Oh, To be Old...

            “Hey Amelia…”

            “Don’t call me that! You know I go by Doris now.”

            “But Doris isn’t your real name.”

            “It’s not my fault my parents had me when they were only in their twenties. You just got lucky, that’s all. Rose is so timeless.”

            “I did get lucky, didn’t I? Rose—such an old-fashioned name. So much better than Amelia.”

            “It’s Doris!”

            “Okay, Doris, what do you want to do?”

            “I got the new issue of Elderly Bop.”

            “Who’s on the cover?”

            “Clint!”

            “Not him again.”

            “What’s wrong with Clint?”

            “Nothing’s wrong with Clint. There’s just other men out there too you know.”

            “Who do you like? Harrison Ford?”

            “He is dreamy, isn’t he? Can’t wait to see that new Star Trek flick. But he’s still not my favorite.”

            “Who then? You better not say Michael Caine.”

            “No way!”

            “Who? Tell me already!”

            “It’s Joe. Okay? My new crush is Joe.”

            “Joe Pesci?”

            “No! Joe Biden. Though Joe Pesci is sexy in an Italian sort of way.”

            “Joe Biden? I didn’t realize you were into politics.”

            “There’s just something about him. Something about the way he articulates everything he says. It’s like he’s smart or something. Smart can be sexy sometimes.”

            “I suppose. Did you hear about Jacob?”

            “What about him?”

            “He got some gray hairs over the summer.”

            “Bullshit! He’s only sixteen. They have to be fake.”
            “No. I’m telling you—he has gray hairs on the side of his head.”

            “He must have dyed them.”

            “No. He claims his uncle scared the shit out of him when they were camping one weekend. Made his hair go gray.”

            “Oh my God! He’s so lucky. I want to be scared like that.”

“Just look in the mirror.”

“Ha, ha, you’re so funny I forgot to laugh. Did you hear Emily got wrinkle implants?”

            “Wrinkle implants? That bitch! Must be nice to have rich parents.”

            “I know, I want wrinkles soooo bad. I’ve been smoking like two packs a day.”

            “Tell me about it. I’ve been smoking three. And cracking my knuckles like crazy.”

            “Cracking your knuckles?”

            “Yeah, you know, to get arthritis.”

            “That’s an old wives tale.”

            “I wish I was an old wife.”

            The girls laughed.

            “Want to go to the mall?”

            “Am I wearing depends?”

            “So, the answer’s yes.”

            “C’mon, let’s get ready.”

            The girls made their way to the bathroom, where they curled their hair, both of which was dyed the lightest tint of blue. They focused on themselves in the large vanity mirror as they each used an Age Enhancing Wrinkle Pen™ to draw fine wrinkles around their eyes. They then applied an overabundance of eye-shadow and blush, mascara and lipstick. In the closet they found baggy tan slacks and white blouses with large colorful flowers that seemed to jump from the polyester fabric. They finished off their wardrobe with fake pearl necklaces, large drooping earrings that sparkled with assorted plastic jewels, and numerous gold-colored bracelets of all styles that hung down their subtle wrists.

            “How do I look, Amelia?”

            “It’s Doris!”

            “Sorry. How do I look, Doris?”

            “Old. But not as old as me.”

            “Oh, screw you bitch.”

            They rode to the mall in Rose’s 1983 Cadillac Coup de Ville, a boat of a car in which she could barely see over the steering wheel. When they got to the parking lot they eyed the Handicap Parking spaces with envy. “I can’t wait until we can park there,” Doris said.

            Once they found a spot, Rose popped the trunk and pulled out a walker.

            “Where’d you get that?” Doris asked with disbelief.

            “My grandma left it to me in her will.”

            “I’m so jealous I could have a stroke.”

            “C’mon, let’s do some mall-walking.”

            The two girls walked slowly through the mall, eyeing other people and peering through store windows, but never actually purchasing anything. On the outskirts of the food court, they came upon two elderly men who were drinking coffee and playing a game of chess. “Oh my God,” Doris proclaimed. “They’re so sexy.”

            “Go talk to them.”

            “I can’t. They’re way too old for me.”

            “I dare you.”

            “What will you give me?”

            “A pack of menthols and handful of Werther’s Originals.”

            The deal was too good to turn down, so Doris took a deep breath and began her approach towards the two men. She didn’t get far. Almost immediately, her right foot got tangled in Rose’s walker and she began to stumble forward. But, like any able human being would, she caught her balance and staggered upright. Rose let out a loud chuckle, which embarrassed Doris immensely. She instantly realized that a real elderly woman would have simply fallen hard to the floor. In a moment of panic, she let her body go limp and plunged to the linoleum in a less than dramatic fashion.

            The old men paused their game to look at the girl lying on the ground beside their table. “Fucking kids,” the one on the left said before sliding his rook across the board.

SoulDate

According to the countless emails I receive on a daily basis, hot chicks in my area are interested in hooking up, so I got that going for me. But I haven’t resorted to that kind of thing yet, you know with all the great dating sites out there. And oh, have I tried them all: OKStupid, Plenty of Shit in the Sea, AthiestMingle…the list goes on and on and on. They were all alright, I mean I was able to tag some premium poontang from each of them, but it was SoulDate.com that really snatched the prize, so to speak. They developed this elaborate algorithm you see, where after a few tests—blood, DNA, IQ, Rorschach, etc.—they could hook you up with girls that have the same soul as you. The whole thing was rather scientific, which I’ve never been much interested in, unless it has to do with whey protein or self-tanning that is. I’ve always been more interested in results, like the other day, when I benched 240, seven times—RESULTS! So, SoulDate sends me a list of women in my area who have the same soul as me. The lists not too long, but long enough, enough to keep me busy for a few months. And I go on these dates with these girls and we have absolutely nothing in common. Like this one chick, she’s studying for her PhD in psychology or sociology or chronology or something like that, I’m not really sure—they’re all the same to me. But anyway, this chick, she’s like all intelligent and shit, like she knows the name of world leaders and the vice-president and things like that, things normal Americans have no need to know. And if it wasn’t for SoulDate, there’s no way we would have ever met, because while I’m spending the majority of my free time getting ripped and checking myself out in the numerous mirrors I own, this chick is in the library, reading and studying, and doing shit like that, shit I haven’t even thought about since middle school. I mean, normally, I wouldn’t even be into a chick like that—we had absolutely nothing in common—but SoulDate was sure that our souls matched, so I thought What the hell? plus, she was wearing a pair of those black framed glasses that really get me going, you know the ones, so I figured why not? And she must have thought the same thing about me, because before I knew it, we were back at my place and well, I think you can figure out what happened after that. She snuck out the next morning and I never heard from her again, but it didn’t matter you see, because the next week SoulDate had another chick lined up for me, and the week after that and the week after that. I was getting so much pussy I didn’t even know what to do with myself. I was in absolute heaven until one day I get an email from the president of SoulDate with a whole bunch of legal jargon that only a lawyer or a professor of law could decipher, but anyway, it goes on to describe how several of their clients had given negative feedback concerning me. Could you even imagine? And after performing all those tests over again, SoulDate realized they had been completely wrong about my matches. As it turns out, I don't even have a single soul mate, because apparently, guys like me don't actually have souls. Who would have thought? It also went on to say that my most recent blood test confirmed that during my time with SoulDate.com I had contracted a handful of STDs—that’s sexual transmitted diseases for you lame men—such as gonorrhea, Chlamydia, herpes, HIV, just to name a few. The list went on and on and on. And I know exactly what you’re thinking—dude, that blows! But don’t be feeling sorry for me quite yet brother, because it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. You see, I found out about all of these dating sites dedicated to people just like me, you know, with STD’s. I’m now a member of RashMatch, ILUVHIV.com, DiseaseDate, HerpeHookup, etc. And you won’t believe what the girls on these websites are willing to do…

Beaver What? Beaver Dick!

Note: This is an excerpt from The Road and the River: An American Adventure. 

I stop at a gas station to have a beer and a truck driver approaches me and asks what I’m doing with a bicycle loaded to the brim with gear. I tell him that I’m riding across the United States and ask if he knows anywhere to camp for the night.

“Definitely,” he says, “Beaver Dick Park is about twenty miles down the road.”

“Beaver what?” I ask.

“Beaver Dick,” he says again.

Is this guy messing with me? Certainly nobody would name a park “Beaver Dick,” would they? Especially in a rural county in Idaho where Mormons are the majority?

“Beaver Dick?” I say in a somewhat confused tone.

“Yes, Beaver Dick,” he says. “Like the thing you find between a girl’s legs and the thing you find between a boy’s legs—Beaver Dick.”

He’s got to be messing with me. I go back inside the gas station and ask the cashier who sold me a beer just a few moments ago: “Is there a park down the road called Beaver…something?”

“Yeah,” she says, “Beaver… something.”

Well, if it is Beaver Dick, she’s not willing to speak the words. I put in another twenty miles, and lo and behold, there it is, right where the truck driver said it would be—Beaver Dick Park. And there’s a sign telling me all about Beaver Dick. Not only is the park called Beaver Dick, but it’s named after a man who was known as Beaver Dick. And Beaver Dick wasn’t even his real name. It was Richard Leigh, and he was a red-headed Englishman who moved west to be a trapper without realizing that the fur trade was already over. So he did what any disappointed white man would do—he married a Native American woman and changed his name to Beaver Dick, unbeknown to him at the time, the hilarious sexual connotation it would represent over a century later. 

How About a Hand for Professor Guff

           Professor Guff sat in front of his computer, fingering keys with his right hand: crunching numbers, sorting data. Where did I go wrong? he thought. President Boon had assigned him an impossible task: eliminate crime in The United Regions of Amexinada. After six "extremely successful” terms in office (the President’s own words), the leader of the “free world” decided to tackle the one problem which seemed so far out of his reach: the steadily rising crime rate. He handpicked Professor Guff to lead the charge.

            Professor Guff’s solution was as simple as the problem was difficult. Start with theft, because if you can’t eliminate the easiest problem first, then how can you be expected to eliminate the more complex ones. And his solution to theft was as old as society: if one gets caught stealing—anything, from a piece of penny candy to a luxury automobile—they would lose their left hand. Chopped off at the wrist. Hung from the branches of a large Sycamore at the Capital, for everyone to see. With the prospect of losing a hand, people would certainly stop stealing. And they did. It worked. For a while…

            At first, the rate of theft dropped significantly, but then something very peculiar happened. The hands began disappearing, leaving the branches of the Sycamore as bare as a tree that wasn’t being used to hang human hands from. The hands had become collector’s items, and with the increasing decrease in theft, their value was skyrocketing. Suddenly, with no hands left in the tree, everybody wanted a hand of their own.

            The theft rate began rising again, mostly due to the theft of human hands. A thief would chop off the hand of their victim to sell on the black market, and in return, would lose their own hand as punishment. Some swindlers even went as far as chopping off their own hands in order to sell them, because after all, there was a good chance they would lose it anyway. Over time, human hands became society’s number one object of desire. Everybody wanted one. Needed one. But once everybody got one, their value fell through the floor, leaving them practically worthless.

            So, now every citizen of Amexinada owned their own hand, which also meant that every citizen of Amexinada was missing a hand of their own. This irony did not escape Professor Guff as he sat in front of his computer, staring at the nub that ended his left forearm. He scanned his eyes across his desk, first to a large jar that contained a human hand floating in formaldehyde, and then to his monitor. He couldn’t help but laugh as he looked over the final conclusion written across the screen: the theft rate was exactly the same as it had been when President Boon asked him to eliminate crime.