Plastic faces rose up from the ground where I had been lying and I took a brief soar over to the mansion where my late friends were skeletizing legislators from the moon. I examined the gravel and noticed that it all appeared to be a rather dull tan color until all of a sudden I lapsed into ColorVision. The rocks were all colors now: pink, blue, yellow, pink, red, orange, yellow, pink, and green. I searched the purple trees for any signs of a puce-winged redbird, but saw only the olive-drab shadows of my lime-green friends. I waved a brown hand into the hazy green air.

"Hey!" I shouted in a kind of a purplish-yellow. My orange friends turned slowly around, letting the mauve football fall on mute grey flowers. I stood under the golden sky, facing my friends, who were wearing dull grey overcoats and smiles that could paint Manhattan with a sultry sweep of their embezzling hands. I waited for mirth to eclipse the pathos of baking. Mines felt out their destinies in silent contemplation of the exploding shards of tangerine metal which I grasped in my expanding Darth hand on a soundstage in Brooklyn where hip-hoppers sold drugs to a little girl who's aunt ran a pet store which sold dogs and cats to the very richest New York artists, one of whom was the lovely Lolita, a friend of Zooploxo's who I had met on a subway in Washington once when I was part of the Donut lobby. Montana fell slowly back to Earth and I tried to imagine a party without stock cars. I was a crate of lobsters in the back of a pickup truck which became a getaway car for an awe-struck teenage liquor thief who had a near-genius I.Q. but bouts of insomnia during which he forgot his wealth and upper-class upbringing and hung out with the boys instead of attending Mr. Basingstoke's history class at the local high school which had been designed by Arthur McBrain, a wealthy architecht whose wife had become one with God at a cookout once and was never the same. Crosses stood silently in the camp, bearing lifeless Boy Scouts. I followed the footprints to the shooting range where I found her, kneeling and sobbing to herself.

"What's the matter?" I asked her, laying my hand on her shoulder and startling her. For a brief discontinuous second I wondered if the target rifle upon whose trigger her right index finger was inexorably trembling was loaded. She lifted Godswept eyes at me and proceeded to explain in gory detail every step of the gruesome crime she had committed. By the time she was done the portable courtroom had been constructed and the jurors were just filing into the cardboard jury box. American flags flapped slowly in the breeze on either side of the judge's carboard podium. The judge, a short cardboard Indian with a paisely robe, banged a cardboard gavel on his desk, silencing the construction workers and a group of children from Rome who were on a time-travelling field trip.

"Order!" the judge shouted, and the carboard court recorder typed it quickly into the cardboard stenograph, which printed it in liquid cardboard on cardboard paper. The judge looked directly at Mrs. McBrain and spoke quietly. "Now can you repeat what you just said to Mr. Smythe here?" he asked. She looked up at me, tears in her eyes, clutching the long, sleek, black gun whose chamber held a primed and ready teflon-coated KTW round whose explosive cap was in the correct position for impact with the cocked, spring-loaded hammer, kneeling quietly in her tattered burlap dress with a damp strand of mellow blond hair flapping across her lips. Her eyes were like black holes, seeming to say "Rescue Me." I coldly ignored her, avoiding the dangerous event horizons just outside her pupils. A cardboard minute passed.

"Speak," ordered the judge with a burst of cardboard typing. A cardboard bird flew overhead. Still looking at me, Mrs. McBrain began to cry the most pitiful cry in the world. It was a pitiful cry, a wailing, moaning, scream of a cry. A sobbing, gluping gasping cry. A cry of sheer delight and joy as she lay, sweating, naked and ecstatic, on my Scottish body. I reached for my kilt and found myself careening down a hallway as a small insect. "Oh boy," I thought to myself and jumped into the mouth of the Amazon river, boa constrictors writhing in anger at my escape. But waiting for me under the muddy yellow water were mechanical pirahnas and a time-space hole so big it would make your head spin. It was the sixties and I was a bullet, being used over and over again to shoot famous people. Over and over again I would explode out of the darkness to make a quick supersonic trip through crowds of astonished people, heading directly for the object of the assasin's desire. Pow! Again and again I tore through flesh, taking the precious lives of politicians, civil rights activists, and protesting students. Then I went to the moon. "So this is Broadway," I thought, humming a guitar solo into the microphone while a concentrated movement of drummers lay down a seething wall of rhythm behind me, locked in isolation booths with headphones the size of detroit blasting their bloodstained ears.

"Baby baby baybee," I wailed. It was a good take. It was pressed and sold inside of thin cardboard sleeves to adolescents who yearned to sweat onstage in front of a bunch of other adolescents, desperately trying to find the right note in a long, screaming electric guitar solo and wondering why, why, why hadn't they just learned drums so that they wouldn't have to work so hard and could make just as much money and be just as famous. Johnny Carson interviewed me in an almost amiable manner before I lunged into the audience, searching for the spy who had come to depose me from the throne of Ethiopia by exposing my almost certain corruption and spreading vicious lies in all the African newspapers. I found him (he was rather obvious, because he was dressed in full tribal attire) and began to strangle him, but I thought better of it and became a trumpet in the band for a while, vibrating painfully every single song known to man in front of tanned California audiences. Trees whiz by the window while I search the radio for something good. Nothing on but music. I begin to wonder about the cloud formations but it's too late because I find myself hanging off the bottom of the train as it approaches a station, where all of a sudden a man hurls himself off the platform, hitting me as the train passes over him.

"You're so defensive! You're always so defensive!" she shouts at me, but I am defenseless and she's brandishing a broadsword and I'm naked from the waist down.

"Hey!" I shout, pointing at the window, "Look over there." It's an old trick, but I'm confident it'll work on her. Unfortunately, what we both see there terrifies us: it is none other than the Sith Lord himself, Darth Vader. He is standing, tall, dark, and handsome, with little bits of dry ice vapor wafting around his boots. He presses the natural logarithm button on his chest calculator and wheezes deeply.

"I'm glad you could both make it," he says, adding insult to injury as I'm struck in the face by a blow from Muhammed Ali. Good gosh, I think, I'm a professional boxer. But by then the sun is down and I've lost my way back to the camp. I stagger back to my car and let the key slide itself into the ignition. Zooploxo is waiting for me.

"Let's get this show on the road," he says.