by Don Calame
My horror must be pretty apparent if Uncle Doug can see it through my spandex mask.
“Look, worse comes to worst,” he continues, “just pee in the suit. It sure as shit won’t make it smell any worse. Hell, it might even warm you up. For a little while.” He throws his head back and howls.
A couple of thigh-clenched minutes later, Uncle Doug pulls the van up to the curb at the corner of Newport and Millburn. Cars and trucks whoosh by at top speed on the six-lane road.
“Here we be,” Uncle Doug says as he gets out of the van.
I shove open my door, swing my legs to the side, and slowly slide out of the passenger seat to the curb below. A quick scan of the landscape reveals a whole lot of nothing. The large plot of snow-laden grass slopes pretty dramatically from the sidewalk where I’m standing to the parking lot of a busy lumberyard below. No big trees or bushes in sight. A great spot to do some sledding but certainly not an ideal place to take a whiz.
“All right, then.” Uncle Doug pulls several large signs from the back of his van and drags them over to me. “I’ve got three ads here. I want you to cycle through them periodically.”
He holds up the first board, which reads BE AS SNUG AS A BUG IN DOUG’S RUGS! 30% OFF EVERY DAY! He shifts the front sign to the back so I can read the next one: DON’T BE A THUG: BUY YOUR GAL A NEW RUG AND GET 30% OFF! He flips the signs once more and shows me the last one: 30% OFF EVERYTHING! DOUG’S GONE MAD! COME TAKE ADVANTAGE OF HIS INSANITY!
Uncle Doug hands me the signs and checks his watch again. “All right. I’ll leave you to it. Oh, and, uh, be sure to stay alert and keep your eyes peeled.”
“For what?”
Uncle Doug drags his hand down his face and beard. “I probably should have mentioned this before but . . . the Doug’s Rug mascot has a tendency to . . .” He swirls his hand in the air like he’s trying to grasp the words.
“To what? A tendency to what?”
“To get attacked. Jumped. Roughed up a little. Nothing serious. Just . . . knocked down occasionally. By hoodlums. And . . . sometimes egged. Or shaving creamed. You know. For fun.”
“Wait a second.” I take a wobbly step toward him. “Are you saying I’m going to be ambushed?” I look down at myself. “Dressed like this? With no chance for self-defense?”
“Look.” Uncle Doug starts to walk backward. “It’s probably not going to happen. I mean, they’ve done it already. These guys. Several times. I’m sure, whoever they are, they’ve moved on to something else. You know how it is.”
“No. I don’t.” I take another step forward. “Because I’ve never assaulted a store mascot before. You can’t leave me here.”
“It’s going to be fine.” Uncle Doug continues to back away. “I wouldn’t put you in any actual danger. I need you out here. This kind of thing pays real dividends in increased store traffic. Besides, the last attack made the evening news. You can’t buy that kind of publicity.” He chuckles nervously, then checks his watch again. “Oh, hey, listen, I’ve got to get back to the store. But don’t worry, I’ll be out here to pick you up around four o’clock.”
“Uncle Doug, please.” I reach toward him with my brown-stockinged arm.
“Don’t forget to move around. You know, writhe a bit, like you’re a wavy carpet.” He undulates his torso and arms. “You want to make sure you’re noticed.”
“I don’t think I do. Not if I’m going to be beaten up. I want to lie down and disappear.”
“Hey, I’m not paying you to lie there like a rug.” Uncle Doug laughs a great big belly laugh.
“You’re not paying me at all!” I remind him.
“Now, now. Did I or did I not advance you five hundred dollars against my one-thousand-dollar investment? The least you can do to repay your uncle Doug’s generosity is generate a bit of traffic for his store.” He winks at me. “You’re a good kid, Seanie. See you in a bit.”
I’M DANCING AROUND in the snow on the side of the road in my carpet costume. Not because I want to attract attention to myself — certainly not, after finding out about the mascot assailants — but because I still have three and a half hours before Uncle Doug is coming back to get me and I have to take the mother of all whizzes.
I spin around desperately, searching for somewhere I can pull off this stupid outfit and drain the dragon.
But there is not a single solitary tree, bush, or abandoned building to crouch behind.
Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. Jesus.
A little pee devil on my shoulder is trying to convince me to “just let go.” To open the floodgates inside my costume like Uncle Doug said to.
Sure, it’s disgusting, but I am in some serious pain here. And I don’t want to die. Because it can totally happen. I know. I heard about this one dude who was “holding his water” to try and win a water scooter on some radio show and his bladder totally exploded.
Oh, God, it hurts so bad. From my belly all the way to the very tip of the tap.
All right. All right. Forget it. I’m done. If I don’t go right now I’m going to pass out. It’s fine. It’s no big deal. Astronauts pee in their space suits. Scuba divers pee in their wet suits.
And I can pee in my carpet costume.
I have my change of clothes back at the store. Everything’ll be mostly dry by the time I get picked up anyway. And this costume definitely can’t smell any worse than it already does. Nobody’ll know the difference.
I just have to relax and let nature take its course. I take a deep breath, exhale slowly, loosen my grip on things, roll my eyes back into my head, and . . .
and . . .
Nothing. Not even a pressure-relieving dribble. Not a single goddamn drop.
I can’t believe this. I actually get myself to the point where I’m ready to whiz all over myself and my stupid, pee-shy bladder won’t even let me go?
Okay. Okay. Calm down. Maybe it’s like in public bathrooms when people are waiting behind me and I can’t get things flowing. I’ll just make a deal. That’s it. I’ll make a deal with my dingle. It’s my go-to strategy in desperate times.
I close my eyes and tell myself, If you pee right now, you will win the film festival and you will not have to share a room with your evil sister. But only if you pee right now. By the count of five.
One . . . Mm-hmm. Okay. I can feel the tension starting to ease. Two . . . Oh, yes. That’s right. Here we go. All I needed was some incentive. Three . . . Almost there . . . Almost there . . .
“Incoming!” some guy shouts.
My eyes fly open, everything inside me clenching back up. A giant red truck is screeching to a halt right in front of me. Two ski-masked kids hang out the windows and start rifling eggs, tomatoes, and — zucchini? — at me.
“Go shag yourself!” one of them hollers.
I undulate like Uncle Doug showed me to try and ward off the onslaught, but it’s pointless. I am pelted from tassels to toes. Eggs exploding all over my costume. Zucchini battering me like dozens of tiny green baseball bats.
A giant juicy beefsteak tomato catches me in the face, erupting on impact and saturating my spandex mask with gloppy pulp.
I try to spin away from the assault, but my sneaker catches a patch of ice, sending my feet flying into the air. I flop onto the sidewalk with a muffled thud.
“Woo-hoo!” the guys whoop. “Fifty points! Did you get that on your phone?”
“Sure did.”
“Sweet. Let’s go YouTube it!”
The truck peels off and I lie there for a minute, stunned. A few self-pitying moments later, I realize that the trauma of the attack has totally scared away my pee urge. Well, thank Lord Vader for small favors.
Finally I roll over, hoist myself to my feet, and waddle back over to the signs. I might as well carry on until Uncle Doug comes back. What else am I going to do dressed as a giant rug and stranded in the middle of a suburban wasteland?
But as I bend over to retrieve the boards — which looks about as awkward as you can imagine — Uncle Doug’s
two-tone green van coasts up to the curb. And just like that, my desperate need to whiz comes back with a vengeance. It’s like now that my bladder knows a toilet is only a quick van ride away, it can stop playing possum and start making noise again. Major noise.
I start to waddle like mad toward the van. The sliding back door flies open, the dark cabin ready to take me in and whisk me to indoor plumbing.
And then, all of a sudden, three humongous hairy things spill out of the van all at once and begin stampeding toward me. It’s like something out of a nightmare. And I wonder, did I hit my head on the sidewalk? Am I in a coma? Am I dreaming this? Or did the mascot thugs go costume up and hijack Uncle Doug’s van so they could come back and attack me again?
The beasts growl and howl as they charge. My heart thuds in my chest as I shamble backward as fast as my leg-constricting carpet suit will let me.
That’s when I catch sight of the video-camera lens furtively poking out from the van’s open back door.
And suddenly it all makes sense.
These are our humanzees and I am meant to be one of their unwitting victims. I barely have time to wonder how we’re going to work a human-size rug into our script before the first creature is upon me. I get a glimpse of the fangs and the blood dripping from the corners of the flying vampanzee’s mouth — a pretty realistic effect, I must say — just as I turn to run. But it’s too late. The monster slams into me, ramming my lower back like I’m a football-tackling dummy. The creature’s hairy arms squeeze my midsection and I lose my balance once again.
We both hit the ground hard and the wind — together with a sizable gush of pee — is knocked right out of me. An odd mix of pain, relief, and humiliation swirls through my body as the wet warmth spreads over my thighs. I bear down, attempting to close off the tap, but there’s no way the flow is gonna stop before the tank’s been emptied.
I’m lying there on my stomach, clinging to the desperate hope that my carpet costume will soak up the embarrassing leak like a sponge, when I suddenly realize that me and the monkey-man have begun to slide down the snow-slicked slope.
And fast.
He is kneeling on top of me, riding me like a toboggan. I hear howls of laughter coming from the hilltop and console myself with the fact that at least the zombie-monkey costumes look pretty dope.
We finally come to a thumping halt against a mound of snow that’s been cleared from the lumberyard parking lot.
“Are you okay, there, buddy?” the monkey-man asks as he climbs off of me. His voice is familiar but since it’s muffled through the monkey mask, I can’t exactly place it.
“Yeah.” I sit up, coughing. “I think so.”
He turns his chimp-head and looks back at the hill we just sledded down. “What the —?” He starts to laugh. “Jeez, kid, did we actually scare the piss out of you?”
My body tingles with horror as I brush the snow and tomato guts out of my spandex-covered eyes and see what it is that he — and everyone on top of the hill — sees: a long, wide, Berry-Beast-bright-yellow swath cut through the snow.
He busts up, grabbing his hairy stomach. “Oh, buddy. Guy. I’m sorry. That’s . . . That’s . . . Wow.” But he doesn’t sound sorry at all. He reaches around his neck and starts to pull off the mask. I cringe, wondering which of our acquaintances just rode me down a hill while I pissed my tights.
The mask comes off and Nick smiles a huge psycho smile at me, his large teeth still stained red from the blood dye. “Now you know how I’ll be coming after you if you ever break my sister’s heart.” He cracks up like this is the funniest thing in the world.
To add insult to injury, Nick has to practically drag me back up the hill, as it’s impossible for me to do any climbing in my soggy restrictive rug suit. Everyone — Coop, Matt, Valerie, Helen, Evelyn, Uncle Doug, and the other two vampanzees — gathers around us once we reach the top.
“Oh, my God,” Evelyn shrieks, squeezing through the crowd to stand beside me. “Are you okay, sweetie pie? We didn’t know you were going to slip down the hill. I wouldn’t have let them do it if I’d known. I swear.”
“It’s okay,” I lie. “I’m fine.” Just clammy, achy, and pee scented.
“That was epic!” Coop hoots. “The kind of happy accident filmmakers dream about.”
“Were you scared?” Evelyn asks.
Nick chuckles. “Oh, he was scared all right.” He looks back at the yellow path I’ve left in the snow.
“What is that, anyway?” Helen asks, snapping a million photos of the scene.
“Nothing,” I say, my cheeks burning up behind the spandex.
“Probably just some dye from the cheap-ass rug costume.” Coop winks at me. “Don’t sweat it. We’ll make it work for us. We can recolor it in post. Make it red so it looks like blood. Your unc wanted product placement, and, boy, we got it! Zombie-vampire-chimps attack Rug Boy! I can’t wait to see the footage. I bet it looks spectac!”
“ANOTHER ROUND OF JALEPEÑO poppers,” Uncle Doug calls out over the loud mariachi music from our long table at Los Muchachos. A sombrero-clad waiter hustles over with his order pad in hand. “And some more of these tasty fried Mexi-cchini sticks.” Uncle Doug pops one in his mouth. “Mmm-mmm. Who knew veggies could ever taste so good?”
Uncle Doug felt so bad about my traumatic time as his rug mascot that he offered to take the whole cast and crew out to lunch — me, Matt, Coop, Valerie, Helen, Evelyn, Nick, and the two other primates: Matt’s older brother, Pete, and Tony “the Gorilla” Grillo.
I couldn’t believe it when Tony took off his mask. But not even the girls’ best makeup efforts could create a lip scar that scary, or a sneer that smarmy.
“Don’t you think we have enough food?” I say, staring at the dozen plates of deep-fried appetizers spread out before us.
“What are you talking about?” Uncle Doug laughs. “We’ve got some big boys to feed.”
Which is true enough. I crane forward and glance down to see Nick, Pete, and Tony at the far end of the table. Pawing at the food and yukking it up with each other like a bunch of bodybuilder buddies after a hard workout.
I lean over to Matt and keep my voice low. “So, how’d you manage to get the three gigantes to dress up like monkeys for us?”
“Nick was easy,” Matt says, taking a bite of a Tex-Mex egg roll. “He’ll play as many parts in the movie as we want. As long as he also gets to play the head of the military.”
I nod. “Okay. And your brother and Tony?”
“That took a bit more negotiating. Originally they wanted fifty bucks a day. But I talked them down to twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five dollars?” I splutter. “A day? That’s . . .” I do some quick mental math. “Seven hundred bucks if we have to shoot with both of them for the whole two weeks!”
“We didn’t really have a choice. They’re the only guys we know who even come close to filling out the costumes. We’ll just have to pick and choose which days we need to shoot full-on chimp suits. Don’t worry about it. It’s like Coop said, a lot of stuff can be done with just the paws and mouths.”
I press my fingers into my temples as a six-Berry-Beast headache thrums its way through my skull. All right, so, that’s fifty bucks for Tony and Pete today. And another hundred for the monkey costumes and makeup the girls bought. Plus the fifty Cathy stole. That still leaves us with three hundred of the original five. With another five hundred to come. I guess we’re still okay. As long as nothing else unexpected comes along.
“Hey, could you move over a little?” Matt asks, scrunching up his nose. “No offense or anything, but you still kinda smell like piss.”
“Sorry.” I scoot my chair toward the corner of the table. We made a pit stop at Uncle Doug’s store so I could wash up in his bathroom sink and change back into my street clothes, but until I take a long hot shower, I won’t be completely pee-free.
I’m hoping that this lunch ends soon so I can get home and really scrub down before I have to head over to Nes
sa’s.
But lunch does not end soon. And as it stretches into its second hour — the three muscleheads having started a full-out eating contest, with Uncle Doug taking bets from the other customers in the restaurant — I start to worry I’ll miss my meeting with Nessa entirely.
I glance at my cell phone. Four fifteen. Okay, so, showering is out of the question. But I can still make it to Nessa’s — maybe just a little late — if I can get back to Uncle Doug’s shop, grab my bike, and go straight to her house. Hopefully the ride over will sufficiently air me out.
I look over to see Evelyn pounding the table and cheering her brother on as Nick tilts his head back and swallows an entire burrito like a python gulleting a rabbit.
Here’s my chance. While everyone is preoccupied.
I tap Matt on the shoulder. He turns around, looking slightly annoyed that I’ve interrupted his viewing of the freak show.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“I have to get out of here. Can you cover for me?”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t feel well,” I say, which isn’t a complete lie. I do feel a little nauseous after eating all that grease. “I just want to slip out without making a big deal out of it. Otherwise Evelyn might want to come with and I really don’t want that right now. Just tell everyone I went home to get some rest and that I didn’t want to ruin their good time.”
Matt keeps glancing over his shoulder, trying to keep track of who’s eating what. “Okay, fine, sure, whatever,” he says, then turns back to watch the festivities.
I crouch down and skulk out of the restaurant. With all the whoops and hollering, no one notices, which is just how I want it. I’ll send Evelyn a text in a little while saying I’m going to take a nap and I’ll see her tomorrow. That way she won’t decide to swing by my house to see if I’m okay.
A little less than an hour later, I hop the curb and ride up Nessa’s driveway. I’ve only been here once before, three years ago. Nessa’s mom had passed away and there was a get-together where they served crustless tuna-salad sandwiches with relish, a shrimp plate with way-too-hot cocktail sauce, a soggy lasagna, and three different brands of cola.
