Hench!

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.

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