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.

Chapter Sixty Two

The top of the Devil box exploded open, wood and metal flying. Satan, his arms outstretched, howled with the volume of an angry lover. His body quivered violently and his ominous teeth bared, revealing bloody gums and crap from two thousand floss-free years. Several of his fingers were shortened or missing entirely.

Babe Ruth searched frantically for his baseball bat and shifted so quickly in his chair that it snapped shut like a mouse trap folding him in half.

Standing in front of the box I pulled back my fist, elbow locked and drawn back, looking like a catcher getting ready to throw out a runner stealing second base. "Relax!" I said to the Devil. All I wanted was for things to be quiet for a few moments while I contemplated what Babe had told me and figure out why I was so angry. My fist knocked Satan down and out. The punch was so hard that even the little yellow birds that would normally circle his head fell to the bottom of the wooden prison and passed out from the trauma. Little tiny stars floated around their heads.

"Shut this box up and fix the God Damn thing!" I didn't even look at Babe as I walked away, but I saw him anyway. He scrambled partly on hands and knees until he could gather enough steam to stand erect.

I walked on into the woods...seeing red...in 360 degrees.

Babe Ruth was screaming at me from the clearing. "Marty, where are you going? What are you going to do?

"Kiss my ass Babe!"

"Marty! What are you going to tell the people?" He was now running after me

"I'm going to tell them to kiss my ass." In my anger, I started seeing things for what they were. I was seeing the details of everything, for miles, in all directions.

I saw a tree that looked like a spindly hand that beckoned me to approach when the wind made it move. I saw that the birds above the forest were actually the black-eyed angels that caught me when I fell from the bridge. I saw a skunk having sex with a black cat. I saw Red Skelton crouching behind a woodland bush.

Babe screamed. "Marty, I won't let you go off half-cocked!" He hurled his Louisville Slugger in my direction and it broke to splinters on a tree trunk just inches from my head. "Uh oh." He lamented.

I spun on my heels to face him. His face was ashen in embarrassment and disbelief. Over his shoulder the box was rocking and starting to splinter.

"How am I going to save the world from the Devil now?" Both of the Bambino's hands held his face and his cigar fell to the ground.

"Maybe you should ask Clem Kadiddlefucker over there." I pointed to the rustling bush a hundred yards away.

Red stood up and brushed his tie with his paint stained hands.

"There's the Devil." I said pointing to Red Skelton "I don't know what that is in the box, but your Devil is standing right here."

Red's face widened with a broad smile that somehow passed the message of delight without showing any teeth. He walked from behind the bush. The bottom half of his body was unclothed and appeared to be the lower half of a German Shepherd. He walked on his tip toes as uncomfortably as any creature that was created to use all fours.

"You don't belong here Marty, you are aware of that aren't you?" His voice as kind and sweet and a Mother lilting to a newborn. "You need to be going."

"Red, tell him that's the Devil and we've got to keep him in the box!" Babe cried.

"Go ahead Red, tell the Babe that you're not the Devil." My voice was echoing through the clearing. "Tell him that he's been serving mankind for all these years. Tell him more lies!"

"The Devil doesn't lie Marty, Satan can't lie. It's like when a prostitute asks a prospective client if he's a policeman or not, he has to tell her, it's the law." Red was very serious about this.

"But you lied to the Babe. You told him that was Satan in the box!"

"Sure, I lied, but I'm not the Devil. Not exactly, anyway." His feet crossed and uncrossed nervously.

Babe Ruth was perplexed. He was starting to realize that he hadn't been guarding the Prince of Darkness all these years. He was scratching his head madly to try and understand what he was witnessing. "If that isn't the Devil, then who or what is that in the box?"

Red shuffled anxiously.

"Tell him Red. He deserves to know." I was suddenly in command of the situation.

"Lou Gehrig." Red mumbled.

The box fell open and the mangled body of the "Iron Horse" stepped out and sauntered into the darkness of the woods.

"God Bless!" Red shouted in the direction of the retreating Gehrig.