Excerpt from Vonnegut's Asshole: Andy

This is an excerpt from Eric Spitznagel and Vonnegut's Asshole that I particularly enjoyed. When I brought it over, the paragraph structure was fucked up. I'll do the best I can with it. Enjoy and have a great weekend, people!

[Excerpt]

There was this kid that lived in my neighborhood. Andy, I think his name was. He wasn't technically retarded, but he did act a little bizarre. He had water on the brain or something. He had to wear a bike helmet all the time because his head was so huge.

Our parents told us, "Be nice to Andy because the doctors don't expect him to live very long."

But we didn't need a reason to treat Andy as a friend. He was always very sweet, if a little slow. And his mother gave him copies of Playboy Magazine - I assume because she thought he was going to die soon and would never have the chance to see real boobies - and Andy let us look at them.

When I got too old to deliver newspapers anymore, Andy took over for me, even though he could barely ride a bike without falling. During his first year, I'm not exactly sure what happened, but he got hit by truck. It wasn't fatal, thank god, but it gave his parents a scare. They wanted him to give up the paper route, but he refused. He just loved it too much.

Exactly one year later, Andy got into another accident with yet another truck. Once again, he walked away with just a few bumps and bruises, but that wasn't the remarkable part anymore. I mean really, what are the odds of getting hit by two trucks in two years?

My family eventually moved to the suburbs of Chicago, but we still visited our old neighborhood every summer. During one trip - I think it was my summer break from college - I ran into Andy again, and I was shocked that he was still alive. We'd been told he wouldn't survive junior high school, but here he was in his early 20s, still bouncing with energy and wearing that same battered bicycle helmet.

The doctors were perplexed, but everybody in town thought it was a miracle. I said hello to Andy and asked him how he was. He smiled at me with a big impish grin and said, "I got hit by a truck!" As I learned later, Andy was still delivering papers and had been involved in a head-on collision - always with a truck - every year for almost a decade. The locals had come to expect it."Andy's been hit by another truck? Well, spring must be just around the corner."

Somehow he always survived without any serious injuries, which just made his stubborn refusal to die prematurely, as his doctors had predicted, all the more freaky.

Last year I heard that he'd been hit by another truck - no surprises there - but this time it had killed him. I'm not sure of the exact tally, but I think it took around twenty-three truck collisions to finally finish the job. So much for being a miracle of science, huh?

(Pause, waits for laugh.)

Yeah, uh... I guess that's kinda sad. It seemed funny at the time.