Brokenhearted in Bakersfield

 

45 - THE PARTY WAS A BLAST

To get to the Port-a-Potty I had to work my way through the gang of Fanny’s devotees now gathered at the buffet table, each one holding a plastic drinking glass and paper plate heaped high with free food.  I glanced at the spread and, damn, the cocktail weenies was already gone.  Everybody ought to know that sorrow gives a man an appetite, and being the only blood relation present, I could claim to be the most aggrieved of all, and therefore the most hungry.  Whatever happened to paying your respects?

I made my way to the Port-a-Potty, and just as I opened the door I heard screams and shouts erupting behind me.  I turned in time to see a ranting and raving Lars foaming at the mouth, standing over the hole where Fanny laid.  High over his head, the last Lars held a Molotov cocktail of Smirnoff plugged with a burning rag.  I couldn’t believe what he was aiming to do.

“Jou!

“Jou beetch!

“Cheet me, will jou?  I gabe jou da bess jeers of my life!  An whad jou ever geeb me?  Sheeeeeet!”  Like a deranged yodeling banshee, he cut loose with a bloodcurdling, “Yieeeeeeeeyiyiyiyiyiyiyiyyi!”

The incendiary device suddenly launched from his hand, propelled directly toward the mortal remains, and a fiery blast ignited deep within the littered pit.  As best I can recall, there followed a thunderous sucking sound:

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

The next thing I knew I was emerging from a state of total darkness, a cold and wet darkness foul beyond description.  A male voice called out, “Anybody there?”

Before I could reply, there was a creaking noise and a bright light.

“Gimme your hand.”

A fireman shined a flashlight in my face, and I felt the iron grip of his hand on mine as he pulled me up to my feet.

“Here, wipe your face.”

I accepted the towel and wiped the caked crud burning in my eyes.  I blinked several times to make sure I could see, and I couldn’t believe what I saw.  The mayhem and destruction all around me was breathtaking.

“What happened?” I asked the fireman who’d rescued me.

“Apparently a huge explosion.”

I glanced down and was horrified to realize I was standing up to my knees in the fetid, nasty-smelling schmutz of the melted and twisted Port-a-Potty.

“Nobody knows for sure what happened,” the fireman said, “although the forensic boys suspect the detonation was funerary malfunction.”

He laughed and slapped my back, “Hey, you’re pretty damn lucky, you know that?  It looks like you’re the only person who survived the blast, and all because you were safe inside a shitcan.”

As he continued to laugh I noticed gold lamé flakes start to fall all around like magical snow.  I was struck in witless awe to witness a towering blue flame majestically shooting up from Fanny’s final resting place.

“Everything and everyone was incinerated beyond recognition following the concussive force of the blast,” the fireman laughed.  “Except for a lucky bastard like you.  Good thing nature called.”

But I wasn’t feeling so lucky.  I could not believe that my Great-Granny Fanny’s former house-jockey would be so mean and spiteful as to commit an act of fiendish homicidal vengeance on a corpse like he did.  And in a flash, he also wiped out nearly every living soul I’d ever met in Ulele.  Just then I resolved to look on the bright side of cruel fate and turn a blind eye to this hateful madness, since it also created the giant memorial flame, the great blue torch that sucked up all the seeping natural gas hanging over my old hometown.  Lars had just lit the urban pilot light, and for the first time ever, I was able to take a breath of gas-free air in Ulele.

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