Camels Light but Unfiltered

By Benjamin Graber

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Finally, there’s something that takes me into Tom Robbins’ mind—inside the place where a story can be written about a pack of Camel cigarettes and a Princess and pyramids and all the other crazy things that lunatic gets paid for writing about, while the rest of us have to sit around writing what my esteemed Welsh friend calls womaggy crap.

Having struggled to survive these past years writing such drivel, and being well paid for it you might imagine, and then again you might not as you may yourself be quite content with living a useless and unrewarding life, but if you can imagine and can make it through this sentence without a breath, how excited I was when I received the commission to write this piece about a slightly used dromedary, one careful owner. I must tell you, even though it breaks several rules to talk to you like this, that I was indeed surprised that any one knew about that whole adventure. But when the envelope came with the check for fifty quid commissioning me to relate it, I had to acknowledge that at least one wealthy patron had heard about it. Probably it was he who benefited from it but that does get a bit ahead of the story. So I will uncharacteristically pause long enough to start another paragraph and continue.

Back in the time of Lawrence, he of the TH variety, not the more erogenous DH, there was a poor Arab who wandered the desert of the country formerly known as Iraq on his camel. He actually had been born to a wealthy family of oil sheiks and spent most of his youth driving around the streets of Kuwait in a variety of expensive automobiles, but he had fallen hopelessly in love with an American woman, who turned out to be an ex-hippie chick fallen on hard times that had become a wanton woman and was selling her body in every brothel east of Soho and had contracted AIDS. Somehow Ahmed, that was his name at the time, didn't get the virus, but infected half of the royal family, leading to the precipitous drop in oil prices that at first was welcomed as the gift of OPEC but later was found to be the result of multiple dementias caused by various mutants of the retrovirus and I must say it probably is a good time to take a breath again.

So Ahmed was disinherited and driven into the desert and, having given up smoking, really wasn't familiar with Camel packs but he found a copy of Still Life with Woodpecker and fell in love, not with Princess Cheri but with the idea of owning his own camel. So he bought one, the aforementioned slightly used dromedary that had indeed only had one very careful owner. Unfortunately, the owner was careful with everything but the camel, and had sexually abused the poor animal repeatedly so that Oscar—that was the camel's name—was quite a mixed-up dromedary by the time he came into the possession of Ahmed (who by way had changed his name to Hazel by that time as he really had always felt he was a woman trapped in an Arab man's body, a fate truly not to be wished on any living being). I am concerned for your mental and physical well-being here, so decided another paragraph probably was in order.

Hazel enjoyed riding his camel around the desert. Unfortunately, the only desert he could afford to wander in at this time was just the other side of Lake Mead, outside Las Vegas, beyond the parts where even the worse failed gamblers end up. Hazel had actually stolen a few petrodollars at the time of his banishment, and after purchasing the camel he was able to go on quite the gambling adventure, but lost almost all of the money and spent the rest of it on a limousine excursion to all forty of the legal brothels in Nevada. He was a lavish tipper and they still tell stories about some of the things he was able to perform inside those converted trailers, but eventually his money ran out and all of the places closed their doors to him, leaving him with nothing to do but ride his camel around in the desert just outside the parking lot next to the 7-11.

Having made one last unannounced paragraph leap for your mental health, I wish I could tell you that this story had a happy ending. But in fact a totally ugly half crazed genetically engineered dwarf, in the possession of a 44 magnum much bigger than either his brain or certain unmentionable parts of his anatomy, decided that Hazel's skirt was too short for riding a camel and, calling himself the morality police, killed the poor camel jockey on a very gray moonless night, making for a very un-colorful and disappointing ending to the tale. But as the fifty quid have already been spent, that's just the way it goes.

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What can we say about Benjamin Graber that hasn’t already been said in wanted posters worldwide?