Jesse Black Explores Moe’s Zoological Park with Dominic
By S.G. Senderoff
1.
Kerwin lifted a pint of obscenely
expensive micro brewed beer (Missoula Wild Moose Brewery Extra Special
Yellowstone Lambic Reserve, for Christ’s sake!), puffed a mist of hops,
wheat, yeast, and raspberry into my face, and asked, “Jesse, if Godzilla ate
Levittown, what type of crap would he take?” Jason turned toward me and
repeated “Captain BangerOOOOO…” in a tremulous
falsetto, while staring cross-eyed somewhere behind me. They’re on the
“departmental organogram,” somewhere above me, and my line connects to one of
them. The weekly office party. “Let’s talk about the reorganization and Missy’s
ass. Don’t ya want ta pump her Jesse…you’re the only bachelor!!! HA
HA HA!!!! Do ya remember that cheer I told ya about…RIM JOB HAND JOB BLOW JOB
DINGUS, FAIRVIEW HIGH SCHOOL CUNNILINGUS!!!! HA HA HA!!!!”
Idiots with advanced degrees.
Funny looking potted plants,
chrome and glass furniture, mauve wallpaper. Tight dresses, big tits, big
noses. Networking and business cards. Arrrgh!
Last call.
I decided it was time to leave. No, really leave.
Blow this pop stand
Become less than the idiotic solitary hair in some overblown Dylan album liner notes
Cancel my rhumba lessons
Do the trans-american boogie with the dharma bum beat
Bodeodo diddlydo dildo noblo
It was no problem leaving all the letters after my name in the dust. They were just collecting dust while my atrophic brain dehydrated under the high vacuum of unspecified packing requirements, non-specific specific activities, and clients who would like to fly the OL’ WANGDOODLE IN THE AIR IN THE AIR while I slowly dripped into the one-way cistern, akin to R Crumb’s cosmic shit-shoveler, the Ol’ Pooperoo.
It can pull a vacuum on a black hole, dennis!
Fuck it.
Had to do something mindless…beyond mindless, possibly mindless to the point that an encounter with mindfulness would produce mesons and two co-linear 511 KeV gammas. Turn my brain to Maypo, price no object!!! Every Single Morning, I WANT MY MAYPO!!!
bird bird bird bird is the word WELL bird bird bird bird is the word bird bird bird bird is the word YES bird bird bird bird is the word NOW DON’T YOU KNOW ABOUT THE BIRD,
WELL, it’s public domain
The guys at Roadway Express sent to me to a Graduate School where I could learn the intricacies of gear jamming an 18 wheeler, doing white cross, and keeping my dispatcher off my back, so I sold everything, moved to a one room apartment in what used to be a Motel 6 in Frackville next door to the Coal Hole, across the street from Moe’s. One week out, four days home, one week out, four days home. Four days conscious out of eleven THROW A SEVEN AND RAKE THE MONEY TO HIS SIDE ain’t bad.
Cancel my rhumba lessons
Fruity toot toot toute suite sweet ham beats all meat for ol’ Briar Picker Brown and his buddy Wry Straw
Hangman’s reel granddad’s favorite snake chapman’s tune
Blues in a bottle give the fiddler a dram
See ya at Mt Airy in the air in the air
See ya…
(Crawl out of my floor-mounted sleeping bag.)
I pick up my ol’ Banner Headstock Gibson J-45, sit on my pillow, and hee hee! the landlord provides a floor, stove, fridge, water, and heat! And a pull-chain Light-Bulb!! No paint, but plenty of greasy dust and a dirty window that looks out at a brick wall that needs pointing, dammit! And it’s the sounds of the NINETEEEEEEENNNNN-TWENTIES blastin’ out of your ass!!!
Only a Gibson is Good Enough,
dennis!
Cryin’ mamma, mamma, mamma
Canned Heat don’ kill me
Snap the sixth string thump with your palm-heel in drop-D with no fingerpicks on stage at the Club 47 and nowhere else to be!!!
Good fantasy, but ah believes ah drives a truck now. It’s the A-Ways of the World.
2.
It’s a lot easier to respond to the world when you take your meds.
I’ve been on my meds religiously for a couple of months now. Just got back from a week out, now four days off…hee hee! I’ve been every-where (WackaChuckaChucka) I’ve been every-where, man:
Rahway gibbsboro New-ark gibbsboro rahway gibbsboro New-ark gibbsboro rahway gibbsboro New-ark gibbsboro rahway
I noticed that my downstairs neighbor plays guitar. A fret board wizard! Segovia from Sunflower County! No one ever canceled his rhumba lessons! I was trying to make some tea because I’m not supposed to drink anymore or eat cheese that would overwhelm the small level of functioning monoamine oxidase in my brain, and I heard what I thought was Blind Blake, but since he’s dead, it had to be a 78, but it stopped when the phone rang, and I heard Assistant Professor Downstairs shouting fuck you and kicking the wall, and then Blind Blake started again, so I guess it was Associate Professor Downstairs playing and not Blind Blake or a 78! He was playing that ol’ Southern Rag, so I picked up my ol’ Banner Headstock Gibson J-45, sat down on my new floor, and played along. He stopped and started playing the Eddie Lang duet stuff, so I played the Lonnie Johnson parts. Full Professor Downstairs stopped playing and banged on the ceiling.
“COME DA FUCK DOWN HERE, AND BRING YOUR GUITAR AND SOME BEER!!”
I brought just myself and the Tenure Committee downstairs. They always come along to someone new. Last time a guitar player banged on the ceiling and told me to COME DA FUCK DOWN HERE AND BRING YOUR GUITAR AND SOME BEER, when I got there with some Beer and my ol’ Banner Headstock Gibson J-45 she wasn’t wearing anything and when my friends the meds wouldn’t let me fuck her, she tried to slash her wrists with a broken Beer bottle and I had to sit up all night trying to convince her that there was nothing wrong with the name Rebecca while I stroked her long black hair until we fell asleep. There was a fiddle hanging on the wall, but no bow.
Cancel my rhumba lessons
The easiest way down is by the fire escape, so I let myself and the Tenure Committee in the chicken wire reinforced window at the end of the third floor. The hall smelled like boiled cabbage. All apartment building halls do. Most of the ceiling Light-Bulbs were burned out, so some of the doors had strips of light across the bottom where faint shadows moved. I passed door 303 on the left, and Mrs. Prybzyk was shouting and stamping on the floor, “…AN’ DEN I FUCKIN’ TOL’ DA BITCH, DAT FUCKIN’ BITCH I TOL’ ‘ER DA FUCKERRR….” Her enormously fat guttural snarl faded over my shoulder as I left a pool of pale yellow light and stood in front of door 310, below me, because I’m door 410. I stared at layers of flaking landlord-issue drab painted on top of black painted on top of red on top of gray metal getting ready to rust, complete with ball peen hammer boot toe kicks on the kick plate, fist dents, and a black plastic doorknob hanging slightly off center below a skeleton keyhole above a cheap deadbolt near a scratched “fuc…”. Underneath the green bronze 31_ was a small bent frame holding a mailing label torn just above the address. The remainder said Orlando, Dominic in faded blue ink.
I thumped door 310 with my fist. The door opened the length of a security chain. A single wide-staring eye with a shimmering black pupil flashed into view. The almond-shaped eye was crowned by an arched black eyebrow and presided over a half-sliver of nose guarding an abbreviated strip of black moustache. The eyebrow flicked higher, and door 310 shut. “Wait a minute,” door 310 said. The security chain catch rattled, and the door swung open. I walked into a space diametrically opposed to cabbage screaming Prybzyk hallway. Everything got calm. Better than IV Valium…quiet…incense…red linen paisley…old instrument cases…78s…books…soft yellow light. Bookcase picture in gilt frame of Emeritus Professor Downstairs with his arm around Mississippi John Hurt, smiling.
Just one room
“You hungry?” Dominic asked.
-sure
“I got some provolone, cotto salami and real bread.”
-can’t do the cheese…the bread sounds good…
“Dig in.”
I made a sandwich and sat on the floor next to the dinette table. Chairs are dangerous. Dominic draped his lanky frame around a straight-backed chair. He assumed a truncated, angular pose reminiscent of a praying mantis, and carefully donned a pair of circular, wire rim glasses. He stared down at me.
Dominic wore a gauzy linen shirt with balloon sleeves. Ancient jeans, frayed at the ankles, were knee-patched with dirty white canvas. All of his fingers and both wrists were adorned with silver Native American jewelry inlaid with sparkling onyx, turquoise and blood red coral stones. Stringy black hair hung limply below his shoulders, framing his face. His vaguely oriental eyes projected the tired, resigned attitude of someone who endured many uncomfortable years doing something others considered glamorous, but he considered a paycheck. Dominic’s hands invalidated first impressions…hands that seemed to come from an El Greco painting; long, sensitive hands reminiscent of the fronds of a sensuous tropical plant. Incongruously, the fingernails on his right hand were long and squared-off. His left hand nails were cut below the level of his heavily calloused fingertips.
His feet were bare. Dominic was cadaverously thin.
Moe tells me you drive a truck but you have some sort of edu-ma-kayshun, as he calls people who know how to read.
-yeah
Where’s your guitar?
-the Tenure Committee said don’t bring it
Can’t fight them…. you play fiddle?
-crosstunings, mostly
Dominic unwrapped himself from the chair, took a fiddle and bow from their wall-hanger, and handed them to me. He shuffled to a jumble of battered musical instrument cases next to his bed and lifted a banjo with an ornate pearl-inlaid neck out of a scuffed tooled leather case.
Dominic tossed a cake of rosin on the floor in front of me. I tuned the fiddle to cross G and said
-G tunes
Did Moe tell you anything about me?
Dominic returned to his chair and sat knees together, banjo pot resting to the side of his right thigh. He cradled the neck between his left thumb and first finger, formed his right hand into the shape of the head of a clawhammer and brushed his middle finger across the strings, catching the short fifth string on the down stroke with his thumb. The banjo rang quietly, deeply, and suddenly stopped speaking with a gentle chuck.
-just that you sucked as a motorcycle repair guy
Fuck ‘im.
-G tunes…I scraped out the A part of Pretty Little Girl.
Moe has this old Norton Commando…it’s a basket case. I get it running, he wrecks it.
-G tunes…or even A tunes tuned down…any of the Callahan stuff….
He’s the stupidest pseudo-biker you can ever hope to meet but ya gotta love him…he has a heart of shit.
-gold?
No, shit. I played in his high school sock hop band. My first rock-n-roll gig.
-before you played with Lyman and Kweskin
How do you know where I played?
-it’s on the first Vanguard recording…tell me about Moe’s band
I PLAYED WITH ALAN BLOCK, STAMPFEL-AND-WEBER, THE FUGS, THE JUG BAND, BILL MONROE, DOC WATSON, J GEILS, DYLAN, LIVED ON FORT HILL, GAVE MS. DIAMONDS-AND-RUST MY GUITAR WHEN SHE DROPPED HER OO-45 BACKSTAGE AT WOODSTOCK, FOR GOD’S SAKE, AND YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT MOE?!
-you also played behind that loudmouth asshole Ochs….
Just on the first Elektra, but Holzman re-cut it with Danny Kalb. You have the boot? Why is Moe so interesting?
-he’s almost a cartoon…I like cartoons…he seems to be the featured cartoon up here
3.
All right.
Dominic stood, leaned the banjo against the wall, and sat on the floor facing me.
I known Moe since we was maybe in the third grade, about 1951. He already weighed about 200 pounds, and the kids used to walk up to him and punch him in the stomach after lunch and then laugh at him when he barfed. He was just greasy brown hair and freckles and a big whine…his eyes was sort of set deep into his fat, pink face like pig’s eyes. He always looked like he was about to cry or had to take a piss and sweated all the time. But by the time we was junior year at Tamaqua High, Moe had been working summers and breaks with his dad in the mines…I think Pioneer; near Centralia…he was as strong as a son-of-a-bitch. He got a mean streak in him too…some football player called him a fat shit hood so Moe turned his car over, and when the kid couldn’t open the door to get out, Moe said, “allow me?” and kicked out the driver’s side window…He’d walk around the halls at school, and mind you, this was before aluminum soda cans, Moe would carry a tomato sauce can, and he’d walk up to DeeDee Yankovic, this saddle-shoe bobby sox cheerleader captain with this short purple skirt, fuzzy white sweater with a big T on it with the cross-bar touchin’ her perky tits, he’d walk up behind her and bellow “YA WAN TA TSEE ME MASH DA FUCKIN’ CAN TROUGH MY FUCKIN’ HEAD?” And then he’d slam the can against his forehead, and the tomato sauce would blow out all over the place, and DeeDee would scream, but Moe never had a mark on him.
Terrorizing DeeDee got to be a game with those two, and Moe discovered girls. He discovered rock-n-roll and guitars at the same time, and even his five-watt mind made the connection. A band from Scranton came down to play a pep rally sock hop. They were fronted by a guy who specialized in doing an Eddie Cochran imitation.
-Buh duh duh duh Buh
duh duh duh AIN’T NO CURE FOR DA SUMMER TIME BLUUUUUUESSSSS
That’s right, you got it…well, Moe was the money-taker/bouncer, basically he was supposed to beat the shit out of anyone who he didn’t like, and when the band started, he freaked out. He’s sitting at the table in the back by the door to the gym, and the Eddie Cochran clone starts devouring the mic and wrappin’ himself around this big-body Gibson, and bellowing NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, and Moe erupts from behind the table and flies up to the stage, looking like a greasy zeppelin with frizzy black fur. He elbows his way between Lola Palermo and Sandy Didchenkov, the fuck girls, he called them…
-why
‘Cause they fucked a lot, I guess, anyway, the three of ‘em was dancing and bumping asses and clappin’ their hands, and singing along to this truly god-awful pounding prehensile rock-n-roll, carrying on looking like a bunch of damn fool hair-hoppers and a balloon-shaped biker at a kiddie sock hop…
-they were, don’t you like rock-n-roll
Yeah, no, anyway, I think it was the very first time that Moe interacted with anyone in a joyous way, much less women…I ended up doing the door, and Moe partied with the fuck girls until the set ended. He comes up to me at the end of the dance, grabs me by the shoulders and says, “Fuckin’ Dominic…I gots ta learn ta play da git-tar and play in a band…dat’s da only way…it’ll get me everyting…” I says huh? and Moe is shakin’ me and screams “DON’T YA GET IT…IF I PLAY IN DA BAND AT DA DANCE, I COULD PROBABLY GET LOLA PALERMO TO SUCK MY DICK...I could be cool, an’ all of da jocks would tink, he plays wit da band, an’ I bet Lola Palermo is suckin’ his dick RIGHT NOW…” I says Moe, that’s not a good reason to be a musician, and he says “Huh? You’re da musician…I just want ta play in da band…”
Moe begged me to get him an electric guitar. It was hard to find an electric guitar around Tamaqua back then…Izzy Greenberg’s dad had a music store, but all he sold was clarinets, stomach-Steinways, and cornets. Izzy told me years later that his dad turned down a Gibson dealership because he figured that rock-n-roll was a stupid kid fad, but polka would never die.
-the dreaded boom-bah, the
coalfield folk instrument of doooooooommmmmm…
Huh??
-sorry
I had to make an electric guitar for Moe. My dad used to play lap steel behind Lester Polfuss when he was Rhubarb Red, and he gave my dad some old parts that he didn’t use on the Log. I cut out an ash body on the band saw, routed cavities for the pickups and controls and neck pocket, put on the components, wired, soldered, bolted on the neck…I still do my own fret jobs…and made a respectable clone of a Telecastertm. No-brainer, all respect to Mr. Fender. Woodworking for paramecia. I hate electric guitars.
-les paul
An electric guitar was a finely carved hollow-body arch top instrument with a magnetic pick-up that used to let you play true guitar tones a bit louder and fill out the rhythm section or comp behind the soloist. Charlie Christian thought it was a clarinet just to piss off Mr. Goodman. Mr. Polfuss figured out how to play several electric guitars at the same time. That’s radical enough…it used to be a real musical instrument…now it’s just a kids’ toy floppy Day-Glo-moray-eel-penis with razorblade teeth that just shreds your eardrums to useless bloody strips of linen WHILE SOME IDIOT BASTARD JACKS OFF ON YOU!!
-easy big fellow
I was talking about Moe and his guitar; I made it for him, sorry.
He told me to paint it all black, and was pissed off by the white maple fingerboard. He never understood the concept of using the fingers of your left hand to fret the strings to make chords. He just wanted to flang-a-dang with his right hand, flailing his arm in a circle until he broke the damn strings while he jumped up and down and shouted “CALLED UP MY FUCKIN’ CONGRESSMAN AND HE SAID QUOTE: NO DICE SON YA DIDN’T FUCKIN’ VOTE”…he never got the words straight to anything…we’d be down his dad’s basement plugged into both channels of this shit Silvertone accordion amp that he turned up to 11 and he’s pounding on all the open strings with his thumb, moaning and gurgling like a Tibetan yak takin’ a shit, then he’d spin around and scream in my ear, “HEY DOMINIC, YOU PLAY LEAD, OK?….NOW!” It finally made me so nauseous to play with him that I thought I was losing my pitch discrimination, so I put his guitar in that Blind Blake “Police Dog Blues” open tuning and showed him how to get I, IV, and V by grabbing the neck like a baseball bat at the places where I put masking tape… That’s when he developed what got to be called the Budzynski Beat, at least locally…
-do you have any idea how idiotic that sounds
You wanted to hear this story, asshole. Anyway, he assembled a band that spring. Clarissa Kennedy played drums, Moose Urhen played doghouse bass, I played lead, and Moe sort of played rhythm and sang, if you could call it that. I couldn’t teach him any songs, and the rest of the band was getting impatient. The saxophone player quit after the first rehearsal. They were embarrassed by the name.
-name
Moe and the Budzynskis. I finally got him to rhythmically
flail out I, IV, and V and scat words on top of it. We’d just put out this roar,
and every so often Moe would scream ROCK-N-ROLL WANTS TO EAT YOU, or BABY, BE
MY PICK AND SHOVEL, or he’d just recite the words to “Blue Suede Shoes”, or
he’d just scream gibberish where the only words I could make out sounded like POLSKA,
ZUBROWKA, or GDANSK. All the songs sounded the same. I told him
to cover the mic tight, so he bit the windscreen and hurt his tongue. Moe was
coming off like he had musical Tourette’s Syndrome, but that’s the way he liked
it. Our hook was the volume. No one, I mean no one played as loud as we
did. I modded all the amps with huge output tubes and cooling fans, nearly up
to a hundred watts. It was awful. We’d always rip the speaker cones or fry the
output transformers. There’d be this sound like a table saw going through
plywood, and Moe would scream LOUDERRRRRR!!!
We had a sound. We needed a look. Moe insisted on all of us wearing big heavy lug sole boots, overalls, and miner’s hardhats. It was a good quarter century ahead of its time.
We practiced every week down Clarissa’s basement. Her parents would take her little brother for ice cream and never come back. Their neighbors threatened to poison their dog. Moe thought we were getting good.
After a coupla months, Moe started whining for a gig. He’d grab me, slam me into a locker, nearly shake my eyeteeth out, and shout “DOMINIC, YA GOTTA GET US A GIG…YA GOTTA GET US TA PLAY DA PEP RALLY SOCK HOP!” I told him we weren’t ready…that playing a live audience was a whole ‘nother world than basement rehearsals at the drummer’s house. Anyway, school’s out for summer soon. Senior year’s coming. I promised him we’d get the first pep rally in September. It was the end of May. To tide us over, and get us some stage experience, I lined us up a series of gigs at a place where I used to play during the summer. My dad and me used to haul my long-neck banjo, a 12-string guitar, and a bunch of huge props with the words written on them to this kids’ summer camp near East Stroudsburg and we’d sing all those Pete Seeger children songs. It was called Camp Wa-Na-Pee-Ko-Nu-Mi-Chabad. It was a Conservative Jewish summer camp run by Gene Geldzweig. It got torched in the early eighties.
-Geldzweig? The Gene Geldzweig?
Yeah…that was the way the mob laundered the resort hotel service money in the Poconos…anyway, Sammy Schmelkes, the head counselor for the boys, said they needed a band to play for a weekly kiddie dance in July. He said we all had to wear yarmulkes. Moe went ballistic, and screamed hard hats or nothing. I explained to him that with havin’ a girl drummer we were lucky to get the gig, so he grudgingly went along with it. He even looked a little Hassidic. He wanted me to teach him some Hebrew, so I taught him the word “Baruch”, you know, blessed. He’d walk up behind Clarissa, grab her by the hair, and bellow BAAAARRRRROOOOOOK in her ear. The second time, she kneed him in the nuts.
It’s the second weekend in July. Clarissa got her dad’s panel truck. We pack, drive up the mountain road to the camp, and load into the social hall around dinnertime. Schmelkes runs up to us, carrying a tray of hamentashen and macaroons. He’s short, fat, sweaty, and panting, with curly black hair going gray at the temples, bushy black eyebrows, horn rim glasses with lenses as thick as the windows on a Brink’s truck, and a jowl-breaking smile. He’s wearing a camp T-shirt, navy blue Bermuda shorts with a flashlight clipped to the belt, and looks like a fifty-seven year old twelve-year old with a stubble, huge nose, and hairy knees. All he needs is a beanie that says L’chaim. He brought some counselors to help us set up. These guys might be hot shit Macabee games basketball players, but they can’t figure out how to plug anything in, except maybe into the camp nurse. Moe is muttering Jewish jokes under his breath, and it’s all I can do to keep him occupied. Sammy is all excited, slaps me on the back nearly knocking my toothpick down my throat, babbling that the kids have been all primed “Oy-vey Dommy, is ve gonna have a whole bunch of fun, boychicks and girlchick” while looking at Clarissa, and he spouts a waterfall of Yiddish from the back of his throat that I couldn’t understand. He puts up a sign on stage left that says “THEY’RE HERE!!” and says we should do some pioneer songs and horas, or something like that. Clarissa says they’re songs and dances of Israeli settlers. Sammy and my dad are real close, so I’m hoping this whole evening doesn’t get me in trouble. I try to get the band together for a sound check, but Moe says forget it…just turn everything up all the way and let God sort it out.
There’s a stampede of feet on the social hall steps and porch. The kids explode through the doors all at once…boys and girls screaming like they hyperventilated with helium, like a squirming mass of eels, about a hundred of them, and about a dozen counselors trying to keep them from getting tangled into the world’s biggest slimy granny knot. There were balloons all over the room, so the kids started batting them around and popping them.
-you really don’t like eels
You ever eat one? This girl counselor shaped like a fireplug wearing a t-shirt that says STAFF is standing in the middle of the dance floor shouting, “When da Fingaz Go Up, DA MOUTHS GO SHUT!!!” but it’s swallowed up in the howling chaos. A pimply faced boy is running after a skinny little girl with long black frizzy hair flying behind her, and he’s screaming, “I’m gonna stick my tongue in your mouth again, Rachel!!” Moe smiles and says, “I like that kid!” Clarissa spots this counselor who looks like a prototypical Uzi-toting Sabra, starts licking her lips and muttering about wishing she was few years older and spoke Hebrew, and I’m beginning to sense that the band is loosing its focus. I ask Moe to check his vocal mic, so he grabs it and bellows BAAAARRRRROOOOOOK into it. He racks the mic across my guitar strings, and the next thing I hear is our PA howling feedback and shaking the whole building with this enormous ground loop humming louder and louder. Moe screams “sounds great” in my one ear, Sammy screams “Dommy, what’s the name of your band again?” in the other, and I go temporarily deaf. Clarissa slithers from behind her drums, grabs the mic from Moe, buries it in her stomach, kneels down at the mixer, and throws the ground lifter. The silence is almost as disorienting as the noise. She snarls, “Fuckin’ grow up, Budzynski.” Moe shouts, “HEY CLARISSA,” jams his thumb in his mouth and sucks on it while gurgling “tastes salty! mmmmmm!” I get between them before Clarissa puts his eyes out with her drumsticks. “Stop it guys,” I shout. “Let’s run down Black Slacks.”
Clarissa gets back behind the drum kit (she stands up like a real rockabilly cat; no throne), flicks her hair off her shoulders, crosses her sticks above her head, and clicks it out. Moose is slapping and popping the bass, giving the kids his pinhead glue-sniff look, and I start laying down a wicked rock-a-boogie groove on top of Clarissa’s ride on the high hat and snare rim. Moe attacks his guitar with both fists and ruins the vibe. He leans over and screams, “HEY DOMINIC, SHOULD I START SINGIN’ NOW?” into what’s left of my one ear. I nod yes. Moe staggers to the mic, and hits it with his forehead.
Pegged cool daddy-o!
Vhen I put dem on I'm a-rarin' ta go…
Vhen I go to places I just don't giva SHYIT
You'd know vhy vhen you tsee vhat I GOT ON
Black slacks…pegged FOURTEEN!
Black slacks…really are KEEN!!
Black slacks…pegged cool DADDY-O!!!
Vhen I put dem on I'm FUCKIN’ OFF TO DA RACES!!!!!!
GO DOMINIC PLAY ONE FOR ME!!!!!!!!
Like I said, he never gets the words right.
I started playing some
string-bending single note solos, but all of a sudden, Moe shrieks “LOUDERRRRRRR!!!!!!”
and achieves a level of inhuman spasticity and sound emission that I saw when I
was working years later as an orderly in a Massachusetts state hospital in the
shock unit. It’s like you’re hanging for dear life on to the wheel a of a VW
bug while you’re going through the Sideling Hill tunnel on the Turnpike and
Moe’s a semi comin’ at you at 50 miles an hour in the other lane. Mechanical
roaring noises are blasting out of every hole in his body while he’s having
what looks like a grand mal seizure. I was afraid his eyes would pop out
of their sockets and he’d dive off the stage looking for them. Everyone in the
social hall was scared shitless. Maybe they were experiencing some sort of
genetic memory of a Cossack pogrom. They all crowded against the back wall, as
far away from the stage as possible. Some of the kids are on the floor with
convulsions; their hands over their ears…one little girl is tugging on the
t-shirt of a counselor and her mouth is moving, “make them stop”. Sammy comes over to the stage and waves me up
front. He’s laughing. He’s been in the summer camp business for two decades. I
kneel down and he shouts, “Dommy, can you get that big guy to let one of the
kids play on the next song?”
We go into the outro, and hold an E chord. Moe jumps up and down, swings the microphone stand over his head with one hand and bellows into the mic he’s holding in the other:
“BLACK…FUCKIN’...SAAAAAAAAAAACKSSSSSSS!!!!!!!”
Bonk…we’re done. Moe grabs me by the arm and yells, “We were great Dominic! You’re a Genius!!”
I tell him I need his guitar; Sammy wants someone to sit in. He starts stamping his feet, bitchin’ and poutin’ with a regular hissy fit, but I explain to him that all professional musicians participate in goodwill and networking, and letting people sit in is part of the mystique. Moe hands over the guitar and stomps backstage. I clean off the sweat and slobber with a towel.
The kids stop whimpering and crying all of a sudden.
Sammy jumps on stage, grabs the mic and bellows, “Hey boychicks and girlchicks, I have a surprise…making his Camp Wa-Na-Pee-Ko-Nu-Mi-Chabad debut is…JOEY SCHMERMERHORN!!!” All the girls start squealing and clapping, and the boys look pissed off. They all run to the stage.
Joey jumps on stage. He looks more like a cartoon wiener dog in a camp T-shirt and gym shorts than a member of “12-The Greatest Bunk”, as his shirt proclaims. He’s bathed head to toe in sweat, and his black hair is pasted down the sides of his head, framing his glasses. It’s like he has on a Groucho Marx mask without the moustache. I give him the guitar, he tangles his mezuzah around the strap, bumps the mic with his face and squeaks, “Thank You, Mr. Orlando,” all adenoids and kreplach breath. Clarissa has slunk up behind me and she shouts in my ear, “He’s got peach fuzz. I’m sixteen. If I fuck him, and we get caught, do I get in trouble?” I tell her to get back behind her fuckin’ drums and decide to get her older brother to replace her. Better still, I’ll find a replacement for me. Joey starts strummin’ bum-chic, bum-chic on a C chord, then he goes bum-chic, bum-chic on a G chord, turns around to us and shouts, "Can you follow that?" To which Clarissa screams, "marry me fuck me!!!" and Moose shouts, “miserable Jew-Boy!!!” and I tell him, “ignore them assholes, Joey, just sing!” and we fall in behind him, bum-chic, bum-chic bum-chic, bum-chic bum-chic, bum-chic….
bum-chic, bum-chic bum-chic, bum-chic
bum-chic, bum-chic
I have a little dreidel,
I made it out of clay,
And when it's dry and ready,
Then dreidel I shall play!
bum-chic, bum-chic bum-chic, bum-chic
bum-chic, bum-chic
Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel,
I made it out of clay;
Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel,
Then dreidel I shall play.
bum-chic, bum-chic bum-chic, bum-chic
bum-chic, bum-chic
It has a lovely body,
With legs so short and thin,
And when it gets all tired,
It drops and then I win!
bum-chic, bum-chic bum-chic, bum-chic
bum-chic, bum-chic
Joey went on for about ten minutes. Sammy was ecstatic. Every pre-teen girl at Camp Wa-Na-Pee-Ko-Nu-Mi-Chabad wet her pants, some for the first time. I looked backstage, and Moe was lying passed out, face down in a pool of vomit.
4.
-stop I can’t take anymore you disgust me shut up
It's a true story…can't take it?
-no, it's you dammit... I can understand all the other trailer trash that never left here or got attracted back to this miserable place like flies to shit… Moose, Clarissa, Johnny Palermo, Leroy, Izzy Greenberg's kid, them fuck girls, they're all waitresses at the Frackville Diner, right? …this place is X MARKS THE SPOT for the place I would give Pennsylvania an enema, even fuckin' Moe, I can appreciate why he would come back here, Christ he probably couldn’t make it in the real world unless somebody remembered to water him and taught him how to find his balls with his hands, but why the fuck did you come back here!!?? you actually had talent and got out of here and then why did you idiots arrange yourselves so that Moe is the center of your pin head world all over again...
We stared at each other. Dominic gave me a wan smile, and slowly lowered his head.
"I just wanted to come back and die in a place where some of the people know me, and the place tied into what was left of my memories of it,” he said quietly. “Unlike you, you coward. You just wanted to disappear into nothing. And you're not even dying like me. You ever hear of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis?”
-no
Wilmington DE, 2002