(Oh! Before I forget: wearing khakis with front pleats makes the whole dad-dancing thing even more powerful!)
So, as I was saying, there was this young idiot in his car outside the Starbucks. His car stereo’s bass was unnecessarily loud. He looked like he was stuck waiting for someone, so I figured he was a semi-prisoner and couldn’t just drive away. And I planted myself right in front of his car and started dad-dancing like Fuck yeah! This new music you kids listen to is amazing! Bring it on! I am grooving! I was grinding my hips. I was 1980s dancing, with swinging arms. For a full visual reference, check out Courteney Cox dancing with Bruce Springsteen in the video for “Dancing in the Dark.” I’m Courteney.
Oh, to see young Dumb-Dumb’s face. He was dying inside. Superpower! Passersby were enjoying my dancing, and why wouldn’t they? A dad dancing his brains out amuses everyone but the young.
This kid was actually in an awkward predicament. He couldn’t really get out and try to chase me away without foregrounding the lameness of his music and how ridiculous his whole cocooned nothing young life is. But here’s where the situation changed in an unexpected manner: another dad-dancer soon joined me: Keith. Keith! He positioned himself down the sidewalk, on the other side of Mr. Bling’s Blingmobile, and began echoing my moves, all in time to the Blingmobile’s bass beats. It was glorious. Between us, we managed to choreograph two minutes of riveting humiliation for that young twit.
Who plans life? Nobody plans life. You try to prepare for a few things and, if you’re in the right place at the right time, fortune smiles on you. And that is what happened for me and Keith. The young guy’s only option was to abandon whoever he was waiting for and drive away. As Keith and I came together to give each other celebratory high fives, another car slithered up and parked in the kid’s spot. It was a talent scout connected with the local TV station, who offered us a slot on the evening news if we’d dad-shame another young idiot in his car. Fuck yeah!
So that’s how Keith and I formed Dad-Dancer-5000, currently the nineteenth-most-visited YouTube channel on earth. We’ve recruited four more dads, who, to be honest, are a bit too young and a little too fit to be total dads like me. I think they need to put on a bit more of a flesh girdle, but Ella said they were okay as they are because we needed a DILF factor. When she said this, I will admit I had to leave the room and quickly go to Urban Dictionary to look up DILF—how did Ella know a word like DILF? When I asked her, though, she just asked me what planet I live on.
This week I’ve been in negotiations with Hollywood, Las Vegas and Broadway. The universe loves Dad-Dancer-5000! We’re The Full Monty in pleated khakis. We have what my agent calls “authentic cluelessness,” which I think is a put-down, but I don’t care. And I can’t believe how broad my vision has become. “Dads on Ice”! “Cirque D’ad”! Maybe a pile of Dad movies with Adam Sandler or Ben Stiller. They’re certainly age-appropriate.
Wait.
Sorry.
Hang on a sec—I really need to take this call.
28
Laptop
I STARTED REPAIRING laptops part-time in college, and man, has it changed the way I look at humanity. These days, I prefer working with older people because I find them less scary than young people and they take everything I say as gospel—they don’t argue when I say I have to take their laptop away for two or three days “to run a diagnostic.” Assuming they didn’t password-encrypt their files (they hardly ever do), the first thing I do is suck everything I can from their hard drive onto my own file storage system and then browse through it over lunch. If it’s a man’s laptop I’ve raided, I first look for porn, obviously. Women pretty much never have porn.
In my experience, my older male clients either have really terrible porn—tiny JPEGs and not many of them—or they have a billion images of just the craziest shit, super-organized into specific folders with super-boring folder names (Tax_files_2011_leftover), figuring that no one would ever suspect what such a file contains. Me, I suspect everything about everybody.
Sometimes the porn images are mixed in with family photos, so you go from a kid’s christening to Destroying_Ashley’s_Hole to a summer barbecue to fecal_03_highrez886 to JPEGs of some guy washing his car. It used to freak me out that even the dullest-looking guy might have dolphin sex orgy folders on his drive (yes, that’s a thing). But then, isn’t that what they say about serial killers, too? You know: there’s no way on earth he could be the one who made a delicious broth out of hitchhikers.
I’ve never found kiddie porn, which I’m grateful for. Curiosity can be a curse. But I can tell from some of these guys’ stashes that they maybe wish they had some. I’ve found some bestiality, too, not just dolphins, but—I’m not going there. It’s as sick as you’d think, but what am I going to do—call the cops? I would if I found some truly scary shit, I think, or kiddie porn.
The trouble is that other people’s porn gets repetitive so quickly that it soon fails to register. What would be so bad that I’d call in the law? I’ve now reached the point where I just assume that every man has a massive porn trove inside his head as well as on his hard drive. I mean, I think about sex about 25 percent of my waking hours. And I figure so does everyone else.
My uncle works border security, and after he was put on a porn squad to track down a kid exploitation ring of some sort, he got PTSD and had to go for therapy. I guess I should find comfort in knowing that most people’s porn style is pretty vanilla.
I always tell people their laptop is clean as a whistle when I hand it back. Sometimes I wonder if I should delete their porn “accidentally” while I’m repairing their laptop, but what kind of judgy statement would that be? Instead, I sometimes add images to the troves of my customers—just enough to make them go WTF? but not enough that they’d email me demanding to know if I added a four-handed massage compilation to the Thailand holiday folder they labeled Invoices_taxpaid_march2016.
There’s this really good word my sister told me: “sonder.” It’s like “wonder” but with an “s.” “Sonder” describes the moment when you’re downtown and you look at all the people walking by and realize that all of them have an inner world that’s as complex and fucked up and noisy as your own. The thought of all that complexity freaks you out and you have to stop thinking about it or you’ll go totally nuts. That’s what other people’s porn does to me. It puts me in a state of sonder so extreme that I have to blank it all out and fix the graphics card or broken keypad or whatever it is that needs fixing and pretend I saw nothing.
You’re likely wondering whether I ever read my customers’ emails. I have, but only a few times, back when I started. People’s emails are about as interesting as snatches of conversation you hear in public, things like Barb didn’t bring the onion dip to the tailgate party again this year, and I don’t know how many more times I can take her “accidentally” forgetting it. Sometimes I wondered if I should email Barb and tell her people were crapping on her reputation because of her onion dip negligence. But why bother? Barb is lazy and, I’m guessing, hates going to tailgate parties anyway.
I once read that the people to feel sorry for in life are Catholic priests because they have to sit in that weird black photo booth confessional box and listen to people hash out the same ten sins, over and over and over. If nothing else, your typical priest must spend hours trying to dream up a new sin—something, anything, to make their job more interesting.
If there were a new sin, what might it be? Ghosting people after a few bad dates? Trolling? Maybe we’ve already invented a new sin and just haven’t realized it—something we do with our bodies and the internet? I mean, every time I go online, I feel like there’s something unclean just about everywhere I go. We all do. Maybe our search histories are the eighth deadly sin. Think about it. It makes sense.
29
Karen
I’M A NICE PERSON, yes, but nice people are not necessarily good people. If you were to m
eet me, you might think, Oh, that Karen is so soft-spoken and gentle. She must surely love kittens and peace and democracy. But you’d be wrong. I don’t like kittens, and I don’t like blacks, and gays scare the shit out of me, especially lesbians—I mean, what’s that all about? How did God put that 2+2 together? (Answer: God didn’t.)
It’s not just blacks and gays I don’t like. You may as well throw in Latinos and basically anyone who’s not white. And there are lots more people and things I loathe, but there are only so many hours in a day to devote to hate.
I worry that I’m giving you the wrong impression here. While I hate a lot of things, it’s true, in my job as a talent scout and manager, you have to actually like the people you represent. I generally do. I especially like them when they do something weird and aren’t aware of how weird they are—like Derek, the first dad-dancer. He was my biggest find. I was in a shitty mood, driving home from my older brother’s second DUI hearing, and we had to stop somewhere to buy him a bus pass, of all things. I was scanning the radio, trying to find a classic rock station, and there was Derek, outside a Starbucks, doing this sphincter-clenchingly accurate imitation of Courteney Cox dancing onstage with Bruce Springsteen in the official “Dancing in the Dark” video.
I fell for Derek right then and there, which is complicated because Derek’s black. So does that mean I’ve stopped hating black people? It’s so complicated! It has to be weird for Derek or any black or gay or Latino or whoever, walking through life, knowing that behind every other smile you receive, someone wants you dead.
The thing about Dad-Dancer-5000 was that it happened so quickly. It was three weeks from spotting Derek that afternoon outside the Starbucks to booking five dad-dancers on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Three weeks! Looks like someone here has their shit together. [Gently puffs a breath onto her right hand’s fingernails and buffs them on her sweater.]
That first wild month I doubt I slept even three hours. First I signed Derek, then his friend Keith. You may be wondering where I found three more dancers so quickly, and the answer is that I found them during a cigarette break outside a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. If you ever need to quickly recruit some human beings, I totally recommend NA meetings. Those people always need cash, and they’ll sign away all rights in perpetuity just so they can back-pay a sliver of alimony. At the end of the meeting, I just said, “I need three guys who look like dads and who can dance.” Presto.
I didn’t make it with Derek until after we were on Jimmy Kimmel. We were all high on life that night, drinking champagne on other people’s dimes in one of those New York hotel lobby bars with cheesy copyright-free pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra bought from Costco all over the walls. Then, “Oh my Lord, it’s already midnight! And we have Good Morning America in six hours. Bedtime for everyone!”
Derek and I ended up alone in the elevator because we were on the same floor, and that was it. And it was great, but he’s so…black, and I kept being pulled in and out of being turned on by him and being surprised that I was with a black guy.
So, yes, as I said, I’m not a good person, and yet the world keeps spinning. Deal with it. And besides, the money kept flowing in, and the gigs got bigger and better. We had to recast two of the original NA recruits with professional dancers when they fell off the wagon again; for some people, money is a curse. I mean, for a few months there, I felt like I was a 1980s game show contestant trapped inside a plexiglass bubble in which thousand-dollar bills were flying around me and all I had to do was grab, grab, grab and all of this money was mine.
With all that cash flowing in, I could have had any rent boy or male escort I wanted. The trouble was, I was only turned on by Derek, belly roll and all. Shoot me now. So there I was, standing in the wings, all motherly and meek, telling him and the guys how terrific they all were on camera. And then, finally, I’d get to Derek’s room, where he’d be on the phone with his wife or one of his kids and I had to be invisible for endless minutes while he talked about boring married shit.
Still, I had his number. After he hung up, looking guilty as only a dad’s dad can look, all I had to say was something like “Derek, I think I’ve figured out a new social media strategy for you” and he’d yank me onto the bed and get all black all over me.
Maybe the thing I hate the most about sex is that it always seems to make you betray yourself.
30
Taco Bell
ONE OF THE STUPIDEST things someone ever said about me being born deaf was at a wedding reception. A guest glanced my way and said to her friend, “Lucky her! It must be so peaceful inside her head.” Like I can’t lip-read. I grabbed a place-setting card and wrote, “I don’t hear silence inside my head. I hear nothing.”
I think she remained a completely unchanged human being, but I don’t mind. You don’t miss what you never had, though I think I would have learned to read and write ten times faster if I knew what these letters you see here actually “sound like” in your head.
I’m jealous that most people get to have a voice in their heads while I don’t. What is it like to “talk to yourself”? What is it like to have a little angel on one shoulder, speaking into one ear, while a devil whispers in the other? Is it funny? Is it confusing? And don’t get me going about music. People never stop reminding me what a loss it is not to experience it. Thanks, everyone! I’ll just sit in the corner and play Bejeweled on my iPhone while you all dance.
Confession: I can sign, but I hate doing it. I can walk invisible in a crowd and no one will know I’m not like them. As soon as I sign, I look like a freak. (Yes, I know this is internalized self-hatred.) Everyone I meet feels bad because they don’t know sign language, so they give me their “solidarity face” as if we were discussing the plight of the American Indian or a heap of burning koala bears.
On the other hand, all you hearing people have no idea how stupid most of you look when you dance. Men especially. They purse their lips and try to look black. It just looks dumb. Which is why Derek was a revelation. Dad-dancing changed my life. Derek made me rethink what it means to be inside my body, and I’m sorry it all blew up the way it did. It was all kind of a fluke, but how can real love be a fluke? It can’t be! It’s love!
I was eating Taco Bell outside the office for the 555th time because Sandy at the counter can sign and I’m too lazy to cultivate new fast-food outlets. I’d just had a new asshole ripped out of me by the temporary financial officer because I didn’t get an approval from a client on storage fees in case there was a project delay, and it blew up in our faces. Boring! I think the guy just wanted to show everyone what a hard-ass he is so that he could be hired full-time. And he picks on me?
Dick.
So I was in a shitty mood, sitting on the concrete lip around the fountain, and Derek walked past. When he saw me, he noticed I didn’t look very happy, so he did a mime thing. (I love mimes! They’re actors who can’t speak or hear!) Derek was like, “Whazzup, young lady?!”
I didn’t know what to make of him. He was wearing a horrible Christmas sweater (I had no idea who he was, so didn’t know this was his branding). He was just this kind of hot black dude with a dad bod who was determined to make me laugh. The thing is, for the first few minutes, he didn’t know I could only lip-read him.
He worked so hard. Robin Williams came to mind. And when Derek did Courteney Cox’s dance from the end of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” video, I almost choked from the brilliance of it, but I still refused to laugh. I mean, this was a dad doing the dance, and the thing about Derek is that he understands cringe better than anyone on earth. A crowd soon gathered around our game of cat and mouse, and everyone was laughing, but not tough little me.
I finally caved when he started to do Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” The crowd went wild. How often do you meet a genius? Maybe never, they’re that rare.
On seeing me smile, he stopped, wiped his brow and said to me, “You
ng lady, you’re the toughest customer I ever met.”
I couldn’t help myself: I had to reply in sign language. “You’re the hardest worker I’ve ever met,” I signed. He freaked out because he thought he’d disrespected my deafness, but I thought it was hilarious. He is hilarious.
We swapped phone numbers and that evening we spent three hours at the Alpine Inn Motel, and we totally rocked it.
Bonus Question: If you see a row of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!s with no words or letters attached, what does that “sound like” inside your head?
Double Bonus Question: When you read a sentence that ends with “!” do you go back and reread it like you’re shouting inside your head? And what is shouting? I know people look very ugly when they shout, so it can’t be good. What is shouting!?!?!! I need to know!!!!!!!!
31
Kirkland Products
I ATTENDED AN OPTIONAL Costco employee motivation seminar because it meant thirty fewer minutes on my shift in which I had to deal with these wretched beings we have circulating through our store called customers. I’m not a people person, and I only ended up running the till at a Costco because two cashiers went on maternity leave at the same time and I happened to be the warm body holding an application form in front of him when the HR guy realized he was about to be two bodies short.
[*Fist bump*]
Part of the seminar was to try to think outside the box (Oh God, people still say this shit?) and come up with new ways of generating long-term Costco loyalty. I put up my hand. “Why not give a $500 Costco voucher to anyone who can show they legally made ‘Kirkland’ the middle name of their newborn child?”
Suddenly, fifteen faces were staring at me. The guy running the show said, “Chloe, that’s interesting. How did you think of that?”
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