I am listening. I can follow two conversations at the same time. Benny’s nonsense as well as my own.
Everything is a potential story.
1983: Burger King opens on Governor’s Island and serves beer.
No Fear, Inc., a popular retailer, is being confused with the National Organization for European American Rights (N.O.F.E.A.R.), a white supremacist group.
The state of Missouri names a stretch of highway adopted by the Ku Klux Klan, the “Rosa Parks Highway.”
During an interview with Congress of Racial Equality’s (CORE) National Spokesman Niger Innis, MSNBC displays a graphic identifying him as “Nigger Innis.”
Not even the best urban legends can surpass true stories like the ones above. You can’t make that stuff up.
Well, yea you can. You just have to bill more per word.
There is a white short bus that comes and picks up the residents of Sunny Vale Assisted Living every Wednesday.
Those that still have their faculties about them walk onto the thing and go grocery shopping. Some bring along their own bags. Colostomy bags, Ileostomy bags. My father is not one of them. He is not allowed to leave the campus. The room, even. Not without an orderly. Assisted leaving.
“Here ya go, pops.”
That’s Benny as me. He hands my father a vacuum-sealed pack of sliced ham and a Kosher pickle wrapped in white paper. I’ve never called him pops.
“He won’t remember anyway, Dude.”
Three hundred and fifty dollars. In travellers’ cheques. That’s how it’s spelled. American Express. That’s what Benny gets from my father this time around. Benny as me. Me as my father’s accountant. Benny as the Roto-Rooter man. Me as my father’s physician. His Lithuanian cousin. Last month we got two hundred. All Benny wants is a slice of pepperoni and anchovies. Large Mountain Dew and garlic sticks. The rest is acting chops. Training ground.
“Pocket, Dude. Gotta have pocket.”
The problem is they’re going to amputate my father’s foot. The other problem is, he needs a new liver.
The Corporate Angel Network, an organization that coordinates free air travel for cancer patients, began when Coca-Cola executives arranged for the Blue Angels to fly a liver from San Diego to Houston in time for a transplant into a little girl.
My most popular story was the one about the home video showing an attractive, scantily-clad woman licking under the rim of the toilet at an extended-stay hotel in the South, demonstrating how clean their apartment homes were.
That was unclassifiable veracity, which somehow turned legend. The ridiculousness of truth is unsurpassed.
See also: honesty.
See also: pathological displacement of erotic interest and satisfaction to a fetish.
See also: advertising for Extended Stay U.S.A.
Benny says, “Yea Dude I bet every guy ran home to get off on that one.” And then he gives me the travellers’ cheques.
“Checks, Dude.”
That’s how it’s spelled.
Alex has been awarded nothing, has never come in second, third, or even fourth, but once plagiarized a composition in 7th grade music class, from an old, Romanian folk song. Unfortunately, it was written in the wrong clef (bass instead of treble) and turned out an awful disaster. Soon after, he switched from piano to drum set, and joined a death metal band in the Washington D.C. area. Alex would love to tell you about the myriad places in which he’s lived, only he skipped out on the rent in most of them and is wanted by various landlords in various states.
Editor's note: This is part 5 of a six-part series. We'll run a section each Monday. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 6.
Archived at http://girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/prose/flash/220-ap-0510-legend5 and shortlinked at http://frsh.in/bi
