GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 13
Hello there, kiddies! It’s your good buddy, GWAR lead singer, and FOX Interplanetary Correspondent Oderus Urungus bringing you some good news. I have ordered Brockie to quit f*cking around and start writing. No more of this extraneous crap… after all, he hasn’t even moved to Richmond yet! So let’s get on with it…
Hello there, kiddies! It’s your good buddy, GWAR lead singer, and FOX Interplanetary Correspondent Oderus Urungus bringing you some good news. I have ordered Brockie to quit fucking around and start writing. No more of this extraneous crap… after all, he hasn’t even moved to Richmond yet! So let’s get on with…
GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death:
Part 13
So, because I think I guess I was supposed to, I was off to college, like many of my friends. Unlike many of my friends, however, my decision wasn’t one arrived at after careful consideration. My complete understanding of what college was came from repeated viewings of “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” Nobody had sat me down and really explained to me what the fuck was going on as far as college. Hell, Dad hadn’t even explained sex to me…really hadn’t talked to me, period, for about four years. My mom didn’t seem overly concerned with the course of my education, though she was glad I’d graduated—that meant I was the fuck out of there! And she was really enjoying having the house to herself. Now she could watch TV all day (there was this new thing called cable) without fear of my dad coming home and demanding mince and tatties. And my brother was far too busy smearing himself from head to toe with caustic man-butter to explain to me that college was hopefully going to have a lot more for me to do than getting wasted and vandalizing anything in sight, which up until that point had been the two main components of my life.
So one day my dad and myself loaded up the Caprice Classic and took the three-hour drive to Farmville, Virginia, home of Longwood College. That time together was probably the best chance father and son had ever had to try and have a meaningful conversation. But between my skinned head and my Dad’s jutting nose hair, both parties were pretty terrified of each other.
I found myself in a seedy dorm at a shitty college. I shared a room with a country boy named Mike. Mike was pleasant enough, even if he didn’t know quite what to make of his “punk rock” roommate, especially one day after I realized he’d been awake while I was masturbating. He had a couple sick friends down the hall whom I bonded with immediately. We formed a crude “anti-frat” that culminated with me urinating on an unconscious pseudo-pledge. Then next day, dude came to me, crying…
“Dave… did you really urinate on me?
Horrible, I know. The repercussions of this act bounced me down the hall, where I ended up with the other weirdo on the floor, Knoblauch. Kloblauch smoked pot and seemed cool enough, besides the fact that he had actually come from New Jersey to go to school here. I really don’t know why I was such a dick to him. Within days I was going through his stuff. Within weeks I’d moved out, this time to an entirely new dorm, taking my old key with me. Pretty soon my new roommate and me had entered Knoblauch’s room while he was at class, and set about sawing the lock off his foot locker.
We knew he had pot, but we were hoping there was more, like we didn’t know what. All we knew was from my carefully ogled intelligence when the locker was open in my presence. There were either a bunch of pills in there or a carton of Tic-Tac’s HOLY FUCK KNOBLAUCH IS COMING THROUGH THE DOOR.
We had only seconds to act. As one, myself and my brother in burglary sat down on the bed as I palmed the hacksaw blade into my pant-leg. Caught red-handed, we beamed with the practiced confidence of an experienced liar as we smiled into Knoblauch’s (and until that moment I hadn’t realized how big he was) reddened face.
“Hey man, just came by to drop off that key!” I said without missing a beat. Luckily the saw marks were on the underside of the the hasp.
Right around here, Vincent Price came to town and hosted a wine-dinner for the English department that I lie about attending until this very day.
My new roommate Tom was actually pretty cool. And the dorm I ended up in had that “party” vibe. I was stepping up to keggers and blotter acid, but still wasn’t getting laid, despite of my occasional bush-bound encounters with “Sloppy-Chops” Magillicutty, the mildly-retarded campus hippie (and whore). The rooms had actual living areas and attached bathrooms shared with the next room over… which sometimes led to interesting combinations of roommates. Tom had the bong, and Freddy had the bass. Chip from down the hall had a set of drums, and we were ready to rock! We purloined a key to the basement, started practicing, and ta-da!!! My latest shitty band, “The Flashbacks” was born! Well, actually it was two bands…my contribution, a bunch of crummy hardcore songs, and Freddy’s contribution, a slew of Police covers. At that point I was still deluding myself that I could play guitar, and Freddy thought he was a black Sting. The awfulness of it all came together (or apart) at some horrible party where our own friends threw garbage at us.
Let me just interject that any success I had with GWAR was not the result of a series of preceding musical experiments, a series of adjustments of increasingly subtle yet powerful effect, finally culminating in the entertainment colossus you see before you today. No, it was more like an increasingly desperate series of failures, until, with the help of a bunch of ridiculous costumes (built by other people) I finally lucked out and had a successful project. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Success at this point was a long way off.
Around then I met Pauly loitering at the dining hall. Pauly wasn’t a student but possibly had been at some point. We hung out with Brain-Dead Ed, heir to a large plumbing company, and spent most of our time trying to shoplift bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 at the local “Par-Bils”. My penchant for urinating on people soon came to the forefront yet again, and I did so on a crowded party from the over-looking fire-escape, only escaping a beating by feigning unconsciousness while continuing to urinate all over myself.
Pauly actually had sex with hot chicks, and that looked fun. I started working on this hot gypsy-looking girl named Mary. We smoked pot and studied for art history tests together. After listening to our teacher scream at the class about the dangers of “being up on pot” we bonded when we were the only students to do well on the mid-term. Things were going great. She looked like Cher or something. But then I almost blew it. I offered to walk her home so “no one would rape her.” Somehow I talked my way out of that one and finally managed to have sex with her. And this time, for once, it wasn’t completely awful!
I dicked around at Longwood for a year, but half way through it I realized I wasn’t going to stay there. I think I had finally realized maybe it was time to try just a little bit harder. I had pretty much been going along with the art thing, not really sure where it would lead me and not too worried. About the only thing worthwhile about the Longwood art school at that time was the art history (Jansons, of course…) and if nothing else I realized that if I ever wanted to be a part of it I better get my ass to a school where you couldn’t hear Klan rallies echoing down from the surrounding hills. For the first time, a bloody little blip appeared on my screen. A name already well-soiled, possessing a impressive art school and a burgeoning punk rock scene; a city burned and trashed, yet reborn…yet still reviled! It only took one visit. I ended up at a random show at the Biograph where I ran into Dickie Disgusting, notorious singer of the Degenerate Blind Boys, to confirm all I had heard as truth…and by the beginning of the second semester in Farmville, the paperwork was done. I was transferring to VCU, in Richmond!
And the Gods wept.
Next : The Dawning of a Nude Error
(Confused? Get caught up with Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.)
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