Ill Noise

An Odd, Self-indulgent One-scene Play

INT. LIVING ROOM

A fiftysomething Asian man, naked, slightly drunk, stands atop a fireplace mantel, stiff-backed, his arms spread flat against the bricks, his chin tucked into his chest. His shoulders are up by his ears, trembling. He’s looking down. He seems unsure of himself. He squints through the spotlight directed onto him. The spotlight floats over to the other side of the room, where toddlers take turns clubbing a piñata stuffed with printed excerpts of his blog and stacks of headshots that he no longer resembles. The toddlers repeat the same thing over and over, in a singsongy chant.

CHILDREN: Your taboo topicality sprinkled with occasional pathos is a tiresome and tawdry schtick! Your taboo topicality sprinkled with occasional pathos is a tiresome and tawdry schtick! Your—

ASIAN MAN: Nooooooo!

The Asian man weeps loudly. He stares at both of his hands in puzzlement, as if he does not recognize them. The children run up to him by the fireplace, grinning unsympathetically.

CHILD #1: Run-on sentences fool no one!

CHILD #2: Hack!

CHILD #3: This dream sequence sucks!

CHILD #2: Asian!

Jessica Alba swoops in on a rope ladder, yodeling like Tarzan on swinging a vine, kicking the children out of the way. She hops onto the floor, stretching her arms out with a celebratory ta-da! She’s wearing a fluffy white bath towel. She takes a moment to gather herself, then bites her bottom lip seductively.

JESSICA: Where are you Petey?

Jessica winks, then grabs her lower jaw right below her ear and tears her face off, revealing herself to be the late great writer, David Foster Wallace. He is wearing a bandana. He’s obviously still in the fluffy white bath towel.

DFW (whispering): You will never be known in American literary circles as ‘the blogger’s blogger’ or sometimes simply ‘the Blogger.’

The children return, but in greater numbers, and they point and cackle. The Asian man scans the room, acknowledging the children with nods, then looks back down at his hands again. His hands slowly ball into fists. The Asian man smiles. He knows what to do now. He’s hoping the device he had bought off of that infomercial weeks ago actually works. He claps his hands, and DFW/Alba and the children run off quietly. He jumps off the mantel, and while in mid-air, he claps twice, loudly, and the lights in the room go out.

CURTAIN.

Yo!kozuna

Leonard is the largest man I have ever seen. He’s like 400, 500 pounds. (At that size, you can give or take a hundred.) He is so big he looks like two people smooshed together, and he wears a basketball jersey over a sweater and a gold chain and what he’d really like to do with his life is be a rapper. In the meantime, he’s a bank teller.

Out of nowhere, he bought me a sake bomb at the sushi place yesterday. This was right after my friends dared me to reproduce that scene from Cool Hand Luke, only instead of consuming 50 hard-boiled eggs it was 50 pieces of nigiri sushi.

It must have been one hell of a spectacle, with all of the frat house-like chanting and screaming and high-fiving going on after I effortlessly swallowed the last piece and stuck my empty tongue out. Too bad I didn’t have my Karate Kid bandana on me. Anyway, that’s when Leonard introduced himself to us. He sort of waddled from across the room and said, “You arr seem rike a gregalious gloup. Ret me buy you a sake bomb.”

Leonard’s also Japanese, which is why he mixes a lot of his r’s and l’s up. When we were talking politics he was all, “How do you feel about Obama and his historic erection?”

How I found out about his aspirations to be a rapper was when I noticed “Yo!kozuna” tattooed across his inner forearm. “It’s my lap name,” he told me. So of course, I revealed to him that I was also an Asian rapper, and of course, we battle freestyled each other while dorky white boys around us beatboxed.

Yo!kozuna:

Yo, you eat sushi
rike your name is Suzy
Samurai like Berushi
shoot an Uzi for that Gucci
kill you softry like a Fugee
and then smoke a doobie

Pistol Pete:

Back when Mark Walhberg was Marky Mark
This is how we used to make the party start
We used to mix Hen’ with Bacardi Dark
And when it, kicks in you can hardly...[interrupted by boos]

Chasing Jillian

Ran into Jillian from The Bachelorette at the Walgreens on Michigan and Illinois. Well, “ran into” is not the word. On the bus ride home from work I spotted what could’ve been pretty much any attractive woman pushing through a revolving door into that store, but somehow, based off of that millisecond-long glimpse, I knew it was her. She has this pudgy sort of nose, you know. I yanked on the pull-cord, jolting the bus to a stop, and speed-walked into Walgreens, hoping to accidentally collide into her, spilling our shopping items onto the floor. “Whoop!” she’d squeal, startled, her hair clumsily flying about in a cute, comedic, Jennifer Aniston sort of way. I’d apologize in a voice about two octaves deeper than necessary, quickly helping her with her things, making sure she noticed me picking up my box of Magnum XLs.

And then I’d exaggerate a double take. “Say – aren’t you Jillian Harris, a jilted fan-favorite on the Jason Mesnick season of The Bachelor who went on to star as The Bachelorette?”

“That’s meee,” she’d say, shrugging and making a cute face that would consist of her eyes getting larger and the bottom row of her teeth being exposed. Her silly way of trying to appear approachable.

We’d chat for a few minutes more while waiting in line at the register. I’d notice Corey Haim on a cover of People and joke, “Damn it! I keep writing ‘Corey Haim is still alive’ on all of my checks.” Jillian would laugh loudly at this – she’d laugh in a way that Ed never made her laugh – thus earning me her phone number and sparking a tumultuous affair that would lead to me dramatically showing up to her and Ed’s televised wedding on some Caribbean island, interrupting with a cry of NOOOOO!!! while they were in the middle of their vows.

I’d follow with a heroically-delivered poem, and then slowly walk up to her, placing that issue of People with the Corey Haim cover onto her hand. Then I’d walk away. Jillian of course would yell WAIT and run towards me to everyone’s astonishment and then we’d embrace and make out with lots of tongue action. ABC’s ratings would be through the fucking roof. The entire blogosphere would have a seizure on that shit, son. Jillian and I would eventually do the whole talk show circuit thing, even convincing Oprah to come back for another season just so that she could interview America’s new Favorite Couple.

But what instead happened at Walgreens is I followed her into the makeup aisle, feeling like a total creep for examining a cheap case of rouge powder while eyeing her carefully through a mirror and furtively texting my friends, “omg she is 5 feet away. wearing nice looking pea coat with shiny boots. her hair smells nice.”

I was in the middle of psyching myself up for my grand introduction when she turned the corner and walked into the “Feminine Needs” aisle. Now, makeup I can handle. Tampons, I cannot. They just make me feel light-headed. You know how some people hold their breath when they drive past a cemetery so they won’t die? I hold my breath when I walk through the tampon section of a store so I won’t sprout a vagina.

So I’m in the tampon section, holding my breath, literally holding my breath, when about two minutes pass and I can’t take it anymore so I go outside for some oxygen and then just end up leaving Walgreens altogether. Yeah I have, on occasion, watched The Bachelorette. Shut up, nothing else was on.

Inside The Room

During a brief Q & A before the film, a heartless gal in the fourth row asks Tommy Wiseau if he’s “had any work done,” like, to that mug of his, or like, has his face always looked like that? There, inside the cavernous Music Box Theater, is an even split between guffaws and howling cringes, and an unruffled Tommy, brushing the flowing Howard Stern locks out of his eyes, nodding like he’s heard that piece of sarcasm before, he says: “Vat do you mean?”

You can tell that Tommy Wiseau is a lonely, pathetic man. Despite a heavy Eastern European accent he insists on being American-born, as if acknowledging the real place of his birth will conjure memories he’d rather not revisit. But you can probably accurately extrapolate much about his formative years through the film that he has directed/written/starred in/produced. At some point in his life, he:

Was euphemistically called ugly
Got his heart smashed into little pieces by a cruel woman whose name is either “Lisa” or sounds likes “Lisa” or starts with the letter “L”; this stupid woman didn’t realize that he would have been a great financial provider for her, and so she thus lost a great man
Longingly stared out of his bedroom window at a close-knit group of guys who were sauntering down the street, laughing, throwing the ol’ pigskin around
Was sipping at the water fountain in high school and noticed the star quarterback, Mark, greet a couple other popular jocks with a series of complicated handshakes
Missed his prom night but was too ashamed to tell his parents that he couldn’t find a date so he rented a tux anyway and just drove around all night; most likely he’d nervously asked a pretty blonde gal named Lisa if she would do the honor of being his prom date and she narrowed her eyes and replied, “Ummm... do I know you?”
Spent an entire month reminding everyone he knew about his upcoming birthday, and assumed that people were acting indifferent because they were planning an epic surprise birthday party, which of course never ended up occurring
Wished his nagging mother would just die already, perhaps from breast cancer.

It’s easy to imagine a thousand plausible turning points in Wiseau’s life, most of them involving some sort of very public humiliation – perhaps one day during college he ran across campus, dodging raindrops, holding a stack of books, until he slipped into an explosive pile of mud and heard cries of “FREAK!” from a pack of shirtless frat boys parked in a giant monster truck with KC lights – resulting in a very public meltdown that consisted of him shaking a fist in the air, screaming “GAHHHHHHH” and “I SHOW YOU, I SHOW YOU ALL,” resulting in him many years later creating a movie that would exorcise the demons of his past, a movie so phenomenally and unintentionally awful that it, dubbed The Worst Movie Ever Created, would develop a rabid cult following, selling out midnight show venues across America, a movie that would inevitably draw comparisons to “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” in terms of audience participation, where enthusiasts recite lines and throw plastic silverware at the screen. This movie would be Wiseau’s vindication, a solipsistic statement of being, and, at the very least, a vehicle for displaying his ox-like lovemaking skills. This movie would be called “The Room”.

“Ah meant to make it zat bad – it eez a black comedy,” Wiseau insists, but how can he not be fully aware that people are laughing at him and not with him? Everyone in the room laughs their asses off at “The Room,” especially me, but a small part of myself is a bit disturbed by wondering what environment could have possibly shaped the man that made this god-awful movie. Just a small part, though.

Stupidstitious

“So you’re telling me, Mom, that during the Chinese New Year today, absolutely no one is allowed to enter or leave the door of the house?”

“Yes, I tellings you thats. Evils spirits can enters.”

“But we’re not even Chinese.”

“Oh shuts up. Rules don’t applies to just the Chineses.”

“There are over six billion people on this planet. And 5.9 billion of them are going to enter and leave their front doors today. Several times, probably. And you expect me to believe that 5.9 billion people are going to be bothered by evil spirits?”

“Chuc mung nam moi.”

“Oh don’t you do that, Mom. Don’t you dare do that. Don’t hide behind the Vietnamese language.”

“Sits down, Peter, and eat mung beans. For lucks.”

“Mom! I don’t believe in this stuff, Mom. I’m going home. I have things to do.”

“You go, you dies.”

“Let me leave, or... or I’m going to sweep the kitchen floor with this broom I see here, is what I’m going to do!”

“NO! PLEASE, MY SON! AIYYA! IF YOU SWEEPS THE KITCHEN FLOORS YOU WILL SWEEPS AWAYS GOOD LUCKS FOR THE ENTIRE YEARS!”

“Muahahaha! How you like me now bitch!”

Raconteur

“THEN HE GOES BACK IN TIME AND THE DOGGIE IS SAD AND ICE CREAM.” — My three year old cousin Maddie, out of breath, telling a more coherent story than LOST.

Amish

This douche from Indiana who resembles Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top rambles on about his hatred of the Hasidic, I think. “People mistake us for them, and them for us,” he seems to say, and I tell him I can totally relate: whenever I walk into my building complex carrying a plastic bag with a couple burritos in it, my neighbors look at me like I’m a delivery guy. But this guy, he talks so strange and just kind of mumbles for minutes that feel like hours. His lips and tongue barely move as he speaks. It’s just this very faint noise coming out of his mouth. He looks down and tells me I’m ugly and I kind of chuckle and slap him on the back. I say, You should talk buddy!

Turns out, he didn’t really call me “ugly” after all. He had actually said the word “stud fee,” I think, and I’m assuming he’s talking about horses or whatever, but it turns out he’s Amish, and he’s explaining to me that because of the rampant inbreeding in their community, they’ll occasionally send someone to trek out into the city in search of strong, virile men who are willing to introduce new DNA into their village in return for a stud fee of $15,000. I lean my ear closer to this guy’s beard so I can listen to him paint more details of this: the women, usually in their late teens, are completely covered with a wool blanket that offers a strategically-placed hole, and three of the village’s elders, including the woman’s father, must be present to witness the act. I ask this guy if Asians are considered “strong” and “virile” and he says yes, for spare change and my CTA bus pass, yes. I mean I think that’s what he’s telling me. I really can’t fucking hear most of what he’s saying. He’s so hard to understand you have no idea.

On a barely-related side note, I’ve got a buddy named Amish, but he’s Indian and his name is pronounced A-MEESH.

Do Not Read

I’ve got a crazy habit of scribbling short, 1- to 3-word messages on Post-Its and then putting them in my pockets so that I’ll discover them later and remember what they mean and act accordingly. Today I’m in the conference room getting the low-down on special Q1 projects and I’m sort of bored and decide to check my pockets to see what’s what and I pull out a little note that says “kumquat!” and decide I don’t need that message anymore, so I fold it into a tiny yellow sliver but there’s no garbage can around so I sit there for a while and wonder what to do with this thing and finally settle upon writing “DO NOT READ” on one side and “TOP SECRET” on the other and then leaving it on the conference table. I checked back a half hour after the meeting was over and it was gone! Or maybe on the floor.

Auld Lang Syne

When I was little New Years Eve used to scare the shit out of me. From my bedroom TV set I would watch the ball drop in Times Square, and while people counted down out loud, “ten... nine... eight...,” while they did this, my muscles would tense, the beads of sweat collecting on my forehead like I had just gone through five rounds of Russian Roulette with a partner and was being handed back the gun. And then “three... two... one... Happy New Year!” would happen, and while all of New York celebrated and kissed each other I’d let out a sigh of relief.

But then I would realize that confetti was only being dropped in the next time zone, and that here in Chicago, the possible end of the world would come for me in an hour.

Growing up, I was so afraid of the end of the world that every New Years celebration that went and passed was a miracle.

Years later, on the eve of Y2K, I smartened up a little. I figured out that if the end of world were to happen, the Australians would get it first. So I would watch for Armageddon to begin every year by watching the Sydney fireworks on CNN.

“Don’t worry about the world ending today,” I used to tell my little sister. “Because it’s already tomorrow in Australia.”

The Orb

We put up a fine Christmas tree this year. It took us an entire pre-game show and most of the first quarter just to rescue this ancient giant from the basement and set it over there right by the fireplace, flooding more than half of the room with dull green plastic pine needles. Mother combed through the cobwebs and spider eggs, replacing them with tinsel and glass ornaments. Dusk occurred like right after lunch so we turned off all the lamps and did a drum roll with our mouths until I cried, “‘And now,’ cried Max, ‘let the wild rumpus start!’” just before plugging in the tree’s power cord, illuminating it with white LEDs. We gasped. There was something eerie about the lighting. Strange unexpected shadows appeared, making it look like there were other trees in the room, now blanketed in a ghostly haze from the soft white glow of the lights. My stare, erratic at first, finally settled on a shiny red glass orb hanging from the tree. I edged closer, thought about “red matter” from that last Star Trek flick, then saw something on the orb that wasn’t my reflection: a lipstick kiss, nearly camouflaged. I thought that was kind of an odd thing to discover. Father saw it too. He looked at Mother. He dug into his breast pocket, fished out a cigarette, walked into the kitchen. There was a tick-tick-tick, and then gas. Fwoosh. He puffed. He blew slowly. What is the meaning of that? He asked, and my mom squinted. Are you thinking about Johnny Depp as you kiss the Christmas ornament? He asked, pronouncing it the way Mother pronounces it^*. “Sometimes I feel like I have lost my wife to a copy of Chocolat on Blu-Ray,” he said, ashing his cigarette into the sink. “Sometimes I wonder why the only things you ever want for Christmas are AA batteries.” I turned on the TV, caught the halftime show. I turned up the volume and wished I had a giant glass of eggnog or some drugs or something.

^* Mother unintentionally “pornofies” the names of actors sometimes. For example, Johnny Depp is Johnny Deep, and Hugh Grant is Huge Grant.

Mantra

I totally want to change my life somehow. This isn’t the start of my annual Downer Week, where I examine why I haven’t pushed myself to publish anything yet or where I question if I’m truly taking advantage of every waking moment. Those thoughts are usually due to the gravity of winter pulling me towards some strange introspection, but that’s not where I’m coming from as of right now. I just want to mix things up a little. There’s no good reason for it, I suppose, but I guess it’s kind of like how people who compulsively rearrange the furniture in their house like to advise me with stuff like “maybe try moving your bed against a different wall and see how long it takes for your dreams to adjust.”

4:59

Cokehead from accounting got all kinds of pregnant (totally not guilty — everyone knows I shoot blanks) and then her doctor told her to stay home for the rest of her last trimester. We threw a baby shower for her right before the holiday. Then on Sunday I’m out driving, windows down, blasting that Li’l Wayne song about how you need to show your man your vagina when he gets home from work, and for a second there I think I see Cokehead From Accounting, walking down the street, totally 100% unpregnant.

It wasn’t her, of course, but it got me to thinking about concocting an elaborate scam where you pretend to be pregnant, announcing it to your coworkers, faking a glow via carefully applied makeup, wearing a fake belly that you bought from Spencers, etc. Then the sudden news where your fictional doctor orders you to stay in bed for the next three months, and then hell-o paid vacation city, USA. And then of course Phase II where you return to work with pictures of Suri Cruise or whomever and then have to pay an illegal Mexican to show up with you at company parties, but I think it’d all be worth it.

Yesterday one of the VPs was talking about shoe fashion and he made a reference to the movie Caddyshack by saying, “In the immortal words of Jean Paul Sartre, ‘Au revoir, loafer.’” (You see what he did there? Replacing “gopher” with “loafer?”) And I was all: “Carl Spackler in the hizzie!!” And he was super impressed that I caught that reference. I mean it wasn’t like: “High five! Way to feel me!” It was more like solemn awe. He sort of shook his head in wonder, deadly serious, slapping me on the shoulder and saying I was a “pro.” This is good timing because I have another review coming up and evidently I still haven’t done any of things I was hired to do.

Murdered.

In a World

PETE: Who dis.

DIKEMBE: It’s Dick, asshole.

PETE: Yeah. Did Judy ever read your love note.

DIKEMBE: Bitch returned it unopened and said there’s no us.

PETE: Well, girls appreciate persistence. Next time try gluing cut-out letters from various magazines onto a sheet of paper and make it say ‘i aM GoiNg To gEt yoU.’

DIKEMBE: Listen to this.

PETE: Slide it under her door.

DIKEMBE: I think she’s seeing Ivan from improv.

PETE: Say what.

DIKEMBE: Remember him. That voice-over actor who always bugged us for a ride home. The ‘In A World’ guy.

PETE: I know who Ivan is. But you can’t be serious.

DIKEMBE: Over the weekend he posted a few pictures of them together and then she untagged herself in all of those pictures, because I think she doesn’t want me to know.

PETE: Clearly he is secretly boinking her.

DIKEMBE: I just can’t believe it. He’s twice her age. It must be the voice.

PETE: So deep, so ominous.

DIKEMBE: So syrupy, so masculine.

PETE: You know. I always thought he looked exactly like what an ‘In A World’ guy ought to look like: silver-haired, dapper, professional. Maybe she just digs the older, distinguished type.

DIKEMBE: All I’m thinking about right now is him slamming her doggystyle and his hair being perfect.

PETE: I’m sure he performs award-winning voice-over narration during sex. ‘In a world where female ejaculation is possible.’

DIKEMBE: Oh God. I should club his larynx with a hammer.

PETE: How about changing your voice.

DIKEMBE: How do I do that.

PETE: Don’t know. I guess just pretend we’re at improv, only you have to stay in character for the rest of your life.

DIKEMBE: That will never work.

PETE: Did you know that Nicolas Cage’s voice is not his voice. He created that nasal sound during high school because he wanted something more distinct for Hollywood. It’s stuck with him ever since.

DIKEMBE: I wouldn’t mind having Vin Diesel’s voice.

PETE: James Earl Jones.

DIKEMBE: Jeremy... EXCUSE ME, JEREMY IRONS.

PETE: Elton from Clueless.

DIKEMBE: ROLLIN' WITH THE HOMIES. TEE HEE.

PETE: Christian Bale playing Batman.

DIKEMBE: WE CAN DO THIS ALL DAY.

PETE: Barry Whi—hey wait a sec. Your voice somehow sounds different now.

DIKEMBE: YEAH.

PETE: Yeah, how are you doing that. There’s an echo to it. A slight reverberation.

DIKEMBE: (Grunt.)

PETE: Is that flushing I hear. Are you taking a shit in the bathroom.

EVERYONE ELSE: Ha ha ha.

DIKEMBE: AM I ON SPEAKER PHONE.

PETE: Yes.

DIKEMBE: GOTTA GO.

PETE: Later gator.

What I Saw Upstairs

My first run-in came in the summer my sister and I stayed with our babysitter’s family during the daytime while our parents worked, when I was eight and Lynn was six. We both despised that family because of all the naps they forced us to take. Mom never understood how bad it was. I’d complain, “Mommy, they make us sleep too much,” and she’d laugh because she had absolutely no idea that it was along the lines of EIGHT OR NINE HOURS OF NAPS. DURING THE DAY. DAMN THEM. THOSE ABUSIVE, LAZY PIECES OF YOU KNOW WHAT.

Even worse, and more relevant to the point of this story, was the fact that this was a family of religious fanatics. At that age, I knew nothing about Christianity. I just knew that there were crucifixes on every wall of every room of their house, only I called them swords, and I really really wanted to pull one of those swords off of the walls so I could do battle with pirates. Yes, who would have thought that the isolation of lying under the covers during entire workdays would make me create imaginary pirate friends?

One afternoon when the babysitter and her family thought Lynn and I were sound asleep, they went to catch a matinee at the local theater. Those abusive, lazy pieces of you know what, they just left us home alone like that. Of course, I didn’t care. I watched their car pull out of the driveway, ran back to the couch that my sister was sleeping on, pulled off her covers, and yelled, “YO IT’S PARTY TIME.”

The first order of business in our afternoon of unsupervised mischief was to explore the house upstairs. Lynn and I had pretty much only been downstairs in the living room and kitchen, and the one time I asked if I could look around upstairs, they threatened to increase my daily nap times by 30%.

But of course, telling a child not to do something only fuels their need to be even crazier motherfuckers. After ordering my sister to stay put, I skulked up the stairs, grinning and rubbing my hands together, fully intending to jump on their beds and perhaps look for a stool that would assist me in taking down one of their swords for my fight with the pirates.

And I’ll never forget what was there when I cracked open one of their bedroom doors.

Covering an entire eight-foot high wall was a gigantic mural of the face of Jesus Christ wearing the Crown of Thorns, with bright red blood dripping down every corner of his face, his bloody eyes looking upwards, his bloody mouth agape in exhausting pain. It looked like this, only bloodier.

I screamed, slammed the door, then ran downstairs.

“LYNN!” I shrieked, shaking her shoulders. “LYNN. I WANT YOU TO ALWAYS LISTEN TO ME, OKAY?”

“Whyth?”

I started hyperventilating. “LYNN, SHUT UP, JUST ALWAYS LISTEN TO ME. YOU CAN’T TRUST ANYONE IN THIS WORLD BUT ME, OKAY? IT’S JUST YOU AND ME, LYNN. THE ONLY PERSON YOU LISTEN TO IS ME.”

“Okayth.”

“OKAY, SO LYNN, I WANT YOU TO PROMISE NEVER TO GO UPSTAIRS. DO NOT GO UPSTAIRS. PROMISE ME, LYNN.”

“Whyth?”

One by one, I pointed to each sword/crucifix on each wall of the living room and replied, “BECAUSE THEY’RE FREAKS! LYNN! THESE PEOPLE ARE FREAKS! THEY’RE CRAZY! YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW WHAT'S UPSTAIRS.”

“Don't yellth ath me anymoreth. I'm getting thscared...”

“I THINK THEY’RE GONNA KILL US. DO YOU KNOW WHY THEY MAKE US TAKE NAPS ALL THE TIME, LYNN? THEY’RE BIDING THEIR TIME. OBSERVING US. SHARPENING THEIR KNIVES AND WAITING FOR THE RIGHT MOMENT TO PUT THORNY HATS ON OUR HEADS SO WE CAN DIE LIKE THE OTHERS AND BECOME A PART OF THEIR COLLECTION. YOU CAN’T TRUST THEM, LYNN. ONLY ME.”

Lynn started sobbing. I started sobbing too. “PROMISE ME, LYNN. DON'T GO UPSTAIRS.”

“I promiseth.”

We slid open the back patio door and it was so bright outside and we ran as fast as our legs allowed, never once looking behind us, until finally reaching the new and improved freeway. The cars were so loud and so big and from the edge of road we jumped and waved our hands in the air, screaming for help, waiting for someone to say, “It’s over,” to drape a blanket over our shaking shoulders as sirens bounced off of our bloodied faces and say, “It’s over, buddy. Don’t worry. It’s all over.” But help wasn’t there and soon Lynn was drifting too far out onto the road and a frantically honking semi swerved, its wheels shaking the ground as the cargo trailer marked OVERWEIGHT LOAD whipped madly towards her direction. My eyes widened and I fell to my knees and clutched my head with both hands and screamed “Oh please God no” while Lynn just stood there, staring at me, not knowing what to do, not knowing that years later I would exaggerate this story on the Internet.