by JRM

July 31, 2006

I just opened a beer with a muppet.  For some reason this sentence is funnier to me than anything I've read for a long time.  I'm laughing my balls off as I type this.  And the fact is, it really happened. Without looking up, I reached over and grabbed the beer.  It's so hot here in KC that an incredible amount of condensation had gathered on the bottle.  When I picked the bottle up, my hand became too wet to turn the cap.  

I looked around for something made out of a material suitable for forcing the cap off of the nice cold beer.  As nothing really jumped out at me (and no way in hell was I going to stand up and walk all the way to the kitchen) I began to look harder.  It was then that I saw poor Elmo.  He was lying face down on the floor with his arms and legs contorted at funny angles, like some expired junkie waiting for the cop that keeps the chalk in his trunk.  To add insult to injury, a toy vacuum had been slammed across the victim's torso.  Even if Elmo is my least favorite muppet, he didn't deserve this fate.  

I grabbed the back of his head and pulled.  Elmo's fuzzy limp body clumsily slid out from under the vacuum, causing its weight to transfer to the hardwood floor with a pop.  I looked long and hard at Elmo.  Finally, I shrugged my shoulders, grabbed Elmo by the small of his back and inserted the beer bottle into his muppet ass.  With a simple and quick jerk, my beer was freed from its tyrannous glass captor.  I said, "Thanks Elmo," and casually chucked the corpse of my new ally back onto the floor. At least he was on top of the vacuum this time.  I just opened a beer with a muppet.

One time when I was 15, my parents let me spend the night at a friend's house.  Of course, they didn't know that the kid's parents were out of town at the time.  We hung out for a while and played guitar and smoked cigarettes and pretended to be cool.  When that got old, my buddy decided that we would go and see his girlfriend who had recently moved from Ankeny to Waukee (two suburbs of Des Moines that were relatively close to one another, yet worlds apart for a couple of dorks without driver's licenses).  We phoned a friend who had just turned 16 and made him ride his bike out to my buddy's house so that he could drive his parents' van to our desired destination.

On the way there, we were total rebels...we smoked cigarettes, talked about sex and swore loudly with a complete and total disregard for the rules.  We were a trio of James Deans...except we were ugly...and I doubt I really knew who James Dean was at the time.  Anyway, we finally got to this girl's house.  It wasn't really in Waukee, it was actually in a rural area outside of Waukee.  

There's probably a shopping mall there now, but at the time the area was mostly cornfields and a Coca-Cola bottling plant. We killed the lights and slowly rolled the van to the end of her driveway. We didn't want to wake her step-dad because according to her, the guy was a dick.  In fact, his name was Dick. I hope he doesn't hunt me down and kill me, but I have to tell you his real name because it's just too funny not to.  The man's name was Dick Comer.  

When I first heard his name, I felt really sorry for the guy - he must have gotten the ever-loving shit kicked out of him every single day of his miserable adolescence.  Then I heard that he had a tattoo on his bicep...of his name.  That's right...the man's upper arm said Dick Comer.  Maybe he had a fear of amnesia or something.  Perhaps he was so often confused that he had to check every morning to see if the name on his underpants matched the name on his arm.  I decided I would save my pity for someone who didn't have their own name tattooed on their person.

It was decided that my friend and I would retrieve the girl and our driver would wait with the lights off and the engine running at the end of the driveway.  We got out of the van and slowly crept toward the house.  I lagged behind a bit, listening to make sure that the coast was still clear.  My friend made it to the house and tapped on the girl's window a couple of times.  Before she could answer, we heard a large engine fire up.  My buddy retreated back to where I was standing and we both instinctively dropped to the ground.  Aside from the rumbling idle of the engine, the night was pretty peaceful.  There was a cool bite in the air and the fact that we were far away from the city gave a view of the stars that will likely stay with me forever.

"We should go camping," I thought to myself.  It would be very difficult for me to believe that the phrases, "We should go camping." and "HOLY FUCK PLEASE JESUS DON'T LET ME DIE!!!" have ever been pondered back-to-back by anyone other than me.

The rumble of the unknown engine grew closer and closer until it was almost upon us.  At about the same time that I had convinced myself that Dick Comer was just going out for beer, two things happened simultaneously...Dick Comer turned on the lights of his old conversion van and Dick Comer put the gas pedal to the floor.

"OH JESUS GOD FUCK PLEASE!!!" I yelled as I sprang to my feet and started running for my life.  I was amazed at how quickly the color returned to everything the moment that Dick Comer flipped on the lights.  I also remember thinking of how embarrassing it was going to be to die this way.  Run down by a conversion van from the early 80's piloted by a man named Dick Comer...just because my friend wanted to make out with a girl who was barely 15.  Weak.  Even if I did make it into heaven, I would never live it down.

My friend immediately jumped a barbed wire fence into the neighboring cornfield.  I would later find out that it tore his legs up pretty bad, but he didn't mind too much, considering he got to live and everything.  I was not as lucky - my friend veered right into the cornfield and I veered left into the wide open space that was his back yard.  I employed evasive maneuvers as best I could, but I was starting to realize that Dick Comer had more gas in the tank than I did and that my defeat was inevitable.  I was beginning to make peace with this fact when I noticed my savior in the form of a cylindrical propane tank out of the corner of my left eye.  I ran to it and crouched down.  Even Dick Comer wasn't dumb enough to slam into a propane tank...or was he?

The conversion van would have screeched to a halt had there been any pavement.  It kind of sounded like what I imagine John Kruk would sound like sliding into second base or something.  Dick Comer killed the engine and threw open the door.  As soon as I heard his boots hit the dirt I was off and running.  He hollered something about a shotgun and letting the dogs out.  I had gotten a second to rest and a new rush of adrenaline from the addition of propane fire to the list of potential ways that I might die on this particular evening.  I was off his property before he finished threatening me.

The rubber on my Bo Jackson model Nike cross-trainers made a slapping sound on the pavement as I crossed the street into a cornfield.  The van that had driven me this unfortunate scene was nowhere to be found.  I began to wonder if my friends had left me for dead.  There was nothing I could do except walk through the field, collecting small cuts from the leaves as I went and think about just how the fuck I was going to get out of there.

It was the middle of the night, a man named Dick Comer was trying to kill me, my friends had abandoned me and I had absolutely no way home.  I remember thinking two things:  First, this would all be better if it was my girlfriend - it was total bullshit that I was going to get killed and there was no chance of me getting any.  Second was the somewhat comforting thought that it couldn't get any worse.  I know it's a harmless cliché, but do yourself a favor and don't ever say that.  

The minute that I thought that dreaded thought, I heard a rustling in to corn about 100 feet from me. Someone or something was headed my direction.  The only things that I had been promised by this neighborhood was a dog and a shotgun, so I wasn't exactly excited about the possibilities.  I quickly decided that I could not outrun a dog and if it was a guy with a shotgun, the only thing running would do was give him a general direction to shoot in.  So I crouched down and held my breath as the rustling of cornstalks came right at me as though whatever it was had been given a map and a compass. I had no choice...I was going to have to confront whatever it was head on...

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