I'll Mature When I'm Dead

by Dave Barry

  I’ve found that in many ways the Jewish worship service is similar to a Christian service. You sit down; you stand up; you sit back down; you remark frequently, as a group, on how great God is; you check your watch and note that it is 10:31 A.M. and vow not to keep checking because it only makes time go slower; you wonder if you could get away with very subtly checking your text messages and decide it is probably not worth incurring the wrath of God or, worse, your wife; you stand back up; you sit back down; you try to remember the name of the movie starring Kevin Bacon that has essentially the same plot as Jaws except it’s set in the Nevada desert and instead of a giant man-eating shark it has giant man-eating worms capable of underground speeds approaching fifty miles per hour; you stand back up; you finally think of a really clever comeback you could have used on the guy who was being a jerk at your daughter’s basketball game several months earlier; you sit back down; you mentally recite the lyrics to “Maybelline,” Chuck Berry’s masterpiece song about two fast cars and one unfaithful woman, including the greatest couplet ever written about automotive thermodynamics, “Rainwater blowin’ all under my hood / I knew that was doin’ my motor good”; you speculate on what the giant worms had supposedly been surviving on out there in the desert before they started eating movie actors; you stand back up; you sit back down; your leg falls asleep; you fall asleep; your wife elbows you awake because you are making a noise like a warthog with a nasal infection; you remember, with a feeling of triumph, that the Kevin Bacon movie was called Tremors; you decide to reward yourself by sneaking another peek at your watch; your mood turns to despair when you see that the time is still 10:31 A.M. And so on.

  Some Jewish holy day services are highlighted by a dramatic moment when a man gets up in front of everybody and blows on a “shofar,” which is the horn of a ram. As you can imagine, this really upsets the ram.

  I’m kidding; the horn is no longer attached to the ram. The ram (and I envy it) is elsewhere, possibly watching old episodes of Reno 911 on TiVo. But the blowing of the shofar is still considered a highlight because it means you have reached the climax of the service, which means there’s only about fourteen more hours to go.

  After the service there is usually eating. Or sometimes there is fasting. Either way, there is a lot of thinking about food. Food is extremely important in the Jewish religion; the word “brisket” alone appears more than 950 times in the Torah. The food connection is especially strong on Passover, the second or third most holy holiday in the Jewish calendar, which commemorates the Exodus, when the Israelites escaped from Egypt, pursued by giant man-eating worms.

  No, seriously, they were pursued by the Egyptians, and on Passover Jewish people hold a special meal called a seder, in which a lot of the food is symbolic. For example, when the Israelites were fleeing Egypt, they did not have time to let their bread rise, so at the seder you are served matzo, which is a very sturdy construction-grade unleavened cracker measuring about eighteen square feet, which you can either eat, sleep under, or break a sharp piece off of for use as a weapon against the Egyptians. Also you drink wine, which symbolizes the fact that, hey, there’s wine.

  My favorite part of the seder is the reciting of the 10 Plagues of Egypt, which God used to convince Pharaoh to free the Israelites. This story illustrates one major difference between me and God. If I were an all-powerful supreme being, I would appear before Pharaoh and order him to let the Israelites go, and if he said no, FWOOM,32 there would be a lightning bolt, and when the smoke cleared, there would be a Pharaoh-shaped smear on the floor. Then I would look around the room in a casual yet menacing manner and ask to speak with the Vice Pharaoh. In other words, I would be an unsubtle, straight-ahead, Dick Cheney style of supreme being.

  God was much cooler. He sent Moses to speak to the Pharaoh, and when the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites, inflicted an escalating series of plagues on Egypt, including flies, cattle disease, lice, hail, boils, locusts, and fruitcake.

  No, I’m kidding about the fruitcake. God wasn’t that wrathful. But He did send the other plagues, and I always look forward to reciting them during the seder because one of them is: frogs. Yes! God caused Egypt to be overrun with frogs. That kind of originality is exactly why we call Him the supreme being. And if you don’t think frogs sounds like a scary plague, you don’t know my mother-in-law. She is terrified of frogs. Once, when we were supposed to have dinner with her, she called to tell us that she couldn’t leave her condominium building because there was a frog outside the door. Seriously. We tried to convince her that there was no real danger, but she wouldn’t listen. In her mind, the frog was waiting out there specifically for her. If she went outside, her lifeless body would be found the next morning in the bushes, covered with what the coroner would later identify as several thousand tongue marks, and then we would be sorry.

  I realize that if you were raised, as I was, in a Christian household, some of these Jewish traditions may seem strange, even weird (although I have yet to encounter anything in the Jewish tradition any weirder than, say, the Easter Bunny). But I believe, based on my experience attending both Christian and Jewish worship services, that the two religions have a lot in common. To help you see what I mean, I’ve created the following chart comparing Judaism and Christianity:

  Yes, there are differences. But in my view they are not as significant as the similarities. I believe that if we could all focus less on what divides us, and more on what we agree on, this would be a better and happier world, both here and in the hereafter, for people of all religions. Except of course for us jokeatarians. We’re definitely going to wind up in hell. Surrounded by fruitcake.

  Fangs of Endearment

  A Vampire Novel

  CHAPTER ONE

  Warning

  With a feeling of ominous foreboding based on the cliff-hanger ending of the last book, I turned my battered old pickup truck into the last remaining parking spot outside Creepstone High School. I glanced in the rearview mirror and scrunched my forehead in dismay as I realized for the millionth time that I do not consider myself at all attractive, although roughly 85 percent of the male characters I encounter either fall in love with me or want to kill me, or both, and in the movie version I am portrayed by a total babe.

  Heaving a sigh of exasperation, I creaked open the truck door and, with my trademark charming clumsiness, fell out face-first. But before I hit the asphalt, Phil was there to catch me, having covered the seventy-five yards from his luxury car to my truck in two-tenths of a second, although fortunately nobody noticed this because Phil is brilliantly clever, and the other students at Creepstone High have the observational skills of boiled ham.

  Phil swooped me into his arms using the super vampire strength that he has in addition to his super vampire speed and his ability to read minds, perform complex mathematical calculations in his head, assemble a working nuclear submarine entirely from clock parts, and recite all the lyrics to Guys and Dolls backward.

  “Good morning,” he breathed calmly.

  For a moment I was unable to respond, because I was so stunned, as I will be many, many more times in this novel, by how unbelievably handsome he is, with his perfect face and chiseled cheekbones, and his gorgeous eyes that change color depending on how recently he has sucked all the blood out of a live bear, and his perfectly teased hair tousling down over his broad gorgeous forehead speckled with beautiful little perfect beads of condensation caused by the fact that he has the same body temperature as an Eskimo Pie. Even through my unfashionable dress that I was wearing because I don’t care about fashion despite being so attractive to men, I could feel the chill of his granite-hard arms. It was like being hefted by a robot that had spent the night in a cold meat locker. I was in heaven.

  “Put me down,” I insisted in a tone of determined insistence.

  “Why? ” he questioned, arching a single perfect gorgeous eyebrow into a quizzical arch.

  “I have to get to class,” I asserted, struggling ineffectively to escape h
is powerful yet sensitive grasp.

  “There’s plenty of time,” he retorted, with a twisting smirk of his perfect lips.

  “Maybe for you,” I objected with a wry smile.

  We can engage in this kind of witty banter for pages on end.

  Finally relenting with a sigh, Phil gently set me down on the parking lot and took my hand in his strong and perfect hand that he sometimes lovingly immerses in my Coke Zero to cool it to exactly the right temperature. Walking toward the school, we were joined by Phil’s brothers and sisters, who are all also gorgeous brilliant wealthy sophisticated centuries-old vampires posing as high-school students for reasons that are never totally clear.

  As we entered the school I felt Phil’s grip tighten, possibly fracturing my ring and index fingers. Looking up I saw the reason: Stewart was striding toward us in an ominous way. Stewart is a member of an indigenous tribe of Native Americans who become werewolves at puberty, in addition to developing acne. They do not get along with the vampires. One time in boys’ phys. ed. the two sides played each other in volleyball, and before it was over seven civilian students had been disemboweled. This could have created a real stink had not the Creepstone High authorities, who are even less observant than the student body, concluded that the cause was an unusually fast-acting stomach flu.

  But tensions still simmered, as I could see by the dark look in Stewart’s brooding, smoldering, husky eyes. He is not as handsome as Phil, who makes Brad Pitt look like a yak butt. But he is still attractive in his own lanky darkly smoldering indigenous tribal way, and it goes without saying that he is in love with me and wants to marry me. I’m in love with him, too, but not as much as I am with Phil, who if all goes well is going to make me a vampire soon so we can spend all eternity being gorgeous and sensitive and sucking on bears together. I long for that day, but I hate knowing that I am hurting Stewart so badly by being so attractive to him without trying to or consciously realizing that I am.

  “Hello, Stewart,” I mouthed with a facial expression of sorrowful chagrin.

  He looked at Phil with a look of pure lanky indigenous hatred before turning to me and replying, with a voice drenched in the aching and smoldering longingness of a powerful emotion that I knew he could never express in words, “Hello.”

  “What do you want?” hissed Phil with anger through his perfect white teeth, although not the ones that were currently retracted.

  “I’m not talking to you, leech,” retorted Stewart with a flash of anger that made me worry that he was about to sprout full-body fur and teeth the size of steak knives, which could lead to bloodshed, death, and—if the school authorities witnessed it—detention.

  “Stop it, you two,” I protested, my heart filling with despair at how much these two attractive males, despite being mortal enemies with completely different lifestyles and diets, were so much alike in the sense of being insanely crazy for me. “What is it, Stewart?” I added in a sincere voice of concerned friendship.

  He looked at me with his dark lanky eyes, and for a moment I saw in his expression the thoughtful and caring young man with whom I had shared so many emotional moments in the previous book without ever actually doing it. Suddenly his expression changed to one of dark foreboding. “If you go out in the woods today,” he whispered hoarsely, “you better not go alone.”

  “What . . .” I protested elliptically. But Stewart was already striding lankily away. I turned to Phil, but before I could speak I was struck dumb by the perfection of his chiseled cheekbones, and the realization that, of all the girls in the world, I was the one he found irresistibly attractive, as so many males do, although for the life of me I don’t see why because as far as I am concerned there is nothing special about me, me, me. Phil was watching Stewart’s back, and on his impossibly handsome face I could see an expression of anger mixed with worry, and possibly thirst.

  Finally finding my voice, I inquired, “What did he mean by that?”

  “Mean by what?” replied Phil flatly.

  “About me not going into the woods alone,” I clarified.

  Phil turned his perfect gaze upon me, causing me to be once again struck by how gorgeous etc. etc. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he soothed calmly, adding, “I’m especially sure it’s not Denise the vengeful psychopathic female vampire from the previous book who has vowed to hunt you down and torture you to death and who has been sighted recently in the woods around Creepstone. There is definitely no need to worry about that,” he added with a quick glance at his brothers and sisters, who sprinted off toward the woods at speeds in excess of 180 miles per hour.

  Despite Phil’s reassurance, there was something in his tone that troubled me. But what was it? What had Stewart been trying to tell me? Was something bad about to happen? Would I soon find myself in yet another dramatic plot situation filled with peril? And why did everybody find me so attractive?

  Before I could answer these questions, the bell rang.

  “I have to get to calculus class!” I exclaimed with rue, adding, “There’s a test today.”

  “You’ll do fine,” kidded Phil with an impish grin on his perfect features.

  “Not if I don’t get there!” I bantered in reply as I turned with such haste that in my endearing clumsiness I would have smashed face-first into the large plate-glass main door if Phil had not yanked it off its hinges with one hand and flung it aside, decapitating two freshmen. They were not major characters, but I could not help but wonder, as I hurried off to class, if this was an omen of bad things to come.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Decision

  “How was school today?” inquired my father, Pete, looking up from the newspaper as he sat at the kitchen table in our modest home where we live together without my mother, who divorced my father and lives with her new husband in Florida and appears only sporadically as needed.

  “Fine,” I responded noncommittally as I removed a Swanson’s Hungry Man Chicken Burrito dinner from the oven and set it down.

  “Ouch,” he retorted, because with my endearing clumsiness I had set it on his forearm.

  “Sorry!” I exclaimed in dismay.

  “Don’t worry,” he sighed with his usual stoic calm as a blister the size of a hockey puck appeared on his skin next to the eight-inch scar from the time I made shish kebabs. “Listen,” he continued, “you seem a little distracted lately. Is there something wrong?”

  I hesitated. Pete is chief of police of Creepstone, but he is not exactly Sherlock Holmes, if you catch my drift. He has so far failed to pick up on the fact that my boyfriend is a vampire who spends every night in my room, and that my other boyfriend is a werewolf, and that Creepstone, not to mention the entire state of Washington, is teeming with violent homicidal supernatural creatures, about 60 percent of whom are trying to kill me personally.

  “No,” I responded simply. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  Satisfied, Pete grunted and returned to his paper. Then, remembering something in his mind, he looked up again.

  “By the way,” he intoned, “I want you to stay out of the woods.”

  I gasped and dropped my fork, which penetrated about a half-inch into Pete’s foot.

  “Why?” I inquired forebodingly.

  “There’s been some trouble,” he expressed with a wince as he pulled the fork out and put it on the table out of my reach.

  “What kind of trouble? ” I probed.

  “In the past two days, a hundred and fifty-eight hikers have been killed in the woods around Creepstone.”

  “Killed?” I queried. I felt a cold feeling shoot through my veins like an intravenous Slushie. “How?” I elaborated.

  “It’s the darnedest thing,” marveled Pete. “All of them were violently dismembered, apparently by someone or something with incredibly savage strength. Some of the victims’ limbs were found as far as two football fields away from their bodies.”

  I stared at him with a facial expression of shock.

  “But how . . .” I began, sea
rching for the words to complete the question that was even then forming in my brain. “How did two football fields get into the woods?”

  Pete shook his head and shrugged, raising and lowering his shoulders to indicate he didn’t know the answer. “That’s got us stumped so far,” he expressed ruefully. “Also we can’t figure out what’s killing all these hikers. I mean, sure, we usually get two or three violent-dismemberment hiker deaths a week around here; that’s been going on as long as anybody can remember. But a hundred and fifty-eight dead in two days seems like a lot. Doc Smelkins examined all of the body pieces we were able to find, and he ruled out natural causes such as hookworm.”

  “Then what could it be?” I persisted.

  “Right now we’re working on the theory that it could be a bobcat, or a pack of unusually aggressive squirrels. But until we get this thing figured out, I don’t want you going out in the woods, OK?”

  I nodded pensively, thinking. First Stewart had warned me not to go into the woods. Then Phil had also mentioned something about the woods . . . What was it?

  At the thought of Phil, I allowed myself a small smile of happiness due to the fact that he is so incredibly beautiful and perfectly chiseled, and yet he still chose me—Me! With all my trademark quirks!—over all the other women in the world including Angelina Jolie. But then my forehead puckered into a frown as I remembered that Phil had mentioned that Denise the psychopathic vampire who was stalking me from the previous book had been sighted recently in the woods. Could she have something to do with the 158 slain hikers? Should I mention any of this to Pete? With all these people being slaughtered, and with him being responsible for the safety of the community, shouldn’t I tell him about the imminent danger so he could protect himself and all the other innocent human lives being threatened?