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  • Mookie and Me
  • Sam Dunnington (bio)

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Photo by Brian Rosner

The bleachers at this little alternative college are full of kids who are not Mookie’s typical demographic: hair dye, no shoes, many piercings, [End Page 161] diverse, androgynous, every type of kid you can imagine, kids fluent in lifestyles that big parts of the country haven’t even learned to fear yet.

Mookie was built for the ignorant and boorish, but this school paid for the presentation, so here we go. I place his marker card on the stage. I retreat behind the curtain, chew my nails, sweat. I press the initiate button on the remote.

Mookie walks onto the stage wearing a winsome smile and a red polo shirt. He tells the audience he drank his first beer at fifteen and hasn’t stopped since. The beer I roll to him, he rips open and chugs. He says he used to think coffee could sober you up. Ha! I roll a bottle of iced coffee to him. What he doesn’t spill down his front, he gulps, and smacks his lips. Not even a little bit of laughter. We are dead meat. I roll Mookie his bottle of Popov. I hate watching this part. He gives the audience some facts about how a body metabolizes alcohol, and then, from the bottle of Popov, he pulls long and deep. The pull prompts vomiting sequence 1 of 3. He soils his shirt. “I get out of control,” says Mookie, “a danger to myself, a liability to others. Headed for a fall.” He staggers around.

“What the fuck is this?” yells a kid in the front row.

Fair enough. If you have even half a brain about this kind of stuff, Mookie is an insult. The brochure from Clean Living, Inc. describes him as “a means to jolt entire communities into better behavior.” Mookie is crass, but Mookie gets results, reductions in rates of alcohol poisoning and sexual assault, especially at the big state schools. Mookie is for the children.

More kids shout at the stage. “A slice of pizza beforehand and one beer an hour!” Mookie yells back. The sweet, balding head of Student Life edges toward me in the backstage darkness. He looks like he needs about three weeks of sleep. He gestures at the seething crowd. “Is there a protocol for this sort of thing?” he says. A kid in a Mohawk and cut-off shorts, his little body taut with adolescent rage, begins to chant, “Storm the stage.” Other students pick it up. Mookie shouts back, “Can you point to your safety partner? Is your drink within sight?”

“At this point,” I say, “we should probably just go.”

“I think that’s a very good idea,” whimpers the head of Student Life.

“Please leave as positive a review as you think appropriate,” I say. My pay is pegged to our reviews. Ninety-seven percent positive, and I meet my financial goals. I am holding steady at 98 percent, with two stops remaining on the tour. I mash the attention button on my remote. [End Page 162] Mookie spins toward me. “Mookie, we’re out,” I yell. We run toward the van, a booing mob of kids in tow.

________

We drive east on I-90. Mookie lies in his recharging cradle in the back of the van. “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “That crowd is probably pretty on top of the sort of thing you’re trying to educate them about.” Whether it’s possible or not for him to be discouraged, I worry about it.

“One can only hope,” says Mookie. “How is your father?”

“Haven’t talked to him in the last couple days.”

“It’s been seven,” he says.

I am not in the mood to be lectured on my filial failures. “Mookie, enter Power Save,” I say.

We pull into Missoula, a town flanked by foothills and smothered beneath low clouds. We check in at a Motel 6. I detach Mookie’s neck port from the cradle, and he follows me to a room beige and clean. On the edge of the bed...

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