The new Dog TV show has a different formula, but I've already fathomed out the formula for it and found it to be not-so-great.
In the Guthrie, Oklahoma episode Dog & Beth caught a fugitive up in Colorado. Nice country they have out there. They drove up to his house and arrested him while he was watching cartoons. They always catch life as it happens. The best aspect of this show is the documentary aspect. But it wasn't exactly an exciting bit of sleuthing.
They did the job for a family business down in Oklahoma, as I said. The wife of this family, who had a son of 21 and a daughter of 16, still wore a metal retainer in her mouth. What she really needed was a chin, but you can't get a chin through your dental surgeon. You'd have to go to a plastic surgeon and the cost might well run into the tens of thousands. After all, they'd have to graft the body parts from elsewhere to add it to your chin. Maybe your thigh.
I don't know. This is idle speculation.
That being the case or not, Beth and Dog caught this dangerous man and sent him to the clink without a fuss. So far, boring TV. Then (and: here comes the formula) they drove to Oklahoma to meet the family they'd caught the perp for.
They arrived at the old farmhouse, the old dawdi haus, at twilight, and it was like a Jimmy Stewart film, all magical and golden and Old American. Everybody shook each others' hands, and the womenfolk pecked each other on the cheeks and exchanged recipes, and the daughter of the house was off out to the prom, so some mildly ribald humour was indulged in at the expense of the father and the boyfriend. Dog grinned a big off-white smile and said he'd put a tracker on the boyfriend's car. "We ain't gonna make it easy for you to fuck this girl on prom night," he laughed lecherously. "We're going to try and ruin your fucking fun! You ain't gonna get to first base without thinking of my leering, salacious face and that's gonna put you right off! I might have put you off sex for life in fact!"
Anyway a terrific time was had by all that evening, and the tears of paralysed elation were soon streaming down everyone's cheeks, and as Dog and Beth turned to leave they chimed that they'd "swing by the office in the morning."
This is the trigger for the next segment of the show.
Dog should have took aside the paterfamilias here and said, in a dark dead baritone, "The nice portion of the show, the gee shucks, Whole Earth catalogue, Allen Ginsberg finger-cymbals mile-high circle-jerk, Hare Krishna, touchy-feely, Kum-By-Yah part of the show, is over as of now. Tomorrow we'll descend on you like a wall of locusts and Beth will abuse you horribly. She will slit you from tip to taint and use you as a fist puppet. I will be absent-minded and bored and chain-smoking and want to get the filming over. Leland, in his designated role as the 'tech and tactics expert,' will be all 'fingers and thumbs', 'all at sixes and sevens,' a fucking tongue-tied bumbler saying obvious things and things that make no sense and bumping into things and generally fucking up. That dumb bohunk. But most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, Beth is going to be rude as hell to you and your loved ones. She's gonna all but shit on your shoe. She's gonna take a brutal dump in your kitty litter. She's gonna crap in your hatbox. She's gonna tear this dawdi haus down. I'd say I'm sorry about it, but as you'll see tomorrow my chosen solution to this unpleasant state of affairs is to act all absent-minded and remote and moral relativist. So I'll be no help to you. Sorry but the worst part is about to come. The part when, guaranteed, my wife insults your wife and family and my son makes a horse's nether asshole of hisself –– again."
He should have said that but, perhaps understandably, he didn't.
Next day though it went as predicted. Beth tromped into the family dawdi haus with dirty fucking boots on dragging dirt with her tailbone, wiped them on the best linen, and spit her wad of tobacco bang smack in the center of the family portrait over the hearth. She pissed on the toilet seat "because she could."
Then she berated the wife, who made the rookie error of admitting casually to having "stacks" of unfulfilled bonds.
"Stacks? Stacks? What stacks? How much in a stack?" She sounded like Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Beth had at record speed fixed on something to drub the dumb wife for and she wasn't liable to surrender the chance to be high-handed and didactic.
Next she sought to sow discontent betwixt husband and wife. She told the wife that her husband had made a fundamental misjudgment and that he should be denounced in the village square for a witch. Then she goes, "You must carry the day within these four walls. Do you think my husband is anything but a blue-balled cuckold? To enforce your position, you might withhold sex if you have to."
I looked at the chinless wife with an empty thought bubble over her head. That drenched head from her daily application of mid-Eighties hair products, and the retainer athwart her teeth. I looked at her and I thought, "'Withholding sex' isn't going to really turn the screws on the husband. I think the threat of sex might be her best bargaining chip at this point."
No comments:
Post a Comment