If you put Andy Riverbed’s brain in a parakeet it would fly straight into the nearest wall. I once asked Andy what his real name was. “It’s Andy Effin Riverbed,” he said. As an internet sock puppet he is also known as “The Riverbed” and “Mr. Potato Head.” Considering he’s in college, none of this is surprising. The Riverbed learned Spanish and English simultaneously as a small child, and because of this he thinks himself a “linguist”. I guess 3 quarters of Arizona’s grocery clerks, gas station attendants, construction workers and landscape crews are linguists too.

I was the new janitor at Pima Community College. One morning I was cleaning the offices in the east wing of the English building. I stopped in front of office CC126 and put the key in the lock. Taped to the door was a newspaper article. “Jefferson Carter will read from his new poetry chapbook Gentling The Horses, on Saturday, May 10th at 8:00 p.m. at The Reader's Oasis.” The gold name plate on the door said Dr. Jefferson Carter. The article was written by a local female arts critic for the Tucson Citizen. She had orgasm after orgasm, right there on the page. Mr. Carter's chapbook was a “must read for anyone even remotely serious about literature." There was a photograph of the bard cradling his book, with beard and dark sunglasses. A white guy, he looked to be about 50. “Well crafted,” the writer said. “A master.”

I entered his vacant office and emptied the trash. A secretary walked down the hall chewing her gum. The office staff didn't like the janitors to linger in the offices. A week before, my co-worker Albert was accused of stealing Jello from a history professor's private refrigerator. They canned him.

Mr. Potato Head Goes on Tour with the Vegetables

In the small university town where Mr. Potato Head graduated from, but was unlucky finding a professional job after he was fired from the data collection laboratory he used to work for, after his bosses from the lab had realized that all his “breaks” were due to his giving ten dollar haircuts with the styling kit he maintained inside his butt, he joined a punk rock band with three other potato heads he met after posting an ad on the local Craigslist’s Miscellaneous Romance section that read: “I’m a Potato Head looking to create with at least three other Potato Heads. My hobbies include drinking Caribbean rum, politics, fashion, and the Ramones. I wear sneakers even to the beach.”

On the post, he had uploaded a picture of himself wearing his mustache, the Pastor Potato Head’s hat, and his formal-events slacks; his collared shirt, he had left inside his butt. In the picture, a colored emblem of a broken home was visible on the middle of his belly. The emblem had been painted on with a permanent marker.