There’s this Miami parking garage I frequent, and in this garage recently was this car that hadn’t been moved in a while.
At one point the car simply bore an unimaginative “wash me” traced into the dirt (but in Spanish), and some former finger-painting arteest later added a penis to this. It had a pair of testicles at the bottom and a shaft extending upward — this is pretty much what you would expect if you asked anyone in the world to draw you the Platonic ideal cartoon dick.
Hel-lo, middle school.1
I walked by it a few times — always cringing, not out of morality but good taste — before it occurred to me that I could fix this; I’d not only make this totally safe-for-work, but I would make this awesome. I started by adding a few extra circles to where the testicles were at the bottom, creating the appearance of a plume of smoke. And going up the side of the shaft, I simply wrote “USA.”
I’d converted this crude penis nobody wants to see into a totally sweet Space Shuttle in the process of launching. Or so I thought.
It turns out that at the time somewhere in the world, some countries were playing some soccer (football, whatever, shut up) thing, and a small but ardent group of people were concerned with the outcome of this tournament.
Crazy, right? Well, as it turns out, they all seemed to park in this garage. Over the course of a few weeks, in strange outbursts of national pride, new penises began filling the windshield alongside the USA penis. Each of these bore the name of a country that — I’m just assuming here — had teams that were competing in that soccer (f.w.s.) thing. Some were big. Some were small. One was Belgium.
I’d sparked an international cartoon-dick-measuring contest.
So was it my fault that everybody completely missed what I was going for? Should I have drawn a launch tower? Solid rocket boosters? Or would they have just seen these as penile enhancements? That’s likely, since the other participants took my smoke plume to mean that this was a six-testicled monster cock. (Something-something… anime.)
The next time this happens, I think I’m writing “NASA.”
- Speaking of which, oh man, I have this great story involving my friends Chris and David in 6th grade.[↩]