This is part two of my story about E. Howard Twitt, the unscrupulous aetiologist who clained to have found a cure for male impotency.  Like I said earlier, I discovered him signing books in front of a trendy bookstore.  And he was also peddling his products that would cure penile disfunction, which means some guy can't get a stiffy.  Anybody with good sense could see that this yahoo was a fraud, but when it comes to something as sensitive as sex (especially when it is concerned with the restoration of it), people are subject to being taken to the cleaners.  That's where I come in, me and the pigeon squadron.

I flew back over to Congress Avenue and found Paula, my sis, hanging around with a bunch of hotel pigeons.  As often as I'd warned her about that, she still persisted in keeping company with those low-lives.  Hotel pigeons are just a jump above grain elevator pigeons because they're the kind looking for an easy way out, a quick fix, a meal on wheels sort of deal. Lazy, that's my opinion of them.  Paula's argument is that some hotel pigeons are OK, especially the ones hanging around the nicer hotels.  My argument is that Austin only has one nice downtown hotel, and it's not a pigeon friendly place because of the location.  Anyway, I found her eating half a sandwich someone had thrown away with a one-legged pigeon named Lefty.

Well, I told her about finding Twitt, said he was a fraud and that we needed to find the gang and see about making a bombing run or two the next day. I had to get her away from Lefty before telling her, since I didn't want to give away any locations to a rival squadron.  If memory served me correctly, he flew with a group calling themselves the 5th Street Strikers, a group almost as rowdy as the Town Lake Torpedos.  My least favoriet squadron is from north Austin, the Balcones Blue Bombers.  My squadron is the Capital Highrollers, so-called because that what we specialize in bombing - highrollers.

To make a long story short, we finally got organized and made preparations for a bombing run.  Logistics wasn't a problem because we already had our target pegged, so all we needed to do was load the bomb bays.  By that, I mean we had to eat our asses off so we'd have enough bombs to drop come morning.  We won't get into specifics here, but some foods make better bombs than others.  If you want to drop heavy bombs, you need to load up on corn or some other grains.  If you want a really stinky bomb, eat some grubs or grasshoppers.  Most things humans eat make good stinky bombs, we've learned, so we gathered early the next morning and went to a restaurant off Congress to pick through the garbage for a couple of hours.  Then we went looking for E. Howard Twitt.

By ten o'clock that morning a sizeable line had gathered where Twitt was signing books and selling his products.  College kids had heard about the stiffydip by now, since some kid had bought a bottle the day before and had spent the rest of the day porking some gal and her roommate.  Word spreads fast among the younger set, so by the time we had assembled to make our first bombing run, the line was a mixed bag of all sorts of people.  That made me think that maybe Twitt's miracle dip really did work, and it probably did for a while. 

We made our first run at 10:45, and it was a terrific success.  Not only did we get Twitt with a big blob or two right on top of his bald head, we got some college kids who'd crowded in line in front of some highly irritated old farts.  We gave them time to clean up, then made another run at 11:00.  It too was a success, but things started getting ugly after that.  People started showing up with BB and pellet guns, and we had to call of any further raids.  But, we'd done our job.  We'd made a shithead out of someone who deserved it, even though the condition only lasted a few minutes.  It's the symbolism of the thing that counts, you see.

E. Howard Twitt left Austin the next morning, headed back to California.  As you might suspect, he ended up getting marginally famous, especially among the blue haired set and college kids.  After making millions selling his book and products, he finally got his comeuppance.  Old men and college guys started developing a malady none of them wanted . . . hair growth on their penises.  In some cases, I'm told, they ended up with dicks that looked like large wooly worms . . . and as you can easily see, no woman wants to have sex with a hairy dicked man, even if he's got a stiffy that'll last all night. 

Even worse, women suffered some hair growth too . . . and in some cases, lots of it.  Hairline wax jobs increased by two hundred percent in some areas of the country, and Twitt's popularity suddenly took a nose dive.  With all those angry men and women after him, he fled to Mexico.  People started investigating him them, found that he had a long history of other failed diagnoses.  He had once done a study of politicians, found that many of them ended up being jerks because of a tiny worm that lived in leather seatcovers.  These worm infested seatcovers are found in courthouses, capitol buildings, and especially in Washington.  Twitt's argument was that these worms, very tiny and seldom noticed, crawled up the butts of congressmen, senators, and all sorts of administrators and executives, thereby causing a condition of irritability that made them bitchy and inconsiderate.  This buttworm infestation had affected entire generations of politicans, he contended, thereby causing all sorts of problems.  Bad laws were the product of buttworm infestation, and all this was caused by seatcover contamination.  One asshole politicans infected others, it was just that simple.

Somebody said that Twitt ended up in Mexico as their Minister of Culture, but others said he'd gone to India and was researching for a new book.  The most reliable accounting of him has him working for the Bush administration - in a clandestine position, of course.  I can't be certain of it, but I'm almost sure Bush bought Twitt's contention about the seatcover contamination.  Rumor has it that all the leather cushioned chairs in the White House have been disenfected, especially in the Oval Office. 

So, that's it for Twitt.  We'll always remember him as a worthwhile target.  Maybe we bombed a few innocent people in getting to him, but that's the way it is with bombing you know - collateral damage, I think they call it.  The important thing is, we got the right guy.

Polly, 11/06/07