Profile of a Comedy Legend: The Wash Me Guy

It was 1975 and the day was hot.  Hot and dry.  I was wearing tight, red shorts to show off my quads, or whatever muscles are shown off by tight, red shorts.  I was hanging with the boys – Davey, Pauly and Jackie-Boy.  We’d just finished some stick ball and were really hankering for some Italian ice, or maybe a delicious Ovaltine.  Man, was it hot.

We was walking down the alley by Old Man McGillicuddy’s junk yard, next to the sand lot where we played ball, when his big old junkyard dog JigJug came barreling towards the fence at us.  Jackie Boy squealed and stumbled back, while Davey and Pauley panicked and started to run. I tried to stand my ground, but Jackie Boy’s wirey yet nubile and pale young arms flew all akimbo and struck me, knocking me asunder.  I stumbled back into Old Man McGillicuddy’s pick up truck.  And that’s when genius struck.

My hand smeared across the mud-slicked passenger side door, creating a swatch of clean that showed the pale blue paint job.  My hand was marred by a grimy, caked-on mess like when you wipe your ass after eating Mexican and then realize you forgot to use toilet paper again.  But oh how beautiful it was.

As my friends struggled to gain their composure, I all but forgot about JigJug.  I knew then what it is like to be an artist or a musician, so consumed by the wonder of the artform that you’re like a man possessed.  My hands had a mind of their own as they set to work.  I was a part of that beautiful canvas, a machine set to work towards one end and one end only – the funniest thing that would ever exist in the history of ever.

Funny!

Quickly, my fingers moved to the passenger window, the window facing out where all who passed by would see.  They bobbed and weaved and cut through the muck like a hot knife through butter.  No, like a penis through vagina, for it was life-giving and life-affirming.  This must have been how Jesus felt when he created America after a big pancake breakfast!

My friends called out to me – “Guy Narrating This Story, what are you doing?” said Jackie Boy.

“Yeah!” said Pauly, who was stupid.

“Yeah!” agreed Davey, who was stupider.  But what could I say?  Could I ever form words at that moment?  I could. So I answered.

“I’m writin’ stuff on this truck,” I said.  My friends gasped in wonder and awe.  Never had they seen anything like this before.

“Never have we seen anything like this before,” said Jackie Boy, reaffirming my previous thought.  They watched on, slack jawed and agog as my fingers pushed aside layers of sticky sludge like a paintbrush moving layers of sticky sludge.  Arcs and curves, hooks and slashes.  I felt the way Da Vinci must have felt, or Hemingway, or Stacy Gilbert, a girl from school who was known to have given more than one boy a handjob under the bleachers.  I felt alive.

Slowly my masterpiece took form and my friends’ (those who could read, being only Jackie Boy) eyes lit up with delight.  As Jackie Boy explained it to Davey and Pauly, so too did their eyes light up, with the childish delight of a child who is delighted by something delightful.  And then, as suddenly as inspiration had struck me, it flooded from my body like undercooked pork, mostly liquid but still rather odious.  I stood, arms slack at my side, side by side with my friends.  We knew then, though we could never articulate such a thing, that this moment would bond us for life.  Except for Pauly, who went super gay a few years later and moved to Thailand, where apparently he was later arrested for running a brothel.  But the rest of us were bonded in a real, almost tangible way.  We had become brothers on a spiritual level.  We had witnessed history and I, Guy Narrating This Story, had made it.  With my own hands.  Well, one hand.  It was like masturbating, only on a truck.  In front of my friends.

Before us, in the filth of the window, blared my message with all the volume of the trumpets of Heaven itself, yet it was soundless.  It demanded to be read by all eyes.  Read and reread.  It demanded to be seen, this newborn thing which had never existed before.  There sat the words “WASH ME.”  They glowed in the grime, blackish glass encrusted in cinnamony filth.  “WASH ME.”  It was like staring into the face of God, if God was boobs and the World Series and a corn dog all at once.  It was fucking awesome.

Funnier!

Davey cracked first, his hypnotic stupor overcome by the complete and utter hilarity of the situation.  Comedy had just evolved.  Darwin would have shit an entire basket of kittens and each kitten would have busted its o-ring laughing.  Davey sucked air into his lungs, his diaphragm spasmed producing an inhuman chirrup, like a beaver wailing for its lost mate, like the sighs of mountains as one era passes into the next.  His laughter was virgin laughter, both in that Davey had never so much as touched a girl’s hand, and in that it was laughter faced for the first time with a new definition of funny.  Something in Davey’s brain broke that day and from then on he couldn’t taste salmon, but it didn’t matter because he was never a big fish guy anyway.  Still, you have to admit, that’s kind of fucked up.

Jackie Boy and Pauly succumbed soon after, the sounds of their elation ringing through the alley and infecting the very air we were breathing, the way gonorrhea will infect your penis, except that the air didn’t have a gross discharge or require antibiotics.  Oh, how they laughed.  They slapped their knees and high fived each other, they hugged and Pauly firmly cupped Jackie Boy’s left ass cheek in his right hand, squeezing it appreciatively and winking at me over our friend’s shoulder, giving me the first glimpse of his future in Thailand.  And by God did they laugh.

My resolve was strong.  Inhuman, some have said.  But at the end of the day, I am mortal.  If you prick me, do I knot bleed? If you show me this super funny shit, do I not laugh?  Yes, I do not.  And by that I mean I do.  And by that I mean I did.

My laugh was strong and proud.  It was sexual, like a humping tiger, all ferocious and full of humptricity.  It was a fulfilled laughter.  Jigjug the dog had stopped his barking and stood in doggy astonishment, peering through the chainlink fence.  A stupid animal?  No, a brother in mirth.  That dog laughed, I shit you not.

Sometime later we all pulled ourselves away from the scene, parting ways to our own homes, bleary-eyed and drunk on jollity, plus some beer we stole from my brother.  As the night went on, the still was occasionally broken by bouts of mysterious, disembodied laughter as others came across my creation.  Days passed and we heard more and more laughter, and then the stories began.

We’d heard it first at school, a hushed whisper passed from ear to ear, about the hilarious thing written on Old Man McGillicuddy’s car window.  It had changed lives.  Homeless people had found the initiative to get jobs, the sick and infirm could walk and urinate properly again.  The elderly stopped smelling so fucking weird.

Funniest!

Rumor said the man had written it on the window was a giant.  He was 7 feet tall of pure muscle and had two dicks.  Each dick was bilingual, but in different languages! He had hair as red as a volcanic eruption.  He carried a sword and rode the coolest BMX bike ever.  He was the archangel Michael.  Some said the words had appeared all on their own.

Only my friends and I knew the truth.  At first we tried to tell others, but no one believed us.  “Oh sure,” they’d say, “Guy Narrating This Story wrote it.  He’s the King of all Comedy.”

They didn’t believe us, but that was OK.  My friends and I knew the truth.  We knew I was a comedy legend.  I was amazing.  I am amazing.

Uncalled for and obscene

Jackie Boy went on to become George Bush Jr.  Pauly, as you know, went on to do that brothel thing and Davey grew up to become the deadliest form of martial arts known to man – judo.  Don’t say it makes no sense, Davey hates it when people say that.  And me, I retired.  I could have been all the Kings of Comedy at once, even Cedric the Entertainer, but I’m not greedy, and I don’t suck.  No, I left that for others.  I gave up my comedy life just then, and that was good enough because I had changed the world with two simple words – WASH ME.  Ha!  Fuck, that’s hilarious.