The Bull Years

by Phil Stern

  But back to gay marriage. I don’t think straight people have a right to ban gay marriage just because gay sex is weird.

  I asked Steve about this last night as we rode up the elevator. He said straight people have deluded themselves into thinking marriage is some kind of exalted state where they are legally, economically, and sexual chained to another human being. But how exalted can marriage be if any fruit loop could do it? So to protect their own bullshit pretensions, the hetros ban gay marriage. Steve then said the one good thing about being gay is that you can’t get married.

  I worry about Steve. He seems pretty bitter at times.

  But he’s right. Gay marriage doesn’t detract from straight marriage any more than gay sex detracts from straight sex.

  Think about it. There could be a pair of married gay guys living next door to you right now. They could do housework in leotards, watch chick-flicks, hang from chandeliers, paint the garage pink, shove all kinds of objects where they don’t belong…in short, they could be the two biggest queers in the history of the universe.

  But if it’s all behind closed doors, what does it matter? How does that detract from your marriage, or your family?

  Hey, there was a time when people said allowing women to vote would ruin America. But they were just sexist assholes. Get the picture?

  Actually, let’s make a deal with gay people right now. If we allow homosexuals to get married, they won’t try to crash any more parades. For God’s sake, why can’t gay people just get shut the fuck up and get drunk on St. Patty’s day like everybody else?

  STEVE LEVINE

  I walked into my building this morning to find one of the new sales reps sitting in a chair, staring off into space. Jake was a nice kid, though like most new employees was having a tough time of it.

  “How’s it going?” I said, strolling past him toward my office.

  “How’s it going!” he shot back. “I guess you didn’t take a real good look at the parking lot today, did you Steve?”

  “I guess not.” Sighing, I leaned against the wall. Being a sales manager for a home water purification company involved a dozen bizarre conversations a day. This was merely the first.

  “Well, if you did, you might have noticed my car isn’t there!” Folding his arms, Jake nodded with great conviction. “You might have noticed my mother’s car instead!”

  “Jake, I don’t give a shit about your car,” I pleasantly replied. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Now, before you think me an insensitive jerk, let me explain how my industry operates. We put vague ads in the local newspaper, promising people good money and a fine career if they were willing to work hard. How one was going to make this money, or what our company did, was never mentioned. We simply wanted to make people curious enough to call.

  Once on the phone I’d explain we’d teach them a short demonstration, then send them out to preset appointments with qualified homeowners. They would demonstrate our water system, then ask if the people wanted to buy one. It sounds simple, and it is simple. I, and a bunch of other people, have made a lot of money doing it.

  But as you might imagine, the system attracted large numbers of unsophisticated, desperate, utterly broke young men. I mean, who else would even look twice at the nonsense ads we put in the newspaper? And by broke, I mean flat-ass broke. I would routinely ask them, during the initial interview, whether they had enough money to buy a few tanks of gas before getting their first check. Many didn’t.

  Oh, and did I mention there was no salary? It was all commission. Make a sale, get paid a lot of money. Don’t make a sale, too bad. Which meant, if they didn’t make a sale immediately, they got even more depressed and angry than when they took the job a week before.

  Jake was typical. By age 24, he had a wife and two kids. Even living with his own folks he couldn’t support his family.

  And why is that, you ask? Well, on a good day, Jake was barely functional. On a bad one, he would just wander into the nearest bar and get drunk. (One thing about these small town boys. No matter how poor they are, there’s always money for beer.)

  Thus my response. Jake, and all the other Jake’s out there, had screwed up their lives all on their own. But if you ever let these guys get away with blaming you for their troubles, they became worse than useless. And since they were pretty useless to begin with, that was saying a lot.

  “Well,” Jake bitterly explained. “I haven’t paid my car payment for three months, so the repo man is looking for my car.”

  “I see.”

  “Of course, the repo man would check my place of work first for my car!” Jake thought he had it all figured out. They always do. “So I had to leave my car at home, and take my mother’s car. And she hates when I take her car, because I sometimes leave wrappers on the seat!”

  “Really?”

  “Uh huh.”

  I smiled. “First of all, I would imagine your mother doesn’t like you taking her car because you wrecked it last year while driving drunk.” Jake, being the moron that he is, had told me this during his job interview. “As I remember, she’s still trying to pay off the auto body shop.”

  “Yeah.” A dumb shrug. “I reckon.”

  “Yeah, I reckon too,” I agreed. “You know what else I reckon? That repo man is probably going to check your house first for the car. After all, you only started work here a week ago. You never put this address on your loan papers. So the only address he has is your house.”

  Leaping to his feet, Jake raced to the phone and called home. The repo man had just driven off with his car.

  Here’s the point. Modern-day society is populated, in large part, by a permanent underclass of people who can only be described as incompetent. The basics of life…finding reasonable work they’re capable of doing, establishing some type of tolerable living situation, maintaining a non-destructive social life, paying their bills…are beyond them. They simply drift from one disaster to another, not even understanding, in most cases, what it is they’re supposed to be doing. Inevitably, these Chronically Lost Overmatched Dummies (CLOD or simply clods, for short) get sucked down the drain of life, clawing futilely at the soap bubbles as they twist ever lower.

  Now don’t talk to me about “education.” You could send a clod to the finest schools, hire private tutors, whatever you want. They would simply sit there, not listening to a word, then wander off to the nearest pool hall to drink with the other clods.

  Nothing is ever a clod’s fault. Take Jake’s car. Was the car repoed because he didn’t make the car payment? Oh, no. Jake’s car was repoed because his brother didn’t send him $500 last month to buy his wife and daughters new Sunday dresses. So he had to use the car payment money for the dresses, leaving him no money for the car payment. Therefore his brother is to blame for the car being repoed.

  Clods don’t understand money. They don’t appreciate how to make it, and have even less sense of how to use it. They always seem to assume that some kindly relative, perhaps even someone they haven’t spoken to for years, will dispatch a fresh infusion of cash to stave off their latest financial emergency. Why not? After all, Aunt Matilda doesn’t want their electricity turned off, now does she?

  The funny thing about clods is that, when Aunt Matilda doesn’t send the money and the lights go out, they somehow find a way of convincing the electric company to turn the power back on for another month. They can be very convincing on this point. Next month they’ll have plenty of money! Well, hell, they have a big deal going down, and their friend Earl is repaying them the 10k he borrowed to start his stump grinding business, and grandma’s inheritance is coming in, and the hospital is finally paying out on their mother’s lawsuit and, well, shit…they’ll have enough cold, hard cash to eat barbecue every night of the week! You just turn the power back on, little lady. We need to see real good for all the big checks we’ll be writing with all our money!

  But next month never comes. I mean, it does come, but it’s next month in this rea
lity, not the alternate dimension where they suddenly become clod tycoons. And the grace period extended by the power company? That’s been used merely to apply to some emergency government program granting them free electricity. The clod’s bill is duly charged off, though everyone else has their rates raised by a quarter-cent a month to make up the difference.

  But I try my best with these guys. I really do. I’ve trained them, given them prime leads, talked them through sales on the phone, everything. And on a few occasions I’ve been able to hand them, two weeks into their new job, a commission check for $1,200, or $1,500, or even $2,000.

  Boy, is that a scene. First they stare at the check in disbelief. Then they begin crying, calling their wife with the good news. They’re on cloud nine. All their problems are over. That check is like a dream come true. I feel pretty good all weekend, thinking I’ve helped make a difference for an entire family.

  That’s Friday. By Monday the money is always gone.

  Think I’m kidding? Two weeks ago I gave some clod a check for $1,623. Three days later he came dragging into the office, asking if he could borrow $20 for gas.

  Ted was the guy’s name. True to form he was 23 years old, with a wife and three kids, trying to make the mortgage on some trailer. I took him in my office, closed the door, and asked him what happened to the sixteen hundred bucks.

  “Hell. It’s all gone,” he said, flashing me his best clod grin.

  “Ted, I’m serious. What did you do with the money?”

  Turns out Ted went out that Friday night, got drunk and then began buying everyone else drinks, running up a bar tab of $400. The next morning his 20-year-old wife demanded the paycheck, leaving a hung over Ted with the kids while she raced off to the nearest semi-legal check cashing outfit. Two hours later she returned with $500 dollars worth of new clothes, draperies, and Halloween decorations, along with $300 of decidedly-illegal pills. High as kites they went out driving that night, ending up in a ditch that required a $100 tow bill.

  The next day their new $600 couch was delivered. Already low on funds, they asked the furniture man to return on Monday for his money. An hour later the bar owner and two friends showed up for the $400, and he wasn’t willing to wait. That evening Ted and his wife got in a huge fight, a neighbor called the cops, and the last $300 was used for bail money early Monday morning. What happened to the remaining $23 is anyone’s guess.

  “Hell, Steve!” Pushing back his chair, Ted let out a huge sigh. “And now the furniture guy’s coming for his money! I don’t got no $600 for him too!”

  “Can’t you return the couch?”

  “Naw.” A dismissive wave of the hand. “My kids already barfed all over it.”

  “Ted.” Pausing, I tried to gather my own thoughts. “You told me, on Friday, that you were going to use a thousand dollars to pay up your mortgage, and put the rest of the money in the bank. What happened?”

  “Look, I was thinking about that.” Ted gave me a knowing nod. “And, well, here’s the thing. If I paid up my two back months of mortgage, what would they want next month?”

  Sighing, I sat back. “I would think, Ted, they’d want another month’s mortgage.”

  “Exactly! Then they’d just want more money the next month, and the next month, and the month after that!” Spreading his hands, Ted grinned again. “Does that make sense to you, Steve?”

  “Actually, it does.”

  “Well, hell, my wife don’t see the point in trying to pay off a bill that ain’t never going to be paid off! She’d rather take that money and buy some pretty clothes and stuff. And hell, the kids deserve a nice Halloween, now don’t they Steve?”

  And that’s the really sad thing about these guys. If they ever had a hope of pulling themselves out of the gutter, their uneducated, overly fertile young wives inevitably drag them back down again. “Ted, what about putting some money in the bank for a rainy day?” Of course, for a clod every day was a rainy day. “Wouldn’t that make sense?”

  “Well, Steve, you’ve got to understand.” Ted firmly folded his arms. “My ma disapproves of banks on principle, so we ain’t doing that. No sir, no how!”

  That afternoon the sheriff showed up looking for Ted, the furniture guy having filed charges after being stiffed again. As the cuffs were being slapped on for the second day in a row, Ted calmly told me he was quitting. This job, he said, was ruining him.

  Actually, there is a type of education that might help these guys, but we’d need to drastically revise our public school system. What they need is a crash course in practical life skills.

  Don’t get me wrong. In an ideal world, I think your average tenth grader should know how to compute the circumference of a trapezoid, or figure out the square root of pi in a base eight counting system. They should know the exact year Arizona became a state and when the cotton gin was invented. No one should have to diagram a sentence (a more egregious example of intellectual nonsense being harder to imagine), but they could learn that too. All that stuff is important.

  But you know what’s more important? Knowing how to keep a job. Being able to budget monthly expenses for themselves and their family. Let’s teach them about interest rates and different types of mortgages, along with taxes and other hidden costs of home ownership. Our young people should have drilled into their heads, before procreating, exactly how much money is involved with raising children. What are the real disadvantages of having a criminal record? Balancing check books, savings accounts, credit scores, what jobs really pay well, what one would have to do to get these jobs, what professions are expected to expand in the future, the practical benefits of health insurance…you get the idea.

  You really want to break the “cycle of poverty,” as so many liberal activists like to babble about? This is how. Teach people how to live. Life Skills should be taught in our schools, as a “core” subject, on the same level as English, Math, Social Studies, etc. There are legions of clods out there who desperately need it.

  Still think I’m kidding? Last night I watched a show on lottery winners. These are clods, essentially, who actually did go to clod heaven. Do you know what often happens to these people? Many of them wind up bankrupt, getting swindled out of their money, or just giving it away in confusion. Often their families disintegrate. Many wind up in jail. This should not happen to a normal, nominally educated person in this country.

  And it’s not just the kids from lower class backgrounds in need of Life Skills. How many middle-class or even upper-class people get into massive credit card debt? How many of them, even with a decent income, buy homes they can’t afford?

  Look, I’ll be the first to tell you there’s nothing better than when clods try to explain their miserable lives to you. Forget Shakespeare, the movies, amusement parks, your favorite porn…it doesn’t matter. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is of greater entertainment value than the adventures of the average clod.

  But it shouldn’t be that way. Life shouldn’t resemble a sitcom, and common sense really isn’t all that common. Our educational system should reflect that simply reality.

  Hey, speaking of television, I saw a show in the gym today. They have eight tv’s lined up before the treadmills. You can listen to the sound on headphones. One of them is always set to a popular music channel that once-upon-a-time used to show videos, but now runs the craziest shit you could ever imagine.

  Imagine an audience of some fifty teenage girls, all very pretty and well dressed…I mean, it almost could have been some church event…sitting before a dias. Three very young, very serious looking doctors in white lab coats stare down at them. Some celebrity bimbo-de-jour comes out to explain that, for the next hour, these girls could “safely” ask any “embarrassing” questions of the doctors they might have. There was a very academic, purposeful air about the whole thing.

  The first questioner stood up, carefully smoothing down her skirt. Then, with a tone of thoughtful consideration, she spoke into a microphone. “Doctor, is it possible to get pregnant
while having sex during my menstrual cycle?” Blushing furiously, the forty-something woman on the treadmill next to me quickly excused herself.

  Now let’s think about this for a second. Can you imagine some middle-class guy, working hard to support his family, taking any overtime he could get, saving up some money for a house in the suburbs…you know the drill. Can you imagine that guy, her father, coming home that night to find out his sweet little girl was on national television discussing the merits of fucking during her period? And if he missed it live, well, he could always check the clip out online, where it will survive indefinitely.

  Can you imagine how that guy feels? In an instant he’s been reduced to a fucking tool, and he knows it.

  I mean, if that was your daughter, what would you do? Ground her until she was 18? Send her to the nearest convent and let the nuns straighten things out? Go hang yourself in the garage? Advise her to put a thick, dark towel over the bed spread and then shower right afterwards? What would you do?

  Oh, and they were just getting warmed up. The second girl wanted to know if being drunk increased her chances of getting pregnant. The third asked if it was “all right” to just give a guy oral sex on the first date, as she wasn’t comfortable with actual intercourse until the second date.

  The fourth question was about “sexting.” A sweet blonde, maybe 15 years old, wanted to know if her “friend” had made a mistake in sending naked pictures of herself to a guy’s cell phone in preparation for a first date that weekend.

  Now I don’t have any kids. And after watching this perversion of a television show, I’m even more certain I don’t want any. But speaking theoretically, let me assure you of this: If my teenage daughter ever even thought of sending naked pictures of herself to anybody via her cell phone, said cell phone would be taken away for the rest of time. It would be gone, forever and ever, never to be seen or heard from again.