Turn it on, the fan. The BIG fan. Broken? Okay, then turn it on, the smaller fan. No smaller fan? What the hell. Right. Then just turn it on, the radio.
Another hot one here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Global warming at work, no doubt. Whatever the cause, it’s sweltering in here. I spent the morning hanging my head into the primitive air shaft at the center of this unused pile of industrial masonry – it seemed strangely airless. That’s why I’m asking Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to break out the fans. It’s times like this when any performer turns to his/her biggest fans. (Boom-crash!) How are ya, how are ya, how are ya! Anybody from Detroit in the audience tonight? Anybody? You in the back? There you are. Gotta’ love the motor city!
Ooops. Heat prostration briefly turned me into a Borscht Belt comedian. (Shecky Green, perhaps.) Must be incoherent thinking that Marvin would help me out, considering how I failed him last week during the inaugural performance of Marvin and the Lawn Robots. What’d I do? Rather ask what I did not do. What I did not do was anything right, that’s what I did … not. I twiddled all the wrong knobs on the board. (At one point, they had no top end at all. Later on, it was “generation reverb” time.) I pointed the lights in the wrong direction. I overloaded the mains so that by the end of the night they sounded like king size kazoos. (Rented, too. Good grief.) And I assigned the door to some straggler who – surprise, surprise – walked off with Marvin’s $57 take for the evening. WHERE DID I GO RIGHT?
I have an excuse, though not a very good one. Just the night before, our beloved sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon sFshzenKlyrn dropped in on us quite unexpectedly with a rather large poke of Zenite snuff. I partook of the, ahem, aid to digestion rather liberally before collapsing into my distressed Army cot sometime before 2:00 a.m. I suppose you could say I was a little worse for wear the following night – not unexpected by any means. Disappointing for the mechanical men, however. Their little shoulders were slumped as they watched me load the van. One of them started rotating at one point, his phony machine guns a-blazing with incandescent rage. Sad scene.
So my calls to Marvin, understandably, go unanswered today. He’ll get over it, I expect. But what of the lawn robots?
If it sounds like I’ve been reduced in rank to roadie status, that’s because it’s true. Just call me Spike or Lenny – you know, one of those roadie names. I’ve considered investing in a carton of muscle shirts, but I don’t have any muscles, so… what’s the point, right? (How do I lift those heavy bass cabinets? Tendons only, my friend.) There are worse things to do for a living, only up to now I haven’t had to do any of them, so… this is rock bottom. The things we do for friends! And by “friends” I mean robot friends.
Turns out I’m the “how”. Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t be wasting my time on this shit. Only.. he’s the only robot I’ve ever had, and when those brass eyes start to tear up, I relent. Mind you, I’m the only member of Big Green involved in this enterprise. Matt and John both flat-out refused to carry water for a bunch of mindless robots. None of our other household denizens and assorted hangers on at the Cheney Hammer Mill would agree to lug Marvin’s gear around either (I thought I could at least get the Lincolns interested, but they REFUSED, insisting they had something else going – some kind of debating society, I believe.) As for the man-sized tuber, he’s running the sound board, and… well, those little twig-like arms of his are even less suited to a roady’s tasks than mine.
Oh, hi. Sorry… I was reading Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the riot act. Not that he needs to be reminded of its contents – It’s been posted on a spike inside his memory banks for a good many years now. Nevertheless, I felt he needed reminding because he’s been unusually disruptive of late. Sure, there have been times when Marvin’s programming has gone south or when he’s unduly under the influence of nefarious telemetry from alien planets (don’t think it doesn’t happen, because it does!). Only recently he’s been trying his hand (or robotic claw, more properly speaking) at a number of different small enterprises, hoping to make a marginal living in these hard times. (What exactly he needs money for, I don’t know. Perhaps some kind of automatonic inebriants.)
Okay, so I’m in the studio, pounding on the keys, trying to make something that sounds vaguely like music. I hit the playback button, and I hear this grinding sound that bears no resemblance to the one emitted by my aging Oberheim rack unit. It was, in fact, motor noises being picked up by an ambient mic. So I go upstairs and see Marvin mustering a small army of robots – I don’t mean five or six normal robots, but about 40 to 50 toy-sized automatons, all with little purring lawn mowers. He apparently crimped the little suckers into being the muscle behind his new landscaping business, and they were practicing on the Hammer Mill courtyard. Which is made of cobblestones. Genius!