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Platypuses

Script

Australia, 1799. White people, as they so often do, discover something that has existed for tens of thousands of years and been known of and tended to by the natives to the point that it’s been common place for as long as the natives can remember. The white people are astounded by their brilliance and bravery, celebrate their great fortune – a blessing from god – and waste no time in changing its name and pushing it to the brink of extinction before “saving” it – which they pat themselves on the back heartily for – and making it a totem of their own culture, erasing its considerable history.
In this particular case, the white person is Captain Hueling Q. Winbiggler and the thing is a strange Australian creature with a bill, thick fur, a large flat tail, and webbed feat, known to the aboriginals as mallangong or tambreet or dulaiwarrung, depending on which aboriginal you ask.
Captain Winbiggler was exploring the Northern coast of Australia, then known to Europeans as New Holland, at the behest of King George III. He hoped to find gold and magical fountains and spices and people to sell spices to. People were crazy for spices back then.
Instead he found the platypus.
Winbiggler, like some of our best middle aged actors, was a renowned prankster. Six months earlier he had reported back home that he’d discovered a race of gigantic, hairy, pig people. All of Britain was abuzz with the report, but when Dr. Rundell Framebridge, a timid, proper intellectual and Winbiggler’s point man in the motherland, received the supposed proof of this discovery, it was just a crude drawing of his mother.
So Dr. Framebridge was understandably skeptical upon hearing of a creature that was a cross between a duck and a beaver. It sounded like it could very well be another joke about his Mom.
It wasn’t, though the creature he found before him still seemed like a hoax. It had, as Winbiggler had described, fur, webbed feet, and a beaver-esque tail. Framebridge assumed that this was just some clever taxidermy – not uncommon at the time. Monkey tops sewn to fish tails were a popular variation, passed off as mermaids, a far cry from the disturbingly sexualized mer-people of today.
He cut into it’s fur to find the stitching. There was none. This bizarre creature was real. What in God’s name had god been thinking when he created this horrid beast? He opened its mouth to inspect the teeth. He didn’t find teeth – adult platypuses don’t have any – but he did find a graphic rendering of the woman that had birthed him being double teamed by rhinoceros scribbled on some paper.
Captain Winbiggler had struck again.

The platypus got it’s name from the Greek words “platus” which, loosely translated to English, means “freaky-deaky” and “pous”, meaning beaver. As with most things, its existence was fairly inconsequential to Europeans, but folks were eager to wear and consume its parts. The pelt – which looks and feels like a beaver’s but smells of pineapple and your first significant girlfriend’s morning breath – became a popular source for stoles and, because of its water repellant properties, swim wear across Europe in the years following the discovery. The bill was either ground down and used to produce healthifying tinctures and the first known fake dog shit – the kind used to pull hilarious pranks, much to Captain Winbiggler’s delight – or strung from a chain and worn around the neck, where it could hold a beverage or perfumes, anything really, or be brought up to the face to be worn over the nose and mouth to scare children and ward off disease. Their flesh was never widely eaten as it tastes like bologna, which most people had not yet become glutenous enough to deem edible. (Editor’s note: It also had yet to be invented.)
As the human population of Australia grew, the platypus population dwindled and the cost of their parts increased. But by 1815 the craze had died down considerably due to the explosive popularity amongst the very rich of clothes made from human hair, typically harvested from orphans.
And so the platypus population made a comeback, and the animals lived peacefully, as they do today, in the parts of Australia left undisturbed by man as well as the countries zoos and the homes of various eccentrics and hipster scofflaws.
In 1898 it was confirmed that the platypus laid eggs – no one had even thought to find out if they did before then, why would they? – and, upon the discovery and removal of those eggs, that the male platypus is equipped with a poisonous claw on its rear right foot that can kill an animal the size of a dog, cause an adult human severe pain for months, and probably kind of sting a blue whale, though this has never been attempted, as far as I know.
In 1901, when Australia declared independence, the platypus was named the countries official animal after defeating a kangaroo and a wallaby in a fight to the death.
In 1905 the worlds largest platypus was erected in Shelley, Idaho, for some reason. It was carried away by a tornado in 1942, killing 34 people at a Woolworths two towns over when it dropped. The headline the next day read, “Platypus Plummets, People Perish.”
Throughout the 1920s and 30s, a gentleman named Manvil Werts became know as The Platypus Man, and was a popular attraction in the Shamblin Family Traveling Freak Show, which made it’s way all over the United States. Werts stood only four feet tall, was covered in hair from head to toe, and had a massive nose. He really did look like a platypus, with the exception of the tale, which had to be pinned on for the show, but still managed to marry a quite classically beautiful woman of average height and fathered 16 children, none of which looked like a platypus. One did look like a potato, though, and went on to have his own successful career as a freak, as well as inspiring the popular Mr. Potato Head toy.
An infamous 1982 episode of Mork and Mindy featured the arrival of Mork’s beloved childhood pet, Zoldar, a 6 foot long talking platypus, who arrived from Ork in, you guessed it, an egg. The animal is sent to Earth by Orson, a disembodied voice and Mork’s manager or something – to remind Mork of his roots and prevent him from becoming too human. Zoldar, terrified by his new surroundings, runs roughshod over Boulder, reducing the city to ashes, all the while screaming, “I didn’t ask for this! I didn’t ask for this!” The episode ends with the beast dead by Mork’s own hand – he hacks and hacks and hacks at it with a shard of its own egg, weeping madly while Mindy, her blood rich with the platypuses poison, lies near death only feet away. The episode never aired and Mork and Mindy would be cancelled within the year.
In 1994, a homeless woman named Bilomina Shivers gained national attention in the United States when a keen eyed movie critic noticed her and her pet platypus, Gordy Shivers, in the background of several notable films shot over the previous decade. Look closely at the scene early in The Neverending Story, when Bastion is running from bullies to seek shelter in a book store. As he turns a corner, you’ll get a brief glimpse of Bilomina staring straight into the camera, holding Gordy’s leash. She similarly appears in Purple Rain, Sixteen Candles, Fletch, Re-Animator, Brazil, Blue Velvet, Howard the Duck, Flight of the Navigator, La Bamba, The Last Temptation of Christ, Gorillas In the Mist, Do the Right Thing, Tremors, and Aladdin, just to name a few. The directors of the various films have denied casting her and were unaware that she appeared in their movies at all. Asked how she had found herself in so many films, she replied, simply, “I goes where I goes and Gordy comes with me.”
In the years since then, the platypus has laid pretty low. Scientists have discovered a few new, barely believable facts – it stores fat in its tail so it can go long stretches of time without eating and its bill is covered in tiny electroreceptors that it uses to sense prey and predators when it is underwater, for instance. It’s been the subject of a ludicrous number of children’s songs, and the title of an equally ludicrous number of instrumental jazz, house, and speed metal songs. But, despite its extraordinary features, the platypus is a humble creature, really, solitary and stoic, intending no harm to anyone and usually able to avoid inflicting it.
We could all stand to take a lesson or two from this magnificent, ludicrous beast.

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Bees

Script

Insects – they’re across the board disgusting, everybody knows it. From aphids to beetles, cockroaches to dragonflies, earwigs to fleas, green stink bugs (green stink bugs!) to horseflies (horseflies!), Io Moths to June bugs, Katydids to lacewings, maggots to nits to owl flies to pea weevils to quiblets to roaches to stink bugs to tsetse flies to unlined giant chafers to vine borers to water bugs to xylodromus to Yucatan Boll Weevils to Zorapterans. They are a menace, earth aliens and poo disseminators matched in awfulness only by underwater creature, many of which, not coincidentally, resemble insects. And at least with the underwater creatures you can avoid them by not infringing on their territory. Not so with the insect. They’re everywhere we are. So, why do we, as slightly less gross and more evolved creatures, not eradicate these wee freaks completely? What is protecting these mini-monsters of land and sky from the bitter sting of our noxious chemical wrath?

The answer? The Honey Bee – Mother Nature’s least disgusting anthropoidal daughter.

Fact (FACT! (deep voice)): The honey bee is beautiful. Its fuzzy black and gold stripes are a pleasure to behold, like a bespoke sweater on a lithe young Gordon Sumner.

Fact: The honey bee is clean. It does not, under any circumstance, eat or crawl on shit, be it human or dog or antelope or whatever. In fact, there are honeybees in the hive whose sole job is to tidy up, like a horde of tiny, lady Mr. Belvederes.

Fact: The honey bee is peace loving. It doesn’t want to sting you and will not unless you bumble into its dwelling like a massive, unannounced house guest, you buffoon! When you are stung by a bee – you can bet dollars to donuts it wasn’t of the honey variety and I would bet those same dollars to those same donuts that it was in fact a wasp. Perhaps you should learn some science before hurling wild accusations, buffoon!

Fact: A Honey bee society is overwhelmingly matriarchal, despite what the lazy writing of current day, too rich for his own good Jerry Seinfeld would have you believe. That is to say, run entirely by the ladies, that is to say, almost inherently better than what we’ve got going, though to be honest, I think we’ve got a low key matriarchy percolating ourselves.

Fact: Honey bees make honey. This is astounding. It’s like a cow making cheese. Sweet golden cheese.

Fact: The honey bee likes the same things we do. Bold colors, beautiful flowers, fruits, vegetables, honey, and the music of Neil Diamond, presumably. 

 We see elegantly simple eye to staggeringly complex multiple eye, us and honey bees, so it’s no surprise that our histories are so inextricably interwoven.

 Allow me to start with an ancient anecdote; a series of cave drawings, actually.  No more than a couple of crude doodles, when it comes right down to it, but they tell quite a story.  They were discovered on the wall of the Altamira Cave in Spain and have been dated as far back as 25,000 years, to the Upper Paleolithic era. 

 The story, depicted as I said, in some haphazard, but fairly impressive for the time, scribbles, goes like this:

 The year was 22,984 BCE.  Homo sapiens were king, having successfully completed history’s first genocide by wiping out those poor Neanderthal folks, whose only crime had been missing a couple of evolutionary adaptations.  Survival and tool making were all the rage, and everyone was looking forward to the upcoming Solutrian period – just 984 years away - having grown bored to tears with their Chatelperronian tools.

Like a recently divorced dad in his first solo apartment, these early-ish homo sapiens had a lot of time and space on their hands. There were only 30,000 people in Europe, after all. That comes to about 1,113.3 square feet per capita, which means that an Upper Paleolithic loner, like the previously mentioned recently divorced dad in his first solo apartment, could get up to a lot of horse feathers.

That’s why marriage is so swell. Aside from the love and companionship and building a life together – all great – you also get someone around to shame you into acting like a decent homo sapien.

Anyway, this particular Upper Paleolithic loner, Plorg the Lonely of 14th Hilltop was the moniker he answered to, was sitting on his haunches, having a good think. After general puttering about, sitting on ones haunches and having a good think was the most popular form of entertainment among folks at the time, especially loners.

So he was thinking. About survival, at first, which was very important to and difficult for these early people on account of they hadn’t invented many of the amenities we so take for granted today. Like the Zune, for instance, or HAM radios or really anything else outside of some vaguely tool shaped rocks and a pair of pants or a shirt here and there, though clothes hadn’t really caught on yet since these early people had yet to identify the shame lurking within themselves.

So he was thinking about survival, according to these barely legible chicken scratches on the walls of this cave, and his mind began to wander, as minds do, to food – and here’s where this early man becomes notable – his mind begins to stir with the beginnings of the concept of sweetness, which was not a taste sensation yet known to humans, but he imagined the idea of it, and he thought of his favorite color which was the color of the sun through the dust of the planes when a heard of _ passes hill 14, which is a kind of pale gold, and he conflates that with the idea of sweetness and then his mind, as minds also often do, drifts vaguely to sex, and he thinks of come and incorporates that into his previous idea and the whole of the idea becomes what we now know as honey. And then, since man is naturally a masochist, he imagines the difficulty of obtaining such a substance, unnecessarily, of course, since this is all in his own mind – he could just as easily imagine that it is bountiful and a pleasure to obtain – imagines that it would be protected by women – women who could hurt him – and he’s angry at the women because he’s dumb and not very self reflective and believes that anything that can hurt him is evil and doesn’t deserve nice things and he wants to take the sweet, sun colored come away from the evil women, and he stands up angrily and storms off to avenge this injustice, even though it only exists in his mind, and he stomps around for days like a lunatic, and, what do you know, on the fourth day he unthinkingly swats a honey bee hive, unaware of what it is, not with curiosity but with unthinking rage, and his arm is covered in bees and also the sweet, sun colored come of his imaginings, and they sting and he swats and it’s unclear to him or us if his imaginings were just a lucky guess or if he actually manifested this thing, and eventually all the bees have died and he is close to death from stings but also ecstatic from the rush of the honey that now drips down his chin, and another human happens to come along and is appalled by the swollen, lumpy man who is licking golden come from all over his own body but also writhing around in pain but the new human, who happens to be an artist, stops long enough to hear the man’s final words – this story, more or less – and to, hesitantly, at first, of course, but then with greater and greater gusto, eat the honey, and he goes back and records the tale via the previously mentioned barely decipherable cave scribblings.

And that’s how humans first encountered the honey bee, so far as we know. It is, of course, entirely possible and even likely that someone else encountered them before this and it just didn’t get written down.

When it comes to history, we’re like Ray Charles in B. Dalton’s Bookseller – the ghost of a blind man in a store that no longer exists.

There are, of course, tales of bees going back to the beginning of time from history’s schizophrenic aunt, religion. Religious kooks have a wacky story for just about everything.

The Kalahari’s San people, for instance, who are not, to my surprise, characters from Star Wars, believed that humans were sprung from the body of a mantis after a bee planted a seed inside of it.

But our next real world documentation of humanity’s interaction with bees comes from Georgia, the country. Some archeologists found some honey there.

Our next interesting real world documentation of this is ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptians had a total boner for honey and honey bees. They used it for everything. They ate it by the fistful, used it to do gross sex stuff, rubbed it on rashes and bunions and sores they got from the gross sex stuff. You name it. It was, as far as they were concerned, a gift from the gods – a show of appreciation for all of the cool shit they were building.

 King Tut was buried with the stuff so he would have a kind of house warming gift for all of the gods in wherever they lived – the location of the Egyptian gods was not conveniently specific, it didn’t have a fun name like heaven, which is probably why it died out – people crave specificity - when he got there.  Fat load of good it did him, as we just it up and put it in a museum.

 The Egyptians harvested their honey in much the same way as we do today, except that they used baskets because they were too dumb to think of wooden hives with removable slats.

 On to Israel, where, according to the Bible, people were pretty sweet on honey as well. It’s mentioned 26 times in the good book.  That’s 26 times more than they bothered to mention ----, for reference. Just get a load of this sexy Bible verse:

Your lips, my bride, drip honey; Honey and milk are under your tongue, And the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon.

Scandalous, sexy stuff.

Anyway, you get the idea. Folks love honey. Have always loved honey and by extension honey bees.

Most folks, anyway. Native Americans referred to bees as white man’s flies. Perhaps if they hadn’t been so hurtful about our bugs we’d’ve treated them better.

So, let’s take a look at honey – its creation and many uses – as everyone knows that a thing is only as good as a commercial output and bees are no exception.

Honey is a byproduct of bee bulimia – that is to say, bees collect delicious pollen and nectar come back to the hive, and vomit it up. Then they use bee magic to turn it into delicious golden sugar goop, which feeds their young. It’s a beautiful, disgusting, delicious process.

But let’s get to the important question – how does honey benefit us human beings? God didn’t create these gorgeous creatures to live autonomous lives for their own health and as an integral cog in the machinery of Earth’s finely tuned through evolution ecosystem, after all. He created them to keep us – their manic depressive overlords – flush with that gooey, sucratic elixir.

Honey or, as I like to call it, God’s Come, has many, many uses. You can eat it, of course, on toast or regular style bread, drizzled on fruit, as a sugar substitute, with your paws, over ice cream, in cereal, in graham crackers, in mustard, on buffalo wings or ham if you’re into the whole slaughter of innocent animals thing, in tea, or just by the spoonful, shameful and sticky, alone in your basement.

Why you could slather Apian Snack Food on just about anything.

But let’s talk about some of the lesser known, more practical and medicinal uses of honey.

First and most importantly, of course, you can just slap that goop right in your hair to create whichever beautiful hairstyle pops into your mind grapes. Image is everything, as Andre Agassi was once fond of saying and my father was fond of quoting to the detriment of just about everybody. And as an added bonus for the entomologists in the audience, it’s going to attract a lot of fascinating bugs to your head, which can be studied at your leisure.

Moving down to below your hair is, as everybody knows, your skin. The ol’ epidermis. Biggest organ in your body, they say, so you’re going to want to take care of it. And ain’t no better way to take care of it than to just absolutely drown that shit in bee batter. Rub it on pour it on, I don’t care, just stop what you’re doing and get some of that heavenly hive juice all over your hide.

Next up, your eyes. There is simply nothing more soothing to the persistent itch in your peepers caused by seasonal allergies – ironically the result of our friend the bee’s prodigious pollination – than a fat dollop of Nature’s Visine. Just let it slowwwwwly drip onto the offending eyeball and bask in the eventual relief. UUUUUUUUUUH, that’s goooooooood.

Onto your nose. Huff up a line of apian nose beers and you’ll be ready to get on the scene like a sex machine, a la sweaty, borderline nonsensical 80s era Mr. Entertainment himself, James Brown. And unlike the devil’s Red Bull powder, Comb Coke can be purchased in any supermarket! Just look for it on the shelf above the Peanut Butter.

Hows abouts them ears? Headed to a screamo or metal core concert? Of course you are. Well, those things get pretty loud and you’re not getting any younger – it must take you forever to squeeze into those skinny jeans, ya goof – so why don’t you protect the old earballs by jam packing them with buzz butter?

Mouth! There is simply no end to the number of beneficial ways to get that sweet sweet bee tea into your craw and no end to the positive outcomes when you do. You eat enough of that delicious comb sap and you’ll be happier, smarter, better smelling, healthy as Mr. Ed on a juice cleanse, and up to 54% more resplendent.

Listen, I could go on and on. Stretch marks, cancer, toe fungus, spousal distrust, penis itching, penal distrust, spousal itching, AIDS, feline aids, death, the dizzies, racism, alcoholism, gigantism, dementia, the heebie-jeebies, butter face, depression, sleepiness, nervousness, nightmares, daymares, Adult SIDS, menstrual cramps, charley horses, hiccups, psychopathy, sociopathy, Republicanism – honey can cure all of those things and more.

Thanks, Bees! You’ve truly earned the moniker “Nature’s Holistic Medicine Practitioners and Friend to Humans Everywhere”!

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Roy Orbison

Script

What do you think of when you hear the name Roy Orbison? Black glasses? A bad haircut? A soaring, operatic voice? A partially shaved bear in a Dracula costume? Pretty Woman? The Travelling Willburys? Maybe even David Lynch movies?

Perhaps nothing at all. Certainly not pimping or writing books about pimping or inventing rap music.

Of all of the founding fathers of Rock ‘N Roll – Elvis, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis – Roy Orbison is the most anonymous – a figure that most know, but few know much about.

We know his music. He had 22 songs in the Billboard Top 40 between 1960 and 1964, many of which remain firmly entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist. Only the Lonely. Crying. Blue Bayou. It’s Over. Pretty Woman. You Got It.

The music can be ethereal, enchanting. Other-worldly. Heartbreaking. Many other adjectives. The songs often defy the rules of the craft, ignore traditional structure. Typical early rock filtered through a unique mind, tweaked with strings and an emo sensibility – endearing innocence and vulnerability.

And that voice. Equal parts Pavarotti, Dean Martin, and hysterical grandmother, it soars above everything else, twists and turns and crescendos. It holds you in its grip.

There’s a suspense to it all. How does this work? Will it keep working? Every song seems like it’s on the verge falling apart, every note on the verge of breaking.

But it doesn’t. They don’t.

He’s no James Brown, though. Man, can you imagine that episode. Anyway . . .

We also know the look. Two looks really – the early years and the later years.

The early years, starting from the top: Thick, goth black hair, drowning in mousse and wrangled into a helmet tight pompadour perched above a pale, southern, weak chinned, nerd face; Small, close set, wonky eyes barely visible under thick lensed, black framed, prescription sunglasses, over a small-mouthed, dopey, slightly down-turned smile, all coming together and looking better than it had any right to – greater than the sum of its parts and sitting atop a thin, normal style body in a classic black and white suit.

In the later years, the pompadour had fallen, long and still stiff, outlining the contours of an increasingly doughy face, like a black candle melted over a peeled potato. He grew chubby and favored the least flattering outfit possible for this development – a polyester jumpsuit or, alternately, a more flattering suit, bolo tie combo.

Roy Orbison was a dark, homely, beardless wizard. A conjurer of sadness. A fascinating, important, weird figure in the birth of rock and in the decades after, and it’s time he got his due: the white guilt replacement topic of a solitary, three-fourths episode of a little loved, little listened to, brilliant podcast.

An anecdote, to begin, told by Tom Waits to Charlie Rose. For reference, the concert referred to is the Black And White Night, a kind of victory lap show, where Roy Orbison was backed by some of the artists that count him as an influence, including Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, KD Lang, Elvis Costello, Jackson Brown, T-Bone Burnett, and Waits:

“This is an odd story. It was after the concert, The Black and White Thing, it was a few hours after that and some of us were still hanging out back at Roy’s hotel room, drinking and, you know, um, imbibing in some other, uh, potent potables, if you will – only a few men left standing. Me, Roy, and Jackson, but I think Jackson was kind of teetering on the edge of the abyss at that point, so I suppose he probably doesn’t remember. Anyway, Roy’s perched on his bed and I’m there and Jackson’s slumped in a chair and Roy says in that quiet voice of his, he says, uh, kind of out of nowhere, “If you play all of the songs I’ve written backwards and at half speed, in the order I wrote them in, it’s an incantion from the Egyptian book of the dead in the original Egyptian.” And I laughed, you know, because I thought it was a joke, but Roy wasn’t laughing and, he’s got those glasses, right, so it’s hard to see his eyes, but from what I could see he was staring right at me and I just, uh, you know, I stopped. Stopped laughing. And then he started singing, kind of, intoning lower and slower than his usual thing, and it sounds like language but it’s not any language I know, right, but it sure as hell could have been Egyptian, and he goes on for, must have been an hour. I swear it, an hour. Jackson fell asleep but Roy was staring into my eyes, man, the whole time and I didn’t dare blink. And then he finished and he said time for bed, and he nodded to the door, and I, uh, I hit the bricks,man, and that’s the last time I ever saw Roy Orbison. He died about a year later.”

Roy Orbison, aka The Big O, aka The Caruso of Rock, aka The Spookiest Man In Showbiz, was born on April 23rd, 1936 to Orbie Lee Orbison, a disgraced magician, known professionally as The Black Orb and ousted from the magic union for dabbling too deeply into the black arts and his refusal to grow a moustache, a requirement for the magic union at the time, and Nadine Vesta Shults, Orbie’s gloomy assistant, who he had lured from a band of American Gypsies when she was but 12 years old.

The small family lived in relative isolation in Vernon, Texas, hunkered down through the Great Depression doing god-knows-what, but moved to Wink, Texas when Roy was seven after Orbie inherited his great uncle’s estate – a grim, dark, supposedly haunted mansion, looming over desolate oil fields.

It has since been razed and the hill it sat upon leveled to make way for a strip mall housing a Papa John’s Pizza, J. Appleseed’s Family Restaurant and Cider Brewery that used to be a Benigan’s, and the lonely remains of an abandoned Blockbuster Video, still unoccupied due to purported paranormal activity. A mute, albino boy strumming an invisible guitar has been spotted on multiple occasions, wandering the video racks, hopelessly searching, perhaps, for a VHS copy of The Fastest Guitar In the World, the ill-fated 1967 comedic western starring none other than Roy Orbison.

This is most of what we know of Orbison’s childhood, as he refused to speak of those days or much of anything really – he was renowned for his mute gloominess – but there is one additional item of interest. Until his seventeenth year Roy’s hair was bone white, not the deep black that would later become such a prominent aspect of his signature, unsettling style. The black hue came from hot tar, which he would run through his mane each morning with a steal comb and also accounted for the acrid, eye watering smell which filled any room he entered.

And we know that a young Roy Orbison played music, of course. From the day he was born he was singing. Legend has it that instead of crying, an infant Roy would wail a soul rending Bolero melody in perfect pitch. His father gave him his first guitar at six years old – conjured the instrument from another realm, if you believe the rumors, but it’s also possible he just bought it from a store. Either way, Roy took to it immediately, with no training, and would wander the oil fields below his family’s estate, strumming Spanish rhythms and crooning – always crooning – a tiny, pale boy leaving a swath of weeping roughnecks in his wake.

Which begs the question – is the ghost of a young Roy Orbison haunting an abandoned Blockbuster Video on the grounds of his family’s former estate? I’m not sure that’s how ghosts work, but it can’t just be a coincidence.

By the time he was a teenager, Roy Orbison was known and feared across West Texas, as a powerful musician and maybe more. His solo performances, mostly held in dirty, rowdy honky-tonks, were more séance than concert. The gloomy, nearly translucent kid would get on the stage with his guitar and the whole place would go quiet. Where there had been western swing and fights and whooping and hollering just a moment before, there was now only silence, occasionally interrupted by weeping, while he played his haunting tunes, songs which haven’t survived to this day, but were, according to the few accounts we have, closer to funeral dirges than country songs.

There was plenty of work for a while – there are innumerable dives in West Texas and at the time they’d let just about anybody play – but eventually Roy’s reputation for hypnotizing an audience became a detriment. The owners of the establishments couldn’t sell booze if their customers were in a weepy trance. They stopped hiring him.

So he retreated back to his family’s mansion.

And then he saw Elvis perform on Ed Sullivan and everything clicked into place. If he was going to be a musician, he’d have to channel whatever it was inside him into something more commercial.

So he changed his look – used the tar in his hair because it was close at hand and he liked the way it burned – put a band together, The Wink Westerners (later changed to the Teen Kings) names so ambiguous as to rouse no possible feelings of discomfort in potential booking agents or audience members, a plan of deceptive ambiguity that he would stick to his entire career.

They played covers, mostly – country tunes by Lefty Frizell and Bob Wills as well as rock stuff from Elvis and Johnny Cash. They were a sensation, packing them in from to _______ with their unique blend of standard youth music as filtered through the other-worldly voice of their front man.

And then Roy wrote the first song of his career. What, if Tom Waits is to be trusted, and he is, would, when played backwards, make up the final lines of the Egyptian incantation. The song was ominously titled, “Ooby Dooby”.

And, shockingly, it took off.

Everybody in America was doing the Ooby Dooby, wiggling to both the left and the right, shaking like a big rattle snack, unaware that they had fallen under the spell of devious mesmerist, whose ultimate goal we can only guess at, but was probably the legalization of . . . something, and, thus, uh, the ushering in of the end times.

Stop the podcast. This is going nowhere. Roy Orbison wasn’t a dark wizard. That was all lies. I admit it. He was a pretty nice, kind of boring guy with a killer voice and some great tunes.

Let me try this again. A show about bees, maybe? Okay, let’s try a show about bees.

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Iceberg Slim

Reid discusses Iceberg Slim and whether a white person can portray the black experience with his guest co-host, Foam Chomsky, a puppet.

Script:

Welcome to The Irrationally Exuberant. On today’s episode we’ll be looking at the life of Iceberg Slim – and for you white people in the audience, no, that’s not some kind of lettuce based diet.

FC: Jesus. What are you doing?

Ladies and gentlemen, that disapproving voice you’re hearing is my guest co-host for the first portion of this episode – Foam Chomsky, the skeptical puppet.

FC: Full disclosure. I’m not really a puppet. There’s no puppet here. I’m just Reid doing a dumb voice to represent his own doubts and insecurities. It’s not a very original gimmick.

Oh, wow, Foam Chomsky, I didn’t think we were going to reveal that to the listeners.

FC: You wrote it into the script, champ.

Right. Now, you were asking what I’m doing. I’m introducing the topic of the show. Iceberg Slim, real name Robert Beck, a notorious pimp from the 1930s and through the 50s who eventually became a prolific author and activist.

FC: Yeah. What are you doing?

A comedy podcast about Iceberg Slim.

FC: You, a middle class white 35 year old male living in Fargo, North Dakota are going to do a COMEDY podcast about an African American PIMP. You, Reid Messerschmidt, are going to make COMEDY about sexual violence against women, human trafficking, and racial stereotypes – in 2018 – without any black folks or women contributing? Just you and me, a dumb gimmick that is also just you.

That was my intention, I guess. I’m the only one that ever contributes to the show. It’s my show. And I just read Slim’s book, Pimp, and thought it was really interesting and bizarre and funny in its own horrifying way, so I wanted to talk about it. Sure I’m all of those things you said, but I recently read A Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Murder of Joe Louis and Whoreson by Donald Goines and Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward and I watched What Happened Miss Simone about Nina Simone and Dutchman by Amiri Baraka. I tried to cram in a lot of black culture and I think I’m pretty sensitive to the plight of women in an ostensibly patriarchal society – I consider myself a Feminist. So I think I’m . . . I think I’m good.

FC: You think you’re good, huh? Was that list meant to impress everyone?

Kind of, I suppose. But I did . . .

FC: You think that reading a bunch of books is somehow going to give you an inside track on the black experience?

I’ve watched The Wire twice.

FC: EVERYONE HAS WATCHED THE WIRE TWICE! Let me ask you this: How many black friends do you have? REAL friends.

There’s Torie at work, I like her a lot, and Robert that I used to work with, and I’m always happy to run into Peterson. I dated a black girl once. There are several I really enjoy on Facebook.

FC: REAL FRIENDS, REID!

None. But I live in Fargo! The options are limited! And I don’t make new friends easily.

FC: Right. But no black friends. So what gives you the right to make comedy about any facet of the black experience?

Well, I like to think that it’s the human experience.

FC: But sometimes you are very, very dumb. Remember when you thought that Michael J. Fox sang “For the Longest Time”?

I was just a kid! But I suppose that the fact that I had any opinion or thought about “Longest Time” proves how white I am.

FC: Wrong! Your opinions of or response to Billy Joel have nothing to do with race. Everyone knows about Billy Joel. You think black people don’t know about Billy Joel? I guess an argument could be made that Billy Joel is white culture, but you don’t think that black people know about white culture? How could they possibly avoid it? They’re drowning in it!

Well . . . did you notice that I watched Dutchman? Not even for the first time! That’s, like, advanced studies. And I really think I get it! It’s about how white culture – liberal, liberated white culture – sexualizes and gaslights black folks, drawing them in and pushing them away, criticizing them for being both not white enough and not black enough. And then punishing them when they act out in a way the way that we’d been goading them into the whole time. I see myself in it, see my own flaws. I’m culpable. It’s chilling stuff, Foam Chomsky.

FC: But you’re still making this COMEDY podcast about Iceberg Slim, and you’re going to dwell on the parts that adhere to atrocious racial stereotypes because that is what he’s primarily known for. Oh, sure, maybe you’ll have a few seconds where the music maybe gets a little slower and you’ll talk about how he changed his ways and became something of a force for civil rights and a good guy. Why not do the show about Amiri Baraka, if you’re so taken with him, or, better yet, James Baldwin?

Well, I don’t find them very funny. It’s hard to make comedy out of people you hold up on a pedestal.

FC: Well, why don’t you do one on Roy Orbison? He’s hilarious and right in your wheelhouse.

I’m working on an episode about Roy Orbison. But I don’t want this just to be a parade of white guys. It’s a double edged sword, if I may use a cliché. May I use a cliché, Foam?

FC: I’ll allow it.

Either this show is 100% white people, which seems wrong, or I, as a white man, am representing a group that I don’t have the right to speak for, which is wrong.

FC: Are you aware that there’s no law on the books stating that every white guy that finds himself amusing has to have a podcast or “be heard” by the broader public?

I am. But . . . I’m really funny. And I like doing this. And people seem to like hearing it. What if, say, Philip Roth had never put pen to paper just because he was a white male?

FC: Oh, lord. First, Philip Roth was a Jew. Second, Philip Roth was a genius. You’re no genius. Third, the answer to your question is nothing. What if Philip Roth had never put pen to paper? Nothing, probably. The world would go on almost exactly like it is now.

That’s fucking depressing.

FC: That’s nothing. If we never heard from one of you ever again, I’m pretty sure we’ve got enough to last a lifetime. Between Roth and Updike and a thousand Jonathan’s and literally almost every popular artist of all time, I’m pretty sure we’ve got our understanding of the white, male, middle class experience wrapped up.

But that’s why I want to do Iceberg Slim! It’s outside of that experience!

FC: Fair enough, but reading a couple black authors is not the same as understanding something, and I think we’re seeing what reacting to a thing without a full understanding of it will get you in this day and age. And we’ve barely touched on the glorification of sexual violence and human trafficking implicit in this story. That’s a whole other bag of potatoes.

But I read all the books and watched the things!

FC: And you enjoyed them, right?

Hmmmm. (whining) Yes. Very much so. The black community has truly given the world most of its greatest art. There seems to be an almost biblical sense of peril and magic running through Ellison, Baldwin, Baraka, and Simone. (sigh) You’re very wise, Foam Chomsky. Alright, I guess I’m going to do an episode about Roy Orbison – right after a commercial break!

Stay with me!

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Sam Patch

References and allusions include, but are not limited to: Icarus,  John Travolta, the Genesee River, George Washington, King Arthur, Jesus Christ, Niagara Falls, New England, base jumping, Western Migration, The Bible, Andrew Jackson, Elvis Presley, Gorgeous George, The Jolly Green Giant, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Carlos Williams, Bob Newhart, Craigslist, My Little Pony, Barry White, Betsy Ross, Netherlanders, Jedediah Smith, Puritans, opium, Giant North American Mason Bees, Freemasons, blueberries, and platypus buttholes.

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The Washington Generals

References and allusions include but are not limited to: Body shame, Basketball, Canada, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dr. James Naismith, the YMCA, Esperanto, Television, hula-hoops, the Internet, Scarlett Rubella, Tuberculosis, Jim Croce, Chicago, kangaroo boxing, The Harlem Globetrotters, New York City, Louis “Red” Klotz, The Philadelphia Sphas, Ken Doll, Judaism, Philadelphia, Rucker Park, South Dakota, Dynarex Cleansing Disposable Enemas, Karkov Vodka, Ralph Nader, Sisyphus, the gender spectrum, Sports Illustrated, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, The Chelsea Hotel, The Borscht Belt, Shecky Greene, Soupy Sales, crows, Mother Russia, the Mayflower, psilocyben, Williston, North Dakota, Arby’s, Whapeton, World War II, Betty Boop, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Greatest Generation, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 1960s, Baby Boomers, Richard Nixon, Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World”, The Osmonds, The Manson Family, Stanley Kubrik’s “A Clockwork Orange”, Jim Morrison, D.B. Cooper, Sean Astin, Brian Dunkleman, Ryan Seacrest, Meadowlark Lemon, Yiddish, Tootsie Pops, Super 8 Motel, Kool and the Gang’s “Live at the Sex Machine”, and black licorice jelly beans.

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Heaven’s Gate

References and allusions include, but are not limited to:  The Hale Bopp Comet, Bonnie Lou Nettles, God, Marshall Applewhite, Jesus Christ, Nikes, California, Eddie Vedder, Christianity, UFOs, Revelations 11, “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker, suicide, Tupperware, vegetarian chili, healing crystals, Oregon, Walter Cronkite, cancer, Luciferians, David Koresh, The Starship Enterprise, Mexico, Sodom, Egypt, Bill Engvall, Fargo, Feminism, Breathe-Rite Strips, and bedazzling.

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McDonaldland

References and allusions include, but are not limited to:  Valentine’s Day, The Ronald McDonald House, McDonald’s, Ronald McDonald, “Summer of Roses” by Willie Nelson, David Lynch, Egg McMuffin, Zune, Beijing, “Rock N Roll McDonalds” by Wesley Willis, Scotland, Robert the Bruce, Druids, the warlord Gillebride, Angus Og McDonald, The Knights Templar, Pope Clement V, the King of France, Satan, Pagans, The Illuminati, the New World Order, The Pantheon, The Luxor Temple, Freemasons, Ray Kroc, Mike Douglas, Baphomet, Cliven Bundy, chemtrails, Sarah Palin, AIDS, Space Pens, Willy Wonka, grimoires, magik, Willard Scott, Henry Kissinger, Heinz, Fruit of the Loom, Slinky, ouroboros, the All Seeing Eye, Liberals, Grimace, Hollywood, Shamrock Shakes, Uncle O’Grimacey, Mayor McCheese, Officer Big Mac, The Hamburglar, antisemitism, Goebbels, John F. Kennedy, The Professor, Captain Crook, Fry Guys, Anne Coulter, Dr. Drew, George W. Bush, The Fisher’s Island Golf Club, Skull and Bones, harakiri, Big League Chew, Raybans, and a SHOCKING TWIST!

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Gravity House

References and allusions include, but are not limited to: Swing, hobos, Jim Crow, Herbert Hoover, The Great Depression, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Rose of Sharon, Prince, Okies, scurvy, Washington, California, Gold Hill, Oregon, The Vortex, Zune, tuberculosis, Sherlock Holmes, John Litster, Scotland, Pubetron Fergleven, San Quentin Penitentiary, Barstow, Emil Jannings, Tillamook Indians, Clarence Birdseye, Forteans, Edward Fort, Gravity Houses, Peter Venkman, Draculas, H.L. Menkin, Theodore Dryser, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Booth Tarkington, ectoplasm, the scientific method, cocaine, opium, syphilis, steampunk, the Victorian Era, Hoot Gibson, Bluto, Popeye, The Nobel Prize, Albert E. Page, Atlantis, plums, feta cheese, Post-grunge, Bird Flu, Duncan Sheik, mini vans, John Popper, Dharma and Greg, Ross Perot, Pearl Jam, The Wisconsin Dells, The Wonder Spot, Soul Asylum, Mt. Rushmore, geodes, Hutterites, Saver’s, Subway, Michael Jordan, Superman, and Chocolate Twizzlers.