THE ANGRY DUDE IN MY STOMACH IS NAMED BIFF

I love pizza.

When I say that I love pizza, I mean, I really love it.

I love it so much I want to drop my pants, slide out of my undies and make sweet, sweet love to it.

When I’m done making love to it, I want to screw it.

Pizza likes it rough too.

Pizza is better than winning the lottery. It’s better than Star Trek and it’s better than Star Trek: The Next Generation. Pizza is better than mom’s homemade apple pie. It’s better than winning the Superbowl, and it’s a hell of a lot better than winning the U.S. Open. Pizza is better than crack and cocaine, and it’s better than butter-soaked biscuits and jam resting on the tanned buttocks of a bikini-clad Rosario Dawson. Pizza is better than oral sex.

Wait, scratch that and revise.

Pizza is better than an hour-long session of oral sex skillfully administered by three women at once, all of whom have been trained, tested and universally certified in the fine art of oral sex.

This story is about one night, with one pizza from a nearby joint called, Rosito’s.

I’d swallowed the last of the deliciously gooey slices thirty minutes prior and unfortunately, something was wrong. The cheesy goodness wasn't quite sitting right. My stomach felt twisted. It was moving and morphing, and wrenching and tying itself into knots, and it was doing it slowly. My insides were belching and my backside was puffing. The awful sensation sloshing inside my knotted stomach was slowly progressing upward.

It was heading for the light of my mouth.

My wife noticed my discomfort and managed to pull her attention from what I’m sure was a fantastic episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashins long enough to make sure I wasn’t dying. "Steven, are you all right?"

There was a pissed off little person trapped in my belly. His name was Biff. He was wearing overalls, a hard hat, and he was working a jackhammer against my slippery, boiling interior while smoking a comically oversized cigar and letting the ashes pool in my stomach acids.

Of course I wasn’t all right.

I was nowhere near all right.

It’s a little-known fact that three-foot tall dude’s named Biff are undoubtedly the angriest three-foot tall people of all.

You can take that to the bank.

In between a stingy hot series of acid-soaked belches, I managed to tell my wife that I was going to hop in the shower. I needed to do something, anything. I was feeling light-headed and I could taste the metal aftermath of bile across the surface of my tongue. I thought maybe the water would make me feel better.

It made sense in my head.

I wobbled into the bathroom, turned on the water, slid out of my clothes and hopped in. At first it was working. The water felt good. It was warm and it gave me something else to focus on. I leaned my head against the tile, closed my eyes and tried my damndest to relax.

I swallowed a mouthful of water and let in land on Biff's head.

He'd been working the night shift. He was grimy, he was coated in the scent of cigar smoke, and he was in desperate need of a shower. I thought he might appreciate it. For a moment, the gruff old bastard laid down his jackhammer and stopped chopping away at my insides.

I sighed and smiled. I’d done it.

Everything was going to be okay.

Or was it?

Fresh and clean, energized and ready to roll, Biff popped another stogie into his mouth and lit it up.

Everything wasn’t going to be okay.

My insides flipped. My stomach exploded and something that smelled like fried death popped like an over-inflated sex doll from between my lips. Less than a second later my insides were sprinting toward my mouth. A of river bile was shooting upward, chunks of pizza cheese and sloppy dough mixed like spawning salmon among the waves.

I keeled over. I couldn’t help it.

It felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach. Choice and thought were a thing of the past. This was reaction and nothing else. I was at the mercy of the Biff and his jackhammer, and the volcano of nastiness frothing within.

My mouth opened and began to spray.

It was lumpy liquid awful.

In mere seconds I’d transformed into a pasty, naked, fire-breathing dragon. My throat heaved and my mouth erupted. Chunks of four different cheeses, perfectly seasoned dough, and a very hush, hush secret tomato sauce passed through my lips and spurt in every direction. It coated the walls. It coated the glass of the shower doors in orange-red globs. It was a Dexter Morgan Blood splatter. It was a Rorschach created by the devil himself. What didn’t cascade onto my feet ricocheted off the porcelain and stuck to the hairs on my chest.

Suddenly I was standing in it. I was wearing it like an awards dress even Lady GaGa would shake her head and gawk at.

I tried to make it stop.

I tried willing it to stop.

I failed.

Sloppy, meaty chunks of steaming, partially digested mozzarella piled between my toes. They mixed with the spraying water and cascaded back against me. I was bathing in it.

Tears pouring down my face, I covered my mouth with my hand in a desperate attempt to make it stop. This accomplished nothing. The devil puke squeezed through the spaces between my fingers. It would not be denied. It was the Terminator and Robocop, and the Predator all mixed together. It was It was tougher then Lieutenant Marion “Cobra” Cobretti and at wouldn’t be stopped.

For nearly three minutes I continued to gag and spew, and stand in my toasty warm insides. When it was finally over, my legs gave way and I dropped to my knees in the steaming aftermath.

There was a knock at the door. "Steven? Are you okay?"

It was my wife - my goddamn wife, late to the show wife.

"Steven?" I tried to tell her not to open the door. I tried to warn her, but a wad of half dissolved cheese the size of a testicle lodged in my throat made it impossible.

The instant she stepped into the bathroom the sickening acid odor hit her nose. It shot into her stomach, then back into her mouth and into her belly once again like a demonic game of pong. At some point during the journey the awful scent triggered her gag reflex.

A moment later she was keeled over and hacking as well. Her hacking succeeded in furthering my own, and my hacking was doing the same to her.

She was useless to me.

The whole thing was moronic.

It was stupid.

Back and forth we traded gags and coughs, and belched with our eyes closed and our hands over our mouths. She kept insisting that she needed to help and I keep insisting that she get the hell out of the room.

The air smelled like the unwashed ass - like the underside of Rachel’s Ray’s boobs after a sweat-drenched trip to the gym, or her recipe for Lasagna Florentine.

Unable to stand it any longer, my wife crawled from the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

I was happy to have her gone.

I spent the next twenty minutes cleaning up my own filth. I soaked my feet, popped open a bottle of body wash and dumped onto my head. I lathered my legs and soaped my chest and scrubbed my various patches of cheese-sticky body hair.

I scooped a piece of half-digested cheese from underneath my balls.

When my body had been fully sanitized, I went to work on the tub itself. I scrubbed the walls and the basin, all while trying my damnedest to keep Biff from getting riled up again.

When I returned to the bedroom, I dropped to the bed and closed my eyes.

My wife placed hand on my shoulder, "Is there anything I can do to help?"

It took everything I had not to punch her in the tit.

The next morning she found a dried up piece of stomach cheese on the bathroom floor that I’d somehow missed.

She started hacking.

I felt a little bit better.

THE GAME WE CALLED COLLEGE

"So, what do you wanna do?"

That was me.

"I dunno."

That was my best friend, Eric.

"Me either."

"College?"

"Play college?"

"Yeah, sure. You want to?"

"Yeah, okay."

We were about eight years old at the time and, as you’ve no doubt gathered from the exchange above, we called the game "college."

Most of the time, Eric and I spent our time together collecting bugs or building forts, or pinning dead bugs to the walls of our forts. On the rare occasions when bugs and forts weren’t enough to cut the mustard - or just when the weather sucked – we would generally fall back on "college.”

I know exactly what you’re thinking, "What the fuck is college? If this son of a bitch types the word college one more time and has the unmitigated gall to put it in italics without telling me just what in the hell he's talking about, I'm going to shove my hand down his throat, grab his intestines, pull them through his mouth and wrap them around his neck like jaunty little scarf.”

First things first: You’re awfully violent.

Second things second: To make a long story short, the game of "college" basically consisted of, Eric and I hanging out in my bedroom, talking to each other and acting out what we imagined our lives would be like when we grew up and found our way to college.

It was simple and it was sort of gay.

When I say gay, what I really mean is lame – the sort of gay that has absolutely nothing to do with becoming aroused by the wonderfully lucid smell of man ass.

Most of the time, anyway.

What’s that? You think the game of “college” sort of, kind of, maybe just a little bit sounds like something a couple of girls might do? You think it has a lot in common with pre-teen pigtailed females bouncing around in their bedroom acting out situations like meeting a hunky guy, or getting married, or having a big beautiful wedding and somehow inexplicably becoming a princess?

Well, if it sounds like a girlish sort of thing for a couple young boys to do, that's because it was.

The only major difference between what we were doing and the games of our penisless counterparts was that I don't recall Eric or I ever fantasizing a “college” scenario in which we donned a pretty pink dress and married a dashing young prince in a flowered gazebo near the ocean.

Well, wait. I guess there was that one time.

The thing both amazing and pathetic about the game of "college" was the type of situations we seemed to think would regularly happen to us once we came of college age.

We expected loads of women and mountains of booze. We anticipated an endless parade of parties, and piles of crotchless panties – some filled with drugs and others were filled with the more traditional female genitals.

Maybe even a few filled with both.

An afternoon of “college” would generally begin with Eric sitting on my bed – basically chillin’ with just a little bit of illin’ – you know, like college kids do. He’d pretend to hear a nonexistent phone ring and promptly pretend to pick up.

"Hello? Yep, this is Eric. Oh, hey Shannon. Yeah. Sure. What are you up to? Oh, really? Yeah. I think we can do that. Totally awesome. Sure. Yeah, see you then, sexy."

In the pretend world Eric was a smooth talking pimp with game so big it could hardly be contained. In the real word he was sort of a weirdo – and a dork – and sort of gross.

Eric pretended to hang up the pretend phone and turned to me with as lecherous a grin as an eight year-old could possibly muster. "Guess who that was?"

I was sitting on the pretend bed at the opposite end of the room in our pretend dorm. I rubbed my hands together like a cartoon villain and smiled. "Shannon?"

"Yep."

"What did she want?"

"She's on her way over."

"No shit?"

"Yep, and she's bringing, Debbie."

"Radical!"

Yeah, that's right, I said radical.

Don’t judge me too harshly, though. I was only eight and the Ninja Turtles were popular at the time. Everything was either radical, or bodacious, or totally tubular.

We immediately scampered to tidy up our pretend dorm and make it somewhat presentable for the visit of our pretend – no doubt ample breasted - college cuties.

I knocked twice on the wall with my fist. "They're here."

After making my way to the pretend door and pretending open it up, I stepped to the side and let in the pretend girls. As I pretended to watch them pass by I also pretended look at their pretend butts, and pretended to mutter the word "dayyyymmmm" silently to myself in my pretend imagination.

Wait - enough of this.

"Pretend imagination?" Isn't that basically the same thing?

I really need to stop typing pretend.

I’m not going to though.

I should, but I’m not going to.

It’s amusing me to no end.

Every time I do it, I chuckle to myself.

Eric and I pretended to spend the next ten minutes sweet-talking the girls. Mindless small talk - even pretend mindless small talk - ended up getting really old, really quick, and before we knew it we'd removed the shirts of our pretend female companions and were pretending to cop ourselves a pretend feel.

The Muppet Babies used to pretend like this - minus the boobs of course.

Not long afterward we’d managed to get their pretend everything off, and soon after that the orgy was underway.

Eric was propped up on his hands, staring at the bed underneath him with a truly terrifying grin and humping the air at a ninety-degree angle.

Taking a moment from pretending to give it to my pretend girl-toy doggie style, I spotted Eric out of the corner of my eye and felt the need to speak up. "It wouldn't work like that."

"What do you mean?"

"It wouldn't work. A real pussy isn't on top like that. You need to do it on more of angle." In order to show him what I meant, I flipped over my pretend girl, placed her pretend legs on his shoulders, rotated my hips and began to hump the air.

It was disturbing.

My know-it-all bravado also annoyed, Eric. "How do you know where a pussy is?"

"Everyone knows. It’s obvious."

"Shut up."

"You shut up."

"No. You shut up."

"You shut up infinity."

"You shut up infinity plus one."

"Fine. Do whatever you want, but when the time comes to actually get it on with a girl at college you're gonna feel pretty stupid."

Out of the many, many things wrong with the situation as a whole, this is the one I chose to point out.

Seriously?

That’s just stupid.

In time I'd come to the awful conclusion that the craziest notion we had while playing “college” was that the women in college would call us and ask to come over - or for that matter, talk to us at all.

The pussy placement predicament was the least of our problems.

THE DAVE THOMAS BATH

Sophomore year of college I moved out of the dorms and got myself a tiny studio apartment in the heart of downtown Columbus, Ohio. The rent was $300 a month, it smelled like the rent was $300 a month and I occasionally spent my night spooning a cockroach or two, but none of that mattered. I was finally living on my own. I was living on my own, I was in the city, and I had absolutely no one to answer to. I could make as much noise as I wanted to make. I could clean when I wanted to clean and I could fart when I wanted to fart.

Hell, I could’ve bought myself a bear skin rug, stripped naked and rolled around on it while masturbating and listening to The Macarena if I’d wanted to.

The Macarena was popular at the time.

Don’t judge me.

Initially I was excited about the idea of finally being on my own and doing my own thing, and being my own man. It was going to be fantastic! It was going to kick ass! It was going to soak the initial ass kicking in alcohol and slap on a few band-aids to allow the ass kicking wounds heal, and then it was going to kick ass again! I was pumped! I was ready to go!

Lets do this shit!

I should have known better to be so excited. Excitement has never worked out for me.

Fast-forward to a month or two after I'd moved in: I woke up in the middle of the night and my head was pounding harder than, Chris Brown pounds his ladies and Mel Gibson pounds back the booze.

Though it was a particularly chilly night, I was covered in sweat. My hair, the sheets, my pillow, everything was soaked – everything was sticking to me. My bed and my body were drenched in a disgusting, sort of clear and sort of piss-colored moisture.

The room smells like the armpits of John Belushi’s corpse – or the armpits of Jim Belushi’s career.

My body was on fire and my head cloudy. There was a mean spirited gymnast sporting a pair of spiked golf shoes and doing a floor routine in my stomach. There was a mariachi band worming their way through my intestines and a layer of magma boiling just inside my anus.

It was hot - so very hot.

My head weighed a thousand pounds.

Things were getting blurry.

I needed to lower my body temperature. I needed to lower my body temperature quickly and I needed to lower it before my insides became my outsides. There was no time to actually check how high my fever was – no time to think - I needed to lower my body temperature.

After rolling from the bed crawl across the floor and into the bathroom, leaving a trail of slippery sweat behind. While sliding awkwardly across the hardwood on my river of perspiration, I recalled something my mother once told me about the first couple years of my life. As a child I was constantly coming down with fevers. These weren’t little girly fevers either – I’m talking about 104 or 105 degrees – the sort of fevers that sear steak and fry brains. When this happened, apparently she’d have to strip me down, wrap me in cold blankets and lay me on the kitchen table.

I didn't have enough blankets. I didn’t even really have a table.

I had a few pizza boxes.That wasn’t going to work, though.

I needed to lower my body temperature.

Grunting the entire way, I lugged my drippy sweat-flesh to the bathroom, leaned into the tub and started filling it with ice-cold water. It took some squirming to get rid of my clothes, but I did exactly that. Once the tub was full I shut off the water.

My penis was going to shrink to toddler size the minute I climbed into that thing – it was unavoidable.

I tossed a military salute in the direction of my dong and offered a remorseful "Godspeed."

My temperature must have been off the charts because I obviously wasn’t thinking straight.

After five minutes in the icy drink I was starting to feel a bit better. It was working. Sure, certain appendages were likely getting frostbitten, and there was a good chance that I might lose a toe or two, but whatever. Appendages could be surgically replaced and toes were useless anyway. At least I didn't feel like I was taking a vacation on the surface of the sun anymore.

Just when I thought things were getting better, they got significantly worse – because that’s the way things work for me.

Things are jerks.

Suddenly something was alive in my stomach. There was something evil in there - something big and hairy, and nasty and scary, and something with two tickets for the ferry. (Rhyming is fun.)

Whatever it was, it had eaten the gymnast in the golf shoes and it was climbing in the direction of my mouth with bad intentions.

I jerked forward so wildly you’d have thought I was possessed by a demon. My body lurched, then recoiled and lurched again. For an encore it convulsed.

Chunks of something that sort of, kind of, sort of resembled the Wendy’s double cheeseburger I’d eaten earlier in the day began pouring from my mouth. There was bread and there was beefy leather boot, and there were salty grease fries - all mashed together and sticky with noxious bile.

SPLASHsPloooNNkkkkkplop!

That’s what it sounded like.

A never-ending torrent of the foulest mouth gunk in the history of mouth gunk was splashing into the water around me – plopping and expanding, and melding with my icy surroundings.

This was what the hail looks like in hell.

For nearly five minutes I continued to spew and gag and reload, only to spew some more. My throat was raw. My eyes were red and my face salty with tears. I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t want to breathe. I wanted to die. I wanted to close my eyes and never wake up. I wanted to remain exactly where I was – floating in a freezing tub of my own insides.

Like an Eskimo after a really good shit followed by a really good screw, I was frozen, I was naked, and I was empty, and I was spent.

Thirty or forty minutes later (time had lost all meaning at that point) I somehow managed to roll out of the tub, get dressed and walk a few blocks to the hospital down the road.

For two days afterward the stench of my Dave Thomas bath stuck to me like honey to a Pooh Bear.

The doctor told me it was most likely food poisoning.

I told him my old pal, Dave would never do that to me.

He told me I was an idiot.

WENDY'S AT 9AM?

"You know what would really hit the spot right about now?"

"I don't know, what?"

"Some Wendy’s."

"Wendy’s?"

"Yeah. Don’t you think it’s the perfect time for Wendy’s?"

"No. Not really. It's like…nine in the morning."

"Yeah, I know. But, still. It would taste good."

The dolt requesting a greasy hamburger at 9AM was my future wife. She’d flown out from California to visit me a few days earlier and was staying with me at my apartment in the city.

The night before had gone well. We did the dinner thing. We did the movie thing. I tried my best to do my own version of the romance thing and to top it all off, I even gave the whole sweet lovin’ thing a go.

While I didn’t do any of those things particularly well individually, lumped together in a big date night stew, I like to think the whole proved better than the sum of its parts.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

In any case, it was the next morning, I’d just woken up and the lovely-insane bastard beside me was insisting that a sloppy, grease-ridden burger from Wendy’s would “hit the spot.”

She’d obviously gone bonkers.

Wendy’s? Really? At nine in the morning? She had to be joking. What sort of screwed up screwhole eats a Wendy’s hamburger at nine in the morning? Even, Dave Thomas wouldn’t do that. Even the corpse of, Dave Thomas wouldn’t do that.

I’m not even kidding.

If you tried to wedge a piping hot bacon cheeseburger between his decaying choppers, he’d spit that garbage right out.

To make matters worse, I looked out the window and noticed that it was pouring freezing rain. It was early December - in Ohio – and it was raining. It was frostbite weather. It was stay outside and lose your toes weather. She must have been off her rocker if she thought for a second that I would walk five blocks through the city in that nonsense.

Intent on keeping the peace, I offered something else instead. "Can't I just make you eggs or something? Don’t eggs sound good? Wouldn't it be cool if I made some eggs for you?"

"I'd really like Wendy’s."

Damn it.

I tried to sweeten the pot. "Tell you what…I'll make them naked. How about that? Naked eggs? Come on. You’re not going to sit there and turn down naked eggs, are you?"

"Sorry. I just have a taste for Wendy’s."

Double damn it.

"It's like fifteen below zero out there…and it's raining…ice. You see the ice rain, right?"

“I know. It would mean a lot to me though."

Shit.

This broad wasn’t going to let this go. She was set on the idea of Wendy’s and she wasn’t going to budge. Even the promise of naked eggs couldn’t turn her away. Naked eggs!

I suppose if I were blessed with a larger set of balls and wasn't such a pushover when it came to women who were willing to let me even suggest naked eggs without slapping on a restraining order, I would have explained to her in no uncertain terms that Wend’s simply wasn’t in the cards.

I am a pushover though. I’m a pushover and a schmuck and ten minutes later I was bundled up in a winter jacket and leaving my building like the schmucky, pushover, no-balled schmuck that I’d always be.

Naked eggs would have been so much more fun.

The wind was blowing like an angry working girl after a twelve-hour shift. It didn’t like me and I didn’t like it, but neither of us were going anywhere. Icy cold rain stabbed me in the face like knives, or a million cheek pinches from a million annoying aunts all at once.

The sidewalks were coated, and shimmering and slippery. Every step was a cautious one. Every movement had to be carefully planned and tested before completed.

A single car drove slowly by and the person inside looked at me like I was a crazy man.

They had no idea.

By the time I arrived at Wendy’s, frostbite had set in and my fingers were utterly useless. My jaw was clattering. There were icicles hanging off my eyebrows and my eyelids were frozen open. Blinking was no longer an option. I couldn’t feel my ears. For all I knew, they’d fallen off along the way.

I'd transformed into, Brundle fly.

I was falling apart.

The worst thing about it -I still had to go back.

She just had to have Wendy’s!

No! Naked eggs weren’t good enough for, Princess California! She had to have Wendy’s and she required me to put my life on the line to get it! She asked me to undertake a journey that put the trek to Modor to shame!

Tomorrow morning she was getting eggs. And not even naked eggs.

She blew her chance at naked eggs.

Fifteen minutes later I stumbled into the apartment with a bag of Wendy’s in what was essentially a block of ice. "Here you go…Wendy’s. Let me just say, this better be the best damn Wendy’s you've ever eaten considering what I went through to get it for you."

She lowered her head, ashamed.

Damn straight.

"I'm sorry Steven...I'm not even really hungry."

Wait. What?

"What the hell? Then what did you send me to Wendy’s for?"

"I had to use the bathroom."

"Huh?"

"I had to use the bathroom, and I didn't want to do it with you in the apartment."

The next time I make naked eggs I'm lacing them with poison.

HIGH PANTS GREEN

Sometimes in life, you see something you can’t forget—terrible things that leave a stain on your soul and make a return to normalcy an utter impossibility.

It happened to the boys in ‘Nam. It happened to anyone that paid the price of a movie ticket to the see the big screen adaptation of The Last Airbender.

It happened to me one unassuming afternoon in the parking lot of the local Target.            

It was there that I spotted him—my doctor—Dr. Green.

He was shoving shopping bags into the rear of his SUV with someone I imagined was his wife. Noticing my doctor in a parking lot doing exactly what people generally do in a parking lot shouldn’t have affected me the way it did.

This is basic stuff, right?

The image shouldn’t have burned itself into the folds of my brain, planted a flag, and pitched a tent. It shouldn’t have made me want to punch young children and shove the elderly down the stairs. It certainly shouldn’t have caused me to question the whole of humanity and its purpose in the universe.

Which is exactly what happened.

You see, it was his pants.

The light brown khakis Doc Green was sporting were literally pulled so high they were tucked underneath his man boobs. They were so high that if he lowered his head, he could have rested his chin on his belt. They were so high he could have pulled his nipples through his fly in an awkward and desperate attempt to entertain the guests at the next family barbeque.

With his pants so high on his chest, the fabric of the legs came to an abrupt stop just below his knees. My wife calls them Gauchos.

My sixty-plus-year-old doctor looked like he was wearing Gauchos.

Below the dangling fabric of his khakis was an inch or two of hairy leg before a pair of striped socks appeared.

Striped socks? Dear God Almighty.

Oh, and he was also wearing sandals.

Brown ones—with Velcro.

Someone stab me in the eye.

Look, I’m not a member of the fashion police or anything. I don’t really follow trends. No one would ever consider me cool. I sometimes go six months without getting a haircut and a month before I bother to shave. I own maybe two pairs of pants and wear the same five shirts week in and week out. I’m scruffy. I’m scraggly. I’m lazy, and I generally don’t care.

If the doc had been sloppy, I could have dealt with it.

Sloppy I can understand.

Sloppy I can wrap my brain around.

Unfortunately, there was nothing sloppy about his attire. Everything he had on was neatly pressed. His shirt was starched, and the lines were as crisp and sharp as a Johnny Unitas buzz cut. His sandals were spotless, and his socks whiter than the light from heaven itself.

He took time to choose his outfit. It was obvious that he cared about his clothes and was concerned with his appearance. The pants wedged underneath the sweaty beef of his moobs were exactly where he wanted them to be and looked exactly like he wanted them to look.

He was a madman.

The whole thing was simply too much to handle. I felt like I was watching a snuff film. It was wrong—wrong on every conceivable level.

My brain exploded.

Instead of actually making the trip into Target to purchase the items my wife sent me to purchase, I hopped in my car and drove home.

It wasn’t right—having to see what I’d seen—it just wasn’t right.

It was plain old wrong.

How was I supposed to believe anything this man told from that point on? How could I entrust my health to him? How could I ever have faith that he could diagnose what was wrong with me when his belt buckle was most likely getting tangled in his chest hair?

I couldn’t. Not with the image of those pants burned into my gray matter and crazy-glued onto the reverse of my eyes. It was asking too much, and I wasn’t that strong.

No one is.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled into the garage and stumbled into the house like I’d just gone ten rounds with the Champ. I dropped onto the couch and coiled into the fetal position.

More than my obvious suffering, the wife noticed I was without the merchandise she requested. “Steven?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t even blink. Blinking no longer existed. For the first time in my life, my eyes were open to the true horrors of the world, and they would never close again. I watched as the shadows on the wall slowly morphed into a pudgy Jewish man in a pair of high-waisted pants.

“Steven? Are the bags in the car?”

I forced myself to respond. My response was breathy, however. My words hung in the air and floated upward, each one sporting both sandals and socks.

“There are no bags.”

“What? What’s the matter with you?”

I swallowed the lump in my throat and closed my eyes. The shadow doctor on the wall was waving at me, smiling from behind his salt-and-pepper beard and mocking my resolve with his high-pantsed atrocity.

Son of a bitch.

“I need to find a new doctor.”

“What are you talking about? Are you okay?”

It was a simple question.

Unfortunately, there were no longer simple answers.

“I saw Doctor Green at Target.”

“So?”

“His pants were pulled really high. He was wearing sandals with socks. I can’t see him anymore. I need to find a new doctor.”

When the wife didn’t respond, I opened my eyes and stared blankly in her direction. She was standing on the opposite end of the room, looking at me like I’d just dropped my pants, drawn a pair of eyes on my butt cheeks, crammed a carrot up my rectum, and started talking out of my taint.

She sighed and shook her head. “Are you serious? You didn’t go into Target and drive all the way back here because your doctor’s pants were too high, did you?”

“Don’t forget about the sandals.”

“You can’t be serious. Are the bags in the car?”

“Oh, I’m being totally serious, and there are no bags.”

“Steven, go get the bags from the car.”

“There aren’t any bags in the car.”

Her expression transformed from confusion to anger—maybe something in between. I’ll call it confuser. Is that a thing? If it’s not a thing, it really should be a thing. It’s fun to type.

With a frustrated huff, she stomped through the kitchen, into the garage, and up to my car. A minute later, she was standing above me with her hands on her hips.

            “Really, Steven?”

“You didn’t see how high these pants were. You don’t know.”

True to my word, I got on the phone and found myself a new doctor the very next day.

You’re probably reading this with an expression fairly similar to the one my wife tossed at me on that fateful day, and I honestly don’t care. You’ll never understand because you weren’t there.

Consider yourself lucky.