[b]The Origin of Marty O'Donnell: A Birthday Story[/b]
Marty O'Donnell, Bungie Maestro and leader of the Glorious Honorable Marty Army, turns 107 years old tomorrow!
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Born in a time of cholera, scurvy and spastic dysentery, Marty O'Donnell had a hardscrabble childhood in an Irish mining town, where as an orphaned guttersnipe, he would make money by roasting gassed canaries and serving them, rotisserie-style, to hungry miners.
But Marty needed to escape the grime, soot and poverty, he had a higher calling. On a harmonica he fashioned himself, from the rotten teeth of a crushed Dublin mineshaft-waxer, Marty blew his way to freedom. Dancing a jig outside of a Limerick pub every night through hail, rain, snow and the occasional goosing, young Marty earned enough for a sixth class passage on the steam liner "Albatross."
Nailed to the propeller shaft to save on luxury tax, Marty rotated across the Atlantic, blowing his yellowed Harmonica, barely audible above the thundering rhythm of the propellers. But blow he did, and the foundations upon which he would later compose, were laid in axle grease, stench and vomit.
Marty found himself at Ellis Island, with only one penny to rub together. He earned enough cash to spend a week stapled to the frozen roof of a Bronx flophouse, by selling his own scabs to prostitutes who would use them as fake lips. But Marty composed all the while.
Often, he would walk by the new York Philharmonic, a tiny pale rapscallion, dwarfed among the fur and finery of New York's elite. But a break was to come. Shivering in an alley behind the imposing concert hall, Marty was soaked in a frozen deluge of saliva, as the brass instrument cleaner dumped the evening's spittle collection.
"What you doing out there in the cold son? Come in here where it's warm, and start swabbing these trombones. I'll give you a shiny new kick in the arse for every instrument you clean."
Marty worked his way up the ranks, from spit-swabber to bow-bender, to drum-tightener to loafer-lightener. Eventually, it came to the notice of Sir Edward Carney-Hands, the maestro and conductor of the 1908 New York Philharmonic, that Marty could hold a tune. He took the now-teenage Marty under his wing, or more accurately, into his Manhattan basement.
When Marty limped into daylight many years later, he was a man, of sorts. A stout young fellow with an education from both the school of hard knocks, and the New York high School for the Performing Arts. And an MD from the Hollywood Upstairs School of Medicine. He had arrived. And one sunny afternoon, just before the great Wall Street Crash, Marty met this group of monks…
Birthday Greetings to Marty, from Bungie, with Love.
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