Bo Knows Ethics

 

In Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho, the psychotic narrator Patrick Batemen muses, "Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?" While he spends most of the book either describing peoples' outfits or brutally torturing them, this meditative moment manages to spawn a couple of interesting questions. Like most human beings, I have often pondered the "root of evil." In spite of common wisdom, I've decided that it's not money based on my refusal to define apples as currency. For one thing, they do grow on trees, and I know for a fact that you can get them free in hotel lobbies. Yet, by the same token, I know that money can make us do mysterious things.

 

When you're in the second grade, the concept of money is just catching up with the concept of wanting stuff. As I've grown older, I feel that this connection has actually dissipated. When I buy a song on iTunes and it immediately shows up in my music library, I am completely convinced that no money has changed hands. Though they email "receipts" that say things like "Slayer 'Angel of Death' $0.99. Nickelback 'How You Remind Me' $0.99. Bill Withers 'Lean On Me' $0.99," I look at these as mildly amusing practical jokes. But when you're in second grade, you deal only in hard cash and those paper tickets you get from Skee-Ball machines at Chuck E. Cheese's—five-hundred yellow tickets translate roughly into a Chinese finger trap and Whoopee Cushion. The tangible immediacy of this commercial exchange avoids the abstract concepts of "electronic transactions" and "credit cards."

When I was in second grade, I spent most of the money that came into my  hands on trading cards. My allowance did not fund big ticket purchases like Nintendo games and Lego fortresses, and "saving" money did not fit into the immediacy of the cash-for-stuff economic model ingrained in my young brain. Sometimes I would buy candy, but once I accidentally bought Halls thinking that "lozenges" was an adult word for delicious sweets. Needless to say, I was sorely mistaken. After that I almost always bought cards.

 

            Back then, my bedroom closet was full of meticulously arranged shoeboxes and trapper keepers full of trading cards, as well as one Perrier Juoet aluminum case which I must have pilfered at the tail end of a dinner party while playing "Spy-O-Matic." Spy-O-Matic was a game I invented in which my brother, my friend Will, and I would assault our elders by detonating stink bombs in their general vicinity. In retrospect, its objectives were more suited to the dossier of a terrorist than a spy, but we cared little for these distinctions. The main objective was to use a combination of stealth and foul smells to incite mayhem.

 

But when it came to my card collection, order and precision reigned supreme. The cards I collected were baseball, basketball, and football; they were categorized first by sport, then by team and position. I even had a special section for "mistakes," such as a card I had that said "Tim Brown" but featured a picture of a different player. At the time I found this hilarious, but now I just find it unprofessional.

 

One day I decided that I should re-organize the cards by value, but this endeavor took so long that by the time I finished, a new Beckett was published with different prices. At that point I just lost heart and reverted to the old method, which also took ages. But the reason I wanted to categorize the cards by value was because I had started a side hustle to supplement my allowance: with no other recourse for acquiring Nintendo games beyond birthdays, Christmases, and bouts of influenza, I started selling cards with my partner-in-crime, Audrius.

 

As his name would suggest, Audrius was slightly odd; he wore a head of long shaggy hair and spent his formative years traveling through Africa with missionaries. The first and last sleepover I had at his house involved watching Child's Play, microwaving a tomato until it exploded, and performing a choreographed dance to a Jackson 5 song for his extended family. We woke up at 5am and he asked me if I wanted to play basketball. I said "yes," but unfortunately he didn't actually have a basketball hoop so we just lurked around his neighborhood, playing in other peoples' backyards until they woke up and chased us away. All things considered, the sleepover was utterly terrifying.

 

            On Wall Street they say that once you make your first sale, it's like the greatest rush you've ever felt in your life. On the streets they say that hustling is not a job, it's a religion. In fact, I'm not sure if anyone says either of these things, but one thing I know for sure is that my first sale fed some entrepreneurial fire burning deep within my impish soul. From the get-go, Audrius and I had only one client, but he was a good one for three main reasons: he was rich, he had practically no knowledge of sports, and best of all, he came to us. As we swapped cards and analyzed stats during lunch and break times, "Evan" (if that was his real name) would fester around us, watching hopefully. One day, he finally worked up the nerve to move in.

 

"Hey guys, can I get some of those cards?" he asked nervously.

"Well, what you got?" Audrius snapped back.

"I don't have any cards," he replied dejectedly, looking down at his too-clean Velcro sneakers. "But I've got some money?"

Before Audrius could speak, I swooped in for the kill. "Here's what I'll do for you, Evan…" I quickly shuffled through my stock and compiled a stack of throwaway cards and doubles. In order to maintain some semblance of "value," I put a Bo Jackson card on top and told him that it was worth twice as much as a normal card because he played two sports. In retrospect, this was only partially false. (Outside the boy's bathroom there was a poster of Jackson in a leather chair beneath the words, "Bo Knows Reading," which also worked in my favor.) Finally, I eyeballed the stack and placed it in a plastic carrying case.

            "Twenty dollars," I said. He extracted a crumpled bill from his Osh Kosh B'Gosh corduroys and handed it to me. And just like that, I had a business. It was all instinct—a hustler's spirit, period. 

 

Because I was at that age when none your pants have pockets, I had to tuck the twenty in between my other cards on the way out of school, arousing a suspicion in my au pair that she wisely decided to ignore so that she could spend more time doing "Danish" things. As time went on, the transactions quickened. Evan didn't even seem to look at the cards. He just handed over the money eagerly, and within the first month of business I had hustled my way to $150 in cold cash. I purchased a celebratory pair of Jordan VIIIs (the colorful ones with the criss-crossed strap across the laces—real hot). When queried about the source of my newfound wealth, I told my mom that I had found the money in the woods behind our house.

 

I didn't mind selling worthless cards to Evan. If he wanted to give me massive sums of cash in exchange for baseball cards that I didn't want, I wasn't going to stop him. I didn't even mind hiding the money from my au pair, because she once tricked me into ordering a bunch of WWF posters from the back of a magazine that never arrived. But lying to my mom filled me with a nameless dread that festered deep inside of me.

 

            The fast money and gear to match came with a price tag that I never could have predicted. In the music video for "I Wish," the ghost of R. Kelly's mom asks her son, "What does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?" That song was not yet out at the time, but this sentiment rankled clairvoyantly within me. I had sold my soul to the devil, and worst of all, the price was cheap. If the internet, let alone Ebay, had been available at the time, I probably could have gotten a better price.

 

My double life began to take its toll. While the "good little boy" sat at the dinner table and finished his leak and potato soup, the little imp within assailed his conscience. One night, my mom went out to a dinner party. I was not invited because apparently, Spy-O-Matic had been disallowed at that particular household. When she returned, she found me crying uncontrollably in her bed, ready to let the truth out in one disjointed stream of garbled confession. For the most part, I blamed the whole thing on Audrius, who I think she was pretty distrustful of in the first place. She didn't get angry or punish me; instead, she said, "I never would have expected this from you," and left me to whimper in my room, staring into my closet. I leafed through one of the trapper keepers and found a Deon Sanders baseball card. Then I found a Deon Sanders football card, which was worth more. Yet they depicted the same person. How could one man carry two different values? My nine-year-old mind grappled with this quandary like a Rubik's Cube.

 

The next day, my mom called Evan's parents. Apparently, Evan had stolen over $500 from their "emergency fund," which they probably regretted "hiding" in their sock drawer. Together, the wise elders decided to stage a chaperoned meeting in which Evan and I were to exchange all goods that had changed hands and bury the hatchet once and for all.

 

To this day, the scene plays in my mind like a movie: On a dim Fall morning, we meet them outside on the walkway leading to our house. For some reason we come out just as they are arriving, I'm not really sure why but I think it's probably irrelevant. Anyways, I march forward from the front door with my mother lagging about a half a step being me. Evan's mother drags him by the ear with a look of unrestrained fury. Evan looks down at the ground and says, "Here," as he hands me a shoebox with every card I had ever given him. I take it and said, "Here," as I handed him about 20% of the money he has given me, for I had spent the rest on the shoes and a pair of athletic shorts. The mother's exchange a few muffled words and then Evan's mom hauls him away, hassling and berating him, while my mom and I turn back to the house in silence. As the door closes, the market deterrent of motherly disappointment squeezes the spirit out of the young hustler, leaving a specter of the American Dream to soar depressingly over the closing credits.

 

Sometimes I tell myself I should be pleased that the moral low point of my life to date occurred in second grade. Since then I've had a few slip-ups here and there, like the time I used my dog Biko as a scapegoat to cover up my defilement of our household, but never again did I pursue such a systematically unethical code of conduct as I did at the age of nine. Lurking amongst pairs of basketball shoes and oversized hooded sweatshirts, the prepubescent skeletons that I left in my closet that year still make me shudder. (I realize that I am talking about an actual closet in my college dorm room and a fictional closet in my mind. Just to be clear, no children died.)

 

Furthermore, the specter of the American dream—that fierce entrepreneurial spirit that flared up in such concentrated form, never to show its face again—still haunts the closet where I once kept my cards. It no longer has wings to fly, but it can never truly be killed, for it is not "of the flesh." As I think about this ghost of the past, I sometimes wonder where the profligacy of those days came from—was it something I did, or something I was?

 

In the song "I'm A Hustla," rapper and convicted coke-dealer Cassidy brags, "In fifth grade I was hustling my Genesis games." Well, in second grade I was hustling my baseball cards. Could the streets have been mine? Sometimes I wonder what could have been, but I have to check myself. I know now that the hustler's life is not the life for me. These days, I couldn't even sell water to an empty well. On the contrary, I would probably just give it to the well for free, knowing full well that water in the Northeast is far from scarce. I guess something has gone missing.

 

But for whatever reason, that one year was different. My mysterious greed and duplicity ran deep. In fact, it ran so deep that I once forged a signature on a card of Charles Barkley with a black Sharpie as an excuse to bump up the price. On my first grade report card, I received a C+ for "Citizenship," but surprisingly, this was not my worst grade.

 

            My worst grade was a C- in "Handwriting." Thankfully, we now have computers, but there's no quick fix for poor citizenship, and there probably never will be.

June 2, 2007

In New York, the bar du jour is often the place where Mischa Barton allegedly threw up or Nicole Ritchie had her first regularly cycled period since she was 12. The obsession with revoltingly thin celebrities and talentless harlots is enough to make you want press a button that says, "End the world." Most of the celebrity "It" girls are actually somewhat ross but are famous for being rich and acting like utter twats.

In England, however, there is a little thing called soaps. They have names like Eastenders, Coronation St., and Emerdale Farm. They feature real people who are really, really ross. The storylines are rife with low class people who work in cafes, celebrate Christmas by having a pint, and lose all their money and self-respect to hard cunts who rule small swaths of London and rural England with an iron fist. In short, they are the absolute dog's bollocks.

There is nothing glamorous about the human beings who populate British soaps. In fact, everything about them is pretty depressing. So when an attractive girl does come along, albeit in the common, British sense of the word, she is basically seems like a perfect 10 and radiates through every scene with the intensity of a thousand suns.

One such lady is Zoe Slater off Eastenders. Within the microcosm of ross, gruff Londoners, she is undeniably boomting. In spite of the fact that her bangs look like they were cut with a bowl on her head, she looks pretty dope and bare dudes in Albert Square try to cop off with her.

Today I met Zoe Slater, aka Michelle Ryan, when she came into my work premise to promote her upcoming role as the "Bionic Woman" on NBC. After she had been thoroughly questioned about boring things like science fiction and moving to America, I swooped in.

"I loved you in Eastenders."

Her eyes lit up. "Really, you watched it? Do you know the Slaters?"

DO I know the Slaters!?!? Only the most infamous family in the Square! We spoke for a minute. Maybe two. I told her my grandparents live in South London. She told me the beer in the Queen Vic is fake and horrible. She was very beautiful, even more so than on-screen.

I do not expect Zoe Slater to remember me. That would be insane. I make a horrible first impression. But when she is being masturbated over by fanboys at Comi-Con and tracked by TMZ.com gossiphounds everytime she steps out the door, I hope she remembers that I loved her before the bionic appendages and six-figure salary.

I loved her when she was just Zoe Slater.

 

Gritz's Guide to the Street - May 1, 2007

Bell – A telephone call.

Biffa – A rotund woman. E.g. Oprah is a biffa but she’d still get wokked out, blatantly bruv!

Brewed – Drunk, inebriated, intoxicated. E.g. I got well brewed down the pub last night, blud!

Bowl – To enter/exit a location in a particular rapid and aggressive manner. E.g.

Bugger – Someone who partakes in buggery.

Butterz – Ugly, hideous. See also: minging. E.g. Men & Motors was crap last night—all the girls were butterz!

 

Cooching/Cotching – Chilling out, relaxing. E.g. I feel to just cooch out and bun a zoot.

Chapping – Extreme cold; freezing temperatures. E.g. I do not wish to commit a felony, but I must wear a hoodie because it’s chapping outside!

Cushdy – Used to articulate pleasure or approval. See also: safe.

 

D-low – Down low. Used to express a desire for secrecy. E.g. Last night I got brewed and ragged out a Ginster’s pasty, but let’s keep that on the D-low.

Fit – Attractive.

Fraff – Bollocks, nonsense. Chatting fraff: spreading falsehoods. E.g. Don’t chat fraff.

Gash – 1) Bad, unfavorable (Scottish). 2) Pussy, girls, etc. E.g. There’s bare fit gash at Yates tonight.

 

Jog on – Expression that translates roughly to “keep it moving.” E.g. What do you think you’re staring at mate? Jog on, my son!

Jook – To stab someone.

 

Licked – Stoned, drunk, out of it.

Lurgers – HIV.

 

Raggings/Ragged – Refers to sexual intercourse. Girls can be “ragged” or “ragged out.” E.g. 

Rucked – Beat up, knocked about.

 

Scooby – Used to express befuddlement. I don’t have a Scooby à Scooby Doo à Clue. Derived from Cockney Rhyming Slang.

Switching/Switch –

Sound – Good, cool, excellent. See also: cushdy, safe.

 

Tinkle – Phone call.

 

Waxed – Similarly to ragged; euphemism for sexual intercourse. Suggests the Mister Miyagi “wax on, wax off” motion used while boning chicks.

 

April - 25, 2007

MEMOIRS OF AN ASIAN.
Gritz interviews a young lady about sex.

How many dudes have you got it crackin with? i currently have 5 lovers, each have their assets
 
 
What is the ideal johnson size? In your experience, what is average? gillette can is ideal, and i can't really give you an average in my experience because i've juiced like 2 guys who are gillette cans and the rest are all like pez dispensers in comparison, which i am hoping to god is not actually average
 
 
You claim you will juice in exchange for access to an open bar. Is this a general rule? yes, definitely. if a man is offering to buy me my favorite top shelf liquor (grey goose pear, also not top shelf but i love absolut ruby red) for the rest of my life, he is in. however, he must be reasonably attractive. if he is not attractive, what a girl should do is *not* put out so that the guy keeps treating her to nice meals and expensive drinks and then continue to not put out until she finally starts thinking maybe she should just to be nice, and then move to a different city to avoid the dilemma altogether.
 
 
What is the weirdest thing a dude has done in the sack? moan like a girl
 
 
What is more offensive to you: facials or the term "beef curtains"? if i were a lesbo i would say beef curtains sound delish, but it may just be because i love beef.
 
 
Tell us about Brazil. In a sex way. always use condoms or you'll get AIDS.

 

April 18, 2007

GRITZ RESPONDS TO A DILEMMA

The Dilemma:

They say a problem shared is a problem halved...bollocks. Such shoddy optimism has no place here. This is just an attempt at a good old fashioned desperate brainstorming session with no actual deluded hope of solving a damned thing.
 
The Problem: An insanely jealous girlfriend, an annoyingly ever present former lay, my increasingly poor record of hooking up with girls who are mental and mans ever increased access to information
 
The thing is I've got this Facebook page...much like MySpace sans the annoying friend requests from pre-pubescent retards and label lackeys trying to get you to listen to their mans music. The problem is I once made the bad decision to slip one to a girl I met at a friends wedding. You how you do at weddings. There's all these women standing around feeling like their time is running out and they'd better find them a man soon and there you are in a nice suit looking all sincere...it's like female Viagra. Anyway I got mine and I wasn't in any way about to extend the relationship any longer than needed...a week prior T Wise had even witnessed my total disregard for a girl still standing there in a towel while I got dressed to leave her in a hotel room before we swanned off to the Notting Hill Carnival.
 
That was the old Tes...I've changed dammit...my past indiscretions should not come back to haunt me. Anyway, they have.
 
This girl apparently also has a Facebook page and it's surprisingly easy to look through your friends friends to find old acquaintances you had long forgotten (or in this case long held deep rooted disdain for)
 
Oviously the inevitable and dreaded "friend request" has come my way with a message attached "Don't you DARE even think about blocking me..."
 
Notice the capitals used to type "DARE" - this woman is crazy. Now on MY page I have my friends and of course my girl. She's lovely most of the time...and then something inside her breaks and she becomes a regular woman...insane. If she spots some broad I used to smash on my friends list I might as well call it a day and move to the Middle East for some peace and stability. If I hit the "Deny" key I have no idea what the hell could happen...the repurcusions could be dramatic.
 
What do you great minds think of the fine mess I done got myself into?


The Response:

That is the type of Catch-22 my wankstain of a classmate probaly had in mind when he launched the Facebook. I have from day one firmly refused to be "friends" with my lady on facebook on the grounds that juicing already makes us better friends than any online social network ever could. To be fair, she had already put out a preemptive strike on our potential "facebook friendship" by disabling her "wall," the area on someone's profile where you can publicly write rude graffitti. Knowing that I would not even get to write things like "you have nice juggs" on her wall extinguished any desire for friendship.
 
Of course, none of this helps you...or does it!? Clearly you cannot reject the bird you wokked out at the wedding after that aggressive request. However, if she is as mental as you say, she will probably firebomb your wall with all sorts of insinuative nonsense that jealous girls love to say on the internet. A broad--it was Merritt, T.Wise!--used to write shit like that on my wall when she decided that we had "dated" after she guilt-tripped me into making out with her...didn't want to be rude, get me? Luckily, my girlfriend was able to see that she was delusional based on mutual friends...the JET!
 
So, unless your girlfriend knows every single facebook friend that you have and becomes suspicious when any female she doesn't know pops up on the list, I would just suggest disabling your wall and taking away the psycho's ability to comment on your photos. These are the only real public avenues of attack.
 
I have watch my roommate cheddar ted scroll through his ex's wall and facebook pictures while listening to sad pop punk, and it is not a pretty "site."
 
hope this helps,
 

Gritz

April 15, 2007

Hello dromes, and welcome to me. I am Gritz, aka America's Favorite Intern, aka "That Dude (who deuced in his pants)." While these are indubitably my names, sometimes I have been mistaken for "asshole," "cracker," and "Mr. Meanie." Actually, these mistaken identities all took place on a single occasion...respectively. Many dudes in Cambridge, Mass., called me an "asshole" when I wore a "Boston Sucks" teeshirt around Harvard Yard. I was attempting to update the rumored Evil Kenievel stunt in which he motorcycled through Somalia with steaks strapped to his person. A girl in my 5th grade class who was adopted from Ecuador called me "cracker" for alledely cutting her in the hot lunch line. I told her we were having pizza, not platanos, but she still got heated. Finally, my girl once called me "Mr. Meanie" when I ranked on her for speaking English poorly. At first I thought she called me "Mr. Feeney," which would have been quite flattering given his penchant for solving complex moral quandaries.

So, I urge you to kick back, relax, change your underwear, and enjoy the lush climate of Gritz's World. Here in Gritz's World, the sky is not the limit. The thing after the sky is. Here, you can literally enjoy all-you-can-eat sushi and take a dump that smells like an aqaurium. Moreover, you can go to a real aquarium and see a smorgasboard of interesting creatures. What you can't do--and the authorities of Gritz's World are very strict about this--is type "Fire, fire, the chatroom's on fire!" in the crowded corridors of nakashon.com. Because that's just out of order.


Bang out of order.