The Rick & WL Deck Show — Season Ender
I stretch my arms and yawn. “Well, I dunno about you, Rick, but it’s been quite the season.”
“Quite.”
“I mean, look at this mess. Someone’s gotta clean this up.”
“Someone.”
“Rick?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not in a very talkative mood.”
Rick narrow-eyes me. It sends a shiver down my alcohol-numbed spine.
“Okay? What gives? C’mon, talk to me.”
“Can I have another?”
“Another what?”
“Whiskey. Can I have another?”
I pry myself off the deck chair, find a half full bottle, and pour three fingers into a tumbler that looks cleaner than the rest strewn on the deck. I place it on Rick’s side table.
Rick looks at me. Rick looks at it.
Then without fanfare, explanation, or to-do, he flicks the tumbler off the table. The tumbler goes kerplunk; the liquor pouring out. The birds and squirrels and bees zoom in for a booze kill.
I whip my hands up. “Cripes, Rick, what the hell!”
“Sorry. I had to, just once, you know. This season. It’s been a killer. I needed to vent.”
“Fine. Okay. I’ll get the mop.”
Rick raises his hand. “Oh, before you go, could you do me a favor?”
I sigh. Rick knows I can’t say no to the guy. “Sure. What is it?”
“Could I have another?”
“STOP IT!”
Rick falls to the deck, laughing, snorting, giggling like a literati loco. I sense now the season has been hard on Rick. He’s losing the plot. Figurative? Literal? Who the heck knows?
A lot has been riding on his shoulders, what with hauling all that free Astro Lager beer up to the deck at the season start. Then, having to fire up his laptop. And don’t get me started on his foraging for cocktail snacks. At one point, I thought the poor wee soul would collapse into a fetal position, wailing tears in the snack aisle at Kroger’s.
After all that, there’s only one thing left to do. Get to work.
At season start…
I suggested we first try to figure out the science behind why a skid load of Astro Lager beer just happened to drop from the sky and land in my backyard, to wit Rick said, “Listen, WL. Learn to walk before you can run. That’s sci-fi upper level thinking. You keep writing e = MC squared wrong. Leave those mysteries to me. Pour us a couple cold ones and let’s start from the beginning.”
I dutifully pour. (As a side note, I bought a drinks cart for the deck… built-in ice machine, lazy Susan glassware dispenser, USB port for sophisticated lounge muzak, the works! I grab a couple beer glasses and expertly pour to the right liquid-to-froth ratio. Rick looks at my delivery and is impressed.)
I table the brews, and we get to work. Straight away. Brows furrowed. Eyes focused…
… on drinking and talking. It’s what we do best.
Our laptops remain in their cases… cold and in the Off position.
“You said earlier, we have to start at the beginning. But which beginning?”
“WL, you have the plot acumen of a chipmunk binging potato chips. The Cygnus X-1 beginning, of course. We stuck those guys tipping over the Event Horizon, remember?”
I sit back and sip. “Oh, yeah… the old Event Horizon thingy. Rrright.” I nod my head, but Rick knows I’m freakin’ lost in space, not dissimilar to the Lion. Kismet is a funny thing.
“WL?”
“Yeah, Rick?”
“Drink up. It’s going to be a long season.”
“You’re telling me.” I point to the tarp covered beer skid in my backyard. At this point, we’d only managed to skim off the top layer of brewskies. Rick warms up on six, six packs, I on two. I’m a lousy drunk.
Again, without fanfare or excess burping, we fire up the old 0/1 processors and started plunking.
Drinking, plunking, drinking, drinking, opining, burping, plunking…
Days melt into nights melt into weeks melt into months…
Scenes get added, deleted, re-written…
Cans and bottles empty, glasses sticky, snack packs flitting in the backyard breeze…
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The occasional neighbor wandering down the back alley looks our way. We’d wave. They’d scurry away, hurriedly dialing someone on their phone.
Rick notices first. “You know, it’s amazing one of your nosy neighbors hasn’t called the literary police on us. Them swinging by in SWAT gear, sirens blaring, arresting us for WUI.”
“What’s WUI?”
“Writing Under the Influence!”
Oh, my gosh, well, the stress dam burst!
The laughing, the burping, the farting, the collapsing to the deck… the rolling around in our drink/snack binging refuse. I assume we’re suffering from heat stroke. We haven’t drunk that much. Yet. Right? I’m sure we haven’t.
Then came the Big Kahuna. The Epic Battle…
This would make or break our sci-fi hacking careers.
“WL, this has to be… uh, what’s the word I’m looking for?” Rick puts a finger to his chin, one of five that had been holding up his latest beer. The can fell. The heady brew fizzed out. I hand him another. It’s not like we’re spoiling for beer.
“Would the word be epic?”
“Hot damn! You know, WL, you can be a genius sometimes!”
I proudly smile and hide the episode title from Rick. I need him to think I’m a genius, just like he needs me to think he’s sober most of the time. MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction.
“Right. Okay. So we’re writing an epic battle scene. How hard can that be?”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I lost my genius rank. Rick narrow-eyes me and his face adopts this ruby-red hue. He instantly balls up his fists, thereby dropping yet another Astro beer can. I quickly hand him a third. The poor wee guy looks like he needs it.
Rick sips, no, gulps, and regains his composure, and schools me on sci-fi shock and awe.
“WL, we write words. But we have to compete with all those sci-fi movie makers out there, not to mention those dumb-ass YouTubers with all their snazzy graphics ’n’ shit. All you and I have are words, WL, words! Do you have any idea how hard it is to create a heart-stopping space battle with only words?”
I sit back, I sip, I gulp, I ponder, then I say, “Well, Douglas Adams did it with words, right?”
Silence.
Then this awful, horrible, nightmarish “ARRRGRHHH!”
The guttural, beastly sound erupts from Rick’s mouth. Birds take flight off trees. Squirrels carry chipmunks to safety. If there had been fuel cells under Rick’s butt, he would have rocketed to the Moon. Lucky for him, he was down a quart. Again, I assume I said the wrong thing at the wrong time. Damn my penchant for faux pas!
After a time…a long while…
Long enough for the birds to return to the trees and go chick-a-de-dee-dee…
Rick turns to me and whispers, “WL?”
“Yes, Rick?”
“I’ll outline the battle picture, so to speak, and you color in the scene with your 3D imagination, okay?”
I smile and say, “Sure Rick. I can do that.”
And so we did.
Heads down, click-clacking away… cans, bottles, tumblers, wine glasses, snack packs, balled-up plot-on-paper starts that went nowhere fast…
We type our way through from beginning to epic end, and along the way the Black Lion crew keep loyal, keep fighting, keep strong, keep warping along.
The summer days get shorter. The shadows, long. Skies above my deck change from a brilliant blue to snow-sky looming gray. Leaves trickle down, one by one. A definite chill is in the air. We know it. It’s time to close out Season Two. It’s time.
I stretch my arms and yawn. “Well, I dunno about you, Rick, but it’s been quite the season.”
“Quite.”
“I mean, look at this mess. Someone’s gotta clean this up.”
“Someone.”
“Rick?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not in a very talkative mood.”
Rick narrow-eyes me. It sends a shiver down my alcohol-numbed spine.
“Okay? What gives? C’mon, talk to me.”
“Can I have another?”
“Another what?”
“Whiskey. Can I have another?”
Written and title pic by WL Thompson
