The Turd: An American Journey, Chptr. 2 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.
When Ernest was barely old enough to pull up his pants, his father took him to junkyards. He was a mechanic, and if he could pick up a part from the lovechild of a two-car pileup, he could charge MSRP and none would be the wiser, on the well established fact that anyone smart enough to open a hood and know what they were looking at wouldn’t have gone to his garage in the first place.
The way his father talked to the junk guy was a language of nuance, a romance of two opossums in combat over a suburban trash can. His dad knew every crack and patina of rust and subpar weld and sold them to the junkman with the panache of a county prosecutor. The junkman, in turn, knew Ernest’s dad was on the clock with the repair, and he used the labyrinth of his yard to take Ernest the elder on wild goose chases for “better parts.”
When Ernest the junior finally realized what his father was doing to his customers, he practiced spontaneous candor in the shop. If review sites were a thing, he would’ve been an anonymous fly in his dad’s soup.
When his dad died, he was sixteen. His mother had long before left, a ghost
through the door, and Ernest was left with a pile of bills and a garage that he realized would never have paid the bills without grift.
Ernest brought the 454 engine along with the junkman to his trailer. He had a hoist at home taking up most of the garage and just enough space to get the system from his mind to his hands. The junkman groaned as he helped lower it onto the trailer, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the front of his shirt.
“Hope you got a fine beauty for this beast,” he said. “They just don’t make them like… well, they just don’t make them anymore.”
“Yeah,” Ernest said. “I’m gonna need a gas tank too. Small one; I’ll do the welds.”
“Kind of a waste, getting a small tank. Got a ’67 Roadrunner, smashed up but the tank is good. Sure you don’t want that?”
“I’m sure. Actually, a motorcycle tank’ll work.”
“Bike engine… you throwing away the manual or what?”
Ernest leaned back on the side of his pickup, his hands sliding the length of the bed. “Just got a little thing,” he said. “Teaching someone mechanics. Figure I don’t need a full tank to get it started. Ain’t going nowhere.”
The junkman grunted. He looked over the bed. “Okay, so the engine, a tank, that toilet… an even twenty-two hundred?”
Ernest nodded and pulled out his wallet.
“You know your dad would’ve got me down to seventeen-fifty.”
Ernest let out a laugh. “Well, he had a passion.”
“I hated him the first time he came here,” the junkman said. “I guess over the years… did you know I asked him to come work here?”
“That so?”
“Was so. He told me everything I had was junk.”
Ernest laughed. Junkman did too. Ernest paid him in a handshake and hopped in, hoping his pickup could lug a 454 without bottoming out.
#
The suburb of San Eldra wasn’t Spanish or the name of a Saint. In fact, no one knew how the neighborhood got its name. The name was a prelude to the general nature of the area, that being fake. The houses bore brick facades that made them look like eighteenth-century colonial dwellings. Every street had a homeowners’ association that wielded power like a Joseph McCarthy commission. There was no crime except for the coke and heroin dealing by men and women dressed for doubles tennis. It was a funny thing that the one empty lot in the neighborhood, bank owned, was a chaotic mess of snack wrappers, cigarette butts, plastic bags and shattered needles. It was the solid core of truth laid bare of the middle class wrapping.
A maintenance man doesn’t afford a house in San Eldra. That was his wife, Lysette. And she had absolutely no clue that he’d run to the junkyard for an engine and a toilet, nor would she have any inkling about their purpose.
He pulled the pickup into the driveway rear-end first and had just gotten it to the sweet spot before he heard shouting and the storm door clapping shut.
“Ernest Kreb, you bring that stuff back right now,” she said. “We will not be turning the driveway into a mechanic’s bay.”
Ernest, who had gotten out by then, said, “I gotta do it, babe. I’ll do it on the street
if I got to.”
Lysette ran her hands along the engine cylinders and the lower curve of the toilet bowl.
“Just what in the hell are you going to be doing out in the street?”
“You’ll think it’s stupid,” Ernest said. “You’ll laugh. Rather just do it out of your purview.”
Lysette scoffed. “You need the engine hoist. The HOA’s gonna’ picket out here, you turn the recycling bin into a tool shed.” She leaned against the bed and picked a sliver of a fallen leaf out of her hair. Then she reached over and smudged a spot of grime on Ernest’s cheek.
“What are you doing, Ernie?”
Ernest sighed. “I figured I could rig the engine to draw suction. If I only had enough suction, it’d be a helping hand.”
“You already broke our vacuum, got a fancier one and broke that too. You know it costs us to haul stuff like that away, right?”
“Figuring out what doesn’t work is engineering. I’m an engineer.”
“You’re a mechanic. And you’re getting close to being a junkman.”
“I can’t keep this shit inside me.”
“Ernie, you sit on a toilet that’s getting suction from a 454, you’re going to end up with a prolapsed rectum.”
“What’s that?”
“Your guts balloon out through your pooper.”
“Aw Jeez,” Ernest said. He scratched his stubble. “Could probably turn it down.”
Lysette shook his shoulders. “Go to the damn hospital.”
“I’m not gonna let them give me a slice job,” Ernest said. “I saw my ex-wife’s
C-Section. No way, no thanks.”
“You gotta’ do something,” Lysette said. “Cause you ain’t gonna do what you’re
thinking. I will be your second ex-wife.”
Ernest knew he’d have to bring the junk back and get half of what he paid for it.
He knew the very laugh the junkman would give him.
“I’ll go to the clinic,” Ernest said. “Maybe they got a new pill.”
Lysette hugged him and squeezed his butt cheeks.
“It’s gonna come out, honey,” she said.
***
Jasen passed through the smoky, sliding glass doors of VidYou One, which was a serious misnomer because the most important building was VidYou Alpha on the other side of the campus. VidYou One was the shiny new toy in the mid-2000s, but now was the janitorial services. The garbage men, garbage women, and other garbage persons sole task was to smite the sexually objectionable and protect the feed, even from nipples and errant sphincters.
The ground floor was open concept with square-cushioned couches and chairs, black marble floors with yellow, black, red, green, and blue painted strips running through the halls of that floor and every floor to provide direction, and a little bit of art.
Jasen slung his sack over his shoulder and prepared to cut the pulse of foot traffic and get to the elevator. But before he could take a step, he heard his name called out. He threw his eyes at the source of the sound, and they landed on the security desk, and Lionel waving him over.
Lionel was a humorless, joyless man, and when Jasen looked over, he felt like
Lionel was eyeing him for heroin. He walked to the station.
“I need your pass. And any keys or passes you have for any room upstairs. Your
HR papers are being mailed to you.”
“What, am I fired?”
“It appears so,” Lionel said. “I don’t know anything else.”
“Let me just go up-,”
“No can do. Your stuff is being mailed to you.”
“What about my-,”
“Everything you own in this building is being either mailed or shipped to you,”
Lionel said, “depending on how much you’ve moved in.”
“Okay, so I gotta go.”
“We agree on something.”
Jasen stiffened up and clenched both fists. “I mean I gotta go and there isn’t a bathroom down here.”
“Me Gusta Tacos has a bathroom.”
“It’ll take me fifteen minutes to get there,” Jasen said.
“I have faith in you. “Lionel took Jasen’s lanyard and put it in his drawer. “Should probably beat the breakfast rush.”
Jasen threw his hands up in the air. He didn’t have to go, but he wanted desperately to go up and ask Bradley what happened. VidYou was no stranger to a haphazard layoff, but they always gave a reason, even a shit one. Would Jasen even be able to get a good reference from VidYou?
He made it for the door and the wildfire smoke-tinged air that was the reference for fresh. The campus was dotted with artistically placed cherry blossoms and ginkgo trees, rock gardens and benches that were really sculptures that were really benches. He took a seat on a bench that was fashioned into two hands holding the weary traveler.
He pressed his palms into his eye sockets. Rent. Power. Food. A dozen streaming services. He had four-hundred in the bank, which in the San Francisco area was like having a twenty in his pocket. What the hell was he going to do?
“Jasen.” Jasen looked up to see a meticulously-attired black man in a suit that Jasen couldn’t have afforded with his Christmas bonus, which he wouldn’t be getting.
The man lowered his sunglasses to reveal bright blue eyes, parrot eyes.
“Do I know you?”
“I’m Larosse,” he said. “I thought my assistant left a text message for you to meet me. I see you didn’t get it.”
“I don’t always keep up with my texts.” Really, Jasen ignored all texts coming from numbers he didn’t know.
“So you got fired,” Larosse said.
“Because I didn’t get the text?”
“You do remember the meeting, right?”
“I was a little bit distracted by a (monumental shit) bout of abdominal pain.”
“So you had no idea you were getting fired today?” Larosse laughed. “That must have been a shock.”
“At least someone should find it funny.”
“I’m just here to get you to your new office. I’m hoping I don’t have to recount the entire meeting for you.”
But on the way across campus, through VidYou Building Three, down the elevator to the sub-basement, beyond the campus server farm to a bank of rooms, cramped and windowless, Larosse did have to recount for Jasen the entirety of the meeting, the plan and his complicity in it, and above all, stressed by Larosse, his agreeing to it all.
Larosse opened the door to the room closest to the server bank. It was frigid. A girl was sitting at one of two desks, the other, apparently, his.
“This is Ophelia Grant,” Larosse said. “She’s like you. I’m thinking she remembered the deal better. Because she handled getting fired a bit better.”
“So if we’re fired by VidYou, who’s really hiring us?”
Larosse reached into both pants pockets and pulled out to bounds of hundreds, a hundred in each bound. He tossed one each to Jasen and Ophelia.
“There’s an extra thousand in each of these that you’re getting to not ask where you’re getting the rest of it from.” Larosse walked out without another word.
“I’m Jasen,” he said. Ophelia wore a green-gray thick crocheted beanie with what looked like space invaders on the edge and an oversized black hoodie with the mid nineties cartoon characters ‘The Earth Patrol’ on it.
“I don’t share my lemon bars,” she said as she pointed to a plastic container. “These right here. I’ll share tuna sandwiches and you can have my whole tuna sandwich when I bring them, but I rarely bring them. Mostly it’s lemon bars, and I can’t share them, I’m sorry.”
“I’m good on lemon bars,” Jasen said. “I know what we’re supposed to do, I just talked to Larosse…”
“Didn’t you have a meeting?”
“I really had to go and I wasn’t paying attention.”
“So you agreed to lose your job, get recruited for black market work because you had to shit?”
“When you put it that way…”
“Did you at least take a video of it?”
“No.”
Ophelia pulled her plastic bin as far away from Jasen as she could without falling over in her chair.
“I’m not saving the internet alone,” she said. “I hope you’re better at hacking than you are at holding in a shit.”
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