Houseboat

This comes from a true story about a friend who got drunk one night and bought a houseboat on eBay.

Some things, thought John Roy Parnell III, were just inevitable. As a matter of fact, everything in his life since the day he broke his leg trying to roll out for a first down in the high school state quarterfinals had seemed to flow inexorably onwards like ten thousand pounds of molasses going up the side of a hill in January. It never went very fast, but it never quite stopped moving, either. And ever since he lay three yards short of the first down on his own 37-yard line clutching his ankle and crying like a little girl his life had oozed forward to this very point.

That’s what he was thinking on an alarmingly sunny Monday morning when he woke up on the rook of his houseboat surrounded by thirteen empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and one bottle of Jagermeister with two inches of brownish liquid and three cigarette butts sloshing around in the bottom. A groan from the lower deck of the houseboat reminded John Roy that he wasn’t alone, and he rolled over on his side to look down, disturbing the delicate balance of the beer cans and sending several of them rolling and clattering to the deck below. one or two landed with a softer thunk as opposed to the clang of their fellows, and John Roy figured those must have landed on Joe Don.

“Gawdammit John Roy, why you always gotta make such a ruckus?” came a screech from below to let him know that yes, indeed, Joe Don Burgess was on the deck below him, and yes, indeed he was awake. “I gotta pee,” mumbled Joe Don in a much quieter voice.

“Piss off the side a the boat, the shitter’s clogged up,” replied John Roy.

“What the hell happened to the shitter?” asked Joe Don.

“I can’t remember, but I think I remember puking in a t-shirt and puttin’ it in the shitter last night. And if I did, you better not piss on it. I might need that shirt later.”

“Alright, alright, I’ll piss off the side.” And Joe Don staggered to the rail of the boat to do just that, without ever quite opening his eyes. When he heard the wet splatter of piss on sun-baked Georgia clay instead of the splash of water on water, he opened his eyes and started to look around. “John Roy…”

“Yeah, Don?”

“Why ain’t your boat in the water?”

“Lake dried up. Drought, remember?”

“Yeah, but didn’t you just get this boat?”

“Yeah.”

“So why’d you buy a boat and put it in a dried-up lake?” Joe Don continued.

“Cause I needed a place to stay after Erlene kicked me out of the trailer park.”

“Oh, ok. But don’t that mean I’m pissing in your front yard?”

“Kinda, but since you’re pissin’ off the back of the boat, I reckon you’re pissin’ in my back yard, not the front yard. Lawn chairs is in the front yard.”

“Oh, ok. I don’t mind pissin’ in the back yard. But pissin’ in the front yard didn’t seem right, somehow. Know what I mean.”

“I reckon.” By this time John Roy had develop a pretty sizable need to piss himself, so he stood up, walked over to the edge of the rook, and started to piss. A golden stream powered by an evening’s worship of Milwaukee’s finest arced high over the side of the boat, and over the head of a very startled Joe Don, and splashed into the dusty red lake bed beside the boat.

“Gawdammit, John Roy, don’t you pee on me!”

“I ain’t gone pee on you, don’t get your panties in a twist,” replied John Roy as he began to write his name in the lake bed. He added his name to a litany of incomplete “John Roy”s in the dust, shook his pecker, and tucked it away in his shorts. Then he kicked the rest of the beer cans off the rook, tossed the Jager bottle in a 55-gallon fuel oil drum he used as a trash can and general place to light shit on fire, and started looking around the edge of the roof. After a few minutes, he laid down on his belly and looked over the edge as Joe Don.

“Don?”

“Yeah?”

“There ain’t no ladder.”

“There ain’t?”

“Nope.”

“How the fuck you get up there?”

“Fuck if I know?”

“How you gone get down?”

“Bring that mattress out there on the deck.”

“That don’t sound like such a good idea.”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you the whole thing. I don’t wanna think about it too much. Now bring me that mattress.”

“Alright.” Joe Don went into the cabin and dragged out a raggedy twin mattress. He laid it on the deck and looked back up at John Roy. “You want the box spring, too?”

“Nope,” said John Roy as he took a couple of running steps and belly-flopped from the roof of the houseboat down the ten feet onto the mattress, blowing up a huge cloud of dust, funky smells and a couple of oddly-shaped insects. He lay there face down for several long minutes without moving before he rolled over, looked up a Joe Don and said “Well, that sucked. Gimme a beer.”

Now What?

So after posting 45 segments of a novel online and updating my website with multiple buttons to my book of short stories and poetry, now what do I do?

Well, for one thing, I get back to what got me here – I blog a bit more. I had toyed around with keeping this page as a writing samples page and adding a blog elsewhere on the site, but that’s just not gonna work. I’m too lazy to update two sites, so it’ll just all be here.

And I’m going to work on new material. I’ve got some poetry to post in the next few days, some drafts of poems and story ideas that I’m working on, and things like that. Not to mention that I have 100 copies of Returning the Favor en route to my house, so I’m going to get out and do readings at local bars and bookstores and hope to move a few books that way.

Plus I’ll be continuing to polish Choices, work on a cover design and get it ready for print. I should have copies ready by fall for print and electronic format.

In other news, I’m trying to muddle through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform process and Returning the Favor should be available on Amazon for the Kindle within the next couple of days. Until then, you can already buy it for the Kindle at Smashwords.com.

Anyway, I really want to thank everyone for reading Choices. It was an experiment that grew into something bigger, and I hope better, and I appreciate my friends, old and new, who came along on the ride with me. Who knows where we’ll go next time?

Choices, Part 40

We’re in the home stretch now, both in uploads and edits. If I finish editing before I finish uploading, the whole thing might see print before it sees the web, but that’s pretty unlikely. But I’m feeling pretty solid that the book will be available by Labor Day at the latest in hard copy, and sooner than that for the Kindle and other e-book formats. In the meantime, enjoy the next section and go buy my other book in hard copy here or here. And it’s now available for the Kindle here. And if you have a site and could pimp the current book, it’ll garner my undying love and gratitude (and maybe a drink or two).

“Aren’t you going to pack, son?” I asked Cain on my way into the hall.

“I haven’t unpacked anything, so I don’t need to pack. I’ll meet you downstairs.” He got up, stretched, and headed towards the door in our wake. Myra and I tossed the few things we’d unpacked into our bags, and looked around the room to make sure we hadn’t forgotten any random firearms before we headed down to the car. She looked pensive, so I gave her a quick hug before we left the room.

“It’s almost over, isn’t it?” She asked, her face buried in my chest. That made her a little hard to hear, but it was worth it.

“Almost.”

“What will you do?”

“What do you mean? My Choice? I don’t even know what it is, so I have no idea what I’ll do.”

“No. I mean after. What will you do after it’s done. Are you going to leave me again?” She held me tighter, but I didn’t think her squeezing me caused the tightness in my chest.

“I don’t know, babe. I…”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. I’ve seen you thinking about it. I can see it whenever you look at me when we’re driving. When you think I don’t notice you looking. I can feel your eyes on me and I know you’re trying to decide if you’re sticking around or if you’re going to run again.”

“You’re right. I have thought about it. A lot. And I still don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve been putting off making that decision until this whole thing was behind us. And who knows? The kid might decide to blow up the planet and we won’t have to worry about it. We are going to DC after all. If there’s any place a slightly crazy right-wing preacher can get his hands on nuclear weapons, it’s Washington.”

“Or Tehran.”

“Yeah, there’s always Tehran. But the jet lag is such a bitch. DC is a better choice.”

“Fair enough. Let’s go finish saving the world. But we’re not done with this, buster. As soon as the world is safe, we’re going to have a long conversation about our future.” She stood on her tiptoes, kissed me lightly on the lips, and headed for the elevator. I watched her walk, both because the view was nice and because I was thinking about that conversation. And how I was gonna get out of that one without actually blowing up the world. Because that option was looking better all the time.

We gathered downstairs, and Michael met us in the hotel lobby. “I will not be accompanying you on this leg of your journey. I must go ahead and prepare the meeting place. Lucypher and I will meet you at the Washington Monument at midnight tomorrow night. Packing was a good idea, you should be able to make it there easily if you leave now.”

“Hey! It’s not that far to DC. If we don’t need to be there until midnight tomorrow night, why are we leaving now?” I was getting a little grumpy about not having the chance to spend a little happy fun time with Myra before the end of the world.

“I’ve seen how long it takes you people to get anywhere, and I assume that Eve will have to start at least one barroom brawl before you can get through Tennessee and Virginia.” Michael responded dryly.

“Nah. I think I’m good for a few days. Thanks for thinking of me, though.” Eve said dryly.

“Besides, I said I would be leaving immediately. I never mentioned you coming with me. That was your own erroneous assumption. If I were you, I would try to salvage some sleep out of this wretched evening and leave in the morning. I will see you there.” With that, he vanished. Not walked out and flew away, just vanished. Sometimes I wondered who was more irritating, my smartass kids, or smartass angels. I stood there looking stupid for a minute with my bag in my hand before I noticed that Cain was sitting on one of the lobby couches, no bag anywhere in sight.

“You knew?” I asked very slowly.

“I noticed that he didn’t mention us going, so I figured there was no reason to rush.”

“And you didn’t think you should share that with the rest of us?”

“You guys were so happy running around like chickens with your heads cut off, I didn’t want to screw that up.” He sat there and chuckled at us as the rest of us dragged our bags back to the elevators and up to the rooms. That’s when I realized we had a little monkey wrench in the works. One with tattoos and a pierced lip.

“Uh, Junior?”

“Yes, Adam?”

“Uh, we don’t really have a room for you, I don’t think. I mean, we had a spot for Michael, but he doesn’t really sleep, so I’m not sure we have two beds in Cain’s room, so I don’t really know what we’re going to do about that. It’s really late and the desk clerk is already a little grumpy with me, you know the whole breaking into the pool, flying Seraphim and shotgun blasts in the middle of the night thing…” I trailed off lamely.

“Don’t worry, Pop. We’ve got it covered.” Cain chimed in.

“How?”

“Don’t ask silly questions, Adam. Now why don’t you and Myra toddle off to bed while Cain and I deal with sleeping arrangements for the children, I mean for Sidney.” I never trusted Eve when she was being solicitous, but Myra had a certain look in her eye at Eve’s offer that I didn’t want to ignore, especially if we were blowing the world up in 21 hours or so. So I did as Eve suggested, ignored the winks that were exchanged between Eve, Myra and Emily, and took my girlfriend to bed.

So why this? And why now?

You might be wondering why, after publishing 39 installments of a novel on this little website, I would decide to start off my self-publishing life by publishing a collection of short stories and poetry, and not hold off until the novel happens. Well, some days so am I, but here’s how my thinking ran. Having never published anything on lulu.com before, or on any other self-publishing format (and the word publishing is extremely hard to type this morning for some reason) I decided to publish the collection of randomness first to see how it all looks. I wanted to see how easy the ISBN process is, to see what it was going to look like in a final product, and to see what the turnaround time on orders is.

And I’m not finished editing the novel yet. Plus, there are a couple of events coming up in Charlotte that I wanted to participate in, and it would be handy to have published examples of my work for those events. I’ll tell you more about them as they develop. So I went ahead and dusted off the small collection and went to press. I’m not done with Choices, but hopefully I will be in the next few weeks, and then I can have it printed and ready to go early fall. And if enough of you buy the current book, I won’t even have to go too deep into hock to pay for it :). Actually, the lulu.com stuff is really affordable, and the royalty setup is much better than traditional publishing (although you obviously expect to sell fewer copies). So it’s an experiment, let’s see if we can make anything blow up!

So buy my book. You can use your debit card on PayPal if you like.

Choices, Part 39

If you’re reading this via the RSS feed, don’t forget to click through to the main site and pick up your signed copy of my collection of short stories and poems, Returning the Favor and other Slices of Life.

I opened my eyes a second later and Lucky was still sitting there, calm as could be, with a little grin twitching the corner of his mouth. He stood, turned slowly around, and reached out to Eve, snatching the shotgun from her hands like you’d take a lollipop from a toddler. Then he wrapped both arms around her and picked her up, twirling her around and laughing like they’d just been reintroduced at a party.

“Oh, Eve, I have missed you! No one since the Garden has had such a fire! I am sorry I haven’t called on you since then, but I’ve been dreadfully busy. You know, wars to starts, pestilence to spread, famine to sow, death to deal, and all that awful pale-horse Revelation garbage. But it’s good to see you, and I promise to come chat with you and little Cain in a few moments, once I’m done talking to the boys here.” With that, he spun a shocked Eve around, patted her on the butt, and shoved her over to where Cain and the other women were standing staring at us.

“Yeah. About that, Lucky. We might want to move this conversation inside. After all, you did just have a giant frigging glowing angel fly off over the pool, and Eve just shot you. Those things tend to attract attention these days. So why don’t we all adjourn to my room, and you can tell everybody what you’ve got to say to me and Junior?” I picked up the bag of beer, grabbed Junior by an arm, and started making my way into the hotel.

“Probably a good idea, Adam. The local constabulary may be making an appearance soon, and it’s probably better if I’m not seen. Something about a bar fire earlier this evening…” He followed us into the hotel, and I stood waiting for the elevator with the Prince of Darkness and a twenty-something tattooed redneck street preacher who was supposed to save the world. If he could keep his eyes off my daughter’s tits long enough to do it.

When we got to the room, Lucky led Junior inside, grabbed the bag of beer, and shoved me backwards out into the hall, shutting the door firmly in my face. I hammered on the door for a minute, but Lucky just called out a few profanities and I finally gave up. I walked down the hall to the room Eve was sharing with Emily, and knocked on the door. They let me in after a second, and I joined Eve, Emily, Myra and Cain in the small room. It was more than a little cramped in there with just a couple of beds and one chair, but we all managed to find someplace more or less comfortable.

After a long moment Emily piped up. “What do you think he’ll do to Sidney?”

“Nothing.” I replied. “If he wanted to hurt the kid there are a lot better ways, sneakier ways that won’t get him in deep shit with Father. My guess is he’s telling the truth, that he just wants to talk to the kid. He’s probably got a lot riding on whatever Choice the kid makes, and he’s looking for an edge.”

“You actually think he’s telling the truth? He’s the Father of Lies? His name is synonymous with deception and misdirection? What makes you think that he’s telling the truth?” Myra asked incredulously.

“Because it’s what we don’t expect. I’ve seen him use this trick before. He tells you the truth when you expect him to lie, and then he can lie with more impunity when it suits his purposes.” I said. “He’ll probably keep the kid in there for a while, make friends with him, fill his head full of just enough truth to confuse him, and send him back to us thinking that Lucky’s just a guy who’s gotten a bad rap in history.”

“Yeah, he’s a fuckin’ prince.” Eve muttered.

“Yeah. Look, babe, I’m not exactly a fan, either, but I can’t kick his ass and you can’t shoot him, so we’re kinda stuck right now.” I was getting a little frustrated, and Lucky had all the beer, so I headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Myra sounded frightened as I reached for the handle. “You’re not going after him, are you?”

“Nah, I know better. I’m gonna go get some ice and a soda from the vending machine. Anybody else want anything?”

“I’ll go with.” Emily hopped up and stood beside me. We got out into the hallway and she looked up at me. “Now tell me straight, what do you think Luke, er, Lucky is doing with Sidney?”

Crap. She had it bad. “I really don’t think he’s going to hurt him. If he’s supposed to make a Choice I don’t think Lucky can hurt him, or everything goes all screwy. I mean, he’s capable, but I don’t think he’s allowed. And there are some rules that even Lucky won’t break. Don’t sweat it, honey, Junior’s gonna be fine.”

“If you say so.” But she still sounded a little dubious.

“Don’t sweat it. You don’t get to be this old without being a decent judge of character.” I tried to sound cavalier, but I don’t know if I pulled it off.

“You got to be that old because you’re immortal, not because you’re a good judge of character.” She pointed out. Smartass kids.

“Yeah, if I was, I probably wouldn’t have ended up hanging with all those Mongolians back when Genghis Khan was running roughshod over most of Asia. I just thought he wanted to ride around and party. Who was I to know he wanted world domination? My Mongolian was never that good anyway.” That at least got a giggle out of her, and we took our ice bucket and armful of soda cans back to the room. We were there for another hour or so before there was a knock on the door and Sid came in, looking awfully pale beneath his tattoos.

Emily leapt to her feet and rushed over to the kid, ushering him to a seat on the bed. I got up and out of the way, as did her mom. Cain tossed him a soda while Eve looked down the hall to see if she could catch any glimpse on Lucky’s location. I kept an eye on her, hoping she wasn’t going to try and put another slug into the fallen angel. Eve’s never been known for restraint, and sometimes it seems like her motto is “if at first you don’t succeed, shoot it again.” I didn’t need the attention, or the redecorating bill on my credit card. You’d be amazed how hard it is to keep a good credit rating when you don’t officially exist.

“What happened? Are you okay?” Emily asked.

“I’m fine. We just talked. Well, he talked. I listened.” Sid replied.

“What did he have to say?” I asked. “Remember, junior, deception is kinda his whole gig.”

“He talked about a lot of things. A lot about my Choice, and what was going to happen depending on what I Choose.”

“Did he happen to mention where you’re supposed to make this Choice, because we’re kinda flying blind right now.” Cain asked from the chair.

“Washington.” Michael pushed his way past Eve and into the room. “The Choice shall be made in Washington, DC. I will be leaving immediately.” The angel looked pissed, so I didn’t even bother with my standard snarky comments.
I just nodded to Myra, grabbed my room key from Junior and we headed to our room to pack. Emily and Eve started tossing things into a bag, and I glanced over at Cain, who was still sitting in the chair watching all the action.