Tom’s hair is unique, in that it is so filthy and scraggly that even head lice refuse to go anywhere near it (his pubic hair has much the same problem, although the aversion of living creatures to Tom’s privates is well documented elsewhere.) But, just the other day, Tom looked in a mirror both big enough to fit his gigantic, heaving face and unlikely to refuse to reflect its image – in other words, a bravely stupid and incredibly rare mirror – and decided, after vomiting copiously for four hours (even Tom doesn’t like Tom) that he needs a haircut. He washes his hair with the requisite four gallons of Head and Shoulders to stop half his scalp flaking off all the time and to make it smell less like a dog’s cunt and runs down to the nearest barber – inasmuch as a bloated, waddling shitsack can run.
This alone is fraught with difficulty. First of all, no barber’s chairs will fit him; the ones that do bend backwards under his weight, crushing innocent barbers to death. This is solved after the ordering of a special reinforced chair, kept by Tom’s mum in the loft since his first birthday came around and he broke all the high chairs. Secondly, even after being washed his hair is so caked with dirt that each strand is roughly the same strength as a steel pole; this too is fixed by the barber simply using a power sander to strip the hair away. Thirdly, from more of a philosophical point of view, the barber has to be tipped two thousand pounds to even touch any part of Tom, such is his general level of filth.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Tom’s pitiful yet unpitied life, his college newspaper has been receiving regular unsolicited articles from him, intended for publication. Predictably, these consist of lengthy reviews of Japanese cartoons featuring underage girls being raped up the bum, as well as interminable paeans to power-prog metal albums which he thinks are awesome (“5 and a half stars”, he says enthusiastically yet entirely wrongly) but everyone else thinks are shit in the extreme. The editorial staff are getting tired of these unwanted, unreadable contributions to their already painful job; they find it hard enough to write cheerfully about the prices in the canteen going up, let alone having to read through a poorly spelt and thoroughly tasteless review of Super Love Octopus Gurgling Girl IV every bloody week.
They have come up with a solution. They will arrange for him to have a televised speech in the college’s gigantic auditorium. While his literary contributions are dull and incoherent, he can help them anyway by giving them something exciting to write about – with any luck, his screaming death at the hands of everyone who has ever needed any kind of contact with him. They telephone him and inform him of the speech and its time, and he promises to dress up a bit (i.e. wear clean clothes and not piss stained rags) and prepare the best speech he possibly can (a very shit one, basically). That evening he writes said speech; it covers all of his favourite subjects, which of course are Japanese schoolgirls, tentacles and sodomy.
His big day comes. His epic speech, all twelve hours of it, has been written down on index cards for him, enabling him to not have to tax his feeble brain to any great degree. He mounts the podium, clears his throat and begins… to be greeted with raucous laughter. Unsure of precisely why, he continues nervously, until the laughter becomes too loud to ignore. “What?”, he exclaims loudly, frantically searching around for the source of the audience’s merriment. Finally, he finds it on the Jumbotron behind him; the barber, unbeknownst to him, has shaved the word “CUNT” in his hair, a fact now being broadcast to millions of viewers as well as the hooting teens in the auditorium. Crying with shame, Tom does the only honourable thing he could ever do and shoots himself in the head on live television, an act which leads to dancing in the streets, the declaration of a new national holiday and a four day standing ovation from everybody in the fucking world.
