Back when I originally wrote Bent as a Mollusc, the world was a very different place. It was a simpler time, a time when two people talking to each other in pure dialogue didn’t need attributions or description or any other exposition.
Oh how times have changed.
Now Bent as a Mollusc is merely “talking heads”, so it must adapt, move with the times, or perish, just as Tang, Tab and Gwen Stefani perished before it.
Here today is Bending the Mollusc: Bend Harder. I asked myself, “What would Gwen Stefani do if she were still cognisant today?” She would Bend Harder, so that’s what I’ve done.
Bending the Mollusc: Bend Harder
“Man, I’m bent as a mollusc.” Charles Winfield III, a kitchen renovation tycoon with contacts in the pet food industry, hung his hands in his head. “A fucking mollusc.”
Jundi, Winfield’s lifelong platonic man-friend glanced up from the huge cone he was packing. “What the fuck is a mollusc?”
“It’s a thing in the sea.” Winfield waved his hands around, his platinum phantom ring catching the light and spitting it back out in all directions. “Like a crustacean.”
“You mean a crayfish?” Jundi selected another choice bud and tweaked a little off. The heady fragrance of unsmoked THC waffled around.
“Sort of like a crayfish, but with soft bits.”
“He ha, you said it.” Jundi lit the bong and drew back deeply on his mystical creation. “Soft bits like an airline hostess.”
Winfield gazed longingly at Jundi’s glowing cherry. “They’re called ‘flight attendants’ these days.”
Jundi coughed and spluttered on the bong and hacked up a ball of phlegm. He went to spit it on the kitchen floor but, remembering that Winfield was a renovation mogul, decided to swallow it instead. “Flight attendant? How are you going to know then if they’re a guy or a chick?”
“I don’t know.” Winfield reached for the bong, his clammy grasping hands like a creature fresh from the grave. “I’ve never worried about it.”
Jundi handed over the bong. “You ever had any gay ones?”
“What, hostesses?”
“No, gay boy hostesses.” Jundi watched as Winfield took a toke of take. He smoked like a bitch, which was to say, like a fairy, but since he bought all the shit, Jundi never complained. “The ones with pimples who wear makeup and put shit in their hair.”
Holding a lungful of smoke, Winfield croaked out a reply. “No. You?”
“Dunno. I can never tell the difference.”
“You can’t?” Winfield exhaled, the pall of purple smoke eclipsing the cheery beams from the downlights. “Fuck Jundi, no wonder you get yourself into trouble every New Year’s Eve.”
Jundi took back the bong. “My theory of evolution is that we came from molluscs.”
“You don’t know anything about evolution.”
Jundi pressed down around the edges of the cone piece, ready for one last toke. “I know we evolved from mollusc to cuttlefish to spiny anteater to sperm whale to man.”
Winfield hung his hand in his heads. “Man, I’m bent as a mollusc.”