Made in China Chapter 19

            There are still voices but no Priest. The radio is on, softly. Some music. A Sinatra song, “All of Me...” Despite the desolation of my pickle, I longingly think of Chloe in the sweet way one should think of a lost love, a moment that slipped away, burned entirely too quickly. Then “China Girl” by David Bowie plays. It is a very popular song these days―more than 50 years old. There are a million different versions. It was a popular wedding song in the cheap marriages of rich Merican men and exported Chinese girls, which they tastelessly call “fortune cookies.” I am drifting out, maybe from blood loss. I remember the painting behind the bed at The Royal Flush Motel in Niagara Falls on my honeymoon, when I Lewis and Clarked into Betty Brown’s Sacajawea. The painting was precisely that, an artist’s interpretation of the trio on the trip of a lifetime.

            News. The radio plays. I am trapped...

I am an ensnared rabbit.

General Whatley and President Rosenbloom were jabbing at each other from opposite ends of the country about what the plan would be to deal with the plague, the rats, so on and so forth. It was all politics. They were actually old chums, both from Jersey City. Many of their public spats were staged. Rosenbloom promoted Whatley to a position that never before existed—five star general, because four wasn’t enough for his pompousness. No better pay or retirement, just an extra gold star on his uniform. Templeton was dead, as Dole McMillian had announced. Brief news of his funeral in Tennessee. On his modest grave marker his wife, Lori Lu, had them carve “Life is a Bowl Full of Cherries Jubilee.” Only she understood the joke.

I laughed hearing Rosenbloom talk. “We’re just not going to put up with all these rats!” he says spastically. I imagine a teleprompter behind him showing giant rats running amuck. “We are not going to do it! But the way to get rid of them isn’t too blow them to Hell and back! It isn’t to pollute the environment with lye, or destroy everything by firebomb. It’s to create a league of giant cats to eat them. So I propose Operation Kitten Lips...,” uninteresting details. “I, President Harry Rosenbloom, as commander-in-chief will see that all these cats are bred properly and I assure you they will be destroyed humanely when the rat problem goes away.” I thought of Alexia and that dirty-faced girl I gave her to. “Look people, in order to fight nature you have to use nature.” A throng of reporters blurted out a million questions at once until one stern voice broke out from the hubbub.

            “But, Mr. President, Mr. President! Do you think that creating a league of giant cats is natural, manipulating genetics...?”

The President was quick to retort, “I didn’t say natural! I said nature. You see, you have to listen and trust that your commander-in-chief will do what’s best for you, okay? That is part of the problem with this country. People don’t trust anyone anymore. Everyone’s a critic. Besides, if you got something better, Mr. Smarty-Pants, then godblessit, let’s hear it. Out with it! Let’s hear what you got?” The anxious reporter was suddenly quiet. You could hear a pin drop in the room. “Didn’t think so...” Rosenbloom was a very effective speaker. He had the reporter’s balls in the palm of his hand. Life is a bowl full of metaphors.

            “How big will these cats be?” A much meeker voice interjects amidst the intensity. I can hear cameras snap pictures, notepads flip, pens scribbling furious notes.

            Rosenbloom seems pleased with this question. It was from someone, who was perhaps, planted by Rosenbloom himself―an old political trick. “Well,” he says thinking it over, “they will certainly be big enough to do the job.” The reporters laugh. Lucky Cat cigarette smoke fills the room. “You know, as my grandfather said to me, ‘Harry, big cats mean big shit.’ Get your litter boxes ready, boys. Pussy is back. Just not the kind you might have preferred.” Another laugh. Hell, I laugh. It seems like a very cordial meeting in that Ho Jo in West Virginia. It seems that is the way of the world—light-hearted; everything is so goddamn pitiful and appalling that it is funny. Dole says that the female count is down to 912 and that President Rosenbloom was wearing a costume during the interview. It is the most popular costume around the country―Bobby Bubonic! “I am not only wearing Bobby Bubonic’s costume to announce to you that the White House here in West Virginia has been in contact with Mr. Bubonic, and that he will be honored for single-handedly killing more rats than anyone in a ceremony next week, but I want you to know I am serious about getting rid of the rats! Dead serious!” Some people look too natural in white spandex body suits. Rosenbloom hadn’t acted so angry since starring in West Side Story.

            The matter of how the rats became as big as Studebakers was never discussed. Not only that, but the government was also not admitting how the plague started. I suddenly remembered in my stupor that I had figured it out accidentally in Turkey, and I would broadcast it to the world once I got to Zula, when Heathcliff Bernard gave me the microphone and all the cameras of the world were all upon me. I would tell them exactly why the ordure hit the fan, those dopes whining about how God betrayed them. It was simple, really. I got drunk with a hotshit Colonel in the Turkish prison camp who had served twenty years in the Pentagon in some “intelligence” fashion. He told me when the aliens came to Earth in 2013, the plan was to kill them by using the plague. The Oregonian leader loved Twinkies, the Colonel laughed recalling it. So, when he demanded a million Twinkies to leave Earth alone, the plan was hatched. “We gave him a million and one, all of them injected with the plague in the yummy cream-filling. Unfortunately for us, the test cat had fleas which lived on after the experimental stage...after the cat died of the plague. Other animals in the clinic became sick and so too did several lab workers.” He paused reflectively for a moment. “Ho hum.” So much for the Devil, I thought. Was the Priest wrong? Was this manmade or was it the Devil?

Whiskey is the world’s greatest truth serum.

            ....

            I wake up and I am in a dank dungeon-like room with little sunlight that trespasses uncomfortably through a single-barred window. No more radio news. No more Ruby. Bones are scattered around me as if to achieve the melodramatic metaphor of my grave fix. No skulls. Those would be mounted on their vehicles, assuredly. “Their” being whatever hellish gang it was that ambushed me and led me to this fine dwelling. Two small rats crawled by my feet. One kept walking. The other stops and looks at me, deciding whether or not I am anything he would be interested in eating. He sniffs twice and continues. I laugh at the sight of them. It is odd seeing a normal-sized rat these days. Like one in a Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedia. I laugh thinking of the religious kooks, who were attempting to cure the world of rat overpopulation by teaching them abstinence. When I laugh I realize I must have a few broken ribs and some internal damage. An abhorrent band of scum are probably lighting blowtorches or sharpening garden secateurs outside as I drift. I am chained to my knees by my feet and waist to a single-point on the wet slug-covered block wall behind me and my arms are painfully outstretched by long heavy chains anchored to opposing bleary walls. I cannot get up off my knees or move from side to side and I am wearing nothing but boxer shorts.

            Drifting...

            I can see Marty Martian walking along the beach with four beautiful virgins. He is wearing a robin’s-egg blue t-shirt, loose khaki pants and the beat-up straw hat he always wears pulled down slightly in front and to the left. He advises them to stay virgins. World’s greatest advice! “This world became fucked up when everyone started fucking everyone and calling it love. Also, inject your body with as few unnecessary chemicals and drugs as humanly possible. Don’t drink alcohol and don’t smoke pot. There is no truth in it. Only stupidity.” The seminar I went to in Cleveland, which taught me the art of clairvoyance, was sold out. He was at the height of his popularity. Shortly thereafter, Marty’s plane disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. I knew it hadn’t disappeared. It was destroyed. I could feel it. I could see it clearly as though I was flipping through a picture book watching it happen. The government or maybe the abominable Mesa-Musa Ali, were responsible. Then it occurred to me in a flash of thought that it was the government. Jimbo Templeton ordered the plane to be shot down because Marty Martian was teaching people to think for themselves and the forbidden art of augury. In the words of zombie Professor John Adams to those Richey Riches at Harvard: “The real enemy of a successful government is transparency.”

            Mesa-Musa Ali is planning to blow up the Statue of Liberty as I rot on these chains. I can see him in a hotel room sitting on the side of his bed. Copies of blueprints of the Statue of Liberty lay out before him on a portable poker table. Captain Jumping Jack Flash is alive. He jumped from the exploding speedboat and lived to tell about it. Scratch that. He told no one about it. It’s a big secret. He is working on killing Ali. But what then, he fears, when there is no one left to kill. Some men used to think along similar lines about women left to fuck. But there will always be men left to kill...

            ....

            After Betty Brown died, I took many drives, soul searching. I was in Indianapolis, Indiana at a gas station. I met zombie Kurt Vonnegut who was out of his car and pumping his own gas like a bohemian. No one pumped their own gas. I knew who he was because I was a big fan and it is hard to mistake his tall lean figure and his curly brown mop. He was smoking a cigarette. He had died when he was 84 but aging, backwards, he looked well. I rolled down my window to talk to him. “Writing anything, Mr. Vonnegut?”

“No one gives a damn about literature these days, son,” he scoffed. “Sadly, I have never written better. Where are you heading? Do I know you?”

“No. But I am the son of Bobby Bubonic. Have you been to the sardine factory in Muncie?”

“No,” he says flatly. “Don’t care for them.”

“Well, that’s where I’m heading. My dad is the sponsor.”

“Bobby Bubonic is black as the Ace of Spades...”

“He is my adoptive father, sir.”

“Well, happy trails.” Zombie Kurt Vonnegut got into his Saab and drove away. I forgot to ask him about the firebombing of Dresden he experienced as a POW in Nazi Germany, where hundreds of thousands of Hansels and Gretels baked in cellars from Allied firebombs.

Ho hum.

There was a heavy woman who worked at that gas station. I don’t remember her name. But she must have found some goodness in me in the short time I was there. She asked me if I would like to go to dinner through the intercom. I said sure. She squeezed in the car and asked me if I wouldn’t mind skipping dinner, being that she is watching what she eats. “Drop me off at my motel,” she says lustfully. She never took her eyes off me. We pull in. It’s called the Stardust. On the sign there are two horny stars with smiling faces who look like they are shitting gold dust.

“Well,” she says, “no point to beat around the bush in a world like this. Wanna ride?” Most women were forced off the streets, but she was fearless. I imagine, in retrospect, a Casanova probably caught up to her and she is dead by now. God only knows. Being then that I didn’t have an emotional pot to piss in, I went inside. The room smelled like roses. There were piles of dead flowers scattered about the room. She was a hoarder. There was an oil painting of Captain Jumping Jack Flash above her bed. His handlebar mustache was impressively twirled and I could tell it must have been the painter’s favorite part. It was a greatly exaggerated. I thought of that mustache while I fucked the big woman. The sex was like driving a 76 Buick Skylark. I couldn’t even tell if we were on the bed. We floated on air. She closed her eyes tight and kept repeating, “Oh, fuck me, Jack Flash! Fuck me!” I left after one turn and never made it to Muncie.

            ....

            I don’t jerk off much, but it is the official national hobby, made so by some president that no one remembers. I write down details of life instead of jerking off. The world prides itself on the sport of jerking and every year in some pre-selected country, two men compete on stage and the winner advances, then two more, so on and so forth until there are only two men standing. It’s like watching Custer’s last stand without the arrows. The winner for the last three years has been a Swedish man named, Twelve Gauge. Two jerks and one squeeze and he shoots, every time.

            ....

            The KITTY was not a natural occurrence. It began in a lab, concocted by the same scientist who had developed the ill-fated cure for Parkinson’s, whose brains were blown out by a good Christian boy with a 9mm over a plate of Pasta Primavera at The Olive Garden. His brains slid down the wall behind him like the snails on the wall behind me. The scientist wanted to punish women for being whores after suffering several broken hearts, so he initiated the spread of the disease through tap water in Denver, Colorado’s water supply. His brother worked there so at a family dinner he stole his ID and slipped in with a pickle-jar full of the disease. It spread like wildfire. His name, for what it’s worth, is Dr. Rhubarb Honduras and he was as Merican as apple pie. As they wheeled his body out on a stretcher, (being that it was the time when they went through such formalities, even going so far as to cover his face with a white sheet!), happily a sign on the door said: When You’re Here You’re Family!™

            ....

            Fourteen dogs were elected as mayors across the country last year—eight in Alabama alone. All those cities run like a top and have strong effective ordinances against stray cats. They threaten to secede from the Union if Operation Kitten Lips is enacted.

            ....

            President Rosenbloom wasn’t liberal because he was gay. He was a self-hating, staunch conservative who made Hitler look like a toy poodle. His plans were yet to be fully realized but I could see them. He began enlisting sociopaths to work for a new branch of government called “Waste Management.” They wore orange jumpsuits with the word “SANITATION” written on back. But they didn’t pick up trash. They went about and murdered people Rosenbloom didn’t like, or “Enemies of the State.” Most were political targets. Others were anyone with red hair. When he was a child, Rosenbloom was beaten up on a regular basis by a boy named Charlie Pitts who was a blazing carrot top. So hundreds of thousands of Charlie Pitts’ died; they were brutally murdered by Sanitation workers from the Office of Waste Management.

            And the worst joke in the world is...?

Well, isn’t that the pits?

            ....

            The United States flag has been replaced. It is in no longer the stars and stripes. It is now one yellow star with five stripes, three white and two red. Below the star it reads: “United States of Merica” and on top it reads: “Wang Chow’s Instant Noodle Company.” There is no Wang Chow involved in the company. It was all marketing.

            They are good noodles.

            ....

            President Jimbo Templeton lived to be fifty four years old, which is twenty years over the national average. To ensure his zombie didn’t come back, Lori Lu had his grave sealed with concrete and his coffin was padlocked. No one suspected a thing.

            ....

            Rhode Island has not suffered a single major natural disaster since the ordure hit the fan in 2027. The people of that state, which is overcrowded for obvious reasons, often boast about this. They even put it on their license plates: “God smiles upon Rhode Island!” If this is the case then God shits all over Missouri, which has had more tornados then Dick Clark has had erections. Zombie Dick Clark, coincidentally, is hosting New Year’s Eve celebrations in New York City every year which "ain't what they used to be." Rhode Island’s governor is a chimpanzee named Floyd and is considering running for President of the United States based upon his record of safety in Rhode Island, even though it certainly isn’t his doing.

            ....

            Goddamn used to be a curse word. Now it is a perfectly respectable adjective.

            ....

            It is by mere coincidence that when I was a small boy my mother, Luella, called me Kitten Lips, or Kitten Whiskers. She is tucking me in bed again. “Listen, here Kitten Whiskers,” she whispers, “you were made for something special. You will see someday that you are someone special!” She rubs her soft hand gently on my face. I can smell dish-soap and lavender lotion. Mothers used to tell children this sort of thing in the old days. But after the ordure hit the fan in 2027, my mother was one of the few whom still said it. I wonder if she believed it, too. Two snails are having a conversation behind me as they slowly scale down the wall. They are talking about the weather and the immorality of promiscuous sex...