Clunkline » doctor_subtle http://clunkline.com Doom flies on detachable wings. Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:30:22 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc Hansnacht and the Sketchiness Curve http://clunkline.com/2010/07/hansnacht-and-the-sketchiness-curve/ http://clunkline.com/2010/07/hansnacht-and-the-sketchiness-curve/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:39:35 +0000 doctor_subtle http://clunkline.com/?p=4888 I live on a quiet street in a nice neighborhood, in a house that is actually two apartments. The first floor is a three bedroom apartment, and the second floor is a separate three bedroom apartment.
What makes the house interesting is that it is the third of four identical houses on that particular block, all in a row. Alternating houses are mirror-images of each other.
As the third house in the line, our large dining room windows look out across twelve feet of scrub brush into the large dining room windows of our neighbors in House 2. For most of my time there, those neighbors have been a gaggle of young gay men, all Pitt students.
They were rarely home, but when they were, they were usually shirtless. Unlike our house, their house had a finished basement, with two more bedrooms, for a total of five bedrooms and five twinky gay boys.
When summer started, many of the gay boys went home to various tiny, not-quite-glam-enough Ohio and Penna. townships, to suffer out the summer in neo-christian hyper-moral misery. They found a few subletters last minute, and then, oddly, those subletters found subletters.
One of these subletters we’ll call Sven. He’s the guy who first triggered little raspy whines from my sketch-o-meter, mostly for his habit of wearing track pants at night, especially while on his phone out on his house’s front deck. I would later find out from SGT. EARTH (who crazily enough became one of the abovementioned subsubletters) that he was on the phone with his ‘bitches’ because he was a ‘pimp’, and that on some weekends Sven would bring over ‘random female friends of his’ and give them a place to ‘earn some money doing massages’, money which he would split with them, ‘generously’.
It also turned out that though he looked like a thirty-year-old serious russian-gangster type, Sven was actually a thirty-year-old lispy raver, and that many of his track pants were a little too dayglo for everyday wear, if you catch my E-fueled drift.
His generally sketchitude was nothing, though, in comparison to a young woman we’ll call Beverly, the first of Sven’s subsubletters.
I first became aware of Beverly when I noticed, while glancing from my dining room into theirs, that someone had brought a giant neon-green dragon-dino plushy into the house. I thought, “Hmm… that dragon doesn’t go with ANYTHING. The gayboys would never have bought it. They must have a new, possibly psychedelic roommate.”
I was not wrong. She made herself known on the deck some hours later, a svelte young-but-vaguely-old-looking woman, chain smoking and wearing a feathery backpack made out of, it looked like, the shredded carcass of Toucan Sam. She had dragged from some room in the house a CHAIR IN THE SHAPE OF A HAND, her crazy throne on their front patio. I waved, and she waved back.
A few weeks later, I came home to find a couple of squad cars out front, and Sven and Beverly sitting on the front patio, guarded by a cop. Apparently, while repairing House #1′s basement, a crony of the landlord that owned both those properties (but not my house), discovered that Sven had sub-subletted, and had threatened eviction that very day. Beverly had called the cops on this also-tattooed-and-vaguely russian crony, as Penna., like most states, has half-decent renter’s laws, and notice and such are required for an eviction. Bev and Sven got to stay, at least for then, but the Crony talked to his bosses and they started the eviction process.
Two days later, in a completely unrelated incident, I watched the cops frog-walk Beverly out of the house in handcuffs. She spent the night in jail.
The story with that is this: Beverly has a boyfriend named Jimmy. Jimmy is a punk-looking guy from the South Side, semi-demi-homeless, and 30 though he looks 17. Jimmy and Beverly like each other, but sometimes they like to strangle each other. Not metaphorically, either: hands-around-throats strangling, and not the fun kinky kind.
Beverly and Jimmy have been strangling each other long enough that they are under court order not to see each other. But, in a sort of masochistic Romeo and Juliet move (actually, thinking about the end of that play, maybe it is just a regular-type Romeo and Juliet move), Jimmy routinely shows up at three in the morning looking for a place to sleep and a girl to sleep with. Sometimes that goes fine, and I look out my dining room windows to see them eating eggs together at breakfast, but sometimes this goes poorly, and the strangling begins, and the other roommates call the cops, and then one or both of them go to jail.
(Hilarious aside: I once overheard Bev and Sven fighting, loudly. The subject was this: why was it cool with all the roommates for Sven to use the house as a pimping-spot for random sketchy women, when it was not cool by everyone for Bev to bring over a single sketchy guy?)
Around or just before the arresting began, SGT. EARTH moved in, and I suddenly had an excuse to stop by and chat with all of them, and thus learn the very details I am here reporting.
The eviction progressed- Sven left the house first, in late June. A bevy of beautiful blonds helped him move out. I presumed they were his ‘bitches’. Bev is scheduled to leave today.
A few days ago, I was sitting on their front porch, hanging out with SGT. EARTH and Beverly, and Beverly was telling us her plans: she was moving back to Middle-of-Nowhere county, PA, to help her brother kick is oxycotten habit. She lamented that she was now the only family member who ‘gave a flying fuck’, despite (or, I later realized, perhaps because of) ‘the bat thing’.
“What bat thing?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, when we were little, me and my brother were BAD. We were terrible! So terrible, that once, he took an aluminum baseball bat to my face. My mother told him, she fuckin’ told him, ‘Oh, now you’ve done it boy, you’ve gone and killed your sister. She’s dead!’ But I wasn’t dead, I was just all bloodied up.”
“What the fuck!”
“I know, right! That’s why I’ve got this metal plate in my face! I’m like the fucking Terminator now. But he’s all fucked up, and I gotta go help him.”
“Yeah?” asked SGT. EARTH.
“Yeah. I’m gonna start by punching him in the face.”
“What?” said Earthfirst. “Why would you do that?”
“No one else in my family would.” she said. She paused. “No one else gives a fuck.”
She went on to describe some other incidents that occurred near or because of her extended family, all of them of an ‘OH GOD THE HUMANITY!’ variety.
After this barrage of stories of sketchiness, I thought I would tell her my own story-of-sketch.
The story I told her was, to this day, the sketchiest thing that ever happened to me, but it was maybe an order of magnitude less sketchy than the stories she told, so I’m thankful for that.
——–
This is that story:
A few years ago I was living in an apartment with two CMU architecture students, Jake and Sammy. Sammy was a girl. Jake and Sammy were occasional users of psychadelic drugs, and though they were both seeing other people, there were nights I would come home to find them high out of their minds, intertwined on the living room couch. Later, I would usually hear them fucking.
Anyway, we had parties at that apartment, and though I would not call them ‘drug parties’, we did not discourage anyone from bringing or using drugs, especially if they shared around.
(I can proudly say, though, that at the time I was a bit of an alcoholic, and passed on the E and the mushrooms and the LSD and the marijuana and the cut-up-Adderal in favor of Wild Turkey mixed with Jack Daniels.)
So there were parties, and drugs occurred to people at these parties, and it was generally great: we were like a modern salon, or a saloon. We had a wall decorated with a grid of old trippy album covers. When a local hairdresser went out of business, we acquired a real working hair-drying chair, weird translucent head-ball intact.
Sometimes my roommates took enough drugs that they decide to paint our walls (strictly against the lease). Usually, in the morning, there would be half-started little drawings, and a lot of misspelled and misderived French.
At one of these parties, my friend Alice arrived with her ‘party-hobo’, Hans. Hans was not yet known as the party hobo, but a few weeks later everyone would be talking about “that weird party hobo that Alice keeps bringing to parties.” We were, as it were, the initial party that lent Hans his party-hobo name.
Hans was tall, thin, with snakebite piercing at the corners of his mouth. He was dressed like a footsoldier in some sort of Darkwave (that horrible mix of Goth and Raver culture) Army. What really did it was the hat he wore, a black Columbian-Paramilitary style field-cap, with the Playboy bunny logo inscribed in it with pink sequins.
When Alice brought him in to the room, he stuck his hand out, and in the deeply insincere manner of a Whitechapel street urchin, said “Pleased to meet you sir!” and began, immediately, with his eyes, to case the place. Behind the haze of obvious high, I could see little cash register wheels spinning as he totaled up our belongings’ street value.
Hans introduced himself as a party promoter and male stripper, but it came out as the night progressed that his income was split five ways, pretty evenly, between party promotion, male stripping, drug dealing, illicit nocturnal activities, and outright crime.
It was this last part that was deeply troubling to me. Sure, he seemed nice enough right now, drunkenly strumming my roommate’s guitar and giving heavy, interesting glances to both the boys and girls in the room, Alice and myself included. But what might happen days or weeks from now, when he falls on hard times, and needs to figure out who he is going to rob? He’ll just make a bee-line to my apartment, is what he’ll do! Oh, god!
That’s when I started drinking more heavily, and trying to figure out how I could covertly inform Alice that she needed to get this guy THE FUCK OUT OF HERE before he figured out where he was.
(I actually asked him once during the evening, point blank, “hey, Hans, do you even know where you are right now?”. “NO MAN! I’m SOOOOOO HIGH! ARE WE IN SHADYSIDE?” We were not in Shadyside.)
The next thing that happened can only be described in cinematic terms. It is what they call a ‘jump cut’ – an immediate, abrupt switch from one scene right in to the next.
Picture it.
——-
We are sitting on couches in a run down, vaguely be-muraled apartment, drunk or high beyond all reason.
Hans, staring at the ceiling, half laughing, his eyes starting to go all hourglass, like goat eyes: “I’m SOOO HIGH! ARE WE IN SHADYSIDE?”
Now i’m unzipping my fly. I’m in the bathroom, alone, just starting to pee an epic pee. It’s hours later, four or five in the morning. I hear a groan behind me, the kind of sound a recently-shot cow might make.
I turn, and the peestream turns with me, coursing over the tile wall next to the toilet, redirecting as it streams across the outcropped corner. I abruptly stop, because Hans is in the bathtub, absolutely passed out, his shirt awash in vomit. His stupid black hat is crooked, almost off his head. It’s brim is just touching the sick-pool, pulling it’s disgusting juices up through the miracle of capillary action.
He’s turned just enough to one side that I feel confident that he won’t choke on his vomit, if he keeps vomiting. I finish my pee and walk out into the hall. Most everyone is gone- Alice is passed out on the couch, Hans is in the bathtub. Jake and Sammy are… somewhere.
Jump cut again – I’m now horizontal, passed out in my bed. Some kind of fuckery is going on in another room, but who it is and why I have no idea, nor care. I am asleep.
——-
I woke up at dawn. It seemed that the night before, I had not only opened the shades on my windows, I had also taken a mirror from the hall and put it near my headboard. To this day I don’t know why. The point is, dawn was bright as fuck, and I was, miraculously, only ‘oh god’ hung over, not ‘puking on Hans’ hung over. Actually, that hangover had a lot of similarities with a marijuana high- I felt all fucked up and slightly mellowed, but also, intensely, acutely paranoid.
I stumbled out into the hall. I looked in the bathroom- Hans was still passed out, and, thankfully, breathing.
I went out into the living room. Alice was asleep on the couch, her arms and legs sticking out in random directions, like a cat.
I shook her awake. “Alice! Hey, Alice!”
“Hey.”
“When did you and Hans last do drugs?”
“We took some LSD right before bed.”
“Do you think he knows where he is?”
“FUCK NO! I’m still all fucked up, and he took tons more than me!”
“Alice, here’s forty dollars. Get him the fuck out of my house before he figures out where I live. Go have breakfast. Have breakfast in Shadyside. Or something. Spend in more drugs? Just get him out, and make sure he doesn’t know where I live.”
At the profferment of free money, she sat right up. I watched as she woke up Hans. They spent about five minutes getting the vomit off of his clothing, and about twenty minutes preening and doing up their hair.
And they were gone. I checked up on the whole “How much does he know” situation a few times over the next few weeks, and Alice assured me that for all he knew, we had had the party in Brooklyn. There was little of that night he remembered, and my apartment’s location was not one of those details.
——–
I told all this to Beverly, on her patio, a week or so before her eminent eviction.
Note, here, that if one was to draw a graph of the sketchiness factor of my life with respect to time, it would be relatively low and flat, with a general rising trend during my stay with Jake and Sammy in that apartment, and a definite, abrupt spike during that night. After Jake and Sammy moved out, it stayed pretty low, until I moved briefly to Los Angeles, where it rose again to Jake-and-Sammy-living levels. Never, though, did it approach the level of Hansnacht.
Not until this most recent subletter-and-subsubletter drama did it rise to even within an order of magnitude of Hansnacht.
(Beverly’s sketch-o-meter, for reference, probably started around Hansnacht levels and just kind of sine-waved across the graph, peaking well above Hansnacht, but never dipping far below it.)
And so it was to my great surprise and amazement that Beverly responded to the story thusly:
“Hans, you said his name was? He hangs out on the South Side a lot?”
“Yeah.” I said.
“And that hat- the black one, it’s got a pink playboy bunny and a stain on the brim?”
“Yup.”
“Oh FUCK! I gotta tell Jimmy!” she said.
“I thought you guys were, you know, court ordered and shit. What with the strangling.” I said.
“Oh, whatever. I gotta tell him, though, about Hans!”
“Why? Do they know each other?”
“KNOW EACH OTHER!? Hans fuckin’ pulled a GUN on Jimmy two years ago. Robbed him and shit!”
“Oh, wow!” I said, in a tone not nearly as excited as my internal “OH SHIT!”
The two local highs in my sketch-o-meter graph were, indeed, horrifying fractal sketch-echos of each other. Sketch-o-soidal waves, as it were.
“Yeah!” Beverly continued. “I want to punch that motherfucker in the face! Jimmy would too!”
I had nothing to say to that, save the thought that Beverly, Old-Testiment-style, apparently facepunches both out of hatred, and love.
]]> http://clunkline.com/2010/07/hansnacht-and-the-sketchiness-curve/feed/ 0 Mayor Ravenstahl to tax the Old for Driving Slowly http://clunkline.com/2009/12/mayor-ravenstahl-to-tax-the-old-for-driving-slowly/ http://clunkline.com/2009/12/mayor-ravenstahl-to-tax-the-old-for-driving-slowly/#comments Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:31:32 +0000 doctor_subtle http://clunkline.com/?p=1651 In an effort to close the $15 million gap in this year’s City Budget, Pittsburgh Mayor Ravenstahl the Younger has made moves to install a “slow driving” tax.

“Too much of our infrastructure is being inefficiently used by aging drivers, who with their light feet that cannot push pedals, and their inability to see over their hoods, and their general mothball-ish scent. Its time that these geriatric big-wigs paid their fair share!” said Ravenstall at a recent news conference.

“Yinz can take a hike,” responded a homeless man in attendance, who himself only responds to the name “Light-Up Mike”.

“I’m sick,” he coughed, “of this government picking on specific groups of people, especially the helpless groups!”

“Oh?” said the Mayor. “How do you propose we do it, Light-Up Mike?”

“We steal the money from UPMC. They are less of a group and more of a maintenance organization.”

Just then, a Death Panel burst into the room, their white Judge’s Wigs arrayed atop black SWAT gear, and killed everyone.

“ALL KNEEL IN PRAISE OF UPMC!” the squad shouted.

And so began the Great Pittsburgh Dystopia of 2009.

The End.

]]> In an effort to close the $15 million gap in this year’s City Budget, Pittsburgh Mayor Ravenstahl the Younger has made moves to install a “slow driving” tax.

“Too much of our infrastructure is being inefficiently used by aging drivers, who with their light feet that cannot push pedals, and their inability to see over their hoods, and their general mothball-ish scent. Its time that these geriatric big-wigs paid their fair share!” said Ravenstall at a recent news conference.

“Yinz can take a hike,” responded a homeless man in attendance, who himself only responds to the name “Light-Up Mike”.

“I’m sick,” he coughed, “of this government picking on specific groups of people, especially the helpless groups!”

“Oh?” said the Mayor. “How do you propose we do it, Light-Up Mike?”

“We steal the money from UPMC. They are less of a group and more of a maintenance organization.”

Just then, a Death Panel burst into the room, their white Judge’s Wigs arrayed atop black SWAT gear, and killed everyone.

“ALL KNEEL IN PRAISE OF UPMC!” the squad shouted.

And so began the Great Pittsburgh Dystopia of 2009.

The End.

]]> http://clunkline.com/2009/12/mayor-ravenstahl-to-tax-the-old-for-driving-slowly/feed/ 0 Living with Peter, the Awful Korean Part Three: Open Season http://clunkline.com/2009/07/living-with-peter-the-awful-korean-part-three-open-season/ http://clunkline.com/2009/07/living-with-peter-the-awful-korean-part-three-open-season/#comments Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:52:06 +0000 doctor_subtle http://clunkline.com/?p=1011 I returned Peter’s stash to its rightful (though dare I say unlawful!) place, and soon enough Peter returned in a similarly criminal manner. I could see in his bloodshot eyes that awful gleam of knowing. Like any good spy, I had returned his rifled-through things to their original places, carefully restacking the most casual of stacks, etc, and though any layman would have been none the wiser, something in those flat eyes knew that I knew that he was a fiend, both horticulturally and demonologically.

“How was smoking, brah-ntosaurus?” I asked. That last bit had come to me in a paleontological flash.

“Hey, brah! Good one!”

“Was it?”

“Yeah! The best I ever came up with was ‘Brah-k to the Future.’ “

“That’s not very funny, Peter.”

“I know.”

Did he know? Did he? I tried to look into his eyes, but all I got was the short black hair at the back of his head, as he had sat at his computer, returning to the conquest of Aiur.

I again walked out of the room, this time crossing our micro-foyer and entering the other room of the suite, held by two easy-going computer science majors. Let me call them Jim and Bob*, though neither of them are innocent or worth protecting.

“Hey Jim.” Jim didn’t stop playing his practice drumset, and answered me back over his shoulder, keeping time on those strange rubber cymbals.

His voice stayed beat-worthy too. “How’s. it. Go. Ing. Dude?”

“I think,” I said, closing his door and then walking towards him, lowering my voice conspiratorily, “that our new ‘friend’ Peter is smoking in our bathroom.”

“I’ve. Done. Worse. Man.”

“I didn’t need to know that. Also, try it in Iambic Pentameter.”

He stopped drumming, staying the silent rubber cymbals out of habit. There was a long pause, and then Jim turned.

“What shall be done to him by we Is not for me to say. Though loath to be a passenger upon this ship of hate, I can but watch the unwinding of fate.”

“You are such a dick, Jim.”

“Let it be known- a phallus am I then.”

“Bye, Jim. I think you inverted that last bit.”

He turned back to the drums.

“Now is the winter of our discontent.”

I walked into the bathroom, locking the door. I pressed my head against the cool tile. I was alone in my endeavors then. A solitary hero. Separate from society, cut off by his quest, misunderstood and sour. Hardboiled. This so-called Peter just another gangster, another thug to be trampled under the heel of my moral, moral boot. And he was an invader, too, a despoiler of land, a rapist of civilization. Room 314 was my Troy, and Peter an awful Greek, come to burn the city, having entered silently in the womb of the Horse of Presumed Morality. This depraved, ineloquent Jersey Barrier was the new Rock to which I was Prometheanically chained.

I came home from class a few days later to find him sitting on his bed, two of his thuggish friends lounging like mafia blackjack dealers, asses on edges of chairs, elbows on knees, hands pressed together in false prayer, or conspiracy. They were passing around a bottle of Bankers Club Rum.

“Oh hey brah!” said Peter. “I thought you had class.”

“I had it.”

“Oh, well, uh, these are my brahs. We’re just killin’ time.”

“For what?”

“What, brah?”

“What are you killing time for? Some hip party?”

“Oh, uh, yeah, sure, brah.”

“You know we’re not supposed to have alcohol in here… no one here is of age.”

“Oh, well, I figured since you were so chill, brah, about that whole scrunchie thing…”

“Was there an age question that night, Peter?”

Peter looked me in the eyes. And winked. That horrible wink. He clearly had never tried such a wink before, as it scrunched the whole side of his face. “No, brah. S’all cool.” He kept the wink; it looked like he had just lost an eye after spitting up a tooth.

“Well then.”

“Brah-hemians! Pack that shit. I think we better head out.” The two henchmen got up. I half expected them to fold their chairs, but then I remembered that we weren’t in some Midtown loft playing Texas Hold ‘Em for the use of each other’s dames.

“Are you gonna be out past your bedtime… brah?”

“Oh fuck yeah, man.” He fist bumped one of his minions, and tried to fist bump me.

I did not return the gesture. “Ok, man.” he said. “Too cool. Too cool. Hey brahs, my other brah here is just. too. cool.”

Only my gentlemanly restraint, and the growing temptation to wait and see how weird it could get, kept me from lifting him up by the shirt and tossing him out of the window.

“You know it, brah-ve New World.” I said.

They all chuckled. As they exited the room, Peter turned. With that same sharklike gaze of knowing that I had seen earlier, he casually, though carefully, winked.

It was war.

Editor’s Note: “Jim” and “Bob” eventually wrote for readme, did improv with me and MesmericKiwi, and “Jim” played in the band with me and Sgt. Earth through which I met and began dating farkle-farkle. This is very important to the story.

]]> I returned Peter’s stash to its rightful (though dare I say unlawful!) place, and soon enough Peter returned in a similarly criminal manner. I could see in his bloodshot eyes that awful gleam of knowing. Like any good spy, I had returned his rifled-through things to their original places, carefully restacking the most casual of stacks, etc, and though any layman would have been none the wiser, something in those flat eyes knew that I knew that he was a fiend, both horticulturally and demonologically.

“How was smoking, brah-ntosaurus?” I asked. That last bit had come to me in a paleontological flash.

“Hey, brah! Good one!”

“Was it?”

“Yeah! The best I ever came up with was ‘Brah-k to the Future.’ “

“That’s not very funny, Peter.”

“I know.”

Did he know? Did he? I tried to look into his eyes, but all I got was the short black hair at the back of his head, as he had sat at his computer, returning to the conquest of Aiur.

I again walked out of the room, this time crossing our micro-foyer and entering the other room of the suite, held by two easy-going computer science majors. Let me call them Jim and Bob*, though neither of them are innocent or worth protecting.

“Hey Jim.” Jim didn’t stop playing his practice drumset, and answered me back over his shoulder, keeping time on those strange rubber cymbals.

His voice stayed beat-worthy too. “How’s. it. Go. Ing. Dude?”

“I think,” I said, closing his door and then walking towards him, lowering my voice conspiratorily, “that our new ‘friend’ Peter is smoking in our bathroom.”

“I’ve. Done. Worse. Man.”

“I didn’t need to know that. Also, try it in Iambic Pentameter.”

He stopped drumming, staying the silent rubber cymbals out of habit. There was a long pause, and then Jim turned.

“What shall be done to him by we
Is not for me to say. Though loath to be
a passenger upon this ship of hate,
I can but watch the unwinding of fate.”

“You are such a dick, Jim.”

“Let it be known- a phallus am I then.”

“Bye, Jim. I think you inverted that last bit.”

He turned back to the drums.

“Now is the winter of our discontent.”

I walked into the bathroom, locking the door. I pressed my head against the cool tile. I was alone in my endeavors then. A solitary hero. Separate from society, cut off by his quest, misunderstood and sour. Hardboiled. This so-called Peter just another gangster, another thug to be trampled under the heel of my moral, moral boot. And he was an invader, too, a despoiler of land, a rapist of civilization. Room 314 was my Troy, and Peter an awful Greek, come to burn the city, having entered silently in the womb of the Horse of Presumed Morality. This depraved, ineloquent Jersey Barrier was the new Rock to which I was Prometheanically chained.

I came home from class a few days later to find him sitting on his bed, two of his thuggish friends lounging like mafia blackjack dealers, asses on edges of chairs, elbows on knees, hands pressed together in false prayer, or conspiracy. They were passing around a bottle of Bankers Club Rum.

“Oh hey brah!” said Peter. “I thought you had class.”

“I had it.”

“Oh, well, uh, these are my brahs. We’re just killin’ time.”

“For what?”

“What, brah?”

“What are you killing time for? Some hip party?”

“Oh, uh, yeah, sure, brah.”

“You know we’re not supposed to have alcohol in here… no one here is of age.”

“Oh, well, I figured since you were so chill, brah, about that whole scrunchie thing…”

“Was there an age question that night, Peter?”

Peter looked me in the eyes. And winked. That horrible wink. He clearly had never tried such a wink before, as it scrunched the whole side of his face. “No, brah. S’all cool.” He kept the wink; it looked like he had just lost an eye after spitting up a tooth.

“Well then.”

“Brah-hemians! Pack that shit. I think we better head out.” The two henchmen got up. I half expected them to fold their chairs, but then I remembered that we weren’t in some Midtown loft playing Texas Hold ‘Em for the use of each other’s dames.

“Are you gonna be out past your bedtime… brah?”

“Oh fuck yeah, man.” He fist bumped one of his minions, and tried to fist bump me.

I did not return the gesture. “Ok, man.” he said. “Too cool. Too cool. Hey brahs, my other brah here is just. too. cool.”

Only my gentlemanly restraint, and the growing temptation to wait and see how weird it could get, kept me from lifting him up by the shirt and tossing him out of the window.

“You know it, brah-ve New World.” I said.

They all chuckled. As they exited the room, Peter turned. With that same sharklike gaze of knowing that I had seen earlier, he casually, though carefully, winked.

It was war.

Editor’s Note: “Jim” and “Bob” eventually wrote for readme, did improv with me and MesmericKiwi, and “Jim” played in the band with me and Sgt. Earth through which I met and began dating farkle-farkle. This is very important to the story.

]]> http://clunkline.com/2009/07/living-with-peter-the-awful-korean-part-three-open-season/feed/ 0 Living with Peter, the Awful Korean Part Two: Smoke and Mirrors http://clunkline.com/2009/07/living-with-peter-the-awful-korean-part-two-smoke-and-mirrors/ http://clunkline.com/2009/07/living-with-peter-the-awful-korean-part-two-smoke-and-mirrors/#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:10:52 +0000 doctor_subtle http://clunkline.com/?p=1008 So one might criticize my reaction to that initial night of sexile, since the blue scrunchie maneuver was something I might have given Peter reason to think was okay. (I hope to god Peter didn’t show that Chinese girl his “blue scrunchie maneuver” if you know what I mean, because what I mean is some kind of sex act).

The next day I got up and left the room without speaking to him. I made up for my lack of sleep by getting an extra couple of shots in my Frappuccino, which is a made up word… though it could be real, seeing as how the Oxford English Dictionary is written by word-whores who just want their vocabulary “bigger! Bigger! BIGGER!”

Later that evening, Peter was playing Starcraft and I was like “Hey. Last night was not cool.”

He turned away from his zerglings. “Oh, no, brah! It was very cool!”

“No. I mean, did it even go through your head that I was asleep? That I need sleep? For like, those times later when I need to be awake?”

“Brah, you got to chill the fuck out.”

“You keep calling me brah. I’m not a breast enclosure.”

“Yeah, brah. Like Bro, but kinda lazy, you know? Like lazy bro is brah.”

“Are you speaking English?”

“I’m from Jersey, brah. ‘Course I speak English.”

Even now, I maintain that that statement is dubious.

“Speaking of Jersey, I’m going for a smoke.” What kind of euphemism might one be positing if one was to “smoke a Jersey” I wondered. Some kind of sexual friction combined with sportsware? A shitty and esoteric marijuana reference?

And that got me thinking. I had already seen Peter sexile me. I had already seen him smoke outside the building, and just that morning detected the faint waft of motherfuckin’ Parliaments in my towel, leading me to suspect that he had been smoking in our poorly ventilated bathroom as well, but… did he smoke pot?

At the time, I wasn’t one to jump to conclusions about people, but his stars did seem to be lining up to form the southern hemisphere constellation Drugus Fiendus. Having seen him leave the room ten times in the last two days to smoke, I knew already that he’d be gone for at least ten minutes. I got up and walked over to his desk, pulling out the drawers it contained and rifling through their contents. I felt the cool fingers of morality plucking at my heartstrings, but the thought of my sexile (or more accurately his sexiling of me) jammed them into the fretboard of my sternum. His penchant for lackadaisical familiarity, that is, his reference to me and all others (especially, curiously, the fairer sex) as one of his “brah’s” then snapped morality’s wrist and I kept pawing through his things.

There it was: in the far back of the lowest drawer, the big one that seems like it should hold manila folders nicely but is secretly a centimeter too thin, was a thin metal case with a tiny latch. His stash was mine. I opened it with haste, thinking already of Campus Police’s number and the location of my perambulatory cell phone, and already leaping imaginative bounds towards that wonderful future of Peter’s lengthy imprisonment and my uninterrupted slumber. I found, to my horror, an empty box.

Not even the barest flecks of resin lined it’s cold interior. I sniffed it, and found it odorless.

I should note here that I am not a drug user. But, having gone to public high school in California, I have seen enough drug use for a life time, and know well the dank scent of cheap weed, for it is the smell I hearken back to every time I pee, as it was the pervading scent of my high school bathrooms.

My mind reeled. This was so clearly a stash box. But it was unstashed: virgin, pure, exactly unlike the girl Peter had brought home last night, whose vague intoxication and high-pitched giggle as she had passed me reminded me more of a harem anime love-doll than such states might reflect an actual flesh-and-blood human being. But the box… the box was clean. I jumped to the only logical conclusion–Peter was Mephistopheles himself, come down to earth to play mind games with me.

Was this empty stash box some kind of Hickory Stump from which Peter was going to challenge me to fiddle-duel for my soul? Or was it just part of the opening gambit of some longer Faustian combat?

Only time would tell.

]]> So one might criticize my reaction to that initial night of sexile, since the blue scrunchie maneuver was something I might have given Peter reason to think was okay. (I hope to god Peter didn’t show that Chinese girl his “blue scrunchie maneuver” if you know what I mean, because what I mean is some kind of sex act).

The next day I got up and left the room without speaking to him. I made up for my lack of sleep by getting an extra couple of shots in my Frappuccino, which is a made up word… though it could be real, seeing as how the Oxford English Dictionary is written by word-whores who just want their vocabulary “bigger! Bigger! BIGGER!”

Later that evening, Peter was playing Starcraft and I was like “Hey. Last night was not cool.”

He turned away from his zerglings. “Oh, no, brah! It was very cool!”

“No. I mean, did it even go through your head that I was asleep? That I need sleep? For like, those times later when I need to be awake?”

“Brah, you got to chill the fuck out.”

“You keep calling me brah. I’m not a breast enclosure.”

“Yeah, brah. Like Bro, but kinda lazy, you know? Like lazy bro is brah.”

“Are you speaking English?”

“I’m from Jersey, brah. ‘Course I speak English.”

Even now, I maintain that that statement is dubious.

“Speaking of Jersey, I’m going for a smoke.” What kind of euphemism might one be positing if one was to “smoke a Jersey” I wondered. Some kind of sexual friction combined with sportsware? A shitty and esoteric marijuana reference?

And that got me thinking. I had already seen Peter sexile me. I had already seen him smoke outside the building, and just that morning detected the faint waft of motherfuckin’ Parliaments in my towel, leading me to suspect that he had been smoking in our poorly ventilated bathroom as well, but… did he smoke pot?

At the time, I wasn’t one to jump to conclusions about people, but his stars did seem to be lining up to form the southern hemisphere constellation Drugus Fiendus. Having seen him leave the room ten times in the last two days to smoke, I knew already that he’d be gone for at least ten minutes. I got up and walked over to his desk, pulling out the drawers it contained and rifling through their contents. I felt the cool fingers of morality plucking at my heartstrings, but the thought of my sexile (or more accurately his sexiling of me) jammed them into the fretboard of my sternum. His penchant for lackadaisical familiarity, that is, his reference to me and all others (especially, curiously, the fairer sex) as one of his “brah’s” then snapped morality’s wrist and I kept pawing through his things.

There it was: in the far back of the lowest drawer, the big one that seems like it should hold manila folders nicely but is secretly a centimeter too thin, was a thin metal case with a tiny latch. His stash was mine. I opened it with haste, thinking already of Campus Police’s number and the location of my perambulatory cell phone, and already leaping imaginative bounds towards that wonderful future of Peter’s lengthy imprisonment and my uninterrupted slumber. I found, to my horror, an empty box.

Not even the barest flecks of resin lined it’s cold interior. I sniffed it, and found it odorless.

I should note here that I am not a drug user. But, having gone to public high school in California, I have seen enough drug use for a life time, and know well the dank scent of cheap weed, for it is the smell I hearken back to every time I pee, as it was the pervading scent of my high school bathrooms.

My mind reeled. This was so clearly a stash box. But it was unstashed: virgin, pure, exactly unlike the girl Peter had brought home last night, whose vague intoxication and high-pitched giggle as she had passed me reminded me more of a harem anime love-doll than such states might reflect an actual flesh-and-blood human being. But the box… the box was clean. I jumped to the only logical conclusion–Peter was Mephistopheles himself, come down to earth to play mind games with me.

Was this empty stash box some kind of Hickory Stump from which Peter was going to challenge me to fiddle-duel for my soul? Or was it just part of the opening gambit of some longer Faustian combat?

Only time would tell.

]]> http://clunkline.com/2009/07/living-with-peter-the-awful-korean-part-two-smoke-and-mirrors/feed/ 0 Living with Peter, the Awful Korean. Part One: It Begins http://clunkline.com/2009/07/living-with-peter-the-awful-korean-part-one-it-begins/ http://clunkline.com/2009/07/living-with-peter-the-awful-korean-part-one-it-begins/#comments Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:38:20 +0000 doctor_subtle http://clunkline.com/?p=1003 Roommate stories, roommate stories, I’m gonna bust out some roommate stories!

Indeed, today is the day I will tell the story of Peter, the Awful Korean.

My sophomore year was one of craziness and shame. My roommate fall semester, Hippie Jesus*, is another story. He was replaced spring semester by Peter.

I found out a bit about Peter the day I came back from winter break. He had moved in, and sort of shoved a bunch of my stuff around in the process. It’s been years, so I remember the weird feeling of, “Oh, thanks for moving my stuff” more than what that stuff actually was. I tried to be pretty chatty, asking him all kinds of stuff about who he was, what he liked, what he was studying, etc. He didn’t respond, as he was playing Starcraft.

He was an only child, from New Jersey, studying business. He had been suspended previously for unspecified reasons, and was just now returning from a year’s absence.

In an effort to build bridges, I showed him my blue scrunchie.

I had picked it up a year previous, having stolen the idea from the short-lived TV show Undeclared. In it, a roommate explains to his new roommate about how girls might come over, and if they do, the blue scrunchie would be waiting on a hook on the wall, to be put onto the door in case of company, thus subtly alerting the other roommate that they had been sexiled.

And so, in an effort to bond with this gruff, Starcraft playing new roomie, I showed him my own blue scrunchie, and explained the deal.

Little did I know how much Undeclared would imitate Art.

The next night, the night before classes started, I went to bed early, around ten, with the intention of getting up at six AM, going to Starbucks, having a nice long breakfast, and arriving at my first class refreshed, awake, and ready to learn. This was a well-honed ritual: I had done the same thing since sixth grade.

I fell asleep quickly, as Peter was not in the room, having gone “clubbing” some hours earlier. Little did I know.

Four hours later, half way through my hypothetical sleep, I was roughly shaken awake.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said.

“Where’s the blue scrunchie?”

“What?”

“Where is it, I need to put it on the door.”

“What?”

“Get out, man. There’s a girl. I brought back a girl.”

“Fuck man, no. It’s…” I looked at the clock. “It’s fucking TWO AM. I have CLASS. I need SLEEP.”

“Dude, you told me about that scrunchie. I’m putting it on the door. You gotta get out.”

I don’t know how it happened, but soon enough, I was pushed out of the door in my boxers and a sweater, a copy of Dune tossed after me as I passed a young moon faced chinese girl, like two ships in some retarded night.

I was sexiled. I looked at the doorknob, at my scrunchie, and remembered that the same thing had happened in Undeclared–the roommate who had actually needed an explanation about sexile was the first to abuse its azure privileges.

Even then, I knew it. I knew that this scrunchie was the first step down a long, terrible road.

You know how one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch? Well, Peter spoiled Koreans for me. Kim Jong Il could nuke Seoul twice, and I’d be totally OK with it, thanks to Peter.

Thanks, Peter.

*Editor’s Note: The person described as “Hippie Jesus” is none other than Clunkline’s own Sgt. Earth, but since “Hippie Jesus” sums it up so succinctly, it was deemed unnecessary to change the reference in-line.

Another popular description of Sgt. Earth is “the world’s happiest homeless man”. In the best possible way.

-Tanzmetall

]]> Roommate stories, roommate stories, I’m gonna bust out some roommate stories!

Indeed, today is the day I will tell the story of Peter, the Awful Korean.

My sophomore year was one of craziness and shame. My roommate fall semester, Hippie Jesus*, is another story. He was replaced spring semester by Peter.

I found out a bit about Peter the day I came back from winter break. He had moved in, and sort of shoved a bunch of my stuff around in the process. It’s been years, so I remember the weird feeling of, “Oh, thanks for moving my stuff” more than what that stuff actually was. I tried to be pretty chatty, asking him all kinds of stuff about who he was, what he liked, what he was studying, etc. He didn’t respond, as he was playing Starcraft.

He was an only child, from New Jersey, studying business. He had been suspended previously for unspecified reasons, and was just now returning from a year’s absence.

In an effort to build bridges, I showed him my blue scrunchie.

I had picked it up a year previous, having stolen the idea from the short-lived TV show Undeclared. In it, a roommate explains to his new roommate about how girls might come over, and if they do, the blue scrunchie would be waiting on a hook on the wall, to be put onto the door in case of company, thus subtly alerting the other roommate that they had been sexiled.

And so, in an effort to bond with this gruff, Starcraft playing new roomie, I showed him my own blue scrunchie, and explained the deal.

Little did I know how much Undeclared would imitate Art.

The next night, the night before classes started, I went to bed early, around ten, with the intention of getting up at six AM, going to Starbucks, having a nice long breakfast, and arriving at my first class refreshed, awake, and ready to learn. This was a well-honed ritual: I had done the same thing since sixth grade.

I fell asleep quickly, as Peter was not in the room, having gone “clubbing” some hours earlier. Little did I know.

Four hours later, half way through my hypothetical sleep, I was roughly shaken awake.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said.

“Where’s the blue scrunchie?”

“What?”

“Where is it, I need to put it on the door.”

“What?”

“Get out, man. There’s a girl. I brought back a girl.”

“Fuck man, no. It’s…” I looked at the clock. “It’s fucking TWO AM. I have CLASS. I need SLEEP.”

“Dude, you told me about that scrunchie. I’m putting it on the door. You gotta get out.”

I don’t know how it happened, but soon enough, I was pushed out of the door in my boxers and a sweater, a copy of Dune tossed after me as I passed a young moon faced chinese girl, like two ships in some retarded night.

I was sexiled. I looked at the doorknob, at my scrunchie, and remembered that the same thing had happened in Undeclared–the roommate who had actually needed an explanation about sexile was the first to abuse its azure privileges.

Even then, I knew it. I knew that this scrunchie was the first step down a long, terrible road.

You know how one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch? Well, Peter spoiled Koreans for me. Kim Jong Il could nuke Seoul twice, and I’d be totally OK with it, thanks to Peter.

Thanks, Peter.

*Editor’s Note: The person described as “Hippie Jesus” is none other than Clunkline’s own Sgt. Earth, but since “Hippie Jesus” sums it up so succinctly, it was deemed unnecessary to change the reference in-line.

Another popular description of Sgt. Earth is “the world’s happiest homeless man”. In the best possible way.

-Tanzmetall

]]> http://clunkline.com/2009/07/living-with-peter-the-awful-korean-part-one-it-begins/feed/ 0