Mucus Membrain in the True Paradise

Ch.1

            “Aloha!  Welcome to our Hawaiian Paradise.”  The airport worker tried to put a lei on the morbid Mucus, but Mucus reeled back in disgust at the attempt.  Mucus Membrain might be a depressive, but he’s certainly no dummy, he knows a “poker” when he sees one.  However, you might not know one, so I’ll tell you.  A poker is person paid by an employer to make you feel good.  He differs from a “probe” in the respect that a probe is paid to make you feel good and extract money from you.  But there was something about this poker that just wasn’t right, something that bothered Mucus.  Mucus ran.  He ran into the nearest bathroom and stared in the mirror at his twisted nose, his beady eyes, his thin, slippery lipped mouth and he spoke the words, “Could it be true?”  There was something sincere about that airport worker’s greeting, like she believed in her words, but resented having to say them to strangers.  Yet the sincerity existed and that frightened Mucus.  He said out loud, “Could this be a true paradise like Moses told me?”

Moses Measles was a childhood friend of Mucus.  Moses had gone to Hawaii on vacation and came back with such good reports that Mucus had to go and find out for himself if it was true.  He assumed it wasn’t.  Moses was the kind of guy who got excited over breakfast cereal toys, so of course he’s gonna rave about Hawaii.  But there was more to it.  Enough to make Mucus make the trip.  Still, he couldn’t believe it.  “We’ll see,” Mucus said.  Someone flushed a toilet and walked out of a stall.

“If you think this place is great, wait until you see the bathroom at Gate 4,” the bum said.

Mucus got his bags and took a taxi to his hotel.  He noticed a sweet fragrance in the air and the taxi driver told him it was the plumerias.  “Interesting,” Mucus thought as he fingered his way through the sacred text he kept in a secret pocket of the battered black overcoat he always wore.  The sacred text of Ami Amore Frog, self-proclaimed and little known prophet of our times.  Unknown would be a better adjective.  Except to Mucus, who met the prophet as he was dying on a park bench in NYC after a life of wandering and homelessness.  It’s true Ami Amore Frog never wandered far, as he was born in the ghettos of Harlem and he spent his entire life in NYC, first as a drug pusher, then in jail, then as a beggar and a bum.  But he wandered.  And he kept a journal which nobody knew about, nobody that is, until Mucus Membrain ran into him.  It was Ami’s last few moments in our world, and he desperately called out for “the One who will take my soul and my secret!”  Nobody wanted it.  But Mucus stopped, on his way home from the coffee shop.  He stopped for kicks.  And Ami said to him, “It is yours now.” and gave him the text, his life’s work.  And then he died.

Mucus felt a new purpose bestowed upon him that day.  He read Ami’s writings and realized that they described a True Paradise, a place of pure happiness.  The main focus of the text was to describe the Paradise so that it may be recognized because, as it is written, “The True Paradise is subtle, it will take a trained eye to know it.”  However, Ami Amore Frog did not know where in the world the Paradise existed.  Only that it did exist somewhere, because he saw it in a sacred vision and he knew it to be true.

Now Mucus turned to the passage in the text which read, “The Paradise will smell sweet from breezes which no man has yet spoiled.  “Interesting,” he thought again.  Just then the taxi driver farted.  “Oh well,” Mucus thought.  They pulled up to the hotel.

The hotel was small and homey looking and the clerk at the desk seemed happier than anyone Mucus had ever met.  He was constantly smiling.  Mucus realized however that the hotel clerk was a probe when he tried to sell Mucus a windsurfing adventure and a couple of day hikes.  Mucus decided to sign up for one of the day hikes but noted that the chances of this being the Paradise were very slim now.