Kevin Ridgeway
is a writer from Southern California, where he resides in a bungalow beneath the shade of an avocado tree with his girlfriend and their one-eyed cat. Recent and forthcoming publications include Haggard & Halloo, Red Fez, Gloom Cupboard, Underground Voices and The Orange Room Review.
Melvyn's Big Adventure (October 25, 2011. Issue 32.)
Melvyn stumbled off the train, bile streaming down his chin. He spotted the strangers moving in his direction. Attired in plutonium suits, these strangers immediately accosted him and he was subsequently injected with a needle whose contents gave him a wave of well-being and gelatinous legs as he was ushered into a large white van just outside the station with seven other people of modest middle class polo shirts, chinos, flowered blouses, spaghetti straps, gentle frocks, human peacocks, permanents, chrome domes, beards in various stages of emergence, one mustache, white teeth, beige teeth, no teeth, dimpled, pock marked, birth marked, freckled or crisply tanned without a blemish—these were his safari mates into the jungles of Angeles Crest. He was told to only bring essential items—a toothbrush, a change of pants, swim trunks and one peculiar request by the admissions director: a dozen packages of white jockey shorts with yellow and blue lines encircling the waistband, an iron-on patch of the popular cartoon character Doobie Dingo affixed at the crotch of each pair. Doobie Dingo was an outback didgeridoo player and kung fu master of iconic status amongst modern children of that time. The plutonium suits were a surprise. The van burned around the sharp corners inches away from oblivion in the canyons below as they ventured further and further into elevation, the suburbs of Los Angeles County resembling an orange mass of melted Lego's in between the frame of the twin peaks that greeted them upon entry into the forest.
After millions of left and right turns and round and rounds, the van made a sharp turn up a driveway paved years ago and at that point reduced to a rubble booby trap for bare feet. The van came to a stop and the sliding passenger door opened and the entire group tumbled out, rag dolls jostled out of the closet of existential despair. The plutonium suited chaperons disappeared in the maze of huts that dotted the campground. A woman with a utility belt with a myriad of keys jangling music strode down a granite slope that led away from a screened in bungalow, stopping before Melvyn and the rest.
"Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman," she said. "I'm Loretta Smock, director of operations here at Forest Creek Serenity Camp. I hope your scenic trip was a pleasant one, and I'm sure you're confused by the medication you've been given. Not to worry. You will be assigned a dormitory to unpack your belongings and we will have an orientation to explain the program here for the next few weeks. You are to dress according to the code outlined in your itineraries. I will look forward to seeing you in a few hours!"
Melvyn found himself in a two man bunk of dusty wood. A wafer mattress caked in layers of pulverized cobwebs was all his for the duration of his stay. Keenan, a roly poly man in his forties was his bunk mate. Keenan was tearful. "I lost my job, my family, my house, and my sense of respect for myself," he said, gobs of snot wiggling over his mustache and into his mouth. "This is my last chance."
Melvyn dropped his trousers and followed Ms. Smock's instructions by yanking on a fresh pair of briefs with Doobie Dingo, all smiles with a didgeridoo in one hand, a pair of nunchucks in the other. He then slapped on a pair of baggy booties that were provided by the staff. Keenan did the same, but the jockeys wound up at his knees as he collapsed backwards onto his bed in a pool of snot and outpouring tears, his scrotum bouncing slowly on the waste band. "My son's favorite show is Doobie Dingo…if he could see daddy now." Melvyn sauntered out of the room and into the glow of the setting sun in search of the main lodge where the orientation was moments from beginning.
***
"Good evening," Loretta Smock said, flanked by three plutonium suit clad counselors on either side of her. "You came here because you wanted help, you were desperate. There is a solution to your malady but you must obey a specific formula. In the morning you will arise at four for what we here like to call Buddy Time. 
Buddy Time consists of two program participants carefully grooming each other over every inch of the body, including the pubic area, which, with special arts and crafts supplies will be decorated to the pleasure of the participant applying the daily Buddy Time cleansing. These creations will be judged by counselors and participants alike in a 5:30 AM vote and the winning duo will be able to change their jockey shorts for the day and receive a gift certificate to Bunyan Burger Barn. 6:00 AM is breakfast—mashed soy beans and a carafe of artificially flavored sugar-free rice milk. 6:30 AM is obstacle course—an hour long relay of great difficulty—participants showing ability in this area will be rewarded with a smiley face sticker around the areola of their nipple. Four happy face stickers around both nipples and the participant can make a phone call to a psychic hot line from a list provided by the camp. 8:00 AM to 5 PM are group therapy sessions of varying particulars that I will not elaborate on now, with a break for lunch, normally yeast patty sandwiches and Metamucil shakes. Dinner at 5 PM, normally cream of parsnip soup served with special edible mystery chunks—new chunks selected each day by the counselors. Jockey shorts inspections are held at 5:30 PM and then you are injected with a high dose of Seremedy, a potent calmative manufactured by the Walker Pharmaceutical Corporation, a trusted camp sponsor. You will lose all feeling in your lower extremities and eventually lose consciousness for several hours before the start of the next day—and so on…"
Melvyn remembered little after this, and found himself bumping into Keenan and a counselor in the dark of early morning. Keenan was prone on his bed and stark naked. "Be gentle with me," Keenan cried, his jelly rolls quivering. Melvyn complied, wielding a sponge soaked in water and industrial soap, cleaning every crevice of this strange man's manatee-like body. The time came for the arts and crafts portion of the exercise. "Oh, I don't care what you do—" Keenan said, "just make me sparkle with a tasteful touch of glitter."
Melvyn and Keenan won the daily contest and gladly changed into identical pairs of jockeys. Melvyn devoured the breakfast, which gave him instant diarrhea. The counselors ignored his polite pleas to visit the bathroom and he was heaved into a valley of tires, the start of the obstacle course. Liquid excrement splashed across his thighs and onto the tires he was stumbling slowly through; a left-over puddle caused Keenan to slip and stumble over, tears and snot and shit that was not his own sliding into his wailing mouth.
Was it all worth it, this extreme form of therapy? Melvyn flashed back two weeks in his mind to that Dollar Tree parking lot outside of Bullhead City, AZ. He was selling a self-produced CD out of the trunk of his car, a defunct jazz-fusion/funk-rap/folk-metal band he played triangle in, The Curley Cues, a crusty Vietnam vet his only potential customer who insisted on hearing a demo from the disc in the car while he chain-smoked menthol cigarettes. The grizzled Vet hated it. He beat Melvyn to a bloodied pulp and took off in the car with the bulk stock of CDs. This was rock bottom for Melvyn, a fledgling dreamer of lofty, unrealistic ambitions. Before that it was a feature film about zombie Mormon missionaries on a Mississippi riverboat financed by ten maxed out credit cards that was shown only once in a rented theatre in Fullerton, California to a three-man audience. Before that it was the thousand page novel with a novel-within-the-novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist marooned at sea on a ship full of flesh eating ape people who also happened to be Republicans. And the art openings where he didn't sell any of his paintings like the one of aborted fetuses riding on the backs of unicorns flying over rainbows—all of these projects fell flat and left Melvyn deeply in debt and homeless. He was now surrendering to his addiction to grandiose artistic delusions, that his artistic career was an unmanageable failure. Forest Creek Serenity Camp was designed for people like him and Keenan, a fledgling composer who squandered the contents of his family bank account on a sixteen-hour song played by nineteen guitarists, thirty-three trumpeters, and eighty-nine keyboard players called "Ponytail Erotica". Now here they were. They would wear their little boy diapers, shit their pants, collect stickers around their nipples, apply glitter, gems and beaded braids to one another's pubic hair, get to the core of their disease, and, as promised upon completion of the program, acquire a job any of the hundreds of Bunyan Burger Barns across the country.
***
"What brings you here, Otto?" Ronald asked, a rotund counselor draped in polo stripes and khaki.
"Excessive poetry slamming," replied Otto, a broken man in his mid thirties with a faded pink Mohawk deflated into a rash of weeds atop his head.
"You need to surrender to your delusion. You seem to have a strength that would make you excellent at burger dressing."
Ronald turned his head to Melvyn, the ruins of what was once his neck farting trapped air from the spaces between the remaining rolls of fat.
"And you, Melvyn, how are you doing with letting go of your obsession to be an auteur of endless garbage?"
Melvyn paused. Tears began to stream down his cheeks. "I'm Melvyn, and I'm a future asset to the Bunyan Burger Barn family."
The group erupted into applause and surrounded Melvyn in one giant hug, flaccid and erect penises pressed up against him. The healing time had begun.
***
The graduation ceremony was held in a room without air conditioning on a particularly hot day. Melvyn sat on a folding chair dressed in a hot pink plutonium suit, the honor of all graduates of the program. A spatula was passed around, each patient singling out one element of Melvyn's new worth to them as recovering artists, and what it was about Melvyn's recovery that inspired them to follow in his path. The spatula came to Keenan, who was in the thralls of a hysterical crying jag.
"Melllllvyyyyynnn," he began, "you-you always mm-mmade my crotch the ppp-prettiest belle of the morning beauty ball…"
He broke down in a storm of tears, snot forming a green mustache on his upper lip. He had to be removed from the ceremony by a few counselors. Poor Keenan, Melvyn thought to himself. With hope he'll recover.
Melvyn stepped onto the train, with a phone number to the manager at the Bunyan Burger Barn franchise in Des Moines, ready for a new life. He was going to play Hoppy the Clown, the mascot of Bunyan Burger Barn, a rare treat for a Forest Creek graduate. Melvyn would circle down the slide after joyful children, a smile permanently painted on his face, accepting his profound failure as an artist of any merit but hopeful for ascension in the world of professional fast food clowns. He had trimmed apart the frontal crotch lining of a pair of shit caked jockeys with the didgeridoo playing dingo's shit-eating smile and sewed it onto the right arm of his blazer as a badge of honor—to forever remind him to behave himself.
Four Poems (September 20, 2011. Issue 31.)
Cowboy Killers
Six tequila, lime and Corona cowboy killers later
my drunken ski instructor friend gave me a free
beginning snowboarder lesson that we
improvised in the cracked ice yard of a bungalow
buried deep within a rural Vermont hamlet
with a child’s flimsy plastic hot pink sled
six violent tumbles on a bruised ass later,
feeling no pain, and learning no lessons, I began
howling at the moon over lack of athletic prowess
Nine tequila, lime and Corona cowboy killers later
we’re the sickening local townies with dreams
beyond this burned out mill town
we’re the seasonal local tourist trap
schlock-fueled oddity road side attractions
the lonely celluloid ghost of John Wayne is
looking on from the unwatched television screen
while we weave drunken yarns in the utility kitchen
the ghost agonizes as these gentlemen tramp scholars
kill the spirit of the far away
romantic west here in the dainty book dust east
with sloppy slugs of hard drink
running amok at our liberal arts colleges with our
light ale cocktails riding plastic hot pink steeds
and clumsily singing along to vintage country songs by
long-haired outlaw heroes
Here in our tucked away cabins
surrounded by cities of ice and letting our minds,
bodies and spirits run free and wild
on pocket change bliss
our shits and giggles, self-contained back porch
entertainment centers of acoustic bluegrass instruments
we barely knew how to play in our baggy thrift attire
laughing all the way to the food banks as we
scratched off the nine lives of our steamroller
youths, headed for a mid-twenties hangover and
stacks of unpaid student loans hidden in
the oven, the glum future of adulthood slowly
baking like a gentle soufflé of savage, sobering
reality.
The 99 Bar and Grille and The 99 Bar and Grille After Party
Broke, drunk and in between jobs,
I would often go across to the local watering hole,
The 99 Bar and Grille
and spend all of the cash I got from selling
food stamps
I drank all morning, and for lunch I
asked the bartender to pour me a shot of tequila
No shots, she said, and poured me a meager
Petron tumbler on ice
I drank it down in one gulp and that’s when I was
asked to leave
And then there was the evening I took
my wife out to dinner at The 99 Bar and Grille
and ordered a Sapphire and tonic and a pitcher
of beer
I ended my 100-hundred proof meal playing
“celebrity look-a-likes” with the bar patrons
The short stocky man with the comb over and thin
mustache who really didn’t look at all like Peter Sellers,
and the fellow who kind of looked like
Bud Cort was a bit aghast at this urban outskirts variation
of Hollywood Squares
We were escorted off the premises, and on the way home
stopped at the corner Package Store
which is Northeast code for booze warehouse
and I bought a large bottle of the cheapest bottom shelf
schnapps and a liter of Diet Seven Up
and we went home and I listened to Sha Na Na
over and over again.
The Academy Presents
Went to a 2 dollar movie at the Academy
and saw this summer’s offering of blockbuster
wisenheimer crude
the hot dogs were a dollar, wrapped in foil
and lukewarm
a giant rat crawled across the sagging wrinkles
on the screen between the enormous gap
separating the leading man’s upper lip and nostrils
the floor is sticky and you shouldn’t rest your
feet on any part if for very long because it will
take you extra long to dodge the stray urine
of one of the drunkard bums who lives there
during business hours.
A ragged curtain stands in for doors of the
each of the Academy’s theatres,
making it hard to hear the movie
while large crowds getting out of Marmaduke 2
fill the lobby with loud, deep conversation
and the assembly line exchanges of hot dogs
and dollar bills
But other than that, it’s a wonderful place to
to go on an afternoon date after a dining
experience from a diarrhea-inducing taco wagon.
Flying High
At the end of the pebble infused
driveway and in the advanced
stages of rigor mortis, a monstrous
black crow lay dead, its wings spread
in a final attempt to escape its doom.
My dear old fledgling father,
stoned to the gills on a dollop
of Mexican black tar heroin
and perhaps a glittered nose
of crystal methamphetamine
trudged barefoot across the
sharp blood slitting stones and
without hesitation, he picked it
up and rested it on his shoulder
He ran across the front lawn
with his new toy
in front of the mail man,
the Jesus freak neighbors
and the retired physicians
holding this dead aerial beast in
his left hand allowing it to soar
in the airs above his unmanageable
curls of salt and pepper mane
"Weeeeeeeee---"
He yelled, with saucer eyed glee.
He did this in circles for several
minutes before reaching a tall
garbage can positioning the crow
for a nosedive deep into the depths
of cat food and soiled geriatric diapers.
And then he mowed half the lawn,
nodding out into slumber among
the brush until suppertime, when
I had to hose him off of his
stained frivolity.