The Apostrophe Enforcer
Hey there counselor, do you mind if I smoke? Well I’m going to smoke anyway, if you don’t mind. Who wants to live in a country where a man can’t enjoy a cigarette and relax at the end of a work day? I’ll just use this coffee cup here as an ashtray, thank you very much.
My wife told me the other day that Dana Point is now a “smoke-free city,” so now you can’t smoke anywhere in town except in your own house. Can you believe that? Those goddamn hippy bastards with their Birkenstocks and Hacky Sacks telling the rest of us how to live our lives! Anyway, I’ll cut to the quick.
I’ve been walking past your law office every weekday for eight years because I get my two donuts every morning at Wally’s Donuts on the corner right next to the liquor store owned by the fella with the red dot on his forehead. Glazed donuts are my favorite, but I enjoy an occasional apple fritter or bear claw just as much as the next guy. Those tiny “donut holes” they started selling when Clinton was in office are a complete scam because if you add up the amount of donut you get for the price, you’re getting way less donut for your money.
Any who, I need some legal advice so that’s why I am sitting across from you in this uncomfortable office chair on a miserably hot August afternoon. Is it true that the attorney/client privilege applies to any discussion that we’ll have during this consultation? Is it also true that the attorney/client privilege will prevent you from talking about anything that we discuss here today, unless I tell you that I am going to hurt someone in the future? Great, that’s what I thought.
I’m no John Gotti, but I’ve done a few things that could put me in the slammer. But don’t worry, I won’t do it again, so your mouth will need to remain shut like a rat trap until the day the undertaker buries you deep in the earth and gives the earthworms the green light to have themselves a nice little lawyer buffet. Some people prefer to be cremated because it’s cheaper, but not me. I want to be buried in a nice plush coffin with red velvet inside, with a giant white fluffy pillow to cradle my dead head. Life is long and hard and mean and exhausting and I’ll need a long peaceful rest when I reach the finish line. I want to lie under a tree in the shade with birds chirping and leaves blowing in the wind.
Where was I? Oh yea, I did some bad things and I need your help.
Look, I never went to no fancy Ivy League college. In fact, I never went to college at all. I’ve been working for a living since I was sixteen. But my Aunt Nora was a grammar school teacher, you see. I went to Aunt Nora’s house every day after school and she taught me reading, writing, and arithmetic. But most of all, Aunt Nora taught me good grammar. You know, where to put apostrophes, and such. She drilled it into my head so good that I could never forget it. I don’t care how smart or educated a man is, if he can’t write well and use proper grammar, he ain’t shit!
Sometimes a man puts up with a thing in life, until he just can’t put up with it no more. That’s what happened with me and business signs that are missing apostrophes. One day I was driving down the road minding my own business, and what did I see? A big old whopper of a sign that read “GRAND OPENING — JENNYS CAFÉ.”
I stopped my car at a red light and stared with my jaw agape, not believing my eyes. Neither Jenny nor the numb nuts sign maker happened to notice that the apostrophe was missing between the Y and S. The problem is that the sign is telling the public that multiple Jennys owned the café, which is just a bald-faced lie.
So, I pulled into the parking lot, went inside the café, and asked to see the owner. Well, if Jenny herself didn’t appear before me in the flesh. She was wearing a pink waitress uniform with a white apron, and she even had a little white hat poking up out of her poufy red hair. She looked like the waitress named Flo from that old TV show “Mel’s Diner.”
I said “Your sign isn’t right. You need to have an apostrophe in your name.”
Jenny looked right past me with this confused look on her face. “What do you mean?” she asked.
I explained to her the best I could why the apostrophe was needed between the Y and the S to show that she, the one and only Jenny, owned the café. Jenny gazed at me and turned her head a little bit to the right, the way a dog does when it hears a high-pitched squeal. I eventually figured that I wasn’t going to get anywhere trying to explain highfalutin rules of grammar to some half wit waitress at a café, so I scrammed.
That night I lied in bed tossing and turning. I couldn’t think of anything but that stupid sign made by a moron sign maker for a dullard café owner. Sometimes in life you have to take matters into your own hands, so that’s what I did. I loaded my pickup truck with my aluminum ladder, a bucket of black paint, and an old paintbrush I had out back in my shed. I drove to the café at about two AM, and the coast was clear. I climbed up on that ladder, dipped the brush deep in the bucket of paint, and slapped that gosh darn apostrophe where it belonged between the Y and the S, once and for all.
“That’s more like it,” is what I said out loud to myself when I was done.
Right about then, I heard the sound of rubber crushing tiny pieces of gravel on asphalt. I turned around and saw a police car slowly coming to a stop behind me. This skinny little guy, couldn’t have been more than twenty years old with pimples covering his face, wiggles his skinny ass out of the patrol car. This guy was so tiny, his gold police badge covered about half of his chest.
The baby-cop asked me what I was doing, and I made up some story about how the owner of the joint paid me to fix the sign. He told me that I couldn’t be out there that late, and I said no problem, because I was just leaving.
I was driving by Jenny’s Café a few days later to admire my handy work, when I noticed that some asshole (probably Jenny herself) had crawled up there and erased my beautiful apostrophe — slapped some white paint right over it. I had tried my best to help that dunce Jenny, but that was the final straw. No more Mr. Nice Guy!
Ever since I was a little boy, I was taught to count to ten when I got mad. Or maybe it was count backwards from ten. I tried to wait a couple days to see if I would feel better about Jenny’s sign, but I just couldn’t help myself. That same night I drove back to the Café with two gallons of gasoline, a few old rags, and a box of matches. I busted the front window with the metal gas container, poured gasoline around the entrance, lit the rags, and threw the rags and gas containers inside through the broken window. Then I stood there with my arms folded and my feet set in a wide stance in the parking lot and watched the joint light up like a Viking funeral. The flames dazzled and hypnotized me, but I soon snapped out of it and realized that I needed to get the hell out of there before Barney Fife showed up again in his little police costume. I raced out of the parking lot and made a clean getaway before the fuzz arrived.
Here’s one thousand dollars cash. I know it’s not a lot, but you’re not going to have to do much. If the cops want to talk to me, I’ll tell them that they need to talk to my lawyer. All you need to do is tell the cops that you don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. Maybe also tell them that if they had any damn sense they would be investigating Jenny for arson and insurance fraud.
By the way, I noticed that the sign on your door says “Law Offices,” followed by your name. It looks to me like it’s just you all alone here in this single office. You don’t have multiple offices like your sign says, do you? Hell, you don’t even have a secretary!
How do you explain your false advertising, counselor?
THE END
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