The Daily Trope

Epizeuxis: Repetition of the same word, with none between, for vehemence. Synonym for palilogia.

“Hope, hope, hope,” that’s what my friend Lyle yelled every time we took off for the Passaic River. We were ten years old and we had watched too much “Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, and His Faithful Husky King” on Saturday morning TV. I started calling my beagle King. His real name was Checkers, but he didn’t care.

Lyle and I had decided we should be gold miners like everybody on “Sgt. Preston.” The Passaic River ran past a golf course near where we lived. We took pie pans from our mothers’ kitchen cupboards. We practiced with the pie pans in my bathtub using marbles for gold nuggets. We got pretty good. The next day I hid my pie pan under my shirt, and my sock to hold nuggets in my back pocket, and headed for the door. My mother said from her chair, “Stop!” I thought I was caught, but she just wanted to give me a hug.

I rode my bike and met Lyle at the caddy shack and we took off across the street to the river. The banks were too high to pan, so we walked along the bank looking for a low spot. We walked past rusted shopping carts, a baby crib, a rotted mattress, and a lawn spreader. What a mess.

Then, we came to a low spot. It was sandy. We dug in our pie pans and swished the river water around. We did that for a half-hour to no avail when I hit something that looked like canvas. I pulled it out of the sand and rinsed it off. I instantly knew what it was! A mail pouch just like the one Sgt. Preston carried to Moosejaw once a week. Then, I noticed it said “Madison National Bank” across the front. On the back it said in big red letters “DEPOSITS.” The pouch was locked.

I pulled out my switchblade and flicked it open. It was illegal, but I carried it out of respect for my grandfather who had given it to me a couple of weeks ago on my tenth birthday. I slit open the pouch and a black balaclava fell out along with a little .25 auto pistol. I was elated! Now I could hunt squirrels in the woods behind my school!

But then! Bonanza! Money started falling out. $100 dollar bills wrapped in bands saying $20,000. We were rich. Neither of us had a backpack. So, we split the money and stuffed it into our shirts, our waistbands, our socks, our Yankees hats, and our underpants. I put the pistol in my nugget sock and tied it to one of my belt loops. I threw the balaclava into the river.

We could hardly walk, but we didn’t care. We yelled “Rich, rich, rich, we’re fu*kin’ rich!”

We walked our bikes out of the woods, waddling with our loads. There was a black Cadillac parked sideways at the head of the trail. The back window went down. It was Big Al whose “Sporting Good” store sold dynamite, fully automatic weapons, hand grenades, LAWs, silencers and switchblade knives along with fishing lures, worms, shotguns, rifles, fishing poles and reels, and ammo.

Big Al looked directly at me and said, “I think you have something that belongs to me.” I almost shit my pants, but I held it for the sake of the money stored in my underpants. “What?” I asked. Big Al asked me if my grandfather had given me a switchblade for my birthday. I said “Yes.” “That old fu*k stole it from my store. Give it back now and Melee won’t slice you up into little meat cubes with his machete.” Big Al said with a smile. With great care I fished out the knife and waddled over to the Cadillac and handed it back to Big Al. “You better do something about that crotch rash” he said as he rolled up his window, Melee drove them away.

Lyle and I were elated. We did it. In great pain we rode our bikes home. I waddled in the front door and Mom asked if I was ok. I told her I was fine and crawled up the stairs to my bedroom. I unpacked my self, throwing the money on my bed. The pile was high. I didn’t want to count it.

I got a safe deposit box at the bank. It was New Jersey, so there were no questions. All I needed to do was sign a signature card. I rented two of the biggest boxes. I wrapped the money in a blanket and put it in my wagon and pulled it back to the bank. I was given a private room where I stuffed the money in the two boxes.

I was home safe. When I was old enough to drive, I bought a red Thunderbird for cash. I paid my college tuition in cash. I’ve funded a revival of “Sgt. Preston of the Yukon.” The only differences from the old show are that the sled dog King was replaced by a snowmobile, and Sgt. Preston is bipolar.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.

Epizeuxis: Repetition of the same word, with none between, for vehemence. Synonym for palilogia.

“Help, help, help!” It was 2:00 a.m. It was my goddamn parrot Larry. He was crying for help, so I had to check and see what was wrong. As usual, it was a false alarm. His seed dish was empty and he was pecking at it and crying “Help!”

I had inherited Larry from my Aunt Lana and I would inherit $500,000 if I took care of Larry for five years, or if Larry died of natural causes before the five years had passed. My aunt had died the previous week in a mysterious poisoning incident. Everybody joked that it was probably Larry who killed her. She and Larry had a notoriously bad relationship ever since she had bought him at an estate auction of Zippy Williams’s worldly goods.

Williams was found dead on his kitchen floor, his throat cut by a cuttlebone—the sharp internal bone of a Cuttlefish. Cuttlebones are often given to birds as a source of calcium, and also, to sharpen their beaks with. Everybody laughed and joked about Larry being Zippy’s killer.

Zippy had been paroled after spending ten years in prison for feeding his wife to a wood chipper. He claimed it was an accident, that she had gotten sucked into the chipper when she was looking for a missing erring. Her hair got caught in the chipper, and that was the end of that.

One of the terms of Zippy’s parole was that he obtain a pet and “learn how to nurture and love it.” That’s where Larry came in. His previous owner was an EMT who had fallen out of his kitchen window and died. Larry learned how to mimic the obnoxious “wee-wah” sound of his owner’s emergency alert box, and also to say “Help, help, help” like his owner yelled when he would frequently get up in the middle of the night and run out the door to an emergency.

Clearly, Larry had a checkered past.

Now, Larry was mine and I didn’t know what to do with him. His midnight antics were making me crazy.

Thanksgiving was just around the corner. Maybe I could pass Larry off as a small turkey and eat hm for Thanksgiving dinner. Only my girlfriend would be coming over. It might work.

First, I had to take off his head. I got out my biggest kitchen knife and headed for his cage. He knew what was up and he started yelling help. He got around my knife-hand and flew out of his cage, still yelling help. I dropped the knife, realizing it wouldn’t look like natural causes if I cut his head off.

He flew to the top of the bookcase and pulled what looked like a vitamin capsule out of the basket on top of it. He flew at me and shoved the capsule in my open mouth, dug his talons into my cheeks and flapped his wings until I swallowed it.

Almost immediately I saw colors and little men climbing my living rom walls yelling obscenities over their shoulders.

There was pounding on my front door. It was the police! The policeman told me that “Somebody called 911 from this address yelling “Help!” I told him it was my bird (who had gone silent when the police arrived). Then I asked if he was the Atman or the walrus and told him he better take care of the unpleasant little men climbing my walls.

Somehow, Larry was able to make a small cut over his eye. I was arrested and charged with animal cruelty and put under observation for “bizarre statements and paranoid delusions.”

Larry was sent to Florida to a place called “Parrot Kingdom.” I have heard he performs segments from the second act of “Don Giovanni” for the “Parrot Kingdom” tourists.

“Parrot Kingdom” has received the $500,000 from my Aunt Lara’s estate.

I will never know where the drug capsule came from that Larry shoved in my mouth. I suspect he had it hidden under his wing when he moved into my house from Aunt Lara’s. But, where did it come from? Maybe Aunt Lara was a fan of psychedelics? She often talked about attending “Woodstock” and how she was Peter Max’s mistress for a week. She made macrame plant hangers, tea cozies, mittens, balaclavas, and coasters for a living, and sold them on her Etsy site “Knot Now.”

I am homeless now and I owe it all to Larry. I have often thought of hitch-hiking to Florida and killing him.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.

Epizeuxis: Repetition of the same word, with none between, for vehemence. Synonym for palilogia.

“Dive, dive, dive!” We were playing submarine in my father’s car parked in the driveway. It was wrong. My father would go crazy if he found out. We were ten years old. Sadly none of us could drive. I was behind the wheel anyway. My First Mate, Carl Brucke was at the navigator’s hatch and Sally Darbin and Phil Jazzowski were in the observation turret keeping a lookout for enemy subs behind us.

We were a tight-knit crew—undersea most of the time prowling for targets. So far, we had destroyed 12 enemy subs, 4 oil tankers, and by mistake, one cruise ship on the way to some Dutch colony in the Caribbean.

“Whale, whale, whale!” I had spotted a whale and steered around it. Actually, it was my mother. She was overweight and I couldn’t help calling her a whale. It wasn’t meant to be an insult.

She was running across the yard holding an envelope. She yelled, “Micky (I was Micky) it came, it came, it came!” I opened the porthole and grabbed the envelope. 4 months ago, on my 10th birthday, I had applied for a Junior Internship at “Big Bells Diving Bells,” a company specializing in the construction of underwater exploration craft. The company was owned and operated by “Sea Skate” Maloney and his 15 children. He had been married 9 times, one lasting only 20 minutes.

The Junior internship was designed for “aspiring diving bell builders” and lasted for two months in the summer. It was unpaid, and given my age, I had to secure a special work permit from the state of Florida, where Big Bells was located.

I was packed and ready to go. My father loaned me the $75 for the bus ticket to St. Augustine. At the last minute, I kept the $75 and hitched to Florida. My first ride took me all the way. She had run over her cat in her driveway and was on her way to Miami to commit suicide due to her grief. I talked her out of it. I read about her years later. She had become a notorious cat lady in Miami, taking care of 57 cats in her South Beach condo.

I arrived at Big Bells and introduced myself to Sea Skate and his family. They showed me to my “room” which was actually a derelict diving bell with a mattresses on the floor.

My job was “leak and air inspector.” When a bell was finished, but not certified yet, they’d lower me down 200 feet. I loved it. I would carefully check for leaks and make sure I was breathing ok. Inevitably there was something wrong. Once, I was up to my neck in water when they finally hauled me up. The last straw was in August when I passed out due to a lack of air. By the time I was hauled up I was almost dead. I was taken to the Emergency Room where I called my parents. With great difficulty, I talked to my dad and he told me he really couldn’t understand me, but. I’d have to wait until September 1st because he had rented out my room to a “college girl.”

The doctor told me the oxygen deprivation had killed a number of my brain cells. It should affect my speech and motor skills for the next couple of months as the cells grew back. I said, “Shanks for legging me know.” He said the bill for my stay had been sent to my parents, who probably had insurance.

Sea Skate was nowhere to be found and Big Bells was closed and shuttered. I had $26 to my name. I decided if I walked home from Florida, I’d get there around September 1st.

Word spread of the “brain damaged boy” walking from Florida to Wayne, New Jersey. I had a small motorcade following me. I affected a slight limp and was interviewed by ABC News. I told them my story.

Subsequently, Sea Skate and his family were arrested for “malignant neglect” of a child. Big Bells was sold to a Chinese holding company. People threw money out of their car windows as they drove by, yelling things like “God bless you” and “Get Well.” I would yell “Shank you. I yam gravel.” (Thank you. I am grateful).

I got home a day early and walked in the front door. To my horror, dad and the college girl were dragging mom’s corpse across the the kitchen floor. Dad said, “Son you’re a day early. I didn’t think you’d be back until tomorrow.” They looked pretty tired, so I offered to help. Dad told me mom had tried stab him, so he shot her the first chance he got. He and the college girl were going to collect mom’s insurance and take off to Ohio or Arizona. We dumped mom in a landfill, and I called the police. I should’ve called earlier, but I was in schock.

I netted $500,000 on my “Walk to Wayne.” There’s going to be a movie made. Jason Winslow the child actor will star, playing me. The movie’s title is “The Brain Damaged Boy.” Jeff Birdcage will play my father and Jeff Goldloon will play Sea Skate. Meryl Street will play my mother and Hilary Swink will play the College Girl.

This has been a crazy year. My Aunt Barbara has been named my guardian and we’re still living in my old house. I bought a Maserati. I am looking forward to playing submarine in it in the driveway with my friends.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.