When I first informed Papa of my aspirations to become a famous Hollywood film comedian he replied, "You'd have better luck shoving a pop tart up your ass and claiming to be a toaster."
Undeterred, I calmly explained my game plan to become my generation's version of the great Charlie Chaplin. "I want to be the next 'little tramp' !" I exclaimed, following my speech.
"Yeah, well you're already halfway there, Junior, seeing as how you're already a goddamn bum. You could just saw your legs off at the knees to meet the height requirement." Papa grumbled, shoving me aside so that he could resume his regular nightly viewing of Knife Collectors' Wholesale Smack Down on the Home Shopping Channel.
"I'm serious!" I said.
"You are? Well that's hardly an ace in the hole for a baggy pants comic, smart guy." Papa quipped, distracted by the shimmering assortment of spring-activated 'Scorpion's Sting' folding buck knives displayed on the television screen. "Oh, man! I gotta get me one of those babies and stab you in the neck with that mother fucker!" he giggled.
"You aren't even listening to the heart-felt dreams of your only son!" I said. Even though I loathed him with all of my heart, I one day longed to be rich and famous and be able to place Papa in a second-rate, or better yet, third-rate nursing home and never visit due to my numerous awards ceremony obligations, leaving him to rot away to a bag of bones in a clouded haze of dementia and suffering from an ever present diaper rash-the result of the laziness and neglect of his underpaid caregivers.
"Fine!" he snarled. "You wanna be Charlie Chaplin? Put on a derby, draw a fucking Hitler moustache on your face and go impregnate some underage girl, you retarded mutant! I'm trying to watch my knife show!"
Papa was "old school". A regular working-class, blue collar Joe who's ideas of elegance and taste encompassed only the rusting double-wide trailer we called home, TV dinners and twelve packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. He was hardly a character to embrace my notions of comic genius. "You wanna be funny?" he asked, pitching a half-empty beer can at my skull and hitting me square in the forehead. The blow knocked me backwards into a collection of dust-covered bowling trophies that he'd found in a moulding cardboard box a few years before and had since proudly displayed as if they were his own. "There you go Shemp!" he cackled, referring to the slapstick comedy stylings of the late Shemp Howard of Three Stooges fame. "Now that shit was funny!"
I rose to my feet and carefully extracted the tip of a bowling trophy that had become impaled through my liver during the unsolicited pratfall. Papa howled with laughter. "Maybe you are a comic genius after all, you fucking dipshit!"
My mind reeled as I sputtered instructions for Papa to call 9-1-1. Moments later, I fainted from a rapid loss of blood from my wound.
Two months later I hazily emerged from my coma and attempted to establish my bearings as I stared, dumbfounded, at the ceiling of the Happy Valley General Hospital's coma ward. As my wits returned, I couldn't help noticing that my right leg had been amputated at the knee and my left arm and testicle were missing. It didn't take a rocket scientist to do the math: organ/limb vegetable garden! Nurtured only to harvest my spare parts like some human auto dismantling yard! Papa had sold me down the river after heartlessly wringing laughs from my comic aspirations with his sadistic beer can-tossing antics!
I gazed about the ward, noting that a good number of my comatose roommates were also missing numerous body parts. What a diabolical turn of events! Suddenly the door of the coma ward swung open. I quickly laid my head back on my pillow, again playing the helpless vegetable that I had been only moments before my horrifically rude awakening. A doctor entered the room, followed by a short, elderly man wearing a double breasted suit. "Of course I'm really a doctor! Why do you think I'm wearing scrubs and a stethoscope?" the doctor asked, sounding irritable. The man in the suit cleared his throat, looking embarrassed. "Well I'm just not used to seeing assless scrubs. Your buttocks are hanging out in full view." the man said. "It's a sexy new look for the coma ward staff. Chocolate Love! 100%!" the doctor said, snapping his fingers with a spicy flair.
"But you're white." the elderly man noted.
"Racist!" the doctor snapped.
The elderly man loosened his tie, nervously. "It's just that at Weinerman's Ball Park Franks, we're a bit choosy about who provides the ingredients for our hot dogs." He unbottoned his shirt collar and then wiped the perspiration from his brow with a handkerchief. "If this sort of deal was discovered I would be finished."
"Finished with what?" the doctor asked.
"I would be ruined" the man explained.
"Well perhaps you could buy stock in my new line of assless scrubs." the doctor said.
"That's not the point. The hot dog-eating public might object to a company putting human meat into their franks." The man said.
"Well, they can bite this human meat frank!" the doctor said, grabbing his crotch.
"I'm just not 100% on this deal." the man said.
"Chocolate Love! 100%!" the doctor repeated, snapping his fingers again.
"I'm really going to have to give your proposal more thought. I'll get back to you." the man said, exiting the ward.
"Yeah, well you're a fuckin' pussy, dude! The fuckin' Chicolini Salami Company was all over us like flies on shit, you fag!" the doctor screamed. "One guy even bit this chick's finger off and swallowed it raw to test the product!"
I couldn't believe my ears...or my eyes for that matter. It was all too dreadful to be believed. My meat, and the meat of these other unfortunates harvested for a cheap brand of salami by some sadistic lunatic in assless cotton pants! It was like some awful Vincent Price film! I had to escape..before I was completely ground into some hideous cured sausage.
"Fuckin' bullshit!" the doctor grumbled as he left the ward. I had to work quickly, before the lunatic discovered his next potential customer. Using what strength and dexterity I had left in my weakened body, as well as several lengths of surgical tubing, I tied together several of the other comatose patients, creating a makeshift raft. I then stuffed a corn cob pipe I had found with aromatic cherry-flavored tobacco and struck a match, puffing madly at the pipe to create a thick cloud of smoke. My plan worked, as in the next few moments the emergency sprinkler system was activated, flooding the coma ward with water. As the room was filled by the sprinklers' watery deluge, my human raft was swept through the door of the coma ward and into the hallway beyond. I paddled madly toward the emergancy exit screaming "Freedom is mine! Freedom is mine!" all the while imagining the horrible vengence that Papa was going to suffer at my remaining hand.
