Author’s note: “Enter the Wombat” consists of five related (not just related; downright incestuous) stories and is the first part of a book entitled Useless Stuff. Three of the stories are pretty long, so I’ll be posting them in parts, while the other two will be posted in their entirety. As a service to the reader, I’ll go ahead and tell you that things don’t make a whole lot of sense at first, but I think I tied everything together in the end. Enjoy!
THE FIRST STORY: HEY DIDDLE, DIDDLE, THE CAT’S ON THE GRIDDLE
PROLOGUE: SVEN AND THE AVATAR
Once upon a time there was a wombat. Now, there have been wombats at other times, of course, but none of those wombats have anything to do with the story at hand, so we'll just concentrate on this particular wombat at this particular time.
This wombat's name, translated into a form humans could understand, was Sven. In the wombats' elaborate and strangely annoying language, his name was "Gnnrgggrnnnn followed by a very strange smell", but Sven's a damned fine name for a wombat, so just get used to it.
That night, Sven and his girlfriend Nikeshia (not her real name in the wombat tongue) were watching Wrestlemania XVIII when he suddenly felt thirsty and went to the refrigerator for a beer.
When he opened the refrigerator door however, it was not Milwaukee's Best which greeted his beady little marsupial eyes, but rather a shining avatar of Royedjobilijim, the wombats' fearsome yet sensitive god of war, famine, and boring social functions.
The avatar, who was very shining and very sensitive, gave Sven the beer that he had come for and proceeded to tell the astounded and worshipful wombat his destiny in greatly nauseating detail. Sven attentively drained his beer and listened, only slightly disappointed that Royedjobilijim looked a lot taller on TV.
When he had finished, the avatar raised a mighty claw and regally began to pick his bulbous nose. Sven picked his own nose in response, and completed the oath with a thunderous belch. Impressed by Sven's commitment and lung capacity, the avatar bestowed upon him the gift of Really Incredible Persuasion, a truly marvelous bequest for a young wombat. This being done, the avatar gave Sven another beer and disappeared back into the refrigerator.
Sven knew that an Epic Quest was soon to come, so he took the proper precautions. He placed the empty beer can on top of his small shrine to Sally (her real name in the wombat tongue), the wombat goddess of roots, berries, beer, Epic Quests, and oral sex, then took his other beer into the living room, where he used the vast new powers at his disposal to get Nikeshia to give him head.
PART ONE: ROCKO AND THE WOMBAT GOD OF WAR
I. Precognitively Advantaged
Dances with Whores woke suddenly from a dreamless sleep. The early morning sunlight streamed in through his open window, which annoyed him. The birds sang sweetly in the trees outside, which irked him. The fresh spring breeze wafted in to caress his nostrils like a gentle lover, and this made him angry.
He hadn’t dreamed, which utterly pissed him off.
Dances with Whores was a genuine prophet, which bothered him because he was also an atheist. When he was a teenager he’d drank mushroom tea and eaten peyote buttons voraciously in a vain attempt to convince himself that it was the chemicals that were producing his visions. This had given him severe diarrhea, malnutrition, and male pattern baldness, so he had switched to LSD in his early twenties. Now, thirty years later, all he had to show for it was hallucinogenic blood, recurrent anorexia, and occasional bleeding from both eyes.
He dragged his emaciated body from the bed, crackling sheets sticking to his naked self. He leaned out of the bedroom window, squinting in the sunlight until he found the tiny songbird chirping merrily in the boughs of the flowering magnolia in his back yard. Then he snatched up the 12-gauge shotgun he kept beside the window, aimed quickly, and blasted the noisy little bastard straight to Tiny Chirping Songbird Hell.
Popping an acid cookie into his mouth and washing it down with warm buttermilk, he scraped a spot clean in the crook of his elbow, licked it to kill any microbes, and jammed a needle in to draw out his daily vial of blood. Half the blood was sold to some local kids, who claimed it was better than LSD. The rest he gave to an elderly Satanist who lived at the end of the road. The old Satanist poured it on his tomato plants, and grew a bumper crop every year.
He was withdrawing the needle when the phone rang shrilly. This was unusual, because he didn’t have a phone. He hated them, because every phone he’d ever owned had been possessed by a demon named Murt. Murt had tried to disguise himself as bill collectors and county deputies and Navy recruiters, but Dances with Whores had known who it really was. He’d promised himself that if he went to Hell when he died, Murt was one screwed demon.
The phone continued to ring. Finally, he picked up the receiver, disgusted at having to touch the thing, and held it away from his ear.
“HELLO!” he yelled into the mouthpiece.
“Hello,” said a feminine voice. “Is this Dances with Whores, the famed prophet and antibiotics dealer?”
“That you, Murt?”
“No, my name is Erica Mann. Is this Mr. Whores?”
“Yes, I’m Dances with Whores. What do you want, Murt?”
“I’m not Murt. I’m Erica Mann. I need your help, Mr. Whores. My sister is missing.”
“I didn’t take her. Unless she’s a fungus, she’s not here.”
“I know, Mr. Whores.”
“Then what makes you think I could help you?”
“You’re a prophet, aren’t you?”
“I prefer ‘precognitively advantaged’, actually.”
“Mr. Whores …”
“Call me Dances.”
“Mr. Whores, I can tell you why you didn’t dream last night.”
He was momentarily silenced. How did this woman know? A sudden realization crept over him. He was chilled by the mixed metaphor. “What do you want, Murt?”
“I’m not Murt, damn it!” Erica Mann screamed. “Murt is dead!”
“Demons don’t die, woman.”
“Well, for God’s sake don’t tell him that. He’s working very hard on his impression of a dead demon.”
He thought about this. “Do demons go to Hell when they die?”
“They go to Paris, Texas.”
That satisfied him. He didn’t know if she was lying or not, but anyone who could be so thoroughly ridiculous and make him believe it, he was prepared to like.
“I should kill you, wench.”
“Anita Mann.”
“I don’t care what you need.”
“No, Mr. Whores, my sister’s name is Anita Mann.”
“I still don’t--”
“I’ll call you later, Mr. Whores.” She hung up.
Dances with Whores dropped the phone and crawled back into bed. It had been a long day.
II. Big Bad Miss Muffett
A Poem by Ethel Fromage
“Little Miss Muffett
sat on her tuffet,
eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider,
who sat down beside her,
and scared the hell out of her with a hockey mask and a big plastic fake chainsaw and then laughed his ass off at her until she wiped that smile right off his face with her big old size 10 work boots she’d started wearing the last time that little bastard scared her half to death and made her spill her curds and whey (whatever those were) all over the new dress she’d bought to go out dancing with her boyfriend Rocko but couldn’t because she had curds and whatever all over it so she had to wear that awful old green thing her Aunt Hortense had made for her back in 1989 “to grow into” and Rocko laughed at her and left the club with that old slut whose tuffet was all wide and flabby and stretched out but she’d put out for anybody so that spider was taking his life into his own hairy little six hands when he screwed with Big Bad Miss Muffett again.”
Mrs. Lester looked up from Ethel’s paper, holding it at with just the very tips of her fingers, as if it were a formerly rabid and now rapidly decomposing guinea pig. “Are you upset about something, Ethel?”
“No, Mrs. Lester. Why?”
III. Tased by Flipper
“Did you hear about Flipper?” the bartender asked, wiping out a glass with a greasy, bleeding hand. “Well, not Flipper as such, but the dolphin they used in the movies. The one that played Flipper, so to speak.”
Dances with Whores pulled his head out of the bowl of rum in front of him and attempted to locate the source of the sound. He reached for his gun and tried to aim before he realized that the gun was beside his window at home. The problem, he thought, with soaking your head in rum…he lost the thought and wondered briefly where all the cowboys had gone. The problem, the problem, the problem with soaking your head in rum, he began again, was that it screwed your temporal senses all to Hell and back.
“Did you just call me a lousy tipper?” he asked, wincing as his eyeballs, formerly protected by the alcohol, were brutally assaulted by the hideously clean air. He lit a match just to clear things out.
“I said, did you hear about Flipper?”
“What, is he sleeping with Liv Tyler again?” He pried a well-preserved caterpillar from inside his right ear. “No, wait, that hasn’t happened yet.” The bartender was staring at the tiny fossil with an expression of almost noticeable horror. “Well, what about Flipper?”
“Well, not so much Flipper, just the dolphin that played Flipper in that movie, not the real Flipper , you see--”
“You’d better just tell your story, Steve. I’m the only surviving High Shaman of the much-feared-yet-not-feared-enough Watchacootchie tribe of south Mississippi, and if I don’t get back to my rum soon, I’m going to violate some peace treaties.”
“Uh, okay.” The bartender struggled to retain his composure; the story had taken on a life-or-death significance. “Uh, well, anyway, this dolphin, I’ll call him Flipper just for the sake of the story, but he’s not really, anyway, he was kidnapped, or dolphin-napped, but they found him stuffed in the lobster tank at Food World, and he had earrings pierced into all his fins, and BORN TO RAISE HELL tattooed down both sides of his body, and flames painted on his tail and dorsal fin.” He stopped expectantly.
Dances with Whores stared at him with the kind of malice usually reserved for plague-ridden Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“Do you know what the dorsal fin is? Do you?”
Dances with Whores said nothing.
“That’s the one on the back, along the backbone. It’s the one that sticks up.” He beamed at the magnitude of his own knowledge.
Dances with Whores dropped the smoldering match into the bowl, igniting the vapors in a beautiful blue-orange flame. Looking meaningfully from the flaming bowl to the greasy bartender, he smiled beatifically. “I know what a dorsal fin is.”
“Uh, anyway, he was pierced and tattooed and painted and he had a taser strapped to his fin, the little hand fins, what-do-you-call-‘em…”
“Pectoral fins, you bloated idiot.”
“Yeah, pectoral fins, I knew that, yeah, a taser was strapped to his right pectoral fin with duct tape, and he was thrashing around and all, and he tased the first dozen or so people who tried to get him out. There was this dolphin in a fish tank flapping around and tasing people and this big pile of twitching bodies laying all around the tank. Finally it tased itself and they could get it out of there. It was still twitching, though. It had an eyepatch, too.”
Dances with Whores stood up suddenly, knocking his barstool over and grabbing the bartender’s face with his left thumb and pinky. Holding the bridge of the man’s nose, he tapped the oily forehead with the other three fingers to the rhythm of “Freak Out”.
Staring into the man’s terrified eyes like a blood-crazed mother ferret, he spoke in a high, sing-song rumble. “Steve, Tender of the Bar, Loud of Mouth, Wide of Ass, and Teller of Truly Damned Stupid Stories, I hereby curse you with Retroactive Stupidity. Know ye that everything that you have ever said or done is now completely moronic, as is all you will ever do. So let it be written, so let it be done.”
Steve the Bartender fell sobbing to the floor. Dances with Whores reached around him and grabbed two bottles for the road.
“H-hey, y-y-you c-can’t t-tak-t-take those,” the fat greasy man sobbed.
“You’re stupid now, remember?” replied Dances with Whores. “Shut up.”
“O-okay,” the bartender whimpered meaningfully. “Hey, my n-n-name’s not S-Steve.”
IV. Rockopolis
A Story by Ethel Fromage
In a city far away lived the Rockos, a decadent and corrupt people. They were carefree and without remorse for anything they did. For centuries they lived in their great city of Rockopolis, taking whatever they needed and giving nothing in return. In fact, anyone who helped them, they threw out of the city in favor of someone new.
For thousands of years the Rockos continued their disgusting ways. In fact, no Rocko could remember a time when things had been different. Every Rocko was evil, so every Rocko was perfectly happy with the Rockopolitan way of life.
Then came the Four Cheesemakers of the Apocalypse, and all of the Rockos died horrible, writhing, torturous, phenomenally interesting deaths.”
“Ethel, I can’t help feeling that there’s something you’d like to talk about,” Mrs. Lester said pleadingly, furrowing her brows in new and different ways every couple of seconds. “I can’t help thinking it would make you feel better.”
Ethel took the paper from her teacher and held it in front of herself. “This makes me feel better.”
V. The Lord High Executioner’s Wife
The Lord High Executioner was not a noble-looking man. He was not a noble man. He wasn’t even a nobleman. He was just a commoner hired to swing an axe.
Of course, he looked great in a black hood. At least, that’s what his wife told him.
She was crazy about the whole executioner thing. She made him wear the mask whenever they made love, and she would often lie on the bed and moan while he told her about the week’s executions. Just the thought of an axe would make her nipples hard and her breathing heavy.
The Lord High Executioner thought she was a very sick woman, but he loved her anyway.
He was Lord High Executioner of a tiny west African country that was left off of 90% of all the maps on Earth. The country’s leaders felt this keenly, and so directed that all the nation’s industrial capacity be put into the production of maps that did include their four-hundred-ninety acres of Free, Independent, and Liberated People’s Socialist Republic. Ten percent of the world’s maps were drawn by the Lord High Mapmaker and printed off on the presses in the President’s basement.
The Lord High Executioner’s name was Kotanga Kutonga. He lived in a spacious six-room house with his beautiful American wife, Erica Mann. She was on the phone now, talking to one of her friends in America.
He checked his watch and realized he was running late. He had three executions to perform that night, the first in fifteen minutes on the other side of town (three streets away). He retrieved his hood, slightly sticky, from his wife’s crotch.
She was yammering in English to someone, so he kissed her on the forehead and left into the wonderfully somber night, humming “Frere Jacques” and drying his hood in the warm air.
VI. My Sheriff is a Wombat God of War
Erica hardly noticed her husband had left. “Have you heard of Royedjobilijim, Mr. Whores?”
“Strangely enough, Ms. Mann, I have. He’s the sheriff here in Parasauropholous County.” “What?”
“HE’S…THE…SHER…IFF…HERE…IN…PA…RA…SAUR…OPH…O…LOUS…COUNT…Y.”
“The wombat god of war is your sheriff?”
“My sheriff is a wombat god of war?” That certainly explained a few things, thought the old Indian. Then he thought of something. “What the hell’s a wombat?”
“A small furry woodland creature with a big nose and a big butt that lives in a burrow. They’re formerly native to Australia.”
“The big butt lives in a burrow, or the whole animal?”
“The whole animal, Mr. Whores.”
“Where are they native to now?”
“Paris, Texas.”
VII. Ben Dover, Mrs. Lester
Mrs. Lester sat in the darkened classroom staring at a faded, yellowed photograph of two happy young people. The young man was Mr. Lester, and the other young man was his lover, an Indian named Ben Dover.
The picture had been taken in 1965, at the summer house on Lake Werthaheckawee, just before she’d found out about them. They were handsome, well-built men with wide shoulders and strong, manly jaws. The Indian was also hung like a well-bred mule. She could tell because her husband was holding the Indian’s John Thomas with just the head sticking out. He was holding it with both hands.
Both of them were wearing conservative swimming trunks and smutty black bustiers. The bustiers were the reason she had finally killed her husband in 1967. She could deal with his cheating. She could even deal with his being a fruit. What she could not accept was the fact that her husband would wear something as shamelessly slutty as a black lace bustier.
She’d let Ben Dover live. At the time, she’d thought that he’d be too scared to show his craven red face anywhere near Mississippi ever again. She’d been wrong. He had come back, though he hadn’t recognized her, even though they’d been sleeping together for the past month.
He called himself Rocko now. And he really was hung like a mule. VIII. Dead Demons and Wombats
“Popular place, that Paris, Texas.”
“Isn’t it.”
“What is this all about, though? What does Sheriff Wombat have to do with my not dreaming for,” he counted on his fingers, “two nights now?”
“It all has to do with my sister, Mr. Whores. You see, she’s the nexus of all realities.”
Now there’s something you don’t hear everyday, he thought. “Is she, now?”
“Yes.”
“So why don’t dead demons and wombats end up in her instead of Paris, Texas?”
“I find that to be in remarkably poor taste, Mr. Whores.”
“Hey, sorry. You called me, remember?”
“Yes, I know. The reason is that Paris, Texas is also a nexus of all realities, and I think it was jealous. So it kidnapped her.”
“The town,” said Dances with Whores, wishing he had a bowl of rum, “the town kidnapped her. Not the townspeople. The town.”
“Yes.”
“Because it was jealous.”
“Yes.”
“Of your sister.”
“Yes.”
He sensed a trend. He acted upon it.
“Ms. Mann, how about coming over here and making wild, passionate love to me for hours upon hours?”
“No.”
Damn. “Why not?”
“Because I’m married, Mr. Whores, and I’m currently talking to you from a very small west African Free, Independent, and Liberated People’s Socialist Republic.”
“Which one?”
“It’s not on any maps, Mr. Whores.”
“Oh. I’m hung like a well-bred mule, you know.”
“So I’ve heard. That’s part of the reason you haven’t dreamed, if you must know.”
“Do what?”
“Never mind. I’ll tell you everything, but not now. Later. In Paris, Texas.”
She hung up. Dances with Whores snorted, threw the phone, and started looking for that last bottle of rum.
IX. Two Mules and a Clydesdale
The apparition hung in front of Mrs. Lester like a great invisible tree frog.
“Mrs. Lester,” it gurgled like a long-drowned insurance salesman, “Helen … may I call you Helen?”
“But-but my name’s Hester,” she stammered, oblivious to the fact that her mortally horrified bladder was rapidly filling her control briefs.
“Yeah, but I like Helen.” The thing made a sort of small-bird-in-an-industrial-vacuum-cleaner noise and spat a wad of luminous mucus that completely violated the laws of color.
“I want to help you,” the thing said. “We have a mutual friend, Helen. His name this week is Rocko. We both want to kill him. Would you like to work together?” It licked her face and right shoulder with a long, wet, invisible tongue. She gasped as a wave of desire rolled through her body.
“Why do you want to kill him?” she sighed as her nipples shot through her ancient “I Shot J.R.” t-shirt.
“Because he doesn’t have a phone,” the thing replied as it disappeared into some shadowy and apparently floral netherdimension.
“By the way … ” his disembodied voice called back, “I’m hung like two mules and a Clydesdale…”