GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #315: THE ART OF CURSING

 I don't know why I was thinking about this today, but for some reason it popped up in my head.

I was in junior high, what everyone calls middle school now. Maybe 6th or 7th grade, I don't remember. I just know it wasn't 8th grade. Anyway, I was in PE, and we were playing softball. In case you don't know my likes and dislikes, I dislike sports a great deal. If you're into it, good for you. It's just not for me.

As we played sportsball, I fucked up. Because, well, I didn't care. So fuck it. I don't remember what I said specifically, but I have a fairly good suspicion that I said, "Ah shoot."

I was in left field for a fairly good reason. No one really expected me to do anything because they understood, at least that much, that I didn't care. But there was a fellow student in center field who gave me shit. I remember very much what his name was, but I'm not going to mention it here. I'm fairly certain that he wouldn't want me to mention it here. Unless he's dead. I don't think he is, but at my age, it's possible. But he might have an important job, and his crime against me was nothing more than a mere inconvenience. So fuck it.

He said, "Bruni! What the fuck, man? Why would you say that? Say shit for fuck's sake!" And then he proceeded to give me an extended tutorial, in person, on how to effectively curse.

I didn't need it. I only said the safe version because I didn't need yet another detention. But what the hell? This guy didn't know me. He just knew what other people said about me. I'm very fuckin' good at cursing. He didn't know that. But he assumed.

So I had no choice but to fuck with him back. "Shhhhhhh-uh-iiiiiiiit?" I said.

"Say it with feeling, Bruni!"

"Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttttt?"

"You're hopeless."

That was it. I just find it funny that this guy assumed that stupid shit about me. I was a quiet kid, but I knew my way around curse words. It is kind of an art, actually. If you curse, you need to mean it or someone is going to think you're an idiot. I curse with great gusto in person. For a great example on how cursing can be an art, I suggest looking up Dr. Dirty songs.

I wonder where that guy is now, now that I have books like POOR BASTARDS AND RICH FUCKS and DONG OF FRANKENSTEIN under my belt. I kind of don't want to know. I fear that he might think that he taught me how to curse, which is simply not true. I have very few skills. Writing is one. Cursing is another. I've been successfully cursing since I was seven. I'm proud of my abilities because I find myself in an odd situation. I can say just about anything I want to, and people won't hate me. They won't even confront me. They'll say, "That's just Bruni being Bruni."

Good thing I don't want to hurt anyone with my cursing. If I did, I would probably be president of the US right now.

THE DAY I ALMOST DIED

Many of you might remember a few years ago when I suffered from a mysterious illness that caused extreme pain in the middle of my stomach and extreme vomiting. After 13 ER visits and 4 hospitalizations, as well as more tests that I knew we had as a civilization, it was determined that the cause was my digestive system. It runs a quarter of the speed of everyone else’s. Things just got jammed up in my guts, and since it couldn’t come out the correct way, it had to go back up the way it came.

Since then, I’ve been careful about how much I eat and how quickly I eat it. However, it was only a matter of time before my vigilance failed me. My bowels dried up on me the weekend before, and that’s a sign that my troubles were about to begin again. By Tuesday, I started feeling odd. By Wednesday, I started feeling discomfort in my stomach, and by Thursday, I started feeling sick. It got to the point where I had to leave work early that day. I barely made it home before I puked my guts out. Over and over and over again for at least fifteen hours. The next day, I gave up and decided it was time to go to the ER. I’d go in, get some Zofran for the sickness and some Dilaudid for the pain, I’d get some sleep for a little while, and they’ll let me go home so I can get more sleep.

It didn’t turn out that way.

They got me through triage pretty quickly, and as soon as I got dressed in the awful gown, they stuck an IV in me and strapped a whole bunch of wires to my chest to monitor my heart. Then, they gave me my shots, which made me very happy.

Let me take a moment to talk about Dilaudid. I can’t tell you how much I love this wonderful drug. If it was readily available to me, I’d be a junkie, proudly sucking dick for my next fix. It works, and it works fast. When the plunger goes down, the heat just fills your heart and lungs, and then it fills your head with a wonderful numbing cloud. Just typing this makes me want to go back and pretend to have pain so I can get more.

Unfortunately, they didn’t allow me to enjoy that beautiful rush. They took me for x-rays and then a CT scan. They surprised me on that one by telling me there would be an enema involved.

I don’t like things going in my ass. I don’t even like the mid-blowjob finger back there. But I gave them permission, because I didn’t want to suffer anymore. They told me to relax—how can you relax when something is about to be shoved in your asshole?!—and they stuck it. The pressure nearly blew my eyes out, and they kept sticking it in further and further. The juice went in, and the nurse said that I had to hold it in.

They then put me into the machine. My guts wanted desperately to shit all this juice out of me. It became painful, but I had to keep it in. Imagine having the worst diarrhea you’ve ever had, and then imagine having to hold it inside of you. That’s how it felt. Mercifully, the scan was short, and they let the juice back into the enema before they pulled it out.

As soon as I got back to my ER bed, I rushed to the bathroom and let out a torrent of diarrhea, which was for the best. I hadn’t defecated in five days.

I managed to get some rest for a while, and then a doctor came in and gave me the bad news. At first I was concerned because they were asking about my appendix, and I didn’t want to have to go through an operation. Thinking back, I changed my mind. If only appendicitis had been the case.

“You have pancreatitis.”

I’d heard of the condition and knew a little about it, but the way he said it made it sound like I was dying. Jokingly, I said, “That doesn’t sound good.”

“No. You almost died. You still might. Your pancreas is as hard as a brick. It’s supposed to help you digest, and nothing is getting through. It’s stopped working, which means it has also stopped making insulin for you.”

I almost missed most of that. I kept thinking about that part about how I might still die. A million thoughts went through my mind in that moment, and here are a few of them, in no particular order:

--Fuck. I just ordered the complete series of THE TUDORS.

--I’m never going to swap orgasms with a woman again.

--I don’t have access to Twitter. How are my followers going to know that I died if I don’t tweet about it?

--I just added minutes to my phone. That’s $30 wasted.

--When I die, I’m really going to miss Wild Turkey 101.

--I have a lot of submissions out right now. What am I going to do if I get posthumous acceptance letters?

--I’ll never get to impress my dentist with how well I’ve been looking after my teeth this time.

--I’ll never know how Clive Barker’s NEXT TESTAMENT is going to end, and THE WALKING DEAD is going to continue without me.

--What are my grandparents going to do without me?

--Why couldn’t it have been a quick heart attack?

--I still owe Forced Viewing a review for GODS AND MONSTERS.

--Next Thursday was supposed to be an unofficial work outing with Fitz, and I can’t make it because I’ll be dead.

There were other thoughts, but those were the most prominent.

“What’s next?” I asked.

“We’re admitting you. We’ve got to get your pancreas working again. It’ll take some time, but if we don’t do this, you’re going to die.”

“What caused this?”

“Primarily, gall stones or alcohol.” Since I didn’t have a gall bladder anymore, there could have been one primary cause, then. He told me that alcohol is a poison, so the pancreas isn’t very good at processing it. He also told me that it’s not suited for handling all the greasy fast food that I’ve been eating almost every day since I was in junior high. And because I need the pancreas to make insulin (I’m diabetic), the soft drinks didn’t help.

“By the way,” he added, “you can never have another alcoholic beverage again for the rest of your life, or you’ll end up back here, or worse.”

That just fucking figures.

My mouth was dry—and had been for about a week or so—and I asked if I could have water. He said no. I can’t ingest anything because my pancreas isn’t working. He said I could suck on some ice chips, but that was it.

They took me upstairs, where they proceeded to fill me full of Dilaudid. A lot of it. I liked that, but it also concerned me a bit. The doctors are usually stingy with their opiates because they don’t want to create any junkies. Becoming a junkie is usually a secondary concern for me, since I’d rather not feel pain if I’ve got it. I can deal with an addiction later. This time, they all but gave me my own drip. I didn’t realize it at the time, but afterward I discovered that they weren’t sure if I was going to make it or not. They were giving me so many painkillers to ease my passage into the next world.

The next day was very strange. I was in and out of a haze, completely uncomfortable because of the IV (and as a result, I couldn’t bend my arm, or an alarm would go off), the wires attached to my chest, the oxygen tube in my nose and the blood pressure cuff on my arm, which went off every hour. I couldn’t even enjoy the Dilaudid because every hour, they had to wake me up to take my blood sugar. By the time I left the hospital, all of my fingertips were covered with red dots, except for one. That one had a pulse monitor taped to it. Because of that motherfucker, I had to learn how to wipe my ass with my other hand.

But that was just the shitty part. The weird part came when I started hearing voices. I started seeing people who weren’t there. I started getting the feeling that there were animals walking around my room. And in one instance, I saw a nurse’s shadow shimmer under her before flying across the floor and disappearing into the wall. I had dreams about friends I haven’t talked to in maybe fifteen years. Three women I used to fuck came to sleep with me in the hospital, but there was nothing sexual about it. One time, I forgot where I was and started rolling backwards. Someone told me I shouldn’t do that, or he was going to score me on a 20 point dive. I caught myself just in time before I rolled off the bed, but no one was in the room with me to say anything.

None of this can be attributed to the drugs, but I’ve talked to a few people who have been hospitalized under similar conditions, and they all say they experienced the same sort of thing. Maybe it’s just the vibe in such places, or maybe it comes from being so close to death. I can’t explain it.

I didn’t know it was Monday, but that was when they decided I was going to live. They moved me upstairs, where the non-critical people are stored. First, they had a nurse give me a sponge bath, wash my hair and get me into a new gown. As she went over my hair, she couldn’t stop complimenting me on it. At least there’s that. My awful, wrecked body has a great head of hair up top. She didn’t mention the beard, though. Women tend not to like it. Ah well. Can’t have everything.

I hoped they’d take those awful wires off of my chest, but they didn’t. However, when I was critical, they were all attached to the wall, so if I needed to get up, I needed a nurse to disconnect me. Now, they decided to put a box around my neck, which would monitor my heart just as well. I believe it was called a Holter Box, and that motherfucker weighed me down for the rest of my hospital stay. It was so bad that it felt like it was choking me sometimes, especially when I was trying to sleep.

As soon as I got settled into my new bed, I got my Dilaudid and went off to . . . I won’t call it sleep. I never truly slept in all that time. There are no comfortable sleep positions in the hospital, especially when you have to keep one arm straight and when you’re wearing wires on your chest. But it was in this moment that I did something I’ve never done in my adult life: I shit myself.

It wasn’t a lot. As soon as it happened, I became wide awake, and I could already feel diarrhea setting into my boxers. Groaning, I pulled myself out of bed, disconnected my IV from the wall and staggered to the bathroom. I kicked my boxers off and sat on the toilet, practically filling it with mush. (It was still tinged yellow, which was the same color of the stuff in the enema, so I think that might have actually been the culprit.) I got a chance to examine my boxers, and there was just a tiny slash of shit on them. Not bad, but I didn’t have anything else to wear in the hospital.

I washed them in the sink and hung them up on a bar in the bathroom after checking to make sure the stain was gone. In the meantime, I tied a bed sheet around my legs to act as a diaper. The next morning, the boxers were dry and actually smelled pretty fresh, so I put them back on.

The next couple of days weren’t so bad, aside from the lack of sleep. I tried to read, but I knew that wouldn’t work out. I can’t read when I’m sick. The words danced on the page, and it hurt to keep them straight, so I gave up and watched TV. In fact, that’s pretty much everything I did until I was released on Wednesday.

When they brought me up to the fifth floor, they let me have fluids. Now, they let me have solid foods. The doctor was surprised by how soft my pancreas felt now, considering it had been a rock a few days ago. He told me to eat right and stop drinking. I was lucky. My pancreas was recovering at a very quick rate. He told me I’d be out in a couple of days, provided I could keep solid food down.

Holy fuck, I don’t know how people can stand watching daytime TV. Even channels like FX had the worst fucking commercials imaginable. I saw more about walk-in bathtubs (with Pat fucking Boone!), buying gold, generic internet services, depression pills that might kill you, JG Wentworth and alerts for old people who have fallen and can’t get up. But that’s not the worst part. You get maybe seven minutes of actual programming, and then you get 10 minutes of commercials.

But I did get to watch good things. I saw a few episodes of GUNSMOKE from the ‘Seventies, including one with Martin Landau about a group of robbers disguised as army men who commandeer the blacksmith shop in Dodge in order to break down a giant hunk of gold. Before that, there was an episode of ANDY GRIFFITH that shits all over the Robin Hood myth and, as a result, the poor. I caught a lot of RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, and I was surprised to find it was actually good. I caught half of TRON 2 and was actually impressed. I swear,             TRON didn’t need a sequel, but now I’m thinking maybe they should have made the original 20 years later than they did.

But the best thing I found on TV in all my time in the hospital was a movie called THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA. This is a movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. It’s a romance, but it’s the greatest romance I’ve ever watched. I think it’s required viewing for anyone who wants to be a writer. It’s perfectly structured, and it’s got great characters spouting great lines. It’s one of Bogie’s best performances. His Faust speech is truly something to behold. It might be one of the best things ever written.

They let me out on Wednesday, but not before a doctor had a talk with me about my ‘Beetus. She said my percentage was 8.1, which is insane. The last time I had it checked, I was down to 6.1, which is excellent. As a result, she decided that I needed to go home and start injecting myself with insulin once a day at 10 pm. They made me inject myself before I left the hospital. It sucks, but it’s doable. The worst part is the cost. When these insulin pens are gone, I’m just going to have to do without.

You should have seen the list of foods they want me to avoid as I build my pancreas back up. They say I need so much of dairy products, but then they take just about every dairy product away from me. The only thing I can think of that wasn’t on the list of stuff to stay away from was skim milk. Essentially, they wanted to keep me to chicken broth, bread, vegetables (unbuttered) and lean meats. No hot dogs, no pizza, no cheeseburgers.

They took everything I love away.

Well, the food isn’t forever. I’m starting to get back to a bigger menu now. I still have to avoid fast food at all costs. To keep my blood sugar down, I have to avoid drinking just about everything. I can have water, and that’s it. (Well, I allow myself my morning Tang, because I can’t let them take everything away from me.) But the big thing is, I’ve been forbidden by the hospital to ever have another drink of alcohol, which sucks because I have three-quarters of a handle of Old Crow Reserve, a half a fifth of Glenfiddich, an entire fifth of Maker’s Mark and an airplane bottle of Wild Turkey 101.

I just couldn’t accept the fact that I could never drink again. I understand the importance of staying away from booze for now, until my pancreas is tip-top again. But forever? When I went to see my regular doctor, I asked about it. He said, “Do you drink to get drunk?”

Well, of course. No one drinks just ‘cause.

“Then, when you drink, you have a lot, not just one or two.”

Fuck. “Yeah.”

“Then I don’t recommend ever drinking again.”

That’s bad news. But! His answer suggested I could drink again. I just can’t drink a lot or often, that’s all. I’m thinking by the time my birthday rolls around, I can maybe treat myself to a couple of drinks.

He wants me down to 200 lbs. He says I can do it if I stick to an 1800 calorie-a-day diet and get my exercise in. If I can do that, he promises I won’t need the insulin pens. I might not even need my oral meds. That gives me hope, and that’s why I’m actually going to listen to him this time. I could definitely stand to lose the weight. (It did, however, take some restraint not to mention the weight I lost in the hospital. I went from about 263 to 248, and I had to punch a new hole in my belt.) With that few calories, I might even get down that much by next winter.

Just before the doctor let me go from the hospital, he told me that I was very lucky. A lot of people who came in as bad as I did didn’t get to go home. They usually just died.

Wish me luck, folks. I hope to never have to go through this again.

RETURN TO THE WAITING ROOM

[NEW NOTE: OK, HERE'S THE VERSION WITH PICTURES. I HOPE YOU FIND THIS FUNNIER.]

[SORRY ABOUT THE LACK OF PICTURES. I'M IN A HUGE HURRY TONIGHT, SO I CAN'T ADD ANY OF THEM UNTIL MONDAY. THIS IS ANOTHER OLDIE FROM MYSPACE, ONE OF THE LAST ONES HOPEFULLY. IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT YET, ENJOY!]



I’ve had quite a few problems of late. Far too many to go into here. I’m sure many of you already know them, anyway. So it wasn’t really a surprise when all of my anger came tumbling out of me on Friday night. It was like I was a bottle of hate, and someone finally popped the cork off and turned me upside down. I try to keep optimistic about things. I kept my anger in when I was arrested, and I tried to face my dental problems with, heh, a smile.

But when the problem with my car’s tires reoccurred, I just couldn’t grin and bear it. No, it was time for doom and gloom and anger. A lot of anger. In fact, I would call it bile. Yes, bile is the perfect word for what came pouring out of me last night.

A couple of weeks ago, when the weather conditions were really bad, my car started fishtailing again. For those of you who have been around this MySpace page for a while, you might recall me venting my spleen about my bald tires about a year ago. Well, since then, I’ve had to get them replaced several times. Since my mom and grandparents have been driving my car, the tires have needed to be replaced at least twice more, most recently in August. These instances were for various incidents, but it is mostly because when other people drive my car, it starts falling apart. I don’t understand this, but this is what was happening.

Two weeks ago, when the fishtailing began again, we examined my tires to discover that after a mere FIVE MONTHS, the back tires were completely fucking bald. FIVE FUCKING MONTHS. There is no reason for something like this to happen, except that the product is DEFECTIVE.



“We have to get new tires,” my grandfather told me.

“With what money?” I asked. “All of my money is tied up in lawyers and dentists.”

“I can’t afford it,” he said. “Don’t you have emergency money?”

“Not anymore. You can ask the lawyers and dentists about that.”

“The car is not safe,” he said.

“I drove that fuckin’ thing through worse winters than this on bald tires,” I said.

And that was the end of the conversation. Things have been a bit drier around here since, so we haven’t had any problems. But Gramps isn’t one to let something like this go. Ever since he hit an age where he could be defined as “elderly,” he’s been taking advantage of being a shriveled up old man. If something goes wrong, he puts on his old man act, and he gets whatever he wants, especially if he’s dealing with a young woman. Even at 83 years of age, Gramps is an incredible flirt.

But there were no young women at the Dealership That Shall Remain Unnamed. No, just a bunch of young to middle-aged men working in service. Unbeknownst to me, while I was at work on Monday, Gramps went over to the dealership, and he put on his old man act to see where it would lead him, hoping that the destination would be two brand new tires for free.

For once, the old man act did not work, and the service guys were blaming him for being a bad driver and hitting potholes and such.

Whenever the old man act doesn’t work, Gramps switches gears to crazy old man, which is what he did in this case. He unloaded all of his anger on these service guys, he demanded to see their supervisor, and when everyone still refused to give in to his demands, he shouted at them that their product was defective, and he refused to leave until the car was made safe for driving.



It took him four hours, but they finally surrendered. Gramps received his satisfaction, and we had two brand new tires on my car for free. Cool, huh?

Fast forward to last night. When my mom and grandfather picked me up from work, I noticed there was a strange sound coming from the back of the car. No one knew what it was. It couldn’t be the tires. They’re brand new.

We went back to Elmhurst, and we were headed for McDonald’s for dinner when I heard a tremendous snap in the car, and we started bouncing erratically. We quickly pulled over onto a side street and examined the back of my car.

The wheel on the rear passenger side of my car was MISSING THREE FUCKING STRUTS. Three out of four. The only thing holding the wheel onto the car was A SINGLE STRUT.

My opinion: the car had all four when Gramps left the dealership. Over the course of the week, two struts came off while driving. What I had just heard was the final strut breaking. It wasn’t even a complete week from the tire transplant. My conclusion: the service guys fucked up. Big time.

Let me emphasize the importance of this: had that last strut popped off while we were on the expressway, WE WOULD PROBABLY BE DEAD RIGHT NOW. And maybe we would have brought a few other drivers with us. Perhaps it would have been a FINAL DESTINATION-type chain effect. The image of us smeared all over the Eisenhower made me sick to my stomach. Not because of fear. No, it was anger. We were lucky we were just on York Road at the time.



As my grandfather and I hovered over the wheel, I let loose with every single curse word I knew, and I think I made a few up, too. I was so angry I wanted to punch something, anything. My knuckles itched to connect with something. The people who lived on the corner of York and Jackson probably thought I was a madman, and I wouldn’t blame them one bit if they thought to put the chain on their doors. I was a raving fiend. I cursed the dealer and every cocksucker who worked there. I cursed their families and their pets and everyone who ever met them. I don’t remember being so furious in a very long time. Usually, I bottle everything up and take it in stride. Well, the bottle broke that night.



When I was finally out of air, muttering incoherencies under my breath, Gramps gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Those motherfuckers,” he said, shaking his head. “Think they did this on purpose?”

I said yes, but in all honesty, they probably weren’t that stupid. Maybe they’d fiddle with something else, but I didn’t think they would purposely do something that would endanger anybody.

When I calmed down long enough to use complete sentences, I called my insurance company, and they called a towing company. The tow was free of charge, which was good. Since the dealer locked up at night tighter than a nun’s butthole, there was no way we could tow it there. We had to bring it home, and then have it towed to the dealer in the morning.

When the tow truck guy tried pulling the car up onto the bed, the wheel in question locked, so some of the rubber peeled off before we could get it on the truck. Even though the drive was short, the driver and I had a weird conversation that ran from the dipshits that worked in service at the dealer to his friend’s DUI case to him witnessing a domestic dispute at the courtroom to how pit bulls get a bad rap. We ran that gamut in about five minutes.

The next day, Gramps tried his old man routine over the phone, and the dealer was having none of it. The service guys said they’d look at the car, but there was no way in hell they were going to tow it in for free. After arguing for a while, we gave up and tried my insurance company. It seems that I used up my only tow for the month, so we had to pay $110 for it.



(As an aside, it seems that certain numbers have been popping up in my life of late. Three lawyers, three judges, three dentists. I paid $110 for a sonic toothbrush that is supposed to restore my receding gums, and now I paid the exact same fee for a tow truck. Am I living THE DAVINCI CODE, or something?)

Anyway, as we waited for the tow truck, I started going over what I was going to say to the cocksuckers at the dealership when we got there. I was still full of bile, and I wanted to spew it all over the service motherfuckers. I had a whole new stream of curse words I was working on, and I was eager to use it on them. They put my family in danger, and I wanted satisfaction from the cuntfaces. If they didn’t give us what we wanted, I was going to threaten them with a lawsuit. I don’t know if my lawyers handle civil cases, but if they didn’t, I was prepared to find someone who would. The vicious things I had in mind to say would have made Al Swarengen of DEADWOOD fame blush. To make matters worse, I was hungover. They would only get more bile because of this little factoid.

The tow truck guy arrived, and Gramps knew him. It seems that he knows just about everyone in Elmhurst. And he’s not that civic minded, either. He just knows everyone. As it turned out, the driver had come for Gramps before. On the way over to the dealer, they talked back and forth. Gramps remembered that the driver was from Rockford, and the driver remembered Gramps telling him that I was an Elmhurst College student. We talked school for a while. I told him I was class of 2000, and he said that he’d given political science at the college a try, but it didn’t work out. As for now, he was getting ready to move down to Georgia, because he was tired of the horrible winters around here. Gramps told him to stop by Ft. Bragg-—and then he corrected himself with Ft. Benning--while he was there.

“I know all about that place,” the driver said. “I was stationed there.”

“Me, too,” Gramps said.

“Wow. Small world. You mentioned Ft. Bragg. Were you there, too?”

“I sure as hell wasn’t Airborne,” Gramps said. “Those guys were crazy.”

The driver laughed. “That’s right. You know those guys get steak and eggs every morning?”

“And then they go jumping out of planes,” Gramps said. “Crazy.”

“Yeah. Meanwhile, us at Ft. Benning, we were getting powdered eggs.”

“SOS,” Gramps said, and the two of them broke up laughing.



We pulled up in front of the dealership, and when Gramps and I got out, I noticed someone inside was looking disapprovingly at the tow truck. I figured it was some sales jag off who was scared that something like that would scare customers away. Fuck him.

As we headed for the service entry, the guy inside popped his head out of the showroom and he said to the driver, “Is that for service?”

“Yeah, but the wheel’s about to pop off. I’m going to ask where they want us to drop it off.”

“Okay.” And then he turned to us and flashed a smile. “Come on in."

I’m at a loss for words to describe what happened in that moment. Let me remind you that I hate politicians with a passion. They’re filthy scumsucking douchebags, almost as low as pedophiles and just a rung above alcoholics. But every once in a while, I speak with someone who has met a politician, and they tell me that in person, these people have an overwhelming charisma which makes it impossible to hate them.

I have always thought this was bullshit, until I met this guy. He wasn’t even a politician, and he exuded what I can only call presence. It was like a supernatural force baking off of him, and I couldn’t help but like him immediately. Over the course of our conversation, he said EXACTLY what I wanted to hear, and he said it with such charisma that I couldn’t detect a lie. He said all the right things, and to all appearances, he meant them all.



It turns out that he is actually the owner of the dealership, which used to be his father’s. When he gave his business card to my grandfather, Gramps recognized the name. It turns out that his father used to be one of his customers back when he was a clothing salesman. Not only that, but the owner’s nephew worked with Gramps at the very same clothing store. The next thing you know, Gramps and the owner are practically best friends. They started talking about people they knew, most of whom had passed away. Then, they started talking about vacations, and wouldn’t you know it? Gramps used to work for the travel agency the owner’s family used to book those vacations. In fact, the owner was friends with the people who ran the agency.

See what I mean about Gramps knowing everyone?

The owner then escorted us over to service, and he proceeded to mediate between Gramps and the service guys. Remember that catalogue of curses I’d come up with to use on the service guys? By the time we were in front of them, and the owner was working his charismatic magic, I had forgotten each and every one of them. I’d even forgotten “cocksucker.” Lawsuit? What lawsuit?

The owner politely and gently dressed the service guys down, and he said to Gramps that they’d have a look at the wheel and see what they could do. He then escorted us to the waiting room.

Ah, the waiting room. My old friend. It was filled with people, but we found someplace to sit down. Gramps watched some TV, and I cracked open a book. (Jones and Campbell’s BEST NEW HORROR 3, in case you were wondering.) I quickly cast my gaze around and was pleased to find that the woman who had asked about my chest hair was not present. In fact, these people looked pretty normal, so I didn’t expect any weirdness from them.



Soon, the owner came back and apologized profusely. They had no idea how something like this could happen, and they were going to fix it free of charge. It was going to take an hour and a half because they had to send out for the struts, but they would have us out of there as soon as possible. He then shook our hands, and he wished us luck.

I went to the bathroom, and as I urinated, I thought about the nature of politicians, and I thought that the owner would make a killing at the business. Had I been manipulated? For what purpose? To make sure that if I need a new car, I’ll come to him? Or was he just a good guy?

I hear that Bill Clinton has this exact same charisma, that people in his presence are overwhelmed by him. I guess it’s just something that doesn’t translate over television, you just have to be in the same room with him as he looks into your eyes and shakes your hand.

I’ve never been so completely comforted by someone before, and it made me slightly uneasy. It still does, as I type this up. But I know that if the owner ever ran for office, I would vote for him. Weird.

True to his word, it took ninety minutes EXACTLY before the mechanic came in to give us the keys to my car. Note that I said it was the mechanic, not one of the service guys. I guess they chickened out and didn’t want to face the wrath of Gramps again.

We went through the showroom to give our thanks to the owner again, but he’d stepped out. On our way to the door, I noticed that the face of every salesman was pointed in the same direction. It filled me with a weird sense of dread, as if I were watching INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. It was like they were thinking with the same mind.





When I followed their gaze to see what they were looking at, I saw an incredibly hot woman bent over, rooting through the back of her SUV. I turned back to the salesmen, and their lust was painted on their faces. None of them had clustered together, so I got the impression that they’d noticed this spectacle independent of one another. Yet their expressions were all the same. Paint-by-numbers faces. Would they look differently if they knew I was watching them? Probably. I don’t know. I just wanted to get out of there.

Gramps and I got into the car and headed for the nearest McDonald’s, because I still had a hangover, and I needed the magical Double Cheeseburgers to cure it. Failing that, there were still energy drinks. At least the car was fixed, and the future looked a little brighter.