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 | | | | Jul31Written by:Philip Cody
Friday, July 31, 1998 6:00 PM  It's Deneueve! She's smiling at me from my PC monitor. Her eyes beckon and she says, "Is that an intercontinental ballistic missile in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?" I reach out for her. I touch her face and her face becomes the sun. My fingers begin to smolder and burst into flames. I'm on fire. No . . . I am fire. I fall into the sun. I am one with it. Here comes the sun. Here comes the Sun King. I am sinking in the west. I'm melting! I can feel myself breaking up into thousands of discrete puddles of molten flesh. The computer screen goes blank and suddenly all is dark . . .
I am drifting though space, locked in a cocoon of metal and plastic with only the sound of my own breathing for company. I'm feeling cramped and ill-at-ease. Tiny motes of light flash intermittently around me like colorful, pesky bugs. I reach out to swat them, only to skin my knuckles on the hard surface of my enclosure. A small, oval window appears before me. Looking out, I can see what appears to be a large, space craft, shaped like a giant femur, tumbling though space. I hear myself say, "Open the pod bay doors, HAL. HAL, open the pod bay doors."
My sister, Grace and her boyfriend, Fontayne P. Farnsworth III got married last month. Grace and Fonzy Farnsworth had been going steady since 1968 and the news of this totally reckless and impulsive act came as quite a pleasant surprise to me. Fonzy is a Big Fucking Deal in the banking business and has more money than God, lives in a house the size of the Astro-Dome, and has been madly, passionately, and faithfully in love with my sister all these years.
Grace, for her part, has been content to spend the last thirty years living in her tiny trailer on Cedar Street, with her cats, candles and potpourri and, up until last week, had resisted Fonzy's efforts to shower her with expensive gifts, fancy cars, elegant clothes, luxurious homes and forty seven proposals of marriage. Her acquiescence, this late in the game, was momentous, significant and cause for celebration. So I grabbed a few bottles of Chateau La Shitface and a fistful of Cohibas and headed down the I-5 to spend a few days partying with the happy newlyweds.
I no sooner pulled into the driveway than Fonzy came storming out of the house, tears streaming down his face, looking like he hadn't slept in a couple of days.
"Analog, she's gone!"
"What the fuck do you mean, Fonzy? Where's Grace?"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you. She's left me."
It seems that, after the honeymoon, the two lovebirds came back to Castle Farnsworth and Grace immediately started putting candles and incense all over the house . . . and Glade Plug-Ins in every available outlet. Old Fonz bit his lip and said nothing for a couple of days. Then, Grace went out to Fonzy's studio, the pride of his life . . . his sanctum sanctorum . . . his scratch-your-nuts-drink-beer-and-fart-your-brains-out place and put a bayberry candle on his desk, two cones of coconut incense in his ash tray and a Glade "Forever Springtime" plug-in in the wall.
Needless to say, Fonz had a shit fit. He completely lost his cool and started yelling at Grace to get that smelly crap out of his studio . . . and out of HIS house. Poor Grace. She burst into tears, ran out of the studio, jumped into Fonzy's 63 Caddy convertible and raced off. As of my arrival, she'd been gone for three days.
I got my blubbering brother-in-law back into the house, sat him down in front of a Mariners game on the giant screen TV, put a bottle of Jack Daniels between his feet, and went into the kitchen to make a few phone calls. I got lucky on the second try. Grace was down in Redding with her girlfriend, Luanda and no . . . she had no intention of coming back until SHE was good and ready . . . if ever . . . goodbye!
"Did you find her?"
"Yeah, Fonz, I found her."
"Where?"
"She's down in Redding with her friend, Luanda."
"I've got to go to her."
"I don't think she wants to see you right now."
"Listen, I've got to see her and tell her I'm sorry. Stay here. Make yourself at home. I'll be back in a day or two. There's a hundred pound bag of Science Diet in the garage. Make sure Bruno and Brunhilda get fed."
And off he went, leaving me alone in that great big house with Bruno and Brunhilda. Who the fuck were Bruno and Brunhilda?
As it turned out, Bruno and Brunhilda were two of the ugliest, meanest, most dangerous looking Dobermans on the face of the earth. They were blue Dobermans. They didn't have any brown on them like your regular Dobie. They were all blue-black, weighed about a hundred pounds each, were both as bald as billiard balls . . . and as nasty and vicious looking as a premenstrual Leona Helmsley. The good news was that they were safely ensconced behind a chain link fence in their own little compound. The bad news . . . their food bowls were all the way over on the other side of the pen.
"Fuck this, " I told myself. I wasn't about to open the gate and get in there with those two, hungry man-eaters. So . . . I went into the garage, filled a bucket with chunks of Science Diet and went out and started throwing the food over the fence. Those fuckers were good! I must have thrown about thirty or forty charcoal-briquet sized food nuggets over the fence and only two of them ever hit the ground. I made a game of it. I'd hold up a chunk of food to get their attention, say "good doggies, good doggies" and I'd lob the sucker way up high and one of them would run under it and snatch it out of mid-air. I did that until the bucket was empty and my arm was sore. Having fed the Baskerville twins, I decided to explore the grounds.
I found the key to Fonzy's studio in a little ceramic pig on a workbench in the garage. Inside, the studio was cool and dark and lit up like a Christmas tree. There were racks upon racks of outboard gear, three keyboards, two desktop PCs, a laptop, a pair of huge, Tanberg studio monitors hanging from the ceiling and a pair of Event bas 20/20s resting above the recording console.
One might get the idea from looking at all this stuff that Fontayne Farnsworth was quite a musician . . . and one would be absolutely wrong! Oh, Fonzy played guitar. Badly! He could hammer out chords on a keyboard . . . but so could a chimpanzee. And, if pitch isn't a problem for you, Fonzy could sing. No, his true talent was for making and spending money and, nowhere was this talent more apparent than in this place. No consumer stuff for the Fonz. Pro shit all the way. All of it the very best, most up-to-date, and most expensive. It didn't matter that the fat, little fucker could hardly play a lick or that he had a tin ear. This was HIS studio and there probably wasn't a better equipped home studio anywhere in America. Looking around, I was more than just a little bit pissed off and feeling a whole shitload of envy.
I sat down at Fonzy's desk and watched his personal stock ticker scroll across a 19 inch monitor. There it was, right before my eyes . . . Fonzy's main axe. Watching the ticker move across the screen I began to get drowsy and, as I nodded off, I began to dream . . .
I dreamed that I was on the bank of a river. I was on my belly, looking down into a rapidly moving stream of numbers and symbols. Just below the surface I could see the gleam of a beautiful, golden fish. I reached out for it and it swam off, just beyond my grasp. I reached out a bit further and touched a gilded flank but the fish eluded me again. I stretched out as far as I could to make another grab and, in the attempt, fell headlong into the river.
The raging torrent carried me along swiftly. I didn't feel like I was in any immediate danger. In fact, the ride was quite exhilarating . . . very much like a roller coaster. Every once in a while, the river would drag me under and let me back up a few seconds later. Eventually, the current slowed down and I found myself in a deep, wide pool of ones and zeros, populated by thousands of golden fish. Off in the distance, I could hear bells ringing. The ringing grew progressively louder and more insistent.
I woke up. The phone was ringing.
"Hullo"
"Can I speak to Tammy, please?"
"Sorry, there's no Tammy here."
"Let me talk to Tammy, god dammit!"
"I told you man, there's no Tammy at this number."
"Hey, ass hole . . . put Tammy on the fucking phone!"
"Who're you calling an ass hole, ass hole?"
"Fuck you! You tell that bitch to get her ass on the phone right now . . . or I'm gonna come over there and kick the ever-loving shit out of the both of you!"
"Just a sec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hey, man . . . Tammy says that you can just go fuck yourself and that she'd rather eat toad shit than talk to a weasel dick mother fucker like you."
CLICK!
Normally, such an exchange would leave me feeling warm and fuzzy all over, but my dream, and its implications, kept intruding into my consciousness. What really bothered me most was the thought that somewhere, deep in my subconscious, I might possibly be harboring a desire to swim in digital waters. Me, Mister Analog, one of the last bastions of analog sanity in a world gone digitally mad. The idea was extremely depressing and, the more I thought about it, the more depressed I became.
I got up and walked over to a small bar and picked out a sixteen ounce tumbler. I opened a little fridge under the bar and lifted out two ice cubes and put them in the glass. I unscrewed the cap on a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin and filled the tumbler half way. I walked back over to the desk, sat down and drained the gin in two, big gulps.
The first thing that I noticed was a hot, burning sensation in my gut. Then my lips went numb. My eyes started to water. I heard whimpering and realized that it was coming from me. I was crying and I couldn't stop crying. After I while I was sobbing uncontrollably. I heard a small, nasty voice in the back of my mind saying, "Better dead than digital . . . . better dead than digital . . . better dead . . ."
I knew what I had to do.
There weren't any guns in the studio. So, I stumbled over to the house but, try as I might, I couldn't find any guns there either. There were some really nasty looking knives in the kitchen but I couldn't feature stabbing myself to death. My drunken mind reasoned that all rich guys had guns and that my brother-in-law was so rich that he had to have an entire arsenal somewhere. But where? The garage, of course!
I was right. There, under a rack filled with fishing rods was what looked to be a large, red refrigerator with a combination lock on the door. A gun locker. A locked gun locker. A fucking locked mother fucking gun fucking locker. I started banging on its door.
"Let me in goddam it! I've got a date with death!"
No such luck. I looked around for something to pry the gun locker open but there weren't any tools to be found.
"Who the fuck has a garage with no fucking tools in it?"
I went storming out of the garage and got about ten or so feet into the yard when I fell, ass over tea kettle, over Fonzy's Florentine marble birdbath. I sat there for a moment, disoriented, trying to focus. When my vision cleared I looked down the grassy embankment and saw Bruno and Brunhilda, asleep in a shady corner of their compound. An evil chuckle welled up in my throat.
Slowly, I lifted the latch on the metal gate and entered the arena of death. I was scared shitless but determined. Death by dog would be a fitting end to my already unconventional life. Painful and messy, yes . . . but fitting. I sat down on the ground, about fifty feet away from the still slumbering hell hounds. I thought about my own pooch, Lance and I hoped that he would find it in his heart to forgive me. Then, I realized that I hadn't left a note. I worried that Grace and Fonzy would get back and find me torn to shreds and think this some terrible accident. I tried to rise but my legs wouldn't support me.
"Fuck the note," I thought. "In five minutes I'm going to be dead and it's not going to matter, one way or the other, what the fuck anybody thinks."
So I sat there, raised my arms and hooked my fingers through the metal links of the fence. I lifted my chin to give the dogs a good, clean shot at my throat and called out, "Here doggies. Nice doggies. Come and get me."
Nada. The dogs didn't bat an eye.
I started screaming at them. "Wake up you stupid, ugly, sorry-assed excuses for dogs. You canine pansies. Eat me, mother fuckers! Eat me."
It was then that I passed out.
I awoke to the huge, slobbery tongue and intense dog breath of Bruno in my face. I looked down and Brunhilda had her chin in my lap and was looking up at me with big, sad, soulful eyes. I berated both dogs for being such pussies, telling them that they were a disgrace to their breed. Then I stroked Brunhilda's bald brow and gave Bruno a big fat kiss on his doggie lips and began laughing hysterically.
"Analog, what the fuck is going on here?"
It was Fonzy. He and my sister were standing at the opened gate, hand in hand, beaming with rekindled, newlywed bliss.
"Just playing with the dogs, Fonz. Just playing with the dogs."
I picked myself up. Walked over to Grace and gave her the biggest, good-to-be-alive hug I could muster.
"You okay, sis?"
Grace looked over at her husband and sighed . . . then looked at me and smiled, "Yes, big brother, I most certainly am."
And so was I!
To be continued . . . . .
Copyright 1998 by Philip Cody
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