More Cowbell!!

The week before last, I took a class on descriptive writing through the Hugo House. The Hugo House is a non-profit organization that seeks to further the art of writing in various ways. The class was helpful and informative and I'd strongly recommend that budding writers such as myself consider taking a class or two. After the week was done I had actually written a couple of things that I'd consider showing to other people. One of them is posted below. As you can see, I have "issues" with long run-on sentences.

The purpose of the writing exercise that spawned this little piece was to make something ordinary seem strange and foreign by playing up the stranger elements. I think I did relatively good work here, making my fairly normal suburban neighborhood seem strange and odd.

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It was that time again. Through the single pane of glass in the kitchen window I could hear the muffled sound of my father horse whistling and ringing the old cowbell hanging off our front porch light in that way that could only mean, “Come home at once.” I surrendered my money, properties and “get out of jail free” card to Joel, who had once again claimed the role of banker, and took my leave.

I left the ramshackle old farm house my bible-thumping friends lived in. Mounting my rusty blue ten-speed I pedaled past the row of caged rabbits their family raised as a supplement to the meager quantities of foodstuffs they were able to purchase with their father’s salary as a pest eradication technician. A faint acrid scent wafted off the symmetrical piles of dung beneath the wire-floored cages and their inhabitants stared plaintively at me, begging for their freedom with their liquid brown eyes.

More than once I had been tempted to liberate the creatures. Their cells were never locked. As it did now, fear of the unknown consequences of such a noble action had always stayed my hand. Who was I to consign the entire Butt family to slow starvation, no matter how furry and adorable their food source? Having recently witnessed one such prisoner rapidly stunned with the blunt end of a hand-axe and than dispatched in quick succession with the other, I was comforted by the knowledge that their executions would be quick and relatively merciful.

As the rabbit prison passed and receded from view my attention now drifted to the next yard down the narrow gravel drive. As I gained speed and began to kick up a thin gray cloud of dust from my tires, the guardians of this home trotted into view. They immediately noted my presence and charged wildly. The mated pair of enormous Golden Labrador Retrievers, Yogi and Cindy, wanted to make sure that I understood that this was their territory. As such, they kept pace while snarling, barking and baring their teeth in a vicious, rabid-like frenzy.

Only a high chain link fence protected me from the murderous instincts of these beasts. Knowing I was safe, I put pressure on my hand brakes and returned their aggression with barks and howls of my own, inciting the dogs into even greater exertions. I briefly allowed myself to imagine the day when I would induce such a paroxysm of rage that Yogi and Cindy would entirely forget about the wall of the house at the far end of the fence and smack into it at full speed like a scene from a Road Runner cartoon. Such an event failed to occur today, as the dogs sensed the oncoming obstacle and quickly pulled back. The racket subsided as the bulk of the house interposed itself between us. I let off the hand brakes began to move faster.

Reaching the final third of the long dusty driveway, the sounds of numerous exotic birds began to fill the air. These birds dwelled within a number of filthy cages that filled the back porch of the broken down two story home occupied by a woman I mentally referred to as “Giant Smelly Mamma.” I had no idea if the birds, like the rabbits, were raised as a food source but I found it difficult to believe that one could find any real sustenance on the bones of canaries and cockatiels. Perhaps a parrot could provide enough meat, but to my knowledge there were no parrots on that porch.

As if on cue, the relative peace was shattered by the misbegotten love child of a shriek and a bellow. Words were presumably contained within the sound, but if they were in English or some other language I couldn't tell. One of the urchin-like children of the woman resentfully lurched to her bare feet and slouched out of the weedy patch of soil she and her numerous dirt-smudged siblings had been playing in. The girl had clearly not responded quickly enough to the first summons as a second one pealed forth from the window of the upstairs bedroom as if it were in fact the cage of a giant mutant cockatoo. The girl of no more than eleven or twelve shouted “I’m Coming!!” in retort and then, with only a little less volume, “Fuck!!!” Her brothers and sisters sniggered derisively and then went back to playing House or War or whatever it was they were doing.

As if to remind me that I was really no different from the girl in any substantial way other than our relative willingness to use foul language, the sound of my father loudly demanding my presence once again filled my ears. Clearly, I had not responded quickly enough to his summons either. It upset me to think that there might not be much difference between my family and the filthy spawn that inhabited that house. After a moment of thought though, one difference occurred to me. Though our situations might be quite similar, at least my family was classy enough to use a cowbell. Thus being reassured, I strove to peddle harder, hit the blacktop and turned left onto 115th street.