Drink isn't Drink

Because I'm a goose and panicked that I wouldn't fulfill my word, I wrote up my own Chatterbox piece between bouts of wheel-barrowing mulch thither and yon today. My shoulders don't thank me for the work, but I had plenty of time for thinking so it all worked out. This piece belongs with Mob Ink. Enjoy!

***

“May I have a glass of water?” It came out more Oliver Twistian than Fizz had hoped. He’d try again: “I can’t possibly continue with the story till I’ve had a drink.”

Camel gave Spinks a nod. Spinks slank (slinked? Fizz had never been certain of the past tense) to a rusty latch in the wall and turned it. A piece of sheet-rock fell back, revealing a cache as deep and wide as the proverbial fountain flowing. Inside the cache were rows upon rows of flat, amber-shot bottles.

“Brandy.” Spinks took a bottle and brought it to Fizz with a very graceless have at the bow of maitre d'.

“From the waist, not the knees,” Fizz directed. He took the proffered bottle and turned it in the dim light of the warehouse. The muted warmth it gave off was admirable in a world that seemed to be nothing but sheet metal and concrete blocks. “Brandy? Under the ban?”

Spinks rolled his shoulders and eyed the flask. “We’re a mob, loony. Less a’ the stuff the country gets, more of it we gets.”

Camel moved one long leg over the other.

“You got any business sense?” Spinks snapped.

Fizz thought of a recent conversation involving Marvin and something about premiums and interest. “Afraid not. Numbers were never my game.”

Camel grunted. “Yeah, but stories is and till you’s started talking, we ain’t gonna let you off our guns.”

Oh, the guns. He’d almost grown used to having conversations with a Colt .45. So much so, he’d failed to notice Camel and Spinks both wore trench coats--and you could count on one thing for sure: if a man wears a trench coat, it’s never for rain.

Conscious of a tickle in his throat, Fizz tossed the brandy to Spinks with a shrug. He hadn’t seen anything stiffer than apple juice, let alone tasted it, in a solid year, but now was not the time to get bubbly and lose his bearings. Perfectly nonchalant. Fizz took pride in the accomplishment of that toss and shrug, for nonchalance often seemed to go with numbers and The Charleston on his list of Things I Am Less Than Good At.

“I can’t tell a story till I’ve had a drink.”

“Then have some and stop yippin’.”

“Water,” Fizz said in an equally impatient tone.

“Water?” Spinks laughed a choppy, disbelieving laugh and elbowed Camel who, till then, had not seemed to find anything interesting.

“Oh yeah,” Camel said, “Water? Ha heh ha.”

Up this awkward moment, Fizz had assumed the humorless-sidekick gag to be a product of  the below-average imagination of filmmakers in Hollywood. Evidently, it was not.

When Spinks was done making fun of his prisoner’s demand, he settled into a naily glare. “You come up to Eddie Harold Howard--to us--and splash our work all over the newsstands with your book and trow yourself on Big Eddie’s good graces and refuse a glass a’ his gold?”

“Don’t you have any water?”

Spinks pocketed one hand and the flask together then ambled to the cache and latched the door with his free hand. He brought out his other hand but the flask remained hidden. Somehow, Fizz got the idea Spinks saw a lot less of the gold he was so hot over than he’d like his storyteller to know.

“You don’t have water, do you?”

Camel looked up to check with Spinks then bit off his thumbnail in a contemplative fashion more suited to a student of Plato than a gangster with a .45.

“Well, no,” he said. “We can’t have it lookin’ like this is an unabandoned abandoned warehouse, can we? We can’t just go grinnin’ up to d’Lord High Mayor and ask him to send us a water-bill, now can we? gotta keep it abandoned so no one knows anyone lives here, see?”

Put in that way, Fizz had to agree that life as a mobster was on par with exploring the Sahara Desert, as far as the peril of dying of thirst went. It could have been delirium brought on by excessive dehydration, but Fizz seemed to have a vision of himself stopping gang-violence and repealing Prohibition all at once by marching to the Mayor of Chicago himself. It would be a simple conversation: he would explain that the reason gangs smuggled liquor at all was because they were too humble to ask for water.

“Give them water, Mr. Mayor, and the demand for liquor supply would go right down. Then you’d need no Prohibition laws because people would drink responsibly--or not at all! Because, dear Mr. Mayor, when you’ve had a nice glass of water, do you yearn for a glass of sherry? Oh, you do? Well, the American Citizen would likely not, and if he did ... well. Yes, Mr. Mayor, no need to shove. I was just on the point of seeing myself out.”

Oh, the gangs had it very rough indeed. But he guessed it was not written in his script to sort it all out.

“Hurry up with da story!” Spinks shouted. One wing of his trench coat flapped eagerly.
Fizz settled his back against the cinder-blocks and thought about licking moisture off the bricks. "As a point of interest, Mr. Spinks, I'm still thirsty."

Mob Ink: an experiment in humor

It isn't easy living by your pen. Writer Fizz Sheridan knows this better than most--he hasn't eaten meat for a week and a half and his last shave was three days ago. But when his novel inspired by a mob crime he witnessed hits Chicago's bookshelves, Fizz finds the real mob overly interested in his life. Kidnapped and taken to headquarters, living by his pen gains new definition when Fizz is told that mob boss Eddie Harold Howard will only let him live if he continues the story of the mob every night. Love tangles, heists gone wrong, and a covey of other problems beset the gang, and the unfortunate Fizz is left with the smoking gun...pen; every incident belonged to the story Fizz told the night before, and Eddie Harold Howard is sure his captive has an ink-vendetta.

The majority of you seemed to like the idea of Mob Ink, so I scrawled up another bit of it the other night just to find my way into the setting and characters a bit more. At the moment, I'm just toying around with bits and smidgens of things when I have the chance. I'm much too busy to buckle down to anything till I've finished editing my mystery, but this rule doesn't go to hand-scrawled things, does it? So I sat on the porch in the middle of my own beetle-flood (so terrifying) and wrote this. Enjoy.

When he stopped to listen, the tick of little beetle toes against little beetle wings filled the space between them. Fizz shifted just a fraction against the wall. Now a forgotten nail threatened to pierce his spinal cord and let his fluid, but at least his head was a bit out of prime bug-drop territory. The ticking-clickery grew louder as if the small beetle cousins were being sent to bed by those of a larger variety whose fancy ran toward having a jazzy dance on the features of the rich and famous. Party-beetles; freakish idea.

A cat—an exceedingly Dust-Bowl specimen of the breed—poked his head into the alleyway from behind an ashcan and chewed on a fish bone, reflective. He blinked at Fizz and his captor then withdrew, disinterested. He was not a very sympathetic animal; obviously entirely unable to appreciate the terror of having one’s head bludgeoned by bombardier insects.

Fizz’s captor, the one with eyes like light-sockets—not the one with the camel-forehead—lounged with him against the wall. He did not seem concerned by beetles or bloodshed. Fizz, deep in some half-frightened, wholly interested part of his mind, speculated how he might be able to put that into a novel.

“Scared of neither beetle nor bloodshed,” he murmured.

“What?” Light Socket barked.

At his silent companion suddenly speaking, Fizz jumped right into the path of a droning,whizzing beetle. He quickly shifted to the other side, directly into Light Socket’s shoulder.

“What?” the guy demanded.

“We are…there are…too many beetles,” he ended lamely.

“So?” Socket lit his third cigarette of the hour and gnawed Fizz’s soul with his eyes.

Thoroughly disturbed, Fizz thought now would be prime opportunity to inquire his fate. He braved the bomber-squadron stream of beetle-y things and stood tall. His unfortunate head brushed the base of the light in its rust-encrusted fixture by the doorway. The glad beetle society embraced his eyes and nose and mouth and ears. Somewhere through the crush, Fizz saw Socket turn just the tiniest bit in his direction as if interested to watch the insect hoards.

“Why can’t we go in?” Fizz meant to say, but with all the joyous bug population using his lips like the Blarney Stone, what came out was more of: “Vy kunt ve do din?”

“Speak English,” Socket ground out over the cigarette.

Fizz puffed a colony of adoring insects from his face and thrashed wildly with his palms as if to stay the ticklish flood. “Whycan’twegoin?” he crammed out before the mass descended again.

Slowly, gracefully, a luna moth parted the way between Fizz and the beetles and settled on the light fixture. Grateful to the moth for at least not clicking like a miniscule pair of Chinaman’s chopsticks, Fizz smiled. He’d forgotten—it all seemed so distant now—but today was the first day of April and just that a.m. he’d been heading down to Lake Michigan with a yellow tulip in his buttonhole. Somewhere between the mugging and this alleyway, the tulip had been lost, but the reflection imbued Fizz with an iota of hopefulness. This was April First after all. Perhaps this whole business was nothing but a huge joke played on him by his eternally inappropriate roommate; it wouldn’t be the first time Marvin had done something idiotic for a laugh.

“We can’t go in cuz the boss hasn’t comed out.” Socket’s explanation was terse and wasted no bonhomie.

“We have to wait for his okay? While the—” Fizz phiffed a miniscule insect off his upper lip and refocused: “While the beetles gobble our face off?”

“Smoke.” Socket offered Fizz his half-burned cigarette.

“Much obliged.” He saluted his kidnapper with the butt end then put it in his mouth and drew in a draught of tobacco smoke.

The flavor turned his stomach, but it wasn’t half bad compared to sticking out the Beetle of Armegeddon. White smoke followed his exhale. Fizz was pleased to see a distinct reduction in the amount of beetles in his immediate vicinity. Maybe this guy wasn’t so awful. He’d given him a way out of suffering…maybe Socket wouldn’t kill him after all. At least, Fizz reflected with the second draw, at least he’d not die at the hands of beetles.