Faust Comes To Bedrock

      Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble's testicles are made of stone.  Barney's drum sticks are human humeri.  He's in a band called Rubble's Five.  Components of the band:

     Fred Flintsone: Bass

     Wilma Flintstone: Lead Vocal, concertina, electric violin

     Barney Rubble: Skins, backing vocals yelling things like "Yippee-ki-yi-yay!" and "Hullaballoo!" writes all lyrics.

     Betty Rubble: 6 and 12 string guitars, cowbell, background exclamations like "Yahoo!" "Give it to me straight," and "Blow it out yr ass!" and "Drop dead, muthafucka!""

     Bam Bam Rubble: Bugle, drum kit, congas, bongos, spoons, marimba, xylophone, glockenspiel, wood blocks, tambourine, harmonica, trumpet, sitar, sound effects, Moog Synthesizer, clarinet, oboe, English horn, tuba, bass trombone, tenor sax, soprano sax, French horn, piano, organ, cello, viola.

     Pebbles Flintstone: Raps, tambourine, maracas, triangles, water harp, clarinet, bassoon, alto recorder.

     First album: Another Day at the Quarry, featuring the number one hit, "Dimetrodon Poop On My Heel Again".

     Most of the time Barney and Fred don't think about their rock balls.  They're like their former organic balls, except they're hard.  Sure, a sharp tap with a metal implement would shatter their balls.  The pain they'd feel would derive from sharp shards of rock digging into tender interior scrotum flesh causing internal bleeding in their never seen cartoon sacks.

     To get where they are, this mediocre band relied on a Mephistophelean bargain, with Cartoon Mephistopheles (voiced by Dan Hagerty), wearing a big cowboy hat, riding a wasted-looking horse, meets Barney Rubble, sells him on the idea of selling his testicles for the chance to start and thrive in (for a time) a rock band--money will come his way, stardom, he'll meet celebrities like Rock Hudson, Lewis Stone, Janet Granite, Drew Barrymore.  

     Barney immediately agrees, hammers and chisels his full name, Barnabas McShale Dempsey Rubble, into the basalt contract.  

     Mephistopheles tucks the stone piece carved with Barney Rubble's fate, into his saddlebag, and produces from a sheath on his saddle a slim blade.  Barney quivers.

     After the operation, Mephistopheles kindly provides Barney with a pair of smooth stones to insert into his unmanned ball sack.

     "I'll see you again.  Take up the drums.  The rest will fall in place."

     Time speeds up, Mephistopheles and his wasted beast skitter away out of the valley of the Rock People.  Barney blinks, says, "Boy oh boy, boy oh boy," about seventeen times, then goes home to find an envelope on the table in the foyer.  Opens it, a check in his name for 65,000 Clams, enough to buy a drum kit, pay for lessons from a pro drummer, and buy Betty that sloth-skin lingerie she eyed up at Jasper's Women's Fine Apparel, a pricey store, but now and then Barney gets a hankering to set money aside, avoid going to the bar and losing a hundred Clams playing darts, and buy Betty something sexy.  Last time it was a pair of soft saber-toothed tiger leather panties dyed green, with a slit over the place where life emerges.

     Barney played drums.  Four hours a day he played drums.  He hollered as he played.  He pissed off his neighbors.  Fred Flintstone came over, holding his eight fingers over his ears, screaming at Barney to cease his noise.

     "I'm starting a band, Fred.  Wanna join?"

     "And do what?"

     "How about bass?  Four strings, easier to play than a six string.  Your fat fingers will do just fine with a bass guitar.  There's one for sale at Opal and Jade's.  I'll buy it for you."

     "You'll what!?  Where did you get the Clams?"

     "An anonymous benefactor.  I bought these drums with it.  I've been practicing for two weeks.  I'm getting good."

     "Oh come on, it takes years to get good at that!"

     Barney twiddles his human bone sticks.  "Think again!"

     Fred, soon amazed, watches his best friend and coworker play the fuck out of his drums.  Fred immediately decides to join the band.  The bass is yet unsold.  It's a beautiful thing, shaped like a bird in flight with the wings swept back.  With a gray granite body, the thing's as heavy as Fred Flintstone's playing.  He takes quickly to providing background thunder to Barney's playing.

     Wilma and Betty chat over breakfast coffee about Barney's band.  Betty's been playing guitar for twenty years, but never felt bold enough to play live.  Wilma sings while washing dishes.  Pebbles has a knack for wind instruments, while Bam Bam, a multi-instrumentalist, will provide rich background for the music.  They play Carnugget Hall, Madison Square Guard Rock, and Jellystone National Park, camping families seated on benches, enjoying Old Faithful going off during the band's number 4 hit, "Been Swingin' a Pick All Day".  

     Barney has never been more happy.  A successful tour, a big-selling second album, Metamorphic.  Wilma's addiction to snorting crushed rubies has yet to become an issue for the group's collective mood.

     Barney gets kidnapped by a Millennialist Paleolithic Cult leader and his henchmen.  They come from the Grasslands, nomadic horse riders.  The band goes on without Barney, who's missing for five years.  Brainwashed, he returns to Bedrock, proseletysing for the Cult of the Hidden Igneous.

     Fred, meanwhile, can't stop hiccuping.  He tries everything, blowing into a pteranodon's cloaca, running full speed into a wall inside his house of endless floor space.  He cuts his wrists open and drinks the blood, declaring he will replace his blood immediately by drinking it.  Cut to commercial.  Two little kids sitting at a breakfast table eating Quake Cereal, pure sugar, gets em to school, zonks em out by noon.  Next commercial, Rocket Cars! Dragsters in miniature, use only with adult supervision, fuel not included.

     Fred's in the hospital.  "Oh my wrists!  Why did I do it?  What if I can't play bass anymore!?  I'll lose caché with the chicks." 

     Wilma and Betty tour as a duo while they wait for Barney to be deprogrammed, but mainly to make money.  Fred's out of the picture, too, relearning how to play bass, considering quitting the band, no one cares one way or the other.  Barney's flipped out.  Barney hands out leaflets in front of movie theaters.  Barney tells men not to visit massage parlors, not to gamble, not to eat.

     The Cult of the Hidden Igneous, like the Shakers, believe in no procreation, but also they believe in extinction, to hell with it, enough already with the Earth thing.  Don't eat, who gives a woo.  Cultists filter through the valley, Barney one of eight in Bedrock.  They meet in Barney's pad, rented faraway from his wife.  He tells his fellow cultists about a grocery store they can knock off.  Barney knows the dairy manager, they're fellow Moose.  

     They knock off the grocery store, come away with steaks, potatoes, parsley, lemon, lettuce, and rice.  Time to have a celebration back at Barney's pad.  Uh-oh, Barney's wife sits in Barney's armchair, arms crossed, one foot bopping about.  Elizabeth Crush Avalanche McGurk Plainstone Phaedra Marvelous One Clantorfowitz Rubble, the one and only.  

     "What's with you, Barney Rubble?"

     "I beg to understand what you're talking about."

     "You've joined this...cult!  Your brain isn't your own entirely.  Come back to us!  The band needs you!  I need you, Barney!  Bam Bam!  Think of Bam Bam growing up with no father.  Tragic!"

     "My life's previous goals have been subsumed into a greater purpose.  I am not the Barney Rubble you speak of."

     "You are so!  You're my Barney!  Come home with me now!  I'll make you some tomato soup and a sandwich, how bout that?  Then we can go in the bedroom, and uh..."

     "Temptations come and go, woman.  I have castrated myself, per the requirements of the Cult of the Hidden Igneous.  You interest me not.  Do you have anything of value to say to me?"

     "You're right.  You are not my Barney.  He's kind, you're a cold fish.  Logical and mean, that's you, not my Barney, though."

     "Sentiments related to your husband cause me to laugh inside.  Begone."

     It's hard to see the lovable harmless-looking Barney Rubble cartoon shape behaving like a dismissive android, but the best Flintstones fan fiction does not ignore life's difficulties as background subject matter.

     In his heart, Barney wanted to rejoin the band.  He missed playing live, hearing the screams, the occasional shouted "You suck!"  Human interaction with imperfect human beings, all unaware of the search for the Hidden Igneous.

     Hidden Igneous: What we don't yet know about Dark Matter, that unknown body of future knowledge is the Hidden Igneous, or HI for short.  Barney, after two years of study in the tablets of knowledge, future seeing, and reincarnation accounts, learned he is a present human manifestation of a twentieth century actor named Arthur Carney.  Fred, he learns from careful study of an appendix to a future reading of the twentieth century, will reincarnate as John Gleason, what do you know, another actor!

     Barney, alone in his pad, thinks about Betty.  He wants to see Betty.  He wants to see Betty naked.  

     He goes home.

Vic Neptune