HOODLUM EMERITUS LECTURES AT THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS: Hustlers, Youth, Politically Incorrect Humor, and other Vulgar Desplays of Wisdom

CINCINNATI (ZP) -- Brother Lexus pushes up from his lounge chair, two sable-colored, tattooed arms raising him from the most comfortable seating in his tiny two-room apartment.

I've been talking shit for a good five minutes straight at this point, trying to get a rise out of the supposed born-again pacifist and sometime adherent to the Five Percent Doctrine.

"Man, how your Old Negro ass pray to Mecca when you can't even get out a motherfucking chair? What you gonna do? Throw a TV Guide at me, Uncle Remus?"

It's been ten years since I last had a chance to jive on the great Brother, once one of my home state's hustler of hustlers, grand teacher to many young juvenile delinquents of all things good, hard, and motherfucking hood - including certain former punkass white kids from rural Southside.

I've heard stories - still have a few nightmares, in fact - about what can happen when some college - educated, cracker-ass jester makes the mistake of calling him a racial epithet outside of the proper circumstance. It's not pretty and, well, it's true what they say about hydrogen peroxide being the cure-all for bloodstains.

And now he's pushing 40, an old man too young, living in one of Cincinnati's worst neighborhoods, working shitty day jobs and waiting for the day when his healthcare professional girlfriend finally says I Do! and they head off into the West as man and wife.

Okay. So I was just hoping I hadn't read the man's face wrong and wasn't about to end up a missing person. Not gonna lie.

We're a long way from Virginia these days, in more ways than either of us would care to remember.

* * * *

He's not smiling as his tree-sized legs straighten. I hear the leather of his Timberland boots squeal as he makes it to his feet. His bootblack Under Armour tee strains in agony as his ebony chest and shoulders expand to almost twice the width of mine.

He's almost a foot taller than my five-nine ass. In fact, he's always been taller, bigger, stronger, older, and, well, much more of an O.G. than I could ever be, thanks in part to a series of state-sponsored vacations. For a brief moment, I feel like a child about to have his ass handed to him by the neighborhood bully.

After all, Brother Lexus was the man who taught me which end of a crub (slang - a modified short crowbar, easily concealed, painted black and covered with grip tape) brings the pain all up on a motherfucker and which end is best used to bodyshop up on a ride, taught me how to fight dirty, hard, and quick, yet also encouraged me save that money, not to flash or flap gums, to go to college and to not sully my adult record.

We're both men of peace these days, well-read, and long past of fighting primes. But, well, we both still know how to take a pound of flesh off a cat if push comes to shove. I may still respect the man, even more so for changing, I tell myself, but I will step to his ass and represent Southside.

Three giant's steps and there's a large fist pushed into my chest, a meaty black digit driven into my sternum like a railroad spike. His biceps, honed by thousands of hours logged benchpressing away years of confinement, each are roughly as big around as my neck.

Oh well, so maybe representing Southside won't last long.

* * * *

Without smiling, he explains that, well, before I come all up into his castle and disrespect, I'd better be grateful that he journeys now, mostly (he does still drink beer, after all, but doth not dine on the swine), along the path of a peaceful and learned disciple of the principles of put forth by the teacher Allah the Father, Clarence 13X. And 13X, you see, was a man born and raised upon the same Virginia red clay that had once fed and nurtured in the pair of us the idea that all men were equals and brothers.

Yes, he says, he can overlook the fact that last century's prophets of Gods and Earths were mostly wrong about the nature of white folk and their supposed devilishness. In the 21st century, it has become imperative that we move past race and embrace Africa as the Original Home of all men. But in HIS house, he says, no one of the Caucasian Persuasion is allowed to forget that it was Europeans and their pale North American and Oceanic descendants who brought the world two hot wars and one cold war, exploited the Motherland and South America and Asia almost to the point of complete destruction...

"Well, amen Reverend. Now you gonna preach it or bring it?"

He stopped and looked suddenly lost in his own mental notes, like a physics professor at a dinner party who suddenly remembers that he's lecturing over the wine and cheese. I wasn't sure where he'd picked up his Poor Righteous Teacher act, but, well, personally, I appreciated it more than what I'd expected to be a much more painful hook to the jaw.

"Sheeeeeeit,* we been through too much for me to hate up on you. And I know that deep in that big white head of yours, mos def, you meant no disrespect."

"Dude, I am so sorry. I just, you know, like just we were kids, man, No offe-"

He pushed that finger harder into my chest. I suddenly felt ashamed, self-conscious of my ethnicity and familial history, embarrassed over the fact that I've spent much of the last decade living as a free, middle-class white man.

"Hold on now. I know you think your academic shit don't stink, but you better listen when I'm schooling your peckerwood librarian ass..."

* * * *

I stared up at him with the same wonder and humility I'd felt when I first met him, back in the day, back when this monster of a man interrupted a rather boring night at a fast-food joint in my hometown.

I'd been studying an opponentless chess board - my regular partner was tied up with woman problems. I was hung over, melancholy but appreciative of the time alone, on a Friday night. Five minutes prior, everybody in the joint had run out to the parking lot. A fight, I'd heard, and some cat had put a piece to some other cat's head.

Hey, none of my fucking business. I had my Mc-Fucking-Nuggets, a shake, and no chess partner. I only hoped they finished their beef elsewhere. I was, however, quite annoyed at the fact that somebody couldn't get that screaming sow of a woman outside to shut the fuck up before the Po-Po rolled by...

He was a suave motherfucker back then, in his Karl Khani jeans and silk shirt and black leather duster, with his gold chain and matching tie clip. He sat down and calmly asked if I was looking for a game - he'd learned to play in a housing project in Jackson Ward, never imagined that us country folk knew how to play.

We talked for a bit, about all sorts of things but mainly about why I hadn't moved from that booth, how I was able to focus surrounded by shoutin' niggas and fools. He liked my answer, appreciated my strategic non-involvement, ability to observe my surroundings, how I could give him the names, describe the faces of every last single person in the dining room without looking up...

After he'd wiped the board with me, was up a good few games, he made me an offer - to play a different sort of game of skill. He said he sometimes had cash-money work for smart white boys who understood things like chess, the strategy of sacrifice of pawns to gain rooks and Bishops, the need for discretion and stealth.

A lot of people, where I grew up, heard the stories. About that midnight - colored sedan with the tinted windows, cruising the countryside between Richmond and Southside. There were sightings everywhere, rumors about all sorts of things, inner-city occupants, hustlers, yes, ballers even. Maybe some of those stories were true.

Maybe the one-time owner of that sedan was always more of a Scientist, a Teacher, than a simple hustler. He taught many young bucks, of all colors, how to defend what was theirs, how to put up the appropriate fronts while not losing one's soul. And he was one fucking hell of a ghetto-trained chess master.

And maybe, yes, that same Teacher was about to renounce his peaceful ways and lay me out like a cheap suit. I knew that if he did, well, there'd be a lesson involved, somewhere.

* * * *

He suddenly smiles wide, ivory white teeth contrasting perfect and bright against his black chin.

"The Negro Community fuckin' frowns upon your shenanigans, son. Now quit acting a fool an' trying to get a rise outta me."

He shakes a smoldering Newport and two fingers disapprovingly, forces his face into a frown, just like the central figure in that highly controversial Internet image.

The lesson, this time, was that wise men, regardless of ethnicity, knows when to behave as serious, educated adults and when to take rather childish, patently offensive race jokes in stride.

Why be angry? Life's too short.

I'd pushed it. And now the war was on.

* * * *

He was down to his last resort - the short white dude jokes. A whole plethora of material, everything from When you stand up like a man... Oh shit! You are standing! one-liners to Man, look at you... I didn't know they made an Albino Smurf jabs.

"Sheeeeeeit, big man." I continue to shit talk, still prodding like a cattleman. "Motherfucker, you saying I didn't get you all worked up? Lookin' like Uncle Ben jumpin' off the rice box, shufflin' up at me like a zombie."

"Sheeeeeeit."

"C'mon... that all you can say? Disgracing the Race, homes. I may have to have a talk with your mama once she's off my dick."

"Maaaan, your dick so small..."

Believe it or not, but this is just how most Southerners handle race relations amongst themselves, as friends, behind closed doors. Snapping on a friend, playing the dozens, even jokes about how your dick is so small, you could fuck a Cheerio and not feel it, tends to be a lot more enjoyable than a goddamn sensitivity-training workshop.

Great desensitization exercise, playing the dozens. Helps people down on their luck, broke, or, just, well, tired of dwelling on all the shitty things they've experienced, times when nobody else gives a shit where they've been, what they've done.

* * * *

"Wigger, I let you stay breathin', and you still can't shut that monkey-looking mouth. And listen to you! A master's degree, a motherfucking scholar, and you talking like you got game? Sheeeeeeeeit!"

And then, time catches up and there's a momentary burst of intellectual, adult conversation. We talk about what Over-The-Rhine's black residents really think of Oxford Fucking Ohio, along with the Local U. - i.e., the state's largest "Color-Free Zone." He fills me in on the recent "urban renewal projects" in OTR, which many working-class residents - including Brother Lexus - see as nothing more than white liberals taking advantage of cheap real estate, pushing out everybody too broke to fight gentrification.

"Fuck it, man. Let's go grab another sixer an' finish this."

He points to the chess board set up on his coffee table. Our first chess game in more than a decade. This was why I was here - he remembered that last game, when he was at his most-dirt covered, sitting in a Section 8 lot and lording over his kingdom, getting his ass handed to him by one of his Boys from down U.S. 360/460, getting beat by that country-fried Fa'mville Cracker.

I have just enough beer in me to suggest that, well, he's just getting old and that we should, possibly, hit a bar and introduce my single ass to some of OTR's legendary Around The Way Girls...

"Man, you ain't changed at all, has you? STILL looking at my people's women like you stand a chance. Please."

In all honesty, I've always looked at all people's women. I mean, who really wants to drink white milk, when one could just add some chocolate or a little caramel syrup, maybe some plum flavoring from Beijing or honey from Cairo?

* * * *

We played two more games before I hit the road. He had me in checkmate within twelve moves each game. And, at thirty bucks a game, well, I left with an empty wallet. It's hard for me to overlook the irony, given the fact that years ago, back in that McDonald's, he actually paid me - a nice, crisp Ben Franklin - just to talk, to hear out his indecent proposal, and to (ha!) let him win a few games.

Brother was once one of Virginia's hustlers of hustlers. Even pushing 40, legit, and out of the game, well, he's still able to make paper off a sucker.

Glad we didn't go for dominoes. He'd have taken me for rent.

Sheeeeeeeeeit! One more lesson, I guess.

- # # #-

* NOTE - The obscenity "SHIT" is pronounced "SHEEIT," "SHEEEEEIT," or "SHEEEEEEEIIIIT!," depending on use, throughout the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, from Philadelphia to Charlotte, North Carolina, but most predominately in Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Maryland.

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: Of Mean-Ass, Downright Evil, High School Dictators, Fortresses of Suckitude, and Notes on a Wildshield

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

- 1 Corinthians 13:11,
King James Version

This is a dude who, 700 years ago, totally ravaged China, and who we were told, two hours ago, like totally ravaged Ashman's Sporting Goods.

- Of Genghis Khan,
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I was fidgeting with my truck keys when I noticed the bright pink paper tucked into the windshield wipers.

Upon closer inspection, I realized that it wasn't a parking ticket. Instead, something slightly more disconcerting had been left by someone other than Oxford's dreaded Meter Nazis.

Someone had left me a note, complete with purple ink, smiley faces, and very girlie-girl handwriting. More appropriately, someone left a note that began with Dear Mr. _______ or Zenfo Pro and ended with Sincerely, Anon. - P.S. Don't get mad but I don't like email.

I'm used to getting emails and IMs from just about every social demographic in Southwestern Ohio. Since 2005, I've gotten notes - 97 percent electronically - from students, alumni and staff at most of the Tri-State's colleges and universities, various area residents, two social services folks, and even a few members of the armed forces serving overseas.

But notes from Local High School students are indeed rare.

Especially notes left on my windshield at nine o'clock in the evening, on a school night.

* * * *

Buried within the simple note, intertwined with the compliments and admonishments over my smoking, the reader had a request.

There is apparently a demonic, authoritative menace stalking the local teenage wasteland, a terror undocumented and neglected by my Hypertext record, one who crushes youthful dreams like soda cans and shatters mischievous hope like a cheap wine glass.

And she (I'm going to go out on a limb here and call the reader a she) wanted me to write something about it, to provide some sort of warning to future Local High School students, to cry out into the World Wide Web about injustice and intolerable cruelty.

A Local High School administrator, from what I'm told, apparently sucks. And given the fact that something about this administrator drove a kid to leave a note on a blogger's windshield, the educator - at least from the student perspective - must suck something fierce.

Sadly, without anything more to go on, besides the cry of suckitude, I cannot condemn a school official for sucking, no matter how much or how great the level of sucky-ness.

And, even if I could, I wouldn't use the sucker's real name, because, well, this sort of sucking isn't exactly outside of a skilled secondary educator's job description, has never been a crime or a misdemeanor.

* * * *

These sorts of things can't exactly be documented by a 29-year-old blogger, really - one who last dealt with sucky high school teachers in the Year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Six.

By high school standards, I'm, well, ancient, a relic of that Gen-X Paleolithic Era, a fossil from a time when Dinosaur Jr. walked the earth, flannel was the trendiest of trendy loin cloth, back when Nirvana was achieved by smelling the air for teen spirit.

Yes, I come from a late 1990s Ice Age, one filled with cop-killing, O.G. pimp pterodactyls and Amerikkka's Most Wanted reptiles, a barbaric time when we all sipped on Gin and Juice and did it Doggystyle while smoking a time-wasting herb nicknamed, appropriately enough, The Chronic.

And, for the record, 99.7 percent of my high school's administrators sucked some serious, deep, unwashed ass. The three-tenths of a percentage point? Well, those were the ones who managed to drill something into my juvenile delinquent, often booze- and narcotic- filled, skull.

I can't even remember the exact number of days I logged in detention or solitary in- and out-of-school suspension, but I do know that I spent a few weeks, easily, trapped in various crusty, vomit colored rooms, surrounded by my fellow inmates.

I'm fairly certain - to this day - that my high school's senior disciplinarians became sexually aroused by the amount of senseless, sucky-ass punishment they doled out like vengeful dominatrices. Yes, they were mean and evil and wretched, human bird shit splashed atop the forehead of youth.

Despite their best efforts and in spite of myself, I survived. In some ways, it made me a stronger, better person. And in other ways, I became more stubborn, more devious and snide and sarcastic.

Not that I'd ever thank my own mean, sucking teachers. Some are dead; most I'll never see ever again. But I did, over time, learn to appreciate their place within the American teenage wasteland. Without those who are intolerable, without those totalitarian educators who make lives hell sometimes, the whole individual high school experience would be, well, boring as fucking shit.

And, hell, I think I turned out okay...

Sorta.

* * * *

"I'll be in front of the movie theater, k?

"The... no ... the MOVIE THEATER, okay? God... Yeah... I will ... Yeah... K, bye."

A Local High School kid stared at me as if I were some ancient, alien menace.

I'd been, well, just holding up a city trashcan, smoking a cigarette outside of a coffee shop when she crossed the street, furiously texting and then chattering into her cell phone.

Two days removed from reading - and then shredding - my mystery correspondent's note, I decided to go hang out at the same place, guarding the same lonely trashcan, that the reader claimed she'd witnessed me doing all summer. Maybe she'd spot me again, stop and say hi, or offer some insight into the terror that apparently is the Local High School's administration?

Maybe this was my mystery tipster?

And this one teen stopped, for no obvious reason, less than five feet from me, just stared. So I did what every mature adult does in such situations - I stared back, made a face.

For a split second, I thought she may, indeed, be my victim of Local High School suckitude.

Another Local High School kid ran up and tugged at Miss Cell Phone's jacket.

"Oh my God," her friend whispered. "That guy... is like... so, like, creepy. Seriously."

Wow. Now that's embarrassing.

I stopped trying to figure out what, exactly, was creepy about me, because, well, the only scenarios I could think of, with my adult mind, were creeping me out. I went back to staring off into space, and the two girls went back to their conversation.

" C'mon! ____'s over there and he's not with her anymore! OH MY Gaaawd! Now's... your ... chance!"

The pair scurried back across the street, towards the long line outside of the theater's box office. Dozens of Local High School kids were waiting there, chatting on cell phones and whispering and staring and giggling at unknown fart jokes...

And for some reason, I suddenly remembered what that was like, what it felt like to be just a devious, pubescent pirate, coasting towards the eventual thrill-killing oblivion of adulthood, without so much as a care beyond the next weekend kegger, the next exam or the next smoked joint in the bathroom.

I stared at my cigarette and remembered what it was like to have mean-ass teachers step in front of my own youthfully awkward, too-damned-fun, train wreck.

And suddenly I wanted to write about how much, well, some educators...

How much...

... Some educators, including myself, just...like ...

... Like, totally suck some seriously mean ass, like, sometimes, like, when you're young and stuff...

Like, you know?

- # # # -

DOGS PLAYING CARDS ON A SICK DAY: Conversations with Ghosts of Myself

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I did something very stupid Tuesday.

I took a prescription medication on an empty stomach, didn't read those pesky do not drink alcoholic beverages instructions, and ended up puking my guts out for seven hours straight.

As punishment for my very, very stupid mistake, I was sentenced to two days sick leave, in order to recover from dehydration, extremely low blood sugar, and overall ickiness. I'd already been recovering from an upper respiratory infection, so the added stress on my system pretty much guaranteed that I'd be forced to take time off for - gasp - health issues.

I don't do sick days very well. I'm a lousy patient. I'd rather just work through it, keep chugging away until something breaks beyond repair. I'll rest when I'm off the clock or when I'm dead.

* * * *

By the time I could finally hold down anything solid, I was too jittery to sit through any DVD, too annoyed to listen to music.

I wrote long-winded emails, responses to comments on the ol' blog, and caught up on just about every open access journal in my research area.

Well, that killed a whopping five hours of my life.

Boredom is my enemy. And nothing screams boredom like five hours' worth of LIS literature.

* * * *

I crawled out of bed Thursday at around 10 (I normally get up between five and six), had one Lean Pocket and a cup of coffee for brunch, took a shower.

I started to get dressed. Couldn't do it. I crawled back into bed, defeated. I felt like the main character in Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, a helpless cripple damned to an eternity of dreary solitude, waiting - begging - for sweet death.

As I stared at the ceiling, my bedroom too bright to sleep, I decided to do what I used to do as a kid when I'd get sick, those lonely days when I'd be left bedridden back on the family farm, 20 miles from civilization and with only three snowy network television stations to keep me company.

I'll play a game.

Hmmm... what sort of game?

For shit's sake, dude! Got it. Let's play Interview!

Interview was one of my favorite sick day games as a child. Actually, Interview was more of an an exercise in imagination than a game.

I'd pretend to be a reporter, a regular Walter Cronkite, interviewing an older, famous version of myself. The television studio was completely within my mind, laid out like those old network news desks, clocks from a hundred time zones covering the walls. I could see clearly the cameras, the Teleprompter, the shining lights.

When I had chickenpox, I'd interviewed Jason, the famous scientist who'd cured cancer. Once, when I was in middle school, I'd interviewed retired Rear Admiral Jason, the hero of the Cold War who'd single-handedly destroyed the Soviet Empire.

In junior high, I even interviewed Jason, winner of three Academy Awards... and husband of Cindy Crawford (we had 12 children, I believe.)

I laughed out loud with what was left of my stomach-acid stripped vocal chords.

Dude, this is gonna be fun.

But I think we'd better mix this shit up a bit...

* * * *

Instead of interviewing my mythological older self, I decided, for shits and giggles, to interview my younger self.

Honestly, the idea of interviewing the 48, 54, or 68 year-old versions of me didn't seem appealing.

I mean, for chrissakes...

Did I really want to think about the divorce back in 2014, the sex scandals of 2043, or that dead hooker in that Vegas hotel room in 2051?

Or what about the possibility of that love child, the one living down in Mexico in 2032, the one I never knew I had, from that very real one night with that daughter of migrant laborers, back in in a very real 1997?

Dude, you'll have nightmares for a week if you interview Future Jason.

You're too damned pessimistic and paranoid to have an imaginary bright future...

* * * *

So, as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, I let my mind wander into that dusty, long-forgotten newsroom one more time. I put on the ol' anchor's blazer, tested the microphone, cleared my mental throat.

I thought I'd share summaries of my first round of Interview in more than 15 years:

* * * *

The Motherfucker was 17, a passionate kid with a huge chip on his shoulder. The Motherfucker liked to fight, smoked way too much weed, played in a punk band, and had a taste for MD 20/20.

"Man, I remember once, at this party, I was so fucked up I couldn't see. We was all outside, all jus' chillin' around this bonfire. Me an' ______ snuck off with this one chick, 'cause she had this dusted bud she'd picked up in Charlottesville. She got so fucked up, she like pissed on herself an' shit. Fucking hippy rich chicks, man. She offered blowjobs if we'd give her a ride home, but I was all, like, shit, white girls from private schools carry all kinds of diseases."

The Motherfucker was known to most adults as a bookish, level-headed kid. He excelled in scholarly activities, as a member of the track team, in academic competitions. But he had a dark side, a lust to be accepted, to be the badass, the instrument of God's Wrath. He hung out with some good kids, but mostly ones destined for lives of trouble.

According to legend, the Motherfucker once broke a guy's knuckles with a ball-peen hammer, gangster-style, because the poor college first-year couldn't pay his illicit pharmaceutical bill. He once took a baseball bat to some poor kid's stomach at a house party, retaliation for the merciless beating a friend of his had received on a school bus.

"That cocksucking redneck had it coming. If we hadn't fucked his shit up, he jus' would've called some brother a coon or somethin' and ended up gettin' capped. I prob'ly saved his sorry ass. Eye for a mothafuckin' eye, homes. You wanna trip some shit, I'll trip shit like a fuckin' electric chair."

The first girl the Motherfucker ever French-kissed ended up killing herself - after doing time in a women's prison for her role in her parents' murder. His childhood best friend was relocated to an undisclosed location as part of a plea agreement, in exchange for testifying against a narcotics kingpin. He knows that several of his friends from those years are now probably dead or in correctional facilities for the rest of their natural lives.

Through some act of God, however, the Motherfucker made it out of his hometown, outgrew his rage, cleaned up his act. He'd been saved only by the unconditional love his family had provided him and by the faith his teachers had in his intellectual gifts.

* * * *

Dog Juan loved playing savior to just about every troubled young woman who showed him even the slightest attention.

In high school, he'd been a late-bloomer, losing his virginity at 17 accidentally to a woman whose exact identity he'd been too drunk to recall. By the time he'd reached 20, he'd overcome enough of his awkwardness around women to be at least somewhat romantically inclined.

Unfortunately for Dog Juan, he learned too late that there were some women he just shouldn't be involved with romantically. As an undergrad, he mastered the art of the one-night stand while simultaneously mastering the art of dating women who were completely nucking futs.

"Once, I was like seeing this girl, T_____. I'd met her through one of my roommates. T____ had her problems, sure...I mean, she'd survived being a prostitute in Colorado Springs, had managed to get into college. So what if she was still stripping to pay the bills? And its not like I'd never done coke before.

"C'mon. The sex was fucking awesome. Wild shit. And she was older than me, old enough to buy beer.

"Fuck, we drank a lot. Actually, she drank a lot. And the fucking suicide threats. Yeah, those sucked.

"But dude! Wait. The fucking sex, dude. One time, I went down on her in an Italian restaurant. We did it at three o'clock in the morning, butt-ass naked on the hood of my truck, smack dab in the middle of an intersection. We're talking three to five times a day, seven days a week. Nothing wrong with that.

"I mean, I've faked it a couple of times, when she gets pushy - the fucking coke messes my shit up sometimes, but she gets it free and won't do it alone, so what am I s'posed to do?

"I mean, yeah, she gets violent an' shit. Lots of women do. And so what if my female friends hate her - they're just fucking jealous because I'm fucking happy.

"C'mon...you never had a chick pull a knife on you before, homes?"

By his 21st birthday, Dog Juan had accomplished two things that few men can claim:

He'd won his first award as a sportswriter, and he'd managed to become a certified victim of domestic violence, complete with restraining order against his one-time fiance.

Researchers have long sought interviews with Dog Juan. The mystery of how such an intelligent young man with such charm and passion could be so goddamned dense sometimes has puzzled numerous people for more than a decade.

* * * *

Talk Radio Guy knew he was in trouble the first day he'd gone into work after the Corporate Radio Juggernaut had finally cleared their FCC hurdles and had taken control of day-to-day operations of his station.

He knew he was a fairly popular sports anchor in his market, but he also knew, somewhere deep inside, that the Corporate Radio Juggernaut had no use for silly little things like women's sports coverage, Major League Baseball broadcasting rights, and colorful sports commentary.

The future, he'd been told, was in nationally syndicated talk radio - conservative talk radio. What use did the Juggernaut have, anyway, for unbiased coverage when its advertising gurus had research to show that America had no use for such things.

Talk Radio Guy knew, somewhere deep down, that some idiot would one day get the idea for liberal talk radio, the same nationally syndicated bullshit, only spun a different way, to sell more worthless airtime to gullible sponsors.

He felt sorry for his listeners. He knew they were smarter than the Juggernaut's advertising gurus.

He sat in his new Program Director's office and listened to the new management's pitch for his talent, a lecture about the fame that would come with moving to FM, to an afternoon drive slot on an Urban Contemporary station that had been faltering for years in the ratings.

"We all called this pile of goatshit P.D. Mr. Backstreet Boy. Homeboy was pushing 40, single, living off tanning salons and expensive hair gel. He used words like "bro" and "hella" in a vain attempt to stay hip.

"From the first day I met the motherfucker, I knew by all of his flattering comments that, for all of his talk about me being a valuable member of the C________ Family, I was nothing more than a local personality that they were slowly trying to push out of the business. He talked about how valuable I' was, but there was no talk of a pay raise.

"I knew my days were numbered the moment I told Mr. Backstreet Boy that I had no interest in spinning bad hip-hop for imaginary listeners, waiting for Big Fucking Brother to finally install the new receivers for the syndicated shit out of New York."

As Talk Radio Guy sat in Mr. Backstreet Boy's office, he looked over at a picture on the new program director's desk - a beautiful portrait of the P.D. and his girlfriend of two years, a former cheerleader with a certain professional sports team.

He grinned from ear to ear, interrupting the P.D. to ask him a question about the woman in the photograph.

You see, Talk Radio Guy had met the Cheerleader, a sweet woman - not very bright, but sweet - at a dance club three days prior to what was to be his last face-to-face meeting with Mr. Backstreet Boy.

She'd told Talk Radio Guy all about how she loved his funny sportscasts, how he made her laugh while she was in the shower. Talk Radio Guy had pretended to be shocked when the former cheerleader claimed that she was in her late 30s; he'd told her that there was no way in hell such gorgeous woman could be a day older than his 22-year-old self.

The Cheerleader thought Talk Radio Guy was cute in person, that he reminded her of a short, cuddly teddy bear. She kept saying how her boyfriend had never once held a door for her, or bought her a drink, or even asked her what she wanted out of life. She told Talk Radio Guy that she was sure Mr. Backstreet Boy was cheating on her with a younger woman, a college student at Talk Radio Guy's Alma mater.

In fact, she apologized several times over several hours' worth of conversation for telling Talk Radio Guy so much - she claimed that the few Fuzzy Navels had made her tipsy, and that she couldn't believe how connected she felt to Talk Radio Guy, and how she wasn't sure why she felt the way she felt, the attraction...

"I think that's probably the downright meanest thing I've ever done to another man. And I don't regret it one bit.

"Feel bad about using her - I mean, she was cute, but wow, was she dumb. And pro cheerleaders are rarely dumb - I've known several over the years.

Besides, I think she was using me a bit, too - she was a new girl in town with a cheating boyfriend, and I was a voice on the radio, the guy who made her laugh, somebody who listened. Lord, I'm naive but not stupid.

"You know, that's always been the power of local talk radio. It's not about the guy behind the mike, the guy ranting and raving. It's about the listening. That's the seduction, my man.

"You should've seen the look on his face when I asked him about that tattoo on her ass.

He knew, knew instantly. I don't know if it bothered him more that, well, I'd screwed something that meant something to him in retaliation for screwing something I cared about, or that he just never thought a fat guy could ever pull one over on his overgrown Boy Band routine.

"God, California really made me an evil bastard, didn't it?"

Years later, Talk Radio Guy would find irony in the fact that he actually slept around a lot more as a fat guy than he does now, 85 pounds lighter than he was when he was at the end of his broadcasting career.

He also finds it fucking hilarious that people sometimes wonder why he just can't find anything attractive about dumb women. Dumb women are easy to manipulate; they don't make him feel the least bit self-conscious. All he's ever had to do was to just listen - there's no challenge in just listening.

Smart women, on the other hand...

Well, he's still just as dense as a lead brick.

* * * *

For some reason, after finishing my first-ever adult game of Interview, I started to feel better.

I took a rather long nap, downloaded some new MP3s, and even started to clean the wreck I'd left the bathroom.

Hell, maybe taking some time off from work is a good thing, taking time to just let old wounds heal up the way their meant to heal.

After all, time is supposed to heal all wounds, right?

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