Joel
My brother had called a week or two ago to tell/ask me about the graduation trip he was planning. He wanted the two of us to fly to Pamplona, Spain to run with the bulls in the San Fermin festival next July. Under other circumstances, I'd be really confused because Joel and I have no Spanish ancestry or, for that matter, any interest in Spain and things Spanish. Please understand, I respect Spain and it is a lovely country with a vibrant culture and myriad history. Naturally, I had to point the discrepancy out to Joel. "Dude, why Spain? We could go cardboarding in New-Zealand or something."
Joel had always been very quiet and he lived in a world all his own. But unlike most detached people who are completely oblivious, Joel's world had annexed ours somewhere along the line and thus he was always acutely aware of his surroundings. Most people regarded him as a socially handicapped idiot savant, a corner lurker; they felt sorry for him, and always tried to engage him and speak to him in social settings. But Joel was always "with it." What he was doing in the corner, was psycho-analyzing everyone in the crowd, listening in to all the conversations, reading between the lines. He had that amusing knack for euphemistically insulting obnoxious shallow people. He could do it so well that sometimes they would even smile and blush and thank him. This'll get back to Hemingway in a bit. I promise. In the meantime, indulge me. I'm a cuckold.
Joel always took up the most fascinating and obscure hobbies. Japanese puzzle boxes, Burr puzzles, Chinese meditation balls, 5x5 rubiks cubes. He could build and program robots using parts from house-hold appliances and old twenty-ounce soda bottles. A textbook eccentric right down to the punctuation and the footnotes. He would walk into campus at sunset and lie around on the benches in the Concourse, smoke cigars, and think about things like probability or the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle. He understood WHY Bach was brilliant and he always cringed when pianos played the harpsichord parts. He was an athlete nonpareil, excellent on the baseball diamond, and phenominal on the gridiron. His was a carousel personality that could engage anyone on any level if he so chose. He new a lot about several things and little bit about everything and was practically worshiped among family and friends as a lesser diety. We all learned to simply nod and say: "Well OK." Like the time Dad and I had to borrow Joel's little rusted out '88 Honda Accord to go get fertilizer from the nursery because Dad didn't want to soil his Ford Windstar (Aside: God forbid that we soil thee; oh, thou, most blessed among mini-vans.)
We were standing out in the driveway in the shade of the huge oak, the one that got decapitated by Hurricane Opal. This was back when Mom and Dad's house was still covered in ivy and they still had French doors on the side porch; back before the stone lions got painted black to match the flower boxes. And Dad and I stood perplexed, scratching our heads, and staring down at a trunk that was crammed full of flattened cardboard boxes and a couple of spent cans of cooking spray. It was a good sized trunk for a small Japanese four-door sedan. In fact, later on in graduate school, I would discover that you could cram a whole full-grown whitetail buck into that trunk. "Joel!" Dad shouted. And Joel got up from the side-porch where he'd been hunched over his do-it-yourself home-mayhem kit; busy, using a benzene torch to mutilate a meticulously assembled and hand painted plastic Ford F150 model pick-up truck. The thick black smoke was still rising from the twisted wreckage. This was just the sort of reckless decadence that Dad so detested. Momentarily distracted by the smoke, Dad stretched an accusing finger towards the sizzling 1:32 scale conflagration. Joel was already halfway to us, stepping over the monkey grass, benzene torch still inhand the hissing blue cone of flame coming dangerously near to his trousers with each step. He was wearing his old REAL skateboards t-shirt with the REAL silk-screened onto the front. The one Tony Hawk had signed in Pensacola even though he was skating for Birdhouse at the time. And then came my Dad's signature: "Doggonit, you guys!" Guilt by association. He was craning his neck and squinting through his glasses to see what was burning. And he was still pointing at the totaled out plastic F150.
We had all seen Joel working on that truck. He'd spent the last three weeks slumped over his workbench under the sizzling ochre cone of an old telescoping architect's lamp, carefully assembling the little truck using tweezers and Testor's plastic cement, the kind that smells like cancer; and painting every piece with his miniature air brush kit and an assortment of tiny little brushes. The truck was a gorgeous electric-blue Ford F150 with a lift-kit, little yellow smiley-face rally lights perched atop chrome rollbars, and a taupe leather interior; and it was impeccable, the level of detail was staggering. And here it was with black smoke curling off of its flames. I think profligate was the word that Dad was searching for. "What are you doing?!" Dad never used profanity, but there was an understood "the hell" in there somewhere. If this was a movie, this would be the part where the hellion kid with the red mohawk, plaid pants, and pierced septum lights up a cigarette and blows smoke in my dad's face. Joel just stood there silently with his bored you-just-don't-get-it-do-you expression. And Dad shook his head and we all looked down at the trunk-full of cardboard. Joel, anticipating the question says: "It's for cardboarding." And that really cleared it up because we all knew what the hell cardboarding was. He said it with a nonchalance that left you buckling under the compulsion to nod and play along for fear of looking ignorant. Joel stared at our faces and took a drag from the invisible cigarette. "Well OK...get it out...we need to make room for the fertilizer," Dad grunted. Joel shrugged indifferently and swung his head, slinging his shoulder-length auburn hair out of his eyes. "...and get a haircut!" Dad barked as he stormed back up the driveway to the house.
It wasn't until Joel was in college that I actually asked him what cardboarding was. It was Christmas time and we were all home at Mom and Dad's. This was after the ivy had been peeled off of the house tendril-by-tendril; all thanks to idiot-savant-sibling and yours truly, who labored tirelessly under the ruthless supervision of the parental gestapo. This was after Dad learned about stick-edgers and self-propelled lawnmowers. After their pipes froze and I'd had to suffer the misfortune of crawling under the house and using the propane torch to mistakenly thaw the natural gas pipe which, incidentally, did not need thawing although it looked an aweful lot like a water pipe. The stone lions were still green and Mom and Dad still had French doors on the side porch. This was a couple years after I had walked past Joel's workbench one evening a few days after he had fried the model truck. And I had noticed the torched, blue, F-150 model sitting under the architect's lamp. Only now it had perfect miniature rust painted on the charred sections and little glints of exposed aluminum painted into the dents. The plastic windshield had been carefully scored with an exacto-blade to duplicate impact fractures. There was mud caked in the wheel-wells and I noticed that he had put bands of fine-gauge orthodontic wire inside the tires so that when they melted, the wire rusted and the rubber oozed down and hung over the bands like wet cloth: perfect 1:32 scale charred tires. Of the millions of mass-produced Revell brand, 1:32 scale, electric-blue, 1995 Ford F-150 step-sides; in its own way, Joel's was the only one that was perfect. All the typical and unavoidable imperfections had been masked by the intentionally warped frame and deep-fried body panels. The driver's side door was missing and there were tiny electrical wires snaking out of the dash where some little 1:32 scale pilfering punk had made off with the stereo. I couldn't believe how perfect it was.
We would have learned to expect this kind of ordered chaos from Joel. But that's where Joel's personality and character really diverged from the norm. Because Dad never saw the finished product. And If it had been me, I would have shoved that work of art in Dad's face, the very second after I'd added the finishing touches. Did someone say profligate? But Joel, in contrast, exuded quiet confidence. He never bragged or defended himself. I think that's what I admire most about him. He only offers up tidbits of information when he's in the right mood and only if you're willing to fish for them. He's a locked vault full of hilarious anecdotes and witty comments and our Holidays were spent sitting around, probing him with conversation, waiting and hoping that he'd slip up and casually mention some unbelievable misadventure in passing. It was like standing impatiently around the baggage claim at the airport, knowing that the little buzzer is going to sound, knowing that the red flashing light will begin to strobe. Standing and waiting anxiosly, trying to anticipate the exact second that the conveyor belt will lurch forward. It was just like that. And it was during one such episode last Christmas that we found out that he'd spent the previous week sleeping on the roof of Auburn's Ralph Brown Draughon Library. Apparently studying for finals had been so taxing that driving home in the evenings when the library closed had been out of the question. He'd apparently decided instead to bring his sleeping bag along. His sleeping bag and a homemade lockpick which he used to pick the lock on the library freight-elevator which deposited him under a ladder that led to the roof.
Anyways, back to cardboarding. Once again, we were all home at Mom and Dad's for Christmas. This was back when the ten-foot Fraser fir made the livingroom smell like turpentine and the Christmas lights cast pine-needle shadows all over the walls and ceiling. Back when cinnamon potpourri simmered on the woodburning stove and you could smell Mom's clam chowder cooking in the kitchen. It was late and Joel had been foraging in the kitchen and was then busy, slumped on the sofa eating a bag of pastel-colored duck-and-bunny-shaped sweet-tarts that were left over from some Easter. He and I were in the den watching some Turner South rubish like American Ninja Twelve or something as we silently contemplated the pros and cons of ritual suicide. I piped up and asked the question bluntly: "Just what the hell is cardboarding anyways?" Joel was halfway through a pink chalky duck. He just stopped chewing and stared at me like I'd just asked where babies came from. I mean we're still not sure that he knows what sex is. I mean no one ever told him about it and he never asked. We think he was dating the daughter of a local attorney during his first year of college, but again, we're not sure. Sometimes I'm tempted to draw an invisible cross in the air with my fingertip and ask him: "Does a vagina go this way or that way?" You know, just to see if he knows.
Anyways, Joel said nothing and finished chewing the sweet-tart duck as he rooted around in his pocket in search of his cell-phone; and as he did this, he just continued to stare at me. He produced the phone, flipped it open, hit speed-dial, and pressed the phone to his ear. I could hear someone else's phone ringing on the other end. He crammed a purple bunny in his mouth and started crunching. "Tyler." Apparently, anymore, a person's name isn't just their name; it also functions as an informal greeting. "Hey, man, you wanna go cardboarding?" He asks the garbled voice that is supposed to be Tyler's. The garbled voice says something that I can't make out and Joel says: "Not yet. You can call them and see. Yeah. Josh is going." A couple more seconds of unilateral cell-phone chit-chat and Joel slammed the phone shut. "C'mon. Get your jacket and some gloves...and try and find some packing tape." He said as he stood and stretched. Then in the kitchen, he turns to me with this playfully derisive grin and says: " You better shut up and pay attention, fool, because you're about to get educated."
Joel had always had an entourage. An amalgamated conglomerate of the faithful. Something like a 24-hour on-call lynch-mob/insurgent guerrilla army/demolition crew/evidence disposal team. Close your eyes and imagine a pimple-faced, underaged version of the A-Team. Now take away the sweet-ass van and the guns and give them an old beat-up '88 Honda Accord, a pile of skateboards, and enough PVC pipe to construct a semi-automatic potato-cannon. Joel refers to them fondly as: "...my legion of cold-ass, no-bullshit, tough-guys... made up entirely of dudes who...are required to train in the art of cowboy-rules no-limit beat-down and who... fit the description of 'ruggedly handsome, balls-to-the-wall genius, and all around bad-ass,' not unlike myself."
We're talking Team Macgyver here.This crew could topple a South American government in less than 24 hours using nothing except the change in their pockets, a half cup of brake fluid, and a jar of creamy peanut butter (preferably Jiff.) They could devastate a third-world political structure and get it all on videotape, and be home in time to watch Jackass. Now fast-forward a couple of years. They've got a couple semesters of chemistry, system dynamics and controls, object oriented programming, and political economy. And they've upgraded from skateboards and '88 Accords to Toyota 4-Runners, Vespa motorscooters, and tweed blazers. A seemingly refined bunch of fellows (strong emphasis on "seemingly.")
I shimmied into my polar fleece as Joel came clopping down the stairs. He was wearing his Marmot fleece, the matted greenish-gold one that looked like a giant booger and the fingers of a pair of gloves hung languidly from one of the pockets. "You find any packing tape?" He grunted as he groped about beneath the sofa cushions in search of his keys. "Seriously, I haven't lived here in like five years, man, how the hell do I know where they keep tha tape?" I said. Joel just stopped and shook his head and looked at me with an expression that said: "You lazy piece of shite." He pocketed his keys and together we searched the kitchen for packing tape. I succeeded only in finding a half-roll that was yellow and cracked with age. I turned to see Joel sitting on the counter-top munching on a bag of stale Cheetohs. "Cheetohs." He said with his mouth full as he thrust the open end of the bag in my direction. It's funny how we never abandon that infantile tendancy to verbally label things for everyone. I shook my head no, trying to decide whether or not to be disgusted with the fact that he hadn't helped me search for the tape when he seemed to need it so desperately. Joel crunched on the last fist-full of Cheetohs as he dusted his hands off and cast the bag aside. "Need some Jones [Jones Soda]..." He spoke with his mouth full again and it came out as: Nid Shom Jownsh. He had a couple of cans of cooking spray on the counter next to him and these he collected as he hopped down off of the counter. He wagged the cans in my face as if I understood what the hell they were for. "Cool," said I. He nodded and gulped the Cheetohs down and I followed him out the back door.
Together we stood out on the side walk and listened to our teeth chatter as we watched our breath turn gold in the light of the patinaed Tiffany-style street lamp. The air was crisp and and sharp with the cold and the stars seemed to be burning holes in the night sky. I pulled my wool hat down over my ears and fished my gloves out of my pocket. Tires screeched in the distance. The sound reminded me of the pig farms near our home in Taitung. Joel and I turned just in time to see Tyler's sticker-encrusted four-door Honda spill out of a side-street and onto Oak Street. He always drove with his interior lights on and we could see him smiling behind the wheel. At one time the car had been a black '95 Accord but it had slowly become a mobile billboard for Toy Machine, Spitfire, Hook-Ups, et al. Evidently, Tyler's muffler had fallen victim to a parking block or a speed bump some ways back because the little Accord put-putted like a go-cart and belched smoke like an old steam-locomotive. Wahhhh. Tyler mashed down on the gas as he spotted us. Joel and I exchanged sidelong glances and took a couple of slow wary steps back from the street, fighting the urge to dive for cover. The suspension linkages made a terrible mechanical crunch as the front driver-side wheel hit the curb and disappeared up inside the wheel well. Tyler's head jostled violently about behind the steering wheel, he looked like a marionette having a seizure. The car ground to a halt, the tires narrowly missing our toes. Weeebada Weeebada Weeebada, to hear the old four-cylinder engine idle like that, you would swear it had a headcold. Tyler's goofy smile was wild and as crooked as congress. When he smiled like that, you knew not to turn your back on him for fear of getting donkey-punched or shoved. We could hear the stereo booming and as the window lowered, a torrent of grungy power-chords assailed us.
Joel and I stared back at him crossly and Joel ran his hand across his own neck like a knife, signalling Tyler to kill the music. Despite our best efforts to educate him, Tyler still thought loud music was cool. The music faded out, giving us room to notice the sickeningly sweet and spicey aroma of some cheap, DollarTree, air freshener. "Sorry," Tyler's apology came as a mumble. Joel and I climbed into the car. Something about the inside of Tyler's car reminded me of the Death Star's trash compactor that Leia, Han, and Luke got trapped in in Star Wars. I was up to my ankles in emptied Funnions, Bugles, and Cheetohs bags. The seat was littered with receipts, old AA batteries, bits of hardware, a socket wrench, an empty bottle of Castrol GTX 20W-50, an assortment of badly worn skateboard wheels, jewelcase fragments, the disturbing stains, etcetera. And in the crevices and seams there were deposits of food crumbs and drinking-straw wrappers and some sort of oily mystery lint. He was probably culturing anthrax in there without even knowing it. Then there was the interesting stuff like a fresh box of Lucky bearings and a road flare, the kinds of things that you wondered if he would care if you pocketed them. "What the hell, man?!" Tyler barked. I looked up to find him glaring at me, or rather, trying to glare. I shrugged sheepishly and pulled the box of bearings back out of my pocket and placed it back on the seat next to me. Tyler tried to glare at Joel too, as if to imply that Joel was somehow responsible for me. The glare shattered as he broke out into a smile and added laughingly: "Ask before you take crap!" He pressed down on the gas and the engine coughed and groaned. "You got any tape?" Joel asked Tyler. Tyler shook his head. I desperately wanted explanations. Why did we need tape and what's with the cooking spray?
Moments later, we were crusing along the local Industrial Parkway, the streetlights made our shadows sweep long archs over the interior of the car as we passed them. "What are we doing?" I finally asked. "Looking for cardboard..." came the distracted reply. I raised my eyebrows and nodded. I couldn't see a thing. The rear windows were completely fogged. I slummped back in the seat and fiddled with an old kids meal trinket that appeared to be a box of french-fries that transformed into a gay-looking robot. The car was loud and I couldn't hear Joel's and Tyler's conversation, but I could tell by their facial expressions that the search for cardboard was not going well at all.
We left the Industrial Park to search behind the various funiture and appliance stores along Mainstreet. I was busy drawing and quartering the gay french-fry robot when Tyler slammed on the brakes. "Whoa!" Joel exclaimed. Just like that they were out the doors and sprinting. I sat up and craned my neck between the two front seats. All I could see through the foggy windshield were their backs and the bottoms of their shoes illuminated by the headlights as the ran. I felt like the dash-mounted camera on a police cruiser. I opened my door, got out of the car. Joel and Tyler were gawking at a collapsed cardboard box that was leaning against the back wall of Badcock's furniture. The collapsed box, that had at one time, housed a seventy-two inch plasma screen, was easily eight feet by ten feet. I walked over and stood, looking over their shoulders. Joel turned to Tyler without taking his eyes off of the box. "Cowboy-rules..." He said, which translates as: "This is going to be so frickin' insane that we're all going to crap our pants!;" which in turn translates as: "Awesome! We are going to have ever so much fun!" Tyler just nodded.
We dragged the box over to the car and tossed it up onto the roof. The car looked ridiculous under the box, like an ant trying to carry a graham cracker. We piled in and rolled the windows down and each of us reached out and took hold of the edges of the box to hold it down on the roof. The box jutted out so far fore and aft that it hung down over the windshield, forcing Tyler to slump over the steering wheel and rest his chin on the dash to see where he was going. At one point, he was steering with his chin, using his free-hand to squeegee the fog off of the glass. We veered a bit and sideswiped a row of azalea bushes and ran over a plastic tricycle. Fortunately, we were less than two blocks from the house, of course, in that town, everything is two-blocks from everything else anyways. Nevertheless, we were grateful because even at ten and fifteen miles per hour, the icey wind was gnawing ravinously on our fingers inspite of the gloves. And Tyler whined all the way to the house for he had no gloves. We deposited the box on the front lawn as we passed, launching it on the count of three.
We drove to Walmart and pooled our pocket change to buy half-a-dozen rolls of clear packing tape and nearly as many cans of cooking spray. The cooking spray was store-brand and this irked Tyler immensely as he had heatedly vouched for the superiority of Pam and other name-brands. Such cardboarding minutiae fascinated me to no end. I was still largely in the dark, but I was accumulating my vision of cardboarding piecemeal. The cooking spray would likely serve as a lubricant, this I deduced simply because I knew from my previous exploits with Joel and Company that it wasn't flammable and all of Joel's and Company's exploits were subdivided into two classes. Class one encompassed activities invovling all manner of fire and explosions. Class two dealt with engaging in dangerous activities (including those activities in class one) whilst traveling at high speeds. Lubricant was typically applied in the pursuit of activities in the latter class.
We arrived back at the house where we emptied the contents of our Walmart bags onto the enormous cardboard box. It was well after midnight and the streets were quiet with the exception of a dog barking in the distance. The burping noise of tape being peeled away from the spool broke the silence and I looked down through my steaming breath to see Tyler and Joel running a line of packing tape over the length of the box. Joel walked backwards on his knees, allowing the spool to rotate in his hands as it fed out a stream of tape and Tyler followed on hands and knees, pressing the tape firmly down onto the cardboard and smoothing out any bubbles of air that formed underneath. I stood and watched selfconsciously, not sure if I was supposed to be doing something or not. Joel and Tyler worked like pre-schoolers, quietly and intently, not even stopping to wipe their dripping noses. They just sniffed and comunicated with hand-signals until Tyler started bitching about how cold his hands were and Joel huffed: "Dude, don't be such a pussy. Here..." and he took off one of his gloves and handed it to Tyler who shook his head and said: "Dude, that's retarded! Don't you have any more gloves in the house?" Joel pulled the glove back down onto his hand and told me to go fetch another pair of gloves from the house.
Tragically, my search turned up nothing and upon hearing this, Tyler stomped off to his car and thrashed around in the back seat for a bit and returned with a pair of thick wool socks that bore a hideous argyle print. These he wore on his hands like mittens and on his face he wore a scowl that defied laughter. Joel and Tyler continued to laminate the box with packing tape and I grabbed a roll myself and started at the other end of the box. It took all six rolls to cover the box and when we were done we stood and admired our work. It was no longer merely a flattened cardboard box. It was suddenly substantial, solid, and more permanent. The light from the lamp shown on the glossy expanse of the laminate. After a few moments of silence and sniffing, Joel motioned with his hands and we gathered around and lifted the box and carried it over and slid it up onto the roof of his 4-Runner. Joel and I climbed in and rolled the windows down and Tyler ran back to his car and returned with a pair of crusty gym socks, cursing under his breath as he struggled to get them on over the woolen argyle ones.
In an effort to avoid local law enforcement, we cruised the back streets until we were well beyond the city-limits. The cardboard kept lurching everytime we caught a breeze or traveled faster than fifteen miles per hour and my fingers burned terrifically from the cold, the pain was nearly unbearable and I chewed on my tongue until it bled. We were poking along, headed North on highway 263 and I was fairly certain that I knew our destination. We were going to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail on Cambrian Ridge and there we would, no doubt, lube the base of that glorious slab of cardboard, before climbing aboard and whizzing down the grassy hill beneath the driving range. I call it a hill but "hill" does not do that geological anomally justice at all. Top-to-bottom you are looking at about 200 feet of elevation and the face of the hill itself is more or less vertical, how the grass clings to that hillside is a mystery. It was one of those hills that you climb on all fours and keep your head down, for if you stood and looked up at the crest, you would surely fall over backwards from the vertigo. I was no stranger to that hill for I had experienced it once before. Hills like that combine splendidly with gravity and juvenile foolery to bring about a visceral tickling sensation in the pit of one's stomach. I know this because Joel and I carved that hill to ribbons on homemade snowboards one winter after Lower Alabama got a freak-dusting of powder. It had been a perfect day and had ended magnificently after an irate, morbidly obese, red-faced grounds keeper charged us like a rhino. He was nearly upon us when he slipped on a patch of ice and planted his ass solidly on the frozen turf. A look of pure terror spread over his round chubby face and he flapped his arms like great beefy wings as he teetered and disappeared over the edge of the hill. We watched, paralyzed with pure amusement, as he plowed a gaping furrow down the face of the hill. I laughed so hard that I peed myself and had to leave my thermal undies in the woods.
We turned left off of 263 and onto Sherling Lake Road. I knew then that I was right. I grinned just as Joel glanced in my direction. He smiled. The heater was running full blast and my feet were on fire inside my sneakers, but the open windows devoured the toasty air before it could warm the rest of me. Our impatience and cardboarding-induced delerium had overwhelmed our better judgment and we had, each of us, conscioulsy avoided suggesting that the cardboard be lashed to the 4-Runner's luggage rack with bungie cords or nylon rope. The extra ten or twenty minutes of knot-tying and rigamarole had been quite out of the question as simply securing the slab of cardboard with our hands seemed most expedient and conducive to haste. But by the time we arrived at Cambrian Ridge, we were cursing ourselves for the oversight. The gate to the clubhouse was closed as always and we continued driving until the asphalt gave way to a dirt road that led into a thick grove of pinetrees. There the line of street lamps halted its pursuit and, like all mischievous interlopers, we were glad of the darkness.
We stood in pitch blackness, huddled next to the 4-Runner whose engine made tinking and popping noises as it cooled. And aside from the engine's popping, the silence was so intense that my ears rang. We waited anxiously in the trees to see if we had been followed. And as we did so, a gentle breeze came rushing through the treetops and I was glad of the noise for it rid my ears of the ringing. Though cold, the breeze was laced with the scent of the pines and was an absolute pleasure to my olfactories. I shivered excitedly and looked up at the myriads of stars that peeped down at us twixt the swaying boughs. I could feel myself getting sentimental. A gorgeous night like that, being home for the holidays, committing Class-2 mischief with Joel and Tyler just like old times. I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I struggled to blink them back and I was once again glad of the darkness.
The breeze abated and my ears began to ring again. My eyes had adjusted and I could see my breath coming out of me in great ghostly clouds. The silence was insufferable and I fought the impulse to crack my knuckles as I waited for the breeze to return. And return it did only this time it blew hot and limey from Tyler's putrid bowels for he shifted his weight and gave birth to a substantial fart that warbled like a bowling ball rolling down a marble stair case. The seat of his pants steamed in the starlight. Joel and I didn't even flinch. Tyler was a casual farter and his brand of sulfur was downright deadly in tight quarters, but out in the open, he was usually harmless. And so we stood motionless next to him. This we would regret for we had grossly underestimated the potency of that particular batch of flatus. The surly fumes reached our noses all at once. Joel's eyes rolled back into his head and he made as if to sneeze. I reeled backwards and cupped my hand over my nose and mouth. And Tyler just grinned giddily back and forth at the two of us. He caught a glimpse of the remnants of my tears in the starlight and he remarked facetiously: "C'mon! It's not THAT bad!" "Not THAT bad?! Christ, Tyler! You could can that sh!t and sell it to SWAT teams!" Joel exclaimed in falsetto as he fought for air.
We quarantined Tyler by shuffling around so that he stood in our lee. Joel and I scowled at him and clucked disapprovingly. Tyler was very pleased with himself and with our apparent disgust. Of course, we were not really all that disgusted with him. It was all part of the game. A timeless game that had found its place in the male sociopolitical structure the world over. That is, that the expulsion of flatus from the bowels is to be acknowledged by one's peers with exceedingly disproportionate disgust. Typically, this is accomplished via fake convulsions, panicked flight, or simply by the administration of acute chastisement. "Good grief..." I shook my head and drew a hesitant probing breath through my nose. Despite our seemingly disgusted tones, you could hear our smiles in the darkness.
We felt that we had waited long enough, so we each grabbed an edge of the flattened cardboard box and carried it back up the old dirt road. We quickened our pace to a jog as we emerged from the pines. I could hear the sound of our shoes padding along on the asphalt, our heavy breathing, and the hum of the street lamps above. As soon as we could, we turned sharply to the left and hopped over the curb and ran down a steep grassy declivity that led to the safety of the driving range which was hidden in the shadows of the hills that surrounded it. The dew had fallen and frozen and the grass crunched gratifyingly under each step. Crunch crunch crunch. We were then marching along the rim of the great slope that vanished into the darkness below, and the breeze was carrying the scent of the pines up to us once again only now it came laced with the scent of hickory and chimney smoke as well. The stars were mirrored in the sparkling dew crystals on the grass and I was giddy with anticipation. Joel and I carried the bulk of the weight as Tyler's dexterity was substantially diminished by his woolen argyle and gym-sock mittens. Add to that the fact that he had volunteered to carry the half-dozen or so cans of cooking spray that we had brought along. These he had crammed inside of his jacket and they kept falling out, whereupon he would curse under his breath as he batted them around in a series of attempts to retrieve them. Exhibit-A in the case for opposable thumbs.
We stopped infront of a sand trap and dropped the slab of cardboard onto the grass. Tyler handed each of us a can of cooking spray and we commenced spraying down the laminated side of the flattened box. The hissing of the spray mingled with our sniffing as we tried in vain to keep our noses from dripping. It was so cold and my hands were still stinging. We stood, snapping the caps back onto our cans of cooking spray before tossing them into the sand trap where we would be sure to find them later. I stood by and watched as Tyler and Joel flipped the cardboard over so that the lubed side was down. They pushed it slowly over to the lip where the slope began its descent in earnest. And very carefully, as if having placed a sleeping baby into a crib, they backed away with their palms facing downward as if to hold the cardboard in place by sheer force of will. They turned slowly to face me and Joel opened his mouth, I assume, to explain to me the boarding process, which comprised us getting a running start and leaping altogether onto the massive sheet of cardboard. He was cut short. "Ahhhh!" I shouted, pointing as the cardboard began sliding over the edge.
Joel and Tyler spun around instictively and sprinted after it. I gave chase and succeeded in overtaking them just as they dove headlong onto the accelerating sheet of cardboard. I dove after them and swam through the air with some semblance of a flailing breast stroke. "Umph!" I grunted as I pancaked ontop of the heap. We had been running at a dead sprint and even then we had only barely overtaken the cardboard. And the momentum of our concerted dive had succeeded in accelerating the cardboard to a dizzying speed. The laminated underside of the box made a whistling noise as it screamed along over the frozen blades of grass. The roar of the wind in our ears became deafening and Joel's and Tylers laughter came in shrieks that seemed somehow distant and muffled. We were all struggling to stand as if to surf, but every little depression or swell in the slope sent us tumbling and bouncing like a skillet full of sizzling shrimp. My stomach tickled the way it had when I used to jump out of the swings at the park as a child. I looked over and saw Tyler's wobbly frame standing near the starboard edge of the box. I could see the triumphant luster in his eyes, his mouth hung wide open in a gaping smile as he struggled to concentrate on maintaining his balance. Our eyes met just as the box bounced across a discontinuity in the slope. Our cardboard chariot bucked violently, tossing Tyler's feet from beneath him. The triumphant luster in Tyler's eyes vanished, and in its place came a look of severe consternation as he flailed his arms in what looked like a backstroke. I watched as he fell butt first towards the carpet of blurry grass that bordered the cardboard. I braced sympathetically for his impact and was stunned as he vanished before my very eyes. The torrent of speeding grass had snatched him from my sight the very instant that his buttocks had touched down upon it. All that remained was the impression made in my mind by the look of hopeless resignation that had appeared in Tyler's eyes during the milliseconds prior to impact.
I struggled to sit up but thought better of it when my abdominal muscles began to cramp from the laughter. I rolled over to find Joel laughing hysterically. We had tears in our eyes and our laughter came in high-pitched staccato bursts, punctuated by sharp coughs as the cardboard lurched over the bumpy irregularities in the declivity. The tickling sensation in my stomach regressed as the hillside deposited us in the meadow at its base. We sped across the meadow, and just when I thought the ride would never end, the leading corner of the box was gobbled up by a divot in the sod and Joel and I were tossed into the air like rag dolls. We were then harshly introduced to the turf after what felt like an eternity of undignified aerobatics. The stars twinkled high above as the aftershocks of our laughter came as hiccups and moaning, gasping, sighs that echoed across the hillside. We simply lay there in mirthful exhaustion, unable to move, with the icey blades of grass pressed against the backs of our necks. Evidently, Tyler's descent was ongoing because we could hear his grunts amidst the thudding of flopping arms and legs.
I sat up and wiped my nose on the back of my glove. Joel stood next to me and dusted the frost off of the seat of his pants. I stood and did likewise, and together we limped over to the cardboard where we each grabbed a corner and began dragging it towards the foot of the hill. We all but stumbled over the tangled mess that was Tyler. He rolled over on his back and stared up at us through his tears and snot. He was laughing so hard that he was suffocating. He was trying to say something but all he could manage was a chorus of falsetto squeaking. "What?" Joel and I asked simultaneously. Tyler's eyes rolled back into his head, he squeaked and shook. "Oh! Oh! DAMMIT, TYLER, DAMMIT!!!" Joel and I dropped the cardboard and staggered backwards. The stench was horrific. "Oh the humanity!" Joel cried. Together, Joel and I held our breath and rushed in; each of us seized a corner of the cardboard and we took off up the hillside. Tyler stumbled after us. "Man, you need to do something about that crap." Joel said to Tyler and I added: "Yeah, you need to go rip a loaf or something 'cuz that shite is surly!"
The hill seemed to rise before us without end. Its dark mass filled our vision, blotting out the stars. We crawled slowly up the slope with the cardboard in tow and the cardboard seemed to grow heavier with each awkward stride. The muscles in my hand began to throb and cramp as I labored to gain purchase on the obstinate piece of cardboard. I could feel the sweat running down the middle of my back and I paused to rip the wool hat from my head and I noticed that it was steaming. We could not shove enough of the cold night air into our lungs. We gasped and winced and grunted and had Tyler farted then, I would surely have met my end there on that frosty hillside.
After half an hour of agonizing work, we crested the hill and collapsed next to the sand trap to catch our breath. Shortly thereafter, we applied another coating of cooking spray to the glossy side of the cardboard and placed it carefully on the grass at the crest of the slope; only this time, not as close to the edge. With a couple dozen paces between ourselves and the cardboard, we readied ourselves along an imaginary starting line. "On three," said Joel. Tyler and I nodded. "One...Two..." we began the countdown. "Three!" blurted Tyler and with that, he darted for the box. Joel and I hesitated briefly in disbelief before racing after him. I was sprinting as fast as I could but Joel surged ahead of me and overtook Tyler. Together they jumped onto the box and landed side-by-side on all fours. I exploded forward, and propelling myself with everything that I had; I leapt into the air, gritted my teeth, and closed my eyes. I succeeded in landing on the cardboard, and I did so on my knees just aft of Tyler. I opened my eyes to find his raucous bum bobbing up and down mere inches from my beak. The box accelerated to terminal velocity and the hillside blasted past us on port and starboard but I didn't notice because I was transfixed. Tyler's arse loomed before me like a loaded musket with an unruly toddler at the trigger. "Noooooooooooo!!!!" I shook my head in slow motion. The seat of Tyler's pants billowed in the clap of his thunder and his fart resounded with a noise that sounded like an orchestra pit full of tubas. My mouth was open and everything. I lurched backwards in an effort to distance myself from the roiling butt-fumes and I was instantly devoured by the blurry sod. The stars and the frosty turf coalesced into a single disorienting blur as I spilled down the slope. I was nothing more than a discombobulated mass of bone and flesh and with each bounce and thud, I cursed Tyler's wretched bum. Tyler's and Joel's laughter dwindled in the distance and I began to wonder if I would ever stop rolling.
Joel had always been very quiet and he lived in a world all his own. But unlike most detached people who are completely oblivious, Joel's world had annexed ours somewhere along the line and thus he was always acutely aware of his surroundings. Most people regarded him as a socially handicapped idiot savant, a corner lurker; they felt sorry for him, and always tried to engage him and speak to him in social settings. But Joel was always "with it." What he was doing in the corner, was psycho-analyzing everyone in the crowd, listening in to all the conversations, reading between the lines. He had that amusing knack for euphemistically insulting obnoxious shallow people. He could do it so well that sometimes they would even smile and blush and thank him. This'll get back to Hemingway in a bit. I promise. In the meantime, indulge me. I'm a cuckold.
Joel always took up the most fascinating and obscure hobbies. Japanese puzzle boxes, Burr puzzles, Chinese meditation balls, 5x5 rubiks cubes. He could build and program robots using parts from house-hold appliances and old twenty-ounce soda bottles. A textbook eccentric right down to the punctuation and the footnotes. He would walk into campus at sunset and lie around on the benches in the Concourse, smoke cigars, and think about things like probability or the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle. He understood WHY Bach was brilliant and he always cringed when pianos played the harpsichord parts. He was an athlete nonpareil, excellent on the baseball diamond, and phenominal on the gridiron. His was a carousel personality that could engage anyone on any level if he so chose. He new a lot about several things and little bit about everything and was practically worshiped among family and friends as a lesser diety. We all learned to simply nod and say: "Well OK." Like the time Dad and I had to borrow Joel's little rusted out '88 Honda Accord to go get fertilizer from the nursery because Dad didn't want to soil his Ford Windstar (Aside: God forbid that we soil thee; oh, thou, most blessed among mini-vans.)
We were standing out in the driveway in the shade of the huge oak, the one that got decapitated by Hurricane Opal. This was back when Mom and Dad's house was still covered in ivy and they still had French doors on the side porch; back before the stone lions got painted black to match the flower boxes. And Dad and I stood perplexed, scratching our heads, and staring down at a trunk that was crammed full of flattened cardboard boxes and a couple of spent cans of cooking spray. It was a good sized trunk for a small Japanese four-door sedan. In fact, later on in graduate school, I would discover that you could cram a whole full-grown whitetail buck into that trunk. "Joel!" Dad shouted. And Joel got up from the side-porch where he'd been hunched over his do-it-yourself home-mayhem kit; busy, using a benzene torch to mutilate a meticulously assembled and hand painted plastic Ford F150 model pick-up truck. The thick black smoke was still rising from the twisted wreckage. This was just the sort of reckless decadence that Dad so detested. Momentarily distracted by the smoke, Dad stretched an accusing finger towards the sizzling 1:32 scale conflagration. Joel was already halfway to us, stepping over the monkey grass, benzene torch still inhand the hissing blue cone of flame coming dangerously near to his trousers with each step. He was wearing his old REAL skateboards t-shirt with the REAL silk-screened onto the front. The one Tony Hawk had signed in Pensacola even though he was skating for Birdhouse at the time. And then came my Dad's signature: "Doggonit, you guys!" Guilt by association. He was craning his neck and squinting through his glasses to see what was burning. And he was still pointing at the totaled out plastic F150.
We had all seen Joel working on that truck. He'd spent the last three weeks slumped over his workbench under the sizzling ochre cone of an old telescoping architect's lamp, carefully assembling the little truck using tweezers and Testor's plastic cement, the kind that smells like cancer; and painting every piece with his miniature air brush kit and an assortment of tiny little brushes. The truck was a gorgeous electric-blue Ford F150 with a lift-kit, little yellow smiley-face rally lights perched atop chrome rollbars, and a taupe leather interior; and it was impeccable, the level of detail was staggering. And here it was with black smoke curling off of its flames. I think profligate was the word that Dad was searching for. "What are you doing?!" Dad never used profanity, but there was an understood "the hell" in there somewhere. If this was a movie, this would be the part where the hellion kid with the red mohawk, plaid pants, and pierced septum lights up a cigarette and blows smoke in my dad's face. Joel just stood there silently with his bored you-just-don't-get-it-do-you expression. And Dad shook his head and we all looked down at the trunk-full of cardboard. Joel, anticipating the question says: "It's for cardboarding." And that really cleared it up because we all knew what the hell cardboarding was. He said it with a nonchalance that left you buckling under the compulsion to nod and play along for fear of looking ignorant. Joel stared at our faces and took a drag from the invisible cigarette. "Well OK...get it out...we need to make room for the fertilizer," Dad grunted. Joel shrugged indifferently and swung his head, slinging his shoulder-length auburn hair out of his eyes. "...and get a haircut!" Dad barked as he stormed back up the driveway to the house.
It wasn't until Joel was in college that I actually asked him what cardboarding was. It was Christmas time and we were all home at Mom and Dad's. This was after the ivy had been peeled off of the house tendril-by-tendril; all thanks to idiot-savant-sibling and yours truly, who labored tirelessly under the ruthless supervision of the parental gestapo. This was after Dad learned about stick-edgers and self-propelled lawnmowers. After their pipes froze and I'd had to suffer the misfortune of crawling under the house and using the propane torch to mistakenly thaw the natural gas pipe which, incidentally, did not need thawing although it looked an aweful lot like a water pipe. The stone lions were still green and Mom and Dad still had French doors on the side porch. This was a couple years after I had walked past Joel's workbench one evening a few days after he had fried the model truck. And I had noticed the torched, blue, F-150 model sitting under the architect's lamp. Only now it had perfect miniature rust painted on the charred sections and little glints of exposed aluminum painted into the dents. The plastic windshield had been carefully scored with an exacto-blade to duplicate impact fractures. There was mud caked in the wheel-wells and I noticed that he had put bands of fine-gauge orthodontic wire inside the tires so that when they melted, the wire rusted and the rubber oozed down and hung over the bands like wet cloth: perfect 1:32 scale charred tires. Of the millions of mass-produced Revell brand, 1:32 scale, electric-blue, 1995 Ford F-150 step-sides; in its own way, Joel's was the only one that was perfect. All the typical and unavoidable imperfections had been masked by the intentionally warped frame and deep-fried body panels. The driver's side door was missing and there were tiny electrical wires snaking out of the dash where some little 1:32 scale pilfering punk had made off with the stereo. I couldn't believe how perfect it was.
We would have learned to expect this kind of ordered chaos from Joel. But that's where Joel's personality and character really diverged from the norm. Because Dad never saw the finished product. And If it had been me, I would have shoved that work of art in Dad's face, the very second after I'd added the finishing touches. Did someone say profligate? But Joel, in contrast, exuded quiet confidence. He never bragged or defended himself. I think that's what I admire most about him. He only offers up tidbits of information when he's in the right mood and only if you're willing to fish for them. He's a locked vault full of hilarious anecdotes and witty comments and our Holidays were spent sitting around, probing him with conversation, waiting and hoping that he'd slip up and casually mention some unbelievable misadventure in passing. It was like standing impatiently around the baggage claim at the airport, knowing that the little buzzer is going to sound, knowing that the red flashing light will begin to strobe. Standing and waiting anxiosly, trying to anticipate the exact second that the conveyor belt will lurch forward. It was just like that. And it was during one such episode last Christmas that we found out that he'd spent the previous week sleeping on the roof of Auburn's Ralph Brown Draughon Library. Apparently studying for finals had been so taxing that driving home in the evenings when the library closed had been out of the question. He'd apparently decided instead to bring his sleeping bag along. His sleeping bag and a homemade lockpick which he used to pick the lock on the library freight-elevator which deposited him under a ladder that led to the roof.
Anyways, back to cardboarding. Once again, we were all home at Mom and Dad's for Christmas. This was back when the ten-foot Fraser fir made the livingroom smell like turpentine and the Christmas lights cast pine-needle shadows all over the walls and ceiling. Back when cinnamon potpourri simmered on the woodburning stove and you could smell Mom's clam chowder cooking in the kitchen. It was late and Joel had been foraging in the kitchen and was then busy, slumped on the sofa eating a bag of pastel-colored duck-and-bunny-shaped sweet-tarts that were left over from some Easter. He and I were in the den watching some Turner South rubish like American Ninja Twelve or something as we silently contemplated the pros and cons of ritual suicide. I piped up and asked the question bluntly: "Just what the hell is cardboarding anyways?" Joel was halfway through a pink chalky duck. He just stopped chewing and stared at me like I'd just asked where babies came from. I mean we're still not sure that he knows what sex is. I mean no one ever told him about it and he never asked. We think he was dating the daughter of a local attorney during his first year of college, but again, we're not sure. Sometimes I'm tempted to draw an invisible cross in the air with my fingertip and ask him: "Does a vagina go this way or that way?" You know, just to see if he knows.
Anyways, Joel said nothing and finished chewing the sweet-tart duck as he rooted around in his pocket in search of his cell-phone; and as he did this, he just continued to stare at me. He produced the phone, flipped it open, hit speed-dial, and pressed the phone to his ear. I could hear someone else's phone ringing on the other end. He crammed a purple bunny in his mouth and started crunching. "Tyler." Apparently, anymore, a person's name isn't just their name; it also functions as an informal greeting. "Hey, man, you wanna go cardboarding?" He asks the garbled voice that is supposed to be Tyler's. The garbled voice says something that I can't make out and Joel says: "Not yet. You can call them and see. Yeah. Josh is going." A couple more seconds of unilateral cell-phone chit-chat and Joel slammed the phone shut. "C'mon. Get your jacket and some gloves...and try and find some packing tape." He said as he stood and stretched. Then in the kitchen, he turns to me with this playfully derisive grin and says: " You better shut up and pay attention, fool, because you're about to get educated."
Joel had always had an entourage. An amalgamated conglomerate of the faithful. Something like a 24-hour on-call lynch-mob/insurgent guerrilla army/demolition crew/evidence disposal team. Close your eyes and imagine a pimple-faced, underaged version of the A-Team. Now take away the sweet-ass van and the guns and give them an old beat-up '88 Honda Accord, a pile of skateboards, and enough PVC pipe to construct a semi-automatic potato-cannon. Joel refers to them fondly as: "...my legion of cold-ass, no-bullshit, tough-guys... made up entirely of dudes who...are required to train in the art of cowboy-rules no-limit beat-down and who... fit the description of 'ruggedly handsome, balls-to-the-wall genius, and all around bad-ass,' not unlike myself."
We're talking Team Macgyver here.This crew could topple a South American government in less than 24 hours using nothing except the change in their pockets, a half cup of brake fluid, and a jar of creamy peanut butter (preferably Jiff.) They could devastate a third-world political structure and get it all on videotape, and be home in time to watch Jackass. Now fast-forward a couple of years. They've got a couple semesters of chemistry, system dynamics and controls, object oriented programming, and political economy. And they've upgraded from skateboards and '88 Accords to Toyota 4-Runners, Vespa motorscooters, and tweed blazers. A seemingly refined bunch of fellows (strong emphasis on "seemingly.")
I shimmied into my polar fleece as Joel came clopping down the stairs. He was wearing his Marmot fleece, the matted greenish-gold one that looked like a giant booger and the fingers of a pair of gloves hung languidly from one of the pockets. "You find any packing tape?" He grunted as he groped about beneath the sofa cushions in search of his keys. "Seriously, I haven't lived here in like five years, man, how the hell do I know where they keep tha tape?" I said. Joel just stopped and shook his head and looked at me with an expression that said: "You lazy piece of shite." He pocketed his keys and together we searched the kitchen for packing tape. I succeeded only in finding a half-roll that was yellow and cracked with age. I turned to see Joel sitting on the counter-top munching on a bag of stale Cheetohs. "Cheetohs." He said with his mouth full as he thrust the open end of the bag in my direction. It's funny how we never abandon that infantile tendancy to verbally label things for everyone. I shook my head no, trying to decide whether or not to be disgusted with the fact that he hadn't helped me search for the tape when he seemed to need it so desperately. Joel crunched on the last fist-full of Cheetohs as he dusted his hands off and cast the bag aside. "Need some Jones [Jones Soda]..." He spoke with his mouth full again and it came out as: Nid Shom Jownsh. He had a couple of cans of cooking spray on the counter next to him and these he collected as he hopped down off of the counter. He wagged the cans in my face as if I understood what the hell they were for. "Cool," said I. He nodded and gulped the Cheetohs down and I followed him out the back door.
Together we stood out on the side walk and listened to our teeth chatter as we watched our breath turn gold in the light of the patinaed Tiffany-style street lamp. The air was crisp and and sharp with the cold and the stars seemed to be burning holes in the night sky. I pulled my wool hat down over my ears and fished my gloves out of my pocket. Tires screeched in the distance. The sound reminded me of the pig farms near our home in Taitung. Joel and I turned just in time to see Tyler's sticker-encrusted four-door Honda spill out of a side-street and onto Oak Street. He always drove with his interior lights on and we could see him smiling behind the wheel. At one time the car had been a black '95 Accord but it had slowly become a mobile billboard for Toy Machine, Spitfire, Hook-Ups, et al. Evidently, Tyler's muffler had fallen victim to a parking block or a speed bump some ways back because the little Accord put-putted like a go-cart and belched smoke like an old steam-locomotive. Wahhhh. Tyler mashed down on the gas as he spotted us. Joel and I exchanged sidelong glances and took a couple of slow wary steps back from the street, fighting the urge to dive for cover. The suspension linkages made a terrible mechanical crunch as the front driver-side wheel hit the curb and disappeared up inside the wheel well. Tyler's head jostled violently about behind the steering wheel, he looked like a marionette having a seizure. The car ground to a halt, the tires narrowly missing our toes. Weeebada Weeebada Weeebada, to hear the old four-cylinder engine idle like that, you would swear it had a headcold. Tyler's goofy smile was wild and as crooked as congress. When he smiled like that, you knew not to turn your back on him for fear of getting donkey-punched or shoved. We could hear the stereo booming and as the window lowered, a torrent of grungy power-chords assailed us.
Joel and I stared back at him crossly and Joel ran his hand across his own neck like a knife, signalling Tyler to kill the music. Despite our best efforts to educate him, Tyler still thought loud music was cool. The music faded out, giving us room to notice the sickeningly sweet and spicey aroma of some cheap, DollarTree, air freshener. "Sorry," Tyler's apology came as a mumble. Joel and I climbed into the car. Something about the inside of Tyler's car reminded me of the Death Star's trash compactor that Leia, Han, and Luke got trapped in in Star Wars. I was up to my ankles in emptied Funnions, Bugles, and Cheetohs bags. The seat was littered with receipts, old AA batteries, bits of hardware, a socket wrench, an empty bottle of Castrol GTX 20W-50, an assortment of badly worn skateboard wheels, jewelcase fragments, the disturbing stains, etcetera. And in the crevices and seams there were deposits of food crumbs and drinking-straw wrappers and some sort of oily mystery lint. He was probably culturing anthrax in there without even knowing it. Then there was the interesting stuff like a fresh box of Lucky bearings and a road flare, the kinds of things that you wondered if he would care if you pocketed them. "What the hell, man?!" Tyler barked. I looked up to find him glaring at me, or rather, trying to glare. I shrugged sheepishly and pulled the box of bearings back out of my pocket and placed it back on the seat next to me. Tyler tried to glare at Joel too, as if to imply that Joel was somehow responsible for me. The glare shattered as he broke out into a smile and added laughingly: "Ask before you take crap!" He pressed down on the gas and the engine coughed and groaned. "You got any tape?" Joel asked Tyler. Tyler shook his head. I desperately wanted explanations. Why did we need tape and what's with the cooking spray?
Moments later, we were crusing along the local Industrial Parkway, the streetlights made our shadows sweep long archs over the interior of the car as we passed them. "What are we doing?" I finally asked. "Looking for cardboard..." came the distracted reply. I raised my eyebrows and nodded. I couldn't see a thing. The rear windows were completely fogged. I slummped back in the seat and fiddled with an old kids meal trinket that appeared to be a box of french-fries that transformed into a gay-looking robot. The car was loud and I couldn't hear Joel's and Tyler's conversation, but I could tell by their facial expressions that the search for cardboard was not going well at all.
We left the Industrial Park to search behind the various funiture and appliance stores along Mainstreet. I was busy drawing and quartering the gay french-fry robot when Tyler slammed on the brakes. "Whoa!" Joel exclaimed. Just like that they were out the doors and sprinting. I sat up and craned my neck between the two front seats. All I could see through the foggy windshield were their backs and the bottoms of their shoes illuminated by the headlights as the ran. I felt like the dash-mounted camera on a police cruiser. I opened my door, got out of the car. Joel and Tyler were gawking at a collapsed cardboard box that was leaning against the back wall of Badcock's furniture. The collapsed box, that had at one time, housed a seventy-two inch plasma screen, was easily eight feet by ten feet. I walked over and stood, looking over their shoulders. Joel turned to Tyler without taking his eyes off of the box. "Cowboy-rules..." He said, which translates as: "This is going to be so frickin' insane that we're all going to crap our pants!;" which in turn translates as: "Awesome! We are going to have ever so much fun!" Tyler just nodded.
We dragged the box over to the car and tossed it up onto the roof. The car looked ridiculous under the box, like an ant trying to carry a graham cracker. We piled in and rolled the windows down and each of us reached out and took hold of the edges of the box to hold it down on the roof. The box jutted out so far fore and aft that it hung down over the windshield, forcing Tyler to slump over the steering wheel and rest his chin on the dash to see where he was going. At one point, he was steering with his chin, using his free-hand to squeegee the fog off of the glass. We veered a bit and sideswiped a row of azalea bushes and ran over a plastic tricycle. Fortunately, we were less than two blocks from the house, of course, in that town, everything is two-blocks from everything else anyways. Nevertheless, we were grateful because even at ten and fifteen miles per hour, the icey wind was gnawing ravinously on our fingers inspite of the gloves. And Tyler whined all the way to the house for he had no gloves. We deposited the box on the front lawn as we passed, launching it on the count of three.
We drove to Walmart and pooled our pocket change to buy half-a-dozen rolls of clear packing tape and nearly as many cans of cooking spray. The cooking spray was store-brand and this irked Tyler immensely as he had heatedly vouched for the superiority of Pam and other name-brands. Such cardboarding minutiae fascinated me to no end. I was still largely in the dark, but I was accumulating my vision of cardboarding piecemeal. The cooking spray would likely serve as a lubricant, this I deduced simply because I knew from my previous exploits with Joel and Company that it wasn't flammable and all of Joel's and Company's exploits were subdivided into two classes. Class one encompassed activities invovling all manner of fire and explosions. Class two dealt with engaging in dangerous activities (including those activities in class one) whilst traveling at high speeds. Lubricant was typically applied in the pursuit of activities in the latter class.
We arrived back at the house where we emptied the contents of our Walmart bags onto the enormous cardboard box. It was well after midnight and the streets were quiet with the exception of a dog barking in the distance. The burping noise of tape being peeled away from the spool broke the silence and I looked down through my steaming breath to see Tyler and Joel running a line of packing tape over the length of the box. Joel walked backwards on his knees, allowing the spool to rotate in his hands as it fed out a stream of tape and Tyler followed on hands and knees, pressing the tape firmly down onto the cardboard and smoothing out any bubbles of air that formed underneath. I stood and watched selfconsciously, not sure if I was supposed to be doing something or not. Joel and Tyler worked like pre-schoolers, quietly and intently, not even stopping to wipe their dripping noses. They just sniffed and comunicated with hand-signals until Tyler started bitching about how cold his hands were and Joel huffed: "Dude, don't be such a pussy. Here..." and he took off one of his gloves and handed it to Tyler who shook his head and said: "Dude, that's retarded! Don't you have any more gloves in the house?" Joel pulled the glove back down onto his hand and told me to go fetch another pair of gloves from the house.
Tragically, my search turned up nothing and upon hearing this, Tyler stomped off to his car and thrashed around in the back seat for a bit and returned with a pair of thick wool socks that bore a hideous argyle print. These he wore on his hands like mittens and on his face he wore a scowl that defied laughter. Joel and Tyler continued to laminate the box with packing tape and I grabbed a roll myself and started at the other end of the box. It took all six rolls to cover the box and when we were done we stood and admired our work. It was no longer merely a flattened cardboard box. It was suddenly substantial, solid, and more permanent. The light from the lamp shown on the glossy expanse of the laminate. After a few moments of silence and sniffing, Joel motioned with his hands and we gathered around and lifted the box and carried it over and slid it up onto the roof of his 4-Runner. Joel and I climbed in and rolled the windows down and Tyler ran back to his car and returned with a pair of crusty gym socks, cursing under his breath as he struggled to get them on over the woolen argyle ones.
In an effort to avoid local law enforcement, we cruised the back streets until we were well beyond the city-limits. The cardboard kept lurching everytime we caught a breeze or traveled faster than fifteen miles per hour and my fingers burned terrifically from the cold, the pain was nearly unbearable and I chewed on my tongue until it bled. We were poking along, headed North on highway 263 and I was fairly certain that I knew our destination. We were going to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail on Cambrian Ridge and there we would, no doubt, lube the base of that glorious slab of cardboard, before climbing aboard and whizzing down the grassy hill beneath the driving range. I call it a hill but "hill" does not do that geological anomally justice at all. Top-to-bottom you are looking at about 200 feet of elevation and the face of the hill itself is more or less vertical, how the grass clings to that hillside is a mystery. It was one of those hills that you climb on all fours and keep your head down, for if you stood and looked up at the crest, you would surely fall over backwards from the vertigo. I was no stranger to that hill for I had experienced it once before. Hills like that combine splendidly with gravity and juvenile foolery to bring about a visceral tickling sensation in the pit of one's stomach. I know this because Joel and I carved that hill to ribbons on homemade snowboards one winter after Lower Alabama got a freak-dusting of powder. It had been a perfect day and had ended magnificently after an irate, morbidly obese, red-faced grounds keeper charged us like a rhino. He was nearly upon us when he slipped on a patch of ice and planted his ass solidly on the frozen turf. A look of pure terror spread over his round chubby face and he flapped his arms like great beefy wings as he teetered and disappeared over the edge of the hill. We watched, paralyzed with pure amusement, as he plowed a gaping furrow down the face of the hill. I laughed so hard that I peed myself and had to leave my thermal undies in the woods.
We turned left off of 263 and onto Sherling Lake Road. I knew then that I was right. I grinned just as Joel glanced in my direction. He smiled. The heater was running full blast and my feet were on fire inside my sneakers, but the open windows devoured the toasty air before it could warm the rest of me. Our impatience and cardboarding-induced delerium had overwhelmed our better judgment and we had, each of us, conscioulsy avoided suggesting that the cardboard be lashed to the 4-Runner's luggage rack with bungie cords or nylon rope. The extra ten or twenty minutes of knot-tying and rigamarole had been quite out of the question as simply securing the slab of cardboard with our hands seemed most expedient and conducive to haste. But by the time we arrived at Cambrian Ridge, we were cursing ourselves for the oversight. The gate to the clubhouse was closed as always and we continued driving until the asphalt gave way to a dirt road that led into a thick grove of pinetrees. There the line of street lamps halted its pursuit and, like all mischievous interlopers, we were glad of the darkness.
We stood in pitch blackness, huddled next to the 4-Runner whose engine made tinking and popping noises as it cooled. And aside from the engine's popping, the silence was so intense that my ears rang. We waited anxiously in the trees to see if we had been followed. And as we did so, a gentle breeze came rushing through the treetops and I was glad of the noise for it rid my ears of the ringing. Though cold, the breeze was laced with the scent of the pines and was an absolute pleasure to my olfactories. I shivered excitedly and looked up at the myriads of stars that peeped down at us twixt the swaying boughs. I could feel myself getting sentimental. A gorgeous night like that, being home for the holidays, committing Class-2 mischief with Joel and Tyler just like old times. I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I struggled to blink them back and I was once again glad of the darkness.
The breeze abated and my ears began to ring again. My eyes had adjusted and I could see my breath coming out of me in great ghostly clouds. The silence was insufferable and I fought the impulse to crack my knuckles as I waited for the breeze to return. And return it did only this time it blew hot and limey from Tyler's putrid bowels for he shifted his weight and gave birth to a substantial fart that warbled like a bowling ball rolling down a marble stair case. The seat of his pants steamed in the starlight. Joel and I didn't even flinch. Tyler was a casual farter and his brand of sulfur was downright deadly in tight quarters, but out in the open, he was usually harmless. And so we stood motionless next to him. This we would regret for we had grossly underestimated the potency of that particular batch of flatus. The surly fumes reached our noses all at once. Joel's eyes rolled back into his head and he made as if to sneeze. I reeled backwards and cupped my hand over my nose and mouth. And Tyler just grinned giddily back and forth at the two of us. He caught a glimpse of the remnants of my tears in the starlight and he remarked facetiously: "C'mon! It's not THAT bad!" "Not THAT bad?! Christ, Tyler! You could can that sh!t and sell it to SWAT teams!" Joel exclaimed in falsetto as he fought for air.
We quarantined Tyler by shuffling around so that he stood in our lee. Joel and I scowled at him and clucked disapprovingly. Tyler was very pleased with himself and with our apparent disgust. Of course, we were not really all that disgusted with him. It was all part of the game. A timeless game that had found its place in the male sociopolitical structure the world over. That is, that the expulsion of flatus from the bowels is to be acknowledged by one's peers with exceedingly disproportionate disgust. Typically, this is accomplished via fake convulsions, panicked flight, or simply by the administration of acute chastisement. "Good grief..." I shook my head and drew a hesitant probing breath through my nose. Despite our seemingly disgusted tones, you could hear our smiles in the darkness.
We felt that we had waited long enough, so we each grabbed an edge of the flattened cardboard box and carried it back up the old dirt road. We quickened our pace to a jog as we emerged from the pines. I could hear the sound of our shoes padding along on the asphalt, our heavy breathing, and the hum of the street lamps above. As soon as we could, we turned sharply to the left and hopped over the curb and ran down a steep grassy declivity that led to the safety of the driving range which was hidden in the shadows of the hills that surrounded it. The dew had fallen and frozen and the grass crunched gratifyingly under each step. Crunch crunch crunch. We were then marching along the rim of the great slope that vanished into the darkness below, and the breeze was carrying the scent of the pines up to us once again only now it came laced with the scent of hickory and chimney smoke as well. The stars were mirrored in the sparkling dew crystals on the grass and I was giddy with anticipation. Joel and I carried the bulk of the weight as Tyler's dexterity was substantially diminished by his woolen argyle and gym-sock mittens. Add to that the fact that he had volunteered to carry the half-dozen or so cans of cooking spray that we had brought along. These he had crammed inside of his jacket and they kept falling out, whereupon he would curse under his breath as he batted them around in a series of attempts to retrieve them. Exhibit-A in the case for opposable thumbs.
We stopped infront of a sand trap and dropped the slab of cardboard onto the grass. Tyler handed each of us a can of cooking spray and we commenced spraying down the laminated side of the flattened box. The hissing of the spray mingled with our sniffing as we tried in vain to keep our noses from dripping. It was so cold and my hands were still stinging. We stood, snapping the caps back onto our cans of cooking spray before tossing them into the sand trap where we would be sure to find them later. I stood by and watched as Tyler and Joel flipped the cardboard over so that the lubed side was down. They pushed it slowly over to the lip where the slope began its descent in earnest. And very carefully, as if having placed a sleeping baby into a crib, they backed away with their palms facing downward as if to hold the cardboard in place by sheer force of will. They turned slowly to face me and Joel opened his mouth, I assume, to explain to me the boarding process, which comprised us getting a running start and leaping altogether onto the massive sheet of cardboard. He was cut short. "Ahhhh!" I shouted, pointing as the cardboard began sliding over the edge.
Joel and Tyler spun around instictively and sprinted after it. I gave chase and succeeded in overtaking them just as they dove headlong onto the accelerating sheet of cardboard. I dove after them and swam through the air with some semblance of a flailing breast stroke. "Umph!" I grunted as I pancaked ontop of the heap. We had been running at a dead sprint and even then we had only barely overtaken the cardboard. And the momentum of our concerted dive had succeeded in accelerating the cardboard to a dizzying speed. The laminated underside of the box made a whistling noise as it screamed along over the frozen blades of grass. The roar of the wind in our ears became deafening and Joel's and Tylers laughter came in shrieks that seemed somehow distant and muffled. We were all struggling to stand as if to surf, but every little depression or swell in the slope sent us tumbling and bouncing like a skillet full of sizzling shrimp. My stomach tickled the way it had when I used to jump out of the swings at the park as a child. I looked over and saw Tyler's wobbly frame standing near the starboard edge of the box. I could see the triumphant luster in his eyes, his mouth hung wide open in a gaping smile as he struggled to concentrate on maintaining his balance. Our eyes met just as the box bounced across a discontinuity in the slope. Our cardboard chariot bucked violently, tossing Tyler's feet from beneath him. The triumphant luster in Tyler's eyes vanished, and in its place came a look of severe consternation as he flailed his arms in what looked like a backstroke. I watched as he fell butt first towards the carpet of blurry grass that bordered the cardboard. I braced sympathetically for his impact and was stunned as he vanished before my very eyes. The torrent of speeding grass had snatched him from my sight the very instant that his buttocks had touched down upon it. All that remained was the impression made in my mind by the look of hopeless resignation that had appeared in Tyler's eyes during the milliseconds prior to impact.
I struggled to sit up but thought better of it when my abdominal muscles began to cramp from the laughter. I rolled over to find Joel laughing hysterically. We had tears in our eyes and our laughter came in high-pitched staccato bursts, punctuated by sharp coughs as the cardboard lurched over the bumpy irregularities in the declivity. The tickling sensation in my stomach regressed as the hillside deposited us in the meadow at its base. We sped across the meadow, and just when I thought the ride would never end, the leading corner of the box was gobbled up by a divot in the sod and Joel and I were tossed into the air like rag dolls. We were then harshly introduced to the turf after what felt like an eternity of undignified aerobatics. The stars twinkled high above as the aftershocks of our laughter came as hiccups and moaning, gasping, sighs that echoed across the hillside. We simply lay there in mirthful exhaustion, unable to move, with the icey blades of grass pressed against the backs of our necks. Evidently, Tyler's descent was ongoing because we could hear his grunts amidst the thudding of flopping arms and legs.
I sat up and wiped my nose on the back of my glove. Joel stood next to me and dusted the frost off of the seat of his pants. I stood and did likewise, and together we limped over to the cardboard where we each grabbed a corner and began dragging it towards the foot of the hill. We all but stumbled over the tangled mess that was Tyler. He rolled over on his back and stared up at us through his tears and snot. He was laughing so hard that he was suffocating. He was trying to say something but all he could manage was a chorus of falsetto squeaking. "What?" Joel and I asked simultaneously. Tyler's eyes rolled back into his head, he squeaked and shook. "Oh! Oh! DAMMIT, TYLER, DAMMIT!!!" Joel and I dropped the cardboard and staggered backwards. The stench was horrific. "Oh the humanity!" Joel cried. Together, Joel and I held our breath and rushed in; each of us seized a corner of the cardboard and we took off up the hillside. Tyler stumbled after us. "Man, you need to do something about that crap." Joel said to Tyler and I added: "Yeah, you need to go rip a loaf or something 'cuz that shite is surly!"
The hill seemed to rise before us without end. Its dark mass filled our vision, blotting out the stars. We crawled slowly up the slope with the cardboard in tow and the cardboard seemed to grow heavier with each awkward stride. The muscles in my hand began to throb and cramp as I labored to gain purchase on the obstinate piece of cardboard. I could feel the sweat running down the middle of my back and I paused to rip the wool hat from my head and I noticed that it was steaming. We could not shove enough of the cold night air into our lungs. We gasped and winced and grunted and had Tyler farted then, I would surely have met my end there on that frosty hillside.
After half an hour of agonizing work, we crested the hill and collapsed next to the sand trap to catch our breath. Shortly thereafter, we applied another coating of cooking spray to the glossy side of the cardboard and placed it carefully on the grass at the crest of the slope; only this time, not as close to the edge. With a couple dozen paces between ourselves and the cardboard, we readied ourselves along an imaginary starting line. "On three," said Joel. Tyler and I nodded. "One...Two..." we began the countdown. "Three!" blurted Tyler and with that, he darted for the box. Joel and I hesitated briefly in disbelief before racing after him. I was sprinting as fast as I could but Joel surged ahead of me and overtook Tyler. Together they jumped onto the box and landed side-by-side on all fours. I exploded forward, and propelling myself with everything that I had; I leapt into the air, gritted my teeth, and closed my eyes. I succeeded in landing on the cardboard, and I did so on my knees just aft of Tyler. I opened my eyes to find his raucous bum bobbing up and down mere inches from my beak. The box accelerated to terminal velocity and the hillside blasted past us on port and starboard but I didn't notice because I was transfixed. Tyler's arse loomed before me like a loaded musket with an unruly toddler at the trigger. "Noooooooooooo!!!!" I shook my head in slow motion. The seat of Tyler's pants billowed in the clap of his thunder and his fart resounded with a noise that sounded like an orchestra pit full of tubas. My mouth was open and everything. I lurched backwards in an effort to distance myself from the roiling butt-fumes and I was instantly devoured by the blurry sod. The stars and the frosty turf coalesced into a single disorienting blur as I spilled down the slope. I was nothing more than a discombobulated mass of bone and flesh and with each bounce and thud, I cursed Tyler's wretched bum. Tyler's and Joel's laughter dwindled in the distance and I began to wonder if I would ever stop rolling.
posted by Reckless at 2:54 PM
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