The Goonies: a postscript

Splice the mainsail and drop the anchor, Chunk, the pirate ship of your youth will sail no more. The asymmetrical fellow with the candy bar, who bore you on his shoulders like John the Baptist and carried you across the briny flood, is dead. The buccaneers are all dead and sunk into the saltwater. Mikey is dead. Data, that merry little fellow with his jangling mechanical equipage is, alas, dead. Mouth is dead (some say of mouth ulcers). Dead dead dead, all of them, and yet we mysteriously remain. The loathed survivors.

Two years later Chunk is a stripper in a low-rent gay strip-club who exists solely for the next hit. At ten past the hour from 7.10 till 3.10 he slithers into the spotlight and lifts the frayed folds of a greasy Hawaiian shirt to reveal a doughy tumescent abdomen, swelling into view like a vat of over-yeasty pizza dough. A few heads turn to regard the sad exhibition. “Get it Guys” cries the M.C.. “It’s ten past the hour. You know what time it is. Come on Guys! I don’t have to tell you. You know what time it is! It’s Truffle Shuffle Time!”. For five minutes (every hour) Chunk manipulates the loose cellulite betwixt his belt line and his ribs, emitting a curious warble from his fat cheeks like an underwater Mickey Rooney. The leering. The touching. The tutting.

At 3.20 Chunk shuffles, trufflessly, into the alley behind the club to where his grizzly junky peers maintain a limp vigil. Their eyes flash a muted greeting. One of them passes Chunk a spoon and a wrap. “Hey guys”, says Chunk, tapping up an artery in his forearm, “did I ever tell you about the time I met Janet Jackson…?”