This is the neighborhood where you live.
You have some neighbors.
That would be Percy.
You love your neighbor Percy.
Percy is the best neighbor anyone could ask for. He’s quiet. Minds his own business. Always asks your permission to leave his house. Always asks your permission to enter his house.
Percy’s generosity knows no bounds.
To welcome you to the neighborhood, he gave you his wife’s spot on the waiting list for a lung transplant, without even asking.
He doesn’t complain if you call the cops on him when his mail is accidentally delivered to your house.
Hell, he even lets you borrow his mailbox to use it as a big hammer for smashing wasp nests around your property.
He never sues you. He never snows on you. And not even once has he been passed out on your driveway when you needed to park there.
You’ve gotten to know Percy pretty well over the years.
His background, his hobbies, his job as an IT manager at a Fortune 500 embalming fluid company, all his water park–related humiliations, etc.
For instance, you know that Percy loves to relax on his computer.
And when Percy relaxes on his computer, he never, ever presses the Hate Speech button that now comes pre-installed on all MacBooks.
Like a saint, he tried getting it removed, but when he called Apple, customer service told him no. He took the high road and told them, “Okay, sorry, I am going to use the bathroom now.”
Still, Percy persists, relaxing on his computer for upwards of 19 hours a day and not even considering pressing the Hate Speech button the entire time.
By not pressing it, he has made your neighborhood a better place.
If that isn’t a true sign of character, nothing is.
Sadly, Percy is moving to Tampa, where he will work for a charity that surgically adds more legs to shelter dogs with only four legs.
Percy’s departure will be a huge blow to the neighborhood. Everyone loves Percy. He’s the keystone to the whole community. Without him, there’d be no point in living on your street.
Frankly, all your other neighbors kind of suck ass compared to Percy. They’re always asking to borrow your home’s support columns but never give them back, never picking up after their dogs when they die on your lawn, etc. Stuff like that.
Percy is throwing a going-away part in his backyard today, and everyone on the block is invited.
Normally, you hate going to neighborhood functions, but because it’s one of the last times you’ll see Percy, you are obligated to go.
You look.
Jesus. Every last one of the neighbors you’d love to see a sinkhole swallow is there.
You’d really love to see Percy. At the same time, you’d rather have a steamroller flatten you from the feet up so your internal organs squeeze out of your mouth like toothpaste rather than hang out with mediocre neighbors.
Are you gonna go?
You were so repulsed by the idea of having to make small talk with your neighbors that you opted to get squashed by construction machinery instead.
Not even the chance of getting to hang with your pal Percy could stop you from begging the foreman at a construction site to turn you into a human Go-Gurt if it meant so much as making eye contact with the non-Percys who also live on your street. As your innards expel from your mouth, eyes, and ears like wild cherry Slurpee out of a dispensing nozzle, you breathe a final breath of relief that you didn’t have to force conversation with the neighbors you don’t like as much.
You failed to get fucked up on gin and build a gazebo for your neighbor. Try again.
You suck it up and head to Percy’s party. After all that Percy’s done to make living near him a pleasure, putting up with all the dipshits who live on your street is the least you can do.
You look around the party for Percy.
Hmm. He doesn’t seem to be here at the moment. Better occupy yourself until he’s here.
You want to get your gin on, and who can blame you? You look out your window and notice that your dear neighbor Percy is having a going-away party for himself. You’ll miss Percy when he leaves, but right now you’ve got gin on the mind and want to ask Percy where he keeps the good stuff.
You head next door and look around the party for Percy.
Hmm. He doesn’t seem to be here at the moment. Better occupy yourself until he’s here.
You approach your adult neighbors. They are wondering out loud why Percy is MIA at his own going-away party.
Before any of them respond, your heinous neighbor Morticia interrupts, leaping in front of you with a digital camera.
She still hasn’t taken the American flag on her porch down even though July 4th was months ago. Yeah. One of those neighbors.
“Look who it is! So sad that Percy’s moving, yes? Anyway, we were all just positively gushing over what my oldest son’s been up to,” lies Morticia. “The one who works as a Representative for the Union of Drunken Masseuses? You’ve met him, yes?”
“Well, he’s been missing for over a year now! We couldn’t be happier for him. Come take a look at the last known photos of him before he wandered off course in that corn maze and never came out.”
Everyone gathers around the camera.
All right, you’re going to have to act interested in this woman’s boring family life.
All the adult neighbors go “ooh” and “ahh” and offer compliments about how lost her son has grown up to be.
It is growing impossible for you to maintain even the slightest interest in this.
“Here it is, the last known photo of my son,” proudly exclaims Morticia. Everyone claps.
Jesus, this is a drag. The only thing you’re getting out of the drunken masseuse pictures is the urge to have a strong drink.
You approach the neighborhood kids. They are playing a game of Exploitative Labor, which involves professionally landscaping Percy’s yard while chanting:
Toil! Toil!
Work the land!
With blistered and arthritic hands!
Our backs will break, this lawn we’ll rake
Two dollars a day, the wage we’ll make!
The kids play this on your lawn every day. Although it keeps your property beautifully landscaped, you will lose your mind if you hear them sing this one more time. It drives you nuts.
Your curmudgeonly ass is going to need a drink to make all this thing tolerable.
You go to the drink cooler.
It’s mostly filled with chilled bottles of embalming fluid.
Percy must have brought some samples from his office.
You pop open a bottle of embalming fluid.
You pour it in a glass and smell it.
Hmm. Hoppy. A hint of citrus. Notes of coriander. Overwhelming formaldehyde.
You take a long gulp, nearly finishing it.
It’s not very good.
—the embalming fluid hits your system. It is fucking you up good, all right.
You wake up in Percy’s backyard, naked and coughing up embalming fluid all over yourself. Damn, that stuff fucked you up.
As you come to, you realize that you built him an above-ground pool.
Wow. Could you have built anything more useless?
He didn’t ask for this. What drove you to do this to his backyard? Kind of an inconsiderate thing to do to a neighbor.
You can definitely not handle your embalming fluid like you could in college.
Try again.
You find gin. Now we’re talking. Gin is your drink. This is good gin, too. Of course Percy would be a man of refined taste.
You make a gin and tonic.
You slam that gin and tonic in no time. You clutch your stomach and shake it around to make sure the gin soaks all your guts, as gin is meant to be consumed.
Immediately, you feel a little looser, a little less uptight.
A buzz is on its way, but you’re not there yet.
You pour a shot. Then two more, polishing off what’s left in the bottle.
Whoo boy, that felt nice. The gin’s coursing through your system, making itself known.
Your liver radiates in gratitude.
Damn, that’s hitting the spot.
Congratulations! You have a solid buzz going.
You put your mouth on the bottle, lean back, and take a long pull of gin, polishing off what’s left in the bottle.
You take off your shirt. Taking off your shirt just makes sense to you right now.
You grab your love handles and shake your gut around some more to coat your insides in gin.
You’re feeling far less antisocial than before. Your mood has lifted considerably.
Unlike before, you don’t hesitate to go right up to your adult neighbors and start a conversation. The buzz has got you in the mood to mingle.
They are all muttering about how Percy hasn’t even showed up to his own going-away party yet.
Before any of them respond, your heinous neighbor Morticia interrupts, jumping in front of you with her digital camera.
“Look who’s shirtless! So sad that Percy’s moving, yes? Anyway, we were all just positively gushing over what my youngest son’s been up to,” lies Morticia. “The one who works as the Official Mascot of Lettuce? You’ve met him, yes?”
“Well, he’s been crushed by a gazebo! We couldn’t be happier for him. Come take a look at the last photos taken of him before the gazebo NASA installed on the International Space Station plummeted to earth and landed right on top of my boy.”
At the very mention of a gazebo, an idea strikes your gin-buzzed brain.
All the adult neighbors go “ooh” and “ahh” and offer compliments about how crushed by a gazebo her son has grown up to be.
Okay that’s enough of that. You are way too into this. Have your gazebo idea.
A gazebo is the Rolex of benches. Imagine if someone glued an umbrella to a bench so helicopter pilots couldn’t spit on you from above. That’s the kind of luxury that a gazebo affords.
You look around Percy’s yard. There are no gazebos.
The gin buzz has got you feeling kind and charitable.
Wouldn’t it be nice to give him a going-away gift? A gazebo would be a really primo gesture. Imagine it. Percy, relaxing on his computer, outside in the shade.
Plus, since a gazebo would be really hard to ship to Tampa… it might even make him stay! Who knows?
You barrel your sedan into Percy’s backyard, crushing several snack tables and his grill.
“That’s not a gazebo,” respond your neighbors. “That’s a shed.”
In the end, they’re right. This isn’t the real deal.
If you’re going to build a gazebo for Percy, don’t take the easy way out.
It’s settled. You are going to build Percy a gazebo.
All your neighbors clear out of Percy’s yard at once because they saw a bee.
Good. More room for construction.
How do you want to get started?
You go home and hop on your computer.
You peruse www.GazeboForMyPerfectNeighbor.com and decide that this nubile gazebo right here is the one you’re going to build for him. It is the only gazebo kit they offer.
He’s gonna love this. You know it.
You sell all of your dad’s war medals on eBay to someone named XX_aliceinchainsfreak_XX and rake in just enough dough for the gazebo.
Immediately after you click “ORDER GAZEBO,” a delivery drone bursts through your window, flies back outside, drops the package on a bird’s nest full of blue robin eggs, flies back inside, scoops up every TV remote in your house, drops them in your toilet, and flies away.
Must be the gazebo kit!
Hmm. No lumber, no nails, no building materials at all. Just the gazebo kit’s instruction manual.
Seems easy enough!
First thing’s first: You need more gin to get fucked up on.
The more gin you can get in your system, the more you’ll feel like you’re pretty sure you can build a gazebo from scratch. How hard could that be?
Go find more gin to get fucked up on.
You’re buzzed and probably shouldn’t be driving, so you hitchhike to the liquor store.
Besides, the liquor’s got you in the mood to mingle, and what better way to make mingle with people than to hitchhike?
A truck honks and pulls over.
It’s a Seagram’s truck—Seagram’s is the Ray Rice of gin!
That’s a big deal! Wow, this couldn’t be more serendipitous.
“My name’s Rig. Lemme guess, liquor store?” presumes Rig the truck driver.
“Well, shit, you got in the right Seagram’s truck!”
Rig punches “liquor store” into his Garmin GPS and then tugs his horn as he pulls back onto the road.
As you drive, you look in the truck’s rearview mirror. Rig’s reflection is a skeleton.
Usually you’d regard that as a bad omen, but right now, you’re buzzed as hell, and you just think it makes Rig cool.
You arrive at the… liquor store? Looks like a prison of some sort.
Rig has no reason to lie to you, so you take his word for it.
“I’ll wait outside and give you a lift back home, too, buddy. Now go on and get some gin!” shouts Rig.
You give him a big thumbs-up.
Wow. This was suspiciously easy. You should hitchhike more often.
You enter.
You arrive at the liquor store. Looks like a liquor store on the inside, at least.
“Hey! Hey, you! This is the place where liquor is milked out of a stingray’s brain. This is where that happens, and that’s where liquor comes from sometimes. Real fucked-up experiments like that—oops, I mean, welcome to the Liquor Store, how can I help you today?” asks the smiling Liquor Lady.
“A gazebo, eh? Sounds like you’re trying to get fucked up on some gin,” responds the Liquor Lady.
“Well, I have some good news for you. We’ve got gin, and it’ll get you good and fucked up all right.”
“Fucked up on gin, eh? Sounds like you’re building a gazebo,” responds the Liquor Lady.
“Well, I have some good news for you. We’ve got gin, and it’ll get you good and fucked up all right.”
The Liquor Lady whispers into her phone, “Boss, we’ve got another one. Begin prepping for surgery.”
She notices you looking. “Oh, of course! My brother here, the Liquor Man, will show you right to it.”
“I am the Liquor Man, follow me please. I will show you to the gin,” barks the Liquor Man, who is also smiling but in a way that is very, very angry.
You reach the gin aisle. You are in heaven.
The Liquor Man steps behind you.
The Liquor Man stabs you in the skull with a syringe, injecting a cold fluid into your brain.
Whatever’s inside knocks you out in seconds.
Oh no! Seagram’s kidnapped you and let scientists in their Experimental Gin Division do twisted experiments on you.
Rig, the Liquor Lady, and the Liquor Man were all in on it. They tricked you. Seagram’s preys on buzzed, hitchhiking gin maniacs like you.
You are now a sentient bottle of Seagram’s. Your piss is 100 percent Seagram’s gin. You are kept chained to the wall in a Seagram’s factory, and you are forced to piss into bottles of Seagram’s. This is how Seagram’s makes their gin now.
Some of the Seagram’s employees feel bad, so they sneak limes into the lab and squeeze them into your body, thinking the lime juice will make you feel better, but the lime juice is incredibly painful. Without a mouth, you are unable to communicate this to them, so they keep on squeezing lime juice into you. Your life is a living hell. You can never die.
Because you are gin, you cannot get fucked up on gin. Therefore, you cannot build a gazebo for your neighbor.
You failed. Try again.
You decide to steal Percy’s personal gin—a small investment on his part that will pay dividends once he’s kicking back in a gazebo on his computer like Caesar, as he deserves, that jewel, Percy.
You walk up to his front door.
“Can I open my door?” Percy asks you from inside.
“Okay,” Percy responds. You wait five minutes. He does not answer the door.
“Okay,” Percy responds.
You enter Percy’s beautiful Dutch Colonial home.
You hear “Monster Mash” playing on low-quality phone speakers somewhere down the hall. Percy is trying and failing to hum along to it, stomping his foot in frustration each time he messes up the melody.
He seems busy. Better skip the pleasantries and focus on stealing his gin so you can get his gazebo built. Where do you want to look for gin first?
You head upstairs to look for gin.
You are upstairs.
You enter the bathroom and find your other neighbor Gene.
Gene’s no Percy, but he’s all right, you guess.
He’s laboring to lift a whole assortment of tools, tiles, pipes, and bathroom appliances above his head.
Gene’s eyes are bloodshot, his face bloated and red. He is stumbling around the bathroom with a long string of drool dangling from his gaping, groaning maw.
Gene is extremely intoxicated.
“You! My neighbor… wow… I am fucked up on… TEQUILA… and renovating a bathroom for my sweet and slick neighbor Percy before he moves to Tampa—who—who—who—who—who—who—who—who—who—who—who—who is such a friendly, such a friendly,” slurs Gene before vomiting onto his own crotch.
“You’re building a GAZEBO? For neighbor Percy? So friendly… so kind of you… what a nice little neighborhood we are… I love you… I mean that… do, I do… I fuckin’ love you, always have… I’ll leave my family,” garbles Gene, so drunk that his puke flies back up into his mouth and down his stomach on its own volition.
“Oh! The gin… that’s DOWNSTAIRS… Percy keeps all that good shit down there,” mumbles Gene right before pissing himself.
You enter the bedroom to find some of Percy’s children fast asleep.
No gin here.
You head downstairs to look for gin.
A wine cellar. Not what we’re looking for.
Finally—a liquor crypt!
All right, let’s see what we have here.
You remember something cryptic Percy says to you when you get your paper at the same time every morning: “Hi, neighbor, I keep my gin in the basement.”
The basement! Of course. You head down to Percy’s basement, and, oh baby, it’s the mother lode.
You can feel the gin receptors in your brain light up in anticipation. You are moments away from being completely fucked up on gin.
Bingo.
Your brain processes the alcohol in seconds flat.
That buzz you had going has become a full-bodied intoxication earthquake.
You can hardly see straight, your face grows numb, and you feel more able to construct a gazebo than ever.
Congratulations—that means you are fucked up on gin!
…
…
You hear waves. You smell the ocean.
“My love awakens! How did you rest, mi amor?” asks a handsome man with a Puerto Rican accent who you’ve never met before.
You have no idea where you are or what day it is. You are hungover as hell.
You appear to be on a yacht. The stranger’s soft, all-white resort wear billows in the salty breeze gliding over the yacht like a gentle ocean whisper.
“Home,” declares the handsome stranger. “Paradise is our home now.”
Oh boy. You remember nothing after you chugged that gin. Things seem to have gotten pretty out of hand.
“A perfect day, no? Oh, mi amor, I cannot wait any longer. My heart will burst if I delay another moment!” exclaims the handsome stranger with passion as his cerulean-blue eyes gaze out over the endless ocean.
“We have made our home in paradise. This island? It is for you. The ocean? It is for you. The world, I give you, and it is ours forever.
We have sailed the seven seas, climbed the tallest mountains, traversed the driest deserts with one another. Together we have defeated our enemies and found peace in the warm embrace of each other’s arms. We have made love so powerful that fruit trees grew from the ground where our bodily congregation was made.
There is but one journey left for us to take.”
The man fishes a small box out of his pocket. He gets down on one knee.
“Mi amor… will you marry me?”
What the fuck is even going on. You don’t know this guy’s name. You have no idea how you got here or what you did after drinking Percy’s gin. Apparently a lot.
Even so, spending the rest of your life in paradise doesn’t sound so bad. You could learn this guy’s name, easy. You could learn how you came to be together. Maybe, just maybe, you could even learn to love him. Having a yacht and private tropical island to yourself doesn’t sound half bad.
What do you do?
Percy is too good of a neighbor for you to ditch him for a life of happiness with some wealthy handsome stranger.
You dive overboard.
“Mi amor, mi amor! You have broken my heart!” you hear the handsome stranger cry out before he sinks his yacht in the Mariana Trench and drowns himself out of sorrow.
You grab onto a dolphin heading in the general direction of your neighborhood.
The dolphin pod feeds you a bunch of herring, pre-chewing it and then oozing it out of their blowholes into your mouth. These are those kind of dolphins.
The dolphin pod drops you off at a buoy near the shoreline.
Then two pelicans, using their beaks, pick you up by your nipples and fly you back to your neighborhood. The pelicans also feed you, but they do it by laying pelican eggs directly in your mouth.
The pelicans drop you off on top of a deer, which carries you to your lawn. The deer breastfeeds you.
With all this nutrition, your hangover is all but erased. You are feeling good as new.
But you are also sober. You better go get fucked up on gin again.
Aloha, paradise.
You take the plunge and marry the handsome stranger. You spend the rest of your days soaking up the sun and spreading your toes in pink and gold sand. Every day you drink from fresh coconuts and eat fish the color of the rainbow directly out of the ocean, which is your new and improved backyard.
It is a nice life. A quiet life. Much quieter than the old neighborhood you used to live in, where that one neighbor you really liked lived, too. What was his name… Peter? Parcey? Parcel? It escapes you.
You never learn the handsome stranger’s name, but you don’t need to. The way you make love together transcends what knowing his name could ever do for you. You make love on the beach every night at sunset, with a piña colada in one hand and, well, him in the other.
You are never sad again. You die happy.
Getting fucked up on gin led you to a life of luxury and happiness. But you did not build a gazebo for your neighbor.
Try again.
You smash the gin bottle to celebrate being fucked up and crawl back upstairs.
You crawl for hours.
Whoa boy. Yeah, you are fucked up on gin for sure, if your double vision is any indication.
Sadly, there are not two of Percy (you wish).
There we go.
“Hello, neighbor. You have stolen my gin. You are fucked up on it. Thank you. Can I leave my home?” asks Percy
“Sounds good. Thank you for coming to my goodbye party that I did not attend,” says Percy.
“I did not come because I was busy reprogramming the Hate Speech button on my computer to do something wonderful. I am going to press it now.”
Too late. He presses the button.
Immediately after Percy presses the Hate Spech button, a small boy scuttles out of an air vent in the room and sits in Percy’s lap.
“This is my son. I named him Hate Speech because that’s what the button said. Now it summons him. May I enter my home?” begs Percy.
“Hello, neighbor,” says Hate Speech. “You’ve never met me because I live in the vents. I never go outside. This is because I am afraid of a helicopter pilot spitting on me from above. I yearn to play in my backyard, but my fear is too great to risk it. If only we had a structure that would ensure that that could never happen.”
Your gin-soaked heart swells. The gazebo is an even more perfect gift than you originally thought. A gift for his whole family.
“Don’t curse,” types Hate Speech into a web browser.
Well, now that you are fucked up on gin, it’s time for the next step: Get a HAMMER.
That is the only tool you need to build a gazebo.
Say goodbye and leave Percy’s house.
After drunkenly falling down Percy’s front steps, dislocating both shoulders, then falling again in a way that relocated both of your shoulders, you are now on your street.
Go find a hammer.
You scream, “HAMMER,” over and over again.
Suddenly, you feel a rumbling in the distance. A stampede?
Then you hear a chant, gradually increasing in volume:
Toil! Toil!
Work the land!
With blistered and arthritic hands!
Our backs will break, this lawn we’ll rake
Two dollars a day, the wage we’ll make!
Just as you start walking toward your tool shed, you feel a rumbling in the distance. A stampede?
Then you hear a chant, gradually increasing in volume:
Toil! Toil!
Work the land!
With blistered and arthritic hands!
Our backs will break, this lawn we’ll rake
Two dollars a day, the wage we’ll make!
It’s the neighborhood children, still playing their game of Exploitative Labor like they were at the yard party.
They are running straight at you.
As you scream, “FAIR WAGES,” the kids turn around and run away from you instead.
Interesting. They don’t seem to like when you yell, “FAIR WAGES.”
The kids turn right back around and sprint toward you again when you yell, “HAMMER.”
The neighborhood children come to a halt right in front of you. Several more scurry onto the scene as well, carrying various lawn-care equipment.
“You are good at yelling ‘hammer.’ We are looking for a boss to loudly demand us to do manual labor such as hammering,” say the kids in unison.
“Will you play the boss?”
“Okay, we can get you a hammer. But how much will you pay us?”
“But that’s not exploitative enough,” shouts a child who has started to cry.
“But then there will be an uprising against you and you will force us to behead you in a public square,” shouts a child who has started to cry.
The children cheer over how much you are exploiting them and run off to their parents’ tool sheds.
They return, dumping a giant pile of hammers at your feet.
You could build a hundred gazebos with this many hammers.
“Yay!” they cheer.
The children cheer some more as they run off to gather nails that hold swing sets and tree houses together from around the neighborhood.
The children return once more, this time with thousands and thousands of rusty nails. Perfect.
“Exploitative Boss! Exploitative Boss!” they chant.
Good call. Just what your gut needed right now.
Pig out on this drunken feast while you demand the kids get back to work.
The children then go from backyard to backyard smashing doghouses and collecting the scrap wood for lumber.
They drop the lumber at your feet. And just like that, you now have all the materials you’ll need to build a gazebo!
Too late. The kids are gone. An angry pack of dobermans whose doghouses the children smashed for lumber chased all of them into the forest.
They are never seen or heard from again.
Rumors spread that the children formed a worker cooperative with the dogs somewhere in Appalachia. Some say the rumors are false hope, purely meant to offer the parents a semblance of closure. Others say they’ve seen the progressive little utopia run by kids and dobermans with their own eyes.
You? All you know for sure is you’re drunk as fuck and ready to build a gazebo.
Okay, you got your nails, you got your hammer, and you got your lumber.
…
You haven’t thought much about how to build a gazebo beyond this point.
You don’t feel like going all the way back to your house, so you’ll just step inside Percy’s place real quick and use his computer.
One scroll through the Gazebo Construction WikiHow and you’ll be set to get this puppy rolling.
You walk back around the house to Percy’s front door.
You stumble down the hall and find Percy relaxing on his computer, as always.
“Hello again. May I leave my house?” pleads Percy.
—you trip over Hate Speech’s toys.
You fall, accidentally slamming your hammer down on Percy’s beloved computer.
You just smashed Percy’s computer with a hammer.
Percy stares in disbelief. The room is so dead silent you can hear every last shard of the computer’s smashed hardware hit the floor.
He tries typing the word “HAPPINESS” into what’s left of the keyboard. Nothing happens. It is completely broken.
You drunk idiot. You ruined the one thing he loved doing most: relaxing on the computer. You took that away from Percy.
This is even worse than if you had murdered Percy. Look at him. He’s devastated.
The sight of Percy silently staring at his destroyed computer sobers you right up.
Percy remains silent.
In fact, he never speaks again. From this day forward, Percy is totally catatonic. He is fed through a tube and pisses into a bag, his eyes never leaving the spot where he last relaxed on his computer.
You hear an angry mob approaching Percy’s house outside.
The mob uses the materials you would’ve used for the gazebo to construct a pillory in Percy’s backyard. Your head and hands are locked into it, and neighbors are constantly coming up to you and giving you super stylish haircuts that you can’t really pull off given your cheekbone structure. It’s a terribly humiliating punishment.
This goes on for years and years until a teen in the neighborhood pantses you so hard your brain becomes a liquid and you die. Vultures descend upon your lifeless body, not to pick your bones clean, but to use your carcass as storage for their roadkill leftovers, like a doggy bag. Not even vultures can stomach the meat of your corpse without getting horrible dysentery from all the shame coursing through your flesh.
You smashed Percy’s computer. You deserve this. You deserve worse.
Try again, and try not to be so clumsy this time.
Who needs a blueprint or engineering know-how? The blueprint for this gazebo is in your heart, right next to Percy.
You close your eyes, dual-wield hammers in each hand, and swing away.
You hammer.
You hammer and hammer.
You hammer hammer hammer.
You hammer so much more. You raise the hammer to swing again—
“What the hell is going on here?” you hear someone yell over Percy’s fence.
It’s your other neighbors Birdhouse Bethany (left) and her toddler Birdhouse Betholomew (right).
The Iranian government contracts them to build birdhouses. This is how they earn a living.
“What’s all this racket? You hammer so loud! Where the hell are your pants?”
Well, turns out you lost your pants somewhere along the way. You have no idea where your pants are. You remember taking off your shirt, but not your pants.
All you have is your Hanes, your hammer, and a belly full of gin.
They stare, bewildered.
“Percy? We’ll cheers to that! Hell of a neighbor. We’ll miss him. If anyone deserves a gazebo, it’s that mothfucker,” toast the Birdhouse women.
“So kind of you to build him a gazebo. But it looks like you could use a little help.”
Yikes. You hammered and hammered and somehow ended up with a crucifix.
A crucifix has way, way less shade cover. What’s the point?
“We know how to build birdhouses, which are gazebos for crows,” says Birdhouse Betholomew.
“We’re more than happy to help you, but, by contract, anything we design becomes property of the Iranian government,” follows up Birdhouse Bethany.
“Knowing this, would you still like our help?”
You accept their offer of assistance. You’re not too worried about the Iran thing, and you don’t think Percy will be either. At least Iran’s our ally, you figure.
Plus, you’ve been fucked up on gin all day. You’re exhausted.
Birdhouse Bethany and Birdhouse Betholomew immediately start to draw up blueprints.
Wow. They really seem to know what they’re doing!
You hang your hammer and let your neighbors do the heavy lifting.
Birdhouse Bethany picks up a megaphone: “Neighborhood! Our sweetheart neighbor Percy is in need of a gazebo! Lend us your manpower so his property may be graced with one!”
Your whole neighborhood arrives.
Men, women, children that didn’t get chased into the woods by dobermans.
Coming together and getting fucked up on gin as a community, just to build Percy a gazebo.
What a beautiful sight. Such neighborly love. Maybe your neighborhood isn’t so mediocre after all…
This is a heartwarming way to send Percy off, all thanks to your drunk ass.
All your neighbors swarm the yard, stepping over your near-unconscious and almost nude body to pitch in and treat Percy to a goodbye gazebo.
You feel yourself slowing passing out. It becomes hard to keep your eyes open.
The roof of the gazebo is swiftly erected above you just as you pass out on the backyard lawn.
…
You begin to wake up.
Your head is fucking pounding. You are so nauseous.
You are incredibly hungover. You are certain you will throw up if you move even slightly.
You hear Percy’s voice, singing along to “Monster Mash” in perfect harmony. It somewhat soothes the pain in your head and stomach.
You are laying on the floor in Percy’s living room. He is relaxing on his computer. It is the next morning.
“Good morning. I dragged you into my house because a doberman was trying to drag your unconscious body into the woods,” says Percy.
“Thank you for the gazebo. I love the gazebo. I feel appreciated. In fact, because the gazebo will be so expensive to ship, I will no longer be moving to Tampa. I am here to stay.”
“May I leave my house?” whispers Percy.
The gazebo is complete. Against all odds, you did it! Plus, you got Percy to stay in the neighborhood!
You turn back to Percy.
With a click of the Hate Speech button, Hate Speech scuttles out of the vent and back into Percy’s lap.
“I am very grateful that I can now play outside without fear of a helicopter pilot spitting on me,” declares Hate Speech, beaming with joy.
Percy and Hate Speech look into each other’s eyes:
“We love Iran.”
Great work! You got fucked up on gin and built a gazebo for your neighbor!
Granted, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gets to sit inside the gazebo whenever he wants—and he does this more frequently than you ever expected him to, like, five days a week—but still, Percy seems really happy with the gazebo.
Your hangover lasts four whole days, but every moment you see Percy relaxing on his computer inside the gazebo, sometimes on Supreme Leader Khamenei’s lap, and sometimes with Hate Speech on Percy’s lap while Percy also sits on Khamenei’s lap, makes it all worth it. It kicks so much ass that Percy didn’t move to Tampa.
Congratulations!
Well, you have no idea what just happened.
Apparently, you got fucked up on gin and built a gazebo for your neighbor? And not just any gazebo, but one where Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has the right to go sit in whenever he wants? Oh, Jesus, he’s there right now. Just sitting. He’s not saying anything, just staring at a butterfly. Is he even enjoying himself? Either way, you wonder what’s wrong with you and why you did that.
You are humiliated to have woken up in Percy’s house only wearing underwear stained with piss, but are nonetheless happy that Percy loves relaxing on his computer in the gazebo you apparently built him.
You decide not to drink again for a long, long while.
This is your gift to Percy. You’re not going to let other neighbors get in on it.
You have gin, and that’s all the help you need to get this job done.
Ouch!
You burped, and it threw off the aim of your swing. You missed the nail and accidentally nailed your hand to some wood.
Oof!
Somehow you managed to nail the hand that was holding the hammer to a piece of wood, too.
Yikes. You drunkenly crucified yourself instead of building a gazebo. That’s not a nice gift to give to a neighbor. Crosses provide virtually no shade cover. In terms of places you can relax on your computer, they’re useless.
Sure, it may have been an accident, but you just made a huge hassle for Percy. He’s got enough on his plate as it is, with the big move and all. Now, thousands of drunks are flocking to his backyard to pray and leave tributary bottles of Beefeater beneath your dying, intoxicated body. He doesn’t have time to deal with that! What a mess.
As the harsh summer sun beats down on your crucified body, you have the soul-crushing realization that it’s you, not everyone else, who is the bad neighbor.
You got fucked up on gin and crucified yourself. Clearly, you can’t hold your liquor.
You failed. Try again.