Long after the Crimean War but
before we knew there would be a second W Administration, I spent my Sunday
nights drinking in the golden age of HBO with my Wisconsin born and bred friend
John. Erudite but with the underlining prejudices of a little old lady school
teacher, John would happily suck in the black humored ribald mayhem of Six
Feet Under and The Sopranos: dead war vets, dead horses,
mechanical talking fish standing in for dead mobsters, adult gay boys in
paintball wars, Tony Soprano plotting to get his deposit back on a summer
rental by playing Dean Martin Live on the Vegas Strip beyond the threshold of
pain, it was all good, but language, language!
The breaking point came season one
of the historically accurate but resolutely profane Deadwood series when
saloon keeper Al Swearengen refers to a rival as “that hardware cocksucker.”
John put his foot down and the terms of our cable TV marriage required that we
go cold turkey on Deadwood.
Coming this week to the Roxie two
Wisconsin straight boys, seeking elegant digs in the lower Height, in the mid
80’s, discover a dirty little secret world. In the new Aussie produced doc Shut
Up Little Man: An Audio Misadventure, “Eddie Lee Sausage” and
“Mitchell D.” describe their pilgrimage to the lower depths of 237 Steiner
Street.
“We’re making our way from the sort
of nice neighborhood where we were staying and I’m going, ‘Oh, wow, we might
live in one of these cool old buildings.’ And then we pulled up and there’s
this totally ramshackle shit hole of a place.”
“Yeah, when we first saw the place
it was this gaudy pink color – what does this remind us off? I don’t remember
who coined it but we came up with the Pepto-Bismol Palace – (after the) classic
antacid, anti-diarrhea medicine.”
“The absentee landlord, Nancy Lee,
stepped out of the apartment, turned and said, ‘One more thing, next door
neighbors, sometime little bit loud.’”
No sooner do Eddie and Mitch – with
their 80’s hair and faux innocence the duo perfectly embody the retro world of
the Roxie/Castro series Midnight for Maniacs – settle into the Palace
then Eddie starts hearing strange noises emanating through the paper thin walls.
Recently the downstairs restaurant has been converting to a new hipper format,
I wake up to the sound of a chainsaw so vividly channeled that I think the dude
wielding it is in the room with me. That’s kind of how Eddie describes his
first audio encounters with Peter J. Haskett and Raymond Huffman: the odd
couple neighbors who kept screaming in Eddie’s sleep, “Shut up, little man,”
and yes, that all purpose standby “cocksucker,” as every possible form of
speech. Efforts to have a dialogue on decibels and dirty words finds Eddie
confronting Huffman – “there was this Cro-Magnon looking kind of guy, who had
the neck mussels of a newborn – ‘Goddamn it you guys have been screaming for
days, I’m trying to get some sleep, you need to shut the fuck up!’ Ray replied,
‘Listen you skinny cocksucker, shut your fucking mouth and go back to bed. I
was a killer before you were born and I’ll be a killer after you’re dead.’”
Eddie then describes noticing a human skull nestled in the window next to the
door and suddenly realizing “that I’m in way over my head.” Once the nervous
little rabbit returns to the safety of his hutch he decides to wake his still
sound asleep roommate to the reality of their situation. The boys start taping
their neighbors, complete with an improvised boom mike, plugged into their
stereo.
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The resulting dozens of hours of
audio cassettes are first shared as party favors – eventually the tapes go
viral and in the early 90’s world of underground tape swappers Shut Up
Little Man becomes a sensation and the raw clay for an avalanche of hipper
than though comic books and radio monologues. The doc is essentially a
summation of a pre-Internet flash mob kind of phenomenon whereby Haskett and
Huffman – now long diseased from booze fueled maladies – become the setup and
punch lines for an ongoing hipster cultural joke that they’re unaware of and
from which they profited not.
It’s impossible to ascertain who
these men really were, how their obviously twisted relationship had evolved or
who they were harming aside from themselves. Shut Up Little Man – which
is more than modestly entertaining – raises all kinds of red flags for us
genuine “cocksuckers,” ranging from the depths of the closet, to usefulness of
the term “self-hating homosexual,” to the need to confront so-called
sophisticated hip commentators about their condescending attitudes often
derived from half digested bits of American religiosity.
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Growing up the ward of a Victorian
raised British dad – whose favorite expletive was “Jesus fucking Christ on a
goddamn fucking cross,” I’ve come to realize just how bizarre and fantastical
it is to be culturally abducted. It wasn’t until I reached the church of the
Castro Theatre and cinema liberation theology of Bruce Beresford and Martin
Scorsese that I was able to emerge from the shame of coming from a background
that was a lot more representative of real life than the hipster crowd would
admit.
Years ago I and thousands of
aspiring hipsters fell asleep to the radio ministry of Jean Shepherd, now
mostly remembered as the screenwriter/narrator of Bob Clark’s cult hit A
Christmas Story. Shepherd’s nightly radio short stories usually began with
the line “I’m this kid, see,” and went on to describe a Holman, Indiana
childhood starring a dad “the old man,” who swore like a sailor at every
possible opportunity but whose pratfalls were not meant to be the object of
self-satisfied, smug derision but rather a humanely comic object lesson in our
shared absurdity. As Shepherd wisely noted, “three thousand years from now
we’ll all be forgotten.”