Art Kumbalek
I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, I’m expecting any day now for some tea-bagging douche-bag Republican House clown and/or Focks News Einstein to demand that the president be isolated and quarantined for at least the next two years ’cause, hey, they’ve got proof somewhere that this Obama character was born in Kenya over there in Africa, so obviously he’s got to have that Ebola thing in his genes, ready to sprout big-time and he’ll make sure only Republican Congress members get it and when they all croak in a couple, three weeks, he’ll make himself emperor of the United States for life, which not only is against the Constitution but most likely would be frowned upon by Jesus if He were alive, you betcha.
And what with the E-focking-bola and all the other viruses that get passed around this time of year like an overstuffed bong at a teen pot party, I’d been thinking of a self-quarantine for myself. Yeah yeah, I haven’t exactly been feeling your hunky dory of late. I chalked it up to some kind of pre-Columbus Day stress syndrome. And how could it not be? After all, here you wait for weeks in anticipation of the big day, it finally comes, you don’t get your mail and then BOOM…it’s over. Cripes, it’s enough to blow any guy off course, what the fock.
But hallelujah, the fellas came by and took me out to buoy my sinking spirits with round after round of tall and frosty cheer over by the Uptowner tavern/charm school, during which we toasted the diversity of certain mighty members of the pink-skin pantheon—Paul Revere, Vince Lombardi, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Mickey Mantle, Russ Meyer, Marco focking Polo, John Philip Sousa, Soupy Sales, Casimir Pulaski, Chet Baker and James Joyce, to name a few, and of course, Christopher Columbus.
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The only thing these guys have in common besides being white is that I believe they’ve never ever before had their names hauled out and stuffed into the same too-long sentence in the entire history of the printed word, I kid you not
So after hours and hours of respect-paying, the fellas hauled my sorry ass back to my dinky apartment, where sometime later whilst lodged in a dream state—half awake, half asleep, but still wholly in the bag without the foresight to take the monstrous leak my bloated bladder screamed for—the image of a 900-foot golf putter came to me. Yes, the putter, proud symbol of the white man. I dreamt that it was the Great Navigator himself who had invented it, then carried this marvelous tool ’cross the ocean blue, to discover a place where he could use the goddamn thing; but to no avail, he had arrived to this New World on a weekend, and had forgotten to make reservations.
In fact, it would be a few hundreds of years before reservations were to be invented, so as to keep the brown (some say red, but I’m colorblind) native people that Columbus had stumbled upon off the course—these so-called native people who had yet to assimilate the difference between a 5-iron and sand wedge.
The tawny so-called native people were nothing but a nuisance to the white man, ’cause how you going to shoot par with a fairway full of buffalo and guys with bows and arrows on mounted horseback? It is to wonder. Oftentimes, the white man who found himself in the rough not only would lose his ball, he’d lose his scalp to boot—talk about your 1-stroke penalty, ain’a?
Dream on, I did. I dreamt that we are all what-you-call “universal Indians,” that we are all “natives” on this planet and who knows where the fock else, and that had the so-called New World native people been as adept at sailing big boats as they were riding ponies, in 1492 they may have landed on the coast of Normandy in search of a trade route to the East and then how history would be different, ain’a? Hey, you tell me.
And then I’ll tell you I also dreamt this, I think: A white woman, wife of a U.S. senator, was driving toward home in southern Nevada when she saw a Navajo woman hitchhiking. She stopped the car and offered the woman a ride. During their small talk, the Navajo woman noticed a brown bag on the front seat between them. The politician’s wife said, “If you’re wondering what’s in the bag, it’s a bottle of wine. I got it for my husband.” The Navajo woman was silent for a while. She then nodded her head and said, “Good trade.”
Ba-ding! It was then during my nocturnal voyage that I did indeed take the Niagara-esque leak I had considered taking earlier. I awoke moments later, the gosh darn victim of an unfortunate sequence of events, again, what a world, ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.
