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That trans-Nebraska weekend we saw dogs, cats, rats, snakes, llamas, longhorn cattle, buffalo, beefalo, a giraffe, a polar bear, and various and sundry human animals, including a rancher, a cop, and a bridesmaid aping a Playboy bunny with her brother’s bow-tie. We began with a meal of testicles, sampled fraudulent Danish and mediocre wedding cake, and concluded our visit by crapping together in what was luckily a two-stall bar bathroom in a less than one-horse town.The forces of the universe blessed me with a buxom buddy from Illinois in grad school. She could easily have landed the starring role in a live-action movie about Betty Boop. We got each other. Betty and I should have been locker mates in junior high. We met as locker neighbors in our twenties. Imagine going to grad school in a building with lockers, adjacent to a corral confining twenty head of cattle. There may be such schools outside of Nebraska, but why look for them?
Betty and I had lots of mutual friends. Mainly freaks. I avoided non-non-traditional students as haughtily as they avoided me. Frat boys have never liked me, and the feeling is mutual. Betty was a little more open-minded about the less open-minded, though, so she would end up at Chi-Chi’s from time to time licking salt off powdered Margaritas with the grad school princesses.
Princesses plan weddings in grad school while the rest of us are working three jobs or recovering from organ donation surgery to pay for everything. One blonde-topped stick bitch that Betty knew was throwing a wedding in her hometown. As the Boop body did not conform to magazine notions of bridesmaidenhood, Broomstick asked Betty to serve as her “personal assistant,” an honor which Betty ultimately renamed “armpit wiper.”
Nebraska is a small town. It is a large state, but it is too small for me to name Broomstick’s hometown for fear of retaliation by her litigious parents. Let’s call it Broomfield. As a native Nebraskan I knew our journey from Lincoln to Broomfield would be long. Betty rarely left her bed before lunchtime, though, so we headed out in the afternoon. We drove and drove and drove and drove and soon the afternoon was gone. I actually saw a low-rent Michael Jackson-style menagerie by the side of the Interstate including llamas and a giraffe, but Betty blinked and missed it and doubted me. When she saw a herd of longhorn cattle and asked what was wrong with their ears, however, I reassessed her gullibility level and later told her we should stop at the museum in Grand Island on the way back to view the “Cornstine Chapel,” the ceiling of which was an angelic mosaic rendered in multicolored kernels of good old Nebraska corn. I may have mentioned a similar Da Vinci style work entitled “Corna Lisa.” She believed me. Dumbass.
We continued to drive along endlessly toward the sun, as it staggered down the sky to trip over the sandhills. I grew hungry and bored. “Pull off here,” I said at Paxton, after four hours in the car, “we’re going to visit my aunt.” Boop did as she was told, in spite of the fact that she was getting cranky. I told her to drive through town, which didn’t take long, and that my aunt lived right on the other side. We drove and drove and drove. Boop was getting pissed. We came to the bridge. She saw the sign and hissed, “’Pavement Ends’?!?” The tone of her eyebrows terrified me.
“I swear,” I swore to her. “First house on the right.” True enough, but out there that means you’re trailing a mile-long plume of dust behind you when you turn into the first driveway. Boop was hot in a number of ways when we got to the ranch, but she got over it quickly because she and my aunt hit it off in an instant. She told my aunt about the Cornstine Chapel and the Corna Lisa and my aunt believed it. A match made in heaven.
My uncle insisted on taking us to town for dinner at the famous Ole’s Big Game Bar, where Boop’s bleeding heart missed a beat as she stepped through the door and saw that triumph of taxidermy, an enormous stuffed polar bear, tromping on a similarly stuffed baby seal. I told her to get over it, as the animals had been standing there like that my entire lifetime and would surely have died of natural causes by now if they’d been left in the wild. My uncle made us order the Rocky Mountain Oysters. Buffalo balls. There was no deception involved. You bread and fry it, Boop and I will eat damn near anything. An hour had transformed Boop from a pissed off city girl to one of the family, and my aunt and uncle hugged and kissed us goodbye and sent us on our way into the dark night.
We were still only halfway to Broomfield. We spent the next several hours on a two-lane highway with almost no traffic except for the snakes, rats, and mice that played chicken in the headlights, and the coal trains barreling toward us lit up like alien spaceships, the radio devoid of anything but static and NPR. We drove and drove and drove and drove. “How can we still be in Nebraska?” asked Boop in wonder. It later occurred to me that was because she hailed from a vertical state instead of a horizontal one.
At long last we arrived at Broomfield and found the palace of the Stick People. The house was actually built to resemble a ridiculous castle, with a façade of fake gray stone and a hexagonal tower displaying a stained glass window with a family coat of arms, probably phony. Inside the tower contained a main floor bathroom with a black toilet, an upper floor study, and a basement room generally inhabited by cats, in which our hosts installed me and Boop, both dreadfully allergic.
I am told that Bush 41’s nickname in the Navy was George Herbert Walker Bush. Well, the Stick family, staunch Republicans all, delighted in my name, as if it were much funnier than it actually is, and nicknamed me Antonia Johanna Holcomb. No Annie, no Toni, no Honey, just Antonia Johanna Holcomb. “Where are you from, Antonia Johanna Holcomb?” And, “Where did you do your undergrad, Antonia Johanna Holcomb?” And “Don’t trip over the litter box, Antonia Johanna Holcomb!”
It was midnight and the bride and her mother went to bed. The squire had long since retired. Boop and I were left with the sister and her visiting cat, Snickers, who was never allowed outdoors. Boop went out for a cigarette and I followed. Worried that the front door might lock behind me, this being a fortress and all, I left it open a little bit. Snickers squeezed out too, without more than a shrug from me. The welfare of cats has never interested me much.
Dogs , on the other hand, matter much more. We found a black lab of bovine proportions in the driveway. “Oh my God!” squeaked Betty. “That’s Hubby’s dog! I can’t believe they let him out here without a leash! Here, doggy…” Hubby and his dog apparently resided in Lincoln, like we did. My conscience kicked in at least where the dog was concerned. I couldn’t let him get lost in this unfamiliar environment, so I gripped him by the collar and marched him into the castle. He was calm, obedient, and enormous. He stood to my hip. I herded him through the house by patting his flank, as if he were a steer. We made our way into the living room where Sister was watching television in a recliner, with her back to us. “Where do you guys keep the dog?” I asked her. “What dog?” she replied. I patted the beast on the rump again and we made our way back out through the dining room with its lace tablecloth, and Sister was never the wiser.
Back on the porch, Boop and the dog and I had to stifle our laughter about the mixup, because we didn’t want to wake the whole family. Brides need beauty sleep, after all. We almost felt bad about having arrived so late. Then Sister came out the front door, frantic because she couldn’t find Snickers, the poor dear who had neither claws nor survival skills, not even the most basic experiences a regular cat would have. “Did you see Snickers get out?” I just shrugged.
Soon the bride and her mother were out there with us, in the middle of the night, poking around in bushes looking for Snickers. Boop was doing it too. I was basically just standing there with my friend, the anonymous black lab, whom everyone wanted to blame for everything. I wondered what would happen if the bride had dark circles around her eyes in the morning, or scratches on her hands or face from parting the shrubbery in search of Snickers. I wondered why anyone cared. I refused to participate in the search because obviously, Snickers had been waiting for this opportunity for years, and finding a small cat enjoying its first taste of freedom in a big state in the middle of a dark night could not be much more likely than finding a needle in a haystack. Apparently these people really liked cats.
That dog was so sweet. He never made a sound. Perhaps the fact that he was large, black, and male made these women assume he was the perpetrator in Snickers’ disappearance. Sister called the police on him and a cruiser arrived within three minutes. It pulled up in front of the castle. A uniformed officer leapt from the driver’s door and opened the back passenger door, and the dog jumped right inside without prompting, as if Sister had called him a cab. The officer drove off without a word to us, which annoyed Sister, who expressed disgust with the force for failure to join the search party.
Sister must have noticed that I was not going to get my hands dirty by digging in the bushes, so she asked me to go into the house and check for Snickers on the third floor, which was the bride’s room. I wanted to see the third floor so I did it. It wasn’t that interesting. In fact, after I saw the cardboard torso poking out of the long thin wedding dress hanging from the top of the door, I turned around and went back outside, where I reported with certainty that Snickers wasn’t in there.
Snickers disappointed me by permitting Boop to drag him out from under a bush a half hour later. Had I escaped Sister’s clutches, I’d have been halfway to Wyoming by then, and no looking back. Boop and I went to bed in the kitty keep to avoid listening to Sister fuss over the thing.
We laughed our heads off about the dog. I knew Boop’s love for me was true, but I wasn’t ready to tell her how Snickers had escaped, mainly because it would have made her laugh harder, and our jollity was already shaking deadly cat hairs out of the twin beds all over us. It was a long, sneezy, wheezy night.
The morning wasn’t much better. After a few hits of albuterol, Boop and I stumbled upstairs to meet the squire and his court for breakfast. He had gone out for Danish. Broomstick’s mother was horrified to discover that there were only twelve Danish in a box labeled “Baker’s Dozen.” She was beside herself. “That’s false advertising,” she appealed to the Squire. “It should be thirteen,” he agreed, wisely. “It’s fraud,” said the mother. They couldn’t let it go. They wanted everyone to join in. “Don’t you think that’s fraud, Antonia Johanna Holcomb?” Shrugging came in very handy for me that weekend.
I spent most of the day imprisoned in the fortress trying to avoid cats while Boop ran beautification errands for Broomstick and Sister. Beautification bores me as much as cats do. These women worked it pageant-style, even going so far as to put Vaseline on their teeth to guarantee gargantuan smiles. At long last they were ready to go to the church, two hours before the wedding was to start, which left just enough time to repeat the entire beautification routine and add some new wrinkles to it. Betty was forced to wipe Sister’s armpits. Boop claimed Sister refused regular water and demanded Perrier, but this report may be apocryphal in the mode of Corna Lisa, in light of our location on this planet. The last three hours of our trip the night before, we never saw so much as a lit-up gas-station or convenience store where we could stop to pee. Even though we were in a town now, a town with a castle, I doubt that Perrier was de rigueur. But I digress.
Oddly I remember nothing whatsoever about the ceremony, other than the brother’s Catholic girlfriend shocking everyone in the church by reflexively shouting out: “And also with you!” in response to the pastor’s greeting of “Peace be with you,” a Protestant faux pas I now emulate every single chance I get, wedding, funeral or whatnot. I furthermore have no recollection whatsoever about the groom.
Have I mentioned the brother? Have I mentioned that the Stick family was extremely close, in fact, disturbingly so? This is how close they were. The brother was having such a great time tearing up the dance floor with his sisters, the one in the black strapless gown wearing his bowtie like a Playboy bunny, that his girlfriend was jealous. His apparently normal, apparently sober girlfriend was actually jealous, it was that much of a spectacle. She was fuming, and she was vocal about it.
I remember little else about the reception, except that the entire town had been invited via a local newspaper ad that all but read, “Let Them Eat Cake.” The townies did not join the royals on the dance floor. Neither did Boop and I. We were bored. We were sunburnt from the trip up, exhausted from trying to sleep through our respective allergy attacks, and uncomfortably constipated due to the profusion of baked goods and lack of privacy. We couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Sadly, however, now that Boop understood about horizontal states, I couldn’t convince her to leave that night. To her credit, though, we left in time to get breakfast at the only McDonald’s in a 100-mile radius, and she was generally not out of bed before noon at school. We hit the road. I told her I let the cat out. We laughed so hard we couldn’t even talk for about an hour. We got progressively more sunburnt, but we were enjoying the fresh air and cigarette smoke after all that cat dander, in spite of our stomachaches.
After a couple hours on a lonely highway, we hit a crest where we could see at least twenty miles in every direction. There were only three things to see from there: a two-mile coal train approaching, a run-down teeny-tiny local bar on the near side of the tracks, and a Taco John’s directly on the far side of the tracks. “Taco John’s!” I screeched. “Bathroom!” The train was bearing down hard. So was Boop, but the crossbuck came down just before we made the tracks. “I can’t wait,” I told her, “I just can’t.” We made for the local. The sun was so bright that we could see nothing inside and had to feel our way to the restroom, the interior of which was fortunately well-lit, and even more fortunately contained two stalls. We plopped ourselves down and did our business with much laughter, noise, and gusto. Ordinarily this would have been a solitary experience, but we had to do what we had to do. When we burst forth into the bar, our eyes had adjusted enough to see that it was full of people who had heard everything. We bolted back into the sunny afternoon.
Thus concludes my memory. This all happened years ago. I remineded Boop about it the other day, and told her that I hate princesses. She said, “Why? I am a princess!”
She is right. We are princesses. We are plain princesses. We are the true Princesses of the Plains.
