To: Merely Bedeviled Remembrants of Weslyn Perish

From: Vicar Vicarious

Re: Powder from an Alum

Recently, from somewhere out of the blue of the wine-dark Ægean, I received a missive from one of my earliest prole protégés here at Weslyn, Owen Lee Knecht (ABBA '57 Chevy). The very few of you who are valetudinarians of my noble vintage may remember Owen Lee. I certainly do: if ever I have been a Mentor, he was the quintessential Mentee! I still recall that Owen 'did' an independent study with me comparing the lyric voices of the late Walt Whitman and the early Bobby Dylan-Darin (he insisted it was authentically pronounced 'DYE-lan-duh-RAIN'). This essay, a magnum if not a jereboam of sparkling intellect, the product of what would soon come to be called 'a hard day's night,' found [rather predictably, since all he had to do was put a record on: that is to say, a phonograph record, as this was the BCD era] that Bobby had a high-nasality-index unfiltered-camels bourbonic baritone with a half-octave range; while he more daringly determined, from performance-practice earchival evidence in Camden-Brooklyn bathhouses, that Walt had been a male alto. Ultimately, despite attempts at censorship–on grounds of anal probscenity– by Weslyn's bishop at the time, Dr. Hobart Feckley, Owen's opus became an opera; thus engranded, it won its honors and was dully deposited in the Farchives of the Perish Library (located in the Crypt of Chapel Fallenfaith) where it has arrested undusted ever since.

After graduation, though I begged Owen Lee to hang with me over an indefinitely long series of lingering, langouring afternoons, reading Martial Proust to one another in his nativist tongue, while bedunking beaucoups of madeleines into teacups of anciently expensive single-malt scotch, he would none of it. Or me. Soon he and his vivacious, voracious girlfriend, Judy Spree, headed to the ultramontane west, where they hoped to divide their coastal time between the upbeat Beat Scene up north and the downbeach Beach Scene around Malibu. Years passed–and such crème-de-la-crème years they were, but that's an udder storing!–and all I heard of Owen and Judy were vague rumors blowin' in the wind (this was of course before the Hinternet): they were in a commune, they practiced group marriage, group poetry, group grope and group divorce. Out of this welter had come a kid named Ree Knecht (you may have heard of shim by hish late-70s Holywood name, Rhee Spree, the teenage star of a number of claymation classics under the serial title, Rhee the Androgyne Meets [Hermes Trismegistus, etc.]).

Such then were the not-so-freshest advices from the West, however furtive and funicular; all in all about what one would have expected from the couple voted by their class as most likely to secede. . . .

More peers yessed, and then one day during the Greed-is-Good-as-God-is-Gold 80s, as I was idly strolling by Weslyn's newest detox damnatory, the high-risk Fate Storm Insurance Cowers (with its daunting inscription over the impediment: 'The Business of Weslyn is None of Your Business'), I noticed piled in the dooryard by the lilac bushes a couple hundred plastic-bagged copies of the WSJ, the daily drop for the gospel-hungry restivents. Deftly if syruptastiously grabbing one and tucking it within my greatcoat, I hastened to the nearest two-hole reading-room to have a good long lecteurship. Imagine my asstonishment when I espeed, right there in column 1, page 1, section 1, an article on a fast-rising California entrepreneur by the name of Own Leigh Kœnig (as he was apparently now known). It seems that, with venture capital seed money from the Brian Wilson Fun-fun-fund, a not-for-prophet foundation dedicated to helping the 60s walk again, Own Leigh had started an exotic ice-drink beach concession called 'Slurpin' Safari.' The gimmie-gimmick was to drive specially-equipped Woodies up and down the bleaches of Sudden California, stopping to provide cold 'endopathic' blender-drinks to saltsick sunstroked surfers, beach blanket bimbos and bingo bums, to each according to historher needs (for instance, if you were 'way way burned,' you'd order a 'Lobster Red,' a decoction of agave-worm protein, cocoa butter, hello vera and overripe persimmons, all nicely ice-blended with red-pepper schnapps. Now I'm sure I needn't remind the liberally educated that the theory of endopathy holds that Well-Ness is best achieved–indeed, only achieved–when scions of dis-ease (like sunburn's pululations) are eased with graceful inward nostra that produce similar defects; hence, the ingestion of a tall frosty 'Lobster Red' would, by radiating hot pain–the feeling, not the bread–outwise from within, counteract the painful 'red lobster' broil afflicting the skin (hence, hence, the endopathist's motto: 'it's a zerosome game!').

But the real peal of 'Slurpin' Safari' was that the drinks tasted good in tasting bad (the second most popular flavor was 'Squeam Dream,' made of jellyfish jelly, kelp, clam juice and Midori ((the watermelon liqueur, not the violinist)) and guaranteed to fend off the creepy feeling you got when ascending from the sea trailing mucky seaweed embedded with flotsam from the Hiv-Condom-Will-Travel Generation [for more info, see under Siemens, seamen's semen]). Demand quickly skyrocketed, and the one problem de man Knecht faced was a scarcity of 40s-50s woodies, which were being covetously collected and cryogenically preserved (against the Resurferection) by the fathers of the next decade's dot.com billionaires, each of whom wanted always to have a woody.

If Own Leigh wanted the genuine articles, he'd have to pay through Brian's pitiful nose, into which so much paingain had already been ingested, from which so many varieties of phlegm had exphlegmed; and his brain-damaged benefactor was currently not being allowed by his ms. handlers to sign checks for little white pills, let alone the extortionate millions being demanded by the Society of Fathers of Dot.Coms for Frozen Woodies. It was at this point, according to the WSJ story, that the budding entre in Leigh really preneured. If I can't buy woodies, he reasoned to the always-retentive Judy, I'll fake 'em. Since by now even odd oligarchs and their dogs Pluto were taking his calls, he buzzed C. Iacoccup, the honchissimo and full monty of Christos Motos and got straight to the point: 'Why don't we invite a bunch of immigrants over and make cars?' For Iacoccup it was a question too good to be answered, and from this magic moment he made 'Look-A-Real Woodies' his pet cat's pet dog's purrject. Henceforward the watchitword was 'leg-lifters, all–and no squatting!'

Nottalotta Look-A-Reals, just enough to let Slurpin' Safari grow sufficiently to be acquired by a near-sighted congolomerate for tons more than it was worth and make Own indefensibly wealthy (in the event, the buyer turned out to be Gentle Mooders, an offshore, third-world, fourth-rate maker of money-laundering powder whose Capos were always just a shot away from new gimme tax shelters on tiny islands with funny names like Aunt Ega and Barb Ruda [GM's latest ad copy: 'Go ahead: take a powder. We are!']). Once C. Imacoccup got his little grey sales going, the solution to the notty problem was simple and obvious: he answered a personal at the back of Argosy magazine offering boxed-up surplus (slurpups!) WWII army jeeps, bought all they had for a song ('The Lion Sleeps Tonight'), leased space in the creepily, cavernously empty Alzheimic Hughes Spruce Goose Aircraft plant long in Down Beach, and hired that bunch of immigrants (just up from the Baja, illegally of course: for their labors they got one free jeep filled with real-looking Look-A-Real green cards to take back home) to bolt the jeeps together, fit the mojos and trannies and do the outside finishing. Just a few modifications were needed to transform the army original into a Look-A-Real Woody. Panels from stolen panel trucks containing stolen orange-crate panels (oddly, no oranges) were glued onto the jeep's sides, and the rest of the body painted a mild banana yellow with black ripe spots; and then a cut-from-pattern styrofoam surfboard, suitably decorated with ten toes overhanging, was inserted through the back where the window would have been had jeeps had back windows so as to protrude in a dude sort of way.

And that was it. As the Look-A-Reals rolled off the makeshift assembly line at erstwhile Hughes, Iacoccup would drive each one recklessly onto the old tarmac, singspiel-ing in a high castrato, 'we're going on safari to stay!' where he would sell them to Own Leigh for the mark-up of a refrain ('A-Wim-A-Way'), and Leigh would in turn provide the vehicles to his franchisees free of charge (the blenders and drink recipes, however, cost them fifty grand, plus a thou a month for the costly ingredients [hey, he had to drink a lot of Cuervo Gold Mescal to keep Slurpin' Safari in worms!])

By this time, glad as I was to read of Own Leigh's success, my lidded eyes and drooping head were telling me that this article, like my bowels, had a bad case of the longeurs. Besides, the sound of urgently shuffling feet outside my stall–er, carrel–meant that someone else needed to use the library, and I ought therefore to get flushing. So I quickly cut through the chaste: in Little Moe Danny Decade M. Knecht/Kœnig had established overt than two thousand Look-A-Real Slurpin' Safari concessions on bitchin' beaches 'from California to the shores of Peru' (and the former Yugoslavia, where the big hit drink was the 'Smegmatic,' wodka mixed with the epoymous ingredient and popped cherry juice [no one knew what it cured, other than virginity]). As his operations expanded, this son-gun of a manwhatam had subtly enhanced the menu to fit the local customs and tastes of his slurpers worldwide. For instance, there were a few fresh water concoctions for beaches of the Great Lakes and those (made of dried mud and muscle shoals) along the lower Mississippi. By a wide, wild margin, the most emetic of the new flaverse turned out to be Alewive Sorbet, which was a heady reduxion of that delicacy of a Great Lakes fish blended with green osage oranges in Crawdaddy Water {don't ask and I won't tell!}–said to be tonic for a range of female complaints [marketing slogan: 'For Whatever Ales Yer Wife!/ Force-feed her some tonight!!']. When Own at last sold out to Gentle Mooders, he received the equivalent in elusive spondulicks of all the songs the Beach Boys ever recorded times all the times they had been rayed on playdio. No one could begin to reckon how much this amounted to in US dolors or Greek dragmans, but according to the 'Hurt on the Street' column (written by a bankrupt who had leapt from the Dow Jones on Bleak Flyday, 1987. yet lived), it was in the Ne-Plus-Filthiest range ('Bah! Bah! Bah! Blah Babwah Ann!'), easily covering the cost of the Ægean island he and Judy very soon bought from Odysseus Properties, along with the Onassis-like yacht with a Jackie-O-like prow ornament. And even after having thus spreed this jeuishly, OL and JS found they had plenty left over for philanthropy (in case they ever found any humanity worthy of their love).

All this because of a Batch-o'-Lore degree from Weslyn! Food and drink for thought, I had then thought, as I laced my girdle and tucked in the pink boiled shirt I had frivolously chosen that morning to wear. But once back in the sad old, I put Owen/Own's epistolic communication away, to language in the swell velveteen inside pocket of my rather defrocked and sadly foreworn coat. There it stayed, forgotten, until a peculiar association of ideas–one might almost, without hubris, call it Shandyesque in its brillance– brought the letter back to mine mind. One foggy morning earlier this week, as I was making my oblatory professorial walk around the triangle of the quadrangle, hands clasped behind me, gray hair en queue, my head bowed in candomblézation of that old villain Villon ('Ou sont. . . ou sont. . . ?'), suddenly I remembered: not neigligees d'antan but hier! At the Bishop's Cabinet particulier yesterday the money-raising theme for this academic pay period ('twas to be my fortieth) had been imperatived: 'Do They Mind? Or, Alum Nous Brings Budget Juice'. . . . Yes! Alumination! The alums , bless them, were the snowed of yesteryear! It was high time I answered Owen sold letter!

(Next time: the Vicar Visits Owen & Judy in Greece!)