LaPorsha and I spent the final hours of 2022 in bed playing a game called Monster Hunter Rise. We were trying to defeat a giant flying dragon that seemed to be at last partially based on the Weedy Sea Dragon from the Sea Horse family. It creates tiny floating platforms that are sometimes equipped with cannons and ballistae and that we are supposed to gain access to through the use of flying insects that excrete elastic cords. We lost.
Anyway the holiday had me thinking about all the different ways that people generally observe it including the resolution to change themselves or otherwise improve their lives. This got me thinking about how most of the stories that I have shared so far generally feature situations in which I am being kind and helpful or at the very least attempting to do the right thing. There have been breaches in etiquette, decisions that led to unforeseen negative consequences and an unapologetic penchant for pursuing drugs that most of polite society disdains but I haven’t really shared any situations where I was being an utter monster.
I wasn’t always a nasty drunk but at times I certainly could be. My father was almost certainly an alcoholic and nearly all of my adult friends have struggled with alcoholism but it’s never actually been an issue for me. I drink in small amounts but not every day, I’m actually getting back into it after not really liking it for years. At the beginning of my drinking career I did often drink to excess and at times this would result in me saying and doing awful things.
I had mentioned in the Tijuana El Rancho story that Robyn had gotten some photos of her bruised face after drunkenly falling down some stairs stolen and she was upset about it because she liked how the pictures made it look like I hit her. In the El Rancho days this idea existed safely insulated in the world of jokes. At the Red House this was not exactly the case. I’m almost certain that I never actually struck her but there was at least one situation in which I became violent.
We were in her room arguing about something or other when I became consumed with rage. I can’t remember exactly how the physics or respective body positions worked but she was standing on her mattress and I grabbed her by the throat and caused her to flip over through the air and onto her back. Not like I knocked her from the standing position onto her back – I remember that it was one complete rotation. I remember seeing the sudden surprise and fear in her eyes. I can’t remember what happened next or if I had even been drinking in this situation. I remember the immediate feeling of shame.
The situation that I was actually wanting to write about was one in which I was extremely drunk and flew into a violent rage against nearly everybody that I lived with. I couldn’t find my portable record player, the DISCO-O-KID from some of my earlier pieces, and convinced myself that my housemates had taken it and were hiding it from me. Eventually I discovered that it was under a pillow the entire time but none of it was really about the record player. I was just unloading anger and darkness on the people close to me.
The chemicals that our brains release into our bloodstreams during episodes of unbridled wrath are supposed to make us somewhat stronger than we are under normal circumstances. Matt’s boyfriend Joe had been sitting in some kind of upholstered armchair. I picked it up with him sitting in it and flung him and the chair across the room. I grabbed a tall floor lamp with a bare light bulb at the top and flung it at Matt like a spear. There was a flash of light as it exploded on contact with his unprotected bicep and shoulder.
Andy Hyde attempted to stop my rampage by punching me repeatedly in the head. Unfortunately for him I seem to have an unusually hard head. Years later at a pre-INC show in Orlando somebody jumped from the crowd to break a wooden chair over my head after being offended by aspects of the performance I had just given on top of the bus. It was probably the bottles I was throwing in the general direction of the crowd or the very small woman I was wrestling with.
The thing with the chair surprised me but I don’t think it did any actual damage. He was a very normal looking dude – brightly colored bicep tattoos of Japanese style fish and flowers. He jumped into a pretty nice looking newer car and sped off immediately afterwards. I just realized that one of the bottles might have hit his car or even just landed near it. Somebody showed me a video of the chair attack on their cell phone immediately afterward. I was drunk to the point of seeing trails and abnormally bright colors. It was a surreal experience.
Anyway back in Chicago Andy had broken his hand punching me in the head. I was unhurt and amused. Somebody drove him to the hospital and they bound his hand without realizing that the knuckle bone had become twisted upside down. The bones healed like that and it now appears like he is simply missing a knuckle. It became something for me to tease him about every subsequent time I was in a drunken asshole mood:
“Wanna try again? Maybe this time I’ll take the whole hand!”
Robyn didn’t want to be around me when I was acting like this and was getting ready to drive to Schaumburg or at least somewhere else. We must have had parking spaces in the back of the house or she needed to circle the alley in order to leave I just remember she pulled along the side of the house. I had been watching from the roof and jumped down onto the hood of her car to scare her. It certainly had that effect, somebody got me off of the car and she sped away.
I normally trust my memory to be accurate with all the details but all of these things happened when I was borderline blacked out drunk. If anything I was probably behaving even more horribly and being more of a violent asshole than the details I can remember give credit to. If anybody who was actually there remembers something differently I’d be interested to hear it.
In 2009 I was drunk and being an asshole at a party in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco that I went to with Lux. I don’t remember what it was that I had been doing specifically but I got kicked out because of it. I thought it was really funny to keep breaking in and scaring her. Not running up to her but climbing somewhere on the walls or ceiling and just staring like a gargoyle until she noticed me and got scared again. I can’t remember exactly how many times I did it because I did spend at least part of the night in a blackout.
I popped back into consciousness or memory hanging off the edge of the building’s roof with my shirt tangled up in some barbed wire. My feet were on the building but I was holding onto the barbed wire with one hand and my body was dangling back over the alley. It was at least two stories tall maybe even three. I felt lucky that I hadn’t fallen and hurt myself and untangled my shirt and finished pulling myself onto the roof.
I used to be really good at climbing and getting onto things. I’m already tall to begin with and as long as I could grab a ledge or bar with my fingers jumping I could probably pull myself up to stand on it. Nothing fancy, just core strength stuff – I used to like to do a trick where I would grab a hanging rope and invert myself, pushing my feet upward until it looked like I was hanging from my ankles. When alcohol was sitting in the driver’s seat sometimes this power would be abused in the name of evil.
I don’t get as drunk as I used to but I think a bigger difference is that I try not to carry around ugly resentments and scars from past traumas that would want to bubble up in the form of rage or violence when my executive function is asleep at the switchboard. I don’t think attacking my friends or terrorizing my partners was cool or cute and I’m lucky that I made it through the situations without getting seriously hurt or catching serious criminal charges. I would have deserved it. Maybe it’s not so much that I changed as it is that I moved to the middle of nowhere and only really have to interact with one other person.
If you catch me on the wrong day I bet that I could still be a total piece of shit.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 