Looking for a Present Tense in Artifacts of Parody: Grits and Choates, and Empty Booty Boats

by D.T. Harris

1) Holden Fricker and the Summer, Garden Hose Museum

"Fricker?"

"Mah-mums?" the Boy yells back through the open, painted window of the what-not room that's just beyond the pile of tractor parts and fencing wire, rusting in the rear garage.

"Fricker -- Git the yallow Dog ... frum ... nosin' Ivy's lundray shorts!" she yells back from her rocker on the leaning porch that overlooks the meadow, beside the creek that snakes the wooded hillside down to Lulu's Checkerboard Café, on 30, just beyond the line of Broken Willow City, where 30 turns to clay.

"Mah-mums -- Yes!" the Boy yells back, his right hand working faster on the garden hose extractor now, just below the nozzle ring. "Almost done ... the ... milk ... IN'!" he adds, voice flirting with the mezzo range.

"Whut?" she yells back.

"YEEEEOOOOO ... oh ... sweee' ... GEEEZE US ..." the Boy is yelling in a muffled scream, his blue eyes closed, hand slowing to a finger roll, blond head resting on the bare wall wood, legs limp and naked as a pair of skinny, Sunday dumplings, white and soggy from the hotness of the chicken broth.

"This is trash! I mean ... good ... God!" William Jefferson Hardcourt begins, then pauses as he removes his reading glasses and rests the manuscript on his lap. "Complete ... and utter ... garbage."

He's still looking at Frederick and shaking his lustrous silver, $80 haircut in disbelief, as Rosie appears beside the chair. "Thank you, Rosie," he says quietly, and takes the Scotch-rocks refill from the tray.

"I mean ... really," Hardcourt continues. He's staring out the closed French doors, past the pecan orchard and ancient barn to the lone, stone chimney that remains from the original Harvest Farm house. The farm, in the Hardcourt family for ten generations now, has been both the capital and social foundation of such recent "business interests" as the publishing concern from which Frederick Witherall, the expendable intern-messenger, has delivered for "perusal" the manuscript of a controversial novel the editor has secured the rights to.

"You tell Franklin Binge-a-moon," Hardcourt finally says -- looking at his humble messenger with the stone cold eye-set of someone who learned social power and control in the nursery -- "this is dead."

"Yes, sir," Frederick responds, rising from the couch and taking the now-entombed tome from his hand.

"Rosie?" Hardcourt then half-yells toward the door. Her sweet, creamed-coffee face appears, magically, in a second or two, and he asks: "Could you please get Mr. Witherall his coat."

Frederick lets himself out, walks across the wide, front portico and gravel drive to his rusted, twenty-year-old Toyota. Inside, he puts the Redweld folder and manuscript on the passenger seat, then drives back down the winding, hillside road toward Broken Willow and the city. But just before the Spanish moss of Harvest Farm Lane ends at Highway 30, he pulls over, lifts the folder flap and slides the top few papers out, and continues reading where Hardcourt stopped.

"Fricker?" she yells back.

"Mah-mums!" the Boy yells back, pulling up his summer bibs and wiping off the stumpy fingers of the "handsome love machine" on page forty-three of a well-used 1927 catalog that shows ladies in "the latest, cotton breathables."

"Gitin' the yallow Dog now!" The Boy steps outside the backdoor of the rear garage. "Harold! GIT you! NOW!" he yells at the mostly old, partly-yellow, partly-Lab.

The Dog looks up from the wicker laundry basket, a pair of Ivy's "Sweet Sixteens" hanging from his teeth, eyes the size of saucers glazed so long it clouded up the pattern in the china.

The Boy takes three quick steps toward the Dog and stops, as the Dog takes the shorts and leaps six times into the deep ferns at the wood edge, then stops and turns. The Boy and Dog stand looking at each other.

"Fricker?" she yells back.

"Mah-mums!" the Boy yells back as the dog turns and disappears into the summer darkness of the woods. "Dog took the lilacs!"

"The lilacs?"

"Yes!" the Boy yells back, turning toward the porch. "Dog smiled and rolled 'em over in his mouth, then turned and scampered to the woods."

"The lilacs?" Ivy yells back, head hanging from her bedroom upstairs window. She's wearing just a slip, the nipples of her bra-less B+ chest making tiny pebbles in the cloth, having hastily arisen from the cool wood floor where, on her back, legs stretch-flexed along the wood like a pair of well-shaved, paper birch limbs, her right hand made her twiggy body rustle with a still-cold Orchard Crush she'd taken from the ice box.

"The lilacs," she yells back from her rocker on the leaning porch that overlooks the meadow, one hand on the sweater she'd been knitting, the other lifting up the flat end of a knitting needle she'd been using, as she rocked, to tune her own piano.

2) Four Socks, One Suit, Two Rolls of NECCO Wafers

Charleston always packed his overnight bag carefully. Before each business trip. Before his weekends at the 'tel in At Cit, playing roulette, chance and pachyderm till he'd lost his chips and the wheels and balls and swinging trunks began to fathom in his dreams. Before his sister's wedding in the B'shires to the future, singing waiter up from Bard.

Before the secret weekend in the snowed White Mounts with Ellis Fleur -- the weekend, ten years back, when they broke the B&B's long-cherished, 1840 Chiselton, as the wrought-iron bed fell through the wide pine floorboards to the hallway of the first floor, Ellis in her leather mask and bustier, screaming in the midst of orgs'mo number four as she straddled Charleston, her grim white charger.

Charleston sits down now with his baggage on the empty, well-made bed. He's looking at a photo on the nightstand of Angel Heart and Claire, taken ten years back, the year his wife and daughter left for Spain and a villa in the hills near Cartagena that overlooks the sea. He imagines what might have happened in their day today, as he sits here in the yellowed room glow of an evening that's been dark since 4:00, the sleet outside his window tapping on the glass like a pack of ghostly suitors, tossing gravel ice, anxious to get in -- in this land where character has fallen back onto itself and become a measure of how deep the frost of winter's hard remorse grows inside your life, throughout your life.

3) Tabloid on the Mount

It was front-page news in the "Morning Post" -- a photo and a story short enough that Brux could read it through the plastic window of the newsstand. He's standing at the "Latest Shopper News" display adjacent to the twenty-seven IN doors of a local Wiggle Giggle Super Store. Above his head is the store chain's buoyant logo of a planet Earth that's floating in a Wiggle Giggle store-boat, with the upbeat slogan: "Our merchandise is EASY on your wallet because it comes from Chinese NO-SWEAT shops."

"Yesterday two males, five females and a parrot disappeared off Pirate Shoals, leaving behind a new, forty-six-foot Hot Bonanza cruiser, various video recording equipment, and what the police are calling 'enough blow to stop a hurricane' -- bobbing in the ocean."

"Tragedy," a lady's voice behind him says.

He turns his head and smiles, still bent over, eyes at the same level as her glitter covered, kiddie sunglasses. Glitter covered, kiddie sunglasses are very popular at the moment, here; as is the new, ankle-length '60s psychedelic moo-moo she is wearing; and the dollar, ruby flip-flops on her feet.

He straightens up after noticing that her toenails are painted "Ravin' Pink," each nail bearing the tiny, black lettering done with Revlon's new "Feet Speak" kit. Written upside down and backward to her eye, he can just make out the word "Psalm" beginning on her little toe, right foot.

"Tragedy," the lady says again. Then, "Makes ya think, don't it?" She's clutching a Wentworth value tote with the latest Wiggle Giggle flier sticking out.

"Yep," he says, nodding his head in the empty pretense of agreement, eyes casually scanning the parking lot for other members of her crew. Despite his efforts at trying to fit in, Bruxton Jumper Nell-Hoose is what the consumer police have come to call an "irregular."

"So?" the lady asks.

"So ... what?" he says.

"So ... it makes ya think ... so what ya thinkin'?"

Well, he's busy thinking a lot of things. Like other consumer irregulars, he has not forgotten how life was before the giant asteroid of marketing collided with the planet Earth, and extinguished the idea dinosaurs.

His mind is still haunted by the ghost of simple, run-on questions past, like: How many weapons could this ninja shopper in disguise be hiding behind a curtain of a dress like that? And, with pupils the size of bloodless Frisbees, is this lady wigged-out on something besides the jelly doughnuts from the Wiggle wagon by the street? And, would someone at 1-800-DR-PHIL-Incorporated, today's "Wiggle Giggle Super Saver Partner," know how to tell? And, truth be told, around what campfire was it that Dr. Phil really got his act together?

And, speaking of doctors and the possible need for a diplomatic response here, what would Condi say? "You know, I saw those ruby flip-flops at Bloomingdales. Just last week. On sale for $90. They look really nice on you. I wish I'd bought them, now. But, well, the 600 square-foot 'shoe room' in my bedroom closet is getting so -- crowded. Ha-ha-ha! Yes, I know -- it's true. You don't have to say it. World diplomacy does require a lot of footwear. You didn't by chance see where Tony Blair's wife got those pea pod pumps --"

"You awake?" the lady finally asks, interrupting his size seven, narrow thoughts, as a man with powdered sugar on his chin walks up beside her. They nod and smile like old friends, part of the extended, Wiggle Giggle family in the aisles. He's wearing a jaunty, deep port baseball cap with the Earth and store-boat logo on the front.

"Nice hat," she says to him. Then, "So?" to Brux.

"Just thinking about the parrot," he answers.

"Parrot? What parrot?" the lady asks, her face as twisted as the message in Wiggle Giggle's "We proudly donate a percentage of our profits to economic-faith based charities."

"The parrot on the boat," he answers, pointing to the newsstand. "Then from parrots in particular, to parroting in general."

The lady and man are both peering at a greeter just inside the store, wondering in what aisle the "Cash Backs" he's handing out are good for. Brux realizes their attention is fading, now, so he hurries to squeeze in one more paragraph.

"I think it was the French fashion philosopher, Coco Chanel," he continues, "who said it best. 'Unlike peee-ple -- an-i-mals are zo luck-eee. They are zo un-en-cum-bered. They have no neeed to zay "I buy this. I buy that. I buy what, therefore, I am." It's why I like to skinnn them, an' put them on a coat. Zo you can buy it and feel freeee, too. Kiss-kiss.'"

D.T. Harris lives in Florida. His writing has appeared on the web in Exquisite Corpse, Doorknobs & Bodypaint, Opium Magazine, Sweet Fancy Moses, Flak Magazine, Facsimilation, Defenestration, and others. For the curious or bored, a writing list with links can be found here.