By Car Johnson
Since I’m legally forbidden to own any more microwaves, I had to rely on my oven for cooking. I hated it. Using an oven is for little girls and their Mommies. Guys don’t use ovens. We nuke things or use fire. So, I built a barbecue in my backyard. I dug a pool sized pit and fashioned a grill out of old car and bicycle parts. Charcoal is for wimps, so I filled it up with nitroglycerin. Unfortunately, no one told me nitroglycerin pills an the stuff that explodes aren’t the same thing. All I did was end up wasting my mother’s heart medication. After I cleared out the pit, I decided to just go with good old fashioned wood. It was hard dragging all my furniture into the backyard, but I had inherited my Great Uncle Wilber’s pine house set and I wanted my food to have a nice smoky flavor.
Now I just needed some meat. I didn’t want to pay too much, so I decided to go to a farm and ask for any animals that had died before they had the chance to get whacked and turned into tasty meat chunks. The first farm I called told me I was a freak and threatened to phone the police if I contacted them again. I called another farm and claimed to be a carcass removal service. They told me to come over the next day. I rented a refrigerated semi and headed to Happy Harvest Farms. I searched the premises and found ten chickens who died of old age, fifteen cows that met their maker at the hands of some wolves (I bypassed the cows corpses that just looked sick. I may be an idiot, but I’m not going to risk getting mad cow disease,) and one still born calf. After I stuffed them into the semi, I went to the dude who ran the farm to tell him I was done. Guess what? I didn’t have to pay him. He paid me! How cool is that?
I drove back home and parked the truck next to my house (and several others). I didn’t have a place to keep all the meat and the truck would keep it cold. To placate the neighbors in advance of any complaints, I started to plan a block party to introduce my new barbecue. It needed to be big. I was showing off the world’s greatest barbecue, not gloating over the fact that my no talent kid got the part of a tree in school’s production of “Snow White.” I called some theater buddies of mine to perform the play I wrote called “The Phone Booth and the Derelict – A Love Story” during the party. The play needed a soundtrack, so I hired ten one man bands (I guess that makes it a band of one man bands) and built a stage for them to perform. I didn’t have any wood left, so I used cardboard boxes filled with heavy bags of sugar left over from my attempt to break the world’s record for the largest cup of sweetened tea. (I stopped the attempt when I learned that Guinness didn’t even have such a record . I wrote to them and asked why, but they never responded. ) I also stocked the bar in my kitchen with all sorts of spirits and custom mugs made out of toilet tanks.
I didn’t want to bother with boring old invitations. Instead, I walked around the block with a bullhorn and a sign around my chest. My neighbors yelled at me and told me they wanted boring old invitations. I got my niece Sandy, who’s a helicopter pilot, to drop invitations weighted with my Grandma’s famous banana bread over the houses of the people I wanted to invite. There were a few bread related injuries, but nothing too serious.
On the day of the party, I lit up the barbeque for the first time. The grease from the car and bicycle parts made the air thick with black film, but the fire seemed to be roaring nicely. I had just placed the meat on the grill when my guests started showing up, and they all asked where the free food and booze was. I showed them to the kitchen and brought out my emergency supply of potato salad. After several gallons of vodka and the first act of my play, a thickening cloud of smoke told me the meat was ready. I pulled in onto a tarp and started to cut at with my trusty circular saw. The meat was a little crisp and covered in a layer of black sludge, but it tasted great to me. Everyone else thought differently. They stuck with the potato salad and liquor. All in all, the party seemed like a success, at least until the storm hit.
The stage sagged and collapsed, spewing young actors and instrument covered musicians into the crowd of drunk party goers. Then came the flood that carried all the meat straight through my house. Since I had no furniture at the time, it all flowed to the front door and out into the street. The Great Meat Flood of Tanner Lane made all the local papers and I was left to clean up the mess and pay for all the damages and injuries my party had caused. At least I didn’t end up arrested or in the hospital. I dismantled the barbecue and turned the pit into a pool. My oven didn’t seem so bad now.
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Wanna talk to Car? Email him at: Car_Johnson_Rocks@hotmail.com
