k dark-blue, baby-skin Brokes Bothers suit and shiny black Goochies, made from adults.
But what really stood out were his trademark aviator shades, which he always wore when he felt the call to look tough and cool at once, two qualities he never experienced independently and failed at utterly combined.
Alas, he had neglected to clear the threshold and the door slammed into him, all but knocking him into the room, now inexplicably lit by a single exposed bulb dangling directly above me, but stark, very noirishy. An unrealistically attractive young Secret Service Agentess, Barbara Santos, conveniently stationed for some reason at the door, helped catch him mid-stumble and avert a completely embarrassing entrance, reducing it to just an unfortunate entrance where those first impressions are so important.
Instead of parlaying it into a potent, even poignant, recovery, instinct took over and the Old Man decided Barbara needed an impromptu neck massage and her hair a good sniffing. Because he was the leader of the Fee World and the person she was in fact supposed to protect with her life if necessary, I only had her knee him firmly but gently in the balls.
He decided to talk to me instead.
“You know who I am.” The reflective eyes of the cocky pre-octogenarian twinkled, while beneath his lower regions tinkled. Thinking of my most excellent pooch Juno, who would get so excited to see me she would puddle up, I took that to be a sign he was happy with me. I may have misjudged.
“Why, of course I do. You’re Unky Joe Biden, tool of the government and industry too.” He was taken aback by my personable tone, not expecting such lilting cordiality from a naked man cuffed to a chair in a dark, poorly production-designed room. “I’ve been in this room twice and I’m beginning to think it’s not featured on the Whitey House tour.”
“Beginning to think? Shoulda done that before you found yourself here, smart guy. I’m not the tool, I’m the guy that uses the tool to tear down all your commie crap.” Joe couldn’t take his eyes off my manhood, fascinated by its silent majesty and imputed menace, and because he and Flendershitt both piss me off, they get to stare at my johnson while I write. Ha! Groove on that you freaks. “I was elected president of the United States of America by the highest margin in the history of the world of world history. Historically. What are you elected to?”
“Well, I elected to write this story, so that should account for something. It was a unanimous vote and even you will admit you didn’t get that. Not by a longshot.” Even though it was meaningless, it made sense, and he, and the other SS agents I haven’t even mentioned until now silently surrounding us, watching us, could little but help to appreciate its political virtue as well as literary utility. “Without the DNC’s overt chicanery, you didn’t even get the primary, buddy.”
This really annoyed him. His slick-as-snot suit and crotchety old-gangster tough guy demeanor made me feel I was being harangued in a Hollywood parking lot by some angry old show-fuck pissed off at the world because his dreams had passed him by, where they didn’t turn out to disappoint him even more when they came to pass. Gained the world but realized there was no soul to lose to begin with. So they just suck up the souls of those around them.
Fucking day-walkers.
“Who in the hell do you think you are?” I looked at him contemptuously, sneering down at me, his shades concealing where his eyes were really looking from everyone but me. And of course everyone who reads this story and is wondering what the hell all the homosexual references are about, having somehow made it to page four and not figuring out that I am engaging in cultural absurdity of the highest order (or at least near the top, I graduated in the top 90% of my class, though only in the lower percentiles there) (so it’s good).
“I know who the hell I think I am, the question has to be who the hell do you think I think I am? Are?” This puzzled him. It challenged him to think outside his comfort zone, and as he’s the god-damned president, he doesn’t have time for such luxuries. In fact, he probably shouldn’t be wasting precious time in this story when there are Iranians to bomb for Israel and shit. But here I held the reins, even the reigns, but never the rains, because they are out of my hands and I can’t do that on a laptop. I’d get electrocuted.
“Oh, I know who you are, asshole. You’re one-a those internet tough guys, sit around on your asses and criticize people like me who talk about thinking about getting things done.” He looked at me with disgust, smirking, shaking his head. “I dealt with punks like you before. I grew up in a bad hood. I took on tough guys like Cocoa Puff–“
I corrected him, “Cornpop?”
“Yeah, him and little Jimmy, and Fleezle Donklings. Those were some bad dudes. Bad dudes. You think you’re tough, you’re not so tough.”
“Tough? I’m juicy and tender, with way more flavor than you can handle. But you need me to be tough, don’t you? Because you’re afraid of me, and people like me who stand up against your oppressions, and to be afraid of a pathetic little wretch living in somebody’s basement would diminish your entirely fabricated self-image. It’s embarrassing getting your asses kicked by a little girl. You need tough guys, monsters, to be vanquished by Mighty Joe and Kammy. So, how’s that working?”
“Living in the executive palace, tens of millions of dollars, all accumulated while on the public tit while I reduced public services every possible way I could. I can’t complain. I been running this government for almost fifty years. What about you?”
I fixed him with a hard glower, shifting around to conceal the real point of his focus so he’d look me in the eyes. “Running from it, mostly.” A vapid kind of smile etched itself across his thin, dry lips, and I could see I had his attention. “You really made yourselves some kinda police state here. Highest prison population in the world. Constitutionally ordained slavery. You assholes just kicked them off the plantations and moved them into workhouses. Everything about your system screams oppression. A buncha pussy-fuck strongmen calling for war and evading the draft. If I had your money and fame, I’d be banging hotties every night. You tight-lipped blue-noses want to subject the world to your cruel and uninteresting lives. Weak-sauce old fucks.”
My voice screamed contempt, and they were all surprised I had them let me get it all out uninterrupted. But only because I made them surprised. Flenderschnitt just rolled his eyes, having gone through this with me in the van, and I made him do that too. So busy.
“C’mon, man. You can’t fly an eraser through potato soup! How would the dog have lunch?” I considered his statement.
“I can’t argue with what you said there and admit I hadn’t really looked at it that way until you brought it up.” He eyed me suspiciously, trying to remember who I was. As I shifted around on the cold folding chair, I realized my folly. He looked downright puzzled to see that I turned it into one of those snazzy Japanese toilets with the heated seat and squirty ass washer, all the bells and whistles, top of the bottom line. I handed him the handcuffs as I torqued out a ginormous moonfish, his face reflecting his amazement and disgust. “Would you? Hard to really clear it with the hands tied behind the back.” He absent-mindedly received the cuffs as I finished up, a horrid caa-caa cacophony echoing through the room, Joe reeling in revulsion and horror.
They were utterly confounded, and no one in particular wanted to lay a finger on me, especially after such a vile and auditory display of boorish depravity. The toilet played a happy little jingle – “Drop a log or just leave gas/ Happy toilet wash your ass” – as the pinball machine pooper flashed lights and gave the old undercarriage a thorough hosing. Joe was appalled. I was in wetted bliss. “This is really nice. Would you like to take it for a spin?”
“What the, what the hell, man? You can’t come in here and do this shit.” My eyes rolled as the heater gently dried my sparkly butthole and glistening sac. The heavenly heated exhale of hygiene. The jingle continued, “After cleaning duty calls/ Dries your asshole and your balls.” Joe shook his head and looked away astonished. He had never been so disrespected in his life. He wanted to smack me, but knew that even touching my insanely alluring body would lead to me writing really awful shit about him and not merely this amusing mockery.
It was to no avail. I stood before him, wearing a reasonably priced black Armani suit, beautifully tailored to accent my literary attributes. The spent little bully stepped back as I towered above him, young, handsome and vibrant (no sense half-assing it now), fearless, the surrounding agents lost in contemplation – did they want to make a move on me and risk the fate of Agent Flenderschitt?
“In your world, the world of global politics, you work from a script. As best as you can. Personally, I think trotting you out for this show so late in your career is cruel, but I guess you’ve advocated cruelty for others long enough, you can enjoy some.” Joe looked imploringly at the impotent agents surrounding us.
“Aren’t you gonna do anything? He’s not armed, he’s just frickin’ standing there.” The black-suited agents (though they weren’t black, just their suits), looked at each other, in a quandary, and Flendersplitt in muted awe, still fully clad in his assault regalia from earlier. And not because I didn’t want to have to write him changing his clothes. On one hand they were sworn to give their own lives for the pathetic old fools the US chooses to lead; on the other, having listened to these pathetic old fools at close range for extended periods, most of them felt it would be a public service to take them out themselves.
Ah, but for Slenderschitt, now of amorphous nomenclature. He had already felt my literary sting and at this juncture had nothing to lose, and an AR-16 clutched in his hands, trembling in homicidal anticipation. A combination to be respected in every instance. I stared into his eyes, character to character, none of that author shit between us. Joe was right, I was unarmed, though nicely appareled, no thanks to Blendersnitt. All he had to do was point the barrel at me and pull the trigger his direction about ¼ inch.
“But remember,” I intoned, “if you kill me off here, you’ll never know what happens to you. Because I, not me me, the writer me, will just end the story out of disinterest once I, the character me, is no longer vital. I know him. He’ll just get stoned and watch porn.” Rendergritts took this all into account. He knew he was a featured extra elevated to supporting character owing to his editorializing. He felt my wrath, but also witnessed my mercy. I mean, I could have written that totally out-of-left-field shitter tangent really graphically stinky, and I chose to make it noisy, not noisome. Mercy.
“Go ahead Fendersplitts, take him out. As your president, I order you to defend me. Shoot this intrudipator!” I stared at the conflicted agent, knowing the pressures which drove him, the frailties which diminished his stature and his own sense of self-worth. In many ways, all of them entirely fabricated, I knew the long-suffering secret service agent better than he knew himself. And he knew that almost intrinsically, but mostly because of the first four words of this sentence.
“Sorry Mr. President. I can no longer watch this hallowed office being used for such base and unworthy purposes. I know Art wanted to say this, but he got going here and didn’t want to have to change characters and do another paragraph when I’m already pontificating. You want to sit on top, you will always be a target. Your predecessor was a pathetic, whiny little bitch about being criticized. Is that going to be the new norm, can’t criticize the king?”
I jumped in, not wanting him to get all the good moral outrage. “You’ve been in politics nearly fifty years and made enough on a public servant’s salary to pay $3 million – that you admitted to – in taxes. Have you ever had an original idea? Have you ever done anything that actually improved the lives of people who aren’t in your donor class? You openly lie, just like deposed King Donny, you stand by and watch people suffer and die, your own subjects, Americans, you and everybody in DC stand by and watch this nation get shredded into the ground for money some asshole created in a computer somewhere. Fucking lying plagiarist.”
Bendersnitt mad-dogged me, annoyed that I stole the good dialogue back from him, feeling the gentle nibble of the old acting bug. He had been rightly impressed at how he delivered lines that by all rights belonged to me.
Joe stood utterly agog, perplexed at the fluidly and ease with which the indictments of his long-ruining political reality were delivered to him, and particularly from Schplendinschlitt, who had no dialogue at all in his script. In Joe’s script, Splendonsplit just held me at bay – all the dialogue was between us. Now Joe was missing out on all the good lines as I write about how the oratory was divvied up. Then Joe pulled one on me. “You, you stand here and call me a plagiarist, but didn’t you do this whole story with Trump as the bad guy?”
The wretched old fuck had me. I was self-plagiarizing to score easy political points and I didn’t even know it. I mean, beyond all the references to the work that I wrote which inspired this spinoff. Who in the fuck was this little asshole to tell me I was plagiarizing? Myself no less. How in the fuck do you plagiarize yourself? “Homage. It’s homage. Asshole.”
Our eyes drifted to Schplendinschlitt, who had directed the barrel of his rifle toward me. This concerned me because I had no intention of even being menaced, let alone shot, and his look of spotlight envy caused me concern.
Joe could see that Femdomschlipp was weakening and called upon the brutal agent’s years as a patriot dedicated to protecting the very people who had made the nation the great teeming shithole of sadness and cruelty it had become. “That’s right Peon–”
Flembdershipp jumped in, “Leon, sir.”
Joe continued, unconcerned, “Whatever. Listen, you waste this punk, we can get some lunch. You like lunch, don’t you, Membershipp?”
It was true, he did. And it had been a long story, we all were getting hungry. All he had to do to go and break bread with the leader of the Fee World was target my heart or my brain and give the trigger a little squeeze, not a tug because it jerks the weapon and makes an easy kill shot into an embarrassing, crippling wounding. And I sure as fuck wasn’t going to have him cripple me. Fuck that crap, I’ll go look at porn right now. But his eyes glowered fiendishly at me, and he lifted the rifle to aim position, the barrel pointed at my head from ten feet away – a clean kill. If he squeezes, not tugs.
The surrounding agents, again happy for the mention, watched this unfold expectantly, appreciating that describing each one of their individual responses, their names, maybe ethnicities, would add paragraphs to this and, as noted, we’re all feeling a little peckish, so best to move it along. Joe pulled down his glasses, his tired red eyes squinting as he watched Messerschmidt prepare to dispatch his creator in favor of a meal that will never be described. The fool. His finger gently squeezed the trigger, the deadly barrel of the instrument of death pointed right between my eyes. I trembled nervously. Would this finally be how I ended my illustrious fictional writing career?
An instant before the trigger unleashed the superheated projectile of death into the overblown head of Art, the barrel and Flendersplitt were knocked out of my harm’s way by an agent in full battle regalia. Unfortunately, the bullet intended for me struck Agent Raskin Bowels of Virginia and caused him irreparable harm. But I was okay.
As Flemberschmidt recovered and swung at the agent, who deftly dodged his assault, the agent removed the helmet, revealing Linda, who winked coyly at me, knocking Fleeemboshott senselessly to the floor with it.
Running sensuously to me in slow-mo, her long glorious tresses bouncing around her perfect face, she rebuffed Joe’s attempt for a grope and sniff with a knee to the crotch, dropping him gasping to the floor. “We don’t put up with that shit anymore. No exceptions.” As Linda and I embraced, we were pleased to see that Barbara had left her post by the door and was approaching us, shedding some of her costume, revealing her stimulating and voluptuous body. After kissing Linda and me, the three of us fled into a hot little romance story developing as I write.
Thanks for coming to my Art Ticulation!
2/6/21 Arturo Hammer
© 2021 ArtAHammer
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