Man Grows Telephone Balls

AURORA, CO – George Casablanca had been a shy, non-confrontational man all his life – that is, until last year when he listened to a motivational tape entitled “How to be Assertive without Getting Your Ass Kicked.” The one-hour lecture starts with the premise that telling people off is the sign of a winner, especially when 1) it is not necessary, really, to badger another human being except to make the person doing the badgering feel better about himself, and 2) the person being told off is hundreds of miles away, or is a clerk at a dead-end job who would lose their employment if they responded to your verbal abuse by taking you out back to the loading dock and sticking your head in a box compressor and sending the result, C.O.D., to your mom. Mr. Casablanca claims that he can now be termed a winner after having memorized and committed himself the advice offered in “How to be Assertive without Getting Your Ass Kicked.”

“My whole life has changed,” said Casablanca in a phone interview. “I have more self-confidence, more self-esteem, and more courage. The key is simple. As long as I do all my human interaction on the telephone, and I don’t know the person, then I can be as abusive as I want. You should hear how manly I am when going off on Bobby or Debbie from India. I sure rip them a new one, let me tell you. In fact, I will tell you…”

Casablanca asked us, with all the bellicosity of a ‘roided out televangelist, how dare we just call him up and write a flattering, human interest story about him; and who did we think we were, a human being trying to do their job with professional competence? Didn’t we know that he, George Casablanca, didn’t take shit from no one, especially someone with a cleft chin? We answered that our chin was not cleft nor dimpled for that matter, but that we did know where he, George Casablanca, lived and that we were at this moment driving on the east side of Denver, not five miles from his home, and now thought it might be better if this interview was conducted in person, maybe with us holding a blackjack.

“Oh no, Mr. Galaxy, that’s all right. We’ll just talk on the phone. It’s cool, right?”

We said, yes, it’s all good, let us continue in this present manner. We asked if he had also grown e-mail balls, to which he replied, in a tone that regained its confidence with each passing utterance, that the motivational tape had taught him that cyber confrontations were ideal training for the goal of being a total dick over the phone.

“Think about it,” bellowed Casablanca. “In an anonymous e-mail, a nine-year-old boy can call Mike Tyson a little faggot – and, on top of that, tell him that he throws like a girl. He could go even further and capitalize all his letters and use three or more explanation points at the end of each sentence. He could be David staring down Goliath, just not in person. Yes, e-mail balls are a precursor to telephone balls.”

Casablanca said that he never had the guts to cancel Valentine’s Day dinner with his mother but had done so last year with a brief e-mail, while making sure that he was in another country during February to hide against the maternal fallout. Now comes the big test, he went on. Yes, thanks to “How to be Assertive without Getting Your Ass Kicked,” he had developed the requisite sack to enable him to scream at the cable customer service people for not being able to divine his thoughts and thereafter make the Earth reverse its axial rotation, but – and he gulped into the phone – this year he plans on telling his mother on the phone that he will not be over on February 14th.

“If I can make it through that call without turning into a nervous, blithering basket case and actually make it known to Mother that, as a forty-two-year-old man, it may be time to spend V-day with a hooker – which would be a major step in itself, the hooker, that is – then I will indeed have the biggest set of telephone balls since JFK told Khrushchev to stand down. I may even have to buy bigger underwear.”