#66 "The Dirty Shirty Gang" In Color!!! July 17, 2013

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The Music Boxer

I hadn't been to work in a while. I was somewhere, I forget where now. It was probably one of two places, but the specifics are lost on me now. I was settling in to work as one does after an extended time away from the workplace. You know, when you are kind of happy to be back and working again, but still a little melancholy about the trip you were just on. You think about where you were a week ago, two thousand miles from work, where your co-workers were the whole time, toiling away while you were on a beach or something.
But I was kind of happy to be back. I certainly needed the money.
I was excited to get started, to see some of the regulars and chat about the adventures I had been on. I would tell them the highlights and maybe the lowlights. We would talk about getting there and getting back. Somehow people always like to talk about that. It's almost like it comforts them to know that going on a long trip requires a fair amount of travel between the two places. If this travel takes a turn for the worse, it helps the person who never left feel better that they never left. It makes them think that well, I didn't go anywhere but thank goodness I didn't, with all that confusion and hassle just getting there and back.
I was back. The guys in kitchen had already made the usual jokes about me not having a job anymore, they had given it away to someone else since I was gone too long. I had already told the stories over dinner to my co-workers, eager to hear something new. We weren't open yet, but there was already a little buzz of activity over at the bar. My Monday was their Friday. My first day back was their end of a long, awful week. They needed that first, second, and third drink. I needed some coffee.
I went into the coat room to change clothes, from my street clothes into my work attire. Button down shirt, tie, and bistro apron. I put on my King Kong tie and tucked it in so only the bi-planes flying high over the Empire State building were visible, while Kong himself stayed hidden beneath my shirt. People really loved that tie, somehow, even without seeing that Kong was always hidden away, minutes from an ugly death.
It was then that I heard it. It had been the next CD in the 5 disc CD player the whole time, I simply hadn't recognized that the previous CD was the same as it always was. And now, this. This one CD that was on an endless repeat. Waiting patiently as 4 other CDs played before it, until it spins into place and starts. I don't know exactly how long it had been in there. It must have been years, spinning around in the same order and playing the same music 6 nights a week for how long? How could anyone gauge that? The only people who would know tried not to think about it. Outside of the place, we all put it out of our minds; tried our best to not think about the tunes. I'm sure some of us dreamed about the tunes, over and over again, playing in our work nightmares. The trumpet, the saxophone, that one solo, that one note that isn't right but is so ingrained in our minds that if it were to magically become correct we would all revolt.
The whole CD came back to me in those first couple of notes. I could see the entire setlist in my head, knew all of the parts and all of the breaks. I didn't need to hear it, it was so deep within my psyche, I could recite it a capella on the street corner and pick up some extra change. I hadn't thought about it for the entire time I was gone, and now, within one hour of being back, here it was, waiting to greet me upon my returning. Like a bully waiting for me after school, waiting to beat me up because he liked the girl I liked but couldn't articulate himself enough to make her notice. He just bellowed and howled out the same tunes over and over again, punching, kicking and scratching at me with them until I wore them as scars.

#45 "Fever Dream" November 17, 2011. In Color!

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Halfway through the evening, our host mysteriously disappeared only to reappear a couple minutes later holding one of the most unique pinata we had ever seen. He described the means in which he had obtained the pinata, a story that would seem outlandish even to us, but told in a way that made even the most skeptical of us believe. He was the kind of man who you meet and know that he had seen things that most people could hardly dream of. He was the man who had proven the unicorn existed and even cloned one out DNA he had obtained on a business trip to Tibet back in the 80's. He had made a couple billion dollars on the business of illegally cloning these animals for affluent families with daughters with princess complexes. His son rode the unnatural beasts in parades in various towns across the world, usually bringing the most eccentric and wildly colored ones for the utmost spectacle. Cloning wasn't the only enterprise we had been lightly lectured about that evening, although unicorns weren't the only animals wrestled out of samples of double helixed obscurity. Our host held the belief that dairy cows would produce more milk if their udders were in the front of the cow instead of in the rear. This way, the milk can be produced faster, and if his theory held sway, he was willing to genetically engineer these cows worldwide. The experiment was a failure so he only made one of these horrible bovine monstrosities. He named the animal "Onesie" and coddled her like one would a house cat or some other such domestic pet. One day his youngest son, who was a champion falconer accidently shot the poor cow, wounding, but not killing the brute. Instead, through some miracle of genetics, the wound inflicted enabled the cow to spit fire from it's posterior. Sadly, our host found this out while the beast was indoors and she set the curtains on fire, scalding one of the guests and sending them to the hospital. It was right around this time that Tobey Maguire showed up to the party. We were all happy to see that he was in the costume of the "Hitchhiker" from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the 1998 vehicle from Terry Gilliam. He was in a foul mood, but still entertained us, first by stripping completely nude and then defecating in our host's public toilet. Our host felt that having a toilet for all to see was some sort of art performance. He was of the school that every organic member of the planet defecates, so why should it be a private matter? Shouldn't it be celebrated like all other human achievements? Many of the guests disagreed with his eccentric tastes, but Tobey was a good sport about the whole thing, and saw it as something interesting to put on his resume. Meanwhile, one of the family dogs thought it prudent to make a cocktail of raspberry sorbet and Oxycodone. The poor devil had been blinded in one eye in a ghastly accident sometime in the past, and even his good eye was injured and he ended up having to wear a monocle. It wasn't a surprise to anyone present that the dog needed the Oxycodone to relieve some of the stress of being nearly blind in one eye and only having a hole in his head where the other eye should be. This dog was special though. Another one of the host's cloning experiments, the dog had thumbs, wore clothes and even had a small demon where his left hand should be. Our host was both modern and terribly old fashioned and he believed that left handed people were actually spawns of Satan Himself so he fashioned the demon hand in the most literal sense. The poor dog had to carry around the demon, who had a mind of his own and a cantankerous smoking habit that polluted the air and melted the sorbet. This would have upset the guests and the host as well, had it not created the river in which our boat had been moored. Unoccupied, our boat waited patiently for us as we listened to our host spin fantastic yarns, all of which we believed because we had no reason not to. After all, isn't it better to believe in the fantastic than to dismiss it? If something can be imagined, it can eventually be created. We simply had to wait for the technology to be invented.