Bayport, Texas - Oafish, ocular, aardvark-like and unobtrusively unlike Ike, Ollie sauntered in for breakfast and stayed for several generations, mired in this former boomtown’s Old City with nary a regret and barely an egret, although chameleon in nature and reptilian in countenance, a crafty individual with a cruel penchant for amateurish identity theft.
He saw Tania by the precipice, alone in her neurosis. He kept his head bowed as if to be unaware of her advanced psychotic state, enflamed it seemed by events beyond her control, also known as a ringing phone. She turned her back on him, on the street and on all of Western Civilization, flailing her arms like a fevered victim of a massive hornet attack. She held a cigarette in a grand theatrical gesture, exaggerating the puff and the exhale, stooping into her reverie, extracting maximum pleasure from one of life’s most truly banal gestures. Her dog arched its back against a snowy mound, redeeming the moment for God yet not for every pedestrian from the summer before.
Ollie thought about his late Aunt Maribel. A giant of a woman, Aunt Maribel wrote folk sayings in tabloid format, selling the artifacts to anti-bellum tourist attractions throughout Appalachia. Over a career that stretched for nearly seven decades she amassed a fortune rivaled only by Ray Krock’s widow and the Canadian Province, Alberta.
After her untimely death from suffocation born of eating too much day-old popcorn in the balcony of the Bobbie Vinton Lounge in Branson, Missouri, USA, her formerly bankrupt nephew inherited not only all her funds but also her amazing ability to see the good in everyone, even truly offensive people.
"I got two gifts," he told his friends at The Moose Club. "I’m richer than Ross Perot and more spiritually evolved than Mother Teresa. How ‘bout that, mutha-scratchers? I don’t have to be nice to anyone any more but I love everybody now. How about that? How a-bout that?"
Ollie bought drinks for the house. Most of the men drank 7-oz. Rolling Rock beers. A quiet man named Ron Toots ordered a triple Manhattan, with no cherry. Bartender Johnny B. Goode got everyone a clean glass and a personal Thai Stick. They enjoyed a moment of conviviality and got quite a kick out of a bracelet being offered for sale on a television station called "The Shopping Network." Seems this particular piece of jewelry was originally priced at $89.99 yet was now reduced to less than fifteen-cents, due to the discovery of asbestos beneath the fax rhinestone façade within the item’s not-entirely-hollow core.
"Hell, I could buy each of you guys millions of those," Ollie said, not bragging as much as celebrating with them the fallen mark-up. "You’d look good with about 40 of those bad boys wrapped around your ears," he said to Col. John Glenn, owner of the building where The Moose Club leased the 2,000,000-sq.-ft. lower level. "You’d look like Liberace on ‘The Lawrence Welk Show’ with a bad tequila buzz."
Meanwhile, across the boulevard, the poor neighbor lady laughed out loud at a comment she had made, convincing everyone in sight this particular fellow traveler had not only a leg up on reality but also an arm down on ennui. Eventually, she admonished her children to sit closer to the television, to remain quiet while she howled and to basically learn to hate life at least as much as she had learned to in her short but meaningless journey from oblivion to obscurity.
Passersby cowed in fear as the street’s dominant denizen of desultory pursued her fallen art, cackling and crying out as if an agent of Satan himself occupied her very soul, a situation soon to be eternally remedied by the logical outcropping of cultural advancement, as reflected in a simple gesture such as this pitiful angel’s anticipated meeting of the Holy Father, either in this lifetime, here, in cyberspace, or later, in Baytown, where breathing the air is less risky than destroying the life force in a fated child’s heart.
Ollie asked Tania to quiet down so he could enjoy infirmity.