The year my brother graduated from college, we moved together to a duplex on France Avenue. Among the many stories I could tell of that time, this one is the funniest, maybe even THE funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
I had a little mutt of a dog I’d named Woojie, a spritzy haired, goofy little guy who had the misfortune to be born with only half his allotment of brains. And since most dogs only have half a brain to start with, that left him two doors down from nothing. He was a basically untrainable, soap-eating, flea-hosting, curtain-shredding little ball of mischief. A canine almost totally without mental ability or talent - with two key exceptions.
He loved to play fetch, and could grab a frisbee out of the air five feet off the ground.
And he could shit. Oh, my god, he could shit. Twice his body weight, three times a day. It wasn’t totally his fault, we bought the cheapest dog chow we could find, probably packed with filler, and his digestive system excelled at doubling the volume before it came back out.
This story takes place about a week before the fourth of July, as fine a summer day as you could ask for. Beautiful, hot weather, not a cloud in the sky and a perfect time to take the dog for a walk. We had made it about three steps out the door when the Wooj assumed the classic dog squat and laid down his first steaming pile, roughly the size of a gopher mound. Soon we’d have two more stops with two more piles of equally impressive dimensions, and it was on the third stop that inspiration struck.
Brother Dale reached in his pocket and withdrew a firecracker, and as soon as he did, we both knew where it was going. Easier to blow the rancid crap up than scoop it into a bag and lug it on home. So, with a devious grin he inserted the gunpowder packed cylinder into the dog poop and withdrew a lighter.
Now, these particular firecrackers had been giving us fits all week long. They were manufactured with defective fuses that absolutely refused to burn. You had to light the darn things four or five times, as each time they would spark and fizzle, burn a fraction of an inch and then die. Every cracker. Fizzle and die. Fizzle and die. But when he went to light this fuse, the flame literally leapt from the lighter, jumping five inches onto the fuse and burning instantly down in the blink of an eye.
Fzzzt. BLAM!
Dale, wide-eyed in disbelief, barely had time to register the unlikely event and start to turn away from the oncoming tsunami. The firecracker, which was the one explosive in the entire pack of one hundred that would actually explode, did so with the energy of ten of its brothers, atomizing the pile of dog poop into a fine mist which completely coated my sibling from head to foot. Not a speck remained on the sidewalk, and 99.7 percent of the flying matter found its target, a ratio any Air Force bomber would envy.
I took it all in for a glorious half-second, and then started breaking up. It was the perfect storm of dog, poop and recalcitrant fireworks.
I still haven’t stopped laughing.
What Are The Odds?
Today, as I was making breakfast an unusual thing happened, and although it may seem minor to you, I guess it shows how boring my life has been lately that I noticed it at all. I dropped a Tupperware® lid with pancake batter all over it and it landed batter side up!
Now, any student of life knows that statisticians would put the odds of such an occurrence at 50/50, but you and I know the probability of a batter-side down landing are much closer to a guaranteed, unassailable 100 percent – Murphy’s Law being firmly in control of such events. Have any of you ever fumbled a piece of jelly-coated toast and not have it end up stuck to your shoe after smearing a crimson trail of raspberry goo all over your white shirt and slacks on the way down? Four minutes before a possibly life-altering job interview?
Speaking of job interviews, one time I was proudly displaying my portfolio of work to a potential employer, when, as I flipped the page a corner caught my eye and scratched my cornea. Probability of that happening? Once in a lifetime, but that was my “once.” I finished the interview with a hand clasped over my madly tearing eye, putting on the best face that I could, but for some reason I never got a call back. People who can’t even turn a page without sustaining grievous bodily injury don’t make the most appealing candidates for employment, I guess.
But, my all-time example of beating the odds, an event so astounding that it remains burned in my memory crystal-clear a quarter of a century later, occurred at a friend’s bachelor party. You may not believe it could even happen, but I’ve got photos and a score of half-drunken eyewitnesses to back me up. The usual mayhem was going on at a typical stag party the night before the big event. There was much consumption of substances designed to negatively affect performance by many young men in their early 30s who, being confident of their own immortality, were determined to ingest mass quantities of said substances. The funniest thing we did that night was rearrange all the photos in the living room (the groom was still living with his parents) knowing our friend would never notice, but there would be a lot of “splaining” to do the second his mother walked into the room.
But I digress.
The Set-up:
Getting back to “the Event” as I call it...On the fireplace mantle sat a full bottle of beer. Behind the beer was a photo or piece of cardboard of some kind (details are a bit fuzzy.) It was a beautiful summer night and the windows were open. Suddenly a breeze whooshes through the room, blowing the picture and beer bottle off the mantle.
The Miracle:
The beer bottle fell four feet and landed upside-down on the stone hearth below, where it did not shatter, hardly spilled a drop of beer, did not tip over, didn’t even foam that much. It just sat there. An inverted glass bottle half full of beer, laughing at us mortals who were staring in slack-jawed amazement at its wonderful impossibility.
Moses parting the Red Sea probably had the same effect on the Israelites...“WTF, Mesheklabob! Did you just SEE that?”
Now, any student of life knows that statisticians would put the odds of such an occurrence at 50/50, but you and I know the probability of a batter-side down landing are much closer to a guaranteed, unassailable 100 percent – Murphy’s Law being firmly in control of such events. Have any of you ever fumbled a piece of jelly-coated toast and not have it end up stuck to your shoe after smearing a crimson trail of raspberry goo all over your white shirt and slacks on the way down? Four minutes before a possibly life-altering job interview?
Speaking of job interviews, one time I was proudly displaying my portfolio of work to a potential employer, when, as I flipped the page a corner caught my eye and scratched my cornea. Probability of that happening? Once in a lifetime, but that was my “once.” I finished the interview with a hand clasped over my madly tearing eye, putting on the best face that I could, but for some reason I never got a call back. People who can’t even turn a page without sustaining grievous bodily injury don’t make the most appealing candidates for employment, I guess.
But, my all-time example of beating the odds, an event so astounding that it remains burned in my memory crystal-clear a quarter of a century later, occurred at a friend’s bachelor party. You may not believe it could even happen, but I’ve got photos and a score of half-drunken eyewitnesses to back me up. The usual mayhem was going on at a typical stag party the night before the big event. There was much consumption of substances designed to negatively affect performance by many young men in their early 30s who, being confident of their own immortality, were determined to ingest mass quantities of said substances. The funniest thing we did that night was rearrange all the photos in the living room (the groom was still living with his parents) knowing our friend would never notice, but there would be a lot of “splaining” to do the second his mother walked into the room.
But I digress.
The Set-up:
Getting back to “the Event” as I call it...On the fireplace mantle sat a full bottle of beer. Behind the beer was a photo or piece of cardboard of some kind (details are a bit fuzzy.) It was a beautiful summer night and the windows were open. Suddenly a breeze whooshes through the room, blowing the picture and beer bottle off the mantle.
The Miracle:
The beer bottle fell four feet and landed upside-down on the stone hearth below, where it did not shatter, hardly spilled a drop of beer, did not tip over, didn’t even foam that much. It just sat there. An inverted glass bottle half full of beer, laughing at us mortals who were staring in slack-jawed amazement at its wonderful impossibility.
Moses parting the Red Sea probably had the same effect on the Israelites...“WTF, Mesheklabob! Did you just SEE that?”
The Rule-Breaker
One hot July in the summer after I graduated from high school I didn’t have anything to do, so I decided to drive over to church camp for a day. I was raised Baptist, and thank God my parents weren’t that strict, because Baptists generally have a prohibition on anything that even remotely resembles fun. No drinking. No smoking. No going to movies, playing cards, dancing, listening to rock music or doing anything other than sitting in a corner reading the Bible. And you probably couldn’t even do that unless you were fully clothed. The joke was, “Why don’t Baptists have sex standing up? Because they’re afraid someone will see them and think they’re dancing.”
But I liked going to Bible camp, because I saw friends that I never saw any other time of the year, and because the camp had a speedboat to water ski behind. I didn’t know anyone with a boat. Nearest lake to my hometown was only about the size of a hockey rink. And the sermons and bible studies didn’t bother me that much...you just learn to zone ’em out and daydream about drinking, and dancing, and sex.
So off I went...It was “Family Camp” that week, which meant you could go for a day if you wanted, and so, even though it was a 120 mile drive, that was my plan, drive over, ski a little, drive back. But my plans got sidetracked when I got there because of "Jessie".
Jessie Knotts.
She had a brother I hung around with named Donny. (Don Knotts, get it? We all thought that was SO funny). But he wasn’t there and she was. And she was cute. Major league cute. And, holy shit, she was sunburned. Not just a little pink, she was RED from stem to stern. I knew, because she was wearing a (gasp!) bikini, which was WAY, WAY, WAY against every Baptist swimsuit regulation dating back to the Crusades!
Whoa! A rule-breaker! A female close to my heart, and definitely one I had to meet. We hit it off immediately, and spent the day together. I sat “next” to her during evening services. I put quotation marks around “next” because one of the seven unbreakable rules of Baptist Camp was that boys and girls had to maintain a 6-inch gap of separation between their bodies at all times. Thus promoting chastity and purity of thought, which was B.S., of course. And, that joke was you could still fuck if your dick was longer than 6 inches, you just couldn’t put it in all the way.
Evening came, and I had to leave. I’d only planned on staying the day and didn’t have any other clothes, or sleeping gear or a place to sleep, for that matter. But you could bet your ass I was coming back the next day. Jessie was way too hot to leave alone. And it was only 120 miles.
One way.
And come back I did. That afternoon we broke another of the seven rules and left camp together to “go for a ride” which of course meant “go parking”.
Parking was code for “find a deserted road, and at the very minimum, burn a little lip.” And we found the greatest road ever, with a driveway that went into a cornfield, which was like the Holy Grail of parking spots. Not even passing traffic could see what we were about to do.
Which was break a few Commandments. Jessie was a rule-breaker, all right.
It wasn’t as easy as it should have been. For one thing, I was driving a 1967 Mustang, and the back seat had less room than your average sized coffin. For another thing, it was 90 degrees out, making for more sweat than could have been generated by ten "Body Heat" movies. And, of course, Jessie had that world class sunburn, which made for some really eye-popping tan lines that just emphasized all the parts that I was interested in. But that just meant that she got to be on top, and I had to be careful where and what I grabbed.
Oh, my. It was spectacular. We did it like bunnies for more than an hour (which, for me, in those days was about 60-plus minutes more than average) and I was about the proudest I’d ever been in my life.
Afterward, we snuck back into camp and sat the requisite 6 inches apart at chapel. Nobody asked where we’d been, and I left for home with a song in my heart.
A rock-n-roll song.
But I liked going to Bible camp, because I saw friends that I never saw any other time of the year, and because the camp had a speedboat to water ski behind. I didn’t know anyone with a boat. Nearest lake to my hometown was only about the size of a hockey rink. And the sermons and bible studies didn’t bother me that much...you just learn to zone ’em out and daydream about drinking, and dancing, and sex.
So off I went...It was “Family Camp” that week, which meant you could go for a day if you wanted, and so, even though it was a 120 mile drive, that was my plan, drive over, ski a little, drive back. But my plans got sidetracked when I got there because of "Jessie".
Jessie Knotts.
She had a brother I hung around with named Donny. (Don Knotts, get it? We all thought that was SO funny). But he wasn’t there and she was. And she was cute. Major league cute. And, holy shit, she was sunburned. Not just a little pink, she was RED from stem to stern. I knew, because she was wearing a (gasp!) bikini, which was WAY, WAY, WAY against every Baptist swimsuit regulation dating back to the Crusades!
Whoa! A rule-breaker! A female close to my heart, and definitely one I had to meet. We hit it off immediately, and spent the day together. I sat “next” to her during evening services. I put quotation marks around “next” because one of the seven unbreakable rules of Baptist Camp was that boys and girls had to maintain a 6-inch gap of separation between their bodies at all times. Thus promoting chastity and purity of thought, which was B.S., of course. And, that joke was you could still fuck if your dick was longer than 6 inches, you just couldn’t put it in all the way.
Evening came, and I had to leave. I’d only planned on staying the day and didn’t have any other clothes, or sleeping gear or a place to sleep, for that matter. But you could bet your ass I was coming back the next day. Jessie was way too hot to leave alone. And it was only 120 miles.
One way.
And come back I did. That afternoon we broke another of the seven rules and left camp together to “go for a ride” which of course meant “go parking”.
Parking was code for “find a deserted road, and at the very minimum, burn a little lip.” And we found the greatest road ever, with a driveway that went into a cornfield, which was like the Holy Grail of parking spots. Not even passing traffic could see what we were about to do.
Which was break a few Commandments. Jessie was a rule-breaker, all right.
It wasn’t as easy as it should have been. For one thing, I was driving a 1967 Mustang, and the back seat had less room than your average sized coffin. For another thing, it was 90 degrees out, making for more sweat than could have been generated by ten "Body Heat" movies. And, of course, Jessie had that world class sunburn, which made for some really eye-popping tan lines that just emphasized all the parts that I was interested in. But that just meant that she got to be on top, and I had to be careful where and what I grabbed.
Oh, my. It was spectacular. We did it like bunnies for more than an hour (which, for me, in those days was about 60-plus minutes more than average) and I was about the proudest I’d ever been in my life.
Afterward, we snuck back into camp and sat the requisite 6 inches apart at chapel. Nobody asked where we’d been, and I left for home with a song in my heart.
A rock-n-roll song.
Leaves And Losses
Every time I go home (and by “home” I mean the farm where I grew up – even though I’ve now lived away from “home” twice as long as I lived there) I’m saddened by the blank space now occupying the area where a giant maple tree once stood. It’s more than a hole in the ground, it’s a hole in my heart.
There were two trees actually – one on the north, and one on the south side of the house, and both were immense. The smaller tree on the south actually lived longer–it was a tenacious son-of-a-bitch–standing for years after being split in two by a bolt of lightning. Defying all odds or logic, the surviving side stood like a sentinel by the driveway, a scrawny, matchstick half-tree, leaning precariously to the east, its shattered sliver of a trunk stubbornly refusing to acknowledge reality or gravity and fall down. For five or six years it stood there, and every time I saw it I thought, “A good, stiff fart should blow that tree over.” But through hell and high water, it never did.
Until one day I came home and it was gone.
The tree on the north was at one time the largest sugar maple in the state (we had it measured and listed in the DNR’S Big Tree Registry) with a circumference around its trunk of over ten feet, it stood 90 feet high with a crown spread of some 80 feet. It was a giant. And home to one heck of a tree house.
Its enormous limbs stretched out nearly parallel to the ground making for some great climbing...you could actually run along them. And from them, a boy could jump onto the roof of the house or garage (although you couldn’t get back again). Amazingly enough, although there were opportunities galore, I don’t ever remember anyone falling out of that tree. Its spirit enveloped and protected us (and laughed with us as we spun ourselves silly on its swing).
One summer day, I was sitting on the deck when my dog began to growl. Curious, I walked over to look around the corner of the house to see what was causing his distress. Nothing looked amiss, but I could hear a crackling sound like someone walking through dry leaves – odd, because it was mid July and the nearest dry leaf was somewhere in the Sonoran Desert – when with a mighty CRACK! one of the main branches tore loose from the tree, limbs and leaves crashing down around me. As it fell, it clipped the corner of the house sending a seismic shudder through the structure, and in a rather telling comment on my accident-prone nature as a youth, my mother’s first reaction was to look up from her book and say, “What on earth did Joe do now?”
It was the beginning of the end, the tree was shot through with rot. And although my dad tried to remove the remaining branches that threatened the buildings and leave the rest, the damage to the mighty tree’s soul was too severe. It too, was gone within a year, another erased and yellowing page in the ledger of my life that used to be written full of laughter, pirate fights, secret meetings and pre-teen espionage.
Sigh.
George Harrison said it best. All things must pass.
But that doesn’t make it any easier to see that empty spot in the lawn.
There were two trees actually – one on the north, and one on the south side of the house, and both were immense. The smaller tree on the south actually lived longer–it was a tenacious son-of-a-bitch–standing for years after being split in two by a bolt of lightning. Defying all odds or logic, the surviving side stood like a sentinel by the driveway, a scrawny, matchstick half-tree, leaning precariously to the east, its shattered sliver of a trunk stubbornly refusing to acknowledge reality or gravity and fall down. For five or six years it stood there, and every time I saw it I thought, “A good, stiff fart should blow that tree over.” But through hell and high water, it never did.
Until one day I came home and it was gone.
The tree on the north was at one time the largest sugar maple in the state (we had it measured and listed in the DNR’S Big Tree Registry) with a circumference around its trunk of over ten feet, it stood 90 feet high with a crown spread of some 80 feet. It was a giant. And home to one heck of a tree house.
Its enormous limbs stretched out nearly parallel to the ground making for some great climbing...you could actually run along them. And from them, a boy could jump onto the roof of the house or garage (although you couldn’t get back again). Amazingly enough, although there were opportunities galore, I don’t ever remember anyone falling out of that tree. Its spirit enveloped and protected us (and laughed with us as we spun ourselves silly on its swing).
One summer day, I was sitting on the deck when my dog began to growl. Curious, I walked over to look around the corner of the house to see what was causing his distress. Nothing looked amiss, but I could hear a crackling sound like someone walking through dry leaves – odd, because it was mid July and the nearest dry leaf was somewhere in the Sonoran Desert – when with a mighty CRACK! one of the main branches tore loose from the tree, limbs and leaves crashing down around me. As it fell, it clipped the corner of the house sending a seismic shudder through the structure, and in a rather telling comment on my accident-prone nature as a youth, my mother’s first reaction was to look up from her book and say, “What on earth did Joe do now?”
It was the beginning of the end, the tree was shot through with rot. And although my dad tried to remove the remaining branches that threatened the buildings and leave the rest, the damage to the mighty tree’s soul was too severe. It too, was gone within a year, another erased and yellowing page in the ledger of my life that used to be written full of laughter, pirate fights, secret meetings and pre-teen espionage.
Sigh.
George Harrison said it best. All things must pass.
But that doesn’t make it any easier to see that empty spot in the lawn.
The Girl Who Loves Carmex
Winters in Minnesota can be rough on a person, and I’m not talking about the 25-below zero temperatures, or the glare-ice coated streets or even the eleventy-hundred days in a row that we go without seeing the sun. No, the real problem that we all face from October to April is the almost total lack of humidity in our air. Oh, yeah. Its drier than a popcorn fart around here and it really takes its toll on our furniture, our musical instruments, our skin and our lips.
Especially our poor, tired, chapped lips.
But in our war on dessication we have a powerful ally. A fount of hydration, a magical moisturizer - a balm for the ages.
I’m talking, of course, about Carmex. Carmex. Carmex! Even the name has a lyrical, orgasmic quality as it rolls off my tongue, and sometimes I can’t stop myself from saying it. Over and over. Carmex!! Oh, that was sooo good! Its like a mantra, and often I’ll mutter it continually at night until I fall asleep and dream the dreams of the satiated - my smooth, supple lips smacking in satisfaction.
In Minneapolis, no one knows the way of the small white jar with the yellow lid better than my friend Maralee, who worships the waxy gel. Maybe a little too much, in my opinion. She keeps it in her purse. She has a tube on the night stand by her bed. She has jars stashed in secret locations throughout her house, and she even keeps a container in her mailbox in case she feels parched while fetching her letters. Whenever she goes shopping, she plots her route in such a way that she will never be farther than two miles from a drugstore or Target. Because, as we all know, sometimes those little containers of bliss run out.
And then what the hell do you do?
Panic. That’s what. And today, that’s exactly what’s happening. Look. Across the street, on the corner by the post office, standing under the billboard announcing Cub Foods’ low, low prices on rutabagas. It’s Maralee, frantically digging through her purse, her pockets all turned out, her eyes shot through with desperation. Her heart is racing, her palms are sweating. And, as she keeps licking her lips in a frenetic attempt to stave off the advancing chafe, you can almost hear her inner voice crying out in fear, “Why me? Oh, God, why me! What did I ever do to deserve this?!”
She thrusts the depleted container of moisturizer skyward in one clenched fist and falls to her knees sobbing. Passers-by are starting to avert their eyes and shift to the other side of the street. In Minnesota, its not polite to stare at the less fortunate, and certainly not the ones with chapped lips. We’ve all been there, but that doesn’t mean we want to pick that scab and let it bleed.
Better to ignore. Maybe the Salvation Army can help. Move along - nothing to see here.
And then, when all hope looks lost—when it seems that the dark night of dehydration will wash over the girl and suck the very will to live from her dry and dusty body, a little old lady with a tasteful bag purchased at a Kohl’s 50% off sale walks over and kneels at her side.
“Here, dear,” she offers kindly, “take mine. I have another.”
And she places a small cylinder of Carmex in Maralee’s hand and walks on without looking back.
“So sad,” she whispers to herself. “So sad.”
Especially our poor, tired, chapped lips.
But in our war on dessication we have a powerful ally. A fount of hydration, a magical moisturizer - a balm for the ages.
I’m talking, of course, about Carmex. Carmex. Carmex! Even the name has a lyrical, orgasmic quality as it rolls off my tongue, and sometimes I can’t stop myself from saying it. Over and over. Carmex!! Oh, that was sooo good! Its like a mantra, and often I’ll mutter it continually at night until I fall asleep and dream the dreams of the satiated - my smooth, supple lips smacking in satisfaction.
In Minneapolis, no one knows the way of the small white jar with the yellow lid better than my friend Maralee, who worships the waxy gel. Maybe a little too much, in my opinion. She keeps it in her purse. She has a tube on the night stand by her bed. She has jars stashed in secret locations throughout her house, and she even keeps a container in her mailbox in case she feels parched while fetching her letters. Whenever she goes shopping, she plots her route in such a way that she will never be farther than two miles from a drugstore or Target. Because, as we all know, sometimes those little containers of bliss run out.
And then what the hell do you do?
Panic. That’s what. And today, that’s exactly what’s happening. Look. Across the street, on the corner by the post office, standing under the billboard announcing Cub Foods’ low, low prices on rutabagas. It’s Maralee, frantically digging through her purse, her pockets all turned out, her eyes shot through with desperation. Her heart is racing, her palms are sweating. And, as she keeps licking her lips in a frenetic attempt to stave off the advancing chafe, you can almost hear her inner voice crying out in fear, “Why me? Oh, God, why me! What did I ever do to deserve this?!”
She thrusts the depleted container of moisturizer skyward in one clenched fist and falls to her knees sobbing. Passers-by are starting to avert their eyes and shift to the other side of the street. In Minnesota, its not polite to stare at the less fortunate, and certainly not the ones with chapped lips. We’ve all been there, but that doesn’t mean we want to pick that scab and let it bleed.
Better to ignore. Maybe the Salvation Army can help. Move along - nothing to see here.
And then, when all hope looks lost—when it seems that the dark night of dehydration will wash over the girl and suck the very will to live from her dry and dusty body, a little old lady with a tasteful bag purchased at a Kohl’s 50% off sale walks over and kneels at her side.
“Here, dear,” she offers kindly, “take mine. I have another.”
And she places a small cylinder of Carmex in Maralee’s hand and walks on without looking back.
“So sad,” she whispers to herself. “So sad.”
The Window
A Not-So-Short StoryIt’s night on the other side of the Window, and I’ve never seen that before. Somewhere a mourning dove cries her sad story of lost love, a haunting song that drifts through the night and lands softly on the sill, ruffling the curtains and cooling the room. A dog barks determinedly in the distance and I can feel the faint rumble of thunder echoing across some long forgotten plain like a discontented dream. The stars are out, shining in unfamiliar constellations – southern hemisphere, would be my guess. It could be a whole ’nother world for all I know, I was never that good at mapping the night sky. I can usually find the Big Dipper, but Orion or Pisces or or anything other than the moon remains a celestial mystery. They all look like shiny points of random light to me. Still, there’s something slightly off about these particular stars, though I’ll be damned if I can say exactly what it is.
But that’s the way it’s been lately.
Never quite real, never quite solid.
I walk to the Window (taking care to avoid the dead cat) and look out at the current version of the world. Everything’s changed and nothing’s changed. It’s still my building, of course. It’s always my building. My room is on the 19th of 27 floors, number 1956 to be exact. In fact, they’re all number 1956. Sixty doors in my hallway, every one displaying the same shiny brass number. 27 buttons on the elevator, and you guessed it, every floor is number 19. But more about that later. Right now I want to survey the landscape, because I still haven’t given up hope that there might be someone out there.
I can see quite a distance from 19 stories up. Today, the Outside features a fairly large city with gently rolling hills humping across the horizon a couple of miles away. A river runs kitty-corner through a park seven blocks to my right, and there are swing sets and a jungle gym next to a softball diamond. As I watch, a dust devil twirls erratically across the infield, stirring up memories of sweaty summer games and sweeping Baby Ruth wrappers under the bleachers; a pint-sized tornado wanna-be. The houses look about 1920’s vintage, a lot of story-and-a-half working class residences, nicely painted with freshly manicured lawns and well-kept gardens. I can make out the main street, looks like three blocks long with a handful of one and two-story buildings squatting along the sidewalk like so many brick and mortar sumo wrestlers. They’re too far away to tell what businesses occupy
the storefronts but they look like your run-of-the-mill hardware, grocery and dry goods stores with maybe a bank or two thrown in for good measure. Cars are parked sporadically along my street, but
I can’t discern makes or models because they’re not quite like any cars I’ve ever seen before, and their colors aren’t quite like any colors I’ve seen before. I can’t put it into words, how do you describe a color that isn’t?
Mostly though, I see the emptiness.
In a city that should boast a population of seven or eight thousand people, the only thing moving is the wind-blown litter. The houses are all dark, almost as if the night sky had drained down their chimneys and covered their lamps with a velvety blanket of ink. I’ve watched, ’cause all I can do is watch, but I’ve yet to catch a glimpse of another living soul. And even though I’ve heard dogs bark and cats yowl and owls hoot, I’ve never actually seen them. Never seen that mourning dove either.
So, tell me this. Who is it that’s emptying the garbage cans and cleaning up the fallen branches after the storms? Who moves the cars to new parking spaces while I’m not looking?
They’re there, but they’re not.
All right, I’ve seen enough. I know better than to do anything futile like scream at the streets. When I first arrived, I did enough shouting and crying and banging on walls to last for the rest of my life, and all it got me was a three day case of laryngitis and a throbbing set of bloody knuckles. If people are out there, they sure as hell don’t want to talk to me.
Their loss.
’Cause I’m a damn fine conversationalist.
OK, let’s see what’s in the refrigerator, anybody here want a beer? That’s an inside joke, I say that’s a joke, son. I know what’s in the refrigerator. The same thing that was in the refrigerator the last two hundred times I looked. A Braunschweiger sandwich, a Tupperware container full of parsnips, a can of Fresca and a tin of pickled herring. Whoever’s running this joint has got one twisted sense of humor. The fascinating thing is, if I take the Fresca out and drink it, the next time I open the ’fridge, it’s been replaced by a brand new can. Same goes for the rest of the food. I apparently have stumbled onto a self-replenishing lifetime supply of parsnips and pickled herring and who wouldn’t be thrilled about good fortune like that?
Now, if you think that sounds like a little slice of Heaven, let’s take a look at the rest of the palace. My room is exactly twelve feet by thirteen feet (I know, because I measured it with my own feet) and is a showcase of understated design. The aforementioned refrigerator occupies a place of honor in one corner, diagonally across the room from a lovely paisley sofa bed. That’s the tour folks, my world in a nutshell. Oh, sorry, I forgot. Through door number one, we have the bathroom. One toilet, one sink, one shower, and the seemingly obligatory supply of self-replenishing toothpaste and toilet paper. I think the pièce de résistance, though, would have to be the painting on the living room wall. A true French masterpiece. That is, if the French Masters ever painted dogs playing poker.
Directly opposite the Window lies door number two, and this is where the real weirdness begins.
Follow me into the hall, if you will. My building is constructed in a square shape, probably with a courtyard in the center, although I can’t say for sure. Along the four hallways (for the sake of argument we’ll call them north, south, east and west) are an equal number of rooms. Eight on the outside wall, seven on the inside, and an elevator centered on the inside of each hall.
Let’s take that elevator. The interior is mirrored on three sides, which gives the interesting effect of thousands of images of me ever diminishing into infinity. Sometimes I get a little flash of someone, or something else sharing the space with me. Always out of the corner of my eye, always forty or fifty reflections in. Never anything concrete, always on the edge of reality.
I think the elevator, with its endless levels of reflections is a metaphor for this whole
damn place.
As I mentioned before, the panel looks like this.
I’ve started to conduct a systematic search of every room on every floor, and have x-ed off the floors I think I have finished. That’s 360 rooms so far, and another sixteen on the next “19” floor in the series. This hasn’t been as easy as you might think. I enter the elevator and press the “19” button third from the bottom in the left hand row. The doors close, the elevator seems to drop and the buttons illuminate in descending order. When I get off the elevator the hall looks exactly like the hall I just left. Exiting, I turn left and choose the seventeenth door on my left hand side.Number 1956, naturally.
Now the magic happens.
My key works in every door, and when I enter the room, it’s my room. They’re all my room. I’m now back on the 19th floor (the one I’ve marked with an arrow) and the room is exactly as I left it, shirt on the floor, half-consumed Fresca by the chair...whatever. To return to the floor I just left, I’ll have to go back down the hall, take the elevator to the third left “19” floor, and repeat the whole process. Now you know why only six floors are x-ed off – the bleepin’ elevators in this place are so slow they make John Goodman look like an Olympic sprinter.
So, if every door leads to an exact duplicate of what I’ll call the Master Room does that mean there are 1620 versions of me in this building? If I open the door and throw my shirt out, do 1620 doors open and 1620 shirts sail into the hall?
The answer is no, and here is my theory. There obviously are other rooms, but none so far that I can enter. Although I can see one entire side of the building with 216 separate windows when I look Outside, on the Inside the doorways seem to operate as some kind of portal to the Master Room, always bringing me home as I cross the threshold. It makes for some major league weirdness. If leave my door open, walk across the hall and open the door directly across from mine, I can look through both doors and see two identical rooms with two identical views out two identical Windows.
Therein lies the trap, but it also just might be the means of my salvation.
If you can have one portal, might you also have two?
I have no memory of time prior to waking up here some 20 odd days (emphasis on the word odd) ago. It’s as if my mind is one of those magic slates that kids play with and someone has lifted the writing sheet and erased my life. But, somehow I came to be in the Room, so it stands to reason that somehow I can get out. Starting tomorrow, I’ll begin the process of walking through every door in
the building.
Because maybe one is the way home.
I return to my Room to prepare for the search and flop down on the sofa while cracking open a nice, cold Fresca. I’m pretty sure my mind is beginning to rot away, because God help me, this stuff is starting to taste pretty good. When I look through the Window I see mountains. Outside, snow is falling in thick curtains of icy whiteness, and all traces of civilization have disappeared. This would be a heck of a place for a ski resort, the slopes are glistening powder, and the air is crisp and clean. I lean out and catch a few flakes on my tongue, and nothing has ever tasted so pure and sweet. As my breath paints dancing clouds that swirl off with the wind, I swear I can hear a baby crying.
I won’t bore you with the details of the search. Suffice it to say that I walked through every blessed door of 1,243 rooms, and every time I ended up right back where I started. Figuring it took me six minutes for each trip, and I worked ten hour days, this tour of the joint ate up nearly two weeks of my precious time.
1,243 times I walked into a room and was greeted by the smell of Braunschweiger and parsnips.
Ah, but it’s the 1,244th door makes the story.
The last door I opened was actually on a mid-level floor, ’cause I got bored and started mixing up the order. I’d long since given up any hope that anything would happen, but kept on going just for the satisfaction of completing the task. “Anything worth doing is worth doing right,” my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Apold would say right before whipping an eraser at Mike Wilkemeyer who was sleeping in the back row. And since the alternative was lounging around my room holding conversations with myself, what did I have to lose?
So, imagine my surprise when I opened that last door and gazed into a completely different room. I about passed out from the shock. The walls were pink instead of light green. The floor had a dingy orange carpet instead of checkerboard tiles, and in place of my beloved poker playing, ramblin’ gamblin’ canines hung a still life painting of a bowl of carrots. Whoever decorates these rooms must be dropping some really good acid. The painting could have been of raw fish, I didn’t care, it looked like freedom to me.
I stepped into this new and exciting land of opportunity, heart hammering, head ringing. Nothing happened. It didn’t flicker and fade away, it was as real as the headache you get after eating ice cream too fast. I looked in the refrigerator. Carrot juice, carrot cake, carrot slices and a tin of pickled carrots. Bugs fricking Bunny must live here. I didn’t care, It wasn’t the Master Room, and that meant I was about to walk out of a nightmare and into a life. I didn’t waste any time, I didn’t even bother to peer out the Window to see where I was, I just headed for the door. As Lynyrd Skynyrd would say, “Gimme two steps mister, and you’ll never see me no more!”
But just as I was about to skip out into the hall I hesitated. There was something itching in the back of my brain, something dark and nasty with two inch claws, and I knew that feeling all too well.
I slowly turned around, afraid to look, but knowing I had to. There, off to the side of the room was a dead cat. Oh, he wasn’t my dead cat, but that was kind of beside the point. Black, brown or calico, long haired or totally bald, it was a bad, bad omen.
Trembling, I walked out into the hall, a different hall, the same hall. The number on the door was 915. The numbers on all the doors were 915. The ringing in my head was getting louder. Quasimodo never had ringing like this, and he lived in a bell tower.
I collapsed on the floor and cried myself to sleep.
It’s hard to say how many days have passed since my little emotional outburst. I’ve stopped checking rooms, and have been spending my time by the Window, a rather fruitless undertaking, I must say. The view hasn’t changed much, and I haven’t seen the sun since I don’t know when. On the floor, the skeleton of the cat grins up at me, and occasionally grinds its teeth, don’t ask me how.
My newest digs are in a desert, and to call it desolate would be the understatement of the year. Miles and miles of scrubby little brush that glows a phosphorescent green in the moonlight and casts an eery light on the sand. But gradually I’ve seen the glow diminish, and two days ago (or maybe I should say two sleeping/waking cycles ago) the brush stopped fluorescing entirely. As I look up at the night sky, the stars are turning off, one by one until a darkness so complete it’s like I’m buried in a cave rains down over the land, a blackness so deep I can’t see my hand two inches in front of my face.
And the wind stops blowing.
And the monsters come out.
I can hear them now, crashing and thrashing around in the underbrush and howling in pain, or at least it sure sounds like pain. They screech and whine like a chainsaw cutting through a sheet of tin. And every now and then something flies by the Window. Something big. Something fast. Something covered in scales and reeking of rotting flesh, something that beats the air with leathery wings. Something that doesn’t have a very good sense of direction, because it slams into the side of the building so hard it makes the floor shake. They’ve been at it for four or five hours, and their blood is starting to run down the side of the building and drip on my windowsill where it forms purple puddles that bubble and froth. I decide enough is enough. I take my blankets and retreat to the hallway where I don’t have to see the carnage. I can’t shut out the sound though, it’s as loud in the hall as it is in my room, and covering my ears only seems to make it worse.
Stop it! Stop it! Oh, God make it stop! I can’t stand to just sit here, I’ve got to do something, so I start to run. Maybe if I can pass through every door in the building the world will change again and it will all go away. Maybe I won’t have to listen to the un-ending sound of breaking teeth and crunching bones.
Maybe I’ll just kill myself and be done with it all.
Or will I end up somewhere even worse than this? Is there anyplace even worse than this?
I’ve gotta run. Running eases the pain. Running holds the screams at arm’s length.
Only twenty six more floors to go.
The terrible noise escalates with every floor I complete, until it’s so loud it becomes something beyond sound. My mind stops processing the audio input, and it’s replaced by some kind of screeching background static. I haven’t stopped running for days, and the hallways are starting to distort, undulating like a serpent as I plod onward toward the next door. Always the next door. Just one more door. I’ve reached the last of the floors, and as I cross the threshold to my Master Room for the thousandth time, I’m so tired I can barely stand up but I can’t give in to the fatigue if I fall asleep here, I don’t think I’ll ever make it out I think this will be my permanent resting place, and for the rest of eternity it will just be me and the monsters I wonder how many times you can be eaten alive in hell I’m at the next to the last door, flipping through the portal for the last time, (I hope) Outside the Window a blood red moon fills the sky displacing the darkness and painting the world with a crimson brush, and I’m into the hall and down the stairs (I gave up on the elevator long ago) and now the hall on the “first” floor one foot in front of the other, one step closer to freedom the hall is shaking, the roaring is so loud its formed a halo of pain around my head turning the corner into the last hallway I can see my destination but with every step doors blow open behind me in a blast of splinters and nails don’t look back don’t look back whatever you do don’t look back I’m at the door oh where’s the goddamn key? footsteps thudding closer plaster falls from the ceiling I can smell its breath I can sense its cavernous mouth and dripping fangs needle sharp as I finally find the key and stumble through the door and pain shoots down my leg as it is raked by something incredibly sharp and the last thing I do before I lose consciousness is catch a glimpse of indescribable evil with burning embers of hate sparking and flashing in its eyes and I wedge the door shut and the noise dies as one last howl of frustration echoes into oblivion and everything is black and everything is black and everything...is...
All right. Everything is all right, although I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sleep through an entire night again. They say that time heals all wounds, but I’ve got an ache right behind my eyes that hurts so bad it makes me dizzy, and I think it will be with me until I’m lying in a box six feet under.
The running helps. I can almost forget when I run.
I’m on my twenty fourth building now, and they get better every time I flip through that last doorway in the series. The food is even getting tolerable, although I could live without the boiled cabbage this particular refrigerator keeps stocked.
Outside, daylight has returned, with a bright cerulean blue sky and fluffy cotton ball clouds. I can hear birds singing, and off in the distance a merry-go-’round squeaks along to the rhythm of children’s voices. Real voices, and they’re not the only ones. I can’t make out the words, but I can hear the murmur of conversation coming from the rooms all around me. And even though no one answers my calls, I don’t care. I can’t see ’em, and I can’t talk to ’em, but at least I’m not alone anymore. My building sits in a middle-American city, and has for quite a while now. I’ll take these neat rows of little pink houses over the dust of the desert any day. The trees sigh contentedly in the breeze, and every now and then I actually see a real, live bird fly by.
Almost time. I walk to the Window and wait for it.
Off in the distance I can hear the sound of tires on pavement, of wind rushing over the streamlined body of a car. It’s been like this for a few days now. The engine’s whine is joined by a second, and I brace myself for what comes next. Horns blare, tires squeal. I can almost see the rubber smoking as the treads skid across the asphalt, and then the crash comes. It’s louder and more wrenching than I ever could have imagined, metal tearing, glass exploding, and it goes on and on for what seems like forever. I know it’s over in a few seconds, but it feels like the springs have snapped and the clock has stopped. Then merciful silence returns, broken only by the spinning clatter of a hubcap twirling ever slower until even that sound retreats into the back alleys of my mind.
I rest my head in my hands and let my eyes drift over the streets. All is calm, all is bright. And so it will stay for the next few hours. Until the next crash. They’re getting closer now, both in distance and in frequency. Pretty soon it’s going to happen on my street, right in front of this Window, and there’s not one damn thing I can do about it. I turn away from the Window and start to run. I’ve only got seven more rooms in this building, and then it’s on to the next one in this endless series of walls, doors and floors. And Windows. Always the Windows.
Seven rooms fly by in a matter of minutes, it’s amazing what good shape you can get in if all you do is run. All day. Every day. The stairs blur by, the doors fling open, I cross over and it all starts again. It’s actually kind of comforting in a way, the repetition. I imagine a tiger in a cage probably feels the same way as he paces behind the bars. He likes the motion, he detests the confinement.
And now I’m standing before the last door on the last floor. Same old, same old. Cheap presswood construction, small peephole blinking out like some kind of miniature glass and brass cyclops,
worn carpet.
However, something is different about this door. Something I’ve never encountered before.
There’s a shiny gold plate attached with my name etched on it.
I’m going to have to think a while before I walk through this one.
So, I thought about it. It was a surprisingly hard decision. Things have been pretty good lately, aside from the car crashes, and I’ve been through way too much weirdness to have any faith that this door can lead to anything other than more trials and tribulations. Not that I have any real choice in the matter, things happen around here whether I want them to or not.
So, I take a deep breath, open the door and step through.
Jenna’s looking good tonight, and my spirits are high. After three years, seven months and twenty one days, this building is done. The glass is polished, the floors are waxed and the electricity is on. Tomorrow we cut the ribbon, tonight we celebrate. I’m always amazed by how the final structure rises like a Phoenix from the ashes of the blueprints and the concrete. I marvel at the miles of wiring and tons of steel, and the countless hands that have a part in bringing the building that had previously only existed in my imagination to three dimensional reality. Walking through the door of a finished building is the greatest rush an architect can have.
We take the elevator down to the parking level and I open the car door for Jenna, then cross to the driver’s side. It’s a warm night, so I put the top down. She’s in a good mood as well, we’re both looking forward to the party. The drive over to the restaurant is one of my favorites, a winding
two-laner that twists around a series of small lakes, and as the sun sets the sky lights up like the atmosphere is on fire. The wind rushes through our hair and I wish this night would never end. I glance over at my wife. I want to remember her like this forever. Summer splashed all over her face.
And then, as we round a particularly sharp bend in the road, a cat darts out in front of the car in the opposing lane. It all happens in the slowest of slow motion, and I notice every detail. I can see the cat, an orange tabby sprinting across the highway in full stretch. He’s not going to make it, he waited too long before making his move. I watch in horror as the other driver slams on his brakes, I can see his face, his eyes are wide and white, and I don’t know what the hell possesses him, but he swerves to miss the cat, cranking hard on his steering wheel, and fishtailing his car sharply to the left.
Over the center line, right into our lane.
It all happens in a heartbeat, I never have a chance to react, and then the world explodes in a flash of light and twisting steel, a brilliant burst of stars and finally comforting waves of darkness that wash over me like the tide.
When I wake up, I’m in our home, lying in bed, and Jenna’s sitting at my foot stroking the cat who’s purring contentedly and licking his butt. “Wake up sleepy head,” she says, “just wake up,” and leaning over kisses my forehead. “You’ve had a long, hard night.” “You got that right,” I answer, (she doesn’t know how hard). “You wouldn’t believe the dream I just had.” She just smiles one of her famous smiles and walks over to the window and draws the shades. Brilliant sunlight spills in, brighter than I’ve ever seen before. So bright the whole room is washed out in a white glare. So bright I can’t see her or anything else, I’m floating in a sea of whiteness. So bright...so bright...
“Time to go home, Sweetheart,” she says softly, “I always loved you.”
As the light begins to fade a new room blurrily comes into focus. Not my bedroom. Not the Master Room. I’ve never seen this one before. Normally, I’d say different is good, but that was a whole ’nother life ago. Upon further inspection it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that I’m lying in a hospital bed. The walls are hospital white, and the smell of antiseptic permeates every corner and every fiber in the place. Mix that with the smell of hospital food, and you get an odor that I won’t soon forget. To my left sunshine spills in through the window – that’s window with a small “w” thank you – and an intravenous line snakes up from my left forearm to a bottle hanging from a metal stand. A nurse in pink scrubs gently squeezes my wrist as she takes my pulse. “Welcome back, honey,” she says, “you’ve been out for a long time.”
She’s got that right. After that long, strange trip it’s good to be back in the real world. I savor every sensation. The cotton sheets, the squeaking wheels as an orderly pushes a gurney down the hall, Jerry Springer on the television. OK, there’s a few things I haven’t missed. I drink it all in, lingering on every detail of the room. The beeping heart monitor. The plastic chairs. The fly buzzing crazily through the air like a drunken stunt pilot. Wow, it feels good to be alive. Even the light on the ceiling seems to be a little brighter than normal.
And on the wall near foot of my bed, ensconced in an ornately carved cherrywood frame hangs a beautifully rendered oil painting. A French masterpiece, you might say.
Dogs playing poker.
I wonder if I’m really back.
Design Police
The door blew in with a deafening explosion, sending wood fragments hurtling through the air and breaking the glass of every computer screen in the room. Black uniformed troops streamed in through the opening, protected by Kevlar™ vests and brandishing Corporate Identity Manuals like lethal weapons.
“Design Police!” they shouted, “Everyone put down your X-Acto© knives, place your hands on your mousepads and no one will get hurt.”
“What’s this all about?” demanded the Creative Director.
“Subdue that man.” the Captain commanded, and the troops swung into action. He was instantly bound with double-sided tape, hosed down with Spray-ment and stuck to the wall.
“I’ll ask the questions here.” the officer barked. “We’ve had a tip that this office has been making unwarranted use of creative license, an offense punishable by permanent assignment to the “Account From Hell” if you’re found guilty under guideline number 7742-B3, article 7.b; subsection 12, paragraph 13, line 7 of the Uniform Corporate Blandness Code.”
“I don’t have the foggiest notion what you’re talking about.” the CD replied, struggling to unstick his arm from the wall.
“Oh no? Then how about THIS?“ the captain retorted, snatching up a Matchprint® and waving it around like a pom-pom. “Just what do you call this color?”
“Pink.” the man replied meekly, “Sir.”
“You are aware that pink is a feminine color, and never, ever to be used in corporate communications in any way? It implies weakness and would give our competitors an edge in the marketplace.”
“Well, I read that series of memos, but this is an ad for tampons.”
“He disagreed with me about strategy on a client’s annual report,” an Account Rep said in a whiney voice, walking through the hole where the door used to be. “He wanted to use an unorthodox typeface!”
“It was Bodoni, for crying out loud!”
“I don’t care. I think I know what the client wants a lot better than you. I specifically said use a
serif font!”
“Bodoni is a serif font, you moron.”
“You’re just making it worse for yourself.” the Captain said. “We also have information that you sent fonts to an output bureau (strictly against the law), set copy flush right, reversed type out of a photograph, chose a non-recycled paper and took too long for a lunch five weeks ago. I don’t think I need to go any further.”
“No doubt about it,” the AE said, “all strictly against the rules.”
“This guy is gone,” the policeman said, signalling his troops to peel the unfortunate man off the wall, “I’d suggest the rest of you take notice. From now on, there will be no, I repeat no, use of creativity of any kind in your designs. Spontaneity and freshness are tools of the Design Devil and will not be tolerated in this company. Our clients want good old-fashioned, familiar materials, produced overnight with very little cleverness, and by God, that’s just what we’re going to give them!”
And with that, they backed cautiously out the door, dragging the man behind them.
The creative staff never saw the CD again, until one day a copywriter picked up the morning newspaper and saw the headline, “Local Man Wins Best Of Show In National Design Competition.”
“Poor sucker,” she thought to herself sadly, “he still hasn’t learned!”
“Design Police!” they shouted, “Everyone put down your X-Acto© knives, place your hands on your mousepads and no one will get hurt.”
“What’s this all about?” demanded the Creative Director.
“Subdue that man.” the Captain commanded, and the troops swung into action. He was instantly bound with double-sided tape, hosed down with Spray-ment and stuck to the wall.
“I’ll ask the questions here.” the officer barked. “We’ve had a tip that this office has been making unwarranted use of creative license, an offense punishable by permanent assignment to the “Account From Hell” if you’re found guilty under guideline number 7742-B3, article 7.b; subsection 12, paragraph 13, line 7 of the Uniform Corporate Blandness Code.”
“I don’t have the foggiest notion what you’re talking about.” the CD replied, struggling to unstick his arm from the wall.
“Oh no? Then how about THIS?“ the captain retorted, snatching up a Matchprint® and waving it around like a pom-pom. “Just what do you call this color?”
“Pink.” the man replied meekly, “Sir.”
“You are aware that pink is a feminine color, and never, ever to be used in corporate communications in any way? It implies weakness and would give our competitors an edge in the marketplace.”
“Well, I read that series of memos, but this is an ad for tampons.”
“He disagreed with me about strategy on a client’s annual report,” an Account Rep said in a whiney voice, walking through the hole where the door used to be. “He wanted to use an unorthodox typeface!”
“It was Bodoni, for crying out loud!”
“I don’t care. I think I know what the client wants a lot better than you. I specifically said use a
serif font!”
“Bodoni is a serif font, you moron.”
“You’re just making it worse for yourself.” the Captain said. “We also have information that you sent fonts to an output bureau (strictly against the law), set copy flush right, reversed type out of a photograph, chose a non-recycled paper and took too long for a lunch five weeks ago. I don’t think I need to go any further.”
“No doubt about it,” the AE said, “all strictly against the rules.”
“This guy is gone,” the policeman said, signalling his troops to peel the unfortunate man off the wall, “I’d suggest the rest of you take notice. From now on, there will be no, I repeat no, use of creativity of any kind in your designs. Spontaneity and freshness are tools of the Design Devil and will not be tolerated in this company. Our clients want good old-fashioned, familiar materials, produced overnight with very little cleverness, and by God, that’s just what we’re going to give them!”
And with that, they backed cautiously out the door, dragging the man behind them.
The creative staff never saw the CD again, until one day a copywriter picked up the morning newspaper and saw the headline, “Local Man Wins Best Of Show In National Design Competition.”
“Poor sucker,” she thought to herself sadly, “he still hasn’t learned!”
You Think You've Got It Bad
I’m sitting here with with my two little daughters, and like all grown-ups since the Bronze Age I’m thinking, “These kids have got it made.” No doubt about it, we had it a lot harder when I was a child.
Yep. Life was a challenge growing up way back in the prehistoric sixties. You kids now-a-days don’t realize it, but when I was a lad the world was just emerging from the dark ages. Our family was luckier than some, but even so, we only had dirt to eat. Still, it was better than nothing, and we did come up with some interesting variations to combat the monotony of serving soil for every meal. Oh, sure, there was brown dirt, red dirt, black dirt, and for a special treat, maybe a little clay. You could mix it with water and make mud (lots easier on the teeth), and in the winter of course, we had frozen dirt a-la-mode.
We didn’t have any of your fancy electronic toys to play with either. I remember the thrill of my first toy, (which I finally received on my seventh birthday). It was awesome. It was interactive.
It was a stick.
Not just any stick, mind you. A nice stick. It was about twenty inches long, with a few small
nubs on one end and smooth, brown bark. I was the envy of all my stickless friends, and when
I took it to school for show and tell even the teacher was jealous. I carried it with me wherever
I went, and in a fit of creativity named it “Stick”. Man, I loved that old branch. I often wonder where he is today.
Now, I hope I haven’t given you the impression that life was dull in those days. Far from it. We had our entertainment, stuff that would beat the socks off anything you can do today. I used to love going to the weekly Stare-downs. And then there were the Breathing Festivals, Walking Bees and Blinking Contests. We Pendletons come from a long line of blinkers. Grandpa was Tri-County champ back in ’13, ’14 and ’18, with an unbeatable flutter-shut combination that kept his rivals terrified for most of the decade.
“But wait,” you say, “I’ve heard so much about the music of that era. The Stones. The Byrds.
The Beatles.”
Well, there may be some selective memory at work here. Everything, it seems, looks better in retrospect, and those groups were really just A) a bunch of guys hammering different sized
rocks together, B) a flock of crows that shrieked from dawn ’til dusk in Harvey Tapp’s grove,
and C) a coffee can full of bugs that would buzz in annoyance if you shook them up enough.
Still, somehow we found a way to dance to it.
We had to walk to school. 37 miles. Through waist-deep volcanic ash. Uphill both ways.
Medicine was still in a primitive state. A visit to the doctor usually involved waiving around a chicken, dancing and drum-beats. The nurse used a syringe with a square, rusty needle to give you a shot, and usually had to pound it into your butt with a hammer. The X-ray machine could melt the plastic keychain in your pocket.
The only TV was in another county. It picked up one station, which in those days mostly featured programs about oven cleaning and pet de-lousing. Everyone looked forward to the big holiday tire rotation spectaculars. And movies! Kids today complain because they only have four thousand channels on cable, but in my day, movies were nothing more than three guys and a
light bulb behind a sheet. You may have seen the 1967 Oscar-winning “Dog Barking” on late-night re-runs. Personally, I thought “Ostrich Head” should have won that year, but who can account for Hollywood tastes?
There was no Nintendo. No Internet or e-mail. No cellular phones, VCRs, cassette decks or microwave ovens. No CDs. No color TV, no cable TV. No space shuttle, and no Super Bowl. Computers filled entire rooms and required their own nuclear power source. No pocket calculators, no interstate highways. No twenty-screen cineplexes. Heart transplants were a decade away, and anesthetic was just a large wooden mallet to the head. There were no women Senators or Congress-people. There were still Mailmen and Firemen, not letter-carriers or fire-fighters. Airline “food” was served by stewardesses instead of flight attendants. There was no Diet Coke, no contact lenses, no Taco Bells, Wendys or Arbys. We wore Red Ball Jets rather than Nikes. No one played football on Monday nights. There were no fax machines.
Pretty grim, huh?
Little daughters, you’re lucky to be living in the modern world. You can communicate via satellite with your cousin in New Mexico, and you take it for granted. Your world is full of promise and hope.
But I remember walking out into the yard one cloudless August night in 1969 and gazing up at a spectacular full moon hovering brightly in the sky above our farm. There were men walking around on that moon, and the thought of it nearly blew me away. In the first 13 years of my life we went from Howdy Doody to “One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind”.
Maybe the dark ages weren’t so dark after all.
Yep. Life was a challenge growing up way back in the prehistoric sixties. You kids now-a-days don’t realize it, but when I was a lad the world was just emerging from the dark ages. Our family was luckier than some, but even so, we only had dirt to eat. Still, it was better than nothing, and we did come up with some interesting variations to combat the monotony of serving soil for every meal. Oh, sure, there was brown dirt, red dirt, black dirt, and for a special treat, maybe a little clay. You could mix it with water and make mud (lots easier on the teeth), and in the winter of course, we had frozen dirt a-la-mode.
We didn’t have any of your fancy electronic toys to play with either. I remember the thrill of my first toy, (which I finally received on my seventh birthday). It was awesome. It was interactive.
It was a stick.
Not just any stick, mind you. A nice stick. It was about twenty inches long, with a few small
nubs on one end and smooth, brown bark. I was the envy of all my stickless friends, and when
I took it to school for show and tell even the teacher was jealous. I carried it with me wherever
I went, and in a fit of creativity named it “Stick”. Man, I loved that old branch. I often wonder where he is today.
Now, I hope I haven’t given you the impression that life was dull in those days. Far from it. We had our entertainment, stuff that would beat the socks off anything you can do today. I used to love going to the weekly Stare-downs. And then there were the Breathing Festivals, Walking Bees and Blinking Contests. We Pendletons come from a long line of blinkers. Grandpa was Tri-County champ back in ’13, ’14 and ’18, with an unbeatable flutter-shut combination that kept his rivals terrified for most of the decade.
“But wait,” you say, “I’ve heard so much about the music of that era. The Stones. The Byrds.
The Beatles.”
Well, there may be some selective memory at work here. Everything, it seems, looks better in retrospect, and those groups were really just A) a bunch of guys hammering different sized
rocks together, B) a flock of crows that shrieked from dawn ’til dusk in Harvey Tapp’s grove,
and C) a coffee can full of bugs that would buzz in annoyance if you shook them up enough.
Still, somehow we found a way to dance to it.
We had to walk to school. 37 miles. Through waist-deep volcanic ash. Uphill both ways.
Medicine was still in a primitive state. A visit to the doctor usually involved waiving around a chicken, dancing and drum-beats. The nurse used a syringe with a square, rusty needle to give you a shot, and usually had to pound it into your butt with a hammer. The X-ray machine could melt the plastic keychain in your pocket.
The only TV was in another county. It picked up one station, which in those days mostly featured programs about oven cleaning and pet de-lousing. Everyone looked forward to the big holiday tire rotation spectaculars. And movies! Kids today complain because they only have four thousand channels on cable, but in my day, movies were nothing more than three guys and a
light bulb behind a sheet. You may have seen the 1967 Oscar-winning “Dog Barking” on late-night re-runs. Personally, I thought “Ostrich Head” should have won that year, but who can account for Hollywood tastes?
There was no Nintendo. No Internet or e-mail. No cellular phones, VCRs, cassette decks or microwave ovens. No CDs. No color TV, no cable TV. No space shuttle, and no Super Bowl. Computers filled entire rooms and required their own nuclear power source. No pocket calculators, no interstate highways. No twenty-screen cineplexes. Heart transplants were a decade away, and anesthetic was just a large wooden mallet to the head. There were no women Senators or Congress-people. There were still Mailmen and Firemen, not letter-carriers or fire-fighters. Airline “food” was served by stewardesses instead of flight attendants. There was no Diet Coke, no contact lenses, no Taco Bells, Wendys or Arbys. We wore Red Ball Jets rather than Nikes. No one played football on Monday nights. There were no fax machines.
Pretty grim, huh?
Little daughters, you’re lucky to be living in the modern world. You can communicate via satellite with your cousin in New Mexico, and you take it for granted. Your world is full of promise and hope.
But I remember walking out into the yard one cloudless August night in 1969 and gazing up at a spectacular full moon hovering brightly in the sky above our farm. There were men walking around on that moon, and the thought of it nearly blew me away. In the first 13 years of my life we went from Howdy Doody to “One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind”.
Maybe the dark ages weren’t so dark after all.
The Trip To Nowhere
My wife and I were driving along on the highway the other day when I spotted a historical marker along-side the road. I couldn’t help it, I just had to pull over and see what it had to say.
It’s not that it was any big deal, it was just your run-of-the-mill marker. But, whenever I see those bronze roadside plaques my heart beats faster, my palms begin to sweat and I start salivating like a Pavlovian dog. You see, I was conditioned as a child to hold these informational monuments in high regard. Dispensers of vital trivia, they must be read, because you never know when someone might ask you if you know where Laura Ingalls-Wilder once built a sod outhouse, or where Buffalo Bill’s beloved pet prairie dog is buried, or where General Grant once had a headache or where the geographical center of South Dakota is located.
I can say I’ve been there.
It’s my mother’s fault, I think. She used to research our family vacations and day-trips for months ahead of time, scouring local tourist guidebooks and atlases for any and all must-see points of interest within driving range. I’m sure they looked good on paper, but I have to say, when you’ve seen one warehouse full of clocks, you’ve seen them all. As a child I visited the Amish earmuff-weaving colonies, the quaint chewing gum grottos of Poontzville, Iowa and the famed Cracker caves in West Pfizer. I’ve seen the world’s largest ball of toilet paper and petted the only surviving laughing badger in all of North America.
En-route to these storied attractions, we stopped and read every roadside sign and historical marker we encountered, and though the years have passed and they have all dissolved onto a kind of chronological blur, there is one that stands out in my memories. A marker so significant, so different from all the others that it warranted a trip of it’s own, a pilgrimage miles into the heart of nowhere just to say that we stood on the hallowed ground.
It was in Iowa, of course. You can visit it right there in Tweed county on Highway 233, four miles west of Putzdale.
The place where nothing happened.
It was a watershed moment in my young life, and I can still remember what it said.
“Here, on the banks of the Unnamed River, nothing happened.
No battles were ever fought here, and the nearest railroad passed by seventeen miles to the East. The early explorers generally disdained the area, giving it a wide berth, and the Indians had no name for it. During the land rush years of the 1800’s it was settled by a series of anonymous pioneers, none of whose names are known today, and although there are some records of a town being established in the vicinity, no evidence of it’s location presently exists. If you look in any direction, you will see several miles of flat, non-descript land. This area, known as “The Flats”, contains soil so poor, that even grass won’t grow, and instead, the hills are colonized by a generic form of fungus.”
“Wow,” we thought, “it’s boring, but by God, it’s unique.”
My mother read on...
“Although many people would be tempted to call this area unique, it actually isn’t - similar landforms may be found on every continent, and in fact the entire nation of Lower Twerdzania is built on land exactly like this.”
We stood there on the scenic overlook (actually a small hillock about the size of a pitcher’s
mound), drinking in the splendid blandness of it all for nearly an hour. My mother took 4300 photographs that all looked exactly the same, and then we adjourned to the requisite souvenir shop. It was a hard choice. As every child knows, the main purpose of a vacation is to buy every worthless plastic dolphin, dog whistle and postcard that you can lay your hands on. These are then carted around in your pocket for the entire trip, and promptly discarded as soon as you cross the threshold of your home. I was torn between the “Box-O-Dirt” and the always reliable “My parents went absolutely nowhere, and all they got me was this lousy T-shirt” shirt. I finally chose one of those holographic keychains with a 3-D picture of the Flats that changed perspective when you looked at it from a different angle. Of course, it didn’t change much, mud is pretty much mud no matter what your viewpoint might be, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t have any keys to put on it anyway.
On the way home, my brother and I played auto bingo, fought with each other, tried to spot license plates from foreign states, fought with each other, sang every campfire song we could think of, fought with each other, and tried not to throw up too many times. In other words a typical family vacation.
Hey, you’ll have to stop over some time and see the slides!
It’s not that it was any big deal, it was just your run-of-the-mill marker. But, whenever I see those bronze roadside plaques my heart beats faster, my palms begin to sweat and I start salivating like a Pavlovian dog. You see, I was conditioned as a child to hold these informational monuments in high regard. Dispensers of vital trivia, they must be read, because you never know when someone might ask you if you know where Laura Ingalls-Wilder once built a sod outhouse, or where Buffalo Bill’s beloved pet prairie dog is buried, or where General Grant once had a headache or where the geographical center of South Dakota is located.
I can say I’ve been there.
It’s my mother’s fault, I think. She used to research our family vacations and day-trips for months ahead of time, scouring local tourist guidebooks and atlases for any and all must-see points of interest within driving range. I’m sure they looked good on paper, but I have to say, when you’ve seen one warehouse full of clocks, you’ve seen them all. As a child I visited the Amish earmuff-weaving colonies, the quaint chewing gum grottos of Poontzville, Iowa and the famed Cracker caves in West Pfizer. I’ve seen the world’s largest ball of toilet paper and petted the only surviving laughing badger in all of North America.
En-route to these storied attractions, we stopped and read every roadside sign and historical marker we encountered, and though the years have passed and they have all dissolved onto a kind of chronological blur, there is one that stands out in my memories. A marker so significant, so different from all the others that it warranted a trip of it’s own, a pilgrimage miles into the heart of nowhere just to say that we stood on the hallowed ground.
It was in Iowa, of course. You can visit it right there in Tweed county on Highway 233, four miles west of Putzdale.
The place where nothing happened.
It was a watershed moment in my young life, and I can still remember what it said.
“Here, on the banks of the Unnamed River, nothing happened.
No battles were ever fought here, and the nearest railroad passed by seventeen miles to the East. The early explorers generally disdained the area, giving it a wide berth, and the Indians had no name for it. During the land rush years of the 1800’s it was settled by a series of anonymous pioneers, none of whose names are known today, and although there are some records of a town being established in the vicinity, no evidence of it’s location presently exists. If you look in any direction, you will see several miles of flat, non-descript land. This area, known as “The Flats”, contains soil so poor, that even grass won’t grow, and instead, the hills are colonized by a generic form of fungus.”
“Wow,” we thought, “it’s boring, but by God, it’s unique.”
My mother read on...
“Although many people would be tempted to call this area unique, it actually isn’t - similar landforms may be found on every continent, and in fact the entire nation of Lower Twerdzania is built on land exactly like this.”
We stood there on the scenic overlook (actually a small hillock about the size of a pitcher’s
mound), drinking in the splendid blandness of it all for nearly an hour. My mother took 4300 photographs that all looked exactly the same, and then we adjourned to the requisite souvenir shop. It was a hard choice. As every child knows, the main purpose of a vacation is to buy every worthless plastic dolphin, dog whistle and postcard that you can lay your hands on. These are then carted around in your pocket for the entire trip, and promptly discarded as soon as you cross the threshold of your home. I was torn between the “Box-O-Dirt” and the always reliable “My parents went absolutely nowhere, and all they got me was this lousy T-shirt” shirt. I finally chose one of those holographic keychains with a 3-D picture of the Flats that changed perspective when you looked at it from a different angle. Of course, it didn’t change much, mud is pretty much mud no matter what your viewpoint might be, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t have any keys to put on it anyway.
On the way home, my brother and I played auto bingo, fought with each other, tried to spot license plates from foreign states, fought with each other, sang every campfire song we could think of, fought with each other, and tried not to throw up too many times. In other words a typical family vacation.
Hey, you’ll have to stop over some time and see the slides!
Just Wait 'Til tomorrow
OK. So I got married. In October.
A few years ago.
It was a beautiful ceremony, held on top of a four hundred foot high bluff overlooking the confluence of the Mississippi and Whitewater rivers. You can see for about five miles up one river and nine or ten down the other, and there are usually some real, honest-to-goodness bald eagles drifting around on the air currents overhead. It’s been my favorite place on Earth (like I might have another one on some other planet) ever since I stumbled upon it one afternoon while riding motorcycles with my brother, Dale.
Anyway, the wedding went off without a hitch (pun intended), unless you count the fact that it was about 45 degrees with gale force winds (it was 85° two days before) or the small matter of me losing our marriage license during the Groom’s Dinner (I never did find it), or how our photographer’s car stalled after the ceremony leaving her stranded in the middle of nowhere. And, I never really got the chance to thank my friends for burying my car with left over salad bar vegetables, mummifying it in Saran Wrap and pouring flour down the defroster vents. But those were minor details, and easily overcome (although we’re still trying to thaw out the Bride’s sister, and I continue to initiate a choking flour-blizzard whenever I try to defrost the windshield). But, that’s the kind of stuff that will turn into a really incredible story fifty years from now when we’re sitting in our rocket-powered, anti-gravitational wheelchairs on the nursing home heli-pad.
In case you’re interested, we honeymooned in Cancun & Cozumel (which, true to our wedding’s natural disaster theme were wiped out by the direct hit of a hurricane five days before). They pretty much had it patched up by the time we got there, and on the plus side, we were the only tourists in the entire Yucatan peninsula, so getting a table in the restaurants was a snap (although thirty-four tip-starved waiters desperately circling your table like vultures does get annoying after a while). We snorkeled, dutifully learned the key Spanish phrases (Señor! ¿Donde esta el Banyo?: Mister -Quick! You gotta tell me! Where is the bathroom?!) and endured a six hour local bus ride back to town from the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, during which I was surrounded and nearly taken prisoner by a marauding band of six year-old children, equipped with some kind of peso-sensing technology and hell-bent on relieving me of all currency.
So, all-in-all it was a lovely vacation, but like I said, that was last year and I still haven’t written
my thank you notes and people are beginning to call the coroner to see if I’m still alive.
I am. It’s just that I was bound by IBSP (International Brotherhood of Scofflaws and Procrastinators) bylaws to wait until now to start putting pen to paper. I did have a good reason to postpone the inevitable at first. We lost the list (no, really, we did, I swear it) of who gave us what, but having an actual reason to delay writing runs counter to what professional level procrastination is all about, and I wanted to stay pure. And, to tell you the truth, I was kind of consumed with training for the Olympics.
Oh, sure. Although it doesn’t get as much press as the more glamorous sports like gymnastics or boxing, there is an Olympic procrastination team. Or at least there was supposed to be. Apparently, the people who were in charge of submitting the documentation for thirty-seven countries all missed the filing deadline. Go figure.
But, that’s OK. As we’re fond of saying, “There’s always next time.” Besides, I’m still waiting for my 1992 uniform to show up, and you can’t compete naked, even though that’s the way the ancient Greek procrastinators used to do it.
I guess this is all pretty hard to understand if you’re not living the life. The hard work, the sacrifice. The constant fear of accidentally doing something when you’re supposed to do it. One year, I almost renewed my car’s license tabs on time and the stress nearly got me. I had to put off a dozen dentist’s appointments just to get back to normal.
I hope you’ll forgive me. I meant to get those thank you’s out, I really did. It’s just that stuff came up, and you know how it goes. But, they’re all written now, and wasn’t it Ben Franklin who said, “Better late than never?” Or how about that great Carly Simon song about how waiting makes everything so much better. Anticipation I think it was. Wasn’t that a great message?
So, thanks for waiting, and thanks to my lovely wife, Agnes, who would gently remind me,
“Joe, If you don’t get your thank you’s out sometime this century or I’m going tie your ears behind your back!!!”
Ha, ha. What a great kid. I’ve really got to tell her just how much I love her, and how she’s made my life better in a thousand different ways. And how much she means to me. Because you never know if you’re going to be here to see the next sunrise. Carpe Diem. Seize the day!
You bet! Me and Nike, we’re just gonna do it!
Well... maybe tomorrow.
A few years ago.
It was a beautiful ceremony, held on top of a four hundred foot high bluff overlooking the confluence of the Mississippi and Whitewater rivers. You can see for about five miles up one river and nine or ten down the other, and there are usually some real, honest-to-goodness bald eagles drifting around on the air currents overhead. It’s been my favorite place on Earth (like I might have another one on some other planet) ever since I stumbled upon it one afternoon while riding motorcycles with my brother, Dale.
Anyway, the wedding went off without a hitch (pun intended), unless you count the fact that it was about 45 degrees with gale force winds (it was 85° two days before) or the small matter of me losing our marriage license during the Groom’s Dinner (I never did find it), or how our photographer’s car stalled after the ceremony leaving her stranded in the middle of nowhere. And, I never really got the chance to thank my friends for burying my car with left over salad bar vegetables, mummifying it in Saran Wrap and pouring flour down the defroster vents. But those were minor details, and easily overcome (although we’re still trying to thaw out the Bride’s sister, and I continue to initiate a choking flour-blizzard whenever I try to defrost the windshield). But, that’s the kind of stuff that will turn into a really incredible story fifty years from now when we’re sitting in our rocket-powered, anti-gravitational wheelchairs on the nursing home heli-pad.
In case you’re interested, we honeymooned in Cancun & Cozumel (which, true to our wedding’s natural disaster theme were wiped out by the direct hit of a hurricane five days before). They pretty much had it patched up by the time we got there, and on the plus side, we were the only tourists in the entire Yucatan peninsula, so getting a table in the restaurants was a snap (although thirty-four tip-starved waiters desperately circling your table like vultures does get annoying after a while). We snorkeled, dutifully learned the key Spanish phrases (Señor! ¿Donde esta el Banyo?: Mister -Quick! You gotta tell me! Where is the bathroom?!) and endured a six hour local bus ride back to town from the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, during which I was surrounded and nearly taken prisoner by a marauding band of six year-old children, equipped with some kind of peso-sensing technology and hell-bent on relieving me of all currency.
So, all-in-all it was a lovely vacation, but like I said, that was last year and I still haven’t written
my thank you notes and people are beginning to call the coroner to see if I’m still alive.
I am. It’s just that I was bound by IBSP (International Brotherhood of Scofflaws and Procrastinators) bylaws to wait until now to start putting pen to paper. I did have a good reason to postpone the inevitable at first. We lost the list (no, really, we did, I swear it) of who gave us what, but having an actual reason to delay writing runs counter to what professional level procrastination is all about, and I wanted to stay pure. And, to tell you the truth, I was kind of consumed with training for the Olympics.
Oh, sure. Although it doesn’t get as much press as the more glamorous sports like gymnastics or boxing, there is an Olympic procrastination team. Or at least there was supposed to be. Apparently, the people who were in charge of submitting the documentation for thirty-seven countries all missed the filing deadline. Go figure.
But, that’s OK. As we’re fond of saying, “There’s always next time.” Besides, I’m still waiting for my 1992 uniform to show up, and you can’t compete naked, even though that’s the way the ancient Greek procrastinators used to do it.
I guess this is all pretty hard to understand if you’re not living the life. The hard work, the sacrifice. The constant fear of accidentally doing something when you’re supposed to do it. One year, I almost renewed my car’s license tabs on time and the stress nearly got me. I had to put off a dozen dentist’s appointments just to get back to normal.
I hope you’ll forgive me. I meant to get those thank you’s out, I really did. It’s just that stuff came up, and you know how it goes. But, they’re all written now, and wasn’t it Ben Franklin who said, “Better late than never?” Or how about that great Carly Simon song about how waiting makes everything so much better. Anticipation I think it was. Wasn’t that a great message?
So, thanks for waiting, and thanks to my lovely wife, Agnes, who would gently remind me,
“Joe, If you don’t get your thank you’s out sometime this century or I’m going tie your ears behind your back!!!”
Ha, ha. What a great kid. I’ve really got to tell her just how much I love her, and how she’s made my life better in a thousand different ways. And how much she means to me. Because you never know if you’re going to be here to see the next sunrise. Carpe Diem. Seize the day!
You bet! Me and Nike, we’re just gonna do it!
Well... maybe tomorrow.
The Cow's Game
I once saw a Far Side cartoon showing a bunch of cows standing on their hind legs in a field, talking amongst themselves. When their lookout spotted a car, they dropped down on all fours until it had passed, and then resumed their bipedal stance. I thought, “Now here’s a guy who knows his cows.”
Having grown up on a dairy farm, I feel relatively confident in stating that people generally don’t give cows enough credit for being the cunning, conniving creatures that they really are. Whether it be plotting to circumvent the electric fence or devising a scheme to be at the far end of the pasture every night at milking time, I can say with confidence that cows are the most nefarious of creatures.
Ours were Guernsey’s, (the brown and white spotted kind) and I’m here to tell you about a little game that they used to play. It might have been that they were bored with their bovine existence, or possibly they were just plain cantankerous. But as far as I could tell, the object of this Cow’s Game was to be as big a pain in the ass to the farmer as possible.
Here’s how it went.
Points were scored on an aggravation index of one to five, and at the end of the evening milking, the Bossy with the highest total was accorded a place of honor at the evening feed bunk (no small thing - these cows went for the ground corn like piranhas, and woe be it to anyone who got in their way). I probably never would have figured it out, but I found their score sheet hidden behind the silo one day.
It went like this...
Official Scoring Tabulation Index: The Cow’s Game
Offense Points Scored
Don’t take a crap all day. Eat as much as you possibly can, and hold it in until
you are pressurized tighter than the Goodyear blimp. Let fly as soon as you get
inside the barn. 1 point bonus if you get it on the walls as well as the floor.
4 point bonus for leaving a big pile on the floor on your way out as well........................ 3
For God’s sake, don’t stick your head in the stanchion on the first try (stanchions are
a sort of yoke that closes on the cow’s neck to hold them in position while being
milked). Go to the left. Go to the right. Go for your neighbor’s spot. Points per miss........ 1
Sneeze and blow snot all over the farmer’s leg as he walks by............................................... 4
Wait until the farmer steps between you and your neighbor to attach the milking
machine, then squish him flat between the two of you. Two point bonus if he
actually turns blue and passes out..................................................................................... 2
Fart lustily as he walks behind you (2 point bonus for blowing him into the wall.
10 point bonus if you have diarrhea and can coat him with poop from head to toe........ 1
Stomp on farmer’s foot, and refuse to move no matter how much he screams
(note: the hilarity of this stunt can be greatly enhanced by putting all 1200
pounds of your weight on the hoof on his foot...................................................................... 1
Nudge the feed shovel with your nose as the farmer walks by, causing corn to
spill all over the floor........................................................................................................... 1
Hold the water valve open on your drinking trough until it overflows, causing a flood
Noah would be proud of...................................................................................................... 2
Squat down and dip your tail in the gutter. Absorb at least three pounds of liquid
manure. When farmer approaches, swat him in the face with it (2 point bonus if
his mouth is open at the time)........................................................................................... 5
Conspire with chickens and ducks to steal socks out of the dryer and hide in a remote
corner of the barnyard (editor’s note: although I have no direct proof this was actually
going on, it explains a lot doesn’t it?).................................................................................... 1
Although most points for this game are scored in the barn, this being the area of maximum human
contact, you may also collect points for...
Finding a minute hole in the fence, enlarging it, and leading the entire herd on a
five-county cross-country marathon..................................................................................... 3
Standing under the bedroom window and mooing obnoxiously at 5:00 a.m.......................... 1
The all-time Cow’s Game champion was one Abnazzer Grizelda Mumphidine, who scored a record 84.5 points on April 6, 1972. Her portrait now hangs in the Bovine Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa.
Unfortunately, she pissed the farmer off so much, he hauled her into town the next day and sold her to the packing house for hamburger.
Having grown up on a dairy farm, I feel relatively confident in stating that people generally don’t give cows enough credit for being the cunning, conniving creatures that they really are. Whether it be plotting to circumvent the electric fence or devising a scheme to be at the far end of the pasture every night at milking time, I can say with confidence that cows are the most nefarious of creatures.
Ours were Guernsey’s, (the brown and white spotted kind) and I’m here to tell you about a little game that they used to play. It might have been that they were bored with their bovine existence, or possibly they were just plain cantankerous. But as far as I could tell, the object of this Cow’s Game was to be as big a pain in the ass to the farmer as possible.
Here’s how it went.
Points were scored on an aggravation index of one to five, and at the end of the evening milking, the Bossy with the highest total was accorded a place of honor at the evening feed bunk (no small thing - these cows went for the ground corn like piranhas, and woe be it to anyone who got in their way). I probably never would have figured it out, but I found their score sheet hidden behind the silo one day.
It went like this...
Official Scoring Tabulation Index: The Cow’s Game
Offense Points Scored
Don’t take a crap all day. Eat as much as you possibly can, and hold it in until
you are pressurized tighter than the Goodyear blimp. Let fly as soon as you get
inside the barn. 1 point bonus if you get it on the walls as well as the floor.
4 point bonus for leaving a big pile on the floor on your way out as well........................ 3
For God’s sake, don’t stick your head in the stanchion on the first try (stanchions are
a sort of yoke that closes on the cow’s neck to hold them in position while being
milked). Go to the left. Go to the right. Go for your neighbor’s spot. Points per miss........ 1
Sneeze and blow snot all over the farmer’s leg as he walks by............................................... 4
Wait until the farmer steps between you and your neighbor to attach the milking
machine, then squish him flat between the two of you. Two point bonus if he
actually turns blue and passes out..................................................................................... 2
Fart lustily as he walks behind you (2 point bonus for blowing him into the wall.
10 point bonus if you have diarrhea and can coat him with poop from head to toe........ 1
Stomp on farmer’s foot, and refuse to move no matter how much he screams
(note: the hilarity of this stunt can be greatly enhanced by putting all 1200
pounds of your weight on the hoof on his foot...................................................................... 1
Nudge the feed shovel with your nose as the farmer walks by, causing corn to
spill all over the floor........................................................................................................... 1
Hold the water valve open on your drinking trough until it overflows, causing a flood
Noah would be proud of...................................................................................................... 2
Squat down and dip your tail in the gutter. Absorb at least three pounds of liquid
manure. When farmer approaches, swat him in the face with it (2 point bonus if
his mouth is open at the time)........................................................................................... 5
Conspire with chickens and ducks to steal socks out of the dryer and hide in a remote
corner of the barnyard (editor’s note: although I have no direct proof this was actually
going on, it explains a lot doesn’t it?).................................................................................... 1
Although most points for this game are scored in the barn, this being the area of maximum human
contact, you may also collect points for...
Finding a minute hole in the fence, enlarging it, and leading the entire herd on a
five-county cross-country marathon..................................................................................... 3
Standing under the bedroom window and mooing obnoxiously at 5:00 a.m.......................... 1
The all-time Cow’s Game champion was one Abnazzer Grizelda Mumphidine, who scored a record 84.5 points on April 6, 1972. Her portrait now hangs in the Bovine Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa.
Unfortunately, she pissed the farmer off so much, he hauled her into town the next day and sold her to the packing house for hamburger.
You Can't Serve That!
I heard about the opening from one of my friends. Nickerson’s needed a cook. Nickerson Farms, that is. Our local establishment was one of a chain of restaurants scattered across the fruited plain, a procession of red roofed barns squatting on Interstate exits throughout middle America that sucked the tourists in
like flies.
It was the middle seventies, and the big gas price shock was still a few years away. Motorhomes prowled the highways like a shore to shining shore procession of whales on wheels, and why not? Gas was cheap, (less than 50¢ a gallon) and three miles per gallon was deemed an acceptable level of ecstasy. Somewhere, somebody decided to cash in on this seemingly endless supply of rolling credit and hence, the concept. Nickerson’s was something for everyone. A combination gas station, restaurant and kitschy gift shop all rolled into one! Get your gas, food and bumper stickers, folks! I could never figure out why anyone would want a souvenir from my hometown (pop. 303, a town so off the beaten track that the biggest thing to happen in twenty years was when they built a new twin pond sewage treatment plant) but I guess no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of people who have been cooped up in a car with seven small children, a dog and an AM radio for ten hours and 500 miles of Interstate hell.
So, they hired me and I joined a cast of characters that among others, included:
Gladys. A hyperkinetic, 50 year old blur of a waitress who made The Amazing Flash look like a Galapagos tortoise. She whirled around the dining room at two mph less than the speed of light, and would do anything for a tip. The only way to understand her when she talked was to record her speech and play it back at half-speed, but I loved her, because she never made a mistake on her orders. And I hated her because she would substitute menu items at the drop of a hat. “Oh, you want a turkey dinner with chicken instead of turkey, fries instead of mashed potatoes, Dom Perignon instead of milk and a tickets to Jesus Christ Superstar instead of dessert? No problem.” Of course, she was a hit with the customers, and had to use a wheelbarrow to haul away her tips at the end of the day. Gladys would blow into the break room in a cloud of dust, grab a cigarette, suck off a few quick puffs and then blow back out leaving the smoldering butts to set off every fire alarm in the building. We used to soak toothpicks in pickle juice for a couple of days and then insert them into her waiting cigs. This caused a choking fog of eye-watering pickle-smoke to envelop the county whenever she lit up, but she wouldn’t put it out until the last shred of tobacco had burned down to the filter. “Oh!” she’d exclaim, wrinkling up her nose in disgust, “This cigarette tastes like shit!” But it still got smoked.
"Gracie" Poor Gracie. She never did get it straight. Waitressing was just way too complicated an ordeal for her to master. At last count I figured 372 of my gray hairs are directly attributable to her. The menus could have been written in Szechuan Chinese for all she knew. Joanne’s special talents invariably surfaced during a mad dinner rush, or when a busload of 154 Armenian whale trainers was clogging the system. Then she would blithely enter an order calling for toast; over easy. What? Or my personal favorite - fish legs. “Fish legs, Gracie?” “Oh, I guess I meant a chicken leg.” “O.K. Do you want the whole leg or just the foot part?” “Don’t get smart with me. Anyone can make a mistake.”
True. But she raised confusion to an art form.
Johnny G Our resident 90 pound weakling, and itinerant dish washer. John’s ability to be obnoxious in any situation and reputation for continual whining was the inspiration for the infamous “one hour rule”, i.e., all cooks must hit the dishwasher once every hour. If you happened to be feeling lenient and inclined to forego the ritual, you could count on the kid to do something stupid like putting grasshoppers in the deep fat fryer, or spiders on the grill or blowing his nose on his apron, and that would earn him a pummeling. So, it was, “C’mere John, your hour’s up!” “Aw, c’mon you guys - I been good.” “Get over here, John, you know the rules.” Smack. Tormenting John was a favorite pastime around the place, and if you were good enough at it, you could start him swearing. The boy had a definite talent. He could cuss for twenty minutes straight and never use the same word twice, an ability that earned him grudging respect from all of us (except for Norma, our ultra religious back-up cook who was sure there was a special room in Hades reserved for certain young men who couldn’t control their mouths). This, of course, was all the more reason to get him going, so taking a page from The Devil’s Guide To A Dishwashers’ Hell, we’d artfully stack the bus tubs three feet high with dishes encrusted with baked on bar-b-que sauce (nuke ’em five minutes in the microwave at maximum warp, and you’d need a sandblaster to get the stuff off). Within minutes enough invectives would be flying around the sink to make a sailor blush, and Norma would be grabbing for her heart medicine. This tactic worked fine for about two months, until John decided to simply throw the offending dishes away rather than trying to get them clean. We were soon suffering an acute plate shortage, and Johnny G earned another thumping.
Boog A fellow fry cook, Boog was one of the skinniest kids you’d ever hope to see. We used to tease him because he had no ass. Seriously. His legs appeared to be joined directly to his back, with no discernable cheeks intervening. But, he turned what could’ve been a handicap into an advantage saying it came in kind of handy. Not having an ass meant he never got beat up, because nobody could whip his ass. He didn’t get tired since his ass was never dragging, he never made an ass out of himself and no one could ever tell him, “Get your ass out of here!” He had a whole list of attributes that made asslessness seem positively desirable. Boog was the prototypical reason that people in the know shy away from eating out in restaurants staffed by high schoolers. Drop a burger into the no-man’s land between the steam table and the garbage can? Fish it out, dust it off (if you’ve got time) and send it out, the minerals will do ’em good. He lived by the Fry Cook’s Golden Creed: “There’s no such thing as spoiled food”, and could usually be found lurking under a counter with a fire extinguisher waiting for an unsuspecting waitress to walk by. Luckily, we never had a fire. What we did have, was a whole bunch of empty extinguishers and a squad of waitresses with frozen butts. 20 years ago this was called “fun.” Now it’s probably sexual harassment, but give us a break. Remember, this was during a time when leisure suits were considered high fashion and CB radios were the rage. Whenever I look at pictures from that era I’m convinced we were all in the grips of some kind of national dementia.
Troobs Another member of the assless set, this guy was so skinny that if he stood sideways he disappeared, a distinct advantage when it came to sneaking up on our back-up cook Ethel and tying her apron strings to the bread rack. He was the chief linguist of the place, and was responsible for inventing a whole new language which enabled us to communicate within earshot of customers without them knowing what we were saying. “Don - we got a 2-4 niner with a 26B” would translate to: cute girl at the counter (but she has a big boyfriend), just as “Looks like a hard winter coming on” would mean: Better pull Johhny G out of the trash can, the manager’s coming! Troobs was decidedly the most wholesome member of our clan, but maintained a low-level devious streak which allowed him to stretch Saran Wrap over the women’s toilet (totally invisible to the naked eye, and guaranteed to cause a minor pee-flood) without causing every waitress in the building to reach for the knife drawer.
Zoad Also a cook, Zoad was a good natured, easy-going fellow. The thing I remember most about him was his car, a 1965 Ford Falcon that he called “the Quiet Coon” because he’d just installed a new muffler. Trips in the Coon were always an adventure due to the looseness of the steering linkage, which allowed a 162 degree swing without noticeably affecting your direction of travel. Riding with Zoad was known as “Coon Pinball” because you basically bounced from ditch to ditch. As an added bonus, the brakes would engage sporadically at best, so you never really knew if you were going to squeak to a halt or continue rolling right off the edge of the world. When he bought a Mustang, Boog acquired the Coon so as to maintain the tradition of placing our lives in jeopardy on even the shortest of trips. The new car was much better, having only 159 degrees of play in the steering. After a while this zig-zagging mode of travel became second nature to us, and we’d all get a little disoriented if we had to ride in a vehicle that could actually maintain a straight line down the road.
Now, every restaurant has its regular customers, and we were no exception. There was an old guy named Cliff who showed up every morning to help make the coffee. We had another pair named Chet and Bud who always came in on Friday and split a chicken dinner (woe be it to the foolish cook who gave Bud a smaller plate than Chet!)
And then we had Fat Irene.
This was no casual nickname, mind you. This was a woman who was on a mission to single-handedly consume more food than the nation of India. We knew when she was coming because the dishes would start to rattle off the shelves from the tremors induced by her gait, and also because the dining room would be swept by a reverential hush as she walked in. The rest of the customers could sense that this lady was there to eat. Whenever she showed up, you just automatically knew to call the chicken farm and order up an extra semi-load of birds for the night, because our walk-in freezer only had 213 cubic feet of space, and you just couldn’t fit enough Rhode Island Reds in there to last through a Hurricane Irene feeding frenzy.
Thursday, 8:26 p.m. All-you-can-eat chicken night. It was starting to look like an easy evening. Thirty-four minutes to closing and still no sign of Fat Irene. But then...
...thummmmmmp.......thummmmmmp.......thummmmmmp.
If you’ve ever seen Jurassic Park you know what I’m talking about. Remember how the dinosaur’s
footstep vibrations made the rings appear in the glass of water? Same thing. Little children were diving under the tables. Grown-ups were breaking for cover like there was going to be a shootout in an old-west saloon. The chandeliers were swaying.
And then she appeared.
We had double doors at the front entrance, and squeezing her through was still touch-and-go, but
we’d all been through this before. The gas pump attendant had rigged up a kind of half snow plow - half battering ram contraption on the front of his pickup, and with a little run across the parking lot to build up speed, was able to wedge her through with a minimum of effort.
Troobs looks over to me and says, “You know, I believe she’s lost weight.”
About this time, I glanced out the screen door in the break room and saw a chicken walk by. “What the heck is going on here?” I wondered. “Zoad, you get her started on the salad, bread, potatoes and beans while I check this out.”
I walked out the back door, and waded into a literal sea of chickens. The semi was parked in the back lot, and birds were everywhere. On the roof. In the ditches. Under the cars. And more were arriving all the time. In a scene reminiscent of The Great Escape they were popping out of a hole in the top of
the truck, rappelling down the side and breaking for cover while clutching forged passports under
their wings.
They’d even set a brush fire as a diversion.
I went back and checked the cooler. Only seventeen pieces of chicken left. This was going to be trouble.
Well, first things first. I called the local small town fire department to put out the blaze which was starting to threaten the cars in our parking lot. I have to say, they responded quickly, if not efficiently. Within minutes the first engine arrived, firemen twisting a cat’s tail because the siren didn’t work. The guys dismounted, and made a great show of surveying the situation, unrolling hoses, and generally preparing to tackle this challenging conflagration, which by then was burning with abandon. The hose was stretched, the men advanced and the signal was given. But, in a scene the Keystone Kops would have been proud of, a small “fweep” of escaping air was all that came out of the nozzle. It seems that no one had remembered to refill the water tank after fighting the last great blaze (Ole Johnson’s dog house).
Under ordinary circumstances this situation would have been a matter of some concern to me, but that night I had more pressing matters on my mind. Fat Irene had consumed all but four pieces of the chicken at hand and was starting to get a little cranky. This was more than a little bit disturbing to the wait-staff, who knew from past experience that a hungry, unsatiated Irene was more dangerous and unpredictable than a badger in a bowling bag. Small animals and underweight children had been known to be sucked into the vortex that surrounded her plate if food was low and they got too close.
The waterless firemen now came in and appropriated the restaurant’s fire extinguishers, but as you may have guessed, this also was a somewhat less than successful effort, since none of them had any charge left. Boog had long ago relieved them of pressure, frosting panties.
Outside, sparks were flying from the grass fire, and inside, sparks were flying from Fat Irene’s silverware when the answer to our problems hit me. “Of course!” I thought, “It’s been right in front of my nose all along!” Acting quickly, (the last drumstick had just disappeared whole into her mouth) I collected the kitchen staff and we started a chicken drive. Banging pots and waving aprons we rounded up about thirty of the critters and herded them toward the ditch. Dust flew and much squawking ensued, but luck was with us, and the disoriented fowl ran directly into the path of the oncoming brush fire where they were bar-b-qued on the spot. The heat burned their feathers completely off, and left behind a golden brown carcass, fried just right. You could smell that roasted chicken all the way into the next county!
We picked ’em up, threw ’em on a platter and shipped ’em out.
So, that was the end of it. The fire eventually burned out of its own accord, and Fat Irene declared the night’s repast to be the “best damn chicken dinner” she’d ever eaten.
Nickerson’s closed years ago, a victim of the Arab oil embargo, but I still think of that day whenever I stop in to visit the Colonel for a bucket of extra-crispy.
like flies.
It was the middle seventies, and the big gas price shock was still a few years away. Motorhomes prowled the highways like a shore to shining shore procession of whales on wheels, and why not? Gas was cheap, (less than 50¢ a gallon) and three miles per gallon was deemed an acceptable level of ecstasy. Somewhere, somebody decided to cash in on this seemingly endless supply of rolling credit and hence, the concept. Nickerson’s was something for everyone. A combination gas station, restaurant and kitschy gift shop all rolled into one! Get your gas, food and bumper stickers, folks! I could never figure out why anyone would want a souvenir from my hometown (pop. 303, a town so off the beaten track that the biggest thing to happen in twenty years was when they built a new twin pond sewage treatment plant) but I guess no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of people who have been cooped up in a car with seven small children, a dog and an AM radio for ten hours and 500 miles of Interstate hell.
So, they hired me and I joined a cast of characters that among others, included:
Gladys. A hyperkinetic, 50 year old blur of a waitress who made The Amazing Flash look like a Galapagos tortoise. She whirled around the dining room at two mph less than the speed of light, and would do anything for a tip. The only way to understand her when she talked was to record her speech and play it back at half-speed, but I loved her, because she never made a mistake on her orders. And I hated her because she would substitute menu items at the drop of a hat. “Oh, you want a turkey dinner with chicken instead of turkey, fries instead of mashed potatoes, Dom Perignon instead of milk and a tickets to Jesus Christ Superstar instead of dessert? No problem.” Of course, she was a hit with the customers, and had to use a wheelbarrow to haul away her tips at the end of the day. Gladys would blow into the break room in a cloud of dust, grab a cigarette, suck off a few quick puffs and then blow back out leaving the smoldering butts to set off every fire alarm in the building. We used to soak toothpicks in pickle juice for a couple of days and then insert them into her waiting cigs. This caused a choking fog of eye-watering pickle-smoke to envelop the county whenever she lit up, but she wouldn’t put it out until the last shred of tobacco had burned down to the filter. “Oh!” she’d exclaim, wrinkling up her nose in disgust, “This cigarette tastes like shit!” But it still got smoked.
"Gracie" Poor Gracie. She never did get it straight. Waitressing was just way too complicated an ordeal for her to master. At last count I figured 372 of my gray hairs are directly attributable to her. The menus could have been written in Szechuan Chinese for all she knew. Joanne’s special talents invariably surfaced during a mad dinner rush, or when a busload of 154 Armenian whale trainers was clogging the system. Then she would blithely enter an order calling for toast; over easy. What? Or my personal favorite - fish legs. “Fish legs, Gracie?” “Oh, I guess I meant a chicken leg.” “O.K. Do you want the whole leg or just the foot part?” “Don’t get smart with me. Anyone can make a mistake.”
True. But she raised confusion to an art form.
Johnny G Our resident 90 pound weakling, and itinerant dish washer. John’s ability to be obnoxious in any situation and reputation for continual whining was the inspiration for the infamous “one hour rule”, i.e., all cooks must hit the dishwasher once every hour. If you happened to be feeling lenient and inclined to forego the ritual, you could count on the kid to do something stupid like putting grasshoppers in the deep fat fryer, or spiders on the grill or blowing his nose on his apron, and that would earn him a pummeling. So, it was, “C’mere John, your hour’s up!” “Aw, c’mon you guys - I been good.” “Get over here, John, you know the rules.” Smack. Tormenting John was a favorite pastime around the place, and if you were good enough at it, you could start him swearing. The boy had a definite talent. He could cuss for twenty minutes straight and never use the same word twice, an ability that earned him grudging respect from all of us (except for Norma, our ultra religious back-up cook who was sure there was a special room in Hades reserved for certain young men who couldn’t control their mouths). This, of course, was all the more reason to get him going, so taking a page from The Devil’s Guide To A Dishwashers’ Hell, we’d artfully stack the bus tubs three feet high with dishes encrusted with baked on bar-b-que sauce (nuke ’em five minutes in the microwave at maximum warp, and you’d need a sandblaster to get the stuff off). Within minutes enough invectives would be flying around the sink to make a sailor blush, and Norma would be grabbing for her heart medicine. This tactic worked fine for about two months, until John decided to simply throw the offending dishes away rather than trying to get them clean. We were soon suffering an acute plate shortage, and Johnny G earned another thumping.
Boog A fellow fry cook, Boog was one of the skinniest kids you’d ever hope to see. We used to tease him because he had no ass. Seriously. His legs appeared to be joined directly to his back, with no discernable cheeks intervening. But, he turned what could’ve been a handicap into an advantage saying it came in kind of handy. Not having an ass meant he never got beat up, because nobody could whip his ass. He didn’t get tired since his ass was never dragging, he never made an ass out of himself and no one could ever tell him, “Get your ass out of here!” He had a whole list of attributes that made asslessness seem positively desirable. Boog was the prototypical reason that people in the know shy away from eating out in restaurants staffed by high schoolers. Drop a burger into the no-man’s land between the steam table and the garbage can? Fish it out, dust it off (if you’ve got time) and send it out, the minerals will do ’em good. He lived by the Fry Cook’s Golden Creed: “There’s no such thing as spoiled food”, and could usually be found lurking under a counter with a fire extinguisher waiting for an unsuspecting waitress to walk by. Luckily, we never had a fire. What we did have, was a whole bunch of empty extinguishers and a squad of waitresses with frozen butts. 20 years ago this was called “fun.” Now it’s probably sexual harassment, but give us a break. Remember, this was during a time when leisure suits were considered high fashion and CB radios were the rage. Whenever I look at pictures from that era I’m convinced we were all in the grips of some kind of national dementia.
Troobs Another member of the assless set, this guy was so skinny that if he stood sideways he disappeared, a distinct advantage when it came to sneaking up on our back-up cook Ethel and tying her apron strings to the bread rack. He was the chief linguist of the place, and was responsible for inventing a whole new language which enabled us to communicate within earshot of customers without them knowing what we were saying. “Don - we got a 2-4 niner with a 26B” would translate to: cute girl at the counter (but she has a big boyfriend), just as “Looks like a hard winter coming on” would mean: Better pull Johhny G out of the trash can, the manager’s coming! Troobs was decidedly the most wholesome member of our clan, but maintained a low-level devious streak which allowed him to stretch Saran Wrap over the women’s toilet (totally invisible to the naked eye, and guaranteed to cause a minor pee-flood) without causing every waitress in the building to reach for the knife drawer.
Zoad Also a cook, Zoad was a good natured, easy-going fellow. The thing I remember most about him was his car, a 1965 Ford Falcon that he called “the Quiet Coon” because he’d just installed a new muffler. Trips in the Coon were always an adventure due to the looseness of the steering linkage, which allowed a 162 degree swing without noticeably affecting your direction of travel. Riding with Zoad was known as “Coon Pinball” because you basically bounced from ditch to ditch. As an added bonus, the brakes would engage sporadically at best, so you never really knew if you were going to squeak to a halt or continue rolling right off the edge of the world. When he bought a Mustang, Boog acquired the Coon so as to maintain the tradition of placing our lives in jeopardy on even the shortest of trips. The new car was much better, having only 159 degrees of play in the steering. After a while this zig-zagging mode of travel became second nature to us, and we’d all get a little disoriented if we had to ride in a vehicle that could actually maintain a straight line down the road.
Now, every restaurant has its regular customers, and we were no exception. There was an old guy named Cliff who showed up every morning to help make the coffee. We had another pair named Chet and Bud who always came in on Friday and split a chicken dinner (woe be it to the foolish cook who gave Bud a smaller plate than Chet!)
And then we had Fat Irene.
This was no casual nickname, mind you. This was a woman who was on a mission to single-handedly consume more food than the nation of India. We knew when she was coming because the dishes would start to rattle off the shelves from the tremors induced by her gait, and also because the dining room would be swept by a reverential hush as she walked in. The rest of the customers could sense that this lady was there to eat. Whenever she showed up, you just automatically knew to call the chicken farm and order up an extra semi-load of birds for the night, because our walk-in freezer only had 213 cubic feet of space, and you just couldn’t fit enough Rhode Island Reds in there to last through a Hurricane Irene feeding frenzy.
Thursday, 8:26 p.m. All-you-can-eat chicken night. It was starting to look like an easy evening. Thirty-four minutes to closing and still no sign of Fat Irene. But then...
...thummmmmmp.......thummmmmmp.......thummmmmmp.
If you’ve ever seen Jurassic Park you know what I’m talking about. Remember how the dinosaur’s
footstep vibrations made the rings appear in the glass of water? Same thing. Little children were diving under the tables. Grown-ups were breaking for cover like there was going to be a shootout in an old-west saloon. The chandeliers were swaying.
And then she appeared.
We had double doors at the front entrance, and squeezing her through was still touch-and-go, but
we’d all been through this before. The gas pump attendant had rigged up a kind of half snow plow - half battering ram contraption on the front of his pickup, and with a little run across the parking lot to build up speed, was able to wedge her through with a minimum of effort.
Troobs looks over to me and says, “You know, I believe she’s lost weight.”
About this time, I glanced out the screen door in the break room and saw a chicken walk by. “What the heck is going on here?” I wondered. “Zoad, you get her started on the salad, bread, potatoes and beans while I check this out.”
I walked out the back door, and waded into a literal sea of chickens. The semi was parked in the back lot, and birds were everywhere. On the roof. In the ditches. Under the cars. And more were arriving all the time. In a scene reminiscent of The Great Escape they were popping out of a hole in the top of
the truck, rappelling down the side and breaking for cover while clutching forged passports under
their wings.
They’d even set a brush fire as a diversion.
I went back and checked the cooler. Only seventeen pieces of chicken left. This was going to be trouble.
Well, first things first. I called the local small town fire department to put out the blaze which was starting to threaten the cars in our parking lot. I have to say, they responded quickly, if not efficiently. Within minutes the first engine arrived, firemen twisting a cat’s tail because the siren didn’t work. The guys dismounted, and made a great show of surveying the situation, unrolling hoses, and generally preparing to tackle this challenging conflagration, which by then was burning with abandon. The hose was stretched, the men advanced and the signal was given. But, in a scene the Keystone Kops would have been proud of, a small “fweep” of escaping air was all that came out of the nozzle. It seems that no one had remembered to refill the water tank after fighting the last great blaze (Ole Johnson’s dog house).
Under ordinary circumstances this situation would have been a matter of some concern to me, but that night I had more pressing matters on my mind. Fat Irene had consumed all but four pieces of the chicken at hand and was starting to get a little cranky. This was more than a little bit disturbing to the wait-staff, who knew from past experience that a hungry, unsatiated Irene was more dangerous and unpredictable than a badger in a bowling bag. Small animals and underweight children had been known to be sucked into the vortex that surrounded her plate if food was low and they got too close.
The waterless firemen now came in and appropriated the restaurant’s fire extinguishers, but as you may have guessed, this also was a somewhat less than successful effort, since none of them had any charge left. Boog had long ago relieved them of pressure, frosting panties.
Outside, sparks were flying from the grass fire, and inside, sparks were flying from Fat Irene’s silverware when the answer to our problems hit me. “Of course!” I thought, “It’s been right in front of my nose all along!” Acting quickly, (the last drumstick had just disappeared whole into her mouth) I collected the kitchen staff and we started a chicken drive. Banging pots and waving aprons we rounded up about thirty of the critters and herded them toward the ditch. Dust flew and much squawking ensued, but luck was with us, and the disoriented fowl ran directly into the path of the oncoming brush fire where they were bar-b-qued on the spot. The heat burned their feathers completely off, and left behind a golden brown carcass, fried just right. You could smell that roasted chicken all the way into the next county!
We picked ’em up, threw ’em on a platter and shipped ’em out.
So, that was the end of it. The fire eventually burned out of its own accord, and Fat Irene declared the night’s repast to be the “best damn chicken dinner” she’d ever eaten.
Nickerson’s closed years ago, a victim of the Arab oil embargo, but I still think of that day whenever I stop in to visit the Colonel for a bucket of extra-crispy.
Catch 2222
Kandra Jardeaux sat at the breakfast table and skimmed over the morning’s headlines. Same old
stuff, although he had to admit, actually seeing “The World Ends Today” in black and mauve was a
bit unsettling. He reached over and switched the monitor off with an irritated flick of the wrist.
They’d known about it for weeks now, and after fifty-seven days of twenty-four hour hysteria he didn’t think there was much the NewsVid could add to the story. You really couldn’t blame them, though. It wasn’t every day that the Earth was struck head-on by a ninety-four mile wide asteroid, and as stories went, this was probably the mother of them all. Every video rag and newszine in the United Hemisphere had been saturating the airwaves with asteroid minutiae ever since a wayward comet had blasted into the orbiting chunk of rock between Mars and Jupiter and sent it falling toward the Sun, on a collision course with destiny. Hot off the press! The end of civilization! Get your asteroid souvenirs!
He wondered if the dinosaurs had cashed in on their cataclysm the way the world’s latest dominant species had.
But profiteers aside, the truly amazing thing to Kandra was the way most people were reacting. Life was generally proceeding on schedule, and instead of the mass panic you might expect in the face of such a disaster, his nutrient bus continued to arrive right on time. The monorails were still humming smoothly along, power was uninterrupted and the brain-twists were still begging for credits outside his building.
So, on this last day of existence, he took it in stride when the telewall began chiming.
Kandra crossed the room and passed his hand over the “accept” sensor. The windows darkened as the living room shimmered briefly, and faded into a three dimensional image featuring a rather frazzled looking attorney seated behind a large plexiglass desk.
“Good day Mr. Jardeaux,” he intoned nasally, “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have been going through the company files - setting things in order, don’t you know - and I came across a letter addressed to your attention buried in our records. I thought you might like to have it.”
“Of course, just drop it in my e-mail.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the lawyer replied. “you see, this is an actual letter. Written on realpaper, sealed in an envelope, the whole schmear. It’s the first one I’ve ever actually seen, except in museums and the holoflicks, of course. Very valuable, I’d guess, or at least it would be if the world wasn’t ending today. Pity.” The man removed a portion of his skull and flicked absent-mindedly at a few switches.
“Jeez, I hate it when they do that,” Kandra thought, grimacing.
“It was supposed to have been delivered to you months ago, but as you can imagine, things have been rather a-jumble around here lately. Apparently it was mis-filed by a temp last March. My apologies.
I’ll teleport it over to you in a few minutes, if you’ll be so kind as to give my secretary your credit authorization for billing purposes. Money makes the world go ’round, at least for a few more hours.”
“Right,” Kandra replied and placed his thumb on the scanner.
A letter! A mystery. Surely, a voice from the distant past,” Kandra mused. Realpaper hadn’t been
available for over a century! “Well, I guess history can be put off for a few more minutes.”
He crossed the room, and sat down next to the teleportal, calmly waiting for his package to materialize. The world might be running out of time, but he still had his whole life in front of him. He chuckled
quietly, as he regarded the odd-looking tangle of cyber-relays, fusion ramps, Doery flags and optical switches that protruded from his chair.
In a few days he would be hailed as the savior of the world, and he was rather looking forward to it.
It seemed like it was only yesterday that he had made the discovery. “Time flies when you’re having fun,” he thought, and smiled at the pun. He had been watching the electrocution of a shoplifter on his favorite game show, Hang ’em High, when the figurative door in his mind had been blown open as
God dropped the secret to time travel into his lap. He had leapt to his feet, Super-Coke spouting out
of his nose, and dashed to the computer to record his insight while it was still fresh. The logic was inescapable. Time wasn’t linear, it was all twisted, chock full of tunnels winding through the fabric of space like some kind of cosmic Swiss cheese. All you had to do was to enter the cheese at point A, and if you picked the right time-tunnel, you would emerge at point B in the past, the future, or if you chose a circular route, right back where you had started. But getting to point A in the first place was the trick.
Well, the key to the cheese was the chair in which he sat.
For a while, he hadn’t thought he could get it built before the asteroid hit, but he’d made it. Barely.
And today would be the Great Escape. Hours before impact, he would exit, stage left, leaving this time and space behind as the Earth was torn apart. He’d travel back far enough to warn humanity about its coming demise, (ten years should be about right) and then reap the benefits of a grateful World Council. When 2222 rolled around again and the comet returned, all it would encounter would be empty space.
Power and fame. Money and love. The adoration of billions of people would be his.
Kandra Jardeaux. King of the World.
And in the midst of his reverie the machine beside him began to hum, and the envelope appeared.
“And now, for one small mystery before I venture into the larger.” he said, gingerly slitting the container and removing the paper within.
It was written in his own hand, and said...
Kandra! Greetings from the stone age. 1937. My god, they barely have electricity here. Before I go any further, I believe a celebration is in order. Congratulations to us. As this letter evidences, the time machine worked (although a little too well). We were right about the nature of time, but the McGregor effect was considerably stronger than anticipated, making it nearly impossible to choose the correct time-tunnel. The ride was rough, and the landing was rougher, causing irreparable damage to the time machine. Luckily, I escaped with little more than scratches and a bruised ego. Since then I have been scrabbling about the twentieth century trying to figure out a way to communicate with you.
After a few days, I hit upon our law firm. The world may pass away, but lawyers go on and on. In exchange for Grandfather’s gold ring, they have undertaken to deliver this letter to you (me) in 2222. The timing, of course, was crucial. It had to be after we tumbled onto the Cheese Theory, (I didn’t want to take any chance of disrupting the creative process) but in time to make corrections (if possible) to the flight calculations. Whether this letter will survive the centuries will depend on the reputation of their firm and a lot of luck.
That was the good news.
The bad news is that there is a larger problem than merely being able to control the tunnel selection process. It would seem that traveling through time has affected my body’s functions on a microscopic level. As near as I can determine using the primitive instruments available here, the osmatic action of my cellular membranes is becoming increasingly distorted. My body cells are taking in water faster than they can get rid of it. I figure I have another thirty hours left before I literally swell up and explode. Not a death I particularly relish. Let’s hope you/I are successful and this timeline ends before it comes to that.
So, there it is. I know that given time, you can overcome these problems. You have to, there’s no other way out. Good luck to us, we’ll need it.
Yours truly,
Yours Truly.
Kandra exhaled slowly, allowing the letter to fall to the floor at his side.
Although he had the means to travel through the ages, for the world and for him, time had run out. In the end, humanity’s destruction would be chalked up to a misplaced letter. And wasn’t that the way it had always been? The more invincible the foe seemed, the less force that was needed to bring it down.
Two choices. A slow, painful death in an unfamiliar time or a fiery denouement by asteroid.
“Some choice,” he whispered to himself.
He walked into his kitchen and called up a large pitcher of margaritas from the food replicator, dragged his chair out onto the balcony, and plopped down with his feet up on the railing.
“A toast,” he said, raising his glass to the world below. “Close, but no cigar.”
And then he sat back and waited for the sky to fall.
stuff, although he had to admit, actually seeing “The World Ends Today” in black and mauve was a
bit unsettling. He reached over and switched the monitor off with an irritated flick of the wrist.
They’d known about it for weeks now, and after fifty-seven days of twenty-four hour hysteria he didn’t think there was much the NewsVid could add to the story. You really couldn’t blame them, though. It wasn’t every day that the Earth was struck head-on by a ninety-four mile wide asteroid, and as stories went, this was probably the mother of them all. Every video rag and newszine in the United Hemisphere had been saturating the airwaves with asteroid minutiae ever since a wayward comet had blasted into the orbiting chunk of rock between Mars and Jupiter and sent it falling toward the Sun, on a collision course with destiny. Hot off the press! The end of civilization! Get your asteroid souvenirs!
He wondered if the dinosaurs had cashed in on their cataclysm the way the world’s latest dominant species had.
But profiteers aside, the truly amazing thing to Kandra was the way most people were reacting. Life was generally proceeding on schedule, and instead of the mass panic you might expect in the face of such a disaster, his nutrient bus continued to arrive right on time. The monorails were still humming smoothly along, power was uninterrupted and the brain-twists were still begging for credits outside his building.
So, on this last day of existence, he took it in stride when the telewall began chiming.
Kandra crossed the room and passed his hand over the “accept” sensor. The windows darkened as the living room shimmered briefly, and faded into a three dimensional image featuring a rather frazzled looking attorney seated behind a large plexiglass desk.
“Good day Mr. Jardeaux,” he intoned nasally, “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have been going through the company files - setting things in order, don’t you know - and I came across a letter addressed to your attention buried in our records. I thought you might like to have it.”
“Of course, just drop it in my e-mail.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the lawyer replied. “you see, this is an actual letter. Written on realpaper, sealed in an envelope, the whole schmear. It’s the first one I’ve ever actually seen, except in museums and the holoflicks, of course. Very valuable, I’d guess, or at least it would be if the world wasn’t ending today. Pity.” The man removed a portion of his skull and flicked absent-mindedly at a few switches.
“Jeez, I hate it when they do that,” Kandra thought, grimacing.
“It was supposed to have been delivered to you months ago, but as you can imagine, things have been rather a-jumble around here lately. Apparently it was mis-filed by a temp last March. My apologies.
I’ll teleport it over to you in a few minutes, if you’ll be so kind as to give my secretary your credit authorization for billing purposes. Money makes the world go ’round, at least for a few more hours.”
“Right,” Kandra replied and placed his thumb on the scanner.
A letter! A mystery. Surely, a voice from the distant past,” Kandra mused. Realpaper hadn’t been
available for over a century! “Well, I guess history can be put off for a few more minutes.”
He crossed the room, and sat down next to the teleportal, calmly waiting for his package to materialize. The world might be running out of time, but he still had his whole life in front of him. He chuckled
quietly, as he regarded the odd-looking tangle of cyber-relays, fusion ramps, Doery flags and optical switches that protruded from his chair.
In a few days he would be hailed as the savior of the world, and he was rather looking forward to it.
It seemed like it was only yesterday that he had made the discovery. “Time flies when you’re having fun,” he thought, and smiled at the pun. He had been watching the electrocution of a shoplifter on his favorite game show, Hang ’em High, when the figurative door in his mind had been blown open as
God dropped the secret to time travel into his lap. He had leapt to his feet, Super-Coke spouting out
of his nose, and dashed to the computer to record his insight while it was still fresh. The logic was inescapable. Time wasn’t linear, it was all twisted, chock full of tunnels winding through the fabric of space like some kind of cosmic Swiss cheese. All you had to do was to enter the cheese at point A, and if you picked the right time-tunnel, you would emerge at point B in the past, the future, or if you chose a circular route, right back where you had started. But getting to point A in the first place was the trick.
Well, the key to the cheese was the chair in which he sat.
For a while, he hadn’t thought he could get it built before the asteroid hit, but he’d made it. Barely.
And today would be the Great Escape. Hours before impact, he would exit, stage left, leaving this time and space behind as the Earth was torn apart. He’d travel back far enough to warn humanity about its coming demise, (ten years should be about right) and then reap the benefits of a grateful World Council. When 2222 rolled around again and the comet returned, all it would encounter would be empty space.
Power and fame. Money and love. The adoration of billions of people would be his.
Kandra Jardeaux. King of the World.
And in the midst of his reverie the machine beside him began to hum, and the envelope appeared.
“And now, for one small mystery before I venture into the larger.” he said, gingerly slitting the container and removing the paper within.
It was written in his own hand, and said...
Kandra! Greetings from the stone age. 1937. My god, they barely have electricity here. Before I go any further, I believe a celebration is in order. Congratulations to us. As this letter evidences, the time machine worked (although a little too well). We were right about the nature of time, but the McGregor effect was considerably stronger than anticipated, making it nearly impossible to choose the correct time-tunnel. The ride was rough, and the landing was rougher, causing irreparable damage to the time machine. Luckily, I escaped with little more than scratches and a bruised ego. Since then I have been scrabbling about the twentieth century trying to figure out a way to communicate with you.
After a few days, I hit upon our law firm. The world may pass away, but lawyers go on and on. In exchange for Grandfather’s gold ring, they have undertaken to deliver this letter to you (me) in 2222. The timing, of course, was crucial. It had to be after we tumbled onto the Cheese Theory, (I didn’t want to take any chance of disrupting the creative process) but in time to make corrections (if possible) to the flight calculations. Whether this letter will survive the centuries will depend on the reputation of their firm and a lot of luck.
That was the good news.
The bad news is that there is a larger problem than merely being able to control the tunnel selection process. It would seem that traveling through time has affected my body’s functions on a microscopic level. As near as I can determine using the primitive instruments available here, the osmatic action of my cellular membranes is becoming increasingly distorted. My body cells are taking in water faster than they can get rid of it. I figure I have another thirty hours left before I literally swell up and explode. Not a death I particularly relish. Let’s hope you/I are successful and this timeline ends before it comes to that.
So, there it is. I know that given time, you can overcome these problems. You have to, there’s no other way out. Good luck to us, we’ll need it.
Yours truly,
Yours Truly.
Kandra exhaled slowly, allowing the letter to fall to the floor at his side.
Although he had the means to travel through the ages, for the world and for him, time had run out. In the end, humanity’s destruction would be chalked up to a misplaced letter. And wasn’t that the way it had always been? The more invincible the foe seemed, the less force that was needed to bring it down.
Two choices. A slow, painful death in an unfamiliar time or a fiery denouement by asteroid.
“Some choice,” he whispered to himself.
He walked into his kitchen and called up a large pitcher of margaritas from the food replicator, dragged his chair out onto the balcony, and plopped down with his feet up on the railing.
“A toast,” he said, raising his glass to the world below. “Close, but no cigar.”
And then he sat back and waited for the sky to fall.
The Cat Came Back
Everybody makes such a big deal out of dying. Well, I’m here to tell ya, it ain’t no big whoop. Dyin’s the easy part, or at least it sure was for me. Nothin’ to it, I could-a done it standin’ on my head.
Being dead. Now that’s a horse of a different color.
I don’t want ya to get the idea that I’m some kind of expert or something, but this story is being told from a first-person point of view. I been there, or I guess I should say I am there. No shit. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’. Heh, heh. A little dead guy humor there.
When I was alive I used to spend a goodly amount of time wonderin’ what it would be like. I mean, lots of people say they know what lies on the other side of the great beyond, but I always figured that was just so much bullcookies. Nobody knows. Outa all the preachers an’ prophets poundin’ pulpits, kickin’ ass and takin’ names, not a single one of ’em has ever been there to see for hisself. “But it says so in the Good Book! Heaven and Hell!” they shout and bang the bible. Yeah, right, and I had a book that said Superman could piss into the wind and not get wet, but that don’t make it so.
Still, ya hear tell about these folks having outta body experiences after car wrecks and such all the
time. And I had a friend what was in a supposedly haunted ceramics room in school one time. He swore an unmotorized potter’s wheel just started turnin’ all by it’s lonesome, and I believe him. He was genuinely scared spitless that night. Vampire and werewolf stories are as old as humanity itself. The undead. Frankenstein. The Egyptians preserved the bodies of their deceased, ’cause they figured they’d be needin’ ’em later when they came back. There’s a lotta weird stuff in the world that even the Einstein Boys down at Harvard can’t explain. We tend to discount the ghost stories we hear ’cause it makes the world seem safer not to have Aunt Gertie’s spirit takin’ up residence in your closet, but that don’t mean she’s not in there rearranging your underwear and stealin’ your socks.
Now me, I always thought I’d buy it in a car crash. You know, a 20¢ pin snaps in the steering column someday on a winding country road. Fireball in the night sky. Very romantic.
But it seems Molly saw my demise in a little different way.
We’d been married about six years and was doin’ OK, I guess. Had a nice little house, a cabin on a lake up north, a new Taurus in the garage and that was good enough for me. But like the Rolling Stones said, satisfaction came hard for that girl. Molly wanted more; always a new pair of shoes away from happiness.
And then lightning struck.
9, 15, 56, 34, 29, 38. My birthday and her measurements made us rich, courtesy of the state lottery.
Silly me. I thought we had it made. Even she couldn’t spend 42 million dollars in a lifetime. Yeah, that last year and a half was the happiest time of my life. We traveled. We partied. We built a new house in the mountains.
I never saw it coming.
It was our anniversary for Pete’s sake, which only goes to show you what a cold-hearted bitch she really was. We’d just finished the cornish game hens and were sitting in front of the fire drinking champagne when my head started to spin and everything got real blurry. It happened so fast. Strichnine would be my guess. She poisoned me!
And there I was, floating in the air above, looking down at my own body lying on the floor, rather amazed by it all. “It’s true!” I thought, and I was so awestruck by the fact that there really was life after death that I wasn’t even upset with her for killing my ass.
But that didn’t last long.
I hadn’t been down three minutes when the door swings open and who should come strollin’ in but my best friend Ray. Molly looks at him and says, “Where you been, lover? We gotta get him outta here!”
But Ray’s playing it cool, sayin’, “Now, don’t get your undies in a bundle, he ain’t goin’ nowhere. We didn’t plan this for four months just to screw it up now,” and he starts to drag my body out the door.
Molly and Ray! Who woulda thought! Obviously not me.
Well, I guess they hadn’t used quite enough poison, ‘cause as he’s pullin’ me down the back steps, I get this really goofy sensation and literally fall out of the sky and land right smack dab back in my body. That hurt too, and now I’m moanin’, and trying to make some sense outta what the hell just happened to me. I opened my eyes, but everything was pretty fuzzy and I still couldn’t move a lick. Ray, he don’t even bat an eye, he just walks over to the shed, picks up a shovel and crosses the yard to where I’m stretched out on my back.
“Sorry, ol’ Hoss,” he says, “I know this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.” Then he put the point of the spade to my forehead, and jumped on it with both feet.
If it hurt, I don’t remember it.
When I woke up, everything was dark and silent as the night. I tried to move, but nothin’ doin’. In
fact after I’d been lyin’ there what seemed like a couple hours I became aware of something that really jerked a knot in my tail.
I wasn’t breathing.
No matter how I looked at it (and I looked at it from a whole lot of different ways in the next few weeks) it all added up to the same thing. I was deader ’n a doornail, and the answer to the all-time cosmic question, at least for me, was that after you cash in your chips you don’t go anywhere. No pearly gates. No coming back as your uncle Benny’s favorite sheep. No tripping around the galaxy. Sorry to disappoint ya folks, you just stay right where you are.
And let me tell you, it’s boring as hell.
You don’t even sleep. It’s pretty much the worst thing you could ever think of.
So, I got really good at playing mental games, I’ll tell you that. I constructed crossword puzzles in my head. I built a new house, board by board. I invented a whole new language.
And time crept by.
Who knows how much? Without any reference to the passing of night and day, it’s impossible to say.
But eventually, I began to notice something unbelievably odd. I was regaining the use of my limbs. No foolin’. It took a while, but what’s time to a dead man? With a little practice I was even able to force air through my lungs and tried singing a song (Don’t Fear The Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult), although by then my vocal chords were starting to decay pretty badly, and I didn’t much like the sound of what came out. Kinda wet and raspy. I guess the Mormon Tabernacle Choir will have to wait.
It wasn’t long (or was it?) before I was able to raise my arms and confirm what I’d suspected all along.
I was buried in a rough wooden box, about shoulder width and a foot high, and I’m tellin’ ya, it was almost worse to know. Before, I couldn’t tell where I was, some weird kind of limbo I thought, I wasn’t even sure I was still in my body, although it seemed that way. Now I knew.
I remembered what a coroner friend told me, how he’d have to dig up the coffins sometimes. He always thought it was kinda creepy ’cause a few of them would have their silk linings all shredded, like the
people inside was tryin’ to get out. ’Course, I always thought he was just yankin’ my chain.
That was quite while ago. I’m noticing it difficult to concentrate, more and more. I think brain start to rot away, and it affecting me. Bugs and centipedes starting get in too. Damn cracks in wood box. Since feeling come back, I know they boring through flesh my. This really starting to annoy me! But good news! I was able to loosen board in ceiling! I lots of time, and patience always my strong suit. I think not long before I have it off.
Board came off Alright. Lots dirt fall in on me, and now can’t move again. This sucks! I just starting to enjoy being able scratch, and now I’m screwed. But oh, well. Death goes on. Ha, ha. More humor.
Something new. Felt tug on hand. Dog dug me up. Sumbitch chewed off left arm! But dirt loose enough that out I now. Moon bright as sun. Been long time since seen I light! Not stand able, been too long, guess. I work on.
Day pass. Practice perfect make. Finally stand, even walk can fast though not. Damn dog come back. Now missing part right shoulder. I hate dog, but guess I not beauty contest win anyway.
Have plan. Know this woods, not too far, my house old. Shotgun still barn in? Not nine lives, but this cat back!
Molly. Ray.
Guess who coming to dinner?
Being dead. Now that’s a horse of a different color.
I don’t want ya to get the idea that I’m some kind of expert or something, but this story is being told from a first-person point of view. I been there, or I guess I should say I am there. No shit. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’. Heh, heh. A little dead guy humor there.
When I was alive I used to spend a goodly amount of time wonderin’ what it would be like. I mean, lots of people say they know what lies on the other side of the great beyond, but I always figured that was just so much bullcookies. Nobody knows. Outa all the preachers an’ prophets poundin’ pulpits, kickin’ ass and takin’ names, not a single one of ’em has ever been there to see for hisself. “But it says so in the Good Book! Heaven and Hell!” they shout and bang the bible. Yeah, right, and I had a book that said Superman could piss into the wind and not get wet, but that don’t make it so.
Still, ya hear tell about these folks having outta body experiences after car wrecks and such all the
time. And I had a friend what was in a supposedly haunted ceramics room in school one time. He swore an unmotorized potter’s wheel just started turnin’ all by it’s lonesome, and I believe him. He was genuinely scared spitless that night. Vampire and werewolf stories are as old as humanity itself. The undead. Frankenstein. The Egyptians preserved the bodies of their deceased, ’cause they figured they’d be needin’ ’em later when they came back. There’s a lotta weird stuff in the world that even the Einstein Boys down at Harvard can’t explain. We tend to discount the ghost stories we hear ’cause it makes the world seem safer not to have Aunt Gertie’s spirit takin’ up residence in your closet, but that don’t mean she’s not in there rearranging your underwear and stealin’ your socks.
Now me, I always thought I’d buy it in a car crash. You know, a 20¢ pin snaps in the steering column someday on a winding country road. Fireball in the night sky. Very romantic.
But it seems Molly saw my demise in a little different way.
We’d been married about six years and was doin’ OK, I guess. Had a nice little house, a cabin on a lake up north, a new Taurus in the garage and that was good enough for me. But like the Rolling Stones said, satisfaction came hard for that girl. Molly wanted more; always a new pair of shoes away from happiness.
And then lightning struck.
9, 15, 56, 34, 29, 38. My birthday and her measurements made us rich, courtesy of the state lottery.
Silly me. I thought we had it made. Even she couldn’t spend 42 million dollars in a lifetime. Yeah, that last year and a half was the happiest time of my life. We traveled. We partied. We built a new house in the mountains.
I never saw it coming.
It was our anniversary for Pete’s sake, which only goes to show you what a cold-hearted bitch she really was. We’d just finished the cornish game hens and were sitting in front of the fire drinking champagne when my head started to spin and everything got real blurry. It happened so fast. Strichnine would be my guess. She poisoned me!
And there I was, floating in the air above, looking down at my own body lying on the floor, rather amazed by it all. “It’s true!” I thought, and I was so awestruck by the fact that there really was life after death that I wasn’t even upset with her for killing my ass.
But that didn’t last long.
I hadn’t been down three minutes when the door swings open and who should come strollin’ in but my best friend Ray. Molly looks at him and says, “Where you been, lover? We gotta get him outta here!”
But Ray’s playing it cool, sayin’, “Now, don’t get your undies in a bundle, he ain’t goin’ nowhere. We didn’t plan this for four months just to screw it up now,” and he starts to drag my body out the door.
Molly and Ray! Who woulda thought! Obviously not me.
Well, I guess they hadn’t used quite enough poison, ‘cause as he’s pullin’ me down the back steps, I get this really goofy sensation and literally fall out of the sky and land right smack dab back in my body. That hurt too, and now I’m moanin’, and trying to make some sense outta what the hell just happened to me. I opened my eyes, but everything was pretty fuzzy and I still couldn’t move a lick. Ray, he don’t even bat an eye, he just walks over to the shed, picks up a shovel and crosses the yard to where I’m stretched out on my back.
“Sorry, ol’ Hoss,” he says, “I know this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.” Then he put the point of the spade to my forehead, and jumped on it with both feet.
If it hurt, I don’t remember it.
When I woke up, everything was dark and silent as the night. I tried to move, but nothin’ doin’. In
fact after I’d been lyin’ there what seemed like a couple hours I became aware of something that really jerked a knot in my tail.
I wasn’t breathing.
No matter how I looked at it (and I looked at it from a whole lot of different ways in the next few weeks) it all added up to the same thing. I was deader ’n a doornail, and the answer to the all-time cosmic question, at least for me, was that after you cash in your chips you don’t go anywhere. No pearly gates. No coming back as your uncle Benny’s favorite sheep. No tripping around the galaxy. Sorry to disappoint ya folks, you just stay right where you are.
And let me tell you, it’s boring as hell.
You don’t even sleep. It’s pretty much the worst thing you could ever think of.
So, I got really good at playing mental games, I’ll tell you that. I constructed crossword puzzles in my head. I built a new house, board by board. I invented a whole new language.
And time crept by.
Who knows how much? Without any reference to the passing of night and day, it’s impossible to say.
But eventually, I began to notice something unbelievably odd. I was regaining the use of my limbs. No foolin’. It took a while, but what’s time to a dead man? With a little practice I was even able to force air through my lungs and tried singing a song (Don’t Fear The Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult), although by then my vocal chords were starting to decay pretty badly, and I didn’t much like the sound of what came out. Kinda wet and raspy. I guess the Mormon Tabernacle Choir will have to wait.
It wasn’t long (or was it?) before I was able to raise my arms and confirm what I’d suspected all along.
I was buried in a rough wooden box, about shoulder width and a foot high, and I’m tellin’ ya, it was almost worse to know. Before, I couldn’t tell where I was, some weird kind of limbo I thought, I wasn’t even sure I was still in my body, although it seemed that way. Now I knew.
I remembered what a coroner friend told me, how he’d have to dig up the coffins sometimes. He always thought it was kinda creepy ’cause a few of them would have their silk linings all shredded, like the
people inside was tryin’ to get out. ’Course, I always thought he was just yankin’ my chain.
That was quite while ago. I’m noticing it difficult to concentrate, more and more. I think brain start to rot away, and it affecting me. Bugs and centipedes starting get in too. Damn cracks in wood box. Since feeling come back, I know they boring through flesh my. This really starting to annoy me! But good news! I was able to loosen board in ceiling! I lots of time, and patience always my strong suit. I think not long before I have it off.
Board came off Alright. Lots dirt fall in on me, and now can’t move again. This sucks! I just starting to enjoy being able scratch, and now I’m screwed. But oh, well. Death goes on. Ha, ha. More humor.
Something new. Felt tug on hand. Dog dug me up. Sumbitch chewed off left arm! But dirt loose enough that out I now. Moon bright as sun. Been long time since seen I light! Not stand able, been too long, guess. I work on.
Day pass. Practice perfect make. Finally stand, even walk can fast though not. Damn dog come back. Now missing part right shoulder. I hate dog, but guess I not beauty contest win anyway.
Have plan. Know this woods, not too far, my house old. Shotgun still barn in? Not nine lives, but this cat back!
Molly. Ray.
Guess who coming to dinner?
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