Aaron

I share my bus ride to work most mornings with a retarded guy named Aaron. Aaron rocks. Aaron looks like Art Garfunkel* and uses lip balm like a condiment. Aaron understands the rules about my morning routine; he reads his sports page and I read a chapter of whatever book I'm reading before we start talking and catching each other up on our days. Aaron goes to the mall a lot with his girlfriend Barbara, and last Saturday he went to Hooters for lunch. I made a face.

"What, you don't like the Hooters?"

"Well, it's a little--"

"Dirty?"

"Yeah. In both senses."

"Sexist?"

"Definitely."

"I like the wings," he said.

We joke sometimes about how many people Aaron has working for him. He has a counselor who visits him and his roommate in their apartment. He has a couple of job coaches. He has a social worker. "Do you ever make them carry you around on pillows?"

"No!"

"You should look into that."

"Off with their heads!"

"That's the spirit."

On the bus this morning, after Aaron scanned the sports page and told me he was rooting for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl**, he said, "That stupid idiot kept talking last night." Aaron lives in a houseshare situation in the building Zach and I used to live in. There's a woman in his program there who talks to coats, and an aggressive 'tard who tried to take $10 from me once in the elevator before wishing me a hearty "Shabbat Shalom!" There's also the Ladies' Man 'tard who spends all his free time flirting with the front desk concierges and dressing like Thurston Howell III when he hangs out by the pool during the summer. There were too many options for me to know which stupid idiot Aaron was talking about.

"The President. He's an idiot. A stupid idiot." And then Aaron sort of chanted "stupid idiot" for a while before telling me how excited he was about the speech class he was starting on Saturday. "My girlfriend's gonna meet me there and then we'll go to the mall."

Regardless of your politics -- and I'm a dyed in the wool liberal democrat (with socialist leanings and a song in my heart for the intellectual days of communism) -- being called an "idiot, stupid idiot" by a retarded man who eats lip balm, that's gotta carry an extra sting, right?

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* Poor Art Garfunkel's kid.

** So, I'm not a sporty guy. I don't know the differences between the Super Bowl and the Splendid Bowl (P.S.: What's a "bowl" in this context?) and any other kind of "-bowl." So, I go to www.superbowl.com thinking that there would be something on the site that would tell me who the two teams were so I could tell you who Aaron picked because, not being a sporty guy, the team he mentioned didn't make an impression and I forgot before I got a chance to write this down. Does www.superbowl.com tell you anywhere on the front page who's playing whom? Not in any way that this homo could figure out. There were two helmets, I'm assuming of the opposing teams -- but again: hi. I just thought somewhere in big letters it would say SUPERBOWL [insert Roman numeral here]: _______________ vs. _______________.