Westport

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Westport

Bob Carson

I’m a professional illustrator and photographer who likes to work rodeos and boxing. Danny and I were nearly killed by the bulls during the last bull-riding event at the big rodeo because neither one of us has been trained to be rodeo clowns and were left out in the middle of the ring with only our cameras to protect us from rampaging bulls. But of course danger lurks everywhere. I thought my girl friend was going to kill me the other day simply because I don’t have a regular job like hers. And last week I was nearly killed at the regular poker game, the game that has been played forever in Westport. Perhaps God does not play dice with the universe, instead he must play poker because poker is played forever and never begins or stops; therefore God only plays with derelicts, family cast-offs, black sheep, drunks, and dopers who have no other place to go and nothing else to do. I was holding a full house, my first full house in many moons, and of course I was excited and because of my advanced drunkenness I fell out of the window directly behind me leaving my cards on the table. We were on the third floor and I should have been messed up badly, but I hit an awning on the way down and only barely noticed the fall. I rushed back up the stairs to retrieve my full house and collect my big winnings but everyone had seen my cards. I only won the ante.

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Flannel Mouth

It’s hard to keep this poker game going with all these country morons afraid of losing as much as a nickel. I’m from Chicago, how I wound up surrounded by all these country morons and imbeciles I don’t know. I left Chicago and played quarterback for Southern Illinois, third string quarterback behind Bob Hart however I had to quit because I flunked creative writing for athletes. We had to write something on our own so I handed in The Old Man And The Fish, a word for word copy of Hemingway’s classic with fish

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replacing sea and my name replacing Hemingway. The professor had no sense of humor and flunked me even though I was third string quarterback behind Bob Hart. I became a salesman and finally found myself in Wichita Kansas, a place full of wind and advanced flatness. I found a woman down there called Carrie who was also full of wind and advanced flatness and had to punch out her estranged husband on our first date because he dove through Carrie’s picture window to threaten us with a nasty looking carpet knife. Now I’m married to her as her fifth husband. I’m David the Fifth, I am, I am; or maybe I’m David the Sixth, I am, I am. I don’t have much to brag about though I’m one of the few people to get kicked out of a dog show. Dog shows use overhead speakers to call for cleanups on aisle 5 or cleanups on aisle 7. I was watching a woman in a fancy gown combing a dog that looked like a mop head when the overhead speaker announced a cleanup on aisle 3. I told the woman she could stick a pole up her dog’s ass and cleanup on aisle 3; but she had no sense of humor either and had security kick me out of the dog show.

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Carrie

I know I’m good looking; but I don’t have any tits. If I had had tits I bet my life would have been different. I meet all these guys who are just wonderful guys when I first meet them and marry them but they all go to hell after a few years of marriage. Some of them declare bankruptcy, some of them have to be run off, and Flannel Mouth even died. I wonder if a boob job would help me out.

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The Count

Those idiots have tried to get me into that poker game several times, but all they play is nickel-dime stuff. That’s not even poker, that’s just bullshit, a waste of time. How can anyone bluff if it’s only nickel, dime, quarter? If you can’t bluff it’s not really poker, it’s just bullshit. I used to hustle golf and we would play for a hundred, two hundred dollars a hole. Now that’s real money, or at least it was years ago when I used to hustle golf. Anymore hundred dollars, two hundred dollars are just like nickel, dime. I would be willing to play for a thousand or two a hole now, but I’m too old for it.

Bob W.

I started the poker game and insisted that only five card stud, five card draw, and seven card stud could be played with a limit raise of twenty cents and only three raises

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allowed. I wanted a friendly game without any professional gamblers or con men, without all those weird games with deuces and one-eyed Jacks wild, and without all those high rollers from the suburbs with their trust funds and phony businesses. It was to be a Westport game played for fun. But before long all kinds of strange people started to show up. One of the women, the midnight gardener, insisted I have a garden and charged me for planting it with stuff she had dug up in the suburbs at night. Then when my wife died another woman showed up, took a shower, and cavorted about nude while she looted my closet of my dead wife’s clothes. She thought I didn’t notice her stealing the clothes because she was nude, but she was not that good looking in the nude. They took advantage of the poker game; they took advantage of me because I was a widower. I died and I don’t know whatever happened to the poker game or the midnight gardener. Now there’s no one in Westport who has the Rubiyat tattooed all over his body.

Hunsaker

I didn’t want in their poker game and I certainly didn’t want to be the accountant for that miserable newspaper which was nothing more than sex, slander, lies, and invective. After all, I have a reputation and a past to protect. Not only am I a C.P.A., but I’m also an M.D., an attorney, a Navy Seal, and a pilot who has flown over one thousand missions from carriers. I can’t remember exactly how many missions I’ve flown off carriers but I’m sure it’s more than a thousand. I’ve also

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climbed Mt. Everest over 15 times which is probably a world’s record, but I don’t really care if it’s a world record or not. I’ve also climbed every mountain in North and South America over five thousand feet which I could list because I have a photographic memory, but why bother? I spent one afternoon memorizing the Library of Congress. I’m currently working as the financial controller for a brush company. My accounting is creative, to say the least. The brush company is doing great according to my figures. Couldn’t be better.

Tommy K.

I work as a detective in Westport and I can’t help checking into things people tell me. When Hunsaker told me he had memorized the Library of Congress in one sitting I knew I should check him out. He’s not a C.P.A., a doctor, lawyer, or any of that other stuff. I confronted him with his lies and told him everyone liked him anyway and he didn’t really need to build himself up with a bunch of lies. I asked him why he told all those lies, and he said it was because he was dying. I asked him how he knew he was dying and he said his doctor at K.U. Med Center, a doctor Goldberg, had told him he was dying. I called up K.U. Med Center and asked for Dr. Goldberg. There is no Dr. Goldberg at K.U. Med Center.

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Reasonably Honest Ed.

A lot of people call me reasonably honest Ed. I don’t mind, at least it’s a lot better than Honest Bill, a guy who is not known for his scrupulous honesty. I’ve been trying to get into management at the Westport paper, but Ralph is too lazy to change anything. I have no idea why he even has a newspaper; he’s such a big gossip, the Westport reporter, he doesn’t need a newspaper. All he has to do is run his mouth. At least Ralph is a little better than that guy from Manhattan who defiled every building on the campus by masturbating in a bathroom in every building on campus. After he graduated his parents sent him to Washington D.C. where he defiled the Smithsonian, the Congress, and the Lincoln monument. After defiling Washington, his parents sent him on a European tour where he defiled all the great cultural monuments of our heritage including the Parthenon, Acropolis. Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower. Personally I would rather pleasure myself with farm animals because the emotional overhead isn’t nearly as large as it is with the ladies, though I had quite a time with the Kansas Pork Producers Queen awhile ago. She and I serpentined all over eastern Kansas on a big drunk for several days which ended when I totaled the car. I had to call my sister for help and it

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turned out she was a very good friend of the Kansas Pork Producers Queen. I was very embarrassed. The police are interested in me again for some reason so I will have to serpentine my way out of here. Don’t worry though, I have my ways.

Ellen

I’ve been looking for a job in public relations for quite awhile now, I’ve spent several years tending bar while I’m waiting for a good job. I need to put my journalism degrees to good use and there’s nothing wrong with taking a job in public relations in spite of what some of the Westport assholes say. It’s impossible to get a job working for a

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legitimate newspaper anyway, and even if you do get a newspaper job they don’t pay anything. One of my customers asked for change for a hundred dollar bill a customer had given him for a cheeseburger. I gave him the change but neglected to take the bill. He called me up that night to tell me why I was a hundred short in my cash drawer. I wasn’t a hundred short in my cash drawer because we rarely count it down because the owner comes in several times a day to stuff the money in his pocket so he can get the money before one of his bartenders gets it. I don’t do that kind of thing myself. I took two of the best looking women that tend bar with me down to see my old boss in Westport. They were dressed to kill, and they did. You should have seen him drool, especially over the good looking brunette who is also a mortician. My old boss asked her what she did for a living. She said, “My day starts when your day is finished, I mean really finished.”

Linda B.

Ralph, the secretary at the newspaper took me out on a date where we did nothing but drink and talk. I told him I had moved out here from New Jersey and had moved to a farm which was really dull because there was nothing to do on the farm but watch the marijuana grow. Ralph looked down his nose and told me his relatives lived on a farm close to Westport years ago and were busy all the time because they had chickens, pigs, horses, cows, a huge garden, and did it all with no electricity or running water. Big deal! Someone has to grow the marijuana around here, otherwise losers like Ralph would never be able to pick up any real tomatoes in Westport. But I’m not like that myself. I’ll go

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out with a guy if I find him attractive even if he doesn’t have any dope.

Michael J. Finnegan

Once I was fired from my grocery store job I was out of money fast and had to do something fast. First I tried to get food stamps. I filled my refrigerator with rotten food from the dumpsters to show the social worker who came to interview me, but I didn’t get any food stamps anyway. Next I went into the moving business, the light moving business. Actually I’m too heavy for light moving and too light for heavy moving, but what the hell. I found the moving business to be more difficult than I imagined. I did a lot of bids over the telephone, but the customer would tell me they had two or three easy pieces and when I showed up with my helper Ralph I found a stuffed giraffe, grand piano, stuffed hippopotamus, full sized juke box stuck in a basement in an impossible way, four tons of books and ten tons of garbage in a three story walkup moving to a four story walkup. If the customer was not at the pickup I would throw everything possible out the window and let Ralph try to catch it. Some guy asked Ralph for our business card because he was going to move in a month and he wanted to be sure he didn’t hire

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us. Although we caused some damage, we never destroyed a piano like the guys we saw topple an upright piano out of a pickup. The piano shattered into thousands of pieces; the two guys got out and tried to put the thing together in the middle of the intersection. I also went into the rental business because there are a lot of houses selling for nothing in Westport. I had a lot of trouble with some of my tenants. One of them met me on the porch of my house with a pistol when I tried to collect some rent which was six months past due and told me to get the hell off her porch. When I took her to court I told everyone she had told me to get the hell off my porch and she stood up and said, “Yes, your honor, and I’d do it again.” Everyone in the courtroom laughed except me. Someone kept calling me at three in the morning, cocaine hour in Westport. I told Larry someone was really bugging me by calling at three in the morning. Next night Larry called me at three in the morning to tell me he was not the person calling at three in the morning. Of course Larry was not right anyway. He would drive his sainted mother to one of the bars in Westport and leave her outside in the car while he came in and got snockered. One day when it was about zero outside he left the car running to keep his mother warm while he put on his drunk. I snuck out the back door of the bar, introduced myself to his mother and drove the car around the corner. He called me up at three next morning to ask if stealing his car and kidnapping his mother had finally satisfied me.

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Larry

After Mike Finnegan stole my car and kidnapped my mother I called him up and asked if he were satisfied with stealing my car and kidnapping my mother. Of course he wasn’t satisfied, he’s never satisfied. At least Finnegan isn’t as bad as that miserable helper of his, Ralph. After my mother died and I burned down her house I had to move into an apartment. Of course I didn’t have the money to pay the rent and drink too, so I didn’t pay the rent. First things first. After they evicted me and threw all my stuff out on the lawn I had to call Ralph to help me. First he tried to get me to go to a hospital just because I don’t look very good and my legs are rainbow colored from my diabetes. Then he asked me why all my stuff seemed to be moving around on the lawn. Well, what did he expect! That apartment was infested with cockroaches and when the sheriff threw my stuff out they threw a bunch of cockroaches out with it. After we were finished moving me into a Salvation Army apartment Ralph started bitching about the cockroaches which were loose in his miserable car. Cockroaches will get into anything, anyone knows that. He also kept bitching about the cat piss he said was sprayed all over my furniture and clothes. My poor cat had run off when they threw my stuff out, but Ralph didn’t care. All he cared about was cat piss. After the move off the lawn I couldn’t find one of my expensive Birkenstock sandals. I called Ralph and asked him what he had done with my Birkenstock sandal, but all he wanted to talk about were my cockroaches infesting his car.

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Action Jackson

I gave the first eulogy at Mike Finnegan’s funeral. He had hired me to help him and we were having a very bad day, nothing seemed to work right. But then we were waiting at a light and watched two black guys with an upright piano in the back of their pickup truck take the corner too fast. The piano fell out of the truck and smashed into thousands of pieces on the pavement. They stopped and tried to put the piano back together but of course it was impossible. Their bad day was even worse than our bad day. Not too bad for an eulogy, was it? After years welding at the Leeds auto plant I went to the Art Institute on a scholarship. I wish I had never gone to the

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Artytute. I didn’t understand an artist needs to be rich or have wide financial support of some kind. I did church steeples, mandalas, and a fiber-glass goose five stories high mounted on gimbals to rotate into the wind. I filled the goose up with empty beer cans while I was working on it. In order to bend steel for the steeples I pinned the strips to the concrete floor of my studio and used a blow torch to bend the steel strip in the shape I had drawn on the floor. A guy from the research department at U.S. Steel in Weirton said they were doing the same thing on a giant lathe in his lab. He was very impressed with my technique. Anyhow, I was never paid enough to cover my expenses which were considerable because of all my various girl friends. I finally gave up and took up drinking beer on a regular and continual basis. All of my girl friends either died or ran away to the suburbs, and now I have to satisfy myself with the crack whores on Broadway. However, I’m still the Sheriff of Westport. I’m going to put on my Confederate Captain’s uniform, my Red Army fur cap with the red star, and my sheriff’s badge and patrol the streets and bars right now.

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Annie

I used to be proud of my police record and would tell everyone I always got my money’s worth when I ordered my police record because it was about an inch thick. However I came to realize it made things a little difficult getting a job, not that I ever wanted a job. No one ever made any money in a job other than some sleazy politician. I used to own and run bars, that’s the way to make a little money. But anyway I decided to get my record expunged and paid the district attorney a lot of money to do it. He assured me it was done, that I no longer had a police record an inch thick. When I tried to vacation in Canada they wouldn’t let me in the country because of my police record. I was furious; but the district attorney said I really didn’t have any record anymore as far as the locals were concerned, but that there was nothing he could do with the federal spook files. I’d like to stick those federal spook files up his ass.

Reasonably Honest Ed

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I was downtown without my cell phone and had to use one of the few public pay phones left in Westport. Just before I tried to step into the booth some woman crowded in front of me and started to talk on the phone. She kept talking on the phone while a long tail of phone waiters attached themselves to me. After the tail had grown to about a half mile I tapped her on the shoulder and asked her how much longer she was going to take. She informed me I should buzz off, but I wasn’t about to lose my first place in the tremendous line behind me. After a few more eons I tapped her on the shoulder again and she told me to buzz off again. I had had enough. I reached over her shoulder and disconnected her. She started screaming for the police and security so I ran up the stairs, and onto the roof where I could see the police and security swarming below. I had trouble serpentining my way out of that mess, but I managed it. I have my ways.

Mrs. S.

I was downtown and discovered I had forgotten my cell phone; therefore I had to place my order with the antique dealer in New York through one of those pay phones that are so hard to find anymore. After finally spotting a phone I had to crowd in front of some idiot who was obviously about to spend all day talking to some other idiot about absolutely nothing. I didn’t even get half the way through my order before he began to bother me. I told that idiot to buzz off but he was incapable of understanding common English and

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before long he was bothering me again by tapping on my shoulder, drooling, and slurring his words. I told him to buzz off again. When he reached over my shoulder and disconnected me from my dealer in the middle of my order I started screaming for the police and for security. My God, I’m glad I live in the suburbs where we have to import idiots like that if we want to see one. But why would anyone want to see one of these idiots.

Phil Nugent

Mrs. S. always has me move her antiques though Mike Finnegan has tried to get her business several times. I even ran all the way to New York to pick up a load that had been shipped in from London and Paris. Finnegan is not the kind of mover an antique dealer needs; he’s an incredibly quick mover who has to be done by four so he can have a beer. He’s the last person who would be careful moving antiques.

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Mike Finnegan

Phil seems to think I’m trying to take business away from him. I wouldn’t touch that Mrs. S. with a ten-foot pole. She has ten thousand shills in her antique auctions and has Pete repair all that busted up junk without telling anyone. Phil had me help move a busted up piece of junk she had sold to the president of United Telephone for five thousand dollars. I wouldn’t even put a piece of junk like that in my garage with all my used refrigerators. We moved the piece of junk into the United Telephone executive suites whose wall were covered with all those do it yourself junk paintings by number. Evidently the president was quite an artist and kind of sewer.

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I Powers

Actually my first name is Ed. I used to be the lead attorney in a very good law office. I was a guide for hunting elk in western Colorado before that. I was also a lobbyist in Tallahassee Florida which was quite a challenge since more corruption goes down in a morning in Tallahassee than goes down all year in Topeka or Jefferson City. I was also the editor of several small newspapers from time to time. I was famous in high school because I could swear better than anyone else. I was the center of attraction; everyone would gather around me to hear me swear. I’m ticked at Marvin who calls me I Powers just because I start every sentence with I. Actually my first name is Ed.

Ellen

I was the attending Bar Goddess when Marvin, Joe T., and Ralph came in the other day. Somehow we got into a conversation where I had to point out that men of color like

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Joe T. are much better lovers than white guys like Marvin or Ralph. I explained as clearly as I could that white guys are always trying to prove themselves while blacks, Mexicans, and Indians are much more spiritual and actually enjoy themselves. Ralph called me a racist. But what can you expect out of Ralph? He’s everyone’s favorite fall guy.

Bob Haley

My tax business in Westport is seasonal so I have most of the year to devote to international travel, not that I’m very good at international travel. Last year I got drunk on the plane down to Mexico City and got off the feeder DC-3 at Guatemala instead of Costa Rico. I couldn’t understand what I was doing in Guatemala especially since there seemed to be some kind of civil war there. I ran after the plane with my suitcase, but fell in a ditch on the runway. I couldn’t get out of the ditch and had to spend the entire night there. There might be anything in a ditch in the tropics, even Bob Haley.

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Mike Finnegan

Bob Haley liked to tell me about all his adventures overseas. One time he told he met a beautiful Indian woman in Tahiti who offered to be his wife for the night. He said they went up to his room and did it five times in one night. “You mean,” I said, “she made you take the garbage out five times in one night”.

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Horton

I liked to travel every chance I got out of Westport. One of my favorites was the Trans-Siberian Express from the Pacific Ocean to Moscow. Everyone spent their time drinking vodka and everyone was happy to share their vodka even though I couldn’t speak Russian; and the time never changed, we were always on Moscow time. My favorite traveler was the guy who tied several dozen weather balloons to a lawn chair and sailed up to over 14,000 feet. When I died they tied several dozen balloons to an empty lawn chair and let it loose in the middle of Westport.

Jan

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I love to travel, but sometimes it just doesn’t work. I took a Windjammer cruise with George, Wendy, and Helen a few years ago. It was a disaster from start to end. Wendy kept flipping George the bird on the airplane as we took off from Westport and the air marshals threatened to throw George off the plane because he was returning the bird to Wendy. They told him they were going to land the plane in Tulsa just for him so they could kick him off. Then Wendy stuck her nose up in the air and refused to talk to anybody but Helen the rest of the trip, Helen fell out of her bunk on the Windjammer and got all screwed up, and George got so drunk he nearly fell overboard several times.

George

I like to travel but especially to race tracks. I used to have a part ownership in several cheap claimers, nothing very fast. My jockey, Stoney Whittle, told me Lydian Nose had done six furlongs in one minute and twelve seconds; but my trainer said Lydian Nose couldn’t do six furlongs in one minute and twelve seconds in the back of a pickup.

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When I died they erected a shrine for drunks to me at the newsroom. It has a huge picture of me holding a cigarette in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. The caption on the picture says, “If you can handle our customers you can handle our food.”

Wendy

I used to take a bullhorn to the dealers selling crack in front of the plasma joint. “I know what you’re doing, you assholes,” I’d scream and the bullhorn would magnify my voice 10 times. Should have seen them scurry. I always seem to wind up back in Westport, my home town. Last place I lived out of town was a small village in Belize which had parades nearly every week. Some American had given the village two Harleys, but he didn’t give them any money for gasoline. Most parades were led by Indians walking the two Harleys in front. Now I’m also a landowner in Climax Springs on Bikini Beach. I’ll have to score big soon or I’ll never survive old age. No one can get a raise or a loan at a decent rate anymore and they’re about to demolish social security. I’ll

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have to score big soon or I’ll never survive old age. Not many survive old age, do they?

Pat

I had a girl friend named Wendy who had several boy friends other than me. One night she called me up and asked me to bring her some of her clothes because one of her other boy friends had taken her to a motel and stranded her with no clothes. I bundled some of her clothes together and took it over to the motel. I guess the other boy friend was waiting outside the motel because he took the license plate number off my truck and called the police telling them I had stolen his truck. Before I could get back home the police pulled me over, forced me out of my truck, and had me lie face down on the road with my hands behind my head. The police maintained I had stolen my truck. No wonder we have such a huge number of people in jail. I was arrested for stealing my own truck!

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Chris

You have to be careful what you pour in your belly. If you drink fourteen vodkas it’s like pouring fourteen crazy Russians in your stomach. Then if you pour a couple of Scotch and waters on top of that it’s like adding a couple of wild Scots to the crazy Russians. A couple of Jagermeisters brings two belligerent Germans into the mix. But the worst of all is drinking just one shot of Kentucky bourbon; that adds a peckerwood to the mix. God help you.

Action Jackson

I’m so skinny I have to jump around in the shower to get wet. I’m so skinny it’s easy for me to fall in open manholes, and of course there are lots of open manholes in Westport. I

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fell into a manhole the other day and happened to be walking past it the next day while it was being filmed by a local T.V. network. I told them I had fallen in the manhole and they turned all their cameras on me. I have become famous and most of the manholes in Westport are called Jackson holes. It’s hard fulfilling my duties as sheriff.

Craig Gasser

That idiot Jackson actually thinks he’s the sheriff of Westport just because he was elected in a phony election which wasn’t even run by government agents. He’s not even a government or police agent; how could he possibly be a viable politician? Now he wants to run against me for mayor. I’ve already had the agencies look up as much dirt as possible on Jackson. Aside from being an idiot he is very late on returning books to the libraries, he never pays a fine to the libraries, and it’s possible he has actually stolen public property from the libraries. I believe he was reading a stolen book when he fell in the manhole from which he received a lot of unwarranted publicity. Wait till I leak that!

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I’m running on a platform of hope and change. Of course if I’m elected there’s no hope for any change that means anything. My slogan is ‘United We Stand’, which really means, ‘Divide and Conquer’ of course. Of course a lot of idiots are elected, but no one likes an idiot who falls into a manhole while reading a book he’s stolen from the library.

Michelle

I’m a very nice girl even though I’ve been married five or six times. I don’t understand why a girl can’t be respectable just because she’s been married five or six times. I was tending bar in this dump in Westport and one of the suburban suits asked me what happened to my last husband. I explained my last husband owned the Tennessee Walking Horse and had a bad customer who had just been released from the Leavenworth penitentiary. Unfortunately the customer refused to leave so my husband had to beat him to death with a pool cue. The suburban suit seemed to be very upset at this story, gulped the rest of his drink, and ran away. I can’t understand what these suburban suits have against a nice girl like me.

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Janie

I worked in a dump in Westport named Charlie’s which was owned by a guy named Charlie who was a belligerent drunk. One day Charlie was drinking with his buddy Charlie Gordon along with three or four other drunks. Suddenly Charlie told Charlie Gordon he was going to bust him in the mouth if he said something again, whatever it was. I guess Charlie Gordon repeated it because Charlie busted him in the mouth. Charlie Gordon retreated to the couch to nurse his split lip while the other three or four drunks ran out of the bar. I told Charlie, the owner, to leave because he was running off all his business. He couldn’t believe he was running off his business and wanted to know how he was running off all his business. I told him he had just hit his friend Charlie Gordon in the mouth but the owner didn’t believe me. He turned to Charlie Gordon and asked him if he had actually hit him. Charlie Gordon replied, “No, Charlie, you’d never do a thing like that.”

Rattlesnake Dave

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I have a lot to do just to earn a living playing the guitar outside these gas stations in the West Bottoms of Westport, but when I was a kid down in Louisiana there was nothing to do but get that worthless sheriff to chase us. That sheriff was so lazy we had a hard time getting him to chase us at all or even to see we were there. Finally my corn-bred daddy told us to throw empty beer cans at the sheriff’s car. That worked. I’m called Rattlesnake Dave because I put as rattlesnake in the lunch pail of this worthless bully who had been pickin on me in the fifth grade.

Tygert

I’ve worked as a cameraman for most of the T.V. stations in Westport at one time or another, but now I’m free-lancing with a truck that uploads to satellites for the networks. In other words there’s nothing I like more than a good disaster.

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My favorite season is the hurricane season, and there’s nothing better than a nice juicy hurricane. The last one I filmed blew my truck nearly 50 yards across a parking lot in New Orleans. But there’s not much to film in Westport. Yesterday I was reduced to filming a manhole because someone named Jackson had fallen into it. A strange skinny man dressed as a Confederate captain sporting a large sheriff’s badge told me he had fallen into the manhole. I turned the camera on him. He said everyone in that part of Westport were calling them Jackson holes instead of manholes in his honor. I congratulated him.

Juanita

I work in a grocery store in Westport and have a good time. All the gringo guys must think I’m sexy because they all like to talk to me although some of them say some very strange things. Yesterday some funny looking guy asked me if I knew it was Hitler’s birthday. I said I didn’t know it was Hitler’s birthday and that I didn’t know any Hitler. He said my Dad would surely know who Hitler was. I told him my Dad still lived in Mexico and didn’t know anyone here in the States.

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Javier

I think I was caught in a sting. The Federales filmed me buying stolen government cheese. The guy who sold me the cheese didn’t tell me it was stolen, he just said it was good government cheese. There was no doubt about it, it was sure good cheese. I had to get an attorney. He defended me in court by getting a whole bunch of my customers to testify that the cheese on my tacos, burritos, and so on was so bad it couldn’t possibly be good government cheese. I was offended, but the judge let me off with a small fine. I think it was a warning sting, a way of telling me I was being watched by the Federales. All the locals say the Federales in Westport are different than the Federales in Mexico but I can’t tell the difference.

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Spike

It’s not easy being a girl named Spike. I find very few men that can keep up with me. I was giving Flannelmouth a ride and banged into the car in front of me just for a little fun, and Flannelmouth jumped out of my car and ran down an alley. I was screwing Richard on his moldy old couch and his roommate came through the front door. Richard started to pull out, and I said “Keep it up, he can watch if he wants.” But the worst was the time Tom had me by the throat on the kitchen floor and was trying to finish me off. I was about to black out so I said, “Go for it.” That chickenshit stopped choking me immediately and ran off just like Flannelmouth. I should take better care of myself, I get far too many bad colds. Some of them are so bad I have trouble getting served by some of the snotty waitresses in Westport because I’m continually coughing and spitting up.

Rita

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You see those two lesbians with bird flu over there! They coughed all over me and didn’t even try to cover their mouths. I think I’m going to throw up; I hate being coughed on by lesbians with bird flu.

Greg I don’t know where Mo finds these lunatics to tend bar for him. This last one is beyond belief. Only Randy and I were in the Bar and she decided to come out from behind the bar and test both of us for cancer with her nose. She sniffed Randy for awhile and announced he didn’t have cancer and would never have cancer. Then she came over to me and sniffed around. She said I already had cancer, it was too late for me. I finished my drink in a hurry and left.

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Judge Still

I was a judge in the Marine Corps before I became a judge here in Westport. I seem to get all kinds of unfair comments about the law and prosecutors and judges. One guy said the Marines don’t have fair trials because they don’t have trials by a jury of peers. I pointed out the Marines have a jury of officers, and he said it was impossible for an enlisted man to have a fair jury trial if the jury were all officers. Of course we don’t have many jury trials anymore here in Westport; they’re too expensive. A plea bargain is much more efficient. At least we don’t have judges that feed inmates into private prison systems and get a kickback. At least none of the judges I know take kickbacks. At least I listen to the criticisms, most of the judges I know in Westport wouldn’t bother. Why should we? We direct the police power; everyone is at our wisdom and mercy.

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Ralph How many elephants fit in one bedroom? I see the all powerful and incredibly expensive military elephant and the corrupt justice system elephant and the impossible medical system elephant; but no one else sees anything. How many invisible elephants fit in one bedroom?

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Carol Some ugly girl asked me where she could buy some weed and I told her out of sheer friendliness. She was a police agent and I was arrested on fourteen counts of distributing narcotics. The local district attorney was running for reelection and needed as many drug convictions as possible. The prosecutor reduced the fourteen to just one count of distributing narcotics out of the goodness of his heart and the court decided I only needed a few months in the women’s prison in Vandalia. My brother who has plenty of money didn’t want to get involved and said “Let justice be served.” Justice was served. Fuck justice and the horse it rode in on.

Ralph

Carol insisted I take her 25 miles north to her brother’s Field of Dreams extravaganza in Weston. Close to the main

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road was a guest’s parking lot with alligator shuttles run by Mexicans who worked on Carol’s brother’s large farming operation. No doubt some of them were farmers displaced from Mexico by the tidal wave of subsidized corn produced by large farmers in the States. The house was set at least a half mile back from the road and was made of metal, a prefabricated Butler building like all of the buildings constructed by her brother’s construction company. Millions of dollars of new combines, tractors, and other equipment was displayed next to the house. The usual games and rides of a small carnival were gathered just beyond the farm equipment and next to a well maintained baseball diamond surrounded by a field of gigantic corn. Two buses of inner city blacks dressed in baseball uniforms had been bused in for the occasion and most of them sat in the bleachers or played catch among themselves. After some of the local ladies had finished digging in the diamond’s dirt for buried diamonds, a team of ex-professional baseball players appeared out of the corn and introduced themselves over a P.A. system that had appeared from nowhere. After a few preliminary baseball flourishes one of the baseball players spoke to the assembled blacks about the long odds of ever making any money as a professional baseball player. He must have been right since it was obvious he had had to become a professional actor in addition to playing baseball. He said they should stick to their studies, that they should hit the books hard and forget about baseball. Carol’s brother is as wrong about Westport’s school system as he is about the justice system. I went through the Westport school system and still have a hard time reading and writing at my advanced age.

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Bill Grigsby

My friend Victor was blathering again about what a great president George W. Bush had been, so I flipped open my cell phone and said, “Hello is this 911? Send someone in a hurry, there’s a very bad man on the loose, a bad man that thinks George W. was great. He must be delusional and probably insane. Help, help, help.”

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Ralph

After many moons of unemployment I finally got a job at the Department of Fraudulent Statistics. The first day was spent in a classroom where the teacher told us to turn to page 117 in our manuals; but unfortunately there was no page 117 in our manuals. Then she instructed us to look very closely at the upper left hand corner of form D1857435669332. She was holding it up in front of the class and from the back it really was the upper left hand corner of form D-1857435669332, but it was the upper right hand corner from the point of view of anyone in the class. Then she needed to know who hadn’t shown up and someone behind me said, “I’m not here”, and everyone laughed. She was not amused and told us she was not amused. Next we had to sign an affidavit saying we understood confidentiality, which carried a fine of 250,000 dollars and 10 years imprisonment for any violation even though the Department of Fraudulent Statistics sold all its statistics to anyone idiotic enough to pay.

Alfred

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I was stopped while driving black in Westport and the officer wrote me a ticket for not having my seat belt connected while two crackheads were making a deal on one corner next to us, two hookers were trolling in the middle of the block right behind three deadheads with open bottles of beer. “Are you out of your mind,” I said, “why are you giving me a seat belt ticket with all these crackheads, hookers, and open containers of beer all around us?” The officer than proceeded to write me another ticket for verbal abuse of legal authority.

Brenda G.

I’m the Astrologer to the Stars; that’s what is on my business cards. I’m good at it and I know what I’m doing. You have to be sure of yourself if you’re charging a hundred dollars an hour for a reading. I’m also a Jazz Singer and like to sit around my apartment naked and sing jazz. Did I

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mention I’m hot? I’m really hot, I’m scorching hot. I’m also a waitress but I don’t like to talk about that much. Ralph asked me to use my powers to predict some horse races for him. I told him I don’t do that kind of thing. That’s so rude and crude, so lower-class.

Jan I have a five hundred pound cement turtle in my front yard, a pack of wild cats in the back yard, and an ex-con in a wheelchair who is trying to kill me. Some people in Westport think I’m a little eccentric; but that’s because they don’t understand how dangerous a determined maniac in a wheelchair can be. I tried to get the maniac’s parole officer to serve him a restraining order; but they don’t give a damn. I can’t get anyone to give a damn. This man in the wheel chair could easily become a serial killer like Bob Berdella.

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Ralph

One year when the Final Four in basketball was in town I stopped by Bob Berdella’s shop window in the Westport Flea Market. He had four skulls in his window named the Final Four. “Wow,” I thought, “it’s incredible what can be done with plastic.” The skulls looked real down to the smallest details. I found out later the skulls were real and belonged to four of Bob’s victims. Of course there are a lot of eccentrics in Westport. Last week I was talking to a blonde who explained I was living next door to White Trash Beach. I couldn’t help but notice the pickup in which she was sitting was filled with trash, and I couldn’t help but notice her black helper kept running into me with his lawn mower. She sports a twenty foot tall wooden crane in her front yard which never seems to lose its Christmas wreath. Two blocks away lives a misanthropic architect who hides his house in a jungle of Missouri trees and weeds. His neighbor tells me he’s a terrible nut and eccentric even though she has a year round artificial waterfall instead of a front yard.

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Honest Bill Last week my friend Victor who gives me all kinds of comps at his restaurants introduced me to Joe who owns three Rancho Doodas in the suburbs. I explained to Joe that I was such a well known loud mouth that I could do marvels for his business and that I was just what he needed in these tough times and that he should immediately write me a comp for his restaurants on the back of one of the bad horse racing tickets we had scattered all over the table. I made sure he signed it and included his phone number so his staff would know it was the real McCoy. Everyone who watched me perform was amazed that Joe actually did it. I told them it’s a simple matter of knowing who can be worked and who can’t. I am the King of Comp.

Joe T.

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I told Sandy the longest journey in the world was from Brooklyn to Manhattan where I was moving from Westport. She was so impressed she insisted on marrying me and coming with me so she could overcome being a Midwestern Jew with little or no class. However, she had a hard time in New York. She took her recipe for gefelte fish down to the famous fish market in Manhattan and the counter man turned up his nose at her list of perch, blue gill, and pike and returned with ingredients for a proper recipe made of real ocean-going fish rather than that lower class list of God awful Midwestern fish. But she did very well in her community organizing classes at Columbia and when we returned to Westport she excelled in putting the fear of God in the worthless teachers and administrators that infest the Westport school system.

Sandy T.

I applied what I had learned at the school for community organizers in New York as best I could. My teachers and Joe told me I would not be appreciated for my efforts to improve the school system in Westport, but I didn’t expect the kind of resistance I got from many of the teachers in the school system. I was trying to improve their teaching, to improve their point of view, to improve their social connections with their students and the parents; but no one seemed to be

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receptive. They all had rusty wings and had forgotten how to fly; that is, if they had ever known how to fly. I wonder how many of them had ever flown.

Rob V. The school system hired a professional union buster to come in to lecture the teachers on the evils of unions and everything they had ever done in the past. She kept talking about rusty wings, she said we all had rusty wings. I wanted to take my rusty wings and stick them straight up her ass. The Westport school system was paying her thousands of dollars an hour but wouldn’t admit exactly how much they were paying her.

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Ralph

I attended Westport schools during the second world war. I sat in a crowded classroom with 125 other kids in the first, second, and third grades behind wooden desks with real ink wells filled with ink. Of course I had a girl with pigtails placed strategically in front of me. After several sessions with the vice-principal I was given a note for my mother. My mother read the note, frowned, gave the note to me and asked if I had any idea what it said. It said something about me being an idiot who would be held back in class if I didn’t improve radically soon. My mother was overjoyed that I could read the note and asked me to redouble my efforts. I knew she wasn’t talking about dipping pigtails in ink wells and collected piles of workbooks from the teacher which I diligently filled with the only word I knew how to write, the word ‘the’. My next note congratulated me on my incredible improvement and promised my promotion to the next class at year’s end. The public schools in Westport have been bad since world war two. I don’t see that anything has changed much in spite of all the sound and fury over many years.

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Jake

I found out I had stage four cancer about 2 months ago. I felt fine until I started on the prescribed chemotherapy; now I feel like shit. I feel like I’ve been hit by a Mack truck. Well, I’m not going out like so many Westport drunks do. I’m not falling off my barstool into oblivion. I’m going to straighten up and fight this all the way.

Russ Hadley

I came to Westport from Bridgeport Connecticut in New England where they know all about busting balls. I wasn’t about to stick around and get my ball’s busted; I came all the way west to Westport. I drive a cab but I don’t let

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anyone bust my balls although the department of Homeland Security would probably like to bust my balls if they ever saw the listing on my cell phone. I must have two dozen sheiks listed, two dozen fellow cab drivers sheiks who run their own cabs. The sheiks go to work for the Lebanese Christian who owns the big cab company then refuse to pay the nut which runs close to $100 a day. When the Lebanese finally catches up with them they have enough money and connections to buy their own cab and go into business on their own. I think they forced the Lebanese to sell out to a big corporation which doesn’t care because they’re too big to fail and get all kinds of bailouts from the government. The sheiks and I send each other business. I don’t know if they’re really sheiks or not but they don’t seem to mind my calling them sheiks. Even the Iranians don’t care.

Evans Z.

I think the Arabs and the Iranians forced Bill George out of the cab business. They just can’t stand Christians. Most of the Christians in Westport are not really Christians because they don’t know what it’s like being a real Christian. But Lebanese Christians who know what it’s like to be persecuted by the Muslims and the Jews are real Christians. Lebanese Christians are the only real Christians in Westport.

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Ralph

I stopped at Faucett Missouri on my way to Omaha to get something to eat at the truck stop. I ate at the counter next to a man who had a story to tell, a story he had to tell whoever sat in my spot at the counter. He said he had just awakened from a strange dream in which people were sticking tubes and needles into him at every orifice for days on end. He said he had just found out it wasn’t a dream at all; that he had had a very serious heart attack and that he had been in the hospital for months, most of it in intensive care. He said he had just been released from the hospital and found his wife had sold the house, taken all the money in his accounts, and divorced him and left town. “My God,” I said, “that’s terrible.” “No it isn’t,” he said, “I’m finally a free man again.”

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Mark Inman

I have no idea how I wound up as a bartender in this dive bar, this absolute dump. The air-conditioning rarely works, the plumbing isn’t right, the interior walls have holes in them, and it stinks. The only good thing is the squalor is contained in a small area. The bar is so small everyone can hear everyone else in the place. It’s like a small stage where everyone gets to perform, not that the performances are worth remembering. For instance, last night Carol bitched me out for putting a splash of water in her bourbon and Coke. “You fucking asshole,” she screamed, “you put water in my drink, you lousy scumbag. Fuck you and fuck the horse you rode in on.” I poured the drink out and poured her one with no water but she refused to quit complaining about water in her drink. Next a derelict wandered in the door and wanted to exchange three bus transfers for a beer. I told him that although we usually dealt in bus transfers, I was out of change and couldn’t give him a beer. He left in a huff, but Carol refused to go or stop complaining. I have no idea how I wound up as a bartender in this dive bar, this absolute dump. I’ve taught sculpture at the art school in Memphis, I’ve wandered all over India and had a part in a Bollywood movie as an evil North American drug dealer. I purchased a monkey in India; I received all kinds of spiritual enlightenments and epiphanies yet I wound up in this miserable bar. What is a Bollywood star doing in this absolute dump?

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Honest Bill

I went to the horse races in Omaha with the three stooges; Ralph, Jimmy and Earl. None of them can handicap and all of them are afraid to plunge with the bets. In the Preakness I showed them how to win a cool thousand while they lost all their money. I decided to take them all to Jazz, a famous restaurant in Omaha owned by my famous friend Victor who said he would cover the bill. I told all the waiters and waitresses I would put a good word in with my friend Victor, and I told them they sure had a nice little town in

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Omaha, not that it was anything like Westport, of course. That asshole Ralph said I was showboating and that everyone on the staff was probably lining up to spit on our food. I couldn’t help notice Ralph ate his spit encrusted steak anyway.

David M. They fired me as a cop because I wasn’t nice enough to prisoners, suspects, and criminals. I had no idea anyone had to be nice to prisoners, suspects, and criminals much less a cop. Well, if everyone has to be either a cop or a criminal, I’d rather be a cop. But they fired me and I found a better job as a press erector. Westport’s central location and huge caves and rail yards give Westport an advantage as a publishing center over nearly anywhere in the country except New York, the center of the rotten ass Ivy League shitbirds. A press erector takes printing presses apart, moves them, and puts them back together again which is a huge job because presses are extremely large and very complicated but have to be leveled precisely to work. My partner and I traveled all over the world moving presses. We even moved a press in New York City although the publisher insisted on hiring Haitians in Times Square who only spoke their version of French as our helpers. Naturally we ran up a huge bill on that asshole. One of our jobs took us to Cali,

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Colombia which was in the midst of a perpetual civil war. Our airplane had to circle the airport for hours before the guerillas on the ground took a siesta and quit firing at us. We were escorted everywhere by guards with AK-47s and bandoliers.

Charlie Forgy

They fired me as a cop for shooting at the wrong people. It’s hard to figure out who to shoot when everything goes to hell in a hand basket. I didn’t care for the job anyway. One day I was driving my patrol car and spotted a dead raccoon in the middle of Rainbow Blvd. I called my dispatcher who happened to be black and told him there was a dead coon in the middle of Rainbow Blvd. “How many legs do he have, two or four,” said the dispatcher and we both laughed. The creepy bastards that eavesdrop on us had us both suspended for some kind of violation of civil rights. Imagine that!

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Erika Actually my name is Berthune, the Norse goddess of victory in war, but I decided to take the name Erika when I moved to the States. Marvin thinks it’s funny my parents named me Berthune and that I was born on the same day the Anglo-Americans invaded France. I don’t see anything funny about it. I became very tired of watching Marvin watching war movies in which the Americans always won and the Germans always lost. One day I turned his miserable war show off and said, “We are tired of losing that war!” Marvin said that movie was about a German victory during the war, so I turned on the T.V. and admired Maximilian Schnell in his uniform. “Don’t you think Maximilian Schnell makes a great Nazi general?” I asked. But Marvin was not impressed. When we were first married I made the mistake of taking Marvin to Germany to meet my parents and other relatives. He was very impressed by my father’s wine cellar and his stories about walking back from Russia after the Second World War. Nearly every surviving German soldier has a story about walking back to Germany through hostile ground after the end of the war. My relatives weren’t impressed with Marvin though and couldn’t decide if I had married a complete idiot or just a simpleton. Every time we mentioned Marvin in our conversations everyone laughed even though he was present. He couldn’t understand German at all. He began to ask me why everyone laughed whenever we mentioned his name. I told him everyone really appreciated his sense of humor.

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Renata

My mother Erika finally moved back to Germany where I visited her last year. She had collected the same kind of weird friends and acquaintances she had collected in Westport. At one time I thought all the screwballs on the planet lived in Westport; but now I know they’re everywhere, even Germany.

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Erika

I spent five or six hundred dollars on a big copper plate and a bunch of copper tubing so my friend and I could rearrange our charkas. Marvin was outraged and insisted I take all the copper back to the hardware store. Later I spent some money on a trip to Seattle to consult with Rama, world’s only 5,000 year old man. Again, Marvin was outraged I had spent any of his precious money on my trip to Seattle; but how often does anyone get a chance to talk to a 5,000 year old man? I think Marvin worships dollars just like all the rest of the Americans. They build gigantic churches so they can wallow around in piles of dollars on Sunday. There’s nothing spiritual about it in the least.

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Marvin I married Erika after Margie had stabbed me in the neck and left me for Bert. I thought Erika would know how to cook and would be very efficient, and besides, she had a great German accent and really big tits. But I was only half right. She couldn’t cook and she was far too dingy to be efficient; but she did have a great German accent and really big tits. One day she and I went over to Judge Stitt’s to help him paint a few of his rooms and have a few drinks. After a few hours and a few drinks I collapsed on the couch while Judge Stitt put the moves on Erika. I was hoping he would get somewhere with her and that they would run off somewhere and live happily ever after, but she wasn’t interested. I was stuck with her for twelve years until she decided I was inadequate and ran off with some guy who just got out of prison.

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Judge Stitt

I was a judge in the Marine Corps for many years before retiring to Westport where I was a judge for many years. I had to spend a lot of energy defending the Marines to the idiots that infest the bars in Westport. Some idiot would start with some remark he thought was clever about military justice being an oxymoron. I would always rise to the bait, I would always defend military justice as we practiced it in the Marines. Then the idiots would complain about the lack of a jury of peers, and I would point out our juries were composed of officers from the same units as the defendant in so far as possible. Then the idiots would complain that it was impossible for an officer to be a peer to an enlisted man. These Westport idiots do not understand a concept as refined as the rule of law. The only concept they really understand is the rule of the bottle.

Ralph

One winter Westport hosted the Final Four in NCAA basketball. I was looking in Bob Berdella’s shop at the Westport Flea Market called Bob’s Bizarre and saw four skulls

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labeled Bob’s Final Four. I thought it was amazing what could be done with plastic, the skulls looked absolutely authentic. Later I found the skulls belonged to four of Bob’s cannibalism victims and were absolutely authentic. This was not the most outrageous of Bob’s exploits either. At one time Bob was sous-chef at the Carriage Club, the swank country club just across the polluted creek from the ultra exclusive private school which taught rich men’s sons how to get rich on their own and be good sports about it too. Imagine the dishes Bob served the rich.

Frank N. I don’t usually play cards with rank amateurs like Marvin, Joe, Jack, and Ralph but it had been several months between poker tournaments and it didn’t bother me at all to play a little nickel, dime, quarter. Of course I always played highlow Omaha every time I had the deal since it has always been my favorite in the tournaments and since the game bamboozled the amateurs. During one of my deals I had the high and low nut, a sure lock on both sides of the game, but one of the amateurs kept raising me the quarter limit. When he lost he had such a downcast look I said, “O don’t worry, winning isn’t everything.” Ralph said, “Frank, you’re really a very bad man.”

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I had to laugh.

Carol That miserable jerk Ralph took me over to Marvin’s one night where I discovered a huge bottle of untouched Dewar’s White Label. While those two idiots watched some piece of garbage on T.V. I drained half the bottle. Then it occurred to me I should cover up my tracks to avoid notice, so I filled the bottle back up with water. Next day I found myself accused of adulterating Scotch with soda pop. I tried to tell Marvin I had not put any soda pop in his Scotch, but he refused to believe me. Fuck Marvin and the horse he rode in on.

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Marvin Carol claimed she had not adulterated my Scotch with soda pop, but I knew it was a lie. I used to trust everyone and believe everyone, but my time as a lawyer cured me of that mistake. One of my first cases out of Salmon P. Chase Y.M.C.A. night law school in Cincinnati, a town larger than Westport but not as well known, involved an uncontested divorce. I had the husband and believed everything he told me about his rotten wife, but the judge had a report from the state of Ohio claiming his wife was only 14 years old and that they had had two children which he had forced into an orphanage. The judge told me the uncontested divorce was denied and my client jumped up and punched me in the nose. The bailiff had to pull my client off me; and several other young attorneys ran out of the courtroom to tell everyone I had lost an uncontested divorce case. In my first jury trial I found myself against one of my good teachers at Salmon P. Chase. He was very slick and very smooth and demolished me on every point. He even gave me pointers during the recesses on all the things I was doing wrong which was just about everything. However I won the decision. As my opponent had taught us, I asked the jury why they had decided in my favor. They said the other lawyer was so slick and I was so bad they knew I had to be telling the truth. For most of my law career I worked for the Socko machine Democratic law office. One day I found myself in court in front of a strange judge not connected in any way to Socko. I decided to try the case anyway since our client seemed to have a very good case and a very good

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change of winning. I did win; but next day Socko slammed me up against the wall at our law office and yelled, “You moron, what are you doing trying a case on its merits.” After that I was shunned as an attorney who tried cases on their merits.

Rick Jensen

I was a little late washing Marvin’s windows and he gave me all kinds of hard times about it. I think he’s wound too tight; I don’t think a year or so is really all that long a time. Besides I was busy with the sets for Sea Monsters. One of

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the sets called for a forlorn plain with a high wind and rain. We rented a rain machine and a jet engine mounted on a carriage which could be towed anywhere as a wind machine. We intended to take the rain and wind machines out to western Kansas as described in the script for filming. Since I had never operated a jet engine I turned it on in our garage in Westport. It blew the door off the garage and made a hell of a noise. Once we towed all that stuff 300 hundred miles west into western Kansas it was raining and the wind was blowing about 70 miles an hour just as the script demanded. We had wasted our time and money with the jet engine. I’d rather work with explosives anyway. One of the commercials we developed for a Japanese company involved exploding glasses, pots, pans, stoves, and refrigerators. But they refused the commercial because they thought it was too violent. I took that as a compliment and used it in our promotional brochures. I want my ashes shot into the air in an exploding rocket when I die.

My last girl friend was Theresa Ryle, a gorgeous gal. The less she wore the better she looked. I took her to one of those environmental rooms up in Excelsior Springs that rent by the hour and she came out of the bathroom with nothing on but a bowtie. Wow, she was sensational!

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Theresa Ryle My favorite boy friends are guys with no job who just got out of the pen. More can be learned in the pen than in any school or at any job. Who can stand those jerks with their phony jobs selling something no one needs like insurance? It doesn’t hurt if they have a powerful bike either. Nothing seems to last though and I’ve wound up out of work and homeless lots of time; and I’m really good looking and hot too. I don’t understand it.

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Margie

After Marvin married me for the third time I got really sick and wound up in Westport General with a dozen guys in white trying to stick a tube in my neck. None of them seemed to know what they were doing and they were causing me a lot of pain. I was lucky, Marvin was in my room watching this procedure. “Wait a minute,” he finally said, “who’s in charge here?” None of the guys in their white coats would say a word, but they stopped trying to stick the tube in my neck. “Who’s in charge!” Marvin demanded. None of the white coats said a word. Finally Marvin said, “Stop, I’m taking her out of here.” And he did.

Wally Leighton

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My wife checked her Dad into the psychiatric ward of Westport General, but had to leave town on business and left me in charge. She said I had to check up on her Dad and see he was O.K. because of all the stories she had heard about Westport General. Saturday morning I went to Westport General and after an hour of searching through their huge maze found the psychiatric ward. But they had no record of my wife’s Dad. I went down to the medical records office and they had no record either. I spent the entire day searching for my father-in-law in that God-awful maze. I finally found him in Surgery. The nurse told me he had slipped trying to get into bed in the psychiatric ward and broken his leg, which required immediate surgery. A likely story if I ever heard one.

Ralph

I finally got a job interview at Westport General. The position was as Tumor Registrar. I would have had to register and follow the career of every tumor reported in the state of Kansas. It seemed to be a strange kind of job so I asked the man who was interviewing me what had happened to the person who was the previous Tumor Registrar. He said he was still at Westport General. I asked if he had received a

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promotion and my interviewer said, “Well, not exactly. He’s now in the psychiatric ward.” I was so depressed by this job interview I decided to stop for a couple of drinks. A very ugly black woman came in and asked me to buy her a drink. I bought her a drink, she took a few swallows, propositioned me, and held the bar up using a note passed to the bartender. We chased her down outside the bar and found she wasn’t really a woman at all. But she did have a loaded .38 in her purse. I felt a little less depressed.

Marvin

I made a pass at a stripper named Candy Barr in a club without knowing her boyfriend owned the club. The boyfriend and his thugs caught me outside the club and knocked most of my teeth out. The next day I went to my dentist who finished the job by pulling the rest of my teeth and sewing me up with black surgical thread. I had been invited to a cocktail party that evening which I didn’t want to miss so I went even though I had black thread hanging out of my mouth and I left crimson crescents at the edge of every martini glass I used. Some good-looking tomato came up to me and asked why I was bleeding all over my martini glasses. I told her my story and she said, “Wow, I’ve always wanted to meet a man like you.” That’s how I met Margie.

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Marvin I remember the first time I met Margie’s friend Bert. I was in the kitchen in my yellow suit when Margie and Bert staggered in drunk. Since I was married to Margie at the time I was a little put out that she would bring one of her drunken boyfriends home with her. I told her and Bert to get out, but Margie picked a steak knife out of our set of steak knives and stabbed me in the neck. She missed the main artery by a fraction of an inch, and all I needed was a band aid though my yellow suit was drenched with blood. I had a hard time getting a cab from the hospital because none of them wanted to pick up a guy in a yellow suit drenched with blood. I refused to press charges, asked the cop to return the steak knife because it was one of a set, and went down to bail out Margie and Bert when she called from jail.

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Bert

I was the black sheep of my family; they shipped me all the way west to Westport and gave me the money to start my own bar which I called Bert’s Fault. I think I met Marvin in my bar though I can’t remember exactly. We both married Margie at one time or another. I used to call Marvin 3 and he used to call me 4. After Margie divorced me and remarried Marvin he became 3 5 while I remained 4. While I was married to Margie I took her back east to meet my rich relatives. We arrived late one Saturday night and were told to present ourselves at Sunday breakfast. Sunday breakfast consisted of several kinds of meat including salmon, omelets, every kind of fruit and so on. My mother turned to Margie and said, “This is the kind of thing we have for breakfast.” Margie slapped a bottle of rotgut bourbon on the table and said, “This is the kind of thing I have for breakfast.” All of my family in attendance turned and looked at me with their slight, smug smiles.

Marvin

My granddaughter’s employee was really a tomato so I asked her over to my apartment to see my computer. But she wasn’t really interested in my computer, she was interested in me and we spent the whole night making love.

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A few days later my granddaughter called me and said her employee was bragging all over the office about fucking granddad. I had to stop. I never get anywhere, what’s an old man to do?

Reasonably Honest Ed “Now hold on there,” I said to Marvin, “you mean to say you did it all night long?” Marvin said he had done it all night long with his granddaughter’s employee. “Didn’t you ever take a break, didn’t you get up to go to the bathroom?” Marvin maintained he had done it all night long. “Didn’t you throw your hip out?” I asked. Marvin insisted he had done it all night long. I said I was really impressed.

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Wes

Together I believe Marvin and I have been married sixteen times, but perhaps that’s a small exaggeration since Marvin married Margie three times. I like to give Marvin a hard time about his chasing women. I put a picture up on the wall of Dave’s Stagecoach Inn of Marvin wearing nothing but a speedo and a silly grin. I didn’t have a picture of Marvin at the nude wedding in Lawrence wearing nothing but a necktie and the same silly grin. But then, he likes to give me a hard time about chasing women too. He likes to bring up my Viking divorce. I was living in a nice house with a dock and boat on the Platte River just north of Westport and neglected to come home to my bride one weekend. As I came up my driveway on Monday morning I could see smoke and fire on the river. My bride had put all my gear in the boat, doused it with gasoline, waited till I arrived, set the boat on fire and let it drift down the river. But he gives me a hard time about other things too. Years ago I retired from my job as a photographer at the Westport Star newspaper and built a cabin in the Ozarks. The locals liked to tie dynamite on pigs at drinking parties and squat in city folks’ cabins. An Englishman I met down there told me he was leaving because he hadn’t known it was the third world in the

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Ozarks. He said if he wanted to live in the third world he might as well move to Albania or Africa because they were closer to his relatives in England. Marvin won’t let me forget my hard times in the Ozarks. It took me several years to remove the sheriff’s niece who had squatted in my cabin on my absence and sell the cabin. O Well, it’s the third world in Westport too now.

Marvin

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I’m beginning to think no good deed goes unpunished. After Wes ran through his retirement money in the Ozarks I got him a job with Mickey R. photographing new office buildings. Wes did nothing but complain about his new job. Then when Wes was looking for a new girl friend I hooked him up with Kathleen and before I knew it Wes had married her. Wes started to complain about his new wife immediately. He said at their first dinner with her children when the happily married couple first announced their nuptials Kathleen’s youngest child took one look at Wes’s white hair and ancient visage and said, “Who’s going to pay to bury Wes?” Of course none of them had any money. After they had been married a short time Kathleen decided to go to medical school at Lower Hell’s Gate in Sabah in the Caribbean for her M.D. She flunked out; the school closed permanently several weeks later. At the same time Wes had a stroke and the hospital in Lower Hell’s Gate prescribed valiums and goat stew for his condition. Maybe Kathleen was no good at goat stew. Anyhow, Wes did nothing but complain to me. I never intended him to marry Kathleen. No good deed goes unpunished.

Henry Schimm

Since I retired as President of Westport Carpenter’s Union I’ve had nothing but trouble from the police. I’ll admit I’ve hit a few side mirrors on parked cars, but I’ve never caused any major damage to anyone but myself. The other day a cop pulled me over and asked to see my driver’s license. I

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said, “You already have it, you took it away from me years ago.” Damn idiots.

Carol I’m in my late fifties but I’m still going to school; as a matter of fact I’ll probably go to school the rest of my life. Every time I quit going to school I get all these duns to repay my student loans. I even tried to take bankruptcy once, but bankruptcy doesn’t work for student loans. Student loans are forever. But if I start going back to school they stop dunning me. Student loans are perpetual; I’ll be going to school the rest of my life.

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Kathleen

I was trying to explain to that idiot Ralph that my company doesn’t charge interest, it charges fees to its customers. Ralph insists people who borrow money and pay for the privilege are actually paying interest and that the interest we charge amounts to the worst kind of usury. As I tried to tell that idiot Ralph, usury doesn’t exist legally in this country. This is a free country dedicated to free enterprise and restrictions like usury laws simply do not apply. Also I tried to convince that idiot Ralph that we charge fees, not interest. But he is too stupid to understand the difference between interest and fees.

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Ralph

Ever heard of IRS form 3949A? It’s really lethal. According to instruction number 6 on the back it’s not necessary for the informant to even identify himself. Instruction number 6 assures the rat bastard filer the form will be processed even if the informant does not identify himself. All the rat bastard need do is identify the victim and his supposed crime. The crime can be picked off a whole menu of crimes including not reporting all income whether legal or not, not withholding taxes from employees, etc. It fits in with laws so complex everyone is guilty of something, everyone is a criminal. The only people who are exempt are police. Everyone must be either a criminal or a cop, there is no other possibility. Everyone must be fingerprinted, everyone must be humiliated at the airports, everyone must vote for either the rotten Democrats or the insane Republicans. With 5% of the world’s population we hold 25% of the world’s prisoners. Ever heard of IRS form 3949A?

Rex Noland

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When I started out as a clown I didn’t have a definite clown name; but at the first hospital ward I visited some little kid pointed at me and said, “Look, it’s Butthead the Clown.” I’ve been Butthead the Clown ever since. I also perform at high schools in Westport as a teacher. I always bring a .38 police revolver into class with me and deposit it wrapped in a brown paper sack on my desk. Sooner or later one of my students asks me what’s in the brown paper sack. “It’s my steel lunch,” I tell them.

Tina Cooper

I usually teach special education out in the safe suburbs of Westport. Most of my students have some kind of serious disability and are nominally in the third or fourth grade. Every now and then I tend bar for Mo who owns a miserable little bar in the middle of Westport’s war zone. I tell my drunks that I understand them completely, that they are just like my students in the third and fourth grade who have serious disabilities. I ask them to raise their hand if they want a drink.

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One of those drunks who appears to have serious mental problems also, raised his hand and asked me if he could leave me a tip. “Yes Ralph,” I said, “you may leave me a tip.”

Alex

I couldn’t believe it when Marvin asked those two broads to take all their clothes off so we could shove them nude down the shuffleboard. I couldn’t believe it when those two broads took off all their clothes and one of them sat up on the shuffleboard. Marvin gave her a shove but she refused to glide. I told Marvin I was married and that I was leaving. Marvin told me he was married too but I said he was never married for long. Of course I’ve never been married for long either.

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Dr. Pile On Of course that dying rich woman with great insurance was referred to me and I made the usual kickback. I found several abscessed teeth in her mouth so I pulled all her teeth. She died 18 hours later, but at least she died in better health than before I operated, and I was able to collect a substantial fee from her insurance company. Of course I don’t like doing that kind of thing, but it’s very hard to make a decent living with all these malpractice lawyers and threats of single-payer health systems polluting the atmosphere for honest doctors and dentists. I didn’t even make 3 million dollars last year and probably netted less than a million after paying my outrageous malpractice insurance premiums and four ex-wives alimonies. Yet very few people outside the profession seem to care or feel sorry for me.

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Bill G.

This miserable Ralph asked me what position I played when he saw my Super Bowl ring. I told him I was the announcer for the Westport Chiefs when they won the Super Bowl, I called the games. I noticed his baseball hat had an advertisement for Volvo on it, and pointed to my baseball hat which had the insignia of the 403rd. Bomber Wing from World War II on it. “You weren’t even alive when I fought the Great War,” I said, “we bombed the entire planet into an American planet.”

Joe Cock

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I’ve memorized dozens of very complex recipes, but the only thing I ever fix myself is a very upscale artichoke salad. I tell all the poor female inmates at Wrinkle City about my recipes; the book of recipes I have stored in my head. They think I’m a great cook and I never cook anything but a very upscale artichoke salad. Therefore the female inmates go out of their way to cook great dishes for me. I rarely have to buy food or a meal. I’m Joe Cock of Wrinkle City.

Mickey R.

Once I became a rich man I wanted to help everybody else become a rich man just like me. But when my fortune fell apart in the 87 crash there was no one to help me become a rich man again. So I looked into the Better Business Bureau carefully and discovered we could devise a legal contract which would allow businesses to advertise in Better Business directories without any recourse to the Better Business Bureau

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itself. In other words any business, no matter how fraudulent, could advertise in Better Business directories. Of course I published the directories and hit another bonanza. I died a revered, rich man in Westport’s wealthiest suburb. No doubt a monument to my better business practices is planned by my heirs and grateful business associates.

Ralph Of course I’m innocent just like you. I would up in jail because I was mugged. The police found me covered with my own blood looking for my wallet. Then I committed a thought crime. I asked the cop where he had been while I was being hit over the head; and the cop arrested me. At least it wasn’t a victimless crime; I was both the victim and the criminal.

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Ralph I understand Osama bin Laden is now 139 years old but can still issue a very cogent threat. What do I do? I commit thought crimes; I’ve committed 139 thought crimes today. I’m thinking you are an absolute asshole for asking me what I do. That’s 140.

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