Home > Royer's Madcap Experiences > Royer’s Madcap Experiences: My Experiences with Dwight (Part II)

Royer’s Madcap Experiences: My Experiences with Dwight (Part II)

September 19, 2013 Leave a comment Go to comments

By Ric Royer
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For hours, Dwight would sit in his lawn chair beneath the bug-zapper utterly motionless, not even shifting his heavy frame once, staring languidly towards the eerie savannah. Then, he would turn towards me abruptly and say something like:

“Let’s go down and beat up that fellow that built that little piano.”

I’d agree and the next thing I know, we’d be heading down there in Dwight’s old pickup. The front was now benchless and it was necessary to squat awkwardly or attempt to position oneself on the squalid collection of fetid blankets that lined the floor but that became moist from ceiling leaks. The pickup was lampless now too and Dwight would often have to veer off the road to avoid an aggregation of tumbleweeds or a dead body.

We finally arrived at the derelict bungalow. It sat off on its own behind a series of low, dead hedges. The front picture window was boarded up with cardboard boxes– you could still read the advertising on their sides. Condor Alights Beer, Buntz Mallows, Magnanimous Boys’ Horn of Comfy Hotel Bedding, standard really. Dwight parked the pickup across the dirt road.

The eccentric was there, we knew it. It was said he had constructed a tiny piano that could read your mind, pick up any melody there, play it back to you. The story was all over the county. But no one had ever seen it. Dwight decided to remedy that.

He kicked in the door with one simple forward exertion. The front room was lit somberly and the eccentric sat crouched at a desk, writing. Papers and books littered the surface. He didn’t look up.

The piano was there on a little shelf. Dwight stared at it. Suddenly, it lurched into action and began playing the “Barberie Pound Soaps” jingle. Dwight let out an abbreviated laugh of self-satisfaction. “Guess it works, huh.”

“Of course it works,” said the eccentric, still not turned in his chair. “Now, I must ask you to leave.”

Dwight had violence in his veins that night, I could tell. But he also felt a measure of respect for the little piano that could play the Barberie Pound Soaps song and its inventor. He wordlessly beckoned me out and even replaced the door using only some old wood screws in his pocket and a dime as a screwdriver.

Then we drove out to a trailer park and beat up some Island People.

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