What Brown did for Jerry
Early autumn had firmly engulfed campus in its chilly embrace–Halloween was around the corner! It was the time of year I had to decided if I’d rather slog through the a mile of icy wind for 20 minutes, or wait with the weirdos for thirty minutes at the bus stop, then sit in the warm bus that smelled like armpits for another 30 minutes to get home. My backpack was filled with textbooks which had cost enough money to feed a family of nineteen for a year and weighed several metric tonnes. I opted for the fresh air.
By the time I arrived at home, I was thoroughly knackered. I flopped down on the couch, not much noticing the dissonant vibe that was reverberating through my small apartment. Jack was in the living room with a heavy coat on and looking deeply annoyed. Jerry was in the kitchen banging dishes around.
After some time, the tension registered in my tired mind and I asked Jack why he was wearing his heavy coat inside the house. He was in no mood to chat. The extent of his response was “I’m cold.”
“Why are you cold?” I asked foolishly ignoring all the signs of danger.
He plunged a fork into a pot of boiling water and withdrew a piece of chicken the color of week old zombie
“The window in my bedroom was opened while I napped, and now I’m cold.” An astute detective like Sherlock Holmes or Lt. Columbo would have caught that phrase “was opened”. He didn’t say “was open”, he said “was opened.”
Not being an astute fictional detective, I barged on.
“Jerry? What’s wrong? You seem upset?”
With one final bang of a dish he said, “I had to take one of my home enemas, and then I had to go to go to Smith’s to get some food and when I was at Smith’s I lost my health. I lost my health all down my leg. And I washed my pants and hung them next to the window to dry. And Jack’s mad at me now. Do you want some chicken?”
He plunged a fork into a pot of boiling water and withdrew a piece of chicken the color of week old zombie.
“No, thank you,” I said.
With that, he stormed down the hallway. The zombie chicken splashed disconsolately back into the pot, having given its life for nought.
I sat down on the sofa and considered the evidence. There was an enema. There was a two-mile walk to the grocery store. There was this mysterious phrase about losing his health. And then there was an emergency washing of the pants.
Finally, I turned to Jack and said, “Jack. Did Jerry give himself an enema and then walk to Smith’s and shit his pants?”
“Yup, I think so.”
I decided then and there I never wanted the visual image of Jerry’s ass in my mind’s eye again. But sadly, it was not meant to be.
The Poo Flap Incident
There’s a full Moon out tonight and it’s a bad Moon rising!
One age-old Halloween tradition in colleges is to find members of the opposite sex, ask them out for Halloween and then drag them to a scare house in the misguided hope that you may accidentally get hugged. A terror-instigated hug is still a hug, so shut up.
Jack, Carl, and I had lured three girls from the next building over to go with us to a cool haunted house set up in the old State Mental Hospital. The six of us sat on our tatty couches in the living room awkwardly passing time until it was dark enough to be scary.
The darkness closed in, though none of us moved to turn on a light. Our conversation stopped cold when a door creaked open from deep down the long and darkened hallway. A great gasping yawn followed by contented lip-smacking assaulted our ears. Jack, Carl, and I looked at each other in horror. “Jerry!” We thought he’d gone to some dance for lonely weirdos. But we were proven wrong when a form emerged from the dark hallway. His hand smacked around at the wall for a light switch. When the lights came on, we saw Jerry standing there sleepily, wearing nothing but long underwear. He wandered into the kitchen and poured himself some orange juice, and turned to head back down the hallway.
One of the girls squeaked in horror then quickly clapped her hand over her mouth to stop the squeak. You see these things in cartoons, but never in real life. Apparently, long underwear really does have a little flap that buttons closed to cover your ass. Jerry’s wasn’t buttoned. So he and his bare hairy ass meandered back down the hallway horrifying our dates for what seemed like an eon.
And not even one of the girls hugged us in terror.
Toilet Paper Image by “Toiletpapier (Gobran111)” by Brandon Blinkenberg. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toiletpapier_(Gobran111).jpg#/media/File:Toiletpapier_(Gobran111).jpg
Moon Image by Gregory H. Revera, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
About the Author
About the Author: Ian is a 3rd generation native of Southern Nevada, where he lives today in a quiet suburban neighborhood with his wife of twenty years and their two sons. Ian has earned his bread in a variety of occupations including stocking a beer freezer, mixing and pouring concrete, being a roadie for a synth punk band in San Francisco in the early 90's, being a not-very-well-known hard rock DJ, scenic carpentry, theatrical lighting design, theatrical sound design, playing Ku Klux Klan Member #5 in a professional production of "Grover", and writing for an virtually unknown, subversive, underground blog called Radio Free Las Vegas.
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