I lead a very boring life. Some people might say it borders on monotonous. Up at 6:30 p.m. Shower. Breakfast. Toll booth all day. Home. Dinner. Bed. Wait, you’ve never met a toll taker before? Well, there aren’t many of us. It’s an honest wage, but just like any minimum-wage job, the days kind of just blend together: one big smudge of radios, loose change, and gasoline fumes. Maybe the gasoline has built up to toxic levels in my system, and what’s been happening can’t be real. It’s all a bad, vivid, nightmarish hallucination. That’s what I keep telling myself. It helps me deal with everything when it starts getting real bad, and I think that if I take a long enough vacation, away from the fumes and the impatience and the mind-numbing routine, things will start to get back to normal.
I don’t know exactly when everything started happening, it was so long ago, but I do remember when I first encountered it. I saw it bulge when I was eating cereal. I get those red-and-white-checkered plastic tablecloths, not only because they’re easy to clean, but because they don’t bunch up like normal tablecloths do, so it wasn’t normal for anything to be underneath there. So, figuring it was an air pocket, I poked it with my spoon. It started scurrying in all directions, and then just melted into the table—I know it sounds crazy, but that’s the only way I can describe it. I dismissed everything as a not-fully-awake-yet delusion, finished my Honey Bunches of Oats and went to the toll station, ready—or so I thought—for the long work day.
The first person I saw that morning was Barb. “Geez, Jim. You okay? It looks like you seen a ghost or somethin’.”
“I must be a little hungover from last night. Didn’t get home until two.” I said. That’s what it was. I was hungover. Your brain plays dirty tricks on you when you’re getting sober so as to convince you never to drink that much again. Self-preservation, I used to call it. It must have been one of those many Saturday nights I picked up my girl Rachel and went dancing. We would dance in that bar ’till the wee hours of the morning and forget everyone and everything around us. In fact, I was going to propose to her...
Damn! I always get to that point in the story, and then all my creativity drains from me. There are way too many avenues to take with this story. And the publishing company is always frustrating me to no end. “We want your next book to be titled, Urge of Crabs.” Urge of Crabs? What am I supposed to do with that?! I don’t even know what that means! Maybe if my publisher gave me a title that made just a little bit of sense, I could get somewhere with the book. I need to get this straightened out.
“Hello, this is Bernie. Talk to me.”
“Hi, Bernie. It’s me again. Look, I’ve just got a killer block, and I want you to go over with me one more time, what is ‘Urge of Crabs?’ And another thing: why is it that I can’t choose my own titles anymore?”
“You can’t choose your own titles because you get more brilliant the more creative control we take from you. And besides, you’re a ghost writer. These books we’re producing are a dime a dozen. You could write, ‘I could not believe my urge of crabs when I saw two fat girls in a car!’ slap some other words around it, put the chapter titles I e-mailed you this morning in there, and boom! You got a book. Look, Josh, I’m a very busy man and I gotta go. If you have any more questions, call my secretary. She’ll be able to take care of you.”
“C’mon, Bern—”
“See ya later, kid. And really. Don’t worry about it! You got this!”
I got this. Right. I don’t even have creative control anymore, apparently. If I’m so brilliant, why didn’t he e-mail the whole book to me? If only I hadn’t gotten my English degree off the internet, I could have had a cushy job writing at a magazine or something.
Okay... well, usually if I read a newspaper, I can get some kind of inspiration and finally get something good down on paper. If Law & Order can rip things from the headlines, maybe I can. Let’s see...
FRESNO, Calif.—Tragedy struck the farm league baseball game between the Madison Wheelbarrows and the Fresno Sloths today when a careless fan threw a hot dog into the Sloth dugout. The hot dog, a Nathan’s Famous, tossed by 22-year-old actuary Chuck Finkleman, landed on the head of the Sloth mascot, played by 30-year veteran mascot technician Martin Gutierrez.
And then it happened. “One minute it’s the bottom of the 6th, and the next thing we know, a flock of seagulls are chasing Marty around the field,” Sloth shortstop Griff Sugarman explained. “I’ve never seen a sloth move so fast!” …
Baseball. I don’t think anyone will put crabs and baseball together. I could write about a giant mutant crab that goes out of control and destroys Fresno. But that sort of thing has been done to death. People will start to think I’m a hack writer, and I can’t let that happen. Okay, TV, don’t fail me now!
“For ten easy payments of $24.99, you’ll never have to not know where your remote is ever again!” —“But Stormy… did all those things you said to me when I was in that coma mean nothing?” — “From my perspective on stage, I could see Newt Gingrich reaching into Mitt Romney’s pocket and…”— “Today we’re cooking crab cakes. Nice juicy crab cakes with the perfect amount of that Dijon-y tang. Every so often I just get that urge for crab, and I have to run to the store and make them.”
Aha!! That is it! That is brilliant!
* * *
And at last, I knew my mistake: I should have never trusted that crooked fishmonger in the smelly alleyway behind the laundromat. But thanks to my instincts, and my faithful cocker spaniel Zippy, all of the defective crab was destroyed, and the power belonged to the Humans of Earth once again. Rachel and I were married the next summer and our main entrée was... sirloin tips.
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