Bubblegum, page 57
“And come a couple days later, he’d done as he said, brought the skellies by, and we sat in the kitchen with soup spoons and plates and turned the skellies into one big happy Scarface-looking pile of powder, and that was that. Experiment time.
“We snorted it, smoked it, put it in cookies, me and Burnsy, and Jizzbrain, too, just did it up til it was gone, took about a week, and wow it was good, and wow that was exciting, and then Jizzbrain got us a bunch more of his own skellies from his studio, and we ground those up, and within a few days, we were the most popular guys in town, bringing it out to parties, clubs, sharing it for nothing, or, you know, selling it at cost when the demand got high and the kids were strangers, but no profit at all, you know, not at all, just love—all goodwill-hippy and whatnot, telling everyone we met how to make it themselves, and by the end of spring break, they were all going back home to their colleges of origin or whatever, and spreading the word. And somewhere in there, a certain chart-topping, shall we say soon-to-be-most-successful-of-all-time heavy metal band that Jizzbrain knew from doing his artwork for, they came through town and we hooked them up, spent half a Friday night with them blowing our supply and pounding back their Jäger, and really just, really bonding, you know? Especially Burnsy. Those guys loved him—everyone loved him—and it’s uh, well…It’s cause of that, cause of how they loved him so much that they ended up dedicating their next album to him. I mean it wasn’t, uh— It wasn’t like just because uh…” Woof holds up a finger. “I just, um. Can I just, uh…” Woof draws a sharp breath.
“You want me to turn the camera off a minute?” the interviewer says.
“No, that’s okay, darling. I don’t…I guess I’m not too used to talking about this too much. Haven’t in a long uh time, you know, uh…Okay. Okay. Fuck it! Back to the tale of Burnsy&Woof, right? Yeah. So now so, what I neglected to mention is, about a week or so after we started hitting the clubs, we’d also started—just cause we thought it was funny—we’d started wrapping el producto up in these little like twisty-ended cellophane-type candy wrappers stamped with a Burnsy&Woof logo that Jizzbrain did up for us. You know the one, right? The burning dog of fire logo. And now that, I guess, is probably what impressed Graham&Swords the most—how we’d not only discovered this new use for their product, but we’d also kind of accidentally developed an extremely cool brand, you know? I mean that’s what convinced them to come find us, I think. Whatever the reason, though, they asked around and tracked us down, and eventually showed up on our doorstep one day, offered to hire us on as like consultants for a while. They were just I guess starting to go at a lot of chem kids back then—recruiting the top-of-the-class types before they finished school, but not yet somehow really thinking to go for the rebel dropout ones running the Ecstasy labs or what have you.
“And so they’d brought all these geeks to this or that G&S facility at that point, to work on PerFormulae mostly, and then me and Burnsy come along, which, in case I aint made it clear: we weren’t like that. Not at all. We knew fuck-all about chemistry, and we were straight up about that, but they mistook us for geniuses, anyway, G&S did. Geniuses of like ‘young American desire and design,’ the recruiter dork told us. They wanted our ideas, he said. And, you know, the pay was righteous—righteous—and we didn’t like school anywho, so we went up north soon as poss, hung out with the geeks, told them our ideas about what we thought people might want from future PerFormulae and whatnot, including like how we thought it would probably be good if the PerFormulae could be made in such a way as to somehow enhance or just change up a little whatever chemical it was in the marrow that gets a person high—sake of variety of buzz, you know—but nothing we said struck any of them as feasible, I guess—or at least so they said cause I tell you true we came up with BullyKing and Effete the both years before they hit the market, even the name of BullyKing was ours, Effete we pitched as Wuss or maybe it was WimpAss, I don’t remember, but they thought we were dummies, these chem kids, and we got moved to Accoutrements, which was basically a matter of like, ‘Which color zipper should we use on this new CureSleeve contraption? Gold or silver?’ and like, you know, ‘Do you think the kids these days want tiny licensed baseball caps to dress up their cures in? Which teams are the most neato?’ Boring taste and real silly tie-in shit in Accoutrements, basically, and that’s what we told them, we were honest, and soon we were shitcanned. Six, maybe seven months we lasted over there.
“But we’d saved a little dough, and our names were out there, Burnsy&Woof was the coolest. I mean, kids were making T-shirts with that burning dog of fire on them. So we got to thinking, and we called up ol’ Jizzbrain, and some venture capitalist friends of our dads, and we told them what we thought. And what we thought, we thought about gear. Utility, you know? In-oh-vay-shun. Like, Graham&Swords had the formula thing locked down, but they saw Accoutrements as just, like, apparel. I wasn’t shitting you about that zipper nonsense. Gold or silver. That’s where they were at. Who the fuck cares gold or silver though, right? Make the CureSleeve better. Slim the pouch so it doesn’t sag out so much, and line it with a kind of protective shell, like an athletic cup kinda deal to protect the cure from accidental blunt force and etcetera. And how about some outside-the-box thinking? Like could a cure not use a little bicycle? A pedal go-cart? A unicycle? Why not? You see them walking on their hands and shit. They got balance. Better balance than a human. And it’s not like people weren’t selling that kinda stuff, but it was all homemade, and the wrong kind of homemade, you know? Not boutiquey, more like flea-markety. And we had this name. This cool. This brand. We could mass-produce, and but just by putting our logo on there not seem mass-produced, just cause we were that cool that nothing we did would anyone imagine came out of the, you know, gray capitalist impulse, and…you know how that shit works. This is America. Everyone knows how that shit works, but we still buy into it. Celebrate it, even. Can’t help ourselves. Story of rock and roll, right? Metal band makes a classy black-and-white video for a song with a couple slow like acoustic parts in it, and they go number one, heavy rotation, platinum times ten, and still every kid at their concert just knows he’s the only person in all the world who really understands their music, even while he’s thinking it from row nine million at a football stadium he paid fifty fucken 1991 dollars to be at, even while all the fuckers who ever picked on him at school, razzing him over his haircut and boots and acne or whatever, they’re all down in front of the stage high-fiving each other and like…aw…oh…aw man…” Woof’s lips contort. He shuts his eyes, says, “Come on, now, Woof.”
The interviewer tells him, “I’ll just—I’m turning the camera off, Woof, okay?”
Woof lowers his head and covers his mouth, stifling whimpers.
CUT.
“So as I was saying,” Woof says, his wraparound shades now covering his eyes, “the real innovation we came up with, all ours, and, you know, this one was our baby because no one had quite thought of it yet, and it was a little outlawish: we thought it would be nice to have a real skinny pipe that took superfine screens that would actually stop the bone dust from getting through, first of all, and secondly—and this was the real sweet part—that it would have a bowl and mouthpiece that you could pop or screw them both off the shaft and use the shaft as a snort straw, and each of these pieces of the pipe would have the little burning dog of fire logo on it, but a little bit weirded-like, kinda bendy looking, signifying, you know, good times, high times, can’t quite see straight.
“So they—our dads’ fancy friends, I’m saying—they invested. In Jizzbrain, Burnsy, and me. And we made those suits happy. First the sleeve. Well, not quite the sleeve. Instead of making a sleeve with a protective insert, we just made a protective insert that fit the ugly Graham&Swords sleeve, and that was a little depressing in a way, but, man, we made a lot of fucken money. It was a good product. Still is to this day. Japanese design—dude from Nike. And Guatemalan labor. And we rolled some of the profits into a factory in Texas where we did the little vehicles, which, yeah, didn’t do as well as the insert, but turned some profit. And all this was within, like, what? fourteen months of starting the company. And next up was the baby, the pipe, and it was just about a week or two before it was set to go into production in Mexico—it was all set up, we were just waiting on a special smelter for the, you know, the ore, or whatever—that’s when I get the call from Jizzbrain, and, you know I don’t even know what to say about it. I mean, what’s there intelligent to say about it, really? They were a great band. They’re still pretty good, to this very day. And Burnsy and me had always been deep into metal, and we loved them from their first album, and we weren’t gonna abandon loving them just cause they had a few hits, you know? I mean, some people did abandon them cause of that, but not us. And I think Burnsy went into that mosh pit that night partly because it was full of a bunch of fratboy-type jerks who were turning our beloved subculture—who’d already turned our beloved subculture—into a kind of mainstream, date-rapey, baseball-cap-wearing travesty of bullying, jock-type aggression—rather than the joyful, celebratory-type aggression it once was, I’m saying—and he wanted to reclaim it, you know. Burnsy. Burnsy wanted, that night, to reclaim the pit. I think he went in there full of hope and love. Jizzbrain was there, too, and the way he tells it, him and Burnsy actually cleared outta the pit about thirty seconds into the opening number, but then these football-fan types were stomping some like eccentrically dressed, probably gay kid, and Burnsy went back in to help the kid to his feet, to get him to safety, and that’s when he took a kick to the head, and, you know, by the time Jizzbrain could get there to help him up—they were both, Burnsy and the gay kid—they were comatose, if not already dead. And I don’t blame the band. I don’t blame rock and roll…I don’t know. I don’t know. I just…Shit. Maybe turn that camera off ag—”
CUT.
“So yeah, so. After Jizzbrain calls and he tells me what happened, I…I guess I blacked out. And when I came to, I blacked out more, uh, deliberately you could say. Blacked out for about a month. Six weeks, maybe. A while.
“My dad comes over one morning, then, you know? And he’s with the lawyers, and they say, ‘Look, Woof, you don’t seem much like you want to do this anymore, and Jizzbrain says it’s your call, and Burnsy’s dad is beyond caring about anything but his loss of his son, and this offer—’ I forgot to mention Graham&Swords had been trying to buy us ever since the sleeve insert hit—‘This offer,’ Daddy says, ‘of three hundred million, seventy-five million of that going to you, is gonna be off the table as soon as your pipe goes to market, and it’s set to ship tomorrow. You gotta make a decision.’ Cause see, up til then, you gotta understand, Burnsy&Woof was cool and all, and all the kids knew we were the ones discovered spidge, but it was more kind of legendary than historical at that point, if you know what I mean? The oldster money didn’t have a clue, and Graham&Swords thought—correctly, I suppose—that if we got known for this special spidge pipe we’d developed, if Burnsy&Woof were that outwardly associated to getting high, well, they didn’t think it was worth the cost to their family-friendly, warhead-selling corporate reputation to buy our brand. So this was our last chance to sell up. And me? My daddy was right about me. I was done. I didn’t want to do shit anymore, and here were all those pals of his and of Burnsy’s dad that believed in us, invested in us, and they wanted to cash in. So I said, ‘Yeah. Sell. Let’s sell up.’ And we sold up, and that was that. And you know, the real bummer was they just trashed all those pipes. Well, they melted them back down and made belt buckles or some shit, I don’t know, but they wouldn’t even let me have one, you know? Not a single one. I really thought those pipes were gonna be so great, and for a minute I thought, ‘Shit, I’ll start a new company, make them on my own,’ but it just seemed wrong without Burnsy. So I didn’t. Anyway. Anything I’ve uh—heh heh—left out?”
“Just one thing,” says the interviewer. “Spidge. The word. Where’d that come from?”
“Aw, spidge was just something Burnsy used to say for thingy or stuff or like you know whatchamacallit or whatever. You know, a guy wants some minestrone soup but can’t remember the word minestrone some reason, or he just never knew what it was called and he says, ‘Hey, uh, ladle me out a bowl of some of that whatchamacallit.’ Burnsy’d, he’d’ve said, like, ‘Ladle me out a bowl of that spidge there,’ instead. So I guess it just caught on in the early days at the clubs. Probably Burnsy said something like, ‘You sexy ladies there should smoke some of this new kind of spidge with me and my boy Woof over here,’ and they just, the hypothetical ladies I’m saying, they just thought that’s what the drug was called, and they called it that, and then so did everyone, and it happened, I guess, that cause spidge involves spines, and there’s that whole sp sound at the beginning, I guess people just went with it. But that’s how it was with Burnsy, you know? Easy come easy go. Leave his mark without even realizing his sword was drawn or whatever. Sword? Sword. Sure. Hell am I talking about? You want to meet my horses? I got some beautiful horses other end of the property. We can take ’em out, or even go riding if you want.”
“I’d love to,” says the interviewer. “Umm…”
“But.”
“ ‘But’?” says the interviewer.
“As in ‘But not today,’ ” says Woof, “ ‘not with some overtanned, tale-telling, near-middle-aged washup,’ right? I understand.”
“Oh, no! No but. I’d love to meet your horses. I was just thinking I could use a cup of coffee first, if that would be alright.”
“ ‘If that would be alright,’ huh?” says Woof, smiling broadly. He half-rises from his bench, turns left, and shouts, “Lupita, my darling! Uno el otro café, por favor!”
Cuddlefarmer Harvest
Security Footage
2004, Elmwood Junior High School, USA
[6 minutes, 57 seconds]
Fixed overhead shot, black-and-white, silent: a water fountain mounted on an otherwise locker-lined wall in a hallway. A tall boy wearing a canvas duster approaches the fountain, bends to drink. Another, shorter boy, dressed for the beach, rushes up from behind and slams into the tall one.
The tall boy heaves, and vomits in the basin.
The short boy kidney-punches the tall boy and pushes his face against the drain, holding it there, as a third boy, shouldering a messenger bag, enters the frame and tears the tall boy’s duster off.
Although the tall boy is now revealed to be wearing a light-colored tank top and what looks like a pair of mid-thigh hotpants, hardly any of the skin below his neck is visible, so thoroughly strapped are his gangly limbs with overlapping, high-capacity CureSleeves—six on each leg, and three each arm.
The third boy kicks the duster aside. He opens his messenger bag against his chest. While the tall boy flails and the short boy intermittently stills him by digging his (i.e. the short boy’s) elbow into and around the tall boy’s clavicle, the third boy removes the tall boy’s CureSleeves, loading them into the bag as he goes.
CUT.
Two minutes later. The third boy is crouching by the tall boy’s right ankle, starting to detach the last remaining CureSleeve, when the short boy says or shouts something to him, then rabbit-punches the tall boy twice and bolts offscreen, the third boy trailing him.
The tall boy, alone again, sits on the floor and leans back against the water fountain, openly weeping. A girl with a ponytail enters the frame, sits down before him, squeezes his shoulder. He tells her something. She raises a buttock, pulls the duster from beneath herself, hands the boy the duster.
He scrubs his hair and face dry with the duster, blows his nose, wipes his eyes, balls the duster and throws it offscreen.
