Corncob’s Great Adventure
Corncob Eisenhower of landlocked Waldick, Wisconsin always dreamed of living in a lighthouse, so you can imagine how excited he was when he opened the classified ads section of his local newspaper and found that one was for sale right there in town. Needless to say, he bought it immediately.
Unfortunately, Corncob was so busy celebrating this opportunity to fulfill his dream of owning a lighthouse that he failed to notice that in the classified ad in question, there was actually a space between “light” and “house,” meaning that – you guessed it – instead of a lighthouse, the poor fellow merely ended up with a light house.
And just how light was this house, you may ask? As it turned out, Corncob was wondering the same thing, and he soon received his answer: a storm came along that wasn’t even that strong, but his new house was so light that the winds lifted it up all the same, carrying it high above the clouds – high enough that had there been a rainbow around, he and his house almost definitely would have gone over it, just like in the case of his fellow Midwesterner Dorothy from that famous old movie The Wizard of Oz.
But there wasn’t a rainbow around, being that this was only a windstorm and there were consequently no rain droplets to refract the light in the manner necessary to create a rainbow; in this regard, Corncob thought, his situation was perhaps less like Dorothy’s and more like that of the protagonist of another, more contemporary movie that he’d never seen but knew enough about to know that it centered around a grumpy old man who tied a vast quantity of balloons to his house so it would fly him away from a world in which he was no longer happy living, only to discover once he’d gone airborne that a child who was both full of optimistic energy and desperately in need of love had joined him as a stowaway. Initially, the grumpy old man was displeased by this turn of events, but over the course of their journey together he learned to let go of whatever pain or resentment or sense of guilt or regret was making him so grumpy in the first place in order to be able to give that child the love he needed.
“Maybe I, too, could be metaphorically reborn in such a tearjerking fashion,” Corncob said to himself. “It’s really just a matter of whether there’s a child both full of optimistic energy and desperately in need of love hidden away somewhere in this floating abode of mine.”
To find out, he undertook a thorough search of the premises. That was how he discovered that there was, indeed, another person with him. In this case, however, it was not a young child full of optimistic energy but, quite the opposite, a grumpy old man who was furthermore attempting to rob him.
“Halt! Police!” cried Corncob when he came upon the elderly hooligan rooting through the top drawer of his dresser, where he kept several important documents as well as a pair of women’s underwear he’d acquired via surreptitious means.
“Oh, please,” sneered the old man, barely bothering to toss a glance back over his shoulder. “If you’re the police, then show me your badge and your gun.”
“I’m off duty,” lied Corncob.
“Off duty my itchy ass,” said the old man. “Now go on and get out of here while I look for something worth stealing or else I’ll be forced to wallop you right in that snaggle-toothed maw of yours.”
It occurred to Corncob that grumpy and old though he may have been, if he was willing to risk a felony conviction in this fashion, the man must have been in need of, if not love, then surely something equally important.
“What I’m in need of is money, you dumbass,” he said when Corncob shared these ruminations with him. “There’s something I want to buy something for my wife Lucille and social security isn’t quite cutting the mustard at the moment as far as a purchase of that magnitude is concerned.”
“That’s actually really sweet,” said Corncob. “Do you mind if I ask what it is you want to buy her?”
“A big ass dildo,” replied the old man. “In other words, none of your fucking business.”
“Well, seeing as I’m the person you’re trying to rob so you can buy it,” observed Corncob, “I’d argue that it sort of is my business.”
The old man slammed the dresser drawer shut. “You know what? You’re very quickly becoming a lot more trouble than you’re worth, and now that I think about it, you’re probably broke, anyway. Therefore, if you’d kindly step to one side, I’ll take my leave of this shithole and go rob someone more worthy of my criminal exertions.”
“You might want to have a look out the window before you do that,” Corncob advised.
The old man leaned to one side and peered through the nearest pane. “Ah,” he said. “We appear to be aloft.”
“Not only that,” said Corncob, “but I haven’t the slightest idea how to steer a flying house, so in all likelihood we’re just going to drift off into space together and die.”
The old man shook his head. “I swear to God the world wasn’t always full of half-witted nincompoops. Listen, you schmuck, it’s just a simple matter of weight distribution, which you sure as hell don’t need a master’s degree in rocket science to figure out. You move the furniture around to steer and chuck it overboard to descend.”
“And you’re saying you could do that?”
“Let’s make a deal,” said the old man. “You go down to the basement where you won’t be able to get in my way with your stupid bullshit questions, and I’ll take care of guiding us safely back to earth.”
“Wow,” said Corncob. “How will I ever be able to thank you for saving my life?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Five minutes ago, I was robbing you and now you’re asking how you can thank me? What a pathetic sniveling lickspittle you turned out to be. By the time I was your age, I knew how to kill a deer, slit it down the middle, and sleep in its steaming entrails as a way to survive being stranded outside on a cold winter night. Not that you’re smart enough to manage something like that, but on the off chance you did, I bet you’d cry about it like some three-hanky milksop.”
“I think I’ll head for the basement now,” said Corncob.
The days Corncob spent down there in the dark, disturbed only by the sound of furniture scraping across the floor overhead, were not altogether unpleasant, especially insofar as they gave him a chance to further pursue his burgeoning interest in the Tibetan Buddhist practice of “mun mtshams,” or dark meditation. Nonetheless, when he at last felt the clunk of the house meeting solid ground, he was truly happy to be back in Waldick. Truly happy, that is, until he came upstairs and discovered that he wasn’t in Waldick at all, but China!
“Ah-ah-ah,” said the old man when Corncob expressed his dismay. “I only said I’d get us safely back to earth – I never said where.”
“But why China, of all places?”
“If you really must know, the thing I was wanting to buy Lucille was a big shitload of Peking Duck, which after whole belly clams and oysters on the half-shell is her third favorite food, and between the favorable Yuan to dollars exchange rate and my detailed knowledge of the very best local back-alley establishments, here in China I can afford to buy her more Peking Duck than she could hog down in two lifetimes without having to resort to robbing asshats such as yourself. And on that note, I’m off to do my shopping, so goodbye for now and with any luck I won’t have to see that stupid looking face of yours again.”
“Wait,” cried Corncob. “How am I going to get along without you? I’ve never even been to Cancún, no less China.”
“If it’s cold and you’re stuck outside overnight, just look for a deer.”
At that, the old man went on his way, and Corncob, without anyone to guide him, commenced wandering around Beijing like a fart in a barrel, as the old Yiddish saying goes. All in all, this was far from an ideal state of affairs, but on balance, things definitely could have been worse. In earlier times, for example, the fact that Corncob didn’t speak a lick of Mandarin Chinese would have completely prevented him from communicating with the local population, but thanks to being a part of the digital age, he had a special app on his mobile phone that could immediately translate anything a person said into the device’s microphone from a total of two hundred and forty-three different foreign languages and dialects into English, and, conversely, anything Corncob said into the microphone into, from among the same two hundred and forty-three, the specific language or dialect of his choosing. As a result, when various members of that local population, noticing how confused and out of place he appeared to be, approached him asking “Nǐ zài zhè’er zuò shénme?”, Corncob not only knew this was Chinese for “What are you doing here?” but was moreover able to reply “Zhè shì yīgè hěn zhǎng de gùshì, wǒ de péngyǒu, cǐkè wǒ tài èle, tài hàipàle, érqiě hěn gūdú, wúfǎ jiǎngshù tā,” which was Chinese for “It’s a long story, my friend, and at the moment I’m too hungry, scared, and alone to tell it.”
Horror Sleaze Trash 