My First Roommate

Cody was a timid boy, and I think he was asthmatic.  Two bad things to be.  He was rat-like, secretly coveted all things homosexual, and hated my stinking guts.  I think he hated me because he secretly wanted to fuck me, but deep down he knew this would never work out.  He was Mormon, I was the antichrist.  He was short, I was tallish.  He was a sneaky little queer, I was (and am) straight as an arrow.

It is curious then that in the moment we met, I made a wisecrack about being a gay predator.  It was how I tried to break the ice, and it had worked in similar situations before.  But not with good ol' Cody--or his mother.

(Before I explain, let me just say that I had no idea she was in the room.)

I moved in to our dorm room on a Friday.  School started the following week, and I didn't want to spend the weekend unpacking my meager possessions.  Instead, I had plans with a good friend to head to a neighboring city and take in a concert.  I was extremely excited to be starting school, and even more excited to be immersing myself in the marijuana-smoke cloud that was sure to envelope the outdoor venue where the show would take place.

I unpacked and headed to the local Wal-Mart to buy some shaving supplies.  I had spent the previous year washing dishes at the best (and only) bar and grill in my hometown, and because of the nature of this work I had little need to pay attention to hygiene.  Washing my clothes was a waste of time because they were covered in filth at the end of each shift.  No matter how hard I could have tried to stay clean it would have been futile, and because it's kind of silly to be clean-shaven when all you have to wear is putrid clothing, I just decided not to bathe, shave or wear any kind of deodorant.  The effect was pleasing to me.  I could detect the many different tones to my pheromonal potential, and after awhile the stench just became part of the scenery.  I grew a massive, gnarly beard, which in turn grew a beak and feathers of its own.

But college is no place to be fucking around with social experiments--at least not in your first semester--and I was convinced that if I were to screw anything female that year I would have to shave and take a shower.

When I returned to the room, Cody was in the process of unpacking.  I could hear him (or at least the person I thought was him) rummaging around in the drawers and cabinet that I had left him.  As I approached the open door to the room, he came walking out.  I stopped him with a firm handshake.  "You must be Cody?" I asked.  I could sense the fear in his heart as he smelled my dog-like musk, and took in the visual feast of my hair and beard.  He was observing someone who looked like a roadie for Foghat.  I was observing a miniature Ryan Seacrest.  He was as obscenely clean as I was obscenely unkempt and foul-smelling.  He had on a skin-tight boy toy shirt--presumably from the GAP--and I had on my dishwashing uniform: a thrift store ensemble with a t-shirt that proudly proclaimed The West Wasn't Won with a Registered Gun!

There was an extremely awkward moment of silence which I could no longer bear.  So I took the first step with my aforementioned anecdote.  It went something like this:

"Don't worry little buddy.  I'll knock you out with ether before I ever fuck you in your ass.  You won't feel a thing."

If I thought he was giving me strange looks prior to this, I was instantly aware of the impression I was making now.  But nothing--and I do mean nothing--would compare to the look that his mother would give me about ten seconds after I said it.  Being unaware that she was inside the room, busily unpacking young Cody's collection of high school memories, I had let go with possibly the most crude assertion that she had ever heard.  Because it was so outlandish, it was slightly easier to assure her that she did not hear what she thought she heard.

Maybe she figured it out in the car on the way home because the Parent's Weekend was kind of tense.

Dammit vs. the Ace Bandage

My Grandparents were born in the early 1900s, so it is no surprise that they are prepared for everything.  They have always remained steadfast in their belief that the apocalypse will occur at any moment, and because of this my grandmother packs her toiletries as if she were marching off to war.

Included in her kit are needles (injection and sewing varieties), every kind of salve known to man, copious amounts of the wonder-drug Benadryl (which not only lessens the effects of allergies, but also provides a mellow, sleepy high), various cutting and pulling utensils, a one quart jumbo-size bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and the list goes on, and on, and on.  Needless to say, the woman could touch down in an unknown, war-torn wasteland and immediately begin triage/surgery on a long line of waiting wounded refugees.

I often wonder if this is what she envisions as she regularly refills the contents of this mobile hospital.  She is, after all, nuts.

Perhaps the crown jewel in this toiletry kit from hell is the ace bandage.  Affectionately referred to by my cousins and I as simply, The Ace.  Its uses myriad, this amazing item will always remind me of my many childhood trips to consult the contents of the kit.  An ace bandage really is a marvelous thing.  It can stem bleeding from a sucking chest wound, it can bind a realigned broken bone, it can support a useless arm after it has been pulled out of location from the shoulder, or it can bind the hands of small younger siblings when they are misbehaving.  (I have had great success with this latter utility, but that's a different post altogether.)

What is most intriguing about The Ace is its durability and smell.  As a kid, whenever I was feeling blue, I would visit my grandmother's bathroom and pull The Ace out of her M*A*S*H toiletry bag and let the healing begin.  It was possibly the only item in her fix-it bag that could bring comfort simply through the memories attached to it.  As the rain would pour down outside, I would hold The Ace close to my face and recall all the good moments we had shared.  The time I fell out of the tree in the backyard and sprained my ankle, and it was there to save me.  The time I crashed on my bike and had angry, bloody road-rash on every pristine part of my left ass cheek--The Ace was there to hold fast the peroxide-soaked bandaging.

It smelled of medicines that only the elderly know about, and its unfading elasticity was more comforting than anything I've yet encountered in this life.  The Ace was, as they say, the absolute tits.

With all of the healing potential of the bandage offered for your consideration, it should definitely surprise you that my most enduring memory of it had nothing to do with medicine.  Far more bizarre than anything you would encounter in an emergency room, it had to do with the slovenly yellow Labrador that my grandparents owned.  A dog called Dammit.

Dammit was so named because it was always doing something to incur someone's wrath, and it was easier to just change its name to the first word that would come to mind when you saw what he had accomplished.  This fucking dog would chew up something metal, shit the shrapnel out on sunroom floor, and then come to you wagging his tail because he expected you to be proud of him.  He was fat, lazy and smelled of something that I can only describe as the sweat that slowly drips of the dirty nutsack of a rhinoceros.  I absolutely loved this dog simply because it was proof that a goat successfully fucked and impregnated an unlucky dog somewhere in West Virginia.  Dammit was a household holocaust.

I don't know the precise moment that Dammit devoured The Ace, but I like to envision the event in my mind.  I like to think that he took his time, enjoying every last stretchy swallow.  Regardless of how much affection I thought I had for The Ace, it was clearly nothing compared to the desire of Dammit.  Like a jealous lover, he must have decided that if he couldn't have this beloved 12 feet of elastic miracle to himself, then no one else would have it either.  The patience that it must have taken to eat the entire thing is simply breathtaking, and doing it without getting caught is one of the finest K9 achievements in history.

And Dammit ate the entire fucking thing.  Gone, without a trace.

We may have never known the fate of Ace if it Dammit's digestive abilities weren't so peerless.  The Ace would probably have killed a normal dog, balling-up in the lower intestine and causing total blockage, but not this maniac.  This dog was special in many ways, but when I first caught a glimpse of The Ace working its way out of Dammit's larger-than-life, pink/brown asshole--only then did I understand the magnitude of his importance.

This dog was a freak of nature.  On the day when The Ace came out, he spent the entire day trotting around the house with his tail slightly raised.  My grandparents knew what was going on, but until Ace was completely out they would just resign themselves to the fact that their dog would be parading the numerous soft, fleshy folds of his asshole around their home.  I still don't fully understand how they could get so comfortable with the sight of that.  It looked as though someone had pulled the fabled yellow ribbon through a wrinkled knot in the old oak tree.  So rarely in life to we get to witness performance art that is so bold, so horrible and yet so beautiful.

The moment to pull the string came just as I was introducing my date to the junior prom.  I had brought this young lady to their house so that they could take the requisite snapshots and tell us how great we looked in a tuxedo and an evening gown.  This girl was the fucking daughter of a Mormon cop, and she was not impressed with me as it was.  No one else had asked her to the big dance, so I was simply a free meal and a ride to the party.  No one could have warned her about the beast known as Dammit.  Even if they had, no one could have imagined the series of events that would unfold as we were preparing to leave the house.

After the photos and hugs and kisses, we were turning to head out the front door when Dammit came prancing in--breathing heavily and dragging about 9 feet of The Ace behind him.  My grandfather--who was sitting in his easy chair--spotted the trailing bandage and in a sudden, but precise flurry, stomped his foot down upon it.  When he did this, Dammit spooked and began to run away.  Well, he didn't exactly run (Dammit was approaching 190 lbs.) but executed a sort of modified low-crawl across the living room floor.  My dear old granddad held fast on the bandage, and as the dog crawled he howled in laughter.  As he howled in laughter, the poor beast moaned in agony.  I'm not sure if the pain came from The Ace being violently unthreaded from his rectum or from the knowledge that his beloved would be back in the world for everyone else to access once more.

Either way the look on my date's face was priceless, and one reason that I will forever hold my grandmother in the highest esteem is that she seized the opportunity to take a quick snapshot of her face as she watched the pathetic creature free himself of The Ace.  It was absolutely poetic--the seamless melding of abject horror, Depression-era simplicity and the beauty of nature.

Love is often expressed, sometimes understood and frequently lost.  But it is never so fully embraced in each of these ways as it was by Dammit and his brief courtship with that childhood favorite, The Ace.

Twelve Puzzling Things

No one can argue that these twelve things aren't just fucking ridiculous.

(1) Peter Jackson's aversion to the finest music ever created. It took three goddamned movies to capture the essence of J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (a total of 40 or so hours of viewing) and not a single fucking note of Led Zeppelin to be heard. No Zeppelin means no Gandalf motherfuckers.

(2) Jamie Lee Curtis. I bet her house smells like Funyuns and hermaphroditic nutsack. She is easily the creepiest person alive.

(3) Mormons.

(4) Texas. The whole state. Even Austin, Live Music Capital of the World, sucks the shit out of my ass now that the Bush skanks have been there. The only person who could have saved it is Stevie Ray (bless him). I would personally prefer just going to Juarez to hang out with the drug lords.

(5) Mormons who reside in Texas. "Daddy, I don't think the court-appointed Social 

Worker would approve of this position, even if it is missionary."

(6) The most genuinely entertaining show on television is not around anymore. The Kids in the Hall was absolute poetry. People who didn't get off on this show should be sent immediately to Iraq. I haven't even seen the re-runs for quite some time and it's almost too much to deal with.

(7) Time magazine's latest 1/2 page about modern day pirates (http://http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1828332,00.html). If there was ever a subject that was owed more than what a shitty little rag like time could give it, it is the subject of pirates. I knew a pirate once. No shit, I met him in Australia where he had fled from an angry neighbor who once lived next to him on one of the 700+ islands in the Philippines. His name--loosely translated--meant 'Crazy Bat' and he certainly lived up to it. He was short, psychotic and had a lust for fat women, goat meat and amphetamines. If I were the goofy jerkoff who wrote the piece I would seriously reconsider my profession. Churn out any more crap like this and a greasy little mutant like Crazy Bat might just turn up on your doorstep. Take a lesson from Hunter S. Thompson and his experience with the Hell's Angels: professional killers and drug fiends generally like their story told a certain way, and that is usually not the smart-ass Ivy League way. I would ditch the figures and historical facts and focus on raw pirate potential.

(9) People named Timothy. Every Timothy I have ever known was just plain fucking feeble. I cannot back this up (because I don't work for Time and I can't regularly converse with the geniuses who work there), but I would guess that the most common name amongst pedophiles is most likely Timothy, or Timmy, or just Tim--if you're into the whole brevity thing. Any name that marries so nicely to 'Tiny' is just not my flavor of meat.

(10) Grown white men who insist that they are Indians. The next one I see driving around with a dreamcatcher hanging from his rear view mirror had better be prepared to produce a tribal identification card--without hesitating. If not, he will experience something akin to having 'Crazy Bat' tear his nuts off. I suppose I would let him off the hook if he could cough up an employee badge from a local reservation casino. I am sick of the "White Hawk" Johnsons of the world feeling as though they are actually fooling anyone. I hate to be the heavy, but the frequently reported 'Cherokee Great, Great Grandmother' on your dad's side doesn't translate into full-blown Indian-hood. Get ready Billie Jack, I'm coming for you.

(11) Computers that will spell-flag a nasty word but give no alternate spelling. I guess this is just too family-friendly for me, and perhaps a bit of refusal to accept reality on the part of software engineers and computer manufacturers. I think they should invest in some research (maybe reach out to the dipshit cock-smokers at Time) about what most home computers are ultimately used for. I assure you they aren't purchased exclusively for Googling passages from the King James Bible or scouring Craigslist. Well, maybe the Women Seeking Women section. Think smut, I always do.

(12) Jay Leno. I wish he would choke on a Dorito. You can have the cackling faggot that plays guitar in the band too.