Short Order

I don’t know where my noir-fascination originated, but there’s something special about dialogue that sizzles like bacon.  I’ve always been a sucker for diner-lingo.  A few months ago, it inspired this short story….

Short Order

Above the clouds, it still rains.  No pitter-patter. More like split-pea mist.

Floating highway roars outside.  Looks like Jetsons. Smells like Jersey.

Naked Lady Calendar: July.  Never used to rain in July.

Electric eye jingles an 8-bit interlude above the door. Octo-Gen with no teeth dodders in. Orders a hockey puck, so I burn one.

Behind the counter, flipping the burger.  Synth-beef smells like octane.  Octo-gen eyes an antique on the shelf.  Faded decal on the side.  “Historic Route 66”.  Been there since I started here.  Décor, I guess.

Phil & Larry – Origin of the Species

Truth be told, I am a frustrated comic artist.  While, like many, I have a massive queue of abandoned projects ranging in shape, size, type, and medium, the vast majority are unfinished comics.  They vary in stages of development, from seeds of ideas and outlines to character designs and half-drawn issues.

I have never successfully completed one.  I love the medium, but maybe I lack the required patience to draw for regular and extended periods of time.  Maybe it’s my total lack of intuitive layout skills.  Who knows?

Recently, though, I’ve been reflecting on a dusty duo of mine, two characters whom few have heard of, yet I’ve been steadily doodling for some ungodly reason since at least 1996.  I am speaking of “Phil & Larry”

Phil and Larry, cerca 1996.

First drawn over a decade ago, Phil and Larry began as my own adolescent Ren and Stimpy knockoff (not to imply that the real McCoy was any less adolescent).  A rabbit and a bear, respectively, Phil and Larry followed the hackneyed comedic trope of an unlikely duo, an odd couple.  Phil was a deadpan cynic and Larry was a complete moron prone to wild flights of fancy.  Their species were completely incidental and totally unexplored– anthropomorphic animals were a given in the genre and seemingly required little more explication.  Bunny and Bear.  Smart and Stupid.  Big and Small.  They simply were.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, I revamped the characters in an attempt to both give them more depth and generate better story fodder.  Their stereotypes were limited and their identities incidental.  Moreover, they took way too long to draw.

In an effort to make things more manageable, I streamlined their designs, making them at once cruder and more graphic, with a splash of vintage Bosco-esque stylization. I also decided to limit their world to single-panel gags.  They essentially became de-contextualized mouthpieces, an Abbot and Costello-like duo that told bad jokes in front of a red curtain.  This was fine by me.

In 2005, after I dropped out of UCLA, Phil and Larry transformed once again.  I was a confused kid floating somewhere between high school and college with no assured plan. Perhaps as a response reflecting my own lack of sure footing, Phil and Larry were suddenly endowed with grounded back-stories and codified philosophies.  Phil, though still cynical, was given specificity as a jaded hedonist.  The hot pursuit of his singular obsession with pleasure pushed him towards increasingly violent and often disturbing extremes.  Larry, conversely, was transformed from an idiotic bear into an amnesiac Yeti, the last of his kind with no sense of identity.

No longer “smart” and “stupid”, the two became better defined as polarized foils- an obsessive madman with a clear goal inexorably paired with a lost wanderer trying to find his place in the world.  As a final act of self-indulgence, I wrote myself into the story as well, playing the part of the comic creator, occupying a confused mental space somewhere between the two characters.  I had a clear goal and no clue how to get there.  They team up and kill me on page 3.

As my CalArts graduation approaches, another transition looms ever closer.  I can’t help but wonder how Phil and Larry will transform next…

Major Ursa (A Short Story)

“Stop.”

I don’t stop. I tighten the straps around her arms and ratchet everything tight until the buckles click. The leather’s old and cracking and the chair smells like Dentist rubber.

“Stop,” she says. And I try to keep it clinical but my eyes meet hers and she‘s looking at me. My Ursa. She looks calm, but I squeeze a thin snake of Paxil paste onto my index finger anyway and I rub it on her ear like we used to do at the G-force accelerator. She was so scared. But she’s calm now. Her ear is wrinkled and see-through like a dried apricot, and I massage it until the paste disappears, and a strand of fur sticks up like a cowlick where the medicine clumped up. I’m not wearing gloves, so I probably get a taste too. Just as well, because my heart is weak. “Stop,” Ursa says again.

She was named for the constellation, the space bear, but Ursa was a chimp. And a guinea pig. And an astronaut. No wonder she was confused. No wonder her days were numbered.

Death comes inevitably to all the animals in the space program. Lab rats are expensive and one-time-use. They have to be purebred for statistical analysis, homogenized and hegemonized. Wonder-bred rodents, white and wired all the same. Chimpanzees are more complicated.

“Rats are dumb animals,” Ursa says. “Chimps have souls.” And I can’t deny it. With rats, you can pretend like they’re matches or Q-tips. Fixed commodity. Really expensive cotton balls that you blast with gas and incinerate when they’re spent. Snuff one and another takes its place. But chimps have souls. It’s just like the movies. They smoke cigars. They smile. Some suffer from chronic depression. Ursa had panic attacks, ergo the Paxil. Even before the mission, her eyes had this huge weight behind them. Almost like she knew she was destined for greater things. Like, primate prescience.

Once, when I was six, my hamster Cinnamon rolled out the back door in his hamster ball. He bounced down the patio steps and splashed into the swimming pool, and the plastic prison filled up slowly like some Houdini escape act. He bobbed up and down there helpless among the hundreds of drowned mosquitoes that my dad was too lazy to skim, and finally sank to the bottom.

Watching Ursa in her space-pod reminded me of that. The day of the launch we called her Major Ursa and grinned at the pun. Rocket scientists chuckled at the absurdity of a chimp pulling rank. I strapped her into the captain’s chair and bit my lip to stifle a smile because she almost looked official, sitting there at the control panel. Not because she was a chimp– I’d seen a dozen chimps blast off– but because she actually looked like she knew what she was doing, more than some expensive cotton ball. She grasped the throttle in her hairy paw and somehow endowed it with new meaning. The pressure door closed with a hiss. Countdown to launch and the rocket took off, trailing spiraling smoke like a cartoon cat-on-fire. And Ursa was gone.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The engineers exchanged sheepish glances when the radio cut out, each too embarrassed to admit he was completely baffled, and we all feared the space pod and Ursa were lost forever, doomed to float unmanned into a vast inky oblivion. Days later, the earth shook and a sonic boom sounded, and the vessel streaked across the sky. It plowed across the desert floor and slowed to a halt. On target. On time. Unmanned. Ursa was still sitting at the console, no worse for wear. The pressure door opened and she turned to look at me, one furry hand on the steering wheel and the expression on her face like “want a ride?” I took her in my arms.

Back in the lab I ran the tests. Needles and CAT-scans and probes and pinpricks, and everything came back normal. Except a tumor. Death comes inevitably to all the animals in the space program.

“Stop,” she says. She can talk. But I’m not ready for it, and neither is she.
I fill the needle with Fatal Plus and imagine she’s floating. And the weight behind her eyes seems lifted. And I wonder what happened when we lost radio contact. What touched her in the static? “She can talk.” My own words echo in my head like a joke. I am a parody of a veterinarian and she only talks to me. I think it’s selfish, or maybe payback. And I almost kiss her because she understands. Instead, I part the fur on her arm and find a bald patch, and I swab the spot with cotton like it really matters. Ursa closes her eyes when I squeeze the needle.

Open Mic Night

Turn off your screen, dim down the lights, and enjoy this short radio drama about hapless comedian Jack Parma’s last night on stage.

Rainy Day Activity

Alice was a natural born killer. Her best-laid plans for her best-laid boyfriend were carried out with utmost precision. The janitor’s body was stashed in the laundry room. Decaying, Zeke was the tawdry prize at the end of Alice’s scavenger hunt. The heat from the dryer made the stink grow fast like moss. She left a note for her boyfriend to find. A careful string of clues led to the laundry room cadaver: A trail of phonograph messages and micro-film chinatown cameras, toy slideshows and miniature, homemade porn featuring the grainy black-and-whites of a cacophony of men, and other lovers.

Cadaver Arcade

I walked into a pinball hall.

Pinball Wizards crouched by each machine.

Every fixture was hollowed out, gutted, and filled with fresh cadavers half-submerged in baths of formaldehyde.

Press “tilt” and work the flippers, their arms and legs flail, seemingly of their own volition.

And, oh god…

The smell.