Dave Barry Talks Back

by Dave Barry

  Another example of politeness I noticed was that nobody ridiculed my clothes. Everybody in New York, including police horses, dresses fashionably, and whenever I’m there, even in my sharpest funeral-quality suit with no visible ketchup stains, I feel as though I’m wearing a Hefty trash bag. And it’s last year’s Hefty trash bag.

  On this trip I also became paranoid about my haircut. After 20 years of having the same haircut, I recently got a more modernistic style that’s a little longer in the back, and I was feeling like one hep “dude” until I got to New York, where the fashionable guys all had haircuts in which the hair is real long on top, but abruptly stops halfway down the head, forming a dramatic Ledge of Hair that depressed lice could commit suicide by jumping from. Nobody has had my haircut in New York since 1978. Pigeons were coming from as far away as Staten Island to void themselves on it. But the New Yorkers themselves politely said nothing.

  Aside from this courtesy epidemic, the other big story in New York is that—get ready for a Flash Bulletin—the United Nations still exists. Yes! Like you, I thought that the UN had been converted to luxury condominiums years ago, but in fact it’s still there, performing the vital function that it was established to perform in this troubled, turmoil-filled world: namely, hold receptions.

  In fact, using the advanced journalism technique of having a friend give me his invitation, I was able to get into a reception hosted by the U.S. ambassador, who is, in my candid assessment, a tall man named “Tom” with a lot of armed guards. After shaking hands with Tom, I proceeded into the reception area, which was filled with representatives of nations large and small, rich and poor, from all over the world; and although I sometimes tend to be cynical, I could not help but be deeply moved, as a journalist and a human being, by the fact that some of these people had haircuts even worse than mine. This was particularly true of the Eastern Bloc men, who looked as if they received their haircuts from the Motherland via fax machine.

  But the important thing was, everyone had a good time. People would arrive filled with international tension, but after several drinks and a couple of pounds of shrimp, they’d mellow right out, ready to continue the vital UN work of going to the next reception.

  I decided that, since I was there, I might as well use proven journalism techniques to find out if any World Events were going on. So I conducted the following interview with a person standing next to me:

  ME: So! Who are you?

  PERSON: I’m a [something about economics] from [some country that sounded like “Insomnia”].

  ME: Ah! And how are things there?

  PERSON: Better.

  ME: Ah! (Pause.) What continent is that in, again?

  Unfortunately at that point the person had to edge away, but nevertheless I had what we journalists call the “main thrust” of the story, namely: Things are better in Insomnia. It was definitely a load off my mind, and as I walked out into the brisk New York evening, I experienced a sense of renewed hope, which was diminished only slightly by the knowledge that taxis had been sighted in the area, and I would never make it back to the hotel alive.

  WELL ENDOWED

  Obscenity. Pornography. Naked people thrusting their loins. Should these things be legal? What is obscenity? What is art? What exactly are “loins”? How come nobody ever calls the office and says: “I can’t come to work today because I have a loinache”? These are some of the serious questions that we must ask ourselves, as Americans, if we are going to get away with writing columns about sex.

  These issues are relevant right now because of the raging national debate over the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established to spend taxpayers’ money on art, the theory being that if the taxpayers were allowed to keep their money, they’d just waste it on things they actually wanted. Because frankly, the average taxpayer is not a big voluntary supporter of the arts. The only art that the average taxpayer buys voluntarily either has a picture of Bart Simpson on it or little suction cups on its feet so you can stick it onto a car window.

  So if you left it up to the public, there would be hardly any art. Certainly there would be no big art, such as the modernistic sculptures that infest many public parks. You almost never hear members of the public saying, “Hey! Let’s all voluntarily chip in and pay a sculptor upwards of $100,000 to fill this park space with what appears to be the rusted remains of a helicopter crash!” It takes concerted government action to erect one of those babies.

  The taxpayers also cannot be relied upon to support performing arts such as opera. As a taxpayer, I am forced to admit that I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera. The one time I did sit through one, it lasted approximately as long as fourth grade and featured large men singing for 45 minutes in a foreign language merely to observe that the sun had risen.

  My point is that the government supports the arts for the same reason that it purchases $400,000 fax machines and keeps dead radioactive beagles in freezers: Nobody else is willing to do it. The question is, should we carry this concept further? Should the government require taxpayers not only to pay for art, but also to go and physically admire it? This program could be linked with the federal court system:

  JUDGE: Mr. Johnson, you have been convicted of tax evasion, and I hereby sentence you to admire four hours of federally subsidized modern dance.

  DEFENDANT: NO! NOT MODERN DANCE!!

  JUDGE: One more outburst like that, Mr. Johnson, and I’m going to order you to also watch the performance artist who protests apartheid using a bathtub full of rigatoni.

  So federal art is good. But now we must grope with the troubling question: Should the government support smut? And how do we define “smut”? You can’t just say it’s naked people, because many famous works of art, such as the late Michelangelo’s statue of David getting ready to fight Goliath, are not wearing a stitch of clothing. Which raises the question: Why would anybody go off to fight in the nude? Was it a tactic? Perhaps this explains why Goliath just stood there like a bozo and let himself get hit by a rock. “Hey!” he was probably thinking. “This guy is naked as a jaybird! What’s he trying to AWWRRK.”

  Some people argue that a work is not pornographic as long as it has redeeming social value. But you can find people who will testify in court that almost anything has redeeming social value:

  PROSECUTOR: So, Professor Weemer, you’re saying that this video depicts an ecology theme?

  WITNESS: Yes. The woman displays a LOT of affection for the zucchini.

  On the other end of the spectrum, some people think that just about everything is evil. For example, the Reverend Donald Wildmon, a leading anti-pornography crusader, once mounted a crusade against a Mighty Mouse cartoon. I swear I am not making this up. In this cartoon, Mighty Mouse took a whiff of something; the cartoon makers said it was clearly flower petals, but the Reverend Wildmon was convinced that Mighty Mouse was snorting cocaine.

  Of course it’s difficult to believe that Mighty Mouse, even if he is a cocaine user, would be stupid enough to snort it on camera. But, as parents, we have to ask ourselves: What if the Rev. Wildmon is right? And speaking of cartoon characters with apparent drug problems, how come Donald Duck has been going around for 50 years wearing a shirt but no pants? Flashing his loins! Right in front of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, his so-called nephews, if you get my drift! And consider this: If you call up the Walt Disney public relations department, they’ll tell you that Mickey and Minnie Mouse are not married, despite having the same last name. Come to think of it, they also have “nephews.”

  My point is that the obscenity-art issue involves many complex questions, and we owe it to ourselves, as Americans, to give them some serious thought. You go first.

  PRANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

  I love Halloween. And not just because it gives us a chance to buy a new mailbox. No, what I love most is the fun of opening our front door and hearing a group of costumed youngsters happily shout out the traditional Halloween greeting: “(Nothing).” />
  At least that’s what traditionally happens at our house. The youngsters just stand there, silent. They have no idea that I have opened the door. They are as blind as bats, because their eyes are not lined up with the eyeholes in their costume masks.

  Poorly aligned eyeholes are an ancient Halloween tradition, dating back at least as far as my childhood in Armonk, New York. My early Halloween memories consist of staggering around disguised as a ghost, unable to see anything except bed sheet, and consequently bonking into trees, falling into brooks, etc. The highlight, of my ghost career came in the 1954 Halloween parade, when I marched directly into the butt of a horse.

  Today’s children, of course, do not wear bed sheets. They wear manufactured costumes representing licensed Saturday-morning cartoon characters and purchased from the Toys “Я” A Billion-Dollar Industry store, but I am pleased to note that the eyeholes still don’t line up. So when I open the door on Halloween, I am confronted with three or four imaginary heroes such as G.I. Joe, Conan the Barbarian, Oliver North, etc., all of whom would look very terrifying except that they are three feet tall and facing in random directions. They stand there silently for several seconds, then an adult voice hisses from the darkness behind them: “Say ‘Trick or Treat,’ dammit!”

  This voice of course belongs to good old Dad, who wants more than anything to be home watching the World Series and eating taco dip in bulk, but who must instead accompany the children on their trick-or-treat rounds to make sure I don’t put razor blades in the candy. This is a traditional Halloween danger that the local perky TV news personalities warn us about every year, using the Frowny Face they put on when they have to tell us about Bad News, such as plane crashes and rainy weekends.

  So I understand why good old Dad has to be there, but he makes me nervous. I can feel him watching me suspiciously from somewhere out there, and I think to myself: What if he’s armed? This is a reasonable concern, because I live in South Florida, where nuns are armed. So I am very careful about the way I hand out treats.

  “Well, boys or perhaps girls!” I say to the licensed characters, in a voice so nonthreatening as to make Mr. Rogers sound like Darth Vader. “How about some NICE CANDY in its ORIGINAL PACKAGING that you can clearly see when I hold it up to the porch light here has NOT BEEN TAMPERED WITH?” Alerted by the sound of my voice, the licensed characters start lurching blindly toward me, thrusting out trick-or-treat bags already containing enough chocolate to meet the nation’s zit needs well into the next century.

  Of course there is more to Halloween than massive carbohydrate overdoses. There is also the tradition of bitching about pumpkin prices, a tradition that my wife and I enjoy engaging in each year after paying as much as $20 for a dense inedible fruit so that some pumpkin rancher can put a new Jacuzzi in his Lear jet. This is followed by the tradition of scooping the insides, or, technically, the “goop,” out of the pumpkin, a chore that always falls to me because both my wife and son refuse to do it, and not without reason, what with the alarming increase in pumpkin-transmitted diseases. (Get the facts! Call the American Pumpkin Council! Don’t mention my name!)

  But I consider the risk of permanent disfigurement to be a small price to pay for the excitement that comes when I finally finish carving Mr. Jack O’Lantern and put him out on the front porch, there to provide hours of pleasure for the trick-or-treating youngsters except that (a) they can’t see and (b) Mr. Jack O’Lantern immediately gets his face kicked into mush by older youngsters playing pranks.

  Pranks—defined as “activities that struck you as truly hilarious when you were a teenager but, now that you are a property owner, make you wish you had a high-voltage fence”—are another ancient Halloween tradition. The first Halloween prank ever, played by a group of Druid teenagers, was Stonehenge (“HEY! You kids GET THOSE ROCKS OFF MY LAWN!!”). I can’t really complain about the pranks, because as a youth I played several thousand myself. In fact, I figure there must be a God of Prank Justice, who keeps track of everything we do when we’re young and then uses Halloween to settle the score (“OK, that’s his 14th mailbox. He has 57 to go.”). Vastly enjoying this spectacle, I bet, are the ghosts of all my former victims. Assuming they can see through their eyeholes.

  SILENT NIGHT, HOLY %*&?c

  The Holiday Season is here again, and there’s “something special” in the air. It’s the aroma being given off by our mailperson, who expired in our driveway several days ago while attempting to deliver 300 pounds of Holiday Greeting cards. These were mostly from businesses sending us heartfelt pre-printed bulk-mailed holiday wishes like:

  ’Tis now a time for Peace on Earth

  And Joy for all Mankind

  So let us know if we can help

  Unclog your sewer line.

  But we don’t have time to read all our holiday wishes. We’re too busy engaging in traditional holiday activities such as Setting Up the Electric Train That Doesn’t Work. I bought this train set for my son on his first Christmas, when he was two months old and the only way he knew to play with it was by putting it in his mouth. So it developed some kind of serious train disorder, probably drool in the motor, and every year, when we finally get it hooked up and plugged in, it just sits there, humming. The Little Engine on Valium.

  But we can’t spend too much time playing with the train, because we have to get on with the tradition of Replacing All the Bulbs in the Christmas Tree Lights. We save big money by buying very inexpensive lights that were manufactured by Third World residents who have no words in their language for “fire code.” These lights use special bulbs that are designed to stand up under virtually any kind of punishment except having electricity go through them. If the train isn’t humming too loud, we can actually hear the bulbs scream when we plug them in, telling us it’s time once again to troop down to the drugstore, where we spend approximately $14,000 per holiday season on replacement bulbs, many of which have been pre-burned-out at the factory for our holiday convenience.

  But we can’t spend too much time enjoying our tree, because we have to get down to the mall to watch the traditional and highly competitive Holiday Shoppers’ Hunt for One of the Four Remaining Department Store Salesclerks in North America. “Ho ho ho!” we shout as a clerk is flushed out of Housewares and makes a desperate dash through Small Appliances, pursued by a baying pack of holiday shoppers, slashing the air with sharpened VISA cards.

  Jingle bells! Jingle bells! sings Mister Low-Fidelity Mall Loudspeaker as loud as he can right in our ear. He sings it over and over and over, because he knows it’s the kind of traditional holiday song that we can listen to for an entire nanosecond without growing tired of it. Jingle bells! it goes. Jingle BELLS! Jingle BELLS, DAMMIT! JINGLE BANG …

  Uh-oh! It looks like Mr. Low-Fidelity Mall Loudspeaker has been shot by another important holiday tradition, the Increasingly Desperate Guy Shopper. He’s trying to find something for that Special Someone in his life, who has made it clear that this year she’d like something a little more personal than what he got her last year, which was a trailer hitch. So he’s edging warily through the aisles of what is, for guys, a very dangerous section of the department store, a section where sometimes women wearing scary quantities of makeup lunge out from behind pillars and spray you with fragrances with names like Calvin Klein’s Clinical Depression. All around are potential gift items, but there’s no way for the guy shopper to tell which ones would be thoughtful and appropriate, and which ones would cause that Special Someone to place an urgent conference call so she could inform all her friends simultaneously what a bonerhead she is hooked up with.

  Last holiday season I went to a department store with a friend of mine named Joel, who was trying to buy something for Mary. He became badly disoriented in the scarf section, which featured a display of tiny fragile cloth wisps that had no imaginable function and that cost as much per wisp as a radial tire. It looked to me like some kind of holiday prank, but Joel, rapidly losing brain function from breathing a department-store atm
osphere that was 2 parts oxygen and 17 parts cologne, grabbed one basically at random and actually bought it. But that was not his major gift purchase. His major gift purchase was something totally romantic, something that represents the ultimate in traditional holiday gift giving: a jogging bra. I am not making this up. “She’ll love it!” he said. I agreed, but only because I knew that if he didn’t finish shopping soon he’d start throwing money directly into wastebaskets.

  Speaking of which, I need to get my holiday butt over to the Toys Sure “Я” Expensive Considering How Fast They Break store before they run out of Giant Radioactive Nose Worms from Space or whatever popular heavily advertised holiday toy concept my son is hoping Santa will bring him. I doubt that Santa will to come to our house personally this year. The reindeer would go berserk if they got a whiff of the mailperson.

  GARBAGE SCAN

  Monday morning. Bad traffic. Let’s just turn on the radio here, see if we can get some good tunes, crank it up. Maybe they’ll play some some early Stones. Yeah. Maybe they

  …—POWER ON—

  “…just reached the end of 14 classic hits in a row, and we’ll be right back after we …”

  —SCAN—

  “… send Bill Doberman to Congress. Because Bill Doberman agrees with us. Bill Doberman. It’s a name we can trust. Bill Doberman. It’s a name we can remember. Let’s write it down. Bill …”

  —SCAN—

  “…just heard 19 uninterrupted classic hits, and now for this …”

  —SCAN—

  “… terrible traffic backup caused by the …”

  —SCAN—

  … EVIL that cometh down and DWELLETH amongst them, and it DID CAUSETH their eyeballs to ooze a new substance, and it WAS a greenish color, but they DID not fear, for they kneweth that the …”