Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed

by Lance Carbuncle

  The beating that I suffered at the hands of Shelby Rubituson was much like what I awake to in the rest area outside of Jacksonville. Open hands slap my face, my arms, my legs. The entire surface of my body burns, something similar to what it would probably feel like to be attacked by a swarm of killer bees.

  “He’s covered in fire ants,” somebody screams. Leaping from the picnic table I try to outrun the pain. Totem tackles me hard, taking me to the ground. Buddy and somebody else continue to slap at my face and body. Tiny red demons sting my eyes, my ears, and the inside of my nose. I roll on the ground as if on fire and they continue to slap and smack at my body. It feels as if somebody is kicking me in the ribs. Heart thumping in a crazy giggle-jazz syncopated beat. Instead of enduring the thousand burning bites of the red demons, I pass out and my friends tend to me.

  • • •

  Reality rudely rips the bedcovers of unconsciousness from my face. I am on the floor of the rest area men’s room, the fog of urinal mints, human effluence, and cleaning fluids snake their way up my chin and nestle in my nostrils. A long, low, mournful fart bellows out from one of the stalls. Buddy, Pedro and a security guard lean in over me. My asshole is sore.

  “Hey there, fella,” the security guard greets me. “My name’s Officer Sleestack. I’m the head of security at this rest stop. You hunkered down on a table that was sitting smack dab in the biggest durn colony of fire ants I ever seent.” Sleestack chuckles to himself, his first, second, and third chins all gently jiggle to the rhythm of his laughter. He grabs one arm and Buddy grips the other. They help me stand. “You know, you ain’t supposed to sleep overnight in these rest areas. It ain’t safe. But I’m guessin’ you learnt your lesson.”

  I look at myself in the smudged piece of polished metal bolted to the bathroom wall. It barely resembles a mirror. A fuzzy reflection of something that looks vaguely like me gazes back. From what I can tell, I look like hell. My eye is blackened from the beer can that Buddy threw at me. The rest of my face is red and swollen with hives. My ribs are sore and each breath feels as if someone is stabbing me in the lungs.

  “I’m calling an ambulance. You don’t look right,” Sleestack tells me. “You’re gun’ta need medical intervention. Your lips are swollen . . . your eyes . . . what you’re experiencing looks like an allergic reaction. Durn it! I wouldn’t be surprised if your balls ain’t swelled up like coconuts.”

  Shoving my hand down my pants, I grip my right nut. It’s heavy and enlarged, easily filling up the palm of my hand. My left nut is even bigger. My scrotum is stretched taut, like a drum skin, over the gargantuan cajones. “I will go to my doctor,” I tell Sleestack. I haven’t had a regular physician in fifteen years and don’t know who I would even see about my condition.

  “Where’s your doctor?” Sleestack asks. “You need to get to him soon.”

  “He’s in Miami. Doctor Bhanigrath Gupta.” I make up a name, figuring that an Indian name sounds good. “He’ll get me fixed up in no time flat.”

  “You can’t go to Miami. There’s a hurricane watch down that way. Angus is supposed to hit somewhere down that way tomorrow morning. Everybody’s evacuating. You won’t even be able to drive down the interstate. Both sides are opened up for north-bound traffic for people to get out of the path. You will not find your doctor, if you can even get down there.”

  “We’re goimb,” I mumble through my swollen lips. My tongue has now puffed up to an enlarged, flapping piece of meat; it offers no help in articulating my position. “You canth thtop us.”

  Sleestack’s eyes narrow to determined slits. He inhales deeply and then exhales a breathy reptilian rasp, a flabby, defiant X of forearms cross over his chest. “You boys are not going anywhere. In fact, I’m gun’ta need to see your identification. You,” Sleestack points at Totem, “let me see your greencard and . . . ”

  BLAMMO! Buddy clocks Sleestack across the back of the head with an empty mop bucket from the bathroom. Sleestack crumples, unconscious. We all raise our eyebrows and shrug our shoulders at each other: What do we do now? Collectively we drag him into a stall. Totem pulls Sleestack’s pants down and sets the unaware rent-a-cop on the toilet. There is a giant green turd coiled up in the bowl, the tip of the turd breaks the surface of the water and points proudly upward. One lone, completely unstained, square of toilet paper rests near the top of the frightening curlicue.

  “Let’s leave him here,” Totem says. “He’ll think he over-exerted himself and passed out pushing that grande thing out of his culo.” Totem shakes his head, “Man, how do you give birth to something like that and have nothing to wipe off of your butt?”

  “That’s called a Mississippi Mudslide,” Buddy explains to Totem. “It’s when you lay out a giant turd and have no poop to wipe off of your butt . . . wait . . . No, I’m sorry. It’s not a Mississippi Mudslide. I think it’s a Depth Charge . . . no . . . ”

  “It’s called an Alabama Slider,” opines a voice from the abutting stall. Someone has heard our entire episode. “It’s an Alabama Slider when there’s nothing to wipe. A Mississippi Mudslide is when you have to wipe shit off of your legs all the way down to your knees, and a logjam is when . . . ”

  We all lock eyes. It’s time to beat it. Once again, Buddy and I high-step it to the truck with Totem right behind us.

  • • •

  My rig screams out of the rest area. We stop at the next exit to fill up the gas tank. I top off the tank and go inside to pay. A handwritten sign hangs on the swinging door that says: No shoes, No shirt, No service. In smaller print, the sign further explains: The shoes are for your protection. The shirt is for ours. You don’t look as good as you think you do. Inside I present the last of my money to pay for my gas and a pickled hot sausage that calls to me from a big glass jar on the counter. Pedro comes into the store to use the restroom.

  Clevis, the gas station attendant, tells me that everybody is heading up I-95 to get away from the storm but I can take A-1A all of the way down the coast to Miami. We head for the edge of the continent and steer the truck south on the coastal highway. Clevis was right. The roadway is eerily vacant. Pedro stole a carton of generic cigarettes from the convenience store. I chug the remainder of Denny’s Mormon Tea, feeling the stimulant effect immediately. Obviously all of the ephedra settles to the bottom of the tea. I don’t even like cigarettes, neither does Buddy or Totem, but we chain-smoke for the rest of the drive. The gas pedal becomes well-acquainted with the rusted metal floor of the truck.

  I am so zipped on the tea and nauseous from the cigarettes. Flames shoot from my fingertips, sparks from my swollen and inflamed eyes, smoke from my ears. The truck and I are like lovers that know each other’s moves. The brakes fail and the transmission grinds, engine smoking like an AA meeting. I feel like a long-haul truck driver pushing his oversized transcontinental hobbyhorse across the country, shipping a load of string beans to Utah. Totem and Buddy grip the seat as I ball that jack all the way to Little Cuba. In Miami I jerk the truck to the west on State Road 41 toward Frog City. Windows are boarded up on the green and orange and pink buildings. The truck chokes to a stop as the transmission drops.

  We are close to the new house. I want to call Mom, but I have lost my cell phone somewhere along the way. The nicotine and ephedra have me so jacked up. I don’t care that it’s raining. I don’t care that I am in unfamiliar territory. I don’t care that the tiny store that I enter slaps me in the face with the funk of half-rotten vegetables and that none of the products are familiar to me. I don’t care that the group of men playing dominoes at a table near the front door eye me suspiciously. I don’t give a shit that nobody in the store speaks English. Totem is with us. He chatters and jibbas and jabbas with the men in the store. Why is it that when people speak in another language they talk so fast? Totem and the men look at me and Buddy and laugh. I think they are calling us Gueros. We laugh back, uncomfortably, sure that us gringos are the butt of some awful joke. They give us something sweet called platanos to eat. Ther
e is a payphone, and that is all that matters. I pick up the phone handset and place a collect call to Mom. She is coming to get us and the truck.

  “Oh Baby, look at you! What happened?” Mom evaluates my condition and looks like she’s going to cry.

  “Mom, I’m fine. Let’s just get out of here and pick up Idjit from the kennel.”

  “Uh, let’s just get you home and out of sight right now.” Mom’s eyes suspiciously scan the area outside of the little bodega. “We’ll talk about Idjit when we get there. You have bigger problems to deal with right now, if you know what I mean.”

  I don’t know exactly what she means, but once we get into her rental car Mom explains. Right now there is a man-hunt up and down the east coast for me, Totem, and Buddy. It turns out that the Sombrero Tower did not explode because of our fireworks. The radio in Rudy Erikson’s backpack was packed with C-4 explosives and probably was intended for an abortion clinic. The bomb coincidentally detonated just as the fireworks were bursting overhead. Surveillance video from South of the Border showed me, Buddy, and Totem sprinting for the moving truck with a massive explosion booming behind us.

  “Baby, they’re saying you boys are confederates of Rudy Erikson.” It seems that everybody in the country except me knows who Rudy is. Rudy’s a Christian terrorist that has been on the Top 10 Most Wanted list for the past three years. He is wanted for setting off a bomb during what he thought was a gay pride convention in Savannah, Georgia. Due to the speech impediment of a worker at the information desk, Rudy detonated his bomb in the wrong section of the convention center. Instead of a Gay Pride get-together, Rudy blew up a May Bride show. The explosion killed twenty engaged couples who were watching a fashion show of bridesmaid dresses. The men in the audience may have been praying for such an end to the show. Taffeta-wrapped disembodied limbs littered the convention center and Rudy went into hiding in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Mom tells me that my face has been all over the news. “You look good on television. They keep showing your picture. You’re famous.”

  “How in the hell did they get a picture of me so fast?” I wonder aloud.

  “Oh, one of them news stations contacted me,” Mom explains. “All they had was a freeze frame of the surveillance video. You looked kind of funny. Not ha-ha funny. More drunk and crazy funny. I didn’t want them running that photo so I gave them a copy of your senior picture.”

  “Mom, that’s a picture from twenty years ago. And I look like a fucking dork in it. I had a mullet and braces. And you made me wear that gay pink shirt. You need to get in touch with the news station and give them a more recent picture.”

  “No. I like that picture of you. You looked so handsome.” Mom gives me that Mom-look that says don’t argue with me, young man. “They are keeping that one and that’s it.”

  • • •

  Mom drives us to the new house, a three bed, two bath, green stucco dwelling with palm trees in the front yard. Plywood has already been nailed over the windows in anticipation of the hurricane. Mom called for a tow truck and it’s on its way to drag the moving truck here.

  “Mom, let’s go get Idjit Galoot. I want my dog here before the storm hits.”

  “Well,” Mom hesitates, “we need to talk about that. Idjit’s not here. I wasn’t altogether truthful with you when I told you I had Idjit boarded down here. I couldn’t find him before I left. I put up lost posters and called the pound. I cruised the neighborhoods looking for him. I even paid that nice neighbor boy, Kevin Emory, to look for him. That dog just disappeared.”

  “Help yourselves, boys,” Mom says in the direction of Totem and Buddy who have already raided the refrigerator and made high-piled, Dagwood-styled, processed lunch-meat sandwiches. Totem takes a swig of milk right from the carton.

  “Hey, get a glass you filthy beast,” I snap at Totem. He smiles sheepishly, shrugs his shoulders, and hands the milk jug to Buddy who also places his mouth right on the jug’s opening and swigs. “Mom! I can’t believe you would leave Idjit behind. I’m going back up to look for him. I need to take your car and I need some money.”

  “You’re not going anywhere right now, Baby. There’s a hurricane coming our way. There are no flights or buses going out of here right now. I’m taking my car out to get more storm supplies and I don’t have any cash on me for you right now anyway. Just wait here for the tow truck while I’m gone. After this storm passes you can decide what to do.” Mom rubs my back and tries to reassure me. “That nice Kevin Emory promised me that he would continue to look until he finds your dog. Things will work out. Now stay here. I’ll be back soon.”

  • • •

  Mom was lying about not having any cash. I found $150.00 in her overnight bag. I don’t like sneaking around in her stuff and taking money without her permission, but sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. It ain’t right that she left Idjit behind and I’m the only person who’s willing to do something about it.

  I don’t give a shit about a hurricane, a little wind and rain won’t stop me. I’m going for my dog. Mom’s not going to stop me. The lack of a car is not going to stop me. God himself isn’t going to stop me unless he drops that hurricane down right on top of me.

  My skin burns from the fire ant toxins, my eyes hurt, lips and nuts are swollen, and it feels like somebody is stabbing me in the lungs every time I take a breath. Yet still I am determined. I pack one of Mom’s duffel bags with canned food and toiletries to get me through on my trip back to Idjit. I don’t need no stinking trains, planes, cars or buses. I’m going to hitchhike right out of Florida and then figure out the rest of my trip from that point.

  “You’re not going out in this shit alone,” Buddy tells me. “I’m gonna go with you. You’re going to need a traveling partner in case you run into any trouble. Besides, I’m having too much God damn fun and I’m not ready to stop yet.” Buddy’s beard[15] has grown out to full facial covering and his chin juts out valiantly. His posture is straight as a board and his appetite for adventure is obvious. “Yessir-ree, Gawdammit! We’s gwanta have fun!”

  It is decided. Buddy and I will go. Totem will stay behind and wait for the moving truck. He can stick around during the storm and then do whatever he wants. As Buddy and I leave, Totem pops his head out from inside of the refrigerator and wishes us luck through a mouth full of chewed up lunch-meat.

  Outside of the house, Buddy asks: “Do you trust that guy? I mean, he seems alright, but . . . you know . . . you’re leaving him at your Mom’s house to wait for all of your possessions. You’re leaving him alone with your Mom and I think he’s been looking her up and down. We barely know anything about him and he’s hardly said more than a few words to us.”

  “He’s okay,” I tell Buddy. I’ve got a feeling about him. And we are on the road again.

  With $150.00, a duffle-bag full of canned meat products[16], and Buddy’s half-full beer pack, we are on our way. And oh, sweet providence, two totally rad BMX bikes lay abandoned in a neighbor’s yard. Obviously the spoiled brats who owned the bikes didn’t care if they were left out to rust or blow away in a storm. They were all but abandoned and clearly meant to be there for us.

  Not a soul to be seen out on the street. No sounds of dogs barking, kids playing or birds chirping. The dark grey sky and fast moving clouds cast an ominous shadow over the cookie-cutter stucco houses of the Boca Del Vista planned community. Buddy quickly seizes the cooler of the two bikes, hops on, and rides a wheelie down the street. “Come on, Peckerwood!” he yells back at me. I mount my bike and trail behind him as we pedal our way out of the community.

  The main road, Calle Ocho, is mostly unbothered by auto traffic. Homeless people mill about, pushing shopping carts and holding involved conversations with invisible friends. A wild man in a brown bathrobe and a matted gray beard shouts at the clouds, wagging his finger at the charcoal sky. We do the same as we coast by on our bikes.

  “That’s right, Amigo,” shouts the mad monk. “Follow the trails. Watch
the clouds, follow the trails.” I look up and see a westward flowing trail in the clouds, like a river, the clouds in the current moving faster than the others. Gales of wind pressing on our backs, we speed along on bikes that are too small for our bloated man-bodies. Vegetable stands and grimy gas stations give way to strip malls with nail salons and insurance brokers. Cuban restaurants and dollar stores line the sides of the road—new development, crunching up the tip of the Florida peninsula, encroaching on the swampy Everglades. Buddy throws me a warm beer and pops one open for himself.

  In a Piggly Wiggly parking lot sits a giant recreational vehicle shaped like a bratwurst.

  “It’s the fucking Bratmobile!” Buddy shouts at me and the wind almost carries his voice away before it reaches my ears. He points toward a brown, tubular, simulated-meat behemoth on wheels. “Oh, man, we’ve gotta fucking stop!” Buddy jumps off of his bike while it is still rolling and lets it do an awkward cartwheel into an overturned shopping cart.

  I set my bike down beside the meaty vehicle and we both gaze on with shock and awe. Who hasn’t seen the commercials with the Albert Morgan Bratmobile. It’s a freakin’ pop culture icon. I didn’t even really believe it existed, but there it was, just sitting in the grocery store parking lot. I give Buddy a boost so that he can look in through the windshield.

  “Oh, my fucking gawd! It’s incredible!” Buddy squeals. “It’s like a gargantuan penis on wheels.”