EEEEAAAGHHH.

It was "the taste test" of the modern condition. And was "A BIG NEGATORY" as we spat out the dregs of bitter coffee. . . . . like flat, watery ashes in a "Dirt Cheap" beer can someone used to tap their Swisher-Sweet cigars in like a man in a tobacco shed gnawin' on mule jerky where salvation was a far-off proposition, like "Sugar-Candy Mountain" or a whore-house that didn't stink like bad pussy and set a feller back a substantial amount.

And for two fat losers like us, we were ravin' on like some sort of brainstormin' session for a Charles Bronson movie with all the mentality of circus clowns. We made Heinrich Himler look like Bill Moyers and Augustus Pinochet look like Jimmy Carter. At least in our rich fantasy lives.

-- "Hmmmm. . . . . I don't understand"

The levels of sub-reality kept rising up to operatic heights until it was "us against the world". . . . . a zany "buddy film", a two-man army of "Soldier of Fortune" role-play like the most self-indulgent General Douglass McArthur wannabes that ever were, storming the beaches of their former defeat with a pipe and sunglasses and smoking the niggers out of their fox-holes with napalm, air raids, and guts like "Chesty the Bulldog", laughin'.

Y2k had been "a bust" so we couldn't fulfill our Tom Sawyer fantasy of going down to the ghetto and shooting rioters like plinking away at rats in the junkyard.

Oh well. . . . . on to the barn dance, a more noble pursuit, as we went ravin' on our way down to a St. Louis county "Barnes & Noble" to watch a jazz concert. Ostensibly, to pick up college girls with wit and wisdom and low-down, scuzzy estimations of the power of the female mind with a hand massaging their thigh like some kind of holdover from those promiscuous, screwy days of 1976 when the nation lost its way.

Just call us "Johnny Wadd" and "Disco Charlie".

Back at his apartment, my friend took out handful after handful of rubbers and stuffed them in his pockets, his sweatpants falling down as he lumbered out of the room with a trail of sin following him like breadcrumbs on the jungle floor of Tarzan sex god fantasy. All he needed to do was crouch down and wrestle a hippopotamus with a dildo. . . . . like two grunting, thrusting balls of meat in a nature video, which rather piteously catches it all with an unblinking eye.

Most skinny, gangling 20 year-old's wearin' ball-caps on this side of the meekly chicken-shit St. Louis county wouldn't know what to say to that, and would be down-right frightened like the more vapid face of Billy Graham having a slow, sinking feeling that Satan might be stronger, kicking through the cardboard sets of his squeaky-clean illusions like a 400 pound nigger with his dick out. It was like impotence, or shyness, or fear of having a teenie winky, or the mortifying fear of failure "and looking out of place" that keeps most men from being heroes, leaders, public speakers, statesmen, as they go along with the crowd. . . . . wondering if things "were different" in that great country called "the past", which takes on an almost mystical golden quality of soft-focus nostalgia.

Men have their take on Vietnam, when "John Wayne" picked a fight in the wrong bar and got his behind kicked, tossed out the swinging doors and shortly followed by his white hat as mysterious, slight, slant-eyed people continued to laugh, knock back drinks, and a V.C. with a bowler hat played the piano in the corner. The story you tell yourself and the townsfolk waiting back at home expectantly says a lot about our ultimate maturity level and our ability to face up to things.

Time passes. . . . . yet may not heal all wounds.

As my friend and I drove the wide boulevard of suburban commerce like so much concrete and sleepy-eyed conservatism, we approached a "Fuddruckers" off in the easy coast of the sunset hills. With a name like that, you wondered if the owners were truly that oblivious, if they could really be that unhip as the perky young help answered the phone and stood there in a cheery, standard-issue apron and uniform. It bespoke of chocolate-fudge-root-beer floats that you were a bit wary of drinking in an establishment with a name like this, like being told that the home-made cheese you were eating came from a woman's tit. You didn't want to think about what was going on back in that kitchen, especially with their motto-- "With a name like Fuddruckers you know it has to be good" but you know it was a restaurant I mysteriously never found my way in.

As a franchise, they sold mugs and t-shirts. . . . . and the entrepreneur who founded this chain, who had about all the irony quotient of "Elmer Fudd", would not understand the repulsive "camp value" of such items. Like a punk band in the city that had the Satanic nerve to call themselves "The Negro Problem" to attract enough off-putting attention to get people to come see their shows. Most would stay home, but then there was "the select" who were in on "the joke".

But there was no joke out here, and that was the blank-countenanced tragedy.

If the average emotional age of most Americans is 15 years-old, then Red-State America appealed to something even more sentimental and regressed. You could have a roly-poly nine year-old boy leaping out of the car and running into Fuddruckers without hesitation, followed by his clueless grandparents who seemed to live without an awareness of unclean undertones of fudge and shit and dicks and fucking and the ultimate wretchedness of the human condition that squeaky-clean values would attempt to deny like Howdy Doody, perhaps the most revolting little bastard I've ever seen dancing on the end of strings this side of George W. Bush.

It was like all of those so-called "opinion polls" and "marketing surveys" drawn up by Machievillian wizards who weren't nearly as brilliant as they thought they were, paying bored, dopey teenagers $8/hour to call households and ask leading questions only answered by those not infuriated enough to waste 20 minutes of their time. Whatever the objectivity of "our scientific age", it makes no difference if the field is already slanted as irrelevant idiots hold on to scoliotic ideals of absolutes "that don't get the joke". In any case, it was the cult of capitalism with scurvy marketing types stroking their chins like gremlins, the ultimate indigestion of this hitting the gut like a fiery belch of gray, rat-meat gravy whose Ayn Rand book-waving was a thin gruel at best. Apparently, our Fed Chairman, Allan Greenspan was a super-fan. . . . . but I saw it all as a subliminated pornography of numbers and figures and stifled libidos. Whatever you wanted to call this "Free Market"/Barry Goldwater/Libertarian culture, it was like a 12-step program for wretches who weren't ever going to climb out of their rut

I was a different "breed of cat". . . . . when those head-scratching kids called in with their questions, I befuddled them with my hyper-intelligent canvas that didn't play by the rules, fit neatly into those five bubbles of agreement or disagreement, or made for easy tracking with a stolchistics candle-stick chart that more literal minds could decipher like General Westmoreland and Roger McNamara, or at least their more dead-eyed counterpart in a slick office suite of high-octane hustle and trendy "untruths". Regardless, they were all chasing after money that a great deal of the population didn't have or could be stoked out of its indifference to alter its habits of "no higher taxes"/"no, I'm not doing back-flips over your new line of bath & beauty products".

You had census data, most of it useless.

You had the chamber of commerce, duly banging a gavel and mostly indifferent to your fate.

You had the kind of fat, breathy, shit-headed woman on the phone who walked around in pearls with the clip-clop of dress shoes who worked in government and banks, who never answers questions with snap and punch and wobbles around the issue like a snail-eyed bureaucrat massively hypnotized by the boredom and importance of their own job. . . . . up to the point when it would have just been easier to have done the research by yourself.

However, not necessarily "going to the library" where the hired help was even "more hopeless" and their computers clogged with homeless bums, but buying a snappy guide in one clasping three-ring binder and studying it like a Talmudist in a prison library.

Whatever the rising bolts and struts of "The Fountainhead" or the cruel laughter of "Atlas Shrugged" as the earth came crashing down off the shoulders of Ayn Rand's whacked-out conception of the cosmos, I could not be terribly impressed by what the market had generated. For instance, ad campaigns had reverted to the stereotypes of not using ethnic stereotypes-- one big bland conformity of smiling, neutral, multicultural hash of human beings who had been so focus-tested to look "average" that they ultimately didn't appear like anyone you had ever met. Nor looking at them, nor would you want to as they waved at the behest of their market masters.

And no matter how artfully I tried to answer those surveys, or drop a comment card into the box, it was never heeded-- the owners always laid out a trough "to slop the hogs". I was lumped in with what they called "cohort marketing" or appealing to a demographic of roughly the same age and generational experience. However, I fundamentally did not relate to most of "my kind" and was part of the stray muck they did not rake in nor cared to.

It was like those B-list and C-list shows on television like "Baywatch", vacuous bimbos acting remotely important and unattainable just so amp up their desirability but fooling themselves with the ass-rot of a string-bikini line, coke-head oblivion, and the sad, sad attrition of time that turns them into harpies worthy of a whorehouse even my buddy and I had sense not to visit, talking about squirting off between my perky ex-French teacher's tits.

Maybe there were better things in life besides chasing after a married woman with kids, but it was like how if you had been to Mt. Tomsauk, the highest point in Missouri, and never had been anywhere else, you would be convinced "that's all there was".

My friend and I were so bitter, because in a previous life we had been convinced "that's all there was" and has been swindled out of our chance to be heroes. . . . . existentially paralyzed by fear. Yes in this world of the airport expansion fiasco when the numbers "didn't add up" -- when air traffic actually shrunk and the locals still paid. . . . . when you build shopping centers in run-down areas with great fanfare but ultimately don't attract enough business and stand empty. . . . . when you have glaring West County eagles and yelling maniacs and long empty highways along the side of shale-rock cliffs where you can dig out fossils, even as waddling Christian doofuses deny what makes them look illogical with a mushroom cloud of apocalypse as geopolitics got crazier and harrier by the day with Islamic "Robin Hood's" and Chinese spies.

Here we were, a Catholic river-town no less, locked in a Medieval mindset. Part of me was afraid that if my buddy were overheard we would be locked in an iron cage, the fate of swindlers, criminals, tyrants, and madmen as the world gawked.

I'll be Moyers. You be Carter.

And finally we got there. . . . . where about 20 people came to watch the jazz combo, not much better than a cruddy post-high school act of shiftless community college/art school types who weren't going anywhere. The girls sat with bemused expressions, little skanks with their eyes half-closed and slight smiles.

My buddy "went in for the kill". . . . . telling a 19 year-old that "she had pretty hair" while I sidled up to the sleepy-eyed lark next to me like a behumbled Richard Nixon in between songs. But his shy attempts were stimied, when the infernal noise started back up again and the girl in question took a sip from her coffee and stared straight ahead.

Such is the fate of the shy. . . . .

Towards the end of the set, the long-haired "paint-bucket" of a musician unexpectedly stopped playing and started clapping his hands in the air and swinging his body to the groove of "Paradise City" by Guns n' Roses.

    "Take me down to Paradise City/Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty"

*******************

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

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