Pandemonium Season, Episode 6: Beyond the Sea (1994)

Note: I wrote this quite a while ago and was never really happy with it. In the interest of moving ahead, I am posting it now. Previous episodes are on the blog if you want to remind yourself of what is going on or catchup. Thanks for reading, Dan. 

The freezer was loaded with frozen dinners: meat loaf with mashed potatoes and carrots, chicken nuggets with French fries and green beans, turkey a la king, and cardboard pizzas. The fridge had two gallons of milk, a pack of deli meat, individual cheese slices, a jar of pickles, butter, and something in a Tupperware – the last remains of food brought over after the funeral two weeks earlier. Richie refused to open it because he was sure something was growing inside and even breathing it would send him into convulsions. Richie knew the cupboard had cans of spaghetti and ravioli, macaroni and cheese boxes, and peanut butter. A loaf of bread was on the counter next to a note from his father.

“Out of town for work for week. Be sure to eat.” Below was scribbled a number for a hotel. A Monday night in April, the house was otherwise empty, and Richie couldn’t fathom what to do next. So, he left. Retreating the sidewalk in front of the house and watching his home, as if he stared long enough, he’d uncover some secret. Perhaps, another family inhabited the space when they were gone. A happy family. With a living mother. A sober father, and a son who wasn’t neurotic.

His tics had increased since his mother died. The cleaning. Not just his skin, but the house, was compulsory. He wore gloves everywhere, including at this moment, outside in April. The night air was cool, but not cold, yet his hands were shoved in a pair of skiing gloves. Now there were the cracks in the sidewalk. He couldn’t’ step on those. School was a mental breakdown between each class, as he tip-toed from one tile to another. He supposed the teachers noticed. He knew by the looks from his classmates that they suspected he was cruising for a breakdown. At least out of respect for his grief, they were still leaving him alone.

The worst was the paranoia – he was certain he was being watched. Even alone on the sidewalk in their quiet neighborhood, he felt eyes on him. Studying his every move. Noting his comings and goings, and his impulses. He took nightly walks, but he couldn’t take more than a few steps without glancing over his shoulder, expecting to see a white van with tinted windows following behind. Something straight out of the X-Files. Dr. Bitch would be worried. His father had stopped paying for his counseling, but his grandmother had taken over the payments and his mother’s insistence that he continue with the therapy.

Richie walked the block, watching other families through their dining room windows. The full tables with warm meals, the happy parents, the content children. He was the watcher rather than the watched. Some of them waved, growing used to this lone boy roaming the neighborhood at dusk. He never waved back, instead increasing the pace of his steps and turning his attention completely to avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk.

He returned home after dark, and the phone rang as soon as his key slipped into the slot. Perhaps, his father was checking in to apologize for abandoning him for a week. The notion was so absurd, Richie was glad that even though he was alone that he hadn’t spoken it aloud. It was more likely that it was his grandmother. He rushed to the phone on the kitchen wall, not bothering to turn on any lights. The sound of a needle scratching across a record came from the other end of the receiver and then music with the lyrics: “It's far beyond a star. It's near beyond the moon. I know beyond a doubt. My heart will lead me there soon” style"

“I’ve been watching you,” Sarah Arndt’s voice greeted him. It was a calm, precise voice with no humor.

“Yeah, and?”

“Your lonely,” she said. Richie wasn’t sure how to respond, so he listened to her shallow breathing on the other end. “You know pain.”

“I sound like a hoot.”

“No joking,” she said. “Joking is for the weak, and if you were weak, you’d be broken by now.”

“Thank you, I guess.”

“Tell me something about your mother and nothing corny like that fruity pastor was saying at the funeral.”

“She loved Led Zeppelin, and her and my dad met at bar when she picked a bunch of Zeppelin songs in the jukebox.”

Sarah didn’t react to that, and it felt like he had uploaded data into a computer, and it was deciding if the information was valid. It was a dreadful silence, like he was standing with a blindfold and being forced to walk forward with no idea if there would be ground to touch once he took my first step. She was so quiet that he wondered if she had put the receiver down when she lost interest in him.

“I’m going to pick you up tomorrow night at seven,” she finally said.

“Where are we going?”

“Beyond the sea,” she said, but the reference was lost on him. When he didn’t respond, she continued.  “It’s never bothered you to get into a strange vehicle before and take off without knowing where you were going, right?”  She said, and he realized that she was referring to his infamous trip with Grandpa Ricky. Most of his classmates had forgotten about that enough that it was rarely mentioned, although it was never too far away in his mind. While Richie was thinking this over, the line clicked dead.

Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 5: Jailbreak (1991)

 

The walls of the kitchen were like a vise squeezing in on Maggie as she juggled a hot casserole pan and a barrage questions and comments winged at her from both directions. Richie was stuck on her medical issue, and RJ was trying to get the story on Richie’s suspension. And both were answering for her.

“He told the teacher what?”

“Will they cut your boob off?” 

“No, Christ, Richie.” 

“Get bent.” 

“Don’t say that to me, boy!”

“No, that’s what I said to the teacher.” 

“You both should take a break to eat something.” 

“Will all your hair fallout?” 

“Well, she doesn’t have much hair left.” 

“That’s true.” 

“Why the hell did you say that?”

“Well, it is true.” 

“No, why did you say that to your teacher?”

“Oh, that.” 

“He was washing his hands.” 

“Who?” 

“I was.” 

“When?” 

“When he should have been in class.”

“Do I have to go to your appointment? I can see the germs from here.” 

“Don’t start in on that shit!”

“That’s what got us in this situation to begin with.” 

“What?”

“You got a lump from the germs? I knew it!” Richie jumped from the table and went straight to the sink, poured a quarter of a bottle of dish soap on his small hands and turned the water on full blast. 

“Stop that,” Maggie shouted. “Washing your hands for twenty minutes is what got you in trouble, I didn’t get a lump from the germs.” 

“Christ!” RJ said. 

“Oh,” Bubbles were floating from the sink and into his hair. 

“I have had it with this shit,” RJ stood, grabbed his son by the elbow, and dragged him away from the sink.

“Hey, that hurts.” 

“RJ, stop that.”

“You are going to spend the next two weeks getting over this once and for all. We’ve spent thousands of dollars at the shrink and that hasn’t worked. Now, it’s my turn, I am going to break you of this washing business if I have to beat it out of you.” 

“RJ!” Maggie yelled, but her husband was lugging Richie from the kitchen and down the hallway to his bedroom. The boy was screaming, and her husband was listing all the things he was taking away. TV. Books. The record player. Candy. Soda. Anything that could be named, RJ was shouting it, not that Richie could possibly have heard him. Not that it mattered anyways, come five in the morning, RJ would be out of the house for twelve hours leaving Maggie to be the warden of this prison he was creating. Typical of him, set a bunch of rules that he couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to enforce, putting her in the position of dealing with her angry son or dealing with him when he came home to find most everything had returned to normal. 

RJ plopped Richie on his bed. 

“You’ll stay in here and think about what I just said.” 

“I hate you!” Richie’s face was beat red, his eyes filled with tears, and his hands were still drenched in water and soap. RJ slammed the bedroom door, behind it something heavy and hard hit it. 

Maggie eyed her husband, who was wearing a dirty t-shirt and blue jeans. His stomach pushed at the seams at the shirt. He was still basically fit, but the years and the beers were catching up with him. 

“Really.” 

“I’m done coddling him.” 

“You think taking everything away just a few hours after finding out his mother might have cancer was the right move?”

“Someone had to do something.” 

She wanted to slap him. That damn line: “Someone had to do something.” He had said the same thing to her the night they had met, seconds after he leaned in for a kiss. 

“What was that?” she had asked, flirting at the time with the sounds of Led Zeppelin roaring from the bar’s jukebox. 

“Well, someone had to do something,” RJ had said, grinned and kissed her again. 

That felt like a thousand years ago, and the charm of the line was completely lost on her now. She followed him back to the kitchen. She had met RJ Glenn when she was in college, and he was working construction on a bridge at the edge of campus. He had walked into a bar one Thursday night while she was filling the jukebox with quarters to play about two hours of Zeppelin. That was enough to win him. He was young, bronzed from working outside, and still had a hint of bad boy gleam in his eyes, that little gleam she’d learned later he’d inherited from his father, the real bad boy of the family. RJ and his father had never got along, and even though RJ was determined not to make the same mistakes as Ricky Dean Glenn, he was doing a grand job of finding all kinds of other mistakes to make. 

“You can’t just expect Richie to stop because you say so,” she said. 

“Why the hell not? I’m his father.” 

“Because he can’t control it no more than you can control having to go to the bathroom. It’s his compulsion.” 

“Oh, don’t get me that psychobabble, if we give him some tough love, he’ll change.” 

“No, he’ll get worse.” 

“Whatever.” 

“So, are you going to stay home and enforce all these rules for the next two weeks?”

RJ eyed her. Their arguments had verged on the precipice of violence for the last few weeks, both too proud to admit part of their anger was fear over her prognosis. Neither could admit that much like their son, their emotions compelled them to behave in certain ways, and this tension brought out the worst in both of them. 

“Fine, do whatever you want,” he said. “I’m going to the bar.” 

He stormed away.

“That’s just great, and who is that just like?” She went to the sink, finally turning off the water, and didn’t bother to listen to his reaction. She knew where to hit him where it hurt. Running had been Ricky Dean Glenn’s specialty, and any comparison to Ricky would just spur RJ’s anger. Maggie didn’t cry, she just put her hand to her heart and then felt a little lower to that alien being clinging to her body, the one that reminded her that when life felt like it was going completely to shit, there was always something worse just waiting around the corner. She squeezed it like a zit, but the damn thing wouldn’t pop. Maggie didn’t cry. She never cried. 

Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 4: Settin’ the Woods on Fire (1988)

Joe Elliot’s house was a two-story redbrick mansion with a wrap-around porch, the garage had four stalls, and his shed, where he kept a bevy of mechanical toys and farm equipment, was big enough to house a football field. The driveway was a hundred feet long, paved to the highway, and not a damn blade of grass was out of place on the palatial estate. Ricky Dean Glenn flicked his cigarette into the lawn, stepping onto the property, his knees aching from the walk and his temper flaring. 

The Orange Blossom Special was parked on a cement pad before the shed’s giant sliding doors. The sun hit the mirrors and the rear pointed slightly up just like the Korean whores Ricky visited back in his war days. He’d got laid three times in Korea before his first kill, but that number evened out eventually and then swayed greatly in the direction of kills by the time he was discharged. A guy like Ricky can only take orders for so long, and while there certainly was a thrill to killing, even that was dulled when done daily for no apparent reason. He learned in Korea that the army was great at killing, but not much else. So, he got the fuck out and never looked back.

While Ole Ricky was finding out about whores and killing in Korea, guys like Joe Elliot made money and had kids, too much of both from what Ricky could tell. The greedy bastard was standing next to the truck in a checkered shirt and blue jeans, the perfect image of some asshole politician on TV trying to sell himself as a farmer. Joe’s gut plunged out before his waistline, his brown hair was combed over his balding dome, and his boots were entirely too clean to be those of a man doing real work. Beside him was his junior, or the youngest of the Elliot clan of juniors. A boy with a wide base and shoulders, wearing a ridiculous cowboy hat and a pair of sneakers. The boy might have been sixteen, he might have been twenty, either way Ricky figured he was about ten ass-kickings away from being a man. Maybe Ricky would get him one closer in a few moments. 

“Well, well, if it ain’t Ricky Dean Glenn,” Joe said. Ricky was ten feet away, his steps were even, his shoulders square, and his jaw set. He only nodded. 

“Who the hell is this?” Joe’s son said, a toothpick dangling from his soft boy lips. 

“Local trash collector,” Joe said. “We don’t have any trash around here.” 

Ricky kept coming, no words, no change in expression. He had learned in the army that talking was for those that stay back in tents and make plans while the action is miles away. Ricky wasn’t made for that when there was action to be had.

“Is he deaf, or just stupid?” Joe’s boy said. His hands were in his jacket pockets. How could a man call someone stupid and keep their hands in their pockets? 

Ricky punched the boy in the mouth with his right fist, and he wasn’t sad when he saw that the fist drove the toothpick through the boy’s upper lip and into his nose. There would be a mark, nothing major, but a mark just the same, and each time that stupid boy looked in the mirror, he would remember getting his clock cleaned. 

The boy landed on the cement with a thud, his eyes rolling back in his head. Ricky supposed the boy had never been hit before and would run the other way whenever anyone else near him ever balled their hand into a fist for the rest of his pathetic life. 

“Jesus, Ricky,” Joe exclaimed. “What the hell has got into you?” 

Ricky took one step toward Joe, but the fat bastard backed off four. Never once did Joe Elliott lean down to see how his son was doing. Naw, he just scurried backward, too scared to care about anyone else. 

Ricky opened the Orange Blossom Special’s door and the key was in the ignition. A fancy looking metal Confederate flag emblem dangled from the key ring. Ricky reached in, grabbed the keys, and tore the flag off the chain. 

“Only idiots celebrate losers,” Ricky said. He whipped the flag emblem at the groggy boy on the ground before climbing onto the truck’s bench seat. 

“Hey,” Joe said as Ricky turned the engine over. Joe’s head swiveled on his neck, sure that someone had to be around to save him and keep his truck from being stolen. Guys like Joe always needed someone. A fella to do the hard work, the labor. Someone to cook. Someone to clean. Someone to wipe their butts. Someone to win their battles. The Joe Elliotts of this country were in charge, they just didn’t understand how unsteady that pedestal was that they were perched upon. Ricky slammed the door and shifted into gear. 

“It’d be best for everyone to keep all this quiet until tomorrow, you hear.” Ricky eyed Joe like a sniper, making sure the fat bastard caught the drift that calling this in any earlier would mean more trouble sometime down the line.

Joe nodded, his chins jiggling, and Ricky hit the gas, spinning the tires and, leaving black marks on the cement before skidding out of the driveway.

Previously on Pandemonium Season 1:

Episode 1: What Lies Ahead: Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 1: Orange Blossom Special (1988) (whatliesaheadblog.blogspot.com)

Episode 2: What Lies Ahead: Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 2: Over the Hills and Far Away (1991) (whatliesaheadblog.blogspot.com)

Episode 3: What Lies Ahead: Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 3: Last Night When We Were Young (1994) (whatliesaheadblog.blogspot.com)

Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 3: Last Night When We Were Young (1994)

 

Sarah Arndt’s sleeveless blue denim dress billowed out in waves at about mid-thigh, and she covered her shoulders with a brown denim jacket. A pair of orange Chuck Taylors completed her funeral outfit. Her short hair was styled so that her long bangs rolled like the surf on the top of head while the sides were cut down to the stubble. The bangs were dyed sliver with the rest toned a dark gray. She stood out, to say the least, among the collared shirts and modest midwestern dresses. Richie noticed her, that’s for sure, as she approached in the receiving line of the visitation before the service. First question: What the hell was she was doing there? She was known as the Queen of Shadows. She smoked, she cursed, she ruled the seedy underbelly of Jordan High School. He was a mere mental case a year behind her. The second question, when would he see her again? She murmured condolences to his father before greeting Richie with an awkward embrace and placing her lips to his left ear.

“Today the world is old. You flew away and time grew cold. Where is that star that shone so bright ages ago last night?” She whispered and before walking away added, “I got my eyes on you, Little Richie.”  

She retreated to the back row of folding chairs where she sat two spaces away from the next person. His eyes kept drifting toward her, and he felt guilty for being distracted by a girl during the mother’s visitation, but he barely knew most of the people passing through the line and they all had the same empty condolences: “She’s in a better place,” “the Lord called her home,” and “At least she’s not hurting anymore.” Plus, they all wanted to touch him. Hug him. Kiss him. Shake his hand. His father refused to let him wear gloves, and his skin was crawling with prickles from the germs. The germs that were burrowing deeper and deeper into his follicles, invading his blood stream, one domino after biological domino falling until he was in an urn alongside his mother.

As far as mourning, he couldn’t cry anymore. There was simply a gap in his heart where she once was, and the events of funeral didn’t feel like they were going to change anything. It just let everyone else wash their hands of the whole sad affair while he and his dad were left without the sun that kept their orbits on comfortable paths.

The last person passed by, and Richie and his father were ushered to a pair of chairs in front. While the pastor, who had never met his mother, regurgitated their memories, and in turn, co-opted them as his own, he could feel Sarah Arndt’s eyes on the back of his head. It made no sense that she was here among the grieving, and it made even less sense that she’d have her eyes on Richie Dean Glenn. What did she want? He was nothing to her. She was a legend of Jordan High, known for her far-out fashion and smoking marijuana in the girl’s room. Did Richie attract outlaws, or something? His mother’s urn rested on a pedestal surrounded by an embarrassment of flowers. Richie wished that the stupid holy man would shut up and lead everyone else out of the room so that Richie could ask his mother’s ashes what to do about Sarah Arndt. She would have answered with something clever.

“Give the girl a chance,” He could hear his mom saying. “The unique ones are always the best ones.”

Or maybe she’d be off put by Sarah’s assumption of belonging at the service. His mom could be a stickler for social etiquette.

“Send her packing, Richie. Trouble is as trouble does, and that girls does trouble.”

His father didn’t flinch the entire service, his wide features reddening in the heat of wearing the three-piece suit. His tie was loosened to accommodate his massive neck and his beard was tangled and uneven. Shaving had become optional in the last couple weeks. R.J. Dean hadn’t registered any of the attendees at the funeral, simply providing quiet acknowledgements of their condolences. He had forewarned Richie that he intended to drink that night, and that he was welcome to stay at any friend’s house that Richie wished. So much for grieving together. Richie’s grandmother sat beside him, and he intended to stay on the sofa at her assisted living home. He’d checked out a Dean Koontz book from the school library the day before, and he planned on reading it to her. They both liked a good scare, and it’d be nice to disappear into the pages of fiction for a few hours. He’d have to do all the reading now, as her eyesight had diminished to near nothing in the last two years.

The service ended and they drove to the cemetery where thankfully the pastor stuck to the basic lines of scripture. The ground was soft from rain the day before, and ducks quacked in a man-made pond centered in the cemetery. Sarah Arndt smoked a cigarette next to a tree about a football field away from the plot, her arms folded over her chest. If it were a movie, Richie would have assumed she were some sort of assassin, just waiting to get a clean shot of him before moving on to her next assignment. Was that what he was to her? Some sort of challenge? Or was she elaborately messing with the most tormented kid at Jordan High? Richie’s usual suspicions about people’s motives were buzzing in his head, but for the first time, they were losing out by a tug at his groin. Jesus, how messed up was he? The pastor finished, Richie looked down at the hole where the urn would be placed, and when his eyes rose, Sarah Arndt was gone. Maybe he’d imagined her the entire time.

Richie rode back in a limousine with his dad and grandma, she commented on how the grass was beginning to green finally after a long cold winter. She could probably barely tell. His dad mumbled a few things on the ride, but none of it was important or even all that intelligible. They weren’t in their house more than ten minutes before he cracked open his first can of beer, not bother to shed his suit.

Richie packed the book, a change of clothes, a few CDS and his portable disc player after slipping into some jeans and a sweatshirt. His dad was slumped in his recliner in the living room as Richie made to leave.

“I’m heading over to Grandmas.”

“All right,” he said, not looking up.

“Don’t drink too much.”

“Yeah, yeah, now you sound like…” He didn’t finish the line, just sort of snorted. He was going to say, “my mother,” before catching himself.

“It’s okay, Dad.”

“Is it?”

Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 2: Over the Hills and Far Away (1991)

 

“Many is a word that only leaves you guessing/Guessing bout a thing, you really ought to know.”

-          Over the Hills and Far Away by Led Zeppelin

Maggie assumed changing her hair caused this. Clipping her tangled blonde locks to a stubble and bleaching the remaining fuzz white had felt right after the blowout with RJ, knowing how much her husband adored her hair. Well, it wasn’t going to stick around much longer anyways, she might as well have it go out in style. She didn’t stop to consider how every change disrupted the fragile constitution of her son’s nerves. RJ liked to blame that truck ride a few years back, but the fact was that their son was always emotionally high-strung. She cranked the window down, letting the damp spring air into the stale climate of her Honda. Her son was descending the stone steps of Jordan Middle School, his dark hair matted to his skull. He wore a black t-shirt tucked into his blue jeans, a pair of generic sneakers, and black gloves. It was April, and still he wore gloves. Maggie knew that RJ would blow a fuse seeing it. She was more forgiving of Richie’s picadilloes than her husband, but she couldn’t help but worry that other boys would pick on Richie.

 Richie opened the passenger door, dropped into the seat, his bookbag falling to his feet, and crossed his arms, hiding each gloved hand under the opposite arm. His face was pale, his eyes dark, and his shoulder blades pointed sharply out on each side of his t-shirt. He was slightly undersized for his age, and very undersized for his peers, who were all older after she and RJ had been convinced to bump him up a grade several years earlier before all the behaviors were noticeable and before that damn truck ride. His grades never slipped, but his moods and habits grew extreme over time.

“Well?” She asked. She was still figuring out the liberal parenting techniques she had embraced after seeing how terribly her parents’ ultra-conservative approach had pushed her out the door when she was seventeen. Well, her parents’ style had pushed, and the Led Zeppelin tour of 1977 had lured her away for good. Those two forces combined had meant she’d seen her parents twice in the last fourteen years.

“Well, Richie?” She asked again, when her first attempt didn’t yield a response.

“Rich, I’ve told you, call me Rich,” he mumbled. She ignored the statement and waited. “I was washing my hands.”

“For twenty minutes?”

Unable to watch him stare at the dashboard any longer, Maggie turned the Honda’s key and the engine coughed to life. Pulling away from the school, Richie cranked his window down and then made for the radio dial.

“No,” she slapped his hand away. “We need to talk.”

“I was washing my hands, that’s why I was late to class. We were outside in gym, throwing that stinking germ-infested rubber ball around. I had to wash it off.”

“For twenty minutes, Richie, that’s crazy? Are you smoking?”

“Call me Rich, and Christ, Mom, smoking? Shit.”

“Don’t curse at me,” Maggie could drive with one eye on him and one on the road, it was a skill she’d mastered over the last few years.

“I don’t smoke,” his gloved fingers smashed the radio buttons, and the speakers burst to life, playing her Houses of the Holy tape. The volume was cranked, as it often was when she’d been out driving alone.

They came to a stop sign and to their right was a cemetery, most known for its monument to a Civil War veteran, who had fought for the South despite being from Illinois. Why anyone wanted to honor the man in Jordan was lost on Maggie. She’d volunteered for a group devoted to the removing the monument, but so far, they had garnered little support from the community. People like their monuments and hate change.

“I shouldn’t have called you crazy,” she said. “That was wrong of me.”

“Why? I am crazy, that’s why you send me to Dr. Bitch.”

“Don’t call her that, and no, you are not.”

“Whatever, I washed my hands for twenty minutes and then I told the teacher to get bent when he asked me about it.”

Someone honked behind them, and Maggie flipped her middle finger out the window before pulling over to the shoulder and killing the engine in the middle of a Robert Plant vocal. The guy behind them, driving a big Chevy, kept honking as he passed, and the word ‘bitch’ trailed in the air. She embraced the term, when it came to her driving and her son, she could be a Grade-A Bitch, and she felt no reason to apologize for it.

“So, now you’re suspended?” Her voice came out hoarse.

“Yeah, two weeks.”

Quiet followed with only the traffic resonating in their ears and the lingering smell of fast food assaulting Maggie’s nose. She tried to be a good mom, a good cook, a good housekeeper, but often they ate crap from McDonalds or Hardees in the car as she raced from one cause to another.

“Well, then you’re going to the doctor with me tomorrow?”

“Doctor? For what?”

“For me.”

“You?”

“Yes, honey, your father and I have been putting off saying anything until we knew more, but you’ll know now, I guess.”

“What is it?”

“A lump, honey, on my breast.”

Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 1: Orange Blossom Special (1988)

 

Intro: I have been wanting to incorporate a tie-in between my blog and my Facebook group: Playlist Pandemonium. The group is a place where the members generate a playlist each week based off a theme or prompt. I thought about doing a Thursday ten, featuring ten songs from a single band or artist, but struggled on how to make that a challenge for my writing, which is the purpose of this blog. So, I thought I’d create a serial series inspired by songs. I admit I cheated here a bit, as the piece below is inspired by a NANOWRIMO project I did a couple years ago. I put 50,000 words down in a month, but the overall story sort of floundered and I haven’t found the right angle to fix it. The below is a new take, new writing, coming at the story from a different point of view and new starting point. My hope is to add a new episode every week or so and keep each post at about a thousand words. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to leave your comments below. Dan.

 

Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 1: Orange Blossom Special

https://open.spotify.com/track/28KTisZDzhDBALLSvRf4wv?si=b677a8e2ee1e48c0

“It's the Orange Blossom Special

Bringin' my baby back”

-         --  Orange Blossom Special by Johnny Cash

 

Reckon it was when that Orange Blossom Special sped by his trailer out on Highway 20 just after lunch that Friday in the fall of 1988 that Ricky Dean Glenn felt the itch again. For two years, he’d been straight, maybe not so much like an arrow but thereabouts. He’d done some scrappin’ of old steel and such to get by. The kind of junk straight folks don’t have much use for anymore, but don’t know what the hell to do with. Washing machines. Rolls of barbed wire. Rusty farm implements. He took care of that concern for those folks with their pearly white teeth and yards with freshly cut grass and flowerbeds, the sort of lives that politicians spew on about being the American fairy tale.

Ricky Dean Glenn’s life was no such fairy tale, no God-damn way. He ate crackers with splotches of peanut butter on them for his lunch and had two Marlboros for desert while sitting on his stoop, thinking about how very big the sky always seemed now that he was out of the pen. Almost too damn big. Sometimes his cigarettes would burn down and singe his fingertips when he got to looking at that big old damn sky with its waves of white clouds and that flaming sun. He’d curse, toss the cigarette away, but it wouldn’t be long before the sky entranced him again. Too damn big.

He heard the truck’s engine rumble from miles away before it streaked by in a blur of orange and cream broken only by the blaring reflections of the sun off the windows. Behind the wheel was Joe Elliot’s boy. Ricky didn’t know the boy’s name, just knew he was too damned young to be driving such a cherry automobile. Course the boy’s daddy hadn’t gone to Korea like Ricky Dean Glenn. No, Joe Elliot had foot pains, as Ricky understood it, a symptom he supposed was caused by the streak of yellow down his back. Joe Elliot stayed home, had a mess of kids, this one the youngest, and cleaned up selling seed corn and crop insurance. Joe Elliot was one of those fairy tale folks, which goes to show those folks aren’t all they are cracked up to be.

“Forget about it,” Ricky whispered, puffing on his cigarette. The engine echoed in his ears. The Elliot place was just down the road a spell, over the bridge that spanned the river where Ricky had once swum naked with Pauline Appleton and taken her cherry. He suspected that then, at least, but figuring back, she sure seemed to know what the hell she was doing more than him. Ricky took another drag considering Pauline Appleton’s virginity back in the day, the big damn sky, and that mighty fine hunk of orange metal that had so recently passed his place. He’d look mighty fine behind that wheel.

“If you want it, just take it,” his father’s voice echoed in his ears. Earl Richard Dean had been dead for more years than Ricky could remember, but the bastard’s rough voice still growled from time to time in Ricky’s head. Mostly when Ricky was drinking. Then the bastard was calling him names while beatin’ the shit out of Ricky before moving onto Ricky’s mama. When Ricky wasn’t drinking, he’d hear the old man’s sage advice. Things like, “Don’t take shit from no one,” or “Might as well fuck those with nice things before they fuck you.” Those were the sort of gems he’d get when they would escape to the shack in Wisconsin each fall for two or three days of huntin’ and fishin’. Ricky wondered if that old shack was still standing, be something to see, if it was.

His knees popped as Ricky rose, his cigarette disappearing in the dust under his boot heel. Inside the trailer was a war zone of junk, discarded clothes, and empty cases of beer, among the rabble was his white Stetson, which he’d swiped after getting out of the pen, and his Colt, which he tucked into the waistband of his jeans. Putting on the hat, he peered around the trailer one last time and thought about Pauline Appleton’s breasts glistening in the river water. Maybe that was the best day of his life. She’d been a beauty, one all the rich boys had been chasing, but she chose the bad boy that night. They always did. Well, sometimes they did. He’d gotten it enough, even tied his hitch to a post for a time, but prison had ended that setup. He was all but sixty now, not a boy, and women didn’t think of him as bad anymore, just reckless, dangerous and over the hill.

Well, he wasn’t dead yet, so he wouldn’t say such a damn fool thing as that day being the best. That Orange Blossom Special zoomed through his mind. Mighty fine automobile. He supposed he’d been straight long enough. Time to get right with a few things before it was too late.

“It’s the Orange Blossom Special. Bringin’ my baby back…” He sang. He knew the Johnny Cash catalog by heart.

A semitrailer hauling a load of corn or soybeans whipped past as Ricky Dean Glenn’s boots struck the gravel shoulder of Highway 20. He walked with the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled just above his forearms and his hat low on his eyes. He walked like a man with a destination, one about an hour down the road by foot. He’d cross that bridge and that river, leaving Pauline Appleton swimming naked in his bittersweet memories. He was after his Orange Blossom Special, and one last day on the run.

“I don’t care if I do-die-do-die-do-die-do-die-do-die.”