Coffee Nips Anonymous

BOOK ONE - Addiction

"Newton?" I asked my roommate in a puzzled voice. "Did you take a bath this morning?"

"Why Animal," answered the bespectacled wolverine, with his usual smugness, "is one missing?"

"As a matter of fact yes!"

Approaching the door, he peered into the bathroom to confirm my statement. Not only was the bathtub missing but also the sink, toilet and most of the far wall.

"Now don't look at me!" said Newton.

I looked at him anyway.

I was about to ask a rhetorical and slightly silly question such as, 'Where do you suppose our bathroom went off to?' but thought better of it. Then I asked, "Where do you suppose our bathroom went off to?"

He shrugged, as I figured he might. I popped a coffee nip (a small piece of coffee flavoured candy... only five cents, but highly addictive) and I felt somewhat better. I'm sure anyone reading this can imagine that finding one's bathroom missing might be quite disconcerting. Especially so if s/he were in my then-current state: dressed only in a blue terry-cloth bathrobe, carrying a large bath-towel and beginning the Dance Of He Who Has Lain In Bed For What Seemed Like An Hour Trying To Go Back To Sleep But Deciding His Bladder Wouldn't Let Him.

Newton began sniffing about in the rubble that was once our bathroom wall, apparently looking for clues as to the bath's whereabouts. "Ah!" he said, "Our bath is not missing after all!" He stood holding up a shard of porcelain that very well could have been part of a bathtub. "Simply hidden by the oof!"

I'm sure Newton didn't mean to say 'oof', but the fact that he did, I must confess, was my fault. You see, that was when my flying tackle knocked the wind out of his lungs; the momentum carried us through the hole in the wall, starting us plummeting forty feet down towards hard pavement.

Normally I don't go about tackling good friends for no reason, especially when that tackle might cause them to fall to their deaths, but there definitely was quite a good reason for the tackle, and I guess you should know what that reason was. Just as Newton had said 'Ah!', I noticed a large black mass outside. As he said 'our bath is not missing after all!' I noticed this large black mass outside getting larger, since it was moving towards us at an alarming rate. Now rather than yelling a warning and having Newton get miffed with me for interrupting, and having to explain that a large black mass was moving towards him at an alarming rate, and that he should move before ... too late! or trying to catch the thing myself and go *splat*, I did the only sensible thing. I launched myself with all speed towards my companion ("oof!" he said), causing us both to sail out of the hole in the wall and begin plummeting forty feet down towards hard pavement ... as I've mentioned.

Fortunately I had a solid grip on my furry friend, and fortunately I could fly. So to the resounding CRASH!! of the wrecking ball knocking another bloody great hole in our wall, we landed safely on the ground.

"Oh!" exclaimed Newton, adjusting his glasses, "thanks ever so much for saving my life!"

"No problem," I said, nearly choking on the coffee nip. I swallowed hard.

"I believe that brings your arrears down to two."

Before Newton could give me a receipt, a grubby-looking man in a hard-hat walked up to us. The expression on his face suggested that we had upset his work schedule. "What the hell are y'all doin' here?" He gestured at the wrecking ball. The man at the controls looked anxious to get on with his job. "Can't you see there's a wreckin' ball about to knock this place down?"

"Yes I can, but..." I started.

Cutting me off he called, "Go ahead Hoss!" to the man at the controls who let the ball fly and knocked another whopping hole in the side of our home. Not only our home, but also Polar Bears Unlimited headquarters and a favorite nightspot, known as the Canary, where one can enjoy the music of the modern counter-culture. A few years ago I had been able to make a down-payment on the place with some reward money that I'd received for my part in stopping Vital Sassoon from taking over the world and destroying our music scene in the process. I managed to pay off the rest of the purchase price by selling some junk that I pulled from my hat - like televisions, VCRs, diamonds cut into shapes of contour maps of various states, peanut-butter-powered cars, gasoline-powered hats and wool-knit sandwiches.

Anyway there were three humongous holes in it now! Um... the Canary; not my hat.

"Hey!" yelled Newton at the foreman, "stop that!"

"Mister," the foreman warned me, "Yew'd better call off yer dawg, we've got a job to do!"

"Dog indeed!" muttered Newton, flexing his claws.

I got between them before things could get ugly. "What you don't understand sir, is that your job is to knock down our bloody house and generally fuck up our day!"

The foreman blinked at me.

"Did it not occur to you," asked Newton from behind me, "to knock and see if anyone was in residence?"

"Hell, ain't s'posetabe anyone here!" He lifted his hard-hat and scratched his balding scalp. "Didn't y'all hear the first time the wreckin' ball hit the buildin'?"

I evaded that question. It's a little embarrassing to admit to how heavily I sleep sometimes. And knowing Newton he was probably reading and was so absorbed in his book that he simply didn't notice the first Earth-shaking smash.

"That's not the fucking point," I said. "The point is that you can't just knock over someone's home at this godforsaken hour!"

The foreman looked at his watch. "It's a quarter after ten and we're behind schedule." He signaled Hoss again and before I could protest, another gigantic hole was placed in the side of our home.

"Look you!" bellowed Newton. "If you do not cease and desist forthwith, there will be one less very ignorant redneck about town, if you catch my meaning!"

The foreman looked indignant. "Don't threaten me, Mister! I've got me some government orders to demolish this place and I aims to git this job done!"

He turned once again to signal Hoss and I lost my temper. Before he could give the fatal sign, I grabbed his wrist and shouted over to the Man Called Hoss, "Get out of that thing! Right now!!!!!!"

What happened next surprised the lot of us. The Man Called Hoss got out of the wrecking machine. Mind you, not on his own power. He flew out of the control seat. Not like I fly, but more like he'd been carried out, and dropped to the ground. There was, however, no one there to have carried him.

Then the wrecking ball snapped right off its chains and cables (seemingly of its own accord), hurtled itself through the air, landed with a mighty crash and turned the wrecking machine into so many potential Spam cans (if, indeed, the Hormel™ company used recycled metal for its canning operation).

Turning pale, Hoss and the Foreman looked at me as if I were Satan himself (which is quite ridiculous; Satan is much taller). A few others in the wrecking crew, who had until this point been eating doughnuts and sipping Java, also gave me the You Must Be Satan look and lost most of the color in their faces and I daresay, the liquid in their bladders. After a short silence and a lot of blinking on everyone's part, the wrecking crew screamed and bolted, leaving the damaged wrecking machine and about a dozen doughnuts behind. The coffee, however, was spilled. All the better for me; I hate coffee. Some think it odd that I hate coffee, yet I am addicted to coffee nips. To them I say, "Go figure," and I leave it at that.

Newton and I started a breakfast of raspberry-filled doughnuts.

"What did you do?" asked Newton between bites.

"Nothing," I shrugged, "I simply yelled at Hoss to get out and he did. The rest ... I dunno."

"Wasn't it the result of a power granted by your hat?"

As I mentioned earlier, I have a hat. It's a black top hat about eight inches tall with a blue bandanna hatband and a red feather stuck in it. But it's no ordinary top hat. It acts as a gateway to an extradimensional space, allowing me to store several hundred of my closest friends in it. I can also produce almost anything I need from it - like televisions, VCRs, diamonds cut into shapes of contour maps of various states, peanut-butter-powered cars, gasoline-powered hats and wool-knit sandwiches. Plus every time I place this particular top hat on my head, it does something strange. Once it made me One With The Cosmos for the better part of four years; another time it hurtled me forward in time approximately fifteen years (safely past the Disco era, thank you for asking) and shortly thereafter granted me the ability to fly (it is worth mentioning that when the hat grants me a power, it is usually temporary, but in this case it was permanent). Normally Newton's suggestion might have been accurate but my hat hung upon a hat-rack in a corner of my bedroom. And I hadn't worn it since the night before when it doubled the size of the Universe (and everything in it). "Nope," I answered pointing to my shaggy but otherwise bare head, "hat's inside."

"Someone's here!" warned Newton, in a low whisper.

"Where?"

"I'm not sure," he said sniffing the air. "He should be close by, but... Hey! Is that ...?" he trailed off as both of us witnessed an unusual phenomenon. Well... if you consider floating doughnuts unusual, that is.

"I hope you don't mind," said a disembodied voice from behind the levitating pastry, "I just got into town and I haven't had breakfast," and then bits of the doughnut started vanishing before our eyes.

"Help yourself," I said to the doughnut, "I assume you're the one who tossed Hoss on his ass and disabled the wrecking machine?"

"Yesh," slurred the voice through a mouthful of custard-filled cake. "Damn, no coffee. Oh well." The invisible person poured himself a cup of orange juice from a thermos that I hadn't noticed before, and then poured out two more cups for Newton and me.

"Excellent! Thanks, man! Sorry about the coffee. Hi, I'm Animal." I held out my hand and an invisible one shook it, "And you are...?"

He introduced himself as "Evan E. Evans, but my friends call me Talisman or Camouflage or Reverend John Spaulding or John C. Penguin or Hovis. You might remember me as Apricot."

I paused. I blinked a couple of times. Trying to place him, I studied his facial features. Unable to see them, I gave up that useless endeavor. "Apricot Jones!?" I said after a bit.

"I was wondering when you'd recognize me, ya big galoot!"

"Holy shit!" I exclaimed, while wrapping my arms around the invisible dude for a crushing but friendly bear hug. "How the fuck are you, man!?!" Apricot Jones, as he was wont to be called, was one of the first people that befriended me after my hat took me away from Woodstock and hurtled me forward into the 1980's. The three of us (Apricot, Newton and I) were practically inseparable for several months, but unfortunately Apricot joined the Army as a way of showing up his mother, who wanted him to join the Army. Or something like that... I never quite understood it. Also unfortunately, we didn't keep in touch as well as we should have and I hadn't seen him since his very brief leave after boot camp. "Damn it's good to see you! Er... so to speak."

"You too my friend!"

We talked about old times (people we knew -- road trips to Memphis -- our adventures on Bitch River -- etc.), and caught up on all that had happened during his years of military service (for instance, how he gained his strange new powers and how when he was invisible he was bulletproof, knife-proof, baseball-bat-proof, mosquito-proof, and possessed the strength of ten men).

"So yer done with Uncle Sam, eh? Good on you. What are you doing now?" I asked.

"Actually, nothing yet. I did notice that there was a job opening at Polar Bears Unlimited," he said as a copy of that very same magazine appeared as if being pulled out of an invisible pocket. "Is the job still open?"

When we established that the job in question was the cartoonist/writer job, and not the marshmallow-stacker job, I told him that it was indeed still open, and that I would like to see his work, if not him, as soon as possible. He said he had a portfolio with him and wouldn't mind stepping inside to show me. I agreed that we should go in (mainly because the orange juice reminded me not only that I really had to drain the proverbial lizard but also had to get on the BatPhone™ and find out who would be responsible for repairing my wall). We proceeded to the door.

We got to the main entrance of the Canary to find that it was locked. Of course neither Newton nor I had our keys. This was not a problem really, since I could fly and there was a whopping great gap in the bathroom wall. So I hopped up, flew through the opening and down the stairs. I considered pausing at the downstairs restroom to take care of some urgent business but decided that it wouldn't take very long to open the front entrance, and since even at this hour, the summer sun was beginning to make things a might uncomfortable outside, it wouldn't be nice to leave my friends waiting. So I held it in long enough to open the door.

As I pushed open the portal and opened my mouth to say something to the effect of 'C'mon in,' I heard the most teeth-rattling noise I had ever heard to that day. As I stood there dumbly, the entire building crashed down around me. When the dust cleared I held in my hand the only recognizable part of my home; the doorknob.

"Well this is a fine How Do You Do!" exclaimed Newton.

"Aw BatPoop™!" I yelled. Somehow this didn't seem quite as funny as it did when a similar thing happened to Arthur Dent. Well at least I did have a towel.

"Maybe I've come at a bad time," said Camouflage.

"Couldn't be worse, I should hope," answered Newton.

"But it's not your fault," I said. Look if you've got some paper and a pen, I'll give you Cat's address. You met him before joining the Army. He's my partner at PBU, so you can show him your work. If it's as good as the stuff you sent us last year, you're in."

He handed me the pen and paper and after a brief pause said, "Isn't it a moot point now, considering recent events?"

"No," I sighed, "we'll just have to go to an outside source for printing, like we did before I acquired this ex-building. There might be a delay in getting off the next issue though, since all of our recent material is under that mess! FUCKDAMNBUGGERHELLSONOFABITCHSHIT! I need a coffee nip."

We said our good-byes to Talisman as he departed to do some apartment hunting, and go see Cat. He assured us that we would see him again. "Will we now?" asked Newton.

"Oh yes," he answered, "I'm not always invisible. It comes and goes."

"Ah," we said.

So Newton and I sat amid the debris that used to be our home, wondering what our next course of action should be.

"Well," said Newton, "I've no problem living in the park and the neighboring woods, being a beast and all, but..."

I took up where Newton left off, "But I've never been any good at roughing it. Don't worry Newton, you do what you need to. I'll get by. I can stay with one of my sisters, I suppose."

"Drop by the Rice Krispie Treat Emporium later and let me know how things are going."

"Sure thing."

Newton went off to stake a claim in the park, and I flew off in search of a public restroom.

****

As I flew through the clouds, my head was swimming. Three rather important things had to be attended to, and they were:

1.My wrecked home.

2.My coffee nip craving.

3.My bladder.

I honestly could not decide which to deal with first. At length, my bladder made the decision for me. It threatened to let go immediately, and I had to convince it to wait two more minutes so I could get to a restroom. I commenced a power dive (which really didn't help matters), touched down in front of a Jim Dandy Market and made a beeline for the back area, where the restroom sign was posted.

"OUT OF ORDER."

"What?" I asked.

"OUT OF ORDER," said the sign on the Men's room door.

"Go anyway!" said my bladder.

"OUT OF ORDER!" said the sign a little more forcefully.

"Women's room," said my bladder, "no one will know."

"But it's a WOMEN'S room," said a rather unreasonable part of my subconscious.

"Okay," said my bladder, "we'll just go out here in front of the Chee-tos™!"

"Women's room!" I said firmly, and barged in.

My business being completed, I made my egress from the convenience store. One of the employees behind the counter called out for me to "Have a Jim Dandy Day!" but I ignored her. I wasn't being rude ... not intentionally anyway. I was distracted by the goings-on outside.

The blue flashing lights of a Metro squad car greeted me, and a frumpy-looking woman, with the name 'Bertha' on her nameplate, was talking to a steely-looking officer.

"... in the wimmin's room, and he was wearin' jest a bathrobe, carryin' a towel and a doorknob and mumblin' to hissef. I think he's plum crazy!"

Bertha glanced up at me and let out a squeal. "That's him, Officer!"

"'Mornin', Officer," I said.

"Could I see some ID, sir?" asked Officer Danny Steele, as the name on his tag read.

"No." Well, I didn't have any on me!

"What?" he said after a very long blink. Apparently no one had ever said this to him before, and he didn't know quite how to handle it.

"NOOOOOO!" I said a bit louder and more drawn out and shook my head slowly, as one might do to someone who spoke no English. I tend to be a smart-ass at the worst times.

Officer Steele's face went as cold as Neapolitan ice cream, "You'll have to come with me, sir," he said through clenched teeth.

"On what charge?" I asked simply.

This must also have been something that no one had ever said to him, for again he was blinking at me. "What?" he said, after partly re-gaining his composure.

"On what charge?" I asked again, with a thick hokey French accent.

"Um ... uh ..." began the frustrated constable.

"Well if you can't think of anything," I said, adopting Newton's haughty tones, "I'm certainly not going to help you. I'll take my leave of you now, sir. Good day. And good day to you, madam."

As I lifted off the ground and began my flight, the officer called after me, "Wait! Wait! Vagrancy! It's VAGRANCY!"

I kept going.

BLAM! BLAM! The report of what was unmistakably two gunshots sounded behind me and I heard something buzz past both ears. "Stop or I'll shoot!" yelled Officer Danny Steele. I got, as they say, the Hell out of there!

After some reflection, I decided I was never going to have another Jim Dandy Day, if I had anything to say about it, ever again.

****

Again I took to the clouds. My troubles were far from solved, and my nerves were frazzled. Having someone shoot at you isn't pleasant under the best of circumstances, and my coffee nip craving was getting unbearable. I had all but forgotten my wrecked home, and probably wouldn't even think about it again before getting a nip fix. But how was I to acquire a coffee nip? True, they're only 5¢ each, but I don't carry change in my bathrobe.

In retrospect, I realize it would have been easy enough to go and visit Squasha Semprini, and bum a nip off of her. She always has a pocket or two full of them. But (for reasons I won't go into right now) things had been a little weird between Squasha and me for the past few months, so I probably wouldn't have gone to her even had it occurred to me.

It also never occurred to me to go to Cat's place, or the Rice Krispie Treat Emporium, or to see Eddie, or Martin, or in fact, any of the Elliston regulars, to borrow a lousy nickel. My brain simply was not working up to par.

I don't know how long I had been flying around, but the sun was just beginning to set when I had it firmly in my mind that I needed to find a nickel before I could get a coffee nip. Landing clumsily on a sidewalk, I leaned heavily on a brick wall. My body trembled, and I felt weak with hunger.