A Year with the Hoopers

A YEAR WITH THE HOOPERS

By James Hoby

Copyright 2006 James Hoby.

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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The characters and events in this book are fictional. Any similarities to real people or events are purely coincidental and unintentional.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Who is James Hoby?

Five Sample Poems from Rosamund

I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name,

And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come for ever and ever.

- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

INTRODUCTION

The incident that is the basis for this book occurred in June 2005, when a large box was thrown from a passing van into my front yard.

Inside the box, I found a grass-stained baseball, a torn pair of shorts, a blue-green vase, various other worthless items, and a tremendous amount of shredded paper, which was used as packing material.

Since I’d recently bought some software that was, among its other functions, guaranteed to unscramble any shredded document, I hired two local teenagers to scan the thousands of small paper rectangles into my computer. Scanning took two and a half months; unscrambling took eleven hours.

I’ve limited the selections in this book to documents that were created during 2002. In places, I have made minor revisions, to correct grammatical or composition errors or to fill gaps in the text caused by missing or illegible shreds.

JANUARY

1. Shopping list, in John Hooper’s handwriting, on a small sheet of yellow paper.

Salad bowl

Pills for cat

Twine (strong—brown?)

Raw sausage

Thick leather gloves

First-aid tape

Gauze

Isopropyl Alcohol

———

2. School essay, written by Jenny Hooper and dated January 7, 2002: My Family Should All Go Straight to Hell.

Why is everybody in my family hounding me all the time? Really! I can’t sit down for five minutes to watch the television? Or read a magazine? If my mother sees me doing anything that isn’t jaw-droppingly boring, all of a sudden I’ve got to start helping out.

So last Saturday I was sitting on the floor in the living room, propped up against the sofa, half-asleep. What else is a Saturday for? Don’t I deserve some time to myself?

And if you don’t think high school is stressful, just take a gander at the swirling crowd in the halls between the bells. It’s like an obstacle course. All the bumping. The shoving. And the smell! Why do high schools have to smell like body odor, wet dirt, and floor wax?

It’s very primordial, I’m sure. I always feel like, if I don’t wash my hands right away, I’m going to catch some kind of proletarian disease. But when I’m at school, I can’t wash my hands—of course—because if I did, I’d have to shoulder my way through the skanks who practically live in the restrooms. What a herd of cows!

They’re always in there. Always. It’s revolting.

All I was doing that morning was sitting in the living room. On the floor, wearing earphones, my eyes closed, listening to jazz. Probably humming. Is that some horrible crime? It’s not like I was outside swinging a cat over my head, screaming about the apocalypse or something else weird.

Out of the blue, the earphones were yanked off my head. I looked up and saw my mother standing over me, hollering at me to put on some clothes—and no, I wasn’t naked, I had on my pajamas for God’s sake—and she ordered me to help get Aunt Trudy out to the car. We needed to take her to get her bi-weekly checkup.

My Aunt Trudy is this immense, mummified, babbling, gas-bag of a woman. She’s got to go to the doctor so much we ought to just get her a room there. It would sure save everybody a lot of time, and she wouldn’t know the difference anyway. It’s not like she’s human. Or sentient. It’s not like she recognizes the people and things around her. Really, she has all the verve and sparkle of an eight-week-old head of cabbage.

My mother forced me to get up, go to my room, and put on a clean shirt, jeans, and sneakers. Then I had to help her take Aunt Trudy out to the car. My mother pulled her by the arm, and I pushed Aunt Trudy from behind. My shoulder was in the small of Aunt Trudy’s enormous back, nestled in the garden of blue daisies on her cotton print dress. As we’re steering her out to the car, Aunt Trudy is talking a mile-a-minute to her dead husband (like he’s still around) and farting up a storm.

Ah, yes!

It’s my favorite place to be on a Saturday morning: ass-high behind my flatulent aunt as we’re maneuvering her through the entryway, out the front door, and down the sidewalk to the driveway.

(Hi, neighbor! Nice day for a colonoscopy, don’t cha think? Huh? Do ya think?)

As we’re going to the clinic in my mother’s car, Aunt Trudy has her face thrust out the window like a dog. Her cheeks are inflated so she looks like Dizzy Gillespie. My assignment is to hang onto her by the collar of her dress so she doesn’t squirt out the window and go tumbling along the side of the road, in the gravel, like an empty beer can.

When we get to the clinic, what happens? My mother tells me I should go in with Aunt Trudy by myself. Of course, so conveniently it appears preordained, she’s got some real important stuff to do back at the house. There’s no reason for both of us to wait, is there? She says that once Aunt Trudy’s finished, all I’ve got to do is call and she’ll come back and pick us up.

I was so tired that I gave up. No use in getting into a loud argument. What choice did I have? What choice do I ever have? None.

Absolutely no choice at all! Who am I to get a choice? What am I? Human or something? Evidently not.

So while my mother’s driving home—probably just going to watch television or read a magazine—I’m at the clinic, grunting and pushing and trying to get Aunt Trudy to move her fat ass up the concrete walkway, past a clump of phony cactuses, through the double glass doors, and into the Clinic.

I steered Aunt Trudy through the reception area into the waiting room, and I shoved her into one of the chairs. Her fat head lolled around and she looked up at me with these big glassy eyes, like she was seeing me for the first time. It was spooky.

Of course, one of the nurses—one of those bony, curly-headed women who think starving yourself and drinking lots of fruit juice makes you healthy—followed us into the waiting room. Angry. She grabs me and drags me back to the reception desk, where I’m interrogated for ten minutes about Aunt Trudy. Once that’s finished, she babbles for a while about a release, in writing, and Aunt Trudy’s insurance deductible. All of this goes whizzing over my head. The curly-headed nurse finally shut up.

I went back to the waiting room.

Where Aunt Trudy was sitting, farting up a storm and digging a booger the size of a baseball out of her nose. She rolled her head around and stared at the six or seven other people in the waiting room. All of them pressed back in their chairs, trying to get as far away from her as possible. I sat down in the chair next to her and grabbed a magazine, immediately, and held it in front of my face. Pretending to be reading. And just as my head dropped out of sight behind Boatlover’s Monthly, Aunt Trudy lets out the longest, loudest fart I’ve ever heard. It sounded like a zeppelin had sprung a leak and was flapping past. The fart was truly Wagnerian in its scope. Everybody in the waiting room should have been wearing helmets and singing high-pitched songs about pagan gods.

I thought I was going to die. It was like I was sinking through my chair into the core of the earth.

But wait!

It gets even more humiliating!

The fart was still echoing in the waiting room as Aunt Trudy stood up, straightened her dress, and hollered the first coherent words I’d heard her say in two months: I’ve got to go to the bathroom! And then, for emphasis—like anybody within ten miles hadn’t heard her the first time—she yelled louder, I’ve got to go to the bathroom! Right now!

The curly-haired, juice-drinking nurse raced into the waiting room and grabbed Aunt Trudy by the elbow. She grabbed my wrist at the same time. She pulled both of us out of the waiting room. Why me? Why do I have to go along? The nurse pushed both me and Aunt Trudy into a bathroom and slammed the door shut.

What horrible thing have I done to deserve this?

As soon as Aunt Trudy saw the toilet, up went her dress, down came her underpants, and she plopped herself down.

No!

Lord Almighty!

Consider yourself lucky.

I’m going to spare you the graphic and horrifying details of what went on in that bathroom for the next 45 minutes.

Let me just say they were 45 minutes of intestine-clutching, dry-mouthed horror.

They don’t make movies anywhere near that scary.

Being in a horror movie would have been like a birthday party compared to what went on in that bathroom. At least people in horror movies get some respect. When they die, there’s always a loving family standing around a casket. At an expensive funeral.

Where’s my loving family?

Where’s my respect and expensive funeral?

Nowhere.

Once again, just when I thought I’d reached the point beyond which horror dared not go, the situation got even worse. Now that Aunt Trudy was talking again, you couldn’t get her to shut up.

For the first twenty minutes she jabbered about her aches, pains, and other unique problems and sensations. Then she started complaining about her parents and her aunts and her family. (Just so you know, Aunt Trudy isn’t really my aunt. She’s my mother’s mother’s sister.) Then she whispered at me, while her eyes were opened so wide it looked like her eyeballs were getting ready to shoot out of their sockets, Jenny, you come from a long line of troubled souls. It’s a white horse. It’s a house without windows! It’s the chaos of the separated wound and the blood-red sword! You know your great-great-grandmother was a ponderous woman. She had a syntactical disorder. She believed all nouns were verbs, all verbs were nouns, and that no matter what anybody does, it’s impossible to divide an adjective by zero.

These are the nuggets of wisdom I get from my family. My heritage. And you wonder why I’m not well-adjusted?

Wonder no more!

The curly-headed, bony nurse poked her head into the bathroom and asked if Aunt Trudy was ready for her visit with the doctor yet. Five minutes later I was in the examination room. I swear. The doctor actually had me holding Aunt Trudy’s butt cheeks apart as he peered up her ass. How gross is that? He gave me some latex gloves to wear, but they didn’t help.

Eek! Doom! Shock!

When it was finally over. When I was back home. After a 90-minute, steaming-hot shower. And after I was back in my pajamas.