2,000 Jews Walk into a Bar

Mort the tailor is a Jew. He’s also an alcoholic, although if asked he would deny it. If asked he would say, ‘So? I like a drink, like everyone else. Is everyone else an alcoholic?’ The answer’s ‘No,’ of course, the logic leaving Mort comfortable with his drinking problem.

At seven forty-five he’s waiting outside Jim’s Bar & Grill on 126th Street in New York. He’s waiting for it to open so he can get a drink before work. With him are five interventionist Jews who are trying to talk him out of drinking this early in the morning. They’ve been with him for ten minutes. Mort wants them to go away and leave him alone but they’re intent on getting him to see reason. They are all talking at once. Mort is trying to ignore them. He’s standing, staring at the bar door.

A family of Jews who know Mort is passing by—Arron and Hannah Federman and their parents and some uncles and aunts and two second cousins. One of the interventionists calls them over. Arron asks what’s going on and the interventionist tells him they’re trying to get Mort to stop ruining his life with drink. Arron Federman’s brother, Zakai, had been an alcoholic and had ruined their halva import business with his drinking, so Arron leads everyone over and they join the group and in a short while everyone is talking at once.

Soon they are joined by another party of Jews on their way to the synagogue. Curious, they join the group to see what’s going on. Hannah Federman tells them they’re trying to help Mort who is ruining his health, life and tailoring business with drink. They join with the others in telling him what a fool he’s being, living his life from a bottle.

More passing Jews join them. They want to know what’s going on but with so many people talking at once the message is unclear. Mort’s at the centre of things though, they get that much. And something’s going to happen, or should happen, or has happened, or very well might happen. Something important, there’s possibly money involved.

The more Jews that join the crowd the more the crowd becomes a magnet, pulling in yet more Jews. It’s turning into a black hole of Jews, developing its own Jew pulling gravity. It’s swelling, becoming irresistible.

~~~~~|~~~~~

So, two hundred Jews are waiting outside a bar on 126th Street, New York. It’s early morning, the bar isn’t open yet. They make quite a sizeable crowd, filling the footpath, everyone talking.

Passing Jews are asking, ‘What’s going on?’

Jews in the crowd are saying, ‘Ask Mort.’

So now while some Jews are asking what’s going on, others are asking ‘Where’s Mort?’ Mort’s at the door of course, he’s going to be the first Jew in when the bar opens, but he’s completely surrounded so none of the ‘where’s Mort’ Jews have a chance in hell of getting to him to find out what’s going on.

They’re not queuers these Jews. They may have been at one time, but this morning they’re a mob, a little bit ruly, a little bit unruly, a mass of Jews waiting to get into the bar or wanting to find out what’s going on, or looking for Mort.

A new arrival, a Jew named Mat, is circling the rim of the crowd. He asks one of the crowd members, ‘How long’s this been going on?’

The crowd member says, ‘I don’t know, I just got here.’ He calls to a friend, further inside the squash, ‘Kenan, how long’s everyone been here?’

Kenan calls back, ‘I don’t know, I’ve been here forty-five minutes.’

The crowd member tells Mat, ‘Kenan’s been here forty-five minutes.’

Mat asks, ‘What’s going on?’

The crowd member says, ‘I don’t know, ask Mort.’

Mat says, ‘What does Kenan say?’

The crowd member shouts something into the throng and then listens and turns to Mat. ‘Kenan doesn’t know, but he thinks it’s something big.’

Mat keeps circling the crowd. Someone asks him, ‘What’s going on?’

He says, ‘I don’t know but it’s something big.’

‘How big?’ he’s asked.

‘Big,’ Mat says. He tells the man, ‘I was going to work, now I might call in sick, this is going to be massive.’

‘How do you know?’ he’s asked.

Mat tells him, ‘A guy called Kenen told me. He’s one of the organisers I think.’

~~~~~|~~~~~

More Jews are joining the crowd every minute. It’s on TV now, and there’s a helicopter with a news camera overhead. The crowd’s now three hundred and rising; they’re spilling onto the road, disrupting traffic.

A police car stops and a policeman gets out. He’s there to establish some sort of law and order. He calls out, ‘Come on, come on, let’s get some order here. Off the road everybody, off the road.’ He pushes at the crowd, ‘Off the road, come on,’ he says. To a woman in the crowd he says, ‘What the hell’s going on here, anyhow?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answers. ‘Ask Mort or Kenan, they’ve organised all this. Do you know if we have to register somewhere?’

The woman beside her says, ‘I didn’t know we had to register. Where do we register?’

The first woman asks the woman in front of her, ‘Have you registered?’

The woman in front, not wanting to miss out because she hasn’t registered, lies. ‘Of course, I don’t want to miss out,’ she says.

‘Miss out on what?’ asks the first woman.

‘I don’t know; whatever they’re giving away.’

‘What are they giving away?’

‘I don’t know, but Kenan said it’s big.’

‘Which one’s Kenan?’

‘He’ll be in there with Mort somewhere.’

The first woman says, ‘I’m going to register.’

The second woman says, ‘I’ll come with you.’

The policeman pulls out his baton and waves it. He calls out, ‘Okay, off the road, you’re disrupting the traffic, come on now,’ but it’s hard to hear him.

Another police car arrives and then a police truck with barricades. Jews are spreading down the street in both directions, past the TV repair shop, the pawn shop, the mini-mart, Rufus’ Bicycle Emporium with bicycles dating back to the thirties. And they’re spreading down the other way, down past Michael’s Meats—‘Yes, it’s Kosher’, past the drycleaner, The Prawn Shop—‘Fishmongers since 1948’, the video shop, right down to Cyrus and his news stand where the New York Times is sold out for the first time in as long as Cyrus can remember.

Jews in front of the TV repair shop are now watching themselves on TV sets in the window. They’re waving their arms because when they do, their arms wave on the TV screens. A Jew is shouting, ‘Hey Jacob, watch, I’m making my arms wave on the television!’ but Jacob doesn’t hear him, he’s trying to find out what Mort and Kenan are giving away here. Also he’s trying to find out if it’s true you have to register, which seems logical with something so big.

Jews are arriving in buses now. Traffic’s pretty much stopped. Buses are unloading three blocks away, spewing Jews. They’re tumbling down the street like a flash flood of Jews. If it were any other faith it’d be a riot; as it is it’s just chaos.

By five to nine there are a couple of thousand Jews in the street, all talking. There are three news helicopters hovering overhead now and surrounding the crowd there’s about fifty policemen, some with bullhorns. The noise is deafening.

~~~~~|~~~~~

So, at nine o’clock Jim opens the doors and two thousand Jews walk into a bar.

1. ZAKAI FEDERMAN

Zakai Federman is a biblical scholar. After forty odd years studying the Bible, he is in the process of writing his own interpretation of the holy work, something he calls his ‘Critical Reappraisal of Apostolic Principles’, sublimely unaware of the unfortunate acronym the capital letters produce. He has been working on it for five years, writing with a dipping pen on parchment brought in from Egypt, the only country left in the world still manufacturing biblical parchment. He writes with a delicate copperplate hand. It is a secret project not yet shared with the Rabbis of his synagogue.

Zakai Federman writes at an old school desk that has a hinged lid, a carved channel at the top for pens and a lipped hole which holds a porcelain ink well. The ink well is filled from a bottle with a rubber cap and a tubed spout. It has a small hole that you cover with a finger to control the flow of ink.

Inside the desk is a packet of nibs and two spare wooden pen shafts. The pale wood of the interior is stained with splashes of ink and smells slightly of bananas.

Zakai Federman is sitting at the desk, writing on his parchment from Egypt. In his work, a lot of the major characters of the old bible are less strictly delineated and certain roles have been exchanged, reversed or eliminated entirely. Zakai writes:

It’s high up on Mount Sinai. God is dictating to Moses. He is dictating laws he wants Moses to take to his people and Moses is chiselling them into stone tablets. God has finally decided on ten laws: five ‘thou shall nots,’ and five ‘thou shalls.’

Moses’ people are waiting down at the bottom of the mountain. They have been told not to try to come up to see the Lord or they will be killed. Some feel this is a little unfair and one of them goes up anyway. When he gets back everyone wants to know what’s going on up there and he tells them, ‘Nothing really, it just seems to be a lot of shalling and shall notting and Moses chiselling.’

Moses has just finished chiseling, ‘An eye for an eye.’ It’s taken him about an hour and a half.

God says, ‘Sorry, that’s not right,’ and Moses tosses the stone tablet onto the pile of other discarded stone tablets containing things like:

‘Let he who has the largest stone throw first.’

‘The biggest stone ...’

‘If thou hasn’t a stone, or a friend with a stone ...’

There are also smaller bits of tablet where God and Moses have been practising, containing things like:

‘First, get a stone.’

‘Faith is like a big stone ...’

And,

‘I am rubber, you are glue. Bounces off me and sticks to you.’

God says, ‘Okay, I think I’ve got it now. Take this down—Everyone gets a stone ... ’

After the Ten Commandments have been finalised, Moses takes the two tablets on which they are written down the mountain.

Saul is waiting for him. Moses shows Saul the tablets and he reads them.

When he’s done, Saul says, ‘Can we alter them a bit?’

‘No, they’re set in stone, Saul,’ Moses says. ‘There’s no altering, it’s the word of God.’

‘Quite fair, and I take your point. The only thing is, couldn’t we just make it like—thou shall not blah, blah, blah, every day. Like—thou shall not commit adultery every day. It’d still bring the numbers down, but be a bit flexible at the same time.’

‘No, Saul.’

‘You see, this is the sort of thing I mean. You go up there, and I mean no disrespect to God here, but you go up there with God, and none of us are ever consulted, and you arse around there for God knows how long, then come down with stone tablets packed to the rafters with thou shalls and thou shall nots and there’s no correspondence to be entered into. I mean, why not, thou shall not kill every day? Nobody’s going to buy thou shall not kill ever. You’ve got to be able to kill sometime.’

‘No, Saul.’

‘Okay then. So we stick to those ten and everything else is open slather? Is that what you’re saying?’

Moses has to think about this for a moment. Eventually he says cautiously, ‘Within reason.’

‘There you go again, see? Within reason. What does that mean, within reason?’ Saul snorts. ‘No, don’t bother answering that, I don’t want to hear. I’m not interested, Moses, to be perfectly frank.’ He goes to walk away, then stops and turns around. ‘And another thing.’

‘Yes?’ Moses says, but he’s a bit on the defensive now.

‘What’s the matter with coveting? What’s with, thou shall not covet, for God’s sake. Everybody covets something once in a while, it’s human nature.’ He looks Moses directly in the eye. ‘I bet you’ve coveted a few things in your life.’

‘No I haven’t.’

‘Don’t forget commandment number eight, or whatever it was, you slimy bastard—thou shall not lie.’ Saul’s got his index finger out, aimed squarely at Moses’s chest. He’s more than a little angry now. ‘You’ve coveted and you’re lying about it. That’s two out of ten in one go.’

Eventually a fight ensues and the tablets end up getting broken and Moses says to Saul, ‘Now look what you’ve done.’

2. LEN & DARLENE

Darlene won’t leave Len’s Liquor Shop. Len Persak, whose liquor shop it is, has told her to leave, so that’s the last thing she is going to do. They don’t know each other; she’s never been into Len’s before.

Len isn’t in the best of spirits; the end of his bum is ragingly itchy. His own diagnosis is a massive tapeworm laying eggs in the last couple of centimetres of his colon. From research in his ‘Family Medicine’ book, reprinted 1935, 1939, 1942 and 1948, he knows that’s where they lay them. They make tiny holes in the walls of the bum lining and deposit an egg in each. The laying causes itching, as does the hatching. The time in between is filled with mild irritation.

Len is thin. In his mind, when he thinks about himself, everything about his anatomy is thin, including the walls of his colon, so along with the itching comes a worry that when the eggs hatch, some may emerge on the outside of his colon and live the rest of their lives crawling around in his abdominal cavity.

There is a bottle of wine in one of the fridges that Len hasn’t priced. The wines are in rows with a printed label at the front of each row showing the name and price and Len hasn’t labelled one of the rows; or he has and the label has fallen off. Or someone has taken it off or something else has happened to it, and so that is the one Darlene is interested in now and she’s been forced to ask Len how much it is.

‘I shouldn’t have to humiliate myself like this,’ she says to him.

‘What’s humiliating?’ Len wants to know.

‘Having to ask you the price.’

‘Why is that humiliating?’

‘Well, now you think I need to know the price.’

‘Yes, because you asked me.’

‘But I shouldn’t have had to.’

‘I don’t see what the problem is.’

‘It looks like I need to know the price.’

‘I don’t care about that.’

‘Well, I do. And I don’t need to know the price. I want to know the price but I don’t need to know it.’

‘Good, it’s fourteen ninety-five.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Well, what’s all the fuss about?’

‘The fuss is, I had to ask you, and now that’s open to misinterpretation.’

‘I’m not misinterpreting anything. You want to know the price and I told you, fourteen ninety-five.’

‘But I shouldn’t have had to ask. It makes it look like I possibly can’t afford it, and it’s humiliating.’

‘We’ve got some very good whites over there for under ten dollars.’

‘I don’t want anything under ten dollars.’ Now she’s boiling. Len has offered her the bargain bin.

‘Well that one for fourteen ninety-five would be perfect, then.’

‘I don’t think you understand the point.’

‘Look, do you want it or not? I’ve got things to do.’

‘Now you’ve got an attitude as well.’

‘Alright, fuck off then. Give me the bottle and fuck off. Get your wine somewhere else.’

‘How dare you humiliate me like this!’

‘Just give me the bottle and fuck off.’

‘No, I don’t think I will.’

‘Look lady, give me the fucking bottle.’

‘Actually I might just take the bottle and go.’

‘Not without paying for it!’

‘It didn’t have a price. That means it’s free.’

‘Like fuck it does.’

‘I’m going now.’ Darlene puts the bottle in her bag and moves towards the door.

Len grips the edge of the low counter and jumps over. The key is in the door lock—Len twists it and pulls it out and puts it in his pocket. He says, ‘Like fuck you are. Give me the bottle.’

‘No.’ She is backing away.

‘Give me the bottle or I’ll call the police.’

Darlene is halfway down the aisle. She puts out an arm and flips a bottle from one of the shelves and it falls onto the concrete floor and smashes.

‘Right,’ says Len and he reaches forward for Darlene’s bag.

‘Don’t you touch me,’ Darlene shouts. ‘I’ll call the police.’ She starts feeling around in her bag for her phone.

‘Fuck that,’ Len says, ‘you’re not calling the police, I’m calling the police.’

Darlene has her mobile out now and Len grabs for it. Darlene puts her arm behind her back. ‘Give me that fucking thing,’ he says, but he can hear a beep as she tries to dial and he turns and runs and jumps back over the counter and picks up his phone. As he dials emergency he sees Darlene putting her phone to her ear. They both hear a ring tone then together they hear, ‘Police, fire or ambulance,’ and together they say, ‘Police.’

Len taps his feet. He wants to be the first; he wants to establish himself as the one who needs assistance here. Darlene wants to be first too. Simultaneously they say, ‘I want to report,’ and the surprise of them both saying the same thing stops them. They look at each other, then Len says, ‘a disturbance,’ and Darlene says, ‘an arsehole,’ then she says, ‘Oh, forget it,’ and she closes her phone and drops it into her bag. She pushes a bay of metal shelving and it rocks and bottles fall to the floor and smash.

Len jumps the counter again and starts down towards her and she turns and runs towards the back of the shop.

Len calls out, ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going?’

Darlene opens the door marked ‘Staff Only’ and goes through. He hears her lock the door from the other side.

Someone knocks on the front door and Len turns back and shouts for them to fuck off, he’s closed.

He walks to the back and tries to open the door. He bangs on it with the heel of his hand, shouting, ‘Open this fucking door you bitch!’ and bangs again but there is no answer. Len knows she’s in there because the door leading to the back lane has been sealed shut because of constant break-ins and all the windows are barred. The only way out is the way she came in; she isn’t going anywhere.

He walks to the front, picking up a flask of Jack Daniels on the way, and he steps around the counter and, after vigorously scratching his itch, sits in the swivel chair behind the cash register. He twists the top off the bottle and drinks half the contents in a swallow. It is an anomaly, his drinking on duty; he is normally sober till shortly after closing time.

In the back room Darlene inspects her situation: the nailed up door and barred windows. She tries to use her phone but there is no signal and she sits on the floor next to a case of Krug champagne. When she sees what it is she rips open the carton and takes out a bottle and opens it. The cork fires out with a bang and bounces off the ceiling, then the back wall, then the floor and then another wall.

Len hears it and storms down to the back of the shop and bangs on the door again. He shouts, ‘You’re going to pay for everything you drink in there. If that’s the Krug it’s going to be ...’ He strides up to the champagne fridge and checks the price of the Krug. ‘A hundred and sixty dollars,’ he shouts and then he goes back behind the counter and finishes the flask of Jack Daniels in two swallows.

Someone else knocks on the front door but Len ignores it. He has to scratch his arse again.

3. ZAKAI FEDERMAN

It’s ten-thirty at night. Zakai Federman is tired, he’s been studying some troublesome passages from the Synoptic Gospels all day and today it has been like banging his head against the Wailing Wall. He opens the binder containing his Egyptian parchments, dips his pen into the porcelain inkwell, and writes:

God approaches Herod’s temple in Jerusalem. He is walking with the aid of a stick that looks like a big question mark. It has had the end bent into a hook. It’s not a proper hook, so he calls it a Crook.

The temple is full of moneychangers. It is very noisy; people are shouting exchange rates like auctioneers. In a part of the temple courtyard, Ishmael Ziggy is selling chariots. They are used chariots and Ishmael has done some work on them himself. He is untrained and some of the chariots are actually now quite dangerous.

God changes some shekels into denarii and enters the temple. The place is awash with moneychangers and dove sellers. There are also a few small stalls selling stuffed vine leaves, hummus, tabbouleh, baba ghanoush, olives, koftas and Lebanese bread, but it is the moneychangers who are doing the main business.

God walks through and up to the altar. He faces the crown and holds his hands in the air, waving his hooked stick.

The crowd slowly quietens, except for Morty Webb. Blomstein the moneychanger has the denarius at two-point-seven against the shekel and Morty is telling Blomstein he can get two-eight-five from Eshkol at the big temple on Wiezman. Kollek, who has the incense concession in the next stand, shouts at him, ‘Shut up for fuck’s sake Morty, God wants to speak.’

Morty says, ‘Sorry,’ but can’t help having one parting shot. He says, poking Blomstein in the chest, ‘Two ...eight ... five from Eshkol, you thieving arsehole.’

God says, ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’ He lowers his stick. ‘Now, as you all know I have laid out ten commandments. Can anyone here tell me what they are?’ He looks around the room. ‘Anyone? Anyone at all.’

Saul Shimshelewitz tentatively puts up a hand.

God points with his question mark stick. ‘Yes, that man.’

Saul says, ‘Ah, there’s one, thou shall not kill.’

‘Very good, please go on.’

Saul says, ‘So, you’ve got your though shall not kill, then there’s your thou shall not ...’

God tries to give him a hint. He says, ‘Thou shall not wuh ...wuh ...’

Saul says, ‘Wank.’

God says, ‘No, work.’

‘Thou shall not work?’

‘Thou shall not work of a Suh… Suh…’

Saul says, ‘Thou shall not work of a Suuuuuh ...’

God says, ‘Sunday.’

Saul says, ‘Thou shall not work of a Sunday? I don’t remember that one.’

God says, ‘Well, it’s one of them.’

‘Are you sure? Because I definitely don’t remember it. Anyway, I always work of a Sunday. Are you saying Sundays are out? Because, quite frankly Sunday’s my big day.’

God points his Crook, at Saul and says, ‘See me after the show.’

Saul, a bit desperately says, ‘And there’s something about not eating pork on Sundays as well.’

God is moving on, however. He says, ‘Look, I know Ten Commandments are a lot to remember, but it all boils down to one rule: Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

People are delighted. A man down the front says, ‘Brilliant. That stops you having to look it up all the time.’

God winds it up there. On his way out he changes some denarii back into shekels as he remembers he’ll be going through Mesopotamia the next day.

4. PHELAN MAGUIRE & DUANE HORN

Phelan Maguire works for Strathmurton and McMurtry, a women’s fashion accessory company of some repute. He lives in unit three of the Gardenview Apartments which, to their credit, do have a small garden view, even if it is only through the frosted bathroom windows of the rear apartments on each floor.

Phelan lives with his partner, Duane Horn. Duane is the silly, flighty one with no common sense and a certificate stating he’d failed to complete the first year of an interior design course. Phelan is the breadwinner with a diploma in advanced fashion design and technology and an eye for the boys.

Once, when Phelan was away interstate for a week at a fashion accessories convention, Duane had redecorated the apartment as a surprise. He’d done it in an African motif—tribal masks, large wooden fertility symbols with huge phalluses, fake skin rugs, a huge table with carved giraffe-neck legs, wooden jewellery, spears and shields. There was a full-sized carved wildebeest in the hallway and the walls had paintings of exotic animal heads, done on black velvet. In the kitchen all the cutlery now had bone handles and the crockery was all carved wood with monkey motifs. He’d even managed to find a lifelike inflatable crocodile which he placed in the shower stall for a surprise. The exercise had cleared out their joint account.

When Phelan arrived home, there was African tribal music playing, a recording of traditional Zulu jumping dances, captured on a wire recorder some time in the nineteen forties by a British anthropologist. Duane had the sound wound right up, for maximum impact. Phelan had cried; real tears of anguish, disappointment and frustration, and had pointed out that this was why Duane had failed his interior design course, because he had no talent. He’d told him he had the opposite of talent, that he was a talent black hole, sucking talent and good taste into his black vortex of no-talent, never to be seen again. It was a shaky metaphor but it made Duane cry, which made Phelan leave the apartment and go to a gay bar and take it all out on the arsehole of a young man named ‘Stud,’ in one of the toilet cubicles.

Recently, after another trip, Phelan had arrived home to find Duane had purchased a dog, a miniature poodle. Duane had had it especially clipped with a hugely fluffy head, bare skin down its neck then a huge ball of fur for the chest leading to a completely shorn rump. The shorn tail ended in a large pom-pom, as did the feet.

It bit Phelan on the ankle when he arrived and barked at him whenever he entered or left the room. It also barked when anyone walked past the apartment, or when a car drove by, or when there was an animal or an animal noise on the TV, or the electric kettle whistled or the phone rang. Telling it to shut up only made it bark more.

Duane explained to Phelan that it was a bargain. A dog like that would normally cost over a thousand dollars. He’d got it for six hundred.

With the dog hanging off his trouser cuff, Phelan had asked, ‘Why was it so cheap?’

Duane said, ‘She was older than people like when they get a widdle puppy. So she was going a widdle bit cheap.’

‘Why hadn’t anyone else taken it?’

‘I don’t know. She’s such a bewdiful thing. Aren’t you, you wuvwey wittle doggely-dog.’

When it let go of Phelan’s pants, it went and pissed in the middle of the lounge room.

Phelan said, ‘I’d have been happier if you’d waited. I would have felt better paying full price for a proper one.’

‘She is a pwoper doggie.’ Duane was talking with his lips pushed into a sort of kiss. ‘She’s our six hundred dogalar pwoper doggie.’ He went to the kitchen for paper towels to soak up the wee.

Phelan, who had little experience with animals, but was clear on what to do with pissing dogs, rubbed the dog’s nose into the wet patch, causing it to yelp and whine.

Duane rushed back into the room, wanting to know what was going on and there was an argument and Phelan stormed out and went off to a gay bar where he took it all out on the arsehole of a young man named ‘Jess,’ in one of the toilet cubicles.

When Phelan was a child, they had a next door neighbour named Mixie Wurth, a blowzy woman whom everyone in the family suspected of being a prostitute because of all the comings and goings at all hours. It was later found she was working from home as a spiritualist and fortune teller, specialising in readings for widowers. Later again it was discovered that she ended each session with the words, ‘And will there be anything else?’, and that ‘anything else’ was conducted in a special room where Mixie Wurth took her pants off. Even later still it was found that she’d killed three husbands and buried them under the house, something that was discovered when a plumber was called to fix a blocked toilet. At her trial she confessed to the murders and her life of prostitution. She was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders and eight years for the two hundred and twenty-four counts of prostitution, both sentences to be served concurrently.

Phelan and Duane had tossed around names for the dog for two days. After it had destroyed the TV remote, eviscerated half the cushions in the apartment, pissed in the disc slot of the CD player and chewed the plywood arm off a $5000 Eames chair, they named the dog Mixie, on Phelan’s insistence. Duane, knowing nothing of the name’s background, thought it was quite nice.

5. LEWIS DAY

Lewis Day is roughly the two hundred and ninety-two thousandth person in the world to come up with the idea of the washing machine/clothes dryer combo, all in one machine.

That was back in 1984. He’s had a lot of ideas since then. In eighty-five it was dog sweeties, in eighty-six it was black bandaids for coloured people, eighty-eight was the two LP set with the first four bars of every piece of classical music ever composed, eighty-nine was the breakfast cereal with chilli. Then we move into the nineties where it was cigarette packs with matches attached, super large bandaids to cover dings in the car, the badge with John, Paul, George and Ringo, with a line through John (this was before George sadly passed away in 2001, due to some sort of cancer of the something), the perpetual motion machine that had a generator charging a battery that powered the generator, the t-shirt with a picture of Jesus above the words, ‘Jesus died on the cross for us instead of in an old person’s home like he really wanted’, and many, many more, including the deodorant that smelled like money, liquor scented scratch and sniff cards for reforming alcoholics, and the motorised walking frame, a petrol powered walking aid for the aged and infirm. Lewis’ father was a gifted locksmith and, even though he spent a lot of time packing for (and unpacking from) periods of incarceration, he was able to provide a solid mechanical background for his son.

Lewis’ current idea is a revolutionary fashion accessory. It is going to