pring straining

We're a third of the way through spring training and I ain't seen shit. Last year this time I had already seen 8 games. I need to get to the Gulf Coast this weekend and use the Pirates tix I already bought. 

Speaking of the Pirates, Jared Jones remains one of the most beautiful men in baseball.

Still in competition though adding a bit seedily, Yoan Moncada—whom CWS omitted to option last fall—got picked up by LAA on a 1-year, $5 million contract.

Many, though not all, spring training stadia are using what MLB has dubbed the 'automated ball & strike' (ABS) system. It does not obviate the home plate ump—yet—but the pitcher, catcher, or batter can challenge a ball/strike call by tapping their helmet immediately. The electronic optics, repaired in animation on the jumbotron, instantaneously confirm or overturn the call. Each team gets two mistaken challenges.  The technology has been there for years, so it's not surprising to see the experiment. I have no doubt this will eventually be adopted in the regular season, though that is not planned for this season.

The word for today is 'inguinal'

 ... as in 'The fungi in our inguinal crease are not the same ones on our heel pad or behind our ear'

All to the what now?

 Chapter VI of Hardy Boys book 10, What Happened at Midnight, begins like this:

"WELL, I guess we're ready to go," Chet announced as he gave his hands a final wipe in an effort to rid them of some of the grime and grease that stuck after the repair job.

"Will she run?" questioned Frank.

"Like a sewing machine!  Step on the starter and see."

Frank did so.

"All to the Worcestershire sauce," he announced.  "Let's go!"

"Gresham?" questioned Chet.

"Where else?"

What in the hell does that mean? Googling the exact phrase 'all to the worcestershire sauce' turns up four references, all quoting this book.

The fuck, Leslie?

Hal Rockland

Gay-for-pay 1990s porn heart- and cock-throb Hal Rockland marks a half century on earth today.

Hardy Hard Hard: A Disclaimer

As you might have noticed by now (for the exactly zero valid values of 'you' that are not also 'me'). I am on a project to rewrite the Hardy Boys books as erotica. Various folks have pointed out this is a risky business, especially inasmuch as the original books (from 1927 to 1959[?])—at least those by Leslie McFarlane—gave Frank Hardy's age as 16 and Joe Hardy's as 15. Despite there being every possibility that two boys in their mid-teens should be well adjusted and mature in their experience of lust—enough to seize sexual agency where and when and with whom they want—it is obviously not legally ok to write pornography about a 15 year old.

By 1959 when the Stratemeyer Syndicate began a systematic 'update' of the original novels (including a number of complete rewrite with new plots), the brothers' aged had been upped 2 years, to 18 and 17. 

I personally feel it is more obscene to insist a 17-year-old is necessarily 'a child'—and that any sex shared with that 17-year-old by someone above 18 is necessarily molestation—than it is to write fiction that includes and celebrates that kind of sex. But I also maintain I have no interest, as I plod along from middle age to old age, in having sex with youngsters. 

What does continue to interest me is the years in my own life roughly between 13 and almost 18 when I was burning for sexual activity and had no idea how to initiate it. In my freshman year of high school (14–15), I spent every second of second period wishing, with exquisite, feverish, horned-up self-torture, that I could figure out a way to get my mouth on Coach Treen. I had never seen a more beautiful pair of thighs in my life. They were like double-wide trailers, only for legs. And had I had the wherewithal to attempt that contact—and had Coach Treen agreed, which seems unlikely—then it would have been an unforgivable insult to me, my agency, and my rights as a thinking human being to arrest him for having had sex with a minor. (A minor in his charge as a teacher—yes, ok, that's valid: he definitely should not have agreed even if I had gotten up the gumption to proposition him.) 

But the point is, that's one of any number of persons/occasions throughout my teen years where I wish to this day I had had some sort of mentor—a slutty older brother, a gay uncle, whatever—that could have advised me on the art of getting my dick wet. Because holy fuck I woulda. That being the case, what right have I to deny Frank and Joe Hardy their own sexual enlightenment, fulfillment, apotheosis?

Anyway, told you that to tell you this: What I'm writing is parody, so it doesn't matter what ages Mr. McFarlane or any of the rest of the Franklin W. Dixon brigade assigned to these two youngsters: for my purposes, Frank and Joe Hardy are of the legal age of consent.

Oh, by the way: when the first episode of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries series aired on ABC on 19770130, Parker Stevenson, who played Frank Hardy, was 24, and Shaun Cassidy, who played Joe, was 18. 

Hardy Hijinx

Dislaimer: For all literary purposes related to this post, Frank and Joe Hardy are both of the legal age of consent.

I finished book 5 this morning, Hunting for Hidden Gold.  

Book 3, The Secret of the Old Mill, barely lent itself to smuttification: the best thing about it is Lester, a boy around Frank and Joe's age who is rescued, first from drowning in the mill race, then from the gang of counterfeiters who are book's bad guys; and whom the Hardys promise in the last chapter to take on as a new chum—only he's never heard from again in the canon. 

Book 4, The Missing Chums, was a bit more fun to corrupt, with Chet and Biff, and then Frank and Joe, captured by a criminal gang and chained up naked. I got to develop Joe's increasing aversion to wearing clothes and his deep attractions to Tony Prito's dad and to big black... snakes. The 'girlfriends' of the series, Callie Shaw and Iola Morton, are fully complicit as beards for Frank and Joe (but still regret that said manflesh is not for them). Also, Chet bags a federal Revenue officer. 

But with Hidden Gold, I feel like I've hit a stride. It was an easy lob of a pitch—I mean, the majority of the plot takes place in Lucky Bottom, Montana, so we begin on page 1 with Joe's driving need to go be a lucky bottom in Lucky Bottom. The boys' dad Fenton is laid up with some broken ribs in Lucky Bottom whilst his 'friend' Hank Shale nurses him back to health (and offers to be the new Mrs. Hardy). The boys accidentally stay at a gay bathhouse in Chicago and have a fun foursome in a car with a couple farmers. Joe flirts with all the help, sniffs outlaw underwear, and just never lets up on his extreme horniness (Frank calls him 'satyriasical'). And Frank gets Grizzled Prospector Syndrome—or at least is about to as the book ends. 

I've also cranked up the silly factor, with characters meta-commenting on the book's (and their own and each other's) virtues and faults, random cultural references (e.g., Venture Bros., Francis Poulenc, MST3K), and various non-sequiturs and absurdities. I have realized I need to abandon a steady temporal setting; these original novels were written in the late 1920s and it's fun playing with the cultural and linguistic markers ('I'll say it is!') but just as the rewrites sought to update those markers by a few decades, I need a bit of leeway, e.g., to situate a modern gay bathhouse in jazz age Chicago. 

Anyway, I'm really happy with this one. Next step is to create counterfeits out of copies of the 1960s picture cover hardback. And the first step of that is finding a reasonably close paper stock. 

Sim, é verdade

 

Frank's turn, part 2

'While we're at it, we have a sort of a cowboy song we'd like to do for ya. This is a song that deals with the rapidly approaching 2[5]0th birthday of the United States of America, ladies and gentlemen! This is a song that warns you in advance that next year everybody is gonna try and sell you things that maybe you shouldn't oughtta buy; and not only that, they've been planning it for years.

'The name of this song is—pardon me—"Poofter's Froth, Wyoming, Plans Ahead"'

With me so far? That is Frank Zappa's spoken introduction to the cited song, appearing on the 1975 album he made from his joint gigs with Captain Beefheart (né Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. this beautiful, insane motherfucker:

) titled Bongo Fury.

This record, by the by, is one of the most glorious grotesqueries in the Zappa catalog—and that, obv., is saying something. 

The song in question takes on crazy significance 50 years later as we approach the [alas there appears to be no consensus on a latinate verbal orgy to designate a quarter-millennium] birthday of the United States, ladies and gentlemen! Having been around in the run-up to the 'Buy-Cent-Any-All'—I remember first being made aware of the imphending Phnomenon in fourth grade in 1975 by Mr. Bill Stokes, to whom eternal thanks and love—I'm not sure I can make it through another round, especially with the present government and political climate.

Anyway, told ya that to tell ya this: 

The Zappa oeuvre is of course full of self-references and callbacks; and his projects always offer weird glimpses into such mental images as were stuck in his brain at the time: in We're Only In It for the Money it's freaks and hair; in Over-Nite Sensation it's tweezers. Here—stick with me a minute—it's DICKS.

I don't really mean anything profound by saying this. I'm not sure it even means anything. But the aforementioned song, echoing its title, contains, amongst a catalog of the products and services to be vended in 1976 in the titular Wyoming hamlet:

'Little Poofter's froth anointments'

Clearly, 'poofter's froth', lowercase, refers to ejaculate—unless Zappa was describing 'Santorum' 28 years before Dan Savage did, while actual Rick Santorum was 17 years old and, presumably, a freak with hair growing out every hole in him. Either way, this is the half of it.

The other half is in the last song on the same record, called 'Muffin Man', whose spoken-word lyrics include:

Arrogantly twisting the sterile canvas

Snoot of a fully charged icing anointment utensil,

He poots forths a quarter-ounce green rosette ... 

Near the summit of a dense,

But radiant muffin of his own design.

'Poot' is, of course, a favorite FZ word; but 'anointment' to my knowledge appears only on this record—and in a derivative or alternate approach to 'Muffin Man' (using a nearly identical spoken-word introduction) called 'A Little Green Rosetta' that ended up at the end of Joe's Garage Acts II and III (1979). Likewise 'poofter' (an Aussie gay slur, I believe?) appears only here—again, to my knowledge, which is not concordancial. I'm not sure whether there's anything to be said for the assonance of 'poot' and 'poofter', but the analogous imagery of 'little poofter's froth anointments' and 'a fully charged icing anointment utensil' cannot have been entirely separate in Zappa's brain. 

Thus: every time Mr. Zappa pooted forth a muffin-crowning rosette in the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, he was, as they say, rubbing one out.

While we're at it, I have a sort of cowboy fuckhead attitude to share. Next time you think of Frank Zappa as some sort of purveyor of enlightened if cynical views re the humans around him, I want you should ponder this quote, with which he deemed fit to festoon page 11 of Them Or Us (The Book) (1984):

You got lotsa guys like that now. Everybody thinks they're terrific . . . who'll be the 'Mozart' of your century? David Bowie?  

 

The people of your century no longer require the service of composers. A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinosaur turd in the middle of his runway.  

 

Your age is ugly and loveless, and when they eventually write you up in the leather book with the red silk thing hanging out the side, YOUR nasty little 'Mozart' will be a sort of egalitarian-affirmative action non-person of indeterminate sex, chosen by a committee who will seek advice from a group of accountants who will consult a tan lawyer who will negotiate with a clothing manufacturer who will sponsor a series which will feature a simulation of a lip-synced version of the troubled life of a white boy with special hair who achieves musical greatness through abnormally large sales figures.

That's some fucking assholery right there. So, ok, maybe Frank just never forgave Bowie for hiring Adrian Belew out from under him in 1978. (Belew memoired an accidental meeting in a restaurant in Köln in which FZ refused to say anything to Bowie but 'Fuck you, Captain Tom.') But I put it to you that it was Bowie's gender-fucking perceived faggotry that put Zappa's sterile canvas snoot in the air; that Zappa was, in fact, a homo- and transphobe (and should you care to drag out the ol' he-made-fun-of-errbody defense? Fuck you, Uncle Tom); and that his irredeemable prejudice blinded Zappa from seeing that David Bowie, in a mien at violent variance with Zappa's own, was doing his own Varèse present-day-composer thang, every bit as well as Frank.

Frank's Turn

Disclaimer: For my literary purposes, Frank and Joe Hardy are both of the legal age of consent.

Book 2, The House on the Cliff, also by Leslie McFarlane and copyright 1927; now in the public domain.

Frank and Joe Hardy's dad Fenton has been missing for a couple weeks. He disappeared after a random outing to investigate the possibility of an international dope smuggling gang operating in his home town. At the end of Chapter 11, Frank, Joe, and their chums are investigating the titular house, which they had recently seen to be unoccupied, neglected, decrepit, and possibly haunted. Now, however, there's a trio of unsavory characters hanging about and the place is all fixt up. Frank finagles a glimpse inside the house and sees what appears to be his father's cap hanging on a peg in the kitchen. Our story continues:

CHAPTER XII

Pointed Questions

Frank thought quickly. He must ascertain the truth!

The cap, he was almost sure, was the one his father had worn on the morning he had left home. But he wanted to look at it closely, because he knew he might be mistaken and that it would not do to make any accusations unless he were sure of his ground.

‘‘I’m very thirsty,’’ he said quickly. ‘‘Do you mind if I have a drink?’’

Redhead and the woman looked at one another without enthusiasm. It was plain that they wished to get rid of their visitors as soon as possible. But they could not refuse such an innocent and reasonable request.

‘‘Come into the kitchen,’’ said Redhead grudgingly.

This was just what Frank wanted. He followed the man into the kitchen of the Polucca place. Redhead pointed to a water tap. A dipper was hanging from a nail near by.

‘‘Go ahead,’’ he grunted.

Frank went over to the tap and as he did so he passed the cap on the peg. He took a swift look at the cap.

He had made no mistake. It was his father’s.

Then he received a shock that almost stunned him. For a second he almost stopped in his tracks, but then he recollected himself and moved mechanically on toward the tap.

He had seen bloodstains!

On the lower edge of the cap were three large stains, reddish in color. They could have been made by nothing but blood.

In a daze, Frank turned on the water, filled the dipper and drank. At last he turned away, conscious that Redhead had been eyeing him carefully all the time.

‘‘Thanks,’’ he said, and again cast a glance at the peg.

The cap was gone!

Redhead had undoubtedly snatched it off the hook—but he certainly had not had time, in the few seconds Frank had drunk the water, to stow it anywhere other than on his person.

Frank’s mind raced, looking for a sure course of action. He wanted keenly to retrieve that cap from Redhead to prove to his friends and family and the Bayport Police that criminal misadventure had befallen his father. But how?

And outlandish idea occurred to him and he could not shake it. ‘‘Well,’’ he told himself, ‘‘the only plan is necessarily the best plan.’’

Frank turned fully from the kitchen tap to face Redhead. ‘‘You know, mister,’’ he said quietly as he doffed his jacket and draped it over a kitchen chair, ‘‘I am still kind of thirsty.’’ He dropped his gaze slowly and deliberately from Redhead’s eyes to his fly and let it linger there. He began walking slowly toward Redhead. He licked his lips. He kicked the kitchen door closed. He unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, and then the next. ‘‘So very thirsty . . .’’

Redhead, for all his rough and tumble posturing, looked scared. ‘‘Kid,’’ he hissed as Frank continued to unbutton, ‘‘what the hell are you doing?’’ He glanced at the closed kitchen door as if afraid one of his cohort were about to open it. But Frank, whose eyes had not left Redhead’s fly, could see from the growing bulge there that his ruse was having the desired effect. Still, he needed Redhead to be fully distracted so that he could hunt about his person for his father’s cap. He pulled off his shirt, peeled his undershirt over his head, and dropped to his knees in front of Redhead.

The tough guy started as if an unexpected firework had exploded. His shoulders fell back against the wall he was standing in front of and he propped himself there. But he made no aggressive or even defensive moves against Frank. Instead, he leaned over to the kitchen door and cranked the deadbolt into place. ‘‘Well,’’ thought Frank, ‘‘here goes nothing.’’

He unzipped Redhead’s fly and deftly fished out the thug’s swelling cock. Pale and pink and lined with blue veins, the cock was fatter in the middle, like a cheap cigar. Redhead’s foreskin was forward and only the tip of the glans showed, glistening on the end with a trace of pre-cum.

Frank, who had seen very few penes up close like this, was genuinely fascinated. His mission here was wholly practical but he took a moment of aesthetic appreciation to say to himself, ‘‘This is a very pretty penis.’’

He gave it a couple gentle tugs. ‘‘Oh, Daddy,’’ he said, looking up into Redhead’s eyes, ‘‘just what I wanted for Christmas.’’ And he put the whole thing in his mouth.

‘‘Oh, Jesus, kid!’’ Redhead blurted involuntarily. His hips were already churning slightly, drawing himself out of and then pushing himself back into Frank’s mouth. He let out a soft moan. ‘‘Oh, fuck, kid, you do that so good! Oh Jesus, yes, suck that cock, boy. Oh fuck, oh Jesus, oh fuck . . .’’

He continued along that line of quiet encouragement until he was interrupted by a sudden clatter at the doorknob, followed by an angry pounding on the door. ‘‘What are you doing in there?’’ the woman shrilled.

Redhead shot a terrified glance at Frank, who, without disengaging for even a second from Redhead’s cock, met his glance and returned the most reassuring, complicit expression he could muster. He shook his head slightly as if to say, ‘‘I won’t tell if you won’t.’’ Striving for an even-keeled tone in his voice, Redhead hollered back, ‘‘I’m havin’ an important conversation with our guest here. Give me a minute, why don’t ya?’’

Frank, meanwhile, had undone Redhead’s trousers entirely and hauled them downward—backing off the cock just long enough to pull the boxer shorts down as well—but Redhead’s wide-legged stance prevented them falling farther than his knees—so inspection of the trouser pockets was a riskier proposition than had they been at Redhead's ankles.

Taking pains to keep his oral caressed in constant rhythm synchronized with Redhead’s hips, and sending one hand to explore Redhead’s inner thighs, teasing upward toward his taint and his ass, Frank used his other hand surreptitiously to palpate Redhead’s front trouser pockets for his father’s cap. It was not there. He began reaching for the back pockets, but quickly realize that reach would be awkward and obvious. He needed to diversify his distraction.

Frank pulled off of Redhead’s cock and, continuing to jack it with his hand, looked up again into Redhead’s eyes and said, ‘‘Turn around, Daddy. I have a present for you.’’

He guided Redhead’s legs, and Redhead obliged, turning toward the wall. Frank gave him no time to think, to consider this odd turn of events, but immediately reached up and pried Redhead’s buttocks apart and applied his tongue to the vicinity of Redhead’s anus.

It was not clean.

Frank repressed his gag reflex, reassured himself that this was a necessary tactic, and went—as the parlance goes—to town on Redhead’s butthole.

This time Redhead’s ‘‘Oh fuck!’’ was not even a little bit quiet, and it earned another inquiry from outside the door. ‘‘You killin’ the kid in there?’’

‘‘Mind your business! The kid’s—aaah!—fine. He’s just . . . fine.’’ After which he dropped his voice again so only Frank could hear him: ‘‘Yeah, you’re fine, kiddo . . . just fine . . . oh, Jesus, so fucking fine . . . oh, my fucking Lord and Saviour . . . Oh, sweet Jesus . . .’’

It was a profoundly strange moment when Frank realized that this likely criminal, up whose filthy butthole he was even now thrusting his tongue, was crying.

Strange as that realization was, however, there was no time to linger on it—for Frank had located the gray cap crumpled in Redhead’s back left trouser pocket, extracted it, and crushed it into his own trouser pocket. Taking stock of the scene in the kitchen around him and the likely scene outside, Frank counted to three and bolted. He grabbed his jacket and shirt in one lithe swoop—forgoing the retrieval of his undershirt as wasteful of milliseconds—and before Redhead realized what was happening he had the deadbolt unbolted and the kitchen door wide open, and he fairly flew out into the yard—shirtless, a baffling sight to all spectators—booming, ‘‘Let’s go, boys! We’re done here!’’

He ran as fast as his feet could carry him toward the motorbikes. His brother and their chums lost the briefest moment in sheer astonishment before following suit and high-tailing it away from the Polucca estate. Frank got in only one good backward glimpse of the scene he was fleeing, but it was a fine one: Redhead staggering out the kitchen door with his trousers not fully raised and his engorged cock wagging to and fro, about which attitude his female companion could say nothing but ‘‘What in the fuck?’’

‘‘We’re sorry we troubled you!’’ Joe yelled as they all fled. ‘‘Good-bye!’’

Once they had put some distance between themselves and the unknown occupants currently haunting Polucca Manor, Frank motioned for all to stop. It was at the same shed they had stopped on the previous visit when his engine misbehaved. Only now did Frank put his shirt and jacket back on. He could not help laughing to himself at the ribald awfulness of his perfectly successful scheme. The boys were beside themselves with curiosity.

‘‘So you got a long, tall drink of water, did you?’’

‘‘Are we all on the run from the law now?’’

‘‘Really, Frank, what on earth happened back there?’’

‘‘Do you know why I went into the kitchen?’’ Frank began.

‘‘Why?’’ they demanded eagerly, and Joe put in:

‘‘I thought there was something fishy about the way you asked for that drink. What did you see?’’

‘‘I saw Dad’s cap hanging on a peg!’’

This caused an immediate sensation. Phil Cohen whistled in amazement.

‘‘So he had been there! They were lying!’’

‘‘Are you sure it was Dad’s cap?’’ asked Joe.

‘‘Positive. But if you doubt it, see for yourself.’’ Frank produced the cap from his pocket, un-crumpling it as much as possible. ‘‘I’m not even going to tell you what I had to do to get it back from Redhead when he tried to squirrel it away. But look here—’’ Frank turned back the inside flap and  showed the initials F.H. imprinted in indelible ink on the leather band. ‘‘It’s dad’s cap, all right. But I knew it the second I saw it. I’d have recognized it anywhere!’’

Frank paused and his countenance dropped. ‘‘But fellas, more alarming than that, look here—there are blood stains on it. In fact, now that I see it up close, the inside of the cap makes me very worried that the wearer was severely injured. The blood stains are much more prevalent than was obvious when I saw it hanging on the hook.’’

The boys looked closely at the cap and then looked at one another in silence.

‘‘I don’t like the look of those bloodstains,’’ said Joe, in a low voice. ‘‘Dad must have been badly hurt. He may have been—’’ Joe left the sentence unfinished.

‘‘He may have been murdered,’’ Frank said firmly. ‘‘And we’re going to find out about it.’’

‘‘We can’t let them get away with this.’’

‘‘I’ll say we can’t,’’ agreed Chet. ‘‘And I’ll say this, too—that cozy trio back there is up to no good. We need to be very busy bees in their bonnets.’’

 

Shitty artwork by Rudy Nappi accompanying the 1959 revision by Harriet S. Adams:

Sorry, Leslie. Really I am.

Disclaimer: For my literary purposes, Frank and Joe Hardy are both of the legal age of consent.

Here is the re-written Chapter 15 of the original Hardy Boys book #1, The Tower Treasure, by Leslie McFarlane.

CHAPTER XV

 

The Chief Gets a Bomb

 

“What’s up now?” asked Joe, when the Hardy boys had left the house.

“Chief Collig and Detective Smuff must miss that train.”

“But how?”

  “I don’t know just yet, but they’ve got to miss it. If they reach the hospital to-night they’ll interview Jackley first. One of two things will happen. They’ll either get a confession and take all the credit for clearing up the case, or they’ll go about it so clumsily that Jackley will say nothing and spoil everything for dad.”

  The Hardy boys walked along the street in silence. They realized that the situation was urgent, but although they racked their brains trying to think of some way in which to prevent Chief Collig and Detective Smuff from catching the train, it seemed hopeless.

  “Let’s round up the gang,” suggested Joe. “Perhaps they can think of something.”

“The gang” consisted of the boys who had been with Frank and Joe the day they held the picnic in the woods. There was, of course, Chet Morton. Besides him were Allen Hooper, otherwise known as “Biff”, because of his passion for boxing, Jerry Gilroy, Phil Cohen and Tony Prito, all students at the Bayport high school. They were usually to be found on the school campus after hours, playing ball, and there the Hardy boys soon located them. The game was just breaking up.

“Pikers,” grinned Chet Morton when he saw the Hardy boys approaching. “You wouldn’t play ball when we asked you to, and now you come around when the game’s all over.”

“We had something more important on our minds,” replied Frank. “We need your help.”

“What’s the mattah?” asked Tony Prito. Tony was the son of a prosperous Italian sanitation contractor, but he had not yet been in America long enough to talk the language without an accent, and his attempts were frequently the cause of much amusement to his companions. He was quick and good-natured, however, and laughed as much at his own errors as any one else did.

“Chief Collig and Detective Smuff are butting into one of dad’s cases,” said Frank. “We can’t tell you much more about it than that. But the whole thing is that they mustn’t catch the nine o’clock train.”

“What do you want us to do?” asked Biff Hooper. “Blow up the bridge?”

“We might lock Collig and Smuff in one of their own cells,” suggested Phil Cohen.

“And get locked in ourselves,” added Jerry Gilroy. “Be sensible. Are you serious about this, Frank?”

“Absolutely. If those two catch that train dad’s case will be ruined. And I don’t mind telling you it has something to do with Perry Robinson.”

Chet Morton whistled.

“Ah, ha! I see now. The Tower affair. In that case, we’ll see to it that the nine o’clock train leaves here without our worthy chief and his equally worthy—although dumb—detective.” Chet cultivated a sharp distaste for Smuff, for the police sleuth had once or twice tried to arrest the boys for bathing in a forbidden section of the bay.

“There is only one question left,” said Phil solemnly. “How to keep them from getting on the train.”

“Get your brains to work, fellows—if you have any,” ordered Jerry Gilroy. “Let’s figure out a plan.”

A dozen plans were suggested, each wilder than the one before. Sabotage of police vehicles was suggested, followed by kidnapping the chief and his detective, binding them hand and foot and setting them adrift in the bay in an open boat.

Phil Cohen suggested putting the chief’s watch an hour ahead. That plan, as Frank observed, would have been a good one but for the little difficulty of laying hands on the watch.

“If we were in Italy we could get the Black Hand to help,” said Tony Prito.

“The Black Hand!” declared Chet. “That’s a good idea!”

“We got no Black Hand society in Bayport,” objected Tony.

“Let’s get one up. Send the chief a Black Hand letter warning him not to take that train.”

“And if he ever found who wrote it, we’d all be up to our necks in trouble,” pointed out Joe. “We need to keep them otherwise occupied in the hour the train boards and leaves. We need an irresistible distraction.”

Chet Morton suggested starting a fight in front of the police station just as Collig and Smuff were about to leave for the train. But that plan too seemed likely to result in penal correction.

The boys all puzzled.

“Leave it to me,” announced Chet Morton at last. “I will make this work. I will guarantee to keep the chief in town.”

“No violence, right?” asked Frank. “No destruction of public property, no jail time?”

“Certainly not” said Chet. He paused, then qualified, “Almost certainly not. Listen.”

Chet proceeded to lay forth his plan in a stealthy whisper. It was received with chuckles, murmurs of admiration, and gasps of astonishment.

Joe took in the plan with particular enthusiasm. “Dad just mentioned that place—he called it ‘seedy.’ That sure piques my curiosity!”

“You’re certain you can arrange it?” Frank asked doubtfully.

“The proprietor of said establishment is, shall we say, an old family friend,” Chet replied elliptically, “one who owes me an entire carnival of favors. He will agree."

“It certainly is a unique idea,” Frank granted.

“I’ll say it is!” Joe agreed. “And I can’t imagine the Chief and Detective Smuff not taking the bait.”

Tony Prito was a bit reluctant. “So, do we all—I mean, have we all to—?”

“We are a united front,” Chet intoned solemnly, “on a mission to save Mr. Hardy’s case and Mr. Perry’s reputation.”

Frank offered an only semi-facetious “amen.”

At seven o’clock, after their several suppers, Chet and Tony drove the chums in the direction of southwestern Bayport where they rendezvoused in front of an unremarkable bungalow that might have served as someone’s residence but for a small, illuminated sign that read:

The Scroobious Pip

 

  Frank had assumed that Chief Collig and Detective Smuff would be leaving to catch the train at about eight-thirty, so shortly after eight, Phil Cohen telephoned the police station and asked for Detective Smuff by name. Disguising his voice with a generic Eastern European accent and a nasal twang, Phil provided the detective with an anonymous—and very unusual—tip.

“They’re going to do what?!” Smuff was apoplectic.

“Zat is as mooch as I can zay,” Phil replied mysteriously and hung up the telephone.

There was no question but that the detective and the chief would investigate the situation personally. Consequently, shortly after eight o’ clock, the front door of The Scroobious Pip was manhandled open by a breathless Ezra Collig, Chief Constable of the Bayport Police Department. The chief swept stridently into the public house and, as he came in sight of the bar, stopped dead in his tracks, staring upward in disbelief.

“Evenin’, Chief!” the proprietor hollered from behind the bar.

‘‘Evenin’, Chief!’’ echoed Joe Hardy, standing on the bar wearing no-thing at all beyond a jock strap, a pair of gym socks, and the confident glow of a young man in his element. Joe’s chums, in similar states of undress, were stationed at intervals along the roughly rect-angular span of the wrap-around bar.

The chief, agog, seemed not to hear the greetings. ‘‘What do you boys think you’re doing?’’ he raged at the Hardy party.

Joe, who was nearest to the chief, replied, ‘‘What do you think we’re doing, Chief Collig?’’

‘‘You—you—you can’t be up there!’’ Collig blustered, stepping closer to the bar. ‘‘You’re minors!’’

‘‘Chief,’’ Joe admonished, likewise narrowing the distance between them, ‘‘you know perfectly well that miners work down there, not up here.’’ He punctuated the gag with an earnest and cheery smile.

Meanwhile, Detective Smuff had advanced in a flanking maneuver and was giving the stink-eye to Chet Morton and Tony Prito, who were likewise upon the bar wearing, respectively, a kilt and a pair of boxers festooned with cartoon tur-tles. At the far side of the bar, nearest the rest rooms, Phil Cohen made the most of his white cotton briefs while Biff Hooper clutched a mauve bath towel around his hips.

“I dunno what’s got into your boys!” so Smuff did huff. “It’s outrageous!”

“Oh, good sir, you don’t know the half of it!” Chet agreed, taking small, slow steps toward the detective. “You should be outraged. Indignant. Maddened. Engorged.”

“Git yer butt down from there, ye damn thesaurus!” Smuff bellowed.

“Brother Smuff, it was Kilimanjaro getting up here—you want me down, you’ll have to climb up and get me,” Chet warned him. “But take your pants off first. It’s the rule.” Chet was surprised to see Oscar Smuff actually blushing.

Meanwhile, Chief Collig’s squall was still blowing but was fast losing pitch. Among other things he had calmed down enough to get an eyeful of Joe, and quite the eyeful that was. Sure, Joe had always been a pretty boy with a generically attractive build. But standing here naked, he clearly wasn’t just a boy anymore. Rather, the young man’s charms were abundantly evident: ripe, cherry nipples standing out from his ample pecs, gorgeous and shapely gams, and a fine light dusting of peach-fuzz covering his thighs and calves and that little trail leading from his navel down toward—

“Joe Hard—”Collig attempted, but it was a useless sally. A highball glass of bourbon whiskey had appeared on the bar in front of him.

“Chief,” Joe said cordially as he lowered himself to his knees before the chief. “This is just a lark. None of us are drinking alcohol. And all the money we raise goes directly to cha-ri-ty.” He over-articulated the word. Joe had positioned his jock strap directly in front of Collig’s face, and the chief was having obvious difficulty directing his gaze anywhere but there. He couldn’t help noticing how very full the pouch was.

“Charity, you say? What charity?”

“The Chet Morton Stolen Automobile Retrieval Fund.”

“What?!” the chief almost giggled. “But the Morton kid got his roadster back! Heck, it’s parked right out front.”

Joe picked up the glass of whiskey and went in for the kill.

“Oh, but you never know . . . when it might be stolen . . . again.” By now he was purring in Collig’s ear and holding the glass to the chief’s lips. “There are . . . so many . . . bad men in the world.”

At this exact moment, Frank Hardy, returning from the rest room, walked around the right side of the bar and accosted the already entangled policeman, who at his salutation was startled out of his reverie.

“Chief Collig! It’s so good of you to be here!” Frank said warmly. “Is this—I mean, do you frequent this place? It’s our first time, of course.”

“Frank—you—”

Frank had on a microscopic pair of swim-wear expressly designed to satisfy all curiosity as to the wearer’s religion.

“Yes, sir, I know, it’s all very silly. But it’s for a good cause!”

Frank continued his stroll around the bar until he came to Detective Smuff, whom he greeted affectionately first with words, then with a big sloppy kiss planted right on Smuff’s mouth. Smuff exploded.

“That’s it! That’s enough! That’s more than too much! You boys get down and get your clothes on right now, you hear?”

“Shut up, Smuff,” came the reply from the bar, where Chief Collig was digging from his billfold a wad of one-dollar bills and a couple fives and tens.

“Charity!” Collig said with the air of a fine, upstanding American, as he poked a dollar bill into the top of Joe Hardy’s jock strap. “One should always support charity.”

Collig and Smuff spent a good while at ‘The Pip’ that night and deposited quite a handful of cash into socks, briefs, and the drink till; and when at last those able guardians of the law took their way home, nine o’clock had come and gone. So had the train.

TBI: 'Never Forget Who You Are'; and, perhaps coincidentally, a plunging necklion

Dude: Quem são esses meninos do Brasil? Are they twins? Identical? (I shouldnae think sae.) Biovular? Regular sibs? Are they both Hitler?

The tattoos are probably coincidental. Menino #1 has a lion sprawled across his neck and collarbone; whereas Menino #2 has the text 'Never forget who you are' on his right pectoral. Mind you, 'Never forget who you are' is mostly webmembered of late as part of the neo-Gibranish body of wisdom issuing forth from Tyrion Lannister; but while the quote from The Lion King is the slightly different 'Remember who you are', Google assures me there are tons of rubes out there with this conflation inked upon them:

Ok, but, most importantly, who are these guys? Yeah, sure, they're random swimwear models. But this is now desperately important to me. You do you. 

Please advise soonest.