Black Ops Janitor
DJ Hazard
Just taking out the trash at Area 51. Sometimes the shredder’s on the fritz.
Okay, so once in a blue moon (or, should I say, once in a blue hollowed out artificial satellite left by overseers of unknown origin), something catches my eye on its way to the sludge tank.
At first I thought it was just another death certificate. We get a dozen on a daily basis, usually from the Aspartame test kitchen or yet another inventor who submitted a 1000-mpg engine to the patent office. I called over Other Guy (not his real name) and had him look at it.
“Holy shit," he said, “The guy who played Ace Ventura is dead? I loved those movies! I got those…”
“No, you moron, that’s Jim Carey. This is fuckin’ John Kerry!”
“Huh?”
Exactly. Not only was Mister Run-For-President dead, he’s been dead forty years. The son of a bitch blew himself up in ‘Nam.
“So who the fuck is the big ugly prick on all the commercials?” said Other Guy.
Attached to the death certificate was paperwork changing it all from a KIA to a Purple Heart and a medical discharge.
We both looked down the conveyor belt. A previous pile of papers was about to go over the edge and into the pulp vat. Our expert reach saved the pages, at least for the time being, from the bubbling cauldron of goop. After all, when you spend eight hours a day (plus overtime and holiday differential) in a job where you’re not allowed to bring in or take out any reading material, you value any brief encounter with any juicy gossip. It also kind of makes up for the thrice daily cavity searches.
At first I thought I had extraneous documents. There was some gibberish from Capitol Records. Then there were some memos between Capitol and the Heinz Corporation, followed by more (mostly blacked-out) papers between Capitol, Heinz and the Pentagon.
Other Guy cleared off the big cork bulletin board and I broke out the thumbtacks we saved from Amelia Earhart’s plane. It looked like we had another puzzle. Half an hour later, we had a pretty good paper trail mosaic. Some pieces were missing, but it went a little something like this:
1967- Paul, McCartney dies in car crash. Capitol Records commissions South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard to install artificial heart into McCartney. Procedure met with limited success.
1968- Barnard consults with Heinz Corporation to collaborate on radical preservation techniques. Test subject needed before tampering with the valuable McCartney cyborg. U.S. State Department contacted for assistance in locating freshly deceased musician to use as experiment. Only celebrities of any kind to expire in 1968 were Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Nick Adams, last known for starring in ‘The Blob’. Adams is selected for being genetically closest to musician. State Department mistakenly sends next body bag back from Southeast Asian Police Action instead of remains of Nick Adams. Reanimated corpse of Lieutenant John F. Kerry has no pulse, but walks and talks incessantly. Process is modified and McCartney cyborg recorporalization is complete.
1969- Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon and experiment with various electromagnetic beams directed towards Earth. Kerry and McCartney reanimatrons go berserk. McCartney convinces band mates to leave Capitol Records, Kerry escapes and keeps surfacing at anti-war rallies.
1971- Beatles break up as a result of McCartney’s bizarre android-like behavior. Kerry unit is herded into Massachusetts law school system for safekeeping. Psychotropic drugs have been pumped into the Massachusetts water system since 1912 to prevent Bostonians from realizing that they only have half a ballpark. The dosage is increased to lull citizens into complacency as the Kerry golem blunders its way up the Commonwealth’s legal career ladder. McCartney cyborg begins a merciless twenty-year output of sounds that makes Abba look like Jethro Tull.
1995- Reanimated Kerry unit dangerously close to being seen outside of brain damaged Massachusetts constituency. Heinz officer Teresa brought in as wrangler, under guise of ‘wife’.
2003- Unfazed by repeated blows to the head, Kerry zombie declares candidacy for President. Radical Heinz mummification begins to show signs of breaking down. Retin-A, Botox and polyurethane regimens prove ineffective. Heinz scientists conclude that only regular blood transfusion from an “extremely peppy and bubbly” subject will keep the Kerry experiment from spontaneously decomposing in mid-step.
2004- Kerry campaign picks John Edwards as vice-presidential running mate.
Black Ops Janitor (not his real name) denies the existence of Area 51 and the Sanitation Engineering Industry, especially Local 14.
