On a pleasant summer night in Miami, a lone policeman, handsomely dressed in his blue uniform and ready for a snack, pulled in to the nearest doughnut shop for a snack halfway through his shift. Before even reaching the counter to ask for it, the goateed black man received what he'd been about to order—a large pink cardboard box filled with O-shaped doughy sweets that might lead to diabetes some years down the line if this man wasn't so damn sexy. Barnardo had never come to this shop before, but the boys in blue had certain consistencies about them such that no doughnut shop owner within the county could get a sales permit without first reading and signing a document ensuring their understanding of the law's tastes. He smiled and took the box, and was just about to unlock his car to drive to the next call—something about a white guy—but stopped when he realized he'd parked next to another officer. "Who's there?" he said, walking towards the neighboring vehicle's window.
"Nay, answer me," the occupant sitting in the driver's seat said. "Stand and unfold yourself." Barnardo looked into the passenger window and laughed at the site of the sexy mustached Mexican officer pigging out on his own box of goodies, albeit one nearly empty by now.
"Long live the King!" Barnardo said, as he and his pal Francisco looked at the Doughnut King sign hanging over the building they'd recently exited. Have it your way.
"Barnardo," Francisco said.
"He," Barnardo replied, opening the passenger door to sit in its namesake seat beside Francisco.
"You come most carefully upon your hour," Francisco said as he offered Barnardo an apple fritter, which he accepted because no cop ever refused a doughnut. It was a second currency to them, which also meant it was just as popular with drug smugglers as cocaine and heroin, but worse: therein lied the perfect bribe, the making of corrupt officials on the force.
"'Tis now struck twelve," Barnardo replied, pointing to the digital clock on the dashboard, whose turquoise lights switched from 11:59 PM to 12:00 AM right on cue. "Get thee to bed, Francisco."
"For this relief much thanks." He chewed on a cinnamon roll, which by the looks of it had been left untouched without protection for hours, and was starting to grow stale and moldy. "'Tis bitter cold," Francisco said, almost tearing up at the words, and he set the neglected doughnut down back into its box feeling foolish and shameful. "And I am sick at heart."
"Have you had quiet guard?" Barnardo asked as he placed a comforting hand on Francisco's shoulder. With his other, he reached into his fresh box and handed the friend a likewise cinnamon roll, which was of course taken.
"Not a mouse stirring," and you can bet the rats were placed in the mafia with care, in the hopes that a legal case soon would be there. Francisco bit into the cinnamon roll and nodded at Barnardo to thank him.
"Well, good night." Barnardo left Francisco's car for his own. After turning on the ignition but before driving off, he informed the other officer, "If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus, the rivals of my watch, bid them make haste."
Suddenly, sirens stunned the two men. "I think I hear them," Francisco said, watching the impending action through his rearview mirror. He and Barnardo jumped as a third police car, perhaps more aptly referred to as a mother-effin' Humvee, crashed at high speed into the parking space beside them, on the other side of Francisco's car. "Stand ho!" Francisco shouted to the two sexy white men in the neighboring vehicle, an order that caused a sexy prostitute smoking a joint on the alleyway floor to make like a customer's manhood and erect herself. "Who is there?"
In epic slow-motion badass-ness, a red-haired man in a black coat and inexplicable sunglasses at night stepped out of the driver's seat, slowly turned to the inferior officers and removed the aforementioned sunglasses to say, "Friends…" and that was it before he put the sunglasses back on and finished, "…to this ground."
The name's Caine. Horatio Caine. And don't you forget it.
"And like, liegeman to the Dane," my partner in proverbial crime, Marcellus, said in a voice familiar to anyone who listens to American Top 40 radio, his faithful Great Dane at his side, a dog ready to solve mysteries even in light of a serious addiction to the eighteenth letter of the English alphabet that rivaled that of pirates.
"Give you good night," Francisco said, tipping his hat to the rest of us.
"O farewell, honest cop," Marcellus replied. "Like, who hath relieved you?"
"Barnardo hath my place," Francisco explained, pointing to said doughnut-inhaling officer. "Give you good night," he repeated, driving back home to see his family, foolishly staying between the lines on the road instead of running over the druggies snorting those lines like any truly badass cop with decent car insurance would do.
"Like, holla, Barnardo!" Marcellus said, his embarrassing attempt at crossing ethnic boundaries redeemed somewhat by the kindness inherent in his lifting a hand to give his co-worker a high-five.
"Say what?" Barnardo replied, though it was hard to tell if that was sarcasm or genuine urban dialect. "Is Horatio there?" Perhaps my badass sexiness was too much for his virgin eyes. Such denial is not uncommon.
Taking off my glasses, I said, "A piece…" and then put them back on and concluded, "of him."
"Welcome, Horatio," Barnardo said. "Welcome, good Marcellus."
"What," I said, taking off my glasses again, "has this thing appeared again tonight?"
"I have seen nothing," Barnardo replied with a shrug. After hearing that, I bitch-slapped him, because I can.
"Like, Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy and will not let belief take hold of him touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us," Marcellus explained to a pink-cheeked Barnardo. "Therefore I have entreated him along with us to watch the minutes of this night, that, like, if again this apparition come, he may approve our eyes and speak it." That's right: it's not real unless I say it is, and after confirming its existence, only I can speak to it. Jesus, I am so badass.
"Tush, tush," I said, putting my sunglasses back on again, "'twill not appear."
"Sit down awhile," Barnardo suggested, "and let us once again assail your ears, that are so fortified against our story, what we have two night seen."
I put my sunglasses back on, leaned against the mother-effin' Humvee, and prepared to hear Barnardo's account of the thing that a careful reader will have noticed has not yet been formally described. With a doubtful sigh, I remarked, "Well, sit we down, and let us hear Barnardo speak of this."
"Last night of all," Barnardo began, pointing towards the night sky above us, "when yond same star that's westward from the pole had made his course t' illume that part of heaven where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, the bell then beating one…"
At that moment, we suddenly got a call on the radio inside our vehicles. "Car 54, where are you?" the woman on the other line asked.
"Some forty-odd years past your sixties television references, ma'am," I said, speaking into my badass car radio. "What be the issue at hand?"
"A ghost has been sighted at the cemetery," she said, without the specifics of a good dispatcher, but we didn't care. Her voice was too sexy for us to care about what she said. Regardless, she went into the specifics in her next sentence. "The ghost of—"
"Say no more," I said quickly throwing the radio back into the mother-effin' Humvee and giving my subordinate colleagues the signal to follow me to the aforementioned cemetery.
After having our otherwise boring three-minute drive to the cemetery made more exciting by interesting camera angles, an electronic soundtrack cut-and-paste from a previous episode, and the simple fact that we were bitchin' characters in pimped-out rides, we arrived at the crime scene to investigate and attract a wide fanbase in the process. As promised, there await the ghost of none other than I'm not spoiling shit.
"Zoiks! Like, thou art a scholar," Marcellus said to me, putting his hand on my shoulder as though I needed the comfort. "Speak to it, Horatio."
"Look he not like the King?" Barnardo added. "Mark it, Horatio."
"Most like," I nodded. "It harrows me…" I said, taking of my glasses again, "with fear and wonder." It didn't—nothing scares me—but I was just being a good friend and co-worker, giving sympathy to the other two men.
"It would be spoke to."
"Speak to it, Horatio," Marcellus quietly pleaded.
I lifted one arm, signaling Barnardo and Marcellus to give the spirit and I room to converse. This could get ugly, and although such a thing is impossible in Miami as far as physical features go, as a situation it happens quite often; on a regular basis, in fact, downright weekly. And you, too, can join in on my sexy, badass team and I every Sunday night at 10:00 PM (9:00 PM Central)on CBS.
"What art thou that usurp'st this time of night, together with that fair and warlike form in which the majesty of buried Dade County did sometimes march?" I asked, putting my shades back on. "I charge thee, speak."
"Like, it is offended," Marcellus observed, as the ghost proceeded to flip us off and grab his transparent crotch with the other hand.
"See, it stalks away," Barnardo said, as the ghost proceeded to stalk away. Nothing escapes these men.
"Stay! Speak! Speak!" I demanded. I pulled my sunglasses back off, thinking that perhaps my wearing them was making me so badass I was scaring the ghost away, and then I continued, "I charge thee, speak!"
Alas, no use. The ghost disappeared into the cold wind of the night, and with that, I sighed and put my sunglasses back on. As you can imagine, I've had a lot of practice when it comes to forearm movement. And for those of you who dare to interpret that as a double entendre (and for those of you who don't get it: masturbation), let me just remind you all that someone as sexy and badass as me doesn't need to self-serve, and I never had to. The women came to me, and only then did I come onto them. And yes, that was a double entendre. If you find that offensive and not the spectacle of violence to follow, then welcome to America, my friend.
"'Like, 'tis gone and will not speak," Marcellus said.
"How now, Horatio, you tremble and look pale," Barnardo remarked. He must have assumed that my appearance was the ghost's doing, having completely forgotten that I was a ginger, albeit an unusually sexy ginger. As for the trembling, well, ha, no way. "Is not this something more than fantasy? What think you on it?"
"Before my God," I said, looking straight up at the full moon above us and putting my hands on my hips, "I might not this believe…" (I reached into my coat pocket and put my sunglasses back on) "without the sensible and true avouch of mine own eyes."
"Is it not like the King?" Marcellus asked, trembling with fear.
"As thou art to thyself," I replied. "Such was the very armor he had on when he the ambitious Cuba combated. So frowned he once when, in an angry parle, he smote the surfing Cubans on the water." People familiar with the original text of the play are now thinking the same thing I was: "'Tis strange." But you try telling me windsurfing Cubans with guns doesn't make for a ridiculously awesome action scene. That's right, you can't.
"Thus twice before," Marcellus said, "and jump at this dead hour, with, like, martial stalk hath he gone by our watch."
"In what particular thought to work I know not, but in the gross and scope of mine opinion this bodes some strange eruption to our state."
Who you gonna call?
"Good now, like, sit down, and tell me, he that knows, why this same strict and most observant watch so nightly toils the subject of the land, and why such daily cast of brazen cannon and foreign mart for implements of war, like, why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task does not divide the Sunday from the week." You have no idea what Marcellus just said, do you? "Like, what might be toward that this sweaty haste doth make the night join laborer with the day? Who is 't that can inform me?"
"Yo," I said with a simple raise of my right hand.
I then went into exposition that was so effective in making the unknowing young officers understand the past, that we were literally transported into the battle between the trigger-happy windsurfing Cubans, led by the Bearded One, Fortinbras Castro, and the trigger-happier parasailing Americans, led by the Ghostly One, King Hamlet, whom we referred to as "King" even though he was actually a "Mayor" because we thought it would be fun making the Queen think she has to actually come down here every time she's on a goodwill tour. This little practical joke worked out so well that Miami, Florida, is now its own little de facto monarchy. And we totally kicked Cuba's ass.
"And this, I take it," I said as we were dropped off back in the present day, "is the main motive of our preparations, the source of this our watch, and the chief head of this posthaste and rummage in the land."
Barnardo and Marcellus exchanged glances, and then the former nodded and said: "I think it be no other but e'en so. Well may it sort that this portentous figure comes armed through our watch so like the king that was and is the question of these wars."
"A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye." One as badass as I was naturally keen to the foreshadowing we were witnessing this night. "In the most high and palmy state of Rome," I noted, showing them the lack of hair on my palms, "a little ere the mightiest Julius fell, the graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets…" I paused here to let those images soak into my companion's minds; after the inexplicable time travel we'd just been put through, this proved a harder task than usual, though it was nothing compared to the frustration high school kids reading this story were having. "As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, disasters of the sun," I continued, stumping even the scholars at this point, "and the moist star, upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands," I said as the three of us looked up at the moon, and a distant siren drew ever closer, "was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse. And even the like precurse of feared events, as harbringers preceding still the fates and prologue to the omen coming on, have heaven and earth together demonstrated unto our climatures and countrymen."
Before I could go on, the source of the loud siren revealed itself to be a white 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor with several enhancements and added product placement in the form of a logo, a white ghost stamped out by a red circle with a cross through it, plastered on several of the doors. The vehicle parked beside our Hummer at the entrance to the cemetery, and four men, one of them black by politically correct obligation, stepped out, all dressed in the same gray outfits with what appeared to be a cumbersome machine of some sort strapped to each of their backs.
"We got a call about a ghost?" the first one said.
"Like, who are you?" Marcellus said.
"Ghostbusters," the second man said.
"What's that mean?" Barnardo said.
"We bust ghosts," the third man said. "Who are you?"
"We're with the crime lab," I said, placing my hands on my hips again. "CSI. Miami. You might have heard of us."
The first man shook his head. "Egon," he told the third, bespectacled man, "what you got?"
When we looked next, Egon had a strange device in his hand, with a computerized display in the center and two wing-like additions with flashing yellow-green lights on either side, which were moving up and down as the device changed position. "The PKE meter is showing a strong concentration of psycho-kinetic energy in this area. Then again, we are in a cemetery, Venkman."
"Guys," the second man said. He was just staring up at the sky behind my team and I. "I don't think we need that anymore."
We turned around, and collectively let out a gasp at the sight of the returned ghost.
"But soft, behold!" I said. "Lo, where it comes again!"
"What?" the fourth man, silent until now but black since he'd arrived, said, but I ignored him. He turned to the other three and asked, "What did he say?"
"I'll cross it though it blast me," I said, signaling everyone else to step back.
"Don't!" the second ghostbuster cried.
"Stay, illusion!"
The ghostbuster slapped his forehead, and Venkman patted him on the back. "It's okay, Ray. He's a ginger. No one will miss him."
As the ghost descended through the air, it opened its arms as if to hug me.
"Proton packs ready?" Ray said, signaling his comrades to pull out a weapon attached the main devices on their backs by a strong black cord. While they aimed those weapons at the ghost of King Hamlet, Ray warned: "Don't antagonize it, Mr…"
"You know my name," I said bluntly, taking my glasses off to help them remember.
"Actually…"
"If thou hast any sound or use of voice," I told the ghost, who continued to descend at an increasingly slow pace, after I put my glasses back on, "speak to me." Though willing to do ghastly things to me, the sluggish movement of the king's spirit made it more than obvious that even in death, there were some things that were still feared, and I was one of those things. "If there be any good thing to be done that may to thee do ease and grace to me, speak to me." Still it said nothing. "If thou art privy to thy country's fate, which happily foreknowing may avoid, O, speak!"
"I really don't think you're going to get through to it, man," the black ghostbuster said. His name is actually Winston, but no character ever says his name in conversation here, which leaves us with no "natural" way to introduce him to you (and resulting in this abrupt interruption of the dramatic tension), but on the bright side, here's an A+ on your math test.
"Or," I persisted, lifting my index finger, a simple feat that even seemed to make the ghost quiver, "if thou hast uphoarded in thy life extorted treasure in the womb of earth, for which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, speak of it." Now I was just being a greedy bastard, but come on, do you honestly think the level of one's badass is directly proportional to their salary? Besides, I had illegitimate children to feed. I assume.
Like any hider of treasure, the ghost wanted to make us seek for it, and so it vomited green slime all over us and began flying away. "Stay and speak!" I demanded of the apparition. Turning to my partner, I pointed backwards and said, "Stop it, Marcellus."
Marcellus looked at me, and then he looked at his pistol and asked, "Like, shall I strike it with my partisan?" A word that was totally not synonymous with gun.
"Do, if it will not stand," I answered condescendingly.
"'Tis here," Barnardo said.
"'Tis here," I echoed.
Then we heard a farting sound, and the ghost vanished into thin air.
"'Tis gone," Marcellus said, having not struck it with the partisan he didn't have.
"Ruh-roh," his Great Dane added.
"Like, we do it wrong," Marcellus reasoned, "being so majestical, to offer it a show of violence, for it is as the air, invulnerable, and our vain blows malicious mockery."
"It was about to speak when the cheese was cut," Barnardo added. Then he gasped (likely for breath), and was reminded sternly that he who smelt it, dealt it.
"And then it started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons," I said, and Marcellus nodded in agreement. "I have heard the cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, doth with his lofty and thrill-sounding throat awake the god of day, and at his warning, whether in sea or in fire, in earth or air, th' extravagant and erring spirit hies to his confine, and of the truth herein this present object made probation."
"No," Barnardo said. He looked at Marcellus and I as though we were a pair of dudes obsessed with cocks. Bitch, please. "It left because someone farted."
"It faded on the crowing of the cock," Marcellus said, bitch-slapping Barnardo because I said he could. "Like, some say that ever 'gainst that season comes wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated, this bird of dawning singeth all night long; and then, they say, like, no spirit dare stir abroad, the nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, no fairy takes, like, nor witch hath power to charm, so hallowed and gracious is that time."
"So have I heard and do in part believe it," I said, taking my glasses off. "But look, the morn in russet mantle clad walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill." Of course, the only reason there's a hill there is because this isn't actually being filmed in Miami, Florida, but in Long Beach, California. "Break we our watch up, and by advice let us impart what we have seen tonight unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life, this spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him. Do you consent we shall acquaint him with it as needful in our loves, fitting our duty?"
"Like, let's do 't," Marcellus said, slapping me a high-five while all four ghostbusters bitch-slapped Barnardo because they were feeling left out, "I pray, and I this morning know where we shall find him most convenient."
"So I guess you could say," I said as I put my sunglasses back on, "we won't get fooled again."
Somewhere in the distance, Roger Daltrey screamed and the guitar kicked in.