Easy Does It

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When it came to things—you know, things you buy, things you build, things that require expertise to install or repair—his biological farter used a gentle touch. Like, with knobs, with handles, with levers on kitchen and bathroom faucets; or like with knobs, levers, and buttons on stereo systems; and especially like with knobs, levers, and buttons on automobile dashboards and control panels. You name it, didn’t matter, always, always, always: a gentle touch. Make no mistake, his biological farter was NOT a gentle man. He was a cheap jerk who farted a lot but more importantly didn’t want to replace anything. And the best way to avoid replacing anything, in his biological farter’s opinion, was to be gentle. That, or to avoid using it, the thing, altogether. Yup, that ole bio-farter, he’d carp if, in his opinion, you opened the refrigerator door once too often; he’d carp if, in his opinion, you spread too much peanut butter on a slice of bread; and he carp if, in his opinion, you used up too much of his toilet paper. That’s right, he was such a jerk that he’d carp about your “liberal” use of toilet paper. He’d do that — make you feel like shit for wiping your own ass — in public, seated at a table in a busy restaurant, in front of his new girlfriend. He was so cheap, that ole bio-farter, that when he finally replaced all the warped doors inside of his century–old house, he decided to skip the doorknobs. That’s right, the only doorknobs were on the front and back doors to the place. And, yeah, not even the bathroom doors had doorknobs. And the water that ran through the pipes, it was well water. GOD FORBID you should use up all of his precious well water when you bathed or washed your hands or brushed your teeth or flushed the toilet. GOD FORFEND the need to dig up the lawn and run a city line up to his precious house. To that ole bio-farter’s way of thinking, a water bill was a harbinger of the Apocalypse. Oh, but the one thing that ole bio-farter absolutely didn’t skimp on? Cars. He drove a 1973 Porsche 911 Carrera RS 2.7; and when he wasn’t driving that, he drove a 1966 Lamborghini Miura P400. He bought these, he said, because he wanted to own cars that “didn’t depreciate.” It was a joke, but really it wasn’t. And whenever his kid — didn’t matter if he was seven or seventeen — “slammed” the passenger side door shut on either of these “vehicular investments,” that ole bio-farter, he’d shout: “Dammit, it’s NOT an American car!” 

 25 June 2005

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