Excerpt from "The Frycook's Revenge"
Dedicated to Appomattox, The “N” word capital of the world.
And to all the Appomattoxins who have Made the town what it is today.
I have traveled the planet.
In many ways, your town was the most memorable.
THE FRYCOOK’S REVENGE: A PREAMBLE
“Turn it into art. Turn your anger into art.”
-The Fattest Crimefighter in the World.
He had been given so much advice, since the tsunami of tragedies had washed over him … what had it been, five years ago, since it all started, with the feelings of pain and loss being quite cruelly relentless ... but none of the advice seemed to work. Except one piece of advice. In that, he saw a glimmer of hope ...
It was advice that he had initially given to himself, but he did not trust it coming from himself. Probably because he felt that in some way, he was personally responsible for all of the disasters which had befallen him, and which had befallen so many other souls within his realm of influence. And hence, he had lost all credibility with himself.
But, as he cocked his overly large ears towards the universe, like some petite pair of satellite dishes listening for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence, he heard others giving him the same advice. And with time, the incidents of hearing this same piece of advice accumulated, until the angry little man felt that this was what he was supposed to do, how he was supposed to handle his anger.
He had heard the man who played Tristram Shandy echo his own secret feelings: which would you rather have? A life of happiness, or a successful career? The actor, who incidentally was also the brand new father of a bouncing baby boy, answered with neither pause nor flinch: “a successful career!” Because if you’re happy, after you die, nobody really knows you were happy. So what? But if you had a successful career, you leave as a legacy, after your demise, this stack of really great DVDs.
The Angriest Man in the World concurred.
And so he sat down to write a story. A story about a man much like himself. A story about a very humble, very unimportant, very angry little man.
Here ends the Preamble. Now begins the story.
If you lived in the tiny town of Weighstation, you knew from birth that you were never going to achieve fame or fortune. It was just something you sort of accepted. The highest paid person in the tiny town of 1707 people was Ernie of Ernie’s Taxidermy; Lavinia Stout’s cousin in Tiddlyville did Ernie’s taxes, and it quickly spread through the raisin vine that one year Ernie made a whopping $28,184 dollars. Opportunity didn’t spring up much in Weighstation, so if you were born there, and didn’t have the courage to leave (which nobody did), you just resigned yourself to genteel poverty. But secretly, there were those in Weighstation who craved more.
Billy Bob Thornbird was one of them. And when the internet came to town, Billy Bob saw his chance.
Billy Bob cherished his big old ten-year-old computer that he had gotten at the Rustburg Volunteer Fireman’s rummage sale, and he had that behemoth hooked right into to the World Wide Web, just as soon as that tower went up on the edge of town. And after a couple of months of surfing the internet late into the night, after his nine to five job at the fast food emporium “Franks for the Memories” (a Germanesque, sausage serving, evil national chain which Billy Bob hated, but which had a fabulous dental plan), anyway, after coming home from that crappy job and logging on, it was only a matter of a couple of weeks before Billy Bob realized that the Internet was a Beast. And a hungry Beast it was.
The Beast, it seemed, was always looking to be fed. Content, content, content.
(As Billy Bob was rewriting the first draft of his novelette, he realized that those three words, thumping like a tribal drum, could be read as the word “conTENT,” as in “I am at peace.” But what Billy Bob was really trying to get at was the Web’s constant need for fresh flies caught in its ethereal strands, so he backtracked and reformatted it to read CONtent, CONtent, CONtent.)
It was fascinating, how it worked, this new-fangled Internet thing. Any weird, whacky, whimsical incident or action, any freaky piece of news from any obscure corner of the world, and it showed up there on the Internet. And there never seemed to be enough of it.
That was it! That was how Billy Bob would pull it off! That was how he would get famous. He would stage some piece of bizarre human theatre. All he had to do was pull off some outrageous stunt, and it would be on the Internet in no time. Millions of people, from Boise to Beijing, would log on and see the story, as they scrolled through the chronicles of human shenanigans that had transpired in the last 24 viral hours. And with that fledgling fame, pondered Billy Bob, who knew to what heights he might climb?
His head was reeling with the possibilities…
***
Billy Bob had observed that a disproportionate number of stories on the internet dealt with people being embarrassed. This seemed to amuse and entertain the world writ large, and it had about it, Billy Bob thought, a certain “gladiatorial” sensibility, as did most reality shows. It was as though we couldn’t be thoroughly entertained anymore, unless it involved watching perfect strangers, perfectly innocent souls, being humiliated in front of a world wide audience.
Bathrooms and their scatological possibilities were also featured as log-on type Internet stories from time to time. It was as though we ought never to forgot those baser elements that keep us closer to being beasts than angels.
Billy Bob was lying awake one night, falling asleep to Road Runner cartoons and nursing the last of his Yoohoo, when the idea occurred to him: he would pull off an amazing bathroom prank. (!) And it would serve double doody, pun intended, he chuckled softly to himself, and that was the last thought he had, as he rolled gently, but not gently enough, onto the plate of Mallomars that were lying beside him on the bed … .
The gag was this: when a lady walked into the restroom at the back of Franks for the Memories, she would go into the stall, the middle stall, which was apparently the only unoccupied stall, and prepare to do her business. Then, Billy Bob had it rigged so that when the victim placed her hiney down on the toilet seat, this pressure on the seat caused another light to come on in the bathroom. (This light worked on the same principle as The Clapper, an invention which Billy Bob had invented at the same time as the other person who invented it and got it onto infomercials, but Billy Bob hadn’t the money for R&D, so his inventor doppelganger had beaten him to the punch and gotten obscenely rich, an injustice which goaded Billy Bob on an almost daily basis.)
Anyway, this special light would come on directly overhead the stalls, and reveal what was really going on: where formerly there had been the traditional walls separating the bathroom stalls, Billy Bob, in the plan, would have snuck in during the night and replaced the stall walls with large, heavy duty One-Way-See-Through glass, so that if you were the poor victim in the middle stall, it looked like the person in the stall next to you could see everything you were doing, and vice versa, when in reality, it was far more innocent than that—the person in the middle stall could see into the stalls on either side, through the glass, but on the other side, in the outside adjoining stalls, it was just mirrors.
But the purpose was clear and the effect worked: the joke was that the person in the middle stall, being able to see straight through to the stall next to her, naturally assumed that the person in the stall next to her could do the same, seeing everything that the poor lady in the middle stall was doing. And therein lay part of the Great Hoax. The truth was that there was no person in the stall next to her, no, nor no chance of one ambling in, for Billy Bob had placed in one of the stalls a giant Santa sitting on the crapper, and in the other, a big elf. Billy Bob had then locked each stall from the inside, and slid out underneath the locked stall door, so that the only one of the three stalls anybody could enter was the middle one.
One side note that I should mention was that the elf (which was in one of the two stalls flanking
the victim’s stall) was a really creepy creation. It was smaller than the Santa, about half Kringle’s size. What it really was was a clown doll dressed up in red and green to look like a Christmas elf, and it had been fashioned by the town’s lone hippie woman, who ran a thriving website called ihateclowns.org. She had made a small fortune copyrighting and selling chatchkees and t-shirts bearing the saying, “Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me.”
The point is, it was the most terrifying Christmas elf you could envision, even in your darkest dreams. Imagine squatting down to pinch a loaf, then glancing to one side and seeing that pressed up against the stall-wall glass staring at you.
And as for the Santa, he was sort of leering too. He looked just like Santa in his costume and everything, but his expression reminded you of a pedophile or something akin to that. He held a big festive sign printed in big red and green letters, with little musical notes implying song lyrics, that read “He sees you while you’re Sh—tting.”
Oh, and in case your mind hasn’t been racing ahead on this one, the victim’s reaction to the whole thing was videotaped, of course, and then fed to a video monitor that folks could watch out in the real world beyond the bathroom. As in, Billy fed it into his computer, then out into the universe. And just in case you are inclined to think that Billy was stupid or cruel, which he was neither, you should know that that camera was positioned such that the only thing it captured was the victim’s expression, not the entire indiscreet part of the practical joke.
Manners, my friend. Manners. And an element of personal consideration.
The entire project had taken Billy one long night. He had worked through the wee hours in the darkened Franks for the Memories fast food restaurant, playing Christmas carols on his portable radio and fantasizing about how this would be such an outrageous story that the Internet would gobble it up.
Then, with his name planted firmly out there on the World Wide Web, Billy could pursue his secret passion: to create a company whose job was to conceive and execute massive practical jokes. Practical jokes for all occasions: birthday parties, graduation, bon voyage, weddings, divorces, retirement, Tisha B’Av, or whatever.
Or just as a whimsical way to show somebody that you loved them. It was surefire. It was foolproof. It was his key to fame and fortune.
And what night of the year do you think he pulled it off? Christmas Eve. He pulled it off on Christmas Eve, when the World Wide Web is frantically looking for Yuletide stories, but stories with a twist. Timing is everything. This is pure genius, Billy Bob thought to himself, as he prepared for the feed to go viral.
***
Billy Bob got fired.
***
Oh, he expected that—sort of. But even the getting fired part he hadn’t thought through ... not as thoroughly as we might have liked, if we are framing him as our hero, which I am. I think Billy Bob thought that not only would this turn out great for him, in terms of the fame and fortune thing, but I think he even thought that he might NOT get fired, the general manager of Franks for the Memories being the same man who had coached Billy Bob for so many years on the Weighstation Wildcats Tetherball Team.
But sports is a feckless mistress, these days, don’cha know, and the old tetherball ties were not what Billy Bob might have hoped. He was fired summarily, first thing Christmas morning.
(Franks for the Memories was open on Christmas Day, catering to all those jolly holiday travelers who were mushing across the snowy state early on the 25th to join with families later on that sacred day. Also for Jews and Muslims. Not that a good Jew would dine at Franks. Pork and all. But it was known to happen.)
Anyway, back to our prank: as soon as the first poor unsuspecting victim walked into the ladies’ room, into the middle stall, (the other stalls being locked), and started in with her business, the lights came on, she saw Sick Santa and Evil Elf, and she ran out of the restroom screaming.
But here was the puzzler: the Internet showed no interest. Even when Billy Bob communicated with all the online article writers, as he had carefully planned, even when Billy Bob broadcast the lady’s reaction on his own website, even when Billy Bob was on the evening news, the shame of little Weighstation, nobody was interested in making Billy Bob famous.
Any fledgling shrink, or anyone at all for that matter, who fancied himself an armchair psychiatrist, could have told you that this was a fairly angry stunt, to begin with—hostile and stalkerish, and a bit misogynistic too—but we haven’t even gotten to The Frycook’s Revenge yet.
* * *
So here was Billy Bob the Frycook’s pathetic little Christmas: he sat alone, all alone, in his efficiency apartment.
Even this apartment building in which Billy Bob lived was considered the pathetic scourge of the town. And the town itself is pathetic, so that’s saying a lot. It was built by a greedy developer, and the apartment building sat square in the center of some centuries old brick homes and shops in the very old town of Weighstation—a town formerly known as Railroad, (state withheld), for the important role it played in the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. But the town finally gave up and changed the name of the town, because tourists would flock to the town, and railroad enthusiasts would come from all over, looking for the railroad tracks and mighty locomotives and scenic train rides and quaint dining cars turned to local cafes, but there was none of that. Instead just only some brown signs here and there talking about slaves making their way to freedom. Tourists left, disappointed, and some wrote disparaging things about the town on Internet tourist review sites. So the town decided to change its name. To evoke its more practical and immediate purpose. So “Weighstation” it was.
Anyway, the Frycook sat in his efficiency apartment in the ugly new apartment building on the edge of town. It had been the Frycook’s plan to work on Christmas Day, because for some reason, Franks for the Memories had irreverently decided to be open on Christmas Day, and its two dozen employees, (all of whom had a much more rich and robust life than the Frycook), were bitching and moaning about having to work on this sacred holiday. So Billy Bob volunteered. He thought he was quite the Pater Familias for being so magnanimous.
He was even going to branch out and assume duties that were not usually part of the Frycook’s lexicon of talents and responsibilities: he would cook weenies, concoct huge batches of the legendary chili, even take helm at the dessert bar and whip up Never On A Sundaes for those with bottomless appetites.
But it had not worked out that way; nothing had worked out the way he planned. Here it was Christmas Day, and he was all by himself in the shithole that he called home.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” was on. Frycook watched in bittery nostalgia as he opened a new can of Chock Full o’ Nuts and made himself one big lonely pot of java for the day. He studied the black and white images on the screen, thought how very untrue everything about this movie was. Where on earth was there evidence that life was so wonderful? And then he wondered if you could sue Hollywood for spouting lies all the time, fantasy being as powerful a drug as LSD.
Then he opened his presents: a Christmas sweater from his mom, which showed a little dog trotting away from a snowman, with a very satisfied expression on its face. The snowman looked distinctly disgruntled, because it had a bright yellow pee stain right at the base of its large snowball torso.
The back of the sweater was the payoff, though. Now it was the little dog who looked disgruntled; a snowball had been lobbed right at its head, and the snowman was looking upward, whistling innocently, as if to deny any blame for having committed the assault.
The Frycook put the sweater on. It did not cheer him up as much as you might think.
His dad had mailed him a gift certificate for the Bacon of the Month Club. The Frycook smiled and put it aside, anticipating the happiness that it would bring him. But he didn’t have any actual bacon yet, so that joy didn’t last as long as you might think, either.
He got three other presents.
The first was from his childhood sweetheart, who was married now and had several children, and who, though blissfully happy in her new life without Billy Bob, was nonetheless plagued by guilt for dating him all through high school, but then finally realizing he was a loser, scraping him off the shoe of her life like a blob of tromped Tewksberry gum.
By way of making it up to him, (for she sensed that Billy Bob would never get another girlfriend, not for free at least), she always remembered him on his birthday and Christmas. She always got the date of his birthday incorrect, Billy Bob always noted with a bittersweet pang, but she never got the date wrong about Christmas. He had to give her that.
The gift from her was the latest variation on “The Chia Pet.” The Frycook was always secretly impressed with the marketing department over at Chia, because it was an old chestnut of a gift idea, but danged if every year they didn’t trot out some new variation on it, sucking the kiddie market and the on-a-tight-budget-shopping-at-the-last-minute-Christmas-Eve-in-the-Rexall-Drug-Store crowd.
Billy Bob had once fancied that he would apply for and get a job at Chia Pet R&D. He had lots of ideas. An extra-terrestrial line: Martian Chia. It would feature the large head and huge almond eyes of the Spielberg Universe, but with green hair, capitalizing on the little green men image. And he would spin out an R&B afro-style line, for those with smoky musical proclivities: Little Richard Chia. Jimmy Hendrix Chia. Earth Wind and Fire Chia. Leo Sayer Chia.
Billy Bob had even researched other kinds of seeds, more free flowing with longer stems, that could be used for Big Hair Band Chia sets. Gun’s ‘n Roses Chia. Def Leopard Chia. Black Sabbath Chia. Spinal Tap Chia. And best part of all, these would be sold as four-sets, instead of single Chia skulls. More fun for the consumer. More money for Chia. Genius! Damn, why hadn’t the folks at Chia Pet called him back yet?
Sadly, almost tragically, like so many of Billy Bob Thornbird’s ideas, nothing had come of it.
So it was with a heavy heart that Billy Bob examined this gift from his lost love, a new variation on the Chia Pet. It was, he had to admit, kind of brilliant. This was the PRESS AND PLAY “15 MINUTES OF FAME CHIA”, where YOU were the Chia. You just mixed up this mélange that came as a dry package of powder; it was a flour and cornstarch and Quikrete based concoction that you mixed with water to make a paste. Then you jammed your face into it for fifteen minutes and let it harden.
This was the Deluxe! Chia Kit (his Lost Love was never one to skimp), and this kit included a multi-colored bendy straw, like the drink straws that Franks for the Memories gave with kiddie meals. But this was no ordinary straw, this was a breathing straw, which instructions indicated were to be used when you had your face in the mélange, so that you didn’t suffocate to death while creating your 15 Minutes of Fame Personalized Chia. That would make it a kind of death mask, thought the Frycook, and a shudder ran down his spine, as this notion caused him to ponder his own mortality, if only for a fleeting moment.
This whole thing, with the straw and whatnot, made Billy Bob wonder if the boys in Legal over there at the Chia Corporation hadn’t had some kind of headaches approving the new product. This Chia variation seemed like it would prove particularly dangerous for children, who were probably the main consumers of Chia—not literally, of course, although as a boy, Billy remembered his mother taking the sprouted greens and using them in assorted health salads, when she was going through her organic health food phase-craze. Then again, in regards to the suffocation dangers, the Chia was made in China, like everything else was these days, dammit to hell, and everybody knew how little regard the Chinese placed on life. They ate dogs, for pete’s sake.
The best part of the Chia Deluxe Kit was the little timer, so you could know how long your face had been in the mélange. The great thing about the timer was that you could use it long after the Chia greens were wilted and dead, and that was exactly what the Frycook planned to do: he could use it for soft boiling eggs, or doing his Kundalini Yoga routine in the mornings (during which he always lost track of time, lost as he was in reveries of the Great Oneness), or talking to his mother long distance on the telephone. (They both had lousy bundled phone plans which they could not figure out, neither of them, so timing their calls to exactly ten minutes seemed to be the only way to not get a whopping cell phone bill at the end of each month.)
So now you know about the 15 Minutes of Fame Chia.
This would have been a great present if the Frycook had
A.) A green thumb.
B.) Any more room for bric-a-brac.
Or
C.) Even the slightest desire to jam his face into a pile of white, sticky mélange for 15 minutes.
But since the Frycook had none of these things, the gift secretly did not go over as well as the giver might have hoped.
The next present under his little tree was from the Waste Not Want Not Septic Tank Company, which had employed him for several years after high school. Like Billy’s high school sweetheart, guilt was the motivator here, as the owner of the Waste Not Want Not Septic Tank Company had been forced to fire Billy Bob when a septic sweep on a pig farm went horrible awry. (The details of the tragedy are for another time and place; suffice it to say that the local butcher was handing out bargain bacon for weeks.)
Here ends the Sneak Preview for “The Frycook’s Revenge”
And to all the Appomattoxins who have Made the town what it is today.
I have traveled the planet.
In many ways, your town was the most memorable.
THE FRYCOOK’S REVENGE: A PREAMBLE
“Turn it into art. Turn your anger into art.”
-The Fattest Crimefighter in the World.
He had been given so much advice, since the tsunami of tragedies had washed over him … what had it been, five years ago, since it all started, with the feelings of pain and loss being quite cruelly relentless ... but none of the advice seemed to work. Except one piece of advice. In that, he saw a glimmer of hope ...
It was advice that he had initially given to himself, but he did not trust it coming from himself. Probably because he felt that in some way, he was personally responsible for all of the disasters which had befallen him, and which had befallen so many other souls within his realm of influence. And hence, he had lost all credibility with himself.
But, as he cocked his overly large ears towards the universe, like some petite pair of satellite dishes listening for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence, he heard others giving him the same advice. And with time, the incidents of hearing this same piece of advice accumulated, until the angry little man felt that this was what he was supposed to do, how he was supposed to handle his anger.
He had heard the man who played Tristram Shandy echo his own secret feelings: which would you rather have? A life of happiness, or a successful career? The actor, who incidentally was also the brand new father of a bouncing baby boy, answered with neither pause nor flinch: “a successful career!” Because if you’re happy, after you die, nobody really knows you were happy. So what? But if you had a successful career, you leave as a legacy, after your demise, this stack of really great DVDs.
The Angriest Man in the World concurred.
And so he sat down to write a story. A story about a man much like himself. A story about a very humble, very unimportant, very angry little man.
Here ends the Preamble. Now begins the story.
If you lived in the tiny town of Weighstation, you knew from birth that you were never going to achieve fame or fortune. It was just something you sort of accepted. The highest paid person in the tiny town of 1707 people was Ernie of Ernie’s Taxidermy; Lavinia Stout’s cousin in Tiddlyville did Ernie’s taxes, and it quickly spread through the raisin vine that one year Ernie made a whopping $28,184 dollars. Opportunity didn’t spring up much in Weighstation, so if you were born there, and didn’t have the courage to leave (which nobody did), you just resigned yourself to genteel poverty. But secretly, there were those in Weighstation who craved more.
Billy Bob Thornbird was one of them. And when the internet came to town, Billy Bob saw his chance.
Billy Bob cherished his big old ten-year-old computer that he had gotten at the Rustburg Volunteer Fireman’s rummage sale, and he had that behemoth hooked right into to the World Wide Web, just as soon as that tower went up on the edge of town. And after a couple of months of surfing the internet late into the night, after his nine to five job at the fast food emporium “Franks for the Memories” (a Germanesque, sausage serving, evil national chain which Billy Bob hated, but which had a fabulous dental plan), anyway, after coming home from that crappy job and logging on, it was only a matter of a couple of weeks before Billy Bob realized that the Internet was a Beast. And a hungry Beast it was.
The Beast, it seemed, was always looking to be fed. Content, content, content.
(As Billy Bob was rewriting the first draft of his novelette, he realized that those three words, thumping like a tribal drum, could be read as the word “conTENT,” as in “I am at peace.” But what Billy Bob was really trying to get at was the Web’s constant need for fresh flies caught in its ethereal strands, so he backtracked and reformatted it to read CONtent, CONtent, CONtent.)
It was fascinating, how it worked, this new-fangled Internet thing. Any weird, whacky, whimsical incident or action, any freaky piece of news from any obscure corner of the world, and it showed up there on the Internet. And there never seemed to be enough of it.
That was it! That was how Billy Bob would pull it off! That was how he would get famous. He would stage some piece of bizarre human theatre. All he had to do was pull off some outrageous stunt, and it would be on the Internet in no time. Millions of people, from Boise to Beijing, would log on and see the story, as they scrolled through the chronicles of human shenanigans that had transpired in the last 24 viral hours. And with that fledgling fame, pondered Billy Bob, who knew to what heights he might climb?
His head was reeling with the possibilities…
***
Billy Bob had observed that a disproportionate number of stories on the internet dealt with people being embarrassed. This seemed to amuse and entertain the world writ large, and it had about it, Billy Bob thought, a certain “gladiatorial” sensibility, as did most reality shows. It was as though we couldn’t be thoroughly entertained anymore, unless it involved watching perfect strangers, perfectly innocent souls, being humiliated in front of a world wide audience.
Bathrooms and their scatological possibilities were also featured as log-on type Internet stories from time to time. It was as though we ought never to forgot those baser elements that keep us closer to being beasts than angels.
Billy Bob was lying awake one night, falling asleep to Road Runner cartoons and nursing the last of his Yoohoo, when the idea occurred to him: he would pull off an amazing bathroom prank. (!) And it would serve double doody, pun intended, he chuckled softly to himself, and that was the last thought he had, as he rolled gently, but not gently enough, onto the plate of Mallomars that were lying beside him on the bed … .
The gag was this: when a lady walked into the restroom at the back of Franks for the Memories, she would go into the stall, the middle stall, which was apparently the only unoccupied stall, and prepare to do her business. Then, Billy Bob had it rigged so that when the victim placed her hiney down on the toilet seat, this pressure on the seat caused another light to come on in the bathroom. (This light worked on the same principle as The Clapper, an invention which Billy Bob had invented at the same time as the other person who invented it and got it onto infomercials, but Billy Bob hadn’t the money for R&D, so his inventor doppelganger had beaten him to the punch and gotten obscenely rich, an injustice which goaded Billy Bob on an almost daily basis.)
Anyway, this special light would come on directly overhead the stalls, and reveal what was really going on: where formerly there had been the traditional walls separating the bathroom stalls, Billy Bob, in the plan, would have snuck in during the night and replaced the stall walls with large, heavy duty One-Way-See-Through glass, so that if you were the poor victim in the middle stall, it looked like the person in the stall next to you could see everything you were doing, and vice versa, when in reality, it was far more innocent than that—the person in the middle stall could see into the stalls on either side, through the glass, but on the other side, in the outside adjoining stalls, it was just mirrors.
But the purpose was clear and the effect worked: the joke was that the person in the middle stall, being able to see straight through to the stall next to her, naturally assumed that the person in the stall next to her could do the same, seeing everything that the poor lady in the middle stall was doing. And therein lay part of the Great Hoax. The truth was that there was no person in the stall next to her, no, nor no chance of one ambling in, for Billy Bob had placed in one of the stalls a giant Santa sitting on the crapper, and in the other, a big elf. Billy Bob had then locked each stall from the inside, and slid out underneath the locked stall door, so that the only one of the three stalls anybody could enter was the middle one.
One side note that I should mention was that the elf (which was in one of the two stalls flanking
the victim’s stall) was a really creepy creation. It was smaller than the Santa, about half Kringle’s size. What it really was was a clown doll dressed up in red and green to look like a Christmas elf, and it had been fashioned by the town’s lone hippie woman, who ran a thriving website called ihateclowns.org. She had made a small fortune copyrighting and selling chatchkees and t-shirts bearing the saying, “Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me.”
The point is, it was the most terrifying Christmas elf you could envision, even in your darkest dreams. Imagine squatting down to pinch a loaf, then glancing to one side and seeing that pressed up against the stall-wall glass staring at you.
And as for the Santa, he was sort of leering too. He looked just like Santa in his costume and everything, but his expression reminded you of a pedophile or something akin to that. He held a big festive sign printed in big red and green letters, with little musical notes implying song lyrics, that read “He sees you while you’re Sh—tting.”
Oh, and in case your mind hasn’t been racing ahead on this one, the victim’s reaction to the whole thing was videotaped, of course, and then fed to a video monitor that folks could watch out in the real world beyond the bathroom. As in, Billy fed it into his computer, then out into the universe. And just in case you are inclined to think that Billy was stupid or cruel, which he was neither, you should know that that camera was positioned such that the only thing it captured was the victim’s expression, not the entire indiscreet part of the practical joke.
Manners, my friend. Manners. And an element of personal consideration.
The entire project had taken Billy one long night. He had worked through the wee hours in the darkened Franks for the Memories fast food restaurant, playing Christmas carols on his portable radio and fantasizing about how this would be such an outrageous story that the Internet would gobble it up.
Then, with his name planted firmly out there on the World Wide Web, Billy could pursue his secret passion: to create a company whose job was to conceive and execute massive practical jokes. Practical jokes for all occasions: birthday parties, graduation, bon voyage, weddings, divorces, retirement, Tisha B’Av, or whatever.
Or just as a whimsical way to show somebody that you loved them. It was surefire. It was foolproof. It was his key to fame and fortune.
And what night of the year do you think he pulled it off? Christmas Eve. He pulled it off on Christmas Eve, when the World Wide Web is frantically looking for Yuletide stories, but stories with a twist. Timing is everything. This is pure genius, Billy Bob thought to himself, as he prepared for the feed to go viral.
***
Billy Bob got fired.
***
Oh, he expected that—sort of. But even the getting fired part he hadn’t thought through ... not as thoroughly as we might have liked, if we are framing him as our hero, which I am. I think Billy Bob thought that not only would this turn out great for him, in terms of the fame and fortune thing, but I think he even thought that he might NOT get fired, the general manager of Franks for the Memories being the same man who had coached Billy Bob for so many years on the Weighstation Wildcats Tetherball Team.
But sports is a feckless mistress, these days, don’cha know, and the old tetherball ties were not what Billy Bob might have hoped. He was fired summarily, first thing Christmas morning.
(Franks for the Memories was open on Christmas Day, catering to all those jolly holiday travelers who were mushing across the snowy state early on the 25th to join with families later on that sacred day. Also for Jews and Muslims. Not that a good Jew would dine at Franks. Pork and all. But it was known to happen.)
Anyway, back to our prank: as soon as the first poor unsuspecting victim walked into the ladies’ room, into the middle stall, (the other stalls being locked), and started in with her business, the lights came on, she saw Sick Santa and Evil Elf, and she ran out of the restroom screaming.
But here was the puzzler: the Internet showed no interest. Even when Billy Bob communicated with all the online article writers, as he had carefully planned, even when Billy Bob broadcast the lady’s reaction on his own website, even when Billy Bob was on the evening news, the shame of little Weighstation, nobody was interested in making Billy Bob famous.
Any fledgling shrink, or anyone at all for that matter, who fancied himself an armchair psychiatrist, could have told you that this was a fairly angry stunt, to begin with—hostile and stalkerish, and a bit misogynistic too—but we haven’t even gotten to The Frycook’s Revenge yet.
* * *
So here was Billy Bob the Frycook’s pathetic little Christmas: he sat alone, all alone, in his efficiency apartment.
Even this apartment building in which Billy Bob lived was considered the pathetic scourge of the town. And the town itself is pathetic, so that’s saying a lot. It was built by a greedy developer, and the apartment building sat square in the center of some centuries old brick homes and shops in the very old town of Weighstation—a town formerly known as Railroad, (state withheld), for the important role it played in the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. But the town finally gave up and changed the name of the town, because tourists would flock to the town, and railroad enthusiasts would come from all over, looking for the railroad tracks and mighty locomotives and scenic train rides and quaint dining cars turned to local cafes, but there was none of that. Instead just only some brown signs here and there talking about slaves making their way to freedom. Tourists left, disappointed, and some wrote disparaging things about the town on Internet tourist review sites. So the town decided to change its name. To evoke its more practical and immediate purpose. So “Weighstation” it was.
Anyway, the Frycook sat in his efficiency apartment in the ugly new apartment building on the edge of town. It had been the Frycook’s plan to work on Christmas Day, because for some reason, Franks for the Memories had irreverently decided to be open on Christmas Day, and its two dozen employees, (all of whom had a much more rich and robust life than the Frycook), were bitching and moaning about having to work on this sacred holiday. So Billy Bob volunteered. He thought he was quite the Pater Familias for being so magnanimous.
He was even going to branch out and assume duties that were not usually part of the Frycook’s lexicon of talents and responsibilities: he would cook weenies, concoct huge batches of the legendary chili, even take helm at the dessert bar and whip up Never On A Sundaes for those with bottomless appetites.
But it had not worked out that way; nothing had worked out the way he planned. Here it was Christmas Day, and he was all by himself in the shithole that he called home.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” was on. Frycook watched in bittery nostalgia as he opened a new can of Chock Full o’ Nuts and made himself one big lonely pot of java for the day. He studied the black and white images on the screen, thought how very untrue everything about this movie was. Where on earth was there evidence that life was so wonderful? And then he wondered if you could sue Hollywood for spouting lies all the time, fantasy being as powerful a drug as LSD.
Then he opened his presents: a Christmas sweater from his mom, which showed a little dog trotting away from a snowman, with a very satisfied expression on its face. The snowman looked distinctly disgruntled, because it had a bright yellow pee stain right at the base of its large snowball torso.
The back of the sweater was the payoff, though. Now it was the little dog who looked disgruntled; a snowball had been lobbed right at its head, and the snowman was looking upward, whistling innocently, as if to deny any blame for having committed the assault.
The Frycook put the sweater on. It did not cheer him up as much as you might think.
His dad had mailed him a gift certificate for the Bacon of the Month Club. The Frycook smiled and put it aside, anticipating the happiness that it would bring him. But he didn’t have any actual bacon yet, so that joy didn’t last as long as you might think, either.
He got three other presents.
The first was from his childhood sweetheart, who was married now and had several children, and who, though blissfully happy in her new life without Billy Bob, was nonetheless plagued by guilt for dating him all through high school, but then finally realizing he was a loser, scraping him off the shoe of her life like a blob of tromped Tewksberry gum.
By way of making it up to him, (for she sensed that Billy Bob would never get another girlfriend, not for free at least), she always remembered him on his birthday and Christmas. She always got the date of his birthday incorrect, Billy Bob always noted with a bittersweet pang, but she never got the date wrong about Christmas. He had to give her that.
The gift from her was the latest variation on “The Chia Pet.” The Frycook was always secretly impressed with the marketing department over at Chia, because it was an old chestnut of a gift idea, but danged if every year they didn’t trot out some new variation on it, sucking the kiddie market and the on-a-tight-budget-shopping-at-the-last-minute-Christmas-Eve-in-the-Rexall-Drug-Store crowd.
Billy Bob had once fancied that he would apply for and get a job at Chia Pet R&D. He had lots of ideas. An extra-terrestrial line: Martian Chia. It would feature the large head and huge almond eyes of the Spielberg Universe, but with green hair, capitalizing on the little green men image. And he would spin out an R&B afro-style line, for those with smoky musical proclivities: Little Richard Chia. Jimmy Hendrix Chia. Earth Wind and Fire Chia. Leo Sayer Chia.
Billy Bob had even researched other kinds of seeds, more free flowing with longer stems, that could be used for Big Hair Band Chia sets. Gun’s ‘n Roses Chia. Def Leopard Chia. Black Sabbath Chia. Spinal Tap Chia. And best part of all, these would be sold as four-sets, instead of single Chia skulls. More fun for the consumer. More money for Chia. Genius! Damn, why hadn’t the folks at Chia Pet called him back yet?
Sadly, almost tragically, like so many of Billy Bob Thornbird’s ideas, nothing had come of it.
So it was with a heavy heart that Billy Bob examined this gift from his lost love, a new variation on the Chia Pet. It was, he had to admit, kind of brilliant. This was the PRESS AND PLAY “15 MINUTES OF FAME CHIA”, where YOU were the Chia. You just mixed up this mélange that came as a dry package of powder; it was a flour and cornstarch and Quikrete based concoction that you mixed with water to make a paste. Then you jammed your face into it for fifteen minutes and let it harden.
This was the Deluxe! Chia Kit (his Lost Love was never one to skimp), and this kit included a multi-colored bendy straw, like the drink straws that Franks for the Memories gave with kiddie meals. But this was no ordinary straw, this was a breathing straw, which instructions indicated were to be used when you had your face in the mélange, so that you didn’t suffocate to death while creating your 15 Minutes of Fame Personalized Chia. That would make it a kind of death mask, thought the Frycook, and a shudder ran down his spine, as this notion caused him to ponder his own mortality, if only for a fleeting moment.
This whole thing, with the straw and whatnot, made Billy Bob wonder if the boys in Legal over there at the Chia Corporation hadn’t had some kind of headaches approving the new product. This Chia variation seemed like it would prove particularly dangerous for children, who were probably the main consumers of Chia—not literally, of course, although as a boy, Billy remembered his mother taking the sprouted greens and using them in assorted health salads, when she was going through her organic health food phase-craze. Then again, in regards to the suffocation dangers, the Chia was made in China, like everything else was these days, dammit to hell, and everybody knew how little regard the Chinese placed on life. They ate dogs, for pete’s sake.
The best part of the Chia Deluxe Kit was the little timer, so you could know how long your face had been in the mélange. The great thing about the timer was that you could use it long after the Chia greens were wilted and dead, and that was exactly what the Frycook planned to do: he could use it for soft boiling eggs, or doing his Kundalini Yoga routine in the mornings (during which he always lost track of time, lost as he was in reveries of the Great Oneness), or talking to his mother long distance on the telephone. (They both had lousy bundled phone plans which they could not figure out, neither of them, so timing their calls to exactly ten minutes seemed to be the only way to not get a whopping cell phone bill at the end of each month.)
So now you know about the 15 Minutes of Fame Chia.
This would have been a great present if the Frycook had
A.) A green thumb.
B.) Any more room for bric-a-brac.
Or
C.) Even the slightest desire to jam his face into a pile of white, sticky mélange for 15 minutes.
But since the Frycook had none of these things, the gift secretly did not go over as well as the giver might have hoped.
The next present under his little tree was from the Waste Not Want Not Septic Tank Company, which had employed him for several years after high school. Like Billy’s high school sweetheart, guilt was the motivator here, as the owner of the Waste Not Want Not Septic Tank Company had been forced to fire Billy Bob when a septic sweep on a pig farm went horrible awry. (The details of the tragedy are for another time and place; suffice it to say that the local butcher was handing out bargain bacon for weeks.)
Here ends the Sneak Preview for “The Frycook’s Revenge”