Ash Magazine Issue 1

by Lord Haywire

  Giles Cripplegate

  By Evan Cooper

  The key thing for Giles was keeping the eggs perfectly balanced on the baboon’s forehead. If there was anything he had learned from balancing chairs, eggs, and baboons simultaneously, it was that concussed, egg spattered baboons were given to erratic behavior and difficult to get a grip on. Therefore, it was paramount that the show go on according to plan, which it inevitably did.

  For every production there was, however ironically, a producer sitting in the audience. In this case, it was Francois D’Estigny, a cut throat craps player who had won residence at the Menage Grimaçant playhouse by putting his sphincter up as collateral against the position for one roll of the dice.

  Always one to hedge his bets, Francois always kept an extra sphincter in a cleverly concealed cooler in his attaché case. Francois could not stand to watch the act, given the precariousness of baboons and eggs being balanced along with one another; which is not even to mention the chairs, although they have now, in fact, been mentioned. Francois was sure that the red-assed baboon had to possess some cosmic teleological relationship with the chairs that somehow allowed the entire act to go on unhindered.

  Despite this, he insisted on sitting backward in his seat facing the audience. Upon the conclusion of each act, Olivia Cripplegate, a tiny minuet of a girl and granddaughter of Giles, would serenade the baboons back to their cages with vocal stylings that had won her the “Little Miss Chili Pepper” at the Newark confederated swap-meet, despite the fact that chili peppers are not native to

  New Jersey, nor do they pertain to singing in really any way imaginable. Still, the judges, who were also recent immigrants to New Jersey, insisted that the performance could only be described as “¡Muy caliente!”

  After the 257th show in which Giles and the baboons defied gravity and the world’s expectations and prejudices (about Englishmen and baboons, effectively) Giles decided to ask the theater owner, Arturo DeLuca, if he could take the show on tour if he advertised for the theater and gave Arturo the merchandising rights. Arturo, a relative giant who towered over the inmates at the Cuban immigration camp where he was forced to assassinate a Castro-supporter’s puggle, became uncharacteristically gentle-toned, and crumpled down to meet the old English gentleman’s gaze.

  “But Giles, I thought you loved Newark, why ever would you leave?” Arturo asked.

  “My dear Arturo, you have been good to us, of course. But you see, I came to New Jersey from England so I could drop bits of spotted dick from overpasses onto cars passing underneath on the turnpike. I have found that, though this has brought me many a moment of almost school-girl-squeal-worthy delight, I must go and find other overpasses. Additionally, I don’t think it would be proper for Olivia to remain here to find a boy to her liking. The Jersey boys all smoke entirely too much Plexi-Glass powder and violate one another with Mercedes hood ornaments. I would prefer her to find a nice boy with proper sensibilities. One with an affinity for Jag-you-are hood ornaments, perhaps.”Arturo said he understood, and bid Giles, Olivia, and Crab the super intelligent alpha-baboon farewell. Crab arranged for train tickets to Bismarck, but he is after all a baboon, so he only managed to scratch himself, vomit a little, and contemplate why his muzzle is blue, yet his ass is red.

  Giles Cripplegate, once a young boy in Birmingham, England, had developed a deathly fear of Birmingham, Alabama. The notion of another Birmingham frightened him most of all because he feared it was the “other” Birmingham, as if it existed on one end of the continuum of matter and anti-matter; black people instead of white. Some strange garbled English language that he was certain was proper English backwards. The terror was so great that to this day he can’t go near Alabama for fear of meeting his anti-matter self on holiday and evaporating into the cosmic everythingness of the universe itself, never to be a distinguishable sub-set of attributes within it again.

  So, for their journey, Olivia, Giles, and Crab decided to pick a route that decidedly avoided Alabama altogether.

  Olivia, intent on finding a suitor before the journey had wrapped up, spritzed herself with the adrenaline of silkworm larvae that a Chinese audience member had gifted her, telling the story of how he had to place silkworm larvae by the thousands into a burlap sack and beat them with jade figurines of Margaret Thatcher in order to frighten the larvae enough for them to excrete the highest quality silk.

  Apparently very intercommunicative, politically savvy, and prodigiously tactile, the silk worms on the outside layer relayed their tactile nervous readings to the rest, only for all of them to collectively discover that, in accordance with silk worm larvae’s worst fear, they were indeed being beaten with a jade figurine of Margaret Thatcher.

  The Chinese man claimed the adrenaline would make any man so overwhelmed with emotion that he would either fall madly in love with her, or void his bowels in terror, thinking inexplicably of a non-existent memory of being alone in the dark with Margaret Thatcher.

  Truck stops along the interstate leading to Bismarck were becoming decidedly more raucous and smelly upon Olivia’s arrival. Giles was forced to put a stop to the silk-worm larvae adrenaline, drawing protests from Crab, who hadn’t been this regular in months. The pressure from the shows had tied his primate small intestine into a sadistic Boy Scout’s idea of a tourniquet. Giles informed

  Crab that he and the rest of the baboons would need to stop with the wanton bowel voiding in the Dodge Caravan if they wanted to one day evolve. The baboons, naturally feeling sheepish and put in their place, decided to hold it until the next rest area, except Crab, who believed in intelligent design.

  On the 17th day of the journey, and completely without the aid of any creature’s secretions, Olivia had found a husband. He was from Ohio, and his name was Chad.

  He had one eye removed as a child as a result of an infection contracted from a retinal baboon scratch which he suffered during a 7th birthday party petting zoo fiasco.

  Sufficed to say, Crab and Chad chose to occupy separate areas in the caravan and only made the most forced and banal small talk when they were somehow the first one’s out of the bathrooms at rest stops.

  In the place of the indirectly purloined eyeball, Chad had inserted a twelve-sided die, so that he could always start up a Dungeons and Dragons game, no matter what the circumstances. Given the tumultuousness of his previous marriage during which Olivia was produced, Giles took the die-eye as a good-natured acknowledgement of the chanciness of falling in love. The fateful 38 bullets that had ended his marriage had embedded themselves into the wall not 3 inches from his head. Yes, love and chanciness, Giles thought.

  Their first show was slated to take place in Bismarck, North Dakota. At least, they thought it was in North Dakota, but Bismarck, definitely. Olivia was concerned that Crab’s agoraphobia would be aggravated by the flatness of the terrain, but Crab assured her that a little flat ground wasn’t more than he could handle. In fact, he decided now might be the time that Olivia, with her eyes freshly dewed by the dawning of new love, learned the true meaning of fear and despair. He decided to tell her of how he ended up in Newark from the rain forests of Brazil.

  Apart from slight exaggerations and much chest pounding, Crab’s story went approximately thus: A lonely lumberjack working a chainsaw in the midst of Crab’s rainforest had found him rehearsing Shakespeare with a few of the more evolved of his brethren. The lumberjack, a French-Canadian with a terrible habit of licking away a perennial ball of spit forming in the corner of his mouth, asked the baboons if they would be interested in a foursome. Just as Crab politely declined, the lumberjack snatched up him and his brothers from the jungle and brought them back to New Jersey where he intended to throw the cosmos into chaos by actually getting monkeys to write Shakespeare on the first try. After Crab explained to him that they were baboons, which are technically not monkeys, the lumberjack became incredibly depressed. After offing himself creatively with an electric eggbeater, the lumberjack left the baboons to their own dev
ices. Crab’s colleagues decided to go to the zoo and ask for the right to conjugal visits in return for scheduled feces-throwing, frolicking, and fang-bearing.

  Crab, however, became depressed being so far from his homeland. Clasping a shoplifted bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label by the neck, Crab staggered tearfully down the streets, wincing at every “giant hemorrhoid monkey” and “cherry buns” crack that the hood ornament wielding Jersey boys would call after him as they drove past. Finally, Crab crossed paths with Giles in an English pub, and they decided to create the chair-egg act with Crab’s colleagues from the zoo.

  As the curtains lifted on the Bismarck stage, Olivia could see the love and devotion on Crab’s face as he balanced a chair on his chin. Chad and Olivia watched in from the audience. Near the end of the performance, Olivia nuzzled in close and decided maybe now was the time to test him. She dabbed a little droplet of the silk worm larvae adrenaline onto her neck. He looked down into her eyes. She could make out the slight indentations of the die’s numbers 12, 6, 9, 3, and 1 in the dim house light of the theater. He said, “I love you, Olivia.” And as they kissed, Giles and Crab took the stage for their bows amidst thunderous applause and every man in the audience rapidly shimmying their way out towards the aisles and into the lobby bathroom.

  this is not art