Fiberglass Clown Head Symphony

By Tom Janikowski

Mr. Michael Nitrous works for a failing newspaper chain. Dr. Neil Troper is an escapee from a psychiatric detention facility. They are both looking for a really good lunch. Fiberglass Clown Head Symphony follows the separate journeys that these two men make across the People's Republic of Illinois on their way to the Wisconsin Confederation, considering music, metaphysics, and fortune cookies along the way. Must the individual sacrifice all creativity and freedom for the good of the society, or can a person become whatever he or she wants to become? Can he or she even become the manufacturer of the finest imitation shrunken heads in North America? The 60,000 words of Fiberglass Clown Head Symphony will move you from the shores of the Mississippi to the shores of Devil's Lake, and they will carry you from an Asian Buffet to a glacier and back again. Michael Nitrous is going to have one heck of a headache in the morning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365323775

Book preview

Fiberglass Clown Head Symphony

Fiberglass Clown Head Symphony

by Tom Janikowski

Fiberglass Clown Head Symphony

First Edition

Copyright ©2016 Tom Janikowski

ISBN: 978-1-365-32377-5

All rights reserved.  No portion of this book may be reproduced without permission of the author, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

For those who think otherwise.

Gratias Tibi

Thank you, once again, to my dear (and long-suffering) wife, Shelly.  How can drivel like this come from the mouth (and pen) of a sane man?  The world may never know.

Thank  you to Jacob Krejci, a native Milwaukeean and excellent photographer, for his photo Giant Clown Head that graces the covers of this book.  Please check out his blog The Carpetbagger at thecarpetbagger.org .

Thank you to Sergei and Tom, my musical colleagues in the Kinoslav Studio Orchestra.  Kinoslava. Cinema glory. Quiet! I listen!

Thank you to my dogs – all of them.

Introduction

This is the first Michael Nitrous novel.  It is the first part of a four-part trilogy.  You'll get to read the rest eventually – don't worry.  Just be patient. Thank you.

If I say much more, it will probably just confuse you more than it would without a proper introduction, so I'm just going to shut my flap and let you read.

All glory to the Lion of the Tribe of Judah.  Maranatha.

1.

Michael Nitrous missed the opening of the Olympics that year. He never saw the torch go by his home on West 43rd Street, and he never even so much as looked at a television screen.  In the early twenty-first century, televisions were usually flat electronic panels that showed moving pictures to people who did not have enough energy to come up with ideas of their own.  Granted, there were still some people who had original ideas but would still sit in front of a television from time to time. The exception and not the rule, as my Great Uncle Franklin Delano Janikowski would always say.  Great Uncle Franklin would use that saying about decent knuckleballers in the major leagues, however, and not television.  You get the point, though.

So Michael Nitrous stood in his garage while the Olympics began, and he tried to make sense of a small slip of paper that he had received in a cookie at an Asian restaurant.  These little baked goods were called fortune cookies, and Michael, for the most part, led his life by the wisdom they contained.  The fortune cookies had pithy little sayings printed on the slips of paper, giving advice to the consumer – sayings like Health will surely come your way, Wealth and riches are not as important as friends, and Don't bet on the horses.  Michael would scan the contents of the cookies, looking for wisdom and truth much in the same way that soothsayers of antiquity might run their fingers through the innards of goats or sheep or llamas or something so as to try to divine the future.

Michael had been a devotee of fortune cookies ever since his college days.  He had a professor back then, Doctor Gerry, who had been a former Baptist minister.  Doctor Gerry had gone to graduate school, earned his PhD, lost his faith, and summarily become an Episcopalian. Better a well-dressed atheist than a hypocritical snake-handler, Doctor Gerry always said after that.  He believed that so strongly that he had that very phrase tattooed on his left pectoral muscle. Michael met Doctor Gerry well after his conversion, but never had the opportunity to see the tattoo.

Fortune cookies, Doctor Gerry had reasoned, were really our best bet in the universe.  He had been having lunch with Michael one day at a Chinese restaurant, and after they had finished their steaming mounds of General Tso's Chicken the waitress brought a little black plastic tray containing the bill for lunch, accompanied by two little fortune cookies wrapped in individual, sterile, clear plastic bags.  Doctor Gerry picked up the cookies and placed one in front of Michael. 

Do you like fortune cookies? asked Doctor Gerry.

I'm not much for cookies in general, said Michael.

Oh no...go on.  Open it.

Do you believe in them? asked Michael.

As much as in anything, said Doctor Gerry, cracking open a sweet, golden shell.

Michael was never able to remember the fortunes that he and Doctor Gerry received that day, although he was sure that they came true.  He became something of a follower from that point on – a true believer, you might say. 

So on the morning of the day that the Olympics began, Michael was standing in his garage, trying to make sense of the most recent bit of spiritual revelation that he had come across.  He had been to a new Chinese restaurant down the road – a fancy place that had opened up in a strip mall and boasted some ungodly figure of entrées and buffet items.  927 chemically-synthesized menu items and 4,000 linear feet of buffet, or words to that effect ran the advertisement in the Saturday newspaper insert. Michael was the last person in his subdivision to take a real newspaper delivery, and the newspaper delivery man would say awful things about Michael (whom he did not personally know) as he approached his house each morning. Take your damn paper, was the most common epithet.  Not terribly awful, on second thought.

Michael Nitrous had made his way to the lunch buffet at the restaurant that very noon, and now was feeling a little ill.  He had started with things that looked like appetizers, thinking that to be logical. Surely a people as logical and as orderly as the Chinese would follow standard convention with foods, and make the appetizers effective as well as identifiable as an appetizer to the average diner. He ran through a plate and a half of egg rolls, spring rolls, won-tons, pot stickers, crab Rangoon, chicken wings, rolled sushi, pork dumplings, and something that looked like eyelids and tasted like fish.  Realizing there were a good 918 items left to go on the buffet, he thought it prudent to move on. 

Eschewing the General Tso's Chicken this time, Michael concentrated his efforts on a big plate of synthetic tangerine beef – a delightful entrée that was sticky-sweet and full of crunchy goodness beneath the heavenly sauce.  Michael was sure that there must be some beef contained deep in the center of each russet, sloppy nugget, but was unable to prove this.  Undaunted, he finished his plate and then topped it off with a bowl of tapioca pudding. Not the most Asian of desserts, perhaps, but one that brought him fond memories of a friend of his, now long dead.

Not Doctor Gerry.  That is, the long-dead friend was someone else – not Doctor Gerry.  You know what I mean.

After all was said and done, the waitress brought a little black plastic tray containing the bill for lunch, accompanied by two little fortune cookies wrapped in one individual, sterile, clear plastic bag.  Michael had never seen such a thing, and it reminded him of a picture he had seen one day a long time ago.  It was a picture of a pair of conjoined Siamese twins – joined at the hip, it seemed, although they wore a frilly dress of sorts to hide all of the details.  The picture was black and white, and seemed to have been taken a long time ago – a long time before Michael saw the picture, which itself was a long time before he saw the dual-packaged fortune cookies.  Michael wondered about this, as he knew that pictures could be posed using old costumes and antiquated photographic techniques – he had seen this done at fairs and amusement parks, where photography studios offered portraits of patrons dressed in rental costumes, so that middle-aged, middle-class fair-goers could pretend to be nineteenth century wild-west prostitutes and gunfighters, Victorian dandies and ladies, and perhaps even pirates.  Pirates were always popular.

Michael picked up the package of the twin cookies and turned it around in his hand.  The cookies appeared perfectly matched, golden and apparently crisp – just what you want out of a fortune cookie.  He gently tore open the package and removed one of the cookies.  As he had been doing for years, he placed the cookie in the palm of his left hand and gently closed his fingers around it, applying pressure until he heard the crisp shell give way.  A satisfying crack, and Michael opened his hand again to reveal a perfectly crushed cookie, its little fortune slip lying amidst the shards.

Michael retrieved the little slip and turned it over. A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.  Lucky numbers 2, 5, 11.  He placed the fortune on the table and placed the cookie shards in his mouth one by one.  They had a nice sweet flavor, somewhat reminiscent of almonds and perhaps a touch of orange or some other citrus flavor.  He had been right in guessing the cookie to be crisp, for if it was nothing else, it was crisp.  This really seemed to be damning the innocent cookie with faint praise, however.

That was a saying that Michael's mother used to trundle out quite a bit when she had still been healthy.  Before she had the debilitating plaque deposits begin forming in her brain, she was quite the quick wit and original thinker.  Still she would from time to time use the odd hackneyed or worn phrase, the over-used idiom.  She would say things like up the creek without a paddle, barking up the wrong tree, damning with faint praise, and pressing the shit button when you really need shinola.  Actually, this last phrase was one that no one but her ever seemed to use, but she would use it so often that you came to believe that it was a common saying. Michael would be with his parents at a party, a wedding reception, a formal dinner, or anything, and conversation would somehow wind its way to where his mother could drop this doozie.  Holy Mother of Pete, his mother would say, you were sure pressing the shit button when you really needed shinola.  People within earshot would sit up and take notice. His father would drop his head and blush, and his mother would chuckle.

Shinola was a brand of wax shoe polish that could presumably be mistaken for human feces. By the time that Michael was an adult, people no longer wore leather shoes requiring any sort of upkeep such as polishing.  Shoes were made entirely of plastics, nylons and a synthetic meerschaum substitute, and when they became unsightly the owner simply rejuvenated them with an intravenous infusion of a product known as helium sponge carbide.  This did nothing for the appearance of the shoes, but rendered the owner less vain. Ironically, Michael's father was a chemist who worked on the team that discovered helium sponge carbide although they never saw the lowering of shoe-owner vanity as an application for their discovery.  They were searching for just another synthetic meerschaum substitute.

The world is a crazy place.

2.

Michael's garage was less cluttered than it used to be.  Several months ago he had begun a cleaning program of sorts – an attempt to get rid of things he no longer needed, and that were of no potential use to him.  He started by throwing out several boxes of old magazines – copies of a news magazine to which he had subscribed since high school. He stopped to look at the covers and take note of the memories each one dredged up for him.  There was a cover story about some middle eastern dictator who had run his country like a proverbial salt mine, and then in the end sold it all and shipped off to live anonymously in Las Vegas, where he had been reported to have been seen.  This was a news item from at least fifteen years ago, and Michael knew the story to have been resolved differently, as the dictator had been gunned down in an attempt to steal religious artifacts from an Ethiopian church. 

Ethiopia never had much to say about the attempted theft, nor about the gunning down of the former dictator.  While the dictator had been trying to spirit away a particular religious artifact, people on the street assumed that it was a drug deal gone awry, and members of a local gang who mistook the dictator for a member of an opposing gang decided to take matters into their own hands.   They shot the dictator dead and fled the scene, unable to find any synthetic meerschaum substitute or even any methamphetamine on him. 

Crowds gathered around the body of the dictator as his blood oozed into the street. 

Hey, said an older man in a white, full-length gown, don't I know this guy from somewhere?

Most people who were there that day only vaguely recognized his face from the cover photo on the same magazine which Michael had thrown out that day while cleaning his garage.  Michael did not have as good of a story to go with his recollection, however.  He remembered getting the magazine in the mail the week that his Great Aunt Davina died, causing him to abort his only attempt to travel to Hawaii.

Michael's garage cleaning continued on for several weeks, and much of the detritus of four decades' worth of living had passed on its way to the landfill or to the recycling center.  Michael Nitrous would be most disappointed if I did not take a brief moment and share with you some of the details regarding recycling as it had come to be practiced by the early twenty-first century, so let's do that right now, shall we?

Recycling – a Primer

By a certain point in history, generally reckoned to be sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, the human experience known as living had generated a lot of trash.  Much of this was due, no doubt, to the proliferation of TV-dinner packaging and condom wrappers that had taken place during a lovely, puritanical decade known as the 1950s, or simply the 50s.  People in North America celebrated the 50s for several decades following their conclusion, owing to their fondness for TV dinners, rock and roll music, and condoms.  Entire television series were developed around the theme of living in the 50s, and this madness did not cease until an even stronger interest in the next decade, known as the 60s, began.  Luckily, the 60s were marked by narcotic and psychoactive drug use, reduced reliance on health and beauty aids, and bare feet, thus resulting in a lower output of certain types of waste products. Sexual activity increased, but condom use decreased, thereby reducing the volume of discarded condom wrappers, as well.  An interesting trade-off.

As trash volume increased over several decades preceding the 50s, many forward-thinking scientists had already begun looking for ways to solve the problem before it began, but were unsuccessful.  Some of the best attempts involved either burning the trash or mounding it up into hills, planting grass and a few trees upon it, and calling it nature.  Some communities in less-geographically-interesting regions would take advantage of the new landscaping, install the necessary facilities, wait for winter snows to fall, and call them ski-hills.  More truthful communities might call them man-made ski hills.  No one called them simply piles of old tin foil and condom wrappers.  People wouldn't want to ski on that.

As the number of communities that were interested in supporting these ski hills dwindled, new ideas were needed.  With the advent of the space race and the moon program, many advocated blasting the stuff into outer space, where the trash could orbit the earth until the cows came home.  When military leaders and future owners of satellite TV companies realized the dangers of their equipment becoming fouled by a veritable space-cloud of tin foil and old condoms wrappers, this idea was quietly brushed aside.  No, what was needed was something really innovative and resourceful.

Enter the parking bumper.

At the dawn of the 1980s (a decade that has never received its full due respect the way the 50s and the 60s have), there was a new cosmic consciousness awakening, due to the demise of disco.  It was into this new age that there stepped Dr. Neil Troper, a former polymer chemist who had come out of retirement to contribute his expertise to a team at MIT that was studying possible routes to a synthetic meerschaum substitute.  Troper had been a devotee of disco for a short while, and the 1980s were hitting him hard. He needed something to occupy his mind.

Troper and his associates in Massachusetts began a series of tests on the molecular structure of real meerschaum, and the way in which it reacted when combined with different organic compounds.  The resulting synthesis would then be subjected to excited protons (laying much of the groundwork for the Large Hadron Collider, in fact).  It was theorized that if meerschaum could be more clearly understood at the molecular level, then there would be a greater chance of duplicating it.

All of the work in the labs at MIT would have had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the development of modern recycling, had it not been for the events of one fateful day – a simple sort of day in which Dr. Troper undertook the simple action of throwing an empty bottle from his mid-day laudanum constitutional into the trash compactor along with a half-finished tube of model glue he had been enjoying until it lost much of its freshness.  He ran the machine once, heard the breaking of glass, ran it again,