The following story is true, and contains a lot of colorful language. If you're not old enough to buy an "Explicit Lyrics" CD without an adult, go read something else. If you are easily offended, you probably don't spend much time with me anyway, but go read something else today. Names have been changed to protect me.
It was late, it was dark, and it was raining. The Girl and I decided to just stash our stuff in the car instead of trying to hang a bear bag. The trees in our area didn't even have limbs below thirty feet, so it was much easier and, we believed, more expedient to just walk the three-quarter mile trail to the car. The rest of our party was either engaged in bear-bag hanging efforts, had already crawled in their tents, or had given us their leftovers to stash in our car, "since you're going down there anyway."
I had just lifted the hatch of my car and started to load our things when a slightly younger man careened up the dirt road and into the parking lot, winded and wide-eyed. Jay told us his story in a rush of clipped sentences which didn't quite mesh until much later in the night, after I had heard corroborating and supplementing accounts from his friends. Jay and his wife, on their way to a camping weekend with two other couples, had come across a crashed pick-up truck with two men standing beside it. They had offered the strandees a ride, being charitable on a rainy evening. One of the men had begun threatening his saviors. "He had knives," Jay told us, "But I took them away." Despite his story, I had already surmised that Jay was not our generation's Bruce Lee, and I wasn't sure how he had managed to disarm the man. "Well, he gave me his knives," he explained. "I put them over there," he added, pointing to a large rock at the corner of the parking lot. "He said I should take them, because he was afraid of what he might do. Then he told me he was gonna cut me, so I took his knives." Since arriving, Jay hadn't gone near that rock, which tells us that this was his second trip to the parking lot where we now stood. This parking lot marked the terminus of a single-lane dirt road in, relatively speaking, the middle of nowhere. The fact that he came
back to the same lot looking for help tells us something else about Jay: he was really, really lucky that we happened to be there (you thought I was going towards a different conclusion, didn't you? That's ok--they're both valid). Jay added that he had left the guy who had offered his knives with two friends. I looked behind him and saw three figures approaching at the outer limits of my headlamp's beam. "Is that them?" I asked. Jay spat out a panicked noise and dashed past me. I told The Girl to get in the car, and to be prepared to go find help. She expressed concern over my own safety, and I reminded her that numbers were on my side.
Then I met Kenny.
Kenny was accompanied by Jay's friends, Adam and Brad. As Kenny reeled drunkenly around the parking lot, Adam and Brad introduced themselves and filled in some holes in Jay's story, much more calmly than he had. The three couples (Jay, Adam, and Brad had each left a wife/fiancee/girlfriend in cars somewhere down the road in order to deal with Kenny) had planned to go camping in the area until their evening was interrupted by the discovery of the wrecked truck and the two drunks it had contained. "Where's the other guy?" I asked. "Oh, he's still with the ladies. He's not as bad as Kenny." By this time, Kenny had made it back to our little circle, swaying gently in a breeze the rest of us couldn't feel, and the party really got started. Until this point, I still thought the highlight of my day would be the bear I had seen that afternoon.
"Whoer yew?" he asked, scowling at me. "I'm Ryan. Who are you?" He slapped clumsily at my shoulder. "Man, don't you know I am, man? I'm Kenny Fucking Smith! I'm Mike Smith's son!" Clearly, the Smith Dynasty were a locally famous clan, but I had never heard of them before. He squinted at me. When we had walked away from the tents, the rain had almost stopped, and I had gone to the car in a lightweight tech tee. Since that time, the rain had picked up again, and the shirt clung to me. Water dripped steadily from the hair clumping wetly above my forehead. Hairs on my arm stood on end, beads of moisture capping each one. "Man, whire yew all wet?" I looked to Adam and Brad, each wearing dripping raincoats, smiling quietly, and avoiding eye contact. I got the feeling they had already met the extents of Kenny Fucking Smith's (Mike Smith's son) conversational range, as I soon would. "Because it's raining, Kenny. It's been raining for hours." "Whut?!" He looked skyward to check my data, and I thought about the story of turkeys drowning when they look up to the rain. "You're wet, too, Kenny." Now he looked at his own wife-beater-clad chest, still dubious as to the verity of my information. "Huh," he replied, and stepped away from us, considering the new hypothesis.
Adam and Brad consulted for a moment, their eyes on Kenny, and I took the opportunity to talk to The Girl, who had so far remained hidden in our parked car. "He's drunk, but he's not a threat," I assured her. I filled her in on everything Adam and Brad had told me, including how at least one of their wives was heading back out the road to look for help. "You know the area better than they do," I told her. "See if you can find some sort of Law Enforcement Professional to deal with this guy." She agreed, and started the car as I went back to Adam and Brad. She backed the car from the space and pointed it toward the lot's exit just in time for Kenny's drunken bird-mind to see movement. When he staggered toward her, arms outstretched, beseeching her to stop, it looked to her like a scene from a zombie movie. A lurching figure approaching in the rainy night, the headlights glinting off its shiny, wet surface as it gargled unintelligible syllables. The tires threw gravel as she sped past him, hoping she wouldn't veer too far to the left and hit one of the large rocks at the lot's entrance. As Kenny Fucking Smith (Mike Smith's son) slapped at the hood of my rapidly exiting car, I just hoped he wouldn't scratch my baby. This was about the time I looked off into the woods surrounding the lot and saw what I still believe was Jay, lying prone in the bushes, fervently hoping Kenny wouldn't find him. Truly, a hero among men.
Adam, Brad, and I spent the next forty-five minutes to an hour (maybe longer) having the same handful of conversations over and over with Kenny Fucking Smith (Mike Smith's son). The first, and most prevalent, was his introductory speech, transcribed above, exactly as it went every single time we had it, with one exception: one time, when he asked if I knew who he was, I told him, "No, I don't know anybody in this area. I'm from Oregon." He leaned back so far I thought he might topple over, then uttered in stupefaction, "
Oregon??" I might have told him I was from the Moon. A little later, he grabbed my arm to ask me again whether I knew who he was, man, because he apparently had forgotten relaying this information to us thirty times already, and suddenly froze. He squeezed my arm again, then slapped at my chest, another frequently-repeated Kenny Fucking Smith (Mike Smith's son) gesture. "Man, you work out? They make 'em strong in Oregon!" Sure.
Oregon he remembers.
Our second conversation revolved around his continual surprise that we were all wet, and his continued disbelief that it was raining.
The third went like this: "Man, you got any smokes?" "No, Kenny, none of us smoke." "Man, man, you got anything to drink?" "No, Kenny, we don't have anything to drink." As if he needed anything to drink. Considering his options, there was usually a pause before his third question. "You got any pussy?" "No, Kenny, we don't have any pussy." As luck would have it, the women each of us held dear were far away, in locked metal boxes, their feet on the accelerators. "Well, what fuckin' good are ya??" We would shrug at this. Clearly, we are no good at all, and no fun, either. Perhaps you'd like to go away now?
In between our Kenversations, the three of us discussed our options and swapped our stories. At one point, Kenny wandered off to consider the informational sign near the entrance to the parking lot, and stepped carefully over the chain gate which blocked unauthorized vehicles from the Forest Service road beyond. A couple moments later, we heard a WHUMP! and looked up to see Kenny Fucking Smith (Mike Smith's son) face-down in the gravel, the chain swinging wildly behind him. "Should we check on him? Is he ok?" asked Adam. I put my light on the drunk's carcass and watched carefully. "Eh, he's breathing. He'll be fine." A minute or so later, he managed to stand up and wandered over to us to inquire whether we were aware of his identity. Never one to wait for a response to this particular question, he would push one of us at the shoulder and proclaim, again, "Man, I'm Kenny Fucking Smith, man! I'm Mike Smith's son!" Years later, a gathering of friends recounted this story to three others who didn't know it, and wondered for the first time whether Fucking was not an exclamatory adjective, but the maiden name of Kenny's mother, Her Ladyship Eveleyn Penelope Von Trapp Fauquing; this led to further consideration of Kenny's dynastic heritage, and whether Mike Smith used the British spelling of "Smythe" on his family crest. Perhaps Kenny's surname was hyphenated?
Probably not.
I convinced my sober companions that Kenny would stay wherever he had an audience rather than leave us alone, and that our best option was to move the audience where we wanted Kenny to go. Namely, away from the campground we planned to inhabit for what remained of the night. We started walking, and naturally, Kenny Fucking Smith (Mike Smith's son) followed, asking us again why we were so wet, did we know who he was, man, and did we have any smokes/drinks/pussy? We had made it maybe half a mile from the parking lot when Kenny Fucking Smith (Mike Smith's son) realized he had to pee, and somehow managed to make it all the way to the edge of the road before dropping his fly, at which point he began to assure us that his dick was bigger than any one of ours, and possibly all three combined. We allowed that this was likely, mainly to avoid the collection of empirical data. This was about when he slipped and somehow managed to fall
underneath the log he had sprayed with his own piss.
Again, Adam and Brad asked if we should help him. Again, I assured him that he was fine. I felt that any extra effort Kenny Fucking Smith (Mike Smith's son) expended would be progress towards a sober state. They caved, feeling a pity I lacked, and it took both of them to get him to his feet.
Ten minutes later, a local sheriff's cruiser approached us. We stopped, relieved that our part in this play was approaching the end, but Kenny was eager to go meet his new friend. "Sir, stop right there! STOP RIGHT THERE!
DO NOT APPROACH THE CAR!!" For a brief, exhilarating moment, I was certain that I was about to see a drunken moron get tased, but instead the officer deftly turned Kenny Fucking Smith (Mike Smith's son) toward the hood of the cruiser and into The Position One Assumes. Adam, Brad, and I stepped into a small drive on the side of the road and chatted for a few minutes, watching the show and getting mildly annoyed that we were left to stand in the rain (now a legitimate downpour) while Kenny Fucking Smith (Mike Smith's son) sat in the
front seat of the cruiser, still struggling against a wind nobody else could feel. Eventually, the officer approached us and asked some questions, never writing anything down or even getting our names. "Is he a regular?" I asked, already certain of the answer, and was surprised to hear the reply, "No, not really... but he usually has a gun." "Did you give him a breathalyzer?" "Yeah, he blew a point-two-four." (three times the legal limit. If he could be that drunk and not dead, I can't possibly imagine how he wasn't a regular) I remembered the pocketknives, and told him where he could collect them as an SUV pulled up from the direction of the parking lot: Park Rangers. The two agencies spent a few minutes discussing where, exactly, they were, in order to determine jurisdiction and custody of Kenny Fucking Smith (Mike Smith's son). A third car approached behind the cruiser, and Adam and Brad left to catch up with their wives. All three drove away without a single offer to take me back to the parking lot, but I ran (mainly to stay warm--by that time everything I wore was soaked to the bone) and arrived in time to show the sheriff's deputy (who had won custody) where to find the knives which had so thoroughly terrified Jay: three or four of the cheapest, shittiest, gas-station check-out line quality pocket knives I've seen in one person's possession. Jay's wife arrived, still chauffeuring Kenny's buddy, who was nowhere near as drunk as Kenny Fucking Smith (Mike Smith's son), collected her husband from wherever he had been hiding, and left again, presumably to drive Kenny's buddy home.
The Girl arrived when the cruiser left, and we both watched the Rangers' SUV drive away up the same dirt road that ran past our campsite, again with no offer of help. We saw toad's eyes gleaming in our flashlight beams on our walk back to the tents. Everyone else in our group was already asleep, and had no idea we hadn't returned within minutes of delivering our food to the car. I told her my side of the story. She said that she had found the truck, and that it had stopped on its way down a steep bank towards a river when it hit a tree. "One foot to either side," she told me, "and he would've been dead. Roll over, crash in the river, drown." Just before midnight, we peeled off our clothes outside the tent, trying to keep the inside dry, but that was the night I discovered my tent had sprung a leak, directly above my forehead.
Someday, I'm going to rewrite this as a country song.
