DARRELL VICKERS – CHAPTER ELEVEN: MIDNIGHT CONFESSION

 CULT MANSION:

The traumatized trio stood in stunned silence as they stared down at the carpet’s recently diseased nougaty center.

“Is it a dead genie?” David asked, bringing an end to the horrified hush.

“No, it’s a dead Little Theater director with a finely hand-crafted golf club stuffed up his ass,” Alison Jessica Fletcher-ed.

“He’s lucky he didn’t play tennis,” Leslie bright-sided.

“Are we going to spend the rest of our lives in jail?”

“Not if we dispose of the corpus delicti before anyone’s the wiser,” Alison reassured him.

“You mean, like, dump him in the ocean?”

“Not a chance. No matter how far out to sea you go, bodies released to the tide tend to wash back up on shore.”

Leslie nodded in agreement. “They did the last two times, anyway.”

“What????”

VILLA HOFFMAN:

Crickets haphazardly rubbed their limbs together in Ensiferac harmony throughout the highly manicured gardens. The non-native trees and plants framing the non-native lawns were tended to, night and day, by non-native gardeners. Nocturnal possums and skunks dined on water-plumped grubs the size of walnuts. Koi-filled ponds and racially incentive statues populated the ridiculously verdant landscape. Cherrapunji levels of over-irrigation had made the Hoffman estate greener than Shane McGowan’s remaining teeth. This grand expanse of Miracle-Gro fecundity was the full, unmitigated magnificence of nature laid bare… if God was Japanese.

MEANWHILE, INSIDE:

Ms. Hoffman stood in the center of her cavernous French Country en suite bathroom, marble under her arches. If you farted with the door closed, it took four days for the smell echo to disappear.

“Where the hell is that jerk-off? And I mean that literally.” Dorothy growled.

“Perhaps Master Dashiel is still attempting to act his way out of a paper bag,” Widish replied, holding an entire banana boat of daiquiris on a silver tray.

She looked at her watch. “Well, if he’s not back here in the next five minutes, I’m donating 750 grand to the Biloxi Save the Beagle Fund.”

“A very noble cause, I’m led to believe.”

Dorothy adjusted her plush cashmere bathrobe belt. “It’s time for my shower.”

“So I surmised.”

“Fuck off, Widish, you know what I’m talking about. He watches me through the crack in the door when I shower.”

“I believe that is an unfortunate praxis of his, Madam.”

“I can see him, in the reflection in the tile, rubbing his crotch through his jeans as I’m sudsing up my breasts and freshening my meat locker.”

“Very regrettable, Madam.”

“I’m his mother, for fuck’s sake.”

“Not a claim many would proudly make.”

Dorothy grabbed a daiquiri and downed it like Keith Richards inhaling a Marlboro. “Have you ever snuck around in the shadows to watch me get undressed?”

“I’m happy to say ‘no,’ Madam.”

Dorothy let her designer robe drop to the floor, revealing her designer boobs. “So, what do these say to you?”

“That we’re out of powdered milk?”

“Get down on your knees and lick me or you’re fired.”

“Very well, Madam.”

Money may not be able to buy you taste, but it can buy someone to taste you – and that ain’t too shabby either.

CULT MANSION:

Sturch and McLaughlin sat on the hood of their cruiser and scanned the eccentric property for blatant, chargeable illegalities. To pass the time, they shared an enormous blunt and dreamed of contravening the Mann Act.

“Looks like it was a wild goose chase,” Office McLaughlin coughed, his head disappearing in a Rastafarian cloud. “Sorry about that chief. I know how much you love to beat the shit out of hobos.”

Sturch shrugged and waxed philosophic. “It’ll make the next one all the sweeter.” He squeezed his fist until his knuckles cracked like the support beams under Kirstie Alley’s porch.

“Speaking of sweet,” Mac buzzed. “You want to hit the Häagen-Dazs Store on the way back to the station?”

“Nah, I think I’d rather drop by Pepperdine and arrest us a couple of co-eds.”

McLaughlin’s face lit up like Michael Jackson’s hair. “Now that’s a fucking idea!”

With their solemn defense of the law of the land at an end, our proud Men in Blue hopped back into their squad car and headed southward at the speed of Gettin’ Some.

BLACK:

 

 

Black

The darkest of all the colors. Especially at night with your head up the butt of a pirate (this happens way more often than the average sailor cares to admit). Really black.  From Cilla to Karen to Jack – you couldn’t see through any of them. And you couldn’t see through this. Until…

‘BU HOUSE:

The light clicked on in the second bedroom. David stood surprised and slightly blinded in the doorway. Considering what was glowering at him from across the room, fortune was his fribble. Spanky clasped a large shopping bag in his antsy mitts, like a Spartan hoplite shielding himself from a spray of arrows.

“And what time do you fucking call this??” Rita casually inquired at an easy-to-be-heard volume.

The weariest of Spankies quickly postulated that the least negatively provocative course of action would be to throw himself on the non-existent mercy of the court. “Truth be told, dearest of ones, I’ve pretty well had a dog’s dinner of an evening. Is there even the remotest possibility that I could fall asleep in the lovin’ and reassurin’ arms of my surprise beloved?”

Rita shot him a look that would have re-crippled Larry Flint. “If I find that you’ve been doling out more of your lap lard to those psycho gack collectors while I’ve been waiting for my women’s products…”

“No. Fer sure, not. I’m so sore down there, I have to pee with my hands off the wheel. It was a crisis. Things that should never even be thought of were done!”

Rita irritably yanked the bag out of David’s apologetic fingers and proceeded to rifle therein.

“I swear, if you weren’t the father of my child and its sole supporter…” She pulled out a package and jammed it into his sole-supporter face. “This is the Venus Comfort Glide with Olay Razor.”

 

“Oh, fer sure. And I can certainly see why you’d be so inexplicably picky. Who wouldn’t want untold guaranteed hours of comfortable gliding?”

“I specifically wrote down Venus Comfort Glide with Olay Sugarberry Razor.”

This was not the thanks and consolatory embrace that he had been timorously anticipating. David took a goodly moment to consider his next crucial utterance. “Well, I think we’ve got some sugar in the cupboard. Now, as to the berries…”

PCH HIGHWAY:

There are sad men. There are sad men on highways. There are sad men on highways in the middle of the night with nary a star for company. There are many, many sad men holding bags of rejected women’s products. But you conjoin the sum total of these separate doleful entities into one big accumulation of super-duper despond… you have yourself a bummed-out lump of melancholia the size of a Chelys Galactica (including the elephants!).

A speeding De Tomaso Pantera, driven by a sleepy Ally Sheedy, whizzed by. She did not pick him up.

CLEVELAND:

St. Peter’s Catholic Church at 17th and Superior was built in 1853, between the time burning people at the stake was outlawed and before pedophilia was invented. It was a very slow and uneventful period for the clergy. Luckily, they could still build massive, garish, tax-free, marble and stained-glass palaces instead of feeding the poor. So, everything wasn’t absolutely Downtown Gloomyville for these patriarchal pecksniffians.

Inside this magnificent, gleaming, multi-million dollar edifice that the blind would never see and the hungry would never taste sat an ornate wooden box where the downtrodden and beleaguered of the city came to beg for forgiveness.

Mike piously knelt, staring at the screen of Christian anonymity within.

Father Seamus Barker’s parents were both killed in the Imperial Airways Hadley Page crash of 1929, which was a bit of a puzzler, because Seamus wasn’t born until 1932. Growing up on the streets of Cork, food was unbelievably scarce. Most days, the only thing he had to eat was Irish cooking.

He burned to death by day. He froze to death by night. But, for a short while, around five thirty, it was really quite pleasant.

Seamus finally gave up on his homeland and immigrated to the United States during the great French Fry Famine of 1951. Once the Chippie on Popes Quay burnt down, you had to walk all the way to Blarney Street for a soggy piece of cod and some crispy bits. With twelve pints of Guinness in tow, this became a crucible beyond endurance. It was time to move to a country that had some snakes!

The New World offered so many things that Ireland lacked. (I.e., beer that you could see through.) It was a young and exciting land. Unlike residents of the troubled Emerald Isle, Americans didn’t despise you just because of your religion (unless you were Jewish). Far from it. They despised you because you were black… or Asian… or a non-vegetable picking Hispanic. And his kind of white went down just right.

Now abiding in Cleveland, he sat himself down and asked, “What do I want to do with the rest of my life?” Perhaps the overriding question should have been, “What the fuck am I doing in Cleveland?” But…

Seamus was Irish, a little dim, lazy, not particularly interested in women, and a raving alcoholic. He was tailor-made for priesthood, and the church welcomed him with open closets.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen,” Mike recited.

“Excuse me. That accent. Are you perchance from Ethiopia?” the kindly Padre inquired.

“No. I’m from Canada, eh? Just outside of Burlingame.”

“You don’t say. So, how long has it been since your last confession?”

“Two and a half weeks. I came down here on the bus and what with having to rent a car and find a hotel…”

“Well, welcome to Cleveland, young fella. You must visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame while you’re here.”

“Oh, for sure. I’m a big fan of the Everly Brothers.”

“Wonderful harmonies. I’d be a slice of buttered meat in an Everly Brothers’ sandwich, any day of the week.”

“Huh. So anyway, I guess the worst sin, since my last confession, was killing a guy that I wasn’t supposed to.”

Father Barker didn’t usually like to interrupt parishioners when they were working up a confessional lather, but on this occasion, he felt compelled to weigh in. “Excuse me. Did you say ‘killed?’”

“Uh huh. I felt terrible ‘cause this stupid woman gave me the wrong picture, and I shot him thinking it was her husband.”

“You wanted to kill her husband?”

“No. I didn’t want to kill anyone. She paid me to.”

“She paid you to kill her husband?”

“Uh huh. So she could go skiing.”

Father Barker was having a difficult time processing this confession session. “Did they only have the one pair of skis?”

“Hard to say, your worship. But it doesn’t take much to flip that switch, if you know what I mean. If it weren’t for married couples, I’d have to find another line of work.”

“But you say you didn’t kill this poor disturbed woman’s husband.”

“Oh no, I whacked him yesterday morning.”

“You murdered a second man?!”

Mike let a little of his professional peacock show. “In her bedroom.”

“You were in the married woman’s bedroom?!”

Mike felt devotionally duty-bound to come to his own defense. “Now, no hanky panky went on in there. I behaved like a perfect gentleman. I just shot her husband in the eye socket, full stop.”

“Well, thank heavens for that.”

“Anyway, I’m fully prepared to pay my penance unto God, Father. And really, whatever other advice that you might have. Like, do you know of anything that will take stains out of custom paint?”

“I’m afraid this is way beyond my purview to render forgiveness, my son. I think you should give some deep and profound consideration to turning yourself in. And as to the stains, you might try the fellas down at Andy’s Hardware & Supply on Pearl Road. They were super helpful in solving our ongoing problem with pew poop.”

“I think I’d prefer to just say a few Hail Mary’s, if you didn’t mind.”

“But murder. That sort of thing can’t be undone with a few trivial petitions. You’ve committed a mortal sin. Two mortal sins. More, if you’re double-parked outside the church. There’s only one course of acceptable action, my son. You must hand yourself over to the police.”

Mike reluctantly took out his gun and shot the priest through the screen. Blood rushed down Father Barker’s chasuble and alb like the Pishon flowing into Eden.

“Thanks anyway, Father,” he sighed.

THE SWINDHEIM THEATRE:

It was the best of times. It was the even bester of times. And the very bestest of times a man can experience in a car were wonderfully transpiring right across the street from the crumbling brick edifice of ego.

Dack blissfully basked behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce Phantom IV, looking like Ben Turpin eating a Klondike Bar. Seconds later, Patti’s oh-so-obliging head popped up from his lap. She wiped her disgusted lips and wondered how much it would cost to get a mouth transplant.

While most hetero gals don’t really mind having their uvula turned into a penis-punching bag by someone they’re reasonably attracted to, being forced to perform a similar service for a creepy little schmuck with mommy issues is the equivalent of sucking the snot out of syphilitic pig’s nose. But hey, when it’s your penance for turning a director’s brains into a Pollock painting, it’s tough to complain. But still…

“How come I have to wear this ugly gray wig? It’s all hot and it smells funny!”

“Will you shut the fuck up? You’re ruining the mood.”

“What mood? I can’t get this fucking thing up. How does your mother do it? Does she take her teeth out?”

Dack huffily re-zipped his pants. “Listen, forget that until later. But you still owe me! Just go in there and look totally surprised when Irongate hasn’t shown up for work.”

“You mean act?”

Dack raised an eyebrow, but not convincingly. “Give it your best shot.”

“What’s my motivation?”

“Not having to share a bunk with Greta Van Toilet Plunger?”

Patti gave this more thought than most things in her life. “I can buy into that.”

=DV=

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Darrell Vickers started out as one half of Toronto area band, Nobby Clegg.  CFNY fans may remember the cheery song “Me Dad” which still gets airplay.  From there, he valiantly ventured to L.A. and eventually became head writer for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  Since then, he’s created numerous sitcoms and animation shows in Canada and the U.S.  He still writes music and has an internet band called Death of the Author Brigade (members in Croatia, Canada and the U.S.)   Mr. Vickers also had a private music mailing-list where he features new and pre-loved music.  Anyone who would like to be added to his daily mailing list, just write him at Radiovickers1@gmail.com