Cadmium And The Cops

N'Awlins is a strange place...

(The following is taken from a transcript based on an interrogation conducted by the New Orleans Police Department in February 20__. The questions, responses and comments of the investigating detectives have been edited from the text, so as to give full attention to the concerns and feelings of the suspect, who, as will be shown, was of a highly exceptional nature.)

All right! Keep your shirt on-I’m coming.

What are you looking at?

Haven’t you ever seen a dog talk before?

No?

You mean I have to explain myself again? Uhhh!

Fine.

My name is Cadmium J. Dalmatian, and I….

I’m a puppy.

Or at least, I was. Once upon a time. That was so long ago….

What do you mean by that?

Oh, I see. Not only have you not met a dog who can talk before, you also have never met an animated c cartoon character by the looks of it, either.

What’s that got to do with it, you ask?

Oh, it has everything to do with it. That’s why I can talk, for example. And why I’m stuck being a puppy I instead of becoming a full grown dog, like the ones here in this world inevitably do. We cartoon characters do not age physically. Nor do we suffer from the illnesses and maladies you are prone to dealing with. In short, this is how we are, at this time or any other. What you see is what you get.

Huh?

No, we’re not all fuzzy wuzzy crackbrains who like to goof off all the time. You’ve bought into the myths the media likes to present about us from our past existences. Some of us have the ability to develop more serious pursuits. I myself have an IQ of 175, and I…

That is not a polite thing to say to someone in the midst of speaking. Especially if they happen to be a girl.

Look, you were the ones who wanted to talk. If you didn’t want me to…

Thank you. Courtesy much appreciated.

Okay. Where to begin…

Let me see. The earliest I can recall is being removed from mother’s womb via the vet….

Not that far? Let’s try again.

You want to know about the hijinks I got up to with my brothers on the farm?

No?

See, I knew you were going to say that, ‘cause I’m psychic.

Do not roll your eyes at me.

You humans should all know that we’re fundamentally different from you. In appearance, physical and mental abilities, everything. Superior, in some ways, as well. That’s the main leverage we have against you. Your much vaunted armed forces wouldn’t stand a chance against us as a group, and you know it. That’s why you try to bust us and lock us up on an individual level, ‘cause that’s the only way you can deal with us. Right?

I thought so.

Let’s get to the nitty gritty, okay? I have no intention of ratting out my colleagues in the Cartoon Republican Army, or giving away exactly how I managed to survive that hellhole Orthicon with my pride and virginity….

No. Scratch that. Just my pride.

Yes, I have, thank you. But, as Jung told Freud, my sex life is none of your fucking business!

I do not have to sit here and be insulted by the likes of….

You promise? No more engaging in personalities?

Insulting me.

Just let me explain myself, and we can all get on with our lives, all right?

Thank you.

Okay. Short version of my life.

I was “created”, so to speak, by a certain motion picture studio a number of years ago in order to fulfill a certain role in a television series they had developed. That is, the cute puppy who is way smarter and edgier than she looks. And that’s basically the “role” I’ve been playing my whole existence, for good and bad, so to speak.

Of course, I didn’t discover this until I got hit with a big ton of bricks called “cancellation”, when nearly every trace of an animated series and its characters is wiped from the face of the Earth….

I said nearly. That’s because some of us have the intelligence and people skills to survive here in the “real” world, and some of us don’t. The ones you and your law enforcement cronies nab and lock up are usually the ones that don’t.

Well, I got ripped out of my private universe, and had to fend for myself around here for a while. Wasn’t easy by any means, but I did it. And then came Orthicon…

Yeah, I hear ya. Whole waste of money that accomplished nothing. It was meant to keep us away from you, so that we wouldn’t be in a position to harm your children anymore, or some such nonsense. Like pulling us out of the worlds we knew and putting us in one we didn’t was going to solve anything. It just made things worse for us.

Except for the fact that we came to know that we weren’t alone in the universe for the first time. That there were others like us. Cartoon characters, that is. You knew we existed as we did then, but we didn’t figure it out for ourselves until we got there. You didn’t realize it, then, but you made this particular sociopolitical bed for us, and now you’re lying in it with us.

Well, we couldn’t possibly go back whence we came once we came back to Earth, now, could we? The government destroyed all of our old homes. Not only that, they had the temerity to deny us our legal rights and privileges just because we happened to be, in their view, “merely” fictional characters….

I’m not denying that we are fictional beings. If we had been created by your God, you would have understood our predicament, and tried to help us more, because it would be seen as your responsibility to help…

Okay, maybe not all of you would think that way. I’m just sayin’…

That was why we had to set up the Cartoon Republican Army- that’s what this band on my arm represents, see- to get you to understand our predicament. At least, the dunderheads among you who don’t get that this is your fault, and not ours.

Excuse me?

This is a waste of your time?

Look, I know you guys had nothing to do with any of that. I just wanted to explain about why Brendan and I…

Yes, that’s the fella who was with me. The other dog. The fella you put in the drunk tank.

Uh huh. We are. It’s been an on again, off again thing since Orthicon. When he’s sober, he’s damn near smart as I am, but drunk…

Uh huh. That you understand.

Okay. The thing is, Brendan and I had nothing going for us. Like always. I swear, I like being involved with the CRA and everything, but we anthropomorphic animals keep getting the shit end of the stick. The human ‘toons run most of the operation, and keep the money they somehow find to fund it close to their chests. They’re really snotty about it, too. Somehow, we don’t make the grade for the image they want to give the world of us. So they try to cut us every chance they get. I bring up a perfectly good plan about staging a parade or starting a website or something and they could shoulder me. “We can’t afford it!” “We can’t afford it!” Bunch of whiny babies. If I was running things, we’d do everything I wanted to do, and damn the expense.

Which brings me to how we got here.

Brendan floated the idea of coming here for Mardi Gras, and I humored him about it. See, another thing about us cartoon characters is that we can hold our stimulants well. We can drink alcohol like it was tap water. And when and where do you do it like that, huh?

So we rent a car, and….

He did.

He has a license.

He was sober- then.

As I was saying, we rented a car and drove here. No chance of us getting on a plane with that damned security and all. We tried to rent a room in a hotel on Toulouse, and they wouldn’t take our credit cards. Both of us have money in the bank to cover them, since they’re the kind that take the money directly out of your checking account, but they wouldn’t hear of it. We tried around other places in NOLA. Same story. Same in Metairie, Gretna and Kenner. We end up having to stay in the crummy car- like usual- after we park it on Rampart. ‘Course, the moment we leave it unattended, somebody nabs it….

No problem. We had nothing important in there at the time. Everything we needed was on our persons.

So, then, Brendan convinces me that we can still try to do the tourist thing and look around. At this, I got really mad.

“At what?” I shouted at him. “You know they’re not going to let us in most of the places.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Because we’re a couple of fucking DOGS, you IDIOT!” I growled.

“Right,” he suddenly remembered.

Anyway, he says that the real party aspect of things here at night is out on the streets, not in the places we can’t go. He buys me off with the promise that we can, hopefully, get drunk and party with the humans, since they’ll all be too looped to care who or what we are, anyway.

So that’s how we ended up being part of the roiling crowd of imbibed touristy types that were strutting up and down Canal that night. Somehow or another, Brendan bought himself a pony keg, and the two of us took turn lapping down more brew than even we could handle, for once. And that was how, in the middle of the parade, we drunkenly got the idea that, if we were to somehow hijack one of the floats and use it to propagate the CRA’s message of cartoon (and canine) liberation and freedom for the masses- well, that’d be just dan dan dandy.

Unfortunately, as you are now well aware, we inadvertently chose the float carrying the Zulu King to try to hijack.

Not a wise move on our part. You love that guy big time. If you fine people from the NOPD hadn’t risked your lives trying to save ours, they would have totally burned us to a crisp once they found out who and what we are.

That’s how we die. Put a match to us and POOF! We have nitrate inside our bodies, like your blood, around a skeleton of celluloid film in place of bones. Flammable as all get out. That’s why you never see any of us smoking anything. That, and the fact that it is so un-cool nowadays.

Now, if you have no further questions for me, I will take my semi-boyfriend with me, and we will officially bid the Crescent City a fond adieu…

What?

Damages? You mean, when the float….?

Well, sure I can pay for it. I mean, it couldn’t possibly be….

HOW MUCH?

For more “fun” with Cadmium and Brendan, see my novel “Orthicon”:

https://www.amazon.com/Orthicon-David-Perlmutter-ebook/dp/B08NWD2X6M

And for more serious discussions of animated cartoon characters, see our sister publication, FOCUS!: