Bad Transmission
Oggy's neck was bothering him and the
reek of his arm pits reminded all present of his decaying insides,
the lack of good attitude and diet, the rotting putrescence of his
bitter bowels. It would all rupture eventually and be filled with
maggots. John Updike said of a close call with death, “The Big Guy
is getting my range.” like a mulligan taken in golf or a practice
toss in cornhole...reducing our demise to a random mortar shot from
the almighty. And why can't God take a practice putt before calling
in our soul?
Oggy was underneath his dashboard the
other day trying to repair a random electrical problem that caused
his tail lights to fail and his turn signal to work intermittently.
It was that stupid decision to update his turn signal cam switch
returning to haunt him. His arthritic knees and besieged spine grated
with global indifference to his agony. He only had a few hours to
drive to San Antonio and back to return that transformer and look for
gifts for the mythological prisoner of Oggy's meandering focus in
Mexico. He was sweating and gasping for breath as his ragged lungs
mocked his efforts. But was he sweating so bad that his ass crack was
soaking wet? Oggy was confused. Maybe he had sat in a puddle when he
rolled underneath the van to tighten the worn transmission bands.
“What could go wrong, went
wrong,” thought Oggy in a rehearsal of the story he would tell
about this day. (Everything was a futile anecdote to fluff his
deflated significance.) Fuses broken, he goes to replace a fuse and
it breaks in half and gets stuck, so he grinds his teeth to reach it
and tears his shirt on a jagged piece of metal, he drops the
screwdriver in mud, reaching for it he steps on a snail and crushes
it but it is still living so he crushes it more to make sure, then he
drops the half of the fuse that he broke...but he was going to repair
that fuse with chewing gum and moonbeam dreams and solder so he hunts
for it among snail guts, while the other half of the fuse awaits some
distant dream when Oggy will have a second to return to the original
issue, which was what...the fuse or the cam turn signal switch or the
light or the wire or the demise of Oggy's insincere hopes? Thoughts
about banned assault rifles, juxtaposed with scenarios in which Oggy
meets the buxom jazz singer of his dreams who also knits and owns a
farm in Brazil that needs a handyman and apprentice piano
tuner....hahahaha, yeah, Diana Krall would fall in love with him,
hahahahah. Only the most outrageous scenario made Oggy laugh these
days, his humor dried up like a midwest cornfield. He hadn't grown
more practical as he had grown older, but more deliberately impulsive
and dynamically crazy. When he was 60 years old, Oggy mused, he would
join a Carnival. He was speeding backwards as the world fumbled
forward. Oggy rubbed his bony neck, probing for the intense isolated
pains that never lets up for five minutes. Bone cancer, Oggy decided,
as a thought of distant sex flitted across his fragmented mind like
an old mateless sparrow on gray wings.
Was there even time to drive all the
way to San Antonio and get back? He was running very late. Oggy
stretched his torn shoulder to reach the broken fuse. He pulled it
out and dropped the fuse as he banged the back of his head on the
steering column. He could smell his own breath and it didn't smell
good. When had he changed his shirt last? It wasn't like he was
homeless and with no clean clothes. He had clothes but he was lazy
and disgusting. Everyone was right about him; he had no class and no
hope. Oggy wondered if it was a piece of food or a piece of dental
floss that was dangling from his decaying molars. Really? His ass was
soaking wet from the sweat? It seemed implausible but it was
also raining because nothing could possibly facilitate a project Oggy
was trying to accomplish. If it could rain then it would rain and if
Oggy was going to get stuck then it would be where mud formed easily
and covered his face and ego with heartfelt insults. If he needs a
tool then he couldn't find it and if he could find it then it would
soon break. Oggy dug around in the mud for the other half of the fuse
that he would need to repair because it was some ridiculous size that
was only made in 1969 and discontinued. Of course! For any single
light to continue working on Oggy's van it would require routing
everything through an axillary fuse panel that had the modern sizes
for fuses or else digging his own teeth out to exploit for the lead
to solder the two broken contacts of the fuse back together. “That's
it,” thought Oggy, “we are all basically going to reach the stage
where we scavenge our own body parts. If it's possible to be less
dignified then we are going in that direction.” moaned Oggy in the
echo chamber of his lost fabrication. “Whatever is gross and simple
and dumb and ugly will be our destination. But we will redefine the
word gross until it is desirable and that's how the manipulation of
mass sheep culture notoriously absorbs the reality that we try to
avoid.”
Oggy shook his head although he had
been lately reduced to a range of 10 degrees motion in his neck.
“But,” he concluded with futile mockery, “nothing actually
matters since the usurpation of reality has already prostituted my
own definitions so it's too late to put the cat back in the bag. We
are disgusting and poisoned and broken in spirit and the negotiation
for our integrity was lost as soon as we cried for our first
artificial snow cone at the little league field. Apples were the
least of our temptations.” noted Oggy in a biblical light that
brought shame because it was also pretentious.
Oggy's wrinkled hand felt his formless
ass. He was hot and wet. Maybe it was this army surplus sweater he
had been wearing for a week. But he was only wearing it because the
heat had been shut off in the house after the furnace broke and it
was 30 degrees all day and 20 degrees at night. So he had no choice
but stay warm like an Eskimo who never took his lard vest off.
Oggy peered through the flaking
blepheritus of his medical and emotional affliction and watched as a
gust of wind broke a tree limb off behind his van and the limb fell
with indifference onto the stick that Oggy had placed behind his van
so that it could hold a small Mexican bicycle mirror and reflect the
tail light of his van that would not work. Of course the branch had
knocked the mirror to the ground, costing him 40 minutes of
calibration. Squirrels fled, the mocking black Grackle flew from the
remains of seed on the muddy asphalt to a nearby tree. A cat waiting
for a scrap chased a sparrow. Oggy's stomach rumbled and he farted
casually because the decay in his own bowels was the sound of the Big
Guy thundering down the hallway to claim another redundant soul.
He'd been working for three hours so
far on the electrical problem and had removed the whole steering
wheel and dashboard to access the impossibly buried fuse panel. Of
course he hadn't checked the electrical system yesterday when his
whole trip to San Antonio had been rained out. No, he'd slept on the
couch with curled up memories of his own mythology to keep him warm,
watching his breath collect on the peeling paint of a junk store
bureau. Now, when he actually had a chance to drive the 81 miles to a
town with more than one stoplight he'd been thwarted by a series of
problems with the van. And he hadn't even solved the flaw that
prevented the automatic transmission from reaching third gear. And
1st gear slipped with ugly sounds in the area below the
doghouse. So, that left him with an illegal van that had one gear and
no lights.
But he had time since he had been fired
to the joy of all who hated him and wished for his failure. Time gave
him the luxury of painting on a smile and walking around in white
socks in the freezing room, eating junk food, flogging his worn cock
to sleep with profanity and self-loathing. So this was the time that
he assigned to this futile task, 3...5...10 hours under the steering
column, adjusting the mirror so the squirrels couldn't see the
reflection of Oggy's misery....closing doors, blowing his nose,
picking up pieces of his own baggy flatulence, always moving away
from a solution and closer to oblivion. It was like a joke and yet
Oggy knew that with enough perseverance he would solve the problem
even if it meant going so far from the solution that eventually he
rebuilt everything in the world to his exacting standards. Then his cell phone rang on his hip. He grabbed it in a fury and saw the caller id: DAD. He hit the "reject" button, then silence, then turned the phone off.
Speaking of problems, the whole saga
started with a 50 year old electric furnace that had failed when the
elements had burned out and grounded the circuit so the fan wouldn't
turn on and that burned out the relay and the transformer...Oggy took
note that he would ask God exactly what the chain of events was that
led to the failure of the furnace. That was the least God could do,
at least explain exactly what happened in this basement dwelling
called Earth that led to our death. This flesh was thin and fleeting,
lustful and secretly pouring odors and fluid and waste into the
atmosphere so at least we could get a detailed analysis of what went
wrong. That was fair, right? That was an appropriate menu item to
order once we were dead and buried and standing tall before the man.
Oggy would make a point not to surrender his nonsensical grip on the
land of the living, just to spite God.
It took hours of non-stop work. 5 hours
earlier Oggy had laughed when he almost walked out the door without
the transformer, the whole reason he was going to San Antonio, and
now he was laughing because he hadn't even left the driveway and the
sun was receding like his feather light hair on his psoriasis face.
But starting at a point so far away from the solution, Oggy had been
reduced to mending an antique bullet fuse and testing it with a
continuity tester and then placing it upside down in the fuse
terminal and then spending at least 50 minutes in tearful agony
trying to orient the ragged ends of the fuse with the broken fuse cap
in exactly the spot where the contact was still touching and
providing current to turn the tail light on. But that wasn't even the
beginning of the solution. That was the beginning of being able
to troubleshoot the actual problem which was a Chinese turn signal
cam mechanism that had broken and was shorting out the fuse and
preventing the turn signal from working which was preventing the tail
light from coming on which was preventing Oggy from leaving because
he would be immediately pulled over by the police and wrongly charged
with murder. That particular problem had required 10 hours of labor
to fix because normally things like this are fixed with a $200 phone
call to China for more broke-ass parts that the mechanic will
install. That saves him time and you pay for the crappy part. Since
Oggy is the mechanic of his own van he knows there is no other
solution except fixing the broken part. This involves bending
microscopic tines so they touch the contacts at exactly the right
angle and orientation to activate the turn signal while not short
circuiting the stop lights. Hours more effort of adjusting the tines,
fixing the mirror so he could see the light come on, picking up
fragments of his demise as squirrels knocked his spine in half and
snails crawled over his arthritic feet.
Eventually, all the universe aligned
and the fuse worked and the tines connected and the bulb was in the
correct astral orientation and the mirror was adjusted so he could
see the narrow window of space with the bulb so that when Oggy hit
the brake pedal the light came and Oggy didn't even smile because
this was not a victory at all but a return to recognizable failure.
And the last test was turning the cam signal to the right and seeing
the bulb blink. It did. Pathetic, too pathetic to celebrate.
Oggy wasted no time in assembling his
confidence for the trip to San Antonio with one gear and a stiff
neck. He'd sleep on the streets, he decided, if everything was
closed. What did it matter? Nothing mattered. Everything was
pointless and eventually all the fuses would melt in the heat of a
nuclear explosion. Pollution would rain down on the meek heads of
belligerent roaches. The raccoons that lived in the piss tank of
Oggy's attic would perish along with the dogs in the abused dog
shelter. Oggy was miserable, bitter, in pain, broke, jobless,
furious, defeated. He went to piss in the bathroom and was
dissatisfied with the stream of malodorous urine that dribbled from
his wasted bowels. Too much sugar and not enough vitamins, Oggy
determined. But there was nothing that could or would be done. The
doctors of the world won't get their knives in me, vowed Oggy. He
grabbed a colon clogging energy bar from the top of his refrigerator
and stumbled toward the van. Fuck it all, he thought.
Later in the week, Oggy looked at his
torn and threadbare underroos and saw shit stains. “What the fuck,”
he thought. Then he saw the stain had soaked through Spiderman's face
onto his thrift store pants. Oh, shit! Shit stains like a potty
trained infant marked Oggy's pants and underroos. He was decaying. He
had apparently shit his pants that day when he fixed the van but had
been oblivious as a drunk tank rape victim. He had shit his pants and
sat in it the whole trip to San Antonio and he had shit in his pants
when the police pulled him over for having a tail light out and for
sleeping in the mall parking lot and when he flirted with that cute
cashier at El Pollo Loco. He had shit in his ass crack and on his
underroos and ruining his pants that whole time and none of it
mattered. It wasn't sweat that had made his ass wet, it was shit from
the diet of rage and Taco Bell. Of course.
As Oggy was washing the shit from his
pants Joe dropped by with an invitation to the old folk's home. “Come
play piano.” There were now 4 regular audience members with floral
bed dresses and blue veins behind transparent flesh. The note said,
“Mrs. Martin passed away. Funeral Wednesday.” Oggy wondered if he
had known her or if she was one of the anonymous women who clapped
from their bedroom. Oggy collected some songbooks, the jazz fakebook,
the book of waltzes, the single “Time Goes By” that always leads
to one of the ladies asking him what movie it was from. Then he
remembered Mrs. Martin was the one who continuously requested “The
Beer Barrel Polka”, a song Oggy couldn't really play at tempo but
was learning. “We couldn't afford shoes so we danced barefoot,”
Mrs. Martin had said predictably after she requested the song with
1950s nostalgia in her blurry eyes. He turned around and dug through
a pile of sheet music until he found a book that contained Beer
Barrel Polka. Then Oggy walked across the street as rain began to
fall. A stray dog barked at him from the sidewalk.
2 comments:
A bit rambling and twangy in the middle but I do like how you kept us hooked by slighlty reminding us about the story and how we could almost guess that you shit yourself but that we had to wait until the end to get the punch line and laugh at you.
Poncho
it's bad enough to shit my pants but to only learn about it a few days later really puts me in a different league of decay.
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