Tuesday, March 22, 2011

PART LXXIX - There is an Accident on the Highway of Life

The unfortunate subject of this case study has, until very recently, led a hopelessly normal life. This all changed last Thursday, when he went to lunch at Butterworth's, on the ninetieth floor of the Rockefeller building. He was preoccupied with the effects of a new tax upon his hobby of collecting rare stamps in holograph when he tripped on the strap of a woman's handbag, crashing into a table and spilling wine on the surprised patrons. All would have been fine, except Jinxy D. Axi Dent-Prone, our subject, made the mistake of apologizing for the way one woman's dress allowed her no modesty when wet. Her husband took offense and struck Jinxy in the jaw, knocking him onto a desert cart. The cart rolled through the swinging doors into the kitchen where he was dumped into the garbage chute and slid down 5 floors. Upon dropping into the garbage elevator, he promptly attempted to find an escape route. He managed to force the doors open and staggered out into a freshly cleaned office area. A VP took one look at him and the smell made him heave his lunch consisting of oysters and yogurt on Jinxy's shoes. Jinxy then made a run for it into an area that was under renovation and he fell three floors into a pile of insulation.

A workman nearby flicked away a cigarette butt, which landed on Jinxy and scorched a small, round welt on his forearm. Jinxy flung himself off the insulation in pain. He ran through an open door while searching for a First Aid kit, and slipped on a puddle of lubricant. As he reached the end of the hall (thinking that he really should find out what kind of lubricant this was and use it in his car), a workman opened a door leading into an air shaft. Dent-Prone slid into him; our subject's jacket caught on a pipe, which saved him from falling eighty four stories to his death in the sub-basement, as the workman did. Jinxy did slide down another four floors before he caught on another pipe. His jacket ripped, and he fell to a landing one floor below. Jinxy limped out of the service shaft towards the elevator, thinking of the implications this afternoon had for his clothing budget. Thus preoccupied, he did not notice the elevator malfunction, which caused it to stop one floor below his own. As he stepped in, it started upwards; Dent-Prone was whisked up thirteen floors on the roof of the elevator. It stopped at the penthouse office of Stürmgosse Smith before plummeting to the ground floor for Mr. Smith's trip to the masseuse. Jinxy climbed through the emergency hatch as a beautiful young woman entered. He was unsure how to answer to her question, "What are you doing?"

"Uh, I'm here to fix the drapes."

"We have blinds."

"That's okay, I'll make the bill out in braille."

The elevator then malfunctioned again, flying up to the penthouse. As a result, Jinxy fell from the elevator ceiling, and the young woman received serious bruising to her inner thighs (rape charges are pending.) The elevator then ceased functioning altogether, and has taken to dispersing pacifist literature to smart bombs.

The woman ran from the elevator screaming profanities. Jinxy left as well, looking for an unobtrusive way to get out of this place. Walking down a narrow corridor, he entered one of the rooms and was promptly hit in the eye with a rubber band.

"Collateral damage!" screamed The Manual "Kant," aiming another elastic at Johnny Dint, who had just pegged off David Wont. Covering his eye with his hand, Jinxy ducked back out into the hall and was smashed in the head by the mail cart, which pushed him across the building. He was dropped into a trolley which carried him down to the mail room on the third floor. A conveyor belt pulled him up and he landed on the desk of one of the sorters who pushed him to the floor.

"This is a restricted area, sir!" the sorter yelled.

"Yeah yeah, and I'm only PG." Jinxy dragged himself out of the room and walked through the door across the way. It was the stairs. Jinxy caught his breath a moment while staring down them when a man came barreling through, knocking him flat. Jinxy was flung into the spiral stair well and proceeded to tumble to the lobby. Two large security guards, standing at the bottom, lost control of their coffee and donuts when he plowed into their ankles. "Watch where you're rollin', asshole!" they growled as they threw Jinxy out onto the sidewalk where his left hand met the bottom of some woman's spike high heeled shoe.

While he lay on the ground dazed, Lassie, the imaginary dog (now deceased) came along and urinated on his face, which snapped him back to reality. He picked himself off the ground and crawled into a cab. Jinxy told the cab to take him to his apartment in the center of town.

The driver considered it odd that Jinxy addressed the car directly, but decided not mention it.

Once they arrived on his street, Jinxy realized that there was no money in his pockets. "Is it alright if I run upstairs and get some cash?"

The cabbie turned and said, "What?"

"Look out!"

"What?"

The driver turned back to the road in time to widen his eyes at the chemical truck backing out in front of him. The vehicles collided, spilling an unidentified radioactive substance all over the street as the taxi skidded into a fire hydrant. A gyser exploded under the car, flipping it over and drowning the driver. Jinxy floated out of the cab, thinking, 'At least I don't have to pay for the ride!' The water carried him into an open storm sewer, which carried him ten miles through some now radioactive sludge to the river outside of town. Immediately after surfacing, Jinxy was hit on the head by The Good Ship Hash Pipe, piloted by Gordie Leadfoot.

He awoke on shore to find a three hundred pound woman who had fallen in love with him at first sight giving him mouth to mouth. Jinxy took one look at her and screamed, shattering both her eardrums and attracting the attention of two cops. Being unable to get any coherent answers out of either of them, the cops tried to haul Jinxy and the fat woman off to the station. The woman went berserk and killed both cops with a bear hug.

In the confusion, Jinxy wandered off, suffering from amnesia. He now thought he was a Neo-nazi torture warden about to put a whole city to it's death. Contriving individual tortures for each person in the populous took him fifteen seconds (Jinxy, in his new identity of Uber Storm Fuhrer Gerhardt Von Gruesome, had the imagination of three deities, if nothing else).

A piece of bubble gum got stuck on Jinxy's shoe, tripping him into a newspaper box. Having discovered the necessary materials for his first torture, J. picked the colour comics out of the box and snatched up a nearby skateboard. Skating down the street, he spied his first victim. Before he could administer a lethal paper cut, however, a wheel from a 747 fell from the sky and struck the back of the skateboard, catapulting Jinxy 35 feet in the air and landing him in an open dumpster seconds before a garbage truck came to empty it.

Tumbling into the truck's dark chamber, J. was then compacted into several cubic meters of rotting restaurant garbage. Hours later, sandwiched amongst rotting tangerines and green Limburger cheese, the truck launched it's contents into the local dump. Jinxy crawled out and scared the two attendants to death. Climbing over their bodies, he wondered who he was. Oh yes, William T. Rockefeller, richest man on earth. He made a deranged beeline for the Rockefeller building, intending to take possession back from his simpering sister and buy up Ravensgate.

When he fought his way into the boardroom past security and secretary, five board members passed out, one crashing through a window and plummeting to her death 90 floors below. A cool summer breeze lightly rustled the papers on the table and flattened the remaining twenty board members to the back wall, who applauded the death of Rockefeller's simpering sister. Jinxy was about to sit down when the T2001 walked in and had a slight malfunction, which caused the shootings of the remaining board members and several wall panels before it shorted out completely. Crawling out from under the table, Jinxy heard a large crash echo from below the open window. The building started to shake. Looking down from the window, J. saw three bus loads of Japanese tourists crashed into the lobby by their Chinese drivers. Subsequently, the building's base started to crumble (there's Italian building for ya)..

Jinxy fell out the broken window only to land on a misdirected hang glider. This would not have saved him either if it weren't for the strong updraft caused by the burning buses, which got the hang glider safely to the roof of a shorter building. Stepping off the hang glider, Jinxy walked over a skylight and fell into the Ramada Inn's indoor swimming pool. The water instantly turned an indescribable grey-brown colour (the Ramada is suing, claiming that the pool has to be replaced entirely), and two swimmers lapsed into comas from toxic shock syndrome. Slipping into the men's change room, Jinxy discovered the showers had been filled with purple dye by some juvenile prankster at the practical joke convention being held in the hotel.

J. wandered out of the shower after getting dressed and into the hotel lobby only to have a baseball bat meet his head from a crazed junkie that had decided to hijack the lobby.

"Take this lobby to Cuba!" the junkie screamed as a SWAT team swatted him.

When he regained consciousness, J. found himself in one of the hotel rooms in bed with a Cocker spaniel and a marriage license sitting on the night stand to Fifi. There was a pounding on the door. "Open up! Police!" The door burst open and in rushed the LAPD and other assorted racist scum, along with the SPCA and a noose borrowed from Our Brothers of Perpetual Strangulation.

Thinking quickly for a change, J. threw the dog at the lynch mob, causing a total of thirteen near-fatal concussions. However, this attracted the attention of the Goddess of Spaniels, who became so incensed that she grabbed a statue of J. (which, much like a voodoo doll, contained his soul) and stepped on it. Now very short and very wide, J. waddled out of the room into the arms of Lickin Linda Lovelace the... pocket mortician(?), who immediately broke his arm by riding on it with Lawrence the Arabian. Waddling as fast as he could to escape, J. failed to notice an open man hole (in a hotel?), and he fell into a mess of over-ripe banana peels. Squishing his way out, J. was subsequently punted into another time zone by a passing subway.

And then Ravensgate collapsed in on itself, and Jinxy's day took a turn for the worse.

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