ANALYTICAL LARRY
By Steve Eskew

Since childhood, I’ve been conflicted about hanging out with my cousin Larry. We’re connected by an absurd commonality––Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

We bonded when we were preschool brats and realized that we both tortured people with our eccentricities. Sometimes reluctantly, sometimes gleefully.

As adults, we finally joined a therapy group. After each session, we concluded that we should count our blessings, congratulating ourselves that our OCD quirks weren’t a third as bad as the others’ in the group.

In truth, ours were two-thirds worse.

Back in the day, Larry and I never missed watching the TV show Monk, featuring Tony Shalhoub’s brilliant OCD detective. As our hero performed such unique tasks as polishing his lightbulbs and ironing his shoestrings, other viewers around us laughed. We saw nothing unusual at all. Didn’t everyone do that?

Larry and I separately conducted ridiculous rituals, constantly cleaned and double-checked everything. We admitted to each other how we shuddered in considering unknown but frightful consequences if we neglected performing such tasks.

We each detested disorder. Like when the cans and/or spices in the pantry (anyone’s pantry) were not uniformly lined up, facing different directions. Not to mention the nightmare of discovering even one item on a store shelf upside down. Oy, if we had a dollar for every time we were ordered to leave a store for the crime of straightening the stock.

Granted, we were both born bizarre. Two zanies running loose. But Larry eventually crossed the line from zany into loony tunes.

Surprise! As a teenager, Larry sucked socially. He wanted to control every aspect of his (and everyone’s else’s) being. Enter Larry’s super weird and wicked stepmother Roberta, a control freak in her own right and no slouch herself in the oddity department.

Easily amused but critical by nature, both of us boys would laugh at some particular aspect of her weirdness. Especially her wardrobe. For example, she favored donning frilly, ultra-feminine dresses — while wearing men’s shoes.

This infraction of high fashion assaulted Larry’s aesthetic concepts. One night, upon the sight of Roberta in a beautiful evening gown that just barely camouflaged men’s shoes, Larry freaked. 

“Egad! Flaws! Smudges! Scuffs! At least let me shine those combat boots,” he wailed.

“I don’t know what your hangup is on my  choice of shoes, Mr. Blackwell, but I’m not walking around in spiked heels to please you. I want comfort. No one but you even notices my shoes,” Roberta shot back.

“I think you wear men’s shoes because you’re jealous,” Larry declared.

“Jealous? Haw!’

“Yes, jealous because you were born without a prostate.”

We got the giggles.

Roberta blew her stack and spit out: “Oh, you smart aleck teenagers. You smirk at everything. None of ya’s got the brains Christ gave a goose.”

I fell over in hysterics; Larry stopped laughing. I think it was at that moment that Larry separated himself from our shared OCD and expanded his horizons into profound over-thinking.

Having completely missed Roberta’s mere sarcasm, Larry commenced taking everything literally and began his tireless (and tiresome) misadventures into analyzing. Analyzing everything.
Did Christ give geese the proper amount of intellectual merit? Hmmmmmm. Well, if Roberta’s theory was correct, then were  geese educable? After much Biblical and textbook research along with endless self-debate, he deduced that Roberta was insane. But he has remained forever indecisive about that and any of his other conclusions.

This morning, Larry and I ate breakfast at an IHOP. After designing his pancakes to suitable dimensions, my demented cousin had to decide which of the three cakes deserved butter. Ten minutes after he solved the “butter-worthy” decision came the biggest conundrum of the morning: the proper distribution of the syrup.

Rejecting the urge to set him on fire, instead I shouted, “Enough already! Guess what I’ve nicknamed you? Analytical Larry. Yup. Analytical Larry. Now, for the sake of all that’s stupid, pour the damn syrup on the pancakes. It all gets mixed up in your guts anyway, doesn’t it?

Larry reached across the table and simulated pouring syrup on my lap while gritting his teeth and growling loudly.

We left the restaurant abruptly. Involuntarily.

Two hours later, Larry called and we congratulated each other for remaining “non-violent” during our spat. We’ve matured. We haven’t had a food fight since we were 32.

To show him I harbored no hard feelings, I invited him over to our house.

“Hurry!” I said. “I need your help to secretly straighten the garments on our neighbor’s clothesline.”

“Fun idea!,” Larry said. “I’d love to calculate the proper distribution of clothespins and evaluate the artistic scheme of the placement of the clothes.”

Analytical Larry. Oh me, oh my.

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