You find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. One early Tuesday morning, you wake up with a start and realize that you’ve never hitchhiked through the Midwest. The thought begins to haunt you, to gnaw at you like a cake-starved cake-lover on a slice of cinnamon cake after a cake-eating drought of over three weeks. You hurriedly scrawl out a sign that reads ‘Michigan or Bust,’ leave your sleeping wife a garbled note and grab a spot at the side of the freeway on-ramp. Just as you stick out your thumb, a Volkswagen bus screeches to a halt beside you.
The side door flies open and you’re hauled inside by a large group of hippies. The friendly young dreamers force their free love and blackberry wine on you for the next few days or weeks. You wake up nude atop a pile of sleeping hippies one morning and climb out the window. Hey, you’re in New Jersey! And you thought that smell was just the hippies! Somehow you missed the Midwest entirely.
You stand there naked and begin acclimating yourself to the East Coast. You know, it really does feel three hours earlier! And you can practically taste the authentic old school charm that emanates from New Jersey’s streets, sidewalks, and restrooms. In fact, you can literally taste it. There are a bunch of old food wrappers and gum stuck to the roof of your mouth.
You begin to carefully peel the garbage and gum from your mouth. Surprisingly, you discover that most of the gum isn’t even yours! You’d never chew Trident, not after your run-in with Neptune, that prick.
The surly Greek God had approached you one day when you were still working at Hot Dog on a Stick. He asked for a corn dog with all the fixins. You informed him that ‘all the fixins’ in this case included nothing more than a small paper cup full of viscous, bright yellow mustard. He shouted something in Greek and left without paying for his corn dog.
Your manager had charged you for the lost corn dog. This seemed patently unfair, since clearly a Greek god should be able to pay for his own lunch. Yet when you mentioned this to your manager, he simply gave you a wry grin. He then turned into a bull and had sex with you. That was one of the strangest afternoons of the entire four years you spent at the Mt. Olympus Galleria.
You look around and soak in the atmosphere. A sign welcomes you to Newark. You thank the sign for its concern and leave it a $10 tip. The sign makes no response, but you can tell that it’s a tiny bit grateful for your largess.
You scramble through the thicket along the roadside, looking for something to wear. While you do find several shirts and a fairly new pair of Lee jeans, you don’t like the way any of them fit. You eventually pull together what passes for a tuxedo out of decaying leaves and a copious amount of horse dung.
You adjust your dung bow tie while trying to flag down a ride. Before you can say, “I shouldn’t have made my bow tie out of horse shit,” a stretch limo pulls up beside you. A well-manicured hand beckons you to enter. When you climb inside, you find that you’ve been picked up by none other than fashion icon Donatella Versace!
Versace gushes over your leaf-and-dung tux. She offers you $500,000 for the recipe. You demand $1 million. She opts not to buy at all but does courteously drop you off at the airport, where you catch a flight to New York City. There, fashion mavens from around the globe vie for your new ideas in men’s style. You end up selling your recipe to Giorgio Armani for $250,000.
You can’t help but think that you should have taken Versace’s offer. But then again, suits don’t even have recipes, so one can only wonder what it was exactly that you sold to Armani!
The mystery only deepens when the story abruptly ends in mid-
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