The Puppeteer Trilogy by Mike Marino (ebook reader that looks like a book .txt) 📕

Chapter One - Page 4

Chapter Two - Page 9

Chapter Three - Page 14

Chapter Four - Page 19

Chapter Five - Page 24

Chapter Six- Page 29

Chapter Seven - Page 35

Chapter Eight - Page 40

Chapter Nine - Page 46

Chapter Ten - Page 50

Chapter Eleven - 57

Chapter Twelve - Page 61

Chapter Thirteen - Page 65

Chapter Fourteen - Page 71

Chapter Fifteen - Page 78

As I entered my  second floor apartment, my  arms loaded with what could be best described as hungover marionettes who had seen better Boston days, I was met with a barrage of recently beheaded ventriloguist dummy heads hurtling at me with the atmospheric re-entry fury of Charlie McCarthy meteors heading on a collision course with dinosaurs and a manifest destiny that manifested itself and festered unfettered in its quest to quash end extinguish life as I know it.

She was PISSED! She being the head hurler aforementioned  who was responsible for the dummy decimation and decapitation. God damn it..she must have run out of painkillers again. Lovely little Darvons, or perhaps she took too little belladonna and her menstrual cramps were now in charge of her control tower.

“Whoa, what the hell are you doing! Stop it!” was all I could muster up in the way of offering a truce for something I didn’t even know we were arguing about.

She, again the head hurler whose name is Louis Comfort Tiffany, responded not too kindly I might add, “You...you asshole,  we’re out of money. The rent is due in a week and all you do is to avoid a real job. You know WORK! PAYCHECK! FOOD! I earn a paycheck, but it’s not enough for the two of us and these...these creepy dummies you keep around here. IT looks like a flop house for puppet junkies!!!”

To set the record straight for you the reading public, I do have a job..two in fact two count them, TWO! I bust my ass as a writer and stage theatricals for a living. I felt smug as  I reminded her of those facts.

She came close, you now that red face rage in your face close and slowly said deliberately emphasizing each word for me to absorb and comprehend as though I were a three legged dog named Tripod who laid about all day on some southern   front porch dreaming of banjo music until a car went by that I could chase (hence how any dog named Tripod probably got its name in the first place on a summer day in pursuit of a Gremlin thereby losing a leg...paw and all of course, its front leg having gotten stuck in the rear hubcap and spun around at 50 MPH as though it were on G Force spin dry in a Maytag!)

“Job? You are kidding me, yes?” Oh shit. Here it comes, duck and cover. I better head her off at the pass.

“I know it’s not much, but I need time to write the next great American novel. For Whom The Bells Toll, that kind of thing. I also want to write plays. Make a huge Andrew Lloyd Webber splash on Broadway...the great white way where I can give the middle finger salute and my fucking regards to patrons of the arts.”

There that should do it. I told her off but good. Damn, I was proud of myself for that vendetta of an explanation.

“Write the next great American novel Mr. F Scott Hemingway Steinbeck Twain? You haven’t written one word,” she pointed out.

I countered her thrust and parry with “I have over 100 pages already written!” Proudly spoken!

“Yes, yes and all 100 are here, crumpled up in the wastebasket!”

“It takes time, you know for it to come together, but I do have that freelance writing job that pays a little, so yes I am a writer!”

Then she clobbered me with the ax of reality.

“You write shithole fortunes  for the Shanghai Fortune Cookie Company for god sakes. I found this months list you did, what a joke…’Good fortune will smile on you as  does Buddha’ or how about these, ‘Excitement and intrigue follow you closely wherever you go!’ ‘A pleasant surprise is in store for you.’ ‘May life throw you a pleasant curve.’ You call this a career? Miss Buddha here ain’t smiling!”

“But...but…” stammer…

She continued “Write plays? You do puppet shows on the Boston Commons on the weekends. Fucking puppets!”

“Now hold on,” my ire now erect, “they aren’t just puppets, there are some marionettes and hand puppets too!”

“Good, I’m leaving you so the next time you need sex let Senor Wences give you one hell of a hand held blow job, and if you’re really hurting go fuck a mime!”

With that she walked out the door, suitcase in hand, leaving me with an apartment that had been through a blitzkrieg of super bitch proportions. Head everywhere, headless dummy bodies strewn about mixing with marionettes tangled in twine. Hand puppets were headless as well. It was a crime scene...a real Charles Manson Marionette Murder spree…

I sat down on the floor to regroup with a warm bottle of Night Train wine, the toast of the town at the Jesus Saves Mission. I also broke open another box of free fortune cookies they always sent me along with my meager check.

If Buddha were going to smile on me...now was the time….

Kathleen Morphine was frustrated by her early morning foray to find the key to the magic fountain of artistic expression of American Gothic Grant Wood, famed Iowa painter of corfields, farms, agrarian landscapes and a closet homosexual. She now returned to her third floor  apartment in one the old factories in Boston’s renovated red brick gentrified 19th Century Industrial Revolution . She and other artists of varied disciplines were living out their Bohemian dream of an artful lowbrow starving artist hipster chic utopia in buildings that at one time made shoes, plows, light bulbs and  firearms.

Through research she discovered her floor was a long forgotten button manufacturer in the 1800’s. At one point they made all the buttons for General U S Grant’s Army. The confederacy had developed a plantation mentality that produced cotton and slaves...alas..but...no buttons for the CSA.  It was illegal for Northern companies to do business with the south of any goods….thus began the great button famine of 1861!

The button company, eager to profit off the war struck a deal with a British company in London to purchase the new CSA buttons and in turn would sell them to the Confederacy. Ah gotta love American ingenuity! No laws were broken. The button manufacturer made a fortune throughout the uncivil war as now both Blue and Grey could button up their pants and in effect not let their guard down exposing their pride and joy flapping in the breeze.     

She entered her hybrid loft apartment/studio  empty handed of any inspiration. Every Boston morning she went search of a patch greenery of one single Thomas Hart Benton muse inspiring farmland with red barn and silos and a sad eyed cow standing alone in a patchwork field of soybeans and tall corn with perhaps a far off in the distance one dimensional man of Amish persuasion, stoic and religious.

Hold the Amish, hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, religious sects don’t upset us!  Hold on the lonely sentinel of a grain silo. This was Boston afterall, a modern Boston I might add where the Standells sang proudly in complete mono….”I love that dirty water..Boston you’re my home!” (Cue the familiar guitar riff here)

It was a landscape of steel and glass, a subway system (first in the US) and of most importance, it was one of the first ballparks, to offer hot dogs for sale during the games! “Fenway Franks, get yer red hots.”

In place of a serene pastoral portrait of the land...Boston could only offer up old hubcaps that ended up in a vacant city lot overgrown with weeds hiding rats . Beer cans and bottles, broken pieces of lumber, a dead possum every now and then, old used condoms, hypodermic needles. A monstrous monument to refuse with a regional flavor. “Make him an offer he can’t refuse!” I love one word that can switch meaning faster than Charlie Sheen can remove a bra from a virgin.

As she sat down in the chair by the window, an epiphany of extraordinary illumination came as a bolt of lightning. Rain silos and red barns, was the landscape Grant Wood and others lived. However,  trash and Salvation Army stores defined her neo-American Gothic landscape.

No lonely cow in a field..but there is probably a stray dog  rooting around in an alley garbage can for scraps of food amidst the broken glass bottles and junkie needles  you had to deftly dodge. The inspiration was intoxicating. She would cast aside her midwest search for the heart,of  Americana art replacing paint and brush with rusted cans and hubcaps and anything else that defined HER world.

Her quest for artistic recognition was insatiable, you know gallery galas with enough wine, cheese, fondue and kiss kiss greetings to fill Boston Harbor. At this point all she could garner and gather were a few commissions for the Sleep Inn Motel chain to recreate paintings of various breeds of dogs playing poker and the paint by numbers look of an old man and the sea with a rickety boat. She was very good at reproducing kitsch, but she craved more.

Andy Warhol painted soup cans and bananas as canvas subject matter.  Kathleen Morphine would use soup cans, junkie needles and beer cans as well s a myriad of other good old fashioned trash  found on a scrounge or two as the message of her medium….

The paintings would be composed of objects that define society’s castaway toss away disposable attitude to life and the planet itself all in a three dimensional  projection from the canvas which would have various ecology posters pasted in place. Of course she would have steal a Do Not Litter sign from the Department of Public Works to highlight a video screen   in the middle of the canvas with Iron Eyes Cody tears streaming down his cheek as he gazed at a trash filled stream.

She had her direction now. Don’t try to power your environment...let nature empower you!

She sat back and smiled and lit up a joint..content now..while across the street on