The old black man named Jack White sat not so high up on the hill top and strummed his four string guitar because those four strings were all that he had left. He had broken another one somewhere down around Clamville. All this did was make him laugh and keep on playing whenever the urge struck him to do so, which was damn near all the time. You see, Jack White was a beast of the blues. He used to stand with his back towards Meg2000's drum set that she purchased at Oui Oui Toys over in the French quarter of the fry district and yell to his dwindling audience just prior to leaving bloodstains permanently splattered not only onto but into the stage. Black and blue blood that is because when Jack White picked up a guitar, no matter how many strings were left, he bled the blues and the blacks. That was all there was to it. Four strings though? Well, even a man who says his prayers by candlelight and makes the dark scream "man meat is murder!" in whorehouses all over the country begins to have himself a little trouble getting some decent enough tread action and blues power with only four strings on his doll rod.
There he sat, pissed, and grumbling lyrics that he had just made up because he knew that soon his prized honey wouldn't have any strings at all. Baby needed new strings and today he was headed into town to get them any way that he could. He was out of money but not even close to running dry of ambition. This week had pretty much sucked him off hard and swallowed without so much as exhibiting a gag reflex. But those new strings would be strung and new songs sung. Some might think that it was his own fault what had happened. That last string would never have broken had it not been for a couple of nights ago when the redux of the old duo was playing that club he had an uneasy feeling about even before setting either of his feet on the same side of the street where its foundation lay crumbling and rank. Payment was usually up front and down center palm before even plug in or the first notes. It was a big mistake not forcing this particular ideal to stick on and hang straight. Still, he knew that how it all had gone down was not his fault because he was a blues man and that was just how he rolls.
Jack White was actually much more than a bluesman. He was an outlaw whether his hammer was juiced on amplification or not. This meant that loud and proud or a riot thats quiet he could sure enough fuck shit up. It was this very thing that had gotten him into trouble a few towns back there in Haleys comet. Gone daddy gone though. Like love potion sliding right down the sewer. For now all that he wanted was a bottle of tequila so he could finish writing them new songs he had been kicking around for yet another mix tape that would probably go un-recorded because nobody would buy it when they could just download it for free off the intersect. This was reason number 812 why he had found himself so bitter in his old age but Jack White would have his final revenge when he would record his new record in his head and leave it there. It was a changing world and technology ran over old black and blues men who used to be successful and white like Jack on a John Deere bulldozer. But even at the age of 72 and some change music stilled flowed through his veins and gurgled from his intestines. Besides, he still could not allow himself to part with the term "making records."
He needed those strings to make his brown eyes black and blue again. As he sat there on the hill top strumming and humming not really to himself he heard a laugh that blasted through the air like a buffalo fart. His sneer crinkled up way past Elvis or Billy Idol lip because even though for the beaten down life of him he couldn't work up enough reasoning as to what brought him here he knew the voice buried in the heaps of that laugh could only belong to one person. The same person who was stepping up the hill and crowding him with the shadow of a royal jellied fat cat.
He kept on playing because despite missing those strings like an old friend sent off to battle the riff he was strumming was found to be a more than suitable companion. With the entire sun now blocked out and the fat man breathing a heavy vapor born of grilled onions and some sort of dead animal the only thing keeping his hair from flattening was the pre-existing layer of chicken grease he had smeared on after leaping from the 409. He looked over at his guitar case to check if it was closed tight. This fat cat was a well known klepto-maniac and Jack wasn't about to have any of the few possessions he had left taken from their place. If that were to happen he would find himself breaking another string.
"Well God damn!" The man yelled so loud that it could have shaken the hill, "I once knew an old son of a bitch who could play the blues so tight that a horny baby doll couldn't fuck it with a pinky finger and a jar of vaseline! He was white though. Jack White to be exact."
Jack remembered that not everybody knew he had gotten a rawhide transplant at the voodoo blues festival last year. Nobody cared much about a decrepit old hasn't been in too damn long. Jack had always wanted to be black anyway so why not he thought? Might as well complete the transaction. So there he was re-fitted with skin coating made from a mixture of old negro flesh and shoe leather. The flesh had been preserved in a jar of the basement of some old blues hound and was rumored to have belonged to Curly Weaver. It hung down a little low when he slouched or sat like he was doing now. But the shoe leather cut in kept him from sweating and that was a blessing all its own to a real blues traveler.
Jack leaned back in an effort to stretch out of the shadow and into the sunlight and his guitar hung between his forearms and his knees. He spit a glob of phlegm within inches of the mans bare feet that resembled Fred Flintsones in post braking mode.
"I'm Jack White. I know who you are. You're Jack Black. Not sure what you're doin' 'round these parts though."
He could see the eagerness building a fort from the wrinkles and dimples on Black's face as he paused. Then he coughed up more ferocity from his lungs and gave the phlegm a playmate.
"I imagine against my wishes you'll tell me though," he said clearly uninterested.
Black laid his own guitar case in the grass and sat right down next to him. He immediately began sizing up White's guitar case.
White sat his guitar down on top of the case and pulled a smoked pepper stick from his shirt pocket.
"I ain't lookin' fer' no trouble Black. I done had me enough that and I don't need no more for the next hundred years should I figure out how to live that long. I can't keep you from eyeballing what little I got left. But you put your hands on any of it I'm gonna do to you what I did that club owner that wouldn't pay me couple nights days back."
Black laughed so hard that he rained spittle all over White. White didn't seem to mind though because it had been a few days since his last shower. After his jelly rolls stopped dancing he glared at White in silence until he realized that the old bastard was not going to continue his story without some support.
"Soooooooo.... what did you do him?" He asked with rabid fervor.
White hadn't seen Black in well over ten years and in just scant minutes he had become more peeved than a man his age ever needed to be. He figured it would be a smart idea to flee the company of his nemesis before he had a Lalapalooza flashback and broke his only guitar over the assholes skull. As he started to move his old bones upward Black pushed him down and began to blubber.
"Come on man, I know you are pissed off about what happened between us. I would be too. Did you know that me and KG no longer jam together?"
White looked on blankly for a moment and then grumbled through his teeth.
"No shit. He's dead isn't he?"
Black laughed.
"Well, yeah. But if he was alive we wouldn't be jamming together anyway. I would forgive him though because that is the Christian thing to do."
White felt an army of phlegm soldiers gathering their legion and heading towards his throat.
"You ain't a goddamn Christian ya fuckin' cabbage catch cow ass!" White yelled.
Black looked somber for a moment and this caused White to settle back down into his seat on the hill.
"Why do you have to make fun of how big my ass is?" Black asked him seeming on the verge of tears.
White just listened because he knew very well what was coming.
"You always were mean to me. I never did anything to you. Well ..." He stumbled his words.
White laughed.
"Yeah, well.... no shit well...." He manage to spit out before Black started up again.
"Look it was Lalapalooza and I was on acid. I said I was sorry on yotube. What else do you want from me?"
White felt himself easing up a little. Fuck it, he thought to himself. That was a long time ago. Lalapalooza had sucked anyway. Black's little charade might caused Meg to skip out on the band and force White to hire that robot Meg1000 to finish the tour. But the real Meg was starring in dirty old lady porn in the Ukraine now and cashing in on White's name. Her name wasn't Meg White anymore. Her name never was Meg White in the first place. It was Black. Like the fucker who was sitting next to him and sinking in the grassy knoll. Couldn't have two Jack Blacks out there kicking it. Besides, White had always thought the Black stripes sounded too urban, but in a bad way.
White looked down at Black's guitar case.
"What kind of axe ya got there?" He asked with the genuine zeal only fellow guitar geeks can exhibit with each other.
Black beamed like a spotlight and reached over to unhook the clips on the side.
"KG ripped this right off the wall when we played at Club Hell-"
Just then, White turned from Black and red and back into White again.
"You guys played at Club Hell?" He almost stuttered.
Black laughed.
"Damn right we did! We were the house band for the main man himself until Lady Gogo came along and fucked up everything."
White looked confused.
"Lady Gogo? What does that bitch have to do with Club Hell?" He really wanted to know.
Black looked at him as if he had just stepped off of a spaceship from Mars wearing Ziggy Stardust underoos.
"Her mom has been the devils old lady for a while now. I thought everybody knew that-"
"Lady Gogo?" White interrupted.
Black clamped his mouth shut and then popped it open again like a spastic puppet.
"Bingo! The one and only."
White shook his head.
"I haven't seen her since we used to fu-"
Black started shaking his head and waving his hands in the air.
"No no no no no no I can't hear you. La la la la la la la la-"
"Alright alright," White said, "You don't have to be a fuckhead about it."
As soon as he said this White took a good look at who he was saying this too and realized that yes he did and yes he would. Some things never change.
"That was how Lady Gogo got her career practically handed to her on a silver platter and guys with talent like me and you got sent up the river and told we needed to dry ourselves out," Black shook his head again," As if you can dry out in a goddamn river."
Though White was sometimes prone to episodes of dementia he was beginning to see the crystal ship clearly approaching.
"Hey when was the last time you been to Club Hell?" White asked him as he began to haul himself up for sure this time.
Black's mouth fell open and the smile he wore on his face looked as if it could swallow a bowling ball.
"Are you serious?" He asked though clearly his expression hoped what the answer would be.
White just smiled on as he finally pulled up onto his feet.
"You know that fucking with the devil ...." Black paused, "...and Lady Gogo could finally get us old bastards into our coffin beds for good, right?"
White looked straight into the sun as if he were greeting a long lost friend all over again. Mostly because after being clouded by Black he knew that he was. His leathery new complexion curled just slightly in its rays and he spoke clearer than he had in years.
"Black, White, don't matter much. Crazy is crazy.... and me and you," he motioned towards himself and Black and emitted a smile that easily could have rivaled both Black's smile and those sun rays, "We is gonna finally show that red footed son of a whore what crazy really is."
*****To be continued*****
*****Being a writer is fun because you never know where you will find inspiration, and even then, you never know what you will find when you find it. I'm not sure if that makes sense to anyone else, though it makes perfect sense to me because it happens all the time. In this case, I saw a writing challenge somewhere. Might have been the old blog site. Don't really remember at the moment. The challenge was to do something based on the theme of black and white. The first thing that popped into my head was how cool it would be if Jack Black and Jack White got together and fucked shit up. I wrote the story, read it, and wasn't that pleased with it. I put it aside and broke it out like a year later and thought it was actually not so bad after all. In fact, I'm very fond of it. It just didn't go at all in the direction that I had wanted it to. As a writer, this also happens quite a bit. I have the start of another story with these two laying around and, one day, hopefully I will finish it.*****
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