Thursday's dusk came the the Greenwood man-lair on gentle April zephyrs that carried only the most delicate bouquet of the Marion County (metro Indianapolis) Stench Combo, which consisted of burning tires, sun-scorched asphalt/oil refinery effluvia and a side of diesel exhaust; to drink, a glorious whiff of the Indianapolis dump which, while more than ten minutes away by car, is growing increasingly foetid in the early summer's heat. Were I to have been luxuriating in the dog-loaf encrusted yard in the canvas camping chair that was not long ago my only piece of upright furniture, I would have most likely puked a little in my mouth before wondering absently if scoring a rock would make it all better.
Instead, I found myself crouched under my desk battling a power-strip as I unplugged anything that might be part of my modem and router in a titanic battle of wills.
What I Wanted: The ability, as I saw fit, to 'blog.
What the Modem and Router Wanted: To be feck-sticks.
It was at this moment - mere seconds before I began to uncontrollably shriek and start ripping at cords like a coatimundi coming down off of methadone - that Keith, my personal deus ex machina, spoke.
Keith: Hey, I saw this weird wire that came down off a pole in our front yard.
Me: I saw that too, and wondered if it was to bring us sparky mortality.
Keith: Maybe we should call the Insight people. [pause] NO! Stop it right now!
[sprays me in the face with water bottle as I begin to savage a wire with my incisors]
Fifteen minutes and a fancy troubleshooting session later, it was determined that we would indeed have to be the recipients of a service call. Would someone be home, the computer-borg-dude asked sweetly, between 8 AM and 6 PM on Saturday? Seeing as how they had our gamete-producing organs over the barrel, we had no choice to affirm.
8:15 AM, Saturday morning
[phone buzzing in the bed next to me; it's a "317" area code - metro Indianapolis]
Me: Who the feck is this?
Voice: Hi, I'm John from Insight.
Me: Oh, gee whiz, I'm sorry! I am just drunk is all.
John: Yeah, I tied one on real good last night at the tittie bar and now I am weaving through - OH HOLY SHET LOOK OUT
Me: John?
John: Feck, I just almost knocked a twelve-year-old Catholic-school girl out of her saddle shoes.
Me: Huh. Well, I take it that you're going to be on the way soon?
John: I'll be there in fifteen. Hey - [whispers] - you got any weed?
It was only after contemplating his parting words that the part of me that is still able to remember things jogged a little bit. I'd been asked that question before.
Could I dare to dream that I would be the recipient of a divine visit from my boil-handed, Marlboro-perfumed Zippo-holstered buddy? Would I - on yet another occasion - be privileged enough to watch the early spring sun glitter off of his oily mullet? Would I - for the second time! - be forced to clean mud-clods that had liberated themselves from the treads of his size 15 blood-stained workboots from the sanctity of my home?
I'd just lowered myself onto the porcelain throne when a knock resounded through my seven-room shanty. I knew better than to have tried to accomplish The Unspeakable with someone on the way; inevitably, one gets caught with one's pants down, and not metaphorically. I hastily completed the task at hand and properly sanitized my hands to greet John, who, upon seeing me at the door, butted out a half-smoked Marlboro Light 100 [?!?] out on his heel and pocketed it.
Classy.
As I led him through our yard - mindful at all times to avoid the scatological evidence of Zeke's unheeded existence - I beheld John's Zippo holster, which carefully cradled the steely butane-filled lighter. I'd not noticed the time before that the lighter was emblazoned with a Confederate flag; how I could have missed this, I have no way of knowing. As I lifted a single pallid finger into the heavens to point out where the cable had tumbled into the tree and partly into our yard, I was taken aback by the absence one thing I'd most looked forward to gazing upon in regards to our special Insight buddy:
His mullet was gone.
I'd not have the pleasure of watching the spring sunlight dance merrily over his greasy neck-cape, and for this I was powerful angry. There's just nothing amusing about a quarter inch of hair under a tidy baseball cap unless owned by Britney Spears. As I frantically tried to reassemble the pieces of my shattered world, I looked to his hands. "At least, dear Baby Jesus in Thy hay-redolent manger, let there be boils", I mouthed. When he removed his gloves to root around in his pockets, their relative smoothness - I mean, other than work calluses - forced a single drop of brine from my left eye.
What had changed? OK, so there was still a little bit of the John from last year in there, but few people take off a mullet once they grow it in, and fewer still are able to rid themselves of gigantic, Roma tomato-sized hand-boils without the aid of a blowtorch and a witch-doctor.
The answer came when the sun glinted off something else other than what was, perhaps, the most exquisite mullet that has ever been grown.
A ring. A wedding band.
Now, whether he'd been married all this time but was unable to wear the ring because of the Clementine orange-sized pustules, I will never know. I do know that the promise of regular sex will cause gentlemen to do strange things, like cut off nearly a foot of flammable hair or go to Chinatown for hand-salve made out of narwhal placentae.
As he snaked a cable from a cable-box located several feet into our neighbor's yard - an old, bitter and, might I add, balding neighbor who has on several occasions called our landlord to tell him how we don't keep our lawn to his standards - I thought: good for you. Everyone needs someone, and the fact that somebody - perhaps that very evening - was polishing his one-eyed gopher made me feel hope for a world that will soon be bereft of a free Paris Hilton.
As he got into his truck, he waved goodbye as he prepared to light the butt that he'd stashed in one of the pockets of his carpenter jeans. He rolled down his window all the way and beckoned me closer.
"You sure you don't have any ganj, buddy?"
I assured him that I didn't and, looking crestfallen, he motored into the distance. Somewhere, perhaps in the shadow of a the Giant Sparkplug Building in our state's bullet-ridden capital, a thirtysomething man with nearly invisible boil scars on his hands will try to shake down a pat of weed from a seventy-year-old man who is barely holding in a bowel movement in the vain hopes that he'll be transported to a skunky heaven aided by a rebel Zippo. When the MedicAlert van shows up, he'll have nowhere to run.
But at least now he'll have someone to bail him out.
Until later, I remain,
Dom (unlesshewantedsomeExtraStrengthTylenolhewasoutofluck) Potorti
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