Damien Galeone

The people standing in front of me are ugly. Not ugly as in slightly not-good-looking. Not ugly as in ‘I wouldn’t sleep with that person sober.’ Not ugly as in minor defects or growths.

 Their ugliness is spectacular. It’s as though they are either missing a chromosome, have crashed on Earth in a saucer-like craft or have some illness that devolves them to a physical state similar to our cement-browed Paleolithic ancestors. The man is drooling. Yes, drooling. Lady Macbeth seems incapable of not squinting, as though she is actively trying not to crap her pants or wincing in pain at the sight of herself in a mirror. As she never stops making this face, it’s clear that this look is a permanent feature of her face, along with her variety of chins, her topography of moles and the sixteen teeth that dwell in her mouth.

What is most amazing about this couple, aside from the fact that they don’t live in a zoo, is that they are standing over a baby carriage. These people have procreated. Together.

Extremely ugly couples always remind me of washing cars. In university, I used to work in the school’s motor pool. I washed cars, changed oil and listened to a classic rock station that played the same 45 songs every day in a different order. My only colleague in this motor pool was a Pittsburgh native named Chris, who was missing his front upper row of teeth and who was balding in such an unusual jigsaw pattern that nature had obviously taken out a grudge on him. Despite his physical appearance, he did have a warped, yet common sense philosophy to explain his views on the world around him. He explained gay people (Don’t care what them homos do, plus means more cooch for me), race relations (What the fuck I care? Plus someone’s gotta make ribs and egg rolls), traffic (No matter how fast you go, you still gonna get there) and books (If nobody gets killed or fucked before page two, I’m out.)   

One day, sitting in a van at a light, a couple walked past us. They, like the couple on the tram with me today, had surely been left under some rocks along the evolutionary ladder.

“Look at them people; you see how happy they are?”

I did in fact note the state of euphoria that they were both in. “Yeah.”

“You ain’t never seen nobody happy as a ugly couple. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Cause they so happy somebody getting into bed with them they can’t believe it.” He then let out a string of giggles through the gap in his teeth and proposed his daily notion, and his solution to any problem. “Fuck it, dude, let’s get a Slurpee.”

He was right, too. Since then I have always enjoyed sneaking looks at ugly couples, just to see if they fit in with Chris’s theory. They often do exhibit a joy that seems to state they do not deserve what they have.   

However, the people on the tram today weren’t happy.

Maybe because in the carriage beneath them was proof of their deranged genetics. Or maybe they had just lost contact with the mothership. I don’t know, but I do know that they should be happy.

They should be happy because they are rubbing my nose in it. And babies are proof of ‘it.’ They are proof of nookie, copulation, doing the deed, the old lust and thrust, of stabbing the trout, screwing, laying pipe, the old two-backed beast, and the four-legged frolic.

Ugly people with babies are part of a (depressingly) long list of people who shouldn’t be getting more play than me, but are. Also on this list are violent convicts, any douchebag who can play one chord on a guitar, hipsters, and Kid Rock.

The whole business makes me want to fill my pockets with stones, walk down the Vltava River and pull a Virginia Woolf. But, when it gets to me, I think about what Chris would say when the cars started backing up, we were covered in motor oil and listening to Hotel California for the ninth time in three days: “Fuck it, dude, let’s get a Slurpee.”