Almost since National Geographic began exploring the nearly-fascinating limits of extreme dog behavior on their wildly popular program The Dog Whisperer, fans have exchanged rumors of the so-called ‘lost episodes’, juicier-than-average installments of the series that were simply too daring or transgressive for even the National Geographic Channel, home of Locked Up Abroad: The Lesbian Years.  Some even hinted that the episodes were not actually ‘lost’, but sealed in a titanium capsule and buried deep in the Marianas Trench by a Nat Geo-trained submersible team.  However, meticulous research of the channel’s archives, along with a daring late-night raid of Cesar Milan’s Pacific Palisades compound, has yielded rare glimpses into these heretofore unseen programs.  Read ‘em and salivate.

Episode 82-20A, Operation Desert Dog: In the hills of Waziristan, a group of resilient Afghan Hound extremists are terrorizing villages of peaceful poodles and Yorskhire terriers with a range of insidious Improvised Edible Doggy Treats (IEDTs).  Their ultimate goal: to impose Sharia discipline on progressive-thinking dachsunds attending the first female dog behavior school in the country.  Cesar Milan intervenes in the conflict using his unique knack for soothing the Afghans with gentle smooching sounds and promises of extensive infrastructure redevelopment funds.  His tense, cave-side meeting with dreaded warhound Masoum Ali-Abari (known as Wetnose Ali) is a remarkable demonstration of the strategic use of the “sit” command and rawhide toys during battlefield negotiations.

Favorite fan moment: Watch for the emotional scene when Cesar teaches an illiterate female dachshund pup to vote with her paw.

Epsiode 47-3BC, Burn, Doggy, Burn: Milly, a timid, but loveable, American Water Spaniel, is in recovery from a psychologically damaging ordeal involving her owner Trish Horgan, who has a persistent sleepwalking habit, a pyromaniac, ADD-afflicted son and a portly husband overly fond of late-night barbeques.  After eight years of life with the Horgans, Milly has developed a fear of fire, a marked aversion to zombie films and an unhealthy obsession with walking on hot charcoal while devouring pork loins.  Fighting fire with fire, Cesar teaches Milly how to subdue her fears by learning to manage flames: performing simple match tricks, balancing an illuminated tiki torch on her nose and setting controlled burns in the chaparral behind the Horgan property.

Favorite fan moment: An over-exuberant Milly swallows a flaming sword and then flourishes it, singeing Cesar’s eyebrows off.  Cesar’s priceless (and browless) facial reaction has become a YouTube classic!

Episode 9.8 – SKL, Dogs of Anarchy: Roddy, a maverick bulldog with a love for searing headbanger tunage, kept sneaking away from home to get violent, offensive tattoos whenever his owner, Mad Wire, passed out from overindulgence in Jim Beam.  It got to the point where Mad Wire felt awkward taking his tatted, canine buddy, adorned with naked, flying devil chicks and flaming pentagrams, for an innocent walk around the trailer park.  Cesar saves the day by employing his unique dog tattoo removal technique while immobilizing the fully-conscious Roddy in a specially-designed iron bulldog clamp.  But it’s not until Roddy gets counseling on how his flaunting of sexual imagery offends others mores that he sees the light and swears off graphic body ink for good.

Favorite fan moment: To win Roddy’s trust, Cesar takes the party animal to Navy Jack’s for a few rounds of stiff boilermakers, after which they bond by getting tattoos of the Crackerjack sailor emblazoned on their respective chests.

Episode KL – 99, Pups and Tacos: Ambitious Mexican restaurant owner Vicente Uribe sees nothing wrong with putting his family to work at his busy eatery.  But when Vicente has his two Russell Terriers, Pico and Gallo, and his Finnish Spitz, Ginger Snap, join the night shift, he runs afoul of commonly accepted dog labor practices.  While Pico and Gallo enjoy chopping up fresh vegetables for a range of tangy, authentic salsas, Vicente takes advantage of their enthusiasm by paying the hounds sub-par wages under the table and skimping on required bathroom breaks.  Meanwhile, on the prep line, Ginger Snap has developed a nasty allergy to cilantro.  Customers are also complaining that, when waiting tables, the terriers have been known to mix up their orders.  Cesar swings into action, giving Vicente a taste of his own medicine with a 12-hour, no-break shift at a local gypsum mine, and putting Ginger Snap on churro duty, far away from the offending cilantro leaves.  With the dogs back on a normal work shift, their service accuracy improves dramatically, and it’s time for a celebratory flan for everyone.

Favorite fan moment: Cesar energetically challenges the terriers to a good-natured competition to see who is fastest at making Vicente’s Macho Burrito from scratch, but Pico tragically gets his paw caught and mangled in the beef grinder.  After the amputation, Cesar and Pico share a memorably touching taco in the ICU.

myspace.com/briankhenry

June 3 – Ha!  Look at the foolish white man.  Putting his mangoes in the bottom of his shopping cart.  Every wise Latina knows that you put the mangoes at the top of the cart in the little tray, so that their vivid, juicy texture is not crushed out of them by the weight of your canned refried beans and laundry detergent.  If only he had consulted the collective knowledge of my Latin homelands!

June 5 – As I sip my café con leche (why do they call it a cappuccino in this Latin neighborhood?), I can’t help but notice that the white housewife at the next table is planning a trip to Cancun on her laptop.  She is a typical representative of the un-wise Anglo people.  If she had the wisdom of a true Latina, she would be planning to explore the beating heart of Mexico’s historic interior.  The mystical ruins of the Mayans, hidden in the jungle where the scent of banana wafts through the air.  Besides, the Mayan Holiday Inn has a great stay-3-nights-get-1-free offer this time of year, and they have a free breakfast buffet with huevos rancheros.  All you can eat.  I truly pity her.

June 8 – It’s sometimes a trial to be such a wise Latina!  Everything that passes before my eyes seems to scream cuan loco!  At the organic food store today, the African-American woman at the counter tried to sell me butternut squash enchiladas.  Who ever heard of putting butternut squash in an enchilada?  My abuela Conchita would be rolling over in her tumba.  The woman had the nerve to become quite irate when I told her that she was prostituting the Latino heritage.  She shouted in her loud, urban-contemporary voice that she was not a whore, and the tubby store manager was instantly called over.  Soon a whole crowd of ignorant gringos had gathered around, but they wouldn’t listen to my pleas for chorizo and barbacoa enchilada choices.  Tonight I will pray to the Holy Virgin for patience.

June 10 – My pale-faced, angry Irish neighbor with the torn T-shirt is on his political warpath again.  This time he is turning his ire on my bold Latino hermanos.  Some young boys in the neighborhood, trying to express their vivid Latino heritage in this homogenous, suffocating suburb, engaged in a proud display of Mexican culture in the park.  But my neighbor claims that their gunplay was ‘gang activity’ and a sign of ‘local drug cartels’.  If only he had the life experience of a wise Latina!  On the haciendas and pampas of the Old Country, a man who did not know how to use his gun was no better than an untutored girl, a sissy boy, fit only for making mole sauce at home, while his man-husband went off to kill a wolf for dinner.  Some traditions must pass across the borders and impregnate this New World, or all of us will suffer the vacuity of the flat and uncultured.  I must consider starting a blog.

June 13 – This may be my last entry in my beloved diary for some time.  Tomorrow I walk into the prison of the white man, but I enter with my head held high!  What was my offense?  I will tell you.  My lovely niece, Graciela, was married to my husband’s cousin Gregorio in a lovely ranch ceremony, complete with mariachis and a wedding keg!  But the policia were furious, simply because Graciela happens to be 13!  Not being Latina sages, they do not realize that in my country, if a woman is not married by the age of 14 she is regarded as a cascara, a shriveled mushroom drained of its ripe femininity.  Gregorio would not look at her twice if she were a wrinkled, mascara-blotched crone of 19!  And he has such a successful auto repair shop that Graciela is bound to benefit from his largesse.  I am unrepentant.  I suspect that I will find many other wise Latinas in this white man’s dungeon to which they are sending me!  We will emerge stronger than ever, and then the non-Latinas will regret their ignorance.  The day of reckoning cannot come too soon!

Nicolas Cage Projects Stalled in Development

Hollywood’s anti-visionaries are at it again, keeping some of the most enticing projects in town tied up in endless rewrites.  Thanks to these sluggards, all of us Cageheads out here in the Cage Fan Nation only saw one new Cage movie last year.  Any year without at least four new Nic pics is a year wasted.  So get your e-mails flooding into these stuffed shirts’ offices so we can get our Nic-o-time now!

FireHead – In this promising concept, an emotionally volatile, devil-may-care detective suddenly acquires the occult power of turning his entire head into a ball of seething flames.  Soon Buck Firehead (Nicolas Cage) is roaring across the country on his souped-up Segway, his head bursting into a weaponized inferno of death at the slightest provocation.  Cate Blanchett is under consideration to play Rixette, the sexy, gritty biker chick who knows FireHead’s darkest secret (that his head often turns into a ball of fire).

Man With The Future Brain – A paranormal action thriller, this gonzo concept tracks the tale of Professor Oscar T. ‘Nostro’ Damus (Nicolas Cage), whose migraine-inducing visions of future events disturb his lectures when they appear as extremely dramatic PowerPoint presentations on his classroom Smart Boards.  Damus, a volatile, emotionally high-strung, no-holds-barred, academic maverick (with wacky thrift store shoes), tries to keep his prophetic powers secret from wise and canny department chair Hirschorn Cleveland  (Morgan Freeman).  But when his entire class sees his vision of humanity being incinerated by a band of flaming Hellriders in an apocalyptic wave of fire outside the Reno city limits, Damus must spring into action.  Shia LeBeouf is on the short list of candidates to play Damus’ charming, but feckless, assistant, Ouija.

National Treasure III: Catacombs with Numerous Secret Passages – In this projected sequel, currently in its fourth rewrite, we become reacquainted with Benjamin Franklin Gates (Cage) lecturing on his best seller, “Building Your Own Ridiculously Elaborate Cavernous Labyrinth”, when he stumbles upon the fact that secret crypts located under St. Louis are carved with hieroglyphics created by Theodore Roosevelt in which the Rough Rider predicted a swarm of 21^st century plagues that would bring clouds of psychic, but still very hungry, locusts down on the Plains States in herds of destruction.  Gates is soon exploring the crypts with new romantic interest, entomologist Shecky Dyerson (Amy Poehler, in a rare dramatic turn) and exploding into volatile fits of disagreement with his father via cell phone (whose voice goes unheard due to Jon Voight’s unusual compensation requirements).

FireManiac – Volatile, drunken con-man Ty Kibler (Cage), haunted by his three failed marriages and the two Southeast Asian refugees he adopted then abandoned to fend for themselves on a desolate Caribbean Island, is transformed by an encounter in Las Vegas with Sinoa Lodilla (Halle Berry) a sleek, but volatile, temptress who’s a craps dealer by day and a Satanic biker/whorehouse madam by night.   When Kibler has inexplicable visions of himself making maniacal love to Sinoa in an Egyptian temple lit by sensual torches, he suddenly finds himself possessing the powers of FireManiac, a leather-jacket-wearing hellion who shoots fatal jets of fire from his index fingers at criminal wrongdoers.  Jack Black is attached to portray Sinoa’s charming but sleazy pimp, Sleazeboy.

Devil Dice, Asshole! – Washed-up professional poker player and volatile, emotionally distraught Las Vegas weatherman Troy Hellburner (Cage) gets a chance to redeem himself when Thai opium smuggler Sweet Lip (Penelope Cruz) hires him to waste her Chinese arch-enemies by strafing their fields with napalm from a motorized hang glider.  But when Troy’s glider is shot down by former Maoist general turned drug-dealer Ching Fick (Chow Yun-Fat), he becomes enmeshed in a high stakes game of tossing small white dice where Satan controls the odds and only Troy’s willingness to sell his soul to a cackling Chinese demon (Margaret Cho) can save Lip’s opium harvest and redeem two Chinese orphans who appear outside the hut sometime during the game.   

By midnight, I knew all the trees were evil.  They were darker than before.

Shadow owls flitted confidently in the blackness.

I peeked out from behind the blackest shed, waiting for the obese man from number 328 to appear.

The obese man had told me about the secrets of the trees.  He had sat there in his cinnamon shirt in the dilapidated room, the creaking sounds of his rocking chair making the only disturbance.

“The tree killed my brother,” the obese man revealed, his shirt wrinkled with the folds of his stomach, the strands of his remaining brown hair dripping past his ears and onto his shoulders.  “The tree with the walnuts.”

I had endured plenty of dreams about the trees.  The dreams usually came at night, after I had drunk too much anise liqueur and watched old Shelley Winters movies on the small black-and-white TV in my room.  I knew about the dreams from my dream journal, where I’d written entries like, ‘Last night, I had a dream that a tree split down the middle and gave birth to a giant cocoon-like armless ghost that proceeded to disturb the entire neighborhood.’  And, ‘Last night I had a dream that I was lost on a deserted World War II beach when a group of trees blocked my way.  They bushwhacked me and humiliated me in front of the troops, and then I disgorged several oysters.’

It was a relief to hear the obese man confirm my fears.  My sister, Angelique, had just laughed at me.  She had interrupted my sleep, poking me in the stomach with a splintery broom handle.  “You freak, shut up!  Lionel needs his sleep.”  Then she would laugh her bitter laugh. 

As I peeked out again, I could discern the obese man.  He was where he had promised, crouching behind the doghouse with a Black and Decker flashlight.

I scurried over to his side.

“Did you hear them?” were his first words to me.

“The trees?”

“They’re onto us.”  He had explained his theory earlier.  That the revolutionary war ground that we lived on was dense with the bodies of decayed and unidentified British soldiers.  Desperate to regain access to the atmosphere, the buried soldiers’ souls had forced their way into the begrudging trunks of the trees, only to find themselves unable to extricate their spirits from the bark.  In the ancient, weathered trees, the spirits whispered to one another of their undying hatred for Americans and their American ways.

“I heard them,” he continued.  “If we try anything they’ve planned to do something terrible with their roots.”

There was then a sharp breeze, and the branches above us creaked and whispered, casting aspersions on our national pastimes and typical choice of dessert items.

“Blast you, blast you all to hell!” I cried, running with ill-considered ardor at the nearest trunk and beating on it with my frustrated fists.

It was then that Lionel, Angelique’s boyfriend, came running out of the back porch, his pajamas aflutter, firing his rifle in the air.  “Goddamn it!  Goddamn it, Anson, get your butt back in bed so I can get me some sleep!”

It might have been the report of the rifle, or the increasing shrieks of the Brits in the wind, or the loud howls of the poorly fed Labrador from the doghouse, but it was then that the obese man clutched his chest, dropped the flashlight, and cold beads of sweat began to make a slow dance on his forehead.

Angelique attended the funeral, with its large coffin and treeless grounds, but I stayed home.  I had to watch the trees, exultant in their moment of triumph.

The former hosts of KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic are gathered for their weekly Sunday brunch at an upscale Westside bistro.  Schnabel, Douridas and Harcourt sit at a patio table, enjoying their meal.

                                                      SCHNABEL

                                       (putting down his champagne glass)

This is one of the best tomato-mushroom omelets

I’ve ever tasted.

                                                      HARCOURT

                                       (slumped in his seat, eyes closed in pain from

                                       a nasty gin martini hangover)

Eggh.

                                                      SCHNABEL

But I’m torn between whether this or the Black Forest

Omelet is my all-time favorite.

                                          DOURIDAS

                                       (leaning back and staring up at the awning)

The menu here is so eclectic.

Suddenly, BENTLEY runs in from the sidewalk.

                                                      BENTLEY

Guys, I’ve got a hot tip from underground progressive

house DJ Glass Electrode.  Crystal Beat Smack is being

held at gunpoint by a Guadalajaran drug trade posse.

Schnabel cocks his ear as a new song plays on the sound system.

                                                      SCHNABEL

What an intriguing fado.  The vocalist reminds me of

that great Guatemalan timbruja singer, Felicidad Conhuevos.

                                                      DOURIDAS

Raul Campos first turned me on to Crystal Beat Smack. 

Loose, organic beats pulsing under a haze of vocal distortion.

                                                      BENTLEY

Exactly.  If we don’t move now, we’re talking the loss

of a major electronica artist.  Guys, this is a job for the

Eclectics.

                                                      HARCOURT

                                       (mumbles)

McCartney cover.

Harcourt’s slumps forward, his head falling into his plate of beans-on-toast.

                                                      SCHNABEL

                        Guadalajara’s gorgeous this time of year.  I once spent a

                        memorable weekend there with a Latin jazz vibraphone player.

Douridas nonchalantly lifts Harcourt’s face out of the beans.

                              DOURIDAS
This café gets worse and worse.  This is three weeks in a

row some vagrant’s come in and crashed our brunch.

                              BENTLEY
Chris, that’s Harcourt.

                              DOURIDAS
Who?

                              BENTLEY
The Third Eclectic.

Douridas wipes some beans from Harcourt’s face with a napkin.

                                                      DOURIDAS

I didn’t sign off on him.

                                                      BENTLEY

You were in a haze.  Guys, we need to get moving.  Only

the Eclectics, with our combined knowledge of the musical

underground, can find Crystal Beat Smack before his

virtuoso knob-twirling fingers are sliced off by the

corredors.

                                                      SCHNABEL

If this mission involves violence, it’s entirely against my

ethical code.  Also if it involves staying up after eleven,

fast running, excessive perspiration, feedback, so-called

indie rock, unpleasant smells or anything that requires me

to raise my voice.

                                                      HARCOURT

               (wiping a bean from his nose)

Live, in-studio set.

                                                      BENTLEY

So this is going to be like all of our other missions?

I do all the work while you guys sit here and lounge.

Douridas perks up, ever so slightly, spotting a woman sitting down at a nearby table.

                                                      DOURIDAS

It’s Canadian neo-folk chanteuse Greta.  I’m going to ask

her to autograph my postcard.

Schnabel sips his champagne.

                                                      SCHNABEL

If only Wayne Shorter were here.

                                                      BENTLEY

I warn you.  The next time this happens, I’m ditching you

all and starting the Electronicas!

Bentley stalks off as Harcourt falls out of his seat.

“I’ve seen some small mummies in my day, but this Planet of the Miniature Mummies easily blows away all of my previous bandaged-corpse experiences,” intoned Anthropology Specialist Letitia Stone-Stone, looking over the sandy Ulgan Plain.

            Commander Hendricksen turned and narrowed his eyes, looking at Stone-Stone with the piercing, authoritative stare that had made him a favorite with the public speaking instructors at Space Academy.  “How small do you expect these mummies to be, Specialist?”

            Stone-Stone made a size indication with one hand, as though holding a small pebble between her thumb and forefinger.

            “That’s pretty small,” Hendricksen agreed.  He was trying to hide his immense bitterness, the nearly palpable rage boiling underneath his stolid, bronzed exterior, at being assigned to this childish mini-mummy mission, when his fellow commanders were taking on major, regular-sized assignments, like exploring the vast mammoth-inhabited ice-tundra of Velcron 6 or tracking down the insidiously obscure hideout of the marauding, bloodthirsty space pirate known only as Deathbeard.  “Tell me something, Specialist Stone-Stone.  Don’t you ever feel the urge to investigate a life-size mummy?”  Hendricksen couldn’t keep the sneer out of his voice as he gazed at the lithe and well-complected Stone-Stone and her thematically-appropriate mummy earrings.

            “These mummies are life-size, to themselves,” she responded with anthropological rectitude.  “Look!  A mummy has fallen into my trap!”

            Stone-Stone knelt down and extracted a test tube she had buried earlier that afternoon in the dry earth of the planet’s surface to form a miniature glass pit.  She held the tube up triumphantly to the eerie lime-green light of the Planet of the Miniature Mummies.  There could be no mistaking her success: at the bottom of the tube, bumping in repeated frustration against the glass walls in slow-brained bewilderment, was a mummy the size of a medium-length salted peanut.  It was covered in tiny, multi-layered mummy-like wrappings of faded beige gauze, with bandage bits hanging off of it in raggedy unravelings.  Peering through a miniscule space between two stripes of tiny head bandaging, Hendricksen could barely make out a pinprick pair of eerie, kumquat-orange mummy eyes. 

            “Ouch!” cried Hendricksen.

            Stone-Stone looked down at the Commander’s masculine, hairy and uncovered legs.  “I advised you not to wear shorts on The Planet of the Miniature Mummies,” she chided.  Hanging on to a lower portion of Hendricksen’s calf were two angry, remarkably tiny mummies, sinking their centuries-old teeth into his unprotected leg flesh. 

            “I thought you were just concerned about being attracted to my abundant leg hair!” snapped the resolutely masculine Henricksen, who always wore shorts on his missions, as long as the atmospheric make-up of the planet allowed it.

Hendricksen shook his leg vigorously, but the mummies, who were nothing if not resilient after centuries of patient survival in the arid, miniature deserts of the Planet of the Miniature Mummies, maintained their dental grip, sending waves of curse-inflicting pain up Hendricksen’s leg.

            “Where’s your mummy repellent?” barked Hendricksen.

            Stone-Stone rummaged through her Space Command-issued Space Purse.  “Repellent will do you no good now.  Mummies are impervious to chemically induced nausea when they’re avenging a captured fellow mummy.  I will have to vanquish them with a recitation of the Ancient Curse of Tumkin Rah.”

            “They’re impervious to repellent but they’ll listen to a creaky old curse?”

            “Hold still, damn it!  We don’t have much time.”  Stone-Stone was not exaggerating.  She looked behind Hendricksen, who was hopping in a painful, hairy-legged fit.  On the supermarket-sized desert plain, an entire brigade of miniature mummies was approaching them, with the characteristic extended-arm, somnolent-stepping march of mummies on the move.

            Stone-Stone took from her Space Purse a life-sized sandstone replica of the tablet of Tumkin Rah, which was actually extremely small since Rah was himself a long-dead ruler of tiny mummies, who was tall for his ethnic group but still extremely short from a human perspective, and began to intone the curse.  “Saw saw zembo.   Zembo kin saw saw.”

            “It’s not working!” screamed Hendricksen, who was increasingly surprised at the amount of pain that could be caused by mummies no larger than the fingernail on one of his pinkies.  He lifted his hands to the green sky in a spasm of desperation, his mouth open in a panoramic scream, and then fell to the ground.

            “Silly me,” said Stone-Stone.  “They can’t hear the nuances of the curse because I’m reading it in my normal, large voice.  I have to miniaturize my pronunciation.  It’s one of the first things we learned in my Small-Scaled Civilizations seminar.”  Stone-Stone began to carefully reshape her lips to create a tiny, miniature-curse-appropriate opening, but failed to notice, with her mind intent on bringing her mouth down to size, that four inconspicuous mummies had climbed up her jumpsuit and were clambering over her lips to assault her throat.

            “Saw saw zembo,” Stone-Stone said again, this time in a mouse-like, carefully shaped whisper.  But she was barely able to enunciate the first part of the curse when she went into a harsh choking fit.  The small squadron of mummies, small both in size and number, were choking the anthropologist from inside, blocking her esophagus.

            Hendricksen looked up in exquisite pain at the mottled face of the asphyxiated Stone-Stone.  He gaped in horror as she tottered, his final moments filled with a realization of her horrible fate.     

             The last thing she tasted was the musty, rust-tinged flavor of decaying mummy bandages as she gagged fruitlessly, her body tumbling to the dry and ruthless ground where lay next to the similarly lifeless body of her shorts-garbed colleague on the Planet of the Miniature Mummies.

The Drinking Channel Line-Up

7:00 am  

American Hangover  (Talk)

9:00 am

The Pint is Right (Game)

10:00 am

America’s Most Inebriated Home Videos (Reality)

Contains profanity

12:00 n

Liquid Lunch (Talk)

1:00 pm

Leaving Las Vegas II  (Movie)

In this sequel, some acquaintances of Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage, seen in flashback) get together over quite a few dirnks to decide if they can remember him.

3:00 pm

Celtic Woman Alcoholic  (Reality)

4:00 pm

Access Budweiser  (News)

5:00 pm

Pimp My Martini  (Reality)

Avocado martinis

6:00 pm 

Larry King Sloshed  (Talk)

7:00 pm

Drinking with the Stars (Reality)

Special Guest: Dame Judi Dench

8:00 pm

Last Drunk Standing  (Reality)

9:00 pm

The Scotch Whisperer  (Reality)

The Scotch Whisperer visits Sean Connery’s private distillery.

10:00 pm

Bouncer! (Drama)

Lou must use tact when evicting an inebriated ‘little person’.

11:00 pm

Two Guys and a Case (Sitcom)

In a stupor, Jeff cooks Martin’s butterfly collection.

11:30 pm

Still Drunk  (Sitcom)

Driving home from The Ugly Mug, Uncle Phil runs over a sheep.

12:00 m

Inside the Bartender’s Studio  (Talk)

1:30

Last Call Across America (Reality)

When Allensford knocked on Thankless Joe’s door, he had high expectations.  Allensford had woman trouble and Thankless Joe was known far and wide for his songs about gritty love affairs and for the numerous encounters with notorious women he’d met on his hard-partying tours.  Women who’d been seduced by his gravelly blues voice, his surly, large-bodied sexuality and his frank, deep, heavy-lidded gaze.  Surely, Thankless Joe would be a fount of valuable advice on the tribulations of love.

            Allensford knocked again on Joe’s door when the first knock went unanswered.  Then he knocked yet again.

            After several more tries, and a near bite on the shin from Joe’s gray, flea-bitten mongrel hound, he walked around to the backyard and peeked through the kitchen window.  Through the dirt-smeared pane of glass, he saw Thankless Joe’s large, bald head lying on the kitchen table, his hands splayed out in front of him, one large, hairy thumb twitching aimlessly.

            Clearly, Thankless had spent a long night rocking some rough-hewn, seedy downtown juke joint and was exhausted.  It was only two in the afternoon and Thankless was nothing if not a night owl. 

Allensford tried the kitchen door and finding it unlocked, he went in and grabbed a soiled dishtowel from the counter.  Soaking it in cold water, he slapped it over Joe’s sweating head, taking care to first remove the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels from the table so Joe wouldn’t knock it over.

            Thankless Joe shuddered into motion, his body jittering.  The large expanse of flesh that made up his stomach and arm fat jiggled and fluctuated.  He threw the wet towel off his head with a surprisingly vigorous motion and shuffled back in his rickety chair, the kitchen floor creaking.  Joe looked around wildly, his small black eyes blinking in the glaring afternoon kitchen light.

            “What the fuck?   Who the fuck. . . ?” Joe cried.  His voice was hoarse and harsh, ragged from a long night of screaming.

            Allensford was used to Joe taking time to gain a full awareness of his surroundings.  There were days when he visited and Joe was not completely coherent until shortly before Allensford took off at sunset for his night job at the Four Lips Motel.  “It’s Allensford, Joe.   Had a long night?”

            “Jesus Christ, you freaking fuck.  What are you doing in my house?”

            Allensford laughed an indulgent laugh.   Joe was nothing if not authentic, a truly gritty, down-home, plain-spoken, roots-music man like they didn’t make anymore.  “Remember how you told me that if I ever needed some advice, no matter when, no matter what the problem, I should come by?”

            “I say a lot of stupid shit.”  Joe looked around with narrowed eyes.  “Where’s my whiskey?”

            “Well, I’m having woman trouble.”  Allensford gave a self-conscious rueful laugh.   “And if there’s one man I know who knows a lot about a lotta women, it’s you, Joe.”

            “I gotta take a piss.” Thankless Joe stood up and stumbled toward the bathroom.  He tripped over an empty bottle of schnapps and banged his head on the doorframe.  “Goddamn!”

 As the sounds of Joe using the bathroom filled the kitchen, Allensford outlined his romantic situation. 

            “See, I’ve been dating this woman, Alicia.  You’d love her, Joe.  She’s smart, wears these totally cool glasses, makes an awesome patty melt.  Just a real classy, all-around authentic girl.  Totally authentic.  From Idaho.  The problem is, I can’t stand her taste in music.”

            Allensford started to take a seat at the kitchen table, then noticed the unidentifiable green stains on the chair and thought better of it.

            “You know me, Joe.  I’m a roots music man.  It’s gotta be real, or I won’t put it on my stereo.  But this Alicia, she listens to nothing but electronica!”

            Joe emerged from the bathroom and took off his black, tattered T-shirt.  “Where’s the refrigerator?”

            “Right here, Joe.  By the oven.”

            “Goddamn.  Over there.  Hand me a beer.”

            Allensford grabbed a can of beer and handed it to Thankless.  He took a good look at Joe’s face.  As expressionless as it was, as unfocused as his eyes were, as soggy and shapeless as his lips looked, Allensford knew that in that unique head little shards of lyrical greatness were stewing.  Bits and pieces of undeniably powerful, primitive roots-music melody and shards of poetic, hard-luck phrasing were cooking that would soon bubble up from Joe’s mouth, spew out and coagulate like chili in a bowl into a new Thankless Joe song.

            Thankless took a gulp of beer and stared at Allensford.  “Who let you in?”

            Allensford shook his head in amazement.  “When you’re brewing up a new song, nothing distracts you!  Amazing.  But seriously, Thankless, what should I do about this girl?  This electronica chick.”

            “You ever see my chuggy dance?” asked Thankless, his mouth gaping.

            “Only a thousand times.”  Allensford grinned at the memories.

            Thankless did it again.  He stepped forward, shook his belly, stepped back, shook his belly again, and then repeated the whole process, doing two steps forward and back, then three steps, then four.  During the whole dance, he kept up a blubbering beat with his lips and slapped his hands on his bare belly.

            Allensford played along, chanting ‘chuggy, chuggy, chuggy’, just like the grizzled fans always did at Thankless Joe’s gigs.

            Thankless shook and jiggled for a good three minutes, then took another gulp of beer.

            “Is that your answer, Thankless?”

            Joe narrowed his eyes.  “You been at my shows.  You know what it’s all about.”

            “I do.  I do know what it’s all about.  It’s all about the roots music, that’s what it’s all about.”  Allensford shook his head.  How could he have been so shallow?  “I see what you’re telling me.  In your poetic, musical way, you’re telling me it’ll never work out with me and Alicia.  How could I ever trust a girl who listens to electronica?”

            For an answer, Joe slapped his belly again and fixed Allensford with a bleary look. 

            “It’s like you say in that song, Joe.  ‘She left me like the squaw left the papoose.  She left me and she went on the loose’.”

            Joe bit his lip.  “Jesus, some of ‘em are just that tawdry.”  He walked into the living room, slumped onto the dusty brown sofa, tossed some dirty undies on the floor and grabbed the TV remote.

            “I’m glad I came by.  Joe, thanks so much for listening.  Really, thanks.”

            “Don’t need to thank me.  That’s why they call me Thankless Joe.”

            “So right,” said Allensford.  A truer statement, he thought, had never been made. 
           “Why don’t this remote work?”