Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down (12 page)

So a lot of people are thinking that this year, while the IRS is under fire, is a good time to “play fast and loose” with their tax returns, and maybe even get revenge for the years of abuse by yanking the IRS’s chain a little bit. One leading tax-preparation firm, which I will not identify here except by its initials, “H” and “R,” has gone so far as to write taunting remarks in the margins of its clients’ tax returns, such as:

This kind of thing is of course a lot of fun, but we are not recommending it. What many people do not realize is that, after the IRS finished publicly apologizing to the taxpayers who testified against it last September, it quietly tracked them down and relieved them of all of their worldly possessions including corneas.

So we are not recommending that you cheat. You should heed the words of IRS commissioner Charles Rossotti, who, in this year’s Letter to Taxpayers, states: “Every citizen owes it to the nation to pay his or her fair share of taxes, unless of course he or she has made a whopping cash contribution to a key congressperson or President Bill ‘Mr. Coffee’ Clinton or Vice President Al ‘I Honestly Thought That They Were Just A Bunch Of Very Wealthy Buddhist Nuns!’ Gore.”

Here are some questions that you are likely to ask in preparing your tax returns this year:

I
was getting ready to board an early American Airlines flight out of Miami, and they announced that it was going to be “bistro service.”

“Please pick up your ‘bistro’ meal from the cart as you board the plane,” they told us.

I honestly wasn’t sure what “bistro” meant, but it sounded French, which I thought was a good sign. French food is pretty tasty, except for the snails, which I do not believe the French actually eat. I believe the French sit around their restaurants pretending to eat out of empty snail shells and making French sounds of enjoyment such as “Yumme!” (literally, “Yum!”). But when foreign tourists order this “delicacy,” the waiters bring them shells that still contain actual unretouched snails, which the tourists eat, causing the French people to duck under their tables and laugh until red wine spurts from their nostrils.

But other than that, French food is pretty good. So I had high hopes when, on my way to the plane, I stopped at the cart and picked up a paper sack containing my “bistro” meal. I was hungry, because I had not eaten breakfast, because I had arrived at the airport one hour early so that, in accordance with airline procedures, I could stand around.

When the plane took off, I opened my “bistro” sack. Here are the items it contained: (1) a container of yogurt, (2) a “breakfast bar”
made from compressed dried wood chips, and (3) the greenest, coldest, hardest banana I have ever touched in my life. If I’d had a mallet, I could have pounded it straight into a vampire’s heart.

So I didn’t eat the banana. Needless to say I also didn’t eat the yogurt. My guess is, nobody
ever
eats the yogurt: at the end of the flight, the airline people just collect all the unused yogurts and put them back into “bistro” sacks for the next flight. There are containers of airline yogurt still in circulation that originally crossed the Atlantic with Charles Lindbergh.

I did eat the “breakfast bar,” because if you’re hungry enough, you will eat wood chips. (That’s why beavers do it. There is no way they would gnaw on trees if they ever found out about pizza delivery.)

Anyway, the flight was scheduled to go directly to Houston, so finally, after navigating around the sky for several hours, we landed in: New Orleans. The pilot said there was fog in Houston. No doubt it was manufactured by the Fog Generator, which every modern airport maintains right next to the Banana Freezer.

They didn’t let the passengers off the plane in New Orleans, possibly for fear that we would run away. So we just sat there for an hour or so, rustling our “bistro meal” sacks and listening to our stomachs grumble. Here’s how bad it got: A woman across the aisle from me finally broke down and
ate her yogurt
. I bet this really messed up the accounting when the airline food personnel got ready to re-sack the yogurt for the next flight (“Hey! There’s one missing!”).

Anyway, we finally took off again and landed in Houston, where we dropped to our knees and gratefully licked crumbs off the terminal floor. So the story ended happily, except for the nagging question that remained stuck in my mind: Why did the airline call it “bistro service”? When I got home, I looked up “bistro.” According to my dictionary, it’s a French word meaning “a small wine shop or restaurant where wine is served.” The image it conjures up is of a cozy little place on a picturesque little street in Paris, with candle-lit tables for two occupied by lovers kissing, drinking wine, enjoying French food, and laughing
at snail-eating tourists. Somehow, the airline decided to use this word, of all the words in the world, to describe what was served on my flight.

Why? The answer is: marketing. At some point, American Airlines went to its Marketing Department and said, “We’re going to stop serving real food to people, and we need a good name for it.” Marketing people love this kind of challenge. Their motto is: “When life hands you lemons, lie.” And so they held a brainstorming session, probably at a nice French restaurant, and finally, after a lot of wine, they came up with “bistro service,” which sounds a LOT better, from a marketing standpoint, than “a sack of inedible objects.”

Giving things ridiculous names is a key marketing tactic. That’s why the gambling industry, when it became concerned that people might think it had something to do with gambling, changed its name to the “gaming” industry, as if people go to Las Vegas to play Capture the Flag.

But I think “bistro service” is even better. It may be the best marketing concept I have seen since back in the 1970s, when McDonald’s, which does not wait on your table, does not cook your food to order, and does not clear your table, came up with the slogan “We Do It All For You.”

With this kind of marketing ingenuity, there is no telling how far we can go. Perhaps someday, when we board our airplane, we will each pick up a box of dirt; this will be called “haute cuisine service.” We will take the box without complaining because we are consumers, and our motto is “moo.”

A
s a parent, I believe it is my responsibility to help my son develop the skills he will need to become a responsible and productive member of society. So I took him to the horse races.

Specifically I took him to Gulfstream Park, a very nice track in Hallandale, where you can bet on horses and feel comfortable wearing clothing styles dating back upward of 45 years. You remember during the Disco Age, when men wore clingy pants in highly unnatural colors and patterns, so that the wearer looked as though he has been wading naked to his waist in a massive toxic polyester spill, and it dried on his body? Those pants are still the height of style, at the racetrack. We are talking about an older crowd, including guys who, at some point in their betting careers, bet on a Trifecta involving Spartacus.

I enjoy the racetrack crowd. It’s a more sociable group than you might think. I’m generally shy, but when I go to the track, I often find myself having conversations with total strangers. I’ll be standing idly near a bank of TV monitors showing horses racing—possibly at this track; possibly at some other track; possibly in races that took place in 1973—and a man standing next to me will suddenly yank his cigar out of his mouth, turn to me, and say: “Can you believe THAT?”

“No!” I’ll say.

“What the (bad word) is he DOING??” the man will say. “He’s (bad word) CRAZY!”

“I’ll say!” I’ll say, wondering whom we’re talking about. A horse? A jockey? Newt Gingrich?

“You’re (bad word) RIGHT he’s (bad word) crazy!” the man will say, glad to have encountered somebody else who knows what’s going on. Then he’ll walk away, still talking, leaving behind no clues except a small puddle of cigar drool.

I began the process of educating my son, Rob, by showing him how to pick a horse to bet on. The key is to have a system. I use what is known as a “two-step” system, as follows (you might want to write this down):

1. I look at a list of the various horses.
   
2. I pick one.
   

Using this system, I selected a horse named “Yield To Maturity,” which seemed appropriate because it’s something that people are always urging me to do. After I placed the bet, we went into the grandstands to watch the race. Tension mounted as post time drew near, and then the announcement came over the loudspeaker: “They’re off!”

“COME ON, YIELD TO MATURITY!” I shouted.

“Where are the horses?” asked Rob.

“I don’t know,” I had to admit. One of the problems with horse racing is that key parts of the race take place several miles away, so that even if you can find the horses, they look like a herd of stampeding squirrels. I think the sport would be better if the horses stayed directly in front of the grandstand, perhaps on a treadmill.

Eventually the horses showed up, and although I specifically yelled at Yield To Maturity to win, he (or possibly she) did not. What’s worse, he (or possibly she) did not look the least bit upset about losing. In fact none of the horses seemed to take the race seriously. Laughing and pooping, they trotted gaily off the track and headed for the horse locker room to call their brokers. They’re all into conservative mutual funds.

Next I took Rob outside to show him how to “look over” the horses that would be running in the next race.

“What are we looking for?” asked Rob.

“Humps,” I said. A hump indicates to the shrewd bettor that the horse is actually a camel, which means it will run slower than the horses. Or possibly faster; I can never remember which.

At this point Rob decided—and this is exactly the problem with young people today; they don’t want to learn anything—that he was going to ignore my system and pick his own horses by (Get this!) studying the racing form. I told him this was a waste of time, because the so-called “racing form” in fact has nothing to do with racing: It’s a means by which espionage agents send each other messages in secret code. Here’s an actual quote from the form that Rob was studying:

“Magic Way has the highest Beyer in the field, which is a nice starting point at the maiden level.”

Right! And the Presbyterian mollusk wears linen jodhpurs!

While Rob was frittering away his time trying to decipher gibberish, I implemented another proven wagering system, known as the “bet on most of the horses in the race system.” Perhaps you think that it is impossible to bet on six horses in an eight-horse race and still not win any money. Perhaps you are an idiot.

I will not beat around the bush. When the day was over, I had picked no winning horses, no placing horses, and no showing horses. I had picked horses that, if you were to cut them open—and don’t let me stand in your way—would have turned out to be powered by pairs of seriously obese men walking backward. Rob had picked three winning horses and ended up making money. He thinks this could be a good career path. He does seem to have a knack for it. I just hope, if he becomes wealthy, that he remembers who showed him the ropes.

S
o I visited my son at college on Parents Weekend, which is a nice event that colleges hold so that parents will have a chance to feel old.

I started feeling old the moment I got to my son’s housing unit and saw a sign on the door that said: END WORLD HUNGER TODAY. This reminded me that there was a time in my life, decades ago, when I was so full of energy that I was going to not only END WORLD HUNGER, but also STOP WAR and ELIMINATE RACISM. Whereas today my life goals, to judge from the notes I leave myself, tend to be along the lines of BUY DETERGENT.

I felt even older when I entered my son’s apartment, which he shares with three roommates and approximately 200 used pizza boxes. When I was a college student, we also accumulated used pizza boxes, but we threw them away after a reasonable period of time (six weeks). Whereas my son and his roommates apparently plan to keep theirs forever. Maybe they believe that a wealthy used-box collector will come to the door and say, “If you can produce a box used to deliver pizza on the night of September 12, 1999, I’ll pay you thousands of dollars for it!” Because they WILL have that box on file.