I Don't Even Know Where Peruvia Is (Cigar Smoke 3-17-11)

I’m an addict. No, it’s not alcohol. Or tobacco. I don’t snort cocaine. I don’t shoot up heroine. I don’t even know what the hell meth is. I’m into something much, much worse. Groupons.

If I were at a meeting, I would have to step up and say, “Hi, I’m Jim. I’m a Groupon addict. Please, I wish all of you wouldn’t give me the finger at once.”

First of all, maybe some of you don’t even know what Groupons are. No, it’s not some kind of new group sex thing. (I could never find more than one person at a time that could even tolerate me.) No, Groupons are simply coupons you get online. That’s it. They send you emails every day, which offer you 50 percent discounts on most everything. I guess they feature restaurants. I know that’s what I feature.

It all started a couple of years ago. I received this innocent little email offering me a $50 coupon to eat at a BBQ rib joint and it would only cast me $25. And I said, maybe there is a god. I bought the coupon, I mean the Groupon, and off I went into a spiral of uncontrollable gluttony and complete abdication of what remaining sense I had. I was hooked.

I went down to The Smokin’ Joint on 3rd Street in L.A. and I plopped down my Groupon and said to the guy, “Here’s my Groupon that I bought for $25 and I would now like my $50 worth of BBQ shit.” I really thought I had been had, and that the guy was going to throw me out of the place or something. I thought it had to be too good to be true. But alas, it was not.

He limped over to my table with this enormous stack of BBQ’d animals on a plate and I kept waiting for some kind of catch. I was more paranoid than a chicken at a KFC, but I just ate my food, and I waddled out of the restaurant. And, like I said, I was hooked.

So, they kept sending me these emails and I kept buying them. At first, I only bought the ones in the San Gabriel Valley. I figured, being a member of MENSA, that I would probably be more likely to go to restaurants close by. But after a while, I wanted to use the Groupons as a way of forcing me out of my regular, boring routine into some new, boring routine. I wanted to seek out a new comfort zone that might possibly be even more comfortable than my current comfort zone.

Therefore, I started to buy Groupons for Vietnamese places in Claremont, and for Moroccan restaurants in Glendora, and for Greek Tavernas in La Verne. I even got one for some Ethiopian little hole-in-the-wall somewhere near Duarte, but I haven’t gone yet, because I know I’m going to feel guilty about eating what little food the Ethiopians have left after their famines. Nobody ever said life would be easy for a Groupon addict.

And just the other day, I sprang one of these little Groupon suckers on Marge. We were doing a crossword puzzle and she actually knew that one of the answers was LOOFAH. And this was just after she had told me that she had never heard of Duke Snider. (You’re right. I don’t know why I am still married to her.)

Anyway, I said, “My little Loofah Love Toy, how would you like to go to a nice Peruvian restaurant tonight for dinner?” And she batted her eyelids and said, “Where the hell is Peruvia?” I told her it was very close to Loofah.

Well, as you might have guessed, my little Love Toy was not speaking to me there for a while. So to win her back, I told her that because her happiness is what I lived for and because my only goal in an otherwise wasted life was to please her, I wondered if she would like to go have some gourmet French food. She hesitated for a second, and I pounced. I whipped out a Groupon from my hefty, alphabetized stack of Groupons and threw it down on the table like the Queen of Spades in Hearts. “Duke Snider is going to take his Loofah Love Toy to the Café Massilia in Monrovia,” I announced with an appropriate romantic flourish.

She said, “I thought you didn’t like French food.” I said, “I don’t. I hate it. But you’re not going with me. You’re going with Duke. I hope you have a nice dinner.”

Hey, I didn’t know a small woman such as Marge could throw such a large object at an even larger husband and throw it accurately and with such force and I was just wondering if maybe the Groupon people were going to offer a nice discount on Huntington Hospital Emergency Room services.