Bottom Dollar

Once Gawlmighty made it to Texas, he started to feel safe.

Now he was back home where people understood little things
like horse- and country-thieving. So confident was he that he
began to whisle, wrongly, the only song he didn't know all the
way through— "Deep in the Heart of Texas."

The man who was giving Gawlmighty a ride—a little orange-haired man
with a big orange beard who wore orange sweats—said, "You're trying
to whistle 'Deep in the Heart of Texas." Does that mean you're from Texas?"

"Yeah, what of it?" Gawlmighty said.

"Well, I thought you might have seen President Gawlmighty! He's run off
from a little old church in Washington with the collection plate and the
choir director. He's a short green thing in a big yellow ten-gallon hat with
a red star on it and big red cowboy boots."

"Aint seen him," Gawlmighty said, cringing in his big yellow ten-gallon
hat with a red star on it and his bright red cowboy boots. "President, huh."

"Yeah," said the man who loved orange.

"How far you goin'?" said Gawlmighty.

"College Station," said the man. "Goin' ta see my boy play ball."

"Great, whatever," Gawlmighty said as he pulled his hat down over his eyes
and lay down in the back seat.

Hours later, when the orange man screeched to a halt in an alley in College
Station, Texas, Gawlmighty slammed into the back of the front seat and
down to the floor of the back seat. In a few seconds, Gawlmighty came up
sputtering and cussing. "Damnit, son! Who taught you to drive, Ray Charles?"

"Get out lizard," snarled the orange man. "This is the end of the line for you."

"Ya dang Aggie! Ya don't have to be so sweet about it! I'm a-gettin'"

Gawlmighty stood glaring at the man's car and never once thought about
the coincidence of orange. Gawlmighty didn't tie things together unless
somebody told him they should be associated. He saved a lot of time that
way and didn't have to think as much.

Gawlmighty could not have known that this was the very alley in which
a miracle had given him and his siblings life. But something seemed
very familiar about the alleyway. It was full of garbage and boxes and
grease like every other alley in the world. Gawlmighty knew at once
that he was in an alley.

He sat down on a wooden box and felt sorry for himself. "Oh, whoa is
me! Oh, whoa is me! I, who rose so high, simply to serve the sheeple
of this great nation, have fallen so low because everybody is out to get
me for some reason. Oh,whoa is me!"

Just then a door across from him in the alley banged open and Gawlmighty's
blood turned to Mountain Dew. He never expected to see, in this alleyway
of all the alleyways in the world, the three people who frightened him more
than anything in the world—the Dixie Chicks.

You could almost here the theme song from "A Fistful of Dollars" as Natalie,
Martie, and Emily stepped out into the alleyway, glaring at Gawlmighty. He,
in horror at the site of his archenemies, raised his hand and tried to back
away. But there was nothing but slimy brick wall behind him. So he instinctively
did what all great cowards before him had done—he begged like a little boy
about to get a spanking.

"Well, well, my, my, the Dixie Chicks!" cringed Gawlmighty. "Isn't that interesting!
Well, I"d love to stay and chat but I've got important president things to do."

The Dixie Chicks had already fanned out, blocking all exit.

"Now, girls," he said. "I don't think you're the kind of young ladies who would hold
a grudge over a little thang like me revokin' your citizenship while you was out of
the country criticizin' me!"

"Oh, we're not mad," Emily said. "Looking back it was kind of funny. We're not
doing this for what you did to us. We're doing this for what you did to all the young
people who have died in your bogus wars. We're gonna whip you like Mama whupped egg whites."

Natalie, stepping just a little closer and said, "Gawlmighty, old friend, some really
powerful people have paid us a lot of money to do what we've been wanting to do
ever since you first showed up."

"Umm, what's that," Gawlmighty winced.

Natalie continued, "We're gonna administer the ancient art of bitchslaps."

"Uh, oh," Gawlmighty said and tried to hide in his hat.

With that, Natalie sprang forward and bitchslapped Gawlmighty so hard that
he was still spinning clockwise when Emily slapped him with her left and sent
him spinning in the opposite direction. Then Martie jumped in and slapped
him with both hands; Gawlmighty couldn't spin in both directions so he only
fell over.

Then Natalie jumped behind him and put a dainty boot in his dooky shoot.
"YeeeOWW!!!" yelled the ex-president as he flew into the opposite wall of
the alley. His stop was abrupt.

Before he could struggle to his feet, the three Dixie Chicks were upon him
with a fury that hell never knew. Gawlmighty was slapped spinning in so many
directions that he almost turned to butter. And every few seconds one of the Chicks
would give him a swift kick just to keep the rhythm lively.

Gawlmighty didn't know how much more a man could take. But he knew that
an overgrown piece of Gila monster doo-doo was reaching its limit.

Finally Natalie stopped her girlfriends and said, "This is for all the boys who
really believed they were dying for their country." And then she jumped up in
the air like a Ninja and delivered a fierce kick that sent Gawlmighty's head
and hat rolling down the alley as his body and boots toppled over.

Then the Dixie Chicks came together like three angels in Sunday school on
Christmas morning and sang, in perfect three-part harmony:

You can bet your bottom dollar,
And you're money's safe and sound,
Whichever way he said it was,
It's the other way around.

You can take it to Las Vegas,
And lay your money down,
Whichever way he said it was,
It's the other way around.

Marathon Dodgeball

Gawlmighty felt like a cat in the dog pound. Everywhere he turned,
people were trying to kill him. The big ape had still been bouncing
the orange fool like a basketball when Gawlmighty slipped out the
door and ran for his life. Gawlmighty wasn't sure who was behind it
all but he had his suspicions.

"Dang hobosexuals!" he whispered.

Gawlmighty, like most cornered animals, thought only of going home
when mercilessly pursued. They'd never think to look for him in the only
place he'd lived in his whole life before moving into the White House,
he reasoned with an obvious lack of practice. He'd catch a ride with a
trucker and be back in Texas in no time.

After standing on the side of the highway for twelve hours with his thumb
stuck out, Gawlmighty finally got a ride. An antique Ford Fairlane slowly
glided over to the shoulder a few yards in front of him. Gawlmighty held
onto his hat and ran up to meet his benefactor.

A little old lady with an orange flower in her hat sat in the driver's seat of
the Ford looking through the steering wheel as he came up alongside the
car. When he opened the door, she looked his way with a big smile and
said, "Hello dear, how far are you going?"

Gawlmighty waited for the expected reaction to his fame. But, though
she looked right at him, she showed no recognition. "Gawldurn, lady,"
Gawlmighty thought, "I been president for three years. I'm a green lizard
in a yellow cowboy hat and red cowboy boots. Ring a friggin' bell?"

But the old dear just kept looking in his direction and smiling.

"Uh, I'm headed fer Texas," Gawlmighty said.

"Why that's just fine," she said pulling back out on the highway in front
of a truck that ran over the meridian and crashed into a tree to avoid
her. "I can take you as far as Arkansas, "she said as if nothing out
of the ordinary had just happened.

Gawlmighty looked back at the smoking truck and said, "I hope you
can, lady. I hope you can."

Somewhere between Virginia and Tennessee, the old lady introduced
herself as Elmira McGoo and told Gawlmighty that she really wasn't
supposed to be driving because the dumb doctors claimed that she
was legally blind but they didn't know what all they were talking about
because she could see just fine if she squinted.

Gawlmighty, a horrified look on his face, both hands gripping the seat and
both boots up on the dash, couldn't help but believe that she'd never seen
a treetop in her life. If she'd caused less than a hundred wrecks since they
left Virginia he had miscounted. A

She was arrested in Arkansas for 7324 unpaid tickets. Gawlmighty, still
unrecognized, was put out on the side of the interstate. He stood on the
side of the highway for two hours with his thumb out before a bright
orange Cadillac pulled over to give him a ride.

The coincidence never occurred to Gawlmighty.

Scrambush!

Gawlmighty awoke one morning in May to a deserted White House.
Consequently it took him longer to get ready because he had to wipe his
own kiester. When he was ready for the day, the day wasn't there.

"HELLO!" he yelled as he was adjusting his hat.

There wasn't even an echo.

"HEY, THE SORTA PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES SAID
FUCKIN' HELLO!!!"

Still no echo.

"HEYSOMEDAMNBODY!!!"

Echoless still.

"Wonder where ever'body is," Gawlmighty growled. "If they had another
evacuation and forgot to tell me, it's somebody's ass!"

Too stupid to be afraid, Gawlmighty got his bicycle and pedaled it through
the halls of his empty castle. Nobody on the first floor. It was starting to
look like it was going to be the same thing on the second floor, when a
baboon the size of a convenience store stepped into view.

There was only one baboon this big. The baboon had been bred in a
secret experiment jointly funded by the U.S. Military, Halliburden,and the Chiquita Bananas
Company. This was no accident of nature like Gawlmighty and his shinola
siblings. This was the product of twisted human minds. This mungo baboon could have slapped
the Packers and made them cry.

Gawlmighty, still too stupid to know the danger he was in, said, "You!
New here? Anyway, where the itchy blazes is ever'body?"

"Gone smash!" said the Mungo Baboon.

Gawlmighty, holding his bicycle, jawed on as if the Baboon had said
nothing at all. "I'm tired of always being the last critter to find out about
ever'thing around here. I'm the dang President of the United States! I
oughta be told at least third or fourth!"

The Mungo Baboon swung at Gawlmighty, missed, and left a suitcase-
sized hole in the wall of the hall.

Gawlmighty still misunderestimated. "Hey, be careful! Tripped over yer
own feet, huh. I done that a couple of times before. Now move so I can
get by with my bike!"

But now the Mungo Baboon reached down and grabbed Gawlmighty in
one fist—bike and all—and then walked back the way it had come. It
repeatedly punched the walls with the fist that contained the Sorta
President of the United States.

It was Gawlmighty's decided misfortune that the place that the Mungo
Baboon was taking him was outside the White House about nine and
a half miles. But Gawlmighty (clasped tightly in the big baboon's fist
which repeatedly smashed into trees and walls along the way), was
beyond thought. Usually almost so, he was now completely thus.

This went on for about an hour, during which time Gawlmighty and his
bike were hammered into one compact mess—half bike, half biker.

Finally, the oversized ape reached its home: the C.I.A. Complex in
Langley, Virginia.

With biker and bike still compressed in its fist, the awesome primate
made a beeline for one of the outbuildings behind the Complex. As the
bigboned baboon approached the huge door in the side of the orange
building, the orange door automatically raised to admit the beast and
closed behind it.

Absolutely everything inside the building was the same shade of orange.

The walls, the floors, the computers, the tables, the logbooks, the clocks,
the coffeemaker, the surveillance monitors, the Kleenex, the paper, the
pens, the printers, the keyboards, the mice, the staplers, the radios, the
handcuffs, the cattleprods, the thumbscrews, and even the ceiling—all
bright orange!

Not that Gawlmighty knew it. He and his bike were still sharing atoms
in the fist of the Mungo Baboon. Everything could have been blue for
all he knew.

There were, however, two things in the room, besides the Baboon, that
weren't orange. (I lied when I said everything in the room was orange. I
should have said almost everything but I got carried away.) The two
non-orange things were the hat and the complexion of the only other
occupant of the room.

Though Gawlmighty still had no idea of these facts (or any other), this
was the infamous Agent Orange. He was the agent that the Agency
called on when they wanted jobs done that were seriously wrong. They
called him "Agent Orange" not only because he loved the color orange
beyond way too much. They were also comparing his deadliness to
the nefarious chemical weapon

And Agent Orange never failed.

He was also seriously deranged and talked to himself.

"Fine work. Fine work," Agent Orange said from under his hat.
"Show me what you've got."

Mungo raised the fist containing Gawlmighty and his bike high and
gestured with the other toward his open mouth.

"Okay, you red-assed, blue-nosed, damn hairy ape, I'll get your damned
bananas but after I get Gawlmighty I'm gonna stick this cattleprod up
your whoop-de-doo, " mumbled Agent Orange as he walked to the
refrigerator for the fruit.

When Agent Orange returned with the bananas, Mungo opened his
fist and let the amalgamation of Gawlmighty and his bike drop to the
orange floor. There was no movement from it. Orange stood over the
tangle of tyrant and transport and continued talking to himself:

"Oh, yeah. Been a bad president. Started screwing up. Making
people mad. Powerful people. Rich people. Crazy people. Say
you gotta go. Gotta go. Too bad. I don't care. I get my orders and
I do the deed. But I got a little problem. Little problem. Now I gotta
separate Gawlmighty from that damned bike of his. What to do?"

He went on. "Okay, what's the difference between bikes and bastards?
Oh, yeah! Bikes don't jump when you zap them with a souped-up,
electric bastardzapper!" With that, Agent Orange stuck his electric
cattleprod into the tangle of gadget and midget.

Gawlmighty had never been able to yodel. He'd listened to the cowboys
yodel in the movies. He heard them on the radio. But, for all his practice,
he never got the hang of it—until just then.

"Yodeeoyodeeoyodeoodoodleedoodleehaw!!" screeched Gawlmighty.

As he stood, smouldering and stretching out of bike-shape, poor
Gawlmighty looked around. "What the hell did you hit me with you
orange idjit!"

"I just did that to get your attention, " said Agent Orange. Then he shocked
Gawlmighty again.

Gawlmighty yelped and then shouted, "Get him monkey! I'll buy ya a whole
truckload of bananas!"

Unfortunately for Agent Orange, the Mungo Baboon understood just enough
English to be deceived.

Dropdead Fine

After Oklahoma stole the Alamo with a convoy of eighteen eighteen-
wheelers and three Mexicans, Texas came up and drove the Gawlmighty
Gang out of Oklahoma and made it apologize.

Gawlmighty was doubly humiliated to have to bow to the will of his own
home state where he had once been governor. It just didn't look right in
the newspapers. (But little of the damage he did ever made it into the the
mainstream papers who were all well-paid and proud to play along.)

Tired of Hitler, Gawlmighty went back to pretending he
was the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Then things went from bad to worse.

Gawlmighty was cokey and hadn't paid attention when Hurricane Hannibal
ate most of New Orleans and Gawlmighty was left looking like he'd been
cokey and hadn't paid attention. As Hannibal chased Louisiana up to the
Great Lakes region, Gawlmighty was watching the little wisps of grey
smoke come up when smokebubbles popped on the beach. Three days
after everything was dry again, Gawlmighty flew over the storm-ravaged
area in the Space Shuttle and told a reporter it didn't look that bad to him.

But his troubles didn't really start until he met Bambianna at a
dinner party in her honor. She was the ambassador from Bambidamn,
a small country in the Alps with no people. She was also sleek, lovely,
and hotter than Venus. Gawlmighty was introduced to her as if he were
the President of the United States.

"No! Zis must be, howyousay, a joke! You tink because I from a country
of no people that you can bring me zis handsome moofie star and tell
me he is zee President and I will know notzing of your ruse!"

"Nah, really, purty lady," Gawlmighty said, blushing lime. "I'm the real
Prez'dent. I stole it fair and square!"

Miss Handbasket lifted a lace hankie to her bombastic bosom and
smiled a smile that made it hard for him to think. It was then that
Gawlmighty truly grew up. And since he didn't wear anything but the
cowboy hat and the cowboy boots, it was obvious to Helena that
Gawlmighty liked her.

Miss Handbasket pretended that she was enamoured of Gawlmighty
because she had been paid very well to do so. Gawlmighty, on Ick's
advice, had used homosexuals as scapegoats the way Hitler had used
Jews. But unlike the homosexuals themselves, payback was a real
bitch. It was her assignment to wrap him around her little finger and
then dismiss him with a snap.

Gawlmighty took his hat off around Miss Helena like Texans did
around the ladyfolk. But the first time he did, Helena passed out
over the ugliness of his bald reptilian head. So he bought himself
a toupee that looked like he snatched it off a clown's head. It was
several days before Miss Handbasket could look at him without
having to run off somewhere and laugh.

Helena Handbasket dragged Gawlmighty through two months of
romantic degradation and had him kissing her slippers at the end.
He was so addicted to the comfort he was getting from the nimble
Miss Handbasket that he would do anything she said. When she
told him to pee on a Bible while she took photographs, he was
beyond denying her anything.

With relief, she learned from her gay patrons that her job was done
and she could leave Gawlmighty. She left, in the middle of one of his
lies, so amazingly fast that he thought she had disappeared and called
Ghostbusters. But he wasn't all alone. He was beside himself.

The awkward Christian soldiers who had been right behind him as long
as he pretended to do what they thought God wanted were
thumping their Bibles and gathering stones. He had betrayed all the
Christians moral values that had made this country the wonderful
mess it is today. How could he do such a horrible thing? Did the Devil
make him do it? If so, he had no business being the leader of a God-
fearing country! With the Washington Monument being so handy, there
was no need to look for a stake to burn him at. But he must be punished!
Christianity was a religion about punishment first and foremost in the
common hypochristian's mind. To hell with impeachment! Crucify him!

But the worst of it all, from Gawlmighty's point of view, was the fact that
something should have been visible in the notorious photograph that
was so small that it could not be seen. Somehow, no one was all that
afraid of Gawlmighty after that.

But, just when Gawlmighty thought that things couldn't possibly get any
worse, something happened that dug his grave even deeper.

Blood may be thicker than water. But it's not as thick as money.

War Monkeys

That day Gawlmighty was dressed like Hitler in the Strategy Room.

Ick had sent him to see Chaplin's "The Great Dictator."

Gawlmighty came back to the White House goosestepping, stiff arm saluting,
with a black Magic Marker mustache. Prudent made him take off the costume
except when he was in the Strategy Room. But there, he played his hero to the hilt.

He goosestepped around the long wide table in the center of the room.
He'd ask each general a question. And if he didn't like the answer, true
or not, he'd give the general a little red boot up the butt. Gawlmighty found
that if he kicked hard enough, the general usually had a good idea before
Gawlmighty made it back around the table.

Gawlmighty had just goosestepped up into a fat general's ass when the
general next to him began spewing out wise advice. Then Gawlmighty
kicked his secretary's hiney to make sure she wrote it down.

He still dressed like a cowboy. But the goosestep, the salute,
and the marker mustache made it pretty obvious that his hero wasn't
Roy Rogers.

He stomped back to Ick: "Who
are we fightin' this week?"

"Don't tell anybody," Ick answered out of the side of his mouth. His
whiskers twitched. "This time we're going to invade Oklahoma. We
just want to do it to keep the other forty-seven states on their toes."

Clicked heels, stiff salutes, and a hardy, "Heil Gawlmighty!" had
to be gotten out of the way first before Gawlmighty could assure his
brother that he'd have absolutely everything he needed. "I want
you to hit them with everything you've got right at midnight. Okies
don't wage war after dark. The longer you stay up the more you
have to think."

"Sharp move," sneered Ick.

Gawlmighty goosestepped to his brother's side and put an arm around
his shoulder. "Seems like you've got everything under control, Ick. If you
need me I'll be in the Oval Office playing Grand Theft Auto."

"Yahvol, mine commandant!" Ick shouted and threw a Nazi salute.

Later as he was shooting drug dealers and police officers in the
Oval Office, Gawlmighty sighed and said, "Gee, I'm the luckiest
wicked dictator ever!"

Fiendish Fibs

In a televised speech from the Oval Office, President
Gawlmighty told the United States that he would be there for the
nation any time it needed him. He didn't say he would help. Just
that he would be there. He got his first chance to prove it late in
his first year on the job.

One day in late August, Gawlmighty was sitting with his boots up
on the Oval Office desk smoking a joint and blowing smokebubbles
through a little plastic stick with circles on both ends. The bubbles,
grey spheres filled with smoke, would drift across the Oval Office
and give up little ghosts of smoke when they popped on the carpet.

Gawlmighty was easily entertained.

As he was doing so, Ick came grumbling through the door.

Ick wasn't tall enough to see over the desk so he came around
the side of it and was attacked by a flock of smokebubbles.
Gagging and spitting, Ick said enough choice words to convince
Gawlmighty that he could blow smokebubbles later. "Whazzup, Ick?"

"Me and Prudent and Rumbo have been talking. If we're ever going to make
any real money off this deal, we're gonna have to take over the world."

"Take over the world, huh."

"Yeah, take over the world. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
United States has been the biggest dog in the yard. And there's no
sense in us just sitting here and playing like everybody's grandfather
in a rocking chair. It's time to bite."

"We don't have grandmas or grandpas."

"Yeah, I know. But stay with me here, you burnout!"

"Okay. Me focus."

"Great. Well, we've decided to take over the world and make it a safe place
to do business in."

"Okay. And you need me why?"

"Well, we don't really need you. I just wanted to make sure you were
in the loop. We've already set in motion what's going to be. It happens
next Tuesday."

"What happens next Tuesday?"

"We're going to blow up Disneyland."

Gawlmighty looked at his brother. "When it's empty?"

"No," said Ick. "That wouldn't do us any good. It's got to be full of people
so that when we blow it up so America will be outraged like they were over
Pearl Harbor and let us start as many wars as we want and suspend their
rights and everything."

"You sure this is gonna work?"

"We're counting on the people of the United States being dumb enough to
fall for it no matter how set-up it looks."

"Oh, okay. It'll work."



In the White House bunker, Ick wore an army helmet he'd bought
at an Army surplus store. And he held a cigar butt on one side of his mouth
while he talked out of the other. "You see, in about two hours you'll be reading
a book about a duck to a bunch of school children. You can't get a better alibi
than that."

"I don't like to read and I don't like kids. They're funny lookin'!"

"That's okay. You don't really have to read the book and you'll only be with the
kids until we blow up Disneyland. Then you can have a press conference from
the school. Having all the kids around you will make you look innocent."

"Whatever!"

"Then, after your press conference with your little alibis, we'll signal all the
demolition teams to set off the explosions in the Magic Kingdom."

"Whoa! Are there gonna be people on those rides?"

"Only poor people."

"Oh, whew! You had me worried there for a minute."

Ick laid out a map of the island of California on the tabletop. "Then,
after the wreckage stops smoking, we'll have salvage ships ready
to haul off all the evidence and dump it in the ocean. And we'll make
the blueprints of Disneyland double top secret classified
for a hundred years just so nobody can prove we lied."

"You think they'll all be stupid enough not to see that there couldn't
be any reason for making the blueprints classified except that we've
got something to hide?"

"No, we'll spread the talking point that anyone who questions the official
story of the catastrophe is a nut case."

Gawlmighty stuck a tiny gold spoon up his nose and sniffed. "You really
think everybody's gonna buy that?"

"Sure," said Ick. "It's like Hitler said, 'The bigger the lie, the more people
will believe it."

"Oh, yeah," Gawlmighty sniffed. "Who's Hitler?"

Billionaire Bingo

Gawlmighty settled into the White House and thought that he was going
to like being P.O.T.U.S (To his face they all told him that the acronym
stood for "President Of The United States." But amongst themselves
they joked that it stood for "Product Of The Ugly Stick"). The way Prudent
had set things up for him, it was the easiest job in the world.

Gawlmighty swiftly appointed:

Ick as vice-president,
Fangosita as secretary of state,
and Rumbo as secretary of defense.

They all took their orders from Prudent. But each lent his or her own
charm to the post. Ick was always sneaking around behind the
scenes reinterpreting intelligence and chewing through ropes. And
Fangosita, while juggling lies in all the languages of the world,
still found time to buy thousands of shoes. (She had foot envy.) And
Rumbo, in his Roman centurion's helmet was always pestering his
brothers to give him a war to run. They told him to be patient a little longer.

While the previous president had been a real sucker for sex, he hadn't
been that bad a president.

There was a surplus of 666 octillion dollars as Elvis left office in disgrace.
The American government was the richest it had ever been. Now every bad
road in America could be fixed and every child given health care or—

"Run it by me again and hand me the bong," Gawlmighty said.

Prudent gave an exasperated sigh (that also released three lung's full
of pot smoke) and said, "Now listen this time. You're going to start a
game of billionaire's bingo. Everybody in the United States who's got
one or more billions of dollars gets a slider board with numbers on it.
Oh, it will be such fun! You'll stand there on national television and call
out the numbers and we'll give away things like the surplus, the national
forests, and "Get Out of Congress Free" passes. Won't it be fun?"

"Can I get high?"

"Yes."

"Bring on da jubilee!"