The short history of Captain benzo369 part 2

The Colonel said the bazooka didn’t happen and that it was up to me to fight false memories of things that never happened. I wasn’t so convinced. The words he used for those made no sense at all. “Nope. No bazooka. That was yesterday and today is today.”

The way he said it and the way his wild saffron eyes were so confident about what he was saying… it left me so that I really couldn’t say whether or not the old man died or if he was shot at all. And apparently we never did run.

“Psycho,” I whispered, afraid of the results.

The Colonel responded by describing a very semantic story of how many people had called him many things in his life. He said in school he had been called Gearzo the Weirdo. In High School he had been called a Gearzo the Menace. As an adult he had at first been called a Criminal Gearzo but he then upgraded it to be known as a Terror Gearzo.

“While all those names are flattering I am now the only Cooolllnell Gear-Zo,” he said in such a voice it almost made him seem feminine. But I wouldn’t go further than that idea for he told me that he expected to be treated with the respect a man with such a title deserves.

I was just glad to be in such illustrious company.

Saturday was over. It was now Unday, not Sunday – that was the old name not the real name. Today, he said, was the day we bring it back to scratch. And he was now in pair of ski goggles that sat oddly on the crown of his bald head, and he wore black track pants and a white dress shirt and… well the rest was just as ridiculous as the first.

He began leading me down Main Street, running people over rather than making way for them. He didn’t say sorry and he didn’t say “excuse me” but he said absolutely nothing at all, like it was normal to bowl people over.

“You must forget everything you were ever taught about yourself and the world around you.”

“Oh so this is some self-help s…”

“NO!” he interrupted before he began to speak in tongues of which man is not receptive to hear, in which perhaps the pitch is meant for dogs or some other form of higher specie. “This is not what you think it is and it is what you think it is but you need to understand it yourself by forgetting it yourself, that my good recruit is the reason you are here and not pouring yet another Mocha-Cocoa-Chocolate-Ice-Cream-Soy-Latte, hold the foam on a weekend morning.”

The Colonel then pulled out a long white joint and sparked it right on Main St. – right in front of a gaggle of lost women, who for one reason or another, thought it a good idea to ask The Colonel for directions.

The Colonel looked at his watch and then took a puff…

“You ladies need to find your own way. I’m not recruiting tourists right now. Not that I wouldn’t. I would. It’s that you don’t seem to know where we are headed.”

The women numbered three and all six eyes seemed to do a loop-dee-loop then made like a roller coaster out of there.

“Did I ever tell you the story about Crabmonster?”

“Well, no, we just met.”

“Listen here, everyone has heard of General Crabmonster.”

But of course no one had heard of General Crabmonster, much like no one had heard of The Colonel, and much like I still had no answer for the pink boa and Titillating, but now no answer for the ski goggles and black track pants, and there was no reason to answer this rhetorical question either.

“The story of General Crabmonster goes like this … puff … the General wasn’t always a General but instead was general like you, very generic and not too sure of himself. Oh there were times when it all came together and the whole village would gladly share in their glee for him, but on the whole he sucked … puff … Then one day he woke to see his stomach four feet from his chest and his moustache crawling under his chin. It was then he realized he could no longer rise himself from bed – not that there was much for him to rise to. I mean if you had seen his Dad, a mullet wearing, “’Sup bitch” saying, no good welfare cheque cashing, redneck you would remain in bed too.”

“And then you burst in?”

“No…puff… I wasn’t stalking him. The point is the lowest of the lows were hitting, Dad had put ‘Highway to Hell’ on its fourth spin and you just can’t put up with that crap even when you are convinced that you would never move again. Eventually his Dad opened the door and laid down the law on the grey inside of a cereal box, “I’m go to C Henry band COVER BLacK n Black at Johnny Bs. Be up and out when’s I’m back or that it.”

“It was as if the law had come from the inbred bastard son of stupidity himself. It was written and now it gon’ be. That was how much the power of words had liquidated, just like the stock market in two years, sure bet. And the embarrassment was too much for the General – he began to cry. After an hour more of self-pity, he took a peak at the letter and read it over, six, no two hundred times.”

“Two hundred times? You’re exaggerating.”

“Hey, who was there, me or you?

I looked at him like a monkey looks at car keys and wondered what strange place he came from. I hadn’t noticed until I was standing right there, but we were in a vacant lot that was surrounded by four buildings, which had been built with different material – concrete, brick, wood and one that looked like it was made of slime.

“… each time he read the note, it made him angrier. I’m go. C. BLacK n Black. Through the absence of grammar he knew those words should have never had strong control over him. What had he been doing? He had acquired a new found energy, as if an angel of hate had come down from Viagra heaven and spiked his dink with truth. His Dad’s words were no more full of truth than a hound playing dead. Crabmonster had had an epiphany. That son of a bitch got out of bed ran across the street naked and kicked the crap out of his Dad in the bar with a million people watching.”

“A million people saw his testies?”

“…puff…Yup and the band was playing a Whole Lot of Rosie, not bad timing if you think about it.”

As the day progressed I soon came to realise we had reached our destination. We weren’t going anywhere. Spending more time with the Colonel, I became convinced that even if this man was odd, he was odd in a motivating way – like a kick to the balls. To be sure, I had found a man who would challenge every belief I held. And I wanted to hear more. I had time, he said.

“You no longer have a job.”

The short history of Captain benzo369 part 1

“Well ain’t that a blast!!!!” The Colonel screamed over at me. “Just like me and the General used to do back in ‘Naaaa’mmmmmmmmm.”

The words of Col. Gearzo rang through my ears like an unrelenting choir, whose teacher had drank far too much Bacardi 151 until the choir knew, like we knew, that there was no end to the note. The Colonel was joking of course. He’d never been to ‘Nam. He was born twenty years too late to get involved. Heck, he’d never left the country. But when you make your own history, memories tend to go this way and that way on the turn of a dime.

The Colonel was at the top of the food chain and it was his lead that we followed unquestionably. The thing about making it to the top of the food chain is you got to keep eating, lest you get replaced by the bigger, chunkier animals waiting in the wings. And those suckers ain’t no elephants neither, as the Colonel likes to say safely behind his desk as he cuts up our organs like they are no more than Papier Marché , grinding and cussin’ and sweating and busting… our… balls…

We we’re hunkered down behind the science shelves. The Colonel had thought this was the best place to start, to burn every single page. Perhaps he was right but he had forgotten one little detail, which was just like him. He had forgotten the fake soldiers.

The door swung wide open and the first fake soldier to burst through came at us like Indian from one of them old western movies, his eyes slanted and his nightstick about to swing down on us like a tomahawk.

“Ah ged doWn, yoU. Dis if a wobbery!!!” Gearzo had slipped his grammar into some sort maddening, fucked-tooth soliloquy that had me thinking this man was nuts, fucked up, insane, more loco than a runaway train… he was the man who might save the whole world but he wasn’t going save us with a poem.

That’s when the fake soldiers came at us one by one, their shimmering badges hanging on the winter afternoon white shirts they were clad in. These men were ready to break our balls in fours and “sUUU, gid damn it,” we were ready to do the same, one-by-one, we were ready to do the same……………………………………………………………………..

It was a Saturday but it was a work day and you got to keep working hard amongst the curious unless you like being asked why you hate your job, why you got to cop that attitude, why you didn’t buy that alarm clock, why for god’s sake –why-why-WHY? There were no answers to the thoughtless questions and so instead you had to keep working through every one of them even though it was Saturday.

The first set of customers came rolling in at 8 am searching desperately for a hot espresso with proper crème, a thick yellow film that sat like foam on top of thin black shits-inducing caffeine motor oil to get their pretentious engine roaring. Then, once the rrrrrrRRRRusshhh was over, the not-so golden oldies crept in looking for peace and quite to go with their pea soup.

“Ummm…uuhhh…ERHUGH! Where do you keep your breakfast sandwiches?” an old Enlgisman asked me, the brush growing out of his ears would have made a deer feel at home.

“Right in front of you, there is a whole…”

“Oh… k… I’ll ERRHUGH...” Don’t die on me today old man, please don’t you expire here, just slowly turn the starter and we’ll be ok… gently…“have… ERRHUGH…” I didn’t know how long we had or if he would ever get to order that breakfast sandwich, and I was about to slowly dial my manager to come help out, when the colonel walked in wearing a pink boa and a name tag below his belt buckle that read Titillating.

“A sandwich is the last thing you need,” he said looking at me, meaning only me, “what you need is an escape clause.”

“Pardon me?” asked the old man, glancing slowly over at the colonel.

“Your Alive! You almost gave ME a seizure but yes an escape clause, Suuu, gid damn it! He needs to get out of this place hard like a lead-coated parachute.”

The thing about the colonel is he don’t hold back for nobody. He will let you know right there and then that he plans to tell you something real important, so you, you old Englishman, you better open your hairy ears.

The colonel stood on the counter and looked down at the old man with wild saffron eyes. He then looked at me with those same eyes. He then looked at the ridiculously long horizontal mirror that stretched 3,000 light years down the room and saw those very same crazy wild saffron eyes in the future, the past and the next dimension and began to murmur and then stutter that this was it, me and the old man had to see him at work… we had to use our escape clause now.

“Now just you wait… ERRHUGH!!...”

“My gid man, you can’t wait that long. Gid your ass out that door.

“You too let’s get a moving,” he said pointing his right index finger straight at my nose.

He was a soldier, of this I had no doubt. Sure he might have worn bell-bottom jeans and a orange dress shirt.He was the 70s. That's how you knew he was a real elephant. You can’t fake being that crazy, fighting against the winds of progress. But the Colonel was pro at it. He could summon his powerful mind to stop time and live like it were 1993 if he wanted. Sometimes he was crazy enough to put on his walkman and drink a clear Pepsi and could you blame him? What did 2007 have to offer? The year of the dolphin was a runaway train of economic deceit, Internet porn and little thing called Virginia Tech massacre. You got to be able to beat that, and lets face it kids, that was not a hard thing to do.

“I don’t know if I heard you right,” I said.

“WELL OF COURSE YOU DIDN’T HEAR ME, YOU TAINT,” he yelled. “YOU… you got to join the army before you can really hear anything at all.”

“Well we moving it or not old boy?” he said to the old man.

“Now, now just you listen… ERRHUGH!... I remember you.”

That was when the Colonel shot the old man with a bazooka. It seemed completely unnecessary for him to do that. But my reaction to it was equally unnecessary – if not emasculating.

“Run!”