Puddlehead

The Adventures of Howie Dork

A friend urged me to post my chapter about the ‘Best of All Possible Worlds’ conference in my absurd satirical novel ‘Puddlehead: The Adventures of Howie Dork (A Fairy Tale of American Business)’. It’s the chapter where Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy of wet foot/dry foot fame now fully grown, confronts a roomful of American thought leaders. Unfortunately, absurdity is getting closer to real life. Cynicism is pro forma. But something in the book is a pushback, or at least a dare. The laughs are bitter but they’re not alone. The full book is here.

Chapter 9 - Elian’s Revenge

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“I have seen our people being steadily ruined. I am a peasant’s son and I know what goes on in the villages. This is why I meant to take my revenge and I regret nothing.”

- Gabriel Princip, after killing an aristocrat and starting World War 1

“To all you Generation Wuss snowflakes out there: GROW SOME BALLS.”

- Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, 2012

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Elian interrupted Bubba because he did not allow others to speak on his behalf. Though much had been taken from him, his judgement had remained his own.

“Elian Gonzalez has no quarrel with Howie Dork,” he said, speaking for himself in the third person.

He was on an improvised platform at the back of the room that held audiovisual controlling equipment for the broadcast of the symposium. Behind the platform were several large rolling cases, inside one of which Elian had hidden while a follower snuck him inside.

Leaked security camera footage would later show a uniformed worker in a low hat stepping down from the platform and approaching the stage. This was Elian. His bland coveralls helped him blend with all the other workers who had been setting up the symposium in the preceding days. Discouragement of eye contact between the workers and their superiors^[60] helped him hide in plain sight.

Richard Hathcock was facing the stage and he still thought this was just a random, routine protester. His security team had practiced these takedowns so often that he was sure the protester would be on the ground before he even had time to turn around and check who it was. He figured it was some leftist trying to impress Aurora Khalifa. He was partly right.

From the stage, Bubba scoffed at the interruption of the proceedings. He used his hand to shade his eyes and looked out over the crowd.

“Excuse me, who are you?” He asked. “You speak for Elian Gonzalez?”

Bubba welcomed a viral video confrontation. For media personalities, controversy was currency.

As the mystery man strode to the stage, heads in the crowd turned to each other; their whispers spread in his wake. It began to dawn on the elites that their enemy was among them.

One of the caterers met Elian in the middle of the room and presented him, not with champagne, but with a weapon. Elian racked the slide on the rifle and the metal noise drew yelps and suppressed screams among the crowd.

From the stage, Bubba tried to reassure them. He felt residually invincible, as a consequence of being more or less always surrounded by security.

“Please calm down, everyone,” Bubba said. “I ask again, who are you?”

“I speak for Elian Gonzalez because I am Elian Gonzalez,” Elian said. And he shot Bubba right in the heart. It was an ugly wound. The bullet fragmented and hollowed out his chest.

Everyone screamed. The event was broadcast live. Bubba was on the stage bleeding out.

Hathcock stood and looked for his security team but he saw that the ambient assistants and caterers had been weaponized. They surrounded the room in a ring and had slain almost all of his guards. He swiftly sat down to blend in and reassess the situation.

Elian hopped onto the stage.

“Darling!” Aurora said. She rushed to his side.

They embraced. She had speculated over the rumors of Elian’s whereabouts after his escape, the same as everyone else, but she had not expected him to actually arrive at the elite symposium to which he had been so recklessly invited.

“Okay, everyone, please be cool!” Elian said.

‘Be Cool’ had been his family’s motto for generations, ever since his ancestor called the Black Caesar^[61] had roamed the Caribbean, deposing dictators and liberating booty.

With one arm around his lover and the other holding his weapon, Elian grinned and greeted the room.

“Thank you again for the invitation!” He said.

Though most of the crowd panicked, some of the glitterati who considered themselves brave were relatively unfazed. One bold man near the front stood to yell.

“You can’t do this, you sonuvabitch!”

Elian furiously dropped down from the stage to swiftly confront the man.

“Which one is this?” He prompted an assistant. One of them whispered the answer in his ear. “Ah,” Elian said, as he tapped the barrel of his gun on his challenger’s forehead. “You make sure the college debt is not forgiven to force the graduates to serve private sector rather than the public^[62], no?” He put the barrel underneath the man’s head and used it to lift his chin. “You use their debt to keep the best talent for yourself?” He lowered his gun and wagged his finger no no no.

He stepped aside. A helper stepped forward and slit the man’s throat with a silver shining blade that flashed in the light. The bold man’s blood spurted over several tables before it overflowed en masse down his neck. He fell into his chair and it skidded loudly across the floor.

“If blood trickled down like money, perhaps there wouldn’t be so much of it on your shirt!” Elian said.

As the man lost his strength, his confused eyes searched for answers until they were finally still.

There were more involuntary screams. People cried. None dared speak out.

The catering staff, meanwhile, was ice cold.

Elian walked among the well-dressed guests while they cowered.

“You don’t think I’m funny?” He asked^[63]. He lifted a napkin and forcefully wiped blood that had landed on the shaking face of a nearby hostage. “I recognize you.” He pointed at his new victim. “I couldn’t see with all the-” He motioned around his face as if to reference their blood. He stepped away and nodded to his assistant as they took another life.

There was more screaming.

“Please shut the fuck up!” Elian yelled.

This was a lesser-known variant on his family’s motto, given that so few who heard it lived to tell the tale.

“You must remain calm, or I’m going to have to embargo this room!” Elian laughed and slapped his thigh. “Nobody in or out!”

He looked around the room. No one laughed^[64].

But Howie, sitting in his chair, reflexively smiled merely at the attempt of an authority figure to make a joke. It was part of what made him such a good servant.

Howie’s smile endeared him to Elian, who shared a flaw common to revolutionaries and musicians of thinking he was funnier than he was.

“You, sir! You’re the star of the hour!” Elian said, jumping back onto the stage. “I was hoping it was Mr. LeBubb who would be here. You’ve lucked yourself into quite a situation! Favorite son of the famous man? Or, are you quite unlucky, if you think about it? Not personal. We wanted your father but we’ll have to settle for you.”

With his life in danger, Howie felt the urge to issue a clarification.

“I barely knew my father,” Howie said “I didn’t even know about him until I was making a delivery earlier today.”

Elian did not know that. Stuck inside a rolling equipment case, he hadn’t kept up with the news. Howie’s admission struck him emotionally. He sympathized with separation from one’s father. His own separation from his own father and the death of his mother in the seas between nations had fueled the events of his life and fame.

“Ah, well I suppose we won’t kill you, then,” Elian said, “just kidnap you. It’s about time to leave, but before that, I came for one thing.”

Elian turned to address the room.

“Where is Geo LaSalle?” He asked.

Elian was honor-bound, in the manner of criminals whose livelihood depended on verbal contracts, to complete a mission given to him by those who had set him free: the guards at Guantanamo Bay. After years of promising and failing to close the prison, the American government had simply privatized it. The ensuing budget cuts were being felt by the guards and they wanted their revenge. Their pay had been cut after overtime was forbidden and any guard who complained was invited to augment their income with a side-hustle, sewing ladies’ undergarments alongside the prisoners^[65]. Their food was downgraded. They began having to pay for parking. The guards eventually began to joke that the only difference between themselves and the prisoners was the length of the commute. The final straw came when a robot dog designed to replace the guards turned out to be racist; while recharging at an outlet in the locker room, it mistook a guard out of uniform for an escaping prisoner^[66]. The guards felt betrayed by their owners.

Many accidents happen in prisons. Cameras work when they need to and don’t work when they need to^[67]. Though the guards were still afraid of Elian, they brought him to the warden and handed him a gun with a single bullet. They offered to do a favor for him if he would do a favor for them.

And so the warden was killed in the so-called chaos of the so-called escape when in reality the guards had simply walked Elian outside^[68].

As always, Elian was helped along by his supporters at each stage of his journey. At the final stage, a German Shepherd in the basement of Whymore News let Elian through because the unionized canine’s job was strictly to sniff for explosives, not people^[69].

And now, honor-bound to the disgruntled guards to fulfill his promise, Elian called again:

“Where is Geo LaSalle?”

The glitterati were without loyalty and swiftly pointed out the lumbering prison magnate. Elian’s followers brought him forward at the point of a gun. Hathcock saw no way to save him but a rough count indicated one of his guards might still be alive.

Geo was forced onto the stage to face Elian.

“Please don’t do this,” Geo said. “We’ll get you whatever you want.”

A follower kicked the back of Geo’s knee to get him to kneel. The large man cowered before Elian.

“I didn’t do anything!” Geo said. “I administer justice.”

“Your justice is not my justice,” Elian said.

All the eyes in the room were on the execution. Maggie checked and saw that the red recording light on one of her cameras meant that the live video feed was still going out to the world. Surely, the police were on their way. Why wasn’t Hathcock doing anything about this? She tried to get his attention.

But Hathcock was still waiting for his opening. He was lucky; the same self-importance that made Elian think he was funny also made him recite a preamble before his most formal killing.

“By the ancient power vested in me by the shackled against the unshackled,” Elian began, “by the laden against the un-laden, the bound against the un-bound, I declare you in violation of the oldest law of the wandering tribes from which humanity commenced, whereby all is shared with all…”

And it went on like that. Hathcock tuned him out. As Elian prepped for a righteous execution, Hathcock saw his missing guard re-enter from the back of the room. Thank god, Hathcock thought. The guard had been in the bathroom, still suffering from the earlier milkshake. Now he stood behind a roomful of eyes that all looked toward the execution onstage.

“You take, you hold, you hoard, and for that I sentence you to death,” Elian finished.

His assistant handed him a blade.

Hathcock made eye contact with his fellow guard as everyone else was focusing on the imminent execution. The guard returning from the bathroom stepped behind the nearest leftist and covered his mouth and quietly stabbed him. But the guard’s gastrointestinal tract betrayed him. The strain of keeping quiet while lowering his victim to the floor forced out another audible fart.

“Hey!”

The attention of the room shifted. A nearby leftist raised their weapon to fire at the surviving guard but Hathcock observed everything and was faster. From the front of the room, he made a headshot that saved his comrade’s life.

And suddenly it was chaos. A swarm of merciless metal furiously filled the room. The smack and crash of metal and glass shattered the silence. The grind, crack, and zip of a hundreds bullets disgorged the blood of the posh denizens of the ‘Best of All Possible Worlds’. Geo’s life was saved and he scrambled for safety.

Elian was surprised. He had thought that the situation was under control. Hathcock was glad to see that the table of Resurrectionists had stood up to fight. How had they brought in guns? He didn’t care. The balance of the battle was shifting in their favor.

Quickly, Elian saw his comrades fall. He fled. He pulled Aurora with him. Howie panicked. He followed Elian simply to escape the bullets.

Hathcock saw them escaping. He couldn’t kill the leftist leader but he had a clear shot for Aurora. He took it. But Starcatcher, who hid from bullets beneath their shared table, bumped it and threw off Hathcock’s aim. Instead of killing Aurora, he merely wounded her. He hoped it was mortal. She was just as bad as Elian and had probably smuggled him in, he thought.

And suddenly some guns clicked, emptied of bullets. Scattered pops slowed. The battle was over.

Through the broken glass, a cold wind blew.

Maggie lay beneath a loyal assistant who had taken a bullet to save her life.

“Thank you-” she began to tell the assistant, but then she realized she had forgotten their name. The underling’s eyes went wide with the horror at their wasted sacrifice before death slackened their eyes into dullness.

Maggie shifted to get out from under. She was covered in blood. She noted with satisfaction that the cameras had recorded everything. It would be the most valuable footage she ever shot.

“Clear?” Hathcock asked.

“In God’s hands,” one of the Resurrectionists replied.

Normally, the Rezzies annoyed Hathcock. But the camaraderie of violence had softened his prejudice.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They ran to the elevators to chase Elian.

“You were pretty useful, back there,” Hathcock said.

“By His grace,” the Rezzie replied.

Hathcock grunted. Whatever deity was in charge, he had seen its will cut back and forth so many times that he no longer cared what design was behind it.

“You got weapons into my event, huh?”

“We have a religious exemption,” the Rezzie replied. “Pistols are part of our worship.”

They stepped inside the elevator and it swiftly dropped toward the lobby and then smoothly slowed to a stop. The doors opened. The lobby was bathed in swirling, amorphous red and blue light. The building was surrounded by emergency vehicles. The mercenary assumed that someone would have caught Elian. But when he asked nearby personnel where he was, nobody had answers.

Above them, Darren flew the helicopter from the roof with Elian, Aurora, and Howie inside it.