Goodness
Gracious, Ripov
by Albert Russo
It had been an especially
exhausting and painful year for Ripov and some of
the problems which were supposedly settled, like
the Gulf War, had rekindled old ones, since the
Kurdish question was not being resolved and the
world had forgotten the plight of' its
inhabitants all too soon - maybe if instead of
spitting saliva or blood, the Kurds spouted oil
out of their mouths, America and Europe would
remember how compassionate they had felt towards
the Kuwaitis. The Western Powers also let what
used to be Yugoslavia disintegrate into a mosaic
of borderless nations splattered with gore and
horror tales. And what was going to happen to the
former Soviet Union, now called the Commonwealth
of Independant States, where the queuing for the
bare necessities of life grew instead of
relenting? Would a madman push the nuclear button
and blow up half of the Old Continent and part of
the New One ? As for the poor Africans, well,
they had slipped to the bottom rung of the world's
priorities.
Ripov, you see, a loner
whose heart belonged to no one in particular, but
whose every pore seemed to be wired to the planet’s
magnetic field, jolted like a crazy buffoon out
of a magician’s box whenever he heard or
read about the calamities that plagued the globe.
Since he had no money and belonged to no
organization, whether humanitarian, proletarian,
pansexual or sadomasochistic - although he dreamt
of these quite often - he woke up one cold
morning in his cell-like room and said to himself
:
“I’m a drop in
the ocean, but enough is enough, all that
suffering in the world is killing me, and from
today onwards, I shall teach them what goodness
is all about and how to proselytize every Tom,
Dickey and Harriet that crosses their path. First
thing: gather the students and tramps of my
neighborhood - instead of letting the latter sit
on their fat bums (no wonder they get fat, they
never exercize, except on the horizontal plane)
and wait for handouts, I shall convert them into
do-gooders; people will recognize their
usefulness and reward them, so that they will,
once in their goddam lives, deserve their
pittance. With the students, softhearted and
idealistic as they often are, the task should
prove much less arduous.”
Ripov wasted not a second
and, standing on an empty soap box in the small
park that faced his dilapidated building, he
began distributing leaflets that spelled out the
program of his goodness campaign, all the while
he lectured the bums who were lying on the
benches, half drunk as usual and asking
themselves if Ripov was a talking crow or some
inflatable dummy so realistic, it could fool even
the more sober of their lot.
Seeing he had little
success addressing them, Ripov decided to shake
the sluggards out of their perennial haze and
pushed each one of them to the ground. They
grumbled somewhat, and since laziness was their
vocation, they started having rambling
discussions with the squirrels of the park, some
of whom mistook the warts of one of the tramps
for chestnuts and started plucking them with
their sharp little teeth. A bearded ‘trampettte’
(she must have been anywhere between 25 and 52),
had remarked to the bleeding bum :
“Ach, stop complainin’,
will ya, you ain't paying a cent for this plastic
surgery ! What do you espect?"
Ripov soon realized that to
get quicker results he had a better chance with
the students, and thus he rounded them up and
started what would be called the Goodness Crusade.
He lectured them for a full week and sent them
trotting about town, by foot, by bus and by
subway.
Bob, who majored in
trampoline, caught a man staring lecherously at
the impressive and heaving bosom of a matron,
whilst aware of his insistent look, she was
turning all the colors of the rainbow. Bob
approached him and whispered to the man’s
ear: "I think you ought to excuse yourself
and help instead the lady with her packages."
"It's her boobs l'm after, not her groceries.
Of course, if I could have both, I wouldn't say
no".
Bob called him a swine and
got ejected from the bus by the driver himself
for causing a public nuisance.
Teeny Weeny Mary - she was
a midget and had the brain and the heart of a
mastodont - watching two children fighting over a
popsicle turned to the little boy and said :
"I saw you trying to break your friend's
candy, that's not nice. Excuse yourself!".
The boy shrugged his
shoulders but when Teeny Weeny Mary reiterated
the admonition, he snatched the popsicle from his
classmate and stuck it into tile midget's mouth
who was later accused of stealing the child’s
iced candy and forced to pay a fine.
Dolly, who studied
psychology but secretly aimed to become a
sexologist, seeing a couple of teenagers kissing
behind a tree, went to the young girl and told
her: "This is not how you kiss a man, don't
you see you're hurting him, munching on his lips,
let me show you". And so, Dolly gave a
passionate demonstration. The result was
unfortunately not what she had expected. The
youngster did seem to appreciate the lesson, but
not his girlfriend. She slapped him across the
face, sank her canines into his arm and punched
Dolly in the stomach, then yelled : "Go to
hell, both of you and do your dirty business
elsewhere! As for you , skunk, I'm through with
you," she told the wretched boy who looked
quite puzzled and somewhat desperate.
In Bill's case the people
concerned had no relation to each other, except
that they stood on the same subway platform,
waiting for the train. He saw a very elegantly
dressed woman twitch her nose, not far from a man
in rags. Bill sneaked next to her and said :
"It's not very nice to snub that guy, just
because he doesn't have your means. Why don't you
offer him a buck or two?" The lady twitched
her nose with an even greater eloquence and at a
certain point, Bill thought she was squinting and
making faces at the man. Then, before he knew it,
she sneezed at him so forcefully, he had the
impression he was being blown away by a hurricane.
"That'll ... teach you
... I have a bloo ... a bloody cold ... you ...
nincompoop ..." she uttered, knocking Bill
flat against the turnstile, causing him to twirl
like a mad dervish.
After more incidents of
that ilk, people in Ripov's neighborhood banded
together and formed "The Anti-Crusade Task
Force", which purported to restore the
Refound Intimacy and Freedom of Facial Expression,
for Ripov's student buddies had become experts in
detecting, or at least trying to detect, the
meaning behind the infinite range a human visage
had of concealing the bearer's schemings and
afterthoughts. Most of these students got evicted
from their schools, and as a result, their
parents thrust themselves headlong against the
initiator of The Goodness Crusade, and ransacked
his miserable lodging.
Now, Ripov, who, let us not
forget, is a paragon of virtue and of kindness,
spends most of his time with the tramps in the
park, feeding the birds.
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