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February 12, 1997, Wednesday

Cool thing to say today: The better the porches the fewer the crimes.

After I awoke I went to my place of employ because Ira, the guy who handles the finances, had sent me e-mail telling me someone had tried to cash a check upon which a stop-payment decree had been placed (this was a check I'd lost and had had to have re-issued). The only trouble with this story was that some weeks ago I had in fact found the lost check, and it had been safely back at my house, sealed in an envelope, unsigned. It's extremely unlikely that someone snuck into my room, rooted around through my stuff, stole the envelope, steamed it open, signed the check, took it to the bank, was turned down on attempting to cash it, erased his signature leaving no trace whatsoever, sealed it back up in the envelope, and hid it back among my things exactly where it had been. All this while having stolen nothing else among the many things far more obvious.

While I was at Comet, Sharynn, the woman who answers the main business line, fixed me a pot of coffee. Without the Bakery, it was good to have another source of free coffee.

I wasn't long back at my house, the Dynashack, when suddenly there was a massive invasion of goths. The contingent that quite suddenly appeared consisted of Theresa, both Brazilian Girls (Cecelia and Nada/Leticia) and an extra goth, Monster Boy, whom I haven't ever really seen outside of Theresa's place.

We sat around talking about Theresa and Persad's recent arrest.

Jessika had told me a little something about "the arrest" in electronic communications with me last night. She had heard about it from Peggy who had returned briefly to Charlottesville to drop off Zachary so he could join a massive Big Fun alumni contingent heading to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. This contingent includes such familiar characters as Matthew Hart, Morgan Anarchy, Vanna the Increasingly Gothic Punk Rock Girl, Torrin and the Wonderboy Neek.
One of the surreal things that happened during this ultraviolence was that the Weirdo Doug's hair started coming out in big nasty blood-soaked clumps.
Back to the arrest. Some week or more ago, the Weirdo Doug (yet another skinny goth boy) was visiting Theresa and Persad as he often does when Theresa told him it was time to leave. She often tells him to leave, she claims, and normally he then leaves without complaint. But not this time; according to Theresa he then hit her in the face...not very hard. But, as Theresa said, he should have known at that point that he was gonna leave dripping blood. She and Theresa proceeded to beat the hell out of him, repeatedly knocking his head into a wall and then, trying but failing to break a thick-walled bottle over his head, pounding him into a bloody pulp. One of the surreal things that happened during this ultraviolence was that the Weirdo Doug's hair started coming out in big nasty blood-soaked clumps. After he recovered his senses, the Werido Doug (also referred to as "Dink Boy" by Theresa) called the cops. The men in blue came to arrest Theresa at work: Millers on the Downtown Mall. What a humiliation, to be a waitress and be led in handcuffs out of the packed bar where you are employed. She just managed to hide a few incriminating items before being nabbed by Duane, the familiar tall cop whose main beat is the Corner (on rare occasions he comes by Comet late at night to surf the Web).

Theresa figures she'll beat the felony charges for which she has been accused. She says that the Weirdo Doug had been reaching for a knife the whole time she'd been attacking him and that, in her own home, this was clearly a case of self defense.

The plan for tonight was to go to "the graveyard" (a little piece of the Victorian Age in northeastern Charlottesville oft-frequented by the goths I know). Since we'd be getting back before 9pm, I could come along.

But there was a chill in the air and the trip to the graveyard never occurred. Instead we went (in Monster Boy's hotrod, the Monstermobile) to Monster Boy's house, which is a Jewish theme house (like Oberlin's Hebrew House, perhaps?) somewhat related to the University of Virginia. It lies in deepest Fratville, not far from Morgan Anarchy's mom's place where Jessika lived this summer. Monsterboy's room looks much like Morgan's room. It's big and full of comfy couches. On the wall punk rock/gothic sentiments are expressed in poster form. Monster Boy unfortunately has to share his bathroom with the older Irish drunk next door, a gentleman who leaves notes on the toilet complaining about something called "shyte."

While sharing a clove cigarette, Leticia and I pleasantly discovered that we are both also given to chewing on whole cloves. I decribed the process to her: biting off the papery thin-walled head, then the four shoulders, and then slowly crushing the clove while the adjacent region of the mouth goes numb. She says she chews cloves the very same way. She thinks there's probably a small underground of clove chewers out there, because she bought a used jacket once and it had cloves in the pocket.

The sheer sociopathy of it all appealed to me.
After listening to some Skinny Puppy and getting rather intoxicated on both vino and marijuana, we started watching an obscure movie from Monster Boy's collection of obscure videotapes. This particular movie was called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, a Black and White Film written, directed and produced by Russ Meyer in 1966. It's sort of a masochistic male sexual fantasy set in the desert. Our heroes, or anti-heroes, are three big-breasted beauties, all of different ethnicities. They drive around the desert in fast little sportscars and whenever they run across men, they humiliate them, exploit them, kill them, or all of the above. They render the same fate unto any insipid girlfriends of such men as well. They end up at the farm of old crippled man who has lots of money stashed away somewhere. The old man's two sons are distillations of the two attributes all men want to have: one is strong but an idiot. The other is intelligent, but not a stunning specimen in the physical sense. But all these men are weakened by lust. This lust is exploited by the three evil heroines as they try to find out where the money is hidden while simultaneously humiliating a capitive cutesie-pie girlfriend of one of their victims as much as possible. In my intoxicated state I found the movie hilarious. The sheer sociopathy of it all appealed to me, as did the miracle of casting that matched physical types perfectly to their roles. It seemed like a carefully tuned machine. Monster Boy and I had to agree that there was no way to improve it from what it was. Furthermore, it was incredibly advanced for its time, showing women to be physically and psychologically powerful in a world of men who are either idiots or slime-balls. Monster Boy and I seemed to be in perfect agreement in our assessments of this movie. When it was done I proclaimed that it was the best film I'd ever seen, something I haven't said since Natural Born Killers. Monster Boy is of the opinion that the beauty of low-budget films like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is that a single person can dominate the whole of the creation, and have things exactly as he wants them, as ridiculous as that might be. By contrast most big-budget films are assembled by committees and as a result often lack the clearness and intensity only a solo unrestrained mind can bring to the creative act.

Monster Boy has a reference guide to all the wacky movies that are out there; that's how he knew to get Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and the other flicks in his collection. The particular reference guide he uses is in a series that includes other books he has collected on subjects such as body piercing and the so-called "modern primitives." I thumbed through a couple of these books in awe.

I skimmed over one story about a man who adminsters to himself all manner of horrendous piercings (he drives nails through his scrotum for example). It's apparently a distraction from the pain of cystic fibrosis and constitutes a kind of therapy. As a result he is the oldest surviving person afflicted with this dreaded genetic disease. The man does other cool things like play in an "experimental noise band." It was obvious that Monster Boy reserved particular respect for him; calling the man "extremely intelligent" for example.

Theresa ripped into his neck with her long nails and drew blood.
In other things we took pictures of one another posed in various places, especially the couches. When a rather violent by good-natured wresting match ensued between Monster Boy, Theresa and Leticia, Cecelia took pictures of that too. Leticia and Theresa are both rather sadistic, whereas Monster Boy struck me as sort of more masochistic. Theresa ripped into his neck with her long nails and drew blood. She attacked me in a similar way, but I fended her off more and came away only slightly mauled.

At around 9pm, we piled back into the Monstermobile, picked up the boy Jesse, and took Leticia home. Then I was let out on the Corner so I could begin my pre-work nap. Theresa did all the driving and was scary enough in that capacity for Monster Boy to deploy his safety belt.

It had been a thoroughly enjoyable evening. It's rare that I have quite that much fun hanging out with a group of people. Monster Boy reminds me somewhat of Persad, mostly in the way he talks, but there is more about him that reminds me of myself than is the case with most people. He's 21 and he thought I was about 23. I'm going to be 29 on Sunday.

By the way, Rebecca, Monster Boy's gothic girlfriend, is not getting along so well with Monster Boy and Theresa these days, judging from what they said about her behind her back. Theresa called her a cunt and a bitch and Monster Boy called her a slut.

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