Der Spookhaus

First Job

2012-01-18T02:45:00.004-05:00

As a teenager, I worked in a Bonanza Sirloin Pit. This was a franchised steak house where I had to wear a burnt orange, polyester shirt stenciled with horses and covered wagons and a chocolate-brown chef's hat. In comparison, this made the ravages of acne seem compassionate.

My friend Glen and I had this thing going on at the time where we would answer the phone (back in the days before caller I.D.) with a long, drawn-out "Hal-owwwwwwww?" in a stupid voice just to make each other laugh. Since, mostly, we were the only ones who called one another it was a pretty safe bet. But of course, the day Bonanza Sirloin Pit called, responding to my application for employment, I did the usual:

"Hal-owwwwwwwwww?"
"What?"

At this point you would think, recognizing a strange, female voice, I would have shifted strategies. But you would be wrong. At sixteen, I was an idiot. Not that much has changed.

"Hal-owwwwwwwww?" I repeated.
"Uh, this is Shannon Doherety from Bonanza Sirloin Pit. May I speak to ChaCha Puddlewinks?"
"Um, uh, yeah, hal-owwwwww, I mean hello, it's me."
"We'd like you to come in for an interview on blah blah blah" and so it was arranged. I did,I was hired and supposedly it was my first job. As it turned out, it was just another opportunity to spread my overreaching sense of Puddlewinksness to a wider audience. Not what they, nor any other employer since, had in mind.

The manager and I were poles apart. He was a surly, middle aged man of few words. I was a flamboyant sixteen-year-old who would not shut the fuck up. He liked wrestling. I liked hand puppets. We did not see eye to eye.

My best friend from junior high, Larry, had left our crazy Christian school and had moved on to a competing crazy Christian school and I hadn't seen him for a few years. Imagine my delight to find he was also working at the same Bonanza Sirloin Pit. We reconnected and it was fun all over again.

Thing is, Larry's parents fucking hated me. They had a daughter who had died, tragically, of cancer and the grieving father had printed up several thousand copies of a gospel tract called "Gerri's Wish For You" which was a folder with the daughter's school picture on the front and inside was the story of the girl getting bone cancer and on her deathbed wishing that everyone would know God's plan of
salvation...basically saying "my daughter died of cancer so if you don't adopt my religious opinions you are a heartless bastard." Personally, I think if there is a God he took her so that siblings wouldn't have to go through life being known as Larry and Gerri. But seventh grade me took an ink pen and blacked out the eyes on the cover photo so that they were hollow sockets and drew flaps of flesh
sagging off her face so that the picture looked like a rotting corpse. Larry thought it was funny but like a fool put it in his pocket and forgot to take it out. His mom was doing the laundry, found it and was not amused. Can't imagine why, but Larry's parents labeled me a bad influence and we were forbidden to be friends anymore.

So Larry didn't tell his folks I was working at Bonanza Sirloin Pit.

Another friend, Donavon, was in my class at school and also worked there. Donovan was funny and appreciated the concept of taking an obscure non-joke and running it the fuck into the ground. His father was somehow involved in distributing the Tastycake line of products, which were not available in our small, West Virginia town, so he would constantly sneak Tastycake promotional materials into my desk, book bag or whatever and wait for me to find them, which I found hilarious.

My first day at work: I am in the back room. Donavon is loading steak into the freezer. I see a couple of salad tongs, grab them and start clicking them like castanets while doing a mad dance. Suddenly Donovan freezes mid-laughter and I know someone is behind me. It's John Hunt, the surly manager. "Get out there and bus some tables when you're done doing the calypso..."

So then Larry and I come up with this great, customer-disorienting thing. When you arrive at Bonanza Sirloin Pit, the first thing you do is place your order with the nerd in the chocolate-brown chef's hat at the front of the line, who repeats your order into a microphone so that the cooks can throw your cheap piece of meat on the grill and cook it to your precious, exacting specifications.

I was the idiot at the microphone. But when I said, "May I help you?" it was actually Larry, crouched behind the counter, saying that while I mouthed the words. It came off as a live-action version of a badly dubbed foreign film. Customers knew something wasn't right, but could not put their finger on precisely what it was and the resulting expressions were priceless. The standard follow-up questions: "How
would you like that cooked?" "Do you want fries or a baked potato" "Salad or a vegetable?" were given the same treatment. The customers became more and more flustered, and in some cases visibly hostile (because dumb people always react with anger to things they don't understand.) If you can find a way to mess with the general public's sensory experience, I highly recommend it.

Other incidents were a little more overt. In order to make the strawberry shortcake, you had to slice fresh strawberries into a vat of red, industrial polymer that passed as 'glaze'. I had on rubber kitchen gloves, was mixing the stuff together, then raised my hands out of the bucket, dripping with red goo. My friend was at the microphone, and I burst out of the swinging kitchen
door, in full view of the customers, gooey gloved hands raised, shouting, "Congratulations, Larry! It's a boy!"

There were complaints.

We had our company Christmas party and I got two gifts: A blow up sex doll from Secret Santa and a Rocky Horror Picture Show poster of Frank-N-Furter in front of the RKO tower from Donovan. I took them home and Mom and Dad laughed at the sex doll and I threw the poster in the back of a drawer, forgetting about it. Some months later I came home from school and there was the poster taped to the front of my bedroom door. Crazy Christian mom had scrawled across it, in black
magic marker, "Avoid all appearances of evil (1 Thessalonians 5:22)" Uh oh. I was staring at it and she came popping out from around the corner like something from a slasher movie, no doubt lying in wait for an hour or so until I got home to see it and started in on her carefully rehearsed tirade. A blow-up naked woman, hey, we'll laugh it off. A fully dressed man in fishnets: ABOMINATION!!!

Oh god, it was dreadful. Scripture references projectile vomiting from her mouth one after the other; threats of eternal damnation, and worse, getting grounded. While I've never harbored a desire to be a sweet transvestite, maybe in that poster she saw in terms of deviant sexuality, which way the wind was blowing. Too bad I didn't.

Donovan came home with me after work. We went down and hung out in our basement. I had not yet put words to my impulses, but knew I wanted to get his medium-rare T-bone out and do things with it, even if we were wearing burnt orange polyester shirts. My confused, clueless and clumsy strategy was this:

"The itsy-bitsy spiiiiiiider...."

Here I did the usual thing of putting your thumb and fingertips together, splaying your other fingers wide open and wriggling your hands back and forth in hopes it resembles an arachnid.

"Climbed up the water spout..."

My finger spider crawled up his pants leg.

"Down came the rain..."

It moved across his crotch. He definitely had a hard-on.

"And washed the spider out..."

He got up, left without speaking, and continued to not speak for the rest of our time at Bonanza Sirloin Pit, our remaining year at school, or forever. He did paste a Tastycake thing into my senior yearbook, but refused to speak. I'm told at university he immediately enrolled in ROTC.

Back at Bonanza Sirloin Pit, I had burned my finger on the grill and had a blister the size of a Good N' Plenty. I'd pricked it with a needle, and when customers would approach me with attitude for no reason I would squeeze it and cause the lymph fluid to squirt out and hose down the back of their neck and shirt. I would then meet them at the drink fountain and if they demanded extra ice I would say "I only have ice for you" then give them a second squirting from the blister of vengeance as they made their way down the line.

Larry got caught jerking off into the Ranch dressing vat used for the salad bar. People knew we were friends and came to me, expecting some sort of explanation.

"Hey," I said, "It's Larry's wish for you."

With Friends Like You, Who Needs.....

2012-01-07T08:25:00.001-05:00

It was my first year of Radiology school. Not something I would have chosen for myself, but Mom and Dad made it clear that in no way would they pay for a college education, since they did that once and it resulted in my oldest brother growing his hair and doing the whole hippie thing (never mind every other kid in the country was doing that; they needed a scapegoat and advanced education was clearly the culprit.) My middle brother, though, was wise enough to not let them know who he really was and kiss their collective conservative ass every step of the way. He’d become a Raidologic Technologist and was making good money. My parents saw this as the only career path for anyone and told me if I followed in my brother’s footsteps they would pay for it. College, no. Saint Mary’s School of X-Ray Technology, yes. Plus they gave a stipend of $38.26 every two weeks. My crazy Christian high school wanted us all to go to Bob Jones University and never, not once, explained the concept of student loans. I was eighteen and seriously thought my only choices in life were going to X-ray school or working at Bonanza Sirloin Pit for the rest of my life. Wait now, someone is going to pay me $38.26 every two weeks to go to school? Sign me up.

Actually, I had a brochure from a college in California that offered courses in animation. That’s what I wanted to do. Mom and Dad looked at it and rolled their eyes; clearly drawing frame-by-frame stuff would lead to drugs.

So I ended up in goddamn X-ray school. It was probably more flip-flopped than it should have been: You would spend the first half of your day out on the floor, helping people who knew what they were doing take X-rays, then spend the second half in a classroom learning about Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen. You understand, now it takes a four-year college degree to become a Radiologic Technologist, but back in the day anyone with the ability to ask “How would you like your steak cooked?” could go through a two-year program and be trusted with equipment that can sterilize someone instantly.

My first day, thrown onto the hospital floor without a clue in the world: To this day I cannot explain what I saw. The completely wrong, politically incorrect term used at the time and place was “monster.” Now, I have worked with people with disabilities for years and have learned to hate people who dismiss others outside their own experience with a vengeance. Having gone through that, though, my memory of my first day and my first patient makes me shudder.

It was, oh, I don’t know but I guess, a four-year-old girl with flippers for arms and flippers for legs. Most of her baby teeth were somehow broken off. She was screaming and screaming and who could blame her? She was strapped to an X-ray table with no clue what was going on. Apparently there was a kidney problem, because she was scheduled for an IVP. This stands for intravenous pyelogram; a procedure to view a patient’s urinary tract system. In order to do this, a substance called a contrast medium is injected into the bloodstream to enable the body parts to show up on the X-ray. A syringe and a tourniquet were shoved into my hands. I thought, fuck, there’s gotta be someone more qualified to do this. I was on the learning curve, so a Tech talked me through it. I wrapped the rubber tube around the flipper. I found the vein and slipped the needle in. Crazed screaming and jerking, causing the needle to rip the flesh and the girl’s parents, present in the room, to shout loudly. Then I went to class an learned some shit about physics.

Day two: I remember both names to this day but I will only tell you this: Her name was Connie. ER brought her in on a stretcher. She was sitting where she shouldn’t have been; in the middle in the front seat without a belt and a collision occurred. Owing to God’s terrific sense of humor, the gearshift shoved up her vagina and shattered her pelvis at the same moment the windshield did the same to her face. ‘Cause that’s the secret of cosmic comedy: timing.

Oh ha, Puddlewinks is off his nut again. No, fucker, it actually happened. Word. Then I went back to class and learned about nuclear medicine.

I got put on barium enema duty. This is how you take an X-ray of someone’s colon; you fill their ass full of barium and it will show up on a radiographic image. Seven in the morning, I’m spreading some geriatric’s cheeks and looking at her winking brown-eye. What a great way to start the day. I lube up the plastic tip and shove it home. The old woman writhes. Another feel-good moment.

“I was an English teacher,” she starts, but at this point I’m inflating the Bardex and her sentence stops short. A Bardex is a brand name for a balloon-like device attached to the enema tip. You insert it into the patient’s rectum and use a squeeze bulb to fft, fft, fft, blow it up and it swells up internally and blocks off the colon, preventing the enema from being prematurely discharged. Or so goes the working theory.

The thing about X-ray Techs, and perhaps the only skill I’ve retained from all those years ago, is this: they can look you up and down and know for certain whether or not you can hold an enema. Trust me, right now, you can look me in the eye and I will know whether or not to just plug it in and go or administer the ol’ fft, fft, fft.

The thing about a barium enema is it’s no small ordeal. It’s not like a squeeze-bulby thing; there’s a big honking bag full of contrast media that flows in and completely fills your bowels. Imagine a bowling bag full of liquid chalk streaming into your ass. There ya go.

But this woman, the English teacher, was determined to put up the good fight. She was going to show no fear. Understand—because this is how it is always done—the lubing up, insertion and pumping of the Bardex happened way before the doctor, the radiologist, was present. The X-ray techs get the dirty work out of the way and then the doctor shows up and stares an the monitor, whistling, grunting and making hand signals to indicate which way he wants the patient to be positioned.

I prided myself on knowing this certain doctor’s particular gestures; it was like knowing American Sign Language for only one person. Whistle-whistle and a hand flip meant ‘barium on’—disengage the locked valve from the tubing and release the flow from the bag. Whistle, shake-shake meant I should ask the patient to reposition.

The enema was shooting into the old woman’s bowels and I said, “Okay, roll over and lay on your left side.”

“Lie!”

The woman was clearly in discomfort. Who wouldn’t be? But no, I had to tell the truth and do what the radiologist wanted.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am. We just need you to roll over and lay on your left side.”

“Lie!” she gasped as her intestines were filling with fluid. “It’s lie!” The inflated Bardex shot out of her ass with an audible pop and the contents of her large intestine hosed down the other tech at the end of the table. She groaned and moaned but managed to bark out, “Roll over and LIE on your left side. Not lay; LIE!”

You would think, Sir, you have no more ghastly barium enema stories to tell. But you would be wrong:

The place at which I trained was a Catholic hospital. There was a convent on the premises. One of the nuns had some gastrointestinal distress and was scheduled for a barium enema. Of course, no one, male nor female was going to shove a plastic thing up a nun’s ass so it was agreed we would all wait outside while she did the actual insertion herself. The doctor, the other tech and I stayed in the hall and after a reasonable time one of us knocked, barely cracked the door and asked, “Are you ready?”

“I’m ready.”

We went in and there was the nun who had modestly covered herself with several hospital gowns and a blanket. Doctor did his hand flippy thing, meaning ‘barium on.’ NOTHING showed up on the fluoroscope but jets of barium were shooting all over the table.

She’d stuck it in her vagina.

Not My First Kiss, But Kinda Of An Important One

2012-01-06T13:57:00.001-05:00

There was this girl.

Her name was Nell Phillips, and in sixth grade she was a pariah and for no real reason. You know grade-school kids: they will target one person out of nowhere to be the ostracized community joke and she was it. I can’t imagine what it would be like to walk in her shoes back then; all you did was exist and suddenly the rest of the world as you knew it hated you for that one simple fact. I was an eight-year-old bastard. I went along with it—probably for the same reason everyone else did—as long as they are talking about HER they might not notice what a freak I am.

It was my brother’s high school graduation. Somehow, I ended up sitting next to Nell. Her sister was on the roster as well. Partly because the whole thing was so desperately boring, but mostly because I did not want to be seen in her company, I turned to her and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.” We scampered off. Of course at that age I was too clueless to get that us being seen leaving together by the other grade school kids with siblings graduating in the gymnasium could be viewed as an alliance with the horrid Nell.

We ended up on a staircase. She was funny, made me laugh and unfortunately anyone, to this day who can do that, makes me want to kiss them. So I did. I wrapped my arms around her and planted one on her face. I was in sixth grade, so you can imagine how inelegant this display of affection might have been. I don’t think any tongues were involved. Didn’t matter; at that age I might as well been Ron Jeremy. Got some; but then oh shit: I just lip locked Nell Phillips, whom the whole world hates.

Grade school on Monday was not fun. People saw; they talked. “Hey now,” I lied, “ I just left with her so I could make fun of her. You know me—I’m the insult king!” (Sadly, a reputation that has not left me. It must be true, then. Apparently I’m a dick on all counts.) My protestations worked. The kids bought it. Nell tried to talk to me but because other sixth-graders were watching me, I ignored her. She looked crestfallen, probably because she thought there was one kid in her school that didn’t hate her but then I pulled the rug out from under her and she was back to being the fucking joke for everyone.

We all got out of grade school and went our separate ways.

Nell went to high school, things got a little but not much better and I landed in koo-koo Christian academy. Years passed and the neighbor boy I was having sex with was a friend with Nell so I ended up seeing her again. She rocked. Hysterically funny, still, not bad looking at all. We ended up, alone, in her bedroom. She was playing me Rick Springfield cuts that never made it to the radio—to this day I will concede they were cool as shit. I was eighteen and trying to prove to myself I wasn’t gay despite an overriding fondness for cocksucking, so it happened again, all these years later: I grabbed her, wrapped my arms around her waist and planted one on her. This time tongues were definitely involved.

She shoved away. “What the hell are you doing?” To me, the answer to the question was obvious (ignoring the subtext, of course.) “Hey,” I said, which was all I could really think of to say at that moment.

“No. NO!” she said.

I replayed this to friends I wasn’t fucking as “Oh my God, I was making out with Nell and she just went crazy right in the middle of it.” At eighteen, I was still a sixth-grader.

Things have changed a little. Just not as much as I wish.

Franklin

2012-01-06T02:42:00.003-05:00

Okay, I lied. One more fictional horror story and then it's back to the stuff out of life that embarrasses the hell out of me but is posted anyway for the amusement of others. One of my favorite comic strips is from Maakies, where Uncle Gabby says "Ha Ha Ha!" Drunky Crow says "What are you laughing at?" To which Gabby replies, "Oh, just the sheer horror of being alive." This might explain why my last few attempts at writing horror stories are all pretty much the SAME story, just with different characters. I really didn't notice this until after they were all done and posted; now I just think, Gawd, what a hack. But I'm putting this one up because I came up with both the idea and the title when I was in high school. I wrote an early draft--not that what you're getting here is all that much better--but kind of wanted to put it out there as a favor as a favor to my gawky teenage self. It's not really the venue I'm suited for, apparently. Trust me, I will go back to the Mostly True Stories soon enough--cause I've had a lot of them in the past year and just need to get to the point where they start being funny instead of hurting and dicking with my head. Time always makes this happen and I think I'm closer than I have been. But for now, my high school me is happy to give you this:

-----------
FRANKLIN

There is a tiny, white worm burrowing out of one of the pores of my arm. Somehow, I know its name is Franklin. I can’t see either situation being any good.

It started a few days ago. There was this weird bump on my arm that itched like crazy and I kept scratching at it and scratching at it and it took up all my thoughts where I couldn’t talk to people for very long because all I wanted to do was go somewhere and use my fingernail to dig at that place on my arm but no, they wanted to talk about work shit or politics or why I wasn’t dating anyone and really I wanted them all to go away so I could go somewhere and scratch this red, raised thingy on my arm. It was like having a popcorn husk wedged between the back of your teeth that your tongue can’t quite get at. Only instead of just bugging you it became something that actually hurts. As if the popcorn shell had shoved up under your gums and was starting to bleed and perhaps was pressing against a nerve. It was more than an annoyance; I knew something was medically wrong.

Thing is, I could see something moving under there. Beneath the surface of my skin, under this place on my arm where my flesh was stretched taught like a particularly infected pimple, I could see a rippling movement. Worse yet, I could feel it. There was something wriggling around close to the bone. Deep within my arm I felt something moving and I wanted to get it out. No wonder I could barely talk to anyone.

I was home, scratching and rubbing my forearm. I threw my coat off and sprinted for my desk, rummaging through the drawers until I found an Exacto knife. I should have boiled it for a half an hour or at least poured rubbing alcohol on it, but fuck that. I shoved the blade into the hurting spot on my arm and split it wide open. Lymph fluid squirted out and drained all over the place. There it was, a wriggling, tiny white worm, the size and diameter of a teency hunk of vermicelli. I knew its name was Franklin. Goddamnit, don’t ask me to explain this because I can’t. I just sort of knew in my head, the same way I know when someone behind my back is staring at me, that this maggoty thing crawling out of my arm was called Franklin. It talked to me somewhere in my mind. It said things.

Yes, of course, I used a pair of tweezers to try and pull it out. Franklin didn’t like that. I convulsed on the floor for a while; the worm did things to the inside of my head to teach me a lesson. My body responded in kind. I don’t know how long I was in that state, jerking around, twitching and hitting the back of my head on the bathroom tiles but when I came out of it there was foamy froth from my mouth soaking all down the front of my shirt. Good thing it was a weekend.

We eventually arrived at a truce. Franklin stayed, emerged halfway out of the pore in my arm and the other half NOT against the bone or a nerve (so that he itched like crazy but no longer caused any pain) and I would not try to use any implements to extract him further. But the itching, oh god, the itching. Unfair.

A very sleepless night, made worse that I’d run out of cigarettes. The corner store didn’t open til five in the morning, but that wasn’t going to be much of a problem since the overwhelming desire to scratch that certain place in my arm—an act made clear that was now forbidden—would prevent me from falling asleep. At 4:55 I put on my coat, went outside and started walking. I had my lighter in my pocket; as soon as I stepped out of the store I was going to burn one and feel the nicotine rush. On the way, though, a small, yapping poodle ran up and started barking at me like the small scrap of fur could actually defend its territory.

“You hate poodles, don’t you?” This was the Franklin voice and I wasn’t happy to be hearing from it again.
“Yes, I hate poodles,” I said.
“Why don’t you do something about it?”
Well now this was just stupid. I hate cocoanut, too, but I’m not moved to ‘do’ anything about it, other than not eat it.
“No, I think you ought to do something about it.”
“I don’t think a dog—“ I started, but then reached down and grabbed the yappy beast by the neck. I started to squeeze.
“No, we need a quicker fix,” said Franklin.
So I grasped both of the dog’s hind legs together and swung it over and over, making sure it’s head made swift, repeated contact with the sharp, curbed corners of the green dumpster until it stopped barking and no longer moved. I was just about to throw the lifeless body of the annoying dog into the trash receptacle, but then Franklin spoke up:
“I’m hungry.”
“What?”
“I’m hungry.”
I knew, I absolutely knew this was not what I wanted to do, but nevertheless pressed the dogs bloodied, open head against my mouth and started sucking like Traci Lords. I felt the warm poodle blood go coursing down my throat, and just before I would have thrown up…I noticed the itching in my arm had not only subsided but stopped all together. The relief was so overwhelming that I just kept sucking down whatever came into my mouth, spitting out bone fragments as needed.
The globules of brain were a lot like swallowing semen.

I got my cigarettes. It was a secondary pleasure. It was though the worm, satiated, were sleeping. So, standing in the corner store parking lot, I slid the lever so my Bic lighter was at full flame. I pressed it against the section of my arm containing the half-out Franklin. I screamed as my flesh became cauterized but I heard a separate screaming in my brain as the exposed part of the worm curled into a blackened crisp. After that, in my head: radio silence.

I made it home, the rest of Sunday was lovely, although I drank a lot.

Now it is Monday morning and I’m taking a shower; getting ready to head into the office. I look down, and there’s a tiny, white worm burrowing out of my meatus, the slit in the head of my penis from which I pee and ejaculate. Her name is Bethany, coincidentally the same name of a girl I once loved who never loved me back. She itches and is painful and keeps telling me how much I hate my boss.

I’m about ready to flick my Bic. Or I might just go into work and see my boss.

And Now A Word From Your Sponsor

2012-01-02T20:36:00.002-05:00

Yeah, I know, it's like I've ignored this thing for a year and suddenly there are two hopefully disturbing things in one day. I'm all right; Joe suggested I do something in a different vein and so I did. I will return to the usual comedy ha-ha soon enough. Just wanted to try my hand at writing horror stories; I think the evidence speaks that I should stick to what I know. But, lousy or not it did get me back on the blog. So I'll see you soon, ok?

Coffin Nails

2012-01-02T20:32:00.002-05:00

I really wish I could quit smoking. It’s a habit I can’t afford, makes me smell funny and most people don’t like it at all. I’ve tried the patches, the gum, the lozenges; no going. Can’t shake it. Thing is, from everything I’ve read it’s probably going to kill me eventually. That might even be why I can’t stop: knowing it’s the coward’s way of offing himself. No blood-drenched body for friends and family to find; just a guy in a hospital bed who brought it on himself. It’s not that I really want to die. I’m just not all that wild about living.

But that seems so romantically glorious compared to the real thing. It’s four-thirty in the morning and I’m out of cigs. Watching the minutes tick by on the little clock in the corner of the computer screen, waiting for six A.M. when the corner store opens and I can go buy some more with money I don’t really have. I’ve already sifted through the trash and re-smoked the last of the butts I’ve thrown away and all of life is focused on buying that fresh, new pack. But it’s not even five and the store doesn’t open for more than an hour and there’s no space in my head for anything other than cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes. Damn.

Time crawls but eventually gets there. I take the short cut, walking through graffiti-slathered alleys to get to the damn store. I have ransacked couch cushions and dresser drawers to scrape up enough change. I don’t have enough to buy my usual—itself a low-rent, knockoff, bargain brand. I scan the counter and see a pack of Cassandras—some low, low priced import things I’ve never heard of. But the price is right and it’s full-flavor and promises to be packed with nicotine goodness so I don’t care. “A pack of Cassandras, please,” I say as though I’m purchasing a diamond bracelet at Tiffany’s.

I get outside and rip the cellophane off the top of the pack right then and there in the parking lot. With shaking hands, I fish one out, put it to my lips and light it up. The nicotine receptors in my brain fire off like bottle rockets and thank me profusely. But then, strange thought: something about a dead little girl.

I make my way back down the alleys and, momentarily, all seems right with the world. That first smoke of the day. I’m not a loser shuffling through a gravel-covered alley; I’m Cole Porter in a swanky, thirties nightclub and the toast of the town. I’m the top. This one thing dangling from my lips has made all the difference.

I get back to my street. Uh oh. Flashing lights all around and I arrive just in time to see a tiny, sheet-covered body being loaded into the coroner’s van. A neighbor, some guy I never met, is openly weeping. Seems his seven-year-old daughter was out in the street and hit by a Pepsi truck. I hear the crowd of onlookers telling the story. Something about a dead little girl.

I’m back in my room. I peep out the window blinds and see most of the crowd has gone away. The man, the neighbor, is still there just staring at an empty spot in the middle of the street. Shit, I think, I need a cigarette. Because this is how it works: I never WANT a cigarette; I always NEED them. I’m stressed—I need a cigarette. I’m bored—I need a cigarette. I’m wishing I was dead—I’ll bet a cigarette would help. I need this. I deserve this. And so on.

So I got out my pack of Cassandras and lit one up, studying the package like a grade school kid reading the back of a cereal box while he eats breakfast. Again, that first hit did everything it was supposed to do. But a weird, fleeting thought: an old woman vomiting blood.

I could not shake this thought. Now I’ve had trouble with thoughts like these in the past: they show up for no reason and don’t go away. This one, though, was different. I could see it happening, felt like it was real and knew I was powerless to do anything about it. Again and again, my mind’s eye replayed the picture of an elderly woman clutching the edge of a sink and puking blood into it. I noticed the connection: every time I lit a cigarette I would see her, larger and more vivid. Her grey bun of hair had become untangled, one strand, blood-soaked, was trailing into the sink as she coughed up crimson in loud, racking sobs. Her eyes were clenched tightly shut although smeared with her own tears, running down her face and smearing her rouge and face powder. She kept banging on the sink with her heavily veined fist, a fresh eruption of blood would shoot from her mouth, she’d scream and finally drop to the floor. I kept seeing this.

My boss did not show up for work the next day. His mother had killed herself by drinking Sani-Flush.

This was horrible, cruel news. A few co-workers and I went out on the porch for smoke break. Gary was saying, “Yeah, I just don’t know how you can live with something like that…” and as I took a drag I saw him, I fucking saw him, go into his daughter’s bedroom and unzip his pants.

This is the part where I am losing it and don’t know what to do. There exists the real possibility that I have lost my mind. But I saw that fucker Gary do his thing and want to call him on it. But what’s going to come from that? Is he going to confess everything here at work and go get help? Doubtful. Is he going to call me a nut and physically lay into me? It could happen. I do what I know I shouldn’t and just keep quiet.

I smoked another one. I saw Gary getting away with everything, my neighbor crying as his wife consoles him and my boss having to clean up a mess. I don’t want this, but I need a cigarette.

Bob

2012-01-02T12:54:00.002-05:00

Life has not been the best, lately. I’m at the age I’m supposed to have everything together but I never managed to make that work out and am stupid in a lot of ways and have a bunch of fucking issues and blah blah blah and things just didn’t work out the way I wished they would have. So I got on Craigslist and found a place to live. Rented a room with some college kids young enough to be my own damn children. You know what? I don’t even care about how pathetic this is. I’m just happy to have a roof over my head.

Ever meet somebody you can’t stand on sight? My new roommate Dick is, or was, just such a person; his name pretty much sums him up. Now perhaps it’s a case of meeting one’s shadow self—he thinks he’s funny when actually he’s just annoying—but no, not a fan. My first day in the new place and he’s knocking on my door and telling me stories about meeting lesbians and converting them over to the straight side and I just want him to dry up and blow away. But no, he goes on and on and decides he’s my new bestest buddy and is going to show me the ropes on what it’s like to live here. So he babbles, and babbles and I dearly wish he would choke on his own tongue. But he doesn’t. “Oh, hey!” he shouts, “You haven’t met Bob!” Motherfucking Dick grabs me by the shirt sleeve and actually pulls me out of my room—as if we were that familiar—and leads me out the door onto our back balcony. “Meet Bob!” he shouts in triumph.

What I am looking at is a moulded rubber bayonet practice dummy with caricatured, Vietnamese features. It was something the landlord brought home from the war, a long time ago. It is a head and a rather ripped torso on a metal post. Instantly, I assign a voice to it. No, not a cartoonish “Velly Solly, me no work in the rice paddies” but just something in my head that made it seem like this rubber thing was talking to me. I did not like this feeling. Not at all.

Goddamn Dick was carrying on about how everyone called it Bob and I should too, and so forth. I didn’t care; I’d already made up my mind I didn’t like him.

It was my first night in the new place. I was tired; I went to bed early. But I had a very vivid dream: I saw Bob, the dummy, and the voice in my head asked, “Want me to fix it?”

I woke up with police in my room. Dick had been found in the bathroom, dead, an apparent suicide. A whole bottle of prescription pain pills washed down with a few cans of Four Loko. I’m like, “Look, I just moved in here yesterday, I don’t know the guy, no I don’t know if he was depressed or anything, really I don’t know.” I guess they bought it but they didn’t seem any too happy about it.

And that goddamn thing, that goddamn Bob: Every time I would go out the back door I’d catch sight of it, think it was a person standing there and jump out of my skin and shriek like a little girl. But the frozen look on its face made it seem like it KNEW that would happen and my response was just what it wanted.

Another bad dream…something about my mother. She’d been dead for a few years but in the dream she was back and I was young and being punished. I awoke with a jolt. In the corner of the room I saw the unmistakable shadow of the thing that was supposed to be on the back balcony. “Life’s what you make it,” said the voice in my head. I grabbed for the lamp and switched it on. Nothing. Just me, about to pee the bed.

Now I’ve had some mental health issues in the past. I mean, I didn’t see or hear shit that wasn’t there or anything, just kinda had trouble reacting emotionally in an appropriate manner and that kind of stuff. But this business with seeing Bob in my room was a whole new level of crazy. I went out on the back balcony. I rubbed my hands across his face, his rubber chest and said out loud: “Stop it.” The voice in my head said, “Oh, we’re just getting started.” And the thing fucking grinned. At least I think it did.

I ran back into the house. Bob was in the middle of the goddamn kitchen.

I must have fainted, passed out, lost my shit, I dunno. I woke up on the kitchen floor, alone—there was no bayonet dummy in the room. It was out on the back porch where it belonged. I got up and went back to my room and started playing on Facebook. But then, that voice, that same voice: “The people you love don’t really love you back.” It wasn’t like before, I didn’t SEE Bob but I could imagine him. The voice in my head would not turn off: “Come outside and play. You know you want to.”

So now I’m outside. I have a serrated steak knife. I could slash up some rubber or I could slash up some flesh. Not sure what to do.

Bye Dana

2010-12-29T14:25:00.009-05:00

I just found out last night that, while I've been out cavorting in the snow with stuffed animals for the past few days, a good friend has died. I got the news in the most blunt fashion imaginable: chatting online. I got dumped that way once; hearing about Dana's death by reading words on a screen felt just as cold and impersonal.

I called my friend Jon, who also loved Dana, hoping that the person who told me was mistaken or misinformed, but no. He'd suffered a fatal heart attack on Sunday, the day after Christmas. Thing is, Dana was one of the least likely people I worked with to be a candidate for a coronary. He didn't drink or smoke, wasn't morbidly obese, nor, that I knew of, had a history of heart problems. He was African-American, which I understand has a higher percentage of high blood pressure among its males than other populations, but I'd never heard anything along those lines concerning Dana. Sometimes fate just takes a big, messy crap and people die.

Dana used a wheelchair and one of his arms was pretty much immobile. He was also
a man of very few words. Though capable of speech and expressing his thoughts verbally, more often than not he chose to make his opinions known through humming and grunting. "MMM-MMM" could mean he was happy, "MMM-MMM" could mean he was pissed off, or "MMM-MMM" could mean "I've just stolen your calculator and you're not getting it back."

It was all a matter of context. If you didn't get the context, oh well, that was your problem. Dana didn't give a shit if anyone understood him or not. Because of this, many people underestimated his cognitive abilities and couldn't be bothered trying to puzzle him out. Those of us who did found an amazing individual full of life, humor and above all an astounding sense of personal independence. What I loved about him was that you always knew where you stood. If you were talking to him and he got bored he would turn his head and coolly stare at his fingernails until you shut up or went away. Likewise, if he was enjoying your company he would sneak his arm around your waist and hug you--an act reserved for only a scant few.

When he did use speech, much of it was repeating the same stock phrases over and over. A lot of these were running jokes, his version of comedy catch-phrases and, for me, they never got old. Many people in the developmentally disabled population tend to do this, and most of the time I would think "Goddamnit, if you say that one more time I'm going to jab my eardrums open with a pair of knitting needles." With Dana, somehow, it was different. "You ain't gonna catch me, I'm gonna pull your ears," was hilarious every time. I know. Written down, it's hardly a knee-slapper. You had to be there for the delivery. "I'm going home on the bus. Gonna take my shoes off and go to bed." was another daily ritual that always provided high amusement.

But every now and then, Dana would pull something out of nowhere that slipped and let on that he was far more cerebral than for which a lot of people gave him credit. We worked in a sheltered work environment; a program which provided job opportunities for people with physical and/or mental barriers to standard community employment. Occasionally, the higher-ups in the company would suddenly arrive, unannounced, leading a tour group through the workplace to show off their wonderful, altruistic facility that enabled people with disabilities to work as hard as they could in exchange for wages comparable to a twelve-year-old in a third world shoe factory. The tour leaders and strangers would stand and stare at the people working, clearly moved by this heartwarming state of affairs. I leaned over and whispered to Dana, "Ever feel like a monkey in a zoo?"

Dana: "I don't know WHAT the hell they're looking at."

So he got it. More than the tour leaders, more than the visitors, more than I. Because he had to live it.

He was a serious klepto. If it wasn't nailed down and he wanted it, he would steal it. Pens and calculators were his favorites; those of us who knew him imagined his bedroom at home probably looked like Staples. Sometimes he would go for big-ticket items like cell phones. One woman found her phone missing and called the number. "MMM-MMM! MMM-MMM!" and the line went dead. She drove across town to Dana's place and when the door was opened and he saw it was her, he ran for his bedroom and shut the door. More often, though, at work the missing item would be discovered before he left. The robbed person would approach him, "Dana, did you steal my notebook?" and thus would begin a mad chase, Dana taking off, propelling his wheelchair with one hand down the hall, "MMM-MMM! MMM-MMM!" as fast as he could go. He was smart enough to embrace the one rule if you're going to embark on a life of crime: Deny, deny, deny. "I didn't take it! I didn't take it!" Invariably, the stolen notebook would be discovered as he usually was sitting on it. The owner would retrieve their property out from under him, and of course, Dana only had one thing to say about it. "I didn't take it."

Dana and I spent a lot of time playing catch with a toy stuffed mouse. It is perhaps a telling description of my own athletic ability that the only person with whom I felt comfortable tossing ball was a guy in a wheelchair with one bad arm. We'd sling the mouse back and forth at one another, and over time it developed into a routine where I'd tell him that he wasn't going home on the bus but rather had to work another shift with me.

"I say N-N-NO!" he'd snap, and fling the mouse. On a good day, I'd catch it.
"But I say Y-S-YES!" I'd shout, and fire it back.
"NO!"
"YES!"
"N-N-NO!"

And back and forth it went. When Dana was tired of playing, instead of tossing
the mouse to me or telling me he didn't want to do it anymore, he would fire the toy down the hallway, into another office, where I would have to go and fetch it. By the time I got back, he'd be gone.

Now he's pulled a fast one. He's gone for good.

I'm no stranger to disappearing acts of late. As explained in my post Mr. Puddlewinks Talks About His New Life, I walked away from a lot of people I cared about and who cared about me
in order to fix the parts of me that are damaged. I had to do it before I became broken beyond repair, and while I'm not sure I've explained myself well enough to anyone's satisfaction, there is at least a chance we'll meet up again someday. But Dana, you gimp bastard, you took a permanent hike and screwed it so I'll never have the chance to say goodbye or sorry for walking out on you. The cosmic version of turning your head and staring at your fingernails.

My situation, desperate and ugly as it is, at least spared me the experience of having to look at Jon or Kendra or Cathy and bursting into tears. Because there's nothing more pathetic than watching a bald man weep.

So long, buddy. My only solace is that, if there's anything to Christian mythology, God will have a hard time sorting out the saved from the damned with a missing calculator.

Mr. Puddlewinks Pays His Respects

2010-12-28T07:44:00.003-05:00

I think I'm done with embedding videos from YouTube directly onto the blog: It crops (more like butchers) the aspect ratio and the resolution is for shit. From here on out if I have a video I'll just put up the link and you can watch it on YouTube in the way it was intended to look.

After the whiny, self-indulgent neuroses of 'Mr. Puddlewinks Talks About His New Life' I wanted to do something completely silly and dumb. So I made a new one, Mr. Puddlewinks Pays His Respects.
Go ahead and click the link to watch it before I tell the rest of the story.

Apparently out here in the sticks people don't call the police; they call the goon squad. In this case it took the form of the burly son-in-law of a new neighbor I've yet to meet. Apparently she looked outside and saw me rolling around in the snow and it scared her.

I was setting up another shot when a truck pulled up at the bottom of the hill. A man rolled down the window and angrily demanded to know what I was doing.

"I'm making a video."
"What kind of video?"
"Just something stupid for YouTube. Just a crazy man running around in the snow."

He then demanded to know where I live so I pointed at the trailer I'm now forced to call home.

"You live with Ray?" he asked. I nodded, and I could see the brain strain show on his face as he struggled to do the homo math. Nothing could be further from the truth, but you know how it goes. "Well my mother-in-law said you were out here screamin' and swingin' a dead cat."

"It's not a dead cat. It's a toy stuffed tiger." Again, I could tell from his expression that a dead cat would be easier for him to understand than a grown man out in the yard playing with stuffed animals.

"She said it was a dead cat," he repeated.

"Nope. Toy tiger. I was pulling it on a thread to make it chase me."

He stared at me for a very long time. "You probably ought to go introduce yourself to the woman who owns the lot," he said.

"I'll do that," I assured him.

So it seems without having met a soul I already have a reputation. Great. But it could have been worse. If anyone had seen the pentagram I made in the snow by now I might have been charbroiled.

Mr. Puddlewinks Talks About His New Life

2010-12-25T18:12:00.002-05:00

Mental illness is a lot like standing on the tracks, seeing the train heading straight for you, but being powerless to move. In my case, not only did I not get off the tracks, I started pissing on the third rail.

Soon

2010-12-24T03:52:00.003-05:00

It astounds me that even though I haven't written anything since July some of you have been faithfully checking back here time and again on the off chance I might actually put something up. Thank you so much for your support and belief; I am not the best at expressing appreciation but rest assured your visits to my long-dormant blog mean a lot. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Der Spookhaus is not dead--it's just been in a coma. So have I; but I'm coming around. All I can tell you is keep checking back and the whole story will soon be revealed--hopefully on Xmas day. Again, thanks to all of you who cared enough to keep visiting. Be well.

Hey God, If You Hate Me, The Feeling Is Mutual

2010-07-27T16:27:00.005-04:00

I think from the age of six my family knew I was queer as a cat fart. I couldn't catch a ball and was obsessed with puppets and life-sized
animal costumes. How I didn't end up a furrie is anyone's guess. But as long as no one talked about it, other than my Dad calling me homo
when I missed a pass, it was ok.

But puberty hit and masturbation became a full-time hobby; I just had a slightly different spin on it. I would try to get the neighborhood boys to do it with me.
As it turns out, I was wildly successful. I would then broach the subject of doing each other, which again, worked out far more than statistical
averages would allow. Apparently I had an eerie charm that could cloud straight boys' minds. Unless this happens all the time and no one wants to admit it. So then I thought, let's try this mouth thing I've been hearing so much about.

Again, my suck-sess rate boggled the odds.

Thing is, I was a born-again Christian, and homosexuality was a sin against nature. So I spun the concept. I wasn't gay, I was just "fooling around."

"Fooling Around" should be a trademarked term, much like "Bombing the Middle East" where Christians can feel better about themselves for ignoring
biblical mandates ("Thou Shalt Not Kill") in favor of what feels good at the moment. I kept these blinders on for years. I was a total boy-whore and would
do anyone, anytime, while maintaining my self-righteous sense of born-again superiority that because I didn't speak with a lisp and had a lousy fashion
sense I couldn't possibly be gay. I liked dick, but come on, that hardly makes you one of those.

But then came Prom Night. A girl was giving me head and I thought to myself, " God, I could do this so much better." I came off and instead of
swallowing she spat down the side of my parents' car. "Good Lord," I thought, "I would have at least had the decency to...oh...wait...um, there's a
word for this, isn't there?"

Five-Thirty in the morning as I'm hosing down the side of my folks' car in an automated car wash, I realize the word I'm thinking of defines me.
Or, if not defines me, at least describes a certain part of me. A part I liked very much.

My slut-boy tendencies went into overdrive. I had more revolving-door dick than Lindsay Lohan. I could not be more chaste now, but back then I was the good time had by all. How I am not the HIV poster child remains a mystery. Once I realized that I liked what I liked and it wasn't just "fooling around" or making do until the
right girl came around I went cock crazy. In a supreme bad judgment call, I thought, "I know, I'll share this with my mother."

Oh god, that was stupid.

My mother and I, once upon a time, were close. She did crafty, artsy sort of stuff and so did I. Dad wasn't wild about it but we had our shared love of fabric textures and hot glue guns. I think her Christian sensibility liked that part of me as long as I was a sissy boy who had no blood flow to his penis. But dragging
deviant sexuality into the picture was not the wisest way to go. God knows how I thought this, but I had this feeling that she might understand. I forgot, somehow,
that her crazed love of a 2000 year old dead Jew and the words of his followers would matter more than her own son. I was eighteen. She was ironing. I
put it in brute, simple, terms:

"Mom, I'm gay."

She looked up. A tear trickled down her cheek. "I KNEW you stole my panty hose!"

I had to say it. "Get your perversions straight! I'm a queer, not a transvestite!"

And then she said the most horrible thing anyone has ever said to me: "I'd rather you were born dead instead of that."

This is the motherfucking thing about the motherfucking Christians. They've got a magic book, just like every other civiliZation with their own, different magic book.
All of the magic books say the same thing: This is the one true magic book and you are right and they are wrong. My mother's magic book, unfortunately, after
numerous translations before the 1611 one she settled on, had some unflattering things to say about guys who like guys. Therefore, she wished I was dead rather than
living a sinful life. The day I told her I was gay was the day she stopped loving me.

She lived by the scriptures: Slavery? No problem. Shoving a plastic enema up a child's ass as punishment? Hey, spare the rod. Boys who like boys? Death wish.

The weeks that followed were sheer hell for both of us. When the two of us, alone, were home she would burst into my room, waving a bible, raving about abominations.

I would point out that two verses up in Leviticus, cloth made of two different materials was also considered an abomination, making her cotton/polyester blend pantsuit on par with cocksucking. At that point her conviction that the bible was to be interpreted literally flew out the window, but somehow her belief in the queer-hating passages held fast.

One night I poured a glass of orange juice. "That is supposed to be for breakfast!" Mom snapped.
I quoted a television commercial on the air at the time. "Anita Bryant says 'It's not just for breakfast anymore'...'
"Do you believe everything Anita Bryant says?"
"Oh Honey," I said, flipping my wrist, my first and last attempt at camp.

She made me swear that I would never tell my father, my brother, my other brother or anyone in the family what I'd told her. Wrong that it may have been, I kept that
promise. It was our way of meeting halfway. I did check back a few years later just to see if time might have tempered her feelings. No, she made it clear that she still wished I was born dead. Thanks to that, I don't know what love is as relates to family. I'm a confused mess. On one hand, you want to love somebody but
knowing their look-at-me-I'm-right mindset means they wish you were dead instead of who you are puts a serious damper on things.

Mother brought out the big guns. She went on an anti-gay hunger strike and stopped eating. She lost tons of weight and of course Dad noticed. "I don't know what's
going on here but something isn't right!" Meanwhile, he wanted my friend Ron to take off his shirt in front of him and "get some sun". Dad's got some issues, but
apparently calling me queer every other week or so covered them up quite nicely. Mom continued to drop weight and she won. I told her it was a stage I was going
through. "Let's eat," she said.

The next decades were spent in shared denial. I never mentioned girlfriends or boyfriends. As long as she could keep the illusion I was an assexual slug, forever
a little boy yet to hit puberty, we could talk.

My mother died last year. I kept my promise to her but once she croaked I no longer feel the need to hide the things she wanted me to hide. Thing is, I doubt a
single person in the family ever thought of me as straight. My nephew made it clear he got the deal when he was eight years old. I'd brought my boyfriend home for the
holidays (euphemistically refered to as my "roommate".) Todd was gay as a goose and the fact that he and I lived together should have been a big, pink flag for
everyone concerned. Nephew started calling him "Uncle Todd." Mom totally spazzed out, shrieking "That is NOt your uncle!" I think that sort of gave the game away.
Not that us together wouldn't have tripped anyone's gaydar.

I don't have to keep a promise to a dead woman. Certain family members, I'm sure, imagine she is in heaven watching my every move. (No more jerking off for me!) I'm
sorry she's gone, but at the same time feel a relief that I can talk about, as I've said, what is absolutely no surprise to anyone.

And now that I can talk about it, I realize how truly boring it all is.

The Raspberry Vinaigrette Man

2010-07-26T21:20:00.002-04:00

Joe, Michelle and I were having dinner at Mac's, a local restaurant that serves great Scottish food. We were seated at a table right next to the door. Suddenly a clattering noise came from the door as an intoxicated street person tried to enter but was having trouble working the door knob and still maintain a grip on his open bottle of malt liquor. He finally wised up and left the bottle outside on the street, then stumbled into the restaurant on shaky legs.

I am a magnet for crazy (they can smell their own) so of course he immediately stumbled over to the head of our table. I was dreading the usual request for a handout but instead he suddenly began to sing. "RAAAAAAAASPERRY VINAIGRETTE!", he belted out in raspy croak then convulsed with laughter. It was so random and so strange that all three of us joined in and started laughing, too. This he took as an invitation, so he pulled up a chair and sat down.

"RAAAAAAAASPERRY VINAIGRETTE!" he sang again, once more busting out into loud, crazed giggling. "You see that commercial? The one on the TV for that salad dressing? They got that song they sing, RAAAAAAAAASPBERRY VINAIGRETTE!"

We were laughing and people were staring. Because the man was loud and clearly shitfaced.

He suddenly turned his attention to Michelle. "Well ain't you something fine! Baby you got it going on..."

Michelle happened to be a lesbian, so I said "I think you're barking up the wrong tree."

He did not get my meaning. Rather, my comment flipped a switch somewhere and he started yelling at me, suddenly every bit as angry as he had been jovial.

"You know what you are?" he screamed, pointing at me, "You are a Penis Head! You are a motherfucking Penis Head and you need to mind your Penis Head business!"

At this point a waiter appeared. He, too, had some advice for me. "Sir, your friend is disturbing the other customers. If your friend can't behave we might have to ask him to leave."

"Penis Head!" Raspberry Vinaigrette Man shouted again.

"Does that really sound like a friend? This man just wandered in, sat down and started raving."

"Just the same, sir, if you can't keep your friend quiet..." the waiter said and prissed away.

Joe, meanwhile, in a moment of cool collectedness worthy of Clint Eastwood, had walked to the door, retrieved Raspberry Vinaigrette Man's bottle of half finished malt liquor, and quietly said, "See this? If you don't leave right away I'm pouring it out."

Worked like magic. He left, although not without a final shout of "Penis Head!"

I've seen Raspberry Vinaigrette man several times since. Once on a bus, where he was causing a very similar disturbance, and later in front of a gay bar where, as patrons would exit he would ask them for a hug and in doing so try and lift their wallets. Later on the street, having no memory of meeting me before, he got in my face with that insufferable ploy of becoming instantly and overly familiar that all street winos try and pull.

"My man! My man!" he said, laughing and high fiving and acting like we were old friends.

(Consumer tip: A good way to nip this in the bud is to say "Dude, if I was your man you'd be home sucking my dick." But I didn't deploy this option at the time.)

He, of course, asked for a hug. "Why sure!" I said, playing the gullible idiot. He wrapped his arms around me and I leaned in and whispered "If you so much as even touch my wallet I will knee you in the balls so hard you won't walk for a week."

He drew back, shocked, and his expression betrayed that it was EXACTLY what he was trying for and was stunned someone called him on his game. "Oh yeah," I said. "All the street people are doing it now; it's this year's version of 'My babies are in the stalled car down the road.' Seriously, give it up, everyone does that one."

I may have robbed a man of his livelihood.

The Not-Quite-As-Hungry-As-He'd-Like-You-To-Think Man

2010-07-26T21:05:00.004-04:00

Two friends were sitting outdoors, downtown, sharing a high-end, gourmet pizza. They were full and had about half of it left over. They were approached by a homeless man.

"Look, I'm homeless and I'm starving. Can you give me some money so I can get a bite to eat?"

One of my friends offered to give the man the rest of the pizza.

"Actually," the man said, "I was really more in the mood for a fish sandwich."

The Distant Man

2010-07-26T20:58:00.002-04:00

I sat down in front of a young couple on the bus. The girl was crying.

He: Now what's the matter?
She: It's just that you're so...distant.
He: What?
She: Distant.
He: Whatever the fuck that is...

The Pie Man

2010-07-26T20:41:00.003-04:00

Another brief tale involving a random street loon.

I was standing on the corner waiting for a bus when I spotted, across the street waiting for another bus, a very large man holding a plastic sack. He whipped away the sack, revealing an entire bakery pie on his palm. He opened the lid of the pie and suddenly burst into song:

"Pie! I love you, piiiiiiiiiiiie!"

With that, he shoved his hand knuckle deep into the center of the pie and began digging out huge handfuls of goo, which he voraciously began shoving into his mouth. He licked his fingers, grunting with near-orgasmic pleasure and kept shoveling bare handfuls of pie into his face. His whole body shook with every bite, slurp and lick.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone enjoy a dessert more.

From The Crap Heap (Part One)

2010-07-25T14:32:00.003-04:00

For every Spookshow In Your Pants song I like, there are a dozen more that just seem stupid. My hard drive is littered with such orphaned attempts and I thought it might be fun to post some of the dumber ones. Plus, what I think sucks someone else might like and vice-versa. So here's round one of my most embarrassing musical moments. Click on the titles to have a listen.

Bye

Come Have Breakfast With Jesus

Corn Curls

Depressatron Two

Gloria/L'Absintheur

Piece of Crap

Sunlight Streaming From Your Butt

You Boys Oughta Take Your Shirts Off And Get Some Sun

You Get Sleepy I Get Creepy

Ok, I have to admit I like the last one. Probably for the memory behind it rather than the song itself. Mortification does a body good.

But seriously, the 2nd worst thing I ever did was so-called "music" for a local audio/video duplication service. Revel and squirm along with me at it's absolute wretchedness:

Audio Video Memories

The Encroaching Man

2010-07-21T01:38:00.003-04:00

My fake internet friend David Parr just related an encounter with a random street crazy and it got me to thinking about similar interactions in my own life.

I was waiting for a bus, some years ago, in the dead of winter. It was bitter cold and the ice on the sidewalk had crystallized several times over into Mother Nature's Twister game of death. I sat on the cold steel bench, my butt cheeks frozen into twin, rounded sno-cones. I sat alone, smoking, waiting for the bus.

Another man showed up. He was fairly well-dressed, not like a street bum, but had pop bottle eyeglasses ensconsed in thick, black plastic frames that gave off the aura of well-educated geek. But he started muttering to himself and that changed everything.

Understand I mutter to myself as a matter of routine. But when I do it I am usually singing songs from 70's TV children's programming, talking in funny voices to amuse myself or pretending I'm a ventriloquist. This guy was having a cut and clear argument with at least three other people, all of whom piped up to make their voices known.

He didn't take a seat on the bench, but rather paced back and forth on the icy sidewalk, resulting in several amusing near-pratfalls. He kept up the self-chatter and I kept watching him.

"Oh really?" he would shout.
"Yes, really!" he would shout in another voice.
"You're both crazy if you ask me!" a third voice would proclaim.

I was fricking fascinated. I kept wondering which one it was who would eventually slip and bust their nose. Somehow he kept upright and continued his ranting.

A third (or fifth, depending) person joined us at the bus stop. He too, did not sit in the enclosure but stood outside, watching. This was just an average, beefy Joe Normal who stood there and watched the show for a minute.

I was treated to this wonderful exchange:

Muttering man suddenly whirled about, screaming, and hurled his fury upon the interloper.

"WHY ARE YOU ENCROACHING UPON ME?"

Joe Normal, looking confused but wanting to stand his ground, said "I'm not encroaching upon you; I'm just standing here!"

The bus came and the two gave each other very nervous looks until one of them got off first.

Someone Wrote A Song About Me

2010-07-15T02:13:00.012-04:00

Krista and I kinda loved one another then kinda hated one another. We went close to a decade without speaking. What I didn't know was during this time she wrote a song about how, despite our differences, she missed me. I'd written and recorded some songs about her, too, but mine were far more bitchy and probably won't ever see public release.

We mended our fences, finally, and one night she sang the song she'd written back in the day and it moved me to tears. I know, "just an old softie" is not usually associated with the Puddlewinks camp. But she re-vamped this same song for her CD "Thanks, But No" and it rocks out and I think I might like it even if it wasn't all about me. But I'm sure that helps.

Click on the title to hear it. Or go here to buy the CD which has a number of other songs I quite like.

Maybe, Maybe Not

2010-07-10T14:39:00.003-04:00

Okay, so maybe I had a little freakout the other night. It happens. At the time I wanted to close down the show but no, I think I was just in a bad place. I'm frustrated about so many things right now it's hard for me to think straight.

I guess I'm saying ignore the last one no matter what happens.

Switch It Off Now

2010-07-09T00:27:00.008-04:00

Been a while, hasn't it?

No easy explanation. Creatively, I'm blank as a fart. Nothing to say.

It's just the way it goes. I have many obsessions, hobbies, outlets and whatnot but none can be counted on to have exclusive staying power. I get hopped up on one thing for a while and then it dries up and goes away. It always comes back, someday, but in the interim other things take its importance in the scheme of my life. I think I've had a good run with this blog (certainly not based on popular response but rather my own fun with it) but I just haven't been motivated for a while and other things are occupying my mind. I haven't done any Spookshow In Your Pants stuff for a couple of years now, but I'm certain someday I will again. So it goes with Der Spookhaus. The stuff filling my mind these days I just don't feel like writing about for everyone to see. Or maybe I just don't feel like writing, period.

Maybe I just want to take a Summer Vacation. I don't know. But my heart's not in it these days. So I think this is going to be goodbye, for now, but certainly not permanently. I have had enough experience to know that something wacky just might happen tomorrow and jump-start the Muse so that I'm off pell-mell for another few months. The shit I'm into and extremes in terms of interest swings back and forth so wildly there's no way I can predict what I want to be doing from one day to the next.
On the other hand, I might just walk away from it all and never look back. It really could go either way and I have no perceptible sense of what's gonna happen.

Shit, I might restart Der Spookhaus in YouTube format. I have some ideas but so far nothing worth writing home about. Brute honestly, right now, I don't want to create; I just want to be entertained by others for the moment. But keep checking back. Like I say, who knows when I'll get a second wind.

I've enjoyed doing this immensely. Just not for now. I think the earliest posts, with the stories and music and all, were the best and when the blog turned into the standard daily diary type of stuff was when it went to shit. I just haven't taken the time to write-and-rewrite-and-rewrite-and-rewrite, which it what it takes to make a good story, for a while now. The music vids and the vintage video are fun--and trust me, everything posted in those categories means something to me, it's just I probably should be crafting a decent story instead of farting out stuff about jerking off into tube socks.

Click on the title if you want to hear the theme music to this post. The song references, I think, Heroin addiction which is NOT what's cluttering up my mind these days, but still is an apt metaphor for how I'm feeling at the moment.

Still, I think you should always leave 'em laughing, so I'll close for now by telling my favorite joke of all time.

Little Billy was sitting in class and the girl behind him tapped him on the shoulder. "Ask the teacher what a 'Purple Poodle' is," she asked, as the class was too young to understand the importance of not ending a sentence with a preposition.

Billy raised his hand.

"Yes, Billy?"

"What's a 'Purple Poodle'?

The teacher could not hide her shocked reaction and screamed, "That does it, Billy! You're going to Mr. Yodelbeans' office!"

"What?"

"Go to the principal's office! Now!"

Billy made the long trek down the hall. The principal was extremely surprised to see him. "Billy," he exclaimed, "What are you doing here?"

"Teacher said I had to come and see you."

"But you've always been a model student! What could you have possibly done to make her send you here for punishment?"

"All I did..." Billy stammered, "...All I did was ask her what was a 'Purple Poodle'."

Mr. Yodelbeans spluttered, his face changed several sets of colors, he slammed his fist on his desk and finally raged, "GET OUT! You are expelled from this elementary school! You sick, sick child! We won't have you infecting the other students! GO!"

Billy walked home in the middle of the morning. His mother greeted him at the door. "Billy! What are you doing home from school this early?"

"I got expelled."

"Expelled? You? How? Why?"

Billy tearfully explained to his mother that all he did was ask the teacher the definition of a 'Purple Poodle.'

She burst into tears; howling, racking sobs the likes of which Billy had never seen come out of her. "Go upstairs," the woman commanded through her hysterics, "and stay there until your Father gets home!"

Billy spent the day in his room, listening to the muffled sounds of his mother crying for hours and hours. Finally he heard his father's car pull up in the drive, the door slam shut, then hushed, hysterical whispering below. He heard the clomp, clomp, clomp of heavy work boots ascending the stairs and suddenly his bedroom door was wrenched open, his father standing there, glowering.

"What's this I hear about you gettin' kicked out of school?"

"All I did," Billy said, "Was ask the teacher what in the world is a 'Purple Poodle'?"

"YOU ARE NO SON OF MINE!" Billy's father shouted. "DO NOT EVEN THINK OF DARKENING THE DOORWAY OF THIS HOME AGAIN!" He was roaring, frothing at the mouth. "YOU ARE A SICK, SINFUL, PERVERT AND TO KNOW IT AT YOUR TENDER AGE IS A SIGN THAT THE DEVIL HAS INFESTED YOUR VERY SOUL! GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, YOU FILTH! YOU ABOMINATION!"

So Billy left.

He walked up the off-ramp to the interstate and walked along the highway. A trucker pulled up beside him and stopped. TCH-TCHSSSS! went the brakes.

"Hey kid, need a lift?" asked the trucker.

Billy climbed into the cab. "Shouldn't you be in school?" the trucker scowled.

"Yeah. But I got expelled."

"Expelled? Do your parents know this?"

"They kicked me out of the house."

"Son, what exactly did you do?"

Billy again explained, "All I did was try to find out the meaning of 'Purple Poodle'."

The truck driver slammed on his brakes, again with a loud TCH-TCHSSS!

"Son, I been in truck stops all over this land of ours and heard a lot of filthy talk but I never, never, never, EVER heard anything as disgusting as that. I think I'd like you to get out now."

Billy put his head in his hands and started sobbing.

"BUT," the trucker added, "Oncet you leave I think I can help ya. If you really, really want to know about the 'Purple Poodle' you have to do this: Find your way to 3rd Street. Walk around until you reach 333 3rd Street. It's a hotel. Go in, git in the elevator and press the button marked 3. That'll take ya to the 3rd floor. Get off and find room 33. Go inside. You'll see a chest of drawers. Open the 3rd drawer and I think you'll find what you're looking for. Now get the fuck out of my truck, you freak."

Billy found 3rd Street. He wandered up and down until he found the address marked 333, and sure enough it was a hotel. He got in the elevator, got off on the 3rd floor and sure enough there was a room 33. He twisted the doorknob and it was open. Inside the room was totally bare. No bed, no TV, no lamps, just a big bureau drawer set pushed against the wall.

Billy opened the third drawer down. A HUGE poodle, painted purple, leaped out of the drawer and ran out the open door. Billy chased it, and the poodle ran for the open stairwell and ran down three flights of stairs, the boy in hot pursuit. The purple poodle ran across the lobby and ran out the open door of 333 3rd Street. Billy was so close he could feel the wisps off its puffy tail against his fingers, but not quite enough to catch it. Chasing the lavender beast, it ran straight out into 3rd Street, into oncoming traffic, and SMACK! Billy was instantly struck by a car and killed dead on the spot.

And the moral to this story is:

Look both ways before crossing the street.

Card Tricks

2010-06-30T03:38:00.002-04:00

This is a weird one and aimed at a splinter group of my friends who happen to be magicians. If you're not a magician, that's cool, because you'll be very important in the comment section if you decide to respond.

Certain people will kill me for exposing this, but a popular theory concerning card tricks is that certain ones work owing to psychological principles. The card trick inventor invariably says, when publishing his or her card trick,
that the spectator will think this, this and this and that is why said card trick is the greatest thing since sliced monkey meat.

I happen to think this is horseshit.

All we know is this: you do a card trick and the spectator does not point out the exact methodology. It's not necessarily a win.

A favorable response does not at all mean the person watching was fooled in the slightest. Given the best case scenario, the spectator exclaims "Oh good lord allmighthy, how in the living fuck did you do that?" Magicians leap to the most favorable mise en scene imaginable: taking these words to be gospel, literal, and an absolute representation of what went down.

But consider other social obligations. Your friend shows up with a gawdawful haircut. "How do you like my hair?" they ask. "Oh it's nice," you say, meanwhile thinking it looks like the back of a skunk's ass. If you're going to say this to people you know, concerning what you know to be an integral part of their self-identity, do you not think folks are going to politely lie involving something as trivial as a card trick?

Professional performers cum all over themselves thinking they've fooled the mythological "paying public" just because no one bothered to cal them out on how they did their shit. These magicians go home smelling of fried clams and think they've reached the pinnacle of magical success, just like my neighbor's sixteen-year-old kid who also works in a restaurant.

But really, who is more likely to step up and push you to the wall: random strangers at family hamburger night or your friends and family who have spent their whole lives trying to make you look stupid? I just don't buy that people who don't know you and all your flaws are the tougher audience.

So you do a card trick. Here are the possible reactions:

1) You present it as a 'Hey, look what I can do that you can't do' thing with flourishy Sybil cuts, one-hand shuffles and stuff where the subtext is nothing more than 'Dig me, I am awesome.' To which the spectator will most likely think, "Yeah, nice juggling. But I went on actual dates in High School."

2) You present it as an experiment in either ESP or psychological manipulation. To which the spectator will most likely think, "Card trick."

3) You present it as a card trick. To which the spectator will also think, 'Card trick' but instantly be bored out of their skull

4) The cards are fake-aged to appear ancient and you spin a twenty minute yarn about turn-of-the-century gamblers and a witch they met. "Still a frigging card trick." No wait, it's Tarot cards. "Same fucking thing."

So essentially the spectator responses are these:

"It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen, oh, and by the way, I am borderline retarded."

"It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen and I am politlely lying just to keep from seeming an asswipe.'

" I know exactly how you did that but hope my silence will be taken as total mystification."

"I am fooled, but seriously, couldn't give a shit. It's a goddamn card trick."
.
"I'm sorry, I was so bored when you brought out the cards I wasn't paying much attention so now that I'm fooled it's no big surprise."

So those of you who are magiciains, reply and agree or disagree, and those of you who aren't who have had to suffer through card tricks (including mine) respond as well. Oh wait, I forgot. Card tricks are not a topic of conversation for those
who don't do them. Unlike what the dealer's ads say.

Middle of the Night Memory

2010-06-11T03:00:00.004-04:00

Fell asleep about an hour ago, woke up and am obsessed with a memory of something that happened years ago when I was a teenager. O Morpheus, thank you so much for reviving me from my slumber so I can spend this valuable time thinking of monkeys.

My parents and I were somewhere on vacation, I have no idea where, but we encountered an organ grinder and his monkey, whom the patrons were encouraged to feed peanuts. The monkey, not the fifty year old alcoholic whose only career option was turning a crank. So I gave the monkey a peanut and my Dad did as well. When my mother tried the mangy beast in a strap-on fez latched onto her finger with its teeth and would not let go. My Mom howled, the organ grinder panicked and Dad and I shared a rare bonding moment convulsing in laughter. The organ grinder used both hands to pry the monkey's face off my mother's finger and we left without having to tip.

Okay, now that it's out there maybe I can go back to sleep.

Hellsnake

2010-06-05T22:45:00.005-04:00

My friend Tor had a bad laundry day.

Clothes in the dryer; he's falling asleep and is brought out of his near-slumber by a loud Ca-chunk-a-chunk sound and then total silence. Shit, he thinks, the clothes dryer has given up the ghost and tells himself he will deal with it tomorrow. He allows himself to drift into sleep and no doubt dreams of naked boys and girls with
pudding-smeared nipples and panda masks paddling one another.

Next morning: Wife goes to work and Tor is forced to deal with the dryer situation. He presses the buttons but nothing happens. He thinks to himself that perhaps the lint blower outlet is clogged and detatches it. He scoops out a few mounds of fluff and sees, of all things, a live snake. It's gasping and writhing and not in good spirits.

Tor just so happens to have a pair of snake tongs on hand, owing to his years of keeping them as pets, a splendid note of happenstance much on the order of my encountering an emergency requiring the use of hand puppets.

He uses the tongs to grasp the snake and pulls it free from the ribbed, polyethurane dryer hose. The animal has a hole in its abdomen, through which Tor can see missing flesh, missing vertebrae and in fact would be clean through were it not for
the transluscent layer of skin on the other side. Holding it to the light, it's the reptilian version of a View-Master.

So Tor has a disassembeled dryer, holding aloft a gutted, living snake in some tongs. He realizes the Ca-chunk-a-chunk sound he heard the night before was a snake getting disemboweled by whirring dryer parts. Apparently the snake crawled through the outdoor dryer vent, slithered into the actual machinery and had its midsection hacked out for its trouble.

Tor loves the crazy serpents, as do I. I kept them as pets in junior high, earning me the nickname of "Snake", so much that other kids would call and ask for me as that, a fact my mother couldn't abide. "His name is NOT Snake!" she would hiss, not getting the irony. Of course, me being saddled with the monicker 'Snake' was on par with Adam Lambert being known as 'Cold Steel Fury'. But I kept snakes as pets and loved them, perhaps because I could identify with nature's most misunderstood creatures.

Tor, being the same kind of guy, is filled with remorse at what happened to the snake in his dryer. I mean, if you met someone with a huge honking hole in their stomach, so much so that the only thing you could see was the skin running down their back on the other side, wouldn't you want to help them in any way you could?

So Tor fills a bucket with ice and water. He drops the snake into it. The snake thrashes around a bit, then deliberately swims to the bottom of the bucket. It stays there, on purpose, and drowns.

Nature knows when it's time is up.

The suicidal part of me knows this, too. Stop, quit. I ain't gonna off myself cause I wanna stick around and see what happens. Get your finger off the 911. But still, just to go out when you know you're done is a thing of beauty.

Man, I envy that snake.

What's The Worst Thing You've Ever Done?

2010-06-02T01:47:00.004-04:00

Good question, isn't it?

It's not one most people would answer publicly but I think I want to do this.

Some people say that confession is good for the soul and they might be right. I don't put the supernatural spin on it and think that if I lay bare my worst secret an invisble man in the sky is going to be appeased and and my guilt will be absolved, but still, yeah, sometimes letting it out can free you up. I think I've told a total of three friends about this but the time feels right to tell everybody I know and a bunch of total strangers. I'm not expecting a magic cure for feeling bad about it, in fact in some quarters it might prove problematic in that I will seem more insane than I already do. I just feel like talking about it tonight, so
I will, and whoever listens can do so and pass judgement in their own fashion.

Most people have their bad secrets and generally they happen in college or shortly after. The stuff they don't want their wife, children or whoever to know because of being messed up on booze or drugs or simply sowing the wild oats. Me, the worst thing I ever did happened when I was in fourth grade. Yes. I am Damien, spawn of Satan.

For real though. Not that I haven't done things I'm ashamed of as an adult, but this thing I did when I was eight has stuck with me and messed with me for most of my life. I'm guessing this post is not going to be a particularly funny one (not that I won't try.)

So in fourth grade I was taking swimming lessons at the local YMCA. It was structured so that you had free time in the game and vending room, the swimming lesson would commence and then you had more free time to socialize before your
parents would come to pick you up. I spent this latter time exploring and managed to discover the YMCA boiler room.

It was very dark and only lit by the amber glow of the lighted dials on all the heating equipment. Pretty much pitch black, but if you stood in front of a furnace you could see a few feet in front of you from the pilot light and the backlit gagues until you moved on to the next one. It was creepy and fun. Plus, this basement was also a storage facility for all the junk the YMCA had no other place to put and was stacked along the walls.

I couldn't keep my discovery to myself. I approaced an older boy in the swim class (who might well have been chosen because he was very good looking--I can remember his face and body to this very day, not just for that but for things that will be made
clear very shortly) and told him I'd found something really incredible. He wanted to see it, so I led him to the underground boiler room. He thought it was cool too, and we slowly made our way in the nearly non-existent light.

It was so dark it was spooky. So I thought I'd play a little joke. I jumped out, screamed at the top of my lungs and grabbed him by the sides. On instinct, he screamed and leapt away. He landed not on or by but through a stack of plate glass leaning against the wall. It shattered. He was cut to ribbons all over. I pulled him out and could tell even in the dim light he was bleeding all over. He wasn't crying. He wasn't screaming. He just said, "I think I got cut pretty bad."

I led him out of the basement and back to the well-lit stairs leading to the YMCA proper. His assessment was correct.

I remember the blood streaming out of his wounds, so much that it left puddles on the stairs. At the top of the staircase I held back and peeped through a crack in the door, watching him hobble to the lobby, the person behind the desk start screaming
and someone else phoning for an ambulance. I stayed there, out of sight, watching. They led him to a chair, blood was pouring from the slashes in his shirtless chest, bare legs, feet and arms and being tracked all over the lobby. The ambulance arrived. They took him away.

He never once mentioned my name.

I went back to the game room to await the arrival of my Mom to drive me home. I have no memory of my state of mind at the time. I'm sure I was filled with fear of discovery and guilt over what I'd--even accidentally--done but this is only a guess.

On the way home I told my mother I didn't want to take swimming lessons any more.

I guess my parents bought it because I don't remember going back. Nothing ever happened. No calls from anyone wanting to know my
involvement. Ever.

But somewhere a kid, who became a young man, and who now is older than me most likely has permanent scars on his body because I chose to play boogeyman and leap out at him in the dark. He totally should have sold me out. I've felt sick about this for decades.

Yeah, I get the one idea: Kids playing, who knew, accidents happen. But it doesn't change the way things turned out. And I hate it.

The very worst thing of all is I can't for the life of me remember his name.

See? There's more stuck inside this head of mine than dick and fart jokes.

So does anyone else want to play? What's the worst thing YOU'VE done? Post in the comments. Do it anonymously if you feel inclined.

NBC4 Follows the AIDS Story With Some Funny Monkeys

2010-05-31T23:39:00.005-04:00

I did this song years and years ago when Spookshow was in the clunky drum machine phase and I forget what I originally called it. I re-named it after a friend started working for a local network affiliate and became aware of just what whores local TV stations really are. They try to present themselves as "Ooh, we care so much about the community" when in fact the only thing they really give a shit about is ratings. They just want you to suck the glass tit and pretend they actually care about your health, your children and your neighborhood when, in fact, if you die in a public place, your kids get raped or your block gets firebombed they will be there with cameras to intrude on your most private, horrible moments.

So the same friend once set this music to video of monkeys at the zoo and it struck me as being absolutely the sort of thing any TV news outlet would do for filler shit. "Woman bashed in the head with bolt cutters; coming up next: Kitties!"

So around that time I changed the name of the music. It's not a great song but it sounds absolutely like what your local news outlet would put behind stock footage in order to suggest they give a crap about you and your neighborhood. Click on the title and pretend I care as well.

Apparently, Sly Is An Asshole

2010-05-26T22:22:00.006-04:00

Just got off the phone with my very own oldest brother, who from 1969 to 1972 was the stage manager at Convention Hall in Wildwood, New Jersey.

This was the premiere hangout for all the hippies who never made it to Oregon or San Francisco.

I continually pump him (ok, just because we were born in West Virginia doesn't mean in THAT way) for information about this time of his life because it just seems fascinating. He was setting up for and hanging out with the most recognized musicians of the day and I'm forever pressing him to spill the details because I'm such a fame whore.

"Who were the coolest bands, in terms of just being people, you met?," I ask.

"Jethro Tull. Would hang out and talk to anyone, no matter who you were."

"Who else?"

"Alice Cooper. As a person. But in his stage show he set off these cannons that blew feathers all over the audience. We were picking feathers out of the carpet three years later."

"Who were the assholes? Prima Donnas?"

"Sly Stone. The biggest prick of them all."

"Why?"

"Well first of all he didn't show up until hours later after he was supposed to be there. We had a crowd of thousands of black people expecting what we promised and Sly was a no-show."

"What did you do?"

"I went out on-stage with my guitar."

(Hysterical laughter on my part) "Right. ***** ******* (real name omitted by request,) the most obvious replacement for Sly Stone. What did you play?"

"Neil Young's Heart of Gold"

Me: "If that's not funk I don't know what is."

Brother: "It didn't go over. But he finally showed up. At ten minutes to twelve. The town had an ordinance that no concert could go on after midnight."

"So you had a ten minute show on your hands?"

"Yeah, and he was drunk and took to the microphone and instead of playing music started cussing out his wife, his manager, all of New Jersey and anyone he could see at the moment."

"That's not good."

"Oh, it only got worse. The sheriff of Wildwood suddenly walked onstage and informed Sly Stone he only had one minute to play before midnight fell down and he was no longer legally allowed to appear before an audience. Meanwhile, other police were appearing backstage with the rest of us. They told us we'd best take off our shirts embroidered with the Convention Hall logo if we wanted to live. Cause people paying big-ticket prices for a one-minute concert would probably not be interested in our continued good health."

"So what did he do?

"He started playing and he was so drunk he sucked."

"How did the crowd react?"

"They reacted like he sucked. But my friend Glen, a part time cop who worked security, pulled the sheriff off-stage and let him know that if the concert wasn't allowed to go on past the legal time limit he'd have a full-scale race riot on his hands."

"What happened?"

"Wildwood, New Jersey got to see the most horrible, drunken, illegal concert they were ever treated to."

Things I Say To My Cat

2010-05-26T02:36:00.005-04:00

I was talking to a friend at work the other day and let it slip that my evening plans included the wildly adventurous, madcap way to pass the time of downing some beers and talking to my cat. She gave me that look which instantly communicates that I had strayed past the point of romantic, arty isolation and into the realm of the truly pathetic.

“Mmm,” she grunted, “How does that usually go?”
“Kinda one-sided,” I had to admit.

Because, yes, while Kitty is pretty vocal, sometimes to the point of annoyance; she’s not the best of conversationalists. If she’s in the mood she will purr and rub her head against me but, aside from that, there’s not all that much give and take. Thinking about it, I realized she can only offer what she’s been taught by example and it dawned on me that I, myself, had not exactly been keeping up my end of the dialogue either.

Here, then, is the entire list of things I have said to my cat for nearly a decade and a half:

“Good Kitty.”
“Sweet Kitty.”
“I love you Kitty.”
“Shut the fuck up! You have food in your bowl! Walk the five feet and take a look!”

Of course, the one thing I’ve told her most often is, “Jesus Christ, it’s not a goddamn race!” This one is reserved for every single time I try to go downstairs to pee. The cat insists on getting there first, usually by darting between my legs in such a way I am someday bound to wind up at the bottom of the stairs with a splintered neck. Her fascination with watching me urinate is only trumped by the way that my taking a crap—call me crazy for considering this the ultimate private moment—has for her become a bonding experience on par with a father and son going fishing. I plant myself on the throne and she’s right there, swishing back and forth on the tub ledge and attempting to rub her every body part on my bare thighs while purring loud enough to rival a riding lawnmower. I know. It’s a cat. It doesn’t get the same social boundaries when it comes to pooping as, say, a roommate. But when I’m straining to expel half a log that’s hung up like a breach pregnancy and some animal chooses THAT moment to become most affectionate, I get a little twitchy. Mostly because I imagine that if I allow it I am part and parcel to some strange, inter-species scat scene you can’t even find on the internet. So I pick her up and throw her out and slam the bathroom door. Always, she starts scratching on it and howling like she’s starving and I’m in there shitting Meow Mix.

That’s mostly it, but there’s a few more:

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“NO!”
“Git! Git! Git!” (This is when I am trying to touch myself and she’s staring at me like Kinsey with a clipboard.)

I do vary the wording, just to make it seem like I have more to say:

“Pretty cat.”
“Sweet cat.”
“I love you cat.”
“Shut the fuck up! It’s a goddamn bird!”

There is one recent development. After years of cuddling the cat has taken to instead crawling out from under the covers and sleeping on top of my legs. I wake in the middle of the night, unable to move them, and start screaming that I am paralyzed and need help. Technically, this one is directed at the neighbors. Thus far they have reacted in the same fashion as my cat to everything I’ve ever told her: complete and utter indifference.

Final Destination 2: Car Crash Scene

2010-05-26T00:49:00.001-04:00

I've watched this movie bunches of times and the car crash always freaks me out way more than the supernatural hijinx to follow. I hydroplaned all the way down an off ramp once, repeatedly smashing the guard rail as the car uncontrollably spun in circles. The car was totaled but I walked away without a scratch. This might have something to do with why the clip gets on my nerves. Or it might be the graphic depiction of teenagers who can afford a vehicle costing more than I make in a year.

Music Is Magic

2010-05-22T00:45:00.009-04:00

Troy Palmer is a fake internet friend I've never met in real life. But we share a common bond in that we often enjoy the same type of music, movies and art. Plus dude is fond of wearing makeup and who can't love that? (Oh, I remember, my entire family when I went through my goth phase.)

But Troy wrote the most amazing rant. He pretty much explained how one's musical appreciation defined one's self. I gotta agree. The songs who shaped who I am, laid out in chronological order, tell the tale way better than I can in words.

Okay, I'm four years old and I'm listening to the radio. Tommy Roe's 'Dizzy' speaks to me so much that I beg my older brother to go and buy me the 45. (Yes, I am that fucking old.) He does and I am forever thankful. Jump cut eons later; someone has taken this very song and fused it with Disney cartoons on the Internet:

Call me crazy, but when a four-year-old relates to lyrics: "My head is spinning/it's like a whirlpool/it never ends" this might be a big, red flag.

My next music memory was the theme song to The Banana Splits. I enjoyed the music but even moreso I enjoyed life-sized puppet costumes. Why I am not a Furrie remains a mystery. Here are The Dickies doing the song I loved so much:

Life progressed and so did Saturday morning TV. I was a kid eating cereal in front of the television,watching Lidsville. While, again, the life-size puppets caught my fancy there was something, something about the bridge to the theme song that made sense to me in a pure audio format. My older brothers played Steppenwolf and Jesus Christ, Superstar but somehow this middle section, featuring maniacal laughter and total psychedelia clamped onto my soul and made me more a hippie than they ever were (aside from my lack of recreational drugs.) When Butch Patrick fell into the hat, the sonic onslaught showed me music didn't have to be what was on the radio.

Music was pretty boring compared to that. But some years later I discovered ELO's 'Fire on High' which wasn't like the shit on the radio but more like the middle bridge to the Lidsville theme:

I'd discovered sypmphonic rock. Three chords and the truth just didn't do it for me. I wanted bombastic, out there, larger than life spectacle. Which of course led me to Queen:

There was something about that Freddie that was damn appealing I just couldn't put my finger on.

A couple years rolled on and I found this cat named Gary Numan:

Wow. Some straight guy playing the part of an android queer helped me get my shit together.

So after that I suppose in order to seem cool and all I'm not supposed to mention this chapter of my life. But I liked it and, god help me, I still do:

So really, if you were this really strange band but were able to sell out because of your pretty boy looks and reinvent yourself as a teen sensation and make millions, wouldn't you do it? I would. Marketing savvy made them seem lame but the music was always ok. Least I think so. But in addition to the top-40 stuff I'd also discovered the import bin at the local mall record store and was starting to find some really cool stuff:

What was strange was that stuff that was absolutely American, red white and blue music ended up in the "import" bin just because it wasn't played on the radio.
This was where I discovered The Meatmen. Here they are doing a Gary Glitter cover:

The Meatmen used to play Columbus then go hang out at the local gay bar. They weren't gay; I think it was their way of being able to go out after a show and get shitfaced without people bugging them. Well, except for me. But they were all funny and decent and very friendly to the one guy who knew who they were. Of course, Tesco walking around shirtless got them more attention than they bargained for and it had nothing to do with fame.

So I looked like a punk at the time but actually enjoyed many types of music. I discovered Orchestral Manouvres In The Dark and quickly became a huge fan, at least before John Hughes convinced them they should be pop stars.

I became a fan of what at the time was called "progressive music", yet another term
for what young people are listening to in order to distance themselves from what
their parents and older brothers like. The terminology changes every five years or
so but always serves the same purpose. My favorite band to fill this need at the time was Xymox:

Then Skinny Puppy came along and took me and everyone to a whole other world.

Industrial music was the name of the game. So many good bands and tunes:

But Industrial wasn't my everything. I just liked anyone doing music who did their own strange thing. Pop music could be damned strange, too, I noticed.

Right around this time I discovered Edward Kaspel and the Legendary Pink Dots. They never fit into any category because they're always changing. I imagine this is a big part of the whole appeal.

I listened to old CDs and music for me got kind of stale. Then a short-lived scene called shoegazing came around and sounded like the inside of my head:

Right about this time I started making my own music. I read an interview with
someone, I forget who, in a magazine and they said if you want to find out what
someone's music sounds like, ask them their five favorite bands. I hope more than
anything this sounds like Gary Numan, Chapterhouse, Pink Floyd, The Meatmen and LPD were stuffed in a studio together and forced to play nice:

Spookshow In Your Pants--Warm Feelings

Music started to accelerate, though, thanks to the internet. Some Japanese kid doing stuff in his bedroom is better than anything on the radio or for sale. Everyone who's always taken pride in loving music has become an instant idiot just because there's too much out there for any one person to keep track of. You can't know it all and contrast and compare anymore. Sure, you can do this with stuff on the radio and supposedly obscure indie magazines...but if it's in a magazine it's hardly obscure, since no doubt some guitar geek on YouTube you've never heard of has racked up half a million hits.

Living in the here and now, I still like what I'm told is pop culture, even though I don't buy it.

It just goes on. The music reflects me. I don't find it. It finds me.

Hellzapoppin

2010-05-19T00:55:00.005-04:00

Honeypot Christian Cagigal clued me into this one.

I love movies from this era, but Hellzapoppin is something way beyond stupid puns and slapstick. I mean, it's that, but it's also Stanley Elkin put onscreen some thirty years before he exploited metafiction. This 1941 movie self-referenced itself so much that South Park seems a pale imitation in terms of making fun of making fun of pop culture. Just watch the opening few minutes:

The rest of the movie just collapses upon itself and has less to do with storyline than a pointed statement that dumb people will line up to watch anything. If, like me, you just like stupid comedy jokes this movie is hilarious. But if you think we live in an idiot world where we're sucking on the tit of the entertainment industry to keep us distracted from what those in power don't want us to see you'll really find it funny--and of course more sad than you can bear. You weren't allowed to say this outright back when this was filmed but Hellzapoppin absolutely gets this point across in subtle, at-the-time subversive ways and points out that society will watch goddamn anything at the expense of thinking, some fifty years before American Idol.

You can find this on Amazon. Buy it, laugh your ass off and learn we really haven't come that far.

Chrithmath Memory

2010-05-16T21:49:00.004-04:00

After posting the Spookshow In Your Pants holiday album, I still like the idea of having Christmas in May. So I think
I'll share one of my favorite (and by that I mean completely mortifying) Christmas memories.

This happened probably a decade or so ago. I'd realized that mall shopping made me absolutely batshit and decided to do
that year's holiday obligation by trolling up and down High Street, near where I live. Unique, weirdo gift shops were far easier to deal with than chain stores that had "JUST HEAR THOSE SLEIGH BELLS JINGLING, JING JING JINGLING, OOOH"
blaring over loudspeakers to the point I wanted to shove a potato peeler through my eardrums to make it stop.

It ended up being a nice night. It was cold, but not horribly freezing, and the fat snowflakes drifting down were pretty to look at. I found some stuff I thought was cool to give as gifts. Would my family appreciate them? Whatever. I don't know them and they don't know me. But once a year we fake like we're on the same page and pretend that commercialism brings us closer. But this particular year I kinda felt like, maybe, I'd gotten it, if not right, at least close.

I had bags full of stuff. I settled in at the bus stop waiting for the ride to take me home.

Some kid was there, probably eighteen or nineteen and was obviously gay as the Easter Parade. I love gay kids, given that they get to be what I was but never could express without being killed, most likely by a family member.

"Merry Chrithmas!" he shouted.

"Merry Christmas to you, too," I said. We started talking. The moonlight flashing on the new-fallen snow was nothing compared to the way it glinted off the silver stud through his tongue.

"Have you been doing thome thopping?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, doing my best to not make it sound like yeth.

"Chrithmath is awethome!" he said. I could not disagree more, but sometimes cuteness gets to win.

I am still a bastard at heart, though, and no matter how endearing his Drew Barrymore in E.T schtick happened to be, I was determined to call him on his affectations and resulting peculiar speech.

"New tongue piercing?" I asked.

"No, I've had this for two years. But I've always had a lithp."

AWKWARD!

It's Tricky

2010-05-16T18:05:00.003-04:00

Man, this takes me back. Just re-watched the video for the first time in years and found myself grinning like a loon all the way through.

In 2006 The Knack filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement, claiming Run-DMC stole the riff from 'My Sharona.' Seriously. It took them that long to notice?

Eclipse

2010-05-15T11:55:00.005-04:00

Christopher Hoffman put out a gospel album entitled 'The Road'. On it, he explores his faith and his relationship with Jesus Christ. There's just one problem, at least as where Evangelicals are concerned: He's gay as a picnic basket.

I love the idea of anybody who feels no need to thump their chest and proclaim how their brand of faith is The One True Message in order to make them feel superior in the here and now. Christopher simply details the road he's traveled, spiritually, and isn't out to convert anyone. But were his sexuality not enough to piss off the people who think they hold a copyright on the words of Jesus Christ, he also strongly identifies with the Wiccan faith. Myself, I'll quote from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra: "I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything." But Chris is a Christian Wiccan, or a Wiccan Christian, depending. I recently told him, "Hey, if you're going to be a person of faith, why settle for just one?"

After a years-long struggle, he and his partner, Jake, have finally adopted two kids (again, a major difference of opinion in that I think NOT breeding is the major perk of homosexuality) and are, finally a real family. He's ready to record again.

And he's asked me to produce. My first return to audio in years and I'm working on a fucking gospel album. Okay, granted, a queer, witchy gospel album from a guy with sleeve tats featuring tarot cards and Harry Potter characters, but still. What's next? I get a call from Alan Jackson?

If you click on Christopher's name at the beginning of this post you can hear samples from his last album. This is not at all the sort of thing I generally listen to, but because of our shared love of penises and Italian horror movies we ended up friends.

There's one song on the album, Eclipse, that has nothing to do with faith but rather his struggle with bi-polar disorder. It's sheer hell to suddenly find yourself miserable for no real reason. You know it's biochemical, but that does nothing to relieve the sheer physical and mental torture you're going through. Chris wrote a song comparing this to planetary motion and I thought the analogy was brilliant. Again, click on his name to hear a sample from it. Even though I'm not a fan of the arrangements on the album, there's no disputing the boy has pipes and can belt them out. Just for fun and just for him, I did a remix of this song:

Christopher Hoffman--Eclipse (Spookshow In Your Pants Prozac Remix)

So now he wants to do something true to his beliefs but sounding freaky and weird. The ancient Chinese had a curse: May you live in interesting times.

Second Guessing

2010-05-15T00:44:00.001-04:00

This is how I learned about abortion:

I attended a private, Christian school and when I was in 7th grade our teacher passed out sealed manilia envelopes with the edict we were NOT to open them until further instructed. He carried on about how the less wholesome segment of society were planning to murder babies, detailing in very specific ways just how it was done, then let us open our packets containing color photos of teency dismembered arms and legs and crushed skulls swimming in a sea of gore. At that point we were dismissed for lunch.

Naturally, the cafeteria served spaghetti.

At thirteen I found this ludicrous, obvious propoganda. It didn't slow me down in the slightest when it came to my appetite; no more than when they served ravioli after making us watch 'Red Asphalt', the gory safe-driving movie. I like food. Just because I'd recently seen pictures of chopped up babies was not going to deter me from a zesty tomato sauce.

They had a point. The stuff in the photos were easily recognized body parts and putting the 'fetus' spin on things didn't detract from the fact that what was going on was no less brutal than putting a premie in a blender. It wasn't a zygote, or some other clinically detatched term for shoving the surgical equivalent of a weed-whacker up a woman's womb and chopping her kid into bits. Abortion is, absolutely, murder.

But so is sending teenage kids into another part of the wold to die in the name of patriotism. That is murder as well. And if you're going to see one as a-ok then you better see the other as kosher as well. Oh sure, trot out your blah-blah-blah "innocent" life schtick. Call me crazy, but a kid at nineteen is no more prepared to be dropped in another part of the world where people want to kill he or she than a crack-whore's baby being aborted instead of plopped out in a toilet bowl. You call war "neccessary" murder? That's what I call abortion in some cases. Okay, most cases, given that children in general are vile to be around.

At last, both sides of this highly volitale argument can come together in the shared hatred of a common enemy: me. 'Cause I think you're both nuts.

Gothpop

2010-05-14T03:24:00.005-04:00

This is an old, throwaway Spookshow In Your Pants tune I did when I was living in a warehouse with bare insulation for walls and exposed electrical conduit hanging everywhere. The sound is much as the title implies. Click on it to have a listen.

Floating Fish

2010-05-08T21:52:00.005-04:00

I had the weirdest kindergarten experience ever.

I started at age four, a year younger than most of my classmates. I guess it made sense; I could already read on my own at the time whereas the older students had yet to completely learn their ABCs. People saw this as a sign of genius. But people are idiots. I could do this one thing well and that was it. My oldest brother believes this happened because my mother started reading to me the day I came home from the hospital after being born and never let up. He might be right. I don't remember being taught anything; I just remember picking up books and somehow knowing what the arrangement of letters was supposed to mean. Mom read the same books over and over, I watched and followed along and through repetition got that certain funny shapes related to specific words and it all kind of sank in through osmosis. Somehow my four-year-old mind was able to break it down so that this combination of letters resulted in this sound, and that another, and somehow I learned to read. The more I read, the better spoken I became. In other words, as a toddler, I interviewed well. So I got to attend kindergarten a year early.

This was hardly a state-supported entity, but rather a self defined institution some woman ran in a garage-like structure in back of her house. It was West Virginia in the sixties, so this sort of shit could fly.

The kindergarten teacher had no idea I could read. I would spring that one on her later. Her primary concern was the fact that when it came to Art time, all I would do was scribble. Other kids were doing stick figures and block houses but I only seemed interested in grabbing a handful of crayons and running them across the page. One of the few sense memories I retain of the time is that I liked the way it looked. I remember how much fun I thought it was to see six different-colored lines streaking across the page at the same time. But no, the teacher wanted to see me draw Mommy and Daddy and Me, so when I kept scribbling she sent home a strongly-worded note, in the language of the time, voicing her suspicion that I might be retarded.

Hell, in the art world everyone's a critic.

But my Mom went to bat for me and essentially said, "Oh yeah? Why don't you give him a candy bar wrapper and ask him to read the ingredients?"

The next day the kindergarten teacher thrust a wrapper in my hands and asked me what it said.

"Sugar, Corn Syrup, Milk Chocolate (Sugar, Cocoa Butter Chocolate, Milk, Dextrose, Emulsifiers (Lecithin), Butter Fat, Salt, with Vanillin and Ethyl Vanillin, Artificial Flavorings), Sweetened Condensed Skim Milk (Sugar, Skim Milk)
CONTAINS LESS THAN .05% OF THE FOLLOWING: Partially Hydrogenated Blend of Vegetable Oils, (CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLWING: Cottonseed, Peanut, Soybean), Soy Protein, Artificial and Natural Flavors, Maple Syrup, Delactosed Whey, Invertase, Tapioca, Flour, Salt, Citric Acid, Artificial Color (Blue #1, Red #3)"

She nearly fainted before I reached Milk Chocolate. But she revived enough to realize that I could be her kindergarten star and recreate the turn of events so that it was SHE who taught me how to read ahead of my time. What fucking wonderful advertising! A four-year-old attends Miss Hick's backyard babysitting and comes away a prodigy! Good luck backing that one up when Ma and Pa Toothless finds their kid still can't count to three.

Thing was, before she hit on the fact that my advanced reading skills could mean advertising gold, something really creepy went down. By total accident I opened the bathroom door and walked in on a female kindergarten classmate, being assisted by the student intern who was probably all of 17 or 18. But the woman who ran the kindergarten got wind of this and decided to go for an eye for an eye approach to punishment.

Here is where things get sketchy, fragmented and perhaps hidden under a few layers of denial. But this definitely happened: I was made to stand on top of a table and pull my pants down in full view of my kindergarten class, so that they could all see me in a vulnerable state, to atone for the unconscionable sin of opening an unlocked restroom door.

Was it just pulling down my pants and seeing me in my underwear, or was my four-year-old peen exposed before everyone? I don't know. I remember the ordeal, just not the details. And really, if you're a supposed "teacher" making a kid do this does it make a fucking difference?

It has taken years to piece one part of the puzzle with another. I did something shortly later, that perhaps began a lifetime of passive-agression. Now, I'm grown up enough to prefer outright aggression, calling things the way you see them, to this, but still: I'm very proud of my four-year-old, kindergarten self for having the balls to react instead of just sucking it up.

My kindergarten teacher had a fish tank full of what she called her "prize" fish.

I dumped half a can of Ajax into it and killed them all.

Ten years ago I set this experience to music as a Spookshow In Your Pants song. Click on the title if you want to listen.

A Hold Of Me

2010-05-05T02:01:00.006-04:00

I put this up on FB and realized for once how honest I was being so I figured I'd repeat it here. This is what I said there:

"So tonight has been Boomtown Rats night here at Der Spookhaus. And I found this video from the 6th annual Dia De Los Muretos Celebtration exhibition; a zillion ways to paint skulls, attached to my personal theme song from 1984. Weird thing, listening to the lyrics tonight, I think it's still my personal theme song from 2010. Yeah, parts of me have grown and become much more human than then...but still...the words pretty much reflect how much of me there is I want to hide."

Over The Rhine And Through The Woods To Grandgansta's House We Go

2010-05-05T00:25:00.005-04:00

I lived in Cincinnati and needed to get a job, pronto, before my boyfriend bludgeoned me in the head to death with a plastic thing he'd bought initially to shove up
his ass. I found employment in a blood plasma center in the middle of Over-The-Rhine, Cincinatti's well-publicised answer to the ghetto. I was a small, skinny white boy, and signing up for this was tantamount to saying that active-duty in Afghanistan gives me tittie hard-ons.

Because blood-plasma centers are not known for drawing the future standouts of the local board of education.
Becuause blood-plasma centers are not generally a gathering place for lively discussions of post-modern approaches to music and literature.
Because blood-plasma centers have yet to be considered a haven for the concept of free thought.

And because I was tiny and white.

This was a slight few years before the Cincinnati riots of 2001 broke out, and although the reslults were less than honorable, not that they were without
good reason. Some fucking cop shot a kid just because he had 14 outstanding warrants, not getting that, duh, all of them were non-violent. But this was simply
the straw that broke the camel's black. This kind of shit had been happening for years and the people who lived in the neighborhood had gotten sicker and sicker
and sicker of this shit until one day it fucking broke and Helter Skelter came raining down. The mood was there, in '87, when I arrived, and years of white
cops getting away with killing black kids for no real reason was uppermost in the minds of the community. It hadn't reached the point of crazy looting and kicking
in windows and screaming "Fuck this!" But it was getting closer and closer. White motherfuckers were coming into a historically black neighborhood and killing people, including children. This is when I landed my job in the middle of Over-The Rhine as an intake clerk.

"Hi," I said to the people gathered in the lobby, "I'm new here!" I waved cheerily like a faggy white boy. Not the best plan.

My co-workers were mostly black, educated and gave me the low-down. "You gotta prove yourself as something different than the cops. This neighborhood can
be cool with white people as long as they distance themselves from the people who are killing their kids."

Sadly, 'Fuck tha Police' wouldn't come out for another few years, so I had nothing to go on. I would have thought that as a freaky punkazoid, sporting
hair down to my shoulders on one side, buzzed off on the other and sporting eyeliner; while wearing a white lab coat to denote me as an employee of
the place that would give them cash money for the malt-liqour infused stuff from out of their veins, would have distanced me enough from the five-oh.

But no. You have to prove yourself in a place like this. Appearances count for nothing. Much as it should in the real world.

This was about the time I took up smoking. I did it so I could learn some really cool magic tricks involving cigarettes. Not that if anyone knew this it would boost my street cred. This was back in the day whereyou could smoke pretty much anywhere, and I thought perhaps my newfound fondness for coffin nails would make me seem just a little cooler and therefore less like an opressor. Unfortunately, my job consisted of having to stab anyone who came through the line in the finger with a pointy thing that drew enough blood to smear on a little card for processing. If someone does this to you, most likely you are not going to consider them on your side, even if you get a teeny-tiny check at the end of the maze.

But I lit up, just to show the inner toughness of the guy wearing Maybelline. But I'd just started and I was no good at it so right after I stabbed a
local gang leader in the finger I coughed loud, hacking sobs and blew most of the contents of my nose on his specifically-colored shirt.

You would think of course that I'd be instantly dead but instead the hoodlum showed a remarkable instinct for subtle sarcasm (my favorite kind) and said,
"Been smoking long?"

I thought this was hilarious, but the woman working alongside me wanted me to live to see another day. "He been smoking forever!" she shouted,
"Don't you know asthma when you see it?"

This is what saved my life. Not her version of cunning strategy but the fact that me and the guy who now had my phlegm across his shirt looked at one another and cracked up together. We both thought it was the stupidest thing to say ever, as if, "Oh yeah, that's gonna work" and shared a moment. And THAT is what turned the tables and made my being there no longer an onslaught of fear.

He spread the word that I was ok. If that woman hadn't said that completly dumb thing it could have been oh so horrible. But because we laughed together, my life in the plasma center got a whole lot better by the very next day. The cold crowd of stare-you-down thugs became warm, personable and funny. They would insult me and I would insult them back and we'd laugh together. I loved it. Me, the whitest man
in America, connecting with the most dangerous part of town. I don't know this for a fact, but I'd like to think that some of them saw the beauty in the very same thing.

Belief

2010-05-01T22:36:00.002-04:00

The Odd Gathering is much as the name implies. It's a collection of really peculiar magicians who get together at a hotel in California and just get crazy. I was supposed to be there this year but I dicked myself out of vacation time so I'm stuck here in Cowtown. But I get to appear virtually, so here's my online turn for those nutjobs.

Amazing Jesus

2010-04-29T12:21:00.005-04:00

I'm very ill. I've got stuff coming out of both ends (as opposed to the usual fantasy of stuff of going into both ends.) But honeypot Christian Cagigal clued me into this and it absolutely made my day.

Kicker

2010-04-28T21:10:00.003-04:00

This has been transfered from hard drive to hard drive for decades. Click on the title to watch or download it. It doesn't take up much space and will provide years of entertainment. Go on, you know you want to.

Fall On Yer Knees

2010-04-28T03:16:00.006-04:00

I froze all day today. It was unseasonably cold. So screw it, let's have Christmas in April.

This is the Spookshow In Your Pants Christmas album; composed, performed and recorded Christmas week of 2000 in a crazy flurry of creativity. Warm Feelings was also composed and performed that week but it didn't quite fit with the Christmas theme aside from the "Have you been a good little boy" sample so I left it out.

It was kind of a nice time. I had a boyfriend who was probably the most natural, normal relationship I've had. He was a Christmas nut, and I have always hated that time of year. No, more than hated; it sends me into the worst place I can imagine and I don't know exactly why. Somehow my worst memories come to the surface that time of year. But Mark was crazy about Santa and trees and lights and for that very reason we never should have got together. We met on Thanksgiving week. For whatever reason, my personality charmed him; usually it tends to go in the opposite direction. But this is the Puddlewinks formula: I go years without a date and when I land someone they are way beyond, physically, for which I should qualify. He looked like a model and I looked like a toad wearing spats. Frankly, I'd rather settle for more mediocre looks and a semblance of regularity, but apparently it's not in the cards.

But Mark's Christmas glee was, at first, tough to endure. I loved looking at him; I loved talking to him. But goddamn, his giddiness over the fact he had a tree in his house and stockings stuck all over the place was more than I could bear. Plus there was that whole actor thing.

I'd said, for years, that I would never, ever date anyone who was a Psychologist or an actor. Because one wants to change your personality and the other changes theirs for a living. And Mark absolutely did this: around his Theatre friends he was insufferable but when it was just he and I felt like I was falling in love. This dual-play personality would have been a turnoff were it not for the fact that, somehow, he got me to understand Christmas.

"Look," he said, "It doesn't have to be about religion or family or crass, crazy commercialism. Let's just drive around. Let's just drive around and look at the houses, decked out in pretty lights and decorations, and pretend Earth looked like that all of the time instead of just one month a year."

So we drove around and held hands and yeah, he was right. The world looked a lot more fun to be around. The ice block around my heart this time of year melted just a tiny bit. Not enough to make me seem entirely human to friends and family, but still, for what it was, it worked a little. And compared to my screaming-meemie approach to Christmas for many years beforehand, it was a gulf as wide as the Grand Canyon.

He forced me to watch the Bing Crosby/Rosemary Clooney movie 'White Christmas' with him; something I would have never done on my own with a gun to my head. But since it was him I initially endured it. And ended up loving it thanks to our shared commentary; simultaneously making fun of it and reveling in the camp factor. And realizing, to my shocked horror, that it was a pretty fun movie just on its own terms. What the hell was I becoming?

Mark left Ohio to visit relatives across the country Xmas week. I went crazy with holiday cheer and catapulted into one of my most creative bursts ever: I created an entire mini-album of Christmas-themed songs to give him upon his return. Not entirely because he had turned me into a manger-frenzied icon of holiday cheer but because he had managed to let just a tiny bit of light shine in when it came to feeling what normal people do. Plus I hoped it would make him happy. 'White Christmas' turned out to be a major influence, but thank God there was enough of me left to make it weird.

I think it did. Make him happy, I mean.

This was not the great love of my life; we broke up a few weeks after Valentine's Day. He was decent about it and brought along a pipe and a bag of pot.

"Oh, lovely parting gifts," I said.

But still, his teaching me how to reinvent horrible times of the year into your own, more positive, terms was one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me. I just didn't know you could do it that way.

So you and I will reinvent Christmas as something that can happen on a cold day in April and listen to the Spookshow In Your Pants Christmas Album 'Fall On Your Knees'.

I will not go into details but it turned out to be a mighty prophetic title.

Click on the titles below to hear the songs in order:

1) Dick the Halls

2) Ave Bill Cosby

3) White (Trash) Christmas

4) Adeste Fidelis

5) Snow

6) The Best Things Happen While We're Dancing

Smells Like Teen Spirit

2010-04-27T08:19:00.001-04:00

That's it. I've officially run out of ideas.

Mugged

2010-04-23T02:17:00.006-04:00

My father saw the world as a scary place. No matter what activity in which I was about to engage, if it took place outside the safety of our home, he would warn me about mysterious strangers who would “knock me in the head” and take my wallet. That I was sixteen, worked in a Bonanza Sirloin Pit and that the contents of my wallet usually amounted to thirty-five bucks didn’t enter the equation. The head-knocking and wallet-stealing was a given; the sure result of one daring to tread the dangerous, gangsta-ridden streets of Huntington, West Virginia.

I grew up and moved to Columbus, Ohio—to his mind the equivalent of settling down in Chicago’s Cabrini Green. Decades have passed where I’ve had to reassure him that I’ve yet to be knocked in the head, although to him the fact I like Chinese food is proof positive I’ve gone all uppity with my high-falutin’ big city ways. But still he thinks I’m in constant danger.

So I never told him about the time I got mugged. Sort of.

“Hey man, you got any papers?”

This is code for a stranger that wants to sell you some pot. Thing is, no stranger will ever do you this favor; it is always, every time, a scam. It works because people wanting weed, despite having been burned a thousand times before, always think that this time will be the one where an entrepreneurial stranger wants to furnish the world with ganja out of the goodness of his heart.

I forgot everything I ever knew and followed the stranger behind a building to make the deal.

“I gots to see the money first.”

I fished a twenty out of my pocket, no doubt preparing to buy the smallest amount of da chronic available on the street possible.

“Now let’s see the weed, “ I said.

Instead of producing said product, the man lunged for the bill. I yanked it away and he was not happy about it.

“Motherfucker, give me that money!”

“For what? Your good looks? You gotta show me what you’re selling before you get the money.”

Not a wise choice of words, as my new friend was apparently not used to being called on his line of crap and found it profoundly distasteful that I would suggest such a thing. He grabbed at me, knocked me to the pavement and the two of us rolled, wrestling, back into public view on the corner of 5th and (appropriately enough,) High Street.

I did a magic trick where I pretended to place the bill in my left hand but actually made it disappear. I kept my hand closed, making my attacker think it was still in there so that he wrestled me for a bit, got the upper hand, then pried my fingers open one by one to find nothing there.

“Tah-Dahhh!” I shouted.

He was not impressed.

I managed to break free and took off running. But the tables were turned and it was suddenly he who had the upper hand.

Because he had a bicycle.

I ran down the street and suddenly he was upon me, pedaling furiously and ringing his bell. Ching ching! Ching ching! The sound of impending gangsta beat-down.

He overtook me. He leapt off his Crips-mobile and once again pulled me to the ground. I saw some nerdy yahoo talking on his cell phone.

“Call 911,” I begged. “A crazy man on a bicycle is trying to hurt me.”

“Ew. Er.Uh. I don't think I want to get involved,” the man said. Reason 774 why Al Queda will win.

I broke the crazy man’s grip and sprinted half a block to the Family Dollar store. But before making it inside, my mugger caught up with me and started applying strategically-applied blows to my face.

“Call 911!” I screamed to the man trying to leave the store.

“He’s got my weed! He’s got my weed!” my attacker screamed, a role-reversal tactic that worked like a charm.

“Uh, I don’t want to get into this,” said the man leaving the Family Dollar.
“Call 911!” I yelled to no avail.

I lunged for the doorway but unfortunately my bicycle mugger had a firm grip on my favorite shirt. The beautiful, pale yellow paisley pattern ripped beneath his strong, ebony hands.

“Call 911!” I shouted as I burst into the store, my nipple peeking out from the sizeable rip in my shirt.

They did.

Although I had been mugged, albeit by a guy on a bicycle, the cops finally showed up. I told them the story I just told you, cleverly omitting the trying to buy some pot part. It probably didn’t help that I was together enough to shop for two cans of Family Dollar brand ravioli before they arrived.

"Yeah, we'll check it out," the police said, making it clear through body language that they damn sure wouldn't.

Someone I knew, Connie, showed up shortly after and saw me standing there in my ripped-to-shreds shirt, holding some ravioli.

“Uh, hi,” she said.

“I just got mugged,” I said, leaving out the part that it was a guy on a bicycle. Or the other stuff.

She took me home. Leave it to a lesbian to be my knight in shining armor.

Scioto Shoe Hut

2010-04-22T23:50:00.007-04:00

Another commercial from the now-defunct-but-soon-to-be-resurrected Spookshow In Your Pants Radio Hour. Sam did the free-form ranting and Chris was kind enough to allow me to use the cheesy background music from his Pagan-Queer-Tattooed-Born-Again gospel album. (Yes, such things exist; just because your pastor has a doctorate from divinity school doesn't make him an expert on what it means to be a Christian. Unless of course it helps you feel better about yourself and morally superior to others.) Sam did a great job here, at least to me; I snicker every time I hear it.

Click on the title if you want to snicker, too.

Kendra Pays Her Respects

2010-04-22T01:22:00.004-04:00

My friend Kendra just returned from a trip home to attend a funeral. While that was bad, the way things turned out was even worse.

I have my own story along those lines but for now I think I'll tell hers instead.

Her uncle died. She was close and it was a sad thing. She drove from Ohio to Tennessee, meeting up with her mother and sisters. All of them were running late, and the service was an hour away. They were cutting it close. Kendra's mom got behind the wheel.

And promptly ran over the family dog.

Kendra and her sisters realized what happened but the mother did not. "You just ran over the dog!" they screamed.

"No, I didn't."

"Yes! You did!"

The dog was shrieking and it's entire lower half was paralyzed. Eventually the mother realized what her daughters were telling her was entirely true. Decisions, decisions: deal with the dog or show up to her bother's funeral on time?

Cell phones were clicked and one of the sibling's boyfriend was dispatched to leave work and arrive to deal with the half-crushed pet.

Inside the car, Kendra, her mother and the sisters were freaking right out. "Didn't you just tell the dog, this morning," one of the daughters said, "that if it didn't stop barking you were going to kill its sorry ass?"

The mother convulsed in a new fit of sobbing; that was exactly what had went down.

Kendra was unable to deal, and the fact that everyone else in the car were fans of rap pushed her over the edge. "WILL YOU TURN THE RADIO DOWN?" she screamed, a half-dead dog and a fully-dead uncle and a career-dead Asher being too much for her to bear. One of her sisters leaned forward for the volume knob and, unfortunately, in the process, her big-boned buttocks knocked over a coffee cup, spilling it on another sister, who had to exit the car, step over the howling, half-crushed dog and return to the house so she could scrub her dress with Life Buoy and blow it clean with a hair dryer.

So Kendra's family had kind of a late start.

They arrived at the funeral home one minute before the service. They were all sobbing; the majority of the guests thinking, 'Oh they must have been so close to the dear departed' insead of "Whoopsie, we just ran over the dog." Kendra, her mother, and her sisters (particularly the one who was trying to hide the coffee blotch on her dress) settled in and tried their best to think about the uncle. But the sounds of a yelping mutt that's spine had been ground into powder took center stage.

The boyfriend called from the vet. Kendra's mother agreed, via cell phone, it would be best if the dog be put down.

"I know," the pastor said, "the death of your beloved family member upsets you..." while Kendra's mother spat out hacking sobs as she tucked her phone into her purse, knowing what she'd done.

Pat at work burst into a sob-fest on hearing this tale, convinced completely the story was all about her.

And I thought, of course, "Shit! Blog content!"

Iam Siam--Talk To Me

2010-04-22T00:06:00.004-04:00

I dunno if these guys ever had a real album. I suppose I could do a google or Wikipedia search but I'm the laziest mofo to ever slither across the planet and its so much easier to post this and suggest you do the work yourself. I did have the vinyl LP single and had a lot of fun listening to it. It's sort of a tribal meets 80's synthpop thing and the video is fun to look at. So here ya go:

Corpse At The Mall

2010-04-21T00:36:00.003-04:00

My friend Richard was into special effects-makeup (blood and gore, as opposed to making yourself pretty, like some of my other friends) and needed a guinea pig. I was all to happy to comply. He was a perfectionist, so it took hours. When finished, yep, I looked like a rotting corpse that had crawled out of the grave. Thing is, it wasn't Halloween. It was just the sort of thing he and I liked to do on a summer afternoon rather than, you know, passing ball.

It was such a terrific effect I thought it would be a shame to waste it on solely ourselves. I suggested we drive to the local mall and let me stumble around and see what people thought. Not the best of plans. We lived in West Virginia, not exactly a haven of zombie fans. Or people particularly interested in being confronted with something different.

We pulled up in the parking lot, near where the multiplex exited. A movie let out and people started streaming from the door. I got out of the car and shambled near them in my rotted corpse makeup. "Excuse me," I said, "Can you tell me how to get to Spring Hill Cemetary?"

One of my favorite, and ongoing, social experiments is to force people to come face to face with something outside their sheltered little world-view. What is fascinating, to me, is how often this sparks, of all things, sheer anger. I'm forced to confront things every day I simply cannot fathom, but the most heated response I usually offer is a smartass joke. But apparently I am not most people. A vast majority, I've found through perpetrating such stunts for most of my life, think that experiencing something they can't understand is immediate cause to feel threatened and offer bodily harm as a solution.

This is exactly what happened mere seconds after appearing in public in July made up as the living dead.

Some redneck and his girlfriend, no doubt watching Stroker Ace for the fifth or sixth time, caught sight of me. Mr. Man clearly had to protect his woman from watching a teenager bathed in latex and the fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in. He chose Fight.

"Buddy," he shouted at me like I was anything but, "You need to take off that creepy-looking suit and get your ass the hell out of this parking lot." He swiftly advanced his pace, heading straight for me.

"Richard? Richard!" I hissed through clenched teeth, "Unlock the car!"

He didn't hear. The angry man in the wife-beater ran after me.

"Richard!" I shrieked like a girl scout, "We've got trouble!"

Richard is not one for moving at a high rate of speed. He opened the driver's side door, then casually unlocked the passenger side. I jumped in an re-locked the door, smearing makeup on the window in the process.

Mr. Man and his 70's porn-star mustache hammered on the window.

"This is why we need to get out of here!"

"Oh," Richard said.

We took off, with seriously offended redneck man chasing the car like a mutt hunting dog.

And there ya go. Some twisted kid shows up in zombie paint and someone's brain misfires in a way that reads 'This does not compute' and a serious beat-down is the only possible way to handle the situation. What scares the living shit out of me is that this is how MOST people deal with such a scenario.

Some years later I bought a bunch of tubs of 'I Can't Believe It's Not Butter' and stood on a busy downtown corner with a shopping bag full of them. As each person passed, I said, "Would you like some margarine? You don't have to rub it on you right now..."

Not one person took one. And many people were hostile and threatened to punch me. (What made this experiment even more fascinating was that when I pointed to a non-existent, "hidden" camera people would smile and laugh and utterly change their personality in a heartbeat.) People clearly have to have a safety zone of the familiar. But potential stardom, no matter how half-baked, can cause them to throw that notion right out the window. Whatta world.

On the way home from my near-thrashing at the mall, Richard and I passed a car full of girls on the highway. They caught sight of me in my corpse makeup.

They mooned us.

Very Empty Spaces

2010-04-20T23:22:00.003-04:00

Spookshow In Your Pants is not exactly known for keeping up with the times. The only cover songs so far has been Debbie Reynolds' Tammy, the James Bond Theme and In The Hall of the Mountain King. Now there's this, a funky slap-bass kind of noodling that unexpectedly morphs into Pink Floyd's (although, I suppose, legally, now Roger Waters') 'Empty Spaces' from The Wall. But since it came out in 1979 I guess we're getting closer to what's current. At this rate a Lady Gaga cover should appear in about thirty years or so.

As usual, click the title if you wanna listen.

Transcendental

2010-04-17T01:10:00.006-04:00

I hate and fear the dentist. This, plus chain smoking as though nicotine were oxygen, has resulted in a smile that is sepia-toned like a turn-of-the-century tinotype. I think this mindset came about early on. I rode my bicycle to the friendly neighborhood dentist for a routine check-up.

Understand, this was in West Virginia so what constituted state-of-the-art in oral health was pretty much the nineteen-fiftes for everyone else. The dreaded drill was operated by a manual foot pump; the dentist's ability to stomp up and down
at a high rate of speed determining the level of pain the patient might endure. But Dr. Barber was elderly and his reflexes weren't quite as quick as one would have hoped.

He leaned in and I couldn't see his eyes, splotches covering his coke-bottle glasses; no doubt specks of pyorhhea from former patients that had spattered onto his eyewear during one of his foot-stomping frenzies.

"It's going to have to come out," he said, probing at a tooth from which I'd never felt any pain.

Whmmmpf? I asked, all his fingers inside of my mouth.

"Shhh!" he hissed. "Now rinse and spit."

He went to a corner and unwrapped a tray of sterilized instruments that looked like H.R. Geiger had run amok in a hardware store.

"Look, I don't think I..."

"Don't worry, this will make you feel better," he said brandishing a syringe with a needle gauge comparable to indoor plumbing. He stuck it into my gum and halfway up my skull. I did not feel better in the slightest, although ten minutes later my entire face was numb and I talked like a woman with Cerebral Palsy.

He stuck a crescent wrench into my mouth and, planting one foot firmly on my cheek, twisted and pulled until a tooth was plucked from my head. "There we go!" he said, spritzing my mouth with Lavoris cinnamon mouthwash to compensate for the loss of part of my anatomy. Wisely, he followed up with some heavy-duty pain relievers, then sent me on my way in such a condition to ride my bike back home.

"I got a tooth pulled," I informed my mother.

"Nonesense," she said, as facts rarely interfered with her world view.

"No, look," I said, pulling back a corner of my mouth to display a hollow space now packed with gauze.

She was on the phone in a heartbeat. "Can you tell me," she asked the dental receptionist, "why I wasn't called about this? You're going to remove one of my son's teeth and didn't think I might want to know ahead of time?"

"Well, it's policy..." the phone-answerer started, but Mom gave them an earful of shouting complete with bible verses that would argue her point.

I thought it was great. Until the pain pills wore off and I spent the day crying in agony like Chris Crocker in the face of people disrespecting Brittney. I wanted to slam my head against the floor until I became unconscious. This was my first brush with the dark side of dentistry and I knew right then I didn't want to experience any more.

But I was forced to go. When I was eighteen, my dentist informed me that I had wisdom teeth buried in my jaw that were about to pose a problem. I needed to have them cut out.

"You'll need an oral surgeon. I generally recommend two. One is sort of a dry fish, not much in the way of personality. The other is a joker, a funny guy. He's got personality in spades."

The subtext was made instantly clear. I had a chance at having my face split open by a comedy oral surgeon. It wouldn't play in Vegas but in Huntington, West Virginia a man had found his niche. "Sign me up," I said.

Confusing funny with what the situation actually calls for has been the hallmark of my life.

I forget his actual name, but for the sake of the story from here on out we're going to call him Dr. Gallagher. He was, pretty much, like what would happen if you made an appointment to go under anaesthesia and Hunter S. Thompson showed up. He came to the waiting room, called my name, then dragged me back to the room where the procedure would take place, talking a blue streak NO ONE wants to hear:

"Yeah, we're gonna get those goddamn wisdom teeth right the fuck outta there before they do some damage. Shit, just last week a woman tried to take me to court--claimed I molested her while she was under. Shit, fuck, I wouldn't have touched her with someone else's dick."

This was back in 1981 where, yeah, someone with a doctorate could talk like this and not get sued. Not that it was the slightest bit reassuring.

"Okay, my faggot of an anesthesiologist is going to shoot you up with some joy juice." Given that they'd already given me a Valium, I couldn't help but smile. If only, I thought. "Count out loud backwards from five to one. Five, four, three..."

Everything went black.

I woke up, dizzy, and had to be led with two people in scrubs supporting me back to the oral surgeon's equivalent of a recovery room: a couple of folding chairs. My mouth was stuffed with so much cotton I felt like a cat hacking hairballs.

My parents drove me home. When you have your wisdom teeth removed they slice open your gums, dig into your jaw, cut loose the renegade teeth and sew you back up again. Only this is not a cross stitch pattern where exacting detail of a red-breasted robin wearing a sombrero scores points for being photo-realistic as possible; at the oral surgeon's they just want to stich you up as quickly as they can. There are loose gaps and you bleed from them. The blood trickles down your throat and, unlike in the Twilight novels, your stomach is not wild about this addition to the party.

Mom, Dad and I were watching TV and the pain medication had worn off. I was hurting. In addition to the pain I'd swallowed so much blood my stomach could stand it no longer. BLAAARRRRGHHH! I screamed, puking dried blood clots all over the coffee table.

My dad took this as supreme insolence, directed specifically at him, as though I'd been planning this for days to ruin his would-be-memorable experience of watching Rhoda.

"What do you think you're doing?" he yelled, leaping from his easy chair and slapping me upside the head. "What is wrong with you? What are you, a queer?"

I thought, but did not say, that queers are generally noted for their lack of gag reflexes.

He hit me a few more times, then pulled off his shirt and threw it on the blood and vomit covered coffee table. "Clean it up!" he shouted, exposing his manly pecs.

Yeah, I don't much like dentists.

The act of vomiting caused a few of the stitches to rip loose, so that I swallowed even more blood. This caused my neck and face to turn a ghastly shade of green, which no doubt caused my father to think I was, through the act of sheer will, turning myself into The Spotmaker. I wised up and forced myself to vomit out the blood chunks in private; getting it out of my system before family TV time. But the damage had caused my face to bloat into one of those things you see on Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

I returned to Dr. Gallagher's office to get what remained of my stitches removed, not that I hadn't already swallowed and puked the bulk of them. He came into the waiting room, took a look at my green and swollen face and was off on another comedy bit:

"Somebody sure beat the shit out of you! What, you don't know how to fight? Come on back here, Greenie!"

I followed him back to where the procedure was supposed to go down, Dr. Gallagher ranting every bit of the way. "Yeah, that's just what the fuck happens when you get your wisdom teeth taken out. Some ugly broad tried to sue me, claiming once
she was under I blacked both her eyes and bashed in her cheeks. I wouldn't let her suck my dick if either one of us were roaring drunk. Hey, want some novacaine before I do this?

"No, I'm fine," I said.

Jump cut ten years later and I go to a dentist's office in Cincinnati. Apparently they were not happy with the way I was flossing, so insisted I watch a video about how to floss your teeth. But they trotted me back out into the lobby, stuck the VHS into the player located there, and an entire room full of strangers got to shame me, mentally, as the guy who doesn't know how to floss.

Those porcelain fuckers can rot, break, and drop one by one out of my head before I ever see a dentist again.

10 Jokes That Failed Miserably

2010-04-15T01:51:00.005-04:00

I toss off zingers and one-liners as often as a guy with Tourette's will shout "Mohammed pees Brine Shrimp!" in line at the bank. Thing is, like anyone trying to be funny, some of them work and some of them don't. But some attempts at humor
transcend bombing and move straight into comedy hell. It's more than not getting a laugh; it's having everyone present hate you simultaneously while the unrelenting silence is like a potato peeler thrust through a kidney.

The following are true-life examples of smartassery gone horribly awry.

1)I'm in 10th grade, and the private, Christian school I'm attending is having some sort of outdoor activity. I just happen to find a perfect circle of barbed wire lying on the ground. "Hey coach!" I shout, "The new Christian Academy baseball caps
are in!" It did not get a single laugh. It did get me harsh, cold stares and a trip to the principal's office.

2) Most of my family is extremely religious. One year I go home for Christmas and find my mother has baked a birthday cake for Jesus, candles and all.

"I messed it up, though," she said. "It was supposed to say 'Happy Birthday, Jesus" but I made a mistake and wrote 'Merry Christmas, Jesus'"

"Oh well," I said, "at least you didn't write 'Happy Easter, Jesus'"

3) A woman I worked with was pregnant. I came in one day and was told by another co-worker, solemnly, that she'd lost the baby.

"Did they look underneath the couch cushions?" I asked.

4) A woman brought into the workplace some kind of country-down-home-charm craft piece of shit that looked like a small child standing in the corner. Because nothing screams family values like a child being punished. From the front it was nothing, but wedged into a corner for a second you might mistake it for a real child. She was trying to sell them. I took one of the things, wrapped an orange industrial extension cord around it's neck and hung it from the drop ceiling in her office with a sign around its neck reading 'Depression Kills.' To me, merry office hijinx. To the powers that be: Grounds for formal disciplinary action.

The write-up I had to sign read like this: "Mr. Puddelwinks did knowingly and without remorse placed an effigy of a small child in a noose in a co-worker's office, with a sign around it's neck alledging that depression brought it to this untimely end. The lifeless body of the child, swaying in the workplace, is highly inappropriate."

"Who wrote this?" I asked upon reading it, "Stephen King?"

"Well I couldn't just say it was a doll," said the Program Director, who I won't name outright but his initials are Paul Spencer, "otherwise people might think it was, you know, a Barbie or something."

"You mean a doll?" I asked.

"Exactly."

"Like what you might call what it was I actually hung as opposed to a real person?"

"Look. What if Marilyn had seen that? Three of her kids have been killed."

"Yes. Owing to sickle-cell anemia and gang warfare. I doubt they were dressed in overalls, a straw hat and polyester blends depicting sheep jumping over a fence."

"The point is that the doll looked like a child."

"Only from behind," I said. "Unless you're concerned Father Emke might have seen it."

"Are you going to sign this are are we going to fire you?"

I signed it.

5) I had moved from a secluded life in a small town to the sprawling, overwhelming metropolis that is Columbus, Ohio. On a friend's advice I started hanging out in the OSU Gay Alliance office (some years before the allegedly downtrodden masses realized renaming such organizations 'Gay-Straight' Alliances could multiply their numbers tenfold.) I watched a militant lesbian painting a sign and it was the first time I'd ever seen the particular spelling, 'Womyn'.

"Why are you spelling it that way?" I asked, honestly puzzled.

"Because this shows that we are seperate from men; completely different in every respect."

"Then why do you get so pissy when we call you cunts?"

6) My mother, after a few years of acting erratic, had finally been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. My extended family and I were gathered together and I thought I'd lighten the mood with a little joke. My friend Paul tells me that every story I've ever told him starting with this concept has ended in disaster.

"So this guy goes to the doctor," I said. "And the doctor says, I have bad news for you. You have both cancer and Alzheimer's..."

At this point my mother cracked up like it was the funniest thing in the world and that in itself was the punch line. I don't think it was the disease. Since childhood, she never understood actual riddles and would supply her own answer instead of waiting for the zinger. She knew she was always right about everything, so a need for further information never entered the picture. "Why did the chicken cross the road?" the six-year-old me would ask. "It wanted some cracked corn" she would reply, then leave the room, having satisfied herself with the answer.

So, to me, her cackling at the set-up was no big surprise. At the same time, handing her a fork and some food could be parlayed into an evening's entertainment. But it was a good joke and I was determined to finish.

"You have both cancer and Alzheimer's, the doctor says," I repeated, trying to maintain the pace.

"And the guy says, well, at least I don't have cancer!"

Not even a smile. From anyone. Except of course, from Mother.

7) My friend Glen had been so ravaged by HIV that he had to use a cane. Even so, he wanted things to be like they used to be and go out and about like we used to. A trip to a favorite restaurant found him wheezing and hobbling like an old man of ninety. I held the door open for him.

"AIDS before beauty," I said.

His boyfriend shot me a look making it clear he'd like to punch his fist through my windpipe.

8) When I was eight or nine, I took swimming lessons at the YMCA. After class I would explore the building and found the very spooky basement where the furnace engines blazed, giving off an eerie light and making dancing shadows. It was so
creepy, I had to get one of my swimming lesson classmates to come down there with me and see it. I snuck up behind him and suddely jabbed him in the sides. He let out a yelp and jumped sideways, crashing through a stack of plate glass leaned against the wall and slashing him to ribbons. They carted him away in an ambulance before my parents came to pick me up.

9) I told my mother I was gay. She told me she would have rather I'd been born dead. I checked up on this a few years later, just to see if it was something she said in anger. Nope, the verdict still held. Then she said, " I KNEW you've been stealing my panty hose!" a nutjob accusation coming way out of left field.

"That's transvestism, not homosexuality," I said. "Get your perversions straight." I thought it was a funny line but she stopped eating, most likely trying to guilt me into being someone else, and lost so much weight she became borderline anorexic.

10) I put a razor blade against my wrist and said, "Well, at least I didn't die in vein!" Then I realized there was no one around to hear it since I've alienated everyone I've ever cared about. I dropped the blade in the sink and went on in to
work.

"I never had the nerve to make the final cut"--Roger Waters

My Twinn. My God.

2010-04-13T22:35:00.005-04:00

My Twinn is a company where you send them 149 clams and a photo of your kid and they will create a toddler-sized doll in your child's image. Paul showed me their catalog some years ago and I could feel my flesh crawling right off its bones. Children are born egotistical, they hardly need further encouragement through props. The only way I could see such a contrivance as a positive step toward mental health would be for a parent to order one, keep it hidden away for those difficult days, then send the real kid outside to play and bash the doll's head repeatedly against the coffee table until you feel better and it's safe for the kid to be around again.

The first thing you do when creating your kid clone is pick an outfit. This is where the concept becomes even more revolting, because My Twinn just happens to sell a full line of children's clothing that match exactly what the dolls are wearing. Yes. They encourage a child to appear in public with this thing looking like Dr. Evil and Mini-Me. Little girls might be taught to go in for this sort of thing, but clearly these dolls and the line of clothing are marketed to hysterical, deluded mothers who truly think the world revolves around their offspring's attention-seeking ass and just one copy of perfection is not enough to go around.

The next step after choosing the outfit is to select eye and skin color. You would think the next part of the ego-run-amok process would be hair color, right? No. Before hair color on the importance chart comes the proper freckle and, ew, mole assortment. A handy tool on the website enables the customer to specify exactly where on the face these are to be placed. I am sorely tempted to order one just so I can dot the thing all over and make it look like I'm raising the poster child for melanoma, or perhaps a many-warted creature with skin like a toad. Nah, I'd probably just send in a picture of one of those third-world kids from the cleft palate hospital with an upper lip split into thirds, the kind where you can see exposed teeth and gums all the way up to the nostril, and see if My Twinn would make me one of those.

Then you pick a hair color, style and texture and submit a photograph.

But it gets even crazier than the love letter to stage mothers everywhere. They also suggest this:

I don't have a problem with a boy playing with a doll if he wants to but THAT, dressing him up in the same outfit and forcing him to play outisde, is asking for trouble. It's quite possible My Twinn has created the first ever Make Your Own Queer kit. I know there's plenty of evidence to support Nature over Nurture, but this sort of insanity would override any genetic disposition toward hetersoexuality whatsover. The straight gene would take one look, say screw it, I'm not even going to try, and order an appletini. Hard-liners on the nature side of the argument aren't going to agree, so let's just agree to disagree, compromise and instead call it a Make Your Kid Get His Ass Kicked In Ten Minutes kit.

Are we not a vain enough society as it is that we can't just give a kid a doll and maybe let imagination come into play? Do we have to reinforce 'It's all about me' instead of letting a kid know early on the fact that, most of the time, it's not?

My Twinn. Making society grotesquely self-indulgent one mole at a time.

Wish Things Were Different

2010-04-12T00:06:00.004-04:00

Man, was I ever in a bad place when I did this one. The title could not have been more heartfelt and even still it's not something I listen to very often because the music always takes me right back there emotionally. But Sunday nights are meant for wallowing in your own sorrows so what the hey. I know I've built the expectation I'm supposed to be hi-larious all the time but the other side of me is a pathetic, depressed fuck no one should have to be around. Click on the title to share in my misery.

Wash! Rinse! Repeat!

2010-04-10T23:07:00.003-04:00

I was fourteen or fifteen and our washing machine conked out. My Dad, who could fix anything, quickly diagnosed the problem and dismantled the washer in our basement and decided to rebuild it from the ground up. He declared the power source as substandard, so in the pile of discarded parts was this thing you could plug into the wall that would loudly hum and quiver. I saw it in action and thought the first thing anyone my age was bound to think:

Homemade vibrator.

It still had plastic tubes poking out of it, one to intake the water and another to spit it out, but it was the vibrating housing which captured my fancy. I waited til no one was around and snuck it back upstairs from the basement to my bedroom. It was huge and the exposed copper wire-wrapped components posed an electrical hazard. Still, the way it called to me, seductively, made it worth the risk. I figured if one of my balls accidentally dropped down and hit the AC power source I would spew across the room so hard it would crack the drywall. I'd be good and dead, but what a way to go.

I plugged it in and unzipped. I also had an open yearbook next to me, gazing at a picture of a guy I fancied, but was still in that stage where I could yank it to pictures of boys with the assistance of household appliances and not be gay. Another stage of denial was just how loud a sound the washing machine part gave off.

I placed my crank atop the exposed housing and man, did it feel good. I rubbed and jerked until, unfortunately, I was interrupted by a knocking at my bedroom door. It was my mother.

"What are you doing in there?"

You would think, good bye hard-on. But the machine had other plans. I continued to stroke it, carrying on the conversation:

"Nothing!"

"What's that noise?"

"I'm doing a science experiment."

"A what?"

"A science experiment," I repeated while grinding my dick into 220 volts of AC current.

"What is that noise?"

"It's the power source from the washing machine Dad threw away." You would think talking to Mom and referencing Dad would
have stopped me. And you would be wrong.

"What salad dressing do you want at dinner?"

"Thousand Island," I said, as I blew my spunk across the face of a yearbook picture.

"You sure you don't want Ranch?"

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure," I said, looking at the mess I'd made.

The washing machine component and I continued to date for an extended period. But eventually it wanted more than I could offer and left me. Story of my life.

Bashtards

2010-04-09T02:41:00.006-04:00

My friend Ray and I lived in Gallipolis, Ohio (queer population: 5) so the nearest gay bar was 50 miles in either direction.

One of these directions was my hometown. I had ongoing, vivid premonitions of my parents driving by at the precise moment we entered a certain establishment along with a man clad entirely in leather and another dressed as Little Debbie. So I tended to make sure we went the opposite route and drove to Charelston, West Virginia: world-reknown as the hotbed of man-on-man action.

I joke, but compared to Gallipolis, it was. The idea that there were ATTRACTIVE guys into other guys made it seem like we were visiting Neptune. The Charleston bar was called The Grand Palace. It was, as you might expect, fraught with hillbilly queens, but there were other sights to behold such as average, corn-fed boys who clearly worked out. Ray and I had our stereotypes dismantled. This was a good thing and long overdue.

Because I had grown up in a crazy Christian school world that made Footloose seem a documentary, I couldn't dance worth a crap. Cute guys would ask me to dance, I'd go out on the lighted, disco floor (again, this was in West Virginia where everything is about eight years behind everyone else) and pretty much look like I was undergoing electroshock therapy.

Before the song was over they would thank me for the "dance" and move on to someone else. I dealt with this by having another Canadian Mist and Coke. Another dance, another jettisoned prospect, another cocktail. Rinse and repeat.

Time to go and I was rocked off my ass. I was a small-town boy in embarassingly non-hip clothing, faking my sophistication by ordering drinks I was in no way prepared to handle. I just ordered what I heard other people requesting, never mind the fact that I'd never taken a drink in my life. "You should probably call it quits," said Ray.

"And you should probably sheep sheep sheep a moo-moo!" I said, to my mind ending the argument.

"Okay, at least you should switch to beer..."

"Okay, at least you should switch to queer!" The fact that Ray was already gay did not enter my logic, as a well-placed rhyme, worthy of Dr. Seuss, made me the clear intellectual winner.

Closing time. The lights went up and everyone got a whole lot uglier.

"Get me out of here," I said. "The fuckers have taken off their rubber masks and I for one am not fooled."

"Yeah, we're going," said Ray.

I stood up, staggered, and Ray put his arm around my shouders to steady me. "Don't you touch me!" I yelled. "I'm tired of your always coming on to me!" I took another step, unassisted, and dropped to the floor.

"Help!" I said, extending a hand.

He hauled me to my feet and led me to his car, the Raymobile.

While the bulk of what is about to happen is mostly my fault, I do think the Raymobile was a contributing factor. Ray lived in the same, teency, judgemental, shithole midwestern town as I and had to be familiar with the way its residents related to anything unusual or different. Shit, buying canned La Choy Chow Mein labeled you a suspect with possible anti-American sensibilities. But Ray's vehicle was a compact car that had been tricked out with a custom paint job so that, across it's baby blue exterior, a wide, hot pink stripe extended from the back of the trunk, across the roof, and over the hood to meet the grille. If a car was capable of bursting into a chorus of I Am What I Am, the Raymobile was it.

We pulled out of the parking lot and immediately stopped at a red light. A convertible of hot college boys pulled up beside us.

"Hi," they yelled in unison.

"Well Hiiiiiii...." I purred back, like I was Cat Woman.

Anyone else would have seen this as a carload of frat boys looking to cause trouble. I, in one of my first brushes with alcohol, saw it as my goddamned due that had finally come around.

"Did you guys just come from The Grand Palace?" one of them yelled.

"Oh shit," whispered Ray, getting the picture.

"Yeah!" I yelled, "But I didn't see you!"

"There's a reason!" Ray hissed.

"But the night is young and I wanna make up for lost time!"

The stop light had yet to change and the frat boys leapt out of their car, brandishing their tools of destruction. This could easily have ended in death or dismemberment, like it has for so many others, but for whatever reason, Ray and I were gay-bashed by the stupidest homophobes to ever concoct a hate crime. Of all things, they had wiffle ball bats. The hollow, plastic weapons rained down upon the Raymobile with muted, thumping sounds. He and I looked at one another with total confusion.

"So I'm not gonna get laid?" I asked.

"No."

"And instead they want to hurt us?"

"It would seem so."

"And they're hitting your car with harmless plastic things to teach us a lesson?"

"Yes. Thank you so much."

The light changed and Ray gunned the Raymobile, trying to get away. The futility of wiffle ball bats as a means of teaching queers a motherfucking lesson sank in, and the carload of drunken Evangelicals trying to right God's plan for the sancity of marriage chased us, breaking the speed laws as they were answering to a higher calling.

Ray was not familiar with the area and shot the wrong way down a one-way street. Our pursuers did the same. Oncoming traffic blared their horns and skidded out of the way, unaware a battle for morality was going down.

Ray stomped the pedal and got us going the right way. But we hit an intersection where we had to stop at a light. The frat boys pulled up alongside. One hopped out and used his foot to kick out the driver's side window, glass raining down on both
of us. Not so funny any more. He swung his fist and decked Ray in the jaw, certainly a justifiable punishment for wanting to look at guys who like guys. Ray stomped the engine and drove off into the night, hitting the highway.

Being local boys, they knew a shortcut, and when the Raymobile drove over an underpass it was pelted with many falling wiffle ball bats.

I guess they showed us.

Ray and I both are married to God-fearing, Christian wives, raising a litter of children and support the war in Iraq. I'm so glad those boys beat the sense into us. God bless all of you who think the same way.

Vendorbending McDonald's

2010-04-08T01:39:00.007-04:00

Okay, first you have to have a look at this news story and then come back. Although it's not so much the story itself you should pay attention to but the general public's response via the crazy internets.

This, my friend, is why Al Queda will win.

There's just no middle ground here. Either people think all they have to do is say 'no' and their kids will magically obey, or they see Ronald McDonald as a red-headed Svengali with the eerie abilty to cloud their children's minds.

I don't have children, and for good reason: I can't stand the little shits. But god damn, I was once a child and haven't forgotten (as so many parents do and slap on the blinders once one comes plopping out of their womb) what it was like to be one. Essentially, you put on a good show for mom and pop and then do whatever it is you feel like doing. This is the way kids operate. Period. They know you don't want to imagine them lying or stealing or having sex, so they give you just the image you're looking for and live a completely different life outside your scruitiny.

Kids are going to eat at McDonald's. Not because some pedophile (yes, that is exactly how one hysterical respondent to this story viewed a cartoon clown, apparently equating the eating of french fries with forced anal rape) has lured your children against their will; but probably because it's affordable if your only source of cash flow is your goddamn allowance. Organic whole foods are pretty damn pricey. Oh, and that, to a kid, McDonald's tastes good even, or perhaps especially more so, if you've been raised your entire life on salads and vegan-equivalent hot dogs. Kids want most what they've been told they cannot have, be it fast food, booze or someone else touching their privates. Deal with it.

So as a parent, it's your fucking job to know where your kids are and what they're doing. GPS cell phones make it easier for you than any other generation of nutjob guardians. Quit whining, quit putting the blame on advertising icons and do just a smidgeon of actual parenting to find out what's going on with your goddamn children. On the other hand, if you are one of these chest-thumping yahoos who claim "I've TOLD my children not to eat there, so, by God, they won't!" you have your head every bit as far up your ass as the folks who think Ronald McDonald is not only real but has the same skill set as Derren Brown. Because children are hardwired to be lying little bastards. If you think your coming across as a bully is going to change this, you're fooling yourself.

You wanna raise your kid vegan and not give them the opportunity to make this choice for their own self, the way you did, fine. That's going to be it's own punishment in a few years when they discover pulled pork and chicken fat as a means of rebellion. By all means, feel free to place the blame on The Hamburglar so you can sleep at night. Likewise, those of you turning a blind eye to the fact your child is swelling up like The Hindenburg, keep on maintaining that whole glandular line of crap. As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and reading the responses to this news story goes to show how stupidly hard-line America is when it comes to belief over reason as long as someone gets to pretend they're always right.

Makes me wanna puke both my #1 Value Meal AND my Paul Newman Southwest Salad.

Roughage

2010-04-07T22:04:00.004-04:00

This was an older Spookshow In Your Pants ditty I had every intention of making the theme song for the Spookshow In Your Pants Radio Hour. I still might.

You know the drill: click on the title to listen or save.

The Worst Sound In The World

2010-04-07T02:09:00.004-04:00

The very worst sound in the world is pkshhhh! That is the sound of a dead mouse skull crushing under your own bare feet after your cat has left it in the bathroom as a present.

When I lived with Todd he kept mice in cages. His plan was to cross-breed them in such a way he would eventually end up with a tiny lion; a mouse with a mane and specific coloring. It was like living with Mengele, assuming it took an hour and
a half for him to do his hair.

We had a cat. Somehow Todd refused to see this as counter-productive to his research efforts.

Our place smelled like mouse pee. But I hardly think I'm the only one who has put up with some weird shit in order to do a hottie. Cages and cages of mice in every nook and cranny. He had names for them all and I was supposed to remember each
and every one. There was Grandma, the matriarch of the clan, the first mouse Todd ever owned. There was Gerald, named after the Barrett-era Pink Floyd song 'Bike': "I've got a mouse and he doesn't have a house/I don't know why I call him Gerald." Those were the only two with which I could keep up, given that mice squirt out babies like the money shot in a porn flick; although perhaps with less embarrassing accessories.

The cat spent all its free time perched on top of the cages, staring down through mesh screening like it could cause them to convulse into shock through sheer will. Apparently this worked, as Grandma the Mouse came down with a neurological disorder that caused her to wildy spin about, much to the cat's and my amusement, but not Todd's.

Centuries ago, the Japanese bred mice and confined them into teency-tiny, mouse-sized cages and kept them there until maturity to produce the phenomena known as 'waltzing mice.' What would happen, after a lifetime of total immobility, was that when the adult mice were released they would spin and whirl about. The poor creatures were sold as novelty items to Victorian England. "Oh look Mummy! The mouse is dancing!" They didn't last long and would soon die. "Oh! He's gone to sleep. Can we get another?"

But a brain tumor or even an ear infection can cause this behavior to occur in rodents. Grandma apparently had the mouse equivalent of spinal meningitis, and while tragic in humans I found it goddamn funny while watching it happen to a mouse. She made strange faces, twitchy neck movements, and danced like nobody's business. I could stare at her for hours, as long as Todd wasn't home.

The cat, of course, was masterminding her plan to find a workaround for the lock system on the cages. She needen't have bothered. The mice were working on the very same escape strategy and turned out to be smarter than the cat given that they actually came up with a workable plan. Unfortunately,
once freed, they were loose in the apartment and at the mercy of the cat, who showed none whatsoever. The first mouse to make it over the wall was gutted and laid to rest on the tiles of the bathroom floor.

I need to pee when I first wake up. I walked in and heard the most horrible sound, as I've said, a human being can be expected to endure. Pkshhhh! I stepped on a mouse head and when the skull popped open some brains shot all over my bare foot. I, gagging, wiped said foot all over the towels.

I picked up what was left of the mouse and flushed it; a burial at sea.

Todd was right behind me, although unlike me his first response upon arising is to make sure his skin still looks pretty and fresh. He elbowed his way into the bathroom and washed his face, then dried it with the same towels I'd just used to clean the mouse brains off my stinky feet.

"You shit!" he screamed!

"What?" I asked, feigning ignorance.

"You used this towel as a cum rag!"

Godhead--Eleanor Rigby

2010-04-06T02:40:00.004-04:00

I think I posted this on FB a while back but because I love it so much I want to give it a permanent home here at Der Spookhaus. I'm a freak for cover versions as long as the artist brings something new to the party and in this case Godhead surely did.

Super Fly

2010-04-06T00:45:00.006-04:00

There's this thing called freeballing. That, for the average male, is a sort of russian-roulette you play with fate in hopes you won't have a heart attack, stroke, heavy thing fall on your head or any other reason to make the paramedics show
up at your workplace and have to pull your pants down in front of all your co-workers. Because freballing means you aren't wearing any underwear and should any of these scenarios come into play, your office mates will be staring at your naked dick
and be able to compare notes on size, girth and general aesthetics.

This is a karmic lottery I often play. I am the kind of guy who finds boxer shorts restrictive, much less the tugging, ongoing reminder that I have a penis due to its rubbing against some extra-snug tightie whities. I really just like being
able to flop around in a pair of jeans without having my underwear continually announce my crank like it was showing up at a society party. I have health issues that make this not a particularly wise decision. But I will always go for comfort over potentially lethal embarassment.

Getting dressed for work is not the same for me as it is most people. The general public chooses which coordinating outfit will best show them off as a professional; I select the one item from the wrinkled, pre-worn pile least covered in cat hair. I throw this in the dryer with a mostened fabric softener sheet: ten minutes later I'm good to go. So I did this, one day, failing to notice that the pants in question were somehow split wide open along the crotch seam.

Naturally this occured on one of my freeballing days.

I remember, in hindsight, thinking to myself on the bus ride to work: Man, I feel a slight breeze in places I shouldn't. Unfortunately, that was where it ended in that my other thoughts overweighed this momentary recognition in that I was far more deep into obsessing on 70's children programmng, why my boss was such a bitch, a recipie for spinach dip and other things far more important than that momentary recognition of a coolness where it wasn't supposed to be.

I made it into work, plopped down into my cubicle, and did what I did I was supposed to do. Unbeknownst to me, my balls and dick were hanging out of the slit in my pants.

My friend Lola, who was even above my boss's boss in terms of heirarchy, just happened to sit down in the cubicle next to me to check out a few things on the computer. She looked over and saw me typing merrily away, my three-piece-set dangling out of my split pants.

She told me, later, her very first thought: My God, he's lost his mind.

"Cha Cha!" she whispered, "Cha Cha!"

"What?"

"You're out!" she whispered, gesturing to my crotch area, "You're out!"

"Well, duh," I said, given that my sexuality was no real secret in the workplace.

"NO! YOU! ARE! HANGING! OUT!"

I looked to where she was pointing. There was my pee-pee, for all the world to see.

This would be a major problem anywhere, but as it was we worked for a company who provided services for people who had developmental disabilities and some of them just happened to be milling around the office at that very moment. They were a couple of guys who, although sometimes had girlfriends, were not above getting it on with one another from time to time.

It would probably not be a good thing for them to see my waggling johnson.

I hastily stuffed the offending flesh back into the split of my pants. The moment the boys we were serving left our part of the office I ran for the bathroom with a stapler and tape dispenser. Once inside, the plan was to staple my split seam together and cover it with tape, then pull my outer shirt down where this improvised handiwork could not be seen. I tried, but I am a moron. Third staple up nicked right through my scrotum. I howled like a woman giving birth.

Lola banged on the bathroom door. "Are you all right?"

"No!" I screamed, sounding like a mezzo soprano. "Go away!"

"What's wrong?" the guys we provided services for asked, loudly.

"Nothing!" Lola and I shouted in unison.

I stopped the bleeding with mucho toilet paper. After a while, I limped back to my desk, crouching in a very unseemly fashion so my shirt would cover my crotch.

"I'm going to McDonald's for lunch," Lola said. "Can I get you anything?"

"Maybe just a cup of ice," I said.

Mother Complex

2010-04-05T20:55:00.007-04:00

I guess I'm posting this a day late because there's a sample in this Spookshow song of my mother saying, "...and we want to wish you a Happy Easter." I pulled it off an answering machine message around 1993 or so, used it in a tape collage, then actually put it to music a couple years later. She passed away earlier this year and I like to think she's making her displeasure known since as I type this thunderclaps are sounding through my window.

But she should have been used to the idea of a day late: I was forever sending belated birthday cards and forgetting to call on important dates. Anyone who knows me will understand she was not alone in this position; I just don't have that seemingly important piece other people do and just cannot remember or even get the significance of specific dates. I'd rather remember the significance of people. But for some reason a lot of folk tie that into the calendar and in that realm, to many, I'm sure, I'm a big disappointment. I think it was Aristophanes who first said: "Oh well."

But my mother is only one of many guest stars in this earlier Spookshow In Your Pants recording. Also featured are Tor and Becca, a vapid local newscaster, CNR, a kindergarten class, Ray and most notably, Mr. Alfonso from Alice, Sweet Alice.

Click on the title to listen or save.

Oh, but it if you'd like to share in a personal joke Chris and I ran into the ground as an escape from insufferable working conditions a couple of years ago, look at the above picture then click here.

More Fun With Socks

2010-04-04T21:16:00.004-04:00

Tor had come from out of town for a visit and I decided to have a little fun.

I'd bought some really cheap, dark dress socks from Family Dollar and discovered, after a day of wearing them and sweating into combat boots, that the dye used for the socks had seeped into my flesh and stained my feet a ghastly shade of bruise-
colored navy blue. It didn't look like my feet had been painted; the resemblance to a horrifying medical condition was uncanny. Plus it didn't wash off. So as not to give away the game, I changed into some white socks.

I laid on the living room floor, making small talk and after a while I said, "You know, I think there's something going on with my feet. They just haven't looked or felt right lately."

"Well they've never really smelled right," said Tor.

"No, serious, I think something's up."

"What do you mean?"

I peeled off one of my socks. Tor sat upright, gave out a little scream and went into a display of horrified double-takes and spluttering worthy of a Thirties' slapstick comedian. "What? Fu-fu-fu-fu-fuck, man! How long? I mean, you, you, you..."

"Plus they're kinda warm to the touch." What Tor didn't know was that I had been lying with my feet right next a ceramic heater and had held them there until I simply couldn't bear the burning pain any longer. He reached out with one finger and
gingerly touched the top of my foot. His hand yanked back and his eyes did pinwheels.

"We gotta get you to a hospital right now!" He shouted, leaping to his feet.

"It can wait till you leave town," I said. "I can go later in the week. Or next week. Sometime. I don't want to be any trouble."

"Trouble! Look, there is something SERIOUSLY wrong here. You need immediate medical attention!"

"It's probably just athelete's foot," I offered. "I'll pick up some Dr. Scholl's or something."

"Are you CRAZY?"

"Besides, the cat likes to curl up against them. Like a hot water bottle, I guess."

"Please," Tor pleaded, "you've got to take this seriously. You could end up losing your feet."

"Well maybe they'll give me one of those cool, motorized carts..."

"Stop!"

"...or a physical assist monkey. If I can't get around the house they'll HAVE to give me a monkey. I've checked into it and you can't get one if you're just lazy. 'Cause I was thinking, say I wanted a sandwich, all I'd have to do is say,
'Monkey, go make me a sandwich' and it would have to do it."

"I'M SERIOUS HERE!", he yelled. "You are in a bad way and deliberately ignoring it!"

"Tor, I want that monkey," I insisted.

He stood up and grabbed the telephone. "Either you get in my car right now and let me take you to the hospital or I'm
calling 911 and having them send an ambulance!", he shouted, nostrils flaring.

"And you're going to tell them what? My friend's cheap socks leaked dye all over his feet and then he held them next to the heater?"

It took a second to process, then the phone whizzed by, inches from my head, clattering against the wall. Tor dove on top of me, pinning me to the floor and started to throttle me.

"Monkey! Get him off of me!" I screamed. "Monkey! Make him stop!"

Hippity, Hoppity, Easter's On Its Way!

2010-04-01T22:36:00.006-04:00

A rabbit is sent to stand before the lord God almighty.

“So here’s the thing,” God says. “Above all species you and your kind are known for fertility. Hell, ‘fucking like bunnies’ has become a friggin’ cliché.”

“Okay,” says the rabbit, not sure what’s going down.

“Well,” says the creator of the universe, “we have sort of a P.R. problem here. This time of year is supposed to be about the resurrection of my son—which is really only me in another form—and how he sacrificed himself to save the world from the eternal judgment I doled out in the first place…just go with it; it’s complicated…but the calendars got all F’d up and somehow it turns out that his martyrdom coincides exactly with previously-existing dates of Pagan fertility rites.”

“ I see,” said the rabbit, not seeing at all.

“Anyway, we’re going to call this thing Easter, and as a means of appeasing centuries of legend that came before our own, we thought it might be cool to have an Easter, you know…bunny.”

“I don’t get it. What do I have to do with Judaism?”

“Mmn, actually the overthrow of Judaism. But let’s not split hares. Get it?”

The rabbit rolled its slick, pink eyes. “Yes, I got it.”

“Just kinda kicking it around the office so far…but we’re thinking, what if a rabbit became the symbol of my only begotten son’s death and resurrection. Cause then you could have that old school fertility thing but whitewashed into something that would play with the tenets of the New Testament.”

“Not sure people would get the whole fertility thing,” the rabbit said.

“I don’t think so either,” said God. “Evangelicals are not big on allegory. Sure, they see Christ’s parables as such, but they don’t allow themselves to see anything else in the bible as anything other than literal, word-for-word absolute truth. They think the bible was written for the lowest common denominator so any standard literary conceit is fucking lost on them. So we’re going to have to hit them over the head with symbolism in the densest possible fashion in order to get them to see the whole fertility angle.”

“How’s that going to work?” asked the rabbit.

“We’re going to have you deliver eggs.”

“Come again?”

“You’ll be the Easter bunny. You’ll go around putting eggs in people’s houses, as a reminder of the Maypole dance and all the other fertility rituals, but at the same time be a symbol for our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

“Isn’t this trying to have your cake and eat it, too?” asked the rabbit.

“Look,” said the lord God Jehovah. “We’re not stupid. We’re going to hedge things in our favor.”

“How’s that?” the bunny asked.

“You’re getting an image makeover. Less Druid, more Republican-friendly. From now on you’re going to be called Peter Cottontail. You know, as in the apostle Peter. The first pope.”

“Or the slang term for phallus, depending.”

“Now you’re just being insolent!” God thundered. “You have no proof that bit of history originated before my story!”

“Actually, it’s pretty well documented,” said the rabbit. “But for the sake of argument, we’ll pretend it’s not and simply agree to disagree. We’ll just pretend it’s an unsolvable mystery. You know, which came first, the Christian or the egg?”
“So we want you, like Santa Claus, to travel the world in a single night and hit every household and give them eggs.”

“Okay, Santa brings Playstation 3’s and gobs of cash. The same kids are going to be placated by some hardboiled eggs?”

“Well, there’s candy, too.”

“What if they’re diabetic?”

“Look, we just need you to do this.”

The rabbit thought for a moment. “You know, I am reminded of the words of Christ crucified, the ones that never made it into the bible.”

“And what quote is that?” asked God.

"The thing he said, nailed to a cross, right before someone stabbed him in the side with a spear."

"Refresh my memory," said God.

"Just before he was forced to drink vinegar while blood was pouring out of his wrists, right before he had a crown of thorns driven into his head."

"What, what did he say?" asked God.

“This is a hell of a way to spend Easter.”

Crab Walk

2010-03-30T23:05:00.008-04:00

People win medals and awards for walking across the country. This may seem like a great distance, but I’m here to tell you the longest journey a single person can take is from the crab lice remedy section of the drugstore up to the cashier. And then, should there be a line, navigating it will feel even twice the unbearable eternity. Especially with people glancing at the product in your hands and doing their best to put some distance between you.

My first encounter (one of only two, I hasten to add) with the flesh-hungry critters was simply insult to injury, given that I got them off someone’s couch and didn’t even get to do the nasty. I was either 17 or 18 and my sexuality was stuck in some peculiar, no-man’s-land of denial I can barely access today. I remember the facts, I remember the behavior, but I just can’t remember how it all connected. I’d been getting it on with guys for half a decade, but I always rationalized it away and couldn’t bring myself to use the G-word because I didn’t act or dress like the swishy guys on TV. My access to information was nil and the scrambled signals in my brain had me convinced I’d been getting it on with guys as a means of release, simply because I hadn’t met the right girl. Of course my efforts at locating said girl came to nothing, whereas my attempts to seduce guys were as complex as a Rube Goldberg cartoon, not that my brain ever noticed.

My friend Richard used to tell me stories about a gay guy he worked with. “Billy passed a Perrier bottle today and broke the men’s toilet.” So I started dropping by the photo lab where Richard worked, ostensibly for a visit, but mainly in hopes of getting a glimpse of this guy who liked penises. Not, of course, that I liked them, but was merely familiar with how they operated in the sack when the right girl wasn’t around.

At that point, taste didn’t enter the picture. No, wait, that’s probably not the word I should be using, given the subject matter. Aesthetics, yes, that’s it, aesthetics didn’t enter the picture. Pretty much any guy, no matter what he looked like, would do in that he was life support for a tallywhacker. Today I would consider Billy an overly-processed freak, meaning he was pretty average for the late seventies.

Most of my usual contacts were starting to wise up to the fact that there was a word for what we’d been doing together and they didn’t want to be one, a conclusion utterly lost on me. I think it was easier for me to envision that, while there was a word for that, I wasn’t one, so therefore I could go on engaging in the behavior. Like I said, my reasoning was short-circuited when it came to this particular topic. So I figured I could get it on with this Billy and I’d ignore the fact that he was one of those and we’d both go home happy.

I managed to pry Billy’s last name from Richard and waited until my parents weren’t home. I looked up his number in the phone book and rang him up.

Note: This is the LAST thing you should ever do if you are conflicted and trying to land a gay encounter:

“Hello?”
“HI THERE!” I screamed, suddenly evoking a lisp and speaking like the worst stereotype imaginable. “IS THITH BILLY?”
“Who is this?”
“OH, I’VE THEEN YOU AROUND! THOMEONE TOLD ME YOU WERE HOMOTHEXUAL? IS THITH TRUE?”
I would have hung up.
“Really, who is this?”
“LET’S JUTHT CALL ME BRUTHE!”
“Okay, Bruce, what is this about?”
“I’M JUTHT CURIOUTH IF YOU ARE AN ACTUAL HOMOTHEXUAL!”
“Well if you’ve seen me around isn’t it fucking obvious?”
“I THUPPOTHE THO!”
“So what’s your story?”
“THTORY?”
“Are you gay, too? You sound it. Although in an entirely fake kind of way.”

So I reverted to my normal voice and explained, ha ha, I was a friend of Richard’s and was just playing a joke.

“You still didn’t answer my question.”

Silence for a bit and then a little light began to shine on the darkened parts of my brain.

“I don’t know.”

I explained how I was still in high school and had done stuff but didn’t think I was gay.

“Do you want to come over and talk about it?”

I did.

I drove to his place, sat down, and talked. And talked. Many, many questions were answered that afternoon. He didn’t make a move on me, but I was damn sure about to make one on him.

The phone rang. It was a very recent ex, wanting to know if he could come over and try talking things out. “You should go,” Billy explained. “It wouldn’t look good if he showed up and you were here.” I hugged him goodbye and thanked him for the chat, which really undid a lot of the knots into which my reasoning ability was tied.

This sensitive, Lifetime Movie of the Week moment, however, was marred by the fact THAT I LEFT HIS APARTMENT WITH MOTHERFUCKING CRABS!

I noticed an itch around my groin a few days later. It got worse and worse. Dinner with the parents became an ordeal, as it was a half hour I had to hide my discomfort, my legs squirming and rubbing together under the table in such a way that my upper body didn’t give away the game. After supper, I ran to the bathroom, yanked down my pants and finally saw them. Tiny insect-like beings, scampering around in my pubes like kids at a playground.

I freaked right the fuck out. I had heard of crabs, but it was not the sort of thing about which my Christian school was going to provide any useful information. I truly thought this was the exact same thing as an STD and I was going to have it forever and ever, amen.

I came so close to calling my older brother and telling him everything, just to find out what the fuck I should do. I had the phone in my hands at one point. But instead I decided that further information might be prudent.

I called my friend Richard. “Ha ha,” I laughed. “Have you ever heard of this thing called crabs?”
“Sure,” he said. “There’s a foolproof cure.”
“Really?” I asked, trying not to sound too anxious.
“You mix one part turpentine to two parts gasoline, then pour the mixture over the affected area.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Then you drop a lit match on it and when they come running out of the blaze you stab ‘em with a fork.”

I decided to do some experimenting on my own. I experimented with various products under the sink. The first was my dad’s cologne. I was immediately caught out on using his stuff without permission, but thankfully no one noticed it was emanating from my crotch. I tried zit cream, hair tonic, toothpaste, Preparation H, baby oil, mercurochrome (which did nothing for the infestation situation but left my dick a jaunty shade of orange,) smelling salts ; the entire contents of the medicine cabinet and family first aid kit.

But then I found the magic substance. Desenex foot powder. Worked like a charm. I kept the application up for several days and dead larvae began dropping off my bush so fast that wherever I walked I left a trail of dead crustaceans in my wake. Important consumer tip here: should you find yourself in this mortifying situation, buy yourself some Desenex foot powder and apply liberally until the critters are dead. Better your fellow drugstore patrons think you have athlete’s feet than the actual state of affairs.

But I got off easy. Someone told me of their friend, who after bathing saw a crab louse in the tub. They freaked, made a doctor’s appointment, explained their recent sexual history, got a prescription filled and paid for it, then went back home and checked the tub.

It was a sesame seed.

A Visit To The Creation Museum

2010-03-30T00:16:00.008-04:00

My friend Joe worked at a science museum and his idea of hell on earth was on the days when the home-schoolers would show up. He'd be midway through his standard, science-based presentation, when some fundy in a housedress would shout "Joe, Joe!" (The written word is simply not capable of replicating his hysterical impersonation of a midwestern, Christ-crazed, self-appointed educator shouting the phonetic equivalent of "Jow! Jow!" but I'll try.)

"I think there's another approach here you're not considering!"

Joe, having undergone this horrid scene so many times before, in the interest in keeping a job, played ignorant. "Which one is that?"

"The Holy Bible speaks of a seven day creation. Never mind your fossils and carbon-14 dating; the lord God created the earth in seven days."

Joe did his best to be diplomatic. "Yes. Another viewpoint. Yes. But as scientists..."

"Jow! Jow! You know that scientists are godless!"

Then why the hell would you bring your kids to a science museum, Joe invariably thought, each and every time.

In 2007, Australian non-scientist (a dingo ate your facts) Ken Ham opened the Creationist Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Because, really, where the hell else would this thing ever play?

Jow, I mean, Joe, told me we had to go and see this thing. I told him I grew up with this line of crap and didn't need to explore it further. He said he would buy me some waffles on the way back so I signed on for the trip to the Creation Museum.

We arrived and the parking lot was full of church busses instead of research scientists. There's a surprise.

The line to pay your way in was ghastly. It took forever. The place is an absolute cash cow, as there are no small numbers of people who want their faith to be validated like parking tickets.

Joe and I finally made it in to, not the museum proper, but yet another holding area which featured animatronic dinosaurs and people cohabitating together:

Because man roamed the earth with the dinosaurs at precisely the moment they discovered cotton-polyster blends. But still, all this seemed familiar, and it suddenly hit me just where Ken Ham got his facts:

After an hour wait, Joe and I made our way in and were herded into a multimedia show in sensurround (some thirty years after Earthquake) but The Creation Museum insisted this was state-of-the-art, where two angels prattled on about godless science while watery mist sprayed in our faces. Then we were free to check out the museum.

Pretty much what you'd expect. Exhibit after exhibit proclaiming the long-disproven moth argument, the usual carbon-14 is crap because it doesn't work on living things line of thinking (never mind that it was never designed for that purpose in the first place) and the usual fundy evolution-is-a-lie-despite-all-evidence-and-scientific-consensus claptrap. This is what I was expecting. This is what I could have lived with.

But then suddenly, this so-called 'museum' turned into something else entirely. You go into this cavern, and come out the other side in a mock-up of a residential neighborhood. You're invited to peer in the windows and see the sins of the neighbors played out before you. A man is drinking. A woman is cheating on her husband. Teenagers are looking at porn on the internet.

"Let me get this straight," I said aloud among the Christians.

Joe bolted. He knew what was coming and didn't want to be around for it.

I continued to bray, loudly, surrounded by the Evangelical Right. "So it's absolutely wrong for these boys to be looking at internet porn, but as long as we're here to point the finger and go shame, shame, it's perfectly okay for us to be taking on the Peeping Tom role and staring through their windows. So I can go back home and stalk my neighbors as long as I am morally superior. That's fine, right?"

The people in this particular exhibit wanted to see more sin and did not care for my calling them on it. "I'll pray for you!" one of them shouted.

"No, you're staring in strangers' windows and feeling better about yourself for it," I said. "I don't really think Christ died on the cross so you can do that without guilt."

There was some loudly spoken talk about calling security, so I left the sin exhibit and managed to find Joe taking pictures of "proof" the earth was only six thousand years old.

"We probably ought to leave soon," I said.

He did buy me some waffles on the way home. I love Jow.

.

Priest Off

2010-03-29T21:37:00.000-04:00

When The Light Comes On The Chicken Dances

2010-03-27T22:34:00.004-04:00

It's hard to get solid information when it comes to a dancing chicken. Harder still when it comes to a piano-playing chicken.

When I vacationed throughout the south with my parents as a small child I saw numerous fair exhibits involving animals in small cages where, if you put a quarter in the slot, the animal would perform a tiny vaudeville act just for you. Put a quarter in the box, and a squirrel suddenly shoots out of a box overhead and rides a tiny bicycle on a tightrope stretching from one end of the tent to the other and back again. But my favorite was the piano-playing chicken. You'd put a quarter in the slot, a light bulb would come on and the chicken would hop up on a toy piano and dance across the keyboard, playing a random cacophonous non-tune with its feet. The only Google results I've seen show pictures of chickens pecking at the keys with their beaks; the explanation being that if the chicken hits the right keys in the right sequence a handful of chicken feed will come cascading out of the piano at the finish.

These explanations are far more humane than what I remembered. My dad explained that, when the light came on, the chicken had a few seconds to hop up on the piano before the floor became electrified. Same with the squirrel. It did it's thing or got the crap shocked out of it. They're probably doing the same thing with Justin Bieber.

But the title here is a Spookshow In Your Pants song, a slightly different version once known as 'Crashing'. Click on the above title to have a listen.

Creature Feature Cards

2010-03-27T20:07:00.005-04:00

In 1973 the Topps bubble gum company released a set of trading cards called Creature Feature consisting of horror movie stills with funny (or at least seemingly so to twelve-year-olds)
captions beneath. The one pictured above was the Rosetta Stone of my childhood.

My friend Mark Maynard had it and we thought it was just about the funniest thing we'd ever laid eyes on. Frankenstein coming out of the bathroom! HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA! Trouble is, Mark had it and I didn't. I chewed my way through hundreds of crunchy, flat, pink gum sticks and had a whole shoebox full of the damn cards but the elusive Frankenstein taking a shit never materialized.

I became a bubble gum junkie, spending my entire allowance and grass-cutting money on stacks of Creature Feature trading cards. I'd tear through the wrappers like it was Christmas morning, quickly scanning the cards and reaching for the next one in the pile. Creature From the Black Lagoon, Wolfman, Phibes, Wolfman...no Frankenstein. Dracula, Mummy, Price from the Wax Museum, Frankenstein!!! No wait, this was one of the boring ones and not the one where he needs toilet paper. Drat! (I wasn't much good at cursing in those days but like to think I've made up for lost time.)

So it went for an entire summer. I never found the object of my desire; a pattern I'm clearly doomed to repeat. I can't help but feel if I'd only latched onto that picture of Frankenstein life would have turned out ever so much better.

You can re-connect with your inner grade-schooler and view the entire series of cards here.

AIDS Before Beauty

2010-03-25T23:11:00.005-04:00

Glen and I began having regular sex in junior high school, although we were not queer. We just liked the feel of a dick in our mouths. I, perhaps, was more on board with this than he, since I liked the idea of penis flavor and quickly learned to dislocate my jaw like a python, whereas Glen had to have my erection coated in Avon strawberry lip gloss in order to keep from gagging. It's not that I was big; I just didn't bathe that often. But the strawberry smell brings back memories. To this day I cannot order shortcake at Bob Evans without getting half a boner.

We attended the same, private, Christian school, which perhaps would explain our insane, at-the-time, denial. You were not allowed to be homosexual. There was nothing in the rule book saying you couldn't have a dick shoved halfway down your throat, you just weren't allowed to be gay. Since we didn't speak with a lisp and run an antique store, clearly, we were not.

After graduating we kind of got what was really going on, which was problematic for Glen because he had a fiancee named Penny who collected glass unicorns. If giving me head didn't switch him, I imagine this would have, all on its own. But he also had a boyfriend named Billy, at the same time, he would sneak into his bedroom window every night while still living with his parents. Glen was either insane or daring; I'm not sure which.

I felt sorry for Penny and begged Glen to just cut her loose, but he wouldn't. No doubt she began to suspect, as she would call me in the middle of the night and ask me, her whiny, West Virginia accent pleading over the phone lines, "Tell me! Is Glen Allen gay?" My loyalty was with my friend so I'd pretend to be half asleep, as if that were not the one question that would instantly jolt me awake, and mumble "What? Huh? Are you insane?" She was, pretty much, but she'd nailed the gay thing nonetheless.

Some time later I met Tor. He was exactly what I wanted in anyone, except for one thing: He wasn't into me in the slightest. He tried, but no. I just didn't do it for him. When I look in the mirror I understand completely.
Glen knew how badly I had it for Tor so hid the fact that he and Tor were hitting it off famously. "I've been hanging out with Tor lately," Glen said, as though their shared interest in horror movies was where it ended. "He's nice."

"He's so much more than nice," I said.

"Really?" Glen asked, as though this were news.

I found out they were lovers, the late-eighties way of saying boyfriends, when they moved in together. Glen had created a sculpture, an H. R. Geiger rip-off I loved despite the fact it was total plaigarism, he promised I could have. But he told me Tor wanted it so therefore I couldn't have it. It was then I began to suspect that the person I'd always considered my best friend was now fucking what he knew to be the one person I wanted most.

Glen, the slut, was now in love. With Tor.

What the hell. I could kick them both to the curb and what would I be left with? No best friend and no one true love of my life. I also understood the one true love of my life was simply that because he was clearly best friend material wrapped in a hot, long-haired body. Tor understood me, perhaps even better than Glen ever did. What's not to love about someone who gets you? While it is well within the scope of my personality to be the world's most jealous prick, there was something about the Glen and Tor combination that made perfect sense. Tor wasn't into me, so his being into my best friend was a close second. I was somehow able to let it go. (This would not happen later, when he fucked my ex and then married a woman I'd introduced him to; a clear theme developing along the lines of anyone in my sphere of influence is somehow profoundly attractive to him except for motherfucking me.) The idea of Glen and Tor, though, became a good thing.

It would have stayed a good thing, a happy thing, were it not for the fact that in between Billy the boyfriend and Tor the true love, Glen went boy crazy and racked up numbers instead of emotion. He also racked up a little virus called HIV.

Although I loved him, Glen was a lying bastard and did not tell me about this when he knew. He grabbed my hand and pressed it against the back of his skull. "Feel that?" he asked, sobbing, "It's a lump. Brain cancer." This was his way of telling me he was HIV postive in the same way we used to suck each other's crank and not be gay. I was too stupid to get the message.

"Well, at least you don't have AIDS," I said. I might as well have been telling coon jokes on Martin Luther King Day.

I was spending the weekend with Glen and Tor when I found out what was really going on. Glen's temperature shot into the stratospheres and he was rushed to the hospital. "We found out," Tor said, "that Glen is HIV positive."

I did not cry. Apparently one thing I can do, despite all my other dysfunction, is pretend to be normal in a crisis situation. I went to the hospital and strolled the corridors, a pensive look on my face, as if that were enough to change everything. It must have been, as a month later Glen was just fine.

"You really scared me," I said.
"You scare me just by virtue of you being you," he said in the West Virginia accent I'd managed to shake but he couldn't get past.

So everything was ok. Until the next time. Once more Glen was in the hospital.

A month later we were at a Laurie Anderson concert. This is the way it went: he'd get sick, then get better, then get sick again. Sick of course meant that he was in the hospital and just might die.

He was there again, so bad his parents were in the hospital room. This terrified me, as I couldn't help but feel if I weren't the first guy to ask if I could jack him off he might not be in this ugly situation. Being held captive in a trailer surrounded by glass unicorns would certainly be its own private hell, but come on. Mortification is worlds better than a homo handjob pointing the way toward death. I was sure that his parents somehow sensed this and blamed me.
Glen's pain was so intense the hospital had fed him with Demerol. It caused him to hallucinate. He held out an invisible, ceramic bowl to his father. "Here, I made you some soup."

Glen's father was in the med corps in the Korean War. "That's Demerol," he said. His mother continued to glare at me as though I had purposefully injected her son with a deadly virus.

They understood that Tor took care of Glen in between the times it was necessary, when there was no other option, for him to become hospitalized. While never, ever, mentioning it aloud, they knew that Tor had cleaned up when Glen had shit the bed or vomited all over himself. They gave him a break. I did not fare so well. "Hello, Dan," Glen's mother said, her look and tone of voice effectively communicating "Spread any death around, lately?"

They left and Tor and I were in the room alone with Glen. "I'm cold," he said, so we moved to reposition the sheets. "I'd like to go to the bathroom, but I can't. There are moles in there."

We looked at one another and turned our heads to keep from laughing. Because when your boyfriend and a guy you've known since junior high is raving about rodents in the bathroom due to a fatal illness, you're not supposed to laugh. But oh god. It was so fucking funny. Moles, of all things.

"Moles," Glen explained, a month later when he was better. "Russian spies. I thought that they were in the bathroom, keeping watch and reporting back to the Kremlin." That Glen could remember his hallucinating state of mind when he was so close to death was amazing.

My phone rang, later. It was Glen, saying his last goodbyes without a trace of sarcasm. That he was not making jokes had me truly frightened. My friend Lola called next, saying she would drive from Columbus to Cincinnati and pick me up, then take me back there, so I could see Glen. It is odd the things you remember in a time like this. I started reading a new Rolling Stone that had an interview with the so-called comedian, Carrot Top. It described how, ew, in all his college appearances some girl will always try to seduce him. "I will not fuck you, Carrot Top," the article claimed the girl said. Yet she did. This was what I was reading when the phone rang again.

It was Glen's mom, who had always hated me. She was in tears, explaining how Glen had called her and was saying his last goodbyes. I told her how he had done the same thing with me. She kept crying and I had nothing to say to console her. What could I possibly offer? Your son was a man whore and brought it on himself?
Goddamn motherfucker. A month later he was fine. He and Tor and I were smoking dope and lauging about the whole thing. "You mean my mother actually called you?" he chortled. "What did you two say?"

"We talked about cross-stitch patterns, Jesus Christ and the fact that you were dying," I said. "Then I placed an order for Avon strawberry lip gloss."
Tor called me some weeks later. Glen was sick again, but I was done. I was tired of jumping up and rushing across the state just so he'd be back to normal in a week or two. So I didn't go. I spent the weekend curled inside a pot pipe.
Tor called again. "He's gone," he said, his voice breaking. "Glen died this morning."

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

It was horrible. Glen had been on a respirator, unable to breathe properly on his own. He signaled for pen and paper, scrawling TAKE TUBE OUT NOW. "No," said Tor, "if I do that you will die." Glen pointedly stabbed at the note with his finger, getting the point across. Tor didn't do it. I couldn't have either. I could do it for a cat with liver disease but not my best friend.

Some months prior, Tor heard a loud crash from Glen's bedroom and had ran upstairs. He found Glen, who had been trying to make it to the bathroom on his own but too weak to do so, sprawled across the floor with explosive diarrhea everywere. As Tor cradled him in his arms, wiping him clean, Glen said, "I thought we said we'd never let it come to this."

"I must have been lying. Because I love you."

P.S. Tor finally gave me the goddamn sculpture.

I Gotta Come Clean

2010-03-25T03:44:00.005-04:00

There's a reason I did a cover of Debbie Reynolds' Tammy. I'm tired of hiding it so click on this or this to find the real tale.

Man, I miss my football days. And my freaking kidney.

Oh wait, I forgot. I'm dead.

The Wasp Woman

2010-03-24T23:23:00.003-04:00

Roger Corman made a movie in 1960 called The Wasp Woman about a cosmetics magnate with an insane quest for eternal youth. She couples up with a crazed, beekeeping scientist who claims injecting her with royal jelly from his special wasps will do the trick. (Of course, in real life, only bees secrete this substance--wasps do not--but scientific accuracy was never the hallmark of anything Corman put out.) It does indeed restore her beauty, but has the unfortunate side effect of causing her to transform into a murderous wasp-lady.

Upon seeing this, like anyone, my very first thought was Why not set it to music?

So I put together what was essentially an EP of music inspired by this really lame film. When all was said and done I didn't much care for it. It was during the phase where I wanted to take the generic samples that came with the Acid sequencing program and try to transcend the fact that a kerjillion other people were using them by tweaking the actual song structure and come up with something different. I don't know if I succeeded or not, but the end results left me less than satisfied. Funny thing, time, in that in the here and now I don't mind it so much. If I remove myself from the process and just listen to it as music instead of a grand experiment I'm not quite so repulsed. I used a couple of these things in other projects, but here, for the first time in public, is the original sequence as it was originally designed:

Click on the titles in order to hear the mini-concept-cycle as God and myself intended:

1) Infestation

2) I Am The Wasp Woman

3) Some Days Just Get Shittier (Parts 1 and 2)

4) Wish Things Were Different

Horror Haiku

2010-03-23T22:33:00.010-04:00

Leatherface is pissed.
Hippies in a goddamn van.
Please kill Franklin first.

Teen kids having sex.
Jason shows up and snuffs them.
Christ, not another.

Michael Caine in drag.
Angie is no Janet Leigh.
Brian thinks he's Hitch.

Woman blows her lunch
and all her organs as well.
Fulci was a god.

Here comes crazy Jack.
Axe busting up the hotel.
The book was better.

Theatre of Blood.
Robert Morley has some dogs.
Hello, Rip Taylor.

David Naughton shifts.
Latex snout stretching to there.
I'm a Pepper, too.

Michael Landon shifts.
It's still ten times better than
Touched By An Angel.

Boy causes much death.
They say he's the antichrist.
You know kids today.

The mines aren't real safe.
Pickaxe through your fucking head.
Sing O Canada.

Look at Miss Kinski.
Even as a cat she's hot.
Wish I was some yarn.

Geek buys a damn car.
You would think they were screwing.
Folks die; roll credits.

Got bugs, Mr. Pratt?
Tell it to call you Billie.
The sequel so sucked.

Cabin plagued by ghosts.
Scary stuff keeps happening.
God bless Steadicam.

I see dead people
and a stunning twist ending.
Thank you, O. Henry.

Ape on twin towers.
It's even scarier now.
Thanks heaps, Al Queda.

Flies on the drywall.
Pig's eyes at the window frame.
Oh, sure, it's all true.

Saw off your damn foot.
You do that, underwear boy.
Once more with feeling.

Copperfield on train.
Jamie Lee, scared, shits herself
sans Activia.

There she is again.
To The Devil A Daughter.
Wish I was some yarn.

College kids with dough.
Ninety minutes of some twigs.
You call this scary?

Boy meets rabid dog.
Years later he's in leather.
Who's the fucking boss?

Cabin still haunted.
Plates smashing on a guy's head.
My god, it's Curly.

Legend of Hell House.
Is "Roddy McDowell" a
slang term for penis?

Little folks in jars.
How's this mesh with Frankenstein?
Fag director.

Kid kills some adults.
Halloween, or any day,
I can so relate.

Dead kid at seance.
George C. Scott cries yet again.
Is that all he does?

Penmanship medal.
Shoes in incenerator.
I dated that girl.

Ballet school mayhem.
Colors bleed off the screen.
Goddamn genius wop.

Little girl is nuts.
Forced cunnilingus with mom.
Pea soup, anyone?

Repo is awesome.
The soundtrack just kicks, brother.
Paul Sorvino? What?

Norman Bates back home.
People die again; surprise.
Whore, whore, whore, whore, whore.

Drill bit through ceiling.
Blood showers down like crazy.
Nope, still not Hitchcock.

A teenage vampire.
Emo kids all want him bad.
Sound familiar, Keefer?

Children of the Corn.
Thomas Tyron's Harvest Home.
It's plagiarism.

The dead like shopping.
I guess it's force of habit.
3M blood films well.

Jigsaw and puzzles.
Bet it wouldn't work without
post-production shit.

The shark is hungry.
Quint is awfully surly.
Here comes Schindler's List.

Woman from the well.
I've never been so frightened.
I rike this movie.

Snails, snails, snails, snails, snails.
Snails, snails, snails, snails, snails, snails, snails.
Midgets are creepy.

Girl gets sodomized
by an invisible ghost.
I should have her luck.

Wait for the action.
Keep waiting, it might happen.
It's a Hammer film.

Zombies moving fast.
Digitally speeded up.
Keystone fucking cops.

Some kids overseas.
Achille's heel gets severed.
Ouch, that's gotta smart.

They remade Chainsaw.
Studs instead of hippie boys.
Glad to watch them die.

Snakecharmer

2010-03-23T03:37:00.004-04:00

Another oldie from back in the "Clunky Drum Machine" phase of Spookshow In Your Pants. I like the song, but the drums were at their clunkiest on this one. Click on the title to listen or save.

Gimme That Old Time Religion

2010-03-23T02:12:00.006-04:00

My plea, sincerely, to the Motion Picture Association Ratings board, who in the seventies rated Jesus Christ Superstar, with its gory finale of a man being nailed through his palms, G, for general audiences, but in the here and now sees fit to slap right-winger Ben Stein’s pro-creationist Expelled with a PG-13 just because it contains archival footage of Edwin R. Murrow smoking, is to take a minute and get over yourselves.

Actually, I love the movie Expelled. Not because I believe in creationism but because I wholeheartedly believe in freedom. People are losing their jobs and having their lives turned upside down because what they want to say doesn’t match the P.C. thought police’s idea of what constitutes a valid argument. This is crap. I have a blog where I tell a story about jacking off into some socks, and these guys are right behind me in terms of my right to put it out there. Someone else believes in a Jewish zombie crawling from the grave and oh no, we can’t have this at all. I just think it’s wrong. You either believe in freedom of speech, period, or you don’t. There’s no such thing as middle ground. You don’t want to hear about how all the homos are going to hell and they don’t want to hear buttfucking jokes on Will and Grace at 4pm when the kids come home from school. Both points of view should be allowed to be aired. If you can’t get this, you are the worst extreme on either side of the argument. So you simply cancel each other out, as no particular party line can be judged by its crazy extremists.

But no, both sides have their share of morons who are more interested in being right; in holding THE TRUTH over everyone’s heads so they can feel a little bit better about themselves by pretending they’re the big expert and confusing belief with proof, rather than finding fellowship despite differences. These people will spend the remainder of the brief slice of life we’re given arguing with one another and no doubt deserve one another. Because being right and therefore smarter is above anything else. What a sad and pathetic way to view humanity.

Anyway, back to you, MPAA ratings board: Let me get this straight--capital punishment in the most violent way is wholesome, family fare, but someone puffing on a butt, back before the link with cancer was known, is something only teenagers should see?

Or Tim Burton’s filmed version of the children’s classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It got a PG for insanely ambiguous quirky situations but the seventies musical Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory got a G even though it was strongly implied that all the bad kids died horrible, mutilating deaths whereas in Burton’s version they all showed up for the finale. But oh lordy, Johnny Depp is more peculiar than Gene Wilder so by all means, warn the parents.

What the fuck is wrong with you people? The F-word, of course, gets an automatic R, meaning that Little Miss Sunshine deserves the same classification as the Saw movies. You can watch entrails being pulled out of someone in slow motion, but speaking a good, earthy word describing the sex act—or in most cases, used as a simple expletive—is just as wrong. Murder and cursing are on equal terms? But have you seen this show, Family Guy that comes on right before Will and Grace in syndication that the kiddies are watching?

God has cursed you for your pious sins and it’s called flat screen plasma and Blu-Ray.

Bok Bok Bok Commercial

2010-03-22T02:11:00.006-04:00

Another from the yet-to-be-realized Spookshow In Your Pants Radio Hour. I wrote it, did the music and gave an Oscar-worthy performance as the hen. Joe did the voice-over. It came out eggsactly like I wanted.

Click on the title to have a listen.

The Spotmaker

2010-03-19T20:55:00.014-04:00

This was one of the iconic commercials to seep into my consciousness during the late seventies. I thought it was hilarious, and would stop whatever I was doing and run to the television whenever I heard it start. I memorized it word for word in no time and soon, in the privacy of my bedroom, I had the blocking down pat as well. The high-stepping dance down the glassware rack, the flamboyant flinging of the arms while saying "spotting and streaking glasses and dishes", not to mention the upraised, oh mary, palms while keening "OH NO! CALGONITE!" But I'd nailed it. I had the vocals down perfect (the opening Hn-hn-hn-hn laugh constituting a no-brainer given my years mimicking Charles Nelson Reilly as Hoodoo.) I did it for my friends and it slayed them; the whole crowd said I had it down spot on (so to speak.) So I decided to do it for my parents one evening at dinner.

I thought that the Spotmaker was a very funny cartoon character designed to pimp a product. What I failed to take into consideration was that my parents saw him as a tiny, green homosexual, sent to spread his filthy lifestyle via people's dishwashers.

I crossed the kitchen, where we ate, rinsed my plate, then opened the dishwasher to put it away. Immediately I crouched down in front of the open appliance and dove in. "Hn-hn-hn-hn-n-hn-hn! I am the Spotmaker!"

Both of my parents froze their forks midway to their mouths.

"I live inside your dishwasher, spotting and streaking dishes and glasses!"

Here I danced down our tiny kitchen, flouncing my arms at imaginary glassware.

"Do I make you unhappy? Do I embarrass you?"

At this point it was made expressly clear that I did, when my father banged his fist on the table and shouted, angrily, "Stop talking like a queer!" In the interest of accuracy, he was yelling through a mouthful of chewing tobacco, so it sounded like "Mrop tbrrkn brike br queer!" but over the years I'd learned to translate perfectly.

"I'm not a queer; I'm the Spotmaker!" I protested to no avail. "Actually, his only weakness is Calgonite."

My line of reasoning did not sway the masses. My Dad's blue cleaning-crystals of faith was not about to subvert what he already held in his heart as the truth. But he'd been finding reason to call me queer at least once a month since I was far too young to even have a sexuality, so I wasn't surprised. It also hit me that I'd had the same pejorative leveled at me when I'd imitated Hoodoo from Lidsville; another balding, accused homosexual who was also painted green.

I began to wonder about my father's view of homosexuality. Did he imagine there were secret, underground clubs in Huntington, West Virginia where men strip down to their green jockstraps, paint their skin the same shade of green, shave their heads and spend the evening evilly snickering to one another? Perhaps questioning his view of gayness might have been the ignition spark which caused me to question my own. Thanks, Spotmaker!

Mega-thanks to Joe for showing me the link and reminding me of the story.

The Big Angry Bear

2010-03-18T02:34:00.007-04:00

Maybe it was because our familiarity with one another bordered on us being sheep clones, but Beth had a way of opening a lock in such a manner that I, several rooms away at the other end of the apartment, knew exactly what kind of mood I was in for. It's not that she slammed the door nor made a wild, dramatic entrance--she was simply capable, on occasion, of emitting a force of pure negativity that would come whooshing down the hall like a poltergeist and envelop anyone who happened to be there. Just a shred more intensity and plates would have been flying off the shelves.

This ability had its useful moments. A co-worker was having an affair and she and her new girlfriend were visiting. But the woman also had a new wife of two whole weeks; an ex-stripper crackhead who liked to throw down. Could this girl pick 'em or what? The wife, a bone skinny ho with Mr. Ed's teeth, came stomping into our apartment without knocking or ringing the bell, clearly on a thirst for blood and screaming the woman's name. Crackhead or not, she probably had a point. But morality is the first thing to go in the face of potential bodily harm and I quickly hustled the affairette into my bedroom and hid there with her.

Beth did that trick of hers where she puffs herself up, spewing attitude like pepper spray, and appears three times physically larger than she actually is.
She met the woman in the hallway, yelling, her formidable presence filling every square inch of space.

"What are you doing in my house?"
"That girl o mine she--"
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY HOUSE?"
"Bitch think she--"
"GET OUT!!!" Beth screamed, opening her full reserve of hostile vibes. It was like being at an exorcism. The slut slunk away on command as though cast into a herd of swine.

A burglar was later given the same treatment, Beth catching him in the act and with the same result. So, see, having a woman like this around can be a very handy thing to have on hand.

The trouble was that people who didn't know her would see Beth having a full-scale meltdown over cigarette smoke and come away with the impression she was like that all the time. She wasn't. Her positive emotions were just as extreme and she could make opening a can of tuna seem like you were at a party. But I tend to hang with timid people and most of them were scared of her. A few started calling her The Big Angry Bear. Just not to her face.

"How can you live with that?" they'd ask.
"Well, she can be a lot of fun."
"Dude, I saw her shame and practically castrate you just because you left a Twinkie wrapper on the coffee table. Why would you put up with that?"
"Because she didn't find the six others stuffed behind the couch."

Beth was also good for crowd control. We had a come-as-your-sexual-fantasy party at our place and some drama went down we didn't count on. Tor and his wife, Krista, came and she had dressed as a dominatrix. This would have been ok were it not for the fact that another friend, Joe, used Krista's prop whip to good-naturedly swat her on the ass. It was not a come on--hell, Joe was sitting right next to his own wife when he did it--but Krista used the incident as an excuse to act as though Joe had seared her buttocks with a curling iron while sticking his tongue in her ear. Tor fumed with righteous indignation as though every living man shared his sensibilities and Joe was simply another in a line of thousands wanting to make it with a braying hyena playing dress-up in a leather corset. It was an odd bit of role reversal as Joe and Julie, the suburban couple, saw the whole thing as a silly stunt while Tor, who had spent his entire adult life doing his best to present himself as a pansexual, anything goes, libertine, started thundering like an evangelist about the lapse of morality and disrespect for the institution of marriage he'd just witnessed.

I did not see it, but Joe tells me that Tor pulled him into the bathroom and tried to pick a fight. Tor was a slight, kittenish man and Joe was twice his size and a karate instructor, but it didn't deter Tor from trying to come off like Walker, Texas Ranger. "Fucking posturing, Banty rooster," is how Joe describes it. "I could have put him in a coma using just my thumb." He could have, too. But knowing Joe, he probably egged Tor on just for the entertainment value. I could hear Tor shouting from the other end of the apartment.

"How dare you?" Tor screamed.

This is something about Tor that is absolutely hysterical, although it is not wise to let him know you think so. When he is pushed into full-scale fury he will always trot out How dare you?, unaware this phrase has not been uttered convincingly by anyone since the turn of the original fin de sicle'. You expect him to follow up with Good day, sir! and stride out of the room in a huff. There is not a trace of self-referential humor when he does this--in fact it is a signal for quite the opposite. When these particular words escape Tor's lips he means business. Physical harm, inasmuch as he is capable of implementing, is not far behind. He can beat me up. So can seven year old girls. Anyone else, probably not, but Tor's unshakable faith in his magic words prevents him from seeing this. How dare you? is a logic puzzle that will render helpless any semblance of brute strength or cunning; the spoken words alone crippling in their profound and awesome power. Naturally, Tor's utter sincerity while invoking How dare you? is what makes it all the more amusing. Somehow, in his head, the utterance of these words are the zenith of expressing anger and he reserves it until long after a barrage of normal profanity and real world, this-century threats have proven ineffective. It is only when you have pushed him to the breaking point you will hear the deadly, confrontational triage of wordsmanship. How! Dare! You? is the final shake of the rattle before the pit viper, albeit a foppish one most likely wearing a cravat, lunges and sinks its poison fangs into your calf.

Beth wasn't having it. Fuck Tor and his Edwardian line of crap.

She forced her way into the bathroom and made it clear that she would mop the floor with both Tor and Joe if they didn't either shut up or leave right then. I'm thinking her chain mail bra was an added convincer, as she could have whirled it around her head and used it as a mace if need be.

No one heard a peep from the offended parties for the rest of the night. Karate instructor or not, Joe knew when he was bested.

She could pull some crazy, though. A group of bar friends had the idea one night to re-convene at our place and have a music jam. I arrived with Eddie, a mutual friend who had played drums in bands for decades. As soon as we walked inside he spotted and made a beeline for Beth's tall hand drum she'd bought at the Michigan Women's Music Festival.

"This is really cool," he said. We took it back to where I had my keyboard rig set up. He tapped out a beat, another friend cut loose on the guitar and I noodled on the synths in my usual, clueless fashion. Beth, who was a part of the plan, arrived late. She walked down the hall and into our music room and you would have thought she'd seen Eddie jerking off all over a baby.

"NOOOOO!" she howled, angry tears bursting from her face. "Bad! Bad! Wrong!" Clearly we could see that the target of her fury was Eddie but had no idea why.

"You fuck! You goddamn bastard! Bad! Bad! Wrong!" she screamed again, as though he'd soiled the carpet.

Her uber-lesbo, feminist sentiments blew a few circuits and went right into crazy town. "You are touching my drum! MY drum! Why are you touching my drum?"

Eddie looked confused, as though she'd gone off on him for breathing her air. We all did.

"Beth, I've been around drums since I was thirteen."

"You! Don't! Under! Staaaaaaaand!" she raged. She was right, we didn't.

"You asshole! A woman made that drum!"
"A woman probably made the toaster, but you're not all fucking precious about that. What the hell, Beth?" I always knew just what to say. To turn things up a couple notches.

"Beth, please," Eddie pleaded.
"It is MY drum! I know the woman who made it by hand herself!! I met her at the Michigan Women's Music Festival and you've no right to touch it!"
"I thought we were all coming over to play music..."
" I saw you!" Beth shouted. "A drum is a woman! You don't beat her! You play her!"

This little tidbit, I later learned, was lifted verbatim from the audiocassette the woman who made the drum thoughtfully included with her product so that purchasers might properly relate to it as a feminist totem rather than, you know, a musical instrument.

"A drum is a woman!" Beth repeated, hysterical.

"You know," I said, "I have scoured that thing from top to bottom and never found any genitalia. Can you show me just where on your instrument you can determine it's sex? Cause if my retro synthesizer is capable of getting a boner it would really make up for the lack of MIDI capability. If I could back into that fucker while playing some minor chords I think I'd be in heaven."

This is the sort of talk, to someone who views men in the same way certain people do the CIA when it comes to the Kennedy assasination, which simply cannot be endured. Beth ran, screaming and crying, into the backyard and wrapped her arms around a tree, no doubt re-living another moment from the Michigan Women's Music Festival. She sobbed and wailed so loudly I was sure someone would call the cops. Eddie went out there and tried to calm her down.

"Beth, what's going on? I told you, I've been playing drums for years."
"But you were playing MY drum!"
"OK, but other people have sat behind my kit. No big deal."
"That's because your drum set is part of the patriarchy! My drum is a woman!" she snapped.

But mostly made from a dead cow, which could seriously piss off a sizeable segment of people, I mean women, at your little gathering, Eddie probably thought but wisely did not say.

But that was Beth, and unexpected tantruming from out of left field was part of the package, just as living with me meant more conversations about 70's children's TV programming than any one human could bear to endure. I could see, from an outsider's view, how everyone who had witnessed Beth and I in similar screamo scenes might think we were headed for the evening news. Beth and I had many fierce, public, knock-down-drag-outs that probably made us seem like one of those horrible married couples who are too into verbal degradation to ever consider filing for divorce. But in reality, the relationship was more like siblings who'd grown up with one another and had the absolute freedom to go crazy on each other's ass within an inch of fratricide then say, "Hey, you wanna go get ice cream?"

She told me stories of a roommate she'd lived with who made insane demands and was forever coming up with new household rules. "You don't say?," I said, remembering last night's hour-long hissy about a thumb print on a mirror.

"No, this woman was nuts," Beth explained. "I went on vacation and had left a popcorn pan in the sink before I left. When I came back I found she had carried my pan down to the basement and left it there, saving it for me to wash when I got back!"

I filed this story away and then a truly marvelous thing happened: Beth left for a week's vacation in Florida. That alone would have been a truly marvelous thing in that I could blare the stereo, smoke in any room I felt like and rub my dick all over her goddamned drum just because it called to me and said it wanted it bad. But she'd also left a popcorn pan in the sink! I don't know if she has this little ritual before she goes on vacation where she thinks popping corn will keep the jet in the sky the next day or what, but finding that pan after she'd left made me laugh out loud. Of course I immediately carried it downstairs and left it in the basement, giggling about how funny it would be when she got back.

By the time she returned I'd forgotten about it. She went out that night and since I had to go to work the next morning I went to bed.

I was awakened by another example of her communicating her present condition through the way she opened the door. It was loud and clumsy, in very specific way. It meant only one thing: Beth was home and she was shitfaced.

I heard her stagger and stumble in the hall, talking out loud to herself. I smiled; it was like listening to an old-time radio show, assuming Fibber McGee and Molly were allowed to cut loose with a torrent of profanities. I heard her go into the kitchen, just on the other side of my bedroom, and start clattering through the cupboards.

"What the fuck?" she barked.

More clattering, although more frenzied. It sounded like she was tearing the place apart with her bare hands. "Where is my goddamned pan? Where is my motherfucking pan?"

I practically had my whole fist in my mouth to keep from busting out laughing. The more frustrated the sounds from the kitchen became, the more hilarious I found it.

"God damn it, I want my pan! Where's my pan? My pan! Where's my tit-fucking pan?"

A mental image of a mohawked lesbian, pleasuring herself by shoving the handle of a popcorn pan up and down between her breasts, came to life in widescreen, 3D technicolor. I'm amazed I didn't go into respiratory arrest.

Suddenly her angry self-talk became a full-fledged roar.

"AND THE LID'S GONE, TOO????"

That was the one that put me over the edge. Like there still might be a smidgeon of justice left in the world, even though her precious pan was gone, if she still had the lid. But no, it was missing as well and all hope for humanity was doomed. I stuffed my face into my pillow and shook like I was having a seizure.

"All I wanted to do was make some goddamned popcorn and---"

Here she broke off. Silence for a few seconds. Just from the sound I could tell that the lightbulb had finally popped on in her head. She broke into a run, trotting down the hall, then Stomp! Stomp! Stomp! down the basement stairs.

"That motherfucker!" she shouted. I heard her storm back up the stairs, through the long hall and suddenly my bedroom door was yanked open. She fired the dirty pan from across the room where it whizzed so close to my head I could feel the breeze of its trajectory blow against my scalp (if it had actually made contact I'd be writing this with a felt tip pen gripped in my teeth.) The pan slammed against and bounced off the wall, crusty popcorn kernels raining down all over me. Ferociously, she slammed the door shut hard enough to crack the hinges.

I could have been killed, but I found it fucking hysterical. Tears of laughter drenched my pillow, which I pretty much had wrapped around my head to muffle my snorts. It occurred to me that she was probably doubly frustrated, now, since her special OCD pan, the only one in the house, to her mind, which could be used for popping corn was somewhere on my bed and she'd just screwed herself out of a snack. I think I finally got to sleep around three hours later, exhausted by manic giggling and the physical effort it took to conceal it.

The next morning I stumbled, sleepily, into the living room where Beth was sitting on the couch. She asked the only possible question that could have been raised after such an incident:

"You want some eggs to go with that pan?"

O Tannenbaum!

2010-03-17T00:19:00.010-04:00

This is a story of young love. Not my first love, but the first that was reciprocated, at least by an actual person and someone else's hand other than my own. I'd spent two years loving a boy in West Virginia who claimed he was straight, then came out, finally getting that it was only me he wasn't attracted to instead of guys in general. He dated various dinner theatre actors, which stabbed at my heart, as it would anyone's. Later, his mother told him he wasn't allowed to be gay so he married a fat girl. I couldn't deal and ran off to Galliopolis, Ohio, a town about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. There I met a guy in a doughnut shop who I told I loved even though I was absolutely lying. You do that sort of thing if you want a cute person in a teency, rural town to do you. Particularly when the gay community in such a place consists of six people who know one another and your best option is to settle for cute and stupid instead of just stupid. I moved on. I went from Gallipolis, Ohio, right across the river from the Mothman sightings, to Columbus, Ohio, home of James Thurber and Lazarus department stores. It was at this point my parents began to demean me for my high-falutin', big city ways.

As far as love stories go, what I'm about to descibe is the real deal. It's the sweetest story of near-statutatory rape you'll ever hear, outside of Edge of Seventeen or I Love Rock and Roll because everyone knows middle-aged women make it so much cooler and forgivable to confess the hotness of high school boys than homos in their early twenties, right? But yeah, I was 24 and Tom was 18 and he was a senior in high school. I had another teenage friend named Paul. We met in a magic club meeting and there are no demographic boundaries whatsoever when it comes to a shared love of card tricks. We were fast friends despite the age difference, probably because I have always been woefully immature. That, and the mean age of all the other magicians in the club was around 70. We had no hip replacement stories nor medicare anectodes and turned to one another to keep from going out of our minds with the onslaught of unrelenting boredom. Paul didn't care that I liked guys and I didn't care that his idea of music was Nolan Thomas singing 'Yo Little Brother.' He told me there was an out, gay kid at his high school who was working part time as a talking Christmas tree at the local mall. He said I'd like him. I was single and prospects were nil. I figured I ought to go and have a chat with this tree.

The concept behind the talking Christmas tree is this: someone, in this case Tom, is hidden inside a hollow, polyurethene tree like one of the Keebler elves, only wired with a mic. Kids come up and tell the tree what they want for Christmas or whatever else they feel like talking about. The tree responds, its electronic voice booming across the department store. I lurked about, waiting for all the children to leave.

"Hi," I said to the tree.
"Um, hello," it said, probably not used to twenty-somethings addressing it.
I went for whimsy. "Do you guys hate dogs? I mean, given what they do on you and all?"

The tree answered immediately. "We just focus on the fact that in China dogs are considered free-range cattle. We have other things to worry about. Moss. What you guys call crabs."
"No," I said, "aphids are crabs. Moss is psoraiasis."
"And Dutch Elm Disease is rectal cancer. Do you have a point?"

Damn, this tree was funny. "I'm Dan," I said. "Paul's friend."

The tree thought for a minute. "I hear you do a mean Carol Channing," it said.

I belted out a couple of croaky stanzas from Hello Dolly, the gayest thing I have ever done in my life, even more so than taking it up the ass. "Come around and open my back door," the tree said.

My brain fizzled and sparked under the weight of too many replies.
I went around behind the fake tree and sure enough, there was a tiny door. I opened it and there was Tom, crouched inside wearing a headset. He was tall and lanky and much too big to be crammed into a tree, which made me laugh in his face. He probably thought I found him unnatractive, little knowing the mere thought of someone who's managed to secure a regular paycheck from being a talking Christmas tree, to me, is like downing several hundred smoked oysters.

I probably made some inappropriate sap jokes.

"Can you come back at 8:30? That's when I get off." Again, my comedy club mind overflowed with too many zingers.

I wandered around the mall at the height of Christmas frenzy, an act which makes waterboarding seem positively humane, then went back to the tree at the designated time. Tom stretched after emerging from the tree, relieving his cramped muscles and I would like to think unknowingly, causing his shirt to ride up and reveal a flash of skin above his belt buckle. His body was just what revved my motor, the delicious, bone-revealing frame of a borderline anorexic; the sort of person who has to wear snowshoes in the shower to keep from slipping down the drain.

Thing is, cranium contents notwithstanding, from the neck up he just wasn't my type. Since I was in my New Wave phase, this was probably due to the lack of applied cosmetics. And the hair. Curly and a little fluffy whereas I wanted it long and flowing or spiked and reeking of Aqua-Net. But no, he looked like Ann B. Taylor as Alice.

Five minutes later I was willing to gobble his pube-trimming remnants from off the bathroom floor. He was so smart and so funny that I was in love before the escalator hit the lower level. This is still my formula for the ideal mate: someone who is wickedly intelligent but enjoys acting like an idiot. Tom was my first exposure to this heady combination and my first insight that what's inside can truly make a person beautiful. He morphed, like CGI special effects, from ew, the hair, into the most beautiful face I'd ever laid eyes on. It was also apparent, during our short walk around the mall, that he liked me, too. He showed me his fake tap-dancing skills and his faux-Israeli call to prayer. Love, love, love.

Time out to deconstruct: Truth is, you can't really love someone unless you really know them. This means at least a year of being around someone or, if you really want to make sure, living with them. If, after that, you still want to kiss the person who's annoying, electric pencil sharpener of a laugh makes you want to put their head through the television, then yes, you probably love them. There's no such thing as love at first sight. It's an endurance trial at best. Confusingly, Infatuation at First Sight is a very real thing. This has dicked with more people than you can imagine because, unfairly, it feels just the same as love. Infatuation makes you swoon, breathe heavy and pop a boner. Love does the same thing, but also keeps you from comitting homicide. There's a subtle difference. So of course Tom and I, two weeks after meeting, professed that we loved one another.

There was just one problem, shared between he, me and Norman Bates: His mother. Tom still lived with her. She was old, so much so that the fact that Tom and his sister were not retarded was pretty much a miracle. This woman, due to the cruelest act of fate a gay kid can consider, also taught math at the very same high school he attended. The fact that he was not shy about telling anyone he was hot for guys, she must have felt, reflected on her abilities as both parent and teacher. His fondness for the main vein and broadway shows was a horrible reflection on her.

Consequently, Tom was barely allowed to leave the house. She probably imagined he would run off to the pet store, buy a supply of white mice, then sneak behind the Taco Bell with a toilet paper tube. Tom's mother monitored his every waking move, demanding at all times to know where he was and who he was with. Ironically, this is how I've since treated all subsequent boyfriends.

My friend Tor, who was there at the time, tells me that he never remembered any gossip about Tom being queer. He had his suspicions, but none of the kids ever mentioned anything about sexuality. Instead, he says, what he heard was that Tom's mother was a cunting bitch who treated him like a dog in a wire cage. What Tom wanted to do with his pecker wasn't news; the fact that everyone understood he was being held captive by a crazy, old woman was what fed the high school rumor mill.

Tom's mother would send him to the store and he'd whiz by my place, giving us a scant five minutes to kiss each other and swear our love. A week later, he would lie and say he was going to some girl's house (hope, no doubt, springing eternal in his mother's mind) and he'd get to spend an hour with me. But finally someone at his high school threw an all-night party and Tom's mother gave him permission to attend, no doubt praying some big-haired cheerleader would finally switch him. He called and I picked him up from there and we headed for my place.

In the car he was smarter and funnier than ever, his version of getting me liquored up. When we got back to my place, we started ripping each other's clothes off before we even made it up the front steps. Inside he finally emerged completely from his clothing, stunning, like an eighteen-year cicada. We shuffled, naked and embracing, to the bedroom and it was great. Even the sex was smart and funny. "Just so you're aware and not alarmed later," he said, adopting his most serious face, "when I climax I scream out the word 'cockroaches.' Hope it's not a turn-off."

I pulled him close. "Call me Mr. Peepers," I begged seductively.

We found it hilarious. Absolutely hysterical. We snickered and laughed all throughout our first coupling. (This would happen time and again with other boyfriends, but for all the wrong reasons.) If you are instantly comfortable enough with someone to actually point out the funny side of sex with one another, first time around, mid-act, then I'd say there's some serious chemistry there. Not that I didn't have serious chemistry with later paramours but it usually took the form of windowpane and blotter acid. He did, in fact, yell out the word 'cockroaches', which he would continue to do in future encounters in such a way it made my heart swell. There is no aphrodisiac like someone fully committed to a joke. I wanted to slide my dick between the hemispheres of his brain. Tom and I held each other afterward, made sarcastic comments and laughed like fools. It was incredible.

But then, of course, we'd catch sight of the time. "Only a half an hour left. Shit." It was always like this. I couldn't call him; he could only call me when Mother was away. Surprise ten minute appearances, like he was a guest on my talk show. Meeting him for fast-food dinner in a very public place. Waiting in line with children, me wanting to scream at them to get the fuck away so I could have private time with the tree. There had to be a knothole in that thing somewhere.

It went on like this for quite a while. At least in the young love time continum, where a day feels like six weeks and a kiss seems to last forever.

Tom's mother begrudgingly allowed that he could have a birthday party at his house. She of course would be on hand to monitor the entire affair. With her there, the concept of a party among his classmates surely seemed appealing as Algebra II. But people said they'd show up, because, who didn't like Tom? His sheer force of personality superseded his gayness, even in a high school in midwestern Ohio during the mid-nineteen-eighties. He never had problems with jocks threatening to beat the crap out of him. He was just Tom, funny as a motherfucker, and nearly everyone adored him. Especially me.

Which meant I had to attend the party. This was a stupid, stupid, stupid idea on both our parts. Mother, we should have realized, would not be sitting quietly in her fruit cellar but lurking about, inspecting the party for moral decay. I was pretty much the poster child for this. She knew every student attending on a first-name basis and I, a total stranger, was youthful for my age but not exactly able to pass as valedictorian material. Plus there was the fact that I looked like every member of Duran Duran, along with the entire Maybelline product line, had been thrown into a gene splicer. I kind of stuck out.

Tom and I were forward-thinking enough that we planned for me to arrive when the party was in full swing instead of when only a few classmates were there. We might have also considered that leading a baboon, or me, into a crowd of average teenagers might attract undue attention, but no, we didn't grasp that essential point. I showed up and Tom immediately dragged me to the piano. I sat on the bench beside him and he banged out a hysterical, torch-song rendition of My Funny Valentine. I was in tears, laughing, mascara trailing down my cheeks. We started talking, whispering actually, each telling what we most liked about the other. Then I went off to mingle. Thanks to the dynamic I'd grown accustomed to--impromptu phone calls from out of nowhere with Tom saying "My friend and I are coming over right now! She has to meet you!"--I knew a lot of the people Tom hung out with at school. More than a few were also gay, if not neccessarily out, the sheer number of which gave me hope for the future.

A bony hand clamped down on Tom's shoulder, like something in a movie about witches eating children. It was Mother. "Who...was...that?" she said, carefully spacing and hissing her words.
"That's Dan. He's a friend of Paul's."
"Then why isn't he talking to Paul? Oh, I know. Because Paul's not here."
"Well," Tom said, stalling for time, "he knows a lot of Paul's friends."
"Like you?"
"Yeah, we've met."
" I don't like his hair at all. Not one bit. What kind of man colors his hair?"
"Rock stars? Televangelists?"
"There's another kind of man who colors his hair." Here, Tom's mother flopped her wrist, American Sign Language for queer as a cat fart.
"I don't color my hair and I'm that way," he said, driving another knife into her sternum.
"I don't think it's healthy he's here in my house."

Tom's mother began to follow me the way Korean convienience store owners do African-Americans. No matter where I was or who I was talking to she was there, arms folded and her tightened, mean face staring as though sheer will could cause my dick to drop off and roll down my pant leg. Finally, after some furious hand waving she whispered something to Tom.

He sidled up to me while I was talking with Andrea. "You've been asked to leave," he said.

"Love ya," I replied as I made my exit. "It's been fun."

This was, sadly, the beginning of the end. Maybe I'm romanticising the situation, but I think our shared intimacy over My Funny Valentine clearly and effectively communicated to Tom's mother that her son and I were more than aquaintences or even friends. I'd like to think the way we looked at one another brought to her mind images of both of us gargling body fluids simultaneously. It sure did to me.

No matter what mental specifics prompted it, the surveillance efforts on his mother's part, after the party, quadrupled and he was interrogated with even more deranged fervor. Casual trips to visit long-standing friends were suddenly suspect and his mother would make him call her from there and also demand to speak to the friend, just to make sure. His already boxed-in life had become ever much more so and I was responsible. I can't blame him at all for not wanting to live like this.

Before I go on, would you like to meet Tom? Experience him just as I did in all his high school hotness and see how fucking funny he was back in the day? You can. The big news at the time was that Hollywood was coming to Columbus to film a movie. The stars were arriving! Nick Nolte, Ralph Macchio, Morgan Freeman and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls' Royal Dano! Sadly, the results were a really unfunny comedy called Teachers which you can get on DVD and in which, in good old 1984, Tom landed a part as an extra, playing in a not especially demanding role, a high schooler. There's a scene in a hallway where a student pulls out a gun and all the other kids hit the floor. Everyone pretty much crouches to their knees. But if you look carefully, the tallest, lankiest one does a pratfall worthy of Chico Marx. Smart but funny. It came out on video while we were dating, if you can really use that term to describe a relationship forged on surprise, ten-minute visits. I am probably the only person in history who has, more than once, jerked off to a Morgan Freeman movie.

I decided I would have my own party for Tom and all his friends, without the glaring spectre of a praying mantis in a house dress spoiling everyone's fun. He created the alibi and I can't remember what it was; only that it worked. Mother allowed Tom to be away for an evening. This was before the word party became associated in my mind with drugs, alcohol and doing my best to alienate everyone present. It was simply music, good times and fun without the electric eye of crippling, parental supervision. We danced on my glass-topped coffee table until it broke, causing us to drop two feet with glass shards flying everywhere. I did not pick up the mess for weeks, much as I do now, given that disarray can serve as a visual reminder of joyous or nutty times gone before, even if in the present that definition references when I spilled scrambled eggs all over the cat. The coffee table destruction was so much fun I invited my guests into the kitchen to avail themselves of all the dishes in the cabinets and to, please, smash them to bits just because it was so exhilarating. We did. Broken cheap China was everywhere. Damn. I need to have another party like that, and soon.

But Mother's opression continued to bear down on Tom. I was probably a sheer prick to expect him to live that way in the name of love. It was like saying I, myself, was reason enough for him to be chained to a post in the basement and forced to shit in a salad bowl.

He arrived one night, unexpected as per custom, and I moved to kiss him. Something tensed. I didn't like it.

"I've got something I'd like you to read," he said.

Whenever a kiss feels like the other person is being rubbed down with lizard entrails and they've got something for you to read, you can bet your ass it's a Dear John letter. It was. As I had yet to perfect my stone-faced, I-will-not-show-you-my-weakness personna, I cried. As Tom was just not funny, but smart, he did not point out how pathetic I was behaving. Had he done so, a gruesome scene involving hacksaws and my bathtub might have occured. Essentially, according to the letter, our relationship was just too intense too survive. He was still in high school. What do you want? Flaubert?

It wasn't just his mother, of course, that killed the concept of us. It was being that age, with your whole life ahead of you. How the hell was I supposed to compete with that? Nonetheless, decades later, when I heard Tom's mother died I visited her grave. I did a fake tap dance on top of it, humming My Funny Valentine the entire time.

Anyone out there, I beg: Let's go home and rap with one another.

Update: 3/17 Per Tom's request, here's Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark in concert from 1985 doing 'Secret'. It was, after all, "our" song. Well, after the Ray Conniff Singers doing 'Coconut Wireless'.

Bananas

2010-03-16T23:44:00.005-04:00

Another very short song from the Spookshow In Your Pants dicography, probably because once again I was trying to be real and can't do that for very long periods of time. When the dark clouds roll in, I feel helpless, horrified, and disgusted at who I am as as a person and want to wish it all away. This clip is supposed to mirror the mindset, combining the usual wacky outlook with disturbing intruding thoughts. I've used this sequence in other pieces, but I think the stark brevity of the original sums it up best.

Click on the title if you want to share my less-peppy moments.

But of course this post wouldn't be complete without this:

McDonald's In Detroit

2010-03-16T01:17:00.003-04:00

"Gimme all the money in the drawer, motherfucker!"
The counter help behind the six inch plexiglas shrugs.
"I said give me all the money in the drawer or I'll blow your fuckin' head off."
"Really?" asks the teen in the paper hat.
"Whatchoo mean really? I said give me the money."
"I know what you said. I'm just not particularly motivated to do it. Besides, there are people behind you, sir. They look hungry."
"Fuck hongry. Empty out that cash drawer or I will blow your damn head off."
"Sir, if you could just please step to one side if you're not ordering anything. I need to get these people taken care of or the manager might become very upset."
"I ain't stepping aside for nobody."
At this, the patrons in line voice their displeasure.
"You asswipe, my daughter wants a strawberry shake."
"I only have a half hour for lunch and I need my Asian Chicken Salad."
"Hey, idiot, you're wasting our time."
"If you don't move it I will fold my Filet O Fish in half and shove it up your ass."
The man with the gun turned to the people behind him. "I done told the man to give me all the money. It's not my fault he's being so slow about it."
"Sir, please, if you're not placing an order could you just please step to one side so that others might enjoy our line of reasonably priced products? "
"Yeah," a man growls, "I want a number one value meal sometime today."
"Sir, I will place your order when you arrive at the counter but there are still two people, not counting this guy with the gun, ahead of you."
"Sorry," the man says.
"Gimme my cash!"
"No sir. It is not your cash. It belongs to the McDonald's corporation; a very, very, very small, teency-tiny portion of which is going to the Ronald McDonald House, an organization for parents who have children with cancer."
"Awww. That's sad. No, wait, I mean, gimme that money, mofo."
"Excuse me," a woman says, "Do you think I could have three of those yogurt parfaits? I know you think that no one noticed you cut them down to a third of the size they used to be, but some of us have eyes, you know."
"Yeah," says a man. "Chicken McNuggets used to be huge but now they're practically the size of a dime."
Celebrity talk show host David Letterman is also in line and says, sarcastically, "Really. If there was a part of of a chicken you could conceivably call a nugget, would you want to put it in your mouth?"
Everyone laughs.
"Shut up!" the man with the gun yells. "All of you."
"Top ten reasons I can't get my fucking lunch," Letterman says, and everyone laughs again.
"So how are you liking Detroit?" the kid behind the counter asks the TV star.
"Shut up! I have a goddamn gun!"
"It's ok," answers Letterman, rolling his eyes. "Mostly."
"Are you going to give me the money or not?"
"I'm going to have to check with my manager on this." The kid disappears, which causes the line of people to audibly sigh and pointedly check thier wristwatches. "Hey," the man with the gun says, "I just figured he would hand it over and I'd be gone. I'm in the same boat as you."
The boy in the paper hat returns, accompanied by a man sans similar chapeau and wearing a necktie, which in the McDonald's world means an ass that needs to be licked, pretty much constantly. "What seems to be the problem here?" the manager asks.
"Gimme all the money in your goddamned cash register. Do it or I will shoot you in the face!"
"Is that David Letterman?" the manager asks.
"Yeah," says the kid in the paper hat. "He's just as funny in real life as he is on the TV."
"Hey!" yells the man with the gun.
"I hear he and that Paul Schaeffer don't really get along."
"Hey!" the man cries again.
"You know Letterman got one of those baboon hearts, like Baby Whatsername. Those rich shits get anything they want. My mom, she died, but if she had her own talk show she'd still be kicking."
The man who was causing all the trouble rapped on the plexiglas with the butt of his gun.
"You have three seconds to give me the cash before I open fire."
"Hi David! I'm the manager here!"
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Three of the four shots fired bounced off the plexiglass, the one remaining stuck barely a sixteenth of an inch into it so that a slight breeze might jar it loose and cause it to fall onto the floor next to the others.
"Excuse me," the manager said, "can you scoop those up and throw them away?"
"Or recycle," said the kid in the paper hat.
"We have a lot of elderly customers. Never mind the fact that the loud noises might have sparked a stroke or something, but could you pick up your spent shells so they don't trip on them. Someone could break a hip."
"I gots a pistol. Bullets, not shells."
"Just the same. Would you mind?"
"Ok. I'll pick 'em up."
" Thanks. Now do you want anything?"
"All the money in the drawer."
"No."
"Fine. A diet Pepsi."
"Sir, we only have Coke products."
"Ok, a diet Coke then."
"What size?"
"Large."
"For here?"
"To go."
"That'll be a dollar ten."
"Thanks."

Something's Not Quite Right About The Baby / Feel

2010-03-14T14:18:00.005-04:00

Legendary among Spookshow In Your Pants fans (all four of them) was the epic concept piece Monkey Barbara And The Other, which told the story of a girl with four-meter forearms locked away in an attic by her cruel parents in a town that valued conformity above everything and also worshiped waffles. This cut from that song cycle still makes me smile after all these years. Click on the title to have a listen.

To bring you up to speed in the story: The Earl of Waffleton and his wife just had a baby that turned out non-standard and so by decree of the Chancellor of Waffleton it, and they, have to be destroyed. Monkey Barbra hears ths announcement on her radio.

The Chancellor of Waffleton:

Citizens of Waffleton I come to you with weighted heart.
The shower for the Earl’s wife is cancelled as of now.
Sorry ‘bout the inconvenience; hope your gifts can be returned.
Go buy something nice to help you ease the sting of grief.
Take heart in the knowledge when bad things happen to the faithful

We grow stronger with each passing trial.
Try and hold to some small hope that someday you will understand
The Waffle King don’t cause these things—he allows them.

Something’s not quite right about the baby!
Something’s gone amiss in utero.
Someone’s nonconformity resulted in deformity.
Someone’s little bundle has to go!

Citizens of Waffleton, you can’t imagine how it looks—
Just so sick and ugly we can’t take a photograph.
Baby’s arms and legs are fleshy flaps devoid of bone.
Nothing there from the neck up; no eyes, no ears, no button
Just a mouth atop a stump that spits and gurgles constantly
And as for baby’s sex…uh…we’ll get back to you…

Something’s not quite right about the baby!
Something in it’s strange genetic code.
Someone was a Ho and that fucked up the embryo—
Someone’s payment for the crime is owed.

In accordance with the laws and wishes of The Waffle King
Triple execution makes good sense.
Nothing gets exterminated while it’s being incubated—
Once it’s born, the judgments will commence.

Citizens of Waffleton, please gather in the parking lot
Of Flapjack Mall ‘round two o’ clock tomorrow afternoon.
Three unwholesome reprobates will be destroyed per holy law—
Three small fires burning with the stench of family shame.
The Earl and his wife agree to take their places willingly.
Offering themselves to Waffle King in sacrifice.
Only their foul offspring will be shackled with restraints.
Come on down—I guarantee a blessing!

Something’s not quite right about the baby!
Something in the way the bastard looks.
Fire up the tallows; bring the hot dogs and marshmallows.
See the way it dances while it cooks!

Monkey Barbara:

Funny how I’m jealous of The Earl and his wife
Yeah, they’re going down in flames—at least they had a life
Safe here in my attic no one knows that I exist
It’s always someone else who’s getting caught and crisped
Can’t take much more of this
Can’t take much more of this
Can’t take much more of this
I just might freak I just might learn to feel

Feel

I know the consequences
I know the consequences
I know the consequences then
If I should crack and just give in
I just might get out of this rut
And off my pimply, monkey butt
I might behave like one sick pup
Do a little acting up
Do something dangerous and real
Something more than simply feel

Feel

You Give Me Fever

2010-03-14T13:23:00.005-04:00

Cold sores. Fever blisters. Whatever you call ‘em, I get ‘em. It’s my understanding that, secondary to gender, there are two types of people: Those whose lips suddenly erupt into the fluid-filled equivalent of bubble-wrap and those who don’t. Color me among the unfortunate.
It’s supposed to be a wintertime thing and usually is, but mine can show up any time of the year. Other people complain about the cold and flu season because they’ve woken up with a stuffy nose; my big grief is greeting the day looking like Oscar Wilde on his syphilitic deathbed.
As if the indignity of seeming a lesion-ravaged leper were not enough, the appearance of these unwelcome intruders upon my person is always accompanied by the acute paranoia that this one inch flawed area on my body is all anyone else can see, as though I were wearing a two foot, novelty foam rubber top hat that, through means of a concealed battery pack, also flashes a neon announcement to the world that blinks “Herpes! Herpes! Herpes!” on and off accompanied by the sound of an air raid siren. This is not an unfounded fear. When you get a cold sore there is always an amateur microbiologist amongst your peer group who feels compelled to mention, usually in the largest crowd in which you circulate, “You know that’s a form of herpes. Not Herpes Simplex, the kind you get from sex, but it’s still herpes.” Thank you dear good doctor. I was still trying to wrap my brain around the fact that canker sore is only one consonant away from cancer sore. It’s like hearing that you’ve got the good kind of leukemia.
What makes this situation fully mortifying is that you know only part of the population will accurately comprehend this information. People who don’t get cold sores are in no particular rush to study up on them. They just assume you’ve had your mouth on the nastiest part of a nasty person. It shows on their faces, like spotting Catholics on Ash Wednesday. You find yourself mentally constructing a profile of the average fever-blister-getter in hopes of determining who around you might be sympathetic, much like trying to figure out if the cashier at the beer store is gay. You also assume people are profiling you as well. You can feel total strangers thinking “Yes, I have severed cat heads in my freezer at home but at least I’m not unclean.”
Getting a fever blister is a horrorshow of premonition, based on the fact you feel it coming, like radiation victims knowing handfuls of hair in the shower will soon mean skin detachment and explosive diarrhea. You feel something akin to razor rash, only coming from inside your lips. This reminds you of how utterly awful shaving is going to be for a while--dragging a razor across a blister-ensconced upper lip merely slices them open, resulting in robust and bleeding scabs (always seen as cute, cute, cute) whereas not shaving causes spiky hairs to form inside the pustules which prick the living crap out of you from within until you want to tear your lips off your face with locking pliers and throw them in the river.
This initial tingling (which will move from that, to pain, to feeling you have pubic crabs swarming on your mouth) signals that your little translucent friend is on its way and there is nothing, nothing you can do about it. You have a day to gather supplies before you transform like a werewolf; supplies to keep you nourished and entertained while you avoid letting anyone see you for the next two weeks.
The next stage is a pronounced redness, which indicates that your earlier paranoia was well founded. At this stage of the game it can pass for a wine-stain birthmark, which although unattractive still allows you to move through society without suspicion of being a slut. It does, at least, allow you to gauge the surface area of the soon-to-be blistered skin and know just how much of a whore you’ll soon be judged.
Then come the blisters, tiny at first but by the end of the day they look and feel like water balloons. The pressure build-up from the inside fluid is so intense that, should you prick one with a needle, you can spritz down the back of someone's shirt merely by pursing your lips. This, in fact, is generally what happens to people who feel moved to mention the word herpes in my presence.
There’s a popular radio ad for a product called Releev that claims to be able to cure this condition “in just one day.” Don’t you believe it. What you get for your twenty bucks is a little tube full of mysterious goo that is as effective for treating cold sores as a glue stick is at fixing amputated limbs. If you want to go cheaper there is the proven favorite Campho-Phenique which treats your problem through aversion therapy by assuming you’ll forget all about the fact that you have a fever blister if you run around smelling like moth balls.
The timing involved is invariably the worst--so much so I believe the virus is wired to the subconcious in such a way that when I know I'm going to be most socially prominent the pustules are simply willed into life. I would bet money I could be locked away, alone, in a remote cabin for years and never get a fever blister. The Unabomber probably never bought Blistex in his life.
One first date, though, and my lips will sprout what appear to be pepperoni slices before cocktails have arrived. I am at my most charming and suddenly my date's getting-to-know-you smile is replaced by someone watching a toddler get autopsied. The conversation awkwardly turns to getting tested. For everything. My new friend slowly slides their chair back as if six more inches distance will prevent them from being quarantined. Another date destined to end with a handshake.
I always do the worst thing possible and drain the blisters. I know it simply prolongs their presence, but I reach a point where I can't bear to be in public a second longer looking like I've got inflated condom tips growing from my skin. So I stand before the mirror with a needle I've sterilized by wiping on my pants and go to town. The fluid leaks all over and it appears my lips are actually crying over the way they look. Unfortunately, the now-stretched skin, not having all that pretty fluid to fill it up, hangs in tatters like a window treatment in the projects. So I tear it off, revealing raw, open flesh, and what do you know? My mouth has it's own little vagina and it's that time of the month. Now I really look like a freak. I could, I suppose, carry a supply of tiny band-aids with me I could curl around my lip to hide the soon-to-be scab, but that would only result in a hundred "What happened?" conversations which would be much worse than the usual, embarassed, looking away. I've tinkered with the idea of inventing stories involving highly theatrical bar fights or near-death spider bite episodes. But then most likely the pooling lymph fluid would ooze away the adhesive, revealing me to be both disgusting and a liar when the band-aid finally slides off and drops off into my soup.
I find myself trying to point the offending side of my face away from all possible viewers, so that I end up twitching around the room like David Byrne dancing. I can't imagine this works in the slightest. "That poor man," people must think, "He's hurt himself very badly or maybe had a stroke, in addition to his diseased, fucked-up lip."
The trouble with having a scab that feels like a manhole cover stuck to my mouth is that patience is not my strong suit. I always attempt to peel it off long before it's time has come, resulting in more fresh blood and having to start the healing process over from scratch. But at least I'm left with something, a part of me, I can turn sticky-side-up and put in the chairs of people I've seen giving me the herpes look. Especially if it's summer and they're wearing shorts.