Frankie's Apartment

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Italian Flag At The Hot Dog Stand

Salute!

Linda, the Transgender Phonebooth

If a building is sentient (and most of them are), sometimes it comes to pass that it feels deep within its structures that it's not the kind of building that it looks like. This is sort of like when a human is transgender.
And that's what's up with my favorite phonebooth in all of Zaghaven.
I'm sorry, my favorite CASTLE in all of Zaghaven. I have to say, whenever I make a call on the
royal telephone, I feel just like the Queen of England. If you make a call inside Linda, please
remember to close her drawbridge. You wouldn't want anyone to overhear the name of the horse on
which you are betting.

Montez, The "Empdas" Mascot

Montez is a straight-up slammingly good person. He might be one of the few Empanadas made out
of florescent yellow OAKTAG, but that didn't stop Mr. Parfenix from eating his arms off one afternoon.
Is Montez bitter? Hell no! He just keeps at his gig, steady rockin' "Empdas" advertisement to the
good people of the Sixth Borough. Chees flavor is good, Beer Empdas are even better, but the
Chic Empdas are the best - they come dressed in Prada heels and designer jeans, but like, wearing some cool
vintage shirt that they just threw on out of their boyfriend's hamper.

Clowns

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Leafy Sea Dragon

King of Seahorses

Blue Kills Park

Blue Kills Park is a great place. Made up of Christmas Trees, Redwoods, and Treehouse People.
Half enchanted-forest, half landfill. Everything you'd want. Lots of retired leprechauns and
sewer alligators that walk on their hind legs. Home of reputed 6th Borough bad guy, the
Green Pumpkin and his tagging crew, the B6 Bonkers, or the B6B. Blue Kills is the divider
of the last two sections of Z - the South: where we chill, and the North: where the Candy
Factory keeps a fence up around itself so it won't drop into the void of the random ideas
going at it in the mists of the most top. Remember: the Candy Factory has its Vapors.
It's when the Vapors start getting down with the Mists that the North goes solid and
produces something weird that sticks around for a while and makes things interesting.

The Treehouse People are nice: they look like ordinary Treehouses. If you're lucky enough to
befriend a Treehouse Person, they might let you spend the night inside them, but be careful not
to hurt their feelings, and let them know you're not looking for a serious relationship.

Other Park-Dwellers like to live in huts they scoop out of the hills.

Don't be shocked to see an Alligator living with a leprechaun in a hill house. They make
fantastic roommate for some reason.

My therapist, Bill the Snowman, has several escape routes in his fridge that bleed out into the
Park. This is one of them. Sometimes Bill does his comedy act in the park for the critters that are willing
(insane enough) to cough up the 10 dollar cover charge. Oh, and the 2-snowcone minimum.
Bill's a funny guy, don't get me wrong, but his comedy is too high concept. Once he just sat there
and did his taxes. That was his act. The Hawks started circling, the snow-leopards were glaring.
The squirrels were laughing their asses off, but they'll laugh at anything.
I mean, I get what Bill was saying, it's funny, but it's not laugh-out-loud funny.

The original site of the candy factory.

View of Blue Kills from the North.

Early Green Pumpkin Sticker.

The Far Edge of Zaghaven

Me, on the north side of Zaghaven. That's supposed to be the East River sort of behind me and to the right, but
the mists of other people's imaginations obscure the north from reality. Zaghaven is weird like that.
We are held together by what we find from the old days, and what people think we are. Once,
when the mists were light, I could see out upon the river and on that day it looked like one gigantic
pink trampoline. It's worth it sounding bible-y. You never know in the North of the Sixth.
And Game of Thrones thought they had the North shit all craze and world-endy. In the Sixth Borough,
the North sways. I once rode my bike down a squiggle that lead straight through the
imagination of a 6-year-old. A six-year-old CAT. Now THAT was spooky. Still,
you can always find your way back, it just might not be the same as you remembered it.

The clear days are the ones to be afraid of. It was on a clear day that they broke the 6th Borough in the
first place.

Trade Secret

Watch Repair Shops can't survive on the money they make repairing watches. Didn't you ever
think of that? Come on. Watch Repair People deal in under-the-table Time Travel.
How do they do it? It's all in those old digital Casio joints. A little programming borrowed from
the future, one of those Venusian batteries that cost a fortune - and voila -- you could be chilling
in last week.

The Sixth Borough has a Jellyfish Problem

Some are calling it an epidemic.

They're popping up in sinks.

Bathtubs.

Toilets.

They took over the POOL at Blue Kills Park last summer. Their leader, a jellyfish named Fred,
says he won't be happy until the Jellyfish are properly represented in government.
A nice painting in the main hall of the Zaghaven courthouse would suffice, he says.

Ay-Chee

Ay-Chee is one of those Happy Wanderer types.
Nothing really bothers him and he doesn't bother nothing.
At least that's what it seems like on the outside.
What no one knows is that he used to be a high stakes poker player (a lousy one too),
which eventually lead him to lose his 99cent shop to a Loan-Shark related "Bust-Out".
And that's the story of how I got Frankie to buy me a dirt-cheap red Igloo cooler.