Dr. Pepper Ten: My Commercial Pitch

[SCENE: Dude-bro in “FBI: Female Body Inspector” shirt (sleeves cut off) strolls through  a post-apocalyptic wasteland, alternately shooting and bayonetting anyone who crosses his path, and casually sipping a Dr. Pepper 10.]

Dude-bro (Looks at camera): Hey women; you think you can handle the high intensity, low-cal kick in the testicles that is Dr. Pepper 10?!

Yeah, we didn’t think so, because you don’t have any testicles! (Cut to diagram of female reproductive system.) See?! No testicles!

You see women, you might have won the right to vote and to drive--but this is Dr. Pepper 10! This ain’t no pussy-ass Congress! (Cut to photo of pussy-ass Congress.) And it’ll be a cold day in hell before we allow women to horn in on the veiny, boner-fest of a man-jam that is the low calorie soft drink game! Go bake us a fucking pie!

Speaking of pie, Dr. Pepper 10 is sweet! But not too sweet! That’d be gay!

One time, I fed my girlfriend’s dog a bunch of whiskey and it was totally funny. But she didn’t think it was funny, and then she got all upset when it died--because she’s a sensitive lady! And that’s exactly why she could never handle the bold waterboarding of taste buds that goes down every time you take a sip of Dr. Pepper 10!

Don’t like monster trucks?! Fuck you!

Never seen First Blood?! Die of bird flu, nancy!

Occasionally menstruate?! No dice!

Joan of Arc led the French to several major victories in the Hundred Years War--but even if she hadn’t been burned at the stake like a thousand years ago, she couldn’t have led herself to the outrageous elbow drop of flavor contained in each drop of Dr. Pepper 10--because Dr. Pepper 10 is for men only!

A therapist once told me that my unhealthy views of women might stem from my strained relationship with my mother. Mom wasn’t around much when I was growing up, and I think ever since then, I’ve struggled with intimacy. Sometimes when I was a kid, I just wished she was there to say “Goodnight,” or read me a story. I wonder if only she knew how much I needed her back then, if she would’ve left Uncle Tyrone and come home for good. (Pauses, looks wistfully off into the distance, then back at the camera.)

Oh, sorry. Got off on a bit of a tangent there.

Anyway, drink Dr. Pepper 10! Unless you’re a broad!

(Voiceover): Dr. Pepper 10 is not intended for women, including but not limited to:

*Your sister
*Fergie
*Pat Summit
*That nice lady who cleans the house
*Your mother
*That one girl who played the pregnant girl in “The Secret Life of the American Teenager”
*Ruth Bader Ginsburg
*Any of the Baseball/Basketball/Football Wives from VH1
*Gloria Steinem
*Queen Elizabeth II
*Gisele Bundchen
*April O’Neil
*Uma Thurman
*The Pussycat Dolls
*Molly Ringwald

Dr. Pepper 10: Don't be a pussy! Go low-cal!

A Rubber Dong For Clara

    Perry’s face brightened upon hearing the familiar rhythm of Clara’s heels, coming down the long hospice hallway in what, he thought, approached perfect four-four time. He had long ago come to terms with the disease that would soon separate he and his young wife, and, optimistic sort of fellow he was, resigned himself to the simple pleasures that remained, like this visit, and good, long fap sessions to that Spanish channel--the one that always showed ladies in lingerie for a reason beyond Perry and I.
    “Holy shit,” Clara said, licking a finger. “Did you know they put a Pinkberry right next door?”
    “Uh, no,” Perry said weakly. “Just been, uh, hanging out here.”   
    “Well you should go sometime, seriously, it is amazing.”
    Watching her lick the rest of her fingers, Perry was reminded of the purpose of their meeting. “Clara, so I was thinking--”
    “Hey, did you hear they’re doing a new Footloose? I’ll probably see it, but it’s like, ‘How can you improve on the original, right?’”
    “Clara, we need to talk. About the mold.”
    This had been weighing heavily on Perry’s mind since the initial diagnosis sank in. In those days, it was customary for a soon-to-be-widow to have a rubber mold of her departing husband’s penis made, particularly if the married couple in question were young--like Perry and Clara Horningsickle, 31 and 29, respectively. It was a sign of eternal love and faithfulness, the idea being that, once the woman is widowed, she may feel as close to her husband--and his dong--in death as she was in life; a sign that his was the only dong the woman would ever need. It was really a very sweet sentiment, as far as the manufacture of dildos goes.
    Aside from that, this was seen as a positive bit of progress, as in the years before the penis molding idea, women were given the choice of being buried alive with their husbands or facing public ridicule, being called “skeezers” by the townspeople and the like.
    “Oh, yeah,” Clara said. “Well, whatever, I mean, you can do what you want.”
    “But, don’t you want it?” he said vulnerably.
    “Uh,” she said, moving her gaze from the screen of her phone to the room’s television. “Has Stuart Scott’s eye always been like that? Creeps me out, you know?”
    “Clara. The mold.”
    “Jeez, is that all you ever talk about?”
    “It’s just that the Dr. Arnett said I only--”
    “Look, I don’t want to fight.”
    “So?”
    “Uh... No, not really, no.”
    “Clara, I know you’re not the kind to keep a rubber dick around--”
    “No, actually I have a bunch. They’re in the drawer under the--”
    “But it would mean a lot to me. I'm not going to be around for much longer, and I want you to have a piece of me with you always. And that piece is my dong.”
    Perry had tears streaming down his face now. The drugs they were pumping into him to ease the pain had had sever side effects, and one of them, apparently, was that he had turned into a total pussy.
    “It’s just what people do, Clara” Perry said finally.
    “Yeah, I know,” Clara said, looking at her phone once more. “Hey, I’ve got to skedaddle. Tyra and I are going to go to Austin for the weekend, so I’ll think about the whole rubber schlong mold thing and see you when I get back.”
    “But, Dr. Arnett said--”
    Clara leaned down and kissed Perry on the mouth, stifling the words--a retelling of Dr. Arnett’s latest, grimmest assessment--into a peculiar hum.
    Before he could gather his thoughts, Clara was striding from the room.
    From the long hallway, Perry listened to the rhythmic clicking fade and fade. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hands. He was exhausted and lost in thought--so much so that he didn’t hear that clicking reverse, growing and growing, drawing nearer once more. He looked up to see Clara smiling at him from the foot of his bed.
    “Forgot my hair clip,” she said. “TTYL!”
  

Wild Animals & Other Potential Threats

   Wolves

 

“Were you raised by wolves?” Marcia asked sharply, and the child wondered what had tipped her off. Could it have been that he was behaving like a wild animal? Had he unwittingly taken up the practice of walking around on all fours? Or was it all those claw wounds?

Spain

The bullfighter stepped to the center of the ring. He peered into the crowd and saw his lady love waving down at him. Her eyes were occupied at once by fear and love. The bullfighter was enraptured by her beauty, her piercing green eyes and her bodacious cans. He put one hand to his mouth and blew her a kiss--and then, “Hey, who put this horn in my side?”

B&E

My boss, Mr. Banks was pretty upset that I had taken his lunch from the refrigerator. “And another thing,” he yelled, “How’d you get into my house?”

How I Survived the Sinking of Titanic

    I was working as a struggling artist in Paris when I first heard of the unsinkable ship called “Titanic.”
    Amazed at the sheer enormity, luxury and unsinkability of the ship, I packed up my crayons and headed to Liverpool shortly. There, I won my ticket from some Scandinavian guy--on a lucky hand in a game of “Go Fish.” Two tickets--one for me, one for my stereotypically goofy Italian best friend, Alessio. “That’s a spicy-a meatball,” Alessio said after we’d acquired our tickets.
    The trouble started summarily.
    For some reason at inspection, Alessio was let right through. But, despite my insistence that I was an American and thus lice-free, the inspectors inspected me scrupulously, digging through my beard with gloved hands and administering the skin test, which seemed to me quite similar to an Indian sunburn. Another guy came along and started poking me in the eye. I protested that I didn’t think that was a very good gauge of my personal cleanliness, but he just stared at me and kept right on a-pokin.’ The guy combing my beard found a bag of chips and a flask of whiskey in there, and he confiscated the items.
    “This stuff could be dangerous to the others,” he said, washing down a handful of my chips with my whiskey.
    The guy who was poking me in the eye finally stopped, and instead began knocking on the top of my head and studying the shape of my skull. Phrenology buff, I guessed.
    The first guy polished off the rest of my chips and whiskey and began combing my beard again. “You got anything else in here that I could confiscate? Some jewelry maybe, or a rare painting?” I told him I didn’t think so, but he just kept at it. He found a Rembrandt eventually and got really excited at first. Then he threw the painting on the ground and glowered at me. “Who do you think you’re fooling here, buddy?” he said.
    “That guy?” I guessed, pointing over his shoulder to a random passenger.
    “That’s nothing but a cheap reprint.” He spat on the painting, and on me, then on me again.
    “Puh. Puh. Puh.”
    “Can I go now?” I asked. “I’ll give you some of my artwork.”
    I produced my portfolio. He eyed the stick figures, and the stink lines that emanated from most of them. “This is no fake Rembrandt,” he said. “No, these are amateurish at best.”
    “I could do a new one,” I said. “Just imagine: You, combing my beard and prodding at my eyes as the sun sits high in the sky, smiling from behind a pair of sunglasses.”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “You’re pretty filthy.”
    I protested again, but he pointed out that I was covered in spit.
    The horn sounded, signaling that the great ship was about to depart.
    “Well, I’ve enjoyed our chat,” he said. “But it looks like we’ve run out of time.”
    “Could I at least get a refund on my ticket?”
    He took the ticket and quickly stuffed it in his mouth. He swallowed with a gulp, and then said, “What ticket?” holding his hands out at his sides.
    I hung my head.
    “Yeah, it’s a shame,” he said. “Say, do you have any more whiskey? That ticket made me parched.”
    “If you haven’t found any by now, I wouldn’t Imagine so.”
    “Too bad.”
    With the help of the amateur phrenologist, he tossed me from the ship. I landed can-first on the dock, and the crowd that had gathered to watch the ship depart pointed and laughed. “It’s called a delousing station,” someone cried. “Use one.”
    I scratched my beard and a fist-sized rock fell out. I threw it at the slowly departing ship. It hit my friend Alessio in the head. “That’s a painful-a rock!” he said.

Remembering the East Coast-West Coast Emo Feud

    Throughout the whiny annals of the emo genre, no two bands have made such an indelible mark on the scene as have Cutwrist and Sadface. The former, led by the ever-mopey Gerald Holland, was established in Los Angeles shortly after Holland’s girlfriend broke up with him; the latter was founded by friends Alex Patterson and Mark Cohen in New York City, when Cohen heard Patterson artfully bitching about having to do his chores.
    “Hey, let’s put some music to that mope,” Cohen is said to have remarked.
    The two bands rocketed to superstardom in their first few years of existence, with Cutwrist issuing such hits as, “Heart-Punched” and “I’m Really, Really Sad,” and Sadface offering such memorable hits as “Alone in the Blackness” and “But I Thought We Were Soul Mates...” With such immediate success, the two bands found themselves touring together in 2003 and became fast friends.
    In less than a year however, their friendship--and careers--would be torn asunder by mutual enmity.
    The feud began at Wet Blanketsville, USA, the studio owned and operated by Sadface. It was a cool November evening, and Holland was recording vocals for the Cutwrist track “Sleeping Pills--That’ll Do the Trick.” Between takes, he stepped out of the booth and into the brisk Manhattan night to smoke a cigarette. He had just lit the cigarette when an unknown and masked assailant accosted Holland and stabbed him three times with a used knife from a nearby Arby’s.
    After the stabbing, Holland whinged with even greater zeal, and Cutwrist’s financial success, after the release of “Stabbed With An Arby’s Knife... In the Heart”, grew to rare heights; but his friendship with Cohen was over. Holland claimed that the attack was set up by Cohen and vowed revenge. Shortly thereafter, Holland was arrested on two counts of being a pussy when he was seen sobbing at an airport. His stay in jail would do little to assuage his feelings of hatred toward his former friend.
    Upon his release, Holland took the beef to the studio. He released the dis track, “You Can’t Kill Me (I’ll Do It Myself)” just three weeks after he was freed, a resonating screed against Sadface, their record label “Boo Hoo Records” and, indeed, all East Coast emo bands. Accompanying the track was a video, in which a tearful Holland intimated that he had sex with Cohen’s girlfriend.    
    For the usually reserved and despondent Cohen, this was the last straw.
    At the Source Awards For Emo in New York, Holland continued his verbal assault. After winning the award for Most Likely To Sob In Public, he took aim at Sadface’s producer, Sean “Puffy Eyed” Mattingly, who could be heard crying in the background many of the group’s songs and videos. “If you want to just be sad and alone, and not have the producer all in the videos... all on the songs... come to Sad Sack!” he said, a reference to his label, Sad Sack Records.
    The remarks were met with bristling from the New York crowd, but this time, Cohen would fire back. After presenting the trophy for Pussy of the Year, Cohen remarked, “You don’t know a thing about sadness, buddy,” pointing at his former friend. “It’s sunny every day in LA! No existentialist thinker has ever come from a tropical climate, douchebag!”
    The audience once again bristled, but the war of words wasn’t over. After a performance of “Cuttin’ The Day Away,” Cutwrist’s cofounder and guitarist Aaron “What’s the Point?” Heckert took aim at the New York audience. “Y’all don’t got love for Cutwrist?” he yelled. “Y’all don’t got no love for Sad Sack Records? Well fuck y’all!”
    It was a seminal moment for both bands. Rather than continuing on being a bunch of whiny-britches, the mutual enmity between the bands made them angry, and this was reflected in their lyrics. The titles of the respective bands’ subsequent albums were “Suck My D***, New York” and “F*** Yourself, LA.”    
    Fans, used to the downtrodden whinging of Holland and the melodic bitching of Patterson, were disappointed by the bands’ newfound sense of not being disappointed and sales plummeted. Meanwhile, the tension between the East and West Coast emo scenes grew, as they blamed one another for the anger that had so affected the genre.
    Soon, both bands split up.
    But the story doesn’t end there.
    Both Holland and Cohen experienced a similar, and possibly career-saving phenomena after their respective bands split up, their lives as musicians possibly over: they got sad. The new sense of sadness has reportedly become fodder for a comeback, and there have been talks of an upcoming comeback tour for each band. We recently reached Cohen at his sadly unfurnished New York loft, and he has confirmed that plans are being made for the “Still Sad Tour” 2012, and that a new, depressing record would be released later this year.
    Will the two bands be able to finally bury the hatchet and just focus on being sad? Will Cutwrist and Sadface return to the heights they so quickly achieved, and from which they even more quickly fell? “Would,” Cohen asked us rhetorically in our recent chat “anyone care if I was gone?”
    With that attitude Mark, you better believe they would.

A Mother's Love

It was a cool spring morning, a Saturday in Bloody, New Jersey. Bennie sat alone in the family’s living room watching television and picking his nose--havin’ a good ole nose-pickin’ type of time. Between episodes of Cheaters, with a multi-textured bugger sitting just out of his reach, there was a curious rattling at the door and, disregarding the rules pertaining to opening doors for strangers, Bennie streaked from his perch on the family couch and answered.
    Upon swinging the door open, Bennie discovered that, unlike most guests at the Patterson house, this one was a bear. A grizzly. A bona fide, picnic-stealin’ trout gobbler.
    Bennie shrieked in terror. The grizzly growled in hunger. Bennie’s mother went, “Guh,” in confusion.
    She descended the stairs quickly to find her son cornered by the lumbering beast. Grabbing a broomstick from the closet, she knocked her son out of harm’s way. And you know how they say women experience an almost superhuman strength when their children are in danger?
    Well, she didn’t have that. She was mauled to death.

Suge & Me: The Doing & Undoing of My Career as a Gangsta Rapper

    My world was turned upside down.
    As I stared out at the cabana area of the Palm Beach Four Seasons, the blood rushing to my head, the concrete below looking up at me menacingly, I wished I had never run a foul of my business associate and, I thought until he decided to hang me by my ankles over a sixth floor hotel balcony, friend, Suge Knight.
    “I thought we were friends,” I told Suge, but he just muttered something over his cigar about his grip giving out.
    “You hear me honky?”
    “Yes,” I lied.
    The entire hubbub could be traced back to my debut album with Death Row Records, “Rich Gangster Junction,” which had flopped monumentally and lost the label a large sum of money. The album was panned critically, with music writers and fans contending that I was not, as I said several times on the album, from Compton, but in fact from a suburb of Dallas, Texas, called Farmers Branch.
    One enterprising investigative journalist dug up my high school year book and discovered that I had been a member of the glee club and the chess team, and was named by my classmates the “friendliest” guy with the “best smile” in all of the class of 2004 at Lakeside Preparatory School.
    Then came the TMZ video.
    In June of 2009, around a month before the release of “Rich Gangster Juntion,” an amateur video surfaced on TMZ.com depicting me falling to the ground and shrieking at the sound of what I thought was a gunshot, but turned out to be a car backfiring. “Still,” I told XXL magazine, “It was pretty loud.”
    The resulting article was titled “Scared Honky Junction: The New, Lilly Face of Death Row.”
    Indeed, my precarious position was greatly the result of this article, which Suge told me hurt our street cred like a motherfucker. Some fans down at the cabana were chanting “Drop him! Drop him!” and so forth, and that was when I faced the dismaying fact that my career as a gangster rapper, and maybe my life, too, was over.
    Suge opted against obliging the bloodthirsty, pool-goin’ masses, though, and let me go--under the stipulation that I never rap for any label ever again--with a light beating from his cronies.
    “I hope this doesn’t mean we can’t be friends,” I told Suge as he threw me, literally, out of his hotel room. But Suge just slammed the door and went back to entertaining the bitches in his room. I walked home sullenly that day, groping the area where my “Death Row” chain had sat so menacingly just an hour before.
   

Belinda and the Bus

It was over a glass of delicious, delicious vodka and over a bag of scrumptious, scrumptious pork rinds and a dish of tasty, tasty donuts one Tuesday morning that my ex-wife endeavored to discourage me from my admittedly unhealthy lifestyle with what she would describe as an interesting story from her childhood.
    “There was a girl named Belinda,” she started, and though I wanted desperately to go watch television, I was breathing pretty heavy, and sweating through my “2 Sexy 4 You” tee shirt. Which is to say, I wasn’t going anywhere. “She was always the fat girl, and the kids would make fun of her so. Oh, it was all so cruel, and for the longest time, she would comfort herself with food. It got really bad, it really did.
    “But one day, she decided that she’d had enough. She went straight home and threw away all her favorite foods, started working out, every day. By the end of our junior year of high school, she didn’t look like the same person. She told me on the last day of that year that she was just 15 pounds from her goal. ‘Just wait,’ she told me. ‘Come the first day of next year, I’m going to be the prettiest girl in school.’”
    She stopped.
    “Well?” I said.
    “What?”
    “Well what happened? Did she do it?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. She got hit by a bus that summer. Killed her dead.”
    For most of the rest of the morning, as I huffed and puffed, unable to get up, I pondered the story. When I finally did emerge from that chair, I reckoned that the story had a moral. Something about looking both ways before crossing a street, something like that. Yeah, that's it.

The Negotiator

    “Let’s go out drinkin’,” Pete said. “It’ll be fun.”
    “No, I’m going to stay in, tonight.”
    “Come on.”
    “No.”
    “Do it.”
    “I don’t want to.”
    “Don’t be a fag.”
    “I’m tired.”
    “I want to drink.”
    “Then go.”
    “Come with me.”
    “Naw.”
    “Dude, you’re being so gay.”
    “Eh.”
    “Come on, dude.”
    “Bah.”
    “I’ll buy you”--he checked his pockets--“three beers.”
    “Yeah, alright.”

    It was after this conversation that I recommended my friend Pete to my superiors down at the station. Pete had been out of work since college, where he questionably chose phrenology as his major, and the squad was looking for a new hostage negotiator.
    One might question the morality in fudging a friend’s resume and helping him to a position for which he is dangerously unqualified, but one can suck it; it’s not as though, in our town, the hostage negotiator was an oft-used weapon of the police force. Really all we do on a day-to-day basis is make routine traffic stops, tell the kids in the schools to stay there and help old women cross the street. Well, that and bust meth labs. Meth labs out the yin yang down here. Can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a meth lab, they say. Fredrik Wagner, a German immigrant, started our first meth lab back in 1888, and really, the town hasn’t looked back since.
    Anyway, that’s another story for another time and place--namely, our Meth Lab Museum on Main and 8th, Monday through Friday from 10 AM to 5 PM, weekends 10 AM to 8 PM.
    I was whistling my way to the station one morning, swinging my keys on my finger and winking at girls of questionable legality when my walkie talkie began telling me something about a jumper on the roof of our Best Buy. It was Pete’s first day, and he, and I by association, were being tossed directly into the fire.
    The scene was one of great intrigue. Cars passing through the lot slowed, merchandise trumpeting “I Survived the Best Buy Jumper ’09” was distributed from tents, and swarms of nerds giddily skipped about, though it was hard to tell if they were riled by the jumper or some new video game.
    “Outta my way, nerds,” I said, elbowing my way through the crowd. It was then that I got my first glimpse of Pete the Negotiator.
    “Come on dude,” he said. “Jumping off that building would be totally gay.”
    “I’m gonna do it,” the man shouted back.
    “May I ask why?”
    “I’ve got nothing to live for.”
    “Wow, really? Nothing? That sucks, bro.”
    “They shut down my meth lab, and my girlfriend left me for another guy, whose meth lab is still in business.”
    “Bummer man.”
    “Get out of my way, I’m gonna do it.”
    Pete looked at me. “Damn, dude, I think he’s gonna jump.”
    “No,” I said, “you have to convince him not to jump.”
    “I don’t know man, he’s pretty convinced suicide is the way to go.”
    The man stepped forward, toeing the ledge now.
    “Do something,” I implored Pete.
    “Alright, alright, DMY bro. Time to use a little something I like to call reverse psychology.”
    Pete looked back up and spoke into the megaphone.
    “Me and the boys are going to pack up and leave. It’s clear you’re too much of a pussy to do it, so we’re gonna go get drunk at Friday’s.”
    “What?” The man yelled.
    “Yeah, we’re gonna go, puss-boots.”
    Pete looked back at me confidently. “He’s starting to crack,” he said, and looked back up.
    “You’re--”
    Pete was interrupted by the sound of the man hitting the concrete. The crowd sat silent for a moment, until the man dusted himself off and walked away. It was a pretty small Best Buy.

The Survivor

    The bad news is that we’d been waylaid by some African pirates. The good news, that instead of killing us, they just cut us with their knives a few times each and left us to die on a raft at sea.
    As we join my story, I’m hungry and trying to convince the rest of the survivors that we should probably kill and eat Doug who, I thought long before the pirates ever even boarded the ship, looked pretty tasty--”Look at his fat face,” I heard myself saying. “Imagine how tender that meat must be.”
    The rest of the survivors looked at me in disgust. Doug chimed in that he had snuck a box of energy bars aboard, that there were twelve of them, easily enough to keep us alive for maybe a week if we ate strategically. “Shut up, Doug,” I told him, which sounds harsh. But by that point, I had had enough of his one-upsmanship-- “We shouldn’t slow down to see what these pirates want, we should drive to safety;” “we shouldn’t grab all the booze, we should grab food, supplies and water;” “we shouldn’t eat me, we should eat these energy bars, here.”
    “And another thing,” I said, “Who the fuck likes energy bars?”
    Doug stared at me blankly, and I drank some of the whiskey I had brought.
    “You really shouldn’t,” said Doug. “Alcohol is a natural diuretic.”
    “Alcohol is a natural diuretic,” I said in a stupid voice, to mock Doug.
    “It’ll dehydrate you, and you’ll die.”
    “I’m going to eat your fat face,” I said, quietly.
    “What?”
    “Nothing, stupid.”
    We pretty much just floated around for a few hours, and, with nothing but the ocean to look at, I sipped my whiskey and mentally undressed Molly, the only female on board. When that got boring, when I grew tired of her nagging--”Stop staring at me;” “Honey, say something;” “Pervert!”--I passed out in my own considerable filth.
    Of course, I didn’t recall dreaming what with the boozin’, but apparently, I had--vividly so.
    I woke up to Molly and her husband’s faces, stricken with terror, staring out at the sea, which was red now. “What’s with the red sea?” I asked. They told me that, in my sleep, I had been thrashing around and knocked Doug overboard. A group of great white sharks then tore him to bits while the couple watched in terror. There was more, but I drifted back to sleep.
    The second time I woke up, the happy couple was gone. Knocked overboard by my thrashing, I suppose. Anyway, no point in dwelling on the past, so I enjoyed an energy bar. Then the coast guard saved me. Nice bunch, those coast guard types. They gave me some hot wings.

Remembrances of Banana Hammocks Past: My Life as a Male Stripper

When I look back on my days of dousing myself in glitter and baby oil and donning themed banana hammocks on a nightly basis, the thing I miss most isn’t the sweaty, glitter- and baby oil-covered dollar bills, the schnockered old women, for whom no never means no, or even the prescription pills, which flowed like water down at the Hung Haus; it’s the men who, like me, cast aside doubt and all but a shred of clothing, and said, “Here I am, world! Here’s my junk, you sassy octogenarian, you! This is me, jiggling and jangling about like so many car keys, you dangerously intoxicated bachelorette!”
    The likeminded group of men who think that history could stand to be sexed up a bit: “Here’s what Crazy Horse might’ve looked like if, instead of rebelling against the encroaching US government, he had rebelled against pants and the common laws of human decency;” “Here’s what Abe Lincoln might’ve looked like if, instead of freeing the slaves, he had freed the James-Younger gang (What I call my knob and berries);” “Here’s what Genghis Kahn might have looked like if, instead of clubbing women with a club, he had clubbed them with his bell end.”
    The men who faced the tough questions:
    “Should I shave my chest hair into a big arrow pointing down at my dong?”
    “What are the moral ramifications of ramificating my wiener into the face of someone’s grandmother?”
    “Where’d all those oxycontins go?”
    And so forth.
    The men who know every word to “It’s Rainin’ Men,” and tear up for nostalgia whenever, and wherever they hear it.
    The men who aren’t afraid to question generally accepted social mores: “Who says getting a boner in public is a bad thing?”
    The men who look past all barriers, social, economic, age, etc., and say, “Gotta dollar? Wanna tuck it near my junk?”

Pitching A Commercial Idea To "Bertolli"

(Scene: A husky Italian chef is standing in front of his family in a dimly lit living room. He is visibly upset, his chef's hat in his hands, his eyes cast down at the floor. He is explaining to his family that his Italian restaurant has gone out of business, and that the tastiness of Bertolli frozen dinners is to blame.)

Man: So I’m afraid that we’ll have to split you kids up and send you to live with some distant relatives. Also, honey, I spoke with the bank today, and... (He begins to cry, his voice growing shaky.) They’re going to take the house.

Woman: What?

(Man nods his head, wipes tears from his eyes.)

Woman: That’s it! I’m leaving! I’m taking the kids to live with your brother Ernesto, who, I should tell you, I’ve been sleeping with for the past four years!

Man (tearfully): But... but...

Woman: But nothing. And trust me, you could learn a thing or two from Ernesto. Both in the bedroom and the kitchen, Johnny Comequick.

(Woman goes out with children, leaving the man standing alone in the living room. Cut to man’s feet, standing on a stool in a shadowy basement. He can be heard sobbing.)

Man: Damn you Bertolli!

(One foot kicks the stool over. The man’s legs dangle, his body sways gently, ominously.)

Man (chokingly, tearfully): Damn you, Bertolli!

(Pan to family living room, where a man (Ernesto) is having sex with the woman in the pile-driver position.)

Voice-over: Bertolli: Responsible for the deaths of 43 Italian chefs in 2009 alone--so you know it’s good!

The Unsightly Death of Gen. Tobias "Big Butt" Whitaker

From the unauthorized biography, “The Biggest Butt: The Cheeky Tale of General Tobias “Big Butt” Whitaker:

“... In 1816, Whitaker led a platoon of 30 men deep into Seminole Territory. Of course, this was a mistake; Whitaker’s orders had been to secure candy mountain, which, at the time, was occupied by a small group of vigilante yokels armed only with pitchforks and what President James Madison would describe in his memoirs as ‘A fucking killer ass sweet tooth.’
    Whitaker’s men were said to have corrected Whitaker on this blunder several times, some of them doing so as they were being hatcheted to death by angry Seminoles. “General,” they’d say, bleeding to death. “I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to be at candy mountain, fighting yokels. Not in Florida, fighting these stabby fellows here.”
    But Whitaker, always a stalwart man--and, it should be noted, in the depths of a four-year ether binge--would just wander off, whistling dixie, huffing on “Tanya,” his favorite ether rag, and yelling, “Man, I loooove ether!”
    When Whitaker finally came down for a few hours, he realized his mistake and in a panic, hid behind a tree.
    ‘To properly understand Whitaker’s life--and certainly his death--one must consider the sheer immensity of his buttocks,’ says Buckly C. Jackson, a professor of history at Cambridge Community College in Hoboken. ‘That ass was what Black Rob might describe as ‘like whoa.’ Like two Christmas hams, and this is a conservative image I’m painting, shoved into a pair of standard issue union trousers. It must’ve been quite a sight indeed.’
    As it turned out, it would also be Whitaker’s undoing.
    With around half of his platoon dead, and half hiding in trees, covering their eyes with their hands, the Indians noticed Whitaker’s buttocks jutting out from behind a tree. They captured the general, and demanded that he either surrender his men, or be pelted with pebbles until he was dead. Naturally, he chose to surrender his men.
    ‘There’s one,’ he’d say. ‘There’s another.’ ‘See that bush there. It’s not really a bush. Shoot it. See?’
    Whitaker had escaped death, and was invited into the Seminoles’ casino to take in some drinking, gambling and a variety show hosted by Robert Goulet.
    However, back on the ether, Whitaker made his final mistake when he bet his car on a hand of No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em.
    He lost the hand, and when payment was demanded, told the Indians, 'It’s 1816, dumbass. I don’t have a car.'
    Incensed by Whitaker’s ruse, the Seminoles hanged him, changed their minds, hatcheted at him for a while, and hanged him again. Over lunch, they decided that hatcheting was the way to go, went back out to the makeshift gallows and cut him down. Then he was hatcheted to death and, though already dead, hanged again.
    On his tombstone, Whitaker’s last words are immortalized: 'Geez, make up your mind you filthy redskins.'"