A lot of the members of the Tri-Cities Body Shamers turned up late for their annual picnic this year for fear of Earle Whatshisface seizing the spotlight (though it was an afternoon event) and droning on for days about how he’d tweaked his famous pork marinade, of which no one had ever heard — behold its fame! — before he joined the group. The methamphetamine abusers — and let’s not pretend there aren’t methamphetamine users in every walk of current American life — took umbrage at Earle’s having co-opted “tweak”.
Every years Bettye Flores’ Ladies Auxiliary set up between the arm-wrestling and cornholing concessions a little tablefor the umbrage of which one of the gals had whipped up a batch of umbrage a couple of days before. Betty’s sign painter husband Jeff, who had come out as gay, but that was between him and The Lord and whichever members of the local high school’s wrestling team he was able to lure into his Econoline with promises of fudge and cold Fanta, had made an attractive sign that urged, “Help Urself!” He’d gotten the cool, fanciful new spelling of “yourself” from a text message one of his wrestlers had sent him: F*** urself u perv uve runed my life, except with real letters rather than asterisks.
There was always entertainment, and this year’s was a humdinger, with Buddy Whatshisface, Earle’s boy, telling topical jokes he’d gotten off YouTube, and then Denise Connors performing with her customary annoying earnestness a set of songs about being a lesbian of colour even though she was neither. Many of Buddy’s jokes were about how stupid Democrats were. The one about how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not having to pay full price when she consulted a mind reader made those who got it howl delightedly. One of them waved his MAGA cap in jubilation, and exclaimed, “You got that right!” as though a truck driver and not a warehouseman at Sam’s Club.
As in previous years, some of the tweakers had tried to get the Mötörhead tribute band from Perky onto the bill, but the bass player had become a little bit too fond of fudge and Fanta over the years, and it wouldn’t do for the shamers to be entertained by an obie (from obese), now would it? It wasn’t as though those who’d been privileged to witness the real Mötörhead’s solo local performance, over in Famine in 1991, didn’t love the music, but they loved it less, at the end of the day, and in early afternoon, than they hated obies.
The group’s problem was that, the more their annual picnic got written up in the local newspapers, the fewer obies made themselves available to be ridiculed. It wasn’t until nearly three this past Sunday afternoon that an overweight family no one recognised waddled over to the edge of the lake, Papa and Uncle carrying between them a small inflatable swimming pool full of day-old-looking baked goods — cupcakes and pies and muffins and what have you. They’d hardly had a chance to spread their blanket before several body shamers dashed over to demand to know why they didn’t buy themselves gym memberships. “Don’t you got a mirror at your house?” Earle of the tweaked marinade demanded, as he did every year, and the others shrieked dutifully in amusement. “What’s your Body Mass Index?” one of the tweakers, heretofore not heard from, tried, “around a hundred?” Several of the others high-fived him for that, as the obies’ roly-poly children burst into tears.
“You’ll thank us for this later in life, hon,” Bettye Flores wheezed, sort of maternally, spelling hon properly. “If you count your calories and join a gym, you’ll actually have a later life.” Betty had never set foot in a gym, but smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and her emphysema kept her slender.
Many agreed that Earle’s pork marinade had been over-tweaked, and become tumeric-heavy, but of course they were comparing the 2019 version to their memory of previous years’, which would never have held up in a court of law, or tennis.
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