Dreams of Fish
Fragments
The Seven Deadly Social Sins
My Enemy
San Francisco, Strippers, and Satan
New Town
Interviews with the People in My Neighborhood
First Dateh
Reunion
Tasty Recipes
Job Search, Pt. 1
Republic, Pt. 2
Scientology
The Girl Who Works at Tower Records on Thursday Afternoons
Meat Market
Fun Pranks
My Best Friend is My Dentist
Tips For Scoring With the Ladies...
It's pretentious as hell to have an italicized synopsis and title for everything I write. I'm going to have to change how I do things around here pretty soon....
One of the first things I did on moving to the Bay Area was meet up with an old friend. We went to go eat in the Mission and talked and joked with one another. She had just begun working as a substitute teacher and told me stories of how much the students hated her.
In one of her classes, the students threw gum at her, ruining her sweater. I could tell her job upset her so I tried comforting her. I told her that everything would be okay, that she had to be patient, that children at that age are just difficult and that their behavior had nothing to do with her. It was difficult to act more concerned than I was, but I had no choice.
We drove to Chinatown, parked, then walked around, looking at vegetables and the ducks hanging in the butcher shop windows. We walked up and down Broadway, staring into the storefronts of the strip clubs. Some of the girls would stand out front and try to talk people into coming in and checking the club out. One girl told us that couples did not have to pay admission at her club. We went inside.
After walking in, we took a table near the back and looked at an overweight girl dancing on the stage. She moved in slow, tired motions, her ass hanging beneath the bright lights. We were the only ones in the club. We left.
There are a number of adult bookstores around Broadway. We went into a couple of them. I was always curious as to what the stores sold and imagined them to be places full of excitement and secrets. Instead, everything inside was very predictable. There were magazines and videos and paraphernalia.
It was a thoroughly uninteresting place. There were a couple of exceptions, though. One of the magazines showed pregnant women beating each other up. I don't know how well that magazine sold or, for that matter, who bought it.
One of the devices on sale was called Auto-Suck. It was a contraption designed to stimulate a man while he drove around in his car. It was powered, conveniently, by an automobile's cigarette lighter.
I thought about the device for a long time. It made me paranoid. Now that I knew about Auto-Suck, I would feel sickened and violed every time I saw someone looking at me from an automobile. How was I to know that they weren't hooked up at any given moment? I couldn't figure out if it was worse when people smiled or frowned at me from the driver's seat. I realized that I lived in a nation of perverts.
It will be just a matter of time before the creators of Auto-Suck created Anywhere-Suck. Just imagine it: a hidden device that can be worn at all hours, constantly stimulating the genitals. It could be worn to the beach, church, the grocery store, and lawyers’ offices.... You would not know who was wearing one. Your boss, your doctor, professional football players on the field...it would be a total moral breakdown.
After we left the adult bookstore, we tried to go watch a Chinese movie. We didn't like the way the posters for the movie looked, though, so we decided to forget about it. We called it a night.
Later, after I had driven home, I fell asleep and had a dream. I was in Hell and was sitting around with Satan. He offered me coffee and was actually a pretty good host. He had a lot of movies on tape and let me watch whatever I wanted. I settled on The Goonies. I hadn't seen the movie since I was very young, so I enjoyed it. In my dream, though, The Goonies was a much more interesting film than it was in real life. I don't remember the details, though.
After we were done watching the movie, Satan said that he wanted to give me some very important advice regarding my career path, but I woke up before he could tell it to me. It wasn't too disappointing. After all, he's Satan. He does stuff like that.
My father was a tough son of a bitch. When I would hear children …