Feeling Tiny? Chance at $10 Million Can Really Pump You Up

Isn’t it great to finally get some recognition in life? You struggle and strain to reach some hazy pinnacle and then one day, the payoff. A special letter comes in the mail, warm congratulations on a job well done: “Believe me when I tell you lots of other folks didn’t make the cut. You’re one of the smart ones, though. . . . Not only did you mail your entry in on time, you had all the contest stamps in their proper places too.”

These kind and, I selfishly must admit, entirely truthful words were sent to me by Margarete Thuemmler, director of contests for Publishers Clearing House. I’m a finalist in their $10 million sweepstakes, one of the select millions who proudly can claim to meeting their requirements: No, I don’t sleep in the weeds--and I have a mailbox! And, you want a stamp neatly stuck in the right place? I’m your man.

I hope I’m not the only one like this: I view these contests as dubiously as I might a Gila monster in my swim shorts, yet I always fall for them (the contests, not the Gila monsters), and on the entry forms I actually will pull up and re-glue a stamp I’ve put in off-center, as if neatness is going to make the Clearing House more inclined to give me $10 million.

I believe there are large toothsome federal laws preventing such contests from discriminating between persons who ante up for products and those merely entering the contest. I know the whole scheme of these things, though, is to suggest elliptically that you won’t win if you don’t subscribe to their horrid magazines, or at least to shame you into thinking that if you don’t subscribe, you don’t deserve to win.

Maybe I’ll read an article about this sort of scam in Rolling Stone someday, as I just subscribed to it, in a trance-like fit of stamp-licking. To know what an idiot I feel like right now, you would have to know how much I despise Rolling Stone as the self-satisfied advertisement of a smug generation. I’d sooner receive pizza by fourth-class mail.

Of course, I won’t feel so dumb when Ed McMahon shows up at my door with a check. Is it Publishers Clearing House Ed works for? Does he work for anyone anymore? I don’t see his ruddy face among the two pounds of forms and coupons that came in the envelope. No matter, Ed’s always coming over to the house anyway these days: “Jim, I’m homesick. Do you mind if I just sit by your desk and fawn?”

I could use McMahon’s beefy laugh--or $10 million for that matter--anything to get me feeling pumped up, because I’ve been feeling kind of tiny of late. I first noticed it while dancing at Laguna’s White House one night, when markedly large people kept bumping into me. I’m not talking obese here, rather muscular, vending-machine-sized, aftershave-ad-brutish people in the pink of health, and lots of them. Sort of like the progeny in the sci-fi movie “Village of the Damned” if, instead of space aliens impregnating a sleeping village, linebackers had done the job.

What brought them to my attention at the White House was the fact that, despite the dance floor being the size of a pancake griddle, these guys were moving like boxers with the whole ring to themselves, randomly colliding with my girlfriend and me and anyone else beneath their notice. After a sufficiency of buffeting I finally elbowed one of them, who merely turned and menacingly said “No elbows,” as if only finishing a sentence that began: “How would you like to go through life with. . . .”

He turned away and I left it at that since, realistically, the only person I might ever have had much chance of punching out was Gandhi, and then only after he’d been fasting.

Since that evening I’ve started seeing these behemoths everywhere, pushing to the front at concerts, shouting and laughing at jackhammer volume in restaurants, hanging out at health spas where, despite their perfect physiques, you rarely see them actually working out. Rather, they stand and glare at you as you struggle with the machine they’re impatiently waiting to use--ignoring the 200 vacant machines in the club--sizing you up with a look that says, “Why bother?” I suspect it also may be this new master race at the wheels of all those muscle cars you see running red lights. Call me old-fashioned, but I can recall a time when green meant go , yellow meant close your eyes, floor it and scream through the intersection at 90 and red meant stop , dammit! Lately, though, you can scarcely see a signal change without at least one motorist barreling through, like he’s on a personal freeway.

This is a moral lapse I attribute to the demise of Engineer Bill. Some of you might recall the old-time KHJ-TV cartoon host, known for his elaborate model train setups. All us youngsters hoped that one day he’d turn up feisty drunk and shout, “C’mon kids, let’s make ‘em crash and burn!” His other signature bit was “Red Light/Green Light” during which viewers were expected to gulp down a glass of milk when he said “green light!” and stop when he said “red light!” Along with getting a lot of cold milk up my nose, this taught me to distinguish between stop and go. It’s rare even today that I venture into traffic without a glass of milk.

But who needs moral strictures when one is perfect? That may be what is happening here. Maybe these supermen and equally ideal female pals--exemplified by all those frisky white women lounging in the pages of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue--are but the first lucky few of mankind to reach our final perfect state. Little did the philosophers know when quibbling over free will and the ultimate good that the true measure of one’s merit is whether he/she is weight-to-height proportionate.

All this is just a roundabout way of suggesting that there are more jerks in Orange County today than there used to be, and it’s starting to impact on the pleasures of going to a show, dining out or making almost any other venture into public.

There may be a few alert readers right now thinking, “OK, Jimbo, if you’re so quick to judge, just what characteristic does a jerk have that you lack?”

I don’t know, but I think it just might be $10 million. How about if, as an experiment, the rest of you throw your contest forms in the trash and let me win? I bet I’ll be insufferable. I’ll be king of the world. I’ll brush people aside like matchsticks. And I might even start to enjoy Rolling Stone.