CULTURE CLUB HUNT

 CULTURE CLUB HUNT

By Andrew Paul Grell

“Has it come down to this, Darby?” Joan and Darby were running out of things to do while stuck in the house. It would be a while before they ran out things to eat, drink and smoke. But sixty-year-old knees could only jog so far, and there was only so much video naughtiness one could endure. Especially with the sixty-year-old thing.

“I prefer to think of it as coming up to this. That last couple ruined it for me. Joan, we’re educated people. Learning the piano isn’t really working out for you and teaching myself Japanese isn’t working that much better. “Two-minute warning, Joan. In or out? And don’t tell me we got all dressed up for nothing. I took me two hours to find Grampa’s smoking jacket; I think you spent all morning tinkering with your grandmother’s dress and then the time it took to make the couch not look like we ate on it while watching TV.”

“Kwitcherbitchin, Darb. I’m in. The things I do for love. That dress was from the afternoon Dorothy Parker invited her to lunch at the Algonquin Round Table.”

The clepsydra icon issued its ultimate drop of water and the AI host showed up on the screen.

“Good evening, Culture Club players, and welcome to game 10471. The object of the game is to pick from successive sets of clues in order to find the solution. In order of seniority, we have Ifoma and David leading off, then Little Bruce and Big Bruce, and then the newcomers, Darby and Joan. Each team starts out with fifty points to spend on buying help or fending off the other teams. We open with a list of five potential clues. Ifoma and David get to pick a clue. For five points, they can hide the clue they chose, otherwise everyone knows their pick. For another five points, they can keep any other team from choosing that clue. For twenty points, they will learn if their selection would lead to the final answer. And for ten points, they can move back to the first set of clues and pick a different clue. Then the Bruce’s take a turn, and finally the Roaring Twenties couple. The pick each team makes will lead them to another set of clues. We’re looking for a two-word answer. If no team guesses correctly, whichever team has the most points left is declared the technical winner. Also, this game has a sponsored prize, a brief vacation for a winning team, playing for the first time, to a much more pleasant place to not worry about The Plague. Technical winners and non-virgin winners receive a $50 Etsy gift card.

A set of clues appeared on the screen:

Tom Bodett

Horseradish

Howard

Al Yankovich

Hawaiian Pizza

“Joan, do you think that A.I. is a little less A and a touch too much I?

“Does it matter, love of my life?”

“Dunno. Depends on what’s going on behind the curtain. Look, Ifoma picked Horseradish. Do we have a strategy?”

“How about we look on Google and see if there’s anything connecting the clues?”

“I love a woman with a soupcon of larceny in her heart. But the TOS authorizes Culture Club to monitor our web traffic while we’re playing. First offence is a two-week ban. Second offence is 50 lashes with a wet noodle. Perhaps I should call Lenore; a librarian may have a special insight into the connections. Or maybe knock on Pete’s door, run a search through Bing and do the opposite of what it says.”

“At least I’m not the only criminally inclined party in the marriage. What’s keeping the Bruce’s from picking? Let’s see what we’ve got on the list. Two foods. Two men with first and last names. One male first name. Odd man out. That’s our choice if it’s available when it’s our turn. Wait, I didn’t see that before.” Joan was looking at the crawl, it was a message stream, the Bruce’s were talking to David and Ifoma.

B&B: “Some of the clues look familiar. You’ve been playing for a long time. Anything ring a bell?”

D&I: “Maybe something does, maybe nothing does. Why would I tell you?”

B&B: If I remember some and you remember some maybe we can work together.

D&I: “You know the newbies are following this, right?”

B&B: “Sure, but we go before them.”

D&I: “Pass. I think it’s cheating.”

The clepsydra showed up back on the screen; it was time to move on. B&B chose Hawaiian Pizza.

“We’re up, Princess. Are we both on board with Howard?”

“Sure, what have we go to lose?”  Joan clicked on their selection. A new list showed up.

Pastrami

Cross Bronx Expressway

Lemony Snicket

Hemlock Street

Rockaway Park

“Care to venture some of our meager allotment of points, big boy?”

“Why not? There are an infinite number of points along any line.”

Darb clicked and was rewarded with confirmation that ‘Howard’ was on the right track. “Should we stick with names, Joanie? This time we have a food and somebody with a food for a name.”

“I think we have an odd man out situation again. Two roads, two foods, one place name.” Joan gave her husband a peck on the cheek and an “accidental” brush while leaning over to move the mouse to click on Rockaway Park.

Samuel Becket

Meat Loaf

Avengers

Origami

Root Canal

“Spend a few more points, my love?”

“Not so fast, handsome. I’ve been following the cross-talk between the veteran teams. They seem to think something’s wrong. Let’s nudge, kibitz, and micher a little bit.  Maybe they’ll spill something we can lap up,” Joan said with a wink.

J&D: Hi, fellow contestants. We’ve been trying to parse your discussion on the issue with the game. Care to fill in your fellow travelers?”

The pause in the chat window was long enough for the newbies to attend to their needs, which included, since it was a clue, pastrami sandwiches. It was the Bruce’s who broke the silence.

B&B: Team 1 seems to think that this game is either a repeat of a previous game or a lightly-altered set of clues from a previous hunt. We’re locked in while playing the game and can’t go through the older games. One or both of us may know something, but we seem to be unable to work out a way that sharing information could aid us both. So there we are. The only thing we both agree on is that it was a game in late 2017 or early 2018.

D&I: What screen are you on? Do you have verification that your second screen is on the right track?

J&D: Third screen. With conformation that the second screen is on the right track.

Darby gave his true love a hint of a frown. “Joanie, should we be giving information away?”

“The other teams seem stuck. Do you want to sell them a clue? There’s an icon for that. Do we offer or do we wait for them to ask?”

“Neither. Hold your water, as they used to say in the Roman Senate. Speaking of which, how much water is in the clepsydra? I want to go over all three screens. I’m beginning to get an idea.”

Darby’s idea was interrupted by the water clock.  He managed to click on a help icon before he and Joan were eliminated for running out of time. But it didn’t take long before the Bruce’s offered to buy a clue from a verified screen.

“If I’m thinking what you’re thinking, sell them pastrami. That will never lead anywhere. And we’ll have an extra 20 points in case something heads south. Samuel Beckett, right?”

“Yup. Wait. Is that meatloaf like the meal or Meat Loaf from Rocky Horror? Remember, there may be an issue with the game. I’m going back to Beckett.” She clicked the playwrite’s name and landed on a laudatory screen with the message “Congratulations, You’ve made it to the final screen. There are three more clues and you’ll have to guess from those to win the vacation.

Republican

East West Timor

Montauk

“Any ideas, my ravishing bride?”

“I’m not seeing anything here. Maybe Montauk. Rockaway was a clue. They kind of come as far points on a cultural spectrum. You wouldn’t know about that, you’re from Council Bluffs.”

“We are definitely on the same track. Wait. Those three clues are one clue. An acrostic. R.E.M. ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know it, and I Feel Fine.’ Samuel Becket wrote a book titled ‘The End.’ We started with Howard. Howard’s End is a movie.”

Joan, a little younger than Darby, chipped in. “Lemony Snicket also has a book named The End. Montauk bumper stickers say ‘Montauk, The End.’ Someone in Rockaway printed up stickers that read ‘Rockaway, the Other End.’ And isn’t root canal work called endodontics?”

“Yes indeedie it is. We’re still in the running; we haven’t gotten the alert that another team won. Ready?”

The couple had only one shot at submitting an answer, and between them, they had only the one answer to submit. Darby typed in ‘The End’ and Joan hit enter.

# # #

“Welcome to the Inn on the Hill. Joan and Darby, I presume? Did you have any trouble getting here, what with every old thing going on these days?  I’m Aunt Cynthia, by the way. Jack will take care of your bags. Dinner is at six on the veranda. There will be one other couple for dinner, plus Jack and me. In the meantime, there are homemade scooter pies, local apples, and coffee in the sitting room.”

“Wow, that’s some welcoming greeting. We haven’t been used to that back in the city for a while. People are starting to get crabby, and the dogs are wondering why people don’t have faces anymore. The roads are near empty,” Darby reported, then took a look at the veranda, a bit of architecture he sorely missed while living in New York. “That is some green meadow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen grass that lush and green.”

“Thanks! I can tell you folks that it’s the greenest part of Aberystwyth County. Not that it does us any good. We’re too far from the ski slopes, the casino never got built, the old mill is the only other attraction; Jack’s late father used to own it, such as it is. Go ahead, take a load off, you must be exhausted. See you at six!”

Cynthia introduced Darby and Joan to Leonard and Ellen. Dinner was a salad of local cucumbers, hothouse tomatoes, and white onions, followed by venison with hunter sauce and new potatoes along with a pretty decent local wine. The three couples shared the large round table. Coffee and desert, munstrudel, appeared accompanied by a warning not to get drug tested for a few days after eating the poppy seed pastry.

“ I hope you’re all enjoying your stay, but you’re probably wondering why a trip to an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere could be a prize for something,” Four heads nodded, some faces registered surprise that there might be a hidden agenda.

“We love the Inn, but we’re too old to keep running it. We came up with the idea of converting the barn to a music, art, performance space, and general culture center. We wanted to give the Inn to enthusiastically cultural folks. Hector, a friend of ours who runs Culture Club, suggested that any of his game winners would be ideal. And so here you two winning teams are.”

Cynthia stated laying out papers on the cleared table.

“This is a contractor’s estimate to convert the barn for public use. Fifty thousand dollars. This one is an approved zoning variance for the plan. These are commitments from the Dalhousie Foundation for operating support, Aberystwyth Community College and Muldoon High School for performances. This is a life estate for whoever takes over the Inn and a similar  one for Jack and me to occupy the top floor. This last one is our lawyer’s take on what happens when we all start dying. And this is a roll of red giftwrapping tape to tie it all up.

“Fifty K if one of you wants it. You get a house and two jobs, and you’ll immediately be big people in the county.”

Leonard and Ellen had to drop out. “Sorry, we were just expecting a bit of escape from what’s happening.”

Joan and Darby looked at each other. “Whaddaya say, Princess, do we want to be known as the folks who live on the hill?”