Roll & Smoke & Boogie
“Let’s see what Dream Weaver will do. I could use a new dream about now.”
The last thing Plank had time for was slugging it out in court. The fact that his brother-in-law was threatening to press charges had his muscles in a knot. How could you trespass on your own sister’s front yard?
He had developed a newfound sympathy for his neighbor’s pit bull who lived conjoined to a chain staked in the ground. But for that chain, the dog would be free to act out its instinctive aggression, a tendency bred into the canine. It was a situation Plank was coming to understand in a visceral and unpleasant way.
Plank might posses enough sense to refrain from stuffing his sister’s sorry husband into a garbage disposal, but that didn’t stop him from obsessing over the idea. As far as he was concerned, he was no more guilty than the rest of his fellow Americans. He worked hard when he could find a job, was fairly moderate with his drinking, maintained a valid driver’s license, and had never abused any of his numerous ex-girl friends.
That Conway the Jerk had singled him out of the vast sea of humanity for the sole purpose of inflicting emotional distress was beginning to get up Plank’s ass in a big way. So far the tether holding him to the earth was keeping things in check. But ever since the recent visit by a pipsqueak calling herself Sargent Alonzo, Plank felt things beginning to come unravelled. It was only a matter of time before the weakest link in the chain would snap, and then all bets were off.
When his cell phone rang, Plank scrambled around his small living room in search of the gizmo. He initially considered cancelling the land line to be a stroke of economic genius; but the more he dealt with his second hand mobile device, the less he liked the digital revolution.
After the obnoxious tenth ring, the cell suddenly went silent, leaving Plank standing beside the couch with a cushion in his hand. He was starting to see why the Me Generation were flocking like sheep to the latest self-help gimmicks that were all the rage. It seemed like everybody he knew was either into therapy, rehab, or hot yoga. If he saw one more pudgy housewife in skintight yoga pants he was afraid he might go full tilt postal. A move he couldn’t afford right now.
The one person he was sure didn’t indulge in self-help was Conway. In the years since his sister had dragged Conway into the family, Plank had made a careful study of the beefy conman’s act. That his brother-in-law was a lawyer who represented white collar criminals was two strikes against the guy right off the bat. If it was true that character matters, Conway was little more than a turd in a bowl of Kool-Aid.
Plank suddenly remembered that he’d left the phone in his jacket pocket, which hung on a peg behind the kitchen door. He retrieved the thing and noticed the battery was down to one bar. Finding the phone was one thing, but locating the charger would require more neurons than he felt like engaging at the moment.
The afternoon was slipping away, so he sauntered onto the patio and considered smoking some of the stuff Julio had picked up on his latest run to Trinidad. Plank still couldn’t believe marijuana was legal in Colorado, or anywhere else. Who was going to run the country when the present crop of six-year-olds grew up with the worst short-term memory in human history? He wasn’t opposed to mind altering interludes, but since legalization, Julio had become something of a babbling idiot.
Plank looked at his phone and remembered that the thing had Caller ID. It took a minute, but he pulled up the last call and recognized the number as belonging to Elaine S. Lockhart. That his sister had kept her maiden name held out a glimmer of hope. Maybe that was why Conway kept her on such a short leash.
He punched in the number and put the phone to his ear. The fact that a growing number of scientists believed cell phones were the latest cause of brain cancer rattled his equanimity.
“Earth to Plank,” he said to himself, “get a fucking land line.”
Elaine was eight years older than her “little” brother, with Conway coming in a good ten years older than that. Conway’s 47 years might not be old in biological terms, but his premature grey hair made him look on the questionable side of ancient. Plank had nothing against old age, as long as it didn’t include him. The slow deterioration of the body was something he’d just as soon happen to somebody else. Preferably in another galaxy.
“Hey, little brother, thanks for calling me back,” Elaine said, her voice bouncing off Plank’s ear drums in an irritating delay.
“The miracle of technology,” he quipped.
“Irony never did suit you.” Elaine had always known how to give as good as she got. Plank noticed a cloud starting to grow into something ominous. Due to a prolonged drought, the cloud sported a patina of ambiguity. “You call to say your lap dog called off the police?” he said, trying to keep the acid out of his voice.
“He hasn’t mentioned it,” she said. “You know how he is.”
“Unfortunately.”
Elaine let out a slow breath that sounded like a vacuum cleaner in the phone’s tiny speaker. “I need a favor and it has to stay between you and me, Plank. No bullshit.”
Plank held the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen. He confirmed that he was talking to his sister and felt a wave of apprehension. Elaine didn’t ask for favors.
“Plank?”
He hoisted the phone and willed himself to sound composed. Life was weird enough without additional melodrama. “I’m all ears,” he said.
Elaine cleared her throat. “Maybe I better tell you in person. Can I come over? I don’t want to be a bother.”
Plank watched the cloud turning a strange shade of purple and figured the valley was in for some serious shit in short order. “You see the weather lately?” he asked. “The sky looks like the build up to Armageddon.”
“It’ll only take me a few seconds to get there.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“In your driveway.”
Plank was halfway across town before he noticed the Subaru was running on fumes. He pulled into a corner mart and put as much gas in the tank as his credit card would tolerate. When he was done, he made a mental note to pay down the balance as soon as his unemployment check rolled in next week. No matter how you sliced it, the economy was kicking his rear end. And as Plank had learned the hard way, he was anything but too big to fail.
The threatening weather had moved on to happier hunting grounds and now the day was trying its best to be a scorcher, a fact that emphasized the Subaru’s malfunctioning air conditioner. Plank usually didn’t mind riding with the windows down, but this summer was challenging his agnosticism. Somebody, somewhere, was monkeying around with the climate, which made the idea of a cosmic manipulator seem almost plausible. “The Wizard of Odd,” he muttered as he turned onto a service road and into the valley’s newest shopping strip.
When he found a parking space, the engine rattled into silence, and he checked his bearings. The list in his pocket only contained a handful of items, but the journey to town had squandered most of his B vitamins. He had read that beer was chock full of nutrition and figured a short pit stop on the way home was in order.
Plank couldn’t quite come to grips with his sister’s sudden change of tack. Elaine had always been the steadier of the siblings, to the point of appearing to the right of square. But the idea that she was coming out of the cultural closet after all these years shook Plank’s foundation.
He was about to get out of the car when a chubby guy in a uniform emerged from the store and pretended to take a professional interest in Plank’s business. That the guy was obviously a weekend rent-a-cop and enjoyed looking stupid made Plank chuckle. These days everybody was an actor, the unintended consequence of a world awash in a tsunami of electronic noise. Having neither TV nor computer, Plank had been spared the fate of becoming a cyber robot. So far, his status as a digital bumpkin was a pleasurable experience.
When Chubbo drove away, Plank walked into the Shop & Hop and began working his way down the aisles. He didn’t usually push a buggy during his shopping trips, but he had to admit the thing was a shade more practical than buying only as much as his arms could carry.
Like most strip center markets, the Shop & Hop was chock full of junk. Plank had never considered himself to be a paragon of health, but if what lined the store’s shelves was the bedrock of American cuisine, the next economic boom was going to be the funeral business.
He stopped in front of the tobacco display and scanned the offerings. Plank might confess to numerous vices, but smoking wasn’t one of them. He spotted a box of rolling papers and tossed a couple of packs in his buggy. The fact that sister wanted rolling papers was completely incomprehensible, but he’d have to sort that out later.
When the girl behind the counter cleared him for takeoff, he sauntered back to the Subaru and aimed for a dingy saloon he used as a respite from normality when the need arose. He had never figured out why the place was called the Psyche Ward, but assumed it had something to do with the sort of regulars the place attracted.
According to his dashboard clock, he had just enough time to toss back a cold one before his return home.
“Howdy, dude,” a burly guy behind the bar said. “What brings you into the big city?” Plank had known Budro since high school and refused to get used to the new shaved head thing. “Supply run. One cold brewski and it’s back to the shack.”
Budro nodded and pulled a bottle from a tub of ice behind the bar. “Heard that slime bag brother-in-law of yours claims you tried to attack him with a weed eater. What’s behind that?”
“Penis envy,” Plank smiled.
“I always thought that prick needed a lobotomy,” Budro opined.
“Maybe in the next life,” Plank agreed.
“You believe in that shit?” Budro muttered as he began wiping down the bar. Happy Hour would commence in a few minutes and he liked to think his customers appreciated a clean place in which to drown their eccentricities.
“Believe in what?”
“The next life. I always figured once was enough.”
Plank put his bottle down and let the question roll around in his head. Budro wasn’t much of a philosopher, but every now and then he could sneak up on you. “You reckon they got a saloon in the afterlife?”
“Not likely,” Budro said, shaking his concrete block of a head.
“In that case, we’re on the same page.” Plank liked the way the dialectic had produced a sensible agreement in just a few sentences. The whole idea of language was nothing short of miraculous.
Plank parked the Subaru in the gravel drive and gathered the supplies he’d brought from town. He felt a smattering of pride that he’d talked Budro into a belated birthday six pack to go. As he walked to the house, he noticed the sky easing into the last gasp of daylight.
He stepped in the front door and saw Elaine reading an old National Geographic. The way the light touched her face made her seem less substantial than he had always taken her to be. The facial muscles had put up a good fight against gravity all these years, but were beginning to lose ground despite the expensive makeup.
“Sorry I took so long; got side-tracked on the way home.”
Elaine smiled, the light tickling her skin. “Still loyal to Old Milwaukee, I see.”
Plank carried the six pack to the fridge, considered opening one, then thought better of it. “You find everything okay?” she asked, getting up from her perch.
“No problem,” he said as he rummaged inside the grocery bag for the rolling papers. “But I’m having a hard time with you taking up smoking for some reason.”
Elaine opened her shiny blue purse, removed a small plastic vial, and handed it to her brother. Plank held the vial to the light, noticed a tiny label that said, “Dream Weaver.” He opened the vial and held it to his nose. “Jesus,” he said, “what’s this about?”
“I told Conway I was visiting an old sorority sister in Denver. Which was partially true; but my main goal was to find that,” she explained, pointing at the vial.
“And?”
“And I have cancer.”
Plank had known his sister for twenty seven years and until that moment had no idea how much he loved the woman. Elaine and cancer had no room for each other in his mind. She was solid, the even keel of the family ship.
He took a seat and studied the contents of the vial. Whoever had cultivated the stuff inside the cylinder knew what they were doing. The bud glistened with oily potency, the leaves coated with resin.
“You ever tried marijuana?” he asked.
Elaine brushed a hair from her face. “Once in college. All we did was giggle and get hungry.”
Plank removed the bud and held it up for a closer look. “This is a different animal than the weed you tried in college,” he told her. “You’re liable to need a seat belt if you plan on smoking this.”
“The concierge said it would help with chemo,” she said.
“Concierge?”
“He was quite knowledgeable about his products. Dream Weaver is very popular with women in treatment.” Elaine reached out and took the bud. “I thought I’d try this before committing to the chemo routine.”
“Do you have another option?”
“Mastectomy,” she said.
“Some choice.”
Elaine smiled and patted his hand. “Let’s see what Dream Weaver will do. I could use a new dream about now.”
Plank’s trajectory had never been smooth sailing. More of a teetering orbit around a dark star, destination unknown. But seeing his sister smiling in the face of cancer was about as unsettling as it got.
“You know how to use rolling papers?” he asked, tossing her a pack.
“I watched a tutorial on YouTube,” she said.
Plank couldn’t help but laugh. “This ought to be good. Hold off until I get a beer, I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
Ned Mudd resides in Alabama where he engages in interspecies communication, rock collecting, and frequent cloud watching. He is the author of The Adventures of Dink and DVD (a space age comedy). Some of Ned’s best friends are raccoons.
If this post resonated with you, hit the ♡ to let us know.
If you have any thoughts about it, please leave a comment.
If you think others would like it, hit re-stack or share:
If you’d like to read more:
If you want to help create more Juke, upgrade to a paid subscription (same button above). Otherwise, you can always contribute a one-time donation via Paypal or Venmo.
Thanks, Ned, as always, for this piece.
Thanks. As the Zen guys say, Plank is perfect just as he is, but could use a little work. He's getting trying.