Rodney, American Style

At the age of seventeen, Rodney Aiken resolved to base his entire existence upon the example given by popular culture. His hope was to become a kind of living mockery of his age. 1986 – the year he began – was the most confusing for him, as he had difficulty climbing the corporate ladder in fish-net stockings. He tried to explain at interviews that despite his long, poofy hair and glittering red fingernails, he wanted to make “truck-loads of cash . . . do cocaine . . . and fuck lots of women, just like any other American.”

Rodney was turned down by every interviewer, except for the human resource manager at Goldman Sachs, who appreciated Rodney’s “enthusiasm and straightforwardness.”

“To tell you the truth,” the interviewer confessed, “you can . . . make love for hours on that stuff . . . fuck for hours, I mean,” he added, more softly.

Rodney excelled at his new position as stock broker until the early 90s when his mood became decidedly more “depressive,” as his supervisors called it. After Rodney appeared at four board meetings in flannel over-shirts – interrupting his superiors with one-liners like “corporate pig” and “stuff it fascist” – he was summarily fired; however, due to obligations insisted upon by Rodney’s earlier, more vigorous glam-rock incarnation, the company was forced to dole out $150,000.00 in severance pay, a generous retirement portfolio, as well as two tickets to the Grand Cayman Islands, which his boss had laughingly agreed upon.

By the time Rodney reached his thirtieth year, he had squandered the bulk of his fortune on Backstreet Boys albums and Limp Bizkit paraphernalia. He was fond of “rockin’ the ganja” and when his mother made her annual Thanksgiving invite call, he replied, obligingly, that he was “stoned out of his gourd” and that “stuffing would be awwweeesooome.”

9/11 caught him off-guard, but he soon found himself at home in the new right-wing order, clogging the Operation TIPS hotline with reports about his suspicious “Muslim” neighbors, many of whom he knew to be Mexicans or Latinos as he had smoked marijuana with them only a few years prior. He felt at ease protesting his Constitutional right to free speech in the designated free speech zones, threw massive fundraisers for Bush’s re-election bid and within a few years was the most active member of Houston’s anti-war movement.

In his remaining days Rodney alternated between paranoid hatred of Obama’s “Socialist policies” and McCain’s “fear-mongering campaign tactics.” He left himself messages from opposing campaign headquarters, criss-crossing political districts, occasionally showing-up at McCain-Palin rallies in his abort sarah palin t-shirt or at Obama-Biden rallies in his democrats are godless commie-muslim-fascists gear.

As was stated in his will, Rodney Aiken was buried naked in a closed coffin. His tombstone read: here lies an honest man.