Jean and Bess received a grant from the small business administration in order to start their business. I don’t know how they did it but sure as shit they did and on the first day they opened shop I stopped by to wish them hell and this is what happened.
The shop was called Hope Teddies. And I swear to god my first thought was that it was going to be a shop with nice looking manikins all standing around and hopefully lying around in those skimpy things called teddies. I mean, they hadn’t told me what they were going to be doing and every time I asked them they acted very secretive and mysterious. Well as it turned out their shop was one that re-stuffed teddy bears and other un-stuffed animals. I just couldn’t believe anyone would come up with such a stupid idea and I REALLY couldn’t believe that they were able to get a loan for it! But, incredibly, while I was visiting them about ten people came in to drop off animals to be re-stuffed. True, their shop was in Basic City which was a suburb of Waynesboro and therefore there were many many cars with even more stuffed animals on their rear and front dashboards. And I guess there was this problem that I was unaware of whereby many children who had been hatched around the Dupont plant seemed to be persistently tearing the crap out of their parent’s stuffed animals. Well seeing the instant gratification that Jean and Bess were enjoying lead me to think that maybe I could come up with a business or something. I mean, stuffed animals! Who would have ever imagined? I wanted to congratulate Jean and Bess, even though it was killing me, but they were too busy piling up the money. I leaned up against the wall and listened to the heavy metal coming out of their little dock while I looked at the customers come in with paper bags full of animals. It really struck me as unbelievable. I took a couple of cheese crackers from the bowl which they’d set up on a table for their grand opening spread. There was a stack made of cans of Mountain Dew which, I suspect, was met to be a model of some noted architectural object. I really wanted to knock it down. God damn! Those girls were so smart! I mean they wouldn’t eat a cheese cracker or drink a Mountain Dew if you held a gun to their heads! But they knew their customers! I was looking at the can monument and shaking my head when Jean came up to me and asked me what I thought. “Well, I have to hand it to you. It looks like you’ve hit the nail on the head.” She patted me on the shoulder and went back to the counter. I knew what she was thinking. I had told them that their idea, what ever it was, would be beyond retarded and that I would eat a dog turd if they made a penny. Now three people came in the door all carrying bags full of stuffed animals. I shook my head. Bess came out from behind the counter and put down a small plate and a fork with a napkin wrapped around it. She set them on the display table right in front of me. I had to laugh. Well, that night I had them both over for dinner and we started talking about how they came up with the idea of a re-stuffing shop. To my surprise they told me that they got the idea from Facebook. “How’s that?” I asked. “Well, as you know,” Replied Bess “Arlene, our friend from India…,” I broke her off, “You mean your friend from India whom you’ve never met or seen in person?” Bess made a face and then said, “What’s it matter if we’ve ever seen her? Do you think someone’s effect as a person is only transmitted by skin and arm lengths distances? Do we have to smell her skin and see small imperfections in her skin to apprehend some essential component of her being?” I told her that I just didn’t see how you could call someone you’d never met a friend, but I understood her point and had no decent response which, as usual, reminded me of how the entire thought process of my contemporaries had morphed into something different. “So, our friend in India, Arlene…,” Began Bess. “Arlene doesn’t sound like an Indian name.” I said. This time Jean spoke up and said, “Who cares if it’s an Indian name or not? What has that got to do with anything?” Well I realized she was right and it irked me that I was so inclined to bring up these points which were essentially pointless. “So,” continued Bess, “our friend Arlene from India turned us on to the underground version of Facebook which is called Disgracebook. The idea behind Disgracebook is that you’re not allowed to use it unless you can prove that you have an IQ below 50.” I looked at Bess and then turned to Jean. “What,” I asked, “is the point of having a social network of retards? And how on earth do you prove that you’re retarded?”
“That’s the beauty of it.” Said Bess. “Everyone on Facebook had already proved that they were retards. They were automatically signed up for Disgracebook, based on their history of comments, the gravity of their political convictions, and the lability of their emotions.
“I really don’t understand.” I said. “What’s the point of having a social network of retards? And, am I hearing you right? Are you admitting that you are retards?”
“No, we’re not admitting that we’re retards!” Snorted Bess. “There really may be a bunch of retards on Disgracebook but not us.”
“That sounds just like Facebook to me! Everyone thinks that everyone else is retarded.”
Jean reached into her back pocket and pulled out a deposit slip which she laid on the table before me. I picked it up and saw that it was for 1900 dollars.
“Does that look retarded to you?”
I had to admit it didn’t.
“Now,” said Bess, “We got this idea from Arlene, our Indian friend. She works for a company that comes up with ideas. The company is called Indian Inscrutable and they cater to Americans. We paid one hundred dollars for an idea that has already, in the first day, made us 1900 dollars. This is the future.”
“How pathetic.” I said. “So the most powerful country on the planet has been reduced to buying ideas from India.”
“What is wrong with you? Why can’t you see things properly. I mean Bess and I had the IDEA to buy an idea. We thought of it. It’s not like some magical person came to us and said you need to have an idea about buying an idea. WE came up with the idea of buying an idea when WE got the notion to take advantage of Disgracebook. It was our initiative all the way.”
“God damn!” I said. “It just seems so wrong to me. What if we become dependent on buying ideas from foreign countries and then for some reason they decide that they’re not going to sell us any more ideas. Are we just going to sit there with our fingers up our noses waiting to be taken over by the Asiatic hordes?”
“What do you mean taken over? Are you completely obtuse? Remember, we used to come up with ideas and make things. Then we moved to just having ideas while China made things. That was a good move because it shifted all the industrial pollution to the Far East. Now we let them make things AND come up with the ideas. We don’t have to waste our time coming up with ideas.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. They were right of course. They had the money to prove it. I went home and flipped my Facebook account to a Disgrace book account (they said I’d thoroughly proved that I was retarded by “Liking” Red Lobster, Regis Philbin, 7-11, etc.) and contacted Arlene at Indian Inscrutable. I wired her one hundred dollars and she sent me an idea. Well the idea was to start a stuffed animal porn site. Stuffed animal porn! What a rip off! I immediately called Indian Inscrutable to complain but instead of talking to an Indian I seemed to be talking to a hick. “Who am I talking to?” I asked.
“My name is Lee Calhoun.”
“Where are you Lee?”
“I’m in Algonquin Idaho.”
“At a call center?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, God damn it Lee. I can’t believe this. I just got so ripped off by Indian Inscrutable.”
“How so?”
“Well I sent them a hundred bucks for an idea and the idea they sent me was to start a stuffed animal porn site. Now doesn’t that beat all?”
“That sounds like a damn good idea to me.”
“Stuffed animal porn? Who in the hell would want to watch stuffed animal porn.”
“I can think of a lot of people.”
“Well now Lee, I just don’t believe you. I think you’re taking the company line. I want to talk to your supervisor.”
I was put on hold for about three minutes while they did whatever they did. The muzak was awful. The supervisor came on the line and he sounded like even more of a hick than Lee.
“Who am I talking to?” I asked.
“I Lee’s supervisor. My name Cooter Jackson. What the problem?”
“The problem Cooter is that I have been totally ripped off by your company, Indian Inscrutable.”
“How ripped off?”
“What do you mean ‘how ripped off?’ Do you mean to what extreme have I been ripped off or are you speaking like an American Indian?”
“I mean both.”
“God damn it! I want to talk to YOUR supervisor!”
I was put on muzak again and this time it was a horrible sort of operatic rap if you can imagine such a thing. The next person to come on the line was very difficult to understand.
“What be problem?” They said.
“What? Who am I talking to? Is this Cooter’s supervisor?”
“I president. President Indian Inscrutable.”
“Now this is just ridiculous. You can barley talk English. How could I go from Cooter to the president? Is this just the biggest scam in the world?”
“Me president.”
“I don’t give a god damn who you are! You guys ripped me off and the second I get off this phone I’m calling the FBI and I’m going to have you hunted down and arrested for committing fraud.”
“You buy stuffed animal porn idea. You go jail if call FIB.”
“What! Are you insane? Are you threatening me?”
“No threaten. Tell truth.”
Well I slammed down the phone and thought I was going to have a coronary I was so mad. I called Bess and Jean to tell them what happened and they told me to calm down. They told me that the entire thing was a joke that they’d played on me for a birthday present to Jean. I couldn’t believe it! They made the whole thing up! They staged the whole business plan and got some cheap actors to come into their shop looking to have animals re-stuffed. They used their formidable computer skills to manipulate Facebook into Disgracebook, (at least as far as I could tell) and they just tricked me right down the line. They also documented it so as to blackmail me into taking Jean to the movies for her post birthday party present. We saw Seabiscuit. It was horrible. I didn’t talk to either of them for a week after that.
