Tag: Dragonlance

[Image from Fever of Unknown Origin Berlin 2009]

I’ve been thinking a bit about what the definition of a story is and how many of my favorite stories wouldn’t actually qualify as stories under commonly established criteria for defining them. I went through a period of reading the nosleep subreddit a lot and tried my hand at writing a few pieces on it that weren’t very good. When I wrote The Dreams in the Red House I thought it would be a good idea to share it there as it was my first piece that actually felt scary.

It got removed after a couple of hours for not being a story. Apparently detailed descriptions of a series of nightmares and sleep paralysis events doesn’t count as a story on that board unless it results in real world consequences. I thought of adding a throwaway final sentence like “and then I woke up and the monster was in my room” and resubmitting it to be obnoxious/funny but decided to just leave it alone.

Now one of my pieces, The Name Is Death Turkeys!, does actually contain a piece of original horror fiction but I’m not sure if it would count as a story either. I don’t want to put in too big of a spoiler in case any readers feel like clicking over and checking it out but I’ll say that the story is somewhat ambiguous as to whether or not anything supernatural happened. I wonder if there are pieces by writers like Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft that are horror classics but wouldn’t count as stories on that subreddit either.

Anyway the things I am going to be calling stories in this piece are just situations where strangers said things that I thought were funny. On the non sequitur to joke continuum most of these little sketches would probably list toward the former. I was thinking earlier today that this whole bit might work better as a comedy album because so much of it is going to depend on vocal mannerisms and timing. I know the exchange rate between words and pictures is fixed at one thousand to one but where would it be for audio?

The first selection in what will probably be a triptych comes from San Diego and was most likely the late nineties as I don’t think I was drinking yet. I was sitting with Francois at the prototypically San Diegan twenty four hour burrito shop on Third Avenue and Washington Street – I want to say that it was early in the afternoon but it could have been the middle of the night. Francois was telling me a story that wasn’t one about the type of tea that is supposedly picked by monkeys.

The story always goes more or less the same way: somewhere in China there are wild tea plants growing on mountainous peaks and ledges too precarious to be reached by human hands. Instead a tribe of wild monkeys has taken to collecting the tender leaves and exchanging them for fruit with the nearby villagers in an arrangement as old as time. I kind of doubt the reality is as idyllic as this anecdote would suggest but even at its worst it would have to be a million times better than the somewhat related cottage industry of force feeding coffee berries to wild civets and waiting for them to shit them out.

The following character was seated at the next table over: a bald and slightly heavy set white man with a soul patch dressed in a leather jacket and one of those colorful caps made up of triangles in different shades of leather suggestive of the 1970’s and Funk Music. He held a small brown paper bag that was crumpled at the top to accommodate the fluted neck of a forty ounce bottle of malt liquor. He looked significantly in our direction and offered the following observation in a voice tinged with sadness and wisdom:

“I’ve heard they uh… steal your belongings and what-not. The monkeys…”

If you’ve seen the Tupac Shakur movie Gridlock’d his voice and speech style were nearly identical to that of the small time heroin dealer and jazz musician character called Mud. The film is set in Detroit but I’m not sure if this monkey man was from there. He seemed to have stepped out of a timeless world where saxophones, poetry and cigarette smoke compete for space in the stilted air of an endless afternoon. Soulful eyes speaking out in earnest wistfulness for an ever-flowing stream of pilfered cameras and sunglasses.

The next bit comes from around 2005 or so in the hey-day of the counterfeit Greyhound Ameripass. I was crossing the desert on my way to or from Chicago and stepped off the bus to stretch my legs. The sharp eyes of a young Desert Rat lit upon the book I carried and the finger as bookmark to indicate it was no mere accessory. Having now spent time living in different versions of what is essentially an oasis of artificial irrigation surrounding an Am-Pm I understand why such a simple sight would have stood out as both significant and encouraging.

He was dressed in what is more-or-less the standard uniform of a dusty California nomad whose life can be neatly divided into long walks either to or from the convenience store. The brimmed cap with protective neck flap was there but what leapt out even louder was the refillable and sun faded insulated soda barrel. It was the kind that the guys who hold the stop sign for road construction crews always carry – probably 64 ounces if I had to guess. He had a long plastic straw to allow sipping without having to lift this burden any higher than waist level:

“Whatcha reading?”

I held up my copy of a popular translation of The Saga of the Volsungs and told him it was The Saga of the Volsungs. He proudly held up his own significantly thicker volume that I have to confess I stopped reading the title of after recognizing the Dragonlance logo. I understand that the books have a bit of a reputation and following but I struggle against deeply ingrained culture snob tendencies.

The entire situation reminds me of a bit of teenage trick-or-treating I did dressed as a Rene Magritte painting that caused my friend’s clown costume to appear especially pedestrian in comparison. We were in a fancy rich neighborhood for the better candy giver and the professorial candy-giver was impressed with my get-up:

“Ah yes, Magritte! My favorite surrealist is Dali!, and what are you young lady?”

“Uh.. I’m a clown, sir.”

In this analogy the Saga of the Volsungs is me in the Magritte costume, the Dragonlance novel is my friend and I’m the judgmental rich guy with the candy:

“Uh… yeah. This one is epic poetry about the Germanic Hero Siegfried…”

The Desert Rat crumpled his chin and attempted an expression of grave intellectualism. His rejoinder would have been hilarious as piss-taking mockery of my snobbishness but as a genuine attempt at pantomiming a Classical Education it was timeless. In the disaffected tone of a worldly scholar:

“Yeah… Socrates… Siegfried and Roy… I’ve read that stuff…”

I could throw out something wry about the Western Tradition here but honestly I think this particular pull-out quote speaks for itself.

The final bauble comes from a situation where a person whose natural register already falls within the “comedic voice” category suddenly switches to a different, more intentionally comedic voice. This isn’t the actual bit but during the production of the experimental opera Fever of Unknown Origin in Berlin in 2009 Raul and I went out to the Museeinsel dressed as goblins. I was in black leather with a witches nose and a badger’s preserved fur mask as headdress; Raul was wearing a horses mane in tanned leather on the back of his head and high platform boots.

We hadn’t specifically coordinated our looks but the entire trip had been goblin-themed for me at least. A woman politely asked in precise German if she might take our picture. I was actually the only member of the American contingent who understood German but I pretended not to because we’d been posing for pictures all day and I was getting bored of it. She asked her male companion what language he thought we might speak in the same precise German and he shrugged.

She asked in German again but with an exaggerated screechy goblin voice like the character Blix in Legend. I still pretended not to understand and we didn’t pose for a photo but I think about this lady and this moment all the time. That rarest of anomalies: a German attempt at humor that was actually quite funny.

This brings us to the third and final thing that I am loosely referring to as a story. I was with Jacki for this one, the brief Jubilee to my Wolverine: a mouthy teenage Asian sidekick. I think this happened in Los Angeles but it could have been Saint Louis or New Orleans. We met on the Rockaway and did a bit of traveling. It was most likely 2008.

I am going to refer to the man who we met on the street as a “crackhead” but the facts of the matter are that we only ever saw him smoking marijuana. I am using the term only for some specific tropes concerning voice and character. A Court Jester like persona and the type of deep and raspy speech you can no doubt already hear in your head. He had asked us to smoke his weed with him and we weren’t smoking very much of it so he complained that we were getting him “drunk” as he took one uninterrupted toke after another.

As these guys are always wont to do he was holding court on nothing much of anything:

“The other day my kids come up to me and say…”

This is where things got odd. When he switched to the character of his “kids” his voice got even deeper and even raspier. Think of somebody that already speaks in a stereotypical “crackhead” voice and now imagine that person doing the most intense, exaggerated impression of a “crackhead” voice they could muster. The tone was still light and comic but the edge on the voice was like something out of a horror movie:

“How you live? How you stay alive?”

My response was almost involuntary:

“Damn! Your kids got some fucked up raspy ass voices! They even older than you are?”

We all laughed. I was making my wife laugh telling this story again in the car with me. She’s getting near her wit’s end with the stories which is part of the reason I started writing them down in the hope that getting some of it down in print would save me from cycles of endless repetition but she never gets sick of this one. I thought about the absurdity of telling the story, doing his voice and then doing him doing the voice.

As always I have to wonder what the fuck is wrong with the hypothetical children. It occurred to me today that maybe they weren’t children in the usual biological sense at all but rather some type of deeply fried homonculi he had inadvertently created by spilling blood on the ground like in the first Hellraiser movie. Twisted, skeletal golems of wire, bone and garbage clawing their way out of the mud and desperately wanting to know:

“How you live? How you stay alive?”