Enlightening Nonsense

 

About three years ago, I was in a dance show in D.U.M.B.O. For those of you hipsters who know every abbreviation for instant and text messaging, such as LOL, ROTL, FMITA (“fuck me in the ass”), FEMA (Fuck Everyone More Agency), BATF (Bullshit Asshole-Taking Fucks) but don’t know D.U.M.B.O. from a flying elephant with flapping ears, it stands for “Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass.”

It was my first time in D.U.M.B.O.—the area, I had sodomized Disney’s flying fat fuck (F.F.F.) many times during our stay at San Quentin Correctional Facility (S.Q.C.F.)—and it seemed like a nice artistic community. I heart it used to be an “autistic” community but they purged all the retards in the 70s.

Walking around the water with the other dancers, it had the peaceful feeling of a retirement home without the overwhelming smell of perfume cleaners covering the smell of piss and death. One man was playing with a small remote-controlled boat, probably an autistic who managed to hide from the S.S. (Social System’s) Purification fo the Community (P.O.T.C.) There were also abstract sculptures scattered around like clothes on the floor of two overly-rambunctious first-time lovers who didn’t make the time to neatly fold their clothes and place them in a pile before fucking like rabbits.

On the sidewalk were various artists and craftsmen and women selling their goods, or “bads” as it may be. Something about art hanging on a wire fence always gives me that warm fuzzy feeling inside, transporting me to a world where everyone is jobless and braless and everyone is happy, except for Old Lady Crotchrot whose boos are as droopy as her scoliated spine.

My girlfriend at the time, Celeste, was a dancer and she choreographed the piece we were going to perform there that night along as part of a dance show which was to include different pieces from a couple of dozen other dance companies. She had partnered with a fashion designer who had created for the girls cute white tights and form-fitting white shirts covered with splatterings of color, as if someone had a monkey, in between hurling his own feces, flick a paintbrush at them.

My costume consisted entirely of thousands of mostly orange rubber bands which covered me from head to toe that not only weighed a ton but also made me look like a rubber sasquatch who used too much artificial sun tanner until my whole body turned a healthy shade of—I believe the Crayola crayon 64-pack with the built-in sharpener on the back they call it “Nuclear Orange.”

Because of the “stretchy” costume theme, my girlfriend named our group, “The Elastic Company (T.E.C.) I had suggested, “Nuclear Sasquatch And His Three Bitches (N.S.A.H.T.B.) but it didn’t fly.

The dance show went well and besides my little niece spending the next several weeks screaming herself to sleep each night from the scarring impression the dance company that portrayed zombies, complete with blood coming from their sliced necks, made on her, everyone seemed to enjoy the show.

There was one tropical number, complete with grass skirts, Hawaiian shirts and a guitarist jamming and singing away under a fake palm tree. The number was a lot of fun but more than any Jerome Robbins-level choreography, it was the song the guitarist was playing that had me snapping my fingers and stomping my feet singing “I want to be in America! Please let me be in America! Everything free in America! I’d like to pee in America!”

After that joyous “Don Ho Meets Michael Flatley” (D.H.M.M.F.) number, I went up to the table where all the different companies had put information and promotional material about their company. I picked up a 4 x 6 postcard advertising the guitarist’s latest release called “Black Box,” which surprisingly didn’t remind me of that nightmarish night I spent in a cheap Boise, Idaho motel with a hooker named Thelma.

As my apartment has seemed to become an accumulation of dirt, dust and crap, it wasn’t until two years later when I decided to search for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (T.T.O.T.S.M.) in my apartment with a shovel and a pickax that I came across the 4 x 6 postcard. It said, “My gynecologist found your watch. Should I send it to you? Always, Thelma.” Beneath that card was the card of the guitarist from D.H.M.M.F. see the preceding paragraph, hipster), Jann Klose, which is pronounced like “Yan” and not like the middle Brady Bunch girl. There was also an email address.

So I sent Jann an “I don’t know if you remember…” email. The last email like that I sent involved a backroom abortion and me forever buying plastic instead of wire hangers.

Jann responded back and told me the D.H.M.M.F. song in which I was interested was called “One Little Chance” and was available on iTunes. He also asked if I wanted to be on his mailing list. I am usually hesitant to agree to be on anyone’s mailing list, as by the time I go through all my “BUY VIAGRA CHEAP!” emails, I’m pretty much too burnt out to read anymore crap. But to Jann I said yes, as it is my theory that one can never receive enough junk mail in their inbox. After a quick pit stop to ricanforeskins.com, my next stop was iTunes, where I downloaded “One Little Chance” and after listening to it concluded that this was the best 99 cents I had spent since Thelma.

His sound is kind of mellifluous, a combination of mellow and fluous, combining soft melodies with some high notes as belting as Fred Mercury doing “Bohemian Rhapsody” (I was going to go with Ethel Merman but figured the dead lead singer of the rock group Queen might be more remembered than a dead musical theater queen.)

Jann was constantly on tour, around the country, in Europe, but I started making it a “thing” to go to all his New York City gigs. We would usually talk a little before and after his gigs and my running joke was to constantly shout out “One Little Chance!” as my request. I suppose I could have been hip and shouted, “O.L.C.!” but I wouldn’t want my hipness to be mistaken for being the behavior of a douche.

Jann assured me that he’d play it for me at some future gig and asked me if I were to continue to bellow my song request during his set to please wait for those quiet moments between songs and not in the middle of songs. It sounded like a fair request but so was mine and he never honored it. I decided I would continue to shout out “One Little Chance!” whenever I felt like it and just carry with me a note from my headshrinker that says I had Tourette’s Syndrome and can’t control what comes out of my fuckin’ mouth—or pen or fingers for that matter. “BITCH FUCK PROSTITUTE CORNHOLE!” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFnLpXzkw4Y]

It was with mixed emotions that I listened to Jann announce at one of his gigs that he had a special request and finally sing “One Little Chance.” I enjoyed hearing the song and appreciated that it was performed for me but when it was completed I realized that I had nothing left to say! “How ‘bout those Yankees?” just didn’t cut it.

The last gig of Jann’s I went to was held at The Nuyerican Poet’s Café (T.N.P.C.) in the East Village (E.V.), made famous for being a home—if not the home—of slam poetry (S.P.), which is kind of like hip-hop poetry. The first time I had heard S.P. was on The Russell Simmon’s Show (T.R.S.S.) on HBO (Home Box Office) and I was totally intrigued. Immediately following T.R.R.S. was a movie called “Slam” about a young slam poet who went to jail and prevented himself from getting sodomized through his craft, as even the most hardened of criminal knows its improper etiquette to interrupt a poet’s word flow by placing your dick in his mouth.

Immediately following “Slam,” I wrote my first slam poem. And it was dope (for the less hip: this does not mean it was stupid, nor does it mean it was a five-leafed drug useful for glaucoma and to enhance an Allman Brothers Band (A.B.B.) concert or an excuse for the B.A.T.F. to break into people’s homes and shoot bed-ridden cripples in the head.) One line was something like, “Big money man, making lots of dollars but little sense.”

From start to finish, the one or two page poem flowed out of me in about one minute. I had found my calling and hadn’t felt this sure of anything since I entered the priesthood. I was hoping that S.P. didn’t have any type of “extracurricular activity” which took place in a confession booth and involved sitting on the lap of some pervert sporting wood.

Some of my longer prose pieces to this day have a “slam” feel to them but after watching more T.R.S.S., I started to see that while there were definitely some “slam” slam poets, most were hacks who had replaced a command of words, images and structure with empty passion. Instead of something poetic like, “My vagina’s big lips may speak loudly but behind her bravado is just a whole lot of empty space,” there was a lot of “MY PUSSIES HUGE!” This didn’t stimulate me when I heard it from Bertha, it certainly didn’t cause any stirrings in my loins when it came from someone who was more autistic than artist.

So I turned off T.R.S.S. and instead sought culture in staring at my wall print of Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Piss Christ.” Still, this was going to be my first time at T.N.P.C. and I was psyched to be a part of history—or rather, to be at a place where at one time history occurred.

I got on an express train instead of a local and instead of being in the E.V., I found myself let off somewhere in Chinatown, where I spent the next hour wandering around trying to find my way, despite having a built-in digital compass on my watch. I was like a kid who was just spun around so many times in “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” (P.T.T.O.T.D.) that I had wandered out into the street and was walking with my tail and pin towards oncoming traffic—lost and in danger of encountering a Chinese fire drill.

I got to T.N.P.C. at 9:00 p.m., an hour after the scheduled start of the night of various singer/songwriters. Someone was onstage reading some poetry and I went to the first staff member I saw and said, “Say, my man, is there music tonight?” He assured me there was.

It was pretty crowded there and so I was forced to stand. After my Chinatown adventure, I was pretty tired and so I went up to some dude sitting at a table and asked if I could sit on the chair on which his bag was resting. He said, “Sure,” and I responded, “I didn’t ask what your favorite antiperspirant is, jackass. I’m tired from wandering around Chinatown for an hour because I couldn’t figure out how to read the digital compass on my watch and would like to rest my weary ass.” He moved the bag and while he had no problem with me sitting there, his bag kept shooting me dirty looks throughout the rest of the show. When I couldn’t take it anymore and finally shouted out, “YOU’RE JUST A BAG—JUST SIT ON THE FLOOR AND SHUT YOUR ZIPPER!” everyone snapped their heads in my direction, the woman onstage reading her poem stopped mid-sentence without penile blockage as the mic responded with a high-pitched whistle which made me think we were in the 70s classic film “The Warriors” and his whistle was the signal to, “LET’S GET READY TO RUUUUUUMBLE!” I could have seriously used some Sure antiperspirant at this point so I could “Raise your hand, raise your hand…if you’re Sure.”

A black man broke the silence with, “And I suppose you want me to sit in the back of the bus?” Sensing the fragility of the situation, in my most tolerant way I said, “I have no problem with a nigger sitting in the front of the bus, but a bag on a seat—“ The next thing I remember was waking up on the floor, the bag sitting back in the seat, smiling at me with a sickening smugness.

I had a lot of time to reflect on my tolerance—or lack thereof—and finally apologized to the bag, telling him, “I realize now how insensitive I was to your needs and as long as women, niggers or fags get equal rights, I have no problem honoring the rights of bags.” He told me to shut the fuck up, that he was married to a woman who was a black fag and if he didn’t think it would disturb her enjoyment of the show, that he would have kicked my floor-sitting ass. I thought it best to keep to myself my opinion on human/accessory relations.

It was an enjoyable evening. One highlight was a black slam poet—who incidentally should be allowed to sit anywhere he wants to on a bus—who shared three kick-ass poems all related to sex. One was about how he was known by everyone as the hippest, most popular guy in town, sleeping with all the honeys and rubbing elbows with all the bees. Then he got AIDS (Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome). Slightly formula but rockin’.

The next piece was about how he’d always show up late with no excuse to his girl’s crib and she would be mad angry but once he banged her all her protests about his irresponsibility would end and he’d promise her that his word would mean something next time, but inevitably the same scene would be repeated where he’d disappoint her with his word but satisfy her with his dick and all would be forgiven…for the moment. Apparently the AIDS didn’t stop him from having the energy to run around all night and still fuck his ho’ on the return home.

The last piece was a more touching piece about how he had love with a woman and how it faded from eternity and settled in the pastures of the past; I don’t think it was the same gullible skank from the second poem. This dude was slammin’! Apparently his dick wasn’t the only thing that could make someone scream, “Give me more, you black stallion!”

Jann was literally the last one scheduled to perform and he was noticeably impatient. He came up to me about ten minutes before going on and said, “Do you have any requests?” I thought he was shitting me and if I wasn’t still high from smoking the black stallion’s poetry, I might have been thrown by his pre-emptive attack, clearly influenced by our government’s new foreign policy after the 9/11 inside job where you can attack a country that doesn’t threaten you “just in the possibility’ that somewhere, someday they might.

Only somewhat flustered, I was like an actor who had spent years working his craft and so when the person at the front table nearest the stage of the dinner theater in whose production he was starring let out a huge blast of a fart he responded with, “Madame Chatterly, perhaps you should check to see if you have a gas leak,” and didn’t miss a beat. “One Little Chance?”

He said, “Besides that.” He had recently sent out a video link of him playing a beautiful new song called “Still.”

“Still?”

“They’re recording tonight and I don’t want that one on tape yet. Pick another one and I’ll play it.”

The truth was that while I did buy his last album entitled “Reverie,” all I really listened to was “One Little Chance” and only recently was “Still” added to my Jann Klose playlist [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5DzRpN-eec]. Think…think…”Do you know any Beatles?” would have made me look retarded, which would have probably resulted in me saying, “I don’t mean to sound like one of those vaccine-induced Down’s Syndrome Dummies (D.S.D.s),” which would have probably resulted in a gang of autistic ‘tards joining in with the “Blacks” and “Bags” for one more beating and at this point I was feeling a bit weak from my newly-acquired AIDS from the Black Stallion.

“Play something from ‘Reverie’,” I said, praying to the made-up God of others that he didn’t ask me which one was my favorite, knowing “Uh, track 3?” would have made it obvious that Reverie got about as much playing time as Englebert Humperdink’s Greatest Hits album, which I don’t even own but always make a note to myself to buy whenever I see it advertised at 3:00 a.m. in between the All-Night Evangelist Marathon (A.N.E.M.)

Jann seemed satisfied with this and left, my shirt soaked with sweat from unprotected armpits, my mouth dry and pasty from nerves as well as the remnants of the Black Stallion’s germ warfare moisture missile. I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that while one day the AIDS may kill me a slow painful death because some sicko government black-ops created it to kill fags as opposed to their latest creation of Swine Flu (S.F.) which not only affects all of us pig-fuckers but will make that prick Rumsfeld a quadrillion as his Tamiflu company sells more mercury-poisoned vaccines, for now I was sitting on a cold floor, listening to some music and poetry and had avoided another beating from a one-hit wonder musician. Life was good!

Jann finally went on and what could be heard of the three songs he sang over my shouts of “ONE LITTLE CHANCE! ONE LITTLE CHANCE!” sounded really good. Besides the Black Stallion’s cock, Jann was the most polished thing to land on the stage that night.

The show was over and it was about 11:30 p.m. now. I went up to Jann who was packing up. He thanked me for coming out on a school night and staying so late to support him. He told me he had to hussle to try and sell some of his CDs to anyone who was still there and hadn’t run off in search of polished black cock.

He pulled out a CD. “Do you have this one?” he asked.

Instead of responding, “I only listen to ‘One Little Chance’ and ‘Still’,” I just said, “All I have is ‘Reverie.’”

“I recorded this awhile back. It’s only four songs. You want it?” I melted inside, feeling appreciated as his #1 Fan and if my jaw wasn’t so numb from the Black Stallion, I would have sucked him off right there.

“Sure,” I said, like a high school girl who was just asked by the quarterback of the football team if she wanted to wear his letter jacket.

“Five dollars, okay?” he asked and now the quarterback had just concluded his proposal with, “Because me and the team are having a contest to see who can get the ugliest girl to wear our letter jacket.” I was dumbfounded that all I could do was pull out my wallet and hand him a fiver.

“I’m gonna see if I can sell some CDs,” he said and left me there with my legs spread, my panties around my ankles and feeling like I’ve just been fucked without an after-sex cuddle and that maybe he doesn’t really love me after all.

It’s hard to be mad at Jann. Like most people, he made a decision based on fear over love—fear of a lack—not realizing that when you give your love freely it comes back to you multi-fold, in the case of the Black Stallion, with a death sentence without trial just like what is afforded our “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

The CDs probably cost him fifty cents to a dollar each. I throw more change than this to all the grossly obese homeless each day who ask for money for something to eat (judging by their girth, I’d say they’re making a pretty good living begging. Come to think of it, even the Buddha with his one meal a day begging bowl meal is always portrayed as a fat fuck!) To add insult to injury, I realized that I could have downloaded it from iTunes and actually saved a dollar.

I determined I would get revenge on Jann Klose. I called up Acme because that was the company that Wile E. Coyote used to always go to when he wanted to off someone but all they were selling was dynamite and giant catapults and, honestly, I was looking for something more sinister. I came up with the plan to recruit hundreds of people to fill all of Jann’s performances worldwide and shout, “ONE LITTLE CHANCE!” throughout the entirety of his shows until all he could do to appease the swelling monster (uh, not the Black Stallion’s dick!) would be to feed it the virginal song “One Little Chance” over and over again to the ever-unsatiated big black penis. Jann will then be relegated to the trash heap of one-hit wonders like Ah Ha with “Take On Me” and Timmy T with “One More Try.” HOO-HOO HA-HA HEE-HEE!

When I got home I tossed the CD in its never-to-be removed cellophane sarcophagus into a pile of CDs that I use as coasters for guests to avoid those terrible moisture stains resulting from condensation of their cool drinks placed on unprotected wood (uh, Black Stallion?)

I then fished it out of the black hole (uh, Thelma?) of CDs and considered bringing it with me to the next Jann Klose gig and asking for my money back. I looked at the CD sleeve and had to laugh—it was “Black Box,” the original CD whose postcard I had picked up at the D.U.M.B.O. dance show three years earlier!

Rumor has it (or so I’m going to start) that on his national tour, Jann had played Idaho where, after having his fill of potatoes, he put his own spud into a 99 cent whore named Thelma and, using his needle dick, played inside her cavernous cave on a phonograph “One Little Chance.” Damn, the acoustics must have been amazing!

Based on this vaginal technology, a small company named Boise Stereos soon dropped the “I” and went on to setting the bar on sound systems, making millions in the process, led by a CEO who gives Guy Lombardi motivational speeches that include, “There is no ‘I’ in Bose.”

Spread the rumor! Go to his shows and shout out “ONE LITTLE CHANCE!” You have an opportunity to become a fellow O.L.C-er this Sunday, June 21 at 7:00 p.m. at Rockwood Music Hall in NYC. The place is really cool, doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, just one drink (I usually buy the small glass bottled water that can empty into a shot glass for $3 plus $1 tip to the waitress, which seems strange as when I go to a restaurant I generally tip 15% and that waitress usually works a lot harder than just taking a bottle from a bar ten feet away and passing it to me for a 25% tip. Jann always gives a good show, you’ll have fun shouting out, “ONE LITTLE CHANCE!” and you can tease him after the show about Thelma, the “black box.” Tell him Swami X sent you and that you plan to attend all of his shows now and post the “Black Box Rumor (B.B.R.) to everyone on your email list. Just don’t let him sweet-talk you into buying his 4-song CD for $5. That charming bastard can do it! [http://www.myspace.com/jannklose]