Jokus Practicalicus (Part III)

. . . previously on Jokus Practicalicus, Jonas was saved from Joe’s brutal behavior by his teacher Miss Anderson, while another teacher’s belongings fell out her desk drawer – LOL, LMAO, LMFAO, HAHAHA. Mortimer played a trick on his friend, who ended up in the police station!! Jerry, Will, Morris and Danny had a close brush with danger in the form of Jerry’s uncle, but were eventually saved by an unknown garage mechanic. George plays a trick on Bill and some other friends as they all end up NOT winning the lottery . . .

Chapter Six

The final(?) story in this series, centers around a brash young individual, living in a small town in a fairly rural area of some North American jurisdiction. Anyway, you get the idea. As it happens, the young man around whom this story takes place, drives a magnificently restored SS model, metallic teal-green, 1963 sport sedan Chevrolet Impala, housing a 327 cubic inch V8 engine with twin Walker mufflers. It featured a new creased roof line and rectilinear styling including an engine-turned aluminum rear taillight panel surrounded by a chrome border. It boasted a beige all-leather interior, a standard four-on-the-floor transmission, all-chrome wheels and hand-wind-up windows. Remember the hand-wind-up windows – that feature is a very important detail in this story. Anyway, this car was a beauty and young Mr. Jason Finch Jr. was the rightfully proud owner of said car. Actually, if truth be known, Mr. Jason Finch Sr., with the help of the First National Savings and Loans Bank was the proud owner of this car.

Jason 'the Younger' was a hard individual to take. He wore his car like a badge. He was frighteningly good looking. He had the best clothes. He never worked for one thing that he ever got in his life and he took advantage of everybody and everything he ever dealt with. His father bought the car for him when he was in Grade 11 and he flaunted it whenever he had the chance, at every other guy in town – every other guy, who by the way, had to drive a beat up klunker or a dusty old farm truck.

Jason liked to party and the parties he frequented were also well-attended by all the girls from town and country-side around, as well as all the girls from the neighbouring towns and neighbouring country-sides around. All the boys in town despised Jason Finch Jr. because he seemed to get all the girls and once those girls had ridden with him in his 1963 Chevy Impala, they certainly didn’t want to drive around in some old farm beater with some hillbilly behind the wheel.

In another story about the young boys in this small town, a farm kid by the name of Bo Gunderson, was traveling home to his family farm one night in his little Toyota Corolla, when a big old mule deer stepped out of the tall grass on the side of the road and directly into the path of his car. Bo hit the brakes but, it all happened so quickly that he T-boned the deer broadside at about 60 mph. The deer bounced off the grill of the little Toyota and stalled in mid-air for long enough that the windshield caught its full mass bang on. The windshield glass shattered into a million little pebbles of debris and the deer ended up on the front seat with Bo, kicking and screaming for a second or two before it finally expired. Bo got out of the incident with only a scratch or two but his car was basically a write-off. For some reason, unbeknownst to man and beast, Bo decided to gather up all the tiny little bits of glass from his broken windshield and keep them, maybe as a memento of his narrow escape. They were eventually stored in a burlap sac he had laying around his work shed. He tied up the bag and threw it back in a corner of the shed and basically forgot about it for a year or two.

One night, at one of the town parties down by the lake, Bo and a couple of his friends were eyeing up some of the cute girls from the neighbouring town, when who should come along and start to chat them up, but Jason Finch Jr. Eventually, they got into Finch’s car and he drove away with all their pretty little arms out the windows, waving at the other boys. Bo looked at his buddies and commented on how it would be a cool thing to play some sort of prank on old Jason to bring him back down to earth and maybe make the girls like his company a little less. The only thing is, the local boys were good boys and they didn’t want to damage Jason’s car in any way. Truth be known, they actually loved his car – it was just Jason they didn’t like.

So, Bo came up with a plan. He remembered the sac of glass chunks he had put aside from his run-in with Bambi a couple of years back. He dug around the shed and found the bag and then stowed it in his truck. That night there was a big house-party in town. Bo and his friends parked the truck and went inside to see what the party was like. It seemed like a pretty good one – good music, a few girls from town and out of town and . . . then . . . along came Jason. Big fish in a small pond. But tonight, it was Jason that Bo was waiting to see. As soon as Jason entered the party and sat down on the couch amongst a throng of girls, Bo slipped outside and got the bag of glass out of the back of his truck. He looked around and found a fairly good-sized rock on the side of the road and headed over to Jason’s car. He wasn’t exactly sure how his trick would play out, if Jason’s car happened to be locked. He wasn’t bad at breaking into locked vehicles but he remembered that this car had an alarm and he didn’t want to activate it. Luckily, Jason had left his front driver’s side window part way down, so Bo was easily able to access the interior of the Impala. The first thing he did was to roll the back driver’s-side window all the way down so that no part of it was visible from inside or outside of the car. Then he placed the rock in the middle of the back seat. Finally, he took his bag of broken auto glass and scattered a very sizeable amount of it around the inside of the car – all over the back seat, up on the back window dash, some on the back floor, a little in the front seat and then finally on the ground outside the car.

After Bo had finished with his work, he went back into the party and told a couple of his friends what he had done. They all laughed about it, thinking it was a good trick. About an hour or so later, Jason Finch Jr. left the party with an armful of girls. Bo and his pals snuck outside behind him and watched to see what his reaction would be to the glass in and around his car. It didn’t take long for Bo to realize that he was going to get exactly what he had hoped for.

Jason’s initial response was to scream at the top of his lungs, “What the fuck? What the fuck? No, no, no, no. Who the fuck did this? What the fuck? Fuck, fuck, fuck. There’s a rock. Somebody threw a fuckin’ rock through my window. That fucker. Some fucker through a rock through my back window.”

At that point, Jason ran back inside the party, holding the rock in his hand and screaming at everyone inside that someone had thrown a rock through the back window of the car. A few people came outside to see the damage, but nobody knew anything about what had happened. Finally Bo and his two friends appeared on the scene and took a look around outside and inside of Jason’s car.

“I guess you’ll have to get that fixed eh, Bro',” said Bo.

This set Jason off another round of F-bombing and general hysteria. Finally he opened the door of his car and swept some of the glass off the seat, got into his car and drove off. Bo and his buddies gave each other some high-fives and went back into the party. Bo fully expected that that would be the end of his practical joke. He honestly thought that Jason would look at his car the next day and decide to try the rear window and see that it was rolled down and realize that he had been tricked, then roll the window up and that would be it. It had gone just as well or better than he had hoped and he realized that everything happens for a reason and felt at that moment, a small bit of joy for having smacked a deer on his road a couple of years ago.

However, the gag was not over yet. Bo happened to see Jason driving around the next afternoon and his back window was still all the way down. How good was that? In fact, Jason drove around for about a week after that with his back window still rolled down. Bo was feeling great about the trick. He had a few more laughs and then, just when he thought things couldn’t be any better, he spotted Jason driving through town one day with a piece of cardboard wrapped in a black garbage bag and held together with some delightfully artistic grey duct tape, all stuck in the gaping frame of his rear window. Priceless, simply priceless. This practical joke had become pregnant and had now given birth to a whole new generation of fun and frivolity. Bo, and many others around town who now knew the joke, could barely contain themselves each time they saw Jason drive past in his cool car with the black plastic cardboard window.

Summer finally ended and cooler autumn weather started to roll in. I guess it was then when Jason decided that he would have to do some permanent repairs to the window. One of Bo’s good friends worked at the Auto Body repair shop in town and he happened to be behind the counter when Jason Finch Jr. walked in one day to book an appointment to have his rear driver’s-side window replaced. Bo’s friend almost keeled over with laughter when Jason walked out of the shop and got back into his car. The practical joke had evolved into a fourth generation of unexpected pleasure. The broken Corolla and the dead deer had been easily paid for many, many times over. Bo got a phone call from his friend to tell him the date and time of the repair job and he conveniently showed up in the Auto Body shop on the day when Jason brought his car in. The repair bay door rolled up and Jason drove his car in. He must have wondered why there were so many extra people milling around inside as he got out of his car. He went to leave and Bo’s friend persuaded him to stay and watch just how the window would be repaired.

I don’t know how familiar my readers are with the process of repairing / replacing the glass on the side window of a car, but in almost all cases, the first step the repair person will take, is to physically roll the broken window up and down to remove some or all of the broken glass from the slot. Then the door panel is removed and the remaining broken glass is cleaned out and removed. A new window is fitted in place, the panel is put back and the job is done. All of this was explained to Jason just before the repair job began but Bo’s friend added one extra feature for Jason Finch. He told him that once in awhile in certain models of cars, windows could be repaired with 'leaps of faith' and that’s why all the extra people were in the shop that day. All that needed to be done was for a group of people to join hands around the car and take part in a simple 'window repair chant'. So, everyone in the shop stood around Jason’s car and joined hands. The chant began, “Window, window clean and bright. Up and down with all your might. Don’t want you loose. Don’t want you tight. Window, window fit just right.” And, then the repair guys got Jason to step forward and perform the last step of the ritual, which was to roll up the rear window. Words fail me at this time to describe the sight of seven young men rolling around on the auto-body repair-shop floor in uncontrollable laughter, while Jason, red-faced and speechless rolled his once broken window back into existence.

The boy’s in town reckoned that the practical joke played on Jason and his car had finally reached its climax. But no, it continues to this day. Jason apparently, relocated to a mountain retreat in Tibet where he practices daily using only his faith (and a whimsical window chant), in constant efforts to just once, recreate the phenomenon of “unbreaking glass”.

To be continued (maybe) . . . stay tuned to VOCAL to find out for sure!!