Inner Monologues VII: Scary Stories
Below you will find the piece I performed at last night's spoken word event, Inner Monologues. I want to thank everyone for showing up, particularly, Mike, Joe, Jen, Gideon, Leslie and Nira. I personally think last night was my overall best performance and was extremely happy with the way the piece turned out despite completing it the day of. The performances were the most varied to date and I personally beared witness to one of the strangest, though uniquely entertaining, when Jessy Delfino performed with her band, Haunted Pussy. It was also one of the funniest all around shows and everyone's piece had plenty of laugh out loud jokes and humorous stories. I'm not sure when the next one is scheduled for, but I will undoubtedly keep everyone posted. Here is the piece I read last night:
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“Count backwards from 100,” he said. "Nobody has ever made it past 93," he snidely remarked. And so I began counting. 100... 99... 98... 97... all the while thinking I know this isn’t that risky of a surgery but who wants their last thought to possibly be of failure? All I wanted to do was yell, “Hey jackass if no one gets past 93 why not try having people countdown from 7 and see how good an anesthesiologist you really are, asshole.” Drugs are drugs, prescription or otherwise. Was it possible to have a bad trip while under the care of an anesthesiologist? I have had some scary shit happen before and those were in small doses and even than I could probably count backwards to at least... 89. All I know was that I was less scared for actual surgery than the thoughts that clouded my brain during surgery.
At around hour five I realized the swirling colors going around me weren’t doctors but cars. NASCAR danced before me above my hospital bed. Fuck, I was watching a Nascar race and enjoying it. I understand the sport is the most popular in the country, but Bush also won the popular vote, so I don’t put much weight on popularity. I consider enjoying a NASCAR race to fall under the category of “bad trip”. Conversely a "good trip" would probably involve myself imaging I was married to Jennifer Aniston for a couple of years and then eventually getting bored with her and moving onto Angelina Jolie all in the span of five hours.
By this point I’m sure the anesthesiologist had done his job and knocked me the fuck out for what I was told would be around 5 hours while I was in surgery and that I wouldn’t remember anything that happened during those five hours. It took an anesthesiologist and thousands of dollars in medical bills to not remember 5 hours of my life. I have friends who drink a six pack for $10 and can’t remember an entire fucking night. Completely doped up now, random thoughts continued to pop into my head.
Because now, I was on Jeapordy! Now entering the studio were our contestants. Matthew Berman, a student from Old Bethpage, Susan Berman from Old Bethpage, a mother of two and homemaker, and Robert Berman from Old Bethpage, a pot smoking hippie salesman with two kids.
And here is your host Alex Trebeck.
I knew it. Even an anesthesiologist couldn’t ensure a “good trip.” How does my brain mix up Angelina Jolie with Alex Trebeck. I shoot for number 1 on my top 100 list of celebrities I’d like to fuck and end up with number 93. Just kidding. I’d long stopped watching Jeopardy aside from when Ken Jennings won, like, 71 consecutive times.
During this particularly funky memory of Jeapordy when I heard that someone found the Daily Double, it brought me back to the longest 30 minutes of my life. Thirty minutes that really, really aged me. It’s those 30 minutes that I have to thank for making me look 21. Yeah I know the real answer is I look 18, fine 17, but this is my bad flashback so the least I can do is say I look older than I do.
So this is the flashback I got to relive: As we always did my parents and I sat down for dinner while watching Jeopardy. My brother was usually at the table but he was just too young still to possibly get a question right. Regardless my brother was at a play date. Remember those? I wonder if they are still called play dates or if they are now called play hookups. No adult uses the word date. We all now just hook up. Wonder if that’s trickled down to the prepubescent set. Parents run into each other at a PTA meeting, oh your so and so’s mom. My son talks about your son all the time. They seem like such good friends we should arrange for them to hook up after school one day.
Play date, play hook up, doesn’t really matter. Prior to Jeopardy starting my brother called saying he needed to be picked up, could my dad come get him. His friend only lived a half mile away and would in all likelihood take my dad ten minutes to pick him up and come back. For whatever reason a half hour had passed and they had yet to return. We surmised that my dad went in and was talking sports or the kids were just finishing up a game and then my dad took him to get food. Jeopardy had started already by now, with less than half the questions still on the board a contestant chose Potpourri for $400. Simultaneously, we heard that dumb ass noise announcing the contestant found the Daily Double and the front door opening.
Usually my brother came through the door first after my dad unlocked it, but something was different this time. My dad came through first and then well… my brother didn’t. So naturally I looked down the stairs from the kitchen to where my dad stood in the entry foyer and asked, “Where’s Matthew?” Either the TV was too loud or this was the precursor for my dad’s diminished hearing because he looked up tears clearly having just been shed and said, “He’s DEAD.”
Those words required no comprehension. The knife had forcefully penetrated my heart and I cried. My mother was crying by now too. My mind began to race about all the times I had gotten mad at him for hanging around my friends, the times I chose television over playing with him, missing a soccer game because I was tired and now he was dead. There were times I couldn’t stand to be around him and wished I hadn’t asked my parents for a sibling. Well it appeared my selfishness won out. I’d never have those feelings again. I’d also never have the opportunity to have the big brother talks or buy him alcohol while he was still underage or hear about his first hook up. I likely also lost the future best man at my wedding and my overall best friend.
Yet, with all these thoughts and emotions racing through my mind, something with the entire situation was off. My father had ceased crying and was regaining his composure. Was he just trying to put up a tough exterior to comfort my mother and I or was there more to the story? Sobbing, I asked, “How’d Matthew die?” His jaw dropped, just plummeted. He looked over and said, “Matthew isn’t dead. He should be home with you.” Sniffle, Sniffle, “but you said he’s, he's dead.” I insisted. “You said it.”
As if in a bad Nancy Drew novel, yeah young boys read those too. In fact I still have a crush on Amelia Bedilia--the facts of what really happened began to piece themselves together: My dad assured us that Matthew was not dead. He gathered himself and I got another long sleeve shirt to which I could wipe my tears and runny nose on. I’ll be damned if I was going to worry about using a tissue at this point. So my dad started from the beginning.
He arrived at my brother’s friend Joe’s house and the boys were outside kicking a soccer ball around with Joe’s dog, Muffin. Realizing it was getting late and Matthew was hungry my dad said it was time to go and they would arrange for the kids to hook up again after school another day soon. My dad put the car in reverse and began to slowly back out. Then out of nowhere, (a shriek was barely audible), my dad could tell he had hit something. He pulled forward to find not a squirrel like he had hoped but, Muffin, my brother’s best friend’s dog. My dad and brother hopped out of the car to find the dog convulsing and shrieking. It was still alive, but being a toy poodle mutt, there wasn’t much time till Muffin became road kill. My brother’s friend Joe was now hysterical crying along with his mother over the impending loss of the family pet. My dad reverted back to his life guard duties and wrapped the dog in a blanket from the trunk and rushed it to the veterinary emergency room. Matthew stayed with Joe, whose father planned to drive Matt home and then meet my father at the emergency room. Joe was so distraught and hungry that Pat decided to take the boys to McDonald’s for Happy Meals.
Muffin was dead by the time my dad got to the emergency room. Thankfully, it wasn’t breakfast otherwise they may literally have been eating an Egg McMuffin. It’s morbid but so is the quality of meat at McDonald’s.
My dad, blissfully unaware that Matt wasn’t already home and having already told us the events that had transpired, had walked in assuming we were waiting to hear the fate of the dog. Thus his tearful announcement that, “He’s Dead.” Yeah, some may ask why he said “he” instead of “she” because one would assume Muffin was a female dog’s name. Well, at least Muffin who was a he was put out of his misery. A male dog named Muffin is roughly the equivalent of naming a boy baby Barbara.
Five minutes later, my brother, Happy Meal in hand walked through the front door. Completely unaware of the emotional turmoil we had all just gone through. He walked up the stairs and I gave him a big hug. At that point in my life I had yet to really experience true loss. None of my immediate family members had passed away so I wasn’t sure how I’d react, god forbid, to news of a parent or my only sibling dying. We know we love the people in our lives so very much, but until that person is gone you never know if that love was real or just something you know you should feel. I know the emotions were real which in a perverse way validated that my feelings were real. The crying, the sweating, the images racing through mind were real. Thankfully, the trigger for those emotions weren’t.
At this point we had all calmed down, but now the guilt had set in for my dad. "How am I ever going to look this kid in the eye knowing I ran over his dog and heard its screeching and bones snapping," he pondered?
I can joke about it now, especially since that night happened to be my father’s birthday and the night he plays poker with his buddies. Naturally no one spoke of the incident the whole night. They presented him with one present about an hour into playing. He unwrapped it to find a headless ceramic dog. That’s the thing about great friends they really know how to stick it to you when your down. From what I hear my dad wept like a little baby as the rest of the grown men took a perverse pleasure in making the screeching noises the dog made.
(pause, because you’re going back to “the action” and not the “flashback”.)
When I came to in recovery, my parents were there waiting for me. They said everything had gone well and I would be OK. From what I’m told I mumbled something about meeting Alex Trebeck and still unsure whether it was the highness from the morphine but in a most pathetic way I began to laugh. It hurt so much to laugh that I kept hitting the button to release more morphine. My parents perplexed as to why I would be laughing asked what’s so funny. I looked at them from behind my glazed eyes, and mumbled stupidly, “you killed Muffin.”
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“Count backwards from 100,” he said. "Nobody has ever made it past 93," he snidely remarked. And so I began counting. 100... 99... 98... 97... all the while thinking I know this isn’t that risky of a surgery but who wants their last thought to possibly be of failure? All I wanted to do was yell, “Hey jackass if no one gets past 93 why not try having people countdown from 7 and see how good an anesthesiologist you really are, asshole.” Drugs are drugs, prescription or otherwise. Was it possible to have a bad trip while under the care of an anesthesiologist? I have had some scary shit happen before and those were in small doses and even than I could probably count backwards to at least... 89. All I know was that I was less scared for actual surgery than the thoughts that clouded my brain during surgery.
At around hour five I realized the swirling colors going around me weren’t doctors but cars. NASCAR danced before me above my hospital bed. Fuck, I was watching a Nascar race and enjoying it. I understand the sport is the most popular in the country, but Bush also won the popular vote, so I don’t put much weight on popularity. I consider enjoying a NASCAR race to fall under the category of “bad trip”. Conversely a "good trip" would probably involve myself imaging I was married to Jennifer Aniston for a couple of years and then eventually getting bored with her and moving onto Angelina Jolie all in the span of five hours.
By this point I’m sure the anesthesiologist had done his job and knocked me the fuck out for what I was told would be around 5 hours while I was in surgery and that I wouldn’t remember anything that happened during those five hours. It took an anesthesiologist and thousands of dollars in medical bills to not remember 5 hours of my life. I have friends who drink a six pack for $10 and can’t remember an entire fucking night. Completely doped up now, random thoughts continued to pop into my head.
Because now, I was on Jeapordy! Now entering the studio were our contestants. Matthew Berman, a student from Old Bethpage, Susan Berman from Old Bethpage, a mother of two and homemaker, and Robert Berman from Old Bethpage, a pot smoking hippie salesman with two kids.
And here is your host Alex Trebeck.
I knew it. Even an anesthesiologist couldn’t ensure a “good trip.” How does my brain mix up Angelina Jolie with Alex Trebeck. I shoot for number 1 on my top 100 list of celebrities I’d like to fuck and end up with number 93. Just kidding. I’d long stopped watching Jeopardy aside from when Ken Jennings won, like, 71 consecutive times.
During this particularly funky memory of Jeapordy when I heard that someone found the Daily Double, it brought me back to the longest 30 minutes of my life. Thirty minutes that really, really aged me. It’s those 30 minutes that I have to thank for making me look 21. Yeah I know the real answer is I look 18, fine 17, but this is my bad flashback so the least I can do is say I look older than I do.
So this is the flashback I got to relive: As we always did my parents and I sat down for dinner while watching Jeopardy. My brother was usually at the table but he was just too young still to possibly get a question right. Regardless my brother was at a play date. Remember those? I wonder if they are still called play dates or if they are now called play hookups. No adult uses the word date. We all now just hook up. Wonder if that’s trickled down to the prepubescent set. Parents run into each other at a PTA meeting, oh your so and so’s mom. My son talks about your son all the time. They seem like such good friends we should arrange for them to hook up after school one day.
Play date, play hook up, doesn’t really matter. Prior to Jeopardy starting my brother called saying he needed to be picked up, could my dad come get him. His friend only lived a half mile away and would in all likelihood take my dad ten minutes to pick him up and come back. For whatever reason a half hour had passed and they had yet to return. We surmised that my dad went in and was talking sports or the kids were just finishing up a game and then my dad took him to get food. Jeopardy had started already by now, with less than half the questions still on the board a contestant chose Potpourri for $400. Simultaneously, we heard that dumb ass noise announcing the contestant found the Daily Double and the front door opening.
Usually my brother came through the door first after my dad unlocked it, but something was different this time. My dad came through first and then well… my brother didn’t. So naturally I looked down the stairs from the kitchen to where my dad stood in the entry foyer and asked, “Where’s Matthew?” Either the TV was too loud or this was the precursor for my dad’s diminished hearing because he looked up tears clearly having just been shed and said, “He’s DEAD.”
Those words required no comprehension. The knife had forcefully penetrated my heart and I cried. My mother was crying by now too. My mind began to race about all the times I had gotten mad at him for hanging around my friends, the times I chose television over playing with him, missing a soccer game because I was tired and now he was dead. There were times I couldn’t stand to be around him and wished I hadn’t asked my parents for a sibling. Well it appeared my selfishness won out. I’d never have those feelings again. I’d also never have the opportunity to have the big brother talks or buy him alcohol while he was still underage or hear about his first hook up. I likely also lost the future best man at my wedding and my overall best friend.
Yet, with all these thoughts and emotions racing through my mind, something with the entire situation was off. My father had ceased crying and was regaining his composure. Was he just trying to put up a tough exterior to comfort my mother and I or was there more to the story? Sobbing, I asked, “How’d Matthew die?” His jaw dropped, just plummeted. He looked over and said, “Matthew isn’t dead. He should be home with you.” Sniffle, Sniffle, “but you said he’s, he's dead.” I insisted. “You said it.”
As if in a bad Nancy Drew novel, yeah young boys read those too. In fact I still have a crush on Amelia Bedilia--the facts of what really happened began to piece themselves together: My dad assured us that Matthew was not dead. He gathered himself and I got another long sleeve shirt to which I could wipe my tears and runny nose on. I’ll be damned if I was going to worry about using a tissue at this point. So my dad started from the beginning.
He arrived at my brother’s friend Joe’s house and the boys were outside kicking a soccer ball around with Joe’s dog, Muffin. Realizing it was getting late and Matthew was hungry my dad said it was time to go and they would arrange for the kids to hook up again after school another day soon. My dad put the car in reverse and began to slowly back out. Then out of nowhere, (a shriek was barely audible), my dad could tell he had hit something. He pulled forward to find not a squirrel like he had hoped but, Muffin, my brother’s best friend’s dog. My dad and brother hopped out of the car to find the dog convulsing and shrieking. It was still alive, but being a toy poodle mutt, there wasn’t much time till Muffin became road kill. My brother’s friend Joe was now hysterical crying along with his mother over the impending loss of the family pet. My dad reverted back to his life guard duties and wrapped the dog in a blanket from the trunk and rushed it to the veterinary emergency room. Matthew stayed with Joe, whose father planned to drive Matt home and then meet my father at the emergency room. Joe was so distraught and hungry that Pat decided to take the boys to McDonald’s for Happy Meals.
Muffin was dead by the time my dad got to the emergency room. Thankfully, it wasn’t breakfast otherwise they may literally have been eating an Egg McMuffin. It’s morbid but so is the quality of meat at McDonald’s.
My dad, blissfully unaware that Matt wasn’t already home and having already told us the events that had transpired, had walked in assuming we were waiting to hear the fate of the dog. Thus his tearful announcement that, “He’s Dead.” Yeah, some may ask why he said “he” instead of “she” because one would assume Muffin was a female dog’s name. Well, at least Muffin who was a he was put out of his misery. A male dog named Muffin is roughly the equivalent of naming a boy baby Barbara.
Five minutes later, my brother, Happy Meal in hand walked through the front door. Completely unaware of the emotional turmoil we had all just gone through. He walked up the stairs and I gave him a big hug. At that point in my life I had yet to really experience true loss. None of my immediate family members had passed away so I wasn’t sure how I’d react, god forbid, to news of a parent or my only sibling dying. We know we love the people in our lives so very much, but until that person is gone you never know if that love was real or just something you know you should feel. I know the emotions were real which in a perverse way validated that my feelings were real. The crying, the sweating, the images racing through mind were real. Thankfully, the trigger for those emotions weren’t.
At this point we had all calmed down, but now the guilt had set in for my dad. "How am I ever going to look this kid in the eye knowing I ran over his dog and heard its screeching and bones snapping," he pondered?
I can joke about it now, especially since that night happened to be my father’s birthday and the night he plays poker with his buddies. Naturally no one spoke of the incident the whole night. They presented him with one present about an hour into playing. He unwrapped it to find a headless ceramic dog. That’s the thing about great friends they really know how to stick it to you when your down. From what I hear my dad wept like a little baby as the rest of the grown men took a perverse pleasure in making the screeching noises the dog made.
(pause, because you’re going back to “the action” and not the “flashback”.)
When I came to in recovery, my parents were there waiting for me. They said everything had gone well and I would be OK. From what I’m told I mumbled something about meeting Alex Trebeck and still unsure whether it was the highness from the morphine but in a most pathetic way I began to laugh. It hurt so much to laugh that I kept hitting the button to release more morphine. My parents perplexed as to why I would be laughing asked what’s so funny. I looked at them from behind my glazed eyes, and mumbled stupidly, “you killed Muffin.”
posted by AristocraCity at 11:11 AM
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