“Did you blow a fuse,” Kenny asked me.
“I don’t think so.” I leaned over and turned a table lamp on and off with no effect. “I thought we had until the fifteenth,” I said.
“What is today?” Kenny asked in his own way of being slightly obtuse.
“This is the seventeenth,” I answered, as I looked at the calendar. One of us felt a little embarrassed, and I could tell by Kenny’s smug look it wasn’t him.
“What are we gonna do?” he asked.
“Well, the bill is over two hundred dollars, and I am sure they will want a huge deposit, too. On a closer level, I sure don’t have two hundred dollars or a deposit. On an even closer level still, the sun’s going down in a couple of hours, and we don’t have any candles or beer.”
“We need to ponder this, and try to decide what to do. It’s Friday, so were screwed for the weekend and the electric company doesn’t care at all.”
“Where did Lester put the cord,” Kenny asked. Now Lester was pretty excitable. He was usually a pretty quiet guy, but he could get worked up over almost nothing. Kenny couldn’t wait ’til Lester learned about this latest predicament.
The last time this happened, we figured out we could just run the old yellow indoor-outdoor extension cord under our front door and out to one of the apartment complex common lights in the breezeway.
Lester was so over-wrought about the power problem, he barely spoke to anyone for several days. When the power was finally restored, he just wadded up the cord into a heap, and tossed it into a closet somewhere., or in the back of the pick-up.
“What’s the matter,” Lester?
Lester had just walked up, and realized we were in the same situation all over again, and he started twitching.
“I’m just tired of you guys never paying attention to anything.”
“I know that you say no matter how hard we work, the MAN runs our life. We have no control over our own lives at all.” Lester was given to drama. He almost wet himself. Kenny, on the other hand was organized and fairly calm. He was the type who enjoyed grinning, or the good laugh of letting one go under the dinner table when we had company. If we ever had company. When we still had a dinner table.
“And tonight were gonna miss my favorite tv show!” said Lester.
“Lester, Kenny, I am going to get some burgers and a six-pack,” I said. “I have about thirty dollars.”
“Lester, you go find what you did with the power extension cord. Kenny go get some paper towels.”
“I’ll be back in ten minutes, and we have to do some thinking and deciding. It may not be the end of the world, but I am ready for this to be the end of this chapter. I don’t think we need to go on living like this.”
Kenny said to Lester, “I think were about to have a summit meeting.”
