Blow Guns and Golf Clubs: Part II

I blame my fascination with combat weaponry on the ninja-craze of the mid-80's. Every kid my age was obsessed with these mythical warriors and their tools of death. Donny and I were no exception. Chinese stars, bokkens, nunchucks, and assorted plastic replicas adorned our walls and accompanied us on many battles in the woods adjoining the apartment complex in which we resided.

Taking careful inventory in the quiet of my shared bedroom like a civil war quartermaster preparing for an onslaught, I lightly ran my hands over the perfectly placed composite doppelgangers. There was a gap. What was missing from our arsenal? Immediately a scene from the recently viewed "9 Deaths of the Ninja" forged in my brain and made it crystal clear: a blow gun. Thinking back, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I mean, I could think of no better way to spend an entire school day in Mrs. Uhl's 3rd grade class than building my own air-powered death tube. I carefully constructed the barrel out of rolled construction paper, ensuring the diameter was consistent for the entire length. The dart itself was fashioned from a straight pin from Mrs. Uhl's little desk pig and a ball of scotch tape acting as the projectile body. I had 8 full hours to kill and I intended on using every last publicly funded moment to hew my aboriginal death-dealer. As I reflect even now, I question the inferred omnipotence of the responsible parties and supervision of whom's care I was under as I walked into the afternoon sunlight, innocuous tube in tow.

Ricky was a bully. He lived between Donny and I in the complex and was often a source of my bruised cheek and swollen knuckles. Overweight and suffering from a mild case of "Uncle/Dad/Grandpa showed me he loved me with his penis", he took his frustrations, and possibly his latent homosexual feelings, on those smaller than he. Being from a lower socioeconomic class, Donny took the worst of Ricky's abuse because the "playground hierarchy" deemed it so. We made it a point to only interact with him under the confines of parental eyesite and protection.

My stomach tightened as I saw Ricky come into view. Donny swore audibly, yet just enough so only I could hear him. "Sheeit, he comin' toward us" he followed. It was now passed the point to casually head in the other direction without drawing further attention to our activities from our nemesis.

"Hey, buttholes, whatcha doing? Being gay?" Ricky had a way with words. Before I could retort, he snatched my mystical weapon of the Ninja from me and looked it over. Without a word, his eyes lit up recognizing the loaded cylinder and allowed a smirk of malice cross his oversized, spittle covered lips. With a huff from his distended belly, he aimed the blowgun in Donny's direction and exhaled sharply. I saw the dart leave the barrel and strike Donny directly in the left jugular.

Panic overcame me.

At that moment, Donny's sole parental figure rounded the corner of the cracked pavement in her aged Pontiac. Upon seeing Ricky's look of satisfaction, my look of terror and Donny holding his neck, she exited the still moving beater and roughly inspected her son like a piece of damaged fruit.

"Hee coulda blayad tah dayeth!" Diane screeched absent-mindedly in Donny's ear as she held a dirty thumb over the tiny red bump that now resembled a wasp sting. Being of limited capacity for rationalization, my 8 year old brain processed that information as "he IS going to bleed to death". The tears started. The apologies followed in between sobs. Diane looked at me with a twinge of pity, but mostly contemtuous parental scorn. The fear that enveloped me was far worse of a punishment than anything my hard working parents would inevitably dole out.

Eyes blurred by stinging salt, I felt a strong hand on the back of my neck leading me to the door of my tenement. The next moments were a confusing mixture of fear, shame and a need for self-preservation of my own ass. Knowing my propensity towards anxiety and a sense of worry over the implications of my actions, my parents took it easy and simply sent me to my room with a stern warning. It wasn't until a post-punishment reflection that I realized Donny would be the one to feel sorry for...he would be both the victim of an unprovoked straight pin puncture and a severe belting at the hands of Sancho for "being such a pussy."

(to be continued...)

New Material Coming Soon!

Back from the dead! After a brief hiatus following an extended hospital visit due to a penis-enlargement pump snafu, I'm now vertical and going to get back to doing what I enjoy doing the most: offending the judgemental. Prepare your sensibilities...

XOXO,

Jay

Acid Rain: Part III

"The clouds are getting difficult to focus on" Anthony offered. "We're gonna head back to Bird's before we peak."

I shook my head and laughed in spite of myself.

"We smoked a ton of weed afterward we dropped, so it shouldn't be long" he continued, shooting a cautionary look at the sky.

"I'll grab some beer and come over right after I close the store" I replied as I returned to my post and watched them take leave. I sat in place and stared out the window, not noticing my eyes had fallen out of focus. I was lost in thought for what seemed like only minutes when I glance at the clock. 6:02 pm...Showtime.

I arrived at Bird's no more than 15 minutes after closing the store to an oddly humorous scene. Anthony sat straight up in a reclinder, absent-mindedly smoking a cigarette; oblivious to the cacaphony enveloping the already thick air. Bird, struck by a notion that the duplex was untidy, was circling the furniture with the vacuum. Little did I know he was approaching hour three pushing said appliance.

"Have you guys been here this whole time?" I asked, as a smile broke on my face at the odd hilarity of the situation.

Anthony now aware of additional company, nervously darted his eyes around the small living room, stopping occasionally at my face and the motorized dust collector.

"Umm, yeah" he answered, obviously disoriented by the humming.

I crossed the room, offering a refreshment to both as I fell into an open recliner with a relieved sigh and snapped open the top of a beer. I smiled again watching the two of them as I took a long pull from the malt beverage and lit a Marlboro. Even though I had missed the best parts, this would be my entertainment for the evening. I couldn't take my eyes away.

It wasn't until the following day, now Monday, that I would hear the entire story. I met Anthony at Subway, Bird acting as our sandwich artist, to hear the missing pieces.

Shortly after they returned from our beer store visit to the 2nd floor duplex, things began to take off.

"It was the weirdest thing I could imagine" Anthony began. "We sat there in silence, and Bird, out of nowhere, jumped up and started cleaning...he never stopped until you got there. It freaked the shit out of me."

Bird, hearing Anthony's recollection, came to our table and chimed in. "Dude, my spine was starting to twitch! I couldn't sit still! Anthony came into the kitchen to get a pop while I was cleaning but I don't remember saying a word to him. He opened the freezer and stood there staring into it like it was fuckin' game 7 of the Stanley Cup!"

He had my attention.

"I came back in the kitchen and he had moved from the freezer to the counter. I watched him watch the bubbles in his pop rise for 20 minutes." He continued.

"Hahaha, you guys are fuckin' retarded!" I said as I exhaled a lungful of Virginian tobacco smoke.
"Then it got weird" Anthony's face changed as he spoke. He was serious now. "I went from feeling happier than I've ever been to the deepest depression imagineable." My mood changed instantaneously as I found nothing humorous about that level of anxiety.

"So what did you do?" I was honestly intrigued by the intricacies of the drug-addled mind.

"Well" he let out an exasperated breath "I did the only thing I could think of at that moment...I went to the bathroom, without staring into the mirror, and rubbed one out!"


Ahh, yes...masturbation: a cure-all stress reliever, prostate exerciser and hallucinogenic drug stabilizer.

Blowguns and Golf Clubs: Part I

"Pain" isn't an accurate or fair description of the feeling of getting hit in the testicles. So many sensations are being downloaded into your nervous system that it's seemingly impossible to sort them all out. Words become difficult to annunciate and one can usually only allow merely a primal, gutteral exclamation from below the diaphragm.

"UGH!!! AUGH!!!"

It took only a fraction of a second for Donny to execute the attack in two fluid motions. A searing pain tore through my testicles and lower abdomen. The bamboo shaft of the old golf club came straight up between my legs, dividing my balls, followed quickly by the head of the wooden driver being pulled back, smashing the front of my coin purse and pathetic kid-weiner.

Nausea.

"Donny, you fucker!!!" I shrieked.

I shouldn't have said that. Granted, I'd heard my father use that word frequently as both a noun and adjective, but I knew my mom was in the very room above us and the subfloor of these cheap townhouses held no sound attenuation.

I chased after him, one hand cradling my now swollen bits, wielding the tennis racket above my head. He managed to elude me in that cramped basement due to my handicap, but I wouldn't forgive him until the day I was sure I could procreate.

That is my first memory of Donny.

We grew up a block apart in the same townhouse complex, yet we were from two different worlds. To say Donny had a difficult upbringing would be an insult to the obvious. Diane, his overbearing, horribly ignorant mother, spoke with a Tenessee drawl and prison vocabulary. Fair skinned like her children, her weathered face was accented by her clownishly large eyeglass frames. She aimed to please her husband, mostly to avoid a swollen lip, but kept the quarters squared away nonetheless. She would wake her sons up at 5 am, "screaming" being her favorite alarm, everyday of the week and insist they did household chores before school, a leather belt being her insurance they would completed to satisfaction.

Sancho, his violent, alcoholic step father, was 100% backwoods hillbilly. Picture Dwight Yoakum's character "Doyle Hargraves" in "Slingblade" for a spot on reference...right down to the ponytail and low-angry voice. I could never figure out, even when I was young, why Diane would marry a man like that. She often had to gather the boys and deceive or elude Sancho in the middle of the night; stealing off to the safe haven of the local motel or our apartment. Sancho loved his whiskey and had a propensity to load his Smith & Wesson .357 revolver and threaten to kill Diane and the kids when he had a head full.

A small fistful of miscreant siblings with a myriad of their own issues rounded out the family tree; each crammed into their own menial allotment of apartment living. Donny's older brother, Orson, was beaten almost daily for shitting his pants; a condition his stepfather was convinced was due to his insolence and disrespect for his ill-received paternal figure.. It wasn't until he hit his teens that they discovered Orson was epileptic and experienced frequent micro-seizures that accounted for his incontinence. Ray-Ray, the 3rd son from Diane's first marriage, had a minor speech impediment from putting his incisors through his tongue and lip, courtesy of a jungle gym mishap. Little Chris, or "Crispy" as we referred to him for his overly-sunburned ears, was no more than 3 yet allowed to freely roam the complex. Diane would occasionally notice Crispy's absence from their unit at various times of the day, drive around the block to find him sound asleep, his fair skin and blonde hair no match for the summer sun, on the front seat of his motorized mini-jeep.

Donny's bucolic life was marked by tragedy and hardship, a theme that would continue until the day he died.

(...to be continued)

Necessity is the Mother of Intervention: Part III

We often pretend to be something we're not. Inner reflection reveals the truth, providing we're prepared to accept it. I grew up a skinny kid with a big mouth. This led to frequent fights and altercations with neighbor kids that couldn't think of a witty comeback and had to use their size to attempt to intimidate me. I wanted to think of myself as a "tough guy", but I was often insecure, having no bulk or muscle to back my acid tongue. I found strength in music, using the channeled adrenaline to shore up my lack of confidence.

My transition into adulthood was much different. Surrounded daily by members of my parent's generation, I aged quickly. I spent my laborious workdays, which often streched into the late evening and weekend, testing limits between humor and insult, trading good-natured barbs with my weathered compatriots. In short time I carried my balls with two hands and led with my acerbic mouth.

"Let's hit Ernie's for a cold one, Kid!" Randy was in a mood to drink and at 19 years old I was not one to complain.

These moments made the long hours brainlessly moving thousands of pounds of block and mortar worth it. Budweiser is similar to llama musk in taste, but after eight hours of swallowing dust, it's the closest thing to utopia I've found. The first two went down quickly.

"Man, that guy won't stop staring at me...do I have something on my face?" I asked irritated, spinning my 12 oz longneck over the condensated napkin. I had developed somewhat of a short fuse and was growing tired of the overweight, balding creep at the other end of the bar dressing me down with his pedo-glasses. I had noticed him watching me for the better part of a half hour; which is approximately 5 minutes in sexual deviant time.

Randy, turned to glance behind him and returned his head to position, his features stoic.

"That's the neighborhood pervert" he delivered as if foreshadowing a future altercation with Chris Hansen's future acquaintance. "He's been out of the big house for awhile, but this whole town knows about him. Hell, he can't be within 1000 feet of an elementary school!" I think If I paced it off, we were about 1002 feet from the nearest daycare. A master of his own state-imposed limits.

"Well he's creeping me out." I shot back. I was getting visibly more agitated, but my focus was quickly diverted by a the fresh beer delivered by the waitress.

"Wait, did I already check your ID" she asked, eyeing me with an incompetent unsurety.

"Yeah, you checked it when we got in, remember?" Randy answered before I could speak and place another $20 on her tray. She retreated without another word.

The first thing I learned working construction wasn't reading blueprints or how trades interact...it was how to get served as an underaged kid. We'd go into the bar, Randy or Jack or Howard would order a round of beers, one extra for me, while I hung back or hit the head, and when I returned, the server would lose track and keep serving me. I figure we had about a 95% success rate with our little ruse. Everyonce in awhile you'd get the self-important "this is my world and you're just living in it" infant-dicked bartender that would throw a fit and kick me out. Keep in mind, this was typically the same guy you hear stories about getting hospitalized for injecting coke into his dong.

Feeling the urge to give back what I had taken in means of liquid ounces, I ambled to the men's room. Upon entering, it had completely escaped my attention that Chester the Molester was following close behind. No more than a half step inside the lavatory, I spun on my heels and exited. I had no interest in letting my lower colon become his Elysium.

(...to be continued)

Acid Rain: Part II

I awoke Sunday morning with a heavy head, still dizzy from the inumerable pints of "Red 8 Ale", a microbrewed favorite, courtesy of the Mackinaw Brewing Pub. Taking a deep breath, I choked on the short wind, a detrimental effect of an expensive habit I was a slave to, but enjoyed thoroughly, and got myself ready to attack the day.

I squinted my eyes to the vibrant late summer morning sun as I climbed into the cramped cab of my "gently used" Toyota truck. Scanning through the tracks of the CD in my dash, I finally settled on a suitable, non-descript song and headed towards my place of temporary employment.

I arrived at the beer store, flicked on the "open" sign and took my post on the wooden bar stool behind the counter and settled in for a long day.

"We'll come see you at the store about 2" Anthony said over the phone with an air of excitement.

"You sure you're ready for this shit, Dude?" I asked him with a tone of uncertainty. You couldn't sell me on the the path he was about to take.

"Haha, yep. Bird and I are going to drop it in about a half hour....should be starting to feel it a little when we come see you."

"Good luck" I said through a chuckle and hung up.

After what seemed like mere minutes, I removed my glazed eyes from the small tv and raised my aching head off the heel of my hand to see two familiar faces came through the fully beer-advertisement-adorned glass door.

"Well?" I asked with skepticism.

"We ate 2 hits each off a Jolly Rancher about an hour ago" Anthony answered. "Things are just starting to get weird."

He had no idea.

Acid Rain: Part I

"I think I want to try acid". Anthony said it so matter-of-factly between songs, Bird and I were unsure if he was serious.

"Ha, seriously? Go ahead, man, you're alone on this one" I said as I sipped my beer and set it on top of a PA speaker.

"If you're serious, I'll get some and do it with you" Bird replied.

Band practice was always like this; a few beers and stimulating conversation. It usually devolved into a battle of depravity, each of us saying the most base thing we could think of to illicit incredulous laughs from each other. This evening had taken a different turn.

"Seriously, dude, I'll get some from this guy I know at work...we'll do it Sunday because neither of us have to work".

This was going to make for an interesting weekend.