Country-and-western sexpot Boogie Crackerjack decided to film a public service announcement about the dangers of vaccines after receiving a flu shot that caused her shoulder to throb for a few hours. She turned on her computer’s webcam and said whatever came into her head, which wasn’t a good idea on account of her various challenges—some more politically correct sorts might call them “opportunities”—related to thinking and talking.
“You know, this vaccine really hurt me. These eggheads tell you it’s supposed to keep you safe, but that needle stung like the dickens! Ouch, ouch, ouch is all I can say about that. And you know what else? It’s not like it works, either. There have been years where I didn’t get the shots and I still got sick. I had a cold three weeks before I got this shot, which means this shot couldn’t do anything about that. A good shot would go back in time and make me less sick, but this one just made my arm ache. The way I see it, there’s only one thing you can be sure of with these shots: They’re going to injure you! There’s a 110 percent chance you’re going to get pinched with a needle, and zero percent chance that you’ll get sick or that the shot will work. Now I don’t go to Las Vegas—‘Lost Wages,’ my daddy calls it—or anything like that, but I know a bad set of odds and evens when I see them on TV. For our own safety and the safety of our loved ones, we have to stop getting vaccines. If they were really working, why would you need one? Wouldn’t the fact that nobody else is getting sick on account of having these vaccines mean that you’re not going to get sick?”
She banged a gavel on the desk in front of her computer.
“Case closed,” she said, giving her virtual audience of simps, paypigs, and basement-dwelling NEETs a knowing wink. Crackerjack “stans” would catch this not-so-subtle reference to her smash hit “Guilty of Love in the Third Degree.” That was an inane and terrible song, but fortunately for Boogie there’s no accounting for taste.
•••
The Crackerjack vaccination video was uploaded to the Internet and became a huge hit with stay-in-bed hippie moms who took it seriously, hipster “content creators” who took it ironically, and extremely online lunatics who took everything personally. Pretty soon polio was on the rise, which was a good thing because “Reek” Bonut and the crutches he affected as his “cool thing” just weren’t cutting it anymore.
Polio was a more authentic way to hobble around on crutches, and authenticity-obsessed “creatives” competed to get the worst kind of it. As always, “Reek” stayed one step ahead of the trends: He acquired a vintage iron lung.
“Man, pink this, I ripped off that guy on craigslist who totally wanted three hundred bucks for that thing,” he said to his good friend “Rope,” except he didn’t say “ripped off,” he uttered one of the cool anti-Semitic slurs that were all the rage in Twitter chatrooms nowadays.
“Shit ‘Reek,’ no way you had that kind of heavy jack. You haven’t sold a take or a piece in years,” “Rope” said. “What did you do?”
“I told him I’d set up an Airbnb account for him. That normie hadn’t heard a thing about it, but after I pinked him in the right direction he was hobo-ing it all over Europe à la Jack Kerouac,” “Reek” said.
“Pinked? What the freak does that mean, zaddy? And how long do you have to stay in that thing?” “Rope” asked.
“Two or three hours a day, my pinkie,” “Reek” said. “The negative ventilation really gets the creative juices flowing.”
“Man, I need something like that,” “Rope” said. “I just need a thing, anything.”
“Reek” nodded. “It’s cheugy, pinkster. Sure, I don’t have the kind of energy I used to have, but it was totally worth it. I feel a lot truer to how the world is.”
•••
“Rope” figured out his own thing after willingly contracting a blood-borne disease while eating lunch out of a filthy public toilet. Before he got sick, his life had been too easy. He sat around and watched reruns of Scooby-Doo and thought about new ways to cuff his pant legs, stretch his gauges, and style his goatee. After getting this disease, he became an inspiration to others in the community. He went around to local poetry slams with his friend “Reek,” who was severely disabled on account of his bout with polio, and the pair talked about how they had overcome various hardships.
“It was tough dealing with these hardships, but I have managed,” “Rope” told an audience of engrossed young millennial slacktivists. “See, the cool part about dying is that you get to be a lot closer to the stuff that matters, like mother earth, father time, and the urban jungle.”
“It’s bigger than this anti-police, anti-business, anti-car, anti-trash pickup downtown arts initiative that some of you are working so hard on,” “Reek” added. “It’s not enough to go grab a shopping cart, a machete, and a block of hash, then start roughing it in an open-air drug market. Authenticity—going “into the wild” like Chris McCandless did—demands a little more these days.”
“It’s about fixing your own narrative,” “Rope” said. “You can’t live from cause to cause any more than you could live from LP to LP back when we all bought vinyl like a bunch of egg-sucking consumerist idiots.”
“Besides, what hasn’t been done?” “Reek” asked. “It’s all been done. Even the stuff that hasn’t been done has been done.”
“He’s dropping a little post-literary theory on you dillweeds,” “Rope” said. “It’s sorta like how you’ve always not done something that was potentially better than what you have done.”
“Nice words, ‘Rope.’ Right now, I’m just feeling my way deep inside every wheezy, weak breath I take. The beats that my heart skips while I’m struggling to breathe are the only music I could ever bear to listen to,” “Reek” said. “If I believed in some kind of white-bearded David Crosby-looking god, this is what I think he’d sound like.”
“He wouldn’t sound like David Crosby, that’s for sure,” “Rope” said. “David Crosby’s only good record was If I Could Only Remember My Name, and I’m sure a god would have way more three-star records than that.”
“Reek” beamed his approval at the crowd, revealing a mouth of rotted and very authentic-looking teeth. “I wish we could just die right now and make all of your lives complete. I wish I could die right in front of all of you. But none of you are worth it. None of you are worth the gift of my death.”
•••
Sometimes I think about how good Shawn Kemp and Vin Baker could’ve been if they hadn’t gotten so fat.
So fat and so old, you mean.
Yes, old and fat. The older they got, the fatter they got—while they were still young! And the drugs, the drinking…
It goes to show you, doesn’t it?
Show us what?
You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
That’s if you even know it’s gone at all. Did Vin Baker and Shawn Kemp know?
Maybe when they were on their third or fourth NBA teams and nobody cared anymore. It’s one thing to average 20 points and 10 boards for a contender, another to post a measly 6.5 ppg for a lousy New York Knicks team. What even are you at that point?
You’re not who you thought you were, that’s for sure. But you’re probably who you were meant to be—a failure who had managed to succeed, however briefly, until you failed once and for all.