Tuesday, February 19, 2013

HUSKY

When I made the transition to HUSKY size late in my elementary school career, I cried in the department
store, an Orbach's.  I said to my Mom, "Husky means fat," and she said that it didn't,
it meant that I was growing and that my proportions were out of wack and that everything would catch up.
I bought three pairs of pants, all of which had to be hemmed by our taylor, this diabetic named Otto.
I used to think getting things hemmed was a standard part of the ordeal of "PANTS" which I still
consider to be a piece of Hell on Earth.  Pants are just awful.  Pants should be the great villain
on Frankie's Apartment.  Frankie's Pants are all members of a terrorist cell that include all
pajama bottoms, bathing suits and even tightie whitie underwear.  Their mission: to extract
joy from the human organism, as payback for years of indentured servitude and the humiliation
of being NUMBER TWO to upper bodywear, aka "THE ENEMY": shirts.
The Pants ultimate goal is not world domination, it's something more sinister: they want to be
worn as shirts.  We once captured a particularly notorious pair of pants: an ancient pair
of Mr. Parfenix's 501 button-fly's named Last Legs -- who escaped by hiding in a neighbor's
laundry basket.  When we questioned (and tortured) Mr. Last Legs we asked him why the Pants were
so hellbent on taking down the Shirts -- he said, "Why should they have all the fun?"

On that day when I first got my huskies, me and my mother came home to my Dad watching the old
Black and White TV in their bedroom.  "What does husky mean?" I asked him.
"It means your fat," he said.