I’ve been playing about on Ficly.com, which is a website where you write short little narratives and then other people can write sequels and prequels and aftquels and mequels. It’s all a bit creative and community-oriented, but that’s what makes it so fun.
Archive for August, 2009
Write A Story With Me, Won't You?
Thursday, August 27th, 2009Dead Drunk Deniability.
Thursday, August 27th, 2009Upon coming home to our ground-floor apartment on a Halloween night quite a few years ago, my lovely wife and I found something on our doorstep. No, not a flaming bag of dog excrement, or a smashed pumpkin, but I like the way you think, reader. It was, in fact, a person. More specifically, it was a very, very, very, very drunk teenage girl, passed out on our doormat, curled up like a kitten.
“Holy Jesus, what the hell is that!?” my wife yelled as I nearly stepped on the huddled mass. I looked down and jumped back a few feet.
“It’s a girl!” I said in surprise as I got a better look in the dim light of our stoop.
“Oh my god… is she dead?” My wife asked tentatively.
“What am I, a psychic?” I replied, and then upon seeing the sharp look she was giving me, I continued, “I don’t think so. Probably just passed out.”
“I can’t tell if she’s breathing. Maybe you should… you know… give her a little kick?”
“Pardon?” I raised an eyebrow.
“You know… nudge her with your foot… just a little kick.” She said, as if this were the most natural thing to do. My wife is just an old hand at this, I guess.
“And what if she is dead, eh? And they examine her body later and find a post-mortem boot mark?” I ask.
“If you don’t want to kick her, then I’ll do it.” she said huffily, taking a step toward the unknown girl.
“Oh, no. I’ll do it. I just want you to realize the lunacy inherent in the situation,” I said.
“Duly noted. Now, I’m freezing out here, so get to kicking.”
I took a step toward her and put my toe out gingerly, to give her a nudge. She groaned before I made contact.
“Alright then, not dead.” My wife said decisively. She then bent down over the girl and started shaking her shoulder gently. “Excuse me! Excuse me, strange drunken girl? Or stoned girl? Intoxicated female person? Wake up!”
I noticed then that this girl was using the electrical outlet on our stoop to charge her cellphone.
“Look, she’s stealing our electricity, the little thief!” I said. Oh, yes, I’m a petty, petty man sometimes.
“Yeah, I see that.” My wife rolled her eyes at me. “I’ll make sure I get back the eleven-cents-worth she’s stealing.”
“It’s the principal of the thing. I’m calling the police.” I said.
“About what? A dime’s worth of electricity?” My wife said, flabbergasted.
“No, about the underage drinker who’s passed out on our doorstep!” I said.
“Oh. Yeah.”
I dialed 911 and gave the operator my address and name and the circumstances. She asked if the girl was breathing.
“Oh yeah. She seems fine, just asleep. No bruises about her face or anything, just asleep.” Just to make sure, I held the phone away from me and bent down to the girl, and said “IS THERE ANYTHING WRONG WITH YOU? ARE YOU DRUNK? YOU’RE JUST DRUNK, RIGHT?” I could smell the alcohol. Then, I said back to the operator, “I think she’s just drunk.”
They said they would send an officer over right away, and I said thank you and hung up. My wife and I stood there for a minute, looking at each other and shrugging.
“Should we step over her?” I asked my wife.
Just then, the girl leaped up to her feet, smoothed back her hair, unplugged her cellphone, stuffed the phone in her purse, picked up her purse, appeared woozy for a moment and then noticed us. This all happened within the space of about twenty seconds, while we were just standing there watching. She looked about 16, maybe 17, and was garbed in what passes these days as a standard teenage girl Halloween costume. In other words, to put it indelicately, she was dressed like a whore, and a cheap one at that.
“Oh!” she said when she noticed us, “I didn’t see you there.”
My wife and I looked at each other in disbelief, our mouths agape.
“Uh… are you feeling alright? I only ask this because you were just passed out a moment ago and you look a bit, well, ill.” I said.
“I… I…” She began. She was quiet for a moment and I could see she was trying to compose herself. She straightened up, looked me squarely in the eye and said what has now become one of my all-time favorite sentence for when someone has caught me doing something I shouldn’t be doing, when someone has caught me in a small gaff or a little white lie or a benign faux-pas, like taking an hors-d’oeuvre before they’ve been formally served.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, with an air of dignity she apparently plucked from thin air.
It’s not so much the words she said, but the way she said them, as if I were implying something completely silly about her, something that could just be dismissed with no more effort than brushing a bit of lint from one’s sleeve.
She paused a moment to let her words sink in, nodded ever-so-slightly at her own matter-of-fact-ness, and then, without further ado, she sidestepped right around my wife and I and started walking briskly away from us.
Allow me to just say that I was fucking shocked. But I quickly regained my own composure enough to yell at the back of her head as she left.
“Hey!” I called after her. “You can’t just deny that! You WERE passed out a minute ago! Are you alright? Why’d you choose MY stoop? Where are you going? Get back here MISSY!” I felt like shaking my fist in the air, to make a point, but resisted. She pretended not to hear me. “I called the cops on you, you’ve got to come back and talk to them when they get here!” At this news she broke into a run, probably hard to do on high heels and newly regained consciousness.
I turned to my wife, who told me to let it go. I shrugged and we then shared a cigarette as we waited for the cops to arrive. When they asked if anything was missing, I heavily considered telling them that’s she’d stolen electricity from me. I didn’t, though, instead telling myself that everyone makes mistakes and that the drunk girl probably had enough to worry about. Wasn’t I a teenager once, too? Also, there’s probably no use in pressing charges when the object taken is not actually an object and is more like a brief flow of current.
What was weird was that she’d flatly denied that she had been passed out in front of us. As if I was going to say, “Oh, that wasn’t you? My mistake then. I must have had something in my eye. Or perhaps I’M drunk or on drugs, not YOU.”
She offered no apology, no “sorry I was passed out”, not even a curt “my bad”. Just the now infamous line “I don’t know what you’re talking about” that has now been said, by yours truly, on various occasions, no less than five hundred times since that night. I only wish I’d thought of it first.
Good on you, you little drunkard.
Dogs, Death, and Dancing.
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009Whenever I visit my parents house, I’m greeted by a fierce but tiny growling. It’s a low, guttural sound that lacks any depth whatsoever, a sound that could very well be an angry grasshopper or a gargling mouse.
“Oh, Rita, you stop that!” my Mom will say. “She’s just protecting the house. She’s a good girl, aren’t you, Rita? Aren’t you?”
A Jack Russel Terror and a Chihuahua mix, Rita is a tiny little thing. She’s black and white, spotted like a cow, and has an under-bite that makes her two bottom canines jut out of her mouth, visible at all times, giving her a tougher-than-thou look. Her general attitude is of mild tolerance toward those who go out of their way to feed her, bathe her, wrap her up in blankets and rub her belly. She growls at me unless I’m eating something, in which case then she’s my best buddy. Not just regular growling, though, she will actually walk into the room where I’m sitting, notice me for the first time, narrow her eyes at me, mouth the words “F*** you,” (I swear.) and then slowly walk out backwards, growling. She’s moody and she’s selfish and she’s plotting my downfall.
My parent’s other dogs weren’t like this. We had a sweet dog, once upon a time, a dog that would take a bullet for any member of my family. His name was Pete, and when he was dropped off at our house by my Uncle (I think), I was the only one home. The first 4 hours that he spent in our house, he spent with me. I was about 13 years old, and we wrestled like two puppies, biting each other playfully and rolling around on the Persian rug in the living room. We bonded.
Pete played in the yard and became a rough and tumble outside-dog. As an Australian cattle dog, his body was a tightly-wound spring, a bundle of potential energy just aching to become kinetic. He could bound over a 7-foot fence, no problem, just as easily as we might step over a garden hose. He could sprint like a cheetah and was indefatigable. His eyes were a mottled brown and blue, really crazy looking, but that was part of his charm. He chased cats, and, unfortunately, occasionally caught them. (Urk. My stomach turns when I think of a grisly scene my brother and I encountered one day, when searching for the source of a haunting meowing. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say that my beloved dog Pete had no concept of mercy.)
The house my family and I lived in at the time we had Pete had a big front yard, enclosed in a gate, where Pete had space to run around while attached to a long length of heavy industrial chain. Whenever I came in through the gate, like, say, home from school, he’d make the most ecstatic half-howling, half-strange-trying-to-talk noises as he danced around on his hind legs. We played fetch for countless hours, me whacking the ball with a tennis racket and him enthusiastically retrieving, until the tennis ball was just a few shredded bits of rubber and green-tinged slobber.
Later in our lives, after I’d turned 16 and gotten my drivers license, I’d come into the driveway very late at night and he’d ambush me playfully, jumping up and down on his hind legs and licking my face. I’d take hold of his outstretched paws and we’d waltz for a bit in the moonlight, me humming a tune and him howling along with me. We’d sit outside in the dark for hours, and I’d talk to him about my girl-troubles or my plans for the future, and he’d hang on my every word, looking at me intently with his crazy eyes, licking my face if he sensed I was melancholy. He was truly wonderful.
When I was 17 years old, my parents decided that Pete needed a companion, and so they brought home Sam, who was Pete’s brother but from a more recent litter. Sam looked a lot like Pete, but his eyes were a bit closer together and he was all-together smaller. And, unlike Pete who had a deep and loving intelligence, Sam was as dumb as a box of rocks. Really. Just nothin’ going on behind those eyes.
For example, Sam would be walking across the yard, and I’d call out to him. “Sam, here boy!” Now, most dogs would stop walking, turn their head, and then, usually, come to the person who called their name. Sam would, instead of stopping, turn his head and continue walking and walk right into a garbage can, hitting his thick skull against it with a resounding “DONG”. Then, he’d get up, shake his head, and stagger around dazed for a moment. Then he’d finally walk over to me. Not the sharpest crayon in the box.
This dog would pee on the tires of my car, and be punished, and then he’d pee on the tires not even an hour later. I would watch out the window and run out there to catch him in the act. I’d put his nose down to the tire and tell him “No! You don’t piss on my tires!”. He’d lie down, groveling, and cover his head with his paws, and then, maybe 45 minutes later, I’d look out the window and see him doing it again. “Arg!!” I’d cry out as ran outside to chase him away from my tires. Pete would roll his eyes.
On occasion, Sam was even stupid enough to challenge Pete’s authority, and Pete would be forced to assert his dominance in the only way he knew how: He’d mount him and screw him vigorously. Pete would sneak up behind Sam, jump him, and begin furiously thrusting away, and Sam would snap at him and try to get away, but to no avail. Eventually Sam would just lie down and Pete would eventually dismount and walk away, perhaps looking back over his shoulder to bark once at Sam, who lay there, sulking and embarrassed. I imagine he was saying “That’s right, bitch.” Of course, the up-side to being so stupid was that Sam would forget about this disturbing, incestuous, homo-erotic travesty after a few minutes and then he’d be back to walking face-first into garbage cans and peeing on my tires.
Eventually, though, Sam had to go. Pete and Sam began fighting regularly, not just playing but real fighting where they’d bloody each other up quite badly, and Sam had to be sent back to my Uncle only six months after his arrival. So, it was back to just me and Pete again and that was fine with both of us.
From the first moment he stepped into our house, my parents encouraged Pete’s instinct to protect the family. And he did, even to a fault. He protected my Mom when she went for walks in the evening, he protected my nephews when they were in the park, and he protected the house from intruders. His motto was, “If you ain’t part of the family, you’re toast”. God help you if you came into our yard uninvited, ignoring the gate with the signs that read in large, bold printing “DANGER. GUARD DOG ON DUTY. NO SOLICITORS! DO NOT ENTER! SERIOUSLY! HE’S CRAZY! HEY, DO YOU ENJOY LIVING? IF YOU DON’T, THEN BY ALL MEANS, PLEASE ENTER AND SAVE US THE HASSLE OF FEEDING THIS FEROCIOUS HELL-HOUND!” in both English and Spanish.
Do you remember that scene in Jurassic Park, after all of the dinosaurs have gotten out, where the the blond female paleontologist (Dr. Ellie Sattler) turns to the raptor-specialist/big-game-hunter guy (Muldoon. Thank you, IMDB!) as they’re walking through the jungle full of raptors. They’re trying to get to the electrical breakers building or something, and Dr. Sattler says, “We can make it if we run…” to which Muldoon replies, “No… we can’t…” and takes a few more steps, looking out into the dense jungle. Sattler asks “Why not?” and he stops and says without turning his head, “Because… we’re being hunted.” Well, once you were in our front yard, past the fence? YOU were being hunted.
Pete would let you get through the gate without barking. And then he’d let you cross the yard, keeping himself out of site behind a car or a bush, biding his time. But the moment you got to the carport which was just a few feet from our front door, you’d hear his chain rattle and then you’d have about 2.2 seconds, usually just enough time to turn and scream in terror, before 75 pounds of sleek, muscular canine would ram into you doing about ninety-miles-an-hour, with a wide open and gnashing mouth. This need to hunt and chew upon those he thought might be a threat to family’s welfare, well, it would ultimately be his downfall.
A few years ago, my parent’s circumstances changed and they wound up in a smaller house with a smaller yard. One day, the landlord visited and Pete bit him, mistaking him for an intruder. The circumstances around the bite are sketchy, but suffice to say that it was bound to happen sooner or later, and no one was to blame. But that was officially strike three on Pete’s record and the landlord was adamant that he be put down.
Now, I know why he had to be put down. Please, don’t think I don’t understand. I’m well aware that owning an animal that has bitten people is unsafe. I’m aware that a dog with a violent, protective streak can bite children and do horrible things that we’ve heard reported on television. And I know that the responsible thing to do was to have Pete put down. But that didn’t make it any easier.
It hurt me greatly when he was put down. I truly loved that dog. I am apprehensive about admitting this in such a public forum, but, in truth, I mourned his death more deeply than I have mourned the loss of some of my human relatives. This may seem wrong to some of you out there, but what can I say? He was my confidant and my friend, my guardian and my dance partner.
Three days later, my parents rescued from the shelter the current dog in their lives, Rita.
“She immediately loved your mom and wanted nothing to do with me. Obviously she had good taste,” my Dad told me. “Finally after about half an hour of being ignored, I picked the cute little dog up and carried her around for another half hour. She finally looked at me and her eyes said ‘I guess you are OK, now lets go home.’”
Rita who hates me. Rita who won’t play fetch. Rita who can’t dance with me because she’s too short. Rita who, I imagine, would taste just fine in a stir-fry. Rita who I can never forgive for filling the gap left in my parents life when Pete was put down. Rita who can never hope to fill the gap in my life.
One morning last week, I came to my parent’s house after dropping my wife off at work for an evening shift. It was 5 o’clock-ish, and my Dad got up to take a phone call in the other room, and my Mom was making me a Bloody Mary in the kitchen. I’m sitting on the couch when Rita walks in and stares right at me. There’s an uneasy few seconds between us, and the tension is palpable. She narrows her eyes at me and I lean forward slightly, so only she will hear what I’m going to say.
“You know what your problem is, Rita?” She tilted her head slightly, the way dogs do when they recognize their name. She looked up at me, and I felt, for just a flicker of a moment, that she was looking at me with the same intense look Pete used to give me, a look of understanding and intense concentration. Then, after another second, it was gone, replaced by her bitchy scowl.
“You’re ugly,” I said, “and you’ve got no rhythm.”
This Desert Night: Part 2 of 2
Friday, August 21st, 2009
If you missed Part 1, please go here.
“We’re going to be bagging and rubber-banding papers on-the-go here. When I call out for a paper, I’ll either say ‘bag’ or ‘tube’ (referring to the special tube next to the mailbox that the banded papers go into) and you’ll hand me whatever I need.” Ron explained.
“Also, don’t worry about the bunnies,” he added cryptically.
We drove through the night on a numbered highway out to the furthest neighborhood from my in-law’s house. We would be working our way inward and, it just so happened, from the poorest neighborhood up to the nicer houses. Our first neighborhood was a trailer park, err, I mean a mobile community. A pink flamingo lawn ornament breeding ground, perhaps. Wind-chime central.
We parked for a moment under a streetlamp so I could bag up the last of a stack of papers and then we took off. Almost immediately I saw the bunnies.
They were everywhere. We drove like mad through the narrow streets, tossing out papers onto porches and in driveways, and all the time the bunnies raced around like mad. Caught in our headlights, they would quickly bolt left, then right, then, torn between directions, they’d leap straight up into the air and land on their heads. Then they’d dazedly hobble over to the side of the road while we raced by. They would have just enough time to collect themselves before we made a run back down their street to hit all the houses on the other side of the road with papers. It is a credit to Ron’s driving ability that I never noticed him swerve or brake very hard and yet I also never felt a cottony little thump that would signal the passing of a furry soul beneath our tires.
“Kamikaze rabbits.” Ron remarked.
“I regret that I have but one fuzzy life to give for my people… bunnykind.” I added. It was getting late.
With the windows rolled down and the air already a crisp 43-degrees without the wind chill, we practiced our throwing arms and razzed each other when a paper landed in the bushes or glanced off of a car. Newspapers in bags make a peculiar sound when you throw them. There’s the WHIP as it’s thrown, then the SHHHH as it sails though the air and then the CLAP when it lands. The papers that landed in the bushes never made that CLAP at the end, so we could tell, even in the dark, if our aim was true.
“Alright, Jeremy. Here’s your chance to redeem yourself after that last one in the bushes. You need to clear the gate here, and get it as close to the geranium pot as you can.” Ron said.
WHIP-SHHH-CLAP.
“Nicely done. Alright, Chris. There’s a truck parked in front of this driveway. I need you to make it over the truck AND the gate.”
WHIP-SMACK-CLATTER.
“Balls,” I muttered as I got out of the car. I spent the next few minutes digging around in the back of this guy’s truck trying to find the paper I’d thrown beautifully, only I didn’t see the upper arm of the lumber rack on the truck. I had only just started imagining what might happen if he decided to walk out his front door at that moment when the porch light went on.
“Effing stupid thing… where are you?” My hand grazed against the paper and I threw it over my shoulder while jumping out of the truck’s bed. I scrambled to make it back into the car as I heard the front door open and we sped off, laughing.
We sped through neighborhoods for two and a half hours before making it to the nicer ranches and larger houses that marked the end of our route. Ron gave me a tour as we went along. Here he’d seen a coyote lazily sitting on it’s haunches in the middle of the road. There he’d been accosted by a bored police officer who wanted to lecture him about his driving technique, which, in the cop’s defense, was fast and furious. Though I had some difficulty imagining anyone lecturing my father-in-law.
As we started on the last leg of the route Ron told me that he does this seven-days-a-week and isn’t paid much, though that doesn’t seem to bother him much. The horizon began to lighten from India ink black to a hazy orange within a few minutes and I popped open a can of orange soda I’d been saving for the end, a reward of sorts. We cruised through the roads between a few ranches and were able to make out the shapes of horses in bespoke warming jackets standing beneath towering silhouettes you could just almost barely make out as trees. No longer was the world confined to the tunnel of the car’s headlights, it now had room to breathe.
The atmosphere reminded me of a trip my drummer and I took to Arizona a few years ago for a string of gigs at a casino near Tempe. We left in the evening from our home in the California wine country and drove down through Los Angeles and out East into the desert. As dawn approached and the pain of being awake became nearly unbearable, we cruised our rental car into the painted desert, that breathtaking landscape of hills and buttes, with it’s multitude of vibrant colors; lavender, red, orange, pink, and every shade between them.
Jeremy passed out in the back of the car and we slowed our pace just a little. A few more papers were thrown by me that hit the mark perfectly, one landed on it’s end right on a doormat and leaned against the door. That’s nothing, Ron told me. Once he threw one over a gate that ended up landing on it’s end like mine, but on top of the gate, on a strip of metal no more than three inches wide. It was a one-in-a-million shot, balanced there, just so, he said. I imagine that he gave it just a moment’s consideration before speeding off to terrify a few more bunnies.
This Desert Night: Part 1 of 2
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
As we rocketed along through the vast winding outskirts of Reno, Nevada, kicking up dust with the tires of my wife’s mother’s Chevy Malibu, under the inky blackness of the new moon, I let out a manly whoop that probably startled a few coyotes and scorpions, but definitely startled the bunnies.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Ron, my father-in-law, picked up a paper-route a few months ago to supplement his retirement. A paper route, I thought to myself when he’d told me, well that sounds relaxing. Somehow I couldn’t imagine my father-in-law who had been a fire department dispatcher for decades having a paper-route, but what with our economy being held together with scotch tape and wishes right now, a job is a job.
And little did I know the details.
The wife and I were up visiting Reno for his birthday and the night we arrived Ron extended to me an invitation to join him on his late-night route.
“It goes pretty late into the night,” he warned.
“‘Going late at night’ is my middle name,” I scoffed. Bladder issues aside, my musical endeavors routinely have me coming home in the early morning, as you may well know, so I wasn’t too worried. This would be a nice opportunity for the two of us to catch up.
We took off from the house at half-past midnight and brought along my wife’s aunt’s stepson, Jeremy, a good-humored sixteen-year-old boy who loves baseball and wanted to show off his pitching arm. On the way, a few things were explained to me. Mostly, I think, these things were for Jeremy’s benefit, but I listened too.
“When we get to the newspaper, stick near the car.” Ron explained.
“Alrighty,” we said.
“Jeremy, you’re going to rubber-band the papers and, Chris, you’re going to be the bagger.”
“Neat.”
“We’ll probably meet a few of the regular guys tonight. They’re sort of gruff, and many of them work regular jobs in addition to working a route, so don’t feel put-out if they’re not very friendly to you.”
“Duly noted,” I said.
We rolled into the newspaper’s back lot and parked in a line of cars that were waiting to load up with papers, ready for distribution. Trucks drove back and forth across the lot, ferrying metric tons of newsprint here and there. There was a loading dock at the far end of the lot where we’d be loading when our number came up.
It was at this point that the night began to deviate from what I’d imagined. Standing around the yard were not the fresh-faced boys that I had imagined, nor the stoner college students driving beat-to-shit Honda hatchbacks that I had expected. The ‘throwers’, as they called themselves, were some hardcore mothers.
I’ve been thinking about it for a few days now and I must say that the best way I can describe the motly lot I saw before me, leaning against their cars and drinking coffee or smoking cigarettes, is that they were a bunch of bearded, glaring, leathery, ornery, former sea captains. There’s really no other way to put it. They looked a little out-of-sorts, like they had been forced into abandoning their pirate/barbarian garb and had then been coerced, no doubt by their wives, into donning a wide array of colorful Cosby sweaters and Dockers, but they were clearly a crew not to be trifled with, a crew that watched each other’s backs, a crew that you’d want on your side in a bar fight.
Ron pulled the key out of the car’s ignition and a particularly crusty gentleman waved to him the group of sailors, not smiling exactly, but there was markedly less animosity in his eyes while he waved. Gruff, indeed.
“That’s Jim.” Ron said, nodding in Jim’s direction. “Let’s get out and say hello…”
“Is that completely necessary?” I suggested. “I mean, I thought you told us to stay in the car, right?”
“Get out.” Ron commanded.
Reluctantly, I got out.
Now, I’m no mincing dandy (well, maybe a little) but I have a remarkably acute self-preservation instinct. It’s like the spidey-sense of wussing out. I walk the edge, surely, and have been known to converse with criminals, but usually they’re smaller than I am. I view our nations laws as more of a set of suggestions and put myself in what others may view as “a dangerous situation” but more often than not it’s a carefully calculated scenario. The look and feel of the edge with none of the maybe-I’ll-be-dying-in-a-knife-fight-tonight substance. Here though, I wasn’t so sure.
Surely, I though to myself, as Ron’s son-in-law I was safe walking among these lions. Jeremy, on the other hand, was on his own.
Jim started yelling at Ron as soon as he was in earshot. He was an older man, in his late sixties, with a beard composed of straight, fine hair that matched the hair peeking out from beneath his weathered baseball cap. He drove a late-model sedan littered with whole newspapers and bits of newspapers and rubber bands and yellow plastic fettuccini that held together the bundles of newspaper. We stood a little bit away from the other sea-captains and their mud-covered pickup trucks and wive’s cars.
“Can you believe this weather we’re having?” Jim asked and then spit. “The weatherman said we’d have nice hot days here. What a load of horse-shit.”
“Yeah, it’s been pretty temperate.” said Ron.
“Yeah. If I’d wanted temperate, I’d have stayed with my son and his can’t-cook-for-shit wife in Portland. I moved here because I like it hot, man.”
“Hmmm. Yeah, that’s something.” Ron said. A few minutes of silence passed uninterrupted.
“This is my daughter’s husband, Chris,” Ron said, gesturing to me.
“Nice to meet you, Chris,” Jim said, jutting his hand out toward me to shake. “You ever been with Ron on his route before?”
“Nope. I thought it might be fun.” I said.
“Yeah, well it’s a lot like fucking work is what it is.” He spat again.
A few more minutes of silence.
“You see the baseball game?” Jim asked suddenly.
“Sure.” Ron replied, shaking his head. “Giants got beat.”
“What a bunch of god-damn retards.” Jim observed.
“Yep.” Ron said.
“Hmmm,” I interjected, wanting to join in. “God-damn retards.”
“Yep,” they both agreed.
This is how, I have found, most men converse. For my female readers this could come as a shock. Only those lady-readers who grew up with a bunch of brothers or who listened in on their father’s weekly poker night are familiar with this kind of masculiny colloquy.
There’s a protocol and it goes, roughly, like this:
- Person 1 says something about baseball or crime or the weather, etc., usually peppering the statement or question with liberal swearing or saying something vaguely racist or sexist in the process.
- Person 2 agrees, then rephrases the original sentiment, adding some fresh vulgarity.
- Person 1 nods and swears again.
- The process is repeated.
Whether or not this conversation is happening at a rodeo or a posh winebar, it makes no difference. The subject can be literally anything, from the oakiness of the scotch to the new rubber ball-gag that his wife makes him wear in the bedroom to the latest model of tractor. Sure, the enlightened among us occasionally bring up a point about the plight of the working man or the unjust nature of life, but that’s as far as we deviate.
Also, sometimes step one can be a burp or a flatulence.
When our time came up to load in the papers, I got back in the car. I was instructed, probably smartly, not to help with the loading, so I sat there. As soon as we were done we jetted out of there with a ferocity of which I had not, until that moment, thought my father-in-law capable.
Part 2 will be posted Friday.
Prices So Low They're Criminal.
Monday, August 17th, 2009Here’s an essay from the vault. I’m off having an intensely hot vacation in Reno right now and will be back tomorrow if the Wordpress Scheduling Robot does like it’s been told. Hugs and kisses, Zaphod.
As a married man, I don’t feel as though I’m doing my job right unless I’m in at least a little trouble with the Missus. Not “Andy-Capp-getting-beaten-with-a-rolling-pin” sort of trouble, but, rather, behavior that keeps my life just a little… thrilling. I enjoy a little danger, within reason. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
Recently, after a recent visit to the chiropractor, the wife and I decided to grab a bagel at the local shop as dinner was still many hours away. I waited in the car as my wife, always feeling quite spry after a visit to the chiropractor, had offered to go in. I’d only been waiting a minute or two when a young man with a woefully under-developed mustache skulked up to the driver’s side window and indicated the window-rolley-downey motion. I rolled it down and his Old Spice aftershave washed into the car in billowing waves. I coughed and my eyes watered immediately.
“Hey, Mack.” He said, whipping a hand out from beneath his large dirty coat and revealing 5 or 6 DVD movies arranged in a perfect fan. “You wanna buy some movies, CDs, or movie soundtracks on CD? Cheap?”
I thought for a moment, looking into this guy’s beady little eyes, and ultimate decided to error on the side of safety.
“Sure!” I said. I reasoned that I was bigger than this guy and, armed with a small but sharp sommelier’s tool I kept in my pocket for just such an occasion (also, the off-chance I’d ever have to un-cork my way out of a quandry), I felt confident that I could “take this guy”, as the kids say. (Mean kids that beat people up.) So, in a sense, I was safe.
I got out of my car, leaving the door unlocked for my sweet wife to be able to get back into it with the bagels, and followed this character around the corner to his Toyota Corolla. I held the little knife in my hand, just in case, and he popped open his trunk and I began to browse through his movies.
“The Godfather complete boxed set of DVDs?! How much?”
“I dunno, how about twenty bucks?”
“Seven bucks?” I ventured.
“TWENTY bucks.” He replied.
“Seven bucks?” I implored.
“No. Twenty!” He insisted.
“Seven bucks?” I chanced.
“NO! Read my lips, buddy. TW-EN-TEE DOLL-ARZ!” He practically yelled.
“Seven bucks?” I said, smiling, as if I hadn’t heard him.
He stood there for a moment, looking down at the boxed set, during which time I took seven dollars out of my pocket and fanned myself with the bills.
“F***. Yeah, seven. Seven’s fine. Gimme that.” He grabbed for the bills and I picked up my new boxed set, which was when my wife rounded the corner. She eyed the situation and understood immediately.
“What in the hell are you doing? Are you buying stolen merchandise?!”
“What? No! Of course not! This guy is just, err, helping a friend sell her brand new movie and record collection because she needs money for… err..”
“An operation!” My criminal friend threw out there. “Yeah, that’s the ticket. She needs money for an operation on her… uhh…” He looked at me for help.
“For her whatever. Anyway, it’s not like my friend here is a cop and this is a sting. Right?”
“Oh, hell no, man, I ain’t no f***ing cop. In fact, I hate cops.”
“You see, love? He hates cops!” I said, smiling and knowing fully well that my wife wasn’t buying any of it.
“What in god’s name has come over you? Buying sto…” She lowered her voice to a whisper/scream and pulled me aside. “…buying-obviously-stolen-merchandise-from-some-hoodlum-out-of-the-trunk-of-his… Oh my goodness, is that the Watchmen movie soundtrack? No! No, we’re not doing this!” She picked up the Watchmen disc and looked at the aforementioned hoodlum.
“How much is this one?” she asked sweetly.
Weary that my wife may have the same bargaining strategy that I do, he offered a nice, low figure. “Four dollars?”
“Why that’s a steal! (No pun intended.) Well, maybe I’ll just get this one.”
As we walked back to the car, quite happy with our purchases, my wife suddenly turned to me and whapped me with the small paper sack containing our toasted, cream-cheesed bagels.
“Damn it! Why is it that whenever I take you out in public with me we end up doing something like this? Last month it was the incident at the Taco Bell where you ended up making that poor girl cry because she didn’t get the order right…”
“Wait just a second! Firstly, they got the order, YOUR order, wrong 3 times in a row! How hard is it to remember ‘no onions on the cheesy bean and rice burrito’, eh? And secondly, it was YOU who sent me back in there the first two times to make them do the order over again. And third and foremost, I didn’t ‘make her cry’, okay? She was obviously in an emotionally fragile state. Maybe there had been a recent death in her family and I just pushed her, ever-so-gently, over the brink.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not how I remember it. I distinctly remember you mentioning something about having her deported.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Well, maybe I do recall something like that. But things said in the heat of the moment in a Taco Bell should be forgotten swiftly, I say.
“My mother warned me about boys like you.” She said as we got in the car.
“Yeah, but girls like you always go for bad boys like me.” I said as we took out the bagels and began to thoughtfully munch away.
“Why is that, anyway? Why do women like bad boys? And why do I like it so much when you get me into trouble?” She said this while reading the back of her brand-new, still-in-the-plastic-wrap soundtrack CD.
I stared at the Godfather boxed set and contemplated her question for a minute. Okay, I actually daydreamed for bit that I was a hit-man in the Corleone family: an impeccably dressed, violent, and passionate goodfella with a tough Brooklyn accent and a two-day-old beard, smacking around the poor schmucks who dared to stand in my way.
“Baby,” I said, taking another bite of my garlic bagel, “It just feels so damn good to be bad.
I'm (Almost) Speechless In It's Presence.
Saturday, August 15th, 2009In response to a post I wrote last week, the amazingly talented D at Seafoodpunch has drawn something of such beauty/horror that I am rendered speechless. It is awesome and, dare I say, bad-ass.
Additionally, by some sort of innately transitive property, it has rendered me, at least temporarily, awesome and bad-ass as well. Please click on the link below so that you too can experience…
Now I’m going to go kick-start a motorcycle with a glance.
I'm Laughing All The Way To The Bank.
Thursday, August 13th, 2009Yes, I totally just wrote a thousand-word blog post/essay when I pretty much promised in my last post that I was going to keep it short and sweet. Ah, well.
Occasionally, a man (or woman) must stand up for what he believes in, weigh the matters at hand and decide that he is a force for justice fighting against a cruel and tyrannical embodiment of evil. In a world where all that is good is assaulted daily, this man alone must rally against wrongful persecution, fight the good fight, and not go quietly into that good night.
Now, this next part is important: when the only open bank teller has just given you the news that your account is overdrawn and there are ten people waiting behind you in line and only 20 minutes before the bank closes is NOT THE RIGHT TIME TO FIGHT THE MAN.
Yeah, I know, buddy. You’re old. You’re angry. You’re trying to be cool about this, but we can all hear the bank teller explaining that the overdraft fee is a result of an error on your part, not theirs, and there’s not much you can do. You’re not appealing to our sense of justice, you’re just wasting out time. We’re not with you, we’re against you. Sometimes, when life gives you lemons, you need to just shut up and eat the god-damn lemons.
What’s that? You’re not “angry at the teller”, just at “the situation”? Yeah, well no kidding. She looks like she’s about fifteen years old and I’d be willing to bet your whole $22 overdraft fee that she didn’t write any of the bank’s policies. In fact, just giving her the once over, I’m not sure that she knows what day it is. Clearly, she’s staring at your old wrinkled face and dreaming about the Jonas Brothers.
I exchanged looks with the person behind me. I gave him a “what-the-effing-hell’s-this-guy’s-problem?” and he passed me back an “I-know-man-what-a-dick” and a sympathetic shrug, which was a pretty good trade. The guy in front of me looked back and I passed him my extra sympathetic shrug, and he shot me a quick “I’m-fucking-late-what-the-hell-I’m-totally-gonna-say-something-okay-not-really”.
“I don’t care what the policy says, I want this charge reversed now,” Angrypants McOldman said. He adopted a firmly-planted crossed-arms demeanor that outwardly expressed the brassy stubbornness within. I’d seen this before, when my nephew Alex was very young and his mother (my sister in-law) would refuse to give him a cookie that might spoil his dinner. I expected Angrypants to hold his breath until they reversed the charges.
“Sir, the manager had to leave because of a family emergency and I simply don’t have the authorization required to reverse the charge. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Augh! I’m tired of your excuses! All you’re giving me are excuses as to why you can’t help me and what I want is for you to just give me some help!” he half-screamed/half-whispered.
I’m going to do something, I thought to myself. I’m going to say what all of us here in line are thinking. No one else is going to? I’m going to have to be that guy? Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am.
I stepped out of line and cleared my throat, which got literally everyone in the bank’s attention. I wonder how many people think I’m about to rob this place? I asked myself. Of course, the longer I paused, the more people here are probably thinking that I’m going to whip out a gun. Okay, that’s enough inner dialogue, here we go…
“Hey! Old man! SHE CAN’T REVERSE THE CHARGE. You have officially reached what we call an “impass”, wherein the present circumstances will not allow for any action that may resolve the matter to your satisfaction. Now, if I may be so bold, please do us all a favor and take your cranky, one-foot-in-the-grave-and-the-other-on-a-banana-peel, aging-before-our-very-eyes self out of here and go down the block to the Sizzler before you miss out on the early-bird special because you had a coronary at the bank over twenty-two bloody dollars. Seriously, it’s twenty-two bucks. Maybe that was a lot of money when you were a little boy (what was George Washington like, anyway?) but right now it’ll buy you either a quarter-tank of gasoline or a tugjob from your sister, so just pay the fee or get the hell out of the way. Or wait a second, here’s an idea: charge it! You probably won’t live long enough to ever have to pay the bill! Let that thing default! If your children are anything like you, then they deserve to be saddled with the debt! Signed, sincerely, Someone With More Shit To Do Today.”
…is what I should have said. What I said was more like this:
“Uh, hello? Is there another teller available?”
Yes, alright, I’m a big pussycat. There was a sudden rush of air as the people in line let out a collective sigh and changed their impression of me from “possible bank robber” to “guy who gently asks if there’s another teller available”, which was sort of disappointing. I rather liked being assumed as dangerous for a moment, but I try not to make a habit of it because I think jail would disagree with me on a fundamental level.
“Sir, I’m doing the best I can,” she replied, and I saw that, honestly, she was doing the best she could. What more can one do but their best?
I stepped back into line and resumed my wait, jostling myself from one foot to the other. I contemplated leaving and going next door to the Juice Shack but instead I stayed put and ran through, in my head, the things I could have said, the things that I might still say, and the things that I would never say, just like everyone else in line, in any line ever, stretching across the annals of human history, going back to the very first line ever, probably some ten-thousand or more years ago, to the very last line ever, probably in few years from now, when we will be forced to line up at the human-processing plant by our robot overlords (Zordon The Destroyer, be praised).
If there is a heaven, a Saint Peter, a pearly gates, a sacred book with everything I’ve ever done, thought, or said in it, I hope there’s at least a comfortable place to sit and wait until they call my number.
A Working Vacation.
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009I’ve decided that I’m spending far too much time writing essays for my blog and not nearly enough time writing my novel, so, for a while at least, I’ll be treating this as less of a “the collected writings of” site and more like a real, honest, down-home country kitchen “blog”. Yee-haw.
I’ll be leaving this Friday on a vacation to Reno to visit my in-laws whom I dearly love and, if I can be perfectly frank here, I effing loathe vacations with the power of a thousand suns. I so dislike vacations because I love to work, because my work is writing and being creative. I stay up all night more often than I think is healthy, writing and editing and rewriting.
“With this patented heat-bead suit and my diet of raw crystal meth, I’m dropping weight faster than a Tijuana crack-whore, and am quickly approaching a Neil Gaiman-level of writing output!”
Writer’s block is a foreign concept to me, something that happens to other people, and so I have the ability to work ALL THE TIME. To me, having writer’s block would be, I imagine, like having breather’s block. My brain just doesn’t work that way.
Especially during that critical time in my writing process I’ve just reached that involves figuring out each of my characters’ story arcs and I really feel like I’m sinking my teeth into the meat of the story, getting down to the nitty-gritty, as it were, and getting some good solid words and phrases and such down onto paper, err, down on the ol’ hard drive. Or the 8GB flash drive I just bought for, I think, a dollar.
But, alas, I haven’t seen the in-laws since they moved and my wife’s mental health begins to suffer when she hasn’t seen her parents and she starts cutting me with a knife while I sleep, just a little, so here I go. We leave Friday morning to go over the mountains and into the desert, tra-la-la la-la, in the middle of summer, to Reno, where the sun is close enough to touch if you stand on you tip-toes.
But I’ve made a few demands. First, I’m bringing my laptop so I can get some work done while we’re there. Secondly, I’ve made the wife promise me that I’ll have at least one hour, uninterrupted, every day, to write. Sure, there’ll be playtime with the nieces and we’ll play a game of Monopoly that’ll last eight hours, and we’ll go out to eat at Peg’s Glorified Ham and Eggs, but I’m positive that there’ll be at least one hour where I can squirrel myself away, probably sitting directly in front of the A/C, to punch in a few words.
A working vacation: the best kind of vacation a workaholic can take.
