Tales of Ponape: The Most Freaking Primo Thing Ever

Mike’s ears were poised to hear it whenever anyone walked through the door, and he always wanted it immediately. For two years, it had been a routine. Every day with military dedication. If any change jingled within earshot, it was his. “Don’t be so selfish, BC. Hand it over.”"Come on, Mike. It’s my money. You have enough of your own.” Somehow, Mike had decided all money that was not in paper form was his. As he was willing to escalate the battle far beyond what I was, I considered it a small price for relative peace and protection.

“Hand it over BC!”

His tiny arms struck out at me, insistently. His eyes glared with primitive fury.

Eventually, I would reach into my pocket, sigh, and give Mike a handful of dimes and nickels. As though the tiny metal discs were smelted from pure joy, Mike’s lips would crack into a smile, so bright you would have thought he was a Care Bear ready to shoot a rainbow out of his chest. I often watched him from his doorway, as he took the change in his hands and let it funnel through his fingers into a large glass jug half-filled with change. There was easily several hundred dollars inside. Mike refused to speak of his plans for it.

Sometimes, I would come home to find him holding the glass bottle as though it were a child, tears of joy running down his eyes as he ran his stubby brown fingers down its smooth glass sides. As he murmured in joy, the one phrase I could make out repeatedly was “the most freaking primo thing ever.”

“What are you going to buy, Mike? Are you saving for a guitar?” It was the only thing that made sense to anyone in the family.

As the tears of joy ran down his face, Mike could only shake his head. As the years passed, and the level of change began to rise and rise, I asked question after question as to the purpose of the change. Each time, I would receive only a rapturous shake of the head, and be sent on my way. Mike treated the change jug as a holy object, and considered any direct questions about it to be sacrilegious. After a while, I stopped asking, as I understood that the time Mike spent with his change was the only time during which I could be sure of quiet in the house. Whatever his grand plan, it could not possibly harm anyone.

Then came the day I walked into the front door to see the change jug laying empty, tipped on its side. It had been as easily forgotten as the wrapping on a present. I was as thunderstruck as if I had found a baby in a dumpster, discarded by its mother. In all of my childhood years, it was the only incident that had made me seek out Mike of my own free will.

I found him on the side of the house, over a steaming crab pot. Streams of sweat ran down his face and great wafts of steam saturated his hair with moisture. This would have been no great surprise had not the crab season been over for three months.

“What happened to all of your change, Mike?”

The Jungle Man, however, could not hear me. He stood as though transfixed, before his brewing potion, mumbling every so often about the “freaking primo” things that were sure to come in the imminent future. Mike’s glazed eyes peered into the crab pot as though it was filled with glorious visions of a prosperous future. Peering over Mike’s shoulder, I was caught by a shiny coppery gleam. I looked again to make sure. For some reason, Mike was cooking several hundred dollars worth of loose change.

“What the hell are you doing? Are you cleaning it? I don’t understand.” Still not able to hear me, Mike bent down on his knees, as though praying to his ancient island gods, then put his face into his hands and cried with silent laughter.

I regarded him for a moment, shook my head, and muttered, “You’re crazy,” before I went into my room. I tried to read, but I couldn’t concentrate. Even for Mike, this was bizarre behavior. Several minutes later, I heard a truck roar out of the driveway and peel sharply around a corner. I put down the book I was reading, marched to where Mike had been, and found that both he and the crab pot were gone.

I scratched my head, baffled. I felt as though I had been called upon to solve a great mystery, with absolutely no evidence. “Where the hell could he have gone now?” With Mike, anything was possible. I had not yet gone back into my room, when I heard his stout legs ascend the stairway. Wherever he had gone, he had sure made quick business of it. In total, he was gone less than ten minutes.

“I did it! I did it! Bryan, Rachel, Darcy, BC! Come quick! I did it!” He was shouting as triumphantly as a man who had lost both legs in an explosion, and gone on to win an Olympic Gold Medal for the 100m dash.

The family gathered around the hysterical pygmy, concerned. Had he finally gone over the edge? He was laughing so hard we could barely understand his words. It took a full five minutes for him to compose himself well enough to speak. That’s when I heard perhaps the worst thing I have heard in my entire life. Afterwards, I spent a minute simply staring and blinking, trying to comprehend the enormity of what I had just been told.

“Wait… you did what?” I asked, awaiting verification. He affirmed it. “Like… for real?” Bryan challenged the reality once again. Mike nodded and laughed, rolling on the floor and pounding his short arms and legs into the plush carpet as the greatness of his own genius swept over him. “Oh my fucking God,” my mother offered, and started to cry as she wondered how she could have been so blind as to “marry a fucking savage.” My sister stood in shock that someone could think of something even more cruel than she could. My brother and I simply shook our heads in mute wonder.

As every bum in Aberdeen started getting in line for a free meal, Mike placed a quick call to his best friend Rick Dittle to verify that everything was finally set. He had been planning the operation for two years, and wanted no mistakes.

At the end of the hour, when all of the change had been raised to temperature far past boiling, Rick Dittle pulled up in front of the house in his truck. Mike picked up the crab pot with two oven mitts, and several rags to shield himself from the heat. Once he had a firm grip on the load, he sprinted to the back of Rick’s truck, and climbed in. They rode at a breakneck pace to the local mission, so the change would not have time to cool.

As approximately fifty destitute, down on their luck hobos prayed for any break the Lord could throw their way, a small brown man suddenly appeared in the back of a truck waving his tiny arms furiously in the air. “FREE CHANGE!!!” the Jungle Man hollered, and to their homeless ears it must have sounded like music. “FREE CHANGE!!!” It must have sounded like the trumpets of a returning Jesus.

Gaunt children, crippled old men, and brain-damaged women in cheap dresses began to converge on the truck like moths to a flame. Mike laughed uproariously and raised the crab-pot above his head like Moses with the Ten Commandments. Their homeless eyes took in the vision of him and saw–not a wild-eyed islander–but a figure with the grace and dignity of Michaelangelo’s David.

In a gentle but forceful rocking motion, Mike gracefully emptied the crab-pot on the sidewalk. The homeless, in awe of the charitable spirit of the Jungle Man screaming above them, did not notice the steam rising off the mountains of quarters, nickels, and dimes. “FREE CHANGE!!!” The call reverberated in their desperate, hobo hearts, overriding their powers of observation.

In my mind, I imagined the children reached the change first. Still filled with the vitality of youth, held under the sway of innocent minds eager to believe in the kindness of their fellow man, there joyful strides must have carried them to the fore of the crowd. Most of them would be in high school by now. I wonder if any of them still have the small busts of the founding fathers seared into their fragile fingertips.

As the crowd converged on the molten metal, Mike began the slow drive away, howling madly as rank after rank of the destitute descended upon his gift, only to find it was poison. Their moans were drowned in the laughter of a primitive from a distant and devilish isle. They screamed at the departing demon, raising defiant hands scorched by hot metal.

As Mike cried on the floor, stomping his short arms and legs at the “freaking primoness” of his evil genius, I could only stare in shock. What he had done could very well be without precedent in the history of the planet Earth.