Coco' Big Day P-2

LIONWORLD By William E Justin Ethan Vulerummer Big-E White’s Last Lion Head Coco’s Big Day

Coco’s Big Day PART TWO Coco didn’t greet Sidney at the front entry when she arrived with her husband. She didn’t want everyone to see her cry. But Sidney quickly made her way to Coco’s room and soon the two were grasping each other, crying, saying how much they loved one another and how they would always be the best of friends. They had met at sixteen, at a girl’s camp. Before the week was over they had proclaimed their “sisterhood”. By the age of eighteen they were leaving a bouquet of smiles wherever they went. A typical Saturday saw them collecting pieces from local thrift stores and working them into new fashions that Coco drew up on her computer. The 3-d studio model she used as the point of departure for shapes and sizes was made up from a careful measuring of Sidney’s body. Coco was a budding seamstress and designer and Sidney her perfect model. They made up some slightly wacky outfits fashioned from sleeves of one blouse sown onto the body of another; or dresses that were trimmed, hemmed and re-pleated in funny ways. They liked to stitch part of one fabric onto another. By eighteen, the two young women were charming their way into clubs at night and driving out to the northern Bay Area fringe whenever they could. They became fascinated by the young aspirants to Lion-fighting who congregated out there. Both girls came from what had become known as “comfortably B Class” families. Coco’s mother Lynette had an office job to go with what Claude had left her. Sidney’s father was a mid-manager for a company that built giant-size blending units for various packagers of cleaning products. They both received moderate allowances from their mothers. Coco’s was the larger because she had to do much of the house work and baby-sitting of her two younger brothers. Sidney was always around the house in those days helping her finish up so they could go out. Out on the fringe, both girls developed altruistically. Seeing the squalor of the C Class castoffs had effected them deeply. The two volunteered one day a month out of the goodness of their hearts—and because it gave them an excuse to go and be around the Lion-fighter boys who looked so cool and excited their fantasies. Sidney and Coco lived together in a small apartment when they were twenty. They each attended San Francisco Bay College. Coco was in full gear pursuing fashion design and the needle crafts with Sidney learning business skills to run the business both saw in their future. By then they were always in demand as guests on nice trips to wonderful places. Men loved them. But the only one who broke into their inner circle was Robert Casoni—a smaller man born in Tanzania, who was homosexual. Robert seemed destined to be Coco’s personal assistant. He quickly became a member of the girls’ dreams of world domination in the design and fashion business. Often he would come into their little studio apartment first thing in the morning, and see them dead asleep and cuddled-up together like soft kittens. He would sit at the foot of the bed and tickle the bottoms of their feet until they woke and got onto whatever they had planned for the day. Robert told his friends that he was, “the Coco and Sidney” handler. The person in charge of taking them for long walks and making sure their coats of fur always shined with a healthy luster. Then there was Jean D’Sole. Following Claude’s death, the Frenchwoman built a strong friendship and alliance with Lynette. She had only one son and had always longed for a daughter. Her heart adopted Coco, and then Sidney as well. Later, Robert too was taken into her natural order. Coco and Sidney visited in Paris every year and later the smaller young man from Tanzania came along too. He had no maternal figure in his life and was deeply drawn to the slender Frenchwoman who possessed a measure of love for many. She visited them as often as possi-

ible in California and was always with one of them on the phone. Lynette and Jean planned to back the three in a small business following college. And this did in fact happen. They began at the bottom. They solicited donations to manufacture basic fresh clothing for the school children left abandoned by Corporatized Education out on the fringes. There—schools backed by donations—were often the only thread of decency available in these districts where rows of tents were employed as housing for those who just couldn’t function within the nearly sub-human world that lower C Class workers were often forced to live in. Coco, Sidney and Robert never made much money but still managed to enjoy themselves. Coco’s great love was needlework. She was always making something. She could stitch and talk on the phone for hours, or stitch and watch movies. Lynette told her once that if she ever got into a real relationship with a man, she’d better not be bringing that needlework into the bed! When the women were twenty-five years old, the change came. Lion-fighters Big-E White and Samoan Luani came into their lives and carried them off in different directions. Sidney went with her man to Hawaii and Coco with hers to Santa Barbara. Robert came along with Coco and they restarted their company exporting various products to small shops around the world. In Hawaii, Sidney was soon pregnant with the first of two sons that were born one year apart like Maxim and Merle. Coco reaffirmed to Sidney that she hadn’t called her fat out of meanness but because she just couldn’t stand to see her youthful beauty diminished in any way and had only wanted to spur her forward. “But look at you!” She said through another burst of tears, “oh…you’re looking perfect!” “Well you were right baby. And I’ve been training for six months now.” Sidney had laid her hand on Coco’s shoulder. “I don’t ever want you to be disappointed in me”. They hugged again and renewed their life-long sisterly vows of love for each other. Little B came over to the edge of the bed and put his paw on Sidney’s hip. She quickly gathered the pampered poodle dog up in her arms and fawned over him for a moment. He appeared intoxicated by the extra dose of women’s perfume that filled the air in the room. “Anyway sweetie, you’re gonna experience what happens to your body after childbirth. You gotta start praying for a son. Big-E needs to have a boy.” Sidney’s glanced at the doorway and lowered her voice a notch. “…to make up for that father of his!” That father…and his son, had made their way inside. Many of the guests had arrived and a bed of smiles quickly bloomed with the appearance Big-E White. Many of those blooms instantly wilted however as Buster entered. His presence made a lot of them a bit uneasy. Two of the exceptions were Bill and Ronnie Le Muffett. Their eyes twinkled at the site of Buster White and they rushed over to greet him and make some attempt to fulfill the promise they made to Coco to “take charge of him”. Buster liked those two. They at least knew how to have a good time which was more then he could say about Big-E whom he felt had turned into another of those “boss types” he really didn’t care to be around. Buster liked Merle too. He was great as an unknowing set-up man for one of his jokes. As for Maxim, well, Buster simply considered him to be the only real man he’d ever had the pleasure to meet in person. Shortly, the four Le Muffett men had Buster surrounded and were listening to his biting comical rendition of the people on the train ride up from L.A. But his gaze kept sliding off to the far side of the room to a table where Coco’s auntie Lucile was sitting. She saw Buster and was smiling at him with those shiny, flashing black eyes of hers. They had briefly met the previous year and had developed a strange chemistry. He wrapped up his story quickly and began to slide out of the group of men to go to her. Merle was going to block his way but Maxim held onto the back of his coat. When Buster had excused himself, Max addressed his brothers. “Might as well let him go on being what he’s always been”, he said watching what seemed like the opening movements of some play. Bill was smiling. “It gonna be a shame to see him go down like that”. “What did you say?” said Ronnie Le Muffett. “I got faith in ol’ Busta”. “I’m taking bets” said Merle. He calculated the odds as being 6-4 in auntie Lucile’s favor.

Buster was over eighty years old. Maxim, Bill and Ronnie each pulled out one-hundred dollar bills, made their bets and handed the money to Merle who quickly calculated the range of his own fixed winnings if he could work the room for more bettors and refresh the odds at each stage. He took a little pad of paper from his pocket, wrote down the bets with the change in the point spread, and handed a receipt to his brothers. “Listen” instructed Maxim, “Everybody gotta know there’s no active rootin’ on of the participants. We can’t be embarrassing Coco and Big-E.” Bill, half-jokingly, said they aught to get an ambulance on site in case the worst happened. “I’m stickin’ with my man Busta” said Ronnie with gleeful confidence that the old man would prevail. “He gonna ride da wild thang and come out smellin’ like a rose. You watch.” Big-E’s dad always impressed him as being a bit ahead of the opinions and expectations others had for him. Ronnie had never met another old guy like Buster White. As the Le Muffett brothers discussed the details and conditions of the bet, Big-E was chatting with Samoan Luani in a corner. The two Lion-fighters weren’t particularly close—not anything like their women—but they had known each other a long time and shared mutual respect that greatly overwhelmed the small amounts of professional jealousy between them. Jimmy Luani acquired the name Samoan Luani when he first hit the big stage in Lion-fighting. He had a clever manager that worked up a story of this boy who had killed every last lion in Samoa. The truth of the matter was that lion had never been seeded in Samoa. It was a lion-free land. Once however, a cargo ship had stored cages with thirty fringe lion at the docks and a group of boys including Jimmy, had snuck in during the night, cut the locks, and set them all free to go up into the into the hills. The next day they began to form into teams to go out and battle the large cats. Within a month they had spent their small supply of lion but loved every moment of it. Jimmy’s grandmother was Samoan but his father was mostly Hawaiian. And his mother was a Latina from Southern California—where he spent most of his time growing up. He had been famous in the region as a high school athlete who set records in football, baseball, wrestling and swimming. People said he was the most complete athlete they’d ever seen. He had been signed to attend the Southern California University and take over the quarterback position in his sophomore year. But during his first year there he developed an interest in Lion-fighting. He was a regular out on the fringe in Riverside. His prowess as a battalier grew by the month and he was quickly signed by Eastern Motors’ All Asia Team as backup for the aging superstar Fallon Chi. When Chi was beaten and partially devoured in the final match of the season, Jimmy instantly inherited the all-important middle spot. For season after season, Samoan Luani & The All Asia Team were outscored by the Le Muffett Crew. Jimmy was flanked by spearmen who were among the best martial artists in the world. They didn’t just drive lions the required distance off the field of play where the big cats were instantly hit with tranquilizer darts—they made a show of it. The Asian fighters would occasionally grab their spears at the center point and slap the beasts around a little. This had several effects. One, it made them the artistic favorites. They constantly had a pay-per-view audience greater then the Le Muffett Crew. And as Lion-fighters received a cut of the sales, they were the top money-makers in the sport. But their flourishes cost them time and points and aided in making them perennial runners up. The third effect of their style of play was that it cost four Asian spearmen their lives. To slap a Tall Lion around with the ends of a spear means that you must open up your front to the powerful forward burst that one of the great beasts can spring. As Maxim put it in one interview, “It may be pretty to watch, but its damn stupid!” While Jimmy Luani pretty much agreed with Max in this regard, he loved the guys he had played with and had cried after each of his four teammates had been killed. What jealousy he felt toward Big-E had to do with his good fortune to play with The Le Muffett brothers. They never fooled around with lion but processed them like a machine. Maxim controlled the field and orchestrated the effect with quick, coded commands to his brothers that even Big-E couldn’t always comprehend. Lions communicated with each other through scent and instinct and so did The Le Muffett Brothers. With the lightening reflexes of Maxim close by and the sheer effectiveness of the crew, Big E White never had to spend

attention protecting his sides and back. He was free to do what he did best which was to go one-on-one with the main alpha male. As was the case with Jimmy, Big-E’s mind moved at a completely higher level of speed then a lion’s. When the window of opportunity opened—even for a split second—Big-E batted the beast into unconsciousness setting it up to be finished off before being further processed into artifacts. Merle always immediately skinned the alpha male and packaged its sellable parts for the market. What jealousy Big-E had for Jimmy stemmed from feelings that his rival was perhaps the better of the two. But they were so close in talent and results that it always made for perfect fodder for sports shows. The statistics showed that Big-E White had knocked out 97.4% of all of the lions that came within striking distance of his bat, and that Samoan Luani had knocked out 96.9%. Considering all of the other intervening factors, nobody could really say one was better then the other. Maxim had set the standard with 97.8% during his seven seasons as a battalier. What went undisputed was the fact that of beasts that spent much time inside the “wheelhouses” of the three great Lion-fighters, only a small fraction went home that night. It’s not that the primary alpha male lions didn’t score on the battalier—this happened all of the time when the lions managed to get their razor claws on the protective gear Lion-fighters wore beneath their clothing. Lions ended up as trophies because that they couldn’t usually gain the upper hand on the men. They would become “passionately involved” and fight to the death rather then retreat. Plus, they really liked to eat Great Ape. There was an unknown biological factor to their involvement. Lion-fighting was a biological endpoint for the long evolutionary battle between man and the monster cats that roamed the earth. What made this Lion-world especially dangerous for human beings was the fact that such predatory beasts had become a bit larger and smarter for having eradicating the chimpanzee thousands of years before. Man was next up on the menu for them and they didn’t often walk away from an opportunity for human meat and to carry on the biological trial. When Man brought them back from the verge of extinction they came back taller, meaner and smarter then ever. Jimmy and Big-E weren’t talking about Lion-fighting however. And they avoided talk about the little spat their women had been involved in. They were talking about the photo they would make with Maxim before the dinner. When Max joined the two, Jimmy began to kid them both. “Hey, you guys gonna dress up in that uniform Coco has everybody wearing now?” He was smiling as Max looked down and shook his head. “The things they do for her” Max muttered. Coco had designed new uniforms for the crew but Max did not go along. He didn’t wear baggy shorts. He wore plain, loose-fitting black silk pants and shirt as he always had. Finally, Coco came out with Sidney and Little B and joined the party. She put the dog down and he immediately ran over to where Merle, Bill and Ronnie were sitting with some of their camera crewman and tranquilizer dart-shooting security enforcers. This was the first time they had seen him since “the Little B incident”. He went to Ronnie who picked him up and spoke to him so all the guys could hear. “Hey Little B, Merle say next time we get a lion he gonna send back a little treat for you!” The table had broken into such a roar of laughter that the everyone in the large room turned to look. Big-E looked over too and frowned. He quickly moved over to the table and grabbed Little B. “This dog being a nuisance?” He carried Little B out a door, put him down, and told him to go play with the children. Little B trotted off obediently and quickly ran into a pack of little girls who picked him up and began to fawn over him. There were twenty-seven children out on the back lawn of the property in an area that was set up for the girl’s summer camp Coco had hosted for three years in a row. It was available for girls from all of the different employment classes. Participants coming from the A Class families directly sponsored girls from the lower classes and for C Class castoffs that lived on the fringe. The theme of the camp was “Work and Have Fun”. It was developed from the pioneering education reform group called Precepts Of The Curriculum that Coco had been involved with in San Francisco Bay. The central idea was to “have fun” and learn to impregnate that spirit into the more structured and goal-oriented activity we call

work. The methodologies or logical activities for achieving this however, required far greater amounts of time for teaching and learning then was available. At a summer camp, they could only touch on a few things. But the girls and their families became year round program members and were offered counseling and various other guides for upping and maintaining the values introduced to them at camp. Coco’s involvement had increased rapidly when Precepts Of The Curriculum found itself targeted by the True Christo Leagues funded and manipulated by Fascists from the entertainment media and other areas that resented competition for the minds of the young. The mixing of C Class castoff children with A and B Class children was especially galling to them. The Fascists were basically against all things progressive. Little girls leaning sewing and physical culturing and creative thinking and “first things first” logic were a direct threat to “private control by the elite”—which was the rudimentary mantra of the Fascists. The A Class executives who went after Precepts Of The Curriculum were known for promoting the illusion of upward mobility rather then the reality-based, spiritualized, genuine article. They wanted children and their families tuned to channels such as SKNK TV with their patented All You Need To Know News programs such the The Lou Glen Show and the nightly predatory “fun” of You Stupid Idiot (Controversy/Comedy/Humiliation/Pretty People and MORE—a full 360 degrees of Riveting, Entertaining, Must-See Content!!!). Since all compensation packages offered to C Class workers included what was called “basic TV”, many children and their parents were swamped by it. Programs with enlightening Christoism were never included. Christo sayings such as, “blessed are the poor for they are filled with opportunity for becoming enriched with the True Spirit” and, “the lowly swine is more apt to attain the Kingdom of Light and Tranquility then is he who has become lost in the thickened mud of the material world”— statements such as these were the basis for entire mini-series’. But that is not what the Fascists and their water-carriers had in mind at all. Statements like these and folks like the Precepts Of The Curriculum people were an actual threat to the “private control” motto of the Fascist elite. That motto: We Are The Power In This Town! was actually coded into a secret handshake they used with one another at certain times. Eight distinct squeezes of the hand represented the syllables in the phrase. Sometimes one could see the ridiculous farce playing out comically in full view as the secret hand shakers counted beneath their breath trying to get it right. There were extra nannies hired by Coco for this day’s event. They were charged with watching over the children only to the extent they didn’t wander too far off, or go and start smacking one another— which especially the boys were prone to do in such a group with so many brothers and cousins. Two of them—young college students—were smiling as some girls fashioned a napkin into a bonnet and put it on Little B. The little dog, like usual, just sat there. Off a ways behind the property were two security men with automatic fast tranquilizer dart crossbows. They were hired to guard against lion. For the California Tall’s that roamed in the Gonzales National Forest east of the property, the squeals and shrieks and laughing sounds of a yard full of children playing could be heard for miles and would strike them like the ring of a dinner bell. It was a remote possibility, but Big-E would take no chances and paid the extra expense of the guards. A few of the boys were standing by a window peering in. They were looking at the old man with the hat and snow white beard. “Who that?” The younger boy had not seen the man before and he looked funny. Another boy replied; “I dunno”. He waved over yet another boy who was older then him—one of his cousins. “You know who that old guy is?” “Yeah, that Big-E’s dad Busta” he answered. “How’d Big-E get an old daddy like that?” “I dunno”. Inside, Buster White didn’t notice the boys peering in at him. His dancing eyes were focused exclusively on auntie Lucile. Her piercing gaze was aimed straight into his. Her three sisters sitting around the table hadn’t seen it in a long time but they knew what that meant. They grew up watching their oldest sister cast her eyes at men like that.