Pen Name

"Seat Safety Switch" (seat-safety-switch)
06/12/2015 at 16:17 • Filed to: ex-rcmp fruit machine, dodge, amc

I was a famous author once, you know.

I wrote under a pen name, hopefully you wouldn’t recognize it.

I hit rock bottom when I got invited onto Good Morning America and found myself drooling into Katie Couric’s old throat microphone, still slick with the scent of fear from the previous guest. The jackals wheeled out a succession of Dodge Vipers in the hope that my impending turgidity would move the needle on the ex-RCMP fruit machine they had won in a late night eBay bidding war.

But they were wrong. It wasn’t good cars that I liked. I had to think about a bored and stroked AMC Gremlin just to feel something akin to authentic delight at the presence of yet another six-figure supercar. They wanted a freak, but I was the wrong kind of freak.

Eventually they found out that I was truly and deeply weird, that my publicist had sold me as some kind of autistic car-advice manchild who could lend a soundbite to a morning show about the importance of keeping your windshield washer fluid topped up and contributing lots of money to dealerships who would install self-driving safety mechanisms to protect your children from your incompetence. They banished me. I was thrown into the mean streets of Burbank, forced to follow the writers of the distant past that I idolized.