A Long Goodbye is Comin' On: One Question with M. Johnston

TheGourdsNews: I'm guessing there's a fair amount of interest out there in this next question, but if you don't feel like answering it I won't take it personally. So I'll just ask, how did your time with Wilco come to an end...can you bring us into the room for the final scene, if there was one?

Max Johnston: Harumph. Well, we were all hangin' out on the Death Star, The Tarkin Room, some off duty Stormette was flirting with me, everything was great. Then poo-poo-head Jeff comes in, waving his field marshall's baton, blathering on about some ubiquitous "rebellion", and scratching himself innapropriately. I figured he just wanted another gin and tonic, but no...he said he'd "had it up to here," [doing] his best impression of a thermometer [but] looking more like a saluting Gomer Pyle, with whoever had been leaving their marbles in the hallway outside his lavish little pod over in Delta Sector. Oh, how any of us would love to branch out of our little Potemkin dwellings up to Delta, but it was Jeff's "thinking place" and was not to be infiltrated by any of the unbrassed soldiery. Anyway, he was all up in arms about the marbles and I suppose he saw a couple rolling around near my feet because he came after me like some Sith who'd had his true darkness called into question.

"You..." he spat, as if he'd spotted some little mouse he'd been trying to catch for six months. "You and your...your..."

"Marbles?" I asked. "They're just marbles, dude. What's your problem with marbles? What are you, some kind of...of...marble hater?"

Jeff's face reddened and curled and buckled into something I could only describe as one of M.C. Escher's more contortative [sic] works. He pointed briskly at his right elbow, which I found odd and distracting behavior until I recognized a crimson little spot just where the head of the radius would meet the humerus. Recognizing, at last, his attempt to convey this as some indication of altercation between his arm and what he assumed were MY marbles, I deftly refused to take the bait and instead employed what I considered an appropriately cunning side-step...a patronizing little questionaire, all the words accentuated at some syllable with the consonant "w", an ingenious literary device which I find imparts bone crushing insult and childish joie de vivre all in one oral suckerpunch.

"Owwie, wittle Jeffwies elbow gwat a scwatch?" M.C. Escher turned HR Giger. I dug in. "Dwoes the boo boo owwie fwom the wugly wevil wittle mawbles?"

Much like on stage but without a fiddle, and with more of a classical flair, I began to mime my best Pinky Zukerman to some silent yet obviously moving piece dedicated to an undisclosed suffering then began again from the top.

"Somebawdy gwet Jeffwies mawmmy! I fwink wittle Jeffwies gonna cwy! Wook at the wittle Je--"

Suddenly I was interrupted by the rude application of what could only be a fist, mailed in some black plastic polymer, Empire vintage no doubt, space age by definition, but down to Earth enough to convey a complete misinterpretation of my humorous intentions. I awoke some hours later in a dank cell on the detention level, Sector 8-G, with a note on pink Empire letterhead informing me of my re-assignment to "Freakwater, Raioballo Sector, Outer Rim." Please deposit one Franklin Credit to conitinue. Please deposit one Franklin Credit to continue. Please deposit one Franklin Credit to continue. Please deposit one--hangs up.

Aaaaaand...SCENE!