A Personal Story

By Jim Preist

2/20/2018
      It was Father’s Day, and I was just about as happy as a father could be. With my two beautiful children in the back seat, and my super-hot girlfriend at my side, I sped down the 10 towards the Santa Monica pier with a feeling of almost unbridled joy.
       An idyllic scene greeted us upon arrival. The summer sun was cheery and bright, but the gentle ocean breeze kept us from being uncomfortably hot. Glimmering waves broke lazily on the beach below and seagulls glided playfully by. I provided the kids with some deliciously toxic foodstuffs, a corrosive mixture of cotton candy and nachos, I think, and we strolled towards the ferris wheel like lambs to the slaughter.
      The line for the ferris wheel was long, needless to say. It was Father’s Day, after all. Jane (the aforementioned super-hot girlfriend) and I made sure the kids were situated in the queue and retired to a nearby bench for a much-needed cigarette.
       Scarcely had the nicotine begun to work its magic when my son ran up, eyes wide with agitation and arms flailing. “He took cuts! He took cuts!” Sensing the gravity of the situation, I adopted a strong fatherly tone. “Huh?” I said.
       “That guy took cuts! He stole our place in line!”
       Jane sprang to her feet. She was about 5 foot 4. Her strawberry blonde hair and freckled face gave her the appearance of being considerably younger than twenty-eight, which she was. Jane was an actress who was often cast as a troubled teenager rather than a troubled adult, which she also was. Beneath her demure exterior beat the heart of a feral beast, whose ferocity I had surmised but had yet to see realized.
      Suddenly I found myself at the edge of a crowd, witnessing a heated exchange between my chick and some dude. He, a black man of no inconsiderable musculature, was being vociferously abused by my sweet little Jane, and he returned her verbal assaults in kind. Things escalated, and suddenly he called her a name which is never used in polite company, but can serve as an acronym for Can’t Understand Normal Thinking.
      The gauntlet was thrown. I invited the gentleman to perform unnatural acts upon himself and further invited him to meet me on the field of honor, which he did forthwith. As I lay on my back receiving blow after painful blow, I remembered something very important about myself. “Oh yeah!” I thought, blood streaming from my nose. “I don’t know how to fight!”
       Luckily, Jane did. She grabbed dude’s camera and proceeded to smash it on his head until security arrived to stop the fight, if that it could be called.
       On the ride home, Jane turned to me and said, “Damn, baby. You can’t fight for shit!”. Only then did I realize the entire episode had been concocted to make that determination.
       Searching for a way out of the the shame spiral into which I’d been thrown, my son thwarted my escape.
       “Dad!” he said. “That wasn’t the guy!”