Since we last spoke there have been some sad times in the life of Berhardt Goates on which I must report due to the sadness of events being mixed in many ways with times that gave me reason to be angry.
Recently, two friends of mine who I met while working as a substitute science teacher at various Greater Baltimore area schools where my resume was never scrutinized very closely, suffered the loss of their teenage son, who was named Jimmy due to the parents lacking any kind of creativity where it comes to the giving of names. Jimmy was killed in a car accident where he drove into a tree for reasons unknown, possibly linked to wet roadways or the abuse of steroids for Jimmy's rather unbelieveable weight training program that had him go from a skinny 150 lbs to a very, very muscular 280 lbs in four days.
My friend Art, who is a chemistry teacher in the Greater Baltimore School System, and has a very spotty and suspicious resume for this kind of work, came to the funeral along with his friend, who I will call Mr. Sensitive in order to avoid legal wranglings such as the kind involved when Wrangler Jeans Company sued the makers of the Brokeback Mountain film for asserting that only homosexuals wear Wrangler Jeans. This idea is clearly lifted from a recent writeup on this website connected to rumors and involved no creative thinking on my part aside from changing the reference to jeans instead of cigarettes.
There was trouble when Mr. Sensitive arrived at the funeral reception, which was a small affair at the home of Jimmy's parents, both of which are unemployed due to the actions of the current president eliminating jobs except for cronies. The small affair was fine, but Mr. Sensitive apparently did not believe so. Here are some of the conversational bits I lifted while I was sitting in the living room being consoling to various family members in my Behr way.
"Why did you buy Pepsi instead of Coke? What kind of moron would buy Pepsi instead of Coke?" Mr. Sensitive asked Jimmy's mom.
"It was on special."
"So is Waist Watchers, but I don't see any of that shit out on the table. I guess you'll be screwing up all the time now that your boy is dead. He was the only one with any sense around here, but then again, he couldn't have had that much sense since he tried to drive through a tree instead of around it."
Unfortunately, he was not done. Jimmy's father was asserting that the roads had been slippery and therefore it was not Jimmy's fault. Mr. Sensitive was prepared for this turn of events.
"How would you even know? If you hadn't lost your job, then you might have been driving because they wouldn't have repossessed your car over all those missed payments. And then maybe I could have gone to the movies today instead of having to be at this crappy funeral. Maybe if you and your tramp wife hadn't both lost your jobs you could have rented a hall or something and done right by your dead son."
At that point I became very uncomfortable and went to the bathroom to drop a few extra pounds. When I returned, Mr. Sensitive had cornered a woman who works as a suspicious English teacher in the Greater Baltimore School System. This woman had recently lost a baby to what is called by medical professionals a miscarriage. It soon became apparent to me that Mr. Sensitive had heard about this.
Ms. Anderson, the unqualified English teacher, was sipping a glass of wine when Mr. Sensitive approached.
"Hey, maybe if you put the booze down for five minutes you might give birth to a healthy baby instead of always coughing up corpses. And I'm sure the cigarettes don't help either."
I don't know what else happened after that because I left, catching a ride with a really cute librarian who told me she hadn't been with a man since 1973.
This writeup is submitted for the Quest.