The image was obtained at www.alanamous.com/page/2 on sept. 20th 2009.
The sky blanketed us with the dirty fleece of a grubby lamb. Gray shadows wrapped Jersey shore, everywhere. We waited for the wash water from the sky to cleanse us, and make the day better. But God held back the heavenly rinse cycle. We got heavy clouds, but no rain.
The demons of autumn honed the air to an edge the summer can’t possess and the chill invaded our sweaters. Despite our best efforts, autumn toddled nearer like a child learning to walk. Is that why they call it the fall?
Jay had a half-day at Kindergarten, and Lance dropped by to look into the bramble. We were his audience as he investigated what lived under my wild rose bramble.
He wore a gray-green ski cap over his shaven head. I am not sure why young guys shave their heads but it is the style, and who would argue with Kojak. Can they all be going pre-maturely bald?He knelt, probing deeper into the brambles, while modeling pants styles for plumbers. Jay giggled seeing Lance’s heinie, covered his mouth with one tiny hand, and pointed vigorously with the other. He followed the etiquette of a Kindergartener.
During this earth shaking moment, Arthur Frank drove up in, what else, a Crown Vic with government plates. Did President Ford sign an exclusive contract with his namesake to supply government vehicles? I wonder if President O’Bummer rides in a Ford? His car must have a webcam camera, so he won’t lose airtime.
Arthur, military and FBI, commented that I looked like the mangy mutt today. I just haven’t had time to get to Mike the Barber. We call him that to distinguish him from Conan the Barbarian. They are twins separated at birth like Arnold and Danny. Mike did not grow up to be the governor of California or a Terminator. He's registered safe with scissors, so sleeping in the chair isn't a risk.
My Isro looks more like a Rasta do than a kosher mop. Tink has started calling me Marley. Jay wants to know why she uses a dog’s name for me.
Art yelled to me, “Boyo, going over to Sea Girt to pop off a few rounds. Want to come?”
“Watchin’ Jay, don’t want him around loud noises. The M1911A is broken down for cleaning anyway.”
I did not want Jayson to hear the word gun or Colt, as he had a fascination with them when his mother was an active FBI agent. He learned Colt .45 as the name of my gun when I brought it back home after being shot. For his safety, and he is a curious George if there ever was one, the Colt stays locked in the floor safe of the shore house.
He played cowboys and Indians up to 3 months ago, hiding in closets and ambushing me with a cap pistol. The first time, almost gave me another stroke, but now he plays secret agent. Less loud noises and surprises, so I fully expect to live another year or two, and not face a sudden traumatic medical episode. No pacemaker needed at this time.
Tink played a DVD of Dr. No for him on a rainy day, and now he wants to go undercover. When we walk Bubs at the shore, he runs on the beach and hunts for conch shells like they did in the movie. At the Jersey shore, he’s more likely to find small shells, old syringes, and used condoms. Just kidding, that was the old Ciba-Geigy days at the shore. The beaches have been especially clean and beautiful this summer. On a scale of 0 to 10, beach cleanliness was a 9.
My favorite character in Dr. No
Because of the James Bond attitude, Pam bought Jayson a video game Golden Eye Rogue Agent. He plays the video game as often as he watches the Telebubbies and Sesame Street. So the less talk about shooting guns the better.
Culture shock meets childhood with a bang. He hasn’t asked for a child-sized tuxedo, and he can’t seem to learn the rules to Baccarat Chemin de fer.
He dressed Bubs as a French secret agent. The dog seemed to like the disguise thinking she was human, hidden, and unrecognizable.
Maybe she likes the human pup enough to put up with all his silliness. She never had a litter, maternal instincts and all that.
In another salute to 007, Tink claims last New Year’s Eve Jay developed a taste for the bubbly. Her spinster sister, Svetlana Angelucci was visiting at the time, (her first name has been changed to protect the humor).
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A bottle of Korbel Brut was missing in action on January 2nd, but I think Svettie requisitioned it for her room after watching the ball drop in Times Square. She needed something inanimate with which to cuddle. She doesn't do well with living, feeling things, like dogs, and cats, and especially humans. I think she might be better with aliens, not the Mexicans who work in the restaurants but the aliens from Neptune ... not Neptune NJ, but Interstellar Neptune, as in Mars, Venus, because she is out of this world and works to put people out of this world. More on that later.
Jay wasn’t hung over the next day, and it was a whole bottle. Once a Marine Military Police Investigator, always solving crimes. Maybe the sisters shared it before I woke up to watch the football games on January 1st – go Rutgers - who knows, who cares.
Maybe it was Svettie who gave Jay his first taste that night. She’d do it for a laugh, like giving catnip to a cat and watching.
Wouldn’t put it past her. Pam would kill the interloper if she knew. She has gone with Art and I to Sea Girt and out shot the both of us, and Art is marksman rated with a handgun. My rating is below that, significantly.
New Years Eve, Tink and I were snuggling on the couch from 11:30 PM to 3:00 AM January 1st. We didn’t need champagne. The bubbles of champagne disturb my eyebrows. When you pass 55 years old, your eyebrows grow so long they curl like Shirley Temple’s hair and develop nerves that can sense the wind from a tsunami in Japan while standing at the Jersey shore. The bubbles are annoying. Ask Andy Rooney. Mike the Barber charges 2 bucks extra and uses a lawnmower to trim them.
Tink likes them long, claiming it’s fun to brush them against the grain. I put up with that but … You can see my problem with the eyebrows, not to mention the tongue.
I think Tink is in denial as to why all the Murphy’s Stout was gone 24 hours after her sister’s arrival. The Chardonnay went next, 6 bottles in 3 days. I didn’t up my intake, although her sister gave everyone orders, and therefore I had justification.
She even had Bubs fetching things for her, and we never taught Bubs to fetch. She’s a poodle not a retriever. That’s like asking a Jewish American Princess to do the laundry, by hand, in the river, on a stone. Svettie got on Bubs nerves to the point where she brought me the beret and glasses, scratched the floor begging me to put them on her. Stupid poodle, like that would help.
Svettie threw Lew P off the computer while he and I were going over a scene for the Fatal Blow, so that she could read her e-mails. She had brought her laptop with her and the shore house has wifi. She didn’t want to go up to her dormer bedroom (yeah, I can’t stand sleeping and living on the same floor with her), and get her computer. She tried to figure out how to tell Bubs to pick it up without teeth marks, but the canine was having none of that. So she sent Lew P to Siberia for a half hour, while the pleasant sound of “You’ve got mail” played from the desktop.
Worse yet, after making large amounts of alcohol disappear, Svetlana can walk a straight line and talk normally, which means she’s had practice, probably on straight Vodka, hence the name.
The way to tell the booze has affected her is the subtle degree of hostility increase. From yes to yeah what, and from please to the royal command of do it, i.e. “Doc is that you who just came in from raking leaves? Bring my glass of wine here. I’m watching Oprah.”
We’ll cut her a break since her four-year relationship with a guy who worked for Bear-Stearns went up in smoke. Truly that is what happened. They caught him smoking the weed in the men’s room and he was fired, right before everyone at Bear-Stearns was fired or absorbed. He is unemployed and she refuses to support him with her job as a computer programmer for NASA.
Back to our dreary, dreary day, Arthur picked up on not using the word gun or Colt, and walked from the car to the yard to see what made Jay giggle. From the street, he couldn’t see Lance’s heinie buck in and out of the brambles in a very obscene manner. Jay was too young to understand, but I had a chuckle, as he lunged in and out of the bush, grabbing rocks and placing them near his feet.
Repetitively, Lance on his knees, springing forward to straight, reaching his arms over his head into the center of the bramble, and pulling back to a compact size, carrying rocks to pile near his shoes. The upper half of his body disappeared and appeared in a steady rhythm. The gray ski cap on his baldhead only added to the effect of safe bramble probing.
When Arthur made it to the corner of the house he stopped. It took him 20 seconds to understand what he saw. A smile percolated onto his face, as he reached the same suggestive conclusion as I. Old men, and the gutter, constant companions, hey. Those who can’t do, teach. I remember that adage from my residency in orthopedics. For old men, those who can’t do, well they just keep thinking about it, but …
“That half-exposed heinie belongs to Lance.” I said, “Something, a snake, a field mouse, a shrew lives in the bramble. Mrs. Leary’s cat thinks it’s something good to eat. I am getting tired of that pseudo-lion being ensnared by my roses. Lance is the MPI of animal control. Unlike the official county people, he has no rules, just like us in Nam.”
“What’s he going to do with it when he catches it?” Art asked.
“If it’s a snake he’ll keep in his zoo/farm. If it’s a mammal, I guess it’s food for the farm. I’m finished crawling in that briar. That’s all I know.”
Jayson said, “Granddaddy looks like a baby when he crawls in there, but his heinie is covered.” Then he whispered to Art. “But granddad’s butt is bigger.”
Art mumbled, ”military, they teach you to CYA, all the time, unlike plumbers.”
“Jay, I had more time to develop my ass.”
Jay laughed loudly. “Grand dad said a bad word. I’m telling mommy you said that.”
“That’s ok, just don’t tell Tink.”
Jayson raised a puzzled look and turned to see Lance putting out traps around the entrance to the creature’s den. He baited each of them with different foods.
“That should do her.” Lance said, as he climbed from his knees to his feet. He dusted off his knees, and wiped his hand across his bald pate, pushing back his ski cap, grabbing it and squeezing it like a wet wash cloth. “Now we just wait.”
He walked away from the bramble, but never bothered to tug up his pants. They made his butt look as flat as an ice pond. He never looked back as he climbed into his Mustang.
I stopped Jayson from giggling and told him that wasn’t polite, but I had trouble keeping a straight face.
Art said, “He shouldn’t expose his brains to the sunlight, might dry them out completely.”
I countered, “Guess it’s his lucky day, no direct sun. Want to go inside and heft a Murphy’s or two?”
“Got go to Sea Girt, need the scores to stay employed. See ya soon.”
So Art left and Jay ran back in the house. It was no surprise that Rogue Agent blasted from the television set in the den when I followed him in.
The Mad Mutt and the horrible, dreary, desolate, desultory, but not dampened day.
I am the Mad Mutt, be grateful that you are not.
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