The Gorko Gazette

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Don Markenbaldi is going to die.

Don is going to The Lake this weekend

The three-time Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism winner, Harvard Professor Emeritus jackass and femicide Dr. Don Markenbaldi, who baldly told an inner circle of the Peoria Poets Association in February of 2012 that ‘the titles in this [Raddy’s own poetic opus With Springs As Angels] are putting me to frickin sleep’, to loud guffaws, is heading to The Lake this week, and we are going to shadow his every movement.

A dish best served cold

Why, you ask? Not to do murder, surely! But imagine if Doctor Don DID have a little accident at The Lake! Who had known that he always carried a 12-gauge shotgun to fish lake trout, oh my, not even his wife?

What if they found the anti-depressants in his tidy little tweed jacket pocket, where the boat was found adrift in the bullrushes?

The crumpled note in his cold dead fingers, written in his own handwriting, which we have perfected after thirteen long painstaking years of practice? He thought it was raccoons in his trash, for more than a decade!

He drives a maroon 2022 Cadillac

Markenbaldi, the archnemesis of As Springs of Angels, is driving alone to The Lake in his stupid maroon 2022 Cadillac with New Hampshire plates, and white leather interior. Imagine what a shotgun blast would do to THAT interior! Markenbaldi will leave our quaint North Berwick subdivision roundabout, where we purchased a house directly across the street from his own several years back, at precisely 8 in the morning this 30 September. He will take highway 11 North and stop at the New Durham Farm Bed & Breakfast for coffee and pie.

All this time we will be tailing his pernicious, octogenarian eyesore of an automobile at the distance of no closer than 100 yards, as per the restraining order. While he dips his schanuzer in his continental-style breakfast plate, we will be eating cold egg and ham on bagels — but our coffee will be absolutely piping hot from the thermos, and delicious. And then…

Where was I

Eventually we will get to The Lake, where Markenbaldi has a cabin and boathouse. It will be too late to go fishing, so he will simply toddle along the shore for several hours, composing his filthy doggerel and laughing that chittering gargoyle laugh of his, until his considerable tummy begins to rumble. Meanwhile we will have run our standard five miles and refreshed ourselves discreetly in the frigid but crystaline waters of The Lake, and will be at our normal station behind the stand of cedars with the binocs and shotgun.

We will have stashed our own vehicle (the 2005 teal Dodge Neon) two clicks up the road behind the Susana Banana 24 Hour Truck Stop, in the clearing there where the security cameras are blind.

The denouement

The maid Maria comes at 11 to fix lunch. She is young, Latina, well-read, and highly sexed. In fact she is not a maid but Markenbaldi’s daughter by his second marriage to Dr. Guadalupe de Los Angeles Castro-Bonetti, whom some say Markenbaldi strangled to death with his own hands — whom others say simply led down the opium path to her own professional ruin, and suicide by hanging.

None of this is true, but we think it may be. What accounts has Markenbaldi ever made for his frequent trips to Los Angeles between 2006 and 2008, The Missing Years of which Markenbaldi scholars have exhaustively written? We believe that Markenbaldi, the great Don, had two families, the conniving son of a gun, and Maria was the generation of the Los Angeles union.

Or as they say Maria is a former student. You take your pick.

Hey look the garage door is opening

Oh dang there he goes now, and he is in his fishing hat. He was supposed to leave tomorrow, THAT IS WHAT HE EMAILED MARIA DANG DANG DANG

Markenbaldi is getting into the maroon Caddy!

Get the coffee in the thermos.

Hand me the shells! Did you gas up The Neon Demon?

We have got to go NOW.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE…

Image generated on deepai