by Dave Barry
So my partners and I went around presenting our proposal to various bankers, and they thought it was the greatest thing they had ever heard. They would set up extra chairs and invite all their banker friends over, and they’d make us go through our proposal again and again, and when we’d get to the part about not using any of our own money, they’d fall over backwards and hurl their loan application forms into the air and laugh until there was spittle all over their vests. They had evidently not read the book.
So eventually we worked out a compromise arrangement whereby my partners and I would each provide our life’s savings, and the bank would provide a Closing Ceremony, which is when you go into a little room with unfamiliar lawyers and you sign every piece of paper they have managed to acquire in their lives, including book reports. This is how we came to acquire, as an investment, eight toilets. The Head Toilet, of course, immediately fired off an urgent message to the others. “We have been purchased,” the message said, “by people who have read a real estate investment book.” As you can imagine, the sound of hysterical gurgling went on well into the night.
I became intimately familiar with every single one of these investment toilets. See, my partners all had useful skills, such as carpentry, whereas my only area of proven competence was listening to the radio, so we agreed that I would learn how to be the plumber. Gradually, I learned that there are two major toilet facts:
TOILET FACT NUMBER ONE: The only way to prevent a toilet part from leaking is to tighten it until it breaks.
TOILET FACT NUMBER TWO: Circling the Earth, at this very moment, is an alien spacecraft that is sending down powerful radio beams that affect the brains of tenants in such a way that they must put inappropriate objects in the toilet. They cannot help themselves. “Find an inappropriate object!” the beam commands them. “Put it in the toilet RIGHT NOW!”
You landlords out there, you know I’m telling the truth, right? And the tenants, they don’t even remember what they have done. “How in the world did THAT get in there?” they say, when you show them, for example, a harmonica. “Ha ha!” they add. “Ha ha,” you agree, all the while calculating the various angles and forces involved in killing them with your wrench.
Because of these two facts, I soon got to know all eight toilets personally, as individuals. I would call them by name. “So, Bob,” I would say. “Leaking again, eh? How would you like to be replaced, Bob? How would you like to be taken outside and have your smooth white porcelain body smashed repeatedly with a hammer? Because there are plenty more toilets, down at the Home Center, who would love to have your job.” But Bob would just chuckle, knowing that even if I could somehow manage to install an entire new toilet, it would quickly become part of the cadre.
This went on for several years, during which I amassed the world’s largest privately held collection of broken toilet parts, but not, surprisingly enough, great wealth, so finally I ceased playing an active role in the investment property. But I have used the knowledge I acquired, in my home. When our toilets break, I call the plumber, and I am able to describe the problem in technical plumbing terms. “It’s our toilets,” I say. “They are broken.” And he comes out and fixes them, and I don’t care how much he charges. “That will be $68,000,” he could tell me, and I would come up with it, somehow, because anything is better than having to deal with the toilets directly. Particularly the one in the hall bathroom. Norman.
The Elements Of Elegance
Today we’re going to talk about how you can hold an elegant dinner party in your home. Well, not really your home, of course. You’ll need a much more elegant home, one where there is fine nonvelveteen art on the walls and a harp in the corner of the living room and some effort has been made over the years to clean behind the toilets.
You’ll also need elegant guests, by which I mean not your friends. You want to invite socially prominent people, which means people who do not object to being called Thad and Bootsie right to their faces and who are directly affected by oil-company mergers. The best way to lure such people to your dinner party is to tell them it has something to do with disease. Socially prominent people are very fond of disease, because it gives them a chance to have these really elaborate charity functions, and the newspaper headlines say “EVENING IN PARIS BALL RAISES MONEY TO FIGHT GOUT” instead of “RICH PEOPLE AMUSE THEMSELVES.”
Now let’s plan your menu. The most elegant and sophisticated dishes are those that involve greasy little unsanitary birds with no meat and about 60
billion bones, such as grouse. If your local supermarket doesn’t carry grouse, your best bet is to go into the woods and tramp around the underbrush until you hear something rustling, then cut loose with 30-second bursts from an automatic weapon until all rustling ceases. Then you merely squat down and scoop up anything that looks like a grouse or some other protein-based life form. It would also be a good idea to take along a pig, which will automatically without any prior training root around for truffles, a kind of delicacy that is very popular among pigs and French people. When you see the pig chewing something, fire a few warning shots over its head and collect whatever it spits out in a Mason jar.
To prepare your grouse, remove the feathers or fur, open up the bodies, remove the organs and parasites and mulch them in the blender until they turn to pate. Now place the grouse corpses on a stout pan and insert them into a heated oven, dousing them from time to time with A-1 sauce.
When your guests arrive, your first responsibility is to make them feel at ease. I strongly suggest you get a copy of the Complete Book of Games and Stunts published by Bonanza Books and authored by Darwin A. Hindman, Ph.D., professor of physical education at the University of Missouri, available at garage sales everywhere. I especially recommend the “Funnel Trick” described in Chapter Four (“Snares”), wherein you tell the victim that the object is to place a penny on his forehead and tilt his head forward so the penny drops into a funnel stuck into his pants. However—get this—while he’s got his head tilted back, you pour a pitcher of water into the funnel and get his pants soaking wet! Be sure to follow this with a lighthearted remark (“You look like a cretin, Thad!”) and offer everybody a swig from the liqueur bottle.
Once your guests are loosened up, have them sit around the dinner table, and start by serving them each a small wad of truffles with a side wad of pate. Then bring on the grouse, after whanging each corpse briskly against the kitchen table so as to knock off the char. As your guests enjoy their meal, show great facial interest in whatever conversational topics they choose (“Grouse don’t have any teeth, do they?” “These aren’t truffles! These are cigarette filters drenched In pig saliva!”) Dessert should be something that has been set on fire.
After dinner, the men will gather around the radial-arm saw for cigars and brandy while the women head for the bathroom en masse to make pasta or whatever it is they do in there. Then you should herd everybody back into the living room for a cultural activity, such as humming and paging through one of those enormous $26.95 coffee-table books with names like The Tractors of Spain that people give you for Christmas when they get desperate.
Your guests will signal when they’re ready to leave by darting out of the room the instant you turn your back; be sure to intercept them at the door to say goodbye and obtain written statements to the effect that they had a wonderful time and will invite you over on a specific date. You really shouldn’t have to do this, but unfortunately many people today have forgotten even the basics of etiquette.
Restrooms And Other Resorts
What we had in mind was a fun and spontaneous get-away weekend in Key West with our son, Robert, our friends Gene and Arlene, and their two children, Molly and Danny. So we tossed several thousand child-related objects into our two cars and off we went in a little spontaneous convoy, and, after a couple of hours, Gene stopped at a nice restaurant for lunch, Except, of course, the children didn’t want to eat lunch. Children never want to eat in restaurants. What they want to do is to play un
der the table until the entrees arrive, then go to the bathroom.
And so we grown-ups sat there, trying to be relaxed, while our table, possessed from below by unseen forces, shrieked and vibrated like the furniture in the little girl’s bedroom in The Exorcist. In accordance with federal restaurant regulations, the people seated around us had no children of any kind whatsoever, probably never had, probably were there to discuss important corporate mergers, and so occasionally we’d dart our heads under the table and hiss “STOP THAT!” like some deranged type of duck. We kept this up until the entrees arrived, and it was time to accompany the children to the restroom.
The men’s room was very small and had not been cleaned since the Westward Expansion. Robert, seeing this, immediately announced that he had to do Number Two, and of course he insisted that I stand right outside the stall. I hate this situation, because when strangers come in to pee, there I am, apparently just hanging around for fun in this tiny repulsive bathroom. So to indicate that I’m actually there on official business, guarding a stall, I feel obligated to keep a conversation going with Robert, but the only topic I can ever think of to talk about, under the circumstance, is how the old Number Two is coming along. You’d feel like a fool in that situation, talking about, say, Iran. So I say: “How’re you doing in there, Robert?” in a ludicrously interested voice. And Robert says: “You just ASKED me that!” which is true. And I say “Ha ha!” to reassure the peeing stranger that I am merely engaging in parenthood and there is no cause for alarm.
And so, finally, we all got out of the restrooms, and we parents grabbed quick violent bites from our nice cold entrees in between checking young Danny’s head for signs of breakage after he walked into adjacent tables. Eventually, the waitress took the children’s plates, untouched, back to the kitchen to be frozen and reused hundreds of times as entrees for other children. Many modern efficient restaurants are now making their children’s entrees entirely out of plastic.
Eventually, we got ourselves back on the road, which was the signal for the children to announce that they were hungry, and, of course, they ate potato chips all the rest of the way to Key West. Once at the hotel we were totally unpacked in a matter of hours, and we decided to go to a restaurant, thus proving that long car trips do indeed damage your brain. We found a charming Italian place with fairly clean restrooms and a lovely illuminated fountain with a dangerous electrical cord to attract the children, especially young Danny, who is only two, but has already figured out hundreds of ways to kill himself.
At the sight of the entrees arriving, the children of course fled like startled deer, so we had one of those restaurant meals where you are constantly whirling your head around as you eat, trying to locate the children, with the ever-present danger that you’ll get your timing off and stab yourself in the side of the head with your fork. And then it was time to go back to the hotel for an intimate evening of sitting on the floor drinking beer and watching the older children bounce on the bed and eat potato chips while young Danny located bureaus to bang his head into.
For breakfast we found a charming buffet-style restaurant with medium restrooms and a cigarette machine that three small children, if they worked together, could pull over onto their heads.
After breakfast, we went back to our hotel so the children could get something to eat, and then we decided that the women would go shopping and the men, being Caring and Sharing eighties-style males, would take the children. Gene and I thought it would be fun to go to the beach, so off we went, unfortunately forgetting to take any of the items usually associated with the beach, such as toys, suntan lotion, rafts, or bathing suits. We did, however, remember to bring the children. Call it instinct.
Of course, as soon as we got to the beach, little Molly announced that she had to go to the bathroom, and so I watched Danny and Robert fill their shorts with beach muck while Gene and Molly hiked off in search of a restroom, which they eventually found a half-mile away. It took them a long time to get back, because Molly refuses to go into the men’s room and Gene can’t go into the women’s room, so he had to hang around right outside like a sex offender while Molly went in alone, only she came back five minutes later and reported that she couldn’t find the toilets. You wonder how we got this far as a species.
Finally, they got back, and we decided we’d better head back to the hotel, because one of the many things we had forgotten was young Danny’s diaper bag, and he was wearing his Big Boy underpants, making him, in Gene’s words, a “time bomb.”
That night, spontaneously, we hired a babysitter.
Revenge Of The Pork Person
OK, ladies, I want you all to line up according to height and prepare to receive your fashion orders for the fall season. You ladies want to be up-to-date, right? You don’t want to show up at work dressed in some dowdy old thing from last year, looking like Beaver Cleaver’s mother, do you? Of course not! You want to look the very best you possibly can, given your various physical deformities.
Ha ha! I’m just teasing you ladies, because I know how sensitive you tend to be about the way you look. I have never met a woman, no matter how attractive, who wasn’t convinced, deep down inside, that she was a real woofer. Men tend to be just the opposite. A man can have a belly you could house commercial aircraft in and a grand total of eight greasy strands of hair, which he grows real long and combs across the top of his head so that he looks, when viewed from above, like an egg in the grasp of a giant spider, plus this man can have B.O. to the point where he interferes with radio transmissions, and he will still be convinced that, in terms of attractiveness, he is borderline Don Johnson.
But not women. Women who look perfectly fine to other people are always seeing horrific physical flaws in themselves. I have this friend, Janice, who looks very nice and is a highly competent professional with a good job and a fine family, yet every now and then she will get very depressed, and do you want to know why? Because she thinks she has puffy ankles.
This worries her much more than, for example, the arms race. Her image of herself is that when she walks down the street, people whisper: “There she goes! The woman with the puffy ankles!”
Likewise my wife, who it goes without saying has a great figure and excellent legs, is convinced, and nothing will change her mind, that she has inadequate calves. This has resulted in a situation where—I can produce documentation to prove this—the number of lifetime fitness-club memberships she has purchased actually exceeds the total number of her legs.
What women think they should look like, of course, is the models in fashion advertisements. This is pretty comical, because when we talk about fashion models, we are talking about mutated women, the results of cruel genetic experiments performed by fashion designers so lacking in any sense of human decency that they think nothing of putting their initials on your eyeglass lenses. These experiments have resulted in a breed of fashion models who are 8 and sometimes 10 feet tall, yet who weigh no more than an abridged dictionary due to the fact that they have virtually none of the bodily features we normally associate with females such as hips and (let’s come right out and say it) bosoms. The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates. If a normal human woman puts on clothing designed for these unfortunate people, she is quite naturally going to look like Revenge of the Pork Person.
This was particularly true last year, when the Fashion Concept that we here in the fashion industry decided to thrust upon you ladies was the Big Shoulder Look. Remember that? What fun! I cannot tell you how many hours of enjoyment we got from watching you trying to have serious business careers while looking like Green Bay Packers in drag. At one point, we considered having you wear actual helmets, but we couldn’t figure out how to fit all our initials on them.
But that was last year. This year we, of course, have an entirely new concept. We have been working on it for just months and months now, and we are extremely proud of it, because it is so highly innovative. Are you ready? Here it is:
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br /> Gray.
Everybody got that? Better write it down! If we find any ladies out on the street without their gray on, we are going to be very upset. Also we are asking you to purchase certain mandatory accessories in the form of several thousand dollars worth of handbags, shoes, belts, and watch straps made from dead crocodiles. NO, YOU MAY NOT ASK WHY! JUST DO IT!
Sorry for that emotional outburst, ladies. It’s just that we work so hard to come up with these concepts, and it really frosts our shorts when we find ourselves being questioned by some bimbo consumer, pardon our French.
Looking ahead to the future, we see some very exciting developments looming on the fashion horizon for you ladies. Here, for example, is a real quotation from a recent issue of Vogue magazine, which uses capital letters for important fashion bulletins:
“THE LOOK OF THE MODERN WOMAN? IN MODERNIST ANDREE PUTMAN’S EYES, SHE’S STRONG-SHOULDERED, HIGH-BREASTED, ALMOST AMAZONIAN AND COMES WITH BUILT-IN HIGH HEELS. AT LEAST, THAT’S THE LOOK OF THE NEW PUTMAN-DESIGNED MANNEQUINS MAKING THEIR FIRST PUBLIC APPEARANCE NOW AT BARNEY’S NEW YORK. COME FALL, THE CREATURES WILL PROLIFERATE TO OTHER STORES, OTHER CITIES.”
Isn’t this exciting, ladies? There could come a time, perhaps in your very lifetimes, when we are no longer designing clothes even for mutated fashion models, but for mannequins based on entirely new concepts of what the female body really should look like, from deep thinkers such as Andree Putman. You could see the day when you can’t even buy shoes without getting large heel implants! Let’s all toss our hats into the air with joy! Our hats, by the way, should be gray porkpies.
Slope Flake
