Ramones | Zach Selwyn

*Warning – the following story contains sexually graphic and disgusting situations

My wife recently bought a $300 vibrator. It’s called a stingray. It pulsates. It’s waterproof. And it does everything but make sandwiches. My wife swears by it and they have a special relationship that extends beyond the bedroom. This throbbing beast has been brought up consistently at dinner conversations since she purchased it… I believe she even told her mother about it, as if she was introducing her to her new boyfriend.

Women have been celebrating the vibrator for hundreds of years… It’s universally acceptable and widely acknowledged that most sexually healthy females have some sort of throbbing stunt penis hiding beneath a pile of T-shirts in their dresser drawers.

However, if I came home one day with a $300 sex toy, it would be considered taboo. Men who do this sort of stuff have long been labeled as perverts and sexual deviants. And, men don’t really discuss masturbation details over wine and pasta at a group dinner.

But why?

Maybe men and sex toys do not go together because most men are seemingly easier to please. After all, all we need is a magazine, a free hand and some “me time.”

The famous Australian man caught “beating it” at work in 2013

I have never used a sex toy on myself. I am not saying that I haven’t been intrigued by the molds of “Jenna Haze’s Pussy and Asshole” that I have seen for sale at an adult store, but shelling out hundreds of dollars for a rubber vagina has never been high on my priority list. Plus.” Real Dolls” are like, five grand. Plus, in humble my opinion, nothing could really beat the time-honored tradition of good old fashioned jerking-off.

But then someone sent me a free “Fleshlight.”

Holy shit.

I had heard about the Fleshlight forever. It was an early podcast sponsor and was the rage of the Adult Video Awards when I covered them for a TV show back in 2007. But still, I had never tried one, and I wasn’t exactly running out to make a purchase without knowing that it would be worth it… Then again, it’s not exactly the type of thing you borrow from a buddy…

Opening the box, I was amazed to find that there are like, 25 different types of Fleshlight models ranging from any body orafice to Jenna Haze to an actual weird blue ALIEN vagina that I assume is supposed to make you feel like you are fucking Neytiri, Zoe Saldana’s character from Avatar…

You can choose the between Jenna Haze model…

And the strange blue “Alien” option…

You are able to choose from a bevy of porn star clitoral replicas and adjust the suction level by twisting the back of the casing. It came with lube (necessary to simulate female wetness) and a cleaning cloth. It also had extensive directions about how to “wash your sleeve of remaining fluids” once you were done with it. This was a no-nonsense operation.

I settled in one day after work before my wife and kids had come home from baseball practice. I opened up my Fleshlight and examined it. This particular model was not a signature porn star version, it was a “Stamina Training Unit” – meaning it was supposed to help you train to maintain an erection longer should you ever have a real life sexual encounter… This was the “elliptical” of Fleshlights.

My first touch of the thing was unsettling. I felt weird. Deviant. I was fondling with an artificial body part. You know those weird people you see on TV who dig up corpses and have sex with them? For a second I wondered if I had stooped to their level.

Until I inserted myself.

It had been 15 years since I had felt any sexual pleasure with anyone other than my wife. I’m not sure how, but I suddenly became engorged and remained rock hard for the next seven minutes of thrusting, adjusting my technique, rhythm and stroke to this Fleshlight as if I was trying to give it an orgasm. Throughout this blissful and pure rubber sexual adventure, I felt as giddy as a 15-year-old learning how to unhook a bra strap in high school. It was something new and exciting…

As I approached climax, I was wondering if it was a customary rule to finish inside the device – or if the recommended method was to jizz onto any nearby available tube sock. While deciding to pull myself out from the sensual erotic vagina, I grabbed and looked at the manual… It did not offer any “jizz directions.”

I found myself climaxing into the sleeve. I immediately doubled over onto my bed as if I was 17 again and in the back of my Dodge Lancer. I was feeling pretty satisfied.

And that’s when the guilt settled in.

I had a large device on my penis. I had just cum into it and I was immediately dreading the moment when my son or wife would walk in. I began wondering if I had somehow caught an STD from the Fleshlight. Worst of all, I had to eventually pull out… which was a feeling that was so hauntingly real, that it reminded me of all the dorm rooms I had left at two in the morning in college after drunken sex romps… In my mind, I felt like I had somehow cheated on my wife with a Pi Beta Phi sophomore.
My friend Mark, who works in virtual reality calmed my fears when I called and told him that I was not feeling very good following the encounter.

“Dude, I’ve gone through, like – six Fleshlights!,” he said. “I get one every year… I had the Jesse Jayne model last year, bruh, that shit was nice! You should change them every six months or so.”

Woah, six Fleshlights? The Jesse Jayne model? Change them every six months? Obviously I was not living up to my masturbatory potential.

“Wait til you see this virtual reality shit we’re coming out with in a few years,” Mark explained. “Dude, you’ll be able to fuck Jessica Biel on a beach while Justin Timberlake is tied up to a nearby palm tree, crying.”

Virtual Reality porn is about to change out lives…

“Are you serious?” I responded.

“Dude, sex is about to go so virtual, we’re gonna all turn into a world of jizz monkeys shooting 9 to 10 loads a day.”

“Dude, in the future you’ll be able to fuck Jessica Biel on a beach while Justin Timberlake is tied up to a nearby palm tree, crying,” my friend Mark told me.

I did some research. If Mark’s prediction, and the internet is correct, the world will enter the virtual porn sex space in the next few years. People will put on their devices and set up a “scene” where they can have sex with a digital female while they pleasure themselves physically. At first, the sex models will be outrageously priced and unaffordable, but eventually, both men and women will all be pounding away at any number of virtual lovers through the power of visual stimulation.

That’s on some Westworld level shit right there.

Feeling less guilty about my Fleshlight encounter, I read the manual about how to clean it out. I learned that Fleshlight makes a special soap that I would now have to buy if I wanted it to stay in pristine condition. I would also have to double up on my lubrication as the sample pack they included was quite small. And then there is the washing of it. Running warm water through a fake vagina isn’t the most comforting part about using a Fleshlight, but it’s a necessary one if you want to keep it in good condition.

It’s like cleaning your bar-be-cue after every use.

When my wife got home, I shared my experience with her and she actually was proud of me. She told me that she thought men should be able to experience the heightened pleasure of something other than just your hand once in a while. Hearing this got me thinking…

“Well, look,” I said. “Pretty soon there’s gonna be a virtual reality device where I can have sex with Jessica Biel on a beach, can I get that too?”

“Sure, if I can get one where I bang DeAndre Jordan,” she responded.

“Oh, uhmm, let me think about it,” I responded.

I went upstairs and hid my Fleshlight beneath some t-shirts in my dresser…

DeAndre Jordan’s “O-Face.”

Subscribe to Zach’s PODCAST! Missi and Zach Might Bang!

Avatar bukowski essays Fleshlight humor Jenna Haze masturbation sex toys short stories virtual reality Zach Selwyn
By Zach Selwyn

“Mr. Selwyn – I think you’ve got a chance to make a lot of money in traffic,” the slightly overweight man staring at me from my computer told me. “We loved your audition… Are you ready to become the next LA eye in the sky?”

“Uhmmm… Can I think about this for a couple of days?”

If you are wondering how I found myself in an online interview to become one of those traffic reporter guys with a nickname like “The SKYLORD,” look no further than the current state of the film and television industry in Los Angeles.

About a year ago, as the Screen Actor’s and Writer’s Guild strikes were coming to an end, I found myself pretty deeply in debt. My last job at a startup media company had gone away the same week that I had bought my first ever new car – a Tesla by the way – and my son was getting ready to start college. In two weeks, I had gone from a top creative executive at a media company to an unemployed 48-year old actor and musician… something I hadn’t been in three years. Expenses were high and no TV work was on the horizon. California’s ridiculous non-existent tax benefits on TV and film production had devastated the very industry that this town was originally founded upon. In short, Hollywood moved out of Hollywood.

To give you an example of how unions and tax incentives have fucked up this city, a friend of mine who is an indy film producer, recently told me about his upcoming project about a pack of possessed coyotes attacking hikers high in the Hollywood Hills. I auditioned. I got a great response. I was excited that something was going to be shot in my own backyard. When I asked my friend the producer about the shooting schedule in LA, he was perplexed…

“We’re not shooting in LA… We are shooting in Colombia,” he said.

I didn’t get the part.

So, as usual, I texted everybody I knew in the business and asked for work. Nobody had anything. Some were off trying their hands at real estate. Some were applying at Trader Joe’s. Others said the Apple Store had decent health benefits. It was bleak. So I logged back into my Linked In account and started looking for any job I could find.

One morning I stumbled across a company that was looking for “Voiceover Talent For a Radio Gig.” After filling out an online application, a recruiter named Steve Bunch reached out to me and asked me to record a simple vocal demo. He sent me a voice sample… and it did not take me long to find out that this was not some amazing cartoon voice job on a show like Family Guy… This audition was to become a traffic reporter in Los Angeles. A TRAFFIC REPORTER? Sure, it sounded like an odd job, but in a way it was totally in my wheelhouse. I’ve announced and done voices for hundreds of projects… and let’s just say I was intrigued. Especially when I found out that the gig promised, “AFTRA union pay, 100K, health insurance and a 401 K.”

A 401 K? I thought to myself… Shit, in my 28 years in Hollywood, I had managed to save about $3,200 for my future. If I could guarantee some wealth in my later years? I would talk about car accidents and freeway closures on the radio all day! Who cares if I didn’t know what a ‘Sig Alert’ was?

But first, let’s face it. Linked In absolutely sucks. In the five or six years I have been on the site – I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs ranging from writing to hosting to creative positions and production jobs… During that time I have maybe been given an interview TWICE. There is nothing more disheartening than seeing that 798 other candidates have already applied for the same gig and that they are more qualified than you are. I did get one paid gig from their website… and it involved selling my facial expressions to an AI company that was digitizing actors for $300. Hey, times are tough. I don’t have many other skills beyond the entertainment industry. Plus, I’m not about to start an “Only Dads” account where I do dirty things for old rich men who are into middle-aged Jewish guys. (Although my wife is contemplating a cooking-with-her-feet Only Fans channel called “Bon Appe-FEET.”)

We’ve already trademarked the name.

So, I wrote Steve Bunch back. I was asked to write something about traffic and record it as if I was announcing it on the radio. I researched some phrases and dropped a killer take on some made up freeway bullshit that sounded legitimate. Here is what i said:

We have a SIG Alert off the 405 just before the 101 freeway that’s been backing up traffic for ten minutes – we are GRIDLOCKED and LOADED – also if you’re heading into Glendale look out for that disabled vehicle on the 170 near Burbank- that should be clearing up in just a few minutes- and be careful of some sort of large dead animal if you’re anywhere near the westside around Bundy – there’s your afternoon traffic report- I’m Zach keeping you on track- and as always – getting you safely back… HOME.

Boom. I fucking nailed it. I threw a little reverb on my voice and sent it out to Steve Bunch awaiting an offer to start recording my voice from home for $100,000 a year.

Steve reached out the following day. He said I was a natural. He loved my audition and even remarked that I had potential to be “One of L.A’s top traffic talents…” if I stuck with it. He mentioned the LA legends of the past… like Bill Keene and modern day freeway phenoms like Stu Mundel and Ginger Chan.

“I’m not familiar with them,” I said, meekly.

“You will be.”

Through Steve, I quickly learned that being a traffic reporter involves a hell of a lot more than speaking traffic jam jargon into a microphone. In fact, this job was NOTHING like I had imagined.

“So, here’s how it works, Zach – firstly do you have a car?” Steve Bunch asked.

“Yes, of course!”

“Great… Well, this job requires you to be in-person at the office around 5:15 a.m. every day to get to the morning rush – but the good news is you’re DONE by 10:30… You can go home for a lunch break but need to get back by 1:00 for the after lunch commute. After that you’re pretty much prepping for the drive home around four and then you’re sending out reports until nine p.m.

“So… it’s like a 15-hour day?” I asked.

“Give or take, but you have breaks in between,” Steve Bunch said.

“Uhm… And where is the office, exactly?”

“We’re over in Long Beach by the 405. Where do you live?”

“Uhm, I’m like in Hollywood,” I said.

“Oh, well… you’d probably have to move.”

“Well, I drive my daughter to school and run carpools and like, all that stuff.”

Steve went silent. I heard him take a deep breath as if he had just been wasting his time in talking to me.

“You know, most of our applicants are empty nesters or they have a non-working spouse,” he said. “But if it helps, it IS an AFTRA job… so you would earn union wages. Like I said, there is a LOT of money in traffic.”

“Well, I mean – I can’t just uproot my family to Long Beach,” I said.

“Well, there’s a six-week training period you’d have to attend, most people move and rent places during that time”

“Really?” I giggled. “Six weeks? This whole thing seems pretty simple to me.”

For some reason, that pissed Steve Bunch off. As if I had broken the cardinal sin in traffic talk. He got serious and became slightly aggressive.

“You think this job is easy?” Steve responded. “You try listening to responders and police scanners all day and then writing traffic copy without the proper training. Lemme ask you a question. Do you even know what a Sig Alert is?”

Oh boy. Steve was mad. Here it was, my first job offer in nearly a year and a half and I was mocking the guy trying to recruit me directly to his face. I explained to Steve that I had no idea what the hell a ‘Sig Alert’ was – I just thought it meant that there was like, a SIGNAL that ALERTED you to bad traffic.

“Wrong,” Steve said, almost sounding appalled. “It’s when an incident causes a delay that lasts over 30 minutes or more. In your audition, you said you had a Sig Alert that was only a ten minute delay. That is HARDLY a Sig Alert, my friend. That’s called slight congestion!”

“Oh,” I said, humbled. “I guess there are some things I wasn’t aware of.”

Steve went on and on about obscure traffic factoids that could not have been more boring. I learned that the LAPD invented the Sig Alert in 1955 from a guy named Lloyd Sigmon who they named it after. I learned that a 1124 code meant there was an overturned vehicle. I even learned that CFJDE stood for “Caucasian Female Juvenile Driving Erratically”

“These are the types of things you need to be familiar with,” Steve said. “This is the traffic capital of the world and you have a chance to help these commuters get to their destinations… we’re sleek, organized and we take this job VERY seriously. Starting salary is 55 thousand but it will go up as you work overtime. So, what do you say? Would you be able to start training in the next two weeks?”

Look. I hate turning down jobs. Especially in today’s economy and with my debt where it is. BUT, to logically start every day of my week in Long beach at 5:15 would mean I leave my house at 4:30 a.m. I would never see my wife or my kids again. I would spend my entire life either IN traffic and talking about it. All I could think of was how I once dreamt of hosting the news on Saturday Night Live and now I was going to be telling radio listeners that there was an overturned turnip truck blocking three lanes on the 405 freeway. I politely had to tell Steve that I wasn’t able to take the job due to the long hours and the daily commute.

“Yeah, I understand,” Steve said, sounding defeated. “Seems like less people care about the traffic reports these days… Everybody’s got Waze and Google maps and A.I. and all that stuff… so weird. But who knows… if you change your mind, we may have a spot for you.”

“Sure, Mr. Bunch,” I said. “And thank you for the interview.”

Over the past year, I’ve told this story to a lot of people, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet in today’s Hollywood. Most folks agree that, although it may not have been the best job in the world, it sure would beat digging ditches. I just didn’t know how I would be able to pull it off with my family responsibilities. However, any time I am driving home and I happen to have a radio station playing and the traffic guy comes on and tells me about some lane closure or a deadly crash, I salute him for taking the leap into the world of traffic reporting. I wasn’t able to make it work, but you never know what the future holds. I just wanna be able to spend as much time with my family as possible before I’m an empty nester.

And tonight, it looks like I’m gonna be late for dinner… Seems like there’s a Sig Alert on the 101 South…

Listen to Zach’s Newest album “Rodeo Zach’s Last Ride“

ZACH SELWYN is a humor writer, actor and musician based in Los Angeles.

Comedy david sedaris fiction funny Hiii Magazine humor humor writer Jonathan Ames Los Angeles Los Angeles Magazine Music Traffic travel writing Zach Selwyn
I had been at the Great Wolf Lodge for roughly an hour when a drunk and angry ex-firefighter threatened to kick my ass at the indoor water park. He was pissed off at me for disrespecting the “sanctity” of the Great Wolf Lodge… I am 100 percent serious. Let me start at the beginning…

Spring Break. These are two of the most beautiful words in the English language… if you are a child. To parents, these words concur up feeling of hopelessness, anguish and despair. And for some reason? Today’s elementary school kids get two whole weeks off for “Spring Break…” TWO WEEKS! When I was a kid we got TWO DAYS. In college we only got a week. And as far as I recall, it wasn’t even a thing in high school.

But sure… the rigorous schedule of counting, handwriting and connect the dots can be so gruesome and torturous for a second grader – that a two-week vacation at the end of March is exactly what the school nurse ordered… So, if you’re like me, you suddenly begin scrambling to find activities for your kids to do during this gratuitous vacation. So, you make plans…

You drop $75.00 to go see shitty movies like Sherlock Gnomes.

You gain 12 pounds by not being able to go to the gym on your regular schedule. And, in some extreme cases, you agree to take your kids to the GREAT WOLF LODGE for two days…

Which is exactly where I found myself last week, riddled with anxiety as I nibbled on a chicken finger ten feet from a wave pool full of screaming children. Praying for death.

Welcome to the 10th Circle of hell.

If you have never heard of a Great Wolf Lodge, let me put it this way… Consider yourself lucky. With 13 locations across the country, the kid-friendly indoor water park is to people like me the end of the fucking world. Known for its indoor water park and “wolf-themed” decor, the franchise has drawn families from far and wide to spend their entire monthly paychecks on shitty food, arcade games and the guarantee that you will contract the Norovirus within three spins in the “Lazy River.”

I mumbled something under my breath as I loaded the car, preparing to journey down to the hotel with my wife, our second grade girl and my very unenthusiastic pre-teen who was pissed because he was missing roughly 48 hours of the video game Fortnite.

The drive down was actually somewhat exciting. I was anticipating the water park summer days of my youth, when I met a cute girl in line at the snack bar, chatted up an 8th grade crush and passed a Sony Walkman around with my buddies listening to Straight Outta Compton. Those days were nothing but innocent and fun… and I was hoping my kids might make some amazing memories of their own…

When we arrived, however, my entire demeanor changed. After looking for a space in the self-parking garage for 30 minutes, I was met with the sudden reality that there were a lot of people here during Spring Break. I mean, a lot of people. Like, thousands. And all of them had kids. Small, sweaty, stinky, gross, fat, weird, uninhibited kids…

My first moment of clarity happened when I was presented with a pair of felt “wolf ears” as I entered the lobby.

“HOWL you doing today!?” A bubbly 20-something dude named Bryan asked.

“PAW-SOME!!!” I responded sarcastically.

“Woah! Someone’s got the Great Wolf spirit!” He screamed. “AWWOOOOOOOO!”

I looked around at the hundred of fathers traipsing through the lobby wearing these ridiculous wolf ears… The looks on their faces all read the same: FAILURE.

There is a certain look a man knows when he runs into another man at a place like the Great Wolf Lodge. It is a look of defeat. Of mediocrity. Of deficiency. Like we all expected to be the dads who take our kids in Hawaii or something, but ended up at the Great Wolf Lodge in Anaheim. I recognized this look on every man’s face I encountered.

We checked in and got to our suite, which we were sharing with another family we knew from from LA. Everyone changed into bathing suits to go hit the indoor water park. A small part of me was hoping it would be a fun day, and after all, as long as they had a jacuzzi I figured I could kill a few hours relaxing and hanging out with strangers.

There was no jacuzzi.

And the water park was massive. And loud. And it smelled like feet.

“Daddy! Come in the lazy river with me!” My daughter squealed.

I took a deep breath and stood up. I took off my shirt and walked over towards the lazy river. The first thing I noticed about the water park was that somehow, I had THE BEST BODY THERE.

In my 42 years, I have never been the “ripped” guy at the pool. Ever. Even when I was 18 I had the beginnings of a dad bod and now, at my age, I had been keeping trim and eating well to the point where at the Great Wolf Lodge in Anaheim, California, I was a SWIMSUIT MODEL. Seriously. I was 30 pounds lighter than the average man. My wife, who has always been in terrific shape looked like Hannah Jeter posing for Sports Illustrated. We were “Anaheim 10’s…” and pretty proud of it.

This was the best body at the water park.

As I strutted around my new Adonis-like physique, I watched as my daughter slowly dipped into the lazy river among what seemed like hundreds of other kids. I put my leg in, noticed it was much colder than I had anticipated, and began walking around the river behind her.

And then some kid’s fleshy leg rubbed up against mine under the water. I froze. It was like in Star Wars when that Dianoga Monster rubs up against Luke in the trash compactor. A gross little bare human leg rubbing against my inner calf. I stopped to gather myself. I felt like a part of the #metoo movement. I was rattled… And then another kid wrapped himself around my chest for support as he floated by… I shuttered. Looking around, I suddenly became keenly aware of little yellow swirls of urine accumulating in certain areas. I also counted three loose Band-Aids and numerous clumps of hair floating in the water. A few more kids hit me with inner tubes as they raced by and finally, when a little girl wiped her snot off of her face and tossed it into the water beside me, my afternoon at the water park was OVER.

“Baby, I’m getting out,” I yelled as she floated down the river.

Her frown broke my heart, but the place was already too much for me. I was done. I had been at the Great Wolf Lodge for less than an hour.

The lazy river… Grabby kids, urine and hair clumps.

After drying off, I noticed the small line of men waiting for beer. I grabbed my “Wolf Band” which had my credit card and room number on it, and bought my first beer of the day. It was 3:30, but if I was going to get through this place, a buzz was certainly needed. Looking around, I noticed that day-drinking was certainly the norm here, like the way it is in airports when people order beers at 7:00 in the morning and nobody thinks twice about it.

After paying, I turned around, noticing three men behind me waiting for drinks. Two of them had “Lakeland County Fire Department” shirts on. The other was shirtless, proudly showing off a fading Tazmanian Devil tattoo from the early 90’s… I toasted the guys with my beer.

“Gentlemen,” I said. “What happened to us? We were all once virile men… with dreams, passions, desires… goals. NOW? We’re on vacation at the fucking Great Wolf Lodge. What the fuck, am I right!!?”

Suddenly, the shirtless man took a threatening step my way and got directly in my face.

“Are you disrespecting the LODGE, bro?” He asked in an accusatory way.

I wasn’t sure if he was serious. I laughed.

“Sounds like you are,” he continued aggressively, the vapor of liquor prominent on his breath. I felt scared. I backpedaled.

“No, man.. I was just, you know – joking-“

I was taken aback. If I said the wrong thing here, there is no doubt in my mind that this guy would start throwing punches. And whereas a pool fight might be the perfect excuse to get banned from the Great Wolf Lodge forever, I decided to lay off. Meanwhile, his friends tried to calm him down.

“Don’t get into another fight, Jim,” his friend told him.

Another fight? Holy shit… this guy Jim was out here kicking dad’s asses all day.

“No, man, I was just joking around, you know…” I mumbled.

“No, I don’t know, bro,” he said. “I’m a retired firefighter… I don’t back down from shit.”

And then, suddenly, there was an extremely loud wolf howl coming from the wave pool – This was the signal to swimmers that a fresh set of waves was about to begin… 200 kids screamed in delight as the call of the wolf echoed through the waterpark.

AWOOOOOOO! AWOOOOOOO!

“Ohhhh shit, what’s that?” I asked the guys.

“That means the waves are starting up…” Jim said. “That’s the call of the Lodge, bro… you better embrace your inner wolf… because like it or not? You made the decision to come here.”

He was right. I could make the most of this experience and embrace my inner wolf… or make myself suffer.

“Hey man, I’m sorry – it’s my first time here… I was just making a bad joke…”

Jim calmed down. His whole demeanor changed and he became aware that he was not in the octagon, but was at the Great Wolf Lodge. If he had wanted to kick my ass, he would have… but my honesty seemed to have chilled him out.

“Screw it,” he said. “Sorry to get up in your face, bro… come on, I’ll buy you a beer.”

Jim and his pals bought me another beer and I returned back to our deck chairs and told the story to my wife and her friend. They weren’t interested. They were concerned about something much more important.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Apparently, another mom had just told my wife that Pink Eye was going around the lodge that weekend… The woman’s two kids had been infected on the water slide and her husband was in the hotel room with his eyes swollen shut.

“Welp, I’m fucking out of here,” I said.

I took my beer upstairs and went to the bar to watch a baseball game. As I walked back through the water park, I began observing a few things.

I never realized how many adults have tattoos of their children’s baby footprints.

I saw 35 of these tattoos.

I had no idea that BIG DOGS Clothing was still a thing. There were also a lot of “Exercise…Eggsercise…Eggs are sides… Eggs are sides for Bacon” t-shirts and ‘water pun’ shirts. Like a picture of a snail holding up a seashell to his face beneath the words “SHELL-FIE!”

Finally, the majority of these adults seemed fine eating garbage for breakfast, lunch and dinner. One dad in line at the snack bar even highly recommended the pork nachos.

I thought we were in Anaheim. Somehow we ended up in Wisconsin.

Upstairs, I found a few other dads watching the Dodgers game. I made some new friends – including a pest control guy from Alhambra and a Target general manager from Riverside. We drank a few beers and talked baseball. As a way to make my new pals laugh, I recognized Bryan, the same guy who had checked me in earlier, eating on his lunch break. I approached him.

“Hey Bryan, quick question… do they have a Great Wolf Glory Hole up in this piece?”

The bar got silent. My new pals hid their laughter. Bryan did not seem amused. Within 30 seconds the bar manager tapped me on the shoulder.

“Just a reminder, sir…” He warned. “This is the Great Wolf Lodge… not the Great Wolf of Wall Street Lodge.”

My afternoon concluded in the arcade, where the kids have given up on video games requiring any sort of skill in favor of games where you spin a wheel,… and win tickets. It’s not even a challenge. It’s just a prize wheel. When I arrived, I found my daughter hoarding what looked like 15,000 prize tickets.

“I’m saving up for the stuffed wolf!” She said. I saw the wolf on the wall. At any CVS store across the country, this dumb little stuffed animal would cost $3.99. My wife told me they had already spent $60.00 trying to win it. I went back to the bar.

These tickets cost us roughly $60.00

That night, after ordering pizza to our room, my wife and I shared some wine as the kids fell asleep. At that moment, we heard a rustling in the hallway. Peeking outside, I noticed two security guards dragging a very drunk man from his room.

“How long has he been drinking today?” They asked his wife, who looked terrified.

“Since brunch, I think,” she said.

“We’ll take him to the first aid area and get him some fluids… We’ll check back in 30 minutes.”

I asked the lady what had happened.

“It’s just my dumb husband… every time we come to this place he gets blackout drunk.”

“That makes two of us,” I said, raising my wine glass.

She shut her door on me.

The next day we were set to check out. I was excited to get home and back outside – as we had been indoors for roughly 18 hours straight. The Great Wolf Lodge is like fucking Vegas in that way. You have no reason to ever leave the place… I started packing and preparing to head back to LA.

“Wanna meet us at the pool?” My wife said.

“We’re not leaving?” I said.

“I figured the kids would want another day at the pool,” she said. “I mean we paid for it.”

And just like that, we did a second day at the water park. At this point I officially gave up. I began day-drinking at 11:00. I howled every time that dumb wolf noise started in the wave pool. I contemplated buying a Great Wolf Lodge t-shirt in the gift shop that was on sale from Halloween (Or as they put it… HOWL-ween…)

Deep down I knew that finally, I had reluctantly embraced my inner wolf.

I looked around the pool again. I was a little bloated from the first day and slightly hungover. I was no longer had the best body there. I was one day into my “Midwest” period.

I went over to our deck chairs and ordered the pork nachos…

WATCH ZACH’S NEW SERIES “ONE MINUTE MUSIC MINUTE” at OLE TV! @oletvofficial

amy adams amyschumer Anaheim beer Comedy essays family funny great wolf lodge humor Naitonal Lampoon norovirus pink eye Sedaris short story SNL steve martin water parks writing
Film Threat Media has tapped Zach selwyn to host their “Anti-Oscars” award show “Award This” Sunday February 2nd at Frida cinemas in Santa Ana, California. Selwyn will emcee the event and introduce nominees as well as imrpovise and compose songs for the live event to be streamed simultaneously.

Comedy conan Obrien Film Film Threat Hollywood hosting humor improv Los Angeles TV Zach Selwyn
T-Shirts $25.00 – includes S&H

z@zachariahmusic.com for more info!

TANK TOPS $20.00! Includes S&H!!!

ZACH’S NOVEL! ORDER NOW!

For signed copies – z@zachariahmusic.com

Austin translation books merch shirts Zach Selwyn Zachariah
By Zach Selwyn

It was somewhere between Los Angeles and Palm Springs when I found myself helping a woman re-apply bloody gauze to an open wound that had split open due to complications from liposuction in Tijuana.

Moments later, another woman – with a razor blade tattoo on the side of her neck – smacked her 7-year-old son for spilling his Mountain Dew on her iPhone and screamed something at him in Spanish.

Sometime after that, a man with an infant child walked out of the bathroom in the back and promptly dumped a full diaper in the trash bag hanging in the middle of the aisle.

We still had seven and a half hours until we hit Tucson…

Welcome to the Flixbus.

For the past few months, my mom and a bunch of other friends have been raving about a new public transportation service known as “The Flixbus.” For a low price, you can travel on this large “comfortable bus” anywhere you like and select from a great list of pre-chosen movies – and use free WiFi the entire time. I looked it up and it seemed legit. And definitely affordable. A ticket to San Diego from Los Angeles cost $4.99. A ticket to Palm Springs? $6.99… To get to my hometown of Tucson, I was looking at $22.00. Since Southwest Air wanted nearly $400 for two one way plane tickets, I booked my 9-year-old daughter and I on a 12:30 Flixbus to Tucson leaving from downtown LA.

Wanting to beat the crowd, my daughter and I took a Lyft down to the parking lot across from Union Station, right by LA’s famed “Twin Towers Correctional Facilities.” It’s an intimidating spot – heavily populated by at least five bail bond storefronts and street meat hot dog vendors. It’s hard not to take note of family members leaving the bail bond stores, openly weeping about their loved ones having spent the night in jail.

“Are they crying because they have to take the Flixbus too, daddy?” My daughter asked.

“Uhh, no. Whole different situation.”

I promptly took notice of the waiting area and its potential to escalate into a violent “prison yard” type of situation. A woman was walking around selling homemade “street tamales” out of a plastic bag, three 12-year-olds were selling bottles of water and packs of cigarettes and two men with children were openly sharing a blunt in front of their kids. (As would happen, I ended up buying two street tamales and a bottled water, as I had not thought to pack any food for the journey.)

I hadn’t even boarded the bus yet and I was $19 dollars in the hole.

The line to board the bus was non-existent. as Everybody sort of milled about near an area until the ticket conductor shouted out, “Palm Springs, Phoenix and Tucson line up HERE.”

The awaiting pack scrambled immediately. As people got tossed aside and trampled like they were rushing the stage of a Travis Scott show… Elbows were thrown. Space was cleared. Somehow, I managed to grab all of my luggage and scoop up my daughter before she was flattened to death. Sadly, even though we were the third people in the waiting area, we had been easily bullied to the back of the line by the violent mob, which was led by a 6’7” ex-linebacker wearing a baseball cap reading: K.U.S.H. Keeps Us Super High.

My advice? Pay the extra $20 online and get a reserved seat.

Once my daughter and I got on the bus, we noticed that any available seats together had been claimed. Eventually I was forced to convince a man who looked like he had recently been let out of a Texas prison to switch seats with me so that my daughter and I could sit together… He scoffed, kicked the side of the seat and mumbled something under his breath.

“Thank you so much, sir,” I said.

His response?

“I run this bus, cocksucker.”

Lovely.

Eventually he moved and we accepted the fact that we were stuck in the last seat in the back of the bus… basically right next to the toilet. And then, minutes before we left, a rather large woman came back and destroyed the bathroom… I nearly vomited. My daughter asked to switch seats. The bus pulled out into traffic.

Nine hours to Tucson.

Back of the bus…

The first thing people tell you about the Flixbus is that you can watch unlimited movies and surf the web, email, text, whatever you like. As it turns out this is simply not true. After trying for nearly an hour to watch Euphoria on HBO GO, I was alerted repeatedly with notes that I was in a “non-connection zone” and that I was possibly traveling “out of the continental United States.” I switched over to Netflix and was met with much of the same. Incredibly long loading times, spotty streaming and the inability to watch anything. After looking up the Flixbus website, I came across some small type in the “Services” section that read, “Please do not stream Netflix, YouTube or HBO Go on the Flixbus as it slows down everybody’s WiFi speeds and will not load correctly.”

Wow. That would have been nice to know. Oh, also? They DO NOT ALLOW MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS on the bus that are bigger than 12 inches… So unless you’re strictly a harmonica player, forget bringing your acoustic guitar anywhere. (Since I was going to play a gig in Tucson, I now had to rent a guitar from the local music shop).

Anyway, reading deeper, they recommended that passengers watch their curated film selections on the Flixbus app, which were “expertly chosen” and free. I checked it out. The selections were the same as what you’d expect on an airplane: Wonder Park, A Madea Family Funeral and about 9 shitty Melissa McCarthy movies.

Seven hours and 45 minutes to Tucson.

As we rattled over the freeways on the outskirts of Los Angeles, weaving in and out of the carpool lane, I was convinced I was going to die on the Flixbus. My daughter was getting carsick from the bumps and sudden stops and I could not believe that I had chosen this as my best means of transportation to Tucson…

A recent Flixbus accident in Germany.

The bus continued to shake from side to side, causing a middle-aged lady across the aisle from me to begin moaning. Like, painfully moaning. And grabbing her sides. Thinking that she may be in labor with a child, I looked over and noticed that she had a freshly dressed wound on the side of her mid-section. At one point, she screamed “Fucking FUCK, can you drive a little slower?”

“Are you OK ma’am?” I asked her, hoping she hadn’t been shot in a bank robbery gone wrong and was using the Flixbus as an escape tool.

“Uggh, yeah – I’m just recovering from plastic surgery,” she said.

“On the Flixbus?” I responded.

“Well, I live in Palm Springs,” she proceeded to tell me. “I went to Mexico for liposuction because it’s like, 75 percent cheaper down there.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Didn’t you go through some sort of like, recovery first?”

“I’ll be fine once I get to Palm Springs.”

We hit a bump and she made a noise that I have only heard once before in my life back when I witnessed a goat slaughter in a tiny village in Mexico in 2003.

“Oh fuck,” she screamed. “One of my sutures popped – can you just hold your finger here for a second?.”

Shielding my daughter from the horror of this situation, I regrettably leaned over and put pressure on an area of bloodied gauze that had come undone. Eventually, the woman fastened it back together with a clip and thanked me profusely. I excused myself to the bathroom and threw ice cold water on my face.

Some of the better results from Dr. Machado’s Tijuana Surgery Clinic. Facelift? $44.99

30 minutes later the ride was smoothing out. Looking out the window I saw the desert approach.

“Folks we are stopping in North Palm Springs in eight minutes,” the driver announced. “We will have time to get refreshments and some air.”

“Thank fucking God,” the bleeding woman said.

We pulled into an AM/PM parking lot in Palm Springs and the lady limped off the bus and met her ride. She waved good-bye to me and sped off into the Palm Springs afternoon. For all I know she bled out on the way home and is dead.

The good news was that 12 passengers got off the bus in Palm Springs. This freed up some seats and we moved a few aisles away from the bathroom. The miles began to roll away and I started to fantasize that I was Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy taking the bus to a new dream, over expansive desert land and into the heart of opportunity. Of course, Jon Voight was heading to New York City in 1968 and I was going to Tucson to visit my mom, but the view sure was pretty.

20 minutes later, I opened up one of my tamales-in-a-bag and gave it a shot. It smelled like some sort of fucking rotting animal. A few passengers looked over at me and covered their faces with blankets and scarves. Acting casual, I took a small bite and chewed for a few seconds before beginning to feel violently ill. I managed to spit the food into a bag and quickly wrapped it up, avoiding the grossed out looks of my fellow Flixbus friends. Luckily, that was exactly the moment when the newborn’s father emerged from the bathroom with the full diaper. He tossed it in the center trash bag and the entire bus groaned and began cursing him out.

“What am I supposed to do?” The dad asked the gallery of hecklers.

“Flush that shit,” the guy in the K.U.S.H. hat suggested.

The driver came on the intercom and reminded everyone that nothing but toilet paper could go down the toilet. The passengers collectively groaned and went back to their devices. At this point, between the tamale and the diaper, the bus was turning toxic. If you lit a match in the thing, there was a strong chance the bus would explode.

Six hours to Tucson.

Our next stop was in Blythe, California, on the Arizona border. Here, we were given a 30 minute lunch period and the only restaurant around for miles was a McDonalds 25 feet away. Assuming this would be my last chance to eat before 9:30 that night, I broke down and ate six Chicken McNuggets and an Oreo McFlurry.

I also called my mom to alert her of our progress.

“How’s the Flixbus?” My mom asked. “Watching any good movies?”

“Well, nothing really works,” I said. “Half the seats don’t have outlets, the WiFi in the desert sucks and they don’t allow streaming… and I refuse to watch Life of the Party. (That’s a terrible Melissa McCarthy movie BTW…)

“What kind of food do they have?” She inquired.

“They don’t have food,” I said.

“What?” She said. “On their website it says you can purchase snacks and stuff from the driver?”

What? Here I was nearly puking street tamales and eating Chicken McNuggets when the driver had food on him the entire time? Why were we not informed of this? I tracked down the driver as he smoked a cigarette and asked him if I could see a menu of the food they offered on board.

“Their aint no menu, mane… We just have some Ruffles and shit.”

Ruffles and shit?

“Come on my man, you don’t have like a Tapas box? My daughter needs some Wiki Stix!”

“This aint Alaska Airlines, mane,” he responded.

Eventually, 100 miles from Phoenix, a college kid broke down and went into the bathroom to vape. He was far from discreet and as a man who once routinely snuck weed to smoke into airplane bathrooms, I viewed his efforts as amateurish. The key to smoking on a bus or airplane is to basically flush the toilet as you exhale with your face nearly in the bowl. Yeah, this is a disgusting activity, but for some reason back in the mid 90’s I had no problem shoving my head inside an airplane toilet. Now I can’t even USE bathrooms on moving vehicles. Anyway, the kid opened the door and a cloud of Watermelon E-Juice enveloped the back area. The kid walked out as if he had done nothing wrong.

Stick your head inside and flush as you exhale. Works every time.

The smoke was impossible to miss and even though it dissipated quickly, it really upset the bus driver, who pulled over to the side of I-10 and DEMANDED to know who had smoked on the bus.

My daughter raised her hand to volunteer the information.

“Put your hand down,” I said, knowing that being labeled a “narc” at age 9 doesn’t do anybody any good.

“Who was smoking back here?” The bus driver said. “I demand an answer!”

I expected somebody to speak up… but nobody did. We all held together in a Flixbus code of silence. Shit, we felt like we were in La Cosa Nostra. For the first time on the ride I sensed a camaraderie with my fellow passengers. We all sort of looked at it the same way… If this was a bus in 1957, people would be smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey from flasks. We all had the same thought… Let the kid vape.

Four and a half hours to Tucson.

The rest of the trip went fairly smoothly. I was amazed at how well behaved my daughter was and as the stops piled up, the passengers started getting off. A few people got on in Phoenix and we got to Tucson in roughly nine hours and 30 minutes. To put that in perspective, If you drive directly from LA in a car, you’re guaranteed to spend eight hours on the road and you have to buy gas. If you fly to Tucson from LAX, door to door takes about five hours and 30 minutes. So, I basically lost four hours of my life, had to endure some awful smells and I got to be an impromptu nurse to the woman recovering from plastic surgery.

When we got to my mom’s house, she had food and wine waiting for me and I told her all the fun stories from my 400 mile road trip in a public bus. We laughed, drank and I slept in until 8:30 the next morning when I awoke to my mom freaking out about a dead animal in the walls.

“Zach, some animal died in the wall I called the exterminator already,” she shrieked.

I woke up and smelled what she was talking about. I opened my backpack and found the OTHER street tamale I had forgotten to throw out buried beneath my laptop.

“Found it, mom,” I said.

She made me throw it out in the neighbor’s trash can…

WATCH Zach’s music video for his song “Watch the Horses”…

essay fiction flixbus humor writing hunter s. thompson jack Kerouac Los Angeles road stories Sedaris short story tijuana plastic surgery Zach Selwyn
By Zach Selwyn

I can vividly picture the scene taking place on a Newark, New Jersey street corner in 1922… Prohibition is hanging heavily over every boarded up bar and single family household on the block. The streets are full of the penniless, making bedding out of old jackets on the grey and crunchy dirty sidewalk snow. Children are wrapping up nightly stick ball games to return home for dinner as the streets darken with denizens of the nightlife and small time hoods…

And then suddenly, out of the darkness, trotting up in a horse-drawn buggy, appears Rabbi Levi Zalman, who is suddenly swarmed by scores of men from these homes looking to procure the finest bottle of bootleg wine they can get their hands on. Money is exchanged, prayers are said and the men race home to their families. With every sale, Rabbi Zalman mutters, “Baruch Hashem.” (Blessed be the name of the lord). When it’s all over, Rabbi Zalman rides away a very rich man…

Of course, Rabbi Levi Zalman is not a Rabbi at all. In fact, he is Jack Joseph Brauer, an out-of-work shoe peddler from East Jersey City who has just unloaded his Government-relegated weekly supply of booze for a shade over $5,000.

He is also my great-great grandfather. This was his “congregation.”

Ratified in 1920, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution – which is America’s only Amendment to later be repealed – federally prohibited the manufacture, transportation and sale of alcohol. Of course, this was one of our biggest failures in our short history, and led to the golden age of organized crime, corruption and sheer madness across the country.

Doing some research (And I am not the first to report this – just giving you some background) Jewish households were allowed a certain amount of wine per household per year. To top that off, if you were a Rabbi, and you lead any type of “congregation” (12 members or more) you were allowed to get as much wine as you wanted for religious purposes at any time you desired… So guess what happened? A lot of “new Rabbis” suddenly started showed up.

“There were fake Rabbis everywhere,” my grandmother told me years ago before she died. “If you knew 12 people, that was a congregation… why do you think so many people started converting to Judaism during the 20’s? FOR BOOZE.”

So, when Jack Brauer’s shoe business got hit with hard times in the early 1920’s, he bought some religious robes, sported a fake beard and marched up to the proper Governmental distribution center and bought as much alcohol as he needed… He flipped it in two days and kicked off a successful six-year-run as the biggest “Rabbi Bootlegger” in Newark, New Jersey.

A few years later, when the American Jewish Committee began cracking down on the large number of fake Rabbi’s, my great-great grandfather Jack was NOT on the suspected fraud list. In fact, he continued to support his family until 1931, just before the Amendment was repealed. How? He had the third largest congregation in New Jersey at the time. (Even though it was 95 percent FAKE.)

Now, according to the three part documentary Prohibition by Ken Burns, other religions had these loopholes as well. In fact, Priests were ALSO able to purchase liquor for religious ceremonies. Of course, the government could actually reference records to determine if someone claiming to be a Priest actually was a Priest. But Rabbis? There was NO WAY OF TELLING WHO WAS A RABBI.

Starting to see why I’m obsessed with this stuff…

According to writer Daniel Okrent, “Rabbis were suddenly showing up everywhere. Irish Rabbis, Black Rabbis…” Nobody ever doubted their religious claims.

As is turns out, my grandmother was correct. In the 1920’s, Jewish congregations increased in membership by like, 75 percent. In short? BOOTLEG LIQUOR BUILT MODERN DAY JUDAISM. In fact, I don’t think you can reference a time in history when more NEW Jews suddenly showed up out of the woodwork to embrace Judaism in our nation’s history. No wonder we say prayers over the wine…

A few years ago, my grandmother Florence passed away. Readers of my stories should be familiar with our adventures together in her later years, which included a trip to the Ace Hotel, smoking medical marijuana and leafing through her old photo albums so she could announce who was presently, “Dead.” When she passed, it was a sad moment, and a week later, our family went through her home to get rid of old useless items…(My grandfather’s 5000 VHS tapes of classic movies) and save valuable ones… (My grandma had always claimed that she had hidden “thousands of dollars in cash” all over the house and that it was our job to find it when she died.)

Of course, knowing this, we tore open her home like Jesse Pinkman looking for hidden cash in that drug dealer’s condo in the film El Camino…

My mom and I found some money, but the “thousands of dollars” my grandma promised turned out to be something more like 220 bucks. We also uncovered a lot of jewelry and a stamp collection valued at about $39. So, if you’re the new couple that bought the place? If you ever find some ungodly wad of $100 dollar bills in a crawl space, hit me up…

Aside for a few of my grandma’s stray Vicodin, which I squirreled away in a jacket pocket, the only other item in the home that really intrigued me was my grandmother’s birth certificate. On it was listed her parent’s names and occupations – (Ruth Brauer-Kaplan – housewife. Jacob Kaplan- Dentist) – as well as her GRANDPARENT’s names and occupations… What intrigued me was the job description as reported to the state of New Jersey by JACK JOSEPH BRAUER –

His job: RABBI.

“Wow so Grandma’s story was true?” I asked my Uncle Steve who was helping my mom go through Florence’s old belongings.

“Yes indeed,” he answered.

“So was he really a Rabbi?” I asked.

“Do you know what a ‘Rabbi’ was back then?”

“I’m guessing a bootlegger?”

“It’s great getting to know your family, isn’t it?”

I went into the kitchen and poured myself a large glass of wine. I toasted my grandma on her final journey and raised my glass up to Jack Joseph Brauer – my great-great grandfather who kept so many families buzzed during the dark years of Prohibition…

“Baruch Hashem,” I said.

STREAM ZACH’S NEW SONG “Red Fuckin Wine” NOW!

Bar Mitzvah Bootlegger Comedy funny hebrew humor Jewish liquor Prohibition Rabbi Wine Zach Selwyn
https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2515935575/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/transparent=true/

americana freestyle hick hop Los Angeles Music Outlaw Country Selwyn ZAchariah Lobos Riders
Episode #17 Missi Pyle & Zach Selwyn

We play “Fake or Florida” and talk about women’s panties…
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-3-scott-macarthur/id1217686743?i=1000383315241&mt=2

Kaitlin Olson Might Bang Missi Pyle podcast Scott MacArthur songs The Mick Zach Selwyn