Dead Clown Barbecue (8 page)

And so I decided to seek revenge. I didn't want to kidnap her dog or decapitate her favorite teddy bear or anything like that. I just wanted to do something that was clever and memorable, but not illegal or
too
mean. I invited my friend Dave (a different Dave than my casual acquaintance) over for a couple of beers and a brainstorming session.

"You could burn her house down," Dave suggested.

"No. It can't be anything that would involve the cops."

"Wouldn't they send the fire department instead of the cops?"

"Yeah, but when they discovered that it was arson, they'd involve the cops."

"Bummer." Dave took a swig of beer and swished it around in his mouth. "What about keying her car?"

"Nothing destructive."

"What's wrong with being destructive?"

"Destructive makes it seem like she got to me too much. I don't want to convey rage. I want her to think I'm laughing at her, not punching holes in walls."

"So you're thinking more of a 'nyahh nyahh' than a 'screw you, hell-bitch'?"

"Exactly."

Dave drank some more beer. "I can work with that. The way I see it, the best alternatives to bloodshed and/or destruction are fear and/or humiliation. Do you agree?"

I nodded. "Fear or humiliation. Yep. Both of those are good."

"Which do you prefer?"

"I'm not sure," I admitted. "Humiliation might be kind of mean."

"Dude, are you seeking revenge or shopping for an engagement ring? You
have
to be mean. That's the whole frickin' point!"

"I know, I know. I just don't want to dump pig's blood on her or anything like that."

"So . . . fear or humiliation?"

"I'm not sure. Let's flip a coin." I reached into my pocket but found it coinless. I reached into my other pocket and found it equally lacking in coinage. "Do you have a coin?"

Dave patted his pockets, and then picked up the bottle cap from his beer. "I've got this."

"Okay, if it lands upside-down, we'll go with fear. If it lands right-side-up, we'll go with humiliation."

Dave flipped the bottle cap. It landed on the floor, upside-down.

"Humiliation," he announced. "Cool."

"No, that was fear."

"It's upside-down."

"I know. That was fear."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Oh." Dave finished off his bottle of beer. "Fear. Fear, fear, fear. Lots of possibilities in the fear arena. What's she most scared of?"

"Terrorists . . . cancer . . . dying alone . . ."

"What about spiders? Is she scared of spiders?"

"I'm not sure."

"What about a big ol' hairy tarantula?"

"I assume so. We never really talked about it. You think I should mail her a tarantula?"

"Not unless you're a complete
loser
," Dave said. "You've gotta be more inventive than that. Mailing a spider is a level one plan. You have to bring this to level two or three at the very least."

"You're right. What could we do with a tarantula to make it more memorable?"

"Dress it up?"

"Please stop being stupid," I requested.

"My bad."

"We need an inventive delivery method for the tarantula. Maybe a singing telegram or something."

"Do they really do singing telegrams?" Dave asked.

"What are you talking about?"

"I've never actually seen a singing telegram. I thought maybe it was just something they did on TV."

"Are you kidding me?"

"Have
you
ever had a singing telegram?"

"No."

"Then maybe I'm right. Where would you even go to get one?"

"I don't know! Any party store! How can you doubt the existence of singing telegrams? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"

"Sorry," Dave said. "Can I have another beer?"

"Later. Anyway, I don't think we'll find a singing telegram service that will sing a song and then chuck a spider at her. Let's think of a better delivery method."

"It would be cool if we could figure out a way to get it to jump out of a cake, like one of those naked girls."

I sat up straight. "I've got it!"

"What?"

"We could bake a tarantula in a cake!"

"When's her birthday?"

"Not for a few months, but still, there has to be a cake-giving occasion coming up. It's perfect! She gets this nice, beautifully decorated cake delivered to her house. She takes a bite, and something's a bit off. She investigates a little further, and there's a frickin' tarantula baked right into the cake! She freaks out. Vengeance is mine."

Dave rubbed his hands together in malicious glee. "You, sir, are a genius. Albert Einstein never would've thought of that. He would've thought of something about physics or science or something. A spider in a cake. That's brilliant!"

And so our nefarious scheme was hatched. After I gave Dave another beer, we divided up our duties equally: Dave would obtain the tarantula, and I would obtain the cake.

It was a difficult decision. Should I go with chocolate? Vanilla? Angel food cake? Pineapple upside-down cake? After much thought and price comparison, I settled on a yellow cake, since it seemed like it would show off the tarantula the best. I also bought some yellow frosting and a tube of red gook used for writing words on cakes.

I returned to my apartment and played football on my Xbox until Dave showed up. He had a tarantula in a small plastic aquarium, which he set on my coffee table.

"Cool," I said, tapping the plastic.

"You owe me thirty-five bucks."

"
Thirty-five
?"

"Twenty-five for the spider, ten for the aquarium."

"Twenty-five bucks for a spider?"

"How much did you think it was gonna be?"

"Free! I thought you'd go to a shelter or something, where they were going to step on it if nobody took it home!"

"It's not a puppy."

"Well, why did you buy the aquarium?"

"It was half-price with any pet purchase. I wasn't gonna drive it home on my lap."

I wanted to smack him in the face with an empty beer bottle. "It's not a pet! It's a sacrifice! Why did you get a live one?"

"Where am I gonna get a dead one? You think they have a dead tarantula aisle at Wal-Mart?"

"But . . . but . . . but . . . twenty-five bucks? It's not even a big one."

"It's average size for the species."

"No, it's not. Tarantulas are huge."

"You're thinking of tarantulas in 50's horror movies," said Dave. "This is a tarantula in real life."

"I didn't think it would be the size of my house, but it should at least be the size of my hand!"

"It's a perfectly good tarantula. Stop being such a whiner."

I held out my hand. "Let me see the receipt."

"I don't have it anymore."

"I'm not paying you back without a receipt."

Dave sighed. "Okay, fine, it was thirty-two, not thirty-five. You're so damn suspicious all the time. Jeez."

"Jerk."

"Cheapskate."

"Drunkard."

"Cheapskate."

"Fine." I took out my wallet and dug out a twenty, a ten, and two ones. That pretty much wiped out my beer budget for the rest of the month. Who knew vengeance would be so pricey?

"Oh, there was tax, too," said Dave.

"Screw you."

We went into the kitchenette of my studio apartment and I made the cake batter, while Dave provided helpful advice about what I was doing incorrectly, and I provided very specific suggestions about what he could do with his advice. I cursed as some eggshell dropped into the mix.

"Who cares?" Dave asked. "If it's going to have a spider in it, it might as well have some eggshell."

"If she crunches down on a piece of eggshell, she'll quit eating the cake, then she'll never find the tarantula, and then my devastating revenge will have been that she ate a bit of eggshell." I dug out the shell bit and flicked it at him.

"Ow! Ow! Dammit! You got my eye!" He recoiled and stumbled backwards, smacking into the counter.

"I did not."

"Take a look! Take a look! Is it protruding?"

"Move your hand away so I can see."

"I think you poked my iris, dude!"

"Move your hand."

"Oh, crap, I'm gonna be seeing eggshell for the rest of my life!"

"
Move your hand
." I grabbed his hand and pulled it away from his eye. "I can't see it."

"It's in there!"

"Okay, I see it. It's not jutting out or anything; it's just stuck in the corner."

"Oh, crap . . ."

"It's no big deal. We'll just run some water on it."

"What if the water flushes it up under my eyelid? It could slice my eye all up! Oh, crap . . ."

"Stop being such a baby. It's just a tiny little speck of eggshell in your eye." I took a dishcloth out of the sink, ran it under some cold water, and twisted the corner. "Don't move."

"What are you gonna do?"

"I'm gonna scrub your eye out with a scouring pad. What do you
think
I'm gonna do? I'm going to flick the shell out."

"Be careful."

I poked at the corner of his eye with the cloth. I could no longer see the piece of eggshell.

"It's out."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"I can still kind of feel it."

"Well, it's not in your eye anymore."

Dave rubbed his eye. "Thanks, dude."

"No problem. Can we go back to making the cake now?"

"Yeah, yeah, sure thing."

I stirred until the batter was completely mixed, then I poured it out into the pan. "When should we add the tarantula?"

"I'd say now."

"How do we kill it?"

"What do you mean?"

"How. Do. We. Kill. It."

"Just bake it."

"We can't just throw a live tarantula into the oven! That's cruel!"

"Dude, it's a bug."

"I don't care. You don't cook things alive like that. It's uncool."

"That's how they boil lobsters. And I think it's how they cook deer."

"Well, it's not gonna happen in my oven."

"Maybe it'll drown in the batter first."

"Shut up." I peered at the spider, which was crawling around on a miniature plastic log. "So what's a quick and humane way to kill it?"

"Stomp on it?"

"Get the hell out of my apartment, dumbass."

"What?" Dave asked. "I wasn't saying that you should stomp it flat and scrape the mess off into the batter. But you could, y'know, stomp on it gently and break its back or something."

"No."

"Cut off its head. It'll still look like a tarantula."

"This would've been a lot easier if you had just brought home a dead one in the first place."

"They don't sell dead tarantulas locally! I already told you that! Maybe we could poison it."

"The cake?"

"The tarantula. To kill it."

I considered that. "I don't think I have any spider poison."

"Do you have any ant poison? That would probably work."

"No. I don't keep a lot of poison in the apartment."

"Do you have any cigarettes? We could blow smoke in there until it chokes to death."

Instead of calling Dave a moron, I gave him a look that said, "You're a moron."

"Fine. You're the leader of the 'Be Humane To Cuddly-Wuddly Spiders' movement,
you
decide how to kill it."

"I don't know! I have no idea how to kill a tarantula without squishing it. Screw it. Let's just bake the stupid thing." I turned on the oven.

"We should name him."

"Yeah, sure, let's give a name to the creature that's going to die a horrible, agonizing death because of us. Let's call him Timmy the Tarantula and paint a smiley face on his back."

"We could name him Eight-Legged Vengeance."

"Don't be such a frickin' — actually, that's pretty cool. Let's go with that." I tapped on the aquarium. "Hello, Eight-Legged Vengeance. How's it going?"

Eight-Legged Vengeance did not respond.

"Maybe we should feed it a mouse as one last meal," Dave suggested.

"Do you have a mouse?"

"No. But I could go get one. I think the pet shop had mice."

I started to give him another "You're a moron" look, but decided that it wasn't worth it. "Let's just put him in the batter and get it over with."

"Sounds good."

I lifted the top off the aquarium. "Okay, reach in there and grab him."

"Yeah, that's gonna happen."

"What, you're scared?"

"It's a tarantula! They're venomous!"

"No, they're not."

"You do it."

I reached inside the aquarium, stopping a few inches away from the arachnid.

"So pick it up," Dave urged.

"I'm going to."

"I hope it doesn't take your hand off."

"I hope it takes your mouth off."

"Pick it up."

"I will."

"Time's a-wastin'."

"Why don't you go home? You've served your purpose."

"No way. I want to see this."

"Well, be quiet."

"Pick it up."

"I am."

"No, you're not. You're being motionless and cowardly."

The tarantula moved toward my hand. I let out a shameful cry and yanked my hand out of the aquarium so fast that I bashed it against the corner. Dave found this to be extremely amusing. I did not.

"Grow up," I told him.

"Oh, God, I wish I'd been taping that! I'd give anything to have been taping that! You looked like such a chickenshit jackass!"

"You suck."

"Reach in there again. It might growl at you this time."

I opened one of the drawers and took out a long wooden spoon. I poked the spoon into the aquarium and tried to scoop up the tarantula, but it kept scurrying away. "Dammit!"

"It probably doesn't like that flavor of cake. You should have bought chocolate."

"I'm just gonna dump it out." I very, very, very quickly reached into the aquarium and removed the plastic log. Then I picked up the aquarium, turned it over, and shook it over the batter. The tarantula didn't fall out.

"He's got some seriously sticky feet," Dave noted.

"Smack the plastic."

Dave knocked on the aquarium. The spider still didn't fall out.