Photos
Jay Leno gripped the wheel of the affordable Saturn Aura sports sedan so tightly that his knuckles went as white as the exterior finish, and he could feel the skin of his palms wearing away to blisters. Perhaps he should have brought one of his many, many pairs of calf’s leather driving gloves. Calves, of course, are baby cows that have barely had a chance to live in this world, babies really. But it was important to slaughter them and turn them into driving gloves because their hides were softer and they felt nicer against Jay Leno’s fat, important hands. One time, a cousin offered him regular leather driving gloves as a birthday present. “I know that you love driving your cars, Jay,” his cousin said. “I thought these would be fun to wear while you’re driving, just like a real race car driver!” Jay Leno’s eyes went flat and dead. He shoved his cousin into a swimming pool and stormed out of the party. At home, he burned the gloves over a burner on his Viking 8-range stove. It was the only time he ever used that stove.
A car next to him at a stop light was honking its horn, and the people inside were pointing and waving. Jay Leno wanted to die from embarrassment. He shielded his face, but it was too late. A woman in the passenger seat rolled down her window. “Hi Jay, we love you!” she said. “This is so exciting!”
Jay limply waved back. “It’s not my car,” he said.
“What?” the woman asked, brightly.
“This isn’t my car,” Jay Leno said. “This is a poor person’s car.”
The woman looked puzzled. “That’s not your car?”
“No,” Jay Leno said. “This is FUCKING HUMILIATING.”
The woman smiled thinly at him as she looked at her children in the backseat. “OK,” she said.
“DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY MOTHERFUCKING INCREDIBLY RARE AND CRAZY EXPENSIVE CARS I OWN?” Jay shrieked.
The woman nodded. “You know, you do talk about cars a lot, so that makes sense. I find that facet of your personality extraordinarily boring. We all do. But I guess I can see now how driving a sensible Saturn Aura sports sedan would go against your self-indulgent love and appreciation for vanity automobiles.”
Jay Leno just shook his head, and he began to cry. The woman got out of her car and came over to Jay and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. It was a very long traffic light. Maybe it was broken. “Hey,” she said, “come on, Jay Leno. It’s not so bad.”
Jay Leno looked up at her, his chin quivering (you can imagine) and his eyes glossy and red-rimmed and full. “But,” Jay Leno said, a catch in his throat, “how will I prove that I’m better than other people. That I’m richer and have a more exciting life?”
“Aw,” the woman said. “People know that you are rich. Everyone knows.”
Jay Leno turned, his hands still on the steering wheel, the plastic of which was getting much hotter in the sun than he was used to with antique leather-wrapped steering wheels, or at least steering wheels beneath his beloved calfskin leather driving gloves, and stared out at the road ahead of him. “But how can I flaunt it? If I am not driving around in a preposterous sports car on which I spent way too much money, one that gets terrible gas mileage and is an insurance hazard to have on the open road, not to mention the fact that while you might not realize it, being a civilian with an income that probably isn’t even the tens of millions of dollars and who has never seen a 1969 Lamborghini Espada much less been behind the wheel of one, but some of these cars are very difficult to drive and not that fun in reality, how will people know: hey, there is Jay Leno, and he is better than us, you can tell by that car?”
The woman stroked Jay’s heaving shoulder with her thumb but said nothing.
“Do you have a website for all of your cars?” Jay Leno asked, hopeful.
“Of course I don’t. It wouldn’t be much of a website. And besides, only an asshole would have something like that.”
“I have a website for all of my cars. It’s called http://www.jaylenosgarage.com. It’s a whole website just about my airplane hangar full of cars. And here I am, sitting in a regular car that some stupid idiot who actually thinks I am funny might own.”
The woman smiled sympathetically. Jay realized now that she had been riding in the passenger seat of a Saturn Aura sports sedan herself. It was such a normal, mid-size car that he didn’t even see it. His eyes couldn’t process such a non-ridiculous and non-too-expensive-people-are-starving-in-this-world thing. “Can I ask why you’re driving this car in the first place?” the woman asked, not unkindly.
Jay Leno frowned and looked around as if the answer were written down somewhere. “I think it’s just the conceit of this story,” Jay Leno said. And then Jay Leno started to cry again. And the woman gave him one final pat on the back and got back into her car. And the light finally turned green.
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Jay Leno’s chin quivering would be the equivalent of a fleshy mountainside succumbing to an eight-point earthquake.
I think this You Can Make It Up is lacking in sudden excessive violence.
I can’t believe the ridiculousness of that website
I know it’s been said before, but if Fuck My Life has a goddamn book, then Gabe should have a goddamn book.
About 15 years ago, I was on a road trip to California with 2 friends. As we drove into LA, I couldn’t help but notice the Michael-Keaton-era Batmobile next to us, and Jay Leno in the driver’s seat (that chin is pretty easy to spot). I said, “Hey, it’s Jay Leno.” Jay Leno glanced over at us, in my friend’s Honda Civic, and sneered (I swear to the Flying Spaghetti Monster). The 3 of us flipped him the bird. I was reminded of that while reading this story.
“Texas, Lexus. Two words that rhyme. Do you think you can use that?”
- you
(Sorry, I have been trying to think of a Murray-related quote to reply to you with forever, and I’ve given up waiting for a correct moment. So cars.)
“If warped values are the price of a vicarious thrill, so be it!”
-you
I applaud you, sir. Topical.
I guess it’s the conceit of this Reality that people like Jay Leno?
“..but I am Pagliacci!”
Okay, so I’m commenting a lot today, but one of Jay Leno’s cars is a 1935 Delahaye. Gabriel, you got some ‘splainin’ to do. I call shenanigans.
When life’s got me down, I can just be grateful that I wasn’t born with a 1922 Stanley Steamer-shaped hole in my heart.
I didn’t know Jay Leno liked cars!
Updating that site is someone’s job. Every day that person lives through without putting a bullet to the head is a victory. Congratulations, hero.
dear lord, how many fucking cars must one own? I actually went to that website, the one about his automobiles, and clicked on the cars page. but I didn’t even finish scrolling down because my thumb got bored and tired of holding the down arrow key.
Remember a few posts back, when K-Mo said the Seth MacFarlane thing was getting tired? It really isn’t, but the Jay Leno thing is.
I understand that Jay Leno is bland and below your level of sophistication. I know that he is a car enthusiast, and that strikes you as a tacky type of conspicuous consumption. Still, Ginger Ball Z’s questionable testimony notwithstanding, I’ve never had any reason to believe that he is anything but a lovely fellow. My cousin, who works for an NBC affiliate in Atlanta, says that he is the sweetest of all the celebrities that the network sends around the country.
I don’t think he is very funny, but he is apparently an incredibly hard worker, and he provides a product that many people apparently wish to consume. You pay lip service to this in most of your Leno-related posts, but you don’t really seem to grasp it. You have called him the worst for not bowing out gracefully, but if millions of people want to watch him, why should he bow out? Because you don’t enjoy his show? Neither do I. I probably won’t enjoy his new show either, but I can find something else to occupy myself at 10pm.
K-Mo professed indifference to being downvoted. I am not indifferent. Getting positive votes on videogum is the most important thing in my entire universe. I am nevertheless willing to sacrifice all that I have to beg you to please leave Jay Leno alone. These attacks are unbecoming, and frankly, they are getting boring.
Hey, I’m up late too. I agree, sometimes the unrelenting inundation of hatred for certain people on Vgum bothers me because of how few commenters opine disparately, and those that do either sound like crazies or are treated like crazies. The ones that aren’t crazy must resort to defensively preempting the torrent of dreaded downvotes. (Hence my reluctance to become an “HTML” initiate–I will probably do it wrong and everyone will hate me so much! And, I am sooooo lazy.)
So yeah, I’m not the biggest Jay Leno fan because as I have previously argued: WOW, HIS FACE. But as unfunny as I also think he is, that is not a crime. Maybe not being funny is a deplorable character trait in Gabe’s book (I’m sure it is, although I think his main problem is Jay Leno’s obviously contrived folksiness amiright?), but he’s not aggressively unfunny like Seth Macfarlane, just kind of inoffensively bland. And even Seth Macfarlane’s humor gets some h-core chuckles out of me every once in a while. I think I hate him so much because I have projected Videogum’s hatred of him almost completely onto my own tastes. I am reminded of when Lindsay, Never Forget, started judging total strangers for having tassels on their scarves just because Rachel Bilson said they were “frankly over,” even though she herself had no personal feelings about scarf tassels.
I feel like there are way more objectionable people we could be hate-commenting about instead of Jay Leno or even Seth Macfarlane. Because ultimately I don’t give a fuck about the Emmy’s or who Brian the dog would vote for or if he thinks a baby that he invented is gay. Like we should be hating Glenn Beck more. How about how all those major companies pulled their ads from Glenn Beck’s timeslot because of how he said Obama was anti-white-people? Like, pretty deplorable shit! My condolences on the loss of your priorities, Videogum.
Is it the conceit of these comment boxes that a double-space is actually a single-space?
just a little bit of HTML could fix you spacing problem
I hear Leno’s a good guy too. The reason he makes me so angry is the same reason that American Idol, the Black Eyed Peas, Two and 1/2 men, etc. etc. etc do – it’s not just that people like bad things, but that good things get overlooked because of it. People who I’d love to see be successful get canceled or have to get day jobs or give up on art while Charlie Sheen becomes the highest paid actor on Tv.
Also, the Leno thing will be tired when I stop laughing out loud when Gabe writes about it. calf-skin gloves? gold.
How dare you, sir? I may have been a college kid on a drug-fueled road trip across the country, but I know a sneer when I see one. (It could have been a smile. He might have even waved. That part is a little hazy). I can’t believe my integrity has come into question.
the jay leno thing will get tired as soon as he gets funny.
pros of this weeks fan fiction:it was great.
cons of this weeks fan fiction:no orphan references? come on.
also, carries is totes right. we need some more beckster hatred disscussions. he gets crazier by the second.
Gabe knows.
he won’t be cool until he drives a chevrolet movie theatre.