Let's try something new - a book, you can actually read as it's being written, chapter by chapter. This one is a totally fictional tale (a fable), with fictional people, set in a fictional place. As the chapters are written, I'll edit this post to add the new ones. Let's see how it goes.
Here's the cover: followed by the text:
Chapter 1
A short time ago, in a place not so far
away, there existed a sleepy little town known as “Geriko.” Nobody knew how
long it had been there, but it was assumed by outsiders that the town was named
after an ancient biblical city, by someone who hadn’t mastered the art of
spelling. Still, the name seemed to fit, because, curiously, no matter how many
children were born there throughout the years, the population remained mostly
elderly. And, also curiously, they all seemed to look the same.
For the most part, they were a happy
people, the Gerikuns. Most of them spent their days working in the orange
groves and their nights thinking about working in the orange groves the next
day. Because, there wasn’t much else to do. Occasionally, they’d go see a movie
– but since there was only one movie theater in Geriko, and since it showed
only one movie – the townsfolk didn’t have reason to get out much. There’s a limit to the number of times a
person – even a Gerikun – can watch “Bedtime for Bonzo.”
Outside of town lived wandering bands of
raccoons – because, that’s what raccoons do, they wander. They didn’t have a
movie theater at all; and they didn’t have orange groves in which to work, so
they would sometimes come into town looking for food, or employment, or
entertainment. The grove owners soon discovered that the raccoons, happy just
to be there, would work for a few oranges a day while the regular Gerikuns
demanded payment in real money. So the owners hired more and more raccoons to
the point that some long-time Gerikuns were having trouble finding jobs. This
made them angry.
A man named O.J. McDonald built a business
for himself providing housing for the raccoons on a street called Baltic
Avenue. At first, the rent O.J. charged was affordable – even for the
scantily-paid raccoons. He charged them 4 oranges per month to camp there.
Then, as he grew richer, he opened his own brick factory to provide materials
with which he could build houses for his tenants. He replaced the campsites
with houses, and raised the rent to 20 oranges per month. The raccoons were glad to be inside on the
cold nights, and they could crowd several of them into a single house, so they
had no problem with paying the rent and splitting the expenses. And the
raccoons kept coming.
O.J. seized upon the population boom, and
the resources he had available. Baltic Avenue wasn’t that big of a street, and
he didn’t want his tenants to go off paying somebody else for their lodging. So
he tore down the houses and built hotels in their places. He, again, upped the
rent, considering all the raccoons that could squeeze into such large
buildings, to 450 oranges per month. The raccoons had to work harder and harder
to pay their rent, but they had much nicer places to live – albeit in a rather
undesirable neighborhood very near a railroad and the tax collector’s office.
Ultimately, O.J. McDonald became a very
wealthy man and moved from his middle-class home on Atlantic Avenue all the way
uptown to a place called Boardwalk, where he built a brick skyscraper, 45
stories tall, and lived in the penthouse so he could look out upon his tenants
and make sure they stayed in line. It was rumored that the 44 stories below his
residence were simply there to hold his oranges, and his money.
The make-up of Geriko was changing.
Raccoons were everywhere – young ones, old one, thin ones, chubby ones. And
while they realized that O.J. was taking advantage of their desire to stay,
they really didn’t want to return to living in the woods, where nobody had even
heard of Bonzo. But the Gerikuns wanted them out so they could go back to the
way things were before. Gerikuns weren’t too big on the concept of change. They
went so far as to begin to build a wall around the town. But O.J. was making
more profits renting hotels to the Raccoons than he made selling brick to the
townspeople for their wall. With brick, and then willpower, in short supply the
wall was only partially completed before the theater got another movie and
everybody just, sort of, forgot about it. For all the trouble and expense, the
wall they had built wasn’t tall enough or wide enough, they thought, to keep
the raccoons from coming into town. When they wanted in, all they had to do was
climb over it, or walk around it. But, over the course of time, it didn’t
really matter so much, because the townsfolk discovered there were other,
better, things to do with their time than picking oranges. Many even stated
that if the raccoons were suddenly to disappear, the oranges would rot on the
trees because there would be nobody to pick them. So, satisfied with the
conditions as they were, there was a period of peace and harmony among the
Gerikuns and the Raccoons, and Geriko continued to prosper.
O.J. McDonald, and his wife, Hilda, spent
their days and nights in their lofty penthouse shipping produce and counting
their money. But they did find a little time to start a family. They had three
relatively normal children who followed in the ways of their parents. Then, one
cold rainy night, a fourth child was born unto O.J. and Hilda. This one was
different. As he came into the world, the attending doctor noticed that he had
something in his mouth. The staff hurried the baby away for examination and
discovered it was a tiny spoon, made of silver. Subsequent inquiries into the
cause of this revealed that the spoon had somehow fallen inside of Hilda
McDonald during the birth of one of the previous children; and the
investigation eventually concluded that it was dropped by one of the McDonalds’
servants who was watching the birth while eating ice cream. Vanilla, of course.
The abnormalities of the new baby were
blamed on Hilda’s body acids slowly dissolving silver from the spoon between
the birth of her previous child and this new one. He was a plump little rascal,
and seemed healthy enough, but his digits were much, much shorter than those of
a normal human; and he had freakishly long eyebrows and a completely bald
head. Even as he was being coddled by
the nurses in the hospital, the baby took his tiny little finger stubs and
brushed his own eyebrows back over his head to keep it warm.
The parents were, of course, concerned
about the baby’s condition, and his welfare, but their first self-serving
emotions were those of embarrassment that they, at the zenith of Gerikun
society, had brought forth something less than a perfect McDonald.
It is assumed that they gave a proper name
to this newborn son before packing him up and hiding him away from the world in
their penthouse, but nobody, to this day, knows what it was. Because of his
short little fingers, and other digits, they simply called him “Stubby.” Stubby McDonald. That moniker seemed to work, and even Stubby
never asked his parents what his real name was. Then the days came that they
passed from this world, and it was too late to ask.
Chapter 2
Stubby grew up in a world quite different
than ours, essentially imprisoned there in the height of luxury. He was
surrounded by money, oranges, and servants, and never had the opportunity of a
normal child to meet and befriend other children. This, in itself, would have been difficult
for him, because as he grew, his other abnormalities manifested.
First, he found that he was, for the most
part, unable to speak in the manner of other people. When he opened his mouth,
he tended to vomit upon his silk pajama top. But, always determined to
overcome, Stubby, at a very young age, developed his own method of sign
language, using his tiny thumbs, and taught it to all those around him. The
problem with that was once they – his servants and family members, and his
imaginary friends – were able to communicate with him through this method, they
discovered that he was literally incapable of telling the truth. Every single
thing that Stubby “said” was a lie. Those with whom he was communicating
adapted to this by simply assuming that the opposite of what Stubby said was
the actual truth.
Next, as he wandered around in that huge
45-story building, he was constantly getting lost. To remedy this, he learned
to mark his tracks by urinating along his path. Because of all the oranges he
consumed, Stubby’s clever markings made a bright, almost fluorescent,
yellow/orange stain that could only be scrubbed off of their surfaces using
sponges made of hundred dollar bills – something about the construction of the
paper. Tens, even twenties, wouldn’t work at all. He used the markings to find
his way back to the penthouse, each time he wandered away, and it was the sole
job of some of the servants to follow him around to clean up after him. So, what began as a survival mechanism
developed into a condition, which Stubby was never able to break as he grew
older. This “habit” is what earned him
the title as “The Whizzer of Orange.”
Of course, even Stubby realized he wasn’t a
normal boy, and he should stay there in the penthouse where he was protected
from the big, bad world outside. But deep within his chubby frame was an
undying desire to get out there and make it on his own, despite his
inadequacies. He had learned enough
about the outside world through thumbversations (that’s what he called them)
with the servants that everybody out there wasn’t as wealthy as his parents,
and some didn’t even have enough oranges to feed their families. But they had
something, all of them. And he made it his mission to get out there and take
that from them.
Stubby finally talked his father into
making him a small loan of 14 million oranges, so he could start his own
business. That wasn’t a problem, as his parents were more than happy to get him
out of their penthouse. He managed to lose that pretty quickly, so he went back
and borrowed more. With that, he hired some of the Raccoons in town to go back
into the woods and bring back snakes. Stubby took those creatures to a factory
to have them processed into an oil, which he then started selling to the
Gerikuns as a cure for boredom, and whooping cough, which nobody had. Many
thought the oil was actually working on them, because they were entertained by
the act of Stubby selling it to them. But that fantasy eventually wore off and
people, now tired of seeing “Hellcats of the Navy,” were back to complaining of
nothing to do, and blaming that on those lowly Raccoons, somehow. And the
Raccoons were also upset because Stubby never paid them for gathering up the
snakes. He washed his tiny hands of the whole enterprise.
“If innertayment is what they want,
innertayment is what I’ll give them!” Stubby announced with his thumbs. He let
his snake oil business go back to the bank; took out another loan from O.J.,
and promoted his own weekly dwarf-tossing event. It was a huge success, by
Stubby standards. Half of the Gerikuns came every week to watch the little
people being thrown about the fairgrounds – against their wills, by the way -
and they laughed and laughed. It seemed to never grow old to them. All during
each event, Stubby sat in an opera box near the top of the stadium, a well-paid
young girl on each knee, clad in a white robe, with a golden crown atop his
huge orange head, holding back his eyebrows. When the performance met with his
approval, he gave it a thumbs-up. Unable to see if the little digit was pointed
up or down, the crowd applauded anyway. It was a grand time for all involved.
The
Gerikuns of lower intelligence began to admire Stubby, the man, and what he had
done for them; and they put out the effort to learn the Art of Thumbversation
so they could communicate with him.
Here, they thought, was an actual self-made billionoranger who could
communicate with them on their level!
They learned to read his markings and follow him to other events he
sponsored, by spotting the yellow bricks. Having them lined with neon signs
made that even easier for them.
The other half of the Gerikuns, mostly
those who had read a book, or traveled outside of town, largely ignored Stubby,
believing him to be an idiotic phase that those other townsfolk were going
through – like the time years ago when they thought all the left-handed people
were aliens from Mars and opened a series of tedious investigations to expose
them. That passed. And it was a sure
thing that this would too.
But Stubby was emboldened and empowered by
all the attention he was getting, and he worked relentlessly to acquire even
more. He sponsored watermelon eating contests and frog-slinging competitions –
the high quality sorts of entertainment his followers had come to expect from
him – and he grew stronger and stronger as a powerful, influential force in
Geriko.
One day, while having his toenails clipped
and saved and laminated for posterity, Stubby decided that there should be some
kind of monument built to honor him. But, how to get that done? What should it
be? Where would it be located?
Voila! Of course. It should be the
completion of the long-forgotten wall the people once craved! He could build it
all around the town, so everybody could see it without having to travel too
far. And, just to add insult to injury, he would have the raccoons build it –
then swindle them out of their paychecks, like every other job he had them do! And, the best part of all was that the only
available materials to build his big, beautiful monument would have to come
from the brick factory his dearly-departed father had left to him. But, how
could he get the townspeople to pay him for all those bricks? How could he convince them that it was,
suddenly, necessary again?
As he stood in an alley, marking his path
from his inherited sky-rise apartment, it came to him. It was so simple. Why
had he not thought of it before? He would get himself elected Mayor of Geriko –
the highest office in the land.
Chapter 3
Luck is a powerful force of nature that few
understand. As luck would have it, there was a drought that year, when Stubby
entered the political arena. The orange
groves were beginning to wilt away, taking with them the economy of
Geriko. So, being a man who was not
burdened with the albatross of morality, the new candidate drew upon the
opportunity to take advantage of the townspeople’s misfortune. He thumbed to
them that he, and only he, could make it rain.
Without question … absent the God-given
ability to reason … his followers believed him. But many residents of Geriko did
not, and they were bold enough to say so, out loud.
One bright, sunny morning, as the Stubsters
stood at the foot of his ivory brick tower, breathlessly awaiting his next campaign
decree, he strolled out onto the 45th floor balcony in his un-tied
silk robe – his exposed ample belly casting a shadow upon his minions – sipping
on a cold Orange Julius. Beside him, on his left, stood his beautiful robotic “wife,”
which had only just arrived from the online store in Taiwan, where he had
ordered it using a credit card he found in his deceased father’s belongings.
The robot wasn’t fully assembled yet, as it was being delivered in two separate
shipments, but all that was missing was the clothing, and he didn’t see why
that was necessary. He named the robot “Mellow Yellow,” because “Orange” was already
taken.
Realizing that the minions down there were
too far away to read his little thumbs, Stubby had also hired an interpreter
who could read his thumbing and shout it out to the crowd. She was a large gray
toad named Sally, who had been inadvertently brought back in a burlap sack by
one of the raccoons delivering snakes for his previous enterprise. As he couldn’t
fathom a market for toad oil, Stubby let her live under the shed where the
urine sponges were stored in exchange for helping him wash his backside when he
was in the tub looking at the pictures in comic books. Over time, she showed a proficiency for
thumbversation and readily repeating, with her mouth, the lies he told, without
reservation or fear of any perceived consequences from any make-believe higher
authority. In other words, she was a proven, unabashed liar. This, of course, made
her a valuable tool in Stubby McDonald’s arsenal.
So, Sally stood on his right as he began to
thumb his “stub speech,” shouting down to the crowd, verbatim, what became known
as the famous “Geriko Address:”
“My fellow Gerikuns,” he began, “As you are
aware, I am offering my services … my unique abilities, my beautiful Mellow
Yellow – the naked robot over here - and my ridiculous, self-made wealth, to
serve as your mayor. Obscene wealth. Obscene, obscene wealth. For too long, the
great, great city of Geriko – and it is great, isn’t it? Fabulous! – has been
overrun by hordes of raccoons looking for a free ride. We let them do our labor
… our heavy lifting; our ditch digging; trash hauling; orange picking, our
brick toting, and they have the audacity to ask for payment in return… to demand payment! They are bandits and thieves and they smell
pretty funny, I tell you. But I have nothing against the raccoons. Ask any of
them and they’ll tell you that I have been very good to them. Very good. They love
me, and they love my family! We even let them build this very tower where I
stand now. But for us to…”
“We had
to!” shouted a voice from the crowd below.
“What’s that?” Stubby turned to ask Sally
who had so rudely interrupted him.
“We had
to build the tower,” the voice shouted again, “Your father was going to have us
made into frontier hats if we didn’t do it! And, still, nobody has paid us for
the work!” The three-legged raccoon known as “Tripod,” had achieved somewhat of
a reputation as a spokesman for the raccoons. Stubby spotted him in the crowd.”
“Oh, it’s you!” Stubby thumbed and Sally
shouted.
Stubby attempted to put one of his hands
behind his back to mock Tripod, not realizing that his thumbing system didn’t
allow for doing it with only one hand. In a moment he regained his train of thought
and continued, “Always hobbling around trying to make trouble aren’t you? This
is exactly what I’m talking about folks. It’s 99 percent of raccoons like this
that give the rest of them a bad name. Bad name. They come here, live in some
pretty nice buildings, I tell you; eat our food; breathe our air; and always
complaining about how bad they’re being treated. Poor, poor raccoon! Poor,
mistreated raccoon!”
Tripod interrupted again, “The McDonalds
tore down our houses, which they had made us build; you made us build the
hotels we live in, and then raised our rent; and made us build your ivory tower;
and none of us ever got paid a single orange for doing it! I even lost my arm
working on that balcony you’re standing on and I had to be tended to by my
family because you wouldn’t allow me to use the hospital!”
“Excuse me! Excuse me!” Stubby shouted.
(Well, Sally actually did the shouting.) “Who’s giving this speech? Is it you?
No! It’s me! You got a lot of gall to come around here trying to hijack my
speech. That’s what you are, you’re a hijacker!”
The crowd of Stubsters began to groan and
shout, “Hijacker! Hijacker!”
“That’s right, folks,” Stubby encouraged
them, “He’s a hijacker. Somebody get him out of here!”
Suddenly, four of Stubby’s biggest henchmen
pushed their way through the crowd and grabbed the 3-legged raccoon and
strapped him to a rail and carried him into an alley, away from the gathering. Some of the other raccoons and a few of the
Gerikuns followed them, at a distance. Then, amidst the rumbling of the crowd,
Stubby continued.
“Now, sorry about that interruption, folks,
you know how they are! Trouble makers, every one of them. That’s why we need to
renew our efforts to keep them out of Geriko. They are a security risk. That
one almost started a riot, right here on Boardwalk! Who ever heard of a riot on
Boardwalk? Was there ever a riot on Boardwalk before the raccoons started
coming in here like this? You have seen what I could do for entertainment here,
and you know that, as your mayor, it will be so much easier for me to fix this
problem with hijacking raccoons. That will be easy compared to dwarf-tossing. I
plan to do that by surrounding this city with a big, beautiful brick wall, made
of bricks that I can let the city have for 98 cents on the dollar! That’s a
huge discount, folks, and you shouldn’t overlook this offer. I’m doing you a
favor!”
“But, how are we going to pay for the
bricks when the orange groves are dying?” someone shouted.
“How are we going to pay for them?” Stubby
echoed, “How are we going to pay for them? I’ll tell you how we’re going to pay
for them. By selling oranges. Lots and lots of oranges. And we can sell them to
those raccoons over on the other side of the wall! Because, I’m here to tell
you, folks, I can make it rain. I can make it rain!”
There was audible gasping and a general
feeling of astonishment from the crowd on the street as Stubby took two steps
toward the balcony rail. He reached under his big round belly and took hold of
his tiniest digit. And the yellowish-orange rain showered down upon them. They
were unable to see the miniscule device from which the “rain” originated, but
it was wet – rather warm – and it delighted them immensely. They turned their
faces to the sky and held up their children so that they, too, could saturate
in the joy. And they danced, and sang the songs of their people.
But
Stubby hadn’t consumed enough orange juice at the time to make it rain for very
long. When it stopped, he tucked “Little Stubby” away and, realizing he had
made the sale, he announced “Elect me as your mayor, and I can make it rain
every Tuesday. And Thursday, if you want! Whatever days you want, I can make it
rain. But it takes a lot out of me having to do this. Takes a lot out of me. So
I won’t be able to do it unless you elect me as your mayor.”
With that, he grabbed his naked robot by
her SD card slot and pulled her into the penthouse.
Sally the Toad stepped up to the balcony
rail and raised her hands, as if to quiet the celebration, and asked if anyone
had any questions. Several hands went up and she pointed to someone – it was
hard to tell whom, as she was 45 stories above them.
As it turned out, the person who shouted
the first question was a reporter from the Orange
Juice Journal (OJJ), a subsidiary of the well- known and totally unbiased
McDonald News Group, established by Stubby’s father some twenty years before.
“How can you stand it, being so close to
this man who is so wonderful? Do you consider yourself blessed?”
It was what could be considered a “hardball”
question, but Sally managed to find an answer. “Yes. Yes, she said. I believe I
was called upon by our Creator to serve Gerikind in this way.”
Sally pointed down again and another
reporter – this one from “ANA,” the “Actual News Agency” – shouted “We have a
camera here with a zoom lens, and we could easily see that Stubby was simply
urinating off the balcony. It wasn’t raining at all. It was urine. He just
stood up there and peed on everybody! We’ll be more than happy to show you the
footage, if you’d like to see it. Would
you like to comment on that?”
Sally responded quickly, “I’m not going to
dignify that ridiculous allegation with an answer. Your statement is made
completely out of context, and I resent the fact that you were born. May God have mercy on your soul.”
“Context? What context?” the reporter
shouted again, “We were right here watching him do it, filming the whole thing!”
Sally ignored the question. She folded up her binder and waddled off the
balcony as the crowd cheered wildly. Because, frogs waddle when there’s not
enough room to hop.
And that was the day Stubby McDonald became
an official candidate for Mayor of Geriko.
Chapter 4
It was 3 am on a Thursday night, two weeks
before the election. A Stubby Staffer,
who shall remain anonymous, heard some noise in the hallway of the penthouse
and stepped out there from his, or her, room to find Stubby, wearing a diaper
and a ten-gallon cowboy hat, riding a tricycle, bumping into the doors along
the way.
“Mr. McDonald,” the staffer pleaded, “please,
let me help you back to bed. Can you not find the way?” But, as the staffer said this he, or she,
noticed the wet yellow stains all along the walls and realized that Stubby had
clearly marked his path.
“Of course I can find the way!” Stubby
thumbed, “What do you think I am, a baby?”
“No sir, it’s not that,” the staffer said, “It’s
just that … oh, wait. I understand. You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?”
“I do not drink alcohol!” Stubby screamed,
as much as one can scream with one’s thumbs, “And I don’t do drugs! All that
stuff is for losers!”
“But,” the staffer asked, “What about those
Orange Juliuses you’re famous for? You don’t sneak a little something into
them? Everybody thinks you do.”
“Absolutely not!” Stubby insisted. “I’m offended
that you would even ask.”
But still, he did seem to be high, so the
staffer, trying to diffuse his growing hostility, said “I know that. I remember
now. You’re a teetotaler! I’ve always intended to ask you, when I got the
chance, how do you relax after a long
day on the campaign trail? I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping, myself.”
Stubby plucked a small plastic bottle from the
leather holster he had strapped around his waist and blew some soap bubbles
into the air.
“Cocaine,” he thumbed, “But
I don’t think it’s gonna help you sleep! … Hey! I think I’ll take a bath. Come
help me wash my back.” Then he peddled on down the hall.
Following, the staffer asked, “But, sir, it’s
three in the morning. Are you sure you want to take a bath right now?”
Still peddling, without looking back,
raising his little paws over his head so the staffer could see, he thumbed, “Less
than nine hours to get clean. It’ll take you about that long. My advisers tell
me they’re coming ‘round here at twelve with some Puerto Rican girls that are
just dyin’ to meet me! Bringing wine. A whole case of it. I told them I don’t
drink, but they’re bringing it anyway!”
“Advisers? What advisers, sir?”
He pulled over, huffing and puffing, and
leaned over on the wall – like Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou. “The ones there,
in that room,” he thumbed, nodding toward a nearby door.
The
staffer was even more confused. “But nobody stays… that’s the music and theater
room … oooohhh! I get it. Once you meet up with these Puerto Rican girls are
you, by any chance gonna mess and fool around like you used to?”
“How did you know that?” Stubby actually
screamed with his mouth. “Is there a leak here? Is there a leak in my campaign
sssstuuuchhhh” And then he puked.
“Oh, no sir. No sir. Not at all! It’s just
that … that’s exactly what I’d do, you know, if somebody came around with some
Puerto Rican girls that were just dyin’ to meet me. I think it’s what anybody
would do. Just a lucky guess! Here, let me call somebody to clean this up
and we’ll get you down there for that hot bath.”
Nobody knows what happened after that. The
staffer’s notebook was found by a maid in his, or her, penthouse room a few
days later, detailing the occurrence; but that particular staffer was never
seen or heard from again.
TO BE CONTINUED
