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Coronas and salsa
Monday, May 27 2002
setting: Hogwaller, Charlottesville, VirginiaThis morning I had my second bad hangover in a row. Some might consider me reckless with my body and, on occasion, flamboyantly decadent, but I believe that this weekend was the first time I ever experienced two hangover mornings in a row.
It was the sort of day where all you want to do is lie around and not be expected to do anything. Jessika spread out a sheet in the shade of a babydoll tree in the backyard and she, Peggy, and I lay on it and stared off into the easiest-to-focus-upon middle distance and talked about things that had happened last night. Not many people have babydoll trees growing in their backyard, but then again, not many people work as a recycling technician at a place where people dump the refuse of their children's childhoods. As we lay there, Abu's childhood was taking place two yards over in Dominique and Savannah's little plastic kiddy pool while Zach and Holly served as lifeguards. Peggy was taking advantage of the ad hoc childcare while it lasted.
Meanwhile Abu was astounding us by the speed with which he was assimilating and making fluent conversational use of Ebonics. One has to envy children for the speed with which they master new language skills.
While I read Ghost World and other Dan Clowes comics, Peggy and the others disappeared somewhere for a several hours and Jessika did some tomato dumpster diving from her favorite produce store. When Jessika returned, she announced that she was making salsa with the bounty. So I helped out with the chopping and stuff and later made a run to the nearest store for Coronas when Jessika said she wanted one.
There's no store really all that close to her house, so Jessika let me take her scooter. As small-town transportation methods go, the scooter is pretty hard to beat. It uses almost no gasoline, has a cruising speed of more than thirty miles per hour, and if it's below a certain horsepower (or, in many cases, if it appears to be below a certain horsepower), a scooter can be driven without a license. When one considers all the tiresome fuss made about "It" or "Ginger," whoever invented the humble scooter should have his face carved in Mount Rushmore. Or, at the very least, Mount Hogwaller, if there is such a thing. Indeed, that part of Belmont known as Hogwaller is experiencing something of a scooter renaissance. The buzz of one-cylinder engines and the carefree flapping of mullets have, I dare say, come to embody the place. There's even a local mechanical genius to whom everyone turns when their scooters need mending, and he lives in the trailerpark at the end of Jessika's street. His name is Bubba Brown (pronounced "B-B-Brown"), though Jessika has been told she can no longer come knocking when she's in need of scooter wisdom. Bubba Brown's wife "might get the wrong impression."
In terms of tranquil, undemanding life pleasures, there are few things that can compete with the salsa and Coronas hangover remedy. That salsa was particularly good - mostly I think because of all the garlic it contained, but it also contained secret ingredients that Jessika added while I was out getting the Coronas. Mind you, Jessika had no desire to keep the ingredients added during my absence a secret, but I acted as though they were and have committed myself to forgetting the things she foolishly divulged.
Adding to the undemanding peacefulness of the salsa and Coronas hangover remedy was the awkward adolescence of a violent thunderstorm, a spectacle we observed for a time from the steps of the front porch. While we were sitting there a single pebble rained down from the heavens. We tried to find it in the grass, hoping it was a meteorite or a stray bullet, but it was lost. While we sat there, an oldish man with no shirt and filthy pants walked past without a stroke of destination in his stride. "That's Mr. Stinkypants," Jessika said, then she gave me the history of his name. It seems Daryl had once stood behind him in line at the convenience store and had noted that the guy reeked of feces.At around five o'clock, Peggy and Abu were ready to drive back to Philadelphia, so I caught a ride with them as far as my parents' place near Staunton. My head was empty from a weekend of relentless decadence and I just sat there unspeaking for most of the ride, listening to Duran Duran wafting quietly from the speakers. Near the I-81/I-64 interchange, we encountered a terrible downpour and were forced to pull over and wait for it to ease up.A horse had indeed died during my absence. It lay on its side in the goat pasture, a huge bloated chestnut-colored corpse. I didn't look at it carefully; a single glance was horrible enough. Death is a shocking process, and the bigger the thing that dies, the more shocking it is. In a way, then, a horse's corpse is even more shocking than a human's.
Adding to the morbid ambiance of my parents' farm was the continued death rattle of the computer I'd been working so hard to make reliable. During my absence, it had died yet again. It seems that it was inherently flawed - probably in the motherboard, but it's difficult to say for sure. Whatever the problem was, it tended to gradually scramble and corrupt data on the hard drive until eventually the system was too unstable to start. In a state approaching despair, I abandoned all hope. My life was too valuable to continue struggling with such unreliable hardware. I told my mother that we needed to go get her a new computer, an idea that pleased her even more than it did me. Later I learned that the horse who had died was Willow, not Hoagie's new horse Rica. Out of nowhere, Willow had come down with a particularly nasty form of colic and there was nothing that could be done to save her. Colic is an especially painful death, and though a vet was called to put her out of her misery, she was dead by the time the vet arrived.
Willow was actually born on the property 20 years ago, on Mother's Day in 1982. Her mother, a horse named Candy (whom my mother subsequently sold), had been covertly pregnant during Willow's entire term. The pregnancy itself was unplanned, the result of a pony stallion's breaking loose from Old Mrs. Wright's farm a quarter mile away. Interestingly, though Willow's father was a mere pony and her mother an average-sized horse, Willow herself was freakishly large, nearly the size of draft horse. Willow's habit of pawing fences into oblivion did not endear her to my father, who referred to her as the "sausage horse" throughout her twenty year life.In the evening I called Gretchen to see how she was doing and was alarmed to learn that she thinks she has mononucleosis, you know, the kissing disease. She said she had been sick pretty much the whole time I've been gone and now can barely muster the strength necessary to walk Sally. At first she'd thought it was the flu or something manageable like that, but the enduring nature of her condition gave her friend Debra the idea that it was probably mono. I felt really bad for Gretchen and offered to return from Virginia earlier than planned once I got Hoagie's computer working reliably.
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