Chauncey Millington and the Lure of Vice City

The first carriage that made my eye shone a brilliant silver in the morning sun and was emblazoned with a curious moniker, a singular H2. I threw myself in front of it, risking certain death. It shrieked and coughed and finally halted, resting just inches from my inflated bosom. At this point I produced my pistol and gave shout, “Have down with you, urchin! Or face the reaper at half bloom. No, it is not my calling to dole out the Lord’s pity. For you, sir, are being jacked.”

A vole of a man wearing ironical garb (tiny he was, yet his shirt touted the Latin “Maxim”), he scurried out from his perch and spread forth as if crucified upon the gravel. He whimpered and I let loose with a guffaw and saw to it that his ribs where acquainted with the toe of my boot. Then into the carriage I leapt.

In moments I was its master, whisking it down the road with the abandon of the beloved characters I so desperately wished to emulate. Bodies were thrown asunder like so many rag-dolls and the vendors along Queensway were quick to know the thrust of a rapscallion uncaged. French balladeer Simon Le Bon, summoned into the carriage by virtue of compact diskette, sang his hymn to lupine appetites and I, dear readers, never felt so alive.

As the miles peeled back behind me like the rind from a radish, I grew steadily aware that the carriage, for all the joy it had given, would now require to be abandoned. Still making a game of it, I remembered to whom in Vice City you distributed such misappropriated goods. What I needed were Sicilians. What I needed, my friends, were urban Africans.

It was Africans I spotted first. Upon their boxes at Speaker’s Corner they stood, adorned in vibrant colors and spouting strains of voodoo. To gain their attention, I negotiated the carriage through the fence of the park, over the bloated body of a slumbering pauper and across the stone courtyard until I had nearly thrown them from their roosts. I leapt down from my seat and announced my presence.

“Chauncey Millington, as you may have surmised,” I chortled. “I deliver to you this gift. Your chopping shops shall be famously wealthy. Golden dentistry for all! Africans! Play your drums. Speak in rhyme. Lean back, if you will. Millington asks for no enumeration. I ask only to be recognized as a honky of righteous proportions. And for that, and with that, I say good day to you.”

I planted my rapier into the ground so as to deliver the exclamation point. Their expressions of disbelief only confirmed the lyric glory of the act, one that undoubtedly lives on in the oral legends of their tribes. At this point, I was content to simply walk away, and that I did, my head held erect, with the knowledge that while the sun may now set on Her Majesty’s empire, it may never set on the legends of one Chauncey Millington.

In time, dear readers, I will grace you with more tales of this ilk. I grow weary of it for now, though, and your employer would be quick to scold you were he to discover your lust for such bawdy entertainments. Yet remember, you must, this singular lesson. One man’s vice is another man’s adventure. And one man’s adventure has the power to give flame to the genitals of the world.

In Utmost Earnestness,

Chauncey Millington (VAAL)