The Rat and the Cleveland Steamer
All this rambling talk the other day in my rage post got me thinking first about my old trunk novel The Bialy Pimps (which some people have asked for, so I need to find out if it’s worth trying to sell on my site) and then about the place that inspired it all. See, the book is about a bagel deli, and if you read between the lines, you’ll see that it’s about MY bagel deli, like from real life. The story in the book is fiction because it involves hippies and spies and bombs and Stinky Ed throwing an ashtray into the windows. But it really didn’t need to be fictionalized to be funny as hell. Not at all.
The place was called Bingham’s Bagel Deli (not its real name) and was run by a guy named Paul Breyer (not his real name) who may or may not have waited on customers while wearing a python around his neck. Paul was an awesome, awesome guy but made for a shitty manager because he may actually have hated the customers worse than the rest of us, and because he had a worse attendance record than any of his staff.
The place would open totally unsupervised and would chug along in debauchery, with kids smoking pot in the back and bums licking the seats in the dining room, and by mid-day, I’d have to phone Paul to rouse him. It would go like this:
Me: “Paul? Are you awake yet?”
Paul: “Mmmmbgphhhp.”
Me: “Paul? It’s noon. The meat guy is here and he wants to be paid.”
Paul: “Ha ha. ‘Meat.’ ”
Me: “Paul? Are you coming in or not? I can’t get at the checkbook because you put it in the safe. If I don’t pay the guy, this load of meat is going to go back.”
Paul: “Ha ha. ‘Load.’ ”
Me: “Paul?”
Paul: “I’m sorry, man. My eardrum got all infected again and so I didn’t get any sleep and had to go to the doctor. And also, I’m drunk.”
Me: “Dude, this is the third time this month. This is your last chance, for real. If you do it again, you’re fired.”
Paul: “You know I’m your boss, right?”
Bingham’s enjoyed great success based largely on the fact that we wanted our customers to suffer. Especially the hippies, whose patchouli scent was, from my perspective, indistinguishable from body odor. There was this one kid who used to come in and yell at us for charging him for sprouts and lettuce because they came from the Earth. Then he’d demand to see the avocado and would yell at the avocado, like “You suck!” and “Be tastier!” He had a dog that he claimed was a vegan and that appeared to be slowly dying from protein malnutrition. We called the kid “Captain Dipshit.” The dog we just called “totally fucked.”
Bingham’s also had a rat. We called the rat “The Rat,” and we always used those verbal capital letters because it was tacitly agreed that there was one rat and that no matter how many times he was caught in a trap or crushed by a 100-pound tank of CO2, it was the same rat that kept coming back again and again in different incarnations, not totally unlike the Dalai Lama. Each time he reincarnated, he gained Karma super-points and possibly special tools and enhanced agility and became larger and harder to kill, not totally unlike the Dalai Lama.
So the hippies would congregate and stink and the meat would get taken back for nonpayment and Little John the angry midget homeless guy would come in yell at the customers and The Rat would get trapped in the bathroom and when Paul came in, we’d punish him by making him wade into the gross little crapper in full battle gear to kill The Rat yet again using (in at least one case) the blunt rubber end of a toilet plunger.
Then he’d come out all victorious and we’d forgive him for his lateness. Because you can’t fire a hero.
We’d play offensive music and people would complain, and when it got to that part in the Rage song where he yells FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME Jack would turn it up really loud and at the register, I’d be like, “What?” to customers and they’d yell their order again and Jack would rewind it a little and all I could hear was Zach de la Rocha telling me to fuck off.
Sometimes we’d make up special bagels. Patsy had one called “Patsy’s Paradise” that had all sorts of vegetables on a whole wheat bagel. Bill made one up called a “Cleveland Steamer” and wrote it up on a colorful sheet of construction paper he taped below the menu board. These little old ladies would come in and say, “Can you give me a Cleveland Steamer?” or “I think I’d really like a Cleveland Steamer!” and Bill would laugh until he cried and have to go get a glass of water from the vomit sink before he could recover and return to work.
I miss those bastards. My current job involves far fewer bums and rats. What kind of a way is that to live?
Cheers to babies, jeers to gonorrhea
Just a few days ago, I found out that my friend Andy had a baby, which was pretty crazy because he’s a dude. Then someone explained to me that HE didn’t actually have the baby and that it was his WIFE who had it, and then I got all mad because Andy actually did NOTHING but people are giving him all this credit, like they say, “Oh, hey, congratulations, Andy, on having your baby!” and all of those people are probably extra impressed because he’s a dude and is having a baby and it’s all a LIE and meanwhile, there are all sorts of hard-working people in this world who do AMAZING things and HE’S the one getting congratulated for not even HAVING a baby, and I’m like, That ass, I’ll bet he cheats at solitaire, too.
(However, I then realized that Andy actually does have a baby now, regardless of whose orifice it came out of. So it’s accurate to congratulate him on HAVING a baby even if it’s pretty meaningless. I mean, we don’t congratulate people for having dogs or having Bubblicious gum. Although, we do sometime express condolences when someone has gonorrhea, and having Bubblicious is in many ways the opposite of having gonorrhea. So maybe it’s okay.)
(The baby congrats, I mean. Not the gonorrhea. Gonorrhea is never okay.)
(In fact, I don’t think Andy has gonorrhea. But maybe he does, in which case congrats on the baby but don’t try to have any more. I mean, Jesus, think of the children.)
So it turns out that the procreation of the next-to-last of my college roommates really has for once and for all dismissed the idea that I’m a kid anymore. When I had my son, I could pretend that I’d knocked up some young girl at an inappropriate age and that hence I was still a young stud. When I had my daughter, I could pretend that this apparently dumb and masochistic young girl came back for more (I mean, who could resist?) and that I knocked her up a second time at a still-inappropriate age. (Everyone note that I’m taking credit for having these kids. If Andy can do it, so can I. That bastard.) So I get the fantasy of forbidden love along with the illusion of being in my late teens, and I get to think about what it would be like if my father-in-law were chasing me with a shotgun, which hardly ever happens in real life.
But that illusion falls apart with Andy. Andy is an engineering grad. We all know that if engineers who electrocute pickles are knocking anyone up, it’s happening well beyond the young chick age. Hence, I had to admit that I’m not a college kid anymore.
On Monday, I turn 33.
Almost everyone around me has kids now. A funny thing happens around this time of life, I’m finding. You don’t notice that YOU are growing up, but you notice that everyone else is. Like, Andy’s the retard who invented the giant fruit cannon. No way that guy is a dad. Or a doctor. I have this fat friend who isn’t actually fat anymore. Only, he used to be fat, and that’s forever how I’ll remember him and every time I see him I’m like, “You’re not fat” and he’s like, “I will disembowel you now” and that’s how it is with Andy and all of these other people I know. I mean, hell, they’re just kids themselves. They’re mentally incompetent. All of us are mentally incompetent. How can these people care for children? They can’t, that’s how.
I’m not one of those people who has a problem getting a year older, though. I have friends who get all freaked out even at our age and I can just imagine the AARP crowd dying to beat the hell out of them the next time they attend an Andy Griffith fan event. I’m cool with not being in my twenties anymore. Really. I’ve got it damn good, especially if poor Andy has gonorrhea.
Happy birthday, Johnny boy.
This goat is your goat, this goat is my goat
As often happens, Robin and I were driving along this weekend and discussing why cows like to climb piles of manure.
We had just passed a small farm and had noticed various bovines clamoring in their empty-skulled way for chief position atop a giant pile of their own feces, much like Snoopy sleeping on the roof of his own doghouse. It struck me as compelling.
“Cows really like to stand on top of crap,” I said.
“Yes,” Robin agreed.
“I wonder why.”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but they can be vicious about it. Everyone wants to be on top.”
I nodded. “Just like congress.”
“Horses do it too. Except that they sometimes kind of sink into it.”
I frowned. “I’ve never done that. Climbed poo, I mean.”
“Goats like to do it too. Climb things. Our goat, she liked to climb the manure piles and just hang out at the top.”
Many of you might have expressed doubt at this point, but I did not. I knew all about goats. My mom’s friend used to have a goat, but she had to get rid of it because it kept standing on her car. This story had always fascinated me. I’d heard plenty of reasons for getting rid of animals before — bit the neighbor, scratched the furniture, wouldn’t stop peeing on the rug — but this one was so unique and fascinating. I could just picture this woman getting ready for work, maybe in a nice semi-casual suit with her hair up, and imagine her walking out to the car to find a goat standing on it. “Oh for Christ’s sake!” she might yell. “How am I supposed to land the Henderson account with a goat on my car?”
“Cows, I don’t understand,” Robin said. ” But I can understand goats climbing. You know, with mountain goats and all.”
“So you’re saying that goats who climb manure are just following a biological urge to climb a mountain?”
“Maybe.”
“Like you’d ask a goat why he climbed the manure, and he’d say, ‘Because it was there.’?”
Robin had begun chewing on a fingernail. “He’d probably actually say, ‘Baaah.’ ”
“That’s what sheep say.”
“Goats say it too,” she told me.
“No, they say, ‘Beeee-eeeh.’ ”
” ‘Baaaa-aaa-ah.’ ”
” ‘ Bee-aaaa-aaa-eeeh.’ ”
” ‘Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeh.’ ”
We resumed driving. Time passed.
Then I said, “Do you think mountain goats are really special goats who live in the mountains? Or do you think they’re just regular goats who were hanging out at the base of the mountain and then looked up and said, ‘Hey, I should go up there.’ And then before you knew it, there’s all these regular goats up on the top of the mountain and someone decided they were ‘Mountain goats”?”
Robin shrugged. “Really wouldn’t be too different from calling hillbillies ‘Mountain people.’ Except that the goat, when at the bottom in the start of your story, wouldn’t say that he wanted to go up there. He’d say ‘Baaah.’ ”
“Beee-eeh.”
“Baaah.”
We drove on in silence. A collapsed inflatable Santa from months ago lay prone on someone’s lawn, as if shot.
“What was your goat’s name, again?” I asked.
” ‘Goat.’ ”
“Just ‘Goat’?”
“When we got her, her name was Dolly. But we just called her ‘Goat.’ ”
“So was her name Dolly, or Goat?”
“Goat. I guess.”
I needed a firmer answer. So I pressed on.
“What was her official name with the vet? Because that’s like a Social Security number for animals — whatever the vet has them recorded as.”
Robin thought for a second. “I don’t think the vet ever saw her.”
“Never?”
“No, I don’t think so. That goat never had any problems.”
“So she had no vet record?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re telling me that this goat lived her entire life off the grid? No ID, no name, no fingerprints?”
“Well, she didn’t have fingers,” Robin said.
Time passed.
“I can’t believe your goat never saw the vet.”
“That was one healthy goat,” she recalled.
“But no vaccines? No hoof trimming? Nothing?”
Robin shook her head.
“I think you were neglecting this goat’s health,” I said.
“No, I don’t think so. She lived to be like a billion.”
I had to admit this was true. I had met Goat, back when Robin and I were just dating, and she had been approximately five hundred years old. And funny-looking, too. Goats are the most strangely put-together animals I’d ever seen, surely something that God had been either tired or drunk while assembling. Bones and joints stuck out at all odd angles. It was more like a robot made by an engineering student to fetch beer than anything organic. Even the sound it made was artificial.
“Beeee-eeeh,” I said.
“What?”
We were almost home. I was fascinated with Goat’s stellar health record but felt a sense of incompletion. Without a vet record, she had no official name. The case would never be totally closed. And another thing was nagging at me, too.
“Have you ever seen our dogs stand on the car?” I asked.
“Your car or mine?”
“Mine.”
“Not that I’ve seen.”
“Okay,” I said. “Then we can keep them. For now.”
Hot talk about murder and suicide
My mom is going to be mad at me again for the topic of this one, but I have to explain something and I have to use the word “motherfucker” to do it. And really, let’s just leave it there, with the responsibility off of my back, and ignore the fact that I’m the cause of it all in the first place.
I got a Twitter direct message from filthytombstone this morning letting me know post haste that I may have irritated the minions of Jenny the Bloggess by sending an email to Jenny yesterday with the subject line “You motherfucker.” Here’s the screen capture she posted, of her inbox:
Now, I’m all about warring with other bloggers. I routinely send bombs and pieces of mice to Darren Rowse, and still he shuts his blinds at night while I’m trying to peer in with my telescope. But this one was personal. I really had no choice, and if it irritated her minions, then so be it.
So earlier in the week, I wrote about why pants are more popular than Don Knotts (probably because you can’t wear Don Knotts) and Jenny replied to that post. So I get this email notification in my inbox:
And that meant that she totally took my bait, and I realized for once and for all that putting a link in my blog to her site is indeed like putting up the bat symbol, except that it’s a hairdryer symbol and Commissioner Gordon really doesn’t want anything to do with it.
Then, like two minutes later, I get this:
BACKSTORY: A little while ago, I asked Jenny if she’d put me in touch with someone (you may assume it’s a Nicaraguan gun runner who smuggles panda bladders filled with cocaine), and she sort of did except that there’s a possibility that it was all crap and that she’s just been laughing at me since. I mean, people tell her they’re going to send her pig hearts, so it’s not like I’m in with a stellar crowd and am probably handled as such.
But I figured this was it, and either didn’t notice the “hehe” or figured this was a fairly unprofessional professional. Which — remember the pig heart — was actually pretty likely. I sort of think that if she had an editor or something, it’d be a woman on a levitating slab who was basically Jabba the Hut but who giggled “hehe!” a lot instead of eating rats. Or she could do both.
So I open the message and get this:
And immediately, I’m like, “motherfucker.” So that’s when I fired this off:
I was so worked up over the lack of sexy pics for me in her journal entry after that hot signoff (”Mwah XOXO always”) that I didn’t even notice that the sender had teased me with the irresistible “Police: Man hunted in family slayings kills self.” Had I seen that before being disappointed, I would have had no choice but to send a pig heard instead of just an email. I actually think American Greetings has a line of e-cards for that.
Now let’s see those minions find a way to have a problem with me after reading the explanation.
Mwah XOXO always
:”‘~Johnny~’”:.
Internet research results: Pants in, Don Knotts out
I was just sitting here writing a post about how my mom took my kids for the weekend (I knew she was doing it, though, it’s not like the time she took my $500) and Betsey Booms DM’s me on Twitter to tell me to check out her zombie bread post, and it occurred to me that I’m apparently writing about the wrong things because her ruminations on mold and zombies and comically large illustrated boobs got 14 comments, whereas my last post about being a dad and writing a book got me two comments. And it’s not like I’m totally bowled over by 14 comments (sorry Betsey), but it’s more that 2 comments makes me want to stuff fish into my shirt and run in circles until I collapse.
(At this point, you’re looking at me and thinking, “He’s really so shallow that he’s measuring his worth in comments?” And I’m looking back at you and saying, “Yes, all comedians are painfully insecure, and by the way, stop looking at me because this is a blog and what are you, some sort of a ninja superstar with a telescope or something? And then I realize that I’m just talking to myself because ninjas don’t use telescopes.)
But I’m not helpless. Instead, I’m starting to cobble together a bulleted list of things that internet browsers like. I figure that there has to be a way to turn this list into some sort of superstar Yoda website that uses the Force and shit and then I’ll make millions of dollars. So here we go:
• You like nerds (two on this one: here and here).
Or perhaps more accurately, you like being nerds, and you like being able to dish with fellow nerds. This makes sense, because you’re all on the internet reading blogs, and I don’t think Chuck McPerfecthairgiantpenis from the high school football team knows what a blog is, and if he did, he’d never be able to read it through all of the naked cheerleaders.
• You like when I talk about holidays being gay
And apparently when I skirt the boundaries of good taste. However, I did have a comment by a black lesbian on that one who essentially said I was cool. Well, not cool, maybe, but she did imply that my post wasn’t totally gay.
• You like pants and Germans
This makes less sense, but I’m going to try to seed my posts from here on out with more mentions of various types of pants and will attempt to do it in German, or else will talk about German pants. You’d think I’d be out because I’ve already covered lederhosen, but what, do you think all Germans walk around all day in lederhosen? They sure as hell do not. I challenge you to call five Germans and ask what kinds of pants they are wearing. Try it.
• One reader, Jenny the Bloggess, likes it when I link to her. I know this because when I do, she’ll often comment on my blog, probably because she gets pinged with a trackback. So I’m going to try it and see what happens. (I enjoy this because it’s like trapping a wildebeest. I set out bait and wait to see if she’ll emerge, like on Wild Kingdom, and in my head is this narrator who’s all like, “The mating habits of the popular and profane mommy blogger range from the obscure to the mundane” and shit.)
• You also seem to like it when I talk about things that aren’t funny
What the hell is that about? This is supposed to be a funny site. What are you, a bunch of gay German nerds?
The things you don’t like include Mad Libs, Don Knotts, comic books, and fatherhood.
Which is really pretty messed up when you think about it. I mean, just look at Don Knotts:
You know what? I can’t totally eliminate Don Knotts from my writing no matter how you all feel. I’m going to target the lucrative Don Knotts niche from here on out. And I’ll even bet Don Knotts wears pants, so it’s a crossover thing, like when Shania Twain became mainstream and made classic rock fans cry righteous metal tears of awesomeness. I mean, I’m pretty sure Don is dead now, but I also bet they buried him in pants, because when you go to the Pearly Gates, St. Peter is liable to punish the pantsless and be like, “HEY! No pants, no shoes, no salvation!” And then you have to go to Hell where nobody wears pants, and the irony is that you’re totally comfortable because you’re not wearing pants but are also in a dimension of total, constant discomfort, and it probably irks Satan something fierce and makes him want to enforce a pants rule, but he can’t, because let’s fact it, it’s Hell for Satan, too.