The Hightower Gang Blog

The next morning Marty, Nigel and Ayn woke up disturbingly simultaneously. Neither of them remembered how last night ended, or the hours leading to its inevitable end. The three did however discover a letter lying at the table in the main lounge of the boat. Marty opened it and read out loud:

"Dear Marty, Nigel and Ayn,
Zoe and I have already left, since we're going to the Dreare glacier and need to take advantage of the few hours of daylight up here. We thank you kindly for your generous hospitality and give you a complimentary DVD of the first season of our show,

yours faithfully,
Edward James "Wolf" Drylls (esq.)."

The DVD showed Wolf standing in the middle of a forest, resting his foot on a recently deceased grizzly bear, even showing thumbs up for the camera while winking. Marty looked with mild disbelief at both the DVD and the letter. Nigel and Ayn were equally discombobulated.

"Who on Earth is this noble, white Wolf Drylls?" Nigel asked. - "Has he been in my boat tonight? Did we invite him?"

"Yes, and apparently all of us are oblivious to it," Ayn said, scratching the back of his Negroe head. - "Do any of you have any recollections what-so-ever what we did last night?" There was a deafening silence, only interrupted by the murmur of the sea. - "Nothing? Nada? Pas du tout?"

"What happens in the kingdom of Wastedor, stays in Wastedor," Marty theatrically proclaimed, before opening a can of premium Alaskan beer. - "Anyone up for some English breakfast at the nearby tavern?"

"Well, we're completely out of food here, so why not?" Ayn asked rhetorically and put on a winter's coat.

The three walked (read: staggered) off the boat and crossed the concrete quay heading for the village's only tavern. It was an omni-function building, with the tavern, the store, the laundry and the post office all merged into one. Built to last at least a century of hostile weather, the three-story building loomed majestically in the otherwise ragged, frozen, wind-torn landscape.

Inside the premises the party from last night had long since met its necessary demise, as there was not a single soul left there save the bartender. He was busy connecting a keg of beer to one of the taps. Seeing his regular customers, he got up and greeted them with a wide smile on his face.

"Lemme guess," he said. - "Three English breakfasts, three cups of coffee and three pints of lager?"

"Why on Earth, yes!" Marty exclaimed with big, bulgy eyes. - "That's exactly what we want! H-how on Earth did you know?"

"You've come here every day for a week," the bartender said. - "And you eat exactly the same for breakfast every day!"

Neither Marty, Nigel nor Ayn could deny this brazenly obvious fact. The three sat down in a nearby booth, where today's newspaper was conveniently present. Before anyone else could react, Marty grabbed the newspaper with egocentric avarice. He let a long, loud fart that was effectively amplified through the leather on the booth seats. Nigel was so startled that he let out a manic falsetto cry, while Ayn was just annoyed.

"Hold your wind, mate!" Ayn said, his face twisted in disgust from the awful stench. - "It's beyond my comprehension how such a putrid odor could come from a living human being..."

Marty chuckled while letting another fart. As the bartender came with the coffee and the pints, Marty let out a long, loud moan of relief, his tummy having settled for the moment. He grabbed his pint, opened his mouth and let the beer flow down his esophagus without swallowing once. Even though he had done this a trillion times before, Nigel and Ayn became just as impressed every time they witnessed it.

"It's beyond my comprehension how one single human being can drink that much so quickly..." Ayn muttered and took a far more modest sip from his pint.

"Oh no!!" Nigel suddenly cried, pointing with a shaking finger on an ancient, elderly Eskimo couple. - "More of those awful, 'orrible Eskimos!"

"And it's certainly beyond my comprehension how a human being could be so xenophobic..." Ayn muttered and took a sip from his cup of coffee.

The three got their English breakfasts and immediately started to indulge of the overly generous amounts of food on their big plates. Marty ate fast and voraciously, the meal being the first time in 24 hours that he ate anything at all. He devoured the food so fast the he accidentally ate his napkin as well - and he did not even notice it. Nigel and Ayn were equally famished, so their meals also tended to disappear within the blink of an eye.

Soon the three were done eating. Marty had another pint for dessert. At precisely eleven o'clock Nigel and Ayn got up, deciding to leave the tavern. Marty, however, remained aseat, drinking from his third pint.

"Where are you gents going?" he asked.

"I'm gonna have my boat fixed," Nigel said. - "It's in an unacceptable state after our Pan-Pacific crossing." Their perilous journey was a textbook example of man's hubris and stupidity combined - sheer, utter madness.

"And I'm gonna defend him from the "awful, 'orrible savages" of the village," Ayn said. - "And I'm gonna help him with the repairs, of course."

"What, so you're just gonna leave me in here all alone?" Marty asked with a childish frown on his now bearded face. He had also got back his classic mullet of white hair.

"You could come and help us you too," Ayn said. - "But since you're allergic to work and any kind of responsibility, you would be as helpful as gangrene. So, enjoy your beers, M."

Then he and Nigel left the tavern, Marty sitting behind. He lit a cigarette, let out a long fart that made the windows vibrate, before ordering his fourth pint. Then he read the newspaper one more time just so that no one else could not read it.

--

While Marty was busy goffling pints, puffing smoke and passing wind, Nigel and Ayn had been at the carpenter's house and bought materials to repair the boat. Now they were fully occupied with the necessary repairs, repairs that had been delayed embarrassingly long. Nigel repaired the masts while Ayn replaced the old, torn canvas with new un-torn. The quiet murmur of the sea was constantly interrupted by deafening bangs of a hammer hitting a nail.

"I really wonder how a die-hard communist as Marty can detest labor that much," Ayn said. - "According to the memes of communism, one should do what lies within one's abilities and get what lies within one's needs. Marty is perfectly able to do a decent day's worth of work, and he really needs a good, old spanking on his lazy, alcohol-drenched buttocks!"

"Sort of proves the point, doesn't it?" Nigel asked rhetorically. - "Marty doesn't do anything despite his ability to, and he gets only what he in no way needs. That just proves the incurably flawed nature of that awful social experiment. People don't get what they deserve, they just get things."

Suddenly Nigel hit his thumb with the hammer. He let out an ear-piercing falsetto scream with an impressive vibrato. His hammer fell down on deck, centimeters away from hitting Ayn's head.

"Hey!" Ayn cried. - "Careful up there! Are you trying to off me?"

"Oh, the pain is unbearable!" Nigel cried in a theatrical falsetto, his thumb hurting like Hell. - "Shoot me in the back o' me neck to spare me from the horrendous, excruciating pain!"

"Blow on it, you big cissy," Ayn said, still feeling shellshocked after nearly having his skull cracked open.

Nigel came sliding down from the top of the mast and grabbed the hammer. To Ayn's perplexity he started to blow frantically on the hammer. He huffed and puffed like he was a wolf about to blow down a house.

"What... are you doing?" Ayn asked.

"Big fat nothing happens!" Nigel cried. - "My thumb still hurts despite me emptying my lungs on the hammer!"

"Why the Hell do you think that blowing on the hammer would help? You must blow on your hurt thumb, you git!"

"Oh... Well, it's counter-intuitive! That's what it is! Just like the phrase 'Hair of the dog that bit you'!"

"Give me the hammer!" Ayn muttered and snatched it out of Nigel's hands. - "You are hereby declared too stupid to handle such a dangerous weapon. You stay down here and mend the sails, and I will go up in the mast and nail it together again."

Then the situation met its necessary mirror image, with Ayn being on top of the mast and Nigel down on deck preparing the canvas.

--

The art sessions took place at five o'clock every afternoon and were led by a stunning Austrian woman in her late 40's. The first thing The One noticed went entering the room, was that she bore an uncanny similatiry to Director's mother Beate. Both had blond, curly hair, perfect bodies - and even that same wide-eyed smile.

"Servus!" the woman said. - "I am Clara! And you must be Eins!" The One nodded, not being surprised over being recognized by a perfect stranger. After all, he had a rather unique physique. She looked at his body, visibly impressed. - "Oh, you have such big... hands! You must be doing manual labor!"

"I used to," The One said. - "I worked as a lumberjack in the forests of Western Canada, but I lost my job when the company went bankrupt. Then I moved to Norway, planning on studying my way out of more of that hard, back-breaking and tedious slave labor. You see where it got m--..."

To The One's surprise, Clara just nodded indifferently and pushed him down to an empty place to sit and draw. He was in no way offended, since he was now regarded as "mentally ill", meaning that his words were now as unreliable as the weather of the Northern Atlantic. Now he was in the same group of the society as the drug addicts, he was a pariah, an untouchable, a freak. Judged merely by his illness rather than his abilities, his future appeared pitch black.

"Now we will start the session," Clara said. Now every inch of her body detested The One. Luckily he possessed the vital male ability to maintain a poker face despite one's inner turmoil. While on the outside he appeared neutral and indifferent, on the inside he was infuriated. - "Today we will deal with the ephemeral nature of life. So, today we will all draw an ephemera!"

'Is she fucking kidding?' The One thought, rolling his eyes.

"And, since life also has a sacred status in our human society, it needs to be protected," Clara continued. - "Hence, our ephemera will be holding an umbrella in its hands!"

"What?" The One asked flatly. - "Flies don't have hands! They can't hold on to anything! Especially not items thousand times larger than they are!"

Clara took a deep breath and smiled condescendingly. With her back straight and an overly confident look on her face, she walked slowly and nonchalantly over to The One.

"You shouldn't let logic and sense stop your imagination, hon," she said, padding The One on his shoulder. - "But, if you want, you can always draw a flying nose holding an umbrella instead, if it makes more sense to you."

Shocked, The One got up and promptly left the room. Furiously offended he burst through the corridors, heading for doctor Kluge's office. With an angered look on his overly masculine face, he burst into the doctor's office without knocking. There Kluge had a very teary session with a severely traumatized rape victim. The young teenage girl let out a scream as the biggest man in Austria entered the office with noise and roaring.

"What kind of behavior is this, Eins?" Kluge asked and cast a look at the shaking teenage girl, who lay in a pile of anguish on the floor behind the mahogany desk.

"You broke the patient-doctor confidensiality, you git!" The One roared, banging his huge man fists in the desk. The teenage girl wet herself out of fear, making Kluge's nostrils vibrate of disgust. - "You've told everyone about my hallucinations, haven't you?! Even Clara at the art sessions!!"

"Now, calm down, Eins," Kluge said, just as four male nurses and a security guard entered the office. - "As colleagues of mine, they are required to know about the condition of our patients." The One was so angry that his mouth foamed. - "I suggest you go to your room now, or we will have to sedate you."

With the company of the male nurses and the security guard, The One was gently escorted out of the office. Back sat Kluge and let a deep sigh. He looked at the nervous wreck lying in a pond of urine on the floor of his office, and pushed a button at his intercom box.

"Helga, I need a cleaning lady in here. And perhaps a wheelchair too."