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Captain Scotto and His Heroes To Be

Episode Thirteen

As the Space Needle receded into the distance, Dr. Ugly knew it was time for drastic measures. So, it wasn't enough that Seattle's precious Capitol Hill had been gutted and demolished. It wasn't enough that the pride of the Seattle skyline, the World's Tallest Space Needle, had defected to Canada. Clearly, he thought, I have yet to strike at the heart of what matters most to that bastard! But the criminally insane mind is also a creative mind, prone to exciting leaps of "thinking outside the box." Soon, an even more diabolical plan was forming in his mind, a plan that could win the Nobel Prize for Diabolical Mad Schemes, if George W. Bush wasn't already a shoo-in for that award.

For Dr. Ugly knew me well enough to know my secret weakness, my Achilles' heel. Oh, it didn't seem like a weakness to me at the time, but that's because I was blinded my own devotion. No, in this one instance Dr. Ugly was as shrewd a character study as any psychiatrist I had ever sent shrieking from her own office. And in those next terrible moments, he would change the face of my reality forever. I'm not joking here. This was some serious shit, dude. I mean… I mean, fuck.

As emergency crews frittered about the city, frantically trying to put things back together before the whole city accidentally exploded or something, a hooded Dr. Ugly made his way from the Seattle Center down into Belltown, casually looking for any convenience store or grocery store or, if he was lucky, actual liquor store that might serve as a place to launch his diabolical scheme. The Space Needle had just been a warm up. This would be a strategic incision into the heart of everything that his mortal enemy believed in. He sauntered into a small, unattended market; the employees and customers had all fled due to the Space Needle's eruption. Alone in the place, he headed directly to the cases of beer and wine in the back of the store. With razor sharp precision, he removed his hood in the presence of all that alcohol…

…and watched as the bottles and cans erupted into a maelstrom of twisted aluminum and molten, fleeing glass. The alcohol itself evaporated into a self-annihilating mist, volumes essentially tearing their own cells apart in an effort to escape Dr. Ugly's penetrating glare of ugliness. The shelves and the refrigerated cases that housed the alcohol also ripped themselves apart in an effort to flee, and before Dr. Ugly could get his hood back on, the entire back half of the market had shredded itself.

Dr. Ugly cackled a deep, satisfied cackle. He frolicked in the wreckage for a moment and then meandered a few blocks south, where an actual, full-fledged liquor store awaited him. His putrescent lips pulled back into a despicable approximation of a human smile as he entered the store.

"Hey, what's with the hood?" the unfortunate attendant asked, suddenly afraid he was being robbed. The old man reached underneath the counter for the shotgun he kept stashed there, but before he could even properly wield it, Dr. Ugly whipped off his hood - again, with a dramatic flourish - and directed the full force of his devastating gaze at the attendant. The man's skin literally ripped itself open as his own organs burst forth and flew through the plate glass window behind him, and then attempted to wriggle off down the street to get away.

Once again alone, Dr. Ugly turned his attention to the alcohol - the sweet, sweet, innocent alcohol. All those helpless bottles of vodka and gin and schnapps, all those wasted young bottles of wine, cut down before their prime... someday, I would plant a memorial to all that spent alcohol. The bottles all exploded at once in a ghastly eruption, the shards all flying as far away from Dr. Ugly as possible, leaving him unscathed by his demented act. And the alcohol, oh the alcohol… Dr. Ugly couldn't even smell it in the air, it dissipated so rapidly.

Now Dr. Ugly's cackle developed into a full fledged maniacal laugh. He grabbed a phone book, and looked up the addresses of every liquor store in range. He would work his way throughout the entire city, and no one would be able to stop him. Why, there was another liquor store a scant several blocks away, and if he managed to steal a car he could make excellent progress. And after all, did he not have the luxury now of time? If it was a waiting game, he could easily outwait me, he believed… for soon, my own private supply of alcohol would run dry, that much he knew for sure, and I would be forced to venture forth into the world. And maybe not that night, maybe not even the next, but eventually I would saunter into some liquor store, expecting the same friendly "Hey, Scotto, still not dead from alcohol poisoning yet?" that I always got when I sauntered in, and I would find to my utter shock and dismay that there was NO MORE ALCOHOL, and in that moment I would realize just exactly what was going on, and I would seek out Dr. Ugly for that dramatic confrontation he'd been seeking all along. And he would somehow outwit me, and then there would be the Love Boat, and the John Tesh, and maybe even the "Nancy Reagan Strip Tease!" episode of Playboy TV, and I would be RUINED, absolutely RUINED, the way Dr. Ugly was himself ruined in a way, and the cosmic scales would be balanced, and Dr. Ugly would at last be able to relax and just get the damn cosmetic surgery he'd been told over and over again would probably be able to make him look just like Erik Estrada. Beautiful, beautiful Erik Estrada.

He stepped out onto the street and gazed lovingly at the plumes of fire and smoke that rose up above the city of Seattle. Soon, they would send in the military to try to restore order, and Dr. Ugly would take possession of their awesome weapons of war, their tanks and their rockets and their impressive wrist watches. He would turn those very weapons against his arch nemesis, he thought to himself, as he sauntered toward downtown, a spring in his step, a sparkle in his eye, a gruesome catastrophe of flesh upon his face...



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