Ye Royal Pain in the Patootey
By
Me
INT. BAR
Linda sits at the bar and receives her drink from the bartender. Stanley sits to her left. Justin appears as if from nowhere and leans on the bar next to her.
JUSTIN Let’s cut the crap.
LINDA Excuse me?JUSTIN Let’s slice the feces. Let’s whittle a pointy end onto a soap bar and shiv a guy in the bowels. You light a flame in my heart.
Justin walks a hand like a spider across the bar and up her glass, where he has it tap dance on the lip.
LINDA I don’t feel comfortable with your use of metaphors. If you have something to say to me, speak plainly.
JUSTIN Oh! I can feel friction between us. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. A boy scout spins a piece of wood on a notch in another piece of wood. A handsome fella siphons gas from a Ducati 848 into a low-end vodka bottle and waits for a spark inside the girl of his dreams to ignite it.
He stops talking and stares at her drink, his hand still dancing on the rim.
LINDA God dang it. I hope you actually put gasoline in a vodka bottle and have some plan for spontaneous human combustion, because I really hate metaphors.
She lifts the drink to her lips, his hand still dancing on the rim, sniffs it, then sips it. She’s disappointed to find that it does not taste like gasoline. She sets it down.
(CONTINUED)
CONTINUED: 2.
JUSTIN Tonight was a blip on my radar, but you have made it a continent. My heart is an F1-50 carrying nuclear love, and I’m just waiting for the Angel-General to give the word.
LINDA I took a class in college that was about nothing but metaphors for 3 months. I hate them. If you cannot respect that, please leave.
JUSTIN My respect surges over your beaches, erod-
Linda throws her drink in his face, sending his dancing hand into his face so he hits himself in the eye and falls back, then stumbles away. She turns to Stanley.
LINDA He was like a rose’s thorn, but your quiet dignity is like the rose’s scent. Scents are like the body language of flowers. Your listening is like a meteorologist in the eye of a hurricane. Hurricane season is like Jupiter’s transit. The planets are like loves we have lost. Love is like a tornado-
STANLEY To be more precise, it is the loss of love that has the truly destructive potential, but even that apparent similarity should fail to impress a scrutinizing audience. Popular perceptions ascribe the traits of chaos and destructive potential to both tornadoes and love, but whereas a tornado actually kills people and destroys physical objects, love only seems to "destroy lives", because our culture considers peace and quiet to be productive and therefore anything that interrupts peace and quiet as destructive, hence the phrase. The attempts to describe love in similes are mere tautologies. Likewise, the oft
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(CONTINUED)
CONTINUED: 3.
STANLEY (cont’d) perpetuated notion of "love as action" is ill-repeated, as it has no inherent relationship to the word as it is most often used. Returning to your tornado simile-
Linda cocks her head to the side, then walks away. Reveal as the door swings shut behind her that the bar is actually the English Faculty Lounge.
STANLEY (CONT) Boy, I really talked myself out of that one.
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