Make War, Not Breasts

Cavazos, too, insisted that boob jobs are not used to lure women into the Armed Forces. He said that after the free military breast augmentations first became public, his office called the recruiting command and told them, “Hey, you need to talk to your recruiters. If it’s happening, it needs to cease.”

He also said, “We don’t run a make-over medical facility.”

Cavazos hadn’t heard about the protest and didn’t know who Mary Carey was, but he explained that the military offers a limited number of boob jobs, liposuctions and other cosmetic procedures, not to gain new recruits, but rather to train military surgeons. “There are very few plastic surgeons throughout the entire Army. Very few cosmetic surgeries are conducted annually, and the reason that a lot of them are done is to ensure that the soldiers maintain their skills, because we’re getting a lot of wounded soldiers that need reconstructive surgery.”

I asked Kulkis if his company and we in the media might actually be helping the Pentagon recruit women who want boob jobs by giving it all of this free publicity.

“I never thought of that,” he said, then added, “We’ll try to make it such negative publicity that they can’t possibly get any benefit from it.”

Did Carey feel as though she reached anyone with her message?

“I think I definitely reached a lot

of . . . men.”

—Dan Kapelovitz

Throw Your Hands in the Air

A few Saturdays ago, I was on my way to a friend’s girlfriend’s birthday party when I realized that I didn’t have a present. I’m piss broke, so instead of showing up empty-handed, I figured I’d go to 7-Eleven and pick up a cheap polyester rose with melted plastic to simulate dew and pass it off as a joke present. Plus, I could get some smokes and a coffee to wake me up for the evening.

A bunch of Arabic-looking guys were huddled around the ATM machine when I showed up, and a couple of stoned white chicks showed up to score some Ding Dongs, one of them wearing a tube top that made you think everything would just flop out if she had to raise her hand. Then there was the 5-foot-high gangsta with a voice like Mickey Rooney.

As I waited, faux rose in hand, to buy my cigs, six squad cars peeled up into the parking lot. One of the white chicks ducked behind the counter. Good instincts on her part, since a bevy of cops emptied out of the cars, guns raised, and introduced themselves with a symphony of clickety-clack.

No explanation. Just a few minutes wherein cops pointed guns and 7-Eleven patrons wondered what the fuck was going on.

“Exit the store with your hands up!” shouted a voice through the megaphone. We all wondered if he was talking to us. None of us was doing anything but buying coffee and doughnuts. We guessed he was talking to all of us. So I set down my coffee and faux rose and then, hands raised, marched out of the building with the rest of them.

Hands raised . . . I kept an eye on the tube top.

“Back up, slowly!” the cops commanded behind us. They slapped a set of cuffs on me. I still couldn’t figure out why any of this was happening, except that it might be a late-night exercise in coppery. You know, practice.

“We got a call saying that this place was being held up with a shotgun,” the cop intimated to me. “Did you see anything like this going on?”

If I were the cop, I would assume that victims of a holdup would be much more alarmed than I was, but it seemed too obvious a point to make at the time. Especially since I couldn’t figure out why I had these cuffs on me, anyway.

All of us were marched off to the curb and commanded to kneel on the ground, where I was hoping that the shattered bottles weren’t going to pierce through my jeans. I couldn’t help but think about Arabs not doing so well in these situations since 9/11, so I kept an eye out for abuses to occur.

A line of cops crept toward the store, guns raised. Clickety-clickey-clack.

“Don’t shoot this way. Shoot this way,” commanded one cop. It was appearing more and more like a shootout was going to take place, despite the fact that nobody was left in the store but the Slurpee machine.

“This isn’t how I want to become famous,” I thought.

We waited on the curb awhile, expecting all pandemonium to break loose when the cops found . . . nothing! Jack shit! Nada!

I wanted a smoke.

When they let us go, I went back in to get my coffee. All seemed well and good until we discovered that a crime had, in fact, taken place.

A cop had taken the white chick’s Ding Dongs.

—A.J. Riley