G: I keep falling after dreams and landing on the Skipper.
P: Is it when he says, “Little buddy,” to you? Is that part of the mechanics of the stem, or the cause, the root of the thing? The, shall we say, problem?
G: I have problems with balance. Equilibrium is not my forte.
P: Putting your best foot forward.
G: Not so that you’d notice, but yes. Does the empire have to crumble?
P: It is the way of all things, like flesh, to decompose, to enter a period of decay, decadence, a fin de siécle if you will. Are we exempt? No. We are here, shrouded in mist like this, and none the wiser. Stranded still, are we not?
G: I grow tired of reds and whites and blues. Mary Ann has me in thrall. A spell, is it not? Sometimes, late at night, in my hammock, the Skipper snoring like some congested wildebeest beneath me, I cry.
P: You might be feverish. Or possibly just fervid with desire. This uncharted place nails in the lid to our collective coffin. It gets to what is left of one. What is left? Just this, that, some more of nothing. A distant voice crying from the wilderness of a radio signal. A constant stream of entertaining guests who always leave without us. And we, here, just to be laughed at, mocked, left to our own devices under the deceitful silvery eye of the moon which shines down like a parabolic aluminized reflector light.
G: Just memories and plastic. That’s what I have inside this marooned doughy head. It might as well be afloat with a thousand other heads on the sea. People do not listen. Have I ever mentioned my predilection for socialism?
P: Ah ha! A turquoise and citrine weft of my thoughts is stirred suddenly. Do tell.
G: A girl in the window of a train, in the rain, which is coming down of course, outside, of course, and nobody is smoking, not inside the train, it is a non-smoking compartment of the train, maybe some violin music, a purling, maybe a drinking fountain or a man urinating, and the girl is all alone, in her seat there, nobody facing her in the facing seats, she is looking out the window at the rain coming down, the raindrops on the window, tiny bubbles, and she shivers, not too much, but enough, and tilts her head back, sighs, and sings a song about Chairman Mao.
P: Have you spoken to Mr. Howell about this?
G: I have had a yen to, but no. I have only dispersed bits and pieces of my hatred for those who control the means of production to the denizens trapped on this islet. The Sherwood Schwartzian capitalists have lain ruin to our souls in this barely discernible landscape of sameness and fake palm trees. These things are self evident. Even the bourgeois among us have no stake in our destiny. We are all the errand boys of the almighty advertising dollar.
P: Aw. Tell it to the politburo Gill. We have our own petty troubles to find and get lost in.
G: I am mad with prurience. I sleep in a thatched hut covered with mildewed grass on a hammock hung above an overweight sailor who screams orders at me and does not listen, while I fetch and fall and stumble and flail, while two clearly unattached women, both of whom are very aesthetically pleasing and nubile, roam around oblivious to their effect on me. I got troubles. I got trouble in my mind.
P: We are merely bits and pieces of things, some sand tossed haphazardly on the surface of a kettle drum, and we draw our breath through straws.
G: Yeah. I know. Just sit right back, and blah, blah, blah…three hour tour, all that fearless crew crap. It’s all the same. My floppy white hat is as blank as my soul. The footprints of a strange woman run me ragged in the throes of my destitute and desperate imaginings. I wish to take Mrs. Howell’s parasol and shove it up her ass. But I am sheepish.
P: My words are all I have. They are not money. They are more substantial. Implacable are the proletariat mob, and the future is always sabotaging the present. Spies are everywhere. Ginger’s body double is making my flesh put on space.
G: Damn furtive whispers in the underbrush. Hearing things they shouldn’t hear. Always giving something away. I scramble and I moan. The Tiki torches burn bright along the coconut-shaped byways of trickling down collateral, though we are doomed not to own a single luxury. Your tweeds are upsetting the applecart of my ambition.
P: Oh, yes. We play dumb for some ambiguous audience, always befuddled by self-serving plutocrats. Luxury is not something to strive for, not something one should want to afford. It breeds lassitude and ennui. A donut-shaped life preserver reading SS Minnow hangs on the door of my hut. Here we have these things. We must be content with them. Somehow, too, we must strive for the stars while lying in the gutter. The petty peace we have from day to day is not worthy of a noble cause. It is hot air blown from a lacerated balloon of whims and gags. I wish to hang myself with my heartstrings.
G: My mind is studded with dull tales, but my voice is mute, possibly a casualty of capitalism’s pseudo-benevolence, its way of forcing people to be nice to each other without really meaning it.
P: I will do this for you if you hand over your money to me.
G: Precisely. We cannot go on feigning bonhomie, with plastic smiles, with hard-wired instincts to consume or be consumed. One should strive to be a kind and generous person, not just to be seen as one.
P: Look ma! No hands!
G: If the will of the people is no longer controlled by the people, where exactly does that leave us?
P: Neither untied nor united.
G: And the Globetrotters keep on winning. No distress signal could ever be seen by those who will not look for it. There, but for the stench of greed, go I.
P: And martyrs are burned at the stake while they speak of suppering with the lord.
G: Go down, Moses, away down to Egypt’s land!
P: Let us speak now of particle colliders. We have Pepsi. We have calendars of the moon. A dormant feral instinct lies snoring at the base of our motivation. The way we move is patented by a businessman in Athens who religiously cheats on his wife three times a week. Even on a Sunday we smash why into because.
G: Oh! Go down, Moses! Tell King Pharaoh to let my people go!
P: Every lost moment is just another piece of a past I am trying to construct for myself with celluloid and a laugh track.
G: It is in music that we survive.
P: Just sit…
G: Right back and you’ll hear a tale…
P: A tale of woe and destruction and, ah! With rue my toast is laden, lest I wake up bereft of my own true self…love—whatever I conceive that to be on that particular morning—is often times confused with ideas about God.
G: An uncharted desert isle.
P: To be deserted. To be lost and alone. We are not men. We are murderous machines of buy and sell and want and never-have-enough, and we don’t last…we don’t last.
G: A mighty sailing man? Making the others comfortable? I shake my head at it and wrinkle my brow. No. Just a rubbery putz clad in sloppy red and white attire who drops things and promotes the idea of things going awry. I can do nothing right. Here for a long…long…long time.
P: Sorrow is a muddy garden. Don’t muck around in it too long, or it’ll be hard to guarantee a smile every week.
G: But who is doing that smiling? Why is nobody asking these questions?
P: They are scattering my family’s mail. Let my cry come unto thee. Nobody knows. Nobody. Rats’ feet over broken glass. Somewhere let somebody sing for me. For I cannot.
G: Sing?
P: My country ‘tis of thee, sour land of oligarchy!
G: Yuck. That was more like a cow losing its jugular.
P: Sip on the froth of life and receive only a milky mustache of living. We must carve from fresh granite. Or at least chip away at miracles and die trying.
G: I wonder if the girls are asleep. The susurration of their breathing is a melody more rich than any music, the closest my life comes to splendor, to having my own personal hegemony over others, others who otherwise would own the title and deed to my moods.
P: You can detect such things above the bugling roar of the stertorous sleeping Skipper?
G: Ah gee whiz, professor. Alliteration will get you nowhere.
P: Tut-tut.
G: A palindrome? Come now.
P: In the town where I was born there lived a man who sailed the sea.
G: Yes. Yes. I go on long walks late at night. I look at things. I stare at the big old circus tent of the sky pockmarked with a thousand scintillating forever-winking eyes. I need a place to go to get away from it all. Outside of…this. Outside. I hear things. The mermaids sing each to each. I listen.
P: We must, perforce, be content with our own demise. Lingering in this sparse chamber of cause without effect. Spoiled brats building a rainstatue out of sand. The days are counted out for us by sly assholes who sit upon the face of humankind and let out a silent but deadly fart.
G: Aye, aye motherfuckers. Aye, aye.
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