Grizzly Junction: A Restaurant For Bears

    After six months, it was clear that Grizzly Junction was doomed to fail. The restaurant business is a tough one; the restaurant business for bears is damn near impossible, a lesson that Pinky Wright, proprietor of the nation’s first bear restaurant was learning the hard way.
    The restaurant itself hardly resembled the gleaming edifice that drew bears of every sort to Portland for the grand opening in early April. Piles of berry-marked bear feces spangled the floor now, and claw marks tore through the oak doors. “I swear,” one of the employees overheard Pinky saying one evening, “I thought bears knew how to use doors.”
    The door conundrum was but a fraction of Pinky’s troubles. The bears seemed to have no respect for the one plate per customer policy of the trash buffet, and all but ignored the poached salmon--of which Pinky was particularly proud.
    Then there were the rogue bears, who, ignorant or dismissive of the clearly posted hours of service sign, routinely smashed in the windows at Grizzly Junction for a late-night snack. After the first incidence of a break-in, Pinky found the culprits sleeping inside, and called the police. The police told him to call the Parks Department, and, an hour or so later, a group of men and women in green uniforms took the rogue bears out in a net, and released them into the wild. They returned the next night, undeterred.
    The bears that did pay were poor tippers, and those were rare. More often, this or that grizzly or black bear would rise from his place at the table, let out a guttural moan and take to clawing at the door as if to say, “How do I get out of this place?” Pinky would confront them and, sometimes, they’d stare back at him, confused; but more often, they’d really maul the shit out of him.   
    So maybe it was the maulings; maybe it was the bear’s inability to use a door, or their lax and stingy approach to tipping.
    In any case, in late October, Pinky came to the heartrending decision to close the doors of Grizzly Junction forever. As the men loaded the still-pristine urinals into a truck, as he watched his life’s work being gutted and torn asunder, Pinky cried.
    Just then, a leviathan grizzly ambled over to him and grunted softly. Pinky looked up, and the bear stood erect on his hind legs, towering over Pinky yet looking in his eyes as if to say, “Thank you, Pinky. On behalf of all bears--thank you.”
    Pinky reached to shake the bear’s considerable paw. The bear looked confused at first, and then reached out, and mauled him.

With Regards To Mannheim

You look at her and she looks at you, your mouths curling at the corners. As if on cue, you erupt in laughter, you hahahaing and her heheheing together in an intimate sharing of experience. She slaps your back and you pound your knee. She covers her mouth with her hand and you begin coughing, from laughing too hard. Milk would shoot out of your noses, if you happened to be drinking milk--luckily, you weren’t. For a moment, it seems as though this moment will last forever, this blithe indulgence of humanity, this otherworldly sense of uncontrollable joy.
    Then, the woman dusts herself off and gets back on her bike. The moment is over, but the laughter hangs in the air.

President Everyman

For centuries, the American Presidency has been a sort of highfalutin position filled by men who don’t like pornography or skee-ball or talking to people who are covered in vomit--unless they’re babies, and even then they proceed with caution, so as not to contract what scientists call “pukey-breath.”
    The day I met the president started like any other, with a stranger nudging me awake with his foot and saying, “Hey, get out of here! This is a place of business!” I ambled on down to Doug’s Tavern and ordered a pint, and Doug told me he couldn’t legally serve me alcohol until ten. I cursed at Doug under my breath, per my routine, and headed over to the gas station.
    It was there that it happened.
    A light-skinned black fellow sat on the curb, leaned against a bindle, smoking a cigarette. He was dressed like any old Joe Schmo, with an American flag t-shirt tucked into a pair of streaked sweatpants, two mismatched, worn-out flip-flops dangling off his crusted feet. I asked him for a cigarette and he slurred something about Vietnam. “Yeah,” I said, “just terrible.”
    I knew he was our president by his easy air of urbanity, the way he slurred carefully chosen words with conviction, and, of course, his patriotic t-shirt. I saluted him, and he saluted back. I said, “It’s an honor to be in your presence,” and he said, “Can you spare some change? I’m trying to get bus fare home.”
    Imagine that! A bus! And all this time, I’d just assumed presidents rode in limousines and jet planes.
    I emptied my pockets, and gave every last dime to the President. He thanked me and wished me a happy birthday for some reason. I shook his sooty hand and bid him adieu. He pulled a forty of Colt .45 from his bindle and took a long swig.
    “Hey, how’d he get malt liquor so early?” I thought to myself, and then, chuckling under my breath, “Well--I guess being of the leader of the free world has its perks!”

The Treasure Hunt

    It was on day three of our treasure hunt, our white t-shirts  transparent with sweat as we walked into the kitchen, that Dad asked us, “What are you boys up to?”
    “Trying to find buried treasure,” we told him.
    “Oh,” he said. “And what makes you so sure there’s buried treasure in the backyard?”
    We looked at each other for a moment and shrugged.
    “Well, who knows?” Dad said with a warm smile. “No sense in not trying, right?”
    We had dug up most of the backyard--Mom’s flower garden, Dad’s chives, and the pet graveyard, by the end of day four, with nothing to show for it but some scary pet corpses in shoeboxes. Plodding into the house, Dad asked us, “How’s the treasure hunt coming?”
    “Bad,” we told him. “It’s been four days, and no treasure.”
    Dad laughed and told us to keep at it. “You may be on the verge of a big discovery,” he said winking.
    The next morning, we agreed that day five would be our last. After breakfast, we gathered our shovels and all the dead animal boxes, as Mom instructed, to put them back into the ground. The early sun was reaching over the trees in the east, beating down on our slumped backs from afar, when Jeff called out to us. “Guys, I found something!”
    Sure enough, when we got over to Jeff, he was holding a small wooden chest. We opened it to find twenty-three crumpled dollar bills, a cheap locket with Mom’s picture inside, and a fallow note staring back at us. In Dad’s handwriting, the note read: “Aaaargh, matey, If ye have found this trunk, ye have found the booty of John Redbeard, the most feared and infamous pirate in all of the seven seas.”
    We ran away from home that day, not because we thought we could live on twenty-three dollars and a cheap locket, but because we were pretty sure Dad was a pirate.

The Condescending Octopus: My Response

   Don’t think I don’t see you in there, looking so happy with yourself. Yeah, you think I’m inferior to you because I only have two arms and you have eight; you have three hearts as compared to my one; you have a hard beak, whereas I have no beak at all. But I’m here to tell you, octopus, that you can suck it.
    Hey what’s your life span? Oh, yeah, five years, six tops? You know what that means? It means that I’ll be here long after you die, to dance on your stupid, watery octopus grave, you boneless freak.
    Yeah, yeah, you can squeeze through very tight spaces. So can cockroaches, and you don’t see them swimming about in fancy tanks, sucking on the glass with their tentacles and acting like this whole scene is beneath them. So, I’ll say it again: you can suck it.
    It says on this plaque that you eat mostly small fish and crustaceans. I could eat that stuff too, if I wanted, but I don’t. I eat cheeseburgers. Morning, noon and night--cheeseburgers. You probably don’t even know what a cheeseburger is, and frankly, that’s kind of sad. Sometimes I feel like I should pity, and not hate you, but then I look in there at your beady, condescending eyes.
    You can squirt ink? Whoa, stop the fucking presses! This guy can squirt ink!
    I’m being sarcastic, captain dick-arms. You think I’m impressed by your stupid ink squirting? Watch this: (spits tobacco juice at the octopus tank). Check, and mate. I bet you didn’t think I could squirt things, huh? I bet you thought you had the squirting-stuff market cornered. Shows what you know, shit for brains.
    I wish you could escape this cage, so I could show everyone else at the aquarium what a shiftless fraud you are, but you’re too spineless. Get it? You really don’t have a spine!
    No, but seriously, escape that cage and I’ll give you a red-ass beat-down. I’ll grab one or two of your arms and pummel you mercilessly with them, and then how silly will you look? All the other octopi will be in there ashamed, trying to pass themselves off as squid and whispering amongst themselves about what a disappointment you are. Which is probably why you’ll never come out here and face the music; because, aside from your beak and sucker-arms, and ink-squirting you have only your sense of self-importance to hide behind.
   Oh, I’m on to your game octopus, and I’ll play along--for now.

That's Baseball

Going into the bottom of the fifth, a steady rain falling, coach gathered us in front of the dugout. “Alright boys,” he said, “We’ve got a five-run lead and rain on the horizon. Three outs, it’s official and we can hit the titty-bar winners.”
    Riled by the promise of drier, nakeder conditions with more booze, the boys took the field, charging across the soggy diamond, raindrops exploding on the bills of their caps. On the first pitch, the Kangaroos’ first baseman popped to third. One out.
    After going up in the count, the next guy hit a long drive that seemed to die abruptly at the warning track, where it fell into the glove of our center fielder. Two outs.
    At the cusp of victory, the team exploded in encouragement, slapping their gloves and yelling in at the wide-eyed freshman pitcher. He wiped his hand on the side of his pants, took a deep breath and stepped on the rubber. A fastball on the inside half, taken for a strike. A slider to the outside, swung at and missed. At 0-2, the encouragement grew from fervid to ferocious, the infielders and outfielders screaming as if to will the 18-year-old hurler to victory.
    The kid took the sign, nodding in agreement. Just as he came set, though, a pack of prehistoric lizard-men leaped the wall in left field. There was a gasp from the crowd as the man-lizards began attacking the players on both teams indiscriminately, tearing flesh from bone and running around in that funny way they do. One of them picked up our third baseman, threw him in the air and caught him again, which was kind of neat. 
    After just a few minutes of carnage, they were gone, reptilian shrieks fading in the distance--but there still weren’t enough players left to finish the game. The surviving umpire broke the news to coach, that the game would have to be made up at a later date, on grounds of a raptor attack. "One minute, you're a strike away from the win--the next your boys are being torn apart by a pack of vicious lizard-men," coach said, tucking a pinch of Copenhagen in his lip. "Welp, that's baseball."

A Few Words On My New Life As A Cattle Rustler

Like any career I’d imagine, cattle rustling has its share of ups and downs, but like any foolish optimist entering an exciting new position in life, I concentrated solely on the bright side of things. Oh, I thought it’d be all fun and excitement, prostitutes in fanciful gowns and free cows. Little did I know, being a cattle rustler in the 21st century is tough work.

First, as a resident of Dallas, Texas, there’s not much cattle to be rustled. Any good beef will require a drive of a half hour or more, and my standard GMC pick-up can hold one or maybe two cows at a time--four to six calves, depending on their age. Seven if I let one ride in the passenger seat next to me. As you might imagine, this makes for some long days in “the biz” (what we cattle rustlers call the business of cattle rustling).

Next are those pesky lynch mobs. Now, I’ve never actually seen a lynch mob in action, and I don’t intend to; but they are as much a part of the business as the smell of manure, large hats and chaps. Every cattle rustler, upon embarking on this career path, must acknowledge the fact that if you’re caught, you’ll be pursued and strung up by the torch-wielding townspeople, who will then have a hoe-down around your cooling corpse. But, as the great French cattle rustler Marcel LeChance would say, C’est la vie, as a cattle rustler.

Another problem is the lack of space to keep the cows I’ve rustled. My apartment is around 1,000 square feet, which would be fine for an accountant or a numismatist, but not so much someone in the business of transporting large bovines to and fro. I wish I would have given more thought to this before becoming a cattle rustler. I doubt it would’ve changed my mind, but the smell of manure and constant lowing is becoming something of a nuisance for my roommate. Imagine my embarrassment last week when, after rustling a few heifers, I returned home to find no room for them. Finally, I had to cut my losses and release them in the parking lot. (Which reminds me, if anyone sees a cow running amok in North Dallas, it’s mine. Give it back.)

To this point, you may be thinking that cattle rustling is miserable, thankless work. I can tell you now, though, that a life of absconding with cows that aren’t yours certainly has its perks.

For starters--and I’ll write this in italics so you know I’m not kidding--All the milk you can drink. Ditto for beef, but my roommate has enacted a “no-slaughtering-cows-in-the-apartment” rule, obliging me to go the “traditional route,” and leave the slaughtering to the fellows in the slaughterhouses.

It is true that the ladies love cattle rustlers, but then you go back to your place and they're all "It smells in here;" "I just stepped in cow shit;" "Hey, what's this in my drink?"--which is a contradiction when you think about it.

Sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t better off at my old job, as the CFO of a Fortune 500 company. Sure, I had a nice salary, an apartment that wasn't filled with livestock and feces, and a beautiful fiancee--but you can't dwell on the past; I've made my bed, and I have to lie in it, even if it is filled with manure. So do I second-guess my decision? Sure.

But then I just drink some of that sweet, sweet milk...Free and straight from the udder, as God intended.