Preparing for the Government's visit took some intense plotting. Erik's plan was that we'd each wear beige pants, each drink a gallon of water beforehand, then, as the agents walked in the door, simultaneously empty our bladders right into our tan slacks. He thought the expanding wet spot was a widely recognized symbol of fear and respect. "Let's make that Plan B," Chet said. His idea was that we would simply bribe them with sex. "This plan hinges on precision timing," he told us, "and that all the agents they send are corrupt. And gay."

"I'm not having sex with them," Seanbaby said.

"And they're attracted to Erik," Chet was forced to add, "Those are long odds, but we've got twenty-four hours to doll Erik up, and I've got a can't-miss beauty regimen: Erik, take off your glasses."

Erik took them off.

Chet walked around him in a circle, rubbing his chin. "Well, that didn't work. I guess we can always fall back on precision timing."

"This is insane." Sean told him, "Everyone knows the key to getting the dork to look like a stud is tearing the sleeves off his shirt. Actually, fuck that. Keep your sleeves on. Nobody here wants to kill the president. It's just a fucking mixup."

"Plan B it is then," Erik said, "Let's practice! Everyone hold hands."

"Nono... Wait," Sean said while he wriggled his fist out of Erik's white-knuckled death grip. "Look, we'll just tell them the truth. It's obvious I don't want to kill the President."

"How is that obvious?" Chet asked as he dug around in his nose with a finger.

Sean smiled, "Because, baby, the President's still alive." As he finished, he did a quick draw on Erik with a gun made out of his thumb and forefinger. He winked so Erik wouldn't be scared, but it was too late.

When the agents arrived, we were a little bit disappointed. Our phone contact and the one heart we could never tame was a forty year old man that came up to Sean's shoulder and was mostly bald. The muscle he brought with him for backup was a nervous, fidgety guy named Tony who looked exactly like Ben Stiller. So much like Ben Stiller that we thought Ben Stiller might have been researching a role for a movie where he plays a guy that has a really crappy job at the Secret Service.


I expected Hannibal Lecter and Dr. Doom. I expected some psychiatric genius who'd get inside my head and yank out my darkest fears until I started crying, a man who'd pull parts of my family out of a plastic bag until I got so scared I confessed to crimes against presidents I've never even heard of. Like Zachary Taylor or the really fat one. No, they sent along a guy named (I swear to God*) Special Agent Smith. Yeah, nice alias, mystery man. I told him I was John Doe, and Chet and Erik were funnyman John Doe and newcomer John Doe.

*This might come in handy: when you swear to God at Coyote Ugly, you're supposed to call Him Kathy Niagra.

Agent Smith said, "We're not here to play games, Mr. Reiley."

This confused me. How did he know we were kidding? If he could recognize a joke, why the fuck would he even be here? Where was this keen joke-spotting ability when "Agent Smith" was reading Fat Chicks in Party Hats and thought it was a terrorist group's manifesto? Yeah, something here didn't feel right, so I decided to abandon all our plans and start crying.

This inspired Erik to execute Plan B. The agents weren't interested in Erik to begin with, but they became sort of conspicuously not interested in him at this point. Even though he stood ramrod straight in the center of the room as he did his business, they avoided looking in his direction the way your grandmother would... Well, there really isn't a better analogy than the way you'd avoid looking at someone who's currently wetting himself and clearly doing it for your benefit. Chet tried to jump out the window, but accidentally thought a bookcase was the window. At press time, Chet is still lying alone in a twisted lump at the bottom of a pile of books. (UPDATE! 9-26-00, Chet has been visited by several egg-laying insects.)


INSIDE SCIENCE TODAY; SPECIAL SAVVY SIDEBAR INFO:
Fat Chicks in Party Hats is white text on a dark background. So if you want to print it on white paper, and then be able to read it, you have to tell your computer to not make the letters white. I first learned that when I printed instructions on how to build a bomb (dear secret service: no I didn't). The government doesn't know how to use computers, so the incriminating hard copies they brought along with them had no visible text on them (recreation above). That's right, Miguel and his brother Ernie's stylistic decision to use white text on their page completely outsmarted the Secret Service.
Agent Smith pulled a spotlight closer to my face. I thought it was to find one of the buttons I took off his jacket and put in my nose, but it was just an interrogation technique he must have seen someone use on Rambo. He demanded, "Were you ever arrested for anything?"

I thought back. I remember getting a harsh scolding from a policeman for getting caught fucking in my car, and once again for talking to a Mexican guy who was incriminatingly Mexican in a town where they hate that. I didn't get arrested either time, but do you remember when you went to college? Neither do I. I could have been arrested on any number of nights and not had any idea it ever happened. So just in case, I told Agent Smith, "I don't recall being arrested. At least not for anything having to do with presidents. Unless you're talking about President Maddog 20/20 and his Parliament of Indecent Exposure."

Agent Smith wasn't happy with my answer, but he smiled. He had a miniature secret agent electronic spy ace up his sleeve. A little trick he learned from my grade school principal when he wanted a confession, but didn't pay close enough attention to Matlock to know how to get one. He said, "If you HAVE BEEN arrested, we'll find out about it."

I asked, "Aren't you guys going to be busy looking for incriminating fart jokes on the Ugly Dudes on Go-Karts Homepage?" Agent Smith repeated his threat(?) in a sterner voice, "Listen... if you've been arrested, we WILL find out."

"Is that going to piss you off? Like would a parking ticket be the final brick in the case you're building against me? Or -"

"More like the final brick in the flimsy house of cards of guilt you're building against him!" Erik yelled from his desk. Agent Smith and I both looked over at him. Erik waved, thought for a second, then screamed "Attica!" while still waving.

I continued, "Or will you just check to make sure I never killed the leader of any countries?"

Agent Smith started to say something, but I interrupted him, "Hey, wait. You guys are like the government. You have all that shit you took from the aliens you keep in [Internet Time Out]. I bet your watch is a total Dick Tracy Watch. You could probably just download my files and DNA onto it with a voice command. Whoa whoa, hold on. Hit record on your watch."

"I can't hit... damn it, this is just a watch."

"This is Seanbaby speaking to Secret Service via Special Agent Smith's ElectraComm Watch. Erik has peed his pants! Repeat: Erik has peed his pants! Ha ha ha ha!"


To see the layers of deception used by our government, here is Secret Service Agent "Tony" disguised as TV's Ben Stiller disguised as Bruce Springsteen.
"Ha ha ha ha! Attention ElectraComm Watch!" Erik screamed from across the office, "I want to kill the President." Now both the agents had no choice but to look directly at him. "Of Iraq!" Erik said. "HA!" he said. He smiled and gave the agents the thumbs up and said "Fuck Iran!"

Agent Smith put his watch hand in his pocket and told me he was going to shoot me. I sat still and looked around the room trying to not move my lips when I mumbled, "mmphh! Agent Smith! mmph! This is central command! mmmph! Take the watch out of your pocket! We can't... breathe!"

Agent Smith decided to finally get to the point. He asked me, "Do you want to harm the President?"

"Harm him? I want to kill the President!" Erik interrupted. Agent Smith wearily cocked his head a little towards him. "Of the United States," Erik added, and Agent Smith started to get up. "Of Germany!" Erik screamed. "The President of United States of Nazi Germany!" he said and then let out a loud "HA!"

Rubbing his forehead like someone had just shot a bb at it, Smith sat back down and asked me again, "Do you want to harm the President?"

I said, "No."

He scribbled something in his notebook that seemed a lot longer than "No." He asked, "So when you decided to blow up the White House, were you hoping the President was inside?"

I said, "I don't... think so?"

"Aha! So you want to blow up the White House!"

I've been talking for 24 years now, so I could tell that Agent Smith was playing games with me. But since he had a gun and Ben Stiller was holding a button that said "BLOW UP SUSPECT," I decided to start stuttering.

Agent Smith felt like he was starting to get the upper hand and scribbled something in his notebook that was obviously just a couple page-size swirls. Erik shouted, "Nice word, Agent Smith! What language is that? Dipshit language? Ha ha ha... Did you go to dipshit school?! Hi, look at me, I'm a Special Agent from dipshit school! Doi! I learned how to scribble today!"

I plugged the agent's drawn gun with my finger and soothed, "What my colleague is trying to say is that no matter how many times you ask me if I want to explode the President, I'm not going to say yes. I probably wouldn't even kill Fidel Castro. It's not that human life is magic and precious; most people are total dicks. I just have other hobbies that keep me busy."

"I understan... wait. None of that made any sense."

"To be honest, Agent Smith, none of it does. None of it really does."

Here's the form the Secret Service gave me to fill out. I knew important people would be reading it, so I typed it. I also went back two or three times and tried to make all of my answers as anti-president-killing as possible. They mailed it back to me with the word "FAIL" stamped on top and included a pill for me to swallow.
Agent Smith put a piece of duct tape over my mouth and explained how if your website or baseball cap says to kill someone and then someone does it, it can get tracked back to you and then you're legally responsible. That's all the information Sean and Erik needed to twist the government's retarded system of blame into a get rich quick scheme. Erik screamed, "Invent flying cars, science!!!" at the exact same time Sean scribbled "Hey, scientists! Invent talking fruit!" onto a scarf and dramatically threw it around his neck. So if we can trust Agent Smith and his Government, Seanbaby will be legally responsible when scientists revolutionize produce with fruit that can talk (and maybe sing!). And Erik is going to be even richer when you're driving through the clouds in your flying cars. Because he was in charge of telling someone to make them.

Agent Smith, with a hand twitching on his firearm, informed us that this blaming policy didn't work like that. You only get the credit for bad stuff like school massacres and "situations of that matter." For example, if you rent a megaphone and bike around the world telling people to "BLOW UP THE WORLD!" you are held responsible if someone blows up the world. But if you call a grocery store and tell the guy on the phone to mop up aisle eight, you don't get a paycheck for cleaning up aisle eight. It didn't make much sense to us, but we were just happy that we were finally confused because someone else was an idiot.

We decided to stop being so selfish and tackle the problem head-on. If people were mindless drones enough to follow the instructions on a website that says to kill someone, they're mindless drones enough to follow instructions on a website that says not to kill someone. So we built a website called, "Stop killing our leaders," and made sure the message would reach the American youth by having pictures of people in sunglasses next to where it says not to kill people. Also, lots of windsurfers and a bunch of the letters were tilted in different directions. Agent Smith and Ben Stiller didn't seem to like it as much as we'd hoped. That's when Chet took charge.

Chet takes government investigations into comedy very seriously, so he wanted to get to the bottom of this case. He tried to casually adjust the pantyhose he was secretly wearing under his pants as he said, "Special Agent sirs, no one here wants to kill anyone."

"Except if I went back in time and met James Polk," Erik pointed out.

"Right, except for that." Chet said and rolled his eyes at the agents. "But you must understand the comedic potential of an assassination joke. Is there a less important government employee that we can joke about killing, but of course not actually kill?"

Agent Smith gave a signal to Ben Stiller and they both took out their guns.

Erik jumped up, ran between the agents and Chet, held up his open wallet and screamed "Whoa whoa whoa! I'm on the job!" The confused silence that usually follows any sentence spoken by Erik was instead occupied by clicking sounds as the agents prepared their sidearms for use.


If you were to imagine this picture of Ben Stiller was wearing a bad suit and pointing a gun at us, you'd have a pretty good idea of what we were looking at that day. Also, you have to imagine that Ben Stiller wasn't disguised as Steve Guttenberg.
Sean thought quickly, "What about the Secretary of the... the... shit what's that one where they... Geography! Secretary of the Geography!"

Agent Smith sighed and lowered his weapon, "That's not a government position."

Displaying uncharacteristic bravery, Erik tested Smith's sincerity by inventing a joke on the spot, "Secretary of the Geography walks into a bar, AND THEN I KILL HIM." A muffled "ha ha ha" drifted out of the area where Sean had immediately wrapped his arms around Erik's head.

The agents didn't open fire. It appears that anyone who wants to joke about killing the Secretary of the Geography can do so with no fear of being vaporized from space. Agent Smith still looked pissed, so Chet offered to get him an iced tea. Erik and Seanbaby said together, "Pussy." A second later, Erik added, "Why don't you lotion your hands and offer them a handjob while you're up? Pussy." He winked at Agent Smith and mouthed the words "I'm on the job."

...

The short time we all spent together flew by, and after two weeks now, we still haven't heard from the friends we made in Special Agent Smith and his assistant Regular Agent Ben "Tony" Stiller. We can only assume that they must have found and eliminated whoever was responsible for all of these damn President deaths. And Secret Service: When we have "President" and "deaths" in the same sentence, there are other smaller words that modify and reverse meanings to try to make it clear that we nor our readers in any way want any harm to come to President. Or as we sometimes call him down at Coyote Ugly, Angel Divine.

Now that this article is online, Erik and I will probably be gone. Thanks for the memories, and please click here to go back and enjoy the work we did before the government picked a fight with us and killed us.
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