The Return of Alex Pizza and the Illegal Artist 5
July 8th, 2008
Uncategorized
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The Illegal Artist was just outside, at the bus stop, making the sort of face you make when you don’t smoke and therefore can’t be nonchalantly smoking to indicate how you aren’t in the least rattled by the sudden appearance of a crone.
Why a crone? Let me fill you in on the Illegal Artist, one-time savior of humanity: she hates crones. Throw her a call to adventure and wrap it in a crone, and you can be guaranteed she’ll refuse that call. This tendency of hers isn’t exactly well-known, for she is a private citizen and her Wikipedia page was nominated for deletion on notability grounds, plus it was mainly just spurious rumors about her invented by Super Lucky one rainy Sunday afternoon when the liquor stores were all closed, so it wouldn’t have told anyone about the crone thing anyways.
This sort of thing happens to the Illegal Artist all the time, nowadays: strangers show up, sometimes with jeweled daggers sticking out of their backs, gasping for air as with their final breaths they command her to seek the silver monkey, or solve the oil crisis, or rescue the abducted love child of Michael Jackson, Monica Lewinsky, and Victor Deli. She always ignores them, and she always pretends she isn’t rattled, and she’s always rattled.
The first time it happened she was at the Super Lucky, with Super Lucky, and Super Lucky was emptying a lint trap and the caked-on lint had formed in the shape of a map of the state of Kentucky with a glowing red dot (it turned out to be a little red LED with a watch battery doohickey that had maybe fallen off of someone’s keychain) somewhere in the middle. Super Lucky tried to use Mapquest to work out exactly where the red spot was (Gainesville, it turned out) when a crone showed up.
This was a different crone, a mustachioed and shawl-wearing senior citizen with a ratty Lyndon LaRouche for President t-shirt. She (or possibly he, let’s go with he to minimize pronoun confusion) claimed to be the Illegal Artist’s long-lost undergraduate advisor, which didn’t jibe with the Illegal Artist’s lack of college education, and had already started to intone some syllables of dark prophecy (despite the Illegal Artist asked him/her to stop) when a mysterious assailant in a red jogging suit shot a dart into his neck with a blowgun. The assailant then fled. Super Lucky made like she was going to chase after him, but didn’t, while the Illegal Artist just glared at the crone with the dart sticking out of his neck as he slumped over and gurgled.
“I don’t do that any more,” the Illegal Artist told the prone crone. “I am done with the whole vision-quest, time travel, secret magic, Alex Jackass Pizza thing. I mean come on,” she sniffed, “you could at least have presented it as performance art or something.”
Super Lucky eventually called an ambulance, because she didn’t want a corpse stinking up her laundromat, but by the time the paramedics got there the crone had dissolved back into old RC Cola cans and shredded newspaper stuffed in garbage bags, and she’d gotten a fine for frivolous antics.
The second time a mysterious figure showed up to demand the Illegal Artist go on a pointless quest of indeterminate purpose to save humanity in some way, it went a little better, but not much. The second figure was a naked young bodybuilder who hid in the suspended ceiling of the public library where the Illegal Artist got her discarded children’s books (she used them in a variety of art projects) and dropped floppily down on her.
After the Illegal Artist had hit him a few times with a copy of the one-volume edition of the Berenstein Bears Encyclopedia (weighing in at about twenty pounds) he managed to get out that he was a performance artist on the run from the RIAA because he had used the phrase “if everybody dances now” as part of his performance, and they claimed it was an illegal use of the copyrighted lyric “everybody dance now,” despite being part of a longer poem on the topic of spousal abuse and having no musical content at all.
This part got the Illegal Artist’s attention for a few minutes at least, as did the bodybuilder’s claim that his nudism was also part of an ongoing protest piece indicting the garment industry for the plight of Taiwanese factory workers, but then he started going on about Antarctic Space Nazis, and she ditched him.
The less said about the third through fifth attempts to rope her back into the esoteric world of gods and monsters and magic, the better; suffice to say that they learned the wrong lessons from their highly limited success in the second attempt.











