David V. Matthews – Page 14 – DAVID V. MATTHEWS

October 1975, Conference Number Two:

Principal: “Mrs. Kazakis?”

Milo’s Mother: “That’s Ms. Henningsen.”

Milo: “My mom and dad got divorced.”

Principal: “All right, Milo. Please have a seat, both of you.” [Both of them sit down.] “So, I’ve spoken with Tommy regarding the incident. He says you did something to him, Milo.”

Milo’s Mother: “Did something? What did he allegedly do?”

Principal: “Maybe Milo could tell us. Did you do something to him, Milo?”

Milo: [No response.]

Milo’s Mother: “Cut the crap, Mrs. Goggins. What did Milo allegedly do to deserve getting beat up?”

Principal: “Well, Tommy says Milo grabbed him.”

Milo’s Mother: “Grabbed him?”

Principal: “Grabbed his—butt.”

Milo’s Mother: “Oh for Christ’s sake.”

Principal: “Did you grab his butt, Milo?”

Milo: “No. Why would I do that? He has a fat butt.”

[Tense pause.]

Milo’s Mother: “Milo!”

Principal: “And if he didn’t have a fat butt, would you grab it?”

Milo: [No response.]

Milo’s Mother: “I hope you don’t go around grabbing boys’ butts, Milo.”

Milo: “No!”

Milo’s Mother: “Or girls’ butts, for that matter.”

Milo: “I don’t grab any butts! I was just kidding!”

Principal: “You shouldn’t kid around about certain topics, Milo.”

Milo: “I didn’t grab his butt.”

Milo’s Mother: “All right, calm down.”

Principal: “I didn’t think he grabbed it. I talked with the eyewitnesses, his classmates, and they all said they hadn’t seen Milo do anything like that.”

Milo’s Mother: “They why the hell’d you call me here? I had to quit work early, and I need the money.”

Principal: “Standard procedure, Mrs.—I mean Ms. Henningsen.”

Milo: “My mom and dad got divorced.”

Principal: “You’ve said that already, Milo.”

Milo’s Mother: “He could say it a million times. I couldn’t stand being married to his father.”

Principal: “Well, I’m sure your dad has some good qualities, Milo.”

Milo: “Yes. He watches Spider-Man with me.”

Socialism and Digital Puddles

For the past several weeks, a small, full-color, slightly-dark photocopy of the above poster for the 2018 romantic comedy Overboard has hung in the DVD section of the B.F. Jones Memorial Library, Aliquippa. I haven’t seen this movie or the original, 1987 version starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, though I have read Susan Faludi’s takedown of the original in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women.

Anyway, you might have noticed that Anna Faris shows more skin (and more Photoshopping) than her male costar does; as every intelligent person living under our belovèd capitalist patriarchy knows, unsexy (as in non-media-sexy) women make advertising—particularly for entertainment-style products—repulsive and thus ineffective, weakening the economy.

Speaking of economic matters: in this movie, Faris plays (according to Professor Wikipedia) “a struggling, working-class single mother”. So maybe you left-wing, Faludi-reading, fair-trade-coffee-enema-receiving losers should quit complaining, because America’s lower economic stratum teems with smokin’-hawt hawties. (All right, I should give this Trump-era movie credit for keeping Faris’s character’s love interest, as seen on the poster, Mexican, instead of, say, Caucasianizing him via CGI, or hiring Christopher Plummer for last-minute reshoots.) (Yes, almost everyone will understand the Plummer reference decades from now, assuming the Earth—I mean the Internet—still exists.)

The Child in Question

October 1975:

Principal: “Let’s get to the point. Your son beat up one of his classmates during recess yesterday.”

Tommy’s Father: “He did?”

Principal: “Yes. The child in question, Milo Kazakis, got not one but two black eyes.”

Tommy’s Father: “Is this true, Tommy? Did you really beat him up?”

Tommy: “Yes sir.”

Tommy’s Father: “Why’d you do it?”

Tommy: “ ’Cause he grabbed my butt.”

Principal: “You sure that’s what happened, Tommy?”

Tommy: [No response.]

Principal: “Because I talked with the other students there and—”

Tommy: “He did it when no one was lookin’. He’s a fag.”

Principal: “Watch your language, Tommy.”

Tommy: “Sorry, ma’am.”

Tommy’s Father: “Now, now, wait, what if this Milo kid actually is a, you know?”

Principal: “We have no proof of that. And even if he is—”

Tommy’s Father: “My son doesn’t lie. If he says this kid grabbed his butt, then that’s what really happened. Isn’t that right, Tommy?”

Tommy: “Yes sir.”

Tommy’s Father: “Tommy’s was just defending himself.”

Principal: “A little too much, it seems.”

Tommy’s Father: “He’s an energetic boy.”

Principal: “Right. As for Milo—”

Tommy’s Father: “Send him to a girls’ school, ha ha.”

Tommy’s Mother: “Ha ha.”

revised February 1, 2019

Flash Fiction (a Hundred Words or Fewer) #48: Why Does Peter Pan Fly?

Recess, fourth grade:

“Why does Peter Pan fly?” Tommy asked. Pause. “You’d fly too, if you got hit in the peter with a pan!”

Laughter from the other students. Except Milo.

“You fag,” Tommy said. “That joke was funny.”

“It was actually a riddle,” Milo said.

Tommy pushed him down onto the ground and commenced punching him in the face. Their classmate Douglas cheered the loudest.

Four decades later, in traction after crashing his SUV, Douglas did not remember the beating, nor would he ever. (Good thing for his health insurance, by the way.) (He despised Obamacare—goddamn socialist medicine.)

Flash Fiction (a Hundred Words or Fewer) #47: My Spider-Sense Is Tinkling

His first day in fourth grade, during recess, the new kid, Milo, approached a group of several boys, the cool boys (they liked TV and hated girls), and announced “My Spider-Sense is tinkling.” Then he sang “Spider-Man / Spider-Man / Always pees when he’s in the can.” The boys’ leader, Tommy, picked up a rock and threw it at the fleeing Milo, missing him by a centimeter. (The school had started teaching the metric system, prior to the national changeover that would end up never happening, inches and miles and so on serving as a vital component of American exceptionalism.)

Flash Fiction (a Hundred Words or Fewer) #46: The Planning Session’s Penultimate Intersectional Proposal

Renée made the planning session’s penultimate intersectional proposal: we should sneak socialist vegan brunch fliers into the free weekly alt-papers distributed at the gourmet coffeehouse (which attracts lots of progressive or at least not very reactionary customers, according to what her wife, a barista there, has told her) on the ground floor of the Republican law firm-slash-fossil fuel lobbyists’ skyscraper downtown. Tanya, somewhat facetiously before offering the final proposal, suggested picturing a scantily-clad babe on the fliers to appeal to the Bernie Bros, causing Caroline to wonder whether a scantily-clad Bernie would work better. Laughter ensued. See, we have fun.

Flash Fiction (a Hundred Words or Fewer) #45: Good Luck with That

Last week, a newbie named Hasker started trying to get us to unionize. He said we deserved a living wage, a voice in the company’s future, all that socialist crap. He got fired the next day—for incompetence, the company said. I’ll bet someone informed them before I could. Anyway, Hasker filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. Trump’s board. Good luck with that. Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy my promotion to department director by buying everyone drinks tonight at Wolves Gentlemen’s Club, that great reason for working your ass off. One lap dance would have cured Hasker for sure.

The Default Setting for Life

I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on Sunday in Pittsburgh, at the Carnegie Science Center’s Rangos Giant Cinema, the first time I’d ever visited that theater. 2001 didn’t quite fit the concave screen, causing a dark shadow at the bottom, making the projected image looked as if it had shrunk in the wash. However, the outstanding digital quality caused me to notice details I hadn’t previously noticed or remembered—e.g., the selections list (apple juice, wine, and so on) for the beverage dispenser aboard the spaceship.

Something I wondered afterwards, as I walked toward the Science Center exit (spoiler alert for a fifty-year-old film): at the end, why didn’t the aliens from the vastly-advanced civilization turn Dave Bowman into a female fetus instead of a male fetus (assuming they’d had some part in his transformation)? My girlfriend, who had accompanied me to the screening, wondered this too, calling female “the default setting for life”; even aliens advanced enough to design a Louis XIV-style hotel room with a proto-disco-style illuminated floor need females to produce presumably new and improved futuristic humans, though possibly the aliens had some awareness of our planet’s rampant patriarchal mindset and thought us Earthlings would find a male fetus more acceptable in launching our next stage of evolution.

Or maybe the aliens themselves had a patriarchal mindset.

Even creators as intelligent and innovative as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke apparently couldn’t or wouldn’t imagine an escape from mandatory maleness, or how an omniscient, floating female fetus could affect civilization (meaning most artists—actually, most people—cannot escape their eras; the mid-1960s, which had brought us 2001, didn’t have a very prominent feminist movement, plus probably a majority of audience members back then would have found an intersex or transgender plot twist perverse if not disgusting; and as a pre-Stonewall gay man, Clarke would have no doubt known about Western society’s conceptions of “normal” gender-related appearance and behavior).

But would a female fetus make a difference in human development? The aliens, via the black monolith, had already taught our ancestors how to kill; and according to Kubrick and Clarke, cultures (including extraterrestrial ones) conceal their brutal, violent, hardwired urges beneath a veneer of sophistication, of scientific advancement, and of Howard Johnson’s Earthlight Rooms. The Twenty-first Century, in case you haven’t noticed, has rooms that epitomize supercharged human development.

Updated September 16. 2018

Flash Fiction (a Hundred Words or Fewer) #44: Self-centered

I felt like posting this image, though it has nothing to do with the story.

My sister, who’s thirty-eight, thinks I’m jealous of her ’cause she’s never been married or had kids. She’s also never had sex, a fact she brags about as the organizer for her virgins’ group. “You don’t need to have sex to have a worthwhile life,” she says. Maybe, but having sex certainly helps. I think she’s too self-centered to get laid, frankly. And too judgmental—she called me a Nazi ’cause first I called ICE on the illegals next door, then I filmed the arrest and posted it.

Fuck her, so to speak. Everyone should see what happens to lawbreakers.

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