Shit be hittin' the oscillating fan ( It is here. The fucking rest of our lives is here indeed)....

                                                                      

 

Sarah 2E (i.e., see Jana Salomon) reacted with bitterness and typical possessive resentment to the poem’s David read to her concerning the newly discerned side pocket of his heart. One night when Dave was on the phone Long distance to Lisa, telling her that, even with the lights out in his room he could still feel her imminent presence and body heat and even over the distance of all of 70 miles he felt the bristles of hair on her forearm giving a standing ovation with every movement of her body next to his, David’s overly-saccharine sonnet was truncated with a thud on his bedroom window and the bark of his dog, LADY. (Schnauzer Lady, being a gift three months earlier from Strickler because, as he psychedelically postulated LADY was the only bitch that would ever remain faithful to VonB).  David cautiously opened the door of ye olde 2013 W. Sherman, finding a distraught Sarah Thuey giving VonB shit for all he was worth. Calling David vitriolic names like ’motherfucker’ and ‘piss-ant cunt’ and telling Dave that, in case he forgot, he used her.

 

“You motherfucker. You Piss-ant Cunt. In case you forgot, you fucking used me.”

 

“Calm down Sarah-you’re waking up my folks.” A light switches on above and the Lady continues to bark.

 

“You fucking no good philanderer didn’t you know I loved you.”

 

“Sarah, I loved you. Hell, I still love you. It’s just that you were fucking arrogant and demanding. I needed someone just to chill and have fun with.”

 

Sarah then hits me with the bomb.

 

“I can’t help who I am, David.”

 

“Then quit trying to change who I am.”

 

“Fuck you-you never should have gotten involved with me you ill’ prick.”

 

“How was I supposed to know? You were very cool on our first couple of dates before you told me every idiosyncratic thing about my life that needed to be altered and/or adjusted. As if I were a fucking belt strapped around your obsequious ass.”

 

“Fuck you and all your poetic shit.” Sarah hurtles a shooter bottle of Vodka someone once gave her as a souvenir off of a foreign flight from Moscow in the direction of David’s face. David ducks. The bottle breaks. Sarah continues to shout out fucks and yous and cunts and motherfuckers as if she is in an oratorio trying to impress some rich bearded monarch with her vulgar fecundity.

           

From inside there is a woman’s voice quietly requesting if she can please see David for a moment.

 

“David, tell her to calm down and go home.” My mother dressed in only a housecoat, holding the dog informs me.

 

My Dad falls down the stairs in laughter. He is laughing so hard my mom is looking at him to please hush telling him that we have a serious situation of a manic depressive on our hands here but Arthur just keeps on laughing. Only twice in my life have I ever heard my father curse like a black man and this is one of them.

 

“Shit.” He says long and drawn out adding an inflected ‘e’ so that the vulgarity sounds like something wrapped around a mattress. “Boy thought he could have it going on with two girls at the same time. Ahhh—now he’s a gonna get it. Shit be hittin’ the oscillating fan.”

 

I look at my dad like I can’t believe it is really my dad and not a black Dave variant of little Shit Hale.

 

“Arthur, don’t say that!” Barks my mom. “We have a serious situation on our fingertips here of a girl who could drink the anti-freeze in her car just to get back at our hopefully one day Christian son who will one day learn what the proper definition of a gentlemen is and how to have a God-pleasing relationship.”

 

“I say shit be hittin’ the oscillating fan woman.” My Dad smirks once again.

 

“Arthur!”

 

“Shit be hittin’ it.” My dad says once again in a voice higher than his ‘Linda would you please pass the margarine for crowsakes’ monotone as he tap-dances across the kitchen floor in old striped runner socks with holes near the toes.

 

I push buttons on the microwave and brew instant tea. I am always brewing instant tea for girls whom I have once said the words ‘I love you’ to.  I return back outside where her festering anger has momentarily faded in the early morning of the dawn.

 

“Did your dad just say something about ‘shit’ hitting the Central Air conditioner unit?” She asks not the least bit nonplussed.

 

I tell her not to ask. After she sips the weak tea she tells me sorry and that she needs to go. She says that she no longer believes in God any more thanks to me and that she hopes Lisa-Joy gives me herpes and cheats on me with MY best friend so she knows what real head tastes like.

 

As Hale and VonB watch the sun fill the entire sky and set, dissolving west like a fat man trying to heave himself into a man hole that is just a tad inch too small for his waist. Hale whips out another cigar from the corner pocket of his Tequila shirt. The name of which is called a Swisher sweet.

 

“Here.” He says. “It’ll leave you licking your lips afterwards.” We fire it up and pretend to be clearing out throats when the nicotine shoots out our nose.

 

“So whatever happened to Sarah?” Hale inquires as I tilt my head back to inhale, pretending like I am less Peorian and more Parisian.

 

At the time of the Damn Fine Pekin Cigar outing VonB really has no clue how Sarah is. He mentions that he would like to see his WHO’s Tommy score back before he goes deaf. He mentions that he again wrote another twenty-page letter to Lisa-Joy last night although he has not heard back from her in almost three weeks.

 

VonB has seen Sarah three times since. The triangular number of the Lutheran Gods that is really only one God according to the Christian faith he was brought up believing and which Sarah claimed she had lost faith in at sixteen a la his ass. He spotted her at the U of ICC where she was holding the hands of someone else. VonB was helping Book-Bag BOB smuggle out yet another bevy of ‘Caution-Floor May Be Slippery When Wet’ signs by stashing them under a trench coat VonB has since given to Matt Berkshire. He was smoking, then, a finer Cigar than a Swisher-a cigar Hale purchased at Paul’s Pipe shop with the gift certificate from Kyle last Christmas. She said that she still had a poetry book he bought in Europe to which David-under the tutelage of a cigar given to him from his best friend of a decade responded to her by saying NO Shit Sherlock.

 

The second time VonB bumper-cared into his ex-girlfriend was at Jonah’s in East Peoria. He was with Brooksie #1 and Sarah was slamming the door of her Escort locked, adjusting the strings on her apron behind her waist, going to waitress with Patrick Mullowney.

 

“David-I know you are making it top on your libidinous list for dating all of the girls in the greater Central Illinois radius, but, how could you.” Mullowney yawps being much more overly dramatic than is called for.

 

“I don’t know Patrick. It just sort of happened. You know.” I said.

 

“No, David-my-boy, literally, how could you?”

 

Rip. Rip. Rip. Patrick then continues to state to his every guest that He- in all his feeble erudition-can’t possibly understand the deeper motifs of why David has to make it with everyone who has breasts. Everyone laughs and VonB even manages to say something witty, emitting the smile out of a fair-fore headed girl by the name of Riley Patrick has grown up with.

 

“You know what they say Dave.” Decrees Hale facing out over the lake in North Pekin. “Two-E or not 2E. That is the question.” Hale exhales smoke from the Swisher and pretends to clear his throat.

 

The only one of us to inquire about 2E Bi-Seasonally is Mamma Hale.

 

“Well what ever happen to that very polite girl who you brought to David’s seventeenth birthday party?” She wants to know. Again.

 

One of Dave’s celebratory B-days entailed a STAR TREK murder Mystery. Hale himself was the Captain, I was Riker, Patrick Data, Sarah-a savvy counselor Troy who enough not to correct me in front of my friends on my error about how fast the Star Trek Enterprise jets through the galaxy.

 

 

“I’m sorry.” Sarah feigns disdain for my Trekie naiveté in the passenger seat of the Plumb. “I keep forgetting you went to Manual and from what I have heard the Physics department there is a few French fries short of a happy meal. No wonder your ACT science scores were well below mine.”

 

At Thanksgiving dinner I tell Mamma Hale what a bitch Sarah was at the time to which Sandy responds, “Well, David, you have to admit-anything is better than the girl who looked like Jar Jar Binks and whined about the goddamn Pizza’s all the time.”

 

Once again, see Jana Solomon.

 

The last time VonB saw Sarah was New Years 2000 at four in the morning at a Bar called the REDD FOXX DEN. The FOXX was a gay bar shaped like a barn. Sarah’s hair was cut much shorter and, when VonB handed her her jean jacket upon her exit, she refused to acknowledge him with even a thank you.

 

On the opposite sweaty-palm, VonB never did see Lisa-Joy again in this lifetime. He would smell the scent of her perfume in dreams and think of her during sunsets and at visits to Mattheison Park. He sent her a Valentine in February ’95 and she responded with a little note and a wallet-sized photograph of her and her Snowball date. In August of ’96, she would tell him over the phone that even if he did send her another letter she may not have the time to read it. In the year 2000 a disconsolate w/o Vanessa VonBehren would meet a girl named Renae who played the piano and had an ass like a good year tire. Renae would, in a very non-rheumy eyed Sarah double-E nostalgia, always tell David that his writing was very, very good but something she was just not sure she knew what it was, was always missing. Renae was from Ottawa and the night VonB retold the tale of Sarah and West Side Story and pancake make-up, he mentioned Lisa-Joys postmarked address still found in the yellow pages of his heart to which pausing, Reane responded:

 

“Lisa No-Relation Simpson. Yeah. That was the girl who like had a kid her senior year.”

 

“What!” Astounded.

 

“Yeah. The only reason I remember that-other than the fact that Ottawa is a very small town and everyone-and I mean everyone, is always in your shit like there is a public fecal sampler stapled to your forehead-is that her Dad was like a Seventh day Baptist pastor and forced her-when she was six months pregnant-to confess in front of the entire congregation.

 

“........”

 

“Can you imagine? Having to apologize for creating something. Giving Birth to something that is, already, from her very breath, considered a sin.”

 

 In his first day of a would be writers class that coming autumn-his senior year of Manual High, the teacher, a rubicund elf by the name of Mr. Reents, passed around broken baubles of Swiss chocolate, requesting that his students eat the chocolate and then write about the experience of eating the chocolate, reading their creative retort out loud with expression for all the class to yeah or to nay.

 

“Chocolate is better than sex.” A virginal Andrew Blinker reads to the class-to which a T.S. Eliot elated VonB suggested that chocolate was like a one night stand in infinity. If ever such an eternal one-night stand did exist-the night he spent with Lisa-Joy in the back seat of Linda’s van deserves to be bitten into like a snickers bar.

 

The sun still has yet to set. Hale taps his stogie, says not bad-eh, nudging VonB in the shoulder. A hesitant and heavy-hearted VonB responds. Hale informs VonB that he was talking about that girl’s ass over there and not about the cigar. VonB responds again. Birds soar by overhead in a glitter. Goth Dan joins them, mentioning both Dante Alighieri and Black Magic in the same sentence. Near the playground, the boys hear what sounds like a farmer being fucked by his prize heifer at a four-H fair.

 

“Wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhahhhhahhhahhhahhhahhhahhhooooooooooooooooo!”

 

 The blue ribbon for screeching near pathetic vocal reverberations goes to one David John Strickler. Before-throughout- and after the initial cigar smoking, Strickler found the type of old-fashioned metallic merry-go-rounds, where, as a going on sixteen year old Hale says re-enacting Bill Cosby, “You go around and around in a circle for five minutes and then you throw up.”

 

 

 

the immortal Strickmeister, immortal....circa 1996..

Strickler spent forty-five minutes going round and around in a circle and once, when he made sure no one else was looking except the two Dave’s and Dan, took a squirt off the metallic boat and almost hit the swing set.

 

            “Yes.” Arms raised.

 

Let it be known far and wide that David John Strickler has a weakness for juicing in public places—for whipping out his thingy in the most absurdist of social milieu and, as he likes to say, ‘Letting ‘her fly.’ So far Strickler has successfully christened many of the most con Peoria, West Peoria landmarks, including the Columbus Statue in Bradley Park, the venerable Aunt Jemima Lydia Moss Statue and once, (purportedly) squirted in Patrick’s coffee cup while he was once again taking a personal phone behind the cash wrap. P-man coming back-and, after tasting, unleashes his forefinger at Hale, asking why Hale filled his coffee with lemon and chives.

 

            Although Strickler’s face is the color of a frozen pea, he refrains from yakking in the Prunemobile on the voyage home. Instead, he digresses his conversation and rants about Elmo and epistemics.

 

“What the fuck is Elmo? I mean, think about it? He can’t be human because he is a muppet and therefore, epistemologically, puppeted by a human hand. Yet he is not solely human either.”

 

Before VonB’s White Buick was stolen, he and Strickler would fly down creek road late at night roving back to the West Bluff from a cigar romping outing w. Hale.

 

“Strick boy.” I say. Preparing for our tour of Germany in four months, “Dast ist that?”

 

Strickler removes a bottle the size of one of Hale’s finer stogies. It is a Pina Coolota he stole from Becky’s boyfriend that he intends to sip as Dave zips down Creek road.

 

“Strickler-what if I pass a cop and he pulls me over for speeding.” I say, as Strickler rolls down the window, mooning an on coming mini-van with an elderly gentlemen behind the wheel.

 

“Ah-Dave don’t worry.” Strickler reaffirms the confidence in his friend. “If they pull you over I’ll just flail the Coolata out the window.”

 

“What?”

 

“I’ll just throw it out the window. What’ll the cops gonna do? Go down into the creek on the middle of the night to search for one glass bottle?”

 

“I’m sorry I was speeding officer, but did you see that flying Pina Coolata almost hit my passenger window.” I parody. Slowly Strickler chugs the pina coolata and tosses it out the side window with a shot putters heave. VonBehren accelerates the gas around a twenty-mile bend. He notices that Strickler is adjusting his zipper and unbuckling his belt.

 

“Dude man-speed up-I gottta juice.”

 

“Stick man, chill-this is my parents car, they’ll fucking kill me.”

 

“Cheers.” He says, the crack of his ass half-wedged out the window lifting his drink. “Here’s to fuckin’ Germany and the rest of our lives, Bro. Here’s to the fucking rest of our lives.”

 

It is here indeed.

 

The fucking rest of our lives is here indeed.