Thursday, June 02, 2005

Used toupees for sale - the whole scary story

My friends know I’m the kind of guy that would give them the toupee off my head if they suddenly found themselves without hair, had a cold scalp or needed a spare coaster to set their beer on…not that I wear a toupee but you get the point. You don’t? Well let me explain.

One fine fucking Sunday morning I threw my duffel bag in my Cherokee and made for my gym for a late morning workout. I prefer Sundays at the gym because the hipster, latte sucking BMW drones are safely out of town visiting their summer beach houses and rubbing their faces up against the oily newsprint of the Wall Street Journal. Only the hardcore gym junkies forsake Jesus and vacation and make the pilgrimage to the only place in which they worship, a place where they can gaze into the primordial sweat that pools in the low sagging parts of the floor and see the ugly fading flesh of their once youthful faces staring back at them. No one really defies age. We all lose to that cocksucker named time, who is holding us up in the air by our jock straps and mocking us.

The gym business isn’t a pretty one no matter how much pastel paint you cover it with nor how many juice bars you try to bury it under. You can line the walls with posters of spandex clad beauties and change the mirrors to funhouse mirrors so the slobs will look at themselves and see long lean impressions and believe that the box of Twinkies they pound on a daily basis is A-O-Fucking-Kay but the ugliness runs much deeper, runs like a swift moving stream of puss to the doorstep of every business’s whoremaster--THE BOTTOM LINE--and in the gym it pimps out its stair steppers and cast iron dumbbells to anyone that will drop a cold hard dime in its calloused palm.

* * *

So, I made my way into the gym that Sunday morning and parked under a massive oak tree so the birds didn’t have to exert too much effort when shitting on my freshly washed vehicle.

Inside the dimly lit gym there was a small but dedicated group of odd balls working out on a variety of machines. It was good to see that not only the “perfect” people liked to test the tensile strength of their abdominal walls and grind their joints into arthritic knobs.

“Hey, what’s up?” the guy behind the desk said.

This guy was all neck and about one pineapple short of a full smoothie bar. He was the type that gnaws on rusty chains and farts out ten penny nails as a hobby. I’m sure the zits as big as acorns on his shoulders were just left over teenage acne they couldn’t have been a result of a pharmaceutically enhanced physique. Or am I just being naive?

“Right,” I said and made a B-line for the locker room. Talk about protein drinks and tanning booths, the outreaching limits of his conversational repertoire, tended to put me in a fitness coma.

In the locker room I threw on my gym shorts and T-shirt in record time, thirty-two seconds to be exact. I know because I timed it with my stop watch. You see I always spend minimal time in the locker room because there’s a certain element that lingers there and feels that there’s no need to wear a towel to cover up their nudity. I’m no prude but when I’m sitting on a bench tying my shoe I really don’t fucking appreciate your dick swinging in front of my fucking face as you walk by on your way to the showers. Get it? Got it? Good.

After a quick warm up on the treadmill I headed over to the free weights and began doing curls while checking out the ass of the aerobics instructor that was giving a class across the gym. As my luck would have it she did a full spin and caught me staring. I smiled. What else could I do? She gave me the finger.

“I thought you were someone’s ass that I knew,” I said, setting down my barbell. “Bitch,” I said under my breath.

I turned towards the cardiovascular equipment when I heard a strange raspy breathing. My first instincts told me that it was some wild beast that had stowed away in the air-conditioning ducts during the night and had just managed to remove the last of the screws in the vent cover and was now running madly about, blood and saliva spilling from its long yellow fangs.

I was wrong.

On one of the treadmills I noticed a guy that was about fifty-five laboring like he was carrying a fully stocked mini-bar and two top heavy pole dancers on his back. His skin was the shade of a pickled cow’s tongue and his lips—Mic Jaggeresque--looked like they’d been wrapped around a bottle Yoohoo since birth but the thing that stood out most about him was not something mother nature had brewed up in her kitchen, no, not this jet black toupee. It was obviously not his natural hair but some strange chemical concoction developed in a laboratory and sewn together in a doll factory. No matter what type of super adhesive held that skinned rat’s ass to his scalp and no matter if it would stay put during the roughest of Tsunamis I knew it was a phony.

I watched in fascination as Mr. Toupee seemed to lose more and more steam and gradually began bending at the waist. I was about to go over and ask him if something was wrong when suddenly his legs folded up, his body crumpled and he flew off the back of the treadmill.

Generally speaking Mr. Toupee should have landed on the thinly carpeted floor behind the treadmill but on this day there was a special bit of padding awaiting his flight and it was in the form of a two-hundred and seventy pound woman clad in full body, rolls hanging, spandex.

“Umph,” Ms. Spandex said as Mr. Toupee knocked her to the ground and then laid across her ample bussoms; she screamed, she bucked, she spun, she whinnied like a quarter horse. “Get off me you pervert,” she cried.

To the untrained eye it looked as if Mr. Hairpiece was trying to ride Ms. Stretchpants like some sort of pie eyed pervert but I knew better for I’d witnessed the debacle from the onset.

“He’s got a hard on,” Ms. Stretchpants yelled.

With a mighty heave Ms. Stretchpants kicked Mr. Hairpiece off and his gigantic hard on was exposed…of course to the trained eye it looked a Hell of a lot more like a Walkman than a penis but what the Hell do I know? I only own one so my experience is limited but I know I can’t play a cassette tape on mine and stick a headphone jack in the end isn’t something I’d advise.

“I just got attacked by a dead guy,” Ms. Stretchpants cried. Her eyes shot out like helium filled golf balls and she began kicking Mr. Hairpiece in the side and the leg.

“Whoa, stop it,” I said coming up to Mr. Hairpieces defense. “He’s not moving.”

I set my gym back down and felt Mr. Toupees neck for a pulse. Nothing. Suddenly Mr. Hairpiece shot up and bucked and churned. His hairpiece came dislodged and flew through the air like a hairy Frisbee. Then he fell limp again in my arms.

“Someone call an ambulance,” I yelled. “I think this guy just had a heart attack.”

Mr. IQ at the front desk began rapidly dialing the phone. A semi-circle of the few gym members in attendance that day formed around me.

“We need to do CPR,” I cried.

Ms. Stretchpants took a step back. “He violated me,” she said, crossing her arms over her breasts as if protecting them from a giant nursing baby.

“He was out cold,” I said.

“I’ll help,” Mr. IQ said.

Thank God that dim bastard come over when he did. I wasn’t about to look lips with this guy even to save his life and besides they were so big I didn’t know if I could properly seal them anyway. Mr. IQ pulled out one of those respirator type pumps, placed it over Mr. Hairpiece’s mouth and pumped it twice. I preformed the proper chest pumping and we were in business.

When the ambulance arrived Mr. Hairpiece was semi-conscious and breathing on his own again. I later heard he died on the way to the hospital. Rumor has it he was grasping for his hairpiece.

Ms. Stretchpants tried to file a police report against Mr. Hairpiece but I intervened and made it out like she attacked him on the treadmill and gave him a heart attack. She backed down.

When I got home I dropped my duffel bag on the floor and flopped on the couch emotionally drained. I opened a beer and turned on the television when out of the corner of my eye I saw my Chihuahua Flea batting something black around on the floor. My first reaction was that it was a varmint of some sort, possibly a mole. I grabbed a Golf Digest off the coffee table and made to splatter the little beast but then I realized what it was that Flea was batting around. It was Mr. Hairpiece’s toupee. It must have landed in my gym bag and Flea had rooted it out.

“Get back,” I cried.

I got the fireplace poker and picked the toupee up with it. It was more hideous than I’d imagined but after some time alone with the little fella I became somewhat used to it and even managed to hold it in my hand. I petted it like an alley cat.

“Nice hairpiece,” I said.

I put the hairpiece on my Chihuahua Flea but it made him look too much like Hitler. I spread it out on my coffee table and set my beer on it but out of the corner of my eye I kept thinking I saw a tarantula. My other Chihuahua Uma and I played fetch with it for a while but it caused her to hack terribly so we stopped that game. Eventually I put it on the Beethoven bust on my mantle and it sits there to this day and every time I look up at it I think of Moe of the Three Stooges.

6 comments:

Dave Morris said...

This "part 1, part 2" shit just ain't cutting it my friend. I will need to see part 2 soon, or someone loses a head.

Anonymous said...

And Ker comes through with the rest of the story :)

I always wondered what would happen if a guy had a heart attack on a treadmill...

The Cuke said...

i'm glad to see we've come to the conclusion (i think) that toupees to not make the best of pets...

Anonymous said...

actually toupees make fantastic pets, provided they get the attention, fresh air and an occasional grope at a barely-legal tit. Mine is the most well-behaved pet I've ever had.

- Jules

Cindy-Lou said...

and there it sits, awaiting the day you need it, huh?

Bottle Rocket Fire Alarm said...

That's a wonderful mantelpiece memento. If it wasn't such a great conversation piece, I'm sure you'd cut it into strips and sell it to the neighborhood punks for Halloween mohawks.

Wonderful story.