Mythical Beasts


BIOS	Blair	Casey	Kyle	Max

The Tale of the Mythical Beast
by a historian by the name of Henry Roughbottom
      Smoke rose over the torn battle fields and broken battalions. On both sides of the trenches friends had lost friends and men had lost men. There was one man left standing and he was a hemisphere away. He was a lover not a fighter, and so he broke ranks and fled to the nearest boat. The young, Irish immigrant, Casey Malloy (Kay-see Mal-oy) stepped off the boat into a land of new found freedom and discrimination against the Irish. It didn’t help that his only earthly possessions were a pair of green pants, a “kiss me, I’m Irish” T-shirt, a sack of potatoes and what appeared to be a garbage bag; it was this very rucksack of rubbish that would lead him on to his glorious destiny of being the butt of many jokes. He walked the streets looking for work, women, and pixie sticks. Mostly, he went to where the pixie sticks were. Sadly due to the anti-Gaelic sentiment, this young dreamer was up a crap creek without a job. Talk may be cheap, pixie stixs certainly weren’t. Without employment he was unable to afford his pixie stick addiction and spent his days sitting in alleys. With a future so dim, he let his mind drift to the past. Casey grabbed the garbage bag that lay beside him. From the bag he pulled out a cherry red guitar with six rusty out of tune strings, and began to play. The first note he played could have been any, for Casey didn’t now much about “music,” instead he knew only the void in his heart and the one in his pixie stick stash. As he began to turn his misery into music, heads turned away and grimaced for the sound emanating from the guitar was anything but pretty, then again, neither was Casey‘s future. Fortunately for this broken-down bard, he caught the eye of Kyle Peter who just happened to be passing by.
      Kyle Peter (Kee-lay Peter) was a young immigrant who left the shores of Jamaica in search of a land free from the Whiteman’s oppression. He tried to stay true to his island roots and continued to worship the island voodoo god Diablo II. Kyle now found himself walking the streets with his dog, a black lab named Shadow (Sha-dooooow). Kyle would do freestyle beatbox and sing scat for small bits of money. When he heard the odd sounds of Casey’s guitar playing, Kyle was drawn to the possibility that someone else in America might have just a little bit of that funky chicken we call Soul. Kyle praised       Joh-Boo and approached him.
      Casey broke the awkward silence:
      “Have you eaten the updog?”
      “What’s updog?” Kyle asked.
      “Not much, g.”
      “Skibbidy, dibbidy doo-wow!”
      “Yeah!”
      And instantaneously their friendship was born; they began to perform together and barely earn a living wage from other people’s pocket change. Most people seemed more attracted to Kyle’s overexcited dog than the music. That’s okay because Kyle’s dog seemed to be more excited about plastic bottles than anything else. Casey and Kyle (and their little dog too) scraped together their days wages and to George Webbs to blow it all on double cheeseburgers and drown their bottomless sorrows with bottomless sodas.
      Meanwhile, across town at the local Big K-mart, Blair Heuer (Blare Hoov-er) was testing the strength of the free market and somehow avoiding getting laid off by his bankrupt employers. This Sicilian's life would soon be redirected, (pause) redirected towards the higher pursuits of rock, roll, and the ladies. That work day began like any other: Blair got up, looked in the mirror, felt good about himself and got on his red Kmart vest; He dealt with abusive customers who called him “stupid,” and made small talk with the lady cashiers, most of whom were four times his age. Little did he know that after that very day, he would never have to worry about getting the pink slip from the Big K and having to turn in his red vest and name tag; because that day a stranger walked through the blue lights of destiny and into the Nerf section.
      He was a simple shepherd, who wore his woolen wares. Max Schleicher (Sax Muh-liker) was his name, and he lived in peace and harmony with his fellow vegetarian animal friends, namely his herd of Shetland sheep. This sheep-shearing, soy-swallowing savvy shopper strolled through Kmart looking for a sweet deal on some Nerf weaponry. Blair was stocking the shelves when he saw this fellow foam aficionado.
      "May I recommend the ____"
      "Shhh... there she is..."
      "Ah, yes, my apologies. Just got that one in stock... its from the early 90's, but we finally got it."
      "Now my dream can come true!"
      "Mine, too!"
      And simultaneously they said in awe, "Nerf Prom!"
      And there were hilarious results. The musical toys happened to be next to the nerf selection: one thing led to another and soon Max and Blair were impressing each other with amazing ability to jam on plastic trumpets and guitars. They decided to rock and roll professionally and for the ladies. With the prospects of musical success running so high, Blair stopped waiting to be fired and quit his day job. Big K got the shrug and these two musical maniacs went to George Webbs to celebrate and flirt with the waitresses (especially to be their “strong men”).
      And so, Blair, Max, Kyle, and Casey walked blindly into fate’s spider web, a web of fate’s intertwining twines of fate (A loser...a trouncer... a jedi bouncer). When times were tough, Mama Webb took care of these young boys and as luck would have it, Casey and Kyle sat at a booth next to Blair and Max. While these two duos of dudeness were right next to each other, they would have gone their separate ways had it not been for Kyle’s super smooth suavity. He said to the waitress:
      “Excuse me, ma’am, do you have an raisins?”
      “Nope, why did it say so on the menus?”
      “How about a date?”
      “Nope, we don’t have those either. We do have grape nuts and a selection of questionably fresh fruit.”
      “Never mind.”
Blair turned to Max and spoke, “Man, that was pathetic. Watch this technique that I learned from the great Gargantubunned one...” And Blair stealthily slid his spoon off the table. The waitress looked up and brought a new spoon for Blair.
      “Excuse me, ma’am, but do you like gardening?”
      “What?”
      “Because, I was thinking maybe we could go and plant our tulips together.”
      “Actually I was planning on doing a little horticulture this weekend.”
      “How’s does 8 o’clock sound.”
      “Yea, how about not, I, uh... kind of... uh... have previous plans... previous gardening plans with one magical gardener who tends his garden...”
      As the waitress turned back to her sad non-horticultural work life, the jamming Jamaican Kyle turned to Blair, “Harsh, she really shot you down.”
      “Yea, I know.”
      “It was just such a good line, too.”
      “Yea, and how come she didn’t go for the gardening bit?”
      “Man, I just don’t understand the ladies...”
      “You too?”
      Max had been distracted from the conversation by Shadows loving eyes, but then he noticed the garbage bag that was seated next to Casey and inquired “Hey, what’s your garbage bag for?”
      “I’m a six string samurai, why? You play?”
      “Nope, but I could. Well, maybe four strings anyway.”
      This was the beginning, the beginning of the rebirth of the renaissance of the resurrection of roots rock and roll revived by these rebuilders. What makes an eagle soar? What makes a lion roar? What makes a banana split? Who put the bop in the bop shoe bop shoe bop? Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? What made these four genuses rock so hard? I think the answer is obvious when we look inside ourselves: too much free time.