Growing up, when things went sideways on the soccer field or in the house, we bitched. “Pasta fazoola,” we swore, meaning “everything is all messed up.” America in the 1960’s, even Polish-Russian-Swedish brats like us luxuriated in this fake molto italiano expression.
After two days and nights— 48 hours— of rain, the sun has returned and everything is slowly drying out.
Pasta fazoola!
Here in Oxburg, Maryland, I am sharing my two-story house with an insect, a hussyrsa in Swedish, a house cricket, which is all right when it’s in the basement, but I don’t like it in my kitchen where I am eating.
Pasta fazoola!
Trash collection in our neighborhood is on Mondays, whether it’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day or not. Of the two black plastic garbage bags, the trashmen have taken one and left the other. Half the garbage is still in the can, where it will sit and rot for a week until, hopefully, the truck collects it next Monday.
Pasta fazoola!
Normally, I would telephone and complain, but the last time I did that, behold, the company got pissed off enough to change the collection time curbside from 8 a.m. to 5 a.m. They now collect the garbage at five o’clock in the morning!
P-P-Pasta fazoooola!
Pasta fazool is the same dish as pasta e fagioli, which translates literally to “pasta and beans.” Popular in southern Italy, in Naples dialect it is called pasta e fasule.
Presto! Pasta fazoola!
While pasta e fagioli is served as a brothy, rustic soup, Italian-American pasta fazool is a thicker, marinara style stew.
Yummy! As we used to say, “Good at half the price.”
Kids. Go figure.
Mutte Fjutt in Uppsala, Sweden is going to telephone the ICA grocery store chain and complain that the cooking time for pasta is always included on the package in teeny-tiny print. “Why is cooking time in the smallest print on the box?” he gripes over Microsoft Teams, wearing a snazzy sportscoat and looking terrific. “Why do Putin and Trump make war when something truly importante like the cooking time for pasta is practically kept top secret?”
I love De Cecco, but when Mutte is right, he is right.
We feel this course correction in human evolution will render Mutte eligible for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
As an online influencer, I should be able to nominate Mutte for this award. Otherwise, pasta fazoola!
God help me, I’m involved with a blue-eyed blonde brat of a school girl. Hell’s bells! Mephistopheles, I teach her which of her moves will ensnare a sucker and lead him by the nose. Skin like ivory, she comes up with the stare, the smile, the pleading looks. And I say, “Yeah, that’s it! There y’ go. Perfeito. Use that look. That’s the hook. Hasta la vista, baby!”
Coaching her.
She calls it “squeezing.” She squeezes her victim like she’s a Burmese python, squeezing the life out of a goat. “I’ll squeeze him… like this!” she cackles, staring, staring. Pure dominatrix, she’s a damn big-eyed, bug-eyed seductress. But don’t get me wrong, a dream girl, sweet sixteen years young, she is good. A capable agent.
The L’île des Blondes accent, as thick as cream and as slippery as butter, gives away her country of origin, the Island of the Blondes way up north. That’s not her fault, we don’t get to choose our parents or where we are born. Her genes lay the groundwork to who she is. Being in a minority makes her strive that much harder. Named Esmerelda, her codename is Firefly. Some busybody at Child Welfare would no doubt have a hemorrhage, but that’s not my beeswax. Screw ’em. This is espionage, we make the rules as we go, and if that includes sacrificing some sweet young thing to the mission, so be it. None of the recruits have ever said “no.”
Vampires, we prey on the young, drowning them in money, privileges, fine clothes and great vacations.
And this particular job is so falling-off-a-log simple! There are other commando units who train for serious action like occupying the presidential palace or taking over the airport, invading a shipyard or manning government offices. Firefly and I focus on something as painless as stealing a door key.
I hate downtown. Queen Street with all the high-end shops. Embassy row. The patisserie. Radio Uhuru, which sits between the Portuguese Embassy on one side and Chez Claus, the interior design shop, on the other. Uhuru is a Swahili word that means freedom, independence, liberty. All the things we lack. It’s also the name of our country.
A prosperous island nation off a major coast, when seen from a distance, the entire island is a shallow cone, topped by Mount Bwana, the volcano. Measuring X by Y, 286 square miles— 74,703.7 hectares— battered by the ocean, rags to ridges, embossed on the edges, we are still a fly speck on a classroom-size map of the world.
Multi-racial and overshadowed by our Portuguese heritage, it’s not by chance that most of the movers and shakers in the upper crust of society bear Portuguese surnames. So why are we ruled by a childish dictator? Yes, the people elected him, it seems like eons ago, but did they know who they were electing? He is both a symptom of our malaise and a cause of our division. Brown as a walnut, the latest bee in President Joaquim “Babyface” Madeira’s bonnet is his predecessor’s mausoleum. He wants to put his name on it. In cursive. And name the adjacent area the Joaquim Madeira Memorial Park and Texas-Style Barbeque. Otherwise, throwing a temper tantrum, he threatens to tear it all down! “It’s in terrible shape, that mausoleum, terrible,” he claims. “The roof is caving in. On a scale of one to ten, I give it a two. Without me, pfft! It’s gone.”
The edifice honors Old Gabe, pater familias, the much-beloved Father of his Country. Volcanic black sand and lava flows have always been part of our surroundings, but it was President Gabriel Rodrigo wa Menza, a handsome, elegant black man, who started mining the island’s potash deposits on the ancient seabed and quarrying limestone for making cement. His use of crushed basaltic lava rock ushered in the modern Uhuru building trade with its signature black concrete architecture. Memories of Old Gabe leave President Madeira choking on the fumes.
Parliament resembles a graveyard. Neither political party, the lefty Dumbocrats nor the right-wing Pelicans, says a thing. Madeira’s supporters have guns and our politicians don’t want to get shot.
This is how our world ends. Madeira sold out to a foreign power and the only protesto was a universal shrug. He unleashed a ragged mob of followers on the Parliament and no one blinked. He suggested ingesting bleach and using hydroxychloroquine to combat Covid-19 and there was nada reaction. He denies climate change and is accused of telling over 30,000 lies, but no one says a word. There’s controversy regarding his family finances and his fancy airplane, while his sons sell classic BMW brand military motorcycle relics from World War Two, army surplus gas masks and Cessna light aircraft lacking documentation. Only to be met with silêncio. An autocrat, the prezident is dabbling in AI and siccing deportation squads on the migrant community, but so far, all I hear is distant grumbling. One protester got arrested, accused of vandalizing the moat around the palace, but that is hardly a rebellion of Tiananmen Square proportion. Lonely at international conferences, Madeira jockeys for a seat next to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni so he can drool all over her dress. Our cup runneth over! He’s unleashed a measles epidemic on the favela with screech owls the single jarring response. Give the man credit, he dominates the discourse. Our very own “Babyface” Madeira, bread & circuses, a performance artist, his realm is pure genius.
The Autoridade Aduaneira, Tributária e Pechinchar— the Customs, Tax and Haggling Authority, also called Finanças— has been trying to catch him for years. He claims that he is being unfairly tormented by a cabal of left-wing radical accountants.
“When I was young,” Madeira tells the adoring crowd at a rally, “I considered myself a follower of Muhammad Ali. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee! A title is only as great as its owner and I am the greatest! There is nothing artificial about my intelligence. The previous administration let this place go to hell. Mount Bwana is eating this island, turning its roads to ash and stifling guano production. When people say our island is a sack of shit, I say ‘Yes, it is. Bird shit. Guano. Full of nitrates.’ I always have your best interests at heart, people. Uhuru está na moda, Uhuru is in fashion. We are importing strawberry soda from Egypt and coconut groves from Micronesia. We are cloning an ancient, long-legged chicken from Easter Island in Polynesia that lays blue eggs. Coming soon to a plantation near you! Only through my efforts can the Kingdom of Uhuru blossom into a new, golden age.” Then, ’Quim does his little war dance, fists in the air, jumping around like a Mexican jumping bean.
“In Turkmenistan,” Madeira explains, returning to the microphone, “their leader Niyazov erected an enormous, 39-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat. The statue, it’s on a turntable which rotates, so his face always points toward the sun. Now how neat is that? So I ask you, why don’t we have that? I’ve put my face on postage stamps, on Uhuru’s currency and on banners outside government buildings, so why not a statue? It will be privately financed and won’t cost the taxpayer six pence.” After which he advises the crowd to buy the Joaquim Madeira edition of the Bible and Joaquim Madeira brand crypto currency.
I love this dude. No filter, no guardrails, he’ll say and do anything. Frontal lobes enflamed, he spouts vitriol on his social media account. When online, I never read him, since he upsets me. Everyone else reads him, though, so it’s not like we don’t know where he stands.
“We must stop Migration,” he insists on his website Antisocial. “Who needs them??? Not since the Short Trek North from Togo to the island of Uhuru by our Forefathers, the continent-spanning Mombasa Trading Caravans, has this chunk of earth been inundated by so many omnivorous Newbies and namby-pamby Bonobos. The unwelcome riffraff from shithole countries, these migrants don’t know how to send Morse code or roll a decent cigar. We got here first, y’all. I am arranging for them to be deported to Angola. It is an hysterical anomaly. Historical… ‘historical’ is the word I am looking for. It is an Historical Anomaly, but this island is ours! Except for the pesky Portuguese, of course, intermarrying with anything that moves. Horny, those Portuguese sailors would marry goats, if they could!”
A grifter, since he tore down the east wing of the palace and paved over the rose garden, there’s no reason to think Madeira will spare the mausoleum. He has also, despite his claims to the contrary, gotten Uhuru involved in a war. Which he insists on calling “a regional conflict,” as if dead soldiers will be any less dead if the conflict is only regional.
“If the Las Palmas don’t give up their stockpile of war canoes, we will utterly annihilate them through the creative employment of slingshots in a military taskforce titled ‘Bathroom Fury,’” he assures us, preening on television like a peacock during his yearly State of the State Speech. “Of course, there’s also the creative use of weather balloons as attack vehicles. Forget drones! Ask the Japanese, ever since World War Two, balloon bombs have been the next big thing. Still another alternative is to award me the Nobel Peace Prize. See? That way the world will avoid a lot of bloodshed. Are you getting this, Nobel Committee? Come in, Oslo! You choose. We may be a small conflagration, but we are chock full of grim prospects. Who knows, we may reintroduce genocide and the slave trade. As American president Richard Nixon once said, ‘When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.’ Saber rattling is politics of a different color. I am unapologetically patriotic. We will never be an anarchist country, that’s not who we are! The Las Palmas have treated us very badly. We have blockaded their major port, driving up the price of palm oil and suntan lotion. If they have a currency crisis, let them print more money. Or they can adopt the Uhuru pound sterling as legal tender, if they want. Last bell, who is buying?”
Transactional, everything is negotiable and the dude is always open to suggestions.
“The last brave soul to roll out of the war zone on a golf cart, please replace the divots before you leave,” he requests. “And don’t forget, everyone who joins the Armed Forces gets a £5,000 signing bonus.”
All 365 days a year, he rules the news cycle. Every newspaper has at least one outrageous Babyface headline. Did he really tell the Chinese that they are free to invade Perspiration Island as long as Uhuru gets to keep the guano rights? Are there really 100,000 people lined up to buy the Joaquim Madeira OneMillion Pound Immigrant Visa Gold Card? What are their names?! Is Joaquim Madeira really a second cousin to Uganda’s Idi Amin? Amidst his gaslighting, his bending of reality and his outright lies, what will remain of our country in ten years’ time?
Battling his demons, often it is hard to tell if he is having any fun.
“The Madeira administration represents a meaningful step toward justice for monk seals, deep sea fishermen, gun owners, crypto investors, crypto-fascists, country western singers, hippies from Gibraltar and victims of the atrocities in Rwanda,” he declares. “The lesbian community has no better friend— I call them Lizzies— than Joaquim Madeira. Whatever happened to the Victoria’s Secret catalog? I found their models very attractive.”
Madeira is Portuguese for “timber,” a surprising coincidence since the president was a real estate developer in his youth. The traditional Uhuru hut is made of woven palm fronds.
“Our chair in the United Nations General Assembly,” he brags, “is 13 centimeters wider than economy class seating.”
Liberdade. Liberty! I’ve spent more time staring at the front door of Radio Uhuru, my cellphone camera raised in position, than I care to remember. I’ve taken pix of anyone going in and everyone coming out. Staff, bike messengers, delivery boys, vendors, interviewers, interviewees. When done, I trot to the L’île des Blondes consulate on Viela Americana, where we hunt through newspapers and wedding pictures, high school yearbooks and photographs from diplomatic receptions, putting a name to every face we can.
Most weekday evenings, I have watched Senhor Tristão Zarco, the general manager of Radio Uhuru, a pale white dude in a tan linen jacket and black baseball cap, as he locks the front door of the building and wanders down the block to his boxy gray Citroën parked by the curb.
. . .
At the mausoleum itself, after an escalating series of outages and outrages, five hundred protesters show up on a Wednesday afternoon to make their voices heard. They carry signs proclaiming “Hands Off Old Gabe!” and “Mad-Mad-Madeira” and “No Kinks” and the reusable protest placard “Leave Me Be, Don’t Tetch Me!” If Joaquim Madeira is a super patriot, where does that leave the rest of us? Filled with resentment and opposition. Statistically, we are at the peak of hurricane season in the North Atlantic, but fortunately, we don’t get rained out. People wear white hats that say “Farewell Uhuru’s Criminal Kingdom.” Opinion appears divided between whether Madeira is unbelievably awful or awfully unbelievable. He is also having Parliament painted lime-green and adorned with stained glass windows, which just adds kindling to the fire. Employees of the mausoleum have organized this event, with the intent of getting coverage in Friday’s newspaper. Um passarinho me contou, a little bird told me. An employee gave me the tip.
I am Mr. Everybody, standing next to you at a demonstration, dressed in sweats and tennis shoes. I am a mirror of your thoughts, angry but not too angry, the dude who never checks his watch since he has an internal clock with circadian rhythm that keeps time 24 hours a day. When I go to the Island News Print Shop to get a sign made saying “Mau-Mau-Mausoleum,” pale-skinned Tomás Falcão, the printer, gets all officious and uppity, refusing to do it because of the historical connection to the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. So, we’re an African nation after all.
O presidente is a step ahead of the protesters, ordering the guards to lock the doors to the mausoleum! After the night cleaning crew finds a dead bat in an exhaust duct, President Madeira declares the building a health hazard and closes it to the public prior to fumigation. Rather than walking through the murky, ammonia-infused interior to pay our respects, where the mummified body of Old Gabe lies under glass, moldering away in the half-light, we are forced to sit on the grass outside instead, smoking ganja. Some hold hands, marching in circles on the concrete parking apron, chanting “Not Yet Uhuru!” and “Kumbaya, m’Lord, kumbaya!” Weathered reps of Associação de Marinheiros e Fuzileiros Navais, the Association of Sailors and Marines, their skin like shoe leather, hand out Gimbal’s LavaBalls Hot Cinnamon Candy, our secret weapon of choice. Made in USA.
The word from the palace is that President Madeira is raging. This is so not good.
Lawyers tell me that if Babyface tears down the mausoleum in defiance of a court order and is allowed to get way with that, the country will have opened a Pandora’s Box constitutionally, where he can proceed to dismantle our entire parliamentary form of government without any personal consequences. Once he is in defiance, there is nothing to hold him back. What we see as a catastrophe, Madeira sees as an opportunity! He’s gaming us. Uneasy, we know that a single call from on high will send the backhoes roaring into action.
Scary stuff. I wish the protesters “Bella ciao” and leave it at that.
. . .
T minus one and counting, I lurk around the safe house. Nervous as a cat, too upset to eat, I have sour coffee stomach. This case of nerves feels so atrocious, I may take up smoking again. I don’t, but I could. Esmerelda Firefly is smoking up a storm. Gen Z, a throwback to the 1950’s, she prefers unfiltered cigs, daintily plucking grains of tobacco off her tongue. She seems unaware of the tension of the moment. Ah, to be sixteen again, oblivious to everything that is more than ten feet in front of my nose! My arthritic thumb aches in time to my heartbeat. I tell myself it is meaningless, but the bugger hurts.
I hand her tickets to a rap concert, which she examines and returns to me. “One adult, one kiddie,” I point out, eliciting an angry glance.
“Who is he?” she asks.
“A rapper from my generation.”
“Whatever,” she shrugs.
Avaricious by nature, she becomes fascinated by deeds, spending an hour online poring over real estate properties. “C’mon, coach! Buy me a big ol’ plantation,” she nags. “We’ll grow tobacco and I’ll have your babies.”
I try to come up with all kinds of reasons why this dream may be both impractical and undoable, but since I have trained her to be a man-eater, I am not all that surprised when she turns on me and bites the hand that feeds her.
“We’ll be tobacco kings! Island King Cigarettes, laced with marijuana,” she envisions, happy as a clam.
Rather than arguing, I google the island’s extensive legislation regulating crop cultivation, especially smokables, but a 16-year-old princess is not so easily dissuaded by mere logic.
After a 20-minute rain shower, she and I make a quick circuit of the neighborhood. The trees are heavy with fruit. Bees and dragonflies fill the air. We take turns splashing in puddles left in the pavement. Dressed entirely in black, Firefly keeps laughing at me open-mouthed, a fount of cackling mirth. A total turn-on, I find her wildly attractive.
I try not to linger too long on the island’s history, as this compendium of journal entries would grow to book length. For instance, Muddville the capital is named after Dutch explorer Cornelis Mudd. Brave of heart but foolish, he and his crew marched into the village of Kigunzi— Swahili for “corn cob”— in the year 1839 and staked claim to the island in the name of King William I of the House of Orange. Only to have their sorry asses driven back into the sea a year later, following a month-long siege by a well-trained native militia under rebel leader Katanga Kabiyé from the other end of the island. Favoring partition, Cornelis proposed, “You kaffirs can live down south while we maintain a colony here in the north.” That never happened, culminating in a series of palace intrigues that resulted in the town being christened in the late explorer’s name. While his severed head, mounted on a spear, was exhibited for days in the village square.
Today, the gambling casinos are the power behind the throne, but their dress code is a bore.
“Whatever you need, I can help you find it,” Firefly offers. Out of the mouths of babes! She makes me feel like a dirty old man.
We go back inside, but tired of watching her smoke, I jog down the hill to the seawall. One of the few advantages of living on an island, you have water on all sides. Otherwise, I do not recommend an island economy, where almost everything has to be brought in by ship or plane. In our case, it is easier to list what indigenous industries we have than to give you a list as long as a telephone catalog of what we lack.
Without busting a gut, our main claim to fame is our coffee industry. Punching above our weight, production is small-scale, spread among a handful of estates with a few thousand Arabica trees in each. The combo of mild climate and volcanic soil is ideal, while the lower average temperature causes the coffee cherries to mature more slowly, resulting in an aromatic bean with highly nuanced flavor. The roaster in the Monte Python Tropical Gardens produces high grade beans with our own unique Uhuru profile. “A tangy, minty flavour with notes of African cockroach, brake fluid and volcanic ash, it is like drinking high-grade sludge,” says OGuia OficinaMecânica, the national Car Repair Workshop Guide which, on a scale of one to three, awards it five stars. Most of the crop is consumed locally by the island’s booming third-wave café culture. Black sand beaches attract a funkier trade of tourist. Still, the occasional sack of beans is sold on the mainland as a luxury gourmet product. We’ve won those funny-looking medallions from Parisian tasting competitions. Everything on the island and its brother is available for export, but competing with Yemen, the birthplace of coffee, is tough.
Believe it or not, we also have our own electronics industry, factories and everything, although the raw materials have to be shipped in. Farmers grow bananas, mangoes and papayas. We have chicken farms and dairy farms, tobacco plantations and a cigarette factory. We have fishermen and smokehouses for smoking their catch. An island full of palm trees, laurels and ancient conifers that survived the last ice age, we have a papermill over by Lake Royale, providing us with coarse-grained toilet paper and paper towels, but polluting the lake. The building trade and small-scale ship-building are smoothly running concerns. Our shipyards are full of rusting hulls and stray dogs. We import boat engines from China. We even had a slicker factory, making rainwear, but it went bust.
That’s about it, everything else, all the gaudy clothes and shiny baubles in the shop windows on Queen Street as well as mountains of beef, has to be shipped in by boat or plane from the mainland. The airport is nice: chic and modern with scads of black stucco buildings, but flights to and from the Arabian Peninsula are banned to reduce the threat of terrorism.
I sleep very badly.
Rising early on T-day, I jog five miles along the seawall and then eat a breakfast of fried eggs, sausage and mango. Firefly has gone home to her folks which is fine by me, after too many hours with a provocative teenager, I am ready to strangle people. Besides, the action doesn’t start until everyone leaves work eventide.
Esmerelda’s classmates, I am told, complain about her mouth, so apparently her training has spilled over into her private life. What is worse, practicing her black arts even on me, I too have been corrupted. She calls me Jimmy Bond and undresses me with her eyes. When she and I first met, I still had a fiancée named Margareta von Roth. Spying the silver engagement ring on the ring finger of my left hand, my protégée asked, faking a casual tone, “Ho hum! What is that?” She pressed a black-painted fingernail against the ring, tap! tap! tap!
“Oh, I just wear it to hold the female population at bay,” I joked.
“Are you engaged?” she demanded, unamused.
“Well, kinda sorta, yes.”
“Where does she live?” she asked accusingly.
“She lives on L’île des Blondes, the Island of the Blondes.”
“Is she a blonde?” demanded Esmerelda, looking surprisingly grown up and angry.
“No, she’s a raven-haired beauty from an aristocratic family.”
“That’s so… far… away!” my pupil exclaimed, giving me a thousand-watt stare. “How often… do… you … meet?”
“Not so often,” I admitted. “Twice a year, on the holidays.”
“You can’t be engaged and only meet your fiancée twice a year!” my firefly insisted, turning away to give me a closer look at all that blonde hair.
One two three, lickety-split, within two days, I telephoned Margareta and broke off our engagement.
“Where’s your ring?” demanded secret agent Firefly when next we met.
“I broke off the engagement.”
“Oh? Why?”
“She lives so far away and we meet so seldom,” I pointed out. “Besides, I am in love with a little woman right here in town,” I confessed.
“Oh?” asked Firefly archly. “What does she look like?”
“She has the world’s blondest hair and the world’s bluest eyes,” I explained, glancing at Firefly’s hair and looking into her eyes.
“Oh, well,” declared Firefly, full of laughter, “you broke up because your fiancée lives so far away. That makes sense.”
And that was that. End of story.
As I see it, Margareta and my engagement was a casualty of Deep Learning.
Everybody pays. There’s no such thing as a free meal.
If I was writing a spy thriller, I’d call it “Codename: Firefly.” Very exciting.
The dark arts are not to be toyed with. Esmerelda is a brat, but I love her.
. . .
Island News, the national newspaper, published three times a week on pulpy paper, lands on the doorstep. It comes out Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. A throwback to the colonial era, it uses formal typography, archaic phrases and starchy commentary. “Magistrate Jinxes Madeira Plan” says the headline. “Teardown not in cards,” says the subhead. Over coffee, I sit and read how our Dear Leader spends almost every waking minute fretting over the memory of his predecessor. He has also replaced the Board of Directors of the mausoleum with lackeys of his own choosing. Jerk, why can’t he let it go? We all have our hang-ups, but that doesn’t mean he needs to make a full-time meal of it.
Among other things, I judge people based on their taste in music. My fave recording artist is songbird Sailor Twist, so what does that say about me? You mention “island music,” people immediately think steel drums and calypso. Sailor is better than that. Filled with pep rally momentum, she belts out every tune like it’s a Bronx cheer.
“Boyz, boyz, keys to the city
They make life incredibly shitty
You got the cheese, you get the keys.”
If I even try to interest my paramour Firefly in Sailor’s songs, her immediate reaction is “Turn that off.” For all her talents, Firefly can’t sing a note. She can’t even rap. Instead, she sits in a chair bouncing one leg over the other and prattles about her romantic conquests. Not exactly music to my ears. All Joaquim Madeira listens to is country.
I get one unhappy visit in the early afternoon, pasty-faced Sérgio de Oliveira from Headquarters.
“Ready to take the training wheels off your tricycle?” he asks, giving me a ghastly smile. Lanky as a beanstalk, dressed in a black trenchcoat and slouch hat like some Gestapo character in a bad movie, looking down his nose at me, the only reason I put up with him is the package he plops on the kitchen table. “If you or your cohort should be captured, call this number,” he instructs, handing me a matchbook with a fancy cover. La Folie des Bananes says the logo in a weird purple font.
“I’ll pass it on to my little friend,” I agree.
“What do you mean?” he asks, his entire face a giant question mark. “It’s an insurance policy for you, blockhead. We’ve— “
“Why in the world would someone who doesn’t smoke be carrying a book of matches on his person?” I counter.
“We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to provide you with invisible backup,” he explains testily. “Don’t muck about.”
“Of course,” I reply. Anything to get him out of there. “Have we squared operations with Madeira’s personal guard force?”
“You mean his Praetorian Guard?” he sneers. “They’re fanatics.”
“Have we fixed it? Yes or no?”
“Sheesh!”
“Don’t sheesh me. Anything subversive contains an element of risk. They’re professionals and they take pride in protecting the president. Have we ironed it out? I don’t want any unnecessary gunplay.”
“Willy Wonka, as always! Stop your fretting, Lulu. Your friend Babyface Madeira has fired so many people, he is one of the least popular dudes in government. The smell of defeat hangs over his administration like a shroud.”
“Answer the question!”
Glaring at me, he tugs at the brim of his hat and leaves.
Ugh! A bike messenger could have made a better delivery.
Being out in the field, I hadn’t realized how intensely the bureaucratic anger among the elite has solidified. Well, now I know. Onward to victory!
I make fish tacos for lunch.
Firefly comes to the safe house at four o’clock in the afternoon, which is fine, we have time. I check out the microwave transmitter built into the lining of her schoolbag. “Say something.”
“Something.”
“Ha, ha, very funny.”
She and I walk into town. Firefly is in a strange mood, all but sleepwalking. Staring straight ahead, she keeps quietly growling about how she much prefers wide open spaces to a jail cell.
“Nobody is going to jail,” I assure her.
“Oh?” she bitches, pent-up resentment flooding her voice. “Is that supposed to be a good thing? I can hear it now: ‘She was shot for committing treason.’ Isn’t that nifty!”
“No one is getting shot.”
“Banished to Nicaragua? Life on a banana plantation? What kind of choices are you offering me here?”
“Shut up!” I seethe, so I guess you could say that we are both a bundle of nerves.
There is a maddening sensation to using a 16-year-old child to counter the misadventures of a seeming 8-year-old. I can forgive the dumbness of youth, yes, but what is Madeira’s excuse? We loiter by the malt shop. Waiting. Relief through action breaks the tension. As soon as the general manager, the pale, finicky Senhor Tristão Zarco, leaves Radio Uhuru, my angel darts across the square and flops to the pavement right in front of him. He’s tripping over her. “What’s the matter?” he asks. “Didja slip?”
“Look, I scraped my knee!” she blurts, standing erect on one leg, latching on to Sr. Zarco with a schoolgirl claw. Shaking her head, all wide-eyed and innocent, her blonde hair dances across her shoulders.
White earbuds plugged in my ears, I listen in. Her transmitter only covers up to 30 feet, but it’s not like they are walking out of range.
“Look!” says Firefly, waving her hands in his face. “Red nail polish.”
“Yeah, okay, very nice,” he mumbles and I can see from across the square, baseball cap or no, that he is blushing. Firefly leans against him and shakes a pebble from her loafer. The girl is inspired! “Do you work in radio?” she gushes. “I would love to work in ra-di-o,” she insists and starts prattling: “Where do you live? Where are you parked? No really, is that your car? Is that a Citroën? What did it cost?” Her hands keep playfully fishing in his pockets. She wrinkles her nose and laughs. “Oops, are these your keys?” she asks, just as they reach his auto. She selects a key and tries to open the car door. Wrong key, of course. “Here, you open it,” she declares in a bossy, starchy British schoolmarm manner.
As soon as he opens the car door, she pushes him onto the back seat, knocks off his baseball cap and jumps on top of him. “Hey, girlie, get off me!” he yelps, but there’s no corralling her, lips pressed against his, her tongue down his throat, her hands reaching hungrily for his nether parts.
By now, I have hiked across the square and fetched his keys where they have fallen on the pavement. Hightailing it to the front door of the radio station, I have to wait while a tall, charcoal black Maasai woman named Noonkishu exits the building, her head held high like she owns the town. Dressed in a bright red shuka, a kind of modern-day toga, she broadcasts on the Maa, Dinka and Kalenjin language programs. Having snubbed me at political functions, I am not surprised that she breezes right by me as if I don’t exist. Left panting in her wake, I finally get an opportunity to test the keys on Zorro’s keyring. Bingo! The square cut Schlage key fits the front door of Radio Uhuru. Sliding the key off his keyring, I pocket it before hustling back to the Citroën where I drop the keyring on the floor of the car and get my sorry ass out of there, the air thick with the smell of Firefly’s talcum powder.
Whatever misgivings he might have had, Sr. Zarco is no match for Firefly’s wily ways. Eventually, she’s had enough, but he’s middle-aged and just getting warmed up. Here’s where the Sturm und Drang of espionage takes over. Firefly has trained for this and services him as efficiently as any prostitute.
Flouncing from the car, running her fingers through her hair, schoolbag over her shoulder, she says “Hey, mister! You dropped your keys!” and hands them to him.
I don’t know what Sr. Zarco thinks is going down, but I hear him asking where she lives and how can he get in touch with her? His face is beet red.
I feel like shouting “White guy speak with forked tongue!” But I don’t. As they said during the Mau Mau Uprising, “Mzungu Arudi Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru.” Let the white man go back to Europe, let the African regain freedom.
Firefly blows off our befuddled Elmer Fudd and comes parading past my lookout. “Haul ass with a hall pass!” she quips. Nose in the air, she marches up the hill and around the corner toward the Township of Vikmansburg.
Almost desperate, the old geezer revs up his car, puts it in gear and roars after her, but, of course, when he turns the corner, she is gone!
Hiding in the bushes, waiting until the coast is clear.
I’m no mind reader, so I won’t try to guess what the general manager of Radio Uhuru thinks just happened.
. . .
Back at the safe house, Firefly and I wait for things to cool down. I make my telephone call. “The chair is on the table,” I recite, barely able to control my excitement. Then, congratulating Firefly on a job well done, I change into business casual attire.
Wishing a cheerful “Banzai!” to my playful housemate, I return to Queen Street, where I wait until a quiet moment and let myself into Radio Uhuru. This is not something that can be done online, it requires a physical presence IRL, in real life. Unfolding my map, I head to the broadcast booth where a mulatto announcer in a white shirt is interviewing two members of the Royal Ornithologists Club on the topic “Abinary challenge: Guano harvesting versus Heimische Striped Nightmare Stork hatchlings.” Weirdly specific. I stick my head in the booth. “Pássaros, birds, are an important issue!” I agree. “Please interrupt this program to play this tape.”
“You jest,” complains one of the birdwatchers. Pink-skinned, he sports a full red beard like a modern-day Viking. Toying with his field glasses, he’s just aching for a fight. “This is a serious situation,” he preaches. “Guano dust in high enough concentrations can clog the stork’s uterus. They start laying eggs with crepe-paper-thin shells.” Lifting them to his face, he peers at me through his field glasses.
“Thin eggshells are unsafe at any speed,” bleats his companion.
“Oh, great,” I groan. “Bird sex!”
Brandishing my pistol, I hand the announcer a 7-inch plastic reel of brown recording tape, which makes him laugh. “Stone Age stuff,” he chuckles, going to the supply closet and rolling a TEAC reel-to-reel tape recorder on wheels into the broadcast booth. The machine looks squat and monstrously impressive. I expect it to bleep like R2D2. “What’s the occasion?” asks the announcer sangfroid, cool as a cucumber, as if bandidos bearing recording tape and waving guns is part of his daily grind.
What’s your name?” I ask.
“Philippe.”
“Well, Philippe, I really appreciate you doing me this favor.”
“What’s on the tape?” he asks doubtfully.
“La Marseillaise,” I assure him.
Plugging in the tape recorder, Philippe couples it to the mixing console with black cables that have RCA jacks on one end and XLR connectors on the other. Cueing up the tape, he gives me a last, sardonic look. “Are you gonna get me fired?” he asks. Terrified, the ornithologists run from the building.
“Anything you do is under duress,” I point out. “I shouldn’t worry about it. I am holding you at gunpoint.”
“Only, I know who you are,” he exclaims. “It’s embarrassing.”
Ours is a small island.
“Extenuating circumstances drive me to take direct action,” I tell him. “We’re a fucked-up society.”
He doesn’t look convinced.
“We have broadcast at least five minutes of dead air. Shall we run the tape?” I suggest.
Philippe runs the tape. Sure enough, it starts off with the Marseillaise. I watch Philippe adjust the volume.
“Viva a revolução!” booms the voice of opposition leader Patrice Kabiyé, carrying on the family tradition. “Long live the revolution! The people have had enough of Babyface Madeira. We are invoking Article 25 of the Constituição. From now on, we are the Free-Thinking Republic of Uhuru. Even as I speak, the people have occupied the presidential palace, the airport, government buildings, the fishing fleet, farmer’s market and the municipal barracks. Sorry ’bout that! Freedom! Liberté!Égalité! Fraternité! Parking is available.”
And that’s how we did it, with a little help from our fellow islanders. Security agencies the world over have a history of instigating coups d’état, it’s a favorite stock in trade.
I intend to wait two years for Esmerelda to turn 18 and then I’ll marry her. To bed in Tibet, perhaps. She owns me.
. . .
“Madeira won’t see you,” says José, my boss, during my debriefing.
“He’ll see whoever enters his cell. Why? What are you afraid of?” I wonder. We are meeting in a safe room at HQ at three o’clock in the morning, so I am not exactly getting a red-carpet rollout.
“You are a meddler. You meddle,” says José and the rest is histrionics.
I’m considered a pacifist since I want to let Babyface live and stand trial for his assorted misdemeanors, felonies, swindles, idiocies and snake oil promises. Por favor, Deus, faça parar. Please, God, make it stop! I would have done the same with Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, but if you let a deposed ruler live, there is the risk that he will rally his peeps and start a civil war. No one wants that.
So while President Madeira was brooding over Old Gabe’s mausoleum, dive-bombing the go-fast boats of drug runners on the high seas and making war, we took out the trash and returned the power to the people.
There is an old adage in American politics that Democrats get America into wars and Republicans get the country into economic depressions. The key to any presidency is to avoid doing both.
I spent 12 years as a county politician, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. A hard-nosed realist politically, my take is “You elect officials and then you live with the results.”
Americans re-elected Donald John Trump as president and we should accept the consequences. It’s not like President Trump has made a secret of his opinions. He considers tariffs beautiful, every agreement not signed by him personally is worthless trash, and anything not specifically forbidden by law is negotiable: Actions like putting his name on public buildings, hanging huge banners with his likeness on federal government property, tearing down the East Wing of the White House and paving over the Rose Garden or turning Washington DC into a racetrack. If something is not expressly forbidden in the Constitution and Trump wants to do it, he issues an Executive Order and does his thing, whether it be resurfacing the Reflecting Pool or holding a cage fight on the White House lawn.
There is an Unwritten Law of Unforeseen Consequences, but until they blow up in our faces, the Trump administration seems oblivious to any consequences what-so-ever.
IRAN. When President Obama left office, the U.S. and Iran had concluded a nuclear arms agreement specifying that Iran would not develop a nuclear weapon. Once elected president, Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S.-Iran nuclear agreement was the worst deal in history and the U.S. was withdrawing from the agreement. Cut loose from any binding agreement, Iran put the pedal to the metal and accelerated development of a nuclear weapon.
This threat led to a direct military strike against Iran by Israeli and American forces on February 28, 2026. Before that date, few members of the general public had ever heard of the Strait of Hormuz. (It sounds like a brand of hummus, Strait of Hormuz brand hummus!)
I expect the White House to be better informed than the general public (including me). Suddenly the Iranians cut off oil tanker traffic in the bottleneck Strait of Hormuz and a third of the world’s crude oil became unavailable. Duh, who knew?
There is no cleaning up this mess. The world was better off with the Obama-era agreement, left to molder in the dust of history.
The economy. The Republicans had a field day poking the Biden administration in the eye over rising gas prices. I am not an economist, so for me that branch of science seems kind of diffuse. Does it really matter if the U.S. has a trade imbalance with China? It’s all numbers. If both countries wanted, you could officially erase the debt tomorrow and just start over. I realize that is unrealistic, but it is not impossible.
What does it mean when America’s national debt has topped 40 trillion dollars?
One thing seems obvious, tariffs are not a good remedy for what ails the U.S. economy. Even I notice when gas prices hit $4 a gallon and grocery prices rise by a third.
The Kennedy Center. If you don’t live in the Washington DC area, this last discussion may seem uninteresting, but I feel it is symptomatic of the current administration’s willful blindness. Someone should point out for White House spokespeople and Department of Justice lawyers that calling an elephant pink doesn’t give us a herd of pink elephants.
The Kennedy Center is the top fine arts venue in the nation’s capital. It is also a bastion of liberals and Democrats, as the name implies. Not especially welcome there, for years, Trump ignored it. Then he decided to make it his own. He issued an Execulive Order adding his name to the building’s façade and he replaced the entire board of directors with allies and supporters. The sad news is that these actions resulted in artists and patrons abandoning the Trump-Kennedy Center as too partisan and reflective of President Trump personally. Unhappy with the current administration, they stopped participating, leaving the venue with very few patrons, fewer donors, almost no artists and in a hellish position financially.
Wake up, America! How many mistakes are too many mistakes?
Some seven years later, rapper Clive Flatenbad in Swedish rap duo realPfft revisits President Trump’s anti-immigrant wall in southern Texas. Only to get interrupted by a phone call from the White House!
And once again, Clive’s rather nutty younger brother Tim has painstakingly moved Heaven, Earth and megabytes to edit and package the mucho raw footage which Clive & Friends brought home from their location shoot outside El Paso.
Based on the saying “Everybody likes a pretty girl,” Tim has even plundered realPfft’s photo archive, seeking images of beautiful women.
God help me, what a crew! As their manager, publicist and music publisher, I am guilty as charged for distributing this hilarious wideo creation.
“I love the smell of Victory Gin in the morning,” Todd Harrison said, sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on his socks. Outside the window, bright yellow sunlight promised the start of another glorious Spring day. The roar of omnicopters rattled the windows.
“You are such a piece of work,” Erin swore angrily. “I come here, give you what you want— what you claim you need— and never do I hear a word of thanks!”
Red hair and green eyes, she was out and out fuming.
“I wonder if they’ve chosen a parade route free of disruption this year,” Todd pondered. “Last year was such a disappointment.” He was a flag carrier in Big Kahuna’s annual birthday festival and military parade.
“You swine—”
A mile deep into Proletown, they were in a rented room on the second floor of a shop on a grubby side street littered with rubbish. The name on the shop window said Ye Olde WatchRepair, but the letters themselves had faded into ghostly outlines. On the walls upstairs, bucolic scenes of a pre-war nature sat in wooden frames, alternating with cracks in the plaster. Over everything hung the pungent odor of mice.
If they climbed upon the roof and looked south, they could see the cranes being used to build the 250-foot-high Victory Arch on the Isle of Dogs.
“I love the Orange Thunderbolt as much as any man,” Todd insisted, balancing on one foot and pulling on his trousers. “Fourth term notwithstanding, he’s the guy. Listen, they can have a 95-year-old PM if they want, but sometimes the Party makes life all but unbearable.” Searching the rickety nightstand for a smoke, he asked “Why is there a giant banner of Big Kahuna hanging on the Ministry of Injustice building? What’s up with that? Has he become a law & order freak in his old age?”
Working in the Lit Department of Miniprop, the Ministry of Propaganda, Todd had a way with words.
Erin just glared.
Th hollow clatter of a transport drone passed by overhead. “We’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last time we ever move,” Todd proposed.
“Again??? Blimey! ’Nough said. I’m not hearing nought!” Erin muttered, pulling the dingy bedsheet up around her chin, round as a tennis ball. Todd loved to kiss her chin, cupping it in his hands and slobbering on it.
On the flip side, sometimes it took all of her wiles just to get Todd to look up from his cellphone.
A half-read novel lay on the nightstand. “Elephant Hunting in Deepest India” screamed the title in lurid red letters. On the cover, a scantily clad damsel rode atop a wayward elephant. Todd had the disquieting sensation that he might have unknowingly contributed bits to the large language model used in the story’s creation. Some of the flowery descriptions matched his prose.
“We need to find a more secure location for our trysts,” he insisted.
“No shit, Sherlock!” sang Erin, jumping from the bed buck naked and marching to the washstand to sponge herself.
Todd heard voices from the street below. “Hoo, hoo, Big Kahuna is watching you!” they chanted, but Todd knew it was just rowdies letting off steam.
“Can you loan me any money?” he asked, not for the first time. Checking the fly strip, he plucked away the dead bodies of flies with his fingers and threw them in the rubbish bin.
“God damn drunk!” Erin griped, her Irish accent as clear as a morning breeze in May. “I never should have taken up with you!”
“It’s all O’Bannon’s fault,” countered Todd defensively. “If he hadn’t introduced us—”
“Yes, yes, blame it on an Inner Party member, why don’t you?” hissed Erin. Wiping the sponge vigorously between her legs, she worked up a lather.
“Ye Irish are as thick as thieves,” Todd commented. “I still wonder what he’s up to, y’ know.”
“I’ll tell you what he’s up to, that wanker. Free love is what he’s up to. Disseminating it among the ranks, so that his own sex crimes will look minor in comparison,” she exclaimed. Throwing the sponge into the washbowl, she marched to the dresser and pulled on her summer frock. Dressed in pink, she looked bleeding gorgeous, barefoot, her hair wild, eyes shining. Todd, hands extended like an eagle’s claws, chased her around the room, drooling. “Just you wait!” predicted Erin. “O’Bannon will throw us under the wheels of the bus, sure as beeswax.”
“I think not,” Todd claimed, only too aware that in politics, Erin was much more perceptive than he.
That’s when there came a click at the washstand and the mirror sank to the floor with a thud.
“Hey, what’s all this!” Todd howled.
The more practical of the two, Erin marched to the washstand and pulled it, screeching, along the floor. The glassy eye of a peeping tom video camera stared at them, the lens covered in dust. “Bastards,” she cursed.
“Yes, bastards!” came a cranky voice over a speaker embedded in the wall.
“Kiss me arse!” she added.
“Yes,” squawked the voice. “Kiss ye arse!”
There was a crash at the window and suddenly the room was filled with guv agents in macks and masks, storming in from window and doorway. “Hup tight! Stand thee with hands behind head!” roared a drill sergeant, teasingly drawing his truncheon down Erin’s spine and along her hip, tapping it meaningfully between her legs. “Tick tock, tick tock,” he joked. “Cat’s got paws, where’s the pussy?”
Todd and she stood helplessly still, trembling, while the guvs milled ‘round. One knocked Erin to the floor.
“Up ye go, lass,” suggested another, helping her to her feet, after which they smashed poor Todd on an elbow and knocked him on his bum.
“All right, that’s enough larking about!” O’Bannon said, coming into the room hurriedly. “Let’s wrap this up.”
“Aye, I thought t’was yer voice I heard,” Erin observed.
While Todd was lifted to a standing position, O’Bannon put on a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and read from a printed green card, “Under Article Eight, Paragraph Two of the Charter for the Isles of Britain and Ireland, you are hereby accused of sex crimes, domestic terrorism, insurrection, thievery, bribery, unauthorized handling of explosives, conspiracy to attain handguns and attack drones, printing of unlawful leaflets and doxxing. Each charge specifically or all of the above. Now, strip!”
“Strip, is it?” complained Erin. “Aye, and we what just now got clothed,” she declared, making everyone except Todd burst out laughing.
“Take them to the Ministry of Hygienic Love,” commanded O’Bannon. Black cloth bags were placed over their heads and they were led, stumbling, downstairs and outside to a waiting van.
2
In a chilly room with steel walls, where every noise had an echo, Todd was tied up and strapped to a contraption that resembled a cross between a dental chair and a barber stool.
A busy bureaucrat, O’Bannon left him there, viewing a series of video tutorials filled with trumpeting fanfare and titled “Oceania in the Age of English Socialism.” Not surprisingly, Eastasia and Eurasia were the bad guys, while life in the British Isles resembled a kind of Garden of Eden. The fourth in a series of five was titled “Big Kahuna Is Watching You.”
Afterward, O’Bannon came back in view and in an almost kindly fashion explained the situation.
“Attention, Todd! Consider yourself privileged,” O’Bannon exclaimed, looking surprisingly morose. “I could leave your interrogation to A.I. and it wouldn’t be pretty. You will be amazed at how effective our robots have become. It’s the perfect match, soulful militants against soulless machines. Guess who wins, each and every time?
“I am taking a personal interest in your case, mostly because I know Erin’s parents, two stalwart revolutionaries of the Old School. I don’t do rehabilitations anymore unless they affect policy. So, whatever else, take these formalities seriously and consider yourself honored to be here and getting my personal treatment.”
“My bad,” agreed Todd.
“As long as we are here, let’s see if we can make some progress,” stated O’Bannon, folding shut the hand-tooled brown leather case to his cellphone, a status symbol limited to members of the Inner Party. “The alternative is seven grams of lead in the head,” he added.
“I would like to forego that eventuality,” Todd replied, croaking like a crow.
“I have been following your vlog. Who gave you permission to stream the Special Olympics?” asked O’Bannon.
“I wasn’t aware that I needed permission. I just repost with ironic emojis,” Todd explained. Eyeing various punitive torture devices hanging from the ceiling, he asked, “Is this a wax museum or what?” Only half-joking.
“You seem to have a penchant for the dog poo emoji,” O’Bannon pointed out.
“I told you, I am being ironic.”
“Why do you only have 38 followers?” O’Bannon wondered, waving away a technician in a white lab coat who seemed intent on speaking to him.
“The Net is a closed system, as you know,” Todd explained. “British Isles Only. You try scraping together followers in the UK, where everybody religiously follows Cheltenham F.C. but nought filthy else. Me followers online are a crew of dodgers. Bloody shy, thanks to your lot breathing hot and heavy and such.”
“Why post on a vlog if you don’t have an audience?” O’Bannon queried, genuinely curious. “What is this about Big Kahuna’s hair-loss remedy? Do you actually know something or is it just click bait? Is your podcast sending secret messages in code to an erstwhile opposition? Vox clamantis in deserto. You are a voice crying out in the wilderness.”
“It’s a hobby. I can’t be working for a foreign power because you can’t find a foreign power in London to save ye arse. I wasn’t aware that being a futile bloody failure online is illegal.”
That’s when O’Bannon hit him in the mouth. Once. Hard. When Todd had recovered enough to speak, he said, “I take that as a typical example of trolling.”
O’Bannon’s face went red, but at least he didn’t hit Todd again. Instead, he stood massaging his knuckles. His hand was sore. “Room 35B,” he said.
“What the fuck?!” Todd protested. “I’m British. Some rights and permissions we have. Read the Magna Carta. Bloody Irish!”
“Room 35B is the worst thing you can imagine,” heckled O’Bannon. “It varies from one individual to another. We use an algorithm to determine what you find most reprehensible, based on your online viewing history. In your case, Todd, it is listening to political speeches. As incredible as this might sound, you never participate in political rallies nor Hate Week, although you hoist the colors in Big K’s yearly procession. Why is that? Do tell.”
“No. Aye. Yes. As you say, I really hate listening to harangues. Too many family troubles growing up and like that. ‘The revolution eats its own,’ as they say. Now that we have that nailed down, how about we go to a Wimpy’s and grab some burgers?” he suggested.
“You jest,” said O’Bannon, “but this is not a jesting matter.”
“I don’t jest!” Todd protested. “On me dear old mother’s grave, I hate speeches and I love a Wimpy Triple Quarterpounder Bacon & Cheese. Now that’s a burger!”
“Untie him!” O’Bannon indicated and the technician came scurrying over in his white lab coat. He struggled with the knots.
Traversing the city in a green Ministry of Works van, avoiding the pro-Kahuna flash mobs in City Centre, they stopped off at the Ministry of War where a surly tattoo artist inked a barcode across Todd’s forehead. “Welcome to the Tribe of Ingrates,” O’Bannon announced, smirking. “The State gives you everything and you are still not satisfied.”
Once the novocaine wore off, Todd’s forehead itched terribly.
At the fast food joint, O’Bannon sat over a cup of java, brooding, while Todd fed his face. “Would you mind paying?” he asked O’Bannon. “We left our loft in such a hurry, I forgot me wallet.”
O’Bannon, sure-footed but immensely bored, plucked an evidence bag from his briefcase and handed Todd his wallet.
“Uh, now this is embarrassing,” Todd admitted, “but I don’t have any coin, you see. I’m skint. Penniless. Stony-broke be the bloke.” Holding up his wallet, he showed it to be empty.
Sighing, O’Bannon waved to the waitress. When she came over, he paid for the burger and the coffee.
“I wonder what Erin is doing right now,” Todd mused.
“Don’t worry yourself on her account,” answered O’Bannon. “A wench like that always lands on her feet. She’ll go home to Eire and get a job tending golf links.”
“Now about these charges against us,” Todd proposed, wiping his mouth daintily with a crinkly napkin. “I can understand that you are angry. Then, too, there’s all the things we said when we were at your flat in Russell Square, all that cal about throwing acid in the faces of babies, the joy of anarchistic drone attacks on municipal housing estates and such drivel, but you need to understand that Erin and I were putting on an act. We didn’t ska mean all that blarney.”
“Then why should I believe you now?” O’Bannon asked stonily, his face dour and furious. He propped an oily grey guv-issued M1911 automatic pistol on the Formica tabletop next to his cellphone. It looked enormous, sitting there among the cardboard tray, plastic utensils and paper wrapper left over from the burger.
Staring at the gun, alarmed, Todd stammered, “All I am saying is give me a chance. Seriously, mate,” he pleaded, “I really do love Big Kahuna. Carrying the banner at his birthday parade is a sure sign of my devotion, I can assure you. Only…”
“Only???” spat O’Bannon, leaning menacingly across the table. “Only what?”
“You are Inner Party, you see, old chum, while I am Outer Party. You gents get the more part of the booze and the capers and all the good stuff while the rest of us poor sods have to put up with Victory Gin, crumbly chocolate and your leavings. It says—”
“WHAT SAYS?” roared O’Bannon, bringing the waitress at a run. He waved her away.
“In the archives. At work. There’s a wine in France called a Bordeaux.”
“Yes? So?” hissed O’Bannon.
As if on cue, three rowdies, unshaven and quite drunk, stumbled through the street door, their black bomber jackets plastered with football badges. One look at O’Bannon and his pistol sent them on their way.
“Life is short,” Todd declared. “If I could procure a supply of something as meaningfully fulfilling as Bordeaux wine, Big Kahuna has in me a trusted servant for as long as we two shall live! It would affix me a place on the black market and such, you see. Ta! I have said my piece.”
Stymied, impressed and immensely irritated, O’Bannon told him, “Come to my flat next Tuesday and we’ll sort you out once and be done with it.”
Tears of gratitude pouring down his face, Todd found he really did love Big Kahuna.
Flying into a brick wall, a small black bat fell at my feet. It seemed like an ill omen. Something ethereal in the bat’s nature made me suspect that this flying rodent consisted of more than met the eye at first glance. Having had some experience in the vivisection of inert bodies as an anatomy student at the University of Uppsala, I gently raised the creature in my gloved hand and stared into one of its glassy eyeballs.
“New life!” I cried aloud in the inky white fog of a London night. The scuttling of rats rose in reply. Eerie footsteps and murky shadows populated a street dripping in condensation. The wings of the bat fluttered, its tiny teeth gnawing on the black leather of my glove.
I was in London for a fortnight’s sojourn at the behest of Professor Otto Penn, renowned physician at Eep’s College, Brixton. When landing at Heathrow, I had been required to declare all items above the threshold of £135, then sign a promise that I would not undertake employment while in the U.K. and finally swear that I have never had any dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, Esquire.
Having left Stateside my betrothed Lenore in the provincial backwater that we call home, I hoped that my recently completed monograph on the derivation of the Irish banshee might win me a teaching fellowship at Eep’s. A laboratory assistant at a glue factory, I wouldn’t mind coming up in the world. Memories of Lenore’s hot, prickly breath made a havoc of my thought processes.
What with both ICE and the Border Patrol on the warpath, God only knows what will happen when I try to return to the States. Airports have become dangerous places. I can check my credit rating, but how do I check my ICE rating? Has some protest march I participated in during college left an indelible signature in the Border Patrol database? Am I on a Watch List and, if so, whose? Has a contribution to the ACLU gotten me listed as a domestic terrorist? What if my next door neighbor’s dog is a subversive? I don’t want to end up in a detention center in Bayou Blue, Louisiana just because my neighbor Bill’s Pekingese has been spying for the Chinese Communist Party. Scary stuff!
Fortunately, although an American down to my bootstraps, my family has a wee connection to the British Isles. Humble brag, one of my maternal great great uncles designed the loos on the battle ship HMS Dreadful.
I know myself to be something of a throwback. Every Victorian drama requires a mad scientist who electrocutes inanimate objects with the hopeful conjecture “It’s alive!”
Administering the Kiss of Life, exhaling into the bat’s jagged mouth, it fell from my hands. Growing in shape and bulk, a mysterious figure four feet in height dressed in a black peacoat took its place on the flagstones, its face a pale blur. Scared shitless, a rash of goosebumps ran down my back. I could feel my hair standing on end. “What the fuck?!” I wailed.
“Have no fear,” commanded this strange apparition.
“Fuck you ‘have no fear,’” I complained. “I got plenty of fear.”
“I am but a weary traveler,” he insisted. “Thee has no idea the extent of my afflictions,” he assured me. “Among other things, I am tormented by the curse of spasmodic recollective memory. Fragments of the past come upon me unbidden, mocking and plaguing me, laying siege to my soul, filling me with ennui and regret. Think of it! Now consider that for 600 years, I have occasioned such emotions.”
I must say, he did look mournful, standing there in the shadows. I found myself unable to look away from his baleful stare, pointy ears, weird nails like spikes and frightful comb-over. There was an Old World slovenliness about him. He stank of sloe gin.
His Mitteleuropa accent assured me that he did not come from any shit-hole country. Still, one can never be sure. He may own a yacht off the coast of Africa.
“Ah, thee be American!” he cried gaily, spreading his claw-like hands in a welcoming gesture.
“Yes,” I admitted, “I am.”
“I could tell thee a tale about a world leader who is sucking the lifeblood out of his country,” the fellow exclaimed, wagging his head playfully, “but I won’t.”
What to make of him? Was he even 9/10th’s of one percent real or simply a bad hallucination brought on by a bout of indigestion?
“Have thee ever considered mindfulness?” he queried, swaying from side to side so violently, I felt compelled to steady him with a hand. “Close thy eyes,” he suggested, “put thy hand over thy heart and imagine all of the enemies thee can vanquish with a swipe of the longsword. Hacking off their limbs! Hacking off their heads!” he shouted with glee, his eyes aglow like two burning embers.
“I think most people are focused on peace,” I objected.
“Oh, yes, peace,” he croaked, as if discussing an inferior brand of laundry detergent. “Naturally, peace speaks to the soul of the populace, but, really, it is no part of human nature. Human nature eggs us on to conquer and subjugate. That’s the way of it.”
“You seem a bloodthirsty lot,” I felt impelled to point out.
“Now thee confuseth me with the Ottomans,” he insisted.
“People need to stick together,” I replied warily, the corporate motto at my place of employment. “All I am saying is give peace a chance.”
“Don’t make me list the unappetizing catalog of military misadventure carried out within the last decade,” he insisted, burping a mouthful of breath that smelled like swamp gas. “There is always someone attacking or bombing their neighbor somewhere upon this sorry globe,” he observed. “Thee need fight like hell or thee won’t have a country anymore. No politician should be elected to high office if they have not studied Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Nothing compares to the gory, glorious warfare we waged 600 years ago upon the field of battle, our barbarity fully on display for all to see. VladȚepeș I was christened in the popular mind, ‘Vlad the Impaler,’ a glutton for dead meat. Anorexic, a banquet of food lies before me, yet I cannot eat. Blood I crave and blood I shall have,” he chuckled, falling flat on his face.
“I say,” I commented, helping the midget to his feet, “I fail to see the connection between bats and you.”
“Creatures of the night,” he grumbled in a voice like thunder rolling down a Transylvania mountain top. His peacoat reeked of mold and sawdust. “I am the greatest vampire in history! Everyone knows Count Dracula, ‘Son of the Dragon.’ That’s me!” he howled. “In Romania, they think I am a hero. They make vampire fangs, keychains and shot glasses in my honor. Suveniruri, jucarii. Souvenirs, toys. Look me up online!”
As he spoke, he began flickering like a faulty lightbulb. Once… twice… and then… poof!
He was gone.
I waited around in the dank night, hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm, but it didn’t seem like he would reappear. Well, I thought, that’ssomething I can tell my grandkids about, one fine day.
I was filled with equal parts relief and trepidation. As I turned to go… blink!… there he was again, clear as a video on YouTube and twice as real. Shivers went up my spine and, let’s face it, I experienced a sense of irritation and major disappointment that I hadn’t shaken loose from his companionship. It began to feel as if I might spend the rest of my life standing on that chunk of pavement. And not in a good way.
“The hour grows late,” he said, as if nothing had transpired, leaving me to ponder whether he even realized that his spectral image had, in fact, shorted out. “So much to do and so little time before sunrise.”
“So what brings you to England?” I wondered, making the best of a bad situation.
“I have purchased an abbey,” he exclaimed expansively, seeming to grow an inch or two in height. “Downton Abbey it is called, but I think of it as Rundown Abbey. Sadly neglected by the previous owners, it needs a lot of work. Still, I expect to make something of it. I am renaming it Vlad’s Hideaway. I have already had the name affixed across the front of the building. So far, the earthmovers have only demolished the east wing. I live in a suitcase— well, a coffin, if thee must know— so, by necessity, I call wherever I hang my coat home. However, buying a property gives me somewhere to exhibit my store of gold objets d’art. Gold ornaments are only worth having if one can flaunt them.”
“I really wouldn’t know,” I insisted.
“More is the pity,” he lectured me. “One can never get enough gold. Thee knows the old saying, ‘Me, impotent? Hogwash! Just behold the golden trophies upon my mantelpiece.’ Klemens von Metternich said that. Or was it Napoleon?”
Listening to him rant, without a doubt, I found Vlad to be a man of deep conviction. “I suppose you are supernatural…” I guessed.
“Eh! Supernatural,” he grimaced, his mouth turned cruelly down. “That and four pounds ninety-five will get thee a salted caramel milkshake at Wimpy’s. I do not drink… wine.”
“I say, are you rich?” I blurted, surprising myself. “Where does your money come from?”
“I thought thee knew,” parried Vlad. “I have made a fortune in real estate. One never loses money in real estate, old boy.”
“Do tell,” I quipped, keenly aware from the cinema that I mustn’t let my guard down for even a minute, lest I find the vile creature at my throat.
“As the world goes kaputt, I would like to secure my position in the structure that remains,” he explained, sounding like a stockbroker.
“Apparently, 600 years have given you opportunities to acquire multiple talents,” I surmised.
“Yes, yes, I haven’t been asleep all the time,” he confirmed. “I donate money to blood banks across the globe. It never hurts in times of trouble to have a reserve.”
He paused, seeming to parse his words. “Every hundred years, I reboot the system,” he claimed. “I could tell thee more, but we do not yet know one another all that well.”
Evidently, vampires don’t share.
“Question: Is it true that you have a harem of female vampires?” I wondered, titillated by the very idea. One sees so much speculative nonsense at the movies.
“Like the Muslims and their 72 vestal virgins awaiting every martyr in heaven?” he grinned. “I think not. If thee seeks the Bride of Dracula, her name is Miruna and she lives on a goat farm at the base of Mount Moldoveanu in the Transylvanian Alps. The altitude raises the level of hemoglobin in the goats. She drove me crazy. We are estranged,” he declared with chauvinist distaste. “All that I got out of that relationship was an exceptional stamp collection.”
I checked my watch. Time to go.
“Doth thou wish to join the Eternal Order of Vampires?” he proffered, taking my drift. He made it sound like a gym membership.
“Who, M-M-ME?” I stuttered. “No way, José.”
“One does feel duty-bound to ask,” he all but apologized. “European custom.”
“I am so done here!” I stammered, breaking into a cold sweat. “Really, I am not the type.”
“Blood types!” he rejoiced, clasping his hands emphatically. “Don’t get me started on the merits of the various types of blood. Type A for kings, type B for queens, type AB for aristos and type O for commoners,” he recited categorically, as if he were listing paint samples. “Bloody confusing until one gets the knack,” he acknowledged. I got the feeling he was trying to sell me on the whole concept of vampirism.
“No, no, no,” I insisted, stamping my foot, which made him look down his nose at me and laugh. Was I afraid? Damn straight I was afraid! “Make a habit of flying into walls, do we?” I asked, now doubly curious.
“I am a vampire,” he sighed, shaking his head woefully. “Alas, when I suck the blood of someone who is hammered, the alcohol enters my bloodstream, poisoning my organs. It is toxic. I become intoxicated. Thee has thyself witnessed the result.” He stared at me cross-eyed. Raising his gnarled hands with their grotesque nails, fingers splayed seductively, he intoned, “Look into my eyes, deep into my eyes,” which I did, only to wonder at their bloodshot condition.
“Ach so?” I asked.
“Well, maybe not,” he muttered.
As bad luck would have it, one of London’s urban foxes chose that moment to come trotting around the corner of a near-by building. Sensing us, the red fox froze in its tracks, but it was already way too late. Down on all-fours, Vlad had become transformed. Coiled like a puma, a feral monster, he emitted a low, ferocious growl, drooling a pool of saliva onto the flagstones.
“WAIT! STOP! NO!” I screamed, but my entreaties fell on deaf ears. The vampire leapt through the air and pounced upon its prey. Amid horrendous yelps and the crunching of bones, the fox was not so much killed as physically obliterated. Never will I be able to erase the frightening image of the vampire, crouched on the ground, glowering at me dementedly from the edge of the building, the dead fox hanging lifelessly from its maw.
In shock, I collapsed onto the pavement and lay gasping as vampire and fox disappeared into the darkness. How long did I lie spread across the flagstones, an oily blackness tinging my sight, my throat a dry and aching hole, my heart thumping hollowly in my chest? Who knows.
About the time I struggled wearily to my feet, Vlad returned, standing erect and assiduously wiping his mouth on a sleeve of his peacoat.
“There’s a nip in the air,” he commented. “Still, rain makes the grass grow.”
The casual banality of this utterance was so unexpected, I found myself doubting my own senses. Didn’t he just attack and drain a pint of blood from a woodland creature? Did he or didn’t he? The night had become surreal.
“I consider myself a connoisseur,” he bragged. “I have traveled the world tasting the blood of yaks, mountain goats, musk ox, bison, water buffalo, elephants, dolphins, mountain lions, lions, snow leopards, marmots, grey squirrels, voles and hummingbirds. Hath thou ever tasted the blood of the horseshoe crab? Quite the treat. It is blue. A remnant of prehistoric times, the crab’s blood is copper-based. You should try it.”
“I find the idea of me drinking blood thoroughly repugnant,” I confessed.
“Warm blood, chilled blood, a blood aperitif. Blood daiquiris. Blood red tomato juice,” he bantered. “The Belgians have the right idea, a different glass beaker for each kind of beverage, fitting the glass to the libation. Blood pudding! Thee will eat blood pudding, but thee won’t drink warm blood. How quaint!”
Giving me a defiant look, Vlad turned on his heels. “Beastliness, brutality, cruelty, depravity, inhumanity, savagery, wickedness,” I heard him curse as he hastily walked down the high street. As if drawn by a magnet, unable to resist, I followed in his path. Reaching a pub, he peered through its green glass window. “I shall drink the blood of yonder drunken sods,” he declared, pulling me past the doorway into the barroom proper.
“More blood?” I asked helplessly, but to no avail.
Hot and noisy, the air was thick with the smell of ale. As Vlad made his appointed rounds among the patrons, a fulsome blond trollop with a painted face waylaid me. “Love me!” she cried gaily, grabbing my codpiece in a vice-like grip. Her eyes, blue orbs all but drained of color, stared hungrily into mine, a playful smile flitting upon her lips. These goings-on pleased me. Having been through hell, I felt I had earned a respite. Quaffing a lime and lager, feeling young and virile, I decided to postpone a return to my lodgings.
Leaning heavily against me, coyly unbuttoning her blouse, a mammary protrusion of salty white flesh filled my mouth. “Ucksayeyemayipplesnay,” she commanded in a well-rehearsed cadence of pig Latin. What can I say? I did as requested.
Later, untangling me from the arms of the trollop, Vlad declared “Come, it is time for second sleep” a concept with which I am only too familiar. An overactive bladder, I only get four hours of shuteye before being forced to rise from my bed and visit the lavatory.
Outside on the pavement, Vlad looked me up and down, as if considering whether to share a particularly ribald joke. “Illegitimi non carborundum” he declared, disappearing in a cloud of ill-smelling grey smoke. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
That’s right, annex Antarctica! It’s Christmas Eve and freezing cold in my House, so I have some Perspective on this issue. What looks like a maxi-chunk of ice is in fact an integral part of America’s Defense Posture. For entirely too long, this vital link in America’s chain of World Domination has been blithely and willfully ignored. Fortunately, there are Republican politicians who truly understand President Donald J. Trump’s fixations and they are willing to go that Extra Mile in understanding just how essential Antarctica is to our National Security. Let us take a Voluntary Position to make Antarctica an integral part of the U.S.A. Any Sleazeball Democrat bleeding-heart Antifa scum who opposes us should be tried for treason! Congress must ratify the selection of a Special Envoy to the icy south, rather than throw out the baby with the bath water. Yes, it’s cold down yonder, but if it is worth doing, it is worth doing right!
Five different species of Penguins be damned. They have been Ripping Off America entirely too long! Yes, they are cute, but they are also totally worthless when it comes to manning machine gun nests or firing HIMAR anti-tank missiles. We have run tests. Nor do they spend anywhere near 3% of Antarctica’s GNP on their own defense. All that penguin guano is chock full of nitrates which could be fertilizing soybean fields in Iowa. It’s shameful that we have let them hitch a Free Ride on America’s coattails for far too long, but we are Good People and, as the Ice Shelf melts, we will save their sorry asses from oblivion.
Don’t let the Southern Elephant Seals fool you, they are all Radical Left Lunatics!
Instead of getting their house in order, the whale, seal, petrel and penguin denizens of Antarctica’s frozen wasteland have depended on International Treaties that claim Antarctica as a nuclear-free zone and pacifist redoubt. No one wants to live there! You have to pay people to overnight. Poo-poo on your international treaties, you softies at the U.N. You typically Fuzzy-Headed Bureaucrats! It is time for you to put the horse before the cart and ensure the survival of the Snowy Albatross. Read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge for details. As Coleridge wrote, “I fear thy skinny hand!”
Redemption is at hand! Redirect the Seventh Fleet. Ship Heavy Weapons to McMurdo Sound and preserve the ice sheet. What’s not to like? The driest, coldest place on the planet, they have nine months of winter and a volcano. We already have a footprint in the region: There are burger bars, pizza ovens, stir-fry and burritos in the cafeteria at McMurdo Station. Grab your moon boots and an AR-15! We must protect the civilian population of research scientists and our $110 million yearly investment. We can use Christchurch, NZ as a staging area. If Pakistan can sell more than $4 billion in military equipment to Libya, what’s the problem? Besides, if we don’t do it, China will label Antarctica as the Final Destination on the Silk Road and invade. We have the aircraft and we have the storage lockers, it is only the will to Invest in Antarctica’s Future that is currently lacking in Congress and among the American people. This will change! I am certain of it.
It’s a rainy Wednesday in November and it occurs to me that I am remiss in serving fans of the Swedish rap duo realPfft. You want more songs. I’ve asked the boys, Mutte and Clive, “What’s cookin’?” They have two biscuits in the oven, but Mutte wants to add musical breaks and bridges before they release these monsters onto an unsuspecting world.
As their music publisher and band manager, I have access to their entire catalog. Why not showcase their best work while they labor on new material in their virtual studio?
“Storming the Capitol” is a great rainy day hit. A terrific riff, lots of bass, their usual fascination with sound effects.
On January 6, 2021, a crowd of rowdy, armed Trump supporters met on the mall in Washington, DC to hear a speech by their leader. After losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump called on them to take back their country. By interrupting the Congressional counting of electoral ballots in the U.S. Capitol, the insurrectionists hoped in some vague way to swing the election to Trump. Overrunning police barricades and beating up the police, they broke into the Capitol, where they did a lot of damage and threatened lawmakers who ran for their lives or took shelter behind locked doors. It was a wild, upsetting afternoon with colored smoke wafting through the air and the future of American democracy very much in question. Returning to the White House, President Trump watched the pageant unfold on television. He waited hours to call the whole thing off.
Two weeks later, on January 20th, Joseph Biden was sworn in as America’s 46th president.
The insurrectionists were charged with unlawful entry, destruction of property, violence against the police and other assorted charges. No one, however, was accused of treason. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys militia, was convicted instead of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 22 years in prison, the longest prison term given to a January 6th insurrectionist.
From June to December 2022, Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol held a series of hearings into the violence at the Capitol. Although never charged, the video record made it pretty obvious that President Trump incited the mob to attack the Capitol. For her courage in pinpointing this truth, Ms. Cheney was drummed out of the Republican Party!
Once elected to a second term, President Trump immediately pardoned all the January 6th defendants.
Rap band realPfft released the instrumental “Storming the Capitol” on January 8th, 2021, exactly two days after the actual event. How in the world did they do that?!
They had already spent two weeks working on the instrumental. A Russian-influenced emotional rollercoaster with roots in classical music, it has a soaring, pining melody and a male choir. Adding diverse crowd sounds and the occasional explosive percussion, the boys fine-tuned the finished product.
The only thing missing was the cover artwork. They turned to their Old World collaborator Kuny who listened to the music, watched footage of the rioters on TV and sketched the 1920’s style German Expressionist agitprop cover art in a single inspired all-nighter. They then delivered the product to TuneCore for almost instantaneous release.
In a January 2021 blog post, I provided a link to the track on YouTube. Five years later, we revisit this musical gem, one of the best things that realPfft has ever done.
It’s award season and Donald Trump has announced that he wants the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump sees himself as a peacemaker and he feels that his efforts to bring peace to Gaza and a negotiated settlement for Ukraine qualify him for the Nobel Prize.
Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. Seeing the carnage of war, Nobel felt responsible. To counter the view of him as a “merchant of death” and to strengthen peace initiatives, he created the Nobel Peace Prize.
You can’t just announce that you want the Nobel Prize, however, that’s not how it works. You are awarded the Peace Prize if, in fact, you deserve it.
Not everyone is eligible. Among other things, you have to be alive to qualify, the prize is not awarded posthumously.
You also need to be nominated, but in Trump’s case, that is no problem since he has been nominated at least 12 times, most recently by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. The government of Pakistan nominated Trump for his work in brokering a cease-fire between Pakistan and India. In 2022, Péter Szijjártó, the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, suggested awarding the prize to Trump for the Abraham Accords. In the past decade, several American lawmakers have nominated Trump, some out of conviction, others to curry favor.
There are six Nobel Prize categories: physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, peace and literature. Some years, the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to an author, other years to a poet. “Song lyrics are also a form of poetry,” Clive Flatenbad of Swedish rap duo realPfft points out. “Therefore, Mutte and I as songwriters should also be eligible for the Nobel Prize in Literature. We have released 140 songs. There’s probably some literary merit in our work somewhere in there. Huh, huh, huh?”
Fortunately for Clive, just because he is gauche doesn’t disqualify him for the Nobel Prize.
Clive’s argument is not completely outlandish since, occasionally, the Nobel Committee chooses a home-grown Swede for the Nobel Prize. “That’s me!” says Clive, whose father is Swedish and whose mother is British. “I grew up in Stockholm,” he insists. “Therefore, I deserve the prize.”
Competition is stiff and no motivation is off-limits. The band’s motto is “With realPfft in Modern Times,” a bastardization of Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf’s slogan “For Sweden in Modern Times.” (För Sverige – i tiden)
To bolster their argument, the boys point out that realPfft has received The Freilitzer Music Award from the district of Sjælland in Denmark in 2021, a grant from The Catherine C. Grant Foundation in the town of Bristol in England in 2022 and the Big Bellyacher Award for Good Housekeeping from the city of Tokyo in 2024.
Just as Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward qualified them for the Nobel Prize, the boys claim that the lyrics to their song Speed Hump qualify them for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sample lyrics: Don’t insult him/ Don’t insult me/ Spending coin/ To put bumps in the roadway… Any love, any love, give me, give me/ Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! / Papa done me, si si dumb need/ Papa done me, si si dumb needy… Pick me up, pick me up, give me, give me/ Pick me up, pick me up, give me, give me… In the roadway… Coin/ Spending coin… etc.
“Mutte has created many an audio effect at the mixing console. Give us the Nobel Prize in Physics,” Clive suggests, using a scatter-shot approach to the awards. “I’m a cough drop addict. Medicine! We have good chemistry. Chemistry! I know how to add. Economics! The cards are stacked against us, but the problem, as I see it, is too few categories. Where is the Nobel Prize in Choreography? Where is the Nobel Prize in Fashion Design? The Nobel Prize in Dumb Jokes? It’s like the Oscars. We could win an Oscar for videos by my younger brother Tim in the category Best Original Short Visual Representation of a Musical Composition by a Swedish Rap Duo Out of Uppsala, Sweden. Easy-peasy, we could win that Oscar! Hands-down.
“We finish every day’s struggle in the studio by making a ‘V for Victory’ sign with both hands, shouting to one another ‘Peace, brother!’ That alone makes us worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize,” according to Clive.
“If Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize without creating peace,” reasons Clive in an open letter to the Swedish Academy, “we deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature without creating literature.”
Note: Since you need to be nominated by a public official in order to win, I, blogger Kevin Feingold, officially nominate songwriters Clive Gunnar Flatenbad and Mutte Anders Fjutt for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2026. May they live to be 100 years old! (Ja, må han leva i hundrade år, the Swedish version of “Happy birthday to you.”)
Life Goes On… In a time of war and disheartening news, musical maestro Mutte Fjutt gives us a ray of sunshine, an instrumental with a crowd-pleasing, big band melody and a sweet refrain.
Add it to your playlist. Going viral on a platform near you!
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