“Still, though. Why—why they call it fruit-the-looms?”
“Beats me, man. I do sure like it, though.”
“I like it too, come to think. Got a ring. Fruit-the-looms, fruit-the-looms. I also like, uh, what’s it? What Mikey G calls it. Calls it, uh…Holymoling! Holymolying? No. Holymoling.”
“Yeah, I think it’s the shorter one, like moling. I think you’re right about that, Doc. Ho lee mow ling.”
“Well but I was—as I was saying, others other places call it other things, but we like to call it popsicling these parts, least I do cause there’s some slam-poetry-type poetry there, see? Cause you can call it what you will, it pops off, you know, all sick. It’s real sick.”
“Ree-ohl sick! Sick poppin.”
“Sick poppin that’s right, it’s the hot new shit, and here’s how you do…Whyn’t you, uh, pass on that little robot, I can show the people.”
The cameraman’s hand appears, passes a cure to Robbie.
Extending his arm toward the camera, holding the cure in a loose fist around the middle, Robbie says, “There. Now this one’s called Scatty.” Scatty reaches toward the camera with both hands, pumping its two longest fingers up and down, while winking and blowing silent kisses. “See that? I trained it to do that. Not the kissing and the winking, least not on purpose, but just the flicking you off like that, and I think it’s great. I really love it. The creative way it adds the gestures together.”
“The creative way it adds those gestures together, Doc, I love that, too,” the cameraman says. “The sensational-emoto singalong technique embedded in its brainial cavern or what-have-you is truly a miracle of engineering that floors me. I sound like a damn ad, now! ‘This message brung to you by Graham&Swords, makers of the Curio. Where’s the beef? Coke is it. We bring good things to life.’ But for realzies, amigo, I love how it’s doing all that stuff all at once, man!”
“Cause you’re thinking, ‘This thing’s flipping me the bird, but there’s no way it’s flipping me the bird,’ right?”
“It’s got no idea what the bird even is or ever was at all.”
“None. Cause with all that kissing and winking? It’s not saying, ‘Fuck you. Kiss this, bitch,’ like if it was just some kid was doing that stuff, but, like, ‘Isn’t this great what I’m doing with my hands? Doesn’t it impress you? Doesn’t it make you want to cuddle me up?’ ”
“Like, ‘Cuddle me up! I really feel like kissing you even though I’m doing this other thing I don’t understand with my fingers here!’ It’s creative as shit, man.”
“Exactly like that. Exactly. But so, as you can see,” says Robbie, addressing the camera directly again, “Scatty’s just a normal cure, about a few months old. Now, we did give it a little bit of that formula this morning for I guess it was called Pucker this stuff, and was supposed to get it to make these like, ‘Oh this taste in my mouth is so sour! So sour!’ kind of faces, and it worked for maybe an hour, but it worn off cause that Pucker was some off-brand local junk this Harvard-type dothead-egghead Munjed kid makes. Anyway. Fuck Pucker.”
“And fuck Munjed, too. Fucken virgin homo beedy-bop-beedy-booper know-it-all weenis. His Pucker sucks shit through a goddamn straw. Slurps up the feke like a milkshake or something. A goddamn milkshake.”
“Like a goddamn milkshake for real, Jeremy-Niles. Main man Jeremy-Niles Nelson, big dog, manning that camera, case I forgot to mention. Now where was I now? Yeah! Popsicling! Yeah! Yes. Yeah. Scatty. Scatty’s just a regular, normal, totally average-type curebotsky as you can see just by looking at it. A few months old, sure, but you could even use a nascent cause even though the older the cuter the better, o’course, you popsicle with a younger one doesn’t know a single trick or fancy whistle, the adorability will still just blow your mind right out your eyes.”
“Give your mind a blowie like, through your eyes.”
“That’s right! Eyes be jizzin!”
“Jizzeyes—maybe that’s even better to call it than Popsicling.”
“Could be, Jeremy-Niles. Could be, could be,” says Robbie, winking. “But as I was saying. What you need the most to popsicle, apart from a cure, is one of these…” Robbie pulls a sharpened pencil from a cargo pocket, holds it up in front of Scatty.
Scatty, ceasing all other gestures, wolf-whistles at the pencil, lightly drags its palm across the tip, looks at its palm, wolf-whistles again, and then shows Robbie the mark on its palm.
“Yeah, Scatty,” coos Robbie, “that’s a nice pencil line you drew on yourself there. Good.”
Scatty flutters its eyelids.
Robbie lowers Scatty, holds it at his side, shakes the pencil at the camera. “So it’s a pencil’s what you need,” he says. “One brand-new pencil. We’re concerned with the eraser part. And this is important: it’s important it’s a brand-new pencil because the eraser is gonna work for you like a kind of measuring stick cause you don’t want to dact the cure before you even did the popsicle, so you want a standard-size, fresh, totally unused eraser on the end of it. So now…See…”
Robbie adjusts his grip on Scatty such that he’s holding Scatty’s tail against its back, and its knees against its stomach. He aims Scatty’s rear at the camera. “Zoom in a little here, Jeremy-Niles. Close-up on Scatty’s exit.”
“Done,” says Jeremy-Niles, having zoomed in.
“As you can see,” Robbie says, “case you’re shy and never looked, what you got here’s a slit in the velvet with a hole in the middle. Now, all we’re working with here’s your basic camcorder you borrow from your dad, so we can’t really like, show you what the inside of that exit hole’s like, not without wasting Scatty at least, but you think about how perfectly round and hard rear ejections are, you know it must be a muscly little hole in there forms them up so solid and tight. A strong little hole that’s gonna fight the eraser is what I’m getting at, and so the key here is two keys. First is, you start putting the pencil in the hole—again, eraser-first—you’re gonna get some resistance from the hole, and you’re gonna get some wiggle from the rest of the cure, so your first impulse might be, like, just jam it! jam it in! Don’t pay mind to that impulse, though, cause you jam hard enough, you’ll run the cure through like a pig on a spit, and then it’s de- to the activation, motherfucker—no fucken popsicle. So you keep a firm grip, remembering not to squeeze, and you add the pressure to the hole slowly and surely.”