The Roto-Rooter man came to the house at 2711 1/2 Paradise Lane, Lemon Grove, California for his service call, right on time. He knocked on the door; it opened and what he saw made him insane.
“I’m gonna give you a haircut, hippie!!” he said as he ran back to his truck to get the necessary tools. A teenager named Ched stared at him from the doorway, dressed in a t-shirt that said GET IT TOEGTHR, grinning like a bowl of disarranged alphabet soup. His eyelids sagged, pulled to earth by the weight of the long brown hair dangling to his knees. Ched had been listening to “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” over and over for 27 hours and was finally starting to understand it, which took every kilowatt his befogged brain could muster. He swore he would stop after three days.
The Roto-Rooter man attached an electric shaver to his drain-scraping tool and rushed back toward the house. His buzz-cut scalp gleamed in the California sunshine like a concrete patio surface. The flesh of his face seemed to be pulled inward by sheer force of his psychic rage, as if it were made of foam rubber, until his white, vein-flecked eyeballs stood out of his skull on stalks. Saliva trailed out his distended mouth and his overloaded larynx shivered from clotted words of savage outrage.
Ched thought that the Roto-Rooter Man looked like the Weird-O car model he had been building that morning: Digger or Davy or maybe Freddie Flame-Out. He stared at the onrushing lunatic, who leveled the whirring razor at his face, ballistic missile style.
Behind him, Ron Bushy thudded mightily on his snare drum as Eric Braunn stabbed at the treble clef and Doug Ingle caressed the undulating vertebrae of an insectoid melody. Ched thought he saw a stray note roll between his knees, so he bent down to catch it. The Roto-Rooter Man lunged forward, slicing off the tip of Ched’s left ear before he collided with the family afghan hound, a huge animated rag mop with a dripping nose and big teeth. Man, dog and razor became a single ball of screams, flying hair and chunks of meat for several seconds, or eternity.
Eventually, Bushy finished his drum solo. The album ended, Lyndon Johnson quit and the next decade dawned. Ched stood up. He was 62 and the house was demolished. He looked behind him and saw a pile of very old hair and some yellowed bones.
“What the hell was that?”
He rubbed his head: “Shit, I could use a hair cut…”
This is what it's like when you use a rubber chicken as a condominium.
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