EXTENDED BIRTHDAY FUN: THE 15TH ANNUAL BUNCHECAT BIRTHDAY LOOOOOOVE SENSATION AT THE LIBRARY, NYC

The birthday kids flash the horns.

There are those who believe that you should celebrate your birthday for at least a month after it actually happens, and I have come to share that philosophy. As we grow older my friends and I no longer necessarily have comparable nine-to-five hours and can’t always get together en masse as we used to, so we have to steal time for gatherings by hook or by crook. Weekends are out for me and most of my crew are either currently residing upstate and raising families, or their schedules don’t allow them to come and go on intoxicating adventures the way they once did.

My high school friend Cat and I have held some form of annual celebration for our birthdays for the past fifteen years, starting out on her tenement roof in Hell’s Kitchen, moving to Riverside Park when we both lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and finally ending up in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park with our largest barbecue crowds (sometimes totaling 100-plus). After that our close-knit tribe began to disperse and move on in life, so it was simply easier for all of us to choose a bar that we could all take over and if the usual suspects could attend then so be it. If not, we’d see each other again at some other time. This year’s Birthday Loooooove Sensation was pushed back from its customary late June/early July slot due to endless scheduling conflicts from all involved, but we were finally able to schedule the shindig for the last Monday in July, less than one week before my buddy Jared’s annual birthday do in Rockland County, so it was likely that if you attended one or both of the gatherings you’d see the whole crew.

Since Monday also happens to be the start of my “weekend,” I went into the city for my usual weekly walkabout, stopping off to see what’s new at Kim’s Video and throwing a plain Wendy’s triple-cheeseburger down my eager gullet. As I made my way over to Library I took the scenic route and waxed nostalgic over the bygone days when the Lower East Side was a truly wild-and-wooly, ultra-dangerous haven for junkies, thieves and killers (remember Daniel Rackowitz, the artist who murdered his girlfriend and ingeniously disposed of her body by making her into soup and feeding her to the local homeless? No, seriously! Look him up!) and also the birthplace of New York’s 1970’s punk rock/new wave scene, with the soon-to-be-closed CBGB serving as the launching pad for Talking Heads, Blondie, and, of course, the Ramones.

The Ramones made the area so famous that there is even a street posthumously dedicated to their frontman.

I made it to Library bar — on Avenue A between 1st and 2nd Streets — at 5PM and struck up a conversation with Becca, the charming bartender who is very easy on the eyes.

Becca: show the lady respect, muthafukkas!

After my customary round of Jose Cuervo with a Budweiser chaser I waited for my friends to start arriving and first on the scene was Jared, who’d been kind enough to travel down from his home upstate. After that the usual cast of characters came out of the woodwork.

Inside Library: pretentious? Naaaah!!!

I chose Library for this year’s location because it’s one of the last good Lower East Side dive joints, complete with a jukebox crammed with punk/metal/psychedelic favorites, lots of my kind of atmosphere,

a projection screen for all manner of questionable cinema, claustrophobic, black-painted, graffiti-festooned restrooms,



and fifties-style booths that appear to have been accented with a dull switchblade.


Among the highlights of the evening were the following:

A reunion of Paul Becton, myself, and Jared Osborn, all former grunts on the comics biz frontline in the Marvel Comics Bullpen of the 1990's.

Dear old friend and comics biz goddess Amanda Conner assists me with a beer. Gotta love them Irish chix!

International playboy and gadabout Steve Hughes, freshly returned from a sojourn in Brazil.

The man with the coolest name in history: Paul Frankenstein. I swear, the charismatic motherfucker should be a secret agent or something!

Bill Wrigley and Mark Gilson, two always-welcome reprobates who share my rabid interest in hopeless geekery.

Cat's two-year-old daughter, Cleonir-Rose, showing up and having fun with tribeswoman Lexi.
NOTE: the kid's also my much-adored niece, so fuck with her at your own considerable peril.

But the icing on the cake was having one of my all time favorite movies, namely THE STREET FIGHTER, running on the projection screen and exposing newbies to the bone-crunching wonder of Sonny Chiba.

"You tell that bitch who sent you how sorry I am that I can no longer be her friend!" Sonny Chiba shares the love in a scene from THE STREET FIGHTER.

All in all, an excellent way to wind down my forty-first birthday festivities, and with that I will leave you with a solid kick in the guts from good old Sonny.

"GOOMPH!!!"

A BRUSH WITH GREATNESS: THE DAY I MET GG ALLIN

No, that isn't a Skittle. It's his dick.

Some called him a visionary rebel, out to save rock 'n' roll from the pussified product that it has become, a righteous firebrand who sought to restore danger to the form. Then there are those of us who thought he was a sociopathic idiot whose beyond-offensive musical stylings and on-and-offstage antics were downright hilarious. Yes, I am talking about the late, "great" GG Allin. And who the fuck, you may ask, was GG Allin? His story is too bizarre and involved to go into here, so I refer you to Allmusic for a very much to the point bio on the guy. I mean, you're pretty much doomed to be a fucking freak when your religious fanatic dad actually names you Jesus Christ Allin...

I first came across GG's recordings in the summer of 1987 during a trip to New Haven, Connecticut's Rhymes Records, a now defunct establishment that housed one of the best vinyl selections on the East Coast. Ever on a quest for the most offensive music I can find, I stumbled upon a "greatest hits" collection entitled "Dirty Love Songs," and was simply gobsmacked by the content; the album opened with "I Wanna Fuck Myself" (a heartfelt ode to jacking off) and continued to astonish with such anti-hits as "I Wanna Rape You" — a very strong contender for the "honor" of being the most offensive song of all time — , "I Wanna Piss On You," "Needle Up My Cock" — a cautionary ditty about the dangers of venereal disease — , "I Fuck the Dead," and many, many others. And on top of all that filth, the album opened up into a big poster of Allin onstage, shouting into a microphone while apparently attempting to rip off his own peanut-sized dick. How could I not add such a treasure to my collection?

In short order I went on to collect pretty much the entirety of the guy's output — a staggering waste of money or a bargain, depending on your point of view — and found other music deviants who enjoyed Allin's work for the same reasons I did (huge shout-outs to Smokey and Tanya!!!), while simultaneously nauseating many of my friends in the process. As the years passed I followed Allin's "career," marveling at his idiotic boasts of how he would one day kill himself onstage as a sacrifice to rock 'n' roll, taking as many of his fans with him as possible, and wondering what would become of him after he was released from a prison term for torturing one of the aforementioned worshippers.

Then, in 1993 filmmaker Todd Phillips released HATED, a must-see (or not) documentary on GG Allin. Several of my friends and I decided to attend the Manhattan premiere of the film at the Lower East Side's Anthology Film Works, and girded ourselves for the event with several rounds at our oft-frequented haunt, Nightbirds. As we drank, only my friend Smokey and I were flat-out determined to go to the film, the rest of our crew opting to hang out at the bar instead, so he and I sauntered over to the movie house where both of us were shocked as a motherfucker to find that GG himself was there, greeting his fans in the lobby.

The site of my brush with the artiste.

GG's notorious lack of any kind of personal hygiene was immediately self-evident because the guy smelled like a piss factory, but I was surprised to find that despite his unpredictable, animalistic nature the guy was really friendly. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he was clearly out of his mind on God knows what? I dunno...

Anyway, I asked GG to autograph my sketchbook. He cheerfully took it from me, and as he wastedly scrawled all over the page he announced, "This is how it was in the past. Here's how it is in the present, and here's how it's gonna be IN THE FUTURE!!!" With that he thrust the sketchbook and pen back to me, and shakily wobbled into the auditorium to watch his own chronicle unspool on the pitiful screen. The documentary was a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it to those brave enough to witness its myriad horrors.

Afterward, Smokey and I raced back to Nightbirds and told our friends what they had missed. Needless to say, they were kicking themselves for the rest of the evening.

Then, a little over a month later on the day after my twenty-eight birthday, GG Allin, the man who would supposedly off himself in the name of rock, died from a heroin overdose following a performance the night before. Say what you want about the guy, but the irony of his demise being that of the common, garden variety rock star douchebag was pretty fucking pathetic, and perhaps the only appropriate coda for rock 'n' roll's most outrageous professional, literally shit-eating asshole.

SOUND ADVICE ON A BEAUTIFUL CANVAS

Here's some sound advive from Manhattan'S Sex Museum as modeled by a particularly spectacular lady I know. HEED HER WISDOM, MUTHAFUKKAS!!!

Why do I have a sudden craving for caramel?

COOL TOY OF THE MONTH

Looking like they wallked right off the pages of Darwyn Cooke's exceptional NEW FRONTIER mini-series, the figures from DC Direct's related series are a 10 out of 10. The first series includes Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow and Blackhawk, all in glorious 1950's-style retro design.


Here's Wonder Woman in her battle gear, complete with Greek warrior's skirt. She comes with two changeable heads — one with battle headgear and one with her standard tiara — her golden lasso, a shield, and a sword, but the sword is very fragile and will break off if you try to fit it into her hand, so widen the grip hole with an eyeglasses screwdriver or something before adding the accessory. I broke the sword on mine, so I reached into my handy toys accessories box — don't look shocked; all toy collectors have one — and dug around for something that would be a fitting substitute. I found a couple of lightsabers, but those looked too delicate for Cooke's chunky/wine-drinkin'/steak-eatin' version of the Amazing Amazon. A plastic turkey leg borrowed from a FIST OF THE NORTH STAR Juza toy would have worked in a humorous way, but the perfect chioce was a Klingon bat'leth, swiped from STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION'S Worf; that seemed not only appropriate, but it added just the right note of savagery to the bloodthirsty woman warrior.

DAY OFF DOUBLE-FEATURE: CLERKS II and MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND

Every now and then I see a movie that I enjoy so much that I just can’t get it out of my head and I even dream about it right after I’ve seen it. Such a film is Kevin Smith’s riotous CLERKS II.

Picking up about a decade after the original indie hit, we find Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) and Randall Graves (Jeff Anderson) having progressed no further in their meaningless careers as clerks at the familiar Quick Stop convenience store/video rental establishment, except that they now work at a Mooby’s fast food after the Quick Stop burns to the ground during the story’s first two minutes. Randall is every bit as side-splittingly foul as he was the first time around, but Dante is engaged to wed Emma (played by the director’s painfully untalented wife, Jennifer Schwalbach, who previously stunk up the place in a mercifully small turn in JAY & SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK) and move to Florida, despite the strong feelings he harbors for his hot boss, Becky (Rosario Dawson), feelings that she also shares.

The threadbare “story” follows the structure of the original film, taking place during the course of a single workday — in this case Dante’s final day on the job — and chronicles the staff’s adventures with all manner of distractions, pretty much anything but work, with cult heroes Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) hanging around outside the fast food joint — right next to a huge piece of Randall-provided graffiti that reads “Eat Pussy” — and providing assorted moments of illicit lunacy.

That’s it, but within this non-scenario Smith manages to cram a cornucopia of his trademark dialogue/tasteless humor that more than makes up for the agonizing cinematic Chernobyl of JERSEY GIRL.

Not surprisingly, the morass of filthy jokes yields some real treasures of content, such as:

• The final word on “ass-to-mouth” etiquette.
• Jay’s jaw-dropping tribute to Jame Gumm.
• Great performances all round, especially O’Halloran and Dawson’s sweet relationship.
• A hilarious running gag using King Diamond’s demonic metal classic “Welcome Home.”
• The now-infamous Tijuana-style donkey show, the mere mention of which prompted film critic/utter douchebag Joel Seigel to loudly walk out of the film at the forty-minute mark.
• A fun musical number that comes from out of nowhere.
• Trevor Fehrman’s Elias, a Christian uber-geek who is funny enough, but his tale of “Pillow Pants” is one for the ages.
• An outrageously hysterical debate over the merits of the STAR WARS and LORD OF THE RINGS trilogies, highlighted by Randall’s priceless — and not inaccurate — less-than-sixty-second reenactment of the three RINGS flicks.
• Randall’s cluless defense of an ethnic slur and his attempts to “take it back” as a term of endearment.
  

But the biggest pluses here are Smith proving that he can actually handle a solid romance — sorry, but I didn’t buy CHASING AMY — and a believable examination of male friendship; I went in expecting a shitload of dick and faggot jokes, but did not foresee how much heart the film turned out to possess.

Bottom line: if you enjoy Smith brand of raunchy humor, CLERKS II is a vulgarian’s delight, and most others should tread carefully.

Ivan (GHOSTBUSTERS, STRIPES) Reitman’s MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND has more true comic spirit — in both senses of the term — than any of this year’s mega-budget super-hero opuses, and is a fun way to kill an hour and a half. The basic premise is pretty much FATAL ATTRACTION, only done as a comedy with the Glenn Close character equipped with the same powers as Superman. It’s pretty fluffy stuff, but taken for what it is, this is pretty enjoyable, with some very funny gags and a few really cool bits involving G-Girl (Uma Thurman) alternately saving the day and neurotically abusing her abilities while making her ex-boyfriend (Luke Wilson) completely miserable. And Eddie Izzard’s turn as Professor Bedlam, G-Girl’s arch-nemesis, is great fun, complete with the most understandable motivation for a supervillain’s bitterness since Lex Luthor blaming his baldness on Superboy.

Uma Thurman as G-Girl.

But I do have one question: exactly why does the super-woman call herself G-Girl? That tidbit is mulled over briefly, but never answered. Isn't she a little long in the tooth to be calling herself "girl?" Also, G-Girl’s character is so neurotic that she’s pretty much every premenstrual stereotype writ large, so keep that in mind.

Bottom line: fun, but pay only matinee or DVD rental price.

TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

TIMEWARPED

Way back in 1978, myself and a friend — whose name I can’t print here for a couple of reasons — were perusing the “art” book section at the local Waldenbooks and enjoying all of those photo books of naked twin sisters and such, when I noticed my friend checking out a copy of “The Joy of Sex.” He was clearly engrossed, and I asked him what he thought of the book; the look on his face said it all so I asked, “Do you want it?” He said, “Yeah!” so I dropped the book into my backpack and we made a hasty exit out onto Main Street.

NOTE: one of the truths about my misspent youth that I am not terribly proud of is the fact that I was once an accomplished master of the “five-finger discount,” and used that skill to obtain boatloads of porn mags and dirty books that I would then sell for a then-hefty price during my junior high years. As was probably inevitable, I got caught early in 1980 while trying to boost an issue of HUSTLER from a convenience store that had recently installed camera security; prior to that point I never once ran afoul of any sort of security because not one of the local bookstores, pharmacies or convenience stores bothered to keep an eye out for young hooligans. After all, this was WESTPORT (capitalized for emphasis), where the kids were all upstanding young men and ladies who would never do such a thing (their rampant promiscuity, alcoholism and drug habits notwithstanding). And since I was Black it was unlikely that I would have any interest in stealing books of any kind…

Anyway, skip ahead twenty-eight years to me working in the kitchen last night; it was just after two days of torrential rain and the neighborhood was coming out once again, in search of food and intoxicating libations, so Scott and I were running ourselves ragged to keep up with the meal orders. Suddenly an odd-looking man darted into the kitchen and thrust a manilla envelope into my hand. I opened the envelope to discover a vintage hardcover copy of “The Joy of Sex,” at which point I dropped what I was doing, ran out into the dining area and asked a general “What the fuck?” But then I noticed Eric Singer, a guy who I grew up with who now lives in the neighborhood, and sitting across from him was the now-grownup kid for whom I’d lifted that copy of “The Joy of Sex” over twenty-five years ago.

This was the first time I’d seen the guy since his family had left Westport in the early eighties, and it was great to see him again; he was simply one of the craziest and funniest people I knew at the time, and such kindred weirdos were precious indeed.

Now that you have all the background info, here’s a shot of the two of us with the ancient stolen tome. I even had “Mister X” sign it as a keepsake.

ADVENTURES OF THE CROOKLYN COWBOY: “WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT?!!?”

I was off from work yesterday, beating the hundred-degree heat in my air-conditioned sanctum sanctorum, having switched with my kitchenmate, Scott — the guy in the photo — so he could get in some time in a recording studio on Monday; Scott’s been part of our wacky little pirate ship of barbecue and booze for about six months, hailing from Texas and providing authentic cowboy flavor to the joint. The guy’s easy-going, funny, friendly, and slightly demented, so he fits right in. During his relatively short time here in the wilds of Crooklyn, he has been constantly astonished by the day-to-day madness, rudeness, and outright assholism of the Big Apple, gleefully adding crazy anecdotes to his repertoire for the amusement of his friends and loved ones back home.

When I returned to work today, as always happens when I’m away, I missed witnessing something idiotic… Fuck it, this is Scott’s story, so I’ll let him tell it:

“Bunche, you are gonna love this story. I stepped out of the kitchen for a smoke and looked over toward Kitchen Bar [note: our distinguished competition next door] where I saw a fiftyish Italian guy having dinner with some hot oriental chick. The guy saw me and asked, ‘Yo! Food ovah there’s pretty good, hunh?’ I said yeah, and then the guy went into the standard, ‘I lived in dis naybuhood since befaw yooz wuz born’ — an intro that never leads to anything good — so I said, ‘Oh yeah, I heard it’s changed a lot over the years.’

“The guy looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, all the fuckin’ yuppies and the hipsters fuckin’ up the place… Ya know, about twenny-five years ago some fuck was tryin’ ta break inta my car with a screwdriver, so I took it from him an’ fuckin’ stabbed him with it.’

“The mook then went silent and waited for my reaction, so I asked, ‘What happened to the guy?’ The mook looked at me like I’d grown an extra head and said, ‘What the fuck kinda question is that?!!? I don’t care! I hope the prick died! Ya know what? That’s kinda funny! I’m gonna tell alla my friends about that! You’re gonna be a fuckin’ legend!’ Like me asking what happened to the guy was the most asinine thing he’d ever heard!

“With that, I finished my smoke and hauled ass back to the kitchen.”

“Man, I love this neighborhood.”

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH: TRUE TALES OF FIRST PORNOGRAPHY

As you may have gathered, the barbecue joint is, among other things, a salon of higher culture and erudite discussion of the arts. Before coming in to work today I perused the items at a local stoop sale, and among the many books I found a charming volume of erotic art for two bucks and figured it would be fun to share with the staff and the regulars when my shift began. As predicted, the book was a big hit, covering all manner of fleshly ground from centuries-old engravings to Japanese shunga prints with the colossal genitalia to contemporary gallery works, and while checking this stuff out I realized that at some point this sort of material was probably some unsuspecting kid’s first exposure to the world of osh-osh as a somewhat prurient form of entertainment. It’s a universally visceral, fascinating and somewhat scary experience to say the least, for both young males and females alike.

Excluding the rather innocent stuff like PLAYBOY and PENTHOUSE, my own first glimpse at such material was a rain-soaked copy of SCREW magazine found at my bus stop when I was ten years old. The tabloid literally dripped with filthiness and while I knew what a girl’s equipment looked like — thanks to a little girl who lived across the street when I was six; you have my eternal gratitude, Terri! — I was horrified by the unbelievable talents of one Honeysuckle Divine, a cute blonde who used her sacred reproductive orifice for purposes that it was never meant to perform, such as individually spewing out greasy-looking matzoh balls. Sadly, I left this treasure where it was because to have it found in my possession at home or at school would have meant certain death in ways that Torquemada never imagined.

Later that same year an uncle gave me a steamer trunk full of rather “weathered” dirty magazines, an act more or less fully endorsed by my mother in an effort to prevent me from becoming “an artsy fag;” you see, in her book anyone with even the slightest interest in the arts was destined to have nuts bouncing off his chin in no time at all and that she would not allow, by God! So porn was an approved part of my library from very early on. Little did she realize that I already had the fever for girls, but any way you cut it, it was a win/win situation.

In the two minutes it took for me to get the trunk to my room, I swiftly managed to riffle through the smut and find most of the really foul stuff — including the now-infamous issue of HUSTLER that included a scratch-and-sniff center-spread — before my mom could pick and choose what was kosher for me to keep. I stashed the toxic material in a hidden panel behind the bookcase in the walk-through closet that connected my bedroom to my bathroom (this was at the palatial first house that we lived in from 1972 through early 1980 in Westport), and then spent hours engrossed in the images of naked womanhood splayed across my bedroom floor.

Shortly after this a succession of babysitters discovered my illicit collection and were even more fascinated than I was, each eagerly devouring page after page of pink. I was particularly enamored of a pair of twins who used to take care of me and had an extensive critical knowledge of the genre thanks to raids on their brother’s closet. These two girls were the first to make it plain to me that girls enjoyed naughty stuff just as much as guys did, and that was a mind-altering revelation. Ever since, I have appreciated the female porno fan.

As I reminisced on my own tender corruption I was intrigued to find out what other people recalled of their early exposure to pornography, and since I have no shame whatsoever I asked all within earshot. Here’s what I got:

“A PENTHOUSE found in the creek bed behind the local elementary school in Lexington, Kentucky!”
-Big Mikey

“A PLAYBOY found in a drainage ditch in Texas.”
-Scott M.

“It was a tape called NAKED AEROBICS found in my dad’s back drawer. It was kinda pathetic, really, since it was just two women with that early-1980’s Jane Fonda workout aesthetic, doing regular aerobics, only naked. And making it even cheesier, there was this mirror/kaleidoscope effect that multiplied the image of the two women into a legion! When my dad died, I inherited all of his adult material, sort of a porn legacy, if you will. The tape, and a bunch of softcover books about dirty nuns, and the like.”
-Tracey McT.

“I like to call any porn found outside somewhere ‘feral porn;’ I mean, you can be in the middle of the fucking woods and find a porn mag! My own feral porn was a OUI magazine found on the fire escape at St. John’s, the local Catholic elementary school.”
-Frank T.

A nudie playing card on the muddy banks of the stream that ran through our neighborhood.”
-Jeff P.

“I was in fifth grade, babysitting with a friend, and we were flipping through the channels while the kid we were looking after was asleep. We found some kind of softcore something or other on HBO, and we were fascinated but too embarrassed to admit that we wanted to watch it, so we kept switching back and forth, but always kept landing on that flick. And my lower half started to feel really weird… And then I was hooked!”
-Lauren A.

“I was in fifth grade and I went over to my buddy Colin Riley’s house, where he showed me his dad’s copy of INSIDE VANESSA Del RIO.”
-Dan E.

"I was in fourth grade and went riffling through my parents’ stuff when they weren’t home, and saw one of those “365 Ways To Do It” manuals; I guess they were trying out something new each day… Anyway, when I lifted it out of the drawer there was an issue of HUSTLER beneath it, and I was blown away to see that the center-spread was signed by the girl in the picture, telling my dad how nice it was to meet him in Vegas and inviting him to 'cum again.'”
-Rob R.

“I think I was eight or nine, and soon after it lead to masturbation at age ten. It was PLAYBOY, of course; my dad had some, and my older brother found them.”
-Tim L.

“I was probably, like, ten and I totally found it on a wildlife walk, between the junior high school and the national elk refuge in Wyoming. Some random sleazy trucker mag or something… No, wait… I was in second grade, seven years old, and a friend who lived in a trailer park invited me over to see the bunnies that his folks raised; his dad would kill them with his bare hands and his mom would cook them, so I was already kind of traumatized that day. Anyway, since we had nothing else to do after the bunnies, my friend asked me if I wanted to ‘look at some pussies.’ I said okay, having no clue what the kid was talking about, and my friend broke out some porn mags that his dad had thrown away, and one of them was called THE BEST PUSSY IN THE WORLD CONTEST. The cover didn’t even have a picture of a woman; it was just a picture of a pussy. So he pulls it out and we start flipping through it, and every single page was, like, four crotch shots! Crotch shot, crotch shot, crotch shot, crotch shot! So I didn’t know what the hell I was even looking at! I didn’t understand that this was part of a woman’s body; I just thought that it was something…animal. And I couldn’t imagine why he’d want to show it to me. So I went home and my mom asked me what I did over at my friend’s house, so I matter-of-factly stated, ‘we looked at pussies.’ My mom was horrified and called my friend’s mother, after which my friend never spoke to me again. I didn’t figure out why until I was, like, fourteen or something.”
-"The Blank" (a regular who was too much of a pussy to be identified for this post)

“When I was around seven years old my family went from South Carolina to spend Christmas with my aunt and uncle, and when I went to use their bathroom I found a book that I’m sure belonged to my uncle. It had, like, a picture of a farm on it. Yep, I learned really young about bestiality… I don’t remember who the characters were, but they were visiting a farm and I’m not sure about most of the animals, but I think they were cows. There was also a woman who put something on herself to get a dog to lick her, and she even got off! I didn’t know such things existed when I was seven years old! So every time I went to the bathroom at their house, I’d look for that book. My mom and my aunt would knock on the bathroom door and go, ‘Debra? Debra, what are you doing in there?’ My dad also used to hide his PLAYBOY stash on top of the freezer, and I eventually discovered them. There was a day when my folks came home early, so I hid the PLAYBOY that I was checking out under my mattress. Now my dad got up really early the next morning and must have gone to look at the issue I borrowed, of course not finding it where it was supposed to be. That afternoon when I got home from school, he laughingly asked me, in front of a friend I was with, ‘So, did you enjoy my magazine?’ I sneaked out of the house, rode my bike past a stretch of road where they were building houses and got rid of the PLAYBOY in the woods, because if it had reappeared my dad would have known for sure that I had it.”
-Debra S.

“When I was sixteen I knew a girl who’d stolen her father’s VHS copy of DEBBI DOES DALLAS and she invited a bunch of us over to her house to watch it while her parents were away. So there I was, surrounded by a room full of high school girls, watching one of the classics of old school porno; now up to a certain point the film has plenty of nudity, but then the real sex started and the girls were horrified. They all started screaming, but I thought it was the greatest thing ever!”
-Chez P.

“I live in West Palm Beach in Florida, and I had these totally white trash neighbors who had fifteen kids — for real — and a duck named Chirpy who they’d feed cat food. They had this huge yard and they’d chuck porn mags all over the place for no apparent reason. It was like a graveyard of porn.”
-Madison P. (age 14, daughter of Chez)

“For me it happened when I was eleven, and my brother and I found a magazine wrapped in black plastic in the mail. It was an issue of PLAYBOY addressed to my father, and he claimed that they had just sent him a free sample. Yeah, right, but considering how whipped he was, I mean, my mother would never have allowed that!”
-Jayne P.

“I was ten when my great-grandmother’s husband died, and me and my cousin Junior were cleaning out Pops’ bedroom when we found all of this really ancient porn. Like pre-PLAYBOY stuff, and we thought, ‘this is hot! This rocks!’ And then we threw them all away.”
-Lee G.

“I don’t know how old I was, but I was really young and I was snooping, you know, like kids do. And my dad had a drawer in his dresser next to his bed that I opened, and I found this postcard of a woman on skis, stark-assed naked. And she had the biggest, hairiest bush I’d ever seen! But I didn’t know if that was just my perception, or if she really was that hairy because I didn’t know what was supposed to be down there. And that’s my story.”
-Joy A.

So what’s your story, dear reader? Remember: sharing is caring!

BEST BIRTHDAY PRESENT EVER!!!

When I woke up this morning I did not expect to find myself underwater, surrounded by live Sand Tiger and Nurse sharks with a couple of huge Moray eels thrown in for good measure.

Let’s backtrack a bit: during one of the many odd conversations had at work, the bar’s TV was running a special on sharks and their habits, and, as I tend to do during such programs, I got that faraway look in my eye and said to myself, “I simply cannot die until I go on a shark dive…” after which I lamented giving up on my childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist. Hey, it was the early 1970’s when I had that dream; Jacques Cousteau was my god, I had forced my parents to take me to see BLUE WATER, WHITE DEATH six times, and I devoured books on marine life like I would later do with comic books (yep, there’s a sad revelation, dear readers). Little did I suspect that Tracey, our oft-mentioned waitress/goddess, had overheard me and filed that piece of info away for future use. A couple of months went by, and when my birthday drew nigh Tracey told me to keep July 10th free because she had a kickass surprise in honor of my birthday planned for that day.

Tracey, the mastermind of the fiendish plot.

Let me state right here and now that I loathe surprise stuff for my birthday because in times past few of the people involved in the planning managed to keep the surprise to themselves, and more often than not I would have preferred to spend my birthday on my own, with friends and loved ones at an agreed upon party location, or in the company of an enthusiastic, pulchritudinous bringer of copious osh-osh. So unless you can pull a spectacular birthday miracle out of your ass, I implore you not to even contemplate a surprise event. Keeping that caveat in mind, you can imagine my trepidation when Tracey let her intentions be known, but I did not want to be rude, so I waited for the 10th to roll around and hopefully be over as swiftly and painlessly as possible. But, like many of us would-be know-it-alls, I didn’t take into account the many times Tracey has made suggestions or recommendations and every single time she’s been right on the money.

Monday the 10th arrived, and while I would normally have slept scandalously late on a day off, I had to meet Tracey at the barbecue joint at 9:30 AM… Not a fun hour for us nocturnals, but ya do what ya gotta do. When I arrived, I was met by Tracey and our co-workers, Joy and Will, all of us looking like the ill-rested specimens that we obviously were. We all boarded Joy’s car and took of for adventures and parts unknown, and, luckily for our intrepid quartet, the day was simply beautiful.

We soon found ourselves on the Long Island Expressway, and for me the mystery of our destination deepened. I nonetheless enjoyed the sights on way while my friends chatted happily about all manner of oddball shit, and we passed by many strange billboards such as the one pictured below:

I’m sorry, but even though the spelling isn’t the same, I refuse to eat a chocolate confection that uses a slogan that sounds like “rectum.”

During the ever-lengthening ride, I saw that Joy possesses a gift that I wish I had, namely taking pleasure from driving, an act that for me is nothing but tedium and merely an exercise in getting from point A to point B. With a toothy grin lighting up her sunglasses-adorned face, Joy fueled her sleepy self with a Red Bull energy drink, kicked off her shoes and hiked up one of her fantastically long legs to rest a heel on one side of the steering wheel and merrily serve as our urban charioteer.

The ride stretched on for roughly an hour and forty-five minutes, passing through Long Island at a brisk clip, until we reached Riverhead; it was there that I sussed out that we were bound for an aquarium. Fine by me, since I loves me some sea critters and I had not been to an aquarium since I was a boy of nine years old.

As we drove into the parking area of Atlantis Marine World, my fellow passengers all turned to look at me as Tracey announced, “Well, obviously we’re taking you to an aquarium, but guess what? You’re gonna go on a shark dive!” My head nearly split in half thanks to my idiotic grin, and I briefly sat in stunned silence. I then went apeshit with happiness and gratitude, and nearly rocketed from the car to get into the dive area.

Once inside, we had to wait for the other booked diver to arrive, so we checked out many of the attractions on view within this building that sought to evoke the lost continent of Atlantis with images of Poseidon, Aphrodite and tridents in view all over the place.

Happy children ran about in sheer ecstasy as they beheld the living wonders of the deep, including an adorable seal that was rescued from the wild, and a pool where guests could not only feed a gaggle of stingrays, but also touch their frictionless hides as well. This exhibit was a big hit with adults and kiddies alike, and the stingrays charmed the hell out of everyone as they greedily jockeyed for position before the cluster of anchovy-supplying human hands. The graceful creatures glided along the bottom of the shallow pool with hypnotic ease, but they would frequently blow their ethereal aspect by practically flopping out of the water and making rude sucking noises as they hoovered the reeking fish from our outstretched mitts.

We didn’t care, though, because they were just so damned cute!

Will makes a friend.

Soon, the other diver arrived, a guy named Vinnie who was treated to this honor by way of a Father’s Day prezzie, and once introductions were made, we went off with Ditte (pronounced “Ditt-Uh”), our Dutch dive master, for some simple instructions. On the way to the platform we were lead past a huge, ceiling-mounted model of a Great White shark and straight to the observation area of the 180, 000 gallon/fourteen-feet deep/forty-feet across saltwater tank and given an in-depth who’s-who of the denizens within, including various fish, a couple of huge and scary-looking Moray eels, and about a dozen or more Sand Tiger and Nurse sharks. Once that was done, we went upstairs to where cage was tethered, and other than the explanation of the logistics of how the full-face mask and its communications capabilities worked, I was pretty much good to go since I am utterly at home underwater, and, in fact, once I am in, I don’t want to get out. Vinnie and I soon found ourselves in skintight wet suits and weight belts to keep us semi-rooted to the diving cage’s platform, and then it was off to the races.

Ditte got us into position, made some last minute adjustments to our breathing apparatus, and then instructed the tender to push us into position and gingerly lower us into the drink.

As we descended, Ditte reminded us to speak loudly and clearly, since when we were submerged the bubbles from our air tanks would be very loud and the noise would drown out our words, pun intended. Once below the surface, Vinnie and I were blown away by the size and grace of the creatures that leisurely swarmed about the cage; the eight-foot Sand Tigers got within mere inches of the bars, and I couldn’t help but marvel at their casual power and simple, perfect predatory perfection, each bearing an ominous presence that scattered the multitude of smaller fish as they implacably bullied their way through the liquid environment.

Almost as impressive were the placid, bottom-feeding Nurse sharks, a mellow lot who slid about the tank’s floor resembling sleepy-eyed, elongated dogs.

And while the sharks were definitely the star attraction, the creatures that riveted me most were the pair of fluorescent green Moray eels who hung out at the bottom, mouths wide open in seeming smiles while their eyes contained a hint of barely contained evil. As they breathed heavily, their temples yawned open, exposing their gill arrays and, in my eyes, rendering them fiercely alien and dragon-like in demeanor. These were the only inhabitants of the tank that all of the other fish gave a wide berth, and when an eight-foot snaggle-toothed shark doesn’t want to piss you off, you must be a pretty bad motherfucker.

I was so enraptured by this experience that I did not feel the allotted half hour fly by, and all too soon we had to return to the surface world and its cruel gravity. But I didn’t mind in the least; my brief stay in the simulated ocean rekindled deep feelings within my heart that I had thought long dead after years of living in the Big Apple and being away from the beach that was within walking distance from my boyhood home in Connecticut. I have to reconnect with the ocean once again, and the sooner I do that, I think that part of my ongoing malaise will be unceremoniously kicked to the curb.

Once back in my street clothes, my friends and I checked out the rest of the aquarium and had a great time doing so as we ooh’ed and aah’ed at the gorgeous forest of sea anemone, in which brightly-colored tropical fish capered about, the display of sea horses and horseshoe crabs (in which the crabs appeared to be giving up the ghost before our very eyes), and a shy, economy-sized octopus whose chromatafores were working overtime to keep it camouflaged as it huddled against a rock. Our group split up for a time while I waited for my complementary 8x10 of myself standing in full wetsuit with Ditte in the dive cage, and when I made it to the photo booth I saw the aquarium’s mascot greeting the kiddies. Some poor kid in a full-body suit portrayed “Jimbo Jaws,” a smiling anthropomorphic shark who looked surreally ridiculous, so I of course had to get photographed with him. Joy soon appeared from out of nowhere and did the honors as parents stared in horror at some crazy black guy flashing the Satanic “horns” next to a character meant for the little ones.

Our little band then regrouped and made our way to the outdoor amphitheater for the 2:45 PM sea lion show, giddily occupying the nosebleed seats as we were gripped with a raging case of the sillies that turned us all into cynical wiseasses. That state of mind proved wholly appropriate as the teenaged announcer got the kids worked up for the incredibly bizarre warm-up show, a parade of pop music snippets accented by the terpsichorean stylings of Jimbo Jaws, who took the stage after taking a header while going up the stairs. Jimbo, a smiling, furry shark in oversized sneakers dancing around was crazy enough, but the performance literally “jumped the shark” into outright lunacy when Jimbo busted loose to that intolerable 1990’s hell-on-wax, the Macarena, while the announcer exhorted the audience to join in. The person who was judged as the best dancer was promised a free t-shirt, but once about twenty little girls and their cellulite-laden mothers began doing that pointlessly semaphore-esque shimmy, I think the announcer thought better of it since I never saw him unload the souvenir shirt. Jimbo then launched into a spirited routine that was identified as the 1970’s mainstay “the robot,” but I found it unrecognizable as such, thinking instead that it resembled nothing so much as cerebral palsy night at the disco (I anticipate your brickbats for that one).

Tracey and I nearly pissed ourselves laughing at all of this madness, but then it was time for Jimbo to return to whatever strange, sub-sea dance club that he haunts, and the stage was taken over by the antics of Bunker, the sea lion. Bunker’s much-ballyhooed act was cute for what it was, but after the buildup it turned to be maybe ten minutes in length, and at the climax the trainer bid the audience farewell as Scandal’s “Goodbye To You” unsubtly spewed from the speakers. Tracey and myself found that quite amusing, and we amused ourselves by singing the more honest lyric of “Goodbye, and get the fuck out” as we filed through the exit. By this point, our little band was weary beyond words, so after a quick lunch we headed back to Brooklyn.

On the ride back I had time to think about the whole experience, and I realized that during the short time that I have worked at the barbecue joint I have come to consider the entire staff as a crazy, semi-dysfunctional family, and while we frequently drive each other into states of apoplexy, we do care about each other a great deal. Today’s trip and shark dive are something that took me by surprise and moved me deeply, a gift given out of love by good friends who every day have put up with a lot of the same shit that I write about on this very blog, and much like during wartime, sometimes a strong bond is formed from shared suffering and horror. As I often say, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it, but sometimes putting up with shit leads to unexpected rewards.

So, thank you, Tracey, Joy and Will. This day will live long in my memory as one of the best of my life.

A HEARTFELT THANK YOU AND A REQUEST

Folks-

I would like to say a hearfelt thank you for all of the prezzies I received for my birthday, but as of now I would also like to make a request: please don't buy me anything for my birthday unless you are 100% certain that I do not have the intended item. You see, I am a hard core collector of all kinds of stuff, and the odds are good that if I want something I will buy it for myself.

The reason I bring this up is that as of this afternoon I have just receieved a fifth (!!!) copy of the hardcover first edition of Ian Fleming's YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE within just under two weeks, and, sad to say, as a longtime James Bond Collector I already had that edition in the first place. Your intentions are laudable, folks, but I am very, VERY hard to shop for and I don't want you to waste your money and efforts on stuff I probably already have, so in future I suggest cash, gift certificates, pussy, or simply taking me out for drinks.

But again, thanks for the thought!