FIND IT:
The Memoirs of Minnie Khlaetsch
Resolutely NOT to observe, not to wonder, not to test, and assuredly NOT to analyze and conclude. Where’s the gleam in that? X meanders as X will, never a nod to the infantile, never a shoe for the elfin sock, never a sore loser to the claim that fame was your errant child lost in the fig newtons of the apple-eyed drone that questioned authority down the fifth avenue of Dante’s oblivion. X is a mean—shut your mouth.
Seventeenth century mentality is one hell of a way to garnish your wages, tithe your churchy felicitations, unnerve your mummy, and visibly caffeinate your virtues whilst two-stepping around the cantina with the babes of Eglantine. Time OUT of mind, if you ask me, essays like a Viking funeral, scats like Ella Baby Girl Fitzgerald, and purloins like a bebopping lil’ E-Poe on the fly.
In truth, X did want finding, but she wanted wooing, not titration, not Bunsen immolation, and not a science fair distillation of fodder on black foam core. She had in mind an afternoon of sultry eye-bashing at the Saturn Bar down in the greeny humid quads of the Ninth Ward, barfly miseries, barfly causalities, barfly mezzanine fury.
Consider it’s—let’s call her X—modest beginnings. Waif in the streets of Milwaukee, ex-Packer fan, renegade debutante, cotillion flame-out, Rainbow Girl, Enya background singer—these were her dreams, folks, not her actuality. In truth, it was not Milwaukee, it was Joliet; it was not ex-Packers, it was not ex-anything; no debutante, no flame-out, no Rainbows, no Celtic nuthin’: Eliza Doolittle, if anything, but not even that. More than anything, she longed to be the silly Barbie doll dreams of Minnie Khlaetsch, Minnie the Mooch, Minnie the Mouse, Minnie the ex post facto Modulator. Minnie’s bod may have been Joliet-bound, but her mind grew up on the streets of Brechtian Berlin, she Mack’d her knife, Mack’d her life, Mack’d the living cheese out of the nougat holes in her voodoo donuts. Cream cheese . . . better yet, Boursin cheese, Krakatoa-erupting into the gullets of the narrow-minded, the grilled cheese-hefted, the chipped beef on toasted, cracked wheat infested Minnie-grams of the Minneapolis elite.
Minnie so lacked for knowledge, but what she lacked for in knowledge, she more than made up for in eyelash-fluttering, Tinkerbell-tinkering, heartfelt dissipation. She longed into the night, like Laura Nyro’s ballad dressing, like “You see, this guy, this guy’s in love with you,”—yes, Minnie was the next Dionne Warwickian warbler, warbling into the heart of Burt Bee, sans her psychic Mama Margies, sans her Herb Alpert, sans her Margot Kidder Lois Lane, hirsute in her dark chocolate lederhosen, her distaff manicotti fur balls, an all-out monogrammed nightmare of Mardi Gras . . . poo.
Ask yourself: is this a fate worthy of Minnie? Is this a fate worthy of anyone of your acquaintance? Dig deep, mes amis, and find the Samaritan lurking in your fuzzy wuzzy bearishness. Ask around. Ask in. Ask why. Ask how. Ms Minnie, she gottta thang for the esses—Singapore, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sergio Leone. Eli Wallach em-poncho’d and sombrero’d made her swoon, in a postmodern Bieberswooning kind of way, a provocation of the senses, a derivation of the candid, a consolidation of the slithy toves.
See the girl: see her shadow in the waiting moments. See the GDP of her rising temps. See the ambidexterity of her cumulonimbus mammatus. Frogspent, she withered after the dimes, her per diem canceling out her carpe, her silent trout amplifying her Kilgores, her Brautigans, her postulant matrix. You canceled the debt, you say? Guess again: she raised you: she hammered you: she angled in for lost time, a merengue that out-Tito Puentes the varicose veins of your channeled avatar.
Call her to the veil. Silence all cell phones.
Scale the Bastille.
Amortize all mortgages.
Catch her before she—

Find It.
Find X.
Find now.