A few years ago, I was heading back from meeting someone in Cape May, when one of my tires blew out while I was driving through Vineland. The blowout happened in one of the city’s nicer residential neighborhoods. I’ve changed enough tires to have the routine down pretty solid. I set about jacking up the car removing the lug nuts on the blown tire.As I worked on removing the tire, a man parked a purple PT Cruiser across the way. He got out of the car and headed for a house down the street. He was a slim man with a moustache wearing aviators and a Hawaiian shirt, carrying a six-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. As the man passed, a problem was brought to my attention: I had removed the spare tire from my car to make room for a hidden compartment that I could store a couple ounces of weed in. It wasn’t until I already had the wheel off that I remembered this.
For a several minutes I tried in vain to get a signal on my cell phone; Vineland apparently not being part of ‘Nationwide Coverage.’ While I was sitting in my disabled car, waving my phone around trying to get bars, another guy walked by in a Hawaiian shirt. He was chunkier than the first one. As he walked, he looked around in a paranoid manner. This man also had a small moustache, wore aviators and carried a six-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. He walked into the same house as the first.
By the time the second man had disappeared into the house, I was outside my car, wandering around the street in a desperate attempt to find a signal. I began to move closer to the house that these men were going into. It looked like a typical two-story home, but there were no lights on and the front door was cracked open. There was a purple PT Cruiser parked in the driveway. As I looked up and down the street, I quickly realized that there were at least a half-dozen purple PT Cruisers parked along it.
Still waving my cell phone around, I approached the house. Its lawn was perfectly manicured; I couldn’t even see any mower tracks. There was a bright assortment of flowers in beds running along the walls of the house. Every last one of the flowers looked like plastic.
“Excuse me,” I called. “My car broke down; I’m looking for a phone.”
I waited a beat for an answer. From somewhere deeper in the house, I faintly heard some talking. I ventured further into the house and ended up in an immaculately clean kitchen. A man suddenly appeared in a doorway at the opposite end of the room. It was Dateline’s Chris Hansen. “Have a seat,” he told me, gesturing to a bar-stool up against one of the counters.
“Oh shit man, you’re that Predator guy.”
“To Catch a Predator… please, take a seat.”
“Really, I just need to use your phone. A tire blew and my cell phone gets shit reception down here.”
“Why don’t you just take a seat,” he said, still standing in the doorway, gesturing again at the barstool.
“What are you like a vampire or something?” I asked. He looked shocked. “You can’t enter until I sit down?”
“Something like that. Take a seat.”
I gave in and sat on the bar-stool. Hansen strolled into the room, looking down at a packet of papers he was holding. He flipped through several pages. “So your car broke down?”
“Really just a flat.”
“Does the name SweetSassy69 ring a bell?”
“Listen, I know what you’re doing… I know how the show works… but seriously, I need to call a tow truck or AAA or something. I don’t know who that is… honestly I don’t really talk to anyone whose screen name or email ends in 69 anyway. It’s just a bad idea.”
Chris flipped through more of the pages in the packet. “So you’re not ThickNMeaty73?”
I shook my head.
“OnURface32?”
“No.”
“AnalBandito72391?” I laughed. “That one caught your attention?”
“I’m just surprised that there are so many people using the name ‘AnalBandito’ that they have to put a five digit number after it.”
“Well… you don’t really seem like the type of person I’m after,” Hansen finally said, looking me over.
“How’s that?”
“I didn’t see you pull up in a purple PT-Cruiser.”
“Only child molesters drive purple PT-Cruisers?”
“It’s a fact.”
I nodded. “Good to know.”
“I’ve got a half hour until the next guy gets here. Would you like some Mike’s Hard Lemonade?” He opened the fridge, revealing over a dozen Mike’s six-packs.
“No thanks, I don’t have a vagina,” I told him. Hansen shrugged. “I do have a bunch of headies though… if you want to blaze… you know, just throwing it out there.”
We set about hot-boxing the garage. After one bowl we were pretty baked. The combination of the small garage, good weed and an ad-hoc gravity bong got us fucked up real fast.
“Dude, there aren’t… like… cameras and shit in here, are there?” I asked the Dateline reporter as he hit the gravity bong. He shook his head, inhaled and then stood motionless for several seconds before finally exhaling a voluminous cloud of smoke. “Isn’t there supposed to be a whole crew here… and cops?” Hansen shook his head again.
“Not this time. It’s just me.”
“So… like… what happens if one of these dudes has a knife… or like, a gun?”
“It hasn’t been a problem.” I rolled my eyes and took a hit from the gravity bong. “You know, this is what I always wanted to do: protect people from the evils of the world. There’s just so much evil out there, someone has to bring it in front of the average American and say ‘this is it; this is the face of evil’ so that they can recognize it.”
I exhaled. “The face of evil is a chubby white dude with blemished skin, aviators and a tiny moustache?”
“I guess so,” Hansen said as he went to use the gravity bong, but knocked it over with his leg. Bong water spilled everywhere. His pants got soaked. “Shit!”
“Awwww dude… that sucks,” I said. I spotted a wet-dry vac sitting across the garage, in front of a large cabinet. “I got this.”
“—no wait!” Hansen called as I pulled the wet-dry vac away from the cabinet. Apparently it was the only thing holding the cabinet closed. It burst open the moment I moved the vacuum. Bodies of men in Hawaiian shirts began to fall out onto the floor. I paused to wait for them to stop falling out, but they didn’t. Body after body toppled forward. Occasionally it seemed like they would stop coming, but the bodies were just stuck together; and with a little time they separated and all comically tumbled out. In all it took a good 30-45 seconds for the whole thing to empty.
“Fuck. That’s a lot of dead child molesters, dude.”
“What ashame,” Hansen said, walking toward me. “Now I’ll have to take care of you too.” Fangs suddenly appeared in his mouth as he closed in menacingly, with his hands formed up in front of him like claws.
“Oh shit… seriously?” I backed up. “You’re a vampire? This is just fucking retarded, man.” I was quickly cornered.
Suddenly, a large knife jutted through the garage door. We both looked to it, confused as it was just stuck there in the door. The knife then twisted and pulled away, taking a chunk of the metal door with it. A beam of sunlight pierced through the dark garage and illuminated the To Catch a Predator host. He tried to shield his face from the sunlight, but it quickly overwhelmed him and he burst into flames. In an instant there was nothing left of the investigative reporter other than some ashes.
The garage door began to open. Light from the outside poured in, blinding me and illuminating the smoke that was drifting around the room. As the door lifted more, I saw the man standing on the other side. At first I couldn’t see who it was as the flood of light only let me make out the man’s outline. He approached slowly, like a cowboy at high-noon. When my eyes finally adjusted, I realized that I was looking right at New Jersey’s own Jon Bon Jovi.
“Fucking shit, man; that was intense!” I shouted at him, gesturing wildly with my arms. “I thought I was fucking dead… then—BAM! Bon Jovi to the fucking rescue; that shit’s crazy!” I saw that he wasn’t paying attention to my reenactment. He surveyed the room and walked around it cautiously, with a certain swagger, while I made an ass of myself. “That was Chris Hansen! To Catch a fucking Predator Chris Hansen! Did you know that when you killed him? Were you thinking ‘oh, just another vampire?’ because that was Chris fucking Hansen!”
“You’re in shock.”
“I know!” I yelled in his face. He backed away. “Sorry,” I said, sitting down on the floor, next to the pile of dead child molesters.
“I knew it was him. I’d been tracking him since October. Hansen was a really slippery son-of-a-bitch, but it was just a matter of time.” He said, sifting through the ashes of a once semi-credible journalist.
“Was he Wanted Dead or Alive?” He didn’t answer. “...sorry.”
“This must be a lot for you to handle.”
“No not really. I ran into Springsteen like a month or two ago… so, you know…”
“Springsteen is way out of his league.”
“Yeah, honestly I thought he was full of shit… but I guess not, if you’re out here doing this…” I trailed off as I began to salvage the spilt gravity bong and pack another bowl. While I went through its remains, Jon Bon Jovi walked off down the driveway. “Thanks,” I called out to him. He just waved dismissively.
As he neared the end of the driveway, another chubby man with a moustache, aviators, a Hawaiian shirt and Mike’s Hard Lemonade appeared. “Excuse me,” he asked the rock legend, “I knocked on the front door but got no answer. Do you know where I could find SweetSassy69?”
In one swift motion, Jon grabbed the man’s chunky head, snapped his neck, let him fall to the group like a rag doll and then continued on.
“Epic.”
And that was the time that I smoked a bowl with Chris Hansen just moments before his demise at the hands of Jon Bon Jovi.
