Well me and
Frank (the
Wookiee in his college days) had wound up flat broke in a roach-sprinkled
Reno motel. That morning I'd woken up with a tongue tasting like
cheap-ass Tequila, my manly frame inverted on a comfy chair that was shedding stuffing like
Roseanne Barr Arnold at a lipsuctionists trade show. Frank was swatting flies with a
squash racket he'd liberated from some touring
Taiwanese salarymen. He'd duct-taped up the racket head to prevent the smaller targets slipping through. Evidently, there was
acid to be had around here.
The room was full of old-fashioned waffle irons that we'd sprung from some poor bastard's storage garage the night before. We'd been so hopped up on goofballs that we kept dropping the damn things lugging them back to the car. My feet felt swollen. I looked up and saw that they were red and throbbing. I was just glad to see there were no griddle marks. Task one of the day would be locating my boots then.
To cut a long story short, which would be desirable at this juncture I sense, we somehow managed to trade them waffleirons for a bunch of bananas, a printing press and a betamax VCR. Mr. Lucky, our simian friend, was much obliged to get them bananas. I never saw a monkey drink as hard as that son of a bitch, and he really needed that potassium-rich snack to cushion the blow. Frank was tinkerin' with the press as Lucky and I played pool in the lobby. Lucky had to keep helping himself to tall glasses of water from the soda pump, but he still chalked up an easy win.
Well, we went back up to see if Frank was rational. He said he'd got the press working and had enough bananas stashed to convince Lucky to operate it for a few hours. We were all agreed and production began in earnest. I went down to the store to see if I could score any more yellow fruit while Frank started tearing up more king size and gluing it together again. He had a plan.
Laying blame would not get us anywhere after the event of course, so I mean Frank no ill. We were all guilty on this one. A week later of course we looked back at this episode and felt it could have been handled better. The key thing, of course, when the cops show up enquiring about why you've been trying to pass off banana-smelling one-sided notes as legal tender, is not to allow your lysergic-frazzled travelling companion to try to bribe them with more. I won't be making any more dollars, you can count on that.