prompt: cantankerous, title: after the gold rush in misc. flash fiction

The idea of taking on the rap personae of a grizzled gold prospector sounded ridiculous to me as well when my agent first pitched it, but as he was quick to remind, this business isn’t just about talent or even connections, everyone needs a gimmick if they want to stand out. Would you have remembered Madonna if she hadn’t first stapled traffic cones to her tits? Lady Gaga without her dress made out of skirt steaks? Yeah, Post Malone looks like he rolls around in a wet newspaper every morning but without it, he’s just another white dude from Syracuse mumbling to himself in the Carousel Mall food-court.

I suppose there were worse things to be than “The Cantankerous B.IG.” especially after my first single “Consarn The Police” drove my album “Straight Outta Rations” to triple platinum. Did I feel inauthentic? Sure, but it turns out the tears of a sensitive artist yearning to sing the rich song of his soul are easily soaked by crisp stacks of hundreds for Kleenex. They have rapping clowns getting rich in Detroit, Kid Rock’s basically just “Hee-Haw” reruns with a bass subwoofer. If my millions of “Saloonatics” as they call themselves want to hoard their afterschool fast-food checks so they can attend their “First Rodeo”, how am I any worse than anyone else in this racket?

KISS was just a bunch of Satanic mimes, Springsteen cosplays as a farmer from the Dust Bowl, I’m pretty sure Billy Joel’s supposed to be some kind of a Hobbit. But again, everyone needs a gimmick, and it seems to have worked out well for all of them, really. Melissa Etheridge married a man twenty-seven years ago, a Lutheran preacher from Oshkosh Wisconsin, they have six kids, but that lesbian market pays her bills, so she maintains the façade. Good for her, I say, and good for the Reverend as well. I’ve had dinner at their house, he makes a great potatoes and lutefisk!

Whenever I doubt the whole mess, my agent reminds me that in the actual Gold Rush, almost no one made any money off finding gold, it was the people who sold all the suckers their shovels, their picks and blue jeans, who founded the towns to sell the rubes whiskey and hookers so as to drown their troubles after coming up empty, those were the only folks who ended up wealthy.

And if it hadn’t been them, someone else would have run the scams instead. So I take the stage as Cantankerous, flash my fingers up four and then nine and then start spitting rhymes about my stubborn mule and dancers at the bar, getting cheated at love and cheated at cards. I show them the good time they would’ve bought off someone else anyway.

Would I rather be my authentic self and successful at the same time? Jesus Christ, yes, of course. But having to choose one or the other, I’ll take the one that gets me a new yacht every Christmas.