By Burt BurrisNote: This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to any person, living or dead, are purely coincidental.
It all started in the winter of 2003. After a hectic day at the Apollonius Avenue Dog Kennel for Dogs and Cats of Pure Breeding, where I was then employed as Head Tummy Scratcher (a promotion I received the previous year due to seniority, an impeccable on-time record and long finger nails), I returned to my empty home. To combat the pangs of loneliness I feel upon entering my large, barren abode, I usually call out, "Sweetums, I have arrived with a cravin' for some lovin'!" and vigorously slap my stomach with my hands, alternating between the left and the right, while growling and wheezing like an aging badger. I then wait for my words to bounce off the walls of my various, cavernous hallways and rooms and bask in the echoes and the resulting feeling of a traditional home and false family. After the final echoed stomach slap reaches me, I proceed to the kitchen to brew some Earl Grey.
Yes, this is indeed my routine, and the after-effects of it can usually last me the duration of the night. It makes me feel like a man, a husband, a father. An alpha-male who bought the house he resides in, after years of mortgage payments and back-breaking labor, instead of who I really am: the only grandson of a former silent film actress, Mary Briggs, the dame of Essanay Studios, lover of Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton and Erich Von Stroheim, muse of King Vidor. Yes, I inherited this expansive lakeside house and many moneys besides. In short, the day of Nana Mary's death coincided with the birth of my life of leisure.
On the winter night in question, I performed "the Routine," as I have come to call it, took my Earl Grey into the living room and collapsed onto Nana's 2 meter-long brown leather couch, on which she once performed fellatio for the great Chaplin. Yes, my grandmother, the renowned fellatrix of Essanay Studios. In a way, I owe my life of leisure to her skillful lips and tongue, her virtuosic performances of mouth love. Thus, I do not judge her meteoric rise to film stardom, because it has afforded me much pleasure. Not in the ways of love and carnality, but rather items of comfort and moments of intense leisure. I have been lucky enough to be able to surround myself with overwhelming contentment, to drown in complacency and cheer and convenience: bubble baths, the soap of which was brewed in the depths of a monastery in Iceland; a mattress stuffed with the eye lashes of giraffes; a tea kettle that whistles the entirety of Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner when ready. But there is one item of leisure that has evaded this man of leisure for as long as I have had the title: the perfect blanket.
So back to the winter night in question (and I will try to avoid further instances of aristocratic men who have lied out in the sun for too long). I was on the fabled couch, sipping my Earl Grey and reading This Side of Paradise, when my entire body convulsed, seized in a moment of intense shivering. I was cold. The living room was drafty. Had it always been so? I resumed reading and was seized again by a frigid gust, nearly arctic in its sharp nature. This is just too much, I thought, as I was unable to concentrate on Fitzgerald's perfect prose. I should might as well be reading Scott Turow, for the sake of Christ, I thought and threw the novel in a fit of rage. A blanket I must find, I thought, and thus began my quest.
I searched the mansion high and low. I found a trunk of old, possibly semen-stained dresses once worn to premieres by my departed grandmother. I wrapped myself in several of them, but the fabric was too thin to fend off the bitter cold. I threw them down and stomped on them, ferociously, for my night was ruined. Ruined by cool air and my grandmother's inability to purchase a decent damn blanket. I returned to the living room, disgusted by the situation, and resumed my cautious sipping. I immediately spit it out. Ice cold! My thoughts then returned to my own feeling of ice-cold: my nearly frost-bitten ankles, purple-tinged wrists, my cheeks too rosy for comfort. It had to end.
The next day I quit my job (you may be wondering, reader, why I even had a job, as my inheritance amounted to a sum far beyond what I needed to live leisurely. For one, I am a great lover of animals. Secondly, a woman I was in love with worked at the kennel as night watchwoman, and my job there was initially a bid to become closer to her and eventually engage in coitus, preferably during the night shift in front of the caged animals [something of a fetish of mine]*. Thirdly, I felt the need to put on airs and appear to be a commoner, a man of the people, in addition to leisure, in order to become a full-fledged human being) and embarked on my quest for the perfect blanket. I will not bore you with too many details about this quest, for many of them are embarrassing and may characterize me as something of a bumbling nincumpoop, which I am not. But I was fooled many a time by many an ethnic, marketplace swindler. For instance, in Kuala Lumpur, I purchased the shed skin of a thirty foot anaconda, which the seller informed me was a Royal Age-Defying Sleeping Sack. After the first night in it, I woke up within the suffocating grasp of the lover of the snake to whom the skin once belonged, looking for his long lost mate. "I am not who you want!" I managed to choke out to the beast, my eyes bulging from their sockets. He relinquished me and slithered away. Needless to say, my Sleeping Sack was left in tatters, and when I returned to the marketplace the next day, a cloud of dust and an ancient mule had replaced the swindler and his stand of wares.
It is not the journey which is important in this story, but the destination at which I arrived, many years later (at the time of this writing, last week). I had just returned home from the Sudan after receiving a promising lead from my travel agent that the Janjawid are renowned sleepers and men of leisure. Seconds after my plane's successful crash landing in a meadow soaked with bloody dew, I found myself in a crossfire. For the next few days (I'm not sure how long exactly as my watch was shattered in the fray), I survived by playing dead and eventually hooking up with a group of Lost Boys. We walked many miles to Kenya. I became their father and taught them the basics of micro and macroeconomics and why their continent will never be saved. I caught a flight to Chicago from Nairobi and, eventually, collapsed once again onto the fabled couch and flipped on the HD flatscreen.
The screen flickered on and my eyes followed suit. A commercial appeared before my optical orbs and they at once became teary. It was a gift from God, or perhaps Mammon himself. The Snuggie. Of course! This whole time I was looking for a traditional blanket. But those are now obsolete! As the commercial states: "Blankets are OK but they can slip and slide, plus your hands are trapped inside." Foolish blankets. With the Snuggie, I can sip Earl Grey, read F. Scott and fend off the bitter cold all at once! I picked up the phone and dialed the number at the bottom of the screen. Take that Malaysian swindler! Take this Janjawid! I will never be cold and without all-intensive leisure again!
That was last week. The quest is over, leisure has been restored, and I am typing this now with my Snuggie-covered arms. Good day, gentle reader. And live leisurely!
*The woman in question quit after my initial advances proved unfruitful and repulsive to her. I stayed on to spite her.
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