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Smoking 60 - The Buick |
| Written by L.kenyon | |
| Friday, 02 March 2007 | |
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The Buick
Once, when I was mowing the lawn at my parent’s house - an attempt to get on my father’s good graces and to try and make up for moving out too early and filling their lives with stress and turmoil - Pinky and Bung pulled up into the driveway in my grandfather’s pickup. I shut the mower off and walked over to the driver’s side as the window came down. I was known to those old dirty codgers as ‘The Boy’. Sometimes I’d hear their phone conversations from my back bedroom. “What’s The Boy up to?” Bung would ask. “Being a pain in my ******* touch hole,” my grandfather would say, and so on. Bung leaned over my grandfather in the truck and smiled at me. “Is everything Pink boy?” he asked. I didn’t know what that meant, and I still don’t. I shrugged. So he asked me again, “Is everything Pink?” My grandfather kept his best poker face but I detected a smirk hidden behind that deviant sparkle in his eyes. Bung repeated the same odd question and then went on, “When are you going to get married so you can have the eggs and the cheese and the milk and the eggs?” I smiled, backed away, and finished the lawn, leaving them to weirdly amuse themselves in the cab of the pickup. Another time, when I was with a friend at my grandfather’s house, again smoking pot and playing music, there came a rapping on the front door. It was Bung. He hobbled into the hall and looked around. His arthritis was near crippling even then, his hands knotted around a cane, his joints twisted and unusually enlarged like the crooked roots of an old oak tree. I could see that my friend Jeremy – a true sweetheart really – was studying the old man with awe and a kind of childish curiosity. “Where’s Frankenstein?” Bung asked. I assumed he meant Gramp. “He’s out.” I said. Bung began the painful work of turning himself back towards the door and then he stopped and nodded to us. “You tell Frankenstein, I said I was sorry about the nuts.” Jeremy and I looked at him, unsure if we should smile, or start backing away. Bung pointed to the sides of his neck and tapped. He repeated, “The nuts.” I understood then that he’d meant the little bolts on the side of the monster’s neck. But it still didn’t make any sense. Before he got himself out the door onto the porch, he turned to us again. “That’s right,” he said. “You tell old Frankie I said I was sorry . . . kicked him right in the old ******* balls I did.” And then he was gone. A few years later at Gramp’s funeral, Bung stood on the steps of the parlor for a much needed rest before he went on in to say goodbye one last time. Jeremy walked up then, and Bung recognized him from that day in the hall all those years before. Jeremy said hello, and Bung jutted a finger towards the door. “You going in to see the stiff?” he asked. Pinky would have said the same if it had been him standing there. Later that day as they lowered the casket into the ground, Bung sat with my mother and the other three girls of my Grandfather’s legacy at the closet side to the dug grave. I’ll never forget the hurt and sadness I saw on their faces, especially his. But, as I started to tell you, it was an afternoon many years before that cold day on the grassy hill, and my grandfather was still alive, full of nails and grit . . . . . . Derek was on the verge of passing out. It wouldn’t be long before he fainted or let loose a cloud of white that could only be dope smoke. But as Pinky turned from the door to go and limp off to the television or a shouting match over the phone with one of his gypsy cohorts, I said, “Come on Gramp, I’ve heard stories about you and Bung smoking pot in the back of a Buick.” My grandfather turned to look at us dead seriously. “Why you louse,” he shouted and then smiled wryly. “I never owned any ******* Buick.” Copyright 2007 L.kenyon {moscomment} |
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 09 March 2007 ) |
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