FICTION: TOJ, Chapter 4: Off The Grid

Howard meets the production crew of his first investiment in European porn.

Bad vibes out here on this rocky butte.  Twenty yards from Howard and Raimondo, Alessandra Amore and Franzello argued heatedly in Italian. Her eyes darted from side to side and she shook her head in a definite no.  In his detached manner, Franzello was trying to calm her down.  He turned his head toward Raimondo and winked.  A playboy who won’t take no for an answer.    

The crew was trading glances, lifting their eyebrows and sharing the smirks of an inside joke.  Raimond tilted his head to the side and pushed his earbud more firmly into its crook.

“Is her body mike on?” Howard asked.

Raimondo nodded and, smiling, bent down to pick up his shooting script.  He explained that today’s scene called for the Empress’s chariot to be portaged by two slaves toward a rendezvous with Caesar. But in this scene she is thirsty, bored, and in the company of men who need some respite.

“See,” he said, pointing to the script.  “Only two slaves.”  Then Raimondo pointed to a lean-to shelter where four men paced in their dress of dirty robes, tied off with crude leather belts.

“She don’t know it til now, but Franzello is asking her to take four slaves.”

“And how does he intend to do that?”

Wait, wait, Raimondo indicated with a single raised finger, listening intently. 

Alessandra Amore’s arms were folded.  She still shook her head no, but her protests were no longer infused with her initial vigor.

“Franzello!” exclaimed Raimondo.  “He can get a woman to do anything.  He like Fellini.  Il maestro could get anyone to do anything, anything he want on his films.”  Raimondo’s face was as ebullient a teenager’s.  In Italy even the pornographers were serious about Fellini. “You know the story about Fellini and Ettore Manni?” asked the Production Assistant.

Howard said he didn’t.

As Franzello and Alessandro closed down their negotiations, Raimondo told Howard about the Italian film star of years past.  He explained how Ettore Manni had been chosen by Il Maestro himself for the role of Dottore Katzone in Città delle Donne.  “Ettore was thrilled,” Raimondo said. “To play a seducer of ten thousand women!”  In his youth Ettore himself had been a Katzone of sorts, a great ladies’ man.  But in the late seventies, Ettore was growing old and getting fat. It was on this set that Fellini took personal revenge on him.  The great director humiliated Ettore, called him out for being sbiadito, a drunk, a has-been. Still, Ettore stayed on the production. There were so many women, the lure was too great!  But then, one morning Ettore was a no-show.  Some crew members went to his hotel room in Rome.  There they found him: dressed as a cowboy, he had blown his balls off with a revolver. The actor had bled to death.

Raimondo paused and let this sink in. 

“So was it murder or suicide?”

Raimondo circumflexed, looked to the sky. “When il maestro hear about it, you know what he say?”   Howard shook his head. “He say it a shame, but . . . it proved that the script work.”  

Raimondo’s eyes were as wide as the world and might have contained as much: lust and terror and cruelty and all that runs along those circuits that feed humanity and drive it to destruction.

Howard shook his head as if to empty it.

Across the way, Franzello stood up and spread his arms wide, the grin of a conquest upon his lips.  It was settled.  He clapped twice to get everyone’s attention. “Avanti!” he said.  There would be four slaves in the scene after all. 

He waved over the crew and actors. Time to block.

Raimondo slinked lazily toward his duties and repeated, “Like a cowboy.”  He and Franzello herded the crew and actors, rhythmically stroking johnsons, into position. 

Alessandra Amore was left alone on her folding chair as Franzello spoke to everyone else.  Perhaps he knew he’d already asked enough from her.  She was dressed as the Queen of Egypt in a costume that could have fit the bill for a high school drama production.  Seated just ten feet from the cliff’s edge, her flat stare hung somewhere out over the sea.  With a bathrobe drawn tightly around her, shivering against the wind high on this exposed bluff, she appeared to maintain, out on that blush-and-foundation front, the poise that a beautiful woman feels she owes the world.  But to Howard she looked like someone who had reached for the core of a belief, some solid foundation of strength that now she needed, but was no more, for it had been eroded and strewn to the winds long ago.

FICTION: TOJ, Chapter 2: Of Wealth and Taste

FICTION: Excerpt from Transit of Jupiter, Chapter 2: Of Wealth and Taste

Nik’s father, Thanassis Aleksakis, had a nose that people couldn’t forget.  It was a big, blocky Fred Flintstone-Karl Malden job: squashlike with bumps all up and down it.  His brother Tony once joked that their dad’s nose was so big that the blackheads on the end had private caterers. As kids, Nik and Tony used to shrink in embarrassment whenever Thanassis would lower it into a wine glass and inhale deeply, indulgently, as he called off the names of the fruits he detected.  Didn’t he know that by doing that, he was drawing people’s attention to that awful thing?  What was it about grown men, Nik wondered, that let them ignore their ugliest features – their drooping man boobs, the hair that sprouted from ears, shoulders, nipples, from their cavernous nostrils – and get on with life as if those things didn’t matter? And even though he was being called Nicky the Nose by kids at school, he knew that if it ever reached Thanassis’s proportions, he’d go see a surgeon. His father, though, seemed to live in a realm beyond embarrassment.  Nik supposed there must be something to admire about being immune to others’ judgments, but as a kid he couldn’t have said just what it was.

Thanassis Aleksakis thrust his beak into thousands of wine glasses, but he was forever naming wood, cherry, raspberry and, god forbid, green pepper as the dominant aroma.  For he drank a grim Greek varietal called Xinomavro; similar, Nik would later discover, to Italian Nebbiolos.  His dad bought it in four-liter basket-woven jugs from an Astoria importer and drank it at every meal.  But he would only showboat with the wine-sniff thing when guests brought their own wines over for dinner. 

When Thanassis’s friends called him The Nose, he would smile modestly.  It wasn’t until years later – when Nik began to appreciate wine in his own way – that he understood the adults hadn’t been making fun of the old man, but were really complimenting him on a skill that a young boy couldn’t appreciate. 

As a boy, Nik’s nose was newly budded, round and smooth with youthful shine, though still with the essential Flintstone-Aleksakis blockiness.  As it grew from that nascent version of his father’s late harvest gourd, college-bound Nik Aleksakis, perhaps more than coincidentally, became interested in wine. 

He once put it this way: if wine appreciation were analogous to womanizing, Thanassis Aleksakis was monogamous, loyal-to-the-grave to his big jugs of Xinomavro; Nik, on the other hand, might have been more of a serial womanizer: knocking off the rarest and most exotic of vintages, drinking them once and thus satisfied, forever done with them.  Nik was constantly hopping from one classic vintage to the next, “bagging” them, as he said. 

In his spare time Nik dug through cellars, attended estate sales, he even looked through the obituaries for mentions of wine-connoisseurship.  Any lead could send him on a new quest for the classics. Once bagged, he would check each wine off in the encyclopedic reference tome he kept on his living room coffee table.  To date, Nik had already bagged a 1979 Romanée-Conti, a ‘75 Lafite-Rothschild, an ‘86 Mouton Rothschild, the fabled ‘61 vintage of Cheval Blanc, a ‘71 Margaux, an ‘82 Latour and a ‘75 Evangile. 

Janet never understood Nik’s obsession.  When people asked if she shared his enthusiasm, she would always say in her vowel-punishing Long Island brogue, “Wine?  I can’t be bothered. It all tastes the same.  It’s like grape juice that’s gone to vinegah.” 

Comments like this Nik would ignore as he stared waxfaced into the distance, lost in his lush life dreamscape where he was getting the VIP treatment in private dining rooms, enjoying the most elusive wines with top-earning friends and receiving compliments for his impeccable taste.

                                                   *           *           *

Near the end of their engagement party seven years earlier, Nik and Janet stood arm-in-arm in the main banquet hall of Verdi’s at Whitestone.  The older guests and family friends had retired for the night so that only the core of their closest friends remained.  Janet, beneath the Mothership vessel-wide chandelier, held a champagne flute as she ribbed Nik. 

“I love the guy,” she said, stretching out the vowels in her playful alto. “But as we all know, he’s uncouth.”  She tapped his chest with the prodding finger of the flirtatious.   “Nik thinks whatever he wants, he can buy.  But there are some things, honey, that you can’t just buy.”

Nik rolled his eyes. “What, Jan, are you gonna say, love?  Cause let me tell you, some of the boys here will swear that even that can be bought.”

Hoots from the groomsmen.

Janet stuck out her tongue and said, “You wouldn’t understand if I told you.”

Arms wide, playing it vaudeville for the fellas. “Name me one thing you can’t buy with money.” 

“Class,” she said. “You can’t buy class.” 

His buddies howled.  Then, to remove the sting of any venom, she took Nik in her arms. “But I love the guy,” she announced, as prenuptial tears blurred her vision and she planted a big kiss on his lips.

Even now, Nik would sometimes think back to that comment.  Not because it had hurt his feelings – Nik’s Teflon pride couldn’t be scratched – but because it rang of wisdom he had never quite cracked.  It sounded good when Janet said it, and the comment had gotten a hell of a laugh, but the thing was, taste was practically the same thing as class.  And taste, you could definitely buy! People who eat gourmet fare night after night – even children – start to ease into the good life.  Any regular who eats those Alain Ducasse-Charlie Trotter seven-course meals soon loses his stomach for the grease, salt, and spongy textures of fast food. Let there be no doubt, taste definitely could be bought. 

These were the thoughts that accompanied Nik one night three years ago as he flipped through his tombstone-massive wine encyclopedia and his browsing finger came to rest on this breathless entry. 

The tasting took place in a Pomerol cellar so that we would not disturb the sediment from the bottle’s resting place . . .   Marcel waved a candle beneath the bottle like a charm. A half shoulder, no more, proving that there had been minimal evaporation over the past half-century.  Once the cork was removed, we saw that mold was present on the shaft, but the bottom proved clean. Our host poured the contents into four long-stemmed tulip glasses. 

“Wine porn,” Nik marveled as he sipped a ‘94 Château Montrose.  “This guy is the Don Juan of tasting.” 

Janet looked up from her mystery novel and shook her head.  He saw it on her face: wine again; she couldn’t be bothered.

Robe: decanted, the wine is dense, thick as blood, with just the slightest glints of pomegranate scarlet in the candlelight. 

Nose: a hint of quince fills the air, that familiar friend of many a fine, aged bottle.  Caramels and honeys from the oak follow.

Texture: a viscosity approaching molasses or maple syrup. The wine swirls in lazy waves.

Taste: a first impression of plum, date; second: violet, truffle. An enduring vivacity as rarely I’ve experienced.  The length unfurls in one’s mouth as long as one chooses to hold it, resisting the finish. Never before has the expression ‘chewing the wine’ so aptly described the feel.  For forty seconds or more I suckle that first sip, touring the legendary soil of this fabled domain. 

The finish: Cocoa, vanilla, pepper, tobacco. The tannins are not yet exhausted! Incredible! Forty-three years in the bottle and this wine still has years, decades to age!

There, in that cold, humid cave, we sat in mystified awe, as one word filled our heads over and above the cellar, like a voice of those long-lost viticulturists chanting an incantation from a half-century back: 

Petrus!  Petrus!

The nineteen-forty-seven Petrus. A wine that was the product of a summer so scorching, so punishingly dry that most grapes had succumbed on the vine.  But those that did survive were nectar: dense and opulent with Merlot fructose.  By the time he finished reading the entry, Nik was already a slave to one of those callings that bedevil any collector. 

From that day forward he was on a grail search. 

FICTION: TOJ, Chapter 4: Off The Grid

FICTION: Excerpt from Transit of Jupiter, Chapter 4: Off The Grid

Jake said he felt it in his gut.  Extreme Impact was cursed.  “Cursed like Heaven’s Gate.”  Howard didn’t get him.  Jake said, “Cursed like The Last Action Hero!”  Howard got him.

Brice Hammonds, Jake was saying, this guy couldn’t act his way out of a playpen! 

But Howard convinced Jake to complete shooting.  It would all work out in the end. “It’s all about the score cards!” he told his partner. Howard was a big believer in the power of test screenings and score cards.  Directors generally disliked them; a couple off-hand audience comments could send their films back to the editing room for weeks, or worse, back out on location to reshoot an ending.  Producers loved them. They were free marketing research. With scorecards, a producer could find out what worked, what didn’t, then have everyone go into a room and agree to meet audience expectations. By the time Extreme Impact was ready to go to market, Howard had lined up test screenings in California, Iowa and Delaware.

At a Riverside Cineplex, Howard and Jake stood with Jett Traynor in the rear of the theater as the audience grew restless.  No one laughed at one of the opening scene’s key jokes. (Hammonds tells a terrorist he’s got a solution, “It’s a no brainer,” he says, then blows off the man’s head.  “We paid twenty grand for that fuckin’ joke,” whispered a Jake, panicked.) Twenty minutes into the screening, the PowderKeg chiefs knew they had a problem.  Audience members had folded their scorecards into airplanes and were winging them at the screen.  A man led his family of four toward the exit signs. Others followed.  Jake looked at Howard.  His mouth was working but no sound came out.  Jake slapped open an exit door and disappeared into the lobby. Howard felt he had to do something to keep the audience there for the grand finale, the record-setting detonation (with twenty-five-angle coverage!).  He walked down the aisle, stood in front of the screen so that his shadow cut a sharp silhouette into the white vinyl, and announced, “You are going to love the last ten minutes.” 

Hostile voices emerged from the darkness.  

“What about the first two hours?” 

Scorecards sliced toward Howard on steep trajectories as he blocked the projectionist’s beam with a hand.  Howard huffed it up the aisle and joined Jett and Jake in the lobby.  A sea of walk-outs followed.  The PowderKeg execs looked more and more ashen.  At last, music swelled as the end credits rolled.  The theater doors swung open. Of the original one hundred-forty spectators, only fifty or so remained.  One stalwart who had gutted it out to the end found Howard standing by the ticket booth.  The man recognized him from his desperate speech down front. 

“Cyborgs?” the man said incredulously.  “The terrorists are cyborgs?”  He handed a half-finished popcorn bucket to his son and moved in close to Howard. He was as solidly built as a bricklayer.  “Did you direct this piece of shit,” he asked.  

“No,” said Howard defiantly.  “I produced it.”

“Who’s gonna believe all those explosions are all tied together?  There’s no story.  Nobody’s that stupid.” 

Howard took in the guy’s shirt: black, block-stencilled with ID-4. 

“You look like you might be that stupid,” said Howard.

The man decked him in the nose. 

Howard doubled over and dabbed his wrist. There was blood.  The guy was already walking out the front doors.  “Asshole,” he growled over his shoulder. 

Howard walked toward Jake and Jett, veering slightly, as he tipped his head back and sniffed up blood. 

Jett had draped his long legs over both arm rests of a cushioned lobby chair and was thumbing through messages on his smart phone, playing nonchalant.  In a stoned Spiccoli drawl he went, “So, what did his scorecard say, Howard?”

“You’re not gonna believe it,” still dabbing his nose and praying to God his off-the-cuff rejoinder would beat back the tears.  “Too much action.”  

FICTION: TOJ, Chapter 5: The Foreigner

FICTION: Excerpt from Transit of Jupiter, Chapter 5: The Foreigner

Ten minutes later she was leaning back against his balcony rail for the first time.  Jared handed her a coffee.

 “So you write stories,” said Rose. “Un romancier.” 

Jared mused that the French word for novelist implied something illicit, like vagabond lover, but was merely derived from the Latin romanus: a story told in a vulgar tongue (i.e. Roman, not Latin). 

“What do you write?” she asked.

He disappeared into the apartment and returned with a copy of The Trifecta Tango.  He explained how he’d had modest success with his first novel, a half-fictionalized account of his youth growing up near the Belmont race track where his father was a cook. 

“Was it a bestseller?” she asked.  The last word she said in English.

“No, but it had just enough success to justify my not working a regular job for a year or so.”  The characters were based on the guys who’d hung around the track.  Gamers and fast talkers who always had an idea to make millions, especially after three or four drinks.   “It starts like this. First chapter: my main character wakes up at 7:07.  That morning he sees sevens everywhere. He catches the seven bus downtown.  He gets off the bus and sees a bank sign; the temperature reads seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit.  A license plate passes…  more sevens.  So he gets the idea that he’s going to play the number seven horse at the track that day.”

Jared stopped and folded his hands.

“So,” asked Rose.  “Does the horse win?”

He turned his head slowly, his lips quivering with satisfaction.  “No, it finishes seventh.”

She smiled. He offered the book to her.

“My publisher wanted me to write a whole series at the horse track. I’m not convinced.  A wise man once said, ‘Never make your first book an autobiography.  Because then what do you do for an encore?’” 

He was grooving on the silences between each exchange.  Feeling alpha state pure, free and poised in the crisp air.  He inspected his neighbor.  She sipped her coffee without hurry.  Did she have to go to work? Where did she work?  Was she interested in him?  Was she just passing time? 

“I’m working on a second book,” he said.  “Trying to, anyway.”  He pointed inside toward a white board.  “When I’m working on a story, that thing’s full of stick-up notes.”

Rose peered into the apartment.  “But it’s almost empty.”

“I know, that’s the point.”

From the kitchen counter his phone began ringing.  He excused himself and withdrew to the apartment to take the call. The display showed ELAINE CELL.  Jared looked to the balcony. His eyes oscillated between Rose and the TV: sultry body and Belucciesque curves; on the TV: Jean-Paul Belmondo crawling, bang-bang, across a Paris rooftop, just one slip-slide from disaster.  Outside, Rose’s auburn tresses shone beneath a golden aureole, reflecting one billion candlepower radiation of the sun’s photosphere.

He didn’t answer. The phone stopped ringing. He pocketed it and returned to the balcony. 

Rose asked, “So what’s your new novel about?”

Still high on this conversation, he sniffed the air of the spring morning and related the premise: the novel was set in a dystopian future in which everyone used aliases in their everyday life, but for administrative purposes, the government identified everyone by an IP Address. 

She wore a blank look.  “So, what?  People are robots?”

“No, they’re not robots.”  Jared wanted to get his book idea across to someone, anyone.  What was so hard to get?  “Humans are still humans.  But in the future, ethnic minorities are grouped into the same subnets, you know, for easier mind control.  And entire populations can be controlled through commands sent over the net.  Total suppression is made easier by sending out ‘updates’ that can stir people to riot, or quash revolutions.”

She made a face.  “That sounds pretty obscure.”

Jared frowned.  “That’s what people keep telling me.”

“Just because something’s obscure doesn’t mean it’s good.”

Jared started to smile, thinking that was a compliment, then realized it wasn’t.   He appraised Rose more closely. 

She said, “If they can send out updates to everybody, maybe they could just erase the whole population’s memories.  Or just remove the parts of their memories they don’t want people to keep?  Why would they bother with the rest?”

Jared was silenced.  He felt like a novice again. 

An idea popped into his head. 

“Do you have plans for tonight?  I’m going to my editor’s place across the Seine.  A cocktail party.  Would you like to come?”  

“What about your wife?” Rose asked.

Jared’s stomach burned.  He looked up to the sky. “She’s on a work trip.  We could just go as friends.  Acquaintances.”

A long moment passed:  Rose staring off into the short distance and Jared trying to pry into those thoughts.  From his pocket his phone beeped.  Elaine had sent him a message:

You missed my call. Pack your bags.

Saturday you’re meeting me in Italy.

Check your email for details. 

Love you, E.

Rose calculated him.  “You know what I think?”

Jared forced his eyes away from the phone and steeled himself for a withering judgment.

Rose said, “I think maybe you need a new subject.”

“What,” whispered Jared.

She had the elfin grin of a twelve year-old.   “For your book.”

“Oh, really.  And what would my subject be?”

Her expression deepened.  Her eyes relaxed but the smile held, like a pleased child who had just captured a butterfly in a jar.

“You should write a story about me.”

HUMOR: The Lonely Traveler’s™ Guide to Romance

The Lonely Traveler’s™ Guide to Romance

 (French Edition)

In the bar / Au bar

Man: How are you?

Homme: Comment allez-vous?       

Woman: Fine, and you.

Femme: Bien, et vous?  

Man: May I buy you a drink?

Homme: Je peux vous offrir un verre?    

Woman: Paris is such a beautiful city, isn’t it?

Femme : Paris est tellement une belle ville, non ?              

Man : Do you like jazz?

Homme : Vous aimez le Jazz?

Woman: You have lovely eyes.

Femme: Vous avez de beaux yeux.

Man: Oscar Wilde said: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”

Homme : Oscar Wilde a dit : Le seul moyen de se délivrer d'une tentation, c'est d'y céder.”

Woman: Should we take a taxi or the subway?

Femme: On prend un taxi ou le métro?

At the apartment / A l’appartement

Man: You’re a good kisser.

Homme: Tu embrasses très bien.

Woman: I have toothpaste, if you’d like to freshen up.

Femme : J’ai du dentifrice, si tu veux.

Man: Oh, look.  You have a cat.

Homme : Oh, regarde-moi ça.  Tu as un chat.

Woman: Would you mind taking off your socks before we start?

Femme : Tu peux enlever tes chaussettes avant?

Man: It’s not herpes.  It’s just a skin rash.

Homme : Ce n’est pas de l’herpès.  C’est juste une petite rougeur.

Woman: Do you have a condom?            

Femme: Aurais-tu un préservatif?

Man: Ouch, you're not supposed to snap it like that. 

Homme : Aïe, fallait pas le lâcher, ça a fait claque!

Woman: Do it yourself then.            

Femme: Alors, fais-le toi-même.

Man: (sigh) So, is your cat just going to watch?

Homme: (soupire) Alors, ton chat il va nous mater?

Woman: (sigh) No worries, let’s have a cigarette and relax.

Femme : (soupire) Pas de soucis, on fume un clope et se met à l’aise.

Man: I swear, this has never happened before. 

Homme : Je te jure, ça ne m’est jamais arrivé. 

Woman : To me neither.

Femme : A moi non plus.                                                                             

Man: It’s not you, it’s me. 

Homme : C’est pas toi.  C’est moi.

Woman: So, does Oscar Wilde have a quote for this situation?

Femme : Alors, Oscar Wilde il a une citation aussi pour cette situation ?

Man: Can you please ask your cat to leave?!

Homme : Tu peux demander à ton chat de partir?!

Woman: Imagine you’re in a brothel with one hundred whores all fighting to suck you off.

Femme : Imagine que tu es dans un bordel avec cent putes qui se battent pour te sucer.

Man: Ah, that’s better.  That’s nice.

Homme : Ah, c’est mieux.  C’est beau, ça.

Woman: You can put inside now.

Femme : Tu peux le mettre dedans.

Man: It is inside!

Homme: C’est dedans!

Woman: Well, that was fast.

Femme: Ben, c’était rapide.

Man: Sorry.  Tonight’s just not my night.

Homme : Désolé. C’est pas ma soirée. 

Woman: What are you doing? Is that your thumb?

Femme : Qu’est-ce que tu fais?  C’est ton pouce?

Man: I’m just trying to help.

Homme : J’essais juste de donner un coup de main.

Woman: You know what, I think I’ll finish myself.

Femme: Tu sais quoi, je me finis moi-même.

Man: I think I saw a zucchini in the kitchen.

Homme : Je pense avoir vu une courgette dans la cuisine.

Woman : Would you please leave?

Femme : Tu veux bien partir?

Man: I was kidding! 

Homme: Je plaisantais! 

Woman: Beat it!  The subway’s at the corner.

Femme : File!  Le métro est au coin.

Man: I think I’ll call a cab.

Homme: J’appelle un taxi.

HUMOR: Fist Fight at Karaoke Night

Fist Fight at Karaoke Night 

"Hey, have you noticed?”  

“Noticed what?”

“That guy in charge of the song selection keeps giving us the shaft.” 

“Really?”

“Really. That dude with the Jheri curls has been up three times in the last hour.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Come on.  The DJ’s only played like one of our requests out of the last ten songs.”

“You know? I think you’re right.” 

“You see?”

“That’s so not cool.”

“I’m going to have a word with him.”

“You sure?”

“Totally sure.”

“Ah, wait a minute, maybe he’ll play one of ours next.” 

“What are you saying?” 

“I'm saying just let it slide.”

“Just let it slide?  You let little things like this slide and then, you know what happens?  Over time your soul gets eaten up. “

“I’m just saying don't make a big deal out of it.”

“You think Donald Trump just lets things slide?  You think that judge on American Idol just lets things slide?  Sean Penn! You think Sean Penn just lets things slide?”

“Sean Penn would never do karaoke.”

“Fuck this!  You let this stuff slide, then next thing you know, you’ve lost all your self-respect and you end up with a bleeding ulcer and then you become one of those guys who walks down the street talking to himself.  Shouting threats at clergymen.”

          *

“Hey. What’s up with the song selection?  You’re totally giving our table the shaft.”

“I’m not giving anybody the shaft.”  

“Our table’s only had like one song in the last hour.” 

“It’s one song per table.  I’m being totally fair.”

“Fair?  My ass.  That dude that looks like Lionel Richie’s already sung three Phil Collins songs in the last hour!  We haven’t gotten any.”

“It’s one song per table.”

“Then how come Lionel’s gotten three?”

“He’s at a table for ten.  Tables with ten or more get two songs for every rotation.  Tables with less than ten get one song per rotation.”

“Aha!  So you admit it!   It’s not one song per table.  It’s two songs per table.”

“For tables with ten.”

“But we’re nine.”

“So you only get one song per rotation.” 

“But Lionel Richie’s the only one singing from his table. “

“Who sings is up to them to decide.”

“That’s bunk, man.  They’ve got one person singing at their table and he gets two songs every round.  We have nine singing people for Chrissake!”

“I don’t make the rules, man, I just apply them.”

“What a cop-out.  I’ll tell you what.  I’m going to invite a girl over for a drink.  She can sit at our table. And that makes ten.  Now we get two songs per rotation.  How about it?”

“No.  That’s cheating.”

“Come on, I’ll invite that waitress over there.  The chubby one with the fat ankles and the Minnie Mouse shoes.” 

“Which waitress?”

“That one.  The one that looks like an alcoholic.”

“That’s my wife.”

“Oh.  Hm.  Ah.   I was kidding!  It was a joke!” 

“It didn’t sound like a joke.”

“Seriously, when are you gonna play my Elvis song?  People have had it up to fucking here with Phil Collins.  Sussudio.  That’s not even a real word! When are you gonna play Blue Christmas?”

“When I decide.  Not when you decide.”

“Oh, I see.  So this is a power trip.”

“It’s not a power trip.”

“Admit it, you’re power tripping on this thing.  Just a little bit.  You’ve got control of the knobs. You’ve got the stack of requests, and you know what I think? I think you’re giving out the song selection to your friends.  The regulars with bad teeth and worse haircuts and the beer-barrel bellies, because the only time they go out is when they come here!” 

“Are you finished?”

“You’re giving us the shaft, man, cuz we’re not regulars!”

“Step down from my control booth.”  

“Step down from your control booth?  Ha!  You talk like a cop.  Get a grip, this is a closet with a karaoke machine.  Control booth!” 

“Step down.”

“You know what?  I bet you’d make a good cop.  But not like a real cop.  I mean, this is karaoke.  No, you’d be a traffic cop.  One of those meter maids.  Oh, you’d let your friends park for free, sure!  Or your family.  Or the karaoke regulars.  But as soon as an outsider stopped and left his car running for two minutes, because his wife’s about to give birth, you’d run right out of the donut shop and dock him with a ticket.”

“You know, you’re really starting to annoy me.”

“So, get rid of me.  Play Elvis.”

“Get out of my booth.”

“Play fucking Elvis and all of this will be over.”

“Get out.”

“Play Elvis and all this will just be a bad memory.”

“You know what?  I’m not playing Elvis.”

“Traffic cop.  Loser!  Failed cop loser.  Loser fucking failed traffic cop whose only joy in life is ruining karaoke night for a group of friends who just want to sing Blue Christmas.”

“Get out!”

“Make me.”

“Out of my booth!”

“Sissy.  Why don’t you call Lionel Richie over here?  Maybe he can make me.”

“Don’t make me throw you out.”

“Why don’t you call over your slag wife with the truck driver sized hands and she can take a sh—”

As a fan of humorists from James Thurber to Ricky Gervais, from The New Yorker to Mad Magazine, I've always enjoyed writing short pieces that focused on the vanity and oddness of the people and institutions around me.  On this site you will find a sample of what I like to write.