The debate beast picked up my scent and had been trailing me for days. I managed to avoid it with cunning and a great deal of luck but the bastard had run me ragged. Anyone that has been pursued by the creature knows that it is relentless, particularly crafty and shows up in the most unexpected places, such as public toilets and super stores late at night. I found myself exiting through back doors and avoiding close friends knowing its preference to attack groups of two or more.
In the beginning of the week, at the height of my paranoia, I passed the mailman coming up my walkway. I feigned deafness when he greeted me, flashing him made up sign language, cupping my ear, and hurrying into my house. Only later did I realized I’d spoken to him before, that now in addition to the oddly shaped packages, shipped from clandestine PO boxes that I received in the mail (How was I supposed to know that rubber doll would come already blown up?), he would have my strange behavior to add to the list when the mental health officials started interviewing people.
I would make it through the week without the beast confronting me, which I was thankful for but this brief period of peace would lull me into a foolish sense of security for which I would pay dearly. Why didn't I heed that fortune cookie I'd eaten in Toronto last June? It read: It may be your sole purpose in life is to simply serve as a warning to others.
By weeks end I was itching to get out of the house and accepted the invitation of a good friend to go out on the town and celebrate his birthday. I'll call this friend Mark to protect his identity. I will also create a false profile for him so that he seems more realistic. Let's say he is a hardcore angler and a retired skateboarder (he might break a skateboard at his current weight) with an unusual admiration for food in all its various forms. He would probably have a fictional brother named Dan and we would all go out that Friday night...
This is how I found myself in one of my old haunts last Friday night in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a bar with ornate wood working and a multitude of televisions. This is the same location where I’d perfected the form of getting turned down by attractive and not so attractive women.
At my request we were seated at a long table in the front of the bar. I needed to have my back to the wall so the beast couldn’t sneak up behind me.
I took out my Spearmint Binaca breath spray and directed several bursts of the misty concoction into the back of my throat. This set off a coughing fit which drew attention to the fact that I was using a breath aid, which is tantamount to saying, “I think I’m going to hook up tonight so I’d better have good smelling breath.” It was a foolish move on my part but then most of what I do at least borders on foolish and so this incident was not a surprise to those surrounding me.
”Sore throat,” I said, straining my voice for affect, and grasping my throat.
I don’t think anyone believed me but this wouldn’t deter me from using similar tactics in the future.
The night proceeded as these nights usually do with several alcohol laden beverages being imbibed. In the midst of the jovial conversation, loaded with wisecracks and good humored ribbing I noticed a particularly attractive young lady positioned at the end of our table. She sipped from a large drink held in the center of a hollowed out pineapple. I briefly entertained the notion of ordering her one of these exotic looking drinks but nixed the idea when I noticed I was having trouble seeing her over top of the pineapple.
I smiled in the direction of the curvaceous beauty and thought I caught her eye. She appeared to smile although it was hard to tell because the pineapple was obscuring my view of her face. None the less I smiled back. I had the distinct feeling I’d witnessed her exquisite good looks at some other locale but when and where I couldn’t pinpoint at that moment.
I rose and her eyes stayed transfixed in my immediate direction. This was going to be good.
“There were no WMD’s in Iraq when we invaded,” I heard my good friend the Weasel say. The Weasel is a high school social studies teacher with an affinity for bottled beverages of the alcoholic variety and who has a solid background in American history which can be an asset when attempting to thwart the debate beast.
“There were WMD’s in Iraq in 1988,” a conservative friend said.
“Not now you bastards,” I said under my breath.
My synapses, most of which were sopping with creamy stout, allowed me only enough brain power to focus my limited attention on the long legged cutie at the end of our table. I didn’t have time to confront the beast now.
“George Bush’s administration manipulated documents so the public would think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction,” Weasel said, standing.
Things around me were getting too rowdy. I could smell the debate beast’s cologne, he was in the direct vicinity of our table. I knew then that I would have to make my move if there was any chance I was going to make her acquaintance.
I bent down below the table and sprayed more Binaca into my mouth. When I came up she was still staring. Emboldened, I took a sip of Guinness and stood.
“Excuse me,” someone said, putting his hand on my shoulder. This guy, former quarterback looking type, who appeared to be still wearing shoulder pads, made his way around me to the end of the table where my dream girl sat emptying the last of her pineapple.
I thought she’d been looking up slightly to see over her pineapple but she must have been staring at the cretin behind me. He met her at the end of the table and she looked up at him shyly, batting her eyelashes and puckering her lips. Damn, love at first site. Those eyes hadn’t been for me. I was damn glad I hadn’t bought her that pineapple.
I drained my Guinness and wiped my lips with the sleeve of my shirt. There was no sense not jumping into the jaws of the debate beast now, so when the beast wasn’t looking I grabbed its left head, pulled its jaws wide open, took one last look around me and jumped in.
“There were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, which was the pretense for which that bastard George W. went to war,” I said. “And he was a cheerleader. Do we want a former male cheerleader running our country?”
“They found Saddam Hussein in a tiny hole in the ground in Baghdad. Don’t you think they would have found WMD’s if they existed?” Weasel said.
I attempted to give Weasel a high five but missed and hit him upside the head spilling Guinness on his shirt.
“Hmm, that went well,” I said.
“Anyone want a chicken finger?” Mark asked.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a rather large, brooding, individual who was now positioned at the end of our table, his hands clamped around the ends, his knuckles white. Service was slow but I didn’t think it was anything to have a hemorrhage over.
“I want in on this conversation,” the big guy said, moving towards us. “I just got back from Iraq. There were weapons of mass destruction there,” he said.
The constraints of reason were never something that curbed my actions when in the throes of a late night drinking binge and this night would be no different. I couldn’t take another person telling me there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This same package of lies had been set flaming on my doorstep many times in the previous months leading up to the election and had continued on in its disastrous wake. Was America really this uninformed? Did an American soldier actually believe this? I was pissed at myself from running from the beast when I should have turned on my verbal light saber and lopped off its heads.
“You are brainwashed if you actually believe that,” I said. “And no you can’t join our conversation.”
The big guy shuffled his feet like Curly of the three stooges when he was agitated. I imagined jumping up on the table, taking the swan fighting stance like the Karate Kid and lashing out, knocking the guy down. I imagined the woman I’d been admiring would then run to my side, everyone would buy me drinks.
“I’d love a drink,” I said, caught up in my drunken fantasy.
“What?” the soldier said.
“Nothing, the point is that we don’t have anything against you,” Weasel said. “My rather, uh, unusual friend and I are on your side. We don’t want to see any of our troops get killed. We think its bullshit that you even have to go over there, that’s our point.”
The big brooding guy shrank three sizes as the anger released in the form of steam from his ears.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t catch the entire conversation.”
“That’s why I said you couldn’t join in,” I said.
“What my friend is trying to say,” Weasel said, “is that we’d like to buy you a drink.”
It then occurred to me, as things usually do after I’ve made an ass out of myself that this guy really wasn’t angry at us but was angry at something completely different, that we’d only been in his way. What the Hell had this war done to him? I couldn’t help but think he should have be knee deep in stale beer and women’s underpants in the basement of some fraternity house like George W. Bush had been in his college days but instead this kid had been forced to witness things Clive Barker couldn’t have conjured up with all the pig’s blood and rubber body parts Hollywood had in stock.
“No, let me buy you guys a drink,” the soldier said.
“That’s okay,” I said.
Weasel took over the conversation with the soldier and I tilted my pint. I don’t like to think about sad things, my naturally melancholy nature won’t allow for it, less I become mired down in a bog of depression. I have to keep moving so that I think I’m happy. Motion is a great substitute for happiness, that and liquor.
* * *
The debate beast barfed me up on the same bar stool I’d been sitting on when the whole fiasco began. I kicked him on the butt with my steel toed boot as he slithered under the table.
“Adios, fuckpot,” I said.
I suddenly began to feel strange. The bar was getting to stuffy. The cigarette smoke was making me feel as if I was going to suffocate. Without saying a word I bolted up from the table, passed the soldier, the Weasel, Mark, and his brother Dan. I weaved in and out of people looking for the door.
“Get out of my way,” I said, pushing and shoving.
I saw the door and made for it but something stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the luscious example of femininity I’d been admiring a few minutes earlier. She was sitting alone beside the popcorn machine, stirring a screw driver with a swizzle stick. It was good to see she’d given up that pineapple nonsense and the quarterback.
I ducked into the wooden phone booth just before the entrance, took out my Binaca, and sprayed several minty bursts into my mouth. When I emerged my eyes were watering from the breath spray, which drew several curious stares. I supposed they thought I’d just gotten off the phone with a girlfriend that had dumped me, so I played on that angle.
“That whore,” I said, wiping at my tears. “She left me, took the kids and the hay bailer.”
Suddenly I’d remembered where I’d seen the object of that night’s desire. I’d seen her in line while I was waiting to vote that past week.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Did I see you–”
“Do bother with the cheesy pickup lines,” she said, tossing her hair back.
“Vote lately?” I asked, sitting down beside her.
“Didn’t everybody?” she said, looking away.
This was going to be good…
This is how I found myself in one of my old haunts last Friday night in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a bar with ornate wood working and a multitude of televisions. This is the same location where I’d perfected the form of getting turned down by attractive and not so attractive women.
At my request we were seated at a long table in the front of the bar. I needed to have my back to the wall so the beast couldn’t sneak up behind me.
I took out my Spearmint Binaca breath spray and directed several bursts of the misty concoction into the back of my throat. This set off a coughing fit which drew attention to the fact that I was using a breath aid, which is tantamount to saying, “I think I’m going to hook up tonight so I’d better have good smelling breath.” It was a foolish move on my part but then most of what I do at least borders on foolish and so this incident was not a surprise to those surrounding me.
”Sore throat,” I said, straining my voice for affect, and grasping my throat.
I don’t think anyone believed me but this wouldn’t deter me from using similar tactics in the future.
The night proceeded as these nights usually do with several alcohol laden beverages being imbibed. In the midst of the jovial conversation, loaded with wisecracks and good humored ribbing I noticed a particularly attractive young lady positioned at the end of our table. She sipped from a large drink held in the center of a hollowed out pineapple. I briefly entertained the notion of ordering her one of these exotic looking drinks but nixed the idea when I noticed I was having trouble seeing her over top of the pineapple.
I smiled in the direction of the curvaceous beauty and thought I caught her eye. She appeared to smile although it was hard to tell because the pineapple was obscuring my view of her face. None the less I smiled back. I had the distinct feeling I’d witnessed her exquisite good looks at some other locale but when and where I couldn’t pinpoint at that moment.
I rose and her eyes stayed transfixed in my immediate direction. This was going to be good.
“There were no WMD’s in Iraq when we invaded,” I heard my good friend the Weasel say. The Weasel is a high school social studies teacher with an affinity for bottled beverages of the alcoholic variety and who has a solid background in American history which can be an asset when attempting to thwart the debate beast.
“There were WMD’s in Iraq in 1988,” a conservative friend said.
“Not now you bastards,” I said under my breath.
My synapses, most of which were sopping with creamy stout, allowed me only enough brain power to focus my limited attention on the long legged cutie at the end of our table. I didn’t have time to confront the beast now.
“George Bush’s administration manipulated documents so the public would think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction,” Weasel said, standing.
Things around me were getting too rowdy. I could smell the debate beast’s cologne, he was in the direct vicinity of our table. I knew then that I would have to make my move if there was any chance I was going to make her acquaintance.
I bent down below the table and sprayed more Binaca into my mouth. When I came up she was still staring. Emboldened, I took a sip of Guinness and stood.
“Excuse me,” someone said, putting his hand on my shoulder. This guy, former quarterback looking type, who appeared to be still wearing shoulder pads, made his way around me to the end of the table where my dream girl sat emptying the last of her pineapple.
I thought she’d been looking up slightly to see over her pineapple but she must have been staring at the cretin behind me. He met her at the end of the table and she looked up at him shyly, batting her eyelashes and puckering her lips. Damn, love at first site. Those eyes hadn’t been for me. I was damn glad I hadn’t bought her that pineapple.
I drained my Guinness and wiped my lips with the sleeve of my shirt. There was no sense not jumping into the jaws of the debate beast now, so when the beast wasn’t looking I grabbed its left head, pulled its jaws wide open, took one last look around me and jumped in.
“There were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, which was the pretense for which that bastard George W. went to war,” I said. “And he was a cheerleader. Do we want a former male cheerleader running our country?”
“They found Saddam Hussein in a tiny hole in the ground in Baghdad. Don’t you think they would have found WMD’s if they existed?” Weasel said.
I attempted to give Weasel a high five but missed and hit him upside the head spilling Guinness on his shirt.
“Hmm, that went well,” I said.
“Anyone want a chicken finger?” Mark asked.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a rather large, brooding, individual who was now positioned at the end of our table, his hands clamped around the ends, his knuckles white. Service was slow but I didn’t think it was anything to have a hemorrhage over.
“I want in on this conversation,” the big guy said, moving towards us. “I just got back from Iraq. There were weapons of mass destruction there,” he said.
The constraints of reason were never something that curbed my actions when in the throes of a late night drinking binge and this night would be no different. I couldn’t take another person telling me there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This same package of lies had been set flaming on my doorstep many times in the previous months leading up to the election and had continued on in its disastrous wake. Was America really this uninformed? Did an American soldier actually believe this? I was pissed at myself from running from the beast when I should have turned on my verbal light saber and lopped off its heads.
“You are brainwashed if you actually believe that,” I said. “And no you can’t join our conversation.”
The big guy shuffled his feet like Curly of the three stooges when he was agitated. I imagined jumping up on the table, taking the swan fighting stance like the Karate Kid and lashing out, knocking the guy down. I imagined the woman I’d been admiring would then run to my side, everyone would buy me drinks.
“I’d love a drink,” I said, caught up in my drunken fantasy.
“What?” the soldier said.
“Nothing, the point is that we don’t have anything against you,” Weasel said. “My rather, uh, unusual friend and I are on your side. We don’t want to see any of our troops get killed. We think its bullshit that you even have to go over there, that’s our point.”
The big brooding guy shrank three sizes as the anger released in the form of steam from his ears.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t catch the entire conversation.”
“That’s why I said you couldn’t join in,” I said.
“What my friend is trying to say,” Weasel said, “is that we’d like to buy you a drink.”
It then occurred to me, as things usually do after I’ve made an ass out of myself that this guy really wasn’t angry at us but was angry at something completely different, that we’d only been in his way. What the Hell had this war done to him? I couldn’t help but think he should have be knee deep in stale beer and women’s underpants in the basement of some fraternity house like George W. Bush had been in his college days but instead this kid had been forced to witness things Clive Barker couldn’t have conjured up with all the pig’s blood and rubber body parts Hollywood had in stock.
“No, let me buy you guys a drink,” the soldier said.
“That’s okay,” I said.
Weasel took over the conversation with the soldier and I tilted my pint. I don’t like to think about sad things, my naturally melancholy nature won’t allow for it, less I become mired down in a bog of depression. I have to keep moving so that I think I’m happy. Motion is a great substitute for happiness, that and liquor.
* * *
The debate beast barfed me up on the same bar stool I’d been sitting on when the whole fiasco began. I kicked him on the butt with my steel toed boot as he slithered under the table.
“Adios, fuckpot,” I said.
I suddenly began to feel strange. The bar was getting to stuffy. The cigarette smoke was making me feel as if I was going to suffocate. Without saying a word I bolted up from the table, passed the soldier, the Weasel, Mark, and his brother Dan. I weaved in and out of people looking for the door.
“Get out of my way,” I said, pushing and shoving.
I saw the door and made for it but something stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the luscious example of femininity I’d been admiring a few minutes earlier. She was sitting alone beside the popcorn machine, stirring a screw driver with a swizzle stick. It was good to see she’d given up that pineapple nonsense and the quarterback.
I ducked into the wooden phone booth just before the entrance, took out my Binaca, and sprayed several minty bursts into my mouth. When I emerged my eyes were watering from the breath spray, which drew several curious stares. I supposed they thought I’d just gotten off the phone with a girlfriend that had dumped me, so I played on that angle.
“That whore,” I said, wiping at my tears. “She left me, took the kids and the hay bailer.”
Suddenly I’d remembered where I’d seen the object of that night’s desire. I’d seen her in line while I was waiting to vote that past week.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Did I see you–”
“Do bother with the cheesy pickup lines,” she said, tossing her hair back.
“Vote lately?” I asked, sitting down beside her.
“Didn’t everybody?” she said, looking away.
This was going to be good…
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