Stories is a section where I am trying an experiment. Storytelling, as it is done on the New York stage, is performed unscripted. This is my attempt to transcribe the stories I perform in such a way as to keep the energy of the live, improvised performance. At least, as much as is possible. You can decide whether or not I succeed.
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The following story, “HEEEY, Motherfucker!”, was done at the BTK show on February 18th, 2009. It was a rowdy show. Thank you to Peter Aguero and the band who filled in music behind it and sang the chorus, which was, “HEEEY, Motherfucker!”
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This story has no moral. There will be no edification. You will not learn and grow. This is not one to grow on and if you think knowledge is half the battle, then we are fighting a very different war, because this is a story about being wasted.
I was living in St. Louis with a girl who I shouldn’t have been. her name was Christy and we had only one car. So, when I finished battling the drunks at my crappy bar job I would have to take a bus, walk for miles and grab the single metro train the city had, in order to meet her at her crappy bar job.
This night, I get to Christy’s crappy bar and, immediately in the door, we start fighting. We have a knock down drag out right there, in the bar, during her shift. And I say, “Fuck this! I am going across the street to another bar and getting drunk.”
Across the street is Blueberry Hill and the first person I see when I walk in is Todd.
Todd had been killed, legally dead, three times before the age of twenty one. If you understand at all the near statistical impossibility of bringing someone back from the dead, then you understand that Todd was unkillable. He could, however be damaged. The last time Todd had died he had been hit in the head with a motorcycle at a motocross event. This had left him with some severely impaired motor skills and one half of his body didn’t quite work right. He tended to drag one foot and one of his eyes veered off. He had a shock of curly red hair, so all in all, he looked like Carrot Top if one of the props had gone horribly horribly wrong. And Todd tended to greet anyone he knew with the slurred words, “HEEEY, Motherfucker!”
I walk in and Todd says, “HEEEY, Motherfucker! Have a Jaegermeister!”
I have seven Jaegermeisters with Todd.
The conversation consists of, “HEEEY, Motherfucker! Do you like Elvis?”
Yes, Todd, I do.
Then I realize that Christy should be getting off work and I wobble back across the street to her bar. When I get there, the little Ethiopian guy she works for says, “Christy not here. She sick. Left.”
Christy Not Here?!
Sick?!
Left?!
She had the car! I am mile s away from home. St. Louis is geographically enormous and mostly abandoned and is one of the most dangerous cities in America. There is no way I will make it home alive. Not this drunk.
So, I go back over to the bar where Todd is and explain all of this. The bartender there volunteers that she will give me a ride home. Have a seat and when she gets off we can go.
Todd says, “HEEEY, Motherfucker! Have another Jaegermeister!”
The bartender drives me home and I have now had two more shots with Todd. I get there, crawl up the stairs and into the apartment. There I find that Christy is not sick, she has a migraine. When I open the door to the bedroom where she is lying in total darkness and the light hits her, she lets out a slow horrible scream.
Now, I snap to. I have to find Christy’s migraine pills, dose her, get her knocked out, and then I can pass out. I will have to be sober for this. So I suck it all back, get my head as clear as I can and go raid the medicine cabinet. I sift through the bottles, trying to squint away my blurry vision, until I find the one crumbling migraine pill she has left. I take it into the room, dose her, and finally crash myself, listening to her moan into unconsciousness beside me.
About three hours later, I wake up because I have to piss. I get up, stagger around, go to do my business. And while I am, I think how strange it was that Christy would park her bike in front of the toilet.
Then I hear this very weak voice about three feet behind me say, “Motherfucker, why are you pissing on my bike?”
I had made it as far as the corner of the room.
This story has no moral. There is no edification. It is just a story about drinking eight shots of Jaegermeister with a brain damaged guy and pissing on a bike. It is a story about being wasted. The war has been won.
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I Have a Lump In My Balls was one of the first stories I told on a New York Stage, it was debuted last December at Storytelling at Coraline Cafe, hosted by Cyndi Freeman, who was not then but is now my fiance.
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I have a lump in my balls
Honestly, if I could remember what I was doing when I found this lump in my balls I would tell you, I have no shame, but everything that happened leading up to finding the lump in my balls has been wiped out by this mind numbing realization: I have a lump in my balls!
I have a dim memory of fooling around down there before and thinking, “Is that a lump? Nah.” But apparently it has crossed some threshold, grown or stiffened or gone through some kind of change, that has pushed it past even my ability to deny it’s existence. It is now a central, and in this moment, all consuming fact. It is now, as I stand in my bedroom, scrotum in hand, stupified look on my face, written across my brain in great flaming letters you can see from space.
I have a lump in my balls.
Mike!
Mike and Karen are my roommates. Mike and I go back more than a decade. Girls throw me out, Mike takes me in. He’s a good friend. Mike comes into my doorway and looks at me. I’m standing there with my hand on my scrotum and a stupified look on my face.
“What’s up?”
I have a lump in my balls.
“Uh… really?”
Dude, I have a lump in my fucking balls!
Mike has one hand kind of half extended and a very cautious look on his face, as if the lump in my balls were a possibly rabid raccoon that had somehow gotten into the apartment and was now holed up in my sac, cornered and hissing, while we debate calling animal control.
“What kind of lump?”
I don’t know, if I knew what kind of lump, I wouldn’t be panicking.
“Because, I have a thing on one of my balls. Like a little hard flap. But it’s always been there. Never caused me any, uh, trouble…”
Even after a decade, there is so much left to learn about your closest friends.
Mike is about to volunteer something that is the greatest possible test of heterosexual male friendship. He is about to do the equivilent of taking a bullet, being Godfather to my children, and giving me a kidney in one fell swoop. The trepidation and distaste on his face accurately register the level of supreme sacrifice he is preparing to make. He says…
“Do… Do you, uh, want me to feel it?”
…
No, dude, it’s cool.
I’m going to call my Mom.
“Right, good idea, call your Mom.”
Ok.
“Let me know what she says.”
Mike runs like a man suddenly set free from a firing squad. No looking back.
I call my Mom. My mom was a nurse and is now a chaplain. This is good, she can tell me if it’s cancer, and if it is she can counsel me through the spiritual crisis that will certainly follow. She’s all purpose, kind of a Swiss Army Mom. And besides, if there’s a problem with the equipment, you call the manufacturer.
I call her at the nursing home where she works.
Mom?
“Well, Hi, Brad.”
I have a lump in my balls.
“What kind of lump?”
What is up with this question!? Polyester cotton blend that’s what kind. Jesus.
I don’t know what kind, Mom, that’s why I’m calling. It’s also why I’m hyperventilating, as a matter of coincidence.
“Ok, well is it hard or soft?”
Hard in some parts, soft in others.
“Does it hurt when you squeeze it?”
Well, it hurts to squeeze my balls!
“Don’t squeeze your balls, just squeeze the lump.”
Right, ok, no, it doesn’t hurt to squeeze the lump. Is that good?
“I don’t know.”
…
“Hold on, Dr. Price just walked in.”
Dr. Price is the thirty year old General Practitioner that does a few days a week at the Nursing Home.
“Brad has a lump in his balls… He doesn’t know what kind.”
Dr. Price says, “Does it feel solid or like a little bag of worms?”
My Mom says, “Does it feel solid or like a little bag of worms?”
I really don’t want to think of anything in my scrotum feeling like a little bag of worms. But its not solid.
Little bag of worms.
“Little bag of worms.”
“Is it on both sides or just one?”
“Is it on both sides or just one?”
Left side.
“Left side.”
“Boxers or briefs?”
“Boxers or briefs?”
Neither.
“Commando.”
“Does it disappear when he lies down?”
“Does it disappear when you lie down?”
…
I lie down.
From the floor of my bathroom where I went before placing this call so I could try to look at the lump in the mirror, which didn’t work…
Yes.
Now there is some medical jargon on the other end of the phone and, of course, all medical jargon just sounds like a complicated way of saying you have cancer, but then Mom says, “Sounds like a veriscele.”
Is that a kind of cancer?
“No, it’s a vericose vein. It’s pretty common and usually harmless.”
Vericose vein. My balls have an affliction that is not cancer but usually reserved for little old Italian ladies. And it is “Usually harmless!” I no longer have a hissing raccoon in my scrotum. It’s now a little fuzzy bunny, I have a little fuzzy bunny napping in my scrotum.
“Can cause sterility.”
I have a little fuzzy bunny that’s on my side. In my balls.
“You should still go to a doctor and make sure.”
She’s right, I should and I will. Ok. I get off the phone. After my mother hangs up, Dr. Price says, “ Your son discusses his balls with you? I would never talk to my mom about my balls.”
My Mom says, “Well, Dr. Price, I’m sorry you’re not close to your mother.”
I go out and tell Mike and Karen that I have a little fuzzy bunny in my balls. They seem both perplexed and relieved.
Then I call a doctor and make an appointment. My doctor is a very attractive British Black woman about five years younger than me. She comes in and asks me what the trouble is. I give her my best Peter O’Toole grin and I tell her, “ I have a bunn… I have a lump in my balls.”
And she says, “What kind of lump?”
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Bartko is a piece I got together for the Moth show “Envy.” But, my name was not pulled and so I performed it at Coraline instead and again at SpeakEasy.
So, I went to Art School.
First day, first class, first teacher is George Bartko. He is this enormous Hungarian man in his late fifties with a cement block for a head. A very expressive cement block. The first and most common thing it expresses is extreme dissatisfaction.
It is the first five minutes of my art school career and I am watching Bartko write things on the board while he explains the first assignment.
The explanation goes like this:
“You are going to draw a straight line. Then we are going to take a ten minute break and when we come back I will tell you what you did wrong.”
I am listening intently. The fat guy next to me is doodling in his sketch book. Bartko turns and sees this and he looks at the fat guy with a burning hatred that you would think a Hungarian would reserve for Soviet tanks, then he breaks his chalk in half, and wings part of it at the fat guy. This gets fat guy’s attention.
Bartko says, ”I’m talking up here! What is fucking wrong with you? Are you stupid? You think you know this?”
And we are eighteen year old art students. By definition we are masochists who have always lacked for strong authority figures, that is how you end up an Art Student. We eat this up.
Yes. Abuse us. We are stupid. Please, yes, the bamboo cane, we deserve it.
So now we are ready acolytes, all we need is hair shirts. We hang on every pearl of wisdom that comes spewing, coated with insulting bile, from the lips of our master.
For me, the wisdom usually came in the form of “Stop smoking the dope. Your brain is like a little fuckin raisin, its so shrivelled up from all the dope.”
Yes, yes, raisin brain.
We were a pathetic bunch.
But then there were the older students. These people who had survived the Bartko boot camp, and now were in the advanced classes and were allowed to draw more than circles and squares, but often only drew circles and squares, only now, it was a statement. And they would walk up to him in the hall and say, “Hey, George.”
And he would look at them and say, things like “Hello” and “How are you” and “What are you working on? Circles and squares, that’s great.”
And then one of us, the lowly, would come up and say, “Excuse me, Mr. Bartko?”
And he would say, ”What! What the fuck do you want? I’m talking here.”
Slink away like a morlock.
So, we lived in Envy of these people who had passed some test and were now allowed to call him George, and it seemed like there was some secret society and you had no idea how you got inducted into it. And all you could do was wait and hope that someday you were chosen to put on the robes and fuck the monkey or whatever it was you had to do.
In the meantime, you got on with the business of Art School which generally involved finding ways to get your classmates to take off all of their clothes. You know, projects. And, if you were me, smoking more dope.
So eventually, after a couple of years, I end up in advanced painting, which is a class taught on Saturdays and involves eight hours straight of studio time. It was a class reserved for those who were truly hard-core and it was taught by Bartko, because he was truly hard-core.
And at this point I am painting almost exclusively with my hands, I have sworn off brushes entirely. Tools are for people who are scared of their art, afraid to get really dirty.
Cuz I am truly hard-core.
And Bartko would come over and look at my work and at the paint up to my elbows and say, “Don’t pick your nose. They’ll know.”
And around this same time I meet a girl and we decide we’re going to drive out to California in a twelve year old Datsun cuz I can be an Artist anywhere, I don’t need school, cuz I am so fucking hard-core. We will leave after the final critique.
Third to last class. We are waiting for Bartko. But instead, Jim Smith comes in, and he puts down his stuff, and he looks at the class and he tells us that George will be out for a couple of weeks because his daughter, in Chicago, was murdered in a hold up at her hair salon. And he looks at us in this way that says, this will be the extent to which this is discussed.
So, the next two classes, we work in somber silence. Jim is a great teacher, worthy of his own personality cult and it is fine.
Then, for the final critique, George is back. And he talks to each of us, for a long time, about the work we have been doing. And his words are measured, and considered, and he seems to really look at all of us, deeply and steadily.
And after class, I feel the need to say something. So, I walk up to him and I tell him that he has been a great teacher and he has taught me a lot and that I am leaving school to go to California and I wanted him to know what an influence he has been on me before I left.
And, there, in the hall, George hugs me, and he says, “You have a lot of talent, you are a great artist. Just be… Be careful. Be safe.”
And as he says this to me, a first year student I had seen hanging around George’s Drawing 1 class, comes up and he says, “Um, excuse me, Mr. Bartko?”
And George says,
“What? What the fuck, I am talking here. What the fuck do you want?”
