I like to cruise the streets sometimes, because I am a teenager and I feel compelled to do it. It’s not that I like the action of getting in my car and wasting gas money and wandering around this town aimlessly; I like the way that it feels to do something I’m probably supposed to be doing.
The car? Thank you for asking. It is a Mercedes Benz — my father’s car. It is brown on the outside, meticulously painted (the fine craftsmanship of European car makers, of course) and the interior is just plain lit fam.
My gosh it’s just the dopest damn thing you’ll ever see. The seats recline and the dashboard is wood grain. This is a vehicle built for a man to drive around town in. So I cruise past deco hues on some avenues that I’ve never been down before. There are women on the sidewalk just walking around and I’m thinking, “Hey bitches, grab a ticket and get in line for a cruise in the dopest-ass vehicle you’ve ever set your dumbass feet in. Stupid fucking bitches.”
I won’t say that out loud, though. My mother calls me a “gentleman,” and I think she might be the smartest lady I know. She gestures to her coworkers that I’m single and that I’d make a killer boyfriend for any of their girls. What my mother doesn’t know is that I already know that I would make a wicked-good boyfriend and her dumbass coworkers probably do to. Like Betty. She’s fat, right? She’s like the stupidest woman in the whole universe. She thinks that toast and butter is a decent snack! What a fucking hag! And even she’d be an idiot to think that her daughter wouldn’t be absolutely blessed to have a bad boy like me with this insanely nice Mercedes Benz.
It’s night time, but I let my sunglasses fall onto the bridge of my nose and all the colors of the world are suddenly drowned in the gauzy tint of city lust, making me feel extra-fly while I take a right turn on a cross street past a bar called “Louie’s house.”
I’ll go there when I’m old enough, I’m sure, and lots of the guys inside will spot my car through the window and start talking me up and say shit like, “Hey, man, you seem like a cool guy, we should go out somewhere else tonight.” They’ll start sweating while they look at the car through the big bay window near the jukebox and they’ll lick their lips, imagining that they’re tasting the luscious chocolaty paint job that was so lovingly applied by, no doubt, a team of aristocratic craftsmen.
I won’t let them get near it, though. I’ll say something like, “Sorry, my brother, but she’s in mint condish and I don’t want you messin’ her up with the stench of booze and that whack cologne you bathed yourself in.”
I decide to turn in to a lower-middle class neighborhood. Driving by the houses, I can feel all the middle-agers in their house droolin’ over this crazy whip I’ve got. They’ve got to be staring through those Venetian blinds, thinking, “I gotta stick around with this hog and raise these two shit kids while that wild boy is out there driving that hella Benz? Just shoot me!”
I turn back around the street and head down the road to my house. It’s a nice stretch of avenue, flanked on both sides by some of THE HOTTEST SPOTS that the city has to offer. There’s clubs, (I hear some of them are even playing some crazy new “house” music from Germany, which sounds extra dope), bars, and even one of those Dandy Bear places where you can shoot zombies in that House of the Dead game and then you can also jump into a pit of plastic balls and sometimes you might even drown.
A voice comes over the radio, interrupting my Celine Dion session, to announce that, “That kid driving down the street in the dope Benz has to be the flyest boy we’ve ever seen. We’d like to give that man a free back rub and miniature palm tree. All he’s gotta do is come to the back alley of Mulaney and Drews Ave by the pillar of salt.”
So of course I floor the car into a u-turn. Finally, I’m going to be getting some recognition for all I do for the people of this town by driving around in this burnin’ hot rod. Even to to find myself at the intersection of Sodom and Gomorrah, where I heard a woman once looked somewhere or something and turned into a big salt stick, I will definitely do that shit for a back rub AND a miniature palm tree. Can you imagine how jealous my friends will be when they come into my room? They’ll be like, “Alright, so what did you want to show us?”
Johnny will look at my stack of brand new Pokemon cards (I think there’s gonna be a Dratini in one of them, I can just feel it) and he’ll say, “So what, you got Pokemon cards?” Then his eyes will scan the room and land on that little palm tree on my desk and he’ll just have a fucking seizure. Then I’ll have to take him to the hospital in the Benz and I’ll be an absolute HERO. My gosh I just can’t wait for that little tree.
So I get to the corner of S & G and this guy flags me down. This must be the palm tree guy. can’t wait for a cool-ass little palm tree. It’ll be like I’m at the beach ALL the time, even when I’m doing my stupid-ass math homework or jerking off.
So I pull my car up to him and I see he’s got a couple other people there. One of them is probably going to give me the back rub and then they’ll present me with the palm tree. I hop out of the Benz, click the locks on, and strut over to them.
The guy who flagged me down takes my hand and asks me to sit down. He tells me to put my hand on the floor, and I do, because I think I’m about to get a little palm tree. He smashes my hand with a hammer. I’m in a lot of pain. Then the other guys come up to me and start kicking the shit out of me. One of them spits in my mouth and laughs and then starts stepping on the hand that the other guy crushed with the hammer.
Then one guy comes out with a miniature palm tree and I’m thinking that it was worth all the pain for that slick little tree. Then he takes the hammer and smashes it. I’m crying like crazy and I don’t like to cry because my father beats the snot out of me when I do. One guy roots around in my pockets for the keys to my Benz and they drive off with it. Fuck the Benz. I can’t believe that all this time I was worried about a stupid car when all I’d ever wanted was a little palm tree for my desk. I could have had it all.