Made in China Chapter 24

Tattoo was taller than I had imagined him to be and looked very snazzy in his white sequined leisure suit with the high collar and cape. He appeared very agile. He looked a little like a pint-sized Zombie Elvis. He was about belt high or so to me. Knee high to a grasshopper. The audience cheered rapaciously as he came on stage and again as he announced my name and I was pushed into the spotlight by some uneducated brute wearing a black shirt with the word “security” on the back which made him feel special. He was upset with me for tearing the head off the fake woman. While the audience maintained their applause (which was on cue from electronic signs that flashed “applause” repeatedly), Tattoo told me in his distinct duck-like voice, “It’s better if you don’t smile,” as though I would play along. He was grinning the entire time. “Show business. Don’t wave or look directly into the camera, kid. Just accept the fact that you are going to die and do so with dignity. Like you have done it before. And hey, maybe you will come back.” Easy for him to say. After all that I had been through in life I was being subjected to this. A game show! Somehow it is a cruel metaphor. The author of my life has a sick sense of humor and is probably having a good laugh on me, watching me on a TV in some lousy bar.

“I’m trying to save Zulu’s life,” I told Tattoo plainly. Maybe I expected him to have sympathy for a fellow creature of the stage.

“You should be more concerned of your own life, Captain Bowie.” Then he hushed the crowd by fanning his little arms and hands the awkward way people do like birds flapping their wings. The techno music theme song died down and the audience took their seats collectively. I couldn’t see them because of the bright lights on the stage but I knew they were out there staring at me. Tattoo answered very deliberately in the microphone that the game of chance was going to be “The Human Cannonball!” He rolled the L’s perfectly. Next to “Pony Joust” it was the most popular game. A little old lady from Bakersfield, California was selected from the audience to choose how I would be killed in the event that I did not fly further than Tattoo, distance being how the winner was decided. Tattoo’s previous record was seventy-six yards. The old lady finally made it up to the stage and everyone smiled at her like she was Mother Theresa. She hissed at me like Komodo dragon. She smelled of mothballs and cats and bent over and gave Tattoo a very sloppy wet kiss on his puffy left cheek. She looked at me scathingly and then after little deliberation in which audience members shouted suggestions, she chose for me to die by strangulation from a thirty foot python named Reggie. I didn’t realize until then she was wearing a sweatshirt that said “I love Reggie!” with his likeness embroidered on it. “Not a bad way to go,” Tattoo said smiling. The crowd became unruly again and started to chant “Reggie! Reggie!” A spotlight hit the large glass aquarium and Reggie looked rather indifferent to all the adulation.

            It was then that I thought to talk to Tattoo using my mind as Marty Martian insisted everyone would be talking to each other in a 100 years, if man survived, and the way the Priest spoke to me when we met. I didn’t plead with him to let me win or escape. I only said what I remember was written on more than one glory hole wall, which suddenly seemed very profound. “This isn’t how it supposed to be.” Tattoo was across the stage from me being loaded into a giant white cannon barrel. He had climbed up the ladder and a very strong-looking bald man with a handlebar mustache in a black leotard grabbed him under the pits and was stuffing him in the cannon gently. I was prodded with a barbed stick like a beef cow to my black cannon. I was in cuffs and was instructed by some professional stuntman to go as deep in the cannon as I could go and how I could achieve maximum velocity by scrunching together tightly doing my utmost to impersonate an actual cannonball. “Be the cannonball,” the dope said deeply. He stunk of marijuana and booze. He put a black helmet on my head and fastened the chinstrap. A few of the others pushed me up the ladder. I thought of the cannon at the VFW where I contemplated suicide. Had I just done it, I wouldn’t have to go through this absurdity. I thought of my Blue Eagle, which was returned to me by the Priest before we parted ways. It was in Ruby’s glove box.

            The cannon was much larger than the one at the VFW. I might have been able to fit my arm in that one, but this one had plenty of room for my entire body, with room to spare. I walked on a platform and was told to sit down and place my left leg in and then my right leg. When I did they quickly removed the platform and I spilled down inside the cannon. I was still cuffed which made me uneasy about my potential for a safe landing. I used my feet to prevent from sinking all the way down. I wanted to see what was happening around me. Tattoo poked his head out of the barrel of his cannon and looked across the stage at me rather curiously. The lights dimmed and they began playing a powerful part of Tchaikovsky’s 5^th symphony. Drum roll...hard and fast...faster...faster...

            I could still see Tattoo’s face and he assured me telepathically, of what I said earlier about...“This isn’t how it’s supposed to be...” that he understood. “I said the same thing all of my life! I have to believe in something. Don’t listen to what they tell you about going to the deepest part of the barrel and scrunching up. If you are going to have a chance to beat me you should stay near the middle, arms out in front of you like you are going off the high-dive. Good luck, Blatz Bowie. Sincerely.”

            I listened to him and I stayed in the middle and positioned my arms so they stuck straight out in front of me like a high-diver. Gunpowder has nothing to do with being a human cannonball. It is all about the power of compressed air. But they use gunpowder in a separate explosion for glitz—so the audience will “Ooooooooooooh!” and “Ahhhhhhhhhh!” right on cue. Without any countdown or warning I was fired and I soared to heights I had never before dreamed of reaching without the assistance of an airplane or helicopter. I was so high that I might have tickled the bottoms of the virgins in Heaven with my whiskers. Somewhere at home I am sure my mother was crying, “Fly, Kitten Whiskers! Fly!”

I was a strange bird. I landed on a three-foot thick blue mat with a resounding thud and the audience cheered that my distance of forty-five yards (though not shabby in comparison to the results of past contestants) was a distance that Tattoo could better in his sleep. I lied on the blue mat like the man on the moon until I was rudely carried away by four large men, each viciously grabbing a limb. One was the same ominous looking strong man who loaded Tattoo up in the white cannon. They thought to throw me directly in the glass aquarium with Reggie, but for the sake of show business, they refrained. Tattoo hadn’t yet made it official. He disappeared in the large white phallic cannon and we all waited. He got a countdown. The old lady with the python sweater nibbled on her fingernails. There was nothing better to compare it to then male ejaculation when tattoo finally flew from the cannon. But instead of a robust powerful high-arching shot that would impregnate even the most stubborn of uteruses, Tattoo was more like a drip on a mattress. He fell short of my forty-five yard mark by a good ten yards, even after the skid.

“Oh, no!” the announcer called. “A personal worst for Tattoo!” the little old lady from Bakersfield said, “Oh, shit!” miserably and returned to her seat. Tattoo telepathically told me to tell Zula “hello” as he walked back toward the stage like a beaten condemned man. If he had a tail it would have been between his legs. I learned I was the first person pardoned in three years. I received a certificate stating that I was free as a bird. The audience booed. Reggie’s tongue slithered indifferently. Tattoo slowly walked on stage under the scrutiny of a spotlight, head low. He took off his helmet and stood there, preparing himself mentally for a moment. Then to the amusement of the fickle audience who had all but forgotten me, he was kicked sharply in the balls by an Argentinian professional soccer player named Raul who had nothing better to do than to be paid to wait three years to kick Tattoo in the balls. Tattoo collapsed on stage and I gathered my belongings quickly and snuck out of the casino to find Ruby. The audience rested easy. There were five more condemned dopes to kill.

Ho hum.