Tales:
The Fenley Chronicles
Brains on the Windshield
Another Saturday evening in Springfield – what to do? A telephone survey of my vast network tells me my choices are limited: Sam isn’t home, Rich doesn’t answer and Jim is working the closing shift at the Sixth Street McDonalds. Jay has a quarter tank of gas in his Pontiac, so he’ll come by and pick me up.
Jay steers the Custom S on the inevitable course to Springfield’s center of teenage culture, a half-mile section of MacArthur Boulevard known as "The Strip". When overcome by the horrible soybean boredom of central Illinois, every card-carrying high school student flees to The Strip, a stretch of asphalt where kids and their cars hang out, typically anchored by a fast food joint. Each town has it’s own Strip, varying in scale from several miles to a single parking lot in the tiny grain elevator hamlets that dot the prairie. Once there, one drives in endless circles, gawking at other kid/car combinations and occasionally hitting the drive-through for large fries. It ain’t much, but hey – this IS the Midwest you know.
We join the line-up and round the circuit a few times, turning around in the MacArthur McDonalds lot (not to be confused with the Jefferson McDonalds where I worked). The golden arches serve as the Pyramids and Coliseum of teenage geography – every bit as important to the high school population as those more ascetic landmarks were to Ramses & Caesar. Just as Egypt and Rome had a ruling class and slaves, so is high school divided into two distinct social classes: The Cool and the UnCool.
As perpetual members of the UnCool, Jay and I are relegated to the "look but don’t stop" citizenry on The Strip. Exalted constituents of The Cool may park in lots along the street, where they rebel against their parents by smoking cigarettes and swigging furtively from hidden cans of cheap beer while flirting with the opposite sex. As certified members of the great unwashed UnCool, Jay and I must make do with yelling at girls from the moving car while reaffirming our hatred of (and desperate desire to belong to) The Cool. Our confidence is bolstered by being able to race the motor and squeal the tires at green lights, another reason for selecting Jay’s 1969 V8 coupe over my very UnCool 1965 Beetle.
Yet a sixteen-year-old’s need for stimulation is great, and even the thrilling titillation of driving in an endless loop fades after an hour or two, especially with the Pontiac’s big engine greedily slurping Jay’s precious quarter tank. Since the only thing less fun than what we’ve been doing is working, we decide to cruise by the Sixth Street McDonalds to deride Jim for a while.
We find Jim assigned to that most odious of all fast food details – the lobby. Even working over a sweltering grill for hours with your forearms crusted in salt and grease is preferable to cleaning up after the public in a fast food restaurant. The lobby guy also gets the restrooms and parking lot too, so you find yourself at the receiving end of humankind’s most revolting bodily functions and poor eating habits. No one will work the lobby for more than a few weeks without quitting, so the post invariably falls to the most junior member of the crew. Jim was the new guy. After sufficiently pestering Jim, we drive around the south side for a bit, wrestling with the age-old Springfield question: "Now what do we do?"
An all-night supermarket seems to offer some relief, so Jay parks the Pontiac and we wander the empty aisles in search of diversion. Inspiration finally shows itself at the meat case. SPECIAL: 50% OFF the first line of the sign said. BEEF BRAINS read the second line. Jay and I look at each other puckishly. It was Kismet; the three dollars and change we have between us is just enough to buy a large package of moo mind. We present our discovery to the sleepy second-shift checker, who appears suitably impressed with our originality. Unlike her usual teenage clientele we weren’t there to buy rubbers or beer, although our motives are no less roguish than average.
Back in the Custom S, we retrace our route, already greatly enjoying the soon-to-come misfortune of our friend Jim. Ever the dutiful employee, Jim had parked the family Buick away from the restaurant so as to leave the choice spaces open for customers. This gave us the freedom to linger over our task without fear of discovery. We wouldn’t simply plaster the Buick with brains – no, that would be too obvious. On inspection of Jim’s car, a far more devious plan evolved. Back in the sixties, Detroit still made cars with hidden windshield wipers. The lip of the hood projected beyond the engine compartment, forming a narrow alcove permitting the factory to mount the wipers out of sight. Clearly this was the most tailor-made container for bovine brains since the skull itself!
Jay and I gingerly pack four pounds of slimy white steer thinker on top of the Buick’s wiper blades. We step back proudly and examine our work. Our disgusting payload might be noticed in daylight, but in the dimly lit parking lot it should go unnoticed. Now for the piece de resistance: a smear directly in front of the driver’s seat with a small chunk of brains. The plan seemed perfect: Jim would get off work around 1 AM and climb into his car. After firing up the Buick and turning on the lights, he would notice the gob on the windshield and hit the wipers – bringing up the full four pound cavalcade of cow intellect from their hiding place.
We congratulated ourselves on our devious genius and make a quick exit before we were seen. Little did we know just how effective our prank would be.
Lowanda always kept a tight reign on her kids and tolerated none of the foolishness teenagers try so hard to get involved in. The McDonalds job was Jim’s first real journey into independence and required him to work late on the weekends, well beyond his regular curfew. Lowanda worried about her son driving so late at night and the temptations such an opportunity might create. As a result, she usually stayed up reading until she heard Jim return home.
At that moment, Jim was none too happy with the current situation himself. Getting the lobby assignment was a bummer, and his mood had worsened when his glasses had slipped off while he was mopping. He had been bent over, swabbing the deck when they fell straight down to the hard tile floor, breaking the right hand lens. Jim had to finish out his shift squinting like a pirate with one eye, and he knew his folks wouldn’t be too happy about having to repair those glasses again. Finally the night was over and he gratefully headed for the car. He hopped in, started the old Buick and began to back out of the lot, when he noticed something on the windshield. Jim reached over and switched on the windshield wipers, which immediately swung great piles of gross-looking stuff across the car!
Once the initial shock passed, Jim got out to assess the situation. As far as he could recall, the Buick’s wipers had never produced large quantities of guts before… then he remembered the visit from Gowan and Jay earlier in the evening and everything became clear. Obviously his "friends" had decided to leave him a little token of their esteem. Swell. The perfect ending to a perfectly rotten night. Jim managed to remove the bulk of the mess from the car, but the brains were greasy and had smeared across the glass. Jim decided to stop by a gas station on the way home and wash the windshield.
Unfortunately, when Jim swung the big car into a 24 hour self-serve he was in for another unpleasant surprise. Driving with one lens out of his glasses screwed up his depth perception and one of the concrete posts that protect the pumps struck the car a glancing blow as he turned into the fuel island. Despite the Buick’s heavy sheet metal, the collision dented the right front corner of the fender and broke out the headlight. Now he was doomed. He might be able to clean up the guts but he could never hide this. After spending a few minutes trying to clear the windshield he gave up and headed home in a black mood. He was already late, and if he didn’t get home quickly his mother would get all worked up and make things even worse.
Jim pulled the Buick into the garage and closed the door. The house was quiet – perhaps his parents were asleep after all. He decided to finish the cleanup job right away. His pals had stuffed their nasty surprise forcefully into the wiper well and some of the oily innards had oozed into the heater air intake grate. Jim went to work tediously picking brain chunks out of the dozens of holes in the grill.
Lowanda was half-awake when she heard Jim come home. The garage door closed, but she didn’t hear him come into the house. After several minutes, she got out of bed and went downstairs to investigate. When she opened the door to the garage her son started and looked up. Lowanda's worst fears were realized!
She was presented with a panorama straight out of Every Mother's Greatest Nightmare: The crumpled fender and shattered headlight, Jim’s broken glasses... and he was in the process of removing entrails from the hood!
