Chapter Sixty Three

"Nothing is as it seems!" Shouted Red Skelton.

"Blow me!" I shouted back. It struck me that while the Babe lay crying on the ground and his lit cigar was burning a hole in his jersey, and while a beaten and mangled Lou Gehrig faded off into the woods, and as a half-dog/all-dead vaudeville comedian stood before me with a soul eating grin on his face, that I had seen a skunk having sex with a black cat. I think that somewhere I had heard that this could be an omen of the apocalypse or perhaps a Pepe La Pew cartoon gone wrong.

"Good point." Red calmly spoke. "God bless it!"

I laughed a little.

"It just seemed like something I should say at a time like this. You know, like in the movies."

I was still mad but a little tickled. "What is this obsession you dead people seem to have with the movies anyway?"

"People relate to movies much better than to real situations. They find movies to be more real than real life, they can understand them. They watch them." Red lifted his leg to the bush he'd been hiding behind and peed on it.

"So people don't watch their own lives?"

"Not exactly. They only glimpse at it as it passes them by. After it's over they scratch their nuts and say "Oh Yea..now I see. That's what that was all about. I thought I was paying attention, but I missed it!""

I kind of envied Red not having to unzip his pants and hide somewhere to pee. What freedom!

"It's like when you take a poop." Now Red was moving to number 2. "Stay with me here." He held his palms up, facing each other, making the traditional public speaker's hand gesture to indicate that one should pay special attention. He didn't realize that he had me when he lifted his leg to the tree.

"I'm listening."

"When you get up from the toilet after a pinching a big Hayooja you always turn around and give it a little glance before you flush. You don't really look at it... you don't stare..you don't pick it apart...you just sort of glance back to make sure that something did IN FACT come out of you and no matter what it was you go ahead and flush it as soon as you possibly can. Later in the day, long after your poopy is long gone, an image of what you saw might flash in your thoughts. You will think that maybe you missed something, that your memory is telling you that you might have seen that jackknife you lost when you were camping with Uncle Roy, or a piece of your colon was in there...whatever."

I was becoming aware that my mind was starting to wander. I thought about how cute it sounded when he said the word "poopy". He was a naturally charming fellow.

"You looked but you didn't look. You might've seen something important, but you'll never know for sure what it was. If it were a movie you could take it home and put it on the DVD and freeze it and play it back in slow motion. You could show it to your friends."

"Why would you want to show your poop to your friends?"

"Are you missing the point or are you just being a smart ass?" Red's tail wagged with agitation.

"Sorry." I was being a smart ass.

"Your whole life is like that. Things happen to you every moment of every day and you glimpse at it and flush it away and later when you're older and sadder and lonely you start remembering things like your poo was gold and filled with nuts made of diamonds. Instead of flushing it you wished that you reached down into that toilet and scooped it up with your hands and showed it to the world, and given it as a gift to your girlfriend...or significant other for Valentine's day."

"Don't bring up Valentine's day, I would rather go ahead and flush that away."

"Whatever, god bless it." Red hopped towards me and wrapped his arms about my shoulders. "Maybe there is a better analogy, trust me, people never remember ordinary poops, but they always remember when they're used as an example."

"I'll keep that close to me forever." Even though I was being a smart ass again, Red smiled and scratched his left leg with his right.

"You'll remember that special Christmas morning or that fabulous babe in the see through nightie you met at the hotel, or the words of a song that touched your heart and made you do something crazy, but you'll cleanse the glance from a stranger that needed your help from your memory only to call it up again when it's too late. In the movies, that glance would play out with that song that you love, in double slow motion, and done by a really attractive actress....in a nightie!" Red was getting noticeably excited, I was starting to wish he had pants.

"OK, so what you're saying is, movies are better than real life?"

"No, I'm saying that movies are easier to understand, prettier, and you can walk away from them whenever you please. I'm saying that what's truly important to you doesn't always reach up and grab your patootie." He stopped to smell the phony flower in his lapel.

I think he was the only person I ever met that could say "patootie" and I wouldn't hit him with a steamroller.

"AND you get popcorn...and that makes your bowels move...and if you look closely, you'll see the kernels in your poopy."

"You really like talking shit, don't you?" I was starting to get annoyed. "How do I know that you're just not talking a line of....POOPY to me like you did to Babe Ruth? How do I know that this is not just another tall tale told by an emissary of Satan himself?"

"You don't." He said calmly. He moved his hands to my shoulders and with a toothless smile, he pushed me with great force down a flight of stairs that had suddenly appeared behind me. A flight of stairs in the woods. Imagine that.