Listen, before you go any further, you should know that Tales of the Birdman is intended for mature audiences only. The views expressed within do not reflect the views of WordPress, Shiny Red Nothing, or myself. Read at your own risk and enjoy. Life’s too short to be offended.
Tales Of The Birdman by Wayne Bird
I: Keeping Our Vices Warm
3.5: Wayne Bird’s Top Five Favorite Things About Two Thousand Five, In Descending Order, Partially Related To Music, But Not Limited To Music
Hello, Folks, I’m Wayne Bird, and this is this year’s edition, the very first of a long line of editions, of Wayne Bird’s Top Five Favorite Things About Two Thousand Five, In Descending Order, Partially Relating To Music, But Not Limited To Music, with the other editions to be about the years, as they come in numerical order, until I am dead or rendered useless by some means or distraction or with the possibility of means of distraction.
5. Coffee Plus Marijuana: Try this when classes start again- as soon as you get home from school, smoke a bowl and drink four cups of coffee. Keep the coffee and homework coming. You will be a goddamn machine. Oh, but this is imperative: LEAVE YOUR HOUSE. Go to a coffee house or Starbucks or something. Trust me. Leave your house.
4. I See Sound: This is not that Blatant Self Promotion bullshit. Fuck that. And fuck that Bootsy Collins song (though, in truth, I do Fear Da Tiger personally and deeply). What I’m talking about is good music, important music writing, and even better photography- led by a dedicated staff of goofballs, gossippers, elitists, and Dale, a self described Pirate King, who, honestly, treats me like shit. Hey, when am I gonna get paid for this?
3. Rock N’ Roll: Oh, man. The top three are so close together that I can hardly tell them apart. I have considered, instead of numbering them: 3, 2, 1, numbering them: 1, 1, 1, but I felt that would do you a disservice (“You” meaning “Dale”). But Rock N’ Roll. It’s here to stay I think. It’s even here in our little hometown. Did anyone else see Dead Flowers open up for Psychic Ills and Blood On The Wall at Southgate House? What a show. DF is weird. There singer is dimutive and looks like a boy in jeans and t-shirt and boy’s haircut. She growls and wails into the microphone while the band soldiers around Fallish territory. Loud And Crazy Punk. That’s what I’m going to call it. The bass player was decked out in a polyester green thrift store tuxedo and played melodic bass that lost against the guitar, but always sounded melodic and badass on it’s own. The keyboard player looked straight from a french movie, bob haircut, thrift store wedding dress, sex kitten boots to her knees: ambient synth, catchy melodies, and drone-alongs coming from her drunk little fingers. It was great, though, for all I know, 5 Songs By Dead Flowers may be impossible for you to find. Lucky for you, Dead Flowers lives here, in your backyard, and you can ask them for it when you see them. Tell Sarah Y I want her phone number.
2. March Of The Penguins: Who knew a movie about penguins walking around the ice to get laid could be so awesome? These penguins go through some tough shit, man. It’s fucking cold in Antartica. It’s like, colder than it is here even.
1. VD: Yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but VD really was my favorite thing about 2005. I know I’ve led you to believe differently, but the six months I had VD were not altogether unpleasant. Sometimes it was really nice. Of course, VD got around, and the repercussions of that are obvious. It’s a fact that somewhere, deep inside of me, I will always have VD.
Listen, before you go any further, you should know that Tales of the Birdman is intended for mature audiences only. The views expressed within do not reflect the views of WordPress, Shiny Red Nothing, or myself. Read at your own risk and enjoy. Life’s too short to be offended.
“Leave me alone/ is all that I say/ when I have nothing/ in me to give away/ a purple marten in her house/ she hollers at me/ why be inhuman/ why be like me/ like so many robins/ like so many doves/ like so many love birds/ with so many loves/ like the songs of the bobwhite/ without any words/ when we are inhuman/ we’re one with the birds”
— Will Oldham
“Homer no function beer well without.”
— Homer Simpson
Tales Of The Birdman by Wayne Bird
I: Keeping Our Vices Warm
1: The Birdman vs VD
The trick is to fry it in butter first. You get it kind of brown, kind of brownish-green really, then you add it to the mix and eggs and water or whatever, and then pour the batter into a well oiled cake pan. It’s just standard brownie baking from there, but allow a couple of hours for them to kick in. You’ll think that they aren’t going to work, but trust me, Bruce says they will.
I’m baking pot-brownies because my girlfriend punched me and burst a blood vessel in my right eye, which is nestled in a warm bed of swollen grey flesh. My friend Bruce told me that it would relieve the swelling, like with cataracts or something, but I think that sounds like bullshit. I’m only doing it because it will piss Vin Diesel off (Vin Diesel being my special lady friend- we’ll get to her in a bit). Besides, this is college. My junior year. And college is meant for this kind of stuff, right?
Bruce turns me on to crazy music. Let me tell you about him: Bruce is thirty-seven years old and a veteran of the first Gulf War. He is suffering from “Gulf War Syndrome,” among other afflictions I’m still not to clear on, and is confined to a wheelchair. He lied about his age when he applied to UC and somehow managed to get a dorm room. Two and a half years later and still no one seems to have noticed. I should also say that Bruce is kind of crazy. Maybe you’ve seen him about campus? He has long black hair and a shaggy beard, is a hippy, is usually in cheap black sunglasses, and is usually in an Ed Hall t- shirt- unless it is winter, when he’ll wear a thermal shirt or two under the Ed Hall t-shirt. He’s a sophomore now, but still has no major. He’s taking all sorts of classes in all sorts of subjects.
Bruce turned me on to The Moldy Peaches and I turned VD onto it. “Vin Diesel” is not really her name, but she just changed her major to drama, wants to be a director, and claims Fast And The Furious as her favorite movie. All I get is the finger and maybe a bruise on my arm (roughly the size of a big metal pentagram ring) for my honesty. I will see her through this, but it’s “Vin Diesel” until she switches majors.
I was telling you about The Moldy Peaches. They’re miles away from what I usually listen to, but I love them because they are retarded, and I knew that would endear VD to them. Bruce said they only had one good song, but they were worth checking out. They kind of remind me of The Vaselines, who Kurt Cobain suggested that everyone should check out way back in 1991 or earlier. Like The Vaselines, The Moldy Peaches are very lo-fi, fun, and a little naughty minded. Unlike the Scottish two-piece, the New York two-piece are really foul-mouthed. A little too much for me, but VD flipped over them.
I woke up one morning at seven AM with her sitting at her desk in her underwear, looking perfect and beautiful but for a large upside-down cross tattooed on her back between her shoulder blades- down her spine- all elaborate Celtic knot-work. Not that she’s an Irish Satanist or anything, she just thought it would be bitchin’, and I admit, seeing it there for the first time, it kind of was. The horizontal portion of the Celtic-knot-upside-down-cross runs the length of the small of her back and has Japanese markings in negative space across its middle. It’s as if the artist had placed tiny stencils of the characters over her skin and drafted the knot-work around them. Actually, I have no idea how it was done, nor will I ask, as I enjoy the mystery of the whole thing. The vertical plank of the cross begins at her neck’s beginning, slopes along with her spine, and ends just above her ass crack.
So, it’s seven in the morning and she’s blasting The Moldy Peaches from her Bose, singing along at the top of her lungs to a song about sucking cock for money.
I tell Bruce this story after English class while we get high in his Oldsmobile (which he drives using a hand accelerator and hand brake- contraptions I had never known to exist before Bruce). I tell him how much it pissed me off to be waked up like that and leave out the part about how much it turned me on. He is obviously aware of how much it must have turned me on. He gets a kick out of it and tells me that he never has to worry about getting laid, that he has a succubus named Dorothy.
You should know that girls at school don’t talk to Bruce. Every once in a while, some blonde and naive seventeen year old freshman girl will approach him out of pity (in the summer, his chicken bones climbing out of his cut off camo shorts- ending in flip-flops at the wheelchair’s foot rests. In July, his toe- nails were painted royal purple, and he had talked VD into painting perfect yellow smiley faces onto his big toes’ nails). He hits on these poor girls in spectacularly inappropriate ways. “Thank God for sending me a sweet young little girl like you. I haven’t made love to a woman since shrapnel took my prostate, and I have been praying to Mary and Jesus every night for you.” Oh, I forgot to say that before he said that, he had taken the hand of this innocent miss to admire her High School class ring. He stared her in the eye with sincere intensity, a hint of a smile creasing his cheeks. Mostly, word has spread, and girls make wide circles around him to keep away. That’s the way he wants it, I suppose.
But none of this is important, because Bruce has a succubus named Dorothy. He tells me she is very short, 5’3 or so, and has shoulder length black hair that is always styled differently. She consistently looks amazing. He emphasizes this with various hand motions and signals and adjectives I’ve never used and I expect are invented. Once, he wanted a redhead and Dorothy showed up as a redhead. She was like that, somehow able to know what he was going to be in the mood for when she arrived. And had she always had those freckles, those freckles like any natural redhead would have? They were slight. Perhaps they had always been there and she was a natural redhead and he had just never noticed. He was on a lot of medication after all. But, still, her pubic hair was black as an AC/DC album cover. If the question would be: how much blacker can they be? The answer would be: none. She had been visiting him ever since the army had moved him to an Ohio VA Hospital after the war.
You should know that we got really stoned while Bruce told me about his succubus in his car around the corner from Chipotle. I’m new to marijuana and never would have considered it in High School. I went to church every Sunday morning until my senior year (some time I’ll tell you about the time I taught the birds and the bees to a junior high school aged Sunday School class). Anyways, pot is new for me, and is yet another thing Bruce introduced me to. I had never talked to VD about it because it had yet to come up in our month long relationship. Neither of us have ever really even drank, but, like I said, I believe that this time to try new things. We have discussed this. She agrees. She wants to try new things too. You can imagine my surprise when she absolutely flips out upon seeing me after Bruce drops me off at her apartment.
Her parents are potheads. Her ex-boyfriend, not the one she broke up with six months ago and not the four year relationship before that where the boy broke her nose because he thought her jeans were too slutty, but the boyfriend before that. Tommy. He was a pothead and prioritized Final Fantasy video games and his bong (which he called “The Incredible Hulk”) over her. I am not open minded, but stupid, and that giant freckle/mole on my right side is probably cancer.
I’m all: fuck, honey, darlin’, I’m sorry this is fun and harmless and you should try it and you look so pretty today and how was class. And, apparently, she feels that I should be violated in a violent sort of way with a grilling utensil and now my “My Chemical Romance” CD is broken in half because she hates it and I’m an asshole.
I was so ridiculously pissed that I went directly to Bruce’s dorm room to listen to old Velvet Underground records, original first pressings you should know, and to get his recipe for pot brownies. He introduced me to Zima as well. This was not the first time I tried one, but the last time it was just one. This time it was seven. And three rum and Cokes.
So, I walk all the way back to VD’s apartment in Covington, Bruce’s Gulf War army helmet, stolen from his closet after he had passed out, strapped firmly to my chin. I make a stop at Blockbuster, a retailer known for it’s disaproval of helmets, to buy up all the Vin Diesel movies I can find and an assistant manager follows my every stumble until I check out and leave. I bust into VD’s unlocked apartment singing that Moldy Peaches song about sucking cock for money and declare that we will have a movie marathon prior to shaving her head to look Vin Diesel. With any luck, it would come back black, just like Dorothy The Sucubus’s hair.
The doctor said that her punch was not as bad as I was making it out to be, and her pentagram ring had only busted a small blood vessel and it was no big deal. Black eye and all, it should be healed up in a few days or so. Meantime, I’m packing for Thanksgiving, and calling Sally “VD” in this column to piss her off and get some revenge. Also, I am making these brownies, which I will trick her into eating.
I should tell you before closing that if you see Bruce about campus or in his dorm building, you should ask him about his sucubus, as he loves the idea of having his life published for entertainment value. Do so at your own risk, though.
Shiny Red Nothing 