Episode #7
Cherchez Les Femmes
I was supposed to be in my room at the Missing Arms posing as some schmuck on welfare.
My last secret missive from Philanthropist, my covert honcho in the Company, had instructed me to await the appearance of another agent, codename: Honeypot. I figured she would knock on my door soon. I'd open it to find her standing tall in spike heels and a tight secret agent outfit. She would be everything I'd ever dreamed of: black hair, brown eyes, straight choppers. She'd have the legs of a dancer and a pair of nay-nays that could choke a horse. We'd fall in love like Freedumb fighters do and ball all night in the back of our minds. Then, when the world was safe from welfare, thanks mostly to our heroic efforts, we'd settle down in a little house the President had built for us in thanks and raise a passel of cuddly sexual afterthoughts.
"Knock-knock!"
"Who's there?"
"Madame!"
"Madame who?"
"Ma damn foot's caught in the door!" I loved a woman with a sense of humor. That was the icing on the cake, the diamond in the rough, the two-car garage. I opened the door wide like my anxious urethra...
"Honeypot?"
I couldn't believe my eyes. Reading small print was getting harder and harder and when I woke up in the morning there was about a ton of crud in the corner hard as a G.D. rock, but it was looking at agent Honeypot that was putting a strain on my cognition unit right at the moment. She wasn't anything like the unctuous anima I'd belabored a paragraph with.
"You gonna stand there gaping like a monkey whose banana got peeled or are ya gonna let me in?" Her voice was a combination of exhaled air passing over a larynx and the resulting vibrations shaped by teeth, tongue and lips.
"Where are my manners?" I quickly covered, stepping back to allow for her entrance.
"What a dump!" she griped like Bette Davis in some movie they still hadn't gotten around to releasing on a video cassette.
"Well...I'm supposed to be on welfare. This is the kind of place they...inhabit." I wanted to be cool even though my fantasy girl hadn't popped up the way I'd imagined.
"Got any booze?" She was no spring chicken. And this girl had slammed back her share of cornbread. Her hair wasn't anything to write home about either, unless your father was a carpenter. Her locks had been dead-bolted. Fashion plate nix fit Honeypot to a tee kneether neither nor. The run down zorries on her feet were the most appealing part of her costume. It was all downhill from there, even though there was no place to go but up, -- from her feet.
"How'd Phililanthropist find you?" She had made herself grotesquely comfy on the bed. Even though my romantic interlude with a sexy moocher-busting Mata Hari had been obliterated, I still had a job to do.
"I joined the team in D.C." I waxed professional.
"Now listen up close, chump, we gonna roll down this scam called 'Nectar'. You play the stooge in this number. You think you can handle it?" She looked up at me and started cackling like a fire with green wood. No, that's crackling. She kept laughing until she was coughing. That reminded her it was time for a smoke. She took out a fresh pack of Benson and Hedges Menthol 1OOs. My eyes bugged out of my head.
"Don't smoke those!" I screamed, lunging for the cigarettes, the self-same brand that had killed Aqueduct back in New Mexico.
"You crazy cracker! Give my puffs!" she got up and started for me with hate steaming from her eyes. I doubted she was thinking of kicking the habit.
"Look, you don' t understand. This is the kind that they poison. To kill you." I was backing away and trying to explain it to her.
"Don't give me no cancer speech, you pimple. This ain't no health club Jim. This is Cleveland." She got me cornered and took her cigarettes back.
"Don't light it! Please! You'll die!" I pleaded like a lawyer working on a contingency basis.
"I seen some stupid stuff sonny, but you'll be in the playoffs!" she scathed, sucking back a noxious hit of fiberglass and carbon monoxide. But that was normal. The regular nicotine additives and bilious byproducts of an agriculture gone mad. There was no special ingredient in Honeypot's emphysema stick. She exhaled still alive.
"Sorry, I guess it was a false alarm." I could admit it when I made a mistake. It just didn't happen very often.
"Your brain is a false alarm, baby. Now shutup and let me fill you in on your gig s'why kin git the hail out cheer!"
Her language was peppered with unusual spellings.
"You got a sis in Omaha, ma right?" She pinned my attention like the staged conclusion of a phoney wrestling match.
"Yeah. . .but what has she got to do with. . ." I didn't like the idea of getting my family involved in anything tasteless.
"She on AFDC, ain't chee?" she demanded, blowing acrid tobacco fumes in my puzzled countenance.
"Yeah..." It was true. Chesterlynn had gotten on the dole way back when little Ikeena and Kadinsky were born. The fathers were unknown, even to themselves.
"You get over there to Cowtown and pay her a little visit. Hang around for a while. I be in touch witchya when the time come. Then we gwine drink some 'Nectar"'.
"Look, I'm not setting my sister up for any falls, I never said I'd do that. She's a good person." Chesterlynn was a prince -- cess.
Honeypot put her cigarette out in a can of tuna and looked me square in the face. It might not have been exactly square, but it was definitely a rectangle.
"Let me axe you sumpun boy, what make you think you got a choice?"
It was chilling the way she chopped up her words. A little pimento and mayonnaise was all she needed to make a jello salad. But I didn't like jello salad.
And I didn't like to go to Omaha.
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