When The Kite String Breaks

This next tale dates back to the early nineties. I know this for sure, because it was the same week that the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head was released. One Saturday afternoon, I was hanging out with a good friend of mine named Jeff Loray. Jeff was a decent guy - fun to party with, but a complete wasteoid. His lifelong claim to fame was that he once sat smoking crack in the basement for so long that the cold floor gave him hemorrhoids. We had already knocked back a twelve pack at my apartment, and it was a nice spring day, so we decide to wander down to the park to look at girls; on our way, we stopped at the liquor store.

If ever there was an omen of bad things to come, it should have been this.

I was a scant sixteen years old at the time, so Jeff went in the liquor store to get Vodka and I go to the adjacent grocery store to buy some orange juice. I am standing in line at the cash register looking at the guy in front of me – I know him, but I can’t place him. While waiting in line, Jeff stumbles into the grocery holding an open bottle of vodka and being a general jackass; drinking it in the store and making a scene. I knew the girl at the cash register; it was probably the only reason we hadn’t been kicked out. So the guy in front of me is paying for his stuff, my friend is waving an open bottle of hooch in my face and the curiosity finally kills me.

“Excuse me, where do I know you from?” I ask the man.

“I was your teacher in driving school,” he responds dryly.

Oh, fuck, that was strange! I had a PhD in GTA when I took his class. No worries; back to the fun. We make it to the park, and it’s a beautiful spring day, so we stay all day drinking screwdrivers, playing hacky sack, and gawking at the high school chicks.

The sun starts to set, so we set forth to my apartment. At the time, I was working for my uncle, as a butcher and slinging a little weed on the side. I get out my box of pre-bagged quarter sacks and notice I had a few stray hits of blotter acid. We’re already pretty drunk, but our plan was to go out that night and see a band. I figured, “Why not keep the fun going and do some acid. Oh, and since I’m really drunk, I might not feel just one hit – we had better take two, just to be sure.”

We come to a decision it would be better to get out of the house before the acid kicks in and we can’t drive. I get in my old 1980-something Ford Tempo dubbed “the Cocktail Mobile” and I’m so fucked up I can’t even make it out of the parking lot.

The acid had already hit me, so I tell Jeff, “I’m too fucked up to do this. This is like a fucking video game.”

So he takes the wheel, careens the wrong direction against traffic, drives around in a few circles, and then over some curbs before he finally reaches the same conclusion. We flip back to my house and call a cab. You know you are some sorry bastards when you need a cab to take you to the bar. On the way to the club Jeff looks in his pocket and realizes that we still have a fat joint from earlier that day. We ask the cabbie if he minds if we spark it up and he obliges. So here we are: in a cab, tripping, having a good time, and smoking some chronic…

WHEN THE KITE STRING BREAKS…

I’m not sure what happened, maybe it was that joint that threw me over the edge. As we started walking up the steps of the club - the insanity took over. First, it crept in the back of my mind - I was thinking that I could ward it off, but the madness was much stronger than my willpower. The feeling is difficult to describe – intense feelings of death, paranoia, and despair -- sort of a hallucinogenic anxiety attack times a billion. My trip had gone bad, and I could no longer control it.

I started telling Jeff, “Dude, I think I’ve overdosed man!”

“Nah, dude you’re alright.”

I’m like, “No, dude, I feel like I’m dying, seriously. Get me some water!”

Among other problems, I had convinced myself my heart had stopped beating, but for some reason, I felt if I drank enough water I would be able to flush the drugs from my system. I was freaking out too much to be in public anymore, for sure, so I go to a quieter, less crowded room at the club and tell my friend to keep bringing water. He brings me probably my twentieth cup of water; I take a drink from it, and look down at the cup. There was blood running off the sides of it! Then I started tasting blood…

“OH MY GOD, JEFF, I AM DYING! LOOK - I’M SPITTING UP BLOOD,” I scream with a salty taste in my mouth.

I hold the cup up to him and he just starts laughing. How can this fuck be laughing at a time like this?!

“Dude, you need to calm down…there’s no blood on that!” he explains.

When I take a closer look; I realize that it’s just a white cup with some red flowers on it. The blood and the taste had all been a hallucination. He leaves the room and I stay, trying to get my shit together, when I am approached by this really young, cute girl. She was maybe seventeen. I realize I’ve met her before and can’t believe, in my fucked up condition, I can remember how I knew her. Winds up: one time I went in a Subway, she was the sandwich girl, and she asked me if I could run next door to get some cigarettes. So I take her money, get her cigs, and leave. That was the only time we ever met.

She walks up to me, “Hey, I know you.”

I’m like, “Yeah, you work at the Subway by my house and I got cigarettes for you once.”

“Oh, my god I can’t believe you remember.”

“Oh yeah, I do. I’m just having a weird night…”

I start explaining what was going on and she just listens; for some reason, talking to this girl was helping me rebound from my bad trip. I could slowly feel myself returning to normal. I finally shake most of my demons, we go back to the other room, and I meet up with a few of my friends as the show is ending. The girl offers Jeff and me a ride home with her and her fat friend.

We get in the car and I am not exaggerating – it was the WORST car ride of all time! Fatty was drunk ass piss, swerving into different lanes - horns were honking at us, and at on point her entire compact car had swerved to where we were traveling under the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler! I wasn’t hallucinating at this point – we really were going to die. Somehow, we manage to make it back to my apartment in one piece. My friends that followed are freaking out over her driving. The girls ask if we want them to come in, we say “hell no” and run for our lives!

I’m at my apartment door - thank god this ordeal was over. I’m just gonna’ kick back and drink a few beers with homies and enjoy what’s left of the evening. As soon as I put my keys in the door, I knew something was wrong. I walk in and see that my kitchen window was smashed in. Someone had broken into my place! I see the drawer where I keep my weed was gone; in my bedroom, I find my 4-track recorder, drum machine, and favorite CD had all been nicked!

I start losing it again and punched a bunch of holes the wall; my friends are trying to calm me down and the black fog in my brain was rolling back in. I am acting like a maniac that my friends can’t take it anymore and split.

I stay there lying on the floor – turning the incident over and over in my head – trying to figure out who could have done this. My brain was too full of acid to sleep – might as well do something constructive. I knew it was someone I know who did this. While listing to the soothing sounds of Adrock’s wa-wa guitar off Check Your Head, I thought of the girl at the supermarket who saw Jeff and me all fucked up earlier during the day. She has a boyfriend named Chris to whom I sold pot. Chris has a penchant for getting drunk and stealing shit. Those facts (plus a few other factors) made me relatively certain I knew who the culprits were; if I wanted to get my stuff back, I needed to act fast.

The time is 9AM. I call Spencer, my drug dealing partner and fellow butcher. First, a couple of words about Spencer: he eats steroids for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; he loves beating on people, and is a complete psycho/all-around thug. I tell him what happened, he comes over, and we drive out to investigate.

It’s noon when we pull up to their house; I still haven’t slept. We creep through the hedges on the side of the house and peer into the windows. It just so happens they were waking up. There were three of them: Chris, Dean, and the girl from the supermarket. This was an excellent chance -- if I saw anything of mine I planned to burst in the door and kill them. We sat there watching for a few minutes – I don’t see any of my musical equipment, but they do have weed and appear to be getting ready for a morning wake n’ bake. Out from under the coffee table the Chris pulls out a bong…THAT HAD BEEN STOLEN FROM MY APARTMENT A FEW WEEKS BEFORE!

That was all I needed! I kicked in the front door and started beating the shit out of Chris on the spot. Startled, Dean was too scared to even jump in.

Dean protests, “John, why don’t you…”

SLAM, SLAM, SLAM – I started laying into Dean and as soon as I had completely fucked him up -- I redirect my rage back toward Chris. Spencer, who was looking forward to doing some ass-whomping, just watched. The girl took off toward the kitchen to call the police. Spencer followed her, unplugged the phone from the wall, and sat it on the coffee table.

“Alright motherfuckers - where is my shit?” I screamed.

Chris was balling his eyes out “John, I never wanted a beef with you – I don’t know what you are talking about!”

We turn their place out like we were the DEA, but only found my bong and some of the weed.

At home, I start reflecting on the events of the past twenty-four hours. Yeah, it was a shitty, shitty experience, but would make for a great story one day. I really redefined the meaning of “having a bad trip” with that one.

That was the day the kite string broke.

Drugs and beating people up are bad.

The Spartanburg Incident

This story dates back to around 1997, when I was roomates with a bunch of band members from Twisted Sound. Anyhoo, they were doing a gig in Spartanburg, SC, and they didn't have a stripper for the show (all their live shows involved strippers somehow). Our friend, Scott Corkren, wass an interesting guy. When he wasn't filming midget porn in a swamp behind his house, shacking up with runaway gutter-punks, or blowing up televisions, he was a professional architect. He told us that he had an 18 year-old bimbo who wanted to dance for us (catch my drift right – she was 18, OK? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge…) and volunteered to meet us at the show with said jamtart. Problem solved.

The show was at the old Ground Zero Club in Spartanburg, which shares a parking lot with the local police precinct. We rolled into town and a short time afterward Scott shows up with his chick -- I can’t remember her name, but she was already really hammered. We get our drink on, hit the stage, start jamming, and the girl gets on stage dancing around in her panties. Midway into the set, Scott jumps up on the stage, and starts beating this girl mercilessly with a 15-inch rubber dildo. Then she gets hold of it and starts flogging members of the audience about the head, neck, and face. It was quite a sight to behold.

By the end of the show, this girl is completely wasted. She grabs the bass player and rushes off into a bathroom stall. Minutes later, she walks back into the club, naked, with dong malt hanging off her chin like a sperm stalactite. The people that were hanging around outside started cracking up so hard, they were having convulsions rolling on the floor.

She has a couple more drinks, lies naked on top of the bar, and various club patrons start playing a game of “hide a fifteen inch dildo in the pickle parlor.” While they are violating this girl’s twat with a foot and a half of polyurethane, Josh (the lead singer) gets a hold of this black magic marker and start tattooing swastikas, 666’s, pentagrams, upside-down crosses, and the obligatory “I HATE NIGGERS!” all over her naked body.

Things are getting pretty crazy, so the guys that own the place leave the bar open for some after-hours fun. Now, it’s down to just a select group of ten or so locals, the dildo girl, a waitress, bartender, and the owners of the club. We are hitting the Jagermeister and smoking weed while the slut-n-dildo show continues into the night. Most of the people are sitting on a table near the bar. The girl decides to take a break from Mr. 15-Inch, walks over to this wiggery-looking guy in a pimp hat, and tries to undo his pants to blow him, but the guy pulls away.

I step to him, “What kind of pimp wouldn’t take a free blowjob? You don’t deserve to wear this hat.” I take the hat off his head, and put it on mine.

I was just kidding, of course, but I could see in his eyes that he was about to hit me for my indiscretion. I decide to beat him to the blow (no put intended) - one well-placed right cross broke his nose in probably fifteen different places. A gallon of blood spurts forth all over the place, and this guy is bloodier than Jesus in a Mel Gibson flick. I instantly felt bad for fucking him up so bad him, and step back behind a barrier on the other side of the table. Once the shock wears off, the guy starts walking over the tops of the tables to come at me, while I’m telling him to chill because I didn’t want to clean his clock again. Before he can jump down, I kick the table out from under him, and he’s lying on the floor, helpless.

That’s when I start to feel shit slamming into my head - his two redneck cousins are pelting me with beer bottles, pool cues, barstools, and just about anything else they can find! Now, I’m fighting all three guys, and Scott Corkren - sensing that police were probably on the way and that an underage drunk girl, tattooed in swastikas, with a fifteen-inch dildo hanging out of her might be a liability - decides to move her out to the van. Just in time, because the bartender had called the police (they are right next door) and the place is crawling with pigs within thirty seconds.

As soon as the cops show up, the main guy I was fighting inexplicably decides to punch the waitress in the face, and flee out the front door. The cops see this and run after him -- which was a blessing, really, because his Ike Turner job on the waitress had taken a lot of the heat off me. We walk outside and stand by the van to talk to the cops. I am covered in blood, with broken glass hanging out of my head. I start telling them that I don’t know what was with that dude, and how “he just started going crazy, officer.” In the meantime, Ole’ Ike had escaped on foot, and it was looking like the cops were about to let us go free, when, from inside the van…

“I JUST NEED SOME FUCKING DRUGS, WILL SOMEONE GIVE ME SOME FUCKING DRUGS!!”

The naked jailbait impaled on a rubber dildo had woken up, and didn’t realize that a half dozen cops were standing right outside the van. The cops open the door of the van, and find this naked underage slut cover with fresh “I hate Niggers…” tattoos, screaming about wanting drugs -- and what do you think was special about the first cop to shine his flashlight in the van? I’ll give you one guess: that’s right…HE WAS A BLACK COP!

I knew it; we were done for. The cops start asking who the girl was with, and, to my surprise, my architect friend, who stood to lose his license over this fiasco, immediately claims her. Love is a hell of a drug, I guess. Skipping the perfunctory interrogation, they cuff him, and walk him across the lot directly into the police station. By this time, the sun is starting to rise, I’m assuming he’s fucked, and we ought to a least start getting together some bail money or something, but, ten minutes later, Scott emerges the police station -- un-arrested! Holy goddamn moly and Jesus H. Christ on a crutch -- this was either a certified miracle or a really big payoff! Cheerleaders, get out your pom-poms and sing along:

B-R-I-B-E-R-Y, WHAT’S THAT SPELL?

BRIBERY! BRIBERY! BRIBERY!

That was the Spartanburg incident.

The Last Kiwi Passionfruit Of The Christ

The Lord works in mysterious ways, much like cotton candy machines, or PCP.

For example, I saw Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ at the Cineplex Odious last night – it was the most amazing movie I’ve ever seen. So amazing, in fact, that I fell asleep no less than three times during a scene where Jesus was on the receiving end of an old school Roman ass-whomping, only to wake up each time and discover that – holy stromboli – he was still getting his ass whomped. Congratulations to Mel for achieving what I have yet to do after almost ten years on the Internet: he made gratuitous violence seem entirely uninteresting.

The most intriguing aspect of the entire experience was not the $30 million worth of spattered fake blood, but the constant whimpering from the dozen or so children whose parents decided their precious tikes would benefit from being terrorized by 127 minutes of bloodletting on an 80-foot screen. Nothing soothes the fragile young psyche like THX-enhanced flesh lacerating. Sakes alive, those kids will really appreciate all that Jesus has done for them after they’ve been awake for five days worrying about Roman soldiers in their closets and Jews under the bed. Thanks, Mumsies and Papa! Now, explain to me, again, why Howard Stern should be off the air.

I don’t mean to "get up on a cross here" (ROFLMAOSH, MFMBIAIFTHISOMLI!!!*), but this God fellow really needs to get his damn story straight. Is glorified brutality acceptable, as long as it confirms with religious ideology? If so, I’ll change my website to some Christian banter, hack out a few essays about intelligent design, and I should have the Pope’s blessing in no time. Of course, Immaculate Conception will be tough to sell with all the hardcore porn videos on the internet, but I’m up for the challenge.

Fuck all this – I’m going to go pull one of those Jews out from under my bed and cane him until he looks like a used tampon

* - Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off so hard, my fecal matter becomes impacted and I’m forced to have invasive surgery on my lower intestine – but you probably already knew that

The Day I Shut Off The Ocean

While I am not famous, I have lived a pretty fucked up life. I was born twenty-eight years ago on January 21st, and while I may have not lived twenty-eight Motley Crue years - I certainly have seen a lot more whacked shit than the average person. Having so many fucked up stories, it’s long been my intention to write my autobiography at some point, but such a project would be really, really ambitious; in fact too ambitious for a hack writer like me. So rather than attempting anything so noble; I would rather regale my readers with some of highlights and lowlights from this strange trip in my new series, John’s True Hollywood Stories.

My first story happened sometime in the spring of 2000, when I went with my friends, Mike and Juan, down to Cocoa Beach, Florida, to "surf" (bear in mind...I don't know, nor have I learned how to surf). We arrived early in the afternoon, and as soon as we got there, we hit the beach and started DRINKING HEAVILY. As the evening rolled in we decided to hit a local club to continue DRINKING HEAVILY. We left the club three sheets to the wind, but decided to stop at the liquor store on the way back to the hotel to grab another case of beer and a fifth of vodka - just for good measure. Upon return to the hotel - we continued to DRINK HEAVILY. We sat by the pool with our vodka, beer, and only a fraction of our brains still functioning; when two strippery looking girls walked past in the courtyard.

“Hey, what’s up ladies?” I asked.

Very candidly, they explain they were going to meet some drug dealer up in a hotel room to buy some five-dollar ecstasy.

“Shit, I want some five-dollar X!”

“We’ll go up and get it for you - just wait here.”

I hand them ten bucks and they wander off to another part of the hotel. We continue drinking and get REALLY, REALLY, WASTED.

“Dude, those chicks just scammed you.” Juan says to me, “They ain’t coming back. We’re going to bed.”

“Yeah, I’ll just give them a few more minutes.”

Not ten seconds after my friends go into the hotel room, the two hoes show up with the drugs. Excited that my ten bucks had not been squandered, I wolf down both pills.

“Hey, do you want to go in the hot tub with us?” one of the strippers asks.

Needless to say, the answer was “yes”. At the hot tub, the girls strip down to their t-backs, and we all get in. Now, let me again reiterate that I am WASTED – not like the “Oh, I’ve had a few too many drinks wasted….” – I’m talking about HAMMERED, BLITZED, ladies and gentlemen: MY GOOSE WAS COOKED. It was only then, while sitting in the hot tub with the topless hoes that the E starts working on me.

Then one of the two fine upstanding young ladies asks me, “Hey, do you want to see our pussies?”

So, I’m sitting there with two muffs in my face, when my brain becomes disconnected from reality, and have no idea what’s going on anymore. I just intuitively knew I needed to get back to my hotel room and pass out before my obituary would read:

John (Name Withheld), 24, Queens, NY - drown in a hot tub while attempting to softserve to two Florida strippers.

To the ladies disappointment; I stumble out of the hot tub, and venture back my hotel room. After I had mistakenly walked into a few other people’s hotel rooms, I eventually make it back to my room where I find my friends asleep in both beds. I lie down on the floor and pass out. Sometime during that night, while sleeping I am awakened by the sound of porcelain clanking around in the bathroom. I open my eyes, I can see that the bathroom door is open from the light shining out of it, but I can’t actually see in. I am thinking to myself: What the fuck is going on in there, and why is someone fucking with the toilet? I think for a minute that maybe I should investigate what was going on, but I never bothered to get up and quickly lapse back into unconsciousness.

The next morning I wake up, feeling like an economy-sized can of smashed assholes. My friends are already awake and seem to be a little bit testy, so I ask what the problem is.

“Dude, you kept us up all fucking night!” Juan bitched.

“What do you mean I kept you up all night? I crashed out on the floor and you guys were already sleeping when I came in!”

“No, dude – you sat in the bathroom for hours last night taking the toilet apart!”

I was like, “What?! I remember being asleep on the floor and I could hear someone else fucking around in the bathroom, but it wasn’t me. I was wondering what was going on in there too.”

“No - that was you, man! I tried to stop you a bunch of times but you wouldn’t.” Mike added, “Look John - you did this….”

He opens the bathroom door and there was the toilet; completely dismantled, laying in pieces all over the floor. The tank had been pulled off, that ball thing was pulled out, pieces of rubber and chains litter the floor. So I start thinking about it, why do I remember someone else taking the toilet apart? I thought about it for a while, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks:

I had an out of body experience.

The next day, I managed to put together what my drug addled mind was doing: Our hotel is right on the beach and I can hear the sound of the ocean. In Queens, my toilet at my apartment was always getting stuck and running at night. The noise would keep me awake at night, so I would have to get out of bed to fuck around with it to shut it off. In my whacked out state: the tides sounded like my toilet running. I was so off-my-block that I start thinking I was in Queens, and went fumbling around in the bathroom attempting to silence the sound of water running, but I couldn’t. The Atlantic has been running for 4.5 billion years - there’s no way a toilet in a cheap motel in Cocoa Beach was going to stop it! Ok, that makes a little bit of sense, but why did I hear someone else playing amateur plumber in the bathroom while I was lying on the floor? Yes folks, my goose was so cooked that I had actually watched myself dismantle the toilet from out of my body. Yeah, that’s pretty fucked up.

That was the day I tried to shut the ocean off.

Drugs are bad, ok?

St. Pete's

Having been in the military had afforded me the opportunity to travel to far-flung lands, meet interesting people, and vomit in exotic locales. Even still, when my friend Rick informed me that we were headed to St. Petersburg, Russia, to research the patriotic possibility of outsourcing all our IT work to hard-up, borscht-chomping Russian programmers, I was giddy as Courtney Love with a stack of blank prescriptions. I mean, holy shit – RUSSIA, dude! This is where you can supposedly trade Levi’s for bricks of gold; where Ivan Drago and Rocky Balboa beat the snot out of each other; and, wasn’t a butt-ton of people systematically slaughtered there too, or was that Germany?

Frankly, I had no idea what to expect when I arrived in St. Petersburg last Tuesday, except for strong assumption that, whatever adventure lay in store for me, it would be played out with my balls shriveled to the size of cashews -- little did I know how much I would require the services of my frozen nutty buddies.

The rest of my office was weary of hearing this, I’m sure, but they’ll get to hear it one more time: St. Petersburg is the greatest goddamn city in the world.

I’m having a difficult time putting into words my love for this city, so, instead, I’ll simply regale you with stories and let the conclusions come as they may.

Story One: I leave Rick at the hotel and venture off with a friend to a club called Magrib. I was excited about this club, because a hooker had advised me earlier that it was quite a swinging little joint, and because I thought it was pronounced “McRib”. After purchasing a pack of Lucky Strikes for roughly $0.50 USD, I arrive at the club and settle onto my perch at the bar. Looking around, I’m struck by the observation that the club patrons are at least 75% women, of which about 80% are stunningly gorgeous. This wasn’t the booze talking, folks – the girls in St. Petersburg are, by and large, the most consistently beautiful women I’ve ever seen in one city. There were no crinkly, hunched-over, Soviet babushka monsters as I had expected.

So, I proceed to down a shameful amount of vodka and Jagermeister, dance poorly to the obligatory Eurodanceboomboom techno beat, and, at about 4 AM, hop in a car with two random dudes who claim to be going to a whorehouse. This, as many wizened Russian travelers will tell you, is known as a “fucking retarded idea”. A drunken American hitching a ride in Russia may not be as dangerous as, say, using a coupon in a Palestinian grocery store, but it’s still not the smoothest of moves – unless your travel budget allows for ransom payments.

Luckily, the two guys turned out to be honest, upstanding hooker connoisseurs like myself, and I arrived at the Palais de Poontang unscathed. The madam then herded in a gaggle of hot, be-thonged Ladies of the Evening. The other two guys argued in Russian with the Madam about, well, I don’t know what the hell they were talking about, but I was growing anxious to get in-out, in-out, in-out, and, finally, out of there, so I yelled at her in Russian-accented broken English, “How much for the fucking and the sucking?”

“500 roubles,” she replied. “500 roubles, one hour, one pretty lady.”

For those not familiar with the current exchange rate, 500 roubles is less than $20. For one girl. For one hour. And they were all hot. A tragic, gory cash hemorrhage was imminent. The other two guys kept haggling the price with her, but even my cheap-ass side was shouting, “Twenty bucks? What a bargain!” So, I slapped a couple hundred bucks on the table, grabbed four girls, and made with the lovin’.

I suppose I’ll skip most the sexual details of the next 3 hours. My mom reads this site, and that could get a little uncomfortable at next Christmas. I will, however, note that I finally played “Chopsticks” with the four hookers. You figure it out.

More memorable than the sex, however, was the hour I spent doing nothing but cracking jokes with these girls. None of them spoke English, and I don’t speak Russian – plus, I was naked -- so this was definitely the toughest audience my comedy bone has ever faced, but, ladies and gentlemen, I’m proud to say that I brought down the house. I killed. These four whores were literally doubled-over, clutching their stomachs in fits of laughter while I slap-sticked around the room. It was the single greatest comedic moment of my life, and it only cost twenty clams per clam. God bless Mother Russia.

I’ve got more stories to tell, but I’ll space them out over the next few weeks. Besides, there will be plenty more wacky hooker stories in the near future, as I’m moving to St. Petersburg in April. Oh, yeah.