GYPSIES

 I don’t know how to say this, these people were real deal Gypsies but I think the word gypsy has become pejorative. So, these people were the real deal. They were Romanian gypsies. They dressed like this woman and they sounded like her, too.  Insert you tube link  Dark skin and Slovik features. We’re talking knife fights and the uncle drunk in the front yard at noon. At 2pm ish he would call the fire department, they would come and there was no fire just this crazy drunk guy in the yard. They threatened to start charging $50 for each false alarm and he finally stopped calling them. 

At around sunset I would sit on the front stoop with two boys that were my age. This was 1998 or so. We’d sit there and have a beer. They were awesome dudes. I’m not kidding, when they introduced themselves I could not believe it. They were named Fonzie and Elvis. They had no idea that their names were insane. 

FIVE POUNDS OF MUSCLE

 My girlfriend dumped me in 2000. I didn't handle it well. The weekend I was supposed to move out I trashed the apartment. I wrote on every picture of her, like put an 'X' on her face with a ballpoint and put a bouquet of dead flowers on the kitchen table and left. I told you I didn't handle it well. I found a place to live and there was a 24 Hour Fitness right near by work. One night I decided to put on 5 pounds of muscle. I was pretty god damned skinny.

I went to the 24 Hour Fitness. They showed me around and as soon as they showed me the pool I decided I'd join. I told the guy I needed a personal trainer and signed up for a fucking year at the gym. The guy said, "Come back on Monday morning and write down what you ate all weekend and we will assign you a personal trainer."

On Monday I went there in the morning with my sheet showing my diet and saw that it only had Oreo cookies on it. I had only eaten Oreos allll weekend. Weird. When I got to the gym they introduced me to the personal trainer. I handed him the sheet, he took me into the gym which was not crowded but not empty. There were totally people around. All I had to wear were the fucking short shorts from high school. I was wearing fucking dolphin shorts and he made me do sit ups. I remember thinking, "Everyone is seeing this dude in dolphin shorts doing the most erratic sit ups ever," and I'm not kidding, I totally told the guy I had to leave and left. 

That Friday my phone rang. I didn't answer it and it went to my answering machine. He said, "Mike, this is Phil and I'm your personal trainer at the gym, just calling to see if you wanna come in." And then he hung up. I did not call him back.

The gym was near both my work and a Safeway. I used to go to the Safeway a lot to get lunch. I was in line with my lunch one day, like a year later. The fucking personal trainer was in line behind me. I could not believe this. He even remembered what I looked like. I had a bag of fried chicken wings, a stick of butter, a small bag of white rice and a giant bag of little white Hostess donuts. I remember thinking, "Holy shit it's that guy." He saw me and said, "If you ever wanna come in, come on down!" In my mind I said, "I'm never coming there again, you need to accept that, it's been a fucking year."

DAVE MATHEWS BAND (LITERAL) SHIT

 People have heard that Dave Mathews Band was driving around Chicago in their RV/tour bus. They were on a bridge to dump out the shit from the septic system. They did that but did not realize that they were dumping shit onto a yacht of people. 

People don't know this story: I had friends that took a taxi in SF. The cab driver said "Dave Mathews was just in here, he was my last customer." They were duly impressed. When they were sitting in back one of them came upon a giant bag of cocaine. It was a pound of coke and really good shit of course. They did it all night and one of them took it home.

This guy was named Don Steele like the airport author named Danielle Steele. Apparently he did the whole bag of coke his friends went to check on him he had lost weight. He had been doing it everyday and then he suddenly died. I saw them not long after this and they told me the whole story. As much as I loved him, that is a pretty great way to die. Dave Mathews Band had a bunch of live albums, at one point at work I had to cover them all. There were like 40, it was annoying. Most of them had been recorded in baseball parks, a big part of the reviews I wrote give a story of the ballpark they were recorded in. The first song was always "Rapunzel." 

3 FUCKING JOBS/NORMAN SHORETTE

 At one point in my 20s I had 3 jobs. There was one day a week when I worked 24 hours and I had Tuesdays entirely off. From 7am til the next day. I used to go to my job cooking at 3:30, at 10:30 I would RUN home and take a shower then I would run to the T to my job at 11pm. I did the night audit at a Best Western from 11-7am. Then I would go to another restaurant where I waited tables until 2pm and then I would go cook. I had fucking tons of money. I actually was able to sleep for 20 minutes here and there.

At the hotel job I got sick of the movies in their library. I read Moby Dick to kill time. All night long the night audit program kept running and literally stop running at like 6am. I had to set up wake up calls. It was a pretty easy job. I fucking read Moby Dick. Most of my job was giving prostitutes who called directions on how to get here. 

In 6th, 7th, and 8th grades I went to this Catholic elementary school called St Bridget's. I walked home with this guy who was so short he looked like a dwarf. No lie. He also had the most incredible foul mouth. I'm not kidding, literally every other word was the F word. At one point he said, "That guy's ass sucks canal water." This makes no sense but he said it. He also said, "Fuck face." The first time I ever heard it I was like, "What the hell? This guy is making swears up." 

TO LIVE AND SHAVE IN LA

 When I was 18 I was gonna open my own donut shop. I had worked in one from when I was 15 and now I was gonna open a new one of my own in this awful Massachusettes town called Marlboro. Before we were gonna open it I had a dream. In the dream I was an old man serving the same DPW workers who I hated. I got out of bed at like 5am, put the keys to the donut shop on the kitchen table and drove to L.A. I remember driving around until the bank opened at 9am. The whole time I was paranoid that my boss was looking for me. I took out all of the money in the bank and dove to LA. 

I was somewhere in New Jersey at night and I saw a sign for Route 66. I figured this was the same Route 66 that they sang about so I took it. It was not the same at all. I drove around a couple hours in midnight New Jersey. I got back on the highway. Three days into the trip I stopped in Indiana and called my mother. I hadn't told anyone anything, I just had just dissapeared. My father put out a fucking APB on me. This is how you end up in jail. Anyway I told my mother I was driving to LA and I would be back. She hung up the phone and told everyone I had moved to California and that I would get residency and go to college there. This was not the plan at all but my mother told everyone that. 

It took me four days total, I basically never stopped driving. I totally got road fever. This is a real thing. I drove around Chicago and St Louis but I didn't stop anywhere. I remember approaching Las Vegas, the plan was to check it out.

 I was in the desert. It was fucking pitch dark but I knew Las Vegas was nearish. At one point I crested a hill.  I got to the top, and a sea of lights opened up before me. This was fucking cool. It had been total black and then an endless sea of lights. These were just the barrios leading up to the strip. This took an an hour at least. When I got to the strip finally it was literally everything I had seen on TV. It lived up to that. I parked and went into a casino. I will never forget that sound. I slept in my car. 

The next day I got to LA. I remember being on the highway going into LA. Everyone was going 85 or so. Suddenly all traffic stopped. The people behind me hit the car directly behind me. Fucking scary. I drove around until I found an adult book store. I went into it, they had a fucking new Traci Lords movie legal and everything. I couldn't believe my luck and bought it. So basically I drove to LA for porn.

I got a hotel room in a chain called Travel Lodge. There was a Guitar Center back on Sunset Blvd, I went to it. The salesman acted like a hungry wolf going for its prey when I walked in. He convinced me to buy a gold top Les Paul. I went back to my hotel room to get the money for it, I realized this would be all my money left so I would be homeless with a sweet guitar. I did not go back to Guitar Center because I felt guilty about lying to the salesman. I left LA and drove to the fucking Grand Canyon. 

I was at the Grand Canyon for about a minute before I got bored and drove out from there. I was headed to Memphis, Tennessee. I wanted to go to Sun Studios and Graceland. For some reason they were both closed even though it was daytime. I did drive by them and looked in. From there I went to Washington, DC and saw the Smithsonian, Lincoln Memorial, the giant monolith, the White House, everything. Then I drove home. 

My mother had told everyone I had moved to California and all my shit was in storage and there were people living in my room. 3 weeks later, I was in the driveway shooting baskets and my boss showed up. He said if you didn't want to open a store you could have just said so.

ROADIE-ING FOR AIRPLANE MAN

In 2004, these two girls I had heard music from in Boston visited. While they were here they asked me to roadie for them on a tour of the west coast. They were playing in San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and LA and they needed a driver so I gladly said yes. This was a 2 piece band, a drummer and a guitar player. Both girls. When we had jammed we played Mona by Bo Diddley. Me and the drummer were laughing because it was so fun. I laughed until I cried. She didn't miss a beat. They played some garage rock but also a lot of Howlin' Wolf covers. They had fucking just seen Junior Kimbrough .

I drove them from here to Vancouver, Canada and then down to LA. They played shows the whole time. Roadie-ing is fucking fun. You become part of the band. I had two days with the van after they flew home. I spent it at these two bars in Echo Park. One was called the Short Stop and the other had no name. These bars were awesome and I love LA. 

One of the things I forgot to mention is that before one of the shows in LA we went to a diner and met fucking Billy West who was a friend of the drummer Tara. The internet was still new so I didn't know what had happened with Ren & Stimpy. He had taken over and he told me the story of how John Kay got eff'd. He just said he had been fired, he didn't say why. He said they needed someone to do Ren. Later I heard Billy West on Howard Stern but before then he had just been a guy from Boston. Now he's my hero.

To be honest he was always my hero. When I was a kid, he had characters on the radio that were hilarious. Fucking WBCN. Every day at 5 minutes past 5 they would play 5 minutes of stand up comedy. "Thanks to morons, psychopaths, and mental defectives." It was funny. And then Billy West would do his developmentally disabled character Duane Glasscock. Later when he was on the Howard Stern show he came out and did fucking Larry Fine. It was incredible. This was back when Howard had homeless Jeopardy and it was on Fox, back when Fox TV was a cool TV station.

I also need to mention that when I spent two days at the bars in Echo Park I wrote my name on the board for pool. By the time I finally came up I was playing a beautiful Latina girl. The Gypsy Kings version of "Hotel California" came on the jukebox. Talk about perfect timing.

THE GRITTY MISSION DISTRICT

I lived in the Mission kind of a lot. For awhile I was at 21st and Harrison and there was a taco wagon within walking distance and a taco window on the corner from my apartment. It was awesome. Eventually I went inside and ate at the restaurant that had the window. I had never been there and ordered enchiladas. They came with fucking cactus. The cactus was succulent and in a pile between the rice and the enchiladas. Fucking good. 

It was just me and a family in the restaurant. The family was totally real deal Mexican people. There was a big screen tv at the counter, you couldn't not watch it. It was back when big screens had those 3 lights at the bottom of the screen. This was some early big screen shitiness. Whatever, I watched anyway. It was a bullfight and I was watching the tv. I noticed that all the matadors were dying and I figured out that it was some Faces Of Death on tv. I hated that stuff. I saw that it was called Toro Del Muerte. It was thankfully silent.

At one point the family called the waiter over and gestured to the tv. I remember thinking, "Thank Christ they're turning off people dying." The waiter went over and turned up the volume, they were totally watching it. 

THE LONG WALK

I moved in with my father in Florida in 2008 or 9. I had just left Thailand so it was the definitely '08. When I got picked up by my father at the airport, we went to Osco Drug so I could buy something. I fucking shit my pants in there somehow. Then I had my father drop me off at Starbucks so I could use the wifi. It was like 9am. The idea was to work all day and make some money. 

When my father left Starbucks I went over to my table and there was no wifi. They had wifi at Starbucks in fucking Bangkok so I assumed they would have it here too. They didn't because Florida sucks. The girl behind the counter said, "We don't have wifi but they have it at Wendy's if you wanna walk to it." So I was like, "Yeah, I have to," so I left Starbucks and started walking to Wendy's.

It was fucking easily 100 degrees. I was in direct sunlight on the highway. Wendy's was fucking miles away. This was Florida, I assumed shit was all a mile apart but it was fucking 10 miles easy. I remember at one point I was thinking, "Wendy's has to be nearby.." I was pouring sweat. I finally got to Wendy's and they had wifi. I ordered food and started working. Eventually I couldn't write anymore and had to go home. 

I didn't see phone booths or phones anywhere. I realized Wendy's doesn't have a phone. Literally no one did. At this point I had to keep walking, I walked another 10 miles to the next Osco Drug. Hopefully they would have some phones. Thank Christ they did and I was able to call my father and have him come get me. This was my first day after moving in with my father. It totally got worse. 

MORE BANGKOK SHIT

 When I first got to Bangkok I realized people there could not say words that ended in a 'K' or 'L' sound. So when I signed up for pool in a bar I started writing 'Mikey.' The word for shit is 'Kee' and that word 'Mai' is a negative, like 'No.' I was in a taxi and the driver asked my name. I said, "Mikey, Mai-kee', and he said, 'You're name is 'no shit'? Do you have constipation or something?" I love pool. I shot it every where. There was a bar I went to called Morning, Night. The idea was to get there in the morning and stay til night. I totally did this. I used to have a rule in Bangkok, any time I walked by a bar and they were playing 'The End' by The Doors, I had to go in. That's how I ended up at Morning, Night. They were playing 'The End' and you could hear it on the sidewalk. Cool. 

There were like 20 tables in this place, it was a pool hall that sold beer and the girls were available if you wanted to leave with one. I would hang out with this girl basically every time I went there. She was fucking good at playing pool. Her name was Tai which in that language means 'rabbit'. So her name was 'Rabbit.' I used to say her name by rolling the 'R' the way people would say hello to Bugs Bunny, "R-r-r-rabbit" She never got this joke but I made it pretty much every night for awhile. I never took a girl from this bar but I did notice that this bar like almost all of them had a shrine to Buddha in the doorway, above the door. When girls left with a customer they would pray to the shrine on their way out. I'm not talking about them kneeling, they would nod or Wai. I loved this. 

I had a girl over to my apartment so I cleaned it up. I was paranoid about it smelling like cigarettes so I bought incense. I got some that smelled good and lit it before she got there. The girl I brought smelled the incense and said, "It smells like a funeral in here."  

WAYNE DIDN'T DO IT

There was a developmentally disabled man that rode his ten speed by our house every sunset. Because my father was drunk on the porch he would invite this dude to warm up and have a beer. Every once in a while when this guy would do that, I remember noticing that he became decidedly stupider when he was drinking. He would literally have like one and be fucking way-stid. 

I don't know if you know this but developmentally disabled men are legendarily endowed. Wayne had that reputation. There was a girl in my grade school that was his daughter. I delivered their newspaper. Everyone in the town had talked about Wayne and the idea of him banging all the house wives in our fucking white privileged enclave. But even though this girl was in my classes, no one ever said anything about her possible father. 

There was an ice cream shop in the center of town that everyone went to a lot. It was called Brigham's. Literally everyone went there. Their BLT was other worldly, they also had crinkly fries but you went there for frappes. In the bathroom someone had carved into the door the phrase, "Wayne didn't do it."

When I was 5 or 6 I remember people asking me, "What do you wanna be when you grow up?" I remember the first time I said this everyone laughed so I said every time for awhile when asked "What do you want to be when you grow up?", I said, "I wanna be an alcoholic." 

SONIC YOUTH STUFF

 One time I saw Sonic Youth opening for Neil Young at The Worchester Centrum. This is a stadium. I went there a lot in highschool. I saw Peter Gabriel, U2, Pink Floyd, a lot of shit there. And then Neil with Sonic Youth, it was late night. They were having the Grammys. Sonic Youth took the stage, Thurston grabbed a microphone and said, "Who gives a fuck about a god damned Grammy?" and they started playing. This is a Public Enemy line, people know that, right? Then they played songs from their early days that was kind of incredible. I had seen them 5 times at this point and they never played these old songs, but they did that night. Pretty cool. 

The first time I saw them was in North Hampton, Mass. This is where Sebadoh and Dinosaur Jr. are from. During the show I look and fucking J Mascis was next to me. The opening band had members of Pussy Galore in it. It was called STP. I didn't know what that stood for but they were awesome. 

Another time when I saw Sonic Youth was in Las Vegas. Our roommates friend was playing in the opening band (XBXRX). We didn't tell him we were going, we just suddenly showed up at his show. Then we hung out with fucking Sonic Youth after he played. This was after Bull in the Heather but before Washing Machine. They were good but totally at the tail end of being a band. 

Star Wars

In 1978 one day my mother at breakfast pointed at an add in the newspaper and said, "you're not going to school today. We're gonna go see this movie." I was looking at the poster. I hated swords and space ships. It looked like Luke was wearing a dress. I said, "Whatever I'm not going to school. I will see this." All I cared about was WWII. Then my mother took me to see Star Wars. I fucking loved it from the second it started. I'll never forget driving home and making laser guns noises the whole ride. I must have been fucking annoying as hell. I also loved R2D2 and you know I was saying "Ahh 2" over and over with a Boston accent. 

You should know that when this movie came out there were people in line around the block. The term "block buster"
came out of this. I remember them saying it on the news. 

When Empire Strikes Back came out, me and my neighbor went to see it. I also loved this movie from the first second. When the snow walkers are trudging all over shooting lasers I was wicked psyched. There were two kids our age in the row in front of us. One of them kept saying, "So fake" over and over. He was clearly angry. I remember thinking, "What an a-hole." 

Also when Princess Leia looks at Hans Solo, right before he is frozen,  she says, "I love you" and he says, "I know." Apparently he totally ad-libbed this. Funny.

STEVE LACHANCE/MORE STUFF ABOUT ITALY

I had this friend from when I was 15, his name was Steve LaChance. It's fucking annoying because he killed himself when we were both in our mid to late thirties. I totally blamed myself, we all do that it's not our fault ever but we all think shit like that when someone kills themself. If I ever commit suicide the idea is to leave behind a giant note that says, "Your Fault." Honestly I blame the Catholic church and that movie, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Steve totally went schizophrenic and became a victim of magical thinking. Anyway years before all this we laughed our asses off a lot. We shot pool all the time. Steve had long straight blonde hair down to his knees. He looked like a member of the band Kansas. He was really into awful Christian metal, specifically the band Stryper. He was wicked into them. When we were 18 we drove to New Orleans and shot pool at every bar on the way there. That was the plan. So there was a lot of getting off the highway and driving around until we saw a bar that offered pool. Then we would go in, order cokes and start playing. We were pretty good. No we were fucking really good. Steve never lost. Eventually some adults would walk over and challenge us to play. We never played for money we just liked playing and we would take the adults and kick their asses. Fucking fun. 

This was when we were young and Steve was not fucking crazy. Later on he went nuts and totally got the idea that he wasn't "holy" enough. At one point the government paid him to not work and he lived with his mother. He was a major pot head but his mother did not approve at all so he hid it from her. I remember him calling me from detox once and saying, "I am addicted to marijuana." I said to him, "Dude, that's not possible." It isn't really, is it? It's fucking marijuana. Anyway Steve calls me like a year later and says, "The government has deemed me unfit for work. And that I have a mental illness. And they have paid me for the last 10 years to catch up. I wanna go to Amsterdam and smoke powerful weed. Will you come with me? I'll pay for everything." I was like, "Okay but only if you promise we can go to the Vatican and to Jim Morrison's grave while we're in Europe." He was like, "Done." We did all these things. 

I landed in Amsterdam and had to find the coffee shop Steve was at. He had made a map of every coffee shop with a Pink Floyd reference for a title and was at one called Dark Side Of The Moon. He literally had this on a map. When I walked in there he made the touchdown signal that referees make, like both arms in the air. From there we spent the next few days going around Amsterdam. I kinda hated it. Walking into the coffee shops was the same as walking into a room of people smoking pot. They would all get silent. It was annoying. A friend of mine's band was playing, this band Comets on Fire. I totally showed up before the show and surprised the shit out of them. They had no idea anyone was in Amsterdam and then I showed up in their dressing room. This was awesome, but everything else was kind boring. So I was psyched to go to Pere Lachaise and the Vatican. It took us fucking hours to find Jim Morrison's grave and it was tiny. I remember when we were leaving some tourists asked us where they could find Jim Morrison's grave. I remember telling them where it was, I wanted to say, "You think finding Jim Morrison's grave was hard, we've been here for 2 days and can't find Jimi Hendrix anywhere." 

On the way to Italy I remember we met these two Italian guys on the train. I convinced them to write 'Suck My Balls' in Italian on my passport because it is valid as long as it has a photo. It's kind of amazing you can write anything in there and they have to accept it. I remember the Customs guys didn't even fucking notice it. I had "Chupa Mis Huevos' written in huge letters on the page with my photo. Still valid but nobody noticed it. 

The Vatican was fucking beautiful. That shit is outta hand. I can't even really say how it made me feel because I am no longer practicing at all but I can't help it. This weird obsession with the iconography and witchcraft of Catholic shit. It was pretty funny that Rome totally looked like they had crucified Jesus. So when we were at the Coliseum Steve actually asked someone where we could find the place where Jesus fought the lions. Then we went to the Coliseum. 

So in 2005 when I decided to go live overseas the idea was to live in Italy and learn the language. I was there for about 2 seconds before I realized that was not gonna happen. But I tried to live in different cities. I tried Rome, Bologna, and Naples. I really wanted to live in Naples but I remember a local said to me, "The mafia will just kill you." Apparently the mafia is really strong there. Naples is an ancient trading place/seaport. It feels like fucking Damascus. When I left the idea was to live in Naples, I wanted to arrive stowed away in the hull of a ship. 

I should also mention that me and Steve used to shoot pool at this place in Lawrence, Massachusetts called the Golden Cue. Some girls were sitting in some bleachers they had by the pool tables and watching us. When they left one of them gave Steve her phone number on a piece of paper. Fucking cool guy. 

CAMBRIDGESIDE GALLERIA

In like '96 or so I visited my mother in the nursing home once a week. For years we went to the mall in Cambridge and went to the movies after going around a bit. Towards end of her life my mother often puked while we were walking around. She also had her eyes closed. At the time I thought she was asleep, now that I have the illness I realize she wasn't sleeping, she was just tired of keeping her eyes open. I do the same thing. As for puking on herself I don't know what brought that on. I just remember it happening a lot. 

So one time we are in the mall, Cambridgeside Galleria Mall before we go to the movies. We were seeing I Know What You Did Last Summer. She had her eyes closed, I was annoyed. I put her on the elevator and turned around to get something or shut the door or something I don't know, I was just turned around. When I turned back the elevator door was closing so I ran up a flight to catch it but it was going to the top and didn't stop so I ran up there. When I made it to the top I pretty much dove into the elevator to stop it. The fucking door was shutting and my mother with her eyes closed looked totally asleep in the corner. Talk about annoying. I ran all the way to the bottom and the same thing happened. I'm not kidding I missed the door by literally a micro-second. This happened like 3 times. The movie was okay but not awful. I wanted Scream level coolness but it was just a horror movie.

COOL CARD

 Sorry I gotta do this. One time in like 2000 me and a guy I worked with went to Las Vegas for a weekend of garage rock called Viva Las Vegas. Fucking Mick Collins was playing with a band called The Screws. I couldn't believe that. Also all these bands I had heard of but never seen were playing. The show was opened by a band called The Stitches. They sounded like The New York Dolls but the lead singer was some kind of comedian, he was that funny. After a song he said, "Sorry my voice is scratchy, I've been smoking... Pole, that is." Funny. At one point I was in a elevator with fucking Mick Collins.

On Sunday I had all day to kill.  It was fucking 110ish, it was really hot so I went to the pool and dove in. In one corner it was Dick Manatoba from The Dictators, they were playing that night. They were the headliners. Dead Moon had been the headliners on Saturday and they were in the pool with us. The drummer was fucking green. At one point he went back to bed and I was in the pool with Dick Manitoba and Dead Moon. Fucking cool. Manitoba told stories. Eventually Dead Moon left the pool and me and Dick Manitoba and another guy stayed. Eventually I learned that this guy had created this magazine I loved and it had failed and disapeared in the 80s. It was called Crazy Magazine. It was fucking funny as shit. They had a Dear Abby type of thing but instead of Abby they had this offensive and mean clown called' Obnoxio the Clown.' When The Simpsons had Krusty the Klown my theory was they were referring to Obnoxio. Crazy Magazine was awesome. Here's an article that will explain the magazine. https://www.bandsiusetalike.com/biul/i-go-crazy/

Did I mention fucking Dick Manitoba was in the pool? You  know the crazy thing is we were both sober all day. He would perform later that night and The Dictators yelled about Brooklyn ruling so much I hated it. At one point I looked and standing next to me was fucking David Arquette. 

APOCALYPSE NOW!

In the 70s my father got laid off from his job driving a truck. He worked for this place that sold various gases, not gasoline but like hydrogen and nitrogen and shit like that. It was called Airco. I was was wicked into the hydrogen tank, it looked like the Hindenburg. He went from Airco to working for Hollywood, like whenever they shot a movie in Boston they had to use the Union. So my father spent his days either drunk in the trailer or driving equipment or celebrities around. He had one of the celebrities, this gay man named Brad Davis. My father's way of saying Brad was gay was saying, "He sucked a prick." I literally have never heard my father say Jewish, he's only ever said Shylock. My father was a Teamster so they had to hire him. He worked on the movies Coma, The Brink's Job, Small Circle of Friends, he worked on fucking Starting Over with Burt Renoylds. Imagine drinking beers with Burt Reynolds. My father met this guy on one of the movies who was in charge of special effects. He got hired and had to go to the Phillipines, he had been hired to work on a movie called Apocalypse Now. This was years before it came out but our plan was to see it whenever they released it because the special effects guy was my father's friend. 

For years I was obsessed with seeing this movie. When the ads came on tv I I could not wait. The fact that it was rated 'R' was apparently ignored. So when it came out in 1979 we all went. It was like a fucking family outing. No one had any idea about the movie at all. I was 9 years old. I remember the poster had an awesome painting of the river that they go up in the movie.

You know there are no credits in the movie, not in the begining or the end. When we went to see it we went to this theater in Boston. It was ancient and called The Cheri. It had a fucking curtain over the screen and everything. When we walked in they handed us a play bill. We read it when we were sitting down and waiting for the movie. The only thing we had known about the movie was that Marlon Brando was in it, my mother loved him. He was a skinny, beautiful young man to us. We saw that the movie also had Robert Duvall in it. To us he had been Tom Hagen in The Godfather and Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. Fucking cool guy. So we were psyched he was in it. 

This is my favorite shot in the movie, who am I kidding it's one of my favorite shots of all time. 

The lights went down and the room became silent. The curtain slowly came across the screen as the song "The End" by The Doors started playing. Fucking cool. I thought that rock and roll was too rebelious to listen to, then I'm hearing live Doors and then the jungle catches fire. It was unbelievable. Then all that weird shit happens where Martin Sheen is naked and drunk in his room punching shit. Weird. I remember being totally freaked out by it. Then he goes to some general's room and gets the mission Hans Solo answers the door and we were all psyched as hell because we love him.

Later on in the movie he is reading about Colonel Kurtz and he says, "Why the fuck would he do that?" I remember thinking, "There's a way of saying the f word that I didn't know about, I thought you only said 'fuck you'" The idea of saying 'why the fuck?' was totally new to me. 

I could go on about this movie forever. For another ten pages, easy but I will take mercy on you and kinda stop there. I have to say though at the end when they are sacrificing the buffalo I remember thinking, 'this could not be any worse'. I remember when we left the theater we got in the car and drove home in total silence. The only thing my mother would say was, "I can't believe how fat Marlon Brando got." None of us had any idea of what we were seeing. I remember getting home and trying to play with my army guys, I remember not wanting to and getting into not wanting to play war at all. I didn't speak for 2 days. 

I realize that movie is totally where I got all my politics. The idea of the government sending you to another country and murdering you was par for the course in the 70s. So I was not shocked by the movie as much as I was bolstered by it. Also I should mention that when they have the scene on the boat and Mr. Clean is dancing to "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" and watching Sheen turn to the guy riding skis on the back of the boat I was so fucking psyched. I had not heard rock n roll. I fucking looked for the song on the radio for years after that. 

I FUCKING HATE BIKES

 

I have always hated bicycles. When I was wicked young my father pulled some "Grew up in the Depression era" shit on me. He pulled me out to the street outside our house and made me learn how to ride a bike. There were no training wheels and every time I fell he would say "Get up" until I figured out how to ride. It was like being thrown off a raft and being told to swim or drown. My father got the bike at work, somebody had brought it in. It was pink and it was a Barbie bike. There was a painting of her on the chain guard. Jesus Christ how do you give that to your male child. I learned how to spray paint the next day. I painted it blue, it was a banana seat bike and now that it wasn't pink it was totally fine. 

I got a paper route when I was like 7 or 8. I walked the whole route with the bag swung over my shoulder because riding a bike was basically impossible with newspapers. When I was 10 I woke up on Christmas morning and went out. There was a huge bike, I was hoping it wasn't for me. Then I realized it had a basket and I knew it was for my paper route. It was black and had giant wheels. The chainguard had a name on it. It was called 'The Dune Rider.' I was mortified at how big the wheels were. The bike looked idiotic. I rode it on a fucking 25 mile road trip they made us do in the Boy Scouts. It didn't have any gears and mountain bikes did not exist yet. That guy running the road thing saw my bike and was impressed. He said, "It's a mountain bike, you're supposed to ride up a mountain on here." Fucking 25 miles with no gears was hell and I eventually gave up and spent the rest of the trip in a car. 

CHARLIE WATTS/JIM BOUTON/MORE MANNY

This Charlie Watts death is kind of a big one. For me it's like Aretha, Prince, or Bowie. I remember when I was 8, they had a video for the song 'Start Me Up.' I was only 8 but I knew there was something sexual going on. They had disgusting tight white jeans. I remember the drummer laughing at everyone the whole time. I loved this. 

A thousand years later my friends Gabe and Tom (who is a drummer) were over and we were listening to 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!' 'Midnight Rambler' was playing and Tom said "When you get sick of Keith and Mick you can always just listen to Charlie." I have done that. He is totally right. Charlie barely ever hits the crash in the song 'Let It Loose.' I fucking love this guy. At one point on the album above Mick Jagger says to the crowd, "Charlie's good tonight, isn't he?" Cool. 

There was a baseball writer/book called 'Ball Four' that exposed the use of greenies by baseball players. This guy was castigated for writing this book and tarnishing the sanctity of baseball. That is horseshit. Jim Bouton was on a terrible team, they had played like 20 games and had not won one. Not even a single one. In the 9th inning before they went out for the last at bats the manager would say, "Go out there and get this over with, then we'll go to the clubhouse and we'll pound those Budweisers."

I bought this book for my father like 10 years ago. He didn't know a single thing about the internet. When I bought the book I bought it directly from Jim Bouton, I emailed him and everything. I asked him to write my father a note in the front. I had Jim write: 'Happy Birthday you fucking dinosaur.' My father was turning like 73 or something. He totally wrote it. My father was astonished that the author had personally written him a note, that whole idea was beyond him. Awesome awesome awesome. 

When the Red Sox got Manny Ramirez I called my father and we talked about it. Then I called my sister and talked to her about it. Then I called my father and talked to him about it. When I hung up my girlfriend at the time said, " I just heard you have the same exact conversation 3 times."

COPYEDITOR WARS/SHOGDIT CANYON

I used to write for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. One time I was there to see to my editor. I was a freelance writer for them. When the guy behind the desk let my editor know I was there he said into the loudspeaker, "Mike McGakky to see Tommy." I remember thinking no one has ever mispronounced McGuirk that badly. It was literally the worst pronunciation I'd ever heard. Also, because I was raised Catholic, whenever I mentioned "God" and they didn't capitalize it I would complain. Basically I wrote an article about the new Beck album and mentioned both "God" and "Satan" at different times. One of my friends wrote me an email saying, "Dude, they did not capitalize 'God' but they capitalized 'Satan'?" I was mortified. 

I totally mentioned all this to the copy editors at The Guardian. They did not reply and I assumed they thought I was insane. But I had to get them back for doing this to me. There was a band here in SF that I had wanted to write about called Total Shutdown. I wrote about them and mentioned that one of their biggest influences was a band from New Hampshire called Anal Cunt. I assumed the copy editors would hate it but they had to let me loose, swear-wise. I mentioned Anal Cunt 11 times in the article. The thing is, Anal Cunt was actually a really good band, they were from the same New Hampshire scene that produced GG Allin and Lisa Suckdog so mentioning them with the free jazz stylings of Total Shutdown made sense. This article, -- through no knowledge of my own -- came out on the fucking singer's birthday. The last line of it I wrote, "Their album is the best thing made available to the public, ever." You should know the record had 2 grooves. One of the grooves played the album, the other groove played the first Beatles record. Fucking funny. I totally had only heard it once and thought they put out a record of Beatles recordings. 

I was at my friend's wedding in a fucking ghost town 4 hours north of SF. It was pretty cool. The church at the wedding looked like the one in Kill Bill. When I had gotten my room I walked around the place to check it out. There was an area with tons of little rocks on the road, like a dirt road and all sorts of trailers. There was a sign on a tree that said, "Welcome to Shogdit Canyon". I thought they had taken the name Shogdit from a Native American tribe that had named the area. I thought it was cool so I walked up the dirt road to the Shogdit canyon. When I got up there there was dog shit everywhere and I realized I had been totally fooled by the sign. 

OLD PEOPLE

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 When I was a kid I totally didn't like/understand old people, mainly my grandparents. I had been forced into the Boy Scouts and when we went to nursing homes it fucking stank like pee. That bummed me out. My mother's mother had this illness also. She hung herself when my mother was 13. Her husband married another woman who I grew up with as my grandmother. She was named Janet and she was legally blind. On top of that she had a fucking hair lip so there was no understanding anything she said. My father's mother, during The Depression gave birth to twins and then had my father and had a second set of twins 9 months later. So in 3 years she had 5 kids during The Depression. Like kind of intense. She was married to this guy that I didn't know. My father's father.

When I was 5 or 7 around there, this homeless guy with a broken arm like a cast on his arm moved into our house for a couple weeks. He and my father drank together all the time until one night my father threw him out and I never saw him again. Years later at some wake I learned he was our grandfather. Isn't that wild? I totally thought he was some homeless guy. I also made a joke at the wake about adoption and I found out later that one of our cousins had been adopted. You would think they would have told us that. 

So I hate old people. I can't help it. 

I forgot to mention my grandmother on my father's side, an Irish woman Nelly had an Irish brogue and nobody could understand her on the phone at all. I dreaded any time she called. The only thing we all said that we understood her saying was, "Stop saying 'What'" The other great thing about Nelly is that when my godfather was a teenager, this is one of her kids, he was in the kitchen eating candy he throws the wrapper in the trash and she goes, "I just emptied that." 

SOME STUFF ABOUT SUN RA/ ANGEL DUST/ MORE STUFF ABOUT DEE DEE

 When I was 20 years old I went and saw Sun Ra live even though no one under 21 was allowed. I used my brother's ID. I also wore nice clothes, I'm not kidding I wore the same sweater that guy called me a loser in. I remember when I gave the door guy the fake ID he looked at me and said "This doesn't even look like you" me and my brother have never looked alike at all. I had ID that said I was 26. He was thinking it over but decided to let me in, thankfully. 

This was the same week the new Batman movie had come out. Prince did the soundtrack and Michael Keaton played Batman. Everyone was into it. Sun Ra came out in a real chair. He had just had a stroke, he got out of the chair and walked fast hunched over to a piano saying, "I just wrote this." and started singing the Batman theme, with the words, "I am the bat man." Then he got behind the piano and did a whole song based on Batman. It was fucking cool. Then he played a whole show. He even did "Space is the Place' and he had his Arkestra with him. This is 25 fucking old guys playing all sorts of instruments. It was awesome. 

Years later in the same part of town I was on a first date with a girl I had a big crush on. I still fucking have a crush on this girl. It's incredible. We went to a show, I forget what band but it was at the Middle East and there was this huge Japanese guy I knew there. He offered us weed. He was smoking a joint, "Do you want any?" We were like, "Hell Yeah." We smoked it and I was immediately too stoned. My vision became like a fucking tunnel and I couldn't deal with anything. I turned to the girl and said, "I need to leave" and fucking left. I went across the street where there was a McDonalds and laid down in the bushes in front. I fucking slept there for a couple hours and then went home. Ten years later this girl is at my house. For a decade I've been wondering what the hell happened. We hadn't talked since this night. The girl says, "Remember the time that guy gave us Angel Dust?" That explains it. 

As a form of protest, one time Dee Dee stole like a dozen chicks from a chicken factory near us. So we had the fucking cutest little things in a box in the basement. For weeks they looked wicked cute and    made little peep noises. Talk about cute. One day they became adolescents, like 10 days in. They were no longer cute and they were kinda big and they shit everywhere. They made horrible noises. I remember being terrified that our father would hear. They were making a fucking racket. Eventually Dee Dee fucking returned them to the factory. We never told my father anything. Years and years later after Dee Dee had died I told my father this story. He said, "I didn't know that at all." He had no idea we had a fucking dozen chickens squawking in the cellar. 

MAN, YOU LOOK LIKE A LOSAH!

 In highschool I skipped a lot. Part of the reason was because it was wicked easy to skip. My highschool was 45 minutes away. Before I had a license my mother let me drive to and from school. When I got to the exit for my school I often kept going and changed the direction, drove all the way into Boston and bought records then I would go home. In homeroom the disciplinarian would come over the loudspeaker and read off the list of names of kids who had not showed up. I'm not kidding one of the kids was named Mike Hunt. He was totally given that name as a joke by another kid. Pretty god damned funny. The thing is the day you showed up after being out sick you just had to produce a note. I forged my mother's name a ton.

 I fucking hated gym class. I had two gym teachers, they were Mr. White and Mr. Loftus and they were awful. I literally saw Mr. White punch a kid in the locker room. Also whenever we played basketball he called me "special olympics," that was my nick name. I used to intentionally foul out within the first couple minutes, then I just stopped showing up at school on days that I had gym.

I also had a thing with my mother. My father had left for work and she was up having her morning coffee and cigarette. If I didn't feel like even driving to school I would say to her, "Hey Ma, you wanna go to Kmart?" And then we would go there and not go to school. She never told my father we were doing this. We did it a lot. One time when I was a junior the disciplinarian called me into his office and said if you skip one more day you'll be expelled. So I didn't skip anymore, but I literally had skipped like a 100 days starting sophmore year. One time I was in Boston after skipping school. I was on Newbury Street going to Newbury Records. I had my school clothes on, this was a maroon and black sweater and tan chinos. I felt fucking cool because I had skipped school and was walking around Boston in my new school sweater. A homeless guy was walking towards me, when he was a couple feet from me, he pointed at me and said, "Man, you look like a losah." I remember thinking, "Well, at least I have a place to go to after this." 

The other thing I should tell you about this highschool, after homeroom they would occasionally have us go to the gym for an assembly. One time the Dean of Students, Brother Fahey was talking. People started applauding everything he said. We kept applauding for so long it was going into the next class. They could not shut us up. Every time they said anything we applauded. The whole school, 1200 kids were there, they could not control us. Finally a guy came out with a dustpan and brush and started banging them together. Apparently this is the universal sign for "Quiet Down". 

COOL ROCK SHIT

 Sometime in the '90s, me and my sister Dee Dee went to LolLapalooza 2 because Cyprus Hill was playing. I was hella into Cyprus Hill. Also Pavement was playing so we went. We didn't really know anyone else. Because they would not sell alcohol in the venue we drank the 12 pack we had bought in the car before we went in. It was like 11am. After one of the bands this guy came on stage with a boombox and sang a song about being a loser. I heard that Sonic Youth had put him on the roster of bands because they thought his music was cool. When Pavement played, the show was outside and during the daytime. There was a huge mud area because it had been raining. People started throwing clumps of mud at each other. There was a huge mud fight in the middle of Pavement's set. It was awesome. The headliner was this girl that nobody had heard of, all we knew was she was Kurt Cobain's girlfriend. She opened with the song "Violet" it was fucking awesome and we had no idea who she was yet. 

I noticed this about AC/DC, you know how Bon Scott died and was kinda scarily satanic. He is wearing a fucking pentagram on the album cover "Highway to Hell!" And the last song on the record is "Night Stalker." At the end of it he says, "Shazbot, nanoo nanoo." This is a reference to the TV show Mork and Mindy so the very last thing that Bon Scott says on vinyl or on a rock n roll recording is a fucking Mork and Mindy reference. That's funny as hell.

CARTOON

 I still love this girl. Her name was Cartoon (that's what she told me). I took her to the bars in Bangkok and one of the girls got mad at me and said, "Her name is not Cartoon it's Tun." So I think she was named that by some British sissy. 

I met Cartoon when I was not leaving this town called Plataya. I was supposed to leave but I didn't want to. This town was basically the size of any town you know let's say Santa Cruz except every room had a pole with girls dancing around it. This town was incredible. After 2 days you're in your hotel room with a gun in your mouth. I went into a bar, claiming the rain kept me in town. This bar was called The B-52 Bar. When I went in there was kinda nobody there, meaning they didn't have customers. It was totally empty except for the girls working. This never happens but the prettiest girl in the bar came over and started talking to me. Usually the prettiest girls leave me alone so I was kinda shocked. She had a spiked dog collar and leather cuffs and camouflage pants, totally heavy eyeshadow. We're talking big black eyes. She looked like Avril Lavigne in a fucking good way. We shot pool and she was clearly good at it. We had a real good game.

Eventually, after a couple hours, she said she'd stay with me all night so we left. I was just beginning with the illness so even though we walked everywhere I was nervous. We walked to these pool tables that were wicked far away but we shot on them. Then we went to some bars, then we walked all the way back to the B-52 Bar and got a hotel room across the street. 

When we were in the room for the night. We started to fool around. Cartoon took off her clothes and said, "I am not perfect" and showed me her foot. Her right foot was backwards. She was totally deformed. I remember thinking, "I'm not perfect either, don't worry". I literally had no idea about her foot and I made her walk everywhere on it. The next day I still didn't want to leave this town. My apartment was 2 hours away. I invited Cartoon and we hired a taxi and went all the way to my house. 

Cartoon stayed a couple days and then took the bus back to her job. She called me every night and accused me of cheating on her. I was like, "There's no way I would do that".  One time I just stopped answering the phone after awhile. One morning I woke up and looked at my phone. I had 50 missed calls. Talk about annoying. I called her and said, "I have not gotten a girl, I don't have money for any girls. I haven't eaten for 2 days, I really don't have a dime." Cartoon says, "What?" and hangs up. I am sitting at my computer watching a baseball game (because of the time difference there was a ballgame on at like 6am). While I'm sitting there, after 2 hours, the door suddenly flies open and Cartoon is standing there with food. She comes in, puts the food down, puts 500 baht on the bed (with the exchange this is like $75 and it's plenty to live on for awhile. Meals are a fucking nickel). Still, I could not believe it. I said I hadn't eaten and Cartoon heard that, went to the bus, came to my house, bought food, and came in my room. 

Another thing about Cartoon, in Thai culture people often believe that deformity is a result of a evil past life. I don't think Cartoon believed this. She was fucking angry at everyone all the time. I'm not kidding, she wouldn't even hold the door for people. They all do shit like that. 

The last time I talked to Cartoon we hadn't talked in a couple months our hangout had ended She called and I answered, knowing it was her. She said she wanted to leave work. She wanted to leave all bar girl type of work and move back home which was way south Thailand. Practically Burma, hella far away. She needed train fare and money to give her dad when she got there. I was like, "Whatever you need I have". I Western Union'd her 5,000 baht, this is about $200. When I had to move back to the states the plan was to go back to Thailand, find her and write a book about the whole thing. That never happened.

HOSTESS PRODUCTS

 I grew up on Hostess products I love them. Little white donuts and cupcakes were literally a part of my diet. When I was a kid I was wicked into Big Wheels which had totally insensitive Native American cartoons on the bag. They eventually changed these and they became King Doh's. One time me and my brother moved in together and we worked the same hours, probably at the same restaurant. When we got home we would smoke pot and eat our shit. This was our nightly intake: 2 liters of Coke, a big bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a box of Ding Dongs. After a couple days of this diet I said, "We're gonna fucking die." But I loved Ding Dongs. 

I was in line at Safeway getting my lunch. If you are familiar with San Francisco I was at the Safeway near Potrero. Like 16th street, around there. There was a Hostess factory behind the Safeway. It smelt awful but it had cool trucks of course. I was in line at the Safeway with my lunch which was a big bag of little white donuts. There was a woman in front of me, I said to her, "You have half a gallon of milk, 6 eggs and 1 bagel." She goes, "You are totally right, how did you know what I was getting?" and I said, "Because you're ugly." That's a joke. That is not what happened at all. What really happened was there were 2 guys behind me in overalls. They saw I was buying donuts and said "We work at the hostess factory." I practically saluted them. I said, "Thank you I love your products." and one of them said, "You wouldn't like them if you saw how we make them." That did not stop me at all. I still love cupcakes.

STRAIGHT POOL

I love pool. But especially this game. It's called Straight Pool. The game is to 125 and each ball is worth one point so it takes hours to play. This is why pool tables often have those wicker counters above the table. Sometimes they have plastic dial/counters in the table itself. This is also for Straight Pool. The idea is because you are calling all your shots. When you break you do it very gently. The idea is to make the corner ball into a pocket and then break them after you make it. I played this game a lot and I only was able do it one time. It's fucking hard. This is the game they play in the Paul Newman movie "The Hustler." They play games of this for like 24 hours. It's crazy. Even though you are calling all your shots, there is a certain type of freedom because in 8-Ball you have to always shoot at your own balls but in Straight Pool they're all open. 

I have to talk about how good they were in Thailand. Literally just about everybody shot pool. All the people were Pro Am level. There's a stick under each table, this is called the bridge. When the shot is out of your reach you use the bridge to create space for yourself. You end up using it kind of a lot. The thing is, in Thailand even though they had that stick like anywhere, no one used it. They fucking shot with one hand instead. I'm not kidding, there were girls on the phone talking and shooting pool with one hand beating you and saying, "Thank you". I fucking love Thailand. One time I saw a girl play and win a game with one arm. The other thing about that night, there was a huge soccer game. Chelsea was playing Manchester United. This is a huge rivalry, it's basically if The Yankees played The Cowboys. The bar was full of British sissies. A girl with a microphone said to me, "Who do you want to win?" and I said, "Thailand", she goes "That's why I love you."

ONE WAY TICKET TO HOMOVILLE

I gotta put this somewhere. In 1998 I moved to SF. Right before I left, I made 5 of these, a bunch of Pudding Maker shit. Me and Bryan Long had been on fire recording shit on the spot, taking lyrics from cool books, all kinds of shit. We had a song that he had written and I put it on here. Before I was done I realized there were fucking five versions of this song. They are all good I am fucking playing drums on all of them. I am so unable to play drums for kind of awhile now ...    I have to tell a bunch of shit about this album.

Me and Bryan took a note this annoying guy had left in the practice room, put music to it, and read it. So basically  this song is a fucking funny note about the practice space. At one point in the note he lists everyone's phone numbers. When he gets to me there is no phone number so he left it blank. I didn't have a phone for like a year. Not a month or two, a fucking year. Also this album has a cover of 'A Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zepplin that we recorded in my bedroom on my 25th birthday. I remember recording it. It was the hardest I had ever laughed while we were playing it. I'm hella proud of the first couple seconds of the album, it's the song by James Gang called "Funk 49". Then J Boronski sings about loving Satan. I'm not even on this. Then next song is all this yelling by a a guy that was in music school for flute. I'm not on either of these songs. 

About the title, just before I put this together I saw a comedian on TV. One of her jokes was, "I went on a date last night. It was a one way ticket to Homoville." I thought that was funny so I named the album that. I didn't realize how inappropriate it was when you think about San Francisco. 

Here is a link to that music, I'm wicked proud of it Pudding Maker

BRIDE OF PINBOT

 I used to really love pinball. I hung out at this diner in Harvard Square called Tommy's Lunch that had a lot of pinball tables and excellent Italian subs. They had a fucking Monte Cristo sandwich. Do you know what these are? It's french toast as the bread and there is ham, turkey and cheese melted in and they serve it with fucking syrup. It's so good I would go there a lot for just that. They also had pinball. There had been this game in the early 80s called Pinbot, it was one of the first electronic games. When you got multi-ball going some robot eyes would raise from the top of the table and you had to hit them to make it go down. It was hard and shitty but cool. I remember I liked it. Then one time while I was at Tommy's Lunch, they had both Funhouse and Earth Shaker. I love Funhouse, but Earth Shaker had a tornado in the upper right corner, it has a tornado you have to get your ball into and as it went down the table shook and became an earthquake. It was not easy but you could do it. 

I loved these games so when Bride of Pinbot appeared I was psyched. I played it a lot. Basically you assemble her and then fuck her and she's a robot. The machine actually says, "The music turns me on!" when you get shit going basically. Fucking cool. They totally sample this in the song, "Paid in Full" by Eric B & Rakim. I was 21 at the time. I took acid for the first time. I took it alone and sat in my living room cranking music. I remember Jimmy Hendrix Electric Lady Land. Especially the song Crosstown Traffic totally blew my mind. Also I heard the Stevie Wonder Songs in the Key Of Life album. The keyboards on that are wicked psychedelic. It was awesome. I remember in the middle of all of this while I was puking, a shiny glistening metallic robot appeared. I'm not kidding, I was tripping on acid and Bride of Pinbot was visiting me. This was fucking amazing. I hate this word amazing but that is the only way to describe what happened. 

NAMES

 I was at General Assistance. I was getting food stamps. This was kind of awhile ago. They take all your info and send you to a giant waiting room where they call names over the loudspeaker and send people to various doorways. Eventually they call you and tell you what door to go in. I was sitting there reading and over the loudspeaker the guy said, "So and so go to door 1". After like 50 times he said, "Denzel Washington go to door 3", then he said, "Angelina Jolie go to door 2." Nobody noticed, I couldn't believe it, the guy was totally fucking with everyone in the room. 

I was at the gate at the airport. You know how they call names and say, "We have a full plane if anyone will forgo their ticket we will give you another ticket," and then they start calling names. One of the names they called was fucking Hunter Thompson. That guy or woman whoever was working at the gate had no idea somebody had either given a fake name or there was actually someone named Hunter Thompson on my flight. I figured if there were really someone fucking with everyone they woulda said "Hunter S. Thompson" because the S is kind of important. 

When you are on the plane in this era they assign you people and they push you all around the place. I used to be going to visit my father in Florida a lot. There were no direct flights to his town so I always had a layover at Atlanta. This is a giant fucking airport. There are trains and shit underground and it would take like an hour to get me from my plane to my connection. We were always in line at the elevator and we wait in line with other people in wheelchairs. As we rolled up I would say, "What is this, the winner's circle?" They hated it. No one ever laughed. 

That reminds me, I used to fly into Orlando. When you got off the plane and onto their tram thing, over the loud speaker it would say, "Welcome to Central Florida." Is there anything worse than Central Florida?  

BASEBALL

When  I was 5 years old my father put me on a Little League team. I remember all the kids were like 8 or 9 and they were astonished that I had been put on a team at 5 years old. I remember a couple weeks before he made me play baseball, I was in bed and I woke up to my father drunk off his ass, tapping me on the heart and saying, "You could've been a great baseball player one day" in a slurry voice. I remember thinking, "Whatever.." 

I played baseball for 3 years and I had 3 hits in 3 years. That's pretty fucking awful, literally 3 hits in 3 years. I was so afraid of striking out I just never swung the bat so I either got hit, walked, or struck out. I remember my first coach told everyone "Go out there and get a hit!" when they were leaving the dugout to go to bat. Whenever I was going up to bat he'd say, "Alright Mike, go out there and get hit." 

One time it was like 22 to nothing in the first inning. I am so old they didn't even have the "Mercy Rule" yet. We were losing that badly. As another dude was going home from 3rd I said to the coach, "There goes our no-hitter," He totally laughed. 

The last year I was on a different team. The coach used to read everyone's batting average at practice. I'll never forget him saying, "Mike McGuirk has a zero, zero, zero average but that's ok because he's always on base even though he's not hitting." 

That reminds me, I only lasted one week in college. When I went to the Bursar's office and asked him for financial aid to go a second semester. I had skipped all my finals -- I had a zero GPA. I was literally like the guy in Animal House. He said, "You have a  zero point zero GPA."

TWO GEEKS/YOU REALLY KNOW HOW TO PARTY

 Me and my roommate and other people were hangin out downstairs. We were having fun. This girl told us she was leaving, I said "You're Heading To The Highway?" My roommate Trevor said, "We'll be Living After Midnight." I said, "If you leave now, you'll be Breaking The Law", my roommate said, "You're gonna miss some Hot Rockin."

Years ago I had a friend visiting from Boston. His Boston accent was so heavy he sounded like fucking Bugs Bunny. I'm not kidding. After driving everyone, including my girlfriend home, I smoked pot with my friend who was visiting. Before we smoked it he said, "I got this shit from the government, it's government weed. It's called G-4. You got some time to kill, right?" I said, "No problem of course I'll be fine". We smoked literally a hit and I was immediately so stoned the tree in front of me started growing and moving like all kinds of shit. We got in his car, we were over by Pacific Heights area. He wanted to look at Alcatraz. We did it, totally stoned. Eventually I could not deal and had to puke so he pulled over in an alley and I was puking. I opened the door of the car and leaned my head out, puking. This went on for a minute. Total fucking silence and the sound of me puking. So to be polite I said to him, "Put on the radio" and he said, "You really know how to party". He was not joking, he thought I wanted tunes while I puked. From then on, I called this "you sank my battleship weed."

25 YEARS/ELECTRIC WIZARD

 When I was 26 I had to move in with my father. You know if you move back in with your parents after moving out, this is not exactly a sign of success. I was doing heroin almost every day. I would go to a day program at the hospital basically every day. My father would drop me off. I pretended to go in the hospital, when his car had left the parking lot I went to the pay phone and called my dealer. He had gotten me a job in town driving a Taxi cab. Basically all I did was drop people off at the airport, there wasn't really any cab stuff in our town. This was Concord, Mass, a very rich town. Every night I'd pass out on the couch and be woken up later that night by my father doing sit ups in front of the TV. In the dark. Fucking counting as he did them and breathing really heavy. It was awful. He had a carton of Camel Straits on the driver's seat of the car and he had another carton on the kitchen table. That was open, too. One day I was probably looking for porn and I found a closet that was full of Members Only jackets. I'm not kidding. There were like 50 jackets and each one had a pack of Camels in it. There was also a case of cartons on the shelf above the jackets. After seeing all this and doing the math, I asked my father,"When is the last time you had to go to the store and buy a pack of cigarettes. Like when was the last time you went out to buy some?" And he goes, "Jeez, it's gotta be 25 years." And I was like, "So the last time you bought a pack at the store I was one?"

When I was in my thirties I was living here and we went to see Electric Wizard. They were known pot heads. They played super slow Doom metal and extolled the benefits of marijuana with every song just about. They were from England and they had never toured the US. We were at the Bottom Of the Hill and I was fucking psyched to see them. They got on stage and started playing, then the singer asked for a hit of weed. Some San Franciscan gave him a bowl, he smoked it. The whole band had a hit. The problem was, this was like '03 or something and California weed was fucking crazy powerful then. Before Sativa and Indica it was just all heavy duty, this shit was purple. Electric Wizard all took a hit and it was obvious that they were too high. The show became a practice session. They were playing, they were not singing they were just playing shit that came to them. They were clearly too high to be there, it was fucking funny. 

MORE ABOUT HOLDING/PUT YOUR HIPS INTO IT/THANKS, PSYCHO

When we weren't being given meds or at an AA meeting we played a card game called Space which was fucking awesome. It's basically Hearts but with spades instead of hearts. The other thing is that one time some dudes came on a Friday night and had an NA meeting. It was considered way cooler than AA. These guys did the whole meeting as a call and response musical type of thing, it was fucking cool. It was like 'The Stepshow" in School Daze. I literally bought an NA book from these guys and from then on described myself as an "Addict and Alcoholic."

When I was there my glasses fell off and smashed on the concrete floor. So I had a broken lens, long hair, and fucking a couple black teeth in front. Everyone there started calling me 'Hanson'. https://youtu.be/LdhEXTQUkDY 

When we went not in AA Meetings or "sharing" we would have like 15 minutes of free time. One time I went to up to my bed to get something, there was a kid in his bed cranking Nirvana. He was playing the song "Beat Me Outta Me" over and over. I had never heard the line which is fucking kinda major for a kid to be cranking. You know he was a junkie or something. One of the other few young people there was someone I recognized who had been a regular at the donut shop I had worked at. Steve Mason had been 10 years old and he would order a dozen assorted donuts. This meant I would have my back turned. While I put the dozen together he would loosen the tops of all the sugars. I figured that out after he did it once. When I ran into him in Holding he had a fucking tear drop tattoo on his eye. You know what that means? He was a little blonde kid but you know he was definitely a murderer as an adult. 

Me and my girlfriend were at a wedding in New Mexico. I remember the place was fucking remote. It was on a Native American Reservation and the hotel didn't have hot water. We were at the reception, they were playing music, my girlfriend Lila said, "Come on let's dance," I was like, "No Way", she says "Come on it doesn't matter what you do, I just wanna dance." I'm like, "Hell No." After a few more of these I finally agreed to dance, it was fucking Afro Cuban Salsa music. This shit is polyrythmic. When were were dancing for like one second Lila said to me, "Why are you marching?" 

Back when Uber just started we got a driver. The driver talked the whole time. He was clearly lonely as hell. He took the fucking longest way home. At one point he said, "I have a book back there, you can draw anything you want in it." We looked through the book and somebody had drawn a clown had written "Thanks, Psycho." 

DETOX

You should never start out a story like this. The first time I was in detox I went to secure myself housing. The idea was to live in a half way house. I realized you don't end up in detox for no reason so I realized I needed to get sober. I wrote about this experience a thousand years ago when it happened.

 I remember you sat around all day eating cinnamon toast, drinking AA coffee and smoking between AA meetings. I remember there was a guy who couldn't really talk. All he could say was, he'd mumble "I was taking 90 Xanax a day." There was another guy who had been drinking fucking gasoline. He had lost the ability to communicate. I remember during dinner one night he, without warning, totally flipped the table while yelling. Because I had to wait til there was a bed in the halfway house I was sent to "holding." 

This is where they put people just out of prison waiting for sober living. Because our country is insane everyone, well just about everyone was African American. I was told I'd be there 5 weeks waiting. Over the loud speaker every day a guy would say, "All the inmates please line up in the front for a meal." Eventually someone complained about him using the word "inmate" and they changed it to "clients". I don't know what meds I was on, but there were plenty of people on Methadone. Every day we'd all line up and they'd give us our meds. One day I was in line, the guy in front of me was there for Methadone and he said "Maybe this time I'll just smoke crack." That was his plan. So you get the idea, these people were fucked. At one point during a class the fucking FBI bust into the room and pulled one of the dudes out. I later learned he had murdered two people in Worceter.

At one point I ran out of cigarettes and no one was coming for a week to bring me more. After 2 days I finally got the courage up and asked one of the men for a cigarette. All the "clients" only had Newports. I had never had a Newport. I finally asked this guy for one and he gave it to me and said, "Son, this is the Cadillac of cigarettes." It tasted fucking awesome. From that moment on I loved Newport/menthol of any kind. Me and my brother call them Nature's Toothbrush and I used to only buy them when I had extra money. I can't really smoke a whole pack so I'd get them when I was particularly flush. I used to say "They call me 2 pack".