The World According to
Naught E. Piggy
Sunday, June 27, 2004 - Another Brick in NP’s Wall
“…The day started long and would be longer yet, as it was only nine in the morning when we arrived at the base of the Great Wall of China. Seven hours earlier NP and I were at a bar called Maggie’s in an unknown district of Beijing where Mongolians were more than on the menu. They were the menu with prices scribbled on their backs with lipstick. My last memory of the evening was of Naughty waving a pool cue around and shooting off imaginary skeet rounds from his crotch between shots of sub-zero Stolichnaya and racks of 9-ball…”
Are you writing more of that ephemeral travelogue twaddle? NP scoffed and tapped the tip of his melting ice-cream block on the corner of my notepad.
“Who me?” I asked sheepishly. “Everything I write is virtually factual.”
“Fine, just don’t put anything incriminating in there.” He snuffed. “About me, that is.”
“You’re a model citizen, NP.” I said with the most sincerity I could muster and snapped my notebook shut. Hopefully, the chocolate wouldn’t make the pages stick together.
He looked glum—more glum than usual, anyway. There was melancholia behind his mood; this was not just another pig with a hang-over.
We handed our tickets to the man who operated the door for the gondola, which was to take us up the hill where we could walk the wall. The man’s breath smelled something reminiscent of an abattoir. Our door shut with a clack, the car seemed to hum for a moment, and we shot out of the cable house. We rose at a fine pace. The morning rays of sunlight cascaded down upon evergreen tree-tops that glistened with dew.
“Why the long face, anyhow?” I began.
His rejoinder was typically Naughty, “Is that supposed to be a horse joke?”
“Don’t be blue.” I consoled. “You look like the saddest pig to ever hold an Eskimo Pie. You know, every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around.”
“Oh, great just what I need, Penelope Cruz philosophy. You want the truth? I’m about 10 meals ahead and five shits behind. So there!” He harrumphed and shoved the rest of his ice-cream in his mouth. Then, with nothing to do with the wrapper, he crammed it into the ashtray. I watched it drip slowly down the inner wall of the car, as he stared sullenly out the window.
We rode out the remainder of the ascension in silence. It soon became a marveled silence, as the wall came into view, conjuring images of Genghis Khan, the Mongol hordes…
“You ever see Mulan?” NP asked, apparently distracted from is gastrointestinal dilemma.
“Yeah?” I answered.
The gondola arrived abruptly at the top and the attending docent unlatched the door, motioning for us to exit.
“I like tom-boys,” he said and got out.
I was knocked off-kilter for a moment by the obscurity of this comment, my head still fuzzy from the night before and wondering just where that came from. After a look from another gondolier who may have been offering another olfactory tour-de-force, I hurried after NP as he trundled up towards the wall.
A hawker with three unnaturally large teeth the color of old meerschaum came and began to press his wares upon us with unbridled fervor: “Mister! I know you, I see you before. You buy this cheap. Good quality. Very Cheap!”
“No thanks,” I said in passing, which was a mistake because the mere acknowledgement that he existed sent him into an even more lathered pitch in hopes of the potential sale of a Mau watch or other piece of “made in China” knickknakery. The man followed us mercilessly until NP stopped short and turned on him like a free-market bull preparing to charge a toreador done up in communist red.
NP fixed a black stare upon him, “You speak English, obviously?”
“Yes! Yes, I do!” The junk-peddler practically squirmed with excitement.
“Good, then take your shit and fuck off, you dirty pinko.” And with that, he turned, hopped up the stairs and vanished up and onto the protection of the wall itself.
The bewilderment on the man’s face showed that he was absolutely gob-smacked, and as I stood there speechless myself, I took leave by simply pointing towards the path NP had taken and followed suit.
I caught up with him as he ambled along the ancient fortification. “You are downright surly today—too much vodka last night?”
“No. You know, I was having a great time, shooting pool with those tom-boys. And, this is all historical and all… It’s just…”
“Um, NP,” I interrupted. “Those weren’t…”
“Yeah, they were transvestites, and your point is?” His tone was that of the jaded pedantic.
“Um, none I guess.” I said shrinking a bit.
“The point is: life. I’m stuck…” He paused for a drawn-out moment of contemplation, and then asked, “Does it get any easier?”
“No.” I answered, maybe a bit too quickly.
“Shit, I knew you were going to say that.” He kicked a hoof at the thousand year old wall and stared out into the verdant Mongolian landscape and the valley below.
“The older you get, and the more you know what you want, the less you let things bother you.” I added.
“Christ, now you’re quoting Lost in Translation. Don’t you have anything original?” He rolled his eyes at me clearly disgusted and turned a distant gaze once again to the majestic horizon, as the wall it carved its way across the Middle Kingdom into the haze of infinity.
At that moment, some jerk-off decided to yodel off the wall at the top of his lungs. There was something so profoundly incongruent in this act of defiling the sanctity of this near-timeless wonder of the world—by this tourist’s bellowing “little ole’ lady hoo—that I was suddenly saddened by the sheer banality that seems to have dulled my life, a worryingly uninteresting patina that has caked up upon my very essence.
“I have you.” I said lamely yet hopeful.
“Yeah, but look at me. I’m nothing… I’m just a cog in the drudgery of life, watching my life go tick-tocking by while those Hollywood types all diddle each other with their diamond-studded dildos, and those too stupid to know how lucky they are to be alive bitch and moan about what they don’t have. I mean, what’s that got to do with the price of tea in China? Maybe I should get a frickin’ lobotomy. That way I could be happy like Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I could just sit around and watch Queer as Folk as day long with a corn-cob and a can of suds.” He let out an enormous sigh as if the weight of Sisyphus’ burden had been relieved from his shoulders.
“Great thunder-balls of death!” I cursed. “Of all things foul and evil, what is that stench?” I gagged and covered my nose.
“The smeller’s the feller!” NP tittered devilishly.
“That must be the rankest compound of villainous smell to have ever offended a nostril!” I managed to gasp.
“So, now it’s Shakespeare.” He rolled his eyes. “C’mon let’s evacuate the area. I can read Chinese. That sign says there are silent gas emissions around here.”
Having barely survived NP’s noxious miasma, we meandered a markedly serpentine length of the wall. Vacantly navigating the crests and troughs of this undulating dragon, I pondered NP’s last tirade, silently letting it soak in and trying to grapple with his grief and at last seeing that we weren’t so different, he and I.
“Life is a bitter pill to swallow sometimes. You could try yodeling.” I offered.
“I’m tired of pills they make me suicidal, and F that a-hole. What does he think this is, the frickin’ Matterhorn at Disneyland?” NP spat.
“C’mon you’ve done quite a bit in your short, little life. You’ve impersonated a war correspondent; you’ve had your own talk show…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah…” he moaned.
“So, what are you bitching about?” I asked—his exasperation now wearing thin on me.
“I don’t know, it just seems like the entire world is totally f’d up.” He sighed. “Damn, my shanks are killing me. How do we get off this damn wall, anyhow? I’ve gotta take a groaner, if you know what I mean. You know: dump some cargo, chum for chocolate sharks, have an Irish shave…”
“Life is imperfect, NP. Have you considered that your depression could be rooted in your mind’s desire to match your idyllic vision of how life should be with the world’s shortfalls? There’s a word for that, it’s called Weltschmertz.”
“No high-falutin Kosher talk from you, Jesus Killer. Ya hear?” He snapped.
“It’s German.” I corrected.
“Shall I roll out zee barrels?" He asked stifling a yawn. “I swear, I don’t think it’s me. It's as if the world has somehow become polluted with a-holes.” He griped.
“And, what’s your contribution?” I asked.
“I point them out. I’m a professional a-hole pointer outer. Maybe, I should start a crusade.” His spirits seemed to lift for a moment.
“Maybe you need a girlfriend first or a mirror, you manic little porker.”
“Screw that, I want a tom-boy.” He mused.
“I’m sure it can be arranged.” I assured him, as I was reminded of last night’s antics.
“Really? Hmm… Do you reckon Genghis Khan had an over-protective mother, or what?”
“Uh, I think it was the other way around.” I said.
“You mean he was protective of his mother?”
“No, the wall was to keep him out.”
“Oh… didn’t work.” He noted. “Plenty of Mongols at Maggie’s last night.”
Suddenly from high on a parapet, NP had spotted the yodeler poised for yet another exasperating “little ole lady hoo.” With a surge of unrefined rage, he leapt up to the rim at the balustrade—eyes full of menace—and let free a blood curdling cry. “Hey, you! Yeah, you! Stand still, laddie! I’ve the right mind to go come down there and make you squeal like a Ned Beaty if you don’t be shuttin’ your Yankee-Doodle pie hole!” His last words “pie-hole” echoed ominously through the vast gorge that gaped just below: “pie-hole, pie-hole, pie-hole...”
The sharp trill of a mobile phone forced my attention upon the Asian girl beside me.
“Weh?” she answered followed by rough, cacophonous discord— a string of utterances that could only be adequately described as Chinese. She proceeded to have a conversation in no hushed tone right then and there about God knows what for everyone within 20-feet to hear without the slightest modicum of concern for anyone around her. The publication of one’s private life into others: technology’s new plague. On the Great Wall of China no less, there was no escape.
Turning back to NP, I wanted to see if he’d pointed out the a-hole, but he’d vanished into thin air. A moment later someone screamed. It was the yodeling man.
I leapt to the battlement and peered over the towering edge of the great wall. A crowd had gathered along the balustrade, and I followed their collective gaze to a small unmoving pink form that lay supine, having cast itself across the hillside. It was NP. In a daze of distress, I took to the stairs of the rampart, bounding down the steep and uneven flights without care for my own welfare.
When I reached his side, NP lay on his back with his mouth agape and eyes fixated somewhere beyond the cloudless sky in search of some fleeting glimpse of clarity in this world gone mad. His limbs were strewn at the odd angles of a puppet tossed to the ground by a bored and angry child. A smile slowly crossed his face like a cloud passing. He blinked once slowly then turned to me.
“Why’d you do it NP?” I cried.
“I told you. Those pills made me suicidal.” His voice was distant, barely audible. He then laughed a strange, vacant laugh. “Life, it’s so simple in perspective. It’s all clear to me now—so simple.” He said then shivered. “It’s cold—so very cold.” His eyes began to close.
“Don’t you leave me, Pig!” I commanded and slapped him across the snout.
“Hey, that hurt you a-hole. I’m trying to take a nap.” He scorned.
“You mean you’re OK? You didn’t just try to kill yourself?” I was incredulous.
“Nah, I’m not the problem. Actually, I slipped. Between, the yodeling product of incest and that mobile toting fart-blossom, I was double-teamed by a-holes. I was simply overwhelmed by a concussive force of magnified a-holia and lost my hoofing.” He informed, propping himself up on one elbow.
“What’s all this about life being so simple and all that?” I asked, painfully.
“Well it is isn’t it? Duh! It’s just that we never know it ‘till it’s usually too late. We’re just bricks in the wall. Everyone wants the whole enchilada, but sometimes it’s a little bit or nothing all.”
“Hey that’s the Texas Tornados!” I exclaimed. “I like that song.”
“You and me, kiddo. You know, I’ve learned just as much as I’m gonna from this fortune cookie, let’s blow this taco stand.” He said and chewed on a piece of straw that had made its way into his snout during the fall.
“I’m with you, Pig.” I said offering a hand to his hoof.
Naught E. Piggy, picked him self up and dusted himself. We then left the wall behind, to start all over again.
“Ack, that tastes like human pee.” He said and spat out the straw. “Can we go to Maggie’s again?”
THE END
The following segment is provided for your listening enjoyment. Simply click the play button to hear The Texas Tornados play NP's new favorite tune:
A Little Bit is Better than Nada.
If you don't have broadband (like me),
click here to download the mp3.