Judi

By Barry F. Schnell

Whether youre seven or seventy, if youve ever been deep in love, or alone and ostracized, its all right here! Fiona Mahoney, Battle Creek, MI

The maestro of the ninety-minute novel! I love to read things I dont have to think about. Again, and again, and again. Lucius Ferguson, WeHo, CA

It reads the same backwards as it does forwards. Im not saying its Satanic, Im just applauding the gimmick. Daffny Deslauriers, USVI

This was, like, everything I ever thought but never had the heart to say. I also dont own any word processing software. Or a computer. Chas Katvic, Chicago, IL

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483636597

Barry F. Schnell

In his first posthumous work, Barry F. Schnell explores the depths of the feline psyche as it has never been extrapolated before. Barry F. Schnells final weeks along the beaches of Pitcairn Island were described by locals as being filled with arguments with palm trees, air quotes, and gluttonous excess. After cramming his manuscript into an emptied, dominated Jeroboam of pink champagne, Schnell grasped a wooden fork and walked into the ocean descending on a school of pufferfish never to be seen erect again.

Book preview

FIFTY-THREE NORTH

W hy didn’t they put in bathrooms? Mom asks.

Every year she asks the same question, with the same disgusted emphasis on why about forty-five minutes into the drive up the most prehistoric road available to our destination. When it comes to long drives, Dad likes to keep it Old School. There are other roads, newer roads—freeways even—but Dad opts never to deviate from the same road he’s taken since his father did the driving to the same locale for years during Dad’s arguably formative days. The previous forty-four minutes, Mom was simply ruminating as to why she married this man who took his nose picking as seriously as he took his sub-par golf.

It was the Twenties when they built camp, Dad counters. Nobody figured they’d need them back then.

Every year he answers the same way, sighs, leans slightly to the right, and jams his left index finger up his left nostril while utilizing the inertia created by the Route 53 cloverleaf exit onto Route 29 West hoping it will yield an as yet unearthed treasure along the septum just yay south of his eyeball. In the rear view mirror, I can detect a triumphant glimmer in his eye while scoping Dad from the back seat when he hits pay dirt during the dig. Dad’s triumphs in an average day are so few, he has to cling to these microbial dominant moments.

Ever since I was born, and even before, they took this same ride so Dad could participate in the big Muschiverein annual golf tournament about ninety-miles northwest of my comfy bed, gel insole slippers, and X-box. Before Dad disappears for the day out to the golf course, which is an additional thirty miles northwest of the retreat compound, he’ll dump me and Mom at the Gemutlichkeit Verruckt Halle (G.V. for short) near the center of camp—officially listed on the state map as Sünde Lager to outsiders. The G.V. is the social meeting hall in this secluded, isolated weekend getaway community of three hundred mostly single room, two hundred square foot cottages those folks who figured they could just use trees for toilets in the 1920’s built as a retreat and recharge outpost away from their factory jobs and the intrusive urban blight. Now three generations in, few improvements have been made to Sünde Lager save for a pay telephone in the kitchen of the G.V. and a pumping well for fresh drinking water at the east end of the Weiblich Grounds where all hallowed Muschiverein athletic competitions and unauthorized spectacles of endurance take place.

Mom and Dad barely exchange words beyond that traditional volley during the entire ride. The sights never change along the route, so I guess they’re out of things to chitchat about after so many years. I don’t ask questions about anything. It’s not that I think I know it all, I’m just skeptical that I’ll get a heartfelt response to anything I ask from the depths of the back seat where Dad’s golf clubs protrude alongside my head from the rear of the hatchback. Quality responses to my questions over the years have somewhat deteriorated amounting to little more than a muttered, whatever from Dad or condescending, "you know that" from Mom. My layman’s guess is they’re just trying to keep any attempts at prolonged conversation doused for their mutual benefit. Mom seems to tolerate Dad more, and Dad seems less agitated, when things in the car are just quiet. I don’t want to be responsible for upsetting the tranquility even if we motor past a farmhouse on fire or decapitated transient with his hitchhiking thumb aloft.

And before I know it, we’re here. Dad peels out of the gravel parking lot behind the G.V. a scant second before I safely yank my left foot out from behind the passenger’s side bucket seat of our 1977 Ford Pinto and slam the structurally compromised door (it’s mostly Bondo and chicken wire) closed. From the outside, no one has ever seen such an ugly car. It’s thirty-five years old. That, Dad said, qualified the oil burning, smoke spewing, and carbon monoxide fungal beast as a classic. I don’t recall seeing another Ford Pinto on the road whenever we are on the road. In the car’s defense, it only has a single, seldom operational headlight, so I could have missed some oncoming Pintos on the other side of the road during Dad’s mandatory night rides up to the Greek (that was really their surname) family owned convenience store for emergency scratch-off ticket runs. On those white knuckle trips, after we pull into the four car parking lot, Dad slaps a sawbuck in my palm and tells me to go inside, while he waits in the car arguing aloud with nighttime AM radio hosts on several different stations, and get him some Tijuana Smalls (cherry) and four scratch-off tickets. Legally, the Greek family has no business selling either to a minor. Fiscally, the Greek family doesn’t know the definition of the word ‘legally.’

Dad can’t be any prouder of the Pinto. He borders on misty whenever he stands beside it duct taping the antenna back on, etc. and has an audience.

I keep it brown to mask the rust, Dad regularly boasts to his peers. And hell, it’s paid for!

The peers laugh every time he says it. I suspect they aren’t laughing with him as much the more the years go by and the Pinto becomes more dilapidated by the motoring second.

Mom does have a few friends at camp—post-childhood friends who, like her, married into this grand life of indentured bladder servitude on Lager-going weekends. They huddle together in the corner of the G.V. furthest away from the stench of the mildewed floorboards throughout the bar where the more cantankerous and lascivious of Lager members hover and sometimes mash just to keep from having conversation. Yes, one actually has to be a member (or one of up to four invited member guests) to partake of all this early 20th Century grandeur. On major event weekends like this, Mom and each of her friends bring books along (for show) then spend the afternoon gossiping away the day while the men take part in the golf tournament as well as the pre—and post jocular festivities that abut it.

Accustomed as they are to the lack of indoor plumbing by now, the ladies have developed a signal for when it is time to venture into the thick forest of oak trees and castor bean plants alongside the G.V. When the urge strikes one of the ladies, she will catch the eye of at least two others and scrunch her face up really tight like she has just bitten into a lemon then shakes her head side to side. The quickly drafted flankers will nod, and out they will tread side-by-side through the oversized, swinging screen doors of the G.V.’s lower level. Constructed long before fire codes and without any official blue print, the exit is the only escape to the outside from the lower level. Each time they are pushed open, the dual swinging doors will close with a loud thwack-thwack! To newcomers, it sounds like back alley gunshot causing the recently indoctrinated to the building to often dive to the floor. Though the seasoned camp goers have become so used to the sound by now, sixty consecutive seconds of quiet seems eerie by comparison. On the upper level of the two-story G.V., there are front and rear exit doors as well as three operative rope ladders that can be tossed from the windows of the expansive feast hall that engulfs four-fifths of the second floor. The small southeast corner of the G.V. second level houses Das Sugar Shack (a candy store) that occupies the younger crowd while adults engage in social intercourse everywhere else in the building.

With Dad away at the golf course and Mom catching up with her friends, that usually leaves me to occupy myself for the next twelve hours until we are back on the road home. Though, some years, Dad will chug one more Manhattan than he is supposed to between greens, and we’ll huddle up together in one of the Lager rental cottages that smell like a potpourri of angry skunk, soiled bunk, and wild funk. We learned the hard way to always pack an overnight bag just in case Dad returns to the Lager from the golf outing unable to manipulate doorknobs properly. Inside the rental cottage there typically will be a chair, two cots, a sleeping bag, and a flashlight. Guess who gets the sleeping bag when it’s Dad, Mom, and me spending the night? Bunkers dug in the WWI muck along the French countryside were far more opulent than the rental digs. Apologists for the rental dwellings say they’re kept to an agreeable minimum standard in order to ensure folks will spend more time outside of the cottages engaging in community gatherings than sequestered inside the cottages. If a family larger than three members desires a rental cottage, they have to rent two of them or arrange for any family members which exceed the inside capacity of three to tuck themselves in inside the crawlspace beneath the cottage where no less than seventy different breeds of spiders command the turf. A report of a wayward beaver also isn’t that uncommon.

A little shy, I don’t care how groin obfuscating the oak and castor bean forest around the camp allegedly is; I hold in my evacuation business until we get back home whenever I can. If we stay overnight, then I have to make a judgment call and ultimately convince myself that the oak and castor bean forest, plus the pitch-black dark night, will sufficiently work together to shield my humility. I don’t know how people survived prior to secure stall doors or eye-high urinal dividers, quite frankly.

Dad isn’t as bashful. As long as he can get at least one arm and half a leg out the front door of the rental cottage, he’ll evacuate his bladder with the full force of gravity times five. One time in particular, when I was about six or so, he stood on the rickety, maple rot porch of rental cottage No. 5 and cut loose with a high trajectory of, ahem, tinkle. The arc of the stream intersected the receptor beam of a battery powered motion detector light mounted above the outer door which immediately fired up and put Dad’s performance on display for a half-dozen teens that had been engaged in passing a Huckleberry Schnapps bottle in the darkness about fifty feet away. They laughed. Dad saluted. Then upon ceasing of free bladder flow, Dad tucked himself in, kissed each bicep, and disappeared back into the rental cottage. Dad never ceases to tell that story at least once per summer on our drive up to the camp compound. I think by regularly repeating the tale he is trying to encourage me to not be so bladder shy on the Lager turf and remember that everybody’s family up at the camp. I have a lot to learn, clearly, on the definition of family and the accepted behaviors within such.

I’m fifteen years old right now. A lot of people call that the awkward age. From my perspective, every age has been the awkward age. I don’t feel any more comfortable in my skin today as I did when I was piddling down my leg at eighteen months. I don’t have specific recollections of that, per se. But if you listen to Dad tell it, that’s all I ever did—soil up the rear seat upholstery of the Pinto eating up the re-sale value in the process. In truth, I’m starting to suspect the notion of reselling the Pinto has never entered his mind. I can’t ever see it being a seller’s market, either.

There are some other kids here, and they all split off into their cliques. There are the athletic kids, the boozehound kids, the townies, and then kids like myself who are just dismissed as weird, because there’s no convenient pigeonhole for us. It’s hard for me to talk to the other kids, because of a shyness thing in general—which is independent of a shy bladder. In the adolescent or juvenile mind, it’s easiest just to dismiss shy as weird. I’m not that athletic though I’ve been known to win an occasional hundred-yard dash at school or the church picnic now and then. I can also toss a pretty good bowling ball. That’s not good enough to pass muster with the Lager athletic kids—whom, up here, are usually involved in training for the Olympics U.S. gymnastics or water polo teams.

I don’t see the big deal about booze. Dad regularly gives me sips from his frothy cocktails. Sometimes he’ll command it. One New Year’s Eve he woke me up out of a sound sleep just after midnight and pushed his Zombie up to my lips decrying, You’re missing out! But the drinks taste horrible to me. I don’t see the appeal. Hence, the boozehound kids don’t think I measure up, either. And when they’ve had too much booze, they really get mean and rowdy. That’s a combination that usually ends up in me being in some type of trauma or peril if I’m within reach.

Townies all know each other, so they know I’m not one of them. They sneak through the three miles of thick oak and castor bean forest surrounding the camp on three sides to tussle with the camp kids or bust in to the rental cottages to play kissing games. They have no respect for Sünde Lager. It’s just a convenient place close enough to their homes to get away from their parents on foot. The camp members don’t chase them off, because they will come inside the G.V. to buy soft drinks, candy, or the legendary rouladen-on-a-stick. All the money taken in during the year goes towards upkeep of the Halle, rental cottages, new leotards and Speedos for the athletic kids, and common grounds of the Lager.

One of my weird friends I call Joe. That’s not his name, and he’s not weird. He told me his name the first time I met him about four years ago, but I rarely remember when people tell me their names—not even ten seconds after they tell it to me. I kept calling him Joe, and he’s been too polite to correct me. But he knows I’m talking to him when I talk to him, because I’ll always look him in the eye. I don’t usually do that with folks on account of they’re always better than me somehow. But Joe is more like me—an outsider on the Sünde Lager inside. I never hear anybody address him by name, so his real name remains a mystery. I’m the only one who calls him, Joe. If I refer to him as such in a rare, face-to-face conversation with another Lager kid, they have no idea who I’m talking about. The first two years everybody thought I had an imaginary friend I’d keep working into the conversation. Finally, last summer, Joe came walking by at an opportune moment so I could point at him and exclaim before the others, "That’s Joe!" My amusing or interesting anecdotes are few and far between. Sadly, that’s one of the better ones.

A dirty river borders the northern edge of the camp. It’s mostly a fast moving stream of septic fish, car tires, and broken off oak tree limbs that stretches all the way from the northern border of the state to the western border of the state. People will put their feet in the water, but only on a dare. And their feet never feel or look the same again. There’s a lot of runoff from castor bean stills that a few camp members operate during the three agreeable weather seasons to keep the G.V. flush with fresh hooch. Joe’s stepsister has set up a permanent residence there along the riverbank, and that’s whom he stays with when he comes to the camp. I never know when he’s going to be there since he doesn’t have a telephone at his real house, and I can’t call him. I just have to go over to his stepsister’s when I’m at the Lager and pound on the trailer door to see if he answers.

Geographically speaking, the Lager is quite the microcosm of terra. Along with the river, the forest, the prairie used for the athletic activities, and a bubbling stream, there are expansive gravel lots, hemp gardens, hills that rise up to five hundred feet above sea level, walking paths that snake for miles around the camp, and a tennis court made from compost and railroad ties. With the legendary lack of sanitation facilities looming over the Lager, everybody in the know knows the spots where she is supposed to divert from the walking paths in order to evacuate a bowel, etc. Hence, if one sees somebody running down the path from the opposite direction towards one of the spots, the runner has the right of way. The other person must step off of the path and grab onto an oak tree until the runner has lunged out of sight into the thatch. It’s a pretty good system, everyone thinks. At night, when the Lager is blacker than the furthest, starless quadrants of space, and one must navigate back to his cottage, an occasional hitch is thrown into the process via collisions or befouled pant legs. It’s a minimal risk for being able to live as one with nature like the Lager’s forefathers from generations before most camp contemporaries concede. I haven’t been knocked over or stepped in anything yet, so it’s all-good to me. It’s easier when you’re younger, Dad always tells me.

To make the quickest complete revolution around the Lager on foot, one must first utilize the main cinder and pebble road until it dead ends at the Enorm Parkplatz. From there, the journey continues atop treacherous, gnarled and scalped tree root ravaged, dirt paths on the outskirts of the camp perimeter. The entire trip circumference covers about four-and-a-half miles and takes just about an hour during daylight. At night, it can take all night. I’ve personally made the revolution a few hundred times, both day and night, over the past three years. While others find plenty of distractions and activities to engage in during their time at camp, I have my own agenda now since learning my way around this storied acreage. Since I was twelve, I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it. Her name is Judi Wendee, and she’s totally the reason I so eagerly come along on these otherwise pointless treks to this toilet-less tundra about a half-dozen times every year.

ONE FINGERED FOURSOME

P each Pech hates golfing with my Dad, Jilly Rücken Haar, according to my Mom, Ethel. While he allegedly doesn’t mind Dad away from the golf course, he hates the pedestrian, sometimes slapstick nature of Dad’s game. Dad could be a much better golfer if he didn’t stop mid-swing to shove his club down the front of his pants and waddle around in circles impersonating dead presidents to get a few laughs, Peach thinks. Dad’s brother, Skitch (my uncle), is best friends with Peach and insisted a few years back that he be in their standing foursome at the annual Muschiverein golf outing. Peach is a four handicap. Uncle Skitch is an eight. Dad is a twenty-one. By design to keep things interesting, they never have a regular for the fourth and generally pluck one of the links bummlers hanging around the driving range waiting for such an opportunity. This year they paired Dad up with Otto Manngeveldt who is the oldest living member of the Muschiverein (he may well be the oldest living mammal at this point in history). I only know this transpired, because Uncle Skitch phoned the G.V. and told Bitt the bartender to wake up, and then send up, more available member golfers as reserves were running a little thin since Otto was already taken. Mom and I had just entered the when I saw Bitt the bartender giving some of the more agile gentlemen leaning up against the bar rail the tap on the shoulder as requested. They’ll need at least seven to nine more warm bodies to wait on the driving range just in case they’re needed.

Other than that, I won’t know what actually happens at the golf tournament until Dad comes back to the G.V. for the post tournament awards banquet dinner. But I have a pretty good guess how things will go since I attended a couple of the tournaments in the past few years to serve as a caddie along with my younger cousin, Storm, for our respective fathers. Two days ago, I told Dad I turned my ankle falling down the steps playing with our cat and wanted to take a break from the action this year. That’s the official version I released to the street. Mathematically, I calculated the eight hours I would normally spend at the golf tournament could translate into eight or nine circles around the Lager to seek out Judi as long as I didn’t stop for lunch. I didn’t tell Dad that part, of course. Dad was initially put off by my slight gimp, but then understood, as I purposely fake limped around the house for several hours sometimes moaning and feigning coming down with the vapors at his feet. Storm will still be on hand to caddie for them, anyway. My plan is then to hook up with Storm after they return from the golf course. Storm often came along as my wingman when I made my hormone fueled treks around the Lager hoping to bump into Judi. Officially, neither of us know what a wingman actually is. We hear the older kids, and some of the married guys, throw the term around pretty willy-nilly. It sounds like an important niche that needs to be filled in order to yield coupling dividends. Storm is pretty much an outsider to the regular Lager kid cliques, like me, and I’m only eighteen months older than he is. In my mind it seems like a much larger age gap on account of me being about half a foot taller than Storm. But I shot up five inches just this summer. So that explains my temporarily lankier wisdom, I guess. I never officially talk about Judi with Storm. He knows whom she is, but he doesn’t yet seem to be that focused on girls. Seemingly, Storm has his own big picture agenda that he doesn’t fully disclose which is just fine by me. I just suspect it has something to do with taking over the world.

In the past couple of tournament years, what Storm and I observed while acting in the capacity of caddies was a lot of bad golf impregnated with alcohol and executed under a cloud of poor sportsmanship. Our dads, as average golfers as they are, usually kept it together—especially with their sons looking on. They’d let fly with the four letter words on a slice off the tee into the adjacent cow pasture like the best of them. But they kept proper sport decorum overall. Since they were together in charge of running the annual tournament for the Muschiverein for over two decades, Dad and Uncle Skitch couldn’t lose complete control.

After they are through on the course, they have to get back to the G.V. upstairs feast hall to set up all the tables, chairs, and prize displays for the awards banquet. Dad always serves as the emcee during the ceremony. He is pretty good at it and knows how to keep the drunken, prime chib (it’s a special compressed concoction of beef shavings and calcified chicken parts made up by one of the