Art Fipper

I was sitting in municipal court on a Thursday morning waiting my turn while people were up there being reckoned upon by a pseudo-judge for behavior such as encouraging their pitty mix to snap a door-to-door solicitor in the britches as he ran yelling down the driveway. The guy next to me snickered at the proceedings which prompted me to glance over. He sported an elongated, twisted and waxed handlebar mustache. It was so long, or wide, it made me wonder if he was in court because of it. Like he was walking down the sidewalk and whipped somebody in the eye by accident. He noticed me noticing and stuck out his hand.

“Art Fipper. Professional fuckup,” he said, giving me the benefit of intense eye contact. I tried to return it as best I could, but the mustache was distracting me. Also, his name. I heard art flipper, like someone who buys oil paintings or statues of some sort to resell. Then I figured it was his handle. Fipper, not Flipper. But I still had to decipher his choice of profession, one I’d never heard.

I shook his hand and said “Is that a job? Do people pay you to, uh, screw up?” I was wary of cursing in court.

“I’m freelance. It’s really more of a calling. It’s why I spend a lot of time with judges. And some in jail.”

“Where’s there’s a profession, or even a calling, there’s often a society or group of some sort, like an umbrella organization,” I said, musing aloud. “Sometimes even a union.”

“I like your thinking,” Art said. “Lord knows the world has a surplus of fuckups. We should create a group. The society for profession fuckups or something like that. And sell t-shirts. Fuckups being what they are we could probably get enough people to send us a ten-dollar membership fee for the privilege. And buy some shirts at three hundred percent mark-up. You can be Vice President.”

“Thanks,” I said, just keeping up with Art’s train of thought. Art was a quick thinker, and talker. I gave that up years ago, at least the quick-talking part.

“What are you here for?” he said, nodding toward the judge, who was questioning a rotund red-faced woman in a rainbow t-shirt about why she backed over her neighbor’s new mailbox in the shape of a cross, compete with a crucified jesus.

“MWI.”

“Milking with intent?” Art surmised.

“Sorry, I said. “Mowing While Intoxicated. My lawyer said to plead guilty and pay the fine because it’s not a real charge but the city doesn’t know that, so it won’t show up in any system. There’s no state code. It’s just something the cop made up.”

“Waldman?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, he got me too.”

“Let me guess. Something fraud-adjacent, but not outright fraud.”

“Close,” Art said. “More like selling without a license, with accusations of fraudulent activity attached but unproven.”

“What’d you sell?”

“Vinyl. Albums. LPs. They’re back in a big way.”

We were near the rear of the courtroom, which wasn’t that big in any case, and had our heads fairly close together to not attract the ire of the sleeping bailiff. We probably looked like we were cooking up some scheme right there in court.

“You got arrested for selling albums?”

“It’s not the albums, per se,” Art per said. “It could have been chia pets or beanie babies or decommissioned nuclear warheads. It’s the door-to-door sales without a license that Waldman took exception to.”

“Waldman’s a dick,” I said. “But he can be fair when it’ll mean less paperwork for him.”

“Here’s the deal. I buy up old albums at flea markets, garage sales, and the salvation army,” Art said. “Then I pop ‘em in a shopping cart and go to houses, apartments, retirement homes, trailer parks and sell ‘em to the people who probably gave them away in the first place but forgot. Sometimes they won’t buy any when I knock on a door but they’ll give me the albums they have in the house and don’t know what to do with anymore because the record player broke in 1974.”

“You should sell record players too.”

“That’s an idea. I’d have to get another cart. Waldman did give me one break. He didn’t charge me for stealing the Dollar Barn cart, just made me walk it back to the store.”

“I got a bad quart of kefir at the Dollar Barn seventeen years ago,” I said. “Haven’t been back since.”

“Their kefir will give you the squirts for sure,” Art said.

Then it was my turn to go up and talk about mowing Lucky Lawson’s overgrown yard on Monday afternoon two weeks past and running over his so-called rare and unusual Gulf Island Rat Snake that he let out to get a little sun while tied to a porch rail with a string so it wouldn’t get away and me not being aware the snake was in the yard until BBBRRRRRAAAPPP occurred under the thirty-two inch deck of my Swamp Ape stand-on zero turn mower.

My lawyer was there and told the judge the snake wasn’t the issue because Lucky Lawson later admitted he shouldn’t have left the snake out on a string.

But he was upset at the time and after I got his yard finished I told Lucky I felt bad about the snake, name of Roger, and I wasn’t going to charge him because I should have wondered why there was a string going from his porch rail into the tall grass but by the time I noticed it the Swamp Ape, which can rip right along with its18hp Kawasaki engine, had severed Roger’s cord. And Roger.

Lucky said he appreciated that but he felt so bad it was time to drink. He brought out a bottle of Old Forester his maternal aunt - coincidentally my old calculus teacher, who used to call me Mister Most Likely To without ever finishing the sentence - gave him for his birthday. We cracked the seal, sat on his porch and drank to Roger for the next two hours. I didn’t tell the judge that part.

The issue was, since I lived a block away from Lucky, I rode the Swamp Ape there and back and officer Waldman on patrol in the neighborhood snuck up on me snoring on the running mower, kind of slumped over the controls, half a block from my house.

My lawyer, Jenny Waldman, was the arresting officer’s sister. I didn’t know his first name. Just Waldman. I also don’t know if someone should have recused themselves in my case because of the familial entanglement, but Jenny got me a fifty-dollar fine and a thirty-day ban from mowing in the town limits. It didn’t make sense, but no one talked about taking my driver’s license, since I wasn’t driving, so I didn’t argue. I got around the ban by weed-wacking my regular yards. There was no weed-wacking ban. My customer’s grass just looked a little rougher that month, like a kitchen haircut, and I used eight spools of line trimmer instead of my usual one or two, but thems the breaks, as they say.

I was on my way out of court when Art came running up behind me. “Hey, what’s your name anyway?”

“Pickle,” I said, stopping to let him catch up. “You done already?”

“Slap on the wrist and don’t do it again,” he said, huffing a little from the run. “The judge actually reached over and slapped my wrist. Didn’t hurt though.”

Art made no fuss about calling me Pickle like a normal person would. Usually I at least get a polite quizzical look at a minimum, a loud guffaw from the ruder among us.

He followed me to my truck and stood at the passenger door, like we’d already arranged I was giving him a ride. I drove off and left him standing there. You can’t let a con man con you all the time. And Art was a con man.

A few weeks later I finished mowing a yard, back on the Swamp Ape since the illegal thirty-day suspension was over, and Art Fipper was standing by my truck as I ran the mower up the ramp and onto the trailer.

“I like the logo,” he said after I shut the engine down and took off my hearing protection. I was proud of it too. A pickle in sunglasses riding a mower and flashing a peace sign. I had one sign on each side of the trailer.

“Designed it myself.”

“I remembered you was Pickle, so figured I’d stop and say hi when I saw the trailer,” he said.

I waited for whatever angle he was going to throw at me.

“You know that empty storefront on fourth street across from the Piggly Wiggly?” he said. “Used to be a feed store a few years ago?”

I nodded.

“That would make a good gym,” he said. “Weightliftin’ is making a comeback.”

“You opening a gym?” I said, waiting for the scam part of his presentation.

“I was thinkin’ about putting up a sign that says Gym Opening Soon and then taking deposits for discounted yearly memberships.”

“And then not opening a gym.”

“You want in? It could be Fipper and Pickle’s Gym, at least on the sign.”

“Nah,” I said. “I like living here.”

“You anticipated that we’d have to skedaddle out of town,” Art said. “That’s true. I think we could pull in two or three thousand before that though.”

“I don’t like people angry at me,” I said. “Have you considered getting a job instead of pulling these scams? Although selling albums wasn’t a bad idea.”

“It didn’t bring in much though. And I don’t like real jobs. They’re hard. And business is hard. You should know that. Opening a real gym would be a nightmare.”

I was busy tying down the Swamp Ape and closing up the gate as we had this conversation. Then I was done and ready to get into the truck.

“Hey,” Art said, pulling a brochure from, his back pocket. “You want to get in early on a geothermal well in Utah? They’re looking for investors.”

I was almost sorry for him with his overwaxed mustache and unrealized dreams of easy pickings from the gullible. I surprised myself by asking “You want a lift somewhere?”

I half expected to be dropping Art off near some woods and watching him ease his way along a narrow trail toward a damp half-hidden tent, but he actually lived in an old little two bedroom with suspect asbestos-looking siding.

He wanted me to come in for a minute and of course the second bedroom and much of the small living room appeared to be some kind of hoarder’s situation. Plastic bins, cardboard boxes and bags of unidentified stuff.

“I’ll bid on a storage unit sometimes after people don’t pay the rent,” he said. “Then I’ll sell what I can at the flea market. That’s how I got started on the vinyl. I ended up with like ten crates of it.”

I riffled through a box of albums for a minute and came up with an old Richard Thompson I didn’t have. If you find something good like that there’s usually more but I didn’t want to get too immersed in Art’s world. “How much?”

“I’ll take five,” he said. “You need something to play it on?”

“Got one.” I had four high-end turntables and a complimentary sound system at home as well as a collection of around nine hundred albums, but that was the last thing I would let Art know.

“You ever run across books?” I asked. I won’t even get started on the library, a combination of my late father’s collection and mine.

“You can make good money on books,” Art said. “Specially if people don’t know what they have.”

I was home between jobs when the doorbell rang. My truck and trailer were in the driveway so I couldn’t act like I wasn’t there. I could have, but this is a neighborly town, so I didn’t. Of course it was Art Fipper on my porch.

“Hey buddy, I was walking by and saw the picklewagon. I didn’t know you lived here.”

“Yeah I park everything in the garage around back at night but I’m not home for long now.” I couldn’t take my eyes off his mustache, which was longer and even more burdened with wax since the last time I saw him.

“Can I get a glass of water? Been walking around town.”

I reluctantly let Art in. He stopped dead when he saw Moord.

“You have a dog.”

“I do.”

“What kind is it?

“Malinois.”

The dog in question was still and taut, where I commanded him to sit when the doorbell rang, with eyes only for Art at the moment. He would stay that way until I told him different.

“What’s his name?”

“Moord.”

“Sounds mean, for sure.”

“It’s Flemish or Dutch for homicide. Af, Moord,” I said, in Flemish or Dutch, and the dog lay on the floor, still watching Art.

Then Art was able to relax enough to look around and I knew I made a mistake letting him in the house when his eyes lit up after he spotted my sound system components and shelves of albums in what was once the dining room. Then he looked to his other side into the den, my father’s old haunt. Shelves of books. Thousands. The rest of the house, while perfectly livable, was negligible compared to these two rooms, in my opinion.

“How long you lived in this house?” he said in wonder.

“My whole life.” Except for college and almost two semesters of ambition-clarifying dental school, I didn’t add.

“Hey, I got something you might wanna buy off me. Got it from a storage unit. One of them dog training suits where a vicious dog can take you down without hurting you too much.”

“I’ll get your water.”

Moord rumbled almost inaudibly while I was in the kitchen so I knew Art had moved, but not toward me.

He was in the den holding a leather-bound copy I hadn’t read yet.

“You could probably get like a hundred bucks for this in a city,” he said, then looked around at the neatly stuffed shelves.

“That was one of my Dad’s.”

“If you ever want to sell anything of this stuff…” he said, then drank the water.

“I don’t think so.” I led him back into the foyer and took the glass. “I’ve got another yard to do.”

He looked back at Moord. “Is he an outside dog?”

“Mostly,” I lied, and opened the door. “See you around.”

“Later, Buddy,” Art said. I watched him walk down the driveway. Moord and I had both seen his wheels turning. A dog person would know Moord wasn’t the type you would leave outside, like a junkyard dog.

"You over there, Pickle?” my neighbor Ronnie called over the fence about a week later. Or maybe it was his brother Donnie. I was out back running Moord through some obedience drills as the sun began to set. There were police cars in front of Ronnie and Donnie’s house when I got home an hour earlier. The ‘onnies weren’t known to be a problem in the neighborhood, but they did like their Glocks and Jim Beam. It was early in the day for that though. They usually didn’t start drinking until precisely one hour after sundown.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You catch all the commotion here before?”

“The tail end.”

“Some crazy guy snuck through my yard and tried to toss like pound of ground beef over the fence to your side. He must have thought our house was abandoned or something.”

They did live in a world resembling squalor on the other side of the privacy fence, one reason I kept it maintained and sturdy.

“Into my yard?”

“The cops got it now. Big hunk of meat. Not even the good stuff, full of fat, low quality Dollar Barn shit. Waldman said it was stuffed with enough tranquilizers to kill my sister.”

His sister, Bonnie, ran to about 420 lbs. She had a thing for me but I’d been able to deflect her politely. As some type of unsuccessful courting mechanism she’d lately tried to fatten me up to the local standard with her homemade mac and cheese, but I false-claimed an intolerance to lactose. As far as Bonnie knew, I was allergic to all the food she tried to ply me with over the years. Still, she persisted.

“That’s a lot of tranquilizer.”

“I went ahead and shot him since he was in my yard without legal permission and such.”

“He dead?”

“Probably just paralyzed, the paramedics said. The suit must have saved him. They took him to the hospital but it don’t look like he’s walking out.”

“Huh.”

“He had a bodacious mustache they clipped to get the oxygen mask to stay put. I didn’t feel that was strictly necessary. They also found a U-Haul around the corner half stuffed with junk already. Looks like he was tryin’ to drug your European killer hound to clear you out of house and home and then get out of dodge.”

“You said suit?”

“One of them dog handler suits,” Ronnie or Donnie said. “Big and bulky. Like they use to train dogs to take people down without half killin’ them. I’m surprised you don’t have one.”

“I could have,” I mused. “Thanks for looking out.”

“No problem,” Ronnie or Donnie said. “You’re my favorite neighbor. Bonnie’s too.”

Fucking Art Fipper. Shot in a bite suit and lost his mustache. Well, he did say he was a professional fuckup. Maybe I’d go visit him in the hospital before he got sent to jail in a wheelchair to tell him no hard feelings. That seemed neighborly.

BIO: Edward Hagelstein lives in Georgia. He's had stories published in various literary magazines online and in print.