Hotter Than Hell

Between 2001 and 2006, I’d secretly hoped that my friend would drop dead. Well, perhaps “hoped” is a strong word, but my reflexes would have slackened considerably had his frame, say, wandered under a falling piano or against an electrified fence. Although the man claimed relatively sound health, even the heartiest of souls forget to look both ways when crossing the street, especially when nudged nonchalantly into traffic. Normally I’m not an evil man, but these and other scenarios of demise remained wildly vivid like an endless ‘Faces of Death’ montage. Ultimately, should the Reaper have dragged his sickle to Connecticut during that five year window, the chest bumps would have begun seconds after the Cloak of Doom’s Amtrak ticket was punched for his return trip from New Haven to Hell.

You see, my friend was planning to be buried in a Kiss Kasket, or so the rumor mill assumed. Yes, a Kiss Kasket, for the man aiming to piss off generations of his family, living and unborn, by subordinating himself to “putting the X in sex,” female objectification, and chest hair grown amok. After interring four grandparents and a few stray aunts in unadorned steel and fiberglass, the prospect of placing rose sprays over a fully laminated coffin with KISS FOREVER emblazoned across the front and an image of the face-painted band on the lid, seemed an intriguing thumb in the eye to conformity. More importantly, receiving the eucharist to “Beth” during the ensuing mass presented a once in a millennium opportunity.

Within my own rehearsed choreography, I anticipated throwing devil horns – that ubiquitous headbanger hand sign – after concluding the eulogy (and basically everywhere else that day); prosthetic tongue dangling halfway to my nipples while crushing blood capsules in my teeth like I’d just gnashed through a dead horse in the rectory. For those unfamiliar with Christian funerals, the aforesaid events would be construed as “disrespectful” to the sanctity of the church, family, faith, God, and basically anyone in a nursing home on Planet Earth preparing to keel sideways. But at a Kiss-themed funeral, the disrespect would occur from not doing them.

For enthusiasts of Goyim-fronted kitsch and/or male make-up, $4,500 ($5,000 autographed) would have scored a rectangular box proclaiming one’s devotion to “rock and roll all nite,” presumably deep into the inner rings of Hades. In his penchant for shameless promotion, Gene Simmons – demon and marketing genius alike – also presented the container as a dual-use cooler or small refrigerator. In others words, if one were to best the odds of pancreatic cancer or the flesh-eating Ebola virus, the casket could begin a successful barbecue tour, contributing to alcoholism while keeping hamburger meat on ice. And if your ailing grandfather wasn’t a fan of arena rock, himself holding out for the Perry Como estate to introduce their own laminated model, you’d leave your family one less issue with which to concern themselves on your fateful day of reckoning. As for your ball busting friends, well, better Kiss than Winger, I suppose.

The funeral business has made strident inroads since an impoverished Tom Hulce (as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) was unceremoniously dumped into a gaping hole, a perverted and disgraced pauper. In Florida, where humans move to die, warehouse clubs proudly hawk caskets of all styles, alongside their expansive selection of tires, electronics, and mustard six-packs. And creativity abounds freely, as specialty manufacturers have designed coffins to resemble gym bags, guitar cases, cigar humidors, and even yellow dumpster bins(!); assuring your surviving family that if they didn’t consider you an asshole during waking years, this representation would destroy any lingering fondness after your ditch was dug.

On a pleasing note to close an otherwise uncomfortable topic, I no longer wish death upon my friend, not if he’s relegated to the same hexagonal container as everyone else. Where’s the originality in a few refrains of “Amazing Grace” and a procession of black Town Cars? The Kiss Kasket may have been a cheap shot at tasteless publicity, but in this age of inelegant egotism, at least it served a purpose. For all the criticism mounted against him, Mr. Simmons remains a bassist second, but a brilliant salesman first and foremost. His exploits may be derided, but his tagline was marketing gold: “I love livin’, but this makes the alternative seem pretty damn good.” Spoken like a man with a few extra bullets in his love gun.

Blinder Than Bats

In a matter of days my buddy is going under the knife, at which point his eyeballs will be tossed into a Petri dish and split open like tiny coconuts. This marks the second attempt at weakening his favored eye in the hope of strengthening his nearly blind one. Grotesque as that sounds, it’s a typical procedure for astigmatism sufferers. A successful operation would prevent the crossing of his pupils, currently marring scores of photos and cursing him with the same leering gaze reserved for villainous megalomaniacs; the kind of people that forever seem preoccupied with, say, plotting the destruction of the Superfriends. Never trust a man with a wandering eye, folks. He’s always looking around for the next best thing, only half focused on your own musings toward (pick your poison) economic collapse, bad sex, or high-impact colonoscopies.

After botched surgery numero uno, my friend was presented with an adhesive strip for one lens of his glasses. The strip contains hundreds of microscopic prisms which refract light in such a way as to force the weaker eye outward, avoiding that DC Comics world dominator expression we discussed. Think of it as having the cover of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of The Moon” stapled directly to your brain’s occipital lobe. Painful, perhaps. Trippy, perchance. Necessary, yes.

Nonetheless, there’s more to that patch, and frankly, I don’t trust it. Any man wearing a sensory exciter over his eye is sitting on a boatload of bionic abilities, untapped or otherwise. How many months before the wearer begins to see through clothing, burn holes into walls, or shoot laser beams out of his sockets to combat the forces of evil (or annoy the bejesus out of his friends)? And forewarned is forearmed, the gift of x-ray vision probably effects more psychological harm than good. Take a few rides on an off-hours New York City subway for evidence of that. Still not convinced? Need I remind anyone of the insane visor screwed onto LeVar Burton’s face in ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ to combat his blindness? Let’s just hope the doctor gets it right this time.

If surgery numero dos is as painfully unproductive, doc’s going to have to prescribe extreme measures, perhaps mandating residence in a crystal cave – like the arctic leaning Fortress of Solitude where Clark Kent deflowered his beloved Lois – guaranteeing an eternity of favorable light refraction. If my buddy has to live like Bizarro, rambling in a backward-throated growl at the ass end of the earth for visual survival, so be it. Real estate on the northern tundra probably runs cheaper than Boston townhouses anyhow, given the menacing climate and months of darkness; you know, all the Arctic Circle nonsense which doesn't concern highly leveraged mortgage holders in the states. Suddenly that high-impact colonoscopy sounds pretty good, no? That's right, bend over and smile.

* * * * *

In sixth grade my psychopathic shop teacher mandated the viewing of a film he dubbed, cruelly, “Tomato Soup.” The event was well known, appreciated among former students as a rite of passage before proudly going forth to manufacture crooked toolboxes. Plot wise, the protagonist, a welder, eschews goggles in exchange for an eyeful of metallic shards. Set to eerily trippy 1970s music, we flash forward to a hospital room where needles are plunged into a bloody puddle (the socket) surrounding a grossly misshapen eyeball. While students groaned, our instructor pumped his fist with the zeal of an old codger winning big at the track.

Joking aside, I can still see that mangled eye in every bowl of Manhattan clam chowder, cultivating a wicked nausea to this day. Unfortunately, the adhesive strip on my buddy’s lens is a temporary fix at best; a shoddy plug in a leaky dam. Surgery needs to work the second time around. Otherwise it's crystal cave time. And honestly, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that I’m flying up to the North Pole for occasional beers, especially on this unemployed shoestring of a budget.

The Elephant Cometh

We became friendly just as his trolley was jumping the tracks. True, my old colleague was a bit quirky, but the laughs shared over our cubical wall balanced the self-loathing panic which bubbled in my gut. What was I doing wasting away in this den of low ceilings and slipshod ethics for the income of a social worker? Shackled firmly in the throes of middle office mediocrity, we collected dust on the low rung of a rusted corporate ladder. It helped neither career nor confidence to have that ladder steadied by functional alcoholics in management positions. Changing urinal cakes was probably a worse existence, but the bottom feeding world of portfolio support was ranked a close second, or perhaps a close third behind our grease-bathing cafeteria fry man (who served up a delicious grilled cheese, mind you). Congenial as I appeared, still living at home with a minimum of expenses, sanity was fleeting in those curious days, and mine persevered where others’ fell dead. Lights out. Pencils down. Work coma. Swiftly did the monotony of account reconciliation make mush of my friend’s mind, pounding brain matter into pulp until it resembled the guts of an overripe cantaloupe; common sense scraped loose and fed to the warring dogs of office politics. Overnight he became a Class A buffoon. An unpredictable pervert. A slow-motion disaster tumbling face first down an upward moving escalator, for months at a clip. And then he snapped.

In those unpleasant days – before the arm of almighty God plucked me out of that cesspool and presented a civilized alternative with all the trappings of a living wage – my friend had fully submitted to insanity, resigned to crunch numbers on the bank’s Windows incompatible accounting software and preoccupy his downtime spinning bizarre yarns on the size of the garbage in his pants. Rechristening himself The Elephant, he was prone to outbursts of extreme genital braggadocio, often using his right arm to emulate a swinging trunk and speaking of Trojan Magnums as a necessary element to his survival, much like water or air. Although he was a man of pedestrian looks and somewhat portly build, no earthly force could prevent his testosterone from bursting through the stratosphere during happy hours; no mere mortal could shield their eyes as he strut into bars like a peacock, puffing his chest through a comically tight blazer (almost certainly last worn at his eighth grade graduation) while lighting matches off clenched teeth. He was a winking, derriere grabbing jackass – something straight out of ‘Mad Men’ or a 1970’s how-to brochure on sexual harassment in the workplace – with limitless confidence and the threat of a rocket launcher in his pants that could presumably be discharged during any conversational lull. Suddenly, the simple act of sharing a beer was like having a grenade launcher pointed at your ear. I was in a perpetual state of unease. Women were aghast. After all, he was a lowly administrator turned (alleged) phallic colossus. A godhead of virility. You would’ve been horrified.

Why this sudden swing from office dolt to sexual superman? Why the invented legend status which, ultimately, spawned an amusing fool amongst the company of men yet a deviant in the mind of females? Quite simply, he had nothing to lose. His personal and professional life were magnificent trainwrecks, and the mythic hammer behind the belt buckle was an emotional crutch; a psychological weapon to be exploited on the worst dates in the worst seats at the worst restaurants when all other attempts at witty banter fell short. For all I know, it could’ve been a twelve inch beanstalk secured to his femur with duct tape. I really don’t care and I never asked for the negatives. And when he finally quit, cowardly retreating on a Greyhound bus with the usual lot of immigrant drifters, hillbillies, and murderous church custodians, it was another chapter closed on another oddball flame-out. Keep in touch, we did not. His manliness was too hardy a force for my diminutive stature. Still, it was always fun having drinks at the circus when the elephant was out of his pen.

A Bronx Tale

Walk with me into the urban jungle. Watch the refuge of leafy Pelham Parkway fall quickly away as we soak in the angular vistas of Williamsbridge Road, scenery chewed by a topography of utilitarian brick and concrete; where the strict lattice of pavement-choked blocks spoils the asylum of absent parks, and trees seldom rupture the swelling asphalt sea. Ungiving brown storefronts and banks and bodegas blend dispassionately into the ubiquitous haze. Sepia glazes the hard lines of body shops and service stations, exhaling their angry oily fumes, while side streets languish in a starving artist’s palette of washed dull grays. Follow me down Haight Avenue, ascending an insufferable staircase to an iron-ringed slab of scorched cement. It functions, barely, as an observation platform from which to marinate in the stewed tang of the sewer and trash bins and apartment cooking. Cough as you may, even on this heightened perch one can never clear the city from the lungs or its cynicism from the throat. Above us the metal forest of rooftop antennas skewer skyward the basin of humid air – themselves the spiky bards of a pre-cable citizenry left behind – and further away the hulking masses of water towers, all gun-metal black, form a watchful clogging ring around the neighborhood sweatbox; a panoramic blockade from what vibrancy exists, if at all, beyond the leathery streets of Morris Park.

We begin and end here. From whence we came is unimportant. Witness the misuse of three years in this stinking hovel, where a helmet-headed friend lay stagnant within its faux wood paneling as the Bronx burned and made mincemeat of his New England pedigree. Before law school. Before anything. Enter the masturbatorium of exhausted ambition, of $25,000 civil servant salaries and cheap pasta dinners, of adolescent black light posters hung clumsily in the hall, themselves the detritus of bygone lodgers. Admire the rusting refrigerator, landmark and icon both, meeting place of half-baked ideas and pressure cooker for asinine schemes. Respect the outmoded kitchen where grandma filled oil drums full of sauce before ratcheting into senility, now an improvised court for indoor beer pong and its distillery stench. Shield your eyes from the blazing mosquito light, crassly revealing the cigarette smoke which rolls thick in the air, burrows in clothing, and rubs grimy into pores cultivating ugly acne. Obey Leatherneck – breaker of backs, human truck, avenue juggernaut and landlord – who was never above dispensing a proper throttling or, for conduct unbecoming of a tenant, a punishing yet deserved sodomization behind drawn dusty blinds. Of that, we must not speak further. Avoid eye contact as he lumbers obtrusively from inner stairways, damning any consolations of privacy with his gigantic pulsing neck and military fatigues, endlessly ferreting through a back rumpus room bursting with transistor radios, toolboxes and the worrying risk of decayed corpses. There will come a time, not today, when he will surely kill us both.

What kind of loathsome reformatory, so polluting to the mind, breeds furniture demolition as a recreational pastime? When does spearing chairs through entertainment centers, smashing cabinets full of flatware, or maniacally ramming tables through walls become encouraged so easily, or attributed so nonchalantly to tequila and loud John Mellencamp? The insane toothy grin, the drunken sweaty brow, the simian roar, the crash of wood against metal as table legs joust wildly through the air, all dead ringers for the man in a low income holding pattern, the hip-hop jackass with no regard for his gear. How could the wreckage of the morning after be regarded with such hilarity? Pointed questions all, yet answered in the corrosive hodgepodge of two parts collegiate invincibility and one part disposable cash, a healthy dollop of accessible malt liquor and a ghetto blaster. Mix and blend.

Understand that I have no history here. No roots to lay claim. I was an occasional tourist with years to burn; an active accomplice with an hourglass of time. Only when I stopped meandering did I finally push beyond, leaving sloth to murder those who remained. And the world moved forward at dizzying speed, away from the street grids and potholes, the clotheslines and antennas, Mother Mary bathtubs and plastic window canopies, chain-link fences and weed riddled stoops. Outside, at last. Allured by opportunity the story plays out as expected, as it always does in sunny suburban landscapes and quaint walking villages. Within later chapters thrive successes familiar: mental reparation, love chosen, career flourished, and rewards generously reaped, each awash in rich reds and golds, deep blues, and bright yellows. Were I to lose myself here, again – shoehorned amid the Grand Concourse and Pelham Bay in the gray space linking adolescence to adulthood – it would serve as a poignant testament to the virility of youth and the transience of days. But more importantly, perhaps, as a lost chance to toe the divide between what society has expected of us and what we hope to become. To concede or release. To walk or to fly. And for this I sometimes mourn.

Two-Season Automobile

Breakfast of champions: Lean Cuisine Chicken Marsala with a side of … nothing. Followed by several handfuls of Lays Salt & Vinegar Potato Chips, a touch of self-loathing, and some hard reflections on this ruinous diet. Most importantly, no coffee, as the gut rot from banging down two nacho platters and a sensible variety of alcohol the night before was maddening. Ah, the slippery slope. Some might consider a glad-handed visit to the local brewery after an evening laced with shenanigans to be idiocy. Not boastful, drooling, horn-dog idiocy of the kind I witnessed on the 1:53am rolling drunk tank from Grand Central, but a serious lapse of judgment nonetheless. And as much as I appreciate a well crafted Smoked Porter (as much as the next guy, I suppose), the drive to the house of hops is forever seared in my memory.

You see, my friend’s car is, at best, a two-season automobile. The vehicle comes unequipped with functional heat or air conditioning, a hallmark of the sub-economy option. The squeal of the brakes, another low-cost feature for the man looking to careen wildly into intersections and tanker trucks, would give any passenger “Deliverance” type fears (or flashbacks, in the worst cases). Thankfully, the good folks at General Motors offered him windows, doors, and AM radio inclusive of the sticker price. Correct me if I’m wrong, and I don’t mean to sound elitist, but the cheapest Toyota Yaris assumes its target customers expect some degree of basic climate control as a standard option (along with the FM band and a steering wheel). In any case, I’m sure the car runs like a dream in late May, but in eleven degree weather you can feel the brain start to become unglued, as tinges of madness ricochet happily from synapse to synapse.

Remarkably, the back seat doubles as a yawning graveyard for 20 ounce Diet Pepsi bottles, tossed haphazardly from the captain’s chair without warning or logic. Empty, full, leaking, there is NO discretion when bridging the divide between sanity and filth, separated meagerly by the always awkward center console. Imagine a six-pack of this poison drained ferociously on each hourly work commute, 120 ounces coating the stomach like caffeine cancer. A surly trucker might snort through a brick of cocaine while smacking the crap out of a hooker in a Travel Center of America restroom to achieve a similar degree of mental acuity. For me, a medium dark coffee is all it takes to clear the sleep from my head. I don’t need to run through concrete each morning to know I’m alive.

As for the recycling factor, it’s “drive at your own risk” when entering my hometown without blacked-out windows. After all, the “can man,” residing king of the dumpster dive, would snap necks for that kind of jackpot on four wheels. My buddy might as well be cruising around with the Hope Diamond dangling off his rear-view mirror and a ROBME vanity plate.

Environmental Love Hole

Today I woke up, took a shit, and slugged down a gallon of unleaded coffee; Tasters Choice instant blend, for those taking notes. I know I promised not to bastardize this forum with full-throttle diary entries, but I also feel responsible for allowing a certain transparency into my daily routine, lifting the proverbial curtain on occasion. To the detriment of some, no webcams will be installed in this manse, or wrapped around my head. This is the fortress of unemployed solitude, not a funhouse where I do handstands for blog hits and ad revenue.

On a brighter note, I’m happy to have received positive feedback on my bottle recycling plans. The gentleman who so greatly approves of my intention to bank coin while saving this polluted earthly hellhole is a Connecticut-based hapkido warrior / accountant with a bad back. The man is addicted to bottle recycling. He wants to make love to bottle recycling. It’s an illness – worse than my autodidactic tendencies to catalog music or play air drums – as sadly, it disrupts his social calendar on an excessive basis. He is a married man, but his true mistress is the can machine, haphazardly tucked away in the nether reaches of your local supermarket, often marred by broken glass and engulfed in an avalanche of garbage; sloppy, boorish, and in this particular case, emblazoned with a big neon “Fuck Me” sign above the input hole. Those who approach this abomination do so with a lustful twinkle. They are either (a) white trash, (b) geriatrics, or (c) shaggy-haired Greenpeace activists with IMPEACH BUSH bumper stickers on their shitbox Volkswagens. Dating the can machine is the equivalent of dating a paraplegic. She ain’t pretty, but she ain’t going anywhere, and she might even pay to play. Yes, bottle recycling is my friend’s dirty laundry, his wicked bitch. Well, that and his inclination to disrespect a Norelco beard trimmer by using it on his lower person. Poor Norelco beard trimmer, forced to lacerate a snarled Vietnam jungle twice weekly without the advantage of Agent Orange.