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gave him a scorching case of herpes.”
    Yeah, she’s a Yankee blue blood from nine to five, but behind her back everybody knows she went to high school in Springburg where the whole football team knew her as Douche Lamprini.
    This time the nasty wig stays in place. The colonial governor gives up glowering at us and goes inside the Customs House. The tourists wander on to other photo opportunities. It starts to rain.
    “It’s okay, dude,” Denny says. “You don’t have to stand out here with me.”
    This is just, for sure, another shitty day in the eighteenth century.
    You wear an earring, you go to jail. Color your hair. Pierceyour nose. Put on deodorant. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect jack shit.
    The Lord High Governor bends Denny over at least twice a week, for chewing tobacco, for wearing cologne, shaving his head.
    Nobody in the 1730s had a goatee, His Governess will lecture Denny.
    And Denny will sass him back, “Maybe the real cool colonists did.”
    And it’s back to the stocks for Denny.
    Our joke is Denny and me have been codependent since 1734. That’s how far back we go. Since we met in a sexaholics meeting. Denny showed me an ad in the classifieds, and we both came to the same job interview.
    Just being curious, at the interview, I asked if they’d hired a village whore yet.
    The town council just looks at me. The hiring committee, even where nobody can see them, all six old guys wear those fake colonial wigs. They write everything with feathers, from birds, dipped in ink. The one in the middle, the colonial governor, sighs. He leans back so he can look at me through his wire-framed glasses. “Colonial Dunsboro,” he says, “doesn’t have a village whore.”
    Then I say, “Then how about the village idiot?”
    The governor shakes his head, no.
    “Pickpocket?”
    No.
    “Hangman?”
    Certainly not.
    This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.
    “You’ve been warned,” the governor says, “that all aspects of your behavior and appearance must coincide with our official period in history.”
    My job is I’m supposed to be some Irish indentured servant. For six dollars an hour, it’s incredibly realistic.
    The first week I was here, a girl got canned for humming an Erasure song while she was churning butter. It’s like, yeah, Erasure is historic, but not historic enough. Even somebody as ancient as the Beach Boys can get you in trouble. It’s like they don’t even think of their stupid powdered wigs and breeches and buckle shoes as
retro.
    His Highness, he forbids tattoos. Nose rings have to stay in your locker while you’re at work. You can’t chew gum. You can’t whistle any songs by the Beatles.
    “Any violation of character,” he says, “and you will be punished.”
    Punished?
    “You’ll be let go,” he says. “Or you can spend two hours in the stocks.”
    Stocks?
    “In the village square,” he says.
    He means bondage. Sadism. Role playing and public humiliation. The governor himself, he makes you wear clocked stockings and tight wool breeches with no underwear and calls this authentic. This is who wants women bent over in the stocks for just wearing nail polish. Either that or you’re fired with no unemployment checks, nothing. And a bad job reference to boot. And for sure, nobody wants it on their résumé that they were a shitty candlemaker.
    Being unmarried twenty-five-year-old guys in the eighteenth century, our options were pretty limited. Footman. Apprentice. Gravedigger. Cooper, whatever that is. Bootblack, whatever thatis. Chimneysweep. Farmer. The minute they say town crier, Denny said, “Yeah. Okay. I can do that. Really, I spend half my life crying.”
    His Highness looks at Denny and says, “Those glasses you’re wearing, do you need them?”
    “Only to see with,” Denny says.
    I took the job because there are worse