| Thunder Sandwich #17
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 dweeb by jeff filipski |
| "God is not dead. He has become hyperreal." —Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation Eventually Badass worked. Named after the self-proclaimed disposition of the biochemist who created it, the drug was administered by means of a simple, single injection. More baboons were killed than soldiers in the Civil War before Badass was perfected. Then one day a dead monkey opened its eyes, cursed in its native language as if waking into the embittered bear hug of a hangover, rolled onto its feet, squatted, and took an angry shit all over the clean white floor of the laboratory. The scientists present broke out into song and lit long, expensive cigars. Between songs and cigar puffs, they talked about what (or rather, who) to do next. Clearly the baboon was functioning normally and, if it continued to function normally for a sufficient duration and passed all of the requisite tests, it was only logical that Badass be tried out on a human subject. But who? That night at the bar the scientists came to a quick unanimous decision, and in the not-too-distant future they packed their bags, divorced their wives (moral support no longer needed from those Suzie-homemakers) and flew to Disneyland. They spent a few days entertaining themselves on the park's rides and dining on sauerkraut and sausage links in the restaurants of a simulacrum of Germany. Then they got bored and decided it was time to exhume Walt Disney's body. The body was located underneath the "Pirates of the Caribbean attraction in a cryogenic sepulcher. Prior to his death by cancer, Disney had requested that his dead body be preserved in deep-freeze until the technology to reanimate him was developed. So the scientists ferried him to a simulacrum of a German hospital, thawed him out and gave him a shot of Badass. Disney cursed in the voice of Mickey Mouse after he opened his eyes. As he rolled onto his feet, squatted and took a shit on the clean white floor of the operating room, the scientists once again resorted to singing and smoking, and subsequently a group of slapdash orderlies wearing ersatz moose antlers rolled a few trash cans full of grain alcohol into the room and everybody started to get drunk. "Can I have some toilet paper?" Disney asked. This time he employed the ornery voice of Donald Duck. "I could use a pair of pants and a shirt, too." Nobody paid attention to him: too busy partying and talking on their cellphones, making dinner plans with full-figured, five-large-a-night hookers. Disney sighed. Then he drank a few handfuls of grain alcohol, stole a dirty surgeon's outfit from a locker in the closet, and snuck away. In addition to the hypodermic full of Badass, Disney had been injected with a little geriatric cocktail that made him look a little younger and a little more handsome than when he died at the age of 65. Not that it mattered to him. He had never cared much about his own image unless he was making a television appearance. But he looked pretty good right now, despite his outfit, which was crinkled up and stained in places with blood. Out in the streets of Disneyland people started recognizing him as a Walt Disney lookalike dressed in a mad scientist's costume. "I'm not a lookalike," he kept telling the children that came up to him and kicked him in the kneecaps for playing what they considered to be a bad joke on them. "I'm the real thing. They just reanimated me a few minutes ago. Seriously." Nobody took him seriously. Finally an indignant group of parents, thinking he was a liar, told him he ought to be ashamed of himself for filling their children's heads with nonsense. He wanted to tell them that he had spent his lifetime filling children's heads with nonsense and nobody had ever complained until now, but he refrained, suddenly realizing that the children and parents were not children and parents. They were lookalikes of children and parents. In fact, the park was filled with children and parents lookalikes: it occurred to him when a young, innocent boy unzipped his chest and face and a midget in a pinstripe suit shrugged out of his skin. A number of other people, he noticed, did likewise, and for no apparent reason. A security guard unzipped himself and out came a groundskeeper. An ugly pigeon-toed woman with no tits and no sense of style unzipped herself and out came a busty pornstar in a lavish ballroom gown. A wiry blond-haired Aryan in a scuba-diving outfit emerged from the fleshy shell of a fat black woman with an afro. Another well-dressed midget relinquished itself from the guise of child. There was one person, a mustachioed gentleman wearing an origami uniform, that looked the exact same on the inside as he did on the outside; that is, the face, body and outfit that constituted his outer layer was a replica of the face, body and outfit that constituted his inner layer. Everywhere Disney looked, people were randomly shedding their bodies like snakes. He wasn't the fraud here, they were. What right did they have to assume he was an imposter? But no matter what he said he knew he would not be able to convince them otherwise. In a sense they were right. If the world is constituted mainly by representations of the real, who's to say the representations aren't themselves the real? Majority rules, after all. Depressed, Walt Disney decided to leave Disneyland. He didn't know where he would go. For now, getting out was enough. The only problem was, every exit door he encountered was only a lookalike exit door. And when he tried to open them, it only looked like he was trying to open them . . . "Shit," said Disney, "I can't get outta here." As he spoke the words a giant Goofy approached him. "Nice outfit," it said. Disney's mustache twitched in distress. "It's not an outfit." "Think so?" replied the Goofy, unzipping itself. Beneath was Pluto. The Pluto unzipped itself and revealed a real dog, a St. Bernard with a tiny barrel of booze hanging from its neck. The St. Bernard proceeded to unzip itself as well. "Have you ever tried to take yourself off?" asked a girl that resembled the black and white version of Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Her voice was the deep-seated rasp of an actor who had drank and smoked his way through life. "Maybe if you tried to step out of yourself, you'd think differently." Disney spit on the Dorothy's glittery red shoes. "Beat it, you," he snarled. The Dorothy made a face, shrugged, turned and skipped away, leaving pixie dust in her wake, and leaving Disney in a state of high anxiety. Maybe she's right, he thought. Maybe I'm not who I think I am. Jesus Christ! Is there a zipper on my body? He was afraid to feel himself up but he did it anyway. Sure enough, there was a zipper— a tiny, almost imperceptible plastic tab was sticking out of the nape of his clavicle bone. "Holy cow!" he screamed. Without another thought he dashed back to the simulacrum hospital to interrogate the scientists that had reanimated him. Clearly those bastards were responsible for all this. Back in his day, people didn't make a habit out of taking their bodies off, and he certainly didn't used to have a zipper on his own body, which, presumably, could be taken off, too. Somebody had some goddamn explaining to do. When Disney returned to the operating room in which the injection of Badass had been administered, however, he found the room teeming with baboons. The skins of the scientists littered the floor and the baboons, all of them piss-drunk, were gibbering and farting and belching and drooling oceans of saliva and performing ungainly breakdance moves. A few of them were having sex with long-legged prostitutes. Disney blinked at the spectacle. He was taken aback but he wasn't freaked out; part of him had almost expected it. "I'm back," he said. No response. "Hey you people. Hey you sunzabitches." No response. Annoyed, Disney dealt the monkeys a long, lewd invective. Not surprisingly, he was ignored. He blustered into a storeroom circumscribed by shelves packed with medical supplies. Standing there alone in the darkness, he meditatively tapped his foot against the floor and filled and refilled his cheeks with air. He hit the light switch. He flexed his jaw and pinched the tab of his zipper . . . Inside Walt Disney was another Walt Disney that was an exact replica of the recently shed Walt Disney and that was also equipped with a zipper. Walt Disney unzipped and squirmed out of himself and exposed another Walt Disney. Inside this Walt Disney was another Walt Disney. Inside that Walt Disney was another Walt Disney. Inside that Walt Disney was yet another Walt Disney. Inside that Walt Disney was still another Walt Disney. He wanted to stop taking himself off, but he was obsessed now. There was no going back. He would keep taking himself off until he could no longer take himself off—until he found out what lay at the core of his body, his being, his identity . . . Every time Disney disposed of another layer of himself, the replica that emerged was a little bit smaller. Eventually he was so small even a microscope would have had to squint to see him clearly. At this point of diminution, he removed his last layer. . . . There was a flickering neon sign. Rectangular in shape, the sign was no bigger than an electron. Written on it in a humdrum font was an anagram for the real name of God. "Ah-ha!" Disney yawped. But he didn't yawp anything. He had no mouth with which to speak. And by degrees the sign stopped flickering and faded out to black . . . |
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| ISSN: 1534-4037 |
Edited by Jim Chandler & Haze McElhenny
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