Hench!

I was once very interested in history, and attempted to become a
history student. Unfortunately, while I was very good at reading the
books, I was very bad at analyzing the content, and subsequently I
often felt like a jerk. I’d get frustrated, and my history stuff
would, throughout the term, would become less of a priority, and then
at the end I’d desperately try to write some paper that made sense.
Sometimes it worked, but often it didn’t.

The trouble is, as I found out, is that there’s two kinds of
history—popular history, and then actual history. Popular history is
like History Channel stuff—wars, boats, kings, that sort of thing.
Actual history includes that stuff, but is largely composed of stuff
like how rubber tariffs caused Midland manufacturing to move to
Rochester, and their subsequent success in transforming Rochester into
an inland boomtown thanks to the Eerie canal, and stuff like that.
More gifted people than I can make something interesting out of that.
I, unfortunately, could not.

Popular history is a little easier. It’s like this: “The Civil War.”
And then it just tells you what happened during the Civil War, and
make it sound like the whole thing was just a dust up between
Stonewall Jackson and Sherman. And then they signed some shit over at
Appottomax, and it was all over, and a new day dawned. Meanwhile,
there were a lot of cool uniforms and muskets and things like that.
Ken Burns slowly zooms in on a photo of young guy holding onto a horse
bridle, and the narrator says “In the Civil War, brother fought
brother.” You know, I don’t really see that as a great tragedy. At
least one of those motherfuckers was on the right side!

Or it’s even more vague, like “Battleships of the West.” This kind of
history is more aimed at people like myself, you know, history
dillettantes. Which is what I am. This kind of history is sort of
like collecting. You read about battleships, watch movies about
battleships, maybe go walk on a battleship, and then you know a lot
about battleships and wars in which battleships were used. You don’t
have any insights into battleships, and could sort of give a shit
about what conditions battle ships are made under, or whatever. Maybe
battleships are a bad example. What the fuck! I try.

If that wasn’t mundane enough, there’s all these popular history books
that are like “Lightbulbs: The Invention that Changed the World,” or
“Chairs: The Invention that Changed the World,” or “Microbes: The
Microbes that Did Things.” Or just “Thimbles!”

I didn’t really come here to put myself down. Instead, I came to
share an interesting story wiith you all. Part of my job requires me
to research odd things from time to time in order to clarify facts,
write captions, etc. And I learned that, not far from where my
apartment building now stands, one of the most important battles of
the RevolutionaryWar was fought. It was called the Battle of the
Gowanus, in reference to the Gowanus Canal, which is not far from me
at all. In fact, my mother, who lived not far from the canal as a
girl, still remembers its distinctive odor. Recently, while
investigating the Gowanus for PCBs or dioxins or some fucking thing,
they tried to measure how deep it was. The thing is though, the
Gowanus has no “bottom.” It’s just dozens off feet of sludge and silt
and chemicals.

Another good Gowanus story I have involves Sarah and I walking home,
and seeing three jellyfish (no shit) floating along. They looked ill,
as if they were suffering. I know you’re probably thinking “how can
you tell that htey were suffering? They don’t have brains!” Well,
you don’t have the kind of empathic connection to the living world
that I do, and you’re nothing but a shit-eating philistine.

Anyway, the Battle of the Gowanus took place in 1781, and involved the
forces of commander Thomas Greene, a second cousin to George
Washington. Greene encamped in the area now known as Brooklyn
Heights, concealing the inferior numbers of his forces by setting up a
main camp behind a ridge, where it was concealed from the sight of the
British, and settting up a decoy camp in plain sight of the redcoats.
The British, led by Col. Nigel Beamish, crossed the Gowanus on
purebread mottled roans, many of which would miraculously survive the
ffurious hail of musket balls that Greene’s forces rained down upon
them from ttheir position on the ridge.

It’s amazing to think that such a simple tactic would trick Beamish,
who was well known for his relentless tactics on the battlefield. Of
course, such an analysis overlooks the fact that the British were used
to fighting in rows, and had little to no experience fighting a “wily”
enemy. That day, the Gowanus ran red with British blood. There is
nothing to mark the location of the battle besides a weathered
historical marker, which is easy to miss if you’re not looking out for
it.

For a long time now I’ve harbored a desire to live a communal existence. The commune I imagine, however, is a mobile one. Everyone in it would travel around the country together in a red schoolbus. We’d go from town to town righting wrongs, singing songs, and generally just wrecking havoc.

This mobile commune would have several interesting features that most communes do not have:

1.) No farming. Fuck farming! We’ll get food some other way.
2.) Everyone has a job title. I will be the Minister of Information. Someone else will be the Minister of Transportation. There will also be a Minister of Entertainment, a Minister of Cooking, and several other ministers that I will not name.
3.) People will have fun on the Red Bus. The Red Bus will always be a lot of fun.

Here’s what would happen:

The Red Bus would pull into a small town. There would be a second of silence, and bird would twitter in the the trees. Then the door of the bus would open, and a member of the commune would step down onto the frozen ground, their face obscured by a scarf and sunglasses. They would slowly unravel the scarf, and then breath out a cloud of condensed breath into the wintery morning.

“Here.”

That’s what they would say. It would be 5 AM.

The next morning, the townspeople would awaken to the Red Bus Commune setting up tents in the town square. There would be music, juggling, and all sorts of other amazing shit that they would hardly be able to believe. People would put on plays and stuff. We’d have time to develop plays and music, see, because we’d be living in the Red Bus, travelling the country. The Red Bus would have berths, right, sleeping berths, and everyone would sleep in them and tell each other stories.

The Red Bus would have a band balled the Incredible Red Bus Band, that would be made up of whowever happened to be on the Red Bus at the time. There would be a lot of tamborines, ya know? And we’d all write songs together. It would be pretty good.

I suppose that the Red Bus will never really come together, though, and it’s a fucking shame. It would be Red, right? And it would be a Bus. Red. Bus.

This evening I was taking a stroll to the deli to buy a bottle of beer (I got Rogue Deadguy Ale, as a matter of fact. I thought to myself “you know, Rick, maybe these beers with the stupid fucking labels aren’t bad. Just because beer usually has this whole fake story about how it was brewed on the side, doesn’t mean it’s bad.” All those stupid microbrew stories are really ridiculous, as if the beer you were drinking was some kind of eugenically engineered racehorse fathered by pegasus or something. ‘Brewed by Trappist monks in Oregon, three handfuls of old growth barley are tossed into every vat of our cold aged porter, after which a choir of castrati with bound feet weep pure liquid hops into the kegs to ensure a crisp brewing process.’ They don’t advertise on television, which is a shame, because the advertisements would be hilarious. For instance, Sarah and I came up with a fake New England microbrew called Hale Ale. There would be a brand called Hale Pale Ale, and the little blurb on the side would go ‘Hale Pale Ale is brewed in Connecticut, by white people. Hale Ale: for when you just don’t feel like dancing.’ You know, aimed at the sort of Lands End catalogue perusing jerks who read these descriptions and think about them when drinking their beer. This Rogue Deadguy Ale basically sucks, it’s like drinking a fermented gingerbread man or something. I should have bought some orange juice. I could discuss the merits of orange juice, but this is a long fucking parenthetical, yeah?) and I began thinking about bats.

In the city I only ever see bats if I’m in a park at night, because they don’t really like to be out in the open, and I’d imagine that all the tall buildings fuck with their sonar. Bird watching had come up somewhere in conversation this week—I forget where and with who—and it occured to me that bat watching would be a hobby if bats came out during the day. Then I started thinking that if nightvision binoculars ever came down in price, than people could actually go out batwatching. It would be real fun, too. Bats are pretty interesting.

I say this, but I should admit that I basically don’t know anything at all about bats. I do like them, however. As a kid I used to ball up little pieces of white bread and throw them up to bats at night sometimes, especially if I’d been out fishing and it was getting dark. The bats would dive for the bread, but usually they’d veer off at the last second.

My parents had this crazy house that had been a barn which they decided to renovate. The renovation took a long time and the place was never completely airtight, and as a result bats used to worm their way in to the house. Bats can squeeze through extremely tight openings, actually. Anyway, the ceiling in the living room was about 25, 30 feet high, and bats would cruise around the living room. This was great when I was watching old horror videos, but sort of scary otherwise. Like if I was trying to take a piss in the middle of the night and this leathery flapping thing buzzed by my head.

When I was very young, I’d wanted a pet bat, but bats don’t really domesticate that well. At least I don’t think so. Let’s put it this way—I used to have a pet mouse, and that thing hated my fucking guts. I imagined that a pet bat would be the same, but it would be able to fly. If a pet hates you and has the ability to fly, it won’t be your pet for very long.

Although I never did own a pet bat, I used to draw a lot as a kid. In fact, I can still draw a pretty good bat if called to do so. I used to daydream that I would have a leash for my pet bat which would be a chain with very fine links. The leash would be more or less unnecessary, though, because the bat would be willing to do my bidding, and we’d hang out an be pals. Kind of a normal kid dream, I guess.

Seeing as how we lived in a barn, my parents had a lot of storage space, and when I got bored I’d dig through it constantly. There was all kinds of really interesting stuff in there, but that’s another story for another time. The point is that I dug up all their old records, which basically sucked, but there were some winners. In summation, the winners were:

• A copy of Tommy by the Who
• A lot off Harry Belafonte
• 1 dozen Sinatra records
• Heartland Music’s “Funrock” collection
• Abby Road
• Creedence Clearwater Revival’s seminal album Cosmo’s Factory, which was scratched to shit
• Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and other country legends
• A six album collection called “Jazz,” which was actually really good and had real, real early stuff on it. In fact, it was compiled in the early fifties, I think, and had Jelly Roll Morton and all that stuff on it.

And that’s it! The rest were fucking terrible. Bread, Mantovani, the Mello Organ, and shit like that. Damn! There were piles and piles of records, you know, and it seemed that I discovered more every year, and they were all bad. Still, I listened to a lot of them, and became sort off obsessed with audio. When you find weird shit like that and really listen to it, and really pay attention to it, and give it serious consideration . . . it could actually be pretty interesting. Even the terrible shit, like the endless albums that featured a pipe organ cover of Stardust.

Some of the most interesting music I found was my mother’s 78 collection. I should inform you that my parents are now in their 70s. They were not hippies because they were too goddamn old, which means that their music collection sucks. Anyway, they have all these old-ass formats like 78 rpm records. They even had 16 rpm records. 16 rpms! Can you imagine such a thing? Who thought that was a good format? Could a record even generate sound at fewer rpms? I’m surprised there weren’t 8 rpm records, made by people who really wanted their music to sound like shit.

I had a record player at one point that played 16 rpm records, but I didn’t have any good 16 rpm records to play on it. 16 rpm records are really big and usually only pressed on one side, and they were a format in which nothing interesting was ever released in. I used to get really drunk, put my Ramones records on the record player, turn it to 16 rpm, and listen to “Half Ramones.” Because it’s more or less half the speed of 33 rpm, ya got me? I’m sure that none of you have a 16 rpm record player, but I bet you could simulate this monophonic listening adventure with modern computer technology; my only fear is that your Half Ramones will lack the Warmth and Presence of mine, considering mine was 100% analogue.

My mother had some pretty good 78s, which I listened to a lot. I remember coming to her really sad after I broke a Gene Krupa 78, and she told me that it was all right, and that she broke the fucking things all the time when she was my age, and that I should just get a Gene Krupa CD.

There were some real weird records buried among the treasure though, or at least stuff that seems weird today. Actually, weird isn’t a good word to describe it. It would be better described as “incredibly fucking stupid.” There was a lot of real banal music back then. Digging amongst these sad crooners belting out vanilla bland renditions of “Buttons and Bows,” I came across a record by a guy named . . . you know, I can’t remember his name. No wait! It’s Burl Ives. Anyway the record was called Cotton Eyed Joe, which was a popular song by some awful country-techno band at the time that was being played all over the radio. I thought “Huh. No shit,” and put it on the record player.

I didn’t listen to the whole thing. I’m sure that Cotton Eye is a traditional song and all that, but the Burl Ives version is like funeral music for a pile of dead earthworms in a wonderbread coffin or something. Man! It’s just bland, and awful, and slow. It’s so bland it writhes in your ear. I get the jimjams just thinking about it actually. Before I tossed Burl back into the box of my mother’s 78s, I checked the name of the song on the other side, and it was called Little Leather Winged Bat.

“I like bats,” I thought, and listened to the song. It was all right. The first verse is classic, and it was running through my head just a little while ago on my way to the deli. It went:

I am a little leather winged bat
and I’ll tell you the reason that
the reason that I fly through the night
is because I lost my heart’s delight

It’s a real good verse. Minor key, and all of that. The other verses are really stupid. They’re like “I’m a little chicken sitting in the pen/something something something I can’t wait then” or something like that. Who gives a fuck about a chicken in a pen? Burl, if you’re out there, I’d be fucking surprised because you’re ten years dead. But if you’re listening, you did yourself wrong! Talking about chickens and shit, listen pal—chickens are comical. Or menu items. People don’t take the chicken seriously. A lonely bat is fucking poignant! Stick with the bat. Burl didn’t stick with the bat, though, because he was a maverick. A maverick with poor taste. If he’d stuck with the bat I’d be prostelytizing (sp?) for Burl right now, instead of tell you he’s a chump, but: “Burl Ives is a chump.”

I sort of miss having bats around. I turned to wikipedia to satisfy my bat loneliness, and came across this unsettling paragraph:

“Although one should not have an unreasonable fear of bats, one should avoid handling them or having them in one’s living space, as with any wild animal. If a bat is found in living quarters near a child, mentally handicapped person, intoxicated person, sleeping person, or pet, the person or pet should receive immediate medical attention for rabies. Bats have very small teeth and can bite a sleeping person without necessarily being felt.”

Now I never see any bats at all.

I.
There’s a black dog in my neighborhood that only has one eye. It’s very skinny, and it looks as though its skin was sewn up over where the socket would be, which is a little weird: the result is sort of as if there never had been an eye there to begin with. The dog is very graceful and very quiet and stalks back and forth in front of a house around the corner from my apartment.

I seem to remember reading, as a kid, some folklore relating to one-eyed black dogs, but I don’t remember exactly what it was. Because I’m lazy, I did some googling, and came across this from skell.org:

“The Black Dog haunted many parts of the country: in Lancashire called ‘Trash’ or ‘Skriker’, and on the Isle of Man, where he haunted Peel Castle, known as the Mauthe Doog. In Norfolk he is called Shuck, Old Shuck or the Shuck Dog, and in Suffolk, Shock, his name perhaps coming from Old Engligh scucca, a demon. The Black Dog was in some places thought to be the ghost of the unquiet dead. Black Dogs commonly haunted lanes, footpaths, bridges, crossroads and gateways.”

I’d though that the black dog appeared before travellers on lonely roads, and its coming fortold their death should they venture further. I don’t know if Clinton street qualifies as a lonely road. Not really. Anyway, the dog is there continues to be a little on the creepy side. I’m sure that it is a very nice dog, and not a portent of ruination and death.

II.
Sarah and I were going to the health food store when an old woman with green nailpolish demanded “Do you two like to make soup?” That woman was nuts, man. I immediately knew it was a bad idea to talk to her, especially because she would not have liked my answer: “No.”

I like to heat soup up, though. It’s nice. Most of you are probably unaware of the fact that I eat bowl of soup for lunch when the weather gets cold. In the summer, I eat some salad for lunch. Sometimes I switch it up, because I am a crazy and impulsive guy who lives on the edge.

III.
I started reading Octavio Paz’s the Labyrinth of Solitude, which is so far very good. I wish I’d paid more attention in Spanish class as a kid, because I would like to be able to read books like this in the original rather than in translation. It’s kind of shitty.

I don’t feel weird about reading Russian novelists in translation, because I think that I shouldn’t be expected to learn all this crazy-ass cyrillic shit. Spanish, on the other hand, is a language that I almost learned. I mean, I was close, and then I forgot it all. I forgot the tenses first, and now I don’t know shit except some nouns. It’s depressing. I should go to nightschool or something. I’m unilingual, for shit’s sake. I need to apply myself.

IV.
I listened to a lot of Captain Beefheart this weekend. Man. Orange Claw Hammer is a real good acapella song, which you wouln’t expect out off Captain Beefheart. He also does an incredible version of Moonlight in Vermont, which is kind of the aural equivalent of being stomped to death by a paisley-clad Yeti wearing one of those propellor beanies. I like that a lot of Beefhearts music sounds like some machine that just keeps going out of control and seems as though it might explode. I look at photos of the Magic Band in their weird house, and photos of weird cult groups like the Incredible String Band, and it really makes me wish I was travelling the country in a big, weird, red bus. I’d have a tambourine, and I’d hit it and yell things.

So, Halloween was this last weekend, and it was real interesting as it marked the first time I’d ever been in the Halloween parade.

Now, Halloween has always been a real important holiday for me, probably because of the influence of my father. My old man was always a big horror fan, and was a kid during the golden age of horror (he was born in 1933). He saw all of the golden oldies when they first appeared in the theatre, was around for the advent of 3–D, etc. When I was a kid, he told me about dressing up in these elaborate Halloween costumes he’d put together. His Wolfman costume, for instance, involved mortician’s wax purchased from a mortuary, and yak hair. I don’t know where the fuck he got yak hair from, but I assume someone must have been selling it somewhere.

The old man was a never ending font of scary stories, a lot of which he just made up. He also had a habit of going outside during the full moon and howling. No shit, he really did this. He had a pretty good wolf howl too, and the sound would echo through the valley we lived in. Dogs would be barking, coyotes would be making that weird coyote sound, and the old man would be laughing.

Since I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Halloween unfortunately kind of sucked. First of all, trick or treating was impossible because everything was so far away. I’d get decked out in my costume and my parents would have to drive me around, because everything was so far away. Sometimes you’d bump into other kids who were being driven around as well. My haul at the end of the night was usually pretty lousy. I’d get a lot of apples, candy not really meant for kids (like toffee drops or something), and pennies. Pennies, yet! I mean, even in the eighties a penny didn’t go too fucking far, you know what I mean? You’d be hard pressed to amuse yourself with a fucking penny.

The only good thing to do was to go to the local Division for Youth Services facility, where there was a haunted house. The DYS facility, where my dad ended up working, was one of New York State’s many juvenile detention centers. The haunted house was pretty fucking scary, I will say, and included this fake severed hand with a motor in it that would kind of twitch. I was terrified of that thing.

Anyway, I basically shelved Halloween at a pretty young age, and spent it by myself wandering around outside at night or sitting around watching horror films. My father, of course, wasn’t so content to sit around. I remember one costume he’d invented called the Killer Pile of Leaves. He’d take two tarps and sewn them together to creat a gigantic sort of pocket. He covered the top of this with layer upon layer of leaves. He’d rake the lawn and glue the leaves to the top of the tarp. He’d then wait impatiently for a day or two for more leaves to fall, then glue those down. He painted this weird mouth on the bottom of the tarp. That Halloween, he’d crouch down on the grass of the local Presbyterian church, looking, so help me god, like a pile of leaves. When kids or senior citizens would pass, he’d rear up, displaying this gigantic, awful mouth. He scared the shit out of dozens off kids, and nearly killed poor old Mrs. Gould, who had a weak ticker. I should mention that my father was in his sixties while he was doing this.

Anyway, over the years I sort of grew to miss Halloween. So I was very excited to move to New York City where Halloween was a massive event. It soon became clear that being in the parade was probably a lot more fun than watching the parade. One year, after dressing like a zombie, I was having lunch with Sarah and mentioned that it’s not much fun being a solo zombie. It would be nice to have a whole bunch of zombies that could run around in a gigantic mob.

“Yeah, and you should all do the Thriller dance,” she said.

One of the interesting things about being with Sarah is that she is very good at making things happen, an ability which I think is sort of beginning to rub off on me. I don’t know. For instance, we went to Serbia recently, and here’s how it hapened. We both wanted to go on vacation, and couldn’t decided where we wanted to go. We both sort of wanted to go to Russia, but didn’t feel prepared yet and didn’t really have the cash. We were listening to a CD of Balkan brass band music taken from an annual Serbian music festival. We decided “hey, lets go to that,” and we did. It was amazing. It just all came together, and we went to Serbia. Stuff like that always happens with her. This year it was “hey, let’s assemble an army of zombies.”

Although it should be noted that neither Sarah nor I can really take credit for what happened this Halloween. An army of zombies doing the Thriller dance is an idea that sells itself. Before we knew it we had two dozen recruits. Kim choreographed the dance, Katrina cut the song down to a more manageable length, Seth rented dance space and kindly helped some of us (OK, me) who were dance-impaired to get the moves down, Niegel got us a space to put on our makeup, Sarah Reynolds showed up with a video camera, Tom and Heather showed up as scientists in matching wigs, Garth let us into his apartment to rehearse, and just about everybody put the word out to other zombies and/or learned how to do zombie makeup. Matt, Angela, and Greg came from out of town to be zombies. In fact, Greg endangered his very reputation as the Chrome Consultant at Woodstock Harley Davidson by donning sweatpants and shakin’ it like Janet. It was like watching Voltron come together and . . . do whatever it was that Voltron did. I don’t know what that was because I never knew any kids who had all the Voltron toys. I had like the yellow lion or something, and I knew some kid with the red one, but that’s like only an arm and a leg, you know? Anyway, I digress. After a few weeks of what seemed like manic activity and teamwork that would put an afterschool special to shame, we were standing in a sea of people ready to issue forth into the Halloween parade.

Standing in a big group like that, you really get an idea of how schizophrenic the parade is. We were between some shitty New York radio station float, some stupid cut rate porn site float, some Star Wars nerds fighting with light sabers, bikers in skull masks, and some douchebags playing the bag pipes. Nothing spells Halloween like the fucking bagpipes. In fact, I think an album called “The Chilling Sounds of the All Hallows Eve Pipers” would go over real well. What is it with people who can play the bagpipes? They think they’re real fucking special, don’t they? In my town growing up, the local volunteer fire department had a bagpipe division of these plaid clad geriatrics who flat out butchered Oh Danny Boy at every public event. Every fucking holiday brought the bagpipers. The bagpipes, as I understand, were originally designed to be played while armies marched to war, and their terrifying sound was meant to carry for miles. It wasn’t meant to sound nice up close. I wish these people could find a less, uh, piercing way to remind people that they’re Scottish.

Anyway, here’s how the parade worked: us guys dressed like zombies would be herded by others dressed like scientists. Periodically, the zombies would get out of control, and the scientists would play Thriller. We would rock the Thriller dance to the delight of the crowd. By “delight” I mean “batshit crazy screams of acceptance and wonder.” Seriously, the crowd screamed really fucking loud. Granted, everyone involved in his production was incredibly good at doing the Thriller dance. We looked great, and made the bagpipers marching near us look like shit. What would YOU rather see, a bunch of frumpy kilt-wearing schmucks or a bunch of good-looking zombies busting a move?

By the end of the parade, it was clear that we were the coolest thing in it. In fact, there’s a Reuters photo of Garth and Anne and the backs of our heads as we wait for the parade to start. It a really good Halloween, and I can only imagine how we’re going to top it next year.