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In Cold Pulp: The Unauthorized, Untold, Unresearched Story of Lime-Toss

In Cold Pulp:
Sex, Drugs, Schadenfreude, Mopery, Extortion, Sodomy, Ennui, More Sex, Graft, Treason, and Loitering:
The Unauthorized, Untold, Unresearched Story of Lime-Toss:
Complete and Unsliced
by Truman Wolfe (feat. Nate Dogg)

Editor’s note: the “In Cold Pulp” manuscript, evidently a history of Lime-Toss written by modern-day “New Journalists”, fell into the possession of Dr. Byron Clavicle, the BTSH writing staff’s foremost reclusive nonentity. As BTSH’s Oklahoma City “Beach” tournament nears, we’re publishing this excerpt to help newcomers understand the origins of a game that has taken America’s shorelines by storm (not literally; limes grow on trees or vines or something, they do not fall from clouds). Lime-Toss, in its modern renaissance, has come to symbolize unprecedented levels of stupidity.

“In Cold Pulp” Book Jacket Cover

Chapter 1: Uh-Oh, Lime Comes to Town

August is the second cruelest month, but for a small-town jive turkey named Freddy “Sticky Fingers” Norblatt, it was so much more. For a small-town jive turkey with an idea and a dream, August was rancid with hot, buttered opportunity. On the twelfth of that soupy month, 1965, he rolled into Ocean City, Maryland, or possibly Delaware, in his 1988 Iroc-Z with a dream, a sack full of nickels, a sweat-stained Army raincoat, and a trunk full of limes.

He’d seen it all. You just needed an idea, an idea and a dream and a vision. An idea, a dream, a vision, an ambition, a concept, and a hot-tub full of moxie, plus also a lime supplier, a zester, and maybe a fried clam once in a while–

He’d seen Whammo hit the big time with the “Frisbee.”

He’d seen Duncan hit the big time with the “Yo-Yo.”

He’d seen Oswald hit the big time with “Kennedy.”

Now it was his turn.

LIME-TOSS.

Don't Believe his Limes

On the O.C. boardwalk he’d strut around in a sandwich board, shoving around a wheelbarrow piled high with limes. He passed those sweaty days screaming at passers-by: “Lime-Toss. Five bucks a lime. Twelve bucks a throw.” The rules, chalked onto his signboard, were simple. For seventeen bucks you could chuck a lime out to sea. If it landed on a sailboat, you could keep it. If you whacked a swimmer, he or she became your permanent concubine. If you knocked out a seagull, you could stick it on a skewer and eat it. The skewers were offered free of charge.

Freddy Norblatt

Last known photo of Freddy “Sticky Fingers” Norblatt.

By the end of the month, beachcombers turned up “Sticky Fingers” Norblatt, floating in the reeds of the waste canal behind the dunes by the Seahawk Motel, starved, beaten, drowned, and deceased. The poor man who’d come to make himself a rich man left town as a poor dead man, his viscera so much stuffing for Ocean City’s crab-human-crab food chain. Limes were strewn all over the goddamned place, roosted upon by colorblind ospreys. Those green eggs would never hatch. Stupid ospreys.

Freddy didn’t hit the big time. History does not remember Freddy Norblatt, and neither should we. History never found his wheelbarrow or his sandwich board, but history did find his raincoat, and the rest is history.

Freddy Norblatt Last Gasp

Freddy Norblatt’s Last Gasp

Chapter 1, Part 2: A Sub-Lime-inal Message involving Limes

It was the best of limes, but it was, paradoxically, also the worst of limes. Nineteen seventy-four. Citrus fruit worldwide suffered an outbreak of Bohemian Weltschmerz, growing too apathetic to fall from the trees. The international lime shortage thrust Gerald Ford into the White House, while a young Donald Rumsfeld secretly negotiated to trade Gavrilo Princip to the Iranian Sandinistas in exchange for surplus helium.

But come October, a young botanist named Kookie Apsigurgle made a discovery that would change the course of history forever for a few days. It was a raincoat, stained with dead moths and rutaceous angiosperm. Freddy Norblatt’s name stitched on the inside collar. In one pocket Kookie found a crumpled up napkin, with a note inside, a note written in shaky, drunken letters, each letter painstakingly inscribed using a system for recording handwritten words that involved ink in some way, and the words were:

…sailboats/concubines/seagulls gimmick not working. Revised rules?
1. get limes
2. people throw limes to one another
3. points are for style but points mean nothing since game is not actually scored
4. limes can never go over the tallest man but that’s not really a rule
5. game makes hands smell good, cures scurvy, great for kids and assertive pets
6. there are no prizes
7. there are no winners
8. …get SUPER RICH!!!
9. use riches to settle bar tab, buy warhead, kill Billy Joel

Kookie Apsigurgle knew genius when she saw it. She quit her pointless botany gig. Bought a lime farm. Convinced the damn things to grow again. Spread the game across the East Coast. Changed her name to Kookie Limepleseed. She founded Seacrets, and eventually, ISIS. The rest is history. 
Lime Tree

A lime tree in full bloom

Chapter 1, Part 3: Lime Me to the Moon

It was early 1986 when a young President Ronald Reagan…

Editor’s note: “In Cold Pulp” continues for another twelve thousand pages, explaining the role of limes in ballistic studies and eventually as propellant for the early Saturn-V rockets, plus Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey’s tour of the country in a giant lime. Unfortunately we at BTSH are about to run out of pixels so we will end our excerpt he

Different editor’s addendum: that was actually a typo. We meant to write, “we will end our excerpt she”

Third editor’s codicil: just to be clear, these editors’ notes are not pa

Ken Kesey’s Citric Kool-Aid Automolime, which toured the country, freaking out the lemonheads.

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