My friends, I'm going to tell you a story. The title of the story is Upholstery, and I hope this story is enjoyable for you. The moral of this story is that I do things today that I'm willing to tell everybody I've done, because when something is awkward and uncomfortable, sometimes you feel like you need to lie, and then you feel bad about yourself for doing things you're not comfortable telling everybody about. I'm going to tell this story while I'm playing a game of Gods Unchained in the background, live on Twitch, giving away 10 gods if we get another win today.
The reason it's called Upholstery is, well, it starts with a... let me not jump right to there. It starts with me being lonely. I was a police officer in 2009, and I was in the middle of my alcoholism, drinking to excess. If I had a night off, I would often meet my friends out at the bar. I'd wake up at like 4 or 5, meet my friends at the bar at 5:30, and drink with them until 9, 10, 11. Then they went home and went to bed, and I went home and drank and played Call of Duty: World at War the rest of the night. That's where this story begins, with me being lonely.
A lonely night in 2009
So lonely me is sitting all on my own, and one night, after a whole lot of drinking, I got real lonely and real horny, and I thought, well, what can I do? I didn't want to call another girl and pay another girl to come over right then, because that's illegal and I hadn't done that in a while and I felt pretty bad about doing that before. Plus, I'm a police officer, so it's probably not a good idea. So on this particular night I'm thinking, well, what else can I do?
At 7 in the morning, after drinking for 10 hours, I drunk drove across town. Now, I don't recommend drunk driving. It kills a ton of people every year, and this is why I'm sober eight and a half years today. But on this particular night, I drunk drove across town and went to Nancy's Nook in Columbia, South Carolina. It's a store I was first taken to in college by my boss, who took us there after dinner because they thought it would be funny. Nancy's Nook is an adult toy store and an adult movie store. I hadn't been there since I went with my ex-girlfriend to buy her a toy that she ended up not even liking, and then when she broke up with me, I ended up being stuck with it. Whatever did I do with that? Huh. Anyhow.
So in 2009 I drunk drive over, and I buy this $200 blow up doll. I looked at which doll had the best features and everything, and I bought this $200 real nice blow up doll. It had a mouth and a pump and two different spots downstairs. It was a real nice blow up doll we were working with. It was $200. I take it back home and I have some quality time with it. Unfortunately, cleaning up the blow up doll was a bit of an issue. It was inconvenient at 10 in the morning when you're drunk and you've just used it and you're ready to go to sleep. The last thing I wanted to do was clean it up right then. So I'd get up the next day, clean it up, and use it again. That was in 2009 when I was single.
Keeping it on the down low
Fast forward to 2011. I moved home with my parents and kept the blow up doll on the down low in the closet there. I'd try to blow it up and I'd be hella discreet, too. My parents would be in bed, and I'd blow that blow up doll up real quiet, because you couldn't be huffing and puffing. So I kept the blow up doll on the down low living with my parents, blowing it up real quietly.
Then I went into my own little bachelor pad in 2010 when I went to grad school at the University of South Florida for criminology. I have this blow up doll in my closet, but I got a girlfriend right away, so I didn't need it. And then I meet my wife. My wife and I had sex every time we saw each other at that time, which was a couple of times a week, so there'd be lots of sex, and again I didn't need a blow up doll. Then I move in with the blow up doll and my wife. Now I've got this blow up doll in a discreet box in the closet, and I'm just picturing one day my wife finding it. This is not going to be a good situation. She's not going to be happy.
Getting rid of it
So I'm thinking, I need to get rid of this blow up doll. But how do you get rid of a blow up doll? This is a $200 fancy blow up doll. Just on general principle, I'm not throwing this thing in the trash. That just feels wrong. So I asked my friends on Xbox, hey, any of you want a blow up doll? I got a nice quality one in the closet. One of my friends on Xbox, who's maybe six years younger than me and who I'd played Call of Duty with for years, says, yeah, let me get that blow up doll. He says they're going to put it on the hood of a car, to hang over or something. That's what he said. I don't know if he used it or not, but that's what he said he was going to do with it. So I'm like, okay, great, problem solved. I can get rid of the blow up doll and send it to my friend.
And you're wondering, what the heck does this chair have to do with this doll? So I get the blow up doll in a box, and I go to the UPS store right next to where I live. There was one thing I wasn't prepared for. At the time, I used to think of myself as honest, but I was a very good liar. The way you become a good liar is you prepare in advance to lie. You think about what you might have to lie about, and you prepare a story to lie about it ahead of time.
"Upholstery"
On this particular day, for some reason, I get to the store all excited to get rid of this blow up doll, and I feel really awkward. My wife's at work, and I feel like I'm sneaking around getting rid of this $200 blow up doll. I give it to the guy, and he asks me, what's in this? And I panic. For some reason, I never considered that the guy would ask me what was in the box. My mind races, and he's making direct eye contact and looking at me, and I'm thinking, I can't be honest about this, this is embarrassing.
Now, if I were to do this again, I would say there's a $200 used blow up doll in here. I would just be directly honest and say what's in there. But at the time, I said the first word that came to mind. The very first word I thought of. I literally didn't think at all. He said, what's in there? And I said, upholstery. If you don't know what upholstery is, it's like some kind of furniture. He looks at me and he knows I'm lying. He looks at me judgmentally because he knows I'm lying, and I know that he knows I'm lying, and I'm so embarrassed. But I'm not going to back down that easily. He can open the package if he wants to, but I'm not backing down. He rings it up and I walk out of there thinking, upholstery? Where did that come from? I don't even know that I'd ever said that word in my life.
So now, every time I hear the word upholstery, I think of that blow up doll. I'll see a billboard that says upholstery, and I'm immediately making love to that blow up doll. My friend said he enjoyed the blow up doll and has disposed of it since then.
The moral
I've enjoyed telling you this story. For the next keyword in the giveaway, after we win, the keyword will be upholstery. So anytime between now and the giveaway, the keyword is upholstery. I hope that next time you see upholstery, you think about my blow up doll. And I hope that you do things in your life that you are comfortable telling everybody about. Because if I bought another blow up doll and did the same thing, I'd tell everybody about it. So if I ever buy another blow up doll, you'll be the first to know.
If you enjoy stories like this one alongside the games I play, and you'd like to hang out and play together, I'd love for you to join the Jerry Banfield Family.
You can also find plenty more of these games and stories in my Games playlist.