"The Legend of the Lactose-Intolerant, Dick-Biting Mouse"
backstage at the Lucille Lortel Theatre
Once upon a time there was a mouse. A very sad mouse. A mouse named Arnold. Arnold's life was a tragedy. When he was only three days old, an old lady stepped on his tail, severing it from his little mouse body. Also, that very same day, "Tom and Jerry" made its national television debut, giving cats everywhere the idea that it was "funny" to torment mice.
To add insult to injury, Arnold could not even assuage the stresses of his daily existence with a mouse's favorite food: cheese. Why? Because Arnold was lactose intolerant. Though he liked cheese, every time he ate it he would become particularly flatulent. And everyone knows that a flatulent mouse attracts cats! Out of self-preservation the tail-less, tormented rodent avoided cheese, assiduously.
Arnold walked through life with a dark cloud of depression hanging over his little mouse head. Cats would chase him. Humans would try to poison him. Hawks would try to catch him with their razor-sharp talons, carry him a hundred feet in the air, drop him in a prickly nest at the top of some fucking tree and then devour his innards while he was still alive, screeching in pain and watching his own limbs be fed piecemeal to a nest full of transparent, veiny alien-looking hawk chicks, blind, bulging eyes moving back and forth in their closed sockets like some sick ravenous R.E.M. nightmare, eating this guileless defenseless rodent so they could grow up to shit on the cars of the greater New York metropolitan area.
His life was one terror after another.
So one day, Arnold decided to fight back. Hiding out in his favorite place, the downstairs backstage bathroom of off-Broadway's historic Lucille Lortel Theatre, which he preferred over all other New York City bathrooms for its dim lighting and cunning hiding places, he awaited the arrival of Dustin, an actor in the show that was currently playing at the theatre. Hiding near the toilet, Arnold waited.
Like clockwork, Dustin entered the dimly lit loo to relieve himself ten minutes before the performance was to begin. Dustin raised the seat of the toilet and pulled his sweats down to take a leak. Dustin's weezer, noted the expectant mouse, looked just like a Christmas cheese log, rolled in crushed almonds. Except without the almonds.
Arnold took his chance: he leapt three-and-a-half feet from the floor right up onto the hand Dustin was holding his wiener with, pretended the extended pee-pee was a cheese log, and remembering the forbidden, fetching flavor of the fromage long since forsaken, he took a big bite!
The womanly screams of the horrified actor were heard for blocks and blocks.
And that is how the legend of the Lucille Lortel Lactose-Intolerant, Dick-Biting Mouse came to be.
THE END
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