Posted: 6/9/2008 11:49:31 PM EDT
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To most of his friends, spending Saturday nights at the Shadybrook Retirement Community was the sort of thing you would only endure if you were working off some deep seated guilt still lingering after your own parents expired there. And that might indeed inspire a bit of guilt. It would be a cruel fate, expiration in those off-white-stained and sour-smelling halls. True, you may be accustomed by then to that particular brand of milk-sour-smelling sweat that could only be replicated by a carefully maintained diet of Ensure Complete Balanced Nutrition Shakes(R), Centrum Silver(tm) and Triple Action Gold Bond Medicated Powder(R) combined with the sort of metabolism you only started to exhibit in your seventh or eighth decade. But then, Todd's friends didn't know about the after-hours parties that sprung up after the Best of Lawrence Welk (every Friday night at 8 pm), Euchre Club (Saturday nights unless it was...) Ronald Reagan cinema night (every third Saturday). And if the sour-salty itch of Shadybrook's halls kept his friends away from Todd's little secret, all the better. Frankly, he had actually grown to look forward to the stale odor now. Like the damp carpet in the house that you grew up in. However vaguely rank it might be, how much like the wet dog it presents itself, it is the smell of home. Or something like that. Third Saturdays were certainly the most promising. Nurse Linda always fucked up the splice on the film (old reel-to-reel projection maintenance clearly was not taught in her nursing school of choice) and so, more likely than not, the end of Bedtime for Bonzo was cut off in the same spot as usual (about 15 minutes from the end) and, if everyone was lucky, it wouldn't smell too much like melted celluloid again. But the frustration, that deep itching irritation that nagged at you like being introduced to an abrasive Depends(tm) seam with a kink in it during the mandatory afternoon exercise walk past the local graveyard (little bit of genius there on the part of the activities director Todd always thought to himself), caused the illicit gatherings to spring up like so many adolescent acne breakouts. That is to say, sudden and tight, first appearing after an itch or two in small numbers, but later grouped in clusters, increasingly visible, growing redder with engorged blood, brightened and prolonged by excessive alcohol consumption, and prone to explode in pusslike eruptions if pressed too hard and squeezed too long... and, even though you knew the sharp explosive pain and the dull ache the next morning were both around the corner... you just couldn't resist pressing too hard and squeezing too long. It started one afternoon when Todd was at Shadybrook visiting his failing mother. She had been "failing" for years, but she never quite seemed to actually "fail." Somehow, Todd had a vague idea that the process of failing was eventually supposed to end in actual failure, but the timing was less than clear to him and the fact that this was his mother made working to pin down the schedule a bit, well... kind of awkward. Slowly growing used to the long-term nature of her decline and his complete lack of agency in the process (baring something rather drastic and criminal), Todd had, on this particular day, snuck a hip-flask of Jim Bean into Shadybrook, in sharp contrast to their very particular rules against bringing alcohol without permission of the staff, to consume in quick, greedy gulps, hoping to anesthetize himself while she went on and on again about the time she had tried to shake Reagan's hand in Ohio. She had waiting for hours and hours but Ronnie only got to her younger friend Dolly before the Secret Service pulled him away. Disillusioned and pissed off, she voted for Carter and, when he discovered his wife suddenly a converted Democrat, Todd's father, Albert, had his first heart attack. He had his second when, after Hinckley shot Reagan, Alexander Haig announced in front of reporters that "I am in control here, in the White House...." "He can't do that," Albert gasped. "He is from fucking Ardmore, Pennsylvania." "No he isn't. He is from Philadelphia, Albert," his wife reminded him. With this, Albert stood up to protest, turned bright red and promptly collapsed in a heap muttering "He's worse than Muskie. Worse. Much worse than Muskie," before lapsing into unconsciousness. Constantly annoyed by his melodramatic and obsessive attachment to politics, in 1984 while sitting in the living room watching the beginnings of election coverage Todd's mother abruptly announced that she had voted for Walter Mondale. She ignored her husband's obvious and disturbingly potent distress, even when he sank from his chair onto the carpet and clutched his chest, gasping "my opponent's youth and inexperience... my opponent's youth and inexperience..." over and over again. Convinced that he was just causing a scene (the other two heart attacks hadn't killed him after all), Todd's mother simply ignored him. He expired right there on the floor while the first exit polls began to come in, and, accordingly, Albert died completely convinced that Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale would win the Presidency. Todd's mother didn't see too well anymore, so Todd had just left the Jim Bean on the bedside table while he excused himself to take a piss but when he came back, SHE was there. "She" was Edna. A 73 year old widow with, as it turned out, an unquenchable thirst for Jim Bean and the tolerance of a Kentucky Coyote raised on a steady diet of gut-rotting, backwoods still moonshine. She had polished off the entire thing, (it had been about two swigs shy of unopened) when he walked back in. She just looked at him expressionless, and he must have returned the non-expression expression with near perfection when they locked eyes. His mother was at the part of her story where the White House sent her back a form letter in reply to her fifth written complaint letter to Reagan since the election. Todd's mother probably didn't even know he had left and was likely about as dimly aware that Edna had arrived. Edna, apologetic at having stolen Todd's Jim Bean (she might not have bothered except he clearly had better sight than his mother at this stage) repaid Todd over the next many weeks by pulling back the curtains on the seamy underbelly of Shadybrook. Shady, it seemed to Todd, must have originated with the rigged BINGO games, the trafficking in stolen crochet materials, the routine bribery of the facility staff (up to and including hush money to look the other way in the face of an alarmingly extensive desert-square extortion scheme that had already taken the lives of half a dozen diabetes afflicted residents) and it was equally clear that "brook" was meant to indicate the area of the mass grave dug to cover up the rash of incidents during the many "animal therapy weeks." Yeah, Todd knew the Shadybrook skeletons (literally and figuratively) by now alright. And as that second tab of acid started to really hit home, right about the time when Edna, adorned in that fantastically orange pantsuit and her favorite white plastic flip-flops, began to survey her best friend Bertha's room for another bottle of Jim Bean, Todd could hear Bertha's ritualistic tobacco-spitting (she swore to Todd time and again that, no matter how it sounded, she wasn't vomiting). That's when it hit him. That's when it all came into an unmistakeable focus. "We need some pork rinds, man," he said. |
 you have way to much time
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LMMFAO hail.gif |
Why the hell didn't you quote the whole thing? I'm going to need to release a director's cut now. |
