To refresh, when that lady called from California on Tuesday to set up my phone interview, she said the questions would be “easy.” I was never very good at Trivial Pursuit, so I figured I could have been in trouble. Thankfully, I didn’t have to study any old math and English exams to prepare for the interrogation, mostly because it was an interrogation.
Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. My point is that the call had nothing to do with “history” or “sports” or whether I was impersonating someone with the intellectual capacity to be on WB Relationship Show (the show’s current title that will hopefully be changed again before it gets on the air). The caller was a private investigator for the WB and she wanted to make sure I didn’t have a checkered past that could create any kind of scandal, end up in the tabloids or result in my becoming engaged to Jennifer Lopez.
The questions ranged from where I lived and how many siblings I have to… well, she wanted to know if I’d ever been in a threesome, been in a relationship with a married woman that could be considered an “affair,” was that story in the newspaper about me and the llama true—like she said, easy questions.
Believe me, I had a strong temptation to answer some of those latter questions with “No, but I’m working on it.” Then I had a flashback to a day in the airport when I was approaching security and they were about to search my backpack. I was on the verge of saying, “No, the bomb is in my other bag,” but then I saw the sign indicating that any jokes would be taken seriously. Translation: smiling cheerily while making such an ironic statement would land me in a pair of cuffs, but without the nipple clamps or body oil. Damn.
I didn’t think this lady would have nipple clamps either, so I provided honest answers, proving that I’ve lived a pretty white-bread existence up to this point, then went on about my life. Oh, one other thing—earlier that morning, I got a call from a medical clinic. Don’t worry, it wasn’t to let me know that I contracted mad llama disease. Quite the opposite: they were sending me a package with some medical forms that I needed to bring to a local laboratory.
It finally arrived this evening, so I filled out some basic information and faxed the forms back to California to let them know I got the package. Aside from going to the clinic tomorrow to donate a splash of blood and urine (hopefully not from the same orifice), I need to give them a throat culture swab. It’s basically a long Q-tip that I’m supposed to jab into the back of my throat without vomiting all over it (I get the feeling that might taint the results). Once that’s done, they should know whether I’ve been using crystal meth or smoking crack, whether I’ve contracted syphilis or the clap… I’m not sure whether they have a test for mad llama disease, but if it shows up, I think I’ll be out of the running. If that’s the case, hey, at least I can go out and start having sex with married women.