Rick Hollo Runs a Tight Ship

NOTE - This section of American Project contains adult language and content and is therefore not suitable for minors.

Episode 10

Rick Hollo rummaged around in the drawer of the battleship grey colored desk. The heavy metal slides swayed smoothly while Rick gripped the top of the drawer with his left hand.

“I know that goddamn thing is in here somewhere,” Rick said.

“What’s that chief?” Madison said.

“That old megaphone I had stashed away in here.”

Rick Hollo had an old electronic megaphone, hard plastic, and hyperbolically shaped with red rimming and off white backing. It looked, Rick Hollo felt, like a 57 Chevy. There was a pistol grip with a knurled handle, and a CB mouthpiece attached to a springy black cord.

Rick bought it, hoping Lalapalooza would roll through Sorbonne sometime in the mid nineties.

“Never happened,” Rick told the boys one slow afternoon. He was rubbing his megaphone with a rag, and some saliva. “Yep,” he said, “I got this baby, three dozen canisters of pepper spray, five see-through shields, fifteen telescoping riot batons, 200 rounds of CS teargas, and 5000 rounds of nine millimeter rubber bullets.”

“They put the goddamn event in Indianapolis instead,” Rick said.

Unbeknownst to him, Rick had stashed the megaphone above the ceiling tiles in the Sorbonne, Ohio Police Station.

***

Madison opened his desk drawer, the middle one, and rummaged around himself. Rick Hollo was still trying to find the megaphone he had stashed, and Madison felt he should help, or at least try to find something to occupy his time. In the drawer Madison found a nail clipper, a small cardboard box of paper clips with the lid torn off, a Halloween eraser, a feather, two empty cans of Skoal, and a small pocket mirror.

Madison took out the mirror, and began looking at his face. For a couple of days Madison had been noticing a large, reddish bump on the side of his jaw. It was more of a swell. A giant boil, or carbuncle, or something. Madison’s brother was is medical school. Thinking it was cancer, Madison called his brother in law, who happened to be in his second year of medical school out in Kansas City.

“Cho,” Madison had said over the phone, "I think I've got cancer."

He told Cho his symptoms, of which he had only two of the seven serious cancer warning signs, and Cho told him he had a carbuncle, or boil, or possibly an ingrown hair.

“Did you use someone else's razor lately?” Cho asked.

“No Cho, I haven't used anyone's razor.” Madison hated when his brother in law talked down to him.

Peering into the small circular pocket mirror on the desk in front of him, Madison palpated his bump. It was tender. He tried to squeeze it, hoping for a nice gusher or maybe a blackhead push up. Nothing.

Madison took a break, and looked out the window. Madison thought about birds ripping worms out of holes, and taking giant shits after being constipated for a day or two.

Looking back into the mirror, Madison massaged the bump area, and went in for a milking squeeze. If this didn't work, it must be cancer, Madison thought. The old milk and squeeze technique always worked in high school, and later in the army. Even on backne. In the army Madison would limber up his spine, and basically put his arm in a hammer lock reaching some hard to reach ‘volcanos’ as he called them, on his scapula.

Madison massaged, and squeezed. Gently at first, and then harder. Suddenly, a black thorn erupted from the bump. Madison took the thorn between his thumb and index finger, and scientifically rolled it.

Madison smelled the rolled thorn. Looking closer, he saw that the thorn was actually a clump of whiskers, banded together like a sheave of wheat. Or a fasces. Or a quiver of arrows. 
He smelled it again, and squeezed the surrounding area. Good old puss patrol, thought Madison.

Standing on a chair, with his head above the ceiling tiles, Rick Hollo bellowed victoriously.

***

“Madison!” The megaphone said. The megaphone made a buzzing sound. “Madison, get your finger out of your nose!” The megaphone said.

Chief Rick Hollo was standing on a grey metal and vinyl padded chair in the Sorbonne Police Headquarters. He had found the megaphone in the ceiling tiles, with the batteries still full of juice, and now he was saying things to Madison.

Madison was sitting at his desk, excising an ingrown hair, and smelling his fingers.

At the sound of the megaphone and megaphone buzzer, Madison jumped, and clamped his hands to his head, covering his ears, and began wincing.

“But chief,” Madison said. With his ears covered, saying ‘but chief’ sounded like felt. It sounded muffled, and echoey. It reminded him of when he was in the first grade, eating lunch in the cafeteria, in the cacophonous din, Madison would cover his ears in an intermittent staccato, garbling the conversations to an incoherent chattering beat. Through the matrix of the beat, Madison would think about himself as a live action Heman figure, wielding a sword, and riding a giant cat who wore a saddle and armor.

“But chief!” The megaphone said.

“Chief come on,” Madison said.

“Chief come on!” The megaphone said.

“It hurts my ears,” Madison said.

“It hurts my ears!” The megaphone said.

Standing on the chair, Chief Hollo pushed the buzzer on the CB mouthpiece of the megaphone, resonating a horrible, sad klaxon throughout the office. Madison clutched his head, and winced and doubled over, and Hollo laughed maniacally, and pointed the megaphone toward Madison's doubled over, clutched head.  

Madison started crying.

Chief Rick Hollo stopped buzzing, and stopped laughing.

Rick Hollo was about to apologize, but luckily the phone rang.

***

It was Graves. He was calling from a payphone outside the bait and tackle commissary at Lake Me.

Chewing on some Gummi Worms, Graves told Chief Hollo about what he saw.

“Chief, there was a man in a Sioux Indian headdress in a small sailboat, and another guy wearing a deerskin unitard in a canoe.” Graves said into the receiver. He pulled a green and yellow banded worm out of the plastic container, and lowered it, head first, into his mouth.

“No,” Graves said.

“There’s more,” he said.

“There was a slender guy wearing a porkpie hat and sepia toned glasses with a toothpick in his mouth, fishing on the bank.” Graves said.

“Yeah, he was sitting on an overturned bucket.” Graves paused.

“Uh huh,” he said. He grabbed another worm. This one had red and orange stripes. The colors secretly reminded Graves of autumn, and he formed it into a loop and bit it mid section.

“Yeah chief, it looked pretty suspicious.”

“Well I drove around the whole lake.”

“Uh huh.”

Small wads of sugary gelatin stuck behind Graves’ bottom molars. The mandibular region. With his finger he picked at the wads, and nodded his head with the dark grey phone receiver on his chin.

“Uh huh.”

“Well chief, that wasn’t all.” Graves said.

Graves dug his slimy, saliva coated finger into the center of the worm pile, and pulled a rare green red worm out of the bottom corner of the plastic container. Graves pretended that the worm said to him ‘don’t eat me, please don’t eat me!’, and then lower the worm into his mouth, slowly dissolving the gelatin, dye, and sugar on his tongue. Graves pretended, for a moment, that his mouth was the pit of Sarlaac from Return of the Jedi.

With the worm in his mouth, Graves said “I shaw a be fat guy by a fan.”

Graves swallowed his worm.

“I said,” he said, “I saw a big fat guy by a van.”

—

Photograph by Nythan James.