Chapter 1: https://withtwoesses.medium.com/holly-and-her-dusty-pranksters-chapter-1-f4656b418a5c
Chapter 2: https://withtwoesses.medium.com/holly-and-her-dusty-pranksters-chapter-2-c70a642ffc74
Street Walk
“Hey, watch where you’re goin’, lady!” a blur of dark green scales admonished her as they zipped past, mere centimeters from her ankles.
The dragonmobile was actually a low-to-the-ground, pedal- powered tricycle that had been decorated meticulously with duct tape and sturdy costume fabric. The pedaler’s face was obscured by two large mesh wings mounted on either side of the trike and flapping violently in its wake.
As soon as she regained her composure, Holly side-eyed Polanco and cracked, “Seems like a damsel with a knight for a boyfriend shouldn’t have to worry about dragons.”
He pounced, “Ooooh, can I bring Blabsalot back out?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” she pleaded, massaging her temples, “At least not until this headache and nausea go away.”
After looking both ways this time, Holly and Polanco strode fully onto the street that abutted Camp Shitstorm. Well, it wasn’t so much a street as it was a wide, semi-groomed, cordoned-off stretch of desiccated lakebed. Holly knew this path to the porta- potties quite well by now, having traversed it both directions at least three times every day for almost a full week. If she’d had her way, they’d at least be able to pee in the toilet in the RV. But Polanco had explained to her that he had tried that previous years and they definitely did *not* want to smell their own excrement, festering day after day in the RV’s overheated depths. It was going to be difficult enough to sleep as it was.
So, any time she needed to relieve herself, Holly had to get all-the-way dressed and go on this little hike to the array of porta- potties they shared with their neighboring camps. She was just about to make her umpteenth case for why they should at least be able to go #1 in the RV’s toilet when the couple was approached by an eager 50-something with a long bleach-white beard. He was wearing a top hat, a flowery maroon vest with matching shorts, and freshly-buffed shiny black dress shoes.
“Sir, have you not been taking care of your kicks?” White Beard tossed his accusation in the direction of Polanco’s feet, “They look like they could use a PRO-fessional shoe shine.”
“Uhhh, a shoe shine? On the playa?” Polanco replied, a bit stunned. “But they’re just gonna get covered in dust again within five minutes.”
“Well, sure, but think about how spectacular those five minutes would be!” White Beard tried to usher them over to the portable shoeshine cart secured to the back of his kickstanded bike, “Come on, it’ll only take a second.”
Polanco chuckled nervously, “As hilarious as a playa shoeshine sounds, sorry. I can’t right now.” He nodded his head toward Holly and then at the porta-potties. “It seems we have an urgent need to see a man about a horse. Maybe you’ll still be here when we’re done?”
“Ok, no worries.” White Beard replied, unfazed. He then cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted into the air, “Shoe shines! Git yer free playa shoe shines here! Fifty percent off, this afternoon only!”
“Ok, that’s just straight-up silly”, Holly said to Polanco when they were alone again. “I love it!”
“Hah! See?” Polanco seized on the L word, “That’s *exactly* why I wanted to bring you with me. I knew you’d appreciate the ridiculousness of this place…even though it can be a tad harsh at times.”
“A *tad* harsh?!?” Holly repeated her boyfriend’s understatement, “You do realize I haven’t had a proper shower in like a week and we’re on our way to yet another disgusting porta- potty, right?”
At this, Polanco smartly clammed up, lest this descend into another of their frustration- and heat-induced playa arguments. During their most recent squabble, just twenty-four hours prior, Holly had practically demanded they go back home, before a few other Stormers intervened to talk her out of it.
As they shuffled away from the mobile shoeshine booth, a voice from a loudspeaker on the other side of the porta-potties cut through the air, accompanied by a single violin.
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest…”
Syncopated blips of treble interwove the man’s spoken words.
“…everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…”
“Hey, cool, my man Carl Sagan!” Polanco exclaimed, giddily.
He scanned the horizon for the source of the familiar voice. The volume steadily increased as the bow of a huge yacht came into view. This landship-on-wheels boasted a full T-shaped mast and riggings, but no sail was raised. Dozens of people, drunk or stoned or otherwise un-sober, flailed arrhythmically on its deck and dangled from its overhangs.
“…every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization…”
“Is that the same ship we hitched a ride on last night, ‘Lanco?” Holly asked.
Polanco glanced at the bow, “I don’t think so — the one we were on was bigger. And see the narwhal figurehead? I think I’d remember that.”
“…every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there…on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam…”
“Hah! More than just *one* mote of dust, I’d say!” Holly responded, gesturing wide-armed at her surroundings as if Sagan himself were listening to her from the crow’s nest.
“…the Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.”
“Nothing like stripping life down to its basic essentials for a week, without a care in the world, to remind us of our insignificance, eh, Hol’?” Polanco waxed poetic as the music accompanying the soliloquy faded and the ship floated into the distance.
“Eh, I guess,” Holly unconsciously massaged where her right ponsjack normally would have been, before adding “But did we have to come to the desert to do that? I can dance and put mind- altering things in my body back home in Cali, where there are showers and flushable toilets and barbecue double bacon cheeseburgers and…”
She trailed off as they turned the corner. Her attention turned to the bank of twenty or so portable toilets, arranged in a perfectly straight line and bookended by hand-washing stations. Dozens of bicycles and other vehicles, including the dragonmobile, were parked in the long rectangular bikeyard directly in front of the porta-potties.
Holly waved dismissively at her boyfriend, offering a “I shouldn’t be long” over her shoulder as she hurried to the line of stalls.
“Ok, I’ll be out here. We can still catch Kristoff if we get there soon,” he shouted after her, ”so make haste with your waste.”
Polanco sauntered over to the tall piece of lumber sticking straight up out of the ground at the closest end of the line of toilets. Manual-pump hand sanitizer dispensers had been mounted on each of its sides, but only one of the four had any liquid in it. He first tested a tiny drop to make sure that it was, in fact, hand sanitizer.
A few years prior, Warm Breeze had eagerly pumped a huge amount of what he assumed was sanitizer from one of these things. It was only after he had rubbed it all over his hands and arms that he realized it was actually KY personal lubricant. He then spent the entire rest of that afternoon covered with the gummy remnants of some stranger’s sick joke. Ever since hearing Warm Breeze’s retelling of the lube prank during campfire story time, Polanco had habitually double-checked each time before giving the dispensers a full pump into his cupped hands.
While he attended to Lil Polanco, Holly rushed to the closest toilet. Each fiberglass capsule looked identical to its neighbor, except for random tags of graffiti and paper fliers that had been shoddily taped to some of their doors. The first one she approached boasted a red Occupied sign above its handle. She didn’t even bother trying to open that one, or any of the other similarly-marked doors as she inspected them one-by-one down the line. After passing a half dozen or so Occupied latrines, she finally arrived at a bright green Vacant sign.
“Thank god”, Holly exclaimed, feeling a sense of relief rush over her entire body. She reached out and — forgetting to knock first — jerked the door wide open.
From inside, a pair of bare knees barked, “Hey! Somebody’s in here!”
Holly jumped back and blurted, “Maybe try locking it next time?”
She released the handle, but the door surprisingly hung in place instead of automatically closing on its spring.
“I tried! Can’t you see it’s broken?” a blushing, balding man shouted back at her. He shifted his weight forward off the seat so he could reach the handle with a fully outstretched arm and slammed it closed with a colossal BANG that reverberated down the rest of the row.
Holly offered a cursory “Oh, sorry!” and continued her desperate search with renewed intensity. All the way to the end of the array, nothing but Occupied stared back at her. She did an about-face, hurried back toward the middle of the row, and rocked impatiently from one foot to the other, silently pleading with every single toilet-sitter behind the closed doors in front of her to hurry the heck up.
All of a sudden, mid pee-dance, the little hairs on Holly’s neck and arms stood on end. She felt an eerie sensation that she was being stared at, so she darted her eyes around the parking lot. The dragon trike rider was fumbling with his pack, clearly ambivalent to her presence. Off to her left, a dozen or so people hovered idly near a golf cart with a smiley-faced rainbow flag attached to its rear frame. She could have sworn they had all been looking in her direction immediately before she glanced at them.
Before she could think anything more of it, a latch in front of her turned from Occupied to Vacant. The emerging figure noticed Holly rushing toward him, looked her squarely in the eyes, and warned, “That was *NOT* me. All *I* did was piss in the urinal!”
She peeked at the threshold behind him and released an audible “Oh dear GAWWWWD” as her nausea immediately intensified. It looked like a Jackson Pollock masterpiece in there, but that certainly wasn’t paint splattered on every visible surface. Instead of a Vacant or Occupied indicator, this one deserved a “Destroyed” sign in big brown block letters until it could be thoroughly hosed down.
She backed away from the disaster pod and heroically willed her tiring pelvic floor muscle to hold on for just a few more moments. Finally, mercifully, another toilet door rattled open. This time, the capsule’s occupant didn’t say anything upon exiting and — at a glance — it appeared clean-ish. Before she stepped in, Holly inhaled one final deep breath of unpolluted air, bracing for the all- too-familiar stagnant cloud that surely awaited.
Chapter 4: https://withtwoesses.medium.com/holly-and-her-dusty-pranksters-chapter-4-6154af4a99bf
Music Credit: N2N
