Big Me: Chapter 2

You’re walking along a cool, windy beach with a cold beer in hand, when you see a dot in the distance with pink things and yellow and it is bouncing, kind of. The thing gets closer and you wish you could see what it was, but when Carol told you to go to the eye doctor, you said “Okay,” and then spent the rest of the day playing Super Mario Bros. on Super Nintendo.

Lucky for you, you found a pair of glasses on the floor of the strip club later that night, and you wear them whenever Carol’s around just to get her to shut up. You mean to call the eye doctor for real, but it’s sweeps week and you never can pry yourself from those teen vampires or sexy oncologists for long enough to do it, so the glasses are here to stay. Now your head hurts so you decide to walk down the beach to clear your throbbing head, and the pink and yellow bouncing question is presented and you throw on your new glasses just to see if it helps. It doesn’t.

But the yellow and pink bouncy blob gets closer and closer, and then you see it’s a woman with yellow hair and a pink bikini, from whence the bouncing issues so delightfully. You take your glasses off because you don’t want to look square, and your head hurts too. You aren’t sure, but you’re pretty sure she wants to have sex with you, and that’s when you wake up tied by your ankle to a bike rack outside the police station. “Nuts to this,” you say, and then you start running away, dragging a bike rack behind you. This is a rite of passage for adolescents in some part of the world, only it isn’t a bike rack they're tied to, but a bull, and they’re not tied to it, but locked in a cage with it, a knife and, for some reason, a condom made of raw cotton fibers.

You know Carol will be confused when she brings you your dinner--a wheelbarrow of Jack in the Box tacos and a few boxes of wine--but you refuse to be held on trumped up charges of indecency. This is bullshit. This is profiling. You're a giant now, kid, and it's high time you start acting like it. So instead of politely ordering your tacos from the drive-thru, you tear the roof off the place and start grabbing. Jesus, you're hungry. But you are also tied to a bike rack. The rope they used is from the ship yard so, yeah, you need to go to the shipyard.

When you get there you're out of breath. One of the seamen speaks like a pirate, and you laugh, mostly because you thought of the word "seamen." Then you find out he's only joking about the pirate thing and you're a little disappointed to hear his regular voice. He cuts your ropes off though, so you thank him and roar and throw the bike rack into the sea.

Then the police come.

You're cornered, they say, so you jump into the sea and get your leg tangled in the bars of the bike rack. "Fucking shit," you gurgle. But you're making your escape, where it'll be much better, down where it's wetter, under the sea. "Sucks to you coppers," you chuckle. Then you're running out of air and this might be tougher than you thought.