Three Men and a Little Ubermensch

Guttenberg woke up immured within a bad metaphor. Raising his head was like the shift of a tectonic plate, lifting eyelids like prising open a bureau encased in titanium, yawning was a cry filled with a thousand echoes - and other such nonsense, all building up the impossibly Sisyphean task that seemed to engulf the man.

The image of the previous evening was a cloudy vapour rapidly dispersing; the faint swirls belying some as of yet unremembered shock. Deprived of full cognitive function, Guttenberg sat at the end of his bed, gawking around at the room, deficient in size as it was. The spectre of bile eddied through his stomach; he had secretly always resented the fact that Danson took no hesitation in claiming the larger of the two bedrooms.

Guttenberg had cohabited with Danson for years; yet without the lease on hand no one would have known it. Playing out the dreams of the misguided, Danson spent the majority of his time being prey for the cameras in Hollywood. Intermittent calls back to home-base were the best Guttenberg could ask for; their short conversations acting as an excuse for Guttenberg to execute his pre-rehearsed lines for what anarchy had occupied his week. All lies of course; Guttenberg ate inertia for breakfast. But regardless, he never failed to compile a list of startling incidents and wholly marvellous coincidences for the occasion.

Just then the circulating bile took a wrong turn, and Guttenberg vomited right at the bow of the bed-ship, which he had been manoeuvring in a stupid gesticulation to some awful film.

Wiping his brow with a balmy hand, he stumbled forth into the hall. Sliding southbound across a sheet of kaleidoscopic wallpaper, and resisting a second deluge of stomach reflux, his eyes met a blinking answering machine.

Danson? Getting the first flight out, back in the afternoon? Sounded urgent.

Fumbling at the pyjama bottoms he wasn’t wearing, Guttenberg deleted the message and moved on.

His routine of untruths had almost had the effect of supplanting the reality. As if the imaginative narratives concocted in Guttenberg’s head had taken on a sense of facticity, negating the dreary actuality. With the amount of rumination required, they almost were true, or at least truer.

The life that was to be veiled from sight was, in fact, barely a life at all. In the afternoon he worked in the local laundrette. In the evening, he would eat his dinner (over the sink, to prevent mess), and then take to the sofa to flaccidly watch the Steptoe and Son movie. The existence was tedious, but Guttenberg still held some hope that Danson would return to rescue him from the monotony. Was that why Danson was flying back here? Is this urgency predicated on years of built-up guilt over his desertion?

Guttenberg hiccupped in rhythm with the sonic drone of the air conditioning unit. The bulky outcropping of aluminium took up a third of the living room – a consolation gift sent by Danson last year. It was then that Guttenberg noticed a figure lying on the sofa. Rifling through his Gutten-hair inquisitively, his curiosity prompted him forward.

He knew the guy lain out on the sofa - this guy aping the foetal position, this guy re-slurping rapids of bacterial mucus from the corners of his mouth, this guy whose blotched trousers intimated of a night full of incandescent amour - the bristles of his moustache were unequivocal. The sleeping curio was none other than Freidrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

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Danson arrived dishevelled at his front-door, hold-all on one arm, a great dangling mass of keys extended from the other, and a whiskey flask hanging precariously out of his jacket pocket. The flight had been bad to Danson. Bought last minute from a freemason hiding under the bread counter in Tesco, the ticket gave him a first class seat on a fifth class plane. When he was not being hounded by paparazzi on jetpacks, he was being seduced by the modish goat to his right who had taken a liking to Danson’s idiosyncratic appropriation of the Antarctic chic look. To top off this airborne persecution, they showed a Tony Scott movie! And it wasn’t even Last Boy Scout.

All was not well indeed, violins crushed under the weight of Ron Howard’s self-important testicles were strewn with indifference across the circumference of Danson’s head.

Working his way through the door, a waft of vile energy was sucked out through the draft. Blindly ambulating around the hallway, his wide-open eyes could perceive only the dense hue of purple that Guttenberg had seemingly saturated the house with. Then he stumbled into the abyss that had usurped the core of the domicile.

In the kitchen, at the dining table, sat at one end, Guttenberg, at the other, Nietzsche. Guttenberg’s eyes were wrapped in cling-film, his thoughts atomising to the tune of asphyxiating scat, as he slouched a quotation from Notre Dame, motionlessly and without demur. Nietzsche too was silent and inert, a copy of the TV Times, rumpled at the edges, hinted of an opus already browsed a myriad of times that morning. It was as if someone had put this image of emasculated Russian roulette on pause, the spectacle of gunless conflict and awkward glances too tempting an image not to hold for the most flinchingly-long length of time.

Penetrating the ambience with his presence, Danson too sat down. This seemed to rouse both benign combatants, each lifting their dejected complexions to stare at the neo-Aryan configuration of hair Danson was sporting these days. This icy rebuttal to global warming tried to ignite the flames of information, but sans success. Eventually, when Danson threatened to put on a VHS of Loch Ness, both mute protagonists combusted into conversation.

Turned out Nietzsche had arrived last night, slightly sloshed on vodka rums, with two large tablets of stone, one displaying the double-dimples of Guttenberg, the other the brink-wall countenance of Danson. These stones were the last will and/or testament of Nietzsche’s deceased lover, Zara, daughter of the mighty genius prophet who cast out the absurdities of mystic narcissism and reaffirmed the living existence, who heralded a new age of humanity in the most poetic and beautiful way possible and communicated the necessity of a total critique of things and concepts, all whilst on an epic journey through an ancient caricature of testaments old and new.

But Zara Lundgren was now dead.

In her death-throws, she left a small child, nurtured under the shade of Nietzsche’s moustache up to now. But the extinguishing of her life brought the knowledge that it was perhaps possible that old F.W was not actually the pater of this familias. Her final whispers spoke of an illicit affair with both Guttenberg and Danson one morning beneath the flight path at LAX.

It was then that Nietzsche took to the podium, pacifying the room with a sudden bout of flatulence. Up ‘til then, this regale had belonged to Guttenberg, but Nietzsche could take no more of the value-laden vomit-talk from, as he called him, “fuck-cheeks”.

Zara had constructed the stones so that her Prussian consort would know who these guys were; just in case Nietzsche hadn’t seen Police Academy or Getting Even With Dad. A stupid misconception indeed since these were two of his favourite cinematic masterworks.

So, after his arrival, Nietzsche had informed Guttenberg of all that had dragged him some four-thousand miles westward - the long drawn-out stories of Zara’s rabies and whatnot. When they ran out of pertinent plot points to reveal, they broke out Danson’s vintage wine collection, supping a cellar’s worth of decades in only a few hours, before each passing out.

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The acceleration of the narrative arc bustled us forward, and loose-ends were discarded, as Danson demanded to know what Nietzsche wanted with all this, what were his intentions?

Nietzsche replied, hyphenating all his words, that this child would become the daughter of the three of them - just like in that film with Tom Selleck. They would all move into Guttenberg’s purple palace, where the three men would awkwardly try and raise the little lady to be the best person she can be in this harsh and relentless world that we live in.

And so it was. Many hilarious moments would materialise over the years, such as the infant urinating all over Danson’s air-con unit, the cheeky scamp, or Guttenberg getting an ice-cream in the face at Mardi Gras, how adorable, or Nietzsche sitting the now-adolescent female down for a chat about “you’re developing into a, erm, young woman now and, um, you’re going to start to get, well, things are going to happen…”

Many years went by until FOX finally accepted Guttenberg’s reality TV show idea – Über My Two Dads. The half-hour bi-weekly would go on to net Guttenberg seven Emmys, reignite Danson’s film career, and allow Nietzsche to host his own chat show, Twilight of the Idols Live from New York.