The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

        I must blurp out to you here the true confession that I had a tad of trouble sleeping that night. Glamorous and exciting scenes of the evening's activities flew like whirlygigs through the canyons of my mind, fighting the updrafts caused by the gusts of hot air and keeping me wide awake with the racket.
        Here was Ms. Fitzpatrick in hot pursuit of our own personal Stink Machine, there was Billy being treated as if he had good sense, here free fizzies for the house, there Runnan Gittit, here Slug, there Zeb, Egghead, bigwigs, nabobs, and Thespians, all dancing across my mind like a compilation of diverse pictures flickering noisily through an old cinerama, or like a video collage put together by some aging sixties hippy strung out on Cuban coffee.
        As I lay and pondered thusly, my thoughts slid slushily down the slippery slope of my brain and splashed into the froggy pond of my past. For some unknown reason I began to recall the days before our big break, and my mind played back moving pictures of some of the bizarre gigs that we had endured in the halycon days of our fallow youth. That's when I remembered the Mummies on Barstools.
        The Schmooze Club it was called, and not without reason. The Schmooze Club had been founded by some garrulous fellows who wanted to share a cup of fizzies for "Old Ankzein" (the popular Dr. Rubric Ankzein was a charter member of the club before his move to Scotland and subsequent fame as a writer of drinking songs).
        It is necessarily needless to say that things had slid a bit downhill for the Schmoozes. There had been a sorry and steady declension in spirits from the early days and happy beginnings of the club… until the fateful night when we played our job at the Schmooze Hall, in downtown Gutchinville. By the time that we did our gig at the Guthchinville Schmooze Club, its members had degenerated into bloated, bulbous hulks barely balanced on their broken barstools.
        They sat without any movement discernable to the unclothed eye, their heads hung gloppily in the gulping gloom. Every now and then one of them would cut loose with a tremendous belch (or worse) that would rattle the windows and spin the guilty patron around like a top on his rickety stool. When the commotion from such an event had ceased and desisted a thick and syrupy silence would envelope the Schmooze Hall like a shroud, wrapping the lolling members in a cocoon of senseless indifference.
        The sorry spectacle of the fallen Schmoozes was the end result of their careless intemperance, their years of Fizzies hogdom. Granny Guthchins could have warned them, but they didn't want to hear it, so here they were. It was enough to make a hyena cry.
        We were hired to entertain these folks, and we almost busted a gut trying. We did hoedowns, Schmoedowns, Polkas, Mazurkas: we even did our sure-fire Cajun number that ended with Frogstick breaking a washboard over his head. The crowd was as still as death. We stood on our heads and played "The Wildwood Flower" backwards. Still no response. I finally got a little ticked off at their ignorance of our classy act; I promptly siezed the cow by the horns and gathered the boys together for a little conference.
        "Boys," I said, "don't take this sorry response to heart." I cleared my throat. "They just need a little warming up."
        "Warming up?" blorped Egghead, "You couldn't warm up these beach-balls with a blowtorch." (I suppose that I never mentioned to you-all that Egghead is a little excitable at times.)
        "Now, now, Egghead," I squirted, "let's give them one more try." I glanced around the dimly lit, cavernous mauseleum of a barroom. "Maybe we can at least get one of them to look at us." Secretly I didn't know if we could, but I aimed to try and see. Now I walked to the front of the stage and opened my big fat mouth.
        "Ladies and Gentlemen," I prated, "and I say that strictly as a rhetorical device." Then I shouted, "We are loud to present to you Hop Sing's version of the ancient Illyrian love song, TU-NING!" I promptly turned my back on the surfeited throng and turned my amp up to Mega-10, which is a setting only recommended for use as a means of powering a public address system during a nuclear attack.
        The rest of our band followed suit. I untuned my old flattop and started to flail away at it like a trained chimpanzee, uttering periodic shrieks and flipping backwards whenever things seemed to get dull. I looked around, and to my great joy and pride the members of the Hootenennies had undone themselves.
        Slug had plugged his guitar directly into a wall socket and was streaking about the stage like Bill Haley's Comet, buzzing and crackling like a ham radio and leaving a shower of sparks in his wake; Stink had swallowed several Fizzies tablets without any water and was blowing up like a balloon in the Macy's parade, bouncing across the ceiling as he serenaded the bargoers with serendipitous blasts of atonal feedback, tethered to earth only by his coiled guitar chord.
        Frogstick was using the bar for a drum-head and using two ballpeen hammers as sticks; and Egghead had set up some test tubes and was using the gas that he generated to power an immense tuba, which he then carried around the room, blasting the unflinching patrons off of their barstools one at a time. They lay scattered in his wake like freshly mown hay, unaware of their sudden supinity.
        All in all, I have to say that I'm mighty proud of the way that the boys handled it, it being an ad lib and all: they did a real fine job, and made me glad to be their pal. It was a red-letter night, and that's a fact.
        By and by we all got tired of it; it was big fun for a few minutes but tiresome after a while; I reckon that the human bean can almost get tired of anything, even if he`s nothing but some ciphers on a page being animated by the imaginations of certain wise and prudent readers, who obviously must have good taste if they are reading about us. At least, that's the way that Egghead might have thunk it, so I'm slipping it into my book.
        Egghead doesn't get to write a chapter in this fabulous book, although he wants to something fierce. I'm concerned about Egghead; people might say that he's daft, what with this fantastical fiction theory and all. The boy doesn't need to get all heated up by contributing to this fabulous true account. He's obviously had enough experience for one lifetime.
        All of Egghead's experience showed that night. The band met in the middle of the stage for a meeting after Egghead had blown all of the patrons onto the floor.
        "Well boys," I brayed, "I reckon that we've showed them a trick or two, whether we wanted to or not." I reached out to squeeze old Slugeroo's shoulder. "I just hope we still get paid...AAAAIIII----------------ZZZZZZZ--!"
        Well now, what do you think? Old Slug was still plugged into the wall! Isn't that hilarious?
        "BZZZZZZ------," I buzzed between clenched teeth.
        "Ho, ho ho!" chortled Frogstick, "This is such good fun!" He slapped his thigh and howled with glee. Then he made the mistake of slapping my thigh.
        "BZZZZZ-----," he buzzed. He bounced up and down, and his hair stood on end. Stink eyed us enviously as we jerked and contorted before him. He seemed to feel that he was once again being left out of a good thing.
        "Forget that noise," he hollered, "I'm getting in on this!" At this brilliantly sharp point he forgot to whet his mind and he dully leaped up and grabbed onto Frogstick's arm. "Count me in," he cried, "BZZZZZ-----." His eyes rolled up like shutters into his head, and he began to jerk like a Mexican jumping being.
        "Fascinating, and yet deplorable," observed Egghead. He walked over to the wall and pulled out the plug. We collapsed like empty cartridges onto the floor of the stage.
        The sound began slowly as we lay there spent and panting, our ears still ringing and fingers still tingling from our electrical ordeal.
        At first I didn't recognize it. It began slowly but it built swiftly into a tumultuos wave of solid sound. I recognized it. It was applause. I turned my head and rested it upon my burning cheek. What I saw was was downright shocking.
        There they were, the members of the Schmooze Club, standing on their feet and applauding like trained seals, uttering loud "hoorays" and "yeehaws" and "huzzahs" as if they were goodfellows. A short, stringy man in cowboy duds approached the stage and came up to me. I shakily raised myself up on an elbow and slowly shook my head.
        "You boys were just great," he cried, "just great!" He siezed my damp hand in his rawbony grip. "I haven't seen it this lively in here since the fire in '63." He slapped me on the shouder and knocked me back onto the floor. "Keep up the good work, boys," he honked, and, throwing a wad of bills on the bandstand, he began to walk away. "There's a little extra in the pay to show our appreciation of the light show."
        "Oh, by the way," he called over his shoulder, "be sure to do that electrocution thing the next time that you come. Or don't bother to come at all." He laughed.
        Later, when I counted our pay, there turned out to be five dollars extra for the whole band. I counted it up as we sat in my pick-up truck after we had forced our aching bodies to load all of our equipment. There were no lights out there in the parking lot, and the night seemed strange and menacing as I told the boys the news of how much extra cash our big tip amounted to. Then I told the boys what the Smooze Club expected at our next gig.
        "It's the electrocution or no job, boys," I told them. I hung my head dejectedly. "I don't know about you guys," I said, "but I say that we move to another town. What do you fellows think? Do you have any good ideas? What do you want?"
        "Fish eggs," said Slug.
        "New drumsticks," said Frogstick.
        "I want to tag along," said Stink, "can I please, huh?"
        "Absolutely not," said Egghead, "you are a member of our band, and you will travel with us where we go. You needn't ever merely "tag along". And as for the entertainment of these Schmoozes, we will not risk death by electrocution to please this mob of atavistic relics."
        "Yeah," said Slug.
        "Yeah," said Fogstick.
        "Yeah," said Stink, "is it allright if I say that, too?"
        "It's okay," sighed Egghead wearily. He gazed at us with the jaundiced eye of a swaybacked jade that doesn't want to plow a field but knows that it has to. "You can say anything that you want to," he told Stink.
        Egghead jerked a thumb at the now-darkened club that towered threateningly like a big old shadowy mugger in the middle of the parking lot, emptied, by this late hour, of its reveling throng. "I liked these guys better when they were Mummies on Barstools," he quacked. That was the final word on the subject. I fired up the old truck, and like dumb birds looking for a place to roost we rode off sleepily into the tar-black night. Many gigs have come and gone since that night, but none have made us quite so glad to skeedaddle home and not look back as our big Saturday night at the old Gutchinville Schmooze Club.
        As I lay in my bed thinking these thoughts with my multi-purpose brain machine, I heaved a massive sigh out the window and promptly fell asleep.
        The next morning we were to rise and continue our great odyssey, in which the least likely hero in the history of western civilization rose to a position of undeserved prominence and worldwide fame. I speak of course of Frogstick Gutchins, friend of rulers, companion of kings, and the goofiest bozo to ever pound the skins off of a set of drums.
        The vast wilderness lay stretched ahead of us like a beckoning siren, unexplored, untapped, and anaware that we were about to walk through its midst in the days ahead as we carried out our heroic search for our missing chum. We little expected that our journey would cause the land and its beauty to be treasured for unknown eons, and that the record of this bold sorty would be revered as long as the fictional literature of the English language has a home in the unfettered minds of enlightened Humanity!
        We left the next morning, filing silently into the great oak forest that clothed the fertile ground to the northeast of the campground, and began to fulfill the calling of our quest: to find a Frog', and bring him back alive into the fellowship of uncivilized society.
        Manfully shouldering our heavy backpacks, we forged on ahead of our own bad selves.