The tattoo in question was a multi-colored electric guitar, and although it clearly resembled the instrument, it also possessed definite female characteristics, with arms and legs coming out of the body, and a head with long hair in numerous, snake-like braids, which were wrapped around the neck of the guitar as if playing a chord. Rita was enthralled by this striking visual image, and had never again seen another like it, despite her exposure since to a wide array of male and female tattoo options.
Right above this picture were the words, in quotes, “music above all, and for this choose the irregular.” When Rita asked what they meant or where they came from, Wendy said only that they held deep meaning, and then asked her charge what she wanted for dinner.
Years later, while researching a high school term paper, Rita actually came upon those very words in an obscure (to her) 1884 French poem, Jadis et Naguere (L’Art Poetique) by Paul Verlaine, brilliant, alcoholic. whose work, for the record, was integral to the development of the school of Symbolism in French literature, who abandoned his 17 year-old wife and infant son to take up with the 18 year-old Rimbaud, who Verlaine shot after a heated argument, resulting in a minor wound and a 2-year prison sentence, and who died at the age of 51, and whose influence can be felt, and heard, and has been acknowledged by a group of pretty impressive people, among them Bob Dylan.
Intrigued, Rita delved a bit more deeply into Verlaine’s tragic story, and amongst her discoveries found that the phrase in question was also the first entry under “Music” in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. She remembered staring at the words in the fat research book, so connected in her mind to the tattooed guitar, and being surrounded by a swirl of ill-defined emotions and questions. Had Wendy, long since gone from their lives, been a bit less mystical than Rita had previously believed? Did it really matter? If she simply had copied the words from book did that necessarily diminish their impact? Was there, somewhere out there, a tattoo artist with a taste for French literature and rock and roll, and did he perhaps have a much younger brother?
For a while, Rita continued to feel a vague sense of unease, as though she had stumbled upon a great, sleeping secret not intended for her, or perhaps anyone, to disturb. Then, she awoke suddenly one day, ran downtown, and almost before she knew it was the proud owner of a small tattoo on her rear end, in the shape of quotation marks with a space between them. Rita found the existential ambiguity calming, and slept better that night than she had in months.
“What the hell is this?,” asked a boy named Lou not too many weeks later, the very night that Rita had decided she’d been the not-so-proud owner of her virginity long enough, circumstances helped along by the fact that although Boots was indeed in town, he was presently out, and the age of Wendy-surrogates had come to a close.
“It’s a tattoo. What does it look like?,” said Rita, who was experiencing a contradictory blend of ephemeral sexual excitement and the early stirrings of a lifelong curiosity about what had possessed her to choose this rather unpleasant naked person currently behind her to mark this significant occasion.
“I know it’s a tattoo,” said Lou, the naked person behind her. “But what is it doing on your butt, and what is it supposed to mean?”
“It doesn’t really do anything but sit there, and it means whatever you want it to mean,” said Rita, who, somewhat perversely she felt, still wanted him inside her while at the same time pictured a large piece of masking tape over his mouth.
“I don’t get it, where are the words?,” Lou asked, at the same time entering her firmly from behind and becoming quiet except for the sporadic squawk, causing Rita to emit a cry of simultaneous pleasure, pain and satisfaction marking not only her delight with the physical sensation but with the ability to make this guy shut up.
“I’ll explain it to you later,” said Rita, for whom words also were a scarce commodity at that particular point.
While Lou came and went rather quickly, he was the first in what was to be a long line of sexual partners, almost all of whom had some sort of lengthy opinion about Rita’s tattoo. While she couldn’t really blame them, for there was indeed a permanent impression where they all expected to find only flesh, she was constantly amazed at the fuss made over it, and eventually began to be able to rely on the reaction as a fairly accurate, early read of the direction of the impending relationship. Except for the most extreme cases, she was willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but it almost always came down to a simple probe: if they liked the tattoo, she tended to like them.
Except, of course, for Eric. He hated the thing but professed to love her, and while she was pretty sure she didn’t love him back, she didn’t at all mind having him around, or being around him, a state of affairs over which she was somewhat confused but which she instinctively knew she better get used to.
And Eric had a band, which, ultimately, for her anyway, threw the question of love right out the window and let rock and roll in through the front door.
Not that the two were necessarily mutually exclusive. For Rita loved rock and roll, had, of course, been surrounded by it all her life, and was more comfortable with it and its various trappings than just about anything else, or anyone for that matter, that she had encountered. And while Boots and the Echoes had, in their own semi-detached but unquestionably devoted way, made her absolutely one of their own, she was now, although she didn’t even realize to what extent, searching for a way to make it her own. And that was pretty much where The Satan Dolls fit in.
They practiced three times a week right down the street, in Eric’s parents’ garage, and Rita, as was her wont, quickly became indispensable to them. She helped carry equipment back and forth between the school’s band room and the house (they’d made a deal: they could borrow the drums as long as they sang in the choir); she borrowed the odd guitar string or percussion instrument from her father’s own abundant supply (although she knew further discussion at some point was a given, to date Boots’ only comment was “Satan Doll? isn’t that the song by Duke Hellington?”), she copied lyric sheets out in her easy-to-read and yet artistic penmanship. These and myriad other tasks, however, paled behind what started out as serendipity and quickly become necessity: Rita sang background vocals, and she was good.
She’d always known she was musically inclined, for, once again with Boots’ encouragement, she’d been able to experiment with all types of instruments and styles, but had never really stuck with the piano, guitar, recorder, trumpet, trombone, flute, oboe, saxophone or violin lessons to which she had been exposed at various points in her life.
After a short period of time with each instrument she not only could play it, but play it reasonably well, but no one of them sang to her in an acute enough way to make her want to return to it and strike it, strum it, blow into it or bow it on a repeated basis, especially considering the fact that she felt she had learned all she needed to learn after two or three encounters with the stupid thing.
“Dad,” she had asked Boots one day during the trumpet phase, “does practice really make perfect?”
Boots found himself on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, he did not want to discourage his daughter from what he considered in his heart of hearts to be her musical destiny, although he also was unsure at this particular point in what direction that destiny may lie.
On the other, he was beginning to have nightmares about legions of luminous trumpets with little arms and little legs, their bells bent into fiendish little grins, marching through the sleeping city, crawling through peoples’ bedroom windows and blaring “When The Moon Comes Over The Mountain” loudly and repeatedly until their ears began to spurt geysers of hot, viscous blood, drowning sleeping pets and filling previously well-operating sewer systems with raging red corpuscles unwillingly donated by unsuspecting human sacrifices to the noble cause of musical advancement.
He decided to equivocate.
“This isn’t one of those trick questions you leave lying about the house in order to trip me up, is it?,” he asked Rita somewhat ashamedly, for he knew hers had been a legitimate question, deserving of a legitimate response.
“No, Dad, it isn’t,” said Rita, who for her part knew that beyond, and sometimes even within, the banter lay wisdom. “I was just wondering if there are some things that, no matter how long or how hard you work on them, you actually never will master?”
“Let me ask you a question, young lady,” said Boots. “How does it feel to be supercalifragalisticexbeal-precocious?”
“Pretty darn good,” said Rita, “but does practice really make perfect?”
“What an interesting question,” said Boots. “Not always, but remember that the journey is as important as the destination.”
“Advice to live by,” said Rita. “Can I borrow the car?”
The road to Rita’s discovery of her true musical forte had started out, as with many other significant events in life, in a completely different direction. Setting up the electric piano one day, Rita began to fiddle around with the keys, and said to no one in particular, “the A above middle C is flat.”
Eric, who was busy adjusting the knobs on his amplifier (a bothersome trait he exhibited constantly from set up right through performance and equipment break down, one that would eventually lead Rita to prefer musicians who knew the level they wanted on any particular song and pretty much left it at that), said, “what makes you think so?”
“I don’t think so, I know so,” said Rita, whose assertiveness on just about any subject, despite Eric’s best conscious intentions, served to make him want to tear her clothes off and make sexual music with her.
“Well, what makes you so sure?,” he asked.
“I can hear it,” Rita said.
“Really. Tell me what note this is,” said Eric, turning a knob on his amp and striking a string on his guitar.
“It’s a B, and it’s a little sharp,” she said.
”I see,” said Eric, impressed that she had gotten it right but also a little nonplussed, having just finished tuning that particular string. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
For the next ten minutes, Rita listened and identified while Eric hit notes at random, including scrambled clusters to try to throw her off, and she didn’t miss one.
“I’ll be damned,” said Eric, “you have perfect pitch.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” said Rita.
“No. I mean you really have perfect pitch. You know what any note is just by hearing it, and can also tell if it sounds the way it really is supposed to sound.”
“Can people really do that?,” asked Rita, who at the same time that she was surprised she’d never heard about this before instinctively knew that Eric was right.
“Not everyone, but some people. My grandmother’s mother used to love going to hear the New York Philharmonic, but eventually was banned from their concerts at Carnegie Hall for sending messages on scented pieces of paper back to the conductor during intermission that said things like, `Your interpretation of Brahms is dead on, but the third violin is way off.’ After that, she tried to have him arrested for passing bad notes.”
“You’re making that up,” said Rita.
“Only the last part,” admitted Eric. “Untuned instruments hurt her ears.”
“Wow,” said Rita, her head suddenly filled with memories of sour strings, cacophonous keys, and adults shushing her as she tried to tell them what they were playing didn’t sound quite right. “Something about me is perfect.”
“I think all of you is perfect,” Eric said.
“I warned you about the flattery thing,” said Rita.
“Right. It’s too bad you don’t play an instrument, you really should be in the band,” he said, changing the subject quickly but at the same time expressing a genuine hope of his.
“I play lots of instruments,” Rita said. “I just don’t like any of them enough to be identified with them.”
“Maybe you could play all of them a little bit, and hide behind the amp,” said Eric.
“You’re not really interested in maintaining this relationship in a significant way, are you,” said Rita.
“Alright, alright. How about this: you could sing,” he said.
“You’re the singer,” said Rita.
“Yeah, but you could be the backup singer; harmonies and stuff. I’ve heard you in choir, and at the risk of praising you once again, I think you have a great voice.”
“Thanks, I’ll accept that one, but I’m not sure harmonies are exactly what a song that’s called ‘Beelzebub’s Reckoning’ are looking for,” said Rita.
“So you play tambourine on that one,” said Eric.
“I’ll think about it,” said Rita, who in actuality had already decided to do it and couldn’t wait to tell Boots that she, too, was now in a band.
“Rehearse with us today,” said Eric.
“I said I’d have to think about it,” said Rita.
“Think about it while you’re singing,” said Eric.
“I could do that, I suppose,” said Rita, who let out with, “I’m singing in the brain, just singing in the brain,” and danced around the garage, kicking various pieces of debris in rhythm.
“Then it’s settled,” said Eric, who didn’t get the reference but was thrilled by Rita’s seemingly endless store of energy and surprises.
“We’ll see,” said Rita, who moved to the garage’s entrance and began to look up and down the street. “Now where are the other guys, aren’t they late?”
Later that day, following the best sounding, most in tune rehearsal in the Satan Dolls short history, Rita and Boots had the talk she’d been expecting, and somewhat dreading.
“Are they any good?” was the first question he asked following her disclosure that she had been asked to be in the band.
“To be honest, not really, but standing there behind that microphone today I felt something I’d never felt before,” said Rita.
“Don’t put your mouth directly on it and you can avoid those electrical shocks,” said Boots.
“Very funny,” said Rita. “I’m serious. They aren’t as good as you, will probably never have a record in the charts, and no, I don’t anticipate a long-term relationship with Eric or the band, but I can tell that this is something that will be good for me. Is it okay?”
Any doubts Boots was harboring were swept away by Rita’s last question, for it had been quite some time since she had actually asked his permission, although she never simply went off and did anything she pleased, without somehow gauging his view on the matter. There was always an unspoken give-and-take, conveyed by a wisecrack, an insult, an innuendo (they were big on innuendo) that made it clear where things stood. A direct request for permission, however, was a rare occurrence, not to be taken lightly.
“What was the question?,” asked Boots.
“Dad.”
“Of course it’s okay. All I ask is my usual ten percent of any negotiated agreement, with the usual under the table graft, of course,” said Boots.
“Of course. How about if I throw in all the guitar picks you can carry?,” Rita asked.
“That’s my girl. Now run along and play.”
And play she did. The Satan Dolls did not, as Rita had predicted they wouldn’t, successfully travel the road to the twin towns of fame and fortune, and indeed broke up shortly after she joined the band following a heated argument between the members over whether a proposed logo should depict a figure with the top half of Mr. Potato Head and the torso of the devil or vice versa, but during their musical sojourn Rita discovered that she had inherited from her father not only the talent but also a much larger propensity for rock and roll than she had ever thought possible
In fact, after only two rehearsals Rita found herself to be pretty much in charge of things, which turned out to be great for the band, which was in dire need of direction and focus, but very bad for her relationship with Eric, which was by then simply dire.
Without even realizing it was happening, Rita was, not for the last time, putting her work ahead of the personal, another trait she had inherited innocently and involuntarily from her father. The two of them, despite their protestations, were more alike than not, and their commitment to the music, the sound of it, the feel of it, the it, took precedence over pretty much everything else, consequences be damned.
In the labyrinthine domain of interpersonal relationships, or what Rita liked to think of as “that boy/girl thing,” she often found herself to be lost, and while each time she plunged back in she was willing for a time to try to abide by the rules and regulations that others seemed to understand well but that for which she was sure she had been left off the mailing list, nothing ever lasted too long, and that was usually just fine with her.
Rita found that, no matter where she found herself to be in her particular life’s journey, the majority of her peers (male and female, it turned out) spent much of their time dissecting the reasons behind why A broke up with B, or why C was cheating on D (why couldn’t A occasionally get together with N and break up all this consecutive betrayal, she often wondered).
Rita, on the other hand, factored in to her life view the belief that, when it came to relationships, a certain amount of deception and/or boredom was bound to take place, and all you could really do was try to be as honest and interested as possible in any given circumstance.
This matter-of-fact attitude, when expressed, amazed her friends, but Rita explained it away as a combination of deductive reasoning, trial-and-error and exposure to heavy doses of country music as a child. And the ultimate irony was that this very pragmatism served to make her more irresistible than ever, although neither she nor her paramours were quite sure why this should be so.
So, following the demise of the Satan Dolls, Rita took to heart more than ever the principle espoused by Wendy’s tattoo, and decided that a backup singer she now, and forever, was. In addition to a high school student.
“I did high school and college, and so will you,” said Boots on the day that Rita suggested she was ready to go on the road with him as a full-fledged Echo in her own right.
“But it bores me,” said Rita, “and the more algorithms I learn the less space I have in my head for song lyrics.”
“Original argument, flawed reasoning,” said Boots, who began to wonder when it was that he had actually begun grading his daughter’s conversation.
“But we actually could use a female voice in the band,” said Sparks, a high-school dropout himself, as he wandered in from the living room.
“That’s right, Dad. You could use a female voice in the band,” said Rita, smiling at Sparks as he began exploring the shelves of the Klondike kitchen.
“It’s funny, but one of my favorite courses in school was `How Not To Butt Into A Private Conversation,’” said Boots, glowering at his bandmate. “Of course, you wouldn’t know about that, because you didn’t graduate.”
“It’s never too late for a little remedial education,” said Lips, who had heard the entire exchange and now was trying to maneuver Sparks out of the room. “But you obviously have never learned to remede.”
“But a female voice would be great for the band,” said Sparks, with Lips’ help moving closer to the door.
“You don’t like the way I sing?,” asked Lips.
“It’s not that at all,” said Sparks. “I simply think a female voice would help add to the mix.”
“But then we’d have to reshoot all the press kit photos,” said Smarts, who missed the earlier part of the conversation but had suddenly realized he was all alone in the living room.
“Alright, alright,” said Rita, who did not want to be the cause of dissension in the band and who actually was aware that staying in school was the right thing to do. “I’ll graduate, but I don’t know about the college thing.”
“We’ll continue to discuss it,” said Boots.
“Isn’t this where someone makes a joke about higher education?,” asked Lips.
“Not if they value their life,” said Boots.
“Got it,” said Lips. “Class dismissed.”
So Rita finished high school, concentrating on her music -- and the boys who inevitably came with it -- and the 1975 Winsome Lake High Yearbook recognized her as “most likely to be heard,” an accolade that pleased her immensely and did not surprise Boots, or the band, at all.
# # #
Now, lying back against the pillows, trying once again to sneak up on sleep, Rita found herself staring across the room at the opposite wall and the large, framed poster announcing the debut album by The National Debt, the latest “next big thing” for whom she had recently laid down backing vocals, at the same time avoiding laying down with the lead singer, whose constant reek from garlic made her wonder if he was on a regular basis bathing in it, smoking it or deodorizing himself with it as part of some ultra-hip fashion craze which had been thankfully unknown to her until she found herself in an isolation booth with him, unsure she would live long enough to take another breath, much less sing another note.
At least his behavior had been sweet, Rita thought, beyond the usual but manageable male penchant for sexual double-entendres and the cute way they always thought they were hiding what they actually were thinking.
And a good smell didn’t necessarily betoken good times, Rita reminded herself, as the singularities of the boys/men with whom she’d been involved flashed within her mind’s eye like so many albums sitting on a shelf (yes, we now lived in the age of CDs and jewel boxes, but always identifying with the age of vinyl, when music meant getting up to listen to side two, singing along with the skips, and rolling joints on the large, flexible, wonderfully illustrated covers, had instilled in Rita’s brain the notion of “records,” which she liked to think was not so much a question of nostalgia but instead an acceptance of the practical, if not technology driven, realities of owning 3500 pieces of recorded vinyl and to date a mere 200 laser-friendly disks).
Take Dex the drummer, for example, whose playing time had taken up most of her 20th year. His redolent charm had captivated her from the first beat, and there were, along the way, many clues that seemed to point towards the relationship becoming an extended one.
Eleven months into it, however, after many physical and psychological intimacies, Dex developed a decidedly abnormal crush on the admittedly well-toned male instructor in “Fab Abs,” a daily exercise show, and could be found every evening sitting on his couch intently watching the gyrations while eating increasingly fattening snack products.
“It’s called ‘Fab Abs,’ not ‘Flab Abs’, Dexter,” said Rita one afternoon when she arrived home from a particularly arduous singing session to find him in front of the TV, sprawled out on her rug, a huge bowl of M&M’s perched on his swelling stomach and the Village People’s “Macho Man” blaring from her speakers. “And what is the fascination with the guy in the shorts?”
“I can’t really define it,” Dexter said, tossing a handful of candies up into the air and catching them in his mouth all at once, an act that simultaneously horrified, impressed and stimulated Rita. “But there is something about him that interests me.”
“Is there anything you’d like to tell me?,” Rita asked, aware suddenly that the relationship was past the salvation point but believing she could possibly provide some help or direction to him.
“I ate all the Oreos,” said Dexter.
“That’s not quite the revelation I had in mind,” said Rita, now standing directly in front of the TV screen. “I mean, is it a sexual thing?”
“No more than ours was,” said Dexter, motioning her to move away from the front of the television.
And that, she knew then and there, was that.
Rita’s final amorous alliance with a member of the opposite sex prior to her current unaccompanied state -- which was, she felt, an increasingly uninhabitable region in which she had resided for far too long -- had fallen apart a good deal more quickly than any of the previous efforts, and, in retrospect, she marked the beginning of the end with the arrival of the bunny on Valentine’s Day.
“He’s adorable,” she said to Peter the keyboard player, picking up the small, furry animal and watching its nose strum the air rapidly, in time to its own essential rhythm. “What a sweet present. But I’m going on the road tomorrow. What will I do with him?”
“I’ll take care of him for you,” he said, cuddling the small animal in his arms. “He’s our good luck charm.”
Two weeks later, Rita returned from the road, and very shortly after entering the house she called Peter the keyboard player, who had been mysteriously unreachable the entire time.
“Hello,” came his groggy voice from the other end of the phone. “Who the fuck is this? It’s six thirty in the morning.”
“The rabbit died,” said Rita.
“What?,” said Peter the keyboard player, trying to wake up, actually place the voice of the woman on the phone, and remember whether or not the girl currently sleeping next to him was by any chance named Tiffany. “You’re pregnant?”
“No, asshole,” said Rita, now trembling with rage. “Remember our good luck charm? Well, I just found his once very adorable, now very rotting corpse on the couch, with what looked like the beginnings of a letter to the ASPCA written in carrot juice.”
“Holy shit,” said Peter the keyboard player as reality set in on him. “I went away and forgot. Can I come over later and apologize to you?”
“If I ever see you again I will cut off all your fingers and make you eat them,” said Rita.
“I’m a vegetarian, babe, remember?”
It had taken Rita three days to find all the pieces of her phone.
This sudden downpour of inclement memories washing away any final notions Rita had of sleep for the night, she picked up the script lying on the table next to her bed and began flipping through the pages.
“What am I doing singing in this stupid movie? I didn’t even see the first one,” she said to Eleanor Rigby, who had reappeared in the room and was currently in her own bed next to the bureau, curled up on an embroidered pillow that said, “To hell with all the lonely people, take me out for my walk.”
Prior to her sessions with The National Debt, Rita had spent a couple of days doing extra harmonies for a rising band called Frozen Snot, whose first album, Eternal Phlegm, had caused critics to turn up their noses but had a solid run on the charts nevertheless.
They had sung the title song, “You Drive Me Insane,” for one of the previous year’s surprise hit movies, “Zombie Golf Pro.” (“FAIRWAY TO HELL,” read the ads). Hired to work on the sequel, “Zombie Golf Pro II: Par For The Corpse,” The Snot had enthusiastically recommended Rita when they discovered that the film’s director was looking for a female singer whose voice would be able to help complement the constant and dense sounds of raving club members, shattering irons, moaning greens keepers and general unsportsmanlike turmoil. Rita took it as a compliment and left it at that.
Scheduled to get on a plane the next day, fly to New York, and begin work on the film, her first, at the studio where the soundtrack was being assembled, Rita’s only consolation was that, for this particular project, a missed night of sleep would probably help her voice, not hurt it.
# # #
“I’m starving!,” Boots yelled in the direction of the approaching footsteps, not caring who they belonged to, as long as they carried something edible, his definition of which also was becoming more flexible as time went on. “What do I have to do to get some service around here?”
“Well, you can always eat me,” said Lips, who was standing in the doorway to Boots’ hospital room.
“I want a meal, not a snack,” said Boots, not so secretly pleased to see his band mate and friend. “And, besides, how many times do I have to tell you I’m not interested in your homoerotic fantasies?”
“Until you convince me you mean what you say, darlin’,” said Lips, coming into the room and flopping down on the not-so-easy chair next to the bed.
“Grow up,” said Boots. “And what the hell are you doing here. I was told we couldn’t visit each other.”
“Precisely why I’m here,” said Lips. “There ain’t a hospital room in the world that can hold me. And besides, I wanted to be the first to tell you that you’re dead.”
“Nice try,” said Boots. “But that’s already old news.”
“Try telling that to WAHU-FM, ‘where the songs are something to yell about,’ ” said Lips.
“What are you on about,” said Boots, who was becoming increasingly irritated by his friend’s obscure pronouncements and his own realization that Lips had not brought anything to eat.
“One person’s old news is another’s headline,” continued Lips. “And Freddie ‘Spin Em’ Dunster’s top story about half an hour ago was that Boots Klondike, rock and roll star in his own right and father of Rita Klondike, died last night from injuries sustained in a car crash.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” said Boots. “I mean, I was dead but I got over it.”
“You say you’re alive, he says you’re not. Why don’t you call the whole thing off?,” said Lips.
“Obnoxious hours are over,” said Boots, sitting up in his bed and hoping he didn’t look as tired as he felt. “We have to call the station and set them straight. Getting a rep as being dead could really cramp my style, not to mention my royalty checks.”
“But think of the comeback possibilities,” said Lips, wondering at the same time if the Queen of England ever got royalty checks.
“Are you going to help me or not,” asked Boots, painfully adjusting himself once again so he could reach for the phone, a maneuver not lost on Lips.
“If telling your best friend that he’s dead isn’t helpful, I don’t know what is,” said Lips.
“Fine, I’ll do it myself,” said Boots, continuing to struggle to rearrange himself.
“Alright,” said Lips, getting up and handing the phone to Boots. “If you’re not dead -- and I’m not a doctor, so I can’t say for sure -- what is the extent of your injuries, which I can see that you do indeed have?”
“Your incompetence as a driver,” began Boots, “combined with your preposterous inability to hear the difference between styles of guitar playing, has resulted in, in roughly this order: fleeting but verifiable loss of life, a somewhat miraculous retrieval of that life from the clutches of the ultimately unknowable but definitely to be feared Hereafter, brought about, I believe, through a combination of luck, medical science and the carrying of one lucky guitar pick, not necessarily in that order, certain recurring and so far unexplained pains in my lower extremities, and an appetite for anything the eating of which would fall just short of placing me in the category of cannibalistic that has yet to be sated.”
“I just wanted to know where it hurt,” said Lips.
“My leg is giving me trouble,” said Boots.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” said Lips.
“Not at all,” said Boots, who silently was aware that he currently was receiving the best medicine he could have hoped for.
“Let’s call the station and put these ugly rumors to rest,” said Lips.
“You got it,” said Boots, picking up the receiver. “What’s the number?”
“What do I look like, an operator?,” asked Lips.
“Without a doubt,” said Boots.
Continued on Next Page