A Snarky Short Story


THE THIRD MAN
—The True Confessions of
Dr. Winkle-Dr. Winkler-Dr. Winkel

“I was so desperate for a book
discussion that I read a book I
knew I wouldn't like and in fact
HATED—it bored the daylights
out of me. Then, the discussion
was desultory at best—not
anyone's fault, really, because
I had nothing much positive to
say about it, but that seems to
be the trend.”—Desdemona

NEW YORK CITY—My dearest Desdemona. I know what you mean—Desperation is the name of the game. I got so desperately bored recently that I even wrote a Novel—even though I hated it and it hated me, but that didn’t make any difference.

Vast hordes of lovely fascinating desperately bored people came to the rather desultory book reading and book-signing party that my pushy Random House publishers recently set up in a rather dreary downtown Poughkeepsie Barnes & Noble pigsty, a really desperately boring & dreary town.

How desperately boring & dreary? It was so dreary and boring in Poughkeepsie that all the little piggy-pooh people there in Poughkeepsie pigged out on my Novel and made me a millionaire!!! That’s how desperate they were for True Lies.

Naturally I was somewhat shocked and so was Gene Hackman, my slouchy bodyguard during my successful book premier and later tour of America. Mr. Hickman made the infamous phrase “Have you ever picked your nose in Poughkeepsie?” from The French Connection so very famous, derigeur & soup de jour dontchaknow.

So, anyway there I was in beautiful downtown putrid ugly Poughkeepsie—desperately bored, even more bored than I was before I wrote my book. Desperation does funny things to people. Like you’d be surprised by how many people shockingly and flagrantly and very seriously pick their noses in Poughkeepsie, my dear…

Gene Hackman thought my book was so funny that he started stalking poor street people and the usual drug addicts all over again in Poughkeepsie dark back alleys, pushing them up against garbage pails and dirty brick walls—really roughing them up and manhandling them bad, while shouting at them “C’mon say it!!! Say it, so I can hear it!!! Tell me the truth!!! Tell me you pick your nose in Poughkeepsie, you sucker!!!”

It was just awful and to make things worse, people in Poughkeepsie at my book readings began laughing so hard they started peeing in their pants. Not only were they picking their noses in Poughkeepsie—but they were peeing in their boxer shorts and panties too. It was just awful…

Which made Gene Hackman even more rabid in his bully bulldog back alley interrogations of anything that moved. That classic little perky Porky Pie hat of his perched on his rather ugly pushy face was so endearing. Plus the name of “Popeye” taken from Faulkner’s trashy novel “Go Down Madupont” or was it “Sanctuary” or was it “The Sound and the Putrescence” or was it “Delta Ding-Dong” I forget…

Anyway, there I was in beautiful downtown Poughkeepsie, surrounded by vast hordes of desperately bored, prissy Poughkeepsie picayune nose-pickers—only gawd knows what they did with their gooey boogers?!?

It’s funny what a person does when they’re desperately bored—so desperately bored they’d pick their noses in public and actually purchase a stupid book like mine. Not just simple thumb through it or peruse a page here or a page there. I mean actually pawing thru it and plundering it for what they desperately think they need—as if my Novel were some kind of secret buried treasure that could spare them from their desperate lives and the [b]Awful Truth[/b]. That their tacky ever-deepening depressing boredom wasn’t going to get better—it was only going to get worse.

One could tell from the vast hordes of desperate nose-picking panty-peeing people flooding my modest little book reading and signing party at the Poughkeepsie Barnes & Noble Bookstore with vast hordes of desperate readers waiting in long lines stretching out the doors of the Book Temple for my stupid insipid crummy autograph that something was desperately wrong going on. That there was noisome Trouble in Tahiti heating up—that there was a terrible troubling undertow and desperate demand for my minor little ho-hum Novel...

Like James Frey’s infamous “A Million Little Pieces,” my novel was a fake autobiography. Okrah Whimsy called it the most soulful tear-jerking fake non-fiction novel she’d ever read and lauded it on her famous TV show. How many hours, she opined, had she sat on her backstage Throne, having magnificent awe-inspiring bowel-movements and elegant constipation-freeing inspirational readings of my rather boring (I thought) fanciful little piece of literary shit.

Of course, everybody in Poughkeepsie looked up to Okrah as the modern trend-setting sophisticated urban Miss Lonelyhearts—and Okrah was more than ready and willing to rake in the big bucks from my novel, along with her cynical publishers who were con-artist experts on how to shakedown the rubes, the whitetrash pulp fiction bored housewives crowd and loony-tune brain-dead drug addicts in piggly-wiggly Poughkeepsie. And that’s just what happened, my dear—they bought a million copies even though it was all Lies, Lies, Lies.

It only affirmed the Elmer Gantry-Burt Lancaster celluloid cynicism that pervaded my decadent consciousness ever since I had my first real sexual experience in my little New Orleans neighborhood Bijou theater’s dark sullen moody sticky-floored Popcorn-smelling Saturday matinee balcony—during an exciting thrilling heart-pounding performance by hysterically kitschy Maria Montez as the campy flaming dancing hoochie-coochie high priestess Cobra Woman herself swooning before the Big Snake much to Sabu’s shock and awe—or was it that movie with Faye Wray drugged and tied to a dumpy Camero while King Kong paraded around Skull Island nightclubs desperately bored and looking for a decent one-night stand—or was it, oh I don’t know, I forget, it’s been such a long time ago…

Anyway, there I was in beautiful downtown Poughkeepsie autographing my “long awaited” Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece—thinking about my royalty check riches, fabulous movie rights and all the usual rigmarole
Razzmatazz that goes into publishing the Great American Novel—along with greedy thoughts about a sequel to my pusillanimous, pulsating, pink-eyed, peachy-keen, picaresque, putrid novel…

BTW, Desdemona, did I tell you what the name of my putrid nose-picking panty-peeing all-too-pleasing Novel was? Forgive me—it was entitled “Confessions of a Try-Sexual Try-Anything Trippy-Dippy Euro-Trash Movie Star” with the triple-dipper cliché being that I played three actors at the same time in the Orson Welles-Graham Greene noir thriller “The Third Man.”

You see I got to play three characters at the same time—Dr. Winkler, Dr. Winkle and Dr. Winkel. Playing a cranky mincing decadent Viennese Jansenist gigolo, living with his rouged toupee-tilting Baron Kurtz nightclub violinist lover, may sound rather queer to you—but nevertheless my “Confessions of a Try-Sexual Try-Anything Trippy-Dippy Euro-Trash Movie Star” fake autobiography changed many lives there in lonely Poughkeepsie and the many dreary boring towns and cities across America.

The clincher in my book was at the very end when Harry Lime throws me and Baron Kurtz off the Giant Ferris Wheel down to our horrible scream-queen deaths there in Vienna when we squeal on him hiding away in the sewers and gutters beneath the bombed-out depressingly boring streets of postwar Vienna.

Ah yes, and I received 3 nice Oscars at the Academy Awards that year for my exquisite swan dive all the way down into a dumpy hotdog stand from way up there at the very top of the spectral looming film noir Giant Ferris Wheel!!!
So, anyway, Desdemona, that’s the story of how desperate things can get—when one gets desperately bored with oneself. The moral of the story being, I suppose, that Despair is actually a goldmine, honey, and that you too can be a success story and do what only desperate people do so well. And that’s to make desperation and boredom your profession—like I’ve done here in Snarksville. But you don’t have to believe me. Simply go to Poughkeepsie—and you’ll find out the exquisite Truth too…


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