Moe Howard Died for Our Sins: Made-To-Fit Tales for the Maladjusted

By Dale Andrew White

READ THE BOOK. SHARE THE FAITH. PASS THE SELTZER.


Nominated for the 2005 James Thurber Prize for American Humor

"...Dale Andrew White is a natural born storyteller with an especial flair for blending fantasy, whimsy, satire, and a fevered imagination into original stories that are replete with ribald humor and reader-engaging novelty. Subtitled made-to-fit tales for the maladjusted, this collection of short stories showcase a genuine and offbeat talent... Highly recommended reading!" - Midwest Book Review



"Dale Andrew White is a devious writer and his new collection, Moe Howard Died For Our Sins, provides incriminating evidence of this. On the one hand, the flavor his tales faintly evokes the decayed ante-bellum style of Southern literature that is both lyrically humorous and self-deprecating: the sort of thing we get in Faulkners Sartoris or Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn. ... On the other hand, this is not the satire of Ambrose Bierce or H.L. Mencken. It is more like the kind of in-your-face semantic slapstick that you might expect of a George Carlin or Lenny Bruce... To open this collection is to invite trouble - and probably enjoy it. ... Excellent!". - Rod Clark, editor of Rosebud Magazine, on BookReview.com

With humor as twisted as its stories plots, Moe Howard Died For Our Sins takes readers on a rollicking, hilarious ride. Go to Hell - and see it as a tourist. Get lured into a pie-throwing cult. Peek backstage at the Second Coming. Encounter talking pigs, a tongue-twisting poet, levitating patients, militant tots and a song-and-dance act thats its own show-stopper. The misadventures just keep coming. Part fantasy, part satire, this collection of short fiction is totally bent.

Stories include: "The Dirtiest Words in the World," "The Souths Greatest Writer," "Lunacy Grounded," "Life of the Party," "Feed the Lawyers," "Mrs. Reinsman Rides Again," "Moe Howard Died For Our Sins" and 12 more "made-to-fit tales for the maladjusted" -- all snatched from the pages of Modern Short Stories, Comic Relief, Beyond Science Fiction & Fantasy, Nuthouse and other magazines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 27, 2004
• ISBN: 9781465321879

Dale Andrew White

Dale Andrew White is a two-fingered typist and part-time iconoclast whose short fiction has appeared in Modern Short Stories, Comic Relief, Beyond Science Fiction & Fantasy and numerous other periodicals.

Book preview

The South’s Greatest Writer

When Hannah Rath died last week, the South lost its greatest-yet perhaps most unappreciated-writer.

Critics generally overlooked her. They can’t be blamed. Rath was barely five feet tall and preferred wearing garments that matched her wallpaper.

The public forgot her. It can’t be blamed. Rath became a recluse in her hometown of Dire Straits, Georgia. Occasionally, she’d go downtown to applaud at funerals or to ask the mayor which hole in the ground he mistook for his anus. Otherwise, she stayed home. If it weren’t for the bruised shins on certain pizza delivery boys, no one would have known the feisty author was alive and literally kicking.

Her own people despised her. They can’t be blamed. Rath despised them.

A cub reporter once asked Rath if hatred and hurt inspired her. Rath confirmed his theory by leaping over her typewriter, slapping him with his own notebook and ramming a knee below his waist. That’s right, college boy, she snapped. Writing is pain!

As the only child of the town drunkard, Hannah learned about small town antagonism early. Her father led her to the town square every afternoon and paid the citizenry to ridicule her. Since the sloppy sot had no known means of financial support, the townspeople didn’t understand how he could afford such extravagances. After he died, they discovered to their chagrin that he paid them in Confederate money.

As a schoolgirl, Hannah contributed stories to women’s magazines. In Repentance Can Wait, The Longest Hay Ride and her other early tales, a steamy sensuality emerged that Rath refused to consider a pandering to commercial interests. I am a Realist, she wrote in her memoirs. Where I come from, it is not unusual for virgins to be debauched in pool halls. It is ritual.

Rath’s neighbors resented her literary inferences that they were sexual deviants.

After all, as a young woman, Rath wore broad-shouldered suits and a horsehair mustache. She spent her prom night alone in a corner tavern, drinking whiskey straight up and bragging to anyone who would listen about how she’d once beat up a sailor.

Undaunted, Rath soon published her first novel, an 800-page historical about the comic antics of slaves on a South Carolina plantation. Yet Mirth Among the Magnolias (1932) sold poorly. The few readers who bought copies complained vehemently that Rath had no ear for black dialect.

All the slaves sound like Japanese houseboys, a receptionist in Raleigh, North Carolina, wrote-sending her copy back to its creator.

So, I don’t hear so good, Rath replied. "Let’s see you write a minor epic in six days. Gee, I wish I were smart enough to answer phones for a living."

Despite an advertising blitz for her second novel, a tale of unrequited love set against the colorful and rhythmic panorama of Sherman’s march through Georgia, historians staged book burnings for My Brother, My Lover (1934) and word circulated that the plot and characterization were hopelessly mired by faulty research.

Matthew and Jeremiah are real characters to me and the liberties I took to embellish them were not excessive, Rath wrote in a rebuttal. I am a proponent of Literary License and it is an integral part of my Vision that I see the entire Confederate Army in drag.

This time, the mailman delivered thousands of rejected copies-most of them postage due.

Refusing to deny her destiny, Rath abandoned historical fiction for contemporary. I don’t owe those dead suckers spit, she told her reflection, which concurred. Refusing to be patronized, she shattered the mirror.

Maxine Perkins, estranged alter ego of a reputable editor, assisted Rath with her new work and, when sent a first draft of200,000 words, neatly trimmed it to one of 32.

I think what we have here is a very tight plot summary, Perkins wrote. In the rewrite, however, I suggest you avoid naming all the characters Carrie Jo Fishback, as you did in this draft. My creative writing instructor at Vassar says that sort of untidiness befuddles less meticulous readers. Being an experienced novelist, you understand, I’m sure. Personally, I’m partial to the name ‘Becky.’-P.S.: If we ever meet, please don’t hit me.

Eventually, Rath produced 100,000 words that Perkins considered suitable.

However, I notice that many of them are identical, Perkins wrote. That’s all right, though. Personally, I’m quite partial to ‘said,’ ‘thought’ and ‘sat.’ They’re so active. And ‘ran’ is a real zinger. I don’t know how you do it. I can just picture these people walking and talking.

Creamed Peaches (1942), the first novel of Rath’s renowned Bile Straits Trilogy, concerns the yearnings of a debutante who is bored with walks through the rose garden and having to wear hats bigger than her head. She sells her body on the Savannah waterfront, then returns home with ten dollars and confesses to her father in minute detail.

You sold your body for ten dollars? her father cries in shame and fury. Don’t lie to me, Becky Jo! That explains five dollars but how’d you get the rest of the money?

Eventually, Becky Jo marries a sharecropper and learns that life can be exciting by merely refusing to reveal the recipe for her buttered yam pie.

To the relief of Rath’s postman, the book was a hit. Her publisher couldn’t print editions fast enough. Mapmakers started misspelling ‘Dire Straits.’ Illiterates sought Rath’s autograph. Movie moguls proposed marriage to obtain film rights.

Her popularity waned, however, when Rath committed a series of public relations blunders.

A reception in her honor at the Governor’s Mansion ended abruptly when Rath asked the First Lady to dance. Graduates at the University of Georgia pelted her with flaming pecans during her infamous commencement address, You Have Sold Your Souls for Lawn Furniture. And the people of Warm Springs didn’t appreciate Rath’s bringing Eleanor Roosevelt to her knees with a handshake or her greeting FDR with the phrase, How’s tricks, Gimpy?

To make a living, Rath resorted to using the pseudonym William Faulkner. I’d practiced his signature and we used the same brand typewriter, she later confessed. So, I figured: Who will know? Faulkner found out, however, when he leafed through a novel with his name on the cover and discovered the word ‘Mississippi’ misspelled.

After receiving a threatening letter from him, Rath threw Perkins, her fragile editor, against a wall. You bitch, you told! How else could he have known? He must live five hundred miles away!

Soon came her incriminating testimony before the McCarthy committee, in which she admitted to having been a card-carrying Communist. But I was only holding it for somebody, she swore. He never returned to reclaim it and I heard it was good for discounts in participating republics.

Physicians from Johns Hopkins to Cedars of Lebanon started diagnosing Rath as an unrecoverable alcoholic, a real boozehound. Rath remained convinced these reports were poppycock, especially since she had never met the men. Everybody’s conspiring against me. The walls are closing in. And I could really use a Scotch-and-soda.

By the late Sixties, Rath was taking LSD and calling Andy Warhol a Genuine Artist. Tabloid photographers snapped her in Times Square, selling carnations and whispering to startled passersby: Hey, you, I’m a flower child. Wanna buy some smack?

Distant relatives committed her to an asylum after she started telling gullible strangers she’d had their marriages annulled and kept demanding the immediate removal of all U.S. troops from Fort Riley, Kansas.

Eventually, Rath returned home. Her neighbors couldn’t understand why she chose to spend her declining years in the town that so despised her.

Dying in Dire Straits, Georgia, sure beats being born here, Rath explained to a welcoming committee from the Chamber of Commerce, which happened to be standing outside her house with torches in hand. And living here’s about as much fun as either one.

Near the end, she spent her time in a rocker, drooling uncontrollably and repetitiously referring to ‘The Great War.’ I’m practicing senility, she told Perkins, her nursemaid.

Yet both women sadly knew this wasn’t practice. Rath was getting lost between adjoining rooms. Several times each day, she would point at a blank TV screen and refer to singer John Davidson as that nice young fella.

Eventually, her weakened heart and shattered nerves left her bedridden.

On her birthday last week, Dire Straits suddenly decided to honor its most famous citizen. The mayor commissioned a brass band to wake Rath at 6:16 a.m., the very moment she’d been born nearly a century earlier.

It was like the ending of one of her novels, Perkins remembered. You couldn’t help but get the feeling that it was meant to be.

Since death was a recurring theme in the Rath canon, an avid reader might presume the author was emotionally prepared for her last moment.

If you ask me, she wasn’t expecting it at all, Perkins said. Of course, that’s just my opinion. I didn’t read any more of her trash than I had to.

Lunacy Grounded

Jack Ayers knew he wasn’t normal.

He realized society considered his tendencies and desires to be deviant and repulsive. Whenever