Can O' Whup-Ass

How we met Rob: a totally true story

So last night we attended a screening of an odd yet hilarious independent film called "Co-dependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same," starring a college friend. After the credits rolled, the producer bounded onstage with the following announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen, I thought you might like to know that our state legislature just legalized gay marriage." The cheers were deafening. There are good days, aren't there?

There's been a subtle yet unmistakable shift. Today we are less of a them and more of an us. And that's what Gay Pride, with all its disco, leather harnesses and g-strings, has always been about (yet we admit a platoon of dykes on bikes leading battalion of baton-twirling homos prancing about in jock straps is an excellent way to be seen as a "Them" with a capitol "T"). And yet, the straights came through. Even some Republicans. Overwhelmingly, gay family members and friends changed their hearts and minds.

And with that in mind, this is how we met Rob...

Once upon a time we'd throw annual gay pride parties on our massive East Village roof deck. There were balloons, streamers, grilled fruit skewers, reefers, martinis, and (at the party's apex) servings of magical mushroom tea. Folks came in drag, leather, party boy spandex. But it was all very co-ed. Male, female, gay, straight. Fellini on poppers. And on the boombox, Ethel Merman's disco album did battle with ABBA, Madonna and Carmen Miranda (thank you, Bruce).

During one such soiree, two stunningly beautiful heterosexual women (fierce bitches by the name of Claudia and Deborah), both clad in halter tops and daisy dukes, briefly left the festivities to pick up some ice at the corner bodega. While they were there, they thought it would be cute if they also purchased some chocolate covered cherries and several dozen condoms in festive gold coin wrappers.

At this point, they caught the eye of a handsome Jewish straight NYU student who was buying a six pack of Heiniken.

"Hey, What's your name?"
"Um...Rob."
"Hi Um Rob, I'm Claudia. This is Deborah."
"Hi."
"So we're having a party, care to join us?"

Poor thing. Two primo specimens of babe-a-licious boobocity, brandishing a bag of ice, chocolate covered cherries and enough prophylactics for the Russian army. He thought he'd stumbled onto the kind of paradise you only read about in Hustler or the Koran.

We remember when our girls escorted a stunned Rob into the throng of the party and immediately abandoned him to flirt with the homos (a zero stakes game). The homos, in turn, preferred flirting with Rob, the reluctant belle of the ball. We have photographs of that party. There's Rob on a bench, surrounded with homos, his lopsided grin frozen, his eyes betraying a kind of terror.

We must have had a profound effect on him, for he promptly abandoned his studies and fled to Budapest to write about gypsies. We stayed in touch, though. And evench, after he returned stateside, he even moved into our vast, decrepit cold-water loft where he lived for a few years.

He saw us through a brutal break-up with an attorney who turned out to be a married embezzler. We, in turn, commiserated with him through two nasty divorces.

Rob has a bad habit of falling in love with the kind of gal you can live with for several years, but runs screaming for the hills within a year of exchanging vows, suddenly discovering she doesn't "see herself married." And frankly, we're not sure we do either.

Perhaps us homos are like the indians who were so ecstatic at first to receive those pox infested blankets from the white man. Marriage equality is divorce equality, after all. Hooray! And...um...thanks?

We recall when Rob returned from vacationing in Majorca with a contraband bottle of Absinthe in tow. During the trip he'd broken up with a dishwater blonde Polish gal (he tends to like fair-haired Eastern European chicks with thick accents who are perpetually bored and have rude personalities).

We each did a couple shots, getting acquainted with the green fairy. Rob grew increasingly remorseful about his lost Polski baleboste.

And absinthe made the tart grow blonder.

xox
WAM

Claudia 'n' Deborah say: "we DARE you to subscribe to this blog's feed."

On your 50th birthday

*sigh*

So. How's junk?

Lots happened since we saw you last, looking (forgive us) less than your best in that sterile chamber; silent, save the regular beeps and whirrings of all that infernal machinery.

Where to start? Chronologically: an election was stolen, the twin towers (and a nation's optimism) reduced to dust, a war or two. We've fallen in (and out of) love. Worked several jobs.  The writing briefly took off, then stalled. In short, life has been occurring. Time has its pedal to the metal these days; milestones fly by in a dizzying blur.

Some developments you'd find interesting: marriage equality and the supreme court stare each other down at the OK corral. Soon our soldiers will be allowed to be gay, honest and employed – all at the same time. A recent rash of homo teen suicides has God's favorite country shaking its head and tossing the word "tragic" around like frisbees at a picnic (we suppose we should be grateful that suddenly it's "tragic"). There's even a YouTube phenomenon called "It Gets Better," where hundreds of well-meaning folks, famous and not, have posted video platitudes for gay youth about how everything gets better.

It's a lovely lie. You knew that better than anyone, having made one clumsy attempt in your youth. Suicide happens when "tomorrow" is too long and terrible a road between "today" and "it gets better." What's more, it doesn't "get better." But we do develop spines. We grow into our armor. Those slings and arrows become easier to deflect.

The two of us are of a certain era, aren't (weren't) we? We're the ones who came of age while watching the ones we adored morph by the dozen from "happy, youthful and vibrant" to "blind, emaciated and incontinent," sometimes in the space of a month.

Our coping mechanism was withdrawal. Numbness over fury. We seldom cried. But now in our 46th year, the ice has thawed a tad. The novocaine's worn off. Some of us are lonelier that we'd prefer to admit. There are so many of you we miss. Maybe we drink more than we ought.

Middle age crises strike every man, of course. Suddenly we feel a tender brotherhood with the poor sap we used to ridicule; the one driving his Corvette down the avenue, hair plugs to the wind, Huey Lewis blaring on the stereo. A lesson you'll mercifully never learn: it's terrifying for a dude, waking up to discover he's past his prime. But enough about us.

What an infuriating, original, beautiful and flat-out cra-zay-zay creature you were. The consummate host who could (and frequently did) clear a room with a venomous remark. You were the big brother we never had, and we fought accordingly. Often. But lord, how you were loved. By everyone.

Your final night on terra firma, we got what we knew would be our last look at you. The faint furrow in your unconscious brow, your body heaving slightly as you refereed the hushed battle between AIDS and your respirator, those impossibly blue eyes clinched shut. Somehow we wound up on the floor, our cheek against the lime green tile of Beth Israel's terminal ward, our nose filled with Pine-Sol clean. We never cried harder or longer, before or since.

Through the alchemy of time, we turn around and a decade separates us from the tiled floor of Beth Israel. We can still smell the Pine-Sol, though.

Remembrance has its irony. We're the big brother now, to the memory of that sweet man on cusp of 40, hooked up to a breathing machine. Funny, isn't it? Life's unexpected reversals.

It's a beautiful autumn Sunday. The air's crisp, the sun brighter than it has a right to be, the sky so blue it borders on cruelty. So...

So we raise a glass (ginger-ale, tonight) to your miserable, glorious, bi-polar, gorgeous ass.

Happy birthday, B.

You would have been fifty today.

xox
WAM

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Motor-mouth Mark of Asbury Park: A totally true story

Hi bitches. We were tempted to rant on 9/11 (aka Republican Christmas), and all the bone-headed Q'uran-burning hijinx that make us wonder whether America's become one big Tuscaloosa trailer park. To us, 9/11 is like Thanksgiving with our Baptist relatives. Everyone talks about God too much. They bicker. It makes our tummy hurt. We're glad when it's over.

And it's over. It's 9/12. Nine years ago today, we were with a friend from TriBeCa who was rendered homeless from the attack. We went to K-mart so she could buy underwear. All they had left was a pair of Disney's Pocohantas thongs which she bought while hissing under her breath that we were forbidden to mention the purchase ever again. We like 9/12 much better. It reminds us of friends. And how they help us wade through crap.

With that in mind, we'd like to talk about our friend Mark (not his real name). Mark's a good guy. Heart o' gold. And to know him is to be aware that should you ask him a harmless question like "what's up," you'd better get comfortable. Not only will he tell you exactly what's up, his answer will take longer than a non-stop flight to Pittsburgh. Our cell phone's battery has run out in the middle of his voice messages. He can talk, but he's not a bore. Everything he has to say in his faint Tennessee drawl is interesting. He doesn't repeat himself, much less pause for breath. Stick a pin in that for a sec.

A few years ago, Mark moved down the shore to Asbury Park. Part of the first wave of homosexual homesteaders (homosteaders?), he and his partner bought an enormous old house just steps from the boardwalk and spent years restoring what had become a decaying SRO crackhouse to its former glory. At the time, Asbury was drug infested, dangerous and filthy. But the few rainbow flags sprouting up like edelweiss at Treblinka seemed to suggest it just might turn the corner.

Last week, we went down for a visit. While Asbury Park hasn't quite turned that corner (it still has the air of a post-nuclear Coney Island), it was good to be there. We went to the beach and chillaxed. And it got us thinking about our two favorite memories of "motor-mouth Mark."

First, know that Mark (a musical theater homo) used to understudy for a once-famous 70's disco group who liked to dress up like cops and cowboys and sing about the Navy (yes, they still tour hither and yon caterwauling their musical invitation to "body-body, feel my body," though half of them need a walker to make it to the stage).

On Mark's 40th birthday, he held a cook-out on his front lawn (freshly cleared of discarded crack vials in honor of the occasion). Philipe, the original "Indian" (who's really Puerto Rican), was in attendance, along with Mark's lovely, chain-smoking and thoroughly charming southern mom.

At the high point of the festivities, the faux-Indian (having indulged in heap-big fire water) cranked up the karaoke version of that song about how much ass-sex can be had at a certain Christian boarding house/fitness club. For the next blissful five minutes, Mark, his mom (menthol Virginia Slims parked 'twixt her lips) and an aging (though still sexy) Puerto Rican Indian sang (and did the complete choreography to) this classic homo anthem. All the while, crack dealers, pimps and hos strolled by, viewing the spectacle with a priceless mixture of terror and confusion. That was the day, we're now convinced, that Asbury Park went irrevocably gay. And though life is booby-trapped with harrowing days like 9/11, Yahweh sometimes blesses us with a vision so surreal and delightful everything seems exactly right with the world – even (especially) when they clearly aren't. 

The second memory (take the pin out), is about the day Mark's motor mouth saved our lives. One bright July Sunday before he moved to the shore, we bought some sandwiches, packed some beer, rolled a joint and headed into Central Park for a lil' picnic. We found a secluded patch of grass away from the madding crowds. Forty-five minutes later...sandwiches eaten, beers open, joint half-smoked, we lay in the grass, looking at the clouds, listening as motor-mouth Mark waxed eloquently, endlessly, prophetically about the house outside of the city he would one day buy and restore. Suddenly, his soliloquy was interrupted.

"Yo, man...got another beer?"

We raised our head and shielded our eyes from the sun. Standing three feet from us was a menacing thug and his just-as-menacing sidekick. The motor of Mark's mouth momentarily slipped into neutral.

"Um, sorry," we croaked, in our deepest heterosexual voice, "we only brought two."

"Aw, man. Me an' my boy want a f*ckin' beer."

Mark's big blue eyes widened. We gulped.

We feebly held up a half-empty bottle. "Wanna sip?"

"No, f*ggot. I don't want no motherf*ckin' sip. I want a beer and you don't gots none. So watchoo got for a brovah, punk?"

At this point, we noticed the sidekick had circled around behind, trapping us between them. They both stuck their hands in the pockets of their baggy jeans with a purpose. They were armed. Thug looked around to see if anyone was within earshot. Sidekick moved in closer. Things looked bad. We might have peed a little in our underoos.

Miraculously, Mark's motor mouth shifted from neutral to overdrive. His astounding monologue went something like this:

"What's your favorite beer? I like Sam Adams. Lager, not dark. Dark beer's too bitter sometimes. Do you think dark beer is bitter? I think so. Sometimes. Although I like Red Stripe. Red Stripe's good. Do you like Red Stripe? I like your pants. Where did you get them? How do they stay up? Nice and baggy, lots of pockets to put things. Do you have a gun in your pants? I hope you don't because if you had a gun I'd have to assume you're going to mug us or shoot us or something. I mean, if you two were having a picnic the park and some guys came up and asked for a beer and pulled out a gun, I'm pretty sure you might draw the same conclusion. I like picnics, do you? When was the last time you went on a picnic? So are you going to mug us? I hope not. I think I saw a policeman walk by a minute ago. It's a beautiful day and it would suck to get arrested for mugging or shooting a person. I've never been arrested. Have you? Not to suggest that you've been arrested. But you look like you might have. Excuse me a sec. Hey you! Yeah you, the man and lady walking your dachshund! Hi! Beautiful day, isn't it! I'm wondering, have you ever seen a mugging? Do people get mugged in this part of the park? I'm just curious because I think these guys might be trying to mug us! So if you know what a mugging looks like maybe you could come over and tell us if we're being mugged or not. Do either of these guys look capable of mugging a person? What about this one, in the red-and-white Chicago Bulls jersey? The other prefers the Knicks, apparently. He's the one who looks like he has a gun. They both might. Anyway, I think they might want to mug us or shoot us, just FYI. Do you like sandwiches? My buddy and I just had some sandwiches. I had a turkey and provolone on wheat and he had a pastrami and swiss on rye. I like pastrami but I can't eat it cause it makes me gassy. We got them at the deli on 110th and Amsterdam, with the old Greek lady with the mustache. They make good sandwiches but I don't like their soup. Have you tried it? I had their tomato soup and it tasted like spaghetti-o's sauce. It was gross. What's your name? I'm Mark. This is Steve. He's hilarious. He's not talking right now but he's funny as hell. A playwright. Do you go to the theater? I like the theater. Did you see Rent? I liked it, although I found the lyrics to be a bit trite and clumsy at times. I mean, if I want to see a show about dirty kids shooting heroin and singing about love, I'll just see Hair. Rent was Hair with AIDS. But it was okay. I hated Lion King, though. It made my head hurt. I think a hundred dollars is too much to pay for a puppet show, don't you?"

By the time motor-mouth Mark started talking about musicals, our would-be assailants were skulking away, dazed looks in their eyes. For our part, about halfway through Mark's jaw-dropping diatribe, the terror had seeped out of our bones, replaced with quiet awe. "Have a nice day!" he called after them.

That last bit, that "have a nice day!" cemented it in our mind: motor-mouth Mark rocks. And while some folks are chatty in a way that makes us long for a rope and a kick-stool, we can listen to motor-mouth Mark's crapola all day long.

Happy 9/12. We survive.

xox
WAM

Motor-mouth Mark sez: "This blog's feed leaves me speechless"

Notes From an Unapologetic Uni-tasker

Some time ago, a teenage girl named Alexa Longueira was blissfully walking the streets of Staten Island (suspicious in itself) whilst texting something earth-shattering, no doubt ("shut UP, Zac Ephron is NOT a homo!"), when she fell into an open sewer manhole. While we wish no one injury, we enjoyed the story as evidence of Darwin's genius. Open manholes, after all, serve two important functions: they allow access to the sewer, and they handily dispose of dingbats like Alexa.

Walking (like driving, flying a plane, luging, operating a lawn mower, skydiving and sex), is an activity that requires one's full attention. Nobody needs to be doing anything else when they're doing any of these things. And if one finds themselves in a position where they simply MUST tweet about Hannah Montana whilst merging their Prius onto the interstate, something has gone terribly awry with their lives.

Take, for example, the curious case of Megan Mariah Barnes. On March 2, the classy Ms. Barnes crashed her Thunderbird into another vehicle because she had her ex-husband (riding shotgun) take the wheel so she could shave her hoo-hoo. Driving and pube-shaving are two activities that need no distraction. One false move doing either can easily result in the loss of something valuable. Heavens, if we're ever driving along and suddenly experience an unforeseen but desperate need to mow the grounds around the Washington Monument, you can rest assured we'd at least pull over. But this is a woman who climbed behind the wheel with a razor. It was planned. Of course this happened in Florida, where they grow retards like oranges.

But let's leave Florida, shall we? Let's go to Japan, the country that gave us hello kitty, kimonos and dolphin burgers. The Japanese are a suspicious lot (enough with the bowing, we're never going to clap). As such, they have a boner for robots. So much so, that they've recently unveiled the dazzling SOM, a portable hands-free whack-off machine (quit yer bitching gals, it also comes in a model for the ladies -- and desperate homos).

It seems to WAM that masturbation is a task one mustn't delegate. Furthermore, our highways are hazardous enough with folks tweeting and texting and facebooking, without adding hands-free chicken-chokers into the mix. After all, at least once a year don't we hear about a frisky couple who engaged in a bit of automotive oral when suddenly their Taurus sailed through a guard rail and down a ravine? We don't need truckers spanking one out with the help of their SOMs as their rigs careen down the turnpike. It's a hazardous distraction.

Want proof? Over the past two years, as America's financial institutions imploded one by one, the good people at the SEC (you know, the dudes we pay to keep an eye on the finance racket) were busily accessing sites like www.ladyboyjuice.com, www.hotgoo.com, www.scatmen.com, www.trannytit.com and www.anal-sins.com. Sitting behind government computers, their sweaty fingers click-click-clicking away, they either gained or tried to gain access to these sites more than 8,273 times. Meanwhile Bernie Madoff was escaping their scrutiny, AIG was playing a shell game with hundreds of billions in non-existent cash, and the strongest economy in the world was transformed into a disastrously precarious house of cards. At least when Nero fiddled as Rome burned, he was fiddling an actual fiddle.

What's more, we are convinced multi-tasking leads to insanity. Exhibit one: a dear friend of ours once had a roommate. One day it was roomie's turn to do the dishes and our friend discovered that roomie had taken the dishes into the shower so she could rinse out her filthy bits while scrubbing the skillets and silverware. That is simply demented, not to mention of dubious hygienic value.

Exhibit two would have to be Tetris Girl. She's a woman we encounter during every morning commute. Her blackberry is constantly running Tetris. She's tetris-ing as she walks, boards the train, disembarks, and totters off on her day. If, on the rare occasion she stops tetris-ing to look you in the eye, one detects her brain making a snap decision on how she must rotate you as you descend, so that you may fit into her twisted tetris-based reality. Tetris is her crack; reality an inconvenient intruder. We sincerely hope she's not tetris-ing whilst crossing the street one day when a cross-town bus sends her to the next level.

No. We are a proud uni-tasker.

It's okay to concentrate on one thing at a time. Really. As a matter of fact, we might all be a lot better off if everyone did just that.

And sometimes, of course, it's okay to do absolutely nothing at all. Sometimes there's nothing we'd rather do.

XOX
WAM

Tetris Girl sez: "If I rotate this blog's feed 90 degrees counter clockwise, it will fit into my life."

Shall We Vance? (UPDATE: 4 years*)

As devoted readers will recall, last July we wrote a note to a professor we had in college, one Mr. Vance Fulkerson. Vance, a be-wigged reptilian creep, was found to have concealed a video camera inside a clock in his bathroom, where he recorded his students making pee-pee and ucky-poo. He often taught voice at his home and instructed his kids (students of his at UNC) to vocalize whilst pissing; singing, he told them, uses the same muscles as going number one. Really, Vance. That's just tacky.

Upon arrest, he claimed he installed the camera to keep tabs on his aging parents (because nothing says "I love you, mom" quite like spying on her pinching a loaf). Howev, of the many, many tapes of recorded bathroom guests, none were of mumsy or daddums, nor were any of them female. But in his defense some of his candid puerile porn stars were totally of legal age.

Anywho, after our blog post (which received FAR more hits than any other COWA post, and still does), his past students kept crawling out of the woodwork, each with a more harrowing/disgusting story to tell, many of whom emailed us or commented here on COWA.

Flash forward: on January 10, Fulkerson (not-so-affectionately known as "Vanceline" back in the day), pleaded guilty to one felony count of sexual exploitation of a child. In the bargain, 16 lesser charges were dropped. And this Wednesday, he gets sentenced to anything from probation to 12 years in the slammer.

We shall update this post when the sentence is handed down, so stay tuned. But meanwhile, we have a few more things to say to this oily predator. So let's "stop dicking around" (one of Vanceline's fave expressions) and get to it, shall we? 

Dear Vanceline:

It's a strong possibility that you're enjoying your last lungfuls of freedom's sweet air for quite a while, maybe even forever (face it cream-puff, you're 63, and some of our more sensitive convicts tend to get stabby with child molesters). So we thought now's a good time to have a lil' chat.

First, we hate to break it to you, but you need to brace yourself for the eventuality of relinquishing your spectacularly obvious toupee. They don't allow wigs in maximum security. We admit to looking forward to your booking photo, for no one (outside that legendary day in dance class when your rug became un-moored after you executed an enthusiastic fan kick) has ever seen you sans hairpiece. You will also be obliged to remove your high-heeled zippered ankle boots, your maroon tights, and that cute plaid shirt you liked to knot at your midriff like Ellie Mae Clampett.

We wish you the best of luck in your game of cell-mate roulette, for you could be partnered with anyone from a check forger to a psychotic cannibal. At any rate, please be aware that the terlit will be in plain view of your cell-mate and every passerby. We hope you think about your hidden clock-camera every time you undergo the indignity of public pooping.

Next, we feel the need to apologize. Not to you, but to your "pets." It's like this: every year, you'd set your sights on a confused young man. You'd groom him, and laughably claiming to have Broadway connections you'd promise him stardom and cast him in leading roles. The WAM-ster himself could have been so "fortunate," had we not shivered in revulsion and told you to remove your hand from whence it had wandered one day in your office. But in the sheltered sphere of college, your "pets" were routinely ostracized by the other students, ruthlessly torn to shreds behind their backs (and sometimes, regrettably, right in front of their faces).

We see now how miserable they were. Enduring the ghastly carnal attentions of an immoral (and profoundly icky) snake, the ridicule and cold shoulder of their classmates, and the visible destruction of their self-esteem. Eventually, a new semester would bring fresh meat, and they'd find themselves cut loose. We wish we'd seen what was really happening instead of being blinded by our shallow teenaged ego/rivalry/resentment. And we hope your long overdue incarceration brings them some kind of belated cold comfort.

And finally, you classy tub of rancid Crisco, know that we take no real pleasure from the thought of you being inevitably beaten to a pulp for pirouetting in some prison cafeteria; no more pleasure than we derive from the fact that you oozed from your mother's thighs to begin with. Your victim's scars endure, regardless. 

XOX
WAM

* The Judge has sentenced Vanceline to 4 years in the slammer (check out his hollow video mea culpa, complete with fake crocodile tears). Your sentence, Vancy-poo, is equal to the four years we spent in the college in which you taught. At sentencing, you said: "I am ashamed of my secretive fantasizing."

Well, Vance...it's like this. Everyone has weird fantasies. Not everyone acts on their fantasies by concealing a camera in their bathroom to record underaged guests going pee-pee and poo-poo. So you're going to the big house for four years, and were led from the courthouse in cuffs. And you'll be 67 when you emerge. Sorry bitch, we can't cry for you.

Because when you're released, the world, for 4 years, will have been blissfully, a little bit less slimy.

Bon voyage. 

Vance sez: "I wouldn't have been so creepy with the kid if I knew he'd grow up and write this blog and invite folks to subscribe to his feed."

Vi Blattner's Wild Ride: A Totally True Story

As devoted readers recall, our retarded childhood was set in a lovely mountain town. Think "Stand by Me" without Kiefer Sutherland or train tracks (albeit leeches played an unfortunate cameo). We were lucky enough to live within walking distance to Wilmot Elementary. In high school, we drove. In the three intervening years, however, we took the bus to Evergreen Junior High (go, Rams! Wooo!).

To set the cultural stage for you, Foreigner and Boston were relevant, "Barracuda" was our fave song, and our friends were raving about a new flick our folks would never allow us to see because of its "R" rating, but it seemed to be about Vinnie Barbarino prancing about to the Bee-Gees (whom we loathed), so it sounded like a colossal bore and who cared anyway? 

Evergreen Junior High started the school day at the obscene hour of 7:15 a.m. and we were at the beginning of the bus route. That meant, for three torturous years, we waited in the dark at the end of a long dirt driveway, shivering in a snow drift at 6 a.m. When the headlights came down the hill and raced past the frozen pond, we were always struck with a mixture of relief and anxiety. On one hand, we could look forward to regaining the feeling in our toes by the time we shuffled into algebra. On the other, our stomach knotted in anticipation of the harrowing hour-and-ten-minute ride that lay before us, courtesy of a spectacularly reckless bus driver named Violet "Vi" Blattner.

We always heard the bus before we saw it; Vi never quite got the hang of the clutch, and the demonic echo of grinding gears always preceded her.

Vi Blattner was a tiny, withered woman who kept her hair dyed jet black and ruthlessly sprayed into an Ethel Mertz bob. She was blind as a bat and wore thick, rhinestone encrusted cat-eye glasses. She always had a lipstick-smeared Pall Mall parked twixt her quivering lips (back when people could spark up a butt in an operating room), and was constantly sliding open her window to flick her ash into the predawn blackness. She had a guttural, smoke-ravaged voice that was somewhere between Harvey Fierstein and a post-possession Linda Blair.

The first thing one noticed about Vi was her profound nervousness. Her bony hands shook so badly she had to fight to keep them on the steering wheel. Years of dodging spitballs while piloting a bus down twisting, ice-covered roads had reduced the poor dear to a tangled mess of tics and twitches, and one had the distinct feeling she was barely held together by nicotine, caffeine and scotch tape. She always had more lipstick on her teeth than on her lips and had a very short fuse.

Just as morons amuse themselves by tacking"in bed" to the end of fortune cookie bon-mots, Vi was wont to add "or I'll give you a D-form!" to the end of every sentence she croaked. "Sit down or I'll give you a D-form!" or "Have a nice day or I'll give you a D-form!" or "Mike Bradley, put that back in your pants or I'll give you a D-form!" We never knew exactly what a D-form was, but we were rather certain we didn't want to be issued anything by Vi Blattner. 

But what made Vi Blattner truly memorable was her driving. She would maneuver that bus down steep mountain hills, careening through canyons, skidding through 20-mile-an-hour zones at fifty. She negotiated pine trees, wayward elk, and hairpin curves with the stomach-twisting agility of a master Jedi.

Chevette Dillon was the first to get on the bus, we were second. Then Scott Stewart, Ned Radinsky, Mike Bradley and so on, zipping through thirty-five stops, finally ending with Debbie Durst, a profoundly unfortunate girl cursed with severe acne and epilepsy. In fact, during one of Debbie Durst's frequent and tiresome seizures, someone remarked that she was actually doing an impression of Vi Blattner.  We all found it terribly witty (kids are monsters).

By the time we skidded to a stop in front of Evergreen Junior High, we filed from the bus like a bunch traumatized Titanic passengers stumbling out of a lifeboat. We knew we'd barely cheated death, and could very easily have ended the morning as frozen kid-cicles at the bottom of Evergreen Lake, just like those chilly moppets in "The Sweet Hereafter."

We never saw Vi Blattner issue a D-form. We were far better-behaved than any reasonable person can expect from cranky, sleepy twelve-year-olds. The reason is simple; in this era that predated seat belts on school buses, we clasped the the seat until our fingernails left permanent crescents in the naugahyde, else we were unlikely survive to see Mr. Fickey's Intro to Spanish.

From time to time we wonder whatever happened to Vi Blattner. We suspect she spent her dotage at a home for the nervous. Upon meeting her maker, a terrified Saint Peter undoubtedly gave dear, unstable Vi uncontested entry into paradise, upon threat of being issued a D-form.

xox
WAM

Vi Blattner sez: "Subscribe to this blog's feed or I'll give you a D-form!"

Olly-Olly-Oxenfree!!

When we sat down today to blog (an verb which sounds like it should involve a magazine and a roll of charmin), we couldn't decide which ass to whup. There's so many to choose from.

There's the classy gal who got drunk and allowed her boyfriend to film her engaging in a little pooch-on-bitch hippity-dippity (note to self: booze, a video camera, and dog-sex are the main incredients for "shame pie"). Later, when her boyfriend threatened to make the video public, she pimped her unwilling underaged daughter to him. One wonders what the woman expects to receive this Mother's Day.

Then there was the case of Ms. Linda Brown, the Ohio woman who woke one day and decided to be a lottery winner. So she rented a stretch limo and headed straight for the mall, where she promised everyone in a particular store she'd foot the bill for their purchases. She learned a valuable life lesson that day: if one wishes to live the life of a lotto winner it's generally a good idea to be one. Because when it was discovered she didn't have two nickles to rub together, the tastefull populace rioted and looted the store so they could get the free stuff they were promised. Stay classy, Ohio.

But no. No, today we've decided to train our cross-hairs on the Heenes. For the better part of Thursday afternoon, Rick Sanchez of CNN could barely contain his glee as the nation (read: cable news) trained its jaundiced eye on what looked to be an air-bourne batch of Jiffy Pop soaring down the front range of Colorado. We all know the story by now: it was believed that a 7-year-old boy named Falcon (why must we name our children after nouns?) had climbed aboard an experimental helium balloon and was performing an unrehearsed solo production of "Around the World in 80 Days." When the thing landed, as suspicious locals poked at it with pitchforks, it was quickly determined that Falcon remained a flightless bird. He'd been hiding in the attic all along.

The first thing to note is the palpable disappointment on the part of the vapid talking heads. Sure, they SAID they were relieved but you KNOW they wished the kid had in fact taken that horrifying journey to 14,000 feet and returned to earth frozen stiff and frightened to death. They could have milked that shizzle for serious ratings. 

Second, if the latest rumours are indeed true, and the Heene's actually cooked up the scenario in order to score a reality television gig, one can't help but admire their chutzpah and creativity. Granted, they had the bad taste to appear not once but twice on a ghastly spectacle called "Wife Swap" (a word of advice to Mrs. Heene: perhaps the fact that your family is so eager to trade you like a pack of bubble gum cards could be mined for a hint or two). But if Kim Kardashian can become a celebrity because of a sex tape depicting Ray J's shame hose disappearing up her oopsie hole, the Heenes may enter the temple of "Hey Everyone! Look at ME!" It's not that exclusive a club. They let anyone in these days (hi, Elizabeth Hasselbeck!).

We frankly don't care. We can proudly say we don't even know what Kate Gosselin's voice sounds like and we want to keep it that way. 

But also, vis-à-vis "balloon boy," we smelled a hoax the minute young Falcon skipped up to reporters. Why? Let's step into the way-back machine, shall we?

One day when we were four years old, Mumsy took us along grocery shopping. Anyone who's ever seen a woman in a grocery store with an under-five knows she was flirting with disaster. Sure enough, as soon as Mumsy turned her back, we'd picked up a pricing gun and marked up an entire aisle of canned goods to $100. When store management complained (unappreciative of their exponentially-increased profit margin), Mumsy hissed at us through her teeth that we were to exit the Food King that instant and wait in our gorgeous faux-wood paneled Chevrolet station wagon so she could finish shopping before spanking our fanny. We obeyed. But instead of waiting in the back seat like a normal child, we thought it might be cute to crawl into the spare tire compartment, where we promptly fell asleep.

We awoke four hours later when the town sheriff discovered us. Teams of cadaver-sniffing dogs had been searching nearby Bear Creek for our bloated corpse. Mother wasn't happy.

We considered it an apt lesson for a woman who sent her four-year-old, unmonitored, to wait in the car. Heavens to betsy, why didn't just she tape a sign to our shirt saying "kidnap me, I'm into butt-sex"? The lesson was lost on her, and spankings ensued for the next two days. She spanked us right there. Then Dad came home and spanked us with a belt. Then Mumsy got to thinking about it the next day, got angry all over again and spanked us some more. Parents are hardly ever happy to discover that a major search and rescue operation was undertaken because of a child's game of hide and seek. 

So when be-dimpled moppet Falcon Heene pranced out of the attic and was greeted with hugs, instead of serving some serious hard time on the "naughty stool" at the very least, we cried "shenanigans."

Hoax? Absolutely. And now the Heenes are facing a butt-load of potential felonious charges.

We can see it now: "Jail Family: The Maximum Security Heenes," premiering this spring on Fox.

xox
WAM

Falcon Heene sez: "My dad said if I play along with his hoax I could subscribe to this blog's feed."

Mamma Will Provide (PLUS: Post-its of Friendly Concern!)

When we arrived in NYC in 1987 to pursue our ill-advised dream of becoming a renowned classical actor, we experienced a period of extreme poverty (who saw THAT coming??). We were reduced to jumping turnstiles, and our daily sustenance consisted of a banana in the morning and either a slice of pizza or a box of kraft macaroni and cheese in the evening. One afternoon we were loitering in Tantalus Deli on East 55th, trying to decide what delectable morsel to purchase with our last remaining 68 cents. Suddenly, we spied a hundred dollar bill on the floor in the beer aisle. That night we had the most delicious pastrami on rye ever.

Likewise, having suckled at the bitter teat of Unemployment Insurance for a year, the milk recently ran dry. The very day the payments ceased, we found ourselves hired by a prominent financial news agency, and now hold full press credentials ("smell YOU Nancy Drew!" we hear you utter under your putrid mentos-and-decaf breath).

But listen, bitches; Mamma will provide. In the darkest moment, something in the universe clicks; the planets align. We blink, and suddenly we're enjoying a delicious pastrami on rye. Burp!

Now that we're once again a respectable (shut up) working member of society, we've found little time to spare. And this, our baby, has suffered. Yet COWA remains our secret crush. Posts will come with more frequency in the future, and we shall ruthlessly whup the asses of those who deserve it until our computer crashes, our hands cramp, or Yahweh yanks us home to Jesus whilst smiting the internet because of Ashton Kucher's sophomoric twittering. We're back.

With that in mind, there have been numerous items of late with blatant "whup my ass" signs taped to their fannies. We've been chomping at the bit to open a can. What follows is the Reader's Digest version of what we've been simply DYING to say:

Dear Mackenzie Phillips:

When obnoxious divorcee Anne Romano relocated her two girls (Valerie Bertinelli—future hair band frau, current fat person—and thou) to the urban shangri-la of Indianapolis, who expected her oldest daughter to be arrested at airports with a kilo of horse wedged up her oopsie hole? Worse still, Schneider hardly foresaw the day when Julie Romano would hit the talk show circuit yammering endlessly about her icky 10-year affair with her father. I'll say it to your face Mack. It's tacky.

What gal hasn't accidentally done the the hippity-dippity with pops for ten years, ultimately aborting his misbegotten inbred womb-booger because hubby wouldn't approve? We're so glad you've decided to launch your extra-classy "I boned pops and all I got was an aborted fetus and a book deal" publicity tour and press junket. We knew you were bad news when you ruined Harrison Ford's evening in "American Graffiti." Do us a favor, take a job as a second shift Stuckey's hostess and slither away into obscurity. Thanks.

xox
WAM

***

Dear Prisscilla Mechell,

Our first impulse is to beg you to run a spell-check on your unfortunate first name.

Beyond that, as we know, a woman just isn't a woman unless a fetus is kicking her abdomen from within her fruitful womb. So when your ample tummy rudely ejected your woebegone uterus spew, you sensibly decided not to tell anyone. Instead, you faked the remainder of your pregnancy and kidnapped a neighbor's infant. Then, to remake the poor thing in your ghastly image, you shaved its noggin and tarted it up under layers of Mary Kay cosmetics. Upon reconsidering the wisdom of those actions, you deposited the wailing diaper-filler in a convenient dumpster, where it was later found by the authorities gurgling under half-eaten chalupas and curbed dog poop. 

We see absolutely nothing wrong with your actions. What does a modern gal want with someone else's tarted up baby? To hell with it. Let's go shopping!

xox
WAM

P.S. To Prisscilla's miscarried fetus: we congratulate you on your foresight with respect to your erstwhile mother-to-be's parenting skills. Better luck next time.

***

Dear Mayor Eric J. Brewer,

Okay, so being Mayor of East Cleveland is pretty much like being crowned King of poop. Sure, it's nice to be King of anything, but East Cleveland? What's second prize?

Howev, if one is running for public office, it's a good idea not to prance about in women's lingerie, snapping nasty pics of ourselves looking like a chorus girl in the all-crack-whore production of Chicago (a production we'd quite enjoy, come to think of it).

Bitch, it's like this; one does not pose for pictures in corsets and panty hose like an unholy hybrid of Betty Page and Flip Wilson if one yearns for a gig in the political sphere. For not only are you a freakin mess (we beg you to investigate proper skin care, pubic mowing, lipo, hot oil treatments and drastic rhinoplasty), you are now known as Ms. Mayor Nasty Pants. Can you really govern dazzling East Cleveland when everyone and their Facebook friends know you're wearing Victoria's Secret's entire "tranny-mess" line underneath your JC Penney double breasted seersucker? We suggest a new career. Perhaps you could give hand-jobs at truck stops or join the gals on The View, or something.

xox
WAM 

***

Dear Ms. Davina Warren:

First, let us dance on the precipice of political incorrectness by saying that the black bitches have ALL the hair. We have seen weaves that gave us vertigo and/or motion sickness. We have seen bitches who are so braided and bobby-pinned their architecturally unstable hair looks like exploding turkeys emerging from chocolate wedding cakes.

So we quite enjoyed the story about how you grabbed hold of a bitch's weave and held it for ransom whilst wielding scissors. And now you find yourself charged with aggravated assault and false imprisonment. 

Chanda. Chanda-Chanda-Chanda. As anyone from Tootie on "Facts of Life" to Beyonce (and her team of nervous wig-wranglers) will attest, one simply does not take a bitch's weave hostage and expect to live to see Tyler Perry's next cinematic masterpiece. Especially considering the fact that, judging by your photo, weaves have waged the cruelest war on thou; for you look like the second-string Big-Mac-assembler at the Tuscaloosa McDonald's.

Perhaps you intended to purloin gal's locks, to pirate her braids in order to supplant your woefully inadequate hairdo.  

xox
WAM

Julie Romano sez: "I'm totally addicted to my subscription to this blog's feed"

Let's Talk About Seck's: A Totally True Story

Yours truly was fortunate enough to grow up in a bucolic mountain town. Us kids from the neighborhood used to ride our bikes up and down Gigi Street (we know), a gently sloping dirt road with exactly nine houses on it, each a couple hundred yards apart. Our house was squarely in the middle and had a nice circular driveway so chez WAMster was the hangout. Back then, the bike made the boy, and the WAM-cycle was unbearably groovy. It was a metallic gold three-speed, with a sparkly silver banana seat. We'd pimped it out with rear-view mirrors, a handle bar-mounted AM radio (with a built in push-button horn), and a day-glo orange flag mounted on the back. Sometimes we'd play bike-swap and take each other's rides for a spin.

David Catterson and his older brother Ronnie had matching red banana bikes, Scott Montgomery's was yellow. Paul Phillips had one of those new-fangled 10-speeds (we disapproved of the awkward ram-horn handle bars), and Jimmy Hall's was a red-and-white Pee Wee Herman-esque number. We'd often construct a jump out of cinder blocks and plywood, and double dutch dare each other to perform the most ill-advised airborne stunts (under threat of having one's name entered in the "Chicken Book," an infamous registry of the faint-hearted which existed only in theory). Consequently, everyone had the pleasure of picking gravel from their bloody knees and elbows with alarming frequency (with the sad exception of Paul Phillips, whose name was entered repeatedly in the "Chicken Book").

We were always having a full-throttle blast, us kids, yet we also complained tirelessly of boredom. When ennui descended, the oldest kid (Ronnie Catterson, approaching puberty) reliably steered the conversation towards a subject he knew very little about: S-E-X. We listened attentively, for despite his sketchy expertise, he had far more than the rest of us combined. He talked of "boobs" and "popping boners." He talked about "Creamy." He talked about popping boners when he thought about Creamy's boobs. Jimmy Hall talked about a magazine called "Hustler" which he found in his father's garage, but was too scared to swipe. About this time, young WAM was browsing through Mom and Dad's library of musty boring books and struck gold: "Human Sexuality by Alfred Kinsey." It was illustrated. Holy crap.

We tiptoed from the house with that dusty tome under our shirt. The Gigi Street gang spent an afternoon gasping at the horrors and marvels contained in those yellowed pages. There were numbered drawings of nekkid men and women getting into the most awkward and inconvenient positions.  A few days after carefully returning the book to its place on the shelf we discovered that our parents had relocated it to the locked cabinet. The Gigi gang demanded more naughty diagrams. So we decided, as a group, to publish our own magazine filled with dirty drawings and erotic jokes. We were eight; rest assured both the drawings and the jokes were retarded and nonsensical. And we decided to name our fledgling periodical "Seck's" (a name we still consider flat-out brilliant).

We designed the cover; a charming illustration of a nekkid woman thrusting her titanic breasts skyward. The other kids submitted jokes about hoo-hoos and shame hoses, boobs and buttholes. Ronnie Catterson sketched a loving portrait of himself holding hands with Creamy whilst popping a boner. We thought we were onto something. For about a week, we took turns taking it home and hiding it under our pillows. Unfortch, only one copy of the first issue was ever produced.

One summer afternoon after a lovely peanut butter and jelly washed down with green Kool-Aid, Mother confronted us. She had found our premier issue of Seck's, and wasn't happy about it. A few days later, a book from the Evergreen Public Library appeared on our Charlie Brown bedspread. It was filled with horrifying illustrations and explanations. That goes THERE? Ew!! We were appalled, and not a little skeptical. Chapter One's opening line was particularly unpromising: "When a man and a woman love each other..."

Although it was years before WAM would bloom into a full-fledged homo, both the "woman" and the "love" parts of that first sentence felt entirely superfluous.

And that, dear readers, is how we learned the difference between Seck's and sex. 

WAM sez: "A subscription to this blog's feed is better than Seck's."

WestWord Cites Whup-Ass Master's Vance Fulkerson Story!

We are now part of the cultural zeitgeist. 

On Tuesday, we posted a heart-warming note to aging toupee-wearer Vance Fulkerson, a repulsive man who taught at our alma mater and is currently facing charges of getting a tad sexually exploit-y with the young 'uns and collecting snapshots of toddlers acting slutty. Since then, our traffic has exploded. We've gotten oodles of emails from the Be-wigged One's former students, each with a more horrific story to tell, each thanking us for writing about it.

And now, WestWord (the only remotely cool newspaper in Denver), has published a lil' piece about yours truly and our cute COWA bloggy thing.

Sharing is caring.

xox
WAM

P.S. Lest any nudges out there accuse us of exploiting a vulnerable dude for our selfish enjoyment, that's precisely what this snake has been doing for decades. Turn-around, while fair play, is hardly advisable in the presence of Vance.

Vance Fulkerson likes to secretly film underaged boys subscribing to this blog's feed.