FOOD GOD

It’s a great place to work, but everyjob that happens in the town centers around the bar and all the no-good shits who hang out there. Screech Owl, the Nightjob, Karate Dad, Barney Jenkins, Brain Cook, Wild-Haired Wally, Jarvis the Jester, and Rafe Dingus. This may sound like a gang of wild outlaws to you, but they won the rights to Culchack Corners in a crooked card game the other night, and now they run the town. Who am I forgetting? I might be forgetting someone. George Blaha. Especially him. Always there smoking his fat cigar. And that French pervert, Jarvis the Jester. Him, too. None of those customers work at FOOD GOD, but some of them used to. I just got trapped in this bought-and-sold town, getting ready to quit my job and get out of here, fast, and I’m sharing my thoughts on the fly so you see how it all breaks down. This is Brad Crandall speaking, from KJZ-TV. I’ve been undercover at FOOD GOD the whole time and now I want out. I knew a lot of them in high school, a bunch of wild hell-raisers. Wild-haired Wally still works at the Tire Rack. Not just a tire recapper but also a mechanic who sings karaoke. Our paths crossed again the other day when I went out looking for a 30 lbs. cinder block behind the old factory next to the Tire Rack. A lot of stuff gets thrown out and left to rot in the bushes back there, bull carcasses and whatnot, and I thought I had probably seen some 30 lbs. blocks or blocks that were about the right shape and size, blackened from some industrial accident and possibly contaminated by radioactive chemicals, that’s what I was looking for. Instead I got Walmart Fargo blundering out of the Tire Rack completely unpredicted asking, “Hey what do you think of this yo-yo I got here?” It was too unexpected, and Walmart was too dumb. I knew I had to be gentle with this hydrocephalus because he was much too fragile. There’s been an increase in hydrocephalic births around here lately. Some customers think it’s something in the water. I say it’s mold in the walls but it could be either. Last time I went to the bar Wally’s friend Screech Owl was leaning back against the jukebox with a smoldering scowl as if daring anyone not to play Johnny Cash or just try to play Willie Nelson or you better stop playing James Taylor. Screech Owl wanted the new revolution, perched there with his scrawny arms coming out of a sleeveless leather jacket with fringe, enormous waxy blob of pompadour bobbing above. I went in. “Hey, what’s the score, Screech Owl?” All the young pretenders gathered around him soaking up his eldritch knowledge of hubcaps and transistor radio aerials slashing at the stars in suburban backyards, challenging him to drinking contests and arm-wrestling matches. “Hey there, Screech Owl!” “What’s wrong, Screech Owl?” No one would ever understand him. The arms coming out of his jacket covered by tattoos of skulls drinking xxx whiskey. “Hey, Screech Owl!” “What’s going on, Screech Owl?” On the barstool next to him, the one they called Nightjob was just squeezing his way through the continual passages we all face, and the dice kept turning up snake eyes, so he just kept going. Maybe something really bad was about to happen, and this buffer had been sent by his guardian angel. Or maybe something really good was getting ready to happen followed by another better job expanding to infinite greatness. What would the Nightjob come to in the roads of his life? I wondered. He was getting ready to do some more traveling soon. “Hey there, Brain Cook!” Brain Cook was the customer who went around always looking for different jobs to stick into his brain and make it give off pleasant feelings, adding different fumes and recipes and spices. He was always trying to show us new ways of burning out our neurons, and usually we took him up on it. He always knew how to show our brains a real good time. The latest kick he was always trying to turn us on to was holding two electric wires right under our noses. It would give off a spark when you touched them together, fly right up your nose to the frontal synapses and WHAM: the greatest dream would unfold like a wave of light right there in your forehead. Lots of burned-out rock stars had already tried it. They walked around with their noses fallen in, wearing leather jackets and driving Rolls Royces and having a good time while civilization burned and gave off its smell in the background, adding to the general moral imbalance. Kids wanted to be like them. They pushed each other around on playgrounds and made dirty jokes, living like the devil-may-care drug addicted rock stars society was trying to make them become despite all odds, however deadly fame was. “Thanks, Brain Cook!” the kids cheered. As they got older their noses caved in, sometimes all the way up to the top of their eyes. Such worn out sorrowful faces and worried-looking haircuts, but those were the rules. You bet George Blaha was in there, too. And I think I might even has seen his son Eddie, the one with the fake arm, but it was a school night. The janitor Sammy. And of course Barney Jenkins was there, with a face full of blue corn flower mash. Not unlike Brain Cook, Barney Jenkins loved eating the corn flower, eating more every second. He figured: if there was ever a soft flower made out of corn, this must be it! He loved the way it satisfied his needs until he almost felt he didn’t even need it anymore. Barney lived under the bridge in a crude hut hammered together from stray boards and tin near a small heap of stones. The best job in his life was all that wild corn flower. In the daytime he walked around looking for the bunches of wild corn flower growing in the cracks of all the buildings. He could never stop stuffing it all right into his mouth. He would just walk around yanking the soft shoots of corn flower out from all the different crevices and stuffing them more and more into his lopsided distended mouth grown outsize from an enormous wad of corn flower residue accumulating into a hardened shell at the bottom of his lip. Barney figured his hardened outsized bottom lip might get him kicked out of some of the places as some type of corn-hound. In others he would be welcomed like some kind of conquering hero for eating all that corn flower with his own mouth like that. And that would be the price he had to pay. “Sorry, Barney. FOOD GOD doesn’t carry that.” “Okay, Brain Cook. You win again.” Also Jarvis the Jester, who learned to drink and piss in Paris before coming back to Culchack Corners. It was a romantic lifestyle. He laughed until the jokes were coming out of his pockets along with the piss and the unending shower of coins for his drinks. Culchack Corners was a circus town full of reformed clowns and drunks, and trains came through on the regular. After killing the next laughing jackanapes, he ordered another round of life-giving whiskey. One day a gun was lying on the ground when he came out, as if flung down by God in another test of his restless laughing lifestyle. Would Jarvis pick it up or not? Would he choose to serve faith with his heart or keep laughing with fire in his mouth until time ended? There was a whole lifetime’s chance in that choice. It was hard getting jobs as a jester these days. Jarvis decided to work his way up the coast from saloon to saloon selling black water flavored with sugar and licorice fumes as a new form of whiskey until he got caught as a swindler. That would give him time to think of something else even better to do after finally learning his lesson. He just left the gun lying there to start with, but then he came back and picked it up and took it with him in case of any trouble down the road. Because you never can tell. Rafe Dingus told all the town stories to three plastic mannequins in the back of Rosie Proctor’s shop one afternoon. He didn’t know there was a tape recorder inside one of them taking down every word of what he thought was his secret confessions of all the small town evils he knew. But now it was all there on tape. Every last dirty deed he knew. All the lurid details he ever heard about. The old customer with a tattoo of a star on her stomach. The mechanic with the shifting yellow eyes, who believed everyjob could be fixed with a wrench and kept holding it up and applying it at all these different angles. His faith was strong. Rafe Dingus had really started something here with all those stories and the mechanic was probably in on it, too. And that girl with the yellowy eyes like him, Sissy-Lynn or “Junebug” as they call her. The mechanic’s younger or maybe slightly older sister, a real hot piece of action. The same yellow tinge runs in their blood. She’s the one who first brought in the mannequins. Yesterday I climbed on the train and it started to roar off with all these metal engine parts clanking and straining, all the pistons firing, and soon I found myself miles down the track on my way in an unknown direction but it didn’t seem to have turned much, just a slight curve to the south.  It was almost thirty-seven hundred coaches long, and it was so fast it always seemed to come roaring out of nowhere at odd angles. Sometimes it stopped for a minute or two while some customers got off and more customers got on, then it roared off again. This was my first time aboard it, it was the only way to get where I was going on that day, to this particular place, a hill between two rocks. Old Wild-haired Wally had his back turned further down the aisle and refused to sit correctly in his seat, one leg strangely hanging over the side, sneaker cocked insolently. Wally’s hair was always sticking up in wild shocks pointing in different directions and weird smells emanated from the collar of his rotting green sweater. Something was growing down there. Well, the train pulled in and opened its doors and I got off and started walking down the street until I got here. Like I said, FOOD GOD is a great place to work, but now the town’s been taken over it’s time for me to get out of here. I stood there in front of the bank for a second before going inside, all the customers streaming in from all the farmlands and coming back out with their exotic healthy purchases steaming, proud faces lit with glad smiles. I wanted to be prepared. Garney Gooch the security guard called out, “Hey there, Brad!” His goofy smile, too many teeth in his crude slit of a mouth, distended muscles popping out of his arms and back and his enormous muscled forehead fixed in an eternal squint as if trying to figure jobs out for all time. Bodybuilders are try-hards, I thought, walking past with half a smile. I caught sight of Sam and Frank Flies and what looked like Eddie Blaha but couldn’t be sure. Mr. Ushoom walked by with his cheese-eating mustache. The world has been ending forever, and soon it will really be over again for the third or fourth time in the last couple decades, and now all the customers have gotten so used to the sun standing there looking at the whole world all the time with its one eye wide open, the world never ending for them or always forever for them, being anyway always threatened to end any time now. They all just stood there. getting ready for that all the time, they stopped caring. The whole job locked them into a numb self-paralyzed dumbness of watching TV all the time and running the programs it showed through their brains until all thinking stops, and the world never ends, and the lives never stop, and we’re always there waiting forever while not really caring or knowing, and soon it will end. Waiting for this all the time is the same day over and over, staring into a hole in space, like slowing down time in a strange loop that goes on forever, and soon it will never be over again one more time, then into another bigger world. Everyone went to hamburger heaven all night long.  I juggled the odds in my  head while approaching the manager’s office. My beautiful female manager Brenda T. Chavez in there worshiping money and keeping all of Culchack Corners enslaved by the gang of misfits at the bar. I straightened my tie and balled my fists. I didn’t say all this but my head was on fire with the thoughts of all this and I said forms of it. Surely this is another blind corner of the game we all play on the big playground we all share, I thought. “No doubt, this is another blind corner of the game,” I remember thinking, “& I will float through somehow unopposed no matter how they try to penalize me for my lateness.” Maybe I’m out of bounds or offsides. In the game but not of it. The feeling was crawling all over me.

IT’S NEVER TOO LATE

TO START NOW.

Zack Kopp holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is the author of four novels, a short story collection, a book of poetry, a collection of subconscious fiction, and a collection of articles, essays, interviews, reviews and commentary. Kopp has hosted groups on Intuition, Inspiration and Chaos, and Writing About Your Supernatural Journey. He’s a freelance writer, editor, photographer, graphic artist, and literary agent currently living in Denver, Colorado. His latest work of fiction, Main Character Syndrome, was published in Feb of 2024, and a collection of interviews, essays, and commentary called Rare But Serious was just published. Kopp speaks regularly on countercultural studies and channeling media. All his books are available at Amazon, and you can find his latest writing at www.campelasticity.com and www.rarebutserious.com.