BannedCast

My name’s not Steve, it’s Stephen. Next time you presume to know someone well enough to abbreviate their god-given birth name, you might do well to pick someone without a criminal record and an undiagnosed personality disorder upon whom to test the bounds of your familiarity. 

Friends we ain’t, brother, and I’d just as soon see you slap my mother as insult her only child by electing brevity over formality when speaking to me. Because you done just stepped into it, my friend, and you better start practicing wrapping those pretty lips of yours around a heartfelt spate of apologies before I wrap them around this here street curb and apply some sudden and liberal force in the form of my bootheel upon the back of your skull.

I’m not sure what gave you the impression that you could speak to me in this way in the first place, you ossified shit-monkey, because I didn’t so much as allow my ex-wife to call me Steve, much less some ass-eating cud-chucker like yourself, and that should give you considerable pause for reflection: If I was unwilling to allow call me Steve the woman to whom I was willing to swear the rest of my life in both this world and the next and, it turns out, twenty-five percent of my gross monthly income earned from behind this here concession stand at the batting cages following our untimely split after she elected to get on her back beneath some guy named Dennis who coaches her spin classes and drives a two-wheel-drive teal-colored Rav-fucking-4, then what sliver of a crooked-cocked prayer do you think you have of calling me Steve?

None is right, you bitch-tit ass-mobile.

And while we’re on the subject, perhaps I should stress that I most definitely am referring to Stephen with a p-h and not Steven with a v, so I had better hear you pronounce it that way. The last guy to mispronounce it with a v offered some lame excuse about having suffered from a childhood “speech impediment,” but if he wasn’t telling the truth initially, he certainly was by the time I finished with him, I can tell you that. It’s why I’m no longer employed by Chuck E. Cheese, and it’s partly why I can no longer so much as step foot in the state of Kansas.

The other reason I have to detour around Kansas when cross-country driving? I may have taken it a little too personally when my previous landlord made an ostentatious show of referring to me as “StePHEN” in a strongly worded letter requesting that I not cut my toenails and hand wash my socks in a bucket on the front stoop of her 4-flat while occasionally haranguing the neighborhood children with threats of violence if they didn’t stay at least 20 yards away from my ‘85 Firebird Trans Am T-top.

Why on Earth the police care about some old broad’s Maltese and whether its legs were or were not fractured by “foul play” is still beyond me, but it’s an argument whose outcome I’m sure they’ve already decided, and so I’d just as soon not extend to them the satisfaction of seeing it handed to me in the form of a hefty fine and possible jail time issued by some lesbian Kansas City judge.

But enough about me, it’s your turn to tell me exactly how you plan to reconcile our little disagreement, and you’d better make it count because I’m counting backwards in my head from ten starting now, and if by the time I reach zero you haven’t made a believer out of me, I’m going to make a widow of your sloppy wife who earlier ordered ketchup on her hot dog.

Yours,