Rroger wiped his brow yesterday and some of his pulpy forehead came off in his handkerchief, revealing the wood beneath.
Women reeled, factory workers swooned. Zeus shrugged. A male sparrow cocked an eyebrow.
He kept rubbing his face until a grotesque cuckoo-clock emerged. Then, when the right side of his moustache spun around his nose, passing his eyebrows, a bird sprung out of his mouth--a faux female sparrow. Ba-doyng!
The male sparrow, eaveswatching, lowered its head and bit at its wingpit.
Smoothing his collar and clearing his throat, Rroger resumed his badger milking with a considerable loss of poise. One of the badgers even got loose and ran off, her teats making wobbly lines in the sawdust.
Rroger's friend, the famous Swiss forensic anthropologist and clockmaker, Johann Tunrumbertus, would have to be commissioned to begin work on his new veneer.
But despite the cuckoo-clock head and the rotating moustache, he still manages to milk way more badgers than his buddy Sunderthigh Bartleberg ever had. Sunderthigh, that doltish brooder, continues to sit at home on disability, armchair idiot, clutching a bag of Andy Capp brand 'Hot Fries' and blowing into an empty bottle of grape brandy.
Sunderthigh's resume has the raw look and dewy innocence of a kindergartner's art project; his liberal use of Popsicle sticks, paste, and glitter, though admirably grouped on a fragment of particle board, does not immediately gain favor with badger plant executives; there’s no fooling them.
They want only the best. They know. They have eyes.
They handle it just once and have a high viscosity glitter all over their fingers for the rest of the day, as though they had eaten waffles at a strip club.
Rroger had to pull strings like a Renaissance puppeteer to get Sunderthigh a position at the badger milking plant, and that damned fool goes and breaks his arm canoodling with a biker.
Holding down a badger with one hand and trying to express milk from their tiny teats with the other is difficult, even with two good arms. Now, between his suddenly exposed clockhead and his vouching for that benighted one-armed stooge, his reputation will be in tatters.
******************
Sunderthigh has found himself, again, amid a gallimaufry of clowns, dwarfs, guys with trick knees, disillusioned sadists, committed masochists, mustachioed stevedores, mountebanks, one briny Greek fisherman, and four cleft-palate fetishists, each vying for the love and affection of his girlfriend who, despite strongly worded notices from the health department, refuses to show up on time for her mandatory womb scourings, slap therapy, and grooming.
She just sits there on a wicker davenport. She stares eagerly, slavishly, confusedly at the gathering like a chubby cannibal diabetic gazing into a pail of fried bellybuttons.
She sits and listens to a meadow vole play the sackbut, waiting for Sunderthigh to drift off to sleep and dream.
Luckily, due to the broken arm and the broken arm medicine and the jug of grape brandy, Sunderthigh passes out.
********************
She had met Sunderthigh when he was hitchhiking with his pet meadow vole, Madrigal #7. She happened to be on a cross country ramble, careening horizontally towards sunsets on a motorcycle bigger and shinier than a mosaic of three thousand archbishop's smiles.
Her motorcycle had three tires.
Its three tires were filled with milk.
And the milk was badger milk.
Milk, badger milk especially, is for smoother ridability. An elderly biker told her that.
The heat of the road, you see, curdles the milk such that punctures are self-repairing.
No more sibilant roadside hisses to interrupt a good sunny day cross-country ramble, not when your tires are boffo with badger milk!
Sunderthigh was, for reasons unknown, hitchhiking in a helmet and standing idle on the side of the highway, his meadow vole perched upon his shoulder.
He plied it with pemmican and tin-eared whistling.
Who is that man? thought Julie. His helmet glistens in the desert sunlight like the business end of Zeus's godmaker. Julie was very glad that she had a sidecar.
*********************
Somewhere, far away, sitting on an empty pickle barrel, crunching pickles, Zeus smiled at that compliment. Perhaps he should pay her a visit, disguised as a Greek fisherman.
Many don't realize this but Zeus's brain lacks vasopressin receptors, and like the meadow vole, he is unable to form lasting bonds with females.
He slathers himself with pickle water for smoother ridability.
For a god-daddy he knows very little about women or badgers.
*********************
Madrigal #7 sat on Sunderthigh's shoulder and smiled a promiscuous smile. He thought that Julie's motorbike was a wide-hipped she-elephant, rumbling with musth. Madrigal #7 alerted Sunderthigh to the approaching noise by tickling him with his crusty hind-whiskers.
Sunderthigh: Hi there.
Julie: Hop on!
Madrigal #7: I thought you were a horned-up she-elephant.
Julie: I’m not, but hop into my duffle anyway.
All three of them rolled down the highway, towards Motelville, and rented a house.
All checked-in, Julie quickly assigned a ratio value of .02575 to Madrigal #7 and suggested that they all participate in a 'ménage-à-2.02575'.
Three cheers were heard by a neighbor. Two sparrows raised two eyebrows. One by one the lights went out.
And Sunderthigh broke an arm.
Madrigal #7 said that Sunderthigh broke his arm "doing it".
*********************
Johann Tunrumbertus, clockateer, gadfly, man-about-town, makes his eyes real big and skates around Julie. His blue eyes are magnified by dual monocles ground from the bottoms of beer bottles; his stare is like a slap in the loins, a mule-kick in the pituitary.
He strokes a very sensible van dyke.
Several eyebrows go up and stay there; a few stevedores are seen nudging each other, ‘hey-wouldya-look-at-that’ style.
He looks at Julie, then at Sunderthigh, then back to Julie.
Her lady parts shimmer in the candlelight like the brim of a ringside spit bucket.
Johann, admiring the realism of Julie's prosthetic leg, finally gets that nod, that affirmation of his yeasty machismo, and swerves towards the wicker chaise like a disco waiter.
Despite wearing shorts that are three sizes too small, he is confident and now strokes his van dyke with both hands.
Sadly, these classic moves are interrupted by his cell phone
------’Ring-a-ling; Ring-a-ling'--------He answers, listens, and terminates the call.
Johann speaks:
"It is Rroger again. His face fell off and he is in the sixth floor men’s room with an empty milking bucket over his head."
"Quick thinking," Julie says. "He hasn’t called in nearly two days. Is it bad?"
"Nearly always is," responds Johann.
"Hurry back," she says, "lest I should have to give that turn of yours to that swarthy, pickle-breathed Greek over there."
******************
Zeus’s ears perk up and he moonwalks along the far wall, showing off, creating a tesseract pattern in the dust.
******************
"I’ll be quick, lamb-chop," he says as he roller-skates away, backwards.
Not really a cuckoo clock, but take Sunderthigh with you she says——retool his soul—why?—because his soul needs retooling.
She is mysterious and charismatic, this woman, thinks Johann.
The menagerie he leaves at her apartment attests to that.
I’m not taking that dolt with me, he thinks.
********************
Johann is seen driving in his car by many. He has on one of those Alpine hats with the feather in it. The feather, think many, denotes fast times and a lithe moral backbone.
This is a fact; it has been well documented in the Almanac of World Truths (Enbridge Publishing, 2004), and supported anecdotally by the road managers of several prominent Swiss boy-bands.
Johann slows down and gets out of the car which then continues on without him.
Many see the car driving down the street, empty, but few see it crash into Walrus Lake.
Police are called to investigate an alleged ‘ghost car’.
They also follow up on reports of crying walruses.
Nobody sees Johann roller-skate sideways into the badger-milking plant.
**************
Johann sees Rroger, desolate, sad Rroger, legs akimbo and bucket-headed on the toilet, just like he said, in the sixth floor men’s room. Johann rattles the door closed behind him.
"It’s occupied," yells Rroger, echoes Rroger.
The bucket on his head makes his voice sound funny and distant and buckety.
"Johann!!"
"Hi, Roger"
"It’s R-r-oger!
"Sorry," Johann says, "I keep thinking the second ‘r’ is silent."
Rroger removes the bucket and displays the cuckoo clock.
"Can you fix me?"
He knows I can fix him, thinks Johann. I’m the famous Swiss cuckoo-clockateer.
Will I? he asks himself.
We are all like cuckoo clocks, Johann thinks; bumpy and obtuse, two arms flailing around, trying to embrace a ‘now’ that doesn’t exist, every so often blurting out the most ridiculous noises to attract attention, to attract an audience; discrete periods of silence followed by the jangle of chaos.
Why should I fix him?
He is the most honest of us all. He knows he is a cuckoo clock. One can always apply more plumber’s putty, more carpenters glue, and more mohair, but should he be allowed to continue this charade?
What would Madrigal #7 do?
He would probably throw a kegger and take the best girl for himself. Not an option here, not now, not without beer. Not without girls!
Just then, Rroger struck four o’clock and emitted a plaintive ‘cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.’
Johann, as if accepting this as a sign, picks up the bucket and puts it on his own head.
This is the best way to help Rroger. Make him accept himself.
Be a cuckoo-clock, damn you!
"What of your Alpine hat, Johann," asks Rroger. "What shall I do?"
"Wear it! Never take it off. Here, go to this address; ignore Sunderthigh, embrace Julie, and kick a fisherman in the god bag. When the fast times come a-callin’ and the feather is blown away by sex wind, replace it. Replace it with a bigger, brighter feather!"
I’ll call it ‘Macaroni’, thinks Rroger.