Kyle Novak
The Now, everybody on thish-yer green earth a’ God’s has got themself a family and an’t no ones family an ordinry one, but folk call me Inman and I come from a large clan a folk what ain’t like none yall hearda before. Like most what come from a southern line, the names a’ my great-great-gran-pappys and gran-mappys can be traced afore the battle of Now great-gran-pappy Clem come up out from the bayous a Alabamer like all his forerunners and he first got his learnin in the fine craft of craw-daddy raisin’ when he was just a toddlin’ young-un. It’s what you oughta know ‘bout craw-daddy raisin’ is that it an’t like the shrimpin’ and its comes from a knowledge of the With his newfound shinin’ skills he moved himself up to Martin County Kentucky to make his shine and he soon founded the After his retirement in ’89 Great-gran-pappy Clem gave all his wealth to his most eldest son Jimmy-bob or Jimbo for shorts. Now gran-pappy Jimbo was infact a good man and my mee-maw Linda Lou was the inspiration for the greatest bluegrass song of all the ages “I’ma goin’ back to Ol’ Kentucky”. Unfort-u-nately, gran-pappy Jimbo was a drinkin’ man and one night he was so dag-gum ine-ber-erare-rated that he took all them dag-gum roosters of ours from they coop and went a-leadin’ dem boys down to the still and he threw each and every one a’ dem boys into a-‘shine and those was some dirty birds they was and they done be-fouled up the whole batch o white lightning. And not ony that, but a rooster on the bottle is a right ugly sight and they roosters was ‘specially rowdy so that they done went back up the hill to Clemsville and (with the help of Jimbo) them bantys tore up the village somethin’ fierce so that come mornin’ time when they usually cock-a-doodlin they was a hun-erd miles from town ore yonder in West Virgina causin’ a ruckus in them coal mines. And it was that before they left naught a buildin’ was left a-standin’ and naught a woman wasn’t a-weepin’. After that commotion gran-pappy Jimbo done got hisself a-ran outta town and ain’t no one seen his sorry lily-livered yellow-hide since then and the legendary whisky of Clem was lost for the rest of forever. However, he son came into his riches and he rebuilt Clemsville into the bestestest hovel in the whole of So it was that the next years was dirty ones indeed for the family and we was forced to go back to the land a-huntin’ and a-trappin’ possum and coons just to survive and some years passed since my pappy returned that before the summer of ’49 I was borned and I lived in them hills learnin ter skin a var-I-ety of varmints and how to cook up some vittles to et. However, bein’ rambuckous young-un I soon craved for the big city and the sop-histiated folk of them parts. So I went to Memoirs of a Christmas Carol Parody In by gone days in the latter years of my youth I partook in a certain creative Later that day I posted several derogatory comments about the French online at some pathetic site and then retired for the evening. Sleep soon overtook me, but much too early I was awoken by a warbling coming from outside my bedchamber window. Grabbing a rifle and a half a dozen rounds I cautiously proceeded to the window. Slowly I lifted the locks, but before I had a chance to prepare myself for what may be lurking outside a figure burst through the glass. I attempted frantically to shoot the beast though he stopped my bullets with exceeding skill. “Hey, quit that!” he demanded and I dropped the firearm. “Who are you? An assassin sent to take me out?” I asked. “No” was his reply “I am Al Bundy, well actually his spirit.” “That’s impossible! Al Bundy was a television character in the wildly popular sitcom “Married…with Children”.” “Maybe so, but the image of Ed O’Neill that was immortalized in film lingers now in myself.” He stood triumphantly for a moment then broke down weeping and to divert his attention from his utterly pathetic life I asked, “Okay, well why are you here then?” “To teach you a lesson about respecting the French, young whippersnapper. You see, when I was alive, or less dead anyway, I disliked the Frogs as well. Do you know what happened to me because of my distaste for “I thought you became a shoe salesman because you married that wild red head… and because you’re a pathetic loser?” “Oh, it’s so nice to see someone who holds the dead in such high esteem” he lamented sarcastically “but the point right now is that you need to start respecting the French and their…uhh…cultured ways. Tonight you will be visited by some spirits and then you will know that you did indeed behold the one who threw four touchdowns in one game.” Suddenly he was engulfed in flames and descended into hell, leaving me alone to ponder the strange words he had spoken and I lay there pondering whether or not he was just fabrication of my brain. A short time later a specter appeared before me and I trembled at the site of him. He was none other than Ferdinand Foch the Marshal of “You diz-respectful American scum! You and your kind think dat you control ze world, you do not ‘onor ze great military achievements of “Like what?” I asked dumbfounded. “For one ve ‘ave fought valiantly against our barbaric neighbors, ze Germans!” he proudly declared. “That isn’t an accomplishment!” I roared in a fit of rage. “Especially when you lost miserably to them in the Franco-Prussian war; in World War One you would have been crushed if not for and us so called “American scum,” and in World War Two you were conquered in a month. We saved you; by our blood were your putrid lands kept safe.” “You forget yourself boy, ‘ave you no memory of the great Napoleon” he replied. “Oh no! How could I have forgotten his fantastic achievements?” I said sarcastically. “He caused seventeen years of war, leaving six million people dead and your country destitute.” “Sacre bleu!” He cried with a sudden change of heart. “I ‘ave been sorely mistaken about my ‘omeland I will not forget zat A short while later the second apparition appeared before me and announced himself as none other than Charles de Gaulle; he beckoned me to come toward him and as I approached I felt my feet live the ground and indeed my entire body was set free of the physical world. We passed through time and space while stars wheeled overhead and it seemed as if a life age of the earth had passed before we exited the void. Immediately upon exiting the realm and not a second later I was informed by the spirit that I had been brought to Immediately I was back in my room and the spirit was gone. It seemed that I had learned the error of my ways; however, something was awry as I had not been visited by a third spirit. I was not left to ponder for an extended amount of time as the final apparition soon manifested before me. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing filthy American? You have not bowed before me eh!” he audaciously demanded. To reply to this I asked. “Well, who the Hell are you?” “I am Scott, the Greatest of the French Canadian’s, and you do not respect us!” “Of course I don’t respect “No, why?……you filthy Yank!” “Everything is about the “Maybe so, but French Canada is the best This remark I could not even dignify with a response so instead I scoffed loudly and in his drunken Canadian rage he left me with a final thought: “Filthy American you’ve won this round but your uppance will come soon enough!!!” He disappeared and I awoke to find that it was dawn. Swiftly I ran to the street and cried out “The French have invented ice cream. They are still hopeless, but at least they did something right (unlike So it came to pass that on that day I understood the purpose of
Born Loser When I was fifteen I decided to get a job so that I wouldn’t be another piece of crap broke lazy pile like all my friends. Something made me realize that sitting in the basement, playing Halo 3 for eleven hours a day and spending what money I had on Doritos and Dr. Pepper, wasn’t the most productive or fulfilling way for me to live my life. So, one day I walked down the street into the establishment of Mr. Nikolai or, The Beard as everybody called him, and asked for a job cooking cheese at his world class one-star restaurant, McCheesies. McCheesies, you ask? Well, basically the story behind McCheesies is that when The Beard was seven his family moved from Balk, Khazakstan to Canada where he learned the fine art of making delicious “edible” foodstuffs using primarily inexpensive Industrial Grade pasteurized process cheese product. When he perfected his art at the age of twenty he moved to America to start a restaurant that everyone would love and afford. And so, McCheesies was born. The Beard sold everything from Pizza (with cheese on it) to Sandwiches (with cheese on them) to Cheese curds (made from cheese) and he made sure to mix pure lard into everything to give it that authentic “heart attack surprise” taste. Anyway, back to me. After a grueling thirty second interview he said to me. “Now I give you a chance to work here cause you seem like a nice kid. So I’ll pay you dead minimum wage with no discount or free food and all you gotta do is show up, stay busy your entire shift, and do whatever I tell you to. If we don’t got customers you go clean the john and I’ll holler at you to come fix up the food for them. Just remember not to stand around, cause if I see you standin’ around, you’re outta here. I can replace anyone who works here, I just fired my own daughter yesterday, so don’t think you can just be a slacker.” With The Beard’s words of encouragement in my head I went home hardly realizing that I had embarked on the most insane journey of my life. The next day I arrived at five o’clock ready to learn how to cook cheese and the first person I met was my co-worker, Mr. Cluchie. Cluchie was the absolute definition of a lowlife. He had never graduated, because in the ninth grade he attempted, for some reason, to drunken box the superintendent of the school and was expelled. He spent the next few years in Denver with his dad and then moved back to town to live with his mom and eventually got a job a McCheesies. During his first week on the job he was trying to cut a pizza and sliced off his hand instead. Apparently he bled on eighteen-hundred bucks worth of the cheese before they got him to the hospital and reattached his hand, but for some reason the nerves didn’t connect properly and he was left with no feeling in his hand (he regularly demonstrated this to me by stabbing it with a fork). Still, the accident left him deep in debt and he coped by spending all of his paychecks at the bar and drowning his sorrows in liquor. In addition to his drunkenness, he also suffered from insomnia and when I first met him he had not slept in eight days and hallucinated frequently. The first words he said to me were “Just to let you know, I hate you cause I’m a prick and you’re like twelve.” Great! I thought, me and this guy are gonna get along swell. So in the first night that I worked, me and Cluchie pushed about a hundred pounds of cheese before he tried to uppercut me in the jaw and sell me and ounce of marijuana. When I refused he smacked me with a greased out pan and went outback to smoke the stuff himself leaving me alone to man the kitchen. When he came back in awhile later he was red-eyed and embarked on a riveting and adventurous tail of his family history. I learned about how they were American Indian and had had the name Moosepaw, until the French arrived in 1999 and changed the name to Cuveur for five years before they formally became the Cluchies through a series of shotgun weddings and poker nights. Despite our rocky beginning, me and Cluchie ended up pretty good pals and I have to admit that for an idiot, he taught me a couple of cool things about metal…. (rage, slipknot, linkin park. You know the deal) and Frank Sinatra. Anyway a story he told me about slipknot. Apparently he was at one of their concerts and they were rocking out and stuff, next thing Cluchie knows a guitar goes sailing through the air, smashes his face in, and he wakes up two days later in the hospital with a broken jaw. The cool part was that slipknot actually came in and apologized for the whole thing…or so he claims. I personally didn’t believe what he was saying do to his inebriation at the time, but I suppose it’s possible that it happened. Now then, Cluchie was what you’d call a slacker who was good at what he did because although he spent more time on the clock than anyone before or after him. He worked less than most and after five months or so of slacking off and harassing new employees, the boss got sick of it. To make a long story short, they started cutting back his hours and then one day outta the blue…BAM! He got fired. Well for the average guy getting fired from the McCheesies wouldn’t have been the greatest tragedy of all time, but Cluchie’s woman had left him the week before. So that, coupled with the mental problems that he already had, made for a pretty pissed off ex-cook. Luckily Cluchie had a friend who worked at McCheesies, Donald, or Big Bird as we called him (or Dragon Master Sephias, or Dark Master Sephron, or Luke Nunya, or Captain Zucchini Head (he had a lot of names)) because of the fact that the guy was 6’ 4”, two-hundred and sixty pounds of pure muscle, and he walked like Big Bird from Seasame Street. It’s also worth it to mention that the guy had attempted to murder his mom by throwing a butcher knife at her and he had a collection of eleven swords, a battle axe, and some Freddy Cruger claws that we’d slice boxes with behind the store until one of the knives went flying off and nearly hit a waitress. So anyway, Cluchie and The Bird had become best pals drinking at the bar every night and smoking Mary Jane every day. So when he got fired he called up Big Bird and said: “Donald, come fishing with me. I just got fired and I think I’m gonna kill myself.” Well being the nice guy that he was Donald went fishing with the guy and although they didn’t have much luck (“…N-yah I went and the worst part was we did catch nothin’) at least Cluchie didn’t die. Oh no, his fortunes actually took a turn for the better that day because he got a job at the asylum in town and started out at nine bucks an hour wiping peoples backsides. And if that wasn’t enough to cheer a guy up he even made enough money to buy a car. So things turned out pretty well for that guy after all I guess. The last time I saw him was at the midnight showing of the Simpsons movie. He showed up with Big Bird and was completely wasted having just spent an entire day (and a week’s wages) at the bar. After the movie I talked with them for awhile while they stumbled their way home because it had been awhile since I’d seen either of them. Cluchie still worked at the asylum and Big Bird had quit his job at McCheesies after he fell in love with a girl from Florida on myspace. He had planned to take a Greyhound down to see her, the only problem was, he told me, was that she got court ordered to job core in Georgia. So he was stuck in town living off welfare and vodka. In any case I got home and that was the last I ever saw of Cluchie, but I’ll always the remember him as the man who taught me what it meant to be a born loser.
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