Six Degrees of Griswald Dreck

In 1947, a researcher at MIT realized that he knew the Pope. Well, not him personally, but his cousin Bernie once met a guy who's grandfather's shoeshine man once stepped on the Pope's robe when he was staggering out of a bar one night, so that was pretty damned close to knowing the Pope. This researcher's gears started turning upstairs as he realized the ramifications of what he had discovered. "I'll be shit in dip, I know the motherfucking Pope!" he yelled to no one in particular.

Then he promptly went out and got shitfaced in celebration, dying of liver failure in a cheap motel nine years later after waging a half-assed battle with alcoholism. But while he was at the bar he had mentioned, loudly and in the form of a song, his discovery to a man in a pirate costume who was occupying the barstool next to him. The pirate said "Arr, the Pope indeed!" and moved further down the bar, but another researcher sitting at a table within earshot heard the conversation. He was less of a fuck-up and actually did something with the information, thank God.

He sold the idea to a third researcher for a fix of heroin, and went off to Naked Lunch his way into oblivion. This third researcher wrote the idea on the back of a map of Utah, where it stayed in his trunk for ten years, until he went to sell the car to a naïve college freshman who actually believed that the car's monstrous rust problem was a new high-tech ventilation system. When the researcher was cleaning out his trunk he found the map with the idea scribbled on the back, and since he had recently been fired from the University for selling test tubes as magic condoms, he decided to make this his next project.

He called the project Six Degrees of Mark Womack, because Mark Womack was his name and he liked to tell naïve freshman girls he had six degrees so they would sleep with him. When one would occasionally ask what his degrees were in, he'd make up subjects like Astrocomedy, SuperBiology and Calculean. Womack spent the first six months of research feverishly trying to figure out how he knew the Pope, and why he couldn't kick this lousy fever. First he called everyone he knew to ask if they knew the Pope, then he just started calling people at random from the phone book in hopes of finding a link. After six months and an assassination attempt by the phone company, the answer finally came to him while he was driving to the police station to bail his brother Don out of jail.

Don had once been arrested for sneaking into Madonna's house dressed in a floor-length evening gown, and Madonna had of course recorded the theme song for the Pony Express: "Express Yourself." Pony Express rider Wild Buffalo Bill McLanihan had once shot Walter "Left Turn" Sykes for riding his horse too slow on the hauling-ass trail, and Sykes was the maternal great-great-grandfather of Father Parrish Lunt, who once French-kissed the Pope at a Vatican mixer before being reassigned to Buggery Beach on Easter Island.

It was almost brilliant in its simplicity! And more importantly, it proved scientifically that Womack kind of sort of knew the Pope. He ran out into the street half-dressed to share his incredible news with the world, and was run over to death by a trolley.

Luckily for science, that pirate-dressing guy from the bar ten years previous had been working on the same problem this whole time, mostly while he was in the doctor's office awaiting his weekly treatments for lupus. Samsonite Cooks had taken a somewhat different approach than Womack, focusing instead on the idea that any two people on earth could be connected by a chain of six or fewer acquaintances. He came up with this idea after running into an old ex-girlfriend he'd been avoiding and subsequently misunderstanding the title of Womack's project. However, he quickly realized that this was bullshit, since it's not like Leon down on 6th street knows the freakin' President. Shit. That dirty dog would need at least 100 steps and a hang glider.

Thus, the idea lay dormant in Cooks' sock drawer for another forty years until he sold it in a sports bar men's room to Michael Bacon, celebrity brother and one half of the celebrity-and-his-brother musical duo The Bacon Brothers. Bacon was desperate to step out of the shadow of his actor brother Kevin, a man who wears jogging shorts so hideously small you can see his Bacon bits. Michael Bacon pitched the idea to Ernie Bradley, an upstart board-game publisher desperate to step out of his own brother's shadow, and there the parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was born. Michael became rich but still could not escape from his brother's shadow, so he had to settle for playing out of key when Kevin sang, making him look like an asshole.

Science jumped on the Six Degrees idea and claimed it was real, much as they did after the first Star Wars became popular. The world took notice, said "Huh, weird" and went back about their lives. More importantly, however, a young scholar-for-hire named Griswald Dreck started his own mail-order business, linking customers to the historical figures of their choice for a nominal fee, and ended up landing a regular columnisting job after he linked Red Bagel to Ivan the Terrible in four steps flat. It's a small world, as they say. Or sing.

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