“Why do I prefer inflatable women?” asked the old man with a torn-throat chuckle, as if surprised, yet in a way not surprised, to have posed himself this question. “Why do I prefer inflatable women?” he asked again, this time with a shake of his head, as though he just couldn’t help being charmed by himself, despite his better wisdom, despite knowing himself all too well.
It was a question on none of our minds. We shot each other little “get me out of here” glances. We didn’t want to know. But now, at this point we also didn’t want to not know, because then we’d always be thinking about it: working it into our group emails as that inside-joke reference you all just had to refer to, eventually out of tradition, long after it had stopped being charming; waking up in the middle of the night with that sudden, quarter-conscious certainty that we had solved it!—but then forgetting the theory by morning; eventually, if it came to this, paying to see one of those “Joke Man” acts that come through the local comedy club from time to time, where the audience is invited to shout out the first parts of jokes so that the Joke Man can prove he knows all the jokes there are to know, and shouting out “Why did the old man prefer inflatable women?” and taking the risk that the Joke Man might actually have the integrity to simply stand there alone in the silence and admit “I never heard that one. What’s the punch line?” and you’d have to say, in front of the whole comedy club, that you didn’t know either, that it was just a real thing that had genuinely been on your mind.
No, it could only get worse if we didn’t find out now.
But it turned out that we didn’t have to ask.
“I don’t prefer them because they’re inflatable,” continued the old man, now all of a sudden more than able to answer the question that had seemed to baffle him only seconds earlier.
His old eyes smiled and his old mouth crackled with decaying mischief as he savored one last second of mystery. “I prefer them because they’re deflatable.”
Oh, gross.
He laughed and rotated his cigar slowly, as though examining it to make sure it was burning evenly, but which he couldn’t have been doing, because when he finished rotating it he nodded at it firmly, sure and pleased, even though the cigar wasn’t burning even close to evenly by any measure. Then he slid another sip of whiskey down his mouth, and then he laughed some more, softer and softer, until he was laughing in perfect silence, as if a skilled DJ were slowly turning his volume knob down to zero.
It was a tasteless thing to say, but I had to admit he said it in a cool way.
Also, who invited this guy? This was supposed to be a party celebrating Mike’s two-year-old’s birthday, and I thought he said he was going to keep things small. Mike said he didn’t know him.
A New Hitler
We need a new Hitler.
Let me explain: a new Hitler nothing like the old Hitler.
I think we can all agree that the old Hitler was a monster, a maniac, and an evil man.
I’m talking about a new Hitler.
I’m talking about a Hitler who’s against genocide. I’m talking about a Hitler who’s opposed to world domination. Now, that’s the kind of Hitler I might be able to get behind! A Hitler who wants to improve our schools. A Hitler who understands that ordinary Americans need more access to health care—and isn’t afraid to tell that to Congress! A new Hitler! A good Hitler.
Hopefully, the new Hitler would not have the name “Hitler,” because I think people might find that distracting.
Constructive Criticism
When it was almost complete, Don took his ten-year-old son to see the office building he had been supervising for almost two years.
Don Junior wanted to be an architect. Just like his dad. That’s what he had declared one night over spaghetti and ketchup, and every birthday and Christmas since then—five, in total—had been devoted to toys, then posters, then books about architecture and construction.
“Here. You’re gonna have to put this on,” said Don, picking up a pair of hard hats from a steel table. “That’s the rule.”
Yellow hard hats. Standard issue. Just like in the books, in the posters, on the Fisher-Price men.
“Okay, now pull the strap … Click it into place. There you go. All set.”
It was a special moment, all the more so for how simple it was: handing his son a hard hat on his first visit to a real construction site. But Don couldn’t let on how much this moment meant to him, because that would mean letting go of that straight face, and he knew that straight face was a big part of the moment.
Don walked his son through the site, pointing out different things he had built and the different decisions that had led to them.
Don Junior took it all in without offering a word or expression.
Don showed him more and talked a little quicker, and Don Junior took that in, too, with the same focused look.
The straight-faced thing apparently came a little easier to his son than to him.
“Well, what do you think?” Don finally asked.
“Can I give you some construct-ive criticism?” said Don Junior, pronouncing the term carefully.