Slightly Cursed

If you watch South Park, you know they always kill Kenny. I’ve decided this is because the guys who write the show know my step-cousin Kenny. A perfect example of what can happen when the wrong genes collide, Kenny’s one of those guys who opens his mouth and immediately makes you want to kill him. I’ve known this since I was 11 years old.

I grew up in Mesa, Arizona, the Shadeless Land of the Blazing Sun. My mother claims that Arizona has shade; she says it’s called “the mall.” She also mentioned carports, but I pointed out that it’s not really “shade” if it makes your skin melt when you stand under it.

Even clouds fear the searing Arizona summers. The ones that don’t instantly evaporate when they cross the state line into Arizona probably wish they did. This fact is never more apparent than when the gigantic nuclear furnace in the sky turns on the afterburners, bringing the temperature to a balmy 142°. Celsius. Except for when it’s 142°C at 8:30am, and your car dies in the desert.

(Travel Tip: Summer runs from mid-February to late-November in the Valley.)

When I was a kid, I changed schools at least once a year. We weren’t military; we just moved a lot. Unfortunately for me, my new schools were often staffed by people who were unable to properly decode my immunization records. This, of course, usually resulted in my mom being told that I needed more shots; I was the best immunized kid in nearly a dozen different states.

It was 1981, and my latest new school decided I was short one measles and a possible tetanus. So my mom sent me off to the health department in Apache Junction with my cousin Michael.

Although that region is now solidly packed with people, back in the early ’80s it was desolate. Not counting snakes, the only things between the two cities were a sparsely populated trailer park, dust, a mostly empty highway, dust, eleventy-billion lizards, dust, enough road fauna to distract the buzzards, and dirty dust. We were about halfway between east Mesa and Apache Junction when the car overheated and died on the side of the road.

Steam poured out of the hood, followed by a lot of cussing from my cousin. Looking over at me, he grouched, “Get out. We’re going to have to walk.” Watching waves of heat rise from the road, I sighed and got out of the car.

I was 11. I was lazy. I didn’t want to walk! “If you were paying attention to the gages like mom said, this wouldn’t have happened.” That’s me. Always helpful, even back then. He ignored me.

While I was thinking of ways to make him pay for ignoring me, we got out of the Mustang-shaped oven, and started walking. It wasn’t even ten minutes before he was sweating buckets and whining about the sun. “Looks like you’re getting a sunburn. Too bad you forgot your hat,” I offered cheerfully. Lucky for me, I’m Italian.” I smiled sweetly, secretly hoping my pale, Irish cousin would lose skin. He glared back, powerless to make my suntan disappear. I smiled again.

We were at least ten miles from home, and we’d only gone about half a mile, when a white van zipped past us. Braking hard, the van backed up along the side of the road and honked at us. It was a different world then; instead of running to hide behind a cactus, we looked up to see our cousin Kenny roll down the window, waving cheerfully. At last! Rescue!

“What are you two doing out here, walking?” He asked. Instead of wasting valuable spit by saying, “Duh,” we pointed toward the car in the distance and explained the situation. Kenny handed us each some water and we sat in the van, side door slid open, and chatted.

Now, most normal people would’ve offered to give us a ride without being asked. But Kenny isn’t normal. So Mike asked him for a ride home.

“I’m not going that way,” Kenny said casually. He looked at his watch. “But that reminds me: I’m late and need to get going. You guys need to get out of the van now.”

We stared at him, mute and disbelieving what we were hearing. No way! It was a zillion degrees outside and he was going to just leave us on the side of the road?

My 11 year old brain was plotting his demise when he said, “You can keep the water bottles and pay me for them later,” He smiled magnanimously as he shoved us out the side door of the van, closed the door, and choked us on a cloud of dust peeling off into the rising mass of incandescent gas.

I would’ve cried but you don’t waste precious fluids on such trivial things when you’re abandoned in the desert without a knife and piece of saran wrap.

I inherited my father’s temper. “Why did he just leave us here? We’re going to DIE out here in this heat and it’ll be ALL YOUR FAULT!” Oh, his death was going to be a beauty. Mike thumped me upside the head and told me to shut up, so I kicked him in the ankle, hard, and committed him to an even lower circle of Hell.

I also inherited my dad’s vindictive nature. Watching him hobble made me feel better. After several minutes, I resumed my observations about his impending sunburn. I’m pretty sure he wanted to kill me because he told me if I didn’t stay a good 30 feet behind him he’d push me into traffic; I threw a few rocks at him.

Ten minutes later, and another half a mile, Kenny and his white van rolled to a stop next to us again. “How you guys doing out here?” He asked us. “I was thinking. I can give you a ride if you want to pay me for gas.” He smiled, quite pleased with himself at finding a way to help out his cousins.

“I don’t have any money, but Eli’ll give you some gas money when we get to the house,” Mike told him. Kenny shook his head. He wasn’t falling for that one. We were in the middle of a huge gas crisis, and the price for regular was at an all-time high of $1.35 a gallon; this equates to $3.62/gal in today’s smaller dollars.

“Sorry, but I don’t trust you. You have to pay me up front.” I didn’t blame him; I didn’t trust Mike either. Kenny looked sad that his solution to our problem wasn’t working out so well for him. “Gas is expensive, and how do I know her mom will give me gas money like you say?” He had a good point. Even if he was a jerk.

Despite my mother saying, “Hey, Mike, you’ll need to put gas in the car. Here’s five dollars,” before we’d left the house, he was insisting we had no money. That’s when my big mouth opened up and out poured the honesty.

“Mom gave you money for gas. Give it to him before he leaves us and we die out here!” Mike glared at me. Kenny looked at him, brightening up at the prospect of his solution becoming yet again workable. “He’s got five bucks on him.” I crossed my arms and stared at them both, wondering exactly how many circles of Hell there really were to consign them to.

Yanking a five out of his pocket, Mike shoved it at Kenny. As he made the five dollars disappear forever, Kenny said, “Well, this van’s a real gas hog, and I’ll still have to come all the way back out here for work. This isn’t enough.”

Right after the yelling stopped, Mike and Kenny negotiated a deal: Kenny got to keep the five bucks, and when we got to my house my mom would give Kenny another $10. The five that Mike had given him was penalty money for lying, and my mom wasn’t supposed to know about it. Kenny was again pleased with himself, having figured out how to salvage his rescue operation and acquire beer money as part of the deal.

My mom paid Kenny the ten bucks Mike had promised, but I’m pretty sure that’s the last time Kenny was ever invited to our house.

written by vic

About a week before we found out she had Lyme’s disease, I’d made my husband check the girl child for ticks.

“Hey, isn’t there manly man stuff outside for me to do?” Ticks are creepy and gross. How much manlier could he get? Head checks were his job, not mine.

A few days later, I learned that the population density of the deer tick, carrier of Lyme’s disease, can be plotted at the CDC website. If you look at the blackest, densest part of that graph, you’ll see that it’s in central New Jersey. If you could scrape away that dense blackness, you’d see my old house. No one ever mentioned ticks in the relocation package. Funny how that worked out.

I’m not a fan of New Jersey, but it does have its good points. It has beautiful beaches, some excellent colleges, the Pine Barrens, and great Italian restaurants. Also, it gave us The Sopranos, which redeemed them quite a bit until that final episode.

We had two acres of lush woods, a dog, three cats, and five kids; daily tick checks were essential. Especially for the girl with the long hair. Who liked to sneak the long-haired cat into her room to trap at night. Even with the best precautions, in the four years we lived there we pulled hundreds of ticks off of ourselves, the kids, and our pets.

It happened during one of those sweltering summer spells, the kind that ends with a $500 electric bill. Luke, one of our cats, was dragging his butt back and forth across the carpet. He wiggled his butt and ground it into the floor, mewling, as he scootched himself along. Turning around, he’d drag himself back the other direction. After watching him do this a few times, it was clear he wasn’t just trying to scratch his over-fed butt as he made his way toward the food bowl. So I figured it was time to investigate.

I picked the cat up and looked him over for easy fixes, like burrs or broken legs or a chewed up tail or something. Nothing.

Lifting his tail, the problem was immediately obvious. Luke had a tick, and it was sticking out of his butt. The tiny, still-mostly-flat tick had embedded itself on the rim of Luke’s pulsating sphincter; only its abdomen showed. Poor, desperate Luke. No creature should have to endure that. Naturally, I called my husband.

“Luke has a tick in his butt. He’s trying to scrape it off on the carpet.” I watched Luke drag himself across the floor again. He stared at me, silently begging for help, eyes filled with misery.

“You’re not thinking of taking the cat to the vet for this are you?”

Bastard!

“Because no way plucking a tick out of his butt’s worth two hundred bucks.” I hung up.

As the day moved on, the tick grew. By the time my husband got home from work Luke’s butt tick was fat and bloated, just ripe for the picking.

Despite my best efforts to make things go more like I wanted them to, he made a very good case for holding the dangerous end of the cat. This meant that I was in charge of the tweezers. Believe me, this was not Plan A. In fact me working the tweezers was somewhere around Plan D. Or F. But hey, I got to be protected by the strong manly-man who selflessly volunteered to keep the cat from hurting me. And at great danger to himself.

Like most cats, Luke was stupid. So naturally, he needed to make the tick recovery operation more difficult than it needed to be. Even with many years of cat stalking experience under our belts, the cat was still faster.

Psychically clued in to our evil scheme, Luke zipped across the room and flew down the stairs. I tried grabbing him before he slipped under the couch. Five minutes later, we dragged Luke out from under the couch, shredding carpet and skin in his wake.

We wrapped the cat in a towel, carefully and firmly restraining all of the stabby bitey parts. Taking a deep breath, I gingerly reached toward his butt, lifted his tail, and tried to grab the tick with my tweezers without getting my face too close to ground zero. My aim wasn’t so great.

Yelping like a puppy, Luke’s butt contracted. It sucked the entire tick back inside of the cat’s butt by at least a centimeter. A couple of minutes later, I watched with fascinated horror as his butt give birth to the tick. Trying again with even less success, the cat twitched and growled at us. Our plan wasn’t working very well, probably because I was trying harder to avoid his ass than to grab the tick.

“Hurry this up. He’s stabbing me through the towel, and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to hold him without hurting him.”

Glaring at the husband and taking a deep breath, I made a resolution: I would not fear the butt. I leaned in and went to work, getting a firm grip on the tick this time; my husband tightened his hold on the cat. Slowly, steadily, I pulled. I knew that a quick tug would probably break the tick, leaving its head embedded in Luke’s butt and on the wrong side of his sphincter. I really needed to avoid that.

Now, sometimes there are things in life that don’t need to be experienced. But when you do experience them, it’s only fair that you share them. With everyone. This was one of those things.

Let me just say that soft, moist tissue in most mammals is stretchy. But there’s a line somewhere between “stretchy” and “can span multiple zip codes.” If only we didn’t know this.

Imagine turning a skinny, wet pink balloon inside out. And then a cat screaming, breaking loose, and running across the house. Yeah, it was kinda like that, only louder and much more horrifying. The tick dangled and squirmed off the end of my tweezers. I would’ve smiled, but I was still traumatized by what I’d seen.

I’m happy to report that there was no lasting damage and the cat’s butt had plenty of elasticity left. Within the hour, he crawled out from under the couch and slinked off to plot his revenge.

written by vic