Shortly after the re-inauguration of Barak Obama, I was in line at Carl’s Jr. when they came for me. I had heard about the banning of large drinks in New York and thought, “Wow, good thing I live in Arizona.” People here don’t like so much Government involvement in their daily lives. That’s why Arizona has a stockpile of weirdness. We were free to be as weird as we wanted and we like it that way. After all, true freedom is the freedom to not be like everyone else, even when that means having no brains. It’s who we are.
I had been losing weight, but I had a lot to go to be considered “not obtuse”…er, I mean “not obese”. Someone told me it was a good thing I was losing weight, good for me and good for America. I did not really understand what he meant by that, but I knew I didn’t like it. I now know why.
As I said, I was in line at Carl’s Jr. when they came for me. I was just sitting in the Ram, waiting for the Mensa candidate wearing the headphones to take my order. I had Joe Walsh on the stereo, his new release, Analog Man. I was jamming to I’m Just Lucky that Way (Walsh’s follow-up to his now 20+ year old hit Life’s Been Good). As I pulled up to the ordering area, I opened my window to speak to the little black box on a stick. But then there was a loud noise, followed by gunfire. As I turned around to see what looked like a Swat vehicle followed by a large bus, I felt the sting of cold steel against my neck. When I turned back, there was a large man in full swat regalia holding a gun to my neck.
“Out of the vehicle,” he said. My response? Probably the wrong one. “Say WHAT?!” It was then I found out firsthand how quickly and easily a fat man can be forced through a truck window. Two larger men stood me up.
“On your knees”, one of them said.
Again, my response was not the best. “Do you see the scars on my knees, I cannot kneel.” I then found out firsthand just why the Doctor told me never to kneel. My deluxe Golfer’s Style Deputy Stainless steel left knee did dent his gun stock when he hit me, so I was in pain, but still laughing.
I was lead into the bus and forced into a seat on the aisle over the rear wheels. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized I was not alone. I was in a bus full of what looked like Wal-Mart regulars—you know, layers of fat surrounded by not enough clothing. People who obviously lack mirrors in their homes.
I was probably the thinnest one on the bus. As I looked around for some kind of signs to tell me just who the fuck I was being held by, I saw a placard over the driver’s head that read: Dept. of Homeland Security: Lipid Division.
Oh shit, they went and done it after all, I thought.
Like the scene in Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston sees the half buried Lady Liberty and shouts, “You bastards, you blew it all to hell!” It was kind of like that only more dramatic.
When the next line of Wal-A-Tubbies was marched in, I started to yell for an explanation but I felt a small hand on my shoulder. I turned to see a little old fat lady. She told me to be quiet. I watched through the window as my beloved Ram was put on a car transport, never to be seen by me again.
As we rode to who-knows-where, all I could think of was my wife, and how she would arrive home from work to find I was gone. I must admit that the mere thought of being away from my wife for any length of time now scares the Hell out of me. At first I’m sure she would rejoice, but I know she would eventually miss me. Well, I hoped so at the time.
As the bus rolled to a stop, the driver’s armed guard stood up. “OK fatties, up and out, single file, and NO SHIT, or I shoot.”
As I got off the bus, I looked around to see only beige—beige everywhere in the form of sand. Lots of sand. It was about 110 and dry, so I figured we were somewhere west of Phoenix, but not quite California. Quonset-hut type buildings surrounded us, and we were whisked off to one. As we were walking, I noticed we were being watched by someone in a rather strange uniform, kind of like if an Italian Policeman’s uniform and a Nazi uniform had a child. As I looked closer, I recognized the little prick from the lifts in his shoes, and the fact that he was standing on a box. It was New York’s Mayor Bloomberg! He was now called the Generalissimo, Co-President and Field Marshal for Life Bloomberg. I left the line to spit in his face.
I woke up on a cot in one of the huts, my head hurt like a som’bitch. That little old fat lady was wiping my head with a cool wet rag.
“Hey, you are awake,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Crank,” I said.
“You made quite a scene out there…got a lotta balls. No friggin’ brains, but lottsa balls.”
I told her that was what my wife said to me on our first date, and she laughed.
By the third day we had named our hut ‘Jabba’. We were fed twice a day, rice, vegetables and some kind of soy shit. It was gross drivel with only water to wash it down. I was having major withdrawal from Coke, and we were all shitting our brains out from the soy overload. They did manage to get me my Ritalin substitute, but no other meds were forthcoming. My tremors returned as did the arthritis. Pissed off–shaking with pain and hunger—the word ‘fuck’ became nearly my entire vocabulary, similar to my Zano rebuttals.
By the fourth day I learned everyone had named their huts ‘Jabba’ as well. We saw no officials, were told no news. We were not able to communicate with the outside at all.
On the sixth day, we were led to a fence on the perimeter of the ‘encampment’ to put it nicely. A line of busses pulled up, and people started to get off the busses. Wait, I thought, these were not fat people. No these were family of the incarcerated. I watched intently looking for my wife. I felt a hand touch mine through the chain-link fence. It was her. She was crying and simultaneously pissed off, something women are really good at.
“Bring any snacks?” I asked.
“Don’t talk,” she said. “We don’t have much time. You were arrested the day after he was re-elected. Obama made being overweight illegal. He has dissolved Congress and he runs Homeland Security. The Department of Justice, the S.E.I.U. and the E.P.A. are his army.”
“Are you OK?” I asked. “What has happened to Gort?”
“Honey, I’m sorry, but your truck is gone forever. All vehicles with under 30 M.P.G. are to be melted down to build Chevy Volts,” she said.
“Oh God, they dun melted my Gort!” I named my Ram Gort after the robot in the original Day The Earth Stood Still movie. Like the Gort robot, my Ram was stupid as a doorknob, ridiculously strong, tough as all hell, and loyal to a fault.
“All the Walsh CD’s too?” I asked.
“Yes, them too,” she replied.
“Not Walsh! Those evil bastards!”
“The government raided Hostess Bakeries this morning, killing 120 people.” She then put her hand on my shoulder through the holes in the chain link fence and whispered. “Crank, listen to me. They burned the Twinkies, all the Twinkies. And the Coke is all gone. They drained all the stored syrup into the river. It was just like the old movies about prohibition that you made me sit through on the fucking History Channel. Obama disarmed the regular military too. But we are fighting this. Sure, you are a fat man, but you are MY fat man, and I want you back.” With that, she said goodbye, and was led back to the bus. I watched her as she went away, wishing she was here to make us some of her great Linzer Tarts, or peanut butter/chocolate chip cookies. Couldn’t she have at least smuggled-in a Snickers?
After a few weeks, one of the guards started to sneak in barbeque sauce. It made the soy shit edible. He did it because his brother Bubba was one of us, only the Feds didn’t know it. They were from West Virginia, but his brother was in Mesa, attending A.S.U., and everyone in West Virginia has the same last name. One night, the guard, Billy-Bob, told us that some of the guards were having second thoughts, as many of them had friends or family incarcerated. He told us they were going to rebel and set us free. They just ask that we run like hell when the time comes. I said for him to take a good look at us, and say that again. He laughed.
It seems as though lots of Obama’s army was starting to fold like a Chinese car in a head-on with a bus, as we started to hear about skirmishes throughout the land. Everyone had stopped paying taxes by then, so like Europe, they were running out of cash fast, and China told Obama to have a nice day. Regular Army stationed in other countries were not forced to surrender their weapons as the stateside ones were, and were all on their way back to the U.S. to help with any overthrow. Whose Navy and Air Force were they using to get home? I was later told that the only real help was from Israel and Australia. When asked if he could help get some of the troops home, Netanyahu had said, “This one’s on me. I hate the bastard.”
The end came one day when some fat ex-Marines greased themselves up and squeezed their asses into some Harrier jets we had sold to Israel. We all heard the missiles hit the guardhouse, looked up to see a jet with a blue star on it, and that’s when we ran. Well, we were fat, so we kind of hurried away. We all looked like a slow-motion wave of human flesh as we scurried out into the desert. The running of the Weebels? We later stole the bus that had brought us here, and heard on the radio that some of the Harriers went to D.C. and Obama was forced to give himself up to the Portly Protectors of Freedom (which is also a good new name for the Republican Party).
As our bus made it back to Phoenix, my wife heard news of our escape, and was there to greet us. As we all got off the bus, she ran to me and we hugged like never before. It was then I noticed she had a package with her. She had an evil smile and giggled as she handed me the package. It was a box of eight Twinkies and a 20 oz Coke. I thought about how many milliseconds it would have taken me to scarf down the lot, and slowly I handed them back to her.
“If I lose weight, it will be because I want to, not because I am being forced to. It’s all about American freedom. They will never succeed in…oh, the hell with it, gimme that damn Twinkie.”
After the last gulp of Coke, I leaned back and belched the word “FREEDOM!” Freedom tasted real good to me. Twice.
I bought the first new Ram (Gort II?) off the transport when they restarted production. Thank the Lord them shifty little Italians at Fiat discretely moved all the plans and stampings to Italy when the shit went down. They were the only truck out for almost a year. Walk-a proud Sergio, Walk-a proud.
Crank
