Allegedly, Fun (part one)

For Don Pépé (José Donoso)

© Mike Mosher 2020

You bought our band t-shirt remaindered at the Skinflintwood Mall. Your editor suggested a piece on the band for the first issue of the semester, "Where Are They Now: Whatever Happened to Tippy and the Chomps?" OK then.

Look, I’ve never been a journalist. Never worked for the high school paper, though they asked me to. It must be a performance, like a Rock show, every article a song, no? Or maybe more like cutting a record, recording a track in the studio. Your editor must be like Aldebbie at the controls, shaping, consolidating our clutter.

Yes, I'm glad you called. So glad. No, you're not bothering me.

I'm quite happy to talk to the OPTICS, the all-seeing eye in the pyramid that is high school. OPTICS doesn’t mean eye doctor? Oh, I guess that’s an Occultist. If you say so. Always used to look for my name in the school paper. I like being noticed, rcognized. Anyway, you want to talk about the Chomps. You want to talk about Tippy. Of course you want to talk about me, and how my guitar was the turbojet engine 12-cylinder Doozie Martian-Landau touring car propelling our songs through the stormy night. Plus how the dynamo turbines of my brother's drums, Dink's lubricious one hundred twenty thousand volt bass lines, were the power plant illuminating our 24-hour, three-shift factory of Rock.

Your hair smells nice, fruity. Shampoo? You're shifting around, am I making you nervous? No? OK, good. I most certainly want to be helpful to my old school paper. And such a pretty correspondent too. Mm, you're not wearing a...never mind. Arts Editor? That's even better. Please, sit here next to me. Is your father a professor?

Your mother a real estate professional? A doctor and an art gallery owner? That's so nice. What kind of doctor, an abortionist? I'm sorry, I certainly didn't mean anything, that just came to mind. I said, I'm sorry.

Do you work on the yearbook too? My years, junior high too, the yearbooks were dedicated to the kids who died each year, the hemophiliacs, casualties of careless summer vacations near wood, water, chainsaws, gasoline, open sewers, hidden wells and sharpened stakes. Those kids who drowned trying to swim in the water filtration plant ponds or worse, waste processing facility's settling pools and tanks. You write those flowery dedications, right?

The yearbook's going to be dedicated to Tippy this year, isn't it? Oh, that's right, he already graduated. Too bad.

Hey, it's OK. You should know, ROCK FOR GIRLS magazine has voted me World's Most Reliable Narrator for three years in a row now. Someday it will be forty, fiftly years. That’s a joke because Tippy always said I procrastinated, instead of jumping right into life.

Maybe he only meant with…girls.

Everybody wants to hear about Tippy and the Chomps. Are you doing a special issue of the OPTICS on us? Were you one of his girls? In junior high? Your sister? Oh, I think I remember her, if she had your nose.

You’ll need to write about my enemy regalia, Dink’s booze, Thump’s violence and rage. And then Aldebbie’s erotobusiness machinations, of course. What, you like him? That song? He stole the idea from Tippy, y’know. And the riff from me.

There's a lot to cover. Tippy's odd background. The history of

Rock, and what bands were popular around town and in the Englishsinging world in those days. Even the history of Aleppo and rest of Michigan, kind of. Are you ready for all of that? For it might not make any sense otherwise, and such baloney has been written about us, especially since Tippy's death, that it's time to put a mighty sword in the ground and pull out the truth, bloody as it may be. A girl old enough to know her own blood is just the one to do that. So let me proceed, please.

Remember, when we were born they only played the sort of post-klezmer boxy-suit Yiddishismo of Doo Wop, bubbling "Nov Shmoz Ka-Pop" or "Nize Bebbe, Is Dis a System?" For all my philosemitic study, I hadn't realized Leslie and the Yellow Stars was a Jewish band. Rhymed "Vichy France" and "Dance, dance, dance" in one song. Nearer home, the PoPoPogroms, from that Slavic suburb of Motorsburgh, miscegenating rock with polka, mazurka, dosvedanyah beats. Oh to be ethnic, defined.

1950s tearjerkers like "She's Willing to Date" by the Confiscated Nosegays. Show tunes like "March of the Siamese Twins". It wasn't yet Rock n' Roll, it was still sort of scary Mom's-generation vocal harmony pop, by quartets like the Avunculars or the Donderos, crewcut crooning Beagle Scouts, named in honor of their anti-Communist Congressman from Michigan. For the moody and melancholy among you (OK, your parents), the Falsehoods, and crooner Tré Buchet.

Tube radios glowed with vocal harmonies by the Uppermiddleclassmen, or vocal Mormons competing with harmonizing big-city matching-housedress shmatte moms the Alright

Alreadys. Shpoopi, salaam, salami, baloney! Vocal bigamies of the era's sequentially married million-sellers. Mouths primitively forming the syllables that ultimately became Rock. Personally, I always liked the records of Jesse Garon Presley better; like I do the paintings of the other Dali brother.

Soviet Premier Kruschev's threat was translated as "We will Chuck Berry you", so in response, the US reinvented racism and emboldened dusty across-state-lines-for-immoral-purposes laws to fearfully protect it. To keep black celebrities from young white teens, laws that our whitish Tippy slipped through to exploit. He gave those girls something to fill it with.

Me, I didn't like music in school. The other kids made me sing Do Re Mi FATSO La Ti Do, made me dance the Becky like a farm milkmaid, most humiliating. If I had ever been tossed in the school pool (won’t happen; I was dismissed from Boys' Swim for diarrhea and extreme obnoxious flatulence), I would undobtedly sink, need emergency lifesaving tracheotomy with the irate coach’s ballpoint pen, at best do the flypaddle until help arrived to fish me gaspingly out. That damn Tippy, he was a natural in the amniotic chlorine, conquering the water (he laughed) "like it was a girl." Stroke, kick, twist, float, etc.

I, on the other hand, was busy assiduously growing up on healthy children's books like How Dinosaurs Help People. And boys' adventure books, some British like Reggie's Regimen for the Regiment. Someone at the record store said a Jamaican was inspired to name his music after it.

Mom bought us subscriptions to Catholic self-control magazines and rather old-fashioned children's classics, like The Misery of Masturbation and Boys' Bulwark Against Wicked Thoughts.

But I really can’t blame the moms of the day. Homemaker magazines would decry breast-feeding as "beast feeding", right next to an ad for an improved baby formula made from plastics or rocket fuel. Young mothers were taught crying children equal Communism, and that a colic-traumatized baby should be soothed with the Pledge of Allegiance, only his own hand upon his heart, instead of enfolding arms or grandma's laudanum. Builds Freedom Twelve Ways.

At age six, Mom had my tonsils removed when she saw me playing with myself, my little parts in hand, since even the politically conservative pediatrician Dr. Frank Wagon discouraged a full castration. For some teens, that comes later, when henpeck'd fathers forcibly cut their long hair, ordered beards trimmed. I never touched myself there again, until Coral, sweet sweet Coral, did for me. Some mothers give love, others have only self-pity and terror, difficult for an attentive, alert boy to brush off.

Meanwhile, I most feared injury to my hands, my precious hands, but couldn't stick my hand in a sinkfull of water hot enough.

Which probably led me to playing guitar, and the Chomps.

What? Pay attention. This IS the story of Tippy and the Chomps.

You’ve got three questions today to start? I’ll make sure I got your requests right.

One: Did we have any musical influences?

Two: Did we have any nonmusical?

And three, How we went from garage to success.

Okay, okay, I'll try to tell you all of this before you have to go off to class. Or, maybe it’lll take a lot longer. I might even need an hour to answer the first part, the influences. For we were pretty smart, pretty aware, growing up in Aleppo in the great radio shadow of Motorsburgh.

Item One. We had been listening to a lot of the very old bands from the beginning. You know, the kinds with names of household products. Only at garage sales, or the Evangelistic Old Charity store on Main Street might you pick up those classic sides by the WasherDryers, the Spongemops, the Billfolds, the Scotchtape Japes, the Scissors, the Paperclips, the Ashtrays, the Aerowaxes, the Air Fresh'ners, the Collanders. Do you remember the Graters and the Knifesharpeners, the Chrome Nailclippers and the Towels? Of course not, you’re too young, but I’ll bet yo’ momma does. Have you heard And-I-Ron and the Fireplacemen, or the Thermostatsons. The Eiderdowns, the Brighten Earlys, and the stage-choreographed Breakfasts-On-the-Run all had something about them that was memorable.

Ahh, Motorsburgh’s own Wlad and the Watched Pots. They often played with the Dishwasher Spots. Kitchen product bands like the Allspices, the Pickling Spices and an unsalted album called "Watching Our Weight". Pert and ruddy Nanci Niacin and the Riboflavins, and other cereal bands with badly-wired amps that went snap, crackle and pop. The X-Press Checkouts, whose every gig had nine songs or less. Irreplaceable groups like the Hot Water

Heaters, the Picnicbaskets, Laundryhampers, Magazineracks. The Nightmagicmarkers, the Soapdishes.

When the Shoppingtrips broke up, members went on to form the Wet Wastebaskets, the Garbage Bags, the Wallcoverings, the Hedgetrimmers, the Hibachis, and later, Hans and the Hang Gliders.

You couldn't get more suburban than the Trashclippings, their amps and keyboards covered with big plastic garbage bags on their Put Out on the Curb Thursday album. I’ll bet Daffie Mars liked the Wrinkle Remover Creams, the Bathshowers and the Clearplastic Showercurtains. The Barber Shaves, the Disposable Razors, the Styptic Pencils. The Shaving Cuts were distinguished by these little wine-dark line segments all over their faces, along with their backup singers the Nixon Scratches. The Electric Toothbrushes, symbol of household prosperity and a new, heightened attentiveness to childhood hygiene.

The Dinnertables served up what critics called their Thanksgivingy Dinnertable-of-Rock sound. Buxom peasant-dress olkies like the Big Rock Candy Mountains. The Cottage Fries, the Avocados, "Oo La La!" by the Croissants, the Cherry Tomatoes, the Whistling Teapots (whom Tippy called the Whistling Tampons), the Magic Markers. We heard the Class Rings, the Stolen Kishkas. the O' Potatoes (which may have been the two guitarists’ Celtic and Celiac family name), the Pecanpies, The Crooknecked Squashes, The Birds' Nest Soups. The Cashews, the Pears, the Mandarin Oranges, the Breadsticks, the Jellomolds, the Purées, Pea Green and the Soup, The Bib Lettuce. The Tea Leaves, with their psychedelic Alice-in-Wonderland suits and March Hare haircuts. The

Padlocks, the Pans, the canny Canisters, and those delicate Aprons.

A bad nutrition band called Convert to Fat. The women's favorites, those sweetvoiced and long-in-the-tooth Cheat On My Diets. The Cholesterols. The Cheesecutters' "Rock n' Roquefort" from whence came the musical question "Who Cut the Cheese?"

No, no, I’m not being pedantic. I really want you to know all of this stuff, to better understand us.

So, the Telepathic Toothpicks, the Papers, the File Cards, the Rubber Stamps, the Clockradios and Clockwatchers. The Draperies, the Shelves, the Stairs, the Skylights, the Signpainters, the Housepainters, the Bricklayers, the Upholsterers, the Handkerchiefs.

The Book Marks, the Desk Calendars, the Sidewalks, the Typewriters, the Sunlamps, the Coins, the Slidingdoors, the Bay Windowettes, even the Vases (pronounced "Vahzes" for elegance, like the dowagers harassed by the Chomps Trio; we’ll talk about them soon). How we loved the Carpetcleaners, with coy backup vocals by apprentice laundresses the Launderettes. "Dancing With a Solvent"

by The Cleaning Fluids. The Bedspreads, the Lapdogs, the Toenails, the Fingernails, the Thumbs, the Thumbtaxes' instrumental guitar single "Thumb Attack", the Eyebrows and the Tennis Elbows.

Playing out on the lawn were the Seedlings and the Saplings.

Hammock bands in the sweet, sweet summertime. The Garden Hoses, the Houseflies, and those proud, mortgaged “Householders of Rock”, the Home Gods. The Leaky Faucets, who were actually four drippy brothers named Fawcett.

The Houseplants. The Dishwashers, the Datebooks (later Dadabooks. The Winebottles’ boring album, covering overplayed

standards, Old Wine in New. The Dried-Ons, implying food residue on a badly-scrubbed pot or plate. You'd think we were in the housewares section of the Big Cyrus Merchant Store in the AleppOrchard Mall. You know, just east of town on farmland, it was built about ten years ago. For right beside its boxy beechwoodhogany stereo consoles were the racks of record albums.

Soul hit "A Wifebeater Ain't Nothin' But an Undershirt,” by the author of the R n' B classic "Honky, Hush." The Strike-Anywhere Matches, mouths sprouting high-tar cigarettes. The Do-What-Tolds.

Tripoli and the Dry Heats. The Humidities. The Onioneaters, actually from farm families that grow beets and onions, including the one that sold the land to build the mall we’re shopping in now.

Already I’m scared this tale will scare you away, since I have a tendency to encrust every story with detail, names, personal impressions. You’re OK with that? Terrific.

I do like you, and am so glad you’re listening.

Remember the Snacks doing "You Ate My Hand"? No? Then what about the Preservatives, the Kelvinators, the Spatulas. The Headrests, the Refrigerator Magnets, the Doggie Bags, the Growlights, the TV Antennas, the Dry Martinis, the Scarsdales, the Estate Sales, the Sunlamps, Portia Sohn and the Sun Porches, and (girl singers) the Breezeways. Elegant star-spangled gownulants the Girlaxies, hair piled like planet foam.

The Cupboards, whose album cover showed them holding British teacups. An all-bell band the Clappers, and the Inner Tubes bob-bob-bobbing along. The Tapiocas. The Cake Testers' sexy

"Come Out Moist", in a review of which the polemical poet Charlemagne Mammon, in the People’s Puma Party paper, quipped “Moist as a Cubist Maoist”, which would have been a good song title too. The Meat Nitrites' "Cured!" The Pipecleaners. The Paper Towels, the Wheelbarrows, the Manganese Chord Organs. The Golden DeCaf. The slightly festive, picnicesque sounds of the Styrofoam Cups. They must've had trouble naming a band called the Everyone's Suggestions.

Did I tell you, we used to pick up these little quarter-sheets of paper listing the radio station’s playlist for that week, the Canadian CNUK Skimpy Top She’s Fifteen or WBVR “The Beaver” Top Free, White and Twenty-One. Like, here, I still have a couple in my pocket to show you.

1. Pots Rust" by the Rustspots. I know, this loping dance number was originally performed by the Blackened Teapots.

2."Beet You Red: by the Beets (symbol: a heart-shaped beet).

3. "Needlemania" by Nick Needleman and the Needlemen.

4. “Bust You” by the Brass Knuckleheads.

5. OK, this is where crooner Louis Weekend tries to jump on the Rock n’ Roll bilgewagon, with…

Wait, you don’t want to hear the rest? OK, maybe next time we talk, no problem.

Pop music is gestalt. You either GET IT in a moment's listen or glance, or you don't. Be ready.

Bands are like relaxing cigarettes (heard the Micronaut Filters?), or the smoke's appendage that filtered out any miniaturized

scientists from entering your bloodstream and accumulating in your lungs. Or is that swirling smoke a better metaphor for the music?

As one of the early saints wrote, whoever eats the lamb outside that house is profane.

Christopher Columbus was one of the early Popes, wasn't he?

Before America, all he'd discovered was the Colobus monkey.

Monkey scream, monkey do. Pounding on something, and liking the beat, she and he both stimulated to mate.

So long ago, vocal Dion-osaurs. The Brylcremeocene epoch.

Old streetcorner harmonizers seeking dignity by taking names like the Your Majesties, the His Highnesses. The Snapfingers, whose digitally-precussive shtick soon grew tiring and obvious. Teens dancing the Bananafoot. All you've probably heard was the Lacklusters' cover version. One mainline Protestant denomination financed and promoted a dance called the Frug, choreographed at great expense, to encourage frugality.

It wasn’t just Rock on the radio though. Frank Sin Atrium crooned of all the sad gold left in Las Vengeances' broadswept streets. Strangler, stop not here.

Pretty-sounding bands like the Sanddapplers. Their tribute band from Germany the Sanddoppelgangers. I liked ‘em both.

The Prostaglandins, but at that age, I thought that meant prostitutes.

One dance number for girls asked "Can't you hear those Menstruating Feet?".

A 1964 short-lived rock phenomenon named Bug Insect, an amiable north-country dockworker with his band the Insecticiders, their logo an apple with a worm in it.

From the East Indies, the international phenomenon of the Betelnuts. The amused short-lived US President had to build a communications satellite so his wife and daughter could watch their Christmas concert on the three TV networks. Blame it on the Cold War. That thoughtful Betelnut named Mothersboy, who (after he had a wife who gave him permission to) sang such sad songs of sadness and sadness. The only Red Betelnut, who criticized Christ, and when in Motorsburgh, the right-wing Priest and the TV movie host Nixonson, is now gussied up like a rural Hitler, you wouldn’t recognize him.

Parents read a syndicated and oft-reprinted shocking exposé of teenage dopesmokers in Wetspot, CT called The Long Bong. The writer's son was haunted for life by his father's public indiscretions, perpetually peeved that the newly-enriched author didn't use some money for the son's college fund, or at least good recording equipment for his songs. The father, at speaking engagements, claimed to be the first parent who dishonored the Beatles, grew bolder on the sound of his kid’s Rock LPs being forcefully folded, snapping.

Jingly Christmas anthems from Baby Eugene and the Eugenicists. The Low Birth Weights sang a grim old folk song about letters from a Civil War soldier tied to his beloved’s baby then dropped down a well. Somebody named Baby Activity, too cute for his own good. Pop singer Bobby Tetrahedron (born Bieber Tetragrammaton). Soul singer King Finest, and the smoother Bobby

Slavemarket. Sweater girls the Lay Flat to Dry. Seductive and reassuring pop songs that invariably rhymed “hymen” with “diamond”. Or here is it only her Jewish boyfriend’s name? You can’t always tell by listening.

A choirboy Catholic band named for its lead singer, Psalm Psunday, who practiced in the basement of a Catholic church, where generations of girls have been deflowered in those creaky oak pews.

I don't mean by the priests, but healthily in the Youth Group, the soda-shoppe sodality. Then a funnyname Indian loup-guru, maybe an Incan psiloshaman, I dunno, recorded the dance hit "The Holy Llama-Rama", its mantra what we call a riff, the hook. Hippie druggishes (that is, drug dervishes) like the Psilocybinators and the Psilocybats. The Edible Flowers had a following, but more hippies listened to the Pothouse Flowers.

A predecessor to Aldebbie's Fop Rock of today might be dandyish Johnny Tomorrowclothes, in a different suit, shirt, tie, socks and pocket square for each verse of each song. Motorsburgh was smitten by the fauxristocrat Lord Car a full decade before Aldebbie, who stepped waving off the Jumbo Jet, all sardonic, supersonic and smiles. Lord Crap, if you ask me.

After a couple catchy hits, pro wrestler-turned-rock screamer Lord Lovin' soon found religion, recorded only drab Gospel records.

The Guinea twins ("Pronounced ghee-nay, motherfucker!") were two slim handsome talented black kids, grandsons of the trainer of Motorsburgh's great slippery black pro wrestler of the 1930s. Their suave and harmonic crooning of a snapfinger shipboard romantic ditty was a big local hit in the early 1960s too. Their later band was

psychedelic, funky swirling guitars, densely expansive as their frizzy hair and sideburns. They were such ladies men, they were jokingly called the Guineacologists.

The Smoothulations. Ronny Domicile, reassuring Neapolitan crooner from Back East City streetcorners, marketed as Teenage Music for Parents. Girls singing tight little pajamas music.

And that white vocal quartet dressed like colored girls, called the Arethacrats.

Repetitous? No, these are all very, very important.

The Clothes appeared about the same time as the Clean Sox (or wait, was that a racquetball team?), the Labels, the Suits, the Buttonholers. Of course there were squabbles offstage between the Play Clothes and the School Clothes.

Vocal quartet the Four Wads. Bevelcreamed haircuts, Benevolent haircuts. Californisurf and Britisch.

Oh man, I mean pretty girl, I could go on and on. Music, its look and feel, was so important to us growing puberties.

The Creases, a song called "I Sold Your Short Shorts" by the Shirttails and a band in suburban white slacks the Grass Stains.

"The Puttering Soul" by the Potting Soyl. The Panama Hats, the Engagement Rings, the Sleeves, the Brogans, the Moccasins. A duo called Keys and Wallet. Songs on the radio by the Rent Receipts, the Unfurnished Apartments, even apartment dwellers the Mail Box Keys. the Jacuzzis, Mantlepieces, Paperweights and the Parapets.

Downstairs or in the garage you found the Hacksaws, the Tackhammers, the License Plates, the Flashlights, the Toggle

Switches, the Ratchet Wrenches, the Awls and the Plywoods' splintery sound from their plywood amps. The Smoke Detectors, Burglar Alarms and that we're still humming. "Into the Wall" by the Murphy Beds. The Bedsides' "Bedside Manor" which Dr. Wagon says a lot of General Practitioners liked to hum. You don’t know Dr. Frank Wagon? I’m getting ahead of myself here.

You really need to know a lot of bands to understand rock history, and our special place in it. Don’t worry, I know all about this stuff, and will help you make sense of it, organize it in your mind. I’ll return to important bands, because that’s what I do.

We’re almost done with this era, at least the stuff we heard and dug. The Sockbreakers, who later grew up to be the Stockbrokers, when they put away childish things, and outgrown clothes. Chirpy, somewhat flighty vocal groups like the Crestfallens, matching birdcolored blazers, long sticky hair combed back and up to a point like a cardinal, blue jay, waxwing or kingfisher's head feathers.

Some of those bands on TV were British bottle-rockets, speeding, sizzling, skidding across the variety-show or teen music showcase stage.

An aging colored men’s vocal group reinvented themselves as the YokoOnotones, soon to be recorded on the Motorbourgeoisie Records label founded, by underpaid factory workers and housing project kids, to appear as bourgeois as possible.

A soulful singer from down south named James Band.

His arch-rival the Motorbougeois soul singer Impeccable Lawn, spanning and encircling his beloved with love and warmth. Somehow I imagined him on a riding mower, crossing an expanse of green to

be by her side.

Another local soul singer on the Viscount Records label, saw his song recorded, mastered and cut on a lathe in the back of the store. I remember in our first grade class his little sister had insisted the grooves were cut with a switchblade. Maybe for her to say that meant she liked me.

I think so much about rock bands because they're a safe number, small enough for solidarity (which others, I'm told, used to find in the family) while big enough to prevent intimacy and intrusion.

Maybe I'll find one, I thought as a boy. And I did.

Influences, yeah. But even more than those first early bands, in the early nineteen-pretties when we were little kids, we were also heavily, heavily influenced by television. Square-shouldered, laughat-the-long-hair Sligo Sundaynight Show, whenever they deigned to have a cool band on “for the kids”. Old faughpaughs, ptui.

Movies, yeah! And Motorsburgh television, the local stuff, the best kind, early morning, late afternoon, weekend daytimes. Drilling into our brainsies even more than the horrible parental laugh-track skitchcoms of the evenings.

Your family watches them, together? No offense.

Look, to really understand us I'll have to tell you all about our place and time, 1970. Which is probably impossible for you to understand, even if you’re from Aleppo, unless you’re our age and sensibility. You're too much younger. Like every smart girl, you must learn from older boys, all that's important. What I'm about to tell you are the facts of life, baby.

Now, it wasn’t just the bands of the time that shaped our sensibilities. There was one other big important bellowing visual voice in the home, and grainy black and white. From September to summer our demographic would watch TV. I’m not considering you part of it, dear, because I just kind of figure our micro-generation ended with Tippy’s demise. Oh wait, you were alive then, scratch that. You younger kids are a whole ‘nother thing. Fetching though, mmm… Sorry. Tippy was home sick a lot as a little kid, so he logged in many, many more hours than the rest of us. disciplining and diminishing the parental influence and power grab. One influence that was, for most of our childhoods and teenage nubility, flickering Tippy was even named, to some degree, after Tim of Athens, popular sitcom about a baby detective who does hardboiled cute things. His real name was something like Tim Outofthequestionberg, I don’t really remember. Though television had been invented over a hundred years before (that's not true) Tippy’s parents had one of those big new televisions called a Deepeningvision II whose station numbers set and re-set themselves in order of the show's national popularity. TV was where families attempted to come together, bound by the cathode-light tether, while it created the illusion of people with something in common, a nightly holiday excuse. Of all the body functions, people didn't sleep much in that tumultuous decade, even in the suburbs. TV is a piano where every key's the same. TV was the prattle of tiny lips. Cold flowers around the house from the vase being set upon freon-filled TVs. People let the TV cooly burn all night, serving as an ersatz bug-zapping light, until they

confusedly found themselves at dawn learning something about electronics or food production, food pollution or even television production if they started regularly watching the test pattern for Art Appreciation credit. Sign Off is where people learn to recognize the National Anthem so they can stand for it at ballgames in wartime, written to be so difficult no enemy could sing it. Basement or garage lights on, husbands puttered in home workshops with the same restless energy their older kids would put into sex, often clumsily slicing several knuckles, severing fingers or blowing holes in the ceiling. Wives dawn-dusted, re-read magazines, chainsmoked.

First we were subjected to children’s television, which taught us surrealism if nothing else. Saturday morning TV show with an old witch called The Children's Cauldron, with unpleasant cautionary lessons for bad children. Don't put me in there! We watched Milquetoat, children’s television clown and comedian, a Negro in whiteface who spoke only in whimpers and chirps. TV LOOKAT magazine, which came with a Motorsburgh Sunday paper Mom used to bring home Mondays, reported he’d converted to Judaism to marry the Producer’s daughter, and had lost one eye tragically to a thrown pie. His sons all became Rock musicians too. Children’s show Poop the Clown, whom I don’t think, beneath that greasepaint, was even really a Negro. I agreed with the colored kids in my grade school, never found these fools particularly amusing.

Monkeys are imperfectly formed youth, the retard kids left behind in the back of the class. A show where babies play chimpanzee roles. Human babies, fur eyebrows painted on them,

that's really cheap. Be sure to catch the new TV series about babies driving cars. Children's holiday special The War Between the Shoes and the Socks.

When the Motorsburgh station began in 1950 they thought it would be cute to have black children made up as amusing monkeys, little tails attached. After family and diocese protests, they realized it was also cheaper to use real chimps, so several show's casts were entirely simian. Then someone got the idea of casting those cute-asa-button colored children as silent whiteface clowns, something that many Moms thought adorable, but I could never see the point in that.

The TV show Chimney Chimp, a chain-smoking simian chimney sweep, supposed to be set in London but with an amusing talking-country-swing theme song. Old vaudevillian song-and-dance man Money Waters played the chimp, a tragedy, really, since he made notable contributions to jazz in the 1920s.

One of Tippy's favorite shows for one season was "The Chimpanzees", where a Rock n' Roll band that doesn't really sing, play instruments or look very good for that matter becomes immensely successful; get it? Another TV series with chimps playing instruments, but this time they're really a profitable band.

The juvenile sitcom "The Ferrets", nasty chattering longrodents, dressed up to look like an adventurous rock band. Still, it had some good songwriting, and ComeTogether had written about the seasoned L.A. session musicians who were really on the songs, backing up the voice actors. Later Promoter Bobby Gauche wanted to send Tippy out, fronting the same session men, as the New Chomps. Tippy said ixnay, no dice. Ah, sweet comedy of life.

One series with a kid who had a pet octopus always getting him out of a life-threatening jam: "Run, Octi, save Susy then go get Dad's saw from the barn! Hurry!" Cartoons were hosted by the old cowboy movin' star Checks Written, from the Checks n' Balances (his horse) serials. He'd still pick up a guitar to croon a local commercial. His frequent guest and harmonizer was the trim, Jewish and urban Clovis the Hatter, who wasn't exactly country-western but the brim-trimming (fedora into porkpie) hat shop was the sponsor, so it was okay.

A disgraced former football coach hosted backwoodsy cartoons on local Saturday morning TV, and Tippy strongly identified with the character Pontiac Nick Huron, the flying Indian allegedly from upper Michigan; he ran to plop in front of the set at the first beat of the theme song’s tom-tom. For Saturday morning was where the cartoons lived, swarmed out of their nest. Diminuitive names for a lilttle frog and a little bird were Cloaquito, Cloaquil, like two Ecuadorian cities. Children would leap up at 6:00 a.m. each morning to watch cartoon adventurer Buck Yaweh where only the lips would move as Buck and his dog Beige hiked through the high weeds of the swamp. Later a fly gets into the canned chives of this slipeyed sailor called Positron Bo'sun and starts throwing pianos at him, so the nautical wag puts diapers on endive and okra plants in the garden, and nipples on plantfood bottles, has a punchout with a squid, Don Peretzo the Pirate, and squad of crab policemen. Cysteye the Sailor, peering through his pinkeye'd periscope, his Tourette's Syndrome tittering, snarling rude or vulgar nonsequitors, the okralike marijuana a prescribed cure. One episode was called "Fuck Off Bees, You'll Ruin My Picnic", the navigator resolving at the end to never come

ashore again. Tippy supposedly had one of Positron's shits dried up under the furnace in his basement, but damned if I'd look.

Cartoon character Elmer Element. Muchacho Moth, with the silhouettes of different U. S. states--they'd send you something if you could identify all of them--tattooed on his wings. Cartoon Mucous Mouse, always slipping out of that ol' tomcat's grip. The cartoon The Man in the Stars, featuring the moon's crescent face, sponsored by the Satanic Soap Company that used it as its logo. Personifications of the earth like Michigan's mitten or Italy's boot. What's more on Saturday morning they had cartoon EVERYTHING: bear, duck, horse, dog, intoxicated rabbit, stinkburro, lion, water buffalo, monitor lizard, cattle, aphid, axolototl, aardvark and aardwolf, hyena, hymen, more cattle, several species of small edible snakes, canaries, cat, mouse, cannibis, fish, octopus, bee, penguin, papyrus, whales, frog, basilisk, panda, woodpecker, astronaut and amoeba. Cheap stations played offshore oriental cartoons, like the one about the kid with a bicycle disguised as a lawnmower, that looked like the faded, folded pages of an early twentieth-century art magazine. Prime-time TV cartoon "Dishwater Dog", pale personality-less and surprisingly popular among the mild. Whenever the band watched cartoons later on, Thump was always angry when Slipeye Sailor punched out the character with whom Thump most identified, Slipey's big burly adversary Thanatoadus (sometimes called Brontocephalus), which was always. So Thump was always angry.

Am I going on to long about TV?

Now this is really somethin', these television characters are my true friends thought Tippy who'd jump up, practically pee running into the kitchen. There he'd grab a Dennis the Menacefood snack, a piece of beggarsfood cake with lingamberry jam, sniffleburgers with a slice of processed mastodon or bowl of charcoal ice cream. Mom would always shop at the Beggarspride Grocery store. Mothers dispensed so many locally packaged breakfast cereals that it was called "Nutrichigan". Food in packages that cleverly say Return for Serving Suggestions. While watching all day he'd nibble handfuls of Buffalo Chips ("The Junk Food that Won the West") or munch Cohen Corn, a new kind of popcorn that imploded in your mouth like a broken picture tube, invented by a TV station's former technical director.

Ads during children's shows that warned us not to pick up blasting caps at construction sites, which kids evidently frequented.

Or to let a glass smash in the bathroom, terrifying us into trusting only plastic. The TV prattled on advertising the cologne for men who dig up graves, Robbers Oak, the resurrectionist in sunglasses and a girl beside him, made up to look English. Ads for a long-established fabric softener whose cable address is FabSoft. Mr. Cleansheets' freecoffeeifIcan'tbeatyourbestdeal sincerity. A bakery or a muffin or small dog called Whelpingers'. Then a pudding made to look like melted plastic, to appeal to kids.

Mother always made a point of buying the household food containing Nutritionol, but little kids were not big consumer advocates in those days. Cartoon characters too cool to eat breakfast saying Eat Mega-Crisp, "the cereal that's burned to a frazzle", burned dark and

carmelized, actually just sugared charcoal briquettes. Prisoner of the sugar cyclops. When they said Go right down to the store and buy Petit Merde Wheat Energy, he must've been watching the Canadian station. Forbidden Pack'd for Freshness, moving and stuffing real fast in order to plunk himself back on the rug on elbows in front of the TV in time for more commercials. The glass boy staring inbetween the loudpicture tube. No way could you separate what you eat with what you watch all day. Ads that began Attention People Who Weep!

An ad he saw in a comic book Hypnotize Women in Miniskirts with Any TV. Commercials for toys that cry when broken. Toys that pray for you. Toys make the child, but I don't seem to be talking about toys.

You like the commercials? I don’t know if I’d consider advertising a career you’d really want to go into. But hey, I can't tell you how much television to watch, or not.

Parents claimed they wanted kids to watch serious TV, and in Aleppo there was some that the University locally produced and broadcast. The Sunday afternoon TV painting shows with the University Art Professor Geza Punchinello, rumored to be a defrocked priest who had seduced his model at a Catholic college to great approbium. Founder of the Aleppo Snuff Film Festival when he taught at the University, he kept a skull on the set beside his pallet and easel, and signed off with “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis”.

Science shows televised from U.F.O.'s were often hosted by the first guy to see a flying saucer, frequent guest stars included Orthon, Firkon, Mrs. Mysterio, and the outrageous Mystic Barber who

cut the aliens' hair to prove something. Professor Hunhnyuknyuk (1910-1986) codified Cloying Encounters of All Three Kinds, the first being mere swamp-gas flatulence, tsk-tskedly proposed to his guests, Please, kindly try to replace Flying Saucers with the term Unidentified Flying Object. Somehow this all relates to the unidentified sex Tippy would come to love.

But groanups hypocritically spent their time with morning game shows like “Zit or Spider Bite?” where contestants would examine red marks on pretty models' legs. On a TV game show, they interviewed the fat man who ate the ZydeCo blimp, and several Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons before that. What a way to make a living, or name for oneself. The series "Who's Who", where they read a list of very famous names from the book, was a precursor to the talk show format. By this time Superman had retired into a talk show called "Kryptonite Tonight". Each Beatle had a TV series, each worse than the next. A medical and pharmacological advice show hosted by the doctor who killed Elvis. Afternoon soap operas like Two Day Heart or All Day Affair. A TV show where these boyish guys compete to make a girl cry. A TV show of ice melting. A TV show of fire every week, for which they’d have to torch a new building.

A game show hosted by a defrocked priest where the winners (usually women) get to talk to God. Game show "Touch a Turtle".

Documentaries, presumably educational, of dogs shitting in the desert, of dogs playing dead, of dogs shooting other wilder dogs in a gameshow called "Dog Eat Dog". Hello, I'm Thomas Jefferson, we’re here off the Barbary Coast, and it's time to play Buccaneer Cash! A junk food quiz show called "Name Your Poison". Quiz show "What's

my Baccalaureate?" asking trivial questions whose answers were buried in the ennui of history. Shows about people stuck in gelatin.

A show "Open Woman", where prominent men from show biz, the business community, journalism, science, the arts and letters meet and talk while taking turns on a well-known actress (she'd always have just had her hair done). Oh, she was a full participant and Executive Producer, seducing slightly embarassed football players or first-book authors who were under the unfair e.s.p. control of her low-cut gown. There was always a clamor to have it scheduled after hours but the network shrugged, but that would be too much trouble. Immediately followed by one of those commercials from the 1950's that implied those housewives gave themselves abortions with a vacuum cleaner hose as soon as they'd dust their livingroom drapes that way. Or at least used Stopdust spray as a contraceptive.

On those cheery TV dating shows, substantial fines were levvy'd on the female contestants—sometimes equivalent of an entire year's salary of a secretary, nurse or stewardess—if they failed to have sex with the winner. Sometimes the guys even complained to waiting gossip columnists the morning after, if the sex wasn't very good.

I admit, TV for me at certain age was terrorvision. I never knew what I'd find on the dial, was scared to leave it on for a show I didn't know about. I was relieved to find one show with a scary name (I mean, who is this guy?) proved to be a gentle comedy with a talking zebra. My father was deaf, his ears blown out in a wartime plane crash, so the TV on was always too loud.

People sure get funny ideas. For all their grumbling about educational and serious television, parents loved situation comedies.

For a while we saw reruns of a 1950s comedy about a jazzy combo called the Swizzle Sticks, skinny gys with horizontal bow ties, crewcuts, saxophones; crazy, man! An all-Negro TV comedy special about the Kennedy assassination was so popular it was later a series, accelerating the career of several accidental Negro comedians.

TV gave you a sixth sense of humor. The form of philosophical discourse most subtly developed in that era was the TV situation comedy. Historians will call the the Age of the Sitcom, and one aged TV sitcom had a joke about an eccentric uncle giving favorite family members a gift of a statue of Coral with a clock in her clitoris. A twist on the old clock-in-the-cloaca punch line. Old women flying on broomsticks, hags and crones really (but once-glamourous actresses), throwing fresh-baked pies full of blackbirds at each other, and they called that Saturday morning kids' show "Grandma's Kitchen". The heartwarming comedy "This Island Hearth", with an unstoppable idiot-chimp. All those TV sitcom series with chimps, or as specail guests on a variety talk shows, where the beasts muscled off the actresses and had to be put down with tranquilizer darts, or as the Hollywood press called it "slept with their co-stars." There was never a situation comedy or a rock song about World War One, therefore it never existed.

Kids quickly tired of their parents' favorite old sitcom "The Romance of the Roses", with its warmhearted humor about life's little vexations, human foibles n' shit. Old parents stayed home on weekends watching the homey TV show called "Tureen Time" where

each week guests sat around a lunch of soup, same guests, different soup. Sitcoms full of airline pilots who rudely insult stewardesses, hollering "Hey, baggage-breath". A series about a little boy who becomes a travel agent. Friendly unassuming comedians from peaceful decades like the Man--practically the Nun, the way showbiz oldtimers would pay their respects--Who Said Duhhh... Tippy laughed, imagining a Special starring all the comedians on TV who could insultingly piss into the audience and make it dribble out the bottom of the set. Jerry Girlfriend and Jerry Satan were supposedly working on that shtick. Old TV comedians like Fatty Ourpeople, sqeaking out speeches in overpurple prose. Watched the Saint Lucy Show, where she'd come out each week all grinning with her eyes rolling loony every-whichway and that on a plain Fliestaware dinnerplate she carried as the audience applauded. In the '50's wifebeating was held in such respect the national comedian intoned every week how, one of these days, his punches would put his wife on the moon for America. The comedy of two male elks who, buting their heads together over a female, lock horns and can't disengage. A chorale of all the TV cowboys who married their horses. The rival network's comedy series about a top New York model in love with (and later, secretly married to) her big dog had lots of shots of her in fabulous clothes walking him through the park, looking for a trysting spot. The long-running series "The Buffs" was about the adventures of a downhome family of nudists, who later spun off a series of nude specials on that network and the popular song "Nothin' to Hide".

There were sitcoms about impotence, sitcoms about fraud and slander, sitcoms about nepotism. A heartfelt series "Hernando the

Fierce" was about a perplexed young monk who couldn't stop thinking about girls, was set in suburban sixteenth-century Spain, with award-winning Gregorian chants and canned laugh track, A Telebishop Production. Another favorite was a racy comedy about Hell called "You Know Where", everybody in these crazy horns. Jes' like ol' Christ's sentimental and folksy show from a parish down south, where he always appeared in a rocking chair at the beginning before He arose.

On Sligo Sundaynight Show, hosted by a dour retired baseball manager who now ran a fine weekly variety circus, young viewers groaned through the Borschtbreadnbutter comedy team of Meatz and Milck in order to see hipper musical acts. Followed by that transparent-tights family of trapeze artists the Pudendas. The Vietnam War made us learn how to pronounce Nguyen as "Noo-yen", not "Na-Goo-Yen". Though too many nights Sligo’s idea of music was Piddlers Three, a vocal group of urinary three-year-olds too cute for words, a teen pop band like the Benevolents might be followed by the old vaudeville comedienne Lotta Blotto. Pop TV gingersingers, matching smiles blazers turtleneck skirts. The Old Hot Tubs, sort of an oompah band, obviously one of “Slugger” Sligo's sentimental favorites, seemed to be on the show every few months. He'd then call eye-rollling clarinetist Ralph Ceramic over for a laugh or two. But later that evening, Sligo featured America’s (certainly his) favorite trio of exotic downriver Negresses, the Supreme Courtesans, one wan and big eyed, one pillowy and sleepy, one svelte and smart-eyed, a vocal group whose very name was interpreted to mean Women On Top When Lovemaking. The top girl trio from Motorsbourgeois

Records on the TV show, three eye-catching duskmelon maidens called (for publicity purposes) Nigeria, Namibia and Nicaragua, though they were all from the projects on the east side and really had Baptist given names. The old coffin-faced Irishman hosting the Sunday evening cavalcade obviously liked them, all huggy and effusive after their song, getting their mascara and makeup all over the shoulder and front of his grim, gray suit. He genuinely liked all those vibrant colored acts on Motorsburgeois Records, whose motto "Young, Middle-Class, Mid-West!" was a demographic that Sundaynight’s advertisers certainly wanted to reach. Sportswear teens dressed for a country club golf course that would not admit them. Evening gowns for bookings at that well-feathered supper club the Peacock's Nest.

Yet there was also a TV show on Sunday nights called "Lost Weekend" that runs through all the things homeowners should've accomplished before Monday rolls around. You'd have fathers outside guiltily, grumpily cutting the lawn afterwards, in the middle of the midwest Winter. There’s too much guilt in the world. Once real strong and mad Tippy's Dad even angrily lobbed a portable TV at a neighbor kid, poking his eye out with the antenna. Or wait, maybe that was our dad. Or my brother. There were some streets where the kids remembered the awful blood mess and stitches, and teased Tippy about it. That used to get his Billygoats' Gruff up, which happened to also be the name of a popular series, with that loveable old character actor from the movies as the troll.

Tippy picks his nose and leans into the icegrey aquarium-ofstars light, sometimes with the sound off for science. Sitting in the metal house, eyes glued thataway. Distractavision.

I too was thinking about TV. Chomps trio in morning before school for gradeschoolers, then Mrs. Roosevelt (they just called her that, it wasn't Eleanor but a discarded mistress) showed women's pictures. Then Noontime News, then Afternoon Babylon, earlier called Billionaire Box Office Movie Show. That was the day, in those days.

As I said, since they couldn't seem to invent shows fast enough, strange old movies populated the airwaves. Tippy saw all these movies because he was home sick, sick on top, with eye, ear, nose and throat infections, infarctions, minor infractions. Coral saw them because she liked to skip school, stay at home eating bonbons with mom and grandma. Me, stuck in school, missed ‘em, ecch.

Out in the hormonal teenage country, drive-ins were blazing with color and imagery. "Painful Dr. Phlebitis" (the movie came out when the dour President so badly suffered it), "Irradiated Insect Desert", "The Berserk Dead Picnic" and "Horror Co-Ed Skinnydip Party at Leechbucket Pond", all deliciously deadly and gigantic in their projection. Falling asleep during "The Wolfman was a Woman", I woke up at doomed bad-girl Brandi’s line "Let's get out of our shirts, so our boyfriends will listen to us." One that was only last summer second-billed at the teen drive-in, was "I Dated a Cheeseburger".

The TV never played the kinds of movies the drive-ins did, like "Girlfight at Marquis de Sade High School" or "Psychotic

Psychiatrist", snarlingly insane and knife-wielding in the poster.

Traditional girls lost their virginity, or conceived the children that would make them drop out of school, beneath the flickering screen of these movies. I guess some day I'll eventually end up with a picturetube-pale girl friend with stay-at-home eyes.

Tippy distrusted zombie movies, "They're really about fear of Negroes, y'know," and he had none, so watched not a one. But even more so, fear of the familiar, the family. "They're just an excuse to kill your parents," I thought to myself. No wonder they pack a drive-in, make kids skip school when scheduled on daytime movies TV. Like all the kids that you kill on TV. To have a US President’s son or brother was the goal of any local station. For a while on the other station there was a rival movie presenter, Joe Provident Presiddent, for he may have been fathered

by Woodrow Wilson in France (though sick, maybe not fucking) or Teddy Roosevelt with a bully bullet in him on the Bull Moose podium, McKinley shot by angry brother of that Czolgosz girl (Emma Goldman arranged her abortion) to get that way?

The afternoon movie where a young woman risks her life in World War Two or the Third Reich to have an orgasm. And the thrilling movie "Flight of the Swastika" and the sweeping overture from it I've pretty much figured out on guitar. Oh wait, I didn't see that on TV, but at the Aleppo Snuff Film Festival last year; sponsored by the University's German class. The 1940s movie "Murder is My Best Friend" (retitled "Murder is My Best Girl"). Creaky afternoon movies like "Evil Massage" (remade for the Snuff Film Festival) and "Gorilla in a Dressing Gown"—the movie ends with the gorilla playing

classical music on a grand piano. Detective movie with psychological underpinnings, like “The Big Teat”. In "Babes in the Navy" I could tell even then that there was something unhealthy about grade-schoolers playing strippers and topless Gauguin-girls even then. "Showgirl" was always a euphemism in these things. Big, buxom-screen'd movies originally in spydiferous Blondivision, now compressed to a crackling phosphor tube's black and white.

Wait, we’re talking about the afternoon movies before the Chomps Trio, shown by Lafcadio “Beau” Nixonson, war hero then Hollywood actor? He was briefly a jazz singer with Mussolini's son on piano, a Selassie kid on drums. He dated every starlet who became someone's neighbor on every TV sitcom.

So he wouldn’t interrupt or distract from his dad’s political career, the dapper and avuncular TV movie host took the name Nixonson, and was quite a character. He had a bit part in the warand-drunkeness charade "Woozy Victory", playing a friend of California Governor Thrice Blessed, then a movie actor. Played the armless, legless American pilot cruelly kept alive as a mascot by the Nazi rocket program. He was one of the bar patrons in "Malingerers in Lingerie", wartime comedians putting on lacy things to escape combat. Old movies like the all-donnybrook "Fight Every Kid Till I Win", with a popular big city back-alley troupe of pugnacious young scrappers. After explaining how he'd actually met the starlet on the Gompers-Golem Pictures lot—“Anton, my assistant, have we got a picture of her? Ahh...”

His twin brother—Aloysius X. Nixonson—came on to explain that this afternoon's double feature, "Cowboy Singers vs. the Nazis"

and "I Married a Bison", Nixonson had gone through two big tumblers of golden brown libation by the end of the show. In case the retired Camelot ex-President ever tuned to a Motorsburgh station, his presence would be a threatening snub..

Nixonson was somehow the son of JFK and Nixon, of some sort of autclave cloven DNA experiment using the preserved eggs of their actress in southern California, by one or more South African or Texan heart transplant doctor. He was the odd man out, the ugly duckling, adopted into the Hyannisport compound but like the Spanish court dwarves in the grand old paintings. So he became the entertainer, the actor, the hail-fellow-well met smiling masked man.

Somebody said he was the one of JFK's brothers—the one who cheated on exams, drove off a bridge with his dead girlfriend—but that was Democratic Party hearsay. So merrily he hosted the afternoon picture show, full of wartime old tearjerkers like "Seeds of the Son", “The Lonelybreakers” or "Babies in the Navy", "This is your crucifix speaking" said a pilot battling a squadron of flying crosses.

These were all patriotic; you’d have to go to campus to see Vietnam War porn like "The Caisson of Passion" and—I don't even want to see—"The Human Foxhole".

Titillating 1950s quickies like "Nude in a Swimsuit". Was "How to Cook a Diamond" a sexy farce or a daytime kitchen recipe show?

"Laugh, Hyena, Laugh", a Hollywood remake of either a German girlfriend-and-golem circus tragedy or a grim Italian cowboy movie, I forget which. Nixonson jovially told us "The western 'A Man Called Cunt' starred Bob Wide-o-the-Mark, a fine, fine actor. I almost shared a coffee with him at Jethro-Murgatroid-Jeter Studios' lunchroom, I

stood in the cafeteria line with him, only a few persons back, I did.

Anton, do we have a picture of Bob? Ahh, there, nice. He also appeared in 'Christ on the 6:19' and 'The Big Blue Steak', which we'll be showing later this month." He had Kennedy panache, insouciance, nonchalance, but grafted upon Nixon’s dour decorum, reserve and fortitude. He was the anticipation, dynamism and tension of the 1960 debate every weekday afternoon! He would wax poetic on forgotten, convoluted B-westerns like "Tutenkhamen Came to Tucumcari", wondering why they hadn't been hits, weren't critically acclaimed and studied by cineastes in the University today. Afternoon movie star Johnny Sympatico was often in medical buddy pictures like "Starvecold and Feedfever". There was always heroism and wartime on Nixonson's show, the 1950s suspense movie "Bank Heist Priest", and the thriller about a vengeful, hundred-year-old ex-slave called "Swamp Negro." And what the avuncular host called the scariest movie of 1944, "The Bat Whisperer".

There were women's movies and romances like "The Rose Witness" and "The Silk Code" on Suzi Schoolgirl's Morning Coffee Chimera. "Oh My" began with a guy in 1900 who tossed his cigar butt from a roof and caught a woman's hair on fire. I call it women's enema. Perennial heartwarming Christmas movie “Kitten in the Mail”.

Movies with former vaudeville and silent movie stars like Tights Bodystocking, once joy of man’s desiring, now cast as crones.

Nixonson showed the dated rocketship drama "Trajectory of an Unmanned Woman" and, the very next day, the costumed romance "Columbus Discovers Woman". White bubbles in each actresses’ silk stockings.

The Motorsburgh Monitor’s weekly TV Guise n’ Guile magazine listed Friday, The Beau Nixonson Movie: Hollywood Prison’ (1946): A pert and feisty actress, who founded a movie studio with two partners, finds herself imprisoned on trumped-up charges when her partners sell her share to a corrupt arms dealer. A junkie starlet helps her break free, take revenge.

“Now let’s hear from Freshmeister Home Appliances”, Nixonson intoned, and there followed some canned blowsy housewifed assurances from Betti Fullness, with the sponsoring local vendor’s address amateurishly tacked on at the end.

I hadn’t thought of this until telling you all this now, but in a certain sense Beau Nixonson was the greatest educator, the prinicipal school Principal, for every kid within fifty broadcast-are miles from Motorsburgh. He was our true Dad. Sure, there were other movies shown on TV too, sometimes newly made for a slot in the prime time evening. One TV movie was about scientists—a meteorologist yachtsman, statistician and gambling mathematicians, etc.—who get together to make money nefarioulsy. A movie about Santa Claus called "Clumsy in the Chimney", a stringy lot of double-entendres about sex and entry like the December issue of a men's magazine. One funny made-for-TV movie (pilot for a sitcom) was about a baby girl who was born with a full, beautiful forty-inch bust. A series about a newlywed couple moving a table across town called "One Leg at a Time", which Tippy thought was going to be about how President Kennedy was said to put his pants on after being with a girl.

Kids especially dug movies about monsters, filmed in Depravovision, the beasts actually just radios with masks and a flying Noah's Ark who wanted to possess the Earth out of a sense of beauty. Old 1950s terrors like "Carnival of Dismemberment" and "My Parents' Beheading" or psychological sequel "My Parents' Beheading (of Me)". Old lasers, barely shooting off, like spent flashlights. Later shlocky low-budgetto horror movies "Ghouls on the Pill", ""Miniskirt Graverobbers" and "The Bardot Robot" and "Monster Mouth of Monmouth". Late nite TV horror movie hostess DeNuda would sometimes laughingly flash a tit then cut to a commercial. Afternoon horroresque movies like "Earth vs. the Wife" and "Barkula, Dingo Dog of Darkness". A weekly vampire show with one bald character with red lips, a wisecracking shrunken head, punctured spiderwebs, white roses, tears and conceivably sperm tadpoles coming out of a patsy's neck. The local station tried a serious show of interviews with exvampires, now in useful occupations, but the series bombed and the vamps kept going back to blood. That insufferable series of Giant Gila Monster movies: “Giant Gila Monster Gives You the Willies”, then Giant Gila Monster in free-love Sweden, Giant Gila Monster at the bikini-twistin' beach, GGM at the North Pole, GGM in a Vegas casino, GGM on a supersonic transatlantic jet, in a Moon rocket, and one buddy picture that paired the reptile with tired 1940s comedians in a last romp (the contemporary, sexier remakes "Girl on a Gila Monster", and sequel "Girl or Gila?", never made it to his show, but were screened on campus). The drive-in buttboiler "Terror in the Terrarium" was actually filmed at the University Museum, using its recalcitrant gila monster, delight. Nixonson might have arranged that,

pulled some strings, called in some favors.

We watched Greek horror films like "The Os of the Ontos".

Something shot Up North called "Rape on the Rapids”, horrifying film clips of real life. Cheap afternoon horror movies, always set on nameless Caribbean islands, like "The Mongoose People", "Queen of the Gecko Slaves". Chopper and laborious carving-knife movies like "In the Thick of the Neck". Tippy's favorite movie monster was Gonado, who had huge lust imbedded in his tusks; the special effects department had tried giving him huge balls but that proved too expensive. Consequently, a late-night weekend horror movie host that stoners and teenagers like took that name.

By this time, if ya can believe it, weird old President Nixon was considered kinda hip, sock-it-to-me “with it” by ad agencies and TV networks, “The New Nixon” and all that. As a result, his seven sons quickly capitalized on their celebrity, sitting on corporate boards, radio and TV pitchmen (for phlebitis nostrums) or sports announcers, one even brewing watery beer.

Watching The Beau Nixonson Movie show, one soon realized he was President Kennedy's older, sophisticated brother, the one their tycoon father wanted to be President but went to Hollywood instead, where he caused so much scandal he slunk back to Motorsburgh to host afternoon movies. Nixonson was surprisingly dapper, with the verve and panache his father sadly lacked. A bon vivant and charming twinkle-eyed roué, he had rakishly played confidence men and slippery rogues in the churn of small-studio backlot B-/C+ pictures that weekly filled small town movie houses a

generation ago. He implied, with the standards of family-friendly daytime TV, he'd been banished from Hollywood and Vegas for performing Marilyngus on the Presidential brothers' girlfriend, on that grassy knoll or another one. Nixonson was the one supposed to be the first Catholic President, under the immense pressure of their father, but when his plane blew up in England said Fuck That, pretended he was dead, swam (or, according to his archenemy Nixon, hitched a U-boat) to Hollywood to appear in a few B-/C+ movies. He dined out on, and milked (but never dined on milk, if you know what I mean, guzzling gesture) those two and a half years for a twenty-five year career on Motorsburgh television. Nice work if you can get it. What a guy.

"Return to Caviar Island", everyone in ascots, white flannel, bougainvilleas and palm trees, was very un-Michigan. Cocktails at noon between tennis matches and suggestive, eyebrows-up assignations. These were obviously projected to teach us how to behave if we struck it rich, became auto executives at play. The distinguished afternoon movie host claimed he had a walk on, one of the hero's friends or frat brothers in the wedding toast scene, but it was edited out of this version for commercial breaks. When he'd talk about cocktails with impressivesses staying at the Hotel Marmoset, busy bawdy days in Spendtrhiftwood, CA, center of the movie industry, Michigan dream-eyed children knew they wanted a piece of that pie. He gushed dramatically how he loved the scene in the 1930s movie about the casino where, at the roulette wheel or card table, she absentmindedly stroked or scratched her nipple beneath her satin gown with the tip of her long cigarette holder.

“I loved that part too!” exclaimed Coral when we talked about it.

And she and I agreed that we couldn’t stand Tartara Toothpaste's early-morning Godzillion Dollar Movie, love stories for the forlorn housewife-mom.

For a while a rival TV station had the dessicated corpse of a bystander shot during the riots, reanimated by puppeteers as a grisly black marionette, jaw clacking with a ventriloquist's words. The station bragged that he was the first Afro-American movie host in Motorsburgh, and though teenage stoners guffawed through clouds of irony, those people certainly didn't buy it.

My mother was of the generation that wanted life to be like a lush Hollywood movie. Consequently, she still sentimentally thought them educational, so plunked me down in front of the television for them when I was home sick from school. Which was, sometimes, most of the time.

Sure, Tippy appeared the sick boy hacking, choking, spitting onstage. But he attended school regularly (when he did), while I was the one sulking in the bedclothes. No, not really, I was at school too, dressed normal. Oh man, I almost envy him, home sick watching all these great and not-so-great movies on TV. I barely remembered the Carribean ackee western "Hold 'Im, Joe; Donkey Wants Water". We could tell those whiteface West Indian gunslingers were really Negroes underneath the greasepaint.

The following week, Nixonson spun a recent ironic resurrection of the 1940s detective genre "Johnny Tubetop". Look at the pair of Oh Johnny, Johnnies on her.

Comedies like "Friedman's Bureau". Old movies like "Patients in Partner City", "Bananas from Scarsdale" or "The Lucky Template".

Old slices of ring-a-ding carnality on the afternoon movie show, like "Lullaby of Broads." A Language Musical about Mick Pomp, the mock-pimp. Watching a movie starring Rock Bratwurst in a space suit "Astronomy Pastrami". The holiday favorite "The Spy Who Came In From the UFO". My own favorite non-war movie was "Gold of the Golem", about the adventures of the jovial Jewish Frankenstein's financial backers, lots of pre-War tuxedos and pencil moustaches.

Now peppered with ads for suburban Motorsburgh furriers named Silvermink, Goldmink or Minkgoldsilver.

An old movie on TV "I Married a Married Couple" sounds ominous but actually a comedy about a guy who takes over for a Justice of the Peace, gets the ceremony wrong and finds himself wedded to both parties. How else would a kid born then have heard old songs like "My Algonquin Concubine"? Everything Tippy knew about the olden days he knew from TV. Mom might watch a more recent TV movie, heartwarming "A Dad for the Disabled Girl." Or else she sat bemusedly transixed by the 1940s movie musical "There Will Be Stockings". The next morning you could see Mae Buxome in the 1930s pre-Decency Code sizzler "She Done Everyone"; Kim Zaftig was in the tamer but cleavage-ready 1950s remake. Sometimes I wondered if preschool Coral watched these too, perched in front of TV when her mom went off to her school job, truant sister staying home with her to talk on the phone with older, unemployed boys (who paid for her services and special attentions? There was talk). How else could she bring such

other-worldly glamour to staid Aleppo?

All these movies are what Coral watches with her mom and gram. I went over to her house to fuck. Do I end up watching these instead? No! Former U.S. Presidents Eishamhowler and Truthman (briefly fictionalized as Saturday morning cartoon superheroes) had children who hosted old movie shows on rival Motorsburgh stations, but didn't last, didn't have the panache nor Jollywood anecdotes of Beau Nixonson.

Beau spun none of these entarte-neu-hollywoodische hippie movies like "Having a Wasted Weekend".

In the Biblical comedy "Samson or Delilah?" the strongman dressed up as the siren for some reason, and merry hi-jinks ensue.

The host said it was often a double feature with the hard-hitting yet sympathetic movie "Men Named Joan", and police would often storm into the theater to nab the nancy men interested in it, their criminal admission being that they'd paid admission. I remember a western—it didn't look like it was made in the US—called "The Devil is a Motherfucker." There may have been a different word in the title though, for I don't remember Beau saying that onscreen, though people from Motorsburgh often take pride in the fact that the do.

Some suburbs in his broadcast umbrella had movie-inspired 1960s streets like RearWindowwood.

Yeah, the Bay-of-Pigs President had one son showing war movies and patriotic inspiration on TV. Some times he appeared as a bellboy to show the Chomps Trio (why? they only did one episode in a hotel), sometimes as a chubby skipper or young, bald deckhand to

show Slipeye the Swabber-of-Decks cartoons. Sometimes showing movies as a woman or avuncular vampire with a rib-roasting laugh.

Or maybe they were all different children of the New-Frontiering-withwomen President. The story goes, when JFK was a young handsome veteran running for Congress, he fathered at least two children in every state so his legitimate son would have allies when HE took his own place in the Senate. That's how he thought, how he worked, how he played.

My mother used to intimate that I was one of those children, if only to make me feel special and worthy when bullied by other children, classmates, as the fat bookish boy.

Don’t forget, Kennedy piloted a PT boat, and PT stands for petrel, a shore bird, so these craft could probably fly. And that's why I wear aviator-style sunglasses today. I am a pilotless PT boat, yeah.

That President was a Roman Cowlick. Because I too seemed to have unmanageable hair as a child, I took that as a sign I was his son. Maybe the DC cartoonist Hugh Blockheadd, who drew an HBomb as a character menacing everyman John Public B. Damned, thought that too.

The stock figure of Lord Syphillis in all those wittily-written low budget British comedies. Or the shangri-lawyers of "Lost Syphillis".

Is he the one they burn in effigy every year? I'll have to go over there to find out, and see the top bands if they haven't already come to Motorsburgh.

The Motorsburgh station started running hip after school tipsfor-teens shows like "Let's Get Lysergey". In defiance, Nixonson hosted a traditional local holiday special, with songs, jugglers,

Russian Army baritones and comedians celebrating Christmas, Chanukah and the new krazy koloreds’ Kwanzaa holiday week. It featured both the Chomps and the Chomps Trio! No, not really, but that would sure be great, wouldn't it?

Noirishly-lit 1940s movies like shipboard drama "Dark Steerage." To show that one, the only thing lit was the host Nixonson.

Rarely first-run or even recent also-run, like John Truth in "The Dancing Gang", "Dark Turds" or Roy Regal's "Their Boots in Mud", war dramas. "King Cunnilingus", starring a suave radio balladeer, was a sentimental favorite, a heroic veteran who lost everything but his face and tongue. Flashed a photo of the female lead and her most famous beau Beau when she slyly refered to "her movieland sex-ex". He was proud to have played the hotel bellboy in her 1940 "Call Her Savage," cringing and scared away by the chimp that leapt out of one of the bags he carried up to her room.

Why would a Hollywood actress write an autobiography Soft is My Turd? Even Nixonson was momentarily taken aback, recovered and continued with his nostalgic monologue. Maybe it was a missprint, and meant “Twat”. Nixonson married a starletette—not quite up to starlet status—who always played the Plain Friend. Daffie Mars identified with her. My Mom did too.

Tippy had seen all those afternoon war movies, WWII dramas of our father's wartime, alternating with wry animal cartoons whose voices sneered like the old big city radio actors they were. And he thought he wanted no part of it, no sir. For all his intuitive theatricality, he never saw himself a star of the silver screen as our ingenue certainly did.

Who do I mean? Coral!

We met Nixonson at the TV studio's teen show taping.

Asked by a viewer his fave movie, Nixonson snapped back the 1939 blockbuster sentimental spectacular “Stalwart Plantation Defenders”. Oh, really? Me, I saw it, thought all the white people, the Anglosassins in it should be shot by the Michigan Regiment, their great houses looted, torched and farm animals butchered, land salted. And all the onscreen Coloreds given their forty acres and mule and sent off, but with little hopes for an onscreen bunch is so stoopid. Another time he said "Sainted Confederates' Camp", the southern-financed movie from the 1950s (to beat back the onslaught of civil rights) about the South winning the Civil War, sending all Negroes back to Africa to found a pro-American state, bulwark of the Cold War, except for a few gentle washed and gussied-up house slaves to serve drinks and dinners. You don’t have to be a People’s Puma politico to see how this was all in keeping with the new President’s southern strategy and silent majority of racist honks. And it’s kind of sad to think of an old man in demographically-blackening Motorsburgh clutching on to this sentimental old Swanee River mummified Mammy crap.

We must bury that generation, plow them under. Though perhaps with a quickly brushed-away tear. Goodbye, Mom. Some boys would watch sports. Those who didn't want to grow up to be Mickey Jagger probably wanted to be Mickey Mantle.

Sometimes Tippy watched fights: Crusher vs. Throbber, Czar Kerenski vs. The Yellow Martha. Arf-Arf Argentina takes on all

comers. TV wrestler Lord Load. Wrestler Joe Puny. Superhero wrestlers the Giant Speed Limit vs. the Blue Reciprocity. Great mounds of meat-men crashing against each other like hot-waterbottle delivery vans on the mattress, narrated excitedly by trusted sportscaster "Fire Engine" Red. A wrestler named Lord Lotus, who'd spit flower petals on the audience, enters the ring wreathed in incense and marijuana smoke. Venus vs. Cupid.

A prize fight in Brooklyn between two buffalos, the loser dried and ground to make black pepper. Bearbaiting and bullbaiting heats via satellite from England, with Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson as referees. He used to watch title matches of pregnant women boxing real hard. Bicycle polo matches were going on just down the block, but if it was a Saturday afternoon he preferred to stay in and watch snatches of the Weekly Knifefights and Kingfights. For he didn't need sports except as simulacrum, and there were crumbs all over the carpet where he lay in front of the TV as a result. Something was learned here that taught him how to regard, and behave before, a paying audience. I'll bet Tippy's parents succumbed to the old cliché and said stop watching so much TV, go out and have fun with other children. Fuck them. A strange warmth would emanate from the set into the grey Michigan Winter outdoors, as it would from cool California baseball or the Latin sweat and speed of prime Miami jai-lai frontons. Pro wrestler named Catholic Johnson shouting supercharged commercials for Michigan's Mulatto Speedway, the only thing Sunday! Sunday! was good for in my opinion. A daytime sportsman's show "Fishing the Vatican", another filmed either up north or down south (same to me) "Squirrel Hunt".

Golf interested him briefly when, like girls, it'd be more of a participatory than a spectator sport, deflty wielding that long stick.

Frustrating weekend afternoons when the band would be gathered he'd rather watch televised golf than to rock. The Gerald Ford Open (Michigan politician was now a famous golfer), where Sunbelt pastels muted into the foppish kiltie shoes, ocean-warm knits upon little alligator-men breasts. A strange sense of space exists on the televised golf course. Is it a Zen act when a mashie niblick or no-fault four iron chops into the farting fairway as decisively as the chopping of a head? I’m asking for Tippy.

We didn't really have a TV, for only stuffy old people, and parents with houses full of children, did. It was several years before TVs for children were introduced, in Life Savior candy colors, and the guy who did made a godzillion from it. I had just watched old movies and sitcoms with my mom and brother, whatever was on, until Tippy introduced me to the Chomps Trio.

We were walking past Big Berry's Appliance store (the proprietor was called that for the horrible purple growth on his nose, emphasized in the chubby caricature on his ads in the newspaper), and color TVs were turned to the black and white comedies. Tippy stopped, gazed, guffawed. "Look at that Roque, aren't they they killer, destroyer, the bombadose?"

I looked dumbly. They weren't funny, Jewish comedians. OK, they were. They grew on me. They should call Louie Louie "Ludovico", because he acts like he's full of 'ludes, I offered, but the guys ignored me. I have to admit, it took me some time to warm my

cotton to them, but Tippy luvved them like daddies from the start.

And I came to recognize their cosmic importance in our band’s life.

You ask why we were called the Chomps? You never saw them, did you? They don’t show them before or after school on Motorsburgh television any more? Ahh, that’s a pity. There were other Jewish comedy teams like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the firey furnace, but the Chomps Trio were still the hottest. The Chomps did badly on the Bagelbialy Belt, humor requiring silly miseen-scene, but really excelled on the short-budget screen, and especially in-your-face television. My Mom would get upset if the Chomps Trio used Yiddishisms in titles or jokes, as INSANEBRAIN magazine so often did too. The Trio’s "Ruckus in the Tuchus" upset her a lot, not only for its Israelism but some sexual innuendo on top of that.

The constant theme of all kids' cartoon TV shows was injury, to the head, the stomach, the butt. Rarely the hand, though occasionally caught in a bear trap. But when we heard the opening bars of NYAAH NYAAH NYH-NYAAH NYAAH—the kid's insult song, later copyrighted by the world's richest Beatle—we knew it was time for the umpteenth-zillion rebroadcast of those ancient, mouldy, shmaltzy-cheapo and shmaltzo-cheapy still-funny funky comedies by the Chomps Trio. Cutey, Mikey and Louie Louie were presumably longdead vaudeville comedians whose antics not-so-subtly encouraged the next couple generations of kids to an anarchic violence that seriously put into question the pettiness of all authority.

They were pretty good at disregarding all decorum, which encouraged especially our generation to do the same.

Every poke Mike takes, every time Cutey does a screw-up-theface-and-bleed, every scraping of toothed woodworking tools over Louie's baldo pate sent chords of information to the youth of the nation. Mikey was the original Hitler in a Beatle haircut. Hitting babies on the head with a hammer to make 'em sleep. Eating tacks, magnets in his trachea (secret of a good stage voice?) and an assful of tacks shot out of another bumbler's gun. Knifethrowing, a machine gun shooting eggs, gorillas performing delicate eye surgery, hotwired enemas. In dentistry Louie puts lacquer on a cowboy's chest, the dead Cutey's replacement a jilted lover in flying saucers patrolled by goggle-eyed space girls in no-density suits, you think I'm kidding but you better just watch it and find out. Small things happen, like putting a gangster in a rolltop desk, the everpresent seltzer bottles, snazzy secretaries with girls' padded Wartime shoulders who bite the boys' noses, staple their hands and pin their cans and you know they love it, you love it. "Nyaaaaahhhh..." says Louie in wobbly frightened terror before trying to be hit with a stethescope. Mikey likes revenge, biting noses again in playful punishment pain-love. Taking "anacanafranistan" and "alkabob", Where we can get these drugs? asked every kid in the world only a few years later. Husbands insanely jealous of census-takers. Lions let loose on trains.

Everybody wearing a mountie hat. Eating cake with feathers in it.

Mad scientists--every adult young boy in that part of the state knew one of them, called engineers, everybody's father. Homicidal butlers, robots driving cars. A tree with rockets on it. Looking at themselves or reading thermometers in funhouse mirrors till the annex of his head hovers over and above like a weightless bowling ball. Sometimes

there's another brother—Shrimp? Shamus?—after one head bonk too many dispatched and disabled Cutey, brain damage from being hit on the head. Oh yeah, the brother who took over’s name Shmek even sounded like a slap.

The embrace of an unmarried heiress crying "Cousin Basilisk" in a chair that's got weak knuckles. Nineteen-forties haircuts, long and short at the same time. They roll out of that hospital or college football game on scooters.

One comedy put the Chomps in an alternative universe, actually an episode so cheap they used three different guys. This was something very spiritual. Those three magi the Chomps, the three wisenheimers of the Gospels, were the only ones who could credibly call Jesus "Baby". Chomps Trio flying on the back of the Arabian Nights' roc, or on camels bringing Xmas gifts to the baby Jesus. They were like three dumb displaced animals in the manger that night. "Calling Doctor Christ' or "Doctor Eve, Doctor Adam, Doctor Eve". The Chomps Trio are truly the earthbound Orthon, Firkon and Ramu seen, by George, in Adam’s sky. Even though they were filmed in the olden days were more powerful than anything we learned in school in the Sixties.

Though President Nixon (aided and abetted by TV movie host Nixonson?) may have been fucking Marilyn's rotting corpse, revenge for the Kennedy’s having her when she was alive, or Tippy's Mom— back then a gangster moll—on the other side of the grassy knoll, the three dumdum Chomps were like the three bullets that killed Kennedy, spat from a sniper amidst warehoused school books. The three pops of the rifle like the weasel gone Pop, why they called it

"Pop" music and I don't mean your own sniveling dad. Has there ever been a really hard Rock version of "Pop Goes the Weasel"?

How many dirty words found written by students on the pages of texts in the School Book Depository?

Ahh, the brio of the Trio. Fave episodes were "Malice in the Bodice" (with Boadicea as the girl in the hotel they thought was a countess) and "College Varsity Grave Robbers", ending with ghouls and zombies chasing them across a football field. The old joke of Jewish guys all dressed as Santa Claus, who can beat that?

Chomps' Trio in "Hubub in the Bathtub"—he'll hold your head under, Bub! Soap in their eyes too, a laff a minute. All in tonsure baldhead haircuts in "Cistercians in the Cistern" episode. The Trio got into the Hindoo gooroo act with "Popcorn in the Baghram". Except this was made in the 1940s, not 1960s, so the conman who hoodwinked them looked like papa-oo-mow mow Mahatma Ghandi instead of a flowerpowery robesman. "Piddlers Three" was where they invented what they thought was a health tonic but it was a strong diuretic instead, so they couldn't stop urinating! In a crowded theater, on a downtown bus (and fat, gruff policeman's shoe), in a wealthy woman's pool and punchbowl, etc. "Why, you pee-brain!" Ka-smack (water flows). To flee the police and everybody they angered, they strip, stand still and pretend they're a fountain, little Belgian boys in the sunshine.

A joke repeated endlessly is that much better, like a sex act.

Tippy had never eaten a pie but had seen it pushed into so many faces. Was my mom a pretty girl in her 1940's youth like the ones that would put the Chomps heads into Gutenbergian book-presses,

hurl pies at them and most of all escape their embraces? Each Chomp was a composite of Everybody's True Dad, for every boy's father is a combination of the passivity of Louie, the absurdity of Cutey and the obstinance of Mikey. Always in the dark, forgetting phone numbers, Tippy immediately realized that the Chomps were the perfect paradigmshiftomatic paradiddle to the world of his parents. Role models for an adult world, a world which didn't work anyway. The Chomps must be what everybody else all over the world sees White people as like. Seated under the early Polaroids of his parents (or models representing them) that they'd found at an auction, only a boy all alone, never paying attention to anything but the TV, could bet anything Life's Like That. Could absorb, absorb the fey and flickering dominimage. I guess Mikey of the Chomps would get into eye-gouging fights with the other fellows and blind them to better listen to Rock n' Roll music. Maybe Mikey's poke-eyd sidekicks should've been those blind blacks, the R & B one from the 1950s or the little guy with the harmonica recording with Motorsbourgeois. They'd know first when their theme song "Nyaah Nyaah Nyaah" was coming up, to save film and production costs.

They say the Chomps Trio, at least the final degraded version, all died in each others' arms, babes in the woods. Dead of exposure, outdoors in the Cucaracha Canyon night, the forested cutting room floor. As a rock n' roll band might.

Ascension TV. Oh me, oh mind, what passed between the interface of those big brownieblue kid syrup eyes and that whispering silver light was unspeakable for many years but there, just as there, just the same.

You're like a trick-or-treater, aren't you?

Hoping to fill your

entire bag with my bonbons, my bon mots. Girls who came by the Firehouse were trick-or-treaters, hoping to fill something else. With boners, ha ha. Maybe I'm the great diarist of rock, the peeping tom turkey Pepys, the Peiping Boswell to every quip of his johnson. Never mind, they probably don’t assign them anymore; they were book report guys in England once.

If you're hot in here, you can take off your tank top. Well, I just wanted you to know that you could, it's OK. Oh yeah, right, we’re in school.

Where was I? When we were kids, I guess, especially Tippy.

A child hates naps because he's trying to gain experience of the world in as full and long a day as possible. A nap as a length of measurement is meaningless. A child is a machine that hates to be shut off. He was so rarely the effortlessly folded child. As a child Tippy had no spatial relationships, would put his pants on his head, his legs in sleeves. He might appear in public with shoes on the wrong feet, sleeping in public. Saw little animals he called ideas, that weren't really there. Kids are great because they can't help but look stupid. That little half-fisted cub, bear-demon with a human face. The boy is the bug. As a child small things would happen. Tippy told the joke about the guy whose face was upside down. As a little putto Tippy's eyes were just one blue cell apiece, and that's why parents loved him so. Lightning yellow hair, hair like curried mashed potatoes or straws. Not the kind of straw in brooms but the plastic drinking kind with fluted elbows and red athletic stripes. Ears little conch shells,

delicate pink curlicues in which you could hear the ocean. Skin a pale swimmingpool color. Wore special underwater underwear. So sexy he could make a bluejay come.

Tippy learned the limits of language. He thought a towed car was a "toad car". He'd call birds "bugs", call little birds "cheapskates". Young children call a lot of things the same. When his parents got married he thought the notary they spoke of going to see was another country, not-a-republic. He couldn't write his name but knew his initial was a schwa, that English-class swastika. For a while his nickname was "like". He'd talk to fire, abuse fire. Said "see ya" to the dishwater as it escaped down the sink. Kids learned to speak idioglossolially from old Poto and Cabengo albums. Those kids'd taunt each other with "Your name sounds like a dentist's".

Invented a gun that shot ballpoint pens. If walking by a church, somebody would say Lookout, the Hunchback of Notre Dame will get you and everybody would scatter, run home.

I was taken to Church about this time, and let me tell you what I learned and thought. If the Bible was the first fanzine, maybe the U. S. Constitution the second and all your school textbooks too. Aleppo Auroch sports page headline GOD WASTES DEVIL—-"I've had it with that motherfucker!" says Lordhead Supremo, at loggerheads.

Job, called to comment, "Relieved. I'm OK though" he said wearily.

Film contracts for life story to follow. Seven sacraments like the seven UHF TV channels.

I was pretty precocious. Not so much Tippy.

Tippy was an ornamental child, a beloved shiny object with no brothers or sisters. When you're an only child, you're onstage every

moment of your goddamn life, worried about critical reaction, tomorrow's reviews, how can one help but be a rockstar, or perceive himself as one? At least it looks that way to me, from here. Terrible fear storms. Prehensile and superincomprehensible. Born small and bald, a Jésufetus like the centerpiece of a Christmas Nativity scene in front of a church or Catholic's house. The Christmas cloaca was probably the name of a beloved children's book. One liberal lapsed Catholic's house displays no manger or mangy Holy Family, only one of the Magi wise men, the colored one. Oh wait, never mind, that’s just the iron jockey that’s always in front of his house, now bedecked with a turban and robe for the holidays. Or was that the theme of a TV sitcom?

Ads and our moms told us the powdered orange-colored and orange-flavored drink was developed to cheer up astronauts on long grim spaceflights, but we kids suspected it was their freeze-died, freeze-dried urine, collected on the flights instead. And don't ask about he similarly-touted chewy chocolate sticks. Ecch.

Most childhoodlings and childhoodlums grew up on an absurdly sweet Motorsburgh brand of gingery cola called Fey Goat, its logo a little billy, winking, drinking out of a can with a bite taken out of it.

Brewed with water from the Sagittarius River by the descendants of Jesuits, half-breed squaws and mulatto trappers who founded the trading post that became the city, it also had notable fancy flavors Le Nain Pop Rouge (in the dwarfish can) and Crème de la Soda. As the goat in the commercials says, Ooh La La! Don’t confuse it with medicinally tonic Farragut Cola, “For ya Gut”. Or another bottled fizzy called Retard, supposed to retard the onset of indigestion. Not really

for kids, certainly not liked by them. But what my Mom said she had to serve me.

Meanwhile, university aculty households in Aleppo served their children expensive Illuminatus Milk, supposed to help their grades, maybe attention span. “Milk from the eye of the pyramid” it said on the carton, beneath a cow with three eyes and the eye of Horus on one side of its hide.

He thought tar in the street was chocolate licorice and ate half the intersection. He'd eat pop bottles, fibreglas from old furnace filters, live kittens and canaries on a dare to impress his friends.

Found an apple squashed in dogshit. Hansel and Gretl's candy shack was at the edge of town but decrepit and half-eaten, surrounded by junked candy cars barely used for parts. Kids would go there till their teeth decayed too. He used to jump out of windows just to break his neck on the stone steps, marble railings outside, jump on a woman's back. So much energy in him waiting to come out or explode. He remembers cutting himself on bandages in the medicine cabinet. The kindergarten school psychiatrist said his problem had root before being conceived and he was born on a toadstool. The prescient Tippy answered Fuck that shit. Better fake i.d. than fake ideas.

I don’t know, I don’t want to conflate different places from childhood: the sludge pond, the creek at the end of the road that supposedly sheltered teenage werewolves, the Dolphin Lake Ice Age crater and bog near where my brother and I grew up, our side of town.

But Tippy rode his bike over streets like Slaveridge, Blathercrest and Palaverston. A lane called Costumeview in the Halloween-friendly subdivision Beastlake. I don't think they could come up with a street

name that sounds whiter than Dogcatcherwood, and that was obviously their intention. Dick Jane Sally Spot Puff Father and Mother lived not far from there. The Fists and the Birthmefirst families would meet over coffeecake to discuss why the little children's shoes won't stay tied. A neighborhood so suburban signs said CAUTION: CHILDREN IN SCHOOL CLOTHES. Small town newspaper headlines like WATCHED POT NEVER BOILS. So suburban that neighbors used cats to deliver messages to each other, invites to Come as You Are parties, Come to a Bar-B-Q and bring a cup of sugar. Proper women in pylon hats. Friendly dogs that say "OK!" "OK!" when they bark. Ours was a land of mailmen spraying rude, threatening dogs like the cops spray students, the same stingingly painful stuff.

Why was he called Tippy? People were named "Michael" of "Jeff" in the 1950's, so be it. He was called Tippy. His name had nothing to do with Tap Dancing, though it was offered in the Aleppo Elementary Schools by tired old hoofers, vaudevillians stranded in the midwest lo these many decades. Tippity tippity tap tap went the cherubic painted six-year olds (the boys angrily wiping off the lipstick on the sleeves of their white shirts), homemade cardboard top hats like aluminum-foil six-pointed stars. Like when the Cub Scout troupe sang Christmas carols at the Veterans' hospital, something vaguely sleazy about the prenubile prefigured showgirlettes in sequins and feathers singing songs beyond their single-digit ages in years. This must be something about show biz that we all remembered. Tippy learned it was called "sex".

A little kid in those days no longer said Hippity Hop to the Barber Shop, bounced on a bed like a little snorting pig, rolled in the fennel and behaved like an immodest copper penny. That was the olden days. Instead Tippy could be found racing his slot car on the public track at the hobby shop. Kids would wish upon a star but when they couldn't find one, use a satellite (American or Russian) or even an airplane. When the other kids started singing "Happy Birthday to You" Tippy resolved, as he ran to play in a neighborboy's sandbox, he'd only be onstage to his own songs, nothing entertaining or saccharine or wimpy like that. Now a crabby old Beatle owns "Happy Birthday", sending sullen enforcers to collect on it, far and wide. Yet Tippy will never forget the smell of a burning birthday cake on a particularly dry summer noon, ignited by its own candles.

His only chore was to burn papers, to take the day's trash to the little snubrocket steel cigar-cone of a trashburner in the backyard. Stir down the ashes with a stick. Burning plastic bags was how these kids discovered napalm, could smell it all the way to Sprinkleton. He and his friends liked to contact each other by fire-o-grams, those dangerous inconvenient things that, when found burning in your mailbox, you have to put out in order to read. Yes, this book too shall burn someday. Once when Tippy was burning an insect, asked why he explained "That wasp was the wife of a famous Hindoo, and I have to suttee her puttees", now where'd he learn a thing like that? He destroyed his (albeit reincarnated) ancestors whenever he got the chance, as a fly, moth, ant larvae etc. Fire equals entropy, things being destroyed, falling apart. Fire equals forbidden. Ponny Fire

Cone Cun. There was one kid in his class who purposely burned his own face "to look more like a monster".

Tippy remembers when digging too deep in the sandbox, beyond the layer of lost plastic army men, red fire ants and cat turds, hitting the Michigan red-mustard clay. Kids find a buried robot, or a disused field marshal and make him do all sorts of things. Find telescopes on the street, lying there just waiting to be looked through.

Tippy and his friends would go out in the woods at night, find and spy on a secret enclave of mice and fallen stars gathered in a circle.

Thought for a moment about the spot on the front lawn where the paperboy's been. They'd committ Jumbocide outside of town where the circus was camped, farmicide by unauthorized cropdusting as they blithely ate field corn tasting like gravel right off the cob. Punished for licking a cigarette lighter, smoking caps guns. You call yourself suburban? Haven't you ever tasted a screen door before? Later on as a teenager he once dropped his dope pipe in a graveyard and set fire to a flammable corpse. It must've been an old professor for it smelled like a burning pocket calculator. Tippy wasn't bad, just inconsistent, like a car radio in a parking structure. That wisenheimer fire. The kid I wasn't and wouldn't dare to be.

Apple trees puctuated every yard in the neighborhood when he was growing up. Boys' Apple Wars magazine. A picture window shattered before we even knew what orgasm was. An apple’s hole where a worm French kissed it. Apples rotted to burnt orange, sweetsmelling dogshit. In the backyard the foxy squirrels are chattering gossip; this taught kids to talk maliciously about people. Squirrels were all that remained of elves and chipmunks, pixies and

leprechauns. Peter Pan was a biologist, a zookeeper down at the University. Somewhere, an attitude otter, deodorant otter, but not near here. Out in the backyard a snake was shedding her skin for the leering amusement of the chipmunks.

War animals. Those big summer barnswallow wasps, sting like an allergy shot. Bees fighting, buzzing angrily, stingers and legs locked, rolling around on the pavement like playground dogs. A bee stung Tippy's teeth, a weak bee. Given a pet bee and always accused by his dad in a jocular way of Puttin' on the Bumblebee, Tippy would say boyhood things like "Don't stab me, bumblebucket".

I must be an adult now for I think what he said was cute. Eyes like two blue Michigan robin's eggs. The birds were gardening, and blujays making their swingset noises were the garden's corrupt police force.

Cardinals are old-fashioned midwestern Catholics, so they respect but distrust the jewbirds squawking in the trees. I've always liked those aggressive Blue Jews, like a teenage gang hopping, then aflight. Yes, you’re right, we’re talking about Tippy, not yours truly.

Redwing blackbirds pulling rank. Crows and blackbirds were the souls and ghosts of black people killed in the Motorsburgh race riots. That blackbird I hit with a slingshot was some R n’ B singer killed by a cop, killed by his girlfriend, killed by his father. They swoop to pick up my cigar butt, but they're paid to do that. When he was still the age when he'd plant birdseed in hopes of growing baby birds. Long before he'd plant his own seed in the moist and loamy garden of girls.

The birds flew up as if in a shovel. Wished he could talk to those birds and their eggs, as he did flowerspiders. Warbling grafters, wheezing birds, splashing out their song. A motor hen on the Michigan moors. A cool quail. Hearing this, he imitated the pathetic creature and sang a little lilt. Singing like a cat with his throat cut in the bushes, a fraidy cat. Appeared to be intensely happy. The singing child. Where children sang "Let's Shoplift and Dance". The Baby Elvis. Sound like a Dutch airplane landing on the Moon. The voice of Before Virginity, so to speak.

Daytime bats flew into Tippy's face mesmerised, flapped their wings against so people thought that little kid had a moustache. A big bat in Michigan called Flying Bears. Country churchgoers outside of town—First Church of the Good Ole Boy—believed those bats to be devils or fallen angels turned ornery and restless and dumb, like they so fear their inbred no-account cousins to be. For each one they angrily killed, a thousand grateful mosquitoes found them. Big frightening wingflap, body the size of a fat gelded tabby cat and sounding like a golfcart, could pluck squirrels off of trees, eat robins.

Even the jays had met their match. A small piglet or baby or fetus left out on the roof of a building overnight would be snatched up. When abortion clinics opened, kids would rifle garbage cans for the floppy tots and elaborately dangle them from their bike handles and wait, usually losing interest and going home before any bats arrived. OK, that was a decade later. For those days were the beginning of kids losing interest quickly, something parents on radio and TV talk about so much now.

Mom didn't want me to play with Kids with Jewish names like Kickstand in grade school, or hang out with them after school. When I’d ask her why, she’d stammer only praises “Uh…they love learning, people of the book.” OK, mommy, I promise I’ll never write a book.

Behavior children too. The last banana in the bunch, of a big Catholic family. Maybe too much like her own. She’s funny that way.

Back in the early 1960s, when the state was called "Twistigan", like we did last summer, Michigan people went Up North every summer. All Michigan is Up North, and all Up North is Nature. They'd pile Tippy into the family car and head for vacation up there. Big Michigan cars easily took four adults and luggage in a northerly direction in expressway comfort. Hercules' Daimler. But Motorsburgh had not yet invented a car that runs on autumn leaves or snow, or a truck that runs on apples. Outboard motor homes stayed at outboard motor lodges on the highway. Once Tippy’s family went to Atlantis, Michigan, that island in the lake where the learned go to fish in summer. Not exactly staying at the Ancient Greek Hotel, with big white columns around the porch and schools of fish all around.

Cabins for the cost-conscious around Budget Lake. Small namecalling towns like Diseased Pine, up there next to Renegadesville, Hotdogsburg and Wimphaven, up along the Faulty River. Summer lakes that were cabiniferous, buzzing with the aggressivefly of summer.

Tippy’s family may have vacationed at some franchised familyfriendly Goa-brand campgrounds as we drove up north, implying they're up to the sanitary standards of the coastal colony on the Indian subcontinent. Or not. Faculty brats attended an art and music camp

called Childrensfire, that I yearned to attend—it sounded like the liberals' children get to play unsupervised with fire!—but my Mom was worried me sleeping away from home would be an opportunity for expressive sexual play, so forbade it. The thought stirred her inner Tyrannasaurus. It was probably expensive too, though maybe her school job made Thump and I eligible to attend for free. Guess I'll never know.

Every year kids would go into the woods, break off a piece of elfin shelf fungus, chew on it and die. The popular name Mike originally was an abbreviation for "mycological". They'd pick prohibited protein flowers like Trillium and get shot trying to escape.

You don't "find" fifty dollars if you kill a seagull, you're fined that much, and no, it's not only twenty-five dollars for a baby gull either. Up North he'd use a deer's foot as a toothbrush. Once he saw a forest ranger repairing a deer's hoof using a hammer and small roadside anvil and cut-up truck tires. Saw an unfair hunter lurking by the highway pushing unsuspecting elk in front of onrushing cars. In some towns, every card shoppe, dentist's, or notary's office had a taxidermied bear.

Everybody ate dry, flaky cafeteria-style palefish, a pastefish with lamprey-chew'd tattoos still on the side like a rancher's brand. Saw Colonia redcoat logforts with keen cool dioramas of massacres. Guys who'd bombed campus C.I.A. offices hightailed it up to that part of the state, tucked their hair under their plaid caps and acted the part of fishermen. Cops tried arresting each other in a bar, there was a drunken gunfight, lumbering axes flailing and souvenir cameras swinging on their straps, with numerous bystanders killed as the contents of tourbuses emptied out to watch.

Up North Tippy would squeeze and flatten frogs into snakes.

Santa's braindeer roamed the woods Up North. Put on a laughing parka, a windbreaker. Collecting spooky ducats he found on the beach must've fallen off pirate tankers in the channel. An ancient Indian in a store window offered to teach Tippy to whittle. Tippy would ponder and dream that his spirit was raven, otter, fox, bear or eagle.

He'd put his finger in his pipe, a little piece of it or the nailclippings of girls, he was that fascinated. Pretend he was smoking dope until once a hippie actually offered him some while the carload of child and parents were waiting for the ferry and the rest is history.

Canada, Michigan's pale twin; the United Nations had designated it that way. Fireworks were legal there. Met kids on vacation in Canada raised by a fox in the woods, now owning the resort and its cabins. Years later as a sullen teen Tippy went up there with his parents with the sole purpose in his head of having sex with Pocohantas. The tire blew on the car, so it was Tippy who thought to reach into the Michigan woods to strap a wolf to the wheel, hogtied forefeet-to-hindpaws after breaking its legs, and driving on it twenty miles to the next service station, the open car windows whistling at sixty m.p.h. drowning out the plaintive howling. This impressed his parents. Another time they ran out of gas near a big chemical plant in the middle of the state so Tippy ran up and borrowed a cup of napalm.

He still called it "naplam", which to his father called up warm memories of pabulum.

Tippy's parents took him to Lake Kitchy-kitchy-koomee, King of the eye-blue Great Michigan Lakes, and he had so much fun and pinesense enjoyment he didn't know what to do. He'd feed coffee

beans to bears so they couldn't hibernate and would get headaches, go on a rampage through the park and steal picnic baskets. Young Tippy would rampage through a hill o' beans himself. They visited all the historic places to spit in public in the state. There was a lake up there poisoned by the pollution of doctors pouring too many medicines in the water. Michigan's water is so cold your feet have a headache, your back a toothache. Tippy, upon swimming in this cold clear water would catch the propellor of a boat, hold on to it screwing around towed and spinning. Vacationed at a lovely lake to drown in. Sinking his parents' fishing boat, a whole ferry full of vacationers, while they were Up North. His mother could've been made of aluminum foil for all the crinkling up she did in the water.

Tippy said they’d stopped at Popke’s Papal Dinosaur Forest up north, which excited me because it was one of my favorite places, a grove of concrete thunder lizards and stone-hurling neanderthals interspersed with ignorable Christian messages. When I aske him what he thought of it, he said his father shrugged, said Not very scientific.

Back home in Aleppo, in order to duplicate the experience of Up North in everyday life he joined a Bug Scout troupe. As a Scout he tried whittling, but stabbed the little boy next to him, who was more proud of his scar than of his woodcraft project or even of his missing front tooth, obtained when the girl whose panties he was looking up jumped off the teeter-totter, incisors then stuck through his lower lip like staples. Once he made a whistle but swallowed it, talked to the birds in the backyard for days till his parents got sick of it and took him to the hospital's outpatient (i.e., get-something-out-of-patients) clinic.

He couldn't braid those dumb plastic strips into belts for dad, but wore Indian moccasins on his venial sins. In the early '60's Lads' World magazine would print a lot of those paintings and cartoons of Christ in an Indian headdress or cowboy outfit, preaching to scouts cooking beans around the campfire. Christ was one Right On Webelos. Tippy had no interest in these but I thought they were kind of cool, like the picture of the current President in the Post Office. Scoutmasters used to get excited by these paintings, would send away for them and put them up in their basements next to the pinup fold-out airbrushed girls and their stacks of girlie magazines. Now what kind of strange magnetism did Scouting have on those men? Though Tippy later was directly responsible for bringing about his Scoutmaster's death— daring him to do too many stupid situps, his weight plus his age in pushups, till his poor boy-overworked heart stopped after a big recovery meal in front of his TV—Tippy would gaze on all these things with skeptical fascination.

Up North, in the woods the trappers and Indian fishing guides called it his birchday, scrambled to find him gifts. Someplace Up North he learned about the "Dandelion Rebellion" in Michigan history.

One big street in Aleppo was an Indian word sounding like "Washroombison" or, more likely "WashingtonAdamsJeffersonMadison". Little Tippy would collect Golemiliths, those stones that had been painfully passed by ancient Golems. He learned and told ruthless baby-out-with-the-bathwater kinds of myths. Why Michigan's nickname is Moustachigan. These were what Indians called "his trippings of war", which meant the

visions that led to his unique career in Rock. What the spiritual and sentimental Indians called a Webelos of Love.

Tippy's parents were of the generation that still thought they read. They subscribed to magazines they didn't really need, that had no relation to their lifestyle, just because it was easier to return the postpaid subscription cards than not. Waterlogged stacks of Grocers' Realpolitik, or Process Illustrated were piled around the periphery of the tiny mobile home, in places even propping it up. Highbrow stuff.

Mother subscribed to all the colorful women's magazines like Knife, Fork and the glossy, brassy Spoon. Lead articles like HOW TO TELL IF YOUR DOCTOR IS IMPOTENT or GOOD VIBES: HOW BAD CAN THEY BE? They liked to have magazines around to pick up, thumb through and fondle. Growing up in a veternarian's waiting room, Tippy felt about that much at home. Fathers took magazines to the bathroom to sit through. Magazine subscriptions formed a web about the home that was irrelevant to Tippy. Supercleavage magazine amazed us as badly-weaned boys.

The latest self-help paperback books like The Kidnapped Person's Cookbook or the contemporary How to Make God Do Your Thing! sat in the mobile home's so-called livingroom in a small wire rack but who needs'em? Oh wait, maybe those were in Coral’s.

Never mind.

Mark my words, the truly wise guy never begins the reading habit. As when a dog first buys a bone. That Idiosyncracy Family, their biological clocks had been reset--like a foreign diesel car on fast idle--by coffee, cigarettes and so much television, so reading a

book cover to cover was out of the question. My boyhood was filled with children's books, like the one about The Little Night Light That Didn't Want to Turn Off, while there were none in Tippy's house.

Didn’t have the old classic Tales Told to Burnt Eggs. His father took him for nature walks, pointed out things in the woods and bogs. Yet it was their mobile home, to which I went to watch TV with my friend.

My own boyhood revolved around three simple things: Comic books, UFO's, and comic books about UFO's Not that Tippy wasn't intelligent, for while still childishly young he completed a remarkable list of all the musical instruments one could play while driving a car: harmonica, etc. But he didn't have the time, nor the radios out of his ears, to read and in time for this world Tippy learned to be like a magazine: shallow, snappy and short.

Smart kids loathed those local kids' sports books like Vaseline on the Baseline. Instead we had comic books, the eternal Wartwoman, Selfindulgentman, Lad of a Thousand Gases and Mudboy comic books. Firefly Boy was peaceful and noneventful.

One comic book was based on the minor aristocrat Dame Duck, while Duck Killer Comics was about a little old hunter, the Duckchild's archnemesis. Hippo Boy comic books and funny papers strip were published folded and big as an advertisement. Vault of Hippies comics had horrible longhaired crazed villains defeated by upstanding young citizen-scholars in blue blazers and haircuts. Somehow parents always managed to bring home those when you were home sick from school and asked for some comics. Gradeschool teachers commited to responsible sexuality tried to interest him in educational Still Concupiscent? Thrilling Contraception Comics with wisecracking

Frank Spermatazoa, but the habit never took or jelled, if he read it was only for maybe a minute and then he didn't really even look at the pictures. There was too much to watch on TV for that.

The psychedelic sparkling reverie caused by sunlight hitting glistening scum-trails of earthworms or snails on the sidewalk, noted in spring or summer. Encumbered with immaturity, like all kids Tippy would get bored, obstinately angry with the endless choices of what to do with the rest of the summer vacation.

A sunny foxwinter day. Winds full of weather called the Toothpasterlies. Like newborn snow in Michigan, or the goddess that birthed the snow. Yet Winter bred violence. Loathing winter, at least once every year he'd slip on the ice and break his nose or his crotch.

Tippy slipped on the ice and broke his crown, some Jill usually came while tumbling after. Or the time a fat kid Jim Fentzpost slid into Tippy and he banged the top of his head against the elementary school, the only part of that place that really got into his skull. Subsequently Tippy grew a little stone of folly in the center. That's why he always had that virgin-taming unicorn expression, a unicorn in his pants.

Later of course I'd turn it into a cuckold's horn for him as well. Well, my mother, serving as Den Mother or chaperone on the field trip to the Motorsburgh assembly line that day, gathered Tippy up in her arms Pieta-style and took him home in her big car. A Den Mother Day. There's more sadistic electricity in Michigan in winter, wintermusic. But it has something to do with our music too, or the psychedelic drugs Tippy takes, he says. As the basement is moist and smelly in summer, cold and bracing in winter, there's sardonic electricity and satyric electricity too

Jumping ahead, it was certainly my electric idea to start the band. Rock is incredibly important to me. We jumped into fame and wealth just like anybody would. And since Tippy's death, I've been busy.

No, you're not really bothering me. You're cute, I like you, I can tell you more. Some pretty cool stuff about our tour. Come back. I was there so that's the best truth. Dink and Thump aren’t here, are dead, or drifted off, maybe to factory jobs. And I'll talk about girls like you, especially one.

Tippy’s parents? Well, I don’t really know. This will all be conjecture, because we never talked about stuff like that. As for some boys it was all about sports, for us the talk was all music. I overheard him bragging some about carnal conquests with the other guys, but around me he mostly clammed up, knowing my virginity at the time plagued me with melancholy so.

Though I never met the man, I'm told his father was a poet, defrocked Chair of the University English Department, now working in Ypsofacto high school. He drove a bubbly, dolphin-shaped blue Ford Ablutions, while other nearby fathers drove a macho Chevrolet Bastinado, later the name of a muscular guitar amplifier too.

At

age five, Tippy was compiling editing and publishing a list of sexual things his father had never done. At least I attribute this effort to him.

Our Tippy would have, if he had time between playing outdoors.

The family lived in a disused NASA-surplus Mercury space capsule, for the nearby plant that had manufactured WWII bombers pronto, chop chop and toute suite had produced hundreds of them,

expecting lush space program contracts that never materialized.

When it went bankrupt, the capsules were foisted upon mobile home parks, and prudent parents like Tippy’s snapped them up.

Cocoonlike, cold in the winter and hot in the summer (though advertised vice-versa), it was thought to be a good place to raise a child, so they did. I know, you’ve heard the legeneds that Tippy supposedly lived in Mud Country Camp, a gypsy caravan of wagons and trailers or something, other side of Aleppo, almost Ypsofacto factoryville.

Why tornadoes are attracted to mobile home parks was some weather phenomena we learned in Science class, but I forgot exactly.

Somehow the atmosphere's water particles combine with the residents' lower-class energy. Their moonshine stills? Ink on uncashed welfare checks? Produced by their multiple children illegitimate children incestantly rubbing together. Blow, rubewinds, blow Anyway, when the sky darkened, air got sucked away summer sullen, birds flew funny, I always kind of worried about Tippy's parents back there. At that dreaded eastern edge of town.

My own parents? Don't talk to me about my parents, huh? My parents never even showed me how to buy a roll of scotch tape by myself, to say nothing of a whore. Parents equal waterbuffaloes. My parents got a TV only to watch Eisenhower nominated in 1956 then secure and saisfied, sold it at a garage sale—kind of difficult in chilly mid-November. Actually I wish they had, for they destroyed what little freethinking they had in their minds with television as surely as they

feared I would with all those drugs. Not the kind of romantic movies you watcheed, Roque, but the crassest of evening shitcoms.

My mother made my father wear antiseptic mouthwash on his hair, "There are sperm swimming in your sweaty scalp", which made it all fall out. Samson and Delightful. Later the weight of the belief that long hair would sap a boychild's strength had me in crewcuts all through the nineteen-fifties, which in her eyes were still mussed-up and out of place.

Parents are a document to be shredded. Sucker-punched by his parents, the whole school would be saying about me. That story about a guy who makes a deal, not with the devil for that gets too complicated, but with God (cynics say What's the difference? Still an exacting price) to see his parents dead. That's the movie that the famous "parents waving from a ship stern, cut to firing cannon, cut to explosion" scene is from. Surprise ending, it was devil he dealt with anyway, for God refers to him all affairs--abortions, inheritances, allowances etc.--between parents and children.

A father emerges thru a son’s dick, especially if small, quiet and under control of the kitchen, reading the newspaper. And I always thought "Poppa-oo-mow-mow" meant "Papa and Mama". My parents weren't bad, just evil. Ours is a family where everybody dies of cancer. Ow! The screams of my heart. Feeling of somehow having had less experience than my friends, for which I would take the rest of my life to try and catch up.

Yeah, you’re right. I just made up all that father part, for my brother and I were raised by Mom after he “left” or “died” or

somesuch. The story keeps changing. I’m sorry, I’ll try to stay consistent, OK? Miss, I'm telling you stories like an Arabian Night Scherezade kneeling on the package of butter. Oh wait, that's a Minnesota moccasin native nubilette, middle-western not middle-eastern. My bad. In whirling, rootlessly cosmopolital Aleppo, who can tell? Am I right?

When I was a little boy there were still winter milk home delivery from Broken Bottle Dairy. White children toured Fire Stations with their fathers, examining red shiny trucks and hoses drying.

I remember finding, in the grade school library, a great grisly illustrated Battle of the Frogs and Mice, barbed thistles skewering enemy animals, gaping corpses in the batlefield, the kind of mortality stuff little boys (especially those protected from death in the family) relish. My favorites were war toys, plastic army men by the duffelbagful, clattering plastic guns with vinyl camouflage leaves flapping, stapled to them. Plus pious Icarus rockets with forbidden flammable engines. But these taught us how to fight our battles in the war called Rock.

Like children everywhere, we played Cat in the Drainpipe, Doctor Alerted and Crying Parents. Children playing Cowboys and Krauts, or Nazis and Lepers, the former exterminating the latter en masse, like settlers did the Indians, even before the Jews. Though it could have been vice versa, had the lepers seduced the schnitzeleaters and simply waited. Or the tribespeople versus the Eurimmigrants, but they'd have had to use knives on them in their cabins the next morning, not the microbes of disease from bed or

blanket. All this is what you think about as a boy, and how you think things through.

Is that neighbor upon whose front window we'd write rude words in wax, Mrs. Hysterio still alive? We could hear her policeband radio crackling inside as we lettered MURD and DEAD, nearly tumbling through the glass, smashing mullions and frame. Haw, score!

She’s your aunt? Oh. You’re right, we weren’t playing music yet. We still had to grow grow grow, to grow up here in Aleppo-po-po, Michigan.

Not like our parents' little-gang-of-rascals generation, when kids had southerneesque nicknames like Foodspots or Ramshackle.

There was, however, a colored girl in the classroom whose given name was Mucus. At the Motorsburgh Zoo, someone threw a peanut and hit the elephant in the eye, started a race riot, trumpeting like free angry jazz. An hour west of there, someone tried the same thing with an acorn and the hissing wolverine cooped up in a concrete stall on campus (I’ll tell you later about that so-called “Zoo”), and Tippy began grade school.

Aleppo schools were supposed to be best: wheras most area schools only taught you enough to read the Sports Page, once a week a guy came in on a winged horse and taught Bellerophonics.

As in all state public schools, we were taught the automobile, shaving soap, and pizza were all invented in Michigan, but what got praised as "Aleppo-ducation" was contemporary and progressive: The Nude Math, to count in base one-and-one-half, something about us all

programming computers for the Space Program some day soon.

There was a sparkling, spanking-new elementary school at the corner of Neverneverland and Utopia Drive and that's where— despite his edge-of-town mobile homeliness—Tippy was enrolled at early kindergarten age. Older elementary school across town had a shark fin hanging from the roof that they tried to pass off as a sundial but the kids knew better. A typical gradeschool classroom was filled with pictures of neat things in the future, like cloudports. Tippy and the other little puddlejumpers would scrape their schooldesks against the floor supposedly like a racing car but more like dragging the ball and chain of elementary education itself. Desktop slamming up and down madly, imitating the washing machine that won't stop in the TV commercial but more a metaphor for children's cranial capacities under those linoleum-fever fluorescent light-of-learning circumstances. Our desks had no foreskins.

He was a poor boy who could pee through the holes in the pockets of his pants of his good school clothes. Or, maybe his parents were just being economical. Whenever a sissy kid wore a hat in the dead of winter it would always get grabbed off stolen, for this was the law of the jungle; one kid got laughed at for his oversized shoes, and to bring an umbrella to school would always get it broken.

When we met a little girl named Renée we just assumed the name was Grenade. Kids who thought the name Zykon-B sounded science fiction space alien, horrifying their Jewish teachers. Yammering kids played the old children's game of Monkey in the Midwest, while mischievous schoolboys were always playing the classic Pee-in-aPurse, purloined from the hapless elementary school teacher, found

by her hours later, fouled on the playground. But elementary and junior high teachers would shame a disruptive and/or rambunctious kid by asking all other class members to put their winter coats and jackets atop him.

Or her? Sometimes that was you? I didn’t know that. I’m sorry; I understand if you don’t like to talk about it now.

Art class always stunk, but Tippy would draw funny cars with names like Pregnant Woman on a Stretch Rack. Seeking an original fact. When the school psychiatrist diagnosed him on the first day of school as a paranoid schizophrenic with oral-anal sadistic tendencies he felt complete and grown-up. Matureboy, as the hymn goes, Hail to the Victor Mature and the Princes Valiant. Little did he know that, like a traffic cop's ticket book, the shrink had a daily quota to fulfill of that specific diagnosis. Tippy made other school psychologists unhappy, for he was so pure, jolly happy and unspoiled, nary a speck of melancholy on him. It had all drifted across town, settled and accumulated on me, Aleppo's share of sad. I'd say he was more the kind of personality described as eventful-offensive. Anyway, Psychiatry is the Jewish science, and God must've liked the fact that those old people sought so much self-knowledge that he punished them so.

I would really like to be able to say that Tippy was a sensitive child, that the birth of a kitten, the death of an insect anywhere in the world was enough to make him solemnly rush to his calendar and mark the date so he'd remember it next year. Some kids in the early grades cried when the teacher left the room, didn't know if they could live even those few moments without supervision and authority,

crying and aware of mortality with the cessation of the big female's endless chatter. Crying when it thundered or even looked like rain, claiming a friend of their fathers' was killed by lightning, a myth to live by. I could claim that Tippy would fall apart, scared when the teacher left the room, having never been unsupervised and out of Mother's watchful hawkeye for even a moment, scared that the social fabric would rend, break down and fellow pupils would turn on him like sharks upon one of their own bleeding, and Tippy was certainly spiritually bleeding in that environment. He may have been afraid during the fire drill that they'd keep the procedure of evacuation and escape to safety from him, for his parents continued to do their level best to obscure from him the Facts of Life. Cried when the teacher left the room, or even when his own thoughts wandered. Crying like a comb covered with tissue paper, or the humming rumble of an oldtime refrigerator. Crying like a coxcomb, said the Bard.

But that wouldn't square with the facts. Real kids never cry.

That was me. I don’t want to get morbid.

Gradeschool flock of caged children, a dovecote or chicken coop. Fish hatchery, cricket bin in the Live Bait store by the smalltown river. An unspoiled school, full of Seratonin children. The kid in class who bragged he could brush his teeth and pee at the same time. Yeah, sure.

The way every brattish, brutish boy who, when the the class was singing "America", twisted and sullied and degraded the words to say "God shit his piss on three." You didn't do that? Of course the Chomps all did, to amuse each other and the impressionable brats

standing close in the chorus. The reasons why kids are blameless, because they philosophically resort to "Don't blame me, blame God because he made me." Can't argue with, or disprove, that.

Teachers were not boatwrights of the soul or intellect in those days. Education was like sucking a weak flame into the end of a cigar. His kindergarten teacher had one of the Jewish names like Honeymoon. Elementary school teachers like ancient and tiny Miss Luger, shrivelled as last year's Michigan apple, drove a big black Cadillac Comfortfood or rode a broom. Old teachers and principals drove slow, heavy high visibility safety cars that looked like shotgun shells with paperclip bumpers. Younger ones drove truncated and peanut-shaped horsepower things that went real fast.

Children were more frightened of Mr. Weblosbury than of Mrs. Wheelbarrowberry. Mrs. Sturmunddrang punished the poor little black girls in the class, already pregnant from eating the starchy white school paste, for talking, sharing motherly childbearing lore.

Throbby Sturmunddrang was in Tippy's class, and in an assult to all forms of hereditary authority Tippy promptly knocked his block off.

An old Aleppo family, fashionable and wealthy descendants of eighteenth-century snuff-dippers, treelined and venerable Sturmunddrangwood Drive rolled purposefully from Academe to out by the river. Other teachers like the late Henry Hangnail or Mrs. Autopartz.. Old Racoonski would say on the recess playground Okay class, divide into two teams the Poppies and the Monkeys and they would. From the West Indies, dour Mr. Upsetter. One teacher the kids really liked, dispensing more than anecdotes about pop music, may have actually been Cynthia Lennon, the lady whom the Beatle

dumped.

I was press-ganged into being a library aide, while my brother Thump was a brutal Safety Patrol boy, all safety petroleum and safety patriot, demanding kickbacks from students wanting to cross, drivers stopped at the stop signs and his hand signals. Medals were given to children's books like Wind in the Weblos (the kid had to fart? Sorry).

Or Little Peter Pee-Pee, about the Belgian boy in the urinary fountain sculpture, later killed in the Blitzkrieg offensive. There wasn't a whole lot of music in that school, but Library Aides chanted Do we like Mister Dewey yes we do yes we do yes we do we do we do we do we do, acknowledging the groovy decimal system, as we filed and straightened disheveled shelves.

Denied tenure at his university, that disgraced famous flying saucer expert served as one of our gradeschool teachers that year.

You'd think Professor Hynuknyuknyuk was the Three Chomps' favorite bit-part player, in one episode trying to remember a formula for sexy girl space aliens’ rocket fuel. Anacanafranistan! Alkabob.

Meanwhile the saucer flaps were craftily used to promote a new bright green soft drink caled Martian Dew. Aleppo kids were smart. Santa Claus was often successfully sued for malpractice and breach of promise around there. Kids would tussle in vicious neighborhood mathfights over whether One Infinity plus One Infinity equals Two Infinities, while university mathemetician neighbors would teach us over the back fence concepts of a googol and googol plex, concepts so expansive that a decade later we'd have to take hallucinogenic drugs to fully accept them. A battery of tests were applied in elementary school which determined Tippy's IQ

to be somewhere between that of a racoon and a bicycle and retested, it fell somewhere between that of a box elder and a customs official. Things were determined to be awfully accurate. Some kids took tough pride in these statisitics of placement and sported Born To Fix Toasters patches on their windbreakers.

I remember I got pretty upset at this educational tracking and typecasting. To Tippy, whatever the tests claimed was OK, for knowledge was like soda pop, sweet but unnourishing and he intended to continue to live his afterschool milk-and-cookies sort of existence. Every experience a protein for strong bones and bodies.

School was not built to stay at home, and school in Aleppo was an active thing, full of field trips. Wailing across a highway bridge on a Science class field trip to a dirt pile, Tippy threw a big green acorn and felled three cars: a late-model Rolledgoldsmobile, a Dodge Decadent and a visiting Professor's wife's Vulveeta. Autosquash, the vegetable that you throw off overpasses, was sold in Mr. Farmer’s Market for specifically that purpose. Regaining his composure, the Science teacher had the kids analyze little bits of the accident with reagents and colored waters in test tubes. While boiling nitroglycerin for that experiment the testtube blew up and scarred my hand, which later influenced my guitar playing. One car that day—the police car that impulsively skidded to the scene and overshot the mark—they could barely retrieve from the sludge pond. Near our elementary school sat a great grey greasy gross sludge pond, containing all the inorganic heavy metal poisons bubbled through the town's water supply intended to kill the ugly river carp while making kids and their

teeth stronger or something in the purification process. The pond was poisonously inorganic in a weird metallic way to begin with, not the kind of place that bred horrid Michigan mosquitoes found in rainwater collected in old tires behind greasers' garages. Not even healthy enough to be malarial. Mudmagnets pulled in a couple of small children every year to become encrusted into lodestones at the bottom, while evil septic cobalt farts bubbled up on occasion, alarming nearby classes and triggering a fire drill. A good excuse while they were out there for the kids to smoke flowers like Virillium and Bartenderfoot, which in Michigan were illegal to pick. A child asks the question, Do trees have orgasms? and fails to get a decent answer.

One class took a field trip to an FBI pistol range and he saw a picture of one of his liberal teachers used as a target, which did not amuse her in the least. A cop who would later be President Ford was shooting up there too. Another trip when older took Tippy's class to the water filtration plant where, when teacher's back was turned, instead of peeing the kids emptied the contents of their drug pockets into Aleppo's water supply, prompting little more than a few rich metaphors in the Letters to the Editor column in the next evening's Aleppo Auroch.

A yellow bus showed up to take us an hour away to the industrial suburb Moxibustion, MI for a hot and noisy factory tour.

Elementary school teacher James Kickstand drove the bus that took us all into the Pistondale Road assembly plant. As the cars rolled by, boys saved any screws or washers rolled out, hoping to assemble a sedan or coupe from a pocketful of parts themselves. Kids were

optimistic at that age. There the kids collected enough parts that rolled onto their side of the yellow line to build a spaceship, then (someone’s older sister’s Science Fair project) a robot, which put several thousand out of work a few years later. Tippy built a gun director to hurl apples, through the curved-space geometry of his neighborhood, over the other mobile homes onto his enemy's metal roof. When a class trip went to Baffle Stream, where the breakfast cereals come from, the bad kids spit their childhood-disease snot, sputum and pink eye into as many packages on the conveyor belt as possible till their young lungs and bronchial passages were cigarettedry. The school nurse, along as one more chaperone, hastily grabbed some of the sugar from the cereal manufacturing process and whipped up some mildly intoxicating codeine syrups to placate her unruly charges. Haw! Score! Still, they got high that days on school authority’s orders, kinda cool.

They taught us things in school like how an elephant can crack and open a peanut with his trunk. How many clowns fit in a little car, compared to how many Shriners. Why goats eat cans. How nobody can fail but slip and fall stepping on a banana peel. They taught children how to laugh like a laugh track, which university researchers determined kept us attentive when school felt like a stituation comedy on TV, and might do so in case of atomic attack. Taught us how to clap our hands when the host comes onstage.

Students were expected to restate and recite short, pithy, secular public school prayers like “April showers bring May flowers.”

In one of the older grades in elementary school, they tried to fill us with the facts of life and wife. They had us watch the award-

winning heart-warming documentary "When a Little Boy Piddles" to teach us about our bodies. Lip service to the Kennedys’ progressive pudenda agenda. But we were still filled with childhood brain mucus.

Filled with childhood Elvis. Romance in our pants.

Across town was an elementary school called Waterfall, for kids who cry too much. Emotionally-deprived children were running out into the fields to kiss the beaks of crows, muzzles of cows, or find suck at the udder's teats. Our own playground world of recess knocked out plenty of permanent teeth, the teeter-totters split front lips, and tongues were found stuck to metal-pipe jungle gyms on a freezing day. Boys chasing the gradeschool girls, the type who'd admonish "Don't eat snow, it's radioactive since the A-bomb tests".

Winter snow snakes and the kind of gravel that kids delight in blaring through snow speakers. Snowballs, snowforts, sledding. A neighbor’s dog with chains on his legs to help him run in the snow; animal angels, made from favorite dogs spun in snow. Winter always left Tippy wheezing, huffing hard to push air down his lungs like it was snow, thick and resistant, lungs as mud. Each winter meant the smartest kid in class would be culled off with a concussion from a tobogganing accident. In half the United States to not like winter is the most subversive thing possible, and we didn't.

Boys our age were often in Scout troops, which probably acclimatized us for Rock n’ Roll bands. Including the fancy duds, for the Scouting Goods section was at the back of Woundlickers' store on Main Street, where my Mom took me to buy TuffBusters boys' jeans, in those embarassingly large sizes "Burly" and "Bulky". Yet

Scoutwise, Wolf, Bear, Lion, Weblos equals Mikey, Louie Louie, Cutey and Mensch (from Shmendrick, the oldest Hormoneowitz brother) Chomp. I don't think the Chomps ever made an episode where they were Cub Scouts, but sure should've. If there was no real nature around us to explore, build brotherly woodsman campfires in, we nevertheless proudly wore these police-like uniforms trudging through snow, icy winds, towards promised adulthood or at least junior high and high school freedoms.

Despite the University and its reputation as a shelter for liberals, the Republlquaint Party was prominent in Aleppo, a town with more realtors than reality-seekers, with more people selling insurance than reefer. The Superintendent of Schools claimed to be a former Dauphin or later-dynasty Pharaoh. The mayor of Aleppo was the guy who made a killing selling the school system campers and motor homes, even streamlined, bulbous Malariastream trailers and sometimes just tiny backyard hibachis, to park behind the schools as "portable classrooms", to house and contain the footloose wanderlust baby boom overflow.

One kid had the kind of antiwar University parents who habitually, chronically refused to let him play army, so as he left deadset against it we would pelt him with apples until he screamed back "You're a toilet". Locked in mortal combat with the enemy chaplain. Ah, sweet peer-group cruelty of youth. Kid stuff. Mind like a tuna fish sandwich. These were the flowers of the future. In the 1960s all that napalm and atomic bombs and germ warfare anthrax stockpiling made playing army difficult, for what kid had those toys?

Not so much fun anymore, we wer bought witless counterinsurgency

toys, sophisticated antipersonnel games and race riot equipment.

Spray candy Mace that just washes off. Tippy was sent home for trying to set fire to an egg. Like a basket of baby Christs crying in the school furnace. Some kid brought a dog-written copy of WOMEN SQUATTING AND PEEING magazine, and all holy moly Hell broke loose. Any more of this nonsense and parents threatened to show their true colors and send us all to Mr. Jesus school. Catechism classes must've taken place, for a hard-to-support lightweight Christianity, churchgoing like a balsa wood glider airplane. Christ's race across the sea. Not a private school like St. Gremlin's Academy or St. Golem's School, with its winning team the Golden Golems.

Tippy wasn't the School Christ anyplace. Threatened with these parochial schools when he became too obstreperous, too vociferously irreverent, too smart for his own good. Advice unheeded, like the version of the story of the puppet-become-boy, where the talking cricket gets killed.

OK, that wasn’t him, that was me. Right, and my brother. But it could have been Tippy too.

By this time Catholic and Jewish and Nothingness and Everythingness were all the same, just something you said when another kid asked. Tippy's people must've been one or the other.

Garlic Catholics, East-Orange Jews. More Hallowe’en than halvah.

Catholic equals Cadillac. Tippy had a doghouse shaped like a church, and an Easter egg with duelling-scar stitches. He thought the holiday greeting was pronounced something like M'BABY CKISSM'ASS, the way the older children said it; I was confused by the tannenbaum, upon which I imagined the Nazis crucified Christ.

Like many saints, Tippy would talk to planes in the sky and get pissed when they didn't reply. He used to steal crucifixes, he must've had hundreds of them. No, that was me too, when I used to identify with bully beef Barabbas or Pilate, you know, the tough guys. Pushing people off cathedrals.

In fifth grade, they separated the boys and the girls for gym class. Self-conscious in a gym full of circumcised bison, but that soon passed once he realized the bounty his endowment, God's gift.

Squirrely classmate Owen Overandover muttered to tittering girls about the enormity, while he was also cruelly denigrating my own.

Hope I never see Owen’s smug face at one of our concerts.

I almost forgot. In the elementary school upper grades they distributed free cautionary issues of DEFLOWERED AND DEVOURED magazine to the girls while we boys were at Gym. Did they do that when you went? I saw one once, that a girl had forgotten. Guys were given auto shop clinical horror stories of female hydraulics and its dire consequences. Ecch.

Like the OPTICS's logo of the little guy with the big magnifying glass, I'm going to put Tippy and the Chomps ourselves under the microscope lenses, add a reagent, see what reacts and is still swimming the petri dish. What remains alive will be the facts.

To blow or pick one’s nose in winter, when furnaces dry up all bodily fluids (except, Tippy says, those re-energized and liquefied by fucking), leaves a mess on the paper like a squashed bug. Nasal weevils, snot houseflies. Ecch.

Tippy was a typical little kid, snot in his hair, luminous with the

fire of behavior. Tippy was a sick boy to account for his brilliance. I guess he was so smart since he was always home from school, getting de-mediocritized. There were reasons every Winter was agony for Tippy. Just as every perfume has its own price tag, his bodily humors grew a sense of the absurd. Tippy's screwed-up athsmatic breathing was like sixteen men on a dead man's chest, all yo-ho-ho-huffs. Punctured bronchitis a whistling teapot wheeze. As a child he made noises like a balloon being squeezed. Not loudmouth as much as loudnose. Hey buzzsaw breath! Bothered by lung lizards, he knew the glovelike taste of aspirin. Knew streptococcus' impeccable ache. Quicksilvery phlegm in the lungs like liquid minnows, little coughs like a popcorn popper. There's a gun in his lungs and it's pointed at his sunburned throat. Breathful of mercenary dumdum bullets. Imagine him with a snootful of dust in his nasum and lungs, dust like the red stuff that floated over a terrified New Orleans from Africa, dust exploding when he smokes a cigarette. The final crackling of John Wilkes Booth's exploding moustache. Sore throat like an overworked fire engine. If for some week in Winter he didn't get sick it was because all his germs were sleeping, somehow forgetting to hang out their sign Illness Here Tonight. Vaporizers, strepthroats, cough medicines, vaporubbing balms and rubs. He even dreamed he got sick. At age seven he carried a stranger-stomped demeanor.

As an adolescent, between strepthroat kisses, he'd moan to girls "Your tongue between your teeth don't offer me no relief," which later became a song. A spaghetti of warm hair in your throat. When he coughed this threadeater yanked at their heartstrings. The

tortured hacking like the strained cables of that bridge that flopped, split, crumbled and crashed in the Tacoma narrowwinds, their heroin wind. Sore throat flying on a magic carpet of discomfort and hacking pain, hacking its way into a repition not unlike music, his first automusical experience. His lungs two big hurtful fluid-filled blisters, anticipating calliope collapse at the stay-at-home circus. Frustration and panic at not being doled out his fair and necessary ration of breath. Bronchitis Love.

Tippy reached for a Snottex tissue. Poor snot somnambulist, when he blew his snout on a tissue he'd wind up with a handful of fibres in his gummy palm. For a while he went through a roll of industrial paper towels a day. Drowning in the toilet of his own nasal swamp. Pesky pesto from his nose. He blew his nose on an old furnace filter and the fibreglass prickled his nostrils even worse. He could barely blow his nose in his sleep. Singing snot. The Age of Mucous. Nerves and nasal passages. Dizziness in America. He owed his character to cold, wet phlegm. Silvery snail-trails under his nose, Welland canals, or the Soo Locks in the flow of their bitter traffic to his mouth in cold weather. Nose and upper lip as a picturesque mucous-covered bridge.

A teenage girl babysitter who thought she was so smart explained that Tippy's nose was always having its period. Every man with a runny nose has a little inkling what it's like to be a woman, and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Sometimes what came out of his nose was the color of cola, blowing big scabs out of his nostrils like wolves' teeth. Bubblegum in his crackpot nose, that pencil factory called his nose. The nose is the outlet of the mind, that

diamond door. Heart in his nostril. Asked his address as a small child, Tippy stood up straight and announced "My fingers can always be found in my nose". Once he accidentally poked his finger through one notstril and out the other side. Trying to finger-poke out an airhole, poking through phlegm, but also through dark childhood thought and depression. One mischievous gradeschool teacher put Tippy's name down in the attendance book as Rusty Fingerz, then tried to get the class to nickname the lad that but it didn't catch on.

What was she thinking? She couldn’t get away with that nowadays.

Bloody pollen came out of his nose, a mystery analogous to sperm, snot of the worst kind no bee would touch. The redveined gummy chalcedony you always find in library books; look it up in my unpublished pamphlet Snot, Enemy of Books. He was bothered by nosewood, brambles and uncleared brush. A rattle in his nose, rattlesnake in its rocky cliffs, finger-scraped escarpment.

Cockroaches running in and out of his nose. The honk of the wild goose man, the grosbeak goose beak laying golden eggs. The condition of his nose like crates of munitions banging into each other while being loaded onto a ship at the dock. A cat runs out of his nose. A bat flies out of a pumpkin, and when a cannister of flour is opened a moth was seen to fly out. The American Dream came out of his nose. Ice cream parlor in his nose well-stocked with so many identifiable flavors of snot and phlegm, like mucous cones with dried blood-snot sprinkles. Where nostrils equal stigmata. They should invent something like pipecleaners for the nose, or an electric drill attachment, something like a toilet bowl brush the size of a pencil. Is snot classified by the courts as a vice? Snot grows up, legally

changes its name. Snot travels south for the winter—Spring Break!— and becomes a guy’s you-know-what.

Springtime found Tippy gardening his nose, yanking weeds and the equivalent of slugs and snails in snot. He hollered Bloody Mucous when stung even by a weak bee Snot in his nose like molecules and doublebubble helixes and stuff, or the notes on a musical staff. Doublemucous nasal infections shot, burning a fuselike trajectory, to his ears, which made his hearing adept for Rock n' Roll. The boy stood on the burning deck.

From the cochlea to the cloaca. Eustachian tubes of a crustacean.

His nose barking like sea lions till his throat felt like the warm slaughtered carcass-pelts of baby seals reddening on the ice floe snow. Squeezing lemonade from those adenoids; Tippy's were swollen grapefruit-pink. On a map he saw a country "Aden" but nowhere could he find relief from these. That's what made his voice that way. A leisure service of the Flu Leasing Corporation. Early man's stone chopper tools or more contemporary atomic mushroom clouds nearly came out from his nose. He blew his nose till his brains came out of his nostrils, little bits of the surface of his brain electrified with cracklin' good ideas and good intentions which he hated to lose and it hurt him just then to forget.

Death from allergy was common in his, and many, families. It got so he'd blow his nose when he didn't really mean it. A direct descendant of Saint Sebastian, pierced by allergy shots, but I'd say Tippy was allergic to Sundays. Still, he went for a battery of shots at Dr. Frank Wagon, Pediatric and Apocalyptic Medicine.

Death from

allergy was common in his family. It got so he'd blow his nose when

he didn't really mean it. A direct descendant of Saint Sebastian, pierced by allergy shots, but I'd say Tippy was allergic to Sundays.

Still, he went for a battery of shots at Dr. Frank Wagon, Pediatric and Apocalyptic Medicine. Dr. Frank Wagon was one of the physicians in the 1952 doctors’ plot to make Stalin sick, but was flown by the CIA to the US and his practice re-established in Aleppo. He supported conservative causes, his friend’s later anti-Rock Mayoral campaign.

Loosen the skin of the allergic child. There are some hypnoallergic children in Aleppo living in oxygen tents and bubble chambers, untouched by human hands, served by sterile ape attendants. Rhinitis, or rhino-itis, is obviously caused by too many Saturday morning cartoons and children's books depicting that animal. In the Parents' Book of Lies, asthma comes from dread hormones involved in masturbation and maturation. Scientists with a conscience have traced it directly to the agar-agar of repression. You needn't have the same allergies as your parents. Allergy to an overstuffed house, furniture and kapok pillows and Mom. Asthma is inherited, you get it from your parents, may have been caused by the constrictions of a too-tight Mom. An overstuffed Mom, maybe. It was surprising that he had asthma, for if athsma equals inhibition, how could Tippy of all people be inhibited? Asthma's azimuth, asthmatic wheezums, mucous spasms. Audio edema, giant hives of sound on the eardrum. Infectious stress from impossible foods, moldy beestings. Allergic to dog dandruff. Allergic to chalk dust so he had his doctor's permission to skip school. As a teenager he counseled reliance on the inhalation of a burning herb to bring relief. Air pollutants wafting over from Motorsburgh made Dr. Frank Wagon

suggest change of climate to cactus instead of reefer weed smoke, and coincidentally he had a daughter who was a real-estate agent in the Southwest. Tippy's parents said nuts.

Tippy continued to suffer in perpetual catarrh. Disturbingly educational pamphlets were written in his name. Raised his head and shoulders in an effort to get air, to get space. His ongoing wheeze a quieter version of the horrible screetch in the middle of that night in November from clocks set back for the end of Daylight Savings time (they seem to enjoy being smoothly set forward). His Mom read a magazine article that recommended, in exasperation, have the child’s nose consult the pediatrician’s, or your own doctor's, fist. Once he went into a cheap hospital—JMJ-Mart experimented with a health department too—thinking an operation could help. The tonsils were promptly removed, but Tippy was so young they were going to let the intern do it and he almost snipped his gonads instead.

This was before Dr. Frank Wagon had crashed his plane Up North, but he was off flying or golfing or both somewhere so he had his great-grandfather paint Tippy's eye, ears, nose and throat with poison prusso-carob-carbohydrotetrachloric iodine. "Bronchitis is a metal" Tolstoy had said to Doctor Gramps, so they painted the inside of the child's throat with mercury, chromed it as they would the bumper and trim of the make of car by that name.

Motorsburgh medicine. Even

at age five Tippy was not amused. Stick to a good pediatrichigan.

Tippy and his doctor never grew as close a friendship as those bloodcovered doctors of the nose Freud and Fleiss. It was more like a mutual battlefield respect. I still don't see why it's considered an insult to a psychiatrist to holler from the couch Hey Fleissnose!

When a sly doctor offered to sell him an operation where he he implanted terrycloth towels in the sinuses in order to dry up the mucous and couscous once and for all, Tippy cried "But muke is the glue that holds my head together! It'd explode in crazy thoughts without it, Doc!" Sawbones then offered to substitute mucous with mercurochrome but it was no sale. The surgeon's son planned to attend an out-of-state university for different ideas, so they finally decided to operate on Tippy. Beside his bed the bouquet stank, for the flowerpot was filled with urine. Nurses confided in him the pranks and blood oath vendettas they were going to play on other patients.

So many catheters in him he felt like a human water pipe, a hookah filled with blood. Tippy was a stigmatic too. No way he could've survived in Catholic school. Self-inflicted self-consciousness, to produce the best songs and deliver them with all his all. He suffered so to entertain you all. You better be grateful.

As he was wheeled into the operating room he just knew he was going to cough and inhale the scalpel, like the whale inside Jonah for a change. Upon the thirty-ninth mis-poke of the intravenous spike he asked "Are you sure you're a doctor?" and the attending physician immediately expired of a broken heart. The pinch-hitter surgeon then ribbed him how, waking from the anesthetic, Tippy decided to form a band. As it turned out, the hospital collapsed during either a typical summer tornado or the rare big Michigan earthquake that happened during his operation, leaving him with Christ's broken nose, which even the Barbara Streisand operation couldn't fix. Tippy could always wrench open a jar of olives with the nose he was left with.

The rock critic Threadbear once said Tippy had a bloody nose for girls. And a good nose for Rock.

Tippy was easily amazed, amazed at how a record could play the same songs in the same order over and over. Or how they merely played records over a loudspeaker. Which is why Tippy and all his friends took so many drugs. Not that we were anything special, the world was such that you needed drugs just to work at jobs; why do you think they even call it a coffee break? As kids we evidently got all the wrong viruses.

For years Tippy, like most American kids, had lived on dyes, preservatives and chemical additives. Ate the nitrites and threw away the bacon. But when those stopped working for themselves he took antihistamines, antivitamins and survivamints. Oh, maybe they were all prescribed by Dr. Frank Wagon at first. Some of them stirred up his annihilitis or urge to trash n' destroy things and loved ones.

Phlogiston and calx, entropy and enthalpy tabs, heat given off upside his head. Nitrogen balloons. Cold drugs, hot drugs, drugs of objectivity and subjectivity. Pills with hair or tendrils. Power cubes.

Ylem, Xylem and Phloem blockers. Strontium, thiamine, cobaltcovered niacin. Miniature A-Bombs. Aspirin that doesn't really cure anything. Drink and Eat drugs. Bottles of breath and hippy vaporizers. Drugs that expand and drugs that don't. Drugs that make you vague and drugs that make you precise. Brain in bloom, his four-alarm conciousness. Getting high was instinctive and selfcorrecting, the way a dog eats grass. Snarfing Mom's oven cleaner.

Some homebody kids learned to like drugs from "kitchen chemistry" experiments, mixing Mom's spices together in the sink. A child's first

drug experiment was licking condensation off the aluminum windows in his room in winter, so high he could see his breath though the furnace was raging on hallucinogenic heating oil, spilled in patches on the driveway. Lots of kids learned how to take drugs from puffballs on the playground kickball fields at recess, sniffing spores.

Consuming vast quantities of Power Comics, which were comic-book compounds that thicken the blood like cum. A haunted bottle of cough suppressant. From playing army—historic army—to cough syrup highs; a rather Hessian Pertussing. Pretty soon Tippy was merrily forgetting things, forgetting people's names, putting plastic wrap in the refrigerator. Something downright pancreatic, in a quantity measured "per square ounce". Taking pennyante and chewing some strange root before he realized, yeah, this is exactly how neurotics notice things.

The first time Tippy smoked dope he cried. It's all too beautiful.

He needed marijuana to lace the disjointed parts of his head together, so they didn't fly off in absentminded forgetfulness like scraps of leather on the surface of a stream. With so many professors in these parts the condition was endemic, not just academic. I can't summarize marijuana. The lettuce of his mind plowed new forms and rivulets into his conversations and thoughts. Plow it under, yes, plow it under. The state motto that year on the license plates was Mister Farmer, Let Me Water Your Crop. The farmer has no need of recreational drugs, attuned to the throbbing of nature's cyclic rhythms and the purgative of hard work pulsing thru his veins. But the student child needs to jumpstart a sense of rhythm and mortality. Tippy would slip marijuana into the vaporizer in his room for athsma.

Cigarettes with a sharp point. Reefers and their refills. We smoked golden asbestos for the sharp spiky tingle in our lungs. Some bitchen Mary Renault reefer. My mood was hempstrung. Putting a chip of philosophers' stone hashish in his pipe. How the Sultan of Tippystan took to the hookah, and the hookah was how Allah got hooked.

Whosoever smokes dope with God loves life through sex or cowardice. Initiating fire. Pot equals Ambrosia. Little kid-sized tokes called "marijuanettes". Once cannibals of cannabis, now smoking cannibis Camels. Smoked some Krakatoa, or the Sound-of-Music flowers that grow on hillsides in Switzerland and Germany.

Smokeless cigarettes. Around the world in Eighty Drugs. Dimes of God. Tippy and his friends would try to smoke sparklers and highway emergency signal flares, even the 3/32" waterproof cannon fuse they used for film can bombs full of black powder stolen from one kid's dad. Cigars that smelled like your dog—or in your case, fool, your momma's pubic hair—on fire.

We were pelted by bong water from the sky. Penguin piss, salmon piddle. Porpoise-skin chewing gum. When Tippy smoked a hydroelectric plant bats flew out and he got water on the brain.

Breathed a gas halfway between CO and CO2. Boudoir air of a nifty robot diner. Puffs from a magic dragon. Zen air, why the bear?

Remember, in those days a common ending to children's storybooks was "So they took a Magic Quaalude and escaped". Ate a handful of Alice-in-Wonderlands that made you teeny-tiny. Welsh Rarebits.

Pills made out of blind-, deaf- and dumbstones. Bubble gum joints.

Sanity pills. Menthol-Rub on his gums. Nibbled a piece of paper too small, with some kind of substance on it. He tried to write an insulting

letter and the paper became brocade, white embroidered silk upon his hands. Haunted frost, like slow-acting vermouth. Made him feel like chewed satin. In the hot season he'd lie on the golf course hills, tripping like all, and shoot at fireflies with a BB gun, little luminous explosions when hit.

Tippy's father lay down the law when he said "If my son needs drugs he'll buy them on the street like my generation did and that's final" and sat back down in his chair with his newspaper, headlines like TEETH STILL MISSING. His mother would wash the dishes while he was still using them, would scrub underneath the food. No, I guess that was my Mom (I really knew nothing of Tippy’s parents, and he rarely mentioned them). But since parents didn't really contribute to the kid's development in those days let me tell you more about the drugs he—and every Aleppo child—took.

It was figured out that drugs were made of old gods, woodland ones once a certain number of people had stopped believing in them.

Drugs were synthesized out of old forms of ambrosia, processed and refined, or out of sleep or love or wind-chill factor or travel. New stuff started flowing into town, or around and around and finally to the kids.

Berries crushed beneath the hooves of Satan. Driving sleep into his head with a mallet. Wake up and go to sleep! in every sense of the word. Drugs like WWII or the Birth of the Universe in his head.

Drugs n' disorientation like a gyroscope off its balance wheel, or ballast in a Montgolfier balloon, the rooster and sheep's head peering out, terrified or at least concerned. Smoked out of a Liberty Bell.

Yellow lozenges of pure ignominy cut with hominy. King Strang stimulants. Sal ammoniac of the simoniacs. An aluminum autumn.

Sardonic salts. Serpentiotus. Simulacras of stimulants called, of course, Stimulacras. Cancerous cantharidians. Spanish flypaper.

Perambulatrol, a weird English drug that makes you feel like a baby carriage, or baby carriage fuel. Taking White-Outs, those pills invented by the mother of one of the guys in "The Chimpanzees" TV show. Duckbilled Placidyls and Platypusas. You know, kid drugs.

Drugs, in their own way trivia of the counterculture, called Plamandons and Larrystarins. Gas stations where kids hung out taking Siropans. Blasphemetamine, which makes you say "fuck" to God, who only chortles. A drug from Vermont called Pomfretamine; a drug, teacher or neighborhood called Piddlebury or Piddleburn. Not just magic mushrooms with "Ask Alice" hookah worms perched on them, but magic pumpkins too. That fine volcanic ash that appears everywhere, pepper covering everything when a plastic spoon is left upon the electric range. How old were you when you first smelled ammonia? Wheezing Tippy was relieved it wasn’t pneumonia.

Drugs that even made him joyously depressed like a girl in love.

Reminded of the oversensitive, momentarily lonely girl, attuned to and operating at a social speed greater than most, who killed herself in despair one night because she wasn't getting any phone calls offering dates, little knowing that the phone line was out of order and a workman, who it turns out she used to know and wanted to take her out in high school was outside nearby furiously working to repair it.

That bad.

Rubber drugs prompting the screeching of brakes between the ears, the stink of minibike tires laying a patch as all his thoughts do a wheelie. The sound of a bike tire carelessly crunching a frog, sound

of a zit being popped as heard from the inside of the face. The different metals in different drugs made sounds in the head. The leadpipe clanging plumbing noises, of objects hitting the heads of everybody’s favorite comedians on TV. His own head got as big as a flying saucer. He ate drugs like the churchgoer eats Christ.

One young Christmas when he was taking drugs Tippy just asked Santa for sounds. Holy injections that made him as generous as Santa Claus. Favorite drugs around Christmas became gold, frankincense—the smell of Frankenstein—and myrrhuana. It even sounds like some kind of snuff. Thinking in motifs of people fainting, falling in bandaged snow. He'd go out in the dead of winter to seek the menstruation of other artistic animals, like snakes, rabbits, possum. Why do you think reindeer, dangerously crashing through treetops and naked wire of electric fences for it, seek out your piss?

Glad it's only Christmas half the year.

Later that year, cabbage moths flitted summer salad days around Tippy's head. Summer-cum-laudanum and summer-cum'ludes. Not drugs as meals or memory, of course, but drugs as public summer recreation program, as the veterans' park pool. Each town or neighborhood has its own drug cultures.

Drug taking was like spilling salt. "He's fainted! Somebody fetch the spilling salts". Throwing some over our left shoulders to the devils that soon appeared there. The battle between sinister lefthanded guiltedged guitarplayers and. the righthanded dexterity of dextrose (cutting edge of white powders) freeks from Dexeater, Michigan, site of the U.F.O. kidnapping "Incident at Dexeater", where

the kidnapped Blood and his white wife were later found to have increased hemogoblins in his plasm, plasma and bloodily fluids.

Pharmaceutical bastardy. Aleppo appleminds in a certain funk punctiliousness, the unctuousness of the unconcious. The Best Robot Minds, the big elephant medicine. A zen pause. A chopstick from Aleppo's only Chinese restaurant. Smoked a yellow reefer rolled all the way from China; several Chinese engineering students at the University verified that, including the one who lived secretly for three years in the church attic. Some kind of drug activity teens called the Chinese Clothesline. Bought his drugs in highschool from somebody named "Coke" Aspirin. Smoked during skipped classes up in the clock tower with a kid nicknamed “Pipes” Caustic, fated to be (like his father) a plumber, but now merely an amiable dopesmoking head. Take some time to spend some money. Some drugs felt like escalators under the sea. Some smelled like burning asbestos. Tippy felt like the Giant with Thirteen Brains. With drugs you see things between the spaces. Rebel trashcans. Some drugs were Heat you can Eat. As a kid he began chewing Welder's Root, later drug chewing gum. Pigeon pills. Us drugdogs, we munched loaves of marijuana or hashish wrapped in plastic explosives. Kids chewed gelgenite that was artfully disguised as wax skeletons with syrup inside or wax moustaches, inhaling Mace stolen out of police cars. Hanging around the edge of student riots, kids found they could spirit tear gas respirators away from the lackadaisical police department. Tippy smoked the five Cubebs and a stairstep.

Sneaked some toilet opium, optimum opium. Murphy's morphine.

Dilithium crystals. We took drama drugs. Humanoid and brahma bull

thyroid steroids. Urban flowers. Chewy kaliedescopes. Blue Hotels.

Mind a fog with colored lights around it, a whipped dessert. A plastic brain. Voluntary autism. Utopia City.

Drugs often turned Tippy into a werewolf boy (roll transition scene), a Focke-Wulf Messerschmidt airplane or later a teenage fuckwolf straight out of The Philosophy of Drugs. Subjectivity, slipsliding into solipsism. Undesirable effect oils. Potent cortisones.

Streptomycin damage to the eighth wonder-nerve to the brain, causing deafness and vertigo vandalism. Psychotic apartments, chlorinated kids in summer swimmingpools, re-learning each Summer how to swim. How badly they were born. A recreational pharmaceutical consortium was developed by the Queen of England's husband in his Rolls Royce chemistry lab to cope with his tremendous boredom. In fact, one theory has it that the Indian medicine man who sold Tippy his drugs was his childhood pediatrician, Frank Wagon in war paint, later to die in a mysterious plane crash Up North.

LSD, of course, stands for Literary, Sensitive Decadents, and for those of us with libraries, continuous packing and unpacking our minds, it was an occasional reference (or de-referencing!) text, ingesto-consulted with preparation and gravity. Kids like us were both lysergic and allergic. Taking dream reagents. Dipsy-doodle drugs especially bouncing around Tippy’s hermetically-sealed head.

Took the dalmatian-spotted pills Pongos and Perditas and saw microdots before our eyes. LSD was invented in the Middle Ages by Moses Mammonnedes, the alchemist who first synthesized mammon.

His descendants turned it into tasty, crunchy manna, sold at Rock

concerts and sporting events. Favorite drug of homunculus kids was this alchemical lead LSD, plumbum as pabulum. A special kind of LSD called "Battery Acid". That silly bison of psilocybin. LSD's nonalkaline reasoning and solipsism pills. As the chemists say, let's drop acid and touch base. They sold psychedelics that fought seasickness too, what the old sailors called the Poopdeck Pill. But that summer the government had added something stinky to LSD to discourage heavy users, earning it the nickname "Acrid". "It's crystalline, I wonder why...?" "Who cares, let's drop!" went the hackneyed antidrug commercial with the teenagers getting caught in a giant crystal.

The old screaming user ploy.

Aleppo schools would experience waves of anemia from auromycin administered without the mild LSD called frolic, or folly, acid. When to frolic, and when to suffer colic? That was the pediatricans’ dilemma. In response, he gobbled up summery carnival snacks like live bees covered in cotton candy or caramel. Stop and take a moment to smoke the flowers. Kids could be confused, make poor landscapers, in a world where "grass" and "weed" were euphemisms for the same thing. As a kid drugs and disease made Tippy feel spiders and bugs hoofing it all over his body, which as a sexual teenager soon made him discover Sensual Massage. As a boy with a broken nose, Tippy earned his cocaine. But drugs and food in that town downright were sex, magazine psychologists cautioned parents, and that comes later.

He was heavily medicated when his parents took him to tne annual Shriners' parade, with middleaged men stuffed into little cars, speeding out of the Zum Zoom Zim (say that fast without laughing)

Grotto. He couldn’t really tell if he just hallucinated that they were all caught in a flashing summer cyclone, clubmen whirling about, fezzes and putt-putt cars crashing everywhere. Wandering around, yearning for puberty, looking up in the night sky the stars all have mustaches. I don’t know about that.

Drugs as vicarious conciousness when you're totally fucking useless in highschool. They paint paisley on the walls of your holding tank, through the spending of several years too puce to be called life.

True, half of the University faculty had at least one son or daughter culled off by LSD overdoses or heroin addiction, but that shouldn't spoil our fun and freedom. Each family also had another child whose drug-taking led him or her to a greater score on the College Entrance Attitude tests, so that hash pipe was a double edged sword. At age eighteen we stopped taking most drugs because they didn't have any effect, now that they were legal and each of us could expand his own life himself and didn't need the metaphorical version these drugs offered.

Taking drugs as an adult, what a concept! Damn near impossible, I'd say.

All my stimulants make me compulsive and furious to write out this guilt, while when Tippy takes them they just make him playful.

He stumbles, smiles, mumbles "Gen-tlllle-men" cheerily, passes out.

He takes drugs just to have fun.

I suppose in boyood my Saturday morning Catholic Catechism classes were a myopic opiate too. They served up an only child religion, the Mom de-sexualized. But I have a brother. And band of bodacious brothers. Perhaps I’d have been happier in classical times

of neighborhood temples to Athena, Hera and Venus. Or embracing some northerly bigmeat babe around a roaring ritual fire in the Willendorf woods. A spring-wound Reject-o-Christ.

C’mere, little girl, I’ll let you touch my…guitar.

What did you

think I’d say? Get your mind out of the gutter. Guitar is not gutter, though the old ones used gutta-percha in the pic guard and other parts.

Oh, I haven’t brought my guitar, you’re right. And you told me that you plan to apply to Weblos Women’s College in Weblos, Massachusetts? We played there once. All stuck ups.

Oh, your mother went there? Hmm… OK, OK, I stand corrected. Don’t go. I’ll talk.

It was a good time to be a kid as bands brushed themselves up with a certain self-consciousness that appealed to kids, like Jack and the Beanstalks, the Little Engines that Could, and rich kid Cuthbert "Breaks" Cradlebough. The Lollipop Puppies had a rock version of "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” and the Birthday Cakes crooned "My Birthday Card". Those classic days, the Porcupines, Parrot Sleds, Peach Cubs and Spads all had songs on the charts, as did the Golfcartz, the Hopter Copters, the Blue Scubas, the Bubble Bambis, the Swearwords. The brief fashion for game-rock, with the Baseball Bats (on Pine Tar Records), Whiffle Balls, the Pennytossers, the Kites and the Guests. The Kickstands. The Flyswatters. the Snowball Fights, the Water Balloons. Conceived on a honeymoon at Nicaragua Falls, NY where slowly I turned, the Waterdowns' "Wow!" Plus "Land of a Thousand Drinks of Water", recorded by a chorus of kids in the middle of the night.

The singer Flo Flue and the Flu Seasons; née Fluegel, she

hated but was driven on by those grade school taunts of "Fluegelhorn!" for her nose. She contemplated a nose job then defiantly didn't get one. But she did playfully name a back-to-school album Deviated September.

I don’t know what made me think of her. She really wasn’t rock.

Maybe because you kind of look like her, y’know. Under your glasses. No, it’s nice, really. You have a pretty face.

Horace Mars had one of her records propped against the stereo that time I visited Coral’s house. Yes, I’ll be talking about them.

Important people in this tale.

The radio played the babyish squeals of the Incubators, as well as the Preemies, with their incubator amps and pacifier microphones.

The Child Stars, never near Hollywood, Child Custards and the Child Swans. The Torns grew up to become the fashion band the Clothespins, their special dance steps making their clothes spin. The Mittens, shaped like the outline of my state in winter. The Overshoe Rubbers' big instrumental splash "Puddlejumpin'", I can still play the riff. The Jokes came out with their successful "The Jokes on You" record, the Toddlers danced the "Toddler Up", and the polyelegant Chaperones faces were plastered everywhere. Johnny Corsage and the Corsairs. You can imagine that a futuristic band incessantly playing proms and formal parties would be the Corsagetron. The Pepper-Uppers did anything but that. The Big Lip Noises sang brrpbrrp-brr-brrpple-b’pple baby! Ha ha.

The Dirt Clods, The Baby Anchors, named after the old novelty item of a rubber tube attached to a lead weight, tied around the crawler's ankle.

Friendly Reform Jewish folk rock by the Passovers. Their opening act, singer-songwriter Barry Mitzvah, whose "My Gretchen" a lot of bands covered. And I might’ve been walking past a Jewish fraternity on campus when I first hear the somnambulistic sounds of the So Nu? Other records on their stereos were by the Nice Guys, Wisenheimer Guys and Nize Bebbies.

Popular on the Sligo Sundaynight Show, slackjaw’d stringballads by Malachai of Molokai, comforting and pseudo-parental in their instrumentation and background choruses.

Directing their energies towards children were the Be Carefuls, the Mompleasers, the Bedwetters, the Odd-Evens and the Imaginary Playmates, the Play Hot Dogs and the Silent Achievers Or the Highlights for Children, all reading early and still bragging about it in their twenties. The Curb Cuts and Bicycle Kings. The Ferris Wheels, the Batons, meteoric clowns of success. A rock song is more than brightly colored plastic parts though.

Young children hated a

group called the Naptimes. The Claire Sleeps With a Nightlight. The Guffaws. I had one popular two-sided record with tunes from the Snack Foods and the Gingerbreadboys. Bands with fanzine names like What the Comics Code Missed. The Life Sizes, the Full Meals and the Full Bullies' "Interview With a House Being Egged". The LoFat Milkmen, the Mild Hallucinogens. The Wax Lips, the Candy Bar Wrappers, The Takes One to Know Ones. The Tightwads, the Spitwads, the Big Things. The Buicks, Teiscoes, Bo'suns and Basketballs. The Choo Choos unforgettable rendition of "Choo Choo Love". Crenellated chemistry-set music by the Homemade Roman Candles. The Chocolate Chip Cookies, they smelled like cookies,

molasses smell to their hot cookie amplifiers. The yogurty sounds of the Pre-Stirreds; kids in Catholic school had a lot of fun with that name, saying it fast. The Nonswimmers, the Minus Signs, the Tinkertoys. A band the Small-School Athletes. Other kid bands were the Paper Route, the Chattertons, the Handouts. Smart n' smarmy cartoonists like the Decals. The Stencils' song "Crayons in the Night on My Mind", made people say "This isn't a band, it's a drawing".

Men with big heads like the the Don't Rububitins. The Jeepers, the Jutting Chins, the Single Files, the Stepasides, the Peckerwoods and the Semifinalists. The Wisdom Teeth covered the song "You're Going to Lose Those Teeth" written by dentist Dr. Fred Silverwashroom. The Passwaters, the Grandchildren, the Teeny Tinys, the Clickers, the Allowances, the Dust Kittens. The Big Darlin' got a job as the voice of the bully in a cartoon about a teenage character named Flip Birdfinger.

Bands whose drummers sounded like the Easter White House Lawn Egg-Roll. A rock star named Peanut (not the advertising Mr. Peanut) who cracks several to endless peanuts onstage to the music.

A rockstar who eats onstage, while one band's gimmick was to give the audience a glass of milk with each song. A band that brought a bowl of gruel onstage, giving food to a rock n' roll audience. The lunchtime sound of the Brown Baggers. Bands with an HO train circling the stage. Bands that say "See Ya" often. The first band to fall asleep onstage—it was late—ironically called the Insomniacs; everybody got their money back. The Bibs, the Aromatics. The Feetsmells vs. the Noseruns at the Built Upside Down Festival. The Nonplusseds and the Try It and See If It Fits.

Some of those bands sounded like a snake farting. I saw the knock down drag-out fight between the Bests and the Bestests. Like the match between two Japanese baseball teams called the Beatles and the Acid Heads, an exhibition game of the Beards vs. the Thighs was staged and a two-record set of the umpires' calls was pressed.

The Finders Keepers, the Barbies and Kens, the Fairytales, the Fastasleeps, The Felt Tips, the Pawprints, the Acorn's Pyjamas, the Kevins. There was never a Rock star named Tim, for who'd admit to being the Tim of Rock? A band Whose Mother Dresses Them Funny released their brilliant (brilliantined!) and defiant first album "WHOSE Mother Dresses Them Funny...?" The Mom and Pop Groceries, the Mailboxes, the Pecan Pies, the Horshoes, the Chemistry Sets, the Lawn Darts, the School Clothes, the Backyard Trampolines, the Lawn Chairs and the Beer Can Collectors. The Dogsleds, the Bobsleds, the Snowballs. The Culverts. The Staplegunners or Staplegunsels.

Neo-childhood bands like the I Don't Know If I Want to Right Now, or the I Don't Have To If I Don't Want to soon learned to dance the What's In It For Me? Of course this wave of kid-phrased bands was exploited by sluttishly short-skirted Who's Gonna Make Mes?.

The

Halloweens were a band in Halloween false-faces with licked candycanes stuck to their suits. The Jackolanterns, a pumpkinheaded bunch in business suits, smashed pumpkins onstage at the climax of their show. A band of Headmasters, and a band of smart English public-school kids called the Lesser Breeds Without the Law. A band that smokes, drinks, curses and plays with matches setting a bad example called the Kids, Don't Try This at Home. A band that broke the spines of books, composed of former press-ganged library

aides. Yet a band called the Fail in School changed their name to Stay in School for a single "family show" TV appearance.

Cacaphony played with old Caca-phone guitars. The Ironing Boards, indelible memories of their mothers ironing when they learned of JFK's assassination. The Lifeguards. I knew this girl broke her her beach bone dancing to the Peeling Sunburns playing in the town of Lifetime Beach, California. The School Buses’ "Stop On Signal" single for singles. They even had a guy in the band named "Bus Driver". The Firedoors' "Alarm Will Sound". The Brambles, the Beatlecards, the Traveltime, the Bleats, the Recordplayer Needles, the Flyswatters, the Spray Paints, the Extended Adolescents, the Melonz, the Ultramarine Submarine Sandwiches. You’ve probably never heard the Peashooters, the Partycrashers, the Pencil Sharpeners, the Seabirds.

A band called the Milk Moustaches sang "Water Puts Out Fire" to reasonable success. A band called the Vociferous, claiming to have been given that name by their elementary school Principal, and another one called the Perspicacious—they had to look that up. The Filmstrips; when I saw them, a cry from the audience: "Learn more".

Old daytime-movie bands like the Mildred Pierces, but , despite his attention to those old movies, Tippy would just change the channel if they got too girlish. The Snapping Gums. "Mind Your Manners" by the Draconians went to the Tippy-top of the charts. The Self-Handcarvings, of whom kids snickered their name referred to masturbation, as they did the By Yourselfs.

Needless to say there was a deep-seated rivalry between the Go Barefoots and the Cow Pies. The Thinks spent weeks deciding to

call themselves the Whaddya Thinks? and were convinced the time was well-spent.

Top popular Rock musicians in those days were bricks-andmortar Gods.

Michigan towns were full of steely old ladies who dyed their hair with gun blueing. Yeah, many were built like barrels, of other kinds, too. Crumbling cigarette-breath waitresses in cheapskate little restaurants with signs PLEASE RETURN TOOTHPICKS AFTER USE. Old crustaceans at the counter would complain about their service that they'd been waiting "for Jews' weeks". I'm not sure if that means shorter (shortchanged) or longer (nasal).

The Lensgrinders Church had lobbied to call the state "Optichigan" since it was shaped like the eye in the pyramid, sort of.

The state motto was originally half-Latin, half-German, "Teubor auf Teutons". The state motto "Tuebor" is Latin for, essentially, "Rock n' Roll, dope, and fucking in the streets", a motto that in full only fit on the license plates of very big sedans and beerwagons. The centurions used to holler it upon entering a barbarian-qua-Bavarian encampment full of shamans, before they fell upon the covens of buxom Frankish or Visigoth women. And we've certainly got them here. Beneath their operatic breastplates, removed their winged helmets. What every Michigan band endeavors to recreate, in a sense.

The state bird was whatever hatchling had fallen, or been pushed, from the nest. We were often a lonely and disappointed place; “Born Under the Sign of the Only Child” sang the zodiac

bluesman. The first classically-trained archeologipedant at the University dug, spat, spatulaed and speculated then wrote of ancient midwestern "Phoneichigans" like a strain of Mediterranean Popomissionaries, Potowatomicks, polite-water meshuggehs.

More recently, historians have sometimes called the late 1950s and early 1960s the Holiday of Snacks, for every midwestern American table was festooned with chips and onion dip from dry soup base in soured cream, Xmas-party cereal snacks roasted in buttery saltsauce, fatty soft Porcelainstershire cheeses and crisp gullet crackers. Family tensions could thus be stuffed beneath full mouths, sated gullets, seasonal holiday vests and decorated sweaters and full skirts Though all—like the relatively clean Uvula River—were vaunted for recreation, there were no healthy springs in Michigan, spas to take the waters.

Some rural households were still beating children with ancient tools made of antler and stone, found in the fields, like their ancestors. Bigfoot squirrels outside peered through the windows.

Squirrels whose tut-tut chatter sound like someone tapping an unopened cigarette pack against their hand. Black pepper buffaloes, the kind whose wooly mantles are dried, ground into spice.

The US war machine was like a great fierce dinosaur, the peasant farmers defeating it overseas like the swift little mammals that ate the dinosaur's eggs. For the children. On the eastern seaboard, Italian immigrants added a verse to the National Anthem about Volare, canatare and the Moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie, and it stuck for a decade or more, maybe two. That Ypsifacto

guy who invented pizza had the bright idea for a bison-jackfruit pie, swears someday he’ll have his own herd outside of Aleppo, rather than import them from millionire’s gentleman-ranches in snide cowboy states. To say nothing how that would be most organic.

Yeah, right. We’ll believe it when we see it. Meanwhile, in Michigan, farms raised ill-bred hogs and purloined horses. Many area farmers had the hide of at least one space alien found in the fields dried and nailed up, varmint-style, on the barn door.

The muscle of our culture was Motorsburgh industry, big aeolipiles turning, puffing steam into the sky. Abandoned elephant towers from Hannibal's legions, once-fierce rusting cannons. Slow Cugnots chuffing, as if road-building equipment themselves.

Originally it was named for Motorsburghen Island, north of Norway, narrowly beating out Svalbear, animal on their state flag. Most of the settlers, and even few of the trappers, had actually seen a Svalbear, and certainly not slapping Tarbo salmon along the busy Motorsburgh River.

Igor Ivor, nineteeth-century wagon maker, responsible for the invention of the cotton wheel for cars and buggies and buses, which flourished but led to 1940s broken buses, 1920s barenaked streetcars in Motorsburgh and the rest of Michigan. His young farmboy apprentice Harry Fuct went on to fill factories that spouted muscle cars, and became the nation’s first Godzillionaire.

The radio priest Reverend Father Francis Xaviver St. Phlegmmy Cough-in-a-Carload’s went over the national radio airwaves, sponsored from the start in 1930 by Fuct Automotive Cars Corporation. Out of his Corruptus Christi Chapel in one of the

something-or-other-woods Motorsburgh suburbs, his broadcast bailiwick visible for miles around, its giant Crucifix dangling a ghastly rendition of Him up there, His corpse rotted up there after several winters like a Michigan scarecrow (or weird trick-or-treater’s costume). By the time we came along, our parents listening in Aleppo, the Reverend’s Papalfascist sermons (sponsored by Fuct) were televised in mortal black and white. Early on the Reverend’s scriptural reasoning had made public transportation into a near-Mortal Sin, and state legislatures made it a felony. Advertising horsepower soon made not having a car as shameful as not having a roll of toilet paper in your home.

In its early days, the Motorsburgh car industry was so morally straightlaced that it developed a car that put a .22 bullet through the driver if he turned without a turn signal, a feature later modified to merely dispatch an electric shock. The auto companies soon betrayed a penchant for proudly naming cars after peoples who worked on the assembly lines; first, the romance of several Indian tribes, but also the 1933 Ford Jew, the 1950 Dodge Negro, the sexy 1969 Chevrolet Mulata. But by our era, the auto industry was going hell-for-leather with all sorts of muscular cars to appeal to crazy youth. Cars were still cars, metal and grease and horsepower, but started to sport flowery, quasi-mystical names like the Dodge Dreamvirgin. They experimented with a few fetal cars, little Euro-veal things with fenders like chamois to the touch. Pine-scented vessels, little Swiss pinecones; professors and liberal ministers around Aleppo tended to drive them, but not people.

Jalopies, late model rustfender bent sedans, were like

discarded kleenexes, use them for a while and then abandon them by the side of freeways when stoned enough to stagger home unfazed, untiring and energized enough to jam musically, or in Tippy's case, upon groupies, until dawn or lunchtime. Cars for all Michigan men's lifestyle, yes, rolled through the city's basketball streets, where children profligately hung shoes from shoelaces tied together. Some workingmen's cars bore the vanity license plate "No Matter How Much You Shake Your Peg,…" etc.

Equally aquatic, Fuct derided nascent Motorsburgh as the Soggy City, a nickname that stuck, for the Canadian water and storms that lapped up against it. He died of insomnia worried about it, unable to use fascist magic against it, even Coughinacarload’s Papist radio spells. You know Coughinacarload’s parish tower is a great Tesla-coil’d radiotelescoping antenna, its massive crucifix pointed due east towards Rumrunnersville, Ontario, don’t you?

Sixty years ago Harry Fuct mined the stratified coal under the city for body panels, crystalline salt for windshield, refined oil into petroleum gasoline, and built carbon cars. Any color as long as it's charcoal. A giant tire was installed by the corporation alongside the Motorsburgh freeway as some sort of warning for children to behave and get good grades, or else the big wheel (also known as History) will roll over them, crush them like a Junebug under a skateboard.

Seems to have done the trick for most, at least until Rock n’ Roll, which spawned like mosquitoes in the puddles in old tires. Across the freeway, another giant flaming World's Fair tire, gas-fed and perpetually burning, its Eternal Flame a proud monument to our state’s inflammatory automaker Harry Fuct.

Was Motorsburgh ethnic? You better believe it. Black people in Motorsburgh, some playing space-age jazz, must be ethnically from the Senufo people because they even have "UFO" in their name. It's always Halloween in Africa, for I saw their scary masks the factory workers painted on chapel walls, and the little painting of peasants dancing their boners and moist women in the art museum.

OK, you’re right, those were Dutchmen. Flanders, then. Black people say "fuck" to mean everything except fucking, and "shit" means shit only half the time. And poor white trash, they laughed and cussed and reveled in the butter pigpen of their poor, ‘poverished pigeon southern-style lives. And the Koleslau brothers, like me and Thump, perpetuators of UFO photos.

What suburban Motorsburgh Jewish bands like the Vegitobbles in our time called the Cool Nidre, some kind of blues-progression prayer of rock n' roll power. They appeared on local TV endorsing Jewish brands of butter, with rabbinically-regulated fat content and colorants. But its their fathers who built the Motorsburgh suburbs.

Half our teachers were nerdy like that purse-lipped middle aged Jewish guy who does the commercials for his Gazebo Construction Company. Our highschool classmate gangly Greta Gazeboroff bragged about her uncle’s commercials, then shrunk back when we started laughing and sneering at them. Uncomfortable, constipated, therefore reliable. You can trust a monotone…hey, perhaps that a secret of Rock sincerity-song as well, must try. Plus, give ‘em the stare directly in the eye. Aye, oh my, drill right into her mind. The rival Apollo Belvedere Construction Company, its handsome President posed in nonchalant contrappasto, nude and modestly circumcised. The Jews who developed, built, remodeled and sold appliances to the Motorsburghburbs, used to the centuries of their covenant with JHVH, built restrictive ones in home buying contracts and mortgages that

whites’ attention. It was as if they wanted to control their own narrative, their own represetation, to not be the old Uncle Remus talespinner seated on a stump any more. Inspired, like China's Red Square Guards, or the frumpy fightin' Feuhrer Youth. Not merely the spunk of the aggressive jocks in my high school, but serious, dedicated.

During the rebellious riots a few years ago, the Fuct Orotundium was burned to the ground, its chocolatey wall panels perceived as a satiric insult to that chubby Reverend’s daughter with the hit song.

Some had even sprayed “This is Boadicea” on it, so bodacious arsonettes felt they must step up with their Molotovs and give Fuct a flaming piece of their minds. Fuct had donated buildings to the University in our town too.

The stern Dutch Motorsburgh department store owner, unsure of Jews, sacrificed a boy on Xmas, Easter or mixed with purina on Purim, made sure to check and hire uncircumcised Santas in December whose laps children sat in, but he hired a Jewish Santa Claus—the old radioman they'd put on to tell secular fairy tales, opposite Monsignior Coughinacarload, later a TV weatherman—for the Thanksgiving Day Parade, in case some radical black or drunken Irish rogue cop decided to shoot him in the motorcade, inspired by the recent goings-on with President in Dallas. Fortunately, only the big cartoon balloons were ever shot, hissing and easing down slowly to suffocate the high school marching band behind it. Oh, it was a festive time for that city, yet to suffer.

Ypsofacto, the county’s second-banana town, homely little sister of Aleppo, often confused by TV weathermen with Expostfacto

up north in Michigan’s windswept Ice Peninsula. In proudly industrial towns like Ypsofacto, you'd see proud bumperstickers on sedans THIS CAR BUILT IN MOTORSBURGH BY COLORED MEN, as if there would ever be a car sold in America that was anything but.

Except, of course, in weird Aleppo. Of course this was the town from which Tippy and the Chomps sprang.

As you gradually stopped smelling the smoke cloud from Ypsofacto factories located near the abyss and gyre by the river, you’d see a sign upon entering," Aleppo: Voted America's Most Racially OK City". Poolhall Negroes with Russian- or Spanishsounding first names sulked, begged to differ. City fathers used to boast there had never been a serial killer from Aleppo, and then there was, suavely strangling coeds on the back of his Mod Italian Volare Cantare scooter, which also sort of stole the thunder from our band.

The sweetly ululating Uvula River ran from its headwaters in Friartucky, MI to empty into the lake by tiny Golem, MI (Home of the Golden Golems). The Uvula Valley had been settled by German idealists fleeing prison following the kerfuffle of 1848, and it’s ironic that their descendants are so butt-stubborn corn-servative now. Karl Marx briefly owned a mill on the Uvala, but escaped predatory creditors by fleeing to London, where he holed up in the British Museum after hours like a stout, bearded mouse. The first University professor wanted to call the town "Aleph" Michigan—horrified the suggested "Alpha" had been chalked by the well-intentioned farmboy that was his assistant as "Alfalfa"—but thus revealed as a secret Jew, was drummed out of his stone church. There was a street named after the once-nearby farm of a pious old German immigrant farmer

named Edel Weiss, and now an elementary school was named after him, but the two names had sentimentally slurred over time into one, Edelweiss. When stoned, Aleppo boys would contemplate awestruck the mystery of that epiphany.

Weird subdivision streets, evinced immigrant developers, like Uziwood and Bouzoukiwood, which Dink called "Boozewood".

Motherfuckerwood, a block from Peckerwood, named after Pecker the still-revered School Superintendent. Aleppo's Voodoowood Drive, to Voodoowood Elementary School. On Birds-of-a-Featherwood Drive, the name of a posh Motorsburgh suburb, teenage lovers groped, dribbled and fogged car windows. Aleppo had streets Palmyra and Tadanou, Assyria and Assurbanipal, since it was founded by the first University archeologist who also brought and unwrapped the mummy, then sent it west by a slaver's whaling clipper, canal boat and wagon.

Glass reflecting globe on pedestal on the lawns of people for whom a television wasn't enough. To smash one would be a point of pride for my brother Thump, who'd come home proud that he had accomplished something that day.

Since everything was fucking in that 1960s springtime, there were rabbit-squirrel hybrids perched on, or under, backyard fences.

Some traditional string tie and cowboy hat-wearing sentimentalists objected to the annual winter mastodon and bison culls in the city limits, but the obstinate beasts were causing too many accidents, trampled gardens, stolen children. In those days a crabby neighbor might shake out his pipe, its burning embers, into a pile of autumn leaves in which little kids were heedlessly playing.

Aleppo was called "America's Spunkiest City" by a magazine that wanted to sell more subscriptions there. But Aleppo conservative radio host Bock Strudelspaetzle hosted an afternoon gripesession forum of outraged citizens, turning from police band radios to fulminating about the Rock concerts in the park. A frisson of disdain to his every broadcast, this local mutterer always seeming to indict and blame the liberal (often Jewish) members of the City Council and staff, or university Social Sciences faculty of all stripes.

A worthy successor to Father Cough-in-a-Carload.

Downtown Men's shops were selling conservative Nixonwear.

Contemporary movies showed at the sophisticated cinemas downtown, like "Bachelor Motherfucker". Greek-owned restaurant on Main Street in Aleppo called the Honey Pot. Others they had in the area were the Pireus, the Thessalonika, the Corinth, the Eumaeus, the Cofu. And the Sparta, a bachelor beach which was likely a homosexual bar.

Out in the new split-level, brick-front houses on Psycho Church Road, angry housewives were storing leftovers in Vituperware, slamming the refrigerator door, thinking they're better, deserve more, than this.

USED AFTER SHAVE said a sign in front of a soapy solvents yard at he north end of town by the river, telling the seasons by the progress of its lazy chemical plume. Then there was a sludge pond of toxic chemicals used to purify the water system beside one elementary school, and a street of stinky old machine shops and smiths that smelter lead motorcycles, bismuth bicycles etc. next to

another. Yet next to my elementary school, only an ancient lake, a groundwater bog full of preserved corpses, mastadons that supped and sipped, and their unlucky hunters, limpid and sullen in its stillness. Perhaps a place to think of the passing of time. Spring-fed in existential purity.

A town so pedagogically school-dominated, dogs behind fences harshly bellowed "Workbook! Workbook!" Bisected by Schoolmarm Boulevard, side streets Speller and Reader. Surprised there’s no street called Spelunker, but that might encourage youth to go underground, go within.

This smug Agog-and-Magog university town had a special nursery school set up for the toddlers and little children born out of wedlock of girls who'd won the "Win a Date With Bob Smogparker and the Double Parkers"—popular rock musicians a few years before—in radio station promoted contests. They treated those kids like pedigreed puppies, the eugenic snobs. A bastardocracy of sorts, enrolled in their own little auntiversity.

Gridiron Gombergs, staunch stadium sportscasters with names like Red Onion or Whooping Red Indian, or contrapuntal, consonantbaffling Slavic contraptions. Names of comic-strip pain, Biff Oof! The neighborhood behind the University was called by its college-graduate developer Beast-of-Baluchistanwood, after the notable Baluchatherium. Many professors lived there. If there wasn’t a stuffy and Tweepublican businessman-stuffed nieghborhood in Aleppo called Honky Heights, Honky Wood, Honky Farms, Honky Shores or Honky Pointe, there should’ve been.

I misheard that our bassplayer Dink's highly respectable

parents lived in a neighborhood that had been an old apple orchard, had a tree with golden apples, but it was really Golem apples. It figures, something Jewy; Harry Fuct's favorite architect Paul Bunyan, though observantly Jewish, had been hired to design some of the stately homes there for auto executives and well-endowed professors, and landscaped it with fruits mentioned in the Old Tenament. No public executions, hanging or lynchings in Aleppo for almost seventy years. It patted itself on the back for its liberality, pacific platitudinous peace and peacefulness. Pampered kids' (miniskirted daughters!) straddled minibikes and go-karts, lawnmower engines sacrificed by working stiffs.

Suddenly, people of means were buying country homes all around the park, just to watch hippie girls in halters and tanktops, sometimes shirtless, dance on summer Sundays. For this was the Epoch of Rock. Groanups, get used to it.

I have more to tell but I’m tired now, for we had a late night gig, and were adrenaline high all night afterwards. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.

The OPTICS like the Eye of Almagordo, New Mexico where you daren’t and mustn't look directly into the hydrogen bomb blast without a piece of smoked glass. Why I wear my sunglasses, even at night, you never can tell. Plus, it’s cool, isn’t it?

Forgive me, I only have scattered memories of our junior high.

A fat kid named Swelly. Young spiritualist, what the thirteen year old found on his sheets he immediately attributed to ectoplasm. A junior high teacher Mrs. Spazzattackeur turned from the blackboard, said

you boys stop doing that.

Colored kids often came in twins: Inigo and Indigo Harepomade, others I can’t remember. Their families must've come from the south move their bodies laughingly to the countrified dance song "Scratchy Duck". A girl, whom I first thought was—sneer— called KooKoo, for mental instability, was actually Couscous, her parents from another country that eats differently. There are a startling number of Arab people around Motorsburgh, exiled by surprisingly kickass badass Israel, to settle in burbs like Dearlybeloved and Wellborn.

Irene Fartson, a girl I knew in junior high, that we tormented terribly until she died of hemophilia or something, maybe fell into a well on her family's farm. Haven’t thought about her in years. A girl named Extrudy. Girls in pert Kathy Beancounter fashions, plaid rompwear, BarelyGrass and Exposée miniskirts. Girls hosting a sock tasting party, hissing at the uninvited. Girls who didn't say yes at first request, vile procrastinatrixes. their fustian panties thrusting.

Little girls Tippy liked to call his Filth Graders. Did he dally with girls that age? I wouldn't be a moment surprised.

You could send away for an electronic kit to assemble your own electric chair, just like kits for a military automatic rifle or machine gun. I know one smart kid who did, later built expensive electronics and guitars for rockstars you could name. Local Boy Makes Good Amps.

Episodes of “Stranger Than Science” were shown on educational TV. Yet the scientific Sun that our blossoming little flowerheads turned towards most was psychochemistry. Drugs

began to interest us, as an alternative or escape from our parents’ socalled reality. Pranksters would painstakingly paper houses with TP infused with PCP, rolls stolen from JMJ-Mart by klepto kid we watched out for, Bobby Sleight-of-Hand. Our friend Dink, like Saint Augustine (really a Carthaginian Jew, Ow-gooste Stein?), spent those days stealing whiskies and cordials from his parents' liquor cabinet to share with other boys in his junior high class. Some cough medicineimbibers lobbied to call the state Pertusschigan, and legislators they had contacted wrote polite but uncomprehending letters in boilerplate reply. Perhaps the very AM radio, its incessant song "A Pill Full of Morning," had us considering alternative lifestyles that included drugs. At least rather childish cannabis. There was even a special issue of the Graveside Astronomer, a pessimistic magazine distributed in the schools, devoted to the subject of drugs and their discontents.

Sports? In school? There may have been. I mean yeah, jocks and cheers and all that. Teaching Sweat Theory. I mean, who could take Coach "Pud" Puscher seriously? Especially the other team.

Still, they named a street in his honor, Pudwood. Not far from here; I can take you there. OK, maybe some other time.

They'd pack us up, take us to the Hormones vs. the Theromones game, or the Androgens-Pathogens playoff in Motorsburgh as an educational field trip. Your Tax Dollars at Work.

Sports were promoted by the schoolpowers-that-be as a healthier alternative to drugs and reading for pleasure.

But I remember reading something. We’d been assigned one book from the Holocaustic Literature For Young Readers, what a university professor reviewing the series for a magazine my Mom got called “it’s shining, yellow star”. Aimée Fink, that holy Hollandaise holocaustess with the mostest. Hollandaisical, insouciant and blasé

girl The Non-Moldy Part of the Berry. Girls tittlered that the big building a block from the school was the city’s “Water Flirtation Plant”, so wanted to drink the water to be brazen. Speaking of water, in one junior high Coach Boulée Bewlay insisted the boys swim nude, while some progressively liberal teachers advocated boys and girls both swim together nude—including part of the class session in total darkness—to feel that oceanic feeling of the recreational drugs they'll inevitably soon take, and to learn early on what life was all about.

Principal Fleidermaus Gangspittle—stolid, stodgy and church-going conservative—was not amused.

What I liked best about junior high was that there was a cafeteria, where we could buy, bring, or both bring and buy food during lunch break. Yes, food, in school. That felt like the lap of luxury and comfort, thought the fibreglas chairs were pretty uncomfortable, purposely, so we wouldn’t sit long, would hurry back to class. At least in theory. There was one lunch lady working in the public schools who'd survived the concentration camp where the doctor had done those hypothermia experiments, testing if a downed fighter or bomber pilot in icy waters could be revived by the heat of a female body, or if a girl Jew would have to be strapped to him while still in the cockpit. As a zaftig teenager she was required to strip naked and embrace the coldwater-soaked guy, then another soaked even longer, et cetera, et cetera. They never seemed to revive, expiring in her arms (often voiding and vomiting, phew), but I don't think that was her fault. Even if they weren't real Luftwaffe pilots, and were only impersonating them, she may still be the closest I'll get to wings in that service, so eventually I will need to figure out how to

lose my virginity in her arms and legs. The pre-planning of this scheme pretty much occupied my eighth and ninth grades.

I was too lazy to do anything about it beyond sneak a peek at her address—Mysterioso Lane—in Mom's dog-eared Aleppo Public Schools Administration, Faculty and Staff Illustrated Directory a few years later. Soon the lunch lady shrieked, “You boys stop calling today’s breakfast ‘snotcakes’!”

Oh yeah, I did once say “Hiya, Moms, me for a shake!” like in a 1940s comic book, on a dare. She laughed, gave me the milkshake and my, my, how the boys at my lunch table admired me. The start of my thing, my awareness of lunch ladies.

Perhaps a law in our boyhood put all druggists in black hornrimmed glasses, yet opthamologists and optometrists in weird transparent plastic framed ones. As soon as I could, I traded my NASA-scientist hornrims for aviator sunglasses. I wanted to classmates and girls to think I was one of those test pilots who later became the Mercury astronauts, just back in junior high for refresher courses, sure.

One springy day there was a parade and motorcade for testpilot astronaut and MU Engineering alum Doug McDoug, the first UnRussian to step out of the orbiting capsule and flip earth the bird.

Yay! Thump and I stood immobile in our sunglasses, only scowled to be cool as it passed by. A skinny kid ran out, jumped on the hood of his parade car, hollered “I am the space monkey Ham! I mean, Sam!” and tumbled off, ran away, and later we learned that kid was Tippy.

We saw his first stage dive, so to speak.

And soon, after the sasparilla summer that was ninth grade, we graduated to the big high school.

Highschool was mostly full of barely-nicked butternut Metternichs. Young protein Catholics. Chemistry class was just Beaker Fever. My classmates wore Virilemore brand men's sport shirts and slacks. We’d figure out subtle and creative ways to taunt a substitute teacher, like tying her down to spit rubies at her.

There were some colored kids in my high school, shunted out of academic placement courses into Fry-Cook Sciences. One was Bisontia Settler, half buffalo soldier, half tawny Irish breed. Some Irish in her back somewhere, her brother red as Malcolm X. Administration was shocked when preacher's daughter Bronzetta actually graduated.

Wild huckleberry friends of ours rafted down the Ululating River, whose laudanummy browngrey waters once fed breweries named after local politicians as it passed through the then-sleepy University town. Most feared a river where even the carp were tough greasers.

Old black men who could no longer remember a blues progression fished out their days.

Sandlot and backfence psychologists had stroked their chins and wondered how such an expressive boy as Tippy would compensate for the natural organized violence of youth, for teenagers were society's most frightening part. He might become a criminal called Baby Face Michigan. Adults didn't seem a danger at the time, they were parental and supportive and offer praise and gifts, but to a child teens were physically large and menacing but unpredictable, flying off the handle, or at least that's the way they dressed. Green

and newly-minted Weblosbursting greengreasers. Young, terse greasemonkey grenades. Student council Leaders of Tomorrow spoke of student power vs. the military-industrial eductional complex when arrested for chopping down billboards, gave the newsmagazines an ecology defense to local environmental liberal applause, and the local Career Scouts Troop quickly issued a merit badge for it. When even valedictorians stole cars and compliant younger girlfriends and drove around the state in search of thrills and higher purpose. In junior highschool Tippy tried to flush a large pizza down the toilet.

Rumor had it the University was breeding dogs that suck eggs, and other dogs big enough to egg houses, purchesed by our neighbors from the back doors of the labs. We had classmates whose fathers made their careers in the Philosophy Department over the big moral question whether or not to egg houses and whose. To be or not to be egging your enemy's house. On Devils' Night kids all went out with the school "Hitting Team", draping houses and trees with fetishistic toilet-paper decoration, carrying the implication "wipe your butt". Sensitive youth, we cried as we smashed store windows, at the demolition of libraries. We'd break into pet stores and set all the birds on the wing free. Shooting crossbows of Christmas decorations and trying to assassinate John Lennon in a concert parking lot full of hippy vans. You know, the carefree joys of youth.

Throw bombs in swimming pools so you'd bust your eardrums and float up dead. The school department headquarters burns down and all of a sudden we're the logical suspects. Race riots were more frequent than nocturnal emissions at that age. The youthful will to

destroy a church subsumed itself in the will to destroy the Public School System Records building. An act of teaching the public despite all the education involved. The burning of the school credentials building was meant to be an egging but got out of hand with our firecrackers and cigarette lighters. No more would anybody have a permanent file, it was like being born again. Could the culprit have been a disgruntled teacher, or Tippy's dad, rankled at what his enrolled-all-those-years son had become?

Violence was one thing. While Rosy Fingerz had removed her tampon for any inquisitive guy, Rosenfinger or Soapsinger was the odd old fellow who ran the high school Planetarium. I don't think he taught other classes or homeroom, just stood in the dark praising the heavens above until a class came in for an hour tour of them. Some kids claimed he abused them in the dark, but who listens to kids anyway? Not school administrators or parents. He was pure as a priest in their downcast eyes.

So was Mr. Frycook for Homeroom. Then Mrs. Bacchanalian, great name which then meant nothing to us. Mrs. Corntunnel was skeptical of wiseacres in her class. We may have had, for something, Mr. Sitdownface. Tippy had Mrs. Hornedmoses for one class, liked her well-traveled, big city cynicism. A bluff, blustering History teacher who, to be contemporary, called Antietam Vietam, and vice versa.

Miss Phosgene, and the Somnambulent Studies teacher Miss Mildhummingbird. Teachers who were alive when Hydrogen was discovered.

I pity our classmates for whom, like a 17th century Protestant divine, their fathers railed against long "Indian" hair, both like the

noble aboriginals of the woods and plains, and those gurus and yogis in Mom's magazine ads whom you couldn't tell male or female. They thundered and bloviated at daughters smelling of "Indian pepper" by which they meant dabs of patchouli or incense burnt coming home from the head shoppe or paisley-bedspread'd and fringed-curtained friend's basement. And one girl I know who suffered that even worked in a musty old chain store called Pottersfield, like your resting place if you shop here.

Guys from our high school who'd take LSD, suddenly understand how refrigeration worked, and begin lifetimes of employment in that. Unmannered tough kid named Boltcutter Bikelock, unequivocally a thief, probably later shot or made paraplegic during an arrest. Latin kid Elrey Sucio solemnly drew a pachuco tattoo on Tippy, said he was now a marked man, too good to live, too bad to die. That made an impression.

Since there they were taught to keep their kit and barracks tidy, Army recruiting posters said KILL PEOPLE AND KEEP CLEAN, in order to get teenagers' mothers encouraging them to join and shape up. My brother Thump almost signed up for the former part, was discouraged by the latter.

All Aleppo was a-titter about a high school honor student who shot his parents, who were a monstrous witch and her service dwarf who couldn't protect him from her or be a healthy adult model and mentor in his life. Only child, you know. Editorials fumed and fulminated against the kids hippie friends, mostly faculty brats, several Jewish to boot. Drive-In teenagers seemed to especially like those Mom-Kills-and-Eats-Her-Kids movies, so Ventura Global

Studios seemed to only produce a rash of those the last couple years, so they made one really good one based on the Aleppo murders. And there was the hippie dorm-room bestseller Roadkill Your Parents by that portly-qua-poetic People's Puma Party polemicist as well. Local radio commentators thundered There Ought to Be a Law, etc.

Church teen organizations were where girls could romantically be deflowered on the altars, like a California Satanist's amusement for the men's-magazine press. School was let out early for the freshly modern religious holiday celebrating Adam and Eve's Divorce.

Thanks, Mr. Pope.

But beyond that, and for the more and mostly celibate youth, these were the days, in ecumenical Aleppo, of religious pranks, like stealing all the hosts from the Mass and putting them in the Gog-andSynagogue atop a Satanic heavy metal album, or telling the Priest after Mass the first two rows at the Communion rail were all circumcised Jews (some young liberal priests just shrugged). Just stuff to wake up and make their interfaith antiwar committees nervous, embarrassed, chilly. Haw! Haw! Haw! Maybe all of being a teenager is a spiritual experience, headsnapping alternately heavenly and hellish. If you lived a hundred years ago, you’d reply “The Devil you say!” heh heh.

But I’m sure you and your little friends had fun too.

How is Tippy different from me? That's easy: the difference between penis and pensées.

Like a lot of intense children, Tippy couldn't tie his shoes tight enough in those days. He used to brush his teeth too hard as a form

of excitement a few years before he'd know it was called sexual. Rub the blood all over his face to play Indians and Liquor. Once a cowboy came to his class and his lasso got out of control, beheaded a child.

Once Tippy's own front teeth, protruding on pink bony stalks of flesh like a frog's tumored eye, caught on a poptop soda can he was clutching and was cut off, pulled and sheared by the hole's sharp edge. Anticipation of chopping off fingers to rid himself of hangnails or to stop scratching his nose, chopping cleanly with little guillotines, cleavers. Like that picture in the window of the insurance agency, next to the hobby shop where he used to race Zloty slot cars (they also had cosmetology school for girls in the back, using many of the same hobby enamels), of the old woman who somehow squeezed a pimple so the hard part shot out, bounced off the mirror and back into her eye, blinding her when it infected into cataracts. Tippy popped his first zit and broke his face.

Lying awake late at night he could hear the water dripping in another house in the neighborhood. It was one night in the late silk Spring or early Summertime, for hashish imposed no calendrical curfew—no, wait, too early for that—that Tippy felt hot. Asprawl in bed, pushed off his blanket but not so far that he couldn't sleep, unbuttoned his pajama shirt. Chicken nude enough to feel his hair grow. Lay open but still sweat touched the edges. Trying to get cool he thought of the sharp x-act razor blade cutting tool on the desk beside him and, remembering how metal is always cool against skin clutched it in his hand and slit, from clavicle down to about four inches to the right of his belly button, equidistant between groin and hip. Ahhh, relief. That night he dreamed he had chopped a snake

into a hypothesis. Child crucifix. Slit himself like a frustrated fat kid yearning to be set really free. He pulled back the covers and when Mom looked in that tit-for-tat morning and found him covered with a Mississippi river of blood smiling sheepishly she screamed, she was always doing that. Nonplussed at her making a fuss, he broke the lucky bone but didn't have no scar. And this was an act he would later come to duplicate on stage many, many times.

There must've been something he could do with himself to ease the pressure of being a child and a boy. There was. But I have no idea where Tippy, an onliest homebodied child, first learned to play with himself.

Some say he was taught the old blues song "Young Master Masterbatin'" by that three-halves black Indian named Thunderbird Firestick Culpepper (whose Cul-pepper came from the French, a woman's ass-pepper, or peppery L.H.O.O.Q butt stuff), whose father was the local "Hindoo" motorcycle dealer. Or Pervez Bey, neighboring Turkish math professor's son, trained in the intricate fingering of classical guitar and instrumentals that he heard on TV. Maybe the slow—OK, retarded—girl dragooned to play Doctor with the neighborhood boys showed him, aimlessly rubbed her hand over his thingy, but I guess that was in a different part of the neighborhood, down the block.

In any case, Tippy took to self-sport. Suddenly, as the stormclouds of puberty gathered everything became sexual. Give me puberty or give me death! Maturity is the villa of the mysteries. The horror of sex, to be thirteen, never thinking of it in the most distant

abstract mechanically like Bessemer Process or how glass is made, to have to remind yourself of mortality. To know fucking is to then have the grinning skull secret behind you. That's why kids need no morality manners. Growing up is growing dead, allegedly realizing you're not the first person in the world. Distate of the shackles of mind, limitations encrusting like barnacles, the only limits are selfimposed. A lesser initiation into the monster of life. Little boys are always filled with bees, or filled with pee, but as a kid his leg always jiggled with libido. When would he ever again have such a self-centered sexual experience?

Tippy's favorite thrill of all came to be himself, his self-use.

Prepuce papoose, he was circumcastrated at an early age but his sexuality managed to grow back. It's those Jews in the Media (movies, television, newspapers and magazines) that made the custom widespread. Smoking himself with the golden arm and the goldenrod to rock music, seeing pink lights, wood ash or mouldering leaves when he came. Learned that old blues song What's That Smell Like Soap Oh Baby? Shampooing his dick till every muscle in the world tightens soaped into a great taper, pointed like a rocket heading into childbirth. Clots of blood, snow coming down and I make the snow. Whiter than anything ever seen. He who casts snow on the mountain. What causes it to snow in Michigan. Now let me put some yogurt on paper. Cock as a pen that writes under whipped cream. Soapsuds deformity. When angels dream of masturbating.

Fucking the air, fucking the whole sky, fucking science like fucking the frosting on a cake. Lemon foam unchanging, those pearls of

affection, one-armed orchestra. Free Samples, samplings of his own wares. The calm of the palm.

He fascinated himself, transfixed himself a cocktail by shaking.

Playing the goggle-eyed horn in the one-man school band. Urine in the Ninth Grade. Like wiping a mirror clean. Walking 'round with his pockets' specific gravity. The pasta from his cock. Hey noodle dick!

That's using your noodle. Bananadiapers held him in. Used a salve to masturbate with called State o' Grace, really just Wisconsin butter.

Remembering the children's story of Pillow Pete, the baker who made white crumbs. Quicker than you could say Jack Off'nberg. Atomic sub-urges, attractions of particles and all that. The initials, the wallcarvings of the vas deferens each sperm leaves as he passes out into the cold world. His dick stuck to his hand, have to call a locksmith or welder to get it off. Like tongues to the frozen schoolyard monkeybars in winter. His self-defense sex. Ringing his own doorbell Halloween night, off and running. There is no wrong way to be free. The joys of root beer were the joys of the flesh.

O yez, Oyez, he spilled his ash on the ground and discovered spiders' milk. Touching himself in a manner that brings excruciatingly instant relief. One of those things for bubblegum. Mobiles would stop turning, pinups roll their eyes as he rode the bucking bronco of ecstasy. When he'd orgasm in the night dogs would bark, car engines start. Red hands, pink hands, oil stained jeans. Later, masturbation under drugs. Masturbating on a train. Firecrackers in his ears and fishhooks in Tippy's red pencil. His little red fire engine; why else do you think little boys want to be firemen? It got pinched in the power window of his friend's Mom's station wagon. Milking a

flesh-colored unicorn cow. Milk bath for the carpet. Orgasm like a carton of pink milk spilling over. Men who buy milk. He jacked off into a milk carton until phosphorescent green wormy things came out.

He thought about how earthworms and creeping slugs must be in a constant state of orgasm, for what they leave on the fingers feels like human cum. Similarly, nobody loves the dry little cockroaches. Salt makes leeches and snails cum themselves to sweet death. That time his class took a field trip to a desalinization plant he was resprinkling the City of Aleppo's water supply with his shaker of salt, explaining "Salt to taste". Uh, Tippy, that’s not a salt shaker. Toilets flushed into his polluted mousemind with every come of a bad idea. He could pollute whole rivers and streams that way with that, something for the fish to avoid. Monster bait. Having an orgy with himself, suffering orgy-taunts. Cock a seahorse in the foam, nereids from the Grandiose Lakes. "His white water was restless at night" said his Indian-chief father, reading the paper in his feather headdress. I don't mean troll, like a lazy fisherman letting his line trail behind him in a slow-putt-putting boat.

White fire came out of Tippy's loins sure as the green fire out of his nose. He stood up like a little spoon in thick soup, dying to stick it in the accompanying sandwich, or into the jar of peanut butter and jam! His cockadoodle got zebra-striped with horniness, a little blushing spinning barber-pole. A hot piece of neon buzzing ON-ON in the night keeping him awake in the cheap hotel called adolescence. His dick needed a manicure. There he goes again, scratching before he had an itch. Your sliding muscle. The pleasures of abrasion. Your weirdwater dribbles into a gushing

torrent. Like a barbershop quarterback crooning in the olden days, he called it his peg-o-my-heart. Sometimes only powder thanked him from it, a powder penis. Beating around the book. His hand-held motorcycle, handheld camera of love. He liked to wear the coat without a label. Blew the arms out of his sweaters that way. A oneman arm party. Like a witch's date with her broom. A cock coming like fingering the cork out of a champagne bottle. Long drums of bush semen beating in the night. Let the Lord turn the white handle and beat down your love. Ceasarian lust and cinematic surgery.

Nude of honor pulling on an elephant's ear. Many are oiled but few are chosen. Whore in my hand. One hand slapping himself. His gazebo oil handle. Consensual World's Fairs. Jaguaring off. Laffing at his own jokes. The fascination of holding an object in your hands, turning it over. Like a bird on a respirator, scarecrow on an iron lung.

Only one appointment on his calendar "Get an Erection", two weeks from today. The King of Masturbation, the Teenage Perfect Master.

Such perfection, it even takes out his own garbage, its ashcans-ofcum. Sperm soliloquies. Schmaltz n' sperm. Fun and sperm.

Wankered weekend. The boy was Pinocchio sexed. After all he couldn't very well un-masturbate. Felt the birth of an elevator.

Mashed potato masturbator. Thinking about my Little Willie John and a few nice things. His "Eleventh Little Piggie" he called it when counting his toes at country fairs. Trunk weenie reaching for branch weenie. He would lock himself in the supermarket late at night and go to the meat counter and love it to death, his pork brains wife, the sisters Calvesmeat and Sweetbreads, got the head cheese, for protein seeks protein. The old fashioned children's counting game

Butt, Butt, Bottom. The use of the word "fanny" when it was barely more than a rural woman's name. Sure as the mercury in a thermometer seeks its own level. He was having a Bird's Nest in the Chinese food section. A few housewives who'd been promiscuous during the War (sent plenty of Dear John letters) caught on what'd been happening and took the meat back to the embarassed German fourth-generation straw-hat butcher.

Still, these were interesting times. They'd just landed the astronaut who had to whip it out and jack off on the moon, "I know Houston will be pissed but I don't care". That's the reason there were so few good television transmissions from that flight. Not to be confused with he astronaut who came to our school to talk about smoking on the USS Pueblo. A spokesperson who showed how they gave the finger when captured and photographed. So horny was preteen Tippy that standing up to say the Pledge of Allegation before a ballgame was difficult. Standing up to stand up. In Math class he was a ready and daydreaming Johnny One-Zero before it ever meant computers, turned on by the binary sexuality of the New Math, he imagined the One piercing the round Naught, the sexy sets and voluptuous Venn diagrams and gaping pink placeholders. Knew what the fingers of the countingmen might do when school was closed for the night. Greater-than or Equal-to Sexuality. A laboratorection.

Bigger than room-sized mainframe computers at the University that love to masturbate. Formulated the hypothesis below the waist. Our young radar masturbator, lost in absorbtion thought.

How when one kid named Dennis would say your "peter" it would come out "pe'er", like "pier" jutting into the Motorsburgh River,

or "peer" as in the group pressure. I don't know about Tippy but I was certainly never part of a circle jerk, little boys around a campfire rubbing each other furiously. Must've been a part of the Pee Wee League sports I missed out on, or the Hitler Youth. A Cub Scout alone is like the neckerchief slide, the soft solenoid-click of his neckerchief wife. Come sparks like hurling flagstones through neighbors' picture windows up and down the length of the street.

Cumstain comfort. Almond hands. Waving it at the world.

PREPUCEBOY magazine, by its very name, intentionally sounds WASPier, the publisher’s intention. Its monthly dating advice column the No-Bris Kiss. In 1963 it was discovered all the girls in the magazines can actually see you. Papercuts on his dick from men's magazines, barebottomed varnished girls. Alone, Tippy learned to love his pink out-of-control. No girl had to show him that it even existed. Girl-geiger counter or divining rod, sesimic sexual stick tickticking like a metal detector. Yet somehow he'd made the discovery of the great musical instrument that was his cock. That short trombone. Or music as youthful selfdiscovery shared.

Heard masturbations are sweeter. "What are you doing in there, Tippy?" Nothing Mother. Everything. Victorian parents used to put garlic on their children's genitals so they wouldn't suck each other off. Onion to make them cry uncontrollably with their eyes.

Tippy's liberal parents didn't even give lip service to this ethic. To frugal parents, a son's first orgasm is no more than a perfectly good kleenex wasted. It became apparent what he was doing when he couldn't hold a wet soda pop bottle anymore from the loss of the use of that thumb. Kleenex from his jackoffs, like butterflies round his

bed, cauliflower-shaped cabbage-moth corpses. His former babysitter, older woman in the trailer next door, overheard him doing it, and invited him over to "fix something", showed him a few new somethings and tricks.

Me, I'd always been scared to mess with my equipment.

Scared it'd fall off if I touched it, or more likely, keep me awake on a school night demanding attention. My premature asexuality. You'd think it was in a dusty old drugstore that my parents found those Victorian anti-erection rings, but the truth is they were being manufactured well into the 1950s. A young fellow had no personal freedom besides his penis. But masturbation is really, in a sense, just a way to get sucked off by the alligators flushed down the pipes as baby souvenirs, sperm wriggling out of their grinning toothsome mouths like polliwogs. He was in love with his sperm, those tadpoles in white silken breeches, he asked them for advice when he rubbed his genie-lamp. Sometimes red and black semen with sperm like chess pieces, tiny rooks, horseheads and bishops hats. All the weird monsters in the bathroom sink's pipes from combinations of himself and his mother's menses. When he first saw Mom's menstrual blood he thought some neighborhood kid jokester had put an M-80 up there and was ready to go out and kick some ass. Then she menopaused and the whole thing kind of died down. Mumbling hallucinationey things about Theremin alligators. Well, he meant monsters in the sewer pipes from combinations of his jackoff and gators flushed down the toilet, or incest monsters from his mother's menses and a few of his DNA down there.

Of course Tippy would rather masturbate than take a shower, figured it got him cleaner. Y'know, I've heard long debates in junior high on the veracity of how if a woman walks in a men's locker room, accidentally or not, it's OK for everyone to rape her or at least take off her clothes and make her run out into the halls acting ashamed.

Tippy didn't care, its all release anyway. A record release party. It's a wonder all that masturbation didn't leave him self-centered.

Masturbation was his dumbest crime, but every time he did it he was his own center of attention, his own world and the world was Onstage. Every time he did it he was an only child.

Remember, Mary and Joseph nailed Christ's hands back so the little carpenter wouldn't oil-and-wine down there, would remain the perfect host. Choirboy squeezing the chalice till angels flew out.

Everytime he did it they canonized a new saint. Bless the diamonds from whence come pearls. The Holy Spasm. A sax-playing sideburned Jewish kid in high school said "Tisdian", supposedly the Aramaic way Christ said "fuck you". Adam may have invented sex but Onan made it safe. There are guys in school who call their dicks their "Pietas", yet sporting tattoos on their biceps "Born Celibate".

Christ, denying everything, pulled his peter three times before his cock crowed. God have mercy on my soul and its waters. When it's raining I want to piss in the street, mix myself in a puddle. As meteorologists make the weather, who invented the ocean? What weather is favorable for panicking? The wind and the mortician. Spit one pearl two, knitting sputum webs, sputum woolens. All over my socks.

Casting off one's virginity must be like that. The assertive young impulse, that which strums the body to fuck, the impulse to band together and make music, these function as the only universal things.

Tippy was ever so charming that even as a little boy he probably could've talked a grumpy bus driver into backing up a few blocks had he missed his stop, and these were barely the days of public transportation, back when each household had 2.8 more cars than children. On chirping charm alone he probably could've made a bluejay come. Sexually mature at age five ("I'm a man but I'm a short man"). He should've known something was funny when little girls'd take their shirts off and rub against him like a statue to kind of, y'know, see what'd come off. As a little kid, back when he thought fucking was called "happy rape", his innocence whetted appetites and wetness. Lust of the lambs. Looked longingly at those pictures of what cuts of meat are divided up from the cow. Fascinated for hours by a picture someone brought into class of a miniskirted girl on a minibike. Young, bored and naked. Balls round as nuns' sins, so pent up sometimes he was literally drowning in his own cum. In the days when Almost Fifteen, Never Had Wet Dream was worthy of a newspaper headline. Even before he had a body he hung out with girls. Tippy knew there was something afoot when I heard a dirty song a little girl belted out on the playground, "See-Saw Rider". Or the year there was the story about that little girl who lost her virginity in the dead of winter at the hands of a snowman some boys'd built,

though I'm getting to an age where I suspect it was the kindly old school crossing guard "Pete". Who built the snowman.

Tippy attained bath puberty, and puts down on a school standardized test form in the box under Sex "Nude" "because that's how I came into the world." Little did he know he would soon know what people do in the nude, already had inklings that it was more than just a color of pantyhose. An epiphany as much as any orgasm the day he discovered a woman's body could substitute for his left hand for that poltergeist touch. The onanismgasm's days and functions were limited by the size of the orgone box. Paleo-oleo, the ageless oil that's like cunt. Tippy still thought the Facts of Life were dogmatic dicta like "socks get dirty". Tippy had a certain brand of plastic harmonica realistically shaped liked a woman's nether world called a Vulvatone. The Highfalutin' Flute, that popular operetta.

Staged in a flying saucer full of women piloted by their underwear.

Thoughts of these things occupied a lad.

Of course there were grade-school games of doctor inspections and practicesex with the retard girl down the block.

Oh, that was your big sister? She's OK now, in a special home? Well. That's good, we remember her fondly. So fondle-y, heh heh.

He was originally called Trippy, and this was before it had any psychedelic implications, an old family name. But playing doctor with the lisping neighborhood retarded girl, she slur-squealed his name as "Tippy", to the hooting delight of the other boys, so that stuck around his neighborhood, and thus his life. The butt, the underground moon in the bushes, and folding parts were reverently shown to us by

Bessie Leonardoretardo. All the boys gathered there to inspect her pinkness have gone on to eminent medical, biology research or legal careers. Tippy, who seemingly plucked that which could be plucked, led the examination with vigor.

That night, forty miles away, the Fuctorama, an ampitheater first built for a 1950s Worlds Fair overseas then reassembled piece by piece at great expense in Motorsburgh, amazingly burst into flame and burned to the ground. Originally intended to promote that year's Clitor, an unsuccessful sedan named for old Fuct’s eldest son who died a virgin, with both a roomy back seat for the sex the lad never grew to have and a charcteristic vulva-like radiator in front, a knobby chrome ornament prominently nestled near its top. In any case, Tippy assumed that seeing the tiny flesh equivalent for the first time caused lightning to strike the Fuctorama, or perhaps the carelesslydiscarded post-coital cigarette butts of a charwoman trysting with a nighttime guard there, caused the expensive conflagration in firey celebration of this unforgotten Aleppo boy’s new carnal knowledge.

And he sure felt good about that.

He was warmed with that knowledge for a while before he put it to use, put 2 + 2 together, bodies and bloodies. Teenage is Tantra, a hallucinatory sex-magick of tumescent tension just before the point of grown-up orgasm, sustained over several years of concupiscent madness. We all looked at the girls in the fashion magazine Décolleté. Girls were skeptical but achingly curious, as demonstrated in that 5th grade girl's sex-education movie—almost a 1940s heartbreaker they'd show on morning or afternoon TV—"The Clown and the Clitoris". At the age their mothers call clitoris-in-progress.

Broke out their tiny, embroidered handkerchiefs for that.

What in fifth-gland, fifth-grade Boy's Sex Education the grim, gripped girded teacher called his Seeds of Fact. It's endosperm when it comes out of your body, puddled on your bed. Ads in comic books advertised Kids! A Nifty Masturbating Fort! as they offered a cardboard kit that boys and girls could assemble in the backyard or basement themselves. A boy's own extruded ecstasies. Tippy thought, how can I make the most out of these? Many households celebrated the Catholic holiday the Feast of the De-chastitatiion, when younger but worldly-wiser girl Mary “Magwheels” Magdalene rid eager teenage Christ of his agonizing virginity, in the temple, pushed up against the altar, as soon as he’d chased out the moneylenders.

I’d sometimes get to stay home from school on that day, play my guitar.

The difference between fourteen and unlucky thirteen was enormous. Boys studied Want Ads in the back of stolen PREPUCEBOY magazines promising to show men how to CONQUER ABSTINENCE. PUDENDAMAN magazine, glossy rival to PEPUCEBOY glistened with scare headlines for men like Monogamy Cost Me My Youth, which I first read as Monotheism etc.

Tippy had turned fourteen that midnight, but his Pop hadn’t come crashing, knocking things over, screaming into his room "You'll end up having sexual intercourse!" while visibly perishing at the thought, and fuming how he wished the Russians would take over tonite and impose a salt-mine morality at gunpoint on these kids. Some father’s generation thought of today's women as open like the cold seatless toilets in prisons and bad reform schools. I say, choose your high

school like you choose your girl.

As my Mom used to say, sex reared its ugly head. Squeamish middleclass grownups even had a euphemism for fucking sex, "relationship", just as Tippy confused the terms "relationship" and "orgasm", thinking he was trying to have a relationship faster.

My Mom ever trying to be helpful—that buttinsky, why doesn't she mind her own business?—suggested to his mother that she him a drugstore remedy called Libido Block. Like the potash those elderly ladies put in the school lunchroom food to calm down and quell youthful ambition. His mother merely threw up her hands, let him go on a diet exclusively of candy and ice cream till he grew strong and sexual with incredible rat-like teeth. Meanwhile, my Mom stayed awake nights, nervousness heightened by a diet of morning quarts of Instant CaCa Coffee, cigarettes and cyclamates, insomnimaniacally anticipating bargains to shop for at garage sales. She tried hard to teach me not to love. Members of her family always tried to concentrate upon loving the United States of America best, and to the Republic, especially if they got unhappy at a parent's death and drank too much on a special sentimental occasion.

Some parents thought that childrearing boiled down to the simple phrase Do anything except play with yourself. It's hard for a Midwestern boy to pee with an erection. All faucets drip at night.

Blinded by puberty. That which adults are afraid of. His mother's crippling fear of him getting it up. No longer kid stuff, just flowerfucking. The choice between your parents or your-pants, what's in your pants. Parent-child play-love-sex. Some kids at school called

him Incest Boy, after the comic book hero, said he was his mother's own twin, and colored kids used an even harsher, more angular word.

So he angrily rubbed off his magic-marker tattoo "MOTHER"—he'd seen it in Positron Bo'sun the Slipeyed Sailor cartoons so inked it on—and felt cheated.

Early attempts at sex can be compared to dropping a stillborn kitten—and catching it, fool!—several times until it gasps for breath.

Adolescent equals scientific, prescient. Teachers tried to convince us that those last moments of teenage virginity, when everything is exciting, is the last Golden Age of Youth you'll ever be. Absolute bullshit. In every boy’s prehistory the cap finally fired on his little cap pistol, came feeling like a procession of soap bubbles through a tunnel, like throwing a handful of gravel against a window.

Spermfire's pilot light nearly went out. Flared genitals under his bellbottomed pants. Needing the crime of paradise bad. Grew old enough to Get. Like when the boy falls next to the girl. The quantam leap. Sexual nutrition to his plastic nervousness. He broke through the horrible nude. But he even sort of tired of illegitimate masturbation, and one day as a teen he learned about shit n' girls.

Junior high I worked in school library, assigned by Principal Nicholas Thunderbird report to the librarian Mrs. Silverfish. Tippy came in and masturbated with library paste. Three girls skipped their assignments for his assignations instead. The old twine-and-dine, dating. A Debbie-may-care expression, everywhere but his face. Cock wool.

Genital fog. Bug envelopes. Behaving like perspicacious Martians.

Thalidomide brides and hug and divide. Cells dividing at an early age. How the porcelain monk came to learn about these inverted

parentheses. He learned the facts or fiction of life, learned what all the words in the songs that weren't saying anything meant. The invisible secret, that everybody liked love. He got lifed. The screen old slam door. When his parents replaced the spring with a pneumatic doorcloser that went ph-h-h-tt, then Tippy just knew he'd have to have sex.

Oh, those suave and fearless kids in junior high who had romance, sex, and romantic sex early. Erotocrats and primsubdivision aristobrats. Maturo-teens. I envied, thus hated, them.

There had been junior high school parties, intending to make youth more sociable, where big honking jazz aggregates, led by the rheumy and bespectacled flu-ridden Del Swine, played so-called dance music in their calamine cotillion coats and carnation cumberbunds from behind little music stand podia. Incidental music. Something not quite yet resembling Rock n' Roll, though close enough to push Tippy in the general direction of girls. Chaperones would flit about holding a sawed-off ruler between dancing couples and say "seven inches apart please", but the jock-colored boys would only laugh knowingly, as that's the length of a standard dick. And then there was theirs, hah. Church group teens were given expurgated copies of their parents' favorite The Sex Lives of the Lord, now cheerfully illustrated and re-titled Take God on That Date!

A lot of junior highs were populated by girls with voices like wind chimes, saying No to boys gracefully, sympathy in their perfect eyes, mocking them behind choreographed romantically blinking lashes. Some, many, maybe most of the refused young gentlemen then turned up in the turbines of the hydroelectric power station on

the river the next morning, small sad sacrificial rams.

Girls, they were the mature ones in those grade levels. Prim stenographers'-desk-bound letterhead blondes. Despite snickering through Hygiene class lectures like "Menstruation vs. Masturbation", mean girls (like Coral, whom I’ll tell you about later) were sexually beyond their breast-fed years. They'd torture boys they found delicious or amusing. To decide which one of them would shoplift Cokes, snacks and cigarettes for their lunchtime, they would capture three nerdy boys—"Hey! You, C'mere!"—where a single hand on a shoulder was usually enough—and then tie his wrists behind him to a locker with a pretty scarf. Those long Cordless Electric Vibrators advertised in Sunday newspaper magazines pressed against faces were then produced out of knapsacks to be brandished against the front of their prisoners' slacks and jeans. The first of the girls to produce a viscous smudge upon a pantsfront was the contest winner, and the girl whose eletric whirring took the longest to bring forth an effect in the lad was the one who had to take the effort to steal the team's lunch. The boys were left tied and whimpering, often to suffer the teasing of jocks and other classmates, until a disgusted teacher untied them sternly.

You and your friends still do that? Well.

I saw a copy of one of those breathless fan magazines for girls Menarche Music!, which mooned on an on about the song "Cathy's Coitus" by the Brotherly Evenings, and their less enduring hit about her button of love. The latter was thought less romantic; teenage boys, probably tired of fumbling for that, discouraged their girlfriends from buying the 45. Rock n' roll songwriting is misreadings,

mishearings, the misinterpretation of sex, or courtship rituals leading up to it. Coition with caution? No way, José!

There was a story of a band of mini-skirted girls, actually proud to be virgins, who impishly called themselves the Unfucked.

Followed by a reverential piece on that best-selling Walking Cross the Womb album by the Abortions, and they were just gods.

Or, as Horace Mars muttered Baptismally, "just God's".

Him? Oh, Coral’s father. I’ll tell your more about him later.

Up North one final summer before he was too old to accompany his parents anywhere he went to an old abandoned limestone quarry, where there was said to be a Manitou Indian medicine man's tumor or cyst, or maybe one from an old magician or addled scientist, buried under the ground or some rock slag at the bottom of a deep pool. The hacked-off growth had putrefied into an iron lodestone or meteorite, and it was giving off radio waves something fierce. The old funguswhittlin' couple in the next cabin complained it could be picked up in their fillings. Though wild dogs in the distance chased him away before he could investigate, it was here that summer that he almost had his first sexual experience, and decided to begin to listen to the radio seriously. His eyes roll, reddened. His ears hot wet pork spiced with chili sauce. Making tarand-feathering noises. Ignoring all the feedback from others, sufficient unto himself. As if he's a planet alone in the noisy or noiseless universe, beginning or making song when there is no song to make.

Many nearby boys first did it with a neighborhood kindness

named Relaxy, so she was a likely candidate. Another theory had his first flow into some teenage doxy named Spitch from a Motorsburgh suburb, face like a cuckoo clock. Whosoever gatekeeper of Tippy’s first time, there followed a cavalcade parade of sweet and youthful carnal love. Now, liberal parents proudly sported the concerned social science bestseller on their shelves Why Johnny Can't Fuck. Ones that had bookshelves in the living room, sheesh! Tippy’s wealth (supplementing his endowment) may have been that was not troubled by the parents in his pants, self-restraint. Had permission of the store clerk to try on his sexual pennyloafers. Collecting girls like fleas, ticks and chiggers like a wooly sock walking in the woods collects burrs.

Still, he never had sex on a swingset, or in a scrubbed-out dumpster.

Summertime, and the living is girls, girls, girls. People mistook Tippy for a highschool swimmer, while he got no exercise at all except for girls. That was the season of fragrance pregnancies, the short-lived fad of girls claiming they'd been knocked up by something like perfumed pollen. A puffball, maybe. Only the most gullible parents bought that.

Girls in white or blue shorts, Dr. Schoe's flipflop sandals, shag flipflop haircuts. Public park grasspromiscuity. Holiday for Bras.

Pigskin blondes, bra-breasts like footballs. Potato-breasted girls in their tuber tops. Girls in introductory dresses. Girls with breasts like Q-Tips. Girls with beach and beachball breasts. Rumpus rumors.

Discovered that a girl in her summer top is sexiest shivering at night just a little too cold. Breasts like a vegetable he saw on TV. Anything you can grasp, treat it like a breast.

Where others saw beasts, Tippy saw breasts. In my case, vice

versa. No, not that the breasts saw him, but that he saw many breasts as beastly. Or wait, maybe I did. Yeah, that's me instead.

Tippy was probably suckled, weaned in the proper healthy amount and duration. I don’t want to talk about me, still hung up I guess.

Girls in winter wearing their Smotheralls underneath so they'd be just a little bit sweaty, difficult to digitate. He loved those babyfatsizzled fondleburgers. A maximum squirt at a miniskirt. Calf pizza.

Golf course butter. When you want to mount the very best. Girls as robin-pecked Michigan apples. What Tippy called “puberries”, implying both pubic robbery and the hymeneal cherries of lore.Standing on the sidewalk, gazing into shirtfronts of young ladies with little lucky sevens for breasts and laughing legs, laughing-gas legs, Tippy liked them playing tennis too. This was, in effect, knowing the birds and the bees around here. Summer's here and the time is ripe, four damn things in the sheets. Girls like houseflies buzzing, or moths fluttering, around a nighttime summer lamp named Tippy. The girls beneath him on the playground were the junior high varsity team he coached.

Tippy discovered sex was just something like riding horseback on the moon. He felt like a landlocked ship in her. The obscure cur.

A Shake Age Object. Still full of spermatazoic naievete, those kids need a carpenter to straighten their nails out. Tippy learned seduction, the foot-in-the-door salesman's trick. Romantically dating a girl with the car radio on the Five Satin Stairsteps. Experiments with new forms of public puberty. Those catalogs with suspiciously blankfaced women with cheek massagers, he knew deep down in his heart or loins she was covering up and hiding something, waiting for the camera or catalog artist to look away. The dick on the desk.

Anatomically elevated. The "Science Friction" of sex. That much-

ballyhooed thing called sex; the will to sex is an assigned garden.

Beach towels and avowed principles dropped. From bashful to bed council, bed of America, bed of my business. The Thousand Dollar Day he put two and two together and learned, girls sleep with their boyfriends. Realized why the state bird of Michigan is the throaty redbreasted buddy the Cock Robin. He finally knew what the soft parts meant.

You could almost call the young and oral ones masturbationmouth'd, their mothmouths and facial hindparts open like little hungry birds. Oil fellatio. Blindfingered girls, still making boys feel good or OK down there, however, whatever. Hostility rubs, Sunday semen, a flash of defloration. The daisybreaker. Unleavened flesh. Hugs n' homework, where vanity does not equal virginity; German Vanity. Virginmania, the virgin knot reinstalled with household cement, plastic wrap or aluminum foil or a slice of rubber truck tire. Tippy, liked to call it the girl's vah-ginity, because it was ameliorated with action upon her vah-gina, but he often used to like to talk or sing lyrics in the accented Tallullah-lilt of the churchgoing southern negro, a habit which irked me to no end.

He didn't belong to a church group, so missed out on all those girls enjoying their first trysts in the church, barebacked halters on the altar, applying the Holy Oil and Church-ready condoms. What sophisticatholics called Kyrie Liasons. Nevertheless, he knew girl named Piffany, which actually comes from the Biblical book Epiphanies. A beauty we called Schoolgirl of Christ. Of course, Christ may have actually been the son of Pontius Pilate, much like all the little mystery shavers fathered by President Kennedy on what he

called his “whistle stops” around the country, for who they had to build new elementary schools by the mid-1960s. All those Catholic girls tasking his ejaculate for the first time, after gagging on the quantity, smiled beatifically and claimed of the Holy, pasty wafer "It tastes just like Communion!" Elvis Pastry. And maybe like Priestly waters too, if clerical mischief afoot.

Can’t remember that book in the Bible where God tells Jesus Christ not to worry if his dick is small, it runs in the family—not like Lucifer's (why they call wooden matches by that name), or wooly bully John the Baptist, his caveman animal robe barely covering it, dangling down like a caveman club. "Or that of Zeus", remarked Jesus. I think they were bathing together under the waterfall stream in Eden or something. Mary brought fresh towels. Maybe Mary Magdalene was bathing with them, giving them more sparkle than the water. I remember that story dimly from Catechism class, just before were asked about our own "adult urges". There are girls with names evoking Irish Catholic towns around here, y’know, Regina VirgoIntacta.

Some girls who'd loved him took to religion, became heartland Baptists, went to Scripture College and bore a minister many faithful children. Faces of those girls like a bundle of Bibles. Like the story of Hattie the Hittite, Christ's first girlfriend long before he grew that yen for the Magdalene. Why Christian gentlemen like Horace Mars still toast Eat, Drink and Make Mary Magdalene. Every Godfearing girl had said something of the sort to him, in holy heat humongous: This is my body, take you and drink from it for these are my breasts.

Rapidly nubile-izing neighborhood girls Roni Rumraisin, Panti

Hosinger, Susan Pituitary, Valerie Allergy. Hours spent playing with Cathy Armymen. Homely, hirsute girl in high school Edna Furbelow, who got nicknamed by a mean and cyical Jewish cartoonist, our school's "Furshlugginer". Flitting around from budding-ripe girl to over-ripe Experienciata like a smart fruit fly, red eyes sparking.

Fluvia, daughter of a Classics Professor, was named in hopes a riverrine menstrual flow would keep at bay the shame of unwanted teen pregnancies; I first heard Effluvia, wondered why her dad would bestow trash and dirt carried downstream by currents. Did she have a gross brother Effulgent? Hope not. Tippy called the classicist's younger daughter Clytemnestra "Clitoris Semester," which amused the girl but not the father. Already he knew about that, probably from a combination of the retard girl memories and whatever he gleaned from glances into his mother’s After Dinner and Drinks women’s magazine. Yet another had that sensitive thing so prominent he called her The Climbing Wall. Like in the fairy tales, touch a tadpole, and the frog turns into a kissed princess.

He'd breathe upon young girls with his reefer breath and cloud their minds. Remember when the 1960 headlines blared Elvis Kisses! Flavor of the pimento in the penis. Learned to use his cock conversationally, through kangaroo punches into those girls' pyjamas.

Going off in them like a string of horsefirecrackers. His come was golden earrings like they’d shoptlife at the JMJMart jewelry counter.

A pediatrician who was also a horsetrader said his cock was sixteen hands high. His scrotum his factotum. Wearing his phallus like a top hat. This fuckknife. He was an ipthyphallic Mutinous Tootinous, the oldtime funny pages character always bumbling around with an

enormous bulge in his oversized vaudeville comedy pants. Women kept busting his leg so the blood would rush only to his cock; sometimes with magic markers full of honey, funkmarkers for writing names of boys that girls like on notebooks. Cuckold tips. Sex Exodus. Riverboat affection, Till He's Punctured Romance. Magic lovepotions. Man, what a prodigious blessingmen with the girls.

Sure, it was just jenifersex but he learned the science creative people do at night. They call it "making time", so that's how time is made; the cock is time and she had space up there and that's how space-time is brewed up. Albert Einstein, the first longhair, must've discovered that. As Eve was a rib taken from Adam while sleeping, that's what "sleeping with" has always meant; a few years later, Tippy would come upstairs in the Firehouse with a boner thinking someone had shouted "rape". Hugging was probably invented by some woman anyway.

He learned the stereo kiss, the ritual in which a princess climbs the pyramid. Their mouths from kissing were like Halloween wax lips, and his cock felt like those wax skeletons and objects full of colored syrup. Kissing till it’s painful in secret parts of the highschool until the school cop's silhouette like Frankenstein chases them away, pants all stained and the girl returned to class. Other guys said "Aww, he falls in love every time he sees a girl's butt", but that was only partly true.

Love is when you'd rather have sex with someone specific you've had before or had your eye on rather than a random new girl. I haven't gotten to that yet! Just going through a stage. I like to think sometimes even more important than sex, this was his first melancholy experience where he learned once and for all the world

was out to sorely disappoint him.

After his about ninety-ninth time with a girl, Tippy started becoming aware of adult inflections, the sex in society's tall tales all around him. Mortal humans thinking about eternity is like a child trying dimly to think about sex—you just can't do anything about it.

Maybe this explains parents' embarassment at the subject, for sex is such a slippery metaphor for all existential questions. Being older just meant blowing your nose on funny cocktail napkins. Sex is vicarious laughter seeping through walls as through gauze. After all, the human body is 700% bongwater. The great sweating is ahead.

List you on my pleasure ledger. He read the Massacre Men's Magazine tales of tough ranchers out West who, from horseback, could grab a UFO out of the sky, fuck it in the portholes real good before it got up a forcefield electric charge to break the ranchero's grip, shake loose and speed away dazed into the sky, the earthbound fellows laughing and feeling good, spent. The more urbane Prepuceboy magazine Manly Advice column instructed that every hip man knows marijuana is a seductant and offers it to women. Soon Tippy knew all the theories of, and gave a report on, how mermaids were dreamed up by men who loved women squirming on top, and sphinxes dreamed up when the woman is taken from behind, animal style. He wondered if Scotch tape was made by putting a girl in cellophane hotpants, making her come then cutting the shorts off of her in strips. He liked breasts that tasted of postage stamps, aftertaste of glue and glee. Tippy bought honey maple candy corn syrup as a sexual lubricant. On some exotic girl's odd suggestion, he tried brown sugar once, but only once.

Too bad they don't give Certificates of Concupiscence. At that age, young people barely have a mental life besides sexuality. Sex takes you outside of yourself, makes you think of some other living being for a minute and puts a little bit of you in someone else and that's just what Tippy did. He used sex to flex, sex to relax, sex to detach and sex as torsion bar suspension. The absence of abstinence. Adult life is boring in a sense because all you ever think about is sex, and deep down you know what the answer is. But was the naggging loss of innocence complete and complex? Yes. Recognition sparked and dawned upon Tippy that this cock could secure his future someday.

Lust as a teapot overflowing, too full to whistle. A matchbox full of hormones. . Great Fuxpectations. This cockroach of joy. Pinch alarms. A hundred virginweight. Something just had to give, and give it to Tippy.

Some people suspect his first sex was a deer in upper Michigan, eyes brown and yearning like a groupie girl. Out in the sexual woods. How the woodchoppers ball. Open the feral faucet.

But no, it was closer to home. Did Tippy, you ask, molest and possess the family dog? His family didn't have a dog in the tiny mobile home, though he did take his pleasure on several strays, yapping Boston terriers and neighborhood families' friendly mutts.

Science? I'll show you science. The University of Aleppo Campus Zoo caged one example of each species in Michigan in a little zoo—rabbit, fox, bear, skunk, squirrel, racoon, snakes and a snapping turtle, and plenty of cocoons. Laid out for the contemplation and delectation of wolf, bear, lion, weblos. A species of wolverine

called a Vulppepperrine, that used to live up north and all around on the munched carcasses of passenger pigeons, now damn near extinct and obsolete. Squirrelwolves nervous and tittering, circling mindlessly in their cramped concrete cage-ette. Squirrelettes. I was probably upstairs in the Museum, staring at the tiny conical plaster breasts of the bare-chested American Indian woman collecting corn in the miniature diorama, while Tippy was outside having his way with those zoo animals. The gila monster on the mezzanine hissed, that bastard better not come up here and try anything with me.

Tippy had been loosed in a little octagonal railroad-roundhouse of Michigan animal commerce, of subjugation of the lesser breeds without the law sure as the honky pig power structure subjugated the mind-your-own-business Indians around here. You might have thought that, over the years, on autumn nights a teenage gang or frathouse delgation might “bestialize the beasts”, gangrenefuck 'em one by one as a club initiation, working from the bullfrog and toad all the way up to the poor little frightened black bear and her cubs. An only a week earlier the Chinese Students' Association had painted her up like a panda to welcome a visiting trade delegation and concert cellist, so she was already suffering lead poisioning from the whitewash. Some lonelyhearts had sex with robins, supposedly in a brothel by the airport with real winged, feathered birds. But no, Tippy was the first to see lust and partnership in this crowd of fur, feather, gill and fin. And so the University Museum presented to him the possibility of fucking all those critters at once, a great variety in one fell swoop. Tippy thought, from then on, of sex as a group activity, a performance where he was first among equals. And thought of

himself as the roaring lion in command of the harem that did all the hunting in his behalf.

I gave Tippy's raid upon the zoo the name "Zoopraxis", though that might not have been completely right. The evening paper speculated it was grad students and campus hangers-on from the radical Peoples Puma Party or the rival one-pill-makes-you-larger White Rabbit Party, whom every April Fool’s Day spiked the city water supply with LSD and other jolly psychedelics. Highschool jocks claimed credit, and the kids who supposedly pulled off the prank were especially revered in their classes, for classmates knew exactly what that lingering smell meant. But no, it turns out they’d rubbed woodland animals and spoor upon themselves to provide misleading evidence of the Zoo caper. It was all inarguably Tippy’s doing alone.

On the radio, that colored Reverend in Motorsburgh preached Sunday that Noah's wife made him take male animals on the Ark too, so he wouldn't be tempted during that long floatation. In the zoo, happy days like Adam and Eve swinging ring-a-ding-ding and wifeswapping with the animals in the Garden. Like a Quaker painting of the peaceable, fuckable kingdom. Maybe Rev had gotten word of what happened from the colored man who cleaned the cages or something.

On my next trip to the Museum the gila monster tapped on the glass, wanted me to lean close, told me all about Tippy's antics, even though her bleak desert sand terrarium on the mezzanine doesn't even face the window After Tippy came home from the university zoo inspired and refreshed, he wrote the song "Let's Everybody Mate". Not only did

Tippy have sex with the university zoo animals, on the way home as a victory lap he had it with the unwrapped Queen Can't-Stay-Put mummy in the archeological museum. The dry, crackly sound alerted the guard, who thundered up the stairs spraying an anti-mugger irritant every which way. Gray, ashen flakes of the Nile ruler tumbled off the front of his barely-buttoned jeans as he ran off. Haw! Score!

Israel one, Egypt zero.

To be modern, the high school had the Californian motto chiseled over the door "Be True to Your School/Like You Would to Your Girl". Now what does that mean? Don't fuck other high schools’ students while attending here? Isn't promoting monogamy like that dangerously commingling church and state? But isn't exogamy a healthy cultural trait? I never touched those gossip teens.

He entered high school for the requisite socio-sexual education of the day, to meet girls. He really didn't want to waste his valuable time on Reading, Writing. Or Math, for his parents had offered to buy him that new expensive thing, a pocket calculator. Tippy became a swinger geschwingen in high school, all long sinewy muscle fluidity, and I don't just mean thru girls. Some teenagers used a substance in a tube called Prom Repair, those cool kids, whose hair was always long by Summer. We grew our hair long, what was called the barbershop of silence. Rollover Beethoven-haired. Tippy's hair was always long-short and short-long. Mine, oy, my mother complained about mine from the day I was born. Came out of the womb unkempt unshemp’t I guess, and embarassed Mom in front of those nurses and she never let me forget it. Meanwhile Tippy looked like a cross

between the beachtanned band the Sandfellows, and handsome man’s wig President JFK. The come-a-lot President was known to have had so many affairs, required all those women, because the painkillers he took for his injured back that made him horny. Cthonic Tonics. Drugs and sex are the human workshop.

Tippy was one great teenage gonadwolf. In the shade of blooming young girls. All around him, fellow teenage vulvadiggers, cunt-badgers marveling in their venery. Squirming and ramming and squirting and slurping with joyous discovery. Many of his classmates took their instruction from underground cartoonist Ricky Speck's Vault of Fucking comix from the head shoppe. Jump for the skirt.

Tunnel of love metaphors, the little boat who goes into the dark of your party tunnel and never comes down. He sure was a horny-toad kid, a hot buttered boy for girls. Little smudgenose sophomore.

Smile full of permanent teeth. Born in an auditorium, born fornicatin' ad infinitum. Tippy the male Tipitina Falalala oola mala gala wah, a marching song which was written by a school principal somewhere in New Orleans. Like all highschoolers Tippy lived on beer and illcooked French toast but he would've rather settled for a "cherry pie and a large Coke", meaning a girl and a school woods toke. He loosened his psychic underpinnings. Rode that trauma train into cold confidence, discovering home. Surrendered to his strong points. A man-of-the-womb. His pecker’s nagging attention caused him to misspeak in class, his answer about the British empire’s “circumcision” when he meant “colonization.” Aldebbie’s ears perked up at that.

Yes, we’ll get to Aldebbie in a while.

Now, Jesus supposedly had a thing for young virgins the rest of

his adult life, because of the special nature of his birth. But Tippy preferred experienced female company too. Dwarf women that he'd take on the swingsets in the minipark. Jello and fellatio on the patio.

A human gourmet. He even hung around with the type of girl in highassed tight jeans, short ski jacket and clean hair. Satin-hearted girls, skin a sort of honey light, girls with cast-iron clothes that would barely come off. Basketball sweat and vanilla tears. YWCA Promiscuity Workshops. Thought for hours about where women had sat, would it rust specially in two hundred years? What kind of highschool hymencleaners could feel that way? In Creative Creating Things class, something experimental dreaped up by hippie teachers, he gave a discourse about girls with braces on their teeth. Was ready to force his tongue between the lips of a huge Olmec head, though some girls seemed suitably precolumbian. Early sex had that little postcard-penis clicking his dick like a ballpoint pen on the next page of her waitress' pad, his dick a can opener to her oil-packed sardines, between her own electric can opener legs. A Live Sex Show by all the Goddesses and Gods of the Classical pantheon.

The Student Committee to Legalize Boners voted to call him Tippy because one leg was slightly shorter than the other two, causing him to lean towards the female. The name stuck, for he had an extra set of olympic-sized muscles in that third leg, an extra set of hormones. Cock as power broker. Cock as a rolled-up newspaper, beating a favorite dog. Showed the girls why his nickname wasn’t "Pinky". They did the That Which Is Not Publicized, that which does not publicize well. In fact, in the Girls' bathrooms at school some of them used to speculate about whether he'd undergone an organ

transplant where the donor was a sasquatch. He studied all over the sperm spectrum. Sharing with girls the smelling sausage. A peter full of diamond chips, a peter full of girls' good ideas. A can of fishing worms. A walking lovewhy. Like Daniel Boone, he used a cocoon for a condom, a million tiny tent caterpillars urging a woman to go on.

Coconut condom for a monkey's uncle. Even learned to wear the boys' swim cap sometimes, for contraceptives were sold in old German Aleppo like a loaf or sausage in an old fashioned butcher shop, ordered "by the experience". When jokes flowed like water and rubbers filled like wine. There was a god in his loins, a pot o' gold.

The golden touch of that little makeup-eater. Cock like a carved and painted Potowatami totem pole on Lake Up North, or one of those knobby poles with which those Indians would brain missionaries and would massacre redcoat soldiers. Slipping into a riverbed cunt like a canoe. Spermfeathers, the animism of eroticism, warpaint on her thighs.

As a teenager dating was like miniature golf, all those crazy holes, windmills in nightlove and Taj Mahals of resistance to his seductions, hitting a ball thru turning windmill vanes, moats and bridges that only made it that much more challenging. So he planned to call his first band the Miniature Golfers. At night he'd sneak girls out on the large public golf course—cheaper than Classic Cabins— and get to fingercomb lovehair, roll 'em in the sagebrush, get 'em to bet all their change. Dodging the dark brown groundskeepers. In the bushes where he used to like girls. Cum on the hazelnuts, cum in the classroom. Highway headhunters, highway hedonists, headwaiters of bad taste. Snake city for punkin'head. Used to take 'em up on

Mud Pie Ridge. At first just mouse sex, tiny intercourse like nibbling on sticky grains of fried rice on a kitchen floor. Soon choo-choo love, riding his girl motorcycle into permission parking. This flying seducer was out ass-fishing. Taking his space-age muscle, his mobius dick, out gathering breasts. Mammary glands in his heart. He'd pierce those girls' young ears with a bite of his canine incisors for the longest earring they'd ever known. Impolite girls might say "Come more, Tippy" but this Lemon Man would gladly squeeze their legs till the juice ran down their life. They crushed the sexual grape together.

There were no tulip bulbs or pears sweet as women. His going-withs were each barely more than a pump primed for love. A gardener of Eden, hotel clerk for Adam and Eve's—the first couple to break up— one night stand. After he heard that colored exuberant Reverend praise adherance to the Ten Impediments on the radio, Tippy started saying he’d already “coveted” this girl or that, after the fact.

Girls were aggressive and self-assured in those days. One loverette cautioned wryly, upon meeting, This better be good. He helped overcome other very young girls' fear of fingering with soothing dialogue from an old movie he saw called "They Fuck by Night". They played chicken-in-the-bushes. He tried to make a crowded space with plain Emily Breakthrough and Ingrid Nereid, who wanted to be nurses because they thought they'd be privileged once the doctor showed it to them. Suggestive teenage girls come to play slidewhistles, ocarinas, had to drink bitter beer to get used to the taste of boys. Girls full of shaving cream. Girls who'd go to school in the morning and come home flat-chested, their hair like the chain-link fence around a school. One girl had a small blemish by her mouth, or

a mouth shaped like a surfer's wave, but a less-than-perfect apple could still be okay. Weird fishlike girl in our high school, Jenny Haniver, a skater who looked like a space alien; Tippy dated her anyway. Dangerous thinking in a honeymoon tank, he learned to stay away from destructive virgins in therapy and psychoanalysis.

Tippy gave the full moon the finger as it rose in the sky. I might've feared irking werewolves, or merely bats, but he feared nought. Neither nereid nor nougat. Like the graffiti banner atop the Cross, IHF. I Have Fucked. So fuck you.

“It’s one thing when a teenage girl’s family name is Sleepover,” thundered the Princial over the school P.A. system, “but this year’s promiscuity is getting out of hand!” The belowing stopped; hilarity ensued. The high school served a wide swath of the townships around Aleppo too, which brought Tippy in contact with pitchforkfaced girls, bitter as the farm just bitten. Farm girls for the plow that broke the pillow, sure. Many made a noise like a kitten's clitoris, when touched. Agricultural blond pearls, girls' big legs like concrete cylinders full of corn. Those female American silos. A girl Jezobelle who lived out in the country, whose hair smelled not like shampoo but real poo, dogs kept outdoors all winter, underarm leeks, and probably something stronger in her underpants. That girl called the Onionness, who really tried to bathe properly, keep it fresh down there, despite boys' cruel taunts. Some of those girls were like doe, a deer, a female deer. Which must have felt down there like a manta ray, his drop of golden Sun. Girls like a small town pizza. He romped through those girls like an English poet through daffodils. Awestruck and adoring basketball-

faced girls. Posessing those girls were the second and third sincerest forms of flattery, but posession is nine-tenths of the Lord.

Innerwomen, called that because a fella's got to get it inside them before he understands anything. Rubber raft girls, bosoms and butts too much like summer boating accident life preservers. He dated one, Cindy Acne, who won and bore the title Michigan's Most Accurate Girl. Gas station-faced girls. Some girls' legs as skinny as a saint's swizzle stick. Fingerbowl girls. What our parents' generation called Gooey Petting. Heavy, man!

There were the Testosteronewald Woods right beside the high school, still stubbornly owned by an old German farmer's family.

Don't confuse those with old man Pesterwald, who donated the school’s make-out Planetarium, the Ovarium "Man o' Schevitz!" exclaimed astronomer Mr. Rosenvenus when he saw what Tippy was doing upon that girl in the high school Explorocosmotarium. Then Rosenvenus promptly retreated to the teachers' schvitz, for a three-towel Turkish bath and rubdown, but left the door unlocked. For this Explainetarium was where sex was explained, mostly gruntingly demonstrated by older male students to younger female ones in the dark. I don't know how much time Tippy spent there, but I'm told the vulpine school cop could, on patrol, in the dark, soon recognize him by smell (despite the richness of the excited. lubricated girl) and holler for him to get out. And it was terrible, how in high school Biology, once an incision was made into the fetal pig or formaldehyde bullfrog, Tippy had to stick in his...well, you know. It was terrible. It was amazing. He danced around the classroom, animal stuck and waving its jiggly arms and little legs like

the good luck lady on the prow of an old clipper ship, or a big baloon float in Pudmeisters' Thanksgiving Day Parade. The teacher Mr. Whooroboros started chasing him down the hall, unconsciously having picked up a scalpel and now brandishing it like a Polish samurai sword. Tippy must've run home, somehow explaining to his mom his pantslessness, or maybe she wasn't home—for he put the blown out porcine dissectee over the top neck of my guitar like a skier's stocking cap or golf club protector. Har de har. I was disgusted, for he hadn't rinsed it out, so I had to pour Dink's beer over my guitar head, tuning pegs and strings before I could play, Christ.

Eeuuww.

Tippy says it's the third or fourth time a night that fucking starts to become really transcendental. That guy in the Running Sores las year who couldn't take the majesty and grandeur of supersex and drugs, his frail heart just pooped out on him, gave up the Holy Ghost.

Sad. Talented bloke too, could pick up and add something smartypants to a song with a lot of different musical instruments.

Girls chewed on Tippy’s gumballs like they were Thump's crash cymbals. Massage neurons sprang to comfortable attention. He was an instinct dog. Stonedog at the fence of limitation, barking away. In smegmadelic, gleetific tapestries of female fluidallucinations.

Involving so-to-speak sex. Guys with cars took girls out to edge of Judaswood, the new subdivision near the freeway, claiming to be where the ancient turncoat hung himself, a massive erection as he swung from the tree. As Harry Fuct industrialized car-building, Tippy industrialized sex with women. A pace of activity only previously met by female prostitutes and gang-bang receptacles. Amazing pump. A

highschool classmate just back from Vietnam told of cheap urban "soaphouses" like Hands n' Suds, which he swore when he mustered out he'd hire some of our skankiest non-graduating classmates to start here in Aleppo. But Tippy had no need of that professionalism now.

There was a school club made up of all the kids who'd been seduced by their teachers and the faculty sponsors of other school clubs. Was that one rakish teacher's name Cockthrust, Cockthrush or Girlsbuttbloom? Rat bastard came out of the chemical storage closet with that little dyed blonde nymphette, nervously touching his lips, while she was walking funny or her miniskirt was. Tippy seduced a high school teacher appropriately named Margaret Dishonor, nicknamed "The Magnet" by her affectionate students. Postpriapism, Tippy would stroll home after pleasing and pleasuring older women, faculty wives, joke that he was picking "widow feathers" from his teeth.

But perhaps the adamant avant-garde movie-music composing Professor's one-legged wife who signed her paintings and essays "Ann Aleppo" was la grande dame who really taught Tippy fucking.

Tippy gave her what he likes to call a "quimplant". Her earlier memoir was called The Wooden Vulva. What will this next one, mentioning us, be? What’s more, who is the older woman—she was nicknamed by brute kids "Hagatha"—who seduces Tippy? A lunch lady? A teacher? Newspaper writer? All of those? Tippy said of some girls' graying moms Date them? I'd have to carbon-date them! Haw! Older and scalier than that Museum gila monster.

Tippy announced at the dinner table that he was now living for

what he called "the girlhole". Tippy's mom chuckled about him, maybe to my mom and Coral's, "That boy is is father's foreskin." I wonder, did Tippy seduce Mrs. Mars too? Forgive me, I’m getting ahead of myself, letting my mind wander. We’ll get to her.

Tippy invariably gets up afterwards to take a whiz against a tree. Switching from sex to peeing really strains the stomach muscles, and that's how he never developed a spare tire like the rest of us. Feels like a giant hand plucking a feat-of-engineering suspension bridge like a samisen string, a rubber band on a cigar box banjo, or a slingshot or Christmas crossbow. It was a musical experience, and those didn't go that unnoticed. Aerate that boner!

Waving it to the world. Which came first, the sperm, the egg or the dance the Funky Chicken? Crossing the road to get to the other side must metaphorically mean death. As Urinal River floodwaters rise, people trapped in an attic break through to another bardo. Hammer, crowbar, whatever it takes.

To the rest of us it appeared that Tippy was blessed with small parents, who had little effect or affect on him, his life.

I thought he was leaving snot in books out of ego, like an author's autograph, but Tippy did it so that he could later actually smell the girls reading it. Especially if the book was in their lap.

There were stodgy members of the youth medical research group Acupuncture Achievement. The rest of us chuckled at science films like "When Lesbians Pee".

Furnace room, the school rectum. There's an old story that my mother, still a child, was molested here. And now she works as a

lunch lady, but at a different school.

Post-Sputnik planetariums were installed in high schools instead of fallout shelters, in hopes of inspiring the race to the moon rather than merely fearing the Russians. But by the end of the 1960s, they mostly encouraged youth to get high, get cosmic.

The generation that, as kids, had looked forward to Acid Rain, outdoors with tongues extended, thinking it means LSD in the rainwater, hallucinogenic raindrops. We were excited to learn from the underground newspapers sold at Sunday free rock concerts of the Peoples' Puma Party plans to spike the water supply in Aleppo, and they circulated bucket drives for that campaign while the next band was setting up.

American history was still going on. And there were strained race relations in those days. Michigan became a state in 1837 just as the cotton market collapsed; people simply didn’t want to wear that stuff anymore. Consquently, the slaves were all released, half sent to Michigan and half to Liberia. In 1914, the Liberian Democratic Empire launched a surprise attack on the US Naval base in the Azores, and retaliation followed, invading forces including white England, France, Germany, Russia, Turkey and Israel, which proceeded to carve up Africa. No, not the History class version, something I pieced together from movies. Needless to say, there was some lingering resentment amongst Motorsburgh blacks.

But enough barn-burning book learning, on to real life. One teenage prank was to singlehandedly—for he was strong enough when on the right drugs—put gravestones on the parent's front lawn

when the kids had run away from home: "MOTHER" "DEARLY BELOVED" "SORELY MISSED" "POOPSIE", maybe from a Pet Cemetary, ad infinitum et nauseum of the mausoleum. This made the parents think seriously about entropy, how the kids growing up in this day and age really spelled Family Death. While Tippy was out taking girls out on the golf course or, more ironic yet, Frontlawn Cemetary, his embarassingly sissyish father continued to struggle under a load as great as Real Live Mom. Tippy went around to every cemetary and monument company looking for a stone that said FUCK YOU MOM, or BELOVED MOTHERFUCKER, or, telepathically, had his girlfriends and groupies do it.

That nutty scumbag Tippy, his bad habits stumbled over each other, he bit his fingernails down so far he couldn't pop his zits. That pizza-faced boy, he read an article in a women's magazine he found, someone had put out for the trash that said popping zits was the greatest form of intimacy so he did it on every first date. His very touch on a girl could bring about zits. Big zits mean big tits. Big zits like the golden domes of some churches. You know what they say about life, find a zit and pop it, or find a house and egg it. The bursting of a secret zit was exploring another galaxy’s stars. Other kids were already pressing their face between their hands, crying "oil out", emptying the chamberpots and cesspools of their face. In Ireland they'd say the graveyard's hallowed ground had "broken out" in ghosts, while here they only talk about a girl's skin that way. Her zits bring sweet explosions to her face. Some of those girls were highschool pumpkins, clear skin on the outside and zits like seeds

you might dry and salt on the inside. Egad, he was crazy about the surface texture of things, especially girls.

One popular screamage prank was to collect all the foreskins from the Synagogue (this was the Baby Boom, remember), offer to dispose of them—they appreciated a Shabbas Goy volunteering— and then substituting them for the Hosts at the St. Conservative Catholic church. At the bottom of the cibarium holding that Sunday's treats, the priest found a cookie fortune: “Do you know what you all just ate? Hah! Score! (signed) Christ of Israel".

Hmm, they were kind of pink and chewy...no, not pork rinds...

Those dirty motherconformists.

Later, our high school English teachers would brag about how Aleppo's first hitmakers had to take their freshman English tests on tour somewhere, concealing the answers in their long English haircuts.

But who ran the damn school? One schoolteacher's warm, domestic name was Mrs. Lunchdinner. Jovial Mr. Simpletonsky.

Mrs. Scalpeurtickets, who was rumored to be the mother of ballroom owner Brother Brucephalus, who had a self-promoting radio show too. Moralistic tobacco-busters, and those themselves busted by the addictive leaf. Coach Pud Pusherman commanded without mercy his little mercy. Miss Feeling, brunt of boy jokes. Teacher from Great Britain, Mr. Shite, whom we asked but hadn't seen any good bands.

And the liberal high school teacher Olive Branch; first we made her angry, then cry. On the other hand, High school teacher Vicenzo "Vinny" Verdammt, who gave Tippy and me a particularly hard time, was a former Texas Ranger who knew our smarmy contempt with an

awareness that few other teachers possessed, honed in 36 years in the classroom dealing with pugs and plug-uglies like us.

I remember them all.

There were still some old harpies, cheerful liberal nerieds and stern Medusae gorgons teaching the classics in the public schools, but few took those tired classes. Some of his teachers were Mrs. Ali Baba, Michael Soupkitchen, Miss Pushplatypus and Mrs. Debbie Sprinkler, yet he found them all limited and tiring sorts. Every University-town high school had one hippy teacher, beard like a beaded curtain. A highschool Methuselah, face dripping in dewlaps, called Mrs. Marsoupielle. The Iron Ma'am. Carbon-date your highschool teachers, some as old as the first pottery. Poetast'resses teaching highschool there, and Tippy would lunch-hour carnally with one Ms. Wordsmith in construction-site culverts and sewer pipes, unfilled and unfulfilled cisterns. Priapism and solipsism like Siamese Twins. Freaks of nature, a woofer with a tweeter in its back. Chang and Eng and the sisters they married, who both taught in Aleppo schools.

Another friend of the court, or public school couriter, was the Astrology teacher in the highschool planetarium Mr. Rosenuranus, whom stayed there shut up all day long talking and projecting the stars coursing across the heavens all to himself. He must've been pretending not to see when Tippy brought girls in there and lay them down on the carpeted floor between the rows of seats, perhaps pining for his own lost youth himself. On a planet green and far away...

School had a generous bridesharing program. Kids like Tippy lurked after school in the science lab looking for explosive chemicals.

Sex with a CPR and mouth-to-mouth resucitation dummy, its swollen orange plastic lips. Boys will make do with anything. Like the time Tippy sprayed stop-time knockout gas into the girls' modern dance class, kind of pushed their leotards aside and took his fancy on them one by one frozen at the barre and jungle gyms mounted on the walls. That dick was a genius!

Gym was the law for there were jocks in the White House, Congress and positions of responsibility in business. Gym is such a bunch of crap, just because I couldn't climb a rope like a monkey the subhuman gym teacher, not in the business of responsibility, thought something was seriously wrong with me and shoved a medicine ball into my solar plexus. These years for me were like a game of Bombardment, played with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

In this school the cinderbreath'd Gym Coach turned into a pumpkin, and big fat Coach Kevin Fieldgoal made Tippy do some kind of sit-ups upside down. God bless the out-of breath, the gasping monster. How many laps could Jesus do? How many did Coach Pilate and the Pharisee team managers make Our Lord doubletime?

The bald and portly Ceasar of a gym teacher would open class saying "Quo Vadis?" and our Jesus in the gym, long hair matted and spittle where a beard would be, arched his aching back with each abdominal contraction. The clanking of the weights, that purgatory pump, the horizontal cross of chrome, the push of the legs like the galley of a trireme. Man is the Universal Machine. Weight machines are Stations of the Cross. Christ's one hundred inclined situps

opened the wound in his side. Farting out last night's burritos with every pump-pump. The Oofer. Christ working out, the first thing he does is throw up. In divine nausea, his sweat caked and clogged with blood, he cried "My body, why have you forsaken me?"

Christexercise. Christ's tiny photo appearing in advertisements as Charles Samson, Most Perfectly Spiritually Developed Man. Give me three minutes a day our daily bread and I'll make you an egg. Still soft and suitable for egging houses, though your body will be hard.

Three sets of ten three-minute Our Fathers/Hail Marys. Why does exertion of the body remind me of the divine?

Somebody stuck a thumbtack or roofing nail point up on the sit up board so it'd go right into the center of the back of Tippy's neck.

Jokes where push came to overshove a bit. The pole vaulting stick broke off in his back, greenstick fibreglas shreds. One machine in the gym was called the Toe Cracker, and the coach could recommend plenty of other exercises that hurt people. "I'll begin this term by breaking my glasses" said one kid resigned to Gym class; maybe me.

They had saunas to boil your ass off at this school and Tippy fell asleep falling over so his head landed on the coals. A Minotaur steambath, a Scylla-Charybdis jacuzzi bath. Something kept in Davy Jones' locker.

The Aleppo Aurochs were our high school team, the name, , with a bit of European flair, bestowed by a Swiss biologist teaching on campus whose son was on the first team a hundred or something years ago.

I remembered Tippy playing grapeball against the Westside Walnuts. My brother Thump's squishy Spring batting practice, using

a litter of live puppies instead of softballs. Tippy saw the other kind of bat thumbtacked to the bulletin board by its' wings, but after all, the basketball team was called the Batmen. A selfconcious sign on the door said NO CHAMPS ALLOWED. Beside it a sports page clipping said WEIRD WOUNDS INFLICTED ON TROJANS, football players in full regalia decapitated in honor of God and Country and Hometown School. One star player accidentally had all his bones broken and organs wrecked from a backrub at a party. And the girl was popular too! Some guys only went around bragging how they put meat and honey all over the floor of a rival highschool one night before parentteacher conferences. There are no secrets in the gym and the amount of guilt present colors the game. Gymming and swimming disinterested Tippy, normally drowning in his own phlegm, and phlegm is the waters even Christ couldn't still or part, the hydraulics of the nose and throat. Barefoot water in the school pool. Kids who tried to swim on the bottom of the pool ended up with a tracheotomy courtesy the Coach angrily grinding into their throat his whistle or the ballpoint pen he'd use to testily record your piss-poor times and scores.

Racking up gambling debts in the school smoking lounge was something else. He liked Individualist sports so Tippy tried out for the school Varsity Hitchhiking team. Highschools had rival bullbaiting and bearbaiting teams, sometimes substituting a buffalo as the victimized beast at the last minute.

There is the story of the cheerleader who fainted on the basketball court the night of the big game. When they pumped he stomach they found twenty ounces of boy, man and horse jism, for

she blew the whole donkey basketball team. What the girls’ fathers euphemistically call Livin’ on Teenage Protein. That story originated in our school, and Tippy was determined to meet the girl. Coach Sweatschurz, who had a broken nose—a leather nose he kept in a little case and only wore to testimonial dinners—was implicated. Boil him in highschool oil.

Shit, this is just placebo school. In that high school of hope, despite Daylight Savings Time it was continually a school night.

Zioneer High School was not a rich, well-kempt school, but an adequate place to get high and hang out. The individualist ant, Tippy was fairly smart in the conventional sense when attuned. In Art class Tippy made a homunculus, whom the stupid teacher thought was supposed to be a ventriloquist's dummy. A government grant had set up creative laboratories for the untying of tied knots. We all soon tired and sickened of grimy genres like the public school peace novels and vegetable-heeled shoes. English teachers for whom to speak in rhyme was something important. Some of the smartest kids delivered their term papers in palindrome, reading the same backwards and forwards, bibliography becoming preface. A centaur came to an assembly to talk about promising careers in mythology.

In school Tippy always took the A-/B+ Train. Tippy started taking cabs to class. So bad he had crabs in his sideburns, or so he told everybody. Occupied himself doing sadism to books. Growing into a million contradictions. The school system had no place for those cream-of-conciousness kids in that glacial, immense, monolithic, seemingly static yet creeping all the time, creepy highschool. Tippy

regarded high school as 2300 of his ex-friends. In this reform school he sort of foundered into fun.

That school system flowed as a river of science. Tippy stayed in high school, studied professional physics and bubblegum mathematics, including the mathematics from Mars, calculus. He could recite all the imaginary numbers, the psychic numerals, well into the jillions. Math people can misinterpret questions better than anybody else. There should be a number that means "one or two".

Prices continue to rise, courtesy the algebraic folkies. Buying dope in Math class from Mary McJuana, factoring the seeds on their desktops in the back of the room; Hashishins of the algorithm, Aleppo Algebra.

Tippy got good grades in Scientology and Geoapathy, the intermediate class in world-weariness, and was briefly in the school Alchemy Club thinking he could make Colombian Gold, but instead kept wasting too much lead for it kept turning into turds. Classrooms were like limekilns for all the children scarred and disfigured (or at least their notebooks) by chemistry class explosions. He earned his nickname "Guppy" for he could enumerate all that fish's differences from a minnow from the teacher who wrote the epic poem "The Lobotomized", about getting his brain pith'd like a frog's, then lost his job for its racist metaphors. Life-farming still a course in the high schools.

We learned of monster DNA that lived in the ocean, cells like pristine dumbbells, diamonds gone ape. Mitochondria in the mouthwash toilet. Tippy liked experiments best, and tried to transplant a dog's paw for his thumb. After Doctor Barnyard's successes the Science departments of schools were swept with

transplant-o-mania, Tippy's class attempting to transplant a cat's heart into a frog. Girls in the class shrieked, wept at the blood and it couldn't jump no higher. Frogs die so valiantly with no squeal or sequel under the knife. The desire to have a snake's tongue, pugnacious badass bullsnake. Found on the freeway your classic tire-trod 8 1/2 x 11" snake. Does the rat suffer? No, it's all very sexual, he thinks he's mating until it's too late. Science will always be special because it's sex, pain and chemicals. Yet even the brightest students soon tired of this kind of medical improvisation, too many failures, too little to grade. Good preparation for life itself.

High school and—journalist notes that Roque looks around suspiciously, even paranoically—its insurmountable girl defects: twisted mouths, bones all bent up and frail, covered with leg braces and long aluminum crutches clutched in talons, weird-smelling skin like papyrus. Every highschool has a kid in a wheelchair, and, as I said, always a kid who died that year that gets the yearbook dedicated to him. The hobbling kid with hemophilia in High School they nicknamed "Cloggy" because of his royal blue blood, everybody bet would die before the end of the year and get the dedicatory honor. Another kid fell off an oil rig at sea the following Summer.

The retard at the Dairy Quandary ice cream stand in the nearby tiny town of Sinister, MI was shoved into an ice cream maker. "He got creamed", they said of him like of a rival football team. Like the kids who went over the edge from drugs, death remained a distant counselor in highschool.

Otherwise, the entire school system was run as if it was still dedicated to the proposition Hiya, Moms! Me for a shake in the Tip-

Top Soda Shoppe. The foundation of every state is the pizza, burgers n' fries of its youth. Over the door of the highschool cafeteria it said "Youth is a Religion and Pizza is Its Sacrament". A cafeteria of scorn. Cafeteria food with all the flavor of an asterisk. Foodfight flies in the cafeteria. Scrumptious hydrogenated vegetable oil milkshakes for which jokers would amble up to the grandmatronly lunch ladies winking in the style of their lovingly-remembered 1940's Dear John boyfriends and say their peace, till some ivory-tower nutritionist put the kibosh on the whole deal. And my mom, like everybody’s, was a lunch lady y’know.

Tippy drank nutmeg tea and smoked herbal marijuanas afterdinner in the cornert of the mobile home his parents alleged was his room, supposedly doing leisure sciences homework. He told his parents to shut up, it was for his cough. By now his father's head looked golden in the lamplight as some old pharoh eating his third dessert. In another window was his mother, lit by the cold light of the TV set, evidently watching it to catch mistakes. In Tippy's History class they'd just read old TV Schedule magazines anyway, so Tippy would skip it to go to a drive-in called Voodoo Burgers, its symbol a bland Black zombie. Another place boasted hamburgers that TASTE AS GOOD AS SEX!!! This isn't decadence, it's just the Midwest in transition. Trying to get detached, it's Middle-American Mass Mediamediated. The Aleppo City Council started naming things Towel Street and Pizza Playground, followed by a slew of brand names.

The kids sat around drinking Beatlebrau, look for the beer with the picture of Ringo ("Ask the Beatle Who's Broke") on the label. The school cop, incognito and "unrecognizable" in crewcut and checkered

sport coat now spent his days correcting teachers' posture and commenting snidely on the brand of cigarettes the kids smoked.

Tippy's cigarettes were voted the Smokiest Smokes. "Pud" representing the Frank H. Fleer Corporation came to their school to lecture to kids to give up smoking and take up snapping gum (after a generous check neutralized the school rules), pink rubber bubbles of soul, even if left on the undersides of desks.

Cruising for burgers, the kind wrapped in tight girls' bluejeans.

Piling into Tamarawagons seeking the thrill. He had to be from Motorsburgh as no way his cock would fit in a small foreign car.

Maybe a hippie van. In the fuck-you future planned by University Engineering fathers, they'll have metal roads developed, actually sort of a rubbery lead. Be careful, all you kids on bikes, knees scraped on 'em will become poison, die. Motorsburgh may be mean—a mean streak runs from a statue downtown clear across the state—but it'd never issue a car whose headlights only shine in eyes of an approaching vehicle's driver, like the Germans now do.

Yet Tippy caused accidents to happen. When he was in a parking structure he'd inadvertantly hit every parking meter, calling it Killing time. Stopped, a police officer asked him if he had drugs, and suddenly remembering the old nursery rhyme Tippy recited Yessir Yessir Three Bags Full and was asked to step out of the car. Once when he was on LSD and trying to steer the car with his mouth he crashed into a car full of Little Leaguers who, though winded and wounded, won anyway and hollered Yaay! when Tippy dragged a couple traffic cops under the car's chassis for several blocks. Under

his wheels the best friends of a girl he liked whom he thought were destroying her. Auto smash accident something fierce. Cars were many ways to get publicity in the One Hundred Years of High School.

Now some of those kids treated their cars as just baloney carriages, conveyances for their dicks. BEDROOMS ON WHEELS shrieked the tabloid ads one of the auto dealerships out on Washkloth County Road had placed in the school paper, and when my Mom found one lying around she just couldn't get that phrase out of her shrill head, every time I asked for the damn car. Parents who got rid of the family car because a kid had sex in it. The Dad said "Look, I don't mind if I have to take buses to work to preserve chastity around here." Not Confessions of the Careless but a better name for my volume of memoirs of these years around age sixteen would be Confessions of the Car-less.

Hey, I'm only going out for Sten-Gun Burgers. A documentary on African teenagers' cars crashing through gazelles. Once Tippy and some doozie fucked parked in a sensual Catholic graveyard and he could swear he saw the angels' wings flapping, waving, the trees putting their fingerlike branches to their maple sugar-sap lips and going sshhh...their knotholes winking knowingly. The trees using their branches to softly, absentmindedly rub their own crotches as the teenagers ground themselves sweatily together on the poison-ivy toxic plastic seatcovers in the fetid night. Sex was everywhere. Out of the tomb of the mobile home to a neighborhood necropolis just as neat as a boneyard could be. Nearby the expressway a summer breeeze of sedans whooshed, crickets gossiped at high frequency.

So maybe I was in the bushes spying on them, it wasn't a school

night. Made you think I was describing my own parents. Parents felt obliged to give their children expensive new gifts on their birthdays to cover up the embarassing possibility of having passed on to them old ideas. One kid had asked for a house. After cooking him for all those years, Tippy was asked by his Mom for a hint, but they were still too cowardly to comply with his suggestions of a pipe, a gun or a car.

Kids all had their crime cars, covered with criminal coats of stolen paint and bondo. Tippy's might've had the word "LIPS" stencilled on the side, short for "libido". There was one kid in our highschool who pulled the parking brake off many Rolls Royces so they'd careen down the hill in to someone else's car—"What, I'm not jealous"—like a winking exhibitionist. Desert boys Rommelling along in a jeep.

Cars for patching out on the neighbors' lawns, leaving deep rivulets in which their fathers twisted their ankles when the winter rains and ice came, necessitating long legal lawsuits, causing them to give up teaching their classes and lose tenure. Cars were a form of currency to the poor, or even that middleclass segment of the population that said "goddam" a lot. This was before those small cars whose electronic engines said "Excuse me".

In earlier times that part of the country had primarily manufactured dog carts and elephant towers for maharajahs on hunting vacations Up North. Now the popular songwriting convention of substituting the word "car" for "heart" was disliked in the area, for people didn't want to be reminded that they worked on the assembly line in the factories manufacturing hearts, or the closest thing most people would come to one. You could still see Fords scratching themselves lazily on fenceposts, roadsigns and billboards. There

were even new cars filled with stuff that looked like dung and compost so they'd feel more "organic". When the Revolution happens, it'll be a general strike where all those former toughkids who know how to fix cars go home, and there'll be no cars to get execs to work, no army trucks, nothing. That simple.

You know, each license plate had this decade’s philosophical state motto The Reverse Is True. And once when he was driving behind his dad's car, believe is or not, father and son both went through a red light. That car, chariot like a cherry pit. Dried priapus.

Graduated summa cum priapus. Pequod Fords, PseudoFords and Flying Dutch Chevrolets. That power poseur's car wasn't no castrati's kiss. Love like a set of car keys. Wedding-dress seatcovers seemed to relax some girls. Car windshield called ProphylactiPane Glass.

Focuses the sun's rays like a magnifying glass on an ant upon the girl's belly so she won't get pregnant. Girls with the sex stomach.

The girl who was indelibly buxom. Misshapen chestless girl they called a flatypus. Purchased at Fur Valley Ford. When Tippy and his friends had been just pedestrians, just hanging out or milkmanning along hand in their own pockets they'd get hassled by the Pump Police, the special force detailled to keep cool boys from picking up girls. But now in cars he was falling in love in the blind spot, dining and dancing at six bits m.p.h., at 36-24-36 m.p.h., at 98.6 m.p.h.

After all, driving is just dancing with your car. Tippy was a teenage carwolf. Maenead enthusiasm that sent the frightened wolf back to its lair and boys their own age into team sports like fixing up old cars.

Rocking hips that drove the wolves out of northern Michigan and the hunters scurrying to their taverns. He would straddle two cars like

two horses or two girls, a foot in each rolled down convertible window. Life was one big wheelie and he was a bit of a mechanic on love's racing team. Love on the car seat as scotch tape sticky-sideup, the seatcovers' doughy plastic smell like a children's art supply, love clutch shifting into orgasm. Now you see him rocketshipping around town like he had an artificial kidney for a head. He was driving on ice with the bodies of those girls. The girls' mothers would look at him half-longingly and only see a dick on wheels. Picked up speed like you'd pick up girls.

Car radios blaring, the kids did a dance called the Slip on Ice, which was immensely popular in Michigan's endless Winters, formed a slow line to do the Book, or waved their hands and hair for the Ucky McUcky. A dance where cowboys swapped the swaddling clothes of sleeping infants. And they'd go to drive-in movies, showbiz pictures about teenagers who jump over cars. They used the fact that kids liked 'em as an excuse to tear down the Drive-Ins, put up "family" shopping centers. Drive-In movies like "The Lesbian Bra", paired with a thriller about a penis transplant where the donor was a devient sex criminal, called "Things You Only Do in the Nude". Scenes of the Superhero shooting a cop, a biker gangbang using motor oil as a lubricant, the scene where the crowd of fascist thugs are breaking up a nightclub and one patron is a razor-throwing champion who scores deadly hits in the cock, eyes, neck and skull of selected attackers. A favorite was "Trans-Amazon Highway", the adventure in the jungle with couples making love in trailers while workmen chop down trees, stopping to lunch on live guinea pigs, drill and excavate all around them. The duel between antagonists armed with machete and

chainsaw, one hurls his chainsaw rattling through the air into the other guy's chest, later into a crowd of soon-extinct disappearing Indians. That's entertainment.

Tippy sped off from the household one summer taking a young girl like other people used to take a sketchbook or snapshot photo album, to deposit his observations into her on a trip to open his eyes.

Stoke him up on myths of the hyperAmerican road. This was still possible as gasoline was available for Rock n' Roll prices, betterthan-Christ prices at church-run bazaar chicken dinner raffleticket gas stations, sanctified brands from the Holy Land. Girls in Shorts' weekend car washes. Robins batting, banging off his windshield like the deflowering of women, breaking their own powder-blue eggs inside. Tippy had picked up six hitchhikers that day, all girls. Piled into his beerwagon, out to a posh part of Aleppo where a lot of landed faculty lived, off Bone Marrow Road. A couple of those nurses told him story about a baby born in the front seat of a car who, miraculously, started driving while his mother made love again in the back seat. But they were just talkin', tryin' to get in his pants.

Reflections so bright on the windshield and chrome it looked like the sun was driving the car. As they reached a railroad crossing he stopped to get a cigarette out of his pocket—this was when he was very consciously trying to do one thing at a time—but I believe he was truly buttoning up his pants. Screechburgers, "Don't, Tippy, it's against my principles", if only one may have said it would ruin a perfect day, but you'd expect them all to equally succumb to peer group pressure. On the track he notices an approaching locomotive and put his car in Park and his Rock n' Rolly ear to the track so he

could get a better look. Advancing, getting bigger and bigger and brighter and better and better. The train appeared and the train revealed itself unto him. The trouble light went on and he stopped and started up at the same time. He could smell that train now, smelling of all the places America had ever been. He kissed the sailing engine on the train as it momentarily split-second embraced him and swept him off the road. The birds in the nest sang screaming as the burgers and fries of earlier in the day ballooned out of their despoiled bellies and breasts popped like double bubble gum, train insisting. Nurses in a crash, blood and milk, stomach full car kill.

The crash tumbled him softly, however, rolling head over heels down the embankment to safety with a few deft sunglassesless Gymclass somersaults. No explanation, save the lucious sound of the final hiss of ex-radiator and oxblood waterballoons once called the girls' kidneys, while little pieces of skin-confetti floated down the sky like pieces of burnt witch from a furnace, landing in Tippy's hair. Leaving broken hearts like twisted auto bodies in the junkyard, this dreadful Vikkicide.

Tippy had thought up plenty of excuses for his driving negligence which caused all those deaths. "Uh, I thought I saw something." "I was writing down a phone number and dropped my pencil". "I swerved to avoid the ghost of a dead child." "I thought I saw Louie Louie of the Three Chomps...Louie Fishbrain was waking on the tracks, I swear." Everybody had seen Louie on TV before school that morning or after school that afternoon, so who could argue with that? Maybe he had thought the lights on the oncoming train were a UFO he was trying to follow.

Car insurance for a teenager? Don't be silly. Though those nurses were trashed they made a good Driver Ed film of the incident.

That aspect of the open nurses' uniform was known as the French Livery Stable, but there's no reason you'd know that. It rattled his brainbasket a bit. Blown-apart redheads, redheads turned inside-out like massmurdered coeds getting on the back of their killer's motorcycle, like Chicago nurses Born to Raise His Hackles. Violation Day. When the Spazz Attack Police arrived the cop cynically answered Tippy's questions "Yes, Your Destructiveship." Some people say he munched on the corpses of those girls, which wasn't so weird for it was late afternoon nearly suppertime and he wasn't snack hungry. When they picked out everybody, so summer tanned it like prying the sandstone top off Biblical-era sewers to find the stinky saint inside, Tippy (who was okay) lay on the bank and thought it would take something beyond music, a mighty meta-music, to try and duplicate that sound. Tippy actually did take one Music class that year, but Mr. Vane Varicose gave him a "D" for Deafening when he played his final project on coffee cans. He had an absolutely inflatable ear. Kids like us never went to that music school summer camp up north in the town Amadeus, Michigan. Some parents attribute this Rock n' Roll thing to Dr. Amadeus, the entire generation of musical monsters, puns of beat-blasts, instilled something dangerous in youth. The good doctor later even became rsolutely anti-war. Can’t have that in middle America.

Ahhh, anabolic youth. Erased teenagers, we were the erasures on the page of the highschool yearbook. Erased our parents' faces but hadn't actually done anything yet that could be described.

Graduation was nearing and it was supposed to be ceremonial. We noticed how people who've graduated stick around town like lint to a black sweater. When Tippy finished highschool he went, just like all the airline and travel agency billboards boast, to Jamaica to Smoke Dope, Las Vegas to Get Drunk and lose his wallet and keys, to San Francisco to Have Sex. With brightly-colored—bright record-store colors—real hippie girls! Indian-print runaways, not just arty faculty brats or students. For he'd found a major airline credit card on the street, bought gas for everyone lined up at the pump at the station.

"What a swell guy" said a conservative company rep.

The kind who’d watch out for us once we got our band, our record.

Aleppo is a mutli-stoplight town, and its University a stately older sister, tasteful jacket and pearls, primly, primply beside a sullen, servile mechanic brother. It’s two, two towns in one. As she serves tea, he tends the farm, weaves among rusty cars up on cement blocks. And recently planted some "Iraqi tobaccy" out back, to cure and smoke and discreetly sell around the college and high schools.

We Aleppo teens used to go to the campus to see what’s what.

All over campus we'd find eyeglasses, bounced off student heads by police billy clubs and—borrowed from the officers' cheerleader daughters—batons. Sometimes the daughters would borrow the billy clubs when dad wasn't looking too. On campus, you had to be careful not to poke and prick yourself on the record player needles everywhere. Geologically, this was the Age of stereo, young engineers' massive speaker cabinets woofing and tweeedledeetweedling drumbocious Rock songs from every frathouse and student apartment house windows. Boogie! everybody shouted.

For a while Tippy liked a cool, bratty and spontaneous girl saddled with the university name of Categoria. Kids in gradeschool sneered "You were born in a Library", more at me than at Tippy.

Though sometimes knocked-up grad students’ babies actually were, the open books used as the towels beneath her then promptly shelved. Eeuuww.

This is an old university. When the university first started, it regularly offered a course that taught circus geeks how to bite the heads off chickens. As automobile-manufacturing wealth flowed in,

accumulated and eddied in southeastern Michigan by Harry Fuct and his executive staff, university patrons hired the aged and venerable Jewish intellectual Daniel Boone, and his son Paul Bunyan, to design stately buildings. They ringed the Tessalation at the center of campus, "from which all points in the universe are equidistant."

Field-found statelystone houses, occupied by generations of professors on Mildewwood Drive just east of campus. More exclusive were are the sprawling smug estates on Mindboggle Road, grand baronial manses with little carriage houses beloved of brown-nosing grad students.

It was more rootlessly cosmopolitan, peppered with footloose Hindoos and heathen (and churchgoing, even attic-hiding) Chinee and all colors, flavors and superstitions, than the other big Ten Ton University, major foootball rival, an hour away. I’m talking about Midwestern Industro-Agricaca University, which Father Coughinacarload and contemporary racist tubthumpers still called Midwestern Indo-Aryan University, signifying racial and linguistic purity, but certainly not the brown or red Indians in India and this continent, respectively. Like a lot of midwesternmen, I guess I reflexively start talking about race and religion. Funny.

Gradeschool grasshoppers all toured the Atomic Campus, saw protean proton collisiofusion reactions take place, energized. Gazed into the swimming pool reactor, the smell of chlorine like the junior high pool in which they'd swim nude in a few short years. A black nucleus struck him, becoming an element of Negrogen, but Tippy

didn't like the southern pronunciation.

There was that quote from the bard's play where the Devils' Night bitch-witches say "To Aleppo gone, Master of the Tiger" about about a tiger-striped ship's captain. This quote was engraved above the door of the University English Spoken Department, and generations of students' would leave their little brothers', or their own, tigers'-eyes marbles and little tins of this Chinese warming herb balm beneath it for good luck on Final Exams. Poets are always superstitious, I guess.

Tippy said his dad took him to this building when he still taught there, before Pop’s ignominious fall from their good graces.

For a while Motorsburgh Records used the same playwright’s literary motto "Like a jewel in an Ethiop's ear", though most colored people in the midwestern cities came from a different part of Africa than Mussolini's Ethiopia. From a book I read.

A Psycholgy professor had invented the Brain Chain, since LSD is made out of amino acids, the building blocks of life. They say a single drop of pure LSD can reanimate a corpse for decades. And DNA was named after the English chemists' fave boozy night club singers named Dina, who died young despite their efforts to save her.

No LSD beneath her feet. An insufficiently-funded study sought to prevent emotionally scarred women—you know, like these—who had unhappy love affairs or unfulfilled, unconsummated crushes—from ever bearing children.

If Harry Fuct' had given notable buildings, he pressured his executives to endow professorships, just to get people reading his

unreadable 1928 two-volume textbook donation to the University, The Maccabees of Vice and The Maccabees of Insanity. But of course he wasn’t fooling anyone about exactly who he meant.

Despite the downriver Fuctedness, eminent Ahasverusii, wandering Jews who found Aleppo, were given tenure after a wellobserved teaching year, or if not, became furriers, or started appliance stores or junkyards like Plansky’s. Solid citizens.

Some professors were of a certain age, when Germans (and German-Americans) named sons Eugen, in honor of Eugenics. In 1947 they changed the name of the Harry Fuct College of Eugenics to EuColl to imply postwar European sophistication or something. Or a chemical symbol Eu; is there a Europeanium? About 1960 it then became the Fuct Family Studies Institute, making everyone— especially administrators cashing their generous government grant checks—happy.

For there's nothing happier than a family.

Churches, colleges, they're the same thing, right? In the cathartic campus Catholic church, the little toddler Infant of Pride statue all bedecked in real robes, some of us in gradeschool catechism class wanted to make a little motorcycle jacket and chaps for it, with tiny mirrored sunglasses, but the Priest (rumored to be a drag queen himself) quietly dissuaded me, smiled. Somewhere there's a shrine to Saint Vagina Regina that might like this.

But religion still had power in the twentieth century. Like how German engineers and captured Jesuit scientists build a U-Boat powered by the spirituo-atomic energy in a tiny piece of the True Cross, a splinter really. And were working on a missile to explode

Protestant London powered by one of the nails that went through His hands or feet, and bombers powered by other relics of the Saints.

That's why the Third Reich captured Vatican City first of all, silly.

Laugh at Hitler for his belief that male Jews menstruated like young women. Maybe Moors, Armenians, Epicenes—too. Hah, flawed science. No wonder we ended up with all their good rocket, math and physical scientists, some here at the University. Missile scientist Dr. Auroch von Braunbison used to like to say "Exactamundo, Peenemunde!" when a rocket hit London on target, and now he was saying it when students gave correct answers in class.

Germans like to think they invented purity, cleanliness itself.

Not really, but they kept their labs spanking clean. A Professor of Prophylactics, which didn't just mean rubbers. One invented tampons for dogs, and built a post-Pavlovian research lab as a result.

Political science, that's practically college research too, right?

Consequently, Jews as well as Nazi scientists, found a home on campus; the first in Social Sciences, Arts and Letters, the second in Engineering and the Sciences. Dr. Freud was now teaching at the University, his energies revived after he'd given up cigars, he had a successful transplant of the jawbone of an ass—to the amusement of his critics—and lived another forty-some years. When he visited the Firehouse looking for his daughter, he claimed, probably accurately, that if not for the other fellows I would've filled up the Firehouse with (useless) crap, and all that crap represents. But we’ll get to that.

Later.

The university Psychlotron lab was working on a Sonic Bosom Trap and needed lonely-boy volunteers to test it. I heard her! each

squealed with glee. Meanwhile, an atom-filled fat engineer left the university in a huff and started up company with the contemporary name You Bet Your Bippy, Inc. Thought he could power the nation’s factories, homes and cars by harnessing the energy of youth: rage and hormones too cheap to meter. Might not contemporary parents of teenagers be a more dependable source or rage? Inspired by the arguments he had with his daughter who liked us, liked coming over to the Firehouse, he died when testifying on the floor of Congress, choking on a joke's punch line to a hall of uproarious laughter.

Scientists of Silence, oh how we avoided them, and radical students were starting to protest some stuff too. The camp doctor who experimented on how often a Slav or Gypsy child could be bashed on the head before imbecility or death was hired and soon tenured, for similar experiments on squirrels or chipmunks instead now. Often in cosmetics industry-funded labs that put makeup on rabbits’ eyes, etc. There were experiments conducted at the College of Medicine on dogs who sometimes then got out, horrible candyloma terriers, acromelagous chihuahuas and ancephalic beagles roaming about the professorial neighborhoods just off campus, often in depraved packs.

Even normal stray, foundling and family dogs, when the critical mass of them in numbers gets too high, you could see their domesticity shed like a bathrobe and an animal howl and selforganization (follow that tooth-baring Alpha!) came over them. What Cub Scouts called the Law of the Pack.

I want my band to be like that.

The regional symbol of scientific aspiration was the Midwest University Fucteum of Natural Technology in the center of our university campus, its pediment missing a big bronze letter in its sign so it said "Univerity", as if all bones within added up to one big truth.

A matched pair of glowering Baluchatheriums stood as if poised to attack disruptive schoolchildren. Full of turdy brontoliths. Tethered archeopteryx circling the ceiling. Fossils of the Motherfuckersaurus, primitive egg-sucking geekos.

Freaks of nature, three-headed Cerberus dogs and the like, were in the Fucteum of Natural Technology. Plus early cyborgs, like the skeleton of the miner with a steam-driven shovel for arms in the old folk song, or that of a legless woman (carriage accident) with attached wheels. Midwest ingenuity. One exhibit reconstructed Homo Suspectus, a species of edgy and suspicious little man scuttling about a sponge-and-seaweed reconstruction of Michigan woods hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Shrunken heads of old professors lined a shelf. Dusty dioramas of the Pottle-Wottle or Bottlerocketi Indians, miniature and morose. Students turned into trilobites and gila monsters, eohippus skeletons. The beetlebox that clean 'em to bone the kids all first thought was a "Beatle box", an omnivorous radio or 45 rpm record case. Staff hologram nebbishes, science types who can all run the movie and filmstrip projectors and kids wearing white socks no matter what color they put on. Dusting the bones of Pleasursaurians, sensual and sex-crazed dinosaurs-about-town; in Latin, the genus Bon Vivant. There was so much Evolution going on in Michigan, the Fucteum had an exhibit, looking out on a special garden, where you

could watch live dinosaurs (little ones, completely harmless) becoming birds. Or watch a chimp, over a few generations pharmaceutically sped up, become human. Or at least something like a college student. The Spanish word for tar pit, LaBrea, also means "library". Tar was made from the animals—nasty Glyptodonts, horny Triceratops, mega-mammals like giant sloths and mastodonii— have sex. Trilobites, Squidissimos and huge dragonflies in there somehow too, fetid and steaming in their foul congress. Suspichigan, named after the state's own Suspiria. Exhibit of a Mermaidasaurus, ancestor of mermaids. Centaurohippus, a flock of Pteroharpies and something that looked like a cross between the goat footed satyr Pan and a Triceratops. Either a genuine Steateo-Stegasaurosphinx or a damn good recreation of one. We all hung around there every so often, just to glean a real fact or two of life. The Natural Technology Museum boasted the skeleton of one of those weird Triceraptopsbison hybrids that roamed the western states, cautiously avoiding tarpit swamps and noxious gas vents. Tippy said its broad forehead and furrowed brow-armor, really reminded him of me.

Fucteum of Natural Technology, so proud of its sturdy, stocky dinosaur and lumbering early mammal bones, lazy live gilamonkey and woodsy wildlife zoo, and the remains of that freaky woman with carriage-wheel legs (whom Fuct orignially tried to marry off to the Mexican muralist he hired to decorate the lobby). The place had that glowering Havana Gila Monster, a triskadecaphobian amphibian, enforcing field-trip discipline even from the confines of its terrarium on the mezzanine.

Parents? Teachers? Cops? Government? To my generation of

Aleppo kids, that was the only believable symbol of authority.

Many of the fossils, treasures, fossilized treasures and treasured fossils in the Fucteum came from African nations Zimbabwestein, Zairefisch, Thebesstein, Egyptgold and Lebanonsilver. Their names reflect the impact of Jewish explorers on the building of empire, colonialism with a forelock. And in Aleppo, these were names of the daughters of professors affiliated with the archeology found in the campus Arcane Sciences Museum, the unwrappers of the mummy there.

The Arcane Sciences Museum, across the campus Tesselation from the Fucteum, was founded by Dr. Prof. Morton "Morty" Rosicrucian, Jewish archeologist with a Latinized name, from the Midwest in the Middle East. Several expiditions had been funded by a famous university brothel-keeper, who supported several archeological trips to the middle east to find traces and relics of whore-Saint Mary Magdalene.

Professor Rosicrucian had given up being a funny TV weatherman in Michigan and went where the climate was forecast always predictably hot and dry. There was a mummy of a Princess in the Museum which Aleppo kids thought was pretty cool, partially unwrapped and crumbling, breasts flattened upon skin like trashburner'd newspapers, but those same kids snitched so many little bits of wrapping to roll their reefers that soon she was completely nude. Nevertheless, this mummy was a major influence on Tippy.

The right kind of ‘ology. We later had her propped up in one corner of the Firehouse, y’know.

Nothing wrong with the suntan deminude lifestyle of the Pharaohs, said Tippy, strutting around shirtless on about the coldest winter day of the year.

Big crowds, barbecue smells and purring overhead airships on certain autumn Saturdays. Familyball games against Who Won? State University. Big hooplah, rah rah, la di da. That's all I really know about the games and teams, except coaches have endearing hillbilly names like Bo and Bump.

Look. Yes, up there. It’s the ZydeCo Zeppelin, owned by Zyde Tyre (UK), elite manufacturer with a smelly plant pouring effulgence and effluence into the meandering Zyde, which bisects their venerable old university. I guess the zeppelin, one they have hangared in the U.S., is floating over university football games like a fat girl in the sky, Coral outstretched naked on a bed.

I haven’t told you about Coral, but I will later. Hold your horses, hold your whores, I sez. No, I don’t mean anything by it, don’t be so touchy.

There's a monument on campus to all the professors' children went to their summer arts camp up north, were pranked in the dormitory by bunkmates who brought up a pan of hot water to the sleeper's hand so he voided his or her bladder—sometimes bowels— in bed, but then committed suicide in morose shame before the school year started and a fugitive rumor might spread. These tragedies were the source of "Bladder Up North", the popular campfire murder ballad. The bronze statue of the boy and girl were

surrounded by sea nymphs, nyads and gentler nereids, enjoying grateful jets and sprays of water for a pleasant, memorable fountain.

It was donated by some bereaved university alumna mother, who then married into auto industry wealth, and sculpted by an Italian professor on the faculty. His daughters may have modeled for the nudes, for I recognize those bodies running thru the halls of the Firehouse.

An uptight, everything all right place? Perhaps, thought its discipline is stifling as a too-tight war surplus uniform. Still, the Jews seemed to run the University and Aleppo well, let’s L’chaim! a splashing toast to ‘em.

Scheiss, I’ll bet Tippy ends up here, at the University.

Do you know your Rock History? I don't suppose they teach it in school any more. That was only a brief window of hipness now sealed up by KKKonservatism. Well, let me tell you, it was the time to be alive. I know about this stuff.

Well, maybe I don't have a handle on the general trend you kids listen to nowadays, perhaps I'd stopped being hip.

But back then, bnds bands bands bands like the Snuffdippers, the Semifinalists, the Tantamounts, the Reverberations, the duets of Vim and Vigor, Honey and the Beelines' "Bramblebee", they ruled the local radio. Then the photo-sensitive Captions and more photo-Rock by the Enlargers, the Regrets, the Deconstructivists, the Dirty Work.

The Fibres, the Olivettis, the New Astringents. The Threadgills, the Monday Morning Quarterbacks, plus college football boys the Brownbeaters. Locker-room doctors commandingly singing "Cough",

the Jogaragiolas, and that gymteachers' afterschool band called A Hundred Situps. The Uproars, the Plumes, the Pluralists, the Fleasearchers, the Klieg Lights, the Househusbands, the Danskins A meaningless battle between the Gherkins and the Glockenspeils, the Shamuses and the Thymuses, the Pipescreens and the Colossi.

"He Was a Naked Fat Man" b/w "Space Attack Slut" by a band How Difficult It Is. The Parsecs "Quick as a Wink (I'll Come)". The Iconoclasts, the World Metaphors and the MasterShemps. Curious and curiouser names like That Goes There, the Things-Aren't-WhatThey-Seems, the We Like It Heres, the C'est La Vies, the Onsite Liquors, and one band merely called the Infidelity. Korean Rock star Jigsaw Jim Ginfizz, descended from the guy who invented sloe gin, methodically applied it to Rock. The Sotto Voces, up there going WO-EE-O-EE-OHH real well. The Hooplahs with their atypical child drummer nicknamed "Traincrash", the Soapstones with their guitarist named "Eight Balls". Bands with songs like the messages they flash in subways like "Hold Bike Kickstand Up". One group called itself the Department of Social Services, in a scramble of groups to seize meaningful totems from daily life. The Lists were endless, man!

The Runarounds, the Wheelspinners, Desmond and the Chariots, the Hours, the Surfaces, the Twenty Questions, the Remembers or Rememberbers (I forgot which), the Taxicab Maccabees. Psychedelic group the Butcherblock Furnitures, the Plywoods, the Insurmountable Odds' poignant "Insured Against Love". The Long Shadows, the Recividists. The Pilasters, the Dictaphones (of Fun), The Finish Lines obvious but unexplicable instrumental "Finnish Lions". Vocal harmonies of the Slapfives. The

Wiggies' "Tighten Up Your Wiggie" debut, the Tunahawks and the Beefamusements, the Breadlights or Breadnoughts, the Globules, the Changeyourjobs. "Three Quartz of a Mile" and "Quantifier of the Beast" by the Button Front Flies. The Census Takers, the Taken Leaves of Your Senses, the Snow Peas. The Thorkelsons. Lord Conveyor-Belt. David Lightning. Son o’ Fun, Rock Loeb and Jim Furs. The Irked, and girl backup singers the Irksomes. The Pinpricks.Records by Babs Baptist, not to be comfused with one of our school teachers by the same name. The Emergency Exits' "Only". The Scions, the Selfauthorities, the Talkshowhosts, the Panaceas and a band of fat girls called the Jelly Donuts. The Dust Clouds' "Mighty Clouds of Dust". When I first heard of the JulieNixons I thought they were called the JukeNixons. "Turning" by the Blynd Eyes or their "Eyes on Blonds" album were pretty good too.

Why do I even mention and talk about all of these bands?

Doodrop Innwop east coast groups the Philadelphiantics, the Newarkers and the Bronxaramas. A band from Massachusetts called the Meatball Grinders. California cannons of cannabis like the Flowers of Gardendom, yes. Unknown band the Perfect Recall had letter-perfect renditions of other people's songs though cover bands were obsolete and frowned upon by then, to the chagrin of all-request bands like the Interpreters, the Anything You Want to Hear and the Stop Me If You've Heard This One. The Next Big Things hailed from Great Next, NY. The Umpteens, the Rhy’ms, and a nostalgia band the Chantilly Lacemakers. Mercybeat cover band the Handholders and their spinoffs like the What Goes Ons and the What Is To Be Dones (Lennonist) . The John Lennon Sisters consisted of Cynthia,

his mother Julia, Yoko and occasionally May Pang. And who was the Jack Lemmon of Rock? Maybe Eddy Univers, or the plunkabilly Hoot Dunning and the Whodunits.

A terrible rivalry between Sam the Chamois, Chaim the Sammy, Shemp the Sham, Ham the Champagne and Jaime the Samoyed, the latter claiming to be the original "Pelt with the Beat".

The unlikely duet of Baron Munchausen and Farmer Alfalfa, called the Self-Righteous Bothers. The Horses' Hooves impressive debut "You're Under the Horses' Hooves". Another band briefly added a stage-organ made up of elephants trumpeting, who were poked when the player pressed down a key on the keyboard. A very Rube Goldberg type of device causing the circus grips and carnies in attendance to holler Hey Rube!

The Disco Volantes were a short-lived supergroup that included Orthon, Ramu and Firkon who musically harped on the subject of UFO's called the Visitations. I find it amazingly pretentious that a band would call itself "The Sky" but in UFO-besotted Michigan it actually happened.

Yet a natural aristocracy of Rock was developing in the East, perhaps a result of all those damn prep schools. Bob Spinnaker and the Spinnakers, like the Down East'ners got their start in a pub called the Town Meeting. The Boston Brownstones, the Martha's Vineyards, the Bad Oysters. From Vermont a band the Covered Bridges. The Debunkers, from Debunker Hill. Toured towns like New South Joke and Rancor. From outside of New Joke, a band called the Portchesters.

The Magistraights and the AristoFrats. Cliquish and aristocrabby snobs the Comeuppances, and the class-concious British wags called the Your New Betters. The Betters, the Bests and the New Paragons. The Riding Crops, Johnny Aloof, the Colonizers, the New Motorcade. A handsome surfer from California called Too Much Sun. Homely pigeonics from the Homing Pigeons, in those days fronted by Johnny Imitation Realfeelings. The Playpersons, the Citizenship Kings, the Greens Fees, Johnny Fast-Forward and the Florins, Vince Change and the Successful Genies. Those lamprubbers the Djinn. King Government and Ben Gentlemen. The Father Figures. A band called the If I Ruled the World. The Arable Lands. The Carafes, the Diners and the Dinners were soon contradicted by the international hungry sound of those jazzy Rice Bowls. The Bluebloods, Roque Vidaloca and the Johnny Carphone Orchestra "Sins of the Supper Club", soon followed by the irritatin gelevator-to-the-dentist's version interpreted by the Hundred and One Dalmatians. Too early in history to call a band the Camcorders, but someone will.

A bunch of hippie Fine Art and Engineering students called the Cowpunchinellos tried to wrest the image of country music from vile and vicious traditional bands like the Slavecatchers.

"Dreamboasts" by the Sweatervests, the Walking Shorts' "Walking Tall", the Good Tasters, Isidore and the Ducats. The Longunderwearbreakers, the Hollywood Hairpieces, the Safety Patrol (being British, they thought it was Petrol) Boys. Rock stars who teach courtesy: the Monarchs of the Glen, the Golden Opportunities. The Philippe Pateks—you know, like the watch, though his real name was

Patel. Artists' band the Erased DeKoonings, the Odalisques. The Artsycraftsypeople toured leading art schools with the Dexter Mat Cutters. Magazine cover stories of pert well-dressed young women calling themselves the Coordinates and the Separates. Fashion bands the Haltertops, the Makeup Band, the Famous Designers and a Rock star in a witch's hat, his necktie a nylon stocking. Never thought there'd be a band called the Nail Polish Remover, but there was. The summery Sundresses. "Acting Tan" by the Dark Ones.

Skincare band the Jojobas and, most recently, the Tanning Booths.

Elegant fashion lions like the Wine Lists. The cool combo with the jazz name the Effectiveness. The Holy Cows!'s jazzlike and improvisational "Bop Tizum".

The Dignitaries' weekly appearance on TV's "Dig It?" Political bands like the Strip Searches, Walter and the Water Cannons, the Off-Year Elections, the Teleprompters' "Abduction from the Seraglio" album and later the Unionbusters. All salaam'd to the Memsahibs and the Refreshingest. The Gloater and the Old Goldwaters. The Diatribes, the Hyperboles and the commentary of the pipesmoking Yell-o-Boles. The New Left Slippers and the patrio-patois of the Oh Say Can You Sees or the We the Undersigned and the Colonial Williamsburgs. The Wet Politicians appeared in some superhero TV show about some character called Incontenenceteen. The Faithful Retainers; does that mean, in this case, feudal or orthodontial?

Senator Eugene McCarthy put out a grand, poetic but forgotten Rock album, and from pre-Rock days there were a left-leaning trio of folksingers the Hollywood Ten. The Materialists were too smart for their own good, as were the Condolence Councils and the Goodbye

Gods. Communist bands in grim black turtleneck sweaters the People and the Workers, the Fidels, the Fidols, the Fidelios, The Earl Browder Band, the Red Books, the Party and even the workaholic Stakhanovites. The Tennis Court Oaths didn't like to be called the T. C. Oafs by that press wag Threadbear. An album called "Down With...!" by the Burgeois Conventions. The Peace Feelers.

May you build your record collection in interesting times.

7.x.19 Now, your graduating class probably doesn't have to read books, for all the curricular classics have been turned into rock operas the past couple years, right? Do your parents buy you the albums? Listen nostalgically with you, "helping with homework"?

Study the cover art for clues, extra credit?

Bull Michigan. Its forest bison and mastadon would be hunted each winter, their hides inflated into lawnmower-engine personal zeppelins or other joyrides of wealthy balloonists and hobbyists.

More mundane men might attach them to lawnmowers to collect the grass cuttings. But summer’s end always meant more University.

Having been summoned on the first day of Spring to the Counselor's office, Tippy was surprised to learn he'd been awarded a scholarship for a year at the University. Perhaps it was swimming, or elocution (though he once referred to it as “occulusion”). Or maybe just a demographic thing, they needed someone from the mobile home park's zip code that year to look munificent, democratic. A girl told me that Tippy’s father suggested he use the gift, enroll in the

damn University, so he did.

I was unsure if college was going to be a good place for my rambunctious friend or not. Hairy students like backwoods roughnecks in hunting dog-skin coats with bison fringe, though they were sons and daughters of suburban Motorsburgh professionals and owners of car dealerships. Trail possum girlfriends playing proud squaws in cutoff shorts. And those were the interesting ones.

Process bumpkins in windberserker jackets carried their books beneath their businesslike-black hornrimmed glasses.

Near that candy-blue glowing atomic pile swimming pool reactivator, they built edge-of-town science-driven spinoffs like Prometheon Corporation. Its ads boasted "Swimming-Pool Accuracy" in its geigery-countery measurement devices, but it may have just been an excuse to put a picture of a girl in a bathing suit in a science magazine.

At one point Tippy considered taking a class in the University's College of Anesthesiology, but was frustrated there weren’t any courses in Stimulants and Aphrodisiacs. Other students like him lost interest in the part of reviving people, bringing them back from the hallucinating slumber of surgery, with a moral objection to doing so.

Tippy may have never stopped hallucinating between the ages of nineteen and twenty-whatever, resulting in his visionary-stupid songs and holy performances. But you can’t really credit college for that.

Vampire vulture Aldebbie wanted to drink Tippy's brain-blood and other stuffs for that percolated youthful inspiration. Oh, who’s he, you ask? We’ll get to him later.

Performance art by some weird artistic kid from Beastland, MI

named Nick Chattycathy. Later he made an arty 16mm film shown at the University of the Fuct auto assembly lines as a tentacled monster, swallowing its slaves and regurgitating gleaming paint-wet sedans.

Tippy and I visited him on campus once, when he thought it was funny to shout "Votes for Jews!" at an antiwar or Black Studies political rally, but the joke fell short.

Loud, exuberant, eccentric Jewish art students formed a sort of Shalom des Réfuses. Young, hirsute sputtering fuses on big ideas rocketships. They incessantly reminded us, Hasidim side curls are called Peyot, from which we get the word Peyote; when the bristling cactus-like twists are cut and boiled, they release the psychedelic properties, hallucinations inspired by all those years of textual studies. Needless to say, those guys were popular on campus, invited to parties for exactly that reason. "Just a little bit, snip snip, Levi..."

One science Prof had gotten a grant to introduce yellowjacket wasps into a picnic. Do they hover over hamburgers or hotdogs?

Macaroni or potato salad? Would snap-lid plastic containers improve picnics in the 1970s? One Prof build a golem, but it didn’t quite work, perhaps because he was in the Religion Department rather than Engineering or Biology. He’d been dating the ceramicist in the Art. Department, source of the clay, though.

Tippy wondered during one lecture, Do farmers around here call them "Aleppogies" rather than allegories, because they're taught, examined and compared in the university town? Or because of residual ninteteenth-century German accents? Possible paper topic.

In college he learned that the world was more than the Exotic

Tiki aisle of the garden-and-furnishings store Planters' Paradise.

That Africa was many countries and black peoples, not just one country.

One literature professor on campus, an English bloke from the village Campusex in Puddlesex (or is it vice versa?) was married to Peter Pan's first wife, still reportedly promiscuous in her dotage.

There was something new on campus, bagel shops. One served something called a Schmagel, the doughbucket covered in frothy pigeon fat. They also have that salty orange fish served at the Last Supper and on Solemnday. These must have sprung up to serve the New York girls and business school majors from New Jersey, who brought with them records of folk rock balladeers with unpronounceable names and reverential, rabbinical blues bands that sound like burnt toast. If my mom caught me buying a snack in one of the bagel joints she'd murdalize me. What DANG! magazine called "A bris at the neck". So, hungry as I am, I’d better steer cleer.

Head shops full of potsmoked paraphenalia began springing up beside campuses like magic mushrooms after a warm jungle rain, and stoner headshemps frequented them, frequently. Hip boutiques carried a brand of jeans called Dumpsters, so rich students and trustfund hippies could supposedly show solidarity with hoboes. Students wore overhauls, Farmer Brownskinned jeans, Farmer Godsends.

Our agricultural heritage, deep in their molecules I guess.

At Irony Leage colleges and Bigtime universities, if they thought you were LSD tripping they'd show you a filmed performance of Oedipus to discourage you from pulling out your eyes, though it often had the opposite effect, of encouragement. They reminded us, the

streets of Holytelevision City are filled with blined and defenestrationcrippled youth, your favorite TV stars' children, shuffling about a seaport ringed with statues of admirals who jumped out of hospital windows when stuffed with government LSD. Fall is the season that commemorates the Fall of Man, and Adam's discovery of fresh, apple-cheeked garden-variety cidersex.

Adam perched on Icarus' handlebars. Michigan had a Fall every year, and Aleppo stocked it with Homecoming parades. College entered our minds as lazily as the burning paper planes pranksters hurled from dorm windows, folded out of posters recruiting U.S. Army Men or advertising jock dances or depicting W.C. Fields. Like the planes made from tiny burning draft cards, student unrest was presented as one more Big Game, this week's Shitcops vs.

Rainflowers. Amonism was the latest fad on campus with potbellied monotheist kids. As Aleppo town frownies, Thump and I had for many years snuck in to buy and sell these people drugs, but all we really knew about college was that it was where Rock bands played on porches where otherwise sofas mouldered all year until merrily torched. A world of guys with Greek fraternity code instead of initials.

Fraternity house bands sang in Greek fraternity-name letters: Phi! Alpha! Let me hear you say Tau, Tau Baby! Omeguhhhhh..."

Driving ranges set up on lawns to bounce balls across the street through hippie households' windows. Single-bellied blondibeasts.

Pumpkin-pie climbers. Jockish jackasses. Smart marketing was the putrid free introductions of cheap Michigan apple, sugarbeet and sourgourd wine, or oak-leaf beer at these frat parties. Kids on the

front lawn dancing the Cars Slipping on Ice, danced the Stupid Surfer. Impressionable highschoolers accumulated in the raucous jockish night. One, two, many motion sicknesses.

It was here we ran into our friend Dink, whose first words were "Don't bother me, I'm working, I'm drinking". Dink was buying for teenagers as we had once beseeched collegiates ourselves. Cool threatening drinking, from an eighty-ounce bottle of BeatleBrau Beer.

So Tippy entered the School of Athens in intellectual Aleppo, Midwest University, pronounced "meow" for short by girls, or abbreviated "MU" like the incontinent continent now undersea. It was a Ten Ton university populated by kids who make out indiscriminately on expressway exits, not the Irony League sons and daughters of particular autocrats. Where they raised trained TV Guide-reading dogs for the blind.

The university unwrapped the mummy of King Atlas III, Utmost the XXII. King Judas the 13th Floor Apostle, not really exhibit-able items but certainly salable to a small devout Catholic college nearby as religious relics. The unwatered university museum gila monster— bought from Hollywood, where they made a 1950s horror movie of anything called "monster"—was licked by guards and students on the museum staff for hallucinogenic sweat. Dog nipples from the biology lab were stolen, popped like candy pills too.

Jewish students from east coast cities like New Jersey, Israeli neutron-bomb mathematics majors, liked to call it Meshuggah University. They built a golem in the Psychlotron there, poured irradiated Kosherwitz wine into the bubble chamber (“the bubbeleh

chamber” chortled Prof. Tummler) and rabbinically parsed and read the neutrino tracks in light of the Talmud's teachings. There was a law school there endowed by a descendant of King William the Motherfucker, or at least built to look like it.

The old university College of Phrenology eagerly sought government grants to experiment with LSD, not only students but the little Michigan animals in the zoo, to augment the tests on its effect on web-spinning spiders sent up in anti-gravity missiles, weather balloons, bottle rockets, etc.

The eminent Dr. Jesus Christ lecturing at the University tonite!

Of course I'm not going.

Tippy's loss of virginity to the zoo animals was one thing.

Thump may have slapped them around a bit, resulting in his hand swiped by the claws of a raccoon, bitten by a wolverine.

All this shit about your permanent record, let me tell you, real records always end up in the 33-cent bargain bins. Tippy didn't particularly want to go to college either, but it was the law. In those parts, all the kids in America went. Or at least the ones we knew and hung around with. Some kids in his high school graduating class went to Barber College to study Sproutology of the Hair, and played for the team the Barbers. Some of our friends went to the other big rumor mill, Midwestern Sports University, another in the Ten Ton. Some went to Midwest Industrial, not Intellectual, increasingly ineffectual, supposed to give a shuffleboard shove to careers in, say, the Post Office. We powertoked their joints down to the ash, when we would gratefully smoke ‘em at their parties, though. Building a

better student Buddha. Sons of coaches with football nicknames like "Headbutt” and “Jostle". This Saturday is the big game against Fredskin University. University of Cohen, University of Co-Eds. Coach Gridiron Gomberg had little to say, and once on the street wiped his nose on Tippy.

For some guys going to college is like a wolf or fox falling down a well, but not for Tippy. Late and dark, he stayed up till a million o'clock.

To look collegiate Tippy had a sweater with an electrocardiogram red heartbeat squiggle on it, like sad child Brian Branfiber in the comic strip “Walnuts”. Tippy went to a Halloween party with dirty socks as his costume and no one got it. In the first week of college, he was beaten up by the Dean because he had found a magic pen that always put down a test's correct answers. Or he would lean forward in the front row of class and draw with a felttip on the professor's satiny necktie. One of his professors was even named Dr. Threepiecesuit. Ducal professors exhorted musically "Take the A-/B+ Train" but Tippy wouldn't do it, wouldn't get (it) on.

Professors just shook their heads, called it his no-mind; the scholar Ian Knowledge said "that boy—something's just got to give" and other bromides. One pissed-off professor had won a short Nobel Prize, off by several dollars. One professor would absentmindedly wipe his nose on dollar bills, fold them and put them back in his pocket. Tippy hitchhiked past the irradiated town where one of his professors owned a house ringed in mobius stripping, ecological with the heat.

Students love to laugh at their teachers. Obsessed with authority,

once I got mixed up and called the professor—no, I guess it was a substitute teacher in highschool—"God".

Tippy investigated the big Department of Lumbering there, assuming all he'd have to do was to climb trees or cry “Tim-BER!”.

Lectures were held over walkie-talkies while fires were being fought.

Then for a week he majored in World Metaphor Theory, a department whose majors were lampooned and easily caricatured as going around saying “It's like, it's like a...wait, like...” He considered a Books Major based on his happy recollection of a two-volume children's set Things to Like and Things to Remember (or did I own those?). In this program of study you read books but have such personal feelings about them you damn well better keep them to yourself; credit was entirely based upon sincerity of intention.

Somehow Tippy figured reading was like a ball rolling, for when he'd stop and look up from the page the words kept rolling, rolling and tumbling till they came up snake eyes, in his head.

In the Library he wanted to handle incunabula, since it almost had the word "cunt" hidden within its name or fragile pages.

Football Saturday. Gridiron gombergs tailgate party at houses near the stadium. Crones on chaise-lounges in front lawns with signs FUCK ME FOR PARKING. Big parties every warm-enough weekend night on the front porch of Louche House fraternity. Good bands gechuggling away.

Someday, maybe I'll have a band with my friends and play there. An inspiration for the male sybaritic lifestyle for our own Firehouse as well…but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

How do college students get the meaning of life? One day one of his classmates he knew inexplicably and spontaneously jumped over a theatre balcony and when his back healed spent several years of intense graduate study of that single incident, trying to figure out why. College was a sanitorium. Imagine a university called "with".

Football players in class were constantly popping cholesteroids for fatty muscles, then popping the boils and pus-filled appurtenances on their pink pasteboard skin that resulted. Last night's frathouse liquor from the Runaround Sue Liquor Store whipping their thickened lips and making their answers even more incomprehensible. A college badly seen through a macho mist., its footballs hurtling down thru the sky, photo'd and mistaken for a UFO by greaser kids from the Motorsburg suburb of Polandtramk. The kind that would shove smaller kids around on the way to junior high, but don't make any comparisons to me and my brother.

Crap. Tippy knew he couldn't cope with kids so healthy and wholesome they positively shit frozen orange juice concentrate.

Couldn't stand those rich and conservatively disciplined brain-bisons, slow and dull-witted, doofy but dutiful and getting excellent grades.

Meathook children and potato rats, though the term for them "rah-rah" was originally from the name of a Haitian voodoo holiday. Collegiate guys in push-button suits, girls in their campus crinolines, neutrinos in their chinos, when they wore pants at all. Self-conscious girls who brush their teeth before talking on the phone. Those dew-heads of morning. Plexiglas tits. Politeboys who say "'Excuse me" if they bump into a dog. Upper-middle class people who skied, from a street so suburban it's called "Footrest". Ecch, those pastel-sweatered

clogfoots who sniffed out their pretentious East Coastanoan koans they called poems, first lines like "I had the honor to lose my arm to a tiger." Prodigies who wrote novels where the climax was the destruction of an expensive stereo system, nude record changer needles dancing like leggy flames snapping in the collegiate night of the mind. College students were "cottage students" because, he reasoned, their convictions had the consistency of cottage cheese, considering they learned most from their parents. Happy butterboneheads who didn't know the difference between sexist and student, between a feminist and a florist. Why would he want to be there, among them?

Small black bears wandered around the campus in the early morning, took to the trees to escaped the noonday sun (ot the fate of those in the Zoo).

Scientists had just discovered you get all the thoughts of all the animals whose meat you'd eaten in your life, but in their obesity the University regents dismissed it as Vegetarianist propaganda and defunded the project. Psy-Collegy. Skulls in football helmets, which cycnics said proved college is a dead and dusty museum. This was the University where they had first synthesized pus. In the center of the university is a big center for the study of birth defects—a fad heightened by the LSD boom—built in the shape of a deformed child; a major pharmeceutical manufacturer in the western part of the state, perhaps feeling guilty, provided the funding for it. In those days you could get a Masters in Psychedelic Studies at the University at the cost of several blissful years and several handfuls of money for drugs. Some students in the program died of frostbite when their

utilities were turned off in the middle of winter without them noticing.

The University's Phlogiston Building got a humongous government grant to prove that phlogiston, ylem, either, orgone, they’re all just another name for fucking. It permeates everything, which was discovered by Kaiser Doctor Wilhelm Reich the Third, who beseeched President Eisenhowl to free him from his lonely prison cell and appoint him University President post here. At this time Science was evolving into Humor and the two were nearly synonomous.

Near-naked scientists racked their brains for witty data, clever answers in their research monologues.

Meanwhile, Tippy did Psychology experiments on butterflies and cocoons, and an easy one on coconuts for which he recieved no credit. In the experiments with the visual cliff Tippy gnawed the plexiglass, prompting the professor to remark "The subject is getting stimulus-itis". As everybody else in his classes wanted to be tenured Thought Readers he figured he'd switch to something else. He just wanted to ask science questions like "Why does snot sometimes harden, sometimes not?", fully aware of the answer. Plus, there was the big list posted outside the Department titled These Are Stupid Questions. Tippy attended academic movies like “The Day the Earth Puked” and “The Boy Who Smoked Dope”, with which he could empathize considering it was filmed in Aleppo. In the Beliefs Department saw a videotape of Knights Templar jacking off on a crucifix, featuring a priest's private parts. They must've paid him to do it. Under the facility's doomed and sunny elms Tippy would sip his soda and be amazed by the fact that he acutally had ancestors a thousand years ago, forty or sixty generations back. He was

descended from the guys who built Stonhenge, from tree-fucking Druids and the celibate monks laboring over the Book of Kells. His Onancestors.

From the start it was obvious by the standards we cultivated in high school that there was insufficient drug use on this campus. I gave generously to the local 'Shrooms for 'Shmen campaign. How can they make room for bookshelves up there without something mind-expanding? Hey, better a University than a universe within these forty-acre boundaries. College students who believed a curledup garden hose would shoot out spiralled water. Tippy got a letter from his upsters asking what he wanted for Christmas and promptly replied, an attention span. In his worldwildness, he wanted a school where the lectures were given in babytalk. The mad student, exiled to the forest. Living on just doing homework in a lab called Life.

Tippy began experimenting with his body's own kitchen chemistry.

One Winter he lived entirely on salt—hey, it worked for the roads— and the following Summer entirely on pepper, which had his pecker standing up like a crackling peppermill. Tippy lived for half a semester on the agar jelly, the solidified nutrient broth in the bottom of petri dishes in the biochemistry lab. "Don't tell me I don't have culture".

University experiments in Nuclear Frisson. What one obese Powerology Prof., who left teaching and hoped to capitalize on his invention there, called it "Nuclear Soupçon". He died while testifying on the floor of the Congress, and his heart glowed blue and throbbed for minutes until a forklift was found to haul him out of there.

"Nuclear fascism" the Peoples' Puma Party called it. "Puma sounds

like the Duma" complained old Reds in response. So consequently, though windows were broken, little was settled. What my wise brother Thump gleefully called the uranium violence of everyday life.

Professor Marjoram Tarragon, which sounds more like a groupie name. Prof. Azimuth's experiments in zero-gravity, zerodegree psychedelics, often bathing student volunteers in that swimming-pool reactor, or spinning them in the Psychlotron, while tripping, to see what it did to their hallucinations and reveries. A scientist with a cool nameplate on his door that I thought was Forcefield turned out to be Fusfeldt. Absent-minded professor who'd wipe his bare butt with his handkerchief, put it back in his pocket all stinky. Young Engineering futurists put down on first-semester surveys they wanted to study Bat Robotics, something they must've seen on a television superhero comedy. Maybe the professor invented the little electronic sensors they put into kitchen knives to make them (even the old-fashioned unmotorized ones) murmur "kill, kill..."

In college Tippy read boosterish books like Plato in the Age of Aleppo, essentially the professors congratulating each other and themselves, clubby as golfers, village burghers, smiling oafs, prestidigi-Rotarians. Pretty dumb. I'd rather stay in my room, play my guitar along with significant records, songs on the radio.

Tippy realized that he was like the Man Who Hated Words—who in the old movie finally loved the Woman Who Invented Feelings.

Though Tippy insisted the line in the song that said "you read too many books" was about a glasses-eyed girl, I felt it was directed towards me. Why am I always in such a bad mood? As a child I read

that melancholy was an attribute of the intellectual but that doesn't necessarily translate to "grumpy". Tippy said "Go read the dictionary" so I did. Absm. Abyss. Axolotl. So...?

For a whole semester of Historical Art he tried too hard to get into the slide of a famous building, bumping his head. Even took notes on where he'd throw rocks thru the windows of Chartres, or would have had sex while witnessing the destruction of the Parthenon in the seventeenth century. Maybe he gravitated towards Arts and Crafts, for they didn't really hurt anybody. Professor Gavrilo Thoth Laszlo had made his fame and academic career a decade before by slugging the Pieta, an adorable act by a role-model to us all. By now Laszlo was Chairman of the University Art Department, pimping his beautiful daughters as nude models for undergraduates. Townie kids were appreciative that he'd organized the annual TV Reruns Festival.

On his own Sculpt Along with Laszlo show on the University educational channel it was one Sunday noon while the show was broadcast, back in the artist's own studio, Tippy ravished all the daughters. “Love’s Modern Art ‘cuz it don’t make sense,” mused the Chairman on his next show.

Still, the Historical Art course imprinted him with memorable imagery of arrow-perforated Saint Sebastian, sated Sardanapalus on his pyre, the Rape of Sabine Women, Jupiter served by Thetis, satyrs on prowl for nymphs (and vice versa), and lusty peasant holiday festivals. Yet he had to admit, college was too much distraction from the band, though some motifs he'd cherish the rest of his life, convert to three- or less chord Rock. Like the record store job, college costs Tippy his

undistracted focus on Rock and the aggression and sex from which it springs, and inflames in turn.

So that was his college year. Semester. Week. Whatever the duration. A university is a kinda cool thing, a variety of approaches, like a Rock festival. But we’ll bow out, Tippy wants to do his thing with his gang. Us! 3.xi.19 I guess at first I kinda wanted us to write songs about our moms, the food they made for us, maybe pooping afterwards, but Tippy wanted all our songs to be about girls, their bodies, their subtlety, at most subduing them and power relations involved in their manipulations and control. Like, that was the rule, his rule. OK, whatever. I'll just play guitar, come up with interesting, involved, or— best of all—abstractly simple riffs beneath Tippy's improvising, prancing, musing, grumbling.

Midwest University in Fall sparkled with intellect, ambition, new contradictions, new comraderies and unchaperoned sex. Every bright colored leaf on a tree a girl on display, look at me!

Tanned, barely-tamed athletic girls striding across campus whose limbs looked like they were formed on a lathe. Bannister legs, coffee-table arms. Bio boys with Freshview electron microscopes, looking beneath girls' shirts, beneath girls' trivia. Clinicians taught sex as efficient as the glass-washing system in a successful campus pub, where jocks bash the pitchers against the ceiling until we play an encore, or they (the pitchers, not the jocks) shatter, which usually

comes first.

The university publicity and press office was massaging the message of its researchers' newest discovery: How the core of the Earth is sex. The campus newspaper had a cover story about a guy who had sex once as a freshmen, got V.D., had sex once as a sophomore, got V.D., then went on to get a Ph.D. in Romance Languages; harrummph, strident student journalism. Tippy's Orgasm Forecasting became quite well known and he always had a line of troubled girls single file outside his room. Spermology like Astrology, associative and divine. Universities all employed old guys with tall conical hats divining the future in people's jackoff, college entranceexam puberty griots breaking the stem of the student's generative pipe then looking at it under a microscope to determine his scholastic fertility--the number of papers to be published by him in him--or futility.

In college Tippy learned the invisible secret, that the spiritual equals the sexual and all those books on metaphysics and the occult, they were just metaphors for fucking. He briefly dated, for nearly an hour, the Efficientest Girl in the World. In college they'd confuse hair growing on a person with ivy, growing on the side of a fraternity house. Kind of neuro-pretty, those eye women. When college girls get horny they think of arranging long weekends when their roommates will be out. The massages were okay, like dropping a bag of groceries in the street breaking all the eggs, milk cartons splitting, jars smashing, spilling. There was a mass murderer killing coeds on campus every Sunday after Mass, but this had nothing to do with Tippy. Tippy had never been without sex when he wanted it

until he went to college, for here encountered girls of divided mind who hesitated at the threshhold of the act.

Tippy got stood up on a date, went to this movie "The Last Pickup" by himself. It began with eyegames between this interesting man and woman on a bus, but the guy doesn't breach the silence, pop the question, so they go their separate ways, she to her prearranged date which she would've gladly broken for novelty and adventure (and from which she ended up conceiving a child or two), he to commit suicide as planned for that afternoon, to get hit by a truck. Tippy went home alone feeling even more depressed. Putto to the wheel. He was mostly flunking his girl classes here. When he was in the bathroom, shaving or masturbating, girls would come to his dorm room and, not finding him would leave explicit notes, leaving him depressed. Later their phones were busy! Tippy studiously spent several nights alone in his dormitory re-learning the Facts of Life from the college handbook. When it mentioned babies being stillborn he thought, yep, that's me, still being born. College made even having a girlfriend seem unpleasant. One day the weather report said REAL COLD WITHOUT A WOMAN. Coeds were always killed (young men's crimes of passion or revenge, mostly) on Valentine's Day, so both city and campus police investigators would invariably shrug, say it was just college kids "feeling their oats", getting rambunctious, put a sympathetic hand on the parent’s arm, shake their heads slowly in a fatherly way.

A lot of good that did for the angry and upset parents: “I’ll sue!” thundered some in the Dean’s office, who never did. They would dumpster the girls' possessions, books and record albums and, in

their bereavement, drive forlornly away to their Motorsburgh (or east coast) suburbs.

Tippy boasted on the first day of college he'd learned the sophisticated term for Steady On One's Feet During Orgasm.

Girls with iron-rich, flattened silk-iron hair listened to gee-whillikers folk music, sit tight music. But that didn’t stop the Tip. The big McGillicuddy-Jardiniere dormitory complex, one built for women, one for men, now mixing it all up in the sexual revolution.

Nicknamed CuddyJar, like a Scots grenadier's whisky ration, its hinged copper cup. Some of those shiny cups were lined up on the wall in the paneled lobby for school-spirit nostalgia in the downtown restaurant The Siz Boom Bah. Tippy often partied and stayed in Donohue-Dragon Hall with stylish east coast girls, sang for them in lovingly smelly sunshine bedrooms the next morning. Old Mr. Schmutz, the Jewish janitor at the girl's dorm, was reprimanded when he took their tampons from restroom wastebaskets for his Pazzover table. "What? It's the bitter root" was his feeble defense.

I won’t quote the stinking old cliché about every college student majoring in the opposite sex. But Tippy had lots of fun, taking different girls like you’re supposed to take different classes.

Campus sororities? Henhouses full of hemoglobin. And hormones!

Smoky-eyed fellatilipped, suckmouth'd dry blondes, and their supportive dreidelmouth'd brunette friends. White eyeshadow, white lipstick, white miniskirts and gone-gone boots. Squirrel girls, toothy and skittishly clattering. It’s a scientific fact sperm in Michigan

hibernate in winter, like certain fish or amphibians under the ice, when not frozen for artificial insemination purposes. This gave college students the opportunity to safely date all winter term, college men to punctuate study sessions with punctuating cheerful co-eds.

Tippy fell out of an airplane and onto a girl's bed where he fell asleep next to her. Lush college student in the dorms was Lil’ Debbie from Entebbe, an Israeli-fathered African girl student, and Tippy said she had a cowrie shell down there, which her people used for money.

I thought of our own elementary school principal Phlogiston W. Cowrie, after whom an elementary school should be named by now.

That's the problem, said Tippy, you get distracted and don't think about cunt in its various forms and flavors enough. Thinking about a school instead, heebiejezus. So sue me, Tippy.

Girls with lightning skin. That little Miss Take-All-the-Pillows.

Bestweather barefoot fair-hairs. Unscented eyes. Catgut-butt girls in their summer jeans. Guys in their own anthropological denim LeviStrausses, so tight they can't—won't—fart while dancing. Some college women, at least one in every dorm or campus co-op house, was shaped like the notable squat German automobile. Some girls' breasts could only be measured by hand in Counter Intuitive Laboratories, a university spinoff company. Like a horsemarket dray mare, that touchable girl was this many hands high. Chemistry-set girls, adept in fellatiosmotic processes. This was, after all, a notable Ten Ton university.

I was most impressed. He had entire swim teams, girls with only their flowered rubber caps still on their heads, and him wearing one someplace else.

He was an Aurangazeb of their aureoles, that breastfeed beast of a boy. That German model Neudsch or Narcolia taught Tippy the word "aoli," obligingly put some on her aureoles for him to relish. A hungry girl from Hungary put paprika on his pricka, Ow-ow-ow!

"Stealing raccoons" is how a Michigan boy describes having several girlfriends in succession in a school night. Likely some of them wear glasses, or because of dark eye, brushy makeup, mascara like Coral's. For Tippy, the opening of a new girl was a satisfaction like a suburban Motorsburgh developer opening a new shopping center. Or strip mall, and its strippers. He even called a young one's rare deflowering "cutting the ribbon", like he was Governor Hominy awarding an astronaut a laboratory, or opening a bridge that removed the last stoplight on the freeway between the state line and the top of the mitten. Every girl an accomplishment of his administration.

That Christian girl who got mad when we said cynical and atheist things insisted that her Jesus was as cool as any Zeus, for He too came down to take women in the form of a bull, a Ganymedean eagle, and a shower of coins too. Oh yeah? Show me where it says that. It's when she said "came down to Earth" that I thought hmm, there might be something fishy about this Christ. Lord on high of all the UFOs and planets. Crown of thorns an asteroid belt, or vice versa. Astro-metaphysical interplanetary transubstantiation, hovering over the substation and all that. What church does the tennis shoe'd lady astronomy professor go to Sundays, after football home games?

My own pagan household gods? Same as when a little boy a

decade ago, Wolf Bear Lion Weblos. Thanks for asking.

Tippy was like that saint or angel that appeared to girls in the form of a mosquitor or bee, especially when they're ovulating. What a poetic beekeeper, visiting Professor that semester, called Honey from the Cunny. Swarming like ant succubi upon Tippy's arms, legs, jeans. I took to referring to those girls like Skyrocketina, or Prurienta the yenta, as Tippy's "penetrata", the penetrated ones. I swear, I heard that pert polical volunteer’s name as Pillory. "Potato-eena" muttered Tippy as he watched one bottom bounce away, smiling and sated, in those blown-out jeans of hers. Like a potato with a thousand eyes.

All those girls made up his pubic library, his Punic War. All-out girls. Hitler deflowered Belgium and the fleshpots of France as the Kaiser never could. Trench warfare as frustrating dates where the girl still says No, but a blitzkrieg was like successful sex, in a car or something or so an older boy told me. Tippy left what he called a "scortched girl" policy. All the lucious, and other girls I wouldn't even pee into. Every virgin boy thinks what if he he peed instead of sweet pecker'd properly, some out of fear, some as anticipated prank.

Maybe I too was ready to study dating and the arts of using one's body for sex. Maybe not, no hurry.

11.v.19 Tippy was getting used to his first week of college when he got his Draft Notice. Draft riots had happened on campus when General Pliny the Elder came to speak, call-and-response riots. And because there was a war going on a long ways away, all the phones were

already bugged. The Army no longer had, nor fostered, any illusions: its new symbol (was Quentin Quimshare commissioned for it?) was a man stretched out on a five-pointed star with his arms and legs blown off. The so-called Peacetime Draft was something every boy with half a heart wanted to avoid. Tippy may have been able to get his longtime patcher-upper pediatrician Dr. Frank Wagon to write a stirring poem about his athsma.

But there's another story about how he got out of that chilling draft, a more flagbusting, leave-me-alonier method yet. Plenty of other uncomfy nonsoldiers avoided military service when they hollered "Fuck the Draft!" when their names were called, using rich and robust sexual imagery to express their political convictions, but Tippy might've been the only guy that really used fecal creativity, and he deserves the swinging medallion for it. They say that down at (what a British wag called) the Daft Board, he made use of having rifled the kitchen cupboard before his number came up. A pleasantly nostalgic odor alerted his fellow passengers in the bus ride downtown. It seems that Tippy made a sandwich out of both halves of his butt, filled his bottom's alley and pants' innards with peanut butter and jelly (mayonnaise would have been too obvious, suggestive), and when the doctor told him to pull down his pants he took the sandwich spread mess and started shmeering it on his face and dancing around singing a song he'd made up for the occasion called "Pull Down Your Pants (and Dance)". The nurse fainted and her face fell tragically upon a scalpel. The doctor harrumphed, angrily stabbing down some official scalawag scrawlwords and smudgy moodmarks before chasing the irreverent imp out of his

office with a painful grenade bottle of mercurichrome. The Draft Board rated him with an unfit 4Q, upon which its stern Marine recruiting Sergeant added a stern “Fuck you.”

I was unimpressed, for I too was rated 4PU: Physiologically Unsuitable, and it was my bowels that prompted me to suggest this strategy to my anticipation-anguished friend. It made use of the body’s nether backwards, not just the fully frontallcock, yet the metaphor of poop (and, therefore, college books) rolls and stinks resonantly. Someday, I thought, he’ll make use of these tactics onstage to entertain, as he did that day to save his life.

Or maybe it’s Rock that will save our lives.

Listen, it's time I told you, I had to take on heavily amplified and electronically-treated guitar to fight the infernal whirring sound of Mom's vacuum cleaner. What's more, she always cleaned when she was angry, probably about my father’s death, so I associated it with derisive, decisive violence, blood oaths against distant (I've never met 'em) but erring relatives, vendettas of silence lasting decades, etc. Once Thump rolled a lawnmower over our gardening mother's hands (a logical reason Tippy’s family would have had to move to a mobile home, but wasn’t) so she wouldn't lick her finger with that postmenstrual-dietetic cigarette breath of hers in order to get a spot off his face in public, when she had dressed him up and combed his toddler’s cowlick for church. Slamming car doors on older women's feet, or on the white underside of flabby flaccid arms, fatal complications setting in, was what Thump told the high school conselor was his career goal. Motherslogging it, as they say in Motherslang. That said, the vacuum cleaner is the battle-axe to the the peaceful home…and she was just the battle axe to wield it.

Why, that'd be enough to get me to play guitar. Yes, I’ll blame it on Mom, give her the eternal credit for a good idea. She ended up buying me a Tedesco electric guitar and amp. There was a special that week at JMJ-Mart, a mammoth parking-lot-sized store founded by a stressed-out advertising executive who got religion (“JesusMaryJoseph!” cried his gobsmacked bartender, the Irish oath of amazement), where later we would find the Chomps' album marked "3 for 69 cents" and you even could buy extra-sensory perception by the cash register. Their ads interviewed kids tired of

imagining girls laughing at them for homemade instruments once they took them out of the basement so they bought some at the big windowless store in the new mall. It was named for Jesus, Mary and Joseph since the corporation headquarters on Motorsburgh Miracle Mile Road was another front financed by the fascist radio priest Father Coughin-a-Carload. My mother had worked for him many years ago as a private secretary, and that he was my real father is only a rumor and let's keep it that way, thank you.

My brother saw my guitar and amp combo and demanded a set of tin and balsa wood drums from there too, holding Mom at gunpoint till she produced her check-cashing guarantee card. Though everything in the house was purchased at garage sales, for Mom thought it was bad taste to spend any money in public, all the lamps in the house were always left on in a kind of potlatch of wasted electricity. So why not amplified instruments too?

I may be small, but my dick I mean my guitar, is loud. Hooked up to British Vicar Field Martial amplifiers like the tall boots and stiff coats with which the Germans compensated. When I'd crank up My Lord Sound, my guitar is like the spear of Longinus, the Roman cop who poked Christ on the Cross with his sharpened billy club. My spear-tip licks and leads pierce the wincing body of Tippy up there, him shrieking Do I not bleed? Do I not fart, burp and sneeze at the same time, and thus, like a guinear pig, die?

Well, duh, yeah. My Pierce Arrows of sound pounded his dogpound pound of flesh. His blood spurted, dog-spurted, causing bleary Dink to rouse, grunt "Sangria!"

Guess I needed electric guitar to protect myself from my family.

On the advice of my Mom, who probably feared my fingers would be used for self-pleasure, I bought that $39 special Tueborster Tedesco guitar with a plastic Shoeboxlite amplifier. But I never should have brought my brother along, for Thump was distracted when a woman yelled at her child, then ripped her arms from her torso when she slapped the frightened kid, so we had to skedaddle out of there, hide in the nearby graveyard.

Aww, I forgot to pay for the musical instruments.

I got my money's worth out of that guitar and little practice amp, lemme tell ya. And practice makes perfect, so the little box's dishwater scrubbing-pad sound was perfect when replicated through Megaron amps at a thousand decibels.

When the power company turned out lights in the Firehouse, I painted the edges of that guitar with glow-in-the-dark radium paint (actually, a girl's borrowed-for-keeps nail polish) so I could find it to practice after dark.

My study of Bach and Liebniz informing my fingers, math equations made electromusical. Notes made from, or into, a powerhouse of eletricity, a dynamo hum of hydroelectric fluidity. You know, like Tippysex itself, as we all have witnessed. Tippy’s voice— his glance—a foil that fortifies my fight.

Go back to talking about guitars with the world's greatest guitarist with the world's best equipment, even if it did come from JMJ-Mart. Glad I grew up when I did, or I would've ended up playing accordion. Over the years Threadbear called me Goebbels of guitar, lying grandiosely, soothingly in a big way, and the Fat Hitler of the

Rock Guitar. Guitar gut rolling over my belt. I learned to whine creatively until Mom agreed to finance my collecting of guitars, for investment purposes you understand in the event I decide to enroll in college. I was a doctor examining musical instruments. Whereas Tippy preferred the ad hoc instruments of his own body and breath, I preferred always the newest guitars, push-button and slide controls, soundamatic fingertip-glide on guitars so big I could hardly carry them. That quality the English blues guitarists call Whitsuntidefire.

An expert and connoisseur of guitars so finicky I'd get rid of a guitar when it got out of tune, or I will when I can afford that. My strings were embittered. What they used to call mandolin indolence.

A Schoolmaster guitar, with that little tassled mortarboard logo at the headstock specifically designed for the university-educated, imported from the the UK (a "pre-BBC" model specifically valued, for I guess they nationalized guitars in the Skiffley 1950s) by the same guy who brought Megalith amplifiers from Stonehenge to Aleppo. Its faithless knockoff, called a Chipster, advertised as a Chippie, implying a 1920 businessman's girl-on-the-side, "When Music is Your Mistress".

When I wore it out, I obtained a big white and lumpy Cauliflowermaster guitar, like that guy used to play the riff for "The Udder and My Thumb" had, like he was twiddling that part of the milk cow with his.

I had this guitar made of petrified wood—it weighed a ton—with dinosaur bone tuning pegs and knobs and fretboard inlay. Heavy, but its tone would wake the dinosaurs from the comet. Now we'd like to do an old song from the Silurian.

I had this one guitar that sounded like cymbals, that sounded like razzamatazz. Tonight I was playing this old Buzz Aldrin ESP guitar, the kind that'd been to space to entertain the crew of the Mercury capsules (the crew strummed "Sloop John B."), bought at a NASA garage sale and evoking all the found spiritual release and mystery of such a trip.

One guitar called an Antiseptic, all tiled and grouted, soapdished and toothpaste'd like a hospital bathroom recently sponge'd clean. Guitars that said Sold For Prevention Of Disease Only. For medium or heavy musical flow.

A Grand Guignol guitar. A Sado-caster. Cream of Predator.

Cream of Pioneer. This one is dedicated to the Non-Dairy Creamed.

Written on my guitar was the line THIS MACHINE KILLS FOLKSINGERS. And that goes double for their ilk, mild soft students.

That girl who’s always smiling.

Cheesecutter guitar. Blackletter guitars. Black leather guitars. The lead guitar must have contempt for the song, try to push its way out of the confines of the melody like a butt in tight jeans.

Buick guitars with wormwire guitar strings. Nails in the cross equal fingernails, fingernail guitar picks. The nails from the cross three tuning pegs, the other three from topsy-turvy Saint Peter. Tried using live moths as guitar picks, wriggling centipede scorpions hardly better. Music a signature as unique as fingerprints upon a glass. My musical signature, I strum a B-fat chord.

So what do I really make of this Megaron amp and electric guitar?

I took up guitar to combat my compulsive washing of the hands, I could be distracted by generating riffs up and down the fingerboard.

Convent sticks. Saul of the Metatarsuls. In school I was voted Least Likely to Decide. Playing with bear paws, beer can paws, as a bear sucks its paw for nourishment in the cave while hibernating. Though these were the days of the cliché of guitar as a revolutionary rifle, I thought of it more as a farm implement, a rake or hoe. The rake's progress over the Autumn leaves that was the audience, pushing them over the treebelt and curb to burn in the street. I felt like a player potato, I don't know anything about music, I don't know how to play this thing. I have had a good education, I've seen all the top rock bands, I have read all the liner notes. I don't want to mention my many years of classical piano, guitar and lute, my polluted liberal art education. Still I'm always the one-note novice. Not a session man, but an obsession man. On my guitar hand is my trench tatoo My Wife Used to be My Right Hand, Now My Right Hand is My Wife, which wasn't really that meaningful since I'd never been married.

Now my right hand is clenched firmly on my guitar strings as it strums and nervously pick-peck-picks. Maybe I took up the guitar to be ipthyphallic. I took up that guitar almost as a prosthetic device, and you can guess which missing or underdeveloped limb. I took up the guitar because the best Eighth Grade girls in the shortest skirts didn't want to dance when I asked. The guitar was my sock hop; that which on Sadie Hawkins Day chose me.

When I lived at my mother's house I could never get any sleep because the glowering challenge of my high school diploma up there on the wall kept me awake. Part of the night and morning I stayed up

and wrote bitter essays disguised as troubled rock songs,"Heavy Metaphor Music". Prisoner of negation in the preciousness of antilove, merrily penning songs like "No, Not One More Couple in the City!". Motto of what women should like in men: "Bad to you, good for you". The American laxity of love. Yet I know I'm excessively romantic, obsessed with coy romance as opposed to the natural sexaction of a Tippy trying to establish territory over his woman like a dog getting a tree wet. I'm probably the only man in the music business whose mother has never seen him nude.

At first I was so nervous in Rock I seriously considered the option of playing two songs at once on two different guitars. It's because I don't fuck many people that I play music with such promiscuity. Compare this to Tippy, whom everything he plays sounds like himself. Relax, said Tippy, it's all in the electronics and turned something way over to the right so it sounded like an airplane taking off inside a whale. Avionics of the guitar, musically equivalent to the headaches of frustrated radar engineers on an inefficient airline. An incapacitor on the guitar, or in the amp. I had these guitar attachments like the Bull-in-a-China-Clipper for that Gutter of Sound approach. Guitar devices which give too much power. Feedback like a wasp whistling. I'm not-so-secretly scared of electric appliances, even lights but especially TV and radio. To turn something On is a terrific responsibility. Like activating a band saw or lathe, it should be watched hawkishly till it's turned off. You wouldn't abandon an electric chainsaw, would you? Feedback like the words I never slur, the continuity and passage of time of which I'm never aware, or try so hard not to be. I can't even wear a watch, fer Chrissake, with out it

taking me over, sending out tendrils of time into my brain. Tears of Time. Feedback victimized my guitar. Made my guitar shriek, scream, whistle for help or merely a cab. Sitting on a window ledge radiator, just me and my guitar, like a hip young realtor, playing through a box of hair. Studying bluesuedeology. Just pissing my guitar, why? One summer I decided I'd summon the Devil, if only for advice on playing the guitar better and to best him in philosophical argument. So in the presence of a black cat I sez the Lloyd's of London Prayer backwards, then soul-kissed the cat under it's tail like a hashoil-stuffed bong--and I hate cats! Ptooey!--but when this didn't summon Old Black Joe so I fling the cat against the wall to quiet it, creating a terrible mess of blood, shit and piss everywhere. What'll I tell Mom when she gets home? Can I blame it on my brother? That’s the kind of thing he might do. She'll tell me to turn down the record player, that's for sure, or make an unkind comment about my haircut.

"His behavior was no better than his guitar" some smalltown newspaper would sniff someday. Who knows, maybe someday I'll get these guitars out of my room. Actually play with other guys. See the opportunity.

Despite almost showing up for class once, Tippy got a "Z" on his final. He got the devil's grades. Not like he was a retard, never said no duhhh or anything. Took a job aptitude test and it came out with his choices of career as Regicide or Fraud. Saint Simon Stylites must've been that Chinese student who lived in the church attic for three years because he'd gotten bad grades. Bad study habits.

The University was celebrating some anniversary, decided it sounded

cool to call the place The Grand Complexity. Tippy set a pyramid on campus afire two days before the Homelycoming event it was built to celebrate. A pyro-midge amidst the fiery foliage.

He was growing impatient. Muscular boredom. He figured Hell, I'll be home soon enough. The Debbie People made him long to committ Debbiecide. Like a zit-covered Haloween mask, oh, the emptiness, the emptiness. Hygenic he-virgins, sporting their golem haircuts; those college children didn't agree with Tippy. Suburban kids just waiting for their parents to die. This cruel college full of owls in straightjackets. Kids eighteen and twenty taunting him "You were born premature". Someone tried to poison him by taking his margerine out ofthe refrigerator till it was rancid before putting it back.

Voodoo bottles of piss left in doorways. He wanted to take a gun to the snackbar and edit his friends. Sometimes wished he'd gone to that other big University in Michigan, the one called High School State.

But God, college hurt Tippy, and I don't think he could be deceived into taking it any longer. College was cruel as a showered girl in a towel who runs wet down the tile dormitory hall and trips before the onlookers. His heart was like a bone fan then, hardened till brittle and hairline-fractured. He was but a teenage mummy, sick to the skin of those stupid job eaters he went to school with, student aliens answering questions from their seats with a buttful of tar.

There had been cases of persons successfully resisting college's four years like other soldiers would resist torture and brainwashing. Remaining kind of kindergarten hearted. A diploma sheepskin worth less than a quality sheepskin condom or sheepskin

auto or truck seatcovers. Boredom in college is as ubiquitous as kids urinating in public swimming pools--if you can't stand it you don't go there. Student phobias. The underdepressed. The thud of indecision. The curriculum a ridiculum. Ugly unkind tension dogs.

We'd had an ugly education. Family sucked but college was even more of a drag. The college authorities would put nitrates and lime from the heating plant's basement walls in my soup and cereal, force me to stand in the rain or smoke of fraternity-house backyard barbecues. I found a large collie on my favorite bleachers at the homecoming football game with his throat slit. Moonstruck campus cops patrolled in squad cars, ready to read us the riot act.

One night after doing some homework he had a nightmare where he saw himself doing without love and much sex for four long years and promptly dropped out of school the next morning. He had been in college for all of forty-five minutes when he quit. Though he'd ridden motorcycles on the upper floors of the coed dorm (killing an unfrocked priest who worked as janitor), ran with engineering students when they forced fellow students to drink a substance that'd ionize 'em like a battery, officially Tippy said he was expelled for not paying attention. Guys without school, they don't know how to think, but you gotta pay 'em. When life is this intense, observation so acute and big eyes recording every moment in quintillions of galaxies of sensation, like radiotelescope deep-dish Arecibo, then a single damn year of college is enough.

Tippy came home from college straight to his parent's mobile home and burnt all his toys, college having taught him they were no longer valid, Lesson One. College was just a weakened weekend in his life.

We did the Drop Out. Tippy did not become a doctor to help the poor people of the world, to clothe the hungry.

Tippy was soon almost the same as before he went to college.

God was tired of Adam macking and thwacking, gruntily fucking all those animals in the Garden, so he built him Eve. Or so said the black preacher on Motorsburgh radio, with that big-voiced pianohugging bosomy daughter, who somehow sounds comfortably chubby and cushionesque to me.

My brother Thump—uh, Roland—and I lived with our Mom on a street called Rucksack Drive near the Trail of Tears, the Last Indian's End of the Trail. Still it was always Roque and Roland; since Thump was the second child, they let him drop on his head, while I was always swathed n' cuddled for my precocious mind. There was constant parental yelling at the Bustemup Brown, versus "Don't you dare damage" the hothouse flowerboy. Sigh.

My brother Thump is younger but burlier, conceived in McCarthyite brutality, probably while Father Cough-in-a-Carload thundered, or brassy big-band jazz bloviated, from a bedside radio turned all the way up. We were just greasers, born concealers, from Stigmatawood Drive on Aleppo's underwest drive-by sub-subdivision.

White monsters, true ashen brothers, subdivision bison. Despite the difference in ages, gradeschool teachers liked to call Thump my evil twin, brutal and brusque as I am refined and attentive. After all, Judas was gentle Jesus' Siamese twin, joined at the hippie. Or, just like Jesus' own wicked and agressive brother, Genghis Christ, or the little bear's tough sibling Vinnie the Pooh, everyone's got a tougher

brother.

How tough was he? hollers a voice from the audience, a claque or cacique. Well, he...never mind. Oh, that was you? Sounded like a man’s voice.

In third grade a chair was pulled out from under Thump and he fatally bodyslammed that boy right then and there. But it was the end of the school year, and the child was one of twins, so the teacher didn’t notice it, or didn’t bother to report it. Lucky break for him.

Aleppo birthed so many twins because of second copies of books in the University library nearby exerting their influence. Because the parents' IQs were twice as high as normal, they were granted twice as many degrees. Or it may have been some sort of military contract experiment in the '50's (twinning being the only tangible effect of LSD on mothers’ chromosomes?), just as Red China retaliated decades later by having Only Children, motherfucking little Maobeanies, practically Macabees. Still, who were the most psychedelic of all Aleppo twins?

Thump’s big-brush attention like a push broom full of tar. With our intellects intact, we were seriously considering the counterclockwise wisdom of crime, figuring we could have a secure career as supervillians in the comics. One kid at school, only child too smart for his own good, made it look like he had brothers and sisters by setting up a trick done with mirrors. Proving my point that every only child is a master illusionist. Here my brother's even in the damn band, and I'm still a lonely might-as-well-be only child.

But I digress.

My brother goes by the nickname Thump but we're really Roque and Roland Ashmolean. The American Ashcan brothers. On our birth certificates it almost said Romulus and Remus, named after some of the first werewolves in Rome who'd run around with his brother biting wolfbitch titties, for until the USA won World War II, With its Mussolini muscles, Rome was the world's coolest empire. All hail Ceasar Romero! Shakespeare’s villainous Joker, Romeo has its Roman softness, limpid and self-effacing, lanquid like a ripe pair of eyes, that the girls liked, like a Rock star (it goes without saying).

Consider the diaphanous Raving Aura. Guys like us need to be paired with an appealing female Rosie, Roz or Roxy. My beardless face smooth as a baby's bottom, which it kinda looked like too. Tippy told everybody I had a sister, but maybe it was just me wearing clothes so fashionable they look feminine. Or in a tapdancing Christmas concert of near-kindergarteners at the Veterans’ Hospital, where mothers lipstick’d their boychildren for the stage; I'm a man, but I'm a short man, and I can kiss too. You can try to beat the feminine side of my personality out of me, but what about the part that'd make me pay big money for a rare pictorial magazine of Marilyn Monroe nude with the Kennedy Brothers on a beach.

Some girls (or Mom’s tittering friends) said the resemblance between my brother and me was like between two bunk beds.

Thump was virtually a six-foot baby, head the size of a duffel bag, hands like watermelons, body like the underground tank beneath the pavement of a gas station. Bison head, horned like the devil, big baluchatherium bull neck and Baudelairean forhead brainpan bulk.

Thump's face a snarl bowl, a scowling glass of brackish water. Cleft

palate that he could still jam a cigar or drumstick into. Cleft chin like a negative-number Hitler moustache, mine more like a slippery Chomps Trio villain. Occasional traces of an Uncle Sam the Sham goat ghoti goatee. Thump had a pug nose and mean Injun stare, relishing the henchman role. Pontiac-grille wide-nostrilled mulatto nose like on Greek philosopher-masks. Eyes of distrust. Killing a cherub. Dry cudchewing mouth. Cottonmouth snake fangs bit into the white pumpkin he called his face.

His hangman's haircut like a black hood of hair, parted like the KKK's. He used a hubcap or blade of a switchblade to comb his hair.

Runs his knife thru his hair to butter bread, towards a pornocratic pomade. When my brother was going through his greaser phase, to style his hair he'd just cut a vein and shake on some blood for that high cholesterol sheen. The hair on Thump's chest swirled in the pattern of flames of an arson fire in a warehouse. Fire Sale!

Top to bottom Thump was a big-and-huge guy. A greaserbarrel. This big bull Elvis, bullsquid psychodaddy. An a priori Maori. Body a leather bath. His gut a bunker, Hitler's bunker with the feuhrer within, swimming in beer. Cloven hoof in his engineer boot.

The public, that is to say the publicity, later picked up on his cryptic libidinousness. Looked like he was educated in a bus stop. Being tough, he'd smoke iron cigarettes, not tobacco exactly but shredded rusty nails. Beatle-breath. We were the school's two best-dressed secrets, except for Thump. Thump got a bulky graphite-covered jacket with eraser sleeves, plastic thermal football shirts made out of grease. Wore steel shirts over his greaserweight. Later, suits like auto seatcovers. Kind of boots called Beetcrushers, that stain the

sidewalk an impressive dark red. Beatlecrushers, from England's shipbuilding docks. Soul of Crown Neolite.

Built like a Child Molester Class battleship, Thump erased the line between slaughter and laughter. For Thump, every bite of salad or vegetable was carnivorous, bloodied by his bad teeh, suppurating and suffering, hemorrhaging and inflaming his already bad mood.

Thump could feed a family of four with the food stuck in his teeth, but he'd be just as likely to eat that family if he detected them rummaging, scavenging there. Dined on neighborhood cats, dogs, budgies and cockatoos right from the cage. Someone called him thanato-burly, the kind of physique that robustly threatens another's death. The night burned in his Godzilla eyes.

An embittered virgin at unlucky age thirteen, Thump had a nightmare of a long-dead soldier, like a big melted plastic army men, but shimmery, chrome—our father?—appearing to him, saying a small penis simply ran in our family, a genetic trait, and there was nothing we could do about that. Disturbed, there followed the string of events that put him into reform school, juvvy hall, hospital wards for the criminally insane. And let’s not talk about all that.

Thump had taken Boys' Labor in the high school's dogleg D-fordogleg wing, actually a quonset hut adjoining the main building. And a grade of D was what most of its denizens received on greasestained report cards. It was linked with a hasty cold corridor as if part of the city zoned separately for industrial degradation and lower-class louts. Directly outside the door, it reeked of cigarettes. Thump acquired some military-grade electronics, hydraulics, welding and gas engine skills in the few classes he actually attended. Thump boasted

he could hot-wire an abortion device out of some car, lawnmower and shotgun parts to spare Coral the trip downtown. A real guy.

My mother bought us one of those radios that parents liked, that cut off the signal if anyone raised their voice, or became emotional. Mom bathed big bro Thump and me with a baby shampoo for boys called Bring On Tears, in a military-style camouflage battle.

Thump and I made an 8 millimeter movie out in the country called "Hitler's Farmer", but we asked mom to play the farmer's daughter who kills the werewolf at the end. Years later the German model Neuda was delighted with it, had the underground film professor at the University film her cavorting with Tippy under moonlight in the same field, love scenes where we had violence. It figures.

Thump and I were the Dan and Grant Jaroslaws of Rock, pimply Slav greaseteens who'd hoaxed the Motorsburgh press, public and science establishment with pie-plate UFO blurphotos. I guess we hoodwink the public with seriously blurred Rock music.

If my brother and/or I would become too obstreperous, my mother would threaten to send us to St. Liam Priam Academy or St. Priapus of Aleppo Catholic School, to be educated and disciplined by the bison of the Church.

In those days Engineering students were fascinated by fecathermal power-generating plants in the west, where refined oxymeshuggenehmethane is produced from bison patties, buffalo chips gathered on the plains. Momentarily hoping it would win him a scholarship there, Thump crafted a child-sized electric chair, attempting an execution of a neighbor kid with current generated by

burning dog turds collected from yards on the entire block.

Thump considered Engineering, but in his single quarter-of-asemester was expelled for pushing students into hydroelectric turbines, under auto company stamping presses on a field trip to Motorsburgh, several poisonings and accidently-on-purpose electrocutions, and the unfortunate drowning of two Naval Engineering seniors.

A pity, for on graduation his income could have helped Mom. Thump admitted he always read Joy Road north of town as "Joy Ride", an inducement to steal a car. "Jew Bride?" I asked, which sounds like a seventeenth century Remleybrandt painting in the University art museum, Dutch masters as a cigar.

Despite Thump’s bulk, my erratic little brother’s head is not right since his helmet-less motorcycle accident at age 17 on a hardscrabble dirt track way out in the country off the burdensome beaten path. He was drooling and dumbfounded until his beefsteak mean streak took control. Riding the future, rotting the future, Thump's teenage motocross accident happened when he and other boy were playing Devil-in-the-Meadows on screaming little Japanese dirtibikes. He claimed he was avoiding running them all over when he swerved into that graffiti-becked (our classmates' names!) railroad bridge. And maybe Mom never should've let him have that huge truck-engined Moehowardly chopper, compression like a Motorsburgh stamping mill, his tiny feet barely reaching the foot pegs, immature legs barely able to wrap around the massively chromed motorcycle without getting burnt. But Mom, in single mother's doubt and guilt, always indulged us, her boys.

Those other children of Eve (and, we'd assume, Adam) who somehow never managed to be washed after birth, remained read and dark and sticky and foul-smelling; ancestors of Bigfoot, Momo Monster, Manitou, Werewolf Boy, etc. Well, Thumpie is like them too.

Despite his accident-induced befuddlement, until we had roadies in our (or the record company’s) employ, Thump piloted our van, a fierce Caribbean pirate. Note how cars and freeways evolved for each other, in the Motorsburghicene epoch, and drivers like him the roadreptiles snuffling around to fill some evolutionary niche.

If Tippy is like my big brother, teaching me all those older-kid or groanup secrets, Thump's responsible side was to make sure there was always enough toilet paper in the house. He didn't want to hear any girls crying for help, but most of all didn't want me forced to smear my feces on the bathroom wall to clean myself if after a particularly humongous pork-and-beans burrito-dump. He was enough of an animal to not tolerate such a challenging marking of turf by scent and scat. I don't blame him.

Rusting construction equipment was beached all over his old sandbox in the backyard. Thump had lived in an oil-filled trash can made out of an old utility power pole transformer or under junked cars for several winters anyway. When our parents saw his hands at the dinner table he earned his boyhood nickname Ucky McUcky. He was nicknamed "Rug" when he worked for some furniture movers. Thump was baptized in gasoline, or the dark sludge drips in the oil drip pan following an oil change on Mom’s big Buick. Thump worked professionally as a greaser, appearing in an industrial documentary called "The Grease" for Underhood Motors and briefly worked as

mechanic at car dealer Bottle Valley Ford, which the cool kids used to call Beatle Valley. Momo Monster Motors. Even I had almost worked as a sales-slime for the bottomweight auto dealership Mouseor-Man Motors, for this was Michigan and cars get you sooner or later. Guys like Thump could change a car's tire while it was moving at 60 mph on a rainy night, steal its hubcaps with their teeth. Once in anger Thump tore the bumper off of my Volkswagen. Carburetor carousers. But when you got Thump's attention, the truck scales fell from his eyes.

My brother got just as fat as I did but he didn't give a shit. He just kept buying bigger trucks when he'd outgrow one, with progressively smaller steering wheels. For a while he drove around in a truck called a Dodge Superego. That year Fuct marketed one big ride, the Set o' Wheels, with tinted windshields that made everyone in the car look like Negroes, a terrific success in those days of the Motorsburgeois Sound. We'd read about notable people's favorite old cars—cars were often interviewed in the Michigan papers in those days—and go out and vandalize them until undriveable. “A car's in tune when the motor's running.” said jug-porch wisdom. On Sundays Thump drove a big old car that sounded like a laundromat.

One of Thump's cars had family of racoons living in his brakes, maybe the old Ford Fido. He had stereo speakers made out of skulls for it but they weren't hooked up yet.

He used to make these hotrods that'd run on salad oil, paint thinner, rubber cement or Mom's oven cleaner. A car that runs on meat, unleaded hamburger patties for the economy model and highcholesteroctane beefsteaks for the T-Bone luxury sedan. Cars that

ran on gupowder, on grease mixed with birdshot, or simply smelled like gunpowder smoke from a cap gun that just went off. He once tried to run a small gas engine on a cup of effluvia from the nearby Sludge Pond. Cars that burned marijuana or ran on beer, he worked on a car till he'd turned it into something illegal. Put it back together as a rocket launcher or a tank. Thump working on all sorts of feral ambulances for us to cruise for burgers in and épater—that's French for "to egg"—the burgomeisters from. Thump sent away to Chicago for an invention for the car that makes a black oily foul fart of black smoke from the tailpipe with a push of a dashboard button, for when some pompous pud honks his horn at you from behind. Thump had this one car he had assembled that was a cross between a Pinto and a TV picture tube, so it'd implode upon impact. Fixed his car muffler so it sounded like a Sten gun or Uzi. Man, that’s Israeli! Everything Thump touched turned to grease, and the wealth of Michigan, the auto industry, was founded and perpetuated by fingerfucking garage engineers like that.

Grand glass-enclosed atrium engines. Third eye attached to his brake lights. Crow-quill custom car aerials and amplifiers with gills. Thank-you notes rarely got written on his truck stationery. He'd won some money at Mulatto Speedway where he wrestled two rail dragsters into wheezing submission. Thump had menacing-looking pliers for gene splicing. Cables for hooking up a 10-volt girl to recharge a weak car battery. Working on a truck with bedsprings for the engine, motel room where the engine should be. Girls said his bed was like dolomite. Thump's aftershave was Burnt Tire Iron. Got beyond first brake with those girls. Snapped women's thong

swimsuits, cutting through them like a piano wire thru cheese.

Thump doing auto bodywork, sexually filling fender dents with Bondo and Discipline. Thump had a Harley Heliogabalus 1000, this motorcycle in the shape of a bull in whose sidecar he'd roast girls alive to hear them scream. With parts stolen years before from highschool classes like Advanced Varsity Auto Shop and Small Jet Engines Thump tried to build a V2 rocket ship to escape his lowly existence, or at least angrily aim it where it'd do some good.

OK, I’ve told you all the nice parts. Hang on to your tampon string, for here’s some not-so-perfect aspects of my brother.

Roland Ashmolean earned his nickname Thump. If Dink "was" drink, Thump "was" violence. Y'know, never quite the same after that teenage Motocross accident where he bashed his helmetless skull.

Went from cheer and ambition to a sullen fatso. Patterned his life after the cruel villain Blowzio in the Cysteye Sailor cartoons he'd watch all day. There's always the trap of television, primed and baited. Into-violence people are also into littering, hence, the yard.

While I had effete whiteboy's tennis elbow, Thump could push his finger through a door, crush golfballs, and would, too. Thump was obeying the brute rules. The lower, the cop chakras. Cut with an eccentric flint. Carried a meanacing folding pimpsaw. Gratuitous dumb industrial violence. A killer among bees, a portrait in felt.

Spider violence. Cross between a tiger and an ape. A winning cannibalism. Didn't know the difference between the trunks and the trees. Didn't want to be an eager Igor. What to do until the mob arrives. Would smash tennis balls and badminton birdies so high into the air they'd fly out of sight and gone. He used to like to say he was

descended from a nail salesman in Biblical times. Said the furry dice hanging, beside that unfortunate Jivaro shrunken head, from the rearview mirror of his van were a bit moldy but nevertheless the ones they'd gambled for Christ's sweatshirt and sweatpants with.

Comments like that were what made even enlightened anti-war liberal clerics in Aleppo denounce the youth of today and their music.

On a standardized test Thump put down "torturer" for desired occupation, but the Aleppo Police Department didn't even have one anymore. The cops strongly recommended in a friendly way that one of us put rolls of plastic over the windows of the old folk's home that our grenade launchers blew out, and the unpleasant task fell to me.

Highschool Guidance Counselors reported Thump had secret powers and could kill a man, or rape a woman, merely by looking at 'em.

One kid's last words were to mistakenly call him "Scraper". My brother was a grave and responsible guy, who would grieve and grow sullen for a week when he'd accidentally kill one of his highschool Auto Shop teachers with an acetylene torch or exploding small gas engine. But what others mistook for mourning may have just been him fearing for the safety of his car in the parking lot. He would never live to sell insurance.

On the playground Thump carried a

butterballknife for slicing fat kids. He carried a switchblade so sharp it could cut a letter as it floated down a river. Slicing big military cymbals. Thump had a sawed-off bowie knife, evidence he'd gotten off the body of a Texas Ranger, that he'd wave around when hoppedup on a Mexican marijauana that's stronger than ours. Thump had a razor but only used it to scratch where it itches. Some kid would sell us scalped tickets or insurance and we'd have to chase roaring

Thump thru every car on a Twilightzone Limited train. Fighting is the best fun in the world but his was a grim sullen pleasure, with the efficacy of genocide. When I offered him a Narvik shield and an Iron Cross Second Class Thump was disinterested, made it clear he had no use for Nazi regalia, felt no need to historicize his contemporary destructive power.

Thump read tales of dynamite soldiers in Vietnam, so wanted his own license to kill. It’s because of so many years of grueling military service that he’s so damaged and brutal, y’know. That’s not true, but that’s what we tell people. In junior high or high school, Thump threw an official Boy Scout hatchet at Mr. Prudentman's suspenders, which got him suspended. For impudence.

He was the top suspect when the School Administrative Paperwork Building, housing our permanent records, burst into flame though I didn’t spot him in the crowd of kids dancing around it. As well as when the Fuct Roundolium in Motorsburgh burned down, as both ignited from flaming arrows. Just like an Alepporigine.

Crossbow bolts were found on his person.

Someone who didn't like the cafeteria food called our lunch lady M omma "a crone mumbling in a dungeon lighted by a handful of burning hair," so Thump pounded him, sliced him open with his own plastic ruler and protractor, impaled his nose and ear with two of the rings from his fat 3-ring binder, the pages of handouts and notes on lined paper flopping over his face, soaking up his blood, obscuring his remaining vision as he staggered down the hall. Every mother is a Lunch Lady, every school lunch lady is a mother, or a lucky in loco parentis surrogate. So don’t mess with ‘em.

Thump, one tough concussionbison in a brawl or bar fight.

Cops left smashed under taillights. He appeared before Judge Troll, merely smiled through a mouth of beating-broken teeth. Thump and another bruiser were convicted of fighting in a churchyard. A hundred years ago, town fathers would have branded his face, split his nose or cut off an ear, but now Judge Elderberry merely gave the two antagonists a stern tut-tut talking to. And, of course, confiscated any dope pipes on their persons for his office curio-shelf collection, his cannibis cabinet of curiosities.

A girl had playfully called Thump "Cookie" so he crumbled her.

All this violence against women is Thump's fantasy of conquering our Mom. Thump had a job for a while repairing and repainting houses for a campus slumlord, but because the man had a pretty daughter, it had to turn out badly. "Putty knife? Oh, man, I thought you said Pussy Knife."

I don’t even want to know why Thump cruelly called that one girl Toothtoilet, unless he was simply exercising his misogyny muscle.

He threatened Mom, imposed discipline and pecking order here.

And he never washed his hands over the decades I’ve known and lived with him.

Thump immediately took up little Brigantia, for wasn't her classical forbearer the patron goddess of brigands? Sad how Thump broke that girl, like a hippie broken on Sheriff Harvester's wheel. Her early death from her injuries was unfortunate, but nobody exactly proved he—or the horrible accident—was responsible, and her weepy parents were too bereaved to investigate or meekly protest,

soon moved out of town.

Sure Thump drank, fucked or even farted like the rest of us, but mostly he used his fists. He called girls the Wet Drum. Grinned he would be playing hard tonight. Roadies had to remove their corpses, dumpster their half-dead battered bodies, bleach the bloody sink and feed sawn parts to the junkyard dogs or car-crunchers. Or succor and salve bruises, under Thump's command, the next morning.

Thump, that angry violent motherfucker, wanted to throw acid in an uncooperative girls' face. Tippy said OK, but only a few small symbolic tabs of snips of blotter paper LSD, which bounced harmlessly off her cheek and forehead, not even popping a pimple.

Thump felt vindicated, the girl relieved, soon rethought (fickle little thing) her recalcitrance. Two days later I ran into her coming out of the shower in the Firehouse, cheery and lightly psychedelic. Happy resolution all around.

So that’s the kind of background that makes a great, great drummer.

Like a chest-pounding Aleppo Yippie Yanomamo, Thump thought his skin was parchment so covered it with tattoos and, noticing how it got taut when he was lifting weights, took up the drums. What's more, we didn't have to perform a drummerectomy on any other band in order to get him installed. After a childhood of my brother hitting me in the stomach, no wonder he went on to the big bass drum. Briefly he may have been Fireman for a locomotive, roughly the same position the drummer holds in a Rockin' band.

Yeah, drums would be the best strategy for this iron ape. My brudder

wouldn't deign to use the gear some bands would, supermarket drums with vinyl cymbals. Why, Thump had a couple of those sets impaled on the radio aerial antennae of his truck. Thump spent a lot of time at Plansky's junkyard, picking up metal pieces too dangerously sharp and too poisonously corroded for anybody else to handle. This material he'd previously turn into cars, and now musical instruments. Drumming with tire irons. Like a wild doctor hunting outdoors, once he tried drumming with two lit butane torches.

Blowtorch drumsticks to light his cigar, highway flares as cigars.

Crosscut round sawmill blades as cymbals, pummeling drums that originally held caustic solvents or were boilers. Parts holding his drums together were ships' hardware salvaged from Winter wrecks in the depths of the Great Lakes, some accident-trashed motorcycle parts. Treestump tomtoms. Brown blacksmiths' aprons were stretched for heads, they smelled to high heaven of the tannery, there was black axle grease all over, globs of it flying as he drummed.

Thump was pounding the "critic skins" stretched hard as a human head. Drumbeats like a cup of shibboleths spilling across the practice room. Drumsticks going round like a brace in a bit. A beat like pieces of lead dropped into a tomb to smash the corpse's face.

At his most sensitive a sort of skipping driveway-chip drumming.

Thump would grab a pound bag of ground coffee and chew it up if he needed to stay awake to keep a vibrant beat with his boot on the high-hat and bass pedals in motion. That got expensive so we didn't play many fast songs. Why his teeth looked so scary when he'd grimace at girls. Tippy had bad teeth, but girls didn't seem to mind.

He would smile, and a flock of sparrows and finches would land, peck at the seeds stuck in his teeth.

Thump was pounding out a military 4-F beat on the new Uncle Toms, then worked out a drum solo stolen from the Gibbets. A drummer is like a rat in a trap. His drums across the Mohawkin’ Motorsburgh river. Drums that sounded like air escaping from a truck tire, like slashed tires and broken windshields during a labor dispute.

His beat sounded like hubcaps falling off, trees falling on parked vans, despondent Manhattan stenos falling out of skyscraper windows to rumple the hood of a parked car. Crashing down like a sledgehammer on a paper plate. Sullenly excusing himself with a look of hostile boredom when he got tired of drinking with Dink, this steel mountain of a man would sometimes go practice by banging on cars in the parking lot. No one would think to stop him. Rhythm and vandalism. Drumming like a steel bath, the Battle of Skagerak. Hard contest, buddy.

"To date, my career in crime has been petty" said Thump, or would have, if he talked like me. Rock n' Roll would change that.

Thump would come up with dim schemes like using a car, a late-model Motorsburg sedan, as a big battery to power a wah-wah or special effects pedal, which you couldn't even hear on the damn drums. I had practiced guitar so much my fingernails moved thru the flesh of my fingers to the bottom of my fingertips. What were formerly baby-bottom soft were now efficiently hardshelled clacking hermitcrabs. Thump offered to install steel fingernails for my guitar playing, said they'd really fly into the slipstream of the pickups, magnetic wind harmonics and all that. It was hard to convince him not to cut off his

own hands and replace 'em in his shop with prosthetic steel piledriver claws. But that's my brother, steadfast as a steel fart.

Thump broke into the University Hospital, maybe attacked nurses or the janitor with the keys, and entered the teaching morgue, stole long femur legbones to use as drumsticks, skulls to use like woodblocks or cowbells mounted on his drumset. He liked this so much he went to the Motorsburgh Suburban Jewish Graveyard in town of Shakespearewood, entered the ossuary of all the Jews killed by automaker Henry Fuct's resentful antisemitism in the 1920s (sparing only the University architect), and ransacked their bones to craft percussion instruments: clattering balafons, xylophones (skeletal plonkety percussion like in the black and white cartoons), guira and ratchety noisemakers, etc.

In his auto or machine metal shop he crafted me a guitar from an athlete's arm bones (popular Motorsburgh professional baseball player and a couple of smart Rabbis' book-stretched skulls as resonator. It didn't play very well, even electrified, but it looked cool, and I appreciated his concern for me, and the initiative he took.

Of course Thump was deaf, had been cleaning his ears with a large hunting knife when some haymarket anarchist bomb fell but that's OK because Rock is 99% a conceptual artform. Once he had a paintbrush sticking in his ear and someone hit it with a baseball bat, missed the eardrum but the handle broke off so he had to leave it there, and that's why he became a drummer. Every time Thump would drive it was like he would experience the birth trauma. Of course, traffic is so bad nowdays. After one of his worst accidents Thump pulled into a gas station called Pureboy Stomach Full Car Kill.

The name sounds like a town in upsnake New York. Slightly rattled and fucked up afterwards like the guy who wrote "Dead Meat Curve", who carries a card in his wallet that says "I am under pressure" signed by his Mom. With the insurance money he bought us all plenty of new instruments at a Police auction, and there picked up brass knuckles, sawed-off shotguns with switchblade bayonets and confiscated marijuana as well.

Imagine the band chiming in the town square, my brother and I the Gog and Magog striking the clock of Rock. Bloodstained Rock warhorses, you had a big drum and I had an guitar amplifier like a bear's skull with an owl hooting around inside. Thump sitting there like Karl Marx at the drums of history. Me and my brother, we're the gentile Loeb and Leopold of Rock. We were the flowers of the freeway. No crowded theatre can escape the cough of the drum.

Once Thump was feeling suicidal so went to a Church for Confession, counsel and consolation. The pale, milkwater, sheltered wimptoast of a Priest was nonplussed, too existential a crisis for his soft, smooth hands to handle, and only muttered “Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry”, worriedly. So an enraged Thump tore him from his seat in the Confessional booth, angrily sodomized him as well as several black-clad Mediterranean elderly widow parishioners, left him strangled, armless and legless, went back to get his huge Humongoose chopper motorcycle and rode it in donuts through the Church until all pews, statuary and altar were upset, knocked over, trodden, soiled, crumbled, decimated and destroyed. Grr! Waste of time, fucken Church.

Told us he didn’t even want to see no damn mannish-skirts

priest even at his execution. Like that ancient Hungarian general, when Thump died in the truck accident at the low bridge, his skin was tanned and stretched into a drumhead. Promptly bought or expropriated by Aldebbie's band, not my own, alas. Oh wait, I haven’t told you about that yet. And I don’t think that’s really how it happened anyway.

Makes me sad to remember him though.

Now, what have I told you about the imbiber Dink, a friend who hung out with us? Dink Dink Dink. It almost sounds like Drink.

Dink grew up and down, down the block, round the corner, on Betwixtwood. As a boy, Dink ballpoint-penn’d on his arm the pirate tattoo GOD BLESS RUM. He had answered the ads in the back of comic books WOW! REAL DRINKS! What Dink called High Drinking and Low Drinking, like the different kinds of Masses held at St. Catholic's Campus Liberal Chapel (where this choirboy stole some wine). Summer spiderwater dripping its webbing from his lips to the front of his shirt. Liquor like a horse's douche. A girl in his college Spanish class had told Dink that Ron meant rum, so he wanted to be my friend. Thought me a rum fellow right from the start.

Dink was a bumbler when drunk, but what a bumbler. He could do no wrong when pie-eyed. Dink was a drunken engineering student, for you can see systems, circuits better when you're potted. His car was worth a fifth of what he bought it for, and he often would've traded it for a fifth. Difficult as it was to carve out a drunkard identity in the '60's, Dink managed supreme dignity. As a boy Dink learned to read labels by

drinking a whiskey called See Spot Run, another called Old Dick Jane Sally. He must've been influenced by the kid's easy reading book The Sot in the Cot. A real winocrat, he'd apologize to food for not eating it. His lank shepherd's face a constant momento mori of a death walking someplace to happen. He had a booze jaw. Red checkmarks in his eyes, an eyeful of blood. Kind of a goofy visage, he had two eyes, upper and lower. Maybe that's because he's lying in the gutter. Hair like a fermented mushroom cap. Spoor spo-dee-o-dee, until we found an old plastic shower curtain to put on Dink’s bed.

But we put a bass guitar in his hands, and he lumberingly made history with it. Oak barrels filled with sound. Fermented, distilled and blended fine old notes.

I don't mean to be, as the old song has it, pickin' on the high school drunk. Dink the drinker would hang around the illicit speakeasy stills of Watery Dale cider mills, the backrooms where the apples fermented like all get out really cut loose and did their thing.

Dink wept the Ninety-Six Tears of Beer for two cents worth of spit upon his beerdrinking name. This guy collaged his beers together.

Energy of a certain debased kind like beer. Ow, too much beer, I banged my head on a loaf of bread. Practically pissing Milwaukee finality, that town's own river where—though it was wartime—they wouldn't raise the drawbridge to disturb a nesting department-store duck and her eggs. Inebriate sots are people whom the real world doesn't satisfy; probably happiest as students, but don't bet on it.

Our bibulous friend Dink, called that because he asked for strong drink even before he could say the word. He said I'm a fine

tankard of a man, a jolly rum fellow. Irish cannibals will call someone a broth of a boy, hoping to soup-bowl and eat him.

Born with draft beer for blood, Dink began drinking at the 7:30 a.m. of life. A drinking boy who drank the last beer, if only for ceremony. Drinking a bottle of cheapshot wine that he'd asked older college students to buy for him, in sunbaked thoughtfulness. Dink was a year older than Tippy and myself, and showed us the college clock tower as a place to take the liquid comfort of alcohol. When he'd drink himself into a stupor up there his pee would drip down the stairwell, counselors would look up at the tower nervously and remember they had phone calls to return. Pissing after plenty drinking said "Waterdown, wow!" Some say baby Dink first tasted beer at the breast. Behaving like an atomic nut. Dink's pee bubbles like the gleaming reflective multiple eyes of spiders. A boyhood drinking game where he'd take a drink every time he asked someone "Are you fermental?"

Dink and his liverboys. Sodden as a fraternity's informal rush.

If you were lonely and hated your parents, you drank. The place was packed. Dink’s bass rumbled beneath the crowd like a drunk falling down the front stairs. We heard it, filed away, yeah, we could use that.

Dink's was not a schoolbook, but an alcohol book, one of those joke library decanters with fake pages, leather covers. A bookbag full of children's 151 overproof rum, candy corn liquor, toddlers' lager.

Dink's face a dog's overbite. Hank of cornsilk hair, last used for moonshining corn likker.

For several years he was too young to be awake. Rubbed the liquor tree. Robbed his Saturday night date like a liquor store. He frequented a college hippy liquor store called Reality Liquors, and then took on the awesome responsibility of buying for underage teens too. For a while he worked sweeping himself off of the floor at a dirty bottle shop called Unclean Liquors. Dink was filling a hole in his soul with liquor, filling a hole in his fainting. Walking with whiskey-driven shoes. The Irish political demonology of incubi, succubi and incumbents. Monster in a Liquor Store. Hickory Dickory Liquors, with that flashing sign's damn mouse drunkenly falling off the clock.

Solipsistically drunk. Sensorially hostile. Somber when sober, disembodied when stone-cold. Lava Lite fluids sloshing together. I'll comb my hair so I don't feel so drunk. Dink drank because his father had used him for a University of the Midwest study on the effects of child abuse by studying too hard or something. The resulting fourpart series his father had ghostwritten for HUMANS, the national picture personality magazine published when parents tell tall tales.

Through a Media darkly. Already appearing in every supermarket, he kind of inched into the Beer-Wine-Liquor section, feeling he was owed support all his life for such dancing-bear exploitation. Blood fueds in Dink's family over the correct spelling "whisky" or "whiskey", cold silence between factions for several generations. They say Dink's father died at a testimonial dinner when his face fell in a cake, suffocated. He'd always said his father had invented a car for drunks that ran on blood alcohol, but that's just a twist on a typical Michigan brag. Dink said of life, "Hey, it's not all Four Roses", philosoddensophically. By drinking he put dusty cotton around life,

hotwater heater insulation. A stormsewer of feelings, which he expressed on properly sodden bass guitar.

Dink wasn't dumb, drinking his fill of Old Thunderstorm, Old Brainscan, Old Brainstorm, Old Brainstem. Dink cracked open a bottle of Old Peyote, a psychomezcal with a sparkling, multicolored shapeshifing worm glowering in the bottom of te bottle, shoplifted from Kegger's grocery. Dink drinking Old Pharaohs, grim priest-kings with long chin beards assembled on the label of the bottle, several dynasties worth. A smooth, dark whiskey from Georgia called James' Brown. Another called Old Jim Crow Law. For a while he was partial to Marmoset cognac, and a Canadian whiskey called Black Vulva that colored gentlemen favored. He'd mix the two into a Black Marmoset when so inclined. Dink said this bottle from Canada was bisonflavored whiskey, but can I believe that? Other kids have fathers who teach them about these things.

Dink's breakfast was what he called Alcohol-Seltzer, a dozen fizzy tablets in a tumbler full of gin, vodka or tequila. With this he sanded down the sharpest edges of hangover, was somewhat somber-sober enough to face the day. By about ten or eleven, Dink was drinking Old Fluorocarbon. Dink grew envious at the thought that my bloating, staggering and inexplicably beery breath might be ABS, that Auto-Brewery Syndrome or gut fermentation that turns a man's entire insides into beer.

Dink, because he came from old alcohol money—Canadian distillers—and his parents could afford it, he was brought a special children's newspaper, My Weekly Pilsener, in the classroom.

If I get smart when I drink one quart, do I get twice as smart when I drink two? If I make one memorable quote when I drink one, and so on. A fresh comment in pure creature rage needs a bar to get in, urgent. The point where you're drinking where you say "aha" because you no longer notice the whiskey's sharp taste. He had so damn many epiphanies, because drink makes you forget but worse, it makes you remember things you forgot. "Alcohol causes you to pause and reflect and notice things that you wouldn't before--like vistas in the reflections on a piece of glass on the front of...that diploma over there..." and you know I winced as he dissolved.

Drunkenness like a heavy chimp that lumbers and climbs up on your shoulders, tiring your neck. You think you can actually do anything, you think you can actually do something. Alcohol is the uncertainty factor, what Black churches call Saint Eshu the Trickster, patron of divergence from course, master of response-ability to chance, or instinct. Baron Someday. Remember, the voice of an old drunk singing out over a crowded bus is the closest thing our society has to oracles, for this voice is always the truth even when it's bullshit. An easy target for the dilation that alcohol brings. Drunks' timing is different, they're on hiccup time, their watches say different things, they can time travel. Musically, they make the very deep sounds of a vat. Sometimes I think Dink was just drunk on sympathy. I don't have a drinking problem, the problem is when I can't find more drink.

Three-martini lunches five times a day. He was sick of martinis before he'd even gotten a desk job.

OK, I understand that you and your friends don’t drink very much. Only a ladylike two drinks an evening, sure. But I need to

describe this important member of our band who did drink a lot, so bear with me, OK? Thanks.

Alcohol washes out all bummers. Why psychiatrists have the highest rate of alcoholism, all that impatience to tell the patient the punchline, why he's really so fucked up! Dink was drinking his way through the Canadian Zodiac. Opera vodka. Peering into and through vodka mirrors. Your shit on vodka becomes beluga caviar for the Politburo in Moscow, they divine it for state secrets. So drunk he forgot how to take a shower. A fluid philosophy, for three-fourths of our planet is covered with water. What to do with the drunken sailor, I muttered. Hey, we could get drunk for a million years.

Drunkenness, Dink says, is the opposite of darkness. What the hippies in San Francisco call "Seeing the Elephant" must have something to do with smoking bananas there, or distilling the peels into a groovy grappa. "This must be what the hippies see" he exclaimed of the paisley before his eyes. Dink, that's wine-linear thinking. As the commercial says, a Man of Substantial Grapes. A drunk-truck. Dink drinks like a forest fire. He once described life as the interval when you drink beer while you're waiting for the ice cube tray to freeze so you can drink whiskey.

Dink drank his way down the whale-hole. Dink claimed whales can live in liquor, but I'm not so sure that's true. Drink makes magic, says Dink, any existence too normal and Midwestern, happy, sane.

Drink makes gnomes. Drink makes life treacherous, where guys get run over by cars in the soul. Moral acoholism. Dink wanted his inebriation viewed as something liberal and mitigating between Revolutionary druggedness and Sheriff Harvester Bug Percheron's

halfnelson barkeep community. Discovered a string of boilermakers loosen things, if not ideas and the tongue at least as much as the bowels. Excitement and excrement. Bread and defoliation. It was a dark and stormy fart. Drunkenness as a wind, phuhhuhh... At a certain age he stopped screaming insults over the back fence to other kids You're a toilet! and silently changed it to Yeah, I am a toilet, flushing my brains out. Trying to shove the central cerebral ammunition down the toilet, shout the cerebro-belly American experience to the world. Or maybe that farting part’s me.

It's OK, said Dink as he entered the restroom, I'm just pissing my life away. About 5 or 6 a.m. horrible kidney pee dreams. I have to run into the bushes and fight a fire. Fight fire with fire. Like pee in the pod. Just pee'ers and not seers. To piss in the toilet would be an extravagance.

Dink's alcohol bone, his alcohol funny bone. His alcohol Dylan's Mister Jones, whatever generational thing that's supposed to mean. Carried on a Cointreau wheelbarrow. The beauty of spilled jug red wine running down a porch on a hot summer day, pounded into the dust at a free Sunday rock concert I wanna go to. Wine and icecream, wine making you want to be one with the icecream. Kneedeep in cheap port wine from a screw-top bottle. Wine turns the nervous eddys, the choppy wavelets of thought into a deep limpid pool. Wine gets to the bone of the brain. His burgandy brigandage.

Washed his dishes in wine. Heart was a boiler full of brandy. Tequila feelers. Vases full of vodka. Many nights in the doghouse with Don Pépé tequila.

An honor to break bourbon with Dink.

That guy would drink as his daily exercise, while I suppose my own competitive sport is banqueting. Everything worth doing— playing loud music, singing, writing postcards to friends, graffiti and painting hotrod monster pictures—is worth doing drunk. In fact, if you can't do it drunk—driving, mathematics, balancing a checkbook— chances are it's not much worth doing. Drinking (and reefer too, for that matter) makes you see morning differently. Civilization isn't everything, and alcoholism doesn't necessarily mean bad.

Dink would sometimes drink imported Santa Claus Vodka.

Nearly died once from poison whiskey. It was never far from his head to the bar. Sang "I remember things I think we said". Temper like throwing a bottle of wine thru a subway train window. The streets of liquor. A pint of fresh breath. The Blood Alcohol Preservation Act. A whiskey that sang on the label "Bottled anywhere in the world".

The alcohol state park, whose ranger staff was the sense of balance in his head. I don't know, Yogi, what if Mister Ranger should see us drunk?

Dink embraced alcohol like others embrace women. Talking ‘bout you, Tippy. People said of him and his girlfriends, "Of course she's beautiful, they only come together when they're drunk". I offered to ghostwrite this guy's autobiography and call it Up From Conciousness. Like Bo DeLayer, he had "GET DRUNK" tattoo'd someplace he wouldn't forget. Stylized Mister Kabuki Theater when he was that way. A whiskey-driven thing. Absolute blithering fool when he wanted to be, the significance of a drunk. Everything is uncontrollable. Went around claiming he was a lush from a planet where life is chemically based on booze, where they breathe alcohol.

Sipping metorite water and tango bangers. The Lion of Amaretto.

Claimed he drank for his face muscles, he couldn't smile without it.

Ointment for the inside of him.

Oh well, Europe drinks all the time therefore Europe is drunk too. Rhino wine, rhinitis wine that comes out of your nose when you laugh while drinking. Why does red wine dry you out? The next morning he was shrivelled up and puffy at the same time. A headache as big as your heart, a shitty feeling as big as all outdoors.

The first thing one of the astronauts did on his return was to get drunk. It may have done something to Dink's personality, drowned it like kittens in a well. He would've ridden a snowmobile onto the soundstages of hell to get a drink.

Dink said "Boy, I could drink a horse right now."

His yardstick for disciplined drinking was President Gerald Ford's "three martinis before dinner" which later in his administration became "Hey, if the wife can't handle it, tough luck". She shouldn't've tried in the first place to keep up with the big jock. Dink reminded us, after all, beery professors at the University composed the college fight song, discovered in the bottom of their pitchers the bubble chamber and the cyclotron, even conceptualized the laser from the way the red bathroom light looked through the sudsy lager. It's all there on the walls of the University rathskellar, You can raise your glass and look it up.

Dink's appeal that seemed so ethereal, bardic, angelic was actually the unfocused orality and boasting of the Celtic drunk. That which seemed so dark and disrespectful was probably the cranky barkings of the morning afters. Insatiable unfocused inspiration-and-

rage boilermaker. I'm going to change, as I would've had so much wine thirteen years ago, it's all the same. Spittin' whiskey. Alcohol as information. Sometimes an overload, a brown-out, a power surge.

Turbines clogged up, another swimming angel, fishing devil or transmigrating soul caught in them back at the hydroelectric, the hydroeccentric plant. This city must be run on hydrocephalic power because I'm sure big-headed when I turn on the light in the morning.

The current of kir. Clouds fulla beer. Socking back a few drinks is as psychedelic as anybody needs to get. Burp-expanding, making time Dali floppy-watch'd. Dink said that drink is relaxation in a bottle, or the urge to relax. But it wasn't particularly relaxing to always have to stop at package liquor stores, stock up on beer at convenience stores.

A Hell-bent destructive formlessness representing all police brutalities, all bank holidays, all rifling of antiwar activists’ offices and Peoples’ Puma Party bombings. Dink scoffed at sober science, "Polywater, that's just newfangled beer". Others feared it would take over all water on earth like they feared LSD in the water supply or the red dust that floated over from Africa upon the city of New Orleans.

He always expected to die in the bath. Samurai-drunk. Dink's drinking habits were set when he was young in the days he never got any hangovers. Now he felt that morning like a bag of gravel that had just fallen off a truck. As a bag of constant sleep, he never went z-zz, he was too proud for that. Perhaps he was weaned too early, a bottle baby. Dink may have not been weaned until well into grade school. He never got sick for germs fried in his sizzling liver. Old frymind. A fried egg with a nail stuck in it. Aww, he just wanted to make

love to Marilyn Monroe and an Oz-fresh Judy Garland. Dink can't puke on alcohol, he kaff-kaffed drunkenly in the dark and nausea gripped his stomach like a horrible sodomy rubber glove while only saliva floodgates opened and he came a glob of poor glittery silver oceanic spit. Dink drank a fifth of whiskey and felt OK. Then all of a sudden had all the hangovers he missed, all at once. His head spun like a rooster, quacked like a duck. Dink's hangover just like being sunburned inside, in each furrow of the brain. When your brain comes out your eyeballs. A sour rainbow. Tired of banging my head against the back of my face. Hey Slushmouth! The first kid on the block to drink cognac, and it was downhill from there. The zen discipline of keeping whiskey down. Dink the drunk was lucky. By the time I met him he was the morning-after man, nausea on wheels, a rattling headache in tennis shoes. The drinking standard. It was written in vomit. Only one time did I actually see him puke. Vomiting like a subway train running through the sewers of a giant smelly dog.

A couple flying saucers of sputum flew from his mouth, violating the vomiting laws. Spewed a vile plug several stories high and over the campus carillon tower. Vomit coming out of his eyesockets, defacing the walls of his head at the back of his eyeballs. Now, this guys brains are pretty fermented but you better believe he had brains enough to program and monitor the emptying of his gut. Threshers and steam combines were plowing the back forty of his guts. Trust me, it was very Michigan.

Dink puking his brains out in night club or auditorium toilets, so that by the first intermission the crowd could tell if the Chomps were on the bill tonight. "I'm suddenly drunken" he'd respectfully say upon

meeting you. Introduced to Tippy he raised his head from the bar, "Tipsy?" he asked, a bit interested. A member of the boozeoisie. He sincerely did like drinking, except alone, which he only did when necessary, like twenty-three hours a day. His life a grandfatherly Rum Tale. He had posters up in his room of the astronauts Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, Hiram Walker and Ezra Brooks. Some prime candidates for that valiant space program were even smuggled over the river from Ontario, Walkerville where they weave. We told him we wanted him to hang out with us and he dug it. A false conciousness and erotic oceanic feeling, the friendship of drink. You better pass that bottle to me. I saw something deeper in Dink's drunkenness, a pretty heavy spiritual aspect to it.

Dink asks nobody in particular, did Christ ever drink too much wine? He had his temptation in the Desert, well I sure ain't never found that bar. Christ's own drinking problem was that Our Lord so wanted to be Dionysus but he already existed and had first dibs, so Christ grudgingly started a new religion. Dionysian heights, Apollonian morning-afters. He chose Heaven, it didn't choose him.

Shitfaced, now there's a Christian concept, selfabasing Christlike humility of knowing (in the Biblical sense, practically) the Earth.

Easier to wash their feet when your head’s on the ground beside them. Something to be said for that. Bless me doctor for I am drunk—Hey, I'm all sin—this is my first lobotomy. The Lord's Sacred Whiskey in the Lord's Drinking Establishment. God is my drinking buddy. A sentimental attachment for Jerry, uh, Jesus. The French think he's a genius, too. Monks probably called wine "Christ's Pee".

That synod of Pernod. The Lord's Prayer over ice. Listen, Jesus was

a whiskey drinker and bought several rounds of call brands and doubles at the Last Supper. There were alcoholics in the earth in the olden days, giant alcoholics, emptying barrels like Cardiff Giants, philistine publicans keeping Goliath's tab. Dink, like Wotan, acquiring world domination by drinking. The alcoholic is a sieve you can pour your fate into. The alcoholic as a lamp, glowing with a little light o' love. Perhaps the yearning to be drunk is the main thing, putting the liquid into the body is just secondary. A baptismal font o' fun. Christ between drinking age and his thirty-three and a third revolution. It takes a special Christ to walk on wine. Christ was an alky, all that wine and faith, openness and humanity. Everybody became just a little bit God when drunk. Minor intoxication as vague as falling through stratospheric clouds. Alcoholic Bishophrics like damp moths on the map. Sipping Christ. The ballad of Christ and my eyeballs.

Dink's clunky old car and bass guitar case were littered with empty bottles of Old Methodist and Old Mendicant.

And John the Baptist was Christ's shaggy bass player, whose riffs at the beginning of the song announced His coming, on mule or sandalfoot, Dink served, in Tippy's case, to announce his coming in every sense of the word.

Dink's mom called, wanted him to go to church with her. A funeral? Wedding? Oh, it's Sunday.

I heard him tell her, "No, ma. Drink is God." I suspect she disagreed.

Actually, drink must be the opposite of prayer. Maybe Dink drank because he couldn't meditate, couldn't pray. But he could play.

Play bass.

Bass guitar, the low-sounding one, dear. That’s right.

Dink had an elegant bass guitar called a Bastardmaker, the song’s Baedeker like its cheaper foreign knockoff the Basketweaver, but his favorite was a lemon-yellow jazz Bartender. Of the manor born, he had more musical instruments, clothes and everything than we did. Oh, didn’t I tell you? Dink was the illegitimate son of Harry Fuct, Junior, so grew up in a posh house in Aleppo Ridge, the town's auto wealth district. It happened to send its children to Tippitina Junior High, where Tippy and I first met him.

Dink, who always had money at hand, bought a unicorn horn to drink from "like a viking", but it may have just been from a narwhal or even goat. The mermaids he ordered a couple times from an ad on the back of a comic book turned out to be a manatee or sometimes even a she-otter.

Dink, of course, called that flavor Butt-Scotch, like it was a whiskey best drunk from a girl's butt.

Dink brought a bottle of Old Negation, whose label wore a tearily sentimental engraving of a plantation house being burnt by Union troops, General Sherman or Sharpton guffawing. "They're the First Michigan Regiment," Dink beamed, proud of an ancestor who fiercely fought, killed, been taken prisoner, sickened and died in that war. A hillbilly kid beat up Dink when he found him drinking that, in his fancy sports car in the parking lot. The next day, Thump broke and removed all of the impertinent rube's fingers, toes and teeth.

Dink wanted the band to play a benefit for liberal politicians who ran on the platform Four More Years of the Full Bladder. In fact, Dink was the one who urge Tippy to pee from the lip of the stage

theatrically, after he himself did inadvertently.

I almost tripped over another of Dink's damn half-empty bottles of Old Testicles, left on the stairs.

Old This, Old That. Everything's old when it comes to whiskey brands. It all evokes Motorsburgh gangster-paid rumrunners in little boats to Canada, handlebar mustache saloons, southern gentlemen and Andy Jackson and Dan'l Webster, and the Whiskey Rebellion soon after the country's founding.

The whiskey drinker yearns at heart, despite the absurd honk regressive politics, to be a conservative (maybe the American history tradition is so racist, so antebellum, that only Canadian whiskey is marketed to Motorsburgh blacks). I think our Dink imbibes for a sense of history, maybe of a mythic auto-wealth blue-blood heredity, poise and peace. Drink so helps you perceive the moment, behold the moment, he whimpered.

Dink says "Drink makes me like things, like my life."

No throttle on the bottle as far as Dink's concerned, though he clutched its neck as if it was an unfaithful New Orleans mistress he was about to strangle. Thump came up with that comparison.

He was always showing up hangdog, feeling bad about having broken something expensive the night before. They call them "Apollogies" but they're usually required after a night of Dionysian debauch. Saints and early churchmen wrote apologia, is that the same? Didn’t think so.

"Bottle up the band" blurted Dink, before falling unconscious.

Tippy once speculated the guy was called Dink because he was worried about his dinky whiteboy penis size, so he drank. "But

don't say anything, it will only upset the dynamics, the delicate balance, of the band."

Duh! I mean, Are the Jesuits Jewish?

I was born in 1950 because it took father five years after the War to get it up. 1970 is the Wreck of the Old 97 times ten. The year bears some Nostradamic relationship to ninety-six tears in the social fabric, but don’t ask me how. I’m not Math.

I sometimes wonder if my unnatural birth wasn't that I almost turned 180 degrees to exit via the large intestine, for as a toddler a bully once memorably called me "a little shit" on the playground, and I guess I knew already that insult would be coming. Instead, ever the momma's boy of invention, I may have been trying to use the placenta previa as an inflatable life raft, or blown-up balloon, a Baron Munchausen Graf Zeppelin to float anywhere, out of the hospital and over the scenic University town. Instead, it Hindenburg Disaster'd Mom's body down there; good thing my older brother bison Thump had already been born.

I don't really remember my father, once there, then not there.

Said to be a stern sado-disciplinarian. More like microscopic planaria. Or water bear. Never knew my father, but when it comes down to it few American boys do.

My father died, seeking a war to match the intensity of domestic strife. Maybe I was fathered by the Kraut gunman who blew up JFK's brother's WWII airplane. Or conceived in a U2 spy plane over Russia, where he was tortured to death without giving up any family secrets. Our father supposedly served on the USS Needleships,

poking the Japanese at the great novel naval battle of Gulfstream.

Why I read military books like Hitler's Vietnam or memoirs of that SS squadron that, before either war, had all been trappers and poachers.

The graveyard near our boyhood home was build upon a paleolithic peat bog, so coffins often burped up and out of it. There was a lake that we used to say was inhabited by a monster, but it might have only been a grabby pervert camped there. Cars with lovers, mostly teenage, in them. My first conscious (birth don't count) glimpse of pussy was when one, there with a married businessman, stepped out to pee. She squatted, appropriately, on the grave of a nineteenth century farmer named Philander.

My mother was terrified of the night, the bush and the Negro bushmen lurking within, the land of ghosts and the dead, but she didn’t call it that. That was the part she liked least about our music.

That, plus the threat of sex and drugs, for she remembered how Sinatra drank and took his fill of actresses and an opera diva. She was fearful of the unknown, and how it might mis-educate her sons.

Mothers keep houses trim and neat; hide all discord from the street. I've heard scary tales of other kids' obsessoparents. Mom was convulsed with horror at being thought a bad mother if my hair was out of place. Tippy’s parents let his grow like a wild banshee, a bush or tree in the forest. He supposedly has parents in that mobile home he grew up in, but I've never met them. But mine, as a single mom of two boys, was frightened of being judged slovenly. I couldn't go out because it was a school night, or drive Up North to see friends’ bands play—for schoolteachers even—if a certified junkie was at the wheel.

Mother would dress things n' me up on the holiday—I forget what it's called—where all Heaven prays for those in Hell.

Christmas? We probably were supposed to too, but only giggled and clowned like boys do. Midwesterners all seem to have church affiliation. Mom enrolled me in Catholic catechism, but it didn't really stick. Still, I remain haunted by its baby, virginity, suffering saints and authority images.

If a mother is both dad and mom, both sides of the Oedipal Muscle Tussle Shoals Struggle is played out, the killing AND the fucking. Of course, there was an oft-told longstanding joke in this Vietnam War era about all the middle-aged mothers who offered pussy or oral satisfaction to pediatricians and local physicians for doctors' letters requesting draft deferments for beloved sons, lights burning in homey little offices, or unpper-stories walkups downtown, as clandestine conferences took place. I'm smart enough not to be sent to the Vietnam War. But sometimes Mom gets me so mad— henpecked boychik—that of course I wish I could go rape and murder with the rest of the guys. Instead I wear imitating jackets and regalia as a protest. OK, a mild one. Boo to you, Mom, all moms, dames!

Mama Babel, that tower of meaningless clutter she builds in telling me what to do. I've always been into lists, like the list of the things Mother Should Have Made Father Do, or my own guilty lists of daily should-be-done activities.

I may even list rock bands before

our interview is done, yessiree dear lady.

Not having found peace in her brief, eventless, loveless marriage, stormclouds of menopause raged in my mother's head for twenty or thirty years. I guess I developed this yen for loud atonal

music because I never saw her relaxed. Mom would listen to my records and, if she thought the songs too romantic and stirring for a young boy, would scratch out the grooves with a nail. Would put rubberized duct tape over decolleté of the cocktail-dress crooners on the covers. Back in those days your mother would hear your high school fight song and ask if it was about drugs. She'd burn my comics if she thought Flying Strongwoman looked too busty or Wartman's tights were too expansively tight. Trying her best to shield me from the horror of sexuality, keep me a freshfaced little boy delighted by Halloween cabbage or Christmas morning. I'm bringing a vanfull of baggage, Martial Megaron amplifiers of guilt to be wrestled and whacked into life on the concert stages of love. Mom would've had me castrated if it was legal and conformist, probably mouthing the rationale "This'll save you a lot of trouble in later life."

Terror of returning to find that juvenile deliquescent vandals wrecked our home, allegedly for fun, every time she left it. Squakking mother was half bluejay, shrill and never shutting up. A family so fastidious they never made garbage. Pain dripping from a family station wagon. There are no pigs in Michigan, mother wouldn't allow them. My mom's the kind that would wash eggshells to reuse 'em.

She dreamed of a white elephant sale during her pregnancy, and when she awoke her unborn children were already marked down.

Mother offered, nay, vowed to scrub floors so we could go to college, so we let her scrub ours, the bathroom tile and to clean up our rooms.

Mom is baking things in her kitchen in my belly.

Why am I so family-fried, so family-fucked? I get sad thinking about the flames consuming Mom, so I hide in strumming a rigid

chord progression till the feeling not exactly passes but dissolves, dissipates, diffuses, diffucks in the music. Family sick.

Tippy interjects here, notes: Roque and Thump's father died— or left on a secret mission for the Korean or brand-new Vietnam War—just as they were feeling their first pangs of puberty, so was not present when they had functioning, flowering dicks and the compulsion for self-definition the organ inevitably brings, its glandular chemicals entail. Musical equipment, both amplified and percussive, proved a suitable outlet. So there.

Thanks, bro. Have to remind myself, Papa didn't leave because of me, perceived rival to Mom's affections, number one apple (or sty) of her eye. Maybe my brother a guy in her eye too. His propensity to violence a threat to the old Prussian's own? The family fog. Worthy of further study.

As a boy, kids made fun of the name Ashmolean, called me Ash-hole. Roque Ashmolean, risqué all-American. Early on, I really thought about what kind of name I would want to appear under on a stage. For a long time I thought of playing with the stage name "Roger" sounding like an airman's cockpit code, almost like "Rogue".

Could be Ron, like Ron Bacardi, the cool Latinate distiller. Ross would have that fascistic'ly bad "SS" steel-of-reference. I could say my last name was Aspirin, like the drug. Or Roland Ax, the Ax part really Axolotl.

Kids on the playground or parking lot rarely came right out with it and said I looked like an axolotl, but I knew that’s what they thought. My face is well-lit, clean, prison guard good looks. Lips

pursed like a rubber stopper, a rubber stamp, a clamp. Born with a cleft palate, it matured into a handsome cleft chin. A trust mask. A Medusa look. Pug nose, hard Adam's apple on neck-stalk, colorless redlidded eyes, pulled-back lips, exposed teeth on gums. Leering like the skullish Joker Man Who Laughs in London After Midnight.

Worried what my nose will be when I'm old.

I resented my boyhood nickname "Forehead." Perhaps a generation ago it would have been "Four Eyes" for my eyeglasses.

True, there are distinguished French poets, their fave American mustached Poe, and other smarties with prominent domes. My shining Daniel Webster forehead. Whenever they went to show rage come to earth in advanced flying saucers, they gave them big upperheads. Finally i could grow my hair long enough to, if not cover, mitigate it.

Maybe I have melancholy from the freckles of melanin in my Irishmick Polack skin.

With a puff of wind in my hair. Hair like forsythia. Hair parted in the middle flowing rust pomegranate ferns to the side of the crown.

My face like sideburns on a wheel of brie. Peatburns, sideburns with the smell of burning peat. Ankor Wat peaks, Ontario escarpment, Soo Locks part for my hair. Less like a satyr than a baby cat. Would you call this a water buffalo haircut or lions' mane? No. I am an owl, round glasses and stern beak, hair sticking up in little Batman-tufts.

Spitting up billiard balls of fur and tiny bones from the inner ear of those mice like a no-nonsense blood owl. Bullfighter hair. Basilisk eyes. Girls would show their classmates pictures of me all orange and sneering over a naked shoulder at poolside as if caught coitus

interruptus.

My big-bellied face, chin like the whiteswept Franklin Roosevelt bluffs overlooking the frothy ocean.

No, wait, for a while I had a Beatificle cut that actually covered it all up, making me look like a medieval German principality's village retard or peasantmichael. German intellectuals, visiting the university or exiled from the Reich and securing a teaching position long ago, would sneer at me in comtempt.

Back to that name thing, when I was thirteen, the Cabronitos' "Weeping Sad Girl" was a hit, a rock Anglicization of the old Mexican folk song "Lagrimitas de la Virgen". The bass player had a big mustache like a range-riding revolutionary, and wore bandoliers of bullets crossed on his chest. But I was most impressed with the singer Roque Vidaloca, his sunglasses and beetle-black Beatle hair, that I announced at the dinner table from then on I wanted to be known as Roque. "Not even Raimundo?" my mother queried, querelously. No, Roque. It even sounded like Rock.

I didn't know at the time he wore the dark glasses because his clownishly crossed eyes were legally blind. In my boy-sized uniforms and cap, I strode around like the Kommandant of the Baronmunchausen concentration camp.

I wore spy-quality turtlenecks in junior high, an ascot and briefly a monocle, first year of high school. No, sported the green greasy tough kid's button down shirt, tight straight leg Levis, big quiff in front, which symbolized big frontal lobes, true.

The time in a boy's life when he wishes he was in a barbershop quartet, sporting a handlebar mustache—waxed!—and a straw

boater. Soon supplanted by desire for a monocle, dueling scar on the face, and Iron Cross First Class with Oak Leaves at he neck of the shirt he wore to grade school.

One day I went shopping at Big n' Gross, rival to JMJ Mart.

There I bought a shirt that my mother considered too lacy, made me take it back. I bought a lacy wisp of a long-cuffed shirt to look like Atl and the Quetzalcoatls, but horrified Mom took it back to the store.

From that day on I resolved to only wear military, manly garb.

Me, an air ace, in my P-40 sharktooth'd Spad 13, by the skin of my sharkskin suit, against those enemy Motherfockewulfs. I wear special opaque sunglasses, white scarf, cigarette-holder insouciance.

As an aviator, of course I liked to hum "Roll, Pitch and Yaw" when reading military histories, poring over battle maps. Kids considered me bookish, bespectacled, controlling, so that's why I took on military regalia, swagger stick, boots; the trappings of command.

They say I was born in my underwear. I am an Aleppo aesthete who dresses mean. Roaches crawling all over my tennis shoes, treating my basketball hightops like a tenement. Sometimes a suit with big saucer flaps. I always used to try to dress like a much older man, in white shoes, string ties and leisure suits, which I then finally accent with a carelessly-tossed motorcycle jacket over my shoulders. This is for a reason. For that rock effect I soon learned to take to cheap jackets made from ersatz hide of domesticated animals, from Manny Thirdreich's Garment District Bargin-o-rama Shopping Centre Warehouse. Otherwise, I had to spend a lot of weekends at a lot of garage sales on Swastikawood Drive before I'd

acquired enough WWII German uniforms to wear nothing but them, exclusively.

I was hobbled by wearing thick waterglasses all through gradeschool. "He can't see well, but he can smell his farts" they said piteously of the little boy. Now I'm sunglass'd like the test pilots of Black Widowfighter jets. Aviator sunglasses, lenses supposedly shaped like the two tempered glass panels from a fighter jet's windshield. Maximum Kill Visibility. The gaze of the afterburner, the visual fuel explosion. That's me.

Glare in my eyes was something stolen. Always wore sunglasses, even when sleeping in my own bed at night, so things would reflect from my eyes back into myself. My sunglasses were my iron curtain. Let them all say he was that stingy with his thoughts.

Some thought it was just cynicism but old women sometimes crossed themselves fearing the infectuous wink of my evil eye, like the glance of the moon when it inculcates lunacy. Gazing from my portrait glasses I can tell what kind of person you are. These aviator spectacles as Baroque picture frames to my limpid fucking eyes.

Glasses are the scales of justice, or my eye-scarf. The last blindfold of a man condemned to the firing-squad. Immaculate glasses like a childraping motorcycle cop. Glasses as gonads. I love my gonads I guess, but I hate these things. But you know, all my booklearning, military history etc. is a distancing device like my sunglasses. My parents always wore them too. I invented wearing them at night as revenge, everybody knows my parents never went out at night.

Kids couldn't get on television so instead they'd do their violence and cruelty upon and to dumb animals. My brother remembers a birds' nest in the fireplace, little singing chirping sparrowlings going up in flames. Bluejays in the back yard making swingset noises. Injury to ducks, fishhooks in their beaks. Bikers paid us money to catch a duck in the park on a school field trip, so they could use the fat as axle grease or to polish saddles and jackets.

I hope we’re always friends with bikers. There’s a gratuitous nastyass part of kids that, when I saw a brick would pick it up and use it to beat some dog tethered there senseless in the pale, peaceful howling suburban moonlit night. And Thump would probably do even worse.

The hound's pleading eyes reminded us of the sister we never had.

Giving cats in the neighborhood catnip laced with LSD so they try to mate with lawnmowers in the middle of the night, with bug-zapping 20,000-volt lamps. At my best when I used to do medical experiments on roses, nightcrawlers, rabbits, watched them exploding, would blow smoke in their faces just like the researchers in the sceince films, kissing and singing to them. Rabbit minded, we had a box of rabbit ears kept under the furnace. Easing the shells off turtles, punching out a toad's brain and replacing it with a matchstick.

Suggested our science class perform a simple heart-lung transplant on a critter. Once I carved open a Halloween pumpkin and found a duck inside or maybe an ugly spitting basilisk. Would walk a block out of his way to step on a caterpillar.

We threw cats in front of cars. A cat's head we'd put in the crotch of a tree and pull with all our might. Dropped kittens off highway bridges onto windshields. The fat kid said "The cat climbed

up grandma's ashcan, do you know what that means? The cat climbed up grandma's ass!" and shocked everybody. That's what kids are for, to say the goddamnedest things. Despite all my clique's brutal experimentation I still don't know how snakes fuck. The first six ants were stepped on. I'd throw a frog out over the lake with all my might, or cover with a stone and jump there like other bands cover hit songs. Midwestmischevious, like Huck Finn and the Detroit Wheels.

My brother and our peers had a club called Hell's Fuckers.

Bicycle polo and the chase up Middle Finger Drive. Bikes with spider webs for spokes. Scobbing down monkey trails on his bamboo bicycle, a bike made of sticks that his father had brought back from the War for the Orient and the West, the World's Best War, where all fathers got their only chance to actually do something for once. A new kid from Okinawa showed him the fine points of the hurling skulls of World War II soldiers. These were the kids who invented napalm.

Neighborhhod children playing Fathers and Stones, Europeans and Jews, three-year-old girls with candy cigarettes and skimpy tops playing Cops and Prostitutes. Cliché children and little Napoleans.

Tippy grew up in the same subdivision as Dennis the Menace and the Peanuts gang, constantly tormenting that asshole Charlie Brown.

Some kids came from families with names like Bearson, Wolverineson. All the little boys in the neighborhood had German officer duelling scars from playing with plastic machetes, rubbing dirt into the cuts for cool infected scar tissue, usually hidden anyway on the dirt on their faces from throwing dirt clods at each other. In the fall the applewars of the boychild boom started and mothers feared for their picture windows. Problematic little monsters. Could use a

screwdriver before they could talk, run from the cops before they could walk. Took the license plates from his parents' cars, the old farts got fined forty bucks and put behind bars. Thought his mom'd murdalize him so he tried to hide-o. Walking down the street carrying an iguana and a pack of matches. Tippy poured poison made with drain cleaner and chlorine bleach into his enemy's air conditioner.

Would give people a can of the caustic Draincleanero, say Drink this and they would and die.

Many times hurled eggs splattered against a house. Robin'segg blue chips all over, snake eggs with tiny liveborn gartersnake hatchlings like them basilisks inside, or the hurling of brown eggs if your neighborhood's about to be integrated. Egging houses combines the appeal of "egg" and "house", both female symbols, compounding excess female energies. Like two mean breasts, piled vertically. Like mother or mistress. "Motherfucker" is such a bad and taboo thing to say to the Celtic, especially cops, because they have those obscene Sheela-na-Gig statues mocking you all over Ireland.

When I met Tippy, he introduced me to fun drugs. They were good for my body too, slimmed me down. Drugs were the death of food. Tippy had these typically American moods of irritation, powerfully impatient frames of mind from eating the food that made you bad. Junk foods that made you give birth to cancerous rats.

Sugar is completion. Candy bars like Bit o' Shit. Chocolate watches.

Foods that dyed you good and red. A comedian named Red died twice when they certified Red Dye #2.

Then we got high, and all was good. We got musical.

Why am I always talking about Jews, when nobody my age in Aleppo seems to give them any thought? Good question. It’s probably due to our Mom, who thought she had ethical resons for us not to, her mortal fear that we would be shunned. And then my attraction to the aesthetics of the Third Reich, which tried so hard in graphic and fashion design to not be like them. Them. Oh, you know who I mean.

So the Mom thing: because of her good grades, Mom's high school voted her Most LIkely to Be Jewish, and she's never forgotten that, remains bitter to this day. She flies into a rage if I use any of those Yiddische words from DANG! magazine that its New York immigrant sons write into a satirical piece every so often, like a pour of honey-apple bitter-root Manischevowitz smuggled out of an openbar schvitz into a recipe. Mom fumed "It's one thing Jews having last names like London, Ireland, France to confuse us. But now they've taken good Catholic words for names, church words like Arcangel, Monsignior and Cherubim." Her fulminations were monthly, had something to do with her biology as much as her sociology or confession. The moon is a Jew, like Mensch, her stout yellow furrier downtown. Proud she had a fur coat, of Persian forest lamb shot in upnorthern Michigan, their pelts then assembled and sprayed with satin lining, she admired it in her closet most of the year, had it kept refrigerated by Mensch Furrier through the moth-months.

Why do Jews occupy a place in my subconcious? It has something to do with God, for they invented God and defined themselves by doing so. You don't know what antisemitism means for a Midwesterner, surrounded by Michigan Jewish families like the

Ishpemings, Engadines and Cheboygans. I'll put down even the Little League novelist, gentle hero in a neighborhood that year-round smelled like the burning of autumn leaves by the curb or the curl of smoke from a professor's pipe; those Ashkenazy are just ash-can Nazis. That surfing sephardi, baggies and a big black hat.

Bagelshirts. My rambling rife antiShempism. Get down to the real Nazi gritty. You know what they say, silence is golem. Let the university Jews have their forthright Fourthreichswagens. The French and Spanish words for "Jew" and "juvenile" are the same, y'know.

The race never outgrew trying to do well in school.

Are Jews still manufacturing golems? For Israeli Army use maybe? Only with the emergence of a kick-ass Israel, where they marched into Cairo and pushed the pyramids into a six-pointed star and rebuilt—"Rebbebuilt"—the nose on the sphinx, did my parents’ antisemitism abate into avowed respect. Still, it didn’t erase the memory of how offended they were when I came home from public elementary school in December singing "I have a little dreidel". And somebody has, by adding a good riff, turned it into a Rock song!

Hey, is "The Holocaust" a patented, trademarked name?

Somebody’s sitting on a gold mine. Growing up in Aleppo in the 1960s, when everyone—well, school teachers and university speakers—talked about the Holocaust and pogroms so much, kids all thought all Germans and Russians were Jewish, that Jews outnumbered Germans by the hundreds of thousands there, the world's biggest religion by population.

Dachau? For the longest time, I thought the concentration camp was called Dracula. The Jews were told the ovens were their

mothers' wombs and, Freudians all, they crawled right back in, to a man. The concentration camps in the early 1940s were actually the best place to prognosticate the future, for there were so many Gypsy fortune-tellers as well as Jewish economists, social scientists and planners interned in them. Wehrmacht generals would show up surreptitiously, in civilian clothes, to consult them. President Roosevelt considered installing private phone lines to keep them on our payroll, or distributing walkie-talkies tuned to a special frequency, but the expense during wartime would be prohibitive. Our father, now artlessly in Heaven, said that in World War Two the Allies colluded with the Germans to specially bomb the Jewish prisoners' concentration camps, out of fear the displaced persons after the war would want to come to the US, or even start their own country. The cynical inscription over the camp gates "Next Year in Jerusalem", not so cynical when you realize they meant Hitler's armies.

I’ll be my politics sound to a proper girl like you like those of some insult comedian, spilling out his shtick over resort people dining in Borschtbeltavia or Sick Joke, NY. So now I play my guitar like a melancholy violin, or a throttled klez klarinet. And I pored over the book The Superpowers of the Jews. In Spain they called a donkey a "Shmuel", and I bet Sancho Panza's was a converso too. Despite my caulked and clanking, sparkling Third Reich adornments, I'm not a killer or burly bucket of hate. Sort of an autosuburbantisemitism, ancestral and dusty, uselessly vestigial like a tail. I was never the kind of gospelly churchbefuddled Jew-bearbaiter who yells "Go down, Moses!" to his turds swirling down the toilet in the morning. Antisemitism: that's just like a

high school clique's bias against one girl or another. Maybe Mom never outgrew high school, y'know? Hell, who does?

So what about the beet-red, beat-you-red Soviet Union? Well, Levin changed his name to Lenin for business reasons, then the Bronstein brothers changed theirs to Stalin and, I forgot the other.

That's how Monsignior Cough-in-a-Carload told it on his radio show in the 1940s, when our Mom was in highschool and typed his transcripts, working for him. She keeps carbon copies of some of those Sunday sermon-speeches in a metal box under her bed. Along with my medical records of chlildhood diseases and my serious reactions to drugs for them, now taken off the market.

Kids are all born fascists, and not just in the area's Old German restaurants and family towns like Veeblefetzer and Potrzebie, Michigan. I knew a girl whose mother Hitler saw peeing through an upstairs window as his motorcade passed, and while in the Hitler Youth she once smelled the Feuhrer's fart. There was a Deuteronomy Duck cartoon about fascist flatulence called "How Hitler Lit Farts" at which Americans guffawed, kept up their spirits in the dark days of the war, as lederhosen folk dances could not do for the losing side. German kids like Johnnie Thirdreich, Karl Sondaughter, and—sounding like an opera composer—Jacques Offenbach. They were all toddlers of total todt, which means death, those tiny little kids in smear-of-dirt Hitler moustaches.

As the Tommies sang, Hitler was a bad little boy moved into my neighborhood. Hitler was amazed, and swept off his jiggledy dancing feet at age twelve by either Lohengrin or Lorne Greene, I forget

which. I always wish there was a state in the U.S. called New Germany. Probably is.

My brother and I were indulged, especially in our military interests, which Mom saw as History, a subject taught in school so OK. We ordered carbide carborundum thermite cannons from comic books, medals and regalia and 3/32" waterproof cannon fuse from dubious small-town Michigan rural village sources (and Thump had black powder for his muzzle-loading muskets and blunderbus). Once I wanted to order a railway gun, but Mom pointed out the Boomschevsky's catalog was from 1927, purchased at a library sale, so WWI armaments were no longer available.

I stopped crying after a couple days.

My Iron Cross centers and collects for psychic spiritual dispersal all pompous pud bogosity. Wrote a guitar instrumental "My Iron Cross" a while ago. Love my Teutonic sonic onyx. Until the V1, V2 rockets, and the Nazis’ death’s-head insignia and high boots, Germany's greatest contribution to human history was Zweiback toast (and after 1938, they made it out of subject peoples). Hitler himself may have said that. Maybe not.

At great expense I bought an authenticated copy of the Judenkreuz, the Reich's military decoration for Jewish heroes in the First, and well into the Second, World War. It consisted of an Iron Cross with a Star of David in the center. It was enameled sky (or Jordan River) blue, when adopted by Israel a few years later. No, I’m not going to necessarily wear it, create the false impresssion that I’m ethnically qualified to. What do you mean? Of course it’s authentic.

Now my swastikas pissed the hell out of most people in this kindly liberal town. Those who fought in the World's Best War II included many members of the Aleppo Police Department. Sargent Turd Turgid of the Sheriff's Department once knocked me upside the head so hard my glasses flew off but tough titty shit. It's a free country. Sometimes I drew swastikas just to get my friends' dads' goats, those good Democrats who fought the wars and kept quiet about President Roosevelt's polio-withered pianolegs. I was always mad at them. Anything to make a father more futile.

Later on I would faithfully read the right wing cultural columnist Claud Conservo, a Jesuit priest who teaches in a snooty little college back east, in the Republicanny-Vaticanological Political Responsibility magazine, and liked what he said to support the War. I was still the age where I supported all war in theory, in the abstract, as eventually adult permission to kill designated people, like burglars, but on a ntational scale. Tried to organize a War is Cool rally, but nobody showed up by my brother and a few of his biker friends who wanted a corner to drink their beers. So I retreated to a couch, read and reread The Art of Jewish War. This is what reading books in this jockish backwater turns a guy into. A libraryish kid who didn't know the difference between Dr. Joseph Mengele and Madeleine L'Engle, between the Iron Cross First Class with Oak Leaves and the Tueborgberry Award for children's books. Imagine, a boy that smart talking about "acceptable genocide" like that.

My father may have been in the German Army—"It wasn't all that great"—and thus the source of much of my memorabilia. One

relative is a Baltic movie star and much of the family is in South America. No, that’s not true, that’s another kid in my school. Never knew who my father was, that is to say I him though Mom once groused he lived with us for almost two decades. If I wear enough of these German badges maybe he'll come back and command me, to a victorious conclusion. I guess Mini-Goerings like my brother and I like the Nazis so much because they had no fathers, they just put on the brown shirt and SS leathers and started marching. My folks could relate. Muse on Nazis as babies. The way German parents used to raise children, with iron good-posture bars built into schooldesks, head restraints that pulled the little Struwwelpeter's long hair at the slightest sign of slumping. They liked them so much that numerous German youth in the 1920s died strangled when masturbation harnesses (erotostruwwelpeterkrafft) they'd ingeniously set up went awry. You can look it up.

In World War II, while the Japanese troops hollered “Banzai!” the American ones countered “Destroy All Monsters!” Meanwhile I collected kamikaze pilot pieces, and song lyrics about what the kamikaze saw. I could play the samisen power-chord parts on my guitar. I posessed a hair from Hitler's moustache (not the fake one), a gram of the poison cocaine—still good—hidden in the capsule in Goering's anus, and a chicken beak from Himmler's farm/ Had the tail of the rat that'd bitten off Hitler's nose (I attribute Tippy's chronic rhinitis to the Rhine) in that Berlin bunker. One guy at an antique store had Hitler's soul in a bottle, sort of a black glow, but I couldn’t afford that. Glitter Hitler moustaches, no-failure medals ornamenting his Midwest surfer good looks. The Hitler drunk sequence out of the

Saturday noon documentary "Famous Drunks of the Third Reich" which taught me how to dance, for I always rocked like the feuhrer's little jig. So what if colored kids made fun of me for it. A pompous professor’s foreword to a quasi-scientific book of Hitler's collages called World War II "the greatest effort ever made to destroy a single artist's work". The greatest thrill would be to see the grey and somber vision of Rudolph Hess at one of our concerts. Rudolph Hess, Deputy Feuhrer (retired) once told me I hear the music of youth on the warden's radio. Somehow I cannot reconcile this with good music. I do enjoy the Beatles, however, their music has a definite beat.

Or maybe it was my Dad said that. Or Tippy’s. Little did I know I would find myself fighting for the lebensraum of Rock. Now I've got elbow room in Aleppo, enough to move around here.

My Thirdreichmanship. Such a nazzy, I had the habit of writing in love letters to my various obsessionatrixes the word "kiss" with the SS rune of the stormtrooper, which would be a cool logo for something. One such note lying around on the dresser in a popular girl's apartment was picked up and inspected by members of the rock band from Big Joke she was dating at the time. And I wondered how Tippy could swasticate himself onstage like he did, his arms and legs all Gog and Magog, furious and envious. The symbols in the schematics of the wiring for our amplifiers look kind of like swastikas to me too. I'm attracted to inside information, discipline, power, cocktails and speedboats. One girl shaved her pubic hair like the Feurher's moustache to please me. I wanted to ball attic-hidden teenager Aimée Fink then shout "Heil" to her clitoris.

Isn't every highschooler, in rigorously defining who and what's hip, what's skeewayyarr, a Nazi? Eeuuww, that record you're playing is subhuman; that homely girl there must be excised from society.

That's how the young individual thus defines the self, by the cruel and exterminatory what's-not.

Shrug. Sounds like an excuse to be saying, imagining bad things. An only child, little emperor, I'll always be solipsistic.

Therefore, sadistic?

No, I don’t think my admiration of Nazi uniforms make me a racist. Tippy, however, danced when he walked like the fascinating partywhistle race that doesn't return phone calls, that dances when they're pregnant. A blackamoor can hear a woman masturbating a mile away, and smell money in it. They talk to their little black sperm, find consolation and oracular advice in them, woven like African fabrics. They've got an extra set of muscles in their sperm. Don't you know sperm click in African dialects? I shrieked, whipped my mind into a frenzy with the riding crop of my tightly wound, troubled ideas.

The world's most bourgeois boy, the world's whitest. Sheriff Percheron said they steal so much because they leave so much in the woman.

I think it all sounds like a part of LIFE not DEATH to me, shrugged Tippy.

They have more blood than we do, that's whey they're a darker color. They turn black from sex. They die without sex, not strengthen like we do, or are supposed to. They sing while coming, they laugh during sex, they're supposed to cry. Why they're such good fishermen. They're crazy.

You're crazy, said Tippy. And, as you Roque like to shout when you’re angry at someone, You're a toilet!

What, I'm not a facist. I take to old-fashioned Nazism because, like the Church, it has cool uniforms, and locates me in a "world", especially European, of tradition. There’s our Catholic thing going on too. Except for mirrors, I would be a man of God; for Lent, I’d have to give up first my narcissism, then my tubby self-loathing, before Confession and Communion. No good and just God would permit a creature that puerile, that puddy, His Holy Sacraments. In my last Confession, just before Confirmation by Cardinal Stillborn, I mistakenly mentioned my last one hadn’t been for months and got told I was going to Hell, straight to Hell, boy. Telling this to Mom I was bombarded with threats of being sent to Catholic school, which is where our friend Dink got so drunk. Ultimately, I saw Tippy reflected in the light of a blender he was throwing at a church.

Shortly after Confirmation, I learned in Catechism class at St. Mary Magdalene-in-the-College Chapel how its namesake was a mermaid, so could only fellate Christ; how she had a lesbian fling with Lillith, Adam’s first wife thrown over for Eve; how, after the Magdalene was martyred by a mob led by jealous Judas, who wanted to be our Lord's boyfriend, Jesus took the symbol of the fish—the Magdalene's tail—in her honor. The host will forever taste like His sperm, like a sperm whale’s ambergris, of that which she relived him.

When my Mom heard all this, she took me out of the class, stopped going to church. The antiwar stuff and folk-guitar Mass was bad enough, but now they’re sacramentalizing sex, seeking intercession from a woman in the Bible who unabashedly performed

it. I don't think that lay teacher is there any more. Got laid? Sorry.

She may have graduated, moved back to Europe or Latin America.

Don’t tell me you read that Tippy had her too. Sheesh.

Please, baby, as we talk, ignore or lament my guts’ feedback, shrieking pedal-driven effects, sonic booms. Farting fast and loose.

Those aren't boots you hear tramping in the snow, those are sounds of my own stomach. Please excuse my intestinal monologues.

A musician’s belly serves as the echoing auditorium, or pastgenerations' Ballroom, peristalsis slowly whirling like a dangerous but decorative mirrored ball. Got my peristalsis working, but it just won't work on you. That gastric blue flame.

Yeah, you can see I’m Aleister Crowley-bellied, Apple-PanBetty burly. Mine was, is the belly of a sad clown, soft and slack, melancholy droopy baggage. I was dogfood-fat, body above my belt a great garlic bulb. My belly round like it contained a sick baby.

Because of my weight, I have high collateral in my veins.

More than happy to play the role of the Mad Glutton of Aleppo, the amusing Obese Man of Rock. Fat clown, like a lost-dog, sad sack stand-in member of the Chomps Trio, especially in their dotage.

I'd always been like a dad with a round, hanging Roman Emperor stomach, a caesarian stomach that asks each passerby "Quo Vadis?"

A corpulent 350-lb. psychedelic blues guitar player called Acid Stomach. Wait, that was Threadbear’s nickname for me.

I was the fat kid in my grade school. Ahh, aarghh, the horror of school gym. My dread of a sit up. Impossible dream of a push-up.

Huffing my way in the frigid elementary school morning, I ran the 600

yard ordeal at the back of the pack with the arthritic hemophiliac kid, who was dead by ninth grade. Even the retard ran faster, flapping his arms aerodynamically.

Then had an elegant not-slim-but-proportionate build in high school, though the raging fat kid inside was always ready to burst forth from indiscipline. Cool but pimp-plump. Still, I'm not really fat, am I? Graceful on the dancefloor as the Beast of Baluchistan. Body like a water buffalo. An enormous person. A pooped satrap. A big fat Daniel Boone or Daniel Webster of a man.

Food does strange things to humans. Pizza had been known to cause Tippy's breatharian causeways to blockhead. The New, Improved Satan. The Devil takes the form of pizza—an unearned extension of Youth—to tempt me too sometimes. The thrill is gone and the feeling is different.

Heavy Metal music? No, more like heavy meal. Food as fuel for the fool. Fat as something caught in the strainer of the system. A world without fat. An intellectual without fat. Suburban meat-smoke from backyard barbecue permeated my clothes. The fatty at the party, the one with the food, or shit, or art, or God obsession, yelling "Pizza is Purity". I eat as obsessively as others take drugs. Drug of choice being food in excess. The esophageal jungle. Emotions equal vitamins. Different kinds of electronic discharges. Dwarves named Glucose, Sucrose, Fructose and Maltose, working in the mines in my veins. All that food just rose up in the skull, food's rich chemicals. In vitro chemicals. A body that, in the course of a single night, converts steak into sweat. Maybe I'm just furnace-fat, an early engine, anachronistic machine for producing fat. Richfood hunger is

a huge and horrible drive. Foodguilt fostered creativity, for I once planned a loving biography of a ham I ate called The Pig That Died for Me. Did I tell you, though, I'm not really fat.

I would go on fasts of nothing but fast franchise burgers to get nearer the breath of the Beast. A fat man is a refrigerator magnet. A man who's fat in height. Became a fat momento, a fat monarch butt'fly. The King of the Full Stomach. The moon is so full that there's fat in the air tonight. I was effulgent with effluent. The modern Hebrews, or their psychiatrists, beleve in a mystic Kabbalistic subconscious relationship between shit and money. I could never really hold on to either, to both.

Energy cut off at the waist, from the cock and legs. Now we're drifting into be-careful water. If a man doesn't have sex and release when aroused, the sperm or hormones turn to poison in his system.

This is the origin of melancholy or depression. Why I would then overeat, a feminine response? I was often invited to weddings to give away the father of the bride. Turn me upside down and my big belly is the lower, broad sugar-beet-filled industrial Michigan, my pecker its smaller and wilder pointed Upper Peninsula.

Tippy once said

something real mean in the college cafeteria, that I probably couldn't get it up without a full stomach after a big meal. When "love handles" doesn't mean your cock but the sides of your waist, ferchrissakes.

My body, in solitude and indecision's fat, conspiring against me. Oh shit, I am the adolescent blivit, two hundred pounds of shit in a one hundred pound bag, left burning on your enemy's doorstep by a ringing doorbell one Devil's Night. Suffering taunts of "childhoodhead" and "loseweight-face" well into college from faculty, alumni and

staff. Adult men and professors would make solidarity comments about how I must play football, but the only football I ever kicked was a small dog, Midwestern mongrel, bled a Baffle Creek Bonesy Dog. From the curb into traffic sailed the squealing Patches Taffy Spot Fido Rover, and many years later I wondered to what degree that pup embodied the spirit of Tippy, a visitation. But I'm not really that fat.

Smiling behind my obesity. Acid rain in my veins, and not the good kind of acid. I'm dyspeptic by nature, viscerally ill-tempered.

Day septic. A scowl from my belly.

Look, I know any interview about Tippy and the Chomps is going to get to the famous sceptre he waved to the world. My own little pecan pud, a snub-nosed Pekinese doggie nougat.

I didn’t say pelican pud. It fits within what statistics call normal range. Hey, it's not like I'm reading Men's Piccolo magazine. Or ordering Extenderomaters in the plain-wrapper US Mail. I suppose I’m dictator-dick’d, with something like Hitler’s own Pocket Krupp Gun. A machine pistol. One of our high school teachers, himself a decorated WWII veteran, said you had to sacrifice (or be born with, I guess) one ball to be in the upper echelons of the Nazi Party, sort of like the art of circumcision for the Jews, an undisputed, undisplayed badge of exclusvity. Ha ha, in the upper eche-schlongs.

You don’t want to talk about mine? OK, fine with me. Let’s move on.

Even as a just-post-toddler of three, I told an interrogating older (age 5?) girl "I'm a Man, but I'm a Short Man." Even at that age, a girl can still tell who’s virgin and not, who’s got the goods and gift for her.

When Tippy was a young boy, he was taken in the back room of

Ghoulyards’ downtown department store where, amidst the mannequins, a suited salesman examined his masculinity. Or maybe it happened to me, and the floorwalker marveled at its tiny delicate perfection to assembled women shoppers in high heels and nylons there. Or maybe the little boy just had to pee, was unrestrained, and that's why what's private became a public issue. Christ, I don't know.

Was long ago.

Mother protected me from sex and my body as best she could.

While changing swimsuits age 10 after running through the summer lawn sprinkler, a neighborhood boy made a fondle. We didn't do anything, but mother horrified. This was actually Aldebbie? Or working for him, some big blond vikingbruiser in his entourage?

Mother a great pale china teapot. Porcelain and porcine. I'll shut the door to shut out my mother and her boring TV shows. Soaps? No, inane daytime talk shows like Herb Halfaloaf.

Gradeschool gym class, fluffing up the little boyparts on way to the showers so as not to be noticeably bereft. Below that, My perennial, perpetual Perineum.

Why are we talking about my body? I can tell you much, much more about Coral’s, infinitely more alluring. And Tippy’s, and its importance, for that matter. I’m not a body, I’m a mind, a sensibility.

You laugh, pointing at my gut. That’s right, it’s big. All right then.

Maybe I just look fat because my stomach's bloated from the inside. There should be a drum roll on the tom-toms while I talk about it. A cry for gastric justice. Stomach news and opening music from the stomach. Obsession with control, Goering-power. Belly and

tight guts self-consuming, self-consulting, self of the self. First guy in my highschool to have an ulcer and I hadn't even considered advertising as a career choice. My twenty-third chakra felt like a vale of tearful death. My stomach is my TV set, my amplifier or drum, pounding on this the hood of my big car. My stomach like the Fuct factory working round-the-clock shifts. My stomach is a jail where the control is tenuous, apt to break out in rioting. Sometimes I was stalled by peristalsis, my stomach feeling like a Roman emperor in trouble with the tribes on the empire's frontier. Alchemical problems down in me, something about acid and base elements in my vice-versa viscera. Huge maritime storms in the belly; rumbles like thunderstorms or tornado alerts a couple of farm towns away. Or the afterstorms. My wagon stomach creaking on the muddy washboard road of my night meal. Defeated by my stomach. My guts, my guts!

My kingdom for my guts! My big schoolyard bully of a belly, bullying me, and, hence, everybody else. Had me praying for intestinal relief to the goddess Dyspepsia until someone—maybe Mom—told me that was really a statue of the Virgin Mary—Christ's mom, ready to serve him seconds and even thirds—standing there in the garden. Like the Commandment says, Honor Thy Guts.

My farts are companions that will never leave me. Renown or reviled for a certain gloomy flatulence. So filled with the evil oxygen of farts. White methane. I could repel an attack of eggs on the house with my farts. Playing the theme from the TV comedy "Dingleberry's Delight". Farting so much because I snack constantly, hand-tomouth. A pizza bridge, appetizer bridge. The menu engine.

Especially after nibbling horsebreads. Robins-egg blue or speckled

candy eggs. Hulkberries. A white chocolate cheeseburger and greyhound coffee. A pizzadwarf. A beast of unleavened bread. A Dagwood sandwich between two Sunday morning Communion Hosts, that's me. Picnic farts. Fatty farts and tears leaving an oily stain on my school shirt. Neither shot put nor shit pot. Like a plastic gofer. The Groundswell Man. Idiots' Delight. Closing the cholesterol mind. Mom forbade me the candy bar called Buttfinger (even parsing my Halloween candy bag), saying she had a hard enough time keeping my hands away from myself back there. Instead, I gobble Simethecone as others do methedreine. I'm not afraid of my farts.

Farts in bed, those foghorns of food traversing the sunless seas of the intestines. Forgive us our tresspasses and passed gases.

Farts of phlogiston. Farts turning north, causing madness, Aeolian winds searching for an aeolipile to power in their escape. Aeolipiles turning like saturnine diesels. Smell of methane, ammonia and urea.

Great winds from under the earth. These were the baby Jesus' farts, bottled and appreciated by the three visiting Magi. Music as farts, lit.

Crippled by fear of farts. A pestilence flying around the moon.

Cresents of excresence. Man, I was sneezing and farting out a robot Postmaster. You can't time-travel on the back of a fart, on the wings of a snow-white fart. Farts bursting into flame spontaneously, didn't even have to hold a match to 'em. A showbiz stage Farting Machine, always good for cheap baggy-pants yuks, what killed vaudeville (and ushered in rock n' roll!), why they used a long hook. Taking Industrial Strength laxatives like Ton o' Bricks. Hindenburg flatulence, disasters all over the room, igniting all the mobiles in an art gallery.

Farts so bad that, when we heard of the recent "saucer flap" of U.F.O. sightings was attributed to methane bubbling up from the dinosaur swamps and paleo-bogs outside of town, these guys wanted to turn me in, worried the origin was my own pajama flap in back.

Farts so bad that maybe I'm the aforementioned hubble-bubble, the hookah of Hell. For after all, Christ farted forty days and nights in the desert, it must've been hard for him to be a septic human after spicand-span Godhood. A yell from his butt. Windwars as headquarterswork for a windass. Grocery ghosts, stomach rumbling, rupp-urpupping like a motocross minidirtbike, sounds like the card clothespinned to the bicycle wheel. A fart said "hushhhh" like sixteen tons of silk exploding. Foodgas warmly generating steam heat, pressure cookin', spinning like the aeolipile of Hero of Alexanderia. In the music of food, onion raises the dish a halfstep sharp, garlic drops it a key flat. Half-storms rock me, a sour Sou'wester. Almost died of wind injury. I sit both craftsman and poltergeist, air pregnant with rain. Call those farts "Strategic Air Demands". When I worked at a downtown bookstore job my farts smelled like the boss's cigarette smoke. Smelly farts, a rotten egg place up there. Smell of dead pandas, the chewed-up bamboo pulp inside the intestine starting to ferment, into sour liquor or rancid Chinese food. I hear the beans singing. The exhalation of the Science Fair parts of the bean. Like cattle being released stampeding from a gate to get their heads smashed. Or cranes toppling. Coming out with these inexpressible farts, garbage smells, those farts just my nerve gas. The air over the city had gone sour with bad laughter. The smell of Up, Brat and Mountain Wind, playing odorifically a benefit for the Highschool Bill of

Rights that declared your classmates have a right to never have to smell this. Land speed records set on the Great Salt Farts. Like a new kind of beans you can smell the farts I'm going to make.

Occasionally TV sick. Foul movements. Took a scream dump. Tried to convince people the butt was just yawning. The yellow dry-as-dust swirling around the tombs of ancient Egypt. Bowels disturbed by robbers. Farts smell like an unpleasant underground factory where they made cheese out of corpses. Peripatetic, perpetual colon, a mobius tunnel and Klein bottle. Such problems with my guts the school nurse used to call me "Bubbles".

I'm often mum onstage, except for my flatulence farts.

Yet I prefer to think of them as old German farts, beerwagon Hindenburg, Ludendorff and Bismarck farts. The thunder of Wotan. I let off a string of thunderwotans, but fortunately my overthrust guitar solo and feedback hum drowned them out.

Conversational indigestion like a repulsive wah-wah pedal. I'm tired of apologizing. As I walked across campus, one cynical Jewish guy, maybe the school paper’s music reviewer, hollered You farted a yarmulke!

A fart is a prophecy, a premonition, or, in a library, a foreshadowing of a shit. My belly an auditorium full of laughs.

As stage pyrotechnics, we lit my farts for a FWOOMM of fire.

When a man explodes. Hindenburg disaster farts. Doctor Frank Wagon went hot-air ballooning on the strength of one young patient's farts, mine, these. A natural gas limp, walked with it from farts damage to my legs, shorts. I smelled like the inside of Winnie the

Pooh, the fey, fetid squeak of a a squeezed rubber animal either. I smelled like an old man, poor-hotel hygine. Farts whose smell won't go away. Smelled like eternity. A long fart, for my belly's brokenhearted. It's when I fart in front of women that I get embarassed.

Indigestion death by indigestion. Indigent, undignified un-digestion.

When I first heard the Indy 500 roaring on TV, I thought it was indigestion suffered by five hundred souls, the motor noises actually their simultaneous farts and newsworthy stomach grumbles.

But wait. It gets worse.

Practically an encyclopedia's worth of toilet training. I am but an offshore and off-center oil well. The seat of base motives. A colon on campus. The bottom of the pile and the piles on the bottom; my basements, my sub-basements, coal cellar. Stomach as dinosaur swamps, trilobite-turds swimming, snuffling under Museum-quality fetid ferns. Petrefied excrement, probably not of human origin, found at the same place. Like the meteor that hit Siberia, flattening forests.

Just thanks. Nothing futile in the Fertile Excrescence. Intestines, like the heavens, opened, thundered, called forth the pouring deluge.

Stomach as a flooded basement, a swimming pool with the plug pulled out, draining painfully. All dreck and drescher, all that is mediocre, pouring down, pouring forth like an unspeakable toothpaste from the tube. Recycled pizza flowing from his butt.

Shitting like the Three Bears' porridge, turds and whey. An animal that kills another animal everytime it voids. When a giant sits down on a volcano to shit.

Parse my guts. Coliform bacteria like other, Aldebbieinfluenced bands have glitter on their eyes. While Tippy was terse, I

was the speaking bison, meaningless bison, meaningless with out the herd. Dung rolled out my other mouth, spewing turds like he would words. On the horns of digestion. I sat down to poop, actually farted two tones. One low brrapp, one high saxophone honk. I could be a pitch pipe, if not for the university orchestra, then at least the gamelan ensemble could tune its brass bowls and pans to me. Like a car muffler geklankking against the chassis as we sped over Aleppo's notable potholes, dirt roads like a dinosaur spine.

I must take in, ingest, while Tippy gives out so much physically and spiritually, shares his toys more like the balanced sibling than the obsessive only child. The constipated mind is like a garbage disposal put on hold, a vacuum cleaner full of water. A constipated cat who doesn't get around the house much anymore, watching children outdoors in the snow play Shit-in-the-Fox. What's being sought is not mind expansion but bowel expansion, comfort expansion.

Most of my relatives had died of overeating cancers. Turds swirling down the toilet were emblazoned with the family motto "Returneth Not”.

Then there were my toothpaste-tube turds, squeezing out mushily, no energy to drop. When compared to the improvisational spurts of Tippy's pecker, my crapping is like archiving record albums and cassettes, cruddy-curds riffs crudely played till I take a digestive.

Like a good German, I examine my poop; they're still in the habit of that, since Hitler decreed all toilets have a little platform shelf for perusal. Looking healthy, quickly flushed away, alles gut. Hitler shit on his pretty cousin until the girl suicided. Weird shit, yeah.

Shakespeare called my colonically-compromised type a

"pooping popinjay." Small, dark turds, like a deer in the woods. Like a deer in the headlights, laughed Thump. Turds shaped like four-inch houseflies, every chunkard of turd some vermin. My shit at this point looked like leaf-munching caterpillars, laundry-room sink millipedes, big tropical centipedes. Man as Motorsburgh's bridge to Canada.

Actually, my shits are like different sounds—their colors, textures, shapes—from my various guitar pedals and attachments.

My turds like Easter Island heads, the US Presidents on Mount Rushmore, Confederate Generals on Stone Mountain, or Korczak Zilikowski’s unfinished Crazy Horse summitt. Except when they were all komodo dragons, brown and soft and hissing. Soft and gooey and orange; shredded, frenetic and dark; like wintry bark or like dirty March snow-melt mud puddles. That's all me, all from me.

Your bowels are your books, your booksheves, sneered Tippy.

I had just enjoyed or suffered today's bowel monument, and he must’ve gotten a snootful that put him in a fouled mood as I came out the bathroom door. Big turds, swirling down like a slow-moving caravan of trucks at a border crossing, some delayed. Turds owing nothing. Shitfire, that disturbing condition I sometimes get when too much phosphorus in my diet causes my turds to plop into the tioilet with a flash and bursting explosion. Hate it. Embarrassing, makes me wet all over down there.

Sometimes I call it a Trowel Movement, for it's as if I am cultivating my garden, turning over the earth, potting and replanting flats of flowers. Oh, it's not. What am I saying?

As if I should call a bowel movement a "foul moment", or at least until I was trained to sit on the little pot, toilet-trained like a little

groan up. Cue up old blues song, "I'm a Man, But I'm a Short Man." For my guitar playing was as soft and fluid as the blissful child's poop in the pants, "The filled trousers of sound" said [bangs] of the warm and gelatinous, gag-inducing musical stench. The way an old man, especially a fat one, has that creamy nagging feeling at the end of an afternoon of an un- (or under-) wiped butt.

You know what a clean butt is supposed to feel like? Well, rock's a lot like that. Guitar riffs as feces, liquid leads diarrhea. Power chords as constipation, valiantly battling against itself.

I took a great cannonball crap. Thousands of pounds of pressurized pneumatics behind it. My maldigestion and obsequious obesity would keep me out of the military. All marksmanship proceeds from the most important first act of toilet training, sitting on the little pot and aiming within, baby’s first firing range. Bang bang; the penis as rifle, the anus as cannon.

My bowels often like a spoiled pouting girl child, saying "No!" and refusing to empty when we both know it would be in our best interest.

Explosive butt death. Diarrhea so bad it demands treaties with the Russians, both air forces on red alert. The Aleppo Sewage Filtration Plant workers declare a wildcat strike. Diarrheabetes plagued me, sugars coming out of both, all three, ends.

I painfully recalled those 1950s "Doctor Diarrhea" movies, they showed us in junior high Healthiness class, produced by the government to be shown in poor, bed-wetter countries. Sometimes those cheapskate Motorsburgh TV stations would show them on kiddie shows before school starts in the early morning. A silent white-

faced clown would mime the introduction about river parasites or mosquito control.

You ask if I got enemas or purges or digestive treatments beyond Explodo-Seltzer or antacids as a kid. Or if I was encouraged to clean my plate, eat seconds and thirds by mother. Who, like Coral, was always plump. As they say, there's something about the dyspeptic, a certain sensibility to those of us wracked by digestive anguish and distraction. No, it’s not just crabbiness.

I used aftershave on my hemorrhoids, bad idea.

I was under gravity's thumb sitting on that toilet stall. The sweat of his brow from a toilet seat. Laxativland. Shitted on a toilet in a sunny wheatfield in the exact center of the Continental U. S. Shitted on a toilet at the bottom of the sea. The foecal focal length, shit in your eye. Turds are dogs on the sidewalk. Turds that turn into fish, that fly into the air turned into little frisbees. A shithorn. The Doctor with the shitty butt. Milton Berle Movements. Empty the stomach like unloading a truck full of equipment. Shits like lit sticks of dynamite dropped into the can, wreaking havoc like the cherrybomb M-80's flushed into the plumbing system of our old rival Slumson Junior High School, halfway across the Old Midwest Side of town. It's defecatingly difficult to telegraph excrement. Mudmakers in the playground and echoes in the intestines. I spent half my life strolling between toilets, pants full of bricks, turds like woodpulp or pork brains. Shit as shrapnel. Diarrhea pushing quart milk cartons through the plumbing. Now I know how and orange juice machine feels.

Snotnosed butt a smoldering ruin. Crapped a few donuts, loaves of day old bread, a small tour bus. Life flows through me. Little animals

in my diarrhea--rats, foxes, otters--some of whom were dead, but others would shake themselves off, unbrown and run away.

Digestive system an array of fountains with allegorical nude figures representing the great rivers of the world, currents, whirlpools, waterfalls and waterspouts. Like the story about the city that couldn't flush its toilets and a hero with diarrhea going from house to house.

In Greece they have a picto of a little lamp, representing Diogenes, to mean "Public Toilet". Sitting on the throne of fishes. Gigolo plumbing.

Always afraid I'd be so fucked up on something I'd forget and wipe myself on the sleeve of a white polyester shirt. That I would tend to get it bathroom backwards. Compression so bad he's cutting his B.V.D's so his products would fall out. I'm now a creature whose front end is a man but whose rear is a skunk. Like a German examining his own turd on the little shelf built into their toilets, I was scared to death of it, I'd be damned it I was going to touch it.

Practically could've been editor of Shit or Get Off the Crapper magazine, mailed in the brownest of paper wrappers. Their billboards "You know in which room of the house it gets read". The man who'd brown-bear'd his blob, who would rather shit than answer his mail. Glad I didn't have to carry it out of the house and put it in the garbage can. Bursting at the seams with shit. Want to distance myself from my shit. Fire-brewed beer in big stainless-steel vats could never be this impure. The exultation of a rat's evacuation, mouse-shaped turds that hit with the sound of mice expiring, as heard from the inside. Cricket sounds. Bowel weevils. Stomachtime.

Shitting sod houses, stones of Venice, seven lamps of architecture,

seven brides for seven constipated brothers, bricks of hashish and smuggled dufflebags of marijuana. That is the world of shit in Aleppo.

The fecal years. The scientific name for the face you make when you scratch your butt and sniff it is flehmen, or what the MENSCH magazine writers call, with a shrug, "feh". On a collision course with my body. You still gotta wipe your butt after you shit no matter which chord in a progression is playing. Wiping those dirty butt lips, I shat Civil War cannonballs, depth charges from the deck of a PT boat butt. Shitting was forcing dinosaurs out of caves and through narrow ant-colony tunnels. Like where the Viet Cong hid Up North in Michigan. Birthing a horse. Sometimes I'd even save a little bit, in proud denial of my personal comfort, and not empty myself entirely, just so I could swear back and bark out "SHIT" authoritatively. Nights were spent in discomfort dreaming of shit seen splattered in the street, probably from some dog. A piece of golden wire through me, must've swallowed a foil candy wrapper. Boston Mudpies. The Eaters' Reich. The toilet as an upturned nose I was voiding myself into. The loudest kid in my neighborhood, when asked I would sulkily scream back "You're a toilet". Couldn't help it, it was all that came to mind.

A gypsy on TV told me I was fated to die on the toilet of a burning bungalow. Musta went to the dumpster a million times between shows. I'd shit at parties, excusing myself to be locked in alone, but you can always shit in your own house best. Robbers came and robbed my house while I was shitting. They left While You Were Out, While You Were Forcing It Out messages. I knew this kid in my fourth grade class, who, on a field trip went to a museum but

was unlucky enough to spend most of the time on the can. The museum closed while he was in there and he was locked in alone.

You got the Men's Museum, a Robinson Crusoe world all to yourself.

The exhibit was eighteenth-century soup tureens and, like a blind man in a parking structure, he proceeded to poop into every one of the exhibited porcelains. Into the downtown library. Into the Men's room and go to the bathroom. Into the Ladies' room and go to the bathroom. There. Feel better? Good. Give us this day our daily dump. This better be good. A grand historic world-purifying shit.

Turn on the fan and stick out the fanny. Do the Dog Doo. Learning to shit. Shitting beans, Cysteye the Sailor's beans n' okra. The food I ride.

To clean out this smoldering stomach firemen had to feed the hose into the mouth, turn it on and--gangway!--avoid the bursting spray out the other end, or point it towards a particularly virulent student demonstration. A bout of diarrhea and they'd be hosing down the gymnasium or, even more embarassing, the ice rink. Mom would have ironed my clothes just to go to an enema. Eeny-meeny-minymoany enemas, Mony Mony and Mona Lisa Enemas, all of them got me overdiarrhea'd. My intestines literally turned themselves inside out in front of the bathroom mirror, disgusting but amazing. Skeptic and septic. Such drastic remedies would disturb and anger the intestinal flora which flew out and about like green bees until settling upon nearby University buildings like Ivy League lichen. Shit with feelers, joined segments swimming, wriggling fecal shrimp. Vitamin millipedes. Stomach flora was a steaming vinegary jungle of improbable flowering plants, animals growling darkly on the rustling

fernlike floor, every so often peristaltic shaking all over, lanterns crashing from the rafters, avalanches, floods and wet internal mudslides. Thhwwoommpp. Colon candy. Sugar boogers. When Doctor Living Stone cut into my intestines an eccentric French tollcollector insisted on being present in order, not to tax it but to paint the verdant expanse. Now that was a compliment. Hey, shits have feelings too! That great instrumental "Bathroom Train", where James Earth hollers Hunhh! Theme to the TV series "Bathroomman", na na nananana na na...

Shitting menacing Halloween masks. The glare of kitten shit.

So filled with poo that I often jumped from a high building safely, cushioning myself internally. That's what St. Simon Stylites did to get down off his pillar n' post when he had to poop.

But shit!, once I was sincerely stuck in the supermarket.

Farmer Gregory's, the first of a chain of those infernal stores grown up from a small produce stall beside what was then a country road. I had to do the do real bad. While a bargain was being anounced over the intercom (ironically, it was for a truckload sale of bath tissue) drew most shoppers to another section of the store, I went in the garden vegetables section. "Here's some organic fertilizer". Wiped myself tearing off leaves from a head of lettuce, cooled the feverish butt on ice which the vegetables rested. But I got the runs when before I knew it I'd emptied a whole pallet of bottles of salad dressing into me for a snack, and hadda use an entire five-pound bag of potatoes as a suppository stopgap measure. "The sprouts this week taste funny" said a disgruntled housewife-shopper.

Tippy once went to the bathroom in a book. That I disapprove.

Why? Middleclass banal retentive. A country coprophage. I'm such a hippie, it's more like floral retentive. I mean, my belly may be big, but I hold it in. Most of the time. All of us, this horror or fascination with the products of our--and everyone's--body has something to do with the fact I'm Middleclass, Middlewest, the background that tried so hard to deny those very messy products. Remember, synthetic nitrogen fertilizer's a big product out here. And it's appropriate to remember Black people are the ones who exclaim and say "shit" the most. The reason, you'd be told, they had to be suppressed, oppressed.

Somewhere medieval I bet it's written that shit equals earth, fart equals air, cum equals fire, and piss equals water. Galen's Good Humors truck, phlegmsicles and yellow bile pops. Balanced like the four Beatles without Pete Best. Body humors like oil and vinegar, oil and water, vinegar and baking soda, wine and cheese receptions, oil and wine, finally body and blood. And blood is cool. Violence and women, y’know?

No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I was joking, please.

Oh, I want to poop out the story of our lives.

I wonder if somewhere in the University is going to call in both pulmonary Tippy and intestinal me, for a study that’s going on how snot in the upper part of the body is connected to shit in the lower.

Like a distorted birth-defect tire, it's a question of fouled, busted pneumatics at both ends of the young burning candle.

Huge maritime storms in my belly, sometimes washing waves of vomit, breaking, spilling into seaside parking lots. Grunts and groans were the first big bass drums sounds I ever heard, making uninhabitable the orchestra pit of my gut. Acidhead stomach. Base metal stomach, maybe cast iron. Stomach imploded like a TV picture tube. Indigenous indigestion. Stomach like a striped bass, swelled up when it's floating dead in an eddy of too many Michigan streams.

Milk attacking cantaloupe at bedtime like pirhanas taking to a milkfed graduating class that fell off a bridge. The samovar of steaming black Russian coffee they fed Francis X. Gary Powers to keep him insomniac so he'd want to spill his tale (along with his runny guts), or the strong tea the English bemusedly fed Rudolph Hess. Coffee is a shovel to these Augean stables.

My gut feeling like a late-night freight train rumbled through town, cavalierly blowing the whistle through sleeping neighborhood, loaded with scrap metal bound for Plunsky's junkyard north of downtown, Ain’t Seen the Sunshine Since I Don’t Know When.

Listening to my stomach growl in the night for oracular voices, trolls under the bridge of my belt or in subterranean mines howling. If I ever come up with song lyrics, it would be from there.

My nickname Duke of Pudgemont came out of a misheard afternoon movie. Perhaps any band I'm in should be called the Roaring Stomachs, its rock songs emphasizing the gastric groans, swooning and sizzling sighs heard deep within.

But my girth and stomachly digestive dysfunction problems really did pose a threat to military preparedness. I mean, an army

couldn't really march on my stomach, or assign me a marching cow just for my diet of fresh milk, could it?

So yes, that’s why I’m not in the Army. I’m playing Rock n’ Roll for my country. And that’s a lot.

Except for mirrors, I would be a man of God. First my narcissism, then my tubby self-loathing. No just God would construct a creature that puerile, that puddy. Self-esteem a puff of steam.

What is loyalty? Judas' bumper sticker Have you hugged your God today? Carrying Tippy like the giant Saint Christopher. Christopher the Christ-stopper. God almost never has an easy way out, or at the present time that's true. My religion a nervous and brittle thing, not a fluid faith. In God we trust, except where marked. Self-castigation and anguish are supposed to lead to a greater spirituality, but I've still got that headache I can't shake. I'm full of INRI reagents. I guess I can't accept anything with all my heart, Savior or otherwise. I need the fiberglass insulation of wordy irony to deal with it.

Better call it a night. I kneel down by the bed, pray.

Our Big Fun Which Allegedly Art in Heaven…

Now look, there are still a lot of bands I want you to know about, to understand where we're coming from. Bear with me.

Our lecture will try to answer the question: What is the origin of bands in human history? In the beginning, to see something and name your gang or tribal troupe—which was ancestor of the band— after it was the greatest form of selfless love, of self-love. Ancient and primitive Rock bands included the Centaurs, the Cicadas, the Canaries (fossils of them found in a coal mine), the Squawking Seagulls, all-hummingbird bands, the Protochimpanzees, the Coelecanth's original version of "Sea of Love", the Centipedes, the Exoskeletons. The Axolotls and the Baboons. The Locusts. Bands like the Louis Quatorze Alligatorz, BoSquiddley Diddley, and the Hematode Toad. The Turnips' "We're Not the World's Worst Band".

The Locusts, on mosquitoey guitars, the Heavy Baluchatheriums and the underdeveloped Eohippies. The Horses' "Rock n' Roadapple".

The Snails' "The Snails Play Live at the Garden". The Manatees.

The Sargasso Sea Monkeys. The Basilisk's "Cousin Basil". The Skunkodelic Difficulties "God is a Skunk" album, all those stickers that came inside it pasted everywhere and the wave of Skunkism that followed. Back when dogs and coyotes had footprints painted on them. A goat with a hammer. Olaf and the Olives. The Sockeye Salmonmen and Coho Caviars' "Rock n' Roe". The recording of the "Duck-Man" TV theme was either by the Raptors or the Cormorants, or the Spoonbills, before they had spoons. Theme song by those queer quetzals the California Quail began "Gonna hear you grill like

the Holy Grail/We're the California Quail". The Emperor Penguins, in such early tuxedos that it actually sounded like jazz.

The Neanderthals' "With Clout" and the funky Ohio Mound Builders. The Maniocs. The Megaliths. The Post n' Lintels. The Glyphs. The Quetzalcoatls and the chaotic Aztec Calendars. The Widow's Mites, the Pink Nubians. The Akhnatons, the Ankhs of Angst, and the Imhoteps, pyramids on their insteps. A band of classical sphinxs, with a harpy solo. "Tears of Israel" by the Bisons of Albion. A horned Jewish rockstar with a circumcised horn section, and a boy horned with bicycle handlebars in the Talmudic Tourists.

The Beershebas growled at David and the Bathshebas, flushed by the success of their "Queen of Sheba" LP. The Skullcaps. The Proconsuls. The Better Christs, the Stigmatics, the Scriptures (house band at club The Baptismal Font), Theology Music, a rock star named—or perhaps reciting—the Rosary. The Holy Ghosts, the Haloes, the Prayers, the Godfears or Godfearers, the Totem Poles, the Churchgoers, Indians from Indiana like the Rupees. The Zen Kings' Zen Fun "Jesus was a Girl" b/w "Funky Address".

Hearing Apollonius of Tyna singing "Tee Na Ni Na Nu" was a major influence on Tristam Shout. The Tertullians, who were probably rock writers, such a critics' band. The Statues, vying with the hot creekbed sound of Johhny Thermoplæ and the Thermoplæyers. All-elephant band Hannibal and the Alps. The Quaranteens, actually devout young Moslems. Every princely college dorm had a copy of Then He Called For... by His Fiddlers Three.

American kids all loved the Halloween Candies. The illuminated record albums by the Judgements of Paris, and the Stentorian Tones,

in judges' robes with gavel guitars. Humanist Gregorian doo-wop by the Fra Filippo Lippis and the Baldacchinos. The Pendulums, whole symbol was Le Pendu, the upside-down hanged man from the Tarot deck. The Mayflower Compacts. John Distrust and the Prayer Books. The Blues Bishops, formed by singer Big Bull Bishop. Dick Whittington and his Cats that Swallowed the Canary. The Cat that Swallowed Admiral Canaris. The Dalai Lamas rivaled Shemp and the Sherpas' own brand of Himalyan hip-hop. Scheduled between the Hourglasses and the Scythes., a short set by the Sachems.

Big old elegant piano bands like the Bechsteins, endorsing Bach Beer, Baroque Beer. The Dutch. The Capuchins and Jacobins, the Roman Noses. The Rogue Elephants, the Haves and Have Nots, "Hey Quagga" by the Procrastinators. The Big Foots, in heavy workshoes with that Bison Grip Sole. The Poltergeists, the Plamandons, the Palimpsetmen. The Pocohanteses. Yodelers like the Alpenstocks, the Cudgels. The Venisonians. The Restored Monuments. Cloud cuckolds like the Waterholes, the Windowseats.

The Scrolls, the Watch Fobs, the Swains. The Safe Dates. Herbert and the Sherberts or the Shys. Motherfucker and the Vandalias. Our grandfathers had bands like the Barrel Staves. The Virtues. Gary Innuendo and the American Dagwoods. Egons and the Umlats, that Aleppo German oompah synthesizer marching band. The Pottersfields, in dirty pottersfield-collared jackets like gravediggers on a Saturday night. Whiskeyish bands like the Windsor Canadians or the Inebriates. A Rock stage Irishman, all spittle and cigar hiss, hand tucked under his arm. The Hooligans were an Irish bunch too, oh how the hotels hated them! The Legislators, and lawyer bands like

the Trustbusters with their catchy "Trust Buster". "The Man's Hard" by the Mansard Roofs. A fashion-qua-politics band the Boss Tweeds, those Tammany Tigers. Bill and the Amendments. The Conestogas gathered in a circle and played their hearts out, plugging their guitars into the campfire I guess. Kooky psychedelic San Francisco band the Emperor Nortons, singing “Over, Under, Sideways, Down the Rainbow”.

Early flying bands like the Kittyhawks played a pub that served special Lindberghers until someone found parts of the Lindbergh baby in one. Somebody was descended from his gramps' 1920's band the Rugcutters or his Mom’s 1940's bands like the Whoopiemakers, the Cement Mixer Putsy Putsies. 1950's bands lighting Coconut Grove Fires from the stage. Integrated 1950's doowoppers the Little Rocks. Corner drugstore bands that still ground their notes with mortar and pestles, to the beat of mortar drums played with pestlesticks. "We Take All the Best Food" by the Sharecroppers. Earl, Derek & the Oil Derricks. "Honey Dub" by the Truckdrivers. The Freightpackers, bands with no more ambition than that might as well be roadies. The Roll Models. The Ipsofactos, the Bittersweets, the Papercuts, unemployable girls the Pinkslips, the Salespersons' "Night in a Storefront", the Bus Stops, the Bad Debts, the Deadnudewoman's Curves (like the fatal runaway truck song), and the hit song by the original cast of the show "Did You Fall or Were You Pushed?"

The Inkwells. The Factcheckers, the Proofreaders' Marks, the Subheads, The Book Jackets, the Not for Publications' "For Background Only, Lonely". Quality paper band the Watermarks. All-

printers bands like the Halftones, the Typefaces, they had songs like "Etoain Shrdlu". Some bands were little more than camera-ready commercial artwork. The Inside Front Covers—some guys who are now editors of some of the textbooks used in your classes used to play with them. But it wasn't until bands like Paper Dick and the Copy Boys—who decades later became The Printer is Out of Paper—that you started getting something that even remotely resembled the fonts and syntax of modern, contemporary-sounding and technologically-enhanced Rock n' Roll.

Many kids in town were content to grow up, get a job in the Farmers and Astrologers' Bank, or piling up debts or to study Refrigeratorology. 9 to 5 nose jobs. Guys we knew like Vinny Iolanthe and Throbby Thingamabob, good rational partygoers in adolescence, they got jobs early and kept 'em all their lives. Smoke a machine-rolled Michigar. Would work for baloney and money, wearing firm civil shoes. Stocking shelves, going into Deodorant Management. Worked for the Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire Donuts, or the Baby Out With the Bathwater Plumbing and Heating Company. Careers like forger-masseur. Could always have a career selling liberal faculty members drugs, a good solid position for townie greasers. Many young people joined the Police force in order to shine flashlights into teenage lovers' cars; the Peter Maids. We merely ignored the chickenshack curfew.

All the Chomps had tried work, as college bookstore clerk, taxidriver, gas station maitre d', liquor store stockboy, busboy, and it all stunk. In that town they wouldn't even let you roll a reefer without

high college aptitude test scores. At least none of us planned to become—sneer, spit ptui!—schoolteachers. Nobody in our generation really has. Reminded of the story of the fellow his age who loves a girl, leaves her and hometown for college, comes back and works for the parents who hold him—like all parents do—in a kind of psychological bondage.

Tippy made it very clear he didn't want to work for no grey stipend. No grey Lazarus even in those fat times. He tried to get a job (his friend's mom worked there) at the Federal Department of Pizza but by that time was showing an allergic reaction to the smell.

Found work one day as an amateur ghost, haunting houses, factories, laboratories. Should've been a cowboy for tumbleweeds rolled across his field of vision, between sidereal glances. He tried to work hard but May I Help You met all to often with I Don't Have Time.

Tried to get a job in a Mind Quality Control department, all the big stores with their psychologist floorwalkers had 'em.

Sign up on the wall GIVE US ALL YOUR MONEY AND WE WILL TRY TO HELP YOU. Blind man at a cash register counting out change ten, twenty thirty with a five, a fifty, a one. For a while he worked in a store which soon attracted a magic man. Something he did suggested Tippy ask him for change for five dollars. In this deal he responded first with pennies, then nickels, coins and so on—"five and five is ten and ten is twenty, twenty, ten is fifty and fifty is a hundred"—until he paid out, paid the man all the money in the world.

At one point Thump worked in a gas station where you had to buy more than one fill-‘em-up tankful each visit; the bookkeeping there was impossible. It wasn't that he didn't always show up for

work, it's just that his mind wandered. And the clocks, that was the worst part, always having to think what time it was at the expense of everything else. Having to wear one on his wrist would be the worst personal pollution he could think of. Clocks are by definition someone else's idea of time. I mean, clocks don't have sex. He saw an ad for cash registers and momentarily brightened, thinking it advertised the Cash Resisters League. Looked for a job in the Want Ads but didn't see anybody advertising for a Leo. Youth, Summer. The day without consequences. Rock little league. Cold beer restaurant. No timelessness like the sweltering Midwest summer in apparently healthy Michigan. For several weeks out of college Tippy had lived under a card table. Then one year he lived in a treehouse, wore a rusty sweatshirt and lived on icicles all winter break. There were no bums in the city, except the young and cool. Out of school in that town we were just sidewalk snails. Strong young filth. The night militia. The nice mafia. Cain and Abel freaks.

Big Rock Candy Martians. Hanging out on Day Old Drive. Sacrificing to the God of Greasers. Bachelors against the wall. Our faces like skyscrapers. Teenage sizzlefaces. Smokin' tomcat tobacco. Lee Harvey Oswald used to sell us Communist LSD. Young cock tunas.

Standing on the corner talking to my boner. The part and waves of my hair made moiré patterns. Out on the street like big dumbstruck bison boys herding dumptruck-jawed farm girls. Making flimflammatory statements about hips that brushed by carrying skirts.

Watching the girl in the middle of her shirt. University of the sidwalk, studying tittyology. Tracking footstep girls. Womanizeresque. The

Salivating Army. Maws like a mouthwash brothel. Studying racoonology in the night, in the threat of the night. How spiders get married. A small hotel in downtown Aleppo called the Regicide, after the one in New York. Girls we knew who worked as maids there had sex on the beds they later made. Optimistic Hellfire clubs constituted to debauch, with offices much like local bailbondsmen, going on business research humping trips to the countryside, but only find girls disconcertingly pure. Looking at naked pictures of girls, the Red Eyebrows of Christ. Talking about extraterrestial married women under a theater marquee for "The Man with the X-Ray Wives".

Tippy, Roque, Thump and Dink. Boners and losers. Midwest wildebeests. Leather lemmings. Interesting emergencies. We were living like a magazine was writing about us already. Young party thiefs with gum sweating in our mouths. Young white cigarette lighters and neo-troublemakers. Hanging out where the cafeteria owners go before the cafeteria opens. Walking down the boulevard of lard. Broke the lackey laws. Tense beatnik affliction lingo.

Sunglasses weather brought out the drugstore cowboys from a cowboy concentration camp. True Griots. Unbuffed polish on our shoes, soap on our faces and shampoo unrinsed from our hair. A Raft of the Medusa haircut. Hair like a windharp. Each wearing his spermshirt, sperm sport coat to get those girls that way. Sexy shirts of whispercloth. Slim male tobacco leaves, we would hang out on the corner speaking cigarettois. Using slang like calling something "vaped" for "vaporized", U.F.O. words. Have fun at the risk of being super uncool. We pool our change and somebody goes and gets a bottle of bitter wine called Hausfraumilch, the only kind they could

make in Michigan. Cursing the obduracy of old honks who refuse to step down and let those who are nearly highschool graduates rule!

Buying our drugs in front of the campus pharmacy. All voices would fall silent and stare when a woman walked into an all-male enclave like the Smokin' Shop. Tippy would light all his cigarettes at once so they'd be ready to smoke at a moment's notice when he wanted one, that's how he treated the girls in that town. Leaning out of the car, praising in that most sincere voice a girl who's miniskirt was so short it covered like a smidgen of sauce upon a well-done steak.

We're young and smart and impatient! We were strong, tall unwatered plants. We were flowers of quantity, flowers of negation.

Felt so cool, like every cell was a newspaper to be read by the light of a tiny little Saturn in a mason jar, ain't no babies in the trunk (and here he'd slap his crotch) of my car! Baby I'm electric, so lick my life from the blade of a stiletto. Squeeze my leg till the juice runs down my life, I'm a Shake Age Object. Everything modern is good, everything oldfashioned is bad. Hung buffalo don't want just one woman cuz one's never enough. That whitey Nixon eats! I want everything and I want it now. Hope I die before I get odd.

Pause to reflect upon the amazing capacity of the human body to absorb, process chemicals: That hallucingnome Tippy's drugs, my food, Dink's drink, Thump's toxic industrial oils and solvents. In a certain sense Thump, Dink and I were all brothers, sons of a drunken father called Aleppo who left one son to fall into drink, another into violence, and the third—the intellectual—into God knows what. Tippy thought the three of us looked like brothers, thought we looked like the Chomps Trio. Maybe all of us really have the same mother. All

our fathers were Chomps too, the Father as fathead. Or could Tippy be our father? He's been doing it, at it, long enough.

I wish I could say we did something exciting like hunting buffalo from motorcycles. Mostly we just, y'know, hung out. Dimly, in the late afternoon when the drugs and nice weather wore off, came the musk of realization that we'd have to do something. Someday maybe.

OK, here's the beginning of the band. But I warn you, I'm going to go back and cover missing ground, fill in winter potholes on the story's crumbling streets.

Oh, man, I loved playing with the band, co-baking its bristlefood cake of Rock. Do you have a band? You could, you know, play some songs and jam with your girlfriends. Or sing with guitarslung male musicians. You want to sing, don’t you?

To be young in those days meant you could only tell time by the length of a record. The cloud-cuckoo clock of Rock, the impudent setup. The night we saw Jenny Lind on the prime-time network Rock show "Wingding", Colonel P.T. Barnum was beaming from the wings and Jumbo the elephant was used as an amplifier, an adaptor to the guitar jack on his trunk. Seeing that spectacle got us deeper into Rock n' Roll, the sea we grew up subconciously swimming in. The emotional plane where family equals famished, suffering ninety-six tears in the social fabric. You have to realize, these are lives for whom music is management, so disorderly that an E chord goes to G goes to A provides their only structure.

The First Bloke, the First Beatle. The Beatles were the world's most middleclass band because they too live in illusion, the heat of the beat. Connecting the frontal lobes of Rock by the light of the radio. Stop Beatle-ing around those girls' bushes and start a band.

I hesitantly proposed we start a Rock band. The rest of the guys endorsed it, pretended it was their idea, or acted like having one had always been the case. So we got the band together. Yipes.

What have I gotten us into?

All of a sudden, even we had purpose.

The water filtration plant's settling sludge pond by his school probably had toxic effects on Tippy’s lungs and nose, gave him a deep watery voice. I'm sure it did on my bowels, on my belly, so inflated with hydrogen like the Hindenburg.

Was Tippy shadow-boxing, writhing, foaming onstage with all the uncontrolled rage of the Oedipal Jewish kid? The furious Freud of Rock, though Dr. Siggy Jungstoogeadlerreich himself eventually cooled down, lit a cigar, figured it all out, wrote books, put on a tie. Of course I'm envious, as the well-behaved straight-and-narrow boy.

His is a world of voices raised, outside of rage and desperation, in daily life and family activity. Oy! We were Tippy's tripod, the band sturdily holding up the movie or TV camera that was Tippy.

We were one of those bands whose members are all the same blood type. Which might prove useful later on, if our tour bus crashed or something. The four different humors were embodied in each member of our band: sanguine, choleric, bilious. Every gig an issue

of the body's humor magazine, like DANG! magzine, or the university's own GOLEM (since 1900).

How we were also like the four Evangelists of Rock: Tippy the angel, me the ox, Thump the lion, Dink the drunken eagle. Churches will make stained glass windows in our honor, and—like our area churches' young women—we, or the next wave of bodacious boys like us, will be honored to break them. The sacrament of rocks, Christmas crossbows. As others say Allelulia, we sneer Haw! Score!

Lonesome!

Irritating make-you-leave-the-room music with feedback and amplifathermother buzz. Tippy wanted to craft our own make-youleave-town music.

Thinking up riffs is like shitting ideas, germs of songs to mutter to Tippy for him to pick up and run with then declaim (and probably someday claim ownership, but I'm not paranoid). Think I saw a dog eating another’s shit when young, therefore was it mad? Spatters out of my guitar, often uncontrollably or under great strain, the offering that brings me peace and relief.

I think I'm going to like being in this band.

We didn't invent music itself. At any supper club or steak house after a few warm whiskeys you'd find a singalong of solid chuckwagon-soul'd Midwesterners bellowing out "Wealth Train", hearty verses about the praries and fields of irradiated wheat like her dishwater hair. Ballads about Conestoga wagons dropping off cliffs, banjos ringing like the clink of gold nuggets when they do, and choruses dedicated to early Midwest riverboat pioneers in the rapids

with bobbing barrels of Daniel Boone's bootleg whisky/ Businessmen who went Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day. Bison in the Flood.

Newspaper ads for orchestral supperclub entertainers billed them as "The Slightly Swollen Sounds of...". Michigan had only produced one musical notable, the saloon singer Tony Erotica, and his session men Scott Maxilla and Mack Mandible were playing amplified drums and a Jellotron under the name "Futurica Melodiciata" at the first salad bar in Aleppo. The trend towards greater democracy in that liberal University town led to salad bars, smorgasbords and the city motto (originally, until about 1949, in Latin) "Mother, Please, I'd Rather Do It Myself," which by city ordinance applied not only to kitchens but also to young boys scrubbing their genitals in the bath with the U.S. flag.

It also led to the appearance of small Pop combos.

There was one cool local Rock band, the Los Roughneckados, a bunch of even greasier guys with parents born South of the Midwestern border. Excellently pixillated Mexicans. Danny Ersatz haircuts stuck out in front like a shelf for a jar of pomade or the handle of a zip gun. Expressions on their faces like they were weaned on cactus. Impeccibly brushed suits. Tough and slick. We, on the other hand, were all guys who looked like they were abandoned as children, as if in leaving for work our parents dropped us on their way out, left us on our own. The Los Roughneckados played radio hits with a serious tone of menace, and dance instrumentals like "Farmer Gregory", about the produce stand outside of town that gave them picking jobs in grade school. Guys for girls familiar with the Wet Side Story. Had the newspaper chosen to review them (policy: nothing good except by or for white people) it

would've followed a policy of stern damning editorials by the old Police Reporter from the Condemnation Desk. Instead grownups chose to ignore Youth Culture in those days. Personally, I confess that until junior high school, I was kind of scared of teens like them.

But Tippy thought we could be like them, get a piece of their action without them noticing and kicking our butts.

Friends are people you can show your vices in front of, and most friendships hinge upon the sharing of one or more vices. Our band was important in the clown world. The band is the bond. I'm bad as a warrior to be in a band. These bands are the male bonding which sings about male-female pairing, even the significant coupling which ultimately makes obsolete and does away with the boy bunch.

Perhaps bands were the first dawning bits of a collective society, a people becoming one big drumbeat band to live in harmony? “That's hogwash, propounded by some University professor”, Mom said. I want to express the team spirit of Rock, the boys who don't live with or for each other through sports. Rock was becoming the next football. At one point we seriously considered getting football Congressman Senator Gerald Ford onstage with us, we could hit him and knock him over or something. Tumbling over the drum set. Set him on fire during the finale like that colored guy did with his guitar.

Dink decided he'd play bass guitar. They call it "bass" like the sullenmouthed fish, swimming through the depths of a song. The bubbling of a grouper-mouth prognathous jaw-slack Great Lakes bass. The bassman in the basement. Dink's grabbed his instrument like a lamppost and lurched through a simple bass line. He'd drink

until he reached clarity, then pick up that invasive, interloper instrument. Bass part like a throbbing headache, low nausea. Notes deep and disappearing as the epiphanies that a drunk thinks. I noticed the affinities between alcoholism and Cubism in the way Dink thought and talked, which worked well in the way he played his bass.

Dink dribbled like a toothless drunk across the lower extremities of the song. The childhood baseballplayer realized that bassplayer sounded like just the closest thing to it. Dink had taut stomach muscles from the tight string thumping of that electric bass, which had also been tightened from the inside because he drank so much. Old bass players would ask him the question "Catgut caught your tongue?" Before our band Dink did play a pick-up gig once with the Drunken Dream Boats, when their bassist was too drunk and dreamstained to pick up his own bass. In the Beatles tradition, like all underrepresented bandmembers of the era Dink wrote pathetic little songs of his own, but the best he could come up with was "Let's Tie One On". Let's heat up some vodka. His crazy Guggenheim museum of bassnotes, clotted aneurisms of rhythm from his thudfingered bass. Blubbering stumblebum basslines, notes on a binge for mourning, morning-after music. The Mens' room loping of a watery bass. Gangway! The thub thub thrub of his accusatory j'accuse bass more like a bubbling jacuzzi, notes like a silly football player turning somersaults in the whirlpool bath. Some wag, probably the ubiquitous Threadbear, compared Dink’s playing to when you're sitting on a crowded rush-hour bus and a standing drunk who has shitted his pants falls onto your face when the bus jerkily starts up.

Dink was delighted, grinning Tonight I am a man because I play in a band. I will allow the music to play tricks upon me. Why the most slovenly bums lovingly groom each other. Dink's sound would dance droolingly and sway with slow vomitous laughter, fingerpoppin' to the fingerfood instrumental "Tequilafinger". Forty Fluent Ounces of Soul. Scenarios flying, spinning and happy.

In his cups, Dink explains: Drunk I can dance to my favorite records, pretend I'm holding and weepily disciplining my unborn and unconceived children, that I'm caring for aged relatives like Auntie who bought me the bass in the first place. Father bragged how I could sweat out my infant D.T.'s in the holding tank of my crib myself but it was she who picked me up when I cried and took me out drinking Slovenly Comfort. I knew it, behind everything creative there's a fucked-up family. Bartenderfoot children. Grandsons of the Gods. Alcoholics are people whose sadness overcomes them.

Prisoners of non-detachment. Dink, you're cool.

Musicians of silence, musicians of restraint, that'll be the day.

As a band, we couldn't tell which way to hold our instruments, but that didn't matter. All it takes to form a band is a name, an image in dress and demeanor, a style carried soon over into a record cover. Tippy started referring to us as the Chomps like the old television tragedians. At least the Chomps Trio always had each other, even if their friendship consisted of whumping each others' chests and heads like Yanomamos, maybe we do that to each other musically. And slapstick Chomps we were, put fly-in-the-icecube drinks, itching powder in other bands' glittering lurex jumpsuits, sneezing powder on

the microphone. Joy buzzers replaced the buttons on the amplifiers and guitars, and whoopie cushions somehow appeared on the first three rows of seats, unless those were real farts. Three chords equal the Chomps Trio.

I hadn't mentioned there were secret surfers in Motorsburgh in those days who would taked boards hammered out of old car hoods and fenders and sink in the warm gushing sluices outside of foundries and factories like the ore-reddened River Rogue. Inevitably they'd get cuts, hangnails and shaving nicks infected by the polluted water and orange oxide air. They'd try to pass them off as "Bad Complexions" till soon the sportsmen would cut class nauseated, sicken, miss school and die. Truant officers, completing their own degrees at the University at night in their spare time, would compile reports and graphs on this phenomena as part of their research grants. The same surfin' kids would recognizably often mock-blond their hair with chlorine bleach, hydrochloric acid, carbon tetrachloride, Christmas window spray-snow flocking or processed cheese spread.

They wore sweaters like 1920's crooners or Hollywood golfers, these surfin' bird-brains. A dorm room gyre. Door left ajar We'd still try to make friends with 'em in order to borrow their records, for they'd never get around to asking for them back.

Listening to rattletrap cassettes intently on cigarbox cassette machines, hairdryer or pencil-box record players with ballpoint needles, we constantly boned up on the realm of Rock.

Entertainment and its attainments. Records that never get returned to the store unopened. Our influences and our swelling record collections obsessed us. The authority of fame we set ourselves up

before were records, and of course pressclippings, as corridorpasses thru life. Records are report cards, listen and between the groove you'll note all absences and tardiness. Nuts, I keep forgetting to forget school.

This was fun! This band was gonna be our Scout pack for all time! Opportunity for success lay like a virgin on the ground. I want our band to be a certain way for a million years. I was so excited and having such a good time manning my guitar my head spun like a Summer tornado caught up some farmer's septic tank. My mind works kind of putting things together, disparate items, which lets me stitch together a munificent, louche guitar solo with so few notes.

Unlike a lot of these hotshots nowadays, especially British or east coast, I can only play a few. But, undoubtedly, the right and proper ones. Guitar solo like the jaw of a dog. Guitar strings taut as an old hymen. That's a carpal tunnel thing to say. Nobody played a Jew's harp, haw haw haw.

Here, you can be in the band too! But Tippy got moody, thought something was lacking, convinced us we were wimpy. We craved authenticity, so figured we'd borrow or steal some.

As youth, besides girls, is defined by vandalism, it was our obligation to invent Rock n' Roll. Every band reinvents Rock with the same three chords and, mostly, the same three songs. And there ain't nothin' but Rock.

Our own huggermugger sound was purely instrumental at that point. Chordprogressionism of the Mind. But one night the drugs must've been a little bit different or something, for when we stayed up

all night, like werewolves on a hill we discovered singing. The songs that the gol durn world was born knowing. Began with the sensitive ballads "Pennyloafer Lover", "Bird or Angel?" and "Prisoner of Fucking", and the old Blues song "Lay that Bison Burden Down ". A few old Adult Brothers songs. Tippy was caught humming that Italian crooner's song from the romantic comedy "The Bleeding Bride". I thought about the nature of singing, was reminded how Christ supposedly didn't cry on Christmas at birth but saved his song for torture.

Flour drums padded, as Thump’s impressive rolls rose like yeasted bread seeking an oven.

The Chomps hung together, went downtown and saw acts that were yet to be famous on their way to to historic concerts. A reporter from England covering the Whatsis?'s gig at the Niteclub at the start of their triumphant American tour said Oi, Blokes! and told us we were the face. Thump must be the cauliflower ears, Dink the runny nose, I the alert judgemental eyes and Tippy must be the big mouth.

Tippy, the mouth to the Press and voice of this band? You must be kidding. He only shakes the tambourine and claps along a little, while mouthing mumbles. He was one part lion, one part girl's bike. Maybe he’ll right a coherent song someday, but don’t hold your yeast infection. I mean, breath.

The Pumas’ band kind of adopted us, since we readily played for their political benefits. We weren’t revolutioanarily progressive, but we weren’t proud. Their graphic design dude Quimshare

designed us a fine logo, Chomps in sort of space-age lettering, letters fused together and curving like 1950s metal furniture from Scandinavian or suburban Motorsburgh furnishings industry designers.

Like them, we took LSD to enrich ourselves, to ferret out magic in the midwestamerica mundane. Stuff the Indians—nay, the forest animals, even—had planted for us tens of thousands of years ago, even if it took Swiss watchmakers to catalyze it.

Tippy took sufficient heavy metal LSD to give him chromeplated chromosomes. Mercurial, not leaden, idea drugs. They make you say "Hey, what's the big idea?" to ponder. Too much, you'll be saying "Why, I oughta..." pugnaciously, ready to sock your friends.

Those Britanniacs must've been psychic. Realizing there was something he could do with it, Tippy began to like Rock. His good essence had appeared at the age of thirteen but his band danced night and day to stomp it out. Tippy was so bad because he never had a serious Confirmation or Bar Mitzvah, so his childhood never ended for him, and instead became a cancerous growth. That was nice but Tippy never stopped, fer Chrissakes.

Thump was irked that summer that coeds were being murdered at the fringes of the various universities and colleges around the state by a reportedly handsome, clean-cut boy on a motorcycle, and not by him. Having all the alleged-to-be-fun that he deserved. So I said Hey, let’s do this band thing together instead, OK? One day soon after, Thump had been

rifling around a junkyard near Wildebeast Run, the old aircraft factory where after the War there were lots of old crashed testpilots' airplanes, and he brought back a pilot's intercom microphone. Tippy rolled it around his palm and fingered it nervously then began murmuring into it. Discovered his voice was like the craters of the moon, all bony hollow echo where atmosphere's supposed to be. Sang in concentric circles, a voice like a Mexican sombrero. Voice like a kangaroo's pouch stretching, or churchbells cracking. The barking of prarie dogs.

An American voice, harsh and self-advertising, promoting something. A crotchety voice, that is to say, a voice like an experienced crotch, betraying its mechanics and passion.

Tippy became de facto, defecto and de fucto vocalist because girls were the only instrument he could really play so he sang about that.

A voice soft as an electric heater in an apartment, like an old refrigerator at night, voice like tiles falling off bathroom walls. Like things falling apart, no longer at ease. An animal's discomfort in its smelly, cramped cage. A ventriloquist's defeat. Discovering his own voice made him happy as a dancing master smelling a young protegé girl's leotard. Tippy discovered his amplified shriek could fill the underground tank in a gas station, or fell a bird in the sky sure as a slingshot.

Spelunking the caverns of his nose, playing the piano of his nasum with his fingers led him to discover how to tune his nose, fine tune its reception till it changed the pitch of his voice. Tippy's favorite food, pizza spaghetti, would come out of his nose, alchemically

transforming into a philosopher's snot of little musical notes all over his shirt. His nose flowed while he sang, wiping it between gasping breaths upon the sleeve of his jacket, flowing like piss cum creativity.

Live snakes came out of Tippy's nose when he picked it, stripey slim garden-variety garter snakes, dusty desert rattlers, twisting black mambos thick as a Motorsburg negress' arm (like that of singer Uretha Thomas-Jefferson). He'd snot up, fishing worms or agricultural-nasties like cabbage worms, ready to munch lawn or carpet, blew out of his nose. Furry caterpillars yearning to be butterflies, or horrendous webs of tent caterpillars filling his nose, anchored on his chin. As a child, he called his finger in his nose rhinoprestidigitation, as he pretty much reshaped it, into something much more gentile, with his internal pressure. It was horrible, but there was something very woods, very Michigan about it too.

Running stools of vocals and even blood from the tiny female spot of yin in his yang, flowing yet flummoxing like a fountain of song, song like the fountain of the little boy from the Belgian town square pissing all over the novelty-item catalogs. Playing his chin and spilling the song all over it. His voice sounded like his best ideas snarling, or his worst turds plopping. Guttural yet celestial, the dark air moving in the cold slipstream whooshing high above the Earth.

The crumbling voice of the magma-larynx, fragmenting like all truth.

From a whine to a grumble, it contained no temperate middle range, evocative of no ethic of middleclass Midwest moderation, and that's good.

Early song list was pretty much limited to "The Mule", "Giant Steps/Baby Steps", "The Giant Girl Steps Back", "The Grateful Girl

Shops" and "The Beautiful Girls", enough for one long event or several entertaining parties. A limpid, dove-censored version of the Dates' "Kiss My Date" and "Caution: Third Date" singles. "Sixty Thousand Flirts", wasn't that a song?

Our bellyfull of tunes grew nightly. Stock car versions, lock stock and barrelhouse, of "Green Moo Cow", "It's an Oversight, Baby" and "Sweet Little Desk" as good as the originals. Dink befuddled around on the bassline to the Mandrilla's "Drinking in the Streets".

Tippy, in his uninhibited dancing around, stepped on my 45 of that "Big Zombie" novelty song, a favorite when I was a kid.

Pinched songs, compelling as the smell of magic markers. The uncrossed legs of sensibility. Lyrics floated in blood. When the cat's away the mice will play electric guitars. Does this song go on my permanent record? I forget, I'm not in school any more.

I took to the stage, grinned to look happy. Heaping a perfect pyramid upon the world. Gallant momentum. We had to invent Rock n' Roll or blow ourselves up. We did blow out the windows on the Quonset Hut Grocery Barn three miles away just by plugging in our amps, and everybody on that tough greasy old Midwest side of town went shoplifting. Gangster rhythms. Quicksong. The first Rock n' Roll version of a three-minute egg. Wrote a song about a tampon left on the moon that fell out of the bag of the most careless woman astronaut, that old subject. I was honored to co-engine this band.

No, maybe I was the leader. This was my band, I led, my moment of glory. It was the best band there ever was as it was balanced chromatically according to Galen, one phlegmatic, one guy choleric, one sanguine and me one melancholy dude. We positively spat

etheric phlogiston.

We wrote the song "Little Jar" about a girl whom those boys just filled up.

He began the song One, two, lick dogshit offa my SHOE! An enemyish yell from Tippy. Like something he'd say in poetically distended sleep.

Gasping asthmatically, a pressure cooker of song.

Tippy passed a bolus of song, warm noises like diseases of the mouth.

My sharp stiletto guitar lead slit your thoughts, as an assassin or bandit might your throat. A loud guitar razzberry, sound made electronically as if by the tongue and rubbery lips.

Enamored and wryly amused of Rock's rapturous magic and destruction. This game of Rock felt like the boldest surgery. The stage is the true self, you can only be alive, unthinking, in public. An Olympic-sized band. So swelled-up with pride that snot and moths were coming right out of our jackets. Ours was the Garage of the Popes. As we practiced in the garage Mom soon tired of hollering Turn That Down, and listing to censor us if we swore about sex or too much romantic love. "Don't fall in love" she always cautioned. Rock n' Roll is the war of the boys against their mothers. Make musical instruments out of your parents. When the other guys came over to practice my Mom practically made the band finish a full bowl of candy before she left us alone to play. What Will the Neighbors Think (they dug it)? Bands were springing up all over Aleppo. One faculty brat

stole his father's hunting crossbow and strung it like a balilaika, which he then electrified. Another proceded to take all of his (an old English professor rumored to have had sex in his youth with nanny Mary Poppins) father's Literary Criticism and set it to dirgelike Rock trumpet solos and aircraft engine whoosh. Maybe parents are just offended by the assertively raucous volume of Rock, still vainly searching for the musical part. Sort of a Sousa and the Elders. Our locked-garage conciousness filled with fumes and nearly exploded.

This concept of smoke-damaged Rock would carry us far.

This was my Rockabildungsroman music. Maybe I was growing up. Rock as Flesh made Spirit? No, I'm not sure I really know the difference yet. Physical music, music made beef and pork, music made snake. A lot of ca-ca, doo-doo and cock-a-doodle-doo humor. Sturm und drang, which is German for cock n' cunt. I had never taken Rock n' Roll seriously enough, had gone on long bus trips with the Debate team, not getting back till late at night and missing the band's practice. Rock n' roll is argumentation with a beat.

I like Rock n' Roll for it deals in the potent symbols. Rythm n' portents. The University's early experiments in holography led so many youth to seek the illusory fame of Rock. While boys and girls played beetles and mealworms, we wanted to be the Beatles. Tippy was on 45 rpm when everyone else played long and with high fidelity at thirty-three and a third. That number even sounded conservative, like some year his father would remember in which the banks failed.

"Oh, the horror of University-ethic Rock, honoring both sides of the fence!" went one two-chord garage chant. The guys who thought you had to have a poetry Ph.D. to play C-Am-F-G. Seeking the kind

of writing where apostrophe equals catastrophe. Me, papermouth, there's a story burning inside me. With steadfast determination I continued my obsession with squaring the circle of Rock.

My musical aesthetic had always been one of too many notes, played too well. Notes with a reputable history. If it's classically highbrow, count me in. I played an obligato out of obligation. Sure, I'm in a Johann Sebastian Bag. Chopin on a chopper. Pachelbel at Taco Bell. A downright Debussy for pussy. But all I knew about music was from books, and I soon learned that scholarship didn't count. Out of exasperation Tippy ran over, asked me to remove my sunglasses and graciously performed a lobotomy with the drugsoaked microphone as a sharpened leucotome. Dink and Thump laughed at this prank, but I learned that there was a meta-sound beyond learning.

We had no use for complicated Patchouli-fisted playing, jazz sixtyninth chords. This was insensible Rock, the sound hot water makes when its cleanliness catches on fire. The absence of safety.

That makes you want to lick hot mirrors. Tension too hot on a bridge.

Chords chafing over guitars like bee-wing vibrations. Called the Chomps for the style of guitar chords, chomp chomp kachompa chucka chuck da CHOMP. Chunga chunka... and so on. I played a guitar line that was a palindrome but Tippy was unimpressed. Played a chord called Shit for Brains. Anything more than three chords is Kabbala. Two chords are better than three, the use of only one is best of all. Pumpin' circumstance. When we turned up real loud the feedback sounded like a locked safe or piano--or one of the Magus

Megaron amps themselves--dropping from an upper-story office window to the sidewalk below.

Drums rumble patter like stockinged feet. First irritating, later an exhilarating headache like driving a convertible real fast with the wind whipping the dog's ears behind him. A hellish baying sound to the drums, you're gonna slap those poor drums to death. Drumming on the point of a pyramid. A bong of drums. Drums equal somebody's mother's breasts. Ointment for the drums from a positive gland. The bass drum loped sticky like cum and further rhythm elocutions, rhythm electrocutions and rhythm erections. Sound like a Pontiac or Oldsmobile running over a TV dinner tray, or gargoyle batwings aflapping. Clanked brightly like a can of light. That hot beat, that hot water beat, that hot water heater beat in a saltcellar full of noise. Down in the basement of the soul.

Tippy's voice like rubber satin, some kind of blanket under a baby fathered by the Cardinal. That fingerprint voice, that safecracking croon. Voice a cockatoo, a warbler, the aardvark's bark, the dire wolf's dishwasher emergency. Voice monotone, more monochrome than mercurochrome. The id on a holiday. Voice as irritation, the grain of sand that makes the pearl inside the echoing bandshell. Words like baby autographs, anti-news. Wind-in-thewarehouse vocals. Tippy's made-for-PVC vocals blurted: Like agar agar in a petri dish I'm a medium for your every wish.

You can shit or get fucked in evey house on the block Won't stop me from loving you round the clock.

She slept with a lot of boys

She made the eyes and he'd make noise.

Some people say you belong in the carwash Say you'll be AWRIGHT to me...HHYUNNHHH... with that sullen expression, acid-sharpened to a pinpoint. Not a great profile, but certainly a great prophylactic. More than just an entertainulator. You got to work your butt off to save your skin sometimes. Smile a whale's balleen, humming thru a tissue'd pocket comb or maybe that's just the amplifiers. Adenoidal huff. Punching widenosed, wipenose, paper-towel tambourines. Dancing across the stage with sidekick legs. Tippy sidesteps the song onstage, the music like a pack or angry dogs a mailman has to avoid. Frustrated, he made little milk fists. I wanted to see him tease the audience with complicated, difficult words: "Let me hear you say 'frequency..diphtheria..aeolipile.." but that wasn't Tippy's style. The way he mumbled "obsessed" it rhymed with "upset", the front part.

Sending message Messerschmidts in these songs. A man turns into his own crowd onstage. The words themselves were no more than "While You Were Out" messages. The crowd members then become intellectuals. He constantly misquoted himself. Nameless and illegitimatewas the voice Tippy would try for. Cro-Magnanimous to our fans. Fecal vocal. A raw ideas dog. They said his songs were written on a dog's wagging tail, puppy whimpers and the growl of the in-heat. Our whelping, whippet guitars with devices that made 'em sound like beagles baying at the moon from the confines of a lonely pound, confined by a chain-link-fence of the drumbeats. Dog-doo drums. Our music sounded like the right dogs barking.

Music a sort of bathroom Beethoven. Music so suburban it still often had the sound of pots and pans, pegboards going up in a garage workshop, electric sanders, Beethoven's gluegun, sonatas of spar varnish being applied to picnic tables. Being born in a peelingsteel mobile home was the reason Tippy's voice sounded so metallic, and his friends' guitar so tinny and drums like washtubs. The notes we used were unmarked notes like conterfeit bills, unlisted phones or a marked deck of card. Notes with no serial numbers, that song a dark and dented car with missing license plates. Mockingbird bass.

Bass guitar strings like spun umbilical cords, or wires put thru intestines for patch cords. Abrasive drums. The sting of the drums.

Banging, tapping on musical glasses filled with water. Guitars going whamwhamwhamwham and other comic-strip noises. Music filled the room like a fluke swimming in a bull's infected eye.

Katharoouumnmowee Thumba thumba, thug thug thug Chikka chikka chavva chau chikka chikka went some instruments and tippy began singing: The President now isbut a dustrag In JFK's parking lot Only the masseuses change I'll be your hangman, I hear your death rattle You honky Cadillac cattle I'll be the chaser to your third damn drink…

Squooeee-ee-ee spat my guitar atop Thump’s drum roll.

Hey Gamelan Breath! I'm proud ours is a unique sound that's a cross between a dog and a violin. Song like the moan of a distant

chainsaw, snow-blower, lawnmower. Roar-o-mumbling the Panther Mantra. The Man in the Moan, like a toad in the moat in ancient times. The song is the man. A threnody to nodding out. Holding the microphone stand his arms felt like great pumping hypos. Some of his songs were just shrieking onomatapeamania. Potowatomi field hollers. This was just Frankensong, a pistachio pastiche, nutty tuttifrutti. Narcopop.

Rock n' roll is trans-parent, which is to say, beyond the parents and their channelling into the child repression of his or her lust.

Electric music begets homunculi. Rock stars are mathematically less-than or greater-than-or-equal-to the boys they inspire with formulae, and thus serve as an example with some subtlety. Some kids piled into a stolen schoolbus to check out the first drive-in movie about Rock "They Came Out of Some Garage". Other kids had died when, intensely practicing their music and packed together in a tight garage, they were too transfixed to notice the family station wagon poisonously idling there. Monoxide Moms wept to the papers. Rock was the deep end of the pool and Tippy held our head under. Well, that kind of drowning certainly helped pass the Summer. But the garage didn't really count, for our victories were not yet accountable before massed armies of Youth. If we opened the door only cars and station wagons passed by, or people's little brothers and sisters. A band that childishly, sullenly asks the musical question What, I didn't throw them eggs at that house. We had frittered away the Summer, but we were sharpening our rifles. Now let's get serious and conquer the world. Rock concerts were basically prize fights for youth. The

dirty university. I was ready to use my guitar as a guillotine. In this world they judge a man by his guitar pick.

Like many people, I think about spiritual things sometimes when I get hight. Thinking a lot about Christ stuff these days, y'know.

Nice day, smell the God in the air. God's good aim is in the air.

Hi babe, nice day if it don't God. Summer's here and I'm drowning in God and it's sweet.

So am I a sort of John the Baptist to Tippy, leading him onstage, preceding Tippy into Rock? Jay the Bee in his JD haircut?

It was my idea to start the band anyway, remember? God's Best Man in a Man's World, a Baphomet Hominid eating locusts with honey—that explains my bad digestion--in the desert of the Midwest?

Bop the John the Bap and at the same time Judas? John the Bap was this wild thing in the wilderness advance man, underassisted West Coast promotion man, this drummer, horseman for the whore Salome. Not just the friendly little urchin John the Baptist of the children's books, inviting you to Christ's birthday party. Even the Magi promised to be there.

Mm, hey, I was Coral's John, the Baptistest on the block, having most embarassingly lost my head over Coral her when I saw her standing there swhen she danced the Salami with me. Yes, I’ll get around to telling you about Coral, and how knocked out by her salaaming salami boney maronie baloney, young chomp and Chomp that I was. Keep your pants on. Or don’t, heh heh.

Don’t give me that look, I’ll get back to the story.

One summer, my older brother Thump taught me how to hang out. Of course we didn't have time for summer jobs. As Professors and their faculty wives tend to hypochondria and general systemic weakness, there were several drugstores in Aleppo. The name Curry Drugs implied a spicy mix, an aromatic tumeric slurry of vindaloo pills, as some London mod band sings. Blecchster's was another pharmacy on the other side of town, where Thump and I read MODERN FLYING SAUCERS magazine, with its ads for motor parts to customize them, and celebratory monster t-shirts. At the old and venerable drugstore Altkockers' Alleppothecary (pompous university coinage), its drugstore cowboys harassed citizens and passersby.

One old biddy, who turned out to be Grandma Mars, had been a tugboat captain, swung at them cursing to high Hell with a purse full of blackjacks, brass knuckles and cudgels, and thus broke jaws, teeth, sunglasses, thoroughly held her own.

Thump and his friend, this kid Dink, had hung out in front of a drugstore the summer before, trying to look menacing, giving people grim and challenging looks. A look that would stop moms in their tracks, clutching their handbags even harder. Looks that would rattle their cage called marriage. Menacing to children and preadolescent boys. A stare that would burn into their hearts, especially only children rattled by parents' unhappy menopausal marriage, a nervous lady with a mama's boy in tow looked at an ad for a too-realistic overthe-head monster masks after a Beefaloes (wholesome English band) movie and slouched out of the store, weeping. Hah! Score!

Mom had said she was frightened her boys would be panhandled, manhandled, jostled and assaulted by teenage

"drugstore cowboys", but, ironically, that's what her boys, we, became. Eye-menacing all girls, feebs and ephebes. Bullying younger, fatter, timid youth in front of the drugstore. "New Menace: Bullying Youth?" said the Aleppo Aristocrat headline, equating the phenomenon with race riots, drug addiction, assassinations, overseas and nuclear war. Once I got my aviator sunglasses, I felt insouciant and unflappably cool enough to join them, sneer at passers-by and ogle girls.

Yes! A public persona at last!

We needed a place to talk, to plot, to meander, to girlwatch properly. I determined the apogee of Aleppo was this corner of Patriotism Blvd. and Midwest Street. And here was the Aleppothecary), where any vagrant sentries would be catching girls coming out of the movie theatre straightening their skirts after fingers had been beneath them.

This motley croup established ourselves in front of the drugstore beside the Status Sun Ra Cinema, a 1930s rosiecrossy Egyptian temple thing, tossed off by a Jewish university architect in a weekend's folly, big terracotta pharaoh's head glowering Let My People Go. Men streamed into the alley between the movies and the drugstore, sullen, suspicious and with collars upturned, for back behind there was a long-time campus brothel. Something to do with the University football team, for it was called The Sporting House.

When we stood in front of the drug store, it was in part because Thump said adults would bring us strong antihistamines and codeine cough syrups. He said he couldn't sand another sleepless night of my hacking, coughing, wheezing...which I didn't even know I did. The

Aleppothecary thus became the crossroads of our universe, our vantage point to stare down honkies, rivals and vulnerable girls.

I tried to speak in manly clichés but would get them wrong; "Colder than a girlfriend's butt" only elicited sneers. We stood there like the Thugs of Christ. Dancing moneylenders to come into the temple, with the cool, accusatory stare of the Apostles at normal, boring Jerusalemites. We gave Aleppo that blessing.

Harassing chubby pre-teens and their mothers coming out of the Theater. Call us, snide mama, pharmacy cowpunchers, cattlerustlers of cough drops, sure. Still, we had fun. It's a pleasure to sneer, to menace from behind sunglasses, to voice our deepfried first impressions of girls walking by. Whistling our weltschmerz.

Rather than merely purchasing various Jewish marijuanas on campus, Thump and Dink were still so young and ignorant, they thought in front of a drugstore would be the best place to score fun drugs. Menacing younger kids, Thump demanded their lunch money.

He and Dink (sometimes called Dinkus, when he drank that Jewifruit wine)bought drink and drugs, but I always invested in record albums from the SpinCycle Records store across the street. There'll always be stereo.

Sure, we’d been called "apothecary cowpunchers" by the sneering, balding professors on campus. We chose that corner in front of Altkockers' Alepppothecary to stand because it commanded a view of hot college girls coming out of the movie theater next door.

And because of my nearsightedness, I could actually see and evaluate them top to toe here. Wealthy freshman girls are being taken clothes shopping by their hideous credit-card mothercreatures.

Some had pre-paid accounts at SpinCycle record store across the street, so we could see when a truck unloaded product in the alley behind it off Libertine Street.

As I always had money in my pocket, there was always something to buy. What's more, new black light posters, buttons with fiery day-glo exhortations, colorful dungarees and fringed suede buffalo billabong jackets, incessant incense and paisley wall hanging stores were springing up, springtime mushrooms of hip business sense, all over the neighborhood, within two blocks of Altkocker’s.

The commercial blocks around the campus were a happy place to be, and to act cynical.

Tippy, a year older, was one baloney child we couldn't rattle with a look. No, I’m not getting ahead of myself. This is where he comes in.

Tippy worked across the street at SpinCycle Records as the basement boy, slashing open cartons without damaging the contents.

One afternoon the owner's sister and her daughter were coming downtown to buy show tunes—an Impossible Dream enduring over sunrise, sunset, etc.—and stopped for cosmetics at the drug store.

As they passed we may have sneered a bit, spit on the sidewalk, accidentally on purpose hitting an open-toed sandal summer shoe.

SpinCycle bpss was furious, geez. Tippy—"They're young, like you"—was commanded to go across the street and chase us away, scatter us like flies from the honied shop entrance, ask us not to bother customers. We hooted, but he persisted, kept coming back about the same time every work day.

Maybe, I almost dimly remember, that Tippy and I may have first met in pediatrician Dr. Frankwagon's waiting room; me for intestinal blockages and Tippy there for his weekly asthmatic allergy shots. Maybe that's where he got his liking for pokes in his skin. Or perhaps I had met Tippy towards the end of the school year when he came into Mrs. Punchbowlbottom's Michigan and Town History class, danced around the front of the room sggestively playing with himself, then lead a parade of girls in a King Konga line Pied Piper-style out of the classroom, presumably to cavort on the lawn, into the flower beds and grass stains. Or was that some other charismatic clown?

In one way, Tippy's apotheosis at the apothecary, was his apogee. When he saw us, he knew: I could have a band with these guys.

He soon started spending his lunch hours with us three thugs, all four of us hung out threateningly across the street, where Tippy & Thump smoked cigarettes, flipped the butts at straight-arrow honkies.

What I first read as As Good as Expected?, Tippy wore a tattoo As God is My Expectorant. Not really, nobody had tattoos, but should have been, cigarette cough girding his natural asthma.

The record store beckoned my brother and I from across the street, its owner offering to hire us to work during the new Ars Festivus, a prestigious new idea drummed up by downtown shops and businesses, as the smug town burghers thought it worthy of a prestigious University's home. Thump was hired as security, but soon let go for beheading shoplifters with a mighty twist, shoulders

one way, head another. Because I had glasses, looked bookkeeperesque, I was given inventory duty, which probably is source of my habit of making lists of bands.

That was your little brother we sneered at, coming out of the Beefaloes' movie "I Plead!" with your mom. Sorry. Interesting that the threat and dread has stuck with him all these years. Still, that he burned all his monster models, resolved that then and there he would become a Byzantine Orthodox monk is pretty impressive. That he did so fifteen years after the traumatic movie (after publishers turned down his award-winning University thesis) you can't exactly blame on us though.

You can learn a lot working in a record store, so working in the record store Tippy learned so much. A record store is the greatest library in the world, and Tippy was its gradeschool library aide. He was well-liked and loved; he made the boys all laugh and the girls all cry. My Mom had said "Don't buy pop records, for the songs won't be popular after a while" as if your peers' approval is the only determinant of quality, listenability. Certainly we wondered about albums like 101 Girls Play the Male Flute, filed under Easy Orgasming music. Albums built around jaunty pop instrumentals like "The Happy Orgasm".

So you’re saying adults, who wear suits and ties and white shirts, or makeup, pearls, dresses and undergarments, have sex like teenagers too? Who knew?

One whole shelf of the record store had spiritual-era records like Music for Young Buddhas, actually recorded in Asia overseas

and brought back from the war by some entrepreneurial G.I. who smelled money in it. In the record store, Thump and I were laughing out loud at another one of those English "Have I a Right to Scold Your Momma?" pop songs, for I thought it said "scald." The tiny, nebbishesque towheaded stock boy we later learned was called Tippy, replenishing the shelves of British Blues records, laughed too, jumped in and said it meant "screw".

Who is this guy?

One magazine story claimed he applied for a job, and when it said put "skills" he put "listening to my records".

That went double for the rest of us too.

But no, Tippy was working in the record store to learn everything, nearly trampled by girls the first day when a Baalshazars or Beefaloes record came out. And that taught him the power of Rock. Tippy learned about all the new hippie bands from California, London and New York, all the rough yet seductive Negro stuff from Motorsburgh and cities down south. As our conversation spun on, Tippy said his parents listened to records by Broadway folkies the Headspinning Talespinners. Or the matronly Beelzebubbes, and their bowl-haircut, guitars and boomchukka boots sons the Beelzebubbles, who had recorded an album with their proud mothers called Mitzvah, Bar None! Live at Kvetschers' Resort, Catskillsstein, NY, a small town between Contraception, NY and Dutch Bear.

Couldn’t resist their little advertising jingle, klezmerifically tootled to the tune of "My Dreidel Has Fleas."

I told Tippy, man, my mom would murdalize me for even listening to such Semitism, and he looked puzzled, nonplussed,

dumbfooted. And SpinCycle Records owner is survivor of that wartime roundup of Jews in a Paris bicycle-racing arena, then fought in Undergound before recruitment by the O.S.S....which he left when he had to work alongside too many ex-Nazis the American spymasters had recruited. Someone told him college students and faculty brats and normal Baby Boom kids would records, so he opened his shop in Aleppo.

Still, Tippy dated the immigrant's daughter. Jewish girls, man…just like Eve in the Garden, forbidden fruit. He had girls doing things to him in the back of the store each shift that he worked, things that worked. During Ars Festivus summer sale days he offered to have sex with the girl who won a neighborhood raffle in the front window of the store as a publicity stunt for SpinCycle, but his boss laughed it off, not realizing Tippy was serious until a college crowd had gathered out front to watch and cheer them on.

Afterwards, refreshed, as he was restocking an Antonio Velour album that someone had shelved in an inappopriate section, immediately it was clear, the vital babe-magnetic lithe wit should front a band, be a star.

Once Thump started hanging out at the store, management noticed the pilfering and even grand theft. And perhaps the aroma of sex in the back room too often?

We got to know Tippy well, or so we thought. Half in jest, I said Let's start a band. So he quit the record store. Our meeting was undoubtedly a natural geothermal occurrence, sort of like Mount Rushmore. Enough was enough, and shortly before his nineteenth birthday Tippy retired from so-called adult life and began the

meaninful part, Hanging Out. I had suggested we call the band the PopStruwwelpeters, since we were as disobedient and wicked as the punk in the nineteenth century children's book, now a Saturday morning cartoon series. But since we'd been up all night, Mom's TV was on the just-before-school local show where the earlymorning phony bellhop spun old Chomps Trio shorts—or fragments—of them, often beginning in the middle.

Or maybe suddenly a summer thunderstorm brought us inside, so we lit up the hookah and turned on the TV. The Chomps Trio!

Hey hey, said Tippy, we're Chomps too.

We’re young and smart, summer in America, God was bored.

And, my dear, that's why we had to form Tippy and the Chomps.

Tippy knew a girl who was babysitter, even at her young age, for the Assistant Principal, and that's how we got ourselves asked to play for her upcoming Junior High Science Fair party. Sounds scientific, but also sounds fair. Our first adulatory experience was to be the Science Fair Y’know, that moment when summer becomes Fall? Summer only sharper, alert with chilliness. Navy-blue day sky. Halloween trees. Apples making cider of themselves. This was the Fall of it all and we were scheduled to play at a Science Fair at Forcefield Junior High School on the Midnorthwest side of Aleppo. The not-weirdest side, it was populated by poor white trash, angry black Negro kids and general workaday workhorse suburbanites.

The junior high was named after educator Israel Forcefield on land that had been his family farm, despite Harry Fuct's assertion he'd never seen a Jewish farmer, having never visited nor invested in northern California's big chicken kibbutzes, and Milk Away From Meat Kosher Dairy chain. Studious Sabra Forcefield was in my 12th grade homeroom. Later one sabbath Sunday morning I saw her coming out of Tippy’s room. Dang. How could he be her Shabbas Goy, asked to light her fire. Double dang.

Anyway, parties to celebrate Progress through Technology were still in vogue, and the new generation's throngs of ambitious kids were no longer satisfied with Aleppo oompah bands' versions of "The Sausage Polka" for entertainment. Especially in autumn, when the chlorophyll in the leaves turn into the brightly-colored sugars used in Halloween candy corn. And no wonder Tippy and the Chomps

were hired: the Student Council President and Vice President were a girl named Orgasmea and her jittery brother Orgone.

Maybe it was still what they call Retard Summer, for the afternoon of our first gig the sky then darkened with a tornado warning, which sure seemed appropriate. Radios crackled in basements, as we had or would in practices. The sky-fart smell of ozone moments before a Summer thunderstorm. The smell of a stove. All the kids had to stay in school, which helped make the impending prison riot atmosphere all the more delicious. Our arrival at the junior highschool that afternoon was marked by near-tragedy when all the kids in an approaching schoolbus rushed to one side to look out the window at the band, causing the bus to tip over.

Impromptu child bullfights took place while the kids were waiting for the band to come on, picadors' blowshooting drinkingstrawwrappers dipped in sticky pudding at each other and the ceiling. Some kids missed the fun since they'd run home to watch the Apogees vs.

Perigees game with their older brothers and fathers. Fools. The youth of today wear heavy, heavy monograms. One kid's name was Soupstock, now claiming he was named after the big Rock festival since his uncle was the farmer who owned the land. Probably a fib.

This citywide Science Fair was sponsored every year by the man who invented pizza, a hardworking orphan across town who didn't think it was right to take time off to attend but might send over a truck containing a buffalo. Imagine, the band would be playing for kids so young Tippy wasn't even still a virgin when they were born.

Born in the International Geophysical Year, what a joke. Microphilia, the unnatural love of little teeny things. Every kid on the shelf. Like a

flock of Gods, too young to know it and too young to know better, too you. Junior high schoolers still looked like the kids on the back of matchbooks who testified how they sold seeds of Family Grippe Newspaper door-to-door for valuable prizes, free gifts or discounted greeting cards. Electric chair haircuts, gas-chamber teeth.

I mean shit, I remember science fairs and science class way back in our Stonehenge Junior High. I had personally done something in Earth Science class involving bunsen burners and potassium nitrate that produced an explosion and burnt scars into my guitar hand years before. One kid in my class who later became a Skylab astronaut wrote the song "Roll, Pitch and Yaw" while he was still in Ninth grade. A young bioengineer wore a cricket protector.

Some kids did science projects on the statistical probability of which kid in the class would die--one always did--and inevitably get the yearbook dedicated to him or to her. The general rule he discovered: bet on the hemophiliacs.

As the spirited song croons, don’t spit on your school.

Miniature flying cities. Sadistic statistics projects like "Teenagers and Integers". "Why Dames Get Varicose Veins" wrote one kid in a Sinatra-like discourse. Various working volcanoes, from vinegar and baking soda to sparking, smoldering purloined chem lab substances. Carbidesque cannon big bangs would punctuate the concert like the 1810 Overdose. One project was about before the continents drifted apart, when there was just one called Gondwanaland, how they addressed letters. Weird monster science.

Earthworm-shockers made from two screwdrivers stuck in the ground, each attached to a split electric cord. A nectaurus in a glass

cylinder full of murky swampwater alcohol, swiped from the University aeons ago. Some kids just exhibited their monster models, often with the heads swapped into odd scenarios, like the Phantom of the Opera Jackie Kennedy on PT109. They were working in the lab late one night, past their bedtimes, still in their school clothes.

What a cool project, the weighing of an early-buxom girl's breasts by how much water they displaced as they fetchingly floated, that poor puckering girl suspended in that freezing glass tank. Where do kids get their crazy ideas? Many kids had dreamed up novel pregnancy test kits, involving a hapless mouse suffocating in a bell jar, a twitching canary in a miners' lamp. Pulling the rabbit's ears.

One cleverly advanced goutish little wag from Britain invented one he called the Welsh Rarebit Test. An experiment How a Werewolf's Testicles are Magnetic. A Science Fair plays directly to the children's fear and depression at the thought of their parents' sexual intercourse and scatological lives. It was at the Sci-Fair that kids started wearing I Love My Sperm buttons. I was pretty amazed at the way these kids pick things up, kind of the way dolphins can learn sign language from a chimp, and that was the topic of one of the projects.

There was a grand era of sexuality, I don't know if we were the cause of it or merely helped it snowball along or were swept up by it, in it.

One of the science teachers had listened to too much early Rock n' Roll himself and hence would take his classes on grand unchaperoned beach parties to Lake Meshuggah under the guise of field trips. He would trade smart kids the materials to make gunpowder straight from the chemistry lab locker to make gunpowder, or a night with the teacher's girlfriend in their car, in

exchange for the kid's secret recipe for napalm. The Mad Scientist was a viable career role models for impressionable kids. When he later spoke favorably about the Chomps' appearance at the Science Fair Sockhop—"Hey, the kids seemed to like them"—the hipster pedagogue immediately had to quit under a cloud, but went on to make a fortune in real estate and student slumlording near the University. This kind of behavior only proves the wickedness of Science to the theologian.

Tobacco vacuum in the school sucked kids into the washrooms.

Angels smoking Camels, putti smoking Kools. I thought about many paralel things as I sat on the too-small toilet, stuck this smokefilled washroom while everybody else was tuning up or testing out the first audience girls before the big Science Fair Gig began. Under my direction we would continue to grow from this afternoon, as the World's Most Scientific Band. I wouldn't get confused today, would play my guitar right. Tippy and the Chomps were truly scientific too, our chord progressions as easy as E=MC2 or the squared hypotenuse thing.

We set up our toys on the three-quarters size—where only little after-hours seductions took place—stage, and soon the young atomic squirts or squirtlings and squirtlingettes came in boisterously right after the last bell. Safety patrol boys and library aides provided security, ringed the stage. Hey, not bad! The kids really dug our amplifiers as big cool on-top-of-it machines. Candy booths were being set up by the Student Council to send 'em to England to meet the Rollings or something. Imaginary art with candy in it. Tippy

thought it'd be fun to take a candy bath, melt the chocolate, especially with a warm girl.

A Senior Girl Scout serving as Program Aide starts the Brownie meeting with the "Little Red Handkerchief", a Czechoslovakian folk dance about you-know-what. One Liberachoid kid in the talent show poured vinegar and baking soda into his piano to simulate a volcano spewing forth champagne. As the youth of today stood around in their socks our music began a thundering KACHOOOUUUOOOUUUOUM OUUUMMMHHH... and Tippy started singing about his bombproof honey and the littles nervously grinned and dropped their candy and candy bars.

C'mon, shake like a snake.

Crowd of youthfuls transfixed by the chainsaw sound of his pocket-of-pain poems.

C'mon, shake yo’ birthday cake.

A school somebody-or-other named Foodslinger, probably the Coach of cafeteria food fights, maybe an old janitor in the furnace room, said "Sounds like that boy ate too many chicken lungs" when Tippy started to sing. One science kid hear Tippy's voice, hurriedly hooked up an ocilloscope and said, yup, that's the sine qua non of sine waves. Kids could really relate to Tippy's combination dancing and swearwords. Shaking drew amazement, overjoy from them. At that age, even yawning was funny.

Realize this was Halloween too, the Great Boy holiday, the bestest day of the year for boys, matched only in its intensity by Valentines' Day for girls. Tippy's goal had always been to match its anarchy and license, its Halloweenness, every day of the year. A

nearby subdivision’s team renowed for T-papering houses in the immediate vicinity of the school filed in, streaming rolls of tissue as they marched. Everybody danced and shook or shivered or at least stood and watched Tippy and the band transfixed. They might call it a celebration of Youth Science but this was truly a Devils' Night dance. Grinning like the skulls in their heads, these elves of Elvis did the steeplechase, danced out of disuse.

Juniorhighschoolers

sure are the perfect people, lil' butterflies with computer-card wings crafted from their permanent records. Tiny human birthday cakes and candles. Protoadults with big foreheads. These blind pumps of the dancefloor. Vacuum-cleaners of Soul. Girls were crazy little splatterdancers with only maps of breasts to guide them. Slaw dancing, like the lunch ladies patiently guiding hesitant junior high boys in their embrace. I gazed out from between the colored lenses of my Luftwaffe sunglasses bemusedly, for to my weltanschauung I could only see children quietly applauding their feuhrer, young suzipimpfs on a weekend excursion to Hitler Youth Hostels. Confused spotty kids ghost dancing in their ghost t-shirts to our marvelous marijuana'd electric whirring. Dick, Jane, Spot, Sally, Wolf, Bear, Lion, Webelos. Tippy tiptoed, stepped and flibberdegibbited upon their fingernails, as they placed their docile and diminutive digits onto the stage. They wanted to touch where the monster walked, and it was his philosophy to give smashed hands. Shooting a slicing laser beam of excitement through the adulation-audience, kids with rubber band lasers pointing them at him right back.

Kastompety kastompfey went the little nervousnesses, little proto-fuckers, in an approximation of teenage dances audible to their

very parents blocks away. Near-naked preadolescent savages bouncing like the Eniwitok Indians standing under the Hydroponic Bomb. Brownie scout uniforms soon lay crushed and wrinkled underfoot. A smart kid with overstuffed glasses name Jointdexter pointed out to press-gang’d chaperone Mr. Bernard Izodsky that his schoolmates could be compared to atoms bouncing under heat and pressure like in a science class film. Though Izodsky wasn’t listening, he went on, hypothesized that Rock could be a more complex molecule model or Science Fair Project than the classic "How Rock Harms the Ears of Mice" (of course the dumb kids, mostly assigned to the experiment, who performed this perennial chestnut never measured the mouse's sex organ afterwards or palpitations from their cheatin' hearts). Izodsky pretended to listen carefully, for the lad had brought honor to the school system with a state prize for his project for the First Film Strip Projector on the Moon. The scholar saw me and jovially called out "A hogshead of Youth!"

Against one wall glowered Mister Stiffinger the Assistant Principal. As lackey to Principal Mr. Rudely Stormsewer, he was empowered to try to stop the Chomps from taking legal children from their mother's childbed to the creaking floodgates of the anticelibacy laws. His solution to any pupil problem was to keep the offender afterschool, disoriented, wandering the school in search of a corridor pass. Mr. Phlegmslinger's hard, cold rodent eyes, weird forest creature like a school Principal, staring over his sniffing pink snout and sharp little teeth. Opossum as oppressor. No way in his dim bureucratic conciousness could he realize that already Tippy was considered so cool that in the duration of the concert one kid, master

forger of corridor passes and excuse letters, ran back to his locker and printed out packs of matches with Tippy's picture on them for the other kids to play with in the woods and dry Michigan fields beside the school. Tippy glared at the bald one with a withering slithering gawk and lurched, haphazardly threw the microphone at the old historical enemy bolo-like, javelin'd the microphone stand at him.

There's a hole in the skylight of the cafequarium still, go look for it.

The kids faces turned and focused like baby violins. An invitation to a dynamiting. Esqueerita brand model rockets whooshed as they shot all over the cafetorium. The kids on this signal of what was right and left and wrong, turned on that godlessfather and godfatherless Principal, tore him up and used him in a torn paper collage on the bulletin board in front of the library celebrating Book Brotherhood Week.

The Kid who won the Science Fair? Well, like everything the Fair had a "Drugs" theme that year, intended as an anti-drug exercise but that gave the kids an excuse to research and explore, construct hookahs, etc. The winning smartypants didn't invent any drugs—no future diet pills for every Mom's medicine chest, nor expensive specialty diet foods for me—but did accidentally come up with a substance that, when rubbed on the face, instantly produced a zit, for people who wanted an excuse to avoid their school picture.

The Science Fair closed on the theme of There is Nothing New Under the Sun. Except us. Look out.

This is where and when all the fun began.

Good morning. I'm at the stage in my life where I really like telling stories to young girls. Imagine, this remains a tale told a teenage girl. Why’s that special? Oh, I dunno.

Loan you a pencil? What, you didn't come prepared for this interview? Sheesh.

You, you kind of remind me of the girl journalist who revealed that Tippy had a band before us, the Gila Monstermen, named after the sulky one in a glass box in the Ancient Nature Museum that could hypnotize schoolchildren make terrified little girls pee on their clean maryjaneshine shoes. For a while Dink actually had an afterschool job cleaning its cage and discovered its sweet liquer-like sweat or saliva was psychedelic, so collected and shared it. I was asked to join, sit in for a practice and frathouse gig while their regular guitarist was in jail for chopping down billboards, but I declined. I was worried when "Gila" got pronounced "Heela", next thing would be people mistaking it, and us, for horrific Hava Nagila hora-dancers, those youknow-whos.

Playing in a bunch of bands before your "true" band is like a girl having a lot of boyfriends in there before dating you. They call it her "past" since you probably covered oldies and Motorbourgeois songs, radio hits of the last couple years or so.

Let me tell you about our musical philosophy. A piano is a bison, a centaur when played well, an elk or wapiti when electrified.

But still too slow-moving, so we don't use one.

Though some have tried to treat an album like a volume of

essays, Rock is not the vehicle of sustained argument. And I articulate more in an eight-bar greasy guitar solo than Tippy mutters and yelps in a hundred songs. Musical instru-mints: lead guitar is Peppermint, bass guitar is Spearmint, like flavors of gum. My guitar leads were appropriate screams. Sometimes I turned up my guitar loud to hide the sound of my farts. I soon discovered if I play really loud and buzzy onstage, I can fart without people hearing. Of course, Dink and Thump and even Tippy-in-motion smell it, but their scowls are considered characteristic of our tough, uncompromising band.

That's how they look on the album cover. Hence, girls like it, for it makes us look dangerous, and boys respect.

Lord Megaron of Baluchatherium had created several devices for guitar distortion, eac filed with coal magnets. He decided to try to use some to amplify music, but it gave it a cavernous, woody sound, buzz like the gnashing of teeth. Stopping into a sweaty club where the guitarist smashed his instrument and hurled it into the crowd, he realized this sound was perfect for intense, urban rock n' roll.

Megaron smoked dope with the Beatles, dated stylish cover girls, for his winter home was in the Punjab hills not far from the Maharishi's ashram. In a local bazaar, he was offered some fissionable material from the subcontinent’s atomic weaponry iniative, and put some of that in a guitar effects box. I bought a used one, where the glowing part had almost burned out but still sounded tuff.

You ask: how did the Chomps obtain those big Megaron amplifiers so early in our musical career? OK, you didn't, but if you were a guy interviewing me, then you might have. This is a boy sort of question, and I’ll still answer it. I played through a Megaron

Mammoth guitar amp, Dink through a Megaron Mastadon bass amp, and Tippy sang through a Megaron Mastaba vocal p.a. system. It’s a good sturdy, powerful brand and carried exclusively by a music store in our town; why Aleppo became the national capitol of muscular, macho Rock.

Thump stole a truck full of them on our band's behalf when the big hallucinogistic English band the Aleistercrowleymen played at the University. They had their equipment in so many trucks and trailers, I don't think they noticed one missing. And Aleppo police would certainly be driven from the smoky auditorium to cries of Narc! Narc! if the came in to investigate when the theft was reported, so they didn't. And because their management saw to it the lucrative, corporate-sponsored band were so insured—by Leviathan of London, Tommy Rot Travel, and Thomas Crown Affairs, who later underwrote Aldebbie’s tours—the matter was soon dropped, and we played on.

Left me saying a Mea Culprit over those stolen amplifiers.

It's OK, morally, because the Aleistercrowleymen have since grown old and stale, and the music kind of boring nowadays. And we were young and bad and wicked and on the way up.

Practice time, down in the basement, gonna be nice and loud with those newly-acquired amps. Dink’s plodding noodling bass began our song "Ennui, We", the anti-anthem of summer lassitude, like the slow dance played at Christ's first sock hop with Mary Magdalene. Teen queen of Sheba, mittel-Afrika, she bears both north and south Hassan i Sabbah genes, darker than even Lillith or Lincoln.

No, I don’t think Coral was a negress. Odd thing to ask at this point in the story.

The frat-rock instrumental "Neighbors' Dog in a Vat of Acid" was always a suitable challenge for me. Then, just for goof, Tippy medlied and muddled it (like mint in the julep, reminds Dink) into the bon vivant oldie "Roué, Roué". Musical comedy, light operetta airs to finish up on, everybody laughing. These are good times.

Something endearingly lost-dog about Tippy, like Jesus Christ's little dog Anubis, faithfully waiting at the foot of the Cross, watching and sniffing all communing disciples. The dog disappeared—picked up by Roman authorities?—when Jesus was twelve, so it began his "lost years." "He's like a little puppy," laughed one Jewish girl on the road to Golgotha, "with his own leash."

A shrimpy little fucker, with barely the stump of a spine, and it’s polio-scolio-twisted at that. Tippy was absolutely restraintless. Of course Midwesterberg must be Jewish, he's so wonderfully loud, coarse and ill-mannered onstage, in public. The Repressionless Boy of 1970, unfettered by Caviar Crescent civility. The kind of voice where if he said "shit" you could absolutely, revoltingly smell it, and if he said "fuck" (often, Ffuu-uu-uucckk...) you'd ask how that pantsless woman, hidden somewhere in the room, got so excited so fast.

Tippy's wheeze bangs around his chest like an echoing leaf on a lonely, wet autumn street. Motherships that plant the worlds.

Someone said it wasn't asthma, that since early boyhood Tippy had a chicken bone stuck in his lungs.

Y’know when a frightened, toad-like young boy pees his pants

to escape bullies clutching him? Tippy was like that to a song whose words I thought we'd agreed upon.

When Tippy sang, his breath stank of cunnilingus, which caused young male virgins in the crowd, unfamiliar with the female, to gag, stream for the exits. He would rhyme “semen” and “women”, or even sing of semen women.

Tippy sang: Bird of paradise, bird of poop Girl who did it on my front stoop…

His voice barked on She’s like a shirt inside out A poke in the eye on the side of the snout A girl now broken, left open The color of birds’ nest souououououp…!

Trying to help, I informed him he could rhyme “Venus” and “penis”, but he ignored me, didn’t.

Tippy was the heart of the wheel, hub and fulcrum of the built-in countertop lazy susan, spinning satisfaction to each at the table with his voice and words. His voice "like the larynx of a skink when clogged with a syrinx" wrote one University newspaper reviewer, a student named Threadbear taking Introductory Physiology, Biology and Archeology, already too damn erudite for his own good. Whereas I thought he’d appreciate me as steady, herd-attentive guitar bison, Threadbear termed me “the great horned bear of Rock.”

Now what’s that supposed to mean?

Every song is a cry of individuation, of separating oneself from the enveloping lover. Right?

Before we had a van I usually let Thump drive when the band piled into Mom's big “Guelph-and-Ghibelline gold” car, a recent Buick LesBianne sedan. Previously Mom had only let me drive her tenyear-old Apollo Mister Belvedere over to Tippy's trailer home. A big car with Suzanne Pleshette-colored interior. It was much easier to transport equipment after Thump stole a van behind Ffat Geoff Appliance Mart, roomy enough for those big amps he stole for us the week before.

Us on stage was like the paintings about outer space, gleaming astronauts and industrial-colored spacecraft of the future, in books given to smart little boys at Christmas. Sternly optimistic, scientifically patriotic, visionary yet temperate and possible. Sharp as an astronaut's fresh crewcut, considering our hair was long and leather-jacket sweaty.

That girl, daughter of a wild-haired Math professor and astrologer, about whom Tippy sang: Rasputina Putainya From Put-It-InYa Bay As a band we wouldn't have you Any other way Than all of the ways we had you... like nearly everything escaping from his jaws, assembled from parts of songs and riffs by our new doomed Frankenrockstar.

Tippy gargled with dishwashing detergent instead of mouthwash, thinking the viscous soup would make his singing sexier.

"To summon kitchen-bound girls" he winked, mouth full of foam and

bubbles.

Tippy, that locomotor Jesus, could say (or sing) "ragamuffin" so it sounded like "dauphin".

Tippy began to sing, me ready to insert fierce guitar: Medieval Jewish Fran-ken-stein All set up to blow your mind KAWOOMMWAAWAARENNRENNRENNGGRR-RR-RR...

Fat Golem!

Very quickly the Rock writer Threadbear said Tippy's voice was a chainsaw cutting through a laundry basket of baby clothes. And, of course, snide little Threadbear claimed the song was about me.

A bombcrash explosion I like to call a nitroglissando, Thump drummoxed upon the cans. A glitzkrieg. A twenty-megaton Chompbomb! But we were starting to sound good, a tambourine shaking in unison. Thump, Dink and I were like the fingers of a hand, and Tippy the opposable thumb.

Then again, Tippy is all cock, probing, thrusting, injecting his creative spurts into the world. I'm all stomach, taking in nutrients of songs and guitar licks, digesting...but sometimes dyspeptic, vomiting or farting out interesting results. Or crap, though the guys are all either too polite, drunk, stoned or self-absorbed to tell me so. And so it is, Tippy and I are two Rock Chakras. The other two are the legs holding up and motorvating this torso.

After our first gig I started thinking: half of all the oldest kids at Forcefied Junior High went to Studentteacherson High School upon leaving, so never saw their junior high classmates again unless

juvenile delinquent gangs rumbled, especially when cutting down billboards. At that school the eminent and beloved Superintedent’s son Fred (Mr.) Studentteacherson was teaching Drama and staging musicals, so of course pooh-poohed us after we played there.

This kid I remember from our junior high school, when the class was touring the swimming pool nuclear reactor, fell in, needed an emergency tracheotomy right then and there from the chaperoning science and (tool-providing) metal shop teacher to be able to breath air again. But he had a good band when in high school with his "atomic" voice though. Could smoke a reefer in the un-healing hole in his neck while singing "Clovis, Clovis" with his mouth. Like that trapper's belly up north, measured bits of digestion going in and out of it by hand, in the famous painting in the lobby of the University’s Medici Medical School Hospital. This was our competition.

Local gigs started lining up. We played for the University's Department of Theosophagy—literally "religion eaters"—and when Tippy, in fake English accent, called them "the 'ouse fags" from the stage they didn't like it. Actually, I did that, or thought to.

A grad student in Music attended a gig, overheard to declare us "idiorhthmic", so an enraged Thump stomped him thoroughly, growling "I ain't no fuckin' IDIOT!" With those broken fingers, incessant ringing in bloody eardrums, the scholar-fool was unable to write or type his thesis, unable to add his supposed insight on the Chomps tonight, so languished in his apartment, dropped out in despair, divorced his young bride.

We liked "rhythmodelic" which someone else wrote, though.

Probably that smart hippie earthmother chick with good grades and a

radio show. What, your older sister? Amazing.

Motorsburgh had long been besodden with bowtied radio personalities the likes of Bud Vase (pronounced "vahze," like the inevitably-shattered Ming ones belonging to snooty women in Chomps Trio comedies), creamily typical of the stodgy voices heard on airwaves or yammering at us on local TV. But the hippies had shinnied up some of the tallest buildings with broadcasting stations in their upper floors, turned on the juice, lit up, and it was good.

We appeared on the free-form radio show called Watermelon Weblos, the first part of their name because they played a lot of Soul and Blues; the white hippies thought they were being respectful. The second part was how they were all proud they'd been active Chub Scouts, who went the distance.

To conquer the industrial Hellzapoppin’ that is Motorsburgh, we played bars that were covered in snot. Bars that had been horses' stables in the nineteenth century and hadn't been cleaned out afterwards, fetid straw and hardened road-apples that rude boys tossed at the band. We played a sophisticated teen club called the Domed Metronome, and a more quotidian suburban teen club called the Drug Pile, its logo a frighteningly shaky psychedelic Caduceus with seven-headed cobras, designed and painted by Quentin Quimshare, a task for which he was likely paid in drugs too.

We played a too-mature-for-teens club called the Kickery. I wasn't sure about all the drugs going on there, so walked home from the gig, and those meanies Tippy and Thump called me Pedometer Buttocks for weeks. I lost two pounds doing so though.

We played a music venue called the Pillow Case. Strip clubs at

the edge of town like Hippies' Paradise and church-owned Carnival Emmanuel, manual being the only real source of carnal pleasure to be found within.

We even played children's birthday parties where they'd otherwise have hired a homunculus or golem to entertain, sometimes one from the Saturday Motorsburgh TV show. Driving back, I envied the Jewish Mo’burgh ‘burbs as nonstop Bar and Bat Mizvahs, pubescent bar and grill, Purim carnivals with kid-made costumes 365 days a year (on seven wintry ones, dreidels spin). Happily minor-key kabbalistic dancing the Houri.

Back in Aleppo, we were asked by a sentimental high school administrator to write a memorial dirge or Mass for our classmates who served on the USS Hector Berlioz, blown up or captured by Up North Viet Kong Koreans or something. We didn't. Imagine, us!

The Anglican American Arsenal started hosting rock concerts and small traveling circuses, so we played there. Found ourselves in police parlors, but stayed some obedient distance from the interrogations going on in there.

The Chomps played for the meritoriously disturbed in Tubeville State Mental Hospital, later gigs for damaged youth, women of all ages and the criminally insane. Government mentals, ostensibly helping the recovery of frazzled bureucrats in the state hospita assigned therel. Bufaloes behind bars.

Those gridiron gomberg fraternities wanted us to play songs like "Hip Flask at Football Game" an "Little Dorm Room Fridge", then a hit by the Califordfalcons. But we didn't know any of that shit, nor did we want to pretend to bother.

Dink joked that someday we’d headline at the Crumbledome, home of the basketball team the Phlogistons. Ahh, maybe someday.

Us four were like Christ's own four evanjavelinas, four little woods-pigs of good news. Leonine drum fury from Thump, drunkhawk bass from Dink, my oxlike guitar in yoke, and angelic vocal annunciation-of-sex from Tippy. Scriptural, Biblical proportions to our sound.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Still, we felt like we were like those TV stars now, the Cherokees, with a series and then the two movies "Nocturnally Missionaries" and "Gulp!", between pretaped musical numbers romping through their shtick onscreen in funny hats, etc. like a Chomps Trio short.

In those early gigs of ours, Tippy was eager as a bellboy in a fine hotel. On his first day of work. Anticipating generous tips.

That said, he had one kind of disturbing tendency though.

When Tippy cut his own bod with Thump's drumstick onstage, critic Threabear celebrated it as profanation of the Body of Christ, his chest the milk-white host, Rock's own baby Jesus and bonechilling only child (ultimately, a boner child). He could then, with his Jewish magicks, make blood spew forth or not, as he chose. Maybe if a girl was in the front row he'd gush blood upon her, remind her what part of her cycle it was, that’s why and how she wanted It So Bad tonight.

If she shrieked in horror, then laffed, he knew he was in there.

His dancing became ever more extreme as he leapt backwards, twisted upon his baseball joint. Tippy leapt, skidded on his belly across milk-bottle floors. A thuffering thuccotasth thpazzattack! wrote

the lisping critic Threadbear. Tippy was giving 180, 116, 128, 157 per cent of himself every performance. The autounmarried young man.

So much blood. This could not last without damage, dam-bursting, violence.

Now, there was more to the folk music clubs in Aleppo than Irish skedaddle music. But not a whole lot more.

In one smoky and short-lived coffeehouse the Aardvark, an imitation New Yorker strummed the droning old ballad of Billy Douche and the Billet-Doux, then folksongs like "The Pretty Mad Girl" b/w "A Flower of Rage", revived a decade ago by the British band the Foundlings. Tippy had actually learned that song when the Sprirulinas—named after a healthy hippie food in California—played the Whale. You’ve been there?

The Whale was Aleppo's premiere folk music club, founded by a church using (or misusing) the story of Jonah in the Whale, held in a creaky-floorboards old house at the edge of campus. Included po’boy poetasters and top-notched folksingers who pass the hat but take only Krugerrands. Almost every act played "That Girl is Like a Barge Canal", which Thump and I had learned from our mother's old Bob Egad albums a decade ago.

Folksinger voices like wandering Jews, hobos missing Hanukah back home, like an Irish policeman misses mother. One wag played novelty standards like "Hanukah Dobro" at another campus coffeehouse, the Foulk. Originally the house of 19th century Dean of Fishing Frederic Foulkes, the coffeehouse bookers wanted the name to convey both "Folk" and beatnik Shmuel-spittle cry "Foul", about

that damn Vietnam war and U.S. foreign policy overseas. Always the old Civil War ballad "The Maidenhead's Dead", songs about Lincoln debating and shooting Douglas, and The Mud in Which a Thousand Negroes Trod, Lord Lord. Bespectacled Aleppo Liberals and leotarded students loved disused folk songs.

But they certainly didn’t love us, even with our instruments unplugged and only a single drum. We are Michigan, we have nothing in common with the cornsilk-liquor’d stories spun by banjoman Shuck Pease, or downsouth dimwiddie stringbean bands like Peck Cotton and the Cotton Peckers. So we didn’t even try.

We attended something new in Aleppo, the Blackest Blues Festival. Who ever heard of that? Didn’t play because there was no place for our buzzernutter dreadnought style of Rock. Nothing is more boring than a Blues Festival, for all the songs are predictable.

But Aleppo's was full of white girls wanting to meet black guys, albeit old ones, and Tippy laughed how he already had the most important attribute of most of those guys.

Bluesbuster Bobby Garbageman, all these colored men, seemed foreign to me, with their accents and customs nothing like my prudent family dinner table, the cleanroom childrearing laboratory.

But Tippy was intrigued, declare that the Blues are what we need to learn, the prudent colored carpentry of deep American song, the songs that built the mansions on the plantations. So we piled into a car, heading five hauling-ass hours west.

Blues thrive in the city of Escargo, IL, named for the massive snails that dined on forest rot, small rodents, carrion and beached alewives, that the French trappers were amazed at, found so

scrumptious and luxurious, imported and hunted to extinction by 1800. Snails Stadium and the Snails Tower are the only remembrances of the natural bounty and early wealth.

The children of bygone Negro saltsnappers, snailtrappers and johndeconquerroot gris-gris traders worked in the stinkyards and slaughterhouses that succeeded the Snail Boom. One blackest song man whose name I forget—sorry—made a banjo from a big fossil snail shell he dug up, electrified it, and birthed the city's distinctive and characteristic eccentric, electric Blues.

Blues songs that spoke of another man's woman caught kicking in stubborn mule's stall. Unfaithful women lying upon, or heralding, flooded fields. All these southern agricultural references; did Michigan farmers sing of such occurrences and dilemmas? Possibly, but between tight Calvinist jaws and barely-moving lips.

So how did Tippy, the world's whitest boy, complexion like a sandblasted cathedral, decide that we wanted to be Blues musicians?

Good question. We turned to the part of town we daren't touch. We were yet to know the Alphanumerics of Soul. I guess Black people were there to borrow cool things from, like attitude, dances or the Blues, because you could forget to return 'em or even acknowledge the favor, unless they personally caught you. We wanted to hear and experience the real Blues because we thought we should. Down on Toenail Street. This was what we understood we were to care about.

Our music had something old, something nude, something barroom and something Blues. It touched the Cardinal's compass points of North, South, East and Midwest of Rock itself. We were Blues Patriots. Electrical peers to old Blacks with song-muttering lips like

pyramids or baseball diamonds. Old Black tyrannosaurus grandpas, red runny vulvas for eyes. We got hometowned-out, so we split like the mountain wind.

All points in America were within hours by expressway so we headed to Escargo in my sputtering Tequilaswagen. The little round car had Hero of Alexandria's aeolipile as an engine, a fuel-interjection Archimedes' screw. I should've replaced the bumper Thump had pulled off but I didn't plan on hitting anything. A minor intellectual's car. Neuropean. Like Tippy, this demicar had asthma. The car was cramped, limited and small, unassuming, eccentric and cheap just like me, not a Motorsburghie roomy agressive horsepowered chromebodiment of self-assurance like most Michigan rock musicians resolved to drive upon success. A donkey of a car. Bought it becasue I envy any car that was designed by my favorite artist Hitler, the only car Hitler could draw. It was lazily concocted out of curvy lines on the back of the prototype of a standardized spelling test for German second-graders. Maybe he couldn't do architecture, but he sure could doodle. A car der feuhrer called the "people's bug" but I called the Mothburner, which I got way too late, when I was absurdly too old to have sex in it. They almost called the bug "The Hitler" but how the hell were they gonna sell that to all the World War II veterans that happened to be our fathers? The famous only child Edvard Fuct influenced the miserably-selling 1950s sedan the Edvard, with its sucking front cuntlike maw, unlike the diminutive yet masculine roundness of Hitler's dickheaded peoplescar. Tippy's father had driven an Edvard and look where it got him. Hah, score, lonesome, cap on you! And your radiator cap.

Driving is a drug that makes it difficult to write. I felt carsick but I drove anyway since I was the most responsible. Nauseated in Michigan. The President's Woozy Field Trip. Breezes felt like unfinished intestinal juices. I'm beginning to understand why Tippy always bums rides. It was Tippy who envisioned travel across Michigan as one great ladder of sound the tires made on the buckling concrete. Akimbo Road to New South Ché Parkway. We watched the big minus signs on the highway and Tippy dashed his fingers trying to pick up a truckers' cigar butt from the moving car. Snow whipped over the road like the ghosts of dead deer. Hallucinating like all, thought the sparks from a chain being dragged under a truck was a little duck tethered there and running along. Early one morning we saw a sign directed towards the dew NO CONDENSING. Road signs that said LEFT LANE MUST HAVE GOOD EXCUSE and the rock 'n rolly FARFISA—ONE MILE. Then RESUME NORMAL HABITS and DO NOT BE OK. Discipline studios always featured STOP HERE OR ELSE. All those signs that had those little silhouettes of children crossing the street and Tippy was sure the small boy was mounting the girl. We knew they must be near the Blues when we saw SEVERAL POSSIBLE VOICES. There should actually be a street called Wrong Way. Saw billboards COME TO LAS VEGAS AND GET DRUNK and COME TO SAN FRANCISCO AND HAVE SEX. Out of envy we stopped and chopped 'em down.

Rubber Wash. Precision Viewpoints. Lip Gas. The chain of twelve Gas Stations of the Cross. Christ or Simon fixes a tire here, Veronica opens his heated radiator with a rag. Freeway elephants like my dad's old Buick Sedate. Racing streetsweepers in the

woefully-named Escargo suburbs of Footstown and Familyheadquarters as we approached the city itself. This great land of ours the U. Thump of A. Colossos discovering America. If only for an hour Tippy needed the Midwest Motel, with healthy humping Midwestern girls with unfashionably long hair inside, and powder-blue dinnerjacket saloon singers in the bar where the rest of us waited.

We soon got sick of bars full of old men muttering "You can't get there from here". Across endless western Michigan, where snow turns to sand.

Thump had put sand, gravel, salts and various condiments in the car's crankcase and gas tank to sound "badder". When we drove our tires sounded like squealing pigs, which got us hungry. I cruised for Baroqueburgers, big sculpted mean and decorative garlands of lettuce, onion. Pull in for a Koshermonster Clayburger at Golem Hut. The luxury of a Michigan countryside pheasant we'd brought all the way impaled on our car radio aerial antenna. Uncooked, sure, but the feathers were pretty when driving fast on the freeway the wind caused them all to fly out.

One restaurant called itself Not So Good Food. An obeliskcovered café—We Pander to Your Convenience—offering Sistine Pizza, lamb eggs, called the Kissing Hole. A hippie place near a campus served breakfast potatoes called Hashish Browns. I suppose I’m making it sound more varied than it was. As we had around Motorsburgh and American environs, we stopped at every Porgy-and-Bess soulfast foodchain for triple-cleaned Chitlinburgers, Mac and Cheese Fries with extra lard. We are what we eat.

The windshield wiper a likeable unneccessary piece like a hook or metal goose, the rhythm carrying us into that fount of all negritude, our nearby Africa-in-this-life, the Mombassa of the Midwest, Escargo’s Smooth Side. Where Lincoln went to college, and as a student, industrially packed meat into linoleum here every summer.

One hitchhiker cut us in on the plot to assasinate a prominent solo Soul singer, which made the recording artist turn to his church for sanctuary. We drove by the Bigshoulders Science and Prosperity Museum with a working cocaine coalmine where visitors got black lung, its asbestos mine where they carried home souvenir asbestosis, "The best thing for my hacking cough" said Tippy. Real Indians mournfully ghost dancing around a uranium mine in a performance that suburban families left positively glowing, their irradiated toddlers in tow. Yet the Museum didn't have a Blues industry exhibit so we didn't stay long. To me the bugs on the windshield suggested musical notes, but to Tippy they were like the sufferings of old black Blues artists, succumbed to drink, government syphillis experiments, bad food, overwork and racism, and that's why we're here.

Supposedly this weekend we'll pick up the lessons of all those things to better our music.

Down chubby streets, no-nonsense boulevards. Where cats ate soulfish. MarcusGarveywood Drive in the neighborhood of Shakewood. To a place where they used shit for shampoo. So poor the streets all headed towards the deep South, escape routes. To the Bat Route, Robin. A ghetto is defined as a place where people let their dogs shit on the sidewalk, that's why Black people say "Shit" a lot. Gangster Gondwanaland, gangbangland, porkbellies and

prayerbellies from cloistered cops. I was driving and a cop said "Hey, yo' car farted in my face" and thwakked the hood with his baton.

Nicotine nigras staring. A penny for your storefront, baby! Gospel Blues songs like "Mannish Lord". Flowered Blues horserace music.

The longtoothed absurdity of Jazz, its own parody.

Traveling anywhere, Dink liked to sustain himself on the little sips he'd find in the pint bottles left on the streets, and could see himself easily living in any neighborhood with liquor stores on every corner. Dink drank a European wine called mothersfluid, but we couldn’t find it here. Dink drank till he damaged his Irelands of Langerhans.

An old drunk the color of coal tar sprawled on the sidewalk with a bottle of sweet wine stared at Tippy through red billiard ball eyes and muttered "That boy Elfish, o' dat Rollstone Mike McJagga, he was yo' J. the B, an' I don' mean the Scotch. You boys too." Wha'd he say?

Still, we appreciated this vote of confidence.

We attended a concert on the Deep South Side of soul singer James Earth, shuffling majestically and sweating cum from every pore. This night-negro did the deerwalk on elegant little doe feet, as he sang a song that must've been about his blood-sugar level called "I Come Crashing". A Monstrous Devourer of Soul. Tippy studied more at James' alligator-shod feet in a couple of days than he ever did in college. Homunculus in exile, the homunculus on parole. Of all of us Tippy was on an ego trip, an ego-a-go-go, on a vacation from all restraint or politeness. Played for the Black Laugh, this topsoilcolored grinning pumpkin, scalper and Tipitina Trickster. Longevity

monkey. Eerily musical and tobacco-juice grumbley like an old country front-porch Blues curser spitting out a Blues streak as he trips over a dog or an oil can on his midnight whiskey piss in the acacia yard. His first job was as a kid he'd been given $2 to bang a drum while a whore fucked, the first time he'd ever heard the word "momentum". They told Tippy to move over off the drums and actually say something. Every possible chance he made us play for negromonster necromancers and their squaws. Tippy passed himself off as both Grand Vizer and Court Jester.

I was cool to the idea of playing Blues music since I'd often been beaten up in junior highschool by gangs of Black teens, newlyliberated by Motorsburghtown songs like "Dancing on Your Engine Block". They'd rip my superhero satin and twill capes, steal my umbrellas and deerstalker caps. The Blues are when you rhyme "dirty mother fuyer" with "fire". Blues was the Black Tattlehood. For all its mumbo-jumbo I'm not sure the Party Race embraces a concept of difficult words; that’s our perogative. Do they dance when they're pregnant? I'm not sure.

We drove back from the Blues hejira exhausted. I dozed off, supposedly let out something halfway between a snore and a scream. After he returned from the big smoky meaty migration city where the most pungent musical form of The Blues was first distilled, Tippy saw the melancholy hard-life, half-life black men singing and dancing onstage, and how black women and men liked it, or didn't.

We soon abandoned our old blues learnings. Mournfully dancing, Tippy spoke only in rhyme, chain-gang Capulet couplets for about two weeks.

The next day when we practiced you would've thought we were Nubian Abyssinian Ethiops, or black Balthazar bringing baby Jesus rough gifts of song. We even wore overalls, sharecropper StagoLeevis. No, of course not. We had stayed overnight in tough neighborhood in Chicago and lived, so now we had enough authenticity to last a lifetime of youth. Yet the Bluesfire soon shifted, for we were essentially s'perban highschoolkids, with little interest in any products of people not of our clique, soon tiring of those people's musics. Whiter than white. We knew nothing of sharecroppertude, meatpackers’ killing floors and parched men’s farms. After our Blues experiment Tippy stopped trying to pretend he lived in Aleppo's baddest block. Ours was No-Ghetto Aleppo.

Those Blues Magis’ Message to the Young came through loud and clear though. Be free. Be yourselves, chillun. We weren't no Duke of Nixons mock-military drill team, boulevard high-stepping at a Presidential Inauguration, or the Rock equivalent. Never would be, no.

Championship baseball had grown moribund when the singing the National Anthrax was abandoned, its British melody "StarSpangled Banger" no longer played to commence any festivities.

Though many in the crowd were not too stoned to stand up.

Yet Aleppo, reeking of university, blossomed in politics.

The Breast Campus Party, feminist and anti-ageist, ran a barely-nubile young virgin for school board, claiming if elected she'd serve only until she took a male lover, but female ones until then were OK and expected. Hailing from a journalistic household, her

mother published Common Woman magazine, tips on satisfying orgasms at orgies; excercises that dry the wet spot on the bed; taking apart, cleaning, and reassembling a military rifle; cooking for male revolutionaries on the lam, and so on.

Tippy had also supposedly inspired the new liberally Humane Onanists' Party, which also ran fifteen year old schoolgirls he'd had a couple years ago for numerous City Hall positions. I think you had to be about fifteen to be considered a viable candidate for anything that year (except that damn Nixon’s reelection). The Party revived the old 1830s Michigan territory cry Every Man His Own County Seat! And a conservative mayoral candidate got AM radio airtime blaming all youth masturbation and consensual sexual explorations on Tippy and the Chomps. Our affiliation with Aldebbie later saw us retroactively ticketed for many uncommitted sodomies. The management supposedly took care of it, greasing police and prosecutorial palms with payola. And, considering Aldebbie’s management strategies, who knows what else with what.

The little mystic Tippy called the Revolution "The Rosicrucian".

Tippy wisely called the student demonstration their DemonCastration, for several cops and deputies were so maimed that day and evening's riots. Heartfelt students protesting at the courthouse with signs WHATEVER YOU DID, NOT GUILTY!" But later things got even more political, y’know? Well, maybe not, but I’ll tell you.

Soon.

Remember, 1969 was when the Revolution had already happened. What, you say, and do without the culture that built our marvelous cliches? Politics permeated the air the way the smell of

burning leaves in fireplaces do in the late, great Fall semester. Then they burn the rival homecoming floats. Remaking society was on the final exam. Grants from the Department of Defense to University sociologists studied connections between student ruckus and Motorbourgeois songs.

For a while, maybe a lull in the storm, things were relaxed enough on campus that you could pay your tuition, or bill at the student union bookstore, in homegrown marijuana. A State Representative was elected on a platform of puffing pot in the epicenter of his district, and sticking out his hand for a hug at Sunday free rock concerts plenty of weekends. Debates no more than blue doves aloft. Calming Christ upon the waters with the gentleness of votes. Supporting government actions which scatters forsythia blossoms everywhere. Barefoot girls in billowing diaphanous flowered minidresses smiled while collecting donations for one of those hip charities providing aid to children trying to live on 500 mg of LSD a day, or less. For a while the churchgoers on the City Council had considered a grade schooler or toddler as Chief of Police “for a little child shall lead them,” but abandoned the idea for a sturdy Korean War vet.

Students sported antiwar amulets. A clean-cut few wore amulets of armament (Young Americans for Obedience), to which my brother and I probably gravitated more. Not for us, that libelliberal hippie shit. None of it. We were always part of the endless chthonic struggle, repression versus expression and all that, but we were antimatter to the campus lumpenpoltico revolutionaires.

Wouldn’t attend weekly meetings of the New Young Condolences.

Our band's tardy contribution was a Rock n’ Roll noise that broke the glasses of everyone smart, or at least irritatingly smudged and dirtied them. We were Aleppo town’s Greek Colonels, not really

apostles. And you know what happens when apostles attract. Or attract your teenybopper daughters. No, I’m not calling you a teenybopper.

Ironically, our band was often found playing at local Armories in the days of student demonstrations. Not big clothing armoires, but Gothic urban fortresses where the Midwestern Natural Guard regrouped, jackbooted across campus double-time, and charged into the corruscating, festering student imbroglio down on Universality street. Big Student Riot Time! The streets were erupting in students, late-nite political partying as efflorescent and pubescent as any adolescent's face breaking out. Oily ringleaders slipped through the clutches of cops. Egged on by the People's Puma Party, who issued droll, incendiary tracts on how egging houses was a revolutionary act, Zoology students were catapaulting burning tigers at the cops. The FBI accused the Party of planting a bomb made of gunpowder, fuse and a bucket of snails, live escargot picked from French-Canadian separtists’ gardents. Barnyard cops trucked in from surrounding communities, with their hayseed billyclubs knocked out of heads the ideas they'd learned in class just that day; uniformed devils verses uninformed angels. As the FGNM song hollered, You Got Me Dancin' Like Ché Guevara On the Slab. Though my brother was by nature conservative and skeptical, Thump spoke of the God-given Freedom of Agression he enjoyed as a midi-class whitened American, but especially as a Michigan boy. Local thugs like our drummer Thump joined just for the donnybrook, relieved the state’s opossumpressors of their Batons of Injustice in order to spit several police helmets and the Indo-European Cro-Magnon skulls inside

them. Girls runnng in jodhpurs thrust in sticks of dynamite stuffed beneath the tails of the sheriff's posse's horses, something other girls—especial those whose parents paid for riding lessons and a colored stable groom—considered mean.

The People's Puma Party radicals—you’ve heard of them, right? They were the vanguard of advocacy for marijuana, Rock, and all amusements. Well, we played at the People's Puma Party first Defend the Defenestrators rally, organized to raise legal defense funds for the students who pushed cops out of dorm windows when they arrived to bust them for pot. This inspired our song—originally an instrumental—"Defenestration" about tossing kings, then our high school teachers, cops, finally recalcitrant girls, from windows. I came up with the memorable riff, thank you.

The Peoples' Puma Party had their own house band though, who lived in their ramshackle commune. Those beatniks the FGNM played at a big political convention protest rally turned into claiming they'd levitate the Pentagon with rock chanting, topless girls with finger cymbals, and their LSD. Had Threadbear believing them, writing panegyrics and encomiums in the underground newspapers all summer long. Originally called the Five Guys Named Motorsburgh, they went by FGNM for a while, until a girl (wise as the child in The Emperor’s New Band Clothes) presciently said “The Fugnums? That sounds goofy.” So they were soon just called the FG’s, and started telling people they were the Effigies, programmed mass-produced dummies, effluent of a sterile contemporary honky pig war-machine culture, and all that.

These guys could readily grow hair to their waists in the course of a short summer. I couldn't, though liked it brushing my shoulders, tops of my glasses. Those guys’ lithe heads looked like medieval monks, all hair and beard and emaciation nation. Heads you'd see on pikes outside the walled city, and Sheriff Lithocephalus Hogan Hamhanded distinctly liked that idea. Yet the Sheriff, much like Father Coughinacarload on radio, was convinced the local Pumas were a branch of the Hesiod Hippies, that wide-eyed cult out of Evil, California dedicated to killing unborn actresses in the womb, and he was determined to make headlines with their capture.

They'd come to the La Grandiosaeity Ballroom to see the headlining act, old blues shamecropper Shadowwheel Pinkmeat, but, discovering they were hours early, still stayed to size up their new competitors, us. They played a bacony electric version of that old blues song “Dig Your Grave Out Loud”, then the 1950s weeper “My Complaint”, yet lugubriously slow and heavy, with a brace of duelingpistol guitars. Their outfront tip-top hippie sang "She Said Show me your Come Credentials!"

Peoples’ Puma railing against the City Counci’s Book-of-Job politics, as well as a ban on Rock concerts in the older, nestled midcity parks, pretty much got everybody’s respect.

One Peoples' Puma Party majordomo with an I-am-the-Walrus mustache was designated the Party's Minister of Burgers and Fries.

Other roaritanian titles were bestowed, in stoned reveries of battlefield aristocracy. The Party’s quasi-religious motto was Opiates for the People!, and they always referred to the state, in print or feedbacky mic'd onstage polemic, as "Oppresschigan".

Ganja marijuanas were extolled by Chingacook, born Hubert Cook Jr., the black West Indian member of the People's Puma Party, was nicknamed "Chingada" for his polyvalent aborigino-pagan sexuality, to which Aldebbie quickly gravitated towards on his first Motorsburgh tour. Chingacook grew up in what had been the Colored Waif's Home, by mid-century modernized to something bland like the Hunter-Gatherer Boulevard Youth Center. Self-posessed and street smart, him. But after the one time he let his guard down, did time behind bars for selling the weed within sniffing distance of a longhaired narc.

Turns out many of these Reds were red Indians—not spicy East Indians, nor aforemetioned calypsodelic windward or leeward black Westerlies, but Michigan natives. Alepporigines, like the sad tan people in the Museum dioramas' little villages and campfires.

Scions and scionists of Karl Marx's Winnetou, up north's big menacing manitoux full of mannitol, in league with the propellorshredding Great Lakes manatee. Another red Indian in the People's Puma Party, a master mechanic named Whippingdeadhorse, got called the PPP Minister of Cavalry, because he could keep their cars and hippie vans (especially the FGs’) running. Because of Whippingdeadhorse’s evocative Rock concert rhetoric, the Police feared literally being scalped, had weekly buzz cuts as prophylaxis.

Corruption may have been alleged involving Sheriff Hogan’s counterpart and rival in student head-busting, Aleppo Police Chief O' Heroism. When he was nicknamed by the college humor magazine O'Heroin, Republicans started a campaign to call him O, the Heroism!

an exhortation a 19th c. poet would utter. He was under fiery criticism for not solving campus murders, like a string of butchered coeds, and a child missing an arm, a leg, a dog.

Against all those student protestors high court alchemy fumed and bubbled. There was always some benefit gig to get some Disturbing-the-Peace-Sign campus rioter sprung from jail, held in a University building donated—if not yet fully liberated—for the purpose. Inevitably the Chomps were always invited to pad the bill.

Tippy got a round of applause when he opened the concert by hollering "Bullshit" in a manner with more meaning than the entire Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Federalist Papers and Burke’s Peerage. Philosophers debated the morality of shouting "Fuck" in a crowded theater. Only a few years before, to be sexual was abusing your rights. Waving your hands in the air was suspect.

The music, not the lyrics, was what was dirty.

And we were considered revolutionary by default. Despite our general, genial apathy, we muttered slogans of support, as we tuned up or even fell asleep on infested, stoner couches. Students, fight for your right to riot in the raucous, head-revolving, revolting Revolution of the upheaval of everything. Or something.

The Peoples' Puma Party was partying with the radical Hippies of Confusion from Big Joke City back east, sons of Borscht Belt comedians who'd taken a lot of LSD, laughing and cavorting in their backyard. Befuddled, the locals called the campus Insight Police to investigate.

Rumors spread that the Pumas sheltered hippie commune

commando Charlemagne Mammon, goateed like a Confederate marauder, his name rattling from newspaper headlines when he killed Hollywood starlets and their hairdressers, made Daniel Booneskin hats of our their inborn children torn from pregnant bellies, worn by him and his flock of trippy girlfriends. All he wanted was all the money in the world, to give to poor white trash and drive the moneychangers from the temple, so he "Killed Like Christ". The Puma commune was a bit embarrassed to have hosted him, let him crash for a while and share their dope. But Whippingdeadhorse wrote it up as a revolutionary act, so all were OK, guilt-free.

Our name appeared on several more event posters in swirly lettering by the Peoples' Puma Party Graffiti y Graphics Generalissimo—they liked third world military titles—Quentin Quimshare. Actually, he had begun as an Amish carpenter's apprentice, so his lettering was ornate but as solid as a Victorian London housefront, or a chain to hold a great doomed steamship at dock. Or the gingerbread and carpentry on the home of a 19th c. judge a small Michigan town.

The Peoples' Puma Party logo, adapted by artist Quimshare from an African one used in Toussaint L'Ouverture and Nat Turner's slave rebellions, was a seven-headed mountain lion, snarling wolverine mouth and barbed rattlesnake tail, paws like prehensile monkey feet. Zoologically inaccurate, but terrific and cool looking.

They waved flags proudly over the free rock concerts and political benefits, but seemed a bit regal, their mascot embroidered in gold on purple velvet, for a supposedly egalitarian primitive cartoon sydicateanarcho-communist communal conclave-coven-cabal.

Finally, they came out and asked us if we’d play at a rally they were organizing against the Endless War to End All Wars Until the Next One. Before this invitation, we had played plenty of free concerts, Sunday in the park, but hadn’t lent our name and time and electricity for political causes. Free in those days was like Alfred Krupp getting numerous princes' orders for steel cannon, but never getting paid for the guns upon delivery. But yeah, we’ll do it.

The Chomps were actually in town to play at another Fourth of July concert opening a new mini-park for young mothers in mini-skirts to do their knitting. Tippy dancing like a twist of spaghetti ready to stick to the wall. People were pleased to see us onstage again and thought it bode well for new things Our band played at their student antiwar protest at the center of the university Romboid (ringed by streets Satan, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, all early university presidents or professors). The demonstration featured the local sharecropper-voiced consciencerocker Eddie Heady and the Headstones, whose song began: When in the course of human events Daddy can't pay the rent...

At the antiwar rallies, most militant bands were playing army to be against war, green fatigues and brass buttons, peaked caps over masses of hair, burly belts and boots. Late nineteenth-century mustache masculinity, Hocus-pocus hussars and Jesus-headed US Calvary officers.

Harry Fuct's young grandson was now Aleppo’s State Senator Gary Fuct. I think he tried hosting a movie show too, intended for hip youth, in bad, grim monster makeup that seemed right on the middle-

aged [sir graves] but only made him look like an alternative rock star trying too hard. Now he was running for re-election, so came to the rock concert, shaking hands and passing out pamphlets.

Not sure I’m one hundred percently with all the rebellionists though. As a band, we really weren't all that concerned about politics, and Tippy certainly modeled and mirrored the angst of the weird individual, not his society (except the girls he's in). Of the two Jewish sciences, Economics or Psychiatry, we marched down the Sigmundstrasse. I called peaceniks "paxolotls", because I could.

Sheriff Bug Percheron busted everybody at the concert as radical bands and speakers shook with indignation, intoned for upheavel and swore revenge against it all. Tippy did heinous unspeakable things with the American flag—he thought the act was sort of a deep, symbolic patriotic communion but the Sheriff, not being Catholic in years, thought he said "communism". Deputy Sheriff Hamhanded had discussed with the evening Aleppo Auroch newspaper’s cozy and forgiving police reporter the idea of crucifying student radicals—all zealot Jews anyway—in the center of campus, calling on Aleppo’s churches to provide legitimacy, nails and authenticity. What we called the Sloppy Police, in their sweat-bellied indignity, were now calling students and youth The Lesser Breeds Without the Law. In response to Hamhanded, we set up our equipment in the middle of campus and Tippy sang of the University: It’s a safe, warm nook For the People of the Book Meanwhile the helmeted line of police aurochs scowled, chewed defense mints, snorted and stamped their boots in the dusty

pavement, across from the university administration fortress. Faculty and students seemed to like the sentiment Tippy expressed, and gazed at us through hornrims of approval. Onstage I kept a stern Chemistry-class face, expression like a bursting beaker. Soon Tippy was angrily spinning around the stage like a Sunday school wasp, or WASP. We got everybody righteously riled up, which is how they want to feel.

It all gets broken up by cops. Meanwhile, Thump's love of any god fight with fists, steel pipes, hurled cans and bottle, hunting crossbow taking out police. Chingacook broke into a gold-toothed grin, then guffawed, lit a Molotov Cocktail bottle of government gasoline that the Peoples' Puma Party had stockpiled to clean Quimshare’s signpainting brushes, to clean Sheriff Hamhanded’s clock. The gentle event turned into a student riot, with burning tires to defecate, I mean demarcate, the "liberated" area. And everybody had a really, really good time. Thump carrying his drums, all the Megaron amplifiers on his mighty shoulders, biceps roaring, to our van.

Turning back before climbing in, with a sophisticated toss he decapitated Hamhanded’s favorite deputy with a hurled razor-edged cymbal, and crushed a phalanx of three cops with a speaker cabinet, yet gets everyting stuffed into the Chompmobile before we roar off, hightail it home. The last to leave the stage, Tippy stands there amused, regally singing: When cops go pop, Pigs snap like twigs, Fuzz goes splat, splat, splat Baa-byyyyyy…

We went over to their big rambling house at the edge of campus, rented from a defrocked fraternity scattered to the winds, to party and laugh at the day’s events.

“Man, every time Tippy shoots onstage, it’s a revolutionary act, and a honky parent dies of fright!” OK, yeah, I guess so.

There was a spirited argument going on, whether at last summer’s space shot the first astronaut landed on the Moon burned the flag, or sewed it on his jeans back in the lunar module. Tippy laughed, “I’m more interested in the Boner Module” and, with a tanktopped girl with long straight hair parted in the middle, retreated upstairs.

Afterwards, Chingacook led us to a small barbecue grill called a Weedsmoker. A hippie girl crushed a bell pepper in her hands, shook out the seeds on the lawn for songbirds. Members of the Peoples’ Puma commune were always quoting Old Testament scripture, often applied to the Vietnam war and political scalawags. Their Minister of Obfuscation, whose great grandpa had been in a long-bearded farming commune in the western part of the state, laughed and approvingly compared her action to Onan—or Tippy!—spilling his seed upon the ground.

At the People's Puma Party BBQ, we dined on a police dog killed in the recent student demonstration. Thank you, Fritz, tender as you are. Though many hippies, especially girls, had whined the progressives weren’t sufficiently vegetarians, vegans or (purest of all) breatharians, the Pumas were all red-blooded Motorsburgh meatknights who enjoyed their right to barbecue.

"Tastes like chicken" said Thump.

"Ha ha, you said that about pussy" sneered Tippy.

"Pussy? We got some kittens right here" said Whippingdeadhorse, holding up a squab-sized carmelized carcass on a skewer. "We recycled them from a well, already soaked for softness." I nibbled on a leg, but there really wasn't much meat to be had upon the spindly bone. Guess they think of it as a holiday treat, a delicacy.

Thump, that true radical of the heart among us, would set freight trains on fire, tie police dogs and even the Department's horses to the tracks beforehand. This may be why the Peoples' Puma Party radicals chose to share their BBQ delicacies with us.

But as Charlemagne Mammon’s California thrill kill cult enthused, it's the Year of the Fork, Knife and Spoon! So get to work we did.

3.xii.19 The good fortune of this tornado warning keeping us in this basement together give me the opportunity of—no, I wasn't thinking of that—of telling you the story of the Chomps in great depth.

Fall in Michigan, leaves on campus the color of Hell or the glow in the rakish magazine PREPUCEBOY publisher’s pipe. Girls in down jackets bulging like a pumpkin patch. One advantage of being dropouts in a college town is plenty of places to gig and a bored, thrill-seeking appreciative audience. Dank sub-garages full of guys expecting entertainment, a boys’ crazy Weblosnacht. We played all boom boom lodges hosting front porch parties with free beer or

samples of unremarkable Michigan wine. Dink smiled, lipsmacked and drank his fill.

Acres of succulent highschool girls along for the ride. For all the jet-set girls we didn't get in highschool, the joy of agriculture is that there's another crop along the next year and the next and the next. Puberty as perennial as April showers, leaves changing colors.

We played a string of strongarm frathouses, where at one party we couldn't find curtain rods so Thump used puppies as drumsticks.

Tippy insultingly challenged them all up there as the cock-of-theRock, singing daring songs in the faces of tomorrow's leaders of the automobile industry. In the faces of jocks that so riled him in the classroom or gym he screamed Pay attention to me Goddam it!

Adroitly and maladroitly he instilled fear they only barely understood or felt, when they weren't upstairs over the toilet puking from too much drink. Jocks ruled, but insufficiently rocked.

Aleppo’s Midwest University Campus wasn't the only place our band played. One night the Chomps played at O'Tearsvale Community College in nearby Petulanti, just east of Ypsofacto. It was a place for guys in college destined to become sub-architects, after a child’s own lifetime of egging houses. "To shoot a pre-med or architecture student is a socially redeeming act," said the valedictorian quoting one almost illegible badly-xeroxed poster, possibly put up by an art school poseur. Architects as arsonists in stone and brick; some had designed the tombs of famous arsonists at the edge of campus, which they called the Pyromids.

Tippy and the Chomps took every opportunity to play in public that came our way all throughout the school year. Our hand-drawn

posters for each gig were stapled up everywhere visible around southeastern Michigan. In Tippy’s own world of graphic design, the spiky instantly-recognizable leaves of Cannibalistic Sativa couldn’t appear too often.

Some of our early gigs were at shopping centers like Realistic Village, Hedonistville and Female Empire in a township called Sporehaven, at the outskirts of the whimsicality of Aleppo. One gig we were invited to play at the opening of a big bag of dogfood at a pet store. We played for a cargo cult, then a potlatch giveaway of everything in a Kwonset Hut supermarket (the power had been out and the refrigerators melted, including melting the 99-cent and threefor-a-dollar record bins). We played at the opening of a generous Chinese restaurant called So Much. The name of the restauranteur’s daughter like the sound of a fingernail against a crystal water glass.

To him our music was probably as welcome as a prank call on the Carry-Out number during a busy dinner hour. We enlivened a sale at Darryl's Stage Prestidigitators’ Shoppe in the small shopping center Supine Village, but wouldn’t wear tuxedoes as requested. An agency called Hell Travel made promises, but never called. A concert in a cemetary? Why not, our volume could wake the dead. Once we played in a crypt for just two bats.

For all Aleppo's academic faithlessness, a big market for rock n' roll bands were churches and their incessant teen parties. Churches in Aleppo, were just like evening day-care centers for respectable adolescents, where boys and girls learned to kiss like Judas kissed Christ. Girls crushed under the altar by young athletes in the church youth groups for which we played. The altar was for deflorations,

romantic defibrillations, not just nuptials. Mainstream Protestantism's plenty of opportunities, where “Did it on the Altar” was practically a respected Sunday hymn. Unitarians, Methodists, Mormon churches all had rival teen bands wailing on a given night. One church had on the front symbolic decorations representing all the attributes of Christ—wavy hair, fishtall, skeleton key, et cetera; I suppose we got the gig because Tippy reputedly has parts shaped like a Christ fish.

That Tippy always on the mark, like how Christ managed to time it to get himself born in the year 4 B.C. Rabbi Teensky's daughter gave birth like Mary less than a year after we played for his B'nai Brigittebardo. We played at Saint Francis X. Bushparish’s annual roasting of the birds flying south for the winter, Canada geezers, airwives for catechismal assignations. The Catholics, in their potpourri of popery, always wanted us to finish with a twenty-minute version of "Pius, Pius", that old Trinity-chord'd song about a rapscallion doo-wop Pope.

We gradually began encroaching on the dim drinking establishments at the outskirts of Motorsburgh. Our bassplayer Dink sure liked being around so much liquor. Cut our rock teeth in a cavern club reminiscent of Jonah's gigs in the belly of the whale.

Played in a kitschy club called the Apiary, for people were getting resigned to the killer bees that had made their way to Michigan the summer before. Some bars were jock jungles, football famines, white beefalo men with processed hair and worry beads. Playing in this bar called the Tomb of Mausolus, every day from about three weeks before Thanksgiving we'd see the old TV announcer Gubin Schatz, who played Santa in the Thanksgiving Day Parade sponsored by

Motorsburgh's biggest department store. Goob would drink until he fell off his stool, frightened that this would be the year he'd be shot up there by some Mayhem City maniac who just wanted to be on TV. By then he was puffed up like one of those big bullwinkle balloons himself, as I too would soon be. Good thing they didn't show the film of the Hindenburg disaster very often, or some kid would probably get the idea to lob a sparking grenade or shoot tracer shells.

We gigged at a night club called the Revolving Door. Local scenes like the Casino Debris, The Gift Shop, the The Azure Plinth, the King Tut's Tombs, sports bars like the Pin Drop, the Putting Green, the Karate Chop House, the Sabrecut and the General Ludd.

Hidalgo Island Yacht Club. Private Clubs like the There goes the Neighborhood. . The part of town where cars were abandoned. The part of town where everybody is a husband. At an early age.

Faded singer Sue Prego owned a place on the midwest side called Superegos. Our sound was said to enhance the taste of the $144 steaks at the Lobstertail supper club, or of the beef tea and scotch at the Beefery, not like we got to play in swank joints like that.

We played a roadhouse near Lake Hoffa, Michigan, by the famous breakwater made up of the concrete slabs encasing the feet and corpses of compromised union officials. We played one gig at the Frank Bison Crossboweum up north, a popular tourist spot. This led to a sportsmanlike appearance on Ball Nerff's fishing show "The Salmon Speak". The band wore camo and leaves. We played at Caviar Island, Michigan, where auto executives golf with chrome balls upon teak tees.

Soon the Chomps were playing in a park among filled trash bags onstage. Like Halloween, July Fourth's a holiday that begins at night, also half the appeal of Rock n' Roll. There’s something symbolic to kids about the fireworks, for intuitively they felt the promise of orgasm even if they didn't know what it meant.

How did we get to be so civic? Our next gig was the opening of a new parking garage. There the newly-elected Aleppo mayor Pontiac P. Ponchatrain cut what he thought was a ribbon which turned out to be my guitar cord after his motorcade rolled over it on their way in. He was instantly fried electrocuted, though the new Republican administration tabled the motion for an investigation of the tragedy for budget considerations. The garage already smelled like piss—it'd been mixed with the concrete—and Tippy promised to dent someone important's car there. Or when we got a record deal and big advance money, his own.

Yet every success had its fixed-price limits. We were nearly caught when Thump felt like burning down the temporary log fort that housed the annual Summer Shopping Fair Folklore concerts, hastily erected on a field out by the rival highschool, Jerry-Ford-built and flammable. That darn liberal couple who set themselves up as local Folk fascists wouldn't let Tippy and the Chomps play there, condemning us as too "inauthentic" for even the weekly open-mike hooligan-free Hootenanny. Those hypocrites had even let guys dress up in armor and swing swords and lutes. We were barbarians, but with stars in our eyes, Astrogoths.

As part of the Shopping Festival, Aleppo took to cinema and the city misappropriated some funds to organize a yearly network TV

retrospective. Professor Thoth, that wine-drinking Italian Painter teaching in the Art Department got the idea he was a Director What he did was hire Tippy and that skinny Big Joke Pupa Art actressmodel called Neuda to cavort and tumble in a potato field in what he called a sort of "spaghetti Midwestern". Bits of it still turn up in latenight used car lot commercials on UHF stations. Neuda was had between all parties involved. What a trouper.

Yet technically we were no longer as ersatz as we were, as other bands started stealing our equipment. We had a pigheaded radio, batnosed amps, anteater-nosed amps and armadillo guitars.

Some drums were just live hippos patiently standing there while pygmy puerii battered their backsides. An electric chair used to eletrocute an elephant saw the beginning of punitive technology applied to musical amplification systems. Precise German gas chamber engineering was applied to the proper pressure of gas-filled drums. Phosgene, freon, hydrogen "Hindenburg" explosions between the drummer's legs onstage were a not-so-uncommon occurrence. Amplifiers or car engines were like a cow's four stomachs, rumm-rumm-ruminating idly. Plugged in, we are all intestine, the miles of magnitudinous plumbing benath a magnanimous city. Satyr financing of musical equipment. At a music store operated by Arthur Zither, who brought the big Magus Megaron Amplifiers—"Satan's Telephones"—to the Midwest, with powerful Tesla Coils and Rolls-Royce engine magnets, and steamship parts designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, bankrolled by the Sultan of Brunei.

Trying to remember, was it the middle of Winter we appeared on the University's educational TV show along with astronaut Colonel Doug McDoug, whom they said went to our highschool? We were there to illustrate a scientific segment about some disease that we (and all the teenage kids of the frightened viewers at home) were supposed to be scared of called Guitarus Fingernalia. Contrasted with some Beagle Scout honor students Colonel Doug approved of, we were mistakenly introduced by him as an Escargo band that sounded like the rush hour traffic on its busiest downtown freeway.

We were pretty famous in our hearts and minds, so suitably abusive to the smarmy host. Spacewalk, so what?

We played a shopping mall opening that featured a salubrious live appearance from the greasepainted Baron Decadenceo Deadmeat, bogus Motorsburgh vampire who introduces Saturday afternoon horror movies. Zombie movies were especially popular for everybody's secret fear of their ancestors, especially their parents.

A week later the Chomps were invited to Motorsburgh to be featured on "Menace Time", a growling teen Rock n' Roll TV show always shown at the best time of day, 3:30 in winter or 6:00 p.m. in the summer. It was sponsored by a regional pimple cream said to be manufactured from caustic industrial waste, its logo a whey-faced clown. For a TV appearance a band is set up like silverware at a place-setting, fine bone-china delicacy and gleaming silver service all in place and functional. Guitars hooked up to megalithic Magus Megaron amplifiers with navelcords. Studio musicians behind us played saxaphones so tiny they looked like seashorses, and sounded like a badly-squeezed cat on summer night. Attention-getting bands

often carried their instruments through the audience. I got a bit paranoid when I remembered my junior highschool electronics teacher warning us that a TV picture tube was more dangerous than a landmine. I get a bit paranoid about a lot of things. What were we, the Chomps, but golden magnets, bending the TV picture that you perceive.

It was Spring, when unseasonably unspeakably warm weather brings the crapapple and adultblossom trees along Aleppo's streets into bloom and they blossom into big warm snow in your face. Tippy was a magnifying glass to the sun of the song, and the ampifiers are the magnifying glass to the hot sun that is Rock. Look at that cave puppy up there, Pissacantropus Erectus or Jehovah Man. Chrome Magnin even, swinging that club, puling women. By the hair and short hairs.

Aw, but Tippy really liked showing off onstage, where the world floated before his eyes like a crenellated dream. Tippy became this pimping, posing, bouncing Ponce de Leon of Rock. Standing there with a sheet music look on his face. Tippy’s Scoliosis-slant further accentuating the wearing of his dick to the other side, for balance. I sing the body electric, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks. He left his ego droppings onstage, was all razors and raisins. That ego fraud, no ego-friend. Tippy's snakeskin-boot haircut, longhair like a genuine Jivaro shrunken head. Expressions on his courduroy face like when a chimp sees a ghost. Light bounced off his eyes and into the bleachers. Cool cargo cult eyes, a suburban cat with flashlight eyes. Rock is no eyesore. The flourescent frontier. The

transformation in his mind like a parachute jump into a raging forest fire in the Haight Ashbury, a hippie commune SWAT-team-dynamited in the woods. Smile like a cigarette put out in a stick of butter, Tippy developed a bitchen hairlip, from the combination of the microphone, beerbottles and joints, which made his breathing sound like constant singing, whistling like a truckdrivin' wolf in the old cartoons would at the sight of a pretty dame. Lycanthrope on a tightrope. It's a difficult thing, the powerlessness of man before microphone which, unless you knock it over, just keeps standing there.

On that stage Tippy learned to jiggle like a baby having a religious experience. Master entertainer and master sensualist. That Michigan Gilgamesh. Practicing his motor skills. Making a fool of himself in fast motion, experimenting with his legs to find the most efficient way to dance his silly little university-town dances. Skinny little person up there little more than a Nehru shirt on a marrow-bone.

Yet full of talent. A manic anaconda. A duck o' war. He was teaching an advanced placement course in spazzattackology up there, demonstrating lip-to-lung thereapy. Tippy was this whirling dervishfish onstage. Tippy alternately danced with helicopter legs, bubblegum trading card legs, big School Board Computer legs. I'm dancing greatfoot! Danced like a flowerfoot. Dancing on little fetusfeet. Dancing on lemonade soles. Dancingwise, the best dancer in the University was nicknamed Stompo, if that gives you some idea how Midwesterners move. Like threshing machines or assembly lines, lumber-stuffed locomotives or Grandiose Lakes freighters cracking ice. Farm boys still chained concrete blocks to each shin so their legs'd grow stronger. Couples on the floor, they did the

Doppelganger. Danced the Lickety Split. Did the Shetland Pony.

Dancing up and down like Hitler's heliocopter. Pluck like bucolic collies. Let me see ya do the Pizza Fish.

Ours was the first post-greaser generation to rework all those great old songs by Elvis' composers Schonbrun and Schloss. A summer's worth of Pop careers could be made out of revamping those few three-minute tunes. The smartest thing we ever did was know how to be stupid. A band you love as much for its faults as for its weaknesses. We were full of God's gasoline. PseudoEnglishmen singing in Pidgin Carnaby pseudo-English, about a pseudo-Englightenment called Love. Soon we were making out musically and musically making out. Laborers of Love. Most of our practices consisted of playing or saying something as funny as we possible can. That's how we became so good.

"We don't plan on making any mistakes", his first words to the audience, were met with cheers. Tippy's voice reminded women of tossed-off babies. Voice like a big paycheck. That gaspaholic, asthma'd-up. Musical notes when he'd wheeze, violin cadences.

Singing the devil's contralto. The devil's breathmint, the devil's inhaler. Meet your Hypnotist. Sad poet brandishing his microphone like a guilt-edged razor, murmuring: My mother was raped by a tiger... over ominous bowel-bass and anarchy bowling drums. Each line of this song corresponds to a different part of the U. S. Mad milkman in the land of money and honey. We played till 41 o'clock. Then the uptempo "I Want Babies", and a song about dreams "Feel So Zomboid". The mastermouth, mothmastermouth dry from song. Now

you're singing with your mothermouth. Tippy's voice had the range of a singer with three balls, or at least irradiated ones. Microphone in hand it was as if he was literally singing into his own cock, some sort of energy recycling of wisdom conservation program, or maybe he was singing into some kind of world-symbolic all-cockness. Like the going-crazy monster who drank too much Groupie Grape.

Remember, the word "akimbo" originally meant "like Christ".

Spread-eagled egalitarian God-man. God-eagled. Described as "snappydelic", "skippydelic", finally "Tippydelic" and that one stuck.

That Tip-it-in-a-delic sound. Jackrabbit fits and starts of songs. The polar opposite of music which after each song virtually says "Hey, no offense". These songs had ridden to other planets on the back of radio and television waves. He could've rhymed "dundas" and "humongous" and gotten away with it. There were seven persons calling themselves Tippy strutting around Aleppo by the end of that spring.

Onstage a lonesome pogrom. Gaze upon him, feel the warmth of his wounds. Writin' prostaglandin postcards. Not just a duckpoet.

Could take a snot from his head and turn it into song. Tippy would always have a new song on the tip of his tongue, the spittle of ideas on his lips, but he'd soon forget it, never write it down, and when asked why he didn't would deprecatingly call it something I would do to remember. Nobody was ever arrested for containing in their songs false or misleading epigrams, I don't think. Personally I could never stand ballads, those tear jerk-offs. My mind would wander in the long spaces between notes, between chords. Fat lout of the loud n' fast. Tippy sang:

I'll blow your mind like I blew your speakers Waltzing in my baby of love.

Girls in clogs like a soda shoppe built of Lincoln Logs In hot pursuit of your birthday suit Been a one-woman dog TOO LONG! YAAUUGGGGGHHHH...!!!

Tippy was always jumping from parapets, out second and third story windows, shattering his ankles, wrists, numbing ligaments, rending muscle and snapping tendon. A tendon is like a harp strummed by some jazzy angel. Like a drunk spraying dirt, the child who eats only innocent things pukes a sacred meal. A bishop on his knees barking like a dog. Tippy both puked and made dog action if he thought it would entertain. Tippy raised (and dirtied) some eyebrows with his fescennine jests, like the pelting of the crowd with ordure and doodoo. Like some medieval dolt he hurled turds at the churls. He'd bring a box of horseshit onstage with him to dump into their smiling accepting faces. Perhaps it was in Dink's honor that Tippy would urinate from the edge of the stage. Peeing on the audience, a sinister sprinkler who sings "piss on your face, piss on your tonsils". As the British say, What a Piss Hitler. I immediately thought how Hitler would have dark women shit on his face and hands, and of his Minister of Psychology Freud, who says even our most healthy ration of beer equals piss and meat equals shit in the bowels of our ideas and urethra of regular human discourse.

Seemed to indicate an angry guy. Still, the performer and the heckling audience equals badinage and discipline. An equal

relationship. The crowd threw rocks--after all, it was Rock music-singng in unison "(Have some) Early Man's Tools!"

The band could've been his sons the way he commanded us like an embattled eleventh-hour Macabee at the parapets and gun emplacements.

The well-stocked butcher shop of Rock, sharp whirring meatcutter guitars. The band boils into action. Music smothered all thoughts, crushing them as they scurry for cover. Hysteria and hernia, the cries of the barenaked, harmonic baboons coupling. The music sounded intangible to my ears, spewing out of the fairness machine of guitars and amps. Some music just audio-offal, offal of the ear from the slaughterhouse of the ear. The Pope's voltage.

Pixies in the resistors. Light mortal radio. Like bee purples, colors that only bees can see, we put a dog whistle screeching behind subliminally on the song "Your Dog Can't Stand Me".

Rock as a grand high school cafeteria food fight and the groupies as lunchladies, starched white uniform like a layer of pastry, the top crust on a pie till you realize what that is dried around her lips.

Rock as Pavlov's Dogfood. We played it as others played children's games, or like the art of chess or professional baseball in the beerdrinkers' league. Rock as a G-force. Another instance of music derailing a train. Our music played mysterious pinching games like pinch-the-ear. Our music, of course, was as indescribable as YHVH, the unutterable name of God. Rock as three-chord prayer. The sound of peergroup pressure, the rhthym of the burglary. Never nerves. Sins of the bargain bins. What a Jewish kid called a stainless steel seder. To put Rock under a microscope is a noble

mission, for duty and humanity. We were the electricians from Michigan, getting people wired with burning-ass-music. I'm going to stand in your path and snarl Stop laughing and start dancing.

And what about me, you ask?

Michigan was the shape of my mitts hammering the guitar. Got my guitar in a hammerlock. Gave my guitar an Indian rub. Guitar is my gavel.

Guitar licks? More like licking a frozen metal monkey bars or playground swingset to see if your tongue will stick, at recess in elementary school. Wire paws. Tortured, guilt-induced guitar lines.

A guitar is just a smokescreen. Those weren't guitar chords, that was Pig Latin. Antler mathematics. A sort of self-limiting music. I played that guitar like a rat in a trap. Pinocchio-fingered guitar. Strum as violently as combing hair. Exploding hands. Lots of notes under the fingers, sounded like Bach or Jujubes. The lout and the lotus. Hands like an unsure manicurist. An unannounced seriousness. Easterbunny Butoh. Sometimes, when the feedback was running high and long and pure, there were moments when we were the band whose shit didn't stink. A warm, enveloping family of sound, and the family happened to be the Krupp's of Essential Germany--somehow I'd gotten his Nazism from a misprint. Guitar as a fake phallus versus Tippy's voice as real overweening sex. Maybe "fuck" is just an abbreviation for "feedback", what pours erotically from the amplifiers.

We thought of passing out earwigs for the cops to stuff into their ears behind the cotton so they'd scream like the teenage girls in their

Tippymania. Then the fat Police Chief would shake his head down at the station house and call the Arawaks of earwax.

Look at Tippy. Plenty of money but knows not from whence it comes. We earned but little; why do you think they call it Chomp Change? Could make more money dealing drugs in high school.

And he drinks and eats just enough but knows not where the food comes from. So much for my stinginess, guilty humbling of myself to borrow even the use of someone's washroom, overeating yet always hungry. Why can't that white dictator Tippy ever get fat? To my chagrin, Tippy's pants were so tight there's no way he could fit a book in his pocket. Had to retire my rolling pin pants. I ate so much so my body would serve as an anchor to all the drugs in my soaring head, to keep anything from happening. Pudgy and puffy, barbecue chicken leg stuck in my mouth like a flamethrower. A pudgy headlinegrabbing Clark Kent Found In a Dumpster. Bachelor-bison on the hoof, great lumbering bachelor sexuality. Guess I'd gotten femmefatale fat from gazing unrequieted at too many seductresses.

Our performances were mass complainings. Comeuppances, using real come. Improvisational and provisional. We were just trying things out.

Rock concerts held in a park called the Jewgarden, in the 19th century a beef, bands and bear-baiting (which seemed to discourage hooligans, ethnic taunts and fisticuffs) and Jew-baiting (they'd often have to hire a traveling merchant to play the part) park called the Judengarten.

As a kid, I always thought the Judengarten was a kindergarten with Punch n' Judy puppet shows, I never understood why Mom was horrified I wanted to go, wouldn't take me. Maybe she was insulted during her truncated semester at business or beauty college by a Jewish girl on the humor magazine staff, dropped out mortified. The girl later worked for MERZ magazine, wrote puns and Yiddishisms I saw and quoted as a boy. Oy!.

The record played on a midwest Jewish radio station The Voice of Challa, leaving the leavening in in contrast with the Catholic whitebreadsters of the Midwest I'm related to, popping hosts each Sunday like amphetamines. The Devil was depicted in a laughing pinball machine in that town called God Damn, Michigan, quite a tourist attraction. Plastic blasphemies for sale, bumper stickers and keychains. We gigged there too.

We were interviewed by self-styled arts critic Beau Beaver for his show on the underground FM radio station “Backstage Beaver”, where famous groupies would perform on the radio upon local Rock notables, or junior high neophytes upon famous bands on tour, at their Motorsburgh appearances. Beav and the DJs would then go up on the roof, as they did during long jamming album sides, to smoke dope. Dr. Chaim Haim Settée, “hip” sociologist expert on Motorsburgh anti-semitism, who performed at festivals under the name Sonic Chanukah, editorialized against us and our pernicious influence on Motorsburgh youth, especially girls. Like the Mormons, Tippy and the Chomps were severely persecuted at first. The Aleppo School Board President fumed on local radio. Visiting the capital

building the guards were ready to kick us out and confiscate our afternoon spliffs till the Mormon governor of Michigan took me to the tabernacle, fastened on the breastplates so I could read and translate the lyrics to all our songs into tongue, anoited my genitals upon marriage and apportioned all my free time, the time that money can't buy. Good little folk, I like to think their buried tablets and first temple were in Michigan, not Wazoo before they headed west. I left the breastplates in the sun on the back window of the van and the plastic melted. Still, we were a firm band.

After one gig, a Business student named Shlep excitedly approached us, a man with a phone. This guy was a moustachean, a moustation, a Buddha-in-a-derby, and he wanted to be our most magic manager. We didn’t quite trust this modern bornfriend, a beautiful bastard in solid gold huraches. Spoke in the dialect of American spacey, vague pragmatic promises, checkered with Tao spots. He wanted to take all our money and throw handfulls of it in the bushes, see if he could find it again. All he probably would ever leave us with were IOU's, gambling debts, headaches. But do we need a manager now to get us exposure and places to plug our amps?

I’ll continue booking the gigs, thanks. So Shlep agreed to roadie for us, for was the name of the lost brother of the Three Chomps, not something I wanted to be doing all my life with my guitar and its acoutrements. Admittedly, transportation problems were formidable to the driver of a burly band stuffed into a compact little German sedan no bigger than Hitler’s moustache, four guys, drums and guitars and all those amps. Maybe Thump was just lonely and

needed the criminal element and beast-of-burdenmen around to do evil with, but he convinced us we needed roadies to haul our equipment. You thought we were bad, our roadies were the absolute dissolute dregs of sociolobotomy. I think Thump created a confederation of several biker gangs for servile purposes. Thump had hung out with louts named Chop, Rugby or Throb, Shack, Snack, Tromp or Shark, in childhood friendships based on pulling off flies' wings, torturing frogs etc. Hollering gratuitous swear words.

Violence of an old kind. When a motorcycle gang goes trick-ortreating. When we became wealthy he took up hunting and bought 'em each a falcon. They became a pool when our equipment needed scholars of haulingology. In a stupor of competence, hazy smellbad untouchables, a proud fraternity. Half man, half marijuana, immune to the decent life. Roadie Bart Beckandcall was one of the first drug addicts (as opposed to normal converstational drug use) in our highschool, maybe the state of Michigan, but my Mom wouldn't let him travel with us because she "didn't know the family". Thump and our roadie named Big Alignment punched disk jockey-ballroom owners Bob Bogus and Dan Douse, and that cost us at least one lifetime of gigs. Burnouts like rocket parts, quickly consumed in a flash of life's temperatures. Roadies remind me of a blind man at a cash register paying out five, ten, fifteen in change with a ten, a one, a fifty: all the money in the world wouldn't smarten 'em up.

A rock n' roll band means growing up one step from violence.

The band that played before us one night, prison-guards of Rock, even chose ugly instruments that looked like truncheons and handcuffs. The gargoylism of making funny faces onstage. That

burning golfball smell from the most poisonous part of the city. Watch your adrenalin.

But as they used to say, every Rock band reinvents America, and we had to start somewhere.

Hey, it’s OK, c’mon in, c’mon over. You, it's you journalists that torment me.

No, just kidding. Actually, I'm glad to see you. You're cute.

We've—that is, Tippy has—had girls like you.

You found me here. The historic Firehouse, ha ha. Tippy and the Chomps Historic Site. I didn't think people, especially kids, still remembered after six months, three months, thirty days, whatever it's been. Tragic, yes. My dearest friend, of course. Thank you for you condolences, it means a lot.

Tippy sure was quiet after the gig as we drove back late that night to the Firehouse. Now that this Rock thing was taking off we all got a house together, with a basement we could practice our music in all night long and on girls all through the day. We could easily run down to a nearby convenience store called Stop n' Clog, pick up some bottom-shelf Brewschkis, or Motorsburgh's dependable PolishAmerican swill Brohs. Coming out of the store, gave a high five and spare change to one-string streetsinger Norman Ain'tcha Warm, Aleppo's own Emperor Norton, sans motorcylce. God Bless the Eccentrics. And return to our lair to play our music.

We rented the Firehouse cheap, for it abutted the field where all those flying saucers were sighted a few years before, a sort of Caribbean Triage where people got lost, where strange crop circles

and Nazca-NASCAR-Nazi glyphs were hewn into the living rock or clayey soil. Where only pheasants dared. Grim, goatee'd specialist from another university came out to investigate, declared it only another Klan cross-burning. That settles that.

The Firehouse was a rambling structure at the edge of town, originally built by farmer Edel Weiss, but converted into an ersatz township fire station when it appeared that Eastaleppo would outgrow both the new university town, and nearby Ypsofacto. Some people live in caves, students in big dolomite dormitories, but in the cabdrivers' version of the world, this was a zero neighborhood. The house was out on Bone Marrow Road, three miles past Bowel Road.

Phosphorescent methane from dumpsters the only lights on these dumpstreets. A neighborhood birds were even scared to fly into.

Vultures circled overhead. Real Estate from Hell. An abandoned church on the street where no one spits. Townspeople mistook us for murderous hippies at the Coattails Ranch in southern California. But for extra credit in a math course I determined that this corner, this block was right in the middle of the world, from whence all points were equidistant, on the campus and out in the farms and fields at the same time. So it was all right for us.

Personally I would've preferred the house to be fieldstone. The house had a pink lawn. Bloodspattered flowers. Trees spouting milkfrogs. Chipmunks making fart noises with their mouths, or cussing me out. Putti and cherubs were caught struggling in the rosebushes outside. Jaybirds so proudly defiant that they wore tshirts DINOSAURS WERE OUR ANCESTORS. Even the front lawn had long hair. Distemper grasses around the House. Fuel oil spilled

all over as the antithesis of fertilizer, probably flammable and causing major birth defects all over. Buried policemen would bubble up. In the garden crawling flowers. We had a menacing phone number.

The Bully Dairy milkman, udder logo pinned to his cap and short Eisenhower jacket, scared to come, hadn't shown up for months.

OK, years. Joke janitors patrolled like moonstruck men. Burnt out hippies littered the front lawn. Poison from an electrolytic region of the earth, Buddhaslop all over the place. Thump had cultivated miasma around the yard, septic sewer vapors, old tires to collect rainwater for malarial mosquitoes; “Sick girls are more pliable”, he reasoned. Next door a guy painting his house fell off the ladder, onto the spiky fence of a disused graveyard. Was still screaming when we got home.

That was you’re your uncle? Oh, man, that’s sad. I’m sorry to hear that.

Thump wanted to call the place the House of Gravediggers, but somehow to me that sounded like a smug suburban Motorsburgh steakhouse-qua-supper club, that still might someday ask us to play.

The band FGNM called our house the Gas Station—probably a good name for a teen nightclub, but intended to be their smarmy dig at my farts. We called it the Firehouse for the fire in Rock boys’ loins, the warm soft furnace-oven of the girls we’d ignite there. Dink came up with the Firehouse name. One night he looked up from his drink, called it that "For the pole is Tippy's erection, and all the girls come to slide down it! Haw!" We called it the Firehouse inspired by that story of the modern firestation in Motorsburgh that had an automated dalmatian, and head-bobbing replica in every truck. Too bad those

were all destroyed, targeted by snipers, in the rascal Riots a couple years ago. At the Firehouse everybody was dancin' the Firefighters' Walk. There should be a sign over the Funhouse door, maybe painted by Quimshare in infernal flaming letters, Here Dragons Spat.

The disused, decommissioned rural Firehouse had a big aragey rollup door, high wall hooks for dring hoses uon which Dink hung his bass guitar, and pole from the second floor to the first upon which girls could both slide pleasurably and, when dried, train to be strippers.

The house was out among rural farmhouses that still had kittenflavored wells. The only kittens flavoring our lives, aromatically scenting the bedsheets, were from the high schools; the house was conveniently on a school bus route. Girls got off, got off and got us off. Or, more accurately, girls got off, came in, got off and came, we got on, got us off. Had never noticed trucks going by in front of the house from that old bakery Semencrust. A historian’s daughter claimed early prostitutes had lived here, but that was actually the house behind the theatre near the campus. Still, students would pass here on their way to make love in the country. That Fuck Factory on Fuck Street, Fuck Church road, where the street shrieks and reeks.

Sex in a soiled street turned lovers into leftovers. Where the streets are dirty sheets. A house of cads. Ours was a house painted with two coats of cunt. Like many bachelors, we just used spider webs as curtains, though adventurous girls would cut them down, used them as fishnet stockings. Orgasmometrics were conducted here on a daily basis. We were fun angels and we were home. Home to all reasonable desires, home to all reasonableness itself. Ironically-clear

young complexions undergoing self-scarification with our smoldering cigarette butts, guitar strings, kitchen utensils, rummaging the wastebaskets for my discarded ballpoint pens to jab themselves, anything to prove to their girlfriends they'd been over here. I can't make you a tattoo, girl, I've got to work on music now. Static electricity in Winter from fucking friction, or the rubbing of those girls' butts on the carpet. I could see blue flashes from under the door of Tippy's room. Sex victory after sex victory here. We were lovelords of the expected. The Hotel Hobgoblin. Perturbility House. We been rolling promiscuity dice, a floating crap game of getting our rocks off.

A house dividing itself into separate bedrooms—where we're each dividing the legs of girls—cannot stand. Tippy took her upstairs to his Exploratoreum. His blanket was so well-used and soaked with body oils and his fundament, it cracked like big potato chip under even a petite girl upon his bed. Developmental bedbugs. Floor-level mattresses whose swarming scabies are practically a box spring in themselves, no? The Tropic of Crabs. And ratscabies, from the found mattresses we fished out of the dumpster behind the second-hand charity store. Damn. The dust, the sticky surfaces, the wet-basement smell of Tipppy's room in the Firehouse. "You'd need a forest fire to clear this place for human habitation" said one disgusted girl.

The campus and high schools seemed to perpetually generate all those Jewish girls who invited him to Passover dinner, nymphs and Seder. Rose Deflowersewer, who seemed to stay in his room at the Firehouse interminably, finally had a rabbi (disguised as a bug exterminator) come over to the house and bless a Jewish mussel, a "muzzel" or Methuselah or whatever they call it, that she nailed up

with her own nails. She told Tippy it merely contained a note for the Bully Dairy milkman, and he was stoned enough that he believed we had milk delivery service.

Someone—Tippy’s father?—warned him about girls getting pregny, or the importance of contraceptions. There was something new on the market called Baby Aspirin, and he thought if he took a thousand of them, he would, or wouldn't (I forget which) leave babies in the next thousand girls. He was ready to go in the drugstore, spend his entire paycheck on the little johnson-to-johnson pink pills.

I discouraged him of that, whatever result.

Yeah, so many girls knocked up here, maybe we should change the name of the house to The Fish Hatchery. Young girls would confuse and call the grand house "the Tippy", like slave maidens did with Pharaoh. Groupies brining coke and a sacrificial animal. A girl going up to Tippy's room was like the parable of the flock of blackbirds and the fresh-baked apple pie. Tippy's room his funk truck. The Firehouse was a house heated by body heat.

Their healthful zaftigity the opposite of pale, arty Nembutalia, who sat at our feet as we watched lustfully through our smoke.

I think I told you how Tippy was soon making movies with a German girl named Nada. She would phone, "Is Tidy home?"

Stoopid edelweiss wuss.

Dink said that girl's name Lushie appropriately described both her convivial but habitual imbibing, as well as squishiness down there where it counts. I wished them well, goodnight, shut my door to practice riffs.

In the living room we liked to read underskin Comix, like Smash the Pope! Comics, wantonly chaotic to the extreme, insulting all honk values. Like the Chomps Trio, they represented values to live by.

We lived in the house as carefree as those 19th century communes of children who had thrown their parents down a well. That had actually happened to an old immigrant couple down Dusenberg Road too, was neighborhood lore that made old farmers cross themselves as they passed our manse.

Ours was the Great Privacy of a band so cool they wore sunglasses to bed. The walls were covered with razor blades to prevent people from running in the halls, or walls were themselves giant razor blades set on edge. Aww, I'm just trying to impress you, maybe frighten you off. A house where the eaves were never cleaned, there may have been downspouts stuffed with Civil War-era money, underground newspapers of the Underground Railroad. Step into the Dirty Mutha Foyer. A windowpane over the kitchen sing was broken and a corner piece was missing, so hastily replaced wit a crumpled post card of the university stadium taped over it, badly. The house patched with gaping wound wood. There were holes in the living room walls from bullets, knives, crossbow bolts, slingshot projectiles, fists and head-butts. Axes, Webelos hatchets, hurled at women, whizzingly parting their long ironed hair in the middle whenever the band had taken too many drugs. A window full of skulls. The question mark hearth. Decorated by robbing a liquor store, it looks like the work of the blind movie director. Other decorations rotted in the corner, a murdered sheriff's star on top of the mummy of a Christmas tree. On Santa Lucia’s feast in Europe

girls set themselves on fire, holly pinned to their Yule-log nipples on the Christmas Gibbet. Are these the slovenly habits of the Beatles?

We had a large, slightly dated Molotovvox stereo, somehow akin to a Molotov cocktail? No, more like those big Soviet sedans, for the Russian mogul went into consumer electronics when he realized he wasn't going to be Stalin's successor in the big chair. It had speaker grilles made from the blue serge uniforms from police trampled in Beatlemania. Twelve unused or unusuable phone extensions on the walls, everyone falls down the peyote-hued halls of this hobgoblin furniture store. A telephone cord that changes color depending on who's talking on the phone.

A fireplace, around which we'd always talk about the wet fire, y'know? Hiding a pregnant woman in the fireplace from her professor husband. A place for infant theatre. A radio not ON but IN. We watched a spaceflight, the Chang and Eng spacecraft of the first Siamese twins shot into space. One girl who came over and felt her orgasmic needs were being ignored while Tippy sat on the couch with us, watching TV and toking, grumbled that it was like Popke’s Papal Dinosaur Forest and stomred out, went home. The U.S.S. Pueblo prisoners were housed upstairs. Rooms like the brown plastic divider that separates a box of candy. A paperback copy someone'd loaned us of Jokes About Jesus, which was a treasury of pretty sick jokes about Him. Copies of SATYR WORLD and WEREWOLF WEEK magazines were strewn about. I like the interesting girly pictorial magazine NUDES & THEIR BABIES, naked women and their equally bare-bottomed infants, strangely arousing paternal feelings in the men who gazed at them. Thump only subscribed to POPULAR

CARCASS magazine for its pictures of carrion (a camera strapped to a buzzard!), dead game and similar girls.

Nose blue and snot green, there was an unexploded bomb stuck in the ceiling from some unclear A-bomb test and an insurancecolored sofa by now shaped more like South America. Bloody furniture in the kingdom of the indolents, formaldehyde machinery.

Dustkittens the size of walruses. A place of many disorders.

Ashtrays full of vomit. Aluminum windows with the tattooed reformschool tears they wept in Winter. Of course aluminum was chosen by the builder seventy-five years ago because it's the metal most like phlegm or dried cum.

Giggling, in the next room, another litter of Tippy's sex mice.

Those little homely girls whom he made feel like a million bucks, much-wanted and desired, huddled in his bed next to him filled, dripping and contentedly napping. The moon is a tampon. "Your mom is the tampon" Tippy blurted out, watching TV commercials on acid. Splatter dancer. Woman as a leaky bag. All those fluids—the monthly thrown-out spoiled eggs, cookie-dough bucket of blood—are necessary to keep cunt moist. What the advertisers call Fresh.

A Polish girl Chicken Itza. Others, pale from settlement, fallen dreildels. Love like a caltrop; love to make the horses stop. Oh, that's just his housepenis. Bubbles, Pebbles to titillate the young Goebbels.

Our band van was red only on the inside, from girls deflowered on its seats therin.

One evening the tiny young daughter of a prominent Professor (the one who’d fired Tippy’s father?) showed up with the family car, asking for directions to the Motorsburgh House of Detention. She

had a fretful fistful of cash money, to bail out her latest inamorata Tippy. The People vs. Tippy Chomp, a misdemeanor thrown out of court. Old ladies picked for jury duty so hoped, prayed and lit church candles for it to go to trial, anticipating he'd strip to display "Exhibit A".

On top of that, he always seemed to find older women who'd take interest in him, take him to nudist covens, and so on. Mustard beds. I think some professors put him in "arty" blue movies, spanking housewives with his pud or running naked in a field of flowers, in slow motion for those old slo-mosexuals. Whenever he wasn't in school, I'd figure he was napping with some faculty wife or wives. Hurried out of the Firehouse through what girls called the revolting doors.

If Tippy couldn't fall asleep, he counted the little sisters he hadn't yet had of those girls, and would soon fall asleep because there weren't many. In my room alone, or with Thump snoring in the camp bed beside me, or cowboy bunk bed below, I can imagine what dancing is like, a girl to gaze upon or hold close.

Despite his love for the voice of TV and records, he always trusted dreams more. He'd leave a glass of water out for several days by his bedside so that when he drunk it before bed the organisms it contained would make him dream and pilot the cabin cruiser of his dreams into the arms of the sea serpents, sailing off the edge of the flat subconcious, his soul wore a yachting cap. He got most of his information from microorgansisms.

Morning for Tippy, that is to say, mid-afternoon. I hear him hacking, spewing, honking, smoking like a tobacco-stained old Navy man in the Veterans hospital where we did that awful kiddie tapdance concert in first grade.

Of course we had a bathroom. Yes, indoors. What a silly question.

The toilet bills were staggering, astounding. For me alone, but girls used it too. A toilet in the Firehouse that wobbles! What a concept. Once that girl climbed out, from then on we called it the Toilet Girl Window, wrote a song by that title.

I had what I thought was a really good, ecological idea, that we could recycle our used shaving cream, reapply it to our faces instead of washing it down the drain, so asked Thump to set up an ingenious mechanical sink-trap. Only problem was, it soon filled with brackish water, algae and pigeon-droppings, and birds had carried little fish and tadpoles into it, so soon it, and by extension, our bathroom, was a wriggling swamp. Tippy, normally so tolerant of disorder of any kind, grew disgusted and let some of his demanding girlfriends clean it out, scrub and make tidy.

Dink the drunk went outside and pissed on the bushes, thoroughly spraying a bird. Each bathroom had chronic mildew, which we thought was kind of cute and sexual, poems growing in moist places. The silver sizzle of some girl in the shower everytime you opened that bathroom door. "Firehouse equals restroom" muttered a rival band. The eleven places to piss. Blood came out of the shower, or were the pipes just rusty? The smell of anvil water, wouldn't drink it if I were you. One faucet, like a body aperture, was labelled DIRT. One floor of the house only had last year's Halloween pumpkin to use as a toilet. Sign from the door of a public washroom labelled BABIES. Into the water treasure, girls drowned in that darn toilet, girls thrown out with the torn and soiled sheets. House like a

linebacker's linen closet. The smell of skunk, and that wasn't just girls.

No-nonsense bath women like a cat entering puberty. In the house, girls found it upsetting when we spoke of the Drainage Room.

The bathroom curtains were Saint Betty-and-Veronica's loincloth pressed up to the face of Christ—he kissed her pussy, was flesh made lips—or her t-shirt pressed up into his bloody face. Doin' that old sudarium rag. He left an impression on her TV picture, cover of a magazine, lightning striking and photographing somebody in a window or how a murderer is photographed in a dead man's eyes if she's the last thing he saw, or how your watch stops upon your death.

Sudarium as a tampon; there was always at least one of them in the wastebasket. Was that virgin menstrual blood that stained the walls?

There must be some kind of use for that, in the unicorn ranch industry or something. I should take it to the University chemistry lab and have it analyzed, there's a guy there who makes drugs we buy. Red walls and gullible light. The Aleppo Traffic Authority once complained the stoplight in front of the Firehouse the Chomps lived in stuck on red once a month for all the girls who passed through now having their periods. We instructed girls to put their soiled tampons not in the wastebasket but in the incense-burners, for a lusty meaty smell to the house.

Out of frugality and conservationist habit I'd blow my nose on a piece of toilet paper, then wipe my butt with it (rarely vice versa), for paper was in short supply in that house with the parade of girls House not a country club but a cunt club. What am I, the colored jockey on the lawn, sweet black angling for his own horse?

Man, I was farting like a fiend in those days. We had Tom-andJerry-rigged up a marijuana sauna upstairs, and I'd have to leave the door open for a while to air out the house. The illuminating man who could lighten and brighten up the house with those farts. Great when we "forgot" to pay the utility bills. Weaponized ketchup-and-mustard gas from my burgers and fries, sorry. The marsh gas was often confused with nighttime UFO's, and sometimes angrily confused the UFO's themselves as prank runway landing lights so they'd fly back to their planet or dimension swearing revenge on Aleppo and all it stood for.

The wheelhouse was hung with pornographic maps, needed to navigate the stern seas between stormily humping Michigan girls' legs. The girls in those magazines like CATHOUSE, CELUI and CELLULITE CUTIES are purgatory nudes, the peach-like color of a colophon. Graf zeppelin breasts. Open pudenda like rotting fruit fallen to the jungle floor, shattered spilling pulp and seeds.

Frightening, like the manatee-mermaid who kills sailors with her conch.

Lights burning mysteriously around the house, like a country western mansion’s cattle candles.It was called the Firehouse because there was always a dope pipe burning someplace in it. That Tippy, he could make a lunchtime marijuana cigarette out of a leftover dill pickle spear left on a sandwich plate. Real marijuana originally, but heavily cut with the wildflower Harlot's Ear. Here comes the drug truck. During the brief fad for them, we partook of the drug made from the corpses of dead priests. "I saw God" was the usual experimenter's summation. And the Saw God was one of Aldebbie's

opportunistically costumed personae, during the autumn Michigan teens were sawing and chopping down billboards with saws. Ewers n' lavers tossed in corners, but no longer for washing, turned into dopesmoking hookahs and bongs. Ours truly a land of Cockaigne, this shipyard of Soul. Mind on a mirror, the house had a great pile of pills on the floor in the late afternoon's aspirin-light. There was a stolen chem-lab bottle of powdered rhino horn in the refrigerator, laughing gas oil, which we'd open up and deeply inhale. Snarf till your heart gets louder than your records. The laboratory rush that refreshes. Caused a notable English bluestaster that we met at Goose Turd Green to inquire "Doesn't anybody remember laughter?"

Those weird rocks strewn about the yard were cameleopardcarried chunks of hashish. My doobie hacienda. Retching out freeform drugs that get taken by us free-form firemen, turning the inhabitants into scuffed and stoned coffee tables. We'd often simply say to girls who had enough to smoke and were pliable, Spend the night in my pipe. That's just humping on hemp. Upstairs there was an antigravity room where it was impossible to roll joints. Sometimes around the house he would find marijuana with tiny seeds, or peyote button spores, and inhale 'em so the plants would sprout in his lungs, so near the ultraviolet gro-light of his heart. He never had a song on the radio so why do you suppose they call the device a seed broadcaster?

They were so sure, Aleppo’s finest cops, as they brandished a greasy warrant to arrest us all on Conspiracy to Light Up a Joint.

Police bison-stampe’ed into the house, subsequently charged us with possession of contraband shrunken heads. Thump had purloined

these from the university museum, so the townie police quickly accepted his apology that they were only Jivaro New Guinea Negroes, sheathed their billyclubs, holstered their machine pistols, headed back to the precinct station.

Tippy evidently spent one bad trip staring into Zionist black holes, with disturbing Einsteinian and Existentialist gravitas gravitational effects. Brr! At least that's what I attribute to his glassyeyed stare, muttering, distraction. I can't fathom the soul of a Jew. Maybe I haven’t tried.

Inevitably, every dope dealer named Brown gets called Hash Brown for the hashish he vends. Smoking mariguanja, a mariguano from the male part of the plant; when people say "good shit", they mean from bats. The best is from Mexico, the mariguanajuato, guannobis satisfactioneva ("Little Eva"). Closely related, Anubis satisfactioneva was dognip. Tippy smoked sentimental sensimilla, Pamela Red and Albuquerque Gold. Homegrown was just as good, except you had to smoke a lot more of it to get high.

OK, it was my first time smoking a doobie, so Tippy and the guys said they wanted me to experience "some really great shit". But with the first deep inhalation, I realized they'd played a prank on me, and there was a whole lot more dried dog doo than any marijuana. I sucked it all in, like an ur-Potawatami tens of thousands of years ago, cooking on a fire on of buffalo chips from bisonmastodons then padding around the river's watershed.

They had their joke, but I never let on. Got mildly high.

You’re right, I haven’t talked about where we practice yet.

The musky smell of the house smelled like dried farmers. But the moisture and creepy mold stuck on the cold concrete walls of the basement room where we practiced, despite lovelorn half-attempts at "finished" wood paneling. Tippy walked down the rickety gyrationstairs to the torture chamber, the lead basement where the band practiced under barf light. A cellar full of noise. You walk down these stairs barefoot and your feet would be stained wine-dark red. Written in scary letters over the door "Audial Sex Here". Written in a psychedelic way to look like it said Arbeit Mach Frei or some shit, might've been my idea.

Down there were a houseful of spacey junior high school kids— they must've come over from the Science Fair—beating out gamelan on pots and pans, teenage mannikin snatchers. The hothouse had its wire room amplifiers turned way up for defenestration of the nation. On the floor lay a famous viola like a stepped-on animal, a road kill. Some wild blaxophones.Tippy clicked up to the microphone and started wailing Don't Get Caught With Your Family Down and We Might Get Cancer One Day and I Saw Your Shakely Hips Down On Pumice Knee Avenue. He spit on a child's bike. His songs were just word crises, moods crashing together, just nude recipes and tonguefarts. Smart stuff like finding a new word for "the."

Thumps and groans from the archaic furnace sounded like cavemen loving animals. All the sex going on below decks between the critters on Noah's Ark, or on a slave ship. Spiders with the heads of old women. Down here the rats gang up and rape the cats that venture in through the broken windows, and those cats are mean bitches too. The cockroaches hold wild congresses, littering the floor

to crunch underfoot like peanut shells, and that's no way to have to keep time to the music. Think of all the stuff Saint George, the patron saint of exterminators, liked to kill and you get the idea. From a crack in the cement floor raw sewage burbled up, don't slip, okay?

Crabdoors. At noon a snake delivered a letter. The door busted when Christ had risen from the coal cellar, they'd stuck his body in there and rolled a rock in front, put up removelable walls. The furnace sang great Wagnerian choral huffing on winter nights. When it worked at all. As if bills were paid. OK, sometimes I paid them, when I wanted heat or light to see my guitar after dark.

Thump ostensibly had a room downstairs by the furnace but mostly slept in his van, his truck. Lit by a lamp of burning hemp. He spat at home. A room we simply called the Damage. Take her down to the Damage, Thump. And he did, hooboy.

Sunday morning. Out of habit, I start thinking stuff.

Christ was born in a menagerie zoo. Or was it in a menage-atrois, of Mary, Joseph, God? Jesus' cruelty to animals, mistreating the ox and lamb that sheltered him in the manger. Somewhere a virgin had a difficult birth. But the baby thought it was funny, couldn't stop laughing, and we heard it coming through the walls on the nextdoor neighbor's TV. The Baby Jesus' Big Wheel scraping on the floor of the motel. Lost in the wilderness without God's Good Grades.

He didn't go to summer Bible School in shopping centers, as his own head was a mosque. As Christ wrote his parents from college: "Dear Mom and Pop; send a Cross”. Bless the Heavenly heavy-breathing,

God bless the out-of-breath. The Lord and His weekend. A hot Christ.

That is, until Christ's divorce. Mary Magdalene gave Christ this great dynamite massage you wouldn't believe before he climbed up on the Cross. God is a scented oil your partner rubs upon you. The wedding of Christ to Magdalene, if only for a weekend. Who was peeking in the transom over the Cross? God as a hotel’s house detective. Fully frontal Jesus in his fully frontal mortality. Notice how you never saw the back of Christ, hidden by the Cross, Howcome?

God's girlfriend is outside, and boy is she mad. After all, Judas only sold Jesus down the river because he wanted a crack at Mary Magdalene. For pocket scratch to wine and dine her, courtesy Old Scratch.

The nails on Jesus' hands were nipples, driven by a buxom blonde who spent an entire night with God. God should come to talk to me too late at night, but it's only still those damn incubi and succubi. And I can here the carnal noise from Tippy’s room, all the way down here.

My own room was near the kitchen, first floor. Tippy called my room that ancient wonder of the world, the Tomb of Nauseous. One night in the Firehouse I was rubbing sturm-und-drangsfoot oil into my leather jacket and jodhpurs to keep them suplpe, responsive to the movements of my body, my arms cradling my guitar, etc. Plus gasmask grease. I got a can of it at a surplus store outside Ypsofacto, near the old nearly-abandoned Ypsofactory. But since Tippy had the girls, it soon disappeared from my room. Tippy tried masturbating

with it, then put it all over before rolling in glitter, sand, glass cubes from a broken windshield. Fly-level (insect's, not trousers) performance. So I sat in my room, defiling a Daily Missal. Parodying the Psalms, one by one. Tearing pages from a grim Psalter, rolling joints with time-honored songs from a hymnal.

I still craved those collected multi-volume hardbound editions of the writings and speeches of Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and Baldur von Shirach, starting to be advertised on late-night television, and which you could still pick up cheap at used bookstores on campus, especially if incomplete or damaged. Especially by war.

But the other guys chuckled at my roomful of books. "If you ever had a girl up here, you could lose her in this mess." As late as the 1920s, psychologists considered someone listening to records alone in his room as disturbed, unwell, insomniac, fugitive and victim to mental trepidation. So I'm glad I grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s, when instead it was the attributes of the deep and thoughtful.

Judeophilia here because I'm so book-reading. I had in my room the Loeb and Leopold Library, a set of major classical texts laboriously assembled over the decades, at great expense, by the thrill-killers in their cell. I sat reading My Confession to Hitler by a young German seminarian-sinner not a whole lot different from me or Tippy. Bless me, Feuhrer, for I have sinned.

The teenage fires of lust, which I always thought of as a forest fire consuming Michigan, as a terrible one did in the nineteenth century. Me with my guitar as the sort of reassuring, attentive bear in the campaign hat for the forest service, keeping the flames in check, building a firebreak of power chords, or musically dumping water,

chemicals and watery chemicals from an airplane upon it. Or on them.

By then people were saying we brushed our teeth with dirt from other people's yards. And you know I'm impeccable about my grooming and appearance, Mom. The whole ninety-six yards.

Tippy strolled in, picked up and read a couple of my scary pseudoscience books like Beyond Evidence and UFOs Contact Michigan, refuting the out-of-state scientist who testily huffed his "Swamp gas!" verdict about the Prune HIll lights swirling around the radiotelescope and burnt lawn crop-circle cattle mutilations, and hightailed it back to the safety of his dubious university. This regional saucer flap inspired a lot of droning, experimentalesque songwriting and jamming by Michigan bands, not a small part of it by us.

Tippy said he was heading to campus, see where the dormitory or hippie commune parties were. Did I want to go?

Oh, I'll just stay home in my study and Faust around. Say the Lord's Prayer backwards and conjure a djinn, teach a homunculus or lepershaun "Clovis, Clovis" or something. Amuse myself. No, not like Tippy does. His "solo gigs" to his audience of kleenex and bath tissue. Thump resolved to spend the evening tearing the legs off cats, just to hear the squawk, while Dink carried the two biggest whiskey bottles I'd ever seen. While these guys retreated upstairs with their vices (or, the several women later in Tippy's case, their virtues), I nursed a few bottles of ranch dressing for the night.

One girl called it the Kitchen of Destruction, though Destitution might've been more like it. At first Tippy thought she'd said Kitchen of Distinction, as he'd had her against the sink when she was attempting

to wash dishes. We chuckled at his vanity.

Unwrapped Foundation Cakes on the kitchen counter. Fauxflies in the Firehouse sink. A bottle of the unstable hydrogen compound—not sure what it was used for—on the refrigerator door shelf that, when quickly inhaled, elated you, but at the risk of your head exploding in flames like the Hindenburg. Kinda The Joy! The horror, the horror!

Like Hitler, my threshold for irritability had become quite low.

I'm the only one who ever washes dishes in the Firehouse. First of all, organize them outside the sink, so they don't bully me, like a parent, into submission. Don't discount the powers of knives, brooms, glassware to do mischief, fuck with your mind. I begrudgingly set my cigarette holder and its smoldering contents aside, got to work.

Mustard in the kitchen actually was genuine mouse-turd. There we ate laughing meals, sampled the four tastes. Sour bacon.

Noiseless beef. The imperceptible difference between brown sugar and brunschwiger. The cupboards held nectars and stimulants, stolen stuff like the Holy Grail. Living on cigarette milk and compressed whiskey. Dining on used fish, hotdogs containing the hoofs of cows, pigs, warbrides and whorish witches.

I am dreaming of the naked food. A salty can of Celadon Coelecanths' soup for lunch. We lived on western snack foods like sesame Besame Munchos and Balsamy Pachucos, that Jorge "Papi" Tristantzara had brought over and pretty much addicted us to promptly. We devoured a canned snack chip called Finagles. When Tippy was stoned he read it as "Finned Eagles". A jumbo family party bag of potato chips with swastika salt; Hell, maybe I fetishize the

whole Nazi thing, the bad guys who took dad away, or so they say.

Meanwhile, pizza is the face of God. Speaking of splat, I meditated upon the miraculous process by which pizza gets converted into snow, into earwax, in the furnace of the gut. He thought he smelled steak and onions but it was a dirty shirt. Ninety-ninth day for that pair of socks.

A fly buzzing around like the reincarnation of yo' momma. Mice as big as Cuba. Playing rat hockey and mouse polo while drinking expensive gas-can topped beers that foamed with the sound of bread breaking. Downstairs in the house, the world's heaviest mouse or mice, smashing into things like Demolition Derby or carnival bumber cars. Food-fight flies like in a rundown and undisciplined school cafeteria, footflies like in unkempt strips in the funny papers.

Charlotte's Web stretched across the hall. From the rafters hung all the bats in China, bats that drink tea. The Firehouse had stalagmites, the buildup of itty-bitty vermin from prisoner of war camps. Spots on the wall from the shit of moths that'd dined in museums, banqueted on tapestries and royal stuffs and upholstries. Moths that'd dined the master tapes of our favorite Golem Oldies.

"To eat egg salad you must think like an egg," said a fortune cookie or university philosopher, and so he ate it right out of a girl.

Egregious potato parties. A full refrigerator meant cat sugar and cat liquor. A half-munched bowl of salt crickets spilled to the floor, Chimpchips and Bumsnickers, for we all love snacks, giving energy just about the length of a song. Like a china chipmunk who lived on wax. Where moths go home to sleep. You were probably sitting in yesterday's gum, for it's gotten in your hair. A refrigerator full of

Hughhefnerbrau beer. Empty bottles from Dink's solar gin. Bullfrogs in the cooler with the beer. Drinking Gator-Aphrodisiac constantly, a spigotty keg in the refrigerator. Hubcaps fallen off getaway cars hung from the wall to serve as dishes. The dirty dishes in the sink mocked the clean dishes. Tippy never washed a dish sure as he never had a wish. Even the standing water was insane. That toasty Dachau smell when a stove is dirty. I'd be eating burgers like hitting a punching bag, my "Vermont mint varmintburgers", but Tippy was bored enough to live on salt and pepper for several weeks, the salt round the rims of the margarita glasses in the morning.

Tippy says of us, "They eat anything, so the Ashmolean brothers might be goats. Do goats really eat cans?"

But why is this coming from the goat-footed rock singer, the piping Pan of seducefunk?

Yeah, I don’t know either.

Highhouse or heavenhouse, this was the part of the zoo where the animals go for forty winks. We had a sleeping dog named Burnout for a while. Racoons broke in and stole a million valuables.

When a rat would enter through a broken window or hole in the basement, it would despair, die. One room was filled with all the penitential cats that had ever crept into a sleeping baby's room, climbed up on its face and smothered it. The ceilings alive with mosquitoes in Michigan summer whose eyes are veined and bloodshot from biting a drugged boys, trailing fireflies so they'd get home safely. The fireflies in the ceiling acted like stars when you were lying in bed tripping, shoot 'em with a BB gun and watch 'em explode. Infested with vermin to be cool, the ceiling was alive with

roaches that would drop onto people below, bounce beercans off 'em, a noticeable hum like guitar or stereo system amplifiers. All sounding like children crying for meat. Would shoot Bic pens, switchblades into a gator crawled out of the sewers, or industrial-strength carp, walking catfish brought up from Florida by the Mars family, a whole station wagon full of 'em.

Don’t worry, I’ll tell you about them, and famous daughter, soon. Soon enough.

I suppose Tippy, the lads, thinks I’m hidden in my room like Aimée Fink, Hollandaise girl hiding from the Nazis in an attic or cellar.

The movie version on Nixonson’s own afternoon had her as a Holofernesque action hero, seducing top invading Reich Generals on holiday in the Netherlands (who came for the cheese?), postillinating potato masher grenades into their hindparts, diving out windows to safety, then scrambling back to her hideout lair. Until the next motorcade of Wehrmacht brass arrive, oblivious to her wiles, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Adventure!

Well, I’m not her. I’m here with my guitars and books, thank you.

Am Am D D7 G G7 Am. Bless Our Oafhouse. We had our fun there.

April 1, 2020 Bay City, MI 48706 USA