They are about as useful as a backscratcher is to a turtle.
And at night, when there is still a nip in the air, the daggone things want to crawl back into my house to congregate by the windowsill. I don’t know what they’re caucusing about, but by golly they won’t get any free rent in my establishment! My mother’s old remedy for a boxelder bug infestation was to have me wash down all the windowsills with soapy water, and then . . . but wait a minute . . . come to think of it . . . that never DID get rid of the boxelder bugs . . . the fact of the matter was that while I cleaned the windowsills she also gave me the Windex to do the window panes, since I was already using some elbow grease . . . hmm . . . that old mother of mine was a lot smarter than I gave her credit for, now that I think back. She’d use any excuse, including boxelder bugs, to inveigle me into doing some of her work. A regular Tom Sawyer!
And when you spray the blame things with insecticide they up and die and become so light and weightless that when you try to sweep them up with a broom you just send them floating about the room like ash. The only way to deal with ‘em is with a vacuum cleaner. And I, for one, would like to advocate that we all get out our shop vacs and suck ‘em all up outside, before they have a chance to start multiplying again. Grind the carcasses up into black powder and hoard it in a warehouse somewhere; soon word will get out that the government is keeping back a powerful cancer cure or baldness cure because the FDA is so slow, and the mobs will come, break down the warehouse doors, and take all the boxelder bug powder away, without having to be paid to do it.
That’s the American way of doing things. Or is it the boxelder way? I can never remember . . .
Can you believe I make money with such dreck?
It was after midnight when I finally posted, and just as I pulled the netting over my bed, with me inside, Joom pounded the door nearly off its hinges. Having finished my article, I was ready to receive my Thai snapping turtle, so I flung open the door with an Errol Flynn grin on my handsome farang face – only to be met with a chamber pot. She didn’t want me stumbling over the sill of the bathroom in the middle of the night again. Thai bathrooms are always built either a little above or a little below the rest of the house, so you either step up or step down to enter one. I kept forgetting that and consequently my toes were turning the color of an overripe avocado. Allured by the scent of alcohol and hops coming off her body, I tried to kiss her over the chamber pot, a difficult maneuver under the best of circumstances. She was having none of it.
“Goo nide, thi rak” she said softly as she pushed me away. She went to sleep on a bamboo mat in the living room, the better to keep an eye on her truck out in the driveway. She was convinced that khamoys had marked it for boosting long ago and were just waiting out in the yard to catch her off guard.
You may be asking yourself, why doesn’t he just go out to her and do the manly thing? Who wears the sarong in this family, anyway? I can’t answer that very coherently, except to say that I did love her enough to leave her alone when she wanted to be left alone, or SAID she wanted to be left alone. So I’m either a hero or a coward. I dunno which. But mostly, that night, I was tired.
The next morning Joom was up before me, with no signs of alcohol poisoning or hangover or remorse or anything except a glowing vitality that threatened to burst through her thin cotton shift. She never wore a bra around the house, only when she went out. She drank her coffee black in the morning; no sugar or milk. I finally was able to give her the long, sweet kiss I wanted to give her the previous night. This time she was not biting, but tamely submitted to my caresses. (Holy Shrek, it’s easy to fall into that kind of Harlequin Romance writing when I think about her!) And then I did the really manly thing – I asked her to make me a big bowl of rice seafood porridge for breakfast. We came apart slowly, like two pieces of Velcro. She went into the kitchen. I went back into my bedroom, which is also my office, to look over a blog that needed rewriting before I could post it. Did you ever write something that you thought was absolutely brilliant while you were writing it, and then when you were done you wanted to crawl into a septic tank because you were so ashamed of the SHIT you had just deposited on the Microsoft Word screen? That was my trouble with this abortion I was calling Elephant Hill:
Joom: A Thai Love Story.
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