Forensic Science woke up one morning with a terrific headache. He stepped out of bed and sharply tilted his head in one direction, immediately the other, and stepped blindly out of the tiny bedroom.
Stumbling, fiddling in the kitchen, he by some miracle soon sat at the table with his coffee reading the newspaper and whistling for his wife, Buddhist Education, who had taken sole residence as of late in the larger bedroom he had once so enjoyed his sleeping in.
Charlotte always arrives at work half an hour early. She leaves her apartment at 7:15, brown bag in hand, and waits in front of a car rental agency for the 7:22 Wilshire Boulevard bus, a tall, broad-beamed secretary in a tortuous beehive hairdo and a miniskirt, fat pads at the knees.
She stands dumbly, lapping pearls of sweat from her upper lip, squinting against the glare from the polished derrieres of the rental cars. Timed gushes of traffic buffet her and powder her face with tiny flakes of carbon soot.
"You haf no sense uff rhythm!" screamed Hitler. His face was flushed and visions of goose-stepped polkas swam before his mad eyes. "You dance like a tank!"
"It's not so easy," Stalin objected. His thick, black moustache glistened with sweat and beer foam. The heavy woolen uniform he wore was the height of un-fashion and reeked of cigar smoke. His big black boots stomped out painful, broken steps.
"My feet mock me and disobey."
"Look at me! Look at me!" shouted Castro. His legs flashed with controlled grace. He did a perfect Time Warp. He whirled in the air like a dervish and landing, broke into The Monkey.
Roosevelt was insanely jealous. Beams of colored light from the disco ball bounced off the mirrored surfaces of his glasses as he struggled to conceal his rage. A martini glass shattered in his powerful hand. He gripped his canes and rose awkwardly from his wheelchair on weak, shriveled legs.
"I shall cut this rug," he declared. His chromed leg braces began to vibrate and twitch, matching each beat of the music. He twirled his canes and started to moonwalk. A thousand faces looked up to catch the rare vision. A thousand little piles of powdered white cocaine were forgotten. He did the Mashed Potatoes. The crowd moaned in admiration. He did The Robot. He did the Hippy Hippy Shake.
"We love you!" yelled a pimply boy through cupped hands. He'd had two beers.
Roosevelt grinned. His yellowed teeth firmly clenched an ivory cigarette holder, the cigarette Turkish and half-smoked. "What is love?" he said, and ran to escape Eleanor, his wheelchair forgotten.
Hitler fumed in the background. "It's my party," he whined. He shook his booty: tiny, Austrian, syphilitic. But he really couldn't dance.
This is a fact: there are no more places on the Earth's surface left to explore. For the last 100 years or so, every inch of the planet has been discovered and combed over by people or satellites. Our sights are now on the nearby planets, perhaps someday the stars - provided, of course, that we can start to get our damn spaceships off the ground without significant problems.
Mel's dad, on the other hand, has always had other ideas.
1.
It'd all started innocently enough: Pamie wanted to go on the pill. Said she wanted to be sure that we couldn't have children -- ever. She wanted to be Double Income, No Kids all the way.
"It'll fuck you up, though," I offered, sitting in the dining room, over breakfast. Scrambled eggs. The way I'd always had them, even since I could remember.
"They wouldn't make something available and put it on the market if there was anything wrong with it," she replied as she poured herself a glass of orange juice in the kitchen, framed like a picture through the hole in the kitchen wall. I looked at her as though she were a piece of art, a still life in mid-pose. You know, something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
"Look at it this way. We'll be able to have more of whatever we want, whenever we want. Don't you want that?"
I shook my head. Pamie could be so naive. She once told me she'd thought that the Ramones were really brothers. And that had been just the tip of the iceberg. At one point in our relationship, she confided that she'd actually thought that Matchbox 20 was a pretty good band. I don't know what we saw in each other at first. Thankfully, I'd trained her to the point where she didn't mention them around me anymore.
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