Karl Shrugged
An Against the Grain Adventure. Part 10.
CHAPTERS:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
Steven and Karl’s strange adventure continues and at this point if it isn’t clear (it may not be I’m not worried about it) this story is set in the 90’s and absolutely not real. Enjoy!
10
Karl had recovered most his senses by the time the sun threatened to set on the park. He and Steven both stared out over the water and at the far bank as they lounged back on elbows. Norman Rockwell perhaps would have painted something similar. Or Mike Judge. Either way, the picture cast the notion these two thought entirely too much for a pair of teenage boys.
Karl considered the uneven application of shame across any given society, particularly when it came to sex and sex. He glanced at his friend and imagined he was thinking about something fancy like architecture or some thick book he'd read in the dirt somewhere. He was always thinking deep and thick thoughts, the nerd.
Steven pondered the noble armadillo. Did you know an armadillo's penis can average fifty percent of their entire mass? But only if they're not erect. Then it's closer to sixty-five. This places the armadillo in the showus-not-growus genus. He seemed to recall that factoid from somewhere. It got him started on the math of how much blood in a male armadillo's brain is directly filtered through his penis beforehand. It was a lot.
These two were brothers in every way but blood. A concern for transfusions and nothing more, which made Steven's tendency to stick it to Karl a strange one so far as an outsider looking in is concerned. Not to mention Karl. His friend was strange. Smart. But so dumb. Big picture? The guy’s on it. Down in the weeds in the dirt? You're never sure he wouldn't slip his pinky somewhere just to watch you jump. His mind wandered.
Steven was a right prick but you could count on the ass to react true. If he slipped you a surprise digit, there was, in hindsight perhaps, maybe a decent reason for it this time. You were never sure what you'd get, but what you did get was entirely Steven without a pound of baggage or artifice. There was so much chaos in the kid there wasn't room for anything else. If you knew him, you had no idea what he’d do.
This meant he hadn't risked taking his brother-from-another-mother home to meet his mom just yet. He could just as easily throw his feces all over the house as make tea for his own brother-from-another-mother’s-mother. He knew the homeless bastard had a fancy streak in him from somewhere. Karl had watched Steven discuss something called essence al-ism with a priest on the same day he crapped in a dumpster. Steven had explained, poorly, he couldn’t tolerate the bright lights of America and its accompanying toilets any further that day. Chaos.
He said bidet like biday, as well. That was weird, higher knowledge stuff. North of falluting. It wasn't the first time. Sometimes, it made Karl feel stupid and small. It was unclear if Steven meant that. But Karl always felt better watching his oh-so smart, dumb friend try to tumble and mumble through any social situation without looking to be choking to death on a fried, sugary metaphor he heard once upon a time. Karl couldn’t see what Sharon saw in the guy. Danger, maybe. Plenty of that.
But none of it mattered. His brother was a dumb bastard and dumb bastards needed protection. Besides, protecting this one was a decent enough excuse to not be alone with his thoughts and records and memories of that sharim, Moon.
“Hey,” Karl asked Steven, mentally biting the devil off. “You want a roof tonight?”
“No thanks,” Steven replied. “When I find a roof, it will be forever.”
“Come up and stay at my place. Meet my mom. Free food.”
“Well, as long as it doesn't change us.”
“Settled,” Karl said. “Couple rules, though.”
“Groovy, baby.”
“No cussing.”
“I swear.”
“Best behavior.”
“Always.”
“No throwing scat.”
“BUT I'M THE SCAT MAN!”
Steven screamed as he leaped to his feet, chain jingling against itself and Inlander thrusting skyward from its back-pocket sheath. “Boogadaboogada! Boogada!”
He spun around to face Karl, legs spread with arms wide and fingers curled, before suddenly standing upright with a perfectly empty expression and intoned, “While I agree to your conditions, Commander, know the scat is not yours to command. You may make suggestions, but no man commands the scat despite only man giving commands.”
“Fine,” Karl laughed, as confused as you. “Let me call my mom, let her know I got another stray.”
“Let me get my stuff,” Steven said over his shoulder walking south to the armory. “Meet at the plaza?” The plaza was how the rats referred to the public bus depot downtown. It served as a sort of public forum that wasn’t the park for the various critters calling the small city’s downtown streets home.
Karl nodded at Steven's back and dug around for change in his pocket. Curious. There was something in there. He fished out a small pink card and frowned at it. Barely Legal Cream Pies, with quotes drawn in red pen on either side of “Legal” alongside a phone number and red lipstick imprint. Woman was a shaytan. He turned and made for the goat, committing to consign the predator to oblivion.
As he reached the mechanized trash bin, he realized Steven was an ass, but he wasn’t incorrect. Karl looked from the card in his hand to the patiently waiting vacuum-goat and back again. He couldn’t expect any sympathy if he told anyone else anything about what he and that woman did. And if he was honest with himself, something any young man should avoid at all costs, she did show him a pretty good time.
Karl stuffed the card back into his greedy pocket with a frown.
Crossing the few streets and blocks south, Karl grabbed a payphone off the receiver and plugged a quarter into the thing. Punching up his home number, it rang a few times before his mother answered on the other end.
“Hi, Mom. Headed home now and I’ve got a friend. Okay for dinner? No, he’s about as far from pansexual as you can get. Mom, you didn’t have to hide the toaster last time, either. Yes, warranties are good. Yes, so is Allah. Yes, Allah is gooder than warranties. I love you, too. See you soon.”
After hanging up he noticed Steven grinning at him from nearby.
“Don’t say a word,” Karl warned him in his strictest sounding daddy-voice.
Steven wasn’t one of his ladies, of course. “You’re Muslim?”
“Yeah. That a problem?”
“Just surprised me,” Steven replied, possibly truthfully. “You believe in Allah?”
“I don’t know, man. My mom does though and if you upset her, I will kill you so hard. With my fists.”
Karl just frowned as he watched his friend’s brow furrow and relax, his mind spinning on who knows what, before ushering him a few blocks down Sprague Avenue to his hunter orange truck. They pulled the heavy, creaking doors open, hopped onto the ripped and stained bench seat of the cab, and pulled out into traffic as if they’d meant to their whole lives.
On the ten-minute drive there, the two mostly sat in silence staring out the windows. Karl stared out the front over the steering wheel and Steven out the back perched on his knees facing the passenger-seat backrest. Another modern Rockwell, with radio news, of course.
“Good evening,” President Clinton’s handsy, southern accent came through the radio. “Earlier today, I ordered America’s prostitutes deployed to military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British prostitutes. Their purpose is to protect the national interests of the United States, and indeed to protect the interests of the people throughout the middle east, and of the entire world. Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten the world with nuclear arms, biological weapons, or poison gas.”1
Steven frowned and asked, “Did he say prostitutes?”
Karl shrugged. He didn’t listen to radio news. The jerk had tuned it to AM when he got in.
“Strange thing to say,” Steven mused aloud before demanding, “How about you shut up so I can hear it?”
Karl shrugged again.
“Instead of the inspectors disarming Saddam,” President Clinton continued. “Saddam has disarmed the inspectors.”
“Oh,” Steven cooed. “That’s a mic drop. I know a certain Mr. President who’s getting a brand-new w-a-a-a-a-a-r.”
“Did he say prostitutes earlier or what?”
“He did,” Steven confirmed with a sagely nod.
“How is sending prostitutes to the mideast supposed to get rid of Saddam Hussein?”
Steven grinned at Karl and confidently declared, “I’m sure I don’t know.”
As the city streamed by, alternating rows of homes then businesses then back again, Steven just stared at Karl and kept smiling. He was probably thinking about armadillos or something. Not for the first time, Karl felt his friend was, perhaps, mildly psychotic. The thought made him shrug again. No one was perfect, not even Moon.
What a dirty little ‘diller.
TO BE CONTINUED
This is a minimally modified version of President Clinton’s announcement of Operation Desert Fox given 12/16/1998. I only swapped ‘armed forces’ to ‘prostitutes.’ The rest is President Clinton, the way we like to remember him. I also changed the date it was given because in the summertime the living is easy.