It's been a long time since anyone really asked anybody to do
anything they really wanted to do (I'm not even sure which party I mean by "they,"
but it sure beats the hell out of "he or she"), but one thing's for
sure: sooner or later, someone or other is going to expect you to get a job.
Avoiding this at all costs, up to and including self-sabotage, will land you
in big, empty places like the parking lot of the Eagle's Lodge on Hawthorne
before you know what hit you, getting banned from their swap meets because of
your stroke of entrepreneurial genius du jour, the one that happened to involve
hawking tee-shirts that said, "GIVE HEAD."
Now, you may in fact love the advertised product as though you were the Red
Cross itself: you may donate Head, fly halfway around the world to personally
organize a Head Drive in Thailand; you may feed cookies and Tang to those who
give it willingly behind the drawn curtains of some makeshift voting booth in
the basement of a high school, seek out those whose type is compatible with
your own and even, heaven forbid, sell it for drugs while under the lock and
key of the University of Wherever.
However, none of this changes the fact that, in what passes for reality, you
don't have a source of income. Not that this matters to the seventy-eight-year-young
toothless hag who's just booted you from the swap meet for disseminating lewd
and profane materials-- she has a job. Her job, in fact, is to kick you out
of your life.
In any case, now you have a Samsoniteful of iron-on letters that would have
Given Head but now Give Two Shits about you and your big, penniless ideas. What
are you going to do now, iron that three-piece suit you bought in Paris four
years ago when you really DID have a job? Hell no! But while that iron's hot,
this is the perfect time to make like Rosemary's Baby's Rosemary and start Anagramming
to the Oldies. Get out the ol' Scrabble board (if you really are that helpless)
and let's think of things to say with "GIVE HEAD" besides, well, things
that actually promulgate the giving of head.
Variation #1: DIE V HAG! Nice play on homophony, evoking misogyny while possibly
alluding to your Hole of Choice's favorite lushette-- perhaps, even, to the
overzealous Secret Society cunt who spun you into this particular dither in
the first place. This is just shrouded in mystery... plus, you have a leftover
E that'll fit perfectly into the story you've been working on about a virtual
Hester Prynne: the tragic tale of the modern E-dulteress. Or you could say you
lettered in Electrical Engineering, but who'd believe you when you're this unemployed?
Variation # 2: You could spell the better part of INNAGADDADAVIDA, and at the
breathless, tone-deaf end of the day when you're filling out your make-believe
time card in your own goddamn bathroom, you'll still have that inimitable, leftover
E.
Or you could try my very own Variation # 3, in which you appliqué the
simple-yet-effective word "HI" to the ass of those designer jeans
that you bought as an afterthought to the aforementioned French suit a thousand
years and far more francs ago, the ones that just need that slight sprucing-up
to bring them, quite literally, into this century.
Then you can run around like a monkey all weekend.
At the end of the weekend, when you're pulling at the stomach lining of your
pockets for lint with which to macramé a surrender hanky, preparing to
really hit the pavement this time with more toothpaste on your resume than your
mouth saw all last year, you'll catch a glimpse of something as you haul your
Mary Tyler Moore ass to the door. What it will be is the remnant of the clever
salutation "HI," drooping from your ass like so much codependent toilet
paper in a stuttering, apologetic whimper; far more like "I... I..."
You will go back into the house at once.
There you will attempt to employ everything in your house (excepting, of course,
the remnants of your liquor cabinet) to eradicate the dangling... participle
or whatever. Soap and water will quickly give way to lighter fluid (hey, it
used to take price tags off vinyl records... whatever those are), S.O.S. pads,
nail polish remover, and facing Mecca. While prostrate on your red shag carpet,
you will see the Holy Grail of a Small Today peering out from under your second-hand
futon: your hairbrush.
A stiff, wire, conical thing meant for Hair Ideas long ago, you abandoned it
to the revival of the Grunge look you began last year-- but it's perfect for
gently picking at the nasty chads of that erstwhile "HI." See how
it now pulls like the placenta from a newborn kitty, now shreds as though identity
theft were fun? How ideal a tool it is, and how quickly it speeds you on your
way to being all things lovely, efficient, and on your way to tomorrow!
And the kicker? All the years, as told in hairs-- the blond ones and the black
ones and the (just a few) gray ones-- are pilled and spilled somehow neatly,
somehow as though they were already a sweater, before your very eyes. They are,
at long last, free from the brush-- the magical, tragical tool that may have
been, in the final analysis, the only thing standing between you and the true-blue
job of your dreams.
Romalyn Schmaltz actually waited in line
last night to see Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. How pathetic is that?
This is her second essay for Lime Tea.
