A Day (Or Two) In The Life

Not unsurprisingly, this day started like most others--the hot sweltering July sun creeping up over the horizon, my R2D2esque air conditioner complete with eight foot tube blowing the evil heat outside into the atmosphere. Surely there is no God, or more accurately, surely there was no sense in the gang of explorers, settlers, whoever, who founded this ugly ol' hog shit town. In the winter it's too cold, in the summer it's too hot, and all the people complain that it's too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. Gotta settle somewhere I suppose. I'm sure those settlers I was just talking about were more concerned with primitive matters--hunting, preventing/instigating war, procreating, infrastructure, crops, cuckoldry. Well shit! We figured out a new way of living so only a few select suckers do all that! The rest of us sit back and get fat, try to bed women, learn Al Green songs on guitar, and generally deal with all sorts of urban matters, like dented bumpers and leaky ceilings. 

On most Sundays I make a quick jaunt to the grocery store. I drive the two kilometres through a wealthy suburb that borders the Humber River. Know how you can tell a nice neighbourhood? You can't afford to live there. There's even this one house that has a spiral staircase and I always make sure to look for it. Pi and all that shit; you know how it is--infinity. Whoever owns this house just had to put a spiral staircase in the middle of his house, AND have floor to ceiling glass so everyone can see this oversized piece of Rotini. How I long to climb that staircase! Going up and around and then down and around. I think I'll go around again. I think I found a new hobby: Spiral staircases. The only other one that I can recall was the next door neighbour to the house I was staying at during  I park underground at the Lowblaws and it's a generally uneventful trip. 

I walked out the automatic door to the car with my lemons,  potatoes, chips, steak, etc. I was parked perfectly inside my three-sided rectangle, like a damn glove, and here was this guy nailed right onto my bumper. Not barely touching, I mean it looked like I caught his car raping mine, my bumper was noticably crumpled. How could he not notice his egregious error? Or at the very least, reverse a foot and pretend it wasn't him? Isn't that the move? I would at least drive down a few spaces and park there. Two weeks later and what's really bothering me is this persons thought process. How? How could they not notice? For Chrissakes they should have whiplash. 

An anger, ney--a smoldering rage, boiled up inside me. My first reaction was to write a quick little note, with a big marker, lift up his wiper and snap it to the dash. Something like, "Hi, I'm a jerkoff and I hit people's bumpers in parking lots, and I'm so fucking stupid that I don't even flee the scene and park somewhere else. I just leave my car pushed RIGHT up against the other car. Tonight, when I get home, I'm going to stuff a dildo in my dog's ass, then lick the dildo clean.
Signed,
Driver Of This Car."

Instead, mainly because I didn't have a marker or paper, the tools for the job, I gave his stupid license plate a good kick and got into my car to accelerate a foot and a half to check the damage. Once I separated contact, my bumper must have popped back into place for all that remained was a small nick, a barely perceptible break in the smoothness of the bumper. I was unsatisfied at the lack of damage because the more damge there is the more justified my reaction will be. I was past the point of talking myself out of it and just driving home. Something had to be done. His old white Chrysler sat there mocking me, out of place amongst the nicely cropped rows of cars all flush with each other. Here's one car awkwardly jutting one and a half feet into MY space and one and a half feet is a pretty big number whether you're in porn or parking.

It looked like an old man car, this Chrysler. I gave the license plate another good stomp. Not like a soccer kick--that would be stupid, and painful--a good hard marching stomp. That didn't really do anything and now my foot hurt. Fuck this! I did a quick scan of the parking lot and there didn't seem to be anyone in my immediate vicinity, only a few cartboys huddled together popping pimples, so I reached down and gave the license plate a good yank. Impossibly, the plate acqueisced to my strength. I stumbled back in triumph, like when you're playing tug-of-war and the other team lets go of the rope, the ID of this metal beast clutched in my hands.  

Well, that wasn't very hard. I had the plastic casing around the plate and everything. That's why it came off so easily I suppose. See, I didn't grab the plate directly, I went for the plastic casing and that was the ticket. 

I felt like the Hulk. A goddamn animal. A fucking hurricane and Mike Tyson's just that plastic bag in American Beauty.

Do. Not. Fuck. With. Me.

Should I go for the back plate too? Naw, don't do it Nezbit, you're a nice guy; remember the scale of justice--keep it level. If there was more damage, well then, yes, but as it stands we're now even. Plus, you got enough problems, don't need some psycho in a Chysler coming after you.

I got in my Vibe and got the fuck outta there. I made a right out of the the Loblaws and proceeded south on Jane St. I rolled down the window and like a frisbee tossed the license plate onto the sidewalk, and that was that.

                                                                             ***
                                                                                 
Later that night, around 10:30, I was deeply engrossed in the season premiere of Breaking Bad. Man, I'd like to get a hold of that blue meth Walt and Jesse cooked; it looked like the crystallized formations found in deep caves. A dripping of some sort penetrated  the barrier of my aural sense. At first, I thought it was the window AC unit of the lady above me dripping onto the pavement below. Even though it was humid as hell, I got up and closed the window some more, not all the way. Damn, can still hear that dripping. Is it just in my head or am I really experiencing this? Is Walt going to notice a dripping sound any minute too?

It had been happening for some time now and I could predict the drops with pinpoint accuracy. Walt didn't notice a thing, had more important matters on his mind: Like how to take Gus out of the picture, and purchase a car wash to clean his dirty money, and cars too, I suppose. No, it wasn't part of the show. Merely a gentle dripping, this must be my problem.

A commercial break.

I inadvertently looked up to the ceiling and to my surprise and dismay there were two distinct droplets steadily coming down. Already a sizeable puddle was gathering on my 1950's parquete floor. Ceiling was bubbling out like it was going to give birth. Hmmm....well, first things first. Grab two pans and set them down. Problem solved. I'm a regular fucking Mike Holmes. I sat back down, tried to drown out the Chinese Water Torture my pans were enduring. My attention kept returning to the ceiling and the leaking was getting progressively worse. I could see new drops forming, threatening to jump. I had to move the pan and put my mop bucket down so I could catch two drops for the price of one. I moved that pan to another leak. What the fuck is going on here? This is serious I think. Do I make the phone call to the landlord at 10:45pm on a Sunday night?

The answer came swiftly: Yes. I was goddamn annoyed at this point. Thoughts of self-pity--oh, this just had to happen to me--fought for control and I struggled to put them aside. I waited a fucking year for this new season of Breaking Bad and my anticipation was as high as it gets for a TV show; then it was further enhanced by the sudden realization that I didn't have to wait until Monday to download it--I have the AMC channel. I can watch it Sunday night! I'm saying Yes! to life.

I found the name for the landlord in my phone and begrudgingly pushed the 'talk' button. As it rang, I debated if I was justified for the late night call. I mean, if it was 2pm there would be no question. But I'm stoned and it's late, and I could probably deal with it in the morning. Mmmm...maybe not, though. What if the ceiling collapses? 

"Hallo?" An Eastern European lady's voice said on the other end. Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Ukraine, take your pick, but it wasn't my landlord; thought I had the wrong number. "Hi, this is Taylor from apartment number three, is Angela around?"

"Oh, hi Taylure. My name's Tuuta. I am landlord while Anna's away."

I explained the gist of the problem. Tuuta made me go upstairs to see what number apartment was above me because she didn't know. I went upstairs. It was number seven. I should have deduced that much considering there's four apartments per floor; I could have simply added four to my apartment. I called her back. "It's number seven, Tuuta."

On the screen, Gus, the druglord that Hank cooks for, is slicing the throat of an underling to prove a point. I don't quite get it though because I'm busy talking on the phone with a lady named Tuuta. The only time I want to be talking to a 'Tuuta' is when I call an escort.

"Okay, I call her now."

Momentarily relieved that the ball was rolling, I sat back and honed in on my ten year old Zenith. I just couldn't get into it though--the show, not the TV, that is. I was hot and bothered, a goddamn leak almost directly above me that keeps getting worse by the minute.

The show ended and just sick of it all, cursing my rotten luck, I decided to get ready for bed. Tuned the radio to CBC 1--the show was This American Life. Picked up whatever book I was reading and knocked off a few pages. Instinctively, I checked the leaks a few more times and then turned out the lights.

As you can guess, it wasn't the greatest sleep. Somehow, even in my dream state I woke up every couple hours and wearily checked the leaks, and more importantly dumped the overflowing bucket and pans. I get out to my living room area and flick the light switch to assess the situation. No dice. I flicked the light switch up and down a few more times to confirm the problem just like you would do. I had to settle for the kitchen light. It was enough to illuminate the horror before me. My mop bucket was overflowing and now there was a steady piss stream flowing down from the bulbous grapefruit sized lamp fixture (chandelier?). The floor was absolutely soaked! This had officially been upgraded from a leak to a downpour. 

At 7:30 am the next morning I called Tuuta and let her know, that yes, it was still leaking. Funny, I told her, that the sun was shining outside and it was raining in my apartment. A meterological anomaly of some kind, don't you think?  Her husband would be there in 30 minutes. I sat on my kitchen table and waited for him to show up.

At 8 O'clock my phone rang. It was Tuuta. "Hi Taylure, can you let my husband, Walter, in? He doesn't have a key." I just laughed and said, "Sure." I was kind of pissed off, but really I welcomed the minor catastrophe. A man has to switch up his routines or he goes madder quicker. But it doesn't matter how madder a man gets if it's quicr or not, glacial or hot, the end result is still the same--madness takes over and Klaus Kinski is suddenly in your dreams stalking you through a tropical forest with a macehte.

Walter was a very short man, about five feet tall. Absurdly short, really. We shook hands and he followed me up the stairs. I said, "I hope you brought your bathing suit," but he just smiled sheepishly and followed me inside. Upon entering, he muttered "Oh, fuck," in perfect English. "This is not good," he added, looking at me, or rather, up at me.  "Yeah, I know it's not good," I said, obviously irritated. I felt somewhat unworthy to have this older man look up at me. He's seen more, probably lived under some horrible Communist regime in Poland, waiting for hours in a bread queue; he shouldn't be looking up to a thirty year old part time loser caker like me.  

Walter said he had to shut off the water to the apartment and get Tuuta to call the plumber. She showed up five minutes later and gave me an exasperated look. "I'm sooo sorry, Taylure, this is horrible." I could barely hear her over fucking Niagara Falls. "Yeah, yeah, it's okay, shit happens, ya know?" I don't think she was entirely familiar with that phrase, maybe she hasn't seen Forest Gump, but she must have sensed the solemnity in my voice, no matter the language. I'm sure some of the other tenants would have been roaring mad. There's a facade of bravado and righteousness tenants must uphold in front of the other tenants, like they're tough guys who know their rights. And I use guys loosely, these women who are my neighbours were flipping out when I invited them in to see the damage. Lady number one: "Oh my god! You should move out! Lady number two: "You have to call the health inspector. There's a knock at the door and looky here, it's Lady number three: "Oh you poor thing! I'm soo sorry." Why is she sorry?

The problem turned out to be a radiator leak from the upstairs apartment. She didn't even know it was leaking. I'm now the proud owner of two ten x ten holes in my ceiling. I walked over to the one in the corner of my living room for an inspection. There I stood directly below this hole, my neck cocked back, my eyes beaming to the stars. At first I didn't believe my blinkers. I could see all the way up to the ceiling ABOVE me. Not MY ceiling, but my neighbours. WHA? Anyone out there got a periscope?

Doug Stanhope at the Underground Cinema

I rode back home in a speechless cab that picked me up on a faceless street. Quick Lubes and Moonlight Restaurants scrolled by my eyeballs’ windshield.

I hailed ten cabs before one stopped and picked me up. Shit, I thought, I could just walk home, just about halfway there. Now I know how those hitchhikers felt when I was roller-coasting up and down Airport Road the other day, just wizzing by, laughing at their fate with a Peter Jackson wedged in my lips, air con fanning my face and Tom Waits blasting some hot shit jazz through my speakers . . . "Romeo is bleeding . . ." I had my axe and laundry in the backseat and my dealers number in my phone. All they got is a thumb and a dream. I'm laughing. Ha! Look at his thumbing arm go limp after I roar by and glimpse the stinging pain of rejection on his face in the rearview window. I now know how those hitchhikers feel, neglected by motor transportation and the people who control them.  

I'm off my tits and have been walking for an hour or so. Great walk, however; beautiful vistas of the 2 AM club crowd on Queen St. West. The jackhammers had the streets were dug up, but I wasn't considering the construction in progress, what it might look like when complete. Everywhere I looked there was another gaggle of sevens, eights, and the occasional nine and ten with their painted faces and tube dresses, drunk and ready to go deeper into the night. The whole lot of them would be tens if this was Dundalk on a Saturday night.

They say Toronto has two seasons: Winter and Construction (eat it, Chicago). That's just like my brain I think, taking the steps down to a friend's basement digs, somewhere near Trinity Bellwoods. A steady excitement has built up over the last week anticipating this show. I’m a big comedy fan, yet I’ve never even been to a stand-up comedy show proper. Sure, just like every hipster wannabe I've been to 'loft parties' and 'basement shows' . . . (Hey dude, you should check out our band...The Blah Blah Swank Art Fags--Blah Blah, we're playing tomorrow night at the blah blah--frag-frick-gorph-gorph--club, you should really come see us--gorph). But this, now this was a fucking theatre show with seats and payments and tickets and the whole deal.

I was excited and not thinking straight when I took my three drink tickets and cashed them all out at once. I rationalized that there would be no getting out of my seat until the end of the show so I wanted to have a few beers to last for the duration. I'm not entirely familiar with theatre etiquette.

Doug had his heavily medicated girlfriend, Bingo, running the merch table. She was sitting cross-legged on top of the table in a red bridesmaid dress. CDs and other Doug Stanhope related material encircled her. Bingo seems like a very genuine, unguarded woman, albeit a woman with a child-like personality playing dress up. I’d buy a CD but I’ve heard them all, and I don’t really know what to do with CDs anymore. Maybe CDs will see a renaissance in thirty years similar to the current resurgence of vinyl, so I covet the meagre collection that has survived the years. They sit there year after year collecting dust in boxes. Perhaps the strategic skip on the CD will be the new needle static.

I asked Bingo about the recent Howard Stern interview with her and Doug. I told her she did all the talking; not in a bad way, it was interesting and funny, but Doug had a bug up his ass and was unusually quiet; barely said a word. She said there definitely was something wrong with him but couldn't tell me. Well as a crazed fan that's about as many degrees as I've come to the Stern Show: talking to the blitzed out girlfriend of a semi-regular guest and legendary comedian. How I long to yell 'Baba Booey!' inappropriately while a beat reporter from CityTV is doing some story about racoons breaching bio-hazard waste bins and eating late-term abortions.

By the way, whatever happened to Harold Hussein? He was my favourite weather guy. He had the perfect Caribbean accent. Not too thick as to be parodic, not too light as to be nearly imperceptible. I always wondered . . . any relation? Nah, he's too warm and friendly! And that weather guy in the chopper, Darryl Dahmer? Couldn't possibly be related, right? Nah.  

I wasn't expecting the time of my life. I wasn't expecting a fucking Celine Dion song, but I was excited. We got to the line-up and Mickey and me had to piss like nobody’s business. Anytime I've been drinking and thrust into a socially confined situation, a line-up or a car, I just know I'll have to pee my brains out. There's no seal to break with me. That's an urban myth. I will pee and then in two minutes pee some more. I'm a goddamn pee machine. I came here to do two things: piss endlessly and kick some ass. We sauntered into a nearby alley and whipped our shooters out. Pisssing like rain dogs and sweating like pigs, we stood there and for whatever unknown evolutionary reason I started doing what friends will oft do when peeing together: cross swords.

"Dude, stop!" Mickey exclaimed, like crossing swords was a felony; we're already pissing illegally in an alleyway twenty feet from Spadina Ave, who cares if we're crossing swords? I laughed uproariously at this, like a mad child, and kept disrupting Mickey's even flow, and there was already some rent-a-cop punk in a silly uniform two sizes too big peeking his head out from around the corner. In unison we zipped up, our jean-teeth cutting through the sticky late summer heat like the frantic mating call of a long extinct bird.

Mickey put the vodka (disguised in a Naya watter bottle, naturally) into some exposed pipe jutting out of the theatre. It appeared to be a perfect fit. Save that for later . . .

Now we're waiting in line and it's just about what I suspected a Doug Stanhope line-up would be: two sets and three sets of balding, apathetic thirty-somethings with shirts futilely covering bulging guts and man boobs. The odd dame dragged out of the woodwork, forced to cancel a Friday night out with the girls to see some jerkoff named Doug Stanhope. Doug WHO? All her girlfriends say in a chorus. That was my initial impression, but as time wore on the pattern became more complex and there was a healthy mix of all types of people. A lawyer can laugh at the hypocrisy and madness of the world just like a tattoo artist—especially if a top shelf comic like Stanhope is delivering the product.

I just came into join a crowd, 'cause I had some time to kill. After all we're just the same—Humans! Humans! Humans! They're everywhere nowadays. But to see humans of the feminine variety at a Doug Stanhope show was definitely an aphrodisiac. I like me a woman with a sense of humour and an ass full of jelly and dumplings. Like a woman reading a book, a woman at a Doug Stanhope show signals long term mate potential.

The whole lot of us moved quite swiftly into the seven hundred seat capacity theatre. It was most definitely the Underground Cinema for I had no reception on my cell. That's probably why I never heard any moronic, idiosyncratic cellphone rings at any point in the proceedings. Genius! Put the theatre underground where it belongs. I mean it is supposed to be subversive, no? Unfortunately, the silence of reception-less phones was offset by the endless clanging of bottles barrelling their way down the aisles. It's great that the Underground Cinema provides booze because it puts you in the mood, but when people have nowhere to put their empties—and there're lots of empties at a Doug Stanhope show—they end up rolling around and constantly disrupting the show.

Now that's not to say one has to be slanted to enjoy this man. His flow is sharp and clear, reels you in with his drunken observations about life, laying the absurdity of it out for you in ways that seem so obvious after the fact. He doesn't set up one liners like Mitch Hedberg or Stephen Wright, he tells stories to the audience like a Woody Allen or Richard Pryor, the set punctuated with anecdotal stories of his life in Bisbee, AZ, a small town near the Mexican border. That chunk was particularly good but I was too drunk to remember the particulars. Doug ranted about the hypocrisy of Dr. Drew and the whole celebrity addict genre. The material was engaging and smart, laugh-out-loud funny at times. Doug has this cynical, myopic outlook on popular culture, but it’s never a whiny type of cynicism. It’s more of a let’s-mock-and-humiliate-these-cretins-because-they-deserve-it attitude. No matter how dark the material is, there’s always this undercurrent amongst the fans that we all share a common ground, a loose community of like minds, and that’s a beautiful thing to be a part of.

One of the benefits of drinking too much is that you can enjoy things twice for the first time. I'd love to see footage of the show. It would seem like a long forgotten dream. Gosh darn, I was so damn wasted. Generally I'm a fairly well behaved Joe Citizen. I'll sit there politely and act accordingly. But on this night I was far gone, driven over the line by slamming vodka before the show and keeping the engine going with a total of four beers during it. I think the adrenalin kept the alcohol at bay and I didn’t quite realize how drunk I was getting.

This was the most drunk I've been in some time and I always quietly say to myself not do anything too embarrassing. I'm always getting into trouble with those damn words when I get into the hard stuff. I was yelling out jibberish to Doug and I couldn't give a squirt of piss what anyone had to say about it. Some of my hilarious lines included: "Doug, you can skin my baby!" (a call back to an earlier joke) and, "Doug, when are you going to do Howard again?" (totally random and out of the blue). There was probably more. I shudder at the thought. I'm so cruel to myself. That damn booze. I'll wait until the crowd is oh so quiet and then blurt out my nonsense. Throughout the following week there were surging waves of douche chills crashing through my body. Sometimes an attack just creeps out of nowhere and it hits you. Time . . . only time heals douche chills, my friends, for now, some two weeks after the event I don't really care all that much. Well, beer helps too, my friends, so stay thirsty. 

Doug ended the show to a roaring standing ovation. The show was timed so well—didn’t go on for too long, but it wasn't too short, either. It left you wanting just one more taste.

I was lit up pretty good and headed out for a cigarette. I found myself standing outside amongst my fellow Stanhope fans. Ah . . . a man amongst his peers. The other day I read an interview with DS in LA Weekly and the interviewer put forth the assumption it was common knowledge that Doug Stanhope fans are comprised of 50% educated liberals and 50% complete fucking morons. I straddled the border precariously. One more beer and I could have easily slipped over to one side or the other.

You could feel it in the air—the night was a success with both crowds. It was plain as day that he killed, but you never know, I could have walked outside to a gaggle of indifferent hipsters and haters. I eased myself into a conversation with a few guys and we laughed about some of the jokes. "All new material...." "...Yeah, fucking killed it." After a few minutes I remembered that guys don't look so good when my belly's full of beer, but we enjoyed the built-in camaraderie that naturally exists with a niche performer like Stanhope and his brand of comedy.

I scanned the scene for my future ex-wife. I was having a difficult time standing still, kept wavering to and fro as if there was a roiling sea beneath my feet. I scolded myself for getting so drunk. My mind is sharp but my body is not so my credibility is shot to the moon. Mmmm . . . but what was this before me? A lovely young woman standing alone smoking a cigarette, just like me; we have so much in common already.

I walk up to her and say, "Greaaadd show, huh?" Goddamn stupid brain! Should’ve said something better than that! Even in my addled state I knew that she knew I was off my pisser, that she pegged me as a drunken creep immediately; I was slurring my words and swaying in the breeze. It’s damn near impossible to reverse a first impression when you're trying to reel in a nice catch. Ah well, doesn't matter all that much because in Toronto there's as many women as there are specks of sand on Cherry Beach. 

"Oh, hey there sweet cheeks, boy do I have ants in my pants for you! I'll buy that wine you like and cook that dinner you like, we can watch your show, not mine, and then for dessert I'll marinate my dip stick in your baby factory. Did you know that's what the Mormons do? They found a loophole in their favourite book—a sly way to cheat the system . . . they call it marinating. You just stick your penis in and let it sit there in the pussy juice. No loco motion. We can do that if you want."

She casually walked away, and when I eventually glanced in her direction she seemed to have disappeared. Another mermaid lost to the ebbing tide, and I, invariably, as noted in the beginning, rode home in a speechless cab.  

Cruelty To Stuffed Animals

When I was fourteen I became obsessed with masturbating just like millions of other healthy teenaged boys. Although the first time I masturbated I was merely twelve, by the time I hit fourteen it was integral to my everyday life. At any possible moment I’d sneak away and abuse myself. I even made this horrific semen stain on the basement carpet after years of  droppingroppingloads in the same spot. I didn’t even bother to use a tissue! What was wrong with me? Dozens of hot sobbing loads dribbled out of my penis and formed this crusty yellowish stain. When I was approaching that glorious divine moment I simply stood up and bombs over Baghdad!

After a while it became like a science experiment--how much semen can one teenagr dump onto one spot until something strange happens? At some point does it become radioactive? What if I create some kind of semen superhero.

Aside from just doing it wherever and whenever, I started getting curious about bringing other objects into the relationship with my hand and penis. When I was fourteen I would stick my dick in just about anything except another human being. Put it in between two pillows? I think I’ll try that. Ohh look at that cream, I’ll definitely whack off with that.

I only masturbated with Rub A535 once and I’m sure you can figure out why. It was like jerking off with jalapeno peppers. That day, I learned my lesson: A cream is not just a cream.

One day alone in my room I noticed that I had a few old stuffed animals on the top shelf of my closet and I got to thinking. Hmmm . . .  

Every male teenager goes through a phase where they want to stick their cock into various things to simulate sex. Some fuck an empty roll of toilet paper, some put two pillows together and go to town, some buy rubber vaginas, Me? I took to fucking my old stuffed animals.

One evening it began. I grabbed a cute little cuddly wuddly teddy bear. I was full of nervous excitement. I was about to lose my virginity…well sort of. I grabbed a pair of scissors and made a nice tight little fuck hole in just the right place. I stuffed my shooter in and violated that teddy bear. In the wild, bears attack humans but it's the other way around in my bedroom.

And my parents thought I was doing homework! After 7.8 seconds of going back and forth stabbing that helpless bear the inevitable happened. At least I pulled out and finished in some toilet paper; I didn’t want any baby bears running around.

The dye had been cast. For the next year or so I had many torrid affairs with my old stuffed animals. First, I chose the white teddy bear the folks got me from Sears when I was about ten because it had the softest fur, but I soon found out that the cotton in and around the pseudo-vaginal area became, after a few uses, how can I say…tarnished. I had a real dilemma. What could I do? I was really enjoying some new sensations here and the cotton is getting all packed in and hard. It just doesn't feel good anymore. But this is a teddy bear, so I got to thinking... I don't have to screw it in the vaginal area. Look at that big bulbous fluffy head. I bet there's a ton of pristine cotton in that dome of hers. I grabbed the scissors and jabbed one of the blades into the top of the bears skull, then cut a tight slit. It's showtime. My first stuffed love, I wish you had known her, we were quite a pair. 

I went hunting for more victims. The next one I grabbed was a brown dog, something like a sheepdog. I don't know, who cares, I cut the old bitch open anyways. This cotton wasn't as soft as the white teddy bears, and for that she only stuck around a few nights.

Like Nero of the Stuffed Animal World I took what I wanted and moved on. Yeh, that's right honey, I just used you for your sweet honey cotton, then I'm onto the next one! Tossed right back into the closet like a memory long forgotten.

On one of my birthdays, about seventeen, some friends bought a blow-up sheep for me as a gag. Complete with a functional vagina and everything. Well, not totally functional, I don't think it could have my baby, actually I'm quite sure, but the kind of function that a man needs.

I've been a bah-h-h-d, bah-h-h-d boy," I said, rubbing some bargain store lube on my unit. The sheep did not protest as I slid it into it's orifice. What sex was this sheep? It simply had one hole--the Vasshole. A genderless sheep, right up my alley, yes sir. Oh, the sights God would see perched in heaven! Me and my skinny white legs in my socks pumping furiously into a little white sheep. Satan is waiting for me with outstreched hands.

This sheep was great sex for a week or two. The perfect affair. She didn't nag me, I didn't have to visit her parents, didn't have to listen to her problems at work, didn't have to send her any Blue Valentines, etc., etc. Only had to listen to her soft little squeaks as I thrust into her.

A year or so prior, I actually had broken down and went to San Diego. It was a store at Shopper's World that sold novelty items: Sex gags, funny shirts, funny shot glasses, bongs with multiple tubes to suck on, aprons complete with furry pubic hair and floppy penis. You know the store. The sex gag shop. The shop you always wanted to go in when you were younger but were too afraid. I found a blow up doll in a back corner and carried it to the check out counter. I couldn't stand my own hand any longer! Variety is the spice of life, I told myself. So here she was, my new girlfriend tucked comfortably under my arm; what a splendid couple we made. I carefully layed her out on the counter. My only purchase. I could feel my cheeks burning up and turning scarlett, but not johansson.

The cashier--a teenage girl about the same age as me--launched into a pre-scripted routine about how the inflatable sex doll is just a PG joke, it doesn't have an actual hole.

What kind of fucking joke is this? I thought as she yammered on. Another genderless toy! Why on earth would you sell such a thing? Horny teenage boys want to ravage their synthetic girlfriends and you give them THIS? A tramp! She can't cook or clean or vacuum AND she can't fuck? And we package her up and sell her for $30 a pop! Maybe it really is the end times.

Now I was stuck in the awkward position of pretending to know that it was fake all along, like I meant to buy a blow up doll without a vagina. I was too nervous to reject the product because then this girl would know that I was buying the doll just to sexually abuse it. She didn't deserve that trauma.

"Oh, it doesn't have a hoooole?" I said in obvious mock disappointment. Of course it doesn't have a hole, I knew that! She giggled and that made my day. I thus continued, "It's just a birthday present for a friend and he's having a pool party. I thought it would make for a good floatation device." Quick thinking Nezbit, I told myself.

"It sure will," she said, and we briefly locked gazes after the transaction was complete. I turned around to leave and once she couldn't see me my face, it tightened in anger and my brows furrowed. "Fucking bullshit," I muttered to myself. "Goddamn fucking doll, can't even fuck it."

I got home and begrudgingly blew her up anyways; she took my breath away. I tried to kiss her and though she accepted my loving pecks, she wouldn't accept the flick of my tongue in her mouth.

Another low in my continuing saga of sexual frustration.

She became the only woman I've ever knifed. I couldn't exactly leave her propped up in the recycling bin now could I? I cut a slit down the top of her head and she deflated along with any remaining vestiges of desire.

And that was that with the stuffed toys. So--ahh--anyways . . . I moved on to real women with real heartbeats only to catch the pieces of my broken heart in my hands. Shit, look at me already getting nostalgic for the good ol' stuffed days. No tight ropes to walk, no delicate balance to uphold, no emotional justice to stand in judegement of. Freedom, baby! But that hook of love keeps digging in, reeling my bloody gutted old weary carcass back, a body limp and lifeless.

Sometimes what we call love is really something else. Where are the words! There aren't enough of them to go around for all the mouths. A scream looking for a mouth, ahh...how right you are Selby.

Team Six On A Kill Mission

If you're going to believe all the bull shit they're telling you about these SEALS than you're crazy as bat shit.

What I'm talking about is, I keep reading the phrase, "Bin Laden lunged for his weapon," and it doesn't seem plausible. I mean he must have had at the very least...minutes, if not a great many seconds considering his life is on the line to lunge/grab/pickup/brandish a weapon while the SEALS were clearing out the 1st and 2nd floors. Did he not hear the commotion? Did he not hear the Blackhawks? The gun fire? He must of had time to sit there cradling his AK like a despondent puppy, waiting for daddy to come take it away.

I'm no expert, obviously, because last time I checked there weren't any SEALS injured in the raid so OBL must not have been packing heat (a couple weeks later as more details emerge, it appears he was armed with two women). His gun was probably in the room somewhere but that's beside the point. This was a kill mission, pure and simple. Look at all the other occupants in the house: Left cuffed for the Pakistani cops to clean up the SEALS' mess. I can picture them showing up and seeing all these dead bodies and people cuffed and Osama's mastermind all over the floor and it was like the devil swept through the house and disappeared into the night.

How in the hell could America detain this megalomaniac and give him a trial, and a fair one at that? Shit, he got his trial alright and the judge was a red snapper. Don't some people just deserve to die anymore? I can think of ten people off the top of my head. Give me some time and eventually you'll end up on that list too. Don't you long for the good ol' days, not even that long ago, when folks were holding placards outside the prison where Ted Bundy was being executed that advertised Bundy Burgers?

I want a Bin Laden Burger and I want it now.

Personally, If I was Obam--I mean, cough cough, Osama, I would have popped out of the shower, toweling my hair and pretended like nothing was wrong, like one casual dude. "Bin Laden? Never heard of 'em," I'd say in a thick Texan twang. "I'm just another ex-pat in Abbottabad, pardner. A simple computer programmer, that's all I am. U-S-A---U-S-A--" BAP! BAP!---a bullet hits his chest and then a bullet hits his head just above his left eye and blows bits of his skull and brains out. Skrains maybe? Maybe not. Take it however you like. You could touch the brain matter and it would still be hot from the electricity of life, from being where it should be--in a head.

Does the brain think for a few seconds even though it's not in the head? I would think the brain would think, "Ohhh, I'm a brain, I'm so smaaart, I can solve problems and tell the body what to do, I control the body like a slave, but how am I going to get off the ground and back into my cozy head?"

I am just too fascinated with this story. I can't get over it. It's great reality TV. I watched an animated clip posted online by NBC, I believe. Goddamn thing was only a minute long. I want the whole raid animated. Is it that hard? It wasn't like the animation was top notch.

Now, there's even a video game where you can play any character. Can I play the courier? Please? Please? Or maybe a goat? Ah well, at least the courier fired a few rounds before the SEALS shuffled off his mortal coil. That must have been nice.

Unlike that jerkoff lead singer in Fallout Boy, Patrick Stump, who doesn't think that it's morally proper, or some such righteous catchphrase, to celebrate the death of OBL, I have a feeling in my gut which tells me to disagree. I only know about this Stump guy from reading a little blurb in the Entertainment section, and also his pseudo-mediocre music if I'm to be totally honest. It's certainly alarming that Patrick Stump from Fallout Boy is the go to guy for a quote about the death of the most wanted terrorist in the world. Perhaps more than the actual death of Bin Laden. I want to know what Gary the Retard thinks a hell of a lot more than Patrick Stump, don't you? Stick to churning out dried turds in hot dog buns for people to put shove in their ears, kid.

Stump and OB. Sounds like a hard hitting Fox News Show. Fridays at 9pm.

How about the SEAL who grabbed the woman and pulled her away from the other SEALS when they entered the room containing OBL so that he could absorb the blast if she was wearing a vest. He will gladly accept total annihilation for his brothers. A lot of people talk the talk but it's a hell of a lonely walk. I can only grasp at the mental fortitude required of a SEAL.

On second thought, maybe I am a hero. I squash a centipede in my bedroom and I think, how dare he mess with the king of Nezbitland? I rule with an iron fist. My giant swatter doles out justice! I stamp out any revolution against the Nezbit government before it begins! Damn the rebels! There will be no change! The streets will run with blood if the infidels attempt to overrun me! Dictator Nezbit will not tolerate insubordination in his homeland!

Some of the centipedes' many legs were stuck to the wall, writhing like a fiver in the greasy fingers of an old timer down on pervert row.

The gall!

Spiders, too beware. There was once a huge monster of a beast right outside my bathroom window. He was always there waiting for me every night when I took a shower. Always flinched when I turned on the taps, too. He was a sensitive one, that spider. I couldn't get at him though; he was just outside the gates of Nezbitland. It appeared as those he hovered in mid air, this leader of the rebels. Big Daddy I called him. Come rain, wind, hell or high water there he was. I had fantasies of my own reconnaisance kill mission...

I consulted with my top officials and we resolved to purchase insect repellant that shot a massive concentrated spray. You see, my screens are permanently in place, I cannot open them and use my giant swatter. Unlike the Bin Laden raid where the intelligence had a high percentage of probability that he was inside that compound, I knew 100% damn well this sonofabitch was right outside and there was fuck all I could do. I pressed my mouth to the screen and gave a good long blow but that only made Big Daddy mad. I didn't want to piss him off. I wanted him to give him the illusion of safety until I attempted an ambush.

I never did get the repellant that shot the fire hose of death (general apathy maybe?) and Big Daddy just kept living the dream, taunting me with his very existence outside of my gates. This Cold War lasted six months. I mean I only saw or was near him for ten minutes every night as I showered and then I forgot about him, so that can explain the lack of initiative. The plans got lost in the bureaucracy of the Nezbitland government and I as ruler, unlike Obama, never pulled the trigger on the operation.

Then one day Big Daddy just disappeared and I never saw him again. I had long ago incorporated him into my routine and was now neurotic that he wasn't there. Now....I didn't know where he was. Big Daddy has escaped! Sound the alarms! I put Nezbitland under a nine o'clock curfew and checked all the nooks and crannies in my bathroom. Has the hunter become the hunted?

One of the funnier headlines in recent days, was "Disney wants to trademark Bin Laden killers."

When they go after Al Qaeda's number two man, Ayman Al Zawahiri, the SEALS will have Mickey Mouse ears on their helmets.

I wait for the day.

The Man Who Clapped Too Loud

(The following events took place in Apr of '09)


It has been exactly one week since I marched into the doctors office knowing the worst was yet to come. It has been exactly two weeks since Rene broke up with me.

She was a beautiful blonde haired girl of twenty one that I was dating. Had all the right measurements. Smart, artistic, rich parents, lived in a suburban palatial estate in Georgetown, complete with her own basement apartment and separate entrance. She out drank me and we fucked like rabbits. Life was too good.

The first time we had sex I came over to her place for dinner. I only knew her a few days at this point. On the night we first met there was an intense makeout session on my friend's porch and I masterbated in front of her (at her request, of course). This was at 4am, but a nosy neighbour decided to take his dog out for a walk and that put a stop to that before I could finish. Even though I was in a drunken stupor there was still an ounce or two of shame as I bent down to pick up my pants which were around my knees. Then there was the additional shame of having a raging hard on as I did this. I really had to pull my pants UP and OUT to zip up! I was standing there with a goofy look on my face and this cock monster pressing against my jeans, sticking out like a broken bone. It was getting late and she had art class or something in the morning so I drove her home and we made a date for the next night.

I brought condoms and a bottle of wine to our first dinner. I didn't show her the condoms though, I'm a gentleman. After we ate her carefully prepared veggie samosas and garden salad we started going at it and oh boy! It was hot.

We moved to her bedroom and proceeded to tear our clothes off--and it wasn't to play doctor. My heart was racing, my head was spinning. I hadn't had sex for a year, and when you wait that long you fear that the shooter won't work or you'll pump once and explode--something's bound to going to go wrong. What if I couldn't perform up to this lovely young woman's standards? There was only one way to find out. Somehow I stopped kissing her long enough to suggest that I had a pack of condoms. Real suave.

I thought I was being sexually responsible but she was some care free hippie girl. "I don't want to use a condom, it feels better without one, no? I'm clean, I just got tested like six months ago," she said.

"Yeah, I'm definitely clean too," I said. "I was tested recently." I just met this girl a few days ago and already my first lie. I guess there was one good thing about not getting laid in a year: 100% disease free!

Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought, gee, a lot can happen in six months but my judgement was clouded with passion and I was all in.

I sliced into Rene (stayharddon'tcumstayharddon'tcumstayhard) and we quickly found our rhythm. The greatest feeling is when you allay the sexual fears within; then one can sit back and enjoy the natural pleasure of a woman's flesh. Instantly Rene and myself had great sexual chemistry and our love making turned into a Dionysian frenzy. I Put one of her legs up and hit that hip bone like it owed me money. "Shuuush..." Rene whispered, "We have to be quiet, my Mom's upstairs."

Be quiet at a time like this? It was near impossible. I slowed down a little but I was building up to climax so to hell with her Mom and all her rules about being quiet. I can't help that your daughter is a beautiful nymph with an ass that could stop traffic. You know, one day subnormal worms and gophers and other underground creatures will be feasting on my skull and then where did those rules get you? And besides, this was a huge dream house like the ones given away on that t.v. show with that guy who has the amazingly techni-coloured pretty boy hair. Anytime you see a guy with a $75 haircut with all the bells and whistles you can guarantee he's a douche with a soul like barndung. I hope he goes bald. I need him in my life like a barricuda needs a bike. But anyways, back to the story...

I was so proud of myself. I finished on Rene's stomach like a good little boy and we bathed in post coital sunshine.

"I bet you want to sleep over, huh?" She said, sensing my desire. Read my mind.

"Su--" I was about to answer, "But you can't, my Mom won't let guys sleep over."

I slipped out her screen door and took a cab back to my friend's place where I was staying that night. The perfect date. I laid in bed and kept replaying the night over and over, her moans of pleasure reverberating through my head. "Still got it, kid," I thought to myself. This is what living's all about, baby!

For some reason, after a month of dating, she didn't want to see me any more. She was always over at my place, neglecting her friends, her school, getting drunk and having sex with ME. She came to her senses. She cut me off so suddenly, with no warning, I was ill prepared. My heart fell into my feet and my head into my hands. She said I was a bad influence; that I brought out the destructive side in her after she just got cleaned up. Baby, I was thinking the same thing, but give me some honesty to chew on.


I quietly took my seat in the waiting room, leafed through an old fashion magazine, looking for women that resembled Rene. I was called in after just a few minutes; an unusually slow day.

“Taylor!” The nurse exclaimed to the mostly empty room, and to this day I still feel slightly awkward hearing the sound of my name. Taylor Nezbit. It’s kind of a pussy name isn’t it? Not something luxurious and suave that rolls of the tongue like Rock Hudson now is it? Even though the man is gay as the day is long, hell of a masculine name isn‘t it? I go into the doctor's office and sit and wait some more. My eyes are fixed on the bland décor consisting of ‘sunset landscapes’ and ‘wild animals staring into the distance’. Nice touch.

Dr. Grant comes in and we make some small talk--turns out he used to live with his immaculately perfect family (pictures on his desk tell me so) in the same neighbourhood as I now reside in--The Kingsway. He I'm sure occupied one of the stately homes directly to my north, not one of the low rise apartment buildings right on Bloor St in my own personal hell.

After the small talk we got down to business. Now the questions that I’ve been waiting to pop for about a week are going to be answered (that’s how long it took to get a goddamn appointment). Now that I had my moment it didn't feel right, the whole situation felt funny. “So, I...uhh have had to pry my penis hole open every day for the last week when I want pee. I grab the head of my penis with my index finger and thumb and pull it open with a pincer grip; and once, the other day, there was the littlest speck of blood right in the tip. BUT, just a little down there means a lot, right? I have no discharge but there is a slight pain and uncomfortable feeling. It just looks a little bit swollen inside there,” I said--'there'--being the INSIDE OF MY FUCKING COCK!

It’s not Halloween but that’s scary stuff. Getting a disease in your brain or your cock has got to be the worst. So the doc gets up and says, “This is going to be torture. Drop ‘em!” I knew exactly where this situation was going.

I had to drop my drawers and lay down on my back. He was putting on the gloves. Nothing good comes when the doctor puts on the gloves. I shudder to think. I’m laying on my back and nervously laughing and panting as he gripped my flaccid member (with a pincer grip), “ha..ah..ha.ah..ha...Just give me a second to mentally prepare doc!”

He didn't wait. This is our health system at work. It's a whole fucking sack full of swift medical justice let me tell ya. He stuck some kind of swab about an inch down into my penis and I let out the yelp of a lifetime. “AHHH!!!” The scream only lasted but a second and it was done, but let me tell you, everyone in that waiting room heard this beastly wail of mine. The nurses too. "Just another clap test," they’d say as they passed each other in the halls.

Boy it was painful. Like getting pierced or like a bee stinging the inside of your pipe. I hope my worst enemy doesn’t have to go through that. I hope they go through much worse but that is neither here nor there.

I was worried there would be a week delay before I got the results of the swab and this disease, whatever it was, would be left to fester inside me. I was actually getting worked up the night before, "I know I have a goddamn STD, I don't want to wait for your goddman tests to tell me!" I pictured myself yelling at Dr. Grant. But that was not the case.

“Taylor, you have Chlamydia. It's common, don't worry. I’m going to prescribe these pills; take them all at once. There’s four small ones and one big one. The big one stays in your system for ten days.”

How easy is that? Medicine takes care of our problems so we don’t have to. Sounds good to me, doc! I mean seriously, kids look at what happens when you get Chlamydia: You go home and take these four small pills and one large pill. All at once, not one this day, two tomorrow. There’s no routine involved--just gulp ‘em down. I gulped mine down with red wine. That Chlamydia will be gone in a week!

It really is quite a benign disease in the grand scheme of things. Not like genital warts which lasts forever or, obviously the HIV, so I think I lucked out. Chlamydia is the most common says my doctor. See, I’m educating myself too. I look at it like this: In the family of STD’s the Clap is the favourite uncle who always gives you the coolest birthday presents compared to HIV who is your absent father who sodomizes you and says he’ll never do it again but after a few months does it again anyways and now you‘re caught in a vicious cycle. Kind of like that. If you’re forced to choose...I mean come on it’s a no-brainer.

The real drama began when I left the doctors office. I swear I was almost happy getting the Clap so I had an excuse to call Rene. Yes, getting the Clap was just a simple worthwhile excuse to call and hear her voice. If I didn't know what love was, it was definitely something like that.

She seemed mildly surprised when I called and told her. Well to be fair, she called me (because I texted her first when she wouldn’t answer her phone). I texted that I had to tell her something ‘important about our health’. What the fuck could that be she must have been thinking when she called five minutes later.

“Hey, how’s it going?” She said in a slightly friendly, slightly detached voice. I couldn’t tell if she was uncomfortable or just didn’t give a fuck about talking to me anymore. Maybe she didn’t think twice, but it’s alright.

“Well, it’s going okay I suppose. I only want to rip my fucking eyeballs out, chew them up and spit them out at passerbys. I’ve been falling down drunk and high on blow, smoking like a chimney the last two weeks. Everything reminds me of you. I just want to obliterate any memory of you. I think that if only I didn’t go to the bar that night I would never have met you. If only my friends and I left and I never approached you and commented on your jacket. Sometimes I can’t even eat. You believe that? I haven’t felt like this since I was a teenager. I would still fuck you even though you have the Clap. Hey I have it now too so who fucking cares? Heck, I’d still fuck you even if I was clean and I knew you were poisoned. I just can’t get enough of you. I just can’t get you out of my head and no I will not make a Kylie Minogue reference here. How did it come to this? From a soaring peak to a cold hard rock (Hudson?) bottom. How’s that generic tramp stamp on your back going to look in thirty years when you got a cigarette hanging from your mouth, a bottle of Jack in your hand, and a dick up your ass? You're only twenty one and you've already sat on a mile of cock. You’ve been with--and I quote--twenty-five to thirty guys. Twenty five TO thirty? You actually gave me a five person range. It could be twenty six but it could very well be twenty nine. That’s disgusting, and you’re a disgusting vile girl. May you go blind and become infertile from the Chlamydia that you infected me with.”

“It’s going okay,” I muttered instead.

“I have something kind of important to tell you.”

“Oh, okay.” She said.

“Yeah I think you should go to a clinic and get checked out because I think I got something from you. The doctor said it was Chlamydia.”

Jackpot!

I just laid it out there--it was the loudest silence for but a second, right after I dropped the C bomb. I’ve been waiting for that screaming silence all week. She really wasn’t too phased by the whole thing. Damn, cold as ice.

Obviously, she was a little shocked: “I’m going to go to the doctor tomorrow.” Then she mentioned that she was going to have to make a few awkward calls tomorrow to the--ahem--two guys she thinks infected her. Who fucking knows if that’s true or not; I try not to even think about those little details.

It’s ovahh! We exchanged a few pleasantries about how we find this whole situation funny in our dark little way.

"You sure do have bad taste in men," I said and it was the second last time I heard her laugh. The last time I heard her laugh was when I asked her: "Does a group of people in a room together who all have the Clap constitute as applause?"

I just wish we could enjoy the laughter together instead of the tears...well, my tears. There was a change in the way she spoke to me, a terrible finality during that last call. It can never go back, the spell has been broken. She'll never look at me again with those green eyes and flash a coy smile. Everyday that seeps into the past we get farther and farther away from getting back the magic we had. That’s the lingering sadness now some month and a half since our break-up. Why, oh WHY does it have to end (screaming on my knees with outstretched hands). I don't want it to end Mommy!

Why do relationships die? Two people make an investment together on a long shot and sooner or later one of the parties wants to cash out. Is it better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all? A question of the ages. I'll let the Immortal Bard sort that one out. In this case I can, at this moment, say that I wish I never met Rene. Now I try to forget but trying to forget is impossible so I give in to the thoughts and exhaust them until they have no raw nerve endings left--they’re fried. I’m starting to feel the heal of time and it itches. What is a person to do but drink and smoke the pain away (scratching) until some other lucky lass hitches her wagon to mine and the whole process begins anew.

God Blessed Me With Two Virginities

Everybody has their story--the night they lost their sexual innocence. Maybe it was to a high school sweetheart on the Mexican Riviera, maybe it was to a $35 (full service) crackwhore in a Vancouver alley. My story is the latter...at least I think. You see, I'm not quite sure when or where my first time happened. Maybe, just maybe, God himself made a mistake, like a bank error in my favour, and he ended up giving me TWO virginities. Thanks big timer. And so it follows there are two competing narratives that run through this story...

The year was 1997. The month was July. I was sixteen years years old, on a summer road trip with my high school buddy Sean and his folks. For the drive we brought two albums: Paranoid by Black Sabbath and L.A. Woman by The Doors. Jim Morrison's drunken voice blared through the speakers as Sean's dad navigated the steep mountainous roads. I particularly liked L.A. Woman. I pictured a bearded and bloated Jim sauntering into the studio and laying down his vocals in one take as he sat on the toilet with a bottle of Jack--
Cops and cars
The topless bars
Never saw a woman
So alone
SO ALONE!

We stopped over in the Rockies on the way to Vancouver for a white water rafting adventure. Apparently it was one of the most difficult rivers to navigate for non-experts; I read that on a brochure. I could not suppress the knots in my belly, they were pulsating and ebbing, tightening up as Sean and myself donned our life jackets and the instructor began his spiel. He had to yell over the endless whooshing of the river, and ultimately it boiled down to, "Paddle like hell when we reach the rapids." Words to live by.

When we arrived in Vancouver, Sean and myself were like feral zombie beasts let loose on the population--specifically the prostitute population. We immediately resolved to get away from his parents, hunt down some pot and mushrooms and get some whores. You have to prioritize!

We asked a cab driver where all the hookers were. "Downtown Eastside," came the answer. So to the Downtown Eastside we went. I don't remember much about the neighborhood but it sure was seedy, with women in short skirts dotting each intersection. Somehow, I wandered away from Sean like a kid in a candy store and ran into a rail thin 30ish brunette walking in the middle of the street, seemingly lost in her own world. I approached her and she gave me a smile, a conmans smile--it's like a stuffed animal, warm and fuzzy on the outside but dead on the inside.

"You wanna come with me, honey?" She said in her best come hither put on, but it could scarcely cover the years of hard living. Nonetheless, I followed. "Yeah, let's do this," I said trying to sound casual. She started having a coughing fit, hacking up a fucking lung and said, "Don't worry, it will feel better than it sounds."
That was reassuring.
We went to a nearby alley and I handed over $35. It wasn't beneath her to ask me for some change too; I handed over some nickels and dimes. The money disappeared up her black leather skirt. She would not be meeting the queen anytime soon.

After a sub par two minute blowjob she got up and so did her black leather skirt. I had my appetizer and now it was time for dinner! With this being my first time and with the alley being so dark, I couldn't really get it in. Couldn't hit the mark. I don't think the problem was me, (I had a raging purple turnip) but she was dryer than a pile of dead leaves. I made a feeble attempt to grab her hips and connect my USB cable to her port; I don't really know if I made a connection. It might have slipped in for a second, maybe just the tip. Is that all there is to sex I wondered after a minute or two of dry humping. She stood up straight, pulled down her skirt and said she had to go. Boy, she was busier than the Pope--AND she just made $35 and change in five minutes or so (including travel time). She must be rich!

Is that my virginity gone with the wind? That was not the earth shattering experience I was hoping for. Maybe if you do it with a lover and not a body seller it feels better? Hey lady, can I have a refund? No fucking condom either. I mean, I know I was a sixteen year old stoner grunge rocker Kurt Cobain all the way but I did have common sense regarding STD's. In school I learned that women working the streets lead a riskier life than Janice down the street and therefore one has a greater chance of contracting a disease if you have sex. When you don't put your knowledge to good use what good is that knowledge in the first place? Well enough of that...

My primary dilemma after I had zipped up and bid adieu is I couldn't find Sean. It was like he disappeared. He simply got lost in the mix while I was busy on my first lap around the inter-course.

What a night, I definitely maybe just lost my viriginity (does the tip count?) and I was high on life (adrenalin and pot) and I wanted to yenta it up with my buddy. I couldn't find him anywhere so I did the logical thing: I began running like a madman down unrecognizable streets. The more I did that the more tangled I became in the web I had spun.
"SEAN! SEAN!" I was screaming and running frantically. Prositutes and clients playing the oldest game in the book were looking at me like I was crazy. My other dilemma was that I might have stuck my penis in a crackwhore with no protection. AIDS kept screaming at me over and over in my mind like the news ticker at the bottom of CNN. It keeps scrolling by on an endless loop ---YOU HAVE AIDS---YOU HAVE AIDS---YOU HAVE AIDS---YOU HAVE AIDS---YOU HAVE HIV WHICH WILL SOON BECOME AIDS---AND YOU CAN'T FIND SEAN---PADDLE LIKE HELL---Running, running, down this road and that road. Lost downtown in a city far from home. To further complicate the situation I had no clue where the ground level loft apartment was that we were staying at. No phone number or anything. No cell phone to call Sean. In short I was fucked. I wanted to crumble to my knees and scream to the heavens.
I turned a corner and this greasy looking guy in a muddy pickup truck rolled down his window and pulled up along side me. He must have seen me running wildly through the streets. A teenager in distress. What a good samaritan to stop and offer help.

"Hey, what chu doin' kid? You'se lost or sumpin?" Now that he was stopped beside me I got a good look. He was short, dirty, bald but still grew his hair out long in defiance of his baldness. Not a good look.

"Yeah, I'm just trying to find my buddy mister. What's it to you?"

"Well, get in, let's go find him!" I ran around the side of his pickup and swooped myself in and he he sped off down the street.

"Hey, my name's Bobby P. What's the matter anyway kid?"

"Well, I can't find my friend, I'm running all over the place trying to find him. Plus I think I may have just lost my virginity, but I don't know for sure."

"Yeah, the first time's tough, huh?"

"You're telling me. I couldn't even find the hole!"

The two of us drove aimlessly down side streets yelling, "SEAN! SEAN!" out of our respective windows. "I know these streets pretty well, don't worry we'll find him--he couldn't of gone too far. Hey, I got me a pig farm a few km's down the road. You should visit some time, we'll get some girls and slaughter a live pig and roast it." Wow! The people in Vancouver are much friendlier than Toronto. I had been here but one night and already made a friend. "That sounds nice Bobby, real nice."
After a few more minutes of driving and chatting we miraculously spotted Sean jogging slowly, weighed down by exhaustion. Bobby saw him first and proclaimed, "There he is!" He was right. There he was.
Sean was stunned and relieved to see me. Perhaps a little confused seeing me roll by in a pickup truck caked in mud with a bald guy with long hair at the wheel. Very confusing indeed. Surely Sean didn't think this was my date? I hope not.
"Case closed!" Bobby yelled. "Well thanks a lot, man you're a life saver."
The rest of the trip turned out to be great. We had dinner with the some of the guys from Doug and the Slugs (I had never heard of them either). Then we went to a hippie drum fest. The only thing I remember was a slogan on someone's bag that read: My body is just a cage for my soul.

The year was also 1997. The month was September. I was in grade 11. Brampton Centennial Secondary School. It was lunch time and I was walking to my locker to grab my jacket and then walk the 5 minutes to my house, eat Chef Boyardee (Ravioli if I remember correct) and watch the Crocodile Hunter. Upon closing my locker, my friend Max appeared with Sabina, this intriguing blonde girl from our art class. She was the girl in the class who seemed to be such an adult. Whatever that was. She was so mature, had so much life experience. Drinking, older boyfriends, fake i.d's, bars. Drugs? Hell, she probably tried 'em all, O.D'd on smack, went to rehab, and lived to tell the story. All by the ripe old age of sixteen. I could tell immediately that she was totally hammered. Drunk by lunch--wow, I couldn't even fathom such a thing--what a creature!
"Sabina's going to come to your house for lunch," Max said conspiratorially. Something was up.
"Uhh sure," I uttered semi-awkwardly. What girl wouldn't want to lose her virignity to me? I was a scrawny, pimply-faced grunge rocker. I'm sure that day I had my brownish plaid shirt on (unbuttoned) with a Mudhoney shirt underneath. Winning!
Little did I know--and probably Sabina too--that in half an hour she was going to bust me loose from the prison of my virginity. But, as you have come to know, this was a liminal phase in my sexual adventures; had I achieved insertion in Vancouver with that hooker in the alley? The answer lies somewhere, whirlpooling around in the synapses of my fickle memory. God only knows.
I don't remember who got Sabina first but she was ready to go. She led me upstairs and it felt like I was walking up to the gallows. A lamb being led to the knife. My God! Are we gonna like...DO it? Mommy! Mommy! I just want to eat my Chef Boyardee. SHIT CHRIST FUCK, will IT work? Will IT work? I mean I've test driven my car many times but never taken it off the track. We went up the stairs...almost at the top. Is this the right time? WHAT? Of course it is, I'm a man goddamnit! You just stick it right in and shuck and jive your way through it.

We quickly disrobed; she was a true blonde, and to my relief IT did work! What was the ryhthm of sex and love and life but the simple back and forth thrusting into one another? There was no thought to use condoms, I just got on top of her, hesitated for a second because I didn't really know what to do and she guided me in. There was no romance or dinner by candlelight, I sliced into her like a rugged caveman. But like a cavemans life the experience was short. It felt absolutely magical. Her guts! I'm in HER GUTS! I'd say I lasted a solid minute and when I reached that point of no return I just unloaded my universe right inside her. Incredibly stupid in hindsight wasn't it? Almost as stupid as having sex with a crack whore without a condom. I look at it like I'm a soldier in the war of life and I managed to do a couple tours and then come to my family without any serious injuries.

I rolled off Sabina and we laid there; I breathed a sigh of relief--the sound of a boy becoming a man. Is that ALL there is to sex? I'm a believer. I opened the drawer by my bed and we shared a cigarette, just like in the movies. She didn't seem too impressed but she didn't seem disappointed either, she just seemed drunk. I snubbed the smoke out and we got dressed. For whatever reason she laid down on my bench prench set in my room, lifted the bar (with about 85lbs on it) and after pulling it down to her chest she couldn't get it back up. That seems to be the hard part in love and bench pressing--getting it back up.

I helped lift the weight off of her and we went downstairs and the three of us made our way back to class. When we got back to school my new nickname was'minute man' because I blabbed that I only lasted that long. Not bad, really, when you think about it considering the circumstances. All the guys and even a few girls were laughing--a minute! What a loser! But really, on the inside most of the guys were thinking, "Shit, I've unloaded after one or two pumps." In the days of high school there is a constant pressure beating down on you to go along. Go where? Who the fuck knows, but you don't want to go out on a limb and stand up for someone who's getting their balls busted, you simply have to bust along with the rest of 'em or shut the fuck up. I prefered to shut the fuck up.

I imagine losing your virginity is similar to turning 50. You await the moment and when it passes nothing really changes. There is no great revelation and you feel pretty much the same as you did yesterday. Although when you turn 50 you damn well know it's the same old story without a new ending. You don't grow another limb or acquire super powers like you may have thought once you lost your virginity. You gain experience--some intangible unit of memory and eventually it turns into words.

Turbo Homo Bang Gang

There was this guy I once knew, Marty, used to have a band back in Brampton called Turbo Homo Bang Gang. On stage he wasn't Marty though, he was Tony Spigoni, his rock n' roll alter ego. He'd play these mad live shows at all the tired old bars and some of the lively ones, the few that there were.

He showed up at the clubs as Tony, decked out in snake skin boots, leather jacket and a tight fitting collared shirt only halfway buttoned up thus exposes a lean muscular torso and taught pecs to go nicely with a thick thatch of hair sprouting from his head. It was the kind of hair God himself would bequeath upon his own head. Tony snorted a gorilla finger of cocaine just before each show to get him pumped up, a line the size God himself would put up his nose. A bottle of Jack later and he really became Tony Spigoni.

On stage the crowd provoked him because they knew Tony had a short fuse and also because humans enjoy swilling booze and provoking violence. But he provoked the crowd too; not afraid to say anything to anyone. The way a real man doesn't take shit, never backs down from a confrontation. Maybe his confidence was propped up by indulging but so what? The crowd seemed to love Sammy Sosa and Mark Mcguire hit it out of the park.

After the first couple songs Tony began hurling obscenities at the crowd in between--and sometimes during--songs. He didn't give a shit if he forgot the lyrics, just soldiered on. Coldplay he was not. His lips were red and licking wet with booze and vitriol:

"Look at you two fat fuckers," (He targeted a couple of regulars near the front who obviously had never seen a THBG show). "You both got belly buttons like BOMB craters! I'm gonna come down there and slap all four of your BITCH tits!"

"Yeahhh?" One of them countered, "Why don't you meet us outside in the parking lot after the show and I'll show you something alright!"

"Yeah, like what? Your stamp collection, or butterflies under glass?"

And with that these two fat drunks rushed the stage and tackled Tony. Fists were flying like napalm. Tony landed a couple good ones but ended up on the wrong side of the beating. Security pulled the two heavyweights off and kicked them out of the club and the show continued, as it must.

Blood was dripping off Tony's face and pooling onto the stage below. A huge welt was already bubbling up on his forehead, his left eye bruised, soon to become technicoloured. The crowd was ROARING asking for More! More! More! Go! Go! Go! You could really feel it reverberating through the audience. A feeling of pure excitement. We go through our days filling up calendar squares with appointments/dates/meetings/birthdays and then it's over. Life just burns away and there's not much to remember most by.

"Next month I'll be on the cover of Town & Country," Tony remarked to the crowd before cueing the band into the next riff rock sludge tune. Something about zombie chicks on the moon in bikinis struggling to build a spaceship to travel back to earth to exterminate the male species:

Just another show, par for the course. The lights went up and the stereo started playing music softly, almost imperceptibly; you thought you knew the tune but couldn't be sure. As Tony settled down for a drink Jerry Stone, a crazed out hanger on to the scene came up to him and said, "Hey man, great show...as usual." "Yeah yeah, alright man."

Jerry Stone was one of those guys who was always around at every show. No one really knew where he came from. But like when neighbours describe someone after they commit a mass murder, he seemed 'odd'.

"Aren't you curious about the dreams of Amazonian tribesmen who have never ventured outside the jungle or whatever? You know, the ones you see in National Geographic documentaries?" "Sure, sure man," Tony said, looking around somewhat disinterested.

"Sometimes," Jerry continued, I dream that I'm a Brazilian tribesman who lives in the rainforest, one of these Arapaso people with poison tipped arrows and all that jazz. Then I fall asleep in the dream as one of these guys, ya know, just a regular hunter or whatever. But I can never remember those dreams. If I could, man I'd have it ALL figured out."

Jerry shuffled out of view and then some sunglass lowering caliber girls made their way over to Tony and now his attention was focused on them. Just because the band had the word 'homo' in their name the only thing homo about Tony was the milk in his cereal. He liked pussy--all kinds of it. Damaged goods were all good. Groupies mainly. Shit, why do you think he started a band in the first place?

One night while I was on assignment doing a write up of one of THBGs' show for a local paper Tony confided in me. We were always fairly close, got along pretty well, known each other a long time. We knew each other before he became Tony Spigoni. I came to the realization he enjoyed my company; we were drinking buddies even though I was a journalist. I saw him do some pretty wild things but he trusted in me, or perhaps, he wanted me to see him as some crazy rock n roller and write about it. Do some myth building for him. Sometimes we went to an after party together and it was at one of these after parties he solemnly related to me--perhaps as Marty--that he had an acute problem of a sexual nature--all that coke and all that booze, he could rarely keep it up when he was with a woman. He feared that there was talk going around amongst his groupies that he was a bad lover. Definitely wasn't Tony Spigoni in bed. Couldn't go all night. Shit, couldn't even go once.

"Man, it's no good. I'm all jazzed up and wasted, I just don't even care about fucking these beautiful women. Even if I DID, the bathroom is out of service Jake. I can't get the motor revving. And hey this off the record, huh?"

"Yes, yes for sure man, don't worry. Well," I said, a little stunned by his ED confession, "maybe you should try just staying sober, at least until after you know, get your rocks off."

"Yeah, I know but it's always after a show and poppa needs his meds before he can go on stage. The meds make me impotent. I mean, the irony just kills me: The very thing I need to perform is the very thing that won't let me perform."

"It's a wicked world isn't it?"

"It's getting to the point where I don't want to even go home with anyone. I'm actually in the middle of writing a song right now called, " Lately, I'm Only Writing Rain Checks". It's a real departure from my usual stuff. A real tear jerker. I'm sick of this shit, night in and night out. these bars Jake! I'm telling you, it'll be the death of me! All these distorted guitars ringing in my ears all fucking night. And for what? A couple hundred bucks? A night of cheap pussy? Do you even know what I do 9 to 5? Fucking manual labor. I got a head full of bumble bees. Assembly line bullshit. Well pretty much-- unloading containers full of all sorts of shit--mushrooms, spaceship parts, keyboards, humans. Why do you think I'm in such good shape? In ten years I won't be able to stand up straight."

"I always wondered what you did," I said.

"It's our dirty little secret," He said.

Just at that very moment his pocket vibrated. He pulled his phone out and unclamped it: 'INCOMING CALL FROM ALLISON CHAINS' the screen read.

"Oh hey, I gotta take this. I'll come back in ten minutes. Remember," Tony said, walking away, "Off the fucking record!"

"Do you even have to ask?" I said.

Tony came back to me and clam shelled his phone shut, put it in his tight leather pockets. They were so tight I didn't know how he tucked the phone in there but somehow everything fit just right. "This chick, Allison I think I really like her, and not in that pump and dump kind of way. The true test of love is if you don't hate her guts after you bust a nut. I can lay there peacefully with her without a care in the world and watch the smoke from my cigarette curl up into the bedroom. I tell ya that's when I'm at peace Jake. No boss man telling me to speed it up, no band bitching at me to get to practice. Life consists of humans grabbing at your hours to give themselves more.

"Ain't that the truth."

"Allison picked me up a few weeks back in Guelph to take me home after a show. I hadn't seen her in a week. I missed her and was surprised by how emotional I was when I met her outside the club. I didn't want to let her know I was overcome so I kept a front of cool indifference. During the drive back to Brampton I stole glances of the way her hair just rested softly on the back of her neck. It just gets to me sometimes--but, you never let a girl know you love her too much Jake or then she'll kill you. You don't want to get caught in her trap."

At another show, Tony got a midget, put him in a cage and fed him booze, ecstacy, and cocaine throughout the set. But not necessarily in that order. He was trapped right in the middle of the stage. He was male, thirty-ish, with one of those goofy oversized heads and stubby limbs. Gods little joke. He went by the name Stephen Dwarf.

Tony bent down beside Stephen's cage and offered him a bump of the devils dandruff, "It's feeding time!" he exclaimed.

Stephen sniffed it up. Just another cranked out midget in his underwear, confined to a cage, forced to take drugs and vomit all over himself for the crowds amusement. You don't notice it sometimes, and it can happen when you're not looking, but Christ, life can get away from you. What was I doing here watching this atrocity? I suppose it beat watching American Idol.

God is a madman with an AK47 firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Stephen wound up getting hit--most don't. Be thankful for that.

At one point he was lying on his back convulsing in his little bird cage. There he was, barely enough room for him to writhe around in for chrissakes; rolling back and forth his flesh screaming against the cage wires. Eventually he found his wits and the show continued...

The guitarist began swaying to the groove in time to his chunky power chords and Tony turned to him and yelled into the mic, "Don't you show an emotion! You show an emotion and I fire you!"

Jerry Stone came up to me and started spitting in my ear about some bullshit dream he had: "There I was having sex with this girl. I was sitting down and she was riding me, her back to me. My cock was so overstuffed and HUGE in her tight pussy I was afraid every time she came down on me that it was going to bend in half and snap like a twig! And you know who was right beside me? That fucking douche nozzle from The Jersey Shore, The Situation. He was crouched down beside me with his immaculate hair and bronzed awesomeness just watching me fuck this girl. I had to be careful because his hair--it was so gelled up it--it was like there were thousands of pen knives jutting out of his skull. Weapons of mass seduction I'm telling ya! Ha! Ha!"

"Right, Jerry sounds great," I said sucking on a bottle of Moosehead.

"Then The Situation told me I had a nice spoke. That's the word he used for my cock: Spoke. I've never heard anyone call it that before. I thought it was a little odd."

"Well dreams usually are."

Back on the stage Tony pulled the key to Stephen's cage from an ass pocket and held it up for the crowd. The band laid down a slow groove behind him. Stephen looked at Tony menacingly and shook his hands to say, No! No! No! but Tony swallowed the key and chased it with a swig of Jack anyways. They had been through this routine before. Tony gave him a cut of the door. It was all for show but the next day Tony really did have to shit the key out, fake or not. The bartender had the real key and took Stephen out back after the show and released him into the night like a dove on a wedding day. The barkeep was a guy everyone called Base Pipe Billy. Pulled a quick beer so he was good in my books. Apparently he tried to cop a feel on a few of my friends late at night when not many people were around. Lured them in with the promise of free booze. Some part of me was a little disappointed that he never tried to fondle me, it would have been good for my self esteem. Maybe I wasn't there too often or he didn't know me well enough, the hermit that I am. Yes, once he got to know me he would most definitely fondle me.

Right after the show ended, with the distortion still gnawing at my brain, I went out a back entrance to grab my pack of cigarettes. I stood outside the back door and lit one up. At that very moment Base Pipe Billy came out holding the cage with Stephen in it.

"Christ, get me outta here!" Stephen demanded.

"Yeah, yeah yeah." Base Pipe knelt down , placed the cage on the ground and unlocked it. His joints cracked, he was getting old.

"Hey Jake you gotta smoke buddy?" Stephen asked me, stretching his miniature limbs, free from his cage and into the prison of the world. "Sure, here ya go," I said fetching one out of my pack. "You want one to Billy?"

"Sure, thanks Jake."

The three of us stood there--Base Pipe Billy, Stephen Dwarf, and me smoking in total silence as the night surrounded us.