Clifford sighed and polished something silly. "I'm the Messiah," he stated. "Show some respect." He then turned away, feigning indignance. He knew it was pointless. ... Still, he felt it was important to keep up appearances just in case God was watching but not paying much attention.

Luci tittered demoniacally as she uttered Christian epipthets and made her way to the stage. She picked up her guitar, made sure her G-string was slightly sharp, and then willed herself an orgasm for no apparent reason other than it seemed an appropriately Bitch-Punk-esque thing to do.

Clifford turned to Angela, the gorgeous blond, and didn't look into her eyes. "The usual?" he asked.

Angela just smiled hypnotically.

"One Holy Water with a rose petal coming up," he replied, fending off the inevitable surge of testosterone-induced machismo that always followed one of Angela's smiles.

From the stage, Luci watched Clifford's strong hands pour the drink and imagined what he'd be like in bed... covered with rose petals... Ravel's Bolero on the stereo... jumper cables connecting their perky little nipples... Then she started giggling uncontrollably and had to go to the bathroom.

"What's wrong with her?" Angela asked.

"You don't want to know," Clifford replied, shaking his head, still careful to avoid direct eye contact with Angela.

Despite the fact that she was an Archangel, or perhaps due to it, Angela had great legs. She also had platinum blond hair, achingly blue eyes, and a to-die-for smile. Such beauty attracted total and undistracted attention from anyone that saw her. Men were known to take vows of chastity, poverty and woe simply because a glimpse of her smile was a religious experience that made stigmata about as exciting as finding a lost Twinkie in the couch cushions. Radio stations had been purchased in her honor, playing only love ballads with the word "angel" in them as a tribute of the magnitude of love all felt for this heavenly creature.

On a more practical level, men had to be careful when they were near her because when Angela looked directly into someone's eyes they turned into a quivering mass of tapioca pudding-- often literally.Angela was in fact the one pure bastion of pristine perfection... the one undefiled magnum opus of all that is truly good... the one spark of light in the portentous abyss of not only The Dirty Dwarf, but America, the Universe, and life as we know it. Angela was indeed a babe of the highest order.

Used to such adulation, Angela sipped her drink, ignored Clifford's third consecutive millenia of nervousness, and said, "I'm afraid the next round starts at midnight, Clifford."

Clifford sighed an omnipresent sigh and glanced around the bar at the patrons who seemed to have no business being there other than the fact that they had been predestined from birth to risk their very souls for the trivial amusement of forces beyond their comprehension. This introspective moment was shattered when Luci Damian screamed into the microphone, "Fuck me naked, dead and blue!... I'd like to start with a little number I wrote for a priest friend of mine who finally realized after one of my blowjobs that the meek aren't going to inherit shit! It's called 'Tie Me Up and Party'!"

Whip marks bleeding down my thighs
All chained up and no place to go
Baby, you've got me where you want me
And I think I'm going to come!

Tie me up and party
Tie me up and party
Tie me up and party
Fuck you!

Gag me so I won't wake up the neighbors
Strap me to the ceiling fan
Give my butt-plug another whack
Then bark and slap me silly

Tie me up and party
Tie me up and party
Tie me up and party
Fuck you!!

As the last note plopped mercifully onto the floor, Luci stood defiantly, dripping with sweat, nostrils flared, fists in the air, to the thunderous sound of... no applause whatsoever. It wasn't easy being the Demon Goddess of Psycho-Grunge Bitch-Punk when you were sentenced to play only in a second-rate poseur-pub with no mosh pit and minimal pyrotechnics. Happily, she had a much more satisfying day job being the Anti-Christ and found solace by standing on her head and flipping off her audience repeatedly as she inserted the neck of her guitar to impossible depths within her vagina. Only when she was firmly convinced that she had made her point did she stomp back over to the bar where Clifford and Angela were noticeably unmoved.

"It's time to go over the rules, Luci," Clifford said.

"What's the point, Cliffy?" Luci replied. "They're the same every fucking time."

Clifford nervously searched for an antacid. "You know as well as I do that any decent religion is ripe with senseless rituals... Ah! There they are." Clifford soon chewed happily on a cherry creme Maalox while he unrolled an official-looking parchment. If there was any part of his existence as the Messiah that truly sucked, it was this-- the impersonal perspective required to referee an age-old battle for souls at a time when their value had plummeted to all-time lows. Of course, the owners of these souls had a slightly different method of evaluation, particularly when they found out that eternal damnation wasn't necessarily the Baptist contrivance for fascist thought control that the new-agers made it out to be. Unfortunately, it didn't mask the truth that people just didn't give a good goddamn, which took all the fun out of the game for Clifford.

"Fuck the exposition, Cliffy," Luci interrupted. "It's getting boring... Let's rock."

Clifford cleared his throat. "OK," he began. "The rules are basic. You may manipulate anyone in any way so long as there is no interference with their free choice. You may not reveal your own or my identity. At the end of the fortnight, the one with the most souls will be declared the winner. The decisions of the Messiah... myself... are final. All souls are awarded on the three-point must system. No souls will be won by floods, famine, or infomercial except on the last day. Upon actual death, all souls will receive a standing eight-count so as to enable them to collect their thoughts before Heaven, Hell, or Reincarnation are awarded. No changing incarnations merely for the purpose of winning souls. Any violations will result in immediate disqualification. Here, in The Dirty Dwarf, where the Beer of Beers meets the King of Kings, in the name of Myself, the Father, and the Holy Ghost... let's get reeeeady to rumble!"

Luci and Angela faced off as Clifford reached up and rang the last call bell ceremoniously, confusing the more anal-retentive patrons who knew it was several hours to last call and demanded an immediate explanation. The senseless ritual thus completed, with the wheels of fate and destiny slowly creaking into motion with the inevitability of a bad case of diarrhea after a spicy South-of-the-Border plate, Clifford resigned himself to continue the charade, and took another Goliath Ale over to George Phoenix, who perpetually sat naked, with his back to the wall in the darkest corner of the bar, waiting for his prophecy to be fulfilled.

As always, George Phoenix wore nothing except for stark white socks and a single stately flower covering mediocre, Caucasian genitals. His sharp, unblinking eyes carefully examined each person in the bar, and, although he had seen them all before, there was still a flicker of hope in his heart that one day, at a moment predestined, he would see the man who was his genetic twin and had his same name.

"Excuse me, do you have a light?" a demure voice asked softly. George's nostrils flared slightly as he inhaled the faint odor of penicillin.

"No," he replied.

Veronica Denise Clapton (known by the regulars as simply "V. D.") shrugged, smiled sweetly and walked away. Going over to the jukebox, she inserted three dollars in quarters and chose a well-worn selection of cheesy drivel-pop tunes placed there just for her. She sat down in front of the bandstand, pulled a passion-pink cigarette lighter out of her purse, and sucked a cigarette with practiced lips. To Veronica, The Dirty Dwarf was a veritable smorgasbord of matrimonial possibilities. That failing, she could occasionally find someone to hop in bed with. For some reason, the man of her dreams had thus far avoided The Dirty Dwarf, and instead she was offered only an endless supply of hopeless dweebs whose collective karmic destinies were to do her no good.

The sticky-sweet, saccharine strains of Johnny Queasy's "Choice Chica Cha-Cha" forced themselves through the bar. The Devil looked over Veronica's shoulder at the jukebox and with a piercing glance, blew it up.

Clifford Godson put down his dishrag and calmly walked over to the rubble muttering, "I'm the Messiah... I shouldn't have to do this sort of thing, should I?" Hearing no answer, he decided that a large dustpan was in order and disappeared into the storage room behind the bar.

Luci glared at Angela satanically... albeit, redundantly... hocked a precocious glob of mucus into Angela's Holy Water and said, "Put the women and children to bed, bitch, 'cause this time you're goin' down."

Angela politely covered the glass with a napkin, smiled at a nondescript, anonymous gentleman who had just stopped in to use the restroom, promptly causing him to temporarily turn into a bubbling mass of quivering tapioca, and said, shrugging innocently, "I don't think so, Luci. But good luck anyway."

"Come on, Cliffy. The challenge for me isn't getting souls anymore, it's trying to keep the boring people out," Luci sneered, turning away from the nondescript, anonymouse melting gentleman.

Butch Stiletto first encountered nondescript, anonymous, melting men in "the Nam" where, on the second day of the war, he made history by having the first recorded Vietnam flashback. Luci made him nervous. Very nervous. Perhaps even very fucking nervous. So he began nervously, yet discreetly, sharpening his Rambo Replica Survival Knife under the table, unaware that he had inadvertently severed the main artery responsible for spontaneous erection and was bleeding profusely onto the floor.

"Excuse me, do you have a light?" a demure voice asked softly.

"Eat shit and die, hosebag," Butch snarled before passing out from lack of blood, shattering his beer mug with his unusually low forehead. Veronica shrugged, smiled sweetly, and walked away.

Clifford calmly walked over, fashioned a tourniquet, and went back to the storage room to trade the dustpan for a mop. "Father, this is pissing me off," he said, eyes raised toward the ceiling fan.

Minutes later, the bar once again immaculate, Clifford approached two dowdy, wool-enshrined fossils recently retired from an obscure and unimportant university whose football team had not won a game in 20 years when "Crazy Legs" Zalinski had valiantly sprinted for 98 yards with two broken legs and a severe case of hemorrhoids, collapsing in the end zone as an undetected brain aneurysm exploded in the final seconds of a game that would determine last place in the division over their perpetual nemesis, an even more obscure, less-important university whose only claim to fame was that they once had a Book-of-the-Month-Club Selection author on the faculty. As the scoreboard flashed an 8-4 victory, "Crazy Legs" Zalinski died. Unaware of this, the enthralled fans carried his lifeless body around and around the stadium, cheering madly and throwing him into the air like a mauve and lavender beach ball before taking him to the victory party and sock-hop where he reigned in the seat of honor, eyes glazed, the smile of victory still on his ever-darkening lips until an exceptionally observant premed student, fearing that rigor mortis was a bad sign, was reluctantly forced to pronounce him dead. A collection was quickly taken up, and "Crazy Legs" Zalinski was forever immortalized in the lobby of the gymnasium-- stuffed and mounted in a dramatic action pose, his eyes pointing in only slightly different directions, a plaque engraved with the inspiring phrase "No Price Too High for Victory!" solemnly tacked to his left ankle.

Not knowing any of this, and not particularly caring, Clifford asked the two men if they would like another drink.

"Please," they replied in unison.

As Clifford left to fetch their usual Desert-Dry Martinis, Professor Klaus continued where he had left off, "... in fact, a single distinction between two types is of overriding importance. Two clauses may be put together in such a way that they retain equivalent status, in which case they are said to be coordinated or conjoined."

Professor Jerend nodded knowingly. "But, alternatively, one clause may be subordinated to another or, as some terminology has it, embedded within another."

"Exactly my point!" said Professor Klaus, pulling out a pen and grabbing a cocktail napkin with a flourish. "The two kinds of amalgamation-- conjoining and embedding-- can be shown diagramatically..."

"Here are your drinks, gentlemen," Clifford said, placing the gin on Professor Klaus' fully articulated diagram, causing the ink to run into a Rorschach resembling nothing more significant than a squished marshmallow. Clifford then took a Whoremonger Beer over to Morton King, who sat at a table with a chess board impregnated into it.

"Hey, Cliffonator, how about a quick game?" Morton asked.

"Sorry, I've got real customers to deal with."

"Aw, c'mon, Cliffster, you big wuss" he snorted, causing a verdant glob of mucus to squirt from his left nostril and arc its way onto one of the support posts, where it dripped and dangled and generally grossed everyone out.

Clifford cringed and mopped up the unsightly mess. "Father, he may be pure in Your sight, but he sure looks like a dickweed from down here," he muttered with eyes raised towards the ceiling fan.

Morton chuckled and thought back to the days in Little Sicily where he grew up. Like all young boys he had wanted to be a professional wrestler with a nifty-cool nickname like "The Amazing Sex Dynamo", "Stud Muffin", or "Elephant Dick." But, alas, fate had decreed that he should be a wimpy little fart, doomed to watch his younger brother Guido bang little Suzy Mozzarella in the back of a two-tone, four-door, '57 Mafia-mobile while he tried to translate her primal screams with his Captain America Decoder Ring. And afterward, when Suzy sneaked away to Confession, leaving his little brother snoring like a garbage disposal with a Ginsu knife in the blades, Morton desperately sought a way to win friends, influence people, and in the name of all that was holy, get laid. Then one sunny afternoon with his Uncle Ragu he discovered a power greater than sex, drugs, or rock-and-roll... CHESS.

It was a brutal game: Pawns against pawns, knights occupying the same spaces, queens on the wrong color. Then Morton saw a chance to break things open. He deftly executed a daring en passant. Uncle Ragu raised one eyebrow and paid Morton the highest of compliments, "Nice move, you little son of a bitch. I knew you were born out your mother's ass."

"I call it the Mortenelli Butt Fork!" Morton replied proudly as his Uncle Ragu clutched his chest and fell face first into an ungracious blop of shit deposited on the board by a thoughtless pigeon. Morton would be forever haunted by the sight of the paramedics removing the victorious king from his Uncle's left eye and the horrible sucking sounds that accompanied the extraction.

From then on chess became an obsession. At times his Uncle's face would appear on his opponent's king and say, "Use your power wisely, you fuckin' pygmy-dick bastard, or I'll kick your ass from here to New Brunswick!"

Having no sense of spatial relationships not clearly defined by black and white squares, Morton took the threats lightly. "Go away. You're dead, and you still have pigeon shit on your face," he would reply.

"Excuse me, do you have a light?" a demure voice asked softly.

"You mean a Bud Light?" Morton guffawed, slapping his knee.

"That's funny," V. D. replied, sitting down and fondling a bishop. "I have one of these at home, only bigger."

"Oh, you play chess too?" Morton asked, his eyes aglitter. "I like the bishop. There's a subtle power in its simplicity of movement."

"I love games that involve a lot of movement," she said, touching the bishop to her lips and circling its head with her tongue. "Tell me, do you like to play real long games?" she purred seductively.

"The longest game I ever had was 139 moves. It finally ended in a King-Pawn stalemate," he answered, smiling at the memory.

V. D. performed some quick mental arithmetic. "We'll have to get a game up... Soon."

"That'd be swell! I'll show you the Queen's Gambit. It's a favorite of mine."

V. D. didn't know what a gambit was, but the queen part sounded intriguing.

"Oh, so you're one of those?"

"You don't become a Grand Master without being a little radical at times," he said modestly.

Not having the slightest idea how to respond to this statement, V. D. shrugged, smiled sweetly, and walked away to the table where a large, muscular man was carefully sipping a large, muscular mug of Goliath Ale and calmly throwing darts over his shoulder into the bulls-eye's of three different dart boards as his tiny companion looked on. His name was Javelin MacLain, originally a champion... THE Champion... dwarf tosser of The Dirty Dwarf. He had been billed locally as "The Man Who Tossed a Thousand Dwarfs." Eventually it had become not a question of whether or not he would hit the wall, but how high. Rumors of Bugs Bunny-esque silhouette holes in the walls, allegedly made by screaming dwarfs victimized by Javelin's particularly overzealous throws were reported by The Orlando Sentinel. "It's the knees that go first in this sport," one broken dwarf was quoted as saying.

Then, on that fateful day-- October 1, 1988-- when the blatantly oppressive, left-wing, tree-hugging, bleeding-heart-liberal, anti-dwarf tossing legislation went into effect, Javelin and seven unemployed dwarfs were sitting at The Dirty Dwarf discussing the possibility of opening a diamond mine in the Enchanted Forest, but that was voted down because no one knew where it was and, additionally, the dwarfs felt that it would be demeaning to work in a mine.

All other possibilities exhausted, they turned to heavy drinking and collecting unemployment checks. Finally, some months later, financially and morally devastated, Javelin found himself passed out in a public restroom, sleeping in his own vomit, pants in a urinal, keys dangling from his rectum, and very much alone.

He had become a mere shell of the legend he had been before, until one day at The Dirty Dwarf he inadvertently discovered that when he maintained a blood/alcohol level equilibrium of exactly .19724 1/4, he was unbeatable at steel darts. From that point on he began supporting himself solely by winning local and regional dart tournaments.

All gifts are not without their price, however, as Javelin had to maintain a strict body weight of 99,082 grams, which meant that he could maintain the necessary blood/alcohol level by drinking 9 1/2 ounces of Goliath Ale Special Bitter TFN (tastes fucking nasty) every 3 minutes and 37 seconds. For purely superstitious reasons having no scientific corroboration, he also found it keen to carry 5 lucky rabbits' feet in various orifices under his clothing.

"Excuse me, do you have a light?" a demure voice asked softly.

Javelin, being on a tight schedule, chose to ignore her and kept throwing darts.

V. D. was about to shrug and smile sweetly when she felt a teensyweensy little tug on the bottom of her formfitting tights. She looked down at little Stymie Tattoo, Javelin's dwarfen companion. "Hey, Babe... How'd ya like ta make 5 dollars the hard way?" Stymie leered politely, standing on his toes so he could look farther up her blouse. At this point, V. D. patted him on his wee little head, shrugged, smiled sweetly, and walked away.

"I'm going home now, Clifford," V. D. said despondently.

"Bigot!" the dwarf squeaked indignantly.

"Good night, Veronica," said Clifford. "Better luck next time."

"Hop up on the stool, Bashful, and shoot," Javelin said, moving to his throwing line at the far end of the bar. "Is this enough of a handicap?"

"The correct term is "Differently Abled , assbag!" the miniature guy pipped angrily as he wound up to hurl his first dart. Stymie Tattoo was the wealthiest professional student in the continental United States. Because Stymie was not only a dwarf, but the only Jewish/ Black/ Asian/ Latino/ Dyslexic/ Ultra-Liberal/ Left-handed/ Veteran/ Hermaphrodite in Orlando, Florida, he consistently received every Affirmative Action grant he applied for. Yet, despite all this, his first dart landed on the floor only 3 feet away.

Subsequently, Stymie was an educated little speck, having majors in Physical Education, Ceramics, and Seminole Culture; masters in Classical Latin and Leatherwork; and was currently working on a Ph.D. in Venezuelan Diphthong Studies. Sadly, no degree in the world could have bolstered his second throw, which was quite an improvement, but still landed 5 feet from the board.

Stymie met Javelin at the Greater Metropolitan Bithlo Dwarf Tossing Championships. Stymie, while trolling for chicks at this event, suddenly found himself mistaken for a contestant. Despite his pitiful little squeals he wound up tits-to-the-sky in the mud after having been thrown through the air and successfully colliding with a standard-issue clay dwarf-skeet pigeon. It was Javelin who had picked Stymie up by the belt, peered intently through his safety goggles, and announced to all who would listen, "You're not Bob," after which they were inseparable. This bonding experience from the past did not help his third and final throw that landed, miraculously enough, the appropriate distance away, but, unfortunately, no where near the board he was aiming at. Nor did it stop Javelin from taunting across the room, "I come farther than that, you fun-size sack of shit!"

Javelin then proceeded to shoot three bull's-eyes into three different dartboards, throwing under, over, around and through various obstacles. Stymie pouted and handed over the Free Textbook Coupons he had wagered.

Clifford looked at his watch and turned to the woman who had been staring intently into her drink for the better part of three hours. "Are you going to finish that?" he asked politely. "It's almost Midnight."

She looked up at him seriously and answered, "I rarely verbs without speaking," and went back to staring into her drink. Her name was Marilyn Janice Snow, and her drug habit was so severe that it was commonly thought that her first hallucination had occurred in the womb. She used chemicals primarily to forget. Unfortunately, she had forgotten that she had already forgotten long ago, and was well on her way to forgetting that she forgot she had already forgotten.

Angela and Luci looked at each other across the bar. Angela raised her glass in a magnanimous toast to her worthy opponent. Luci spat slime the color of curdled pea soup all over the bar. Outside, a crack of thunder pierced the night sky. The tides swelled another three feet. The last living Saskatchewan Tree Moth fell to its death after munching on some pesticide-laced dillweed. Clifford sighed a beatific sigh and announced without much enthusiasm whatsoever that the game had begun. He then reached up and rang the shiny brass bell above the bar. "Last call, everyone."

At the sound of the bell, Marilyn blinked, only to see that, in her drink, a Salsa band of rotting corpses was chasing after a little mermaid, paddling ice cubes furiously with toothpicks, keeping cadence to "The Rancid Burrito-Fart Mambo" as they attempted to box her in. Suddenly, a man in white emerged from the depths, sporting a hero's grin and a sparkly codpiece, strafing the little Latinos de la Muerte with his big, bad Uzi. The grateful little mermaid swam into his arms to thank him, only to be hurled to the ground, her seashell pasties torn off, leaving the man in white searching hopelessly for her legs, ironically illustrating the truth in the age-old maxim: "You can't rape a fish."

And she ran screaming from the bar...