Feo

Before Clyde Krebbs became a bad check artist, he all but stole jewelry from my mother by selling what she had taken with us when all our worldly goods got put into storage in May of 2001 when we were evicted from our rented rambler at 3606 Croftview Terrace, Minnetonka, Minnesota.

It began after he’d gotten his sole source of income cut off when he had a spat with his kooky rich daddy; Clyde didn’t work a day he lived with his family.    Soon the bill at the hotel we were stuck at in Chaska, Minnesota, began to go up without a dollar to pay it with and dad began to pester mom into selling jewelry she’d brought starting with a string of pearls.

I remember the day we went to a place down along Lyndale Avenue south of the Shops at Lyndale at Lyndale and Old Shakopee Road in Bloomington, MN to a place next to the Gill Brothers funeral home named Wixon Jewelers, an establishment located in the front part of a reverse L-shaped building done up in the manner of a house with mock chimneys that taper off into metal popes, bay windows, etc.

I stayed in the car with my brother and two Pomeranians while Clyde and mom went in to try to sell it.  They soon came out: no sale.   Clyde commented on how security had to let them in.  Well no shite Sherlock!   What did he think a jewelers was, wide open as J.B. Hudson at Ridgedale Mall?  What an asshole.

The goddam bastard finally sold it someplace else in town and got his money, but it was only a drop in the bucket that didn’t tide us over for long.

God how I hate him for that and the other things of ours he sold and pawned off in the midst of that mess!   What was he trying to do, literally buy time before he had to face what he’d written on the wall and go get a decent job for one in his miserable, failed little life?  Come on.

Clyde is a leach that sucks people dry not only emotionally but also monetarily.  If you know somebody like him, I’d keep your valuables under lock and key and smack the hell out of them whenever they try to con you out of them so they don’t have to go get a decent job and actually earn a living for a change.    That is how they operate, and that is what you must look out for with such trash.

So far as I’m concerned, Clyde and his kind can burn in hell.

Last week in “Clyde The Misogynist” I briefly touched on a dark addiction that happened to me thanks to a horrid parental example set by my father, one I’d dealt with before on this blog. *   This week, to wrap things up on this dark time of my life, I’d like to explore in detail how this addiction made me feel.

Feelings … well, where do I begin?  Let’s start here with something I wrote in last week’s post:

Despite the glimpse of a woman’s bare chest it afforded, that crappy misogynic scene always left me in a sexually anti-climactic daze. 

This is a good summary of the emotions  engendered by a violent smutty movie scene the man I call “Clyde Krebbs” (aka “dad”) sadistically enjoyed and set an example for me that said “This is normal.”  One thing I did not mention, however, is another emotion that existed deep down as I plunged into following his sleazy example: You are addicted, it said, and whenever I heard that little voice, I saw a syringe going into an arm.  My arm.  

But on and on I would go, sneaking into the basement for that sexual anti-climactic high, because the knowledge that it was unhealthy in the extreme was frozen inside the tissue of lies Clyde had told as I watched a bimbo “actress” run out gleefully showing off a ring a gangster had given her, run over, walk into with breasts bouncing in her loosely tied light blue bikini top, then at some point-off screen deliberately take off her top and then when next seen gleefully jump up and down bare-breasted waving her top in a film scene born of some sick male imagination ... and a few frames later get shot in her chest between her breasts and tumble backwards to lie floating dead in the water in a perverse fantasy brought dubiously to life on the silver screen.  

On and on I went, ignoring healthy sexy stuff like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition or Victoria’s Secret supermodels in favor of something disgusting from the 1970’s. And all because it afforded glimpses of some screen bimbo’s naked chest … and I could have gotten just that from a scene in Caddyshack where another screen bimbo has her top unhooked as she falls into the water during that risqué pool bash with the caddies and emerges out of the water seconds later proudly baring her chest with no violence taking place at all.   But oh no, away I felt following not so dear old dad’s footsteps.  Gah!  Ick!  Ugh!

In a cruel irony, I recall looking at a sign promoting a porno film called “Sensations” featuring a woman posing in the act of undressing that was in the hotel room of the Holiday Inn in Newburgh, New York during a miserable trip out east in 1994.   Mercifully, I did not make any clumsy attempts to watch that crud, though I am sure it was a far cry from the violent porno I was already getting low (not high) from.

It got so bad that in 1996, Clyde –sucky parent that he was- helped me create a VHS devoted to this crap so I could watch it over and over without continuing to wear out the VHS tape that had the flick it came from (recorded off Cinemax, incidentally; mercifully it was not a store-bought movie.)  Mercifully, in 1997 I destroyed that tape, and not by having it copied over; I deliberately took it apart and threw it in the trash can.  So from that point on until 2002 I was “clean” … until the addiction, incredibly, came back even though Clyde had fled my life forever.   Thanks to the goddam Internet, I found I could restart the vicious cycle that plagued me from 12 to 17 … and let it plague me all over again from 22 to 31.  God! 

Towards the end, it would go away, and I’d think thought I’d wiped it out from deep inside me  … only to get sucked into the same old self-destructive cycle yet again, even after being free of it for several months.   And the wet dreams – dammit, the wet dreams it planted in my subconscious!   They were grotesque, and all spawned by that bimbo actress in the light blue bikini who later became a damn sitcom starlet and then a mere personality hawking her healthy living wares and exercise gear.   Damn did that movie scene hit me in a vulnerable spot (i.e. my sexual taste for bathing beauties) causing no end of mental confusion and distress, even: how could a movie justify something so crass and disrespectful to women in swimsuits?   Damn that movie's makers all to hell for it!   

I am glad to relate that those are fading out too as my libido finds far more healthy sexy imagery from pop culture to take root on (i.e. supermodels), thank you God.

This sexual addiction left proverbial needle tracks all over my libido, I swear.  And that talentless light blue bikini-clad bimbo “actress” in that crappy movie scene the syringe, one that lay on a light blue cloth I kept picking up and sticking in again and again, hurting myself and warping my core value of adoration of women in the process.

I swear that one day they will fade – in fact, writing about them is making them fade, thank you God once more.

Far and away, this addiction was one of the worst things that ever happened to me.    And the scary fact is, there are hundreds, if not thousands of men out there trawling the Internet, porno cable channels, or God knows what else for sleazy smut ranging from “soft core” to blood-soaked violent.  On the latter, some even proudly list “machine guns” as a fetish.  Machine guns!  God almighty but men can allow themselves to stumble into the darkest crap thanks to libidos mutated by perverse fantasies, especially when they are influenced by the dreck Hollywood churns out in that regard.  

So far as I’m concerned, such men are pieces of human waste who deserve to be sterilized; and also believe such creeps deserve to be doomed to the life of a eunuch locked up in an insane asylum without a prayer of having sex, if I may be so point-blank.

How I hate Clyde for encouraging me to watch a piece of violent, smutty ‘70’s porn just so I could see a woman’s breasts, especially since he was the one who had the real hots for that tramp of an actress, not me..

 I could just beat the hell out of him for the rest of his miserable life for this addiction he coaxed me into, God damn him to hell forever and ever …

On February 7^th, 1992, anger was born inside me.  One which has burned for twenty years.

How did it happen?  Well, let me plunge you into my feelings right off the bat by saying this:  If a dark spell could be cast, everyone who laughed and just would not stop laughing at a certain funeral held on that date in the David Lee Funeral Home in Wayzata, MN, would first have screamed in horror as the head of the preacher making them laugh half the time suddenly exploded like Paul Freeman’s does in that disgusting “opening the Ark” scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.   Then their screams would rise and rise as one by one their faces melted like Ronald Lacey’s did in that same needlessly grotesque movie scene before they turned to ashes in that not-so-gross way Crispin Glover dies in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.   Then those ashes would be swept up in a whirlwind and cast into the deepest level of hell you could find as the survivors in the funeral home screamed, cried, or barfed all over.

And suddenly more funerals would be required, only there were no bodies or ashes to bury, and the media would go wild about a supernatural massacre at a funeral …

True emotions are seldom pretty.  Even the true emotion of mutual attraction expressed by the act of love is too risqué to discuss in public (unless you are an insecure famous person or sleazy radio or TV show host.  Then it’s just fine, and how dare you complain, John or Jane Q. public!)   But nothing is uglier than anger, especially if it grows and grows for twenty years.

I suffered as a boy in a funeral home that long ago at the funeral of my grandpa, and I came away with wounds that only bled anger more and more as the years progressed.  Wounds my parents balked at helping staunch because it meant confronting members of a branch of the family.  Cowards.

Let’s call him Grandpa Hellman;  when he died, all the Hellmans –and many others- flocked to his funeral. 

Damn, but that room at the David Lee Funeral Home was tiny!  So tiny it quickly became jam-packed with humanity to the point it was suffocating … as well as became a powder keg waiting to explode.  And that goddam preacher dropped the match when he  got up and said “It is okay to laugh.  It is okay to cry.”

 At the time I was shocked: laughter at a funeral?  What?!

I remember thinking of some song from South Pacific that included the phrase "you've got to be careful" as I tried to will the preacher not to make everyone laugh. Fat freaking chance, that.

Looking back, I could just beat the hell out of him for saying that. Beat him until he screamed and cried for his life.   He did not factor in that there might be one person in the room who would be offended, confused, and angered all at once.  Especially if that someone happened to be an eleven year-old kid (namely moi.)

So the laugh-fest began as the preacher gave a humorous narration of grandpa’s life, relating things like how he would make “surprise pancakes” that ceased to be surprises (a story I had not heard about until them.  FU very much, Hellman clan.)   Or about the times grandpa did things like spill iced tea in grandma’s lap, then proceed to pour the entire pitcher on her lap.  (Again, FU very, very much, Hellman clan, for not sharing that story with me until he was dead, you goddam shallow-minded yahoos.)

Then the Hellman brothers joined in.  The first got himself laugh after laugh as he did a virtual stand-up comedy routine at the lectern as he talked precious little about grandpa and about the Hellman clan exclusively, saying deadpan something about the Hellman children “… marrying and marrying up to new heights.   And marrying and marrying up to new heights.”  God damn him!   Looking back, I would gladly go back in time, grab him by the scuff of the neck, and first fling him up into the ceiling screaming “There’s your ‘new heights’, goddam you!” before I proceeded to hurl him into the crowd of “mourners” bowling over dozens of those irrelevant bastards and bitches.

Then the next Hellman brother –a U.S. Army colonel- got up, said “I’m Bill. The one in the uniform.” And got more laughs with that and other things I mercifully cannot recall except for the laughter it sparked. Looking back, I wish I could time warp back, fling a chair at him as he stood at the lectern in his green class A Army uniform acting like a comedian and scream: “With all due respect, Bill, especially in regards to your service record, you are such an asshole: you hated your father as well as your mother! STFU!" (A true fact: they were damn good parents to their kids, grandma and grandpa, but Bill had a burr up his ass about them "not being good enough" when it came to him.)  Then proceed to rush him, haul his ass off the lectern, and begin pounding away bellowing “Soon you’re going to say ‘I’m Bill, the one in the body cast!’”   And before I time warped out of the room before people could grabbed me I would have kicked a few holes in a wall of that lousy, rotten funeral home.

Finally, the third Uncle Hellman –in tears like me- got up and said things everyone finally shut the hell up and listened to.  

Then that clerical collar-wearing comedian had to get back up and could not resist even joking about a Bible quote where Jesus fed his followers fish.  “I don’t know if was surprise pancakes, but …” 

God damn that preacher!   I wish God had sent a lightning bolt down and killed him there and then.  I discovered what I call “religious irrelevance” that day, something that would make me run away from home four years later. *

When the minister asked at the end of all the comedy “Anyone else want to say anything?”  I wish I could zoom back in time faster than Billy Pilgrim can in Slaughter House Five, kick open the double doors leading into the room, storm up through all the shocked people (perhaps shoving aside somebody who got up and demanded “Who are you?” as I did), shove the preacher off the lectern bodily, and start to rant, rave, and scream at everyone.   Deliberately trying to ruin the ceremony so my poor younger self sitting there with mom’s hand on my neck has some justice; justice I would reap even if I had to beat up every person who laughed –and made others laugh- at that goddam funeral.   Hell, I would have punched ‘em senseless and hurled them one by one through those windows facing the parking lot.

Worst of all, my goddam father, Clyde Krebbs, took pleasure in my anger afterward.

Now, memory is always imperfect, especially when anger and trauma are in the mix.

I do not know whether or no Clyde dropped me at the house or at the foot of the hill so I could take a walk around the block with a warning to  “ … not kill anybody …” when the funeral guests arrived.  

I do remember being at the foot of the hill, seeing those cars rolling up Larchwood drive fresh from Wayzata, and how I wept saying “Go away!” in a hoarse angry voice … and wanted to wipe them all off the face of the earth.

Looking back, I wish I could yet again time warp faster than Billy P., haul  Clyde out of our old green sedan … and proceed to beat him senseless, climaxing with bashing his head on the hood of the car  in plain sight of all those arriving guests, zipping back to the present before they could lay hands on this big, mysterious young man falling on Clyde with apocalyptic fury …

Mom told me afterward people kept asking if I was all right after hearing me cry so much in that freaking funeral home.   Looking back at them now here is something I’ve always wanted to slam them with:  “No I am not all right, you goddam shallow-mined, empty-headed, irrelevant jerkoffs!   I hate your guts and I probably forever will hate them,  you goddam bastards and bitches who don’t know the first thing about death! And I was crying so much towards the end because your irrelevant attitude was hurting my feelings, damn you all to hell forever!”

Clyde Krebbs also has another strike against him from this ugly moment of my life: he constantly frustrated my attempts to write the Hellman brothers to express how they had hurt my feelings that day.  Bastard.   I would gladly smash his face in for that alone, to say nothing of the other crap he pulled with me, God damn him.

"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand," Mark Twain once said. Well Mark, I can stand against such an assault, because laughter is a fire that can warm, but it can also burn, and burn like hell. I got burned in that funeral home, man, badly burned, leaving painful scars that have bled nothing but anger of the kind I’ve expressed here.

“Oh no!  You're going to become the next Charles Manson!” some might scream.  Screw you, I say to that; you're not me, and if you can't understand me, shut the hell up and go away.

 “You really need professional help,” others might say.  Been there, done that, buddy.  

“You just have no sense of humor; don’t know when to laugh just to be polite.”  Still more “bottom feeders” might howl.  STFU, assholes.   I laugh when I please, not when howling audiences of the brain-dead likes that jam TV studios, lecture halls, theaters (and funeral homes) tell me to, so go to hell.

As the final exhibit in this case study of true emotion, here’s a few things I wrote shortly after that stand-up family comedy laugh fest supposedly called a “funeral” (edited for privacy and clarity):

“Grandpa

Dick [Hellman].  I loved him [until] the moment he died.   At the funeral I cried like a baby most of the time.  While the others rejoiced as if he was still [alive].   God [damn] it.  They did not know that I loved him very much.  They didn’t know he was deceased.  I love you Grandpa.”

Worse, grandpa was the third death in a row in a year for me, which also compelled me to write this:

“Three

Three people I have loved died.  Don’t know why!   Why now?  Why? Why? Why?  Doomsday, Feb. 1, 1992.  BOOM!

The End”**

This 20-year anger is so massive, it scares me.  But it is not my fault, people; the grown-ups that day caused it, and thus the blame rests entirely on their shoulders.

And speaking of dark spells, there is another my anger makes me wish I could cast on those people: cramming them aboard a train crossing a weakened bridge like in The Cassandra Crossing with the same gory results of people being impaled by flying debris, burned alive as train cars explode, etc.

In my opinion, children should not be made to go to funerals.  The goddam “grown-up” content of services like grandpa’s just flies over the heads of little kids … or so hurts their feelings they see nothing but red afterward.

God is anger terrifying in it’s pure, unbridled state.

Update: just after I thought I'd finalized this blog post, I read that there was a fight at a funeral held at a Baptist church in Phoenix, AZ. *** Too bad nothing like this didn't happen at that family comedy fest I suffered through twenty years ago: it would have spared me so much anger if somebody had started a brawl like that one in Phoenix or done something -anything- which would have wrecked that funeral for everybody, not just me.

The roughly L-shaped building with the weathered brown brick exterior stands along the frontage road located at the intersection of Highway 77 and Interstate 494 on the Richfield-Bloomington (MN) border.  It stands incubated with the sounds of traffic as it flows north/south on 77 and east/west on 494 seasoned with the sounds of turboprops and jet engines from the planes at Minneapolis/St. Paul International as they arrive and depart.  

If it were not for the big sign out front with the digital sign that reads “45.99” next to the permanent words “One Person” and the smaller sign above the lobby, the Richfield (MN) Motel 6 could pass for one of the dingy-looking apartments you can find near Minneapolis/St. Paul International airport.  In fact, maybe it was a dingy apartment complex before it became a hotel.  An ugly building fit for an ugly time of my life that intersected with it ten years ago.

God how I hated having to stay there, and all because the man I call “Clyde Krebbs” in certain entries made in this blog had left me, my mom, my brother, two dogs living in our Chevrolet suburban.  Via charity from her family, we temporarily roosted at that Motel 6 from January 18^th to January 21^st, 2002.

“Well, tonight we’re at the Richfield Motel 6.  Have spent the previous two nights in Matilda the Great. [Our name for our Chevy Surburban.]  Don’t feel like going into details on what’s up, tho[ugh.]”*  I wrote in my diary entry for the 18^th before spilling ink over naïve romantic daydreams about girls.  I was only 21 then and desperately sought some kind of refuge amidst the wreckage of my life.

Daydreams, however, could not hide the discontent underneath.  A mood so ugly, in fact, that I snapped “Don’t bother me!” several times at a couple in the lobby admiring our two dogs as I brought them in from a walk one morning.  Instead of getting the hint to mind their own business, they both had the bad taste to laugh with the husband repeating “Don’t bother me!” several times.  I swear, if I could, I would go back in time, kick him in his old tokay, and tell him to STFU.

Being shoehorned into one measly two-bed hotel room was a nightmare for me, especially when things happened that rubbed my raw nerve ends.   I remember without fondness the night mom flicked on a program I absolutely hate: the awards show better named “The Golden Globs” saying “I just want to see who won.”  Not giving a hoot in hell for Hollywood and its cruddy awards, I ducked out of the room for a walk.

Worse was to come the next night, when, while my brother showered before bed mom flicked on that laugh track-addled “Britcom” better called “So Irritating And Loud It Drives Me Out Of My Mind.”   Appalled she would put on with me in the room a show I did not like because of its ear-piercing (for me) audio content, I shouted “Mute it!  Mute it!” in sheer exasperated desperation. 

Damn did the sparks fly over that one.   We fought quite a bit, actually, then as soon as my brother was out of the shower we tucked in for an unpleasant night’s sleep.

Howe I curse Clyde for the actions that saw is wind up in cramped confines like that damned room at the Richfield Motel 6!  Here we were stranded in our own city when by rights we should have been in our own home with me and my brother in our own rooms with a nice big yard for our dogs to run in and out of through a pet door, with mom –the queen of the household now that the “king” had fled- watching the tube far out of my hearing in her own room.  Gah!

The night of the “Britcom” incident for my money marks the beginning of another unpleasant phase of my life: constantly butting heads with my mom, one that landed on me mere days after that jerkoff Clyde had fled to a friend in Florida via a bus ticket his sister had bought him, leaving us high and dry.

Irony of ironies, the night in question was on Martin Luther King Jr. day  2002, a date marred not only by my fight with mom, but my first pointless conversation with Clyde since he’d bolted on January 10^th, this time via the telephone.   That too did not improve my move any when mom put that damned “Britcom” on.

I ached to get the hell out of that place after our fight, and the next day we did just that … only wind up at another hotel I hated in another suburb;  a continuation of our ugly situation which I will devote time to in this blog at a future date.