Archie hated people. He didn’t want to talk to them, he didn’t want to live with them, and he certainly didn’t want to work with them. As a result, he shunned society by living in a cardboard box under the L on 86th St. in Brooklyn, and that suited him just fine.
One day, when Archie was out scavenging for food, he caught sight of Alice. He wasn’t sure what it was about Alice…perhaps the disproportionate amount of doughy flesh on the backsides of her arms, but she reminded him of his dear mama who he’d last seen when she told him he was birthed in a dumpster in the back of the Coney Island AppleBees. That was right before she ran off with Mario from Mario’s Pizza and Doughnuts on the M75 to fulfill her dreams of becoming the Donut Queen of Long Island. But in any case, his heart, which he hertofore had dismissed as no longer capable of doing much more than keeping him alive, albeit in the flimsiest of manners, skipped a beat. He felt an undeniable urge to bond with this human Alice of the Fleshy Arms and he began running towards her.
It just so happened thatĀ Alice was just in the middle of snapping a picture with her cousin Mavis who she hadn’t seen in a dog’s age (her words not mine). Archie came close but never did quite make it to Alice, who he was hoping to embrace, by the time the picture was taken.
Now, unbeknownst to Archie, Alice was on the the tail end of a 15 minute bout of fame spurred when a Youtube video of her laughing maniacally at a wind up parakeet that shouted out swear words in Chinese somehow went viral.
Also unbeknownst to Archie, the photo of her and Mavis would end up on Alice’s Facebook page bearing the caption #photobombedinbrooklyn.
So while this picture of Archie photobombing Alice was getting shared, tweeted and retweeted, Archie’s heart strings were still acting up. He hence ended up photobombing many, including a man who’s balding pate recalled memories of his favorite uncle, Heroin Harry and a particularly photogenic chihuahua who reminded him of the feral cat who used to claw through his dumpsters til old ma threw a shoe at it.
So Archie’s fame rose in social media circles by fans who called him Photobombing Phil, (because they didn’t know his name was Archie) and all sorts started to line up on 86th St. outside Archie’s cardboard box, taking photos that they hoped Archie would photobomb. The masses included washed up actresses wishing to revamp their careers, hipsters who found Phil delightfully ironic and debutantes who decided being Photobombed by Archie would be the height of slumming it. There were even some who brought their sick relatives believing Archie had strange and magical healing powers. Bootleggers sold shirts that said things like I Got Photobombed in Brooklyn and I Took A Still With Phil!
But all efforts were in vain as Archie soon decided that his misadventures were due to telepathic messages coming to his brain through iPhone batteries as well as a bad case of acid reflux from the subway fumes. So Archie decided to relocate to an abandoned industrial warehouse in Williamsburg were he was killed in an unfortunate accident involving a button holing machine he wrongly assumed was inoperative. His body was never found.