Toto,watch out for those winged....Eewwww! Too late.

"What do you mean Toto's dead?", Kilgallen screamed. But it was true. Done in by monkeys. Winged monkeys. Winged, shameless monkeys, plying their evil trade over and around the Journal-American building wearing little yellow organ grinder hats and nothing else. "Then I shall go to meet him." And she was to, too. But much sooner than she had imagined. Let me explain.

Before meeting JFK for the first time Dot (I shall now call her Dot for brevity of typing, my skills not being particularly advanced. In fact I have eleveated the hunt and peck method of typing to the hunt, hunt more, cuss, and peck method. But it seems I digress.) was more or less happily married, more less than more maybe, to Bernard, a sad sack of a boardwalk taffy puller with a criminal bent. There is a lot of crime to be had in this old world. Big crime. Profitable crime. And by any way in which you choose to slice it, all of these crimes could be sampled and pursued on the boardwalk in Miami Beach. But this was not Miami Beach. Unfortunately, Bernie's taffy pulling kiosk was located near Atlantic City , New Jersey's famed ocean boardwalk. Near, of course, meaning it required a bus ride with two or less transfers.

Bernie eventually met up with the mob. It was inevitable. He did, after all, reside in New Jersey, where all new residents recieve, in their welcome package from the chamber of commerce, a listing of useful numbers which includes, among the sandwich shops and manicure salon listings, a section on useful mob numbers. It is, naturally, under the heading of LOCAL GOVERNMENT, but those who know, well, they know. Bernie knew.

Soon his kiosk was making large deposits weekly at his financial institution. Large cash deposits, with the depoist slip reading: From Bernies Olde Fashioned Salt Water Taffy and Coin Wash. The coin wash was added to the business letter head because the mob, consisting primarily of sly, crafty, grumpy old men, knew that no bank official of sound mind would believe Bernie's kiosk, near the Jersey shore in December, was pulling in that kind of dough. Bernie didn't know that, but then, Bernie was the patsy. Yes, that's right kiddies. Bernie was now laundering money.

Now Bernie was crafty. Crafty in the way that a box of rocks floats. In other words, Bernie was dumber than a sack of fence pole holes. He was made and arrested upon making only his second deposit for the mob. Fingered by a nineteen year old teller...and not in the good way.

So there he was, languishing in Sing Sing Prison, which despite it's rather lyrical name is a dreary, dreary place, doing 19 to 19.375 for money laundering. And as he sat there, a whipped man, nearly out of hope, choking down his dinner of prison bread and prison ham and prison peas and prison sweet tea, in other words, prison food, he had but one thought. "Man, this food is really bad and yet... somehow...unexplainably... I am pretty doggone horny. Wonder what ol' Dot is up to tonight? I do have this GOOD FOR ONE CONJUGAL VISIT coupon I won at Sing Sing Fear Factor last month." And with little or no further thought, other than how, at twenty five cents an hour working in the prison library, IF Dot was free and IF the warden didn't renege on the coupon and IF he could get Lester, his cellmate to go to a movie or something, tonights condom* was still gonna cost him the fruits of five hours labor. He thought about buying two before concluding that no broad, not even Dot, was worth that much work.

Now I could go on and on about this for a long time. There are many details and much minutae left to convey. But, since my one good typing finger is beginning to go numb, I'll jump right into summarizing this for you. The three main summation points are:

1. JFK ate a bullet. The nation mourned. Dallas has carried the black mark ever since.
2. Dot was found dead. While her death is officially classified as A DANG MYSTERY, it is generally assumed that she was taken by winged monkeys, reportedly wearing nothing but organ grinder's yellow hats and sneers, to be with Toto.
3. Bernie was left, alone in prison, to continue as a taffy puller.

Yes, it is a sad, sad tale, but the Gunner wanted to know.

* Why? Well then YOU try to raise a kid on twenty five cents an hour.

Fly..fly my pretties, out
Ramblin' Ed