The haberdashery, act III
Haunted on March 19, 2006.
Once again, I flopped on by Mr. Thaddeus C.L. Harshbarger’s haberdashery on Wednesday, inquiring as to whether or not he would like to take on an apprentice. Once again, he said no. So I begged him, and pleaded with him, and taunted him about his daughter having been arrested in a brothel along with her “client” and six small goats, and once again he said, “Hell no.” This time, he added, “Come back again, and I’ll shoot you with a baseball bat, you knave.”
I was too frightened to tell him that you can’t shoot people with baseball bats (only schmongel them, and perhaps dingleberry their hamsters), so I slithered lithe porcupines from my pores and ran out of their in a casual saunter.
Again I visited the local eigencafé, now called the Crammin’ Pegs, and ordered a ham-and-spam sandwich with some scrambled eggs on the side (I wanted to play with them first), along with a single strip of Canadian bacon and a dollop of mint ice cream on top of it. They told me they serve neither ham nor eggs anymore, and then three large waitresses surrounded me and crammed a peg into my eye socket to drive the point home.
I ran out of there faster than you can shout “Great Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer’s Ghost riding a pure white stallion into the sunset along the shores of the beautiful Lake Erie!” while their waitresses chased me, trying to cram more pegs into my body wherever they could fit. It was a zany and whimsical trip home, filled with mirth and alabaster.
Two days later I finally figured out why they chose such an unusual new name for their eigencafé.