Golden Booty Duty: The Mystery Of The Dueling Poets

There’s a reason limericks aren’t allowed in this pub

“Absolutely NO limericks allowed,” specifies the sign on the windowless door that takes Wonder Woman strength to peel open. What’s the story here, I think to myself, flattening my sundress to my thighs as the wind threatens to sail me across the nearby canal.

As I meander into a grungy little pub baptized “Elm Street Public House” the stench of rotting peanuts and moldy lemons cascades over my freshly lipsticked face. This bar is completely unlike the airy canopy of the trees after which it is named. Next to the coat hook, etched at eye level into the turn of the century bricks the color and feel of fossilized dinosaur snot, are the following words.

The fewer the lines The greater the dimes Gold and booty A writer’s duty Say hello to my limericky rhymes

Scratched under it block letters spell out by A. Hohl.

Turning this place into a sensation might be a challenge, I admit. I’ve morphed tampon companies, funeral homes, and corner stores into marketing successes — so I trust the creative forces inhabiting my head can do the same here.

“Can we really do something with this place?” I whisper to Eugene, the more sensible of voices living amongst my gray matter. His gruff tone softens – I mean her. She’s been with me so long that sometimes it escapes me that she’s currently transitioning both socially and legally. She’s the strong one and her confidence in our abilities wavers only about as often as Duck Dynasty dudes shave.

“The limericks sign has something to do with something, though,” warns Tabitha. She’s a lethal combination of a cautious soccer mom and a hyperactive cheerleader. She twists her flowing smurf-blue hair into knots as she’s apt to do when straining her brain cells. She and Eugene are frenemies.

“We don’t even know what they want yet,” I remind us all, stepping further into the oak-paneled room. Twisting on a bar stool towards me is a cream soda complexioned man, the gap in his front teeth as big as the silver belt buckle at his waist.

“Well, welcome, dahhhling…” Is he drunk? Or just from South Carolina? His sizeable stumble towards me, clouded in what smells like Hubba Bubba, gives nothing away. He could be diabetic, for all I know. The tobacco-stained toes coiling from his flip-flops, slightly resemble those of my grandmother’s oozing sausage feet. Just before she had them removed and pickled in a jar that now rests on her mantle next to Granddad’s ashes.

“What’s with the limerick limitation?” I spew before I can stop myself. He only chuckles, sounding as deep and hearty as though we’re snuggled inside an almost empty wine cask.

“Well, dahhhling, let me tell ya a story.” He pulls a chair out of nowhere and gently presses me into it.

“A Doctor used to reside in these here parts,” he starts, pouring what looks like urine into three crystal glasses. He tips back two of them before pushing one towards me. “It’s always one for me and one for me ma. And one now for ya, of course.”

“What kind of doctor?” I ask, already recklessly sucked into his tale.

“The kind ya want around when ya gets one of them their mysterious ail-ee-mints. He could fix anythin’.”

Doctor Funny some called him. Others referred to him as The Ice Berg since his surname sounded more like a frozen floating mountain than the German fortification from whence it originated. People ‘round these parts were anti-Deutsch so sadly “the less kraut the better”.

Since he was knee-high to a carriage wheel everyone in the surrounding county knew he was a loquacious logophile. His mother claimed his curly-haired head popped out of her womb already blathering,

There was a young lad from Womb Escaping a dark, dark tomb emblazoned by light not a stitch of fright sighed “Welcome me to this room!”

Before he started at the local one-room schoolhouse he had already been designated the mayor’s choice confidant and heralded as the local pastor’s earpiece advisor. So imagine his shock at discovering, when catapulting his tiny frame onto the front row bench in class, that beside him sat Will Hull.

Most knew Will as Boat Boy — for obvious reasons and also because his father, an infamous local one eyebrow-ed pirate, had been slaughtered while heisting the bejeweled collar belonging to the Queen’s corgi. To the ones claiming the biggest piece of his heart, Will was A. Hohl.

It was commonly understood that though Boat Boy and The Ice Berg had never been formally introduced, they were mortal enemies. These two brainy ruffians were the only locals intelligent enough to spell the word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis before they could print their own name.

And here they sat close enough to smell one another’s ear wax. From the millisecond their gazes connected a lightning-filled fever accompanied their desire to best one another. A lifelong rivalry had been lit and their attempts to dominate were its fuel.

Everything between these two involved competition — from algebra tests to shoe brands to life partners. Boat Boy used his mother’s best soup ladle to scratch “I’ll take him down” into his bedpost. The Ice Berg carved “I win everything” into the first step of a cement pad his father had fashioned leading into the shed.

“So they competed. Typical testosterone-y stuff,” I sigh, knocking my Fuschia nail against the tumbler in a request for more whiskey. It burns worse than the nail polish remover I’d accidentally chugged as a child and yet I continue to stun my larynx.

“But it was here, dahhhling, where it all came to a head. Didja see the limerick on the wall on that their way in? Boat Boy’s very last communication.” A chill crawls down my spine and suddenly I am very sure that both Boat Boy and The Ice Berg are sprawled out in one of the pub’s crusty booths.

“Me loves ya both and I absolutely can’t decide,” she declared, chunky calloused hands gripping her apron-clad hips. Her fingers still dripped from soaping dirty shot glasses.

Annie was her name and she’d spent four years slip-sliding between the rivals. Weighing kisses, canoodles, and midnight discussions, she still waffled as to which limerick-spewing genius should lend his brains and genetic fortitude to her future fledglings.

“So, whoever there comes up with the winnin’ limerick, judged by me ma, and enough cold hard cash to buy this here me Da’s pub will also get me womb and me heart.”

For a week Boat Boy and The Ice Berg limericked through the noonday cannon and well past post-dinner aperitifs. “I’ll take him down,” Boat Boy muttered until his lips bled. “I win everything,” muttered The Ice Berg to his rottweiler, his neighbors, and the dandelions he weeded from the front flowerbed.

Limericks were sliced into paper then discarded. Re-written, edited, revised, and chucked into the woodstove. Without knowing it, on the thirteenth day of ‘the contest’ at the exact same time the clock chimed 3:33 pm in both homes, the two completed what they hailed as their best poetry. Gathering up a sack of cash drained from their family holdings, poem tightly fisted, they both marched their way to Annie’s family pub.

“What happened? Who won?” simultaneously asks me, Eugene, and Tabitha. Tabitha has chewed her nails to her bloody cuticles and Eugene has yanked most of her hair from a previously meticulous ponytail.

“Well,” he says, slapping a hand as thick as a bible on the bar top. Droplets from a beerish puddle spray his ruddy cheeks. “No one, I s’pose.”

“What do you mean, NO ONE?” I am shouting. A need to know who won Annie’s loyal love presses against my ribs from the inside.

“I ‘spose Boat Boy did. He was declared them their winner.”

“So he and Annie got married, had kids, ran this pub?” My bets had been on him while Eugene and Tabitha sided with The Ice Berg.

“No,” he sighs, tossing back what must be his fiftieth glass of liquor. “He had just finished etchin’ that there limerick on that there wall when The Ice Berg paced in. Hauled Boat Boy’s ma’s soup ladle from his there jacket pocket.”

“The one Boat Boy carved ‘I’ll take him down’ with? He stole it?” I screech.

“Yep, that’s the one, sweetums. He fashioned that there sucker into a shank sword and stabbed it right through and through Boat Boy’s ribs and into his there heart. Then he shot himself right through his own damn heart. They slumped down together, and just before they kicked the ole bucket, sighed their last, entered the Pearly Gates, they both shouted at Annie together ‘Gold and Booty’.”

“Gold and Booty?”

“Yep, Gold and Booty. Holdin’ hands. Died together sayin’ ‘Gold and Booty’.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I lisp from my slightly drunken lips.

“That there’s what you’re here to find out, dahhhhling.” His Michelin Man arms hook under my armpits and lift me to standing. He smacks a thick palm against his heart and mimics stabbing himself before slumping his pouffy body dramatically to the sticky floor.

Limericks, dueling poets, dank bars, and way too much whiskey. How did I get into this Golden Booty Duty mess?

©Jennifer J. McDougall 2021

Thanks to Will Hull for his limerick and prompt/challenge. And to Michael Burg, MD (AKA Medium Michael Burg) whom I am sure can handle a jab or two.