The Lost Episode (Seinfeld Parody)
This piece was originally published as "Jerry's World" in Satire Magazine [online] in 1999 or 2000. Sadly, the Mag no longer exists (having perished shortly after publishing J World).
The Lost Episode
“Jerry. Let me use your toilet,” says Kramer, bursting through the door.
Jerry, at effrontery, blows a spray of milk and cereal out of his mouth.
“Are you crazy?” he shouts, eyes ecstatic. “Nobody-uses-the toilet. I-don’t-even-use-the-toilet.”
“Come on, Jerry! I’ve got to use the toilet.”
“What’s wrong with your own toilet? Why do you always have to use my toilet?”
“Come on, Jerry,” Kramer pleads, his body shaking pathologically.
“Nobody ... uses ... the toilet,” Jerry says, his hands rising and falling in emphatic rhythm.
“Just this once! PLEASE, Jerry.”
Kramer’s erect hair is even more highly charged than usual. There is a soft glow of light around its edges, and this makes him appear angelic in an off-beat way. Jerry’s neat appearance is crystallized by a well-ironed, fuchsia, button-down-collar shirt. His stance is one of well-centeredness and control. Not to mention bilateral symmetry.
“Can’t do it,” Jerry says non-chalantly, hands on hips.
“I’m begging you,” Kramer pleads, on his knees, hands clasped in prayer. “For the love of God, Jerry. I’m about to shit my pants.”
“Nope.”
“JERRY! It’s knocking at the door.”
“Can’t do it.”
“You’re killing me, Jerry.”
“Can’t help you,” he says, folding his arms.
“You’ve done it this time. Oh yeah. Now you’ve crossed the line!”
He leaves, slamming the door behind him. Jerry waves him off with a look of bored reproof, then checks his watch. It is precisely 2:00 P.M. Time for the big game. He proceeds to the couch, but is distracted by what appears to be a loose hair, or eyelash, in his field of vision. He stops and attempts to remove the hair, but is unable to fix on its exact location. He fumbles madly for a moment then drops his hands and takes a deep breath.
Elaine stands by the curb, her arms folded, braced against the elements. An anonymous car passes by, splashing her with exhaust-stained slush. Her eyes, nose and mouth twist in womanly peeve. Beneath this mask of trivial emotion, however, is a burning rage.
“You owe me five dollars!” says George, slamming his fist on the newsstand counter. “I want my five dollars.”
“All sales are final,” says the proprietor, an Arab-type. “Besides, you break the seal. How I’m going to sell this magazine now that you break the seal?”
“Alright,” says George, calm now, as if concealing an inferno. “Just give me the five dollars. It’ll be like it never happened.”
“All sales are final,” insists the proprietor.
“Listen, dot-head, no one hustles George Costanza. No one!”
“You are a crazy man. You already read the magazine.”
“Read? Who reads? If I wanted to read I would’ve bought the Times. Do I look like I have an imagination?” He indicates himself. “I mean, come on!”
“I cannot help you,” the proprietor says, turning away.
George stews for a moment, hands on the counter, until his eyes focus on some nearby object. Inspired, his facial features relax in dumb wonderment, and suddenly he has grabbed what appears to be a magazine and vanishes from the scene.
The proprietor turns back to the counter, looking side to side. But it is too late. George has fled.
A car pulls up to the curb, George at the wheel. Elaine opens the passenger side door and gets in. Her tongue pressed against her cheek, she is visibly ticked.
“Alright, alright,” says George, as he pulls away. “So I’m a little late.”
“A little?” mocks Elaine, her lower jaw extended, the lip in a pout. She rolls her eyes.
“Well I had a little problem with that guy who runs the newsstand across from Ella’s.”
“You mean Ali?” she asks, piqued.
“Yeah it turns out he’s a real jerk off. He wouldn’t let me return a magazine.”
“So what happened?” she persists, with girlish enthusiasm.
“I was trying to return that copy of Playboy I bought last week-”
“The Mimi Rogers issue?”
“Yeah.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“Ah, too arty,” he says, shaking his head smugly.
“I saw that issue. She shows plenty.”
“Nope. Not for my money, Elaine.” He shakes his head—there is a glint in his eye—his voice rising climactically. “I pay five dollars, I want gyno.”
“Gyno?” Elaine chortles.
“What? She’s too good for gyno? Plenty of respectable actresses have done gyno! What makes her so special?”
“Name one,” Elaine says, articulating hyperbolically.
“Sharon Stone,” he murmurs.
“Sharon Stone?”
“I know what I saw, Elaine. When she crossed her legs. Boom! GYNO!”
“What ever, George. Anyway, what happened with Ali?”
“He didn’t give me the five dollars.”
“He didn’t?” she says, excited.
“Don’t worry,” George says, smiling, cocking his head. “I took this when he wasn’t looking.”
He points to a magazine on the dashboard. Elaine picks it up and looks at the cover.
“Chicks with Dicks?” she says, incredulous.
She flips through it, and George smiles mischievously.
“You’re wacko.”
“Well, what can I say?” he smirks, shrugging.
“Uh-huh,” she says, the tip of her tongue pressed against her cheek.
She regards him from a distance.
Having buzzed their arrival, George and Elaine open the door—set somewhat ajar by Jerry—and proceed into the apartment. Their boisterous entrée is arrested, however, by the grim visage of a steak knife embedded in Jerry’s eye socket.
“It’s a long story, come on in,” he says, slightly put out.
“Jerry, what happened?” says Elaine, moving toward him solicitously.
“There was a hair, or an eye lash, I don’t know-”
“Did you get it?” asks George, biting into an apple.
“I can’t tell. I’m blind in this eye.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter then.”
“I guess not.”
“Jerry, we’ve gotta get you to a doctor,” says Elaine.
“No, I’ll be alright. It didn’t hit the brain. I don’t think it hit the brain, anyway. I wrote some material for my new act, and the wording is pretty good, maybe even better than before.” His voice achieves a subtle rise in affectation. “Have you ever wondered why people don’t have exoskeletons? Insects have ‘em. You know that crunching sound when you step on a centipede? That’s the exoskeleton. It’s like eating a bowl of cereal, especially Captain Crunch. Except it’s not insects I imagine I’m chewing, but people.
“See, same old observations.”
“Sounds kind of cynical to me,” offers Elaine, cringing a bit.
“Wait, there’s more,” he portentously informs her. Again the same subtle rise ... “What’s the deal with ants-in-the-pants? Where does this come from? Have you ever had ants in the pants? I mean, on your dick?”
“That’s gross, Jerry,” Elaine says.
“Too many questions,” says George, inspecting the apple, then biting into it. “Nobody wants questions,” he continues, mouth full. “You want questions, you live with your mother. ‘George, did you change your underwear? Did you wash your face?’ Nobody wants questions, Jerry. They’re not funny. Do you know what that bitch asked me? She wanted, no, she demanded, to know if I had washed off the smegma. That’s not funny, Jerry. It’s aggravating. It eats away at you. At the soul. If I wasn’t so repressed I would kill her.”
“That’s nice, George. But they’re rhetorical questions.”
“What do I know from rhetorical? A questions a question.”
He throws the apple core away.
“You’re an idiot,” says Elaine.
Pause.
“Me?” he asks, dumbfounded.
“Yeah, you.”
He shrugs.
There is a knock at the door. Jerry, the handle of the steak knife projecting from his eye socket, crosses the room and opens it. But instead of a person, or gnome, as he had expected, there is a brown paper bag consumed in fire. He studies it for a moment, then crosses the room to the kitchen sink. He takes a glass from the cabinet and fills it with water. He raises the glass to the light, frowns slightly, and empties it. There are too many particles. He begins to refill the glass but notices that a residue of some kind, possibly soap, has built up, almost invisibly, around the rim. He puts the glass in the dishwasher and takes another one from the cabinet, which he inspects thoroughly, finding it to contain no flaws or blemishes. None, anyway, that are detectable to the naked eye. He fills the glass and returns to the now barely smoldering paper bag. He pours the water on it and in so doing notices a foul odor. It is not unlike that of human feces. Curious, he dons a pair of latex gloves...
As he realizes that the blood on the front of his shirt is his own, George’s expression becomes one of dumbfounded horror. Again, the spasms in his midsection, then the bilious, bloody onslaught from his mouth—in the background Jerry can be seen kneeling over the paper bag, in fact, poring over it, with, it appears, forceps—“Oh my god, I’m vomiting blood. How can this be?”
Elaine, in reaction to his ashen panic, places her hands on her hips and assumes a bitter look.
“I hypnotized you, you idiot.”
“What?”
“And then I made you eat Ajax.”
“That’s impossible! I don’t eat Ajax.”
“You do in a trance-state. And plenty of it.”
“You’re lying,” he insists, spraying blood.
“Am I?”
“What are you asking me for? I’m bleeding to death,” he says, hysterical.
She walks over to him and runs a finger along the corner of his mouth.
“What do you think these are?” she asks, showing him the bloodstained granules. “Flavor crystals?”
“This is impossible. Why did you do this?”
“Do you realize how long you kept me waiting today? And for what? Virilism, George?” She leans toward him venemously. “That’s Rude.”
George whirls and rushes for the bathroom but is clotheslined by Jerry, dropping him to the floor.
“No bathroom.”
“No bathroom?”
“No bathroom.”
“Right. No bathroom.”
George rises and leaves the apartment.
“So what was that fire all about?” Elaine asks, clapping her hands together.
“I can’t really figure it out. There was a substance in the bag: Feces. And I put it under the microscope. I pretty sure it’s Kramer’s.”
Elaine laughs gaily and Jerry scratches his head in puzzlement.
“Don’t you get it?”
“Get what?”
“It’s a prank, Jerry. You fill up a bag with doodoo, light it on fire, and when the person opens their door and stamps it out they get crap all over their shoes.”
“Wait. They step on the fire?”
“Yeah, Jerry. It’s a natural reaction.”
“I don’t step on fire.”
“What ever, Jerry,” she says, throwing up her hands, exasperated. “Anyway, why’d Kramer do it? Is there something going on between you two?”
“Yeah, he wanted to use the toilet again-”
“Just let him use the damn toilet, Jerry.”
“Nobody ... uses ... the toilet.”
On the floor of the dimly lit bathroom, clutching the toilet bowl, George sees his muted image in the crimson water. He heaves again, flushing the image with blood, bile. For the first time he reflects on his life, on what he has become; and the sickness and shame fill his crystalline eyes.
Elaine attends to the buzz at the intercom.
“Hi, Patrick. Come on up,” she says, whirling around with a smile.
Jerry crosses his arms, steak knife in eye socket.
“So you’re going out with Patrick again.”
“Yep.”
“You two are starting to become quite the item.”
“Have you ever heard the expression tall, dark and handsome? Or millionaire?”
There is a knock and Elaine opens the door to reveal none other than New York Knicks superstar Patrick Ewing. Although he is listed at seven feet, in relation to Jerry and Elaine he is easily nine or ten.
“So are we on for tonight?”
“You bet.”
In fact, as he leans down, presumably to kiss her, it seems for a moment as if he might, mythologically, consume her entire head.
“How are you doing, Jerry?”
“Fine, fine. A little problem with the eye, but...”
He waves it off.
“I’m glad to hear it. By the way, there’s shit in your hallway. Speaking of which, where’s the john?”
“Ahh...”
Elaine looks frantically at Jerry.
Jerry is holding his breath, mouth open pre-verbally.
Patrick.
Jerry.
Elaine.
Patrick.
Jerry.
“Am I missing something, Jerry? Do you have a problem with my using your toilet?”
“Ahh...well...”
He, steak knife in eye socket, appears on a precipice.
“Because if you feel that way, I wish you’d be man enough to say so.”
“I don’t want you to use the toilet.”
“You don’t want me to use the toilet.”
“I wouldn’t even call it a toilet really. It’s more of a-”
“Shit hole?” offers Elaine, hopefully.
“Right,” he says, shrinking from faux pas.
“I realize we’ve only known each other a short time, Jerry. But I’m gonna have to go upside your head.”
The monstrous super-athlete moves on Jerry (Elaine freezes) his giant arm in back stroke, then the open hand like an iron skillet in collision course with Jerry’s skull. Jerry, removing the steak knife from his eye socket, the blade outward, perpendicular to his horse-face, backs away, and Patrick’s hand swings through the blade.
“My shooting hand,” he says, staring in disbelief at the impaled member, as Jerry calmly walks to the window, opens it, and jumps out.
There is a period of silence.
“Elaine, I think your boy just defenestrated himself,” Patrick finally says.
The solitary din of late night traffic, another New York city night, the newsstand proprietor leans, arms propped up on the counter, reading a magazine. He takes a sip of coffee and turns the page, the faint sirens in the background like a perpetual undercurrent of trauma. And through the filter of darkness George Costanza comes to him. Not a word between them, the man puts out his hand, knowingly, and George deposits in his palm a coin of blood.
The proprietor stares down at his hand, his eyes fraught with the probity of suffering. “Welcome to New York,” he seems to be saying, as George, a hushed finger to his lips, turns and descends into darkness.
EPILOGUE:
Jerry addresses the crowd: “You see, it’s not so much minutiae that I’m interested in—the minutiae of everyday life—but pathogens. Pathogens, too, are very, very small...”
The Lost Episode
“Jerry. Let me use your toilet,” says Kramer, bursting through the door.
Jerry, at effrontery, blows a spray of milk and cereal out of his mouth.
“Are you crazy?” he shouts, eyes ecstatic. “Nobody-uses-the toilet. I-don’t-even-use-the-toilet.”
“Come on, Jerry! I’ve got to use the toilet.”
“What’s wrong with your own toilet? Why do you always have to use my toilet?”
“Come on, Jerry,” Kramer pleads, his body shaking pathologically.
“Nobody ... uses ... the toilet,” Jerry says, his hands rising and falling in emphatic rhythm.
“Just this once! PLEASE, Jerry.”
Kramer’s erect hair is even more highly charged than usual. There is a soft glow of light around its edges, and this makes him appear angelic in an off-beat way. Jerry’s neat appearance is crystallized by a well-ironed, fuchsia, button-down-collar shirt. His stance is one of well-centeredness and control. Not to mention bilateral symmetry.
“Can’t do it,” Jerry says non-chalantly, hands on hips.
“I’m begging you,” Kramer pleads, on his knees, hands clasped in prayer. “For the love of God, Jerry. I’m about to shit my pants.”
“Nope.”
“JERRY! It’s knocking at the door.”
“Can’t do it.”
“You’re killing me, Jerry.”
“Can’t help you,” he says, folding his arms.
“You’ve done it this time. Oh yeah. Now you’ve crossed the line!”
He leaves, slamming the door behind him. Jerry waves him off with a look of bored reproof, then checks his watch. It is precisely 2:00 P.M. Time for the big game. He proceeds to the couch, but is distracted by what appears to be a loose hair, or eyelash, in his field of vision. He stops and attempts to remove the hair, but is unable to fix on its exact location. He fumbles madly for a moment then drops his hands and takes a deep breath.
Elaine stands by the curb, her arms folded, braced against the elements. An anonymous car passes by, splashing her with exhaust-stained slush. Her eyes, nose and mouth twist in womanly peeve. Beneath this mask of trivial emotion, however, is a burning rage.
“You owe me five dollars!” says George, slamming his fist on the newsstand counter. “I want my five dollars.”
“All sales are final,” says the proprietor, an Arab-type. “Besides, you break the seal. How I’m going to sell this magazine now that you break the seal?”
“Alright,” says George, calm now, as if concealing an inferno. “Just give me the five dollars. It’ll be like it never happened.”
“All sales are final,” insists the proprietor.
“Listen, dot-head, no one hustles George Costanza. No one!”
“You are a crazy man. You already read the magazine.”
“Read? Who reads? If I wanted to read I would’ve bought the Times. Do I look like I have an imagination?” He indicates himself. “I mean, come on!”
“I cannot help you,” the proprietor says, turning away.
George stews for a moment, hands on the counter, until his eyes focus on some nearby object. Inspired, his facial features relax in dumb wonderment, and suddenly he has grabbed what appears to be a magazine and vanishes from the scene.
The proprietor turns back to the counter, looking side to side. But it is too late. George has fled.
A car pulls up to the curb, George at the wheel. Elaine opens the passenger side door and gets in. Her tongue pressed against her cheek, she is visibly ticked.
“Alright, alright,” says George, as he pulls away. “So I’m a little late.”
“A little?” mocks Elaine, her lower jaw extended, the lip in a pout. She rolls her eyes.
“Well I had a little problem with that guy who runs the newsstand across from Ella’s.”
“You mean Ali?” she asks, piqued.
“Yeah it turns out he’s a real jerk off. He wouldn’t let me return a magazine.”
“So what happened?” she persists, with girlish enthusiasm.
“I was trying to return that copy of Playboy I bought last week-”
“The Mimi Rogers issue?”
“Yeah.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“Ah, too arty,” he says, shaking his head smugly.
“I saw that issue. She shows plenty.”
“Nope. Not for my money, Elaine.” He shakes his head—there is a glint in his eye—his voice rising climactically. “I pay five dollars, I want gyno.”
“Gyno?” Elaine chortles.
“What? She’s too good for gyno? Plenty of respectable actresses have done gyno! What makes her so special?”
“Name one,” Elaine says, articulating hyperbolically.
“Sharon Stone,” he murmurs.
“Sharon Stone?”
“I know what I saw, Elaine. When she crossed her legs. Boom! GYNO!”
“What ever, George. Anyway, what happened with Ali?”
“He didn’t give me the five dollars.”
“He didn’t?” she says, excited.
“Don’t worry,” George says, smiling, cocking his head. “I took this when he wasn’t looking.”
He points to a magazine on the dashboard. Elaine picks it up and looks at the cover.
“Chicks with Dicks?” she says, incredulous.
She flips through it, and George smiles mischievously.
“You’re wacko.”
“Well, what can I say?” he smirks, shrugging.
“Uh-huh,” she says, the tip of her tongue pressed against her cheek.
She regards him from a distance.
Having buzzed their arrival, George and Elaine open the door—set somewhat ajar by Jerry—and proceed into the apartment. Their boisterous entrée is arrested, however, by the grim visage of a steak knife embedded in Jerry’s eye socket.
“It’s a long story, come on in,” he says, slightly put out.
“Jerry, what happened?” says Elaine, moving toward him solicitously.
“There was a hair, or an eye lash, I don’t know-”
“Did you get it?” asks George, biting into an apple.
“I can’t tell. I’m blind in this eye.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter then.”
“I guess not.”
“Jerry, we’ve gotta get you to a doctor,” says Elaine.
“No, I’ll be alright. It didn’t hit the brain. I don’t think it hit the brain, anyway. I wrote some material for my new act, and the wording is pretty good, maybe even better than before.” His voice achieves a subtle rise in affectation. “Have you ever wondered why people don’t have exoskeletons? Insects have ‘em. You know that crunching sound when you step on a centipede? That’s the exoskeleton. It’s like eating a bowl of cereal, especially Captain Crunch. Except it’s not insects I imagine I’m chewing, but people.
“See, same old observations.”
“Sounds kind of cynical to me,” offers Elaine, cringing a bit.
“Wait, there’s more,” he portentously informs her. Again the same subtle rise ... “What’s the deal with ants-in-the-pants? Where does this come from? Have you ever had ants in the pants? I mean, on your dick?”
“That’s gross, Jerry,” Elaine says.
“Too many questions,” says George, inspecting the apple, then biting into it. “Nobody wants questions,” he continues, mouth full. “You want questions, you live with your mother. ‘George, did you change your underwear? Did you wash your face?’ Nobody wants questions, Jerry. They’re not funny. Do you know what that bitch asked me? She wanted, no, she demanded, to know if I had washed off the smegma. That’s not funny, Jerry. It’s aggravating. It eats away at you. At the soul. If I wasn’t so repressed I would kill her.”
“That’s nice, George. But they’re rhetorical questions.”
“What do I know from rhetorical? A questions a question.”
He throws the apple core away.
“You’re an idiot,” says Elaine.
Pause.
“Me?” he asks, dumbfounded.
“Yeah, you.”
He shrugs.
There is a knock at the door. Jerry, the handle of the steak knife projecting from his eye socket, crosses the room and opens it. But instead of a person, or gnome, as he had expected, there is a brown paper bag consumed in fire. He studies it for a moment, then crosses the room to the kitchen sink. He takes a glass from the cabinet and fills it with water. He raises the glass to the light, frowns slightly, and empties it. There are too many particles. He begins to refill the glass but notices that a residue of some kind, possibly soap, has built up, almost invisibly, around the rim. He puts the glass in the dishwasher and takes another one from the cabinet, which he inspects thoroughly, finding it to contain no flaws or blemishes. None, anyway, that are detectable to the naked eye. He fills the glass and returns to the now barely smoldering paper bag. He pours the water on it and in so doing notices a foul odor. It is not unlike that of human feces. Curious, he dons a pair of latex gloves...
As he realizes that the blood on the front of his shirt is his own, George’s expression becomes one of dumbfounded horror. Again, the spasms in his midsection, then the bilious, bloody onslaught from his mouth—in the background Jerry can be seen kneeling over the paper bag, in fact, poring over it, with, it appears, forceps—“Oh my god, I’m vomiting blood. How can this be?”
Elaine, in reaction to his ashen panic, places her hands on her hips and assumes a bitter look.
“I hypnotized you, you idiot.”
“What?”
“And then I made you eat Ajax.”
“That’s impossible! I don’t eat Ajax.”
“You do in a trance-state. And plenty of it.”
“You’re lying,” he insists, spraying blood.
“Am I?”
“What are you asking me for? I’m bleeding to death,” he says, hysterical.
She walks over to him and runs a finger along the corner of his mouth.
“What do you think these are?” she asks, showing him the bloodstained granules. “Flavor crystals?”
“This is impossible. Why did you do this?”
“Do you realize how long you kept me waiting today? And for what? Virilism, George?” She leans toward him venemously. “That’s Rude.”
George whirls and rushes for the bathroom but is clotheslined by Jerry, dropping him to the floor.
“No bathroom.”
“No bathroom?”
“No bathroom.”
“Right. No bathroom.”
George rises and leaves the apartment.
“So what was that fire all about?” Elaine asks, clapping her hands together.
“I can’t really figure it out. There was a substance in the bag: Feces. And I put it under the microscope. I pretty sure it’s Kramer’s.”
Elaine laughs gaily and Jerry scratches his head in puzzlement.
“Don’t you get it?”
“Get what?”
“It’s a prank, Jerry. You fill up a bag with doodoo, light it on fire, and when the person opens their door and stamps it out they get crap all over their shoes.”
“Wait. They step on the fire?”
“Yeah, Jerry. It’s a natural reaction.”
“I don’t step on fire.”
“What ever, Jerry,” she says, throwing up her hands, exasperated. “Anyway, why’d Kramer do it? Is there something going on between you two?”
“Yeah, he wanted to use the toilet again-”
“Just let him use the damn toilet, Jerry.”
“Nobody ... uses ... the toilet.”
On the floor of the dimly lit bathroom, clutching the toilet bowl, George sees his muted image in the crimson water. He heaves again, flushing the image with blood, bile. For the first time he reflects on his life, on what he has become; and the sickness and shame fill his crystalline eyes.
Elaine attends to the buzz at the intercom.
“Hi, Patrick. Come on up,” she says, whirling around with a smile.
Jerry crosses his arms, steak knife in eye socket.
“So you’re going out with Patrick again.”
“Yep.”
“You two are starting to become quite the item.”
“Have you ever heard the expression tall, dark and handsome? Or millionaire?”
There is a knock and Elaine opens the door to reveal none other than New York Knicks superstar Patrick Ewing. Although he is listed at seven feet, in relation to Jerry and Elaine he is easily nine or ten.
“So are we on for tonight?”
“You bet.”
In fact, as he leans down, presumably to kiss her, it seems for a moment as if he might, mythologically, consume her entire head.
“How are you doing, Jerry?”
“Fine, fine. A little problem with the eye, but...”
He waves it off.
“I’m glad to hear it. By the way, there’s shit in your hallway. Speaking of which, where’s the john?”
“Ahh...”
Elaine looks frantically at Jerry.
Jerry is holding his breath, mouth open pre-verbally.
Patrick.
Jerry.
Elaine.
Patrick.
Jerry.
“Am I missing something, Jerry? Do you have a problem with my using your toilet?”
“Ahh...well...”
He, steak knife in eye socket, appears on a precipice.
“Because if you feel that way, I wish you’d be man enough to say so.”
“I don’t want you to use the toilet.”
“You don’t want me to use the toilet.”
“I wouldn’t even call it a toilet really. It’s more of a-”
“Shit hole?” offers Elaine, hopefully.
“Right,” he says, shrinking from faux pas.
“I realize we’ve only known each other a short time, Jerry. But I’m gonna have to go upside your head.”
The monstrous super-athlete moves on Jerry (Elaine freezes) his giant arm in back stroke, then the open hand like an iron skillet in collision course with Jerry’s skull. Jerry, removing the steak knife from his eye socket, the blade outward, perpendicular to his horse-face, backs away, and Patrick’s hand swings through the blade.
“My shooting hand,” he says, staring in disbelief at the impaled member, as Jerry calmly walks to the window, opens it, and jumps out.
There is a period of silence.
“Elaine, I think your boy just defenestrated himself,” Patrick finally says.
The solitary din of late night traffic, another New York city night, the newsstand proprietor leans, arms propped up on the counter, reading a magazine. He takes a sip of coffee and turns the page, the faint sirens in the background like a perpetual undercurrent of trauma. And through the filter of darkness George Costanza comes to him. Not a word between them, the man puts out his hand, knowingly, and George deposits in his palm a coin of blood.
The proprietor stares down at his hand, his eyes fraught with the probity of suffering. “Welcome to New York,” he seems to be saying, as George, a hushed finger to his lips, turns and descends into darkness.
EPILOGUE:
Jerry addresses the crowd: “You see, it’s not so much minutiae that I’m interested in—the minutiae of everyday life—but pathogens. Pathogens, too, are very, very small...”
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