The Hood Cooper Story: An Urban Tale

By Malbis Nimmer

This thing is different than anything else. It’s so expertly vacuolated! It enables me, somehow, to create—to hang my own literary entrails on the skeleton of elemental form. By camouflaging its native interior light, it somehow unveils my own.
“Weird.”
—Shauna Reaves (high school English teacher)
“We sit around at night with Hood Cooper and a stop-watch, and see who can read it the longest without bustin’ up.”
—Mike Brewster (mechanic)
“My friends say I’m lying when I tell them I get it. Plus, my parents leave me alone now.”
—Trevor Langley (seventh-grader)
“Before reading Hood Cooper; An Urban Tale, I was diagnosed as being clinically neurotic. Reading Hood Cooper did not relieve my neurosis. It did, however, seem to “coat” it in a kind of paranoiac psychosis.”
—Skeeter McCoy (meter reader)
“I like this book. It reminds me of …. my sofa.”
—Willa-Jean (housewife)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Apr 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483447360

Book preview

PhD.

CHAPTER 1

A VOLUBLY TETRALOGICAL NEXUS

T o better inculcate a more thorough-going neo-diffusionism, Sir Hector von Hildegaard la Castro di Giovanni changed his name to Hood Cooper. Hood Cooper hung his arm out the window and laughed. That warm breezy freedom was echoing within. He had just recently eluded the onslaught of susurrant ensconcement. Antiochean anthropomorphic maximalism, a presupposition to which he had firmly clung, showed signs of ebbing. Had he not successfully evaded the tyranny of taste? He wore a brown leather hat and jacket and black-jeans. He had only recently allayed the cognitive dissonance of a metaphorical bushel of tainted yams (which we’ll unpack later).

It was due, in part, to his deep experience of all the aforesaid strugglings that had turned Hood Cooper into a shadowy, self-effacing modern day hero of sorts, and although any real awareness of latent valor was far from him, luminous jets of nebulosity, like invisible dymaxion omni-directional haloes, emanated from his chalky gray ego — udamian wendings in aspic!

So, it all began a little less than the cube root of seven leap years ago at the end of the Great Battle of Acrimonious Parameters, at a lecture hall near the interior outskirts of Megatropolis, and directly across the alley from Jamaal’s Gently Pulsing Synagogue of Science. Doc Vinting and Augustus Croxford, the tri-polar, gamma-blockin’ twadlist, were arguing about middle-age dominate matralinear marketing trends, and whether they had been cauterized into a mono-dimensional nexus by the death of art and Industrial Jazz.

Hood Cooper was there at the Hot Purple Symposium sitting motionlessly, absorbing the intensity of the debate and the deep symbolic fragrances careering around the room. Cybernetic steel peacocks swoop and zag! People started yelling. Lois Level, a friend of Hood Cooper’s, offers up to him her tremulous vortex. This sends him into a type of semi-tethered centrifuge. He knew in a flash that it meant some sort of re-involvement with Harmon Hands and the Behind-the-Birdcage-gang.

You see, back in ’36, Murphy Trainer and Leadpipe (the choreman) did some kind of drop-cord on the Debuting Lethargy Regiment from the Quasi-flaccid Peninsula. Recall that they were to have opened for Quinn Little and the Vapor-lock Quartet. What you might not know is that Harmon Hands was one of a large irrational number of semi-non-Microplebians who had snuck aboard a freighter ship, scum-surf racing across the oily Atlantic, and barely escaping from the Platinum Model of Psycho-cyclical Recidivism, an emulsified crustaceous oceanic ooze that feeds off gelatinous petroleum bio-mass soaked in black slag, forming a plastic garbage-field mega-slick that seems to be acting as though it were acquiring its own organic identity. That was Doc Vinting’s theory at least. He said that petascopic robots with artificially generated intelligences were electrically linked, by the government, to suspended colloidal polymers that floated in, and were broken down by, salty voltage-inducing sea water. (When his theory gained greater currency the government found out about it, and poor Doc Vinting almost lost his thumbs.) For Cold Wayne, on the other hand, it was a faceless personal image that was reconfiguring itself into some sort of gigantic sodium chloride memory-collection catalyst.

Clip Hopper was the manic, yellow-eyed circus consultant from Edessa who introduced Harmon Hands to the alto saxanet. Hands hooked up with the Behind-the-Birdcage-gang at a speak-easy down under the upper half of the lower side of Polytropolis. Straining through squinted eyes, Hands still vividly remembers dozens of over-jammed, glitzy night clubs and crypto-psychedelic funhouses…stuffed with neon. But what was it all supposed to signify? Paul Harvey Oswald, Hood Cooper’s primary nemesis, thought he knew; but, Paul Harvey Oswald labored under the fallacy of a favorable enumeration.

Now, Hood Cooper was very tight with one, Murphy Trainer, which makes him even heavier. Murphy Trainer was the chrome-decoplated pugilistic Transdanubian shlazaphone blower from Chemung. He and Little Dick Breether would coerce their audience into a type of frenzied siesta with a recurrent rendition of Teffer’s Grey Again, a little tuffy from the twenties with a swinging beat and a sonorous refrain. Trainer was the nuts! He could reek twitzers tighter than barnacles on a zidzister. His proto-rhythm-and-beige wounded me with turbid laddergrammic syncopation — like entire populations of peasantries migrating en mass to remote land formations, all the while haunching, irreverent, expectorating, loping inexorably over endless stretches of prairie, in search of counsel and cheap entertainment. (Two’s Dewey used to say that Trainer was awful handy with a