Roadside Attraction 1/2

You might have heard of me, I’m the old guy in the bib overalls and Orange Crush T-shirt who lives in the shed behind the Swiss Cheese House and World’s Tallest Jenga Tower. (Suggested donation, ten dollars.)

I used to be a contributing member of society, just like you. Now I live the life of a hobo, here on my own land. Considering all that happened to get me here, life isn’t so bad.

I used to be a respected and trusted member of a secret shopper crew, and in some ways I still am, but it’s harder. You see, one day, I was wending my way down the sidewalk to my car, my eventual destination being The Sooper Dooper, for another secret shopper mission, when I heard, from the knothole in the fence-

“You insulating?”

That would be my neighbor Tom, of course. That’s is the only way I ever see him- an eye looking through the knothole in the fence at a level of four feet.

“What are you talking about?”

Tom can be a snert, but I value his perspective and opinion. His house and grounds are especially nice for someone who ambushes people through a knothole in his fence. Tom is retired, having made his bundle underwriting smartphone insurance.

“Holes in your house, dude.”

“What!” I spun around, and whaddaya know, there were three, inch wide holes in my crackerbox house, without any discernable pattern.

“Where’d those come from?”

Tom sniggered through the hole.

“You didn’t put them there?”

“No!”

“Thought it was a sloppy job. Holes perfectly round, though. You got compass ants, then.”

I’d heard of compass ants. Termites and rattlesnakes are the only things worse. Compass ants are rarely seen in temperate climates, but have been found on all continents. Their raison d’etre is to describe a perfect circle, and there are so many of them, I betcha a few have succeeded. I told Tom that my next call would be to Terminix.

“Can’t do that,” he told me. “Against the neighborhood association agreement. Because they’ll just go to another house and make holes. You’ll need to go to 'Pegs R Us'. Seal the little bastards in. You’re lucky it’s not sided. Wouldn’ta seen the holes soon enough.”

“But what’ll happen to the ants?”

“They’ll die in there.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry. What you lose in karma points, you’ll gain in insulation value.”

I asked him- “Is that ‘Pegs R Us’, with an ‘R’ for the ‘Are’?”

He sniggered through four square inches.

“You’ll be able to narrow it down. Just find the place where pegs are them.”

After my overnight shift, I found Pegs R Us in a plaza suite that used to be an “Everything Rhinestones”. Who knows what lies beyond the scored but sturdy glass doors of those places. I do! There was a young man in an untucked polo shirt standing behind the counter. He looked up from his phone and greeted me with a most professional- “Urmph?”

“I need pegs to seal up compass ant holes,” I told him.

 He seemed anxious to impress me with how busy and how bored he was. He sighed.

“You need pegs, then?”

“That’s what I’m sayin’.”

He sighed, then perked up, seeming to remember something helpful.

“Break time.”

He then ducked behind a yellowed cardboard display of shop towels, and I heard a hollow wood ply door closing behind him as he left the shop proper, and me, alone with my thought:

“Dear Pegs R Us. I’d like to thank you for a particular aspect of your service. After meeting one of your trusted associates, I now understand the reason why they print ‘Do Not Eat’ on silica packets…”

“Are you being helped?”

Holy shit, a disembodied head broke my reverie. The man stepped from behind a key display like Buck Henry in The Graduate. He sported a pocket-protector which itself sported the company logo, which is a peg.

“I was just able to convey to one of your associates that I need pegs, and then he went to break.”

The manager nodded sagely. He understood.

You know? It might be just in comparison, but it seemed like the manager was everything his subordinate wasn’t. He understood. I told the man that I thought my request was too much for the associate. And that he looked like he needed a break.

The manager nodded at my observation. “I understand. Compass ants?”

“Yes! How did you know?”

He knew!

“There’s a lot of ‘em around,” The manager said. “You’ll need our new square pegs.”       

“Square pegs?”

“Round pegs won’t work, you see. They’ll get past it. With the short life cycle of the compass ant, they’ve evolved quickly.”

This special and intuitive manager with his magic pocket protector explained to me that Compass ants have every curve worked out. But now they aren’t used to angles. That made sense to me, at the time. As he kindly and articulately explained to me that square pegs were my best bet, and that I needed one of their special mallets that was specially designed to put square pegs into round holes in the most efficient manner possible, I wished this manager well, and hoped he would be promoted to Area Manager or something. He told me that their Compass ant kits were state of the art.

“Along with our special caulk.” he said.

“Caulk?”

“Of course!”

He charismatically and mellifluously explained.

“With square pegs you’re bound to get little half-mooney gaps and splintered corners, you see, so you’ll need our special anti-Compass Ant caulk. Don’t want those little bastards getting back out!”

I found more holes when I got home, and, that afternoon it was all I could do to put pegs in the holes and caulk them as they were being made. Despite the banging, my cat, Oscar, was fascinated with the entire process, what with the ladder and the various tools and the box with the pegs. It went quickly that evening. My house only has one level, and in some places I can almost reach the gutter just standing on the ground.

Over the course of the next few days, the ants made their way back outside. I was finding more and more pegs back near the foundation. I had hammered them in well, but the caulk wasn’t holding. In fact, I couldn’t find any caulk left, in the holes or on the ground. Tom, knot holing again, explained to me that the ants had adapted, and were eating the anti-compass ant caulk.

“One ant’s poison is another ant’s food. Bad luck.”

The next day, after a particularly long assignment buying three ounce tuna packets throughout the metro area, I returned home and the ants had obviously been busy. Now no spot on the exterior walls was exempt from the hole blight. No hole was less than five inches from another, from the drip edge to the fascia.

I quickly regrouped, picking up all the square pegs that had fallen outside of the house and putting them back in the box. Then I slathered primer over the exterior, making sure to get it into the holes. Over the course of five days, I changed the house from a dusty blue to bright yellow. Oscar helped, of course.

Of course, good Swiss Cheese isn’t yellow, but ‘Swiss Cheese’ was the look I was trying to get, if you catch my drift. I wanted the color like on a wedge of Swiss that a mouse carries in the cartoons. With his two little paws. We’re talkin’ yellow. “McDonald’s Arches” yellow. The house now looked like a 10/1 scale rain poncho previously owned by someone who met an unfortunate end.  Once my house was properly yellow, I put up a sign at the highway intersection nearby- “New Roadside Attraction! Swiss Cheese House!”

I felt pretty good when I’d finished. I had done something about “It”. I put a coffee can on top of the post next to the gate. “Suggested Donation: Five Dollars”.

Then I got a great idea for a side project. I took all those square pegs out front and made the world’s tallest Jenga tower. (6’4”.)  I called Guiness, but they said that, although my tower broke the record, it didn’t meet the qualifications, what with the use of glue. The current record-holder hadn’t used glue. To tell the truth, it was hard to stick with the issue with the Guiness people, because I’d spilled the beans to them early about my whole situation, and they mostly wanted to know if I was “alright”. But, I stuck with the issue at hand, telling them that they didn’t mention the lack of glue in their current edition. They told me that with a stacked tower, it’s implied. The lack of glue is what makes an impressive Jenga tower, so they say.

I couldn’t argue with that, so I called glue companies until someone said that they wouldn’t be averse to a sponsorship in principle. Then, up went the sign on my lawn: “World’s Tallest Jenga Tower. In Conjunction With Elmer’s Glue.” It was a hit, and now, if it ever falls down, I can always blame Elmer. After some soul-searching, I raised the suggested donation fee to ten dollars and added signs next to that main intersection. “Swiss Cheese House! However does it stay up?”

Oscar is quite tolerant, and didn’t seem to mind the publicity, but he was the first to retreat from the house to the shed out back. A few ants had made it inside, and that was entertaining, but he got bored with it after a while. I joined him outside with a pillow and sleeping bag two days later.