Tag: cocaine

Chicago 2001 : “Number One you punk! Number Two you Jew! Number Three you gay!”

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Wow, I really haven’t written anything in a while. I’ve been struggling with this three part piece that isn’t really coming out the way I imagined it and isn’t done yet. It goes into the sort of thing I’ve mostly been avoiding writing about, like sex and relationship stuff, but that isn’t what it’s really about. I think I’m still struggling to understand what it actually is fundamentally about.

I’m sure I’ll finish it and put it up eventually but it’ll probably be a while.

Anyway I decided to just write some more stories about when I worked at this Italian coffee bar called Trattoria Monterotondo. I just read back over some older pieces to see how much I had written about this place already and it turned out to be hardly anything. Sometimes I worry that I’m losing the thread and my earlier pieces had a quality that my new ones lack but then I go back and read some and they’re all full of typos and really short.

It’s fine, everything’s good for something even if that thing is only being thrown in a corner because it isn’t good for anything; if that makes sense. There was a show last night that I helped set up but I got there so late that I only saw the touring band and then had to leave immediately to run errands. I would have felt really bad if it was only sparsely attended but there was a decent crowd and they probably made good gas money so I feel a medium amount of bad.

I hope Ivory Daze made it up to Eugene okay, their van was apparently starting to overheat when it goes up hills and it’s uphill the whole way there and today was really hot. I was reading today about the “Faustian Bargain” where the aerosols from human economic activity actually have a globally cooling effect because they reflect some of the sun’s rays and as soon as we stop creating air pollution it will suddenly get a lot hotter really, really fast.

That sounds perfectly awful but it must be good for something too. Maybe the extreme heat will make it easier to breed lots and lots of insects like crickets in shoeboxes with bits of egg carton in them like you’re supposed to do when you keep small reptiles or amphibians as pets. It’s not like there will be anything else to eat.

Ok, the Trattoria Monterotondo place. I mentioned in the earlier piece that the owner and my boss, Papa Giovanni Moratti, was a giant asshole but I only really talked about him being the fun kind of asshole like refusing to let uppity customers buy his approval with money. To make things really clear he was a racist homophobic antisemitic womanizer shady businessman kind of asshole too.

That part wasn’t always as fun. If you’ve ever seen The Simpsons episode where an old Italian character says he can’t speak Italian but only broken English that was basically the deal with Papa. I’ve taken Linguistics classes now so I have a better grasp of how language fossilization works – basically when a person acquires a new language as an adult they will hit a point where they stop improving and just mispronounce things and forget words that they need to use all the time forever.

Somewhere along the line he must have forgotten how to speak Italian too because sometimes other Italians would come in and try to speak it with him and he obviously couldn’t. Every week I would help him write down a shopping list and he’d always say to write down “silver things” and I’d tell him it’s aluminum foil and the next week he’d say “silver things” again. He told me to go outside and feed the birds in the same way every day:

“Go feed your bird your pidge.”

Anyway that’s probably enough of his charming and harmless catch phrases. Here’s another thing he was fond of repeating:

“We have three rule here: No Jew. No Black. No Gay.”

Sometimes he would throw something in about how he knew I was Jewish but it was all right because he was teaching me how to be better or some crap like that. I know that sort of thing would probably piss a lot of people off but it’s always been like water off a duck’s back for me. It’s entirely possible that the only reason he hired me in the first place was to get one over on the Jewish owner of the furniture store I’d been working at around the corner.

It is what it is.

Everything about his hole in the wall coffee bar was some kind of flex. He had made a ton of money in the ‘70s and ‘80s with a store down the street that sold cheap Turkish knockoffs of Italian designer goods and now he just wanted to show off, have fun and waste it. When I first started working there the main flex was to make the little patch of sidewalk in front of his shop look as elaborate as possible.

Every day we would drag out a table, some chairs, a few planters, an assortment of statuary and a fully functional stone fountain that we put live goldfish in. They only lived inside a bowl on one of the shelves at night and died a lot because of how much they were constantly moved and handled but he kept buying more. If all of this doesn’t sound preposterous enough the main purpose of this tiny pocket of paradise was to tell 90% of his potential customers that everything was takeout only and they couldn’t sit there and it was “members only”.

I guess it was kind of like the concept of a “spite shop” on Curb Your Enthusiasm except that this spite was directed at the world in general instead of a neighboring business. Not that he didn’t have plenty of spite for a neighboring business. I’ll get to that.

This whole tableaux took us at least an hour to set up every day and another hour to pack back up again and it was heavy and most days nobody was ever allowed to sit there. So one day we are in the midst of either dragging out or packing up the heaviest part, the fountain, and a very Black and very gay man dressed in a speedo and sunglasses comes rollerblading down the sidewalk and does a flawless little twirl in Papa’s face before disappearing around the corner.

Papa wiped the sweat from his forehead with the folded little towel that was always stylishly draped over his shoulder and turns to me and says in a tone of total resignation:

“What can you do?”

I don’t think I actually said it but my immediate thought was “I guess you can tell me what you want to do and I can tell you if you can do it or not.” Anyway I think I have a pretty good idea of the sort of thing he wanted to do and thankfully, he couldn’t do it. Now that I think about it that dismissive twirl must have done a pretty good job deflating him – it wasn’t that long afterwards that the fountain disappeared and his new flex turned into flying in gelato from Italy even though it would have been cheaper and smarter to just make it.

One of the statues that we set up everyday was a cement donkey pointed at a nearby business on the corner of Clark Street to “frighten the Marrochini.” It was a fairly successful French Restaurant owned by a pair of brothers from Morocco and I guess donkeys are some kind of negative stereotype for that country in Italy. He would refer to them as “used donkey salesmen” and spread baseless rumors about the cleanliness of their kitchen to his fan club.

At some point he made up a story that they were coming and peeking through his window at night to try to learn how to emulate Italian cuisine. This was especially laughable because nothing in our shop was even made there with the exception of a couple weeks that he did paninis – everything else was brought in from off site. The Moroccan guys always dressed well and made a point of going out of their way to greet Papa with some well curated polite contempt.

I used to chat with one of the waitresses that worked over there because we both wore white belts. It was pretty trendy in the circa 2000 hardcore landscape but I never saw her at Fireside shows or anything. Papa was obsessed with trying to get us to hook up but it wasn’t really like that. Her name was Sonia.

Playing matchmaker was a thing he was actually pretty obsessed with with his fan club of neighborhood yuppie transplants but I can’t think of any instances where it was actually successful. He had me write up a poster for his imaginary dating service at some point with a lot of coded wording about the “right kind of people” – basically trying to say no Jews and everybody had to be white.

Out of the group of much younger women that he was always trying to set up with his male regulars he arbitrarily decided one was “his” and tried to make a move on her. When she was less than receptive to his advances he quickly turned a cold shoulder and stopped talking to her entirely. That night he loudly complained about the situation:

“All God damn bitches! Papa wants to fuck too!”

The whole referring to himself in the third person thing was especially creepy but he didn’t do it too often. He just wasn’t particularly interested in names. The entire time I worked there he never bothered to learn mine – he either called me “boy” or “Tom Croo” because he thought my unibrow made me look the famous actor whose name he would have been pronouncing if he ever bothered with the final “s”.

She did not take getting kicked out of his imaginary club very well. She showed up the next day crying and begged me to tell her how to get back in his good graces – if she could maybe give him some kind of food or flowers. What could I tell her? You could throw away your dignity and pity fuck an old bald man you aren’t attracted to but I wouldn’t. When somebody tells you who they are what can you do but listen?

My own relationship status and his suspicions surrounding my supposed homosexuality became a bit more of a project for him. For the period of time that I worked there I was in an off and on situation with Robyn but she never came by the shop and he didn’t believe she existed. After his attempts to hook me up with Sonia from the restaurant down the block didn’t pan out he started hiring girls in their late teens or early twenties for the express purpose of trying to get them to sleep with me.

It only happened a couple of times but it was incredibly awkward. He was shamelessly transparent about the whole thing so I’d try to warn my new coworkers about the nature of the situation they had just found themselves in. I just remember the second girl seeming incredibly suspicious and thinking that I was making the whole thing up as a ploy to actually get into her pants. When nothing happened after a couple of days he fired her and said she smelled like marijuana.

Now that I’m typing this part up I’m getting flashbacks of Karen Centerfold in Los Angeles who also had a cartoonishly obvious habit of trying to get random girls to fuck me. I’ll have to write more about Karen somewhere else later but I most remember her yelling:

“You know what the problem with all you stuck up bitches is? You all want to fuck surfers with big dicks but you won’t do it because you’re too scared!”

Once again I wish I could somehow convey the actual voice. I don’t know what it is about me that all these characters seem to make it a personal crusade to get me laid but even my mother had a similar outlook. When I was about ten years old a family with a daughter close to my age from the commune was staying with us and all the grownups somehow thought it was a good idea to have her sleep in my bed with me.

I wasn’t old enough to get an erection or even know what one was but one of my aunts had just remarried and evidently not been very discreet because the next time I saw my cousin she showed me how to play a game called “honeymoon”. Me and the commune girl went through some of the same motions once all the grownups had gone to sleep.

After that my mom would periodically give me random updates about this girl’s life. Last I heard she became a ballet dancer. Hippy families are weird.

Back to Papa’s spot – it was during the time I worked there that I started injecting heroin and eventually cocaine but Papa took all the evidence of a drug problem and explained it away to himself as a “gay problem”. I would roll in looking haggard after a sleepless night, even taking a final shot in a Port-a-Potty a few blocks down the road, and this would be his response the moment he laid eyes on me:

“What’s wrong boy? Partying all night with the happy boys on Broadway?”

His accusation referred to the popular street in Chicago’s Boy’s Town district – coincidentally I had just moved into an apartment there. I wanted to keep my job and figured he wouldn’t take kindly to the actual causes of my current condition so I parroted sarcastic assent:

“You got me Papa, I just can’t resist those gay discos…”

It was around this time that his “private club” started to include a crew of wise guy Italian cops from the neighborhood. They’d hang around the one outside table most nights and he’d give them some food and booze they were perfectly happy to drink on duty. There was a big story in Chicago around that time about a bunch of cocaine mysteriously disappearing from a police evidence locker and for some reason it came up in conversation.

“Yeah! Wanna buy some? Ha ha ha ha!”

Typical Chicago cop humor…

I didn’t live too far away, this was in the Red House near DePaul University era, and I figured it was only a matter of time until one of them recognized me going into Cabrini Greene or something. It either didn’t happen or if they did see me they kept it to themselves. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of them were into the same shit. One night Papa obliviously made the comment:

“Isn’t it great boy? All the cops in the neighborhood know your face now!”

Yeah, just wonderful…

I said before that we didn’t make any food there but around that time we were putting together cannolis. This fat cop that the other one’s called Shrek, the first movie had just come out, was always asking me for them:

“You want a cannoli huh? How about I bring you the one with a big fat red strawberry on the end? You want me to dip it in chocolate for you?”

We did in fact have cannolis with strawberries on the end that were dipped in chocolate but I was taking advantage of an opportunity to make stupid jokes about sodomizing him and getting him to perform fellatio on me. In my defense it was a reversal of the usual power dynamic where I was constantly getting harassed by different Chicago cops in my other life as an injection drug user. The other cops were happy for any opportunity to make Shrek the butt of a joke and he licked his lips and clowned it up the way submissive abused Chicago cops always seem to.

Papa was very particular about the coffee we’d be willing to make for anybody. We did straight espressos and cappuccinos or macchiatos but if anyone dared to ask for an americano he’d yell at them to “go to Sewerbucks!”. One afternoon somebody must have asked him for some kind of vanilla something because the moment I walked in he was excited for me to make a coffee menu for the window that listed “Café Milanesi Finnochio”

It basically translates to “faggot coffee of Milan”. His big plan was that if anybody else ever asked for some kind of flavored coffee beverage we were supposed to point to this item on the menu and make them order it by name. He even bought some kind of CostCo vanilla cappuccino mix to complete his little joke. It never actually happened.

I’ve covered him being all the different kind of assholes I listed earlier except for the shady businessman one. He had a refrigerator full of cans of Sprite and one day somebody looked at the bottom of a can and noticed it was expired. You’d think he would have just thrown the rest of them away because we had plenty of orange and lemon San Pellegrino but that’s not what he did.

He had me fill a sink with hot water and soak all the cans of soda in it so I could scrub away the expiration dates with steel wool. Soaking the Sprites in scalding water probably did more to mess up the flavor then the expiration part but it mostly seemed pointless because hardly anyone ever asked for it to begin with. He pointed to the printed expiration dates:

“Just for decoration anyway…”

It was his little phrase he’d use any time he thought he was being sneaky. He said the exact same thing when he had me write out a paper that said “I am responsible for paying my own tax” because the job was under the table. Maybe he’d gotten caught up in some kind of situation with tax evasion in the past but it was never an issue when I worked there – the cops were in our pocket.

The bigger thing was that he constantly and carelessly lied about the nature of the food he sold and where it had come from:

“Everything made fresh today!”

“Everything 100% fat free sugar free!”

Neither of these things were true for anything except for maybe a shot of espresso. He would get cookies delivered from some bakery that would sit in the pastry case for weeks until he’d sold them all. Frozen pasta entrees sat in freezers for months. The pizzas and focaccias were delivered on a daily basis so at least the fresh part was true for those.

We’d get diabetics who were excited about the sugar thing and I’d have to wait until he was out of earshot to tell them that of course it wasn’t true and honestly you couldn’t trust a word out of his mouth. With all of these lies it would have made perfect sense for him to be lying about the gelato being flown in from Italy but that part was actually true. I saw the weird frozen customs cases it came in.

Like I said everything with him was a flex. He liked lying about where various things around the shop had come from too.

“This was Al Capone’s Espresso Machine!”

“This was Mussolini’s bicycle!”

Really pointless little lies. He’d tell his fan club we had a hot tub on the roof and some of them seemed to believe it.

Besides the Marrochini thing I didn’t see too much of him being racist right to people’s faces but this was probably because the Black folks in the neighborhood had already had bad interactions with him and kept their distance. There is a story on Yelp! about a family realizing that the reason he wouldn’t sell them gelato was because they weren’t white. He didn’t outright turn away nonwhite customers for to go orders when I worked there – he’d just say “your department” and have me wait on them.

Honestly things weren’t too different at the furniture store. Besides Yvonne, who was Black herself, most of my coworkers there would blatantly ignore Black customers and pretend they didn’t exist. In a city like Chicago you would almost say Papa’s candid honesty was refreshing but then there was the thing he yelled at the television during a Michael Jordan interview:

“God damn black gorilla! I hate!”

I was getting sloppier from the drugs so eventually he fired me. I forget what specific thing set him off but he shook his finger at me and bellowed in rage:

“Number one you punk! Number two you Jew! Number three you gay!”

At least he got two out of three. It was fun while it lasted. I assume he’s probably dead by now.

San Diego 2002 : “Watch your tongue you Terran Dog!”

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I’ve been touching on a handful of different parties, observances and festivals here – mostly aligned with experimental music on some level. You’ve got BitchPork, Voices of the Valley, Burning Fleshtival, International Noise Conference, The Wheel and Babylon Bazaar in Maine and of course the Mojave Raves. Then there is Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Mummer’s Parade in Philadelphia and celebrating New Year’s Eve in Slab City – the only one of these that blurs the line between calendar holidays and alternative music festivals.

For me and most of my friends from San Diego there was another annual observance that had almost nothing to do with underground music but played a more formative role in nearly all of our lives: The San Diego Comic Con.

It took me much longer to get into Rock and Roll, or any aggressive music, but comic books were exciting for as far back as I remember seeing them. I wasn’t interested in my older brother and his friends’ hair metal records but any comics they might have had were a different story. It must have been at least 1992 when I stumbled onto an issue of the Frank Miller reboot of Rust but I couldn’t have been older than third grade when I found a copy of Marvel’s promotional monthly Marvel Age with a picture of the mid ‘80s X-Men team.

Before this point I would pick out back issues of Power Pack and The Eternals on trips to the comic shop but once I saw the tiny picture of Nightcrawler I was obsessed. I think it was the visual style of the whole team at this point but something about his design and costume really spoke to me even if though I initially thought he was holding a whip when I saw his tail. I think I just had a thing for big, puffy shoulders but not in a football player or Rob Liefeld Cable sense – I liked his unconventional silhouette and leaner gymnast’s build.

When I did the thing in third grade that I think a lot of kids do, meeting up with the other comic nerds and designing endless costumed heroes and villains, I created a team called The Blue Dudes where everybody looked like Nightcrawler with blue skin, yellow eyes and pointed ears. This piece would probably get boring if I spent the entire time listing my favorite comics but besides older The Uncanny X-Men issues my favorite thing to get was a book called Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Update ‘89 – it was an illustrated encyclopedia with full page pictures of all the characters and background information on them in alphabetical order.

The first time I got to go to Comic Con was in 1992 when I was twelve years old. My dad took me for a single day with my best friend Jason. I remember the year because the freebie items were still really good in the early ‘90s and they were giving out tons of stuff to promote the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula – comic books, posters, pins, trading cards and probably some other stuff I don’t remember.

The band Green Jellö also had a booth that year – it was set up like a cool punk house living room with couches and upholstered armchairs pointed at a big TV playing a loop of their music videos. It was probably the most popular thing in the convention with our demographic, eleven to fifteen year old boys, though I didn’t see many adults taking interest. They were handing out free cassettes of their songs and considering the track Shitman had the word “shit” in it and House Me Teenage Rave was full of simulated sex sounds it all seemed badass to us.

I might have paid one more year but it seems just as likely that by 1993 I was hooked up with the programming office to start volunteering. My sister found the connections for this at her Performing Arts High School – we would get a free four day pass for helping out with the different events in the upstairs conference rooms. The only thing I really remember is delivering a bunch of pencils to a figure drawing lesson that the guy who made Lady Rawhide was giving. There wasn’t a model or anything – it was a lesson on drawing unrealistic female bodies from your own imagination.

I do remember a story that my sister and some other volunteers were helping with a Steven Seagal panel and he made them all leave the room while he changed his shirt. They complained about how ridiculous this was considering how often he is shirtless onscreen but he was probably just a little out of shape between movies and didn’t want anyone to see.

The next few years were really the golden age of the San Diego Comic Con, it had gotten big enough to feel like you were living in a temporary city that was only populated by other comic book geeks but it wasn’t so big as to be overcrowded and unmanageable yet. It was also still mainly about comic books instead of television shows and movies because there wasn’t as much superhero/sci-fi/fantasy stuff being made in those years. Every year a few movies were being heavily promoted but nothing like it is now.

We were all into staying at or around the con for the entirety of all four days. On Friday and Saturday the screening rooms that showed anime and old shows and movies were open until three in the morning and there was a big room on top of the Hyatt called the Hospitality Suite where they put out free sodas, chips and candy. There was a decent amount of night time programming like the Masquerade, the Eisner Awards and a big dance party but we also just loved running around downtown San Diego.

The Gaslamp Quarter revitalization had started but there was still plenty of urban blight and the center city could be nearly deserted at night. That was how we liked it – we would explore empty buildings and sneak into parts of the Convention Center and surrounding hotels that we weren’t supposed to be in. My favorite spot was opening an access door to a section of the ventilation system from the mezzanine. If you’ve ever been in the San Diego Convention Center this was just on the other side of the big blue tubes that stick out of the wall in the main hall.

I would always dream up pranks like getting a box of bouncy balls and throwing them over the main hall from the giant tubes but never actually did any of them. At fifteen years old just sneaking into all these secret nooks and crannies felt devious enough. I would bring friends from my High School and show them around all of these little spots when the Convention wasn’t happening also. Once me and my friend Brandi from The Singles managed to get inside between events and spend a few minutes roller skating the giant empty concrete slab of the main hall before somebody kicked us out.

On top of all this the late ‘90s was just a great time for comic books. There was a little bit of a “black and white explosion” going on but it felt more creative and less formulaic than the one that had followed the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Slave Labor Graphics was booming – Evan Dorkin’s Milk and Cheese had hints of the third wave ska culture we were all into, Jhonen Vasquez was just starting his goth classic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and I got super obsessed with this comic Hairbat that never got a second issue.

Francois was making an independent fanzine called The Comics Review and I got to tag along with him while he interviewed Paul Pope from THB and Stan Sakai from Usagi Yojimbo. Wendy and Richard Pini were reprinting all of their hard to find Elfquest books and had just started up Warp Graphics that eventually spread the franchise too thin but it started out strong. Vertigo was still putting out stuff we liked and Sam Keith’s The Maxx was a cartoon on MTV and we were teenagers and lots of cool comics were coming out – Bone, Stray Bullets, Beanworld, I could list things off all day.

I used to bring a white t-shirt and embroidery hoop to the Con and get all my favorite artists to sign and draw sketches on it. The hoop allowed me to pull the fabric taut in small sections at a time so it was almost as easy to draw on as a flat piece of paper. In the year that Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean were promoting the book Mr. Punch, Neil drew a quick portrait of the titular character that he seemed to think came out a lot better than his drawings usually did. Looking at other sketches of his online I’m inclined to agree but my mother washed the shirt behind my back and he was the only person that neglected to use a waterproof marker.

It’s possible that I made it to every single Comic Con from 1992 to 2006 but I remember 2002 as a year of big changes. I had always attended the festival as a straight edge teenage geek but this was my first time in full partying drinking and hard drugs mode. Me and all my friends had a tradition of gravitating toward the big “C” outside the Convention Center when we were looking for people to hang out with. This is where this picture would have been taken but it isn’t from 2002 – it might be 2003 or 2004.

I am holding a plastic pineapple which despite being completely obvious allowed me to constantly drink in public without attracting any negative attention.

I didn’t get into it until I moved back in 2001 but another thing that went through a “golden era” in late ‘90s San Diego was street drugs. Methamphetamine hadn’t become as ubiquitous as it is now, although there was plenty of it around, and all the Mexican heroin dealers still sold tiny bags of near pure cocaine for shooting speedballs. For those readers who haven’t tried it an intravenous shot of cocaine delivers an intense euphoric rush where time seems to stop for a moment then all sounds take on a metallic echo like they were being processed through a flange pedal.

I wouldn’t recommend it and I’ll most likely never do it again but it was a ton of fun in my early twenties. Especially coming from Chicago where the only thing available was crack and I had to cook it down with lemon juice, having constant access to cocaine so pure it would dissolve the moment it touched water and you could taste it in the back of your throat like silver was certainly an experience.

I would have either made myself a counterfeit pass or asked people that were leaving if I could have theirs – this actually was a solid method of getting one in the early aughts but the last time I tried around 2014 or so it was nearly impossible. Anyway I spent at least as much time chasing down drugs and alcohol as I did at the actual convention this year if not more.

The thing about injecting cocaine, with or without heroin, is that it makes you really want to inject more cocaine soon afterwards so I would have been spending a lot of time in the bathrooms. This is what I clearly remember: arriving early one day and riding the escalators to the upper floors to slam a speedball in a toilet stall. Still rushing I wander into a panel for the new Muppet movie Kermit’s Swamp Years and pop open a tall can of Steel Reserve. The first sip, combined with lingering nausea from the intravenous cocaine, causes me to rush over to the trash can and loudly vomit into it.

I get kicked out of the Muppet panel.

Over the years a list of “must see” panels and presentations started to grow as people from our friend group showed each other their favorite bits of scheduled programming. One of these was called Starship Smackdown and it was basically a fantasy league tournament for imaginary dogfights between space crafts from a range of sci-fi books, shows, comic books and movies. A rotating cast of moderators wrote the names on a dry erase board and presided over a group discussion of who would win each matchup until there was a single champion.

To give a very general idea it would be stuff like the Winnebago from Space Balls going head to head with the actual Millennium Falcoln from Star Wars.

Another popular one was called the Klingon Lifestyles Presentation – a group of cosplayers that created a community theater troupe around the fictional Star Trek race. The sci-fi and fantasy landscape was especially lacking in diverse characters at the turn of the millennium but Klingons offered a way for Black and mixed race fans to depict a group of characters that were faithful to the source material. They wore the costumes and forehead prosthetics of the version that started with Star Trek: The Next Generation and created a fictional ship for all these scenes to play out on called the VSS Stranglehold.

On this particular year I would have been fairly drunk and fucked up on drugs by the time this performance was happening. I noticed a couple of young teenage girls in full Klingon getup and made a crude joke:

“Check out the Klingon jailbait!”

One of the older cast members, quite likely an uncle or even father, pointed his blaster pistol at me in what seemed like genuine anger:

“Watch your tongue you Terran Dog!”

I was impressed by his ability to chastise me without ever breaking character.

I’ve mostly been writing about getting drunk and high and being an asshole but there was definitely a lot going on with comics this year that was exciting as well. A lot of the Fort Thunder artists wouldn’t be published on anything with an ISBN number for a couple more years but there was a lot more awareness of their work and screen printed mini comics, posters and calendars were starting to pop up in places like the Giant Robot booth. Highwater Books had been publishing stuff from some Fort-adjacent artists with more of a twee style: Ron Regé Jr., James Kochalka and Jordan Crane.

I’m not 100% sure but I think 2002 was the year that Paper Rad sent out the “peace envelope”. I don’t know if there is an official name for this object but it was a folio size Manila envelope that was spray painted with stencils of hearts and peace signs and probably some other things I forget. It was filled with a selection of zines and mini comics in a wide variety of sizes and colors – stuff from the members of Paper Rad, Dearraindrop and I think CF and Keith Waters, though I might be wrong on those last two.

As far as I know these weren’t available for sale anywhere but had been sent out with a friend in the underground comics scene to be passed out to mutual acquaintances. I know that I got mine when I passed by a booth like Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly and somebody recognized me and grabbed me one from under the counter – not that there would have been any popular demand for their work at this point. As always if anybody reading knows anything more about the object I’m referring to I’d love to hear it.

The most exciting new discovery for me at the 2002 Comic Con was definitely Junko Mizuno and her Cinderella paper back. Her drawing style is generally referred to as “gothic kawaii” but beyond the dark and erotic elements my favorite part was the way her work synthesized the aesthetics of vintage Sanrio, Strawberry Shortcake and the entire spectrum of consumer goods that were marketed to adolescent girls in the ‘70s and ‘80s. In a rare situation the English language release of Cinderella is actually more definitive than the original Japanese one because Mizuno got to have greater control of the colors and printing style – she went for newsprint and four color process for a vintage Western comic book feel.

I was going through a bit of an obsession with the aesthetics of cuteness myself – collecting all of the vintage Lisa Frank gear I could find and hunting for pink and purple apparel with images of unicorns. It’s been crazy watching the proliferation of unicorns and rainbows on every product imaginable in the last few years because in 2002 that kind of stuff was not easy to find.

My outfit for that year’s Comic Con was a white hospital gown layered with a reproduced unicorn tapestry, brightly colored scraps of tie dye and hand sewn prayer flags in a psychedelic style. My friend Joy had given me a single arm guard from a Rainbow Brite costume and I safety pinned on some of the plastic jewelry that came with the same Glitterator that had filled me with anti-Christmas angst as an adolescent.

The things that made Comic Con exciting in the early aughts were a little different from the things that made it exciting in the ‘90s and every year it felt a bit more commercial and mainstream. The last time I went was with LaPorsha in 2014 or so. It was a lot harder to bum passes and the Convention Center had not only been expanded but a special section was added with promotional inflatable funhouses for Adult Swim and The Smurfs movie. We had a good time and ran into Jesse Camp but a lot of the old magic seemed to be gone.

Still I was surprised to learn that things like the Klingon Lifestyles Presentation are still happening every year. It wouldn’t be this one but some year in July I just might make it down to San Diego to check it out again.

If I ever make it look for me under the big “C” where the cars pass in front of the Convention Center.

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New York 2010 : “Play Something Slow And Sexy”

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This is going to sound egregiously reductive, mostly because it is egregiously reductive, but all of the Russian girls I’ve met have fallen into two categories. There’s the fresh faced wide eyed with wonder perpetually innocent summer’s child type: these tend to be Yanas and Lanas. The second type are the world weary won’t get fooled again wistfully smoking a cigarette while sitting on the edge of the bed winter’s child type: I can’t remember the names of the ones I’ve met like this but I instinctively want to say Tatianas.

These are very broad generalizations based on first impressions where in most cases I didn’t get to know these women super well but it did seem to be a pattern. It certainly wasn’t a preconceived notion I started with and projected onto the Russian women that I met – it was a thing I noticed over time. I suppose it’s possible that they all roughly start as the first type and move toward the second depending on life experiences but I don’t see it that way: the type ones I’ve known didn’t seem to lead completely charmed lives and the type twos seemed like they had similar personalities as children.

It should go without saying that obviously there are many, many more types of Russian girls and women – I just haven’t met them.

As her name would suggest, Yana was one of the first type of Russian girls I described. I first met her when I went to New Orleans for Halloween in 2008. New Orleans was still a very different city from what it’s like now in that year. It had been three years since Hurricane Katrina and the Military Police, or MPs, were still handling a lot of law enforcement. The spray paint marks of the rescue workers were still fresh on the buildings in affected areas and it wasn’t uncommon to see blocks where ruined buildings vastly outnumbered those in any stage of restoration where the flood had hit hardest.

Rebuilding as a concept had not yet come to represent gentrification and displacement.

I’ve been to a handful of Mardi Gras celebrations in the city, sometimes for the entire season and sometimes for just the last few days, but this was my only New Orleans Halloween. Maybe it’s that all of the festivities are packed into a single weekend or so instead of a longer season but it definitely felt like things had a harder, darker edge. It could have something to do with the academic calendars of the surrounding colleges and universities.

Frenchmen Street in particular had a younger crowd and almost Woodstock ‘99 vibe. I remember joking at the time about how much I enjoyed seeing angry people in costumes and that if none were available it was easy enough to make some. On Frenchmen Street it didn’t require any particular intervention. A quick scan of the busiest intersection revealed a caveman with a giant plastic club screaming at his girlfriend in a blind rage and a group of Medieval princesses giving courtly waves after one of them projectile vomited from a taxi window.

A strong thread connected New Orleans and the people who had been on board The Miss Rockaway Armada in 2008 and I generally connected with and spent time with people from the project when in the city. It was Lisers who plucked Yana from a crowd and introduced her to the rest of the group. At the time she wore blocky glasses, had dark hair with severe bangs and the same infectious smile that helped me recognize her in more recent photos where the first two features were gone.

She carried the kind of large black camera that signifies somebody is trying to get serious about photography – the super youthful kind if you know what I mean by that. I want to say Minolta because that’s what they gave us is Sixth Grade Photography but in reality it was probably a Canon or Leica. I’m not the guy to take a lot of pictures or know much about cameras, hence the thing you’re reading and, at the time of writing, the hundred or so pieces like it.

I showed Yana around New Orleans a bit and brought her to Termite and Vine with the promise that it was populated with besprizornye. It’s a Soviet era word for orphaned children that supposedly lived in Dickensian underground societies – I would have learned it from a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I don’t know if anyone who lived at Termite that year was an actual orphan but the house was a hotbed of the kind of train rider and jug band informed fashion that was in a special vogue those years.

Yana and I stuck around town at least until November Fifth when Drew celebrated his birthday in a bar at the edge of the Bywater I’m going to guess doesn’t exist anymore. The night ended up being especially celebratory because Barack Obama’s first presidential victory was announced. New Orleans responded to this news with a level of general public jubilation that I didn’t see again until The Saints won the Super Bowl in 2010.

What this looked like on the ground was every person who was out in public shaking every other person they came into contact with in genuine excitement and every person that was driving a vehicle leaning on the horn and out the window to high five all of the passing pedestrians. I’m sure the city has it’s share of staunch Republicans and at least more than zero Colts fans but in each of these situations they must have stayed home. I certainly never saw a single human being that wasn’t over the moon about these happenings.

I think the next time I would have seen Yana was back in New Orleans for the 2009 Mardi Gras season. She had just come from Washington D.C. where she had gone to see the historic inauguration first hand. I don’t know if every Russian who learns English as a second language mispronounces certain diphthongs the same way but every time she shared this piece of information it caused every person in earshot to laugh uncontrollably.

The same pun made by a person with actual racist intent wouldn’t have been particularly funny but combined with Yana’s constant wide eyed innocence it was a winner. I have to take full accountability for my role in maneuvering to cause her to repeat this word in front of as many people as possible while leaving her in the dark about what everyone was finding funny about it. I don’t know if somebody else told her, she figured it out for herself or she was just reacting to the obvious energy that she was being made a figure of fun but she started responding with wounded indignance:

“No, Ossian!”

This is another one of those situations where I wish this was in an auditory format because none of this is going to be as funny without her actual voice or accent and the pouting expression she made. On the very slim chance that anybody didn’t get what the original joke was it was that she was accidentally saying a word that rhymes with the one before “of fun” in the previous paragraph every time she said inauguration. It definitely helped the humor of the situation that everything about Yana was as cute as pajamas on a ladybug.

The next couple times I saw her she was living on the edge of Williamsburg in New York City. She snuck me in to crash at a famous butoh studio she was living and studying at when I was in town around New Year’s Eve and didn’t have anywhere else to go. The next morning we were walking to the train when I happened to look down and find a mysterious baggie of white powder lying in the snow.

Yana certainly wasn’t into that and I hadn’t been using drugs much that year except for psychedelics and pharmaceuticals. This discovery wasn’t actually that far from where I had tried cocaine for the first time with the intention of it being a gateway drug at the legendary Kokie’s Place. I never actually liked the drug that much if I wasn’t injecting or smoking it – without a rush the effects are nothing to write home about.

Still there’s something about found drugs that makes you feel like you have to do them and I wasn’t about to sketch out any of the people I was staying with by searching for needles or attempting to cook up freebase. I don’t know how I decided on The Cloisters as the place to get geeked out but it did feel appropriate. It definitely wasn’t for any historical significance because outside of some questionable analyses of almost certainly cross contaminated mummies it is extremely well established that the substance would have been completely unknown in the era of the exhibited artifacts.

Still the cold weather, drafty flagstone walls and unicorn tapestries I’d been waiting to see my entire life seemed to pair well with whatever I was stuffing up my nose. I had been growing my fingernails out in the interest of dressing like a witch so pinky nail bumps held as much if not more than any key. Discreetly ducking behind interesting helmets and ornamental serving dishes to take them was an adventure in itself.

I never put it on a scale but I must have found at least a gram and I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t really like the stuff. The whole Cloisters thing was fun but there was no way I was going to do all of it. It would have been pure insanity to smuggle it onto a plane but I also couldn’t bring myself to just throw it away. I went to a lot of different cities and stayed with a lot of different people on this East Coast visit so I’m struggling to remember who I finished it off with.

I want to say that it was either a brother and sister or a male/female couple and they were kind of square. Now that I’m wracking my brain about it I realize that I may be transposing another memory about randomly finding cocaine on the ground in Oakland during the OCCUPY! protests. Maybe somebody reading this will remember me uncharacteristically offering them powdered cocaine somewhere in the North East in early January of 2010.

It doesn’t matter to the larger story, if there can even be said to be one, in the least but little details like this are among my favorite parts of this whole thing. I couldn’t make them up.

The last time I remember seeing Yana she had helped set up a show for me at a warehouse/loft space down the street from her butoh studio. This space felt like it could have existed on a show like Friends – it wasn’t decorated too differently from spaces me and my friends had lived in, with things like painted pieces of mannequins, but something about the energy was painfully generic.

The people who lived there were like hippies who are into circus aesthetics and electronic dance music – basically what I’d call burners. I don’t know if any of the kids who lived there actually went to Burning Man but they definitely seemed like they thought Burning Man was cool. There’s a lot of rave hippy types that I wrote off as burners when I first encountered them only to discover that they were actually cooler than burners. The SPAZ, Katabatik and Mutant Fest crews immediately come to mind.

Being a burner isn’t the worst thing in the world.

This would have been on the U.S. Tour where Teen Suicide changed their name to Generation and I’m pretty sure we were traveling with Forced Into Femininity. We had been through a veritable tasting flight of artistically trying scenarios at this point: a party in Denver, Colorado where a recently arrived freight rider free style rapped over Rain’s set about how much cocaine he was on; a generator show in Ann Arbor, Michigan where they said we could jump the bill but then refused to let me turn up my drum machine to even half the volume of my screaming voice without a microphone, or the ambient noise of the generator at that, in fear that the show would get broken up before the “real bands” with drummers played; a failed festival outside of Detroit where we were going to play on a bicycle powered stage with recycling themed clowns but jumped to one of the main stages because all of the big name artists were abandoning ship with the revelation that they weren’t getting paid.

Or actually I’m second guessing myself as to whether this was on that Summer tour or if it had been earlier during my January trip. I know that other people besides me were supposed to play this show and I don’t remember it being the acoustic singer-songwriter girls I was touring the North East with that January. I guess it really doesn’t matter in terms of the things that I want to say about this show.

The people who lived at this space had a somewhat unconventional idea of what agreeing to host a show means or maybe there had been a bit of a language barrier when Yana had set it up with them. They thought it would be more like a rave and when it was nothing like a rave they insisted that the people who had been scheduled to play stop playing so that their housemate could DJ some more rave-appropriate music. It’s killing me that I can’t clearly remember who all else I was playing with but I do remember this back and forth conflict between live acts and the hosts just DJing building up as the night progressed.

In the course of doing Bleak End at Bernie’s I learned that I seemed to put on the best performances when the crowd, to some degree at least, liked what I was doing and I, to some degree at least, hated them. There was something like a feedback mechanism involved: nearly all of my songs were rooted in feelings of anger, disappointment and disgust and having real time stimuli that helped me tap into those feelings led to a more genuine and compelling performance.

I don’t know if it was because she saw my drum machine or just a coincidence in terms of timing but just as I was taking the stage one of the girls who lived at the venue stepped in front of me in a burlesque costume holding a hula hoop. She glanced back at me over her shoulder:

“Play something slow and sexy.”

I can’t remember which one of my songs I started with but only one of them could be said to fit those parameters and it wasn’t that one.

I gathered my hatred, cranked up the drum machine and started to scream…

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San Diego 2000 : “I Put That Baby Where The Sun Don’t Shine”

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Writing all of this stuff out has done wonders for my memory. There is a borderline magical concept in the book Little Big by John Crowley called a “memory mansion”. The idea is that if you visualize your memories as an imaginary structure of some kind it will help you retain memories, make hitherto unseen connections, bring back forgotten details and even do a bit of divination – like if two walls are actual memories but the corner where they meet is something you’ve never experienced or been aware of you will acquire a sense of this thing because there needs to be a corner there.

I’ve never consciously attempted this but I did read the novel very young and several more times in the intervening years. I think my memory just kind of works in a similar fashion naturally – maybe everybody’s does, I’ve never actually lived in another person’s head. I’ll be looking for some music to play on a road trip and suddenly remember seeing an ad for the Lida Husik album Fly Stereophonic in this free electronica and rave culture magazine called Sweater way back in High School. We didn’t end up actually liking that album for that drive right then but her earlier one Bozo turned out to complement the empty Northern California streets perfectly.

Anyway in one of my earlier pieces I only vaguely recalled the timeline of when I started drinking alcohol but after spending so much time focusing on that era it has returned in perfect focus. It was Summer of 1999 and me and Francois had just driven to Chicago with this guy Andy Robillard we had met in the Balboa Park pickup soccer games arranged by Pall Jenkins from Three Mile Pilot. We had moved into an empty room with Brandi and her goth roommate at the time Kelly.

This girl Shana who lived on the other side of the brick building was having a Rock Star themed party. Her apartment was accessed through a different door and staircase from California Avenue but around the back by the El tracks the wooden porches were all connected. I had a huge crush on Shana and didn’t bother to hide it to the chagrin of her boyfriend who made enhanced CD multimedia content for bands like Cheap Trick and gave me my first stick and poke tattoo. It’s a bad habit of mine – at least I’m married now so whatever little flirting I still do has a safety on it.

I had decided that this party would be my first time getting drunk. Francois had put on loose camo pants and done heavy makeup to go as Maxim Reality from the Prodigy Breathe video. I was Iggy Pop – I had one of those platinum blonde ‘80s rocker wigs and was super proud that I could squeeze into Kelly’s black vinyl pants. She had a medical condition that prevented her from developing any real fat or muscle tissue and weighed less than a hundred pounds. I had gone through a patch of manorexia – I weighed 150 pounds when I was 14 and always wanted to get back to that number (I never actually did) and shaved all my body hair for a bit. I guess most guys look forward to puberty but I wasn’t having it.

I think I probably ended up drinking Bacardi and Coke but the more memorable part was that I ended up making out with a girl called Fashion Julie who went to the Art Institute. Outside of a brief relationship (2 months 14 days) when I was 15 romance had been a dead end for me. I was too socially awkward and didn’t have the confidence to ever make a move. I noticed immediately that alcohol seemed to solve that problem although it wasn’t exactly reliable.

She told me that she was into the rave scene. I invited her on a date to go see either Physics or Aspects of Physics at the Fireside, I thought the music would be somewhat similar to what she was into but it wasn’t at all. She invited me to a Rave at a closed down Roller Rink on the far South Side. Delta 9 was performing with a trumpet player and looped projections of exploding robots from Sci-Fi movies. She started making out with some guy who gave her ecstasy. He was going to give her a ride back to her dorm in the Loop, I tried to get her to convince him to drop me off at the Blue Line on the way but he wasn’t having it. The rave ended and I walked the streets until the trains I needed started up again.

Anyway the fact that I was no longer a complete teetotaler shaped my experience back in San Diego for the Summer of 2000 in numerous ways. First off there was a girl in town who had had a crush on me for several years but I always insisted was too young – a glasses and pixie bob solve mysteries and babysit type. She had just graduated from High School so I decided the age gap was doable now and started seeing her. I shouldn’t have – I wasn’t totally comfortable with her youth so I refused to remove any clothes while we were making out. We always ended up in a reverse John and Yoko – she was naked but I’d be fully clothed.

Eventually I noticed that this guy in the indie pop circuit seemed like he was actually in love with her so I told him that they should be together instead. He got mad and told me that that was disrespectful, I popped a switchblade on him and made vague threats because I thought it was funny. She broke up with me over the phone when I got to Chicago and they’ve been pretty much married ever since and have kids. My instincts seem to have been more or less correct but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t being an asshole and shouldn’t have played with her heart like that.

I also started spending a lot of time and generally behaving like a pirate with my friends Badger and Ben Jovi. They had gotten into a thing they called “Chicken Burrito Madness” where they would shoplift an entire shopping cart full of fancy food and expensive liquor. I was supposed to run distraction most of the time – Badger told me to drop a giant jar of pickles but I found that asking for help finding obscure vegetarian or ethnic products seemed to do the trick better. We would get drunk, cook fancy steaks poorly and end up sword fighting on an almost daily basis. I remember going to visit my teenage girlfriend at a friend’s house and them insisting that they hosed me down before I could come inside.

Badger had been dating this girl named Martina for a few years. Leather hat, summer dresses and pickup truck with a dog kind of girl; she looked like the sort of woman that Lee Hazlewood would record an album in Scandinavia with. She had this “I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers” kind of vibe where she would play up being small and helpless to get men to help her with things. Or maybe that was specific to me and my friend Paul – I never did see her doing it with anyone else.

Anyhow she had somehow ended up owning a tiny houseboat in the Point Loma Marina and had convinced me and Paul to help row her out to it. She didn’t actually own a dinghy but she seemed extremely confident that nobody would mind if we borrowed one from the spot where everybody kept their dinghies. Me and Paul were less convinced but she could be very persuasive so we bent our backs and rowed her out to her slip.

There were four abnormally large dried out sea horses sitting on her boat when we got there. She said they hadn’t been there the last time she’d stepped aboard so we figured maybe a cormorant or other aquatic bird species had dropped them. Like they grabbed the sea horses when they see a flash of movement but realize it’s an unappetizing ridge-y mess of bone or cartilage once they get out of the water and drop it. I don’t know though – they looked like the kind of thing you would buy at a beachcomber shells and souvenirs store and they seemed so much bigger than they should have been.

Boats are weird – there’s nothing really at deck level and you have to go kind of down and in to get to the part you would usually live in. Martina lit a candle and I looked around a little bit, it seemed to only really be big enough to fit a mattress into. I’m really tall also, 6 feet and 5 inches so it’s not the kind of space I can ever really be comfortable in. We heard a bit of commotion above decks and had to come out to figure out what was going on.

Apparently somebody had tried to go home to their houseboat only to discover that some unknown ne’er-do-wells had absconded with their only dinghy effectively trapping them onshore. The man had found a neighbor to take him around to all the different slips to discover who had made off with his property. Martina maintained that it was no big deal which did very little to placate him. He had the beard and bald spot hairstyle of Will Oldham but it wasn’t red and he was a bit on the older side. He made a few thinly veiled threats:

“Your boat could come untied and drift into someone else’s creating a lot of damage that you would be liable for legally. These things happen out here!”

Him and his less irritated neighbor talked about tipping us over or just leaving us stranded on Martina’s boat but the other guy’s demeanor pretty much gave away that none of that would be actually happening. They deposited us back on the docks because anything else could become another headache for them later and rowed away with a stern warning to not be helping ourselves to anymore unlocked dinghies. I don’t think Martina lived out there for very much longer – the boat was in pretty bad shape anyway. She stopped renting it or sold it to somebody else or it just sunk and she walked away from it.

A little bit later her and Badger were living in Encanto – a hilly low income and mostly Black neighborhood along the 94, the then youngest of San Diego’s freeways. One day she asked me if I would dig a hole for her and I actually love digging holes. She drove us in her pickup truck to a bit of no-man’s-land where I dug a decent one at the base of a gigantic white and black eucalyptus tree. She deposited a small red velvet pouch and I asked her what was in it and she said “Badger’s Soul”.

I figured that it was probably drugs or an old love poem he had written or some other kind of sentimental knick-knack. I was musing about the question aloud in the presence of Lil Four one day and she stared at me in shocked disbelief:

“You don’t know what was in there!? Everybody knows what was in there! It’s Martina’s fucking miscarried fetus! She was keeping it in the freezer and talking to it and shit!”

The revelation changed me. Ever since I’ve felt naturally drawn to some kind of combined psychopomp and gravedigger role. On some level I am just okay with people dying. When both of my parents passed I felt like it was my responsibility out of all my siblings to give them permission, to tell them it was okay and that nobody has to live forever. In my father’s case I had moved back in for a few months to help out as a caregiver and explicitly asked him if he had any fears or regrets the night before his final morning:

“No, I’ve had a pretty good life and I’m all paid up for a bed burning.”

That last bit means that he had already contracted somebody for cremation services and paid in advance so we wouldn’t have to figure that out in the midst of morning. He was thoughtful like that.

There’s a Tom Waits song where he says “and I sleep with my shovel and my leather gloves” and a noise track called Shoveler’s Void on a cassette album by an outfit called Wretched Worst – those two do a decent job of summing up how I feel about the whole thing. I think it was part of my temperament and destiny even before this incident. In High School English class I animated the entire gravedigger scene from Hamlet and provided all of the voices.

I’m not sure if I’ve gone into it too much in any of these stories but I’m a rapper. I started in sixth grade when I wrote a rap song for my classes D.A.R.E. presentation but a super religious girl went home and told her parents about it who called the school and said they weren’t comfortable with their daughter rapping so my class had to do something else. This is the sort of thing I can barely believe actually happened but it did. The song was extremely wholesome:

“Each day on the streets another life is ended. This could be stopped if these people were defended. If they knew what to do in this kind of situation. That’s why there’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education!”

Now that it’s all typed up I’m sort of bitter about it. It’s super catchy and extremely earnest sounding – my class should have blown away the assembly audience and then gone on to perform my piece at other schools and national conferences and shit. I’m sure that would have happened if not for that girl’s rap hating parents.

Anyway I was in a couple of ‘80s style party rap groups with two other women both times. I entered a Freestyle Rap Battle at City College and got second place but it actually wasn’t fair because the tagger crew that worked at Pokez started beefing with a rival crew and knocked over a lemonade cart giving my opponent almost 15 minutes to compose his riposte. Even though I was in second place they put a full color photo of me on the cover of the next City College newspaper and a tiny black & white one of the kid who beat me on page 8. The caption said “Nope! It’s not a protest!” because I guess I didn’t look how rappers were expected to look like in 2005.

Some people think Bleak End at Bernie’s is rap but it’s not. It’s Industrial.

So it’s Summer of 2000 and I’m at a party with Badger and Ben Jovi. It was at this kid Jon’s house who went to my High School and his parents were well-to-do College Professors and had a nice place by SDSU. I can’t remember his last name but I think it was hyphenated. Him and his best friend Ramon were really into The Beastie Boys and skateboarding and that sort of thing. There was a very classic DJ setup that Jon was spinning from – “two turntables and a microphone” like the popular Beck song.

Badger was trying to get me to rap all night, I guess you could say he was “badgering” me. I was getting progressively more drunk, not like blackout territory because I still remember this very clearly. Spicy. Mean spirited. Vindictive. Jon started laying down a rap beat for me and I started ripping into Badger about the fact that I had buried his unborn baby in rhyme:

“I put that baby where the sun don’t shine.

I’m glad that child was no son of mine.

I put your baby underneath the earth.

I buried your baby what the fuck you worth?”

There was quite a bit more but I don’t clearly remember it. There might have been the odd slant rhyme and I wasn’t using a lot of polysyllabic words or doing the thing where there’s rhymes inside the lines instead of just at the end but it was all essentially sound. There were little slow parts toward the wind down where I’d go up to different girls in the audience and kind of take their hands and go:

“Girl, if you miscarry it I’ll bury it!”

Sort of in the style of like a romantic slow dance sort of rap track. Badger was, I don’t know exactly what to call it, sort of thunderstruck or dumbfounded I suppose. I’d imagine he was feeling some mixture of admiration, shame and a kind of “press a button get a cookie” feeling surrounding having pressured me to grab the mic and start rapping in the first place. I don’t think we had talked about this topic before and I’m not sure if Martina had told him anything or not.

It’s extremely unlikely but I like to think he was reflecting on the parable of Jupiter and the frogs.

When I wrote about feeling comfortable as a psychopomp and gravedigger I’m sure I made the whole thing sound very healthy and well adjusted. And at this stage it pretty much is but there was definitely some darkness in learning that I had been an unwitting participant in the internment of human remains. I exorcised and unloaded that darkness onto Badger during the freestyle rap session, not because I thought he should have been the one to dig that particular hole but because it had to go somewhere.

There was a point earlier that summer or maybe even before that when Badger and Ben Jovi were hanging out at a coffee shop in Hillcrest. There was a girl there who had just come back from Norway because she was addicted to heroin and her parents thought that would get her off of it. I guess my friends thought she and I were vibing. I was pretty oblivious to that sort of thing but I remember Ben Jovi making knowing eyebrows at me.

We all ended up back at her and her roommate’s apartment. Her roommate had constructed this crazy glass multi-chambered device for smoking marijuana that kind of looked like the play zones that people build for their hamsters and gerbils. Everyone else was smoking a little bit of weed somebody had but I didn’t do that yet. This new kind of gum with fresh breath crystals had been released that supposedly made visible sparks if you chewed it in the dark. Me and the girl went in the bathroom and turned off the lights to try it. I don’t remember seeing sparks or whether or not we kissed.

She showed me a copy of Emperor’s first demo tape that she had brought back from her time in Norway. The one with a many headed alchemical dragon illustration on the cover. The timeline seems a little off as it was released around 1991 but it looked legit enough. I was into Mortiis by then but hadn’t listened to any Black Metal yet and wasn’t aware of the connection.

She didn’t put it on. Ben Jovi disparagingly said that Emperor “sounds like a guitar and wind”. I really like their stuff now especially Anthems to the Welkins at Dusk.

When we ended up in her bedroom she told me that she had just had a baby but had to give it up for adoption and didn’t know how to feel about it. She put on the Belle and Sebastian Dog on Wheels EP and turned it up really loud and set it to loop. She undressed completely and laid down in her bed. Her body was covered with scars from injecting like mine is now. She told me to take off all my clothes and get in bed with her so I did.

She laid perfectly rigid, our bodies just touching at the calf and shoulder. She fell asleep like that and I laid awake all night listening to those four songs on repeat. By morning I knew all the words to every one of them and really liked the band. It’s been almost a mark of shame ever since – that I’m a Belle and Sebastian fan. A lot of people will look at this and think that she wanted me to initiate sex but I don’t think she did. I think she didn’t want to be alone.

I would run into her on the street sometimes when I started using the same drugs. She had lost a lot of weight. I heard that something was wrong with her heart and a doctor had told her that if she didn’t stop injecting cocaine she was going to die.

She didn’t stop injecting cocaine.

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