The Great Gay Peacock flies to Newark

(yet another brilliant story...)

In the town of Littlepocket, New Jersey was a small band of onion-eating postal workers. Postal workers were not popular as a rule, and the onions made it worse. The onions arrived, strangely, not in the mail, but on a bus filled with Mexican sweatshop workers who were employed in the shoe-manufacturing side of the Hudson River.

Littlepocket was home to the Precision Dance Competition, where young men and women stole away and precisely danced the Koochoo, the Wombat and the Delorean [recalls Back to the Future].

One of the great hopes of the dance world was Edgar F. Gunwaddle, who was sympathetic to the Mexican plight and grew visibly reddened whenever his mom made reference to tacos, or hired Mexicans to water her suburban lawn.

Edgar was an activist, and the dancing made his a celebrated cause, for let it not be said that a man's legs have never danced him into the record books.

Edgar worked night and day on the Peacock, a crazed dance that made him sweat. The Peacock was a stinky dance, and it was not without practical and social peril. Edgar was a bashful stinkmaker in his private life who refused to fart or even be caught without deodorant in his over-the-shoulder laptop sack. Imagine, then, the stink of sweat.

Peacocks were plentiful, as it was 1999. The great peacock hunt had not fully decimated the beplumaged game fowl and many fine feathers spread across the eastern seaboard. They clogged the propellors of ships, blocking up the drainage pipes and littering the beach coast.

Storkels Mendacus Mulberry was a beach worker charged with general maintenance and shoreline vigilance. He strutted about the surf's edge like a grand Iroquois chief, or a great janitor from beyond the mists of centuries. Mulberry drove an elevated hovercraft across the glades and bays of the New Jersey peacock-feather delta. He searched for flotsam and jetsam through the lens of his optical X-Viewtron binoculars and cussed at the clouds whenever they threatened his sorties with a contratempal rain.

Obadiah Von Boatwater was Mulberry's liege upon the hovercraft. The man was a grand Ethiopian chessmaster, a top ranked pogo stick-hopper who somehow found himself exiled to the deltas of New Jersey. The Nubian could sing great Sinatra and his plaintive guttural rumbles did not just clear phlegm from his throat but somehow attracted the peacocks of the delta.

These three characters collided one night in mid-river, Boatwater and Mulberry in their patrol craft and Edgar F. Gunwaddle in his bare bones laser. It was a mischance that scuttled a great dancer's career. Gunwaddle drowned and as he choked and thrashed the two shoreline vigilantes splashed at him with paddles to stoke some buoyancy into the man. But this could only aggravate him and Gunwaddle sank to the bottom of the man-claiming Hudson, kicking and thrashing his last glorious Peacock down into the mud.

The police arrived but could not reclaim the waterlogged corpse and their dredgings only returned sundry rotten planks and tires from the riverbed.

[unfinished of course]