Cultured Freaks of Nature

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Cultured Freaks of Nature

By Plot Roach

Smith was a great guru, a captain behind the wheel of modern literature and art. His paintings sold for millions of dollars and his books lasted for months on the New York Times bestseller list. He looked at himself in the mirror, checking his immaculate reflection and running a tongue over his sharp even teeth. In a few minutes he would be giving the lecture of his life, in fact it was to be his farewell address to the world and the people who supported him for many years. He felt a slight twinge of guilt at what he was about to do, but knew that it was all for the best. He just could not keep up appearances anymore. And sooner or later they, his adoring public, would find out the truth. Better to find out from him than from a graduate student with an ax to grind thirty years after his death.

He walked the long and narrow hallway, feeling as though he was a condemned man living his last seconds on the earth before facing the dark face of death. He waited at the edge of the stage as a man, a president of a local independent writing community, announced his presence followed by a long string of accomplishments, awards and credentials, none of which Smith felt that he deserved.

On cue, he took to the stage, shaking the announcer’s hand on the way to the microphone. The man had a sweaty but strong grip and Smith had to wonder if the man was nervous because of Smith’s celebrity or if the man thought that he would flub his lines in front of the audience before Smith’s big presentation. Little does he know what I have in store, Smith thought. If he did, he might have called in sick and let a lesser person in his organization take the fall.

Smith cleared his throat, waiting for the applause to die down before launching into his farewell address. He looked out among the audience. It was the same at every gathering, be it an independent lecture, a book signing or party: women dressed in their best gowns, dripping in pearls and others gems worth a small fortune and bought by the sweat of third world laborers who broke their backs to bring such treasures up from the earth so that old and dying shells of women could use them as a means to feel more attractive where plastic surgery and Botox had failed. Men, only a margin better than their female counterparts, tucked into suits that barely covered their bulbous bellies, noses red from alcoholism and eyes bloodshot from whatever drug of choice they had used to get up enough courage to face the day and follow their shrewish wives into an event such as this, all in the name of 'culture’.

“Let me begin” Smith said, looking into the eyes of these tired human beasts, “by saying that I am fraud.” He paused a moment to let the words sink into their drug and alcohol addled brains. He could smell the perfume of the women and the sour smell of tobacco waft off of them like an anxious musk of an animal that has been trapped and stands to face its hunter. “I know nothing, have come from nothing, and deserve nothing. Not a thing from the likes of you, too caught up in what to wear, what to eat and what to think of your neighbors you deem too ‘common’ to have the same ’culture’ as yourselves. You throw money at problems that will never go away. Yet never ask yourself if they might be solved if you lent a hand helping in solving them yourself. But of course you can’t, you’re too busy being ‘cultured’ to give a crap. You talk a good talk, amongst your peers. Saying that you would do it if you weren’t tied up in a current project. But we both know that the thought of being in the same room with -even talking to- a person of lesser ‘culture’ than yourself scares you more than a diagnosis of cancer from your doctor. Yet cancer is what you have become. Everything you have and enjoy, comes at the cost of others. The clothes on your backs stitched together in sweat shops, the drugs you take to conjure courage smuggled in by men and women who have no other reasonable financial alternative to support their families back home in third world countries, and let us not forget the expensive perfumes you slather upon yourselves gathered from the glands ripped from the corpses of endangered animals.”

Smith paused, letting his eyes bore into eyes face in the crowd. The silence was like an aftermath of bomb explosion. His audience stood, dumbfounded and frozen in place. Well Smith, he told himself. You wanted to end it, and this sure as Hell ought to close the deal. He took a deep breath and continued.

“And if none of this made any sense to you infants, let me continue in a babble that you will pretend to understand and eat up like the tripe I have fed you over the past forty years. The purple hippos have agreed to play croquet today. Thought the marmot, in his cursing, will undoubtedly rue the day…”

Smith continued with this nonsensical speech, which reminded him oddly enough of “The Jabberwocky” which he had loved as a child. Twenty minutes into it, and his audience still stood transfixed. What is wrong with them? He thought. Why haven’t they left the auditorium? Why haven’t they thrown things at me, booed or even stormed the stage looking to bathe in my blood for making them look like fools? “And to conclude this lecture, might I say that hamsters have laid eggs in my pants and I must now go and change into a crimson tutu.”

He left the stage as quickly as his legs would carry him, shaking so badly he thought that he would collapse in the hallway long before he reached his dressing room. The steel handle of the door slipped in his grasp and he leaned against the wall, trying desperately to catch his breath. That was when he heard the roar of the audience. Not yelling for his blood, but applauding him.

Applause? he thought.

His agent ran up to him and clapped him on the back, smiling like he had won a million dollars for being named ‘the sexiest man alive’. “I don’t know where that came from, Smith. But they loved it -LOVED IT! They want an encore.”

“It will cost them." Smith said with a weak smile. Yet his agent continued with the complements that the audience had asked to relay to him. Smith just nodded his head and barely made it to his limousine before collapsing in a heap. This was not at all what he had expected.

The next day Smith’s phone service was overrun by requests of reporters wanting interviews, talk show hosts who wished to feature him on their programs and book publishers vying for the rights to his ‘farewell lecture’.

Barnum (or was it Hannum?) was right, he thought, looking at his perfect reflection in the hotel mirror. There’s a sucker born every minute. And in my case they come looking for ‘culture’ instead of gawking at two headed livestock and human freaks of nature.