October 28, 2004
bellyrub's big adventure
Bored!
I’m boring myself once again. Today I have decided to take many things that have occurred in real life and to mash them up with things that probably won’t happen ever. Like the Red Sox winning some fancy ball game.
Today’s story doesn’t yet have a title, as I haven’t yet written the story.
Here ‘tis:
Seven weeks ago, when skies were still sunny and the words “Indian Summer” fluttered on people’s lips like a promise, my brother BellyRub called me with a question. The answer to this question was important to his future at his work, my future as a member of the Parker clan, and to a terrifying variable that I am not at liberty to disclose.
“Dotty.” He said that with desperation, yet a harmonic note or two praising my smarts. “Oh, wow. There I was, down with Junior doing some work junk and laughing and all of a sudden I slipped and said, ‘whoopst’ just like Dr.Dad does. Next thing I know I’ve broken a $300,000 piece of equipment. I also damaged the fork truck that we were playing on when I slipped and said, ‘whoopst’.”
“BellyRub, you’ve said that stuff happens all the time. You told me when you were first working there and you were learning to drive the forklift that you crashed now and then. You told me that you put dings in a bunch of expensive stuff.”
I could hear him sobbing quietly on the other end of the phone. A small squirrel was comforting him. (They have arboreal mammalian creatures at his company. They found that having a possum family around really helped calm nerves during the dot com crisis. They’ve moved to squirrels though. They’re cuter.)
Suddenly I heard, “You little bastard!” and a “Sqeeeeeeee” sound. BellyRub had been bitten by the squirrel and then he had offended it with his naughty language.
After he had calmed down and had a cigarette and tied his shoes and gotten another cup of coffee, he got back on the phone (I’d been on hold this entire time.) and said, “Dotty.”
I was getting annoyed. The sounds of his squirrel had bothered my dogs. (And when my dogs are bothered then Sprocket’s monkey gets bothered. Then Spring’s invisible army of mutants gets bothered.)
So I said, “Yeah.”
“Yeah, I, kind of pierced the compressor unit that was specially ordered by NASA, the CIA, Monsanto, Exxon/Mobil, and Genghis Khan. It was going to be sent to a secret lab in EPCOT center at Disney World. Now it isn’t even fit for Euro Disney.”
“That does suck.”
“Yeah, and I had one of Erotica’s lipsticks in my shirt pocket from when we went out last week and I was drinking this nuts and berries smoothie that they had free samples of and then I was laughing and I slipped and the lipstick got all over my face and I dropped my smoothie. And I was laughing and then I pierced the compressor.”
“So what did you boss say?”
“That’s the thing. He didn’t say anything. Not right then. I totally didn’t understand. But then Genghis Khan, Jane Goodall, and Malcolm Forbes walked in along with George H. W. Bush. Right behind the boss. He saw me there with the look that combines Whoa and Oops, which translates into ‘Whoopst.”
“And then what?”
“I saw myself in a reflection in the glass and I almost died.”
“Were you hurt?”
“No way. It was hysterical.”
“So why are you calling so panicked?”
“I’ll get to it, but listen, I looked in the mirror and Isaw that I'd had Erotica’s lipstick on my hand so that when I wiped my mouth, I got her lipstick on my lips. And it wasn’t applied real well.”
“I bet you looked HOT!”
“Yes. No, wait. And remember that smoothie? I said it was nuts and berries, right? Well, it was blended, but not completely, and it had an odd color. And it was spilled all over me.”
“Gross.”
“Dotty, I looked like I had yakked all over myself and as if I were a chick leaving a fraternity house very early in the morning. Not pretty.”
“This sucks, BellyRub.”
“But there’s still more! Junior and I had been laughing before but when I crashed into that compressor we started laughing in that nervous way. You know, that nervous way?”
“Yeah, like Beavis and Butthead on crack?”
“Yeah. So Junior and I are laughing like that and I’m pawing at the windshield and we’re making monkey noises and had just gotten into a rip-roaring session of ‘cheee cheee!’ and a whole bunch of uuuh uuuuh oooo ooo.”
I snickered.
“Shut up!” BellyRub kind of laughed. “So there I am, acting like a stupid monkey, looking like a cross dressing man with a GI problem and then, remember the arboreal mammals? Well those little bastards came swinging on in once they heard my monkey calls.”
“You've got monkeys, too? I wanted to practice my calls. I wish I had been there.”
“No, Dotty, you don’t. When Genghis came in the room, the monkeys started playing that little game they play when they’re angry.”
“They started throwing shit?”
BellyRub sighed and laughed. “You got it.”
“So you’re there with barf on your suit, lipstick on your own lips, a forklift…”
“Oh yeah, it was still running. And in gear. Forgot to tell you that.”
“A forklift that is STILL trying to destroy this piece of equipment, you and Junior hanging on the fork lift and banging on the windows while making monkey sounds, real monkeys coming in to play with you, and then the big guys come in and that's when the monkeys start flinging their poo around. That’s it?”
”No! Then Jane Goodall was there and she told the monkeys to stop throwing shit, but she said it in monkey language like, ‘Oowe kehkaka guh’. And they started to stop. Mostly because they ran out of shit. But it turns out that Jane Goodall’s old and instead of saying, ‘Stop throwing your shit,’ she said, ‘Don’t lose your good drugs.’ She didn’t have her dentures in securely. She was slurring.”
“I suppose all hell broke loose after that.”
“Well, yeah! Monkeys love sniffing compressor vapor. They were alerted to the fact that there was a drug in the air and they used their arboreal mammal sense of small to plaster themselves on the two tines of the fork truck. The formed a line. One would suck down enough to make him fall off and the next guy would get a snoot full.”
“BellyRub, you are totally making this up.”
“You think I could make up this stuff?”
“No, I suppose not. But why did you call me sounding upset? It sounds like everything’s crazy. It can’t be just your fault, even though it might be mostly your fault.”
“Dotty, they want me to do this every time guests come. You know how I try to make everything into a joke, right? Well, I told the guests that it was a joke we play. (George H. W. Bush said he hadn’t seen such monkey shines since his days at Yale. He was laughing that heh heh laugh that the Really Rotten dog does.) I said that the monkeys don’t always chuck crap at people…but I lied flat out. There are never any people to chuck at. My boss obviously knows I lied. And he doesn’t care. He thinks people will call him up to place big orders just so they can see the floor show.”
“So you get to keep your job?”
“Yeah, with a huge raise and a nice big bonus.”
“I still don’t know why you sounded upset, though.”
“I don’t know if I can do it again. I can get more lipstick, but I need your help.”
“If I get a cut of your bonus, I’ll help you out.”
“Dotty, how do you make a smoothie?”
