Chapter 6a: Highway from Hell

written by: Jonathon Scott (appearing as a guest of Just Laugh magazine)

Willy Nelson was a gritty, tough man. The sort of man that works in a diner as a short order cook and knowingly ignores the "Employees Must Always Wash Hands" sign each time he goes to the bathroom; a renegade who follows no social folkways like one-way streets or downward escalators. He drives wherever he wants, and he walks up the down escalators if it tickles his fancy...and it just so happens that it does tickle his fancy.

All this being said, Willy Nelson Guildenstern lacked many necessary social skills. He had journeyed with the girls for 20 minutes to the gas station without saying a word. He just stared blankly at the road and continually opened and closed his switchblade. As they left the gas station on the way to the Planet Hollywood gift shop, you could cut the tension with his knife. Jane decided she’d break the ice.

"So, you must be a really big Willy Nelson fan, huh," she said awkwardly as she remembered the scene from Office Space.

"No, I hate his music more than life itself," he snapped back. The car fell deadly silent again as the girls didn’t quite know how to respond to this. Julia growing more intrigued with this gruff character had to inquire, "Why do you hate his music?"

You could see he was getting nervous as sweat beads began to form on the back of his neck. The switchblade started opening and closing faster and faster. A vein began pulsating in his forehead. The car’s rhythmic bumping sound grew louder----thu-thump, thu-thump, thu-thump, as Willy Nelson began to speak.

"Well, my mother used to belong to a book club. You know, those highly pretentious, self-righteous groups of women that come together to talk about Charlotte Bronte while millions of people die from poverty. Anywho, every time these women used to congregate at our house, my mother used me as the closing act of the evening. I still remember as a three-year-old being pushed into the middle of the living room. I of course was naked wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and holding a microphone in my hand as I was goaded by my mother to sing On the Road Again."

"Oh, that’s just one of those cute things that parents do to you when you’re little," said Julia.

"Cute? Cute? Can you even begin to imagine the embarrassment I felt when at thirteen my pubescent voice kept cracking as I tried to hit the high note of ‘Just can't wait to get on the road again’? Or can you fathom how devastating it was when, at twenty, I got an erection looking at Mrs. Peterson’s girdle. I had to put my stinkin’ hat over it."

Jane felt the urge to speak, "That sounds pretty traumatizing, but it’s no reason to hate your life. After all, I just realized the meaning of life, the purpose of all our meaningless toil. I have found what human beings have been searching for since the beginning of time; the reason why people felt it necessary to create religion, god...

"Hey Janey, Woodstock’s on the phone, and they want their acid back. Is she trippin? What type of person talks like that in the middle of a car ride? I’ll tell you what type of a person; someone who eats acid, and then after seeing gnomes burrow into the ground, think they have the solution to the world’s problems and the meaning of life. The same type of a person who uses words like ‘pulsatile thrombus, demitasse, imbibe, cerebral logos, jejune, raison d’ étre, and ennui’ in their writing. Such a person could only be on acid. Which gets me to thinking, what if everything, this whole trip to Bermuda and all of these far-fetched events was just one, long acid trip? You know, the way that whole season of Dallas where JR dies was a dream. Do you think that this writer would make the five previous writers’ work futile," exclaimed Julia.

[At this moment, the editor’s stomach began to feel queasy. He began to wonder why he had even let Jonathon in on the project in the first place. For all he knew, this guy could be a cyber derelict that roams the net looking to destroy collaborative stories under the false pretense of being a comedic writer. But it just so happens that on this day, in this story, he wasn’t. A calm passed over him as Julia continued to speak...]

"It just so happens that I am going after the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry image, and that has nothing to do with the switchblade. The reason I hate my life so much is because I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. You know, OCD," said Willy Nelson.

"We know what Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is. You don’t have to insult our intelligence by giving us acronyms," snapped Julia.

"No, you don’t understand. That’s one of my obsessive-compulsive habits. Every time I say Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, you know OCD, I have to follow it by saying ‘you know OCD.’ It’s the same with the switchblade. I have to open and close it 32 times every time that the letter ‘e’ is used in a word while I’m driving. The medication really helps, though. I used to have to open and close it 64 times every time the letters ‘a’ or ‘e’ appeared in a word while I was driving. The doctors hope that with any luck I might one day only have to do it 16 times when an infrequently used consonant such as ‘x’ or ‘z’ appears in a word while I’m driving. I can’t say it’s made for an easy life, though. You can only imagine what other children at my birthday parties thought as I had to blow out and relight my birthday candles 47 times before my parents could cut the cake. Those damn Carvel Ice Cream Cakes, rich, creamy, and perfect for every birthday occasion. Maybe the deceptive Carvel Corporation should have been more clear in saying that their ice cream cakes are rich, creamy, and perfect for every non-obsessive-compulsive birthday occasion because everyone of my birthdays ended in a rich, creamy puddle," whined Willy Nelson.

He just had finished his story as the sign appeared in the distance. It looked like manna from heaven, an oasis in a trip filled with desert sand. It looked like just about almost every other Planet Hollywood sign they had seen in their lives. Yet something was different about this sign. The colors were the same, and the font was unmistakably the normal Century Gothic font that all Planet Hollywood signs are written in. However, the three couldn’t get over the fact that something was different. Maybe it wasn’t even the sign that was different. Perhaps, they were different, altered and forever changed by their travels.

Whatever it was, no one really seemed to care. After all, it was a sign! No one cares about signs except writers on power trips who think they can waste other people’s time by spending a whole paragraph describing a meaningless sign as if there’s some deep meaning or symbolism behind it all just to be able to use as many prepositions as possible in the next paragraph in order to show their grammatical mastery.

The three got out of the car and Jane and Julia quickly followed Willy Nelson into the gift shop like baby ducks trailing behind their obsessive-compulsive traumatized mother duck. Jane clasped the sausages tightly for she feared the unsavory types that might come into a Planet Hollywood gift shop. In their haste, neither Willy Nelson, Jane, nor Julia noticed the coughing sound coming from their trunk or the blue suit fabric hanging from the corner of the trunk.

Once inside of the gift shop, they each went their separate ways, acting like a couple of adults in a Planet Hollywood gift shop. Julia started trying on Marilyn Monroe wigs. Willy Nelson put on an original Clint Eastwood sombrero from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and felt the urge to ask the cashier 17 times if he felt lucky. Janey needed to call someone from home to help her make sense of the whole situation. She needed someone to give her a rational explanation for everything.

Jane’s first instinct was to call her family. However, she remembered what had occurred one month prior to her trip to Bermuda. You see, Jane along with four of her family members were chosen to appear on the game show Family Feud. Their family had the chance to go for the steal as Ray Combs asked her Aunt Doris to "name an animal you might find at the zoo." Well, Aunt Doris immediately responded by saying "trees" without any hesitation. The other family members supportively and encouragingly clapped and said, "Good answer, good answer." However, when that X came up and the buzzer piercingly sounded, Jane lost it. She screamed, "Good answer? GOOD ANSWER? Are you friggin’ kidding me. Are you all insane? A good answer would be lion or elephant you freakin’ retards. Mr. Combs, I demand a DNA test because there’s no way on God’s green earth that I’m related to anyone that thought that trees was a good answer." On second thought, maybe calling her family wasn’t the best idea.

She decided to call her ex-boyfriend, Sven von Svenson. He was a World’s Strongest Man competitor and they had broken up six months ago because he kept leaving her at 3:30am to go to a 24-hour gym to work on his lats. Ring, ring, ring, ring-click. "Hi you’ve reached Sven. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, but I’m probably out thrusting a 600-pound industrial saw above my head or consuming 3,000 grams of protein. Leave your name and number, and I’ll be sure to call you back," answered the machine.

Jane realized that there was no one that she could call who would understand. Anyway, Sven’s mention of protein had made her hungry, and when craving food, Jane lacked any sort of will power. She went right for the highly coveted sausages, but she began to gag upon swallowing the meat. Hidden inside the tubed meat was an ancient parchment. On the parchment were the answers to the most puzzling questions known to man. There was the answer to where do the left socks in the laundry machine go, the answer to how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood, and of course, there was the answer to what is the meaning of life. Jane knew she had to protect this parchment from falling into the wrong hands. She placed it in her bra as the three left the gift shop on the way to the Palm Fronds.

Continue on to the next chapter with Jane & Julia...
Find out what Tim & Jerry did during the chapter you just read...