Music enters: Scott H. Biram song, "No Way", a scratchy country song that repeats an obsessive guitar line over and over, connotating the chicken-scratched rural wastelands and dementia left to drift, like a crazy hobo pulling out a bad tooth with a pair of rusted pliers and holding it out like a buck-toothed braggart finding "poor man's relief"

Text comes on: that reads as follows:

To understand this screwball cinematic masterpiece, you have to know a few things about my buddy. He is a "good ol' boy" who suffers from manic-depression and whose favorite pastime is sitting down in a rocking chair, smoking Swisher Sweet cigars like a big-shot, and repeating vulgar stories & gossip. . . . . a platform of subreality that keeps building higher and higher as he builds toward the punch-line like some kind of unholy combination of "Touched by an Angel", Charles Bronson, and the circus. Perhaps the man likes to embellish, or maybe he is just half-crazy, but it makes for some damn fine entertainment (-- for as long as you can stand it!). Too much exposure will lead to your walls of reality melting down like a bad LSD trip as we, the filmmakers try to recreate it for the sake of dime-store Americana. Just remember: although talk is cheap, you don't get your dime back!

Establishing shot opens to various cuts of Brandy Station Apartments, a marginal housing complex of high-turnover apartments upon which a tremulous soup-skin of utter placidity covers roiling social dysfunction and low-down living. A bunch of lunk-headed folk living outside their means with brand new trucks supported by unwise financing schemes sitting in the parking places. These people are confined to brutal existences once "the well runs dry", scratching their heads like paupers living on opulence or on next to nothing with equal ease when the bills come due. Life is either extremely boring and tedious or full of extreme "off-the-cuff" excitement like crawling through a window for sex or dancing in the street with an explosion of firecrackers as the camera cuts to a shot of the handyman in a brown uniform walking across the parking lot with a bucket and mop.

A rattling car pulls into a parking space, revealing THE FOIL of the movie, yours truly, behind the windshield where hangs a pair of fuzzy dice. A big kid in his 20's wearing a sheriff's hat and flannel shirt out of a sense of ironic absurdity. I open the car door, and struggle my bulk out. I'm here to visit my friend, Mike who lives here like a crazed prophet, like "The Old Man of the Mountain", the sage of storytelling, king of the elbowin' blue-collar bullshitter's.

Cut to brief shot of apartment porch, where sits a flimsy little wire mesh table and a rocking chair. On this table is a giant red ashtray that's overflowing with Swisher Sweet cigar butts. "The Poor Man's Hang-Out". Simplicity-- it takes nothing, it gives nothing.

I walk up to the door and knock

No answer

I knock again

Looking around, I feel pretty absurd and conspicuous.

Finally, I grip the doorknob and turn it gently, opening the door.

The camera follows me as I step inside, revealing a filthy apartment covered over with clutter. Stacks of video tapes, newspapers, coupon circulars, and cigar ashes all over the floor. Did I mention soda cans? There is a dingy STICKINESS to everything that makes you ITCHY just standing in there, the feeling of entropy and decay that just makes you acquiescent and sleepy in the dimness. And there, sitting in a plush easy chair asleep, is Mike. His red nose dipped down with a vague, dreamy smile on his face through his scraggly beard. He's snoring softly.

I wake him up and he slowly rises to consciousness like a fat carp from the depths of a greasy lake. He goes "Wh-- wh-- what?" And with his eyes still closed he announces as if under hypnosis, "I've been sleeping".

"Well, I can tell that, Mike. But if we don't get moving, the pizza buffet is going to close"

My best buddy goes "hmmmmm" and adds with his snuffy voice, half-laughing "Give me some time to wake up. . . . . I'll be ready"

Now we're sitting outside. Mike is sitting in the rocking chair and is smoking those cherry-flavored Swisher-Sweet cigars, tapping the end on occasion like a big-shot. Work is hard, leisure is majestic, talk is cheap. His hair is unwashed and is whipped upward almost as if it was moussed, and he is wearing a gray St. Louis Rams sweatshirt, and a loose pair of sweatpants that his bulging belly hangs out over. He is drinking from a giant 54 ounce jug of hot coffee, offering praise up to the drink of the living in his slurring, nasal voice that splatters across the screen like squirting mustard.

"Let's see, let's see. . . . . it's like this, you see!"

********************

"I've been fighting depression real bad lately. . . . . . and the voices". This, as he rocks in the rocking chair with manic energy-- pleased for the company, for someone to listen-- on the verge of tittering with the sheer absurdity of life that exists like a giant screwball cartoon.

"One time, I slept for 36 hours. Boy did I have to pee when I woke up!"

"I know Mike. I was there. Didn't I wake you up?"

FLASHBACK: Cut to shot of me standing in the hallway as Mike lays on the mattress, rolls out of bed, and lumbers past me into the bathroom like an old bear covered with moss after a long winter's hibernation [SOUNDS OF PADDING FOOTSTEPS]. That, or the wild man of the woods, or even John the Baptist reincarnated. Sounds of comically long urination, going on for two minutes as I stand there in amazement, snickering in the filthy living room listening to this Olympic feat of dishevelment. Mike is merrily singing the castration song about cutting off niggers' balls and putting them in a jar, handing back to the criminally-minded ghetto folk looking down at this screwball frontier justice and reacting in aghast, open-mouthed horror, working their pink lips like Ghannian tribesman picking up a VooDoo doll with their name on it. Mike calls from the bathroom, caught up in the goofy glee of the moment:

"Don't you think that would keep down the crime rate? Cut off the balls then throw 'em down the elevator shaft! Just like in 'Marked for Death'!"

Cut to shot of 1990 movie "Marked for Death" in climatic scene when Steven Segal and a manical-looking VooDoo cocaine lord in dreadlocks are having a long, drawn-out fight to the living end. Steven Seagal impales his scrotum with a sharp Carribian ninja blade, they fight for a while longer, then he throws the psychopath down the elevator shaft where the villain is impaled with cheesy, low-rent special effects. It's such a moment of hilarious screwball incongruity that the only thing the audience can do is laugh. That's the magic of Mike-- how can you take his antics with a straight face?

Back to flashback of apartment where Mike is chuckling with a wild "HEE, HEE, HEE!" like a mad-man

Cut to shot of present, back on the porch. I'm trying to calm down this insanity--

"I didn't know that the human bladder could hold so much"

"When I was on the run from the drug dealers in U-City, and they cut my power and my phone line, I went without eating for seven days-- laying low in the house with pans full of kerosene in case they came through the window-- go and torch the fuckers. But they were out on the sidewalk hollering for my white hide. [Mike gets caught up in his routine, counting on his fingers] They poisoned my water, they broke into the house and did VooDoo rituals, and they blared their rap music. But I had a plan for 'em!"

Cut to shot of two black women, a mother and daughter, wrapping up the sale of a nice new car, a fire-apple red Camaro. They drive it home, park across the street, and Mike bursts out the door of his house looking all crazy and busts out the windshield with a baseball bat, hollering like Jim Belushi in some late '80s movie seeking "everyman justice"

Cut to still shot of Mike's pathetically aged mother with a "dinging" sound with an underheader that reads "His mother quietly paid for the damage"

"You're lucky you didn't get killed"

Mike raises his voice in defiance:

"The Lord was with me that day, and I stood up against the drug dealers and the crooked police. No one would believe me!"

Scene changes, I'm at his fat old sister's trying to get at the bottom of things like an off-screen Walter Conkrite. The house is insanely cluttered and covered with clothes and women's magazines. She is a rotund woman who reminds you of "Cathy" from the mid 1970's comic strip of a woman overwhelmed by life that though has somewhat matured, never lost that flakiness as she stands around her filthy living room with her hand on her hip, frowning at the mess. Off-camera, I talk to her:

"Mike's stories can get pretty wild sometimes"

She shrugs

"That's just part of his illness, talking about the drug dealers and the police"

I innocently ask this question with absurdity--

"There wasn't really a drug house right across the street from Mike's, was there?"

The sister answers "Yes there was", shaking her head with her face up toward the ceiling like it was no big deal

Cut to shot of gang-bangers walking in and out of house on Mike's old street, exchanging money and drugs out in the open while gangsta rap plays

"He just should have stayed in the house and minded his own business"

Cut to shot of Mike's view from inside of his home, a shaky-cam view through the drapes of a black drug dealer walking up to the window and going "RAAAHHH!" with his arms extended like a vampire bat

SCENE CHANGES: We're back on Mike's porch, warming up to go to the pizza buffet at "Pizza Hut". Mike's caught up in telling stories, and once he's on a roll he's impossible to "shut up". Here he's talking about his sister in an authoritative way, one of the many truisms he hammers on:

"Nancy my sister is really liberal in a fucked-up way. The only thing she cares about is her unions and voting Democrat. Everybody who's for legalizing drugs has a relative who's either ON drugs or is SELLING drugs and they don't want them to get boo-fooed in prison. My nephew, David used to have a "high-maintenance" girlfriend he supported by selling crack cocaine and carrying a gun. Boy, did he think he was somebody! When he saw some friends get killed that damn scared him straight!"

"When I was struck with my illness after that whole mess at Church's Chicken and was wandering around the streets hungry, YOU KNOW WHAT HE DID? He wouldn't even give me food. He told me to [coarsening his voice like a cross between a growling dog and a goblin] 'go away, come back at meal time'. He wouldn't even give me a package of saltine crackers that were sitting there on the kitchen counter"

Cut to shot of short-statured, snuffy-voiced, cloudy-eyed young man in kitchen with cap backwards miming "go away!" with a waving hand in front of the camera

BACK TO THE BRANDY STATION PORCH, WHERE I'M ABSORBING THIS, AND ASK A QUESTION, A CLOSE-UP ON MY FACE TO EMPHASIZE THIS MOMENT:

"What's the deal with Church's Chicken?"

Mike splays his fingers out, like a man driving away bats with fluttering fingers

"I don't want to get into that. It's too crazy"

"Oh. Okay"

(I'm the perfect foil to Mike's soliloquy, as he continues on and on)

Mike pauses, as if to catch his breath, then takes off on a different track

"Yeah. . . . . you ought to find yourself a nice Christian girl and go to school and get an education while you can. When I first moved in here there was this girl who. . . . . [voice fades out and the image shimmers into a hazy memory]

In this memory, Mike is sitting out on the porch rocking and smoking when this sleazy 19 year-old girl comes sauntering down the street and starts up a friendly conversation with Mike. He is pleased to have someone listen to his conversation, so they get to talking. She asks if he has any liquor, and he has some in the apartment. They're drinking outside and laughing. He mentions flirtatiously that she looks like "Princess Di". She puts her hair up and says "now I look like Princess Di!". They go into his apartment, he lays flat on his back on the mattress, and she gives him a blow-job. Everything's going fine, but then the next day she comes back looking for more money and liquor and mentions her five boyfriends and Mike figures he doesn't need any more of this. She leaves in a huff and that's the last he sees of her.

Back to present day on Brandy Station Porch, Mike's voice fading back in

". . . . . so there she was with about four or five different boyfriends. GOD! That's the surest way to catch AIDS. You're better off 'beating the meat on a toilet seat'"

Both of us break out laughing--

Scene abruptly changes to the United Nations General Assembly, where you have serious people grappling with global pan-humanistic awareness talking about how to combat AIDS, preventing it from spreading over the world-- humanity's momentous plague. Mike is dressed up in a respectable suit with his hair combed, leans over the microphone, and in his slurring voice advises the world body to go ahead and "beat the meat on a toilet seat"

"You certainly know how to elevate a conversation, Mike"

"If you think that's elevated, you should have met my cousin, 'Uncle Perv'. When we were 12 and 13 years old he'd tell jokes about violating dead bodies. One time, when we were walking down by the railroad tracks, we saw a yellow labador retriever cut in half and stinking. BOY, WAS THAT DOG DEAD. Uncle Perv ran home and got an ax and cut the dog's head off and brought it home in a burlap sack. He boiled the head so all the meat would come off and had a skull that he hung up in his room. "Boy's Life" Magazine would walk in there and their head would creak around in circles like in "The Exorcist"! Uncle Perv used to show that he had a crush on a girl by wiping his ass with a pair of socks and leaving it on her doorstep"

"And where did you fit into this, Mike?"

"I was with him, we were a bunch of kids drunk on homemade wine. One time I got up on the roof--"

Cut to shot of thirteen year-old kid up on the roof as narration continues

"And dropped my pants to go take a shit down the girl's chimney--"

Cut to shot of kid dropping his britches to do just that

"But Uncle Perv stopped me. It could potentially stop up the chimney and suffocate them!"

"Yeah, that would be a horrible way to go. . . . ."

Mike takes a breath before continuing--

"Yeah. . . . . we were a bunch of juvenile delinquents. But I was always the one holding Uncle Perv back. He got his name from a trucker's comedy tape when trucking was all the rage back in the '70s. You'd go in and buy a tape at the truck stop. Everyone was buying it. [Counting on his fingers, pulling respected professionals down to his level] Doctors, lawyers. . . . . . The humor was real crude, but it was funny. We'd listen to the tape for hours!"

"What Uncle Perv liked to do was go up to a girl with a big butt and act like he was humping her and holler "Oh, Bohemia!". That's the words he used for butt-fucking"

[I try to explain to Mike the nature of the Bohemians, independent thinkers and unconventional coffee shop folk and the poets Byron and Shelley in the 19th century. Mike really doesn't "get it". But he explodes with laughter when I mention the song "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen]

Cut to shot of musical montage, perhaps a 30 second clip of famous Queen song-- women with big butts wandering around and Uncle Perv yelling "Oh Bohemia!" and running them off like a perverted farm kid chasing a fat sheep

BACK TO THE BRANDY STATION PORCH

I look down at my watch

"OH, SHIT MIKE! We're going to miss the pizza buffet!"

Cut to shot of car backing up with screeching tires, camera focuses on my zany bumper stickers: "NUKE THE WHALES" "PROTEST-- AND WIN-- WITH NIXON" and my car speeds off

The next shot is of us riding down the highway, we're getting lost in the blather of things and Mike's not sure which way to turn. We miss the exit and all is downcast. Mike mentions "I fucked up" in his slurring, nasal voice. We finally manage to turn around and arrive at Pizza Hut with eleven minutes to spare.

We're in Pizza Hut and there's the last offering of food, and we're two big guys butting the little kids out of the way to get at the good pizza but mostly filling up on bread sticks instead

Finally we sit down, and Mike is obviously embarrassed about our stranded lot and is trying to keep the subject away from our "slim pickings" without much subtlety

"Did you hear the latest on Sue and Charles?"

"No, I don't think I remember them, but please go on. . . . . ."

"Well, you know they got together out of "a marriage of convenience'. They put their social security checks together so they could buy a van and drive all over town, looking for all-you-can restaurants where she eats for ten men. She's so mean and fat, and Charles is so passive and gay that she rules over him like 'Satan's Sow' with a pair of tusks. 'GRRRRRRRR". I don't even want to speculate about their sex life, but I heard what she did to Charles was take out this 14 inch dildo with two heads and a handle and shove it up his ass when he was sleeping on his stomach. She gripped the handle and was pumping it up and down while he was screaming for mercy. [Mike hoots wildly with his lips pursed] WHOOO-HOO-HOO-HOO! They had to take him away in an ambulance because he was bleeding out his ass from a busted bowel and he went ahead & claimed that he got been raped by a gang of blacks in the city. The doctors didn't believe him, but now he wears adult diapers. I heard that Sue took that dildo, all covered in shit, and held it up at a women's therapy group at 'The Self-Help Center"

I cringe and laugh at the same time with Mike's insufferable antics, insisting that "Hey, I'm trying to eat here!".

Cut to shot of 1960's drive-in movie "reminder" for the concession stand-- dancing soda and popcorn and box of Jube-Jubes

The movie stops with a "WHHHORRRP!" and a mock case file appears over the distortion where this text is slowly typed out with the official sound of a typewriter:

"GAWD. . . . . If that sow came after me, I'd hit her with a couple of good right crosses!" [Mike miming a boxer with a good couple of solid punches in the air like an Irish-Catholic scrapper to emphasize the point]

"While they were together, all they did was sit around and watch T.V. I was over at their apartment and she was sitting on the couch that was busted-- she was so fat-- and there was Charles sitting on the floor leaning on his arm like a little kid. . . . ."

[Cut to shot of this depraved scene]

"She'd sit there eating fried chicken, and throw him food down there on the floor. . . . . and he'd eat it!"

So let it be written, cut to shot of Sue in gluttonous majesty throwing down a drumstick and Charles eating it like an obsequious dog as the television plays in the background

"They got so lazy and fat, that they weren't even willing to walk across the room to the kitchen to get their own sodas. They had minature fridges stocked with soda-- one for Sue, one for Charles, so they would never have to leave their spots!"

So let it be written, the scene now exists with fridges present as Sue slurps a soda in a meaty fist like King Kong

"Next thing you know they'll have a toilet in the living room so they won't have to leave to take a shit!"

So let it be written, now there is a port-a-john standing there-- the kind of thing you would see at construction sites reeking of chemical cleanser and day-old urine.

Cut to shot of Charles gnawing on drum stick, the light of the television shining off his sallow, passive face

"Mike, you have taken my faith in a higher, intervening force in the universe and dashed it to pieces"

"Oh, there is a God all right. Don't get me started on Church's Chicken!"

A momentary pause, then "the talk machine" gets reved up once more.

"There are the most fucked-up people in the world who go to that [Self-Help] Center. It's such a rumor mill. All people ever do is gossip, gossip, gossip--"

[A bell dings, and an underheader reads "Irony, anyone?"]

"-- about other peoples' problems" I don't even bother with it anymore"

"Especially after the board voted your Dad out and replaced him with Maureen Bullock. The bitch was a con-woman!"

I shrug at the fates--

"Well, Mike-- I guess that's what happens when you hand democratic control over to 'The Three Stooges'. Or were there more on that board? It's just that my Dad wasn't organized or all that good with paperwork"

"Well, she had her eyes on that job like a circling hawk. What I heard was that she overheard about "The Center" when Dave Diestler was trying to pick up a woman in a bar. She rubbed her hands together and figured that she was gonna 'crack open the safe' like a bank robber. She came to that Center with her eye on that directorship and was all berating your Dad and calling him incompetent and saying that she was going to write grants and bring in all this money. [Mike furrows his brow in sarcasm, his voice dripping with acid and disbelief like a man swindled afar out of the little he had] Yeah. Right. With a two year degree from a community college. . . . .

"Well, all you need is the wrong agitator to stir up the rabble"

Cut to clip of Classic Silent Movie, "Metropolis" when a charismatic woman inside a grotto is stirring up a grubby-faced mass of workers who are getting more and more agitated with snarling, angry expressions. The movie is wild and over-the-top because it was originally filmed without any sound and the actors have to jack it up in extreme levels. The woman is in the ecstasy of destruction, a destroying angel/whore. This is the restored 1984 Giorgio Moroder edition, so there's a nifty '80s soundtrack in the background to heighten the effect. Perhaps an underheader helps the audience make the loopy connection

Mike continues, like a man regaining his sway

"Wouldn't you know that she loaded up the board with her sympathizers and drove your Dad out. Man, I heard he was MAD that day"

Cut to clip of "Metropolis", horde of rioting ecstatic workers charging the central power plant where stands the bearded, portly foreman with a wrench warning them off from destroying the machinery. They rush in, overwhelm him, and destroy the power station

BACK TO PIZZA HUT

I sigh and act conciliatory. It was all in the past and this is a somewhat bitter memory, the fact they sacked my Dad and that we never came back after that

"Yeah, well-- you know, it was all probably for the better. That ol' 'Center' didn't pay anything and there was no health insurance. A few months later my Dad had his problems with the gallbladder. It all worked out in the end. For us, anyway"

"It didn't work out for ol' Larry George. He was mad because your father called him 'a Nazi' and he voted him off

"Well, he was a Nazi, Mike. One time I came over to his apartment and there he was sitting in his easy chair, drinking liquor and watching that porno movie, 'She-Wolves of the SS'. That's twisted, man. They had a guy on there with a Hitler mustache and a ten-inch dick"

FLASHBACK

My car pulling up to Larry George's apartment at night, a little corner tucked away in tight obscurity like an inn. Knocking on the door and an ominous man opening it like a character from a Charles Dickens novel. He welcomes me in, and sits me down by the computer where has a simulated boxing match going on auto-pilot, a theoretical recreation of Jack Johnson vs. Jim Jefferies, "The Great White Hope". Larry explains about boxers in their prime, how Jim Jefferies might have won if he hadn't been retired for six years, how blacks have longer arms than white people, and one piece skulls. Yes, the great white hope.

Cut to shot of hokey 1920's clip of "Great White Hope", a young man standing on top of a mountain in a cape and a Klansman's hood. It is the lost, the hokey, the defeated, and the discredited!

Back to Pizza Hut

"Larry George only wanted the paper work more organized and for there to be no ban on smoking. Well, the first thing Maureen did was ban smoking. Then she sold the pool table. And she left no paper trail! She raised her salary to $30,000 a year and only worked 10 hours a week. And she made the members bring in their own vanilla sandwich cookies"

Cut to shot of pathetic mentally ill noodling around tables, moping and dissatisfied. What a pathetic lot!

Cut to shot of Larry George scowling. He removes a pack of cigarettes, as if to light one

Cut to shot of waving finger, emblematic of the Nanny welfare state that belittles

Cut to shot of Larry George moping like a little boy

"Wouldn't you know that Maureen stole the $4000 the local Lutheran church raised for them. She bought a new car, paid vacations, meals out, and I heard even a fur coat. By the time "The Center" caught on to what was going on and changed the locks and figured "Call the police" if she ever came in here again, Maureen was gone. She even stole the computer!"

Cut to shot of empty gap in office, a bunch of wires and cables and old beat-to-shit equipment laying around in disarray as the fluorescent ceiling lights buzz above

"Last I heard, she was going around selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door that didn't work! She can suck me off!"

I'm laughing and shaking my head

(Mike leans over and starts speaking confidentially)

"I heard this rumor going around "The Center" that she was in this bestiality video starring a horse. Or at least there was a woman who looked just like her. What they did was put her in this wooden shed so the horse can mount up and fuck her"

Cut to shot of R-rated set-up of horse mounting this set-up (-- Incidentally, I have no idea what this would look like)

"Well, Mike-- in the end I think we'd all like to get even with that woman"

Cut to clip of movie "Metropolis" when furious workers turn their wrath on the agitator, now the despised whore, dragging her from the street and burning her at the stake. They're laughing and jeering while she's cackling like a witch, tossing her head from side to side with the ecstasy of destruction

"Ol' Larry don't like to talk about that. He also don't like to talk about the time he walked into porno store, spent $200 on a pile of tapes, and found out that he brought home "Chicks with Dicks"

Cut to picture of ugly, clawing shemales

Voice-Over: "GAWWWD DAMN-IT!"

Cut to shot of Larry George storming into the porno shop and demanding a refund. The clerk apologizes, and explains that they can't accept back opened boxes because "it's unhygienic". Larry throws a bellowing hissy-fit, and the clerk threatens to call the police as Larry picks the box up over his head and slams it down on the floor. Larry leaves like a grizzly bear having "lost face" and trying to hide it, right through the swinging doors

Cut to shot of box on floor

BACK TO PIZZA HUT, where we're sniggering

"Well, Larry was always literal-minded. It said 'Chicks with Dicks', like they would encounter one or something"

Patrons are looking in our direction quizically, some with pissed-off expressions. Finally, a manager comes over, leans over us, and sternly asks us to leave and never come back. We sheepishly exit, as if "caught in the act" and ashamed. So much for boisterous fun

Cut to shot of us cackling madly outside in the parking lot, doubling over with hilarity with Mike's manic-depressive "HEE-HEE-HEE"

NOW WE'RE SITTING OUTSIDE OF HIS APARTMENT AGAIN

This time, Mike is a bit more reflective and rueful

"Yeah, I'd like to get well and go back to work someday. Maybe drive a truck. But it's that damn 'Church's Chicken'".

"Hmmmm"

"You see, Mike-- I used to be well. I used to be close to God. I used to have money. I used to be happy. But then one day, after I had been pushed & pushed & pushed, God struck me with this illness. It happened when I was working in Church's Chicken under this mean boss. It's like I prayed for a test, like Jonah defying God, and was swallowed by a whale and am sitting in the belly of the beast with all these god-awful people. I wanted to go back and talk to that woman, THAT BLACK BITCH but I got tackled by five employees and put in jail. God wants me to go back there and confront that boss, leap over the counter and bust out windows screaming and hollering"

"I know how that feels. . . . . that one ultimate moment when everything 'went to hell" and if you could 'just go back', like taking an existential stand"

"Yeah, that's it"

"Tell you what, Mike. . . . . ."

CUT TO SHOT OF CHURCH'S CHICKEN

We run in there whooping and screaming like Indians, overthrowing tables and chairs. Mike tries to leap over the counter, but is so fat that he kind of rolls over it instead. Here we are, yelling racial epithets and raising hell-- exorcising demons

Cut to shot of us being hauled away in squad cars

Cut to shot of our mug shots being taken

Cut to shot of us being lead through St. Louis city jail, being made to lean up against the wall as we are patted down, as Negro spiritual plays. Indeed, we are "The Lord's Captives"

As we sit up with a group of Negroes, I mutter to Mike through clenched teeth:

"Don't sing the castration song"

Cut to shot of us sitting in a jail cell as a drunk sleeps with an arm over his face, passed out.

"You know, Mike? Did it ever occur to you that in our lives, it's not exactly 'the exact moment why the South lost the Civil War', but more like those factors were already built in? Men built sailboats, go out to harbor, and wait for the wind to cast them off. Sometimes the wind never blows, but guys like us, they can tell the best stories down at the mariana bar. See what I'm sayin'?"

"Shit on the dick, you're a good friend"

The End