[257] Screed City

[257]

07/08/2023 Saturday. Kitchen Microwave. Beaver Haus. Lower Granville, Vermont.

Oh, boy. Where to start? How to start? What can be said? What shouldn't be said?

Last Friday, not yesterday, but a week ago yesterday, Professor Curly got back from France. I picked her up from the airport with two tex-mex burritos and some iced water. The idea was that she would take her car, the Real-estate Wagon to New Hampshire and I would take the subway back to the apartment. She had taken an earlier flight in order to get back earlier, naturally, but because of capitalism, her flight was delayed and she ended up getting back at roughly the same time as she would have had she not changed her flight. So instead of sticking to our plan, she came back with me to the apartment and left the next morning.

The reason for the urgency was a dire situation in New Ham. There was an accident that involved some broken ribs and a t-bone steak. A baseball game and a garage. Plus rain. I won't go into detail, but things were pretty intense. I was planning on going up to New Ham on Sunday. The idea was that we would know more by Saturday afternoon and I would avoid the worst travel day before the 4th of July. It didn't work out that way. PC left early on Saturday morning and around 11a things were looking dismal, so I made myself a couple tex-mex burritos and made some iced water and iced coffee and hit the road.

Four hours later I still hadn't crossed the Whitestone Bridge, a thing that usually takes about 35 minutes from our place in Brooklyn/Queens. I spent most of that time with Junior Mint in park. Watching the four hour trip turn into five hours, then six hours, then seven hours. I decided that I would turn around, somehow, when the trip reached eight hours, but lucky for me, I suppose, that didn't happen until a couple hours later when I hit another snag by Bridgeport, Connecticut. I won't lie though, when I finally got to the point in the road right next to the Whitestone Bridge, there was a very cathartic ending to my troubles. There was a car, a skeleton of a car, burned out, totally gutted, like the thing had burned to the ground. There were no emergency crews or vehicles even at this point, just the burned out car, and as I let a car pass in front of me, I could see a dead rat, a freshly killed rat, headless, in a puddle of blood, and the car drove right over it, the front right tire taking on an ink stamp quality, the blood sticking to the tire and slowly rotating with it. It was very gross, but at least it wasn't two idiots who got into a fender bender and refusing to move their cars to the side of the road so they could prove something to their insurance companies, whatever had happened was real and very dramatic.

I didn't make it to the hospital that day. I instead met Professor Curly and Aunt Dianne and Anne at this place called Good Thymes in a town I can't remember. We had dinner. I got the prime rib, PC got the baked haddock, I made the joke, I've haddock up to here! Everyone thought I was real hilarious. Anne got the fried chicken with onion rings, I can't remember what Aunt Dianne got, I think it was a sandwich, but I do remember that she and Anne shared a spiced margarita with salt on the rim. PC got a glass of wine. [Whine!] And I drank three diet Cokes. Fountain-style.

Good Thymes was funny. When we showed up at almost 7p exactly, the place was packed to the gills, everyone was quite advanced in age, and the music playing over the system was current pop music. It was a very weird scene. Like a retirement home dance party that nobody danced at. 10 minutes after we ordered the place was a ghost town. We had shown up at the end of the dinner rush.

The food was fantastic. My sides were fries and a bowl of corn. The prime rib, rare. Aunt Dianne paid, the sweetheart, and she and Anne went to use the restroom and me and Professor Curly hit the skids. On the way out of the parking lot I stopped and took a bottle of Ticklers from the trunk of Junior Mint and put it in the driver's seat of Aunt Diane's car. I had noticed she left it unlocked when they pulled in.

I drove Professor Curly 25 miles up the road to Paddington's house. She saw us pull in and looked out of the window. I yelled, Hi, [Paddington!] She yelled down, Hi, Joey! Hope you had a nice drive! I yelled up, it was a little rough, but nice weather we're having! She yelled, Oh, very nice! [Professor Curly,] you coming in! PC yelled, Hi, mom! I'll be right in! I got out of the car and helped PC with her luggage and we hugged and smooched and I said I would talk to her in the morning. She gave me instructions on how to get back to the interstate and how to navigate the driveway getting out. I hauled ass and got back on the interstate.

Two hours later I was at Beaver Haus, it was 11p and I didn't know what to do with myself, so I spent the next two hours writing and went to bed by 1a.

The next five days were a roller coaster. I drove back and forth to the hospital two hours each way, as PC and family spent countless hours in a wild waiting room. Waiting. Things changing moment to moment. PC sleeping on Paddington's couch. Aunt Dianne and Anne driving back and forth from Swampscott. I mean, I won't go into details, but the cafeteria at the hospital was top notch. They had a salad bar, a wrap station, cheeseburgers, fries, pizza, fountain soda, all the interns and doctors and nurses you could ever want to see, they had a gift shop and a place to buy scratch tickets, other families in the thralls of absolute tragedy just trying to keep their shit together. There was a story about a family member having Alzheimer’s who's wife had died and during the funeral he asked, Where's Flimsy? The dead wife. Who's funeral he was at, who's body was in the casket. And then later at the grave he asked, What's in the hole? I mean, I hate to laugh, but that is funny as shit. I mean, maybe I got it wrong and he asked, What's the hole for? But either way? What?!!!

I mean, I put 1,000 miles on Junior Mint driving back and forth from Vermont to New Ham. But things luckily seem to have settled down. The turning point was when Daddy Dick said, Where the fuck is Dianne? His sister. Because he never cursed. Because his spirit was alive and just as spunky as ever. I mean, hope returned to the scene. And, I mean, I will give a couple little details about the recovery that I found quite hilarious, but then I think I will stop reporting on this very personal tragedy.

So, how the accident happened was very typical of Daddy Dick, he had ordered a prime rib from this place called T-Bones, I think I have mentioned this place before, a couple years ago, it's a steakhouse, naturally, but Daddy Dick had ordered a prime rib and had set up a television tray to watch the Red Socks game and eat his prime rib. What I don't know is how he planned on getting this steak. If it was getting delivered or if he was going to have to go and get it. But I think he was going to drive and get it. I don't know. But on his way to the car he tripped and fell. And tragedy ensued.

Fast-forward to two weeks later, scare after scare, doctors and nurses and tubes and mittens and dark nights and dark days and tears, lots and lots of tears, he finally moved from the ICU to a room up on the 8th floor, a place with a window, a roommate who introduced himself as, Hi, I'm Johnny Cash. Who listened to horse racing on the radio, who, when asked if he went to the bathroom by a nurse had said, I did, I mean, when I looked down, I thought a horse had come by! And Daddy Dick had eaten only two meals in the last two weeks, one the day before and one the next day. And on the third day, he gained access to his phone and called T-Bones and ordered a prime rib. To be picked up by his wife. I mean, DICK! You rascal! I mean, she picked it up for him, but of course he couldn't eat it. But it was a baller move, indeed. Hats off!

Pray for Dick, he seems to be on the road to recovery, but he needs all the help he can get.

But because things seemed to have stabilized, Professor Curly came up with me yesterday to hang out for a couple of days. To do some work and rest a little before heading back down, or over, however the map works. Last night we went to the Compound and had brats inside the Double Wide. The rain, there was rain, quite a bit of rain, made brats on the beach impossible. SeaBass is still in town, and we caught up about things and talked and talked and talked, until it was time to go home and PC went to bed and I wrote for a few hours.

This morning we got up and did some things, PC went for a run and did some work and some other things happened and we ended up going to the Waitsfield Farmers Market to see the Putin of Gluten. The old stomping grounds. Nobody but he missed me, and it turns out his wife is pregnant, and his cutting boards look as fantastic as always, and he has 68 meat birds to kill and he has half a beef coming around, and a whole pig and some broccoli rabe in the freezer and his garden is doing great, and he looks great and is hilarious as ever and the market was hot as hell and the UpSkirter is still in pure form, selling her tinctures, flashing her dingle-berries all over town. I mean, I felt a twinge of nostalgia, but I think it may take a few years before I am ready to get on the circuit again. I mean, I made some Cubby Bubbys for the waiting room family, but I still need to figure out my technique. I mean, I just need to give into the idea that the things need to be super juicy and full of Hot Pocket-style innards. I just need to do it. Fuck the purists. Either do all Ruby Rolls or something or give up entirely and just sell Scott's Brats. I mean, treat the business like a business instead of an art project.

But tonight, after the Farmers Market, we went to the A&W in Middlebury and ate fish sandwiches and drank root beer floats, after that we went to the reservoir and swam. Grit is at camp for the summer, so it was just us adults, me and the Publisher and Scott and Professor Curly and SeaBass. And it was like old times. Like Last Good Summer-times. Except now, we are a little bit older, a little bit wiser. I mean, I did yell, Fire Down Below! When PC was changing, because, you know, #lovethemredheads. And the water was hot on top and cold underneath and there were frogs and tadpoles and Vermont, as much shit as I talk about it, it really is a nice place to live.

I mean, we had a great noodle thing for dinner tonight that SeaBass made. On DogBoy Beach. It was quite delicious. Like very delicious. And we talked about this guy, Dante, who lives in a bus on the legal side of a long driveway that is 100 feet from his baby-mama's mama's house, who she hates, and who hates her right back and this guy Dante is a sovereign citizen, his bus has walls and his walls have wheels, and he has permission to park his bus there because the town chaos harbinger gave him permission and Dante, who is a Libertarian, who is the kind of guy that posts things on his social media where he is shirtless, six-packed stomach, wearing mom jeans, floating in a kiddy-pool, has nothing better to do with his time than to force everyone in town to deal with his bullshit because he is a member of the Brown family, who are the Alpha-family of Hancock. It's more complicated than that, for sure, and everyone involved is just as petty as he is, but he managed to get the local government involved, Vermont-style, so the whole thing is hilarious and includes a four page screed from Dante himself that was so poorly executed that the three different ways he identified himself, from his electronic mail to his address to what he was even trying to attempt in the first place made his urgent appeal to the local government obsolete. And because they have no choice but to respond to his nonsense, it has created quite the stir in the town of 300 people. Even the local paper got involved, which dragged Scott and the Publisher into the mix because the transphobic asshole that gave permission to Dante to use the land was mentioned in an article in the paper and because Scott is involved in the government and because the Publisher is married to Scott, she thought she could gain access to Scott because of it, and now everyone is involved and the whole operation is a shit-show.

I mean, I am sure I got every detail of that re-telling wrong, and I don't mean to slander anybody, aside from Dante, I mean, I don't mean to slander him, but he is the dick in this story, well, he is not the only dick in this story, the transphobe is really the biggest dick in this story, because she is being a dick just for the sake of being a dick, but my point is, everything is chaos and nobody wins and this is the kind of story that I can get behind because it isn't exactly tragic, it's just petty, I mean, it's tragic that these supposed libertarians have no problem stomping on other peoples rights just as long as they fit into their own understanding of how people should live in this world, but if you can remove the transphobia, it would be worth it to live up here just for the drama.

Maybe, with time, this story won't be so obnoxious. And parking a bus on somebody else's lawn would become more of story of how fucked up small town living is, instead of a story about how fucked up people have become, and that culture is destroying lives for no reason, and we can all laugh about how petty people can be for no reason.

I mean, I've paddock up to here!

[Insert Waiting Room Photo With Anne and Aunt Dianne and Professor Curly and Paddington And Bowl of Cherries]