This Is a Book - Demetri Martin [2]
DAVE: Hey there!
OPERATOR: I’m going to say goodbye now, Dave—
DAVE: Hey there! Hey there!
OPERATOR: Dave, put down the phone and get out of there. You need to leave that party immediately. Hold out your phone and look at it like something is very wrong with it. And do not say “Hey there” again.
DAVE: …
OPERATOR: Dave?
DAVE: All riiiiiight.
Megaphone
They say your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness. I think this is true. For me, it would definitely be my megaphone.
It all started when I got the megaphone. It was a gift from my friend Doug. I remember the moment clearly. Doug and I were standing in his garage looking for his turtle, when I noticed the megaphone just sitting there quietly. I asked Doug if I could have it. He said, “Sure.” Then he picked it up and handed it to me. That moment would change my life forever.
I took to the megaphone right away. Right after Doug handed it to me, the first word I said through it was “Thank” and then right after that “You,” but I really let it ring out—like “Youuuuuuu!” Doug didn’t seem that thrilled with me. I think that’s a common sort of reaction when someone gives something away and then realizes how great the thing they just gave away was. It was right after I tried out the siren function that Doug really started to seem irritated about his decision to give away that great megaphone. I didn’t want to make the situation any worse, so I just said “Hello?” through the megaphone and made a face that said “this thing isn’t really that great.” I think that helped, because Doug stopped shaking his head and cursing at me.
At first, everything with the megaphone was great. It came in really handy in the obvious situations. I would be meeting a friend somewhere and I’d use it to call out to him so that he could find me in a crowd, or I’d use the megaphone to get someone to move out of my way on the sidewalk or in line at the pharmacy.
I’ve always hated boring street performers. Thanks to the megaphone I finally had a real outlet to express that. And you know, I never really knew what “thinking out loud” meant until I did it through the megaphone. It made my thinking way more “out loud” and more “out landish” too.
Like a lot of people, I’ve always enjoyed commenting on strangers’ outfits. Unlike a lot of people, I now had a new megaphone to do it with. And, let me tell you, commenting on people’s hilarious clothing choices through a megaphone makes it so much better.
With the megaphone, I also started to get noticed a lot more by women, especially whenever I tried to guess their name or bra size as they walked by.
One thing you learn pretty quickly with a megaphone is that it’s hard not to say “Step right up!” through it. For me that proved to be most problematic at carnivals and soup kitchens. I discovered that if there’s one thing carnies and soupies have in common it’s that they do not like to “step right up” and then find that there’s nothing there besides a guy with a megaphone.
One thing I learned to do was to get that megaphone away from my face pretty quickly after saying my “thang” through it, because people love nothing more than to push a megaphone straight into the mouth of its master. And, in case you didn’t know, that equals big trouble for your teeth. A good trick is to have a backup megaphone. That way, when someone takes or smashes your first one, you have another one right there ready to go, ideally cranked to full volume for when you give them the old “Nice try!” through it.
After a while, I entered what I call my “do-gooder phase” with my megaphone. If I saw a fire I would make alarm sounds through the megaphone to alert people to get out of there. This would irritate the firefighters and sometimes make them aggressive. But this was never a problem as long as I ran away before the fire was over, while the firefighters were still busy being heroes.
If I heard the police talking through one of their megaphones, I would join in and add little