TEAM LAST CALL

Our faithful readers are sending in letters by the truckload asking questions on a variety of summer-related topics, such as “What’s the best way to keep cool this summer?” and “What’s this year’s hottest trend in beachwear?” and “How would you like it if I tore your arms off and stuffed you into a mailbox?”

Yes, I’m afraid that Team Last Call has also been the recipient of some good, old-fashioned hate mail. At first, Team Last Call was very upset. For the life of Team Last Call, we just couldn’t figure out what we were doing wrong. But eventually, we realized that virtually all of the hostile letters were coming from a single source, a small constituency of readers known as “Hummer owners.”

This neat group of people has been writing little love notes to Team Last Call ever since we published our annual column on Hummers last March. We’re not sure if it was because we called them bed-wetters or compared their vehicles to a four-ton Viagra pill on wheels, but something definitely seems to have struck a nerve.

We at Team Last Call are taken aback by the Hummer owners’ angry response. We certainly meant no offense in our columns. Team Last Call would never deliberately ridicule Hummer drivers or the various insecurities that compel them to drive a truck the size of a river barge. Like tiny genitalia, for example. We would never make fun of that. Or impotence. Again, not funny.

The last thing we want to do is make the area’s Hummer drivers feel bad about themselves or their ethically retarded vehicles. Yet, despite our best efforts at remaining neutral, Hummer drivers all across the midstate have made Team Last Call the focus of their unstable rage. Regardless of the fact that we had literally nothing to do with their being born with only one testicle.

It’s like you can’t even characterize a group of people as greedy, wasteful, obnoxious, environment-hating pig-dogs without them getting all huffy.

Actually, huffy would have been OK. We could have lived with huffy. Huffy would have been a vacation compared to the reaction we’ve been getting, which falls somewhere between “totally freaking crazy” and “Courtney Love.”

One Hummer driver called us Nazis. Another compared our persecution of Hummer drivers to the persecution of black slaves by white slave owners. Others psychoanalyzed our columns and determined that we are all, in fact, a bunch of raging homosexuals, which is going to break my wife’s heart. One particularly upset Hummer driver said that we were hate incarnate, which up until that point we had always assumed was Bill O’Reilly.

But what’s really been creeping us out are the threatening letters. Some of them talk about what the Hummer owners would do to us if they ever caught us walking alone in an alley on a dark night. Others list various things they would like us to do to ourselves, most of which would require us to be double-jointed. Almost all of them end with some variation of, “Your a awful riter.”

Many of the threats have come from a certain Harrisburg-area bar where evidently a lot of Hummer owners congregate. I guess it’s like a Hummer club. They probably sit around all day just talking about Hummers, washing and waxing their Hummers – maybe even trading Hummers. Yep, they probably sit around all day just swapping Hummers back and forth. First one guy will give the guy beside him a Hummer, and then that guy will give a Hummer to the guy beside him. It’s a very tightly knit community.

We admit that all of the attention we’ve been getting lately is flattering, even if it is in the form of grammatically questionable threats. But it’s not really the kind of recognition Team Last Call was hoping for when we started our column. We were imagining something more along the lines of internet fan sites and television interviews, as opposed to e-mails telling us to “take a long walk off a short pier,” which is only a clever threat if you’re trying to make us die of boredom.

Despite their lack of creativity, the threats have actually been kind of scary. In the words of Toby Keith, it seems that we’ve “rattled the big dog’s cage,” and now the Hummer drivers want to “put their boot up our ass,” because “it’s the American way.” Of all the ways a person could die, we never thought ours would involve getting run over by a four-ton automobile with Yosemite Sam mudflaps and a sticker in the back window that says “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.” If the actual vehicle doesn’t kill us, its tackiness surely will.

And so, in an effort to not be murdered, we at Team Last Call are ready to call a truce. We solemnly swear to do our best not to talk about your comically small genitalia, as long as you do your best not to overcompensate for it by driving a vehicle with the gas mileage of Mount Rushmore.

Obviously, we can’t promise that the occasional joke won’t slip through the cracks. Like, “How many Hummer owners does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None: they’re too busy ‘off-roading’ their way to a gas station to fill up their 8-mile-per-gallon tanks.” For example.

But seriously, Hummer drivers, as far as Team Last Call is concerned, this is the last column we will ever write about you and your turd-mobiles. We’ve said what we needed to say, and the ball is in your morally bankrupt court. If you choose to continue driving your Hummers around, therefore condemning yourselves to purgatory where you will spend the rest of eternity questioning what it was that made you want to drive a vehicle so obnoxious and mind-bogglingly illogical that it made everybody on heaven and earth hate you, then that’s your decision, and we respect it. We’re not here to judge.