James? James, right? Here, let me get those bags for you, I’ll just pop the trunk. This a senior park? The Last Chance Café of life in your own cozy, tin roofed rabbit warren, Granddad’s blissful retirement before Grandma spikes the bourbon, a little manufactured monument to middle class contentment. Nice enough if you don’t mind sagging floors and foam ceilings. I lived in a trailer park myself once before I got sober. You know what’s strange? I’ve known three guys in my life named James and they were all gay. You don’t look gay, though. You ever notice how most gays are snappy dressers? And they’re good looking, too.  

So we’re going to the airport this morning, LAX, right? Biggest airport in California and the second biggest, in terms of traffic, in the country. City bought farmland in nineteen twenty eight for the construction of the first landing strip. I think most planes then were powered by rubber bands. Wheat and barley made fertile by generations of dead farmers.  Now it’s a huge, international monstrosity.

And where are the two of you oldie but goodies going? That sounds nice. Me, I’ve never been to Ireland. Been to London a few times, once on account of my wife’s younger sister getting married there but I never got around to Ireland. Ah, there’s nothing like the old country for hospitality and burning yourself every time you wash your hands in those weird two spigot sinks.  

Getting enough air back there? Let me know if you start turning blue, okay? Yeah, my wife’s from Kent, left England when she was sixteen, probably to escape beheading. Family’s nice. Sort of chilly, psychotic polite, if you know what I mean. When I met them, which must have been forty years ago, they hated, I mean really hated, the Irish, liked to call them the stupidest people on earth.  That didn’t sit well with me since I liked people then but they had a boy who was nearly killed by a bomb some IRA jackass set off in a pub. Blowing up innocent people makes for some hard feelings for some reason.  

A bunch of kooks in a ski mask almost kills my son I’d hold it against them I suppose. Homicide should be kept in the family. If someone murders me I’d at least like to know who it is.  

So much violence in the world, people getting killed every day here and there and for what? It’s all the news is today. But I don’t think you can get rid of violence by violence.  But sometimes mindless destruction does us good. Like the Hindu goddess Kali, with her sword and severed head. It’s the union of death and creation.

I mean, you’ve heard of the Nobel Prize, right? Started by Alfred Bernhard Nobel, a Swedish scientist, the inventor of dynamite. Brilliant man, had over three hundred patents. Did you know that? But everyone just thinks of dynamite. It’s like being Doctor Frankenstein. No matter how many broken bones and runny noses you treat, everyone brings up the monster. 

I forget to say that there’s water back there for you and Jolly Ranchers. They’re just purified tap water and dye in corn syrup but a good tax write off. 

So now people who work for peace are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize from the endowment of a man who raised mass slaughter to new heights.  Kind of ironic, don’t you think?  People were different then. Now rich people just want to get richer and to hell with everyone else, but back in the day it was the other way around.  Did you know that Nobel’s father invented plywood? I kid you not. And here’s something else. Nobel’s younger brother, Emil, was killed by a nitroglycerin explosion. Dynamite is more stable they say, but you’ll just have to take my word for that.

I can just imagine the scene. Emil says, hey Claude, hand me that test tube. Careful, don’t drop it. Claude says, here it is, master. Oops. Emil says, you clumsy…Ka-boom!

It’d make a great one act play. Best writers in the world have been Irish. You ever read Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw? I read it when I was a teen and still remember it. He was given the Nobel Prize in literature in nineteen twenty five. Did you know that? Born in Dublin but moved to London. If you’re Irish through and through the first thing you want to do is move somewhere else. I guess England was good for him because he lived a ridiculously long time. Would have made it to a hundred but broke his hip and in those days and at his age, that was it, you know? I guess they just put people down in those days, like dogs. Sorry kids but we have to put Gramps to sleep.  

These days you break a hip and it’s nothing. I got a knee replaced. Car hit me a few years ago. I was on my motorcycle-my wife used to call them murdercycles-and I got thrown twenty feet, bounced like a deflated basketball and smacked my head hard enough to get a concussion. If I hadn’t been wearing a helmet I’d be dead or brain injured. I hear guys saying they don’t want to wear a helmet and I say, brother, you’re nuts ‘cause on a bike you got nothing between you and asphalt but thin air. Maybe if you don’t understand the importance of wearing a helmet you should be allowed to ride without one and thus spare the gene pool. It’s okay, Bob, just get on your bike and ride like the wind. Don’t forget to take the freeways.  

For months I lost a whole week’s worth of memories. It was like, one day I’m picking up a jar of olives at the grocery store and the next minute I’m waking up in the hospital. You have any idea how spooky that is?  I look up in bed, see my wife staring down at me and I say, where am I? She says, where do you think you are? You’re in hospital, you prick. What a sweetheart. It’s a wonder she didn’t rub salt in my scalp. 

The average weight of an adult human brain is about three pounds. Did you know that? Roughly thirteen to fourteen hundred grams. Doesn’t sound like much until you consider that the brain contains a hundred billion neurons. No wonder we’re smarter than the average slug.  

It’s kind of a miracle I’m not brain damaged. When I was ten I went over to see my friends, Pete and Mike, the neighborhood’ local hoodlums. They were in the backyard playing with throwing knives. All the sudden I feel something whack me in the head and then I’m wondering why they’re looking at me with their mouth hanging open. I didn’t know I had a knife sticking in my head. Doctors told me that if it had gone in two more centimeters I wouldn’t be alive. I still got the scar. It always freaks my barber out. He’s an Italian Mafioso type with a moustache so big you want to curl up in it and take a nap. 

You’d think I’d be more careful after that but a year later I fell off the roof of our garage and got the tip of my little finger cut off. Doctors sewed it back on. Man was my old lady pissed at me! This is how screwed up I was. I didn’t want them to sew it back on. Having a little stump would be cool, I thought. Well, you know how kids are. Can’t think two seconds into the future. Now I can think twice that many seconds into the future.

I thought I was destined to become some sort of dare devil, like Evel Knievel. I saw him a few years before he died. Poor bastard couldn’t take a step without a walker. I guess that’s what happens when you break every bone in your body ten times over. In a way I did become a dare devil since I flew over one car. For me that was enough.

You know the difference between a biker and a vacuum cleaner, right? A vacuum cleaner has its dirt bag on the inside.

Yeah, give me a car any old day. I don’t mind driving for Uber but sometimes it gets a little weird. Two months ago I’m driving at night, it’s almost midnight and I’m about to pack it in but decide to take one last call. Can’t sleep anyway, you know, brain’s wired for work and I need the money so I show up at this dark house with no street lights and a tall Chinese dude comes out wearing nothing but boxer shorts. He gets in and I think, what the hell, a ride’s a ride but then this skinny black girl opens the door and says, get your ass in the house and put on some clothes. I’m not going with you like that.

So as soon as he’s in the house she says, take off, damnit. Just go. He’s messed up, been taking Percocet all day. So now I’m thinking, do I want some guy high on drugs in my car? So I take off but we’re in a cul-de-sac and I have to turn the car around but when I start to do this the dude comes running out, screaming and banging on my windows and she’s in the backseat yelling that he’ll kill her. So I’m swerving all over the place and it’s like Mister Toad’s Wild Ride but then I lose him and she says, hey, man, you want to go to a party?

I’m sweating and having a heart attack and for a second the idea of going to a party doesn’t sound like a bad idea, like I’m not married or anything. No, I just dropped her off. For a while I was worried that the dude would complain to Uber but he didn’t.

I used to think that driving a taxi was one of the most dangerous jobs but the most dangerous job is logging, you know, like cutting down trees. Did you know that? Still, you always hear stories about Uber drivers getting fired for creepy stuff but you don’t hear about all the drivers who get attacked. Oh yeah. I picked up a guy once who got mad because he thought I was taking the long way to get somewhere so he starts punching me and I have to pull over on the freeway to push him out of my car. You don’t see that on the news. I reported him, got him banned from Uber. I don’t want anyone in my car who is more dangerous than I am.