I want to be Tommy

            2011 is where the world bends for me. All Toms are Kat-cool.  

Before today, I was a level four, cape commander on Playstation II Battleberms and Dungeons.

But not anymore. I Google ‘Toms’ and my trusty computer finds a thing called a Peeping Tom. It must be where you start! I bet like, you get like, training from a real Tommy. Who takes you under his wing and says stuff like, “Yo Bros, this is my peeps.”  

I’d be like wearin’ my shades, standing with my hands stuck in my armpits.   

The website says; “You be Peeping Tom! $24.00 Dollar. You download now.”

I open page one.

1. You wait till dark.

2. You sneak under windows.

Like spies or something. Wait till the chicks come out. They must be the ones with the goods; you know, the information on how to be a real Tomcat. I bet they keep it hidden in a drawer or something. That’s why hardly nobody knows how to be a Tommy.

That night, I crawl under Trisha Tittle’s window, sliding along the siding. “Cranium-crack, it’s starting to rain.” I pull my salted-in-the-shell peanuts from my pocket. An old habit from my Donkey-Kong days.

High in the tree, the aroma alerts a squiggle of squirrels high on pistachios. They drop from the sky, bent on bag-snatching my nuts. Landing on my back, they crash me to the ground face-first into the mud.

Tastes like mud-covered nuts.

Out of the window-well, darts a poky of porcupines low on patience. I sit back on my haunches, right on top Pretty Porcupine Patty. I sky rocket upward, land with my fingernails clawing the windowsill.

Inside, Trisha Tittles is pulling something out of her drawer. The Book of Knowledge of Tom. Of course!

I scream as my nails give up their post and I fall back to face Pretty Porcupine Patty and her date, Puddy. Known in the burrows as ‘The Beast from the East Puddles.’

Quills fly through the air and I am doomed, because inside my pocket protector is a laser pointer. The missiles hone in, I scream as squirrels spin through the air picking my pockets.

I am coated eyebrows to britches with mud, shells, sticks, squirrel fur and porcupine quills. I struggle to my knees when Trisha Tittles opens the window and screams “It’s a bear! Call 911! Call 911!”

Mere minutes later, a cage-truck, side-slices across the lawn. Out steps the figure of a man wide at the shoulder, narrow at the mind.

Ernie Shootumfirst, critter-getter and sewage-plant wedding ring recover-er.

Back before the metal plate in his head, between the divorce and the incident with the brake press, simultaneously with the affair over right-of-way on a one-way one-lane bridge, the same day he got the bill for the trailer-on-fire-drove-at-high-speed into the new fire department. (Four Million at $42 per week comes to 1,831 weeks). Yes, that was the day that led him here.

Now standing at the back of the cage-truck he pulls out Betty-Lou. She’s the one, double-barreled, triple-scoped, heat-seeking shotgun.

He shouts out, “Ernie been on a bear hunt before” rattling the bear claws safety-pinned on his yellow slicker.

He whistles, using his missing tooth. It, lost when Louise Littleton tossed the winning beer-barrel toss in Anchorage during the Land-where-men-are-men festival. (No one would tell her she couldn’t enter.)

 “Where ya at Yogi!”  

Lightening strikes the cage truck, runs down Betty-Lou seeking the metal plate in his head. Ernie lights up like a fire fly. Again.  

I run for the street wailing like a little girl who just got Christmas canceled.

Ernie stands smoldering, turns the gun and bellows one down the sidewalk.

The buckshot scorches the porcupine quills hanging out my butt. I go up an octave.

I round the corner and head straight for my playstation II, and my Star Trek screen saver, and my posters of Farah Fawcett and Jabba the Hut. My shot-gunned quills make me look like a fresh plucked chicken.

Tenderly I sink into my chair and type my 2012 resolution; never leave my room; never leave the room again.

Ever.