If you’re following along, below is the fourth chapter of the exquisite corpse collaboration between ChatGPT and me. If you’re new here, be sure to check out the first three chapters:
No more ado. Let’s jump in.
Taco Hut, Chapter 4
The next day, back at the ranch (which is what the Vanilla Spectacle City Council called Taco Hut), Manager Jim was silently contemplating a new business venture. No one knew his last name, and some folks speculated he didn’t have one. They only called him “Manager Jim” because he insisted they do so even though he’d been an hourly employee for almost thirty years.
Manager Jim got in his head that he knew how to run a business and reasoned the gold folks of Vanilla Spectacle would appreciate a drive-thru mustache-penciling enterprise. He was anxious to get started.
Manager Jim paced the linoleum, his footsteps squeaking like nervous mice beneath a disco ball of fluorescent lights. He rubbed his temple with one hand and held a grease-slicked pepperoni in the other—his “thinking slice,” which he’d been nibbling for 11 years.
The idea struck him like divine inspiration—or maybe indigestion. A mustache-penciling drive-thru. No appointments. No mirrors. No refunds. Just drive up, stick your lip through the magic flap, and emerge with dignity. Or at least a handlebar.
He scribbled a prototype on the back of a takeout box: “MustaChez—For Men of Taste and Tacos.” Sister Doris, who had recently taken a vow of interpretive capitalism, nodded in silent agreement from her floating patio chair, thirty-two inches above the dumpster.
“It's brilliant,” she whispered, unsure if she was talking about the business or the taco.
Jim took that as a sign. He opened the mop closet and began training his first employee: a confused but eager lemur named Barry.
Now Barry had a nose for bad ideas. He once sniffed out a fake fedora at an all-fez convention of hoteliers. It took him three hours, but he was quite fastidious in the process. Once he was slapped across the brow for snorting Laffy Taffy down a bartender’s blouse made of deep-fried onion.
When he’d heard that Manager Jim was plotting to overthrow the Taco Hut headquarters with thin mustache paint, he laughed until his ribs split open. Literally.
Sister Doris called 911 while Mayor Crumbwell revisited last year’s festival budget. When the ambulance arrived to take Barry to the emergency room, Kenny showed up to prove he could still carve a Christmas turkey but, since there was no turkey, he had to demonstrate his veteran skills on a three-year-old hush puppy.
“So much for fowl odors,” he snorted as he slammed down a kiwi milkshake topped with silicone-flavored motor oil.
The EMTs, who were just the marching band from Vanilla Spectacle Community College in disguise (budget cuts, long story), hoisted Barry onto a gurney fashioned from trombone slides and churro sticks. Barry wheezed, pointed to his ribs, and muttered something about counterfeit mustaches and the fall of Western grooming.
Pastor Bruce appeared out of nowhere wearing a fireman’s hat and carrying a colander full of glitter. “Now is not the time for wisdom,” he declared. “It is the time for bandages and bagpipes.”
Kenny, unfazed, pulled out a kazoo and began tooting “The Ballad of Mild Regret” in C-flat. Sister Doris levitated precisely three centimeters, enough to indicate concern but not enough to wrinkle her sky-blue habit.
Meanwhile, Manager Jim retreated to the mop closet to consult Barry’s emergency lemur diary, which he assumed would contain step-by-step CPR instructions. Instead, it was filled with limericks about dental floss and several cryptic doodles of a frowning spatula labeled “Mother.”
It took all of fourteen hours and seventeen minutes to transport the broken-hearted Barry to the place of his early demise. Hardly anyone noticed. Upon arrival, the paramedics were all treated to a half gallon of parsnip ice cream and a handclap.
It wasn’t long and the entire town of Vanilla Spectacle was planning a funeral for one of their most dearly tolerated. That, needless to say, was an event of its own. Televised at eleven.
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First published at Substack. Image by ChatGPT
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