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L'HISTOIRE DE TED
By Fegtet
This is a story I wrote while high (on life). It's not a fanfic, but I felt like sending it anyway. Those of you who are truly insane should appreciate it.
Once upon a time, there was a farmer named Ted. Ted wasn't a really good farmer, but he got along all right by teaching German on the side. One day, Ted was at work when a letter came from the President telling him that he was going to have to die. Ted really didn't understand this, but he was a good, patriotic American, so he followed the simple, easy-to-read instructions in the letter and hit himself over the head until he was dead. Fortunately, he wasn't very strong, so he only knocked himself out, and his blind neighbor found him and brought him to the hospital.
After a few days there, it was discovered that Ted had a hidden talent. He was able to sculpt magnificent monuments using bedpans and frozen peas. On his second day in the hospital, he met a traveling acrobat who liked peas a lot. The two became great friends. At lunch, however, Ted had just pulled some bedpans out of a pocket he had sewn onto his hospital gown to make it more stylish, and was about to amuse the other patients by constructing one of his sculptures, when his acrobat friend saw the wasteful use that he was putting the peas to (the acrobat didn't appreciate art) and attacked him with his crutches. Fortunately for Ted, Nurse Fixabooboo happened to be keeping a close eye on him at that precise moment. Unlike the acrobat, she was an art fanatic; she loved Ted's sculptures, and was hoping to see him in action. However, as soon as the acrobat let out a bloodcurdling cry and hurled himself at Ted in defense of the helpless peas, the nurse grabbed the nearest sharp rock and rushed to the telephone, where she ordered a medium taco pizza from Happy Joe's. After using the pizza to lure the acrobat away from Ted, she cut it with the sharp rock and they all made up over lunch.
Ted was so grateful to her that he decided to ask her to accompany him on his quest to find out why the president wanted him dead. Upon hearing his request, Nurse Fixabooboo gently explained to him that her first duty was to the hospital, and suggested that he buy a nice dog instead, or perhaps a pot-bellied pig. As it happened, Ted had such a pig back at his farm, and after thanking the nurse for showing him the way, he launched himself through the window and ran home. On the way to his farm, Ted met a small band of ninjas who were going to Canada because they felt that they would be better ninjas if they had Canadian accents. He kindly told them they would get there faster if they went straight instead of going around in circles, and continued on his way. After reaching his farm, he looked all around for his pot-bellied pig Zork, but couldn't find her anywhere. After several more hours of searching, he gave up and went to bed, a sad and broken man.
The next morning, Ted decided to mourn the loss of Zork by brushing his teeth extra hard, which was a good thing, because if he hadn't, he never would have gone back into his house (Ted had been sleeping in the cornfield ever since he saw "Field of Dreams") and he wouldn't have found his second letter from the President. This new message explained that Zork was being held prisoner at the White House and would never, ever, ever be released. Ted became so angry at the Clintons that he burned his poster of Chelsea in a fiery fire, and set off toward Washington immediately.
However, as noble and admirable as Ted's quest was, he soon realized that Washington DC was a lot farther than Washington the state (his farm was located on a small, rocky stretch of beach in northern California, which was a big part of the reason why he had had to go into teaching to support himself), and that he just wasn't going to be able to walk all the way. So, after thinking about his predicament for a while, he decided to hitchhike, since he didn't have a car, couldn't afford a plane, didn't believe in trains, and was deathly afraid of buses (Ted's favorite aunt had been tragically defingered in an accident with a bulldozer, causing him to develop an irrational fear of all vehicles whose names started with "b").
At first, no one would stop for Ted, and this puzzled him greatly. After awhile, though, he realized that the drivers couldn't see him because he was standing behind a tree, which wouldn't have been a problem if they had had x-ray vision like Superman, as Ted had naively assumed. He cleverly improved the situation by moving out into the open, and before long, one of the cars began to slow down.
Ted wasn't sure whether or not he wanted to get in the car, since it was a convertible with the top down and he didn't want the wind to mess up his hair, but when the driver offered him some candy, his mind was made up. The man explained that he was on his way to Disneyworld, where, he had heard, Mickey Mouse could be found. Because he didn't want to have to find another car going east, Ted mischievously refrained from telling the man that Mickey was also at nearby Disneyland. He then paid for his selfish silence when he suddenly realized that if Mickey Mouse was in two places at once, he couldn't possibly be real, thus destroying his entire belief system. This painful revelation caused him to cry as he hadn't cried since he saw the end of "Old Yeller", until the nice man finally dropped him off in Washington, DC.
At the outskirts of the capital city, a sadder but wiser Ted began the final stage of his epic trek. He didn't feel too well, as he had once again forgotten that everyone (except maybe Superman) needed to eat and sleep occasionally, but he was too tired to try to figure out what was wrong, and ended up taking the far more intelligent course of passing out on the sidewalk. Fortunately, a roving tribe of salmon merchants rescued him before he had been stepped on once too often, and nursed him back to health at their carefully hidden headquarters in the seamy underbelly of the city. After thanking them and giving them a multitude of helpful fishing tips (by a happy coincidence, Ted knew everything there was to know about salmon, having once been one in a dream), he continued on his journey, remembering to stop for food and drink when necessary.
After several minutes of wandering around the city in a fruitless effort to figure out just which white house the President lived in, Ted decided that he was being silly, and sensibly began knocking on doors and asking. Eventually, just as he was beginning to despair, he found the right door through sheer luck. He was walking up to his thirty-first white house when he noticed a baby carriage across the street. This horrible sight brought back a rush of painful memories of Ted's favorite aunt running around fingerlessly near the hated bulldozer that had cut short her promising career in glove modeling. Terrified, and completely without regard for the safety of any ants, mice, or small children that may have been underfoot, Ted ran screaming from the scene. He hurdled fences, charged through hedges, and even vaulted over one particularly tall wall that surrounded an unusually large and well-kept lawn, at the center of which was a really big white house that Ted had somehow missed before.
Intrigued by this unexpected development, Ted marched up to the door of the house and was about to knock on the door when a black-clad figure restrained him. He turned to see the small band of ninjas he had helped earlier. The ninjas stealthily explained that after taking his advice and going in a straight line, they had reached Canada and been enlightened by the wonderful accents there, and had then decided to track down Ted and return the favor if possible. It was fortunate for him that they had come, since he was wearing his "I'm really mad at the President because he tried to kill me" T-shirt that he had gotten at a custom T-shirt shop during the break he had taken after checking fifteen white houses, and that wouldn't have gone over well with the Secret Service people.
The ninjas used their newly enhanced powers of concealment to sneak Ted into the White House without being seen. Ted almost gave them away when he squealed with glee upon seeing his hero, Newt Gingrich, but Ninja #4 quieted him by stuffing a tasty doughnut into his mouth. Before long, the little group had reached the President's office. Ted waited a moment for the ninjas to break in and quietly tie up Mr. Clinton, who hadn't heard or seen them because he was talking on a pretty red phone. Once he had his audience, Ted pulled the two letters he had received out of the pocket of the hospital gown he was still wearing under his T-shirt (because it was so stylish) and slammed them down on the President's desk. He tried to angrily explain what terrible personal losses these letters had caused him, but he hadn't swallowed his tasty doughnut yet, so all that came out was angry mumbling and a few angry crumbs. However, Mr. Clinton had learned to read early in life, and after looking over the letters, he told Ted that he had never seen them before, and that they probably had been written by Ted's mean blind neighbor, Mr. Evil.
Ted wasn't really sure how the President had known this, but wisely attributed it to Mr. Clinton's mutant powers. He thought about things, and realized that the President's advice explained a lot, like why the letters were written in Braille (their writer had thoughtfully included both subtitled versions for our non-blind friends and tape-recorded editions for our blind but illiterate acquaintances), and why they had been signed "Your Mean Blind Neighbor, Mr. Evil I Mean the President". He apologized for jumping to conclusions, and left with the ninjas after repaying Mr. Clinton for his inconvenience by teaching him farming songs and reciting dirty limericks.
Back outside the White House, Ted and the ninjas parted company, since the ninjas were on their way to England (using their straight-line trick), where they hoped to become even better ninjas by creating a powerful meld of Canadian and English accents. After a long, tearful goodbye involving numerous group hugs and Eskimo kisses, Ted's companions slunk off, leaving him alone once again to face the perils of our nation's capitol. This time, however, there would be no hitchhiking, for Ted's recent adventures had rendered him both dirty and scary-looking, and no one was about to consider stopping for him (except for a few stray dogs and imaginary wildebeests), not even when he tried to trick them by hiding near the road and then suddenly jumping out and flailing his arms invitingly. But his love for Zork kept him going, and seven hours later, his fascination with all things bright, yellow,and honking led him to a new discovery: the taxicab.
By this time, Ted's Zork-finding funds had dwindled to three and a halfpennies and a pretty rock, but as it turned out, this particular cab had been stolen by its driver (a homely young woman named Herbert), and therefore did not require any fare. Unfortunately, it seemed that Herbert hadn't really expected any passengers; Ted, as he quickly found out, had understandably mistaken the car's sudden decrease in speed, blaring horn, and open rear window as an invitation to jump inside, when actually these things had been caused by the rock that had broken the window, an errant spider monkey in the engine, and a classic episode of "Mr. Ed" (though not necessarily in that order). After apologizing for his mistake, Ted managed to negotiate his way to a ride home, in return for helping his hostess with the grueling task of engine-monkey removal. A few short hours later, the groovy yellow cab entered the great state of California.
The pair had almost reached Ted's neighborhood when an unhappy accident brought about their separation. Ted, for some unknown reason, had chosen this time to ask Herbert when her baby was due. The argument that resulted revealed to him that Herbert, whom he had taken to be a homely, young, pregnant woman, was, in fact, a homely, young, portly man (though, unbeknownst to both of them, he really was pregnant). Needless to say, Ted had to walk the rest of the way home. But there was only a mile or two left,and he was able to sustain his worn-out body on wild grubs and berries until he finally reached Mr. Evil's house.
A craftier man might, at this point, have tried to find some clever way to sneak undetected into the edifice of evil, but Ted was an up front kind of guy, so he marched right up to his neighbor's door and knocked, yelling that he had come to rescue his pig. When mean Mr. Evil wouldn't open the door, Ted was at a loss. He then knocked again, screaming in his most fearsome voice that he was only a harmless girl scout, but for some reason, this plan failed as well. Then, he decided to be tricky. He went to the nearest typewriter shop, and after scaring away the proprietor by yelling "FIRE!", he found a machine that would type Braille and altered his first letter, which was now signed "Your Mean Blind Neighbor, Mr. Evil I Mean the President I Mean Barney the Dinosaur". Ted knew that his neighbor would follow the instructions in the letter, since all truly evil people love Barney. He deposited the letter in Mr. Evil's mailbox, called for the paramedics to come get Mr. Evil, and went to giggle in the bushes near the mailbox. Several minutes later, the ambulance came, and Ted told the medics to wait in the bushes with him. Eventually, Mr. Evil came out and read the letter. He followed the easy-to-read instructions, just as Ted had hoped he would,and the ambulance took him away. Ted triumphantly charged into the house and searched until he found Zork glued to a wall. The pig was very happy to see him, and Ted promised that they would never be parted again.
* * *
Shortly after Ted had returned from his adventure, he began to realize that he wasn't satisfied with his old life anymore. Mr. Evil's fiendish plots had taught him that danger can strike at any moment, even while one is at the mailbox, or in the hospital, or in the White House, or flying high above the countryside in a helium-induced stupor, and he was determined not to let anymore surly blind people jerk him around like mad puppeteers again. Furthermore, he was no longer the same old Ted who could try, day after day,to get good beans and rice to grow in sand; he now found himself wondering sometimes about other things he could do to earn a living, like growing Twinkies instead. Of course, this was just idle thought (Ted didn't want to get sued by Hostess), but such ponderings soon led him to a second idea: why not sell his farm, and use the proceeds to start a business that would actually be successful? As soon as this plan entered his mind, Ted jumped into it wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, he was almost as bad a salesman as he was a farmer, and though he tried mightily to get a good price, he ended up giving the farm to some Japanese tourists for thirteen yen and part of a carrot (he would have held out for the whole carrot, but was distracted by a shiny piece of glass on the ground). But the money was shinier, and Ted was satisfied.
So, once again, Ted found himself a wanderer on the boulevard of life, and though he was now homeless rather than pigless, he was feeling rather happy-go-lucky, for the rush of carrotly goodness that was coursing through his veins had dislodged yet another idea from his overworked brain, revealing to him once and for all what his true calling should be. Cheerfully whistling and randomly kicking things, he strode off, Zork in hand, toward the hospital, his artist's fingers already itching to begin a new bedpan masterpiece.
One of his shoelaces was untied, but then it got better.
The End
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