My friends Paul and Mark call me Jake, so can you; my real name is Jacob, but that doesn’t matter, it’s just a handle, the one with which I got saddled. When I first, like, started school…well, I never talked to anyone. Sat in the back mostly. And blew bubbles with my spit. The teacher would sometimes call on me for answers and I would give them and then just sit there quietly. It was perfectly fine. Once she asked me to draw the number ten on a board. I did it, but the numbers looked real bad, sort of like two skinny ladies leaning on each other, the skinny zero bottoming-out all belt-around-a-goitre. I felt terrible but just went and sat down. Once after school I got cast in a TV show called Balthazar the Talking Dog. It happened just like that. An old man on the street pulled me aside and asked me if I wanted to be on TV and I said sure, shit, yeah, you know. He said I had the perfect face for it. They made me read some lines to a camera, but that was it. It was easy getting on TV. I guess Paul and Mark aren’t really my friends, they are just on Balthazar the Talking Dog with me. We play three kids who are friends and one of us has a talking dog that fights crime. Every episode, Balthazar fights a new crime, but it is all pretty much the same. It is, uh, cool…I guess. Mark’s character owns the dog and the, I guess, cool part about the show is that Mark’s mom is played by the famous actress Catherine Chestnut. She used to be a famous movie actress but now she’s on Balthazar the Talking Dog. She is sad and angry all the time and she sits in her trailer and drinks bourbon from a coffee cup. Once she called me a ‘little cocksucker.’ Her voice is raspy and deep like Darth Vader, or, like, I guess James Earl Jones, right? Paul and Mark say that her voice is like that because she smokes too many cigarettes. Those Joe Camel cigarettes. What is strange though is that she can make her voice sound sweet on TV. When they turn the camera on she changes completely. I guess that’s acting. The first Balthazar died after four episodes. Paul says that Catherine Chestnut hit him with her car when she was drunk at three in the afternoon, but our executive producer Lance would not tell us what happened. The new Balthazar is better though so it is not a big deal, really. The new Balthazar looks like the old one but he can jump higher and his lips move better so it looks like he is talking. They use bacon on a coat hanger on a boom rig to get Balthazar to move his lips like he’s talking. I do not know how that works. I tried it with my mom’s dog Pepper, but Pepper just jumped up and ate the bacon. My boom rig was a broom. In this week’s episode of Balthazar the Talking Dog, uh, Balthazar fights a ruthless real estate jagoff who wants to steal Mark’s mom’s house to turn it into a parking lot, I think. The neat thing about this show has nothing to do with that, though. The neat thing, that most kids will probably like, is that Balthazar gets to play basketball in this episode. Once he played soccer and the people liked that a lot, so now it is basketball. I recently learned a poem and I was maybe going to ask to read it on the show. Mark said I was an idiot and a fairy. The poem is called “Quaker Oates” by Rita Dove. I think those are really good names both for a poem and for a lady who writes poems. Rita Dove is a coloured woman, or a woman of colour…she’s, you know, black…of African descent…and “Quaker Oates” is called a prose poem which means that the way it sits on the page you wouldn’t really think it was a poem, more like a inter-studio memorandum type deal or a normal thing you would…whatever, whatever tickles your fancy, whatever people write for. I have the whole fucking thing memorized. There is a bit I really like about “breakfast-nooks, fingers dreaming, children let their spoons clack on the white side of their bowls,” and then also it has this great ending that goes “And they come, the sick and the healthy; the red, the brown, the white; the ruddy and the sallow; the curly and the lank. They tumble from rafters and crawl out of trundles. He gives them to eat. He gives them prayers and a good start in the morning. He gives them free enterprise; he gives them the flag and PA systems and roller skates and citizenship. He gives them a tawny canoe to portage overland, through the woods, through the midwestern snow.” Isn’t that fucking great? Except, well, thinking it is great would appear to mark me. But who could really care. That’s not even a question. It is a statement. Like, it is stupid to care about mean bedizened child star halfwits and their what-are-I-have-heard-called aspersions. Also the new Balthazar does not do sex things like the old one did. The old Balthazar would scurry up behind you and try to do sex on your legs; at least that’s what Paul and Mark said he was doing. It got us in trouble when the old Balthazar tried doing sex on the network guy’s wife. Lance had to hall Balthazar off and then apologize like mad. Either Paul or Mark, I can’t remember which, told me that they might have killed the old Balthazar because of all this. I hope not, that sure would be a waste of a dog’s life. Maybe if the new Balthazar starts to do sex on people’s legs we will have to get another new dog. I hope not. I like the new Balthazar a lot. Really. Like him loads. That grin, right? I really cannot imagine that the show, eck, not be, like…you know…it wouldn’t, uh…would not be the same…show…without him…
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