Helicopter

Now, I had some wackadoo folks whose ideas of parenting were a bit, er, 'unconventional' to put it kindly. Forced enemas as punishment. Being made to strip down to my underwear and breathe heavily while lifting weights as my father looked on disapprovingly. This weird diagram where all of my friends had to be my exact age or I couldn't be friends with them, unless they went to my church. There was some same strange stuff. But god damn, at least I got to go outside, ride bikes in nothing but short pants, play wherever I wanted until the streetlights came on, listen to whatever music I liked (okay, this one was a little strange in that I couldn't READ anything I liked without parental approval, but with music I had carte blanche)plus I had enough alone time to play with matches, make my own explosives, have furtive sex, fall out of trees, say no to proffered drugs, play Mystery Date with the neighbor girls, prove I was shitty at football, convince my friends that we should turn their garage into a spook house, get beaten up by bullies, win at kick the can, watch Night Gallery at a neighbor's house, have a sleepover in tents in some kid's backyard, and on and on. So if you've read some of the stories I've told here you know that there were a lot of damned peculiar things going on inside the house. But, and here's the thing, I was allowed to have a life outside the house. And outside the house is where I learned that it's not a good idea to try and make a roller coaster out of an expandable wooden ladder stretching from the roof to the ground that you're going to ride down on a toy wagon. Outside the house is where I learned that a well-placed, funny, insult can keep the school bully from picking on you. Outside the house is where I learned, oh boy, not everything anyone tells you is absolutely true all the time. And it's that last one, I bet, that gives parents the heebie-jeebies. The current term for this is 'helicopter parents': people so involved in their little precious children's lives that the child can't have a moment alone and the child is constantly monitored to make sure not a single, independent influence is thrusted upon them and not a single thought enters their brain not pre-approved by those who know best: Mommy and Daddy. Now yeah, it would be easy to pinpoint the Evangelical Fundies who homeschool and you'd probably be right, because like any cult, independent thought is the devil's Team Fortress 2. (So no video games allowed, either.) But this culture of I'm-gonna-keep-my-kid-stuffed-up-my-cunt-like-a-goddamn-marsupial is so much more sickeningly widespread than the people bent out of shape over chicken sandwiches. A friend showed me a birthday party invitation his hippy-dippy girlfrend's kid had been sent. Attached to the bottom was this ominous warning: "Note: The party is Star Wars themed and foam weapons will be distributed. For those not wishing their children to be involved in this kind of violence, a 'No Play' area will be provided." Oh yeah. I wanna be the kid in the 'No Play' area. Cause that's a goddamn party. It's part of what it means to be a parent anymore, and it scares me shitless. Lady tried to sue the school board because her kid struck out at a baseball game--she felt he really ought to run around the bases and was pissed when he didn't. (Ain't making this one up; it actually happened.) Kids can't ride a bike without enough plastic and padding to look like Optimus Prime. Elmer Fudd's shotgun is being digitally erased. I think I'm going to go with koo-koo parents who say the end the world is coming next week and here's the proof instead of this. I got off lucky. And with this, I think I am going to close down Der Spookhaus at this address. Blogger is intent on ignoring formatting and fusing every paragraph into one giant blob of text. You can come back here to see the old stuff, if you want, but I think the time has come to move the site to somewhere else. Check back here for the link to the new place. Soon as I get it figured out I'll let you know.

Return of the Shoe Store Stalker

I was moving away from home, a relief to all concerned, and found my first apartment and job in Gallipolis, Ohio, a town as I’ve noted about as big as the period at the end of this sentence. (The jokes don’t write themselves, folks; sometimes you have to bring out the summer re-runs.) I found an ad in the paper for an apartment to rent and went there. The first thing I noticed was that the sidewalk, stairs and guardrail were all spray-painted fluorescent orange, like the entire building had been gang-tagged. Since it was Gallipolis, probably not the case as the only resident gang members were two guys in baggy pants who shoplifted from the hardware store. The reason for the ostentatious display of fire-orange paint was because the landlady was legally blind. In fact, she was all the way blind, so I doubt she knew her aid to seeing the place made her house look like crap. The first thing she told me, even before I looked at the apartment, was “You will not bring strange women to your room. I’ll not have my home turned into a whorehouse.” Can do, I thought. I also thought if that is how I come across, she’s gotta be REALLY blind. Also, it crossed my mind that anyone described as a strange woman would probably turn out to be a pretty good friend. I’ve met some strange women in the years since and it’s usually been the case. The apartment was pretty damn ugly, but at the time I did not have the discriminating, rarefied taste in living quarters I do now. My job was working as an X-ray tech in a local Medical Center, a job at which I was terribly not good. I got fired for, among other reasons, pinching a woman on the butt, my thinking being, hey, I’m gay so how the hell can that be sexual harassment or offensive, a concept I have difficulty understanding to this very day. I mean, not that I run around goosing women anymore but a lot of shit I think is funny other people…do not. So I had to get a job, anything, no doubt a few steps down on the economic ladder from what I’d been used to—again, a situation that seems to keep happening. I saw a sign on a shoe store reading ‘Help Wanted’ so I went in and talked to the manager. He was actually one of the funniest, smartest people in that teency town I’d ever talked to. I liked him on sight, but not in the way he instantly liked me. He was closeted but somehow sensed I was gay, too. It might have been the fuzzy pink sweater I was wearing. (My clothing options have changed considerably; now my decisions are based on, well, this doesn’t smell TOO rank so I guess I’ll put it on.) So I got hired and we became friends, and he wanted a lot more than I could give, because I just wasn’t attracted. Besides, I was madly in love with someone else. To him, this did not serve as a plausible excuse for why we shouldn’t be together. Things got creepy; there were many offers for unsolicited back-rubs. He told me, “You know, I parked my car in your parking lot last night, happy just to watch your building and know you were in there.” Yow-ok. Things were starting to get messy. Then there was the night he refused to leave. “Okay, good night, Shoe Store Manager, I’m going to bed.” ”I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here with you tonight.” ”No, you’re not. The night’s over, I’m going to sleep.” ”And I am going to stay here tonight and watch you sleep.” Jesus Motherfucking Godzilla. “NO, you’re not staying here. It’s time to go home.” He did this thoroughly insane thing where he shut his eyes tightly and shook his head back and forth, like no, no, no I’m not hearing this and god damn, everything is going down the way my crazed fantasies want them to and that’s just the way it’s going to happen. You get face to face with that kind of nuts and you get scared. Things were starting to blur; I really did like him as a friend but this kind of crap was starting to be a deal-breaker. “Okay, since you’re refusing to leave, I’m calling the police.” “Go ahead,” he said. I picked up the phone and dialed 911. “You’re an asshole,” he said, as he bolted. It might have been true, but I doubt so much in this specific case. Shortly after I moved from teeny-tiny Gallipolis to my beloved Columbus, where I lived with my friend Michael. One day, Michael told me, “You know, I’ve really got to tell you something. Your shoe store manager has followed you here and has been living here. And he’s been keeping tabs on you.” Goddamn Michael. It would have been nice to have known this sooner. But, you might ask, what would a complete idiot do in this situation? What would someone who was totally incapable of learning through experience; someone who’s hope for the best might as well be an illness do? I’ll tell you what they would do—they would move in with the shoe store stalker, which is just what I did. I just assumed I’d made it crystal clear that no romance or sexy-time was ever, ever going to happen and figured that would be the end of it. First night in our shared space: “Do you want me to rub your back a little bit?” No, no I do not. And I got every bit as weird as him. The fact that I loved someone who didn’t love me back made me feel like I was dying. So, I told him I was dying. Yeah, there’s a good move when someone’s not only crazy about you but just plain crazy. Plus, I was wearing parachute pants so I can’t say my judgment was all that sound. “Oh yes, I’ll be dead soon,”I said, cause I really thought it. I made up this lie that I had pernicious anemia, cause saying I was dying of angst-ridden heartbreak would have sounded as stupid as it was. Unfortunately, I gave Shoe Store Manager the book to read I’d stolen the idea from and the jig was up. I’m not that bright. He went on a passive-aggressive tirade and just didn’t speak to me for months. Uh-oh, this ain’t good, cause the opposite of love isn’t hate; the opposite of love is indifference. I’d beg him; “Fuck it! Tell me what’s wrong and maybe we’ll fix it and maybe we won’t!” but nope. He just wouldn’t speak and it was a very awkward series of months. But finally, he spoke. It was my birthday. “I made you something,” he said. It was a cake pan full of chocolate pudding stuffed with little, plastic dinosaurs. “I call it La Brea Tar Pit.” I got the hell out of Columbus. I moved for love. Again, I’m not that bright. Ten years later, back in town. Fifteen years later after that, life had gone to hell in a handbasket. In the meantime, though, I’d talked to Shoe Store Manager on the Internet and on the phone, and it seemed as though, you know, we were back on the same page where we were friends and there wasn’t going to be any insinuations. And for a change, I was the one who had gone stark, raving crazy. I was out of my damn mind, couldn’t think straight and thought the best plan of action was to leave the best job I ever had and run, run away. So I asked him, can I come and live with you for a little while, cause I’m going out of my damn mind? Also, I want to bring my cat. Amazingly, he said yes. He lived in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, a place that make Gallipolis seem like goddamn Manhattan, but my mindset at the time was flee at all costs. So my friend Joe drove me halfway, Shoe Store Manager’s sister met us at the midway point and was going to drive me back the rest of the way. You understand, life as I knew it was unsettled to crap and back, I was shaking like a leaf at just the sheer uncertainty of the whole situation—which I did knowingly but still was kind of freaking over—and it didn’t help when Shoe Store Manager called his sister, asked to speak to me and said in a slow, measured and altogether creepy voice, “So are you a frightened bunny?” Well, ya know, I wouldn’t have personally put in those terms but after hearing this, yes, yes I think I am. It was his creepy voice. The same one offering back rubs I hadn’t heard for 25 years. He’d seemed so normal and fun lately and the guy I liked hanging with, but no, back now that I was on the way to live with him again his tone of voice had changed from someone desperately trying to sound alluring. It did not work and instead the flesh crawled off my bones. Now his sister, she was driving a van up the winding mountains of Virginia and a snowstorm had hit and snow and ice was all over the road. The vehicle was sliding all over the place, with her saying “We gonna get there in time! We gonna get there in time!” and then just let drop with this chestnut: “You know what? Sometimes I just pass out behind the wheel! I don’t know why, I just do and sometimes I end up in the ditch.” I was a scared little bunny. Somehow we made it there in one piece. And it was good to see Shoe Store Manager again, at least for the first night. Now he has some health issues (and apparently has a crackpot doctor that prescribes him an entire wall of prescriptions, which he unfortunately thinks he needs) and the next morning Shoe Store Manager was doing some projecting and wanted to make sure I didn’t have them as well. Now, I was in a bad place and thought, hell, if a guy is going to let me come live with him it’s perfectly normal for him to do a finger stick and test me for diabetes. It’s not, of course, but like I say I was sort of batshit at the time, so hey, why not, draw blood and let’s get this over with. You see, though, this was only the first step in his wanting to be some kind of nurturing, authority figure. Which is really the last goddamn approach you’d ever want to take with me if you were going to be met with any sort of success. So fuck, he took my blood pressure, he took my temperature, he would have done a bowel chart if I would have let him. I put up with it because, hey, this nice man is helping save me from myself…but things just got too far. All the time. If I was washing dishes or cooking dinner he would sidle up behind me and start telling me how I was doing it wrong and needed to do it the right way. If the dish is damn clean or the meal is tasty, fuck you, it’s not the method but the end result. But no, everything had to be done in a specific way and if it wasn’t the Shoe Store Manager way it was wrong. Oh, did this get on my nerves. And that, hellish enough to endure, I probably could have lived with were it not for the creepy factor. I was crashing on the couch. His bedroom was on the other side of the trailer but he would NOT shut his damn door, claiming it was for the benefit of his cat to roam free. Now nobody other than me knows how a lonely man can love his cat, but in this case it meant he was perched across his bed, staring out the open door and watching me sleep just like he wanted to do years ago. Shut the damn door and let the cat shit in the box in your room. With him doing that, though, I didn’t get much sleep. I mentioned this, and here was his suggestion: “Maybe you’d like to masturbate. I have some tissues and lotion.” Like I was ever going to fucking close my eyes after that. I’d been faked out, the phone calls and Facebook chats were lies and the real deal was that the Shoe Store Manager was once again thinking about me in a sexual scenario I just didn’t want. How did I cope with this? I drank. I was trying to get away from doing that, but when essentially some guy tells you he wants to pet his cat and watch you jerk off your options for dealing are limited. Shoe Store Manager was not wild about this and of course turned it into a thing all about him: “What would you do,” he asked, “If you were entrusted to take care of someone, to protect someone, and they kept drinking beer?” “You’re NOT entrusted to take care of me or protect me; I just needed a place to live for a while! I don’t even know how to answer your damn question because it’s some weird world you live in that I don’t.” My solution to the problem: Jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. And that might be a story for another time.

Hot, I Guess, But...

I met this guy and he was just as hot as could be; like everything I want that makes blood rush to a different part of my body, but there was one thing wrong: NO sense of humor, which you pretty much have to have if you’re going to hang with me or else I’ll just come across as an asshole. He was into me, though, a thing that keeps happening I don’t even understand: It’s infrequent I hook up, but when I do, it’s usually with someone physically way, way out of my league. I’m not all that special and as the years pass it’s getting worse, but somehow, I keep landing model-gorgeous guys until I eventually drive them away. This man, though, was lust made flesh, at least on my terms. Long hair: check. Borderline anorexic: yep, you could count the ribs and play them like a xylophone. Cheekbones in danger of splitting flesh. Eyes you could dive in and swim around in. And then there was his monster dick, which I suppose gay guys are supposed to find hot, but logistically created certain problems. There was no way that thing was going into me, especially with spit for lube. And I’ve always prided myself on my ability to dislocate my jaw like a python, but in this case it was like trying to go down on a fire hydrant. Awkward. There’s this completely hot, naked man in bed next to me but his penis is like one of the sand-worms from Dune and I really didn’t know what to do with it. That, that, could have been worked around. We could have figured something out. But lying there naked, with his bigass pecker flopping up against his nips, he said “You keep making jokes. I don’t like jokes. All humor is based on cruelty.” Well yeah. That’s what makes it funny. But oh damn. A gorgeous naked man was telling me I should be serious all the time. Now I’m not saying it works on every attempt and I know there are some pretty lousy fails, but trying to be funny is what I fucking do. Now I should have said get the hell out, slapped him in the face with a cream pie and doused him down with seltzer, but my dick was doing the talking (which compared to his could have been measured with a micrometer.) And so I tried. I tried not to be funny. We went on a date and a fat woman was shoving fried eggs down her throat using her fingers. I don’t think my resolve has ever been so tested. I didn’t point it out, I didn’t make a comment, but I did excuse myself to the restroom to laugh like an idiot. Days passed and I did my best to not make any damn jokes. Although a slew of giant pecker one-liners crossed my mind. He told me my brain was a wonderland. I just thought he looked good without any clothes. And so he had to go to Mexico for school and was gone six weeks. I missed him; I did. I also thought Mexico is one of the cheapest places to get penis-reduction surgery but I didn’t mention it. He finally came back and who knows what happened: either he turned into a complete ass or I did, or we both did, who knows? Its just things weren’t the same. I’d gone back to trying to be funny about everything, he called me on it and said I was a mean person because of it (he might have been right on this one) and we fought like rabid cats. I can, at times, be a spot-on gifted mimic, especially if I’m pissed off. I did a righteous imitation of his bitchy queen voice and I think that was the nail in the coffin. There wasn’t going to be any more big-dick sex after that. Here’s the thing: I’ve pretty much stayed on good terms with all my old boyfriends; hey, we shared something nice so when things change, okay, it’s not what it was but we had that and now it’s something different and life moves on and I still like you. Not this guy. He hated me. He fucking hated me. I’d go out and I’d see him and say, “Hey, how’s it going?” and you would have thought I’d thrown a bowel movement in his face and pissed on his chest. “Fine,” he’d say but with this frigid, fuck-you demeanor. I’d try to talk but he’d look away with no response and making it clear I was dead to him. “So, uh, you seeing anybody?” cause he was super-attractive and I figured that would be going on and maybe a conversation starter. A blank stare, a head turned away from me. You know what, I’m done with this. “So Terry Schaivo and a child molester walk into a bar…”

Deathbed

So I’d gone to AA because I couldn’t drink anymore without stopping. Their plan to fix it was to fill me up with catch-phrases and secret terminology like “these rooms” and “let go and let God” instead of booze, which I found to be a piss-poor substitute. I did what they said, though, and had stopped drinking. I was just a lazy sot and my living room was still a sea of empty beer cans I never bothered to clean up. Every day I would clank, clank, clank through them while getting ready for work. I was told I should get them out of the house. That would have involved actual, manual labor, so I didn’t. Now at AA you’re supposed to find a sponsor; someone with whom you find an immediate rapport and is pretty much an instant boyfriend who will keep you from drinking without all the good stuff that usually goes along. You talk to that person every damn day and spill out your deepest secrets. Thing is, you’re supposed to pick THEM. This did not happen for me. A man just showed up and announced he was going to be my sponsor and asked for my phone number. You would think I would say, “Get lost, nutjob” but you would be wrong. Instead I gave the man my phone number and he called me every day to talk about not drinking. That was fun. My mother was dying. She had Alzhimer’s and here’s the thing: It starts with the person acting confused and it’s kind of funny but it ends with them in a hospital bed looking like a living skeleton and it’s not funny at all. It had gotten to that point and I was going back home to watch my mother die. AA Sponsor Man told me, “Look, you have to call me every day.” ”No. I don’t,” I said. “It’s not about you and me and the goddamn bottle right now. My mom’s about to croak and I’m going to have to watch it.” ”You need to call me every day,” he said again. Fuck this dolt, and goodbye. I showed up at the nursing home and my mom looked like a skeleton covered with flesh-tone paint. My two brothers were there; we hadn’t all been in the same room together in decades. My middle brother works in a hospital and he fools the rest of the family by acting like he’s a doctor or some shit; they buy it and the rest of us just roll our eyes. His thing with Mom was this: the nurse would come in and move her and because of her condition it would cause agony, she would gasp and middle brother would grab her wrist, take her pulse and stare at the clock like he was keeping her alive through his own eerie powers. Every goddamn time. It was clear, fuck, that whenever my mother was moved it caused her physical pain, but middle brother jumped on the bed, grabbed her wrist and announced she was dying. Much like his religious predictions about the end of the world, it did not come true. But hell, he was living through it like the rest of us and coping however he could. He was playing doctor. I knew I would write about it on the Internet someday. Neither one of us are all that good at life, I guess, and do weird shit just to get by. My Uncle Bill showed up with his wife and some girl far less than half his age who he claimed was a relative and kept calling him, creepily, “Daddy.” He was my mother’s brother and for most of his life she hated his guts, and for good reason: he was a dick. In later years they mended their fences, somehow, but yeah he was still a dick. This woman he’d brought along: Whore City. Tits out to there in a low-cut shirt designed to show them off. His wife acted like she didn’t even notice, but I think everyone else did. And she kept calling him ‘Daddy’ in front of my dying Mom and yeah it was pretty horrible. Middle brother has a flair for the theatric surpassing even my own. He’d brought along his church pastor, a doctor of divinity (Kind of like a doctor of poetry) and said, all casual-like, “Say, Pastor, weren’t you humming a tune earlier today? I wonder if you might do that again?” It was some kind of damn song about flying up to heaven or whatever, some maudlin piece of tripe, again I say he deals by doing that and I deal by doing this. So the pastor started to sing and we all held hands and looked at my mother like as if at any moment a bright, white light would burst out of her chest and she would be ushered into the Kingdom of God. Didn’t happen. Uncle Bill’s companion started passing out business cards. Oh gawd, I knew exactly what it was. She was a franchised representative for dildos and sex toys. It was called Love, Inc. or something very near that. “Why thank you,” said the pastor as he took her information in case he wanted to buy a butt plug. My brother kept grabbing my mom’s wrist and announcing her demise, but she refused to die on his watch. I went back home and the first thing I did was buy a 12-pack of Milwaukee’s Best. AA Sponsor Guy was right, things got weird and I turned to the brew to cope. The next day my brother called me, once again going all drama instead of just telling me outright: ”Eleven P.M.” ”What?” ”Eleven P.M.” ”That’s not even a sentence.” ”Eleven P.M. Your mother died at eleven P.M.” ”And you didn’t call me last night?” He’d fucked it up. “Er, uh, Eleven A.M. I mean. She died an hour ago.” And then he went on to tell me how he’d watched her die and wouldn’t let anyone else in the room and was calling all the shots. People deal and grieve in their own way. I went back home for the funeral; I was a pall-bearer. I couldn’t help but notice how lightweight the coffin was; damned Alzheimer’s. It was closed-coffin, per her wishes. A month or so later I got a commemorative card from the funeral home honoring my mother, Maria Lopez. Who the fuck did we bury?

Identity Crisis

I was sixth-grade, going into seventh-grade and my parents called me into the living room. This was always bad news; it was always something kind of fucked up. Being called into the living room meant that they were going to re-live every god damned thing I’d ever done wrong or were going to accuse me of shit I hadn’t done but they were sure I was about to, or was going to explain to me how my very existence pained our savior. “Danny,” they said. ””Yeah,” I said. “You can’t be called that anymore. That’s a baby name.” My folks, you understand, were insane for child psychology. My oldest brother didn’t quite end up the way they’d like, instead ending up like every other kid his age at the time, so my parents went batshit crazy reading books to fix me and make sure it wouldn’t happen again. I wasn’t allowed to have friends outside a certain age ratio and there was a bowel chart with gold stars stuck up on my bedroom wall. Why I am not, today, an axe murderer with cannibalistic tendencies remains a mystery. But they’d called me into the living room to tell me I was no longer allowed to be called Danny, the name I’d used all my life, and instead had to pick another: Dan, Daniel or Shane (my middle name.) I should have gone with Shane, so much cooler than the other choices. But I didn’t, I went with Dan because that was one of the ones I was suddenly allowed to be. I told my friends: “You can’t call me Danny anymore. I’m not allowed. You have to call me Dan.” They thought I was crazy. I think they were right. “No, never mind how you’ve known me for years, my parents have decided that I have to change my name. So call me something else from now on.” My friends: “Uhhhhh…” My parents: “This name change is going to make you so much more mature.” Me: (holding up hand puppet) Meow meow cat witch! So I got shuttled off to a new school where nobody knew me as Danny and it was a given that my name was Dan; a macho moniker befitting my studly persona. And I’ve been that ever since. But you know what? Secretly, Danny suits me a lot better.

I Was Twenty

I’d had girlfriends before and had fooled around in the sack with guys, but when I was twenty I fell heels over head in love. This is, perhaps, the perfect age for this to happen; you’re old enough to impersonate an adult if need be but still young enough to get away with idiot behavior. Here’s what makes my first homo crush hilarious: He worked at Chick-Fil-A. My best friend worked there as well, and I used to go in to see him. On a good day, they’d make him put on a chicken costume and stroll around the mall as Doodles, the Chick-Fil-A mascot. My friend hated this and you could feel the waves of embarrassment rolling off him as he strutted back and forth in a plastic beak and feathers. I relished in his agony, a thing I still tend to do even though I know it’s wrong. I was supposed to have empathy, I know, but my best friend was getting minimum wage for putting on a chicken suit. What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t show up to twist the knife? I saw this guy behind the counter. The angels sang, the heavens opened up and Cupid fired an arrow into the crack of my ass. “Who is THAT?” I asked, drooling. “Just some guy I work with,” my friend said, muffled through his giant chicken head. Looking back, objectively, he was all right. But twenty-year-old me swooned like a silent film star and thought he was the most beautiful creature to walk atop the planet. This was a new one for me, as previously I’d do pretty much anyone as long as they were a life-support system for a penis. But this guy somehow flipped a switch and was just beauty personified. For the first time, I was wowed and turned on by looking at a dude. There were the niggling details that he was breathtakingly gorgeous and I wasn’t, plus the fact we didn’t know one another, but I did not see these problems as insurmountable. “Give me his phone number,” I commanded my friend. ”I don’t KNOW his phone number.” ”Get it. I mean it. Nice chicken suit, by the way.” You see, when you’re twenty, a little thing like common sense won’t stand in the way of true love. My friend got the phone number. So I just called the guy up. I was interested in film-making at the time, so my big ruse was to tell him I thought he’d be great for a part I had in mind. Yeah. A kid in West Virginia tries the casting couch approach. What happened, though, was nothing short of amazing. We hit it off and ended up being great friends fairly quick. If you’re twenty and want to land someone in the sack, the first step is ingratiating yourself to their parents. When I met his Dad, Ding! Ding! Ding! Gaydar went off. Twenty years later, I’d be proven right. His mom was fun but capable of going nuts in a heartbeat. With that as the parental units, I figured he had to be enough of a mess that sexy time was bound to happen. It did not. Our friendship was storybook awesome. We connected in a way I hadn’t experienced; we loved the same things and could crack each other up just by thinking of funny things. This only fueled my ardor; I no longer wanted to get in his pants—I wanted to make love. This was a new experience for me. It was overwhelming, overpowering and my every waking moment was filled with thinking about him. Which I guess is love. I just didn’t have too good of a handle on it. We were watching fireworks when I told him how I felt. ”I know,” he said. And here I thought I was being subtle. “I’m not gay,” he said. “Yes you are.” (Denial springs eternal.) ”No, I’m not.” ”Are too.” And so on, for a long time. Born that way and all that shit; I don’t really believe it. Gay guys reading this are gonna be pissed. For some people, yeah, it’s a straight six on the Kinsey scale (ha ha) and for others, no, things flex and change a bit. Sometimes you’re in the mood for strawberries, other times you want pineapple. And so it goes, I think, with sexual desire. The guy liked women, but I caught him looking at gay porn. “AHA!” I cried. ”Um, well, ya know… crap.” So I thought, hot diggity, dude is finally in touch with his homoerotic tendencies, let the lovemaking commence. But again, no. “Yes, I figured out I like guys. I just don’t like you. In that way.” And then all my feelings turned to sheer agony. Nothing I wanted more than to end up at a gay bar with him, but when we did and cuter guys than me were asking him to dance it felt like an ice pick to the pancreas. I was twenty, it was my first real love and so I sat on the stairs and openly blubbered like a little girl with a skinned knee. ”What’s wrong?” said an old man, probably far less older than I am now, sliding his hand down my back. ”Fuck off,” I said through my tears, still I imagine the best possible response to the situation. It got worse and a whole lot gayer. There was a traveling dinner theatre company doing a production of “They’re Playing Our Song” (you see, I told you) and one of the actors met the boy I loved. They hooked up and did the nasty; his first time that should have been, I felt, me instead of some theatre queen. I knew it was happening when it was happening and I punched the shit out of my pillow. I was twenty. I’m sure I’d have a much better response today. You understand how this stabbed at me? In love for the first time with the boy who hung the moon and farted out the planets and who loved me, just not in a let’s-get-it-on kind of way? Oh, the agony. I gave him the big fuck you and said I never wanted to see him again because it hurt too badly. I guess I was the drama queen he wasn’t fucking. But that hurt, too, cause he was my best friend and I missed that, big time. We got each other, and goddamn desire went and screwed it all up. He knocked on my door in the middle of the night. “If I can sleep with people I don’t know, I can sleep with you.” Hawt damn! But once again, nope. I planted one on him. It was not the bombs-bursting-in-air experience I always imagined. He rolled over and said, “Ew. That’s kind of like kissing my brother.” God damn cock tease. But he was right, you know. That was then, back when I was twenty. A couple of Christmases ago we got back together, and for old time’s sake I hit on him. He declined the offer. But in a few decades I’ll be old enough to take my teeth out. We’ll see what happens then.

Tales From The Bus: My Milkshake Brings All The Boys To The Ground

I had to run some errands in the neighborhood where I used to work. It's as familiar as the back of my dick; yet now when I'm there I feel like an alien intruder. I walked past the place where I used to live and inside I had the absolute sensation I was sneaking by, on tiptoe, like a cartoon cat.

But I had things to do and so I did them. My travels took me further west, but still all landmarks I'd passed many, many times before. There is something about going back to my old stomping grounds, given all the shit that's gone down since last time I was there, that seriously fucks with my head and heart. Actually, it's probably just my continuing to smoke cigarettes that's fucking with my heart; the stir of emotions are only fucking with my limbic system. Let's call it artistic license and move on. Suffice to say, being there had me nostalgic--a kind way
of saying batshit bonkers seeped in regret.

It had been a long walk and after I got my stuff done I decided to take the bus back home. Even this simple act evoked a swirl of memories: When I worked in the neighborhood I would walk to work if it was nice out, but after eight hours on my feet I would take the bus back to where I lived. It was only a ten block ride or so, but I would splurge on the fare just to sit down for a bit. I saw the same bus driver at the exact same time, five days a week, and he started announcing me when I got on: "Mr. Pennsylvania!" He did this because I'd get off at the stop on Pennsylvania Avenue, and I kind of got a kick out of it. He confided to me that he had names for all his regulars who got off at the same stop every day and I thought it was kind of fun. I also thought it was the exact same thing I would do if I had his job to keep from losing my mind.

What I did not realize was that being called "Mr. Pennsylvania" five days a week was actually some kind of bus driver/speak-it-and-it-will-manifest curse which would create a whirl of hardships resulting in my actually living in Pennsylvania where the only people I knew was a fifty-one year old man with no legs and his mother who still had the umbilical cord wrapped several times around his neck. But that is a horror story for another time.

So my errands involved selling some crap and getting a check for it, then walking to the check-cashing store to get it turned into money so, among other things, I'd have bus fare home. That's just the kind of high-roller world I'm used to.

April's Flowers is right next door to the check-cashing store, and the marquee in front proclaimed "Gifts for Cat People." So of course I began singing: "See these eyes so green..."

Got my shit done; money in my pocket. A block up was the United Dairy Farmers convenience store; also a place packed with memories. There was this guy who used to work there, a portly gentleman, who was kind of a science fiction nerd and would consistently ask the customers if they'd seen the latest Deep Space Nine. He would use this line of store clerk banter even if said customer was eighty and packing a colostomy bag. But. He had this going for him: UDF, if you're not familiar, is part convienience store with beer and cigs and snack chips but also a full-service ice cream store. Gobs of flavors and you can get cones, sodas, sundaes, the works.
When it came to this latter part, Dude threw himself into his work like nobody's business. Especially with children. My friend Beth and I saw this over and over again...we'd laugh at the "Oh, a pack of Pall Malls? Who do you think, if they smoked, would be more likely to smoke them? Kirk or Picard?" stuff but had deep respect for the way he threw himself into the role of The Ice Cream Man. Because, with kids, that's who he was. He was the motherfucking Ice Cream Man. When you're a little kid that's kind of a big deal. The guy instinctively knew this and gave each
child not only special attention, but a show. He'd enthuse with them over their choice of flavors, make jokes and silly faces and just be the goddamn Ice Cream Man that every little kid needs to have. He understood going out for ice cream was a treat and he did all he could to make that moment as special and fun as possible. This was a guy probably making shit wages and given his knowledge of sci-fi lore probably highly intelligent...but instead of being a bitter, surly fuck just reveled in making little kids happy by being the ultimate Ice Cream Man. It was like
watching Jesus Christ with a paper hat and a throat beard.

But he was long gone from the neighborhood and so was I. Across the intersection I saw a guy seated on the bench at the bus stop. I looked up the street (flat, as far as the eye can see) and saw no bus coming, so I figured I had time enough to duck into the store and buy a pack of smokes. A woman hit the door at the exact same time I did, so I held it open for her. Not that women are dainty, frail creatures lacking the strength to pull open a door and then continue on with their day; I probably would have done that for anyone. It's just the polite thing to do.
However, she didn't do it for me so I win.

So she bolts for the counter ahead of me and orders a chocolate milkshake. The elderly woman, working alone, behind the counter proceeds to the task at hand.
Let me make this clear: She was no Ice Cream Lady. No jokes, no smiles; she just busied herself with making a chocolate milkshake. But she was every bit as into the job as would have been the Ice Cream Man--it's just, where he threw himself into the role with personality, she applied the same sense of proffessionalism into procedure. She moved with an exacting, irritating slowness. It wasn't that she didn't know what she was doing; she clearly did. It was just that to her, making a milkshake was on par with Oppenheimer constructing the atom bomb and if any one of the steps involved were left to chance or not done with the precise formula in mind it could result in a huge explosion that would blow out the store windows.

I have it on good authority from my secret spies in the convenience store world that the proper way to make a UDF chocolate shake is this: You take the size cup they want and pour chocolate milk into the cup until it reaches the specially embossed line inside the cup. Then you take two scoops of malt base (a proprietary, UDF compound consisting of ice milk and some malt crap) and add it to the cup. You take the cup to the mixer and stick it underneath. The mixer will automatically turn on; something UDF put in place in the eventuality chimpanzees in aprons will
work for less than minimum wage. It stirs the shit, you slap a lid on it, end of story. But no. The woman making the milkshake had other ideas of how it should be done. She poured the chocolate milk, drop by drop like she was formulating plastic explosives, to make sure it exactly hit the line inside the cup. Apparently it didn't look right to her, so she tottered to the other side of the store to retreive a plastic spoon, ambled back, taking her own sweet time, then carefully poured out a spoonful of milk which she dribbled into the cup. She peered in, staring, evaluating her work for a full five minutes to make sure it looked okay.

I'd just come in for a pack of smokes. Turn around, take them off the shelf behind you, here's my money, goodbye. Instead I was watching Madame Curie tabulating the effects of radium isotopes.

The woman shifted her head from side to side as she closed one eye and then another to assess the level of milk in the paper cup. Her brow was furrowed; she had to get this just right. She dipped in with the plastic spoon and removed just a little bit. She slowly ambled to the other side of the store again to dispose of the utenisil and its offending contents. Another slow shuffle back to the cup to appraise her handiwork. She burst into a slow smile. All was right inside the cardboard container that summed up her life so far.

People were lining up behind me. A guy wearing Men In Black wraparound shades indoors. A Chinese kid who'd used the ATM. A fat woman with an armful of gummi bears and a food stamp card. A vampire looking guy with tats. We were all shuffling from foot to foot, waiting for our turn.

The woman behind the counter, satisfied with her milk-pouring strategies, turned her attention to adding the malt base. Two scoops. Like Raisin Bran. You could see the wheels turning in her head: What, precisely, constitutes a scoop? She used a mechanical thing intended for this purpose to glob it out, but clearly, this was not precise enough. Another agonizing trip across the store to fetch another plastic spoon and back, in order to scrape off the edges of the ice milk compound that fused out over the scoop proper, resulting in a sliver more than was called for and, clearly, that would just not do. She held the device over the trash can, shaving off the offending bits that leaked through the imperfections in the instrument. But you can't just rake it off in one full sweep, no, you have to slice at it bit by bit like you're making an ice sculpture for Prince Harry's wedding.

The line was getting longer. I so wanted to turn around and stare at the vampire looking guy but as I was at the front of the line I couldn't do that without turning around and making it obvious. I made do with looking at him through the convex security mirror above the counter, which not only made him look fat but possiby macrocephallic.

The Ice Cream Lady (she wishes) plopped her first scoop into the paper cup with a look that was either triumphant or orgasmic, I'm not sure which. But then there was the second scoop tocontend with; trust me, more of the same. Slowness of measurement, trek across the store to fetch yet another plastic spoon, scraping over the trash like she was orchestrating a snow globe, plopping it into the container and staring at it to make sure it doesn't create a new life form that reaches out of the cup and grabs her by the throat.

Hooray, I thought, I'm almost out of here. And as so often happens when I try to think, I was so very, very wrong.

The other part of the UDF formula, once the mixer has self-activated, is to make sure the malt base has no lumps and to also ensure the shake is a soft texture and not purely liquified. The exacting steps the woman behind the counter had used thus far, it became apparent, was merely prelude to the milkshake-making skill set she was determined to follow. She put the cup under the mixer: WHIRRRR! for a full second, after which she removed the cup, tottered across the store for yet another goddamn plastic spoon and slowly sauntered back, then poked at the mixture. She put
it back under the mixer again. WHIRRR! and then stop. She poked at it again with the spoon.

WHIRR! Observe, then poke. WHIRR! A full second had passed, better check on it again.

Jesus and the Cowsills. I'm going to miss my bus.

Poke, poke, poke. Whirr, whirr, whirr. On and on it went. I checked my phone; it had been a full fifteen minutes. Mentally, I wanted to dive behind the counter, grab the woman by the hair and slap her face deep, repeatedly, into a vat of banana nut cluster. I am a polite boy, so I did not do this. The people behind me, though, were vocally snarling and making their discomfort known. Mob mentality. Vampire guy had thrown down his Hot Pockets and left, which made me hate
her even more.

Finally, the chocolate shake that no amount of science could produce but was clearly birthed through God's own loins had been produced. At four bucks, I imagine that was a bargain. Money was exchanged, the girl left sucking on it. Pretty much what I thought of her.

I got my damn cigs; a 30 second exchange. I went outside, unwrapped the pack and threw the cellophane and foil thingy into the trash. I turned around. Uh oh. Across the intersection, there was the damn bus stopped at a red light. The guy on the bench was getting onto it.

I could have darted in between moving traffic like Frogger to get to it, but instead I thought, "Oh I know...I'll just race the bus." In other words, there was a bus stop three blocks down in the opposite direction in front of April's Flowers (Gifts for Cat People) and I figured I could
run three blocks before the light changed, you know, in the same way I think I might outplace Money For Nothing in the goddamn Preakness.

So I sprinted. Understand, I am a chain-smoking, middle-aged man who abhors excersise in all forms. My idea of doing curls is lifting a Miluakee's Best to my mouth. But yeah, I was going to beat this damn bus.

I ran. I ran hard, although to the untrained eye it might look like a T-rex flailing its tiny arms while skipping. I made it a block. I made it a block and a a half, always looking back to check my progress. The bus was gaining on me, but I was still in the lead. April's Flowers was half a block away. Yes!

And then the bus whooshed past me. I flailed my arms in the universal signal for Wait! Wait! Wait!/ I Am A Crazy Person and, mercifully, the bus slowed to a stop. I continued my breakneck speed and then tripped over my shoes, doing a perfect Laurel and Hardy pratfall aside from the fact that there was much bleeding and I'd ripped the fuck out of my last pair of decent jeans. I got up and started for the bus again and then WHAM! I fell down onto the sidewalk once more, ripping up some parts of flesh I'd thoughtlessly ignored the first time.

You have to understand I make it a point never, ever to run, so being out of practice like I was I was wheezing and out of breath when I finally climbed onto the bus. You also have to understand part of the reason I don't believe in God is because, if I did, I would have to conclude he is a heartless bastard hell-bent on dicking with me--not at all the sort of diety I care to worship. I say this because the bus driver, of all people, was the same guy who used to call me Mr. Pennsylvania.

"Well...(wheeze)," I said, "That (wheeze, wheeze) didn't go as planned."

If the bus driver recognized me, he did not let on. If he did and chose to not point it out, then I love him.

I, bleeding and out of breath, tried to make my way to the back of the bus. Midway there, it happened again. It fucking happened again. I tripped over my own feet and faceplanted in the aisle of the bus. No, I hadn't been drinking, I'm just clumsy that way but I might as well have been Hemingway on a bender given that I'd fallen down in as many minutes.

What seemed to be the entire bus broke out into spontaneous applause.

So I'm sitting there stinging from minor flesh wounds and mostly embarrassment when the woman behind me whips out her cell phone and proceeds to shout, not talk but shout, into it about how Lashawn's cousin's landlord can help Ree Ree get a car and it goes on and on and on. This is right in my ear. loud, painful and I want to turn around and punch her in her "I'm Sexy" throat tattoo but realize that probably this time the idiot on the bus story is probably not her but me.

(Oh, you wanna soundtrack to go with this story? It fits in so many ways...)

First Job

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.....

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.

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

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

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 Pie Man

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.

The Encroaching Man

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.

Maybe, Maybe Not

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.

Middle of the Night Memory

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

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?

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.