SOS Gab & Eti 1.06

Bip Orgrease finds a strange object in an antique shop. The narrative describes the rundown area of Bullamanka where the narrator and Bip live, far from the town's more prosperous side. 

Transcript

“Self-contained mechanical implants are made of a series of interlocked plastic blocks with a spring-loaded cable passed through them. They are easy to operate, but mechanical failure can occur.” Dr. Nick Chopper

So, back closer for me to home, sweet home, we have a small bit of a replay from near the end of the last month with the lunar eclipse where my buddy bro Bip Enois Orgrease found this here tinsmith’s… uh… object of art… wedged head down in a piney knothole behind a Ouija board and a pile of eggplant delight cookbooks and recycled Architectural Digest in a dusty back corner on the bare wood floor of Schmuck Brothers Antiques, second floor level over on Church Street.

You can’t hardly miss the old-fashioned place, if you are habituated to look for old discarded useless cute stuff, because Schmucks, founded in 1929 and still expanding, earflaps and all as they say, is with a big red lettered arty fart neon sign across on the north side of the street. A four-story façade with a fire escape that needs paint bad on the front, on a spot of hot asphalt next door to the one-story blue mini-mart, where you can purchase rolling papers, twenty different varieties of hookah, magic chant candles (which is what we had sent Bip after to begin with), twined clumps of sage, a fist of musk incense or a foil of French ticklers.

Though we are in the same latitude as the famous Wetwater Falls, Bip and I are not exactly used to wander around at that better-known end of our “opulent” county seat. We be the butt end of Bullamanka, the heartless dead zone between roadway and river, is our place, our tiny light post, and it gets on for us different than the cultured masses who congregate at night in the fields outside of town with their camp chairs, binoculars and beer. At this end, our piss-poor riverside promenade of shed condoms and crushed glass that we  reconvene when we walk with our no-name sneakers and tread sandals, and that we can kind of feel through our toenails the Wetwater River that vibrates beneath.

We are a bit out here, with our fortune and cut bait business, a way beyond the local. This is our homestead, the hot lot Bip and I last left off before we left off to leave with the white lightning -- and where Bip heads off to after he makes his lucky find on this humid day at Schmucks. We are well beyond the Trailways station, and beyond the newly reupholstered Bullamanka Theater, much further in a line east than the pirate radio station. We, in short, are the ones live on the outer edge of a town of four hundred and thirty-seven. Souls.

We have two traffic lights, a token inland red and white striped lighthouse to make us look like an historic district, a used bookstore specialized in paperback romances sharing a storefront with the Bullamanka Bugle-Clarion Rosewater Pennysaver, a grill, the empty shell of a former hardware store, three gas stations, only one of which sells diesel. As an homage to the past, air is free. The log-cabin fire station that triples as the town hall and upstairs the once-monthly court and weekly dance class.

Yeah, it is sweet and always another adventure around here, but black or white, our end of this megalopolis gets burnt burritos packed for beans. Over near us we’ve got no enterprise redevelopment and no x-presidential cigar humidors. Instead, we’ve got us warehouses of second-hand foam mattresses and a lot of citizens in need of some urgent maintenance, and I don’t mean any more of that gossip about citizens screwing around to irrepressibly procreate with their extraterrestrial neighbors.

We’ve got junk dealers who clutter up the historic bubble gum splattered sidewalk with crap from ruined buildings, a dead booth with colored phone wires trailed out hagglerly, a set of burgundy terra-cotta breasts that sit out along the bottom of the brick façade on the ground all by themselves without even Bip’s thoughts of animal caress as he passes them by, and there stands there for the last four months some wrecker’s discarded Corinthian wood column up for commission sale, too damned expensive if you ask me from the business perspective, a hollow wooden drum set there like a prosthetic for a one-legged giant.

To be continued… No, I can’t handle being turned into a frog right now.