by Dave Barry
What bothers me about the yuppies is, they’re destroying the normal social order, which is that people are supposed to start out as wild-eyed radicals, and then gradually, over time, develop gum disease and become conservatives.
This has always been the system. A good example is Franklin Roosevelt, who when he was alive was considered extremely liberal, but now is constantly being quoted by Ronald Reagan. Or take the Russian leaders. When they were young, they’d pull any kind of crazy stunt, kill the czar, anything, but now they mostly just lie around in state.
So I say the yuppies represent a threat to society as we know it, and I say we need to do something about them. One possibility would be to simply wait until they reproduce, on the theory that they’ll give their children the finest clothing and toys and designer educations, and their children will of course grow up to absolutely loathe everything their parents stand for and thus become defiant, ill-dressed, unwashed, unkempt, violently antiestablishment drug addicts, and society will return to normal. The problem here is that yuppies have a very low birth rate, because apparently they have to go to Aspen to mate.
So we’ll have to draft them. Not into the Armed Forces, of course; they’d all make colonel in about a week, plus they’d be useless in an actual war, whapping at the enemy with briefcases. Likewise we cannot put them in the Peace Corps, as they would cause no end of ill will abroad, crouching among the residents of some poverty-racked village in, say, Somalia, and attempting to demonstrate the water-powered Cuisinart.
No, what we need for the yuppies is a national Lighten Up Corps. First they’d go through basic training, where a harsh drill sergeant would force them to engage in pointless nonproductive activities, such as eating moon pies and watching “Days of Our Lives.” Then they’d each have to serve two years in a job that offered no opportunity whatsoever for career advancement, such as:
–bumper-car repairman; —gum-wad remover; —random street lunatic; —bus-station urinal maintenance person; —lieutenant governor; —owner of a roadside attraction such as “World’s Largest All-Snake Orchestra.”
During their time of service in the Lighten Up Corps, the Yuppies would of course be required to wear neon-yellow polyester jumpsuits with the name “Earl” embroidered over the breast pocket.
Pain And Suffering
As an american, you are very fortunate to live in a country (America) where you have many legal rights. Bales of rights. And new ones are being discovered all the time, such as the right to make a right turn on a red light.
This doesn’t mean you can do just anything. For example, you can’t shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. Even if there is a fire, you can’t shout it. A union worker has to shout it. But you can—I know this, because you always sit right behind me—clear your throat every 15 seconds all the way through an entire movie, and finally, at the exact moment of greatest on-screen drama, hawk up a gob the size of a golf ball. Nobody can stop you. It’s your right.
The way you got all these rights is the Founding Fathers fought and died for them, then wrote them down on the Constitution, a very old piece of paper that looks like sick puppies have lived on it, which is stored in Washington, D.C., where you have the right to view it during normal viewing hours. The most important part of the Constitution, rightswise, appears in Article IX, Section II, Row 27, which states:
If any citizen of the United States shall ever at any time for any reason have any kind of bad thing happen to him or her, then this is probably the result of Negligence on the part of a large corporation with a lot of insurance. If you get our drift.
What the Constitution is trying to get across to you here is that the way you protect your rights, in America, is by suing the tar out of everybody. This is an especially good time to sue, because today’s juries hand out giant cash awards as if they were complimentary breath mints.
So you definitely want to get in on this. Let’s say your wedding ring falls into your toaster, and when you stick your hand in to retrieve it, you suffer Pain and Suffering as well as Mental Anguish. You would sue:
–The toaster manufacturer, for failure to include, in the instructions section that says you should never never never never ever stick your hand in the toaster, the statement: “Not even if your wedding ring falls in there.” —The store where you bought the toaster, for selling it to an obvious cretin like yourself. —The Union Carbide Corporation, which is not directly responsible in this case, but which is feeling so guilty that it would probably send you a large cash settlement anyway.
Of course you need the help of a professional lawyer. Experts agree the best way to select a lawyer is to watch VHF television, where more and more of your top legal talents are advertising:
“Hi. I’m Preston A. Mantis, President of Consumers Retail Law Outlet. As you can see by my suit and the fact that I have all these books of equal height on the shelves behind me, I am a trained legal attorney. Do you have a car or a truck? Do you ever walk around? If so, you probably have the makings Of an excellent legal case. Although of course every case is different, I would definitely say that, based on my experience and training, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t come out of this thing with at least a cabin cruiser. Remember, at the Preston A. Mantis Consumers Retail Law Outlet, our motto is: “It is very difficult to disprove certain kinds Of Pain.”
Another right you have, as an American, is the right to Speedy justice. For an example of how Speedy justice works, we turn now to an anecdote told to me by a friend who once worked as a clerk for a judge in a medium-sized city. my friend swears this is true. It happened to an elderly recent immigrant who was hauled before the judge one day. The thing to bear in mind is, this man was not actually guilty of anything. He had simply gotten lost and confused, and he spoke very little English, and he was wandering around, so the police had picked him up just so he’d have a warm place to sleep while they straightened everything out.
Unfortunately, this judge, who got his job less on the basis of being knowledgeable in matters of law than on the basis of attending the most picnics, somehow got the wrong folder in front of him, the folder of a person who had done something semiserious, so he gave the accused man a stern speech, then sentenced him to six months in jail. When this was explained to the man, he burst into tears. He was thinking, no doubt, that if he had only known they had such severe penalties for being elderly and lost in America, he would never have immigrated here in the first place.
Finally, about an hour later, the police figured out what happened, and after they stopped rolling around the floor and wetting their pants, they told the judge, and he sent them to fetch the prisoner back from jail. By now, of course, the prisoner had no idea what they’re going to do to him. Shoot him, maybe. He was terrified. So put yourself in the judge’s position. Here you have a completely innocent man in front of you, whom you have scared half to death and had carted off to jail because you made a stupid mistake. What is the only conceivable thing you can do? Apologize, right?
This just shows you have no legal training. What this judge did was give a speech. “America,” it began. just the one word, very dramatically spoken. My friend, who saw all this happen, still cannot recount this speech without falling most of the way out of his chair. The gist of it was that this is a Great Country, and since this was a First Offense, he, the judge, had had a Change of Heart, and had decided to give the accused a Second Chance. Well. Once they explained this to the prisoner, that he was not going to jail after all, that he was to be shown all this mercy, he burst into tears again, and rushed up and tried to kiss the judge’s hand. Who could blame him? This was probably the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. What a great country! What speedy justice! I bet he still tells his grandchildren about it. I bet they tell him he should have sued.
The Deadly Wind
What prospective buyers said, when they looked at our house, was: “Huh! This is ... interesting.” They always said this. They never said: “What a nice house!” Or: “
We’ll take this house! Here’s a suitcase filled with money!!” No, they said our house is interesting. What they meant was: “Who installed this paneling? Vandals?”
Sometimes, to cheer us up, they also said: “Well it certainly has a lot of possibilities!” Meaning: “These people have lived here for 10 years and they never put up any curtains.”
We were trying to sell our house. We had elected to move voluntarily to Miami. We wanted our child to benefit from the experience of growing up in a community that is constantly being enriched by a diverse and ever-changing infusion of tropical diseases. Also they have roaches down there you could play polo with.
The first thing we did, when we decided to move, was we rented a dumpster and threw away the majority of our furniture. You think I am kidding, but this is only because you never saw our furniture. It was much too pathetic to give to The Poor. The Poor would have taken one look at it and returned, laughing, to their street grates.
What we did give to The Poor was all my college textbooks, which I had gone through, in college, using a yellow felt marker to highlight the good parts. You college graduates out there know what I’m talking about. You go back, years later, when college is just a vague semicomical memory, and read something you chose to highlight, and it’s always a statement like: “Structuralized functionalism represents both a continuance of, and a departure from, functionalistic structuralism.” And you realize that at one time you actually had large sectors of your brain devoted to this type of knowledge. Lord only knows what The Poor will use it for. Fuel, probably.
One book we did keep is called Survive the Deadly Wind. I don’t know where we got it, but it’s about hurricanes, and so we thought it might contain useful information about life in Miami. “Any large pieces of aluminum left in a yard are a definite hazard,” it states. “Each piece has a potential for decapitation. Hurled on the tide of a 150-mile-an-hour wind, it can slice its way to, and through, bone.” Ha ha! Our New Home!
After we threw away our furniture, we hired two men, both named Jonathan, to come over and fix our house up so prospective buyers wouldn’t get to laughing so hard they’d fall down the basement stairs and file costly lawsuits. The two jonathans were extremely competent, the kind of men who own winches and freely use words like “joist” and can build houses starting out with only raw trees. The first thing they did was rip out all the Homeowner Projects I had committed against our house back when I thought I had manual dexterity. They were trying to make the house look as nice as it did before I started improving it. This cost thousands of dollars.
I think there should be a federal law requiring people who publish do-it-yourself books to include a warning, similar to what the Surgeon General has on cigarette packs, right on the cover of the book, stating:
WARNING: ANY MONEY YOU SAVE BY DOING HOMEOWNER PROJECTS YOURSELF WILL BE OFFSET BY THE COST OF HIRING COMPETENT PROFESSIONALS TO COME AND REMOVE THEM SO you CAN SELL YOUR HOUSE, NOT TO MENTION THE EMOTIONAL TRAUMA ASSOCIATED WITH LISTENING TO THESE PROFESSIONALS, AS THEY RIP OUT LARGE CHUNKS OF A PROJECT, LAUGH, AND YELL REMARKS SUCH AS: “HEY! GET A LOAD OF THIS.”
After the jonathans took out all my projects, the house mostly consisted of holes, which they filled up with spackle. When prospective buyers asked: “What kind of construction is this house?” I answered: “Spackle.”
The only real bright spot in the move was when I got even with the television set in our bedroom, which had been broken for years. My wife and I have had the same argument about it maybe 200 times, wherein I say we should throw it away, and she says we should get it repaired. My wife grew up in a very sheltered rural Ohio community and she still believes you can get things repaired.
Over the years, this television had come to believe that as long as my wife was around, it was safe, and it had grown very smug, which is why I wish you could have seen the look on its face when, with my wife weakened by the flu, I took it out and propped it up at the end of the dumpster, execution-style, and, as a small neighborhood crowd gathered, one of the jonathans hurled a long, spear-like piece of Homeowner Project from 20 feet away right directly through the screen, into the very heart of its picture tube. It made a sound that I am sure our other appliances will not soon forget.
But the rest were mostly low points. I looked forward to the day when somebody bought our house, perhaps to use as a tourist attraction (SPACKLE KINGDOM, 5 MI.), and we could pack our remaining household possessions—a piano and 48,000 “He-Man” action figures—into cardboard boxes and move to Miami to begin our new life, soaking up the sun and watching the palm trees sway in the tropical breeze. At least until the aluminum sliced through them.
The House Of The Seven Figures
Before my wife, Beth, left on the jet airplane to buy us a new house, we sat down and figured out what our Price Range was. We used the standard formula where you take your income and divide it by three, which gives you the amount you would spend annually on housing if you bought a house that is much cheaper than the one you will actually end up buying.
With that figure in mind, Beth took off for our new home-to-be, South Florida, and my son and I, who had never been in charge of each other for this long before, embarked on the following rigorous nutritional program:
BREAKFAST: Frozen waffles heated up. LUNCH: Hot dogs heated up. DINNER: Choice of hot dogs or frozen waffles heated up.
Also in the refrigerator were many health-fanatic foods such as pre-sliced carrot sticks placed there by Beth in hopes that we would eat something that did not have a label stating that it met the minimum federal standard for human armpit hair, but we rejected these because of the lengthy preparation time.
Some of you may be wondering why, considering that this is the most important financial transaction of our lives, I didn’t go with Beth to buy the house. The answer is that I am a very dangerous person to have on your side in a sales situation. I develop great anxiety in the presence of sales people, and the only way I can think of to make it go away is to buy whatever they’re selling. This is not a major problem with, for example, pants, but it leads to trouble with cars and houses.
Here is how I bought our last car. I didn’t dare go directly to the car dealership, so, for several consecutive days—this is the truth—I would park at a nearby Dairy Queen, buy a chocolate cone, then amble over to the car lot, disguised as a person just ambling around with a chocolate cone, and I would try to quickly read the sticker on the side of the car where they explain that the only part of the car included in the Base Sticker Price is the actual sticker itself, and you have to pay extra if you want, for example, transparent windows. After a few minutes, a salesman would spot me and come striding out, smiling like an entire Rotary Club, and I would adopt the expression of a person who had just remembered an important appointment and amble off at speeds approaching 40 miles per hour. What I’m saying is, I shopped for this car the way a squirrel hunts for acorns in a dog-infested neighborhood.
When I finally went in to buy the car, I was desperate to get it over with as quickly as possible. Here is how I negotiated:
SALESPERSON: (showing me a sheet of paper with figures on it): OK, Dave. Here’s a ludicrously inflated opening price that only a person with Rice-A-Roni for brains would settle for. ME: You got a deal.
I am worse with houses. The last time we were trying to buy a house, I made Beth crazy because I was willing to make a formal offer on whatever structure we were standing in at the time:
ME: This is perfect! Isn’t this perfect?! BETH: This is the real-estate office. ME: Well, how much are they asking?
So this is why Beth went to Miami without me. Moments after she arrived, she ascertained that there were no houses there in our Price Range. Our Price Range turned out to be what the average homeowner down there spends on roach control. (And we are not talking about killing the roaches. We are talking about sedating them enough so they let you into your house.)
Fortunately, Beth found out about a new financial concept they ha
ve in home-buying that is tailor-made for people like us, called Going Outside Your Price Range. This is where she started looking, and before long she had stumbled onto an even newer financial concept called Going Way Outside Your Price Range. This is where she eventually found a house, and I am very much looking forward to seeing it someday, assuming we get a mortgage.
They have developed a new wrinkle in mortgages since the last time we got one, back in the seventies. The way it worked then was, you borrowed money from the bank, and every month you paid back some money, and at the end of the year the bank sent you a computerized statement proving you still owed them all the money you borrowed in the first place. Well, they’re still using that basic system, but now they also have this wrinkle called “points,” which is a large quantity of money you give to the bank, right up front, for no apparent reason. It’s as though the bank is the one trying to buy the house. You ask real-estate people to explain it, and they just say: “Oh yes, the points! Be sure to bring an enormous sum of money to the settlement for those!” And of course we will. We consumers will do almost anything to get our mortgages. Banks know this, so they keep inventing new charges to see how far they can go:
MORTGAGE OFFICER: OK, at your settlement you have to pay $400 for the preparation of the Certificate of Indemption. CONSUMER: Yes, of course. MORTGAGE OFFICER: And $430 for pastries.
But it will all be worth it, to get to our house. It sounds, from Beth’s description, as though it has everything that I look for in a house: (1) a basketball hoop and (2) a fiberglass backboard. I understand it also has rooms.