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Berkowitz floored it, his mint peppermint green 1989 Porsche 911 Targa sinking into the ess just like the late, great Bjorn Beerjiwoort carving the giant slalom and elbowing the gates at Calgary. Shuss! Crack! He jerked the custom mahagony Momo steering wheel left, the right, then left anew, zigging and zagging through the turns; the tires responded with squeals of delight, rubber seared off by friction. “Shrieking tires are happy tires,” the dealer, his fucking brother-in-law Mel, had said. Fuck those Sun Valley assholes, he thought. Do they have any idea how good I look? Specifically, Berkowitz argued, how fantastic do the matte black BBS racing rims I selected look right now, at full spin, up here among these ancient, majestic peaks? Jet black eyes speeding across meandering asphalt in the sky! “Yes!” “You like that, baby?” Berkowitz cocked his head back and laughed, pushing her head back down, his almond shaped nostrils greedily snorting the thin air with equine alacrity. His hair plugs jostled in the wind like vegetation on the sea bed. “I wasn’t speaking to you!” He scooted his ass forward, pumped the cremaster thrice and made damn sure his turgid schvantz stood tall in the sleeve of her throat. He downshifted into fourth and punched it around the next bend. Moose! The Targa performed a brilliant pirouette, punching through the guardrail and erupting snowily into the air above a ravine. Beerjiwoort skimmed the icy face, skis gleaming, tucked, dropping like a bullet. The screaming spectators lining the run warped in the convex mirror of his aerodynamic face shield. The speed of sound. Roaring. Tiny flags. The Porsche descended and Berkowitz pumped his salt malt past the punching bag. The tips of Beerjiwoort’s poles skipped along the surface of the crusty snow behind him, chipping off particles of ice like comet dust for the snow hares. The girl tumbled out as the Targa somersaulted through the air. Beerjiwoort’s tips crossed and adrenaline flooded his blood. Berkowitz took his feet off the pedals and the feeling of helplessness bloomed like a fireball. The skier hit the orange safety netting at impossible speed, shattering everything. Twigs in a blender. And how perfect they must look, Berkowitz thought, plunging noiselessly in the wind, like a dollop of ice cream spat from a straw. And then he thought, lastly: Ice cream! Beerjiwoort! Eject! Horse teeth! Eject! Beerjiwoort! Tooth whitening! Death! Death! Sun Valley smug monkey show you! Something! Oh god! Oh god! Oh god! Oh god! Mel, you fucking asshoooollleeeee…

Date Written: July 19, 2005
Author: Dick Vomit
Average Vote: 3.75

Comments:
07/25/2005 Dylan Danko: The short lept from the page with the grace and athleticism of Kschessinskaya's sublime and dramatic fouettes en tournants. Words, details swashed the dreamstage in a tidal bore of ferocity that recalled at once and simultaneously 3 different metaphors for such a tidal bore of ferocity. The author’s fingertips palpated the methyl methacrylate keys of his Inspiron XPS 2 with DDR 2 Dual Channel SDRAM as he reveled in his own content, self indulgent mediocrity.
07/25/2005 anonymous: Wake up on the wrong side of the bed, Danko, you grumpy fuckstick?
07/25/2005 Dylan Danko: Morning, author!
07/25/2005 Will Disney: I liked the "Moose!" part.
07/25/2005 TheBuyer: Dylan, it's sunny here.
07/25/2005 Dylan Danko: here too
07/25/2005 qualcomm: there's much to enjoy here, and much to dis-enjoy. "I wasn't speaking to you!" and "pumped his salt malt past the punching bag" were delightful.
07/25/2005 TheBuyer (4.5):
07/25/2005 The Rid: This is long.
07/25/2005 anonymous: THIS is long: 8========o
07/25/2005 The Rid: This is LONGER: 8===============o
07/25/2005 Litcube: 8==o
07/25/2005 Jon Matza (3): Writing seems unnecessarily florid & targets obvious. Also, "asshoooollleeeee" has only one 'e'.
07/25/2005 anonymous: have I ever written a short that did not receive at least one 3? must investigate...
07/25/2005 qualcomm (3.5): as i indicated, there are a bunch of choice lines, but the density of the metaphors makes this a tough rug to munch.
07/25/2005 Poop (3): Poop?
07/25/2005 anonymous: Sometimes I am thinking I (the 'thor) am charged with the offenses of the somewhat douchey characters in mein shorts. Like this twat here, glorifying himself fattily, imagining he is some object of glorious fabulosity, even in his dumb, cheesy, road-head death sequence. I am great! I am him! OOh, ohh. Etc.
07/25/2005 qualcomm: i didn't confuse you and berkowitz, author. i just thought the short, for all its gems, was a chore to get through. i think part of the problem is that many of the overwritten lines are boring ("Jet black eyes speeding across meandering asphalt in the sky!"), and others are funny/interesting. but they're all being "said" by the same narrator, so am i supposed to attribute only the good lines to you, and all the bad lines to the narrator/cheesy protag? the difference between the good lines and the bad lines is small enough that it's difficult to make the argument that this is one of those shorts where good writing and terrible writing are purposely used in equal measure. that is, i didn't detect any ironic quotation marks around the bad lines. were they really there?
07/25/2005 qualcomm: (i guess you're saying they were. the real question is, can you see how the "salt malt" line and "moose!" are fun to read, while awfulnesses like the "jet black eyes" line are just a pain in the ass?)
07/25/2005 anonymous: Garsh, I sure can see that. In the case of, like, MOOSE!, I really felt like even if you're a coked-out cunt of an idiot driving your speedy car and getting off on yourself and POORLY waxing poetic (like, the YES! is him being so very impressed with his shitty imagery), you get pretty real when you turn the corner and a double-sized horse with antlers is staring at you chewing a branch. But I feel ya -- sort of like Dick Vomit's short about the Poles, that flowery poetic language about the poles sure sucks ass, but DV slips in there sometimes. Hey, now that I think on it, sort of the same thing when DV did that short about the cunty hippie hanging at the Vatican. Long story short, though, is a) the line is definitely FINE and b) maybe I want a little more credit than I deserve. But I did picture Berkowitz as being an ugly narcissist and, in particular, the BBS rims graf is meant to be most illustrative of his poor taste in everything -- and how he simply adores himself.
07/25/2005 anonymous: But if I got this much 'splainin' to do, it obviousy deserves shit marks.
07/25/2005 anonymous: I just want a threeless short!
07/25/2005 qualcomm: gee, i thought those rims sounded real nice. can i get those for a ford taurus station wagon?
07/25/2005 anonymous: Ebay Motors.
07/26/2005 Dylan Danko: What have you done to my car, QC?? Wait until I tell my Daddy!
07/26/2005 Mr. Pony (4.5): I thought the style was ridiculous and funny, but I do agree that sometimes DV adds a distracting extra character (the narrator) whose word and phrase choices often make him/her (the narrator) the most noteworthy person in the story. This is, I think, sometimes an odd choice. The rating I give is not clean; as qualcomm suggested, I believe it to be the rough result of the good versus the dump-tent in this short. Plus a quarter point or so to welcome a unique voice back to the home page.
07/26/2005 Mr. Joshua (4): I'll give you a 4, V-Dog...Spa opens tomorrow, so I'm feeling like a nice guy. Not that this short doesn't stand on its own merits. But if you had tightened this baby up, maybe you'd be sitting on a fiver.
07/27/2005 Dylan Danko: Spa?