How Jack Got Blah blah blah...

I want to thank you for having me back here for another interview. The foreman over at the Ferretworks isn't exactly pleased to be missing one of his best wranglers, but I'm sure the team will manage for a few hours without me. I don't mean to brag, but I can wrangle me some ferrets, lemme tell you.

So where was I? Ahh yes, the Big City. I approached on horseback, or rather, goatback, since Chester didn't want me to use his horse. Not that I'd have wanted his horse anyway. It was actually a mean-spirited sofa, but there was no arguing with Chester.

Yes, I suppose it was rather a strange sight to see a nine-year-old approaching one of The Country's biggest cities riding a goat. I was probably too young and inexperienced to realize that though, because I thought I was quite a dashing figure, mounted upon my steed and waving my cane. A few motorists honked at me, which startled my goat and made me drop my hat a couple of times, but I still felt like I could conquer anything.

It only took a day for the City to knock me off my high goat and bring me down to size.

The Big City was the archetypal large metropolis. As a wide-eyed street urchin, I was amazed at the height of the towers. I remember gazing up at them and, like the moron kid that I was, thinking that they scraped the sky. (I later found out that they were actually called "skyscrapers," and some of the magic disappeared.) The noise was incredible. Taxi cabs honked. Streetcars clanged. Angry fat men in silk hats stomped and swore. Actually, it seemed as if everybody was swearing all the time in the Big City.

"Damn kid! Why don't you watch where the damn you're walking, huh? Made me drop my damning cigar the hell on the friggin' street! Ass!"

I didn't even get a chance to apologize. By the time I had figured out that I'd bumped into the lady, she was already blocks away. People moved in the Big City.

Being from a very small community (it was just my family and one other on top of the US Bank Tower) I was astonished at what people were able to get away with right in broad daylight in that place. Every corner, it seemed, had at least one fake Rolex seller, dildo vendor, perverted mime, child pornographer, wife beater or street magician/abortionist plying his trade.

I'd also never seen such blatant exhibitions of wealth before. My father once created a sportcoat out of waffles he'd glued together with butterscotch, but it was nothing compared to what the rich people in the Big City had on display. One man I saw shopping at a dildo wagon had a cape made entirely out of live fox terriers that had to be held up at its edges by five servants. I saw a family drive by in a car so big it had to be driven in sections by four different drivers.

Of course, looking back, it might have just been four separate cars. But I was pretty much in stimulus overload, so a lot of things I saw didn't make a whole lot of sense.

From what Chester told me, I knew that the Big City offered nearly limitless employment, if one was willing to work in one of the many factories, mills, grindhouses, meat stuffing plants, sweatshops, slapshops, killing floors, killing lofts, killing basements, or poo treatment facilities.

"It's hard work, but sometimes they pay you in dimes!" Chester told me. I had never even heard of such ridiculously large denominations before, and I concluded that Chester was simply making it up. "Dimes," indeed!

But it wasn't long before I was making not only dimes, but multiple dimes working eighteen hours a day for a man who ran one of the Big City's Biggest Industries...


...to be continued!