How to do the wrong thing right
Lobster grilled cheese or sex with Kendall Jenner?
Such is our guns-of-August question this sizzling month. But first, a torpid prepper.
Apparently, my tires were due for rotating (whatever the hell that means) and, true to form, I was shanghaied into an “alignment” while they were at it, plus some crucial filter that I never remotely knew existed was naturally in the direst of straits, too. Rey, the tire center’s service representative, sucked in his breath, a look of terror on his face worse than even Roy Scheider’s chum-baiting, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat!” Rey gasped in mortification, “Mr. Ruzzell, about how long’s it been since you changed out this dern filter?”
“Well, lemme think,” I pondered, putting to use my doctorate in auto mechanics. “Probably, Rey, I’d guess it was about the last time I ever looked under my hood.” Earnestly solemn — licking his poised pencil tip in hand, and all — Rey chomped my baited hook: “So, ballpark, about when wouldja say that wuz, Mr. Ruzzell?”
“Hmmmmmm? Well, ballpark, it was either when the Rangers went to the Super Bowl last, or else it was probably more likely when my Park Place sales rep slammed down the hood back in, oh, March of 2013 as he tossed me the keys. Just out of curiosity’s sake, Rey, about how long do you think this wheel rotary thing’s gonna take anyhow — ballpark?”
Rey’s showroom (lit up as dauntingly as a Nuremberg rally) reeked an aromatic trifecta combined of artificial rubber, oily lubricants and stale Mary Jane; my hippocampus throbbed: “Rey, is there at least, like, any coffee or a TV room? Even a newspaper, maybe, while I wait?” Already, I was debating whether to just bolt and head over to the gorgeously relaxing, highway-robbery Park Place for a loaner. “Heck,” he grunted, nodding toward a grim looking doorway, “we got it all — vendin’ machines and everthang. Knock yourself out. It shouldn’t be mighty long.”
To say that the waiting room’s aesthetic could have given any state-of-the-art laundromat, circa 1967, a good run for its money — faded sherbet-hued plastic “scoop” chairs, metallic ivy wallpaper, linoleum flooring the color of scorched marmalade, the obligatory, barely still living philodendron positioned underneath a spot where the roof sometimes leaks — would have been an insult to The Summer of Love. Fittingly, my reading choices to select from (all two of them) practically echoed a New Yorker cartoon: The one where a grizzled hayseed donning a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN cap waits impatiently at the veteran’s clinic leafing through the office’s latest Time with a frustrated snort, “Oh my, President Johnson’s Great Society Program is in danger of budgetary cuts due to escalating Vietnam spending.” (Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?)
Both my own periodical options were equally as out of touch with reality, larded with the usual, mind-numbingly dyspeptic, lowest common-denominator clichés that could put even a kangaroo slamming meth up to the rafters asleep: O The Oprah Magazine sagely decried from its passé, seven-month-old cover, “LOBSTER GRILLED CHEESE OR SEX? ‘I choose sex,’ said no one ever.” Meanwhile, on the eight-month-old, ancient-history cover of Harper’s Bazaar, vogued a dead-faced Kendall Jenner channeling an even tawdrier doppelganger of Nancy Sinatra (Whodathunk such a feat possible!) posing in scant more than a white marabou feather boa, black accordion go-go boots and a pair of gargantuan blinged-out hoop earrings rivaling the girthy circumference of her boyfriends’ cock rings (perhaps she borrowed them from one) replete with a narcissistically perfect, cotton-candy Harper’s cover caption of varyingly numbing font sizes: Between Friends KENDALL JENNER LOOKS TO LOVE FOR SPRING. (Hey, hey, Kendall J., where’d you bury Doris Day?)
I couldn’t decide which of these two wastes of virgin forests was of a greater shocking insult to my LGBT soul: that Kendall, our modern-day Nancy Sinatra/Edie Sedgwick retread, has friends, or that Oprah’s eponymous magazine obviously employs no gay male staff writers whatsoever; despite her best valiant effort on its cover every month to dress as a Hee Haw drag diva recovering from peritonitis. After all, were she actually employing gays to write her ridiculous tag teasers, she’d have received a fierce finger-poppin’ in no uncertain terms, and been quickly illuminated to the fact that ain’t no gay man on planet Earth, Mz. Harpo, ever gonna pass up any nice juicy Grindr dick for no grilled cheese sandwich stack—lobster morsel temptations be damned!
Sheepishly, Rey suddenly peeked around the doorframe, knocking, “Mr. Ruzzell, mind if I have a private word with you?” I leaped up, ecstatic.
“Wow, you guys are fast. How much is the damage?” Rey blinked vacuously, “Uh, your car’s not even on the rack yet — I found a slug wedged ’tween your right rear tire’s grooves. If it’s yours, just ’tween us, I could put it in an envelope; nobody’d be any the wiser.”
It was my turn to vapidly blink: I couldn’t even wrap my mind around what he was blathering. I’d entered Kendall Jenner’s brain: I mean, who in the world keeps slugs for pets? And even if I were so “eccentric” as to desire owning a gastropod Mollusca, why would I house it in my tire treads? Is petroleum latex a treat they particularly enjoy? I motioned to Rey, “Just dump it over there in that philodendron, why don’t you? It sure couldn’t hurt it. Who knows, it might even bring the miserable thing back to life.”
“Uhm, but it ain’t the kinda slug you pour salt on, Mr. Ruzzell.” Rey’s head hung at me, accusatorily. “I think somebody’s been a playin’ with matches where they oughtn’t a been playin’.” To which I prissily assured, “Well, not that it’s any of your damned business, but I’ve never held a firearm in my entire… life.” (This, I realized startlingly, wasn’t being technically truthful.)
Hell, let’s just get all Second Amendmenty to it.
Dear Howard: To keep our marriage spark alive, me and my husband of three years now have begun getting into fantasy role-playing. He likes me to be the peeping Tom and him my victim, but now he’s talking about buying a gun — a pistol — for added “dramatic realism” but I’ve never even touched a gun before, and aiming one at a live person, particularly my husband, doesn’t really gel with my idea of arousal. What’s next, real bullets? Your thoughts? — Cade
Dearest Cadence: A la Kendall Jenner, this role requires no thinking: There’s fantasy play, and then there’s playing-out roles fantasized — pistol-whipping is the quickest way to forever kill any kinky sparks. I’ll elucidate for you, via a role experienced from my own life that, in fact, took place just about the same time last winter when Kendall was being “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” fantasy pho-togged, donning her beau’s you keep lyin’ when you oughta be truthin’ diamond cock ring earbobs:
It was Christmastime, during my regularly ordinary Friday Meals-On-Wheels route: A beautiful, warm sunshiny day, my first delivery, but a truck was blocking the middle of the one-way street; a slouched man on its hood was seated with his back to me. Forced to stop, I asked when he could please move a foot to either side, so that I could get around — a simple enough request, kindly requiring but a simple remedy. Instead, what I got was a maniac who leaped off his hood and started strutting toward me with a gun aimed directly at my face. And this, children, is where reflexes kick in.
There was no time to think rationally. All I heard in my head was, “Oh, hell no, it ain’t ending like this!” Stepping out of my car, trancelike, I snatched the gun from his surprised hands, aimed it up upwards and pulled the trigger, repeatedly, until I stopped hearing firecracker noises. Noticing a swimming pool just across a fence on the other side of the road, I casually tossed the spent pistol into it and proceeded to deliver a schoolmarm sermon to my thwarted murderer as he backed away, gingerly, looking every bit as though he’d stumbled into a roomful of demons.
Crisply, I lectured, “The next time someone politely asks you please to pull over, then, by God, you pull the fuck over!” Then, quite serenely, I got back into my car and continued upon my mission of volunteerism in the other direction. Only later that evening, whilst addressing my
Christmas cards a la Serial Mom, did my hands, both, begin simultaneously trembling as it dawned, “Howard, that could have gone just so grotesquely wrong in so many different ways.” Especially had I been packin’ my own peacemaker — which, FYI, I would not have hesitated for one microsecond to blow that fothermucker’s head clean-off with.
Hence, the moral to my cautionary tale, Cade: No, it’s not, walk softly with your britches half-way down your butt and carry a BBC; rather, it’s if you pack a firearm, you’ll risk likely pulling it on someone crazier than even you. Guns belong exclusively in the hands of hunters who must shoot their own food to survive. These ain’t the pioneer days; Texas ain’t the frontier and your dick ain’t bigger just ’cause you carry a little piece. Thus, don’t buy guns, kidz, or you just may end up stuck throughout the remainder of your lifelong days imprisoned in a tire center with Kendall Jenner and a laughably photo-shopped “How To Make Your Life Sync With Your Soul” Oprah. Just shoot me now.
— Howard Lewis Russell
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