pitstop

PITSTOP: OKLAHOMA CITY

Clean, clean, clean--so clean. The holding tanks are really really clean all right. You see, while I was busy putting the sewer pipe away in the rear bumper, kind of smelly and all, even though I had rinsed it a bit, I noticed a woman across the way, walking a little white Bichon. Unlike most campers who dress really casually, she wore a form-fitting fushia dress that seemed molded to her body. As I tried to figure out if there were any undergarments under that dress, I forgot all about the plumbing under the car.
We drove all day with the shitter pipe open, and didn't discover it only the next afternoon. Fortunately, I didn't get a ticket, but we can never go back to that WalMart again.

Flower City was not exactly what we'd hoped it would be. We bought a few interesting items, but a lot of it was hardly wholesale prices. We liked a big cheetah thing we saw, but it cost $40. I don't think we couldl retail it for much more than $50. That isn't enough markup for a small business like ours. They didn't have any purses, either, but we did spend about $300 on stock. The best buy I found was $2.25 for a sink wrench that we could use to fix the leaky kitchen sink that Diane's been concerned about for the last three weeks.
As usual, I couldn't get my hands into that tight connection. I ended up shoving some silicon into it and getting Freddy to tighten it up. So far, they haven't leaked. The caulking I put on the spot over our bed has been holding too--not a single leak. Of course, it hasn't rained yet.

    I'm beginning to feel that my writing is strained. Guess I've got that gopher on my mind. So far, the electrocution of John (Gopher) Coffey has been the most outrageous event of the summer. I mean, it's right up there with Gary and I almost getting arrested as Terrorists in Washington D.C. or Diane trying to save the camcorder after the canoe flipped over on the rock in the Shenandoah River, or the time the bug crawled into my ear in Wildwood State Park and we had to have it removed by a specialist. Why do things like this always happen to us?
    Take yesterday, for instance. I'm pumping gas, and I hear Freddy call me, so I open the car door and stick my head in. He calls me again.
    "Dad!"
    "What?"
    "DAD?"
    "WHAT? FOR CHRISSAKE, I'M STANDING HERE WITH MY HEAD IN THE DOOR LISTENING. WHAT DO YOU WANT?"
    Diane started to laugh and said, "Freddy's not in here."
    "WHAT?"
    She laughed again. You're not listening in surroundsound.
    "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?"
    "Dad, I'm over here."
    I looked behind me and Freddy was standing there, next to the Texaco pump. I could hear Diane laughing in the camper. She's STILL laughing. When I said, "What happened yesterday? I can't remember what to write in these notes," both she and Freddy said, "DAD! WHAT!"
    I don't really see any humor in that, none at all, but Diane is still laughing.

We stopped at a few tourist places. We're still looking for bolts for Freddy's crossbow, so we stopped at a knife store. No luck, but I did buy a Route 66 70th anniversary license plate. Diane had been looking for a wooden paddle to use on Freddy when he starts acting annoying, and found an old souvenir paddle for 50 cents. When I saw what she had purchased, I didn't believe it. It was an official Fanny Whacker from Jungle Habitat in New Jersey, a theme park that's only a memory now. And what a memory. I touched the wooden paddle, and remembered . . .
I remembered a time, long long ago, more than half my lifetime away, when my wife and I, and our new baby, Billy, went on an outing to to Jungle Habitat with my close friend, Bill, and his wife, Carol. Jungle Habitat was one of those zoos where you drive your car through the park and the animals all run freely around you. The park is loaded with signs that said, "Drive at your own risk" and "Convertibles may not enter the baboon area."

    My guess is that the insurance costs eventually put such places out of business. I know when we drove past the rhinocerous, all I could think of was John Wayne in "Hatari" capturing wild rhinos while Hardy Kruger herded them over to the truck on a jeep padded with more tires than the pier at Coney Island in 1954. As that Rhino walked by us, I kept waiting for him to WHACK his horny nose into the side of the car, but it never haven't. The worst thing he did was splash us a bit as he urinated a stream on the dirt road with the size and force of a firehose.
    I always drove convertibles in those days, so Bill had borrowed his father's car, a new Lincoln, that had plenty of room for us all, although Bill was a little nervous right from the start.
    "Be careful when you feed the baby. Don't spill any milk on my father's new car."
    "We'll be careful," said my wife.
    "Does he puke a lot?"
    "He'll be fine, Bill."
    "Right. I don't mean to fuss, but this is my father's new car, you know?"
    "We understand, Bill. We'll be careful. Want a potato chip?"
    "Be careful we don't get any crumbs in the car."
    We had a great time, watching the animals walk by. Then, as Bill drove slowly through the park, a camel began to approach us. Bill turned right; the camel turned left, putting him directly on our path. Bill turned left to pass him, but the camel turned right, still heading directly to the car.
    "What should I do?" cried Bill. "He's heading right for us."
    "Just stop the car, " I said. We don't want to hit the poor thing.
    I saw an odd look in the camel's eyes are he approached Bill's father's car, I thought of the camel in that old TV commercial, the one where the goofy camel turns to the camera and says, "I want a Clark bar!"
    "He's coming right towards us!"
    "Bill," I said, "It's only a camel with a stupid look on his face."
    The camel stopped at the front of Bill's side of the car. His forelegs came up on the hood, as he adjusted his shanks so that his sexual organ was pressed somewhere against the left headlight and began to pump his hips back and forth in a sexual fashion, rocking the car like Cousin Eddie's dog, Snot, humping on a dinner guest's leg.
    "What am I going to do?" screamed Bill. "My father's car! My father's car!"
    I didn't know what to say; I was too busy trying to get a clear picture, a difficult task with the car rocking.
    A moment or so later, the camel dismounted and walked off, probably looking for a cigarette.
    "What should I do?" asked Bill again.
    I couldn't answer that question. I handed him one of Billy's clean diapers.
    And that fanny whacker shall be a treasured wall ornament in our camper.

    Speaking of animals, our pets are beginning to make their presence known. For one thing, they always sleep on the floor, and when I try to walk by them, they freak. Lady is the worst offender, as well as the biggest. The dear thing wants so hard to please everybody, that if she finds herself in the way, she jumps up and tries to get out of the way immediately, even when it would be easier to just let me step over her. I keep trying to get the animals to sleep on the bed, instead of the floor, when we're not driving, but they just won't stay there. The only time they want to sleep on the bed is when we're sleeping there--then they ALL want to join us.
    Lady always visits us in bed, but the minute I roll, or shift my position, she either jumps off or moves into the corner. Sonny just rolls up wherever he can be the most annoying. Simba likes to bite my toes if they should twitch from beneath the covers. Gidget has to be the worst of all--at any time, in the middle of the night, we can expect the rude awakening of Gidget--bounding, not walking, from my head to Diane's face, looking out the window, then bounding back, usually hitting parts of my body I'd rather didn't get visited by sharp little kitten paws. Pooka sleeps with Freddy. He's no problem unless we try to wake Freddy up--he then becomes a fierce watchdog, protecting his boy from evil.
    I guess we're all starting to feel a bit close. A lot a drinks are being spilled, and that kitchen table is always full of junk. Sometimes, when we drive, Lady sleeps on Pooka.

Walking the dogs is sometimes difficult, as they refuse to do their business on dirt. It's grass or nothing for them. Lady is even more of a problem. The minute she saw the grass was soft, unlike the crabgrass all over the lawns in Florida, she decided her favorite song was, "Roll Me Over in the Clover," and rather than use the grass for its doggy purpose, she just rolled in it, over and over.

That crabgrass thing reminds me of Florida. As we all know, Shakespeare said, "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." I guess in Florida, they never realized the antithesis of that phrase is equally true. No matter what they call it, that green crap on your lawns that you can barely roll a bowling ball over is CRABGRASS! In other states, we pull that out of our lawns! And while we're on the subject, guys, a freakin Palmetto bug is a Goddamned COCKROACH, you know? Cockroach, La Cucurocha!

One thing about being on the road so much is we rarely see a newspaper. The only newspaper we've seen lately is The Globe, at the checkout counter of WalMart. Freddy and I couldn't put it down when it featured a story about Osama Ben Laden being an actor in homosexual pornographic films as a young man, a story which led to the current feature--photographs proving that Sadam Hussein is alive, gay, and his current lover.

Our plan was to complete our first circle, back to Chad's auto repair to change our oil. We stopped at a few places on the way, looked at more souvenirs we couldn't afford, and a few ideas for our shop to sell. We found a number of places on the highway where we could drain the holding tanks and refill our washing water. At one place, we had to wait for the truck in front of us to finish. The driver sent his barefooted son out with the portapotti to dump it in the sewer, spilling it all over the place in the process. As you can see in the picture below, the barefoot boy stood there--did I say he was BAREFOOTED? You can see him there, standing in the shitty pissy water with not even a sock separating his feet from the slops.

We got to Oklahoma City on Tuesday night, and stayed at the same WalMart as we had a month ago. This time, we got to park behind a guy from California who was carrying a puppy farm in his trailer. He let the poor animals out in a small pen, probably two dozen of them for a short bit of exercise. I wished those dogs would go for his throat, but they were too young to understand how they were being abused.

The next day, we pulled into Chad's at 8:00 AM. Chad was happy to see we had made the first lap in one piece and got to work on the car.

    They needed to have the doghouse removed inside the car, to check the oil filter, so Freddy and I took it apart, and used the time to fix our broken radio speaker wires again. When we put it back, we had a hard time closing it up.
    "Here, I've got my side, Dad."
    "No. We have to do my side first."
    "Get the piece under the bolt, like this."
    "I've got it, Freddy--Oh Christ!" I let out a stream of oaths as the clasp tore a hole in the middle of my finger. This wasn't cut, it was just torn from my flesh. The pain was excruciating.
    "What did you do to yourself now?" asked Diane. after the cursing died down.
    I was a little embarrassed to have sworn so much in my pain, especially since Chad had a number of letters posted on his window from people whose cars had broken down on the road and prayed that the Lord would deliver them to a great repairman. I apologised to everybody I saw. God wouldn't want to send people to a place where customers use the language of Satan. Forgive me, Lord, but Jesus, look at that finger:

Wounded, we proceeded down the highway. At least our radio was working well--then it blew another fuse. We headed west again!

CHAPTER TWELVE