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Three Gals

Mrs. Pumpkin, the former head of the Nancy Sinatra Fan Club, is putting pale pink lotion on her body. She has given up perfume for Lent. Her son, Father Tuck-Tuck, has been repeatedly put away for whipping his own mother and a few others. He said it’s because of their sins, that he has God’s permissive will to do as he sees fit. Actually, it’s been Tuck-Tuck’s late father’s will that has enabled and ennobled the authorities (both spiritual and political) in New Jersey City to always get him off the hook. His late father, Frank Rectori Pumpkin was behind the Mafia’s operations on Atlantic City’s pinballs.

Rectori was often called “rats on rollerskates” because he was so quick to escape the police dragnet on him. He always had his son’s rat line to help him. But why he had his son enter the priesthood, perhaps to expiate his own shortcomings, has always been a mystery. At Frankie Rectori’s funeral his body had smelt so much of Irish whiskey the whole place had to be fumigated by three lovely altar boys, all of whom had been given instructions by Father Tuck-Tuck, and one was discovered with him in quite a dissembling position after the wake.

Anyway, Mrs. Pumpkin was only actually married for one day or one night (depending on your point of view) when she conceived her son Father Tuck-Tuck who has always maintained a rather strange relationship to her. He has arranged to give her communion intravenously on different occasions at St. Mary of the Sea’s Hospital and often he intervened with the Atlantic City Mafia when Mrs. Pumpkin was losing at blackjack.

It’s been a tough life for Mrs. Pumpkin, who once weighed 386, now down to 90, but always found an opportunity to march for hunger in her gold-plated wheelchair with the Fatima statue in turquoise on the back of it.

Mrs. Pumpkin’s only friends are Mrs. Canasta and Mrs. Bagel who are card sharks. Mrs. Canasta, having lost parts of her three sons’ bodies to Korea, Nam, and Granada and the rest to the Mafia, and Mrs. Bagel (rumored to be related to the late Bugsy Siegel) who has lately taken to making up a Chinese kosher cookbook (her favorite recipe is Tongue Fu). Mrs. Pumpkin tried to convert Mrs. Bagel, but to no avail, even when Father Tuck-Tuck poured holy water on her while she was sleeping.

All three gals love Nancy Sinatra; that’s what kept them together through all their tragedies, such as when Mrs. Bagel’s late hubby was found on Yom Kippur with three Harlem diamond merchants’ models whom he had a harem with. It was the talk of the neighborhood for years. Mrs. Bagel had only one daughter, Melissa, who was on a toothpaste commercial which was shown repeatedly on German television, and married a millionaire toy store magnate from Munich, it was reported in The Post, the son of prominent Nazis – and a son, Schlimazl, who worked on the atomic bomb until he was declared a “missing person” during the dreadful McCarthy days for having made the bomb drawings on a Rice Krispies’ box.

The three ladies meet every day to watch the soaps. No one is allowed to call Mrs. Pumpkin from twelve noon to three o’clock.

Mrs. Bagel is excused once a week for her favorite hobby: funerals. She only likes the ones that are flooded with emotion. She will often complain, “You call this a funeral? No one tried to jump in the grave or the casket; no one cried out loud, not even the children cried. I don’t call this a funeral.” She also liked the Lone Ranger and the old Brooklyn Dodgers and collected baseball cards for Melissa’s two suns, Adolf and Heinrich, whom she is hoping will be bar mitzvahed.

“OK, no circumcision, but at least a little ceremony.”

She often brought smoked salmon or sable over to the Pumpkins’ which Tuck-Tuck devoured. He loves to eat. He often says after communion he feels like a cannibal.

Mrs. Canasta likes her macramé, macaroni and Monty Hall. She has a limited intelligence but always won at bingo. She has had a crush on Tuck-Tuck since he started out in long pants but never disclosed it, except at confession, when she would dress up like a bride. Father Tuck-Tuck used to call her on those days, “my Bride of Frankenstein.”

It was just last Easter Sunday that Mr. Chestnut, the janitor, was out of crack and needed money desperately. He banged, and then broke down Mrs. Pumpkin’s door. The three ladies were found by the police, playing bridge, on chairs, strangled together on one rope, with Father Tuck-Tuck, spared, pleading for mercy. There was some, however, for Mr. Chestnut. After he took the money from Mrs. Pumpkin’s mattress and Mrs. Canasta’s polka dot pocketbook and Mrs. Bagel’s bra, he decided to go straight, married Pastor White’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Candy Cane, and became a member of the clergy, and now has a demon deliverance and pregnancy counseling ministry.

Tuck-Tuck unfortunately was arrested, and he ultimately confessed to the crime. He always wanted to be a member of the confined.


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