Pt. 27

"I really wish we didn't have to do this," Bo grunted as he slowly heaved his generous frame onto the motorized cart Tom Jones had brought to him at the edge of the parking lot, where the bus had let them off. By the time the young monk was settled in his seat, Tom was already a good fifteen yards ahead of him, gleefully pushing a regular cart in a serpentine pattern, narrowly missing a parked brown sedan after trying to challenge a twelve-year-old to a backwards shopping cart race.

Once within the unholy depths of Wal-mart, Bo managed to gather all of the items on the list before he ran into Tom again. He found him in the pets section, having what looked to be a heated debate with the fish, about the welfare system. The fish appeared to remain unconvinced. Actually, to be fair, the fish didn't seem to understand what was happening at all, or why random items were being thrown into their tanks as "visual aids".

"Tom, I've got the ... ingredie--items. Let's go - leave that cart there, we can't afford - and definitely don't need - all of that stuff." Tom's cart was filled nearly to overflowing with women's plus-sized jogging suits, children's novelty sunglasses, two magic 8 balls, a couch cushion from a piece of display furniture, various and sundry office supplies, three Toblerones and a Hanson cd. "Except for the chocolate, grab those." Bo added.

The pair nearly got thrown out when Tom Jones kept trying to get a price on his chest at the self check-out, but the boy managed to distract him by claiming to have seen a doo-wop group in the parking lot. Bo was disturbed beyond words when he exited the store to find Tom singing with a couple of homeless gentlemen.

--------

"Do you think this will work?" Tom asked, squatting in front of the box as he dumped the yogurt in. Bo was still a bit tender from his recent surgeries as well as exhausted from their shopping trip, so he was just observing the experiment from his perch atop the bed. "I ... nothing surprises me anymore." Bo replied, shaking his head.
Tom continued adding ingredients, one after another, until everything on the list was inside the box, and the crotch of his pants was splattered liberally with yogurt, milk, ice cream and egg. "I think I might have added the block of cheddar last, Bo." Tom mused. The boy squeeked painfully in reply, stiffling a guffaw. "Close the box, Tom." Bo ordered. Tom Jones dutifully closed the box. "Now open it!" Bo said breathlessly. Tom lifted the lid and peered inside.

"Well? What do you see?" the young monk asked impatiently.

The deeply tanned crooner began to sing, "Up north where the snow grows colder, I travel onward 'cross the border--"

"Christmas cake!" Bo interrupted. "What the freshly-washed handkerchief are you babbling about this time?"

"It's quite simple, my dear boy," Tom replied, gesturing toward the box, "your precious missing jar is in...

Part 26

a raging, paralyzing case of gut rot. Bo's rotund hoagie boiler, it would seem, had finally had enough. It endured, unceasingly, a miserable and arbitrary pattern of hoagie enjoyment, intertwined with seemingly infinite periods of grease-soaked reminiscence of said hoagies. The young monk's tummy-tums would have no more of this nonsense, it decided. Bo doubled over and collapsed. The last words to escape his wanton lips before everything went black could faintly be heard, "i regret not a single sandwich..."


Yogurt. Blackness. Darkness. Milk.
Nothingness. Kix. Void. An ambiguously dead/alive cat.

Has our hero's unscrupulous disregard for dietary health finally caught up with him?

Not if Kangaroo Jim has anything to say about the matter.

A sudden rush of pain overwhelmed Bo's senses who, quite frankly, were perfectly content existing in a vacuous plane of numbness. This made it all the much more difficult for our hero's battered and abused mind to cope with all the sensory information he was once again experiencing.

Needless to say, it didn't do Bo any favours as his eyes gradually focused on what hovered atop him. A large bald-eagle, with white leather tassels in place of feathers, large cubic zirconia in place of eyes, and a pair of Pringles chips arranged in the vague shape of a beak in place of a...beak.

The majestic animal proceeded to gracefully devour it's own salty beak, slap Bo across the face swiftly, and take a sip of the coke it just ordered.

Bo was having a bit of trouble putting all this together, and with all the grace and style of  piece of roadkill stuck under a car carrying two teenagers making out for the first time, mused rather loudly, "What the FU-" "Fun, fun, fun!" Kangaroo Jones announced, tearing off his makeshift surgeon outfit and adding, "Yes, sir, performing a quadruple-bypass and emergency stomach flush in a questionably hygienic environment with nothing but basic bartending tools on a Friday night is my idea of fun, fun, fun!" It is worth noting that this was said with all the seriousness that someone willing to perform open heart surgery in the middle of a sketchy bar, wearing a giant eagle mask can possibly muster.

Bo, understandably, was still groggy and his mind was working as hard as it could (not so hard) to fill in what seemed to him to be an eternity's worth of blanks. After a long while, Bo finally summoned the courage to speak. "Is this-" "Yes," Jim "Tom" Jones blurted out, "You'll be fine. I'm sure that's the question you were going to ask," and in a moment of inexplicable Kangaroo Klarity, Tom "Jones" Jim made his best attempt to further the plot line through insightful dialogue.

"My dear boy, I'd love to explain to you how I was able to perform a complicated surgery, successfully, under the worst conditions possible, but I am afraid that there is yet work to be done! We must decipher the meaning of this shopping list! It starts with milk, an-"

Bo gasped loudly, memories of his delicate dance with death rushing back to him. "Milk! I've got it! It isn't a shopping list at all. It came to me while I was dead...dying...err..or whatever. It was all so clear to me after everything went black. It is a list of ingredients, for a powerful potion. We must put all these ingredients in a box - and close the box. Inside, it will have precisely a 50% chance of being the correct formula which will serve as the necessary component to lead us to the missing jar. We will not know whether it is the correct formula until we observe it."

"Great googly moogly!" Timmity "Kangaroo Tune" Jonesey exclaimed dramatically, "That's just crazy enough to work! So, where do we get all these seemingly random items necessary for a complex quantum physics experiment?"

A dark and foreboding look cast across Bo's sweaty face. With a deep sigh, he uttered the words...

"Wal-mart."

Part 25

Bo looked up at the beet clad woman and began to open his mouth.  Before he could even force a sound out, Tom had leapt onto the table in a frantic scurry, knocking over the bowl of beet dip that Anna had brought out with her.   He began to do what resembled a river dance, and spewed something from his mouth that sounded much like the strange ramblings of a southern Baptist minister who had been taken over by the spirit.  He finished his strange dance with a triple back tuck and the “pew, pew, wink” move.  Anna mimicked his “pew, pew, wink” and rushed into the kitchen. How he managed that triple back tuck without cracking his head on that flail completely perplexed Bo, but he had become accustomed to the strange while on this journey. Tom turned to Bo and said

“I just ordered us two cokes”

Bo gave him a puzzled look and pulled out the note.

“Tom..er….Kangaroo Jim, we need to find out what this note means.  It’s got to be related to why the other jar is missing!”  

Both men had come to the conclusion that it must be some sort of acronym, but an acronym for what, and how were they going to find out what it meant?  Seconds later, a mysterious man with bilateral torn rotator cuffs walked up to their table and said

“I think I can solve your mystery, boys.”

Bo’s eyes lit up like the first time he ever saw a hoagie.  Then his mouth started to salivate because he couldn’t stop thinking about that very first hoagie and how oh so special it was, and how much it changed his life and his waistline and how everything was surreal each and every time he took a bite.  The man was expanding upon each letter of the acronym, but Bo didn’t hear him, all he could hear was the rustle of the wax paper as you tore open a freshly made hoagie, dripping with vinegar end to end.  Bo finally snapped out of his greasy coma to hear this mysterious man finish by saying

“And that’s why we can’t have nice things!”
With that, the man was gone in a puff of beet dust. Bo turned to Tom, who at this point was admiring his own chest hair in a small, my little pony pocket mirror.

“You don’t think I need to wax this, right?  I mean, the ladies love a lit..”

“Forget about that! What did bilateral torn rotator cuff guy say about the note and what M I C K E Y meant!” Blurted Bo

“Note? He didn’t say anything about a note.  He just recited his shopping list, Milk, Icecream, Cheese, Kix, Eggs, and Yogurt, then started babbling about quantum physics”

“Hush poppet” Whispered Bo.

In that instant, it hit him…

Part 24

And off our one and a half men fled (three and a half if you ask Tom Jones) into the black of night with jar and note in tow.
As they journeyed across the vast, craggy New England Sahara, Bo's stomach began to growl.
"Tom, do you see anywhere we could stop to get a bite to eat?" he asked his companion.
"Please," said Tom holding his hand up modestly, "I feel we've grown very close, you and I. Almost like best buddies, except I've never given you a foot massage. I want you to call me by the name that my Welsh grandmother bestowed upon me the first time I beat her at Candyland-- Kangaroo Jim."
"Kangaroo Jim," began Bo again, too ravenous to object, "Do you see anywhere we could eat at? I'm starving."
"What about Igor's House of Beets and Eats?" He suggested, pointing to a kinky looking stone building on the horizon that Bo's glance had somehow passed over.
As they drew nearer, Bo's gut began to growl ever louder, both out of apprehension about entering an establishment that looked like a prison rigged up with torches at the entrance and neon pink barbed wire encircling the rooftop, and with his ever-mounting hunger.
"Yo yo yo!" said Tom Jones cheerily to the shirtless bouncer at the door, "we be hankrin' for some gruuuuub to ruuuub in the tuuuuub, know what I'm sayin' hawk-baby?"
The bouncer turned around and Bo realized with a start that the face Tom Jones had been speaking to was merely a tattoo on the back of the bouncer's bald head. Glancing down at the name tag pinned directly onto his bare chest, Bo noted that the man's name was Zbrtp.
"If you don't mind me asking," said Bo, a bit meekly, "Would you be in possession of any information regarding the name of this fine establishment... particularly the 'beats' part of it?"
"Look bubble boy," said Zbrtp in a gravely high-pitched Jamaican accent, "If you don't think you can handle what we got, you'd better just get. Got it?"
Bo nodded, a hundred nightmarish scenarios rushed through his brain and made his face begin to sweat.
"Think we might fluff our stuff in the ruff dufff tuff?" said Tom Jones.
"I'm not so sure." said the bouncer, staring wickedly at Bo. "He don't look like he's of age to be frolicking in a joint like this here. I don't think he'd last, know what I'm talking about, cowboy? I don't think he's got enough guts."
"Now listen here!" snapped Bo, stomping one rhinestoned suede platform moccasin in disgust, "I'll have you know that I was nearly killed earlier today!"
"YEAH, KILLED!" said Tom Jones, throwing back his head and snapping his fingers in a display of support for his friend.
"And furthermore, I'm on a mission from God that is for your benediction and the benediction of every man, woman, and child in this great country of ours!"
"YEAH, BENEDICTION!" tooted Tom Jones, twirling around and ending with a breathy "cha CHA" and jazz hands.
Zbrtp watched this display with a look of slight contempt before waving them inside.
"But don't say I didn't warn you!" he called after them.

*****

"Woah... look at this cat scat of a joint!" Jones yelled over the techno-polka music blaring through the loud speakers. Mounted high on the walls were paintings of famous leading Hollywood men, each painted in a baby bonnet and a set of fangs. Inside glass niches positioned along the walls were dancers wearing nothing but bear-claw slippers and fancy Victorian hats. And dangling above each table was a different medieval instrument of torture turned mood light.
But worst of all was the catastrophic aroma of cooked beets that assaulted Bo's ever-flared nostrils as he opened the massive, spiked doors.
Tom and Bo sat at a table beneath a giant flail emanating a rosy glow, illuminating a portrait of a grinning, toothy Clark Gable. A waiter appeared dressed in a foam beet costume, studded all over with cheery buttons and flair.
"Good evening dearies, my name is Anna Banana, I am going to be your beet scout tonight. Can I get you something to drink?"

Pt. 23

paralyzed, and more than just a little queasy.  He swallowed, hard, searching his mind for something - anything - appropriate in a situation like this.

Just as he was about to resort to bursting into desperate tears, all at once he heard a loud crack, and the old woman squeak as she jumped back and her gun clattered to the floor.

Bo looked up, stunned, as Tom Jones stood holding his Airsoft gun pointed at the woman, while she gripped her hand painfully.  The crooner leaned down, picked up the revolver and said, "I don't like it when people shoot my friends.  It's not sexy."

The boy scrambled to grab the jar and the note as fast as he could, and said, "Keep an eye on her, I'll check for a First Aid kit - then we're out of here."

"Like Vladimir?" Tom asked.

"We can bring Vladimir along, for all I care." Bo said before he left the room. 

As he tore apart the linen closet looking for the kit, he could hear Tom casually chattering to the old woman, "You can't be a sexy person unless you have something sexy to offer. With me, it's my voice: the way that I sing, the way I express myself when I sing ..."

"Tom, I found it.  Let's go.  We're going to hole up somewhere until we can figure out what this note means."

Part 22

MICKEY

in large purple letters. 

"Well that's unusual." said Bo, puzzled, and a second later found himself sprawled out on the floor ten feet away, his face smarting where Tom Jones's foot had smashed into his jawbone.

Tom, meanwhile, was moving jerkily around the musty room, thrashing his arms about whilst belting, "Oh Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind! HEY MICKEY! HEY MICKEY!" 

"Tom, I will have none of your tomfoolery at this dire moment in our plight! Not only are we holding an old woman hostage and must decode what logically appears to be an acronym, but I am also growing extremely hungry!"

"... what a pity, you don't understand" continued Tom who was now turning cartwheels. 

Suddenly, Bo remembered the other jar he had neglected to retrieve from beneath the floorboards. He reached his great dugong of an arm into the cavity and pulled out his prize, this one bigger than the first. He clamped his octopus of a hand around the lid, but before he had a chance to exert any minor effort to detach the rusty topper, he heard a loud crack behind him and felt a burning sensation in his right earlobe. Gingerly touching his smarting wound, he quickly withdrew his hand when his fingers encountered no earlobe where one should have been.

"HOLY BEARS THAT MAKES ME SICK LIKE ARMAGEDDON ON A STICK!" he howled as he wheeled around to be faced full on by the old woman clutching a smoking revolver.

"You think you've got the right to break into my house," she said in a nasty thin voice, "but I think you've got it wrong." 

And with that, she fired another shot that just whizzed past one of Tom Jones's twirling limbs. 

"M'am," said Bo, clutching his bleeding ear while simultaneously tapping into the reservoir of courtesy he had been saturated with at the monastery, "the monks have sent us on a wild musical journey... a mission from God, you might call it. We must smite the forces of evil in order to collect musicians and assemble a creation with the power to save our musical destiny!"

"Don't give me that crapola," spat the woman, "What, you think I'm the only person in the world who hasn't seen The Blues Brothers? You wanna start some drama? 'Cus you don't want no drama. I see right through you, punk. You're a piggy and a swine, I'll crack your spine and blow your mind!"

Tom continued singing and jumping, contorting his face into grotesque expressions, knocking over furniture and  kicking out windows with his flailing limbs. "Every time you move you let a little more show!" he belted.

The woman advanced fifteen baby steps closer so that her nose was pressed against Bo's forehead. She inhaled deeply and then inserted her tongue into his eyeball. 

Bo felt

Pt. 21

Bo sighed deeply as he stood in front of his childhood home, arms akimbo, legs ... not akimbo.  The boy knew it wouldn't be easy to get the jars, especially now that the house was no longer owned by his family.  He wasn't even completely certain the jars were still there, but there was a chance and he had to try.

The original plan had been to bring Captain and Tennille along, but during an ill-advised, last-minute fit of square dancing, Tom boxed the gnat when he should have allemande left, causing Tennille to go flying into the next room, slamming right into the bowl of the commode, the seat of which had unfortunately been left up.  It goes without saying exactly how angry this had made Captain, as well as how lucky both Bo and Tom were to escape with Rick Allen's missing arm (which they found in Captain's suitcase - he'd been using it to hold his large collection of novelty watches), let alone their lives.

After about 10 minutes of procrastinating, while Tom hummed Smells Like Teen Spirit to himself, Bo finally knocked at the front door.  An elderly woman opened the door and stood there, mouth agape, looking back and forth between the boy, who was dressed in linen pants and an embroidered linen tunic, and Tom Jones, who was now cheerfully singing My Humps under his breath. 

"Hello," the boy began.  "My name is Bo and this is Tom Jones..."

Tom nodded and continued singing, "I mix your milk with my cocoa puff, milky, milky cocoa ... Mix your milk with my cocoa puff, milky, milky riiiiiiight."

The woman responded by dropping to the floor in a heap.  Bo closed his eyes slowly and drew in another deep breath.

-----

"There's no need for alarm," Tom reassured the woman, who was now securely tied to one of her dining chairs. "I love listening to new stuff, at home in LA I always have the radio on to hear what is happening."

"Tom, I don't think her biggest concern is what you were just singing.  Although I'm sure it's no comfort." Bo said, as he finished carefully tying the bandanna over her mouth.  A slow, high pitched squeak began to emanate from the deeply tanned singer.

"Tom, don't cry.  I'm sure she loved your song.  Right before she lost consciousness and cracked her head on her entryway."  Tom Jones grinned widely at this and regarded the old woman, who was now mumbling quietly, pleadingly, through the bandanna, something that sounded a lot like, "Take whatever you want, just go, just go..."

"It's true," Tom Jones replied.  "this life we're living, it's a tough row to hoe ... why just the other -"

"Tom!" Bo interrupted him, "we don't have time for this, help me pull up the floorboards in my old bedroom, so we can get out of this poor woman's house."

They both entered his childhood bedroom, where Bo pushed back the area rug, and pried up the floorboard where he remembered stashing his jars several years earlier.  In the place where the two jars should have been was a note.  "Flying fruitcakes in a pogo stick parade!" Bo exclaimed before putting his head in his hands.

"Now that sounds like a fantastic time!" Tom gushed.  "When do we get to do that?"

It took the boy a full minute before he could lift his head and reach out for the note.  It read: