— Fiction —

Xmas for the Masses

Resolved: 2009 is the year I will teach Boots not to use the urinal.

**

It’s a commonplace among ornithologists that crows are the equivalent of little flying monkeys, but I would argue that crows are shortchanged in this comparison. I once saw a crow hotwire a Porsche Boxster in broad daylight. Look. Those crows jawboning in the cottonwood at twilight are not squabbling over who gets the topmost branch. Yo, they might well be plotting the takeover of DreamWorks SKG. I once witnessed a crow observing the moving shadows of leaves on the sidewalk and cawing to himself, How quantum mechanical. No shit. A crow would kick a monkey’s ass if, like, they both had 30 seconds to weigh in on Hannity & Colmes.

**

Hang on. I want to be precise about this. A crow would kick a monkey’s ass like Harrison Ford kicked Donny Deutsch’s ass when Harrison Ford was a guest on The Big Idea. If you missed that one, cuz, you missed something. It was awesome to watch HF push back with force when D.D. asked about his relationship with Calista Flockhart. D.D. totally caved. It was like, if you’re Letterman you can ask me about Calista Flockhart, if you’re Conan O’Brien you can ask me about Calista Flockhart, but not someone so low on the food chain as you, pal. I know cowering when I see it, and D.D. totally cowered. No crow would cower, ever. Nothing against DD, btw.

**

Y’all, this is my cousin Boots. Boots, this is y’all. Did you know (a crow would) that the word moron was defined in 1910 by the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-minded (which changed its name, in the Hotel Statler in Boston, in 1933, to the American Association on Mental Deficiency; no shit) as the term for an adult with a mental age between 8 and 12? Boots is my ward. Is that not perfect or what? Boots had two parents who were to you and me as crows are to monkeys. Nevertheless, they wrapped their Porsche Cayenne around the trunk of a live oak at the corner of Perdition and Gehenna. Boots, orphaned, unofficially became my ward. I am raising a ward, basically. My ward shadows me as I make my way through this world that would kick the crap out of me if I trip and fall! Friends and family see me as the caretaker of Boots, but I think of myself as something more like Boots’s inner power coach.

**

We fucking party it up, ’cause Boots can party, I mean we’ll kick back with some witches’-cauldron bud that a crow would not turn its nose up at, and some cheap but posh screwtop (you can get it if you try), and get hammered while I take advantage of the fact that women actually come on to Boots (because he’s a dead ringer for Michael Cera), and then Boots will begin to look a little green around the gills (here you have a nice example of a moribund idiom) and because he is my ward, it is my burden to help him stagger over to the Wendy’s to upchuck in the restroom. And then it’s like, not the urinal, Boots.

**

My gift to Boots for the holidays is, I’m gonna let him ride the waves at the Coliseum. Yes, this is the imbecile’s one delicious joy in life. We go to the Coliseum just when a Lakers game is letting out and walk upstream (paddle out) against the human traffic heading back to their cars. Then we turn around and let ourselves be carried along with the flow. Boots glows with joy and delight. Truthfully, when I was nine I did some ’shrooms in the vicinity of the Coliseum and purely by chance discovered this little thrill which is now recreation ecstasy as far as Boots is concerned. Incidentally, The American Association etc. defined “imbecile” basically as having the intelligence of an elm. Boots has way more smarts than any elm. I would take umbrage at anyone who implied that an elm and Boots were comparable in terms of smarts.

**

This year we’ll do our usual holiday thing of making the rounds of all our cousins and getting wasted. Somewhere along the way Boots will tap me on the shoulder and I’ll have to take him into a Burger King and it will again be, like, not the urinal, Boots. That is why despite all the shit I need to fix in my own life, the focus of my New Year’s resolution will be to teach Boots not to use the urinal.