INSURANCE SALESMAN: Is John home?

YOUR FRIEND: Yes, but I think he’s dead. Let me check. John? Are you dead? YOU: Not yet. Who is it?

YOUR FRIEND: A visitor. YOU: Oh, goody. Send him in. I haven’t had a visitor since poor old Wesley Bumpers came to see me last week. Speaking of whom, I wish you’d get him out of here. He’s beginning to spoil.

INSURANCE SALESMAN: Perhaps I’ve picked a bad time. YOU: Not at all. Come on in. (Here you cough violently, and toss a bucket of giblets into the living room.)

INSURANCE SALESMAN: I just realized I’m late for an important appointment in Belgium. I’ll stop by later. (Holding his breath, he barges out the door.)

If this approach doesn’t work, you should try vicious dogs.

You young couples out there who dream of having your own houses someday have probably read a lot of depressing articles about housing costs. You know:

WASHINGTON—The American Institute of People who Keep Track of These Things released a study today showing that by 1990 the average single-family house will cost eleven million dollars, not counting drapes, and that the only people who will be able to afford houses will be members of the Saudi Arabian royal family and major drug dealers.

Well, cheer up, young couples: You can have your own house. All you need is a large sum of money. The best source of money is your parents. You can get almost anything you want from your parents, provided you’re not afraid to whine. I remember when I was twelve and really needed a BB gun. My parents didn’t want me to have one, on the grounds I might shoot my brother. But I put together a string of about thirty-five days during which I was without question the most sniveling, obnoxious child in the entire world. It got to the point where, to preserve their sanity, my parents had to either give me a BB gun or hire someone to kidnap me. They eventually elected to buy me a BB gun, mainly because it was cheaper. I was so grateful I didn’t shoot my brother for three or four days.

Anyway, your parents probably have a bunch of money rotting away in things like savings accounts and investments and pensions and insurance and retirement homes. So what you should do is follow your parents everywhere—to the supermarket, to work, to parties—tugging at their sleeves and saying “I wanna house.” Sooner or later, because they love you, they’ll give you some money. Or flee to Brazil.

If you can’t get money from your parents, you may be able to get some from a bank. The trouble is that banks prefer to give money to people who already have a lot of it. If you walk into a bank looking like a poverty-stricken young couple whose own parents won’t give them money, the loan officer will drum his fingers impatiently and try to get you out of his office so he can get back to increasing the prime rate. So you want to look wealthy. Wear tuxedos and evening gowns, and act as though you could not care less whether you get any money:

LOAN OFFICER: May I help you? YOU: Yes. We’d like to grab a quick bite of pheasant while Jacques fuels the Mercedes. Could we have a table please?

LOAN OFFICER: I’m sorry, but this is a bank. YOU: A bank? How very quaint. Is it for sale? I should think it would be gobs of fun to have a cozy little bank like this. Our others are so huge.

LOAN OFFICER: Uh, no, I’m afraid it’s not for sale. But I could give you a loan. Would $300,000 do? YOU: Thanks awfully, but we’re all set for today.

LOAN OFFICER: How about $450,000? Please, take it. We can sign the papers later.

If you can’t get money from your parents or a bank, you can build your own house. Anybody can build a house. My father is a Presbyterian minister who knows only the basics of carpentry, and he built the house I grew up in. The only problems are that the house took him about thirty-five years to finish and in many ways looks like it was built by a Presbyterian minister who knows only the basics of carpentry. Also some of the windows have BB-gun holes.

Here is how to build a house:

1. Find some land. You can find empty land all over the place, particularly along interstate highways. Pick out a nice batch of land and watch it for a few days: If nobody seems to be doing anything with it, you can assume it’s okay for you to build a house there.

2. Dig a ditch in the shape of the house. If you run into a lot of rocks and stuff, forget the ditch, You’re going to put a house on top of it anyway, so nobody will know the difference.

3. Get several thousand boards at a lumberyard and nail them together so they form a house. (NOTE: Do not do this at the lumberyard.)

If you don’t want to go to all this trouble, you can just put up a crude hut made of animal skins or mud and twigs. No matter what you build, you’ll be able to sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few years, when you need the money to get your children to stop following you around saying “I wanna house.”

Here are three types of people you should not trust:

People who tell you God told them to tell you to send them money. You know the guys I mean. They get on television and say: “God told me He wants you to send me some money, say $100, or even just $10, if that’s all you can afford, but in all honesty I must point out that God is less likely to give you some horrible disease if your gift is in the $100 range.”

The theory here seems to be that God talks only to the guys on television. I always thought that if God needed money all that badly, He would get in touch with us directly.

My wife gets a lot of letters from people who say God told them to tell her to send them money. She got a great one recently from Brother Leroy Jenkins, who is evidently one of the people God goes to when He needs a lot of money. Leroy is very straightforward:

The Lord spoke to me to have you send a one-time large gift. Will you send me $1,000, or $500, or $100, or even $5,000 ... If you are not able to send all of the $1,000, $500, $100 or $5,000 now, send as much as you can, and make a vow to the Lord that you will send an offering of $20 (or at least $10) each month.

Notice you make the vow to the Lord, but you send the money to Leroy. Leroy doesn’t specify what he plans to do with it, but he does tell you to send it to him at the Walden Correctional Institution in South Carolina, where he is serving a twelve-year term for criminal conspiracy. I imagine God advised him to get a good lawyer.

People who say they want to do things for the Public. I have yet to locate the Public: All I ever see is people. Nevertheless, some people are certain there’s a Public out there somewhere, sort of like the Lost Continent of Atlantis, and they keep trying to do things for it. Generally, these things consist of taking money away from people to help the Public, or passing laws prohibiting people from doing things that most people see nothing wrong with, but that are not in the Public Interest. For example:

The federal government helps the Public by taking ever larger amounts of money away from most people. The theory is that if the government didn’t step in, people would spend the money on things they want, which would cause inflation, which would be bad for the Public. So the government takes the money and (surprise!) spends it. Most states protect the Public by limiting people to only one telephone company, electric company, and so on. This is Good for the Public. It is not to be confused with monopolies, which are Bad for the Public. Your really enlightened states protect the Public by prohibiting everybody but the state from operating liquor or gambling businesses. These businesses are considered Bad if people operate them, but Good if the state does, even though the only real difference is that state liquor stores have high prices, poor selection, and all the charm of unwashed junior-high school locker rooms; and state gambling games offer sucker odds and idiot advertisements that appeal most to people who can least afford to throw money away.