As a Man, you have to be able to withstand a truly horrifying amount of torture. Lesser creatures might break and spill their guts, but a Man would never do that. I, myself, have endured torture of a most despicable sort. Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll tell you about it.
Do you remember the scene in the recent James Bond movie Casino Royale, when James Bond was tied naked to a chair with the bottom cut out? (I mean the chair’s bottom was cut out, not James Bond’s.) Remember when the bad guy, in an attempt to make James tell him the password, took a heavy rope with a knot tied in the end, and swung the rope up underneath the chair very fast so that it slammed repeated into James Bond’s 007s? I faced the exact same situation, except I wasn’t naked, there wasn’t a bottomless chair, and there wasn’t a bad guy swinging a heavy rope with a knot in it.
What happened was, several years ago my wife and I were returning from a trip to Jamaica. Now, we’re not the type to just jet off to Jamaica on a whim; we’re more the type to jet off to Publix to get more chocolate-chip muffins. But we had scrimped and saved for a long time to give ourselves a three-day trip to Jamaica without the kids. After months of saving, there was about $11.43 in our Jamaica fund, so we put the rest of the trip on a credit card, which we’ll never pay off and which is torture of a different sort.
Anyway, we enjoyed a fun-filled 56 hours in Jamaica, which during our visit experienced approximately 53 ½ hours of rain. (Actual Jamaican quote: “It never rains this long here! I guess you folks just got lucky!”) When our visit was over, we boarded the Air Jamaica plane (airline slogan: “More than 40 percent of our pilots don’t smoke ganja … every day”) and settled in to our seats. I was on the aisle, and my wife was by the window. You’ll see why this detail is important in a second.
A few moments after we got settled, a very large Jamaican woman boarded the plane and took the aisle seat in the row in front of us. I say “Jamaican woman,” but it was difficult to say exactly WHAT she was, because there was a visible cloud, wave after wave, of truly nostril-raping stink coming off her. It made the air shimmer, like the heat waves on a summer day rising from hot asphalt that smells like a stinky Jamaican woman. Between the stink cloud and the watering of my eyes, all I could really see was a large mass wearing a floral-print muumuu holding a purse, or possibly a book on Rastafarianism. The mass might have been a musk ox with heightened fashion sense, for all I could tell.
Naturally, as a caring and compassionate husband, my first thought was of my wife – specifically, if I could get her to change seats with me so she’d suffer the worst of the stink instead of me. She, however, had very alertly sized up the situation and quickly pretended to be asleep with her head against the window. I was obviously going to have to withstand this torture alone.
And then – THEN, my friends – it got infinitely worse. The Jamaican woman/musk ox decided her purse/Rastafarian book needed to go into the overhead storage compartment. She stood up, RAISED HER ARMS, and opened the compartment above her seat. And a moment later, she realized there wasn’t any storage space there (it was apparently full of approximately 400 pounds of marijuana), and OPENED THE COMPARTMENT DIRECTLY ABOVE MY HEAD. So now my face – and what’s worse, my nose – was now as close to Ground Zero as it could get without physically touching her.
Remember the scene in the wonderful 1950s real-life documentary movie “The Blob,” when the Blob oozes over a diner, completely enveloping it and threatening to suffocate Steve McQueen? And how, when another character shoots the Blob accidentally with a fire extinguisher, and Steve McQueen realizes the Blob is hurt by cold, he says “Now we can fight it! Thank God it’s not a hellaciously stinky Jamaican woman, or we’d be doomed!”
This stink was like that. It grabbed me like a muscular octopus, a stinky Jamaican octopus with 4,200 arms. I’d thought it was bad before, but that was a stroll through a flower garden in comparison. Every nostril hair on the right side of my nose was seared off. This happened more than six years ago now, and those nostril hairs STILL haven’t grown back.
Finally the woman stored her baggage and sat back down. We took off, and I spent the brief flight to Orlando attempting to ram my head through the plane’s window for a breath of fresh air. I wasn’t successful.
When we landed, the Jamaican woman started to get up to retrieve her bundle from the overhead compartment. I immediately leaped to my feet, grabbed something from the compartment without looking, and shoved it into her hands. “I think this is yours,” I said. She was very grateful that I had given her the package without her having to search for it. I gallantly said “Don’t mention it,” right before dying of asphyxiation.
No, actually, I survived and didn’t succumb to the torture, just like James Bond in Casino Royale. Both James and I used our training, our willpower, and our Manly self-control to withstand the pain. Of course, James had it much easier than I did; all he had to do was endure a few shots to his scrotum. I bet he'd have folded like a cheap suit if he'd had to face the stinky Jamaican musk oxtopus.
(c) 2012 John Puckett
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