MOMMY, THERE’S A RUDY GIULIANI IN MY BEDROOM!!!

“’Mommy, Daddy, there’s a monster under my bed!’ my daughter cried out. She was standing, in her Spider-Man pajamas, in the doorway, looking mortified.”

“Behind her was this grayish column of light spilling in from the hallway, and I was so groggy that, for a second, I thought the gray column was some sort of monster, maybe a ghost or something.”

“’There’s no such thing as monsters,’ I tell her, but in my heart, I don’t mean that. There are monsters everywhere. 10-foot-tall bears living in the woods, sharks in the ocean, tigers roaming the jungle, jailhouses full of sociopaths…”

“Don’t forget those phone zombies, jerkoffs walking around crowded public places while texting…”

“Monsters are real. No doubt. But I say what I can to calm her down and I lift outta bed to pick her up and go to put her back to sleep.”

“I’m saying the usual placatory shit, trying to tell her it’s a nightmare, it’s her imagination, all that, but she’s insistent, saying again and again, how, really, really, there’s really a monster under her bed.”

“Sounds like she was being quite exigent.”

“So, once we got to the doorway of her room, she started shaking her head, refused to go in, and she wrapped herself around me, like a little octopus.”

“’Look,’ I tell her, ‘I’m gonna prove to you that there is no monster under your bed.’”

“I set her down, push the door open, slowly, and click on the light. My eyes were squinting and burning from the sudden shock of the brightness.”

“I walked over, kneeled and poked my head under her bed, and right as I started to say, ‘See, there’s no…’ my heart skipped a beat.”

“It was him. Beyond a doubt, it was him. Rudy Giuliani. Those black streaks of hair dye sliding down his face, you know. The guy’s cheeks looking like skid-marked sidewalks, his whole face like a car crash.”

“Ghoulish… Fucking Nosferatu… Worse than the worst vampire…”

“Worse than Marilyn Manson…”

“Brian Warner.”

“I had no idea how or why Rudy Giuliani had chosen my kid’s bed to climb under. I had no idea how he got into our house. My kid’s window was open, but her room is on the second floor.”

“Maybe he flew in.”

“Maybe he levitated. Are you sure it wasn’t David Blaine?”

“No, no. None of it made any sense. None whatsoever. But he was there.”

“Rudy Giuliani.”

“Did your daughter have a duffel bag full of cash, Botox or hair dye, hair gel lying around, by any chance?”

“ … “

“She did have raisins on her nightstand…”

“Not the raisins…”

“The fucking raisins.”

“So, yeah, I’m like… ’Rudy… Rudy Giuliani?’ I asked him. I was on all-fours, like an animal, and I’m craning my neck and my face was twisted in disbelief. Then he just mumbled gibberish and backed up further, huddling into a corner, like a frightened cat.”

“So we’re two animals, staring each other down. Then I noticed he was in a pin-striped, gray suit and that he was sweating buckets. Guy looked like he’d just stepped outta a Turkish bathhouse.”

“I mean, I know there’s been lots of politicians out at night, but they’re usually just out chasing after and shaving the fur off of cats or eating out of garbage cans. They’re not usually coming inside your house.”

“But when I called the police, the 911 operator didn’t believe me. Starts spitting how there’s no Rudy Giuliani in my house, that swatting, pranking 911 is a crime, and if I call again about any Rudy Giuliani nonsense, they will… yada yada yada…!”

“Christ on a hoverboard…”

“So I grab my kid and we slowly backed away. We built a barricade around her door. Stuffed animals, chairs, a stool, a beachball.”

“The next morning, I woke up wondering if it was all a dream.”

“After breakfast, we sent our kid to school, then the wife and I treaded cautiously, dismantled the barricade.”

“And he was still there… But was no longer under the bed. Instead, he was crawling along the ceiling, like a fly. He’d also shrunk, was only around two-feet-tall…”

“My wife couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. Our jaws were hanging low, agape, like that Scream mask. That was our expression. Then we whipped out our phones to snap video of the thing.”

“But then it got weirder. On our phones’ screens, no images appeared of Rudy Giuliani. On our screens, the ceiling appeared empty. Then Rudy Giuliani starts making these atrocious sounds, like a fire engine siren, just wailing and screaming, until we close our phones, and then he goes back to mumbling gibberish.”

“So I tossed him a bag of raisins. I couldn’t think of what else to do.”

“The fucking raisins.”

“Yeah, well, we barricaded the room again. But neither of us knew what the hell we should do. There was no playbook for this. There was no emergency plan for this, a politician crawling on your kid’s ceiling. I mean, I thought about shooting it with Lysol or going after it with a flyswatter…”

“Or calling animal control. It’s not that much different than an alligator, bear, or a snake breaking into your house.”

“My wife and I decided to make it public. We were determined not to suffer in silence. Not to be helpless. When we showed up to our IR offices, we told all our coworkers. But no one believed us.”

“A certain degree of apprehension is understandable.”

“It’s a tough topic to broach.”

“So we invited about a dozen coworkers over, after work, to see the Rudy Giuliani in our kid’s room. It was altogether about 10 people that showed up.”

“Collectively, we marched up the stairs. Everyone was yucking it up, faces all yanked into smiles. Then we cleared the barricade. Then we opened the door for the big show. The big reveal. Everyone hushed and had their phones, tablets pointed. I felt like we were a battalion of soldiers, armed with digital devices as our weapons.”

“Cue the Indiana Jones music.”

“Indianapolis Colts?”

“Better would be Cliff-era Metallica… Or Bad Brains…”

“Kanye West.”

“Brian Warner.”

“ … “

“But yeah, so, like once we entered the room, the window was open, and there was no trace of Rudy Giuliani anywhere.”

“My wife and I were thrilled. But our coworkers, eh, not so much. They all grunted, grumbled, and were terribly disappointed.”

“It is very anticlimactic.”

“Bathetic.”

“Pathetic, why?”

“Uh, just, forget it…”

“Yeah, and the only evidence to prove he was there were the black streaks of hair dye smeared along the ceiling. And a heavy smell of aftershave.”

“Skid marks and aftershave smells. Sounds like a politician.”

“Well, we are happy that Rudy Giuliani is gone. But, for good measure, we greased up every window ledge around our house, slathered them good with Vaseline, in case him or any other politician tries to come back.”

“And no more raisins.”

“Damn straight. No more fucking raisins.”