Thursday, July 16, 2009

THUG ZAPPER (no. 4)

THUG ZAPPER (no. 4)

Yup, Jingles had been “testie number 1” on the ice with the zapping collar device. This is supposed to be our piece of miracle hockey gear to help the NHL, through Mr. Rup Iverson – Enforcement Technology Rep, control fighting.

The NHL ran an unsuccessful test of their idea on some Oakland ice and we’ve run one less than successful test on our local ice up here in the back woods.

Ehh?

After closing the bar at the conclusion of our skate, Jingles had invited us all over for a barbeque at his place on the next Saturday afternoon. This was to be a good time but also a chance to troubleshoot and brainstorm possible improvements or changes to the idea we had already formulated and tested once.

Families and all are gathered out at Jingles’ place. D-Pity brought his architect girlfriend and I got to meet her for the first time. Nice lady and as opposed to what the other guys had picked on him about, I found that she was mildly attractive and not the horse’s ass as I was led to believe. She and I chatted a bit about construction practices and the new “green” edicts that our government is tasking us with. She’s a firm believer in global warming and I had to take an opposing view recommending that she read some of my writings on the subject and my proposition that we’re getting reading for a shift of the polar axis. Yes, that the North Pole will be soon positioned just above the Mexican border near Del Rio, Texas. This she found absolutely hilarious but said that she’d try to find time to read my shit.

Well, it was apparent that Jingles was running the show. He had two big old wash tubs just jammed packed with chipped ice and bottles of his home brew; tall necks. Yup! He had wine, iced tea, and a couple of coolers full of pops for the kids.

He’s got a couple of redwood decks out in the back yard with one of them next to a big old above-ground pool with a ladder wide enough for two people to step into it or out of it at once. It was a nice hot humid day and the skeeters weren’t half bad. Jingles says that he uses some sort of high frequency speaker system, beyond the range that we can hear, to repel them fool bugs. Must work.

At the other deck he’s got a built in six foot wide barbeque setup. And like I said earlier he was running the show. Flipping burgers, turning hotdogs and smoking ears of corn. Good shit! But I think he’d already had a handful of those brews before anyone got there because the pattern for flipping burgers kinda went: two on the grill and one on the deck. He’s a flipping fanatic. Damn sure his dogs ate well that afternoon. Stinky even gathered up some of the dirt burgers and took them back for his junkyard mutts.

After we all sat around eating and doing the usual chat, yelling at the kids and helping clean up; Jingles lead us dudes down to his basement workshop.

Smelled like a friggin brewery down there. He had two separate batches of his home brew fermenting in a couple of 5 gallon crocks under cover of some wet towels. He also had an old book case filled up with capped off long necks. Must a been a couple hundred bottles of beer sitting there on the shelves.

D-Pity said, “Jingles, old buddy old pal, why are these delectable bottles of ale extraordinaire not being refrigerated? Ehh, you king of brew-meisters?”

Damn, we’re all pretty cocked.

Stinky added, “Yeah, Jings, you old fool, why aren’t these chillin? Not sure there are many left in the tubs out on your deck.”

Jingles extends his hand at Stinky and curls his index finger a couple a times without saying a word and turns walking away from us around the bench into another little room.

Shit, there’s two refrigerators and three more crocks. He opens one and it’s completely filled with brown bottles and he opens the other with equal contained capacity.

“Damned, all right! That’s a lot of beer Mr. Wheats,” exclaimed D-Pity. “But, still why aren’t those others refrigerated?”

Jingles, all proud of his beer making expertise explains, “I found that when I first started doing this, that I’d give a six pack or two away to somebody and they wouldn’t have room in their frig to put it all away. After a couple of days some of the bottles occasionally would burst. Sometimes, ya know, I bottle a little green and the yeast keeps working. Gets a little stronger but also makes a little more pressure and busts the bottles. I wasn’t happy that the beer I gave away went to waste so now I bottle it and let is sit at least a week before cooling it down. If the bottles are going to explode – at least most of the time it will happen here before I give it away.”

I said, “I get it. But dab-nab if you don’t have a lot of beer here. Isn’t there some sort of legal limit on what your allowed to brew?”

“Ahh, yeah,” Jingles gagged out, “but we don’t need to get into that. Come on back to the bench and let me show you guys what I worked on this week.”

“Looks to me,” piped in Bronzy, “that all you had time to work on was brewing. And I shit for sure ain’t complaining none. Uh uh, not one bit.”

Then he belched from the deepest regions of his gut and Stinky immediately followed by lifting a leg and ripped a fart that could have only been churned up from a perditious tomb of torment. We almost evacuated the workshop as Jingles pulled an overhead cord turning on a high velocity exhaust fan.

“Got ya covered,” he whispered to Stinky. And then in a louder voice, “The wife made me put this in to keep the fragrances from permeating the livable regions of our humble domain. Either that or I had to quit making beer. Ha-ha! And you know where that would go. Ehh?”

“Here. You guys check out these ideas I’ve got here on the bench. I amped up the original collar and also fixed up another one so that they will zap at a higher voltage. Both Ry-Ry and myself have tested it in the heat of staged but protracted arguments. I wouldn’t let Dilbert try it at this level. You know, he’s just a kid. But he sure wanted to again and he laughed his ass off watching what it did to both of us. He pushed the remote to do the zapping. Both times it just knocked us on our asses. Ry-Ry said it was fuckin intense. Called it quite the thug zapper. He said that’s what we ought to name it and that he’d check on whether that was already copyrighted. Said that he found something that might indicate it was assigned in Australia, but was part of a security system and we might be able to get away with it here in the US and Canada. He’s still doing research so we’ll see.”

Jingles wasn’t slurring his words so much now and seemed to have sobered up some in the excitement of showing us these revisions to the design.

D-Pity barked, “I like that, ‘Thug Zapper’. Maybe we could get Dave Shultz to endorse the suckers. Kinda like ‘bug zapper’ but more oomph to it. Tell Ry-Ry that I think that that’s the shit, ehh.”

Stinky ripped another one and we all gagged for a bit while the fan cleared the air.

“So anyway,” Jingles bragged, “we’ve got two of these now that I’ve fixed up and they’re tuned to about the same zapping output power. I think we should give them another try, maybe at the Nightmares’ practice again this week. I’ll wear one again but we need to get someone else to try it.”

“I’m not so sure that we can legally get one of the kids to try it,” I stated. “Well, I mean we could probably talk a couple of them into trying it out but if they decided to sue afterwards for some stupid shit reason then we’d be toast. Ehh. It’s got to be one of us. You guys agree?”

Bronzy dekes to the left and says, “I don’t know about that Jasper. I’ll be damned if I want to get zapped. I try to avoid fighting anyway – you know I get just as pissed as any other guy but I’m still just barely pushing one-sixty and that usually puts me on the losing end of any kinda physical altercation. Besides that, my pain threshold has never been on par with Jingles. Brother or not, he’s crazy and’s always been that way. Remember how he used to play ‘red zone’ and we’d try no nail that red tee shirt that he’d tuck into his shorts and hang in front of his nuts. Uhn-uh, no sirree, I don’t want to test one of those puppies out!”

“Well fuck you dude. I’ll give it a try,” said D-Pity. “I’ve probably got twenty pounds on Jingles so maybe it will be more tolerable. Of course that isn’t what we want is it guys?”

I responded, “No, no. It’s gotta knock a guy on his ass, without permanent or long lasting injury. You’re gonna want the guy to probably be fully recovered after serving five minutes though. Right? You guys agree? Right? But still it’s gotta break up the fight or Rup ain’t gonna be interested in it.”

“So everybody agrees that we’ll try it again, the same scenario as last time but Jingles you and D-Pity both will be wearing a collar. I’m sorry guys, you’ll be wearing a ‘Thug Zapper’. OK?”

“Sure, sure Jasper,” Jingles conclude. “You and Bronzy run the controls and camera. Stinky, I think you should play this time and help create the agitation. Ok. Just put on a prick attitude like you did that time when those guys were trying to steal shit from the junk yard. Ehh!”

“Can do!”

Well Jingles wasn’t done yet.

“Just in case this doesn’t work,” he said, “I’ve got a back up device that I’m working on. Jasper, you remember those ‘nuclear briefs’ that you made for me as a Christmas present when I was a kid?”

“Yeah. No way Jingles! You can’t charge up and zap a jock strap. Shit ass man! You might make someone sterile or toast their friggin dick. What the hell? After you use that and the trainer comes out to check on his fighter, what’s he gonna do stick his hand down the guy’s shorts and ask him how his package is doing? No way! Fucking no way!

Mr. D-Pity – Wayno Studholm, is laughing his ass off. “Jingles, you’ve electrified some Bike or whatever brand of jock strap? Show us this crazy-ass crotch cradle. Will ya? I gotta see this thing.”

Jingles opens up a shoe box on the bench and there the damn thing is. You could see wires woven into the ball sling and a battery pack with a remote receiver attached to the back of the waist band. A definite torture device if I ever saw one.

Bronzy is moaning, “Oh shit, I ache already just thinking about that thing. Ohhhhh.”

Jingles defends himself by stating, “Look you guys, it’s only a back up plan. I’m sure it will work. It’s detuned from the original dog collar that we tested, so it won’t be as strong a zap. But shit you guys. It’s gonna zap the most sensitive part of a player’s body. And if that won’t break up a fight than I don’t know what will. It’s only a back up. Ok? Ya know, only if these two don’t work. I thought you guys would think I had done my homework and would appreciate an alternate device. Who wants another beer?”

He beered us all and we went upstairs and back outside. Jingles went over to the deck by the pool and jogged across it leaping and doing a cannon ball just missing Bronzy’s little girl, Chatisha. What a little sweetie but it scared the crap outta her and got him yelled at by just about everybody.

Well, pucksters, somebody’s walking with wood and right now I’m not sure it’s any of us. There’s more to follow so as they used to say “Stay tuned folks!”