Today is Halloween. I stay home tonight, and give out candy to the little goblins. I think I'll wear a scary outfit. I thought of going as one of the trolls from my other blog: I'd have bleeding hearts taped to both sleeves of my "No Blood for Oil!" tee-shirt, a copy of Fahrenheit 9/11 in one hand and a joint in the other, all the while prattling on about the repression of my free speech, interspersed with Tourette's-like episodes of "Bush Lied! Bush Knew!", but alas. I think that might be a bit too scary for the young ones. I could, alternatively, wear a thong, and show the little Future Childbearers of America visions of their future - what a real woman looks like after childbirth - but I know that would be waaay too scary. Might put 'em off reproduction altogether. Boys, too. Not to mention the violation of scores of state and local laws.
Fuck it. I'll stick to vampire teeth.
I'm having the period from beyond the grave. The fucker just Will. Not. Die. Two weeks and counting now, and I'm still flooding like Niagara Falls. I went to the gyno last month, complaining of the same problem, and was told that I needed to be on birth control pills. Birth control pills?!?! What, so I can gain more weight and have my skin break out and slough off that pesky sex drive? What's the fucking point of that?
And you people wonder why I'm so shit-tempered and ill. Please.
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far, away, I briefly made my living as a cocktail waitress in a titty bar. I reveal this fact, believe it or not, with some measure of shame; you would not believe what a prejudicial revelation this can be for some people. "She must be a slut," thinks the man, salaciously, hopefully, when I drop this one in conversation. As for women, you can see a sort of switch go off in their heads. Like, "Oh. Shit, well, I liked her, too bad now I'll have to relegate her to the category of C-list women." Like you're soiled, somehow, your proximity with naked muff not your own a contaminant that you can't have escaped. Unless, of course, the woman one is having the conversation with was, at some point in her past, a titty-bar employee, too. You'd be surprised how many chicks have a stripper-job somewhere in their dim pasts.
I digress. I wanted to tell you a story today, a story about how, this one time, in a trashy roadhouse by the side of the highway in Arkady, Georgia, I was literally Healed By The Word. No shit.
I was working there, at the Parachute Lounge. Two nights a week, I'd drive the forty-five miles to the small town of Arkady, to don a skimpy simulacrum of a flight suit, one that had had its legs carved into "Daisy Dukes" style buttercutters, arms cut down to little cap-sleeves, and a zipper open to reveal a full payload of cleavage. Oh, and a hat...let me not forget the little hat. Ugh. While the girls danced on the makeshift stage, and swayed carefully atop rickety tables, I ran drinks from the bar to the customers in thigh-high leather boots with four-inch heels and Air Force shades. I'm gregarious, got a big mouth, and back in the day I didn't look so bad, either. Them good ole boys, them bikers, them blue-collar men, they tipped well when they saw a girl was workin' hard - and the harder I worked, the drunker they got, the more they tipped the dancers, the more they tipped me. The dancers, too, tipped me out at the end of the night. I made a shitload of money at that job, much more than was available to me as an undergraduate anywhere in my nearby college town. More than enough, in fact, pay the bills and support my nascent cocaine habit.
Ahh...my nascent cocaine habit, you ask? Sadly, yes - this was, what? 1987? 1989? Somewhere around in there. Working at the roadhouse on the weekends, playing music for next-to-nothing in the bar circuit on weeknights, one does tend to overmedicate. Perhaps it's the overall lack of daylight, perhaps it's the intimacy that one comes to share with those faces that one sees in the bar night after night....whatever the case, I liked to get down and party, wax the ol' skis, as often as possible. Usually nightly, beginning just before the second set and lasting until way after last call.
Regular cocaine use, though, did not agree with my robust Anglo-Saxon constitution. I developed a head-cold at first - scratchy throat, snotty nose - a head-cold that just never went away. After about six months of the snot in residence, it moved over into my ears and began to infect them, too. The problem was, I was snorting so much coke that I could feel no pain in my ears. You know, the old numby. I had no idea I had an ear infection until one day when I woke up deaf.
No shit, I woke up deaf. I couldn't hear a damn thing - not the TV on max volume, not the telephone, not the doorbell, not my Fender amp. I hied my ass to the University clinic, where I was chided by the doctor. He could see the lesions in my nose, and proceeded to relate to me a story about his own coke problem back when he was a drummer in a rock band in the seventies. I took the antibiotics and the steroids he offered, and decided to lay off the blow for a week or so, until the deafness and ear infection subsided. I had to take the week off work, anyway - real work, I mean, music-work, because, well, I was deaf.
I did go back to work at the roadhouse, though. I could read lips well enough to understand "Jack and Coke" and "Bud", the most exotic things my clientèle usually ordered. It was business as usual, mostly, except for the fact that a group of Baptists had decided to come down to the Parachute and picket the titty bar. Bear in mind, at this point in the South, every little town didn't have a titty bar - in fact, the Parachute had only been open for about six months at the time. It was a pain in the ass, crossing the picket to get in the place of a Saturday. Red-faced peasant women waved Bibles in my face as I walked into the bar, sturdy ankle-less matrons screamed at me of my certain dooming to Hell. This actually went on for a couple of weekends, as did my ear infection. It was nerve-wracking.
The second Saturday after my visit to the doctor, I went to work. As I was crossing the Baptist picket, an old fishwife glommed on to my arm, hollering something - I don't know what - into my ear and shaking the bible at me. The bouncer at the door jumped in to extricate me from the fray and escort me inside the rope-line. A few seconds after he broke me away from this zealot, I felt something cold and hard smash into the side of my head, just above my right ear. It hit me so hard I went down, stunned.
I sat up and tried to shake it off...but something was opverwhelmingly different. On the ground, in a puddle some five feet away, lay the fishwife's Bible - she'd beaned me with it as hard as she could. Something about the impact on my head, combined, I'm sure, with the antibiotics and the steroids, had made both of my ears go POP! I could hear again. Woozily, echo-ey...but I could hear. The sound, after weeks of silence, was extremely disorienting.
So that is the story of how I was Healed by the Word. I moved to the west coast for a day job four months later. I dropped the "music career" and the rampant cocaine abuse and the waitressing jobs forever, becoming, fifteen years later, a pillar of the fucking community.
Life is strange. People are stranger. Don't judge a book by its cover.
I have known some odd fuckers in my day.
Strange attractors; outside the usual definitions for the phrase, I also use it to describe people like myself, people who have tiny little signs that can only be seen by crazy loon people stapled to their foreheads, signs that say, I'm Too Nice and Well-Bred To Tell You To Fuck Off! Mama always said I had the damndest talent for bringing home strays. Das de troof, too.
Take old Herb, God rest his drunk cracker ass. I met Herb back in the days when I was snooting at least a gram of the good stuff on a slow day - in the bar circuit, dontchaknow, what we old townies called the barmuda triangle. At the time, I regretted the acquaintance; Herb could be a total fucking pain in the ass to get rid of. He was nutty. He'd get real drunk, and start talking like Boomhauer, grinning a slick red leer, eyes closed. "Dangoledidyerrahtternitedinit? Yewsnortnuffthatstuyewgawngithi, mayan. Shit," he'd declaim, draping a too-friendly arm across your shoulders. "Ahluhmesumcoke, mayan. ishoredewman. utinlahkit. cuttinitoursnorthatstu'up, man." You'd be totally trying to skeeze on some delectable piece of flesh at this small party, and suddenly Herb would be there, drunk as a lord, hanging all on you and not allowing a moment's private conversation. He was also a coke-hoover, which made him persona non grata in my selfish-cunt private world.
Herb was an occasionally genial manic-depressive country-and-western genius; short and dumplingesque, hair totally white at fifty, Herb worked at the Sunshine Liquors by day and occupied the end stool at the State Bar at night. He liked his seven and seven, Herb did, and his weed and his coke and his pre-skreeption meds, whatever the Dope Gods chose to sling out on any given night of the week. Failing all that he'd pay calls on his neighbors, axing did you have a cup of booze he could borrow.
Herb may have been a liquor store clerk by profession and a pestical neighbor by necessity, but he was a musician by vocation and inclination and talent. I remember him writing gentle she-done-broke-mah-heart three-chorders, the catchiest fucking tunes. Real earworms, I shit you not. Beautiful, literate lyrics with melodies so simple you could play 'em even when you were cracked out. That takes talent, my friends, especially when one is the possessor in sole of only eight of your original fingers (chicken plant work had taken both of 'em). When he was not passed out, partying, or working one of his jobs, he played with several short-lived country bands. Really, though, he was most constantly to be found in the process of scrapin' a couple hunnerd bucks together to record a track, man in his friend Doug's basement studio. Doug was chargin', damn right, because he'd worked with Herb before and knew his feckless shit. Doug may have been a hippie, but he was a shrewd hippie.
Herb was a real man-about-town, too. Literally, for the seven years I lived in that burg, not a day went by in which I did not see old Herb. Understand that Herb had been in that town forever, that, crazy and fucked-up as he was, he knew everyone. While a small town, simply by virtue of its size, has a way of eventually revealing all your feckless shit (see the Doug example, above) everyone still liked Herb. They'd throw him a bone, now and then, in the form of an odd-job of some sort. Herb was quite the handyman; acting as janitor at a bar, general factotom at the town's biggest rock club, occasionally got to take tickets at the downtown movie theater, once in a while helping to move stuff into or out of a business.
Some days our encounters would be mundane enough - I'd see his four-foot ass wobbling on either side of his six-inch bike seat on the way down the avenue, and I'd buzz him in my red Honda, honking and waving, or maybe I'd see him in a bar, falling out of a chair, or having one of his famous arguments with himself. Other days my chance meetings with Herb had the quality of a dream; I'd see Herb walking downtown toting a giant faux-fur anaconda to decorate for Disco. Or I'd see him hanging off the side of a building downtown and think, my god! the old sot has finally taken the leap and then I'd realize he was just stringing Christmas lights on the side of a bar, but he was doing it by hanging off the storm eave with one arm. And then he'd see my car and incredulous mug and he'd wave and wave, jingling the lights against the brick facade of the building and shaking the aluminum he hung from, grinning, and holler, "HOW-DO?"
Herb had a wife and kids, too - relations, yes, but more like revelations if you could analyze them strictly in relation to the Herb lifestyle and personality. The Herbs lived in a run-down rental mill-house, just up the hill from the tracks and two blocks from the Sunshine Liquors - staggering distance, I figured. Herb's wife Annette was a Xanax addicted horrorshow with delusions of talent: every time Herb managed to scrape up that elusive couple hunnerd bucks and get in the studio, Annette dragged her poxy ass down there, too, and insisted on backing Herb up on every vocal track. Annette sounded like a farmload of copulating cats when she sang, too. Don't get me wrong - she was a Real Sweet person and everything, but damn. Couldn't carry a tune with a croker sack, and the Xanax and pot warm-ups didn't help matters.
As for the kids, I can only say this: The oldest boy joined the military as soon as he could git his daddy drunk enough to lie about his age for him, the middle boy was serving juvenile time for grand theft at 15, and the youngest, a big old girl whose name was Karen but forced kids her own age to call her Rhonda by beating the shit out of them, well, last I heard, she was living with a forty year old man out in a single-wide, as his common-law wife. She was fourteen. What can I say? The kids grew up with their momma and daddy and really, the apple don't fall far from the tree.
The party never stopped with Herb. He woke up, took a piss, ran a toothbrush over his tongue, and started drinking, every day - provided, that is, that he woke up at home, and not in a gutter, or someone's dumpster. He was one of the only true falling-down drunks that I have ever known; add that debilitation to a jigger of mental illness with a pony of his environmental inculcation with both white-trash sensibilities and liberal artistic pretentions, and you have a fucking redneck house afire.
Actually, that's a lie. The party did stop with Herb, in the summer of 1999. I actually saw him shortly before he died; I was making a trip through my old town on business, and went downtown for a coffee. There he was, taking out the trash at the record store, but it was a yellow wraith of Herb, a Herb who staggered and limped, but not from drink alone. Herb's liver was going out on him - how he was not in the hospital was beyond me.
Of course, he saw me, and bummed a ride home. Really, I was both glad to do it and a bit creeped out. I dropped him off at his old house, and "loaned" him a twenty. Herb entered the hospital a week later, and was dead in a month.
His funeral was packed. Slimy old drunk cracker bastard, and his funeral was packed.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who picks up strays.
Time to start a new blog, I think.
See, I have a blog. An old one. One that I like, has some traffic, regular visitors. Occasionally, even the MSM throws me a bone. Not a Big Dawg blog, but still. Top 200, I'd reckon, by TTLB's standards. A good number of other bloggers know me, some know me personally, my picture's in the paper, yadda yadda yadda. Pillar of the fucking community, already. That's great, I guess. Except that's not why I started blogging.
I think, when I started blogging, I thought that I could remain semi-anonymous. You know, I never posted my full name on anything, didn't post much of anything that was potentially an identifier. I posted anything I damn well pleased; blistering, nasty, foul, sex-drugs-rock-roll - whatever turned my crank that particular day. However, being of a political bent, I also wrote extensively about certain political matters. Which drew the attention of other bloggers. Which my friends noticed. And my family. Oh, yes, honey, even my mother-in-law got in on the act.
I had to clean up my language or be exposed for the vicious cunt I really am. What can I say? I sold out.
Today, while showering the 162lbs of whale blubber I tote around and call a body, I thought on this issue. This evening, running the blubber on the elliptical, I thought some more. And I decided to start another blogspot blog. Totally anonymous. Even my husband won't know.
And here, I'll write about all the shit I can't discuss on my real blog. This should be fun.