Chapter Six: Celebrating The American Mustache

Real MFG's original story by Max Gardner and Travis Taylor

“Raow, Raow, like a dungeon dragon,

 Change your little drawers ‘cause your pants were saggin!”

            --Busta Rhymes/A Tribe Called Quest

            It was not a dark and stormy night. It was a weenie-shrinkingly cold night, the sort of night on which you would expect to see a group of boorish liberal arts students running around naked in order to prove their artistic integrity, the stench of patchouli hanging about them like a pall. It was also the sort of place where that thing happened.

            The stately edifice stood beneath a bald spot in one of the surrounding green mountains like an altar before a really large greenish Wendt that’s kind of bald. It was one of the premiere liberal arts colleges in the world, in reality more like a four year long summer camp interrupted by the seasonal vacation, in which the angst ridden artistes would go home to sober up, and make more money for their respective liquor and marijuana runs.  But for this night, this night so cold that it would cause a penguin’s testicles to ascend to the level of its nipples (if it had any), there were students and artistes aplenty.

            The infamous poetry reading attracted travelers from every town, city and village within chariot distance, from Raccoon Village  to Blacklodge to my home town of Coorhagen.  All within the shadowed confines of the café were silent, save for the high pitched squeal of someone’s tortured cough in the back of the room. A lone figure, little more than a skeleton with lips and wiry hair stood at the center of attention, spouting verses of self pity and sickly sweet, pink rhetoric.

            “A-top the tomb-stone I saw the-world,” oozed this bare stalk of a man. The soon to be czars of the arts voiced their approval, relating to the unending anguish unique to those privileged enough to own a Gangsta Truck at age ten.

            The café itself was an ordinary one, neither large nor small, with the dim lighting and soft wood paneling that emanated the pretensions of the caffeinated. Here the only avatar was whatever self proclaimed artist who stood preaching his pseudo intellectual jargon.  Indeed a motley crew populated this den, from a small and ultimately unassuming man, sporting a mustache that resembled a vole perched upon his upper lip, to a fat weaselish milksop of a man, observing the reading with what may have been either contempt or rapturous delight.

            “He sees you,” he muttered, as if it this obscure truth were written in stone. “He sees you.”

            To whomever this fool referred, I do not know.  At the table across from this disheveled peasant sat a skinny, dark-skinned man with large eyes and a pair of legs which might have broken in a strong gale. He smiled roguishly as he rubbed the thigh of an unusually tall and buxom woman with odd pigmentation, vaguely feline ears, and spotted hair.  She chose to ignore his advances, instead focusing her attention on the can of black cherry spritzer on the table before her.  At the same table sat a pale, well-muscled man with hair as angular as a child’s pinwheel, eyeing the little man suspiciously.

            The reading had officially ended, and I found myself grateful for this.

            “Barkeep!” I called vigorously to a petite woman who had the look of someone who wondered if the light in a refrigerator would go off when the door was shut. “Nachos for a weary traveler from distant Coorhagen--make them supreme, and very large.”

            The dull witted young lady pulled back for a moment and queried, “How much are those?”

            “I shall give you a silver piece,” I said, referring to a dime in my pocket. She looked impressed at this as she departed to prepare my night’s feast. She turned around briefly.

            “Wow, your skin is so gray! That is, like amazing!” I ignored her.  One such as herself did not know the price of such a dermatological condition, and would have been more fit to adorn the walls of a crypt, a sacrifice to gods more intelligent than she.

            The sound of a group of pre-sentient minstrels with barely a whit of coherent speech between the nine of them drifted over from a stage on which the lot of them stood.  A low bass rumble provided the background to this song, the only lyrics which I cold identify being a discussion of various methods of torture.  Kindred, this group and I.

            A being with a strong chin and broad shoulders,  but vaguely feminine features quickly moved to extinguish the music with a wave of her hand. The small mousish man rose to his feet indignantly, roughly as threatening as a wet piece of toilet tissue, ginger beer bottle in hand.

            “I was listening to that,” he intoned, lifting the bottle slightly toward the androgynous beast who stared back at him with a simian beadiness in its eyes, and replied with a voice far too female for its form.

            “I want to hear folk music,” it said.  The other denizens of the room paid this no heed, sticking to their pre-coital conversations and games of scruples.

            A pair of inebriated young louts shuffled past me,  one gorilla-like in form, and the other resembling a penguin. In one’s hands was a tray of succulent nachos. In his drunken stupor, he tripped, spilling the contents of the tray across the floor for all to see.

            “D’oh,” the man-ape said, rubbing his massive head in frustrated confusion.

            “I’m sorry,” apologized the penguin worriedly. His fretting did not last long, as he gestured toward a picture on the wall. “Gotta hit it!” he bellowed, striking the wall with the drunken speed and precision of a snake or crane. Truly, I speculated, this must be one of the “drunken masters” of whom I had heard.

            The drama between the androgyn and the small mustached man had not yet reached its zenith.

            “I liked that.” said the mousish man, eyes lighting with a dull inferno which could not have sparked a puddle of gasoline in a heatwave.  He paused for a moment and gestured with his bottle.  “They’re nuthin’ to fuck with.”

            “Ohmigod,” I heard behind me, “is he going to--like...”

            Her sentence was left incomplete, as the androgyn’s head met the green bottle, spraying ginger brew like a shower of clear carbonated blood, with much sugar.  The room fell into turmoil, instantly. The tall spotted woman took this opportunity to disarm the vulgar man who sought her amorous attentions.  As I saw the evil left hand fly past me, the little man’s last words were an emphatic “Fuck you, osshole!!!”

            The pinwheel-haired man grabbed from among a cache of many weapons a silver bottle and buried it in the head of the wiry construction who had earlier been spouting his supposed “poetry.”

            “Bu-ump,” he said as his tiny frame hit the ground, the very shockwave of his weight causing his every malnourished bone to shatter.

            Meanwhile, the music of the nine minstrels had recommenced beneath the watchful eye of the mouse-mustached man. Within that chest beatthe heart of a tiger, albeit a small, asthmatic and overweight one. He looked about at the carnage of the room, and said “It’s time to get some doughnuts,” in that oddly emphatic manner which seemed to mark him as a sheep among a pack of wolves.

            The being who had fallen victim to his mighty bottle of ginger brew had risen to clash with a being who resembled her greatly. Verily, the two matched like a summer sky.  The bestial ululations of their battle rose above the din of the assembled brawlers as in a clash of titans.  I called several times upon the serving wench to whom I had promised a shiny new dime, but she was, alas, rather too involved in her attempts to discern with which end of her own bottle to strike any opponent who might happen across her path to answer my requests.  I surveyed my surroundings, as changed from the insufferable tranquillity of the evening’s poetry reading as a winter sky is changed to spring.  A long-haired man knelt weeping like a child in the corner, a series of dark, circular bruises marking his tear-lined face.

            “Curse those evil octopi...” muttered a short, grim-faced, and bespectacled man who sat at the table adjacent the long-haired man.

            The chaos continued, and I felt the broken bottle I clenched in my gray-skinned hand begin to itch for the battle surrounding me.  A young man who might, in any less civilized clime, have passed for a court jester or a king’s fool, stood beating himself upside the head with two bottles of vanilla brew which, against the thick armored plate of his skull, refused to break.  His face was proud, and his arms moved fluidly as he bellowed, “Huh huh huh! I’m from the Burgh! Huh huh huh!”

            His pride, however, was short-lived, as an enigmatic man dressed, curiously, as a fisherman and brandishing a golden hook between the middle and index fingers of his right hand, crept up behind the ill-fated jester and split him from crotch to gizzard, letting the body fall onto the table before him.  Beside him stood a comically hunched and disfigured man who snapped at the air before him with a pair of scissors half his own length.

            “I know what you did last summer!” the fisherman bellowed triumphantly as he leapt into the fray, followed by his scissor-wielding companion.  (At this warcry, the androgyn glanced up from its battle with its doppelganger for a moment, and was struck down.)

            A group of pale onlookers, frightened into stunned, immobile silence by the fray, nervously chewed their fingernails and I chuckled at their fishlike complexions, wondering what the nameless fisherman would make of them.

            The man-ape was taken by a bottle to the head (albeit a very large bottle) and his companion expired not long after, as I heard him cry “VAE VICTUS!” as he tore the picture which had roused his ire from its perch.  I grimaced--he was surely unworthy of such a battle cry.  I deftly rose from my chair and waded through the bodies and brawlers, finally introducing his head to my bottle.  He crumpled with a penguin-like squawk of surprise.  I dodged nimbly as a starched-suited man sporting a mustache as false as a senile old man’s teeth stumbled past me, waving a pair of bottles as if they were axes.

            “The well-dressed fuckin’ man is gonna kick your fuckin’ cute little butt!” he threatened the nearest brawler.

            The melee was dying down, and I noticed a remarkably hideous young woman who had been reaching for a weapon all night, stunned by the realization that all bottles would break before her Gorgon-like countenance. “Wheel,” she said with anguish before being struck down by the pale-skinned, muscular man with the angular hair, who (I gathered from his very appearance) was quite vain, and was loathe to allow such a deformity to survive in this breathing world.

            The war continued for a time, its ferocity ever decreasing, until at last all but myself lay dead or dying, or had escaped with the bounty of nachos which had been left unattended by the barkeep, who had inexplicably shut her head into the drink cooler and frozen to death while trying to figure out how to open the door.  The fisherman and the scissor-man, ironically, had been overcome by the fish-skinned “pacifists,” who with their dying breaths had turned his own hook against him.  The shapely, spotted creature had been crushed to death like an insect beneath the two androgyns, who had apparently felled each other at the same instant and fallen with the weight of two ships against one another; I imagined her horror at seeing these two great towers of sculpted stone falling upon her.  Her companion, the pinwheel-haired man, bore no wound from knife, bottle, or gun, but had been stricken dead by the Medusa he had slain, his heart, I imagine, unable to bear the sight of her face even in death.  One by one the others fell: a young man boasting the power of his ultima technique, “Yogenrangigidan!”; a small man with extraordinarily large hands who sat at his table throughout the turmoil, furiously writing ballads for those who had died.  And several others deserving no special mention.

            At last I let the bottle fall from my hand as the last choking death rattle sounded, breaking the silence like a giant’s belch.  I was about to turn and move on when, like mighty Phunbaba in the epic of Gilgamesh, a lone figure rose from some nether pit, drawing himself to his full height--perhaps four feet--atop the center table.  He was clad from head to toe in a blue coat and tails, and on his head was perched a black top hat.  His beard was sculpted like rolls of clay, and his face was stern as he lifted a finger to address the dead.

            “YOU ALL LOSE.”

            “I would rather have seen a puh-lay,” I remarked.

            And I was thus cast out into the snow, and the open road.

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Chapter Seven: But You Must Call Me Papa!