(one in a series of Squid Squidley stories, involving a bumbling, drug-addled squid detective I wrote circa 1995 (pre-Spongebob, mind you), that I'm re-editing for no particular reason -- click on the title and it will take you to a cool image to go with the stories that was created by Tad Cronn)
Natalie Nautilus comes over while I'm sorting out my crack stash.
"Well, I knew you wouldn't just invite me over," says Nat, her tentacles blistering in the breeze, her lip-things blubbering like a jagged percolator stuffed with cottage cheese. Nat is the worst sort of ceph, always bringing up that time in junior high when I wore the pink Bugs Bunny T-shirt to school on photo day. That sort of thing. I could do without this on crack-purchase day.
"I brought grandma," says Nat.
"Grandma" being the pissant wag stuffed into a brick bag. Hairs brimming, waving and ripping away in the wind. Bruises from a recently acquired tap dancing hobby lining her cracked scuzz.
"So how's your TV reception?" asks the singed rag of gristle tucked into a steel jar and whisking back and forth, chug flapping with each frothy shake.
I head to the bathroom to juke up. Catch lip on pipe bomb and blow up and stuff.
Hit reset.
Fiddle with the TV set.
FADE OUT
FADE IN
"Whaddaya think of the place?" I say later, still reeling from my last fix.
"I bet Kid Squid likes the big backyard," farts the bobbing egg scab-packed beasty.
Nat picks up grandma and hurls her behind the couch, confusing an ant trail and throwing its travelers madly off course. Grandma begins to shimmy sideways to nowhere locked inside her glass shack.
"C'mere Kid!" yells Nat, spittle pellets exploding from her lips and forming cryptic squiggles on the floor tile.
Later, we'll read our astrological charts. For now, it's time for this squidster to ink fast!
"Here's ink in your eye, Nat."
Nat takes a whiff of the specially formulated black murk and turns a sort of chartreuse, gills shot out like wings, eye-whatzits rotating like a 160-horse nugat wheel. I head to the bedroom for my briefcase, bowler cap and squid-luck cane.
Next door I hear a door slam. Kid Squid's up on the windowsill giving bad directions to a frantic pack of ants. Grandma's somehow started an impromptu Jehovah's Witness luau on the conjoining lawn, and the Ghost of Norman Mailer's there clicking away on a typewriter, fist stuffed in mouth. To say the least, there's lots of hugging going on over there.
My front door inhales a soft turnip attached to a rolling, growling, flattened reptilian backside upon which pulsates gelatinous tonsil-lookalikes, my cue that the limo's arrived. The turnip's all smiles, its frame squeezing and relaxing at odd creases like a booby folded and tugged at from the insides. I slither out and hop inside.
"Hey you young, sexy thing," barks turnip chauffeur.
"SQLUASH!" Something like a woman's sliced thigh on the winning side of roots pulled from the magma shelf unfolds onto the floorboard and cuddles up to my congealing skin. The top of my head sucks itself in like a party whistle at moment of inhale. Then out I pop and down my tentacles sweep across my gangle, digging out clam bits and rusted mussels, remnants of a long forgotten fish festival.
It's supposed to be a party gag, an icebreaker, but it merely elicits a condescending glare from the driving turnip. Turnips by nature are a temperamental breed of simple-minded dirt-breathers. They mate with dull, watery feelers and vote for the guys with the biggest beaks. However, this was some gene pool mutt, probably misdirected into a career as a driver through the inexplicable shuffle of paperwork back at headquarters.
"Alright, bitch," I mumble as I chomp through the mutating goo-walls of the rancid limo and feel the crack's ebb receding to some secret place. "Just keep your eyes peeled on the road and get me to the airport."
FADE OUT
FADE IN
At HQ, the storyline editors hack out a telegram telling me they've hit a roadblock in the plot. They drink a lot of coffee, chase after unsightly members of whichever sex crosses the path of their beady maskholes, when not bombarding their cubicles with cut-outs from the funny pages and gorging on test products never intended to make it into the marketplace.
"I thought, uh, what? I mean ... are you? ..." stammers Gretchen, a creature made mostly of leather, straw and alcohol. Don't worry, fearless reader, noboby much pays attention to her voice anymore, nor the constant flailing of her arms as they shuffle papers around on her desk or shoot out to grab another helping of liver paste. However, her being a perfect example of the staff on hand, you can see why we're in this mess.
"Hey, do you know how to ...? Oh, never mind. I mean, hey ...!" A sustained, warbling giggle-sob follows as an undetected undercover antisquid scrub scoots by, picking up what may have been an important piece of plotline had it not already been forgotten.
As if through instinctual urge, proofreaders continually launch themselves from the porch plank into a shit pit nine stories below. Regis Philbin blurts bland babble out of sqwauk box implants dialed to turbo and sticking out of lazy stunt doubles' liquified brains.
FADE OUT
FADE IN
Up in the air, crime-fighting ceph hero Squid Squidley fumbles with his superhero costume, its arms tangled in knots knotty enough to make an uprooted phone line terminal in a fair-sized city blush with lust. He wonders whether the incompetent fuckwads back at HQ will bother to call in the storyline at all. In the next seat, Kid Squid sits in a concentrated strain over his squid box, then goes back to deciphering ant trails in between nervous yawns.
"Would you like your crack now, Mister Squid?" inquires a bull-headed hostess on roller skates.
"Would I!" I throw down the confounded suit and run it through the handy suit-shredder to the left side of my specially constructed airplane seat. I pull down the spoon from the ceiling and cook me up some junk. In a minute, I'm really flying!
----------------------
Little do I know that ...
In a converted truck stop bathroom somewhere on the outskirts of Nashville, an abomination to all known life has just been created. The demented cartoonist Bil Keane, known to most indiscriminate humans (and cute, wittle inchworms and the dopiest among small dog breeds) as some sort of smiley-faced god filled with yummy marshmallows, had finally found a way to achieve the ultimate degradation, after buying a cheapo geology kit and a bucket of olestra, and mailing in coupons for pubic hairs belonging to prominent Scientologists.
In fact, Bil was more bug than man ever since that fateful spring day in 1993 when he fell in the tub while cooking Pop-Tarts in a toaster that doubled as a cockroach colony. Moments before Bil fell into the tub, a zeppelin came plummeting out of the sky about 500 yards away and struck a sewer line. As he hit the water, an enormous pocket of methane, paired with bits of californium freight the blimp had been carrying to California (of course), bubbled up through the pipes. Let's throw in the fact his house had an extremely high concentration of radon gas; and Bil had been munching on horseradish all day. Hence, bug man.
"Ooo hooo hooo bloo-oo-ffffphph," Keane drools, rubbing his insect antennae together and fondling some larvae.
He has lots of plans for this new monstrosity he's dubbed "Not Me," none of them involving drawing in crayon on the walls of suburban households. He grabs the phone and dials up his good-for-nothing bud in the Mojave Desert. Coincidentally, the exploded californium zeppelin had been ordered by the ornery octopus he was now ringy-dinging. But that's just between you and me.
"Hey, Doc Octoplasm, it worked just like you said it would. Although I still can't believe margarine was the problem the whole time."
"Alas, so it begins," Octo burbles ominously. A volley of ker-splatting sounds are heard.
"What was that?"
"Oh, I just slammed my arms down on the table and broke all my eggs and now I'm a sticky mess. Can I call you back?"
"Sure."
FADE OUT
FADE IN
"Mr. Squid, Mr. Squid, we need your help ..."
....giving me lollipops. Suddenly, unthinkably, an earthquake! The little oasis nymphs scatter away and the clouds turn solid and muddy, sending meaty missiles down from a bruise in the sky. One blasts away my left-middle-left tentacle. I begin to run, but am for some reason compelled to go back for Kid's teddy bear, which appears to be locked away inside a ....
"Mr. Squid!!" The hostess continues to hit the sea creature with one of her roller skates, thinking how she should have swallowed her pride and married dim-bulb Edgar Pumperpenny before he sold his Volvo and darted off to Neptune to mine for diamonds. The rest of her child-bearing life would center, she figured, around poking at gluey forms and gulping down antiseptic slew in Newark bars.
"Wha!" I shoot awake to someone beating at me with some object. By super-evolved reflexes, my tentacles reach out and fling the assailant away from me. However, as too late I recall where I'm at, this involves the perp crashing through the small window to my right, a feat it performs cleanly, with Olympic grace, if a bit forced. I quickly turn my ink jets to "plexi-blast" to restore cabin pressure, then cross my tentacles and begin whistling a tune innocently, looking toward Kid Squid, who sits across from me, oblivious, with a frozen sneer pasted on his beak, which means he's been smelling himself again.
A call comes through on the emergency squid phone.
"Squidley, it's Lt. Dan back at headquarters. There's a problem. Someone snuck in and messed with the storyline while we were all at lunch and/or on vacation. Can you look out the window and tell me what you see?"
My first impression as I lean over and peer across the sky is the sun seems way too low for it to still be shining so bright, but I let it slide. I begin to tell Dan I don't see anything out of the ordinary, wondering what this is all about when the plane starts spinning out of control and the phone flies out of my tentacle. I put my ink full-on and crawl toward the cabin, as the horizon cartwheels. A line of trees above or below is a little too noticeable.
Reaching the cabin door, I struggle to push it open, but find there's something weighted against it. Turning my squid gauge to BLAM!, I fart the stuff with a flourish and the door breaks free from its hinges, revealing two gigantic hot dog buns that had been blocking my passage.
Noticing a pilot's cap sticking out of the end of one bun and glancing toward the controls, I realize what I'm up against. For wildly wielding the wheel is an evildoer dressed up in a mustard bottle suit.
Condiment man!
"I hope you remembered to pack your parachute, Slimeface," he says, not missing a beat with the ensuing loop-de-loops.
"You're going to wish you were a shirt stain by the time I get done with you, Condi-geek," I fire back, craning out a tentacle to clog his nozzle while gloating a bit at my handy retort.
But with a mayonnaise explosion, he's gone.
And so is the plane.
The idiot crew back at HQ obviously not bothering to script any further, I'm without my handy squid chute, which doesn't seem to matter as there's no longer anything to crash into below, rather I almost instantly thud onto a blank surface with blank expression on my face.
THE END?
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