Roads, Mills, Laps

More land has been sold down the road from where I live. Toll Brothers arrived on the scene and snatched it up, lickety-split; Indian families and old people are walking around looking at plots, scratching their heads, pointing to churned up ground, standing where the living room is supposed to be; they got their blueprints upside down, but their dreams of artificial elbow room right side up.

Thick guys in hard hats holding shiny shovels stand around waiting for flat bed trucks to arrive and deliver brobdingnagian concrete donuts that will be lodged in the ground to facilitate the flowing of torrents of shit, chunky toilet paper, and an occasional happy meal doll into an underground Mississippi-size confluence of other neighboring McMansion brown water streams. This turbid mass of discarded waste raises the water table at the local sewage plant; the Happy Meal toys sink to the bottom, but the lighter turds stay at the top and escape the overloaded sewage plant, making their way into the Brandywine River where they are confused by Red Man-chewing anglers for keeper-sized Brook Trout.

Fresh servings of Mexicans stand down the road waiting to be picked up by parasite landscaping companies who will hand them gasoline-powered leaf blowers in the fall, ergonomic snow shovels in the winter, and five crisp dollars a day.

Bulletin boards will rise up from the sides of the new roads into disposable luxury land, advertising the sequel to that movie Hoot: Hoot 2–Hooting For the Good Guyz . Toll Brothaz families will drive to the new movie theater were just built in the deforested, windswept field where they will root for the displaced owl with the big eyeballs; they’ll jeer the evil developers in the movie; they’ll boo them and compare them to those greedy assholes down the road–those guys who are dismantling Farmer John’s old barn brick-by-brick and erecting those gaudy McMansions.

Made in China blow-up santas are being packed (with their plastic air generators) in large container ships by emaciated Chinese laborers with hand-rolled cigarettes dangling from their sagging mouths. The containers sail the seas, enroute to their ultimate destination: the front of these new palaces. Toll Brothaz spray-on green lawn gunk seeps into the blow-up Santas, making him look like the Grinch. A Mexican with a leaf blower accidentally trips on the blowup generator cord thing while trying to blow a stubborn leaf stuck in Santas ass; he breaks his neck and dies a few days later; a nervous parasite Landscaper pays a shifty ‘illegal handler’ to dump the body in the last part of the forest (itself under contract for development next year).

The Mexican decomposes a year later; excess runoff from deforested lands washes out the the Mexican’s shallow grave and carries parts of his skeleton down the Brandywine river. A rib lodges in a rock in the river. One of the red man-chewing fishermen slips on a turd (thinking he had landed a brook trout) and catches his balance by grabbing onto the rib. A fibia legbone thing flows five miles further down the river and ends up blocking a grate that goes into the water treatment plant. Because of this stoppage, a tooth (one of Hector’s molars) makes its way into the wrong pipe and travels into a series of tubes that lead to McWorld part Two. The tooth winds and tumbles along until it finds itself in a pipe belonging to the house where the Mexican died; the tooth pops out of the outside spigot at precisely the right time when the old man with the Bush n’ Eaglez sticker is washing his Suburban on a warm spring day.

The tooth flys out of the hose at 50mph, ricochets off the suburban, and pops a hole in the blow-up Easter Bunny on the guys front lawn; it finally lodges itself in the tire of a car across the street. The tire deflates; the car sinks down to its rim like a dying beast; the man with the hose raises his fist in euphoric exaltation because the car belongs to the neighbor’s girlfriend who had parked it there in wanton disregard for the unwritten McWorldPart2 ‘code’ about parking rank and privilege. The man with the hose had been in that development since it was a churned up field and so it was justice served to see her car with a flat–’Goddamn newbies,’ the man mutters under his breath as he inspects his Suburban for a dent, spitting into his hands and wiping across his enormous vehicle. The man walks over to his shriveled Easter Bunny and tosses it into the trash.

The molar had lodged itself in the tire and when it was repaired, the tire guys at the new tire store next to the movie theater didn’t spot it. After all, they were just grease monkeys–wastoid potheads, high school dropouts out to help deal anything from black tar heroin down to shrooms to the white dads with the secret lives, who lived in the single-family mansions on the top of the hills. The white dads also liked gimps but they couldn’t get them at the tire shop; they had to go on the internet for them.

So the molar went wherever the car went; it rolled and rolled making fast circles. Some days it made a clanking noise when it pulled into McWorldPartTwo, summoning the yentas to their windows, causing them to call the other yentas and make gossip about that car with the funny noise.

To be continued, maybe. . . .