The Prank

 

We had the first half of our supplies, so unless Seamus had stowed away the rolls of toilet paper in the back of the ambulance, we were still missing the other half.  No worries though, Seamus had said, there was a Walgreens right down the road, he’d go and pick up a pack there.  As for the forks, we were in a bit of a bind because Newest Hunan’s plastic cutlery sets came not with a fork but with that useless and trifling piece of shit called a spork, together with a knife and packets of salt and pepper.  Seamus opened one of the sets, removed the spork and held it up to his face, examined it.  I could tell he was wondering whether it’d do the trick, whether its tines were long and pointy enough to pierce the ground.  “We’ll see,” he said.  “We’d be better off if they’d just given us chopsticks.”

We pulled into the Walgreens lot.  Seamus parked the ambulance and opened his door.  I was about to do the same when he asked me if I needed anything, which led me to believe he was going to be in and out of there, just popping in real quick for the TP, probably only a minute or two, so I said no, and boy was that a mistake.  He was in there doing God knows what for about forty-five minutes, while my dumbass was locked in the cabin of the ambulance, convincing myself, admittedly a bit dramatically, that it was steadily getting hotter and hotter and that I was surely going to die from heatstroke.  Was I actually locked in, trapped?  No.  But Seamus had locked the doors, and my fear of death wasn’t as strong as my fear of blowing the anti-theft alarm—embarrassment is a worse fate than death, sometimes—and I’d started to wonder whether Seamus was even allowed to be driving the ambulance in the first place.  Like, had he stolen the fucking thing?  And why were these thoughts just now creeping into my thick head instead of, say, oh, I don’t know, maybe when he pulled up outside of the hospital and told me to get in?  But, for whatever reason, I was along for the ride, there was no turning back, so I decided to busy myself by removing the sporks from the plastic wraps.

Eventually, I saw the sliding doors open and Seamus strutting through them, a pack of Red Bull in his right hand and a load of what must’ve been the toilet paper over his left shoulder.  He tossed the toilet paper in the back and then hopped back in, dropped the Red Bulls on the floor by his feet.  He reached down and opened the pack, grabbed a can and popped it open with his two front teeth, and then proceeded to gulp it down in a single mouth-to-can connection.  He crushed the finished can and tossed it back on the floor.  He then looked me square in the face and screamed, “BOOYA!”  I flinched in my seat a little because, sure, that caught me off guard, but even more startling was when he reached back down and retrieved another Red Bull and did the same exact thing again.  This time, though, he only drank about half the can before he had to let loose a belch that rattled the cabin.  “Sorry it took me so long in there,” he said, wiping his mouth.  “Couldn’t decide on the toilet paper.”  Then, thoroughly amped but dangerously caffeinated, Seamus drove off.

I figured we were making another pitstop as Seamus peeled off the road into an apartment complex called the Luxor Gardens which, despite its grandiose name, was clearly an overpriced dump, the steep rent justified by the “hip” outdoor communal space in its center that the tour guides were always so hyped to show you during your walkthrough—like so this is our pointless wooden pergola that’ll offer you no protection from the rain or the sun! and next to it we have four gas grills where you can cook your hotdogs or burgers, how fun! (but be careful, no tenant has ever bothered to clean the grates and I don’t think we’ve ever checked to see if the propane tanks need to be changed out) and then right over here is our very own rectangle of green turf and, I swear, I sprayed this thing down for an hour the other day but I guess it will perpetually stink of dog piss! and then, of course, right this way is the big ticket item, the pool!! it’s basically our very own hippo enclosure, but please read the sign—Do not throw beers or hard seltzers at the animals!—they can get a bit ornery throughout the day, and now look, I know $1,950 a month is a lot of money, but the pool is totally worth it, like if you ever needed to reupholster an old La-Z-Boy recliner or something, just hop on in and you’ll collect enough hair in no time, no need to search, the strands will find you and wrap around your limbs like jellyfish!  Anyway, I thought that maybe this was where Seamus lived, that he’d left something inside and had come to retrieve it—a set of black gloves, a balaclava, shit, maybe even some wire cutters—but nope, he pulled into a spot next the dumpsters, put the wagon in park, and said, “We’re here.”  When I asked the obvious follow-up, what “here” was, he looked at me like I was an idiot and said, all matter-of-factly, Mike and Carl’s place, duh.  I looked out the window, turned my head.  Here?

“Yes,” he confirmed.

Luxor Gardens, my ass.  Where were the trees?  Where were the gardens?  And what the fuck were we supposed to do with all these goddamn sporks and rolls of toilet paper?  Before I could voice my concerns, though, Seamus pointed out his window and announced that Mike and Carl’s unit was around the corner.  He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a beige wad of fabric, unfurled it a little, and then pulled it down over his head.  It was a woman’s stocking.  Of course it was.  I was an idiot for thinking he’d own a balaclava.  Those were for professionals, after all, and everything about this operation so far was screaming AMATEURS.  Anyway, Seamus turned to me and asked how he looked, said that he had an extra one for me, as well.  I told him that, while the lady’s leg garment did obscure his face, I’d take my chances and pass on mine, thank you.  He asked me why, and I had no choice but to describe for him how the empty space for the toes on the tip of his head made him look like a giant condom, which didn’t seem to bother him at all.  “Suit yourself,” he said.  He was still revved up from the two Red Bulls he’d taken straight to the dome, and, speaking of, he grabbed another one and hopped out of the cabin.  I followed him to the rear, and as soon as he opened the doors, I noticed the red flannel and chiseled jawline of the Brawny man.  I shook my head, and when I pointed this out, that he’d bought paper towels instead of toilet paper, he chugged the Red Bull, crushed the can on his head, and proceeded to batter himself with the crumpled aluminum puck, cursing himself for his ineptitude.  I let him get it out of his system, and he must’ve eventually jostled loose or shaken back into place some cerebral fluid, because he stopped and got all serious and said, “It’ll have to do,” then, “Let’s go.”

As we rounded the corner, Seamus stopped abruptly and stuck out his arm to hold me back.  “There,” he said, pointing.  I tried to follow his finger, and, sure enough, it looked like he was pointing to somewhere on the third—the top—floor, maybe even the roof.  Am I understanding you Seamus, I asked him, that these pricks aren’t in a ground-level unit?  He confirmed that they were not.  But beneath Mike and Carl’s unit, whichever one it was, between the sidewalk and the curb of the parking lot, was a grass strip with a single tree, a sapling maybe twelve feet tall, tied to a stake.  This, I learned, was where we’d engage in our jape, where we’d commit our caper, and Seamus soon devised a rather simple plan: he’d roll the tree; I’d spork the ground.  Reluctant yet committed, I agreed and set about my task, which quickly proved impossible.  It hadn’t rained in over a week, so the ground was hard as a rock.  Plus, Newest Hunan’s sporks were of inferior quality, so every time I tried to stick one in the ground, the head snapped right off.  I looked over at Seamus and saw he wasn’t faring any better with his task, given that the tree was being partially mummified rather than rolled.  Its lowest branches out of reach, Seamus had simply wrapped the paper towels around the trunk and the stake to which it was tied.  He noticed the shit progress on my end and tossed me the final roll.  “Here,” he said.  “I’ll finish this up.  When you’re done, go back to the truck and get the salt packets.”  Why, I asked?  Well, because we were gonna salt the earth on these mother fuckers, he replied, Roman style.  I didn’t even bother to try to understand, and, in a last-ditch effort, I unspooled a few sheets from the roll for a paper towel tail, adjusted it in my hand, set my feet, and then launched the fucker in an upwards trajectory.  A roll of paper towels, though, does not unravel like a roll of toilet paper.  It maintained its cylindrical shape as it cleared the height of the tree and then landed on the ground on the other side in a padded thump.

Back at the ambulance, I had no intention of retrieving the salt.  Sure, that plan was even more retarded than the rolling and the sporking.  I was exhausted, so I just climbed into the passenger seat of the wagon, and I think I was only there for a minute or two when I heard a blood-curdling scream.  I opened the door and looked outside and saw Seamus booking it around the corner, still wearing the stocking over his head.  He jumped in and threw the ambulance into reverse and slammed the gas pedal, the three-hundred-plus milligrams of caffeine still coursing through his bloodstream, and he nearly crashed into another parked car behind us before he threw her back into drive and floored it.  He swerved through the parking lot, and as I yelled at him to take the fucking stocking off his head, I noticed the blood gushing from his fingers on the steering wheel.  I asked him what the hell, had he gotten into a fight, to which he responded no, the sporks kept snapping and slicing his knuckles, and that it was crazy, he wasn’t sure what had gone wrong, but a security guard appeared out of nowhere.  Sure, “out of nowhere,” I thought, because what was more inconspicuous than a giant brown love glove bloodying itself up while sticking plastic sporks into the ground?  Seamus sped up, and then as he prepared to make the final turn out of the parking lot, he realized he couldn’t slow down, a Red Bull can had gotten lodged under the brake pedal, and Seamus screamed and then I screamed as he lost control and hurtled towards the Luxor Gardens monument sign at the entrance.