WEEK FORTY-TWO
It took my dad several days to convince his friends to meet with me. Chuck was a beefy dirty blonde whose back – and he wanted me to be very clear on this point – was dominated by a tattoo of Rod Steiger. I had no idea who that was. Pete was a doughy little man with wire-frame glasses and a laugh that could chill the blood of a used car salesman. (If used car salesmen even have blood – the jury is still out.) Dieter was wire-thin, with dead eyes and a gentle accent that he insisted was not German even though nobody actually said it was.
We met at a strip joint called The Naked Truth. It was once a respectable joint where a man could get a drink and watch women take their clothes off, my dad told me, but then they started letting journalists in and the whole place went to hell. The afternoon we met his friends, there were two New York Times reporters and a Fox anchor, but they were on the other side of the stage, so Dieter told me it was safe to talk. The fact that one of the Times reporters was wearing a bra on his head and the Fox anchor seemed to be snoring may have contributed to Dieter’s assessment of the situation.
“Brett says you have a story to tell,” Pete skeptically commented. Without further prompting, I told it. By the end, the three men were on the edge of their seats.
“So,” Chuck asked, “did you manage to get out of the prison alive?”
I looked at my dad, who shrugged. He had warned me that Chuck wasn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee.
“Here I am,” I pointed out.
“Did you see any black helicopters?” Dieter asked.
“Black helicopters?” I asked in return. I had never heard of such a thing.
“Jah – I mean, yes,” Dieter said. “The government paints them black and flies them without lights so that they can spy on us in the middle of the night without us knowing that they are there. The helicopters have to take off and land from somewhere – I thought, maybe, this prison…” The other men nodded in agreement.
“Uhh, no,” I answered. “I never saw any black helicopters when I was inside.”
“Were you interrogated by Jews?” Pete asked.
“I…I don’t know,” I responded. “Nobody I encountered at the prison ever told me their names.”
“You don’t have to know their names,” Pete insisted. “You can just tell.”
“You can?”
“Sure,” Pete told me. “When you run the world, you get a certain…superior attitude towards everybody else. It’s hard to miss, really.”
“I can’t say as I noticed,” I said. I was not comfortable with this discussion. In my line of business, I had worked with a lot of Jews, and, while I wouldn’t say that any of them were my friends – that would be racist – I had always gotten along with them. Frankly, it would never have occurred to me that they ruled the world.
“Place was probably run by Jews,” Pete quietly commented.
“Did you see any alien corpses?” Chuck asked. Pete rolled his eyes. Dieter looked at the stage, where a pair of women were standing next to podiums in a mock debate, taking their clothes off to the tune of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.”
“You don’t have to answer that,” my dad told me. “Chuck…Chuck has some weird ideas…”
“Hey!” Chuck loudly defended himself. “Where do you think the iPhone came from? Alien tech, man! You think human beings could have come up with something like that on their own?”
We sat with our beers for a couple of minutes. Eventually, Pete cleared his throat. “Phil, you ever fired a gun?” he asked.
“No!” I responded a little too quickly. They all looked at me wondering why I was sitting with them, until I added, “I’m in advertising.” They all shook their heads knowingly and went back to watching the action on the stage, drinking or imagining what an alien body on a coroner’s slab would look like.
We spent the rest of the evening talking about sports and which strippers we would happily do (perhaps not surprisingly, all of them). When we got back to the trailer, I asked my dad how he thought it went, but he just shrugged and told me we would have to wait to find out.
Five minutes later, Dieter called to let me know I was in.
SOURCE: Harpo’s
[http://harpos.org/archive/2012/10/21/dd-9000042]
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