Tales of the Madman Underground Chapter 13 Summary

An Afternoon Down the Toilet

  • After school, Browning meets up with Karl and offers him $20 to help build a new frame for Rose's couch.
  • She doesn't know he's doing this—the couch was her last anniversary gift from her dead husband, and Browning doesn't want her to know what a sorry excuse for furniture the couch is.
  • The other part of the deal is that Karl has to fix his clogged toilet, which is no big deal to him; his dad taught him how to do household repairs.
  • After they get the jobs done, Karl and Browning go to Pongo's for dinner. Darla is their waitress, and Browning shamelessly checks out her butt.
  • While they eat, Browning runs his mouth about Lightsburg in the old days. Karl, however, stops him in his tracks when Browning uses the n-word and tells him to please not say it.
  • This just makes Browning go off about how kids today are being brainwashed by the liberal agenda. Or, something.
  • Then, he crosses even more boundaries and tells Karl that Darla likes him, but he doesn't need a girl like her for a girlfriend because she's kind of easy.
  • This is a regular occurrence. Karl once hung out with Darla late at night, and when he got home, his mom started taunting him about whether or not he and Darla had sex. She was also drunk, which didn't help.
  • Then, she spun around the room singing a song she made up about Darla and Karl having sex and broke a lamp and started crying. Karl had to replace the lamp.
  • The next night, his mom went crazy on all of the cats and broke another lamp because one of them pooped on her skirt. When he came home from McDonald's, he found her lying on the floor with them, begging for forgiveness.
  • Anyway, back to the present day. Browning keeps being pervy about Darla the whole drive back to Karl's. It would be a relief to go home if he didn't have to go home to his mom's latest rampage.
  • The cats are eating a can of tuna fish in the living room, which only means one thing: Karl's mom went shopping again and likely bought herself new clothes. All of this with Karl's money, of course.
  • Karl has a fit of anger and starts crying because his mom is ruining his life. Can't say we blame him or disagree with him.
  • When he goes up to his room, though, Karl finds his dirty pants from that afternoon with the $20 he earned from Browning gone. He's overjoyed that all his mom took was the $20 bill.
  • He's so thrilled that he almost doesn't care that one of the cats pooped in the middle of his bed again.
  • This gets him thinking—burying dead cats is a regular event at their house because his mom never takes them to the vet or gets them spayed or neutered. Accidents happen all the time. Would it really be a big deal if he sort of picked the next one whose funeral he'd hold?
  • The more he thinks about this, the better it sounds. All he has to do is find out which cat is pooping on the bed and kill it. Seriously, whatever he does to it has to be more humane than getting mauled by a raccoon.
  • Karl feels like a jerk for thinking this and figures it's because he wants revenge on his mom for ruining his life. He finally decides that for now, he really just wants a clean bed, so he decides to wash his sheets.