Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(37)

We’re forever blaming the airline industry for turning us into monsters: it’s the fault of the ticket agents, the baggage handlers, the slowpokes at the newsstands and the fast-food restaurants. But what if this is who we truly are, and the airport’s just a forum that allows us to be our real selves, not just hateful but gloriously so?

Would Adolf Hitler please meet his party at Baggage Claim Four? Repeat. Adolf Hitler can meet his party at Baggage Claim Four.

It’s a depressing thought, and one that proved hard to shake. It was with me when I boarded my flight to Portland and was still on my mind several hours later, when we were told to put our tray tables away and prepare for landing. Then the flight attendants, garbage bags in hand, glided down the aisle, looking each one of us square in the face and whispering, without discrimination, “Your trash. You’re trash. Your family’s trash.”





I Break for Traditional Marriage




When a referendum was passed making it legal for gay men and lesbians to marry each other in nearby New York State, the first thing my wife and I thought was What now?

We’d been Mr. and Mrs. Randolph Denny for going on thirty-nine years, and suddenly, on the whim of some high-and-mighty fat cats, it was all meaningless: our wedding, our anniversaries, even our love. “Who are we?” Brenda cried.

And I looked at her thinking, What do you mean, “we”?

Then I walked into the kitchen and yelled for my daughter, Bonita, who was watching TV in the basement rec room. You’d think that at thirty-seven she’d be married with a home and a family of her own, but when she was a teenager she fell in with a custodian at her high school. Next came the news that she was pregnant. The fetus got lodged in her tubes somehow, and to make a long story short they had to yank everything out, leaving her infertile, which is what she deserved, if you ask her mother and me—a custodian, for God’s sake! Oh, she married him all right, we saw to that, but two years later their relationship ended in divorce. Her next marriage ended the same way, as did the one after that. So now here she is, practically middle-aged and living with her parents.

“Bonita,” I yelled, “get up here.”

She’s lazy as sin, my daughter, and in the time it took her to get off the sofa and climb the seven steps to the kitchen, I was more than ready for her.

“Damn it, Daddy, I was just in the middle of—” and before she could finish I shot her through the head. The high jinks in New York made a sham of my marriage, so it logically made the fruits of that marriage meaningless as well. That was one good thing that came of it.

The noise of the gun brought Brenda down from the bedroom. “What in God’s name have you done to our daughter?” she asked. And I shot her in the head as well, just like I’d been wanting to every day for the past thirty-nine years.

This might sound inexcusable, but if homosexuality is no longer a sin, then who’s to say that murder is? If it feels good, do it—that’s what the state legislators seem to be saying. Who cares what all the decent people think?

After shooting my wife and daughter, I grabbed an ice pick and headed out to the garage. A few years back my mother-in-law—Nancy Anne, she likes me to call her—fell out of a tree. She’d been climbing up after her iguana when a branch snapped off, and the next thing she knew she was laid up in the hospital with a dozen pins in her hip. Brenda insisted she come live with us, but what with the stairs, the house was too much of a hassle. So we moved the cars out onto the lawn and turned the garage into an apartment. She’s got a kitchenette, a shower stall, the whole nine yards. You’d think it would make her happy, living there for free the way she does, but all I ever hear is that it’s not insulated and hasn’t got any windows. “You hung my doggone pictures on the retractable door, and every time someone opens it they fall off,” she says.

I say, “Secure them with tape, why don’t you?”

And she says, “I’m not spending my hard-earned money on tape.” As if she ever worked a day in her life. She lives off alimony.

“Oh, Nancy Anne,” I called, and I pointed the remote in the direction of her retractable door. She was in her nightgown but had tights on underneath it—in this heat! Her glasses were on top of the TV set, and she reached for them, saying, “Randolph? Randolph, is that you?”





Boy, it felt good to reclaim that garage. After dragging Nancy Anne’s bed into the backyard, I returned for her sofa, then her potty-chair. I got her clothes, her cushions, all of her wooden bracelets and hairpieces, and built a raging bonfire. Then I threw her body into the flames and returned my cars to their rightful place. Or what I thought of as their rightful place. For all I knew, in the time it took to kill my mother-in-law with an ice pick and throw her onto a bonfire, some activist judge or group of state assemblymen had decided that cars don’t belong in garages anymore, that they should live in houses and eat chicken dinners, just like people do. Up was down and down was up, as far as the world was concerned, so why not make like the homosexuals and follow my dreams?

Back in the house, I made a list. Everything I’d always wanted to do but didn’t because society frowned on it:

1. Shoot my wife.



That I could cross off, along with:

2. Solve the Bonita problem, and

3. Stab Nancy Anne through the eye with an ice pick.