Jimi Strawberry's Gas Bomb & More Stories from Dank Summit
By Dan Baldwin
()
About this ebook
This collection has something for everyone and everything for any short story enthusiast. The variety of humor, irony, darkness, and pathos provides the reader with the motivation to keep moving on to the next story, confident that he will find still more surprises. Dan touches in the universals of human experience over and over again. You’ll wonder about every decision you’ll ever make after reading Flip.
- Duke Southard, award winner author of The Fallacy of Closure and Cracks in the Wall
Dan Baldwin
Dan Baldwin is the author of westerns, mysteries, thrillers, short story collections and books on the paranormal. He is the winner of numerous local, regional, and national awards for writing and directing film and video projects. He earned an Honorable Mention from the Society of Southwestern Authors writing competition for his short story Flat Busted and a Finalist designation from the National Indie Excellence Awards for Trapp Canyon and Caldera III – A Man of Blood. Baldwin received a Finalist designation in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards for Sparky and the King. Bock’s Canyon earned the Winner designation in the 2017 Best Book Awards. Baldwin’s paranormal works are The Practical Pendulum – A Swinging Guide, Find Me as told to Dan Baldwin, They Are Not Yet Lost and How Find Me Lost Me – A Betrayal of Trust Told by the Psychic Who Didn’t See It Coming. They Are Not Yet Lost earned the Winner designation in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Competition. How Find Me Lost Me won the Winner designation in the Best Book Awards 2017 competition and the Finalist designation in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Competition.
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Jimi Strawberry's Gas Bomb & More Stories from Dank Summit - Dan Baldwin
TITLE PAGE
by
Dan Baldwin
COPYRIGHT INFO
JIMI STRAWBERRY’S
GAS BOMB
&
MORE
SHORT STORIES
FROM
DANK SUMMIT
Copyright © 2017 by Dan Baldwin
All rights reserved.
Published by Four Knights Press
www.fourknightspress.com
Cover Design and Layout Copyright © 2017
Based on original design by Aryn Livingston
Designed by Daring Creative Designs
daringcreativedesigns.com
This book is a work of fiction. All rights reserved. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
OCTOBER 2017
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Info
Introduction
Jimi Strawberry’s Gas Bomb
Two to Go
The Mutt
Gizzard
Give Me a Break
Huffines at Last
Caddaja
Diddy
Flip
Knuckles
Pig’s Flying
Flashing the Jerks on Fannin Street
Lurlene Hurlbutt’s Flatline
About the Author
Books By Dan Baldwin
If You Liked…
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the intriguing, sometimes crazy, sometimes poignant, but always entertaining world of Dan Baldwin. Whether a long-time fan or a newcomer to Dan’s unique talents, you will be sure to enjoy his latest sojourn into the captivating characters inhabiting the town of Dank Summit.
Imagine a place populated by the gizzard, half girl and half lizard, or a caddaja, an Indian form of the devil, and visited by Gospel Billy, a charlatan with evangelical hair.
Mix in an alien or two, a vampire frustrated in his attempts to draw blood, and a medical receptionist whose manner is as cold and as comforting as an aluminum bed pan
and you have just a small taste of the unique characters you will meet in Dank Summit.
This collection has something for everyone and everything for any short story enthusiast. The variety of humor, irony, darkness, and pathos provides the reader with the motivation to keep moving on to the next story, confident that he will find still more surprises. Dan touches in the universals of human experience over and over again. You’ll wonder about every decision you’ll ever make after reading Flip.
Dan Baldwin is a master at dialectic dialogue and his storytelling captures the spirit of the commonplace, making even Girth and Harb, the two aliens come to earth for a human hunt as real as old friends. In this volume, he enhances his reputation as a writer with tremendous range and talent. Readers will be left wanting more and are sure to be disappointed when finished the final story.
—Duke Southard, award winner author of The Fallacy of Closure and Cracks in the Wall
JIMI STRAWBERRY’S GAS BOMB
JIMI STRAWBERRY WOKE UP AND CRAWLED out of the rolling waves submerged in his king-sized waterbed. He rolled over the hand-varnished 2x12 mahogany bedframe, stretched and did a few squats to jumpstart the old heartbeat. The crackling of his knee joints sounded like a young war kicking off on the other side of the hill. He looked in the mirror and grasped the dresser with both hands.
You’re either on the bus or off the bus.
He winked and smiled.
He stepped into the shower, sprayed his body and quickly turned off the water. He lathered up with organic soap blissfully hand made by his girlfriend, Melanie Clover Meadowfield. The soap smelled like a mix of roses and rotgut, but a gift is a gift especially if hand delivered by an attractive sixties throwback who pretended to know what ‘you’re either on the bus or off the bus’ means. Melanie had a good heart and talented hands, but she wasn’t the brightest bubble in the lava lamp. Swathed in suds, he ran the water just enough to de-lather before stepping from the stall. After drying off on his genuine hemp towels he combed his gray hair and opened the top drawer of his dresser. Inside was an array of ponytail bands. Each one was made of hand-tooled leather embossed with mantras important to Jimi and his generation. He had them arranged by days.
Give peace a chance Monday.
Make love not war Tuesday.
Peace! Wednesday.
Power to the People Thursday.
Go with the flow Friday.
Outtasight Saturday.
Dorothy Provine Sunday.
He selected one of his favorite anyday bands – Right On! - and locked it in place just behind his occipital bump. His hair reflected his outlook on life that day – straight and tight up front for the squares, but, like Jimi, loose and free behind the image. Looking again into the mirror he said, If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
His’68 VW van nestled in his three-car garage was like a second home and he
approached it with a reverence one gives a holy relic. It had been rebuilt from the ground up and was on its second engine, but from the looks of the exterior the vehicle could have just pulled out of a Viet Nam War protest. The original flower-power art and protest slogans had long worn away. But a few years back he hired an artist to replicate the original in shiny and permanent paint.
As he drove downhill toward central Dank Summit he glanced back at his home. The castle
was built by his great-grandfather. The old boy had been a roughneck in the Louisiana oilpatch who had the incredible good fortune to have an ace up his sleeve in a card game late one night in some long-forgotten back-bayou whiskey bar. The ace won him a hole in the ground in the middle of a mass of red dirt that came to be known as the Rodessa Field, one of the richest oil deposits in the United States. The old roughneck became staggeringly wealthy and he wanted to make a permanent statement to that effect. He built the castle to look like the one in the Frankenstein and Dracula films of the thirties. It was big, gray and imposing, just like the old man. Although Jimi loudly and often denounced the industry from which his fortune grew, he loved the stone fortress, especially on Halloween when he turned it into a playhouse for Dank Summit’s little monsters.
His mind blew back to the moment that set this day in motion, a meeting with his banker several weeks earlier.
Xavier Hollander was a middle-aged bank manager and Mr. Drysdale to Jimi’s Jed Clampett. His primary concern was trying to keep the substantial Jimi Strawberry trust fund intact. And in the bank. He flopped back in his leather seat and wiped his hand across his comb-over. You want a gas station!
Jimi said, "A service station."
Jimi, are you possessed? You’re a dadblamed socialist.
Capitalistic socialism – it’s the wave of the future. Catch it, Xavier.
"You are possessed."
I want a service station that provides ultra-service, something new for the people.
"The people want cheap gas and a place to buy cold beer and potato chips."
I know what the people want. And I’m going to see that they get it. Service beyond service. Horsepower to the people.
Hollander couldn’t talk Jimi out of his latest fantasy, so the money was allocated for the project and within a month the citizens of Dank Summit were buzzing about the new enterprise. Jimi bought an existing station and began