Welcome one and all to our new add-on-story blog! Here's our first:
The other day, while driving around town, I noticed there was a sale at my favorite store.
The other day, while driving around town, I noticed there was a sale at my favorite store.
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I know I usually don't go into the day old bread store, on any day but Wednesday's...how can I resist? I pulled the El cameno over on the shoulder, and put on my hazzard lights.....
...Dolly Madison here I come. The cowbell on the glass door sounded my arrival. I was the only one in the store except for...
a mullet-sporting cowboy, his missing link wife and a passel of uncombed, nasty-looking brats. The clerk eyed them suspiciously as they ran through the store, exclaiming over such delights as day-old fruit pies, and finally told them...
..."You break it, you buy it." The unkempt varmits seemed puzzled over that for a moment, but then delighted in discovering a dozen ways to dismantle a dusted donut. Just then the cowbell dinged again and in walked...
(p.s. I know I digress, and I do hope I'm not intruding, but I had so much fun on your last add-on story I have to say I am THRILLED about this new blog. [I was starting to tire of blogging, and this is just what I needed.] I will try to keep my predilection for innuendo to a minimum. I'll behave myself. I promise!)
(OK, you're a better woman than I am. Innuendo makes me laugh.)
(I only promised to try. Although I should also alert you to the fact that I'm not very adept at avoiding alliteration, either.)
(promise not to use the word predilection again until I look it up in the dictionary?)
...Just then the cowbell dinged again and in walked...
Rex.
(I'm sorry, but if there's an El Camino in this story, there's gotta be a guy named Rex, and he'd better be cool.)
It was Cool Rex from Coolsville. I'd seen him around before. He always wore head-to-toe black leather and a really poofy Elvis pompadour wig. "Hey, babe," he said to the clerk. It was obvious to me and everyone else that the clerk was male, but since Rex was too cool to wear his glasses, he often made this mistake. I watched in horror as the clerk, jaw tightly clenched, reached under the counter, grabbed his favorite bread-cutting knife, and...
cut open a package of stale English muffins.
(my maiden name is Rex, but I don't hail from Coolsville, no siree.)
The clerk thought to himself, "Wow! Those anger management courses really work!" He deftly sliced the English muffins. He did not mind that they were stale because everyone knows English muffins are never not stale.
"A round of muffins on the house!" he cried, in a move reminiscent of his bartender days at "Lame Horse Saloon" across the street. He even broke out his best bottle of gooseberry jam and slathered it on thick for me, Rex and the unkempt cowboy and his family.
"Suddenly, I . . .
...realized I'd left my El Camino running, parked on the shoulder of I-5. Horfing down the last delicious bit of gooseberry jam-covered English muffin, I flew out the cowbell-dinging door with Rex flying right behind me. "Wait!" he yelled as coolly as he could. "You forgot your..."
"Is that what you're calling yourself these days, Rex?" I laughed, as I ran to my car. I began to wonder if he'd quit taking his medication.
Rex was also too cool to take his medication, so every so often he had "episodes", as he liked to call them. The local cops liked to call them "bloodthirsty rampages" but then, they're not psychiatrists, are they. What do you expect from an Elvis-fixated guy walking around half-blind? Helping little old ladies across the street?
But I digress... Rex laughed off my comment and answered...
"Wait! Mom! I'm not kidding this time. I hired a private detective to find my birth mother and he led me straight to you..."
You can imagine this news came as a bit of a shock to me. For one, I had always thought of myself as being much too young and much too hip to have given birth to a near-sighted aging Elvis-wannabe. And I'd never even realized Rex was part Philipino.
But more importantly, I didn't recall ever having given birth before.
Eventually it came to me...
...that time, awhile back. I was working at a carnival. I sold funnel cakes and dream catchers. It was a dark time. A fuzzy time. I don't like to thing about it very much. He was a carnie like me. He had a booth selling...
... bonsai trees and water features, I could resist his accent. He sounded just like Mr. Arnold from Happy Days and before I knew it we were in his trailer....
...and I was waxing his floor. "Wax on! Wax off!" he would shout in that darling Filipino accent. I figured I would get paid for my services, and since my funnel cake/dream catcher venture wasn't going too well, the extra money would come in handy. It did strike me as funny that a Filipino carnie would be such a neat freak, but I went ahead and did as he said. But then, once his old, gummed-up, beer-stained floor was sparkling and slippery, instead of handing me a nice wad of cash, he said...
"I hope you accept fly encrusted chopsticks as payment for your cleaning services. I'll trim your bush too, if you want. I can cut and tame it into any kind of wild animal your little mind can dream up." Now, this sentence was fraught with innuendo, but she thought of how much she'd always desired to own a little tabletop topiary sculpted in the form of a baboon with a giant red berry placed in the rear for maximum baboon butt effect. Excitedly, she turned to him to relay her inner bush fantasies when she saw with horror that....
He had a piece of broccoli stuck between his front teeth.
"How long has THAT been there?" I wondered. Alas, too late, I realized it was a distraction technique. Before I knew it, he hit me over the head with...
a foam bat.
"Stop that!" I said with a hiss. Perhaps it came out a little stronger than I had meant, after all, here was Rex, a reminder of my dark times, the Filipino carnie son I never knew. Here he was, standing right in front of me, broccoli stuck between his teeth, the whole leather-Elvis look, foam bat on one hand, a popsicle on the other.
I didn't what this part of my past to be part of who I was today, the me memories of the uneaten funnel cakes 9the flies that then had made their home inside of fake chocolate concoction), the ruined dream catchers, the ones my cat “Fpido” had played and destroyed while I soaked my feet in vinegar, the money that had to be refunded...out of all the day-old bread stores in the city, why did I have to pick this one.
"Rex, I have to go, please, forget me, forget us, I was never your mother, I never even liked your Bonsai tree"
"You lie" Rex answered, "and no, I won't forget you, I...wait, is that your El Camino? I love El Caminos!"
This gave me a great idea, “Say Rex, I’ll make you a deal…
...I'll tie one end of a rope around your waist, and the other end around the front bumper of the El Camino, and we'll put you at the top of a hill and put the El Camino in neutral. You start running, and if you make it down the hill alive, you're welcome to keep it."
Watching the gears go around in his head was highly entertaining for a few minutes, but finally he caught on. "Hey," he said angrily, "I may be the illegitimate son of two carnies, one Filipino, but that doesn't mean..."
...I'm stupid!"
Just then an eagle flew down from out of nowhere and grabbed Rex's Elvis pompadour wig in its talons. With lightening-fast reflexes (honed on his twin six-shooters) Rex reached right back up and grabbed the eagle's feet. Neither man nor beast were about to relinquish their prize. The mighty eagle carried Rex and the wanna-be hairpiece up into the cumulus clouds, never to be seen again.
Heaving a sigh of relief, I . . .
...decided I needed to start a new life with a new name. Yes, I need a name. A good name, for my new good life, free of carnivals and sons I never knew and didn't remember having and Philipinos. Well, maybe just the bad Philipinos. I'm sure there are some good ones out there.
Where was I? Yes, a name. What am I going to call myself?
There were so many options. Ivana Tinkle... Amanda Huginkiss... Ima Manwatcher... Hugh Jass... Oh, wait, that's a guy's name. Well, whatever. I finally went with...
a payne....yes, I think I will go with a payne...I just like the way it sounds. I also think I should sell my El Camino to my friend So Dak...she has always wanted it...maybe I will just give it to her.
Yeah, I think I will. I will do just that. I'll give So Dak my El Camino!
Epilogue: a payne was good on her word. She did give So Dak her El Camino and watched as she drove off into the sunset. Then she hopped on the next Greyhound and blew that dusty one-day-old break shop town good-bye.
(Hey look--there's room for a sequel!)
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