Romance:From Fat To Fatale(25)
We're not. The lady nutritionist had taken me outside the trailer one night for some fresh air and to try to take my mind off the diarrhea and the cravings.
She'd pointed up at the vast array of stunningly beautiful stars that filled the night sky and, staring above at the infinity of space, she'd calmly proclaimed that the universe really didn't give a damn about us or what we did - although I distinctly recall that she used much more colourful language at the time, purely as a rhetorical device, of course, to add weight and emphasis to her philosophical observation. It's a totally messed up perspective but we live as though we are the centre of the universe. I soon discovered that we are not the centre of the universe. Or at least - that I was not.
I stood up to embrace the lady nutritionist and step out once again, refreshed, into the bright new world but she'd made another super-discount appointment for me at the Thai massage parlour along the corridor, her sweetly personal way of showing how happy she'd been to see me.
I nodded my thanks, trying to muster as much enthusiasm as possible for the encounter. Our oriental friend had obviously been main-lining steroids since I'd last seen her because she was able to twist and contort my body into positions that would've won me a gold medal and a standing ovation in the Kama Sutra Olympics. No question. If I wasn't mistaken, I was getting a little more flexible. The masseuse nodded approvingly. Now we gettin'
somewhere, kiddo! She said. I'm convinced she enjoyed the session a lot more than I did.
I was dreading the inevitable return home and the unavoidable confrontation with the family. The Bulgari household was only a few short miles away from the college but it felt like it was already on another planet.
I'd lost a lot of weight since I'd moved onto campus and that was the first and most obvious alarm bell that would alert Mama to any real or imagined problems. She'd totally over-react and immediately strap me to a sick bed whilst she ladled vast quantities of triple-strength goose-fat soup down my protesting throat, something like a French goose being force-fed corn on a French goose-liver pate production line.
That's foie gras in case you're interested in developing your French vocabulary a little further. But my expectations proved completely groundless. In the short time I'd been away, things had moved on back at the ranch. Things had changed. A lot.
Chapter 17:
The forces of Chaos decide to make a house call
The Bulgaris could never be accused of being computer literate. So it was not surprising that I'd received no E-mails from the family during my absence. That's mainly because they didn't have any E-Mail addresses in the first place. And Miclav's preferred sources of solitary evening entertainment on the Internet obviously discouraged him from leaving too many clues about his identity or his location. He might've had a point. I'm not sure that an un-enlightened judge in our part of the world would see a group of cavorting, scantily clad, Albanian Internet dwarves as anything but a shallow disguise for kiddie porn.
If only Miclav had followed in the old family tradition and stuck to whittling goat's head walking canes. Much safer. And infinitely less confusing and thus less open to possible misinterpretation. The detectives had picked him up from high school in a discretely controlled operation that minimised all risks to the officers yet exposed the chubby miscreant to the joys of being
handcuffed, tasered and restrained on the floor of an anonymous black van. A masked officer tapped out a slow, percussive rhythm on the fat boy's bubble butt with his riot baton, muttering that it was different when you had kids of your own, you just wanted to get the scum off the streets and put them out of their misery, make the world a safer place for kids everywhere.
It was not one of Miclav's happier moments. A pair of perfectly polite and courteous police officers came round to the house the same day with a warrant and confiscated the now notorious PC and Miclav disappeared for a while into the belly of the beast. For his own safety, he was being kept in solitary confinement and the unofficial label of kiddie-fiddler had been unceremoniously and quite unfairly attached to his docket.
The next shimmering shock on the Bulgari domestic front was the discovery that my little sister was pregnant. Papa's blood pressure had hit meltdown levels since the announcement and, apart from his declared intention to castrate whoever was responsible for the crime, he was soon confined to his bed with hourly doses of a particularly potent cocktail of drugs that left him barely one feeble pulse-beat short of a coma. Despite his condition, a good half dozen pick-up truck drivers had hastily left town and headed for the hills, their breeding equipment safely distanced from the imminent danger of Papa Bulgari's professionally sharpened pruning
shears.
No wonder no one noticed that I'd dumped about a leg and half's worth of excess weight and that I was physically stronger, fitter and more alive than I'd ever felt in my life. I guess they were all a little distracted at the time. My condition escaped the attention of deeply distraught Mama Bulgari and the semi-comatose Papa. Once I'd dropped my bag and processed the news, it seemed blindingly obvious that someone was needed to take charge amidst the unfolding chaos.
Mama's absolute conviction that this was either the product of a dreadful curse or an act of revenge from a wrathful and judgemental God had to be put on hold whilst we dealt with the more practical issues confronting the Bulgaris. It was time for action and I wanted to hear nothing more about sacrificing virgin goats to lift the curse or bribing the Bishop to intercede with God on our undeserving, sin-blighted behalf. We needed something a little more unconventional. I called Larry.