BALLSPLITTING FUN PART TWO 8-4-04
I seldom publish other people's writing, so this is a rare treat.
HERE IS INK'S VERSION:::
Let's take a little trip back to 1996: I was a Jesus looking fresh high school graduate with dreams of joining a traveling carnival and writing the great American novel between my sword swallowing acts. COJO was finishing up his first year at SVA, laying the foundations of the machine, that would be known as the Art Juggernaut. Our friend who I shall call "The G-Man" to protect his identity was working at McDonalds and building a healthy if not totally worthless collection of CD's and toys based on comic book characters (still in their packaging to keep their value). In the world scene the Dream Team was showing that professional basketball players were a wise decision to easily win a gold medal and show the world just how superior a force we were.
On this particular day COJO, G-Man and I were on our way to Stroudsburg all with various agendas on our mind. The G-Man was looking for the perfect gift for his girlfriend who was menstruating or one of her friends stubbed their toes or the planets were not aligned correctly but what ever the cause G-Man was receiving a healthy dose of verbal whopping and she was with holding any physical contact till he made amends the amends found at an overpriced mall jewelry store. COJO and I were looking to hit the local thrift store which since the boom in Grunge had made the ability to dress like bums from the old Pre-Disney 42nd street an acceptable fashion. The game plan was as follows, let the G-man get this silly "I did nothing wrong but here is a gift so you will love me" gift, then we would hit the "Super Salvation Army" Store (I don’Äôt use the term Super lightly either. This store was a warehouse of old clothing. This was were Old Gramps military surplus ended up after he died from that massive stroke while stuffing twenties down a stripper's G-string. You could find those really tacky flora prints that the crazy "cat lady" wore before a freak accident left her with a broken hip laying on the kitchen floor and her dear "pets" devoured her when they ran out of their Meow-Mix. Yeah this was the store to find all your fashion from a long gone era and tastelessly mix it into a poor fashion choice) before heading back to Jersey to waste the evening at a party I had found out about.
Actually this wasn't any party; this was one of those rare gatherings of people and mind altering substances that would guarantee at least a few random sexual encounters. And with all of us being the ripe age (and when I say all of us I mean COJO and I) 19 we were all looking for a little something, something in the old sex department. But before we could restock our Frankenstein Fashion Wardrobe, or hope to satisfy teenage lust we needed to get through the mall with the G-Man, which itself was a Herculean labored feat.
There is something you need to know about the G-Man and going to any type of store with him. Dave is one of those individuals who can't make up his mind. He will go into a record store looking for a particular CD, then spend the next forty minutes stressing over which of those CD's has the best cover and jewel case, which one seems to weigh the most as well as which has the least amount of dust on it. Then to top it off he has a woman's talent to be instinctively drawn to every other store in the mall to see if they have anything he might need. Now this is just for a simple CD, so COJO and I knew we were in for a very long day while he looked this particular piece of jewelry. Patience is a keyword to have with our dear friend, unfortunately, between COJO and I we had the patience and attention span of a fruit fly. So this is the scene: G-Man running about the mall like a two year old hopped up on Crank, jumping into Spencer's, or some music store, before hitting a comic books store to see if they got the limited edition "Wolverine figure with realistic Adamantine claws". In short he was doing everything but looking for that fucking piece of jewelry so we could do other things besides wander behind G-man slowly resorting to a primate state (this was either because of some toxic combination of florescent lighting and mall food, or we were becoming so bored our higher brain functions were trying to save energy and shut down). Now like many of the malls I've seen Stroudsburg has "hidden" hallways that are used to transport things that the mall doesn't want the average public to see. Most of the time it is just supplies for the various stores other times it is garbage being brought out to the dumpster. Every once and while if you sneak in there you can smoke a cigarette or joint and if you are really lucky catch some mall staff screwing in the hallways. But this particular day these sacred and off limit to non mall employee halls would be give birth to something else. With what seemed like hours following G-Man around the mall and the already stated decline in mental facilities COJO, G-man and I headed into the off limit catacombs of the mall.
Looking back on this event I don't know what inspired (and I use the word inspired loosely) us to begin smashing each other into the pockmarked plaster board that made up the walls of the hallway. Perhaps it was recently seeing T2, or pent up frustration and a desire to smash G-Man through the walls for wasting our afternoon in suburbia hell. Whatever the cause we began taking turns throwing each other around like meat rag dolls leaving chalky white indentions in the walls, and cocaine-ish white powder on our clothing. Our fun however was cut short by the highly trained and mentally competent security force checking out the noise coming from the hallway. The three of us using the maze like setup of the mall managed to appear by the movie theater where we took up hiding in the bathroom. Only a few minutes went by and COJO and I were faking urination while G-Man was busy in the stalls talking about how cool it was that we did that. We were agreeing with him, until one of the esteemed security professionals walked in, at which point COJO and I shut up, while G-Man continued to ramble on about what fun it was to toss people into the walls. Now you would assume that the guard would put the equation together, three kids covered in stucco white, one of them talking about throwing people into walls, and the recently dented up hallway. This wasn't the case. The rent a cop waits for G-Man to get out of the stall and escorts him out of the mall. He looks,over to us briefly and asked "do you know him" to which we respond "no". We kept out a distance from G-Man and followed them out of the mall. About this time G-man received a page from his love and needed to use the pay phone to answer it. Remember those days everyone when pagers where the cool thing to have back when cell phones where those large bulky monstrosities very much akin to the dinosaurs of our past useless and extinct today? Well COJO and I busied ourselves outside while G-Man used the phone.
Maybe five minutes went by and G-man came running out stomping his feet and bouncing off walls. He stopped for a moment to answer our questions about what was happening, turns out he was angry so he was freestyle walking to release some stress. Quick history lesson for all of you, Freestyle walking became popular thanks to Dan Cortes on MTV or some other incredibly trendy news piece they used to fill five minutes that could have been spent showing videos. The gist of it is this: picture skateboarding without a skateboard. You would perform all the same tricks as you normally would; except you don't have a board under your feet. It is basically a "sport" for all those people who could never get the hang of skateboarding and wanted to be cool. It is along the same lines as fishing only you don't have any water or fish, or a line. It was an activity for morons, who wanted to feel like they were hip. It was also the type of activity that would end up with someone getting hurt. And guess what? It did.
G-man continued his freestyle walking through the parking lot looking like the offspring of a mating between the retard kid Corky from TV and the Easter Bunny. COJO and I hung back and just laughed up until we saw G-man jump up on one of those parking barriers. The parking barriers are three to four foot high cylinders of concrete painted yellow with a rounded cap that surround lamp posts and other valuable equipment in the parking lot. They basically provide a barrier to keep people from carelessly knocking over things which shouldn’Äôt be driven over. We saw G-man go up then watched as if in slow motion his decent as he lost his balance and dropped nuts first on the top of this barrier. We then watched as he slowly slid off and made an almost cartoon-ish thud on the ground. Being the kind friends we were we rushed over to him watching him lie on the ground grasping his manhood and wrapped in the fetal position. Around us a few mini vans and station wagons drive around slowing down to see what is going on. All he can say is "Get the car" in response to the questions, with an almost serious and concern filled edge to them, about the status of his balls. I stayed put with him while COJO ran off to get the car. G-man managed to peel himself off the blacktop and into the back seat of the car while I got in the front with COJO. G-man said he was okay so happily COJO and I began the trip to our next destination the Thrift store. We were on the road for about five minutes and approaching our destination when both COJO and I heard a whimpering coming from the back seat. We turned around to see G-man with his pants down around his ankles and his boxer shorts lifted up, a pasty white complexion on his face and his eyes with a thousand yard stare in them. From our vantage point all we could see was G-man’Äôs face and his boxer shorts, we had no idea what was going down or what was happening with his balls. COJO began to start screaming at G-man out of concern and fear asking him are his balls falling out? To which G-man could only give a whimper and a pathetic head shake. I on the other hand whether because of the shock of the moment or because I'm just a mean bastard just started laughing and continued to do so for the next five minutes till COJO's screaming for us to find a hospital snapped me out of that incredibly funny moment. Within moments we were at Stroudsburg hospital. In hindsight I wouldn't wish a visit to this hospital on my worse enemy. I have more faith in a Haitian voodoo priest telling me I needed to chop off some chicken heads and drink the blood to heal myself then put my life in the hands of this hospital.
The emergency room was plucked from the scenes of Dante's Inferno. By the end of the night all manner of damned and doomed souls would waste their life away waiting for sub par medical treatment. But we would first have to check our dear if not somewhat stupid friend into the emergency room first, there was only a slight problem, he refused to tell the nurse what was wrong with him, and he wouldn't let us tell her either. So we were standing there at the hospital trying to get him to see a doctor and he was too embarrassed to tell the nurse that he split his sack open jumping around like a seizure prone monkey. We finally convinced him to tell the nurse and she finally checked him in. They quickly raced him away in a wheel chair and we figured he was going to get some immediate medical treatment. The time was about four thirty in the afternoon, plenty of time to get him stitched up and make it to the party we thought.
So wrong. . .
The hours sort of sped by and the emergency room filled with these poor damned souls hoping for quick and efficient medical service. Their only form of entertainment was the small thirteen inch TV which was broadcasting the US's thrashing of some small world country in Basketball. There were so many people in there, none of them seemed to be getting any closer to seeing a doctor. There was a goth girl with her boyfriend who looked perfectly fine until upon closer inspection you saw the bump in her throat where her boyfriends penis piercing dislodged itself. There was the guy who was given gauze to stop the blood from oozing out of his skull, which turned out to be from a construction accident (Someone dropped a hammer on his head).
There was the raging body builder who brought his girlfriend in with stomach pains around the same time that we brought our buddy in. He was outside chain smoking and screaming about the fucking shitty medical care at this place. I was trying to get on his good side so when the roids he'd been shooting up to get this Arnold build finally cause him to snap and go on a hospital killing spree he might just spare my life. This place was filling up with more bodies then a slasher flick. And the best part they all just sat there like cattle waiting to be lead to slaughter / medical assistance. Walking around asking people personal questions about what brought them to the hospital was fun, but got old quickly. COJO and I began to consider just leaving G-man there and continuing on with our plans. We would tell his parents and let them deal with it. We would get excited every time the doors that lead to the treatment area opened just incase our friend who managed to ruin our day and what would have been a amazing night came through them. But that never happened. Instead we were forced to ask medical staff about our friend's status to which we got a "hold on we aren't showing him on the records". So COJO and I did the only thing we could do, sat down watched the Olympics and like expecting fathers stared every time the door opened.
Meanwhile bodies continued to fill the waiting area, and the thought crossed my mind that we might be at some gateway to the afterlife much like the waiting room in Beatlejuice. I was waiting for the river Styx to appear and that skulled faced ferry man to start hauling away people. But none of this ever came, though about six hours later COJO and I heard our names called and we both ran back to the treatment area where we were informed of our friend's condition. It turns out he just saw the doctor and he would need stitches, they should be done soon so if we just waited a bit longer he would be with us. A bit longer in hospital speak translates to another hour, so fully exhausted and pissed off at him for ruining our evening we gather our friend and head back home defeated, horny and without a new used wardrobe. The final result, one set of stitches on his nut sack, to keep his genetic reproducers in place (though after the intelligence he showed during the day they would have been doing the gene pool a favor by amputation) and a set of stitches on his leg. Our night would end with us bowling actually just COJO and I bowling with the occasional wise crack to G-Man about him lending us one of his balls to use.
-INK
januschaos@hotmail.com
Chris/INK tries to send out these updates Bi-weekly. But due to a busy schedule and the fact that when he sits at his computer he downloads anime and porn it runs on a more schizophrenic schedule. All events covered in these updates are true, except where Chris/INK lies to protect the innocent, embellish the truth, or forgets what happened due to consuming alcohol. No animals were injured in the events covered in the update. Though a few were slightly teased, mocked and pointed at while making insults in a bad French accent. Chris/INK is not held responsible for any poor grammar or sentence structure. These updates are written on the fly, usually during periods of sleep depravation. This seems the only logical time write several pages of random events and mass email them to people. If you wish to be removed from the update list drop an email and Chris/INK will remove you. Also if you know anyone who will enjoy receiving this updates forward it ahead and drop me a name and e-mail address. Finally, Chris/INK doesn’Äôt support any political groups or affiliations unless they pay me to do so. Chris/INK is looking for friends in England who will show him the sites and not pick on him too much for being a) an American b) part Gypsy c) An English Major with not real sense of the English language or structure. Chris/INK likes to talk about himself in the third person it make him feel arty.
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Just another day in the life of an Art Juggernaut.
-Cojo