Gigantic Fail

World of Cox Episode 2: Elimination Dancing (Part Three)

SCENE I

Samantha Chignon is at Ivy, an upscale clothing store in Uptown Minneapolis, shopping for an outfit to impress at the upcoming Barbizon call for models. The clerk is the usual flaming male Uptown type.

SAM: Are these skirts this season?

CLERK: The Marc By Marc? With the paillettes?

SAM: Those are so nice.

Johnnova Assnest sneaks up to Sam.

JOHNNOVA: Haven’t you heard? Paillettes are for tards! Those are about as hip as Kate Hudson wearing UGGs at a Winger reunion show at a sports bar in Shakopee.

SAM: I thought the saying was “Paillards are for tards,” and unlike you, I haven’t pounded any chicken in the recent past.

CLERK: Oh, snap, honey! Don’t cockblock my potential sale, though. In these economic times, if I don’t work that commission you better believe I’ll be bitchin’.

JOHNNOVA: Weak! Girl, you are on! Unlike this video ho . . . Seriously, Sam. You look borderline plus-sized in those jeans. And are they bootcut?

SAM: These are Sevens, and what the fuck?

JOHNNOVA: A hot buy from Bluefly? Always there when retail price is enough to scare.

SAM: That isn’t even witty! Hugh Jackman isn’t even feeling his Oscar job security take a minor dip!

CLERK: Count and pointercount! Watching two fierce bitches trade zingers reminds me of my days judging high school debate. If I were straight I would be pitching a tent a family of four could sleep comfortably in right now.

SAM: Four fruit flies, probably.

JOHNNOVA: Based on his feet, I’d say at least four sugar gliders.

SAM: I wouldn’t want to be guilty of penile misunderestimation.

CLERK: Sooner or later you bitches always turn on me.

SAM: I’ll go take my business away from unisex cattiness.

CLERK: Didn’t Pitchfork just give their album an 8.4?

Sam storms out of the store and runs a few stores down to Jimmy John’s, where her brother, Jogs, is waiting for her in front of the remains of a consumed sub, only the pickle uneaten.

JOGS: I just exhausted my calories for the whole weekend.

SAM: Evil whorecunt!

She grabs his pickle and bites a huge chunk out of it.

JOGS: I hope you weren’t talking about me. Or that pickle.

SAM: No, that walking yeast infection Johnnova is everywhere! It’s like she’s stalking me.

JOGS: Are you possibly facilitating that with Facebook?

SAM: Not unless she knows a lot more about atbash ciphers than I’d guess. But that gives me an idea. . . . I need to talk to your friend Boobs.

JOGS: “Friend.” Don’t rub it in.

He rubs his smaller-than-before but currently bloated stomach resignedly in illustration.

SCENE II

Slim, Chunky, and Ratso are hanging out in the latter’s basement, drinking Schlitz Ice and listening to the Doors.

RATSO: Dude, that scene in Apocalypse Now with this song is the greatest fucking scene in a movie ever!

SLIM: Oh, please. It’s not even the best Coppola scene. The restaurant scene in The Godfather rapes anything in Apoc Now.

RATSO: Wrong, but you would say that, fag.

SLIM: Fuck you! And, hello: Chinatown? Scorsese? Kubrick?

CHUNKY: Shamalama? That guy who did Superbad?

RATSO AND SLIM: Noob!

The doorbell rings upstairs.

RATSO: That dick-waving cocksucker is back from Iowa! He better have gotten some fucking serious cash shoved up his . . . What was that thing called, Slim?

SLIM: Skintastic Leopard Fantasy Enhancement Pouch.

Saggy bounds downstairs, throwing his gym bag, which almost knocks over a poster from a Monet exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1983.

RATSO: Dude! Mom will shellac your ass if you break that again!

CHUNKY: It’s already shellacked, just like mine! Dude, I don’t spend hours on my glutes to obscure the definition with fucking hair!

SLIM: You have to shave your ass?

CHUNKY: Sugar. But yes.

RATSO: Of course! Don’t tell me yours is hairless!

SLIM: Isn’t that normal?

Chunky and Ratso laugh uproariously.

CHUNKY: Bareass homo!

SAGGY: I’m hella jealous.

RATSO: The inevitable has occurred. Your new job has made you a flaming homosexual gay faggot.

SAGGY: Hella no.

RATSO: Then what did happen?

CHUNKY: Yeah! Did any fags try to cup your nuts or peel your carrot?

SAGGY: Beer, then talk.

Ratso hands him a beer, which Saggy drinks in one go, then belches thunderously.

SAGGY: Another.

SCENE III

Precious Cox and her roommate Julissa are cleaning their apartment in preparation for Spring Break.

PRECIOUS: It was so sad, seeing those lower-income kids in brand new bondage gear tearing up just because I’ll be gone for a week.

JULISSA: And the tears could react with the metallic spikes on their codpieces!

PRECIOUS: I know! And that shit isn’t real silver, but some toxic shit like when you buy a ring from a grocery store vending machine when you’re seven and it leaves a green rash on your finger.

JULISSA: I always imagined an STD would be the vaginal equivalent of that.

PRECIOUS: Delish! I’ll ask my stripper friend. She has to have stories, though hopefully regarding the genitals of others.

The doorbell rings.

PRECIOUS: Ooh, is that some manpower? I hope you requested a hung Latino ranchero!

JULISSA: No, sadly. It’s Gunnar, retuning that Cynthia 12” I left at the station.

PRECIOUS: Any excuse.

JULISSA (going to the door): It’s not my fault! I was stoned and accidentally took La Bouche instead.

PRECIOUS: But that’s so much better.

Julissa shrugs and lets Gunnar in.

GUNNAR: Here’s your record . . . Hey, Precious! What you up to?

PRECIOUS: Just bracing myself for my fast-approaching return to the Land of Pop: The accents exhibiting the nasal legacy of generations of Nordic ancestors, the antithesis of the global subaltern potentially ironically back to a subject position some of us consider problematic, ideologically or otherwise.

GUNNAT: Homi Bhabha, eat your heart out.

PRECIOUS: That is dehumanizing vis-à-vis Aztecs.

JULISSA: There aren’t any Aztecs, though.

PRECIOUS: Says you!

GUNNAR: Yeah, extinction assumes a notion of temporality that Riemann shattered decades before Foucault’s asshole suffered a verbally congruous but literal fate.

PRECIOUS: Anyway, it’s Spring Break. Let’s bracket the timespace shit and break out the Thunderbird.

GUNNAR: I only drink Viognier.

PRECIOUS: Don’t push your luck, unless you want a horde of nine-year-olds in bondage gear sicced on you—and that’s pre-April Fool’s!

SCENE IV

Slim and his mother are sitting in their living room, waiting for Raymond to return from picking Precious up at the airport.

WIFE: Every time your sister comes home, I have this silly fantasy that she’s going to really try to make herself attractive to normal men. She could be such a hot piece if she just made an effort.

SLIM: Dude, I think she’s probably considered something like that at college. And now I’m never going to be able to jack off again without crying.

WIFE: I certainly understand; after all, I was brought up in a house where Catholic guilt comingled with puritanical abusiveness. We were taught to be afraid of our own parts.

SLIM: Before I go vomit and hope that fucking image is forever expunged from my psyche, I should note that some of my friends could use that kind of home environment.

WIFE: Oh, no, honey. You don’t want to wish that devilish fate on nubile, young high school boys.

The doorbell rings and wife does a plié of joy on the way to answer.

Precious is dressed for the holiday in pale green patent flats, an orange skirt with a print of the molecule structure of pollen molecules, and a khaki riding jacket over a yellow silk shirt.

WIFE: I hope Spring Break is as festive as your colorful outfit!

PRECIOUS: That’s all we can deign to hope for in an atmosphere marked predominately by the panic fear of the collapse of global markets and the system of objects that thrusts the hyperreality of the quotidian into previously untold orders of simulation.

RAYMOND: Not to mention the economy these days! Although thankfully those new finger vibes have been selling faster than it would take Slim to lose his virginity to an Israeli hooker!

SLIM: I’ll save my shekels for falafel.

PRECIOUS: That’s so played out on the sandwich scale. Even bánh mì is becoming the new torta.

RAYMOND: You can buy tortas as the Mehican place two doors down from my store. Their employees are some of the most loyal patrons of the jackoff booths, but the stench in there after their visits is pretty ripe.

SLIM: That’s a fucking understatement.

WIFE: I wonder if it has anything to do with those wife-beaters they always rock?

PRECIOUS: Have you been watching Juno again?

SLIM: Bitch, dudes do not fucking talk like that. Michael Cera would get his faggot ass beat in so hard if he showed up to a party here.

PRECIOUS: Maybe he’d like that. I’ve always surmised that his doughy, sexless façade is hiding a serious taste for horsewhips, hot wax, and cock worshipping.

RAYMOND: Then he should come to my store, especially if he’ll accept strap-ons for that worshipping!

SCENE V

Slim and Precious are having brunch at a revisionist hipster diner near Lake and Hiawatha.

SLIM: So they were about to get booked for some fucking huge contract to perform at clubs and shit and get mad rich, and Saggy was making baller cash . . .

PRECIOUS: “Baller” in more ways than one, presumably.

SLIM: He’d never let a guy hit that, but apparently his moves were making fags drool or some shit.

PRECIOUS: That says something tragic about standards in the gay community, unless he got way better at dancing since that video first hit the internet.

SLIM: Fags will be fags.

PRECIOUS: I guess if thirty-year-old men are obsessed with dressing like teenagers, they may as well cut to the chase and reel in the AE, AF, Hollister, etc., crowd.

SLIM: Well, they won’t get his jock anywhere else, because his adult entertainment career is on hiatus.

PRECIOUS: Why?

SLIM: They found out he’s seventeen.

PRECIOUS: Tragic. Nine-year-olds can hover—and, in fact gyrate—under the radar of censorship, but sexually agentic teens like your friends are publicly infantilized.

SLIM: I sure as fuck wouldn’t go that far.

PRECIOUS: They only want you when you’re seventeen. When you’re twenty-one, you’re no fun.

SLIM: That sounds familiar.

PRECIOUS: That’s the first line of the song Boobs does her pole act to. I should really call her.

SLIM: These huevos rancheros are going to cause a fiesta in my digestive tract.

PRECIOUS: I love being home.

A table of heavily tattooed twenty-somethings toast bacon mimosas at the next table. A man with a monocle erotically plucks a gherkin out of his bloody bull. A waitress drops a fork on the ground; the metallic clang echoes through the poor acoustics of the dining room.

Spring Break has only just begun.

END OF PART III

END OF EPISODE

World of Cox Episode 2: Elimination Dancing (Part Two)

SCENE I

Slim, Chunky, Ratso, and Saggy arrive at school in the morning. They are immediately greeted with a chorus of hoots and wolf whistles.

MALE STUDENT 1 (singing): Baby don’t hurt me, baby don’t hurt me . . .

RATSO: I’ll hurt you when I shove that bitch’s UGG boot all the way up your ass. Fuckin homo probably already gets fisted, but now your faggot ass is gonna get footed!

MALE STUDENT 1: Ooh, threatening sexual assault. How au courant.

MALE STUDENT 2: Watching your gay asses try to dance was sexual assault on my eyes. My eyes! Brain bleach FTW!

CHUNKY: Did you know the FTW backwards in WTF, motherfucker? And I’ll WT your F’in ass if you don’t shut it.

MALE STUDENT 2: You’re pretty fuckin WT, that’s for sure.

RATSO: He’s got you there, man.

CHUNKY: Fuck you all. You’re just jealous of my glutes. Well, reality check, motherfuckers: there’s less than three weeks of juicing time before spring. What bitch will want to bite the thong off your non-ass?

Chunky’s occasional sexing partner, Tamra, dramatically limps over the support him.

TAMRA: Yeah, Male Student 1! The next bitch you’re fucking is gonna try to grab your ass and either fall over or have to settle for folds of back skin. Not fun, trust me.

RATSO: Trust the ho. She knows of what she speaks.

MALE STUDENT 1: I guess I’ve been pwned, but at least the entire interweb hasn’t seen me rip off fucking porn star pants.

SAGGY: You don’t know me, motherfucker!

MALE STUDENT 1: We were lab partners last semester.

RATSO: My brother was being illiteral, you ignorant fuckwad.

MALE STUDENT 1: Whatever, I’m gonna bounce. The bell’s about to ring.

The crowd disperses.

TAMRA: I loved your video, and the camerawork was absolutely amazing. Best cinematography since Memoirs of a Geisha!

RATSO: That sounds gay.

SLIM: I did the photography.

TAMRA: Oh, wow! Maybe you can videotape our dance team’s charity bikini performance next month.

SLIM: Are you fucking kidding me?

TAMRA: So you’ll do it?

SLIM: Hell no. That sounds like the gayest thing since Memoirs of a Geisha 2: The Gay-ening.

CHUNKY: Is that real?

SLIM: Have Saggy ask his customers tonight.

CHUNKY: You’re working already?

RATSO: He’s booked tonight at the 90’s and Friday and the Saloon, and his manager says that if he hits it fucking big they’ll go down to some faggot-ass gay club in Des Moines and rape the Iowan homos for the Benjamins there.

SLIM: Oh, yeah. Iowa doesn’t have the no booze with pubes law like Minnesota, does it? I bet that draws in the shit-stabbers.

RATSO: That law is so fucked up. Booze and pubes is like chocolate and peanut butter.

CHUNKY: Or fapping and shitting.

RATSO: Or that.

SAGGY: Hella.

SCENE II

Precious and her roommate, Julissa Rose, enter their college radio station’s Viva Indie Rawk party, held in a dorm basement’s recreational space. The radio station president, Eden Dahl, greets them with plastic cups.

EDEN: I know it’s trashay, but we’re consistent: we’ve got wop with Everclear for your imbibing pleasure.

PRECIOUS: How scintillatingly politically incorrect! Just the way I like my sexual partners.

EDEN: Speaking of scintillating, how’s your project with the lower income elementary students going?

PRECIOUS: One squat at a time. Kids these days really don’t have the hip and thigh flexibility that we learned practically from the time we could walk. I just thank Jesus H. Kristofferson that Manpower Australia doesn’t use poles yet, because we would be up the proverbial creek.

EDEN: You should write a PSA so we can advertise your show on the air.

PRECIOUS: Totes. I’ll get on that like Lance Bass on a purple-headed love warrior. Now excuse us while we get wopped.

Precious and Julissa head toward the garbage can of wop.

JULISSA: Last year at a Mardi Gras party, my friend spiked the wop with G.

PRECIOUS: That must have been a very short Mardi Gras.

JULISSA: Yeah; I wasn’t drinking because I still had mandatory piss tests for that recovery program with the crank addicts.

PRECIOUS: Did you cock-block any rape attempts?

JULISSA: No, I just left and went to Jimmy John’s and headed home for a bubble bath.

PRECIOUS: Nice. Oh, look: Gunnar’s spinning.

JULISSA: The minimalist Finnish psych folk playing didn’t clue you in?

PRECIOUS: I was too immersed in the promise of hot wop to even notice. I feel like such a pathetic excuse for a Sarah Lawrence radio DJ! I’ll have to go home and read fanzines from 1994 while listening to Danish coldwave seven inches.

JULISSA: Let’s request something.

They approach Gunnar, who takes a break from looking through bins of records to drink directly from a full-size bottle of Kariho sake.

GUNNAR: Hey, how’s late modernity treating y’all?

PRECIOUS: Victimized by the ideological domination of consumerist panic in the throes of an amodernist interpellatory-panoptic deadlock on subjectivity; in other words: same old, same old. And you?

GUNNAR: Hangin’ in there.

JULISSA: Are you taking requests tonight?

GUNNAR: Na klar! Wir haben mucho electo and wave shit we dragged out. Perhaps some Debbie Deb?

PRECIOUS: Well, if we were at a rent party in Astoria in 2004, that would have been pretty ground-breaking.

GUNNAR: Ouch!

JULISSA: I play freestyle on my show all the time!

PRECIOUS: And in the house. But nobody’s perfect.

GUNNAR: A cyborg version of Zizek would be perfect.

SCENE III

Ratso, Saggy, and Chunky are hanging out in Ratso and Saggy’s basement, listening to Roger Waters and drinking Old Milwaukee. Saggy is playing Halo 3 on the 360.

CHUNKY: Dude, now that we’re all famous, I’m totally going to try to get Tamra to have a threesome. I bet we could ever get a porn star.

RATSO: What’s the fucking point? One bitch already has more holes than you can fill.

CHUNKY: I guess I wasn’t thinking about it that way.

RATSO: Then in what fucking way were you thinking about it? One on your dick and the other tossing your salad? You’d be the first dude ever to turn into an insta-fag while fucking two bitches at the same time.

CHUNKY: My brother said it feels awesome, though.

RATSO: Then your brother is a faggot. You’ll find a way to accept him in your heart someday.

CHUNKY: Fuck you!

RATSO: Saggy, did you see Chunky’s bro at the club last night?

SAGGY: Not that I . . . fucking zombie alien bitch!

RATSO: That motherfucker raped you so hard! Dude, you need to get that shotgun thing back. Go to the left. No, not over there.

SAGGY: Fagbug!

Ratso laughs. Slim enters the basement holding a stack of magazines.

RATSO: What up, cockmaster?

SLIM: Fuck you. Anyway, we got a magazine with a feature on our video and I brought copies for everyone.

He hands out the copies and Ratso hands him a beer.

RATSO: Freshmen? What the hell is this faggot fuckery?

SLIM: Yeah, it’s for fags, but my dad says that there isn’t really a market for straight porn featuring barely legal guys. This magazine has also featured the two legal Jonas brothers and Zac Efron, and nobody thinks they’re gay.

CHUNKY: Are you fucking kidding me? Joe Jonas is gayer than a bag of dicks.

RATSO: Did your brother tell you that?

CHUNKY: Enough about my motherfucking brother! He’s fucked more girls than the number of times you’ve fucked your right hand.

RATSO: That is highly fucking unlikely.

SAGGY: Hella highly.

SLIM: Dude, I really don’t want to think about that. Anyway, how was the gig, Saggy?

SAGGY: Noice.

RATSO: He got almost four hundred dollars that fags stuffed into his g-string.

SLIM: I told you that thing was high-quality. Most g’s would have perished under that kind of tension.

RATSO: Bulge probably knows about tension in his g, unlike you.

SLIM: Fuck you!

RATSO: Anyway, the money wasn’t all there at the same time, you idiot. He took breaks and took it out as the night went on. Dumbass shitbag.

SLIM: How would I know?

CHUNKY: How do you not know that shit? Do you not have internet access?

RATSO: Yeah, your ignorance is fucking shocking sometime.

SLIM: Whatever.

RATO: There’s some pics posted on Facebook of Saggy dancing last night. You should check it out.

SLIM: Yeah, I don’t think so.

RATSO: Don’t be so gay.

SCENE IV

Slim’s parents are having dinner at the home of Raymond’s sister, Lacey Cox-Sickle, and her husband, Dick “Enrico” Sickle.

LACEY: Can I just tell you how sweet these li’l cocktail glasses are? You just pour in some ice—nice and cold—and a pre-mixed cocktail, and garnish with a couple . . . dozen . . . bluberries.

ENRICO: This is some strong shit, honey! Are you trying to get us shit-faced before dessert?

LACEY: I wouldn’t want you to be anything but literally vertical.

ENRICO: So, Ray, how’s business at the house of dildo? Hard times for hard customers in today’s economy? Obamanomics having you holding onto your pocketbook like a pubescent boy’s death grasp on his own cock?

RAYMOND (laughing): Actually, I’m confident that people will, more and more, remember to appreciate life’s simple pleasures, like prostate stimulators and MILF videos.

WIFE: I just hope people don’t get so depressed that their libido goes away. I’ve heard that can happen.

RAYMOND: Oh, spare me your pop psychology bullshit. That stuff’s just for bored housewives who want to sound intelligent to impress morons.

ENRICO: Cheers to that!

LACEY: That’s why I only read magazines about cooking and entertaining, tablescapes, and sweet li’l things like that. Ask Enrico about my Valentine’s Day surprise. I got it from Sandra.

ENRICO: You mean the homemade edible cleavage-enhancing powder? We could barely make it upstairs before I plundered her musky treasures!

LACEY (whispering coyly): The secret is Pixy Stix.

WIFE: I’ll have to try that sometime.

ENRICO: So, how are the kids? The daughter still caught up in the feminazi bullshit?

WIFE: I hope it’s just a phase, but she’s doing some great community service with poor black children from the hood.

RAYMOND: “The hood”? Are you trying to talk like the kids now?

WIFE: Maybe I’m just a silly bitch, but I think it’s important to understand the way people communicate—even teens.

ENRICO: You’re wrong! The “LOL” and the “BFR” and the “DP” and all that hooey.

RAYMOND: Well, I know what DP means.

SCENE V

Jogs Chignon and his friend, Boobs Carlisle, are waiting in line to get into the Saloon, a gay club in downtown Minneapolis.

JOGS: So, you’re sure this isn’t going to be weird?

BOOBS: No! How many times have you had to watch gross guys hitting on and grinding with girls in douchebag clubs? At least here you aren’t competing with those Axe-wearing frat boy motherfuckers.

JOGS: Do you get a lot of those types?

BOOBS: I wish! Although lap dances are easier on fat dudes.

JOGS: Don’t say that word!

BOOBS: It’s not my fault you let yourself go, doughboy.

JOGS: I’ve lost two more pounds in the last week.

They reach the bouncer, who ID’s them, stamps their hands, and lets them in.

They head to the bar.

JOGS: Did you ever find out anything from your coworker who does pageants?

BOOBS: Yes! I totally forgot to mention it. She’s pretty incoherent, but she told me that there’s some weird shit that goes down at those things: bribes, sexual favors, crazy shit.

JOGS: It’s so disgusting to see girls being taught that they’re only valuable for their bodies, like tools.

BOOBS: You’re a tool, asshole!

JOGS: Oh, sorry. It’s just that I think sex workers are forced into a situation that’s painfully unsubversive vis-à-vis the liberatory strategies of post-feminists.

BOOBS: You need to drop that sociology class. Look at that guy in the cage!

JOGS: Gross!

BOOBS: Whatever. He’s wearing a g-string! And he can’t take it off. Remember the pubes and booze law?

JOGS: Yeah, but does that count when he’s suspended in a cage up there? I mean, it’s not like we can climb up there and grope his zipper knight.

BOOBS: I actually don't know how the law works in situations like that. But I do know how I'd work in a situation like that guy's bedroom.

JOGS: Jesus, I already have to see him practically naked and now you say shit like that.

BOOBS: So what? Everyone's seen a dick outline in a thong by sixth grade these days. It's no big deal.

JOGS: His doesn’t look like a small deal, either.

BOOBS: Jealous?

JOGS: Maybe.

BOOBS: Well, you know what they say: lose ten pounds, gain an inch. Your dick is just hiding in all that unsightly blubber.

JOGS: I didn’t know about that! But now that I think about it . . .

BOOBS: See? Sometimes clichés are true.

JOGS: I guess they are. I guess you can’t judge a book by its cover.

BOOBS: Tell that to Michael Crichton!