The Worst Mime in the World by Martin Mundt       Jacques claimed the rush-hour corner of Clark and Diversey for his own, where he began throwing his long, skinny arms around like two whip antennas on a pick-up truck with bad shocks going over railroad tracks. He was tall and thin and penniless. Food and money meant nothing to him, less than nothing; mime was everything.      He began setting up an invisible container of some sort. It was impossible to tell from Jacques' sloppy pantomime exactly what sort of container it might be, but, the construction apparently having been completed, Jacques began removing, one by one, unidentifiable... somethings... from it.      He could have been removing, for example, kitchen utensils from a suitcase; or he could have been arranging a three-card monte game with...well, with what seemed to be 18th century antique French shoes instead of playing cards; or he could have been scooping out the still-steaming entrails from a disemboweled roadkill deer.      Well, no, he couldn't really have been doing that, because what mime would do something like that? But from the right angle, that's what it looked like he was doing, or maybe he was coping badly with heroin withdrawal, or maybe he was having an aneurysm, except that he was wearing whiteface--well, actually grayface, since he had gotten his makeup from a dumpster behind a magic store, and the powder was old and dried out--and he was wearing a black-and-white striped shirt with suspenders, and skin-tight black pants, and these little, black, fairy ballet-slippers that were too big for him and had newspaper bulging out of the toes to make them fit, as if words were desperately trying to squeeze themselves out of his self-imposed professional silence.      A mother and her little five-year-old daughter stopped to watch him, even though they were careful to remain out of arm's reach. They didn't keep their distance so much because Jacques was doing such a bang-up job miming furniture; or land mines; or maybe these weird, multiheaded, 25th century, post-holocaust mutant humans playing...well, it looked like the mutants were playing croquet.      No, the mother and daughter kept their distance because Jacques smelled like a wet dog, and a little bit as if he had been worn as an undershirt by a bum who had just been through a series of serious untreated medical crises involving skin eruptions and the uncontrollable leakage of syrupy bodily fluids. They kept their distance because Jacques could have done his own one-man show at Bad Smell Theater.      Jacques crouched down in front of the little girl--at a distance--and did Trapped Behind An Invisible Wall, although his hands never really stopped in the same plane twice, and it looked more like he was doing Blind Man Having A Heart Attack And Fumbling Through Medicine Cabinet For Digitalis.      The little girl, however, still smiled and clapped her hands together in front of her gleeful face. She giggled. She gurgled. She grinned.      And that's when it happened, just like it always happened, each and every time Jacques performed. He felt the desire, the necessity; the unstoppable, caveman-hindbrain need squirming up inside him, clawing its way out of his stomach, slithering up his trachea, coiling at the back of his mouth. Jacques smiled a tight-lipped smile, as if he were trying to hold back a gallon of projectile vomit. The makeup around his lips cracked with the effort. He redoubled his search for the elusive edge of the invisible wall behind which he was trapped, trying to smother his coming compulsion beneath the pillowy glories of mime.      The little girl goggled. She guffawed. She gibbered.      Jacques told himself he could control it this time. He told himself he would control it this time. He put every milligram of willpower in his being into controlling it, but it was no use.      "Out! Out!" it screamed inside his skull, raking razor-talons across the pink underside of his brain. He gripped his jaw down harder, bit into his own cheek, swallowed some of his own blood. He smiled even harder, like a death rictus, but it wanted out, and it got its way.      "Bitch!" he shrieked into the little girl's face, and she flinched and blinked as warm mime-spittle flecked her cheek and flew into her eyes. "Motherfucker!" Jacques screamed. "Cocksucker! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"      The little girl's face began to percolate as tears rose to her eyes.      "Cock in your pussy!" Jacques yelled.      For Jacques, the worst thing about being a mime--absolutely the very worst thing--was his Tourette's Syndrome.      His life had been a series of inappropriate pornographic tirades--with no HBO specials in sight--one sexually explicit rant screamed at random passersby after another; a vicious wrist-slashing cycle of involuntary, genitalia-laced soapbox screeds shouted at an open-mouthed, dusty-Victorian-velvet-eared world; one long endless psychosexual slurry of verbal diarrhea sprinkled with the indigestible puke-green chunks of racial slurs.      Jacques was a bad mime.      Now, normally, the general public couldn't tell a good mime from a bad mime from a mute, hallucinating, undermedicated, homeless schizophrenic with delirium tremens, at least not since the Ed Sullivan Show had disappeared into its final blue dot. Good, bad, stricken with Parkinson's. To the people on the corner of Clark and Diversey, it simply did not matter. Mimes were an annoyance, and Jacques was an annoyance; so, therefore, Jacques was a mime.      But this...this verbal violation of a five-year-old girl, this forcible blooper reel culled from triple-x, 8mm, dirty bookstore sex loops; well, this was...different.      The girl cried, of course. This was the first time that a mime--a trusted, lovable, respected, nonthreatening, warm-and-fuzzy mime--the Officer Friendly of entertainers; the Smokey the Bear of street performers, the Mister Rogers of mutes--had spewed a torrent of filth into her impressionable ears and spit into her face.      Perhaps, in the right setting, a radical, in-your-face, edgy, guerrilla mime cackling obscenities at a little girl could have been considered artistic, or avant garde, or cutting edge, or even Gallic in its intellectual disdain for the conventional, unsophisticated mores of middle-class America, or at least it could have been considered funny, but not here, not now. Here and now, only an evil person could have considered this to be funny.      The girl cried.      Jacques wanted to cry as well, but he didn't. He forced his tears inside. He had to be strong. He had to restore this little angel's trust. He had to make it all better.      The girl cried. Jacques reached out to smooth her hair, to dry her tears, to comfort her.      "Whore!" he bellowed in her ear. He tried to force calm into his voice. "Sloppy slut! Pussy juice!"      The girl cried.      No! No! That wasn't what he'd meant to say at all. He had meant to apologize, to beg forgiveness, to somehow, by any means at his disposal, give her back her little-girl innocence, and when he opened his mouth, out had come "Pussy juice!"      The mother began to drag the girl stumbling away from Jacques, pushing through the stunned crowd, back in the direction from which they had come, anywhere just to get away from Jacques, anything to get away from Jacques.      Jacques followed, trying to explain, to apologize, to somehow shove the innocence back inside the little girl, to seal up her ears to obscenity, to blind her eyes, to make the world all bunnies and Raggedy Ann's, containing no pieces small enough for her to swallow and choke on, a place that was radon-free, where everything was inflammable--no, no, where everything was non-flammable--and where the only pedophiles were hanging from lampposts by nooses made of piano wire.      OK, OK, Jacques told himself to calm down; he was getting off track. Pedophiles were irrelevant. He stopped chasing the mother and daughter, and he focused himself. He called after them in the plaintive tone of Timmy searching for Lassie.      "Cock in your pussy! Cock in your pussy!"      But they only ran faster.      The little girl's emotional deflowering, however, was now the least of Jacques' worries. A Java programmer stepped out of the crowd and seized Jacques' right arm, and a vegetarian professor emeritus of games theory clutched his left, and they hustled him into a nearby alley. Jacques struggled, but he was too weak and undernourished to escape from the anger of the sleek, well-fed, gainfully employed, Republican vigilantes.      "What kind of weird little child-molesting motherfucker are you?" said the Java programmer.      "Yeah. Child-molesting motherfucker," chimed in the white-haired professor emeritus.      "Feces," said Jacques.      "Someone should beat some sense into your pasty-white ass," said the programmer.      "Yeah. Pasty-white ass," said the professor.      "Crap happy," begged Jacques.      "Potty-mouthed motherfucker," said the programmer, and she rabbitpunched Jacques in his throat.      Jacques tried to say ‘Bunghole', but it came out as a gurgle.      "Yeah. Motherfucker," said the professor, and he bearhugged Jacques from behind, holding him still while the Java programmer pummeled him.      Now, Jacques' use of the word ‘motherfucker' had been abhorred by everyone in the crowd, but when the programmer applied that selfsame word to Jacques, everyone cheered her, and they kept cheering as she punched Jacques senseless.      The crowd did not witness a fight. They did not witness anything that was fair. They witnessed carnage, pure and simple. A Hong Kong kung-fu-movie stunt coordinator in the crowd got down on all fours and chewed on the curb, howling, "That can't be done! The human body can't do that!" as he watched the vegetarian horrors the professor emeritus visited upon Jacques when it was his turn. And when the two were done clobbering Jacques, he looked like a scene from When Animals Attack Mimes, or World's Worst Mime Accidents, or Who Wants To Dismember A Mime.      The applause only increased.      It had always been the same for Jacques. The only times in his life that he had heard true, heartfelt applause, it was always on the far side of the salsa-drumming of concussive fists into his face. He would hear cyberpunk lightning-slashes of synthesizer chords detonate against his ears like balled fists of sound; bare-knuckled chuckling cracking apart his cheekbones; guttural, steel-toed jackal-laughter ooomphing into his stomach, liquefying his organs; a joyous ode to the old ultraviolence, and he always got called back for a second and a third and sometimes even a fourth encore with the nickel-roll fists, and the final crescendo of applause was as crushing as a dumpster tipped over on top of him.      The professor wingtipped him one final time in the head before Jacques was abandoned under the dumpster, and the crowd dissipated, and the whole world went on its way, and Jacques was forgotten by everybody, except the little girl, whose name was Becky, and who went through years of therapy--years--in a futile effort to repair her psychic damage, until eventually she died during the making of a snuff film at the age of nineteen, ironically in an offscreen accident, but that's another story.      But Jacques just lay under the dumpster despairing, the imprints of fists pressed into his facepaint, a few broken teeth slumping out of his mouth.      "I wish I could--penis--stop talking," he sighed. "I--fucker--want to be--steaming crap--the best mime--piss in my mouth--the world has ever seen--foreskin."      Jacques had never wanted to be anything but a street mime--a very edgy, extreme, urban artist and artwork all in one, like living graffiti; but the attempts had always ended in pummelings and applause. He didn't even know how many times any more; he simply went limp, dropping into a fetal fugue state whenever the fists began to fall.      Today's had not even been the worst beating. The worst had been the time that an entire troupe of Christian evangelical mimes had been seized with righteous bugfuck indignation and had gone Nebuchadnezzar on his blasphemous ass.      He had seen them, like twelve apostles with their tongues cut out, walking with kelplike, underwater-slow undulations of their arms and legs, miming the literal truth of the Bible and the pervasiveness of Satanism in child-care facilities across the country, like a prancing ministry of closeted gay toreadors, all wearing those little fairy ballet-slippers.      Jacques had tried to join, a thirteenth impious apostle screaming "Hail Mary's Ass, and a motherfucker of a bod," barking filth during the silent Sermon on the Mount, dropping sloppy depravities into the quiet beatitudes of the Psalms, when the evangelicals opened a family-sized can of extra-strength whup-ass on him. He collapsed under a mime-beating, quivering on the ground, curled into a godless ball of profanity, twitching under suckerpunches, kidney-kicks and headbutts, all airy and insubstantial, not one of which was real, not one of which came anywhere near him, but all of which were mimed to such perfection that he believed utterly that he had taken a real, old-fashioned Bible-thumping.      He lay there in spasms of imaginary agony, helplessly swearing and convulsing in such a pathetic, shivering seizure that even the evangelical Christians--yes, even the Christians--finally decided that enough was enough, and so left him alone with his unreal pain.      Now, that was what Jacques wanted to do with his life, to make people believe in things that weren't really there; to make people feel pain that didn't really exist. That was being a mime.      He had grown up reading the stories of the great mimes of history. He had read about Peter the Little Tramp, the leader of the Great Mime Crusade of 1073, the legendary inventor of Walking Against The Wind, who was such a perfectionist, and who had so many thousands of followers who also wanted to learn to Walk Against The Wind, that he spent the last fourteen years of his life walking and walking and walking and never actually getting anywhere.      Jacques had devoured stories about Turninkov, the illiterate Russian peasant mime, who had dragged himself up from the rank of village idiot by the sheer genius of his pantomimed political satire. Turninkov had spent the years 1571-79 honing Trapped In A Box to such a state of subtlety in front of Czar Ivan the Terrible's palace, as a protest against political absolutism, that even Ivan eventually realized that he was being criticized, and he loosed his pet bears on the brave Turninkov. The bears, however--so the story goes--were so mesmerized by Turninkov's illusion of being Trapped that they first had to chew their way through his box before they ate Turninkov.      Jacques had collected every scrap of information he could find about Srechangalar Subrahmaputra, the subcontinent's most illustrious mime, who was so dedicated that, for 37 years after his death, his dead body continued to perfectly mime being a dead body; and he was last seen, still in character, miming a dead body floating down the Ganges toward the Indian Ocean after a monsoon flood.      The professional mime community, however, as represented by the International Brotherhood of Knifethrowers, Spiritual Advisors, Plate-Spinners, Circus Geeks, Human Pincushions, Contortionists and Mimes, had not opened their arms in air-hugs for an apprentice so differently-abled as Jacques. Every audition had ended with Jacques spewing vulgarities, and he was always told to hustle himself to the door with invisible hands at his belt and collar and throw himself out onto the street.      "If only I could--tittie twister--stop talking," he sighed again.      And then a shadow passed over his head, and from the shadow came a voice. "Easier done than said," said the voice.      The dumpster was lifted from Jacques' body, and when Jacques looked up, he saw a man lifting the dumpster with one hand. The man was tall, and he wore a swirling black cape that grazed the ground, and a hat with a brim that swooped down nearly to his left cheek, a ensemble that would have incited lust in Lamont Cranston.      "Who are you?" said Jacques.      "You can call me Mister E.S. Trainjer," said the man, smiling, and he reached down to help Jacques to his feet.      Jacques felt warmth flow through his body as if he were a hot-water pipe. He stared at his wounds as they closed and healed as completely as if they had never been.      "But..." he started to say.      "No, no," said Mister E.S. Trainjer, waggling a finger in front of Jacques' face. "No more talking. You're a mime now." He passed his right hand across Jacques' mouth as if he were zipping a zipper closed, and a steel zipper appeared on Jacques' lips, sticking to his skin with a sucking Velcro sound. A tiny padlock clicked shut as the zipper closed and dangled underneath the corner of Jacques' mouth, steel-cold against his skin.      "Mmmm, mmmm," Jacques mumbled, trying to roll his eyes down to see what had happened. He pulled on the lock with his fingers, and he twisted his mouth this way and that way, trying to dislodge the zipper, but nothing moved, nothing budged, nothing opened.      "Mmmm, mmmm," he said again as a look of horror crossed his face, better than any look of mime-horror he had ever mimed before.      The zipper began to glow red-hot, then white-hot, and then it melted into his face, and Jacques clutched his mouth and mmmm'd from the pain.      Mister E. S. Trainjer dusted his hands together and grinned. "Well, that's that," he said.      Jacques staggered out of the alley, wisps of smoke rising between his fingers from his burning, liquefying flesh. He leaned against a lamppost on Diversey Avenue, doubled over with the searing pain, as if his jaw had been torn off by big, iron, Inquisitional pincers.      The pain, however, slowly subsided, and the zipper cooled, settling on his skin as if it were a black, painted-on zipper with a black, painted-on padlock.      Jacques couldn't open his mouth. He couldn't pry his fingers in between his lips, even though he tried. And oh, how he tried, pulling his skin into funny faces and scary masks.      Jacques planted his feet wide and solid apart, and he screamed--a slow, considered, floor-by-floor construction of a scream, starting in his diaphragm, squiggling like an tumor goaded with a glowing fireplace poker, wiggling up his windpipe, but stopping in his throat, kneading the flesh around his Adam's apple like a couple of hands wringing themselves with worry inside a flesh-colored balloon. But not a word escaped his lips. Not one.      A few people stopped on the sidewalk to watch, because it was funny seeing a mime, of all people, struggling to wrench some sound out of his zippered mouth, wide-eyed and terrified as if the whole mime thing were somehow involuntary, like lockjaw or some back-alley verbal liposuction gone terribly, terribly wrong, and ending up in an accidental verbal amputation.      The scene was just really very funny, Jacques bunching the skin of his face into triangles and oblongs, his fingers circling fleshy spirograph-shapes around his staring eyes. Jacques was clearly an expert mime. People could see--they could really feel--his mounting frustration at being unable to open his mouth. It was exactly as if his mouth actually were zipped closed and padlocked shut.      Jacques looked around for Mister E.S. Trainjer, but the man was nowhere to be seen. Jacques looked this-away high, and that-away low, and every-which-away between things, but nobody caped and brimmed and grinning was anywhere to be seen.      The people watching his show smiled, looking where Jacques looked, sweeping their collective gazes around like silent-movie doubletakes, and they also failed to see what he failed to see. They waited for Jacques' next bit, utterly absorbed in his situation, exactly as if they were in front of their TV's and there were no commercials. Imagine that: no commercials. They were that happy.      Then Jacques noticed. He was...performing. He wasn't swearing or cursing or reviling or otherwise profaning the air with his voice. He was simply performing. He was silent. He was...cured.      And then he saw the rats.      Dozens of rats, hundreds, a scrum of rats, an unrolling shag carpet of rats, and all of them Indonesian wharf rats, the smallest the size of a furry, fanged, foaming-at-the-mouth football, and all of them scuttling and scurrying on penknife-sized nails that actually scratched the sidewalk's concrete, and all of them sprinting directly at Jacques, and all of them smiling wide, razor-wire smiles.      Jacques saw the rats before anyone else did because no one else saw them at all. They did not actually exist. They were delusional rats; they were bizarro rats; they were from an alternate rat-ruled universe; drawn forth from the dark, dripping basement of the collective silent unconscious of rat-phobia, swarming in from beyond the flickering edge of the first prehistoric, anti-rat firelight; they were the essence of man's fear of rats; they were the Platonic perfection of the Rat, the ideal form on which all merely earth-bound rats were based; they were mime-rats, and they existed only for Jacques, so that he could show other people, through mime, what it was like to experience rat-attack, to be rat-prey, to be a rat-toy, to be rat-food. They were Jacques' rats, all his and his alone, yessirree.      Jacques performed Head Being Gnawed By Rats for his sidewalk audience, and his performance was brilliant. He was able to convey exactly his sense of impending envelopment by rats. He established a baseline of horror as he fell under the weight of charging rats, and then he increased his terror as they climbed up his legs, his genitals, onto his face, inside his mouth, under his eyelids, biting, eating, ripping; he threw up his hands in disgust and agony; he compounded the hideous unstoppability of the rat invasion with the desperation of his scuttling retreat along the sidewalk, crabwalking away from the rising tide of invisible rats, until he finally collapsed under the rodents' weight, succumbing to teeth, thousands of teeth.      Now, here is just one detail to demonstrate how accomplished a mime Jacques had become. The rats were rabid. Jacques coronated his performance with despairing flicks of his white-gloved fingers, trying to rid himself of the bone-white flecks of rabid rat-spittle that speckled his face. His fingers were as expressive as sign language, shrieking ‘Rabid Rats! Rabid Rats!' to his audience, until eventually he convulsed in a muscle-shivering fit in the gutter, and bubbling saliva began to foam and fizz between the painted-on teeth of his zippered-shut lips.      Everybody understood. Rats. Rabid rats. Eaten alive. Infectious disease. Seizures. Agony. Death.      Magnificent.      The crowd cheered.      But Jacques did not stop there. The rats left, but next Jacques performed Testicles Being Jabbed With Cattle Prods By Big-Eyed Aliens.      It was an electric performance!      He performed Leper French-Kissing A Reluctant Mime. He did Walking Against The Spray Of Hydrofluoric Acid From A Police Water-Cannon. He did Rock Star Choking To Death On His Own Vomit After Doing Goofballs With Coked-Up Groupie Girlfriend. What mime had ever done these slices of life before? Not Marcel Marceau, that's for sure.      The crowd grew. The cheers grew. The love grew. "Oh, my," they all said, "Isn't this fellow a superb, spectacular, superfantabulastic mime? And why haven't I ever seen him on Regis and Kathie Lee or Oprah? How am I supposed to know what I'm supposed to like unless Regis or Kathie Lee or Oprah tells me first?" But they did like Jacques, despite his lack of marketing, talkshow appearances, laugh-tracks and celebrity endorsements.      Jacques was just recovering from his performance of Being Crushed By An Elephant, in which the imprint of the elephant's foot could actually be seen sinking into his torso, squeezing his organs out of place like balloon animals, slowly bending his ribs until the bones snapped, the jagged breaks ripping through his skin, blood spurting everywhere, and my, what couldn't these hi-tech, special-effects-savvy, Industrial-Light-and-Magic era mimes do these days?      Jacques had become a real mime.      He had gone beyond Peter the Little Tramp. He had gone further than Turninkov. He had gone where Srechangalar had been afraid to go. He was the Howard Carter of mimes; he had broken through the innermost wall into the dark, dry, sealed-shut-for-millennia vault of genius; into the internal world that was more vibrant, more real, more of a world than the merely existing world. He had been graced by every mythological muse and giver of genius from Ahura Mazda to Zeus. He was more than human. He was a demigod, bringing back silent fire to those who lived in darkness and cold. He was a helluva mime.      He never saw the kangaroo coming.      This kangaroo was no ordinary kangaroo, but a huge, eight-foot-tall, nose-pierced, tattooed, black-leather-jacketed, purple mohawked, body-building, sex-addict, biker kangaroo who looked a lot like that leather guy in the Village People, if that guy had been a kangaroo.      Jacques lay on the sidewalk, hyperventilating as his testicle burns healed and his elephant-crushed bones knit together, and he didn't see the kangaroo coming until the kangaroo was right there, hey-ho! Look at that! An eight-foot-tall kangaroo right here on Diversey. An eight-foot-tall kangaroo with...love in his eyes.      Well, perhaps not love exactly. Not a gentle, nuzzling, gawky, soft-focus, shy, I'll-show-you-mine-if, homosexual awakening. No, no, no. This was strictly a sticky-floored, trench-coated, creaky, holes-in-the-wall, backroom peepshow with ABSOLUTELY NO MORE THAN ONE PERSON ALLOWED PER BOOTH AT A TIME THIS MEANS YOU THANK YOU VERY MUCH!, wham-bam-thank-you-man, Holy-Mother-of-God-forgive-me-I-swear I'll-never-do-this-again, buttfuckery in the dark. And without even a clammy handjob as a thank you. And with Topsy the kangaroo in the driver's seat to boot.      Jacques wanted to remain celibate outside his own species, but what happened was, Jacques performed Kangaroo Having Rough Anal Sex With Unwilling Mime.      Now, most of the people in the audience didn't realize that a kangaroo's wanger is big, really big, essentially a second, full-frontally nude tail, but they realized it when they saw Jacques' face after he realized it. Oh, the crowd was looking forward to this...this outback assramming, this kangaroo boofoo. They rubbed their hands together and grinned their expectant grins, all spit-takes and wet pants eager to happen, because what mime had ever done interspecies buttfucking before? Not Shields and Yarnell, that's for sure.      He conveyed his impending impalement with just his eyes, and then he was suddenly on his feet--this was Topsy picking him up--and then he was suddenly floating, flying, levitating in mid-air--this was Topsy hoisting him up to fit him onto Little Topsy--and then he bounced and jounced a yard above the sidewalk, arms and legs sprawling and spraddling and spreadillating all crosswised and ragdolled, speared and suspended split-crotched on Topsy's didgereedoo as the fornicating pouchie began to rhythmically apply the rolling thunder to Jacques' down under.      The kangaroo's prick was ribbed, like the threads of a bolt--a great, big, slightly-curving-from-its-own-weight, battleship bolt--and the ‘roo picked Jacques up and screwed his bolt into Jacques' hole--you know what I'm talking about--and he backed it out; and he twisted it in, and he backed it out; and he swiveled it in, and he backed it out; and he ground it in--but, wait, imagine this part being described by George C. Scott: he ground it in--and imagine George C. Scott describing this part with the visual aid of a rotating, upthrusting fist: he ground it in, because that was the kind of rough, gravelly, joyous, manly, lip-smacking, crushed-glass penetration that it was.      Oh, Jacques was a superb mime. It was the little things that made him great. Just that subtle way that his eyes rolled back into his head with each thrust, which made it clear that there was no condom involved, merely flesh on unsafe flesh. Just that particular grimace which made it clear that this was raging, unnatural, marsupial buggery, that this was a kangaroo penis inside him, and not a rhinoceros penis or a Kodiak bear penis. Somehow he made his head whiplash back with every push, so that every member of the audience could feel, really feel, Jacques' prostate swabbing against the inside of his skull. Jacques made people really live the nonconsensual nature of the bassackwards bestiality, even those people who had never fantasized, not even once, about being sodomized by a kangaroo. Even those people. Jacques' bloodshot eyes goggled out like little beating hearts with every stroke, and the words that he might have said, were he not such a stupendous mime, were so clear that they were almost printed on his eyes, like screens.      "Cock in my ass!" shrieked his eyes. "Cock in my ass! Really, really BIG cock in my ass!"      What mime had ever done that before? Not Red Skelton, that's for sure.      Jacques sold the scene entirely with his brilliantly realized reactions, every facet of the illusory, anally invading beast being made clear to everyone in the crowd, every slop of blood pulsing from his mouth and nose and ears and rear drippingly real, even though, of course, there couldn't possibly be any blood, because there wasn't any kangaroo. It was all an act. But everyone buckled up for the rock-hard, hard-rock rhythm of kangaroo boogie-woogie anyway.      Oh, and what a ride it was! A Theater-of-Cruelty, Quentin Tarantino, Faces-of-Death ride, wringing every nuance and shading and variegation of meaning that could possibly be wrung from being buggered by a kangaroo, the whole act worthy of the highest award in mimedom, the Mutey.      The kangaroo shoved Jacques up against the window of The Chocolate Highway Candy Shop--and don't think that everyone didn't realize how funny that name was for a shop to have under those circumstances, because they did--and began squeegeeing him up and down the plate-glass, squeaking him up the glass, squonking him down the glass, Erreee, Erraaaw, Erreee, Erraaaw, scrubbing a series of W-shaped streaks of gray facepaint across the glass as the kangaroo finally, finally--listen to it!--pushed, squirted, crammed, crammed, Erreee, squirted, pushed, Erreeeee, squirted, squirted, spurted, burst, erupted, gushed, crammed, crammed, mashed, crammed, gushed, gushed--checked his watch--slammed, Erreeeee, Erreeeee, spurted, throbbed, quivered, gushed, lunged, chummed, chuffed, thrummed, huffed, upped, upped, re-upped, shot, strained, stretched, poised, crescendoed, dribbled, dwindled, diminished, trickled, faded, exhausted, paled, shriveled, withered, sighed, Erraaaaaw, fumbled, withdrew, exited, disappeared--and ah! finally, finally came.      The crowd cheered. This would be Jacques' trademark, his signature bit, the one thing that everybody would always want to see each and every time he did anything anywhere.      Jacques...leaked, slumped on the sidewalk against the glass, a Rosetta Stone of body language, ragged and spent, weak as a wad of sodden tissues, used, abused, crusty, and with his inside diameter somehow having impossibly exceeded his outside diameter.      Mister E.S. Trainjer, smiling, leaned over Jacques.      "Mmmm," murmured Jacques.      Mister E.S. Trainjer kissed the tips of his fingers away from his lips. "Bravo," he said through a proliferation of smiles.      Jacques' kangaroo-wounds crawled closed in front of his eyes. His bleeding stopped. He healed.      "Oh, did I mention that you can't die?" said Mister E.S. Trainjer. "Did I mention that? Did I mention that you're never going to die? I fixed it for you. Like I always say: once a mime, always a mime. Always, always, always."      Mister E.S. Trainjer grinned one last grin and moonwalked down the sidewalk, making not the slightest sound, and he backed through a door that opened in the space-time continuum, waving as he went, and then both he and door disappeared from reality.      "Mmmm," said Jacques as he glanced up into the sky. He saw the next performance he would be expected to mime descending through the clouds to meet him.      "Mmmm, mmmm," he said, which meant, roughly translated, "I didn't know that flying hippos even knew how to use chainsaws."      He felt trapped behind the invisible walls of his destiny; he could find no edges, no way around the walls, but he ran anyway. He ran, and he ran, and he ran against the headwind of his fate, but, of course, he got absolutely nowhere.      And he alone heard the chainsaws revving. # # # Back to Who IS Martin Mundt???. Back to Martin Mundt's Transcendental Experiences Check out Martin Mundt's Other Works. Back to Martystories.