Natalie Burroughs: Sex Detective

RUSSELL: Um, hello? Miss Burroughs, are you in here? Your receptionist told me to come on in.

NATALIE: Yes, I’m Natalie Burroughs, Sex Detective. You must be Russell Muddige. You were supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago. I almost gave your appointment to a young woman convinced her boyfriend is sleeping with his science professor.

RUSSELL: Sorry. I hit traffic on the 101.

NATALIE: Well, now that you’re here, we can begin. Why don’t you step across my spacious, ornately decorated office and sit in one of the brown calfskin chairs in front of my impressive but not quite boastful glass desk.

RUSSELL: (confused) Why are you talking like that?

NATALIE: I apologize. Sometimes I lapse into talking like I’m giving narrative details. It only happens occasionally.

RUSSELL: To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing here. I saw your late-night commercial after an ad for a phone-sex chatline. I’m not even really clear on what a “sex detective” does.

NATALIE: Some people prefer the term “sextective,” which may clear things up.

RUSSELL: Not really.

NATALIE: Mainly we specialize in helping concerned spouses or significant others uncover whether or not their partners are having … um … undisclosed relations. When the situation is more internal and no infidelity can be proven, we try to get at the root of what the couple’s problem is. I take it something’s not right with your relationship and that’s why you’re here.

RUSSELL: (defeated) It is. I think my wife may be having an affair. She’s been distracted lately, and we haven’t made lovey-doves in almost three months.

NATALIE: Is that what you call it? “Lovey-doves”?

RUSSELL: (refocusing his attention) Yes. Why, does that mean something?

NATALIE: (deadpan) It just means that I’ve cracked a case in which a young man tried impregnating a cat repeatedly and you still take the trophy in my WTF competition.

RUSSELL: I suppose it does sound a little … cutesy. (pause) Oh god. You don’t think I’m the reason my wife’s out having an affair, do you?

NATALIE: Well, we can’t even be sure that your opposite sex life partner is actually having an affair. It’s too soon to jump to any conclusions. But, to answer your question: Yes.

RUSSELL: I can’t believe it. I mean, I figured that things, you know, in the bedroom might have been strained because of the long hours I work and my freakishly misshapen penis, but I didn’t realize that something so simple as a phrase could snuff out our love dumpling noodle time.

NATALIE: I’m staring at you, incredulously and with a hint of disgust.

RUSSELL: More narrative detail talk?

NATALIE: Sorry. It sneaks up on me.

RUSSELL: If I really am the cause of all this, what can I do to fix things?

NATALIE: First of all, you need to retrain the language center of your brain to not sound so … hmm, what’s the clinical phrase … “fucking retarded” when you’re talking about sex. We women like a man who isn’t afraid to plow it like it’s harvest time, if you know what I mean. And the same thing goes for the way you talk about getting freaky under the covers. Don’t shy away from terms and phrases like “skanky ho,” “cum-hungry pig,” and “I want to fuck the shit out of you.” They’re scientifically proven to trigger the affection regions of a woman’s brain mass.

RUSSELL: (repeating, as if to remember) Skanky ho. Cum-hungry pig. I want to fuck the shit out of you. Got it. And you think that this may help rekindle things between me and my elementary schoolteacher wife?

NATALIE: I think it’ll be a start.

RUSSELL: Thank you, Miss Burroughs. I really think this might just be the turning point in my marriage. I don’t know how you do it, but you’re something wubby-bubby-snubby-lubby indeed.

That Which Has Led Me Here Before You

“I’ve never really been opposed to the idea of slaughtering animals.  Now, taken out of context, that statement can sound kind of bad.  But hear me out.  Before, when I was growing up, my parents never owned a farm.  They never plowed fields or woke up at some ungodly hour to trudge through the rain or snow to collect eggs from a chicken coop.  We didn’t live anywhere remotely city-like, but our shoes didn’t smell like chicken shit.  Oh, sorry, Your Honor.  Excuse me, ‘chicken poop.’  My experience with livestock came from the TV and a single trip to my aunt and uncle’s house in the country, one time when I was seven.

“Their farm wasn’t the biggest, and it was certainly nothing to bring in the big bucks.  Nothing more than a couple cows, a litter of good-for-nothing cats, and one pig that went by the name of Lucas Pembroil.  I’m talking, Your Honor, about my cousin, a fat little boy a couple years older than me, who decided it would be hilarious to show me the chickens.  See, it was his job to feed them each day, and on one of my family’s trips to see his parents, he brought me outside, out to the hen house.  They had a chain-link fence to keep the chickens penned up, but it was the most ramshackle thing ever laid eyes on.  The birds always got out and ran amok, bringing dogs and coyotes around.  It was Lucas’s job to get them back in the pen and fix wherever they’d managed to get out.

“So Lucas brings me to the chickens and tells me that they love to play.  ‘It’s sure fun trying to run and catch ‘em,’ he says.  And this, remember, to a little seven-year-old boy.  ‘Why don’t you try it?’

“And so I’m all full of energy from being stuck in the car for the ride there and then being inside while my mom and pop gab-gab-gab with my aunt and uncle.  So I go after this one chicken, a hen.  This little burnt red soccer ball of a thing that’s running around, jutting its neck out like it’s dancing.  Lucas, meanwhile, has a grin on his face that touches his scabbed ear, like my aunt smacked his mouth and sent it a couple inches sideways on his head.  And as I’m going after this chicken, he grabs this wooden pole, even taller than him at five feet.

“All of a sudden this bird decides it’s had enough.  It comes after me, jumping, flapping its wings, losing feathers like money in the state lotto.  Surely you’ve seen chickens when they get agitated, Your Honor.  Well, I hadn’t seen such a thing, and I screamed like a girl when I felt that first spur cut into my hand.  She got me several times, and by the time Lucas had beat her away with that pole, my arms were scratched to hell and back like I’d just lost a fight with a rosebush.

“That event was a traumatization.  That’s what my shrink calls it, anyway.  I’m just a good old boy from Cornhole, Iowa.  Ha ha!  I’m just joshing; that’s just what us locals call it.  You all probably know it as Compton.  That’s where I was born and raised.

“Anyways, that moment stuck with me for the rest of my days, and it still wakes me up in the middle of the night sometimes.  I’ll open my eyes to the dead of night, my hair matted with sweat, thinking that I’m surrounded by the prickliest feathers but which are really just the low thread-count sheets I bought at the Discount Decor over in Ridgemont.

“My parents didn’t have high hopes for me, and I guess maybe their lack of inspiration set me down the path that brought me here today.  I knew from a young age that the college education card got left out of my deck, and so I turned to mechanics in high school.  I thought about being an inventor, but I could never come up with something to invent.  ‘Well, think about something people need,’ my shop teacher would say.  ‘Try to fill a niche that hasn’t been filled.’

“Now that’s easy to say when you ain’t trying to invent things and you know what in the H-E-double-toothpicks niche means, but for me, the best I ever came up with was my own version of a clothes dryer for people who liked their shirts to smell like the outdoors.  You know that smell that comes with hanging clothes out on the line?  Well, this was a machine to get clothes dried fast but still get that outdoor-fresh scent, you see?

“Basically it was just a big vented metal tub attached to a motor.  It spun like the devil and dried things quicker than you could say ‘Kenmore can lick my — ’

“Well, you get the idea.

“After graduating I spent a few years moving from job to job, working as a dishwasher and a laborer and a few other little things.  But I never stopped thinking about how great it might be to invent something that people all across the country might use.  Something that would make me rich and give me what my shrink calls ‘validation.’  Ultimately, though, my parents kicked me out of the house when I lost my job as the high school’s facilities cleanliness specialist due to a marijuana addiction that I’ve recently gotten under control.

“I ended up heading back to my aunt and uncle’s farm, where I figured they could use a hand since Lucas had gone on to bigger and better things in the United States military.  Family, as they say, is the one place you’re always welcome.  So I helped them with the chores and duties they couldn’t do anymore, and they let me into their home until I could figure out what to do with myself.

“Corralling the chickens had to be my least favorite job, but I did it because I was grateful.  I swallowed the fear that had been my companion for all these years and took to those birds with my own stick.  After some time, I jerry rigged the fence around the pen, and they didn’t get out except for every once in a while.  Nothing like before, when Lucas had to take care of them.  Dealing with those chickens wasn’t so terrifying after that; feeding them was nothing like corralling them, but when my aunt decided to cook chicken for dinner it was my job to get one and pluck it.  It was bad enough having to get near them to feed them, but taking one in my hands was a whole other story.

“For months I had to go in that pen and hunt for the plumpest one.  Then, after the rigamarole of catching and killing it, I had to pluck the damn thing.

“My uncle had quite a workshop in an old shed out behind the house.  And one day I had an idea.  What if, I thought, I put that outdoor dryer to use?  So I went back home and got my dryer, and when I brought it to my uncle’s workshop I put little rubber spikes along the walls of the metal drum.  In my head I imagined that, if I put a bird in there and started the motor, the rubber pieces would catch the feathers, plucking them out with no problem at all.

“And that’s exactly what happened when I tried it out.  Sure, I had to use the hose to spray inside there to get that chicken clean.  And, yes, it made such a thudding, horrible noise that my aunt and uncle came rushing outside to check on what they thought was a derailed locomotive crashing through their yard, but that chicken came out naked as a Playboy centerfold!

“Of course, what I didn’t realize at the time was that putting a live chicken in there would be considered animal cruelty.  And that’s exactly what I did when I demonstrated my automated chicken plucker for the fine folks at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which has led me here before you fine folks and you, Your Honor.

“That’s about it, I guess.  That’s all I have to say.  My mouth to God’s ear, I am not one for treating animals with anything less than the dignity and respect they deserve.  Those chickens, however…”

Ten Questions For The Person Who Literally Took A Shit In The Women's Clothing Wednesday Night

1)  What the hell were you thinking?

2)  Was it really a good idea to, apparently, eat such a hearty meal before coming to shop at a major retailer?


3)  If you are old and/or senile do you have someone to monitor you while in public?


4)  If this sort of thing happens on a regular basis and you can expect such an event, why do you not wear protective diapers?


5)  Honestly, how could you take the time to check for onlookers and then pull down your pants but not have time to get to the restroom ten yards away?


6)  Did you wipe afterwards?  If so, should we have looked for an empty, stolen package of toilet paper, too?


7)  If no toilet paper was stolen, should shoppers beware any chocolate-colored blouses in that area?


8)  After you finished, did you have to leave, or did you continue shopping?


9)  If you're a teenage prankster, don't you have anything better to do, like get someone pregnant in the backseat of an automobile or cook crystal meth in your parents' basement?


10)  Again, if you're a prankster, do you realize that we're going to search through our extensive security footage and find you, and then many jokes will be shared at your expense, kind of like what's happening right now?  

A Quick Message at the Mega Church

"... and that, my brothers and sisters, concludes this morning's sermon.

"Now, I want to take a moment here at the end of this, our first nationally syndicated service, to talk about something that's been plaguing my heart for days now.  I promise it'll only take a minute or two, so as we're not running over into time allotted for Travis Jones's Prayer Power Hour or whatever else fine programming the Cristian Broadcasting Network decides to air.

"Ha ha!  And, you, Sister Jones, don't you worry one fake feather in your sunhat that you won't make it to the Denny's noon lunch special!  Ha ha!

"Our church has seen its fair share of changes in its time.  Why, I've seen it grow from a twig to a tree in my fifteen-plus years here.  I remember it having just a few leaves -- like you, Sister Marsha, and you, Brother Marcus Levinson, who was just a young pup when we opened the doors and let the light o' God shine on out -- and now, we've got an entire tree full.  Some are smaller, and some of us are, well, bigger, if you know what I mean!  Ha ha!  We have over three thousand God-fearing, selfless people, to put things in perspective.  Several of you have known me for all of those fifteen-plus years.  Many of you have known me for nearly as long.

"I want to address something that's come up recently, something so heinous and unspeakable that I'm loathe to even broach the subject.  But I feel it's important to not let these ... rumors ... gain a foothold.

"As many of you have probably heard, a dear, dear member of our teen youth group, Brother Deshawn Clift -- who's eighteen -- has stated that there have been, between him and myself, certain ... indiscretions.

"Now, now!  I know it's hard to hear, but I want to talk about this and make sure we all know the truth of the matter:  Brother Deshawn is a, a troubled young man of eighteen -- which makes him legally an adult.  I don't know the movies he watches, what music he listens to, or whose company he keeps, but it is obvious that he's been taken over, his mind ... infected by the seed o' the devil!  His judgment has been clouded by Lucifer himself.

"One year ago next month will be the anniversary of the missionary trip Brother Deshawn and I took to Uganda, the month-long trip which our confused but good-hearted, green-eyed, athletic brother believes put the two of us in a compromising position with another young man who is not a 'prostitute' as some major news organizations have reported.  Mistakenly.

"Brothers and sisters, this troubles me deeply.  My job as pastor is to protect you all from the influence of the devil, and to have this filth slung up in our faces is ... is ... Oh, it just breaks my heart.  Now, as you all know, ever since the beginning I have taught that hommasexuality is a sin.  Plain and simple.  I've been married to my lovely wife, Denise, for almost twenty-five years, and although we don't have children -- for personal reasons which are entirely unnecessary to discuss here -- we have built for ourselves a wonderful, stable relationship impervious to the temptation to be unfaithful.

"Intimacy is a ... a sacred gift.  One that should not be taken for granted, even for husbands and the women to whom they're married.  Intimacy is something that should be kept for special occasions.  The secret, my friends, is to save it for ... once a year.  Maybe every few years.  As the Lord intended.

"Anyway, we need to pray for our dear Brother Deshawn.  Pray that God shows him the truth about what happened on that trip to Uganda, so that this veil of confusion can be lifted!  Pray that the Lord reveals to him the truth of my hired ASSISTANT and the fact that there was only one cot for the three of us to sleep on, as well as the reality of it being so hot in our tent that clothing had to have been shed so as not to suffer some sort of nighttime heatstroke.

"Pray that this disheartening, deceitful story goes back down to the brimstone it was written with so that we all can get back to worshipping Almighty God and our newly-inked television deal with the Christian Broadcasting Network does not suffer in any way from these falsehoods floating around.

"Thank you all.  Let us pray."

Hopped Up On Drugs

Harry lost everything, buying drugs from the thugs.

Now life don't seem so sunny, cause he's one sad little bunny.

Apple Of My Eye

In the fall of 2009 my friend Amber and I stopped in at a Best Buy, looking at laptop computers for Amber’s boyfriend. We made cursory passes by desktops, examining them in the way that all window shoppers do, when we came around to the computers adorned with little glowing apples. Before Amber went to the job of actually considering her options, she paused a moment at the Apple kiosk and stood there, as if dreaming.

The computers contrasted sharply with the simple, polished wood of their display table, which further set them apart from the rest of the brands. Everything else sat on black metal shelves, secured by black metal arms so that no one could pick them up and carry them away. The Apple notebooks had nothing keeping them there save for a thin white wire attached to a sensor. I’ve never attempted larceny, but I assumed that severing it would result in a lot of attention with loud sirens and flashing lights. Sitting that way, it truly felt like having one would be no more difficult than filling out a credit card application.

“My computer’s so old,” she said, tracing a finger along the lid of one of the shiny silver laptops. “I’d love to have a Mac, but…” She paused. “I don’t want to become one of those Mac snobs.”

I watched her finger as it followed the graceful curved edges of the otherwise rectangular lid, and I felt that familiar stirring, like heartstrings but in my back pocket.

Gadgets, to this day, are a big draw for me. As a self-proclaimed nerd, I have an eye for anything with glowing lights or blinking buttons, and the attraction is probably best described as “unhealthy.” Right up there with sugar and a mild self-loathing, technology could be described as one of my major addictions. Walking into an electronics store, I imagine that the sight of me is something like a kitten plopped into the middle of a room filled with yarn, if the yarn was dancing and the kitten hopped up on speed. God knows how much of my income I’ve squandered on technological trinkets that, really, are nothing more than flashy toys.

How, then, does one admit to already having become one of those snobs? I’d made the switch to Apple computers a year or so before, and I felt immediately uncomfortable in that moment, standing there looking at several overpriced products I had lying in wait for me back home. I went from feeling ashamed, then, to slightly defensive. I certainly didn’t think of myself as a snob, and as we walked away I ran through all my reasoning for wanting things like these and the justifications for already having them.

As a child, I loved toys that lit up and had switches and levers and made science-y noises. I would pretend that educational toys — things made of bright plastics that were supposed to teach a child how to count or multiply — instead made excellent controls for spaceships or a computer workstation at a distant outpost. Things didn’t even have to be toys. At my great-grandmother’s house, I would play with her melodica, a handheld musical instrument that looked like the result of a flute and a piano’s wild night in Vegas; the rows of black and white keys looked like buttons that would fire missiles or close a bulkhead against an advancing army of mutant soldiers.

Years later, in the middle of a camping trip where my mother and I seemed sentenced to boredom, she and I drove into town to look at the local shops. We were in the middle of a junk store, basically a glorified indoor garage sale, when I stumbled upon an entire computer priced at twenty-five dollars. The find felt like a prospector’s discovery of gold, and, without prodding, my mother asked if I’d like to have it. Never one to pass up a good deal, my mother, I think, overestimated the computer’s capabilities. When we got it back to our camper, we set it up on the foldaway dining table and plugged it in. From school and even at home, I was used to having a mouse and onscreen pointer to navigate things. But this thing was from a different era. All the monitor gave me was a black screen. That and a lime green cursor for typing commands in what I thought of as the old-fashioned way. At twelve years old and a child of the nineties, I had no idea how to work a computer that had possibly seen its prime during the Kennedy administration. So I was left typing little stories onto the screen, only to have no idea how to store or retrieve them when I shut the thing off.

The computer was a disappointment at best. Still, the sight of it, boulder-like and bowing the dining table, felt comforting in a way that got me through the rest of the camping trip. It even outweighed the fear I felt when using it, when the thought of it crashing through the table and crushing both of my legs covered me like a shadow.

In high school, when I got my first job, I passed up the opportunity to go to London on a class field trip so that I could buy my first real computer. The idea of going to another country felt promising in the way that adventure does when you’re a teenager and your departure date is still far off. Partly, it was my parents who diverted my desire to go. The trip was in the summer of 2002, not even a year after the events of September 11th. America had forced its way into the War on Terror, and being a U.S. citizen abroad — to my parents, at least — was like bringing a toasty roast beef sandwich into a bear cage.

“You could go to Europe,” my father said. “Or...you could get a brand new laptop.”

My mother chimed in, her voice masking her intention of me never leaving the country or even setting foot on a plane. “It’d be about the same amount of money. And it would last longer.”

All the wonders of the British Isles paled against the glowing promise of a shiny new computer, and in that moment, no matter how much I might have pretended to think about it, I was sold. As a family, we made the trip to a Best Buy, the nearest of which was almost forty minutes away, so that I could make my first foray into the world of zero percent financing.

In the way that these things go, the laptop ended up being outdated within eight months, and within shouting distance of its fourth birthday it quit on me, essentially retiring into the job of a thousand-dollar paperweight.

By this time I had a little better income, and so I purchased a new computer, an Apple laptop that I would turn around and resell less than a year later when a newer, better one caught my eye. I had no justification for doing it. I’d just finished paying off the desktop I’d bought, and there was nothing wrong with my laptop except for the fact that it lacked a few features of the shinier, slimmer models.

Standing there in the Best Buy, I had to wonder if I really was one of those Mac snobs. And not just a Mac snob, but a tech snob in general. What other reason could there be for my attitude toward technology? Should a man’s worth be measured in flashy gadgets, I guess I thought I might rank a few rungs higher than other people. But, as we walked away from the Macs and toward the other computers, perched on their demure black shelves reaching onward to infinity, it became clear that all my toys really are are testaments to the fact that I don’t have a life. While other people are out getting drunk in a friend’s cornfield or sleeping around in the backs of sports car, I’m sitting alone in a sea of glowing lights and blinking buttons, waiting for my next toy.

Fast Food Slogans From Red Light Districts

McDonald's

• "Over 1 Billion Serviced"

Burger King

• "Have A Four-Way"

Wendy's

• "Where's The Beefcake?"

Quiznos

• "Mmmm...sexy!"

Taco Bell

• "Think About Those Buns"

Dairy Queen

• "Hot Eats, Cool Teats"

Kentucky Friend Chicken

• "Finger Lickin' Good"