Upon the Stopping of Jake

They were freewheeling.

The Charger was going 130, easily, riding the downhill country road like surfing a wave. The suspension system absorbed the road flaws and threw them away like a used cigarette butt.

Jake and Tom were laughing their asses off, until they saw the flashing lights in their collective mirrors.

"Oh, shit." The thought occurred to them, simultaneously. Or very close.

Jake pulled the orange beast over, lifted his sunglasses to get a better view in the side mirror, and then let them fall onto the bridge of his nose. After an eternity of held breath, he whispered, "Hide the whiskey."

Tom shoved the bottle down his pants. He looked in his mirror and noted her breasts and blonde hair. He then lowered his eyes to his crotch, and kept them there.

The policewoman walked up next to Jake, peered into the vehicle, without raising her shades.

Tom chanced a glance, and saw his reflection in her lenses.

Jake lowered his window, and asked, "What seems to be the problem, officer?"

She did not respond. Tom grew restless. The whiskey bottle was pressing his nuts.

Once again, Jake queried, "What's the problem?"

The woman officer replied, "You were going a bit fast there, boy."

Jake, not in the least intimidated, responded, "I don't think I was going that fast, actually."

Tom was about to crap his pants on that. Jesus, be nice, and let’s get out of here.

The officer stated, "I have you on radar going 69."

Jake mulled it over, and then asked, "So, is there a problem with '69' on this road?"

The officer replied, "Yeah, when the speed limit is 65."

Jake said back, "Yeah, but lots of cars were passing us, easily going 75, but you stopped us. Do you have a problem with 69?"

"What are you asking, sir?" The woman demanded.

Tom was freaking out.

"What, don't you like a good '69' once in a while, around here, or what?" Jake stood his ground.

As she lifted her shades, she looked across Jake's seat, stared at Tom, lowered her shades, and then spoke directly at Jake.

"I'll tolerate a 69 around these parts, as long as I get to sit on your face."

Jake replied, "I can live with that, baby."

The policewoman leaned in and kissed Jake squarely in the mouth, passionately, while Tom shook in the next seat.

As she pulled away, she commented, "You boys need to be more careful out here."

"Otherwise, I'd have to put my cuffs on you and punish you."

As they peeled out, Jake yelled back, "My place at nine?"

In the rear view mirrors, they both saw her raise her middle finger.

Jake reached over and pulled the whiskey bottle out of Tom's pants and told him, "God, I love a strong woman."

They both watched the speedometer creep up to 140.

Simultaneously, they both yelled, "Fuck gravity!"

Sometimes, Texas roads are good.

Tom wondered how he could ever clean his underwear. He’d have to throw them away. That was just a fact.

Smug grin on Jake's face, as they pulled into town.

Heaven, Hell, or Houston

Betty was a skilled receptionist. Efficient, and smart enough to know exactly how to route calls throughout the building.

I interacted with her on a daily basis, and always was distracted by that ring on her finger. It looked a lot like a wedding band, so it was a sort of, "lust after her, but you can never have her," kind of thing, at times.

We worked together for over a year, and then she made the effort to walk by my desk, and announce that she was going on vacation, to Glacier National Park. I was envious. That park isn't meant for pussies.

I really didn't miss her all that much while she was gone, but then she came back, and made a point of coming by my desk, to announce her arrival. She started telling these stories, about how she had come into contact with grizzlies, and she told a good story. There was something missing, though.

At one point, I asked her, "What did your husband have to say about that."

She stated, "I'm not married."

I'm looking back, and at her hand, and she has this ring on her finger, like she's married. I confront her, and she simply states that "I like wearing a ring on that finger."

That totally pisses me off. Here's this woman, hiding herself behind a curtain of a fake marriage, all the while, she's completely free. I guess she liked that, and I don't blame her, too much.

Still, when she left, to me, it was like an opportunity that never knocked.

One time, we were in this corporate closet, looking at various corporate items that had not been dispersed, like T-Shirts and crap. She would hold a shirt sporting the corporate logo up across her breasts and ask me, "Does this make you want to believe?"

I believed in her breasts. That's a fucking fact. She knew what she was doing.

Then, as the day wore on, she started donating little facts about her life. Her life back in Houston.

Apparently, she wasn't entirely mentally healthy, and had been working for this company, as a receptionist, and had just decided, out of the blue, to stop going in to work. I did that once myself.

Nothing bad had happened at work. She just woke up and said, "I am not going to work, today."

This caused major problems, because she basically ran the business from her phone, and all business stopped without her presence. That was not her intent. It was a result.

She went to a therapist, for a short time, and returned to work. Then she changed jobs. Else, I would never have met her.

A Texas girl. A Texas woman.

So, she comes by my desk after her vacation, and announces that she visited Glacier, saw some fucking bears, and then says that she's moving back to Houston.

Of course, no one in a right mind would move back to Houston, so I'm at a quandary. What do I do with this woman?

I confront her about her ring, and she laughs at me.

I ask, "Why are you telling me this shit?"

She giggles, and walks away.

I don't know if she expected me to follow her, or not. I chose not to. She was attractive, for sure. But fucked up, as well.

Still, her story of waking up in her car surrounded by grizzly bears was riveting.

Won't forget that, anytime soon.

She had lovely hands. And thighs.

She also had a strangely hypnotic presence about her...

blue

She hated outdoor adventures, unless she could watch them from the air-conditioned comfort of her home theater with a "G & T" in hand. With a fresh slice of lime.

"Well, shit, I didn't expect to go out like this." Blue made his comment as she tried, all too late, to stop the poison.

She humored herself, internally, that things would work out okay. "Around Blue, they always do." Not this time.

She finally attempted a tourniquet that would never work.

She had insisted on accompanying him on this excursion, even though she hated them. No cooks. No bed. No meds. He was insistent on that point. "When you're out in the wild, you need all of your natural senses, no matter how unnatural you might think yours to be." She spilled some water on her scarf, and continued to stroke his forehead, alive like fire. He was becoming delirious.

He had warned her of the snakes so many times. He explained, "Where we're going, your chances of being bitten by a non-venomous snake are pretty damned slim, if you happen to get bitten." He hated snakes, actually, while she had always found them exotic and fascinating. From watching him on TV, you'd never know it.

He had dropped down to rub her foot, and that's when the beast was forced to strike. It got him in the calf, quite deeply. There was no turning around point for them, after that.

She had complained the whole way. "Jesus, I wanted to get out of L.A., not out of the fucking world!" After a while, it became a joke between them, and they would alternate the names of other towns and cities along the way.

"Jesus, I just wanted to get out of Fort Worth, not out of the fucking world!"

"Jesus, I just wanted to get out of Orlando, not out of the fucking world!"

The desert seemed to stretch on forever.

But here was Blue, sweating like a pig, lying on the sand with his forearm over his forehead, repeating the words, "I'm not ready to leave this fucking world."

She delicately applied more water, and it seemed to help, but it did not even approach postponing the inevitable. Her knees ground into the sand, slowly, struggling to support his head.

Out of the blue, he told her, "I think I'm 2000 light years from home." She laughed out loud, for the first time in days.

Looking back at the mound behind her, she remembered his last words: "Cover me up, and keep walking. When they see you from the helicopter, during the scheduled flyover, they will see that you are alone and pick you up."

Years later, sitting in some "hip" bar in L.A., she laughed to a friend and noted, "You know, it takes a lot more sand to cover a body than you might first think." It was hot in the city today, and sleazy men of various shapes and sizes continued to ogle her from across the room. She felt slightly ill.

She rubbed the ice-cold glass against her forehead, finished her drink, and said, "Let's get out of here. Too many snakes around here for my taste."

On the way home, she was mesmerized by the blue sky. Not gray today. She slipped off her shoes, and felt the sand embedded in the carpet of her floorboard rise between her toes. The grit made her feel alive. Terribly alive.

"Jesus, I'm stuck in this world."

She put the key into the deadbolt, opened the door, only to be greeted by "Blue," her Python. She picked him up, and he wrapped himself around her body, like a scaly quilt, while she cooed to him, "Precious boy, how I so did miss you today."

"I think we could both use a gin and tonic after today."

She turned on the TV. The glow was somehow reassuring.

"Jesus, I just wanted him to go away, not to fucking die!"

She admitted to herself that the limes, of late, seemed to be fresher than usual.

Backseat Driving Woman

She holds all the cards.
Texas winding roads.
Lightening bolt, out of the blue.
She seeks a smoke.

She stoops and takes a piss
Looking me in the eyes
With glee
On the side of a Texas road.

Drops ashes,
Pulls up her pants
And spits.

She holds all the cards.
Licks her lips
Gets in the passenger seat
And says, "Drive."

As I drive
She reaches over
And unzips my pants.

The highway patrolman passing by
Has no idea.

She is a Texas girl.
A Texas woman.
And she will never be mine.

She holds all the cards
She will never be mine.
As I turn my cards over,
I realize,
I am beaten, big time,

From the start.

The Ballad of Danny Joe

Danny Joe's father was an asshole. The whole town knew it as fact.

Danny's mother performed her duties as waitress at the small-town restaurant, just so that the family could eat. Danny's father was the local bootlegger, and not a particularly good one, unless you wanted beer. Then, he occasionally could provide. Otherwise, you could usually find him in the county jail.

I didn't get to know Danny until I was a freshman in High School. A small town high school, at that. Danny was smart, but lazy. Looking back, I think that his only goal in life was to surpass his father's success as a bootlegger. Can't recall if he pulled that off or not.

As I said, I didn't meet him until I entered High School, and he kind of took me under his wing. Why? I have no idea, other than there were a couple of weird times in school where I made him laugh. Once I started hanging around him, he looked after me, and I made him laugh. I was a small boy, and people would try to pick on me, but as long as Danny was around, nothing ever happened to me, in a bad way.

While most of my classmates were in bed late Friday and Saturday nights, I was always out with Danny, drinking beer. Probably not a healthy way to approach puberty, but that's where I was, at the time. We used to make the most amazing runs to liquor stores on other counties, since the county where we lived was dry. Hence the marketplace for bootleggers. There I was, 14 years old, sitting in the passenger's seat, with Danny passing me a quart of Coors beer driving about 100 miles an hour, with the radio blasting, and him telling me stories about his latest sexual conquests.

I knew the girls that he spoke about. Made it all very interesting.

He had this one girlfriend, Sara, who was actually a year older than he. She was very reserved. Not the kind of girl that you would fancy hanging around the likes of Danny, but live and learn, I suppose. She had gone off to college for a semester, and had come back into town for the Christmas holiday.

This one particular night, Danny was tending a gas station, which was his regular job as a senior in High School, and I was hanging out with him. Sara comes wheeling up, opens the door to the station, and plops down on Danny's lap, with a bottle of Vodka in tow. She's lit. Lit not like a firecracker, but like a stick of dynamite. They kiss and laugh for about an hour, exchanging drinks off of the bottle of hooch, and then they both turn and look at me.

Sara leaves the building, and Danny looks at me and says, "Sara wants to fuck you."

I'm sitting there, going, "What the hell?"

And Danny repeats his statement. "Sara wants to fuck you."

I answer, "What am I supposed to do about that?"

He replies, "I'll let you go with her, and you can let her fuck you. But she has to fuck you. If you fuck her, I'll beat the shit out of you. Understand?"

I said, "Yes." I was not telling the truth, of course.

So Sara drives me out of town, into this cornfield, takes a swig on the near-empty vodka bottle, and says, "Have you ever been with a naked woman before?"

I just say, "No, not since I took a bath with my sister when I was five years old." She laughs. She laughs in a way that I know that she thinks that I am funny.

She says to me, "Just watch." She starts with her shoes. Then her blouse. Then her jeans. And she's sitting in the driver's seat, wearing only a bra and panties, finishes off the bottle of vodka, throws it out of the window, and says to me, "If you wanna keep going, it's your turn."

I'm scared shitless. And horny. I wonder if this is some sort of big joke. I fully expect Danny to jump out of the corn and go "boo!" That does not happen.

So she says, jump in the back seat. So I do.

She's watching me from behind the steering wheel, in the rear view mirror, as I get into the back seat. She reaches into the glove compartment and gets a fresh pint of vodka. She opens it, and says, "Take your shirt off."

And I do. She says, "Take off all of your clothes, I want to look at you."

I almost run away, but don't. I slowly peel away my clothing, as she takes swigs off of the fresh bottle of vodka. Watching.

Finally, I am down to my underwear, and she can see the fear in my eyes. She laughs, crawls over the seat, until she is sitting right next to me. I can feel the heat coming off of her near-naked body, with her sitting next to me. There is just enough light from the moon outside that she doesn't have to leave a light on in the car, anymore.

At that point, she removes her bra. Then she pulls down her panties. And she is naked. Then she tells me to lie back. I do it.

She gets on top of me, and kisses me. My first kiss, and she knows it.

As we are kissing, she moves her hands down and starts pulling off my underwear. Then she kisses me on my neck. And then my chest. Then my belly. Then she looks up ands says, "Do you want me to stop?"

I merely shake my head "no."

Then she proceeds to take me in her mouth.

It didn't take too long, only about five minutes, but I screamed. Mostly because I think that she wanted me to scream. And I was right about that one.

I offered, at that point, to do something for her, but she said, "No." We pulled on our clothes, and shared the rest of the vodka driving back into town.

I was pretty drunk by the time we got back into town.

We pulled up to the gas station, and I stumbled out of the car, with a huge grin on my face.

Sara went in to use the bathroom.

Danny Joe looked me square in the eyes and asked me, "Did you fuck her?"

As a true statement, I said "No."

Then he asked, "Did she fuck you?"

I said, "Yeah, I think so."

He laughed heartily, and said, "Yeah, she likes to fuck. You tell anybody about this, and WILL beat the shit out of you!"

They gave me a ride home, and that was the last time I saw either of them.

I heard later that they went to California, or somewhere out West. Further west than Texas, I guess.

Trucking, got my chips cashed in...

When I was growing up, my dad had a car/truck dealership. He sold a lot of big trucks to people, including this guy that I came to know. We'll call him Andy, out of convenience.

Andy used his first truck, a huge dump truck with a wench, to pick up dead animals and take them to the "rendering" plant. I don't know if you understand what a "rendering" plant is, but it's basically a meat plant for animals that have been dead too long to use for human consumption. I mean really dead stuff, here. Days dead.

Anyway, I used to ride with Andy as he made his pick ups. Ranchers would call him when they had a dead cow, and Andy would back up to the dead animal, attach a steel wire to a hind leg, and pull it into the bed of the truck.

Well, one day, a very hot July kind of day, I was with Andy and he got a call for a pick up. It must have been 105 outside, and the truck had no air conditioner, but I went with him to this sprawling ranch outside of Hereford, Texas. This was no ordinary pickup, 'cause this animal had been dead for about a week. In the Texas heat. It was bloated, stiff, and very, very dead. Beyond dead.

I usually didn't do much when I was with Andy, and that day was no exception. I got out of the cab, walked to the rear, and watched him attach the wire to the dead cow's rear leg. As I stood there mired in sweat, I watched him pull the lever to activate the wench. Everything was okay until he attempted to drag the dead animal over a cactus plant. There was a moment of hesitation, and the main part of the cow's body came to a halt, but the wench kept moving. Suddenly, the cow's leg, due to decomposition, let go of its body and the steel cable from the wench acted like a rubber band. The separated leg went flying through the air, toward the truck bed, and hit Andy square in the head. Knocked him out.

So there I am, standing in the Texas July heat, sweating like a pig, wondering what to do about it all. I walked over to Andy, sprawled on the ground, and that was when the smell hit me. A very bad smell. At a rendering plant, they take days old dead animals and harvest the meat to use as dog and cat food, for the most part. If you've ever opened a can of dog or cat food, then you have an inkling about days-old dead cow smell. You can smell it, and think to yourself, "There's something that ain't right about this stuff." Standing in 105 degree heat in West Texas, with a dismembered dead cow, you get the same idea. Only fresh. Fresh dead, that is.

Andy was knocked out, I was hot and sweaty, and he was covered in dead cow pieces. He stunk. Bad.

When he woke up, he looked around, dusted himself off, and physically threw the cow's leg into the bed of the trunk. Then he attached the wire to the cow and finished pulling it on board.

We got into the truck to drive away, but he stunk so bad that I couldn't stand it. I got into the cab, and immediately vomited. Out the side window. Andy started laughing, and laughed so hard that he vomited out of the driver's side window. The drive back into town was punctuated with barfing and rampant laughter. There was a dark humor at work, there.

Death is nothing to laugh at, but we managed to pull it off. Not without a lot of vomit.

Andy later moved into vehicle towing, and purchased another truck. From time to time, and regularly on Saturday nights, I would ride with him to perform towing services. He had a police frequency radio on board, so that he could swoop down on wrecks and take advantage of the economic opportunity afforded by wrecked cars.

Most of the time, it was a clean operation. Drunk driver, easy tow. Until one night.

The traffic on the radio was busy, 'cause there was a bad wreck. Drunk driver stuff. We proceeded out the wreck site, and sure enough, it was ugly. Torn steel everywhere. Two pickups and a twisted Corvette. We weren't the first people on the scene, but close. Apparently, this Corvette held three people -- two guys and a blonde. I watched as the ambulance guys carried away the two dead males on stretchers. Strangely, they put a sheet over the dead blonde's body and left her in the mangled car.

We kept waiting, for about an hour, and then I saw the coroner pull up. He had a flashlight, and he focused it on the woman's body briefly, and then walked over to the side of the road, where there was a police jacket sitting in the ditch. I moved closer, and he pulled away the jacket to reveal the severed head from the dead blonde woman. When the coroner reached to bag it, it slipped, and went rolling down the side of the ditch, still grinning. It was a bizarre grin.

The coroner commented, "Hey, I think she bumped her head."

Moments before the accident, she had been sitting up on the back seat, on the trunk, laughing and drinking. In fact, they had almost run over a poor old woman walking across the street.

She had yelled out to the lady, "Step out there and meet Jesus!"

Now I was watching the coroner bag her head.

It was a matter-of-fact operation.

To this day, I can't look at the severed head of a blonde without thinking of that dark night.

Live and learn.