Four years ago, while decorating my front yard with my regular Halloween decorations—pumpkins, hay bale, a ghost made from an old handkerchief—I turned to my special lady friend Nickie and said, “You know what’s missing? The biggest damn skeleton you’ve ever seen.”
So Nickie started tapping away with her acrylics on her Android and said the largest skeleton available for public purchase in the United States was only six feet tall.
Six.
It was an injustice, frankly.
And then before I could even think, a voice spoke from deep within my being. Like it wasn’t even me speaking. And I said, “The skeleton needs to be twelve feet tall and we’re gonna mass produce them.”
Now of course, despite the fact what I’d said was clearly a divinely appointed idea, Nickie immediately started shooting holes in it:
How you gonna ship it?
Where are people gonna store it??
Won’t it cost a fortune????
But I wasn’t scared. Like before, the answers were already on my tongue:
One, it’ll come in the biggest cardboard box you’ve ever seen.
Two, where people store it is not my problem.
And three, no one will consider how much it costs because it’s the biggest damn skeleton they’ve ever seen!
Course I needed a manufacturer to make the blessed thing. Nickie and I are big Shark Tankers so I quickly put together a list of potential candidates. The first outfit said anything bigger than nine feet was “physically impossible.” The second guy said they could go twelve but it would blow over in the wind and kill people. The third dude said, “Can we add creepy green eyes that light up at night and give children nightmares?”
He was hired on the spot.
Then we got to work. Making giant pelvis molds. Piling up plastic femurs. Arguing about whether it should have teeth and if it could spit blood. And by the following September, we had 20,000 units sitting in Home Depots from San Diego to Bar Harbor.
I love this country.
How’d we do that first Halloween? Let’s just say Nickie was driving a Range Rover by Christmas.
So as we approach another October 31st, I just wanted to say THANK YOU, AMERICA. I had faith in you.
Which is why I also want you to let you know we’re in the final design stage of our new product. Something extra special. And it’ll be ready to ship by Easter.
The biggest darn Jesus you’ve ever seen.
Thank you to my friend Clint Culp for lending his voice to the audio version of this story. Clint can be seen in the upcoming Jumanji 3 with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Kevin Hart, opening Christmas Day. He also recently appeared in the Netflix series The Hawk with Will Ferrell and on HBO’s Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness with Larry David.
My new book DEAD MEAT lands November 17th!
I started laughing at “You know what’s missing?” and didn’t stop until the end.