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Roger Stubbins
Anyway, people started to complain about Roger and they even went so far as to concoct vicious lies that our lion, who would roam freely throughout the neighborhood, had even killed some old people and a few homeless drifters who had gone missing. Now, this was preposterous, but even if it wasn’t, who the hell cares? How is that a crime? That’s just simply “natural selection” in my book. So every time Roger would go and maul someone to death, it was the responsibility of my brother and me to go clean out their house of valuables and try and cover up the crime and make it seem like a suicide or something. The plan worked perfectly for a while but after we had done it maybe twenty times or so, we got cocky. We figured we were never gonna get caught and we became sloppy. Plain and simple. So the cops found some forensic evidence and came to get Roger Stubbins but the joke was on them, as we had already driven him to the state park a few towns over and let him loose. He ran off into the woods without so much as a look back and we never heard from our old pal again but once in a blue moon a hunter would go missing and we just knew it was our buddy Roger, up to his old tricks. Well that’s not really the point, I’m trying to make here, it’s just a little backstory. The real story was that one time when my brother and I were cleaning out this old lady’s house whom Roger had eaten, I came across a velvet bag taped to the underside of one of her dresser drawers. The bag said, “Magic Beans” on the side but I figured that was just to throw off robbers. “Jackpot!” I thought. I turned it over, spilling out the contents into my greedy palm, but instead of the diamonds and rubies I was expecting, some actual beans were all that was inside! “That wizened old crone!” I exclaimed, using the popular phrase of the time amongst third-graders in my town. I was duly impressed by her cunning. She had played me for a fool and I was, simply put, the best. I tip my hat to you, madam, wherever the scattered and desecrated remains of your brutalized corpse’s soul may be, wandering the boundaries of heaven and earth, forever. I was ready to chuck her precious “magic beans” in the toilet but something in my mind held me back from doing so. “Why would she go to such lengths to hide them if they weren’t real?” I pondered. At first I just assumed she was a crazy old bat, I mean she must have been if she was stupid enough to get mauled by a ferocious lion roaming freely in a suburban Connecticut neighborhood. Something just wasn’t right though, how could a crazy old lady be intelligent enough to be a professor at a prestigious Ivy League university for all those years, not to mention, matriarch to a powerfully-connected political family who loved her very much and missed her so when she mysteriously disappeared without a trace? I pocketed the beanbag and finished washing everything down with the powerful commercial lye we used to eradicate any traces of Roger’s crimes and was on my way. I completely forgot about those ridiculous beans until I was emptying my pockets out on laundry day. There was the bag, taunting me: “magic beans”. Suddenly, I felt extremely stupid. If any of my brothers had caught me holding on to such an immature and foolish keepsake, they would have beaten me senseless, not just for being a dim-witted prat, but also for jeopardizing our little money-making operation. My brother had gone to great lengths to make our murder of this woman look like a covered-up lion attack and this is how I chose to repay him? This was, after all, material evidence in a murder investigation, not just some stupid magic beans. I took the beans out of their pouch and threw them out the window. I was so upset with myself, I decided to get drunk and drown my sorrows in some corn liquor. Well, I passed out for nearly 18 hours and when I awoke with the sun the next morning, I hobbled over to the window to draw the shades, my head pounding. Well I had to rub my eyes because I was sure they were playing tricks
on me. Just outside my window was an enormous beanstalk, probably 20 feet
wide at its base. I stuck my head out the window and craned my head upwards
to see how tall it had gotten but it’s top was lost from sight,
far up in the clouds. So maybe 20 minutes into my journey, I traveled through the clouds and reached the top of the beanstalk. I’m a fast climber. As I looked around, I was surprised to find not the filthy megalopolis I had expected to see teeming with shrewd but conniving foreigners, selling cheaply made wares and moderately priced pasta dishes, but rather a rustic farmland, brimming with stalks of corn the size of buses and tomatoes as big as your house and carrots that were normal-sized for some reason. I started to explore and came upon a large barn, the biggest I had ever
seen. The handle on the door alone was probably 3 feet long. I shimmied
up the side and into the barn, a barn unlike one I had ever seen before.
It was gigantic in proportion and had crown molding. Who the hell puts
crown molding in a barn? Score! I grabbed the sack, kicked the goose in the balls and ran for it. I was almost back at the beanstalk when I heard the ground shaking, like in Jurassic Park, but instead of a dinosaur, I was being chased by the third-biggest giant I had ever seen in my life. He was wearing enormous blue overalls, had a red bandana around his neck the size of a sail and a straw hat that could have doubled as a boat for a family of six. My hunch had been right: Italians! But why was he chasing me? How could he have known I had stolen anything?
All the money was secured away in my rucksack, hidden from sight. Did
he just have a problem with trespassers? Was he simply jealous of my superior,
non-Italian intellect? No, it was clear: he meant to have sexual relations
with me. Well not fifty years later, that beanstalk was covered in limestone bricks and became what is now known as the Washington Monument. So next time you’re sight-seeing in our nation’s capital, think of my good friend, Roger Stubbins and smile, because if not for that brutal killer and his murderous rampage, all those years ago, this country wouldn’t have invented the world’s first skyscraper. |
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When
I was a kid, my family had a pet lion named Roger Stubbins. Roger was
a full grown, African male lion and he was very tame and playful. For
some reason, people just couldn’t accept the fact that a wild animal
like that could be tame and pose no threat to anyone. For fuck’s
sake, we’ve got pictures of him carrying me around as a baby in
his mouth.