57. "Meet Some of the Parents (The Interview, Pt. 1)"
DELAWARE
The First State
WIGGLESWORTH
JOHN HENRY
2004 N BOSTON AVENUE
NOTTINGHAM, DE 19959
Sex Hgt Wgt Spcs
M 04'-11"115 FOX-RED
Eyes Hair1 Hair2 D.O.B.
BRO RED WHI 08/08/1973
DELAWARE
The First State
VAN BOMMEL
ROBERT OLIVER
2004 N BOSTON AVENUE
NOTTINGHAM, DE 19959
Sex Hgt Wgt Spcs
M 08'-02"794 BEAR-BRO
Eyes Hair1 Hair2 D.O.B.
BRO BRO N/A 05/09/1967
"Ya see, Geoffrey!? Even if a cop pulls us over because I ain't wearin' a seatbelt… we got us some motherfuckin' documents!"
"We can go ANYWHERE now! Let's… let's go to the Statue of Liberty! No, no - the White House! THE WHITE HOUSE! Fuck off, George Bush!"
"Fuck that, let's go knock on King Richard's door and tell him his brother's a piece a' shit!"
"Oh, yes, Johnny, you're right! Geoff! Geoffrey! Take us to Washington! Right - right now!"
"ROAD TRIP!"
"ROAD TRIP!"
"Geoff, if you can't take us on a road trip, can we just… fuckin'... borrow your car? I can drive!"
"Oh, no, Johnny, if your big arse could fit behind the steering wheel, you wouldn't be squeezed in back there!"
"Hey, I'll stick my fuckin' head out the sunroof! Problem fuckin' SOLVED! You're just bitter because your short ass can't see over the steering wheel! AND you can barely drive anyway!"
"Sweetheart, you know I'm bigger compared to my people than you are to yours! And according to my new documents, the wolf boy made me another inch taller!"
"Bitch, you ain't that special, he made me an inch taller on mine, too! And I like how you're just ignoring my valid fuckin' point that you can't drive for shit!"
"Oh, you don't see my driving license!?" "Jack" taunted as he turned to wave the piece of plastic in front of "Bobby's" face. "Can't get one of these if you can't drive, now can you!?"
The bear ignored the fox to address the Saint Bernard. "Jeffy, please don't make me and my secret boyfriend fight! Can you just drive us to DC? We'll rob some politicians for gas money!"
"ROAD TRIP, GODDAMMIT!"
"FUCK YEAH, ROAD TRIP!"
Dr. Fort simply drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, all his digits flailing in succession like waves were running across his paws. He simply kept his eyes on the road, ignoring the Merry Men so that their namesake merriment didn't exacerbate his sleep-deprivation migraine.
I… I don't need to tell you that the fox and bear were completely plowed again, do I?
"Do you guys want food or not?" the dog eventually grumbled.
"Oh, fuck yeah, we want food!" (You can tell which of the outlaws is talking just by their speech patterns, right?)
"Tonight is a glorious night, for we have DOCUMENTS! And a glorious night deserves a glorious feast at the Castle!" (Okay, that one should be easier to figure out.)
"FOOD, FOOD, FOOD, FOOD, FOOD, FOOD, FOOD, FOOD, FOOD, FOOD, FOOD, FOOD, FOOD!"
After their evening imbibing, Robin had finally screwed up the courage to go see the good doctor and inform him that a recent incident with a horny teenage girl had reaggravated his broken arm, and never being one to waste time, the duo took off at that very moment of inspiration to meet Geoff. Then by the time they actually got there, Robin pussed out and Johnny agreed that while he should probably tell Dr. Fort about it eventually, the dead of night was not the time for it. Therefore in their drunken stupor they instead spun it as an spur-of-the-moment urge to know whether Geoff knew any cause-friendly dentists (which, to be fair, was a question they'd genuinely been wondering for a while because they hadn't seen one in years and they wanted to make a decent impression when they finally ran into Marian again).
Well, the doctor did know a dentist who'd be cool with the outlaws, but this discussion was happening outside normal business hours and there was nothing to be done about it now. There was, however, something that could be done about the fact that these two showed up profoundly inebriated without even having any food in their stomachs, therefore making the effects of the alcohol all the more severe (honestly it was a miracle they could routinely make it all the way across town to his place while completely wasted and never fall down a hole or trip in front of a bus or something). The dog doctor had sworn an oath to always look out for his patients' well-being, and these two idiots were his patients. Therefore he was now taking them to a 24-hour fast food joint, and for the second time in that cycle of wakefulness the Merry Men were gonna scarf down some chow from a restaurant renowned for great drunk food and infamous for causing diarrhea, a place that would probably have rivalled Taco Bell in those two regards in the mainstream American culture if this weren't a regional chain only occurring in the Midwest and Northeast (although I guess it's true that you could buy their sliders frozen in grocery stores across the country).
"Alright, Harold and Kumar," Geoff grumbled as he pulled onto the grounds, "you know what you want? We're here." The doctor pressed a button to roll down his window (press-button windows were becoming more commonplace in those days, but this was still an era where you were more likely rich than not if your car windows didn't have a hand crank, as Robin and Johnny often goofed on him for) and drove up to the speaker, looking vaguely anxious as he did. Perhaps he was nervous that he was going to have a rough time with the restaurant's service; if so, he was right to be.
It took a second, but the speaker eventually squeaked to life. "Alright, what's ya order?" A female voice, species indeterminable but based on her accent, you could narrow it down to a certain list.
"Uh… hi," Geoff sputtered, trying to be cordial, "how're you doing?"
"...C'mon, what's ya order?"
It was the night shift at a fast-food restaurant, a position only the most desperate people wind up working. This employee had a bad attitude, sure, but Geoff, Johnny, and Robin, all three of whom having sworn their lives to help people like her, completely understood; hey, if you were working this job and dealing with entitled and often intoxicated customers all throughout the hours when you're not supposed to be awake all in order to maybe barely be able to pay your bills, would you care enough to put on a happy face for strangers? Of course, being completely sympathetic to her situation didn't make dealing with her negativity any less unpleasant, but the Merry Men had a tolerance for this stuff and could exercise more patience in a situation like this than most people would.
"Good evening, madame!" Robin beamed. "If we could please trouble you for, errr… how many do you want, Johnny?"
"Thirty. And no onions!"
"They get cooked on a bed a' onions, ya know that, right?" asked the employee.
"Yeah, yeah, I know, I get it!" Johnny said coolly. "Just push the onions outta the way and cook 'em on a clean spot, no skin off my bones! And hey, could ya put some ketchup on them while you're at it? Don't worry, we'll tip handsomely!"
"So if we can make that thirty with no onions and add ketchup, aaand twenty with no pickles please!" Robin summarized. "Oh, and these are hamburgers, not cheeseburgers, so no cheese on any of them please!"
Dr. Fort just rolled his eyes. This was another thing he was afraid of: the Merry Men wearing out their good will with the night staff with their custom orders. He'd taken these knuckleheads to get junk food enough times to know that Robin and Johnny were… well, they weren't picky eaters, but, y'know, they had their preferences. Hey, if you're gonna be eating crap that's terrible for you, might as well have it the way you like it, right? No point in consuming empty calories if you're not even enjoying it. Geoff could tell you their tastes and distastes in burger toppings offhand by this point: Johnny didn't get much utility out of goopy tomatoes and was liable to vomit if he tasted an onion, Robin never saw the appeal of briny pickles and didn't fundamentally understand the botanical concept of lettuce, both of the outlaws agreed that mayonnaise was a scourge upon the earth, and while neither of them abhorred American cheese, neither thought it meshed well with beef-flavored meat. Now, you would think that these preferences would be less of a hassle at a place where the standard slider only came with onions and a single pickle (and cheese when applicable), but of course these guys found a way to make it complicated.
The employee was silent for a few seconds, Geoff thinking she was fuming that she'd have to move the onions around just to accommodate Johnny's burgers (assuming she was even going to attempt to get the order right, which was not at all a guarantee). But after a second, she spoke again: "Thirty seventy-nine-"
"Oh, we're not done yet!" said Robin, still remaining friendly.
"And wait, hold on!" said Little John, notably less friendly. "Did you ring me up for thirty individual sliders or a 30-pack? Because… Geoff, help me out here, am I doing the math wrong or is the Crave Case more expensive than the sum of its parts?"
"You order thirty, you get the Crave Case," said the employee flatly.
But the doctor in the house was doing the math in his head. "Yeah, a… a 30-pack is more expensive than thirty individuals." Indeed, the tiny hamburgers were fifty-nine cents in those days, but a pack of thirty of them cost about a dollar more than they should have.
"Because you're paying for the box," said the employee.
"I don't want the box, I just want the burgers!" Johnny protested. "Hey, we rob people, not you!"
"That's right!" Robin added. "Don't rob us, we're the good guys!" Now the Merry Men's patience was starting to wear just a liiiiittle thin.
The employee was silent again, and Dr. Fort put a paw over his eyes. In his head, it was a certainty that they were going to get their food spit in. Robin would likely disagree, being too optimistic to assume such a thing as a foregone conclusion, while Johnny would honestly say it was a fifty/fifty chance and he wasn't afraid to gamble.
The speaker spoke again: "...Twenty-nine fifty-"
"Hey, we still want more!" Johnny declared, still friendly but almost aggressively so. "Uhhh… what sizes do your chicken rings come in again?"
"Six, nine, and twenty," Geoff muttered, reading the menu board.
"Alright, uhhh, gimme ninety-nine chicken rings!"
The dog facepalmed.
"Ninety-nine?" the employee asked in annoyance.
"You can just get a hundred," Geoff suggested, "that's five twenties."
"I don't need a hundred, I just need ninety-nine!" Johnny shot back. "Eleven times nine, easy! Besides, they're probably cheaper per volume that way!"
The Saint Bernard looked at the board and ran the numbers in his head; well he'd be damned, Johnny's hunch was right again.
"Unless… Rob, did you want some chicken rings?" Johnny asked.
"I'm a bloody fox, you daft bastard!" Robin remarked. "Chicken is, like… one million percent of what we eat! So, er… what's ninety-nine times two?"
"Oh, for the love of God," Dr. Fort growled through his teeth, "just order two hundred like a normal person-"
"One hundred and ninety-eight chicken rings!" Robin declared proudly.
"Wait," said Johnny, "Geoff, honey, what do you want?"
The doctor scoffed. "Oh, I don't need anything-"
"Come on now, Geoffrey, treat yourself!" Robin urged. "You drove all this way and you're not even going to get yourself anything!?"
"No," he muttered, "no, I'm good-"
"C'mon, Geoff, pig out with us!" said Johnny.
"FEAST WITH US!"
"GEOFF! GEOFF! GEOFF! GEOFF! GEOFF!"
Geoff rolled his eyes again (probably as the employee did the same) and took a reluctant gander at the menu.
"Alright, uh… gimme a… three-piece mozzarella stick."
"That's gonna take ten minutes," said the woman on the speaker, sounding like her eyelids were half shut.
"OH, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GEOFF!"
"GODDAMMIT, GEOFF, REALLY!? FUCKING MOZZARELLA STICKS!?"
"WHAT THE BLOODY HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU!?"
"HOW THE SWEET FUCK ARE YOU A DOCTOR IF YOU'RE THIS STUPID!?"
"WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE NORMAL!?"
"I FUCKING HATE YOU, GEOFF!"
After screaming over each other, the Merry Men took turns:
"You really want to wait that long just for three lousy mozzarella sticks!?" demanded Robin. "You know those take forever!"
"And they're probably gonna forget the goddamn marinara sauce anyway!" said Johnny. "You seriously can't just order some burgers like a normal person!?"
"They cook the burgers on a bed of onions! You might hate onions, but my people are straight-up allergic to onions!"
"Then get a fuckin' chocolate-covered cheesecake on a stick, that's something ya can't get just anywhere!"
"MY PEOPLE ARE ALLERGIC TO FUCKING CHOCOLATE!" the dog hollered. "And I'm a doctor, so I shouldn't be eating fucking chocolate-covered cheesecake! Nobody should be eating that!"
"'Ey, so you want the mozzarella sticks or not!?" said the employee. "C'mon, I ain't got all night!"
That was probably the precise moment the Merry Men lost their patience. They were compassionate heroes to the poor, but they were only mortal and couldn't be kind forever if a poor individual didn't want to play nice. (And also they were drunk, that didn't help.)
"Hey, what's with the fucking attitude!?" Johnny hollered at the speaker.
"Do you know who we are!?" Robin demanded. "We're the only people in this blasted city who care enough to help the poor! Like you!"
And that seemed to ring a bell to her.
"Is that who you are!?" she shot back. "You're that British guy and that redneck!?"
"Damn fuckin' straight, we are!" screamed Little John. "Hey - Geoff, Geoff, roll down my window…"
"Johnny, you don't need to roll down the window-"
"HEY!" the bear screamed with his head and neck sticking out of the Escalade. "We get it! Your job sucks, your life sucks, that's why we're out here tryna make it all suck a little bit less! All we ask is you put a little respect on our names!"
"Which are ROBINHOOD'N'LITTLEJOHN!" Robin added, howling like a warcry.
"Not necessarily in that order but YEAH! We threw away our goddamn lives to make yours bare-bones fucking tolerable! It ain't your fault you were born in the ghetto, but you don't have to act like it!"
Geoff's eyes damn-near popped out of his head when he heard the blitzed and befuddled bruin drop the G bomb.
"Oh, no, you did not just call me ghetto!" the employee hollered back, understandably displeased with the choice of vocabulary.
"I didn't say you are ghetto, I just said you're from there!"
"Uh, Johnny...?" Dr. Fort tried to pipe up. He didn't like the direction this conversation was going.
"Explain to me what the muthafuckin' difference is then, honky!"
Then Robin got in on it: "We're all the products of our environment, lass, but we don't have to become like our environments!"
"Hey, don't call me lass, Brit boy! And what the fuck do you know about my environment!? You don't even know me!"
"We got a pretty good hunch, we can hear it in your voice!" said Johnny, seeming amused. "Hey, it's nothing to be ashamed of!"
"And the fact that you're stuck working a drive-thru at this hour also clues us in!" Robin added cheerfully.
"Well I can hear in your voices that you're a trailer-trash redneck who's prolly afraid of people like me and a fancy-ass British guy who prolly never had to worry about money in his life!"
"Hey, now who's making assumptions!?" Robin shit back.
"What the fuck is our motivation to help people like you if you're gonna be so goddamn mean to us!?" asked Johnny. (Okay, so I'm on a group call with Johnny, Robin, and Geoff, Johnny swears he said 'someone like you,' Geoff however insists Johnny said 'you people,' to which Johnny said he'd never say that because he knows that sounds racist as all get-out and he was trying to point out this person as an individual, but Geoff countered with dude, you were drunk and argued that as unfortunate as it was, Johnny phrased his point badly, and Little John was begging me not to publish him sounding like an accidental bigot, all the while insisting that he wouldn't talk like that even while intoxicated, at which point Robin cut in and suggested I just split the difference and write 'people like you' since very, very few of the quotes in this story are 100% accurate anyway.)
"How you helping me by showing up drunk to my place of work at two in the morning, calling me ghetto, and pissing me off!?"
"We were going to give you money, for the sake of fuck!" the fox slurred. "That's literally all we do!"
"Hell, we're still gonna give you money to prove we're better fuckin' people than you!" the bear growled. "We're like Jesus, we love you by fuckin' default! Even if your personality sucks!"
"You really think I want ya muthafuckin' money!?"
"We do!" answered Robin. "We just think you're too proud to accept it!"
"Too PROUD!? You two having people live off stolen money and you think I'm ghetto!?"
The vehicle went silent as its passengers pondered that one.
"...Shiiit, that's actually kind of a really good point!" said Johnny.
"You ain't helping anybody by stealing shit just to give it to the people everybody thinks stole everything they've had to work their asses off for anyway!" (The trio still debate whether "everything they've had to work [...] for" was supposed to mean the robbery victims thinking "oh, all the stuff poor people have was stolen from us!" or if she was talking about poor people like herself in the third person and saying that people unaffected by such extreme poverty likely don't recognize the hard work done by people like her and think the poor only own what they've stolen, but this narrator would say it works both ways.) "I don't like the police, but I will not hesitate to call them to get you out of my fucking drive-thru!"
"Awww, c'mahhn!" Johnny cooed, "don't-"
"NOPE!" Geoff yipped as he threw his SUV in drive and peeled out of the lot.
"Aw, no, Geoff!"
"Geoff, you're forgetting the food!"
"Food! FOOOOOD!"
"FOOD! I need it to live!"
"Geoff, no!"
"Why, Geoffrey, WHY!?"
"Why you gotta be such a fucking drama queen!?"
"Is this the man you choose to be in this life, Geoff!?"
"I thought you were a fucking doctor who's supposed to fucking help people!"
"Goddammit, Geoffrey."
Geoff drove in silence with an unamused look on his face as he chauffeured them to the 24-hour McDonald's a few blocks away, brainstorming whether he should bother mentioning this when they finally sobered up.
"Hey, now that we got papers…" Johnny mused, "...we can buy our OWN car!"
-IllI-
It was a pain in the ass, but Eddy restrained himself from hitting the snooze button on his alarm. He'd gotten the Merry Men their documents, and now he wanted to inform his parents as soon as possible that they had interested tenants lining up - if for no other reason than to ensure the bandits got a place in line before any "legitimate" inquiries came in. He wanted to ask them last night, but they'd both worked late making that sweet, sweet commission money. So up early he was.
"...and I tell this son of a bitch, 'Ron, if you steal a sale out from under me again, even if it's a piece of shit Daewoo, I'm gonna rip your nuts out and use whatever the fuck you call the connecting tendons to make a string instrument!'" Terry spat in between spoonfuls of his bowl of Wheaties. "And you know what this pig bastard says in reply?"
"What?" Toni asked, barely looking up from her Special K.
"'What instrument you gonna make?'"
Toni chuckled through her nose a little, much to her husband's chagrin. "And then what did you say?"
Terry scoffed with a full mouth. "Well I told him to go fuck himself. Follow the script, Ron, heed the threat, don't fucking dissect it!"
"I thought one of the reasons why they called you 'classy' was because you never swore in front of them," came the third member of the household, to his parents' surprise.
"What're you doing up this early?" asked Terry.
"Your father wake you up with his impassioned tales of heroics?" Toni quipped.
Eddy looked at both of his parents before focusing on his father. "I asked you a question first."
Terry looked to Toni, who gave Terry a look of he's got you there.
"Well, I don't swear in front of the customers," he explained.
"So other salespeople do?" asked Toni teasingly.
Terry gave her an evil eye before returning to his son. "Oh, you know what I mean. I make a classy first impression. And then I can maintain that impression. Once someone knows me for a while - like my family - then it's safe to loosen up a little bit and use more, uh, lax vocabulary. Whereas with people who I try to maintain that classy image in front of - like my coworkers - if they hear Classy Terry using naughty no-no words, then they know something must be bad if even I'm swearing myself blue in the face. You see, son, when you're picky and choosy about using your swear words, you can use them to show you're comfortable around someone and likewise get them to better trust you, or, you can get them to take your threats all the more seriously, depending on the context." And to prove his nickname wasn't an informed attribute, he turned in his seat and adjusted his posture into a very gentlemanly pose. "But being classy is so much more than using PG-rated words. It's something I can teach you if you ever care to sit down and listen to me, Eddy. That's the good news. The bad news, however, is that this is a trait that our people are typically born with and don't need to learn, so if I have to sit down and teach it to you, there's probably a ceiling to how much of it you could ever learn."
"Terry!" his wife hissed as she leaned far over the table to smack him on the arm. "Don't tell your son that he's just born without a trait anybody can learn!"
Classy Terry classily brushed off the part of the arm his wife had smacked. "What else isn't classy, Eddy, is lying to people just to make them feel better. If you're doing it right, Eddy, you can tell people a harsh truth and still make them appreciate your straightforwardness - but you have to do it right. As such, I expect you to value the fact that I'm being honest with you because you know I'm not wasting your time with niceties and I am still offering to help you."
Eddy was unfazed. He'd soon have someone else to teach him such things, someone who wasn't secretly an asshole in private company like his father, someone who was classy enough to make Terry look like a trashy scrublord.
"Oh, ignore your father, he's not classy, he's stuck up," Toni insisted. "But for real, what're you doing up already?"
Eddy simply shrugged. "Couldn't stop thinking about something, figured I oughta tell ya while I have the chance since you guys are basically working all the time…"
"Fair enough," said Terry. "What's up? Let 'er rip."
Eddy looked a little bit nervous again but mostly looked like his head was in a fuck it, go for broke state of emboldened apathy.
"So I decided to take some initiative yesterday… but I didn't want to, y'know… circumvent your wishes…"
His parents were raising their eyebrows.
"Go on…" Toni invited skeptically.
"...I drew up… a poster. Made it by hand, not saved to the computer or anything, just… one copy and that's all. Advertising the new room."
Both his parents raised both their eyebrows, their eyes completely open in surprise and puzzlement.
"So you did," said the tod.
"I feel like there's more to this, that wasn't shocking enough," added the vixen.
"Uh, yeah, so… I went to the corner to put it up on a… y'know, a light post or whatever, and… y'know how we get those crazy gusts of wind every so often?"
"Yeah?" said Terry.
"Well, the wind took it. But these two guys caught it… and they looked at it… and, well, they were interested."
His parents looked surprised all over again.
"Now that was not a twist I was expecting," said Toni.
"That honestly kinda sounds far-fetched," said Terry. "You make one copy once by hand and the wind blows it into the hands of our new tenants? Bullshit. Baloney."
"Was it Ed?" Toni asked bluntly.
"What!?"
"Was it Ed? Did stupid Hilary kick him out of the house? Because if that poor boy needs a place to live, he can stay here, but somebody's paying for his rent, because I'm not charging that kid a dime, and there is no way we can afford his food expenses-"
"It wasn't Ed," Eddy assured them. "It was… a couple of strangers. Eh, I'd say they were friendly enough, so don't worry about that-"
"Tell me then, how'd it happen?" his father cut in.
"Huh?"
"How'd it happen?" Terry repeated. "What did they say, what did you say… and also, what were these people… like?"
"...Like?"
"Yeah, y'know, were they…?" Terry trailed off to choose his words in a rare moment of looking hesitant. "Were they like us," he said as he gestured to all three of them, "were they like, uh, our neighbors, were they like, uhhh…"
"Were they… salesmen?" Eddy asked with a wince.
Terry threw his hands up in the air. "I'm trying to not be racist here! Were they foxes, were they bunnies, were they sheep, were they wolves, were they fish-people, were they fucking aliens? Species, kid, species."
"Or was it a mix?" offered Toni. "You said there were two, right? Two guys? Were they… friends? Brothers? Uh…"
"I'd have no issue with a couple of fags living with us as long as they don't make gay sex noises and don't attract fundamentalist nutjobs to throw rocks in our windows," Terry announced, proud to showcase his progressive New Englander attitudes. (Toni just rolled her eyes.)
Eddy didn't comment on that. "Fox and a bear. I'm… preeeeetty sure they're just friends?"
Terry pondered that. "Well, that kinda makes sense since our peoples are tight, but… your mother and I keep in contact with another fox friend from college who still lives in Boston, you remember Paul, right? Well Paul had a gay brother and when Massachusetts legalized gay marriage last year, Paul's brother and his brother's bear boyfriend were one of the first to get married, even made the local news up there! And if they can make a four-foot height difference work, then so can others, so these two could still be an item-"
"Goddammit, Terry, why do you care about this so much?" Toni snapped. "Your son just told you they were probably straight!"
Terry was unmoved. "It's not the queers I'm afraid of, it's the people who hate the queers I'm afraid of! Our species already gets enough bullshit, bears arguably have it just as bad, I don't wanna jeopardize my family further by bringing more hated demographics into this house! Don't give me that look, Toni, I'm a good father. And husband. And protector."
Toni just looked away. "My question is how big is this bear? Is he gonna fit in this house?"
Eddy shrugged. "Well, he was bigger than us. He said he'd make it work, he said he was flexible."
Terry shrugged himself, paws up, mouth agape, and shaking his head quickly. "What the fuck does that mean, is he a fucking contortionist!?"
Eddy shrugged again. "Hey, maybe. But they said they were desperate for a place to stay, so they were willing to compromise."
"What did the poster you made even say?" asked his mother. "Can we see it?"
"Oh, they kept it," Eddy squeaked. "Uh, what was on it? Y'know, the usual… separate entrance, separate bathroom, price negotiable… the works-"
"And our address and phone number, right?" Toni asked, displeased at what she assumed was the answer. "Are you telling us this so we can expect knocks on our doors and phone calls on our work phones?"
"Huh? Oh, nonononono. I, uh… I completely forgot that! That's why it was a miracle that they ran into me putting the poster up!"
"So you gave them our number?" Terry drilled.
Eddy shook his head. "Didn't think about that. Just gave them my school email."
His parents' faces scrunched up.
"Your school email?"
"That's all I had in mind. They told me to email them back letting them know if you guys were open to making a deal." Hopefully they'd never interrogate him about the validity of this one, since his junior high email had probably been deleted after graduation and his high school account wouldn't be set up until he started in August, but he had a feeling they wouldn't get that nosy and that he was covering his tracks pretty well. "And yeah, they were even like, 'it's weird we're contacting a family through a kid's email,' but like I said… they were desperate."
Both the parents visibly had their doubts but were both damned curious whether this was actually happening like this.
"Okay, then," said Toni, "we'll play along and see where this goes. Send them our work numbers-"
"Fuck that, just tell 'em to come by this afternoon!" Terry laughed.
"What!?" Toni and Eddy yelped in unison.
"Boss is gonna send me home at lunch because I worked twelve hours yesterday, I ain't gonna have anything better to do," he said casually as he folded his arms behind his head.
"Terry, the friggin' room isn't even halfway done yet!" his wife protested.
Terry responded by leaning in with oddly seductive eyes. "Eddy said they're desperate, didn't he? Fine. Let's use that as a bargaining chip! Let's see how badly these guys want a roof over their heads."
Okay, this was beginning to sound eerily manipulative, but Eddy stood silently, telling himself that whatever worked to get them into that house, worked. He just hoped his dad wasn't looking to jack up the price on them, because Eddy had prepared himself to offer to loan the Merry Men deposit money.
Terry turned to his son. "Eddy, these guys have your email, but do you have their email?"
"...Yeah, they… emailed me reminding me to ask you."
"Perfect! Email them my work number! We'll work out a time for them to interview!"
"Terry!" went Toni.
"If they're creeps, we tell them, to get fucked. There is no inherent conflict here."
"Interview?" Eddy asked.
"Yeah, y'know, when you want an apartment, you interview the landlord so both parties know the other is good for it. Did you… did you not know that? That you have to interview for rentals? Have you not been apartment hunting yet?"
"...No! Why would I!? I'm not even fourteen yet!"
Terry shrugged. "Well, your uppity brother was already trying to move out at your age, the little asshole. But yeah, send them my digits, we'll work something out. Ya got me curious who these weirdos are."
"Uh… can I just tell them what time to swing by?" Eddy asked. Goddammit, Dad, these people don't have a fucking phone! ...I think.
"Life lesson, Eddy: if you're gonna be so bold as to set a time for someone to do something, not knowing or not caring if that time works for them, you'd better be damned sure you won't care if they hate you if it doesn't. Plus, y'know… kind of a waste of time scheduling something that doesn't work anyway."
Eddy nodded along, doing well to hide his frustration. Well, pay phone it was, then. This was all happening so fast, but as much as that was giving him some adrenaline nerves, he knew that quicker was for the better.
-IllI-
"You idiots are so lucky I'm off work today," the doctor grumbled. "I can't always just let you sleep in my car in my driveway till half past noon."
"Geoff, we only slept in your car for no more than an hour," said the fox in the passenger seat. "Then we had to take a wee."
"Thanks for leaving the keys in the car so we could get out without the alarm going off, by the way," said the bear splayed across the back rows.
"Yeah, and then you moved to a tree in my backyard!"
"Hey, it was a really nice tree!" Little John retorted.
"You should know by now that we're rather partial to sleeping under trees!" said Robin.
"Are you also partial to pissing in my bushes?"
"Dude, we drank a lot last night," Johnny explained. "We didn't wanna take a leak in your yard-"
"Several dozen leaks throughout the morning."
"Exactly! We had to!"
"Geoffrey, we'll make it up to you," said Robin with a smirk. "One of these days, you can pass out drunk and urinate all over our backyard!"
The dog rolled his eyes. "Is this another one of your hungover 'headache go bye-bye' jokes?"
"It is."
"Knock it off. And as a doctor I'd be remiss not to tell you to stop getting fucking hammered every goddamn night! IT'S. NOT. GOOD FOR YOU!"
The car was silent for a few blocks before the doctor spoke again.
"...So is that what you guys really think of the people you help?"
"I beg your pardon?" asked the polite one.
"Whaddya talkin' about?" asked the boisterous one.
"'Why should we help you people,' 'We love you by default, even if we hate your personality,' 'You should seriously respect us more,' those things."
"Aw, you mean the shit we said to that bitch at the drive-thru!?" asked Johnny as it all came back to him. "Naw, man, we didn't mean all of the people we help, God no, we wouldn't do this shit if we felt that way! We're adults, Geoff, we can differentiate between shitty individuals and the groups they happen to be part of!"
"Johnny's right, Doctor," Robin confirmed. "Yes, we were absolutely pissed - in both senses of the word - so we probably weren't wording our words the best we could have, we admit. But just because this person had a disagreeable personality doesn't mean we're going to disregard the plight she was born into that probably made her that way! When we said we'd give her money anyway, we meant that!"
"I'm just saying, guys, that's how it sounded," the dog said matter-of-factly. "At some points it was clear you meant her and her alone, but at other points it sounded like you were saying poor people were ingrates, at other points, uh - I'm gonna be honest: Johnny, you especially - it sounded like you were saying, uh, her people were ingrates-"
"Jesus Christ, man, my accent ain't even that thick and you're really gonna tell me it makes everything I say sound racist!?" the bear growled.
Geoff took a breath. "Honestly, man? This isn't fair to you, but you saying 'Why should we try to help someone like you?' with a voice like yours - especially, um, to someone with a voice like hers, ahem - it sounds a helluva lot more, uh, charged than if Mister Guy Who Sounds Like James Bond over here had said it."
"Well, people back home told me I sounded more James Hunt during one of his rare moments of sobriety, but if Bond is the only British James you know, I won't scoff at the comparison," Robin remarked with a smile, but neither of the Americans seemed to heed him. (And he brought this up during the same group call as earlier, because after all these years he's still annoyed that these ignorant yanks didn't acknowledge his clever quip. And now he's asking me to look up James Hunt so I get the reference. Alright, hold on, James Hunt was the, uh, Formula One guy, right? Alright, I found an interview… Wait, Jesus fucking Christ, fuck sounding alike, these two could pass for father and son. So Robin Hood and James Hunt are/were both foxes with disproportionately deep and manly voices that simply don't match their cartoonishly handsome vulpine faces. Man, my self-esteem doesn't need me to be reminded that apparently eminently good-looking people are a fuckton more common than I once thought and I'm still not one of them. Why couldn't I get any genes like this? I asked Robin that out loud during our phone call.)
"Oh, yeah, that's rich!" Little John continued, picking up where they left off before the fox had interrupted to remind everyone that he greatly resembled a famous playboy. "Like everything America knows about colonialism wasn't learned from Mommy England? I'm not the one who crashed a fucking civil rights rally!"
"What was that?" asked the Saint Bernard who knew nothing of that incident.
"Er - nothing, Geoffrey," Robin spoke up. "But the point is that we'd been drinking, we weren't as eloquent as we'd usually like to be, we surely said some things that were phrased poorly. But I don't think anybody in their right mind would take those remarks at face value and hold them against us.
Geoff winced. "Uh… yes they would," he seemed to seethe. "That's like saying you wouldn't blame a drunk driver for running over a toddler."
Robin sighed and turned to look out the window. "Alright, point taken-"
"Which ACTUALLY HAPPENED, TWO FUCKING NIGHTS AGO, it was a five-year-old porcupine boy, and NO, WE COULDN'T SAVE HIM, because his midsection was as flat as a FUCKING PANCAKE, and according to the parents - who were less hysterical than you'd think they'd be ONLY because they were already getting past it by the time the kid got to us because even Helen fucking Keller could tell that the kid was D.O.A. - the only reason the stupid drunk son of a bitch even realized he ran a kid over was because the kid's quills BLEW HIS FUCKING TIRE OUT! WHY! IS THIS! THE WORLD! THAT I LIVE IN!?" And after pounding the steering wheel repeatedly and nearly to the point of breaking it, he took a few deep breaths, in through his nose and out through his mouth, slowly calming down as he turned onto the dirt road leading to the junkyard. "Alas that these evil days should be mine," he finally muttered.
Spooked, the Merry Men had been thoroughly silenced.
"Jeez, man, we're sorry," Johnny said after a time, "we didn't know."
Geoff kept breathing as his respiratory system returned to its normal pace. "I know you guys didn't know, but… I know you guys do know I have my own shit going on, right? You know that, right?"
"Of course we do! That's why we offered to help you get over some of your anxiety!"
"Not just that, John, I mean my work. I try to be available when you guys need me, but one of these days you guys are gonna catch me on a bad day. And even if you don't, the bad days still linger with me. Because a few weeks before the porcupine kid was the giraffe kid whose big brother found out the hard way not to play with their dad's Glock. Few weeks before that was the nine-year-old Great Dane girl who went behind her parents' backs and ate a Share Size bag of M&Ms - that's a mistake she'll never be able to make again, I shouldn't have to tell you that that one struck pretty close to home. And let's not forget a few months ago back during that snowstorm, we had the little cheetah boy who was the only one in his family who didn't die when his family's car skidded through a red light and got impaled by a fucking semi! You think I'm ever gonna forget the way that kid cried his eyes out for hours when he found out his parents and siblings were gone forever while also crying from the pain of a dozen broken bones? The kid begging us to make him die so he could be with his family!? Man, there's stuff from years ago I still have nightmares about. Like when those dipshits blew the red light and impaled the city bus all those years back - you guys said you knew two different people who had spouses on that bus who didn't make it out, right? I probably handled their corpses in some capacity. Or that one time the fucking high-rise housing project went up in flames. Just a bunch of bodies charred to pitch black, a lot of babies and old people, so many people who wouldn't have been in there if the maintenance company hadn't been too afraid to go to a dangerous neighborhood to make sure the fucking smoke detectors actually worked, and we couldn't even use dental records to identify some of those people because a bunch of 'em were too poor to have ever been to the dentist! I… I'm sorry, that was… I know that was a lot. But have I made my point?" he asked as he maneuvered around the mounds of refuse. "I appreciate that you wanna include me in your goofy spontaneous happy fun-time shenanigans, but… goddammit, I'm not somebody who can just snap out of it when I'm stewing in bad thoughts. And I can't always be there for you. Your end of the deal is to not take advantage of my availability. Especially when I'm trying to sleep, because that's the only time I get to escape the reality that a big part of my job is watching people die! So if you're gonna knock on my door in the dead of night… it better be a freaking emergency. Or one of these days I'm just not gonna answer. Does that sound fair?"
Johnny responded by turning to his fox friend. "You've been quiet."
Robin had been. And of course he was, he was a bit overwhelmed by all these tales of dead children, who wouldn't be? The fact that he had recently formally dragged a couple kids into their own dangerous line of work wasn't easing his mind at all. It was almost enough to make him wonder whether Skippy and Toby were safer in prison than they would have been if they kept following him and Johnny around.
"I know I've been quiet, I'm just… thinking," he finally said. "And I understand what you're going through completely, Doctor; me mum was a nurse, mind you, she had plenty of bad days herself. So our apologies if we've been wearing out our welcome."
"Copy that," added Little John.
The Cadillac eventually came to a stop and Geoff put it in park. "Look at that," he said, gesturing to their van. "We're already here and I haven't even gotten to my point yet. Alright, so… just, just forget everything about the dead kids, let's go back to last night, it, it wasn't anything about the wording, per se, just…" The dog shifted in his seat to better face his passengers. "Maybe you guys just need to figure out how to be more patient with people like that."
"I'm sorry?" asked Robin, admittedly a tad offended.
Johnny elaborated: "MORE patient? What, like we're not already more patient than most people would be in our situation!? Most people would be like, 'Listen, bitch, this bad attitude is why you're poor and you work at fucking White Castle!' Never stopping to think that maybe she has a bad attitude because she's poor and has to work at fucking White Castle! We're already miles ahead of your average person and you think we need to be more patient!?"
And the doctor just gave a wishy-washy shrug. "I mean, in a lot of ways, you're definitely a lot more patient with someone like her than most people would be, but honestly… in other ways, you aren't. An average middle-class suburbanite might not know or care about the… like… the idiosyncrasies of poverty or the fine details about how it works, but the average person would also just… not get so fucking heated like you two eventually did. The average person would just want to get their food and get out of that situation without making a stink about it, they wouldn't flip out and demand she change her entire demeanor on the spot - it took you a while to get to that point, but you got there eventually. The average person never would. And what I was really really trying to say was…." A sigh. "...as someone who knows you guys… fairly well, I'd like to imagine… it really didn't sound like you were just talking to her. It honestly didn't. And hearing all that, it was like I had an epiphany where I was like… 'Oh. So that's how they really feel. So that's why they're getting plastered every night, relapsing into alcohol abuse like they used to after making so much progress in handling it responsibly over the last few years. It's because they had their own Road to Damascus moment where they suddenly feel like the people don't appreciate them, so now they're getting blackout drunk to cope with their feelings that their time's been wasted on people they now hold in contempt, and now that they are drunk, they're lacking the inhibitions stopping them from telling these people what they really wanna say.' That's what it sounded like to me. And I know you guys, so I can't imagine how it'd sound to other people."
The fox and bear had told the Saint Bernard absolutely nothing about how they'd recently begun having moments of feeling exactly like that. But their stunned expressions betrayed the fact that - not completely accurately, but more so than they'd care to admit - the doctor had called his shot.
But Geoff wasn't looking to embarrass them. He didn't need to pry for confirmation; their faces said enough.
"Alright!" he announced, suddenly seeming cheery. "I got you home! You can get out of my car now!"
"Well, wait," said Robin, "we're in no rush, we can spare a few minutes to discuss what we-"
"No, sir. You're in no rush, but I've got shit to do today. Nobody wants an ER doc in a dirty jacket because he didn't take the time to do his laundry. Besides, I think we've talked enough, haven't we? Even Quentin Torontino would be bored by all this dialogue."
The duo just kept staring at him, not knowing what to say.
"Plus it looks like someone's waiting on you anyway," Geoff noted, looking out the windshield towards the van.
The Merry Men looked. From their angle, they couldn't see the back hatch of the van, but they could see an orange and black tail through the negative space under the chassis, suggesting someone of the vulpine persuasion was sitting on the rear bumper.
"Is that one of the kids you creeps hang out with?"
"It actually might be," said Johnny.
They got out of the SUV and said their (incredibly awkward) goodbyes to the dogtor (I came up with that word all by myself!), power-walking over to Eddy.
"Aw, shit, Eddy, we're sorry," Johnny apologized as he and Robin approached, "we completely forgot about training time, that's all on us."
"We'll make it up to you for all the time you wasted waiting for us, lad," Robin insisted, equally as remorseful. "...Say, where's your brownie friend? Ed couldn't come out to play today?"
Eddy looked very serious sitting there. "I told him to stay home. We got more important things to do. You two got job-interview clothes?"
-IllI-
"...Oh, no, we actually… we're actually in the area already, incidentally." Johnny knew he was tripping over his words a bit, but hey, that was natural for a phone call of this nature. "Y'know, we actually had a full day of looking at apartments and sublets planned out here, but one of them cancelled on us just now - we took down your phone number in case something like this happened, and whaddya know, it did!"
Robin nodded peacefully as he looked up at Johnny doing all the talking; they both agreed it'd probably be best for the American to put in the call, since Eddy's father might find it distractingly jarring to answer the phone and hear a British accent.
"Oh, yeah, man, we can be there in, like… twenty minutes? ...Awesome! And, uh… Rethink Avenue and Grove Street are the same street, right? ...Grove Street turns into Rethink, perfect, got it! Alright, well it's been a pleasure talking to you, Mister - wait, I never got your name, did I? ...Terry! Well, we'll see you soon, Terry, Jack and me're looking forward to it!" Little John sighed a bit as he hung up the payphone. "Man, I'm grateful for how much more comfy I am talking to people after meeting you, but damn, I still can't figure out how to make a conversation like that not be at least a little bit awkward."
"Nonsense, Johnny, you did perfectly fine!" Robin praised as they started off toward Eddy's house two blocks away. "It's an odd conversation to have, anybody would be a tad bit awkward having it. Though - if I may give some constructive criticism - I'd have made more of a point to pay attention when he gave his name the first time-"
"Man, what first time!?" Johnny responded. "I mean, I know you couldn't hear his side, but wasn't it obvious by the cadence of the conversation? You heard me say 'hey, we're calling about the room' and he just skipped straight to 'okay, when can you come over?' Even at the end, he didn't even say his last name, he just said Terry."
"Hm," Robin pondered, "well, in that case, my apologies, Johnny. But if he raised a lad like Eddy… I suppose we shouldn't be surprised if he turned out to be a bit of an oddball."
"Yeah, it seemed like he was just itchin' to close this deal, didn't wanna waste time with introductions and all that. Seemed like a perfectly cool guy besides that, didn't seem like he was pushing me so much as he was just eager to meet us and get this done. Hey, Eddy did say his dad's literally a used car salesman."
"Wait, he did?"
Johnny smirked. "Now who wasn't paying attention?"
The fox nodded in concession. "Alright, you got me there. Well… in that case, good on you for telling him we'd also been looking elsewhere! Give him the impression that he needs to make us an offer before he loses out on us and he might just sweeten the deal!"
"Why thank ya, sir," the bear replied with a tip of an invisible hat. "Yeah, the entire time I was talking to him, I was just imagining as if I'd walked into, I dunno, a Chevy dealership and saw him there. And he wasn't the 'buy something or get out' kind of salesman, he did a very good job of bullshitting me into thinking he actually gave a damn or two about my satisfaction as a customer."
And that was something Robin was just a tiny bit worried about. Nothing too big, it wasn't getting his heart thumping or anything, it was just the faintest niggle of apprehension in his head. The last thing Robin wanted was to get into a charisma competition with this geezer.
Although Robin's debonair aura was the stuff of legend, his magnetic personality was not infallible. There were some specific demographics who were almost always impervious to Robin's famous charm: teenagers, who were invariably too jaded and cynical to buy what Robin was selling; the cripplingly insecure, who would see Robin's confidence and react with anger and frustration that they couldn't be like him and therefore would rather oppose him than follow him; lesbian women, who were neither attracted to Robin the way that many straight women and gay dudes were nor were envious of him in the guy-to-guy way that many straight men were; people (this group including many people back home in England) who were privy to the fact that Robin had literally attended charm school in the sense that he'd had a rich absentee father who sent him to take those damned etiquette classes, with such people concluding that Robin's charisma was thusly artificial and consequently were not impressed by it; the French; and other foxes, many of whom would not be shy to say that, yes, the stereotypes were true, their people were masters of deception as a consequence of their people's historical cultural values, and as societally unfortunate as it might sound to say, they knew better than to trust their own kind.
All Robin knew about this guy so far was that he was a fox who lived on a block with no other foxes (foxes on the block, there's a tongue-twister in there somewhere) and seemed, to Johnny at least, exactly as foxy as a fox should be while holding an occupation that was perhaps the single most stereotypically scummy and underhanded line of work in mainstream American culture, arguably only overshadowed by lawyers and attorneys. This was by no means a foregone conclusion, but if this Terry bloke was a tod who distrusted other foxes specifically because he thought they were all as shifty and conniving as he himself was intentionally striving to be… that is what it would look like. This kind of vulpine self-hatred was somewhat visible but not nearly as common back home in England - and it kind of couldn't be, because you'd swear foxes bred like rabbits in the British Isles and a blind man couldn't walk a mile in England without stepping on a bushy red tail - but in a place as diverse and spread-out as America, it was all too easy for a guy like Terry to set himself up to be the only fox in his neighborhood and run it accordingly; there might be some antivulpinism coming from the other species, but if a fox got the impression that they were the only one in sight with half a brain, the rewards would absolutely be worth it. And while not every fox sought to be a leader to "dumber" animals, even the ones that didn't could do without another fox as competition in their cunning dealings. It made sense that Eddy said his parents were friends with Ed's folks; foxes gravitated towards bears not just because bears made great sidekicks for sneaky plans, but also because foxes just couldn't do business with each other.
And good God, if you thought it could get heated when two grizzlies arm wrestle, you should see the sparks fly when two foxes get into a charm-off, each one trying to one-up one another while getting progressively more passive-aggressive and still looking like a class act all the while. What I'm trying to say, Dear Reader, is that there were a lot of foxes who embraced the stereotypes of their species and revelled in them, and those who did rarely wanted to be challenged by another fox in being the craftiest one around. From the scant information he knew about him, Robin thought this Terry dude fit that description to a T.
There was a chance that this guy wouldn't want another fox around, no matter how friendly Robin tried to be - if anything, friendliness might actually play to Robin's detriment if it made him seem like a social threat. This was a possibility that Robin did not fear but it sat in his mind as a possibility nevertheless. Besides, something the Merry Men also knew about Terry was that Eddy had clarified to him that the prospective tenants were indeed one fox and one bear, ergo he wouldn't have played along this long if he didn't want another fox in his house. But just in case this used car salesman was just that eager to become an exploitative landlord and was willing to put his prejudices against his own people aside for the sake of a buck, there was another good reason to have Johnny do the talking on the phone: a heavier voice suggesting it was the heavier animal. Might sound like a stupid little idea, but hey, in all likelihood this Terry guy would be cool with another tod around.
...Ooor maybe you're telling yourself that this narrator wouldn't have bothered including all that if it wasn't an important detail. Hey, you never know, maybe I'm a terrible writer and I just threw in a bunch of non-pertinent information just to waste your time, you don't know my life.