Free The Woefield Poultry Collective by Susan Juby

our school’s production of
Jesus Christ Superstar
. I didn’t build the actual cross, which was made out of fancy plywood. The woodworking teacher did that. I just nailed a lot of boards near the base of it so it would stay upright until Jesus needed to carry it around and then pretend to get hung off it. Even doing that tested my skills. But I would have made the cross and the stage and the whole drama room from scratch for the drama teacher if she’d asked. Anyway, I don’t want to get into that.
    What I will tell you is that I’d never been in a hardware store before. I know. It’s kind of fucked up. I’m a grown man from a rural area but I just never went before. Blogging about heavy metal and assholish actors doesn’t call for trips to the hardware store. Still, I was pretty sure I knew what it would be like. The place would be teeming with people who’d been there the night of the big production.
    Fuck that. I wasn’t going to Home Depot with Earl. I even considered heading home to avoid it, but I looked across the street and saw my mom and Bobby sitting on the porch drinking beer. You know, I’d been at Woefield, basically within eyeshot of my mother, for like three days and she hadn’t even come over to check on me. I know that doesn’t sound very masculine or whatever, especially when combined with a story about how I’ve never been to a hardware store before, but too bad. When she saw me looking over at her and Bobby, my goddamned mother didn’t even
wave
. How fucked is that?
    It was so fucked that I decided I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of asking to come home again. I’d tough it out. Do the hardware store thing. Face all those pricks from high school. I knew at least half of them would be working at Home Depot.
    To pull it off I’d need a little mellowing agent. The vodka didn’t take effect immediately, so I had another couple of shots. Still, I was barely buzzing when I went out to the truck to wait for Earl. I was not in any way impaired. I just want to make that clear.
    Earl didn’t say one word to me on the drive to the store, which is way over on the other side of town. It didn’t bother me. Certain types of manly men, especially old ones, are like that. This girl, at least I think she was a girl, used to write comments on Celebutard. She said she was once part of the craft services team on a Clint Eastwood movie. There’s hardly any gossip about him because his people are pretty loyal. But this girl was lonely or on drugs or something and we started messaging back and forth. She said Clint would go entire days saying only what was necessary. I try to be like that when I’m sober. But when I’m drunk it seems necessary to say a lot of shit, such as how I’m feeling, whether my arm has a twinge, what I ate, what I’d like to drink, whether I tooka shit recently and how weird it is that so many Hollywood people have such enormous heads. It feels completely necessary for me to say all that stuff and more.
    This girl said that Clint pretty much only says please, thank you and good. When something’s not good, he just grunts. Well, old Earl may be Clint Eastwood’s long-lost brother or something. He wouldn’t say shit if he stepped in it. At least not to me. But I didn’t take it personally. I just tried to keep up a pleasant commentary.
    When we got to Home Depot, which, as you probably know, is just basically a huge white and orange cube surrounded by about twenty acres of parking, the lot was packed. Earl’s a prime candidate for that
Worst Driver
show, and I think he was scared to get hit or whatever, so he drove us way the fuck into some
other
big-box store’s parking lot that was pretty empty because everyone was clogging up the Home Depot.
    Earl was still doing his Clint Eastwood impression. I didn’t point out that if he bought more than a box of nails we’d probably die of exposure trying to get it back to the truck. I kept my cool and acted like everything was