April 30, 2004
The reason I haven’t called
I received this email/letter from my sister a few days before her birthday this year. I submitted it for McSweeney's Van Zorn Prize, alas, I received word this morning it did not make the cut. Nevertheless it is a hell-of-a-read.
The reason I haven’t called
Dear Brother,...Well, you see; the rodeo is in town and so is the carnival with them. Oh, what fun! What fun! All the rides! The animals! The happy families everywhere!
But alas, our gleeful outing took a misfortunate turn when one of the unwitting though adequately trained carney-folk who was operating my ride on the highly touted Slam!-O-Matic carriage was distracted by a passing woman with arms full of fluffy pink cotton candy heaven on her way back to the petting rodeo pen where all her 15 children were eagerly awaiting their daily nourishment; it seems that suddenly one of the stiletto heels on her cowboy boots got wedged right firmly in a day-old cow pie, and before she could yell "S---!" she was on her way
But the carney man was watching, thankfully, and immediately lurched into action. He swiftly balanced his cigarette down on the control box, careful to let the ash end point out, glanced at his shoelaces to be sure they were out of the way, and with a great flourish of his long, curly hair, he made a death-defying leap off the Slam!-O-Matic platform and landed squarely in front of the cow pie and the endangered woman, catching her by the fringe of her leather mini-skirt with one burly hand and deftly capturing the enormous cotton candy poofball in the other as it came floating down along it's sweet parabolic trajectory--thus averting a near sticky and stinky disaster.
Incidentally, the woman had excellent reflexes herself--that was just one tough cow pie--for in the midst of all this tripping and catching and leaping and lurching, her own smoldering bud had been displaced from her painted lips and had gone sailing up, up, up into the air as if it would never be seen again--but with a flash of ankle motion and agility supported by the efforts of the kind carney man, she was miraculously able to glance up at just the right moment, and time the falling of the burning cigarette above her such that she could flick her second two toes slightly apart out of her open-toed cowboy boots, and voila!, snatched that burning cigarette out of the air between them, pausing just for a moment to ash, and then breathing a great sigh of relief. What a moment.
Well, meanwhile, I was watching through my slatted bars atop the whirling Slam!-O-Matic, when I guess in his initial leap to the rescue, our hero accidentally kicked the accelerator lever with his steel-toed boot and I began tumbling faster and faster in my cage, all the while hanging on, but fighting gravitational pulls in all imaginable directions, but still straining to witness the incredible rescue that was taking place three stories below---
All I remember is that my hair got caught in one of the hinges on the door, and as I was craning my neck to see below and look for the release lever, the Slam!-O-Matic made a final tremendous lurch into high gear, and 'WHHOOSH', my head was suddenly wedged between the bars, which were now pushed past my ears and getting very painful...I must have been screaming at this point, because people on the ground were looking up and pointing and a couple of them made quick-ducking maneuvers that I guessed were in response to the woman's cigarette flying through the crowd along with all that cotton candy.
I couldn't hear anything they were saying down there, and I began to feel faint from all the whooshing of the ride. Then as it made one more violent brush along the ground, and I was only inches from the fray on the ground amidst the cow pies and fringe and stilettos and cigarettes, my vision cleared momentarily and I saw on the ground beneath the crowd, two trampled-looking halves of caramel-coated pretzel! But as the carriage yanked me up and away again, I noticed that the pretzels were bleeding. And so was my head! Oh my god.
MY EARS!!!!
Yes, yes... No, noo!!!!!
No wonder I couldn't hear anything! And no wonder my head was no longer stuck between the bars as I clanged around the metal cage at 80 mph---my ears had been shorn off between the bars!
Well, not much else to tell, except that I obviously lived and got home and all that; but my ears were just too beaten and crumpled to be of any further use. I am on the organ waiting list for external ears, but it's not looking good.
So anyway, that's why I haven't called. I can't! I have no ears!
Hope all is well with you,
Love,
Jen
Posted by wayne at 12:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
