Monthly Archives: July 2010

Coulrophobia Is No Laughing Matter. Well, Maybe A Little.

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If you're looking at this picture and having trouble breathing, you may suffer from coulrophobia, the irrational fear of clowns. Or asthma. This is a bad time of year for allergies.

If you asked me to name the three things English people are most afraid of, I’d say bad table manners, spicy food and Nazis.

But I’d be wrong.

A recent poll found that the top three most frightfully frightening things in Britain are spiders, needles and clowns.

Well knock me down with a feather!

Spiders and needles I understand. Nobody likes animals that have eight legs and yet can still sneak up and kill you with a single venomous bite. And needles hurt. But clowns?

I’ve never understood coulrophobia, the irrational fear of middle-aged men who like to paint their faces and wear bright-orange wigs. I don’t particularly like clowns, but I’m not afraid of them. They’re silly. What’s the worst they can do? Throw a bucket of multi-colored confetti at you? Squirt water in your face with the plastic daisy they keep tucked in the oversized lapel of their polka-dotted jumpsuit? Repeatedly honk a giant bicycle horn in your ear?

Still, coulrophobia is a real fear for many people.

Recently, for instance, I was surprised to discover that one of my co-workers has been petrified of clowns since 1960. He’s an American citizen and successful professional who appears to be perfectly rational in every other way. Well, maybe not in every way. He eats day-old cake donuts by the box full and tucks in his Hawaiian shirts, for instance, and that’s not normal. But he’s mostly normal.

So why is this grown man afraid of clowns?

Because when he was about 6 years old, his parents came home from work one night and did what all good parents did back in those days: They sat him down in front of the television to shut him up while they drank martinis, smoked Marlboros and conversed like adults. Unfortunately, that night’s thrilling episode of One Step Beyond was titled The Clown and featured a killer circus clown. A creepy killer circus clown named Pippo. A mute creepy killer circus clown named Pippo who uses his bizarro clowny mind-control powers to force the Big Top’s wife-murdering strongman to throw himself off a bridge into a river and then confess to his foul crime after the police save him from drowning by fishing him out of the water. And that one black-and-white television show scared my co-worker so much, he still wets his pants some 50 years later whenever he hears the Ringling Bros. circus is coming to town.

If I was afraid of clowns, I’d try to get some professional help. Not counseling, though. Counselors use their bizarro counselor mind-control powers to get you to calm down, and I don’t need any of that crap. If I want to calm down, I’ll do it the old-fashioned way, by overdosing on Benadryl and Tanqueray.

No, I’d call the sales department at the ACME Box Co. and ask them to make me an invisible cardboard box. Then if a clown started bothering me, I’d trick him into the invisible box. At first, the clown would think he was doing the very best trapped-in-an-invisible-box routine of his life. But then he would realize he was actually trapped in an invisible box, and panic. And that’s when I’d make the clown promise to quit clowning around and start behaving like a normal person.

Unless the clown was an insane Nazi clown, of course.

Then I’d just shoot him, or throw some poisonous spiders and extra-sharp needles at him.

Because the British are right about one thing, even if they’re too scared to discuss it with pollsters: Nazis are terrifying.

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Superman’s Lament

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Don't believe everything you read about Superman. I'm not what you think.

Do you ever feel out of place, like you’re a misfit from another planet?

Of course you do.

It’s a common human emotion.

In your case, it’s probably because your mother didn’t breastfeed you, or your father was a tyrannical perfectionist who demanded that you exceed his expectations. Or maybe you’re just a little bit nuts. Whatever the cause, all you have to do to make the anxiety go away is pop a Xanax or slurp a couple of martinis and in a few minutes you’re as relaxed as a government employee on holiday and acting like the life of the party.

But not me.

In my case, I feel like a misfit from another planet because I am from another planet. It was called Krypton, and despite everything you might’ve read about it or me in the comic books, my life hasn’t lived up to the marketing hype any better than the iPhone 4g. Here’s the true story:

I was born on the planet Krypton, just minutes before my home world was destroyed. But my father, a scientist named Jor-El, saved me from certain death by placing me in a rocket and pointing it toward Earth. I was found by a simple and kind Kansas farmer and his wife, who adopted me, changed my name from Kal-El to Clark Kent and taught me everything I needed to know but didn’t want to know about milking cows, feeding chickens and slopping hogs.

According to the handwritten note pinned to my Onesie by Jor-El, he predicted that on Earth I would have superpowers that I could use to benefit humanity. I was supposed to be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. I was supposed to be able to jump into thin air and fly.

What a crock.

Turns out dear old dad may have been smart enough to pack me into a rocket and point it toward Earth, but I guess he wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist when it comes to predicting superpowers, because I can’t do any of those things. Stop bullets? Ha! A buddy of mine nearly put out my left eye out in the eighth grade with his Daisy Red Rider Classic BB gun. More powerful than a locomotive? Ha! When I tried out for the varsity football team in high school, it took me three days to come out of the coma after I was hit at the line of scrimmage by John “The Brick” Maslin. Leaping buildings? Ha! I can barely climb the stairs to my second-floor apartment without pausing on the landing to catch my breath.

Meet the real Superman. Not quite what you were expecting, is it?

As for flying, sure, I tried it once. I jumped off the top of my dad’s barn with the colorful tights and cape my mother sewed out of my baby blanket. Knocked out two teeth, broke both my legs and herniated a disk in my lower back that still hurts when the weather gets cold. Now I’m scared to take a United Airlines flight to Des Moines, let alone circle the Earth at supersonic speeds looking for evil villains to battle.

Given my shortcomings, it’ll probably come as no surprise to you that I grew up and entered the only profession that’s open to awkward knuckleheads like me, and that’s journalism. I write obituaries for the Daily Planet in Metropolis. Let me tell you about my co-workers.

My boss, Perry White, is a real jerk and I’d punch him in the nose but I’m afraid he put me in a headlock and parade me around the office like a trained monkey. The woman in the cubicle next to me, Lois Lane, is hotter than a jalapeño pepper in August, but when I asked her out on a date a few years ago, she just laughed and said she’d sooner go out with a loser like Jimmy Olsen, the paper’s photographer, than be caught dead in public with a goofball like me.

Lois and Jimmy got married five months later, and now they have three children—the twins Jonathan and David, and a daughter, Riley.

I tried dating other women, but was never successful. I think it’s the Coke-bottle glasses, or my tendency to over-share, or the fact that because I’m lactose intolerant, I sometimes get a little gassy. So I live by myself in a small walk-up apartment on the west side. You might think I get lonely, but I consider my place my Fortress of Solitude. Nobody bothers me there, and I keep myself busy reading and watching television, or playing chess with a computerized chessboard that I bought at Radio Shack. I also have my hobbies to keep me entertained:  I’m writing a novel—it’s a spy novel—and I collect rocks and crystals. I have hundreds and hundreds of them in all sizes and colors. Sometimes I sit in the dark surrounded by the quartzes, amethysts, aquamarines, citrines and whatnot, dozing off as I watch them sparkle and shine by the glow of the flashing colored neon lights outside my living room window.

I wish I wasn’t such a misfit, of course.

Who doesn’t?

Maybe someday I’ll find a piece of Kryptonite in a little rock shop out in the country. My father said Kryptonite would make me weak and frail, like a human. But my theory is that if he was dead wrong about the Earth’s effects on my superpowers, he might be dead wrong about Kryptonite, too. Maybe a deep green chunk of my home planet will give me superpowers. Then I can put it in my coat pocket, walk into work, give Perry a bloody nose, steal Lois from Jimmy, and take her on a round-the-world tour of the Earth from outer space. Protected under my cape, naturally, no rocket ship needed.

Until then, though, I’m going to have to keep learning to live with myself—Superman, the silly misfit.

I tell you, it’s not easy being me.

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Motel 6: “We’ll Leave The Light On For You. Because You’ll Want It On. Trust Us. Don’t Even Think About Turning It Off.”

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This is a Motel 6. When you are tempted to stay at one, remember the old saying, "Every stick has two ends." I have no idea what it means, but you don't hear it as often as "Too many cooks spoil the broth."

Whenever I consider staying at a Motel 6, I can’t help but think of Tom Bodett, the humorist and radio pitchman with the mellifluous drawl who once assured his listeners that the motel was so homey and accommodating, they’d “leave the light on for you.”

But whenever I stay at a Motel 6, I can’t help but remember Sam Kinison, the late comedian and former revival-style preacher who got famous for screaming lines like, “There’s no happy ending to cocaine. You either die, you go to jail, or else you run out.”

Listening to Bodett is like eating a warm bowl of buttery mashed potatoes and gravy at grandma’s house.

Listening to Kinison is like going to an exorcism and getting putrid split-pea soup barfed into your face, and yet you keep coming back for more because it’s inexpensive and there’s a lot of it.

And so it goes with Motel 6.

I’m always drawn to Motel 6 because, well, it’s cheap and convenient, much like home. For about $35 to $50 a night, you can find a Motel 6 just inches from any major highway pretty much anywhere in America. And they do leave the light on for you, although I no longer believe it’s because they’re friendly. I think it’s because cockroaches hate light and will stay hidden under the baseboards and sink cabinets as long as it’s on.

Why I can’t remember that when I’m on the road, I have no idea.

Take my last visit to Motel 6 a few months ago.

My family was driving from Dallas, Texas to our home in Denver, Colorado when we got tired and decided to pull into a Motel 6 in Wichita, Kansas to rest for the night. It was about 2 a.m. when I walked up the reception counter.

Are these young men capable of being Motel 6 night clerks? Perhaps but they're going to have to practice being more surly.

Okay, it wasn’t a reception counter. It was a narrow Formica shelf jutting out from the wall just below a 1-inch-thick polycarbonate window about the size of my head. Somebody with the carpentry skills of a second-grader had cut a hole into the wall, bolted a piece of  bullet-proof plastic over it and, for good measure, covered it with iron bars, Gulag Archipelago style. Standing behind that greasy window was a very disheveled, very disgruntled young man wearing a black hoodie who looked less like a hotel clerk than a deeply disturbed former monk turned meth dealer.

When I saw that yellowed plastic window and his gold chains, I should’ve spun right around without saying a word and driven down the street to the Days Inn. Or even the RV Park. We could have slept among the Winnebagos practically free. We would have been sleeping in our minivan, sure, but we would have been safe, surrounded by dozens of loyal members of the Good Sam Club, who watch out for the wellbeing of their fellow travelers fiercely, or as fiercely as you can watch for one another when you’re 80 years old, have cataracts and ride a motorized scooter to the grocery store.  But I didn’t run away because the price was alluringly cheap, a mere $37, tax included.

Now if you’re like me, you’re very familiar with the old expression, “You always get what you pay for.”

But if you’re like me, you also ignore the old expressions because you don’t really know what they mean and because you stubbornly believe that it’s good to be thrifty, even if that means getting beaten to death by angry drunks.

Which is exactly what I thought was going to happen.

Twice.

After parking the minivan and unloading our luggage, I hurried my son, daughter and wife past a prostitute who was standing in the parking lot. Or maybe she was Lindsay Lohan, I’m not sure. All I really know is that it was freezing cold outside and she was standing there smoking a cigarette and wearing one of the three official hooker’s uniforms–stiletto heels, fishnet stockings and two bright red tube tops, one for the top half, which I think of as the marketing department, the other for the bottom two-thirds, which in my mind is the shipping department. Either way, though, I was fairly certain this particular young lady wasn’t running a family business.

As we rushed past her into the courtyard, we met a group of young men who appeared to be a little angry and a lot intoxicated. They looked me up and down like I was their personal ATM, but I immediately scared them away by nervously pointing at my well-muscled 15-year-old son, who’s not only a stud hockey player, but also happened to be carrying his sticks. They quickly left, probably because they correctly sensed that my sweet boy loves nothing more in life than removing people’s teeth from their mouths with a Nike Bauer Vapor X, 120 flex, Sakic curve.

If you're on the road and need a helping hand, look for a member of the Good Sam Club. They may not be able to lend you a hand, but they're good people and would probably be happy to lend you a walker.

The light was indeed on in our room, and it was also surprisingly spacious and well-equipped. If by “spacious” you mean all four of us were able to fit inside of it without standing single file, and by “well-equipped” you mean it had a rust-stained sink, a dripping shower and two beds spaced roughly 6 inches apart.  Ignoring the primitive, defensive part of my brain that was instinctively yelling “bed bugs,” “is that blood on the shower curtain” and “what are those stains on the carpet, walls and furniture,” we unpacked for night, climbed under the covers and fell asleep.

Or would have, if it hadn’t been for the drunk guy who started pounding on the door and shouting at us about 10 minutes later. I honestly wish I could tell you what he wanted or why he sounded so angry and bitter, but he was so lubricated I could hardly make out a word of what he was saying. It sounded like, “Waaah grundle snort fucking waaah waaah yaaah stinking waaah fuck you waaah.” Or words to that effect. I glanced at my son to make sure he was still awake in case trouble developed, and cowered under the covers waiting for it to go away, which it did.

And then, finally, mercifully, we slept.

Until about 7 a.m.

That’s when the maid ignored the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob. That’s when the maid ignored the strict unspoken rule that says maids are supposed to knock before entering a room just in case you and your wife, or you and your secretary, or you and the hard-working entrepreneur you met in the parking lot earlier that night are busy putting fresh stains on the carpet. That’s when the maid used her magic pass key to unlock the door and became the only woman in the world other than my wife and my doctor to see me in my tighty-whiteys in about 32 years.

“What time are you checking out?” she shouted.

“We asked for a late checkout, which is about 11 a.m.,” my wife replied, looking and sounding a lot like a hockey player.

“We’re cleaning the rooms now,” the maid argued.

“We’re checking out at 11,” my wife replied, in a tone that frightened me and compelled the maid to close the door.

And then we laid there trying to sleep for another couple of hours while the Motel 6 maintenance man–who would have guessed they had one?–chipped ice off the sidewalk outside our room. I’d like to think he was doing it for us, or at least for my kids. But it was probably because Motel 6 hates getting sued by the hookers who slip and fall escorting their clients to and from their rooms.

We complained about our night, of course–first to the desk clerk, who shrugged and grunted apathetically instead of sympathetically, and later to some anonymous person or persons with an e-mail address in the customer service department at Motel 6′s corporate offices, who didn’t even bother to send us a cordial, automatically generated e-mail expressing regret for our discomfort.

So will I ever stay at Motel 6 again?

I hope not.

But if I do, I hope Tom Bodett’s there to tuck me in and read me a bedtime story. With that voice of his, he could recite the warning label on a can of Raid bug spray and put me to sleep.

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A Note From The Author

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Writing a book. Be back in a minute.

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My Dog Bounce

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When I was a kid, my parents bought me a dog.

He wasn’t a fancy dog–he was a mutt, with straggly hair, stand-up ears and a skinny tail that was twice as long as his body and randomly traced squiggly lines in the air like it had a mind of its own. I named him Bounce, but he didn’t like the name, and decided to go by Rufus instead. “Call me Wroofus,” he’d growl. “I ain’t no Bounce. I’m a Wroofus.”

I loved my dog like a brother–better than a brother, really, because brothers are always breaking your toys and ratting you out to your parents for eating Fudgesicles and Oreos for lunch when they really ought to be minding their own business. Rufus pretty much let me do what I wanted, and he listened to all my problems and put up with all my mistakes and all my bad moods without complaining not even once, which is more than I can say for just about anybody I’ve ever known in my entire life, dog or human. But as much as I hated my brother and loved Rufus, I have to admit that Rufus wasn’t the best dog for a kid to have around.

For one thing, Rufus drank like a fish, except instead of water, it was beer and gin. Mostly gin, to be honest, especially in the evenings. He liked to kick back in the Barcalounger to watch television with a tall glass of Burnett’s London Dry mixed down with Schweppes Tonic Water, a few ice cubes and a twist of lime. Mostly he liked cop dramas, but if he didn’t fall asleep early while drinking the gin, he’d stay up for the late-night talk shows because he enjoyed the comedians.

“That Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is fucking hilarious,” he’d say, never minding that my mother would think it was me cussing up a shit storm downstairs in the family room and then come rushing in like Joan of Arc to wash the infidels out of my mouth out with soap. If you’ve never had your tongue practically yanked out of your mouth and lathered up with a bar of Ivory, it tastes like total crap, I don’t care if it is 99.44 percent pure and floats.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Rufus smoked cigarettes, too. I don’t mean he snuck a cigarette or two in the afternoons like President Obama does when Michelle and girls aren’t looking. I mean he used the nearly spent stub of the smoldering cigarette he was holding in his paw to light the fresh cigarette hanging from his lip, puffing those cancer sticks down one after the other like they were peppermint candy or something. All dogs have bad breath because they eat too much meat and don’t floss or brush as often as they should, but Rufus could breathe on you and make you want to puke your guts up all over the carpet. It was disgusting.

But it wasn’t the drinking or the smoking that got Rufus into trouble, or even the gambling.

Oh, I just remembered that I forgot to mention the gambling.

It’s true, Rufus played poker–usually Texas Hold ‘em or Seven-Card Stud, but sometimes Indian poker, which is funnier when dogs play it than when people play it because dogs can’t make the cards stick to their foreheads like people can because dogs have fur up there instead of grease and are forced to hold the cards in place with their paws while they haggle over their bets. It’s goofy looking, I tell you.

Anyway, I’m sure you get the picture about the gambling. If not, you’ve probably seen those paintings of dogs playing cards, right? That was Rufus and his pals, except you’re going to have to trust me when I tell you that it’s not so cute when a bunch of hairy dogs with stinking breath get together to drink beer and cuss and tell dirty jokes and fart it up for four or five hours while you’re trying to sleep but you can’t because you’re worried your mom’s going to hear all that cussing and decide you’ve got Tourette’s Syndrome and come downstairs and do the laundry in your mouth to teach you a valuable lesson that you’ll never forget.

Like I said earlier, though, it wasn’t the drinking or the smoking or the gambling that got Rufus into a mess, although they probably didn’t help the situation any.

It was the carousing.

Yes, I’m embarrassed to admit that in addition to all of his other problems, Rufus was an incorrigible lady’s dog. He had no loyalty or morals at all when it came to females, and he would sleep with anything on four legs, from bulldogs and Yorkshire terriers to German shepherds and Shih Tzus. Once, I even caught him on the pool table with a Pekingese, which has got to be the ugliest dog on the planet. He’d covered the poor girl’s head with an empty bag of dog food and she was yelping and yipping and I don’t even want to say what they were doing beyond that because I’m pretty sure it was illegal, and not just in the Bible Belt states.

Rufus’ undoing, however, was the cute little Bichon Frise who lived with the rich people in the big house on the next block over. As far as I was concerned, she looked like two oversized cotton balls with legs and seemed very stuck on herself. But Rufus said her French accent was an “irresistible aphrodisiac,” and he hooked up with her as often as he could. Being generally irresponsible, of course, one thing led to another, and the Bichon eventually got knocked up.

And that’s when Rufus found out that that sweet little French girl was cheating on her boyfriend, and not just any boyfriend, either. He was a great big Doberman with a mean temper and a sharp set of teeth to back it up. He showed up at the house one night wearing a black leather collar with steel spikes in it and he was growling like a Wolfman on a moonlit blood rampage. Before he could sink his fangs into anything meaty, though, Rufus peeled out of the side door of the house faster than I’d ever seen him run–faster than I’d ever imagined that he could run–and jumped into the driver’s seat of my father’s Buick and took off down the street like Bobby Rahal on his way to winning the 1986 Indianapolis 500.

I was astonished because until that moment I had no idea Rufus could drive. So I just stood there, speechless, my mouth hanging open like a Venus fly trap and my eyeballs practically popping out of their sockets.

“Gotta go, kid!” Rufus shouted through the open window with a cavalier wave of his paw as he sped by me. “Listen to Rufus, now! Do what your mom tells you and keep your nose clean! You don’t want to grow up like me because it ain’t nothin’ but trouble! Send you a postcard when I get settled!”

The Doberman chased Rufus’ tailpipe for about a block and a half before giving up, and that was the last time I ever saw or heard from Rufus. I like to think he moved to Las Vegas, and is living in the lap of luxury in a penthouse suite at the Bellagio, where he can watch the gondolas glide up and down the canal under a perpetual sunset in the hotel’s palazzo while he smokes his cigarettes and drinks his gin.

I’ve had a few other dogs since then, and they’ve all been great. But, to be honest, they’ve all been a little too quiet for me, and sometimes–maybe especially on Friday and Saturday nights–I get to missing Rufus a bit. He may have been a terrible influence, and he surely had the worst breath ever, but he listened to me, and was a one hell of a unique dog.

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