Positively True Adventures 2!

Warning: This one is long.

"How about these long lines, huh?" the forty-something man with the patchy facial hair and extreme overbite (EXTREME OVERBITE! The new hot dog from the creators of Mountain Dew!) says to me.

"Yeah. They're something," I reply, staring at the "Rules for Safe Driving" sign on the wall hoping to end the conversation there.

"I mean, seriously," he continues, "it's like, these lines are so long, I better be getting a blowjob from Pam Fucking Anderson at the end. Am I right?" His arm nudges mine.

My arm feels sticky where he touched me. I know it isn't, but it just feels like it should be.

I fucking hate strangers. And this doesn't come from some childhood trauma where a guy fingered my asshole in the changing room at Wild Rivers Water Park. I just fucking hate strangers.

"Hmm." My replies are getting shorter. Still no eye contact. Is he catching on?

"So, what are you here for?"

A goddamn question. Why did it have to be a question? Now everybody around me will think I'm the asshole if I don't answer him. Don't they know that he's really the asshole? He is. Not me. But, I can't have all of these random strangers thinking that I'm an asshole.

I'm here to renew my license.

Before I can say the words, he continues, "I'm here because I just bought a new boat and, thanks to the D fucking M fucking V fucking," he doesn't know how words work, "I have to fiscally come down to the office to register it."

Fiscally? I hate this man. I hate him hard. This is a special kind of hate that is only reserved for people who put pets in clothing and the guy who fingered my asshole in the changing room at Wild Rivers. If that happened. But it didn't.

Without thinking, I spin around and grab a number two pencil (not the clever moniker I assign to the log of shit that I fill out Scan-Trons with, but an actual pencil) from a girl taking her written exam.

"Hey, that's my...," she cries, stopping when she sees the fury of hate soup overflowing from my eyes.

"I'm doing this for everybody," I tell her. She totally makes out with me for, like, ten seconds.

Back to work.

"What are you doing with that pencil, Buddy?" the man asks. I pretend I don't hear him even though I do. It's called pretending; look it up.

Turning my anger into strength thanks to a process called photosynthesis (which was invented by the Ancient Egyptians), I jam the pencil into the man's throat.

The crowd cheers and I totally make out with that one girl again. But their cheering is cut short.

A plume of thick smoke erupts from the man's neck. The song "Don't Stop Believin" by Journey begins to fill the room.

Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world.

It's worse than I thought.

The cheers turn into screams. A black woman explodes. Everybody is covered in chocolate cake and attitude.

"So, you thought a number two pencil could defeat me, did you?" A half-lizard, half-Steve Perry nine-foot-tall beast hisses at me.

She took the midnight train goin' anywhere.

"Make it stop! Oh, God. Make it stop," a woman screams. She pulls on the door to escape, but the door doesn't budge. "He's somehow locked the doors with his mind! We're all going to die!"

A sign on the door reads 'Push to exit.' I don't correct her mistake. I hope the Steve Perry lizard eats her first.

"Do something," that wicked hot chick that I've made out with twice now screams to me. "You don't know what's going to happen when it hits the chorus."

Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit.

She's right. It's nearly at the chorus and Steve Perry lizard is growing stronger and larger with each line of the verse. It's as though he's powered by suck.

A centaur who, unbelievably, I hadn't noticed before, hands me a golden bow and arrow then evaporates into a cloud of a hundred pregnant rainbows.

"Hey, Steve Perry," I say pulling the arrow back onto the string.

He took the midnight train goin' anywhere.

I let go of the string. But, I've never used a bow and arrow before and the arrow just kind of sticks to my hand then falls to the ground.

"What do you want?" Steve Perry lizard hisses. Now eleven feet tall, glowing, and stroking his reptillian mullet with one hand, he holds a poster of a soaking wet kitten that reads "Bad Hair Day" that he tore from the wall in the other. "Now that's funny. Git 'er done."


A singer in a smoky room, the smell of wine and cheap perfume.

"Wait. Just--hold on." I pick up the arrow and rearm the bow. Quickly I try to come up with a clever way to work one of his other songs like "Faithfully" or "Open Arms" into some sort of comedic line but can't. I let it fly and it sticks straight into his torso. He should be dramatically exploding any second.

"What is this?" he asks, not exploding.

"It's the golden arrow that the centaur gave me," I reply in a surprisingly matter-of-fact manner.

For a smile they can share the night, it goes on and on and on and on.

That's the last line of the verse. The chorus is coming.

"On and on and on and on," he shrieks, his body swelling in size and breaking the roof of the DMV.

Everybody, maybe even me, screams in unison at the horror that is about to occur once the chorus begins and Steve Perry lizard is able to harness all of his power or whatever happens at the chorus. It was never really made too clear. This was all kind of sudden, you know.

Before our fears can be realized, the spirit of Kurt Cobain appears and, using his ghostly shotgun, shoots what I'm assuming were some sort of Magic Heaven Bullets through the hole in his own head and into the head of the fifteen-foot-tall, reptillian, former lead singer of Journey causing him to just sort of cough a little and then fall over and die.

The young girl who may have contracted my Herpes Simplex I (and, if she's lucky later, II), runs over and wraps her arms around me, "Who was that ghost? John Mayer?"

I break her neck and she drops to the floor in a heap.

I have one!

"Hey, Steve Perry, Who's Crying Now?" Nobody laughs. Maybe they don't realize what song it is. But I know they know it.

"Come on, guys," I say.

I start singing, "One love feeds the fire. One heart burns desire. I wonder, who's cryin' now."

Nobody reacts. Fuck them. It was a good one.

The moral of this story is: If some stranger is bothering you, maybe you shouldn't overreact and try to murder them because you never know when they'll turn into some 80s rock star demon beast.