Jack Sprat Speaks!

He walks out the paddock door; his gait is gangly, brisk. Your first thought is the one everyone has -- Jack Sprat is still lean.

“Oh, sure,” he says, sitting angularly on a nearby bench. “I still hear it all the time — lean, boney, lanky, gaunt, scrawny. But however you say it, that’s me,” he says, an ever present smile accenting the lines in his drawn cheeks. Traces of an Elizabethan accent still sparkle in his speech.

He extracts a smoke and lights it. The smell of the nearby stables pervades the air. Sprat has worked these last twenty years as a hot walker at the track at Santa Anita. “I had to get away,” he sighs with a trace of sadness. “Ma Goose might as well have been Ma Bell by the time I left. The operation had gone corporate. I could see the writing on the wall. Think about it – they’ve all sold out, haven’t they? -- Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus, the comic book twits. How could we not be next?

“I would’ve ended up like Beauty and the Beast – sanitized and commercialized. They were lovely people, you know – the Beast played piano nicely and Beauty could sing, and we’d sit around evenings at their place and pass the time over cocktails. You can imagine how they felt about being turned into a plastic toy kids use to clog up their parents’ toilets,” he sneers, flicking his ash. His teeth are a smoker’s yellow. “But if I left Goose, what then? Cartoons? The old cat-and-mouse stuff? Sticking the firecracker up the poor cat's ass? Not me,” he says, shaking a close-cropped head.

So, when others would have gone with the program, Jack Sprat walked. “Ma Goose begged me to stay – begged me. But you can’t buy my art and you can’t buy me.”

What of the famous partnership with his ex-wife — the Nichols and May, the Burton and Taylor of the Goose register?

“Oh, back in the day, it was ideal,” he smiles nostalgically. “We were the top two-man act in the industry. Our numbers were better than Jack and Jill’s every year.” He scoffs lightly. An early publicity still shows them together — she, in pigtails, with spoon, hovering over a banana split, he leering behind her in a derby hat, his needly fingers reaching around her for the banana.

“You see, originally, I was a solo act, but it wasn't going anywhere. My rhyme went something like this;

“Jack Sprat can eat no fat

It aggravates his ulcer

When gravy’s passed his way, he asks

“May I have something else, sir?”

“So, they came to me and they said, ‛Jack, this isn’t going anywhere, how about a partner?' And in walks Dora and I thought to myself, ‘That’s a lot of woman’.”

A wedding picture shows her resplendent in white, beaming, happy, as her gnarled, tuxedoed husband stands beside her, knobby wrists and hands extending far past the sleeves. Sprat’s eyes sadden. “But she became so self-destructive -- lard, tallow, all the time. I said, ‘There are medical procedures now,’ but she cut me off. Then, one night I found a piece of suet hidden under the sofa. That was the end. I couldn’t watch her hurt herself anymore.”

Three thousand miles away, Dora Sprat is sweating. Not the dissipated moisture of the stout, but the glowing, vigorous shine of an athlete. A stunningly short black dress covers much of the middle of her more-than-ample frame. Her hair is a radiant purple, her eyes flash from under glitter shadow. An archipelago of studs, hoops, and bangles runs down her right earlobe. On stage, she moves in every direction at once as she vocalizes growlingly over thumping bass rifts and distorted power chords. Her fans throw pork rinds. She snatches one out of the air with her generous lips and the crowd goes wild.

Her band, Big Ass, is the hottest item in Williamsburg today.

Sitting at a table between sets, she swirls a frozen Kahlua, then gulps it down lustily. “Oh, he got quite testy at the end. He’d hide my food, wanted me to eat crudités with him. ‘Dora, you’re killing yourself,’ he’d whine. But look at me!” she commands. “This is my body! This is how God made me! I’m getting bigger all the time and I’m just beginning to live!”

So, when Jack split for California, she stayed East and joined the music scene. “These young people don’t judge you the way others do,” she says, as a second drink is placed before her. She makes quick work of it. An album, Lick Me Clean, is due next year.

She is unafraid to show her bitterness. “I wanted to stay with the Goose people, sure,” she says. “All those musty children’s books – it was old, man. We were finally going to have a big payday. But Jack wouldn’t hear of it — he was true to his art, he said.” She laughs derisively. “They tried to pair me with Wee Willie Winkie but it didn’t work. He was small, really, rather than skinny. It’s not the same thing.”

And are the rumors true? Is marriage to Jack Horner around the corner? “We’re good friends,” Dora smiles coyly. “But I love his plums!”

Back in California, a jockey leads a laconic mare past the bench where Jack Sprat sits. “I don’t worry about the future,” he says. “I like what I do. And I have plenty of options.” A film deal was said to be in the works, but now looks unlikely. “Roseanne was interested, but no one will touch her now, so then it was going to be Melissa McCarthy. They wanted Joaquin Phoenix to play me, but I said, ‘But he’s not lean.’ I said, ‘Malkovitch, how about Malkovitch? Or Bale?’ but they said, ‛Too dark.’” He shrugs and his skeletal hands light another smoke.

Does he stay in touch with the others? Absolutely. “Jack’s passed. He and Jill hung it up a while back. By the end, Jack just couldn’t function, the sauce, y’know. Here’s something you don’t know -- they weren’t even supposed to tumble down the hill like that, but Jack was so deep in his cups that day he stumbled and fell, and it worked so well they kept it in the act. The old woman who lived in a shoe, she’s good. She owns an Italian restaurant in the Bronx. The dish and spoon work for her.”

He takes another drag and contemplates his old colleagues. “Of course, there’s also Tom, the Piper’s Son.” His eyebrows arch reflexively. “He’s doing 18 months in federal, securities fraud. He was trading pork bellies and doing alright, but his old ways resurfaced. They found incriminating messages from him on the phone of a Congressman from upstate New York. But they went easy on him, knowing who he was and all…”

He sighs and collects himself. “Still, I’m alright. I still do personal appearances — mummy and daddy want all the little nippers to see me. Mall openings, school auditoriums, that kind of thing. I lecture the kids on good eating habits. And I’m doing public service spots about eating disorders. Want to hear one?

“Jack Sprat still eats no fat

You'd think that he'd get pallid

But he stays well and rosy-cheeked

On veggies, fish, and salad.”

Graverobbers

From the bbc.com, September 14: The illegitimate grandson of Warren G. Harding seeks to exhume the ex-President’s remains to establish further his claim to Harding’s “legacy” by virtue of his being a descendant of the President and his assignee, Nan Britton.

My grandson wants to exhume me. I hear he wants to be acknowledged as part of my legacy. Well, if the kid really wants a piece of my legacy, he ought to look before he digs.

To start with, I’m generally regarded as one of our worst Presidents. In all fairness to me, though, I was a mediocre Governor and a back-bench Senator, so what were people expecting? Teddy Roosevelt?

Also, and I know this is a little selfish, butI enjoy being dead. I was having a few with Pierce and Filmore a while ago – boy, Pierce can toss ‘em back! -- and we were discussing which of the three of us was the worst, since there’s no sense discussing which of us was best. But then, Buchanan ambles over – we Presidents have our own little section – and we all had to defer. We demeaned our country – Buchanan broke it. We all felt proud we weren’t him.

The whole fracas is about my love child – excuse me, my other love children’s half-brother. So what? Presidents breed outside the stable as often as they write Memoirs. Washington sent General Nathaniel Greene off to fight in the field so his wife, Kitty, could be Bathsheba to his David. And Jefferson! The man thought rape was on par with horseback riding while drunk. Sally Hemmings was only 14 when he took her to Paris. He fathered her six kids, and I doubt she ever looked at him adoringly and said, “Gee, Tom, can’t we have another?” Still, six kids out of Jefferson impresses me, since anyone with Jefferson’s full-blown OCD would have had trouble getting past the sink on his way to bed. (Think about it; he wrote down the temperature every day for twenty years. In Ohio, we call those guys “hermits.”)

William Henry Harrison, the one-month President, and John Tyler, his 47-month successor, both saw chattel slavery as an early version of The Bachelor and a prequel to Bringing Up Baby. (But don’t ask about their statues.) Pleasuring Nan in a White House coat closet looks like dinner at Delmonico’s compared to that. Grover Cleveland was the County Sheriff when he assaulted a local woman in her room and knocked her up, then shanghaied her to a local lunatic asylum and had her declared insane. Somewhere, one of his descendants has a shovel ready.

Then there are the First Bastards we don’t know about. Yet. Kennedy did half the Wellesley student body on his desk, giving new meaning to the word Resolute. I wish I had college interns. Clinton did, but practiced birth control, of a sort. And then there’s the rumor Trump had a baby with his housekeeper, but I think that’s just like those stories about George Bush the Kid doing cocaine in his rough and rowdy days -- sleazy, unfounded, and probably true.

If the kid wants the legacy of my escapades with Nan, he’s welcome to them. Like they‘d say today, we “met cute.” I was on a streetcar in Marion, Ohio, my hometown, back in ‘12, and I ran into Sam Britton, my doctor. He tells me his seventeen-year-old daughter, Nan, had my campaign posters all over her room, like I was a doughy David Hasselhoff. Smitten was the word he used, meaning “a likely prospect.”

I told him, “Send her over to my office and I’ll tell her to forget about me and go out and meet the man of her dreams.” She did, both. Given the difficult logistics of carrying on with a high school girl in her parents’ house, I had the decency to wait until she graduated. She moved to New York to find secretarial work and it was there I introduced her to my friend Jerry. We ended up in more hotel rooms than the Gideon Bible.

When I became President, she’d drop by the White House for a turn – not enough room for a roll -- in an out-of-they-way five foot coat closet. The secret service stood by the door and would knock if Mrs. Harding walked by. Who says romance is dead? On the plus side of my legacy, I was fifty-five years old and still capable of a knee-buckler. Kennedy couldn’t, even with steroids.

I felt badly about the Nan business, though, because it was unfair to the woman I loved. Unfortunately, that woman wasn’t my wife. Mrs Harding -- Florence -- was wealthy, divorced, older than me, and not very interested in animal husbandry, so in that respect Washington, a very good President, and I had something in common. I was the publisher of the Marion newspaper and she turned it into a thriving business. While she did, I did my own thriving business, first with her childhood best friend for three years and one baby (not the one with the showgirl, that was different) before moving on to Florence’s best friend in adult life, a good-looking flapper named Carrie Phillips.

Oh, Carrie! Those were fifteen wonderful years. The Phillipses and Hardings even travelled the world together as a foursome. Can you imagine? What a vacation! I passed through the port of entry more often than her steamer trunk did. When we went our separate ways, the Republican National Committee gave her a considerable monthly stipend in exchange for her silence. I might not have been a good President, but I am proud to be the father of this venerable Presidential tradition.

My grandson would do better to discuss my legacy with his cardiologist. I’d been showing

signs of congestive heart failure for years, and all this thump and bump ended up contributing to my demise of a heart attack at fifty-seven. Some people think Florence poisoned me, but they can only point to two pieces of circumstantial evidence: first, she had me embalmed an hour after I croaked; and, second, everything I’ve written here up until this sentence.

So, if my grandson wants to be part of my legacy, he’s welcome to it. I’m buried back in Marion, Ohio. Come and get me, kid. Your Mom was the product of the 29th President’s affair with a woman thirty-five years his junior.

Let’s see Pierce and Filmore match that.

All About Eve

I didn’t have a childhood. Sure, I hear from all sorts of people how they hated childhood and I didn’t miss a thing, but still. The first thing I knew, I was lying there next to Adam, naked and afraid as they say, and I looked pretty much the way I do now – well, maybe a few pounds lighter. I opened my eyes and, of course, it’s Eden and it’s lovely, but imagine you’ve never seen anything. Ever. It came as quite a shock – a lot of green to sort out.

And I rolled over and there’s Adam – he looks confused and he’s busy poking himself in the side and counting, which I can tell because his lips are moving, and when he’s done he starts all over again but it always ends up the same way. "I think I lost a rib,” he says, as if I had nothing else to worry about.

But then there’s a brilliant flash of light and a low electronic hum and it’s the Lord -- I was surprised I understood who He was right away but, when you think about it, I shouldn’t have been. Well, Adam was a little scared at this point but the Lord tells him not to worry about it, because He’s taken one of Adam’s ribs and made me out of it. The Lord said He could tell Adam was lonely and needed a helpmate, so he made me, which reminded me of those people who have their dogs cloned. Right away I didn’t like the look on Adam – like the party was just getting started and the Lord said “playmate” instead of “helpmate.” So, I said to the Lord, “What about my helpmate?” And the Lord laughed as if I was being funny and told me that’s my job, and Adam piped up and said, “He made you out of my rib, after all,” but I thought, if the Lord is that big a deal, he could have made me out of a tuna sandwich. But it was an argument I was going to lose, so I let it go and we ventured out into Eden.

The Lord gave us the run of the place, although He did say quite specifically not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, no argument there. Of course, I wondered why He made a fruit-bearing Tree of Knowledge if nobody was allowed to eat the stuff, like it was some kind of ornamental shrub. Regardless, things were going pretty well, until one day the Snake comes up to me – he was very cute back then, with his attractive scales and his hundred little legs, like a big centipede – and he says, “Look, the Big Guy is playing you for a dope. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge will allow you to have meaningful insights and a sense of right and wrong,” which the Snake admitted was a mixed blessing, but besides, he said, it tasted delicious, kind of like a paw paw, and it had a lot of fiber.

Well, I remembered what the Lord said, so I told the Snake to shove off, but the day was hardly over when I saw him talking to Adam over at the Tree of Knowledge and you can see Adam is buying it, but before I can say “What the heck are you doing?” Adam has picked one of the fruits and bitten into it. I run over and grabbed the Snake – all those little legs twisting around while I shook him -- and I tell him what a little shit he was, going around instigating trouble like that, and he all but laughs in my face. Meanwhile Adam is chewing quite pleasantly because apparently the fruit really was delicious, and then he pushes me to try it, and I relent, against my better judgment – after all, the harm was already done.

Well, it was delicious – we were about to have another when Adam and I have the same realization – we’re both naked. Now, I know I was naked from the moment I woke up, but now it felt entirely different, so I found some fig leaves to put over our junk, because if I hadn’t, Adam would have walked around carrying his package in his hands for the rest of his life, which at the time was forever.

But then the Lord shows up again – He’s been wandering around looking for us, and Adam tried to hide from Him, as if he was going to put one over on a sharp character like the Lord. So, the Lord finds us and asks why we’re skulking behind the hydrangea, and Adam, Mr. Helpful, says, “Well, we’re naked,” and the Lord loses it completely and asks if He had told us not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge – that was the world’s first rhetorical question, by the way -- and Adam gets up and says, “Eve bade me eat!”

The little prick! You could have bought me for a penny, if we had pennies. I’m stammering, just agape at the gall of this guy, but then I remembered something. The birds of the air and the beasts of the fields had gathered unto me a few days before and told me I wasn’t Adam’s first, and I had a right to know. Like any other girl, I didn’t want to believe it at first, but after a while I had to admit it was true. There was this girl Lilith, but instead of making her from one of Adam’s ribs, or a clavicle or something, the Lord blew His Breath of Life into some dirt, like He did with Adam, and somehow it didn’t work out -- the Earth didn’t put forth its best dust, or that’s what the Lord said later, as if the Earth had some reason to hold out on Him. Regardless, Lilith was a bad apple, and one day she was gone, disappeared, finito, like a Mob hit.

So, what am I supposed to do? If I argued with Adam, I’d get a rep as a bad helpmate and I’d get what Lilith got. Besides, who’s the Lord going to believe? Me, His second try at a sex toy for the big galoot, or His pride and joy, the pinnacle of Creation – you’ve seen the Michelangelo stuff, it’s like Genesis porn. After all, the Lord made the guy in His own image, meaning they’re both men, if you get my meaning.

So, I kept my mouth shut and sucked it up, although I did say the Snake told me to do it, because the little son of a bitch had it coming. And sure enough, the Lord buys Adam’s story, and before you know it, Adam’s going to sweat to eat bread, I’m going to go through agony bearing children, and the Snake – actually, this is the good part – is going to have to slither around in the dirt for the rest of everybody’s life, which he particularly doesn’t like because up to that point he was something of a fastidious creature. And, sure enough, Adam and I are shown the door, although the Snake, for all the slithering, got to stay in Eden while we were kicked out, and we ended up somewhere in Mesopotamia, which might as well have been New Jersey for all we knew.

Then there were the boys, the twins. Boy, that was tough! One day Adam comes back from poking holes in the ground with a stick and dropping seeds in them, and he sits down by the fire where I was cooking one of the beasts of the field and he says, “Boy, am I pooped! Talk about the sweat of my brow!”

And I told him, “I’m pregnant.”

And Adam said, “What’s that?”

Nobody had ever given birth before, so I was totally unprepared. We didn’t know about breathing, or whatever else they do nowadays – it was just me alone in the field, and a lot of help Adam was – he was so out of it I wished he’d go back and eat a couple more of the Tree of Knowledge fruits so he’d figure out what to do. And the babies! Out came two of them! I was so naive I thought that was the deal – you had two at a time, one for each boob.

Well, right away you could see there was trouble. Abel was a good kid, not very fussy, and once he was old enough he’d be out there in the field, poking holes with sticks and dropping seeds in them. But Cain, different story. Instead of going out and hole-poking like his brother, he’d wander around looking for beasts to torment, and once I found him with his loincloth off – well, let’s not go into that. But one evening I had laid with Adam – that part survived our expulsion from Eden, and rest assured Adam was no great shakes in that department – and afterwards, I said to him, “There’s something wrong with Cain.”

And Adam said, “Huh?”

I said, “Adam, he’s pulling the wings off flies.”

Adam was unperturbed. “Boys will be boys.”

“How do you know how boys are?” I told him. “You weren’t even a boy!”

“Don’t worry,” he said, and he rolled over and was snoring before you could say “Let there be light.”

Well, you know how that ended up. Poor Abel. So, we had Seth – you know how tag kids are, they practically raise themselves -- and he and Cain married their sisters and that’s why the human race is a pack of in-bred morons. Adam and I lived for another couple hundred years, and I kept busy – needlework, gardening, Book Club – but frankly, I lived enough for a lifetime in the first week after I opened my eyes.

I still get the hit on that Fall of Man thing, like it was all my fault, but I’m telling you the truth. Don’t blame me.

#MeFirst.