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Wednesday, January 30, 2019
The Gator Snorts
Somewhere, just a skosh on the outskirts of a small Bulgarian shtetl, within a semi-crumbled wasteland of a half-constructed tanning salon, a deep guttural cry pierces the pre-dawn greyness. It is a pure, atonal inchoate note of dissatisfaction. A foghorn clarion call that rises like a smokestack into the turgid, Eastern European air.
“Grrrmmmmmphhhhhh!!”
A large, lumpy swatch of leathery orange is visible amidst the ruins.
It is The Gator.
The former king of scrote-choadal greasewankery tilts his leathery visage. Surveys the ruins of his once exalted kingdom.
His face-lumps pulse in contemplation. Rough hewn veins bulge from decades of chemical abuse locked in perpetual battle with Botoxian preservation.
The Woo Hotts, long gone.
The Axe Bodyspray long ago exhausted its pyrrhic scent like a lingering, somnambulant roadkill exhaling one last misty gasp before ending its mortal coil.
The once pulsing techno soundtrack to a life of perpetual motion has been replaced only by the faint howls of wind and failed purchasing power. The echoing, phantasmic boom-siss-boom-siss lurks within the Gater’s mind like the tinny drums of a Ramada Inn 80s cover band doing injustice to early Thomas Dolby. The outdated iPod headphones that once struggled to contain the Gator’s greasy veiny head-visage now hang only limply. Sadly. Discarded. For sale on Ebay.
A moment of silence.
A grackle lands on a wooden stump. Regards the sagging, semi-hulken slugworth slumped in front of it like a discarded baggage of unrecycled cookie dough.
The Gator looks up. His ruddy eyes fixate on the small bird through wrinkled, heavy, tangelo-colored eyelids.
The Gator sniffs. Snuffs. Huffs. Then scratches his leathery orange pec-hide with a coarse, ripping sound. The ragged skin undulates like a vomiting coelacanth.
The grackle knows.
Oh yes, the grackle knows.
Orange is the head that once wore the crown.
Like a rumbling subway station that smells vaguely of yesteryear’s bottle service, the noise begins to rise from within his energy-drink stained sternum. And then, as if a rusty windpipe in a post-Lynch landscape, the Gator’s weary lungs exhale, emitting yet another inhuman, atonal note of dispair.
“Grrrrrrmmmmppphhhhh….”
The grackle flies off.
Too much time has passed for the Gator to still be here.
All that’s left is his thought.
Which means nothing. Nothing is left.
The Gator is exhausted. Physically. Mentally. Roidally. Scrotally.
Long live The Gator.
