"You alright?" I asked my mom who claimed she was tired and that was all. Okay.
If you didn't know it, I live at my mom's. And though this is no secret, it should be mentioned (and for those who need reminding) that I have an apartment of my own. I've paid for it eight months straight without living there, though others have. The point is -- and this for the sake of my little ego -- I don't have to live here necessarily and am not, therefore, a loser.
Moving on.
I asked one more time, "Are you sure, you're alright?"
Her answer was the same and with it came total darkness. All the lights went out, the TVs hummed to a stop and the great outdoors grew loud – crickets, frogs and such. The house is in the middle of almost nowhere and when there is no light, there is only darkness in much the same way there is only Zuul. One is gone, the other is all that is left.
This was at 10:15pm.
"Well, I'll be damned," I think I said. Yeah, so the wind was picking up and yeah, I'd heard plenty about the impending doom that was Hurricane Frances. I had no idea it'd take out the power, stamp out precious cable and eliminate the Internet. And damn if there weren't other side effects. No electricity = no air conditioning. You might say it was raining and it was night time... and to you, I'd say you don't know shit about middle Georgia.
The unexpected problem was unabated fear. I hate windows at night. I can't stand looking at them, and though I don't care to get into right now, there are plenty of witnesses to attest to my irrational trepidation. With a million of candles blazing and the humid air rising, I had to go to the windows and lift them.
What was that? Who's there? I'm going to die.
All these thoughts and a thousand more when I ventured outside searching for some answer in the rain.
See, fear phase two was just the total pitch black of it all. Being the fan of horror films that I am, I know well what occurs in the woods at night when there is nothing more than a flashlight to illuminate the evil awaiting. For some reason, I couldn’t help but singing to myself, “That was the night that the lights went out in Georgia. That was the night they killed an innocent man.” Those words flying from my lips, I realized I needed to be guilty quick, fast and in a hurry despite being in no danger of state-sanctioned homicide myself. I reached into my bag of sin and almost blasphemed thinking it was a swift, easy way to transgress but stopped myself short because there was too much lightning around for me to feel comfortable pissing off Yahweh. That’s when I scampered back into the house.
Playing brave and looking for something to mitigate the tension, I drove through the storm to pass over the imaginary line where cell phone range begins and ends. From the safety of a still well-lit car wash, I called the power company getting only a heartless automated system to hear my plea. I cried. It was genuine. Please, I begged of God Almighty, return me to the levels of comfort and luxury heretofore unknown by my ancestors.
With no immediate and happy answers coming from heaven, I dried my eyes and pulled back into the opaque, choosing to suffer with Mom and Jeff than endure it alone. Time lost its weight and I fell into a panic that slowly melted into the sort of complacency that a terminally ill patient finds to buffer the inevitable. Laying and moping on the couch, I quelled thoughts of eternal ennui with a book; reading by candlelight.
After my little brother and his friend (who I discovered a few days ago has been living with us and this only after Mom told me they had a fight and weren't talking anymore) cooked Hamburger Helper on a propane camp stove in the basement, Jeff bounded up the stairs with a plan.
"If the power doesn't come on in a little bit, we're going to go get a generator," he exclaimed like he'd just invented Jesus.
At this point, my malaise was in full swing. I grunted just enough to acknowledge his comment and waved him away as if I were a snooty Frenchman. Moments later, he and Jonathon were out the door, navigating the debris strewn roads of Monroe County in search of a generator.
Thirty minutes into their voyage and thusly an hour and a half into my surrender, everything that'd been on at 10:14pm came back to me. A miracle, a true-to-life Christmas miracle! Glory be, I ran shouting and leaping into my mom's bedroom screaming that God and the Prophets had blessed our home. Oh, and poor Jeff, I said. Oh he went out for a generator, but damn if this isn't awesome, let's have chocolate cake!!!
Fifteen minutes later, hooked by the book and enjoying reading it under the approving shine of a 100 watt bulb, the power left us again. From deep within me, a howl escaped followed justly by every swear word I know.
It has to come back on, I told myself. It just has to, and that's why I stayed up half the night.
When Jeff returned, he and his pal cranked the generator out in the garage, realizing only then that they had no idea how a generator works its magic. They did this, they did that. They even created an extension cord with two male plugs but it didn't work. They were dumbfounded and the basement was flooding since the sump-pump had been killed. Something had to be done and quick.
Always well-intentioned if not always entirely too naive for his own good, Jeff and Jonathon carried the rusted old beast downstairs to run the pump directly off the generator. If you, too, have no concept of the finer detains of a generator, let me explain a few simple principles. Number one, they run on some combustible fuel. In this case, gasoline. Secondly, once the engine has combusted the precious gas, it releases copious amounts of exhaust. This exhaust is carbon-monoxide, which is also very poisonous to most people.
So my little brother and his pal had the generator running full throttle downstairs in the basement, filling the room and subsequently, the house with a deadly gas. Mom woke up and asked what was going on, but I was really sleepy at that point so I told her not to worry about it. "Go to bed, it'll all be better soon."
I didn't even bother blowing out the candles before allowing myself to drift off into dreamland. They died on their own, like canaries in a coal mine.
At three o' clock, I got up because my pillow and myself was soaked in sweat. The generator, mercifully, had been moved outside. The noise it made was only a mild and muffled distraction now. Gone were the crazy fumes that made me so eager to rest. On that note, I couldn't sleep anymore so I went back to reading.
Mom needed to be up by 6:30am so she could get ready for work and head to Columbus, GA. I set the alarm clock on my cell phone and when it sounded, I woke her up. By 7am, I was wide awake and Jeff soon joined us. The day's early air crept ominously in my lungs. That is to say I had a bad feeling.
It hadn't been a dream. The power outage was real and it was continued. It's the morning, I'm tired and no electricity meant I had no fucking coffee, which was the salt in the wounds of the camel's back that made him go nuts. Furthermore, Jeff explained that the 60mph winds had downed three trees in our yard, two of which had fallen directly across the driveway along the two different paths that lead out. With an addiction to caffeine shouting obscenely, I selflessly offered myself as a sacrifice. I, and I alone, would go out into the world to get gas and coffee -- to call loved ones and send word to our utility providers that we were stranded.
The trees remained disobedient though Jeff had chopped halfway through them during the night. Driven mad by the distance between me and a tall, sweet cup of joe, I -- like Bruce Banner before me -- put my anger to good use and broke the trees to pieces with my amazing pulling and kicking powers. Triumphant, tired and a little sore, I was finally free to pursue my dream of artificial rejuvenation.
But it'd be a long day, my friends. No sleep and no respite. I suggested we seek refuge in the cuddly arms of a nearby Waffle House. That way we'd remain in cell phone range and could figure out our next move. What we didn't know was that 100,000 people in the mid-state were without electricity. The 99,996 others were at Waffle House ahead of us. Trying a handful of them only to find the same scene repeated, Mom remembered the IHOP that God forgot.
It's tucked away so it couldn't be packed. Dammit. It was. All the same, we were soon seated -- just she and I, as my sibling and his buddy were out in search of something that'd make the generator power the entire house. It was a relatively uneventful breakfast with Mom checking her eMail on the Blackberry she carries, and I calling people I thought might have died in the storm.
On the way out, I glanced at a middle-aged lady who was waiting with her pal to grab a table. This lady's eyes shot wide and she shouted, "CHRIS HORNE!!! HOW'VE YOU BEEN?!" I crapped and soon gathered myself. Mom jumped in and exchanged pleasantries with this stranger while I struggled to explain I was fine. This woman wasn't even vaguely familiar to me. She just went on and on and said, "It's just so good to see you." This is where I like to reciprocate and say, "{person's name}, it's so good to see you, too." However, having no clue who she was, I could only muster, "It's really good to be here. Thank you. I wish I were more presentable, you know, to be seen."
Finally she broke the mystery and said, "Oh, you're fine. You should see Frank with his long hair and shaggy beard."
That's who she was. Frank's mom. Frank was my good friend from days of way back when. He and I dug a hole at Mammaw's house in which we intended to place a swimming pool. It wasn't a very big hole as we were rather undisciplined in the art of hole digging but it was a hole that remained visible well into my early twenties until Mammaw and Pop finally sold the house.
She said Frank is getting his Master's in Photography at New Mexico State. He was a good guy and I think I remember his dad looking like the dad in "Saturday the 14th", a spoof on the Jason flicks. I wonder where I might find that movie.
So it was good to be seen and eventually, I learned that it was good to see Ms. Frank's Mom, too. I wish I knew their last names.
From there, our helplessness only grew. Mom didn't go to work because they told her not to. The lights were still out and I was starting to hate the state of definite uncleanliness I'd acquired in the meantime. Thanks to Juliet T., I had a place to get a shower. Apparently, nothing much happened in Warner Robins as she kept her all her utilities throughout the night. Jealousy subsided easily because I could get my bathe on.
Before I made the trip down there, I grabbed the laptop and went to the Joshua Cup so I could take care of what truly mattered: my eMail. The only one I had was from Rodball of Dearborn, MI. He said he liked "Garden State". He said he'd seen it twice.
I took a nap in my apartment, lying on the mostly deflated air mattress, relishing the gentle breeze coming through the windows, and letting my thoughts fall back in time to moments when I had company on that blue felt topped bed. It was nice.
After the nap, after the shower, I drove up 475 thinking I could take care of some business at Macon State and get to rejoin my old Trivia Team buddies during a practice. Damn place was all locked up, so the first part of that equation waits until Wednesday, while the other will wait a week. Since I'd been shut out of my only remaining destination, I tip-toed over to Waffle House and read all but the remaining 13 pages of the book I'd borrowed from J'Doh. It was good stuff and I was truly engaged but I figured I'd need something to pass the time in the dungeon that was our home.
The lights and such were still out. The generator had run out of gas and Mom didn't know how to make it work, which isn't her fault so much as the wreck she had last year that shattered her collarbone thus making any severe movement with it difficult at best. So I got those things back in order and finished the book. Fat and sassy, so to speak.
Too sassy for my own good. I grew restless in a heartbeat and wanted to leave again. No, no, stay settled down for the evening, I told myself. And I went to bed.
There I only tossed and turned as I contemplated an opportunity that -- though previously unmentioned here -- had caught my fancy. In the end, I was more restless and even anxious. I got up and declared that I was “Audi 3000”. My mom said, "You're what?" I explained it was slang for "I'm leaving."
But the goddamned muthafuckin car wouldn't start. So I stuck around trying to read the newspaper from last week. As I did so, the generator started making funny noises like it wanted to fall apart or quit. It wasn't allowed to do either since it was the source of everything that made our refrigerator keep food cold, so I headed back outside to fiddle with it.
By the time I arrived, it was running more smoothly but I could see what the trouble was; the carburetor was loose and shaking all over the place. However, I didn't know how to cut the damn thing off. Seeing no switch or button, I grabbed the spark plug and inadvertently got my finger between the plug and the cap. A jolt shot through my digit and triggered some loud cussing, which when coupled with the backfire of the generator lead my mother to believe I'd exploded. I only heard her the third time she called out, "Are you okay?" It was hard to be nice since my finger still hurt but I assured her everything was fine.
I fixed the bastard generator and loaded my pockets up to leave again. Unbeknownst to me, I was making manic circles around the couch in the living room even though I'd secured all the items I'd need to make a successful run out of the house. Mom told me to stop because I was making her dizzy and I obliged. She lent me the truck I used to call my own and I was headed for the door when I gave her a hug and said, "I'll be back soon so don't worry about the generator. Not that it'll matter, I'll come back and everything will be back on."
Two seconds -- I swear, I clocked it, two seconds -- and everything came back on. Now I was offered an opportunity to indulge in all the things I'd missed over the previous 24 hours but I passed. I needed to make phone calls, fill out a to-do list and get some writing done.
I even threw in a trip to Liz Reed's to see Roger and the gang; hoping to get a little advice from the sage DJ. The folks there were of the rockin' sort. Love Train, working bar and saddened that she didn’t get to see the Prodigal Babe, confided in me and everyone within shouting distance that she’s have a time of things romantically. The blues CD I made for Riddle was playing and I felt good. When I left, it was only to keep me from drinking on money I don't have and staying on time I can't spare.
It's five in the morning now, and I feel complete because the pale, nasty glow of the computer has again cast shadows under my eyes. With my belly full of technology, I am satisfied. Now I can go to bed.
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