THIRTEEN
Steve Hanel, AKA Captain Kirk, always started our games of Star Trek off by saying ‘Man your stations.’ This consisted of us putting the large garage door up and the four of us sitting on it so we were facing into the garage up in the rafters. It became the deck of the Starship Enterprise.
Steve, Jason and Cory were like spider monkeys when it came to getting up on the topside of the door. They’d climb up the inside frame work of the garage walls, using it like wooden ladders. I on the other hand, was always afraid of falling and breaking my neck, so I had my own way of getting topside.
“You guys going to help me up?” I asked them.
“Of course,” Steve said, with a roll of his eyes. “Come on guys, give me a hand.”
The four of us went out of the garage through the small door and walked around to the driveway. On the front of the large door there were big wooden squares set in patterns. Their edges protruded about an inch. Just enough so I could stand on them with my feet sideways. I stepped up, grabbed my handholds at the top of one of the squares and clung to it like a gecko. The three of them then lifted the large, heavy door about halfway so it was at a forty-five degree angle. When it was in position I would scurry up on my belly under the huge frame of the carport till I was safely on the other end. Finally, using my weight, they would lift the door the rest of the way until it was fully ajar, me sitting pretty on the inside.
To me, Steve said, “Scotty, set a course…for…warp speed.”
On the rafters above the opened door, we had taken crayons and drawn circles and squares of varying colors. These were the computer’s buttons that controlled the ship and I began pushing them and making beep and boop sounds to engage our flight path.
The other three began to make their own way to the flight deck, climbing up the framework, when Steve said to Jason, “Mr. Spock, you stay below. I’ve…got…a…mission for you.” He even did Shatner’s jerks and arm thrusts for effect.
Jason turned to Steve and in his best Spock imitation replied, “A mission Captain?” His hands held behind his back like Leonard Nemoy’s character always did.
“Yes. Grab a communicator and toss one up to me.”
Spock did as he was told. He picked up the walkie-talkies from the washing machine where we had left them and pitched one up, underhand to Kirk who had taken his place at the helm in the middle of the garage door. They turned them on and tested them.
“Spock. Are we…on the same frequency?” Kirk spoke into the Batman radio.
And although we all heard Steve’s voice over the radio Jason held, Spock answered back, “Yes, Captain. I hear you.”
“Good. Scotty, prepare…to beam Spock down.”
Pushing a couple of the crayon buttons, issuing the beeps and boops when needed, I said, “Beam ready, Captain.”
“Your mission, Mr. Spock, is…Dead Grove planet. When you get there…I’ll guide you to where you need to go. Set your phaser to stun.” We didn’t have any toys that resembled the phasers they used on the show, so we usually just used our fingers as guns when needed.
“All ready, Captain,” Spock said and gave his famous hand sign, fingers split in the middle.
“Bones, be prepared with your medical bag if something happens to Spock while he’s on his mission.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Cory said, looking almost bored as he touched one or two of the fake buttons above his head, sans sound.
Our captain then gave me my command.
“Scotty, beam him down.”
“Beep. Wheeller, wheeller, wheeller.” At the sound of being beamed, Jason ran out of the garage and headed for the short alley and gate that ran next to the Maherrin’s house.
“Beam successful, Captain,” I informed him.
“Very good. Bones I need you to… PROOOCH!” Steve made this last sound as if we were being fired upon. He rocked the garage door with his butt as a special effect. “Oh no. It seems… that the Klingons… have found us. We’ve been hit. Bones, man the guns.”
“Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a gunman,” Cory said in a voice that sounded nothing like Dr. McCoy. And the one funny thing about that was that Cory’s dad, Guy, actually looked a lot like DeForest Kelley, although Cory, himself, did not.
“Just… do it… man!”
“Aye aye, Captain,” Cory said and crawled on hands and knees to the other side of the door. He grabbed a pair of gardening sheers and held them like a laser canon. “Pchoo. Pchoo. They’re hit, but not destroyed. Pchoo. Pchoo.”
Kirk swung around toward me, his red bandana covering the top of his eyes. “Scotty, put us in cloaking mode. Now!”
I reached for a button, my finger hovering an inch from it and turned to him and asked, “What’s cloaking mode?”
Off in the distance we heard a faint banging and rattling sound as Mr. Spock hopped the fence that led into Dead Grove.
With a shrug of his shoulders and a sigh, Kirk fixed his headband and said, “It means turn the ship invisible.”
“Oh,” I said touching buttons. “Beep, boop, boop.”
Kirk: “How we doing Bones?”
“Pchoo, pchoo. Got another hit on them.”
“Cease fire for just a second. Everyone remain silent. We’re cloaked, but they may be able to pick up on our sound waves.”
The three of us sat up there on the door not saying a word. Cory and I looked over at Steve who was staring up into the rafters, his hand raised to stay our speech. After another twenty seconds of silence, he said in a quite whisper, “Bones, set your gun to overkill. Scotty, prepare to change a course to the far side of planet Dead Grove.”
“I’m not sure this is such a good idea, Jim,” Bones said. “We could blow ourselves into a black hole.”
“Trust me.” Kirk held his gaze at a rafter in the middle of the ceiling and after a couple more seconds said, “FIRE! Change course.”
“Pawoom.”
“Boop, beep, boop.”
Steve started bouncing up and down on the garage door making it feel as if we were experiencing some sort of heavy space turbulence. I thought the door was going to fall down and take us all with it.
“I canna hold ‘er togeda Captain,” I said.
“We blew them into smithereens,” Bones whooped and pumped his fist into the air.
Steve settled back and let the door still itself. “Good job, men. I’d… better check in with Spock.” He picked up the walkie-talkie from next to him, pressed the button and said, “Spock, what’s your location? Over.”
After a pause of a second or two a weak static reply came back from Jason. “I seem to be on some strange alien world. There’s dead trees and dirt everywhere. I’m currently standing next to some sort of small metal shack.”
Steve looked at both of us and abandoning the Kirk persona for now said, “He must be next to the water shack.” Then back into the radio, “Okay, now I want you to walk straight out into the groves and turn right at the first clear path you come to.”
“You mean the trail to the fort?” came the reply. Obviously he had given up being Spock as well.
“That’s the one. But don’t go all the way up to the fort. Radio me back when you get about halfway there and you see an old tire and a pile of wood.”
“Gotcha.”
Just then the front door to Steve’s house opened and slammed shut. Jacob came strutting into the garage, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He stopped and leaned up against the water heater and said, “The fuck’s going on in here?”
Cory and I remained silent, looking anywhere except at Steve’s brother, pretending to be interested in the stuff stored up in the rafters.
“Nothing,” Steve said and shrugged.
“Well than how come I could feel the whole damn house shake while I was taking a dump right now.” He took a pull off the Marlboro and exhaled a plume of blue smoke.
Now we looked at Steve. We knew we were busted.
“We were just playing,” he said.<
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Taking a step forward, meaning to look intimidating, Jacob shouted, “Well go do it somewhere else. You fuckers are going to break the damn door doing that. Besides I’m trying to relax.”
We all knew this meant he was in the house getting high. He was probably rolling up a joint while he was sitting on the toilet. His eyes were already considerably red and glossy.
Steve stared his brother down for a moment and when Jacob didn’t look away Steve did and said, “Come on guys. Let’s get out of here.”
Steve and Cory jumped down from their perch on the Starship Enterprise easily enough. I on the other hand had just as much trouble getting down as I did getting up. So I laid down flat on my stomach and let my legs dangle over the side so Steve could help me the rest of the way.
Once the three of us were on the ground, Jacob came over and said, “Well what do we have here? You girls sitting in here and jacking off to these pictures,” pointing up to the naked women plastered to the inside of the door.
“No,” Steve said back, looking a little embarrassed at the suggestion. “We were shooting at them, with the BB gun.”
The walkie-talkie on Steve’s hip crackled to life. “I found it. Now what?”
Steve picked it up and pressed the button. “Give me one second. We’re going to meet you over there.”
“Well take the pictures down so mom don’t see ‘em. She’ll probably think it was me,” Jacob said and returned to the house.
After he was safely out of earshot, Cory said quietly, “Yeah, go smoke some more dope, loser.”
We all laughed.
We then set to taking the pictures down and throwing them in the trashcans on the side yard behind the gate.
“We’re on our way,” Steve spoke into the radio. “Did you happen to find an old bowling ball bag under the wood?”
Two seconds of silence passed and then, “No but I’ll look.”
Pressing his button again Steve said, “Open the bag and check to see what’s in it.”
Steve grabbed his BB gun as Cory closed Steve’s garage doors and we headed to the alley next to the Maherrin’s. I was just jumping the gate that was meant to restrict access when Jason came back on the radio.
“Holy shit. Now I know where you got the pictures. Hurry up.”
Steve began laughing as we followed him into Dead Grove.
Frisbee Page 17
