Boone There ~ Fun That by Mike Bozart - HTML preview

Jim. Jim, Jim, Jim, ever heard of him? No, not your best friend, lover, husband, brother, nephew or uncle (or self?) – that Jim. The other one. The odd duck. The uniquely weird one. Unintentionally strange, but not harmful. A minimal art-form in himself, and a resounding arthouse flop.

Yeah, the surreal gem. The meta-real mistake. The one who stopped time with Jill. You know, that less-than-comical series on facebook. (Relax, 99.999% of the planet has no idea, either.)

Jim and Jill. The timeless sequence that Jill wants out of, but Jim is content with. (Frames can be seen on the psecret psociety facebook page.) The one where the characters never move. Yeah, that one, where they only read each other’s thoughts. Why, I know, it seems like an excruciating exercise in ennui. And it was/is. Trust me. You may need another mug of coffee (or beer) just to survive this preface.

Jim, the quasi-scientific mind experiment that went awry. They scrambled his bean pretty good. Really overdid it. The Caucasian middle-aged lad isn’t sure if he is – or was – even alive. Poor guy. I’m not a litigious type, but someone deserves to be sued for that.

Ah, here she comes. Agent 32 is now in the house, or hotel room. “Thanks for the extra-spatial tea, Monique.”

Ok, some more background on Jim and Jill. Well, to make a short story slightly longer, Jill said that Jim escaped from some meta-space. Yes, a space beyond a space. (I was lost, as well.) And then she got herself sucked into it, too. This was stated in her last e-mail.

But, maybe you’ve seen Jim wafting up and down the Boone-area ski slopes. Not sure? No, he doesn’t look like Frankenstein. He’s not a mu-mu (Tagalog for monster, Agent 32 tells me). You can check the psecret psociety page on facebook. Ok, I’ll save you a trip to the internet: Just jump to the end of this story (but, please do come back).

--------------------------{early intermission}-----------------------------

Ok, I assume that you came back. Thanks. A lot. And a future house. Ok, let’s get this tale moving again. Moving along with cilia action (or, maybe not). 

We arrived at the old Greene’s Motel on US 321 in Boone (NC) on a cold, cloudy, gray December afternoon. Castle weather, we would often call it. I think it was the Thursday between Christmas and New Year’s. Yeah, that sounds about right. Let’s go with that.

[The clink of glasses.]

Well, we got one of the upper level rooms with a nice view of a mountain ridge … and of a tarpaulin-covered pool.

“No swimming tonight, Agent 32.”

“Probably not, Parkaar, [my ailing alias] unless you packed our wetsuits.”

Monique (aka Agent 32, now my wife) got the luggage unpacked. She checked the drawers for notes and other less obvious clues.

My son, Agent-to-be 666 (yes, he demanded that number), began to play on the dresser with one of his Hot Wheels cars, a white ’68 Shelby Mustang with a blue duo-stripe.

I checked the closet for any notes or curios, as you never know who plays the hotel games. And Jim would participate in them. All waves.

Oh, speaking of hotel games, did you know that Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane/Starship used to carefully remove hotel room artwork from the frame and draw miniature fornicating stick figures on it? Yes, really. Then he would carefully replace the print in the frame and hang it back on the wall. Apparently he did it so discreetly that you would only notice it if you were zoning in on a detail of the art from, say, four inches away. Sways, eh? Give that man a game ball.

Relax, we didn’t deface any art at the Greene’s. The velvet Elvis still had the added Camel cigarette. We didn’t do it; it was already there. Hipsters these days.

We got settled in as darkness fell on the valley of Winkler Creek. Old Ripped van Winkler. Where is he now?

Well, everyone was hungry. I asked 32 to watch 666, as I was going out to procure some food for dinner.

I walked over to the nearby Pizza Hut and brought back a couple of thin crusters. I thought about writing Fold Online on the pizza box, and leaving it for the maid to consider. But, I decided it was way too obscure. Maybe just scrap it. We did.

After we finished eating, a snow-sleet shower started to sprinkle and tinkle. Then, within 13 minutes, it was all white snow, and coming down at a jolly good clip.

We walked out on the balcony to take it in: a splendid winter night in Appalachia. The onset of snow is always a magic time. Unless, you’ve got 110 miles to drive.

Then I asked my wife and son if they had any ideas for my next short story – the one you are reading now – and they pondered my question for a few moments.

My son fired back first. “Dad, how about staging a car accident scene using my Hot Wheels car? You could zoom in on the scene so close that the car would look like a full-size ’68 Shelby Mustang.”

His idea intrigued me. “Agent 666, that is a grand idea. But, are you sure that you don’t want a different agent number?”

“I want to keep triple-six for life!” He demanded vociferously.

“Ok, ok.” I relented.

My son continued with his idea for a Boone-based short story. He told me that we could say that we were on Jim’s trail, closing in on him, when we got into a car chase with him. He said that Jim would lose us temporarily on a Blue Ridge Parkway curve. But after passing through a tunnel, we would find his car stuck in a tall wall of snow.

“I love this idea, son. So, Jim crashes into a snowbank. Let’s go with it.”

Monique then chimed in. “I’d add some spice to your silly little tale, 33. Female readers love interpersonal drama. Tell them that another head was seen in the car – a female’s head – the head of Jill.” Nice touch.

“Oh, I like it, 32. Jim and Jill fleeing from us on the Blue Ridge Parkway in an evening snowstorm.”

Monique went on to tell me to write the story up in a way that made Jill look like the evil mind behind the escapade. I asked Monique what Jill had done wrong – just for our story’s sake. She told me that I could insinuate that Jill really did control the electronic chip inside Jim’s brain.

Then Monique blurted, “Insist that Jill made Jim walk into the bank and demand money.”

“What bank?” I asked.

“A local one. Just say that it was a Boone bank.”

“So, they’ll be bank robbers?” my son asked.

I groaned. I was non-elated with this premise. I never saw either of these characters as bank robbers. In fact, I never saw them doing much of anything, action-wise. But then, after a Duck Rabbit dark beer, it won me over.

I would later ask Agents 32 and 666 how we could tie this in with a Mount Mayon Volcano eruption in the Philippines. But, they just looked at me, mouths agape. My son muttered something about how I always ruin a good story with extraneous material. Monique just sighed, and poured herself a glass of Merlot.

To tell you the truth, I was quite happy. My body wasn’t in pain, and we were off the icy roads for the night, safely ensconced in a concrete cocoon, composing a surreal short story together as the snow fell outside. A perfect mountain escape from the Charlotte chatter.

Then a phone was vibrating. It was my cell phone on the nightstand. I grabbed it. An unknown number. I didn’t answer it. The anonymous caller left no message.

“Monique, could you kindly research the 333 area code?” I asked my wife, who was now lying on the bed closest to the window.

She quickly looked it up on her tablet computer. “The 333 area code hasn’t been activated yet. No phone numbers have that area code, Parkaar.” Very strange.

At first I has completely dumbfounded, but then I had a hunch who it was. My son thought it was Jim, too.

Monique looked at the door. It was already locked. I told her that we would be ok, and that Jim was just a cerebral killer – not a serial one.

Future Agent 666 then asked me if I thought that our hotel room was bugged. I told both of them that I saw a column of ants marching on the aluminum window frame, but other than that, all was ok.

Monique said that she saw an earwig in the tub, but it didn’t look like Ernie, so she smashed it with my Bukowski Earth Poems book. I was like, “Oh, no, you didn’t.” I told her that was my crapper reading material.

She then scraped the insect’s remains off the back cover with her nail file. Then she wiped the back cover with an alcohol pad.

And it went on like this until we burned the popcorn in the ancient microwave. We were all sound asleep by 2:02 AM.

We awoke to a partly cloudy morning with a few flurries, and decided to get serious about our gem of a ruse. Outside we marched. It was brisk.

The macro-photo was fairly convincing. If you didn’t study the photo with a magnifying glass, you would think that a real ’68 Shelby Mustang ran off the road into a ten-foot-high snowdrift.

We agreed to say that neither Jim’s, nor Jill’s, body was ever found. And that when the cops found the car, Bonaparte’s Retreat was playing.

Why Bonaparte’s Retreat, you ask? Ok, some much-needed background. Sorry for the temporary disconnect.

In one of Bukowski’s poems de terre, there is this guy named Fred who loves the song Bonaparte’s Retreat (in fact, that’s the name of the poem). He was one of those older guys at the bar who never speaks to anyone. Some drained soul just riding the clock out.

Well, old Fred died before I could mention him here. I bet when he was a wee lad, he lived up North somewhere where it snows fairly often. Maybe in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hell, maybe in Minneapolis, North Carolina. Well, he had teeth. Just jesting. Put the gun down, partner. I’m buying.

I bet as a child, Fred had a small toy car, or maybe four. I bet he made snow sherbet. But, I bet he pronounced it sher-BERT. Sure, Bert. You know that was his pal.

And more on Jim. Whenever reviewing his past results, Jim would refer to himself as they. He would spout off something like: “Ah, look what they did last year; they can beat that number.” A perplexing use of pronouns, for sure.

You know that sensation when you’re in a train, waiting to go, and an adjacent train starts to creep along in the opposite direction, and you feel like your train is moving, when, in fact, it’s still stopped? I believe they call it a vection illusion. Well, Jim was vexed by the exact opposite from an early age. He would often feel that his train was stationary, even as the outside scene whizzed by at high speed.

Driving a car was obviously a bit of a challenge for Jim. He had to take special medications to do it.

Then my son told me that we had it all wrapped up, ready for the bow and ribbon.

We would state that Jim was speeding on an icy road on a snowy night and crashed due to a moment of invection. Ernie would probably buy it. Though, I bet we never see any money.

I reached for Monique’s coffee cup. Luke warm.

We hid previous copies throughout the hotel room.