Hidden in the Mayonnaise (Part 2)

While Sam and Sullivan strolled down the concrete sidewalk, their mayonnaise soaked bodies continued to accumulate things like magnets. Dust and sand, bits of newspaper, twigs and soil from gardens, cigarette butts. Even the smoke from automobile emissions seemed to be drawn to them and linger. And the stuff seemed to settle like rubber glue, stretching and sticking wherever they went.

They eventually encountered a deli owner named Georgi who was holding a rubber hose and diligently washing the sidewalk outside his store. Georgi, who was a refugee from Bulgaria, had a wind-worn face and had seen many things in his life, but nothing like the trash heaps—one big and one small—that were lumbering towards him. Still, such sights didn’t going crack his immovably stoic expression.

“Listen, can you help a brother out?” Sam implored of the man. “Could you spray us off?”

Georgi immediately obliged, aiming his hose right at Sam. However, the water did nothing to appease the situation. Some of it soaked in, but most of it just bounced or dribbled off.

“What is this?” Georgi said to Sam. He then directed his attention to the little blob that was Sullivan and said, “And what is that?”

Sam shrugged, or as much as he could given how much gunk had accumulated on his shoulders.

As Georgi reached over to turn off his spigot to talk to these poor souls, Sam and Sullivan had already walked on by.

“Hey, where are you going?” Georgi called after them.

“To Coney Island,” Sam said back.

“You’re going to work on your tan?”

 

~*~

 

“What is that?” a woman’s voice cried out.

That was Diana Maples. She had just finished dining on the white sands of the beach with her mother and fiancé. They were sprawled out on a white blanket with an ice bucket full of empty oyster shells and two bottles of champagne that only had sips left. But they was interrupted when a mysterious dark shadow was cast over them.

That was Sam. He and Sullivan had accumulated so much debris at that point that Sam was bigger than any sumo wrestler, and Sullivan was a blob the size of a potbelly pig with only his eyes and the tippy toes of his paws exposed.

“Sorry miss,” Sam replied. He didn’t see them down there. He had so much gunk around his face that he no longer had use of his peripheral vision. 

Sam had already been walking past them when Diana’s mother, Mavis, who wore a hat with a bouquet of pheasant feathers that stuck out of its side, shook her head and made tsk sounds. 

“Why don’t they clean up this city?” she said.

Sam turned back and asked her sardonically, “Could you kindly direct me to the water?”

“Ugh,” Mavis cried. “Get away from us, you vagrant!”

“Ah, I see where it is,” Sam said, pointing at it with his rubbery, trash-coated arm, “it’s that other thing on this beach that makes dull roars.”

Sam chuckled to himself, as he continued to walk to the water.

As the family observed Sam and Sullivan glob towards the water, another much thinner shadow was cast over them.

It was Rita who had been discreetly trailing Sam and Sullivan on their journey. In her hand, she held a dozen poppies that looked fairly mangled. She had been gazing Sam and Sullivan when Diana’s fiancé William had interrupted her. 

“Miss, we aren’t interested in buying any of your poppies,” he said to her stiffly. The man had coke bottle glasses and a full head of brown hair that was parted down the middle. 

“I’m not selling them,” she spat back at him, as she threw her handful onto their bucket of empty oyster shells. “They’re yours for free!”

 

~*~

 

“That wasn’t very nice of you, what you did back there with those people,” Sullivan told Sam as they continued to lumber in the sand, making their way to the ocean. The roaring gush of waves and the sound of seagulls were gradually getting louder the closer they got.

“Nice?” Sam asked. “Do you think they were being nice to us? Do you think they’re nice to anybody? All they do is lounge on the beach sucking on oysters just to get away from their luxury homes, and they have the gall to complain about us little people getting in the way of their ocean view?”

“Well,” Sullivan said. “Jesus did say blessed are the meek…”

“If that’s so, I could use a little bit of that blessing right about now.”

Right then, Sam and Sullivan heard a flurry of footsteps in the sand come running up behind him. Sam turned to see a tall blond boy who had come armed with a folded, blue-and-white striped beach umbrella. A smaller blond boy and a girl in pigtails came scampering behind.

“Hey!” Sam cried. “What are you doing?”

“Get off our beach, you filthy hobo!” the boy with the umbrella replied. He then gave Sam one big thwack with it, hitting him squarely on the belly. He responded by falling on his back into the sand.

“This beach is just as much mine as it is yours!” Sam protested as the boy then gave him another thwack on the belly. However, the blow only made the muck that coated it jiggle like gelatin and didn’t hurt Sam at all. Sam then struggled but failed to get back up. The sand that he’d come into contact with on his back had accumulated around his body, just like everything else had. At that point, he was just too heavy to get himself back up.

“Children!” cried a woman’s voice. It was their mother. “What did I tell you about disturbing the wildlife?”

Sam managed to roll onto his belly, which made him accumulate even more sand. He then kept on rolling—over and over—accumulating more and more sand—and gaining momentum until he rolled all the way to the flat, glassy surf zone.

“Neat!” the little girl exclaimed. “He’s like a snowball!”

Gulliver, the blob with little cat feet, scampered to his side and said, panicked, “Sam! Are you OK in there?”

“Just dandy,” he replied in a muffled voice.

“What if you drown?” Gulliver exclaimed.

“Seems I’m drowning either way. Whether in the water or with all this gunk on me.”

Then suddenly Sullivan gasped and exclaimed, “There’s wave is headed right for us!”

“Cripes!” Sam cried as a giant blue, bubbly breaker came gushing in. It completely engulfed him.

 

~*~

 

Fortunately for Sam, all the layers of gunk that had accumulated on his body that day broke apart and dissolved in the saltwater. In fact, he could feel most of it get pulled off him as the wave had retreated. Much of the rest he was able to shake off. As soon as Sam got back to his feet, he looked around frantically for his feline friend. He breathed a sigh of relief when he spotted him below, shaking off the slime melting from his own body.

Sam then got to work wiping away all the junk from his face. As he did so, he noticed the smoothness of his cheek. The stuff seemed to have taken off the beard clean from his face. It felt like he’d just come in fresh from the barbershop. He then worried it also took off hair from the top of his head, but he breathed a sigh of relief when he found it full of silky follicles. Although, it seemed surprisingly short.

Then there was even more confusion when Sam had looked down at Sullivan. His familiar orange-and-white friend had suddenly become black and white, and his wet hair looked long and silky.

“Sullivan, is that you?” Sam said, squinting his eyes. The cat looked up at Sam and let out a breathy mew.

Sam, then gazing at the cat, felt a sudden rush of memories flood back to him.

He then titled his head and said, “Spartacus?”

The cat mewed again.

Before Sam was able to organize his thoughts further, he heard a voice. It was the boy who had pushed him into the sand with the umbrella.

“Gee, Mister,” he said. “You look awful familiar.”

“Yeah,” the girl in pigtails said, “I’d seen you in the papers.”

The older boy, who had his finger to his cheek deeply in thought, suddenly snapped his fingers and pointed it at him. 

“You’re Montgomery Fryberg!” he declared.

Rita, who was just enough in earshot to have heard this, covered her mouth in disbelief.

 

~*~

 

“Good evening, folks. Harvey Stone here with your Daily Digest,” the journalist spoke into the broadcasting microphone, back at the WNRC radio station. “A tantalizing mystery that had gripped high society for months had just come to an abrupt conclusion today when Montgomery Fryberg, the son of cold storage tycoon Harold Fryberg, has been recovered alive and well! As our longtime listeners might recall, the younger Fryberg hadn’t been seen since Christmas when he ran out the door of his estate on Park Avenue, chasing after his beloved rag-doll cat, Spartacus. Of all places, he was discovered on the beach in Coney Island. A little bit disoriented, but all intact. And not only that, he had little Spartacus with him as well. Let this be a lesson for all you cat lovers out there. If you’re going to let your cat outside, perhaps it’s a good idea to invest in a little leash.”

Harvey then flipped the page of the stack of papers he was holding.

“And now, for you lovers of cinemas out there who own automobiles. If you find yourself passing by Camden, New Jersey with some time to spare…”

 

~*~

 

“…you can catch a movie and never leave the comfort of your own car. A start-up company just opened what they call a drive-in movie theater…”

Harold Fryberg turned off the radio.

“That’s it,” exclaimed the elder Fryberg. He flailed his arms about like a demented marionette. “We are the laughing stock of the city!”

Harold was a peculiar looking creature who had a large, round head that was crowned with a small, meticulously arranged hairdo that was parted down the middle. His torso was just as round as his head except much larger. Such an arrangement has caused some observant, albeit insensitive, people to describe his body as looking like a large tomato on top of a much larger tomato.

Minerva, Montgomery’s mother, was a svelte woman with a finger-wave hairdo that was dyed black. She was sitting on a divan, soaking a silk handkerchief with her eyes.

“To think, my own son, who I raised from a birth, living under a bridge,” she cried. “I can’t bear to even think about it.”

Montgomery sat opposite of his mother on another divan and staring into the void.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Montgomery said. “I remember it was Christmas. Sparty had run out. I went to go chase after him. The next thing I knew, I was a homeless man named Sam Jones.”

Right then, Spartacus, the rag doll cat, jumped up on Montgomery’s lap and started to purr.

“And you,” Montgomery cooed lovingly to the cat, stroking his silky fur. “You were my best friend in the world.”

Minerva honked into her handkerchief. “You and that cat!” she cried.

Dr. Vernon, the family’s on-call doctor, was pacing by the fireplace and sucking on a pipe, deeply in thought.

“The best I can make of it,” said the doctor, then holding his smoldering pipe by the bowl, “is you went into a fugue state.”

“Is that right,” Montgomery replied uneasily. “A fugue state.”

“It’s exceptionally rare, but it happens especially in cases where the sufferer is under an immense amount of stress—“

“Stress?” cried Harold, punching the air with a clenched fist. “What could Montgomery have to stress about? He’s got everything in life handed to him. The best toys a kid could ask for. The best schools money could buy. I even made him my Vice President of Operations—“

Right then, the front door slammed open, and a woman with tottering voice called out, “Monty! I came as soon I heard!”

It was Montgomery’s fiancée Geraldine. She wore a white fox stole and a lavender cloche hat that had a white bow on the side.

Montgomery looked at his watch and gave her a bit of side-eye. “By way of the beauty parlor?” he said. “It’s been hours.”

“Oh now Monty,” she said, scuttling up to him on the divan. Spartacus meowed and jumped off of his lap. “It’s important I look good for my sweetie, you know that.” She put her lips to his cheek, assaulting him with kisses with the rapid succession of a machine gun.

“Now stop that,” he said, waving her off.

“Monty,” she said. Her eyes widening, starting to water as she gazed at him. He took one glance at those eyes and then suddenly felt a pang of remorse. 

“I just was beside myself all this time,” Geraldine continued. “I just didn’t know what I would do if I never saw you again.”

It might not have been Montgomery’s idea to get engaged to her, but he wouldn’t deny that she was a very attractive woman.

“Well…” Monty said, putting his arms around her. He went in to kiss her on the cheek but stopped in his tracks when he felt the white fox fur draped around her neck.

 “Is this new?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, blushing. “Your adorable father got it for me while you were away. Do you like it?”

Before Montgomery had a chance to answer, the family butler, Blaine, entered in the room. Blaine said in his monotone voice, “Dinner is served.” His droopy eyes then flicked to Montgomery, and he added cooly, “Welcome back, Mr. Fryberg.”

“Thanks, Blainsey,” Montgomery replied playfully. He’d been using that name to refer to Blaine ever since he was a child. 

Blaine cleared his throat. He never cared for that name.

 

~*~

 

And now, the conclusion...