Having been on McSweeney’s is one of my proudest accomplishments. After my first piece was accepted by them, though, I saw nothing but rejection.
I’ve stopped walking a fine line, and it’s the price to be paid.
There is no reason that anybody except me would think that the following is funny:
For Whom The Buzz Tolls
When he got home from his job as a dickless mascot, he turned off all the lights and threw the only somewhat-fitting pair of pants he still had into the ensuite washing machine.
“These are the pants I was wearing,” he said. “I will need to remember them later.”
Later, when the Swiss Chalet Man comes: When the Swiss Chalet Man comes to bring the quarter-chicken dinner that will one day render these sad and final pants unfitting as well. The pants were a light blue jean-type, with ends that had been serrated by dragging too long against the pavement.
The fashion of rolling them up had returned, but only for capris.
There was a knock at the door. It was the Swiss Chalet Man. This man had a dark, solemn face and wore a red coat, and he felt shame at the certainty of their economic and vocational contrast.
“Even though I currently owe $16,736 to the Bank of Montreal.”
“Why have you said this?”
“Is that the Swiss Chalet you’ve brought me?”
“It is. You are not wearing pants.”
He surveyed the apartment. Beyond not wearing pants, the landscape of his abode was riddled with the containers of Swiss Chalet dinners from days and weeks in the past. The Swiss Chalet man looked at him simply.
“I’ve not yet had the chance,” he said. “Before you came, I was to have patrolled the dust-caked granite surfaces and unkempt beds that I neither cook nor fornicate in for the old containers that you know you have brought me. As you can see, everything has become riddled with them.”
“And your pants?”
“I had removed my pants expressly to clean the apartment,” he said. “I am not skilled or thin enough to pick up objects on the ground while wearing them.”
“You must have pyjamas.”
He gave no explanation.
Inside the discarded containers, the remaining bits of chicken sealed within them disintegrated slowly, safe from producing any pungent awareness of themselves.
“You, in this condo,” said the Swiss Chalet Man. “You’re just like the chicken.”
“If sitting on your hand and jerking off actually worked, I would do it,” he said. “And if it put me in a hospital, I would confess I had done it to a nurse my own age, and I would say, ‘You would have never loved me anyways.’”
He saw two shelves of his own DVDs that he could not remember why he did not steal over the internet. He wore a shirt with a tail made more for the tall than the big, realizing that without pants he now appeared to be wearing a sundress. He ran around the apartment, collecting containers with a contractor-sized garbage bag for outdoor use. The bags were from a bulk-sized box of them he had purchased years ago, not knowing at the time that he was not a man. He became exhausted and finally collapsed, taking a final garbage bag and crawling into it.
He laid on the floor. In the garbage bag.
“You want your food?”
“They say the suite next to the garbage chute is the worst in any building.”
“I have heard this.”
“But nobody making this estimation has any account of how convenient it is if you are a person who needs to utilize that chute without wearing any pants. All of the people who say this are real-estate agents who are dumb and sexy – people who never had any dreams to wash away in the first place. All they do is drop out of school once they get tired of it; then they get their picture taken for a business card and, before you know it, they are out there giving advice on what it takes to be a success. But they don’t know about anything but themselves.”
“Could this not be said of you?”
Outside the window he could see, with all the lights down, and with the wet hiss of the washer in the background, the distant buildings and apartments that were made of so much other hope. He crawled out of the garbage bag and sat down on the edge of his rectangular, cotton-filled mattress and thought of how much he would never be a part of.
“I am a big fat pussy,” he said.
The Swiss Chalet Man said nothing.