The American Jerk

“Well Rob, the old girl quit on me. I need to get a new one. Got any suggestions?” he asked.

“Hell, I’m sorry to hear that. Well, you’re going to want to find a girl who meets your needs. Someone who’ll be willing to do the things that you like to do without complaining too much, and who’ll be willing to stick with you for the long haul, so if I were you, I’d head down to the local - ”

“Here’s what I’m thinking, Rob: I’m gonna head out, and the first girl I see? I’m gonna chloroform her, drag her home, and then fuck her in the ass real quick.”

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“It’s a conspiracy,” my girl slurred, “Those poor bastards threw the game to get Arlen Spector off their backs!”

“Baby, Arlen Spector’s a Republican who’s shooting for re-election in two years in a country that now hates Republicans. He’d say anything to look like he’s doing something that a corporation didn’t pay him for. Besides: everyone south of Rhode Island hates the Patriots, so threatening them is a no-risk proposition. It’s like saying you’re against Hitler. Spector’s an empty threat. It’s not what cost the game.”

“But they’re gonna drag Belichick in front of Congress!”

“Big fucking deal. They dragged John Denver in front of Congress, and it took an airplane crash to get rid of him.”

“Well… they shouldn’t have had to worry about it before the game.”

“And I shouldn’t have had to worry about you pouring a half-bottle of 16-year-old scotch on top of a quintuple dose of NyQuil Cough.”

“Fuck you. I’m sick.”

“Not right now, you’re not. You couldn’t cough if I maced you.”

She looked pained. “I can’t believe the Patriots lost. It hurts.” She pointed at her chest. “It hurts right here.”

“That’s just heartburn from spitting up a half-quart of Lagavulin.”

But she had already fallen asleep, so I rolled her over onto her side so she wouldn’t die.

———————–

And the evening had started so promisingly. Here in Boston, we’d spent a week hearing the local sports pros predicting a Super Bowl win by score margins that thinking people would have realized could only be reached if someone replaced the Giants special teams squad’s Gatorade with Hanta Mouse Urine, and if Eli Manning were given a partial lobotomy… although based on his constant wide-eyed, vacant stare, someone might have already taken care of that. Let’s just say that, if someone gave Eli a head MRI, I wouldn’t be surprised if the film showed a Lego with “Peyton” written on the side in the vicinity of the parietal lobe.

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I usually give any event announced in an all-caps, company-wide email as “FAMILIES WELCOME!!!!” a wide berth. Events like that just mean that every employee without the foresight pull out and aim it at the Kleenex will ram his entire brood into the suffocating Tuffskins equivilent of business casual attire, compensate them for their discomfort by allowing them to jack up on fully-fructosed Coke and stampede around like hookers at a convention center, offering to trade a little of the ol’ Shutee-Upee in exchange for ten minutes with a Nintendo DS.

On one level, I can’t blame the childrened for gleefully hauling their kids out to a company-sponsored event like this. If I had kids, I would gratefully take advantage of an opportunity to spend a weekend afternoon able to talk with people who didn’t have a strong and vocal opinion about Bratz (And it seems strange to have reached a point in history where children have a stronger, more vocal opinion about brats than I do), and who, were I to suggest we watch the Happy Feet DVD, would cheerfully shank me.

As the Green Arrow of hitting the Kleenex, I normally see no need to involve myself in such a situation. However, this particular fully catered, open bar event was held at the New England Aquarium, so I decided to sign on, since my girl loves her some fish, and I loves me some drinking like one.

This was a mistake.

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Until last week, all I knew about Flickr was that some kind soul duped a venture capitalist into paying to create a Web service upon which I could dump several hundred megabytes worth of Nerd Prom pictures, thus passing my bandwidth savings onto the Phillip Morris tobacco company.

But it seems that Flickr is ever so much more than that. It’s set itself up as an online community of photographers, where people can search for and comment on each other’s snapshots. Had I known this, I would probably never have signed up. I’m all about the free photo hosting, but I have no interest in communicating with serious photographers, and believe me: I have nothing to contribute to a conversation with them. When asked what my favorite F-Stop is, I will respond, “dental dam,” which won’t help them and will only make both of us feel dirty. Or at least, dirtier.

The plus side of Flickr being what it is is that, on top of the seven of you who read this crappy little rag, literally thousands of people have found and looked at my Comic-Con photos (Note to self: quit fighting with success, and change the name of this Web site to “Pictures of Freaks in Costumes”). The down side is, the one picture they’ve all looked at is this one:

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Let’s get right down to business: I want to hire you to write my obituary.

Oh, I know, I’m not dead yet, but based on the number of empty beer bottles and cigarette packs I trash every day, the local garbage haulers tell me that, based on their over-under numbers, the smart money’s on planning ahead for this kind of thing. Besides, I’m not 20 anymore, and I’m old enough to realize that “Covered in his own vomit” is a pretty shitty epitaph. And frankly, I’ve seen your work in the Pat Tillman incident, and I’m willing to pay serious coin to get the best ghostwriter in this morbid little business to make sure that when I go, I look good.

The way I see it, your strength is that you don’t seem to tell out-and-out lies; you just gloss over some of the uglier details and put a shine on the best details of a situation. Which is exactly what I’m looking for. If I wanted someone to tell lies about me, I’d bring in my old buddy and wingman Ken MacDonald, who once told a girl in a bar that not only was I worth millions from my invention of American Sign Language, but that my semen tasted like Bananas Foster and cured glaucoma.

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