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Tales with a Twist (James Thurber) is an excerpt from Jay Dubya's latest e-book titled Hawthorne Hacked, Shakespeare Sacked and Thurber Thwacked (Adult Lit: 320 page) (Now in Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, and also at Smashwords)
“Popular Fairy Tales with a Twist”
The items below are from the James Thurber section of HH, SS & TT
“The Little Girl and the Wolf”
One snowy afternoon during a severe blizzard a big bad wolf was impatiently waiting near an icy forest trail for the next little girl wearing a red coat (for she looked like a British soldier of the colonial era) to approach carrying a basket of food to her sick and aged grandmother. Finally, a little girl dressed in a Salvation Army red coat and accompanying hood came along toting a basket, presumably filled with tacos, guacamole and other fine edibles.
“Are you carrying that fine basket of food to your grandmother whose crib is in the nearby yonder ‘hood?” the wolf politely asked with a heavy British Cockney accent.
“Yes I am,” the little well-mannered girl courteously declared to the totally grotesque-looking stranger.
So then the nefarious wolf (who was too poor to own any sheep’s clothing) requested of the little girl exactly where in yonder ‘hood did the old decrepit grandmother have her crib. “I understand that your ancient grandmother used to be a hairdresser, so I want to get a trim and a shampoo before the raunchy bitch dies.”
The accommodating little girl dressed in red during the height of the nasty winter blizzard supplied the correct information, and then both individuals disappeared into the snow-clad woods.
When the lost little girl finally arrived at her grandmother’s house half-frostbitten six hours later, she immediately observed and realized that somebody was occupying the crib (bed) wearing a nightgown and having a nightcap (a tall glass of Southern Comfort).
“Grandmom, why is your skin so damned furry?” the little girl asked. “Are you turning into a werewolf? Or perhaps maybe turning into an is wolf instead?”
The house in the ‘hood consisted only of one two-hundred foot long bedroom, so when the little girl wearing the red coat with the famous red hood approached twenty-five or so feet away from the bed, the perceptive child noticed that a diabolical wolf wearing a nightgown and a nightcap does not look any more like anybody’s dumb-ass grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn Mayer’s roaring lion looks like a laughing hyena or like a laughing Barack Obama.
So therefore, the clever little girl nonchalantly removed a glock automatic from under the heavy red blanket and red bed sheet and proficiently shot the mentally challenged wolf dead.
Moral: Don’t fuck around with little streetwise girls who happen to be cavorting like streetwalkers and strutting their’ stuff in the ‘hood. It’s not quite as easy nowadays to get a trick from (or to fool, molest or eat) little girls as it used to be.
“The Princess and the Tin Box”
Once upon a time in a dipshit faraway anonymous country, several centuries before adventurous Christopher Columbus had ever contemplated discovering America, there lived a despotic dysfunctional King whose only doted-on daughter was the prettiest princess in the known world. The royal girl’s blue eyes were like the cornflower, her blonde hair was sweeter than the perfumed hyacinth, her tiny-nipple tits were like miniature tangerines, her scrawny throat made the local swan take a dive into the waterless lake it owned, and the Princess’s firm, trim ass was the envy of every non-dieting elephant in the not-so-vast land.
From the time she was a year old, the adorable little Princess had been showered with gifts and presents, starting with her baby shower. At age five, her nursery looked like Cartier’s window, and the spoiled brat would have breakfast every morning at her playmate cousin Tiffany’s neighboring castle. Her toys, including three regal cone-shaped, A-cupped, pointed brassieres, were all made out of gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sticky used condoms.
At age six, the Princess was not permitted to have wooden alphabet nor number blocks, or Japanese china dolls, or rubber dogs, or brand new rubbers to inflate like balloons, or linen books, simply because those mundane materials were considered to be too inferior for the only daughter of a totally dysfunctional King. However, the favored Princess walked around the palace in silver-and-samite slippers while narcissistically wearing her sapphire-and-topaz bathrobe, slept in an ebony and ivory bed inlaid with rubies, but preferred playing with her used inflatable condoms and her three regal cone-shaped, A-cupped, pointed brassieres.
When the Princess was seven, she just had her twelfth period and so was allowed to attend her six-year-old brother’s grand wedding and throw real pearls and clams at the merry bride and groom instead of her Uncle Ben’s rice. Only the horny male nightingale, with his lyre of gold was permitted to sing melodies of praise for the Princess. The common blackbird, with its boxwood flute, which is something to sometimes crow about, was kept out of the palace grounds, the drunken guards stationed at the imperial gate singing each time, “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.”
When the Princess became age eighteen, her tangerine-like tits had grown overnight to be the size of navel oranges, even though they had developed on her chest and not around her bellybutton. The proud dysfunctional King, fully aware of his daughter’s maturation through puberty, dispatched a royal ambassador to the courts of five neighboring kingdoms where other dumb kings also ruled. The extemporaneous announcements being orally circulated in the five neighboring jurisdictions indicated that the Princess’s hand (along with the rest of her voluptuous body) would be given in marriage to the prince who would bring her the gift that she liked the most.
The first arrogant prince to arrive at the dysfunctional King’s palace rode upon a swift Italian Stallion from Sicily. The clumsy jerk-off descended from his steed and laid upon the gift table a big apple (not quite the size of Manhattan) made of solid gold which the royal asshole had cowardly pilfered from a blind and handicapped dragon’, who had been guarding the gigantic fruit replica for a thousand years. The colossal apple was placed on a long ebony picnic table set-up to hold tokens and expensive gifts of various non-tailor suitors wanting to marry the Princess and get laid ever after.
The second haughty prince rode-in on a black horse imported from a country run by a lot of dark horse politicians. This royal jackass carried a musical jewelry box inlaid with rubies and diamonds, the exquisite box containing six unused mammoth mechanical dildos with comprehensive operating instructions.
The third egotistical prince riding a gray pony brought along as a wonderful gift a lesbian nightingale made of sparkling sapphires and emeralds, the attractive wind-up bird robustly singing, “This Is My Cunt-Tree,” redundantly over and over again.
The fourth condescending prince riding a fiery yellow filly from Philly’ offered the Princess an immense heart made of rubies and emeralds, even though the Princess already possessed a young and healthy heart. As a special gift bonus, a diamond arrow was piercing the heart as part of the combo enticement.
The fifth prince rode a white albino plow donkey and was the handsomest of the suitors, even though the idiot had no tailoring skills whatsoever. But the muscular fifth prince was the strongest specimen among the five competitors. However, this royal asshole was the son of a pauper king whose realm had been plagued by mice, frogs, locusts, lizards and wizards, along with a myriad of mining engineers so that the entire empire was basically doomed and defunct. This fifth humble noble brought as a gift a tiny lackluster tin box that in truth, really lacked luster. The cheap thin metal container was filled with feldspar, mica, Formica and hornblende, a weird mixture of goat and ram horns, which the fifth prince had picked-up off the ground on his three mile journey.
The four other self-centered, sanctimonious, ingrate royal rivals indulgently roared with disdainful merriment when they evaluated the tawdry tin box gift presented by the shy, modest shabbily-dressed fifth prince. But the curious Princess carefully scrutinized and examined the tin box very closely, as if she were carefully investigating her own wet, pink pubic box with a hand-held mirror.
The enamored Princess squealed with delight, nearly having multiple orgasms, for in all her living days she had always been deluged with priceless metals and precious gemstones, but the royal female had never before ever seen worthless bullshit items such as mica, Formica, feldspar and hornblende. The skinny, cute, frail undernourished fifth prince then gently placed the tin box upon the display table next to the fucked-up singing jeweled Jew nightingale.
“Now,” the proud pompous King said to his favorite (one and only) daughter, “you must choose the gift you like the most and then marry the fuck-head, er, I mean marry the royal personage who had offered it!”
The Princess cordially smiled at all the guests gathered in attendance, then stepped over to the exhibition table and next the brat selected the present she loved the best. It was the special, elegant, musical jewelry box, which was the sensational gift presented by the second haughty prince.
“The way I objectively assess the overall situation,” the Princess unremarkably remarked, “this elaborate gemstone musical jewelry box is very magnificent and expensive and when I’m officially married, I shall gladly utilize the extra-bonus mechanical dildos that are inside if Prince #2’s dick is too small to keep the love light burning! Bur honestly Father,” the ecstatic Princess finished, “I don’t need any goddamned comprehensive instructions’ manual on how to use a fuckin’ dildo!”
Moral: All those stupid assholes who thought that the spoiled, doted-on Princess was going to select the fifth lazy, indigent, bankrupt prince along with the thin, tawdry tin box loaded with worthless rocks and assorted junk kindly stay after class and write one hundred times on the front blackboard, “I would rather have a hunk of bent aluminum than a fabulous diamond necklace and a good piece of ass!”
“The Tiger Who Would Be King”
One morning the presumptuous male tiger woke-up inside the dense jungle and insisted to his apathetic mate that he was indeed the undisputed king of beasts.
“Bullshit,” the realistic wife answered. ‘Leo the Lion is the king of beasts. Any indigenous asshole knows that basic fact.”
“We need to institute a change in order to eliminate that false stereotype,” the muscular tiger of the house indicated, ignoring his sage spouse’s wisdom. “The other animals are crying for a change.”
The pragmatic tigress obediently listened to her husband’s bull-crap rhetoric, but the only crying her keen ears could discern was the whimpering and wheezing of her own rambunctious cubs.
“I’ll be king of beasts by the time the bad moon is arising,” the tiger boasted and predicted. “I’ll have to buy a brand new orange uniform with more stripes on it than the obsolete one I now have.”
“Oh sure,” the wary tigress cynically replied, as the overworked wife then attended to a crying male cub sporting its father’s facial features, the toddler complaining about an imaginary thorn that had recently penetrated its paw. “Go out and get killed trying to conquer the jungle! Leave me here at home miserable and destitute while you futilely pursue your frivolous, hollow ambition! I’m sick of your shit! Go now!”
The determined-now-livid tiger prowled the outskirts of the jungle until the bully encountered a lion’s den situated on the savanna fringe. “Come out of your comfortable den, you craven coward!” the emboldened Mr. T. challenged. “Greet the new king of beasts! The old king has been dethroned! Long live the new king, fuckin’ me!”
Inside the crowded lion’s den, the lioness woke her drowsy mate. “Wake-up Leo. Tony’s here to see you. The delusional idiot thinks he’s the new king of the jungle replacing you!”
“What’s wrong with that fucked-up asshole? I’m the fuckin’ king of beasts,” Leo bellowed and roared with pride.
The angry and insulted lion then charged out of its protective den to intrepidly defend his crown against the out-of-touch impostor.
A terrible battle ensued, and the extended conflict lasted until the setting sun finally disappeared in the west. All of the political animals in the vicinity ranging from the asshole aardvark to the zany zebra (who indeed wore the biggest brassiere) soon joined in the donnybrook, some siding with the tiger, while others defending the lion’s pretentious pride. A third contingent of jungle creatures didn’t know whom they were supporting, and so the ignoramuses acted like humans and savagely fought against anyone that happened to be near them.
“What the fuck are we fighting for?” the confused asshole aardvark asked the zany zebra he was battling. “I’m getting my wimpy aardvark ass kicked and I don’t like this bullshit one bit!”
“What the hell am I dying for?” the wounded zebra screamed back. “I feel just like James Dean in that classic teen movie ‘Rebel without a Cause’! I’m too fuckin’ young to die on this battlefield!”
“We’re fighting against each other for the New World Order, whatever the fuck that phraseology means!” the fatigued asshole aardvark explained and related to his new-found opponent.
When the bad full moon rose in the eastern twilight sky, the illuminated sphere shone-down upon a silent jungle, with the only creatures stirring being a fagged-out faggot macaw and an exhausted cockatoo still struggling in a dual beak death grip’.
All of the other partisan animals within sight were stone-cold dead, including Republican elephants and Democratic jackasses. The only survivor of the battle royal King of the Jungle War was the now-wounded bragging tiger, but his hours were diminishing and his time clock was morbidly ticking. For the remaining few hours of his brief reign, the arrogant tiger was monarch of all he surveyed, even the last remaining migrating butterflies. But the new king of beasts ultimate bloody victory, in the final analysis, really didn’t seem to mean anything at all, that is, except death and destruction to the previous happy and contented jungle population!
Moral: Kick ass all you want, but you can’t very well be the eminent king of beasts if there aren’t any fuck-heads around to rule.
“The Kingfisher and the Phoebe”
An all-too-proud mother phoebe’, who had successfully raised two broods of fledglings in favorable weather, was brooding (but then hypocritically delighted) that one male in the second brood refused to leave the nest and fly away like his siblings had done.
“I have raised an extraordinary phoebe unlike any of my other phoebes, who only had chirped ‘Phoebe, phoebe!’ without ever criticizing or saying any other goddamned thing!” the mother phoebe phoebed. “I’m convinced that my independent-minded, late-blooming phoebe will become a great singer, even greater than the famed nightingale that sings opera over in Berkeley Square!”
The mother phoebe brought into her nest a talented nightingale to teach her recalcitrant, stubborn, obdurate child phoebe how to sing opera, disco and rock and roll, but all that the obstinate little phoebe would utter or sing was, “Phoebe, phoebe!”
And so the overprotective fawning mother phoebe logically sent for Dr. Kingfisher, who once sang in front of a packed house audience on the Amos and Andy Grand Old Opry stage. The birdbrain physician/psychologist meticulously examined the child prodigy progeny very carefully and then regrettably informed the mother phoebe, “This phoebe, Mrs. Phoebe, is a phoebe just like any other phoebe, and all he can ever sing is ‘phoebe, phoebe’!”
Thinking that her talented and gifted little phoebe was special and without a doubt apart from the nondescript phoebe masses, the adamant mother ignored Dr. Kingfisher’s prognosis and evaluated, ‘Maybe my youngest phoebe won’t become a great phoebe singer, but my precious phoebe will certainly become a great something,’ the mommy phoebe philosophized. ‘My phoebe will undoubtedly take the place of the eagle on the Presidential Seal, or perhaps the canary in the gilded cage or even that other canary in the coal mine, or maybe replace the coo-coo cuckoo in the cuckoo clock. Just wait and see world! Just wait and see how wrong you are, Dr. Kingfisher! I oughta’ peck your king-sized pecker off!’
The phoebe mother patiently waited and waited for years on end, but the forty-year-old offspring phoebe still living as a freeloader in the mother’s nest could still only sing “Phoebe, phoebe!” just like any other phoebe, and that was the alpha and the omega of it all!
Moral: You can’t make anything else out of cookie dough except cookies, and you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit!
“The Spreading ‘You Know’ Epidemic”
The latest debacle to savagely plague the spoken nomenclature in the United States is the rapidly spreading epidemic of the absolutely dumb-ass phrase “You know!” I don’t recollect precisely when this horrendous bad verbal habit surfaced like an alien attack submarine in our culture, but the bullshit terminology has quickly barnstormed across the nation like a violent tropical hurricane. I shudder and cringe every time my ears are wickedly assaulted with the fucked-up hackneyed subject-verb reiteration.
One pedestrian pedestrian I had asked for directions last week out on the West Coast articulated the inane “You know!” crap thirty-six times in about five minutes, and while listening to my favorite classical music radio station in my rented automobile, an illiterate bitch reading the news off of a written script carelessly pronounced the same stupid shit “You know!” nonsense seven times in one primitive rambling sentence.
And I’ve even heard the frivolous cliché “You know!” when I had been vacationing that summer out in San Diego. I had attended (well, crashed without a formal invitation) a garden party in La Jolla, and an intoxicated garrulous woman approached me and inadvertently said “You know!” more than a Whippoorwill says “Whippoorwill” in the same five-minute time frame.
That non-memorable night I had the utter displeasure of listening to a horny male whippoorwill soliciting a female mate (I presume that the male whippoorwill was not a homosexual whippoorwill) chant “Whippoorwill!” one hundred and fifty-nine consecutive times, and next the sex-starved birdbrain suddenly chirped “Whip-,” and then plummeted from his high tree limb, dead as an extinct pterodactyl after hitting the ground. In fact, while in California, I had heard so many damned “You knows!” and so many damned “Whippoorwills!” that I’m beginning to believe that I’m the friggin’ Birdman of Alcatraz.
While listening to a glib radio commentator not too long ago discussing the United Nations Organization, the verbose asshole kept repeating “UNO”, which naturally I had inaccurately interpreted as all-too-familiar “You know!” While looking at my image in the bathroom mirror later that morning while shaving, and then nearly slitting my delicate throat and upper esophagus, I asked myself, “James, why the hell does ‘UNO’ sound exactly like fuckin’ ‘You know’?”
A typical example of monotonous speech “You know!” goes something like this rendition: “The other day I saw, you know, Frank Wilson, you know, the former lawyer for, you know, the Boot Hill Blueberry Company, you know, over on Strawberry Road, you know, over in Cranberry. Anyway, you know, what he wanted to tell me, you know, is something that you’ll never know, you know!”
My rational theory is that this debilitating “You know!” curse had originated among acting airheads in Hollywood and on Broadway, ideal settings where such ludicrous curses such as “You know!” are apt to originate. This rumination is what supports my clever hypothesis. About three decades ago Hollywood movie and Broadway stage assholes punctuated their favorite talking points with dumb shit like “You know what I mean!” and “You don’t know Jack!” and “You know that I’m full of shit!” Consequently, I reasonably conjectured that “You know!” is simply a blighted offshoot of those three early 1920s’ stupid-shit language usages.
I mean, before the Great Depression, Americans talked common sense oral communications such as “Twenty-three Skidoo”, “So’s your old man,” “Believe you me,” “Fuck you shithead!” and the like, where the discerning listener truly comprehended the exact intent of the sophisticated, well-prepared speaker.
And then in the 1950s, everything seemed to be “Triggered!” Arguments were indiscreetly “triggered,” various allergies were “Triggered!,” hostile divorces were “Triggered,” straight and gay love triangles were “Triggered,” and even guns and Roy Rogers’ horse were “Triggered.”
And then around the same chaotic time other phrases were dominant in American vernacular, those particular canards being “Glut!”, “You said it!” and “You can say that again!” all absurdly spoken to the point where there was a glut of “you said it” and “you can say that again” and “you know” all over the goddamned already cluttered radio and TV airwaves.
In conclusion and summary of this literary endeavor, I honestly hope that this annoying “You Know!” crap eventually stops. It better cease immediately, and “I don’t mean maybe!”
(This excerpt is from the James Thurber section of Hawthorne Hacked, Shakespeare Sacked & Thurber Thwacked)(320 pages)
Jay Dubya
Google: Jay Dubya Books
Contents
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The Great Stone Face” 1
“The Minister’s Black Veil” 27
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” 47
“Feathertop” 79
“The Three Golden Apples” 105
“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” 119
William Shakespeare
“The Tempest” 135
“Macbeth” 173
“Hamlet” 205
James Thurber
“The Catbird Seat” 241
“A Couple of Hamburgers” 261
“The Night the Bed Fell” 269
“Tales with a Twist” 275
“The Dog That Bit People” 285
“The Secret Life of Walter Witty”299
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