The Stain on Little Gwen's Dress from A Gremlin and His Goober.
rebelholler.com
The beginning of the end of the Bumkin administration didn't involve purloined treasures or state enemies or roasted religious fanatics. Instead, it involved a stain on the right shoulder of a dress.
You will remember the little girl who asked Billy a fateful question on the day a serendipitous tornado brought an Arkansaw hovel onto the mall of Capital City: "Are you our new president?"
Yes, none other than Little Gwendolyn, now with the blush of womanhood about her, appeared one day at the doorstep of the Castle to apply for a job.
"Remember what you said? About me coming to work for you?" she asked, a little coquettishly. "Daddy says I'm old enough now."
Billy honored his word right away by giving Gwen the coveted position of chambermaid in the Oblong Office. There she would dutifully take dictation, conduct official intercourse, and moisten Billy's cigars in exchange for room, board, and college credits.
You can very well guess what comes next. Billy, or the gremlin, or maybe the both of them, found Miss Gwen irresistible, and the rest is history.
We'll just draw a little curtain over this ugly scene. Enough has been said and written about it already.
I just happened to be there on the bright morning when Miss Gwen came bursting out of the Oblong Office shrieking at the top of her lungs.
"My dress!!" she screeled. "My late grandmother's irreplaceable antique dress!!!"
I won't lower myself to repeat the jokes that soon circulated about the stain on Little Gwen's dress. But thanks to the vigilant Drudgery of the journalism world, word spread throughout the country like the reverberations of a shot heard 'round the world: the President of the United State had allegedly spilled his seed on the irreplaceable antique dress of that innocent young flower, Little Gwen.
Billy never bothered consulting me about this unfortunate situation. Instead, he marched right out to the front lawn of the White Castle, where the story had already drawn a crowd, and confronted the issue head on.
"I did NOT," he protested to the gathering, wagging his finger and beating insistently on the rostrum, "despoil the irreplaceable antique dress of that little Jezebel--Miss Gwendolyn." With that he turned resolutely back towards the Castle.
An intrepid reporter chimed in. "Mr. President," she shouted. "Critics argue that you have lost touch with the people. Do you still consider yourself a man who is of the people?"
Billy didn't hesitate one second. "That depends," he said over his shoulder, "on the sense that your definition of 'is of' is of."
"Pardon me?" asked the reporter.
The president halted and turned to face her. "I said, 'That depends on the sense your definition of 'is of' is of.'"
As the reporters stood with their mouths agape, Billy thanked them, turned briskly on his heels, and marched back into the White Castle.
We went into full attack mode immediately. Little Gwen's schoolmates were drilled concerning any history of heavy petting. A boy was found who testified that he showed her his, and she showed him hers. Her father was audited. Reporters hounded her every relative, and wealthy DoGooder donors withdrew their donations from her township's orphanage and soup kitchen.
For days the story roiled in the nation's public organs. Even the legions of the DoGooder press, who would have let the president get away with murder (or rape at least), wallowed in the irresistible appeal of the stain on Little Gwen's dress, an appeal that pumped up their circulation handsomely.
Understandably, there were those who refused to let the story die. Miss Gwendolyn demanded a position in the government, a corner apartment in Capital City, and a wheelbarrow full of cash, or else. Her father demanded a public duel. The chambermaid's union demanded a public apology.
Despite my best efforts, the president's filthy deed had become the hottest issue in years. Days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, and still the story of the stain on Little Gwen's late grandmother's irreplaceable antique dress thundered on without abating.
Finally, Gwen got serious. She gathered the nation's press one afternoon for an important announcement. With the same dramatic flair and lollipop cuteness that had brought her to the nation's attention all those years ago, Miss Gwendolyn, as she insisted on being called, produced an old-timey Montgomery-Ward dress box. She then described in ghastly detail how Billy had splotched the irreplaceable antique dress, which she proceeded to remove from that venerable container.
Naturally, I was in attendance that day. What happened next made my knees go weak.
"Please notice, ladies and gentlemen of the jur...of the press, that the stain in question is unmistakably on the right shoulder of my late grandmother's irreplaceable antique dress," she said, dramatically raising the garment up high for the photographers. "Well, there's a reason for that."
That was the moment when my knees went weak. I knew what was coming.
"The reason the stain is on the right shoulder," she continued in a prosecutorial tone, "is that about halfway down, the president's penis turns sharply to the left, at an angle of approximately thirty-degrees."
The reporters' brows wrinkled simultaneously, and then one by one their jaws dropped as they nodded their heads in understanding.
Just as I'd feared, this little fact was the trickle that unleashed a flood of the most salacious stories of decadence and debauchery you ever heard. It was like someone had pulled their fingers out of a gushing dyke. The president's round bed, the trapeze, his cigar fetish--every detail of Billy's love life was soon being discussed throughout Capital City and beyond.
But the detail that really caught the public's imagination was that damned thirty-degree bend. I knocked myself out trying to come up with a strategy to squeeze off the dambreak, but to no avail. This was a story that just wouldn't go away.
Through it all, isolated as she was in her Ivory Tower, Hilda remained completely ignorant of the bend in Billy's bone.
Worse than that, so did Billy, whose faith in the miracle goober straightening cream had not diminished. |
