"I've had my requisite two beers and two tequilas, and I feel I am now qualified as a carpenter. I am headed over to your house with a chain saw. I hope you are home."
Normally I'd be frightened if I knew there was a drunk guy with a chain saw on his way to my place, but this is Tequila Lary we're talking about, and when Tequila Lary wants to come over you should let him. Tequila Lary will have picked your place because, right around his third shot, he will have remembered that the last time he was in your yard he noticed that maybe your rain gutters need cleaning or something, and all of a sudden it will have occurred to him how to devise a solar-operated flushing system composed of five rusty pitch forks and 20 rotating crowbars, and he will need to implement his invention right then. Afterward you will never have to worry about cleaning your gutters again, which is worth the occasional concussion if you ask me.
But I should caution you to make sure it's Tequila Lary you're getting and not Jäger Lary. Jäger Lary will fix the leak in your bathtub, sure, but not before installing a covert turd cam in your toilet before he's done. And he'll build you a tree house, sure, with an outdoor shower and everything, but then he will also rape all the woodland creatures in your yard while he's at it, probably.
So thank God it was Tequila Lary on his way over to my place and not Jäger Lary, and what normally would have frightened me made me excited instead. Tequila Lary picked my place! I wonder what inefficiency he felt inspired to fix, because truthfully there are so many. There is my washroom, for example, which is so small I practically have to climb over my washer to get to my dryer, and don't get me started about the utility shed out the back of my house with the missing roof. It will take a lot of tequila to fix everything. The chain saw, though, is a mystery. What do I have wrong with my place that requires a chain saw?
"You need an outdoor cat crapper," Lary insisted when he got here.
"What the hell is an outdoor cat crapper?" I griped.
But Lary did not answer. Instead, he simply took his chain saw and, literally, without even measuring anything — or even carefully calculating potential gas-pipe placement or electrical lines or anything — he just-like-that cut a hole in my house. I knew better than to get in the way, because this was still a drunk man with a running chain saw, so instead I just holed myself up in the vintage trailer I keep in my crumbling driveway and tried to get used to the idea that this might be my permanent residence for while in case this turns out to be the first time the genius of Tequila Lary takes a turn to the dark side.
One hour, two margaritas and a hundred lungfuls of gasoline fumes later, Lary was done. He banged on the door of the trailer and told me to take a look, so I ventured outside, but only after insisting he turn off the chain saw, because by then he had begun to gesture with it as though it was one of those metal pointers favored by self-involved geography professors.
The hole he cut into my house turned out to be precisely the size of a standard pet door, and the hole's placement allowed access from my laundry room, which is part of my house, to the shed out back, which is not, though it is perfectly enclosed and now, compliments of Tequila Lary, covered with a new roof of corrugated fiberglass. Plus he'd installed a ramp structure that led from the hole in my house to the spot on the ground where, I was told, I could put the litter box.
I have to say the entire get-up was worthy of the genius we have come to expect from Tequila Lary. I did not even know I needed such a thing. "Oh, you needed it," said Lary, who was the one who, last year, had searched the neighborhood to find Jethro, my outdoor cat who up and broke my heart by disappearing one day. It turned out he was trying to die without saying goodbye. Lary stood there as I clutched Jethro's weakening body to my chest and bawled. Ever since I've hoarded my other two cats in the house, terrified to let them outside lest they had a mind do the same. According to Lary, the fumes from the litter box had begun to cremate his corneas.
"There," Lary said. "Now your cats can go outside to crap without being outdoor cats."
Before I could thank him he had already tossed his chain saw into the back of his truck and was driving off, leaving me there next to my new outdoor cat crapper, grateful. Tequila Lary strikes again.
Hollis Gillespie authored two top-selling memoirs and founded the Shocking Real-Life Writing Academy (hollisgillespie.com).
