Plague Monkey Spam

CHAPTER ONE - AN E-MAIL FROM HELL

Aman can find God in the damndest of places. There’s just no telling how an epiphany will play itself out.

There’s an order to life, and it runs like this. Hum along if you don’t know the words. Sometimes things happen because you make them happen. That’s called karma and it is the favorite four-star rated, two thumbs up, sundae topping of choice for any god you care to mention. The gods invented karma for its stickiness. It clings to you like freshly flung monkey dung. On the other hand, sometimes things just happen for no particular reason at all. That’s called life. It starts and ends like any other story.

Bobby Kaye’s life story started and ended with an e-mail from hell.

Hello good friend. In all heart I write to you, offering you this chance in one of your lifetimes. E-mail me here, at hanuman.org for an opportunity your eyes will fall out to believe. Drugs, all kinds, you will want everything. Gods will it, sending soon. All you have to do is ask. ARdeth99.

Damn! Bobby swore. There it goes again.

What’s wrong, honey? Maggie asked.

Bobby looked up. Maggie stood there in the doorway of his home office, wearing her blue flannel bathrobe and the pair of fuzzy gray monkey slippers he’d given her for her last birthday.

Have you broken another keyboard? She asked. It would serve you right for monkeying around with that old computer of yours before even saying good morning to your loving wife.

Her smile hung just a little off of center, like her sense of humor. Bobby smiled back. Her grin was that contagious and he never wanted to find himself a cure.

It’s just this damned spam, He pointed at the screen. It doesn’t even make sense. Look, here’s another one.

He read the second spam out loud to her.

Hello good friend. It may be of surprise to see me writing two you, I em Prince Wakanda Nazerie of Nigeria, and I and my family of fifty eight apostle raised children and...

It went on and on for some time but the gist of it was fairly predictable. Send money. Send a bank account number. Send the name of your first born. Prepare to make sacrifice.

See what I mean? It’s always the same sort of thing. Either a sales pitch or a heartfelt plea from his royal fecundity Prince Wakanda of Nigeria asking for my bank account number. Bobby rolled his eyes. Fifty eight kids? What kind of Viagra do you think he takes and what website does he order it from?

Maggie laughed. She always laughed at Bobby’s jokes. She swore that he had subliminally imbedded the habit within her genetic make-up as a part of their wedding vows, and Bobby never argued. If something wasn’t broke, why the fuck would you want to try and fix it?

The web is a scary place, Maggie said. I wish you didn’t have to hang around it so much.

Scary for sure. Way scarier than zombies and witches and reanimated buffalo. It’s scary like cell telephones, the way it connects us all, like we’re all just dancing in some mad spider’s mucilage snare. Bobby raised his voice to a Vincent Price - Mickey Mouse castrato. Help me, help me.

Maggie shook her head. Shouldn’t you be writing this down?

I’ll let your memory capture it for me. In later years when I’ve gone to that old writer’s home in the sky to creak in my haunted rocker right next to HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Hisownself Poe, you can repeat my wisdom for generations to come.

Suppose I’m dead by then?

Impossible. You are my young trophy wife. It is your destiny to be my memory, thesaurus, and bearer of piping hot caffeine.

Maggie laughed and Bobby laughed along, and Maggie laughed harder. A perfect loop. If God was looking down he should record it and file it under good things that he had created, as far as Bobby was concerned.

It’s just this spam. I keep thinking it has to mean something.

It sounds like a conspiracy to me, Maggie said, arching her eyebrows in a perfect Groucho Marx brow-waggle. Somebody better alert Mulder and Scully.

Bobby stared at the spam, lying there flat and plain on his screen. He couldn’t let go of his irritation any more than a fat bearded lady could let go of her last candy frosted sticky bun. It just stayed stuck.

It makes me angry, is all.

Maybe it’s time to get a brand new computer, Maggie suggested. With a great big firewall. You could leave it in the box and not even plug it in. Then you’d be sure of never getting any spam.

Bobby made a face. Have I ever told you how much I appreciate your razor-keen sense of sarcasm? Remind me to rub a little lemon juice into the cuts you’ve carved into my delicate psyche.

You do need a new computer, Maggie pointed out.

She was right. He needed a new computer but evolution scared the hell out of him. He’d written for so long with pen and ink and then with an old Brother typewriter. When he finally broke down and bought himself a real honest-to-Bill-Gates computer he grew unnaturally attached to the thing. It became a kind of a good luck charm, and even though it was now sadly obsolete he believed in that good luck so much that he couldn’t imagine replacing the old beast. He wasn’t up for the sacrifice such a revolution would entail.

Still, the machine was dying. Every day it worked a little slower. Just last week Maggie warned him that the computer was degrading.

I’m a writer, he had told her. I’m used to degradation.

Poor baby, Maggie had said. Am I that hard on you?

Do you know how often and in how many different ways your mother asks me when I’m going to give up this writing foolishness and get myself a real job? I asked.

I’ve never heard either of my parents say any such thing.

Your mother never says anything directly. She’s like advertising - subliminal, downright insidious, only worse. She gets in and around the cracks in a man, kind of like mildew.

Face it Bobby, you’re about as cracked as they come. You just plain hate change.

That’s not true. I’m incredibly flexible.

Ha! Maggie pointed around the room. You packrat your manuscripts in a filing cabinet that’d take Godzilla, a case of industrial strength steroids, and a Jesse James pimped-up forklift to move. You single-handedly generate enough paper to feed a platoon of hungry mutant wasps. Your paperbacks are double stacked on every bookshelf in the house. And that cobweb, She pointed up at the ceiling lamp. How long are you going to leave that hanging there?

Bobby looked up to the veil of cobweb that was tented across his ceiling lamp.

I’ve left that broom down here, hoping you’d get the hint, Maggie pointed at the broom lying beside his desk. There were cobwebs around the broom, as well. Bobby hoped she didn’t notice.

So he shrugged to camouflage the clutter. I haven’t the heart to sweep it.

Why not?

My Welsh grandfather told me that spiders and cobwebs brought good luck. I believed him. Writers need that kind of faith.

It was a good try, but mostly pure bullshit. The most that Bobby’s grandfather had ever said amounted to Bring me that belt, boy followed closely by Bend over and catch hold of your toes. I’m going to learn you your scripture, good and proper.

Maggie made the sound of a road-killed strawberry. She wasn’t buying it one bit.

It’s just this damned spam, Bobby went on, trying to change the subject. It’s plaguing me. Everyday there’s some new variation crammed into my mailbox. Nothing changes. They’re all so banal. Not one of them shows the slightest spark of creativity.

Maggie smiled at that.

You want creative spam? She asked.

"Why not? At Cannes every year they hold a festival for the world’s greatest commercials. A whole weekend of nothing but commercial watching with no television to get in the way. They sit and they watch and they select the world’s top commercials