Okay Sleepy Head

“Okay sleepy head, it’s time to leave,” Sherman purrs into my ear. My reaction to this is the same every morning. I flail my arms like a maniac until I hit him in the face.

“Sorry lover,” I say, as I do every morning.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sherman says. He is walking on egg-shells because he still thinks I am going to bolt from our planed journey to the north. The thing Sherman is forgetting about me is that I am lazy. There’s no way I would exert the mental energy required to cancel my plane ticket. I’m kind of an idiot too, but that’s not what we are talking about here. The thing about Sherman is that he was a big black bear until about a week ago. As it turns out, he is actually a polar bear. However, our cat, Ms. Richard Hatch, is still a cat and the three of us are all getting ready to move back to Sherman’s hometown—Wasilla, Alaska.

Understandably, Sherman likes to spend his summers in the south for several reasons. Not the least of which is getting away from the Palins and obviously, he was never going to find a gem like me up in the colds of Alaska. What he did do was meet me—as an unemployable wreck sleeping in my car on the edge of the forest he makes his “summer home” in—make me become completely reliant on his love and survival skills—which, let’s be honest, didn’t take much—and then, tell me he has to move back up to the Arctic Circle for the winter.

“You’re still coming with me, right?” he asks.

“As long as you’re not going to abandon me for some hussy wolf or polar bear,” I yawn. “Plus, I can’t wait to get away from these fucking blue jays.” I throw a stick up in the air in their direction. The blue jay family flip their right wings at me (the avian version of “screw you”) and proceed to dive down one-after-another and try to crap on my head.

That would really suck too, as I recently bleached my hair so that it would match my lover’s naturally white locks. Thankfully, these blue jays are about as adept as I am, and they all miss. “Fail, bitches!” I holler. The sound echoes over a dozen times, as though the blue jays are saying it back to me. Probably what they had planned all along. “Figures,” I sulk.

“Okay, we’re going to need to go if we are going to make the plane,” Sherman says. This is when Ms. Richard Hatch howls as though she just found out tuna is out of season and tries to make a bolt for the front of the cave I have been living in with my make-shift family of choice. Fortunately, Richard is about as athletic as I am and she doesn’t get more than a few feet before she gives up and sits in her Kennel Cab II (because Kennel Cab I wasn’t even close to big enough).

Sherman leans down, gives Richard some tuna snaps and closes her cage. “Thank you Ms. Richard. No one wants to go up north without you.” Richard is only mildly tolerable of me, but she worships Sherman. It makes sense. He feeds her. He walks her. He even plays with her. The most I do is throw crap at her when she won’t shut-up at night.

When we get to the airport things go from boring to ridiculous. Sherman is usually in control of everything, which I enjoy because thinking has never been my strength. But Sherman doesn’t do as well in large gatherings of people. Neither does Ms. Richard. They both lose it, which makes me jealous. However, I love them, so I guess I am going to have to pull my own personal shit together for this journey to where the sun doesn’t wander.

When we get to the front of the line some four-hundred pound woman who is sporting a rape whistle informs us that Ms. Richard will have to travel in the cargo. “She was pissed enough when she thought she was going to be travelling coach.”

 We notice that the man behind us in line has a 26er of Budweiser.

“Maybe she’ll get wasted,” I joke as I watch Richard rolling down the cargo belt. Inside it’s unsettling though. This is the first time since I had found Ms. Richard hitchhiking on the side of the freeway that we have been separated. She had been running from the pound. I had been running from a traffic cop. We forged a bound of mutual deviancy and in the process she had become a kindred spirit. A fat, balding, bitchy, kindred spirit—the best kind.

“Oh Ms. Richard,” I cry, I miss you already!

Sherman hugs me as we move toward the gate to get our boarding passes. I may be vulnerable without Ms. Richard Hatch by my side, but when I get vulnerable I get super pissed too. It isn’t a great time for someone to mess with me is what I’m getting at.

“Hello,” says the bubbly woman on the other side of the counter.

“Screw you,” I respond, sullenly. Admittedly, this is an over-reaction, but she is wearing an awful lot of tangerine. It may be her work uniform, but that is the reason we have unions in this country—so you can fight the man on issues like that. If she isn’t going to bother meeting basic social protocols, neither am I.

She looks over at Sherman. “Your friend will have to buy an extra ticket or stay in cargo.”

I had heard about the ridiculous law that said a plus-sized individual would now have to pay for two seats, but I clearly thought it was a gag. “No fucking way,” I respond, meeting her stare. “If you even think about trying to make him pay double, I’ll have CNN, CBC and Fox all over this story. I am a highly-connected journalist of the highest integrity.”

“Yeah, and what’s the story?” Mellow Yellow asks, trying to call my bluff.

“Belligerent orange-clad stewardess goes on homophobic tirade over plus-sized albino couple trying to honeymoon in the Arctic,” I say without skipping a beat. “The press will eat it up the way I eat everything in the forest.”

 If I didn’t think Sheba would know how to respond to this. I was wrong.

“Fox will never publish that shit,” she says, without blinking.

“No, but you think Anderson Cooper, CNN’s silver fox, will pass it up?” I ask. “Sherman and I will be on 360 and Ellen every day for a week!” Like I said, when I get vulnerable, I get bitchy. I don’t know about how Sherman feels, but I think it really works for me.

The woman who looks like Tang’s wet-dream pretends to push a few buttons as she contemplates her next move. The line behind us is starting to get kind of long and I pull out my grocery list and pretend to jot a few notes down as I continue to channel Erin Brokovich.

“Okay, I can upgrade the two of you to first class and then there will be lots of space for your…” she hesitates while she breaks our stare and looks at Sherman. “…special friend.”

“You better add a couple of free cocktails after that last little comment,” I counter. “I may have been bluffing before, but that was rude and these people all heard you.”

“Fine,” she snarls as she hands me the coupons. “Have a nice flight.”

“We better,” I say, as Sherman and I go to board our plane.

The trip to The Arctic Circle requires a couple of flight transfers, a bus and finally a dog-sled ride. There is probably an Inuktitut test in there somewhere, but I had an awful lot of champagne on the first leg of our journey, so the ending was a little hazy.

When we got off the first plane I couldn’t wait to be reunited with Ms. Richard Hatch, who would be riding with Sherman and I for the rest of the journey. When she arrived through the cargo chute, she was sporting her bitchy-face-on look. Kind of like a modern-day Power Ranger without the spanks.

“What smells so rank?” Sherman asks.

Of course, it was Ms. Richard Hatch. It appears that 26er of Budweiser had been bunking on top of Ms. Richard and one of the bottles had busted open, spilling its contents all over her. “First impressions Richard. First impressions,” I laugh, as she howls at my with her you’ll pay boy, oh how you’ll pay face.

“If this is any indication of what we are in for during our Arctic Circle adventures, it does not bode well, does it Ms. Richard?”

In response…a blank stare.

“Well, we have arrived in your kingdom Sherman,” I sigh, as I pick Ms. Richard Hatch’s drunken ass up and walk into the blizzard that is my new home. “Hi Tundra, I’m home!”

“I hope we survive the experience,” snickers Sherman, as he follows me out into the white abyss. “I hope the Arctic does too.”