I was brought up on Park Avenue by my rich widower dad, who owned the Empire State Building and the Triborough Bridge, but my heart was in the Bronx, where I visited my batty hillbilly moomymoo every summer and major holidays such as Christmas, Thanksgiving and John Wilkes Booth’s Birthday.
Moomymoo was originally from Hog’s Anus, Arkansas, a small hamlet of 16 people, 15 of them Moomymoo’s illegitimate children. She lived in a ramshackle yet flimsy hovel that also housed my seven violent, alcoholic uncles—Jeb, Job, Jack, Jim, Jake, Joop and Jot—every one of them mean, lazy psychopaths who’d never done an honest day’s work in their lives and all of whom boasted of having killed a man (the same one).
I loved them.
Dad was the only one of Moomymoo’s kids who’d left Hog’s Anus and made good. For this he was despised and forbidden to set foot on the family property including its many outhouses and broken-down, rusted-out pickup trucks. (Moomymoo always insisted it was really because Dad had killed Mom, but I didn’t believe that) But the family liked, or at least tolerated me, because I sucked up to them and gave them pocket change I had stolen from Dad’s bejeweled satin purse.
When I was seven, the entire population of Appalachia emigrated to Chicago but Moomymoo and her criminal brood got lost on the nation’s poorly mapped highways and ended up in the Bronx. “It’s durn nice up here,” Moomymoo told me. “There’s a polluted river, lots of trash and a good supply of homeless bums for my prostitutin’ business.”
But I soon realized things weren't as beatific as Moomymoo had made them out to be. A terrible wave of Pepto-Bismol addiction had swept through America’s white lower class, transforming them from unemployed, good-for-nothing bums into unemployed, good-for-nothing Pepto-Bismol addicts.
The pink, cloying liquid was everywhere you looked and its victims lay in the streets, burping and breaking wind with abandon. When tested, the Bronx River proved to be 87 percent Pepto.
The government did nothing.
The bastards.
When I saw that, I knew I would have to give up my dream of being Joe Rogan’s personal assistant and instead go to Yale Law School, write a best-selling memoir, become a U.S. senator, Vice President and finally, president of the United States, in order to help Moomymoo and her oppressed people climb out of the hog excrement and into the sun.
I knew that meant I would have to give up my integrity, but fortunately I never had much in the first place.
I knew I could stop at nothing and might even have to ally myself for a time with some lying Hitlerian demagogue.
But I also knew that in the end it would make me seem to be an almost Christ-like figure of destiny, and that Moomymoo would approve, so I said, all right, let’s do it!
Thank you so much! Now I don’t need to read this phony’s book: perhaps also renamed Hillbilly allegedly.
Which Hog’s Anus? We have many hamlets of that name here in Arkansas 😉