The power went out again. Central Virginia Electric Cooperative.
Cooperative.
That’s the word they picked. For themselves. Out of all the words.
A cooperative is a group working together toward a shared goal. Our shared goal is electricity.
We are not hitting our numbers.
So we’re sitting in the dark at two in the afternoon like Amish people with a canceled Barn Raising, and Karie says she wants to clip the piggy’s nails.
Sure. Perfect time. No lights, no fans, no way to call anyone.
I said, “Do you want me to do the wrestling flip maneuver? The one we saw?”
Quick explainer, because the maneuver has a story shared with us, and I’m a little excited to try it.
I sit down on the floor behind her. Right up against her, close, like I’m about to teach her to row.
Then I flip her.
Back and over, both of us going down together, and I land flat with 162 pounds of pig on my chest and my arms around her. Firm. Calm. Nobody hurt. The way ICE could do it, if ICE had any interest in a version where nobody dies and nobody has to cover their face.
(I digress. But also, fuck those cowards in the Lucha libre masks. Rey Mysterio wore one and still managed to be a hero. It’s not the mask.)
Where was I?
Right. Pig on my chest. She goes quiet. Something about being tipped over on a guy just switches her off.
Then other people clip.
That’s the whole job. I’m furniture. I’m a beanbag chair with a pulse and a heart rate the ER would want to look at.
So that’s what I offered.
She said, “No. I think you should get on HER back.”
Her back. My back. One leading word makes for a completely different afternoon.
I said we’d tried that before. I said I got tossed. I said the pig looked at me afterward the way a bouncer looks at a guy who says he knows the owner… and his mistresses.
She said that’s what she wants.
Dear reader, I want you to understand that I am a grown man with a a nice job and a LinkedIn profile.
I got on the pig.
Trouble McFussbucket is 162 pounds. (She was 159 last week. I blame the co-op. When the power goes out, she gets nervous, and when she gets nervous, I feed her, and when I feed her, she stops being nervous, which teaches her something I’d rather not think about.)
Here’s what nobody tells you about riding a pig indoors. Or outdoors.
There is no steering.
We made it around the kitchen counter. Good time. Clean line. Past the dining table, which is when the dining table became a suggestion rather than a location (Note to self: reposition it).
Then I came off.
Not thrown. Not bucked. I’d like the record to show it was more of a dismount. A tactical one.
I lay there on the floor for a second and did what you do. I looked for the crowd. I need applause.
Because here’s the part I had in my head the whole ride. Karie is standing there. Giant clippers up. Ready. The way a pit crew is ready. I bring the pig around, I pin her, Karie moves in, we get four nails before the animal knows what happened. A team. A cooperative, if you will.
The clippers were on the counter. Nobody was holding them.
Karie had gone to pee.
The one witness. The person who ASKED FOR THIS. Off having a tinkle while I set a family record.
I yelled, “Did you see it???”
She yelled back, “See what?”
Eight seconds. No judges. No time.
THIS WAS MY FIRST RODEO.
My daughter Allie heard the whole story and said, “I think you should go pro.”
(There’s also a stepdaughter. Her name is Ali. Yep. Allie and Ali. George Foreman meets a banjo song from a county with one bridge. Calling the girls in for dinner sounds like a man having a small stroke. No worse than trying to get the weird dog in and screaming “Pickles!” The neighbors have opinions. Strong opinions.)
Two problems.
One. Clowns.
The rodeo clown is the guy who runs at the animal so you can crawl away. Which means my survival gets handed to a man in makeup. Nope. Clowns scare me. They always have. I don’t need a reason, and I’m not taking questions.
Two. The hat.
I have a giant melon. Not a Guinness World Records melon. Nobody’s flying anybody out to measure it. But big enough that when a hat actually fits, I buy it. Instantly. I don’t look at the price, I don’t look at the color, I walk it to the register as if I stole it.
Cowboy hats do not go on my head. They sit on it. They perch. I look like a thumb wearing a saucer.
Now, I do own a very wonderful Carmen Miranda-style hat, and I wear it out when I’m feeling sassy.
So it isn’t a hat problem.
It’s a brim problem.
They’re big now. The pig’s nails.
The aforementioned Guinness big.
(Mmmm. I could go for a Guinness.)
Anyway, you’ve seen those people. The world record fingernail people. Yellow, spiraled, sort of ribboned, like a Christmas display at a mall that closed in 1994.
And I have one question. One.
How do they wipe their ass?
Do they have a guy? Is that a job? Does it have a title? Is there a LinkedIn profile that says “Personal Care Associate” and a headshot of a man who has made peace with things?
Do they use the tongs? They must use the tongs. Somebody at some point handed them the tongs and said, “Here.” And they took them. I am sorry if I just ruined tongs for you.
I think about this more than I think about my retirement.
Last time we brought in a professional for “The Clipping.”
The farrier came out to do Trouble’s nails, and I had a Zoom meeting scheduled, so I took it on the deck like a man with priorities.
Middle of the call, I look up. A pig goes by the sliders at speed.
Four seconds later, the farrier goes by the sliders. Holding a large needle.
Nobody on the call said anything. I don’t think they saw it. I have never been sure.
A few minutes after that, Karie is screaming my name in a register I associate with house fires. I apologize to the yawn-inducing group on the call, and I hit mute. I go inside.
They are both screaming the same thing.
“GET THE FLOUR.”
Not a doctor. Not a towel. Flour.
Turns out Trouble had tossed Karie too (so at least it’s not a me thing, at least there’s a lineage now), kicked her in the head on the way, and in the confusion the farrier had gone a little deep on a nail.
And the blood came out like Peckinpah. Like Tarantino watching Peckinpah and taking notes.
You dump flour on it. That’s the actual fix. That’s what the internet says, and that’s what worked. Our kitchen looked like a bakery got robbed.
I went back to the deck. Unmuted.
Somebody said, “Sorry, you were saying?”
I was not saying.
The power came back on around four. The nails did not get clipped.
Sigh.
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.
He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.
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