Tucker C. and Company Need a Fix

Tucker C. needed a fix. He stumbled down the mean streets of Boca Grande, the luxe, exclusive hideaway on the west coast of Florida, the rows of clean, tidy, and ultra-expensive shops downtown offering an overflowing abundance of food and goods for the exclusive set of millionaires who lived there, but nothing in any of the stores gave him what he really needed.

His nerve endings fired with exquisite agonies. His skull was lit up like a Christmas tree in Las Vegas. His stomach felt as if it was turning itself inside out. His hair was soaked from sweat. He leaned against a street light, out of breath. His J. Press neck tie, costing $145, before taxes, hung way too low against his shirt and his Mercer & Sons custom-made, button-down shirt was torn right open across the heart. How did the shirt get ripped? And he’d lost his suit jacket. When did that happen? He couldn’t remember.

Holding the light pole, he sank down to the surface of the sidewalk, the early morning shoppers staring at him as if he were some pathetic homeless creep, unheard of Boca Grande, and not the media superstar that he was (notwithstanding his recent rude dismissal by the Fox Propaganda Network – who did those people think they were?), close pal of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin alike, a famous globetrotting reporter who broke the story that Russian supermarkets were so much better than American stores. (No one had known!)

His face was lying right on the sidewalk, inches away from the gutter, feeling as if he were going to retch. He heard a passerby call 911 and realized no one could save him. He had to pull himself together, but how? He had nothing left. He wanted to puke, but there was not even one ounce of bile in his whining stomach.

A black man, probably a bum, appearing to suffer from similar symptoms himself, fell on Tucker C. The black man was wheezing and puffing and sweating, the black pointed hood on his head ripped and tattered. The bum aroused great nervousness among the dribble of early morning shoppers. They had been interrupted from their daily tasks trying to be good consumers – how annoying! The ultra-hard shield of their existence had somehow been punctured. This was offensive and someone was going to pay. A complaint to the police needed to be made. Someone called 911 to remove the black miscreant and the white drug addict.

The black hooded man rolled over on Tucker C.’s back, so the two were face to face.

“Kanye W., what are you doing here?” Tucker C. gasped out.

“Same as you, man. I’m in withdrawal. I’m not going to make it.”

A third man weaved in the middle of the street, then tripped and fell into the hood of a parked Mercedes down the street. He twisted his body around, the Florida sun hammering his skin. The Mercedes man’s nerve endings ached. He felt empty, his soul devoid of any light. He felt as if he were in hell, the devil ready to roast him in a boiling vat full of chicken fat and kosher salt.

Tucker C. and Kanye W., sweating profusely and sunk in the horrors of the deprivation of their regular, favorite drug, were disturbed enough to look up from their agonies.

“It’s Nick. F.,” Tucker C. whispered with the little strength he had left. “What is happening?”

“We’re in Hades that’s the only explanation,” Kanye W. said.

“But this is Florida,” Tucker C. wheezed out. “It’s supposed to be heaven. Gated communities. No climate change. Lots of walls to keep out the poor and uneducated– I mean Republican voters.”

They heard someone arguing inside a local bakery. He was complaining, loudly, that he needed help, desperately, but the woman behind the cash register yelled back at him that she didn’t understand. One of the bakers, a well-muscled side of beef, came out from the back and pushed a man out the door onto the street, by Kanye W.’s feet. The man lost his footing and crashed into Kanye W. and Tucker C.

“I own the world! I’m the ultimate twit! And I’ll tweet about you on my enormously influential website!” the man shouted. “I’ll ruin you!”

The side of beef laughed and went inside to make the daily bread.

Tucker C.’s eyebrows hardened.

“That’s my best friend! It’s Elon M!” Tucker managed to squeeze out.

Two Boca Grande police cars arrived. Four clean-cut cops got out and swept toward Nick. F. first. Despite his rattled state, he managed to lift himself off the Mercedes and took a swing at them. The first officer to get to Nick. F. easily dodged his fist, pulled the perpetrator’s arm behind his back, and cuffed him.

“We have to get out of here,” Tucker C. said. He tried to get up, but his legs failed him.

“We’ll be fine,” Elon the twit said. “I’ll just sweet talk the chief and grease his wheels, if you know what I mean.”

The other three cops came for them, cuffed them, and pulled the queasy drug addicts into their police cars. They roared off to the police station.

The four of them shared a box of a jail cell. The men shivered on the cement floor, each in a corner, desperate, their veins screaming for absolution, the only thing that could satisfy them contained in a long needle with a syringe and plunger at each end.

They sweated out the hours of a day and then a night under the harsh lights of the jail and all started to hallucinate. Nick F. found himself suddenly craving a bagel. Which also made him want to vomit. A guerilla thought swept into his brain, an invading army of insurgents flooding over the boundaries of his superior white brain.

“Jews and Christians share the same basic moral values about how to live a responsible life. Jesus was born a Jew and died a Jew,” he told the others.

“Ucch! What is wrong with me?” he demanded to know. “These ideas hurt so much!”

Elon M. sank his head underneath the toilet in the cell. Contrary to what he’d told his buddies, the police chief didn’t want to hear about how much money Elon would spend on two or three nice new Tesla police cruisers for the Boca Grande police department. The chief floated the concept of bribery at Elon and said he would consider additional charges against him.

“The actual truth is that Jews have nothing to do with pushing hatred against whites or encouraging hordes of immigrants of color to emigrate to the U.S,” he managed to scratch out, before realizing the import of what he had said, then cried out, “My life is now worthless!”

Tucker C. pulled himself up and sat against the back wall of the cell, then immediately began to sag.

He started speaking, but it didn’t feel like his voice. Instead, it seemed as if his soul was possessed by a first century Israelite rabbi. He said, in a clear, unmistakably magisterial voice, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”

The weird voice departed as suddenly as it came, leaving Tucker disoriented and dizzy. He sprouted a fresh streak of sweat in his helmet of hair.

“This is disgusting! Why am I being assaulted like this?”

Kanye W., curled into a fetal ball, started to whisper to himself. “Hitler hated black people too. Why didn’t I see it before?”

He coughed and screamed. “Oy vey! I’m so sick!”

“Oh, God, I need a fix!” Nick F. screamed.

“We’re losing it!” Tucker C. complained.

“We may die!” Kanye shouted. “Where are the cops? We need help! I want to go the hospital.”

“We all need the hospital,” Nick F. said.

“Where is God?” Elon whined to the heavens. “Why have You forsaken us?”

A few hours later, a police officer pushed a cart with trays of food for the prisoners. He took each meal off the cart and pushed four trays between the bars on the floor into the cell. But to a man, they were too sick to eat.

The meals sat there, untouched, until a few mice crawled in and started making a mess of the men’s lunch.

A tall man with shoulder-length orange hair, a long beard, and painfully sad eyes, wearing a simple, flowing robe and worn, dusty sandals, walked down the hallway, and arrived in front of the four cellmates.

They looked at the man, and blinked involuntarily, not believing what their sight was telling them.

“You’re not supposed to be here. A great injustice has been done. You’ve all been treated unfairly,” the orange-haired man said.

“Can you help us get rid of these terrible thoughts?” Nick F. whined.

Tucker C. started to cry.

“Can you help us? Can you bail us out?”

“The Republican National Committee sent me here to make the very large bail payment for each of you. But I’m not paying for anything. Because I intend to keep the money for myself. But I need you out and back to your old selves. To help spread the word of the Lord.”

“How are we going to do that?” Elon wanted to know.

The sad orange man brought out four long syringes from the folds of his robe, each containing a brown liquid, which resembled nothing so much as raw sewage.

“Come here. Get in line.”

One by one, each man rose unsteadily, and smelling like dead lizards left in the Florida sun, and stuck their arms through the bars of the cell.

Their deliverer and redeemer injected the brown liquid into each of their arms. A bloom of good cheer immediately returned to each of their faces. Except you couldn’t tell with Kanye W., who still wore his black hood.

Inspired with the brown liquid, the men started preaching, as if they were pastors in the pulpit.

“I feel like Captain America!” Tucker C. exclaimed. “Strong and white and good, working to stamp out Jewish evil!”

“God hates the Jews. They’re in league with Satan!” Nick F. shouted. “The Holocaust never happened! The Jews have manipulated the media! The 2020 election was stolen by Sleepy Joe Biden, with help from the Jews in the shadows!”

“The actual truth is Jews really hate white people!” Elon M. yelled.

“The Jews are rats trying to destroy the white race by opening the borders of our blessed country to millions of brown and black scum!” Tucker C. announced. “I may be incredibly rich and privileged, but the Jews are oppressing me!”

“I’m going Deathcon Five on the Jews!” Kanye W. proclaimed.

The robed man smiled.

“These are the boys I know and love!” he told them.

Nick F. looked more closely at the robed man and examined his face.

“Donald T.? Is that really you?”

“I’m actually Jesus, temporarily inhabiting the body of Donald T. This is God’s purpose at work. I’m operating through Trump. He’s the instrument of the divine will.”

Donald T. brought a red MAGA cap out of the inner folds of his robe and put it proudly on his Jesus head.

“But, if you’re not going to pay our bail, how are we going to get out?” Kanye W. complained.

Looking down, Donald T. fussed briefly with his clothing, and brought out a shiny-new AR-15 military assault rifle hidden deep in the robe.

“Stand back and stand by,” Donald T. commanded the minions. They obeyed instantly.

He shot out the lock of the cell with a barrage of bullets.

“Jesus, Donald – I Iove your drugs!” Nick F. yelled. Antisemitism – it’s the gift that keeps on giving!” the overjoyed Nick F. yelled.

The MAGA-capped, long-haired Jesus exulted, to the war whoops of his holy followers, “Follow me, boys! We’re shooting our way out of here! We have to fight like hell for the white race. God is on our side!”