Gumby and Pokey were out taking a spin around the back porch table in G’s ’38 Citroen TA one fine sunny afternoon, without a care in the world while still paying close attention to the dreaded Edge of the Table, which for all they knew in that moment might also be the end of the world. TA stands for “traction avant” in French, which makes sense as there is no organization in the world that is more French than Citroen, manufacturing or otherwise, and most North American car mechanics run in terror whenever one turns up outside their repair shop, that company’s brilliant and downright quirky and overly clever engineering be damned.
The TA was the first mass-produced front-wheel drive automobile and was low-slung with great handling, which made it beloved of French bank robbers not to mention Francois Truffaut the movie guy. John Dillinger’s fave getaway cars, by the way, were those early Ford V8s, about which the bold gangster actually famously penned a thank you letter to Henry Ford himself. There is no evidence that the man ever employed a Citroen in his nefarious activities, which is too bad. G and P were pondering none of these things when who should they run into (not literally!) but Carotina, recently pulled by Joan from the dirt at Paul Gore Beecher St Garden. Carotina, living life to the fullest before she becomes salad or horse fodder (don’t get any ideas, Pokey!), had just returned from a trip out to San Fran, where she’d done the Haight Ashbury walking tour and become enamored of R. Crumb, the cartoonist. Here she does her interpretation of “Keep on Truckin'”, one of Crumb’s notable contributions to Western Civilization.
So anyways they get to talking and C offers them some parsley tea, as that’s what carrots do in social situations, in case you didn’t know. Well, would you believe that that rascally root had laced the tea with some “substance” she’d picked up in the Haight, mescaline or peyote or something ‘shroomy and most mind-altering, and for a few moments our heroes experienced the craziest visual alterations to reality one might imagine.
Not scary exactly but most assuredly disorienting in a colorful or sometimes black-and-white way. When it was all over after what seemed like an eternity or at least a day in the Trump-covid era, our friends weren’t angry but were at least somewhat out-of-sorts, and had to admit that if they weren’t previously “experienced”, they sure were now. Carotina was giggling as carrots tend to do in such moments, but she kind of apologized and Gumb and Poke shrugged it off as something you might expect from a vegetable only a few weeks old, no doubt headed for a salad sometime all too soon. Like all carrots, she didn’t carrot all, as the saying goes.
