Fred’s Place

Picking up from the previous week’s edition...

Until I awoke in the middle of the night hot as blazes. Our sheets were damp with sweat, and not from a night of passionate lovemaking.

“Why is it so hot in here?” Brenda asked.

I heard footsteps overhead and murmuring voices, so I headed up the stairs.

Jimmy was staring at the thermostat.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The air conditioner has quit working. Maybe it’s just a breaker that’s tripped. I wonder where in this house the breaker box is.”

By that time, everyone was up and complaining. Jimmy’s four-year-old twins, his and Tenia’s surprise kids, peered down from the loft they were sleeping in. Their cheeks were rosy red and their hair was stuck to their sweaty faces, but, bless their hearts, they were smiling.

I helped them down while Jimmy struck out in search of the breaker box.

When he returned, his glum expression said it all.

“It’s not the breaker.”

So, we put in a call to Fred, who sounded like he was in high spirits, “spirits” being the operative word. He reassured us he would call a friend of his in the morning and it’d be fixed right up, which turned out to be only half true. He did call him, but it was two scorching July days before he showed up.

In the meantime, the Johnsons and Kings resorted to our tried-and-true method of cooling — box fans. We bought out Walmart’s supply.

We stayed on the boat and in the water during the day to stay cool, and at night slept on top of the sheets.

The day the air conditioner was repaired and cool air filled the house, we acted like lost travelers who’d crossed the Sahara and finally found an oasis. We were all smiles and played games that night.

“Fred’s Place is the best!”

Until.

Until a thunderstorm in the middle of the night knocked out the power.

All the children screamed like Freddie Krueger was in the room with them.

No air conditioning.

No electricity to run the fans.

About fifteen minutes later, right after one of the kids flushed the commode, we discovered Fred’s Place wasn’t on city water. Its water came from a well…that required electricity to work…

Suddenly, everyone had the urge to use the bathroom, and while going outside to pee was an option for Jimmy and me, the females in the crowd balked at the idea.

That’s when Jimmy, bless his heart, volunteered to carry a 30-gallon trashcan down to the boat dock and fill it with lake water and carry it back up.

I wish I could say I felt guilty about not helping him, but I can’t. I think I may have said something about having back spasms and grimaced accordingly.

When Jimmy returned, he looked like he’d lost twenty pounds, his cheeks were sunken and his face was pale. Of course, that pale part was probably because the kids kept shining their flashlights directly at his face. The main thing, though, was Jimmy was a hero and everyone took turns using the bathroom.

Later that night, after everyone had settled back in bed, Jimmy’s bowels that had been tensed for hours decided it was time to relax. And you know how impatient bowels can be.

Rising from his bed, he went to the bathroom only to discover there was no more water in the trashcan. And it wasn’t physically possible to traverse the steps to the lake and back up. No sphincter muscle in the world would be strong enough to hold back that kind of pressure.

So, he grabbed a roll of toilet paper and headed outside into the woods to let nature take her course.

Unfortunately for him, when he pulled down his shorts and squatted, his buttocks must have shown like a streetlamp, because 10,000 thousand mosquitoes swarmed it and extracted a pint of blood before he could get finished.

He made it back to the cabin, feeling washed out and badly in need of a transfusion.

Sometimes, years after a traumatic experience, you can look back and say that it really wasn’t all that bad. That’s not the case for Fred’s Place.

* Taken from The Wit and Wisdom of David Johnson, Volume I1: The Hairy Catfish Caper.