“Pecker. Pecker.”
“Damnit Dave.”
Von Behren still is keeping Hale’s
pet pecker parrot beneath his shoulder blade while his arms remain firmly
buckled around Patrick’s torso. Occasionally the Thruster wobbles and purrs in
a mechanical titter, coercing Von Behren to gyrate his shoulder and arm down
near his waist in a motion that looks like he is trying to produce an armpit
fart with the licked palm of the opposite hand.
“Pecker. Pecker.”
“Damnit! Stop that.”
“Dude,” Von Behren says, hoping
Patrick will pay as much attention to him as he did to his brother who recently
employed Patrick’s similar idiosyncratic jibe. “I’m not doing it on
purpose—besides, we need to get back home. I can’t imagine what Hale and Lynnford
of all people are doing at casa McReynolds to entertain Mister and Misses
Mcreynolds. Your folks are gonna think somethings up—“
“Pecker. Pecker.”
“Dave.”
“I told you. It’s involuntary. If
you’d quit jangling the vessel so much the parrot wouldn’t have to object to
your slovenly skills when it comes to operating a classified aerial craft
vessel.”
“Dude,” Allan comment from the
front handlebars. “I’m proud of you bro. This Thruster fucking rules.
Patrick smiles to himself, thinking
of the new bumper sticker he plans on manufacturing once this bad boy hits the
global market. “In God we Thrust, “ puns Patrick, aloud. “All others must give
handjobs.”
Allan immediately erupts in a
cherry skin coated hiccupy-spurts of laughter. Even the barrage of muffled
underarm pecker’s seem to correlate smoothly to the chorus of laughter. Patrick
smiles himself, monkey-fucks a fresh cigarette from the illuminating ember of
the old one before watching still-life awed open lip the cigarette descend into
the wallowing blue below.
“Plus you forget, this bad boy
thruster just has a little bit of a problem when it comes to brakes. If for
some reason we run out of gas or whatever your father put in this for fuel on
the way home and if it’s an emergency we are more or less again stranded in I’m
fucked-up-the-ass mode.”
Upon hearing the word fucked, chief
Allan gets excited, starts rattling his torso, saying yeah baby, bring it on.
Yeah!
“Meaning that we have to either
cruise home at such a moderate speed that we can easily be detected so that we
can coast to a smooth landing or that we have to somehow dove-tail the vehicle
into the lawn of the circus tent next door and hope that the impact doesn’t hurl
the vehicle itself somewhere perilous.”
Patrick says the words, “blah”
seven times in a row in a condescending and disparaging manner. Allan makes an
almost Bev Pinesol like puppet with his hand and starts talking up and down,
indicating the Von B is some conglomeration between a chatterbox and a worry
wart. The bike wheezes out a jilted rattle, Von Behren squeezes even tighter
around Patrick’s lower spine. The parrot Von Behren has been safeguarding
begins caroling out Christmas tunes about an open fire.
“Plus,” Von Behren continues
raising his voice as if in a classroom with noisy pupils. “Both you guys seem
to have somehow neglected to acknowledge the fact that we already crashed this
thruster-fuck once already today while cruising at a reckless speed. Who knows
how much more wear and tear the engine will take till…”
Allan interrupts Von Behren’s
brainy discourse by transmogrifying the fist-puppet into a chill-sign and then,
upon following the eyesight of his older brothers vision, into one finger and
then blowing over it, offering a healthy middle-aged asexual librarian
shhhhhh!!!!! From outside of the school the boys see Coach M and Marcellus’
Father Obadiah Buck strut out, Coach M looks like he is pontificating something
through a megaphone. Patrick has both hands off the aerial steering handles
and, along with Allan and against Von Behren’s astute judgment, has wedged dual
thumbs inside their earlobes and begin protruding their tongues down on Coach
M, warbling nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah in a rather pre-schoolian drawl. Whatever
Coach M is echoing through the megaphone sounds like telephone static by the
time it reaches the boys earlobes above them. Patrick then flicks his
half-smoked cigarette at coach M, who Patrick thinks looks about the size of
one of his Little People GI Joe scattered in the tall summer grass of Warren
McReynolds backyard when viewed from the roof of Casa McReynolds before Patrick
performs his signature cannon ball plop into the neighborhood trampoline. The
blare from the megaphone continues to emit Coach M’s high-pitched baritone into
the ocean of pending blue separating the two parties. Much to Von Behren’s
constant chagrin Patrick pitches his tomahawk even further into the air and
then catches it, before lifting up both arms into a Y removing then from the
steering wheel handle-bars, offering Coach M dual fingers of choice from each
fist.
“Fuck you!!!” Patrick yells out
from far above, paying no attention in the slightest when Von Behren squeezes
Patrick’s waist, informing him to please, quit taunting, let’s just get the
fuck outta here.
“FUCK YOU!!!” Allan raises his fist
as well. Patrick, remembering the slightly-lit cigarette butts he has been
casually depositing from high-altitude all afternoon suddenly gets an idea.
“Check this out holmes, this will
only work if we station ourselves directly above them.” Patrick can feel Von
Behren digging his forehead into the back of Patrick’s neck as Patrick zips the
THRUSTER BABY from Logan field back over to the top of the parking lot, the
monkey bars resembling nothing more than small yellow almost country and
western ghost town sage brush whistling bushel from their distance and height.
With his eyes smacked tightly into his sockets and the wind rattling his body
back and forth Von Behren can hear Patrick sucking up air through his lips in a
graveling gushing sound and then spit, expectorating from hi-above and then
shouting out bullseye followed by the word “fucker” at the top of his voice.
Von Behren then hears Allan trying to do the same thing, only the first time he
tries to hawk a serious loogie he ends up making a farting sound with his
perched lips.
“Patrick, quit fucking around LET’S
GO!!!!” Von Behren grapples Patrick around his waist even tighter. The parrot,
tucked under Von Behren’s armpit like a triangular folded flag continues to
alternate between Chestnuts roasting on an open fire and the pecker
orchestration. From directly above Patrick can hear Coach M’s magnified echo.
It sounds like he is planning some sort of retaliation for which Patrick sticks
his thumb into the tip of his nose and forms rhinoceros visage, twinkling all
of his fingers before leaving the middle finger up stationed in perennial “fuck
you,” jest.
“Look at him,” Patrick points at
Coach M who now, even from this altitude can be seen rolling his fist, yelping
diatribes of certain death into his megaphone—his forehead and neck coated with
a thick rash of redness. Both Patrick and Allan continue to make scathing
guttural throat searing sounds with their lips before jutting their necks as
far as they possibly can over the side of the Thruster and then letting the wad
of collected drool into one crystal animated tear of ammunition, salivating
into a spit bomb on their adversaries blow. Von Behren can hear Allan laugh
like a grade school girl trying to keep her legs crossed to refrain from peeing
when Patrick boasts bullseye, right on the forehead. Von Behren wishes he could
speak the voice of scientific reason once again, but figures that the brothers
are participating in one of their oft-ill oriented brotherly bonds. Two years
ago after a field trip to tanners apple-turnips and harvest cider located north
of town, It was Allan’s idea to sell apple-turnips at Bradley University
outside one of the female dorms in an effort that maybe, one of the crimp
pony-tailed sweatpants and college logod sweatshirt sophomores might give him a
quick attaboy, a scurried frisk on the top of the head with their smooth and
hands, while their packaged cleavage hobbled personal and up close in front of
his vision. When Allan suggested his idea for instance hands-on feminine
contact to his older Brother, Patrick, always thinking with the exclamatory
mark between his thighs he will one day refer to as Lloyd, informed his
precocious yet sexual naïve younger sibling that he had a better idea—which was
to host a skin-to-win super solvent wet t-shirt contest until they were spotted
passing out fliers in front of St. Mark’s church, Patrick being interviewed by
a sour-countenance Bishop telling him that he is sort of hoping to institute a orgiastic
Garden of Eden Toga-optional sin-til-til
you can sin no more party after student mass later on that evening. The apple
solution somehow rendered an aphrodisiac effect and Coach M, later granting a 10
% tuition deduction for advent of that year quid pro quo an additional 20 bushels.
As Patrick pushes in the nub to the
cigarette lighter he notices a change drawer his father must have installed
knowing far well in advance that the lads would encounter their fair share of
toll booths en route to the eternal sunshine state of Florida, seeing the clump
of silver currency Patrick is reminded of the urban legend stating that,
employed as a projectile, a penny, casually tossed from the zenith of the
Empire States Building can total a car, accumulating velocity as it splatters
in to the earth with the density and force of a crater. Reminiscing over this
scientific fact, a wicked grin folds across Patrick’s like a Chinese fan slowly
opening as Patrick punches his fist into the bushel of coins, fishing out a
superfluous handful of loose change, laughing to himself like a mad scientist
and without deliberation tosses them up in the air in a fit of hysterical
laughter, cackling with his chin stationed north as a drizzle of nickel and
dimes and quarters slide past Patrick and hail towards his nemesis below. Von
Behren tries to squeeze Patrick’s waist tighter before conveying to him that he
is loosing control and that he should merely stop while he’s ahead. All Patrick
can do is ask his brother the 50 yard line question of heads or tails. When
Allan says heads, Patrick points down, says no, they’re assholes, fuckers.
Screams are heard from below. The
accumulated amebic bubble forming near the losers parking place is beginning to
cover their heads. Car horns and alarms are heard bleeping. Patrick begins
laughing his devious laugh even more so, screeching his nails deep into the
change drawer and scooping out the remainder of the spare change and, with a
careless fling tossing them over his shoulders, saying the words die.
Patrick’s power-haughty laugh is
beginning to remind Von Behren of something Tim Brandigan might deem satanic.
Patrick then launches his tomahawk an additional thirty feet, Von Behren
watching as the handle to the blade falls directly back into Patrick’s grip
with grace and facility.
More car
horns. Apparently one of the coins wrecked havoc on a vehicle cruising down
Starr street which may or may not be affiliated with CLS. Patrick wonders if
this is what being God is like, being stationed on a cloudy throne above the
masses, being able to release a lighting bolt as easily as scattering loose
change. Patrick then remembers what Dr. Kennedy Marshal was always telling him
about the reason he and the dave’s felt a compelling urge to scale the yellow
rungs of the monkey bars was because it was, psychologically speaking, the
highest attainable summit accessible to the like of a Loser like himself and
how, being stationed on such a lofty summit, momentarily allows Patrick and the
dave’s total autonomy and emancipation to actuate their fantasy and dream via what Doctor Kennedy Marshal has classified
over and over again as their “petty” role-playing techniques, is merely nothing
more or less than pure escapism from interfacing with the day to day pangs and
perils of modern life.
Patrick
thinks this and slowly roves the aerial vessel over the top of Dr Kennedy
Marhshal’s red pick up truck. Von Behren can feel the Thruster slightly wobble
as he slowly inquires what Patrick is doing as if he is prescripted in a B-
movie.
“Fucker.”
Patrick yells out, getting vindictive. As if in a rote motion, Von Behren’s
eyes tuck even further inside his sockets. Allan thinks it looks as if Von
Behren is trying to squint inside his own face.
“Dude,”
Patrick says, addressing Von Behren. “I need you to spot me bro.”
With his
arms tightly buckled around Patrick’s waist Von B feels the entire Thruster
Baby wobble precariously to the right and left as Patrick, the captain my captain
of the vessel himself, begins to lift himself on the top frame connecting the
handle bars to the seat, Patrick hobbling, sticking both of his hands out like
a tightrope walker with no net in a effort to balance himself.
“Pat, bro,
what the fuck are you doing brother?”
The entire
vessel is nodding back and forth as if it has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
Patrick has one foot in front of the other and Von Behren, still stationed
unclasped on the pegs. Von Behren can hear the ruffled severing of Patrick
unzipping his corduroy pants before Patrick asks the same question Von Behren
previously addressed at him, dick curled in hand like a wounded bird.
“You wanna
know what the fuck I’m doing?” Patrick asks, the bike still tottering
precariously in the vacuum blue of the atmosphere. “I’ll tell you just what the
fuck I’m doing. It’s called, Divine Retribution, fuckers.”
Patrick
starts talking to somebody neither Von Behren nor Allan have ever heard of
called Lloyd, telling Lloyd to go to work, baby. Patrick then begins to
urinate, aiming directly towards the bluish windshield of Doctor Kennedy
Marshal’s truck. It seems to take longer for the stream of broken yellow to
reach the ground and when it does it does so in intermittent hisses. Allan
continues to hackle out of control, laughing on the front of the handlebars,
the entire bike nodding as if from shoulder to shoulder. Von behren looks up
and sees Patrick giving his cock a healthy shake before grapping it in a
obscene gesture, informing the hoi-poloi of CLS to eat his shit, before turning
around lowering his corduroy trousers and mooning the entire building. Von
Behren feels the vessel dip perilously to the left and then wobble when he sees
Allan trying to balance himself on the handlebars, holding on to his brothers
waist.
“Dude,”
Allan says, “I can totally one-up that.”
Before Von
Behren can properly assess the situation Allan is completely balancing himself
across the center steel beam of the bicycle when he starts tugging at his
waist. The next thing everyone on the bike realizes, Allan has yanked down his
corduroy pants around his ankles, the prominent white of his ass situated in a
squatting position, his lip and eyes tucked into his cranberry-red face and
before either Patrick or Von Behren can zip out a “what the fuck?” Allan has
dropped two serious turdbombs off the THRSUTER and into the direction of CLS.
“SHIT!”
Both Patrick and Von Behren look still eyed in the direction of Allan. Von
Behren can see Bev Pinesol looking up, flapping open an umbrella two seconds
too late, her yelp, audible even from this altitude. Coach M continues to
warble out what sounds like magnified static into the megaphone.
“Allan,”
Patrick chides, “You’re acting fucking puerile. Marking your territory in
public by taking a leak is one thing; popping a squat bomb is fucking
disgusting.”
“Pecker,
pecker.” The parrot nods, seemingly in appalled concurrence.
Allan
remains squatted in defactory posture, his eyes welded shut as he harks back at
both Patrick and Von B, asking them for a little privacy, trying to
concentrate, he’s on the Thruster throne. With his arms still sealed around
Patrick’s waist as if he is trying to perform one of Tim Brandigan’s
complicating wrestling moves Von Behren feels Patrick all but surge at his
younger sibling in an act of corporeal restraint, trying to curtail Allan from
releasing any more disgusting bombs in front of his face by informing his
brother that Coach M could easily break down the chemical compounds in his
fecal sample and then we’d all be, literally, stranded up shit creek without a
canoe paddle or toilet paper. The Thruster dips perilously low and Von Behren
lets out a serious yelp as he can hear Patrick curse out loud, saying the word
oh shit and then hang on as Patrick jumps kicks the side of the vehicle and it
takes off, performing a quick dizzying loop and then zagging hard to the left.
With his eyes still welded into his upper cheekbones, Hale’s pecker-parrot
still tightly lodged beneath the pit of his arms. From below there is an
additional screech—what sounds like a whistle taking off from a runway in a jet
fueled blast. Von Behren has to open his eyes. In what appears to be an effort
to make the best of an almost sure-as-shitfire futile situation, Allan begins
chirping out the theme song to the A-team before Patrick tells him seriously to
cut that shit out, telling all the comrades to hang the fuck on as he yanks the
handlebars rather heavily to the right as if trying to dodge some sort of
arsenal. Before Von Behren can reinstate his caveat that he told them so and
that, if Patrick and Allan hadn’t felt compelled to fuck around they could all
be safely back home at Casa McReynolds nestled around the fake fireplace and
electric neon-fizz of the Guests First barstool sign gorging on Bailey Brownies
fresh from the oven while swigging copious amounts of a lambic super solvent
leftover from the holidays—just as Von Behren is reminiscing over the hearty
domesticity of the McReynolds living room—Tim Brandigan then showing up uninvited
at the doorstep as is habit, dropping ten sides dice while for once, narrating
a campaign in which Allan doesn’t cry and where Patrick’s and Von Behren’s turn
out to be victorious—just as Von Behren is reflecting over all this he hears
what sounds like sonic fissure zipping across the skyline, Patrick savagely
oscillating the handlebars with the front tire stationed up in the air as if
trying to reel in a legendary catfish from a pond of oceanic blue. Just as Von
Behren pictures his tribe of friends sitting around the fake fire in the
McReynolds living room and being joyful for once and not being so emotionally
bandied from the ever evocative harangues of CLS and of the varsity elite in
general and just being blissful in a late sunshine in spring everything is
eternal adolescent sort of way, the sonic breeze seems to smack into the front
skeleton of the Thruster and the next thing Von Behren realizes is that his
tight grip around Patrick’s torso has been completely set free, his body
splayed-limbed, free-falling, part of what looks like a spoke and a wheel
plummeting to his side, a pantless Allan performing what looks like
somersaults, screaming out of control to his near right. Von Behren looks up
for Patrick and the remainder of the Thruster but sees nothing but blue
overhead and a grisly cloud hovering where the apparent blast took place. The
blacktop of CLS parking lot seems to press into him closer and closer like
looking through the magnifies lens of a camcorder while putting the black lid
on at the same time. Allan is still wailing out of control, performing
somersaults as if cannonballing into the deep end at free swim at Bradley pool.
For a terse snapped second Von Behren thinks that it feels less like falling
and more like being stranded in some sort of limbo, as if hovering wide- limbed
over a ventilator, thick currents of breeze creeping up around skin and skull.
Falling like this is almost relaxing, lulling, breathtaking even—since hanging
out with Patrick A. McReynolds and gaming around the clock nonstop Von Behren
has come to realize that when situations when everything in the planet appears
to be bleak and hopeless, the inevitable rush and then vacant-spine nothingness
of death spilling into the vision of the foreseeable future—at moments like
these a pervasive almost serene calm overtakes the boys nervous system—as if
the light at the end of the tunnel is just an illuminated welcome matt to the
place you were meant to be at—such a calm Von Behren is experiencing right now
as a pantless chief Allan continues to somersault and yelp and howl like a
mental patient. The front wheel of the Thruster has already made contact with
the ground and is rolling like a hubcap below. Von Behren can see Coach M
holding some sort of cannon over his shoulders with little exclamatory poofs of
smoke unfurling from the tip as Von Behren wonders what it would look like from
their periphery when his body hits the ground in an accelerated splatter of
organs and limbs. Although his eyes had all but melted into the den of his
socket as Patrick was busy taunting CLS from five hundred feet above, the lids
of Von Behren’s eyes remain wide open, wanting to experience every last brisk
elevated flash of life before it is yanked from under his heart like a magician
yanking a tablecloth from the setting of a four star restaurant and not
agitating the silverware and goblets and plates in the slightest. As he looks
straight down Von Behren can see Coach M and Obadiah Buck and Bev Pinesol all
continue to run towards the direction of the school as if taking cover. Even
from up here it appears that Doc Kennedy Marshal has something extremely
phallic dangling between her legs as she sprints towards the finance for
eternity gym. Von Behren wonders just how fast he will experience leaving his own
body when it splatters against the blacktop—he wonders if it will feel just
like kicking off an old pair of jeans into a slough of dirty raiments on his
bedroom floor. Just as the top of CLS is getting perilously close, the russet
brick, the scaffolding and rafters always seemingly abutting the sides of the
architecture—always adding something new, now at close range, maybe thirty
feet. Von Behren smiles when realizing to himself that the moment he finds
himself parallel with the top of the rafters less than a half-second later he
will be no more. Because of the rate in which he is tumbling it feels more like
the earth is pressing up into his forehead than he is plummeting down into it.
Von Behren is almost parallel with the top of the school. Smoke still spirals
out of the sockets of Ghetto Jesus. Allan is squealing for his mommy, yelling that
it was all his brothers’ fault when an eruptive searing sound is heard again.
VB begins to wonder aloud what sort of a pussy Coach M is
from firing at close range when he turns his head the earth flashes into his
left side and then thrusts him over to the twenty feet to the right. Before he
realizes just what the fuck is eternally transpiring, that he is still above
ground, swooshing from left-to-right like a pendulum, a swollen pain tight in
his abdomen where something fell into his side. Von Behren is beginning to
wonder if maybe he already splattered into the ground and that his spirit is
soaring out, back up, into the next world when he espies a quick blur and
another smack spotting Allan next to him, who apparently had another accident
while his entire body was drooling down the skyline like a corduroy tear.
“FUCK!!!”
Von Behren yells out looking around, seeing Patrick’s chin above still
harnessing the front of the half-decimated Thruster. Before Von Behren can turn
around completely and rip Pat’s nad’s out from the dugout of his crotch seat,
Patrick foists his hand hard over both Von Behren and McReynolds heads ordering
them to get the fuck down. Pat’s chin bows as well as another sonic blast rips
overhead, mere feet above the vessel.
“Coach M
won’t quit firing. We gotta land this sonuvabitch and get the fuck out of
here.” Patrick says, cruising over the patch of houses near Manual high school,
close to the emerging bluff separating the dregs of the south side from the
lower-middle class affluence of West Peoria. There is another blast. Patrick
feels that the sonic jet streams that keep brushing past him by mere inches
feels like they are actually accompanying him in some formation, like mallards
migrating to the south in overhead pyramidal postures. Another thud. Von
Behren’s entire body is lying limp across the v-frame of the Thruster, as if he
is pinned on a clothes line in Mid-august waiting to dry. Another rackety jerk,
and the sight of jet-streams shot near the handlebars. Von Behren’s head is
near Patrick’s right pro-wing. The front of the Thruster appears to be burnt,
the wheel that was in all likelihood blown off during the initial impact, is
still steaming. Allan continues to cough intermittently, spitting out blood,
before informing his brother that this was fun—can we do this again next
weekend. Much in the similar fashion that the Thruster originally crashed into
the retina of Ghetto Jesus for what was twenty minutes earlier but seems like
decades ago Von Behren can feel the Thruster begin to burn and slope, looping
several times, slowing down speed. Patrick tries not to heavily contemplate
just what might have happened to the errant missiles Coach M launched which
fortunately missed the Thruster—tries not to imagine that perhaps the
projectiles hit some innocent family house in the Bluff, some recently
assembled swing set or some father holding his daughter behind the plastic seat
of her own bicycle sans training wheels. Patrick tries not to think about all
of this right now, tries not to imagine what it felt like when the Thruster was
initially hit and he saw his brother topple head over feet across the
handlebars—tries not to imagine what it felt like when he looked behind and saw
Von Behren drowning into a cesspool of blue—his limbs spread out as if
crucified and how it took Patrick a minute himself to accumulate the tenacity
and to wonder just the fuck is going on as the bicycle sputtered and bleeped
out a foreign lexicon of symbols until finally he was able to rev the
handlebars a certain way, descending into an accelerating v-cut swoosh, barely
rescuing both Von Behren and his brother at the last possible second. Patrick
will later tell Hale on the monkey bars that it was as of he had lived out his
own last ditched second attempt—as is true with role playing game the moment
the creations are about ready to give up the ghost so to speak, the moment
their hero points get so low they can only be validated with negative signs in
front of them. Von Behren always allows either Patrick or Hale a what is
commonly referred to over the jaundice rainbow arc at the top of the monkey
bars as a LDD (or Last Ditch Defense, Baker, claiming that every time he drops
LDD he sees that lil’ Leprechaun sitting on a mushroom smoking a pipe next to
Jebediah in Miss Wiltz’ Euclid for Eunach seminar). A Last Ditched Defense is where Von Behren allows his
players three opportunities to roll doubles or belt out the refrain to a
pending swan song. Tim Flanagan claims to have such a thing as a LDD, but with
Tim, it’s more like accepting the fact that his creations will always rule
victorious while your own feebly crafted spawn is extremely privileged even to
be sucking air in the same space continuum of Tim and his imaginary toys.
Patrick
feels that perhaps, having already used up his last LDD to rescue Von B and
Allan as they were toppling to an almost certain demise that something
transpired within his nervous system that was lacking when he was in the school
and froze up—that something triggered throughout his spine where for once he
didn’t pause or hesitate but acted directly, without pondering the mock outcome
of the scenario—without wondering if Hollis Lyons is looking at him or noticing
him in the slightest—without secluding himself in the gaming room in the back
of his skull replete with character sketches of Patrick as well of those of his
friends and adversaries—without consulting a pair of ten sided dice first atop
the Yellow Monkey bars and blowing over them ever so slightly as they are
dropped across a trapper keeper bridge, the numerical tandem blinking at
Patrick, like eyes, informing him if he succeeded in the accomplishment of his
endeavor.
Patrick
continues to contemplate all of this, informing both his brother and Von B to
hang on as he marshals the bike over the coniferous green of Madison Golf
course, trying to convolute his direction in mid-air, only to find the
handlebars no longer connected to the frame of the Thruster as the vehicle
seemingly emits one neighing sputter, descending with a deflated pause into the
symphony of green trees below before giving off one final explosion as if in
applause.
pgs 433-443 in text...
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