Archive for the ‘Edd Vick’ Category
The King of Bowlers and the Queen of the Jet Pilots
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
Now this, boys and girls, is a story from back when we still had kings and queens of Chicago.
Paulie Haversack was the King of Bowlers then, and Hildegarde Fullenwider was the Queen of the Jet Pilots. Well, you can just imagine the rivalry between those clans, what with the pilots buzzing the lanes, and the bowlers putting dents in the jets. It got so bad for a while there that the Hairdressers and the Anglers were taking over big parts of their territories while they fought each other.
This dirty little war went on for the better part of a decade, until the Bowlers were reduced to a few alleys off Humboldt Park and the Jet Pilots had to use air refueling planes from Baltimore. And that’s when Paulie Haversack had the bright idea of challenging Hildegarde Fullenwider to a bowling tournament, winner take all. He set up the meet and was just about to spring his bright idea on her when she up and challenged him to a jet airplane race.
“Nothing doing,” he said to her proposal, and she said the same to his. That was very nearly that. The world would see the last of the Bowlers, the end of the Jet Pilots. Was this the split he couldn’t pick up? The power dive she couldn’t pull out of?
No. He wouldn’t have it.
This was it, the tenth frame. Paulie Haversack gulped, and he stammered, his hands went sweaty inside his favorite bowling gloves. But then he did it; he asked Hildegarde Fullenwider to marry him. And she thought about it, and peered at a contrail far overhead, and glanced back at her wingmen. Then she said yes, and they tied the knot the very next week.
Until the day they died he couldn’t stand flying, and she wouldn’t bowl. And yet the Bowlers thrived, and so did the Jet Pilots, and they taught the Anglers and the Hairdressers the meaning of ‘massive head trauma’, if you know what I mean.
The Salvation Complication
Thursday, August 16th, 2007
So this beanpole walks in the bar, says I’m the buyer, I just bought the Earth and I’m checking it out. And I say so how do you like it so far. Remember, and I’m saying this to you and not to the guy, remember I’ve had a few, well more than a few I’ve had a lot but that’s the way it is when you’ve been subjected to the kind of day I had. But enough about me, we were talking about the guy.
It’s kind of fixer-upper, he says, from under the crust on down it’s solid, well not solid but you know what I mean. The atmosphere, though, and here he waves his hand in front of his face in a whew what a smell way. That’s just going to have to go, but I think I can save the water and a representative sampling of the life, you know, enough breeding pairs to keep most species going, at least most of the megafauna. But the rest, he makes a bulldozer blade hand shape and runs it along the bar, swoosh, just flatten it all and turn it into a big park.
A park, I say, is there a lot of money in that? Naw, he says, it’s a government thing, there’s got to be a park every so many cubic parsecs, and somebody’s got to buy up the land and clear it.
Who’d you buy it from, I say, and he says, from this guy, and gestures vaguely outside, and what does it take to get a drink around here? This last is to the bartender, who brings him a Bud and a Bushmills. So, he says, I’m looking for a few guys to help me out, could be a box in the org chart with your name on it.
Now see, up to here it’s just a story. Could be legit, could be phony. But see, I read too many philosophy books. Maybe that’s got a lot to do with me having the kinda day I was having, but let’s forget that for now.
Do you believe in God? Say you do and he exists, yay, big win for you. He doesn’t exist, no big, you just die. Say you don’t believe and he exists, uh-oh, you’re doomed. He doesn’t exist, oh well, at least you weren’t fooled.
So the guy’s looking at me. Do I want a job? Do I want to be saved if his story is true? I hold up my glass and tink it against his. I’m your man, I say.