Not Lou Perez.

It was pretty apparent upon meeting us that we were a very ramshackle company and that interning for us would probably not get one any closer to working in the actual publishing industry than interning at McDonalds. But Lou was kind enough to pretend we were worth his time, hanging out with us for a semester and continuing to show up to our events, long past the days when we were not paying him to do work for us. And then he went all fancy and started an amazing sketch group and began doing stand-up and now I can shed a tear of pride as I present to you his hilarious and somehow poignant piece of fiction, "My bin Laden Orgasm." (Note: this piece first appeared on his website, louperez.net.)

It has been over a month since it was announced that U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, but my Brooklyn neighborhood—like all other cities and towns in the United States—is still abuzz with bin Laden conversation.

Today at the supermarket I was waiting on the checkout line when an elderly woman, whom I recognized from the soup aisle, approached me. Although I was looking right at her, she reached out to touch my elbow.

“Yes?” I said.

She smiled. “Where were you?”

“Me?” I had repeated the story so many times before; it was becoming staler with each repetition. “I was in Los Angeles visiting a friend. We were at a restaurant—a chain called Umami Burger. My friend and I sat at the bar. We were eating hamburgers and watching sports highlights on the television. We heard about bin Laden’s death—I mean we read about it—from the news crawler at the bottom of the TV screen.”

“Oh,” she said. She continued to smile. I knew what was coming next. “How good was your orgasm?”

I took a moment. I knew the answer the old woman wanted to hear—the answer she expected to hear. “It was the best orgasm I’ve ever had in my life.”

“They don’t come along very often,” she said. “Trust me. I’m a lot older than you. I was a little girl when Hitler put a bullet through his head—and that whore of his. I was so young I didn’t know what I was feeling. But it felt so good.”

I asked her if she’d like to go ahead of me, and she accepted my invitation. She piled her groceries onto the conveyor belt before I could lend a hand.

When the cashier scanned the first of her items the old woman turned back to me with that smile of hers.

“Sorry,” I said. It was my turn to ask her about her bin Laden story. “Where were you?”

“Well, my granddaughter had just left the apartment,” she said. “I think you’d like my granddaughter. She’s beautiful, smart—a lawyer. What’s not to like?”

Rather than tell her I was dating someone, I looked at the loaf of bread in my hand. Do I really need this now? I thought.

“I heard it on the radio,” she said. “And I had the orgasm right there in my kitchen. Thank God I didn’t fall down!”

The cashier, a black kid no more than 17, broke in to the conversation. “I was with my girl at the movies.”

“That’s so nice,” the old woman said. “I wish my husband were alive to experience it with me.”

“Yeah, we were watching Fast Five,” the cashier continued. “She got a text and we both nutted right there. It was so cool. Good movie too.”

I stepped out of line, deposited my loaf of bread into a basket on the floor near the register, and walked out of the store. Behind me I could hear all the voices of the supermarket shoppers and staff gather until they were one loud soundscape of orgasmic recollection.

*

Sitting at my kitchen table, breadless—and therefore without sandwich—I’m feeling bad about having lied to the old woman. No, my bin Laden orgasm was not the best orgasm I’ve ever had. Not even close.

I sat at the bar in Umami with a special hamburger topped with pastrami in my hand, and a big bite of it in my mouth, and felt—as I read the crawler on the TV—what I would describe as a jolt. I shook for a moment—was in no danger of choking, fortunately—then felt whatever semen I had ejaculated creep down my thigh and stop at the border of my underwear.

I looked to my friend sitting next to me who was convulsing—like everyone else in the restaurant. Someone looking in through the window would have thought there was an earthquake happening inside.

The rest of the night my cell phone was on fire with calls and text messages from friends and family with accounts of their bin Laden orgasms. My parents, short of breath, recommended I turn on CNN. While I watched the network’s news coverage of the citizens that had assembled spontaneously post-climax outside the White House and Ground Zero, my girlfriend called.

“I wish I could come like that all the time,” she said, unaware of the impact her words were having on me.

“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”

*

What’s wrong with me? I wonder. Why after 10 years of build-up—I was a sophomore at New York University in 2001, my dorm was not far from the World Trade Center, and I knew a fireman who perished—why didn’t I come harder? Why?

Perhaps I’ve been desensitized over the years, like a man so used to watching porn that the written word—even at its most erotic—isn’t enough to harden his flaccid cock. Maybe the news of Osama bin Laden’s death, with its sizzling details, just isn’t enough for me to bust a life-transforming load.

Maybe I need to see it happen: I need to see the erotic details of his death, the ones I’ve heard so much about—the two shots to the face—played out before me. Is there a tape of the attack? I’m sure there is. Can I download it? Soon, I hope. I hope.

I want to come. I want to come so hard. I want to feel what everyone else was feeling.

Lou Perez is Luis Amate Perez, a writer/comedian based in New York City. He produces videos and performs at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater with his group, Greg and Lou (www.GregandLou.com). His work has appeared in Fiction; Born in the 1980s; Rejected: Tales of the Failed, Dumped, and Canceled; Beyond Race Magazine; and Religion Dispatches. His blog is www.LouPerez.net. Follow him @LOUontheSUBWAY.

A few days ago, Sarah and I were sitting around with our baby, as we are wont to do nowadays. We had had enough of television after trying to muddle through an awful but supposedly underrated movie called In Her Shoes. It was directed by Curtis Hanson who also directed L.A. Confidential, which is one of my favorite films. This was not one of my favorite films. There was a period of my life in which I refused to leave a movie unfinished; if I started a movie, I would watch it until the bitter end, regardless of how much I was enjoying the experience. Those days are long gone. In the age of Netflix and babies, if a movie hasn't captured my attention within fifteen minutes, I'm done.

Having failed in our movie-watching attempt, Sarah requested that I read her and Hazel a story. I love to hear the sound of my own voice, so I obliged. My book of choice for this assignment was Richard Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn. Brautigan's stories are short and strange and wonderful and they sounded really nice when being read aloud to my wife and child on a rainy night in Los Angeles.

Brautigan's stories got me thinking that a nice experiment for the New Year would be to write some kind of story every day. It wouldn't need to be the best story I've ever written. It most probably would not be, on account of the limitations that arise from trying to crank out a new one every day. But as long as there is some kind of thing that happens, it counts. For example, my story for today is about how I was inspired by Richard Brautigan to write a story every day for my New Year's Resolution. And now the story has been told and we can officially mark this first day of the project a success.

I will be posting these stories on our tumblr account - awkwardpress.tumblr.com. If you would like to join me in this project, I'd love to have you. Please create a tumblr or posterous in which to tell your stories and send me the URL; I will gladly link to you. If enough people join the experiment, maybe we can do something in published form at the end of 2011. I know a guy.

Let the tales begin! And Happy New Year!

(Claps his hands.) All right! Coffee time! Let's do this shit!

Me at Starbucks (in line behind him): You look great!

But then, to my surprise, a story arrived courtesy of uber-talented F.o.A. (Friend of Awkward) and Awkward Two author Heather Clitheroe that clears the whole mess up. I particularly like the image of Ms. Howard "oozing herself between bar stools." And so we begin.

Victoria Howard's Retirement Card

by Heather Clitheroe

The email arrives in your inbox around nine thirty, give or take, sent from the Cultural Affairs account. Nancy wrote it; she typed it out, clicked send, and went back to work. Hello! Most of you have probably heard that Victoria Howard will be retiring from the city soon. We invite you to sign her "retirement card". It’s located under the front counter in the main office and will be available through June 3. Thanks! Nancy. Several hours later, Nancy will send out the invitation to a small reception in the office for Victoria Howard, to take place at 2:30 on June 2, two days before Victoria Howard will be gone.

You wish Victoria's retirement card was filled with the things people have wanted to say to her but never have. Wish you hadn't screwed up the coffee machine. Thanks for ratting me out to the boss. I hope people treat you the way you've treated them. Victoria Howard has not been a favourite of yours. She is a favourite of nobody's, or perhaps only of a few. Several months ago, close to retirement and entering peri-menopause, she began to experiment with weight loss, leather jackets, tattoos, and alcohol. You were horrified -- and fascinated -- to discover her at a bar one Saturday evening, oozing herself between bar stools to begin a sloppy flirtation with the bartender. You tried to act as though you hadn't seen her, but she recognized you and shrieked hello over the band, and you left soon after that. On Monday morning, however, she said nothing, and you suspect she had forgotten her confession that she needed a man between her legs in the worst way.

You fervently hope you were not the man she to whom she referred. You suspect you might have been.

Do you write best wishes for a happy retirement or never darken our doorstep again? Or take your 401K and put it into a good rehab facility, you'll need it, maybe, because more and more her eyes are bloodshot and her breath smells suspiciously of mouthwash by mid-afternoon. Yesterday she came to ask you about her computer -- it's stopped working, for some reason, and perhaps it's because she's something of a fool when it comes to opening attachments and replying to Nigerian email scams. But you felt sorry for her, the way her sky blue eyeshadow had begun to drive down her cheeks in a slow, powdery cascade, and when you were clearing out her browsing history, you found that she had been reading about breast cancer on her lunch break. But you see that she has also been reading about nasty hot chicks who love to be spanked, and also nipple clamps, and you suspect that it is, once again, possible that you are overthinking the situation.

Her retirement is in three weeks. The day before she leaves, you and the others will assemble in the lunchroom to listen to the vice-president read a speech that his assistant has written for him. It will highlight Victoria's career with the Cultural Affairs division, but it will leave out such cultural faux pas as referring to the Ivory Coast trade mission as 'those darkies' that landed her in a week of sensitivity training seminars. You were there, too, for a joke about cougars that did not go over well. Victoria will simper and blush, but she will enjoy the faint praise, rather than be damned by it.

There will be a slab cake, with white frosting and gel words that will say something like we'll miss you or good luck, Victoria Howard!!!! The cake underneath the frosting will be yellow and of an indeterminate flavour, but you will take a piece, eating the icing and dumping the rest in the garbage. If you go for drinks after work -- and Nancy will be arranging this, at the local Kilkenny's Good Time Pub, so you will go -- you will have a beer, and then three more in rapid succession, and by the end of the night you will be trying to remember if you did body shots off of Victoria Howard's fleshy belly. You will not be able to recall, for you will go home in the cab that Nancy has called for you, with the buzzing silence in your ears that you always get when you have had too much to drink.

You will not call in sick on Friday, because Nancy is your supervisor. When you wake in the morning, with a pounding headache and an urgent feeling of nausea, you will assume that it was Nancy that called the cab, even though you don't really remember, and you will come to the sick realization that whatever happened to you happened in front of everybody you work with. There will be no calling in sick. You will vomit in the toilet, and when you are done, you will continue to vomit thin bile in the shower, and you will curse Victoria Howard and her eyeshadow, and her suggestion -- which you suddenly recall -- that you meet her in the bathroom, and you will find yourself wide-eyed and staring at your hands in the shower, trying desperately to remember what happened. What happened?

When you finally arrive at work -- and you will arrive, because you owe too much on student loans and credit cards to risk being fired, especially in this economy -- you will be close to twenty minutes late, and Nancy will see you creeping by her office door and shake her head. You will try very hard to have a normal day, despite the jokes that people tell you and tell around you, and the knowing glances from the cute girl in the cubicle by the photocopier, and the slightly disgusted way Nancy speaks to you. You will drink coffee by mid-morning, when you can trust yourself not to boot it in the recycling bin under your desk, and then the girl in the cubicle by the photocopier -- her name is Dipti, and she's new -- will smirk at you and ask you if you remembered to sign Victoria Howard's "retirement card." Dipti will not make air quotes, but she will sound as though she had.

You will drag yourself to the front counter, where the receptionist asks you, with great concern, if you are feeling okay. You will mumble something and ask for the card, and when she gives it to you and hands you a pen, you will be suddenly paralyzed because you do not know what to write . . . not only that, but you have a sudden recollection of a women's bathroom and somebody who looked a lot like Victoria Howard.

And you will wish that you deleted the emails from Nancy. You will wish that you never finished your BComm degree, and that you'd gone on the road with the band you and your buddies started in college, because you are sure the women you would have met would never have been anything like Victoria Howard. You will wish all of these things, but, as Victoria Howard often says, if wishes were horses we'd all ride cowboys.

Update: (This is Jeffrey again.) I just realized yesterday that I'm a complete asshole. I know exactly who Victoria Howard is, because I took an art class from her. And she was really a lovely woman. So, apologies, Victoria! You are nothing like the woman described in this story! I really hope the U.S. Special Teams do not count this slip-up against me.

The saddest place on Earth.

We went to Macy's because we had returned a wedding present there a few years ago and we had a bunch of free money to spend. Macy's has really gone downhill. When I was a kid, I remember it being one notch below Bloomingdales. Now it's a sad collection of unfashionable, overpriced merchandise that is about on par with TJ Maxx. Although TJ Maxx is way better because it's at least super cheap.

It doesn't help that Macy's is in the saddest mall in the world, the Eagle Rock Plaza. The Eagle Rock Plaza looks like it was made for a movie in which none of the stores were allowed to have real brand names. Some of the highlights include "Anna's Linens," "Dress Town," "Fashion City," and "MasterCuts." It is both the saddest mall in the world and the best place I've ever been. This weekend they were piping karaoke renditions of popular songs through the mall, coming from some unseen location. I heard two different people sing Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" which I never realized was such a popular karaoke choice.

We managed to find our towels, or at least a reasonable approximation of what we were looking for, and I got in line. The short, fiftysomethingish woman with meticulously painted nails and giant sunglasses in line in front of me had written a check, and she was searching desperately for her license. I stood behind her patiently for about 5 minutes while she searched through every pocket and crevice she could find. "Do I need a license?" she finally asked. "Yes," the woman behind the desk said. The woman behind the desk did not appear to be in any particular rush, either.

"I can't find my license," the fiftysomethingish woman said.

"Well, I have to put a number into the computer," said the woman behind the desk. "I need an ID."

The fiftysomethingish woman continued to look. Sarah whispered across the store, "why is this taking so long?" I shushed her because sometimes she says rude things a little too loudly and I get embarrassed, even though they're usually things I'm thinking, too. Finally, the woman managed to exhaust every pocket she had.

"I can't find my license," she said. "Can I give you anything else?"

"ID, passport," the woman behind the counter said, "military ID ..."

"Oh, I have a military ID," the fiftysomethingish woman said, immediately pulling a military ID out of her wallet.

I admit, I didn't see that one coming.

Conversation just now at the library:

Matt: I'm looking for Anne Frank's Diary.
Librarian: Is that the title of the book?
Matt: It's actually called "Diary of a Girl."
Librarian: And who is the author?
Matt: Um, Anne Frank.
Librarian: Is it a children's book?
Matt: ... Are you fucking with me?

Yes, this is all true, and I'm not proud. I was in Starbucks ordering a Venti coffee and listening to a freaking RECORDING ... not even live radio, but a RECORDING that I had SPECIFICALLY SOUGHT OUT ... of an NPR podcast on my, yes, I admit it, my IPHONE. My god. I think I'm the enemy! And yet every time I see the display of Starbucks CDs I scoff and say, "what kind of poser would buy a CD at Starbucks?" Sigh. Yuppie ain't nothing but a number, though, right?

Anyhoo, at the Starbucks, listening to On the Media, dude walks up and stares intently at my chest. At first I thought he was maybe going to punch me, because that happens a lot, but then I realized that I was wearing this t-shirt:

Meat Is Murder

He said something that I didn't hear because I was totally rocking out to media analysis. I slipped my headphones off and said, "What's that?" which is what I always say, because for some reason it's a much nicer thing to say than just, "What?"

"That's a cool shirt," he said.

"Thanks," I said. "It's handy if you need to butcher a cow on the spur of the moment."

"We've all been there," he said, knowingly. And something in his eyes told me he meant it.

"There are Cheetos all over my inseam."

That one's a freebie. Go forth and create greatness.

You're doing great. We're really proud of you. That thing you're doing? It's great. Everyone here agrees. We don't want you to ever stop.

You are a team player. It's not just about you anymore. You have a responsibility to the team. Don't you get it? You are a role model. The team needs you. There's nothing stopping you now! You're on the path to success! Some of us are uncertain about you, but most of us aren't. Some of us have doubts, but those people are in the minority. Of course they are! You're doing great! We all agree. Most of us. Some of us. Most of us.

What's that thing you said? It was so clever. It was great. We were really proud of you when you said that. Jane wanted to get t-shirts made. I wish I could remember what it was! It was so clever and great! You're great. You're doing great. There's something special about you!

None of us want you to die. Not a single one of us. We're all really excited about the work you're doing and we hope you never die because we want you to keep doing it. If you died, we don't know what we'd do. We pretend that it would be great, but deep inside we know it wouldn't be. We're just playing pretend when we think that! We know it would be miserable for all of us if you died, because you're the glue. You're the glue that's holding us together. Jane never said she wanted you to die. I don't know where you heard that. Jane wanted to get t-shirts made with your saying! Why would she want you to die? No one wants you to die. We want you to keep doing great, for the team! The team needs you! Even more than we need margaritas on summer Fridays! Ha ha, we don't need you that much. We really need those margaritas. But we need you, too! You're the best!

We understand that it's difficult to believe us right now, but you should really try. We don't want you dead. You're the glue! Why would we want you dead? It's not just about you. It's about the team!

Yes, we did try to kill you. We didn't try to kill you. We tried to kill, and you were there while we were trying. That's all! It wasn't about you! You're the glue! Why would we try to kill the glue? Especially after that thing you said that would have made a great t-shirt. Even Jane loved that, and you know how hard it is to please Jane!

We think you should kill Jane. After all, she tried to kill you, didn't she? Well, we all tried, but she tried the most. She was the one who tried the hardest. The rest of us, we weren't really trying. We were just there. We wanted to kill, yes, but we had no intention of killing you. We wanted to kill the first person who came through the door of your surprise party at the time we knew you would be arriving. That's all! That was the person we tried to kill. Not you! It was your surprise party! Why would we go to the trouble of throwing a surprise party for someone we wanted to kill? Did you see the streamers? It would be ridiculous to buy streamers for a dead person!

Jane bought the streamers. She's ridiculous, isn't she? God, we wish someone would kill her. We never wanted you dead. No one. Not even Jane. Well, Jane did. On second thought, that's right, Jane wanted you dead quite badly. She wanted you dead so she could steal your t-shirt idea and pretend it was hers. Jane is not a team player. Everyone knows that. Everyone agrees. It's not just about you anymore. It's about the team. And the team would like you to kill Jane. And so would you! It would make a great t-shirt.

We've hidden a gun. We haven't hidden it, it's right there on the table. Remember, we were just pointing it at you! Yes, you're limping. You're limping because we shot you in the leg. You can still kill with a wounded leg! A wounded leg is a great thing to kill with! You couldn't kill with a wounded arm. But a wounded leg is just great! It's perfect! Someone like you could really do well with a wounded leg! You do great work. We're so proud of you. Now take the gun, and use it to kill Jane. Just grab it! It's right there! Don't be afraid! We're all here! We're so proud of you. That's right!

Bang! Oh, that was us. We said "bang" in anticipation of the gunshot. We're so excited! What a great party. Don't listen to Jane. She's having a great time. Just kill her, and it will all be over. We promise. You're doing great! Stop crying! Jane, you too! Aren't we having fun? We think this is just great. What a team! Surprise!

Summer Fridays are the best. As soon as we fix up that leg and bury Jane, we're going for margaritas!

Now we remember! That was your t-shirt idea! "Did somebody say 'margaritas?'"

You're the best.