DIAL IT UP!

A short story

My wife, lately she’s been telling me to “dial it back a little.”

“Dial what back?” I ask her

“All of it.”

Of course, I ask for an example, this being the kind of thing that spurs a husband to ask for one, and she says, “The hamburgers.”

“Oh Christ,” I say, “I was joking around. Everybody knew I was joking around.”

“It was disturbing,” she says.

Of course, we didn’t resolve things. This is not the kind of couple’s argument that gets resolved.

About the hamburgers, alls I said was… Well, first you gotta know that our friend Mitchell is a really good cook. Jane and I, we can’t cook for shit. In fact, whenever one of us attempts a meal, I usually make the same joke. I take a bite, make a face, then beat my chest and say, “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” What I mean by that is we cook like cavemen. You get it. But Mitchell, man, he cooks and bakes amazing things. I get recipes from him and watch how me does it, but try as I may, I just can’t emulate what he does in the kitchen, the complex flavors he conjures up.

Anyways, he had a small barbecue with a small, select group of friends. I was flattered we were invited and was determined to be myself. Because being yourself is the way to go. You know that.

No surprise, the burgers he made were amazing. And one of the guests says, “Oh my God, you could tell me this was squirrel and I’d keep eating it.”

And I say: “Hell, you could tell me this was human and I’d keep eating it.”

And everybody laughed. I’m no dummy, I know when you’ve got a spark, you build a fire, so I say, “Seriously. And if you run out of human meat, just let me know, I’ll go murder someone.” Then, as if God himself wanted me to keep riffing, a super hot jogger ran by at that very moment and I said, “There’s a prime candidate right there! Somebody, quick, get me a gun so I can chase her down and shoot her in the back of the head! Yum-my! (slight Ace Ventura accenct)” I’ll admit I should’ve said “knife” instead of “gun.” This is LA after all, and people HATE guns here. Seriously. I keep my X-C-R hidden in a box within a box and after I showed it to a couple Jane’s friends’ husbands, both of whom were gun nuts, Jane told me to quit showing it off, that “word could get out,” and I was like, “Good. Let the word get out. Let the whole world know you break into Ben Geller’s house and you die!”

But anyhow, back to my joke. I thought it was funny and that it worked on a couple different levels cause the jogger woman was such an out of this world smoke-show that all the guys were already thinking they wouldn’t mind taking a bite out of that ass. Not in a cannibal way, of course, which was the premise of my joke, but in a way that made my joke into sort of a pun to boot.

Anyways, three nights or so after the BBQ, as my wife applied million dollar lotion to her forehead and told me that I needed to “dial it back some,” I said, “You’re right, I should have said ‘knife’ and not ‘gun.’”

And the look she gave me, my Lord, you’d think the mothership was about to pick me up and take me back to Jupiter to actually eat humans from some human farm they’ve got going on up there.

Anyways, isn’t the whole point of jokes, especially jokes made at parties, to feel like you’re skiing down a slippery slope? Shouldn’t there be a little danger to it all? After thinking on it for a while, this is what I landed on, this is the truth that asserted itself within my mind. And it was so clear and bright that I had to wake Jane up and tell her. I slipped off her sleeping mask (we sleep with the lights on, long story) and as she blinked up at me saying, “Is something wrong? What’s wrong?” I said, “You know what, Jane? It’s time for you to dial it up! How about that! Dial. It. Up.” Then I went right to sleep. And I slept like a baby.