Adam Levin - Hot Pink

I had this mutt once. Medium-to-large. A gift from my father, a schmuck. I forget the mutt’s name. It had a few before it died and I can’t remember what we finally settled on. When we dropped its corpse into the ditch we’d dug, my schmuck father said a prayer to his schmuck higher power in which the mutt’s name was mentioned, and I remember feeling confused for a second because the name wasn’t the name I was expecting to hear. Whether my father’d used the mutt’s most recent name and I’d been expecting to hear an earlier name or it was the other way around I couldn’t say, but it sounded all wrong. It sounded wrong to my brother, too, now that I think about it, so that probably means Dad used an earlier name because my brother was not sentimental — he was a mental cripple — and he corrected my father’s prayer, and my father gave him a kind of schmuck-type look, though he let the correction stand, and Billy piped down.

Billy was also one of the names of the mutt, not just my brother, who was, understandably, confused by this fact, though it was my brother himself who named the mutt Billy. Billy, now that I recall it, was the mutt’s original name, and that, in fact, is part of how the mutt came to have so many different names.

I said the mutt was my mutt, but the mutt started out Billy’s mutt, who Dad brought the mutt home for and then told to name it. When Billy named it Billy, I said it was a bad idea and my dad said it wasn’t up to me. What he actually said was, “Not your dog,” which is how a schmuck talks, but what he meant was what I just said he said — wasn’t up to me — and then he left the room and ate some cold chicken.

A few days into having a mutt with the same name as him, which made Billy-my-brother more confused and scared than usual, Billy said he wanted to change the mutt’s name, and my dad said he could not change the mutt’s name. Said he had to stick with his choice, honor his commitments, the schmuck, though what he actually said to my brother when my brother, mentally crippled, said he’d like to change the mutt’s name was, “Can’t. Made your bed.” I made, in response, a kind of fuck-you face, and my father told me, “Not your dog,” so I offered my brother a dollar for the mutt and Billy sold me the mutt and ran off to buy candy and I gave the mutt its second name, which I don’t remember, and my schmuck father gave me a kind of schmuck-type defeated look, so I gave the mutt a third name, right then and there, and received another schmuck look, and I gave the mutt a fourth name, and so on, until the schmuck stopped looking at me, which didn’t take that long.

The thing about it was, though, I didn’t much want the mutt and had bought it only to help out Billy and get at the schmuck, and had, in fact, later offered to sell the mutt back to Billy, newly named, for just a penny, but Billy didn’t much want the mutt either, poor mutt. Poor schmuck. Poor Billy. Poor me.

A couple days later, the mutt got sick with something I can’t remember, something painful we couldn’t afford to treat, and the schmuck, who said it was my responsibility, would neither let me handle his gun nor would he shoot the mutt himself. I’d had enough of this schmuck ruling over me and Billy, and I did what I had to. I raised up a shovel and ended the mutt and raised up that shovel and turned to the schmuck and told him some things had to change around here and I told him he would help us bury the mutt.

No. A SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT — a phrase better suited to describe the quality possessed by freshmen who park their Jeeps in the handicapped spaces of faculty lots and contest B-minuses with intendedly rhetorical questions like “How do you expect me to be accepted into a top-tier law school if you won’t give me an A?”—would not describe the DRIVING FORCE that had led Professor Jon Maxwell Schinkl, medievalist, to drag three fingertips along the curve of moon-faced sophomore Hallie Benton’s jawline and speak INAPPROPRIATELY about her mouth. Nor, for that matter, did PERVERSITY describe the DRIVING FORCE. But then no one on the committee had posited PERVERSITY. To accuse Schinkl of PERVERSITY would endanger their whole PROJECT, for PERVERSITY was a HEGEMENOUS concept responsible for SOCIAL BIAS against the likes of furries and N.A.M.B.L.A. constituents, no less so coprophiliacs and gerbilers. (Though to be fair, just last semester THE RIGHT OF GERBILERS TO GERBIL was hotly contested by a special panel comprising six members of the very disciplinary committee before whom Schinkl was presently speechifying, and while it’s true that during that panel-discussion — over the two-hour course of which the words NATURAL and UNNATURAL remained impressively unspoken — three of the committee members had defended the gerbiler assertion that GERBILS SEEMED TO ENJOY GERBILING, it is also true that the other three members, while they readily defended THE LEGITIMACY OF THE DESIRE TO GERBIL, and even the possibility that gerbils themselves enjoyed THEIR ROLE IN THE PROCESS, were also MADE UNCOMFORTABLE BY THE IDEA OF SPEAKING FOR ANY POPULATION BEREFT OF A VOICE WITH WHICH TO PROTEST ITS OWN OPPRESSION and therefore opined that THE WILL TO MAKE SUCH PROTESTS, HOWEVER FRUSTRATED BY SYSTEMIC LIMITATIONS, IS MORE SAFELY ASSUMED MANIFEST IN GERBILS THAN NOT and that furthermore WHETHER THEIR ROLE IN THE PROCESS IS EXPLOITATIVE OR TRULY CONSENSUAL, GERBILS, AS OFTEN AS NOT, DIE INSIDE THOSE WHO GERBIL THEM. Thereafter ensued a firestorm of fresh debate about the meaning of CHOICE and THE RIGHT TO DIE. The firestorm had raged beyond the bounds of the panel, for the most part via listserv, until just last Monday, at which point Hallie Benton’s formal complaint, to the relief of everyone in the college but Schinkl, decisively snuffed it.) No, it was not PERVERSITY the committee had accused him of. Had they accused him of PERVERSITY, they would have been vulnerable to the counter-accusation of HYPOCRISY, an accusation with which they had — each and every one of them — made their careers by uttering skillfully, liberally, without hesitation. Like a master long-swordsman and a long sword, the committee members had wielded HYPOCRISY so many times, had landed so many fatal blows with it, that they almost couldn’t have helped but to forge and don the superlative armor they’d forged and continued to don against the accusation. Even if their armor’s impregnability was an illusion — even if the armor was, as it were, a little bit pregnable — the members’ reputations as masters over HYPOCRISY served to prevent all but their most reckless enemies (doomed from the outset by their recklessness anyway) from testing that armor with the one weapon it was specifically designed to frustrate. No, to stab at their helmets with HYPOCRISY would only serve to humiliate Schinkl further. In pursuing the death of master long-swordsmen, one’s only hope is to mount a cliff and take aim with a crossbow, if not a carbine. Yet THE PATRIARCHAL RHETORIC OF ROMANTIC LOVE was all that Schinkl had come to the hearing strapped with, and even if that old cannon had retained some firepower, he was far too scared of heights to climb any cliff, and so instead he said a number of lofty-sounding things that smelled of self-pity and resigned.

That to hide amid the strip mall’s dumpster-array and unbox, uncap, and — tipping her head back, squinting against the high summer sun, nozzle whole inches above her lips — empty the tube of frosting she’d stolen from Pattycake’s Partystore into herself had provided Danielle Platz, who was lately getting stocky, AN EROTIC CHARGE was not the kind of information her father, Richard, had meant to solicit when he queried their neighbor, Dr. Linus Manx, about whether Danielle had behaved that afternoon on her trip into town with the Manxes. It seemed to Richard Platz the kind of information that a decent human being, psychotherapist or not, shouldn’t ever share with another human being about his child — the second human being’s. Either one’s, actually, come to think of it. And Richard Platz, coming to think of it, had no doubt at all that Dr. Linus Manx would have proffered the same untoward information about Johan Manx, who had after all hidden amid the dumpsters right next to Danielle, sucking down his own tube of stolen frosting, were Johan, rather than budding his way into sequined, lisping, limp-wristed queerdom — Platz had seen him mincing in overtight T-shirts around the sprinkler, dancing serpentinely in their unfinished basement, making pouty faces when he swung on their swing set — also getting stocky. Which is just what Richard Platz, in so many words, said to Linus Manx on the trapezoid of grass that split their two driveways.