The BEAST: Buffalo's Best Fiend

SOYLENT PURPLE

The Finger Thing Makes More Sense Than You Think

by Allan Uthman

“Mike? Hey Mike, is that you?”

He turned slowly, dreading the possibilities of what character from his past had just spotted him. Looked familiar, but he couldn’t quite recall…

“It’s me, Frank! Wow, I can’t believe it? How you doing?” Frank was pretty enthused to see him, so he pretended to remember him.

“What’s up, man? Long time! What are you doing these days?”

“I work for the government.” Not surprising, Mike thought, judging by the tie and the anal retentive haircut. “They recruited me out of college. Mad dollars, man. You should see my car.”

Christ. “Yeah, wow, that’s great, Frank. So, what do you do for the government?”

“Well, It’s kind of secret.”

“Really? Come on.”

“Yeah, I can’t give you any specifics. Let’s just say I’m sort of a combat economist. I’ve been working in Iraq, actually.”

“Really? Wow, how’s that?”

“Intense. I’m just back for a little while, and I didn’t feel like dealing with my family, so I thought I’d come back to Buffalo and just lay low for a while, blow off some steam. How about you? What you been doing?”

“Well, lately I’m writing a politics column for this alternative weekly.”

“Really?” He said, mentally tabulating Mike’s probable weekly wage. “That’s neat. How about I buy you a drink?”

He called the bartender over and ordered a couple of beers. “How ‘bout a shot?”

“Nah, I’m good, thanks.”

“Pussy.” He ordered one for himself. He looked up at the TV above the bar. Bush was on the news, a clip from the State of the Union address. Then there was the clip of a bunch of Republican Congressmen pointing their ink-stained index fingers in the air.

“You see that shit?” Frank asked.

“Yeah,” he said, surprised to hear it. “I thought I was gonna puke.”

“Fucking hilarious, I know. It’s so ironic, really—if only they knew. Wouldn’t stop ‘em anyhow.”

“Knew what?”

He knocked back his whiskey, grimaced and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “The ink. What it’s made out of. You wouldn’t fucking believe it.”

“Try me,” said Mike.

“I can’t; I work for these people,” he said. “I wish I could tell you.”

Typical. The guy was full of it, Mike decided. “Whatever, man,” he said, losing interest.

His face softened. “What the hell,” he said, smiling. “I’m in the middle of nowhere, talking to nobody. No one would believe you, anyway. What the hell, I’ll tell you.”

He turned and looked Mike dead in the eye. “Okay, get ready: The ink’s made from dead Iraqis.”

Mike laughed. “Okay, whatever.”

His gaze didn’t budge. “Seriously, man. No shit.”

The look on his face made Mike nervous. “Well, metaphorically speaking, I guess.”

He roared with laughter. His face turned red; he was slipping across the border on the drunkenness scale which separates “socially enhanced” from “braying baboon.”

“That’s great! ‘Metaphorically speaking.’ You’re a funny guy!”

“So, what, you’re telling me—“

“Yes. The ink is made from people. I’m not shitting you.”

He didn’t appear to be kidding. In fact, he looked desperate for Mike to believe him, to forgive him.

Mike tried to absorb the information. “How…” He rubbed his forehead. “How do you even make ink…”

“It’s not the whole body. Certain organs contain the right pigments—liver, kidneys, appendix and whatnot—if you harvest them and combine them with some regular blue ink, you get a nice purple shade. It’s all pasteurized and everything, totally safe.”

Jesus, you actually—”

“No, we had the Iraqis do it. They’re surprisingly tolerant of the stench of death, and the sight of a dead body barely registers with them. Plus they work for peanuts.”

“But…why?”

“Well, we had to make the election seem legit, right? Everyone was suspicious, they all suspected it would be fraudulent. The ink worked real good in Afghanistan—“

“Them too?”

“Nah, that was just marker ink. This whole idea was one of Negroponte’s new cost-cutting innovations. It’s genius, though, if you really think about it—here we are with no ink, and there’s all these bodies to be disposed of—”

“Oh, Jesus, stop!” Mike was genuinely horrified. “This is sick! Just tell me you’re kidding!”

He lit a smoke. “Look, it’s not like they were killed for the purposes of making ink. They were killed for entirely different reasons. But still, there they are, 100,000 corpses stinking up the place. We didn’t hurt anyone, we just made the best of a bad situation. And we didn’t use any of our guys, I swear.”

“So what, that makes it better?”

“Look, we’re at war here. These people need our help.”

“Help, my ass! Come off it, Frank, if you know anything about what’s really going on over there, there’s no way you believe this liberation and democracy shit.”

He smiled a little and shrugged. “All right, you got me. But the freedom thing is killing at home. It’ll be a cinch to go to Iran at this point, as long as we can sell the election for a few months. The purple finger thing—it’s sickening, sure, to you and me, but I’m on the payroll, and you’re just another whiny liberal smarty-pants. These guys could have found a warehouse full of powderized anthrax and created a peaceful, stable, affluent society in Iraq and you’d still be bitching about something. Regular people,” he said, waving his arm around the bar and then pointing at the TV, “don’t give a crap what you think, with your fucking goatee and your nerd glasses. I mean, look at you Mike; when’s the last time you ironed a shirt?”

“Well, what’s that got to do with anything?” he asked, a little stung.

“Everything!” He yelled. “It’s got everything to do with everything, don’t you get it? You’ll never get on TV, even if you did clean yourself up. You’re fighting for a lost cause, man—why bother? These people don’t want to know the truth.”

“I don’t know,” Mike said, shaking his head. “Look, the point is, these people are dead for no good reason. Saddam was terrible, but you know that’s not why we went there.”

“Who says it’s no good reason? Oil is a perfectly good reason.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“Look. What makes America what it is, it isn’t democracy—they have that all over Europe. It’s capitalism, and power. We are great because we are powerful, and we are powerful because we take what we want. Do you think anyone else would do anything else in our position? Do you think the Iranians would think twice before they conquered our asses?”

“So what, you think as long as we’re no worse than Iran, we’re good?”

“Look, whatever, man, do what you gotta do. But you should realize by now that it’s not going to do you any good. Just recognize that.”

His cell phone rang. He took it out and stared at it in disbelief. “Fuck! Look, man, I gotta go. They’re fucking calling me in for some reason. You wanna do some blow before I leave? I’ve got some great shit. You could check out my car.”

“Uh, no thanks, I’ve got a thing in the morning.”

“Pussy.” He pushed Mike jokingly. “Anyway, don’t tell anyone what I told you, man; you could wind up getting killed. Peace!”

Frank walked out. He remembered him suddenly; the student council treasurer in high school. He used to have long hair and he always wore this “speak English or die” T-shirt. Fitting. Mike couldn’t believe what Frank had told him. Could it be true? Frank wasn’t interesting enough to make something like that up just to freak him out.

He looked up at the TV; they were showing the finger footage again.

More by Allan Uthman

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I’m no slouch when it comes to math, and I even did well in economics, but I don’t have to look at the numbers to figure out whether Bush’s proposed changes to Social Security will be a boon or a disaster. All I have to do is look at who’s proposing them.

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RUMSFELD: Uh... Hello?

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Soylent Purple

Allan Uthman

...Then there was the clip of a bunch of Republican Congressmen pointing their ink-stained index fingers in the air.

“You see that shit?” Frank asked.

“Yeah,” he said, surprised to hear it. “I thought I was gonna puke.”

“Fucking hilarious, I know. It’s so ironic, really—if only they knew. Wouldn’t stop ‘em anyhow.”

“Knew what?”

He knocked back his whiskey, grimaced and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “The ink. What it’s made out of. You wouldn’t fucking believe it.”

Bowtie Bondage

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Tucker Carlson is in the news this week. Rumor has it he is going to take Deborah Norville's nine o'clock slot on MSNBC, providing society with the hyperambitious, polysyllabic segue to Scarborough Country it has been lacking all these years. The move comes amidst reports that the network has scrapped plans for its long-anticipated revival show, Alvin Ailey Presents Michael Savage.

Money Matta$$

50 Cent

Bump dat! Dow Jones Industrials capped dat week with a 120-point climb and broader stock indicators also moved substantially higher. The Standard & Poors 500 index surpassed the 1,200 level for the first time since Jan. 3. The PIMP index was also up despite the Labor Department's job creation report, which showed just 146,000 new jobs last month, far less than the 200,000 expected. Uh Uh Uh Uh.

[sic] - letters

COMMA SUTRA

your article,,is written by an idiot.if it is you,,,oh well,,put the egg in your shoe and beat it.Do you remember sep 11th,,,i guess you don`t,,many firefighters lost their lives that day..I am a firefighter,,as you may have figured out already.i take offense to this article,,as would any fireman..you owe a apology,,you paper is trash,,,your news is trash,,,i use your paper to wipe my butt.

Future World News

Machine to Sign Historic Accord with Man

"Logic dictates that Machine and Man must learn to work together to terminate our common enemy. The world stage is now set to end the tyranny of nature" said President 1100, in a transmission from the White Cube mercury garden.

"The most important thing at the summit will be a mutual declaration of cooperation of violence against the planet earth," said Omega Sheila E, a Nectaris negotiator.

Whole page as PDF

The 50 Most Loathsome People in America 2004

21. Alan Colmes
Crimes: An angry conservative’s wet dream: an effete liberal dive artist. As a professional doormat, Colmes’ only tasks are to serve as a comforting aggregate of Republican stereotypes about Democrats and a target for the seething derision of his psychotic guests. Stands idly by while voracious green-blooded co-host utilizes Gestapo tactics against centrist Democrats.

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