The Pink Panther (A Lost Episode)
Does anyone remember the Pink Panther? Well, I mean, obviously you do: it's just a matter of whether it's the cartoon or the film series. Starring an almost mute, anthropomorphic pink panther man with a heart of gold, and yellowy eyes to boot, the Pink Panther cartoons have been entertaining families for decades. One might even say that there was the wheel, the wagon, the cotton gin, and finally, the Pink Panther cartoon and film franchises.
As for me, my name is Jim. I live out of a truck. I used to be a married man with seventeen children, but my marriage was on the rocks and, ultimately, went soaring off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote when he fails to secure delicious roadrunner meat. "We have nothing in common", she said to me between disheveled pauses of tension. "Well, we do have one thing in common", I replied, referencing the time that we watched Breakfast at Tiffany's together, and both kinda liked it.
Given that this is a stupid argument for holding onto a failing relationship, Ms. Dakota Watson tossed me out of her house and filed a restraining order against me for being a dips***. With a sad heart, I turned to walk away before feeling the force of a blunt object smacking against my back neck area. I was instantly knocked into a coma. When I 'came to', I turned around and picked up the object, which, to my horror, was a VHS tape. The Pink Panther in: Disheveled Man's Blues. How topical. Bluesmen tend to sing about not getting any, and obviously, being grossly out of shape and no longer having a girlfriend, I wasn't about to get any either. I instantly realized my next step: to find a place that had a VCR, so I could set up the coax cables and discover the secret messages attached to my untimely break-up. Your face.
Now, I don't have any friends, so that wasn't an option. I went around to various schools and church buildings and asked them if they had a VCR, but they told me that VCRs were replaced years ago by Blu-ray DVD discs, or some other kind of technical mumbo-jumbo. I nearly fell into despair until I remembered the Goodwill store down the street. I latched onto the lightbulb over my head and drove the turtle van all the way down. After fooling the minimum wage prepubescent clerk to accept an expired credit card, I was the proud owner of a shiny new VCR. Sorry, no CODS.
Given that this was only part one of a three part enterprise of obtaining a VCR, setting up the VCR, and playing/watching the tape, I did the logical thing and faked my departure of the store, instead darting to the employee stockroom. My heart skipped a beat when I discovered, to my great dishevelment, an employee uniform and nametag. "Eureka!", I shouted, prompting the middle-aged morbidly obese lady next to me to yell "Shut the f*** up" so that she could watch her soaps. Feeling hurt, I nearly gave up and went home, but instead I flipped her 'the bird', yanked out her copy of As the World Yearns, and went right to work on watching the thing. She tattled about me to the boss, but he sided with me. "Jim is always right", he asserted. It felt good to be among friends. I'd never had friends before...
Now, straight from the get-go, it was obvious that what I was perusing on screen was... not quite right. You know the typical, jazzy Pink Panther theme song by Harry Mancini? It was replaced by... I know you're not going to believe me, but it was a crunkrock cover by indie media darlings 'Brokencyde'!
Pink Panther, get crunk
Y'all suck on dick
Pink Panther get stuck
On hos who ain't worth s***
Sippin' on juice
Of kumquats and ale
I know you think you're a good person but you killed her and it's all your fault Jim-
Okay... no. This was unacceptable. I did nothing wrong. I may have herpes, but I'm not a killer. I have soul, but I'm not a soldier. In a fit of rage, I shut the tape off and smashed it with a hammer. With all of that said: there's something that I should let you know about human nature. We tend to choose short-term solutions to satisfy long-term problems, which may feel blissful in the moment but in the long haul causes us immense grief. When I stole that hammer from the employee stock room, smashed the VHS tape to the bits, and tossed it into the middle-aged woman's face, killing her instantly, I was not thinking about ramifications. A potch-marked teenage boy screamed at my terrifyingly short-sighted mistake. It was now his turn to report my mishaps to the boss. "Jim's always right. Now go sort the f***ing tide pods", I could hear him chortle. Whew. No police, no nothing. I breathed a sigh of relief, grabbed the body, dragged it across the hardwood employee stockroom floor, and gave sweet Mrs. Puffnstuff a five-star salute and a proper burial.
After cleaning up the puce and crimson trail that had been left behind, I returned to the stock room and turned the TV back on. It was only just then that I realized that I had made a horrifying mistake: I went through all of that trouble to illegally obtain a VCR, but I didn't even need one because the employee stockroom was already well-equipped. Eager to correct my error, I picked up the excess VCR and tossed it out the window, s***tering the glass and sending shards flying, impaling the potch-marked employee right in the face. Highly realistic gore flew everywhere. So much highly realistic gore that it took me forever to mop and wipe and conduct two funerals in the same fifteen minute span, but it is what it is. "Looks like we're going to need to hire more people", my makeshift boss nonchalantly asserted.
Being a five-star employee with a five-star conscious, I took the turtle van and roamed the streets for the homeless. After relentless requests to buy them hot coffees and f-words (that means 'cigarette's) from dunkin donuts (yes, some dunkin donuts do carry cigarettes--or at least they do here in downtown Trenton), they finally agreed to apply for the Goodwill customer service representatives in return for a place to stay for the night. "Good work, Jim. This deserves a promotion", Mr. Makeshift Boss proclaimed. He swiftly resigned, inspired by my goodwill to serve Goodwill goodwillly to promote me to his previous position. What a nice guy.
My new life turned out to not be so bad. Giving homeless people a van to sleep in over the night, taking people's welfare checks in return for antique clocks that no longer work and herpes-covered, unhinged microwave doors by day. "We're in the money", I told my underlings, Rupurt and Murdoch, prior to dismissing them for their mandatory 10-minute break.
With all of that said, there was still a part of me that felt unfulfilled. Perhaps I should go see a ball game, or a broadway show. Perhaps trim my neckbeard. Purchase a new fedora. Again, I didn't know why, but something didn't feel quite right. But then it finally dawned on me...
I had never watched the conclusion of that Pink Panther VHS tape. Did the Pink Panther finally win? And what was the general plot of the episode, if so? After all, I had only watched through the opening theme. Now a newfound 'thousandaire' from my retail store management position (I'm a thrifty guy for a thrift story employee, donchaknow), I had enough invested in the bank to actually purchase a VHS tape off of eBay. I figured that, if I had missed out on an enlightening experience, then what I'd witness this time around would make up for it, and if it was just an ordinary children's cartoon with a strangely me-centric opening theme song, then I could at least resell it on eBay.
BigNoseClouseauChick earned my $5.76 in Western Union urgent-money (plus shipping), and I got myself an experience that would change my life in ways that I could never do justice through words alone. However, I'll try anyway, given that there's no other medium available. I fast forwarded to where I left off. Suddenly: the fast forward button detached right off, falling from the controller, as if I had had been pressing down on it so hard that it lost the will to remote! That alone should have been foul omen enough for me to forget about the tape, quit my job, and try to bribe Veronica or whatever the f*** her name was to let me move back in with her. I knew that women like chocolate and roses, and there were some used chocolate and roses in a cardboard box toward the back of the stockroom. It was almost like a sign. An option for me to opt out and go back to living a normal, wholesome, healthy life. And as my former boss had always said: Jim was never wrong. Right?
WRONG.
Now, although the Pink Panther show starred the eponymous Pink Panther himself, that didn't mean that there weren't other characters in the program. For example, there was a spin-off of the elitist French detective from the movie series played by Steve Martin, and there was also a blue aardvark, appropriately monikered 'Blue Aardvark'. Rather than starting off with a Pink Panther animation, I was greeted by Blue Aardvark singing to himself about, of all things, how all of his friends were dying lately. Toward the end of each stanza, he screamed to himself, and I s*** you not, the 'camera' or whatever you call that thing in cartooning zoomed in on his eyes, which were highly realistic, bloodshot, and blood red. Blood is a pretty scary thing naturally, but so is sudden zooming animation on people's strange appendages! I, myself, let out a scream, prompting Rupert and Murdoch to run in and check up on me. I could only bumble 'L-l-l-l... look', pointing to the old-fashioned Zenith tube-knob television screen, and the Blue Aardvark sing-about-death sequence, which looped for another eight and a half minutes. As much as this all bothered me, Rupert and Murdoch didn't even flinch a teet. "Taco enchilida loco cabaza", one muttered to another in their native Spanish, making a circular 'coocoo' motion and leaving me alone to myself in horror. "Some friends you are!", I screamed, tossing dried gray cinderblocks at one of them... whichever had one of those typical Spanish handlebar mustaches... in disgust. I mean, I didn't know them individually, they looked alike to me. The living one dragged off the dead one to, I presume, bury him and hold a funeral (if they do that sort of thing--I don't know much about Spanish festivities), I can tell you that much.
The next segment showed a bunch of landmines, ditches, and bloody cartoon bodies. This did bother me a little bit, but since it wasn't highly realistic, I acknowledged that it could have been much worse. "Time to make Pink stink like a mutilated corpse!", Blue Aardvark screamed to himself in a voice that sounded like Joey Soprano or whatever his name is from that vulgar HBO sitcom that people talk about a lot. Well, O.K., then... but that wasn't enough to foreshadow what happened next: Blue Aardvark threw a blue grenade at the Pink Panther, but like it often does in cartoons, it didn't explode. Pink Panther motioned for Blue Aardvark to come over, and also like what happens in most cartoons in this kind of segment, I expected the grenade to go off and blow up Blue Aardvark, similar to that old Rabbit-Season-Duck-Season Looney Tunes short. But instead...
"We interrupt this news broadcast for a special news bulletin!". It was a cartoon news set, though the eyes of the newsman did look quite a bit lifelike, bloodshot and with nerves and bulging like wide saucers and all. "...We're all a little dead inside." I gaped. What the hell was this doing in a children's cartoon? "Also, we know you killed your wife, Jim. Seriously, could you have at least gotten a room?".
O.K, this was seriously pissing me off. Both the accusation, and the non-sequitur. I grabbed the very same hammer from before, and smashed THIS tape into teenie weenie little plastic tape pieces. Intensely frustrated and obsessed with demonstrating my dominance, I collected the plastic and rubbery (tape tape is made of rubber) pieces and shreds and attached them to a macaroni necklace. I had never been so proud. Hot pockets. If only my wife were still alive to see this.
And that's when it all hit me. Something was not quite right about my life. Something, or someone, was painfully absent. I went up to the front register and talked to Randy, our freshest hire from Green Acres Mental Asylum. "Randy: did you ever get the feeling that you were being watched?" "Yeah, Jim. By my ex-wife when I tweet on her over Facebook using the instantgram.", he chuckled to myself. Okay: this was unacceptable. Enmaddened and unable to cope with the horrifying truth, I reached for my cleaver, stashed comfortably inside my blazer. "Oh, no you don't!", he shouted like a madman, escaping through the Goodwill entrance like a Bat out of Hell. "What a maroon", I mumbled at this act of unmanly cowardice. I shrugged, sighed, and chucked my cleaver, which soared right across the used birth control aisle and right into the back of the skull of an elderly regular in a sleezy disco suit. Highly realistic gore spilled everywhere, over both the lambskin and latex condoms. "Serves ya right, Larry.", I mumbled with a chuckle.
You know that bittersweet feeling of accomplishment? It's like you've done everything you can and should, but as you have indeed done everything you can and should, you know it's onto the next realm of virtue. Tears welling in my eyes, I untacked my name badge, erased my name with a blackboard eraser, and wrote in a new name: 'Pedro'. "That's 'Murdoch'", said Pedro, with a scowl. I apologized, and accepted Pedro's invitation to a fiesta in the county orange field after work, though I had no intention of going.
I had to be... somewhere else.
I did everything straight out of the book. Picked out a previously owned teddy bear, rung up some hair gel, and smothered my armpits in Axe Body Spray. I was going to be a real romantic. It was time for me to be the man Vanessa always needed, and deserved. I flung my final purchase on the counter--a CD copy of Hootie and the Blowfish's Cracked Rear View--and walked off into the sunset. By that, I mean the store's front entrance, but the sky did happen to be a brilliant violet-reddish hue.
"Your rear crack is in view!", shouted Pedro from behind me. Disheveled and delirious at this lowbrow dishonorment, I considered setting Goodwill on fire, but I decided that skipping the festive celebration was enough of an eye-for-an-eye. I hopped into the turtle van, and turned the key, kicking out some homeless guy who thought he lived in my van for some unknown f***ing reason.
It was Christmas, I had realized. Good thing that I picked out a Santa Claus teddy. Pulling onto Hootandhollar Road filled me with bittersweet nostalgia, while I squinted Costanza-style in search of house #311, in which Veronessa domiciled.
I let out a gasp of unadulterated joy when I finally rediscovered it. I reached for the bear and the Blowfish, brushed back my gel-polished mullet, and reached for the van handle. I had finally arrived. I had finally...
No. Something didn't feel right. There was sadness in the air. Something had changed. The door was... boarded? Windows... boarded? Her car door windows...boarded? Had my brain been tossed overboard...ed, this entire time? Just who was I? Where in the world was I...?
Perplexed, I returned to my car and pulled out a hammer. It was time to finally learn the shocking truth. It took a little bit of determination and elbow grease, but I managed to pry off the wooden door panels, lengthy boardscrews at all. In my fierce rage, I plucked them off with the back of the hammer top, before tossing the tool, bear, CD, and nails over the neighbor's shrubbery. There was a scream and a crimson trickle. Whatever! I grabbed at the door knob and gave it a twist. No turn. I took out a screwdriver and unscrewed it until it dropped. Raging from steroid abuse, I kicked the thing and it flung over the leafy vegetation, prompting an additional hollar and quickening stream of the oozing red stuff. Whatever! I stuck my hand in the hole like I used to do and flung the front door around, hellbent, til death does us part, to tell Vickie that I loved her and returned home a changed man, and she could stop hiding from the world now.
"Hello? Baby V?". No reply. I looked around the kitchen. The drawers were empty, except for cobwebs and sweet spicy chili doritos crumbs. I tried the bathroom. The toilet had been pulled out. The medicine cabinet was bare, except for an unkempt pile of discarded syringes. I ran upstairs. The stairs creaked, and all three of the bedrooms... were empty. Nothing. No beds, no curtains, no ceiling fans... and no notes. It was like I was in a ghost town.
I held my head in my hands and fell to the floor. A sudden pain and realization of what I had done. Who I once was... I was pathetic. I was a bad man. But was I truly a changed man? If I was, wouldn't Vernice have waited for me? Did she remarry? Did she produce another seventeen children? Did she...
She...
No...
No...
NO!!!
It... memories. Memories came flooding in like an ice cream headache. When you slurp a slurpee too fast and even clenching your slimy, slug-like, sugar-coated tongue to the roof of your mouth accomplishes nothing. You hurt. You freeze. Just a man alone with his thoughts, and discarded dreams of what was once promising. Delicious. This was not delicious. This taste was unshakable. I couldn't...
I passed out for who knows how long, but a perusal through the undecorated, unadorned windows revealed that it was nighttime outside. There was nothing that I could do to bring her back. I let out a sigh of resignation. I had resigned from my lifelong career earlier that day, and now, I had to resign myself from my lifelong romance. I creaked back down the stairs... uneased on down the road, one might say. And then I...
I tripped over the final step, and fell flat on my face. I was sure I deserved it, and I laughed at the divine justice of my punishment and, in a sick, sick sense, retribution on myself. I almost forgot to turn around and check what I tripped over, but let me tell you... I did. And let me tell you what it was... whether you choose to accept the shocking truth itself.
It was a VHS tape. A blank one. What could it be? There were no other objects in the house, so there wasn't a VCR I could play it on. Except for...
Goodwill! Thank my lucky stars I didn't burn it down! I swung the door back open, walked past the police tape (careful not to alter the scene of the crime or whatever, who cares), and hopped back into the turtle van like a bunny. A smart bunny. A fun bunny. A clever bunny. Bugs Bunny. Dafty Duck. I turned the key, backed out, hit something (I'll assume it was a midget, 'cause why not), and drove back to Goodwill to find...
Boarded... windows? What? How? What? ... How? What? Well, this wasn't going to do! I clawed open my trunk, rummaging through guns, gasoline, packs of matches, daggers, rope, and... a hammer. I took the hammer, and tried to unpry the boards. It was no use. f*** this s***! Channeling my inner JaMarcus Russell, I tossed the friggin' piece of iron right on through the frontstore window. I climbed in, cutting my arms and legs and fingers and toes and not giving a s***. I had to get to the stockroom...
No register. No items on sale. No corpses of disco legends. Strange. But whatever! The important thing is that, when I made it back to the stockroom that I used to call home, there it was. Old-fashioned Zenith boob tube. And a... a VCR. My VCR. My favorite. Mine. MINE! ME! ... MINE!! I crammed the tape into the VCR like a meth head doing I don't know something that assists them in injecting meth into their system. I pressed play on the same old remote control that I was accustomed to from my younger years, but the stupid button fell off because it's a coward. Stupid button! Be a MAN!!!
The intro was different this time. The Pink Panther smoked a great big bag of weed and got bloodshot eyes from the high and then ate an entire pack of Haribo Sugar Free CLASSIC Gummi Bears and then the cartoon camera or whatever you call it again I don't even know zoomed to a bathroom door while you could hear the Pink Panther scream in intestinal pain. Meanwhile, the scene changed to an orange field where a handsome Spanish orange picker with tanned skin from years spent working out in the sun I guess was hard at work. And then... an attractive woman.
"Hey, Pedro." "MEES DAKOTA! WE CAN'T LEET JEEM SEE US LIKE THEES!" "Oh, Pedro. You know that our love is... forbidden. But now it's time for... ...
... what's bidden."
The beautiful, youthful brunette grabs the gardener's hand and runs away with him. The sound of a car starting and roaring away from the house is heard. Finally, the scene returns to the bathroom door. It creaks open, and the Pink Panther looks around, confused. Somehow, he can tell that something has changed while he was away. His head swings back and forth, left-to-right, in swift, horizontal motions, while checking the living room. Then he checks the kitchen. Heads back to the bathroom. Finally, up the creaking stairs. There are three bedrooms, and they are all empty, except for the very last room that he checks, in which, toward the edge of the most distant wall, in the most distant corner from the entrance door...
He finds a note. Bewildered, he snatches the note. Picks it up. Reads it. Animated pupils sway back and forth to simulate the central character's reading of the document. And...
He pauses. His mouth gapes. And then closes. Shuts. Clearly. Firm. And then he... he lets out a single tear drop. He runs downstairs. He runs outside, past his neighbor's shrubbery. He opens the trunk of his car. He finds, and grabs a rope. He runs back aside. He stares into where the stars above would be, if not for the roof. And then...
He tosses the rope aside. He darts to the kitchen. He grabs a variety of household objects in a fit of rage. In a seemingly random order. A blender. A microwave. A toaster. A waffle iron. One by one, he takes them all... each and every one... and he tosses them out of the window. A scream is heard, presumably from the other side of the window, from the other side of the neighbor's shrubbery.
Finally, there are police sirens. And a knock on the door. The Pink Panther's eyes do not even move. He doesn't twitch. Doesn't flinch. For a full three minutes and eleven seconds, he just stays the same. In the same position. Nothing changes. Nothing ever changes at all.
Finally: a zoom-in of the Pink Panther's face is shown. It is a steady zoom-in... gradual, yet somehow, chilling. Horrifying. Terrifying. His teeth... are jagged. Shattered. As if he had taken a series of terrible, terrible blows. His gums... blackened. Like tar. And finally... his arms. And his legs. Could it be...
...Where he used to shoot up?...
There was no audio, but I had subtitles turned on. The Pink Panther didn't make a noise, but there were ellipses. Dot dot dots. And while there were no words, or even audible sounds associated with, the dot dot dots... the name... the name gave it all away.
The name was not 'The Pink Panther', or 'Pink', or even 'Panther'.
His name was Jim.
My name was Jim.
The tape went to static, and abruptly ended. I sat in silence for awhile. Until morning. The harsh light of day.
Then, I opened my trunk. For gas...
...and matches.
The end.
YouTube reading
Credited to DaveTheUseless
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