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I had just left the local Wal-Mart (unfortunately the only thing open at midnight that sells both beer and cigarettes.) and was heading up Hwy-74 back to the house, gently patting the case of Budweiser Select (again, unfortunate. I’d much rather have a lager, but I’m on a budget here.) when a most foul odor pierced my nostrils with overpowering vigor. “Skunk,” I muttered to myself. I drove along half expecting to see a monochromatic corpse bloated on the roadside. Somewhere between four and six miles down Hwy-74 yet another overpowering stench invaded my nasal cavity. Except, this time I was jamming out to For Those About to Rock, muttered “opossum”, and instead of scrunching my nose, I started laughing at myself. I laughed because of my ability to distinguish the source of the different… aromas. And I thought about a week or so earlier when someone said they smelled cow shit and I corrected that they were smelling chicken shit. And Jeff Foxworthy came to mind. You might be a redneck… If you can name any animal by the smell of its feces.
I guess what they say is true, you can take a man out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of a man.
I don’t recall the specifics, but I know I had been at a party. I’m pretty sure it was a kegger hosted by this Staff Sergeant that looked like Jessica Alba, but I can’t be entirely certain. I am, however, entirely certain that I was drunk off my ass that night. So was my lady friend, we’ll call her Ashley. Ashley was an attractive, fit, and somewhat sexually uninhibited young woman. Our sex life was awesome, we tried new things, we were awesome at the old, we did it often, and we did it everywhere; however, she was adamantly against the notion of anal sex.
Now I’m not an anal fiend or anything like that, but I am defiant. The moment she set the rule of “no rear entry” it became my primary objective. I always want what I can’t have. Time passed by and I slowly wore her down. Eventually, she tried it and, to her surprise, she actually enjoyed it. I had taken what I wasn’t allowed and was rather content with myself. I didn’t feel the need to press the matter any longer, so when she brought up the next day that she was rather sore, I agreed that we would only do it on the rarest of occasions.
A few months went by and we found ourselves at the party I was taking about. We were both incredibly drunk, and incredibly horny. No bathroom quickie or cramped closet romp would allow us the pleasures our hearts genitals desired. We made an exit, stage left, and cruised home. Our pace was slow and steady as we navigated the vacant, back road, shortcuts. As soon as we arrived at my house we started stripping, and had initiated the act a little early, in the form of your traditional stand and carry position in the carport. We moved into the house, stumbled through the kitchen, dodged the bar, and bounced off the hallway walls until reaching my bedroom door. “Hey dude, how’s it-oh fuck!” my roommate, Tom, saw my exposed ass as I fumbled with the door to my bedroom.
We ultimately ended up in my bedroom, on my bed, doing-the-do in the more conventional sense. Both of us are still extremely inebriated when I get the idea of trying anal again. I don’t recall exactly how I brought it up, but in my drunken state I’m sure it wasn’t far from, “Hey, babe, let me put it in your pooper.” Regardless, it worked, and she agreed. So I scurry over to the end of the bed, and she starts going through my nightstand looking for the K.Y. Jelly. She finds it and, somehow, between my penis and her ass, uses over half of the bottle. So were all lubed up, and in our positions, and I’m readying the approach. Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Houston, we have lift-uh oh, there seems to be a slight problem. Despite the gallon of oily lubricant that my penis is swimming in, entry is posing rather challenging. I’m pushing, but it’s not going in. I’m trying to be careful, because it is a rather sensitive area, and I’m pushing, and pushing. Finally! I start to penetrate, but the momentum and the lubricant play their evil deeds and, instead of taking it slow and easy, my entire penis slams into her pooper. I mean entire. Balls deep. I know immediately that the situation is ugly, and I don’t move. I’m just standing there, slack-jawed.
Aaaaaaaaaaaannnngggghhhh!!!!!!! She screams.
I scream.
Tom screams.
She screams again.
I scream again.
Tom screams again.
Tom comes rushing to the door, “Are you guys okay?!”
“Yeah, dude. Don’t come in!”
“Are you sure? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing dude, just don’t fucking come in.” I’m freaking out; trying to make sure my drunken Ashley isn’t bleeding all over my bed. She’s curled up, fetal position, bawling uncontrollably. I don’t really remember much after that. I think I passed out. All I know is that was the last time I had anal sex.
When I was in Kuwait there was a big job site, a $2.6 million construction project. It was a massive place, there we’re a ton of Third Country Nationals (euphemism for broke-ass laborers who make a dollar a day, just to send it to their family back home), and they worked extended hours, so we had to have a ton of escorts to secure the area. We we’re there all the time.
For the first several weeks, one of the spots we routinely set up shop was on a large piece of metal that protruded from the ground. It was in a good spot; a back corner of the fence-line, away from the construction, in a good angle to see a lot of what was going on. Day in and day out we sat on this big piece of metal and watched these TCNs do their thing. They moved some bricks, took a siesta, bitched each other out, moved some more bricks, and the cycle continued. Sometimes the boredom got the best of us. We’d dance around if someone had a radio, or we’d kick stuff, or draw in the sand. Whatever the entertainment of the hour may be. Once we played a makeshift game of horseshoes; we threw rocks, instead of horseshoes, at the big piece of metal, instead of a pole. A few times we banged on it with sticks and rebar, to make a little percussion à la the Stomp musical group. It could get pretty brutal just sitting there in the sand for hours on end, day in and day out.
Time passed, we worked other sites, banged on other pieces of metal, and made up new games with rocks and sand. About two months after we had started working on that particular construction project, one of our guys who had never worked the site before notices the big piece of metal. We saw it and said, “There we go, a nice place to sit.” He saw it and said, “What the hell is that thing?” So he radioed it in. He asked around if anyone knew what the big chunk of metal was, and nobody could answer him. So they followed procedure and sent some Explosives Ordinance Disposal (EOD) guys down to check it out.
Sure enough, the damn thing was a huge fucking bomb that had never gone off. It was just sitting there, ready to blow up. It was still live too; made a humongous explosion when EOD took it out. Needless to say everyone was pretty shocked… Wait, you mean that thing I was beating with a piece of rebar was a bomb? Yup. Like, the kind that blow up? Yeah. You mean that piece of metal that we jumped up and down on all of last week was a bomb? Yup. A real bomb? Yeah, a real bomb.
Son of a bitch. I don’t think any other group of 50-or-so people have ever been so simultaneously relieved to still have their legs as we all were that day. This moral should be pretty easy to figure out: Don’t beat on strange pieces of metal. They might blow you up.
Despite my loathing for the city of San Angelo, I miss it often. I miss it for all of the people I knew, because they are what got me through that delicate time in my life. I had great friends; friends I was closer to within three months than friends with which I had grown up. Some of them seemed more like family than friends, and one of those members of my extended family was Julio.
I remember picking him up at the airport. Setting a wonderful example for the rest of the city, the sewer lines had cracked at the airport; the whole area reeked of rotten human feces. It was bad, ‘singe the hair in your nostrils’ bad. But I greeted him, got his luggage loaded into my car, and set off to the base to welcome him to his new life. Julio was Puerto Rican and a native speaker of the Spanish language. His English left something to be desired, and everyone had frequent trouble understanding him through his thick accent. Don’t get me wrong, I had mounds of respect and admiration for his ability to speak in two languages. The more he worked with us, the better his English was; despite his remaining accent, it’s easy to say he’s now a fluent speaker.
We hit it off almost immediately, having shared a common interest in import automobiles. My car alone was enough of an icebreaker and in the months to come there was little dead air when in shared company. He was married when he showed up, so he didn’t have to live in the dorms, but once they found out he was separated from his wife, they considered making him move in. Before they had time, he relinquished his on-base housing and moved in with me. We shared a 3-bedroom apartment with my previous roommate, Jerry, who had met a girl and spent frequently less time with us. Having worked and lived together, Julio and I spent most of out time in each other’s presence. Yet, we somehow managed to never argue, less the occasional tussle over beer preference, or some other insignificant difference in taste (as far as the large scheme of things goes, anyway).
Julio was a very easygoing guy; it was a nice contrast, since I’m constantly pinging off the walls. Sometimes we would just sit on the balcony and smoke a cigarette, or enjoy a beer. Sometimes we would just ride. We rode around back roads, through expensive neighborhoods, and into old areas of town. Sometimes we would pick our favorite old house, or talk about what we would do if we had one of the mansions, but a lot of the time we just rode in silence, taking in the scenery. Those we’re the rides I cherished the most; the ones that were near transcendental, meditative. Jerry moved in with his girlfriend and Julio and I eventually started renting a house on the outskirt of one of the neighborhoods we frequented. Sooner or later I started spending time at other people’s houses, and Julio met a girl who moved in with him. I moved into a house with a friend who returned from the Middle East, and Julio’s and my interaction dwindled to mostly in-office interaction. Though the rides stopped, they were, and will continue to be, forever cherished.
To you, Julio, I tip my hat. Thank you for being a brother.
I drove my mother to her bank the other day so she could get some cash. It was after banking hours and we took the drive-through to the 24-hour ATM. The ATM in the middle of all the lanes of the bank drive-through. The drive-through. And on its little keypad, I found braille.
This is either good, bad, or ugly. Using my exquisite powers of deductive reasoning, I would assume that GPS systems have become so advanced that they are no longer limited to mere “turn left, 25 feet” directions, but can now take on autopilot-esque qualities, and actually control the movement of the vehicle. I want one. Imagine the possibilities. Man, I could go for a 6-dollar burger right now, but I want to finish this chapter, “Carl’s Jr.” Boom, your zooming your way to go get your grub on – while reading a book. That would be cool, read a book while your car drives for you. Multitasking. But who are we kidding here? Let’s think huge – life-changing. You could go get shit faced, and always have a designated driver. Don’t feel like waiting till you get to her place? KITT, take us home!
But I seriously doubt this is what it means. More likely, we’ve got blind people who walk through the drive-through to use the ATM. This is dangerous. It would be bad enough for anyone to walk where jackasses drive, but it compounds when they can’t see you coming and don’t know where to aim when they dive out of the way. They’d probably hear some soccer mom barreling around the corner in her Ford Excursion, or H2, or equivalently oversized gas-hog, just to dive out of the way and slam their head into a column they weren’t aware of. They could knock themselves unconscious, fall onto the drive-through ground, and be ran over by someone talking on their cellphone, putting on eyeliner, and yelling at her four kids in the back seat.
That’s bad, but I can think of even worse. We’ve got blind people driving around out there, with no auto-pilot! Just kind of winging it. Mowing over innocent joggers and dog-walkers. The roads would not be safe, and neither would the sidewalks.
I may be overreacting, and it could just be there for all those voluntarily-braille-reading patrons. But I wouldn’t count on it. Next time you see someone driving beside you, rocking it out with some Stevie Wonder shades, get as far ahead of them as you can.
The first life lesson I recall learning was the permanence of death. When I was four years old, my step-dad took me downtown and picked up a Daisy Red Ryder. It was magnificent. Real wood, lever action, even a little metal loop with some leather tied to it! Oh, how I adored it so. I was finally a real-life, shoot-em-up cowboy.
With my little rattlesnake-skin boots, my red bandanna, and my Red Ryder, I was the new sheriff of Perry’s Yard. Watch out. I spent day after day with my glorious Red Ryder. I showed every tree, bush, fencepost, coke-can, and beer-bottle who was boss, one BB at a time. No single inanimate object dare step out of line with me in town. Then, when I had shot everything, and shot everything again, and shot some stuff I wasn’t supposed to and got yelled at for it, and then shot some more stuff, I started to get bored. These lifeless entities were no match for my superior marksmanship. I needed a challenge.
So I set my sights on moving prey. I shot at squirrels, and birds, and pretty much everything that I could get away with. My favorites were the birds who often settled along the barbed wire fence in our back yard. They just lined up, sat there. It was like a row of coke cans, without the effort of setting them up. They would sit. I would shoot. They would fly away. I was, once again, the supreme ruler of my domain. All was grand, until one fateful afternoon, when a hoppy-toad (yeah, I called it a hoppy-toad. get fucked.) decided to test my rule. And by test my rule, I mean he just kinda… hopped… across the porch, but let’s not get caught up in semantics here.
So there I was. And there he was. It was high noon, and we were having a draw. I informed the town inhabitants (my parents), and gathered them outside. My mom and my step-dad warned me, “Are you sure you want to shoot that toad?” “You know, if you do, he’ll die.” Of course he will. That’s why I’m shooting him. He’s challenged my rule, and for that, he must suffer the consequences. I take aim. I pull the trigger. My BB gun clicks. The hoppy-toad just sits there. What a sham?! Shouldn’t he be grabbing his chest, and flipping all around saying, “Oh. Yuh got me.” Again, I take aim and fire.
This time, something is different. The little hoppy-toad looks flat. He’s just sitting there, not moving. Something is oozing out of him. What’s going on here? Hoppy-toad, what’s wrong? I kind of poke him with the barrel of my gun, “hoppy-toad?” I reach down and pick him up by one of his little hoppy-toad feet. His tongue rolls out of his mouth, and I can see it’s covered in blood. I totally freak out. Mom, fix it. The hoppy-toad is broken. I start crying, and run to my mom. They explain to me, that the hoppy-toad is dead, and he’s not coming back. I killed him. I cry some more. How could this happen? My step-dad says, “Well, you killed him. I think you better go bury him.” I cry some more. But I do as I’m told, and I go put my little hoppy-toad in a shallow grave, just into the edge of the forest that lines our front yard. What had I done?
Neither my mother, nor my step-dad seemed very concerned with this tragic loss. This wasn’t the case with me, however, and I would not touch the cursed Red Ryder for months to come. The vision of that dead little hoppy-toad is still so fiercely emblazoned in my mind that every time I think if death, I see him. I see him sitting on the porch, and I see him hanging lifeless as I carry him to his grave. To this day, I have yet to shoot at another animal.
