Stories From the Bottom of the Glass - Version Fest 5/18/12

Here's what I did at a Bridgeport spot called Co-Prosperity Sphere. Stellar lineup of storytellers at a cool place, all telling booze-related stories. Warning: not safe for those averse to reading about ass hair.

Full disclosure: I quit drinking 18 years ago.

BUT, where boozing is concerned, I have so many stories to choose from. So, so, soooooo many stories.

But most of my hammered stories end in a halo of crusted vomit around my mouth, coming to on a grimy concrete floor with bottle caps and cigarette butts mashed into a face covered in scabs of unknown origin. Or passed out on church steps - and just so we're clear: I'm not talking about passing out ALONG one step, I'm talking about passing out diagonally over a series of steps. Or in a snow bank.

So I thought reach farther back – I thought I’d spin one of my deep cuts for you, and lay the needle on a track that would not sap you of your will to live. Cool? Cool.

This is when I’m like 18 or so. Summer after high school. My hometown, Amherst, Massachusetts. I’m working as a lifeguard. So it’s like dirtbag Bay Watch all summer long.

I should be saving every nickel for college in the fall. But instead, I poured every nickel down my gullet in the form of well gin and boilermakers, depending on the special at Barselotti’s, the grimy tavern downtown where I am wasting my life.

This is 1984, so the legal drinking age in Massachusetts is 20 – became 21 the following year. So, as an 18-year-old, every time I park my ass in that caved-in stool with the cracked vinyl at the end of the bar at Barselotti’s, I am breaking the law. Just like Judas Priest.

But you gotta understand – this is a college town. And as a college town, the main industry is drunkenness – instilling it, maintaining it, cleaning up after it. It’s like a mining town or a mill town – it’s the only game there is, man – without it, the whole town grinds to a halt.

So when 40,000 students empty the place out each May, that is a shit-ton of drunkenness that is failing to happen. So the good folks at Barselotti’s are understandably a little more lax where this bit of compliance is concerned. And in their defense, I was pretty haggard looking even by this time. It fell to me, along with a handful of scarlet-nosed lifers to carry them through that lean summer. And I carried my weight,

I can tell you. If powering down off-brand whisky and watery beer was swinging a hammer, I’d have been John Henry. I didn’t just get drunk, I got folk hero drunk. Every goddamn night.

And then the next morning, I’d haul my carcass out of bed to stare into the middle distance by the pool where I should have been paying attention to the children swimming. In terms of my unresponsiveness, I was like the guards at Buckingham Palace, but with way more sweating and dry heaves. I was like a horrifying Eagle Scout, earning badge after badge in Hangovers and Remorse.

Needless to say, I did allll right with the ladies. I am a catch, as you can well imagine. I am a prize. Or at least I was to a cocktail waitress at Barselotti’s. Her name, perhaps inevitably, was Tammy. Do you know? How she reeled me in? Was it the shocking blue eye shadow? Or the denim vests? The headband she wore some shifts? The leg warmers? Certainly these all played a part in her bewitchment.

But the sealer of the deal? The thing that caused me to slop off my barstool and stagger out the sidewalk and lean my slanty ass on the wall outside while she closed up the bar, and prop myself against her as she guided me back to her place? Well, that’s easy, friends – she called me “smart”. Not just “smart,” mind you – she said “you are sooooo smart”.

This was untrue, obviously. But Tammy is to be forgiven for drawing this wrong conclusion. She was ill-equipped to make such assessments. It would just be asking too much of her apparatus, you know? It would be like removing engine from a moped and putting it in a bulldozer and expecting it to do the same job. Tammy was… untroubled by ideas.

But the reason Tammy is to be forgiven for finding me “sooooooooo smart” was that I perpetrated a bit of hoax on her – because each night that I’d be pounding them back and getting sloppier and sloppier, I’d have a book there on the bar next to me. Laid open. Like I had been reading it. Which I had not.

Oh, sure. When I’d stagger back to the rat hole apartment I shared with a few other guys at 2am, I’d pass my eyes over the words in books, but I mean, a squirrel can do that. And like the squirrel, when you get me hammered, my comprehension takes a nosedive, and I retain I nothing.

When asked – or, more likely among the lifers at Barselotti’s “axed” – about the book, I would rear my head back at the maximal musing angle, and spout off some canned monologue about it being a lamentation about the futility of the human condition. Squirrels are know to do this, too. It is an irritating habit. And one of the reasons we regard them as pests.

But I would have a book propped next to my coaster. And I was still pretty fresh off the SATs, so I was the only dude in that place that found his gin and tonic “bracing.” So, obviously, what Tammy was taking to be smarts was, in point of fact, a teenager being a pretentious asshole.

But Tammy was fooled for sure. So she shanghaied me back to her place one night, with its well-trafficked carpeting and cable spool coffee table.

And we’re making out on this couch that’s upholstered in the kind of plaid gabardine you might see on a jacket worn by neighbor Larry from Three’s Company. And she drags me back to her room, and shoves me on her mattress which in on the floor in the way of college-age people and minimally functioning depressives.

She places a calloused finger to my lips and says:

“Stay right there.” The sheets, it goes without saying, are gritty.

Tammy then proceeds to undress in the sexy style. She sliiiiides her cutoffs down. Having neglected to take off her Reebok high tops, so what began as a pretty fluid motion ended in lots herky-jerky action. She places her hands flat against the wall and peers at me over the shoulder of her sleeveless denim shirt in what is clearly meant to be a coquettish manner. But on the wall, right above her head, is a ceramic mask of a mime’s face, clutched in the mouth of which is a single dried rose. That mime face? It is the saddest goddamn thing I have ever seen. And I’m including my dad’s suicide note.

And she’s talking to me in what she imagines is this breathy Marilyn Monroe voice, but which sounds more like Smurfette if she had pretty bad asthma.

And Tammy drops the denim shirt, and then she shoulders her way out of her bra. And I gotta say – these are some boobs of exceptionally high quality. Boobs SO exemplary, that I have only seen perhaps two or three other sets to rival them.

Despite the ceramic mime face pinning me with its wistful gaze, I was now starting to come around the merits of this whole situation.

But then she removed her panties. And she waggled her ass at me in a way intended to be fetching. I remained un-fetched.

Tammy had a hairy ass. Now let’s be clear – I’m not talking about an ass with some hairs on it, I’m talking about a hairy ass. Not a sasquatch ass, maybe, or a wookie ass, but still. Hairy.

But I am not here referring to the kind of downy pale fur that covered that whatever-the-fuck-it was in Neverending Story. I’m talking about coarse hair. Hair that was wiry. You remember that scene in The Fly when Geena Davis snips those like QUILLS off of Jeff Goldblum’s back? They were like that.

And they are fanned across each ass cheek like fireworks.

Did her ass look like mirror images of Randy Macho Man Savage? Not quite, no. But Randy Macho Man Savage did occur to me as I gazed at it.

Now you may be going:

“HEY. BUDDY. This is a story about some girl’s hairy ass, not about drinking.”

On the contrary.

It was the shots of whisky and bottles of Rolling Rock in the hours preceding this encounter that permitted the possibility of pushing aside visions of Randy Macho Man Savage and bringing the evening to its moist conclusion the upon her gritty sheets. 

And now, all these years later, when I think of Tammy – managing a Quizno’s, maybe, or keeping books at her dad’s lumber yard – I say a word of thanks to her and her ass beard for playing a small part in accelerating my decline, and permitting me eventually to stop drinking altogether. 

Paper Machete - 4/28/12 - Commit to the Bit

Audio is up at WBEZ site, HERE.

If you don't know Paper Machete, it may be found HERE.

Dateline: Brazil. From The Daily Telegrach UK

Which I will quote in its entirety. It appears under the following headline:

“Actor dies after accidentally hanging himself as Judas during The Passion of Christ”

“Tiago Klimeck, 27, had been in a coma since the accident on Good Friday earlier this month in Itarare. Klimeck was enacting the suicide of Judas during the performance. He was hanging for four minutes before fellow actors realised something was wrong, believing he was playing his role. When he was taken down, Klimeck was unconscious. Scans found that the incident had caused cerebral anoxia due to the complete lack of oxygen to the brain. His life support machine was switched off on Sunday. An autopsy was due to take place yesterday.

Police are examining the security apparatus that was meant to support Klimeck during the scene.

It is unclear if any charges will be filed.

The Passion of Christ is performed every year in Brazil across the country. The biggest show is in Pernambuco, where thousands of visitors watch more than 500 actors on nine separate stages.”

I will set aside the fact that the copy editors wished to leave you with a bit of cultural context regarding the show. Because I realize that, like me, you read an item like this, you cock your head and go “Not to discount the fella that hung himself onstage, but I sure would like to know a scosh more about significance of the Passion of Christ in the local culture.”

Here’s your real takeaway from this story, and here is the legacy of the late Mr. Klimeck:

Commit to the Bit.

Because, come on – on the Stanislavsky Scale, Mr. Klimeck makes Nicholas Cage seem pretty bush league, am I right? I mean that Taylor Lautner? David Arquette? Billy Zane? Our various Afflecks, and lesser Baldwins? Our best and brightest? Tiago Klimeck SMOKED ‘em all, man.

But if he was just some lone genius – in that riveting way of like a Chris Klein or a Justin Long – then, OK, THEN I would not feel like the U.S. supremacy in the realm of ultra-dazzling mastery of craft was threatened.

But it isn’t just him, though. Think about it: the guy is hanging himself in full view of his cast mates, and they are all STAYING IN THE SCENE. A whole STAGE filled with Brazilians, you guys – BRAZILIANS! – and they see a colleague twisting and kicking, seconds away from death, and they just keep delivering their lines.

Because the show must go on. Or, as the locals would say:

Porque o espectáculo tem de continuar

Brazil, you guys. Brazil - famous for nothing but nuts and waxes. Brazil nuts: the ones that everyone despises and leaves in the can. And, sure, everybody admires the Brazilian wax from afar, until they get a closer view of the scalded bologna surrounding that Hitler’s mustache of pubes.

Are we gonna let BRAZIL beat us at Committing to the Bit?!? I know that Brazil has an emerging economy that’s one of the globe’s great success stories, but that’s petroleum and bananas and coffee, you guys, not SHOW BUSINESS. They should be DECADES away from challenging U.S. dominance of show business – DECADES. The Brazilian Dane Cook or Ryan Reynolds shouldn’t even be BORN yet, so how is it that these Amazonian yokels are making a play for the U.S. of A. here?

I tell ya what we gotta do – we gotta shut ‘em down. We gotta take decisive action now, and we gotta take the fight to them. What I propose is bold, ladies and gentlemen, what I propose will demand sacrifice. What I propose is this:

We airlift a crack thespian squad of our most battle-tested hunks and starlets and drop them into Rio for this Passion of the Christ festival to do their own goddamn production that’ll be so brutal, those Brazilians are all gonna scuttle back to the coffee plantation. I say we stage a Passion of the Christ where EVERY member of the cast winds up dead. We get the Army Corps of Engineers to design a stage that’ll unfold in midair so our stars can parachute down onto it and show these savages how it’s done.

Getting the actors is gonna be simple – we load ‘em in limos, we hustle ‘em out to Edwards Air Force Base. From the limo, we leave a trail of gift bags up the cargo bay of a waiting C-130. We stuff ‘em in their costumes, we fly ‘em to Brazil, we equip ‘em with period weapons – swords and axes and shit, and they improvise a production of the Passion of the Christ that’ll make the Hunger Games look like a game of Pictionary.

We’re calling this Operation Avenging Apostle.

Here’s our cast:

• James Franco is Judas. One of history’s most reviled figures, portrayed by the actor People Magazine called The Man We’d Most Like to Throttle.
• Pontius Pilate will be that James Pattison from the Twilight franchise – for is not the tyrant with nothing going on behind his eyes all the more terrifying?
• Mary Magdalene, in an audacious and if I may say so inspired bit of casting, will played by Orlando Bloom.
• The apostle Matthew, obviously, has gotta be Matthew McConaughey, who was the top vote-getter in the recent Us Magazine poll “Jesus God, Do I Wanna Beat This Guy With a Pipe Wrench.”
• Salome will be played by Jessica Alba and Megan Fox and Katie Holmes and January Jones and Keira Knightley and Blake Lively and Scarlett Johansen.
• Jesus? Keanu.

You get the idea. It’s gonna be amazing. It’s gonna add a whole new level to this – these Brazilian amateurs went the whole “naturalistic death scene of a single cast member” route. Not so Operation Avenging Apostle: this will be the most stilted and unconvincing bloodbath the world has ever known. Each and every member of our all-star cast will not only be splayed lifeless at the end of the show, but the audience will file out going “ I don’t know. I didn’t really buy it.”

Then later, they will learn that each one of these trite and unnatural-looking deaths was 100% real. When those Brazilians have seen actual nails driven through the hands of Keanu-Jesus, and his reaction remains totally unconvincing, even though he is an international star, they’ll think twice before they come gunnin’ for us, my friends.

Now you may be asking: “Why does this matter?” I’ll tell you. In the waning days of our empire, when we no longer make anything, and where the average U.S. citizen is an obese man-child that finds science “confusing and scary” – all we HAVE is the dream factory churning out the world’s entertainment. It’s our only remaining claim to superpower status. And if the only basis for we have for clinging to the vestiges of world leadership is as Content Provider to the World, then I am by God willing to sacrifice a few pretty boys we can easily replace, and I think you should be, too. Tell Congress: support Operation Avenging Apostle. Now. Before it’s too late.

WRITE CLUB - Belknap, Found, 4/24/12

We’ve all seen the flyers. LOST DOG – with plaintive-looking pictures, and offers of rewards, and pleas for information.

When you see that flyer, you have one of two thoughts:

1. That dog took a powder, man – they are never gonna see that thing again. Or:
2. I’m looking at a picture of a dead dog right now. 

But when you see the flyer that says FOUND DOG, then you’re talking about a dog that was so WINNING, the people would not only take the thing home, but they would actually make a flyer.

And the flyer people dig the dog so much, that even though they REALLY wanna keep him, they consider his feelings, and would hate to contribute to his unhappiness, so they post a flyer. But even as they do, they cling to the unexpressed hope that his owners never see it, or that they are persons of such dubious priorities that they don’t want this dog, even though he is the BEST BOY.

So to review:

• Lost Dogs? Smelly morons who in all likelihood are already dead because they were too stupid and unappealing to figure shit out.
• Found Dogs? The most magnetic and lovable animals there are. These dogs will live on in your memory and prompt wistful smiles and feeling of tenderness for the rest of your days. Indeed, years from now, when you’re a different life stage, without a landlord to worry about, and you’re visiting the shelter looking for a dog, in your mind’s eye, it will be that flyer dog – that you search for. 

Look: they don’t do those milk cartons anymore, do they? With the missing kids on the back. You know why? Cause Cinnamon Toast Crunch does not go well with despair.

Lost hair. Lost gloves. Lost dreams. Lost hopes. Lost pennies. Lost at sea. Lost cities. Lost keys. Lost souls. Lost weekends. Lost heroes. Lost memories. Lost generation. Lost highways. Lost glasses. Lost in translation. Lost love. The lost boys of Sudan? ENOUGH.

Things I have lost? They number in the tens of thousands, and they range from ticket stubs and receipts to my own father, and I miss not a goddamn one of them.

Things I have found? They are few in number. But these things have a luster and a persistence and a capacity to tug at the hem of my mind in a way that that lost things never will.

The shell of a robin’s egg.

A cedar box full of time-burnished medals from my grandfather’s naval service.

A series of sand dollars and seashells, trapezoids of sea glass, abraded to perfection.

A snowy owl. Happened upon in a fog-shrouded clearing as the moonlight slipped through the clouds.

This one time? Ten bucks.

The carcass of a four-foot shark. On a Cape Cod beach. The day after we saw Jaws.

A possum, sliced clean through at the waist by a passing freight train – it landed on the flat of the cut. So it looked like a zombie possum that had nosed its way out of the earth, its face a rictus of terror and hatred, and its spindly little flesh-claws splayed in the Nosferatu style.

The only surviving photocopy of my dad’s suicide note, tucked in a file of police reports. The original was destroyed.

In the woods near our house, when I was like12: a marshy and leaf-strewn stack of Playboys – and this was the 70s, mind, when they still featured fully human females – each page needing to be coaxed away from its neighbor, so boggy and crumbly they were. You could spend ten minutes teasing apart a VITALLY important photo spread only to have the most critical components fuse together into a clot of sodden white pulp.

All these and scores of other items - stacked in the cigar box of posterity, the repository for the too-sporadic, the too-infrequent brushes with magic that make life bearable.

Found is discovery and intrepidness; it is the consequence of courage, or at least an awareness sufficient to recognize and snatch at happenstance. At the center of Found is a fondness for adventure, borne of a willingness to get off your ass and LOOK. The Tomb of the Pharoh and the Terracotta Warriors are made plain ONLY to those who get off the goddamn couch.

Look: there’s no ducking loss. We all know this.

The day we buried my grandfather – all the movie funerals can’t prepare you for the compact little box of the cremated, no bigger than a cinder block. It was disorienting to watch him lowered into a hole the size of one you’d dig to bury a toaster. My grandma knelt to stroke the box one final time. As she did so, a gold bracelet slipped off her narrow old lady wrist and into the small pit containing her husband.

She stood and brushed off her knees. “He can have it,” she said.  

My mom – abruptly, with a manic edge – dropped to her knees at the muddy lip of the hole now containing her father, and reached in. She retrieved the shimmering strand of gold.

“You keep it, mom,” she said, setting it in the cove of grandma’s palm and clasping it there.

It had been lost. But now was found.

WRITE CLUB Los Angeles - Belknap, Fame, 4/4/12

In the titty bar of life – and I think we can agree that life is a titty bar – Fame is the Champagne Room. Every bit as depressing as out front, but the no-touch rule does not apply. You can smack the ass of any leathery herpes-girl that captures your fancy.

Little known fact: behind the semen-crusted velvet rope outside the super-prestigious Champagne Room, you will find no actual champagne. There is a tepid case of Prosecco from a haunted vineyard outside of Bakersfield, but you are urged to avoid it, because to take but one sip is to know madness. Phil Spector and Tom Sizemore split a bottle of that shit, and look where it got them – all over the news.

The difficulty – as with any magical place that is super-amazing – is gaining access. To stand out from the other spray-tan bulemics and chiseled gym rats requires a deathless brand of attention-seeking and a towering self-regard that eludes most of us. Here’s a quick test to see if you’re ready for the mind-shattering wonders of the Champagne Room:

Good. Did you snuff the puppy? Check. You got a cauterized candle hole in your hand? Check. O’Dell enchanted by your convincing regard for Statutory? Check. She thought it was hilarious when you described the high jinks on the set, like the time Grodin dipped his dick in your Jamba Juice, and stood over you laughing while he forced you to drink the rest of it.

You’re ready, my friend. Welcome to the eye-searing Glory of the super-foxy Champagne Room. Be advised, though: it is less a room than it is a bunker built of human skulls and dreams defiled. But it’s glamorous like crazy, though.

You’re home free. The Champagne Room, after all, is the ONLY place on the face of the fucking earth where a dilettante fucktard like James fucking Franco gets called a fucking renaissance man.

Before you head in, though, you gotta do a quick interview with Joan and Missy Rivers – do not be alarmed. Just know that Joan at this point is made mostly of Spackle, and that Missy is technically a shaved pony. You’ll love them, they’re the best – “the best” here meaning “intolerable harpies.”

STAY FOCUSED. Too often, a newcomer is so entranced by the sights and smells (it will come as no shock that Jessica Simpson, for example, smells like Jolly Ranchers and unrecovered memories of being molested).

It’s gonna be tough to stay sharp, though, cause THEY’RE ALL HERE: Vincent D’Nofrio with his bafflingly giant face you could park a motorcycle on; Madonna, with those arms made of human jerky; Tom Cruise standing on a bar stool so he can make out with Neil Patrick Harris; Nicholas Cage with his Total Recall Quatto that makes his every decision; Gwyneth Paltrow who, it turns out, did NOT rely on special effects for that scalp-and-face peel off in Contagion BECAUSE THAT IS HER FAVORITE PARLOR TRICK AND SHE DOES IT ALL THE TIME.

Do NOT get so captivated by celebrity that you forget you’ve entered a Thunderdome arena where you must fight like a dragon to claim your piece of the dream. If you falter, there is a remorseless army of great-looking sexbots right behind you – this is the Champagne Room, the most glittering slaughterhouse there is, and you’re not willing to spill a little bit of your own blood, dignity, cartilage, stomach acid, brain matter, empathy, and tooth enamel, then you are not DESERVING of the Champagne Room and you can wait out front with the rest of the scumbag failures.

WRITE CLUB - Belknap, Creation, 3/27/12

You ever see that Michael Douglas picture Falling Down? Where he’s got a flat top and glasses? And he beats dudes to death with a bat? That pretty closely approximates my inner life. I may be a dork; I may be in a short-sleeved dress shirt; but I am filled with avenging fury. When you impede me, in my mind, my glasses are spattered with your blood.

What I mostly want to do is pry the spine out of each asshole that makes modern living such a clot of hassle-prone misery and vexation and beat them into a wet, chunky pile with it.

If it came to my attention that the devil himself was gonna be at like the Aragon or Park West, and he was gonna eat a basket of puppies, I’d think about buying a ticket. I would. I would think about getting a sitter, and going to watch the devil eat puppies.

So. I get it. The allure. Of destruction.

But even though destruction has a visceral appeal that you feel at the very root of your nad-satchel, it wields no real or lasting power.

I have borne witness to creation. I have been present for the birth of my children.

It is cliché I realize to speak of childbirth as miraculous. Which is true, obviously, but is also an idea that has grown so thumb-worn that it has ceased meaning anything.

And however miraculous it may be, childbirth is completely disgusting. A more sickening spectacle you could never hope to see. It is a punishing test of vaginal endurance comparable to shitting a toaster oven or squeezing a double-A battery out of your tear duct.

But then after all the suffering and horribleness that brings a mother’s body to the very brink of destruction, there is this person.

A caterwauling person slathered in womb-snot and clotted placenta, it is true, but a person such as the world has never seen previously. This person, wriggling in protest, is distinct from all other persons before or since, a lion-hearted little person unique among the seven billion on this planet residing, and unique among all persons yet born – but for me, this singularity is not the full measure of the power and majesty of this event.

The FULL weight and wonder of the thing is this:

When my son was born in 2001, he knew us already. He reached toward us from across the room where the nurses were weighing and cleaning him. He heard our voices and he reached toward us. I had been reading aloud to my wife’s belly for months before his arrival. He was like 40 seconds old and he reached for us because he knew us already.

Now. You may believe that what I take to be reaching was just some infantile conniption – but I will go to my rapidly advancing grave knowing that it was the dawn of his consciousness and that he was in his preverbal way attempting to convey that we were known to him and that he wished to be near us.

And then seven months later, the towers came down. I was clutching him in my arms as I watched the second plane plow into the second tower. And it was horrifying, obviously. But it was rendered more horrifying, or the horror was etched more sharply because of the yielding little body in my arms. There is a kind of weight specific to babies – a gelatinous helplessness, a boneless and witless heft. A baby is a like a goatskin bag of wine – if you don’t exercise care or your attention lapses, the bag will drop and burst open. But neither can you hold too tightly the bag – if you clutch it too fiercely, it will pop.

Holding your own baby, you grow conditioned to it, this hammocking action. This cradling becomes habitual and unnoticed by you, almost – your baby becomes like an appendage of its own – a fattened Popeye arm. But when you are holding that baby and you are witnessing the worst fucking thing that you have ever seen – that hammocking embrace becomes suddenly the most mindful and attentive thing you ever have done. It becomes the only thing for which you are suited and you feel as you watch this horrific thing that you never, ever wish to stop holding this baby. Because it is all you know to do.

In the years intervening, people have often asked me: “Dude. Why are you such a combative dickface who is totally ripshit all the time?”

As much as anything – the awfulness of my family history, the quagmire of my years squandered in drink, the unbearable shittiness of people and their unrelenting campaign of assholery and willful ignorance clearly meant to grind us all down – it is that moment.

That baffled and powerless moment where I held my fat-legged son and watched the end of the world – because it was in that moment, I see now, when I resolved to fight my way toward believing that this fat-legged little person, and all the others like him, was more potent and lasting than the column of fire and the shards of steel and the screams of the fallen.

The victories in this fight are fleeting, and only for skirmishes. Victory in the campaign will never be mine. Victory in the campaign will elude me forever. But my choice is to fight, or to succumb. And that is no choice at all.