I MADE A START on Kap’n Klam: The Memoirs of Porky White, Nonpareil American Restaurateur, Entrepreneur, and Raconteur, As Told to Peter Leroy that very night. I only had two episodes, but writing them felt like making a start on a new life. The first was about the architecture of the Kap’n Klam huts that are now perched on transparent bases from Kennebunkport to Kursk:
My young friend Peter Leroy, to whom I am indebted for so many of the clever ideas that have made Kap’n Klam the success it is today, had inadvertently caused a local sensation in Babbington when he photographed some clams that I tossed into the air. The Babbington Reporter published the picture as a photograph of flying saucers, and since the name of my clam bar showed prominently, people flocked there out of curiosity. I decided to capitalize on the fact that people seemed fascinated by the near resemblance of the putative spaceships to clamshells. I began sketching, and I came up with the first rough version of the “hovercraft clam” restaurant that you see replicated all over the globe today. Basically, each Kap’n Klam restaurant is housed in a giant fiberglass clamshell — the top shell is the roof, and the bottom the base, with a gap all around for the shell-to-shell windows — but the bottom shell perches on a glass cylinder, as if the clam ship has just arrived at its site after an intergalactic expedition. It seems that virtually every time we open a new restaurant, some guy comes lurching out of a gin mill half crocked, gets in his car and starts driving down the road, sees one of our restaurants looming ahead, and figures aliens have landed. There are a couple of standard reactions. Some of these people call the cops, the FBI, and the Marines, and others drive in and try to make contact. This happens often enough that I’ve got a clipping file of “eyewitness” accounts. They are much alike, so I will let one represent them all:
I was driving along Route 14 on the evening of Friday, June 12, when suddenly I saw a huge alien spaceship up ahead, on the side of the road. It looked like two saucers, one on the bottom and then one upside down, on the top. You know, I honestly didn’t realize until then that that was why they call them flying saucers? I approached the ship very cautiously, since I knew from movies and TV that aliens possess superior weapons technology and are capable of turning a person into a heap of smoking ashes before he can say “Welcome, Creatures!” I walked all around the ship, and I could see that the saucers were not like the kind of saucer we use here on earth. For one thing, they were not flat on the bottom, to keep them from tipping and rocking on the table. They were rounded over their whole surface, and kind of clam-shaped. I’ve thought about this a lot since that night, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the planet they came from must have a more equalized kind of gravity than ours, if you know what I mean, so that it’s easier to get things to balance. You can see that if you have that kind of gravity, then you wouldn’t need to have flat bottoms for things, so I think that explains it.
I stood there for a moment, trying to think. More than anything else, I wanted to make contact with the superior beings who had flown this ship to earth and landed in what I now noticed was a parking lot right there on Route 14 because I figured that with their superior intelligence and spirituality they could probably help me get on top of some of the things that were making a mess of my life and help me find a point to it all and get me directed onto the right path to a rich and meaningful future. I knew that the risks might be great, but I also knew that I had been given an opportunity that no other human might have. I felt that for the good of humankind I had to enter that ship. I determined that the entrance was in the front, a rectangular arrangement consisting of pairs of smooth, hard, transparent panels. Inside, I could see that there were dozens of aliens disguised as human beings. I stepped toward the entrance, and the doors opened automatically. Elecric eye, I thought. I was able to pass among the aliens without being detected because the aliens mistook me for one of them — I mean an alien disguised as a human being. I even sampled some of their alien food, and let me tell you it was delicious.
Actually, the first flush of interest in flying saucers had worn off long before we opened our first hovering restaurant, so I think we can take credit for launching the flying-saucer revival. Of course, a lot of people accused us of planting these stories. To tell you the truth, we did.
[to be continued]
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