Sodamen

First: The road. THE ROAD: See it. See it? OK…

Actually, scratch that. Not the road, not yet. First: The girl, no…The lady.

The lady’s name is Dawn Webb. The Lady lives on High St. The lady is looking for a job. In her house, in the morning, at around 9:00am she reaches for the telephone. She dials a number, sits down, waits as the tones sound out and there’s 1...2...3...4...(she’s going to hang up) and…No. Somebody answers at the other end. The Lady, Dawn, smiles, face-changing from concerned/hopeful to energetic!/optimistic!!.

It’s 9:00am on a Tuesday in late July when our Dawn gets on the phone. Dawn lives in a small house on a small street in a small state in a small town on the east coast of the North American landmass. By the time Dawn hangs up the phone it’s 9:16am. Information has been exchanged, opinions formed. An agreement has been proposed and agreed to between Dawn and whomever it was that she’d spoken to after dialing and waiting through 4 and one half rings. In order to meet her end of said agreement, Dawn must take action. She uses the next 5 minutes to make a list of three items. The first thing on the list is “Shower” capitalized for no reason and underlined. The next is “eat”, no caps and no line. The third and last item on Dawns list: “Resume”. It takes a total of 25 minutes for Dawn to clean herself in the shower. It takes another seven minutes to dry off and get dressed. It takes one more minute to scratch the word “Shower” off the list using a different pen than the one she’d written with. Since she’d practically eaten already (she’d had a tic tac to counter her morning breath)Dawn went ahead and crossed out the word “eat” as well (Big John likes ‘em “small in the right places and big everywhere else”) . She crossed it out twice. After that she attempted to erase both the word and the cross-outs but only succeeded in basically ruining the note-pad paper which she then crumpled up and ripped into tiny little pieces and ate. She washed the pieces down with the first guzzle of a brand new bottle of Poland Spring ™. The last word on the list “Resume” would remain unconsidered and un-dealt with until sometime in the future.

And now: the antagonist or in this case “ists“. All stories must have both antagonists and protagonists. The reason for this is that firstly, that’s how things are real life. In regular everyday life there are good people and bad people, and so it’s that way in stories as well. I was going to say that secondly it helps the reader keep track of the details of the story, but that sort of goes along with number one there. Having good and bad guys (or girls or women) in a story also ( I guess this would actually be secondly) gives you somebody to really hate so that you appreciate it all the more when they “get it” somewhere near the beginning of the end of the story. But I’m getting way ahead of myself though. I’m overstepping the bounds of my created unreality. No reason to have that last sentence except that it sounds cool and fits rhythmically. same for these Italics.

　

So, the bad guys. Ok, first see the car, no, first see them. They are: Men. More accurately they are men in their very early 20’s. They have baseball hats on. One has a baseball hat that says “Michigan” on it. It’s dark purple. Michigan hat is also wearing shorts. He himself made the shorts three days before by cutting an old pair of jeans off just above the knee. Michigan hat has a shirt as well but he’s not wearing it and the same can be said for his shoes. The shirt is - in fact - lying in a crumpled pile behind the drivers side front seat of his car. The shirt (hunter green heavy duty cotton with face of a popular T.V. cartoon over the left pocket) is covering his shoes (canvas and sort of skateboard-y). This boy is 5 feet 9 inches tall. He weighs 168 lbs exactly. He has what cops in pursuit would refer to as a “swarthy” or “Mediterranean” complexion. The other boy is wearing a blue hat with the logo of the Boston Red Sox ™ on the front. He is wearing his shirt and his shoes and if the cops were chasing him they’d say, “we are chasing a light skinned black dude.” They’d be wrong though, the dude is not black. His family is from Samoa. Both he and his friend are nursing bruisies and contusions. Samoa has a black ear and Michigan Hat's got two black eyes and a fucked nose. They ache.

After you see the two boys then it’s ok you see them in the car. The car is a small Japanese two door sport coupe with some dings and pings and a carpet of empty and almost empty beer cans that’s two and three cans thick in some places. The company that manufactures the car calls this car CLOUD SILVER.

It’s at this point in the story that I’m going to deploy a story-telling technique called “the flash-forward”. (and I MUST STRESS, I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH!! That flashing-forward is something best left to the masters. Don’t try the flash-forward even as an experiment to see how badly it would come out. Just be glad that you get to bask, for a few precious moments, in the wholly benign and entirely joy-promoting light of the authors prodigious talent. You can tell your grandchildren “I was there when he flashed forward,” and they will actually love you twice as much as they did before you spoke the words. I just decided to italicize again. This whole paragraph right above us.

Wow. Just wow.

And so we will point out a few things just to get everybody on the same page (no pun intended) (but actually did intend for their to be a pun. Even so, “no pun intended” looks cooler. It sounds cooler too. “no pun intended no pun intended no pun intended no pun intended.”

Well see now it just sounds weird. It sounds like a bunch of blathering nonsense is what it sounds like. As a matter of fact the whole thing is coming off the rails right here. It’s a train wreck AND a pier six brawl. I haven’t addressed any of the characters or any of the story like since like 6 ‘graphs ago. ’Graphs is an abbreviation that wicked smart people use instead of saying “micrograph”. Also, no I did not forget about flashing forward but I did feel like - upon further consideration - flashing forward just then wouldn’t have been the best play. I didn’t want to call attention to that though so I just went on like nothing happened. Which - coincidentally - is what Dawn Webb did for a while after a flying soda hit her in the tits when she was walking away from her car, which broke down on the way to a job interview.

See that: the flash-forward and also got right back into the “story arc” and even indulged in a bit of “plot exposition”. You don’t know what any of those words mean but trust me: they’re of no importance. By this point in our story I’ve built so much volatile, molten, tension-fraught suspense that I bet you peed a little in your pants. No matter. Take them off. Take your pants off.

　

THE Daynomah. Daynomah means “the part of the day that is not remembered because of drink and/or narcotic inebriation” in Lebanese. Because Lebonians are so good at writing, they named a whole story part after them. The Daynomah part of this particular tale is so powerful and compelling, so dynamic and thought-provoking we will have to break events down to their component seconds!! Minds will be blown, but again I proceed too quickly towards that which I am proceeding to.

Melting back into the action at 9:30am. We have our protagonist (DW) and antagonists (the boys, Michigan Hat and the Samoan) and clever, non-intrusive exposition has told us everything we need to know about each one. We know that Dawn has a job interview and she’s got to be there at 10:00am. The interview is in town. Town is five miles down a road called Bisquit City Lane. Since Dawn lives on Eire Road, and since Eire Road becomes Bisquit City Lane 3 miles from town, we can deduce that Ms. Webb should leave her house by 9:45 if she is to gain that golden five minutes of earliness that she suspects will put her over the top if the job is too hotly contested.

Michigan Hat and Samoan have nowhere to be. We know that they’ve been up since 4:30 the night before. We know that they passed out around 2:30 and then right before they passed out they - in a drunken coincidence almost too improbable to consider - came across 4 postage stamp-sized slabs of the exceptionally clean, high-powered blotter LSD that Michigan Hat had been brokering in the early goings of the summer before. They found the acid in the sleeve of a video game called Wii ™ Sports Resort. Samoan split the blotter into two equal tabs and they washed them down with 5 more cans each of Busch beer. By the time they wake up two hours later they’re going hard toward the good part. It takes almost three hours of constant demented laughter to decide to go to the beach. Once they collect themselves to get into the car they sit for another hour, listening to the song “Seasons of Wither” by Aerosmith almost 14 whole times before finally getting the thing on the road and pointed at the beach. Since their houses are next to each other, and since said houses are on Eire Road, and since Eire Road t-bones into the road that goes to the beach, we deduce that: a) the boys will probably listen to the song again a few times on the way to the beach and b)that they are traveling on the about the same road at about the same time as our Heroine. The tension: still ramping as we color in final details

Dawn. On the long straight, flat part of Eire that goes about 2 miles through the turf lands, Dawn’s Car stops working. How and why? We can but ponder… The car is a shitbox, and it has been very hot lately, and Dawn and Big John aren’t the type of people who adhere to a strict every-three-thousand mile type service routine. Also Dawn is the protagonist. Things can’t be too easy for the protagonist because the reader will loose interest. We identify with hardship and suffering and so our heroes must climb mountains and fight dragons. Or - in Dawn’s case - they have to endure both the complete hassle of blowing a job interview, and the added hassle of her shitbox Camry done shit the bed just when she needed it most! Sucks. It’s been fucking hot and humid like hell. It’s late July in New England and walking outside is like walking at the bottom of a pool filled with warm wet dust. Dawn Webb steels herself against the heat and gets out and starts to trudge back toward Big John’s house.

So see it: the stage is set. Anticipation about to become action. DW trudging, head down, shoulders slumped, mute shame and a long hot wet walk. “But“, she’s thinking, “who cares?” Who cares if she really thought she had a chance at the job and that she vibed well with the voice on the other end of the phone. It’s nice out. It’s beach weather. Her dress is glowing white in the beach-flavored New England summer. She looks good and she knows it, and it’s ten minutes tops to walk back to her house and take off her dress and smoke some weed and hit the beach. Her head stops the shame-drooping and now she’s hovering, fucking gliding back down to where Bisquit City drive turns into Eire road.

In the middle distance, a car comes into view.

Samoan is in the passenger seat trying to smoke an un-smokably small roach. He’s working the radio trying to get Seasons of Wither on for a 15^th go-round (around S.O.W. listening number ¾: “This is the craziest shit I evuh fuckin hudoot…”) the stereo volume is pinned against it’s decibel limits and he’s lost track, so now it’s little 2 second mega-burps of tunes that aren’t quite as good as the one he’s trying to find. Michigan hat is driving and he’s into it. The roads back here are, well they’re sublime is what they are. He’s locked into the car, wearing it like a giant ergonomic backpack that sings to him in the voice of Steven Tyler. His left hand is feathering the wheel against the lefts and rights. His right hand is holding a big gulp cup with half a bottle of Bacardi and 20 ounces of CocaCola ™. He’s horking the vile brew up through a .12 gauge straw from McDonalds as he pod-races through the backchannels. He feels a nice 4 wheel levitation around a hard left and then leans right into it. The whole circus makes the jump to hyper-space while the stars and old-growth oaks smudge out all around them. 55, 60, 65, 75 and beginning to just gently caress the underside of the number 80.

Then, in the next 4 seconds a lot of things happen at once.

The first thing that happens is this: Michigan Hat sees a car stopped and blinking in his lane and a girl, or lady, or woman, or something female anyway, walking toward them. Again on his side of the road. The vision and M. hat’s understanding of it happening take up 1.5 seconds. The next two things happen at the same time and they are : Michigan Hat becoming quickly and completely enraged at whomever that is walking slow on his side of the road AND Samoan saying “Hey look at that girl,” and pointing with his stereo finger. Another 1.5 seconds have ticked by. The car is going 73 miles an hour. The car is 150 odd yards away from DW. Two more things happen, again at the same time: Samoan also becomes sharply and aggressively bitter towards the intrusive walker and M. Hat holds up his monster cocktail and says with a chilly lack of emotion: “throw this at her”. 5.5 seconds. There is one second left. During that second Samoan takes the drink and flicks the mirror toggle and begins zeroing his target. Some deeply evil and mathematically proficient quadrant of his acidified mind uses the final moment to consider the constants and coefficients while another sparks the required muscular response. Michigan Hat watches the window going down as the Big Gulp cup is jettisoned and he sees: The cup and the car and Dawn Webb.

The cup in moving forward through space at 80, Dawn Webb moving opposite at a trudging pace.

The cup actually leaves the window with the soggy rum corroded bottom leading. The Samoan’s primitive core is, again, in sharp relief as he feathers the thing like George Gervin and effects a spin that flips it slow through 190-odd degrees, catching our Dawn in the right shoulder area and depositing the entire stinking syrupy gruel all down her interview dress. M-Hat catches her shoulder-slump from behind as they speed for the beach.

Michigan Hat and Samoan scream and cheer like the fucking Enola Gay.

Later that day they are arrested and processed on two counts each of felony possession and public drunken-ness. One of them also ends up doing a month long tango with a loooong federal bid behind two more pieces of LSD that they didn’t even know they had with them.

Dawn get’s 376 mosquito bites on her shoulders arms and face on the walk home. Big John tunes her up smartly for being stupid and getting her dress messed up, and allowing her car to fail, and not getting the job. When she tells people that she walked into a door they look at her like a doctor looking at a patient who doesn’t yet know that they’ve got permanent, inoperable, quick-acting cancer.

I know, amazing, but don’t think too long on it. I’m a slave to my almost godlike storytelling talent. It’s just something I do…Let’s fire up the italics one last time before we go off to bed shall we? There…Much better no? But now that we’ve gone italic I feel like maybe we rushed the ending a bit no?

But see now I’m sort of at a loss. That end part seems a tiny bit contrived, a little less than “massively satisfying” or “brilliantly conceived”. Also, I’m remembering now that characters in a story are supposed to change in some way as the *story arc progresses. Fuck it, I leave it to you, oh dearest reader: Come back in a minute and get the rest of the story (meet the abusive husband, be surprised by his occupation, read a sexy sex scene (!)) or just bail now and go jag off. I myself will enjoy the luxury of being able to do both, and will indeed.

OK fer now.