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| "AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HUMOR"TM
SHOWCASE
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August /
September 2006 Contest Results |
From "101
Ways To Win A Man's Heart" (An Excerpt)
By Julia Rivera-Armstrong,
New Mexico
We dashed to
Carmen’s decrepit Toyota, Carmen jumped behind the wheel, and we prayed
that the engine would start. Carmen glanced in the rearview mirror
before pulling out into the street. The last rays of sunlight were long
gone. I looked through the rear window. A car was waiting behind us. A
late-arriving party animal who wanted our parking space? No. A cop.
Carmen said, “There’s a cop. Hide the booze!”
I kicked four cans of Miller Lite under the seat. The sudden thrust
pushed them against something sharp, puncturing them. Beer gushed out,
filling the car with the stench of a brewery. Carmen and I screamed. We
were trapped in the car with our seatbelts on, as panicked as if we were
being stung by swarms of giant mutant killer bees.
Carmen screamed, “Throw it out the window!” as if I were near a hand
grenade that would explode within seconds, blowing our bodies into a
billion fragments.
Carmen usually epitomized grace under pressure, making it easier for me
to stay calm and to do just what she said, but I yelled, “I can’t! It’s
stuck.” Then I felt rain on my lap. But it wasn’t raining, and I was
inside Carmen’s Toyota, which wasn’t a convertible. I looked up. Copious
amounts of beer had sprayed all over the car’s ceiling, which was now
dripping down, like drops of rain flowing to the ocean. The ocean of
warm beer in my lap.
“Quickly!” Carmen added, “Before the cop sees.”
I finally managed to free the beers and toss them out the window onto
the lawn a few feet away. The cop’s spotlight came on. The only sound
was the spraying beer.
“Too late,” said Carmen.
I turned around and saw the policeman at Carmen’s door. He said, “Please
get out of the car with your hands up.”
We got out. What else could we do? Floor it and head over the cliff into
the Pacific Ocean, the way Thelma and Louise drove their car into the
Grand Canyon? Carmen’s car would probably land on the tarry sand, ten
feet from the surf, and we’d be spinning the wheels in deeper when the
cop finally walked across the beach to the Toyota.
So I found myself soaked with beer, standing on the sidewalk next to
Carmen, who had somehow, miraculously, avoided becoming completely
doused with beer. What I mean by that is that her blouse was still dry
in a few places, here and there.
“Have you been drinking?” he asked.
We were sopping wet, reeking of beer, and leaving a college party.
“Yes,” I admitted, figuring that denial would be insane, under the
circumstances (which included the fact that my father didn’t live in
Beverly Hills, wasn’t a multimillionaire, didn’t count senators or
members of Congress among his closest friends, and wasn’t a brilliant
defense attorney; his work as a school janitor was probably not a great
bargaining chip for getting the cop to agree not to file a police
report).
“Which one of you is more sober?” the officer asked.
He wasn’t bad looking. He was probably in his mid-twenties, not that
much older than I was, clean-cut, about 5’10”. Carmen’s type. She
doesn’t go for “bad boys”; as we’ve seen, altar boys are more her speed.
“I am,” said Carmen, who probably realized that even if she’d had more
to drink than I had, she had better self-control and was better at
talking her way out of a bind than I would ever be. The sad thing, I
realized, was that in this, she was absolutely correct. “Haaaaaah,” she
exhaled into the officer’s face. I hoped she’d been too busy with Ray at
the party to mosey on over to the keg for more beer.
“No,” the officer concluded. “You both appear highly intoxicated.”
So much for my brilliant theory.
He added, “Do you have anyone you can call for a ride home?”
“No, sir,” I said, retreating into my last defense: the respect for
authority that my mother had drilled into me. “All our friends are at
the party, and they’re all drunk.”
“Maybe you could give us a ride home?” Carmen said coyly. “Aren’t you
supposed to serve and protect the public?”
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