EXITING THROUGH THE ENTRANCE

July 25th, 2008 | ACID, BLAIR ACADEMY, BROKEN FEET, TIRES, TV, WARWICK

when i was 16 my parents shipped me off to boarding school. this place called Blair Academy. i have a lot of stories from there i’ll probably write at some point, so much fucked up shit went on there its beyond sane. i had pretty much just one friend, this kid named nick. i’m gonna leave his last name out of this. he was pretty much the most badass dude of all time. totally amazing totally bananas completely crazy. we had a lot of fun together just getting fucked up and being ridiculous. the school was like 2 hours from my folks apple farm and a bunch of weekends we would leave school and go hang out in warwick. this story is about the first time we did that.

basically i spent a lot of time on acid while in high school. i was kind of obsessed with it. one time i even volunteered to be hypnotized in front of my entire school by a guy giving a hypnosis demonstration at some retarded assembly while i was on acid. i’ll talk about that some other time. but acid, yeah it was seriously like my favorite thing. whatever. so this one weekend i invited nick to come chill on the farm, and of course we had some tabs. i grew up in a serious country bumpkin town, ‘the sticks’ if you know what i mean. its a real pretty town, warwick new york, and its getting better, but back in 95 it was still pretty trashy. i’m kinda nervous about anyone from the town who knows me to be reading this so i am gonna have to alter some names. so nick comes upstate and theres not a shit to do and thankfully we’ve got drugs so i’m not so worried. he’s never met any of my friends from home before, and this girl- lets call her Debbie- calls and says her parents are out for the night so we can come over and get drunk if we want. she lives all the way on the other side of town, like 45 minutes away but if she can come and get us, we’re game. turned out she had a broken foot and couldnt drive, but we found another friend who could pick us up and take us there. so thats what happened. a little background on the situation here… Debbie’s mom is a total normal lady, really nice and chill, but she married this serious fucking freak named Tommy a few years before and he’s like the epitome of white trash. he’s a bad drunk, a freaking maniac, and totally scary. big kinda guy with a belly that looks like he’s somehow managed to swallow a freaking beach ball and the kind of beard that makes you suspect he’s into some heavy shit that you’d love to know about except that it might give you nightmares. anyhow we get to their house, in the middle of nowhere, and already nick and i are tripping our balls off. It was pretty mellow for a friday night in february, fucking cold outside and nobody wanted to travel all the way to Debbies house so it was pretty much just me, nick, Debbie and this other girlfriend of hers who picked us up and she has nothing really do to with this so i’m not going to describe her at all except to say that 2 years later it came out that she’d been sleeping with her history teacher who got her preggers and hooked on coke and i’ll have to write about that some other time. so theres a bunch of booze at her house as always and we start drinking, talking shit, and staring at these stupid tropical fish that she’s got in her living room inside one of those tanks with a fake treasure scene, which when you’ve taken 2 tabs is pretty fucking amusing.

At like 1230 her parents get back from whatever shithole dive bar they’ve been partying at, and Tommy fucking barrels in the door like he’s about to shit his pants and he disappears immediately down the hallway to the bathroom. Nick thinks he’s seen some sort of giant and begins cracking up and i’ve got to assure him that its Debbie’s step dad and not some freaky weirdo who’s about to kill us except that i’m not exactly sure myself. so her mom sits down in the living room and starts ranting about what an asshole Tommy is and its getting awkward so nick and i hide out with the other girl in Debbie’s bedroom while she and her mom talk shit about the monster in the bathroom. Suddenly the bedroom door opens up and its Tommy, standing there looking fucking terrifying. I’ve met him about 20 times, but he never remembers, and he politely (and drunkenly) introduces himself to me and nick and tells us he wants to show us something. innocent enough i guess. so we follow Tommy down the hall to his bedroom, and he’s telling us he got this huge new tv. mind you this is like a looong time ago and we’re in warwick new york. we get to his bedroom and blammo there it is- a Massive 30 Inch Screen sitting right on top of a table at the foot of the bed. i have to tell you i hadnt been this disappointed in a long time, but nick thinks its amazing and is congratulating Tommy on his purchase, telling him its about time he graduated to a bigger size, blah blah whatever. Then Tommy gets this weird look and asks us if we want to see how amazing the screen is, and of course nick is like ‘yes old boy show us what you got!’ and thats when all hell breaks loose.

The tv turns on and tommy pushes play on the VCR and what the fuck comes on the screen but a fucking porno. but not just any porno. no no no not just any old porno that some creepy fucking drunken white trash weirdo just happens to have in his personal collection. nope. not this night. this was something special. My eyes thought they were about to fucking explode. yes, i was seeing shit- colors, trails, nonsense- the whole fucking thing. but the one thing i was having a hard time computing was what was actually on the screen. but nick said it first, the terrible truth about what was really going on, what i wasnt making up to myself, what was right there, on the screen, in full color right in front of my face- a woman, quite familiar, all too familiar, getting her fucking face fucked full on by the big creepy fucking drunken white trash weirdo standing right in between me and nick. nick looks at me, then looks at Tommy with full on tripped-out admiration, and is like ‘hey man! thats you! this is amazing! are you a porn star? who’s that lady? man, you’re really giving it to her! wow, this is fucking great! look at you go!!!!’ Tommy, who suddenly is feeling very highly of himself at the star struck attention he’s getting, proudly declares ‘yeah thats Ronnie (debbie’s moms name) right there, she’s a fucking animal alright, watch this’ and as he holds down the fast forward scan button.

as we’re watching in that speeded up jumbled distortion the next few positions he and debbie’s mom move into as they’re heading towards climax, the door swings open and Debbie, in her crutches and her fucking broken foot cast, gives a casual ‘what are you guys doing in here’ before her face turns to the screen we are intently watching, and in one bizarro instant, Tommy, drunkenly unaware of the fact that his step daughter just entered the room, announces ‘here’s the money shot’ and we 4 people- Tommy, Nick, Debbie and i- all turn to the screen in time to see him shoot a load of cum all over her moms face. BLAMMO.

Nick screams out “booya!” Debbie collapses to the ground screaming bloody murder at the top of her lungs, Tommy is smiling like he just won an oscar, and i’m completely fucking speechless. The ‘other girl’ and Debbies mom run into the room, see debbie on the floor, look at the screen and thats when shit REALLY hit the fucking fan. Debbie’s mom goes total ape shit, screaming and yelling, and attacks Tommy with one of her daughters crutches as Debbie herself struggled with the plug to the tv and in trying to turn it off, pulls the tv off the table its sitting on and it crashes to the floor and breaks. Nick is laughing HYSTERICALLY, i’m on the verge of having a bad trip, and the other girl announces that she’s leaving. Debbie’s mom announces that we all better fucking leave, tommy included, and tommy escorts us out down the hallway to another door which he opens and pushes us into, and all of a sudden the three of us are out of the house and in some cold pitch black room. Tommy shuts the door behind us and cooly calmly and casually asks us (as if nothing just happened) if we want to see his masterpiece, which at this point i am afraid is going to look a lot like what we just saw on the screen.

Without giving us a second to answer, he flips on a light switch and there in front of us is what looks like the great wall of china, made out of beer cans, stacked at least 7 feet tall and the width of the entire 2 car garage. mother fucking genius, if you ask me. how this motherfucker accomplished this feat is beyond me. now mind you, this wasnt a great wall of china. in fact it was really just a giant wall of beer cans he had stacked as sort of an homage to coors light. but either way it was goddamn impressive. and nick, still in awe of everything we’d seen in the past 5 minutes, lets out a ‘WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?!’ and at this point i’m not sure who any of us are anymore. Tommy, seeing some bizarre opportunity to bask in the glory of the admiration of somebody who seems to ‘understand’ then goes one step further into the unimaginable territory of his brain and says- “i’m a man who loves his father. do you love your father? well you should. we should all love our fathers, because someday they might die and we’ll regret not loving them while they were alive.” and with that, he bursts into tears. and nick burst into tears, and i burst into tears. and there we were, 2 teenagers on acid inside of a garage in a random backwoods town in front of a giant wall of beer with a big scary drunk dude, all having out. Tommy suddenly pulls away and tells us he needs to give us something, and he enters back into the house. we hear a bunch of yelling and in a few minutes he comes back out and hands us two small black leather pouches each about the size of a fist. before we open them, he tells us that this night means a lot to him, and that we’re his best friends and that he hopes we’ll never forget the time we’ve shared. um right like i’m going to forget this shit. and then we open up the pouches, and inside is a tire pressure gauge. a tire pressure gauge? i’ll let tommy explain.

“dudes. its the most important thing in the world to know the air pressure inside your tires. nobody ever checks their tires but if they did they’d probably realize that they need to put more air in them. and by putting more air inside your tires, your car is going to run more smoothly than it was before. so here, take these pressure gauges and check your tires on the regular and remember to add air when they need it.”

who was this guy, fucking Confucious? what did it all mean. i have no idea. but it seemed important. and it seemed like there was more to what he was saying than that we needed to check our car tires. then he said that he had to go and fix things with debbie’s mom and he turned around and went back inside the house. Nick and i were silent for a few minutes before either of us spoke. this whole incident took place in like 30 minutes from when Tommy got home to when he gave us the gifts and left. tho it felt like a decade had passed. I turned to nick, who was smiling like he just won the fucking lottery, and all he could say was “that was fucking amazing.”

we exited the garage through the entrance and walked home.

Written by Gordon | 2 COMMENTS

BATTLE OF THE BURLESQUE

June 29th, 2008 | BREAKFAST, DANCING, DITA VON TEESE, MAGIC, SANDRA STORM

SANDRA STORM VERSUS DITA VON TEESE

Written by Gordon | COMMENT

THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS OF MONROVIA, LIBERIA

June 27th, 2008 | AFRICA, FASHION, FIREARMS, RAPPERS, life jackets, womanizing

A fighter from Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) wearing a life jacket opens fire while running in a frontline street of Monrovia, Liberia Thursday, April 18, 1996. Some fighters believe that a life jacket is similar to a flak jacket, and others wear them to look bigger. Fighting was sporadic in the Liberian capital today. Rampant looting has virtually shut down humanitarian shipments. Food distribution resumed in part Wednesday, but aid officials said the danger of more violence still threatened hundreds of thousands of people dependent on the aid. (AP Photo/Jean-Marc Bouju)

Written by Gordon | COMMENT

CHUCKASS THE MUNSEE / VOICES FROM INSIDE THE TREE

June 23rd, 2008 | chuckass, special k, sugar loaf, the munsee

i was born in new york city in september of 1977. that makes me 30 today. i grew up in a small arts and crafts community called Sugar Loaf, NY. its a hamlet- not even a town- and its all of about a half a mile long. It was kind of full of hippies, although my parents didnt exactly fit into that category. they were part of this lost time period in the early-mid 60’s where they werent really ‘beats’ but they were a bit too old to become ‘hippies.’ Pretty much everyone in the town was some sort of craftsperson, and we all lived next to each other. by craftsperson i mean it was like the renaissance fair minus the costumes but full on the weed. there were candlemakers, leather workers, jewelry makers, painters, wood carvers, clothing designers, musicians, karate instructors with living room dojos. you name it and there they were, all along Kings Highway. And these people were serious hippies. The place had an interesting history dating way back to the native american tribe the Munsee (Wolf Clan) whose famous leader was named Chuckass, and whom originally inhabited the region in what was at the time one of the largest indian populations in Northeastern America. There are caves all around there, and tons of arrowheads and other cool shit. also back in the day, the famous surrealist artist Kurt Seligmann lived there (as well as committed suicide there) and his good pals Chagall and Dali used to come hang out. Oh and it was also a famous old timey meeting spot for gypsies. Which sort of fueled one of my 2 greatest childhood fears- 1. being kidnapped by gypsies 2. turning into a vampire. PS- these days i am obsessed with gypsies, but no longer fear becoming a vampire.

On the far side of Kings Highway that i lived on, there were 2 other families- the Links and the Bonkenburgs. Robin Link, who was my best friend and worst enemy growing up, lived right next door to me above a restaurant his mom and step dad owned and operated. Ted Bonkenburg, my other best friend, lived next to Robin but across the railroad tracks. This story deals exclusively with Robin. He was kind of my adopted brother. Like i said before, his mom and step dad owned a restaurant (famous for a chocolate cake dish known as ‘the fudgely uglie’) that he lived above, and they were amazing people but i dont know if they were the most attentive parents. As i discovered much later on in life, Robin basically lived, ate, and slept at my house virtually every night for about 7 years because his parents were basically always getting fucked up. I thought they were cool- at 7 years old he showed up at my house with a porno mag his step dad gave him, he had no bed time, and could watch all the rated R movies he wanted. Little did i know, they just werent really paying attention. Whatever. they were still pretty rad people if you ask me. They had an old train caboose in their backyard that we used as a clubhouse.

Anyhow, behind my house and bordering on Robins, there was a little woods with a creek behind it. Most of the time to get from one house to the other, we would go through the woods. We loved that fucking woods. so in the middle of it there was this super old oak tree that was just kind of amazing for being the biggest and oldest tree in the woods. i think my dad told me one time that the tree was probably 300 years old or more. This one summer day when i was about 10 years old, Robin comes over and tells me that the night before, as he left my house at dark on his way home, he had an amazing conversation with this girl who is trapped inside the old oak tree, and that she’s totally in love with me. Now i have to tell you this- i’ve been obsessed with girls since i was in kindergarten. there was never a moment in my life that i can remember where girls were at all icky or awful. they’ve always been badass and i’ve always been bokers for them. like, serious bonkers. so when robin tells me this wack job nonsense about this girl trapped in the tree, i want to both call 10 year old bullshit on him and at the same time go see this tree. and thats what happened. But of course there was some weird stipulation- that the girl can only speak at night.

At about 9 or 10 o’clock that same night, just as its dark enough outside for your imagination to start fuck with you, Robin and i go to listen to the tree. We get to the tree and Robin tells me to be quiet, very quiet. After a few minutes of silence, he says in full seriousness “gordie’s here to see you.” This of course sends shivers up my spine and i am about 5 seconds from running full speed back to my house but for some reason i am still compelled to stay. A few minutes later, Robin turns to me and asks me if i can hear her. I cant. He tells me that she is very happy that i have come to see her and that she loves me and hopes i’ll return to see her again. I felt this weird sensation in my head, kind of like a tingling that also started to permeate through my body. it was nothing like i had ever experienced before at that point in my life.
it was like drugs! i felt disembodied all of a sudden and when i came back to my senses Robin had already crossed though the woods, the sound of his screen door slamming shut snapping me back into reality.

I spent the rest of the summer trying to figure out what the fuck had happened. i snuck out of the house nightly to go see the tree, waiting for a voice, waiting for whatever it was. And i never really heard anything. A few times i thought i did. maybe. maybe i thought i heard some kind of whispering of some unintelligible sort, in a gentle girls voice. but i tell you in a strange certainty that i felt a presence. i had some sort of bizarre feeling around that tree, at night, in the woods. and it was as though i wasnt alone, and that there really was some girl trapped inside the tree, and she was lonely. She had at one point told Robin that she had been there for quite a long time before anybody heard her. This was in about 1987. As summer turned to fall it got to be too cold to go to see the tree every night, and after a while i kind of forgot about her and the whole incident and never thought about it again. until 10 years later.

In the fall of 1997 i was a junior at NYU. I was in the Gallatin school there- which is like the experimental free form division of NYU where they pretty much expect you to be some sort of avant garde freakshow, or at least a bit more bold than the psychology, pre-med or business kids. I was taking a class on ’shamanism and the creation of contemporary art’ with a professor named Barnaby Ruhe who actually had a PHD in Shamanism. for real. He was totally bananas and i was kind of obsessed with his class. One day we were discussing native american burial rituals and beliefs and he told me that certain tribes believed that when a child died, that the childs spirit would inhabit a tree and remain there for the rest of time. All of a sudden i got totally freaked out. i remembered the tree, i remembered the girl, i remembered the whole thing in a crazy flashback like it was the summer of 1987 all over again. Granted, i was taking a lot of acid and special K at the time too, but the strength of the memory was ridiculous. And then it all made sense. Perhaps Robin Link wasnt full of shit. Perhaps there really was the spirit of some Munsee girl trapped inside the tree. It was just too weird a coincidence that Robin could have come up with this on his own. This was a kid who watched Animal House, not the Discovery Channel. And besides, there wasnt a discovery channel on then anyhow. so what the fuck was it. what was that eerie feeling that compelled me to return night after night for a whole summer. its been like another 10 years since then, i’m 30 and i still dont know- but now i cant really forget.

Written by Gordon | 1 COMMENT

A LIST

June 23rd, 2008 | BACON, FRENCH, LISTS, SOLAR PLEXUS, X

1. THE WORD “FRENCH”

2. A LIVE MINIATURE OWL AS SEEN IN A SHOPPING MALL IN BUFFALO, NEW YORK

3. A GIANT MILK TANKER TRUCK COLLIDING WITH A SCHOOL BUS ALONG A SECLUDED AND WOODY STRIP OF HIGHWAY

4. TINTIN IN THE LAND OF BLACK GOLD

5. FARMS IN FINNEY COUNTY, KANSAS, AS SEEN FROM A SATELLITE IN SPACE

6. “GATO LOCO”

7. AN EMPTY AND FLOATING BATHROBE HOVERING IN A DARK BACK ALLEY

8. THE SOLAR PLEXUS

9. A READY-TO-EAT BACON STRIP VENDING MACHINE

10. A SHOEBOX OF LETTERS NEVER MAILED

Written by Gordon | 1 COMMENT

LIFE JACKETS AND THE ANIMALS THAT WEAR THEM

June 16th, 2008 | Uncategorized, cat, dogs, life jackets, womanizing

Written by Gordon | 1 COMMENT

MILDRED AND THE MARBLE

June 12th, 2008 | box cake, marbles, ted bonkenburg

i feel like telling a story today so thats what i’m going to do.

when i was in first grade, my school bus driver was a crazy shell shocked old vietnam vet in his early 50’s named Chuckie. He had a long beard and still wore all of his war fatigues. all the time. including the combat boots. and this crazy hat that said ’semper fi or die’ on it. he was terrifying. he drove the bus about a million miles an hour and in fact one afternoon we got pulled over by the cops for speeding. i’m not sure if he drove a bus in vietnam but he might as well have the dude was a fucking master of the bus. and nobody on the bus ever misbehaved. i mean- ever. he had this technique of driving with one eye on the road and the other eye on the mirror that looked into the back of the bus and he could see every single thing anybody was doing. and if you were misbehaving, he would pull the bus right over, get up, go over to you and scream at the top of his lungs, so loud that your ears would hurt for the next hour.

anyhow, this one time, there was this little black girl on the bus. her name was mildred, and she was also in the first grade. and she was obsessed with marbles, the ones that have the funny color swirl inside them. i used to always wonder how they got that swirl in there. it seems very tricky even now and i’m 30 years old. so whatever. this one day we were just barreling down the highway in the middle of the stick town i grew up in (warwick, new york). nothing new here- chuckie liked to drive like the viet cong were giving chase- and mildred and i were sitting in the very back seat of the bus where the shocks were the worst, and you could get the biggest air off any bump in the road. side note here: for many years the whole rosa parks thing made absolutely no sense to me since as far as i could tell the back seat of the bus was the best part about riding the bus. i mean, sitting in the front was the first grade equivalent of going to jail. so yeah, mildred and i are in the back, and she’s playing with the marbles. she used to do this weird thing where she would put one in her mouth, and spit it straight up in the air, and catch it again. like some weird seal or something. there she is, doing the marble spit trick, when we hit our favorite huge bump that always sends us about a foot in the air. we hit the bump, the marble shoots straight up in the air, she looks at me, i’m watching her, and the marble- in slow motion- comes right back at her, and while she and the marble and i are all mid-air, she makes a spectacular catch. so spectacular in fact that the marble goes right down and lodges itself firmly in her throat.

At this, i can tell something has gone terribly wrong. She begins choking and freaking out. i begin freaking out. the other kids begin freaking out. its a full on school bus freak out in about 30 seconds. Chuckie with his eagle eye of course saw the whole thing happen, and in a flash of napalm he’s pulled the bus over and is running though the jungle to the end of the bus. In one extremely long motion that at the time seemed to take 40 years, he grabbed mildred by the throat, picked her up into the air and punched her solid right in the stomach. i’ll be damned if the marble didnt shoot right up and out of her mouth and halfway across the bus onto the lap of vince herlihy, who to this day still has the marble. it was extraordinary. and if it hadnt been for some esoteric tactic i’m sure chuckie learned while trapped in some far off POW camp back in the late 60’s, mildred for sure would be a goner. and i wouldnt have learned a very important lesson.

About 2 months later, one of my 2 best friends in the whole universe, ted bonkenburg was having his birthday. he lived just down the street from me, across the railroad tracks. i remember it was a beautiful day in the summer and we were excited about having the cake his mom made. this was because his mom made cake from a box. my mom refused to make cake from a box so to me cake from a box was a real treat that i wasnt about to pass up. There we all were, all of the kids from the neighborhood and all the parents. ted’s dad was from holland and owned a bulb company (flower bulbs) and they had a warehouse in the back of their house that we used to play in. The birthday was outside in the yard however, and ted’s dad, who was strangely allergic to grass (though he sold bulbs for a living) was watching us all celebrate from the comfort of his living room. When the cake came out we all gathered around and sang happy birthday. ted blew out the candles and had a huge piece of cake cut for him. We all watched as he ate the first bite, waiting for our piece to be cut. me especially because i couldnt stop thinking about the box cake, the box, that strange vanilla flavor, the odd yellow color, and the tastiness that would soon be mine. except that never happened, because ted began to choke on the first bite he took. thankfully, i had recently witnessed a choking situation so i knew exactly what to do. in front of all our friends, and all our parents, i quickly punched ted in the stomach as hard as i could. and he fell down. and i jumped on top of him and kept punching because there was no way my best friend ted was going to die from that cake. no way in hell.

before i knew it, i was being attacked by parents left and right! they didnt seem to understand what i was doing! that i was going to be the hero, that i was going to save ted from certain death, death by cake, a deliciously horrible way to go but one that for sure would never be forgotten! yet there i was, being ripped away and carried off. but as my folks dragged me from the scene, desperate for an explanation that could possibly save them from the embarrassment and raised-eyebrow questioning that was sure to ensue from their seeming dysfunctional parenting, all i had in my defense was a story of mildred and the marble. nevertheless, they didnt believe me. instead they blamed professional wrestling and video games and that was pretty much one of the last times i saw a television until i was 15 years old. thanks chuckie.

Written by Gordon | 3 COMMENTS