DREW
"Lovely," I muttered as I stared through the window of the Savoy.
I frowned at my rodent companion. "You know, you could have just told me she was cheating on me, and I would have believed it."
Sneezer just shook his head. "Like I said, that wouldn't be dramatic. It wouldn't make a very good flashback."
"I don't want a flashback of this!" I barked. "This only depresses me!"
The mouse offered me my wallet. "I'm sorry."
I don't really know why, but I held up a hand to stop him.
Maybe I thought I still had a chance. Or maybe I thought, `Two can play that game.'
"Hold onto it," I said. "I'm not finished yet."
The mouse's eyes widened in shock. "You mean...?"
"Uh-huh," I said.
Sneezer looked confused. "But how will you even get Smurfette's legs that far apart?"
I smacked my face. "Never mind."
"I suppose...if there's a will, there's a way..."
"I'm not going to do Smurfette. That's disgusting."
"So you're going to win Jessica back?" Sneezer asked. "If you are, I have some ideas..."
I was not impressed. "What, like a serenade? Or standing below her window and calling `Hark, what light through yonder window breaks?' Is that what you had in mind?"
The mouse turned red. "Maybe?"
"That stuff only works in cartoons," I said. "Don't get me wrong, corny romantic overtures might work in some situations, but they generally don't work on women who are satisfied with the man they've got."
As an afterthought, I added, "Or cartoon."
Sneezer looked puzzled. "But you said you weren't finished yet! Surely..."
I just wiggled my eyebrows.
"But she's a doodle, and you're a noid! That's-"
"I know," I said.
The mouse's jaw dropped open. "Ohhh..."
I sat down on a crate, feeling as if divulging that information drained something out of me.
Maybe I was tired. I had certainly gotten a workout the moment I stepped through `the looking glass', and the realization that my metaphorical (and physically attractive) `rabbit' was taken by a kangaroo probably was a lot of stress.
Plus I was kinda ashamed. Giving up on humans to screw a cartoon? Had I really sunk that low?
"But Vanessa left you!" Sneezer said.
"Maybe, maybe not. Maybe she just...had to turn into a superhero or something. I think she deserves a second chance. All we have to do is find her."
"Okay..." Sneezer stammered, looking nervous. "So when do you think you'll do it?"
"I...don't know." I swallowed. "We'll, uh, do it whenever she says we'll do it. You have to work up to these things."
That's when I remembered that I had a pair of birds roosting on my shoulder.
Looking at them, I said, "Don't tell anyone, please."
The two sang a line from Skynard's Don't Ask Me Questions.
Sneezer paused and thought a moment. "What you said about doing it...that explains a lot."
I frowned. "How so?"
The mouse reddened. "I meant, it explains a lot about why I'm not getting any."
I rubbed my face, feeling rather disgusted. "Great. I'm glad I could...educate you."
I glanced at my Back to the Future watch. The digital readout was saying five thirty, but it felt much earlier than that. I supposed that even Marty McFly underwent some time compression in order to fit in his Saturday morning time slot.
"Tell me, Sneezer. How do we get to the Halftone Club?"
The mouse pushed back a dumpster, opening a sewer manhole. We climbed down inside it, crawling through a narrow tunnel, which in turn led to a cramped staircase with a panel along one wall.
The panel featured six switches, which Sneezer flipped in a seemingly random pattern, clicking buttons next to each one.
"What's that?" I asked.
"You'll see. Just remember the order of these numbers. It's important: Four, three, one, five, three, two, one, five, six."
I rolled my eyes. "Whatever."
We climbed another flight, stepped through a door, and we were in a carpeted hallway lined with five identical looking hotel doors, six counting ours, each labeled by a number. There was actually seven in total, but the last door was on the south wall, by itself, and it had no number above it.
I stared at the crazily patterned wallpaper, the antique looking wall sconces. The north wall held a framed picture of...some guy in a mustache.
All of a sudden, the south door burst open. "Deebes! Hold it right there!"
I turned just in time to see Officer Harris running up the carpet, accompanied by his bow tied spider pal, and a cyborg cowboy from Galaxy Rangers.
Sneezer hissed the sequence of door numbers again, rushing through door number four.
Not wanting to go to prison again, I raced after him...and found myself in a Scooby Doo style chase sequence, complete with corny music, Top of the World by the Carpenters.
Not as amusing when you're actually doing it.
I won't bore you with all the details, but I will give you the highlights of the whole series of shenanigans:
Scooby Doo doors contain a wide variety of worlds for you to run through in order to reach the next door. There was a spaceship corridor, where we bowled over Bucky O' Hare, a desert with a mirage and a genie, an old spooky mansion, an old western saloon (I knocked over Harris by swinging on a chandelier and hitting him with a beer bottle), and a jungle. One door even took me out the mouth of Snoopy's doghouse and through the front door of Charlie Brown's house.
The doors also contained stairs leading to...the same hotel hallway.
A lot of times it was just a pitch black room, explaining, or at least hiding the reasons why such bizarre things happened on the other side. Like why I suddenly found myself cradled in Harris's arms like some distressed maiden, or why the butler from Miss Terious's house was standing in the doorway dressed like a stripper cowboy and saying "Mmyes."
Thinking I could skip this whole ridiculous performance by using the south door, I opened it, but it only revealed a giant eye. I slammed it shut again.
Also, the windows didn't open.
Like any good Scooby Doo chase, I and Harris kept running into each other. I and Harris weren't complete idiots, but the room kept tripping us up.
Harris, probably used to such things due to living there so long, managed to handcuff me several times, but the results were hit or miss.
Once, he dragged me through a door and found himself handcuffed to Sneezer...or the Galaxy Ranger.
When he tried it again, I came out on the other side wearing cuffs, with no officer in sight.
I opened a door, discovered a roaring abominable snowman, slammed it shut again.
Harris pulled me through door number six, a big darkened room, and guess what? When I stepped out into the hallway again, I was handcuffed to a roaring snow beast. Good times.
When not handcuffed, I found myself avoiding Harris as he ran toward me, or past me. Don't ask me how I got the cuffs off, or sometimes ended up wearing women's clothing. It didn't make any logical sense.
One time, I opened a door and found Harris hollering at me. I responded by punching him in the face and running past.
Somehow the alligator from the sewer made an appearance, trying to French me again, but I shoved her off me, running away.
During one encounter with the yeti, I punched it in the face.
Then, after knocking it to the floor with a football charge, I stepped through another doorway and found myself being floored by a large hairy fist.
Somehow, I remembered the sequence of numbers, running through the correct sequence of doors, for, after going through all these mildly amusing antics, to the tune of the Carpenters and Rolling Down the River, all the numbered doors in the room banged open on their own accord, slammed shut, and the door Harris had originally entered through swung open, revealing a street corner.
I'm not sure why Harris occasionally dragging us through the doors out of sequence didn't matter, but I certainly wasn't the one to complain!
You can probably guess I'd rather have my eyes gouged out than stay there another minute. Out I went.
When Sneezer slammed the door shut behind us, the door vanished, taking Officer Harris with it.
With my feet both planted firmly on the pavement, I checked the watch and saw that only a couple minutes had passed. In fact, the exact amount of time it took for the two songs to play to their completion. Still, the skies had turned a dusty color, and it felt like an eternity.
It looked like dusk now.
We stood along a side street in a different side of town, the buildings looking considerably more...urban.
To the right of me, I saw the back end of a large carpet store, and a dilapidated old gym, probably home to a bunch of boxing cartoons.
To my left, I could see the loading docks of a massive factory that said Acme on the garage doors.
Across the street was the club.
The place was apparently a strip joint, judging by the neon sign that said `Live girls' and the seductively dancing neon cowgirl on the side of the building. I estimated that you would have needed at least a hundred sets of glass tubes to replicate that quality of animation in real life.
As far as those types of establishments go, it seemed to have a bit more class than the ones I've driven past in Nevada. The front entrance had an Arabian style arch, and pictures of `performers' were displayed tastefully in movie theater marquee boxes.
The `halftone' name referenced those dots commonly used in the printing of comic strips. These dots, blown up to the size of golf balls, stretched down on either side of the entrance in wide swaths like banners. The rest of the front was concrete, but it had a sort of arabesque trim to it, making it a little less like the scummy bowling alley it could have been. That, and the red awning helped.
I was about to check out the place, but Sneezer stopped me, looking at my watch.
"We've still got some time," he said, tugging my arm. "You have to dress up to go in there."
"Does it really matter what we wear? Or is it like the Savoy...?"
Sneezer shook his head. "It's different. C'mon. I know just the place. It's right around the corner."
He led me to a dingy looking thrift store across the street from the gym.
The official name: Musical Montage Thrift.
"How long will this take?" I groaned.
Sneezer checked my watch again. "One minute, thirty seconds."
I laughed. "Okay?"
I heard music start up the moment we stepped through the door.
I'm Gonna Pop Some Tags by Macklemore.
It felt like I shopped for an hour, but I was outside when the song ended, dressed in a cartoon tuxedo.
It seemed the street we walked along now was not a major thoroughfare, for although I sucked in my breath when Sneezer stepped off the curb, I saw no cars approaching in any direction.
After nervously testing the blacktop with my foot, and not seeing any semis, I followed him.
The club's archway led to a bright movie theater-like hallway, then to an imposing looking set of metal doors with a peeping slot near the top.
Feeling a bit jaunty at the moment, I gave the door the shave and a haircut knock.
A plate behind the slot moved sideways, and I was looking at a pair of gorilla eyes.
"What's the password," a voice growled.
"Walt sent me," I said with a grin.
Sneezer gawked at me like I were a mind reader or something.
The ape paused for a minute, then muttered, "Damn, we need to come up with a new password."
The door swung open, and I froze in one spot, taking in my surroundings.
It was a big wide room, its walls decorated with halftone dots of various colors and sizes, Chinese dragons and ceiling to floor mirrors. Evil looking creatures occupied raised booths with white leather seats, sat around tables, smoking and drinking.
Among the weirdos, I saw black riders from the Lord of the Rings cartoon, Popeye's Bluto, and Bruh Rabbit from Street Fight. At one table sat King Koopa, flanked by two turtles. I didn't see Mario, probably because he had his choice of princesses.
For cage dancers, we had a Sailor showing a little too much `Moon', Riffraff's girlfriend Cleo, and some Anime catgirl.
I was fortunate to come in at the end of Justin Timberlake's I Got My Sexy Back, because that song annoyed me.
The room darkened, stage lights came on, and techno dance music started up.
I noticed that Beavis and Butthead were in the audience, but they made too much noise, so the gorilla dragged them out.
Hearing someone shouting about an entry fee, I turned and saw Sneezer passing Morgana from Darkwing Duck a handful of bills.
A second later, the lady from the Dino Crisis video game muttered something to the duck, and she handed the money back.
"They said it's covered," Sneezer whispered to me with a shrug. "I wonder who's paying?"
For awhile, I just stood where I was, watching scantily clad cartoon characters walking around, serving drinks, or swinging on poles near the staircases.
But then I felt Sneezer tugging me onward, to an empty booth near a stage at the end of the room.
I gawked at the faces I saw at the surrounding tables. Skeletor, Merman, slavemasters and Orcs from Dungeons and Dragons, Moblins from the Legend of Zelda, Planet of the Apes gorillas, and dozens of ducks, Ewoks, wolves and cats.
Slimer from the Real Ghostbusters snatched drinks off people's tables, pouring liquids down his throat.
My booth was situated between Count Chocula and Fritz the Cat.
Directly ahead of me, on a stage surrounded by mirrors, a pair of Persian cats with shapely female figures danced on either side of a pantless female skunk with glasses and a blue shirt, who busily rode a pole on the center runway.
Sabrina Skunk.
From an internet comic.
I felt embarrassed to even recognize her...she and her stripey tiger companion serving drinks.
Okay, so maybe I did occasionally view cartoons after age twelve.
One of the Persians sidled off into the crowd, and the indecently attired chick from Ghost in the Shell took center stage.
I watched her dance, hypnotized by the movements of her naked legs and strangely uniformed upper torso, all the while wondering if piloting a robot really requires you to not wear pants.
A purple skunk blocked my view of the stage.
Fifi Le Pew. Strip club drink server.
"A drink for you, monsieur?"
I frowned at her in annoyance, not only of obstructing my view, but also in recognition of the fickle nature of cartoon drinks.
If I asked for anything with a funny name, I would probably regret it. Bloody Mary, for example.
"Pina colada," I said.
Try to make fun of that one! I thought.
"A what?" she said, looking baffled.
Dirty Shirley. Out. Mudslide. Out. Boiler Maker. Definitely out.
Giving up, I said, "I'll have a beer."
As she wrote the order down, I quickly blurted, "And a hat suspended in purple liquid."
She gave me a dirty look, but scribbled the order down.
Fifi's not getting a tip, I thought.
I reconsidered when she came back a couple seconds later with the beer...and the hat suspended in purple liquid.
When she left the table, I dumped the liquid out, because I didn't know what it was.
The beer tasted like tea. I wasn't sure if it really was tea in a beer bottle or if Cool World didn't actually have beer.
The music changed to Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones as the curtain came down. All the dancers left the stage.
When the curtain came back up, I saw a cluster of tombstones and cardboard mausoleums on the stage, from behind which a young woman in a half skull mask danced out, to the tune of Jim Towel's I've Been Hoodooed.
She was the most gorgeous woman I'd ever laid eyes upon.
Noid.
A non animated human woman, clad in an appropriately Voodoo-esque black robe patterned with skulls, bones, snakes and arcane symbols. The mask concealed part of her face, but the exposed part looked nice.
She danced rhythmically along the runway, accompanied by dancing skeletons from some old Terry Toon program or another.
She spun around, and as she did so, I momentarily caught a flicker out of the corner of my eye.
The flicker came from the mirrors.
When I glanced that way, I saw a cartoon female same general body shape as the dancer, clad in the same robe, which she slowly unbuttoned and discarded to the rhythm.
I looked away from the mirrors and saw that the real woman had done the same, and now danced among the tombstones in a tight pink blouse and black leather miniskirt.
She spun around a pole in a sexually suggestive way, then threw her blouse to a drooling wolf.
In her form fitting leather bra, she straddled a pole, slid to the stage floor, then disappeared behind a cardboard mausoleum.
A pair of dainty cartoon hands held up an ink and paint miniskirt, and the doodle from the mirror stepped out on the stage, prancing up the runway in a thong.
And then she was on one of the tables, crouching on all fours.
A cartoon Baron Sembedi, Morticia, and Dracula from, I believe, Goolies Get Together, pulled up the table cloth around her, and when it came down, she was gone.
Before I could adequately prepare myself, I see the flesh and blood woman climbing out from beneath the table cloth in front of me, right between my legs.
She pressed me flat against the seat, straddling my lap as she unbuttoned my shirt to the music.
I stared uncomfortably at her heaving breasts as she simulated intercourse upon my pants, her leather thong creaking as it rubbed back and forth on clothing which, incidentally, felt like I was wearing nothing at all anyway.
Her lips came close to my face, almost touching mine.
And then she blew me a kiss.
It was weird. Her lipstick popped off, flapped through the air between our mouths, and smacked mine.
The song ended, and she disappeared beneath the tablecloth again.
The cartoon woman popped out on the opposite side of the table, giving me a mischievous wink.