Editor:  Quentin here.

Tortoise:  How can I sue Esquire?

E: *sigh* What now?

T:  You didn’t see the interview in the June issue?

E: Not yet.  I’m busy, you know.  I can’t keep up with all of my subscriptions.  What’s the problem?

T:  The new issue has an interview with Yoda.

E:  And… why am I caring?

T:  Yoda’s my cousin, you nitwit.

E:  Bullshit.  He doesn’t look anything like you.

T:  No, no, he’s a product of a party gone bad; ugly interactions between species under the influence of mind-altering substances.  In his case, a chimpanzee and a tortoise.

E:  Oh, why the hell not?  Full story, please.

T:  Not much to tell, really.  Just another bizarre party of mine where the wrong animals ingested the wrong substances.  Hell, they’re adults, I’m not going to baby-sit them. Apparently a chimp took a ride on a tortoise, something happened and 8 months later a freak appears.  Green, no shell, hairy, basically bipedal.  Luckily, the birth happened on the island, so we were able to raise it secretly.

E:  Nope, it can’t be that simple.  Well, maybe with you it could, but I don’t believe it.

T:  Took your gingko pills today, eh, Quentin?  That was perceptive.

E:  Nothing is ever as it seems with you, Tortoise.

T:  That’s certainly true.  *chuckles*  Okay, here’s the deal.  I was in the Mediterranean on vacation, just wandering around, checking out the local scenery, when I came across a guy building a huge wooden ship.  Not tremendously odd, except the guy wass doing it by himself.  I mean, we’re talking huge here.  Easily a hundred yards long, fifty yards wide, and maybe fifty yards tall.  Monstrous thing.

E:  So naturally you inquired.

T:  Naturally.  I’m not a total idiot.  So I walked up, introduced myself, and asked what he’s up to.  “I’m building a boat,” he said.  Of course you’re building a boat, you bonehead, I can see that.  “Why are you building such a big boat?”  I asked.  “The Lord told me to build it so I can save everything I possibly can when He destroys it with water,” he replied.

E:  This guy’s name was Noah, I take it.

T:  No, it wasn’t.  You’re reading too much propaganda again.  He had some huge 14-syllable Phoenician name.  Everyone just called him Noah.

E:   Don’t try my patience, Tortoise.

T:  Yeah, yeah, sticks and stones.  Anyway, I was getting weird vibes from him.  I couldn’t quite tell if he really was some sort of fanatic or if he was just burnt out on some exotic Middle Eastern drug that I didn’t know about.

E:  So this turned into research.  I know you.  You can’t keep your grubby little paws out of anyone’s hair when it comes to decadence.

T:  I’ll take that as a compliment, Quentin.  Thank you.

E:  Continue, please.

T:  So I decided to hang out and poke my nose around a bit, you’re right.  Noah needed the company, anyway.  People who build monuments to mass destruction aren’t all that popular, you know.  Even his family was goofy.  Oh, his wife was okay, but he had three kids who didn’t lift a finger, just sat on the porch drinking this vile wheat beer, watching their dad bust his ass.  Awful people.

E:  Not that you particularly cared.

T:  Well, no, except when they made me drink the beer.  Christ.  I used it as a diuretic.  Anyway, Noah was deep into the project by the time I came along.  Really, he was just doing some finishing work, making it watertight, stuff like that.  He was a pro.  I watched and gave a few helpful hints now and then.  If there’s something I understand, it’s water technology.

E:  So he wasn’t a crackhead after all?  That must have disappointed you.

T:  Well… not really.  I do appreciate fine works of art, and this was good, for what it was.  And ultimately, Noah offered me a spot on the boat when the rains came.

E:  Which you didn’t need.

T:  Right.  It was nice of him to ask, though.  I declined, but then I offered to hang around during this whole flood business, check for leaks, that kind of thing, and even offered to round up some more help to swim around the boat.  Noah was happy to accept that.  So off I went to recruit, and a few months later brought back a number of various water species on a “cruise vacation”, at it were.  Got there just in time, too, as the rain was beginning to fall.

E:  So did Noah have the boat all stocked up when you got back?

T:  Yeah, just about.  Chock-full of animals.  I actually knew some of them.  Noah kept all of the elephants at the bottom, and I didn’t go down there very much.  There were still some hard feelings from the woolly mammoth episode.

E:  This was the story about how woolly mammoths came out of a bad sloth-elephant “discovery” from an earlier party of yours, right?  You didn’t tell him about that, I hope.

T:  Oh my God, no.  He had his inner voices, I had mine.

E:  So the adventure was off and running.

T:  Basically, yeah.  It took some time to get the ball rolling.  We needed an awful lot of water to get that puppy off the ground.  It wasn’t close enough to the sea to leverage it in there.

E:  So how long did it take?

T:  Oh, hell, I don’t know.  The official version is forty days; let’s leave it at that.  It was a fucking long time.  The best part was that all of Noah’s neighbors got flooded out and when they came pounding on the boat to get on, he told them all to piss off.  Good riddance, too.  You don’t need non-supportive people around when you’re doing business.

E:  Eventually, though, the water rose and the boat floated up and away.

T:  Yep.

E:  And then your motley band of thieves went to work.

T:  Hey, that was uncalled for.  This was not a harassment trip.

E:  I apologize, then.  Please continue.

T:  Okay.  The boat was floating around, and as I was swimming around it, checking things out, suddenly I realized that it doesn’t have any steering.  There was no keel.

E:  Come to think of it, you really couldn’t put a keel on a boat that big.

T:  That’s right, but I didn’t think of that until after I went on board and talked with Noah about it.  He had designed it without a keel; he knew what was going on.  He had faith that he’d hit dry land eventually.

E:  *pauses*  And he probably would have, too.  It’s highly doubtful he would have gone all the way through the Med Sea without running aground somewhere.  Unless, of course, the current took him the other way down past Arabia into the Indian Ocean.  Then he would’ve been fucked.

T:  You’re not supposed to be this intelligent, Quentin.

E:  Don’t underestimate the Dark Side, Tortoise.

T:  Oh, you’re gonna get smacked for that one.  You were behind that Esquire article after all, weren’t you?  I know it, I can feel it in my bones.

E:  *laughs*  I see I’m going to have to read this damn article you keep bitching about.

T:  So anyway, I was on the boat, and Noah being the good host that he was asked me to stick around, talk with some of the animals, get a sense from them how they like things, anything they want, etc.  Sure, I can do that, no problem.  So I wandered around the boat for a few days, talking with various folks, and I got some heavy vibes all over the place.

E:  What kind of vibes?

T:  Well, how would you like to be cooped up in a boat with forty kazillion other people for months with no end in sight?

E:  Ah.  I see your point.  Cabin fever.

T:  You betcha.  Morale was not good.  So I suggested to Noah that we have a party.

E:  *sigh*  Oh, no.

T:  *cackles*  Oh yes.  Noah had no idea what he was getting himself into.

E:  But the animals did.  You bastard.

T:  Hey, if I’m the morale officer, things are going to be done right.  Time to kick out the jams, buddy.  Lots of fun and frolicking for everyone, including any of my merry band of thieves, as you called them, who could come on board.

E:  I said they were a motley band of thieves, not merry.

T:  I think you’re right.  They were definitely merry, though, not motley.

E:  So what did you supply the guests with?

T:  Well, Noah let me go through the foliage that he had collected for various purposes, and I was amazed.  Unknowingly, he had picked up some of the strongest mind-altering medication in the world.  All kinds of goodies.  It was nothing for me to sort everything out and slice it up for consumption.

E:  And shortly afterward all hell broke loose.

T:  Of course.  The cacophony was incredible.  It took weeks for everything to get sorted out and most of the animals to get back in their stalls and so forth.

E:  Most of the animals…?

T:  Well, we did lose a few over the side.  Rather unfortunate.  Some animals couldn’t handle it.  You never can tell.

E:  So it was during this drug orgy that the dreaded coupling took place.

T:  Had to have been.  We were doing tortoise races on the deck and everyone thought it great fun.  The chimps were great jockey sizes.  I guess a tortoise and one of the jockeys got a bit carried away.  Anyway, shortly after this mess, we had to flee.

E:  I’d imagine.

T:  We all hightailed it out of there and got back to the island for laying season, you know, when the tortoises lay their eggs.

E:  And eight months later, there was your surprise.

T:  You got it.  Good God, I thought we had brought back a viral mutation or something that was going to wipe us all out.  So we kept the critter around the palace, out of sight.

E:  There’s a problem here, Tortoise.

T:  Eh?  What’s that?

E:  Ears, Tortoise, the ears don’t match.

T:  You’re right.  The ears didn’t match originally, not until I started picking him up by the damn things every time he didn’t get his language lessons right.  He had problems with that from the start, you see.  Looking back, it had to be a genetic problem of some sort.  We thought he was just an idiot, always mixing up the nouns and verbs.  You know, “Food have I must, then sleep.  Good, sleep is.”  He actually talked like that.  Anyway, by the time I realized Yoda just wasn’t going to get it, the damage was done.  Just one more problem in the gene pool by then.

E:  And how long did he stay on the island?

T:  Oh, his whole life up until about 25 years ago, I guess.  I really don’t even know how old he is, to tell you the truth.  I mean, good Lord, you wouldn’t want something like that running amok in civilization, would you?  We could have used him as a poster boy for birth control, I suppose, even though I thought the woolly mammoths took care of that.  I guess everyone has a bad memory these days.

E:  I don’t want to hear about the mammoths again, Tortoise… although I hear they’ve found another one perfectly preserved in Mongolia and they’re going to dig it out next fall.

T:  Heh.  They think they’re going to dig it out next fall.  I’ve got that one covered, dear Quentin.  No more genetic testing.  No fucking way.

E:  Back to Yoda, Tortoise.

T: In the mid-‘70s I was scheduled to go to Los Angeles for some pre-production meetings, I don’t remember what about now, and I decided to bring Yoda along, finally get him off the island, let him get a taste of things.  He was mesmerized by TV & radio and I figured, why not?  This is L.A. we’re going to, he’ll blend right in.

E:  Well, depending where you go in L.A., that’s probably true.

T:  Jesus, if Studio 54 had been in California, the damn state would have broken off into the sea by 1980.  Maybe we should have thought of that.  Hmm…

E:  That’s neither here nor there, Tortoise.

T:  All right, all right, you’re getting cranky all of a sudden.  So we’re at the studio doing some storyboarding or whatever, and Yoda’s sitting there in the corner, trying to be interested.  That was part of the ground rules.  He could come on the trip, but he had to stay out of the way.  Anyway, we get done with the meeting, walk out into the hallway, and who’s standing there but George Lucas.

E:  What was he doing there?

T:  Oh, you know – meetings, the usual.  Now, I know George.  I had helped him out with a little financing on “American Graffiti,” so we chatted a bit until Yoda came out of the meeting room.  “Who the hell’s that?!?!” George said.  “This is my cousin,  blah, blah,” you know, mundane stuff.  George just looked at Yoda flabbergasted, looked back at me, and said, “You know, he looks just like a character I’m thinking about for this space-type movie series I’m doing.  Does he talk?”  “Well, yeah, George, he talks, but he has this weird speech pattern, I don’t think he’ll work out for you.”  Didn’t matter.  George gets a thought in his head, you gotta roll with it.  He looked back at Yoda and asked his name.  “Yoda, my name is.  Thank you, I do, for asking.”  George started hollering then.  “Oh, my God, absolutely perfect.  I have to use him, Tortoise.”  Well, Yoda is family, and I really wasn’t keen on loaning him out, so I didn’t commit.  We ended up dragging things out until it was too late for the first movie.  By that time, George finally ground my ass into the dirt and I said fine.  So Yoda got into “The Empire Strikes Back”, “Return of the Jedi”, and the new movie and I got a few points of the action in return.

E:  Yoda didn’t get paid for any of this?

T:  Good grief, no.  They just basically fed him, and I hung around the set during shooting just to make sure he was all right.  George can be a good guy, but I felt better keeping my eye on things.

E:  So I’m confused now.  Why are you pissed off about this Esquire article?

T:  Because it’s not Yoda, you idiot.  He doesn’t talk in normal speech patterns.  Some idiot made it up.  I don’t want frivolous articles about my family circulating in national publications.  Me, fine.  Not the family.  I want this editor’s ass nailed to the wall and covered with scorpions.  Outside slander is not tolerated.  Only I can make things up.

E:  I don’t know why you can’t handle this through your lawyers.

T:  I am already, Quentin; I just want a point man up in New York.

E:  Okay, fair enough.  I’ll see what I can do.

T:  That’s all I’m asking.  Thanks, Quentin.

E:  Good night.

*click*