SUPER SHITSHINS TO THE RESCUE!

“Your reign on top was short, like leprechauns. As I crush so-called willies, thugs, and rapper-dons.”

Damn straight, Biggie.

Don’t get me wrong, those lyrics are a wee bit silly, but damn straight, Biggie.

That’s what  I was listening to.

That’s what I was listening to the day I nearly died.

I’m not sure what that says about me. Probably nothing at all.

White dudes in their thirties who enjoy an occasional track from the late Mr. Smalls are the coolest white dudes of all, right?

No?

In any case, it was a night like any other night. The sun had, long since, set and I was enjoying/hating every moment of my nightly jog/run. The rhymes of a rather plump African Ammerican rapper were pumping through my ears, tickling my brain with thier lispy lyrical goodness. My shins were hurting because my shins always hurt when I run/walk.

They’re shitshins.

That’s what shitshins do.

I was in pain, serious pain. My shins were throbbing like the babyhole of a cat in heat. They were hurting more then Will Smith’s ego after Wild Wild West. I needed to take a break. I also needed to catch my breath, but I’m going to blame that on my deficient shins rather than my piss-poor athleticism.

Less than five seconds after stopping, inhaling, and trying to ignore the sound of my lower legs cracking, something flew past me. It was huge. Three thousand pounds of steel and gas, and gears, and hoses, and rubber, and leather and whatever else is used to make a car leapt off of the road behind me and took to the air. It flipped onto the sidewalk, steel screaming, glass flying. It smashed through a tree and a row of bushes, spinning and tossing dirt in every direction. When it finally stopped, it was just ten feet away, headlights shattered, driver side collapsed, smoke seeping from underneath the twisted hood.

Holy shit.

Holy shit. Shit.

Sholy Hit.

I didn’t move, didn’t even blink.

Amazingly, I hadn’t crapped my pants.

Suddenly, I was moving forward. I didn’t particularly want to move forward, but that’s exactly what I was doing. I couldn’t tell if anyone was alive inside the flying deathtrap that nearly transformed me into a racing stripe on the underpants of a poorly wiped backside. I couldn’t image how anyone would be.

Seemed impossible.

I was fully expecting to see something that resembled the crisper tray in Jeffery Dahmer’s refrigerator when I arrived at what was left of the passenger side door – a literal head of lettuce, pinky fingers instead of baby carrots, a scooped out skull being used as a guacamole serving dish.

It was going to be gross. I just knew it was going to be gross. It had to be gross.

Amazingly, the passenger side window was intact. At first glance, I didn’t see any severed limbs.

So that was a good thing.

While the door was a complete mess, the window seemed to be hanging in there. I leaned in close. I could vaguely make out the shadow of a person in the driver’s seat. It was moving. It was a woman. Her head seemed to be exactly where her head was supposed to be. Her arms looked attached, fingers still in place.

“Are you okay?”

She didn’t respond.

“Are you hurt?”

“Went from ten G’s for blow to thirty G’s a show, to orgies with hoes I never seen befo.”

Damn it, I still had my earbuds in. That would have been a really odd response from her.

I popped them out. “Can you move?”

“I’m okay. I don’t…I don’t know…”

She was shaken up. She was babbling, not making much sense. A light near the hood caught my eye, the warm glimmer of fire. Something was on fire under the car.

While I don’t know a hell of a lot about cars – nothing actually - I knew enough to realize that fire probably wasn’t supposed to be there. It probably wasn’t flaming like Bruce Vilanch at Harvey Fierstein’s sixty-thitd birthday bash when they drove it off the assembly line.

“You should probably get out, if you can.” I tried to open the passenger side door. Unfortunatley it looked like Rihanna’s face after a romantic afternoon with her man. It wouldn’t budge.

I had to do something.

“Get back.”

The passenger side window was open just a smidge at the top. I wedged my fingers inside, held tight and pulled toward me. The glass shattered a hell of a lot easier than I thought it would.

Leaning into the window, I wrapped my arms around the girl, pulled her from the car, moved her away from the wreck and sat her down on a rock. By this time, a bunch of cars had stopped and a small crowd had gathered. There were police sirens in the distance, maybe a fire truck. Some guy hopped from his SUV, knelt beside the girl and started asking her questions. Other people were talking on their cell phones. A few were using those very same phones to snap candid shots of the flaming car. Shadowgirl was shaken. Her hair was a mess, eyes glassy. She also seemed a little drunk.

Moron.

For the first time since her car nearly wiped me from existence, I realized that I had very nearly been wiped from existence. This broad’s car almost transformed me into a Tom Savini make-up effect. If my shitshins hadn’t been performing to their absolute shittiest ability, I’d have been a goner.

That’s it.

Gonezo.

The end.

Nothing left but a mashed up smudge of powdered bones and half digested pizza.

It would have been all she wrote.

The fat lady would have sung and the fat man would have died of complications due to his early-onset diabetes.

Some poor bastard would have been scraping the mushed remains of my brain off the sidewalk and picking it out of the grass for days.

I didn’t want to be there, anymore.

I wanted to go home.

I returned the earbuds to my ears, tossed the hood over my head and took off like a goof ball. I think someone said something to me. I ignored them. A jog turned into a run rather quickly and a run became a full-on sprint shortly afterward. The flaming car, and the crowd of people, and the tipsy dope who nearly reduced me into me a barely-there memory in the minds of a few, disappeared into the night.

When I got home I headed straight to the bedroom. My wife was on the phone. I told her to get off.

“Face to face, out in the heat. Hangin’ tough, stayin’ hugry.”

Fucking earbuds.

And so what if I listen to Eye of the Tiger when I run?

When she didn’t get off the phone, I yelled at her. “Just get off the phone!”

I spent the next ten minutes telling her what happened while pacing back and forth, unable to believe it myself. She sat silently, twiddling her fingers, never blinking and barely breathing. When I was done, she said I was like a superhero, that I might have saved that girl’s life.

Yep, that’s me, Shitshins McGee, shattering windows and rescuing half-drunk morons from flaming cars.

She also mentioned that I probably should have stayed there to answer any questions the police might have.

That part wasn’t very superhero like.

In fact, running away like it was the end of a Benny Hill sketch was so un-superhero like that I probably shouldn’t have included it in this story.

That part doesn’t make me look too cool.

Oh well, why change things now?

I SOMETIMES LET MY WIFE DRIVE

      Generally, when the wife and I take to the highway, which is a pretty rare occurrence, I’m the one behind the wheel. This isn’t because I have a penis and I think that it takes a penis to operate a motor vehicle. Driving a car with a penis would be difficult, even for those most gifted in the dong area.

The truth is that, despite my penis, I don’t like cars and I hate driving. It’s boring, and it’s cramped, and dealing with the idiots on the road is a pain in the ass. Plus, there’s nowhere I want to go. If I don’t want to go anywhere and I don’t like the act of getting there, what’s the point? There isn’t one.

I’ve also never changed a tire or oil, or even opened a glove compartment.

Actually, I have done the last thing once or twice.

There are two reasons I insist on driving when the only other person in the car is my wife. Want me to list them? No? Well, I’m going to do it anyway. If you didn’t want to read my ramblings you probably shouldn’t have bought this book, and you definitely shouldn’t have made it this far into it.

The first is that my wife gets nervous every time a truck passes her on the highway, and every time she gets nervous, she nearly drives us off the road. Seriously, in eleven years of marriage we’re averaging two close call collisions into the midway per season. It’s amazing there aren’t multiple shards of windshield embedded in my brain yet.

The second reason I don’t like to let my wife behind the wheel is because she seems to think she knows exactly where she’s going, when in truth, she knows very little. The problem is that she’s lived in southern California her entire life. She thinks she knows every secret back road, shortcut, and quicker route home that there is to know. She thinks she’s smarter than the GPS and the various satellites feeding the GPS its information. That’s right, she thinks she’s smarter than the billion dollar computers floating in space.

This is a woman who isn’t yet sure how to empty the trash can on her laptop.

On this particular occasion, when my wife opened her hand, motioned for the keys, and said to me, “I know a shortcut. It’ll get us home in half the time,” she seemed oblivious to just how silly she sounded.

I knew she was going to get us lost and she knew that I knew that she was going to get us lost. The car even knew she was going to get us lost and the keys clung to my palm like sticky candy to the grubby-fat palm of a pudgy baby.

Needless to say, I was reluctant. I tried to shoo her away. “No, it’s okay. It’s not like we’re in a hurry or anything. I’ve got it.”

“Stop it, Steven. Come on. Give me the keys.”

I should have shoved her over. That’s exactly what I should have done. I should have walloped her in the chest with both hands and slammed her to the pavement. When her skull hit the cement, it might have knocked her unconscious. Once she’d been neutralized, I could have rolled her into the trunk, drove us home, and saved us both the misery of what was to come.

Unfortunately, I did the exact opposite.

Her eyes narrowed and she motioned for the keys once again. “Come on, Steven. Give me the keys.” She meant business.

With a sigh and a shake of my head, I handed over the keys. I really need to start walloping people more.

We were on the highway for less than five minutes when she pulled off.

“Where are you going, hun?”

“It’s a shortcut. Trust me.”

Before continuing, I should mention that we were only half an hour away from our destination to begin with. We didn’t have a long trip ahead of us. We weren’t traversing the country by covered wagon and stopping at night to cook beans from a can and blast a buffalo in the face for protein. There wasn’t a chance that either of us was going to die of dysentery along the way. The car was air-conditioned. It was comfortable. There was a bag of fun-sized snickers in the back seat.

In a roundabout sort of way, the regular cut was actually a shortcut.

The wife wasn’t hearing it, though. She thought she knew a quicker way home and damn it she was going to take it!

Ten minutes into the journey it was fairly clear to the both of us that we were lost. The direct route the highway provided was a distant memory. Even if we had wanted to turn around and go back the way we came, we wouldn’t have been able too. We’d been wandering for too long and we’d past the point of no return.

I felt like I needed to say something. “We’re lost, aren’t we?”

“No. Stop it. I know exactly where we’re going.”

I wasn’t buying it. A blind man with one deaf ear, the inability to speak, a pack of rodents living in his lower intestine, and wooden pegs where his arms should be wouldn’t have bought it. My wife is a terrible actress.

She was nervous. She wiped a bead of sweat from her face, tried her damndest to erase the look of utter confusion from her face, and turned on the radio. Some terrible 80s song began to play and she threw one hand into the air like she’d just stepped into the hottest club in town and she owned the place. “Alright! I love this song!”

I still wasn’t buying it. It was a distraction. She was trying to throw me off the scent and it wasn’t going to work. No one likes old Bananarama songs that much. Not even Bananarama.

Fifteen minutes later, the sun began to set. The car jumped and the road turned to gravel. Our tires were spitting dirt, and there were rocks banging against all of the car-stuff on the underside.

I think I heard a piston pop. I dunno what it was. Something popped.

Before I could say a word, my wife held up her hand and pointed her palm at my face. “Not a word, Steven! Don’t you dare say a word! The turn is right up here. Three more blocks and we’re there!”

My only problem was that there didn’t seem to be anything even vaguely resembling “blocks” where we were.

We passed by a fence that looked like it had been constructed in the early 20s from the bones of dead cowboys. I swear I saw a femur. There was a dead raccoon twisted in the barbed wire, binding them all together and blowing in the breeze like a pirate flag. It was a warning.

Five minutes later I spotted a rusted Port-A-Potty in the middle of an empty field. Rip Van Winkle himself peeked out from the door and flashed us the finger. I think I might have seen his junk.

When the sun dropped from the sky I began to get worried. We’d been four-wheeling through the backwoods of DeliveranceTown for nearly an hour. Sure, we hadn’t yet been kidnapped and butt raped by the locals, but it was bound to happen sooner or later. I’ve heard that hillbilly butt rape happens most often at night. Trust me on this. I read it in a pamphlet.

From the darkness outside, something howled. I can’t say for certain if it was a wild dog, or a wolf, or some poor, unsuspecting sap bent over the backdoor of a pickup truck getting his fudge packed more awkwardly than Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory. It was one of those things, though.

Something smacked against the window and we both jumped, and my wife laid into the gas. Suddenly the car was swerving, careening back and forth and tearing into the uneven ground beneath us. A flash of lightning exploded over the mountains. Something laughed. The radio went dead and something that sounded like a lion roared. I think I even heard a gunshot.

I was seconds from leaning over, walloping my wife in the face, taking the wheel, and getting us the hell out of whatever circle of hell we’d accidently driven into when the gravel road transformed, quite suddenly, again into pavement. A streetlight popped into existence just over the horizon and three more followed soon after. A couple minutes later my wife maneuvered the car back into civilization.

Not only were we on a street I recognized, but we were also ten minutes from home. A trip that should have lasted thirty minutes at the most, had taken us nearly an hour and a half.

My wife turned to me and smiled brightly. “See? Told you I knew where I was going.”

I think she actually expected me to buy it. The woman’s got balls.

GOODWILL, GONE BAD

My wife and I have two cats. Actually, my wife has two cats. They only became my cats as a result of marriage.

I hate them both.

Okay, scratch that—maybe hate is too strong a word. I should probably reserve the word hate for people like Hitler, Pol Pot, Perez Hilton, and maybe Wilford Brimley.

I don’t have to check my blood sugar if I don’t want to.

You don’t own me, Brimley.

While I can’t honestly say that I hate my cats as much as Blood Sugar Brimley, I don’t really like them all that much either.

They’re old, and they’re needy, and they’re always cranky. They yell at me when they’re hungry. They walk on my head when I’m in their way. They steal the pencils from my drawing table and bat them around the room. They gnaw on my shoestrings. They leave hair all over the place. They puke. They attack my feet while I’m sleeping. They’re always fighting and knocking things over and digging in the trash and walking on the counters.

They’re plain old rude—and they’re annoying.

If they were people, they’d be assholes.

If they were rich people, they’d be Kardashians.

A year or so ago, I was cleaning out the garage when I noticed that it smelled a lot worse than usual. Since we keep the little jerks' litter box in the garage, it tends to always smell a bit “pooey” in there—especially in the summer months. This was something else, though. This was something more. No matter what I did—no matter how hard I scrubbed or cleaned or wiped or disinfected—the odor wasn’t going away.

It was rancid, and it was old.

It smelled dead.

Try to imagine the corpse of a greased up Jonathan Winters, slathered in rotten eggs, tossed in the oven, and cooked for thirty minutes at 450 degrees. Maybe there are couple spoonfuls of guacamole over his eyes? Maybe a trout wedged in his butt crack?

That’s how this smelled.

After a bit of sniffing and searching around, I traced the scent to my car.

Did I run over a skunk?

No. The tires were free of skunk brains.

When I leaned in the open window, the odor slapped me in the face. After it smacked me once, it coiled back and delivered a backhand. As I was reeling, it traveled up my nose, into my skull, and spread outward like a fart cloud laced with Agent Orange.

Whatever the ungodly stench was, it was emanating from inside my car.

Standing at the doorway leading into the house were both the cats. The jerks were just standing there beside each other. They were watching me. They were watching me with their smart little cat eyes. They knew exactly what I’d stumbled upon and what I was about to see.

They were watching me, and they were laughing.

Cats are smarter than you think. They understand, they formulate, they plan, and they strategize. Cats are working out all the angles when you’re still settling on a first move. Cats are whisker-deep in semester two of Calculus 101 when you’re still struggling with long division.

             With the little bastards watching me from across the room with their unblinking eyes and grinning from behind their whisker-laden cheeks, I opened my car door and crawled inside.

I could swear I’d stepped into the fifth circle of hell.

My eyes watered, and my chest heaved. I used two fingers on one hand to pinch my nose and the other hand to cover my mouth. I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t want to breathe.

On the passenger seat was a dried up pile of cat plop. On the floor beneath my feet was another, and in the little drink holder between the two seats was another still.

Damn it. What sort of sick bastard drops a load in a drink holder?

The back seat was filled with it too—piles of dried-up cat dump—crumply like rocks and discolored with weeks of decay. It was wedged between the mattresses, flattened against the floorboards, and spread across an old magazine. Some of it was drenched in piss and stuck to the seats.

Partially because we were away on vacation and partially because I work out of home, the car hadn’t been driven in a while. There was no telling how long those sons of bitches had been using my car as their personal four-thousand-pound litter box.

That’s when I remembered it—the Goodwill stuff.

There were at least ten garbage bags of stuff we planned on giving to Goodwill in the rearmost section of the SUV. They’d been there for a while. I told my wife I’d drop them off months ago, but laziness got the better of me—as laziness tends to do.

I dislike laziness almost as much as I dislike my cats.

Still wobbly from the odor, I hobbled on spaghetti legs to the rear of the car and opened the back door.

What greeted me was a sight no human being should ever have to see.

Rock-hard feces spilled out the door and onto my feet. The bags were covered in pebbly crap and caked with blackish-yellow stains. Everything was sticky and crumply—crusty and moist in ways that didn’t seem scientifically feasible.

It smelled like a mass grave—like a hundred corpses were buried somewhere beneath our bags of old clothes and ill-fitted shoes. It smelled like what a Civil War battlefield must have smelled like.

I started to cough, and when I started to cough, I started to inhale.

It was inside me. Poo particles coated my nose and filled my lungs. Once inside, they set up shop, joined together, and began to procreate. They sent their kids off to school and invited their friends over for a barbecue. They were planning on staying a while.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the cats still in the doorway.

I was lying before when I said I didn’t hate them.

I charged in their direction, and they scattered. One of them zoomed beneath my legs, causing me to stumble forward, and land on my face—inches from a rocky-stiff cat turd.

I spent the afternoon cleaning, spraying, and cleaning my car again. When I was done, I repeated the process.

If I thought for a second that my wife wouldn’t kill me, I’d kill the cats.

If I thought for a second that I wouldn’t go to jail, I’d kill my wife.

If I thought for a second that he wouldn’t be dead in five years anyway, I’d kill, Wilford Brimley.