And the Shoes on the Cables Are There for the Angels

by Mike Young

after Missy

So Jerry Friedstat owns the RV Park plus the Family Fun Center.
There's go-karts, bumper boats, and chili sauce not chili.
His daughter got kidnapped three years ago while eating a churro.
She was standing near the rowboat on the miniature golf course
and looking at the freeway.  Sometimes the Sysco trucks spill
and the drivers will go shit and sit down and eat the cherries with you,
smile and close their eyes when you offer to help lie to their boss.
Friedstat closed the park for a year.  Weird as fuck when he would buy
aspirin or shoe polish at the drugstore.  You get what I mean.
But then he started to rebuild the park.  Not to be all queer, but I would say:
it turned grand.  That's what I would say.  Got this slick-ass
cowboy theme.  Everything a fake saloon or a stable.  Silver belly hats.
I mean, he built this cross between a haunted house and shooting gallery.
A mine shaft was the gimmick.  You would clank through on a cart
and shoot at these pop-up bats and cardboard banditos.
He painted their mustaches neon so you could shoot their mustaches.
Hella fun shit.  He also installed one of those mystery shacks
where the jacks roll uphill and the mannequins look real.
Whenever they find a clump of bones in the woods near the quarry,
everybody's like what if it's her, what if it's her.
When you turn twelve or eleven, you hear her story when you're
putt-putting or mashing the spray button on the boats, or I don't know—
trying to sell them a lawnmower engine or whatever.  That's
pretty much when you hear the story about Friedstat's daughter.
Then when the papers tuck something about bones into the
lower-left corner, right by the cartoon weather thing,
you try to be the first one to talk about it.  You go into
Linda Riesling's Original Waffle House with the pictures of the flood
from 1954, trying to spy out Linda's daughter, who listens to Rancid
and fucks anything remotely hung.  But it's only the VFW assholes
and they say don’t need to wear baggy jeans
if you’re not in jail or they say plugging along
or you know if you put rubbing alcohol on those cheeks that shit’ll go away—
you try to sit down at the counter
and order coffee, black, just black.  Helps the whiskers.
And you say hey did you hear about those bones or whatever?
Yeah.  New bones.  You think?  I don't know.  It's weird huh?
And they give you hot chocolate, not coffee, every time.
And you leave and the light looks staged like somebody's playing it.
Like there's somebody with a motherfucking cello or something.
Like you could take off your shoes and take off your socks and
scrape your toes on the porches and get a bunch of splinters,
but you would hear the wood moan back a mess of juicy shit.

When I grow a beard, just a chinstrap maybe, and people believe me
about things, I will say this:  there is no such thing as a wild horse.
The wild ones were made by God to buck the ghosts.
That's pretty good, right?  I want to go to Nashville, maybe.
First I want to write that on a yellow Post-It note and leave it in the
bathroom labeled Gents of Jerry Friedstat's joint.  Then I will
buy a corndog and I will steal somebody's RV and I will
drive and I will drive and I will drive until my bones are too loud.
Everything else—I'm sure—will sound like it does in a seashell.