Prick & Chuck travel to Miami on their next step in flooding the Orange concealer scandal. What will they find out, how are they coping with the all the substances they have been taking and how does an 80’s Brit TV star help??
Confused? You won’t be after the episode of A Prick in America.
Transcript
The arrival in Miami was, to put it mildly, a sensory assault. The air hung thick and humid, smelling of salt, exhaust fumes, and a faint, cloying sweetness that I suspected was the city’s collective desperation. That or dubious amounts of hemorrhoid cream.
Our hotel, a monument to questionable taste, shimmered with a gaudy, pastel-coloured optimism that felt utterly at odds with the grim realities we carried. Chuck, after a month of substance abuse, bless his cotton socks and an increasingly fragile psyche, had immediately succumbed. The moment we stepped into our room, a vast, air-conditioned cavern of synthetic luxury, he’d bolted for the bathroom.
“This fucking country!” he’d shrieked, his voice echoing off the tiled walls. “It’s here! It’s in the wallpaper! It’s in the very fibres of this goddamn carpet! This place no longer has a story! It has thousands of fractured little histories, mostly made of lego, pizza and Steve Bannon’s scabs. The Empire has crumbled. We’ve swallowed the myth of “medieval”- without the illuminated literature. Without Merlin. The sword has ran back to the stone and buried itself to the hilt and it’ll refuse to come out for ANY human hand. The next king is he who finds a Sonic the Hedgehog in his nuggets! It’s the ultimate Happy Meal, Prick, and it’s over my head!”
He then proceeded to strip off his clothes and climb into the bath, pulling the shower curtain around him like a flimsy, plastic shroud against his perceived encroaching madness. He refused to emerge, muttering about the invisible tongues of eternal fires licking across America and the insidious hum of Trump’s fascism. “Get me room service, Knobinson. Everything with fucking mayo. If I die, I die eating pastrami and fried fucking onions!”
I sighed, poured myself a generous measure of gin, and dialled Clementine. The phone rang for what felt like an eternity, punctuated only by Chuck’s muffled whimpers from the bath.
“Clementine, my dear,” I began, once her gravelly purr answered. “We have a slight… situation. Chuck has acquired ‘the fear.’ He’s currently attempting to achieve spiritual enlightenment in the hotel bathtub.”
A hearty chuckle rumbled down the line. “Oh, that happens to the best of them, darling. Reggie’s had a few bouts himself, usually after a particularly strong batch of his homemade herbal and elderflower wine. We’re currently somewhere in Texas, making rather good time. The backpacking chap is proving to be an absolute wizard with maps, though his insistence on navigating by the phases of the moon is a tad unconventional.”
“Right,” I said, trying to steer her back to the immediate crisis. “Any suggestions for extracting a psychedelic congressman from a porcelain tub?”
“Indeed, darling! I’ve just emailed you the plan for later. It’s rather ingenious, if I do say so myself. But as for Chuck- You need to call Ward. Ward Allen. Ex- Brit TV star. He’s a mutual friend, lives in Miami… made a fortune selling the TV rights to his failed british- TV show to Alaska. A ventriloquist, and an absolute genius at talking people down from the precipice. He’s got a rather charming puppet, Roger the Dog. Roger has a way of gaining trust, you see, and then Ward, through Roger, bombards them with questions that ground them in the present. Works a treat. He made a fortune in calming mass fear in California in the early 70s… ”
I checked my phone. An email from Clementine, subject: “Operation Orange Fizzog.” I opened it, and a slow, delighted grin spread across my face. Clementine, bless her utterly unhinged brilliance, had truly outdone herself. This plan… this was art.But back to Chuck. I dialled Ward. He answered with a cheerful, slightly tinny and rather feeble voice, “Roger the Dog’s” ‘rrr rrr rrr’ was audible in the background. I explained the predicament.
“Ah, the fear,” Ward mused, “Roger’s” voice adding a sympathetic whine. “A classic. Congressman Finnegan, you say? Tricky. They get rather… abstract when they’re in that state. They hate fluidity. You know, no one in power in America had the fear until Rosa Parks pointed out the huge elephant in the room… and then they all watched their expected futures floating down the river to / A long time coming / But I know, a change gonna come / Oh, yes it will.” Roger, what do you think?”
“Woof! Woof! He needs grounding, Ward! Something familiar! Something… British!” “Roger” barked.
“Precisely, Roger! My thoughts exactly. Look, Prick, getting through to him directly might be tough. But I’ve found that for particularly stubborn cases, a bit of nostalgic, utterly mundane brit television can work wonders. I suggest you stream consecutive episodes of Chucklevision, The Krankies Klub and Les Dawson’s Blankety Blank. The sheer, unadulterated banality, the comforting predictability… it’s like a mental reset button. Tell him Roger recommends it. That’ll soon get the Congressman’s tail wagging, eh Roger?!”
“Woof, woof, Ward…”
I hung up as this madness was now giving ME the fear…
I stared at the phone, then at the bathroom door. Chucklevision. Wee Jimmy Krankie. Les Dawson’s Blankety Blank. Fandaby bloody dozy. The absurdity was profound, but the familiarity of those old style, unreconstructed patriarchal comedians just might work.
While Chuck was being subjected to the therapeutic banality of British light entertainment, I had my own mission. Clementine’s plan, you see, involved more than just extracting Chuck from a bath. It involved a rather audacious reconnaissance. Armed with a pair of binoculars and a flask of something bracing, I hailed a taxi.
As the cab wound its way through the working-class suburbs of Miami, followed by the familiar flapping of a flock of pink bats, a landscape of faded bungalows and corner stores bordered by billboards for everything you didn’t need plus stuff that would definitely kill you, on our way to the private airport, the true horror of Trump’s America presented itself again, stark, unvarnished and fracturing before my eyes.
At the small airport, just as I was vacating the cab, a sudden flurry of activity. Black vans, unmarked, but with the unmistakable air of official menace, screeched to a halt near a nondescript warehouse. Uniformed agents, looking like particularly grim automatons, swarmed out. An ICE raid. My blood ran cold. A young family, a mother, a father, and two small children, were being dragged from a nearby vehicle. The parents screamed, their pleas guttural, desperate, “Don’t take our children! Please! Not our children!” A few brave souls, passersby, tried to intervene, shouting, pleading, but they were quickly pushed back, their protests swallowed by the cold efficiency of the agents. The children, bewildered and terrified, were roughly pushed into a separate van from their parents, their small faces pressed against the glass as they were driven away.
And the rest? They walked by. They drove past. Heads down, eyes averted, as if the screaming, the terror, the tearing apart of a family, was merely background noise to their morning commute. A man talking loudly on his phone, almost bumped into me. “Can’t you see what’s happening?” I snarled, my voice raw with a sudden, unexpected fury. He merely shrugged, a dismissive flick of his hand, and pushed past, his eyes staring, utterly blankly at his Samsung Apple machine. The sheer, horrifyingly hypnotised indifference. It was then, watching the vans disappear into the Miami traffic, the screams fading to a chilling echo, that the truth hit me with the force of a physical blow. It wasn’t just the Trumps, the Musks, or the faceless corporations. It was the silence. The vast, complicit, indifferent, electronically narcotised silence of the many that allowed fascism to grow, to fester, to consume the very soul of the land of the free. This chilling apathy, this casual turning away, solidified my resolve. This mission, this absurd, drug-fueled Gonzo crusade, was no longer just about exposing truth; it was about shattering that silence. I watched the armoured vehicles drive off. Lives wrecked. The concept of America smashed again. The birth of Phillip K. Dick’s Nazi America… The Man in the High Castle already hiding books from this current reality. The Gipper smirkingly freeing us all from progress. Freeing us from ourselves. Handing us over to madmen with a fetish for slaves, automatons and dead planets.
I finally reached the private airport on the outskirts of Miami. The target: the private jets, the discreet hangars, the very arteries through which the orange-hued truth, Bronx Colors Boosting Hydrating Concealer in the shade Orange BHC06, was being ferried across continents.
I settled into a patch of overgrown scrub, pulling out a pair of rather exquisite opera glasses I’d, shall we say, liberated from the Whitehall Theatre during a particularly tired performance of Cats on Skates or Starlight Express Spotting or some such dreadfully dull nonsense. Through the lenses, the small airstrip came into sharp, almost terrifying, focus. And then, there it was: a top-range private jet, sleek, predatory… descending with a whisper of power. On its gleaming fuselage, unmistakable even from this distance, was the subtle, yet utterly damning, logo of Bronx Colors. My heart gave a peculiar lurch, which I took as it deciding at the very last minute it wanted to live.
Immediately, two government-issue black cars, looking like particularly aggressive Doc Martens on wheels, pulled up to the plane as its doors hissed open. A figure emerged, impossibly glamorous at this ungodly hour, all sharp angles and expensive fabric. She carried a small, discreet case. With a practiced flourish, she handed two small, identical pots to two stone-faced security officers, who then peeled off in opposite directions, their vehicles disappearing into the pre-dawn gloom.
This was it. The very arteries of the orange countenance. With a surge of adrenaline, I wriggled under the chain-link fence, ignoring the faint tearing sound of my hand me down Tom Fords. The plane was still refuelling, its engines a low, throbbing hum. I approached the glamorous woman, who was now supervising the ground crew with an air of detached authority.
“My dear,” I began, my voice, despite the gin, the ket and the recent horrors, managing a surprising degree of charm. “Forgive the intrusion, but you have the most exquisite taste in… logistics. And, if I’m not mistaken, a certain familial resemblance to my second wife, the late, lamented cosmetics heiress, Lady Penelope Featherstonehaugh-Smythe?”
Her eyes, initially guarded, widened slightly. “Good heavens,” she murmured, a faint, almost imperceptible flicker of recognition. “You’re… Prick, aren’t you? Penelope’s rather notorious ex-husband. What on earth are you doing lurking by a private jet at this hour?”
“Research, my dear,” I replied, with a theatrical wave of my hand. “Always research. And it seems I’ve stumbled upon rather a fascinating detail. These… special batches of Orange BHC06. Flown in every two days, I gather?”
She sighed, a weary, almost resigned sound. “I’ve read your stuff. You always have a knack for sniffing out inconvenient truths, Richard. Yes. One pot goes to the White House. The other… to Mar-a-Lago. Every forty-eight hours. The demand, you see, is… constant. He smears it on more than his visage, you know…”
I nodded as some sick filled my cheeks. The entire edifice of power, sustained by a twice-weekly delivery of orange concealer.
I swallowed.
“Fascinating,” I mused, pulling out my phone. “Might I trouble you for your number? One never knows when one might require a rather swift, discreet lift back to Blighty in the coming days. For… journalistic purposes, naturally.” She gave it to me, a faint, knowing smile playing on her lips.
Back in the dubious comfort of the hotel room, with Chuck still lost in Chucklevision, I fired off an email to Clementine, detailing the bi-daily flights, the dual destinations. Her reply was almost instantaneous, a single, triumphant line: “Darling Prick, I’m positive. The plan will work. The orange truth shall set us free.” The Presidency, it seemed, was about to get a very specific makeover.
Scottish left, pro-Indy, pro-LGBTIQA
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