Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [24]
“It is?”
“Es. Very good for men. Men smoke.” To emphasize this he crooks his arm and does a Spartacus muscle-clench gesture with it. Men smoke—grrrr!
Of course, this is where they'd benefit from television reception. Documentaries are handy for filling in the blanks. But for once I bite my tongue.
Still shaking his head in disbelief that we're even having such a ridiculous conversation, Tom stands up and vanishes into the trees, sidestepping a young woman bouncing a naked baby in her arms. As I watch him go, my eyes switch to the baby. In that moment, it expels a thick projectile of greeny-brown diarrhea from its ass, hosepipe-style. Then another. BLEEEEECCCCCHHHHHHH! A fecal torrent of such abundance that it cascades in a viscous stream over the mother's shoulder, down her arms and the backs of her legs.
Grossed out, Tasha takes in a sharp gulp of air behind me. Then, before it's even fully registered on any of us what just happened, a small dog, one of those emaciated bag-of-bones animals I saw roaming the village earlier, scurries out of the trees, clearly unable to believe its luck. Before the pigs can come running over, the dog wraps itself around the mother's feet and begins gobbling up the elasticated tongues of shit dripping from her arm.
Too stunned to recoil, too sick to throw up, I just stand there, staring, hand clutched to my mouth, thinking to myself, “This is the life? Seriously?”
1 The Past is divided into eight distinct periods, so that people sitting history exams can remember them better.
i. Modern Times. Covers the period generally known as “nowadays.” Began about ten years ago and is still going on.
ii. Yesteryear. A sunny, carefree era, remembered only by lonely grandmothers and tiresomely chatty uncles, and which happened just long enough ago that it prevents you arguing with them, when gas was a penny a gallon, songs had tunes you could hum, acid reflux was still called indigestion, cigarettes were considered nutritious, and wars were fought for good reason.
iii. Days Gone By. An ill-defined time shortly before the birth of everyone alive today, spoken of with great fondness and recorded at length in books, but otherwise with no proof that it existed at all. For instance, Marconi is said to have invented the telephone in Days Gone By. Yeah, right.
iv. Historical Times. 1300 to 1870 A.D. Americans fought the Civil War. Shakespeare copied Francis Bacon's plays and sold them as his own. The fifteen laws of aerodynamics were written down. Captain Cook sailed the world, randomly renaming things, and was killed in Hawaii (renamed the Island of Sudden Stabbings). And Vanuatu was discovered.
v. The Days of Yore. 1000 to 1300 A.D. (Later merged with the Dark Ages to avoid confusion.)
vi. Ancient Historical Times. 5000 B.C. to 1000 A.D. Incorporates Biblical Times and the era of great ancient civilizations: Greeks, Ephesians, Corinthians, Colossians, Romans, and a bunch of other people St. Paul wrote to. During this time, Buddha invented doing nothing and called it meditation, Vesuvius erupted, Atlantis sank, and aliens visited our planet and gave us Stonehenge, marijuana, pyramids, Scientology, fire, algebra, and wheels.
vii. Time Immemorial. A catch-all for the five thousand years before history really got started, when nobody can account for what happened, but certain things—things that were showing promise and would come into their own later on—are thought to have had their origins. Man, for instance. And fish. Otherwise, lots of waiting around.
viii. Prehistoric Times. Started with the Big Bang and lasted for hundreds of millions of years. Made famous by its colossal ice ages and the Jurassic Era, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Grrrr.
5
Fat Kid
Coming up with the concept for All Washed Up turned out to be the easy part. Next, it had to be fleshed out into a full-blown TV series (the act of watching television taking a different set of skills to actually making it, apparently), and since I had no idea at all how to