Stories: All-New Tales

Except now, you need to guess the price of a whole cow full of milk in a box, the way milk comes in the kitchen fridge. You have to guess the cost of a whole thing of breakfast cereal like you’d find in the kitchen cabinet. After that, a giant deal of pure salt the way it comes from the ocean only in a round box, but more salt than anybody could eat in an entire lifetime. Enough salt, you could rim approximately a million-billion margaritas.

All the Zeta Delts start texting you like crazy. Your in-box is piling up.

Next come these eggs like you’d find at Easter, only plain white and lined up inside some special kind of cardboard case. A whole, complete set of twelve. These really minimalist eggs, pure white…so white you could just look at them forever, only right away you need to guess at a big bottle like a yellow shampoo, except it’s something gross called cooking oil, you don’t know what for, and the next thing is you need to choose the right price of something frozen.

You cup one hand over your eyes to see past the footlights, except all the Zeta Delts are lost in the glare. All you can hear is their screaming different prices of money. Fifty thousand dollars. A million. Ten thousand. Just loony people yelling just numbers.

Like the TV studio is just some dark jungle, and people are just some monkeys just screeching their monkey sounds.

The molars inside your mouth, they’re grinding together so hard you can taste the hot metal of your fillings, that silver melting in your back teeth. Meantime, the sweat stains creep down from your armpit to your elbow, all black-red down both sides of your Zeta Delt T-shirt. The flavor of melted silver and pink bubblegum. It’s sleep apnea only in the day, and you need to remind yourself to take the next breath…take another breath…while the supermodels walking on sparkly high heels try pimping the audience a microwave oven, pimping a treadmill while you keep staring to decide if they’re really good-looking. They make you spin this doohickey so it rolls around. You have to match a bunch of different pictures so they go together perfect. Like you’re some white rat in Principles of Behavioral Psychology 201, they make you guess what can of baked beans costs more than another. All that fuss to win something you sit on to mow your lawn.

Thanks to your mom telling you prices, you win a thing like you’d put in a room covered in easy-care, wipe-clean, stain-resistant vinyl. You win one of those deals people might ride on vacation for a lifetime of wholesome fun and family excitement. You win something hand painted with the Old World charm inspired by the recent release of a blockbuster epic motion picture.

It’s the same as when you felt sick with a high fever and your little-kid heart would pound and you couldn’t catch your breath, just from the idea that somebody might take home an electric organ. No matter how sick you felt, you’d watch this show until your fever broke. All the flashing lights and patio furniture, it seemed to make you feel better. To heal you or to cure you in some way.

It’s like forever later, but you win all the way to the Showcase Round.

There, it’s just you and the old granny wearing the sweatshirt from before, just somebody’s regular grandma, but she’s lived through world wars and nuclear bombs, probably she saw all the Kennedys get shot and Abraham Lincoln, and now she’s bobbing up and down on her tennis-shoe toes, clapping her granny hands and crowded by supermodels and flashing lights while the big voice makes her the promise of a sports utility vehicle, a wide-screen television, a floor-length fur coat.

And probably it’s the acid, but it’s like nothing seems to add up.

It’s like, if you live a boring-enough life, knowing the price of Rice-A-Roni and hot dog wieners, your big reward is you get to live for a week in some hotel in London? You get to ride on some airplane to Rome. Rome, like, in Italy. You fill your head full of enough ordinary junk, and your pay-off is giant supermodels giving you a snowmobile?

If this game show wants to see how smart you really are, they need to ask you how many calories in a regular onion–cheddar cheese bagel. Go ahead, ask you the price of your cell phone minutes any hour of the day. Ask you about the cost of a ticket for going thirty miles over the speed limit. Ask the round-trip fare to Cabo for spring break. Down to the penny, you can tell them the price of decent seats for the Panic at the Disco reunion tour.

They should ask you the price of a Long Island iced tea. The price of Marcia Sanders’s abortion. Ask about your expensive herpes medication you have to take but don’t want your folks to know you need. Ask the price of your History of European Art textbook, which cost three hundred bucks—fuck you very much.

Ask what that stamp of Hello Kitty set you back.