Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:28:52 -0700 (PDT) From: August Zellner Subject: Julian - Day 6A JULIAN Day 6 Part A The next day was Thursday, and this time when I awoke I was alone, and nobody called to wake me up either. My timeshare was eerily quiet. Would I ever hear from my handsome young clan elder Julian again? Would he even come by to pick up his last few clothes, or the souvenirs from Rock City and Ruby Falls and Mammoth Cave? I looked at those things and, seriously, I got a lump in my throat – I was happy for Julian and his new life in the forest, but was going to miss him too. My plan for that day all along was to drive to Fort Wayne and back – and if you know anything about Indiana you will also know that from Fresh Links that's a four hour drive, each way. And like I have said every other day, I don't intend to bore you with some detailed explanation of how this trip fits into my family history research – except to say I was driving all that way just to go look at one grave, and then drive all the way back! Yeah I really did that, because I can't think of any other reason for the rest of my life why I will ever be even this close – four hours away from Fort Wayne, Indiana – so it was now or never to go visit my great-great-great-grandparents. So anyway, I called my wife a couple of times during all that driving, and told her how I love her and missed her, and how I'd be home in a few days ... and then, late in the afternoon, my phone rang again and when I looked at the phone number – it was Julian! Oh Julian, Julian, are you really calling to talk to me? This is wonderful! "Hey old man, where are ya?" Seriously, those were the very first words out of his mouth when I said hello. "Umm, well I'm on my way back to the timeshare, I think I'll be there in about an hour," I said, "Where are you?" "I'm here waitin' for ya." "But – but – what about the forest?" I said. "Oh come on!" said Julian, as if he hated the forest. But then he backed off. "Acksully, the forest is okay – I'll tell ya all about it when ya get here – and it's a lot nicer than any shithole but, ya know, this is the nicest house I've ever lived in – even for a week. I just wanna live in it one more night, okay?" Gee, I guess I never really thought about it that way. To me it was just another timeshare in the middle of asshole-to-nowhere. But to Julian, it seemed like a mansion. "Hey Julian, are ya hungry?" "Oh man I am STARVIN'!" he said. Now that sounded like my boy. "And you got, like, nothin' in this fridge, man!" "Well, feel free to eat whatever ya do find in there, but how about if I take you out to the nicest restaurant I can find?" "Oh, so ya wanna take me out on another date, eh perv?" He was funny, and he was ssssooooo cute, even over the phone. "Yeah, like a date," I said, "Hey, I'll make it official and take ya to a movie too if ya want." "Uhhh, yeah," he said, "How about Mexican Teenage Pro Girls?" "Oh, so you found that?" I asked, suddenly embarrassed. He just laughed. And so I hurried home to my young boy, and when I got there – holy shit! – he was dressed in just his cargo pants, and with all the arm and ankle bracelets and the body and face paint still on him. "I'm not allowed to take this stuff off for three days," he explained. Ohhhhh, he was beautiful. "But I can't take you anywhere without a shirt and shoes," I lamented. "Oh, well I can wear a shirt and shoes, but I just can't take this stuff off," he said. So he got just enough clothes on and we headed out. As you might imagine, in a town like Fresh Links the "nicest restaurant I can find" is going to be at the resort – specifically Diamond Jim's Ristorante, which according to the web site "has an expansive menu of American favorites from eggs benedict to specialty cut steaks and is located adjacent to the casino floor." All this, even though it's supposedly an Italian-themed restaurant. The waitress who came to take our drink orders didn't say anything but she was clearly a little taken aback by Julian's appearance. But after a few minutes looking over the menu, out came an obviously latino man dressed in chef's garb holding our drinks. "Julian! Julian! I knew eet hadt to be you!" he proclaimed as he set the drinks down. "Andt you mahst be dee gentleman who hass brought heem to findt hees forest," he said. "Eet ees an honor to meet you seρor." He shook my hand vigorously while Julian explained that he was the head chef here. Oh this figures, I thought – of course Julian already knows this guy, he must have met him the other day while he was roaming around the resort with the cleaning crew kids. Maybe they all had lunch right there in his kitchen! "I haff always admired dee Forest People sso mahch," the chef said, "Dey haff kept all off deir tradishonss – not like sso many off oss who haff cahm here, or eeffen een our own countries. And now, God has brought both off you here to save hees people andt bring dem to deir new forest home. You are my honored guests tonight." Then turning to Julian he said, "And whaht weel you hafve Julian?" and they started discussing it in Spanish, but I heard the word "cheeseburger" mixed in there several times. I was floored! How could he come to the finest restaurant in Fresh Links and order a cheeseburger? Shouldn't he at least have some kind of fabulous traditional latin food? The chef must have seen the incredulous look on my face, and when he turned to take my order I said, "Seriously? He's getting a cheeseburger?" He smiled and said, "But eets gon to be dee finest cheessburger een all off Indiana." Well I certainly believed that! "And what weel you haff seρor?" "Oh," I said, "you're the Top Chef here! So I want you to bring me whatever you most enjoy making." "Well you may not beleef deez, seρor, but I enchoy dee French cooking aboff all else!" Well actually I did believe that – I mean why not, right? He's a latino head chef in an Italian-themed American restaurant, so why shouldn't he love French cuisine? So I said, "It has been so long since I've had Beef Burgundy ..." "Oh, seρor," he said, "eets jost gon to melt een your mouth!" Oh god I could hardly wait! And as we enjoyed the best dinner in all of Fresh Links together, Julian told me about some of the perks of being a young clan elder of the Hoover Forest People. "I get my own hut, and I can have any girl I want live with me there!" he said, "So I can have Lupita live with me." "Well in that case, what happens to Florito?" I asked. "Yeah, that's a problem," he said, "I have to take him too if Lupita's with me – but as soon as her parents come back he goes home." "So does that mean you can, like, make Lupita stay with you even if she doesn't want to?" "Yeah!" he exclaimed, "Pretty cool, huh?" "Well I don't know Julian," I said, "Here's a piece of advice from an old geezer who's been with a few girls and women. If any girl doesn't want you anymore, the best thing to do is just let her go – even if you still love her and want her to stay. Because, seriously, if she don't wanna be there she's just gonna make your life a living hell – cuz if there's one thing girls know how to do best, that's it! And then what have you got? No, you're better off just ditching her right then and there, and go through the pain, and be over it. And like my dad used to say, `Nothing mends a broken heart quite like fucking a new girl'!" "He really said that?" "Yeah, actually, he did." And he really did, too! "So anyway," I said, "I've been wondering about something. If there's three forests, and Lupita's clan claimed the first one, and the clan chiefs and elders of the different clans have always known how to get a hold of each other, how come somebody in Lupita's clan never, like, just called your clan chief a long time ago and said `Hey man, we've got a forest here with your name on it, why don't ya just come on up and have a look?'" Well, the answer to that question turned out to be that as far as anyone was concerned, no, actually these forests never had anybody's name on them, and that included any other clan of the Juva Forest People. Just because Lupita's clan showed up and found their forest, it was never obvious to the Miami Nation or even to her clan that the other forests were now somehow "reserved" for other Juva Forest clans. That kind of thinking only makes sense now because of the internal logic of this story. And if you think about it, even if you knew ahead of time that Julian's clan was "destined" to find a new forest, who's to say it's one of the Miami Nation's forests, right? Why wouldn't it be some completely different forest in, like, Oregon or someplace? Actually, nobody can call you on your cell phone and say come get your forest. Jesus and the angels have to lead you there. And to this day it's still not obvious to either the Miami Nation or the Forest People who will come to find the third forest – or when. "Okay," I said, "so what was it like when you went to find your forest?" "Ackshully, it was pretty cool!" said Julian. "First we all ate some mushrooms to bring Jesus and the angels to guide us." "Oh, well that must have been fun!" I said, "Have you ever had mushrooms before? I haven't, so I don't even know what that would be like ..." "Yeah well ackshully, our clan chief had most of them, so he was the only one that really got wasted. The rest of us only got a little bit." "But what about Lupita's clan chief?" I asked, "He must have had a bunch of mushrooms too, right?" No, cuz he didn't go!" Julian said. "Nobody from her clan went – just our clan to find our forest." Oh, right, of course, I thought, I am way too wrapped up in the internal logic of this story to realize that only Jesus and the angels can lead you to your forest – nobody else can take you there, not even a related clan chief. He can't even go with you, so it must have been just the five of them – Julian, his uncle Tito, their clan chief and two elders – summoning Jesus and the angels by getting ripped up on mushrooms. "But still, I got a little buzz and it was like the whole forest was shiny and shimmery and shit." Oh good, cuz I wouldn't want it any other way. "So then we went into the forest, and I had to go first cuz, like, I'm the one that came here first, right? And I didn't know which way to go, but it didn't matter cuz every time I looked around, it was like I just knew, ya know?" No, I don't know, but please go on. "We followed that little river, right? And there was a path along side it but sometimes we were on the path and sometimes we were off the path and sometimes I didn't know where the fuck we were but, like, it didn't matter and the forest was shining and shimmering and shit, right?" Uhhh, okay ... "And we were going and going and like, all of a sudden I looked around and like, I just knew that was the place, ya know?" No, I don't know, but that's not what matters here. "And so when I looked around, I saw everybody else looking around too, like we all just knew at the same time, right? And then the chief starts dancing and yelling some crazy shit I couldn't figure out, and the forest was shining – and, like, the Sun Spirit shined down into the forest and showed us a clearing, so that was the clearing for our village." "Holy shit, Julian, that's really something!" was all I could muster. "Yeah, right?" he said, "So we spent, like, an hour clearing out the clearing to make it ready and so we won't forget where it is." Oh, right, I forgot to tell you, they were all carrying machetes in this little journey of discovery. So to fully appreciate all this, you have to imagine five Juva Forest People in face and body paint and arm and ankle bracelets and headdresses, hallucinating and carrying machetes through a forest on a hot summer day in Indiana, coming to a clearing and suddenly realizing that Jesus and the angels have given them this place to dwell under the protection of the Miami Nation of Indiana, Inc. Pretty cool, huh? There was, however, one little remaining problem with all this. For even as Julian and his fellow clan elders cleared away the clearing that the Sun Spirit had shown them, and chopped away a path through the forest back to Lupita's village, no one had even asked themselves whether this new village Julian's clan had marked out for themselves was even located on one of the 40-acre tracts owned by the Miami Nation. It was not something that mattered to them. But fortunately, that was something that mattered an awful lot to the Board of Directors of the Miami Nation of Indiana, Inc. So no sooner had Julian's clan elders returned to Lupita's village to rejoin the great celebration going on there, than the Miami Nation guys who were standing by with survey maps and aerial photos and GPS software on their iPads headed back down the trail to determine precisely where the fuck this new clearing was. And the good news was – tadahhh! Yes indeed, the clearing was on the "southern" tract, which meant that if any of those Miami Nation guys had harbored any lingering doubt as to whether Julian's clan really were the correct people coming from afar to dwell under the protection of the Miami Nation, well any such doubts were erased right then and there. They marked out the four corners of the 40-acre tract for future reference and returned to Lupita's village, where the great celebration was in full swing and it was just about lunchtime. "So, like, what'd'ja have for lunch?" I asked. "Roast moose or something?" Julian just laughed hysterically. "No ackshully – it was catered! I think all the food came from one of the casino restaurants, maybe even this one!" Don't it just figure, right? I was trying to imagine what it might be like to be part of the catering staff for an event like that one, standing behind a Swedish meatball table. "I ate a little, but then I asked Uncle Tito if I could come back to your house cuz really, I was wiped out after all that everything, and who could get any sleep with a lot of whoopin' and hollerin' goin' on?" "So that's what you did this afternoon, you crashed at my timeshare?" "Yeah." Fine with me. And by that time we were just about done with the finest dinner in all of Fresh Links, prepared by a chef so honored by our presence that he insisted over and over that he just couldn't possibly take my money to pay for it. And so Julian and I went back to the timeshare together. First things first – it was time for me to call and check in with my wife. "And you have to be quiet while I do that," I reminded Julian, so he went upstairs for a little while. So I talked to my darling and told her how much I loved her and missed her – which is the truth! – and I told her all about the great French cuisine I had at the finest restaurant in all of Fresh Links – but of course I left out everything else. "I love you, honey, and I'll call you tomorrow morning, okay? Love ya, bye-bye." As soon as I hung up and while I was still holding the cell phone in my hand, I looked up from where I was sitting on the couch, and I saw a very beautiful young golden brown Hoover Forest clan elder, adorned in partly faded body and face paint and arm and ankle bracelets, but otherwise NAKED and just beginning to walk down the stairs. Oh god oh god! – is he really going to do this? Is he really doing this for me?? I was at first stunned as I looked up at him, but after a couple of seconds I regained enough composure to press the power button on my phone to turn it off, then reach over and grab my camcorder from where it was sitting on the end table. I managed to get the camcorder going just as Julian was coming around on the landing halfway down the stairs, so now he was facing me, walking down the steps toward me, and each time he set one of his feet down a step he jiggled his ankle so the bracelets jangled against each other just as if he was performing a ritual dance ... a naked ritual dance, just for me. In one hand he was holding a DVD case, which I knew to be filled with Mexican child porn. When Julian reached the bottom of the stairs, he stopped briefly and jiggled his hands and feet so all the bracelets jangled together while I filmed the whole thing and zoomed in for a close-up of his bouncing penis and balls. Then I panned back out as he walked up to the couch. He sat down on the far end from where I was, sitting sideways to display himself just as he had done in the car on our very first day together, except that this time he was not a dirty shirtless migrant labor boy. No, he was a fully adorned naked forest clan elder, the most exotic young boy I've ever seen. He had a big shit-eating grin on his handsome face. "You are SUCH a pervert!" he said. Then he held the DVD case up to the camera and said, "So perv, like, are we gonna watch a movie or what?" Oh, yeah, right, the movie. I paused the camcorder and set it down on the coffee table in front of me. Then I took the DVD case out of Julian's had and brought it to the TV, all the while trembling a little bit, totally nervous. Oh god oh god oh shit – now that this was really happening my mind was so screwed up I just knew I'd never be able to even get an erection no matter how much hardcore Mexican child porn was playing right in front of my face! Still, I had promised that boy a porn flick, so I was pretty much stuck with whatever was gonna happen now – even complete humiliation. I slid the disk into the DVD player, grabbed the remote and returned to my seat. I flicked the remote nervously to skip through the phone sex ads and get to the "feature" selection screen. After looking that over for a couple seconds I selected the one I had watch on Day 3 of this story – the one with just the young boy and girl I had pretended were Julian and Lupita. "I think you'll like this one," I said, and pressed the play button. At this, Julian laughed. "Oh right!" he declared, "You already watched all these, haven't you?" and he laughed some more. I was caught and humiliated – already! – but I just said, "Well, not all of 'em ..." And as I said the last time I described this "feature," it starts with just the two of them on the couch French kissing and making out and feeling each other up, and "Lupita" stroking "Julian's" hard cock while they talk softly to each other in Maya-niole. Then after a couple of minutes, "Julian" reaches over to the end table and grabs a joint, lights it up and those two kids start getting stoned together while they continue to make out and feel each other up. I was watching this sequence uncomfortably trying not to look at Julian too much when I suddenly heard Julian say, perhaps a little sheepishly, "I wish WE had some weed – that would be so cool ..." Now it was my turn to laugh. I paused the video right in the middle of "Julian" taking a hit and said, "Actually, Julian, we DO have some weed!" "Oooohhhhh SHIT!" he said, "Ya mean you had reefer this whole time and didn't even tell me?!" "You didn't ask!" I said, "and anyway, I'm surprised ya didn't find it when you were going through my shit looking for the porn!" "But I was just lookin' for porn, ya know?" he said as I got up. "Well, wait here and just gimme a minute," I said, heading for the stairs. "Yeah, okay, I'll be right here ..." he said.