Mystery: Solved

If I offended any dead people with that last blog, I apologize right now. Forgive the Jon-Dog. He knows not of what he speaks. Do not haunt him.

Anyway this is Roberto Clemente and Felix The Cat, in heaven. You'll notice that Felix has really bad post-nasal action going on. He's like the Jon-Dog in that way. These Bradford Pears are killing me with their sex dust.

Nevermind all that, though. The mail just came and I just solved the mystery of Lightning Fair. In case you forgot, Lightning Fair is the name on the tombstone in our front yard placed over what I'm assuming is the shallow grave of a beloved family pet. Most likely a dog. I mean, a cat named Lightning Fair? Maybe. Could be a ferret, too, I guess.

But anyway, the mystery was the name. I thought "Lightning Fair" was a pretty weird name and now I know why. I suppose I should have figured this to begin with, but I'm not exactly the sharpest detective in the 'Yuga. "Lightning," I thought, "makes sense. Not a bad pet name. But Lightning Fair? What is that anyway?"

Know what is is? First and last name, that's what. Yup. First name: Lightning. Last name: Fair. I discovered this when a piece of mail came addressed to Dorothea Fair.

This is, of course, further fodder for my death house ideations. I just hope that I don't, in one of my walks around the property with Eleanor, stumble upon 2 shallow human graves. That'd pretty much be it for me.

When I was in college, I worked in the dining halls to make ends meet (i.e to buy pizzas and c.d.'s and add drops to the bucket of my checking account). One of my managers was a great big rotund doofus named Ron. Last name: Fair. Of course, we all had to call him Mr. Fair, even the poor, workaday old black women that worked on the serving line and lived in the projects and used their paychecks not for pizza and beer, but for electricity and water. He'd stare at them. They'd stare back. Then, eventually, a "How you today Missuh Fair?" He rarely answered back. He didn't do much, in fact. Ever. He just holed up in his office half the day, until it was his whim to float around in his clippity-clop Buster Browns, a toothpick perpetually perched on his lip, dishing out looks of narcotized disdain to us unlucky fellahin bastards.

At the dining hall, I worked on the Pizza Line with a good guy named Ken. Me and Ken, we'd work hard and laugh all the time and churn out pizzas in our little kitchen area. It might sound okay, but don't think it was fun. It sucked. But we managed. We'd talk about rap music and anthropology and Isaac Hayes and other concerns of the day. We had a good system. It worked. But one day a new face arrived in our kitchen. The face of a new, totally unwarranted employee. His name? Doug. Last name? Fair. And guess who his uncle was.

Doug Fair, whose favorite band was a band called "Ugly Kid Joe," lasted about 2 weeks in the dining hall. Turns out, his employment there was a favor to his Mom and represented the Fair family's last ditch effort to save Doug from "throwing his life away." He told me and Ken this when he wasn't stealing food from the freezer or trying to mack on college girls who looked at him with a kind of narcotized disdain that would have been no doubt familiar to him, had he any insight - which he didn't. As I say, he lasted about 2 weeks, during which time I heard him call his uncle - behind his back - a "fat ass sonovabitch" about forty times. It never got old to him.

I guess La Familia Fair figured, "Let's stick him someplace where he can't screw up too bad, and will generally be out of the way." And so Mr. Fair would walk into the pizza "prep" area, stare us all down, and say something like, "Everything coming along in here?" And we'd all mumble "Yah," and then Mr. Fair would stare like a wild animal at Doug and say, "Everything good, Doug?" and Doug'd say "Yes, sir." Then, as soon as Mr. Fair turned and walked out, Doug'd add, under his breath but loud enough so Ken and I could hear, "you damn...fat ass sonuvabitch." He always paused between the "damn" and "fat ass sonuvabitch," like he always had to search for the words like it was the very first time.

For all I know, Dorothea was Doug's grandma. He might've, as a lad, hunted Easter eggs in this very yard, running wild as the gentle pup Lightning ran alongside him in the green grass of precious Youth. I guess I sort of wonder where Doug is now. Probably he's in the appropriate place. The appropriate place generally tends to find each of us, no matter how hard we try to get there - or not.