George Washington Is Cash Money

by Cory O'Brien; Illustrated by Soren Melville

  and Pecos Bill is still chilling out on this tornado

  just occasionally digging his spurs into it.

  I don’t know what he found to dig his spurs into

  but whatever it is it sure pisses the tornado off

  so finally the tornado is like “Aww, Jesus fuck

  no matter what I do

  this asshole just keeps sitting on me

  occasionally making cowboy or wolf noises

  this is horrible

  life is horrible

  why me?”

  So the tornado decides to commit suicide.

  It flies over to the Grand Canyon

  and cries itself out of existence

  raining so hard it fills up the entire canyon

  and as a result of this elemental emogasm

  Pecos Bill finds himself with nothing to ride

  and he flies through the air

  and hits the ground so hard

  it creates Death Valley

  and then a bunch of cowboys are like

  whoa that looks pretty sweet

  let’s make that a sport

  only let’s do it with horses instead of tornadoes

  because we are stupid enough to think this looks fun

  but we’re not THAT stupid.

  AND THAT’S WHERE RODEO COMES FROM.

  So the moral of the story is

  dismantle FEMA.

  Pecos Bill could have stopped Katrina single-handed

  or maybe made it like

  a thousand times worse

  in fact probably that is the more likely scenario

  seeing as he devastated like 50 percent of America

  so the real moral of the story is

  stay the hell away from tornadoes

  rodeo has already been invented

  you have nothing left to gain.

  CALAMITY JANE HAS THE BEST NICKNAME

  So in the Wild West

  there’s a couple ways to get famous:

  You can kill a bunch of white dudes

  you can kill a bunch of Native Americans

  or you can find a bunch of gold

  (and probably kill a bunch of dudes to keep it).

  In this way

  the Wild West is an equal-opportunity employer

  they don’t care if you’re a man, woman, or kid

  all that matters is that you have guns

  and that you shower as little as possible.

  Calamity Jane is proof of this.

  I mean, she’s pretty isolated proof of this

  so either she’s like the only lady who figured it out

  or the Old West is not as equal-opportunity as I said

  but, uh . . .

  yay, cowboys!

  So Martha Jane Cannery

  (her non-awesome non-frontier name)

  gets born in Missouri

  and then her parents die

  for vague, fairy-tale reasons

  and suddenly Martha is the boss of all her sisters

  (pro tip:

  it is way easier to be a badass lady in the Old West

  if your dad is dead).

  So Martha moves her family from Virginia City

  (which is in Montana because settlers are dumb)

  all the way to Wyoming

  and along the way she hangs out with all the dudes

  firing pistols constantly

  and riding her horse across dangerous rivers for fun

  and by the time they get to Piedmont

  everyone knows she bad.

  So she works whatever jobs she can

  mostly boring shit like washing dishes

  and cooking meals and being a prostitute

  and she’s like “Wait a second

  why am I doing this

  when I could be KILLING PEOPLE?”

  So she loads up a couple of guns

  gets hella drunk

  and proceeds to remain armed and tipsy

  for most of the rest of her natural life.

  Now, the frontier is a lot like Burning Man:

  It’s hot

  it’s dry

  everybody’s drunk

  and everybody’s got a goddamn nickname

  except instead of techno-hippy shit

  like “Alice in Wonderland” or “Love Laser”

  you get random violence words

  like CALAMITY JANE.

  Jane says a military guy gave her the name

  after she saved his life from some Indians

  but I prefer to think she got it

  by just being a walking talking crisis her whole life.

  Anyway, she works for the military for a while

  scouting and shooting and hanging with Custer a bit

  (maybe

  it is possible that she lied about that

  when she dictated her autobiography for cash

  but lying is manly too so don’t worry about it)

  and eventually she hooks up with another badass

  called Wild Bill Hickok.

  Now, Wild Bill is a character in his own right

  he killed a bear in hand-to-hand combat

  INVENTED the quick-draw duel

  and was so stupidly lucky

  he made an actual PROFESSION out of gambling.

  So when Wild Bill and Calamity Jane get to town

  (the town of Deadwood, South Dakota

  which is so crawling with famous Western heroes

  that they eventually make a TV show out of it)

  what do you think the newspaper headlines say?

  “NEWS FLASH:

  CALAMITY JANE HAS ARRIVED.”

  HAHA, SCREW YOU, WILD BILL.

  So Jane and Bill hang out in Deadwood for a bit

  drinking and gambling

  gambling and drinking

  until Wild Bill gambles a little too hard

  and gets shot for it

  and Jane responds

  by attacking the guy who did it with a meat cleaver

  and then settling down to drink herself dead.

  This works really well

  although she does live long enough

  to nurse people through a smallpox epidemic

  which she is apparently immune to

  due to a persistent lack of showers

  and the antiseptic properties of rye whiskey.

  But she finally does die

  after getting thrown off a train for being drunk

  and the rest, as they say, is history.

  I mean, that part was history too

  but I’m talking about

  like

  other history.

  So you may be saying to yourself

  “I get that Calamity Jane’s ass

  was about as maximally bad as an ass can be

  but did she actually . . . do anything?”

  Well, yes and no.

  Like, she must have done something to gain her cred

  but most of what we know about her

  is stuff she just straight-up told her biographer

  without anything to back it up

  so, just like with a lot of Old West badasses

  it’s pretty hard to separate her real life

  from the shit people made up about her

  which just goes to show

  that it is always better to talk the talk

  than to walk the walk

  because talk is way cheaper.

  JOHNNY APPLESEED IS THE DELICIOUS KIND OF CRAZY

  So America, right?

  It has all these trees everywhere

/>   but most of them suck

  (this is two hundred years ago by the way

  today I feel like we have significantly fewer trees

  but I’m not sure what percentage of them suck).

  We got all these like

  cedar trees

  pine trees

  weeping willows

  what the nuts, you guys

  weeping willows??

  I’m supposed to feel sorry for a tree

  that does nothing but weep all day?

  What do you have to cry about, barky?

  You’re a TREE

  GET A JOB.

  But what we don’t have at all

  are FREE FOOD TREES.

  There are hungry dudes all over America

  just DREAMING of free food trees

  boughs laden with bacon and waffles

  cigarettes and whiskey.

  (Most of these hungry dudes are homeless, btw.

  Like, have you ever listened to the song

  “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”

  like REALLY listened to it?

  It’s a song for homeless dudes, straight up.)

  ENTER JOHNNY APPLESEED.

  This is a dude

  who for FORTY-NINE YEARS

  dedicates his life

  to kicking hunger in the nuts

  with his bare feet.

  He just walks around all over the place

  with a big old sack of apple seeds

  planting trees and taking names

  names of people who need to be FED

  and then FEEDING THEM APPLES.

  He wears a pot on his head instead of a hat

  and this is super convenient

  because what other kind of hat can you make soup in

  other than a souphat

  and can someone please tell me

  where can I get a souphat?

  also what is a souphat?

  Anyway, this dude’s feet are SO TOUGH

  that one time a rattlesnake tries to bite him in the foot

  and it just cannot pierce the rhinoceros hide

  that passes for Johnny Appleseed’s foot skin

  also when he gets bored he CHILLS WITH BEARS.

  Native Americans totally dig this dude

  I mean, what’s not to like?

  “Here comes that white dude with no shoes

  wearing a pot on his head

  handing out apples.

  Do you think he might be crazy?

  Who gives a shit

  at least he’s not setting us on fire

  or taking our land.”

  So even when all the tribes start murdering pioneers

  (because pioneers are reliably huge bastards)

  they leave Johnny Appleseed alone

  which he views as a perfect opportunity

  to warn the settlers when there are Indians coming

  at one point he runs twenty-six miles to do this.

  TWENTY-SIX MILES, MY FRIENDS.

  That is only three hundred yards short of a marathon.

  If you were wondering

  why Paul Revere doesn’t have a chapter in this book

  it’s because Johnny Appleseed BEAT HIM HERE.

  Anyway Johnny does that

  and thousands more Indians die because of it

  so good job Johnny Appleseed?

  But mainly he just plants apple trees.

  The moral of the story

  is that if an apple tree falls in the forest

  and there’s no one around to hear it

  who gives a shit?

  Dude planted like a million of those.

  H. H. HOLMES: THE ORIGINAL TRIPLE H

  Yes, of course we have to do a serial killer

  ’cause if there’s one constant in America

  it’s reverence for dudes who kill tons of people.

  You can do it in war if you want

  but you’ll get just as much publicity

  if you do it in a murder castle.

  “MURDER CASTLE?” you cry

  “THAT SOUNDS BITCHIN’!”

  Well, it’s only bitchin’ if you’re not inside of it

  but yeah, that’s why I picked the guy I picked:

  DR. H. H. HOLMES

  PROUD AMERICAN PIONEER

  OF KILLING DEFENSELESS PEOPLE.

  I mean yeah, John Wayne Gacy is terrible

  what with the kid-murdering

  and the side-gig as a clown

  and having the name of a movie star cowboy

  and Ed Gein and Ed Kemper are fine

  if you like dudes named Ed.

  But of all those proud soulless soldiers

  who captured the public’s fancy

  by murdering a significant percentage of the public

  only H. H. Holmes

  the very first American serial killer

  has a FUCKING MURDER CASTLE.

  Ol’ H-bomb starts small

  by which I mean “in medical school”

  where he makes money by stealing cadavers

  taking out insurance policies on them

  then making them look like they died by accident.

  Apparently the biggest problem with this scheme

  is that Holmes doesn’t get to kill the cadavers himself

  so once he graduates med school

  he moves to Chicago

  buys an empty lot

  and builds a hotel

  right down the street

  from the proposed site of the 1893 WORLD’S FAIR

  (commemorating the 400th anniversary

  of when Columbus showed up in America

  and killed a bunch of people for money and laughs

  so if you think about it

  Holmes is really just carrying on the tradition).

  Oh dang, did I say he builds a hotel?

  I meant to say MURDER CASTLE.

  What is a murder castle, you ask?

  Well, let me give you the grand tour.

  On the first floor we have a drugstore

  nothing to see here

  and on the second and third floors . . .

  we have a labyrinthine network of dead-end rooms

  stairways to nowhere

  and random gas vents

  ready to asphyxiate you

  or set you on fire

  or get torn out of the wall and banged on your head.

  The murder castle is not choosy about its methods.

  Holmes changes builders a bunch of times

  just so no one but him will know the layout

  which is sort of like what Egyptian pharaohs did

  except the bodies in their murder castles

  WERE DEAD WHEN THEY ARRIVED.

  Oh, and also the basement is a crematorium.

  Have fun never staying at any hotel ever again.

  The whole hotel is staffed with babes

  babes with LIFE INSURANCE POLICIES

  which Holmes requires them to get

  but which he pays for

  and is the sole beneficiary of

  in case, oh, I dunno

  THEY DIE IN THE MURDER CASTLE??

  Add on all the random tourists from the fair

  and Holmes manages to rack up a TON of murders

  though I doubt he has insurance policies on strangers

  so why kill them?

  Well, I believe the technical term is

  “for the lols.”

  After the World’s Fair, Holmes moves to Texas

  where he fails to build another murder castle


  but manages to get in trouble for stealing a horse

  which I guess he isn’t as good at

  so he runs from state to state for a while

  (this is apparently before you could like

  call ahead about people)

  then hits up an old bro of his

  one of the carpenters who helped with the castle

  and is like “Hey, bro, it’s me, Holmes”

  and his bro Ben is like “Wassup, Holmes?”

  and Holmes is like “I have a great idea:

  fake your own death and collect life insurance”

  and Ben is like “That’s brilliant!”

  and Holmes is like “Psyche, actually killing you!

  Hey, Ben’s wife?”

  and Ben’s wife is like “Yeah?”

  and Holmes is like “Ben is uh . . . in London.

  Can I have your kids?”

  and Ben’s wife is like “Sure, you seem legit.”

  So then Holmes kills three of her kids

  for basically no reason.

  But the problem with killing so many people

  other than that you’re killing so many people

  is that you have to hide all their dead bodies.

  Holmes is really good at this

  but he finally fucks up

  by only MOSTLY burning up one of the kids

  and the cops find it

  right after they arrest him for horse-stealing

  right BEFORE he escapes into Canada

  and once they have him in custody they’re like “Hm.

  We can tell you’re a bad dude

  but all we have is this horse thief nonsense

  and like, part of a dead kid.

  OH WAIT

  MURDER CASTLE.”

  So yeah, they find the murder castle in Chicago

  which pretty much seals Holmes’s fate

  by which I mean his death

  but also his killer rep

  and he spends the rest of his short life

  lying ceaselessly about his murders.

  Not in a constructive way, like “I didn’t do it”

  but in a totally random way

  like “I killed twenty-seven people

  no wait, two

  no wait, two hundred

  can we all just agree I killed people and move on?”

  and everyone is like “YES.

  If by move on, you mean hang you to death.”

  And he’s like “Yeah, okay, fair enough.”

  So that’s what they do

  and everyone learns a valuable lesson:

  DON’T GO INTO A MURDER CASTLE.

  SUSAN B. ANTHONY SELLS OUT FOR EQUALITY

  So at around the time of the Civil War