JPod

by Douglas Coupland

  How come you don't see dildos that are 5 or 6 inches long?

  I know you're good looking. You probably have money and a nice car. But I would bet you have one that is small to average size. How do Iknow? Statistics. On average, men are from 5 to 6.3 inches. And don't tell me you haven't measured it, because every guy does at some point.

  I used to be small—so small I'm too embarrassed to even type it. I was like you . . . thinking that it was the love that counted, or that money was all that I needed. How wrong I was! I found that out when my wife of a year packed up her bags and divorced me, yelling as she walked out the door that I was the worst guy she had ever slept with, because my unit was too small to get her off.

  Right then and there I decided that I had to do something. But I didn't know where to look. That's when I came across an email telling me that I could gain 3 inches in 3 weeks.

  Desperately wanting to try anything, I said to myself "What the heck,it's cheap, and who knows, it might work." It MIGHT work? How about growing 3 inches in only 2 weeks! Now Im the proud owner ofan 8.3 inch unit.

  Anyway, I just recently saw my ex-wife at our favorite hang out. She told me she still loved me and that she wanted me back. I took her to my house and her eyes almost popped out when I pulled down my pants Then I told her to get out of my house. As she was walking out the door (crying) she asked me why didn't I want her back, Ireplied "Baby, I have a huge (actually gigantic) new gun that's loaded with bullets, and its hunting season!"

  So, if you like being small (or average), then delete this email. On the other hand if you want to be Better-Than-Average then visit the link below and try it for yourself.

  . . .

  I played this truly evil welcome-to-j Pod prank on Kaitlin while she was away from her desk. I popped the M and N keys off her keyboard and switched them. I can't wait to see the mirth and mayhem that ensues.

  Okay, so around nine at night I finally got down to work, trawling through Google for data on turtles. Then my father phoned. From the odd background noise, I guessed he was calling from a location shoot.

  "Dad, where are you?"

  "I'm way the fuck out in Clover dale."

  "Is it a Western? I hear yee-hawing in the background."

  "Sort of a Western—it's about ranchers, but they get invaded by aliens."

  "What do the aliens do?"

  "They inhabit the cattle, but then they get stuck inside them. So the ranchers suddenly discover their cattle are displaying highly intelligent behaviour, and every time the price of beef comes up, the cows go apeshit."

  "What's the budget?"

  "Crap."

  "Why are you calling?"

  "Because I want you to come out to the shoot."

  Clover dale is a half-hour drive, but because it's in the Fraser Valley it feels like three hours away. Los Angeles seems closer to me than Cloverdale does. I'm a bad son. I didn't want to make the drive.

  "Dad, I have to finish scrubbing up some 1980s motherboards I bought on eBay."

  "Ethan, I'm in love."

  Dad using an expression like "in love" was a wallbuster. "Oh," I said.

  "That sounded judgmental."

  "Well, this is a pretty weird thing to be hearing. What about Mom?"

  "Just come out here and watch the dailies with me."

  "Dad, you're an extra in a movie about aliens invading a cattle ranch. Why would you be allowed to watch the dailies?"

  "Today I finally got my first speaking part. I thought it'd be a good day to tell you about other changes in my life, too."

  I heaved out a lungful of air. "Okay. Tell me where you are."

  "I'll pass you along to Sharon here. She's a teamster, and handles anything to do with vehicles."

  Sharon's directions were eerie, a mirror image of the two lefts and two rights I took to get to Mom's. I took two rights and two lefts and arrived at Dad's shoot. I parked my car and got shuttled to the trailers. I opened the door to Dad's trailer, expecting to find him in a makeup bib drinking bottled water. Instead, he was French kissing someone who appeared to be Ellen Kovacs, who had been two years behind me in high school.

  "Dad?"

  It was like a French farce, the two of them separating and trying to appear chaste, smoothing their hair and pulling down their shirts. "Don't worry," I said, "there's no judging going on here."

  "Son, this is Ellen."

  "Hi, Ellen."

  "Ethan, you look just the same as you did in high school."

  "You two went to school together?"

  "She didn't tell you?"

  Dad said, "We're in love. Weird, huh?"

  "You know what? You got me on the wrong day. I've actually seen weirder."

  Dad still felt the need to justify his love. "Ellen here's in charge of set-dec for this production. She's got a head on her shoulders."

  I needed to change the subject. "How's the shoot going?"

  Ellen said, "Actually, not too well. We had to do this scene supposedly set in New Mexico, which is impossible to fake in Vancouver, at least on our budget. So we hosed this whole field and ravine with zinc isocyanine, which gives a nice rusty colour, but I don't think the salmon will be hatching in the nearby feeder stream for a few years to come."

  "Isn't she talented?" Dad asked.

  "Yes, Dad, she certainly is."

  Ellen said, "I have to prep for tomorrow. It's a long day's shoot. The mother ship arrives above the ranch."

  Dad said, "That's okay. We've got the dailies to watch." He turned to me, "Come on. Let's go check them out."

  The lovebirds kissed goodbye, and I followed Dad to another trailer filled with cables and screens. We arrived at an exquisitely bad moment—flubbed shots; a hair trapped in the gate; a failed mike contact. Men in suits sweated vegetable oil as they watched what was, to even the most uninitiated eye, money flittering away into nothing. Dad asked the director, "Matt, can you—"

  "You got axed, Jim."

  "Huh?"

  "Your line is gone."

  "Dad, I think we should leave."

  As we walked back to the extras' trailer, Dad kept saying, "It was supposed to have been my speaking part."

  "Dad, I'll drive you home."

  As I gave him a lift, I wondered if there was a more subjective, non-Einsteinian theory of time that could explain how I was able to cram so much weirdness into one day—Steve; turtles; dead bikers; philandering parents. The day felt like two or three days crammed into one. I wondered, if you're an incredibly famous rich person who does more in one day than I do in a month, does your perception of time's passing go slower or faster than it does for me?

  Finally I broke the silence to ask Dad what his line in the movie had been.

  "Goddam aliens!" he roared with astonishing anger. "Did a good job, didn't I?"

  "Dad, I'm the one who's supposed to be looking for approval from, you."

  "We're all adults now, and by the way, we're two people in a car, not one, so let's stay in the commuters-only lane."

  "But there's no traffic."

  "Think big, Ethan. Your head's always locked in a little cupboard, like boxed-up Christmas decorations in the middle of July. You have to open up your mind about stuff. . ."

  During this lecture, I realized Dad was doing something to his shoe. "Dad—are you rubbing a vitamin E capsule on your shoe?"

  "So what if I am?"

  "Why are you doing that?"

  "Keeps the leather alive—vital."

  "That is so stupid. What are you doing with a bunch of vitamin E capsules, anyway?"

  "I found them in the Fraziers' garbage."

  The Fraziers live three doors down from my parents.

  "You what}"

  "I was trying out my new pedometer, and I saw that the Fraziers had thrown out a perfectly good bottle of vitamin E capsules."

  "Dad, I can't believe what I'm hearing. You stole vitamin E from the Fraziers' trash to rub onto your shoe}"

  "No sense it going to waste."
>
  "I guess not, but doesn't Mom's grow-op clearing God-knows-how-much per year render vitamin E theft kind of silly?"

  "We have to save all of that money."

  "Why?"

  "In case you or Greg is in some other country and needs major surgery. Appendicitis can bankrupt you, especially in the States."

  "Dad, I could accept Grandma or Grandpa stealing vitamin E capsules—what with their being members of the Greatest Generation and living through the Depression and all. But you?"

  "It wasn't theft! Once trash is on the curb, it belongs to everyone."

  "Even in my darkest moment, I would never pilfer vitamins from the neighbours' trash can."

  "We like ourselves, don't we?"

  '"Yes, Dad, we do like ourselves."

  Painful silence.

  More painful silence.

  The effort of not discussing Ellen amplified the silence further. I broke down. "Did they throw out anything else good?"

  "An umbrella, a nice black one, with a malacca cane handle and just one of the spokes shot."

  "Isn't that something."

  We pulled into the driveway. Not twelve hours earlier, I'd dragged Tim the biker into Mom's car.

  Suddenly, I felt profoundly tired. I felt like I'd just been tossed into a construction site hole.

  I drove home.

  When I arrived in jPod the next morning, I found that my keypad's

  . . .

  keys had been rearranged in the following configuration:

  1234D67890

  QWFRTYUIP

  A5SHOLEKJG

  ZXCVBNM

  Kaitlin also won't acknowledge my presence. Fascinating...

  . . .

  The first turtle meeting was scheduled for one, and I hadn't yet given it three brain cells worth of thought. I was in denial over the turtle as a concept. Here we have a genuinely non-lame skateboard game for PlayStation, and they add a turtle to it? All morning I hung around the cafeteria, pretending to be busy, but actually playing Tetris with my back against the wall. At noon I went upstairs and was sitting down in my cubicle when suddenly I smelled something.

  "The Taint!" I yelled.

  John Doe's head popped up. He said, "You're right—'tis the Taint!"

  My voice was loud enough to escape jPod's remote grotto and reach the cubicles in the main work area. "The Taint! The Taint!" Heads and bodies appeared as if on cue in a Broadway musical: The Taint? The Taint!

  A minute later the mob zeroed in on Mike, a coder, who sullenly pulled from a drawer beneath his hard drive the crescent-shaped corpse of a partially eaten Quarter Pounder with Cheese and a scraggly bale of cold, dead fries.

  "Mike, I can't believe you brought the Taint into our office."

  "It's their french fries. They're the only fast-food place that doesn't put that disgusting batter on their fries. I went home to get a disk, and I saw their drive-thru sign and . . . I was weak."

  "Silence! Let the shunning begin!"

  Mike knew the rules, and he broke them. And so, for the rest of the day, he was shunned by everybody in the company.

  Back in jPod, Bree said, "Maybe McDonald's food is the way it is because Ronald is lonely."

  "Lonely? He's asexual."

  "That doesn't mean he's not lonely. Maybe he needs a cat."

  "I bet he's into water sports."

  "No, that'd mess up his makeup."

  "I think he's probably bi-curious."

  "Bi-curious? How can he be bi-curious? By now he's at least fifty."

  "He's from a different era. They didn't discuss certain topics back then."

  "Well, then, how does he stay so young-looking?"

  "Steroids. Botox. Happy Meals."

  "But all those kids' birthday parties must leave him pretty haggard."

  "I wonder what he'd be like on a date."

  "Well, you couldn't really go to a movie with him, because everybody would recognize him. No privacy. It'd be like dating Spider-man."

  "Where do you live if you're Ronald McDonald? He must be loaded—Bel Air? I mean, he can't even go out for a coffee without looking like a flashing red light."

  "Maybe he takes off his makeup and wears sweats."

  "No, I don't think so. If you're Ronald, then part of the whole metaphysical proposition is that you can never 'go civilian.'"

  "I agree. On The Simpsons, whenever you see Krusty the Clown, even if he's in a Jacuzzi or as a baby, he's always got his full makeup on."

  "I bet Ronald drinks."

  "All clowns drink. They need to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living. I wonder what you say to your parents: 'Mom, Dad—I want to be a clown. I'm going to Clown School, and you can't stop me.'"

  "Can you imagine the annual family Christmas card photocopied mail-out? Dan broke his arm skiing in February, but six weeks in a splint and he's tickety-boo. Laurie got her accreditation and is now a fully qualified dental hygienist. Mark brought shame upon the family after he signed up for the local community college's Clown Program. He says the program willput him into the clown fast track, but he's now dead to us."

  "I bet Ronald is home as we speak—it's his day off. He's in his bathrobe and staring out the den window at his immaculately maintained front garden. He wonders if it was all worth it—the fame, the money, the fries—and then he has this moment when he realizes that this is all he'll ever be. It shocks him—the purity of the emotion. He has to sit down in an armchair. He reaches over to the bookshelf and, from between a row of comic books, he removes a bottle of Scotch."

  "And just then, the Hamburglar walks in wearing a pink nightie."

  "We need to find him a mate."

  "Let's all write to Ronald to explain why each of us is his ideal mate."

  "Who chooses the winner?"

  "We'll vote." I went first.

  . . .

  Hi Ronald,

  You may or may not remember me. I'm Ethan—you gave away balloons at my seventh birthday party, and my mother says you were ableto get the orange drink machine working again with just a paperclipand the wits God gave you.

  Ronald, I hear you're looking for a mate. I may not be the best candidate, as I'm straight and, well, too much makeup is always a bit of aturnoff. Maybe you're straight, too. Maybe we're just two lost souls tryingto make a go of it in this great big nutty world.

  Be all of this as it may, I'm supposed to plead my case. I am nearing thirty, and I make $41,500 a year (Canadian) as a programmer, but they've dangled this huge carrot in front of me, telling me that I can become an assistant production assistant if I learn to integrate programming skills with art skills plus skills in managing people. The irony is, assistant production assistants make way less, even though they're higher up the food chain. In any event, this is all to say that I have good prospects as a provider.

  Ronald, do you play computer games? I know that the cooking of your french fries is regulated by a special deep-frying computer run by proprietary McDonald's software that beeps once the fries are golden yellow So I think maybe you're more computer savvy than people give you credit for.

  I'm single at the moment, but have had two reasonably longish relationships. Both ended because they simply weren't The One, which is such a corny notion. It always leaves you with a niggling unease that the relationship you're in is merely love's calorie-reduced version. It also would have helped if they cared about my work. It's not like I'm married to my job, but a little "Honey, how was your day?" goes a long way. Speaking of work and relationships, I'mcurrently more attracted than I acknowledge to Kaitlin, who's new to jPod. She's a programmer and she's . . . just nice to look at. But wait,I'm supposed to be wooing you. What else can I add that would make you desire me? Oh, I know—I like both helium and balloons. What a blast it would be to mate with someone who has the entire global helium cartel in his big yellow pockets.

  That's about as gay as it gets, Ronald.

  Pick me! Pick me!

  Ethan

  . . . />
  Naughty Ronald, you mayonnaise-guzzling bun pig . . .

  It must be hard to live at the top, what with Wendy and Burger King always waiting to knife you in the back. I say to you, smother them in melted cheese while they pray uselessly to their cardiac gods!

  I am Bree, and when I was sixteen I worked in a McDonald's in Richmond, BC (which was, BTW, the first non-US McDonald's ever). I was fired because I was never meant to be working in the service industry, which is an elliptical way of saying I dated all the guys on the staff at once, thus triggering a mass-quitting saga. That, and I also reconfigured the french-fry computer to make a ringing doorbell sound instead of beeping, which is how I turned on to technology.

  Here's a confession: everyone thinks I sleep with anything with three legs, but the fact is, I don't do it that much, and when I do, it's only to confirm that I don't like it that much—which means I'm maybe into gals instead of guys. That's my challenge for the next year. Are you into gals who like gals? To be honest, I look at your public persona and say, "Okay, Bree, this guy's into Smurfs or something, not women." Or am I wrong? I mean, Ronald, let's face it—what's with you? How do clowns replicate? Do you have parents? A family? Do you believe in God or a political party? After you've taped your TV commercials, do you go back to your toadstool and kick back a box of wine? Part of me is happy to think of you as a mere cartoon, but the more genuine Bree says there has to be something more primal and demanding and blood-and-guts at the centre of it all.

  I work in a cubicle farm called jPod with a small handful of geeks. It's called jPod because of a computer glitch that put six people whose last names start with the letter J in the space that was supposed to have been a rock climbing wall, but which got cancelled because it was too twentieth century. Once you're in jPod, there's no escaping. I tried for months, and simply gave up. Kaitlin's new here. She'll try hard to get out for a while, and then she'll simply accept her fate and try to get on with life as best she can.