TP for the Q of E

After a bike ride on the trail the other day I used a port-a-potty at the edge of the parking lot. There were two identical plastic enclosures on the wall. One held toilet paper, the other you couldn’t see what was inside and it had a padlock on it with a message “Do Not Remove”. Made me wonder what exactly was in the plastic case. Is this where they keep the “good” toilet paper? You know, like when you were a kid and Mom always had the “good” china and silverware you only used on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Imagine the Queen of England visiting our area and during a tour of the local farmland and hoi polloi, nature calls to her. She stops in at the trail station and one of her retinue announces

“The Queen requires to drop a deuce. Please issue your finest papier toilette.”

Some maintenance man named Butch with a six day growth of beard and wearing a t-shirt stained with wing sauce steps forward.

“Uh, yessir. Give me, uh, one minute.”

Butch pulls a flap of skin away from his left ear and slips out a small key made of cut crystal. He steps into the port-a-potty, opens the padlock and lifts out a roll of 34-ply toilet paper flecked with specks of gold. He sits the roll on a shelf. It begins playing a Debussy piano concerto. The tube inside, made of wood taken from the limb of a 1000 year old tree in the Schwarzwald of Baden-Wurttemberg, sprays the area with jasmine scented mist.

Also in the container is a hermetically sealed jar containing butterflies, the laughter of small children and light captured from supernova SN 1006. Butch removes the lid and the portable bathroom becomes incandescent and pastoral. A privy fit for royalty.

Then again, the plastic box might just contain some back-up rolls of Joe’s 1-Ply Shitter Paper. 

Goose Down

Taking a bike ride on the local rail trail I met the Goose family out for a late-day swim. That’s dad Walter and mom Henrietta along with the kids Donna, Tammy, Skeeter, Stewart, David, Shaniqua, Tanya, Blind Lemon, Larry, Latrell, Hazel, Ann Marie and D-Train.

I thought they were in the creek just for a family outing. Unfortunately after a conversation with Walter I found out they were living in the high grass at the base of the bridge.

Walter used to be a line manager at a pillow factory until everyone’s job was lost. The plant closed up and moved overseas where the pillows are now stuffed by robots with down imported from Indonesia. Walter’s severance kept them for a while but it wasn’t long before they couldn’t pay the mortgage on the split level rancher, Henrietta’s dream home. If things weren’t bad enough with no job, bills piling up, and 356 children spread all over North America that still needed help from time to time, Henrietta found out she was pregnant again. Walter admits he didn’t handle the news well.

“How did she expect me to react?” Walter said to me. “I can’t pay the water bill and soon there will be 5-15 more mouths to feed? I thought we were being careful, but . . .”

Counting himself, Walter now had 15 geese to support. There was a ray of hope when he was offered a line cook’s job at Arby’s but at the last minute assistant manager Lonny Hornberg gave the position to his nephew Darryl instead. Walter lost his temper throwing a squawking fit and flapping his wings wildly. It would have been much ado over nothing had he not also pooped in the French fry grease and stuck his beak into a customer’s strawberry shake. That earned Walter a fine he couldn’t afford.

After that Walter took any odd job he could find to earn money but it wasn’t enough to save the house. For a month following they stayed with Henrietta’s cousin Sharon until her own 11 goslings hatched. Twenty eight honking geese was just too much for one townhouse so Walter and Henrietta took their brood on the road. They’ve been staying near any creek or lake where they can lay low in the weeds. During the day Henrietta raises her kids as best she can while Walter sends his resume to anyone who will take it.

“We were living the Canadian-American dream for a little while,” Henrietta said in a hushed voice. “Now we’re just trying to survive.”

I wished Walter and Henrietta good luck and got back on my bike. I watched as they swam under the bridge to get out of the Sun, the goslings blissfully unaware of anything except their immediate surroundings. Walter put a supportive wing around his wife before they drifted out of sight.

A Boy and his Bike

I bought a bike. A used, blue mountain bike that I wanted to ride to enjoy being outside in the sun and get some exercise. We made a good team out on the trail, my legs pumping and growing stronger, the bike gleaming proudly in the sun.

This is the story of how the bike turned on me.

On only my second ride on the trail, I was going through a railroad tunnel. When you hit the middle, its pitch black. The light from in front of you and behind you has all dissipated and you are alone in the darkness, just the sound of the bike tires rolling through the dirt and if you’re like me, your heavy breathing because you’re fat and out of shape.

After about thirty seconds of just me and the invisible things in the dark, a faint trace of light illuminated my front tire and I saw a ridge at the edge of the path. Then I saw the tire smile: A deep, snake-like grin. A licorice-black tongue snapped out, grasping the edge of the path. The bike slid out from under me and I went down, dragging my left leg through a morass of mud, gravel and dirt. When I stood up I was filthy and bleeding from the palm of my hand, my knee and from scratches all over my lower leg.

It didn’t make me “mean mad” as Ma Joad asked in the Grapes of Wrath. I felt stupid: An adult who can’t go on a simple bike ride. I did have questions about the bike though. I had the whole damn tunnel to ride in so how did the tire catch the only place that would send me to the ground? I didn’t want to believe the bike was bad, didn’t want to make the obvious “Christine” comparisons, but then it got worse. The bike lulled me into a false sense of security. I continued to ride it for weeks with no problems. On the road, on the trail, took it on vacation with me to the shore. I put dozens of miles on the bike without incident. Except for one thing.

I had a cut on my knee, a remnant of the crash, that wouldn’t heal properly. It started bothering me again on vacation and continued in the weeks after until last week when my own knee joined forces with the bike in a diptych of evil. Pus-filled blisters started appearing around the original cut. I drained them, put on ointment. But then, in a move straight out of the necronomicon, the demonic pairing created a blister on the back of my knee. Of course I didn’t notice it because who the hell looks at the back of their knee except for deviants and the Dutch? The abscess soon swelled to the size of a golf ball. By the next day my knee and ankle were swollen and hot and I knew. I knew that my bike had corrupted my own body against me. In the libertine smoke of the early morning hours, I had been infected.

I had to alight to the hospital where I was put on nefarious drugs which broke my skin out in hives. I was tortured by a tall man in a blue smock who resembled the angel of death. With metal instruments he cut and poked at the bulbous growth on the back of my knee, delighting a contingent of Dutch residents there to observe and squeezing out tainted, hellish pus. By the next day, immobile and itching, mercy was relayed to me by an angel with better drugs. I spent the next 4 days sitting on the end of my couch, my leg propped up and hurting. My cat used me as a bed and cleaning station. And all the while, from my spare room, I could hear the bike laughing, low and wet.

And the moral of the story comes from my brother: “It never pays to exercise. Put the bike away and forget it exists.”

Sage advice.