If ABC had a sign “Boo and Jeer” they would have pulled it out, but they were asleep at the switch. So the audience only gasped, those few who actually understood what I’d said.
I think Dave flushed, although with his fake tan I couldn’t be sure.
“Do you believe the aliens were responsible for the disappearance of Flight 888?”
“Louie’d never do anything to hurt anyone,” Jimmy bursts out.
I reached forward and poured my glass of water into the flower vase. Then took out my flask and poured a shot into the empty glass. Took a swig.
“Most people believe they zapped the plane back to their own universe. And people have been disappearing—” says Dave.
“All bullshit. I’ve been around FFs and never seen one hurt a thing, except the time Louie accidentally rolled over a fly.”
“What about the young child, Donny Arkin, he crippled only three weeks ago on your property?”
“Donny’s a baby. He wasn’t hurt at all,” says Lucas. “He’s a jerk.”
“You three seem to think these aliens are all just innocent fun, but there’s significant evidence that they’ve robbed banks of millions of dollars, cyberattacked numerous government and corporate systems, and kidnapped people off the streets, possibly sending them to other universes.”
“Hey, don’t knock other universes,” says I. “For most human beings on this planet, a different one would be a big improvement.”
“Your… friend Louie has even confessed to robbing banks,” Dave went on. “How do you defend such actions?”
I was about to say something brilliant, but the next thing I knew Louie, in his usual hairy beach ball shape, came bouncing up onto the stage and plopped himself into Jimmy’s lap. And Lita looked like she’d just lost twenty pounds.
The audience gasped again and then, without any raised sign from ABC, burst into spontaneous applause.
Dave was a pro. He didn’t bat an eyelash. Although with all that make-up, he probably couldn’t bat an eyelash if he tried.
“Mr. Louie, I presume,” Dave says.
“Just Louie,” says Louie. “No need for formality, Dave.”
He bounced off Jimmy’s lap, morphed into a skinny, furry human midget, and went and sat himself tight up against Jimmy. Then he neatly crossed his legs—like any good guest.
The damn audience gasped, then laughed and again applauded. The poor ABC guy with the signs must have been beginning to feel impotent: a god who had lost his power.
“Well, Louie,” says Dave. “Why don’t you answer my last question: there are reports that you, or one of your alien friends, have confessed to government authorities that you have been electronically robbing banks. How do you justify such crimes?”
“Well, Dave,” says Louie, “we’re just having a bit of fun. You seem to have developed an economic system here that’s forgotten how to have fun. Forgotten how to play. Your sports are not play. They’re all about winning and money, the same as your economic system. So shifting money from the rich to the poor seems like a good way to begin making it possible for people to begin playing again.”
“You’re taking money from people or companies that have earned it,” says Dave, “and giving it to people who haven’t earned it and don’t deserve it.”
“Actually, Dave,” says Louie, “we’re taking money from people and companies who have gotten it through a rigged system, and giving it to people who have lost it through your rigged system. You talk about an equal playing field but have tilted it at a forty-five-degree angle against most of your people. Makes for an uneven playing field and boring games, Dave.”
Louie then slid back off Jimmy and shrunk back into his beach ball mode and began bouncing.
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” he says, ten feet in the air and on the way down. “You Americans are mostly dull boys.”
Louie was now bouncing twelve feet up in the air, then down, then up again.
“You’re trying to destroy the capitalist system!” says Dave.
“Oh, Dave,” says Louie, and he suddenly bounces over to Jimmy, resumes his skinny midget shape, and maneuvers himself up so he’s sitting on Jimmy’s shoulders piggyback style, both “legs” straddling Jimmy’s head. “Who would ever want to destroy the capitalist system?”
I raised my hand.
“I would,” says I.
No one noticed.
Because Louie was now standing on his head on top of Jimmy’s head.
Dave stared at Louie balanced upside down on Jimmy’s head and then looked down at some notes he had on his lap.
“Let’s talk about what makes you tick, Louie,” Dave begins. “How smart would you say you aliens are?”
“Pretty smart, Dave,” says Louie, still upside down on Jimmy’s head, Jimmy giggling away. “Many of us could graduate from your high schools.”
He now spread his two “legs” wide so it looked like a hairy letter “T” on top of Jimmy. “Ask me a question, any question.”
Dave hesitates.
“How much is five thousand eight hundred and seventy-six times six hundred and eight-eight.”
“A lot, Dave. Quite a lot. How about an easier one?”
I figured Louie could have had the answer to that tough one in a millisecond, so he was just hacking around.
“How much is six times six?” asks Dave.
“Less, Dave. A lot less.”
A tittering of laughter from the audience.
Dave was smart enough to know he was getting nowhere and, after glancing at his notes again, looked up with his most serious expression.
“How do you aliens reproduce?” he asks.
Louie slid off Jimmy’s head, somersaulted onto his feet in front of Jimmy, and sat again beside him in his cross-legged guest position.
“Carefully, Dave,” says Louie. “We reproduce carefully.”
“And when do you reproduce?”
“When we feel like it,” says Louie. “When there are no interesting games going on we often feel like creating a kid to help with the fun.”
“You can create a child instantaneously?” says Dave.
“Oh, no, takes three or four weeks your time,” says Louie.
“And what does your… baby look like when it is born?”
“Looks like a hairy tennis ball, Dave. Or, if he’s a big bugger, a hairy softball.”
More titters.
“And how is this baby conceived, Louie?” asks Dave. “Does it require, as most mammalian species do, the interaction of a male member of the species with a female member?”
“Nothing that primitive,” says Louie. “We FFs are bisexual you might say.”
“You have both male and female characteristics?”
“We do, Dave, we do.”
And at this point I noticed, and the audience began to notice, that out of Louie’s crotch was now protruding a six-inch-long, inch thick… hairy penis.
Dave was speechless.
As the penis expanded further to eight inches and two inches thick, Louie’s skinny chest began to expand into two tennis-ball size breasts, again, furry breasts, which kept growing too until they were getting close to softball-sized—almost as big as Louie’s head.
At first the audience gasped and tittered, but as Louie’s swellings grew to their final full sizes, the titters grew to laughter, and a few claps became a loud surge of applause.
Louie uncrossed his legs, stood up and took a bow, his penis and breasts bobbing nicely up and down.
More gasps drowned out by more laughter and applause.
“Having both sexes within us, Dave,” Louie says. “Anyone of us can produce a little tennis ball whenever we get the urge.”
Dave was recovering nicely.
“But this means,” he says, “that you can create a dozen children a year, and if you live a long time, hundreds of children.”
“That’s right,” says Louie, “but we actually only live for twelve Earth years, and most o
f us don’t produce more than five or six kids over that time.”
Dave hesitates, looks down at his notes.
“Well, tell our audience this, Louie,” he says. “Why have you and your friends come to our planet?”
“To play, Dave.”
“But what is your purpose?”
“To have fun. No more, no less. To play and have fun.”
“But that seems to me—”
“Hey, Dave,” says Louie. “You’ve got visitors!”
We all looked where Louie was looking, and there, marching up the central aisle, were two men all in black with visored helmets and holding some sort of big weapons.
At the same time three other men, also carrying weapons, dressed not in SWAT-team black, but in suits, appeared at the side of the stage and began approaching Louie, who was still standing in front of Jimmy. One of them was Agent Johnson.
I stood up and so did Lucas. The audience was gasping, screaming, and pointing.
Dave looked surprised, then nervous, and he too stood up. I couldn’t read Louie’s expression, but I noticed his pecker was shrinking, which is what usually happens when men with guns approach a stiff prick.
In fact, all of Louie began to shrink and he was now back in fighting trim: a beach ball.
Three more men in cop uniforms appeared at the other side of the stage, two of them carrying what looked like a large chain-link net.
“There are a lot of innocent people here, Louie,” says Agent Johnson, stopping with his two buddies ten feet away from where Louie rested on the floor. “If you resist, some may get hurt. Please come with us peacefully.”
Louie didn’t answer but began bouncing in place. All the TV cameras were nodding up and down trying to keep a focus on him: looked like oil rigs pumping up the gooey stuff.
Louie kept bouncing. Everyone kept staring. Could have gone on for years except that one of the bright cops pushed forward with his two pals and threw the mesh net onto Louie, or at least where Louie had been last time they looked. The iron mesh net crashed empty to the floor. Louie took up bouncing a few feet away.
The audience began to applaud, at first tentatively, and then fully, as if they’d seen the ABC sign. Which I doubt was anywhere in sight.
Agent Johnson, his two pals, the three cops, and the two Robocops in black—who had arrived on stage to surround Louie—all just stood and nodded their heads up and down as they watched Louie continue his bouncing. Then Louie abruptly stopped and rested a few feet in front of where I and the boys were standing. When the cops began to approach him, Jimmy ran quickly to throw himself on top of Louie so that they’d have to shoot him to get their target. The men halted.
With Jimmy still aboard, Louie again began bouncing. And then to show off in a way that I didn’t like at all: he bounced high, somehow propelled Jimmy off him up higher into the air, came down and bounced on one of the SWAT guy’s heads, then up again to catch Jimmy on his way down, then onto a cop’s head and then back up. Again he tossed Jimmy higher and after Louie had bounced off Agent Johnson, back up to catch Jimmy, who was now giggling away to beat the band.
The audience’s applause kept getting louder and louder.
Well, all good things have to come to an end—although I’m not certain why—and the next thing I knew Louie had deposited Jimmy on my shoulders, and one of the guys in a suit had shot Louie.
The sound of the gun blast silenced the crowd. Louie quickly assumed his skinny midget shape and began staggering across the stage, right past Dave and Agent Johnson, finally collapsing on the floor fifteen feet away, rolling onto his back and spreading out his arms and legs and letting his head fall limply to one side.
Screams from the audience.
Johnson motioned his men to stay back and slowly approached the prostrate Louie. Gun in hand.
“Get that net!” Johnson ordered, standing now near Louie. “Get it over here!”
“He’s dead, Chief,” one of the suits said.
“Bullshit! The net!”
Not sure that ABC can keep all the “bullshits” when they do reruns, but it had its intended effect: two of the cops grabbed the net and hurried toward the stricken midget.
Louie suddenly kicked out with a limb that grew an extra foot for the occasion and knocked Johnson’s gun into the air. He took on his beach ball shape, eluded the mesh net, rolled off the stage, and bounced rapidly down into the audience, bouncing from one head or shoulder to another, then past the pathetic efforts to stop him from the ABC security guards at the door. Finally, out into the hallway and away. As a few of the cops chased after him, the audience laughed and cheered mightily.
Dave comes staggering up to me with a blank look on his face.
“I thought it was a pretty good show, Dave,” says I. “A bit over the top at times, but the audience didn’t seem to mind.”
“You’re under arrest,” Agent Johnson says to me.
ITEM IN THE NEWS
THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE ANNOUNCED TODAY THE SIX BASIC PRINCIPLES OF ALL GOOD REPUBLICANS
Washington, D.C.
The Republican National Committee today released a document stating that they have developed the Six Basic Principles upon which all good Republicans stand. The list is detailed and bold, and represents the most comprehensive statement that any political party has ever dared make.
SIX BASIC PRINCIPLES
1. On Eternal War: We Republicans, knowing that people throughout the world will always hate us for our love of Freedom, believe that Our Beloved Nation should be eternally at war with all who resist our just interference in their nation’s affairs; that this Eternal War must be offensive rather than defensive; that all killing should take place in other lands; and that there will be peace in the world only when Our Great Nation has pacified all our enemies.
2. On Corporations Avoiding Taxes: We Republicans believe that it is the God-given right of every corporation to do everything in its power to avoid paying taxes. Many of us believe that this right is part of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Thus, opening an office in a closet in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands and, as a result, being a foreign corporation and becoming exempt from US taxes, is fair and reasonable and legal, as long as the closet is at least thirty square feet in area.
3. On the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict: We Republicans believe that there should be two states living side by side in peace and harmony, with borders to be determined by the Prime Minister of Israel after consulting with surviving Palestinians. Republicans also believe that additional Jewish settlements are not desirable and should be done as secretly as possible. Finally, we believe that the Israeli government should not negotiate with any Palestinian unless the official accepts the Israeli position before beginning negotiations.
4. On Gun Control: While the pussyfooting Democrats want to make it more difficult for Americans to buy a howitzer, we Republicans believe that it is the right of every citizen to have as many weapons as he chooses, and to use them as Our Nation’s wonderful law enforcement agencies do, whenever anyone makes a possibly threatening move.
5. On High Pay for Corporate CEOs: We Republicans believe that it is the God-given right of every person to get all that he can get, as stated in the clause in the Declaration of Independence that enshrines “the pursuit of happiness,” and that therefore there is no upper limit to what CEOs can earn except the limit on a CEO’s ability to bully more out of his board members.
6. On Avoiding Facts: While Democrats are always attacking us for our indifference to factual accuracy, we Republicans have found that avoiding all facts is a winning policy, and we will not abandon it until we are able to find some facts that actually support our point of view.
FIFTEEN
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 99–108)
Well, after that TV spectacular, sections of which had more hits on YouTube than any video in history, our lives were never the same. We’d been living in a Happy Family sitcom for more than a dozen years
and now suddenly found ourselves in a sci-fi thriller. And for a while a police procedural.
First of all, even before we could leave the ABC studio, Lita and I were called in for two hours of questioning by Agents Johnson, Wall, and two other guys I’d never seen from an agency I’d never heard of.
However, it wasn’t hard at all. We told them that we didn’t have the faintest idea how Louie got into the studio or why he came up on stage. We said we had no idea he would spout subversive ideas. We said he was just an over-intelligent pet that we’d adopted and who had then disappeared. When they began asking detailed questions about how often we had seen Louie at the computer and what things Louie could do, I reverted to my more natural stance with law enforcement: total ignorance. I just answered all their questions about Louie with “Beats me.”
Lita was much more cooperative. She answered their questions fully: “I’m not certain,” “I’m afraid I don’t remember what happened then,” “I wish I could help you, but I simply don’t know the answer.” She was a graduate of NYU Law School.
The boys were questioned too, and they bragged about all the things Louie could do. Lucas said he was sure that if God himself had a website, Louie would be able to hack into it and totally change things around. Probably for the better. When they had more or less finished, Agent Johnson turned to Carlita.
“As you know, Mrs. Morton,” he says, “you and your husband have done nothing since we’ve met you except feed us lies. No more. We have or will find sufficient evidence to indict you for aiding and abetting this alien creature, who is legally a terrorist. I suggest you make arrangements for the care of your children.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Johnson,” says Lita. “But I’m afraid you are on shaky legal grounds.”
“In what way, Mrs. Morton?”
“I’m afraid no police agency will be able to legally arrest this alien, Louie, since he is not a human being.”