Johnny Houseman, Vol 2: Permeation

"Front Desk to.....Josh," my radio spat at me, scaring me half to death. After I quit twitching, I guessed that the hesitation was due to the fact that I normally, if not a bit impersonally in my opinion, go simply by Houseman, and this call needed Josh, not just the Houseman.

Hmmm, I thought, as I scratched at my goatee.

I wonder what that means? So I allowed a few ticks before I gave an answer. Dylan was working his way through Tangled Up In Blue on KZGL, Flagstaff's only actual radio station. I reached down and turned it up. He, Mr. Zimmerman, was right at the line where he's in the strip club and he mentions that he "must have felt a bit uneasy when she bent down to tie the laaaayy-sis on my shoe....tangled up in bluuuue."

I smiled, reached over and turned it down a few clicks.


I was wary. I took a sip of coffee and I said somewhat slowly, "Go ahead, Front Desk." After nearly four months of working there, I was savvy to what the tone in the voice during these types of calls might mean. Furthermore, it was just odd timing on their part. 11:00 a.m. on a Friday is a somewhat crazy time of the day for me and they know it.

Front Desk took a moment or two for itself. Then: "Hey, Josh, um. Well, I'm sure you heard that unit number 3110 was just called out for inspection."

I looked confusedly at the scratched face of the two-way radio, with all its inertness, pressed the button on the side of it and said, "10-4." 

"Stand by, please, Josh," Front Desk said.

"10-4."

That's the easiest response for a guy in my position. It cuts down on unnecessary rhetoric. However, I was still at a loss as to what the hell it was, exactly, Front Desk was getting at. I am not an Inspector. 

I am Johnny Houseman. 

"Sorry, for the wait, Josh," came the reply after a moment from Front Desk, "Um, the, um, we, I guess, were wondering if you could take the fogger up there and treat that unit. Thirty-one ten. The Inspector said it really stinks."

Even Yoda can't remedy something that really stinks. Jedi powers and all. Of which, I am lacking. Damn. I wanted to be somewhere else. Maybe on the precarious lip of the Grand Canyon just 80 miles away, staring into a mile-deep abyss. Or horseback on the trail, heading up to Cow Camp, moving a gaggle of cows into the shadows of Capitol Peak during sobering cold morning temperatures with my brother.


All of this was on my mind as I said, "Huh," into the two-way. 

And that was all I offered. I reached down and turned up Dylan. He was at the point in the story where "she handed me a book of poems written by an Italian poet from the 13th cen-tur-eee." 

Front Desk didn't push the matter on me. My concern was that no one had defined the stink but they were more than willing to send me in there to rectify what was, in my head, an encounter with a crazy putrescence - armed with nothing more than a whirring machine full of a citrus-scented oily liquid that could be sprayed about in a misty manner.

Dylan had gotten to "and every word flowed like burning coal, written in my soul from me to you....tangled up in bluuuuue."

It was a beautiful pre-Spring day. It was just after eleven in the morning in mid-March at 7,000 feet in the Southern Rockies and I was already in a t-shirt. I let Dylan get through the solo in the middle of the song; as he jangled along I let him work to his point where he tells you, "And one day the axe just fell." Contradictory to the song, there was an easiness to my day; a sense of calm that I have not felt in quite some time. 

I looked left, over the tops of the houses on the hill. A Bald Eagle was making its way quite quickly over the resort, from West to East, with two ravens in its wake. 

Ravens, being large birds themselves - the largest, actually, of the Corvus genus, are regarded as one of the most intelligent birds on the planet. While also being the largest all-black bird in the world and riding on a wingspan of nearly five feet, the two I saw that morning were surprisingly dwarfed by the power, grace, and majesty of the Eagle in front of them. 

We - one king raptor, two winged omnivores and a lowly, Earth-bound biped - all glided along until our paths intersected at roughly 11:11 a.m. on a tertiary street in the middle of a city mostly foreign to me, during a job that was, at most times, rewarding and highly manageable, but recently had become...cumbersome. But no matter. I was with Dylan and an eagle and two ravens. Things were good in my world. 

I inhaled deeply and let out the air between pursed lips, like a tire going flat quickly, perhaps in anticipation of smelling bad stuff for the next thirty minutes or so. 

"Did you copy that, Josh?"

"10-4," I said to Front Desk through the last few PSI in my lungs, as politely as I could. 

"Thanks, Josh," said Front Desk. I thought I detected a bit of empathy through the static.

I guided the small pickup truck down the hill, waltzed into the warehouse, seized a fifteen pound shoebox-sized piece of equipment with a five foot hose attached to it, placed it in the truck and drove back up the hill to unit 3110. 



The smell, the stink, was, in fact, the result of a skunk's bouquet. Perfect. Skunks. Now, there are a few of you who know that I have been sprayed, point-blank, by a skunk, thanks to my little red dog named Rye. All of you found this event pretty god damned funny.

On that most disappointing October night, I had opted to walk from the Shop on McCabe Ranch to my Cabin, just a few hundred yards down the road. 

At the Shop, the dog thought that the red Toyota pickup would have been a wiser option. Upon her jumping into the back of it, I said, "Naw, hell, Rye, it's a nice night. Let's walk. C'mon."


She obligingly popped out of the back of the truck and took off down the stretch of dirt road, upon which we had walked maybe ten thousand times, to our house. 


It was, indeed, a fine October night. Indian Summer warmth hung in the air and a prodigious moon hefted itself over the vicinity of Vagneur Mountain. We'd all had a few Coors Lights around the round table at the Shop after a day of riding as we discussed everything from politics to pipelines to music to horses to cows to trucks and finally, without intentionally making the topic lastly, women.

All that be as it may, and after we had mostly solved not only our challenges with the women in our lives but also with our respective politicians, trucks, phones, friends, tractors, ditches, brothers, bottles, computers, families, ideologies and tempers, I moseyed off down the road with my dog.


I had every piece of riding equipment I owned - except my saddle - in my arms: raincoat, chinks, saddlebags, boots from yesterday, extra black felt hat, extra gloves, sweatshirt, a rope I can't throw worth a damn and a few extra shirts.


I ambled happily, a touch inebriated, by an old concrete wall that used to serve as an abutment to a bridge that passed over the road above the Cabin. The dog, which had been at my heels, suddenly darted off into the brush on the right - maybe ten feet away - and barked twice. She presently returned to my side, snorting. I took three more steps.


The smell that hit me was, at that point, unrecognizable it was so ridiculously pungent. 

Surely, there are many ingrained smells in our brains: Dust smells nostalgic if one is in an attic. A lilac smells like the repudiation of months of dormancy. Falling rain smells like encumbered love. High country January cold smells clear, harsh and calm. A river smells like motion, life and strength. A meadow smells like time is standing still. A horse smells like work and a dog smells like home. Snow smells quiet. The scent of fresh cut hay just makes you smile. The smell of a lawn mowed just after dawn may make you reminisce. Bacon smells like an available morning and a BBQ grill smells like friends and family on a Summer evening. Woodstove smoke smells like comfort and a campfire smells like well-deserved time around it. The ocean smells like all of the distance the wave that brought the scent to you has traveled. The exhaust from an engine with a carburetor reminds you of being a kid. A whiff of cigar smoke might as well put my dead Grandpa Luigi right here next to me. These are good smells. They conjure good memories. Any of them, individually or combined, could be the impetus of numerous stories.

Skunks, however, are vile, unnecessary creations, much like the human appendix. They - skunks - are an obviously god-damned, lowly, waddling, ill-devised, rat-like, poison-tailed and utterly useless rodent whose spray inflicts weeks worth of embarrassment and discontent upon the victim. To hell with Mace; spray someone with skunk piss. They are heinous creatures. I loathe their existence.



So, back to that October night: 

Immediately, upon being doused with the wretched solution spewed forth from that godawful critter's ass, you curse - at length - the dog. Next, you verbally unleash on the skunk and finally, everything else - including, but not limited to: god, his supposed son, sons of bitches, and those that are sometimes known to copulate with a maternal figure. 

Then, you run as fast as possible in the opposite direction, flapping your arms in a manner that would make you look semi-crazed, mostly stupid and as though you were being attacked by bees to an onlooker but with zero rate of success of outstripping the stink. During these moments, you accidentally drop all of your very important belongings for the skunk to piss upon again because your eyes are watering so bad you can't see your own feet and your nose feels like someone just stuffed it full of diced jalapenos. 

Your dog is ambivalent at this time, for the skunk is a slow and very painful moving target to pursue, but a moving mark nonetheless. At this point, you startle yourself in your ability to actually take the time it takes you to painfully blink and consider how ambivalence and presumptions can lead to bad decisions.  


Then your wits come about you and you realize that you've been fucking sprayed by a skunk from four arms length's away. A fucking skunk. That smell just doesn't go away by tomorrow. You, your dog and nearly fifteen hundred bucks worth of your belongings that are essential to your job are now covered in skunk's piss. At eleven o'clock at night. 

Many things, at this point, run through your head. Namely, to:

1) Shoot the dog until she's very dead upon first sight. 
2) Move a million miles away to alleviate the humiliation that will no doubt be supplied by those supposedly called friends and family.
3) Wish that you had driven the Toyota.
4) Wonder where the skunk is RIGHT NOW and how many times it can do such a thing.


This is what actually happens, though, if you were to be caught in such a situation:

1) The dog loses its mind and goes into a series of fish-out-of-water-esque actions and flops around on the ground, all the while pawing madly at its nose and eyes.

2) You continue to curse madly and blow poisonous, stinging snot-rockets from your nose.

3) You gather your things, half-blind, and head towards your house knowing all the time that you are just going to bring the rotten stench home with you.

4) Arrive at the house, uttering words unfit for most publications, including this one.

5) Strip naked and throw everything you are wearing in the trash can outside.

6) Take a few kicks at the dog because she is now over the entire matter and sees nothing wrong with smelling like a skunk and would very much like to tell you that she does, indeed, smell like a skunk as you tip-toe over the rocks to your front door, stark raving naked.  ("Ow, fuckin rocks, ouch, shit, ouch, ow, Rye, fuck, git the fuck outta here, ow, shit, Rye, goddammit, go on, ye god damn dog, wait, come here you little bitch, lemme kick the hell out of you, oof, shit, ow, shit, dammit, fuck, fuckin rocks, fucking dog, git the fuck outta here ya little bitch, you stink like hell itself...FUCK!") 

7) Immediately shower until the hot water cylinder runs ice cold. 

8) Put the dog on a one-way airplane to Siberia.

9) Dress.

10) Sleep on the roof of your house in an old sleeping bag. (No shit.) Luckily, it's a flat roof.


However, it smells like a skunk even on the roof of your house because the whole event happened not 75 yards from your house. And as I laid there in an old sleeping bag, I could imagine other inhabitants of the ranch saying to those around them, "Damn skunk sprayed out there; stinks like hell," having no clue that the damn skunk sprayed ME. 

All of this was running through my head as I toted the little whirring machine around in unit 3110 and sprayed the drapes, the beds, the sofas, the bathrooms, the stairs, the carpets, the chairs, the ceiling fans, even the damn door knobs. I was going to defeat that little Pepe La Pew sonofabitch if I had to go buy more citrus-smelling shit myself. It was at vendetta stage. I was at DefCon 4. 

I spent forty-five minutes in that cursed unit. 


The guests checked in the next day.


"Front Desk to.....Josh," came the call. 

"Go ahead, Front Desk."

"Hey, Josh, um, the guests from unit 3110 just called down here and said that their unit smells like a skunk. Do you think that you could go in there and treat it?"

I just laughed.


At that point, I wanted to say, "10-4, Front Desk. I can do that with no problem at all. Then it will smell like a skunk pissed all over a fucking lemon tree and a grapefruit tree and an orange tree and maybe even a rose shrub in there because IT'S A FUCKING SKUNK!!" 

But I didn't. I reached up to the radio in the truck, rotated the volume knob to the right as Dave Lowery worked his way through Cracker's Euro-Trash Girl. "Took the train down to Athens and I slept in a fountain. Some Swiss junkie in Turin ripped me off of my cash. Yeah, I'll search the world over for my angel in black," Dave sang.

No eagles; just two pairs of two ravens circling high above me. Laughing, I think, at me in that call that should be a "caw-caw-caw" but on that day I think it was "Ha-Ha-Ha." I sighed. 

"10-4," I said very politely, " I'll be there in a minute or two."

Within a minute or two, I fogged unit 3110 again. Rod, the Maintenance Supervisor, who had just cut the end of his thumb off with a table saw (and has the severed bit in a jar of formaldehyde on his desk for reasons unknown to all of us) showed up, placed a live trap under the unit, cursed quietly to himself and zoomed off, muttering, "Fucking skunks." 


How true.


Thirteen minutes later: "Front Desk to Josh." 


Front Desk seemed to have repudiated its months-long impersonal manner towards the Houseman in less than twenty-four hours.


"Go ahead, Front Desk."


"Hey, Josh, we have an insurance vendor down here who would like to meet with you."


Hmmm, I thought, as I scratched at my goatee. I wonder what that means. Dave Lowery sang, "I sold my plasma in Amsterdam, spent it all in a night. Gotta tattoo in Berlin and a case of the crabs. It was a rose and a dagger on the palm of my hand."

I love that song. I turned the truck stereo down again.


"10-4, Front Desk," I said, "I'll be there in a minute."


I walked in to the Front Office and this guy was standing there. I just laughed again.

Two skunks in one day?