activist judge or group of state assemblymen had decided that cars don’t belong in garages anymore, that they should live in houses and eat chicken dinners, just like people do. Up was down and down was up, as far as the world was concerned, so why not make like the homosexuals and follow my dreams?
Back in the house, I made a list. Everything I’d always wanted to do but didn’t because society frowned on it:
1. Shoot my wife.
That I could cross off, along with:
2. Solve the Bonita problem, and
3. Stab Nancy Anne through the eye with an ice pick.
Next I needed to:
4. Grow a mustache like Yosemite Sam’s.
5. Make a piñata but use precious documents instead of torn newspaper.
6. Eat at the Old Spaghetti Factory and walk out without paying.
There are other things I’d like to do, but this, I figured, was more than enough to start with. Seeing as the Old Spaghetti Factory wouldn’t be open until lunchtime and there was nothing I could do to rush the mustache, I decided to start by going to the bank and withdrawing some precious documents. The marriage license in my safe-deposit box was no longer worth the paper it was printed on, but that still left my birth certificate, my life insurance policy, and my social security card.
While driving to First Federal, I listened to the radio, an all-talk program I’m partial to where the callers were just as riled up as I was.
When I tuned in, Sherry was on the line. “If the gays can stand in a church of God and exchange vows, who’s to say my husband can’t divorce me and marry a five-year-old?” she said. “Or a newborn baby, heaven forbid! I’m not saying he’s into that, but I guess if he was, there’d be nothing stopping him now!”
The next caller identified himself as Steverino. “I remember as a boy we had this joke,” he said. “Your buddy might say, ‘I love this pepperoni pizza,’ and you’d say, ‘Why don’t you marry it, then?’
“At the time it was just a saying, but I guess now you really could tie the knot with a pizza, couldn’t you? I mean, if the guy who cuts my mother’s hair is free to wed his little gay boyfriend, why can’t I marry a slab of flattened-out dough with cheese and dried sausage on it?”
The host of the show is a guy named Jimbo Barnes, and on pretty much everything we see eye-to-eye. “There’s no reason I can think of why you couldn’t marry a pizza,” he said. “Hell, you could probably even marry a mini-pizza, one of those ones made from an English muffin, if you felt like it.”
Steverino said that he didn’t really like English muffins, and Jimbo said that was just an example. “Bite-size pizza or sixteen-incher, whatever floats your boat is what the activist state legislatures are saying.”
This was something I’d never thought of—marrying an object: my refrigerator, say, or maybe the riding mower I sometimes borrowed from my neighbor Pete Spaker. It’s a John Deere X304—top-of-the-line, with automatic transmission, cruise control, and four-wheel steering. Maybe I could just borrow it again, and when he asked me to return it, I’d tell him we’d eloped, that the mower was my new wife and until such time as we divorced, it was living with me!
Of course, by then they’d have probably closed the loopholes. Taking away anything that might benefit traditional heterosexuals, especially white ones and especially especially white males. This is something Jimbo Barnes addresses quite often—“an endangered species,” he calls us. No matter that we made this country what it is today. Thinking about this got me so mad that I missed my turnoff for the bank. This meant taking a side street, where I fell in behind a school bus, of all things.
I know you’re not supposed to pass them, but normal classes were out for the summer, so the only students on board were ones who had failed and had to go to summer school—dummies, basically, like my daughter, Bonita, had been. The bus stopped on the corner, and just as I was pulling around it, this kid—most likely a gay one—threw himself in front of my car. Someone got my license plate number as I was taking off, and the next thing I know, I’m in jail with one charge of second-degree manslaughter and three charges of first-degree murder! Plus the hit-and-run bit. And all because some high-and-mighty legislators in New York State thought