Dear Dirty America

(UPDATE: The owner of this yellow Ferrari also owns a lipstick red Maserati. How many other top-shelf luxury vehicles does he own? And how does this change his perspective on life? Does he ever feel guilty about the rest of the world being so goddamned poor? Does this realization hit him when he sweats through his shirt and shorts and sticks to the damp leather beneath his ass after he gets into his car on a hot, Los Angeles summer’s day? I mean, his cars may be far beyond average, but how far beyond average can one human be? He still shits, I imagine, and he still occasionally runs out of toilet paper at inconvenient times. I imagine.

Here’s an example of another man who must shit, too. Instead of a lipstick red Maserati, he’s got a velvet red shopping cart, and he drives it on the very same street as the man described above:

end of update)

(if the driver of that Ferrari is in any way linked to the Italian, Jewish, or Romanian mafia, I could be in trouble. I could end up dead, or with broken bones, or both. I used to be in the German mafia, but we turned out to be more of a culture and fine arts club, so there’s very little protection there. If, however, this driver is just one lucky bloke who was awarded for sucking Shell’s nozzle hard enough and long enough, with exceptional firmness and deftness, I’m in considerably less danger…)

The pleasant afternoon was disrupted by a snarling, sleek yellow sports car trolling past my apartment complex.

My poor, working class neighborhood, close to downtown Los Angeles, hardly gets such a show. It’s like having a professional clown wearing a yellow suit with a puff of red hair and honking a horn come rolling through on a squeaky unicycle. Sure, we all stop what we’re doing, smile and stare, but it kind of pisses us off, too.

Yes, it would be with great enthusiasm and joy that I would open up that car on the freeway, had I the chance. The car’s poor suspension and thin rubber tires would have me bouncing around inside like a ping pong ball. The sole of my right foot would be tingling with the low-end rumbling vibrating the floorboards.

Of course I would feel like a superstar parking in the litter-strewn local Ralph’s grocery store lot and hopping out of a car that looks like a large version of my favorite childhood Hot Wheels model. The homeless drunk couple with the dirty faces, who sit slouched at the cement tables out front, would no doubt catch a second wind at the sight of that vibrant yellow. It might even turn their lives around.

But could I drive such a vehicle?

Having a garish yellow Ferrari is a false measure of success. Whatever that person did to earn or collect the money necessary to own that car is only a shadow of the inner deficiency of anybody clueless enough to drive it in public. It’s a satirical way of displaying personal wealth.

It’s like attaching an enormous golden penis to the outside of your pants and walking through rich and  poor neighborhoods alike so everybody can catch a glimpse of the glimmering thing. And if you’re really desperate, you’ll hook a clanging bell just below the shiny testicles to alert people over a block away that you’ll be there soon. (The sentiment behind that act would be, “If you didn’t think I had a big one before, well, now you know….”)

That’s how I would feel driving down the freeway in a car like that. A car so uncommon, and so bright, people have to look. Like an enormous yellow penis. I’d feel exposed. Overdone. Desperate. My internal issues ripped inside out and on display for everyone.

That man feels incompetent, I could hear my fellow motorists thinking, as I blow by them in their Honda Civics, Toyotas, and Fords. That man doesn’t feel accomplished on the inside, so there he is, making sure you can’t miss him on the outside. That man has trouble pleasing his wife in bed. That man was teased in high school and never got over it. That man was never good at sports. That man never felt adequate in the workplace. And so on.

I think writer and activist Eric Chaet laid it out best in his ‘so-called poem’ Achievement, where he imagines himself attaining, through the first twenty-four thorough lines, various measures of wild success, but he writes at the end, if “…there is as much suffering as when I began / and as much injustice… / …then I will have achieved nothing worth mentioning.” Including that banging yellow Ferrari.

Yes, yes, I know I’m a bit of a hypocrite

Because I want to someday win a Pulitzer for this blog, I’ll come clean right now about a glaring inconsistency. For those who are familiar with Dear Dirty America, you’ll know I’ve tried to manifest the Jaguar XK sports car. You may think, because of what I’ve written above, I’ve become a hypocrite. Well, kind of. A Jaguar sports car is excessive and silly, and it would be me pumping up my ego by trying to suggest to other people that I am, somehow, or some way, richer and more important than they are.

However, a white Jaguar is not a banana slug yellow Ferrari. It is also about three times cheaper. And, if I were blessed with that Jaguar, I’d drive my less fortunate friends around, like downtown Johnny, Frank, and the infamous wheatgrass juicer, Marlin.

The worst part about the vehicle in the picture is the Shell logos printed to its back bumper. Who would advertise for such an atrocious company? Human rights abusers. Environment killers. It’s bad enough to have to buy their gasoline (which we’re forced to buy because our taxpayer dollars subsidize Big Oil and stamp out other cleaner, greener energies from being introduced into the mainstream market and made affordable).

Perhaps the driver of the vehicle cut a deal with Shell. That means he’s a whore. It’s a classier version of prostitution than what most of us are used to, but it’s still prostitution.

The other worst part about all of this is how loud the car is. It sputters and spits and snarls like it’s got a snag in its throat.

A quick and excessive descent into Hell…

It’s the sound Satan makes before he hawks a fat slug of mucus into his scaly palm, and then wipes it in Richard Nixon’s hair. It’s obvious to most people that Nixon is in hell (I don’t think that’s a stretch), seated at the splintered table reserved for dignitaries. It’s a table that constantly sheds slivers into the soft forearms of those chained to sit around it. Of course, everybody at that dignitaries’ table has shed their suit jackets, shirts, ties, and slacks, because it’s just so damned hot. This leaves little protection against getting slivers.

Nixon arrived in Hell on Air Force One — at first, he thought he’d touched down in Heaven…

Each dignitary is forced to eat his favorite meal, again and again, until he vomits on what’s left, and then he must start eating again. There is no guard standing watch to make sure each member at the table stuffs his face every minute of every hour of every day. Rather, it’s an internal urge, a necessity, a fate, that these men and women must keep eating. As miserable as they are pushing their favorites meals down their throats and into their bulging guts, they are even more miserable when they stop.

There is also the slow buildup of gas in the lower intestines. The loads of chewed food press the stomach and small intestines into the bursting lower intestinal pockets of gas, but alas, not one of those men or women are able to fart until the end of the week, when they all let it out at once, but to very little relief, as they must keep eating, and then, for the whole rest of that day, the smell lingers heavy and high in the air. By the time the odor fades, a new batch of gas has begun roiling in their guts, and they have six more days of enduring it until that long moment of release, and tiny moment of relief.

And it is with great humor that Satan watches Richard Nixon frantically try to wipe out that thick string of mucus in his hair, and suffering as he does so because he isn’t eating. Meanwhile, the mucus mixes with the sweat and creeps over Nixon’s wrinkled brow and into his eyes, where the mucus and the sweat is then mixed with his tears, and the whole concoction slides down his jowls, which are, forever and ever, glistening with fried chicken grease that splatters, from time to time, off his plate.

That frothy, thickened solution drips off of Nixon’s rounded chin and onto the drumsticks and gourmet meatloaf stacked on his plate.

And, back to street level…

Anyway, the Ferrari outside my window is loud. What I mean to say is, there’s an awful lot of low-end racket before the car actually takes off. The engine sounds touchy, temperamental. I can take off in my Chevy, and nobody knows it. I used to consider that a selling point. The less social disturbance, the better.

But the wealthier you get, the more noise you’ve got to make. The more cages you’ve got to rattle. The more intense the colors must be. The whiter your teeth must get. It would be a damn shame to be filthy rich and nobody outside of your family knew it.

SEE ALSO

Manifesting an illegally parked Jaguar XK

Marring my clean slate with a tin-can rental car

Doctor: men my age are killed by cars & other men

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