AUTHOR'S NOTE
This is a
work of fiction. All
of the major characters are made up.
Because the story plays against the historical backdrop of professional
football, an avid fan may recognize that the Rams did take on the Vikings in a
play-off game in 1969, a game in which there were so many controversial calls
that sports reporters of the time questioned whether the refs had taken the
game out of the players' hands and decided it for themselves. Where actual players are mentioned in the
context of that game, their actions have been taken from the newspaper sports
pages of the time, primarily from the Los Angeles Times and the Herald Examiner. It is my hope that none of these figures has
been misrepresented. However, the
fictional characters involved in that game and in the larger context of this
story-including Ripper Brown, Lani Kazin, Loaf Ludder, Rand Burkle, Jeff
Raymond, Nathan Paramis, Jimmy "Motorfoot" Teams and George
Haslins-are purely fictional, as are their motivations and actions. There have been many colorful names for
defensive lines; there have been at least three Fearsome Foursomes playing for
various teams (although arguably the most famous was the Rams line of
1964-1974), to say nothing of The Steel Curtain, The Doomsday Squad, The Purple
People Eaters, The Orange Crush and many others. "The Mighty Foremen" are a creation
of this author for this novel, and represent a completely fictional defensive
front four. On the other hand, there is
a real Megan's Cafe in Aurora, Minnesota, run by a blonde lady named Gwen who
has a sense of humor.
CHAPTER
1
Never
mind my name; I promised the name-under-the-title (a vain and pompous little
current day auteur) that I wouldn't tell. But I'll give you
enough clues in passing that you'll get it before we're through. Let's just say I was
the rough and ready Hemingway of my time.
Well, Odd's Plut and her Nails, maybe not Hemingway, but at least
something resembling a delicious combination of
a higher-plane Nora Roberts and a Robert B. Parker with a better
vocabulary..., that is, if they did cheap, two-penny novels. That said, will it 'freak you out', as you
say in your own quaint dialect, 'devil your pleasantries' too much, if I reveal
to you that I've been dead for over 200 years? Right.
Your storyteller, your narrator, cold stone dead as a mackerel...bones
ground and blown to dust, actually...but that's another
story, and one that's never been told. Here's the thing-I'm the only bumfiddle who can actually
tell this tale, this delightful little penny dreadful called FOUL. That's because our
protagonist, one Brando Mahr, came back from the mental dead zone in 1980 by
reading penny novels scribbled two centuries before-mostly by moi! Yea and verily, my friends. Yes, myself-the great, tattered bard! Allow me to take a bow, and that
accomplished, I'll retreat ass-over-teakettle (swiftly
but not humbly) into the background as a sort of translator, here for you
whenever the going gets a little patchy.
You see, Brando's returned to the 20th century, but he thinks
like somebody just off the streets of London in the mid-1700s. So, with no further pleasantries, let us
begin in the middle of his troubles.
As our story
opens, it is August, 1984. Brando Mahr hadn't actually ever intended to gather the
acquaintanceship of the famous football hero Ripper Brown, as he might have
said in that quaint, cobbled-together English of his. That he had met Ripper at all-or Mister
Doomsday, as the great footballer had been dubbed in his glory days of yore-was
the result of a bit of well-meaning dirty work on the part of Brando's old
studio pal Keith Lagosi.
It was a hot
August in the summer of 1984. Lying
with his back on the stained and dirty floor of an interrogation room next to
Los Angeles Police Lieutenant Baker's scuffed black work shoes, Brando found
himself bearing Keith plenty of ill will.
Wish
you were here, pal Lagosi,
his overworked brain thought, that we might discuss the unpredictable
mushroom manifestations of your foolish pipe dreams. As I've said,
Brando talks like that because, after years in a coma, he re-taught himself
English-unfortunately, by reading my fantastico 18th century picaresques.
Brando
stayed down on one elbow on the floor and felt the painful fires flicker
through every joint in his body. He
swallowed the thin trickle of blood from the inside of his torn cheek.
"Oh,
yeah. Quite a mess, you're
in," Baker commented, looking down at him while he took a laconic drag
from one of those unfiltered Camels that he counted on as part of his drably
anachronistic persona. Baker seemed to
think he was Sergeant Friday of Dragnet.
"How the hell did you think you were going to get away with
it?" he asked in his quietly menacing way.
Brando knew
Baker meant the murder of Ripper's wife, and that it was time to answer.
"Considering
that, in your mind, I am the guilty party," he said, "it is a fair but complex
question, and I require a moment to cognize."
Mulling over
the situation seemed to deaden his physical pain, and after a few moments
Brando was able to drag his reluctant frame semi-erect. He tottered for a moment and then sagged into
the nearest chair.
And there,
while Lieutenant Baker smoked and watched him, he tried to sort out his
thoughts and recollect the scattered fragments of his recent past.
The morning
the Ripper mess had begun, the sun was shining down on Lotusland, and Brando
had been thinking he was a bona fide Hollywood eater, that is, a chap of
substance and possibilities. He was
relatively unrecognized in show biz, but he felt he had excellent
prospects. There would always be his
uncertain health, but on that day he'd convinced
himself he was sputtering forward. Think
positive thoughts, he told himself.
Passible, Peppy, Perceptive, Perfect, Pleasing. His old learning techniques danced along at
the back of his awareness. Ordinary
humans don't usually think this way-in alphabetical
order-but Brando, as you will see, is far from ordinary, and beggars cannot be
choosers.
Here now,
take a moment to look back: Here is what
happened to him to make him the way he was:
Once upon a time, at the precise wrong moment for his well-being, Brando
had been too close to the massive concussive force of a large artillery
shell. It had left him catatonic, dumb
as a stone for a number of years. After that duration, and against all odds, he
had revived-only to find himself aphasiac and prey to epileptic seizures. Aphasia, of course, is a mental disconnect;
it is knowing what a thing is even while your brain can't
remember the word for it.
After a
time, Brando had managed to gather enough of wit about him to sneak out of the
Veterans Hospital on Wilshire in West Los Angeles, and then, after bumming
around a bit in Santa Monica with the street people, to get a minimum wage job
carting books back to the stacks in the UCLA library. It was there, deep in the bowels of
bookville, that he re-taught himself words... and, incidentally, learned to think
and speak in London street slang that hasn't been
heard in ordinary conversation in nearly 200 years. As for the epilepsy, well, you know what that
is.
Even in
this, Brando is no ordinary garden variety tomato of an epileptic. Like some of the rarer strains, strange and
deceptive delusions-visions, even-sometimes
precede his seizures. He has
given these visionary delusions the name Zeemans, because they seem to
come from some unknown "z" dimension, perhaps like a rain of frogs from a clear
blue sky. While not unpleasant, unless
he recognizes the Zeemans for what they are, and is able to interrupt them, they
invariably led to a fairly predictable series of
mental and physical interruptions that can easily kill him.
Before he'd met Ripper Brown, Brando hadn't had the beginnings of a
Zeeman in weeks, and he was infused with boundless enthusiasm. Captain Padrow had warned him this sort of
euphoria generally came before a fall.
Padrow? She was a practicing U.S.
Army psychologist with multiple professional degrees and a career to
protect. He saw her as a deep and
fuddering yawn-bearer who scribbled papers and nodded with great authority at
meetings of her peers. He'd also had her in bed, so their relationship was, if
nothing else, complicated.
Don't
get too accustomed to life, Brando,
she'd warned, you're not going to be here that long. Brando shrugged her off, figuring her
comments were the army version of tough love.
Even if she was right, what did it matter? There was today to be enjoyed, and maybe
tomorrow. It was what he had, so it had
to be enough.
The day he
met the Ripper, he was some years down the road from his bumbling early revival
in the bowels of the library. Progress
had been made, and he was stumbling along in a career of sorts in show biz,
where people mostly couldn't tell who did and who
didn't have their wits about them. On
this particular sunny day, he was outfitted tres chic
militaire in an old army shirt and a pair of fatigues so threadbare they'd
gone beatnik. Ronald Reagan was running
for his 2nd term against Walter Mondale, Cats was big on Broadway, and Brando
was heading north, out of town, to get as far away as he could from the swarm
and blather of the Summer Olympics He
was scooting Fifi, his rumbly little brown Fiat Spyder, along in fifth, the
gear that real sports car aficionados hardly ever employ in L.A. due to freeway
clog. Brando and Fifi were on their way
to meet his old pal Lagosi, soon to be known as master of treachery.
Brando was
in what he might call the Joyful Judy mode, with absolutely no intention to
bother any lord of the highway or geek of the road. He'd flipped Fifi's
new tan ragtop down, her mag wheels were dutifully gleaming, his seat was
cranked back nearly like a shrink's couch and his sun-bleached moustachios and
receding hairline were flaring in the wind.
He didn't much mind about the hairline. English lords and barristers wore wigs, and
the brutish Germans just shaved it all off, bald as cue balls and convinced
they were utterly, fiendishly sexy.
"Therefore,
why bother, I?" He shouted to the
wind.
Fifi was
round and sleek like a dark and rangy little ocelot. He'd heard rumors
that Spyders weren't to be boated into the States anymore, but he'd picked his
up on a brief filming assignment in Europe.
When he wanted to bring it back to the States, his only other friend on
the planet besides Keith, semi-gangster Charlie Manganetti, had gray-listed it
into California for him. That was back
in the fat times when Brando was a middle-ranking somebody at the studio, and Caesar
had been almost entirely given unto before the lean years set in...meaning
Fifi was nearly paid for before he got canned.
He was
zooming north out of the San Fernando Valley, climbing the five-mile upgrade
the locals call 'The Grapevine,' when a spot of trouble inadvertently scuttered
across his path like a dark tarantula.
He was in
the far left fast lane cruising at seventy-something when a lime-green Porsche
Targa closed in on Fifi's backside. No
road hog or, as he would say, no dog in a doublet, Brando hit the
right blinker and started to cut over into the next lane.
Unfortunately,
the Targa was too impatient for the circumstance. The fellow started right at the same time
Brando was making his cut-only two material objects cannot occupy the same
space and time without some form of mechanical bending.
Brando had
moved in front of le banana verte.
No big deal, but the green banana had to consider tapping his brakes, a
major insult.
The Targa
eased up a bit and the black front bumper moved within bare inches of Fifi's
rear end. And then the Porsche crossed
behind and its driver gunned it to Fifi's left.
Brando
sensed a flash of pilot's steel-rim sunglasses and a carrot-colored pate, and
the speed felon yelled over at him, "Learn to drive, you asshole!"
"You-you-Ichabod!"
Brando yelled back, giving him the Western One-Finger. That would teach the offender, Brando
thought; Ichabod, son of Phinehas in the Bible, a name which throughout history
had been used to describe a person without honor.
The
name-calling may have been lost in time beyond recall, but the significance of
Brando's emphatic hand gesture was not lost on the driver of the green
banana. He pulled close enough to
Brando's side to shave Fifi's fender.
Brando figured they were going to enjoy a West Coast verbal exchange, or
maybe banana-man would surface a pistola and pop him in the cranium, and that
might just be a blessing in disguise.
"I
ought to run you off the road and beat the crap out of you, you stupid
schmuck!" banana-man yelled.
Ahh,
no pistol popping! Verbals it was!.
Brando grinned, overjoyed to use a small part of his large but
incredibly antiquated vocabulary of ridicule and abuse.
"Not
manifesting overall cleverness today, are we?" he shouted back over the
roaring wind. "Who writes your
dialogue-Prince Myshkin?" He was,
of course, referring to the idiot in Dostoevski's novel of the same name. Maybe not on the current New York best seller
list, but it was the only thing that burbled to mind.
"You
stupid prick!" Banana-man replied.
"Cod-licking
dribble-dick! " Brando yelled with
a victorious note to his voice.
"Talk
English, you idiot!"
"My
English is more English than your English!" Brando shouted back. "You mundungus buffle-headed
bumfiddle! You're an affront to good
taste everywhere!"
With that,
Brando had to swerve as his foe carried out a mad bomber attempt to buzz off
Fifi's left fender. Brando braked, and
carrot-top carried over across his lane into the parallel on his right.
"You're
dicked in the knob, dildo ding-boy!" Brando shouted, meaning his foe was a
crazy, womanish knave of the lowest cut.
Banana-man jerked his wheel left to force the Spyder off the road. Brando was prepared to swerve out of the way;
but, due to wicked fortune, he hit the brakes at a sandy smear and Fifi's back
end went goosey.
In what
Brando would call a milli-tick, a forest of chrome bumpers and
dung-brown Southland hills whipped by with a wondrous tilt-a-world sweep as
Fifi la Fiat and her owner did a violent 360.
The little roadster skidded out onto the center divide, still doing well
over 60 in the dusty, loose gravel.
Brando saw
flying dry tumbleweed suspended stop-frame in the air for a moment before they
burst through it. Fifi was heading for a
steep down-slope that led into a boulder-choked barranca. Brando tapped his brakes and waited until the
last moment to correct, and played the bite of the rubber in a controlled slide
the shape of a shallow "C". They narrowly missed the barranca
and ended up back in the far left lane on the freeway, still caroming along in
the right direction.
"Get a
life, you sorry mother-fucker!" came the green banana's distant cry..
Carrot-top
was receding into the distance. He had
floored his pedal to the metal, as the pseudo truck-talkers all said, this
being that loquacious epoch when America was suffering the CB radio virus, and
he was speeding away. Brando was left
behind, shaking and furious in a wake of his rival's
sooty effluvium. In ten seconds
Carrot-top was just a chartreuse bug, and in twenty he was a disappearing dot
on the horizon.
However,
this being the Southern California Southland where one's reality easily
meanders off the yogurt truck, in another minute, Brando passed him. The driver of the green Porsche had been
jerked over by a Black Maria, a little copper-gimcrack smirking behind her dark
glasses, her taunting femininity plumping out a starched tan CHP uniform as she
handed Carrot-top the unpleasantly numbered slip. Banana-boy glared a pair of degans-that is,
dagger-eyes-as Brando raised his finger-salute high, yelled God Save The Queen's
Britches! and roared on past.
He shifted
into fourth and then downshifted into third and second, Fifi's engine rapping
off wonderfully as la Spyder and her master dove across the many lanes
and into the designated turn-off for the shooting range.
He and Fifi
zoomed from the freeway through a dust-blown off-ramp leading to a cement and
gravel operation, where the tight little imp of a car negotiated a swift left
on an unpaved road. They cut back under
deep shadows between the tall cement trunks of the freeway. Fifi slid through a series of turns and
Brando gunned her into third, dodging and weaving around the bigger
potholes.
He fairly rocketed Fifi along, eager to meet his pal Keith, for
the devious Lagosi had lured him to this location with a gunnysack lumpy with
unregistered widow's guns that he wanted to trade for cold, hard cash.