Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (19 page)

Dr. Ibrahim told me that the gonads are very valuable,
and are kept in a locked freezer in a secure area. “We are sitting on a gold mine here,” he said. (Really.)

I definitely see the need for security. You cannot have unsecured gonads in an environment frequented by college students; the potential for pranks is too great. This means you will NOT be able to actually see anything during your visit to Fort Collins. You will, however, be able to say, “Kids, we’re standing within a mile or so of about two hundred frozen human gonads!”

Trust me, it will be a vacation memory that will remain in their minds for the rest of their lives. Even after electroshock therapy.

M
y son is learning to drive. This terrifies me. He’s four years old.

Well, okay, technically he’s fifteen. But from the perspective of the aging parent, there is no major difference between four and fifteen, except that when your child is four, his motoring privileges are restricted to little toy Fisher-Price vehicles containing little toy Fisher-Price people who are unlikely (although I would not totally rule it out, in America) to sue you.

Whereas when your child turns fifteen, the state of Florida lets him obtain a permit that allows him to drive an actual car on actual roads, despite the fact that you can vividly remember when he slept on
Return of the Jedi
sheets. Of course there are restrictions: He must be accompanied by a licensed driver age eighteen or over. But that does not reassure me. What that means to me is that, in the eyes of the state of Florida, it is perfectly okay for my son to be driving around accompanied only by Ted Kennedy.

I want tougher restrictions than that. I want the law to say
that if my son is going to drive, he must be accompanied by a licensed paramedic and at least two Supreme Court justices. Also I believe that, as a safety precaution, his car should be attached via a stout chain to a restraining device such as the Pentagon.

It’s not that I think my son is a bad driver. He’s actually a pretty
good
driver, careful to signal his turns. That’s what worries me: He’ll be driving in Miami, where nobody else, including the police, does this. If Miami motorists were to see a turn signal, there’s no telling how they’d react. They could become alarmed and start shooting.

And what if my son actually believes the official Florida state driver’s manual when it says that the left lane is for passing only? Not here in Miami, it isn’t! The driving public here apparently believes that there is some kind of deadly voodoo curse on the right lane, so
everybody
drives in the left lane here, at speeds ranging all the way from Indianapolis 500 down to Car Wash. This means that if you get behind somebody traveling at, say, Funeral Procession, and you want to pass, you have to disregard the driver’s manual, risk the voodoo curse, and use the right lane, UNLESS the driver in front of you is talking on a cellular telephone, because these people frequently receive urgent mandatory instructions from whoever they’re talking to, such as “SWERVE ACROSS ALL AVAILABLE LANES IMMEDIATELY!” So when you’re behind cell-phone drivers, it’s generally wise to wait patiently for a few moments until they ram into a bridge abutment; then you can pass safely on whichever side has the least amount of flame spewing out.

We veteran Miami drivers know this, just as we know
that, in Miami, it’s considered acceptable to park on any semi-level surface including roofs, and to go through a red light as long as you can still remember when it was yellow. But how is my son supposed to know these things?

What really scares me is, he’ll want to drive a LOT. I know this, because I remember exactly how I felt when I got my driver’s license, in 1963.1 was a student at Pleasantville (New York) High School, where, if you were a male, cars were
extremely
important. There were two major religions: Ford and Chevy. Ford guys would carve “FoMoCo” (for “Ford Motor Company”) on desks; Chevy guys—this was considered extremely witty—would change it to read “FoNoGo.” We found great wisdom in Beach Boys car songs, which are just like love songs to a woman, except they’re (a) more passionate, and (b) more technically detailed, as in these lyrics from “Little Deuce Coupe”:

At lunchtime we stood next to the circle in front of the high school and watched guys drive around slowly, revving their engines. Sometimes, if we were especially impressed with a car, we would spit.

I applied for my New York state driver’s license the instant I was old enough, and the day it arrived—finally!—in the mail, I borrowed my mother’s car, which was a Plymouth Valiant station wagon that could attain a top speed of 53 miles per hour if dropped from a bomber. I didn’t care:
I had wheels
. I drove around at random for approximately the next two years. It made no difference to me where I was going. I was happy simply to be in motion, with the AM radio turned
up loud and tuned to WABC in New York City, which would be playing, say, “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons:

And behind the wheel, with my arm draped casually out the window, I imagined that I WAS that handsome boy, not some dweeb driving his mom’s Valiant. I was cool. I was
driving
.

These days when I’m driving I rarely listen to music. I do listen to traffic reports, because I’m always late for some obligatory grown-up thing. I’m never driving just to be driving.

But my son will be, soon. He’ll be out there every chance he gets, feeling so fine, cruising to nowhere, signaling his turns, playing his music, cranking it up when a good song comes on, maybe exchanging high-fives with the Supreme Court justices.

Yup, he’ll be on the road a lot—a teenager, but still, in many ways, a human being. Please watch out for him.

C
ould alien beings from another galaxy come here and obliterate human civilization? If so, would this be covered by our homeowners’ insurance?

These troubling questions are on the minds of the millions of people who are being exposed this summer to the spectacle of grotesque, repulsive, inhuman creatures that would stop at nothing in their determination to dominate the Earth. I am referring, of course, to the Democratic and Republican conventions.

But the public was also troubled by the blockbuster motion picture
Independence Day
. It definitely had a powerful effect on me. I had been skeptical about all the “hype,” but when the two-and-a-half-hour movie was over, I found myself sitting pensively in the theater for quite a while, pondering the question: How am I going to get out of here when my shoes are bonded in place by one of the most powerful adhesives known to science, Movie Floor Crud, which is a mixture of Pepsi, Milk Duds, and year-old nasal secretions snorted out by distraught moviegoers during the ending
of
The Bridges of Madison County? A
lot of people just leave their shoes on the theater floor and walk out barefoot.

But getting back to
Independence Day:
What happens is, these aliens from millions of light-years away arrive in our solar system in a fantastically huge spaceship manufactured by the Winnebago Corporation. When they reach Earth, they are in a bad mood, possibly because their luggage has not arrived, so they attack New York City, causing the population to panic and run around screaming.

In my opinion, this is the only unrealistic part of the movie. I mean, we’re talking about
New Yorkers
, here. These are tough people. These are people who, every day, without even thinking about it, voluntarily go down into dark, steaming, noisy, extremely aromatic holes containing the New York City subway system. People who do that are not going to get bent out of shape just because an alien invasion force is obliterating their city. They are merely going to shrug and continue reading the
New York Post
(front-page headline:
UFO ATTACK DESTROYS BUTTAFUOCO HOME)
.

At the same time as they hit New York, the aliens destroy Los Angeles—a clear indication that they had been monitoring the O.J. Simpson trial. They also wipe out Washington, D.C., apparently believing—this just shows that even a highly advanced species can be stupid—that wiping out the federal government would somehow make it more difficult for the country to function.

While millions of Americans take to the streets to celebrate the fact that they will probably not have to file income-tax returns for several years, the president of the United States, played by a weenie, escapes, along with several key actors, to an ultra-secret government installation.

There they learn that scientists have been trying to repair an alien flying saucer that crashed in 1947, which means the warranty has expired. (This crash was hushed up, except for a brief statement from the Federal Aviation Administration assuring the public that flying-saucer travel is perfectly safe.) The secret installation also contains the bodies of deceased aliens, which have likewise been kept completely hidden away except for one brief incident in 1977 when one of them showed up as part of a science-fair project submitted by Amy Carter.

The plot thickens when Jeff Goldblum, who plays a brilliant cable-TV scientist, discovers, by analyzing signals coming from the extraterrestrial Mother Ship, that the aliens are the source of all “infomercials.” This makes the Earth so mad that it decides to fight back. There is a spectacular aerial battle between a fleet of scale-model alien saucers and a fleet of scale-model Air Force fighters, led by President Weenie. Meanwhile, Jeff Goldblum, flying in the crashed enemy saucer, which is piloted by the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, gets inside the mother ship and uses his laptop computer to put a virus into the aliens’ main computer system. He can do this because the aliens, like every other life form in the galaxy, have basically no choice but to use the Windows 95 operating system; in fact the whole reason why they have attacked the Earth is to destroy Bill Gates.

Goldblum’s virus easily disables the aliens’ main computer. Perhaps you’re wondering why aliens who can travel millions of light-years can’t fix a computer virus. The answer is that, like any large organization, the Mother Ship has only one individual who actually understands the computer system, and that individual is not available. The alien computer nerd is hiding in the bowels of the Mother Ship,
playing the alien version of Space Invaders, in which the object is to kill little attacking figures that look like Keanu Reeves.

So, the alien ships, their defenses disabled, are all shot down, and the movie ends with people all over the world celebrating. Of course the cheering will stop soon enough, when millions of attorneys crawl out of the smoking rubble of America’s cities, contact the surviving aliens, put neck braces on them, and start suing the Earth in general for trillions of dollars. THAT’S when we should really get worried.