Dr. Laser's Cheese Wheel of Death

And Yet Still More Random Thoughts

It was hot that day in the city, hot like only the city got hot, where the clouds rolled in low and trapped the heat down in sweltering layers that ebb and flow in swirls and eddies in the endless canyons of glass and steel that stretch to the horizon and carry with them the rise and fall of a sea of desperate humanity, a tide that mocks me, a tide of whores and junkies and petty crooks who spread out below me in an endless June Taylor Dancers routine. Only this ain't no variety show. This is life. Life in the city, where lives are bought and sold on street corners like canned hams, where children don't dream of anything more than where the next crust of bread or can of beans is coming from, where even the pale grass poking up from the cracks in the uneven pavement seems to struggle, defiant, reaching skyward as if to say "Hey...How you doing?"

And I can prove that in a court of law, if I have to.

There are six million stories in the city and most of them end badly. They end in alleys or in jails or in places people don't like to talk about. They end with knives or guns or needles or cheese that's way past its expiration date. The cheese I can't do anything about, but as for the rest of it, well, I'm the Claw. And that's my job and I don't like it but somebody's got to do it so it might as well be me.

The calendar said it was October, but someone forgot to tell the thermometer. Or maybe the calendar and the thermometer just weren't talking, like when your mother says something to piss you off and rather than confront her about it and open some constructive interpersonal communication, you repress your anger and freeze her out until she finally screams at you for not talking to her. Or maybe it wasn't like that at all. Anyway, it was hot.

In my everday guise of John J. Doolittle, ace reporter for the City News Herald Ledger Tribune Planet, test pilot for NASA, private investigator, federal agent, and billionaire playboy, I kept an office on the 27th floor of the Calamity Building on the 10th Street. My clients were the worst of the worst, desperate people with desperate lives whose dreams cracked and splintered like glass and hopes died stillborn before they can even have them. That is, until today. Because today is the day she walked in.

I'd just taken a slug of courage from a bottle in my drawer. I don't know why I bothered with the drawer. I wasn't fooling anyone.

And then I heard it.

Her voice had a musical lilt to it. My head snapped up. If she hadn't been a dame she'd have gotten the drop on me. As it was she carried something far more deadly.

"I hope so," I said, "I'm wearing his shorts." For the first time I looked at her and felt my heart hammer like a tommy gun. She was sunshine and cotton candy and Pink Champagne all tied up in ribbons in a basket and left on your front porch swing with a card that says "Eat me". She was all floral prints and lipstick and blonde curls, with legs up to her chin, but her eyes were tough as diamond chips and told me she usually got what she wanted.

"I need your help," she said, her gaze sweeping the room, and from her expression I could tell that she didn't much like what she saw.

"Why me?" I asked, "From the looks of ya, a doll like you's gotta have the dough to hire someone respectable.

"Respectable?" she echoed, arching an eyebrow, "Respectable is Coke in green glass bottles, Doolittle. They don't make it any more."

I wasn't sure what she meant by that. But whatever.

"My name is Betty," she went on, "and I need you to find my father."

My eyes met hers. "You're Betty Seltzer," I said with a confidence I didn't feel, "Your father is Harry Seltzer."

"You've heard of him?"

I shrugged. "Sure. Y'know, he's an idiot."

"Most people are idiots, Doolittle."

"Most people don't own multi-national conglomerates."

Her gaze withered, and fell, like leaves in the winter. I took her hand. "I'll find him, Betty..." I promised.

And somewhere far off, I knew, Invisible Government Ninjas were watching my every move.

To Be Continued.........

(From The Mailbag July 31)

RE: Dr. Lazer's Cheese Wheel of Death

This is the funniest thing I've ever read!!!! I actually couldn't breathe at the end!!!! You are a total Psycho!!!!

And here I've been thinking for the last 36 years that no one understood me.

I think if I ever publish I will use this on the book jacket.

Chapter II

When Harry Seltzer came to the city 32 years ago, everything he owned in the world was a buck thirty-two and a shoeshine box and a head so full of dreams he couldn't have remembered his own phone number even if he'd lived in more than a two-room tenement and could have scraped together enough dough to have a phone put in under the glaring bare bulb hanging in his kitchenette. He was nothing more than a dust mote in a sea of flotsam, awash in despair; a single life in 32 million, adrift in a hardscrabble city that did its best to pull him down and hold him under, while fat guys named Tony and Vinnie grew rich on his toil and sweat.

Any other man might have set his box on a street corner and spent the next 30 years scraping out a living by licking the boots of every two-bit street hustler and working joe that tossed him a dime. Any other man might have seen how things were and knuckled under to Injustice and cried out "Why me?" But Harry Seltzer wasn't any other man. Harry Seltzer was the kind of man who saw the possibilities in how things could be and asked himself "Why not me?" Harry Seltzer was the kind of man who faced Injustice head-on and spit in its eye, then shoved it backwards down a flight of stairs and kicked the crap out of it all the way down.

But I mean, in a nice kind of way.

Maybe it was just Dumb Luck that made billionaire industrialist Johnny Romanov step off the street corner that day, and maybe it was just Dumb Luck that made that delivery truck's brakes give out at the end of the block....but it wasn't Dumb Luck that pulled him out of harm's way and spent the next three weeks in intensive care with massive internal hemorraging. That was Harry Seltzer's doing. That one good deed started his rise to the top, and there was no stopping Harry Seltzer.

That is, until two days ago.

I decided to start my search for Harry with a snitch I knew who worked the East Side Harbor as a button man for the Spaghettio crime family. He'd blown twelve in the circuit by the time he was fourteen years old, and made a name for himself dropping cubes for a slappy out of Hell Town before burning a point for old man Spaghettio two years ago on the coast.

I don't know what any of that means, either.

Anyway his name was Eddie. Eddie Perlucci.

I came upon him in the middle of a deal behind a fish warehouse on the harbor. He and his "client" were muttering to themselves when I appeared.

"Hello, Eddie," I said.

His head snapped up. "The Claw!"

His buddy tried to ditch a bright yellow box. With my energy claw I caught it. I'd seen these before. The success of methadone clinics across the country had inspired a great many imitation drugs recently. This was one of the more popular ones, "I Can't Believe It's Not Crack".

"What do you want?!" the stranger cried, "This ain't even illegal!"

"You're right," I said evenly, in a cold voice that seemed to unnerve him, "That's because the laws haven't been able to keep up with these imitation drugs. Now, beat it, punk. This don't concern you."

While he ran around the corner and disappeared, Eddie's eyes darted back and forth. I wondered if he was actually measuring his escape route. I wondered if he was actually that stupid.

"I need information, Eddie."

Shadows leapt and fell across his long, swarthy features, shadows cast by the unearthly energy pulsating from my eyes and the mutant energy claw that enveloped my hand.

"You know the deal, Claw. You don't harrass my clients, and I give you information."

"Justice doesn't make deals, Perlucci. You give me information and I don't drop you in the harbor."

Eddie gulped nervously and glanced toward the edge of the building again. He stood four feet from me, but we were in two different worlds. He was a two-bit thug with a chip on his shoulder trying to squeeze what he could from an unappreciative world; I was a simple man with an energy claw trying to make up for a past I could never forget.

"Word on the street is you're looking for Harry Seltzer."

"What do you know about it?"

A long pause. Eddie looked at his shoes. "No much," he said, finally, carefully, "I just know that..."

That was all I heard before my world exploded in crimson and faded to black...

To Be Continued....

I dreamed of a city consumed in the white-hot blaze of a thousand flames, of a million lost souls begging for mercy while the clouds rained blood and the acrid stench of death hung in the air. And a giant bulldog with wooden teeth. And then I woke up.

Light leaked under my eyelids, hot and bright, and pain wracked my body like an old lover, a lover with a part-time job as a Swedish masseusse who kept getting fired because she thought her job was to cause endless hellish torment. And yet the pain was familiar, the one constant in my otherwise tumultuous life, and in that sense, at least, I took a measure of comfort from it: I slapped it on the back and called it Shirley and took it out to dinner.

I heard the voices next, dark and muffled, arguing, demanding, begging and wailing all at once, a thousand voices, a sweeping orchestra in three movements, all funneled down into a single pencil-point of sound......

"Claw?"

I didn't realize at first that the voice was speaking to me, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I tried to move. No such luck. Gleaming shards of steel bit into my arm.

"Claw?"

Again that voice. I tried to answer but all that came out was a tongueless wail with lots of 'n' sounds in it.

"You're awake, that's good," said the voice, "Now, don't try to talk, just listen. We're getting outta here, see? You and me and all these mugs are making a break for it."

The words rung in my ear like a Christmas bell. Freedom suddenly seemed far away, like the black sand beaches of Tahiti, where a man's troubles melt away in the salt and the brine. But this stiff wasn't a hula girl. He was a man. A man like any other man. A man caught up in something bigger than himself with no way out. "Who...are you?" I manager to say at last.

"The name is Seltzer, see? Harry Seltzer. Word on the street is..."

A loud clang, and then silence. A silence more than sound, a silence of fear, a fear beyond reason or logic, a fear that turns a man's guts to ice, like going in for a routine physical and finding out that you have a tumor the size of a watermelon in your head.

"Ah, so!" another voice this time: "The Claw!!! We meet again!!!" And this time, it is on a battlefield of my own choosing!!! And what do you think about that, my friend?"

I found my voice, "Laser Boy?"

"There is no Laser Boy!!!" he snapped "Laser Boy died at the eleven o'clock showing of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of The Clones, at Cinema 18 off State Route 20!!! It was there that Laser Boy met his match, in 10-year-old Billy Dugan, whose comments on the nature of the film were so insightful, whose understanding of the Force and the burdens of a Jedi were unparalleled. I struck up a friendship with young Billy, and I discovered that, along with his love of Star Wars and all that it encompasses, he also had one other passion, a passion undreamed of in song or story. It was cheese!!! Cheese, I say!!! And it was young Billy's love of cheese that inspired me with a problem of my own!"

I ventured a guess: "Your breath?"

"Dorkititude?" said a second voice.

"That drool thing you do when you're excited?"

"Silence!!!" he thundered, and quickly regained his composure: "It was nothing so mundane, I assure you!!! No, this was a puzzle that has vexed me and others like me for generations!!! A power problem, if you will. You see, when laser science was in its infancy, it wasn't possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix, and the threshold for power output was 4.7 megawatts! But when I apply cheese dynamics, I can extract ten to the twenty-first kilojoules per cubic centimeter, or....one megajoule per liter."

"That's hotter than the sun!"

"A cheese laser?"

At that moment the dampers on my energy eyes were lifted, and I saw it, in the center of the room, surrounded by pathetic men in chains like myself. A gleaming silver monstrosity that looked like a cannon of some sort, and in its center...well, along with my sight, unfortunately, my sense of smell had unfortunately returned. In the center of the field piece was a bowl of milky, runny, gooey mess, a mess so foul and repugnant I started to wretch.

"Behold," said Dr. Laser, "The power of cheese!"

"And what do you plan to do with it, Laser?"

"What else? Acquire money, power, sex, and revenge against my enemies. Starting with you, Claw! You think I'd forgotten how you mocked me as a child? I've been watching you, Claw! Who do you think planted that sleeper agent among your co-workers that you wrote about on your infernal website on June 6, 2002?"

"My Arch Nemesis! Of course! Only you, Laser, could have devised such a diabolical scheme!"

While Dr. Laser blathered on about his plans, I was busy building up the energy in my claw. "That's it, Dr. Laser! I've had it with you...Cheese Boy...That idiot at work who always asks me how I'm doing!!!"

Energy rippled and pulsated from my mutant energy claw and destroyed the cheese laser just as Dr. Laser and Cheese Boy made their escape. As the smoke cleared, I saw a team of government ninjas, led by my old Lithuanian friend from the 6th grade, Agent XJ7.

"Nevermind about me!" I yelled at the guy freeing me from my chains, "He's getting away!"

"Don't worry, Claw," said my old friend, "The only lasers he'll be using are the kind....um, that they use in prison..."

We shared a hearty laugh, and knew that it was over.

THE END.

(Update - Critic's Corner, August 14, 2002)

Today I had the following conversation with the sarcastic girl at work who had previously criticized my original drawing of The Claw!!!

"I read your story."

"What did you think?"

"It was very funny. But I have a question. If Doolittle's secret identity is The Claw, how did Dr. Laser know that the Claw was the one who made fun of them when they were kids?"

"Um....well, because he had that sleeper agent. The one who bugged me. He had the agent at work, who found out my secret."

"So why did he kidnap the Alka Seltzer guy?"

"As...um, as bait. To set a trap for me."

"So he kidnaps a millionaire you don't even know, and just assumes that the guy's daughter will hire you, not as the Claw but as Doolittle, and then bribes a snitch that you know as the Claw and not as Doolittle, to capture you?"

"Um....sort of, yeah..."

"Wouldn't it have been easier to just walk in the hotel where you work, alone, in the middle of the night, and catch you here?"

"Hmmmm, yeah, that's an excellent question. Excellent, excellent question."

"Uh huh. So what's the answer?"

"I don't...I mean...you're stupid!"

"No, you're stupid."

"No, you are."

"You're stupid, stupid."

"You are you are you are!. LA LA LA LA infinity!"