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TRASH THEATER, Part 2 81 minutes. A Bob Balaban Film Written by: Christopher
Hawthorne Directed by: Bob Balaban (Psssst. Here's why they call it a
Bob Balaban Film. You see, no one had anything else to do with it, really. A
director, see, he's like, well, you know, magic.) Produced by: Bonnie Palef Starring: Randy Quaid,
Marybeth Hunt, Bryan Madorsky, Sandy Dennis,
Kathryn Brody, and several pounds of raw meat and entrails.
Food is the subject of our
column this time. And child abuse. You might not think the two
go together, but we're going to show you differently, through the sweet
metaphor of white-collar cannibalism. You see, we, the USofA, are a meat-lovin' people. Ain't nothing better than
throwing a slab of decaying cow meat on the pit or brewing up a big batch of
Tex-Mex Chili, which, by the way, we are doing here at Trash Theater even as we
dictate this to our secretary, Bambi. We should pause for a moment
of introduction. Bambi just went to work for us this week. Her prison record
and facial tattoos* do not concern us. Her inability to type more than fifteen
words per half-hour is unimportant. You see, what she can do, is cook. And
she's not very smart, so she works cheap, almost as cheap as Gort, our non-human companion, whose idea of payment is a
bag of pork skins.** So,
say hello to Bambi. She'll be handling our correspondence from here on out, and
if you send anything we consider distasteful, then Bambi will bring her entire
three-hundred-and-forty pounds and her taped axe handle over to your house and
will shove said axe handle up that nasty little slot between your ass cheeks
about as far as she can get it, and if her prison record is to be believed, she
can shove that dude pretty goddamn far. Bless her ole Momma's heart. And ass. Parents. This one takes place in the Fifties, and
it's the nightmare version of Beaver Cleaver's neighborhood. In fact, let's
make that Beaver Meat Cleaver's neighborhood. It's the Yankee version of The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, minus bad teeth and Drayton Sawyer's Rolling
Grill and dropped "g" letters on the ends of words that Yankees waste
their time giving "g" letters to.
Make a film about the South
or Texas, you immediately got to have some retards with chainsaws and enough
slobber to fill a mayonnaise jar and a whole bucket of missing "g"s on words,
but you go up to Yankee land, well, you got to be careful, 'cause
the nuts don't always look like nuts, and in the case of Parents, they're
pretty straight-lace looking.
Story is about a fine family
of three. Mom and Dad and little Mike. They're the kind of family would fit
anywhere in any town. The boy is about twelve, subject to chronic nightmares,
some triggered by mere adjustments made in his PJs, which goes to prove, you
got to put your goddamn jammies on right. He has a bad dream, and his Mom explains it away with he hasn't got his jammie shirt on. Wear
your jammie shirt,
those dreams will clear right up.
Only they don't.
But he's got his Dad to help him deal with the nightmares. He gets scared,
Dad knows what to say. The Gestapo and the North Koreans ain't got nothin' on Dad.
Mike, he's scared of the
dark, so Dad, very comforting, says, "Mike, the cellar is dark. Your room
is dark. Everything is dark at night. Pretty soon we'll turn off all the lights
and it will be dark everywhere."
Then good ole Dad points to
his own head and sums it up. "You know, there's one dark place you have to
be very careful in. You know where that is? The human mind."
And Dad leaves Mike in the
dark, where he dreams of floods of blood and grisly horrors.
The family has just moved
from one Yankee place to another, following Dad's job as a chemist to a local
plant doing some bang up work on developing powerful defoliants. Dad, he don't give a shit where he
works. Fact is, he don't give a shit about anything
but prime cuts of meat and the resulting leftovers.
At home, Dad, Mr. Laemie, is the king of his
supremely honky castle. His wife, Mrs. Laemie, she knows how to please him. She's a
disconnected Betty Crocker, ever the perky homemaker, nose to the cookbook. She
stands behind her man, no matter how bad he fucks up their son. She's willing
to say, "Honey, don't," to Dad when he messes with Mikey's head, but
that's about the end of it.
First day in a new school,
Mikey's teacher, Miss Baxter, asks the kids to share some new facts with the
class. Mikey, he's got a fact. He says: "Take a black cat and boil it in
an oven. And you peel off the skin until the bones are cleaned off. And you
chew on the bones and you'll be invisible."
Miss Baxter switches the
subject, asks Mike if he has a cat or a puppy.
Nope. No puppy or kitty at
Mike's house.
Later on, Miss Baxter has the kids do portraits of
their family. Mikey draws strange and savage pictures of three monsters
completely covered in scribbly red lines. The teacher, she's worried. Not only
is this bad artwork, there's something symbolic in all
this. She's been to school, see, and knows some things. Draw some red lines
through monsters, there's some bad shit brewing somewhere.
Mikey gets sent to the
social worker, Millie Dew, and they become friends. She's certain Mikey's home
life is on the odd side. He has weird views on things. She speculates and Mikey
goes home.
Later on, Mikey's dreams get worse, and one night
he wakes up thirsty, goes into the kitchen for a drink of water, and finds his
parents rolling and fucking on the floor. And we're talking kinky loving too.
Nothing so sissy as whipped cream and chocolate, rubber pants, dill pickles,
and big rubber dicks with knobs on them. They're rutting around in about
twenty-five pounds of human guts.
Dad is pissed. He was
getting some pussy. Mom, she tries to gloss things over, tucks a dazed, little
Mikey back in bed, Mikey having seen something he cannot explain on any level
to anyone.
Mikey's nightmares become
more intense, and boy are they visual. Like visions created by Dali while
painting with an electric potato peeler up his ass.
Mikey follows his Dad to work one day. He creeps around inside the building,
discovers a whole batch of bodies. The ones used for tissue experiments. In
comes his Dad. Mikey hides under a lab table while his
Dad takes out the carving tools and carves some
kidneys and loin roast off one of the stiffs. This fits in with Mike's gut
reactions that things are weird with Pop. He knows now why he always shunned
the meat at the dinner table, why his instincts were against it, and why Dad
was so agitated with him, called him the vegetarian in the family, way you'd say "the Ku Kluxer"
or the "public masturbater."
To Dad, this meat was sacred. A pot roast was like the Sacrament.
Millie Dew, bless her stupid
little heart, decides she wants to help Mikey, and she goes over to the Laemie house to snoop
around. This is like a serious fuck up. She finds a body in the basement, and
Mr. Laemie finds
her. Millie, she gets cut, several times.
That night, Millie, she's
swimming with the carrots and taters, and Miss Laemie announces proudly at the dinner table to
her family, "I trimmed off all the fat."
Things escalate. The boy is
a disappointment to his father, who sees him as nothing better than a goddamn
carrot gobbler. Dad has finally had enough, and in a rage grabs the kid and
threatens him. Mom protests. After all, she kinda likes the boy. Dad, he's not impressed
with the protest. He's logical. "It's okay, Lilly, we'll make another, and
raise him right!"
We don't want to tell you
much more. Some interesting silverware techniques follow, the Laemie house gets warmed up
good, there's a film ending connection with the old and good movie, The
Bad Seed, and the Beave's neighborhood is once again safe for
democracy and legitimate pot roast.
Some notes: Great food
preparations scenes. Fab looking human meat loaf. (Yea!, pass the ketchup!) And, a real message. That's right, we're gonna say it. This isn't
just your regular cannibalism movie. It's a valid metaphor for child abuse. The
abused and confused child, tortured not so much physically, or sexually, but
emotionally. Good ole Dad always making it unpleasant for him, talking about
the dark, wanting him to eat human meat. Mom, turning her back, ignoring what's
going on to keep the husband happy, thinking that's the ticket, chirping right
along like she really is June Cleaver (thank goodness no one is).
Parents has its funny moments, but ultimately,
it's a disturbing film. Not because it's about cannibalism and has Sandy Dennis
in it, but because it touches on real childhood fears. Such as Mom and Dad may
not be just exactly right. We highly recommend this. But not to be watched with
the kids, or staunch vegetarians. Dogs and cats may not like it either.
Let's wrap with appropriate
snacks. Well, almost any meat product would fit right in with this. But, a three
weenie sandwich on a white bread bun with mayonnaise and a side of
macaroni and cheese seems like the ticket. Oh, and don't forget the big ole
tumbler of purple or red Kool-Aid.
Okay, it has
to happen. You begged. You pleaded. You insisted. So, here it is.
We're finally going to do
it. We're going to talk about, that's right— The woman.
The sweet potatoes.
The asshole.
You see, there's this woman
named Karen Finley, she's like a performance artist or something. She's
relevant. She's a feminist, and we got to tell you, we at Trash Theater have
been moved by her.
You see, to speak out
against the horrible abuse against women, our stupid passion for consumerism,
Karen Finley goes bravely where no woman has gone before.
She gets up there on the
stage and drops her trousers, and most everything else, and then, right there
in front of God and everybody, she shoves canned yams (we prefer to call them
sweet taters) up her asshole.
We are not making this up.
If ever a blow has been
struck for art, feminism, and anti-consumerism, then Karen has struck it. Or
shoved it. Or something.
We were a little confused as
to if she does this with the taters still in the can, or if she takes them out
of the can before shoving, so we here at Trash Theater, following in the bold
steps of Karen Finley her ownself,
experimented. We found you shove those taters up your asshole while
in the can, it hurts.
We finally had to hammer the
can to a point on one end, get some forty weight lube
oil on the cans, and with one of us holding the salad spoons, the other bending
over and Gort or Bambie shoving,
we were able to get the whole goddamn can up there. The getting it out was some
work, and required a couple sets of salad spoons and a rubber glove and a
determined attitude.
We found just taking them
out of the can and shoving them up our assholes was a hell of a lot easier,
though there is the waste involved. You leave them in the can before you shove
them up there, make your statement, you can then wipe the can off, open it up
and fix those taters in a casserole with baked marshmallows on top.
Anyway, we now understand
what Karen was trying to say, and we suggest you do not try this at home. We
are, by the way, professionals.
What we think is a crime is
the fact that Karen Finley was turned down, get this, turned down, for a
National Endowment of the Arts. The goddamn,
scum-sucking pigs, the male chauvinist consumerist assholes. To think they
wouldn't want to give this lady money for her art, money to finance her
lifestyle so she can go up on stage and stick yams, or even a goddamn
watermelon, up her ass.
What has happened to our
love for the arts?
Have we become so enraptured
with AIDS research and help for the homeless that we don't know a good artistic
deal when we see it?
We here at Trash Theater are
fucking outraged.
Come on National Endowment.
Come around. Give her the grant. Let's get Karen on down to the Piggly-Wiggly
so she can get her a couple cans of canned yams and a striped rattlesnake
watermelon.
Remember, America is about
life and liberty and the arts, and the freedom to publicly shove stuff up your
asshole and get paid for it.
In honor of Karen Finley, we
here at Trash Theater are instituting the Trash Theater Canned Yam Award. This
award will be given whenever we feel like it to those who deserve it.
The envelope please.
The Rue Morgue.
All right. The Rue Morgue
recently invited Andrew Vachss as a guest to their bookstore to do
a signing, and right before his arrival, printed in their newsletter that they
thought his novels pandered to child molesters.
When numerous letters and
phone calls poured in protesting these comments about Mr. Vachss, the Rue Morgue, in their
ever-fair and vigilant manner, printed excerpts of the letters in their
newsletter and then went on to indicate that they had all been engineered by
Mr. Vachss, despite
the fact the letters came not only from friends and fans, but from colleagues
and people Vachss had
never heard of.
The Rue Morgue just couldn't
accept the truth. They fucked up. They made stupid comments. They were rude to
invite someone to a signing and then try and plant a note like that in their
newsletter.
People like that, they got
to deserve a can of yams up the ass. So, we salute you with our first honorary
Trash Theater Canned Yam Award, and no lube oil.
So, Rue Morgue, our best
wishes, and up your ass.
FOOTNOTES: *One, written in Latin,
reads: Suck Blood From the Balls of Satan, You Ass
Wipe.
**We actually
say pigskins, but we like to be polite in mixed company.
***It should be noted that
Lansdale, like Dan Quayle, our erstwhile Vice President, wanted to spell potato
with an "e" on the end here. He actually got
in an argument with Bambi about it, and Bambi's supposed to be stupid.
Even Gort sided with Bambi and Webb on this
one. Lansdale and Quayle, they can't spell potato.
On a personal note. Need it
be said that our opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Mr. Chizmar, whose hand feeds us, and whose hand we bite in
turn.
Next time: Trash Theater Anniversary Office Party!
Live! Blow by blow account!
(Brought to you by those
bastions of good taste, JoeR. Lansdale and David
E. Webb, their ownselves.) Okay, we can't get back into
our offices yet, due to all those damn snakes, which seemed to have bred under
one of the couches and produced a whole flock of baby copperheads, and our
exterminator is currently in the hospital.
Seems Billy Sue Constantine
of We Pest The Pests, in spite of experience, misjudged the speed of a striking
copperhead, and is now in the hospital with a vagina1 the size
of Richard Nixon's ego. We're talking big, so big the vagina sleeps in a chair
beside the bed. I mean, you look over at Billie Sue, lying on her side, her
vagina in that chair beside her, it looks like someone has put a box of
heart-shaped Valentine candy there, rested the box on its side. That's exactly
how it looks, except this box has a pulse.
While we're on such matters,
we'd like to tell you this. Billie Sue, in that special spirit that's made her
the life of many a smoker and bachelor party, told us a story about how her
ex-husband, Floyd, who played second accordion in a polka band, while helping
her eliminate rattlesnakes from an outhouse, decided to take a leak, only to
discover that a rattlesnake had somehow curled up under the rim of one of the
two-holers—actually, she
said shit had caked up under there hard enough to form a ledge and the snake
had gone to sleep on it—and something about the look of Floyd's vienna sausage doing the
boogaloo above its head, spitting wee-wee, perhaps resembling some reptilian
mating ritual, or more likely a snaky challenge, excited the rattler, and in
defiance, it rose out of there and struck Floyd four square on the penis2.
Floyd stumbled from the
outhouse, fell out on the ground, the snake dangling from his joint3 with
the tenacity of a Jehovah Witness with his foot in the door. Billie Sue said
the irony of it was, way it swelled up, it was the first time Floyd had a
hard-on in a year, and damn if he couldn't use it. He died too. Billie Sue
wouldn't suck the poison out. She said she'd promised her boyfriend her lips
would touch no other bulbous, throbbing member but his. ('Course, this was
before she accidentally backed over her boyfriend while he was sleeping in the
driveway next to his water dish.)
Billie Sue's story is for
those who think Dave and Joe are a little too raunchy. We offer it to you, the
easily offended, and we offer our thanks to Billie Sue.
And furthermore, for those
among you who wrote letters to say stuff like, "Gee, your column is too
raunchy, I'm fifty years old," well, we're getting there ourselves, fifty
we mean, and we can't seem to clean up a bit, least not in this column. It
brings the fucking worst out in us.
In that spirit, let us pause
to comment on all the negative mail we've received in the last month. To those
letter writers we offer a heartfelt Fuck You.
And, for the more
overwhelming positive mail we've received, we'd like to offer our goddamnest thanks and gratitude,
though if you want to put a dollar in your envelopes to help support culture
here at Trash Theater, do so, as this will be our contribution
to trickle-down economics, the benefactors being us, of course.
But, we're here for a movie column, aren't we?
Our situation is we got no
Trash Theater to go to, and of course, that causes a loss of column ambience.
We've really had trouble getting our spirits up. But tonight we may have the medicine for that, we
have something special for you. This column is being written by penlight,
alternately between Dave and Joe, at The Backroads Drive-In just
off 1-20 near Bolivar, and folks, we're talking sad, momentous occasion here.
This is the last night at The Backroads. Next week the dozer
comes in and levels the place for construction of a new Wal-Mart.
That's the bad news. The
good news is tonight this last night, it's Dusk to Dawn for one dollar. And the
features are:
The Bible, Viva Las
Vegas, and something
that sounds pretty salty and may involve Billie Sue
Constantine in one of her earlier careers as an accomplice to producing on film
the exalted two-second "money shot"4. Need we say more.
The title is, Clam Bake.
This is one of those
old-fashioned drive-ins with the playground up front. You'll remember, if you've gone to any drive-ins built before
the mid-sixties. This was where the parents could send you after you'd knocked
over your soft drink for the third time and put your buttery popcorn fingers on
the car's upholstery so much mosquitoes
were starting to stick to it.
And speaking of mosquitoes,
we've got us a Skeeter Coil here, the original White Trash incense, rating
right up there with used Kotex stuck to the bottom of the bathroom trash can
and the runny, open-sore smell of a busted sewage pipe out back of a trailer
park. This Skeeter Coil stuff is serious, as well it ought to be. You see,
every car is a temple and the humans inside are just sacrament, the body and the blood for one of God's favorite creatures,
the skeeter—remember, it was his idea to put two of these motherfuckers on the
ark.
Yes sir, the skeeter, just a
little angel carrying a small prayer to heaven.
And when you light your
Skeeter Coil, it's actually in reverence,
all that incense, 'cause it ain't like that shit actually kills or runs off skeeters. No sir, it attracts
them. About the only way a skeeter will die from a Skeeter Coil, is if he's so
drunk on your blood he lights on the goddamn coil and catches on fire.
Anyway, this is the last
night at the drive-in here, and everyone has come to enjoy whatever fate has in
store for them tonight. We're all optimistic. There hasn't been a killing here
in a couple of months, and maybe some people have been storing up for this
closeout night. The management has invited everyone to bring their BBQ pits
and fixin's, so things
are dangerous already, what with dozens of BBQ pits shooting flames ten feet
into the air and idiots squeezing charcoal lighter fluid into the fires as casual
as pissing on an ant nest. So intense is the flaming response, it's peeling the
paint off the cars next to the cookers. I guess the management is allowing this
'cause they know they won't be selling too many of
their hot dogs cooked on the weenie rotator, the one that passes the weenies by
a sixty-watt bulb every few seconds. Way you know the
weenies are done is they break into a sweat.
Dave here.
It's not even good dark yet,
and already Joe is down at the front under the screen swinging wildly on the
rickety swing set and making it dangerous for those passing by within
swing-chain reach. He's already knocked the cowboy hat off one fella and a
fight ensued, but Joe is unhurt because the guy fell down when first struck,
and Joe, in a moment of good sportsmanship, kicked him in the head while he was
there, and the man's children, ranging in age from five to twelve, have had to
tote him back to his car, and come back for his wheel chain.
Well, I'm going to join Joe
down at the swings. Looks like he's having a little trouble with a kid over
there. The little bully has pushed Joe off the swing set and is making him eat
dirt up by the screen. And who knows, that wheel chair
motherfucker might come back.
Mutually written movie
report to follow.
The Bible (Actually they just do Genesis)
102 long goddamn minutes
Starring: John Huston,
Michael Parks, Richard Harris, George C. Scott, Ava Gardner, Peter O'Toole, and
a special guest appearance by God.
Directed by: John Huston and
narrated by J. Huston
Well, up here under the
screen gives us a serious view, though the original screen has been replaced by
a sheet of corrugated tin coated with Sherman Williams flat white paint. This
makes the movie look as if it's being shown on a large, Ruffles potato
chip. (It was all Joe could do to resist putting an "e" on the end of
potato. Him and Dan Quayle. D.W.)
We thought since we'd been
missing a flock of Bible study classes, God would let a spectacle such as this
make up for it. We see this, we ought to be good for a lot of lessons missed.
We might even have some credit coming. We figure since we've spent so much
church-offering money on worldly goods (movies, Big Red, sody waters, Weekly
World News, fire balls and peanut patties), that a few bucks given to
the drive-in management will suffice as an offering. Hell, they're
showing The Bible ain't they?
They got to be good people.
Little ways into it, we got
cricks in our necks straining to see Eve's bush, which was continually, and
artfully, concealed by shadow, a twist of the hip, and a lot of rear angle. Meaning a lot of ass was
exposed, but shit, you can see that in an ad in a magazine. There was also this
thing with her titties. They were covered by her hair, and when the wind blew,
or she moved, the hair stuck to the titties. This
is frustrating. We wondered what kind of glue was used to keep the hair on the
titties.
Then there's this Michael
Parks playing Adam. He hasn't got a hammer. No matter what he does, no matter
from what angle he's shown, no hammer is visible, no plums swinging from side
to side. Lot of gals are gonna be
as disappointed as we are about Eve's bush and titties, and those of mixed
persuasions ain't gonna get no thrill either.
In fact, the bi-folks are gonna be double mad.
Sometimes, art can be annoying.
'Course, considering the way
some of the cars out in the drive-in are rocking, it seems to have been enough
to stimulate some of the less intelligent out here. 'Course, there's only one
person in some of those cars, so God only knows what the hell they're doing.
But back to the movie.
What's the deal with the serpent? He has Eve eat fruit from this forbidden
tree, which God set up there to tease these two people, then Eve has Adam eat
some of the fruit. Then Adam and Eve know suddenly they're without trousers, and
that this stuff they been doing, this sticky business where they get dirt and
leaves in their ass cracks and explore each other's nether parts, well, it's actually some nasty stuff. And up until then, they just
thought they were having fun. Now Adam knows he has a pecker
and it gives him no joy. And Eve, she's an asshole. She's the one fucked it up
for the rest of us. Or what about the serpent? He pointed the fruit out, and lost his legs over it. Now he's been split into a
zillion different species of serpent, and some of them are still pissed about
this and will bite you on account of it.
Poor Adam and Eve. God, who
up until now hasn't given one flying damn that his creations have been playing
hide the salami, is suddenly pissed off, and he throws them out of the Garden
of Eden. We don't get it. There's only two people in the world, they want
to fuck in their garden and eat fruit off
trees, what's the problem? It's not like they're gonna get bodily fluid stains on someone's
upholstery or something.
Anyway, the movie is quite a
Bible lesson, but by the Salty Dog of Abraham, it raised a few questions, some
more confusing than the serpent, fruit, and fuck business discussed above.
Let's take this Noah guy.
Wow, what a job the Big Man gave him.
"Round up all the
animals two by two, Noah, and put them on the ark you got to build, because in
my intimate mercy, I'm gonna drown
every sonofabitch outside of your family That way, you can all interbreed
later."
"Wow," says Noah.
"No shit?"
"No shit. Now, I want
two elephants, two giraffes, two skeeters, two flies, two worms, two of
every motherfuckin'
species. I want...."
"God, excuse me,"
Noah might say. "But what about the other animals? The other giraffes, etc? They're not wicked. They'll be drowned with the evil
folks."
"Fuck em. I want two hippos. Two of
every ass-licking animal on the earth. Don't forget snakes, birds, flat worms,
and heartworms...."
"Excuse me, Mr. God.
Captain, sir. Don't you think, since you're like, you know, gonna drown the shit out of the world, we could lose the vermin. It's
like a big chance."
"What? And decrease
suffering? You think those little bastards are some mean shit,
those flies and skeeters and worms, that ain't mean, wait until I invent AIDS."
"AIDS, Captain God,
sir?"
"Ahead of your time.
Look, I'm a busy deity here. Places to make, people to destroy, things to fuck
up. Just do what I tell you."
"Yes, sir."
Okay, dear readers, you add
all those animals up and put 'em on
a boat. You got to wonder how big's this
boat? The Bible tells you, but still, it doesn't come out a
boat that big. You couldn't get a family and the Lufkin, Texas petting zoo on a
boat that size. You'd have serious trouble getting on a couple elephants. And
say you got all the animals on the boat, and the rain starts, the weather
changes, the barometric pressure shifts dramatically, man, we're talking some
waste products here. For animals, something like that happens, it's like that
first, hot cup of coffee in the morning. Some wee-wee is gonna fly. Then you got
number two. And when you're talking big animals, you're talking some
serious dumps. This is okay for the flies. They got to have
this stuff to eat and live in, drop their babies, those cuddly little maggots,
but say you're Shem, one of Noah's sons, and the barometric pressure shifts and you can't open a window fast enough, and then
Noah, Dad, he comes to you with a shovel and a wheel barrow.
You're gonna be
busy, that's what we're trying to tell you. Get that finished, it's about time
for the regular dumps these animals got to do.
And say Noah's got to house
the tapeworms and all. Who gets to be designated host?
"Shem, come here would you?" says Dad. "I got a little
something I want you to swallow. Two of all these worms, and by the Great
Asshole of God Almighty, don't you dare let your rotting teeth scrape, or in
any way harm, one of these worms. God's own special little creatures."
And once the ark comes into
port, and all the animals get off the magic boat, how long was it before the
lions remembered who they were and scarfed a few bunnies? Or rather, why
didn't they scarf a few bunnies? No telling how many species ceased to exist
right there. You know, stuff like the galblip. Don't hear about it much these days, do
you? That's because Tony Tiger ate both those sonofabitches while they were, in
their own animalistic way, praising the glory of God.
Or say one of a species got
eaten. Well, in a few years there goes a whole race of animals. Maybe, in their
haste to get off the boat, an elephant steps on some rare form of worm Shem has just regurgitated, killing out a whole future that would
have been filled with some unique disease fueled by worms in shit. It could
have been heartbreaking.
And now that we think about
it, what were those animals eating on board? Some of the plant species brought along? Can lions and tigers and bears be vegetarians for
forty days and forty nights? Did Noah bring a few extra bunnies to feed the
carnivores? Plus, what about genetic diversity?
What were these animals and
Noah's family drinking? Wee-wee? You got to have a lot of water for big
critters and humans for forty days and forty nights. Was the water they were
floating on fresh water? Maybe that's the answer. But if it was, how come the
oceans didn't run into it and salt it up? There's some serious Biblical questions here
that won't be answered in The Old Testament index.
Then we get the story of The
Tower of Babel, where we meet Nimrod, whose kind of the top dog and looks like
Alice Cooper without a snake.
Did you know everyone on
earth once spoke the same language? Least until Nimrod in his arrogance tried
to build a tower so high and beautiful it would rival God.
God got so mad at Nimrod, he
not only punished him, but all the innocents being forced to build the tower.
Did it by causing them to speak different languages.
This fact cleans up a lot of
linguistic problems. God made different languages in one stroke, as punishment.
But knowing this, you got to ask some things. How long did it take everyone to
teach someone else their language so at least two people could hang out
together? And for there to be new races, once again, we're back to the
serious fucking problem. One guy, he's speaking
French, and this lady he meets, she speaks some Danish dialect, so they got to
teach each other their language, decide what language they like best, which
race they want to be, then some serious fucking and child raising is in order,
and of course, to make this work, in God's fashion, lot of incest has to go on,
'cause teaching everyone a new language is a pain in
the ass, takes up time.
Another point. About
everyone in this movie is white. Where are the Brothers,
and the Chinese? The Texans?
We could go on about other
events in the movie, like the story of Lot, and how he was willing to offer his
daughters to the bad people of Sodom to fuck in place of giving over a couple
of angels he was protecting, who didn't need protection. Or we could talk about
the part where later he fucked his daughters, and if this was in the Bible, why
was it left out of the movie? It should have been there. In the Bible, God
seldom missed an opportunity for some relative to fuck another relative. It
was kind of a standard plot device, along with someone getting hurt or
brutalized in some terrible fashion. God knew how to keep things from getting
boring.
We could probably spend a
little time on Abraham, and how God tells him to kill his son as a test, just
because God likes to know where he stands in the hearts of his chosen people.
But we did all that, we'd be here till about the time the new Wal-Mart was
opening its doors.
But, before we move on
to Viva Las Vegas, let us leave you with a movie snack
suggestion for The Bible.
Unleavened bread. We brought
with us some of Dave's hot water cornbread. We also brought a big container of
black-eyed peas with sausage meat in them, but we guess that isn't Biblical.
But the cornbread's close. There's no yeast in it, and you can sail it like a
miniature frisbee if you get bored.
All right, all right.
The Cemetery Dance Police are cutting us off, and we've still
got the rest of the night to go, but we'll report on the other two movies next
time.
Anyway, before we leave you,
we got to admit we're in kind of a tizzy right now. The drive-in is surrounded
by a tin and a three strand barb wire fence, and
people stand in the woods nearby with their lawn chairs waiting for it to get
dark, then they come out and hop over the fence and set up front near the
screen.
One fella, with a lawn
chair, has snagged his balls on the top wire and is yodeling like a Country and
Western singer. People have all turned on their headlights illuminating the
work for the ambulance drivers who've just arrived.
Some fool produced a pair of
wire cutters, and before we could get to him, he cut the wire. You should have
seen that wire spring twelve feet into the air, snapping into a tight coil,
flinging the ole boy's nut sack into a thirty-foot, moonlit arc, terminating in
a hole-in-one in some gravitationally impaired lady's Dr. Pepper cup, which
fortunately, turned out to be well iced.
One of the E.M.T.s wrestled
her to the ground, strained off the Dr. Pepper between his fingers, and is now
screaming to keep them nuts on ice until they ship him off to Houston to get them
hooked back up.
The ambulance has just
whipped out of here, hot with lights and siren, smashing two ice-chests, a lawn
chair, and something that had been moving under a blanket, but is now being
ignored as the car lights and horns have ceased, and the projector is rolling,
and here comes, Viva Las Vegas!
NOTES: (This means some
little notes that explain confusing things in the text.)
1For our not so cultured readers, vagina is
not a Southern state that fought for the Confederacy. It's a pussy. A poontang.
A cunt. A gash. A slit. The honey hole. A happy,
sucking wound. A weenie-squeezer. Snatch. The ole sausage grinder. The Venus
Mound. Her womanhood, etc. Do we make ourselves clear?
2This is not, as David has suggested, a
French word for several ballpoint pens. We're talking hammer here. Tool. Rod.
The ole hanging meat. The piston. The bobbin' dog. The battering ram. The dick.
The cock. The flesh pistol. The meat cutter. His manhood. Clear?
3See above.
4In porno films, when the meat pipe blows
the mayonnaise, this is called "the money shot" because it's the one
the viewers (mostly male) want to see.
Jump back this way next
Thursday, April 17, for the third installment of Trash Theater!
"Trash Theater, Part
2" originally appeared in Cemetery Dance Magazine. It later
appeared in A Fist Full of Stories [and Articles], a
collection published by CD Publications. "Trash Theater, Part 2" ©
1992 By Bizarre Hands, LLC, and David E. Webb. All Rights Reserved. |