CHAPTER ONE.
Joom liked to bite my nipples after her third bottle of beer. She only drank Leo brand, because the other leading brand, Chang, was run by people who had it in for the rice farmers up north. So she said. What I noticed was that after the third beer she would drink Chang or anything else, including paint thinner, if she were in the mood to get projectile-vomit drunk. Which was not that romantic, but I respected her right to kill off her brain cells any way she wanted. When we first got together, after a night at the Bedrock Inn in Ban Phe, on the gulf of Thailand, I told her that she would always have “Idsaraphaab” with me. Meaning, she would be free to do and say and think whatever she pleased. She did not have to ask my permission to go out or to sleep all day or to chuck a plank of dried herring at me, or to drink herself into a stupor. Whatever she wanted to do was okay by me. Why? Because I loved her? Obsessed about her? Needed her tawny arms around me in the evening on the beach? Yeah, all of that. But mostly, I gave her complete freedom because when the writing bug hit me I didn’t want to be bothered with love, sex, conversation, or the price of Japanese yen on the Forex. When she saw that faraway look in my eyes she knew it was not a hankering to make love to her; it was an idea for a blog post. That’s how I made my living, posting blogs on my popular website and charging fat fees for advertising.
This particular night Joom had inhaled a huge salad of lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and canned tuna fish, doused with fish sauce and sweet chili sauce. It made her thirsty, and she was ready for her fourth bottle of beer when I saw some kind of bug on the wall in the living room and immediately began channeling my mother’s strictures against boxelder bugs back in Minnesota. That would be my next article. Joom’s amorous snappings at my pectorals did not sway me in the least.
“Thi rak” I said, “I’m going in my bedroom to write. Don’t forget to turn the porch light on so the khamoys know we’re home.” I gave her a kiss. She bit my lip until it bled. She wanted to fight with me, then go down to the beach and fall asleep in my arms. But I had to produce a new article every day, and since day was night and night was day back in the USA – that is, they were six hours behind us in Thailand -- well, Boisea trivitattus would wait for no man, no matter how horny.
My articles never flow smoothly, and it took me nearly three hours to write the Boxelder thing. It went like this:
I’ve had it up to here with boxelder bugs . . . no, come to think of it, I’ve had it up to HERE! The critters all woke up today, en masse, and are silently winging their way around in meandering, meaningless parabolas. Walking along the River Parkway I kept brushing them off like dandruff with legs. They don’t bite and they don’t carry any diseases, so I’m supposed to tolerate ‘em? Not by the hair of MY chinny chin chin!
They don’t work as bait. I’ve watched thousands of them flit down onto the river, and nothing will rise to even see what they are. Not a trout, not a carp; even the mallards, who MUST be hungry after all that spring mating, let them float by. They can’t be used like fruit flies, to check out DNA and other genetic stuff by scientists. I don’t think they have any DNA; they run on pure inertia, with no genetic code to guide them.
If we put ‘em on an endangered species list maybe they’ll disappear, but that seems unlikely; they poop out eggs in a continuous stream, and the eggs hatch in a few days, and the whole kit and caboodle fly over to a south-facing wall and lollygag in the sun, with nothing to do but crack sunflower seeds and gossip about Ashton Kutchner.
They are truly the Slackers of the bug world, filling no purpose that either man or God can determine. I’ve never seen a bird eat one. And I’ve watched, nonplussed, as a line of ants has deliberately gone around the corpse of one, disdaining to drag it back into their anthill.
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:
There is nothing quite so pleasant as finishing an out-of-town job interview, being told “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”, and then driving away, only to be called on your cell phone before you reach the city limits and told the job is yours, so come on back!
This happened to me a number of years ago in Sheldon, Iowa, when I interviewed to be the News Director for KIWA Radio AM/FM. Walt Pruiksma and Wayne Barahona, the general manager and program director, respectively, had given me the third degree during my interview, wanting to know why I had left my job as News Director at KICD in Spencer, Iowa, just forty miles away, the year before. I was frank with them; I said that I had tired of the ceaseless toil and thankless burdens of a radio news director, so I had gone down to Mexico to teach English. That was a lot more fun and a lot less work, but I had not been able to get the proper work visa after eight months and so was obliged to return to the USA and find some way to earn my bread. I was willing to work hard again, but I also was determined to work smart, so that I could sleep eight hours most nights and have an occasional weekend to myself. I’m not sure what turned the tide in my favor; perhaps it was myBrown College training, since Walt is a big fan of the school.
Whatever the reason, I found myself gainfully employed in Sheldon, Iowa, with an apartment above Evie’s Hallmark Store on 9th Street, just a half block from the station. The Laundromat was a half block on the other side of the station, and next door to the station was the movie hall – which all employees of KIWA got into for free. Down at the Hy-Vee the deli featured a $3.00 lunch special every day, including Sunday, that featured meat and two sides, with a white dinner roll. Boy howdy, I was living in high cotton!
Despite my best efforts at healthy sloth, I found myself gradually showing up at the station each morning at 3:30 a.m., and rarely leaving for the day much before 6 p.m. Even when I had a weekend off I couldn’t bear to leave the news in the hands of part-timers, and Sunday morning, when I should have been in church, would find me anxiously combing the Iowa State Patrol website for any gruesome traffic accidents in our broadcast area.
Part of the problem, as always in a small town, is that there are long stretches when NOTHING HAPPENS. That is both the charm and the curse of small town living. You can live a completely peaceful life, never a hazard in sight except an occasional tornado. And you can thus die of boredom, or drink yourself into an early grave.
I was always searching for something to liven things up. One day, on a whim, I declared it to be National No Shoes At Work Week, and kept my loafers in a desk drawer. The station staff got into the spirit of it and many tootsies in need of a pedicure were on display in the station lobby. But since this was done in the middle of winter, it did not spread to the general populace. Still, I heard people talking about it at the Hy-Vee and the Ethanol Plant. One hot summer day I announced on the 9 a.m. newscast that I would attempt to fry an egg on the sidewalk in front of the station at precisely 3 p.m. that afternoon. A crowd of nearly forty showed up, and the police had to send a cruiser over for crowd control. The egg did not cook, not even a little, but it sure left a stain on the cement, which General Manager Pruiksma insisted I clean completely off with baking soda and a scrub brush.
My biggest coup was the Elephant Hill Scandal.
The hill in question was a slight rise just outside of town. It was mentioned infrequently in advertising copy as a point of reference to get to the new Pizza Ranch or Drenkow Motors. When I mentioned on the air that there were no hills to speak of around Sheldon, and certainly none that looked like a pachyderm, the receptionist was flooded with calls from indignant denizens who claimed that the hill was so named because back in the 1930’s a circus had come to town, its’elephant had died, and it had been buried on the side of the hill, and thus it was named Elephant Hill. Several elderly kibitzers stopped by the station that same day to say they had seen, with their own eyes, the elephant hauled into the ditch by a tractor and tons of dirt pushed over it with a bulldozer.
I decided to investigate this fairy tale. The Clay County Historical Society had no record of such an event, and the N’West Iowa Review newspaper had nothing about it in their morgue. I issued daily bulletins about what I now termed “theElephant Hill Fraud”. This whipped public opinion into a frenzy – or at least into a snit. One evening, just as I was about to lock the front door to the lobby and go home, an old man shambled in with the hottest tip on the story so far. He claimed that back in the 1960’s a museum from up in Minneapolis had come down and dug up the elephant skeleton for display at the University of Minnesota. He refused to give his name, and pulled the collar of his coat up around his face as he cautiously went back out into the night.
The next morning, on a hunch, I called the Bell Museum in Minneapolis to ask about an elephant skeleton. The friendly lady who answered the phone just happened to be the oldest veteran at the museum, and yes, she did recall an elephantskeleton coming from Iowa back in the 60’s sometime. But the Bell Museum had long ago sold it to the Children’s Museum in Saint Paul. When I called the Children’s Museum they absolutely refused to divulge any information at all – in the parlance of journalists at the New York Times, they “refused to return calls placed by journalists.” When I called the Bell Museum back the nice old lady suddenly became a scared old lady and told me to stop bothering her, and hung up on me. Obviously, somebody had gotten to her.
And there the story ended, for all intents and purposes. I went out to the hill itself one blustery March day, poked around, was chased off by the man that farmed most of the hill, who profanely refused to make any sort of a statement for the edification of my listeners – so I called it quits. Besides, that spring produced a bumper crop of tornados in Northwestern Iowa – so I abandoned my deerstalker and magnifying glass in order to fiddle with the new-fangled Doppler radar the station had just installed.
The ending was no good. It wasn’t funny. It had no Chaplin pathos, if that was what I was aiming for. No Buster Keaton irony. No S.J. Perelman elan or Robert Benchley twist. James Thurber would have skewered me with his fountain pen for such shoddy workmanship.
A line floated into my memory from an old Warner Brothers cartoon, directed by Frank Tashlin, that had Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Bugs Bunny in it. Daffy loses the rent money for their hotel room in a crap game. The scene is set up in silhouette. We hear the dice click and roll, and then a voice like Rochester says “Duck, you is a dead duck!”
If I didn’t come up with something soon, I would be a dead duck.
Groucho Marx said somewhere that you can’t be funny at nine in the morning. How was I going to fix the damn ending to make this Elephant Hill piece raise the rafters when it was only 8:30AM?
What would Jerry Seinfeld do?
Joom called out from the kitchen that my rice porridge was ready. She set it out on the veranda for me, so I ate it while I watched her water the orchids, pick some Thai aubergines and play with Nipoo, her dog. She loved that dog more than me. I did not mind, because I never wanted her to take me in to be neutered. Which she did with Nipoo.
Then it came to me, as thunderous and majestic as Kipling’s Mandalay sunrise. There was NO elephant skeleton in Elephant Hill, because all that was buried there was a DOG! Now THAT was funny – it was downright hilarious.
I left my rice porridge unfinished. I rewrote the ending. Not once, not twice, but three times. And then I knew, I knew that there would never be a good ending for Elephant Hill. It would always be classified as halt and lame in the annals of humor. I brooded. I shooed Joom away when she came in to ask if I wanted to go to the beach. She said I was “baa”, got in her truck with Nipoo, and drove away. I didn’t care. I had to conquer this black hole yawning before me. I would rewrite the whole blessed thing. So I did. And called it A Cock Fight in Iowa:
When I was a crusading radio newscaster in Iowa I wanted, more than anything else, to expose a cockfighting ring. Iowa has stringent laws against pitting one rooster against another in a battle to the death, but I knew, from tantalizingly vague hints dropped by the Fred Ziffels who came by the radio station to chew the fat with the manager, that cockfighting was still an available rural venue. If you knew the right people.
I licked my chops at the thought of infiltrating a gang of nogoodniks bent on matching a Kelso gamecock with a feisty Roundhead in some deserted barn, and then blasting their nefarious hobby, as well as their reputations, on the air. I kept my ears open, frequenting a local farmer’s tavern called The Cider Mill, where agriculturalists sipped pensive long neck bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, inserting a dill pickle spear as a nod to their Dutch forebears. I stuck to ginger ale. Sans the gherkin.
Several times a farmer that had taken on a heavy load of hops water would blurt out that something was not right at So-and-So’s place; there were strangers slinking about the yard late at night, and neighbors were being turned away when they came over with a sociable casserole. That’s all I needed to know. The next day I would ask the station secretary, an elderly spinster who knew the address and pedigree of everyone within fifty miles, where So-and-So’s farm was, then shoot out the door like a greased shoat.
Driving up to the farm house, I’d look around for dogs, and, if none presented themselves, I’d go knock on the front door, furtively asking whoever answered if there was any “action” going on. Several times I was ushered through the front door into the kitchen and then out the back door to the barn. But each time I was bitterly disappointed. Wading through discarded coffee filters and kitty litter I’d discover nothing but a crummy meth lab reeking of ammonia and benzene. No rooster could survive those fumes, so I’d make my excuses and quickly leave – cursing the waste of time and wondering what I would do that day for local news.
I have to admit that I never did bust a cockfighting ring in all my time as a newscaster in Iowa. At a county fair I interviewed a man who ran a fighting turtle concession. You had to pay a dollar to go in to see the battling turtles. Since I was media, I got a free pass. The sluggish pair of creatures crawled over each other at a leisurely pace, occasionally attempting a half-hearted snap at its adversary. The promoter confided in me, off the record, that he got the turtles into a contentious mood by blowing snuff into their faces prior to showtime. Why anyone would pay a buck to observe such somnolent reptiles is beyond me, but I saw with my own eyes the long lines that formed outside his canvas tent. On the off chance that turtle fighting might be illegal in Iowa I checked with the sheriff’s office. The dispatcher I spoke to seemed to think I had lost my mind and refused to patch me through to an officer when she heard what my question was. Sensing a cover up, I sped out to the sheriff’s office and confronted a deputy about it, intimating that I knew something was being passed under the table to allow the turtles to bore innocent victims to death. The deputy gave me a blank look, then told me I was parked in a Reserved space so I better move my car pronto. He apparently didn’t know the power of the broadcast medium to rip his tawdry racket apart; I bristled and turned my back on him – so he could see the radio station call letters stenciled on the back of my windbreaker. This had the desired effect; he immediately became chatty, asking me if the station would be broadcasting the high school basketball games again that fall, since his sixteen-year old would be playing. When I assured him that we would (it was our largest source of advertising revenue outside of Swap Shop) he broke into a grin and invited me to sit down and have a kruller. I reminded him that I was there to uncover the facts behind the turtle fight concession at the county fair. The deputy shrugged his shoulders, saying that to his knowledge there was nothing on the books against two turtles going at it or charging the public to watch it – although for his part he’d rather watch a good basketball game, or even a sprightly badminton tournament, instead.
Balked of another expose, I drove back to the station to cobble together something from Senator Grassley’s latest email newsletter for the evening news. Then I headed for The Cider Mill to drown my frustrations with a brace of Shirley Temples. With a dill pickle spear.
Now I was thinking of another line from another Warner Brothers cartoon, this one done by Chuck Jones, with Wylie Coyote and Bugs Bunny, in which the coyote keeps repeating to himself in ecstasy “Wylie Coyote, super genius!”
Yes, I was, undoubtedly, a comedic super genius, having turned a dull piece of commonplace prose into a sparkling example of classic understatement and misdirection.
When Joom came back from wherever she had been, I offered to take her out to the Korean buffet. All you can eat for 89 baht per person. She saw I was in a good mood, so she made me promise that I would also pay 89 baht for Nipoo, so Joom could give her plenty of raw meat. First I said sure thing, thi rak, and then, while going to the bathroom, I stubbed my toe bad on the shitty door sill, and told her hell no I wasn’t going to pay for her flea-bitten mutt. But I said it in English, very rapidly, and she didn’t catch the full meaning, only that I was upset because I had stubbed my toe again. So she reached up on her tiptoes to kiss my chin, then licked it like a popsicle until I relented.
It was Champoo season, and the Korean place had a platter of the waxy pink fruit out front. I sank my teeth into the crispy flesh, while Joom poured us soda water and Nipoo sniffed my bandaged toe.
Night came down on us like a soggy blanket, and there was much laughter, eating, belching, and many kind words in English and Thai.