Barbed Wire 04
BARBED WIRE
Vancouver's only FREE webzine with a COMPLETE money-back guarantee
(contact paull@istar.ca)
also available in glorious technocolour at http://home.istar.ca/~paull/wire
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C O N T E N T S -
ISSUE 4
Message From the Editor
The Bottom Line: Kiss and Tell
THE REGULARS
IN BOX
Readers write: organs blessed, conservatives enthralled
and colonoscopies avoided.
Letter from New York
Lyn Chick moves into a lower East Side apartment.
Lost and Found
Alex Mackenzie finds a fondly inscribed high school photo.
FIRST FUCK WORST FUCK NO FUCK
Thematically linked confessionals
from the Barbed Wire stable:
- THE GIRLS...
Busboy in the Basement
Sian Young reaches university with a pressing "virginity problem" and a hankering for a lithe restaurant worker called Rick.. "He was poor, he had a girlfriend, he hated his job... I had decided he would do," she explains.
Notes from The Summer of '86
Heather Young spots a familiar face at Granville and Smithe and remembers a bet she had with her best friend.
Prime Rib
Lyn Chick has dinner at the Homestead Restaurant and dessert at the Travelodge.
- THE BOYS...
Ten Seconds in May
Real world dramatics ensue when a young Adrian Mack finds release between the teutonic thighs of his school acting teacher.
Drunk Teen Beach Fuck
16 year old army Cadet Chuck Blade meets the girl of his dreams at Camp Ipperwash. "She'd tailored her standard issue bush fatigues into a fit far too provocative for any man's army," he remembers.
Bird in the Hand and None in the Bush
European tourist Ridge Rockfield finds himself quite suddenly in the same room as a young woman in an absurd red negligee and red panties. "She stood there and looked at me and I stood there and looked at her," he tells us.
For You I'll Make an Exception
Washington Irving lends a drunken ear to a closeted lesbian and ends up back at her place. "I just want you to hold me, " she tells him.
Jean-Paul Sartre & Jenny Piccolo
Teenage post-punk, training-wheels Existentialist Paul Levine preferred futility, death and masturbation before he met a young celebrity look-alike who he hoped would provide him with the ultimate orgasmic benchmark.
THE TRAVELERS...
Circuling Uranus in Search of Klingons
Dot Alot is no Trek-obsessed geek, but that didn't stop her from attending two Star Trek conventions. "My motives were purely academic, sociological even," she explains.
The Price of Admission
Laurie Drukier hates gambling but still managed to figure out how to win in Las Vegas. "We shared the table with Jerry from New Jersey," she admits.
Holy Smoke
Photographer John Spooner visits the ghats at Varanasi and finds the locals are dying to get burned.
THE LUNCHEON MEAT...
The Complete Online Guide to Spam
Wes Robertson unearths the whole story behind the much-maligned luncheon meat. "The name is generally agreed to be a contraction of Spiced Ham," he tells us, "not, as it has been rumored, "super pink artificial meat".
A THOUSAND WORDS...
Get Your Doggie Spayed or Neutered
Resident Barbed Wire artist Geoff Carter displays the results of his recent vasectomy.
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INBOX
BLESSINGS ON YOUR ORGAN
I feel I know you, having spent the last two days reading, sharing, living vicariously through and inwardly digesting your mighty organ - Barbed Wire.
As a transplanted Canadian (from the Island), now living in England, I was beginning to doubt my attachments to BC, and Vancouver in particular. However, three issues and a box of tissues later, I am full of vim and vigour again. I found myself salivating over meals in The
Latin Quarter, laughing at the seriousness of the Lesbian & Gay softball game in Stanley Park, and riding the #19 bus to SFU.
Thank you, and blessings on your organ.
Blaine Castle blaine@lsl.co.uk
CONSERVATIVES NEED
ENEMIES TOO
Jim Hinter sent us an invitation to a conference, saying...
Hey! Interesting design and stories,
Jim Hinter ( jhinter@incentre.net)
Conference Chairman, Roots of Change Conference, a meeting of conservative minded Canadians from across Canada
When we told Jim we suspected that he hadn't read any of the stories he replied...
I did read the stories! I do so under the thinking that only by reading and knowing more can Iearn and grow.
Or if you take the 'tv bad guy~ Capitalist' J.R. Ewing approach, keep your friends close and your enemies closer!
We replied: Ah, perhaps you're less conservative than you think you are, with an attitude like that. Perhaps next year the Roots of Change will be looking for a new chairman if they catch on to your permissive attitude.
If you care to respond, we'd be interested in knowing which stories particularly resonated with you (and, of course, helped you "learn and grow").
Jim hasn't responded yet. He's probably too busy reading Barbed Wire.
NO COLONOSCOPIES
I can't imagine your webzine getting past too many of the internet
screening/filtering programs, but, I must say I haven't laughed so hard
reading an online zine for a long time. The colonoscopy story was a real hoot... I was supposed to have one of those procedures two years ago, but, so far haven't had the courage to show up at the hospital... now I know why.
Keep up the good work, and for those who passed by jumping to this URL before... if your sensibilities won't be offended by some R-rated language - some of the 7 words George Carlin said couldn't be said on TV - then give these pages a read.
Bob Cotter bob@educom.com
NOT MAINSTREAM
I think your site shows a good variety of interesting topics that we don't normally get to read about in the mainstream media. Keep it up. Although you could use more images, but that could be just me, as I am an image junkie.
Clint Adam Smyth
Clint@ClintPhoto.com
http://www.clintphoto.com
GREAT
Great!
ralpha6982@aol.com
Http://www.bongobeat.com
Letter from New York
By Lyn Chick
All right, so the moon is waning and so am I. Not physically, of course, nor mentally for that matter. No, I'm speaking of cycles baby: and no longer tandom trikes at that. It's my menstrual cycle of which I speak and its' uncanny synchronicity to the lunar cycle - you know, tides, ebb and flow and such. It's <dis>comforting to know that I am so in sync with the universe. So, the astrology chick on TV told me - I'm sure she was addressing me, who else would be home watching TV at 3:37 am Saturday morning in the city that never sleeps? - that the cycles of the moon do indeed affect the cycles in our lives. We are meant to be very productive and full (of oneself) during the full moon phase and then it's down hill from there.
As I pondered pounding the pavement to find a/the job of my dreams, I realized that my womanly cycle was indeed in harmony with the moons'. And I thought I had best wait for my energy to get back up to par before embarking on such endeavors. Hmm... now that I'm in the thick of my argument - which is? - it seems like utter bullshit to me. All right, I'll buy the lunar cycle stuff, but I can't get a clear grip on it's relationship to my cycle. I mean the moon is waning and now so is my flow, (hope this isn't too graphic for you) and thus my energy is depleted. Makes sense so far. So, I'll wait until my nutritious lining (yummy if you're an embryo) starts replenishing itself and my womanhood is strong and prepared for anything (pregnancy, employment, etc.) to start the job hunt. Is this the new moon phase? or the waxing? The waxing phase is also supposed to be extremely productive, when we are brimming with confidence and possibilities. But what about all the women out there - you know who you are - who have hellish PMS during this time before the full moon busts loose; I'm sure they don't feel like taking the tiger by the tail. So now I am totally confused. And if there are any of you astrological hippie types out there who think that I'm some idiot who has butchered and belittled your "science" - keep it to yourself! I was half asleep and part drunk at the time I was enlightened by the TV lady. I was really just looking for a good excuse to procrastinate in looking for a job and I was also looking for a segue into why I have the free time to write this piece.
Best get on with it, if you're still there. All right, my new surroundings are.... new. Where do I begin? I have neighbors upstairs who think we are playing dueling banjos or something. Yes, that's right, it's Salsa Central in my building , neighborhood, vicinity. Every time I put on some music, they put on some music, if I want to hear my music over their music I turn my music up, they turn their music up. You get the picture. It's DJ Cam and Julian Bream's popular classics for Spanish guitar going head to head. They must imagine me dancing around to my funky beats (would it be the Robert Smith tight-rope walk?) because I hear the furniture being dragged across the floor to make room for the flamenco dancing. Stomping, clapping, all the usual gaiety that accompanies such activity ensues. Yeehaa, or is it OlÈ? I thought it was neat and refreshing; for the first few days. Thank God and Sony for headphones.
This same sentiment can be applied to the sound that has been waking me up without fail at 5 am every morning. Let's see, New York City; is it a car alarm? sirens? blood-curdling screams? No, just a rooster crowing in the new day. I thought I was imagining it at first; you know some kind of "Dorothy, you're not (or maybe you are) in Kansas (anymore)" thing. The next day, whilst out walking the dog I saw and heard the neighborhood chicken coop that is behind the building behind my building. I'm slowly brain-washing my dog into thinking the rooster is a rabbit and am planning to sick him on him soon. "Just picture Bugs Bunny in a FogHorn-LegHorn costume," I keep telling him in my best Elmer Fudd impression. Get over it, those freaks can buy their eggs at the corner Bodega like everyone else. Between the ice-cream truck's sickeningly sweet (and constant) jingles and a rooster that doesn't have a snooze button, I'm on the verge of going insane.
I'm living in a predominantly Latino neighborhood in the Lower East side. It's mainly a mix of Puerto-Ricans, Dominicans, Spanish and African-Americans from a bit further east. A very strong family bond is evident here; they're Catholics after all. And the chicks are hot! I know we (women) like to tell men that the "Pamela Anderson/Lee" body doesn't actually exist in nature, but girls, we are wrong. Come take a gander at the ponies prancing around my neighborhood. These girls are thin with incredibly voluptuous breasts and high-water booties going on, and they know how to wear it. No wonder there are so many young families around, who could resist? And this also explains why none of the plentiful gaggles of young male hotties don't even give me a second look; why would they look at the scrawny pale chick when these Gauguin goddesses are in the midst? I'm not taking it personally though, it's actually refreshing not to be the object of the male gaze. Really. Seriously. If I need to have my ego boosted I merely have to north of Houston. Ha, just joking. I don't need a man's approval to establish my worth. Really. Seriously. Have I made my point? More on my new surroundings later. I have to go consult my charts, change my tampon and cry into my pillow.
Lyn Chick would rather be waxing than waning.
Busboy in the Basement
By Sian Young
It was a summer of hot, sticky nights. Nights when you go past sealed, air conditioned houses and snarl. When you take a shower and go to bed wet and naked, dripping on your pillow, with a fan lazily breathing on you, oscillating up and down your body. When everyone breathes through their mouth, slowly, as if they are blowing on a flame to make it go out.
I was nineteen, confused, and horny. There was a lack in my life, and I was at risk of blowing my cover of maturity. The thing was, I had never had sex, done it, gone all the way. In high school, if you didn't want to be a slut, you had to wait until you were with a boyfriend you loved: minimum dating time before The Big Moment was six months. I had never quite reached that threshold and thus arrived at university, where everyone seemed to be boffing away, uninitiated still.
I sensed this was holding me back from becoming the adult I desperately wanted to be. I had the developed chest, I had the dyed-blond hair, I had the mature lifestyle of a student living off-campus in an apartment which really didn't have roaches any more. I had the standard-issue condoms, courtesy of my cautious late-80's university. I was out to break the invisible barrier between me and Real Life along with whatever was left of my hymen.
And it was the heady days of youth running free in a town that was not their own. Summer jobs in offices, bars, restaurants, where you could show up hung over or still drunk. We rode rickety bicycles along the river, crowded on buses to annoy sober riders, discussed our adventures in sordid detail in late night cafes. A balanced meal was falafel and grape juice, and a cultural experience was scrawling with crayons on the walls of a friend's about-to-be-renovated apartment. I remember that summer in the relative cool of night, prowling around a city that slept except for us.
I was having a great time. All I needed to do, as I saw things, was to have fun, make enough money to pay tuition in September, and solve my virginity problem. Not onerous tasks, but the latter continued to hang over my head by the end of summer. But then I met a friend's busboy co-worker, Rick.. After work a crowd would hang out together, drinking Caesars and Harvey Wallbangers and tracking down all the after-hours bars and late parties we could find. Rick was the only non-student in the crowd, and I liked his flip wit, his attitude, his lithe body, his cockiness.
Over a week or two of pack socializing, I found out some more about him... he was poor, he had a girlfriend, he hated his job... I wasn't really listening. I had decided he would do. He told me that he had started having sex when he was fourteen and had already had over twenty partners now at the ripe old age of nineteen. Great - if I wasn't going to sleep with someone for late-adolescent love, it had to be someone who knew what he was doing. I was looking for someone experienced, unavailable and enthusiastic.
Somehow the situation advanced; one night we were at a party on a boat which moved to someone's house. He and I wound up making out at the end of the party, lying together on a scratchy couch. I remember whispering that his friend "sleeping" on the floor nearby was still awake. He asked his friend what the song playing on the radio was, and sure enough, the friend, wide awake, told us what it was, and I bolted.
So, after whispered negotiations in the kitchen, he coaxed me into the unfinished basement, where it was private and blissfully cool. We spread out something to lie on - a piece of cardboard? a sleeping bag? - and pulled off clothing. The crucial moment has been lost in the mists of time and repetition, but I believe I was, well, a bit reluctant. Not unwilling, just chicken-shit. Having decided that I wanted to do it, I think I just wasn't sure what the hell to do. The details of his body, the shock of being totally naked with someone else, of skin on skin alone, all made me feel pretty inept.
Fortunately, I had lucked out in my choice of partner. There have been a few men I have known who have shown an almost artistic appreciation of the female body and the sensory overload of the erotic experience. This happened to be one. It was about the Female Body, not about my body in particular, but I didn't know the difference, nor did I care. I stopped worrying about the spiders in the basement and about how exactly to do it. I followed his lead and we got on with things, with none of the pain or blood that years of reading female novelists had prepared me for.
One thing, though, was wholly unexpected (I hadn't yet read Erica Jong). He slid down my body, past my belly, between my legs, and laid his mouth on me. I sat up in astonishment - much to his annoyance, since it probably gave him whiplash. It took me a while to get used to the feeling. Whole sets of nerve endings found their purpose in life and sprang into action. It was like finding out that I had another limb, or had another sense, or lived on another planet... His commendable attitude was, lie back down and get out of my way while I get you off.
I didn't know what to make of that. I had been focused on the context of sex - being a virgin or a non-virgin, who you sleep with and who you don't... It hadn't occurred to me to worry about whether I would actually enjoy it, or whether I would have specific preferences or desires. This guy took it as his duty to teach me how to appreciate sex in the relatively pure, physical way he did. (It took a few years for this lesson to sink in completely. After all, he did have a five year head start on me.)
Of course, not much was different afterwards. After a few nights together he rode off into the sunset, right on schedule. He did once rather forlornly ask if I would be his mistress, but I said no and wrote it off as a joke. My friend who worked with him quit his job and we all went back to school. Finally being able to answer "yes" to the campus doctor who asked "Are you sexually active?" every time I went to see her for an allergy test or bronchitis, I proudly went on the pill. Took up with, then dumped, a pathological liar. Went off the pill in favour of safe sex. I had dealt with the First Time and I was in search of the good times, which proved to be more rare than my first experience had led me to believe...
Here's to you, Rick, ten years later, wherever and whoever you may be. Thanks for the first, good time. Maybe my memories have romanticized this story a bit, but hey - it's another hot summer night on the top floor and all I can think of is how it must be cooler in the damp of the basement...
Sian Young has since found time to read Erica Jong.
Notes from the Summer of '86
By Heather Young
Just last week I was driving downtown and noticed that the guy standing on the corner of Granville and Smithe was my first fuck.
My gut reaction was to hide, followed by a queasy feeling in my stomach. Ewww. How could I have given it away to him?
Summer of '86. My best friend Michelle and I had a bet to see who could lose their virginity first. This was around the time when a crush on a boy meant a 24 hour consuming obsession.
All we really wanted to do was lose "it". Virginity was some kind of protected status that I felt no need to upkeep. If I could just get it over with, I could stop worrying about losing it.
Being a fairly active 15 year old and bicycle rider, I thought that my hymen had probably already been stretched and therefore I did not have to worry about any pain or blood.
Once his penis arrived inside my virginal vagina and started to move about I kept thinking it would be so much better if he just kept still. My insides were being ripped apart and any sexual desires I had experienced were now dead.
Needless to say, it didn't last long and I kept wondering what the big deal was. Isn't it unfortunate that we give more importance to that first fuck than to all the rest that were so far superior.
Oh, and Michelle won the bet. She lost it with her cousin while visiting England. We celebrated with French Champagne.
Heather Young still rides her bicycle.
Prime Rib
By Lyn Chick
My first time. It was hardly romantic. Although, it was hard, of course. We, me and my boyfriend Lee Little (what's in a name? - I was soon to find out) were young and hungry. We often treated ourselves to a prime-rib dinner at the Homestead restaurant at our local Travelodge. It was my fave place to go, very sophisticated; dinner included the salad bar, a slab of meat cut to your specifications and authentic apple studel rounded the meal out nicely. We needed a place to fuck. I don't remember the details. One night we bypassed the restaurant and went straight for the registration desk. Forty dollars later we were in bed doing the nasty. I just remember sitting on the toilet afterwards as thick, mucusy goop dripped from my raw swollen lips. Later, when we would return to the Homestead, my boyfriend would always say, "Gee, I wish we had an extra forty bucks so we could fuck." I'm touched (in retrospect) that the situation wasn't reversed; that we weren't in the hotel room with him saying "Gee, I wish we had an extra forty bucks so we could eat." I guess he really must have known how much I enjoyed the ice-berg lettuce smothered in thousand islands dressing with banana chips on top, and the apple studel with whipped edible oil product. But, I liked the meat too.
Lyn Chick only dines at sophisticated restaurants.
Ten Seconds in May
By Adrian Mack
"Adrian, I'm concerned with the sexual content of your essay. I don't think it's appropriate for this class, for someone your age - for anything, really."
Mr. Humphries, my English Teacher, had ordered me into his office. I had a soft spot for Mr. Humphries because he had gone to college with Virgin Records Uber-Hippie Richard Branson and still had an abiding contempt for the bearded dirigible adventurer. Right now, though, he just seemed like a terrible prude.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Well," he sighed, "I refer to the passage in which the naked Medium extrudes several pounds of ectoplasm from her vagina."
"Yeah..?" I pushed.
"Yes," he continued, "that in itself is objectionable Adrian, however, you go on to describe the ectoplasm metamorphosing into a hideous midget with an oversized erection who performs cunnilingus on the naked Medium. This act of vaginal stimulation, you then reveal, is so ferocious that the Medium actually dies. The midget then rapes and kills the assembled members of the seance, all of whom, rather curiously, are senior Cabinet Ministers. Given that these Cabinet Ministers are men then I'm forced to assume that this is an act of anal rape. Does it surprise you that I would be somewhat alarmed by this, Adrian?"
"Well, yes..." I replied as I mentally inventorized the more recent scandals in the tawdry history of Matthew Humberstone Comprehensive Upper School. There were two members of your department, Mr. Humphries, I thought - one of whom having taken a sudden moonlight flight to Morocco in search of Pederast Asylum. Then there were the three Deputy Headmasters that had comfortably established themselves as High Ranking Community Predators - not to mention the Chemistry Prof with a glandular condition that had ballooned him into a three-hundred pound oaf with a test-tube full of hydrochloric acid, a cavalier approach to the bunsen burner and a cock that itched for boy. For him, covalency was an issue that extended all the way to his libido, with porn and lager as catalysts.
It was 1983, I was sixteen and I was well inured to the byzantine couplings that filled the halls with whispered innuendo. Man-boy, Man-girl, Teacher-teacher, Teacher-teacher's pet, Teacher's petting, Teacher fucks squirt, Teacher squirts, fuck fuck fuck, squirt squirt squirt. Fuck 'em all - I wasn't gettting any. My dog, Yoda, she was looking at me differently. All my dreams were about water. I knew I had the goods and I knew I had the action but I couldn't get any solid gold easy and I had taken to wanking in alleys in some bizarre expression of adolescent sexual rage.
So when Mr. Humphries gave me shit for the innocent act of raping Norman Tebbit with an ectoplasmic midget, on paper, I felt the cold, wet snap of British sexual hypocrisy on my ass for the first time. I had been educated in an environment analagous to a Bedroom Farce as written by H.P. Lovecraft and all I could think was - you sleazy fuckers made me.
The truth is, I felt no moral panic over the cross-generational poly-humping that loomed everywhere. When the aforementioned Chemistry John approached me with a view to making me his catamite, I felt no urge to haul him into my office and wax wrath over his inappropriate behaviour in class. On the contrary, I declined very politely, suggested that he approach Anton Cumberbatch in Form 5B and went about the business of not caring. If anything, I felt bad for the poor horny bastard.
Spring came, gonads flared again and I was entreated to join Miss Baxter's drama class for a term. I had long since abandoned the idea of becoming anything as fluffy as an actor - like most teenage boys I was preparing for a career in something more convulsive than that, like a Prophet of Doom or maybe a Syphilitic Marquis whose poetically cruel experiments in sexual libertinism would somehow escape the gaze of moral, natural and criminal law. Still and all, Miss Baxter was the first hot teacher to descend on Matthew Humberstone Comprehensive in a King's age and there was something in her circumspect bike-shed solicitation that inflamed my leathery sac even further.
"Alright," I said, "but I'm not wearing a dress."
Thus began, as I'm sure you know, a three-week ritual mating dance characterized by extended afterschool conversations, insidious enquiries into my private life and the gradual unbottoning of all my pubertal compulsions towards tacky romance. This, in turn, was followed by the less gradual unbottoning of my shirt and trousers and the first female hand to ever grasp my throb. Lying on a blanket before her fireplace, drunk on red wine and thrilled that I had finally fallen in with school policy, I now occupied stage right in anticipation of my entrance on this debut fuck.
But at what price? Miss Baxter was a thirty-something born again Christian with a fiance. Had I known then what I know now about the psychotic tendencies of Christ's Good Army, I would have circumnavigated this experience altogether, dispatching Miss Baxter off to Anton Cumberbatch and myself into a distant field where I might blow my loving spoonful into a cow's nostril like many an enlightened man has done before and since.
On top of this, Miss Baxter and I had demonstrated little caution in our final vertiginous descent into coitus. In fact, we showed up at my best friend's birthday party together, snogged like hyena cubs in front of the entire room and left in the urgent manner of any couple intent on fucking each other in two.
Clearly, it would seem, Miss Baxter's head was not altogether attached to the rest of her - but the rest of her was so bloody good to look at and anyway, her head was just one more thing on this woman that I could shove my cock into so damn their eyes, all of them! I went in.
She gently guided my dick inside her and I whimpered, panic-stricken. It was the same kind of feeble, puling, challenge I offered when, at the age of ten, I had been lifted naked from a gurney onto the operating table prior to hernia surgery. Significantly, the surgeon had been the first man to ever gently guide his finger into my A-hole and I suspect there was some sense-memory at play as I struggled to avoid Miss Baxter's clammy interior and the impending petite-mort.
But she was stronger than me and so my deflowering came in a fit of mewling and discontent. Worse than this, though, was the anaesthetic quality of my orgasm which was evidenced only by the sound of semen lapping around tackle and my abrupt detumescence. Ejaculating into my usual partner, the alley behind Brereton Avenue, was like biting into a bon-bon loaded with cocaine. Ejaculating into Miss Baxter, on the other hand, held all the pleasure of giving tongue to a weeping transistor battery and I rolled away from her covered in stink and agony and fell asleep to the gentle humming of William Blake's "Jerusalem".
Now, I may have been a pretentious teenage git but I wasn't stupid and with a solid education in the rules of sex, as derived from my father's subscription to "Fiesta" and "Knave", I plied onward with my Christian Soldier for another two weeks of furtive lunchtime and afterschool rutting. And it got much better - I developed confidence enough to talk dirty, pinch hard, scratch, ram, accelerate and, when required, tease with a more measured stroke. Afterwards, she would humbly bathe my penis in soapy water, much like Jesus would have and she taught me how to smoke.
I was forging most of the sexual imprints that would continue with me for the rest of my life. Principally, I fast became aggravated by her growing emotional dependance. I hated the fact that she'd invented a crap nickname for me - "Schmacky". SCHMACKY!!! What kind of nonsense is that for an English teacher? I was bothered that she had insinuated herself into my group of friends and I was learning the politics of disgust. Her pie was too hairy, her nipples too leathery, her skin altogether too annealed, her bangs too short, her colour - ALL WRONG - and her teutonic thighs filled me with terror.
The social repercussions were beginning to affect me, too. I discovered very quickly that the only thing another human being will leap at faster than an oppurtunity to fuck is the oppurtunity to express disdain when someone else does it. Thus my friends and my other teachers now saw fit to treat me with low-key censure, though none dared to ever actually confront me. More discomfiting than this, however, was the situation a mere five doors down from Miss Baxter's house involving a senior member of my own family and his extra-curricular rutting activities.
I pulled out. As far as I was concerned, the course was finished, I had passed, I wanted to apply my new skills in the real world. I put an end to Miss Baxter's missionary work with the method I use to this very day - I pretended I'd never met her. This was a tactical error and she consequently Waterloo'd me - in short order she furnished my friends, my parents, the faculty and possibly even the Grimsby Evening Telegraph with every detail she could muster from the scandal. In the time honoured fashion of all Christians, she somehow managed to excuse herself from any moral responsibility in the matter and so it became historical fact that Adrian Mack had committed an act of sexual villainy. It was a matter of Public Record that I was the asshole in spite of the fact that Miss Baxter was now following me through the dark streets of Grimsby wearing a ludicrously oversized black raincoat, that she would occassionally turn up at my house in the middle of the night in order to swear at me in a migraine-inducing falsetto and that she had hi-jacked my W.H. Auden essay from another teacher and scrawled "This is pretentious garbage" all over it in blood red ink.
"C'est le guerre," I reasoned to myself as I stood in the hallway of the Science Block at Matthew Humberstone, patiently absorbing another tirade from Miss Baxter. She was still wearing this hideous green scarf around her neck that had previously concealed a hickey. Now, I suppose, it held some talismanic value in her religious devotion towards despising me.
Her bluster was swelling to it's typically insane pitch as the bell rang, flooding the hall with fourteen year old kids, teachers, lumpy kitchen staff and, mercifully, noise. I retreated with an exasperated wave, bringing Miss Baxter's sulphurous fulminating to its boiling point and she howled with almost supernatural fire, "You weren't even very good in bed!"
With that, Miss Baxter had achieved the extraordinary feat of bringing every person, every clock and possibly the planet itself to a dead halt, a dreadful silence fell and everything ended.
Not too long afterwards, I took the first oppurtunity to leave town which seems ridiculous now but this whole episode had been conceived in drama class after all and such action, therefore, seemed entirely apposite.
Out of the blue, very recently, I found myself craving emotional dependancy, the insinuation of some other into my world and a sudden U-turn in the politics of disgust which have become, now, the politics of absolute desire. Whereas the story of Miss Baxter had once provided me with an archetype for everything that followed, it now serves to illuminate the wonder of evolutionary psychology, not to mention psychological evolution. Let hate flourish, I say, because it sublimates, finally, into love. I have the proof. I still want to bury Christians alive, though.
Adrian Mack never pursued an acting career.
Drunk Teen Beach Fuck
By Chuck Blade
We met at camp. Ipperwash Army Cadet Camp. She was from Kapuskasing, a northern mining town, somewhere in the Clay Belt. Looking at her photo now I guess she was part native. It was my second day there and I saw her at the mess. She was tiny, barely five feet on her toes, and had tailored her standard-issue bush fatigues into a fit far too provocative for any man's army. Even the Sergeant Major was seen admiring the strategically placed darts on her uniform during the morning marchpast. I was determined to get laid that summer and after the long meaningful look we gave each other that day decided it would be her.
Her name was Sandi and she was a seventeen-year-old shit disturber who liked to drink and party. She was a returning callout and likely to make sergeant. Only problem was she had a psycho ex-boyfriend who had been in and out of prison and would kick the shit out of anybody who laid a hand on her. The story went he was Returned To Unit last summer after flying into a jealous rage over her and nearly killing someone. This summer he was persona non grata at camp. So the next day during CPR lessons I asked her to be my partner. We necked all the way through the mouth-to-mouth drills and in a fit of passion I bit a piece of her lip off. She screamed and bled into my mouth. Later that day I saw her with her bandages and I apologised. She smiled coyly and called me animal. I was in love.
We met every night our first week there. The first night by the jumping tower she denied my advances saying we only just met, it was all too fast, that we should take our time. The second night in one of the lecture tents we drank and played cards with some new buddies until our indiscreet fondling and kissing broke the party up. It was then that she laid down the rules: I'll do what I want, when I want, and with who I want. That was fine as long as she would fuck me now. We went at each other like a couple of wrestlers. She pushed me back against the centre pole and undid my belt. I threw her onto a table, tore open her shirt, yanked down her bra, and realised I had to take a piss. I stepped out of the tent to relieve myself and when I returned she had dressed herself and said she wasn't in the mood anymore. The rules. The little ballbuster.
The next day after classes a bunch of us headed for the beach. Sandi had been drinking all day from a can of Orange Crush that she topped up with vodka every time our instructors barked at ease. Someone took a polaroid of us that day that she signed: I will never forget you, love Sandi. We didn't bother with dinner. Eight of us made our way to the beach, drinking gin straight from the bottle, singing stupid army songs, making a typical drunken teenage scene all the way there. When the sun went down we swam naked in the bay. That was when she started acting crazy, saying the lake was calling her, walking out into the water like some zombie until she was swallowed up by the bay. I had to fight her kicking and screaming all the way back to the shore. She was fucked up beyond repair. Needless to say she didn't remember a thing but I did. She puked all the way back to the barracks.
We were off the next day so I hung around the barracks not doing much of anything, but trying to look busy while I did it so that I wouldn't look like I had nothing to do, when I heard the news. Someone had come back from Grand Bend and said he saw Sandi's ex-boyfriend in town. Apparently he had driven down from Kapukasing and was staying at the trailer park that bordered the military and the civilian beaches. When I saw her for the first time that day she was talking to some tough-looking older guy and we completely ignored each other. I went and got high and played some pinball at the rec centre. When she didn't show up for dinner I knew she'd gone with him.
I went to the annex bought some cola and retired to my bunk. After a few rum and colas I had decided I didn't need to be played for a sucker, shit, there was plenty of pussy to be had that summer. Fuck her drunk ass. Next thing I know one of my friends burst in telling me to get the hell outta here cause he was headed this way, drunk, screaming bloody murder, looking to crack my skull. I grabbed my bottle and headed down to the dunes muttering to myself, 'the little bitch told him everything.' I found a beach party and joined it finally passing out from the rum. When I got back to base my bed had been completely dismantled, my locker knocked down, and my boots pissed in.
All this and we hadn't even fucked yet. The next day she was unapologetic. My unit was shipping out for manoeuvres so maybe I'd see her in a week or something. I wasn't even sure what I was talking about anymore. I just had to get away from her. It was in the bush I got word she was gangbanging killer and a couple of his buddies down at the trailer park.
Back at base I stayed clear of her. Ignored her entirely. Pretending like it meant nothing to me. Swallowing down my anger and disappointment, plotting my revenge on them, concocting the least expected, dispassionate yet most humiliating deed my naive sixteen year old brain could imagine
I didn't get my chance with him but the police took care of it for me, arresting him for drunk and disorderly, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and breaking probation. They shipped his ass back to Kapuskasing.
On the eve of my sixteenth birthday I was partying at the rec centre when she came in, saw me, and for the first time since the incident with her ex, came over to talk to me. She told me she knew it was my birthday and that she wanted to give me what I had always wanted: her pretty pussy was mine for the taking. I was to meet her down in the dunes, at our regular party spot, at midnight. Now was my chance.
I found her there. Her small naked body swaying drunkly in the sand, reflecting a pale light from the moon against the inky blackness of the bay. Lust was subverting my plan. She kneeled down, took my cock into her mouth and drained the last bit of anger out of me. She lay down on her sleeping bag spreading her legs. Take me lover.
It was over in about three strokes. I had lost my virginity to a drunken teenager on the beach at summer camp. Sweet sixteen. She had passed out from all the booze and excitement. I stood up to take a piss and as I looked down at her a sense of disgust raced through me. I left her there and walked back to camp. I never did get my revenge on Sandi but years later, at an Ipperwash reunion, I heard she got in a serious car accident driving drunk one night so that now she walked with a permanent limp and had other chronic health problems.
Chuck Blade never kept his boots piss-free enough to establish to military career.
Bird in the Hand & None in the Bush
By Ridge Rockfield
Sex in my life is feast and famine. It comes and goes in waves: the dry spells stretch out like hot barren plains which I crawl across, tongue hung out, ass blistered. It is during these times that I like to torture myself and think about the sex I could have had, but didn't. The memories erupt like boils on my shriveled soul and I fast-forward to my cracked endgame: slumped in an easy chair in a corner of the retirement home, regretting everything in a stained cardigan puddled around my wasting torso as I jack off. But how will I know if I've got Alzheimer's?
I have usually not had sex because a) I thought it was the right thing not to do or b) I thought it was the wrong thing to do, yet only wishing yes didn't get me (c), anywhere anyhow. I think back to when I was 23, mooning across Europe on my backpack tour, having left my girlfriend for the summer to stay with my relatives and sleep in rec-room hostels and cheap hotels with high-ceilinged rooms on loud streets.
I travelled with my friend Bob through Holland, Belgium, France, Italy and Austria. On the beaches in the south of France I was amazed as women pulled their golden bodies out of t-shirts and cotton sweaters, out of shorts and summer dresses, to lie topless on the beach with us. I watched as Venus walked out of the sea shell-less in a hot pink bikini bottom. France, Spain, Italy: beautiful girls live there. To keep our minds off we wrestled in the sea, lunging and thrashing at each other in waist-high water.
Up the Brenner Pass to Innsbruck where Bob and I parted. I was in Austria and travelling alone. I hung my head out of a train window and watched the valleys bend and turn out of sight, lonesome for my distant girlfriend. One afternoon, I found myself in a neat village in a pretty valley. The day was blue and hot, and I wandered into town to see its book-marked waterfall. Below the falls I stopped and saw a lovely girl. She had her face turned to catch the falling mist, and when she opened her eyes she smiled at me. Her skin was olive and her eyes were dark, and her face was beaded with water.
I get stuck there in memory. Later in another scene I am at the hostel, and can't remember how I returned there. The girl was there, with another girl. They were Israelis: Leora said she was Farsi, which didn't mean a lot to me then or now. We talked that night in an otherwise empty hostel, and made plans to hike to a neighboring village the next day. It was a happy carefree day. The three of us followed mountain trails and took pictures of each other on a snowfield, in wildflowers, and by a stream. Leora's friend was lively and sweet, and we laughed often but Leora joined less and less. My attention shifted ever from lovely Leora to plain and funny girl whose name is lost to me now.
Tired and hungry, we returned to the hostel and ate together, and sat up late and talked. Our rooms had become neighbours, another trick of memory. Leora and the other girl were in one room, me in the next by myself with a bathroom across the hall. When I went in to wash and brush my teeth I left the door open so I could keep eyeing Leora as she delicately walked about in an absurd red negligee and red panties. I walked to my room and Leora followed me in. She looked like she had stepped out of a naughty English postcard, coquettish and barely dressed. I was breathless.
She stood there and looked at me and I stood there and looked at her. There were vast empty spaces around my smallest movement.
Even now, there is a small jab of regret: I can still see her smooth skin, her small round form and dark eyes as if she had just left the room. I didn't put my hands on her hips and I didn't trace her smooth torso upwards with my fingers to caress her nipples. At the time, I didn't want to "hurt" the girl next door whose name I now forget. And I didn't want to cheat on my girlfriend at home. Noble, nice, and boring. My light side says I was good, but my dark side says I missed the train, chump.
Ridge Rockfield regrets nothing and everything in equal measures.
For You I'll Make an Exception
By Irving Washington
It's no secret that alcohol somehow makes you want to have sex with people who wouldn't make your C list in sobriety's cold light. Or maybe it forces you to acknowledge that you'll have sex with almost anyone, which you can fool yourself into disbelieving any other time. So booze breaks down those inhibitors, crushing your purported standards to dust and leaving you waking up next to someone who looks at you with a horror at least equal to your own. This is what happened to me a few years back.
I went out a drinkin' with a pal to a neighborhood hangout. Our drug of choice was out of our financial means that night, but not out of our cravings, so we decided to try to drown them in cheap draft. Good idea, and good execution; we slug away on pints of grog and shoot pool. About four pints in, a couple of women ask to join the table, and we say sure. I know one of them by sight, and it so happens that we work in the same large institution. About six pints in, she's telling me a hurtin' story about being dumped by her lover - a woman who also works at that institution. About seven pints in, she's telling me all about discarding her het veneer and beginning to embrace (but not yet coming out) her lesbianism.
You haven't had sex until a woman's made love to you, she tells me. I know, I tell her, because several women have had the lack of judgement to want to make love to me. No, no, she tells me. A woman doesn't know until a woman has made love to her. Okay, I tell her, enjoying the conversation but slightly bitter that I wasn't quick enough to hook up with her attractive friend, who I assume is heterosexual by the way she's working on my friend, who I know is a confirmed het. My luck, I think darkly, but only briefly, because this person's cool and it's something else I'm craving anyway, something that can't be replaced by drunken fornication, even if it's with a good-looking het - and she's neither good-looking or heterosexual.
But then, about seven pints in, it gets weird. Her friend and mine are doing alright, and I don't know what the hell happens, if she feels left out or if she wants to get back at her lover who dumped her by fucking not only someone she doesn't know but isn't even her newly chosen gender preference - or maybe she's just loaded like me and can't make the distinction between breeders and non-breeders, or the distinction doesn't matter for now, or she's remembering her het days and thinking they weren't so bad. I don't know, but she's telling me that she thinks I'm, uh, desirable and we should go to her place when the bar closes. Which we do. (My friend and hers take off together too.)
At this point I should reiterate that, in my books, she's not physically attractive, and she's told me she's a practising dyke, so what am I doing? Is my beer-flatulent male ego stroked by the notion that a muff-diver wants to do me? Am I thinking that I'm such a stud that even lesbians will make an exception for me? Christ, I hope not. I mean, I hope beer can't make me suffer from delusions that severe.
Anyway, we're necking on her couch, and suddenly she says, I can't do this. Fine, I think, because I'm not even sure what we're doing. I just want you to hold me, she says. Oh man, I think, I know you well enough to fuck you, but not enough to hold you. But that's okay, and we're tired and drunk, so we go into her bedroom, which is dark. She doesn't turn on the light, we get undressed, slide into her bed, hold each other, and that's when she decides she can do this and wants to, so we end up drunkenly screwing - an act notable for its meaninglessness.
Here's the worst thing in this beer-soaked silliness; I wake up in the morning, so hung over that the rain pattering on the window sounds like machine gun fire. I look around her bedroom, and the walls are adorned with those line-art soft-porn drawings of improbably gorgeous, mostly naked, sultry, cat-eyed women touching each other in various ways, kissing and stroking each other. I look over at her, and she looks at me with a mixture of horror and disgust. Actually, it's clear that we're both repulsed by each other and disgusted with ourselves. The soft-porn lesbian line-art is making my skin crawl, and I'm out of there, like, now.
Irving Washington doesn't drink as much as he used to.
Jean-Paul Sartre & Jenny Piccolo
By Paul Levine
While the end of the seventies was met with the usual enthusiasm for renewal that greets the dawning of a new decade, I entered the 80's having to face the terrible truth that I'd yet to come across anyone who thought it a good idea that I stick my penis inside of them. Not that I was particularly rushed about seeking out a carnal coupling with one of my acne-blemished peers, or anyone else for that matter. From what I could tell sex seemed like a terribly odd and embarrassing thing to do - all that naked grunting and slithery pumping, the absurdity of actually entering another human being. In order to have sex, I decided, you must have to pretend that you're not doing it - self deception being the only way anyone could get through such an obvious lack of decorum. Furthermore, I reasoned, since everyone was so excited about sex it must be over-hyped - like the latest pop phenomena - and not really worth the fuss. And Christ, could you think of a more pedestrian thing to do; almost every adult outside of a few monasteries and the upper echelons of the Catholic church were doing it. The Queen was doing it. Newscasters, prime ministers, the neighbors - they were all doing it. And, much as it disturbed me to admit it, my parents were doing it.
The uncertainty that accompanied my teenage years found solace in the writings of Existentialist authors and the minor key dirges of the post-punk ensembles whose members, had they been born a decade later, would have had their musical instincts quashed at the point of inspiration by daily dosages of Prozac. One band of the time - ironically named Joy Division - had achieved a measure of success when the lead singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself just before a concert. Unlike the death of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, no one needed any deconstructions of Mr. Curtis' lyrics to realize he wasn't happy. Depression, alienation, despair - these were a few of his favorite things - and he sang about them in an affectless moan that had you wondering why he was bothering and how much longer he'd be able to put off killing himself before he was denounced as a hypocrite. Consequently, his suicide was largely considered by the legions of fashionably disenfranchised suburbanites the world over to be an act of supreme authenticity. I was profoundly impressed. While the feckless masses obsessed over acts of bodily pleasure I decided that depression and death were where the action really was. They could have their sex, I resolved. And I, the more authentic citizen, could have obsessional thoughts about futility and death.
At this time I had adopted a practiced look of studied indifference and an approach to fashion that announced I was always ready for a funeral. Cruising the malls in the lifeless suburb my parents made me live in, I wanted to scream at the happy shoppers, "don't you realize that you're all going to die!" But the sentiment, of course, would have been lost on them. Only a small handful of people had the necessary courage to admit that they were alone, to take time out to properly obsess about death and futility and to embrace the ultimate pointlessness of their lives. On my reading list at the time was Sartre's Being and Nothingness. The title grabbed me from the start and upon pouring over the weighty tome I started feeling oddly aroused. I'd previously missed the relationship between existential angst and sexual stimulation, and I congratulated myself on yet another pithy insight into important matters: for a person to properly embrace his solitude, to negotiate the boundaries of what Sartre called "being in itself", and to avoid the pitfalls of "bad faith", I decided that one should masturbate whenever possible, in as many different ways as imagination and circumstances permitted. Sartre would have wanted it that way.
I took to the project with the enthusiasm of a scientist working on a cure for a life-threatening disease. My benchmark was the generic dry tossed-off wank, an act that always made me think of the frenzied throttling of a wayward swan. I liked its stripped-down, bare bones portability, but I quickly came to realize that the quality of orgasm is directly related to the novelty of the sensation. I started experimenting with the contents of the bathroom cabinet and jotted down a few important notes for future generations. The observations "applying toothpaste to any area of the body that doesn't contain teeth results in a minty-fresh stinging sensation that endures for hours" and "hairspray is an ineffective lubricant" have stayed with me over the years.
Pretty soon I was branching out into different rooms of the house. Much of the furniture became well aquainted with my tender touch. The family cat was often forced out of my lap by a sudden, unaccommodating growth. I started to eye the contents of the refrigerator with a lewdness that had formerly escaped me; and I was particularly interested in the idea of liver in a milk bottle which someone had told me was so close an approximation to the real thing as to be virtually indistinguishable. Fate, to my misfortune, ensured that while both liver and milk bottles came through the house from time to time, they were always on different shifts. My mission continued, unabated, and I discovered the sad truth that most fruits and vegetables are not very hardy once you really put them to the test. I think it was the day I started to drool over a chocolate cake for distinctly non-confectionery reasons that I decided that there was some room in my principles for compromise. I should really get myself fucked, I decided.
I was taking a lot of buses in this period. I enjoyed this particularly because on board there seemed to be an atmosphere of despair and failure, the public cattle car filled with those whose very presence was evidence of financial, if not spiritual, defeat. I liked the way people avoided eye contact, steered clear of even the most polite conversation, and sat silent in their seats. I was in the habit of sitting in the back row passing the time by trying the fill out the details of my fellow passenger's lives. On one occasion I amused myself by imagining the sexual lives of my travel companions. While I had little to go on from personal experience, pornography had taught me all I needed to hazard guesses about anyone's sexual forays: the more conservative they appeared outwardly the more voracious their appetite for carnal pleasures. I'd done about half the bus when I was became aware that a full throttle erection was winking at me from under the elastic waistline of my black rugby pants. Since I had trained my dick, through a rigorous regimen of self-abuse, to expect some attention at the slightest provocation, spontaneous public hard-ons were no stranger to me and I had several strategies for dispatching them, the most effective being various imagined formed of self-mutilation. In my field of dreams my dick deserved a purple heart. It had endured, on several occasions, being squashed in a vice, jammed with pins and knitting needles, and hammered into flatness with a mallet. Today, though, none of my normal strategies seemed to be working. With my stop coming up in a few minutes I closed my eyes and went to work. My dick needed to be humiliated, I decided, so I pulled my pants down around my knees to expose it to the world. I then reached into my bag and pulled out a chain-saw, tugged on its cord to get it going and then casually sprayed my fellow passengers with the bloody fragments of my misbehaved member. I exited the bus fully committed to the idea that this summer I was going to get laid.
As the weather got hotter I got myself into circulation and managed to negotiate myself into a series of short-lived relationships, each fizzling out in the post-grope, pre-fuck stage. It was during this period that I discovered a new orgasmic benchmark courtesy of an orally enthusiastic yet vaginally reluctant partner. I had to resist the urge to break into song as I lay there at a delicious slow simmer watching her head bob. Short, slow bursts of machine gun fire filled the night sky.
Eventually I met the girl who was to provide me with a vagina. She had an uncanny resemblance to a minor character from the 70's sitcom Happy Days - the dowdy Jenny Piccolo - and any sexual attraction I felt initially was kept in check by the intimidation of her proto-celebrity status and the fact that one of my best friends had quite recently had his way with her. Screwing her, I decided, would be just one step away from screwing him, so we settled into a completely sexless "Platonic" friendship.
We saw each other often and both managed somehow to maintain romantic relationships with others simultaneously, the details of which we would often share. Her boyfriends, although puzzled and noticeably frustrated, tolerated my presence in her life. Each time she told one of them she was too busy to see them because I was over I took some satisfaction in being a wedge between her and her lovers. We continued what was, in retrospect, an extended flirtation for over almost a year before I became her lover and someone else stepped in as the wedge.
Nonetheless, just about as soon as we had succumbed to our instincts we were planning my de-virginization - which we decided was going to occur at her grandmother's vacant apartment the following weekend. We had made preparations by picking up some condoms at the pharmacy and a mickey of gin at the liquor store.
There was a musty dampness in the apartment and a preponderance of doilies graced almost every horizontal surface. With the black and white TV on - volume down - we sat on the green shag in the middle of the living room, quickly disposed of the gin and deliberately, clinically disrobed. As we launched into the perils of drunken foreplay I fought off waves of nausea as the room started to spin. I groaned as she set me on my back determined to get the job done, with or without my participation. Alan Alda was yapping on the TV as she administered a condom, then crouched over me as my eyes closed and I braced to greet the ultimate benchmark.
It was a hot day and for a moment I became convinced that I was lying in a child's wading pool filled with warm water, my legs spilling out over the edge, my heals dancing lightly on blades of grass. Through a fine mist, I could feel the muffled yet enthusiastic gnawing of a woodchuck who was systematically nibbling away at my midsection. I felt a vague twitch between my legs, then another, then nothing.
Paul Levine stays away from children's wading pools.
Circling Uranus in Search of Klingons
By Dot Alot
Star Trek: The name alone conjures up images of greasy haired nerds with extreme side-parts, scientific calculators strapped to their sides, ready for an emergency pi calculation; boys dressed up as Enterprise crew members, or worse, aliens; people speaking the completely fake foreign language of Klingon, and above all, people taking their Star Trek way too seriously. And well ya, that's about it. But before you start making assumptions about the kind of pimple faced geek that you might expect to be reporting on a Star Trek convention, at least hear me out. I admit to attending two Star Trek conventions on two separate occasions; I admit to spending actual money on the tickets (35 bux, if you please); and I admit to feeling a little anticipatory excitement before ol' Captain Picard stepped onto the stage, but I will not admit to being a card carrying Trekker. So why, you may be asking yourself, did you bother going? My motives were purely academic, sociological even. I needed to know what kind of people would go to these events and take them seriously.
And here's what I found out -- people really do dress up as crew members and aliens. It's usually guys, but a few women dress up, and if they aren't more that 50 pounds overweight, they attract alot of male attention, becoming the fabulous babes of the convention; people dressed as Klingons really do speak the fictional language of Klingon (like if these people don't have too much time on their hands, who does?); and there is a definite hierarchy of nerds, with some nerds being cooler than others. The ages of participants ranges from about 13 to 45, with over 50% of those people being 30 year old virgin males who still live with their moms. Sadly though, no one flashes the live long and prosper sign, because it's just too "old show" and that just isn't cool anymore.
The first convention I went to was the premiere convention in Vancouver, held at the PNE -- basically the local fairgrounds. In fact I think they held it in one of the cattle exhibition areas, which actually turned out to be kind of appros pos, but that's a bitchy side issue. Now for the 35 dollar price of admission you might expect something more that a huge, badly lit, damp warehouse filled with not enough folding chairs and hoards of people, crammed around a makeshift stage, but then, if you did, you'd be sorely disappointed like I was.
Hey, but in all fairness there was also a merchandising room...another room set up with folding tables and covered with assorted Trek paraphinelia (read overpriced crap): posters, mugs, buttons, second hand stuff and show accessories. Strangely, each table was manned by the same guy: that comic shop owner from the Simpsons, long stringy hair, slovenly dressed, overweight and suffering from the Mr. Spock logic syndrome. (see below)
Mr. Spock Logic Syndrome n. 1. The erroneous belief that logic and emotion are mutually exclusive, hence, syndrome 2. Affecting a manner of complete indifference while abstaining from the use of all contractions of speech ("I cannot...He did not...It is not" etc.)
"I want a communicator pin from the NG show" says the friend I who accompanied me. But you know how it is, you snooze you lose and this being the second day of the convention, they were all sold out!!!!, as she was so emphatically told by the Simpsons clones. But my friend, optimist that she is, decided she'd look around in the glass cases in the hopes that a stray one got hidden under a pile of something else. But wait! She spots one! "There's one!" she says to the fat guy behind the counter with the gone bananas T-shirt on, " NO" he sighs, weary and pissed at having to deal with such Trekker ineptitude, "that is NOT a COMMUNICATOR pin, it is a KLINGON member of the HIGH COUNCIL INSIGNIA!" rolling his eyes and enunciating the whole line for a couple of dimwits like us.
After 30 minutes of browsing amongst the Trekkie stuff and vampires, wizards 'n' warlock ephemera (don't ask me why but Star Trek and wizards seem to share something in common), I began to notice that the novelty of the event was really starting to wear off. Sadly, we still had an hour to go before Patrick Stewart would grace us with his presence and we needed something to do. I spotted a guy dressed up: Six feet two inches tall, maybe 135 pounds, clothed in a Star Trek costume that he had paid a dressmaker to make for him. You have to remember that this was years ago, well before the days of the Star Trek stores even, so the fabric he had the costume made out of wasn't quite right. Instead of being a thick double-knit kind of thing, it was more like speedo material, if you get my meaning, and I think you do. The kind of fabric that clings to every lump, bump and bulge, including the one on his chest that bore the much coveted communicator pin and "sound board" - a rather large and cumbersome four inch square and half inch thick contraption that allowed the communicator to make that chirpy sound like it does on the show.
"That's quite the gizmo you've got there, sir" I say, hitting him with my sincerely interested look. Now any other guy would see the double entendre potential there, but not Trekkers, and you really do have to like that.
"Thanks!" he said trying to look all NG Crew Member casual
"I see you're wearing the Next Generation uniform, does that mean you are a fan of NG" I ask, showing him I was HIP TO THE SCENE with my cool Star Trek lingo.
"Oh yeah, I really like the Next Gen."
"And the old show? Do you still like that or have you basically dumped it in favour of the new one?" I inquire.
"Nah, I still like the old show, like I'll still watch it, but NG is better"
"So that costume you're wearing, I notice some other people in costumes, are you with them?"
"Oh no, those people are in the Official Star Trek Club."
"And you aren't?"
"No, not yet. I'm trying to get in, but it's tough to get accepted."
Hmm I think to myself, not cool enough to be accepted into the official NERD ASSOCIATION. No 12-step, arms wide, accepting camaraderie amongst the Trekkers.
"Well I really hope you get in." I tell him.
"Yah" he says emphatically "me too".
By the time Patrick Stewart arrived, I was kinda ready to go. There weren't enough seats by a long shot so I had to stand. Ol' Patty was wearing a pair of neatly pressed Levi's, and a shirt that looked suspiciously like the Puffy shirt from a Seinfeld episode. The audience was crammed full of sycophants asking questions like "Would you say that the Next Generation is solely responsible for the increasingly friendly relations with the (then) Soviet Union, or is it more your personal magnetism and outstanding mastery of the theatrical arts that has led to an overall increase in the personal happiness level of the world, thereby reducing hostilities?" The really sad part is that he'd actually answer questions like that, pensively too. Plus he called his watch a "timepiece" as in, "I glanced at my timepiece" and by that point I had had enough. "I don't care if you're driving" I said to my friend "I'm leaving now and I don't care if I have to take the bus."
Some years later, again purely out of the purest sociological interest, I decided to attend a second convention. The next one was slicker: held at a downtown hotel, plusher carpets, better merchandise, big snack bar, the whole shebang. And talk about pay dirt with the people in costumes. There were Klingons, Enterprise crew members, Vulcans galore and a chubby girl with bad skin, dressed in a pink sweat suit who identified herself as "full Betazoid". Ya, nice way to not have to shell out any money for a costume.
I quickly hooked up with the smokers: two women and a 13 year old kid dressed as a Vulcan. "Show me your world" I say to them "teach me your Trekkie ways"
"Well first off," says Barbara, taking a long drag from her smoke, "it's TrekkER not TrekkIE. You'd better get that right or you're going to really offend the WRONG person and then no one will talk to you"
"TrekkER, got it. Anything else I should know?"
"yah," she says "don't piss off any of the members of the Star Trek club because they can get you banned from these conventions if they want. They're very powerful people."
"How does one go about pissing them off exactly?"
"Well" she says "like you ask alot of questions. That might get on their nerves. So just watch it."
Point and match.
I tired the same thing on Delnor, my monosyllabic Vulcan emissary. "How do you get those ears to stay on? ("Glue"). Is your communicator made out of Lego? ("Yes") Why does everyone hate Wesley so much? ("He's a goof").
To me, Star Trek Conventioneer, the most interesting thing to note was how the conventioneers' feelings of the original and NG shows had evolved over time. At the first convention, when I asked my favourite Star Trek question, which is (and by all means, play along at home) "You're stranded in space, your ship is severely damaged, you've barely got any power left in the warp coil and a Romulan attack is imminent...who do you want for your captain, Picard or Kirk?", the answers were quite mixed, some going with Picard and others with Kirk, but by the 95 convention, no one chose Kirk. Well no one except me, because the way I look at it, Kirk had a crappier ship, a stupider crew and way more Irresistible Green Babe temptations than Picard ever did and he was still able to get the whole lot of them out of every single bad situation they ever encountered. The devotees were completely unmoved by this argument, however, answering back with: "Kirk's a joke"; "Kirk's a freak"; "Kirk's a fat bald guy who wears a toupee and a girdle."
Whatever. Oh and one final thing...the guy at the first convention who wanted to get into the Official Star Trek Club...he made it. What do you know, sometimes there really are happy endings.
One to beam up.
Dot Alot never tells anyone to live long and prosper.
The Price of Admission
By Laurie Drukier
I hate gambling. Actually, it's losing I hate, so I don't play games I might lose. When my friend Lorrie invited me to help celebrate her birthday by going to Las Vegas, all I could think was, how can I avoid gambling? And if I can't avoid it, how much can I afford to lose?
I decided to think of it this way: losing money in Vegas is like paying to get into Disneyland - the price of admission. I'll set a limit in advance, I thought, and when I lose all I can afford, I'll stop playing.
Playing what, though? What game would bother me the least to lose? Any of them? Poker, with it's steely-eyed professionals and blank-faced marathon players is too intimidating. And I dreaded the looks I knew I would get for whispering "which is higher, a straight or a flush?"
Slot machines seem reserved for the Vegas clichÈs I could never become: Miami suburbanites with bright pink faces and animal print voices to match their wardrobes, tarted-up skanks in trailer park blue eyeshadow and teetery silver sandals, all of them mechanically feeding coin after coin into machines that require little skill and less thought.
What about blackjack? The rules for hitting and standing seem to leave little room for mistakes, yet just enough for creative play. But I was reluctant to sit at a table where it cost five bucks a hand. I could imagine my "admission fee" going up in smoke the first night. Craps and roulette are too mysterious, beyond my willingness to risk the frustrations of the learning curve.
We drove to Las Vegas from Los Angeles, leaving late on a warm May night. There were four of us in Lorrie's white Mustang convertible: Lorrie driving, since it was her car and her birthday; me riding shotgun, in charge of the music; Jennifer and LeeAnn in the back, settled into blankets and reading all the road signs out loud. The traffic out of LA, as always, was awful. But we cranked the stereo, loaded up on road food, and headed out along I-15 towards the lights.
If you've never driven into Las Vegas at night, I highly recommend it. Coming over the rise in the road we were drawn to the beacon a hundred times brighter than I imagined. I felt as if I could sense the hum of moving, rushing, hurrying, laughing and spending people. How could they help it, in the midst of that buzz?
We drove past pop culture icons: The Flamingo, Luxor, MGM Grand. Energized, we shouted and laughed and pointed to places we'd seen in the movies. "Can we go there?" "There? " "I want to see that!" "Is it too late to do something tonight?" Lorrie laughed. "This is Las Vegas," she said. "It never closes!"
After checking into The Mirage and freshening up, we entered the casino with caution, as if afraid someone would tell us they were closed, that we should be in bed. After all, it was nearly four in the morning. But no one even looked up as we walked in.
All the hotels, Lorrie told us, are designed so that you have to go through the casino to get to anything else. The casino in the Mirage is huge; stand almost anywhere and you can't see the end. And none of the aisleways between banks of slot machines go in a straight line, so that even if you know where you want to go, you seem to end up somewhere else, somewhere you can take your mind off your confusion by feeding money into a machine. There are nickel slots, quarter slots, dollar slots and five dollar slots. I didn't see any dime machines and wondered why. Are dimes too small to inspire even the most desperate gambler?
There is a separate room for serious poker and baccarat, rows of tidy half circle blackjack tables and areas for craps and roulette. Occasionally, mostly near main aisle intersections, there are giant, silly slot machines. My favourite is one the size of suburban home theater, the spinning wheels easily a TV set each, surrounded by enormous glowing neon tubes and bubbling tanks of colored water. It draws people irresistibly, as if it would be easier to lose to a machine that makes you feel like child, playing just for fun and not for hard-earned cash. "The price of admission," I reminded myself, as I reached to pull the lever poised a foot above my head. I wanted to know if the jackpot paid off in giant coins.
There were only a few people scattered throughout the casino at that early hour, mostly playing slots, a few sitting at card tables. Not knowing where else to start, we headed for the bar.
Bartenders in Las Vegas are not mere dispensers of drinks. Along with conventional bar wisdom, they offer "inside" knowledge of how the games work. Coincidentally, our bartender's specialty was the very video poker game set into the bar in front of us.
We played and laughed, played and learned, played and drank, all without getting drunk or paying for a single drink. With Gus the bartender as our guide, we left the bar at seven that morning, giddy and giggling at our success. Lorrie and Jennifer broke even, I was gleefully up about 10 bucks. LeeAnn had gone to bed a couple of hours before. By keeping us talking and drinking, our pal Gus made sure we stayed much longer and spent more money that if we had gone to bed at a decent hour. He made some good tips, we had fun and suddenly felt that this town was only intimidating to those who don't know how to play.
Rumor has it that casinos pump pure oxygen into the ventilation system so that the air is always fresh and people stay awake longer, feel more alert, and are less likely to get drunk or irritable. I don't know if I believe that, but I felt that something must be at work. Why else was I up and ready to go the next morning after only a couple of hours sleep?
Nevertheless, we took some down-time by the pool, marveled at the amount of money and water it must take to keep the gardens healthy and lush, and gasped at the price of drinks outside the casino. By mid-afternoon, we were ready to venture out again.
Freemont Street is downtown Las Vegas, the old strip, full of familiar names and sights: Golden Nugget, Lady Luck and the giant neon kicking cowboy. To get there from The Strip, you drive all the way down Las Vegas Blvd, past the really big names: Luxor, MGM Grand, Aladdin, Flamingo, Mirage, Caesar's Palace and Circus Circus. The big venues compete for attention and eye time with dazzling lights of pyrotechnic intensity and colour. Each landmark proudly proclaims its big money act with building-sized portraits and flashing clichÈs. We passed invitations to spend an evening with Susan Anton, relive the music of Earth Wind and Fire, be amazed by Siegfried and Roy, wonder at Penn and Teller, gawk at the Miss Universe Pageant.
Past the big lights, smaller, yet just as familiar landmarks line the street: the Drive-Up Wedding Window, the Graceland Wedding Chapel, the We've Only Just Begun Wedding Chapel, and the Chapel of Love. The four of us on an all-girl road trip debated the kitsch vs clichÈ value of a Vegas wedding without reaching any conclusions.
It's a good thing that most of the sights of Vegas can be seen in one turn around town by car. That leaves lots of time to head for the casino, any casino. We gambled our evening away on Freemont street, first at the Las Vegas Club, then the Lady Luck. Sometime before we were done we managed a quick visit to Caesar's as well.
It was at the Lady Luck that the four of us settled in at a blackjack table. We felt lucky to find a kindly dealer, like Gus the bartender, who helped us as he helped himself. The more we thought we were learning, (and on the verge of winning a big one) the longer we stayed. Four hours later we were still there, We shared the table with Jerry from New Jersey and another chair that held three or four different people throughout the evening. Jerry appeared to be an experienced player so we made friends with him fast.
We also had the help of a cheat sheet from LeeAnn's boyfriend Larry. The credit card-sized chart has directions for what to do - hit or stand - depending on what you have and what the dealer is showing. Larry told LeeAnn he's never lost big using the Card. We believed in it and by the end of the evening, even Jerry was checking. The dealer didn't mind, although I guess some would - he encouraged us to check the Card before making decisions.
Even though blackjack moves fairly quickly, there's always time for talking, laughing, and having a drink or two. "Just one more hand," and "Check the Card," kept us entertained until late. We celebrated Lorrie's birthday with shooters at midnight and kept right on playing. By the time we left we had all lost money, but not nearly as much, we figured, if we had been at a nightclub for the same amount of time. The price of admission, we decided, was well worth it.
I'm proud to report that despite my worrying I did win some money that night. And it didn't take any particular skill. After spending only a couple of bucks in quarters on video poker, the machine suddenly came up with four wild cards. With riotous flashing lights and the melodic crashing of coins, my new favourite game dumped a hundred bucks in quarters practically in my lap. Did I jump up and down and scream for joy? No, but I remember giggling as I watched the coins gush out. Did I run to the nearest roulette table and bet it all on a single, lucky number? Not me. I serenely swept my winnings into the tasteful plastic bucket and glided over to the cashier. I took most of my cash in bills and tucked it safely away. Then I bought a new roll of quarters and went to find a new game.
Laurie Drukier is having an oxygen pump installed in her apartment.
Holy Smoke
Text and Photography by John Spooner
Early April in the northern Indian plain. Hot and getting worse each day. The monsoon rains will bring cool relief, but they are still two months away. This time of year the average day begins early, before the sun makes the simple act of moving about into a tiresome task. In the afternoon, the moist heat drives all intelligent life forms to a cool place, emerging only when the sun's rays are again horizontal to the wide, dry flood plain.
Varanasi is a contemporary of ancient Babylon and has been a center of civilization for over 2 centuries. It is the city of God Shiva, the destroyer and reproducer. The phallic stone "lingams" of Shiva can be seen throughout the city, usually adorned with flower garlands and powders of worship. His potency is revered and respected.
Each year, thousands of Hindu believers travel to Varanasi on holy pilgrimage to the Ganges river, where scripture dictates that the devout shall bathe daily and in precise order at 12 designated ghats, or stepped river landings. This city of more than one million is considered by Hindus to be the very best place to die. Those who expire in Varanasi by-pass all the usual reincarnation paperwork -- their soul won't come back as a used Rajdoot salesman or something equally distasteful, so go straight to nirvana, pass go, choose your halo from the rack near the entrance.
Many go to Varanasi for the singular purpose of dying there. They know they are getting close to the final curtain and travel to the ancient city on the Ganges in order to begin their last nap at one of many hospices set up specifically for the disintegrating tourist. Imagine western style travel agents selling to the dying traveler: "One-way ticket on the pay-when-you-go plan! Fly in first class comfort on modern astral planes! Air miles transferable to your next of kin!". When the moment comes, death is a joyous occasion for the surviving members of the family. A close relative has slipped the surly bondage of the physical prison. Sometimes a noisy procession through the streets accompanies mortal remains to the banks of the holy river Ganga.
All this spiritual tourism has generated the usual material entrepreneurism. Anything you may need or desire can be purchased on the streets near the river. Worship powders and incense, food of all kinds, water vessels of the faith, and whirligigs for the kids. A local man with next to no English approached me on the street holding a plastic jar lid crawling with blind, pink, hairless creatures. It was apparent that I could buy the baby beasts, but I could not imagine any use for them, as I did not own a hungry cobra. I think they were newborn rats. Birth and death, all day long, nothing unusual in that.
For the devout Hindu, cremation is the long preferred means of departure from physical existence. With a population of nearly a billion, it also doesn't hurt to reduce useless human flesh to the smallest manageable units. The remains of Mahatma and Indira Ghandi were both burned.
Long ago, when Indian nobles died, their wife or wives were expected to throw themselves on the burning pyre so they could accompany the exalted man to the great beyond, presumably to continue in a subservient role. Though illegal, this practice, called Sati, is said to happen today. As the widow left the home for the final time, she had her hand dipped in red dye and a print was left on the gatepost. Often the women were drugged to the point where it occurred to them that it would be a good idea to leap onto a huge fire and die.
There are two burning ghats on the shores of the Ganges in Varanasi. The small, less used one (I like to think of it as the overflow ghat) has an electric crematorium. This smaller ghat is also for poorer folks, as it only costs about C$2.00 per cosmic campfire. Down the river apiece, at the much older and more stylish Manikarnika burning ghat, things are a little different.
After the relentless sun was far enough west to make walking about more comfortable, I went for a stroll. After the usual street ballet of dodging bicycle rickshaws, sidewalk shops, and the ever-present cows and their offal, I found myself above the Manikarnika burning ghat. It was like walking into Vulcan's own workshop. The structure where I stood seemed as old as Krishna, with a black patina of soot coating everything except for several massive stacks of wood and the enshrouded body below. The freshly wrapped corpse had been laid out like a white presto log and the sun was just beginning its last sighs. The river reflected the mostly clear sky, which was coloured by warm brushstrokes. The dim light hid all the worry lines of the world. The stage was set for a final bow.
An Indian man, whom I immediately identified as a tout, or commission salesman, sidled along the stone railing to a place beside me and offered to reveal the intricacies of the Hindu funeral ritual in return for a visit to his silk emporium. Curious, I shrugged my assent and plotted to duck the subsequent sales pitch. He began his tale by outlining the financial obligations involved in passing on.
The faithful who can afford it use wood for the event, purchased from the conveniently located vendor. The flame to spark up the deceased's final cook-out must also be bought and is supplied from a pyre lit by Shiva, that dancin' devil, many eons ago. I surmised that the various site attendants expect tips as well. Well, now -- this was really starting to sound like the western style organized religion I knew. Total invoice: about C$87.00.
A fire bearer is chosen from the family of the recently defunct, probably the eldest male offspring. This man, the appointed sparker-upper, shaves his head, bathes in the holy (though gunky) river, dons white robes, and grabs a fistful of fire with which to consign the chronologically concluded to the immortal beyond. The rest of the family also gets wet in the big muddy, but the designated immolator must return and bathe for the next 13 days as well. I assume this ensures a clean getaway for the vaporous and recently de-animated relation.
Meanwhile, our inert guest of honour, who has been wrapped in cloth and had her own dip in the Ganges, is waiting atop a pile of expensive and increasingly scarce timber products. I wonder if mesquite is appropriate? Junior, with his flaming sheaf of grass, intones something in the spirit of the occasion and walks around the pyre five times before setting it alight. The guy I saw do this was a little slow off the mark and had to put the throttle down sometime around turn three, as his handful of burning straw was becoming dreadfully short.
After ignition, the job of tending the flaming guest of honour is handed over to no- caste people, or Dalits, which means "oppressed". Junior joins the rest of the clan nearby, hunkers down and passes around a bowl of bhang, or marijuana, in the traditional chillum. By this time it was quite dark and the funeral pyre itself was the main source of light for the family bonding activity.
The pelvises of women and the chests of men don't burn entirely and eventually get chucked straight into the river. The rest of the smokily departed's ashes go onto a pile to cool and the "watchmen" sift through them for jewelry and gold teeth - a job obviously with perks unapparent to the casual observer. In time, the ashes also go into the drink. Three groups of people do not get cremated: Children under ten, people with smallpox, and Sadhus, or ascetic pilgrims. These representatives of humanity are all considered closest to God. They just get wrapped up, weighted down, and dumped into the river. Considering the number of boats on the river, this gives new meaning to the nautical term "deadhead". Carnivorous turtles were once introduced into the river to take care of some of the decaying organic matter, but poachers have killed most of them for the meat.
Besides being the depository of all of the city's sewage and dead people, the holy Ganges is also host to such activities as bathing (human and animal), boating, and laundry. Needless to say, I wasn't too keen on the hotel service washing out my undies.
After the riverside bar-b-que was all but over, the commission tout insisted that I fulfill my part of the deal and accompany him to the silk emporium. A short, dark, and sense-jolting walk through the winding and smelly back lanes of the ancient city led me to a small unmarked shop, where I was shown into a series of rooms, brightly lit with the ubiquitous fluorescent tubes. Scattered around me was a rainbow of silks and carpets, as if the God of chroma had regurgitated his last meal before again consuming all the colours of the world.
I was told that the proprietor would be with me shortly. I was seated, and a young girl offered me a cup of sweet chai, which I drank. By the time I was near the end of my second chai, the silk seller had only made one short appearance, during which my presence was barely acknowledged. I got the impression that the tout who brought me to the shop was not known for supplying big spenders as fodder for the silk hard-sell. I waited until the tout momentarily left the room and I slipped out the side entrance.
I was footloose and hungry and it was time to find a clean-looking restaurant for supper. Although in an area of the city I had never seen, I knew vaguely the direction to more familiar streets. I felt wiser in the ways of death, but happy to be alive, even while sidestepping fresh cow shit. Life, like some cosmic digestive process, ground on.
John Spooner hopes that he'll never be drugged to the point where it occurs to him that it would be a good idea to leap onto a huge fire and die.
The Complete On-Line Guide to SPAM(r)
By Wes Robertson
My first encounter with SPAM(r) [ 1 ] was only a couple of years ago. A friend and I were on a fishing trip in the interior of British Columbia, camped by the side of a small lake. It was near the end of the season, and starting to get cold; on that day there was a light rain and a stiff breeze, and after a long fish-less morning in a canoe we were stiff and near-frozen. As we searched around with numb fingers for something to eat for lunch, I came across a can of SPAM in our box of emergency supplies. I had never actually intended on eating it unless was dying and I had to, but for some reason it appealed to us more than anything else we had. So we fried it up, put cheddar on top, and made SPAM sandwiches. It was the best sandwich I have ever eaten in my life.
When I got home I naturally turned to the Internet to find out more about this strange, tasty, and, in my limited experience, much-maligned luncheon meat. I already knew lots about the Internet variety of SPAM--off-topic nuisance postings to multiple discussion groups at the same time-- but was unprepared for the huge volume of information about the low-tech variety, made of pork shoulder and salt. My first AltaVista search turned up over 9,000 references, and in short order I found ten or twenty up-to-date sites devoted to the topic of SPAM, three SPAM newsgroups, and another thirty or more sites containing at least some SPAM-related material.
As I sifted through the search hits I realized that, apart from telling me more than I ever wanted to know about SPAM, the sites were also interesting as a group for what they showed about an interesting aspect of the Internet. Specifically, they were a perfect example of an Internet "cluster," something that has developed over time around hundreds (maybe even thousands) of specific topics, ranging from cabinetmaking to the X-Files.
In a cluster, information about a topic is spread out amongst many sites, with each site linked to a number of others in the same cluster. Clusters can contain big, commercial web sites, as well as tiny one-page personal ones; they can contain newsgroups, telnet, and FTP sites as well as web sites; they can contain dull, sanitized "official" sites as well as the more exciting, fanatical ones created by fans or afficionados; they can even contain humorously off-topic and oddball sites to round them out. The SPAM cluster contains all of these. As an experiment, therefore, I decided to write an article about SPAM using only on-line sources (and an actual can of SPAM) as background material, to see if it would be possible to give the subject full and fair treatment. And if I can't do that, I resolved, I will find at least one SPAM recipe that my girlfriend (who doesn't even like the sound of the name) would eat.
The SPAM story begins in 1926, when George A. Hormel & Co. developed the first canned ham, but it wasn't until 1936 that the founder's son, Jay C. Hormel, developed "Hormel Spiced Ham," the first canned meat product that didn't require refrigeration. This was a major accomplishment at the time, but other manufacturers soon came out with similar products of their own, and for a while Hormel was hard-pressed to retain their market share. To do so, they decided a new, snappy name and marketing blitz was necessary. So they offered a $100 prize for a new name, which was soon coined by Kenneth Daigneau, the brother of a Hormel executive.
The name SPAM is generally agreed to be a contraction of the original name, "Spiced Ham" (not, as it has been rumored, "super pink artificial meat" or "specially processed army meat"). In 1937 Hormel re-introduced the product under the new name. Dubbed the "Miracle Meat," they promoted it heavily through the radio, with catchy musical jingles (among the first to be produced) and sponsorship of George Burns and Gracie Allens' popular show, which involved a character named "Spammy the Pig."
Coincidentally, a pig character named SPAM has turned up again recently, this time in the Disney movie "Muppet Treasure Island." The character, named Spa'am (pronounced Spam), is the high priest of a tribe of wild boars that live on Treasure Island and worship Miss Piggy. Hormel is not at all amused by the character or the film, and has filed a lawsuit claiming copyright infringement. Jim Henson productions says that it was all in fun, and that Hormel should lighten up. They will probably settle out of court, but the episode does illustrate how seriously Hormel takes their trademark. That or the fact that they really don't like the muppets.
In World War II SPAM naturally became a major staple in the armed forces because it required no refrigeration, and because it packed such a huge amount of food energy into a strong and easily-carried tin. The standard C-ration SPAM tin was a 6-pound monster, never sold commercially. It is said to have saved the lives of dozens of GI's by deflecting or stopping bullets. On the home front, SPAM was never rationed the same way beef was, and thus also became a favorite there. But it wasn't only Americans who appreciated the contribution of SPAM to the war effort: Nikita Kruschev credited it with nothing less than the survival of the Russian army, and Margaret Thatcher reportedly remembered it as "our wartime delicacy."
After the war, the Hormel marketing machine took advantage of the huge momentum that had built up around their signature product, promoting it as "the meat with 1000 uses." It enjoyed the same military-related cachet as the jeep, and cookbooks in the 50's listed SPAM as the primary ingredient in everything from chili to lasagna. In 1960 Hormel introduced the now-familiar rectangular 7 oz. can (previously it came only in a squarish 12 oz. can), the first major change to the product line in over 20 years, and cemented SPAM's reputation as one of the most ubiquitous processed food products in the world, a distinction it has never lost.
However, SPAM has had its "lean" years. In the 70's and 80's SPAM sales flattened as consumers became increasingly health-conscious, wary of the high fat and sodium content that were, after all, what had made SPAM so useful and popular in the first place. This was the period of the famous Monty Python SPAM sketch, which poked fun both at SPAM's almost ridiculous omnipresence as well as pointing out that some people just "don't like SPAM!" (a sentiment which was probably considered close to blasphemy at the time). Hormel countered in a suitably surrealistically way in 1971 with smoke-flavoured SPAM, but it wasn't until 1986 that a low-sodium SPAM was first introduced, sparking a slight increase in SPAM consumption for the first time in almost 20 years. But this was just a prelude to the big comeback.
In the 1990's, three things happened to rocket SPAM back into the luncheon meat stratosphere. The first was SPAM Lite, with 25% less sodium AND 25% less fat. Today it and the original low-sodium SPAM account for about one-third of all SPAM sales, according to Hormel, which does nearly $3 billion (US) in annual sales (also including its other brands, such as Dinty Moore, Patak's, and Black Label). The second was the Internet, which with its facility for multiplying and disseminating huge volumes of useless information, was a natural match for SPAM. And the third, paradoxically, was the rediscovery (or, at least, the ever-growing popularity) of the Monty Python SPAM sketch. By giving the product an ironic and humorous spin, that sketch has probably helped boost its popularity more than any straight-faced commercial could in this cynical and self consciously postmodern decade. Damn vikings, indeed.
Whatever the reasons, 100 million pounds of SPAM (45 million kg) are sold around the world every year, 3.8 cans being consumed every second in the U.S.A. alone. SPAM is trademarked in 92 countries, and sold in around 50, from Anguilla to Zimbabwe. The largest international markets for SPAM are the UK and South Korea--where it is considered an "upscale food" and often given as a gift, instead of wine or chocolates. Of the American states, Hawaii, Alaska, Arkansas, Texas, and Alabama have the highest per-capita SPAM consumption rates respectively.
The ingredients of SPAM are listed on the can as: "Chopped pork shoulder meat with ham meat added and salt, water, sugar, sodium nitrite." SPAM Lite cuts out the ham meat, replacing it with potato starch for volume, and adds sodium phosphate and sodium ascorbate (for flavour?). Although SPAM has a fearsome reputation for containing "scary meat" (pig snouts, rats , etc.), it's actually pretty much all perfectly edible pork, inspected and passed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
To every 100 pounds of meat is added 3.5 pounds of salt, a pound of sugar, and about an ounce of sodium nitrite, which is what gives SPAM its disturbing fluorescent pink colour (otherwise it would be a dull grey, like cooked ground beef). In only one place did I read that Hormel adds spices to the mixture to "enhance the product's natural flavour," but as these spices do not appear on the label or listed on any other web site, I have to assume that this is mistaken. Its omission would be a bit strange, given its original name, "Spiced Ham." But maybe sodium nitrite is considered a spice in the U.S.A.
SPAM is built on the same principle as concrete, with coarse meat chunks (making up about 3/4 of the total volume) being held together by a paste of more finely-ground meat. The two grades of meat and the other ingredients are mixed together for five minutes in a vacuum mixer set to a 27-inch vacuum, and then set aside overnight to cure. The next day the meat is mixed again in the vacuum mixer for ten minutes, and then it is ready for canning. All the grinding, mixing, and curing is done in a chilled factory (34 degrees Farenheit) to minimize bacterial growth.
At the canning plant, the inner surfaces of the cans are sprayed with oil, then packed with the still-raw meat mixture and sealed under a 27-inch vacuum. The cans are then cooked for about 70 minutes in a 230 degree Farenheit retort oven (an oven that talks back?). The can's design and internal vacuum preventing it from exploding. They are then dried and transferred to the packaging section, where they are sorted, stamped with a dating code, packed into cardboard trays, and shrink wrapped. The dating code, on the bottom of each can of SPAM, consists of a letter and 5 numbers, for example A11056. The initial letter indicates the processing plant (A=Austin, Minnesota, F=Fremont, Nebraska), the first two numbers the month (11=November), the next two the day, and the last digit the year (6=1996, unless the can has been around for ten years) that the SPAM was processed. Hormel advises that all canned good should be eaten within two years of manufacture, but it has been reported that canned meat (not SPAM, of course) has been edible even after over 100 years. I guess we won't know about SPAM until 2037--assuming someone has an original can.
The SPAM can itself is a masterpiece of simple, corny, but effective design. The dark blue background and the SPAM logo, with its bulging, rounded yellow type, have been the same for years. It's probably one of the most immediately recognizable logos on earth (I have no idea if that's true). The illustrated serving suggestion has also been the same for a long, long time: sliced baked SPAM on a plate with cloves on the top and green stuff (parsley?) on the side. Gee, I'll have to try that. The background of the SPAM Lite can is lighter blue (natch), and the serving suggestion is fried SPAM slices with pineapple and a strawberry. And in Canada, where all packaging is bilingual, "Luncheon Meat" is translated as "Viande ¿ Lunch." But of course, SPAM is still SPAM, no matter what language you speak.
SPAM is the official luncheon meat of the Internet. I have no idea why the Internet needs an official luncheon meat, no one would deny that SPAM is the one. Rivals are few--there are no on-line references to Prem, Treet, or any of the other SPAM competitors that I could find. Given this, you would think that the most important site in the SPAM Internet cluster would be the official Hormel site, where you could find a detailed SPAM history, pictures of the evolution of can designs, recipies, an archive of old radio and TV ads, and many other multimedia wonders. However, at present the Hormel site is a lame, three-page "under construction" affair (the longest of these being a ridiculously detailed legal disclaimers page) that does nothing more than warn people against some Hormel email impersonator using the address spam@spam.com. They do have a survey form which, if you are interested in on-line SPAM (and you've read this far, so you must be), I urge you to fill out. However, I don't know if they read their email.
Almost as an afterthought, the Hormel site gives a link to their authorized SPAM merchandise dealer, called SPAMTASTIC. For a commercial site, the SPAMTASTIC page design is, let's be brutally honest, terrible--but they do carry an impressive line of official SPAM branded merchandise. This includes everything from the usual (tshirts and baseball caps) to the somewhat wierd (ties and earrings) to the downright twisted (boxer shorts and a 20-minute phone card). The boxer shorts are a bit itchy but it's worth it for the mental edge they give you while public speaking. Trust me on this one.
Almost by default, then, the central sites in the SPAM cluster are not by its manufacturer but by its fans. In the "first ring" there is the The Amazing SPAM Homepage by Polly Esther Fabrique, Dan Garcia's SPAM Homepage, Emily Wise's SPAM Page, and Tim Schab's SPAM Center. These are all relatively normal people, who happen to maintain web sites devoted to a particular brand of luncheon meat. The reasons they give for this offbeat pasttime are anticlimactic; no one's life was saved by SPAM or anything like that. For example, Dan Garcia explains why he uses SPAM as a nickname, and thus created his site:
It's rather simple, really. I've always found SPAM funny, primarily due to the connection with Monty Python. Also, I actually like SPAM quite a lot, and I make a great 3,000 calorie 4-egg / SPAM / Mozerella / Tomato omlette that's to die for. So, using SPAM as a nickname represents my love for humor, Monty Python and cheap, high-calorie food.
Tim Schab is more concise, if a bit less grammatical:
This page is hopelessly devoted to that wonderful awe inspiriting can of meat to almost a religious point and it knows (partly to the fact that you haven't left this page yet) that you love it to!
Finally, Emily Wise, nicknamed Spamily, is almost dismissive of her SPAM connection:
Late one night when I was in college, a friend and I were, um, inebriated, and she up at me and said, "Emily Spemily Spam." That somehow mutated into "Spamily," which has stuck. I have a Spam page, mostly because people would be surprised if I didn't.
These sites contain, besides links to other SPAM sites, everything from semi-official SPAM histories and factoids (did you know that Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia eats sandwitch of SPAM and mayonnaise on white bread three times a week?) to arcana like the full text of the Monty Python SPAM sketch, SPAM-related news stories, recipies, poetry, and graphics. For the most part these sites stick to the facts, giving lots of background on what SPAM is, and what to do with it.
Further out from the center of the SPAM cluster are the "religious" sites, and, considering that we're talking about luncheon meat here, there are quite a number of them. The two most prominent are The Church of SPAM and John's Shrine to SPAM. The fact that SPAM inspires religious awe in some people should probably not be surprising, as it does share with God the twin attributes of omnipresence and a short, catchy name that also means something spelled backwards. And I can attest from personal experience that, when I'm really cold and hungry and I eat a SPAM sandwitch, it's a more religious experience than anything I ever experienced in a church.
At the Church of SPAM, Pastor Swiggy (an office clerk and standup comedian from Ohio named John N! Swegan) (no, that's not a typo) offers up a huge array of original SPAM holy works, including his encyclopedic "Books of SPAM" and various hymns, tenets, and Spamandments. From his First Book of SPAM:
In the beginning there was a void
And chaos reigned amongst the void
And this was before government was with us
And SPAM stepped out onto this void
And saw it was empty and not good
And HE said unto no one in particular
(for there was no one yet created)
LET THERE BE SPAM, and so it was
And he separated the SPAM from the Gel
And the SPAM became the firmament unto which he stood
And the gel became the heavens above that surrounded the SPAM
...you get the idea. John's Shine of SPAM contains material which is similar to the Church in that it is based on the Bible. However, it's also completely different, seeing as they are emphatically "not affiliated with the Church of SPAM." They are perhaps Protestants to the Church's Catholics--I don't know who claims priority. Anyway, the Spammandments in the Shrine of SPAM begin this way:
I am the one and only SPAM
Thou shalt have no other SPAM before me
Thou shalt honor the Spabbath and keep it holy. It shall be a day of rest for you and all of your household, your man servants, your woman servants, your asexual servants, your budgies, your orangutans, your llamas, your sphincter, and any other creature under your domain
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's SPAM, or any other meat by-product
The SPAM cluster even contains a small SPAM pantheon (Spamtheon?), including spamgod ("25% less Satan than regular Jesus Treat") and the Spam Goddes (yes, spelled that way). However, despite the names neither of these two sites actually contain any SPAM-related material that I could find. The name is being used in a purely ironic manner, as befits a luncheon meat of SPAM's almost pure irony content (strange that irony doesn't show up on the list of contents).
Related to the religious sites, there are also the mystical and conspiracy sites, such as the essay entitled "The SPAM Can Totality". The author asserts that "the entire observable universe is actually a single can of SPAM," and goes on to prove it with Chariots of the Gods-type proofs like:
The mathematic constant e is approximately 19/7--but the letter "s", the first letter of SPAM, is the 19th letter of the alphabet and a can of SPAM weighs 7 ounces! e is equal to the number of the first letter of SPAM divided by the weight of SPAM!
I'll buy that. In a similar but more Holy Blood, Holy Grail kind of article called The SPAM Conspiracy, another unnamed author makes a convincing argument that the world is dominated by a secret society known as the International SPAM Consortium. According to this theory, the chief goal of the Freemasons (who are somehow related to the Consortium) is:
...to fill Mason jars with the pink chunky stuff [SPAM] and offer it free of charge to anyone who would care to partake of the disgusting slop. Hence the name FreeMasons.
One of the most active and truly amazing areas of the SPAM cluster is that involving poetry. The SPAM Haiku Archive, for example, now contains over 7100 SPAM haiku (or Spamku), and is still growing. They have them archived by date, by subject matter (art, cinema, jazz, poverty, sex), and even have a section (Tasty Picks and Choice Cuts) where they pick out the best ones so you don't have to scroll through them all. How convenient! This site also contains sonnets, limericks, and other poetic forms, all of them worth reading if only to deepen your sense of awe at the variety of uses to which humans are putting cutting-edge Internet technology. Honestly, you could spend hours at this site. My current favorite:
Old man seeks doctor
"I eat SPAM daily," he says
ANGIOPLASTY
On another note, it was only upon reading the haiku at this site that the sexual aspects of SPAM even occured to me (honest!). There are of course the obvious innuendoes that can be made about any pink, salty meat--but it came as a surprise that there are people out there (more than a few) who quite obviously find SPAM an essential part of their sexual as well as nutritional diets. For example, the site abounds with references to Portnoy's complaint, where the protagonist uses a piece of raw liver as a tool for self-love:
Portnoy, as a boy,
finds the liver much too rough.
Uses SPAM instead.
There are also those who, bypassing the products made specifically for the purpose, use SPAM as a lubricant, an aphrodisiac, or who quite obviously like it "more than a friend":
I used to love SPAM
But now abstain, since slicing
My member with can.
Enough said. Another growth area in the SPAM cluster is that of sites dedicated to SPAM-related events. The granddady of these is the SPAMARAMA held annually in Austin, Texas (remember, Hormel is based in Austin, Minnesota), who celebrated their 19th anniversary in April 1997. They have had official Hormel sponsorship since 1994, and boast great posters, a SPAM Olympics (including SPAM tossing), and of course SPAM cooking competitions. Closer to home (my home, anyway), there is an annual SPAM carving contest in Seattle, which sounds like a slice. And since 1994 at the University of California Santa Cruz there has been a music festival named SPAM on Cement. Like a number of other things named SPAM this last event has no connection with the product at all except that they find it funny, and watch Monty Python a lot.
Speaking of funny, since Monty Python is given almost universal credit for the popularity of SPAM on the Internet, it isn't surprising that there exists an official Monty Python SPAM Club site. The club doesn't really offer you anything except for the ability to insult and taunt people via email, but it's definitely worth a visit. It is a silly site.
We have now reached the outer edges of the SPAM cluster, where lie miscellanous arcana like the SPAM top ten list (the top ten differences between SPAM and Hillary Clinton), the notorious SPAM Cam (of course not working when I visited), and a popular but mystifying "find the SPAM" contest. There are also the entertaining near misses, like the site dedicated with a straight face to a UNIX utility named the "System Performance and Availability Monitor" (SPAM), or a monumentally lame personal web page for an 18-year old college student whose only recorded comment on SPAM is:
My name is Mike Richey and I like SPAM.
That's great, Mike, so do I.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I don't have any fond childhood memories of SPAM, or a long history of eating or cooking it. Either my mother never cooked with it, or it just wasn't widely available or used where we lived, or (and most plausibly) she's simply not telling me. I wouldn't be alone in this:
When I was a kid
Mom would make SPAM casserole
Now she denies it
So I am now on the lookout for good SPAM recipies--I have a lot of catching up to do. As mentioned above, Hawaii is the SPAM capital of the world, and from the Aloha state alone there comes a SPAM sushi, a SPAM soup and noodles delicacy called Saimin, SPAM fried won ton, and an interesting sounding recipie involving SPAM, cloves, and pineapple that I wouldn't mind trying myself. There's also a Spamikopita (Greek), Sweet and Sour SPAM (Chinese), and even Spaghetti Carbonara with SPAM (Italian). The mind boggles. But the extent of my experimentation so far has been SPAM and cheese sandwiches, and to fry up SPAM for breakfast with eggs, basting the eggs with the leftover fat from the SPAM. Mmm.
Watch the pink slab fry
Its grease can lubricate eggs
Get ketchup ready
The worst recipies that I heard of during my surfing were the Spamalamadingdong, "a bite-sized SPAM sandwitch covered by chocolate and with whipped cream in the middle", and SPAM wine. As they say at the end of the wine recipe, "after an evening of Spam wine drinking, ensure the buckets are nearby." Of course, part of the fun of SPAM seems to be reveling in its underlying repulsiveness, of which there can be no denying even by people (like me) who actually quite like it.
Which brings me to my goal of finding a SPAM recipe that even my girlfriend would eat. Okay, so I was kidding about that one. However, in my searches I did find (at The Amazing SPAM Homepage) what I think is the quintessential SPAM recipie: it's fast, it's easy, it's ironic, and its ingredients are all trademarked processed foods. It's Spam a L'Orange:
One box Kraft Macaroni and Cheese
One can SPAM
One cup Tang
Make the Macaroni and Cheese according to the directions on the box (don't even think about using a no-name brand). Then dice up the SPAM and fry it lightly, bringing out the full flavour. Mix the two together, add the Tang, and serve immediately. Haute cuisine it's not, but if you like SPAM (and especially if you're really cold and hungry), there's nothing like it.
Wes Robertson
Note 1 - SPAM, SPAMTASTIC, Patak's, Black Label, and Dinty Moore are registered trademarks of The Hormel Foods Corporation; wherever these words appear in this article, the (r) symbol is implied. All other trademarks and copyrighted materials used or quoted in this article remain the property of the respective copyright owners. All links are valid as of 28 July 1997. Facts and figures used in the article are derived from the best available on-line sources, but are not necessarily official, authoritative, or even correct, and of course have not been authorized by Hormel, with whom I have no affiliation whatsoever. Questions, comments, and corrections are encouraged, and can be sent directly to the author at wes@apfc.apfnet.org.
Wes Robertson enjoys SPAMwiches.
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