The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Please, Drew Barrymore, don't do a dating reality show! Plus: Christmas at 30 Rock, another Gossip Girl couple, and since when is Elisha Cuthbert 'sloppy seconds'?
When the AOL I shorted at 82 shot up into the 90s last week, I felt like a victim, a chump, a homeless person getting arrested for the holidays. But then I thought: Why waste precious energy punishing yourself when you can get Rudy Giuliani, New York City's vindictive mayor, to do it for you? I'd let my husband play Rudy, only poor Max is off in France trying to raise money to film this middle-income family that's torn between cedar and vinyl siding. Ever-resourceful, I retire to my couch for a solo sex break.
To get Rudy excited, I taxi down to City Hall and picket on the steps, something he has expressly forbidden. Within seconds he arrives (hopping mad!), handcuffs me and takes me into custody, violating my First Amendment rights!
When Mom got arrested last March protesting the forty-one bullets that Rudy's "Special Unit" cops shot into that unarmed immigrant, Amadou Diallo, she was held in some police official's office with Susan Sarandon. But I'm no movie star. To Rudy I'm no better than a killer or a jaywalker, so he throws me into a terrible little cubicle furnished with nothing but a lidless toilet and a stained mattress. When I hit the wall, the buttons pop open on my blouse, and as I struggle to free my hands, my breasts are revealed, like a Columbian Madonna's. We both stare at them for a second, watching my nipples pucker.
"You're daring me to ban those, aren't you?" he leers. I nod defiantly, egging him on.
"I'm going to do to you what I did to this city," he threatens.
"You mean stop and frisk me," I taunt, "or clean me up?"
He douses me with a bucket of cold Spic 'n' Span and starts scrubbing imaginary elephant dung off my chest.
"And I'm selling that . . . ," he leers, ripping my slip-skirt to expose my pulsating vulva, the 42nd Street of my body, "to Disney."
"As a family entertainment center?" I ask ever so innocently. He tells me that any more than 40% smut out of that mouth of mine and he's closing it down tighter than a porn shop. Then he slaps me hard with a wet blanket.
"Thanks, Rudy, I feel so much cleaner now," I sneer sarcastically.
A cold glint in his eye shimmers like a cop's badge. He is seeing in me everybody who has ever defied or embarrassed him. I'm Rudy Crew now, dissing him on the school voucher issue. I'm a million black youths, marching through Harlem over his limp veto. I'm that librarian with no priors whose car got impounded for a tenth of a point on the Breathalyzer during the anti-drunk-driver crackdown. I'm that artist, Steve Powers, whose home got raided by police on a "grafitti" rap right after he satirized the mayor.
"I'm a nice guy," Rudy says, "but you wanted trouble."
He beats me with a roll of desk reports until I faint, and when I come to, he's standing there in my dress, pointing a big subpoena at me.
"I'm going to be your next senator," he hisses.
For the first time, I feel real fear. With a gasp I realize that in my madcap haste to get this scenario going, we never established a safe word. Worked up as he is, the more I yell "Stop! Don't stick that subpoena up my ass!" the more he's going to think I really want him to. What words can cool him down? He's getting so close I can see the pores on his nose.
"Press conference!" I shout, inspired.
Bingo. He snaps out.
"Ha ha. The subpoena isn't for you," he chortles. "It's for Hillary."
I'm so relieved I experience instant hostage syndrome. Helpless, I feel I need this madman to protect me from crack-crazed turnstile jumpers and weirdos who commit gridlock. Fondly, I remember what a riot he was on Saturday Night Live, before he started courting the upstate vote.
But he's no longer joking. He lights up a big joint and tells me that if I inhale one puff he'll send me up the river for fifteen years on the Rockefeller drug laws. At the thought of this little tyrant stripping me of my precious freedoms, not to mention my public funding, I come with a scream.
"When I get through with you, whore," he's saying, "you'll be selling yourself in mega-malls from Red Hook to NoHo." But I'm done; he's history.
"I would never come for you for real, Rudy," I tell him, as I return to my tangerine iMac. "That was a fantasy." Like your marriage, I want to add. But I don't, because, really, why be mean?
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
