Best Mistake I Ever Made

Hank Murphy spoke into the CB radio to the other drivers, “What’s pink and wet and you have to eat a lot of it to get your fill? Over.”

Blanks responded, “That’s easy.”

“Wrong, over.”

“How can I be wrong? I haven’t even guessed yet.”

“The answer is watermelon, over.”

“That’s what I was going to say, over.”

“Yeah, you bet.”

“Roger that.”

Ben Masterson said into his CB, “Sick, sick minds. It’s coming down heavy now on my side of town. Over.”

Blanks answered, “We are definitely underway. Highway 12 is starting to pile up. Blowing more by the minute, too. I was thinking, this summer we should plant some trees on that sharp turn by Broan’s farm. It piles up really fast. Over.”

Hank said, “You do that, Johnny Appleseed. In fact, write up a memo about your plan and have it on my desk in the morning. Over.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Then submit a revised version to the township, write up a work order, draft a report that evaluates the pros and cons, lobby your state congressman for the rights to dig in that ragged ditch where pheasants hatch their precious eggs, then we’ll get our hopes up before getting stonewalled by some bureaucrat. Over.”

Blanks said, “You’re outlook on things inspires us all, Hank.”

The other drivers listened to the Hank and Blanks radio show, interjecting only to let other drivers know about relevant facts regarding the surface of the road. The banter kept the drivers awake, especially in the small hours past midnight. Somehow Hank and Blanks never ran out of stories from their past lives as full-time fools. When the other drivers weren’t shaking their heads in disbelief or disgust, they laughed outright at the audacity of Hank and Blanks. Other drivers held back their own stories, only because they lacked the panache of exaggeration.

Hank turned on his wipers for a moment to break the monotony of the falling snow in front of him. The wipers of the truck squeaked and moved in rhythm with the falling snowflakes. The voodoo swirl of the snow bombarded the windshield and hypnotized him, but he kept the wheel straight and kept on talking. Hank did not want the drivers tuning to slow Christmas songs on the AM radios.

“Hey Blanks, do you remember that December of…I think it was 1970, one of the worst blizzards I can remember. We should have been in the plow business then. Night a lot like tonight. It was a Saturday and I was nursing a hangover with a late afternoon Bloody Mary. You wanted to go to St. Paul to party that night because we had tickets to the Vikings and Packers game the next day. I said ‘No way’ but then you came up with the motivation I needed to head out in the storm. Remember what you said Blanks?”

Blanks said, “I do remember. I knew that you were going to sack out on the couch so I said, ‘Tonight is the night I’m going to find Jesus, and when I do I’m going to buy that man a beer.'”

“That was it.”

Hank began the story and felt at home gabbing into the CB, like a disk jockey without a censor. “So with that nugget of inspiration we went out into the blizzard and we made it to St. Paul through blinding snow in an absolute-piece-of-shit Dodge. Blanks had recently wrecked his Toyota pickup, which was another matter – another fecal matter. Thanks to St. Christopher we made it safely to a sauce house. That was when we started ordering double-whiskeys and were later asked to vacate the establishment. We ended up going back to a woman’s house, one who had just moved to St. Paul from – God knows where – I want to say Japan. Over?”

Blanks said, “She was from Iowa.”

“Right, Iowa. Josh Werther came with us that night. Of course, Werther was dating this Iowegian. Oh, I remember now – he met her at college. Well he was upstairs screwing half the night so Blanks and I drank every last thing in the house short of the hair spray and mouthwash. Blanks ran around naked most of the night for some reason. It was truly disgusting, over.”

“That’s a lie, over.”

Hank’s words phased in through the static. “…reminded me of my nephew, who is a toddler. Blanks could only be considered well-endowed if he was a rodent. A few other girls were at the house and they got involved in Blanks’ little game of nudity, but if I remember right there was no steamy sex. Blanks’ feet spend more time in his mouth than in shoes. We drank until the sun came up and the game started at noon. After an hour of sleep, I woke up to the sound of a second heartbeat in my head. What an awful morning. I thought I was going to die, so I started to drink immediately. Werther would not get out of bed. Seems the poor guy fell in love overnight! She was much older, like forty, I think. Ooh la la, very sexy, though. We ditched him, left him at the house, but he showed up at the stadium later, furious with us for leaving him. He was in a real mood that whole weekend. He was almost reckless for once. That was the beginning of the most expensive weekend of my life. Haven’t I told this story before? Over.”

One of the other drivers chimed in, “I swear you’ve told it fifty times, but last time you said it was the Chicago Bears. Over.”

Blanks said, “No, it was definitely the Packers.”

Hank continued, “Roger that. The game ended with the Vikings losing. Like I cared. After the game we discovered a dirty hole-in-the-wall in Minneapolis which had some very shady characters. In fact, one guy had a great nickname. Remember his nickname, Blanks?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“That was his name: Thirty-eight. I say again: Thirty-eight. Who is going to mess with a guy named Thirty-eight? I spent $140 on lap dances and Blanks disappeared into the back lounge for quite awhile, but to this day he hasn’t told me what went on in there. What went on in there, Blanks?”

Blanks said, “We discussed the bean market.”

“The only thing you discussed was the market rate of getting her ankles up in the air so you could snap her bean. That’s one of the Glorious Mysteries of Blanks, and we may never know what happened there until his nose starts to fall off. Anyway, by three o’clock in the morning we were getting hungry. We sat down for a nice dinner at an all-night slum in some drippy icicle alley. We met some black girls from North Minneapolis. They thought we were pretty fun. But that’s when the argument started. Blanks and I were both living with our parents and working as rendering truck drivers, picking up exploded roadkill and bloated cattle. We constantly smelled terrible, south-of-cheese. Hands down the worst job on the planet. Needless to say, we hadn’t exactly set the world on fire after we dropped out of high school. My Pontiac was up on blocks, so what did I have to live for anymore? Blanks and I started accusing each other of being a mama’s boy, and…what else did you call me?”

Blanks cleared his throat, “A leech on the balls of progress, over.”

“And you still use that line to this day. For originality, you are a zero, Blanks. You’ve been hammering at the same things for twenty years.”

“Including your mom.”

“Well, that’s better. Anyway, during the argument an idea touched me like it was from God’s mouth to mine. Does God have a mouth, over?”

Shelly said, “He has a hand, over.”

“Oh? It must be enormous. Then it was his hand that moved my lips. The winter had been really cold and I had been dreaming of moving to Hawaii for a long time – days even. Next thing I know, Blanks said yes and we were cruising back to the Minneapolis airport, driving one hundred miles an hour. The other cars seemed like they were standing still, and the music was blasting. Josh Werther was asleep through it all so I punched him in the stomach so that he could appreciate what was happening. We made him promise not to tell anyone about our idea. In the Minneapolis airport we said goodbye and hugged each other like idiots, saying, ‘It was nice knowing you, Werther’ and ‘Come visit us in Honolulu!’ All kinds of nonsense. We approached the ticket counter and, I am not kidding you when I tell you this, a plane was leaving for Honolulu in fifteen minutes. Blanks didn’t have enough cash but I had a checkbook and no problems. I wrote a bad check for two one-way tickets and I don’t even want to mention the cost. We knew that we had to leave that night or we never would get to Hawaii. We said goodbye to Werther again. The airline agent at the ticket window was very confused. He suggested we wait awhile for a cheaper ticket, but his practical ways meant nothing to us. He clearly did not understand the stuff of legend. Over.”

Shelly said over the CB, “You guys are just, like, complete retards! Tell me this did not happen.”

“It’s true, I promise,” Hank said. “Shelly, I’ve sold my soul to seven different devils in the pursuit of alcohol and women. One night I howled at the moon and said, ‘Take my soul, and give me something warm!’ And when I die, I hope to buy some time relaxing in purgatory, while the demons carry out litigation over who first damned me.”

Hank paused to catch his breath and take a large swallow of coffee. Several other drivers tried to talk on the CB at once, and so nothing coherent came through the speaker. Hank waited patiently until the squeals stopped.

“Well, anyway, Blanks and I, we ran down the terminal, tickets in hand, and barely reached the gate before takeoff. On the plane we were giggling like school girls and ordering beers for everyone on the plane. That’s the only time I’ve ever heard of anyone buy a round of beers on an airplane. We talked to everyone and danced in the aisles. We must have smelled awful. Come to think of it, I was surprised how many people were willing to drink on a red-eye. But then again, even snobs and tightasses love a free drink. Anyway, to make a long story longer, we were flying at last. By the time we landed, we knew everyone on the plane. We still had energy yet. What was the weather like in Honolulu, Blanks?”

Blanks said, “Overcast.”

“Talk about stunned! As it turned out, we had a seven-hour layover in Seattle. That was when we hit the wall. No sleep for two days and very little nourishment; we were strung out. As you know, we did more than just drink back in those days. I wasn’t addicted or anything, but I did like the smell of a certain powder. To kill time we roamed around in the airport and slept on the floor, but I kept waking up every time an announcement came over the loud speaker. We still had every intention of leaving for Hawaii in a few hours and only then did I realize what I had brought with me: a winter jacket, jeans, heavy leather boots, and a sweatshirt. No shorts, no T-shirts, or anything useful for the Hawaii climate. Our plan was to buy a pair of shorts and a T-shirt in the airport when we got to Hawaii. And a newspaper. We would take the newspaper to the beach and look for jobs and girls. Between us we had a total of $212 left of actual liquid cash plus whatever bad checks could buy. With that money we could get clothes and maybe a sleeper apartment for a month. Since it was late December, we decided that we were going to live on the streets until January 1st. We also decided our new career would be as banana pickers. Over.”

Blanks said, “Or pineapple.”

“Coconuts, bananas, noses, whatever. Some kind of picker. Just so we would be picking something. But I started having feelings of extreme guilt. Turns out I learned my catechism after all. I started thinking about my car, my job, and the bridges I was about to burn. Not that I had much to lose; I hated my job, the Pontiac was dead (may it rest in pieces), but I couldn’t stop thinking about family and the bounced checks. Blanks was beginning to feel guilty too, but after paying so much for the ticket we simply had to go through with it. To chicken out and return home with our tails between our legs was worse than going through with it. Blanks, you tell them what happened next. It’s unbearable to say.”

Blanks said, “We chickened out.”

“In our winter jackets and stocking caps we stood in the terminal heartbroken. We went to the ticketing agent and booked a one-way ticket back to Minneapolis for another obscene amount of money, another bad check written, and with tears in our eyes watched the plane for Honolulu take off. It was devastating after coming so close to our dream of picking bananas. We called Werther and told him to pick us up in Minneapolis. By the time we arrived in Immaculate everyone already knew the story, thanks to Werther’s big mouth. He spilled the beans as soon as he could. Blanks and I crashed when we reached our beds – the beds in our mothers’ houses. Almost sixty hours without sleep. And here I am now plowing snow when I should be waking up to a wonderful Polynesian woman every morning. Over.”

The other drivers laughed in the solitude of their trucks and temporarily forgot about the hypnotic snow meeting the windshield. Hank Murphy smiled at the conclusion of his story but felt foolish glorifying it since he omitted most of the drug abuse. In that period Hank and Blanks fueled themselves with not only alcohol, but cocaine too; it was not just good clean fun. To make the story real he needed to explain the withdrawal he went through, how he shuddered with tremens and tore at his hair in depression, strung out in bed for the entire week. He should have explained in detail the desperate cravings of the addictions that made his head split and his forearms feel like rats were burrowing inside him in a search of the drug. But that part he kept private because it wasn’t funny.