by Jim Dodge
‘It’s just one of Elmer’s jokes,’ a weary female voice informed me. ‘A recording. Breaking the circuit in the door activates it. I tell Elmer it’s bad for business but he don’t listen to me.’ The speaker was the dour-faced woman I’d seen in the window. She didn’t look any happier in the dingy glow of the two forty-watts lighting the store. She was in her fifties, a few inches over five feet but showing all the signs of shrinking fast. She was dressed entirely in dull black except for a large, round pin on her bosom, a grinning, bright orange pumpkin with the legend KEEP FUN SAFE FOR KIDS. As I looked at her narrow, tight-lipped face, the legend seemed less a plea for the safety of innocence than a personal admission of its loss – her matte-brown eyes had given up on fun long ago.
‘No problem.’ I smiled to show her I could take a joke. My instinct was to cheer her up.
‘There’s not much stock left,’ she said, ‘but go ahead and look around. You need any help I’ll be behind the counter.’
It was a joke shop: joy buzzers, whoopee cushions that emitted long flatulent squeals when you sat on them, fountain pens designed to leak all over the unsuspecting user, plastic lapel flowers with hidden water-filled squeeze-bulbs to flush the sinuses of sniffers, kaleidoscopes that left the viewer with a black eye – that sort of thing, and more bare shelf than merchandise.
A section of plastics caught my eye. A pile of dogshit that looked so real you could smell it. Below that a display of severed extremities – fingertips to put in somebody’s beer, whole fingers to wedge in doors, the entire hand for under the pillow or the lip of the toilet bowl. Not to mention plastic snakes, spiders, bats, scorpions, flies, and hideously bloated sewer rats that I instantly envisioned floating belly-up in suburban swimming pools. Next to the animals were plastic puddles of vomit with realistic chunks of potatoes and half-digested meat. None of them made me laugh, but I’ll admit to a smile.
In the next aisle were books of matches that wouldn’t light, rolling papers saturated with invisible chemicals guaranteed to gag the smoker, exploding loads for cigarettes and cigars, and boxes of birthday candles that appeared normal but could not be blown out. The last struck me as cruel. If you couldn’t blow out your birthday candles, your wish wouldn’t come true; not that it did anyway, which was a different sort of cruelty. But if the candles couldn’t be blown out, was the birthday eternal, the wish kept alive without a future to grant it, deny it, betray it? The candles didn’t make me laugh, but since they provoked me with possibilities I decided to buy a box.
The next aisle was devoted to humor of a chemical nature. A handsomely packaged soap that promised to turn the user’s skin a gangrenous green a half hour after application. Something called Uro-Stim, invisible when dissolved in liquid and guaranteed to create in any drinker the frantic need to piss. I immediately thought of a couple of long-winded North Beach poets who could use a few hits in their pre-reading wine. There was also Rainbow P, a little packet of six colorless capsules that would turn your urine a choice of colors. I thought Uro-Stim and Rainbow P might make a devastating combination – send the victim hopping pigeon-toed and grimacing to the pisser only to deliver a stream of bright maroon urine … looking down, stunned, and thinking, It can’t be me! Jesus, who was I fucking last night? I started laughing, clearly getting in the mood.
I skipped a section of playing cards – some shaved or marked for tricks, others obviously for viewing (‘52 Different Beauties – No Pose the Same’) – and browsed a miscellaneous aisle of Chinese handcuffs, balloons called Lung Busters because you couldn’t blow them up with anything lighter than an air compressor, and a cheap-looking fry pan ostensibly coated with a revolutionary stick-proof compound, although the accompanying literature guaranteed this miracle coating would melt into industrial-strength epoxy within two minutes of heating, locking your eggs to the pan.
What sort of mind thinks of such things? I wondered as I shuffled on past the mustache wax that caramelized fifteen minutes after you put it on, a dusty box of Chocolate Creme Surprises (the surprise was either a licorice-tapioca filling or a hidden capsule of raw jalapeno extract), a display of rubber kitchen utensils, and, all alone at the end of a bare shelf, a big magenta tube with a screw top that looked like a tinker-toy package except for the gold lettering that identified it as ‘S.D. Rollo’s Divinity Confections, The Finest Sweets This Side of Heaven.’ No telling what those were. I unscrewed the lid to take a peek and great fucking Jesus! a giant spring-coiled snake shot halfway across the store, its flannel skin a blinding yellow with glaring polka-dots of baby blue and a flamingo pink only slightly more muted than my hat, its black button eyes glossy as sin and its tongue of red stiffened velvet ready to lie for pleasure. The shock of the vaulting snake made me drop the box of Uro-Stim, then step on it as I moved to retrieve the snake from over by the whoopee cushions. Blushing brighter than the serpent’s scarlet tongue and trying to babble an apology to the sour-puss clerk, who hadn’t even looked up from what she was doing, I was stumbling in total disarray when a familiar voice called, ‘Hey, George,’ and I wheeled around to see my ghost pointing to a stack of small white boxes. ‘Get me a couple of these, would you?’
‘What are they,’ I asked, but then he was gone.
‘I beg your pardon?’ called the woman behind the counter.
In my attempt to turn around, I tripped on the damn snake and fell against the shelf of whoopee cushions, instinctively grabbing one to break my fall. Which it did, to the long accompaniment of what we young boys in Jacksonville used to call a ‘tight-ass screamer,’ only this one ended more like a siren sinking in bubbling mud.
‘My goodness! Are you all right?’ She was peering down at me, sounding even wearier than before.
‘Fine, no problem,’ I mumbled, flailing my way up off the floor with the whoopee cushion under one arm and a hand around the snake’s throat.
‘I tell Elmer he should put a warning on that darn snake, but he thinks there’s already too many jokes that are explained. He thinks people can’t develop a sense of humor unless they experience the joke themselves. Here, let me help you get that snake back in the can.’
‘No, that’s okay; I got him.’ I was enjoying jamming him back in his container. ‘And don’t worry about that package I stepped on; I was going to buy it anyway.’ I screwed the lid down on S.D. Rollo’s Heavenly Confections with mad delight. ‘How much is this obnoxious snake anyway?’
‘Nineteen ninety-five,’ she said, sounding dismayed.
‘That’s a lot.’ I’d figured it’d be around two bucks.
‘The company that made it, Fallaho Novelties, went out of business a couple of years ago. They don’t make them with flannel bodies anymore – make them overseas cheaper with plastic now, but the plastic don’t hold up. Three or four leaps and the plastic cracks. And the spring’s some new alloy, not steel. Elmer wanted to keep it as a collector’s item, but he already had eight or nine of them so I insisted it go on the shelf. Elmer just marked the price way up there where he said somebody would have to be crazy to buy it.’
‘You and Elmer are partners in the store, is that it?’ Suddenly I was interested in old Elmer.
‘I’m his wife.’
‘Ma’am, if you tell me Elmer has cancer or has mysteriously disappeared, I’m going to jump through your front window and sprint for the Pacific Ocean.’
Her lips parted in surprise. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘Because I’m crazy enough to buy this damn snake,’ I said, smacking the can down on the counter, ‘plus the whoopee cushion here, and the Uro-Stim and some Rainbow P, and these birthday candles you can’t blow out, and a couple of boxes of that stuff over there, whatever it is – my ghost wants some. What is it anyway?’
‘Rabi-Tabs. They’re little tablets you put under your tongue that work up into a froth. Supposed to make you look like you’re foaming at the mouth. Like you have rabies.’
‘I’ll take two.’ I went over and plucked them off the shelf. ‘Any
thing else you want, Ghost?’ I said loudly. He didn’t reply. I picked up the squashed box of Uro-Stim on my way back to the counter.
‘Is that who you’re talking to? A ghost?’ Dismay and weariness joined forces in her voice.
‘Yup. I think so.’
‘Elmer’d like you.’
‘Ma’am,’ I asked gently, knowing better, ‘where is Elmer? What’s he up to?’
‘He’s in the hospital. In Omaha.’ She said it as if surprised I didn’t know.
I felt guilty for having forced the painful information. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I hope it’s nothing serious.’
She looked up at me and said in a flat voice, ‘I thought everyone knew. It was ten months ago, last Christmas Eve. He went to midnight mass and slipped this new dental dye in the communion wine. Turned everybody’s teeth bright purple. People were furious. It was Christmas. They knew who did it, of course, and they turned on him. He went running from the church – laughing like crazy, they said – and his feet went out from under him on the icy steps and he cracked his head. He’s been in a coma ever since, in the VA down there. The doctors say they don’t know what’s keeping him alive.
‘I go over there every weekend. He doesn’t recognize me, though. He has this huge, happy smile on his face. It never changes, or not that any of us has ever seen. I tried once to pull the corners of his mouth down – so he’d look more dignified, you know? – but they went right back up. But he never opens his eyes, never looks at me, never says a word. I don’t know if he’s happy or paralyzed or near dead. I’m selling off all the stuff in the store. I guess I’m just waiting for him to die, and I don’t even know why I’m waiting for that.’
‘I think he’s happy,’ I said. ‘And I think this weekend he’s going to open his eyes and look in yours and say, “Honey, let’s run away to Brazil and start all over.” But if he doesn’t, if he dies, I hope you can find it within yourself to sit on his headstone and laugh, really laugh, from way down in your guts, for him and for you.’
‘It’s not funny,’ she said.
‘Some of it surely is. Why lose that, too?’
‘Because you just do,’ she said sourly, and started ringing up my purchases.
‘You should smother your husband,’ my ghost said, appearing briefly over her shoulder before he faded.
‘Did you hear that?’ I asked her, though she’d given no indication she had.
‘No,’ she glanced up, ‘what?’
‘My ghost said, “Mother him.”’
‘You’re just like Elmer. He loved Halloween.’
‘My ghost’s like Elmer. I’m really like you. Except I’m not waiting. You know why? Because time flies like an arrow.’
‘I know, I know,’ she waved a hand, ‘and fruit flies like rotten fruit.’ She handed me my bag of purchases. ‘You and your ghost have a nice Halloween.’ I wish she could’ve smiled when she said it.
I went straight back to the tire shop. The Caddy was ready and waiting, chrome flashing with sunlight. I put the bag of tricks on the passenger-side floor, except for the whoopee cushion, which I carefully placed on the passenger seat. If my ghost showed up again, still along for the ride, I wanted to find out if he’d set it off. This might well have been the first fart trap ever designed to detect the physical presence of a ghost. Never too crazy for empirical experiments in reality.
I paid for the tire and tune-up, then wheeled the car around the block a few times to make sure it was running tight. Couldn’t have been better. I headed back out for I-80, stopping along the way for dinosaur power at a Sinclair, and then at the Allied Superette for a couple of six-packs of Bud to restock the cooler. By the dash clock it was 9:20. I took a little sip from the crank mix to keep me on track, and a few minutes later I was ripping down the Interstate, California-bound.
Using my benny-quickened brain, I calculated that the Caddy would be introduced to the Pacific in about twenty hours, some twelve hundred minutes. I had roughly two hundred records in the back seat, two sides each, say three minutes a side, six per disc – well how about that? Talk about your celestial clickety-click, that was about twelve hundred minutes of music if I listened to it all, and that was exactly my intention. I could feel myself starting to hit the nerve snap-point of too much speed and not enough sleep, and music soothes the beast. I set aside everything by the Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens; it seemed only fitting to save them for the last wild-heart run at the sea.
Between watching the road and shuffling records it took me about ten minutes to get set up. The spindle on Joshua’s turntable would take a stack of ten, which meant all I had to do was flip them every half-hour and change the stack on the hour. The first tune, Elvis’ ‘Now Or Never,’ sounded about right to me. I leaned back and cruised as I listened to him croon.
From Grand Island through North Platte and on to the state line, Nebraska – if you can believe it – gets flatter. You don’t really have to drive; just put it in boogie and hold it between the lines. It’s boring, and I suppose it was boredom that inspired the idea of sailing the records out the window once the whole stack had played. By the time this occurred to me I already had a stockpile of twenty records, so by restricting myself to one toss for every two cuts, I had some physical activity every six minutes. The interim was well occupied with drinking beer, listening to the music blast at cone-wrenching volume, choosing suitable targets, and, best of all, matching titles to their fates. For Brenda Lee’s ‘I’m Sorry,’ for instance, I just plopped into the slow lane to get run over. The Everly Brothers’ ‘Bird Dog’ I sailed out into a cornfield to hunt pheasants. ‘Teen Angel’ I saved till the highway cut in to parallel some railroad tracks, but I undershot it badly into a weedy ditch. Since I had some slack, I saved a few titles for more appropriate places – ‘Mr Custer’ definitely belonged to Wyoming, while the Drifters’ ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ was obviously meant for a late-night fling.
Those whose titles didn’t suggest targets became general ammunition in my war on control, and were gleefully winged at billboards and road signs, and especially at speed limit signs. To sail a record out of a car moving 95 mph and hit anything except the ground is a real trick, and about 98 percent of the time I probably missed. But I tell you, it’s a magnificent feeling when you connect. Damn near blew my shoes off with joy when I sent ‘The Duke of Earl’ tearing through a Bank of America billboard. And as to the musical question ‘Who Put the Bomp in the Bomp-Da-Bomp?’ I’m not sure, but I know the record itself put one hell of a bomp on a 65 mph sign – folded the fucker almost in half, much to my delight. I celebrated this rare bull’s-eye with a toot on the horn and a solid squeeze of the whoopee cushion, happy as a seven-year-old with a slingshot in a glass factory. Shit, even the misses were fun – sailing gracefully out over the fields to drop like miniature spacecraft from Pluto.
I was having so much fun my ghost couldn’t resist. I’d just barely missed a Burger Hut billboard with ‘Theme from a Summer Place’ when he appeared in the passenger seat.
‘Ah ha!’ I pounced, ‘you’re not real: the whoopee cushion didn’t go off.’
He ignored me in his excitement. ‘Salvoes,’ he urged, ‘fusillades, machine guns, cluster bombs. Shotgun the fuckers! To hell with this johnny-one-note stuff.’ And he was gone.
I was reluctant but had a few spares, so I picked up five together, waited for a large green road sign announcing ‘CHEYENNE 37,’ came within a hundred yards and, allowing for some lead, snapped them backhanded out the passenger window. But something wasn’t right – the weight, the throw, the aerodynamics – because one nosed down and the other four fluttered and died way short of the target. I wrote it off as bad advice and told my ghost to forget it. I didn’t hear any argument.
If throwing music away like that seems sacrilegious … well, maybe it was. But I’d already decided to send the records and sound system down with the ship; they belonged with the Caddy as part of the gift, but rather than do it all at once I was
delivering pieces along the way. The Bopper’s records, Buddy’s, Ritchie’s – I still intended to send them over the edge with the blazing Caddy, maybe even stacked on the spindle as a crowning touch. The rest I felt free to fling like seeds across the landscape, scatter like ashes. If they happened to collide with bill-boards, road signs, and other emblems of oppressive enterprise and gratuitous control, all the better – that seemed altogether congruent with the spirit of the music, doubly fitting considering it was also a lot of fun.
I gassed at a Sinclair station in Cheyenne, tipping my flamingo hat to the dinosaur, then hauled on for Laramie. I was starting up the east slope of the Rockies, where driving required a bit more attention, but there were still plenty of opportunities to cast the music far and wide.
‘What’s that, Mr Charles? “Hit the road, Jack”? No sweat.’ I reached out the window and fired it straight down; hard to miss when you’re right on top of it. No need to tell me not to come back no more, no more, no more, no more.
When Frankie Avalon asked the musical question ‘Why?’ I told him it was just to see how far he could sail into the sagebrush, that’s why. And I flung him out there as far as I could.
‘And Tom Dooley,’ I said aloud to myself and my ghost if he was listening, ‘sweet Jesus, man, you’ve been hanging your head since the Civil War, poor boy. Let me cut you some slack.’ And with a sharp backhanded toss I set him free.
Just out of Rawlins, about to crest the Continental Divide, I tired of the game and decided to use the thin air to go for distance – but was going so fast I couldn’t keep the longer shots in sight. When I hit the crest I pulled over, scooped up my pile of reserves and, after pissing beer into both watersheds, alternately sailed records east and west, watching them hang majestically and curve away, a few disappearing before I could see where they hit, and I’d bet some of them carried for miles.
I returned to the Caddy refreshed, though my break from rapid motion made me realize I was probably a bit overamped on speed; I made a mental note to lay off for a while or I’d be chewing on the steering wheel by midnight. Generally, however, I felt wonderful. I was on the Pacific side of the country, halfway to the edge with a downhill run, looking good and having fun.
