WARNING! THIS POST CONTAINS ADULT LANGUAGE AND MATURE SUBJECT MATTER. IT IS NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN UNDER 18 OR ANYONE WHO FINDS ADULT CONTENT OFFENSIVE

This ain’t what you think it is. Okay, I lied. If you know my posts, or worse, if you know me, you probably know exactly what I’m about to do to your head.

That’s not a bad thing though, is it? We’ve had a few laughs over the past couple of years. I’ve creeped you out a few times with this freaky post and this one. I promise you that every word is true.

Sometimes the freakier stuff hits too close to home and sometimes I just got stupid.

But my life isn’t all horror. Hey, we’ve had some laughs, too. Like when I shared the story of the world’s most hilarious criminal and the chase on Interstate highway 70 everyone wished never happened and this treat.

But I was with you all through 2020, and you got to see me at my best and my worst. Political shit I’d seen and couldn’t believe. COVID-19 which I had twice. And didn’t deserve to live when better people died. I’ll always be sorry for that.

Well…the new year is here, and looking back at my favorite posts, the ones in which I winged it and just let my keyboard loose like this one and BROOKLYN CONFIDENTIAL is helpful to me.

But there’s so much more to tell. And I really was an asshole, you know. I think I’ll officially start this year with a soul-cleansing confession of one brief second in time when I couldn’t help being an asshole because, assholes. You know?

Spring found me dumped by Donna, the girl who got an honorable mention in “Nineteen Seventy Eight”, linked above as one of my favorites.

I didn’t like being dumped. I mean, not many people do unless they wanted to break it off but not to be the one doing the dumping.

I’m sure you can relate. You know, being in a daze, feeling like you’re gut-punched and never sleeping or eating. Like that.

The Month The Music Died

AM radio. Top 40. In May it had some real crap. “Lonely Boy” and “Undercover Angel” did not belong on the same chart with songs by Boz Scaggs, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner, Jimmy Buffett, Yvonne Eliman and a few others (link below) and it was the week “Da Doo Ron Ron” debuted, causing a shitload of people to pray for the apocalypse. I mean, that song was barf aimed at–wait. Who the fuck would listen…who bought that drek (If it was you, don’t tell me. I’ll take the first and every opportunity to find new and disparaging names to call you)?

I wondered for a while if ODs and suicides increased. Or if the FCC would help us be rid of the din (insert Brando in Apocalypse Now whispering “The horror…the horror…” here).

The Spring of ’77 was, to be blunt, fucking weird.

The Top 40 in that very bad week of May 1977 made me queasy as all hell. I mean I’m fine with Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. I think they were alumni of the 5th Dimension. Great voices so hey, how could some of these other dildoes debut or even place in AT40?

I’ll bet Casey Casem was drinking a pint before he had his weekly countdown. You couldn’t have paid me to do it. Or drugged me enough.

It was dystopian for sure. Like America had split into two types of people: sane, and ball sacks.

McDonald’s either had, or was about to have, a banana milkshake. Okay? Really. The world watched us and said, “Hey, look at all those fucking nuts! Quick, sell all your shares in McDonald’s!”

Come to think of it, what if it was a trick by McDonald’s to make people dump shares so they could buy them back for cheap?

Robin

My older sister was home from College. She had brought a friend with her. Chick named Robin. They went with us on a trip with the high school I was in with my younger sister who was in the band which was slated to do a “concert” (ha!) at historic Jamestown. Followed by a day at King’s Dominion, a large theme park off Interstate 95 in Virginia. I never thought much about Robin. Except that she was alright looking and would probably go both ways which was kinda hot. I did undress her with my eyes and had a fantasy or two. But she never acted much like she was interested in me. I got the impression a couple of times that she might have fooled around with my father but I was never sure. Being full of hormones and heartbreak, I wouldn’t have minded getting a blowjob from her.

Until one day during the trip when I was sent to the motel room my sisters and Robin were in to make sure they were up.

Yeah. They were up all right. Starkers, primping at the mirror. All I really saw was asses but Robin had a nice ass. Only I wasn’t interested in asses. I wanted to see tits. As the door was closed on me I saw one of them, I don’t know which, reach down and in front of the other. Wasn’t that a fucked up thing to see. Didn’t want to see my sisters naked. But I began getting some real ideas in my head. Holy fuck I thought. No. Not a fuckin hillbilly chick.

Don’t know where she was from. Can’t say I cared but it was down south in a place I hoped I’d never go. But then again, hormones. Surely a blowjob wouldn’t kill me, right? I wouldn’t have gone down on her, though. No fucking way. I knew that with that accent, it’d taste either like soap or dirty twat and I didn’t like either one.

Hey, it’s okay. Years later my younger brother did that shit to a girl whose mother never gave her any personal hygiene tips. He ended up puking all over her crotch and stomach and running out her front door.

I’m not trying to be sexist. This is how I was then. A product of abuse, and if you don’t think over ten years of that shit makes you a jaded weirdo before you’re even a man, you’re wrong. I was sexist, horny and totally disgusting.

I was still wondering how I could get some head off this chick before she went home to her mountain abode when, one day, my mother made hot dogs for lunch. She asked Robin what she wanted on hers. I swear she said. “Chili and slaw.” Or, more precisely, “Chili and slewawl.”

Stop! Fucking time out here!

Chili and Coleslaw together on a fuckin hot dog?

What the fuck?

Now up until that point I probably would have gone to bed with Robin. Maybe even made love and kissed her.

But when I saw what she was eating that was it for me.

I wouldn’t have cared if she ate nightcrawlers, snails, scorpions or snakes, but watching her eat that shit I wouldn’t have let her mouth touch any part of me. I wouldn’t have let her suck my thumb.

I’m not trying to be unkind here. It’s how I was back then.

And speaking of my older sister, I owe her anyway.

It wasn’t bad enough that our mother couldn’t cook worth a fuck. One time mother was cooking broccoli on the stove, an exhaust fan to the outside turned to high setting, but the stench permeated the house. I was on the living room sofa reading a volume of the old children’s encyclopedia, “The Golden Book Of Knowledge” when the concentration of a noxious cloud became too dense for me and I puked.

I don’t eat broccoli. Ever.

One time we had dinner and cherry pie for dessert. The younger kids ate something I must not have eaten, because they went to the den to watch TV but the three of them didn’t watch any TV. Nope.

They were making a serious level of decibels, vomiting with more gusto than any little kids you ever saw. Heaving, backs arched back as they bent forward at the waist, chunks literally spraying. My next youngest sister looked at me and pointed down the steps. “Look,” she said, “halves of cherries.”

I don’t eat cherry pie.

One thing that might have saved me from getting sick by eating whatever they had is that I had long since, before the three younger siblings were born, proven that you can’t make me, on pain of a serious lashing, eat anything I don’t want to.

I was really young. The dish was chop suey and it had mushrooms. Mushrooms looked like toadstools which my father had once warned me to stay well away from. He said if I even kicked one by accident, little tiny bugs would fly out and embed themselves in my navel. So you tell me, am I gonna eat anything that looks like a small toadstool?

He threatened the flogging and I put the fork in my mouth and promptly emptied my entire digestive system onto my plate. Haha, bastard. When I don’t want it you keep that shit away from me. I probably heaved up strained peas from when I was a baby.

I don’t eat mushrooms.

“Killers! Assassins!”

I grew up thinking my family was trying to kill me. I’m sure us kids had food poisoning every time we got diagnosed with a stomach virus. And my oldest sister must have been apprenticed to mom as a killer by food. When we were little and it was just the three of us, older sister made mud pies. And she was a scorpio and she was as mean as a mama bear guarding a cub.

So naturally she made us eat her mud pies. I know she ate one too. Maybe not all of it. But a little was enough.

Because we were in the dirt where the dog tie-out was. The dog was a big collie which made big turds.

And the collie had roundworms. And now, so did we.

I don’t remember much. Just that we were really fucking sick, always on the commodes, and the doctor made a house call and gave us an elixir to kill the worms. The liquid in the big amber bottle tasted like bananas and we’d shit all night long.

Banana milkshakes! Fuck you, McDonald’s!

I don’t drink milkshakes.

I don’t eat bananas.

Mother used to make salad. Tossed salad. No romaine or iceberg. Fucking green lettuce. That’s right, the kind that has claws on the outer edge of the leaves; little prickly spikes that get caught in your throat and make you choke because you would have to chew it like a cow with a cud to break that shit down.

I don’t eat salad.

I don’t eat chili.

I don’t eat fucking coleslaw.

Keep that shit out of sight. Nobody who lives in the same county as I should be eating any of this shit. It’s a violation of my personal rights.

Are You Crazy, Ms. Kressler?

From 1975 to 1977, four semesters, I took and flunked Biology I. One reason was I detested my teachers. Another was that one of them told us that her husband was a surgeon and he was sent a patient who was having severe trouble breathing. It wasn’t long before the cause revealed itself: a very large roundworm was emerging from one of his nostrils. Now that story and my past had me phobic about roundworms and other parasites. So one day we get to the lab and this crazy teacher has a big plastic bag full of–you guessed it–dead roundworms. She brought what? Fuck! They probably came from the gullet of the guy her husband was going to do a tracheotomy on til one of these monsters crawled out of his nose.

And we were supposed to dissect them. And she provided the class with gloves and tweezers and scalpels but warned us not to touch the worms as their eggs…

I refused. Never went near one of these rubber waxy trays and she got mad and I said fuck you, and a letter got sent home because of my profanity and choosing to take a failing grade. And I failed that semester. And three more.

I hated Biology. Kressler next went into a lot of talk about “eggs and sperm” which is always the ways she announced a class on reproduction. It made me sick. She sounded like someone’s mother asking her kid what they wanted for breakfast. “Eggs and bacon” is a term I never use.

I simply say “bacon and eggs”.

Unnamed mother: “Jerry, you want eggs and sperm?”

Except my plight, in the third semester, delighted underclassmen. And one day we were supposed to look at sperm cells with microscopes. And they didn’t look like sperm cells in pictures. They looked like red blood cells. What the hell?

“Where are their tails?” I asked. No answer. This teacher was different. I didn’t get it.

One underclassman, a guy who looked like he’d never be strong enough to fuck or fap, a stick who played the tuba, took inspiration from those classes and graffitied “The Blue Sperm” on the walls.

What a fuckin madhouse.

As the spring of 1977 gave way to summer, Robin left and I never saw her again.

Some time later I hard she had died, and all I could remember was that she was kind of sad, kind of pretty and was always nice to me. And maybe I never directly harassed her but those thoughts, the meanness of it all still causes me guilt, but this all proves one thing.

Abuse goes deep with its wounds but just because you couldn’t handle those wounds before, and you’ve been an asshole, there’s nothing saying you gotta stay one.