My Custom Van

by Michael Ian Black

  Your number one fan,

  Michael Ian Black

  Dear René,

  After sending my last letter, I was immediately seized with regret for not enclosing a separate self-addressed stamped envelope. What if the reason you have not yet responded is because you misplaced the first envelope I sent and have been waiting for me to send another? I would never forgive myself if we were unable to develop a correspondence (friendship?) for want of a lousy international stamp!!!

  You will notice I am now enclosing TWO self-addressed stamped envelopes. That way you can either respond to my first two letters individually or together. (If you want to respond to this one as well, that’s going to be on YOUR dime! (J/K! LOL!))

  Until I hear back, I remain…

  Your fan,

  Michael Ian Black

  Dear René,

  What’s the deal with your postal system? It has now been over two months since my initial letter to you, and I still have not heard back. I knew that your medical system was a cesspool, but I had never heard anything negative about your postal service. Forgive me for not knowing, but is Canada a third world country?

  On the off chance that you have not received ANY of my previous letters, I am resending everything via FedEx. The only time I have ever had a problem with that company was the one time I attempted to send a package of smelling salts overseas.

  (Because you are in the music biz, I think you know what I mean when I say “smelling salts.” I mean cocaine.)

  As you can see, I have also enclosed a return FedEx envelope for you. All of this letter writing and FedExing is starting to add up. If you want to throw a couple bucks into the envelope along with everything else, I wouldn’t say no. (No Canadian money, please!!!)

  Some good news on my end: I approached a young girl at the mall and asked if she wanted to become rich and famous. Guess what she said? YES!!!

  I have already mortgaged my house, just like you, and I can’t wait to get into the studio to start “cutting” her first album. I’m thinking of calling it The Next Celine Dion. What do you think?

  Can I start planning a tour, or is this something I need to discuss with her parents? Is there a legal way to avoid telling them? How illegal is it if I don’t?

  Questions, questions, questions!!!

  Thanks,

  Michael Ian Black

  Talent Scout

  René,

  Trouble on the home front. Yesterday I received a VERY ANGRY visit from Stacy’s father. (Stacy is the girl I wrote to you about a while ago.) Long story short: despite my specific instructions NOT to tell her parents about our project, she spilled the beans. Half an hour later I’m dealing with an irate man at my doorstep making all kinds of wild accusations.

  I explained to him the situation, told him all about you, that you were behind this project, and that if he had a problem with it, he should contact you. He told me his lawyer (and possibly the police, if you can believe it) would be in touch. Anyway, don’t be surprised if you get a call.

  I think the whole thing is an effort to get a bigger piece of the merchandising. What do you think?

  Michael Ian Black

  Talent Scout

  Manager

  René,

  Once again, the FedEx guy passed my house without stopping. Once again I am forced to wonder if you are avoiding me. If so, I think I know why. You are jealous. You are jealous that I have found a future superstar (and bride?) while you are stuck playing second fiddle to the incomparable Celine Dion.

  I don’t blame you. My Stacy is younger, talenteder, and so much less French Canadian than Celine Dion will ever be! And even though I have yet to hear her actually “sing,” some talent doesn’t need singing. Some talent just IS.

  Also, I think it’s only fair to let you know that my beard is now fully grown in. How does it look? Objectively speaking, incredible. Furthermore, it looks better than your beard. How much better? SOOOO much better. Don’t believe me? I am enclosing a photo of myself as proof.

  Yes, the photo is “in the buff,” because I thought you should also see that I am in much better shape than you will ever be. Please notice that the sticker covering my privates is the kind that is easy to peel off and put back on. You will have to decide for yourself whether or not you can handle what’s underneath.

  Because of ongoing litigation involving my client’s family, my lawyer has advised me that we no longer communicate. So be it. This will be my last letter. But before I sign off, I wanted to thank you, Mr. Angélil. You have given me so much more than your autograph. You gave me an education.

  You taught me that dreams are more important than hard work and perseverance. You taught me that true talent will always overcome “the law.” But mostly, you taught me that the music business is cruel and fickle and cruel. Yes, I said cruel twice because that is how cruel this business can be.

  But I am not cruel, Mr. Angélil. I am a watcher of clouds and when I cast my eyes to the sky today, I see nothing but angelly days ahead.

  Sincerely,

  Michael Ian Black

  Talent Scout

  Manager

  Watcher of Clouds

  Icky

  “ICKY” is a word I would definitely use to describe myself. I do not see it listed here on this form. I see “Caucasian,” “African-American,” “Hispanic,” “Native American,” “Asian,” and “Other,” but no “Icky.” I scan the list again. No. I use the blunted point of my number two pencil to fill in the oval marked “Other.” Icky is closest to “Other,” although the deep, secret racist part of me sometimes equates African-Americans with icky, too, but that is not my fault. It is the fault of my culture, which is inherently racist. I give fifty dollars a year to the United Negro College Fund as a way of absolving my own inherent white, racist, icky guilt. Yes, I am icky, and there is not a damn thing I can do about it.

  Here’s the deal with me: thirty years old, male, white (Caucasian), straight, perpetually single, out of shape, unemployed, irresponsible, bad-smelling, racist (previously mentioned), lazy, poorly groomed, and worth approximately $65 million.

  None of my many friends knows about the money, but it’s true. My net worth, in numerals, is 65,000,000.00, minus the fifty bucks I give to the United Negro College Fund each year. This is, I know, a lot of money. The kind of money that is so large it is literally inconceivable. Here’s how I sometimes picture it when I am lying in my studio apartment trying to sleep: Imagine you walked into your house and found a $100 bill on the dresser. You would be pretty psyched. Anybody would be. A hundred dollars is a lot of money. Now imagine if you walked in and found ten $100 bills. That’s a thousand dollars. A lot of fucking money, right? You’re flipping out. You’re calling people. “I just found a thousand bucks on my dresser!”

  Okay, now imagine that once you find the thousand bucks, it occurs to you that there might be more money to find around. It seems unlikely, and there’s no need to be greedy, but if there’s an unexpected K lying around, who’s to say there might not be more? So you look in your sock drawer, and there you find nine more bundles of ten $100 bills, bringing your total to ten thousand dollars. Now you’re past the point of freaking out; now you’re just scared. There’s ten thousand dollars in $100 bills in and around your dresser. No more perky “Hey, guess what I just found!” telephone calls. No, you’re not calling anybody. No, now your job is to rip the apartment down to the floorboards and see just how much money is hidden in this shitty Lower East Side studio apartment.

  You decide to look under the mattress because that is historically where people conceal money. There, under the stained mattress you inherited when you took over the apartment, are nine more $10,000 stacks just like the one you have next to the bed. A hundred thousand dollars.

  Now multiply that by a factor of ten. Already the image starts to get fuzzy, doesn’t it? Up until ten thousand, it was easy. A hundred thousand, yes, you can kind of picture it when it’s in neat $10,000 stacks. If the full mil
is hard to fathom, just do it one at a time. Two $100,000 stacks. Now three. Up to ten. That’s a million bucks. Multiply that by a factor of six. You’ve got six million dollars. Now consider this: that six million dollars represents less than 10 percent of what I am worth. It is to my worth what less than ten dollars is to a hundred—not very much.

  That is one way I sometimes picture the amount of money in my control.

  The sum is so vast that the only way I know how to deal with it is to totally ignore it. So that’s what I do. I did nothing to earn the money, and do not feel right about claiming any of it. So I leave it alone and only occasionally turn it over in my mind when trying to fall asleep, the way some people count sheep or drink cough syrup.

  The money is sitting in accounts at various international banks, all of it overseen by a buttoned-up family lawyer named Thatcher Emory Lloyd, who deals with all of the tax shit and investment shit and all the other shit that such a large amount of money generates. He’s been the family lawyer for as long as I’ve been alive, and I imagine he will be around long after I am dead, because when you are as icky as I am, there can be no real hope for a long and fruitful life. There can be no hope really for anything, and even $65 million may not be enough to change that.

  The form I am filling out at the moment is required by the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain a driver’s license. I do not want a driver’s license since I do not own a car and have no intention of purchasing a car, but I am finding it very difficult to accomplish certain tasks I want to accomplish without this form of identification.

  For example, the other day I was attempting to secure a library card, which is something I do want, but was unable to get because I was unable to produce any identification other than a membership card to a video store, and I was almost unable to even get that without said identification, except that my best friend Jasmine works at the video store and vouched for my identity to her asshole manager, Keith, who, I swear to God, is thirteen years old. No exaggeration. He is thirteen motherfucking years old, and he runs that video store like it’s his personal fiefdom, and if I wasn’t so weak from chronic ickiness, I would put my fist right through that little fucker’s face.

  The library card, when I finally do get it, will be useful. Libraries are one of civilization’s great gifts to itself. A place to go to read magazines and stare at college girls researching whatever it is college girls research, and maybe accidentally spill some coffee on one of them, and then apologize profusely while mopping off the girl’s sweater and then, purely in the spirit of wanting to blot out the coffee before it stains, cop a feel.

  Copping coffee feels off studious coeds half my age is a perfect example of a way in which I am icky. It is also the kind of behavior that can generate complaints from those same coeds. About two dozen complaints, in fact, which resulted in my being barred from my local library, which is another reason I am in the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles obtaining a driver’s license with the name “Roland O. Wesbacher.”

  I am hoping that the name Roland O. Wesbacher, which is not my real name, will sound so different from Trevor P. Chellgren, which is my real name, that it will allow me to sneak back into the local library to resume my groping. If I am stopped at the door by an intrepid librarian who recognizes me despite the fake mustache I intend on donning, or the blonde wig with highlights, which I am already wearing, then I will simply produce this driver’s license with the official seal of the great state of New York and say (in a carefully cultivated French accent), “Madam, you are mistaken. I am Roland O. Wesbacher.”

  And that should take care of that.

  Looking around the waiting room here at the DMV, I am concerned that my blonde wig is already arousing suspicion among the more observant patrons. I have noticed more than one sniggering laugh aimed in my direction, and I am beginning to grow a touch paranoid. Of course, it is hard to say whether the pointing and laughter is due entirely to the wig or to my outfit, which is deliberately outlandish in order to deflect attention from my obviously fake hair. Now I fear that the plan might have backfired—the faux mink stole, feety pajamas, football shoulder pads, and blonde wig are actually creating too much attention.

  Yes, people are definitely pointing and laughing, and I am realizing this entire operation is going down in flames before I have even approached Counter #2, which is where they take your picture and tell you to wait over by Counter #3. I should have known to abandon the project as soon as I got to Counter #1, where the woman told me if I thought I was going to get a driver’s license looking like that, I had another think coming. Perhaps optimistically, I thought she was kidding, but now I am beginning to see she was not.

  I cannot afford to be barred from another public institution. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor, which is a fancy way of saying I need to get the hell out of here.

  The thing to do now is to arrive at a plan of action that does not make me look foolish. My instinct is to just run out of the place, but that would give them the victory, and while I recognize that the battle here has been lost, the war is far from over, and even a small victory today may embolden them tomorrow. At the moment, I am a touch unclear as to who “they” are, but I know that I cannot give them an inch. I must escape this place unscathed.

  A plan gradually forms. The first thing I do is fake a yawn. As I stretch, I nonchalantly unhook my shoulder pads and let them slide to the carpeted floor, as if to say, “Okay, football shoulder pads, you’ve done your work for the day. Take a load off, guys.”

  Then I pretend I have something in my eye. (For the sake of my inner monologue, it is sand grit picked up while surfing in Maui.) I make a good show of pain for everybody at the DMV, grimacing and pointing at my eye. I nudge the woman next to me, who is about sixty and Cambodian or something, and who does not seem to speak much English, and say, “I have some sand in my eye.” She looks a little scared and nods, but I wasn’t really speaking to her. I was talking to the security guard, who I know is watching my every move.

  And this is where the plan gets, I must admit, brilliant. Rather than flee the scene, rather than scurry away like a scared little squirrel, I make straight for the enemy. Right hand pressed to eye, left hand dragging football shoulder pads, I walk up to the guard and say, “Excuse me, is there a water fountain in here? I need to rinse out my eye because of the sand I got in it when I was surfing in Maui.” The guard shifts his body weight, and I know I have him exactly where I want him—totally flummoxed.

  I can just hear his feeble thoughts tumbling around in that pea brain of his: Maybe this is how they dress in Maui. What a stooge. He stares at me for a couple seconds, and I stare right back. Two gladiators fighting to the death in ancient Greece, or Rome, or wherever ancient gladiators fought to the death. After an eternity, he jerks his thumb toward the restrooms and says, “Over there.”

  Trying not to smirk, I thank the man and proceed to walk in exactly the opposite direction, right out the door. That should have him scratching his head for the better part of the rest of his life.

  How strange, I think, as I leave the DMV. Here I am, a well-liked and attractive man worth $65 million, unable to procure a practically free tiny plastic card that will allow me to use an entirely free public service for the purpose of bettering myself through literature and also copping feels from college girls. What a strange, paradoxical country this is. At that moment, I feel disappointed, yes, but oddly patriotic. I may be icky, but my country is good.

  I deposit the football shoulder pads that I am still dragging behind me in a trash pile along the sidewalk. These shoulder pads have served me well, I think, as I lay them on top of several smelly trash bags that, if I had to guess, contain more than a little used kitty litter. Yes, they have served me well, and they deserve a hero’s burial. I compose a little eulogy to the shoulder pads along the lines of “We are gathered today to celebrate these shoulder pads, which protected countless young men in battle on the gridiron
and one young man in the battlefield of the motor vehicle department. They did their duty honorably and with valor.” Then I hum “Taps” and snap into a smart salute. Several blocks away, a truck backfires. Above, the sky has turned a majestic crimson, and just as I finish the final bars of the song, a flock of pigeons shoots overhead in formation, and I have to choke down tears as I pivot on one heel and step away.

  A Few Words About My Jug Band

  FOR the last few years I’ve been playing washboard in a local jug band, the Salt Cracker Crazies. Mostly we play country fairs, rodeos, jug band–themed birthday parties, jug band–themed funerals, that sort of thing. Our biggest gig was probably when we played 50 Cent’s record-release party for his last album. You wouldn’t think that 50 Cent would be into jug bands, and you’d be right. He wasn’t. Curtis didn’t enjoy our music at all, although later in the night he graciously told me he thought my washboard strumming was “bumpin’.”

  People often approach me after one of our gigs wanting to know how I got into playing the washboard. I was an all-state defensive back in high school and played college ball for Auburn. During my junior year, I blew out my knee, which ended any thoughts I had about entering the NFL. But the injury allowed me to focus on other things, like writing my radical feminist poetry. It also gave me plenty of time to explore the campus. Of course I was on crutches, so I couldn’t wander far, but one night, with exams behind me and football out of the picture, I found myself hobbling into a basement coffee shop. What I saw there changed my life.

  It was around ten o’clock on a Monday night. The place was mostly empty, but on a tiny stage in the back was a band. A jug band. I’d heard of jug bands before, of course, but I thought they went extinct with the dinosaurs (although I didn’t think the two events were necessarily related). Well, if jug bands no longer existed, these guys never got the memo! They were hootin’ and hollerin’ and playing a wild skiffle, although I didn’t know the word “skiffle” back then. I just knew the sound was infectious and completely unlike the usual music I listened to (Iron Maiden, Slayer, Natalie Merchant, etc.). This was organic music, music that sounded like what compost would taste like if you ate compost and didn’t throw up. It was a wild concoction of bluegrass, jazz, and country twang all thrown together into a musical potluck supper upon which I feasted. With my ears. I ear-feasted.