Sunday, September 7, 2014

Earl's Monster

When my brother used to live in LA and I still lived in the Bay Area, I would usually take a road trip a couple of times a year to see him. It was about a 6 hour drive and generally a boring one so I occasionally I would get ride shares. This was before Craigslist so I'd either use San Francisco State's ride share board or the SF Bay Guardian(I tried the SF weekly once but I only got replies from people who wanted to know if they could pay for gas with drugs or sex).

It was a little harder to get to know someone back then without email,  maybe a phone call or two so it was always a crap shoot. There was the woman who refused to talk and winced any time I brought up any topic. There was the jolly stoner who would spend 20 minutes in the bathroom at rest stops and then got us lost in Compton trying to find his girlfriends apartment.

One trip I got a young woman in her early twenties. She seemed nice enough on the phone, but about an hour before the trip she called me and asked if she could bring her 3 year old son along. She had some story about her babysitter cancelling at the last minute, but I had the feeling this had been plan all along. The kid seemed okay, if a little hyper.

We were in a Honda Civic which had a nice big back seat. The boy, Earl, was strapped in in back, If there were any car seat rules at that time I was unaware of them, We'd been driving along for about an hour when Earl screamed. It was a loud, sort of jarring yell. The mom, Shelly, turned around to ask what was wrong. Earl was huddled in the corner, he wouldn't say what was wrong. She gave him a cookie and he calmed down.

Two hours later, I'd just bought them some hamburgers at a rest stop and Earl was sleeping away in the back seat. Earl suddenly woke up screaming again. This time he said, "There's a monster. There's a monster." He wouldn't stop so I pulled over somewhere on I5 in the middle of nowhere and Shelly and I made a big show out of looking at the back seat. Finally Shelly convinced him he'd been dreaming and he calmed down.

Five minutes before reaching Shelly's destination in West Wood Earl started screaming again. This time he wouldn't stop and they  arrived at their stop with Earl crying and Shelly feeling kind of embarrassed.

After a nice week of visiting my brother I left LA around Midnight and headed up I5. By 4 AM I was getting White Line Fever and decided to pull over at a rest stop and take a nap. The back seat was fairly big so I laid down and took a nap. I was in a deep sleep, but I suddenly started dreaming about something crawling on me. I startled awake and had the feeling that something had really been crawling on me. But then I convinced myself that I was just imagining that. I'd been reading Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas and probably had Hunter S Thompson's desert hallucinations in my mind.

3 days later I was washing and cleaning out the car. I'd pulled everything out, and was vacuuming the back seat, when I suddenly noticed something wedged in the seat. I thought it was one of Earl's toys, As I reached toward it, it suddenly moved. There, running across the seat was small green lizard. There were plenty of Lizards where I lived and this one must have burrowed in the car at some point; Earl Monster.

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