Johnny Bag O' Doughnuts
Scientists observed rats running free immediately after atomic
detonations. Decades of pesticides have produced super immune poison resistance
in generations of rats. In large urban centers such as New York reports indicate rats live in
collective nests of upward of a billion members. Thousands of deaths as recent
as two months ago, in India,
were attributed to rat populations overrunning garbage sites. Spreading disease
from one city to another from the depths of human refuse. Our excretement is
their glory.
This all comes to forefront of my brain as I recycle my sixth bag of
aluminum cans and pause to think about the park down the street. The recurring
incident that has angered neighbors and officials alike. An ironic occurrence
indeed. But that's another twisted tale born of this frequent escapade.
Some sick park visitor is feeding a few rats residing in a mound cavity.
His perverted excursions (it's assumed only a man would be this degraded) have
caused the rats to become braver in their explorations of the park. Parents confine children to living rooms for fear of rabies or worse. At press time
this lunatic has not been identified. What remains as evidence is a small
white bag of partially eaten doughnuts at the mouth of a fist-sized hole in the
dirt mound. And tiny footprints mocking the hostility of park supervisors.
Basically mocking you and me.
We are living in an era of easy excuses for every act of
irresponsibility known to exist. Ever since a white Ford bronco sped down a
crowded highway, therapists have captured the nation's attention with wild
theories of deep-seated dysfunction and delirium. Again the excuse rises its
unwashed head. The local university shrink has made a name for himself on local
news and cable channels. Charting the mind of the secret park pervert, now
vilely labeled "Johnny Bag O' Doughnuts." He even toured the local
bakeries with news cameras interviewing bakers about possible leads to
"Johnny's" identity. With doughnut in mouth the shrink smirks before
the audience and spells out his "delicious" psychological assumptions.
Our press and police, benighted with anything beyond simple graft or
gossip, welcome this limp analysis without reservation. It now serves as an
expert profile of a poor soul in search of companionship. So say the papers
that have made a crusade of blaming social policies for causing "Johnny
Bag O' Doughnuts to seek out rats as friends." Editorializing the ill
treatment of senior citizens in America
while bashing Wall Street, Bourbon
Street, Main
Street and any other street able to fill the
spaces between Geritol and Depends ads.
Comic strips have included a caped-geezer called "Ratman" in
their sketch cells. A horrible creation produced by an
overly youth-oriented culture that builds nursing homes to hide pimple-faced
consumer’s eventual fate. While all this pseudo-sermonizing wastes time the rat
lover remains free and anonymous. He’s strengthening a colony of filthy
creatures five yards away from a pre-school. Where a four-year old
Spanish-speaking girl was bit in a gated school playground by a rat bigger than
a breadbox. Probably attracted to the girl's half-opened lunch pail.
Unfortunately it took a terrified young girl's punctured calf to
intensify the manhunt. The jokes and gerrymandered psycho-jargon came to a
halt. Stakeout teams in unmarked cars waited with coffee and rolls in hand. If
the weirdo showed up, his rat-loving butt was theirs. The public mood was sour.
Angry fathers walked their dogs at night and spat out vigilante verses.
Several times detectives were forced to shoo
away crowbar carrying citizens. Threats and counter-threats further stifled the
humid spring air. Photographers bent in bushes were beaten by local bar
patrons. Sidewalks were littered with black plastic film containers, camera
parts and blood droplets.
The growing attention brought the area a nasty nickname "Fangville."
Residents demanded the freak in custody; brought to a mental hospital, padded
walls and all. But it quickly became a raging circus. And Johnny Bag
O'Doughnuts (or whatever his real name is) was no blind man. He never did show
up. And the unmarked cars dwindled down to an extra night patrolman swinging a
stick and tune.
Huge rats started appearing in people's basements. Drinking puddles of
stale rainwater left after a recent down pour. Two heart attacks were reported
in less than two weeks. The Sanitation Department first stuff cakes laced with
powerful poisons in the mound hole. Nothing doing. The rats scrambled on as
usual. Grounds keepers dug up the mound, armed with pitchforks to stab the
critters. None were present. The mound was completely covered up only to be
freshly broke open the next morning. A new hole cut a foot away from a small
white bag of nearly finished doughnuts.
The City bought ad space to appeal to Johnny to turn himself in. They
promised understanding and a suspended sentence -- but no can do. At least twice a week a small white bag of
doughnuts was placed at the mouth of a hole that became two holes. There was no
money in the City budget for round-the-clock electronic surveillance. Local
pest-control companies repeatedly failed to capitalize on the publicity by
claiming their company would be the first to silence the menaces. Poisons,
traps, tricks and dammed Halloween treats could not arrest the rate of rat
population growth.
Yesterday a few high-ranking city officials, including the mayor
herself, made a trip to the state capital to plead for state or federal
assistance. Full grown red-eyed rats were popping up daily on top of
refrigerators. The public was beyond digested. Some took the law into their own
hands and assaulted an elderly gentleman feeding pigeons two blocks away from
the park. He was a Lutheran priest and quick to forgive the lynch mob. No arrests
were made.
I don't know whom I despise more, the fat rat sitting atop my computer
monitor, the rat man-at-large, or the gall of price-gouging hardware stores
charging $10 a rattrap. Johnny Bag O' Doughnuts wherever you are -- you deserve
at least some credit. I can't recall in twenty-two years this much neighborly
cooperation.
People are actually talking to one
another. Trading rat poison tips and asking about the children. Church
attendance is up 22%. I'm not qualified to comment if recent events are
examples of the last signs in the Book of Revelations. But I have to say God
does work in mysterious ways.
In 1994, driving his year-old white Ford Bronco SUV, Al Cowlings led the California police on a 2-hour slomo chase on Interstate 405. The incident was watched on TV by 95 million viewers until his passenger, former Buffalo Bills team mate running back O. J. Simpson, surrendered at his own home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, after another hour of negotiations. He was charged with the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson was acquitted at the televised "trial of the century" in 1994. According to the prosecutor, "When the trial began, all of the networks were getting these hate-mail letters because people's soap operas were being interrupted for the Simpson trial. But then what happened was the people who liked soap operas got addicted to the Simpson trial. And they got really upset when the Simpson trial was over, and people would come up to me on the street and say, 'God, I loved your show.'"
ReplyDeleteWall Street is an 8-block street in New York, the world’s leading financial center, and is a synecdoche for that activity, especially the greed associated with it. The street was named for a wooden palisade built as a defensive line. Over time business interests became the most numerous inhabitants of the area. In 1884 Charles H. Dow began tracking stocks; in 1889 his report changed its name from “Customers' Afternoon Letter” to “The Wall Street Journal,” giving the street added public focus, although as early as 1853 Herman Melville had subtitled “Bartleby, the Scrivener," his short story about the alienation in the district, “"A Story of Wall Street."
ReplyDeleteBourbon Street runs for 13 blocks through the French Quarter, the oldest neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana. When the royal engineer Adrien de Pauger designed the city's layout in 1721, he named the streets after Catholic saints and French royal families, including the ruling Bourbon dynasty. Over time it became famous for its many bars and strip clubs, especially in the late 1800s.
“Main Street” is a generic phrase denoting the primary retail street of a village, town, or small city, and as a symbol of traditional small-town middle-class value, often used in contrast to the wealth and elitism of “Wall Street.” Between 1870-1930 in particular, social realists used the name as a symbol of stifling conformity. In 1930 Sherwood Anderson became the 1st American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely on the strength of his satiric 1920 novel “Main Street.” Its protagonist is confronted by the smug conservatism of fictional Gopher Prairie, Minnesota; in despair, she proclaims, “I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women!”
In 1950 Pharmaceuticals, Inc. introduced Geritol, an alcohol-based (12%), iron and B vitamin tonic that it particularly marketed to old people. J. B. Williams Company bought up Pharmaceuticals in 1957, and the Federal trade Commission began investigating its health claims in 1959. In 1965 the FTC ordered Williams to disclose that Geritol’s benefits extended only to the small number of people who suffered from iron deficiency anemia, and Geritol's claims were discredited in court findings as conduct that “amounted to gross negligence and bordered on recklessness." The FTC imposed the largest fine in its history up to that time, $812,000 (nearly $4.5 million when adjusted for inflation). Nabisco acquired the brand in 1971. Despite the fines and bad publicity, the product continued to be the best-selling iron and B vitamin supplement in the US through 1979. Beginning in 1982 it has passed though a series of corporate hands, before going to the Dutch conglomerate Mylan in 2016.
“Depend” is a brand of absorbent, disposable underwear and undergarments for people with urinary or fecal incontinence, marketed as an alternative to adult diapers by Kimberly-Clark. It was originally test-marketed in 1983 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the "Toilet Paper Capital of the World" because of the prevalence of the paper industry in the city, and became a national brand in 1984. (Kimberly-Clark had been making “Huggies” disposable diapers for infants since 1978.) Most of David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel “Infinite Jest” (in which each year has a corporate sponsor) takes place in the "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.”