Hellvaluation(TM) by H.M. Loaf Staple removers bite your spleen as you trudge into the fifteenth hour of your Satanic Performance Review. Forms and firms and farms form formica under your eyelids, While tiny chiropterae raise a civilization under the desk. You try to concentrate on the questions, but the bats are revolting. And their civilization's collapsing, too. You think to yourself, "This kinda sucks." As if in response, nurses in Packers facepaint draw another quart of your blood to test your ability to do without it. They give you a glass of OJ, but you can't stomach any more OJ, Nor can the nation at large. Your eyes swim, but your ears stay on the beach to get a tan Without you, the ingrates. So now your ears are red, and you didn't even know they were Authors. They must have played it by ear. Tiny Authors chainsaw your ears off and take them to 223DON'TTRYITAUTHORSONLY. You think to yourself, "This really sucks." Satan T. Lucifer Jones reads your mind and offers to sell you new ears at wholesale. Ignore him. Coherent Comics UnInc. Presents: ___ __ __ ___ _ _ ___ _ _ _ _ CRAZY GUY #18 / '/ | / | / \/ / ' / / \/ "A Day At The Office" / /--' /--| / / / __ / / / copyright 1997 Dave Van Domelen `___ / | / |/__ _/ `__/ \__/ _/ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ At last the office was empty again, except for the horrible, Satanic stench, the kind of smell which made strong men go weak and made weak men go home, but which oddly made stray dogs go wild. It smelled like brimstone and pure evil, like an egg salad sandwich that had been dropped behind the filing cabinet and left to rot among the empty gin bottles, used socks and unwelcome overnight guests. I made a note to have the cleaning service scrape that old sandwich out from behind the filing cabinet if they ever got their biohazard certification back. But for now, at least it covered up the odor of Inhuman Resources Agent. There was a knock at the door. I sighed loudly...weirdness may be part of the job description for the Shaman Shamus, but the last coupla days had been like fitting a family of five, two dogs, a hypertense cat and fifteen assorted hamsters into a goldfish bowl's worth of weirdness. And if Jack was back already, it meant I'd have to make room in that goldfish bowl for Grandpa and his entire surviving unit from Normandy. "C'mon in, it ain't locked!" I hollered, in my best "it may not be locked but you better think twice and have all your wills and insurance up to date before you enter if you plan on making my day any more interesting" voice. The door opened slowly, and in walked two bookish men in tweed coats with those patches at the elbows for no very good reason. I wasn't sure, but they seemed to be trying to exude an aura of evil, but whether they just weren't good at it or their attempt was overwhelmed by the evil which had been in the room half an hour ago (or by the egg salad sandwich), I couldn't say. "We'd like to hire you in a matter of some importance," said the first, who seemed to be the slightly more evil of the two, if either could really be said to be evil. He seemed about as evil as someone who spends his days gloating over having torn the tags off his mattresses and then guiltily sews them back on when no one's looking. "That bein'?" I asked, hoping it would be something remotely normal. "We're trying to acquire a bird," the first said. "A very special bird," added his previously silent partner. "If it's covered in black enamel, I'll feed you your ties," I warned. You wouldn't believe how many people assumed I'd know where that blasted thing was just because I was a noir detective. "Oh, no no no," assured the first. "Although that might be a very good idea!" chirped the second. "We could suspend a vat of black enamel...." "Shush, we'll consider that later," the first chided. "No, this bird is quite alive, I assure you, it is simply rather elusive." "You don't want a detective, you want a birdwatcher," I snorted impatiently, hoping the pair would just go away before I was forced to do something drastic like offer them an egg salad sandwich. "Er, that's just IT, you see, we ARE birdwatchers," said the first. "EVIL Bird--OOF!" started the second before being elbowed in the gut. "Ooookay," I sighed. "Say, you clowns never gave me your names." "We...can't," the first admitted guiltily. "What, Author forget to give you any?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. They certainly had more characterization than your average nameless joe. "No...you see, we aren't supposed to be here," the first admitted. "We, ah, went AWOL from our usual milieu, and if our Author finds us here, he may be quite cross." I sighed loudly. "Look, guys, I don't find birds. I do weird stuff, but not THAT weird. Why don't you try another detective agency, I hear there's this new outfit that handles really weird stuff, the Organ Detective Agency, you could try them." The pair looked crestfallen. "I'm sorry for wasting your time, Mr. Kartoffelkopf," sighed the first as he led his partner out the door. "Thanks for the black enamel idea, though," the other said as he was practically pushed out the door. I sighed again and leaned back in my swivel chair, carefully so that it wouldn't tip over and send me headlong out the window to bounce off the fire escape three times and land on my neck in a dumpster full of things so foul that I'd actually gotten off my butt and thrown them out last week. * * * * I was watching a shaft of sunlight crawl across the floor like a parched wanderer crawling across the desert floor, slowly and agonizingly, every breath a knife of pain through slowly drying lungs, alveoli withering by the minute and fluid ironically filling the space left behind. Dust motes swam in the light like sparks from a bonfire on which the hopes and dreams of an entire generation had been heaped, to burn and burn in mockery of all they had ever striven for, all the work of their brows now charring black under the relentless dance of the sparks. It had crawled halfway across a battered and yellowed linoleum tile, highlighting a crack that jagged crazily across it, when there was another knock on the door. "Yeah, yeah, come in," I called out, closing the blinds and snuffing out the shaft of light as arbitrarily as a judge might snuff out a basic human right. Where the last pair had been odd in an offhandedly inoffensive manner albeit with that slight taint of evil, this gentleman was odd in a deliberately offensive manner. He wore a modified Zoot Suit which was stiff enough that either he'd used enough starch to make an entire platoon of soldiers itch, or he'd backed the fabric with a few layers of every private eye's favorite miracle weave, Kevlar(TM). He wore dark sunglasses, but under them had an eyepatch over one eye, and a glint of some sorta diamond or ruby flashed off the patch through the heavily smoked glass. In fact, the guy looked heavily smoked in general. But what topped off the ensemble was the light anti-tank weapon he cradled like it was his own flesh and spattering red blood, which he had somehow converted for use as a Bass Saxophone...I guess if he pushed the wrong key while laying out the licks he'd REALLY blow his mind. "Name's Skazooka Joe," he said in a clipped New York accent. He had a voice that explained why he was a sax player and not a lead singer, and which also said he'd used the non-musical aspects of his sax plenty often on people who got in his way...which is to say, it sounded like he was partially deaf from firing the damn thing right next to his ears allatime. "Whatchawant?" I asked, deliberately keeping my voice at normal levels. Sure, maybe he wouldn't hear me, but I'd rather repeat myself than get spread over three suburbs by that Sax'o'Doom because Joe here thought I was patronizing him. Either he heard or didn't need to, since he answered, "I'm lookin' for someone ta keep an eye on a kid fer me. He's a superguy, but ya ain't gonna need ta get close, just watch the guy." I pondered this for a moment. The last time I'd been offered a "simple" eyeball job on a superguy, it'd ended with a Satanic Performance Review Manager camping out in my office. Then again, a different gig might give me an excuse to get away from Jack for a little while. "Name?" "He goes by Dante, 'r Kid Dante. High school kid, shouldn't be too much trouble." My neck hairs immediately started line dancing. Whenever someone told me it wouldn't be much trouble, I knew it would be more trouble than trying to nail cottage cheese to Jell-O in a thunderstorm while Ozzy Osbourne fans rioted in the background. Not that this ever kept me from taking a job, but I mentally added a zero to the end of the fee I was gonna ask. "Which high school?" I inquired, hoping I wouldn't have to track a kid by his pseudonym through the mind-numbing expanses of the Los Angeles Public School System, just one of the more obvious proofs that L.A. wasn't really a single city but thirty five suburbs in search of a city. And it might not even be a nickname, plenty of kids named Dante these days. "S. Agnew High School," Joe replied, a toothpick suddenly sticking out of his mouth that wasn't there before. I decided not to wonder too long on where it came from. "Wait...I ain't never heard of that place," I said, hoping this wasn't another out of town joker wanting me to drag off to the sticks for a tail job in some nowhere SoCal burg. "Where is it?" "Bethesda area." "Bethesda...Maryland?" "Yeah, it's a bit down the coast, but I'll cover trainfare." I boggled for a moment. "Mister...Joe, where exactly do you THINK you are?" I asked as diplomatically as possible, keeping my eye on that big wind instrument of death. "Boston, I flew in and caught a cab straight here," he replied, pulling out a tattered old page from the Yellow Pages. "For the love a'...this is Los Angeles! Take off the sunglasses once and you might see that." Skazooka Joe paused as if blinking, then reached around in his jacket to pull out an airline ticket, which he scrutinized very carefully. "Well I'll be carved up for reeds, no wonder the ticket cost so much. I got on the wrong plane. But if this ain't Boston, why are you here?" "I moved, you might invest in a more recent phonebook when y'get home. And much as I'd like to leave this little slice of heaven for a while, there's no way it'd be worth your while ta pay me to drag all the way out to Maryland just for watching a kid," I sighed. "Er, sorry about that, bye," he sheepishly left as quickly as he could, to get back to the correct coast. Whatever took out that eye musta removed half his brains too. * * * * As if to prove the saying that "all things happen in threes," or at least to show Murphy was taking an active interest in my life, there was another knock at the door. "Come in," I all but growled, a growl matching the one which was starting to rumble around in my stomach, suggesting a trip out to eat since I'd have no real appetite as long as I stuck around this place. An obvious superguy walked in the door, wearing a blue outfit and a squid for a head. "Hello, I'd like to hire you to help me track down the remnants of the Century Pact...." I didn't let him finish, I was on my feet and across the room like a bolt of lightning into the tree you and your honey are snuggling under for protection from the oncoming storm. "OOooooohhh no you don't! You're not using me to start another of those crossover things! Out! Out! Out! Die! Die! Die!" WILL SQUIDMAN START ANOTHER CROSSOVER BETWEEN THE LNH AND SUPERGUY? HOW MANY SECONDS WILL THE AUTHOR SURVIVE IF THE ANSWER IS YES? WILL CRAZY GUY SHOW UP NEXT ISSUE? IT *IS* HIS BOOK, AFTER ALL. WHAT ABOUT THE SQUIRRELS? AND THE DEMONS? AND THAT FUNKY ERIC LANG GUY? DOES THE AUTHOR HAVE A PLOT, OR IS HE JUST FAKING IT? Some of this, and hopefully not all of it, on the next...SUPERGUY! ============================================================================ Author's Notes: Please stop throwing anvils at me, it's a joke. I'm no more likely to start a crossover right now than I am to successfully swim the English Channel. Then again, I *am* failry buoyant...OW! The "H.M. Loaf" of the poem at the top of this episode is Hassenpfeffer Meat Loaf, something from my sordid and surreal college days in the American National Spap Oop Society. The H.M. Loaf style of poem was fairly formulistic while also being downright weird, and was dubbed by me the "ComPost-Modern Style." Titles always include Hell somewhere, something bites something else in the first line, you always think to yourself "This kinda sucks" at some point (and in longer poems, "This REALLY sucks,"), and in the end are instructed to ignore it/him/them/etc. I turned out some really bizarre H.M. Loafs in my heyday, before turning that energy to writing Hans Kartoffelkopf. Dante and the evil birdwatchers property of their respective Authors, used with permissions, etc etc etc....