With Tongue: Short Humor Volume II

By James Sarver

Second volume of the short humor of James E. Sarver. The first volume, "Words Fail Me," was the #1 Self-Help book in Kazakhstan for three days running. If you enjoyed James E. Sarver's subtle but devastating wit in the first book, you probably won't enjoy this second book all that much, as he lays off the wit and goes more for the cheap laughs. Remember how "Superman III" tried so hard to be funny, with Richard Pryor and everything? It's kinda like that.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781678111588

Book preview

THE PANTS IN THE FAMILY

Levi’s 501s, K-Mart, $11.95

What Mitch was wearing when I met him. He was working on an oil rig, pulling sweet Wesson out of the hard brown earth. His hair was long, so long the other guys kept tripping over it and filing OSHA complaints. But Mitch was the big boss man’s nephew’s second cousin’s half-brother’s stepson’s godfather’s ex-roommate, so there was no way the big boss man was going to let him go. I can still remember the first time I saw him, his Levi’s shining in the sun, or maybe that was his glass eye. I said to myself, That’s the man I’m going to sleep with tonight, and by gum if I wasn’t fifty percent right. (Him and one other guy.) Mitch was everything I’d been looking for in a man — tall, skinny, slightly slow from overexposure to asbestos as a child. When he spoke you were never quite sure where he was going until he was finished, and he’d take forever to get there, too. One time he started a story on Thursday and didn’t finish it till March. And the non sequiturs would flow like Lake Conemaugh over Johnstown, thanks to Mitch’s speech impediment. Forklift the transmission. Stallion heats sorgum fossils. Malingering isn’t so particular after tremulous nightswim. Mitch never was the brightest bulb on the string. He was the one you had to twist to make work, until next Christmas, when he’d go out again. And those Levi’s of his. Those Levi’s had more holes in them than a senator’s alibi. They didn’t leave much to the imagination. But that was all right, because in those days I didn’t have much of an imagination. Why else would I have married Mitch?

Brown Gabardine Slacks, J.C. Penney, $17.95

These were on sale, so I got them for Mitch for his birthday, but he didn’t like gabardine because he was deathly allergic to it. So I wore them myself instead. He asked me many a time why I insisted on wearing pants that he was deathly allergic to, and I said, That’s a question that answers itself. By this time, you see, I already hated Mitch with an all-consuming passion. We’d only been dating for three weeks, but sometimes that’s all it takes for an all-consuming hatred to develop. Like that time with Mindy McBranigan, when she took away my car keys because she said I was too drunk to drive and so I smashed her car, her house, her workplace, her son’s preschool, and her mom’s hospital room. In that case, after she found out what I’d done, it only took about two seconds for her to develop an all-consuming hatred for me. Some people just don’t mix. But I’m wandering too far afield. I’m not used to this writing business, my mind may meander. Like Mitch’s glass eye, which used to follow me across the room like one of those paintings in a horror movie. Except his good eye was still watching the television on the other side of the room. Is it any wonder I hated the man, all-consumingly?

Black Dress Slacks, Macy’s, $40.95

Also on sale, and if that doesn’t define the man that Mitch was and the marriage that followed, I don’t know what does — he bought the pants he wore at our wedding on sale. Then he wore them to his bachelor party and got fake-wedding-cake-with-a-stripper-inside frosting on them. Or that’s what he said those stains were. He had twenty-four hours, he couldn’t have gotten them martinized before the ceremony? But that’s Mitch for you. Thoughtless as a skull. When I asked whether he wanted to write his own vows, he asked, What about the consonants? Our wedding was a farce. His dad got drunk and started listing the women he’d slept with. Women with names like Tracy, and Kelly, and Robin, and Alex. His mom started crying, because he never listed her. Apparently their marriage had gone unconsummated. Mitch the genius didn’t make the connection that if this were true his dad couldn’t be his dad, but I wasn’t going to be the one to spill the beans. Though I did spill the beans that were in the card Mitch’s great-aunt Florencia gave us — some kind of Peruvian tradition. Or was she from Uruguay? All in all it was a day to forget. So was the wedding night. Never have I seen a man regurgitate with such velocity, or hang time. Like a sabotaged pipeline. When we finally got around to making love he couldn’t do much but lie there, which was actually an improvement over his usual technique. I tried to say, I love you, but it came out as, I don’t love you. Mitch was so blitzed he didn’t even notice. All he could talk about, or mumble through El Pollo Loco catering-encrusted lips about, was the real love of his life, Heidi Klum. I laughed in his face and said he was a groom without a Klum. No, that’s not true. I thought of that line years later. There’s a first time for everything, and the thing now is the first time for is honesty.

Cargo Shorts, Target, $6.95

What Mitch wore for most of his life. Short pants. A grown man, wearing short pants to church. It was embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as his singing voice, which was like Barry White crossed with Andrae Crouch. He’d sing The Old Rugged Cross and the female half of the congregation would start furiously fanning their laps. I was never a big fan of church myself, but Mitch’s mom was devoted to her pastor, Reverend Rick, who’d officiated at our wedding and pronounced us, in what he called an honest mistake, man and strife. I always suspected there might be something going on between Mitch’s mom and Reverend Rick, but didn’t dwell too much on the possibility because I wanted to sleep at night. Mitch wore shorts not just at church, but to work, to formal dinners, to funerals, even to the one fundraising event we went to for the American Cancer Society, where Mitch, being Mitch, lit up a Marlboro. The only good thing about those shorts was that they showed off Mitch’s legs, which even I have to admit were handsomely shaped. Muscular, tanned, just the right amount of hair — if the rest of his body had lived up to his legs, we’d never have come out of our honeymoon suite at the Motel 6. Mitch must have gone through thirty or forty pairs of those shorts, in our years together. He wore them till they all but disintegrated, like the old Soviet Union. Toward the end of their lives they’d be nothing but spider webs of single threads, clinging to one another desperately, hoping against hope to make it through one more day. Not so different from our marriage.

Camouflage Pants, Army Surplus Store, $1.50

Mitch had these on when he showed up at the hospital two hours after our son was born. In Mitch’s absence I had named the boy Nolan, after my favorite pitcher, as opposed to what Mitch wanted to name him, which was Rollie. Thanks to the pants the nurses thought Mitch was on leave from the Green Berets, but I told them the only thing he’d left was his green beans, on his plate every night. A real stretch, but the nurses laughed. Nolan was a beautiful baby, but I wasn’t ready to be a mother, and Mitch wasn’t ready to be a father — Mitch wasn’t ready to be a person — so we gave up little Nolan for adoption. But not without making the prospective parents sign a piece of paper stating that they would never change his name to anything else, such as Whitey, or Big Train. But there was a loophole, namely that we hadn’t given the adoption agency our real names, so the contract wasn’t legally binding. After they’d taken Nolan I asked Mitch why he’d been two hours late. He said he’d been polishing his glass eye and time had gotten away from him. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the baby had been born with a glass eye, too. But if you’re out there, Nolan, or Catfish, or Satchel, I hope you got your daddy’s legs and your mama’s brains. Because if you got them reversed, then you have varicose veins and dyslexia, or, as Mitch used to call it, dyxselia. Do I regret giving up my baby? No. He’s happier, wherever he is. Having me for a mother and Mitch for a father? That’s a recipe for twelve kinds of disaster, with meringue on top. If we’d had the Christ child for a son, He’d have gotten some girl pregnant at sixteen and run off to join the French Foreign Legion. We made the right choice, giving up our little Grover Cleveland