Leo Sgouros: Man for All Ages
Jacob W. Haller
Finnish blockade to deliver bacon to the Mennonites of Turku. Leo
worked for the Dutch secret service and had somehow determined what was
going on, and he managed to spray-paint the entire set of Pokemon
characters onto the hull of our ship under cover of night while we were
underway, just to let us know that he was on to us. (Cocky bastard.)
The next day he negotiated a deal where our shipment would go through,
but most of the profits would go to Holland after being converted into
British pfennig for money-laundering purposes. Man, the accountants
made out like bandits on that one.
The next thing I heard, Leo had had one of those cybernetic implants put
in, so that he would be the first one to know the new T.V. schedules
each year. Man, that guy really loved the Brady Bunch. Then one year
as a joke a bunch of us hacked into his implant and switched the
schedule around, and the next day when he went to watch Jan and Marsha's
latest exploits Wild Kingdom was on instead. We thought it would be
funny, but when we saw that disappointed look on his face -- well, let's
just say nobody ever tried THAT particular trick again.
The Carter years were tough for Leo. The Brady Bunch was cancelled, and
giant mechanized tarantula fights, which was only his most favorite
hobby in the whole world, was outlawed after President Carter said that
watching giant fighting spiders excited 'lust in his heart' or some damn
thing. Still, he bounced back and before long he had won American
Gladiators a record thirty-two billion, nine hundred seventy-four
million, three hundred nineteen thousand, one hundred and fifty-two
times in a row while simultaneously winning the Nobel prizes for
economics, physics, and nougat and writing the prize-winning screenplay
for "Tootsie". They were glory days for Leo, but he didn't seem quite
comfortable in the spotlight -- I guess that Alpha Centauran training is
hard to throw off. I think he felt a little relieved when the next
celebrity du jour came down the pike and he could retire to his castle
in the Swiss Alps and resume his private existence as the world's
foremost connoisseur of yoghurt.
I haven't seen Leo in a while -- he's been busy whittling Mars landers
for NASA, a tough task since a single misplaced splinter can cause a
catastrophic buttermilk leak at takeoff -- but I know that some day I'll
walk into a bar, and there he'll be at one of the booths, and I'll walk
over and we'll trade stories and laugh just like it's old times, and at
the end of the night he'll have my wallet and he'll have mine, and it'll
be just another in a series of perfect moments in time for us both.
-jwgh
--
"I don't advocate responding to rudeness with rudeness, but inducing
fear is always a good option."
-- Paula on alt.religion.kibology, 30 November 2003