Good For You Chicki Chipmunk

By

BARRY EYSMAN

PUBLISHED BY

Barry Eysman on Smashwords

Good For You Chicki Chipmunk

Copyright © 2011 by Barry Eysman

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Good For You Chicki Chipmunk

Freak Show

Dotting the Eyes

A Difference of Opinion

Sweet Halloween

The Xylophone Day

…and the Sea Monsters

Little Fur Jackets

Johnny Chino

Wheat

The Siege of Willie Peace

Rival

Guest 23

Oh THAT House

A Tall Grown Trippin’ Sky

(Nearer My God Am I)

The Other Side--Kind Of

Growing up Pantomime

Psycho Over Your Shoulder

Skin Grafts

A Valentine

Cherry Bomb on July Street

Sammy Zombie God

Puzzle Down Day

~~~~~

TO THE MEMORY OF THE ONCE AND FUTURE PRINCES OF THE REALM

JJD+B

Good For You Chicki Chipmunk

He was a good little machine. He never cursed or thought a bad word. He never got his clothes dirty. He never got in fights. His jeans were always sharply creased and pressed. He got a hair cut every Saturday. He had 2 friends in summer. He never got into arguments with them. He did his home work hours a night and in advance. He walked through the day, eventually realizing he wasn’t thinking dreamy thoughts. He decided he was the type to think dreamy thoughts, so he began. He did what everybody said. Then one day he decided not to be a little machine. He stopped making little machines out of what he read. He decided they should be real. And since he was the only one around who read them, he thought, it was up to him to be them. He tried. But he couldn’t. He kept being him. So he ducked into college on a cool wing of a September morning and became a college student machine. He did his home work, never missed a class, still failed at math, though he tried his best.

He never drank or smoked or did grass. But he read a lot of the wrong kinds of books that good little machines are not supposed to read. And he would begin having friends, He would begin thinking once more if the little books he read could come true, though with more of him… Only problem was he still read with good little machine eyes. Like Gerber’s for the baby machine brain of his. Writers wrote all kinds of things, but they really didn’t do them. Or their characters. Or people he was around, they didn’t actually do them, even when he saw them, they were not really. It was theoretical for them as for him, even when they threw up a lot of non-theoretical right in front of him. As his roommate came back to the dorm late after a party where they had smoked fanciful possibilities and drank a lot of theorems on the curiosities of the human mind and had pretended to disrobe behind commercials, to prove to each other they were just walking by and we saw absolutely nothing, sir, because a good philosophical posit was fair and ken, was it not?

And as it seemed the good university machine’s words were somewhat larger and his sentence structures more jungly, it seemed his good little machine mind still had the strained self at bay. So the tall lanky machine of dark clothing and tinted shade wire rimmed sunglasses one fine winter morn stopped and wondered where the boy of formerly colorful red or lime green shirts and heavy brown clunky glasses had gone? Well, he was at home on Christmas break in mid though dignified fall full throttle across the living room floor, as he had misdiagnosed the length between the couch and the full length mirror, and crashed his clatter of bones. As he finally had to admit, as jolly colored as his orange, red, green or pink shade lenses made the viewable world seem, he could see very badly with always headaches. He lay there in his 20 year old frame, wondering how much he looked like Emma Peel as Oliver! in Too Many Christmas Trees, the first episode he saw of THE AVENGERS one Saturday night on a local TV station, deeming it too adult for earlier hours. The whole episode captivated the teenage machine. It was in black and white now gone green on his much-hated color RCA snowy TV, somehow making the show seem from the long-ago, when it was then here and now. It’s Xmas party setting shadowy. Rainy and sad, made safe and warm by Steed and Mrs. Peel whose pleasantness made him feel happy.

In a land of shadows and murders most ghastly, they were so steadfast and in the series, especially before THE AVENGERS IN COLOR, in color for him too, after the 3rd picture tube was, to motherly screaming, installed. A sense of friendly serious caring amidst the giddy quips and accents. He knew he would be safe if he could just get to England, where such lovely actors and writers live. The good little machine did not of course think all of this as he lay on his stomach on the floor. Who he was then is not who he is now. He felt he had finally dignity. He had friends who thought he had too. What he did was this, this good little machine, he had an invisible friend with him. Later known as Craig, he had no name now. When people laughed at him, they were laughing at his invisible friend. The good little machine laughed with them. By the time he was at university, the good machine had it down to a science.

When he was goofy, or better known as Dumbo, it was the little invisible thing beside him that took the barbs. When he was ripped off and conned, he let it happen because it was like the rising of the sun. It was immutable. The good little machine was building up a lot of good little hatred. And like a lot of good little machines, he pushed the hatred in deeply. He went to church and prayed every night that God would help him not be quite as lonely. He had given up on God helping him on math tests. This was impossible, even for God. The good little machine was a barrel of laughs. He was always cracking people up or rather the invisible thing beside him was, while he was very, very serious. Lets picture now the good little university machine in his dorm room on a snowy Sunday night, having just gotten back from Christmas break. He is looked over, not over looked, by an elderly man who studies him quite intently. Well, the man thinks, your hair is long and you are scared. The room is too hot as always. Your room mate has Playboy center folds on his wall. The old man pauses. He feels winter back then. And he hates every part of it. He stops typing. He walks with difficulty to the front porch to have a cigarette. It is a September night and it is cool. He is unable to take a walk as he loved to do once upon a time.

He remembers the thin boy in the dorm room that winter night curled into a comma on his bed reading. The boy is thinking his elliptical thoughts like small waves of madness