Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

by Patton Oswalt

  Compare the rollicking lyrics of “Squirrel House Christmas” with the more elliptical, tone-poem quality of “Toenail” Timmy Trimblish’s “Springtime”:

  Bug-dick, bug-dick

  Oatmeal pants

  Salami whore’s twat box

  Fill it up with ants

  Dead mouse pecker puppet

  Wave it at a church

  Eat a peck of pickle berries

  Then shit

  Whereas Clemm’s song is comical and boasting in nature, Toenail evokes a thoughtful, reflective quality.

  Spring is a time of renewal in nature, and that goes doubly for hobos. One of the first signs of spring is bees, traveling from flower to flower as they gather nectar and unwittingly pollinate a summer’s worth of blooms. It is a sight that inspires poetic reveries—dreamy, hopeful inner vistas that remind us we are all, great and small, connected to the diurnal cycle.

  “Bug-dicking” is a hobo term for this process. Note this excerpt from the rarely performed play Shoebox Serenade:

  LITTLE GIRL: Look at the bumblebee on the pretty flower!

  [“Mudtoe” Simmons emerges from a row of bramble bushes, with several bleeding cuts on his exposed belly.]

  MUDTOE: That bug’s dicking the flower in the petal-pussy! Bug-dicking!

  MOTHER: Get away from my child!

  “Oatmeal pants” is a clever bit of “hobo code” and actually means “short-sleeved shirt.” Hobos were forever afraid of people asking precisely what they had in their pants, so they’d refer to any trousers they might be wearing as a “coconut shirt” (“coconut” = “white”) and any shirt as “pants.” “Oatmeal” is hobo rhyming slang for the color blue.* Thus the lyric “oatmeal pants” is a way of saying, “I’m wearing a blue shirt, and there’s no reason for you to take any interest in what may or may not be in my trousers.”

  “Salami whore’s twat box” needs no explanation.

  “Fill it up with ants” is a term meaning “get some soup started” or, more generally, “begin preparations for dinner.” Trimblish has secured the company of a young lady and is about to make some dinner—possibly barley or millet in warm water, a celebratory dish for hobos. One can imagine Trimblish’s quiet joy as he fills an empty fireman’s helmet with sun-warmed water from a poorly guarded dog dish, slowly digging the millet or barley grains from his pocket (his “coconut shirt” subterfuge has paid off!) while, nearby, his companion gnaws lustily on her salami with her remaining strong molars. Hobos could be crass, but they never lacked sentiment.

  “Dead mouse pecker puppet” also needs little explanation, except in the way of social function. Once the deboned and scraped-clean mouse carcass was fitted over a hobo’s reproductive member, he would entertain other hobos with “puppet theater”—usually retelling various hobo folktales. The “mouse puppet” would play various roles, such as:

  “Half-Gone” Johnny Strong in “Snoozin’ on the Tracks”

  “Fist-Width” Petey Fishbein in “Jailhouse Prom”

  “The Bludge” in “Stool Pit”

  Performing the same known-by-all folktales for other hobos (who would often interject random, personal embellishments or, more often than not, try to box the mouse puppet) could become tiresome. Where to find a new, unversed audience who could delight in these whimsical tales with the innocence of a child? Where could a large group of people be found gathered together? The answer can be found in the lyric “Wave it at a church.”

  “Pickle berries” are pencil erasers.

  FULL DISCLOSURE

  Stuff I did on the Internet while writing this chapter:

  Typed “Ilkey Moor” into Google and found a picture of what might be a goblin

  Read the trivia section on the imdb.com page for The Breakfast Club

  * Most hobos were, for some reason, insistent that “Oatmeal” rhymed with “blue.”

  I Went to an MTV

  Gifting Suite and All I Got

  Was This Lousy Awareness

  of My Own Shallowness

  I got invited to the MTV Style lounge a few years ago. It’s the first and last “gifting suite” I’ll ever go to.

  You know what a “gifting suite” is, right? Remember that episode of The Sopranos, the one where Chris-tu-pha goes with Ben Kingsley to a gifting suite out in Hollywood and can’t believe all the free goodies they’re piling onto these celebrities? Then later he punches Lauren Bacall?* Yeah, that one. It’s a room or, in my case, an entire fucking house full of free shit they give away to celebrities.

  I’d read about gifting suites before. US Weekly seems to have a permanent branch of their reporting staff covering them. Hey, celebrities worked hard to become insanely wealthy and famous, right? Don’t they deserve some retroactive free shit, to make up for all the years they had to survive on a standard living wage?

  Also, the term “gifting suite” has this sinister, Orwellian quality. Like something Warren Ellis or Grant Morrison would come up with as a creepy throwaway bit of dialogue in one of their mind-bending stories. Maybe a “gifting suite” is a torture room or a lab where they infect subjects with biological agents, shit like that.

  It still wouldn’t be half as horrifying as the actual suite I visited.

  First off, there weren’t a lot of actual “celebrities” there. The fact that I was invited should let you know the cultural cachet of the attendees. Well, maybe there were some big, actual, photo-worthy celebrities attending later, but not when I got there. I got there at noon on a Friday.

  That’s when the “celebrities” consisted of asterisks like me and people who had fast-forwarded.

  “Fast-forwards” describes a specific substratum of the Los Angeles population. These are people who, even though they don’t have a shred of talent or even a joyful curiosity about film, music, or theater, have a ravenous appetite for the rewards those three pursuits bring. So they’ve decided, Fuck it, I’m going to fast-forward to the rewards stage. Part of the “rewards,” in their estimation—and this is beyond the goodie bags, chef’s tables in restaurants, and access to exclusive nightspots—is getting to treat everyone like shit.

  Assholes. Assholes in bespoke clothing, distressed jeans, and artfully faded concert T-shirts barking and sighing at everyone and everything around them. Bitches. Bitches who stomp down Melrose in week-old fashions, already furious that there’s new stuff on the racks, and I swear to God I’d better get personal service when I walk into that goddamn boutique or this boba tea’s going in someone’s face. Shitheads. Shitheads who were confident that every repeated catchphrase that left their freshly balmed lips was brilliant or perfect for the occasion. Their hands were always, subtly, at half-mast, ready to post up for a high five when they successfully repeated the watered-down hip-hop slang they’d acquired.

  You pulled up to a valet station on Benedict Canyon, where a driver took your car away, and you boarded a huge SUV, which then took you a little farther up a hill to where the “gifting suite residence” was. Well, this was paradise for the Assholes, the Impatient Bitches, and the Fearless Shitheads. They got to complain about having to leave their expensive cars, they got to bitch to the reception girls about having to stand in the sun, they got to roll their eyes at the SUV, which, apparently, was “ghetto” and “last year.” Wow!

  Maybe these men and women realize how short a window they have where, coiffed and dressed, they’ve still got tight, young-enough faces to fool people for the three seconds it takes for them to squeeze beyond the velvet rope. Hot, tan, blond girls who are structurally and philosophically hideous. Buff, gelled, open-collared boys who can’t read and constantly text.

  This is not a screed against Los Angeles. Los Angeles is five of the best cities in the country, and three or four of the worst.

  My friend the brilliant comedian Blaine Capatch said Los Angeles is eight or nine different cities. You have to pick the right ones to live in. I was spending the afternoon in the part of Los Angeles that is Sunset Boulevard west of Cre
scent Heights. It’s Robertson Boulevard between Beverly and Olympic. Both of these areas could be napalmed, and the IQ and talent level of the city would triple.

  I hadn’t even reached the house yet, and my self-loathing was bubbling and curdling in my stomach. The fact that I’d accepted the invitation revealed a nascent shithead streak that ran to my core. I know it’s still there. I’ve got to live with it.

  My agent had said, “You wanna go to the gifting suite? MTV invited you.” I responded with my lizard brain. Free stuff! Blaaaaaaarghhhh! Give me free stuff! Like a galumphing goat of greed and gimme, I accepted.

  Now I felt like shit. But it was too late. The SUV pulled up to the gifting suite residence, and a clutch of asswipes pushed their way past me from the backseat, scanning the landscape like velociraptors for someone who wasn’t moving fast enough for their taste.

  I got my ID from the receptionist and found out that the gifting suite was put on by some organization trying to raise awareness for AIDS. I clung to this fact like a life raft in a sea of wrong.

  I was immediately led into a high-ceilinged chamber where an Adidas rep was giving away custom shoes. A flat-screen TV was set up, connected to a web page where you can design your own sneakers. He shoved a pair of size 11 basketball hi-tops into a canvas bag and told me, “Check out the website at home when you get a chance. It rocks.”

  The second those shoes went into the bag my brain started screaming, “Out! I want Out!”

  It comes down to this: I love money. I love success and fame even more. But I worked very hard to get money so I can pay for things myself. That’s what turns me on and makes me happy. Having shit handed to me by surly hipsters, or people whose mouths smile but eyes don’t, is bad for the soul.

  But no, I still had to do penance. Led around by a tightly smiling escort, I had to visit ghastly jewelry dealers; shitty tequila salesmen; loads and loads of iPod accessories, stationery, and facial cream concerns; and two sad-looking hotties from a restaurant called Pink Taco. “Pink Taco”— get it? It’s a rude slang term for “pussy”! But it’s Mexican food!

  “We’re opening a new place in Century City. It’s going to be off the hook. It’ll be super-crowded and, like, the place to be,” intoned one of the girls, adjusting her baby-doll halter.

  Super-crowded. That’s the habitat. That’s where these people thrive. I was surrounded by women waiting for someone to cut in front of them. Their upper lips were permanently curled, and their jaws were always half-relaxed, ready to fully snap open and let fly with a hellish trumpeting of unrighteous fury. Their lives are spent crowded in front of the Griddle on Sunset for breakfast, fighting for a treadmill at Crunch, jostling for lunch at Chin Chin, and spending long, pointless nights outside of Hyde or the spider Club. I’d just discovered a remote bar on Magnolia in Burbank. Cool, dark interior, plush booths, and never crowded. A terrific jukebox. Scotch and pretzels. One of my favorite places to eat is BLD, which can get crowded, but there are plenty of windows of opportunity to eat and read and not be slapped against the rest of humanity like pigs. And I walk, for hours, in the space and cool of a nearby park.

  Hell on earth for the Assholes. If there isn’t the potential for a screaming match over a shoulder nudge, it isn’t life.

  While I was waiting for the SUV to take me back to my car, I got waylaid by an assistant from MTV’s Pimp My Ride. You know what a pimp is, right? He’s a dude who tricks, frightens, or flat-out bullies a woman to fuck other men for money, which she then gives to him. Oh, and it’s also an adorable slang phrase. There’s a doggy grooming spa near where I live called Pimp My Pooch. Someday there will be a baby boutique called Rape My Bassinet.

  Anyway, the assistant was showing me some of the cool cars from the show, which they had in the house’s massive garage. And by the way, this was not a house where people lived, raised families, hosted friends, built memories. This was a sprawling, unwelcoming residence that was rented out for brainless rap videos or shitty TV shows where they needed a remorseful but sexy drug dealer’s pad. You get to see a lot of gifting suite denizens as background extras in these.

  So he was showing me a “party van” they’d outfitted with an extendable “Wheels of Steel” and minibar. It was kind of nice. Wow, someone had actually, you know, created something. Had used skill and talent to craft something kind of new. My heart warmed for a moment.

  “Yeah, we had this thing at a Ja Rule record release party, and we hired a fuckin’ midget to serve drinks out of the side. And this one bitch . . .”

  But I couldn’t hear him anymore. My heart had snapped shut. Even the few good things in this world were splashed with wet ugliness.

  I rode the SUV back down and waited for my car. At one point, a blond-haired nobody with perky tits and bad skin got in my face and said, “Is there a long wait at the house? Or do I get to go right in?”

  “You’re not missing anything,” I said, and she managed to sigh and sneer at the same time. The sneer made her zits flare under her spray-on tan.

  I drove to the House of Secrets, got comics, and then ate a quiet, yummy turkey sandwich at the half-empty Tallyrand on Olive Avenue, and thought about how much I suddenly missed my grandma Runfola.

  Anybody want a pair of size 11 Adidas?

  * Chris-tu-pha, not Ben Kingsley.

  Mary C. Runfola

  Explains Her Gifts

  EIGHTH BIRTHDAY

  A picture of Chuck Yeager

  signed to someone named “Jimmy”

  Grandma Runfola: Well I know how much you liked that Space Battles movie. And I thought . . . yes, all right, dear, yes, Star Wars. So anyway, I was at this rummage sale and they had a table—well, one man there had a table, and I don’t think he was with the rummage sale people because he had his table set up a little bit off to the side. Well, he had two tables. One table was all these photographs of celebrities. And the other table had a large beach towel over it. And I couldn’t see what was under the beach towel but I was standing there looking at the different pictures and every now and then a young man would come up to the man selling pictures. And all of these young men either had these really close crew cuts or blond hair and they looked like if a punch in the face could get up and walk around and wear clothing. And the man selling pictures would let them lift the towel and it looked like all these knives and Nazi stuff. And the punch-in-the-face men would buy a knife or a patch. Maybe they were actors buying props for a stage show.

  Oh, but anyway, Chuck Yeager. Well, you liked Sp— yes, dear. Star Wars. Well, you liked that movie so much and did you know Chuck Yeager was kind of a space pilot, like that Han Solo fellow? Oh yes, I know Han Solo, your grandmother didn’t just fall off the pickle truck. Han Solo and Mr. Spock and Robbie the Robot and everyone. Well, the signature meant that Chuck Yeager actually held this photo, which makes it even more valuable.

  ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY

  The cassette case for AC/DC’s For Those About to Rock

  with a Best of Steppenwolf cassette inside of it

  Grandma Runfola: Well, you wouldn’t believe it. There was a blind box sale, where you buy a box for fifty cents and you get whatever’s in it. Except this box had been under a leaky drainpipe, so one of the corners was soaked and kind of caving in. So I talked the man down to a dime, can you imagine? Inside there were twelve baby bibs that I gave to your cousin Jesse—maybe he could wipe something down with them in the summer? And then there was this cassette and it looks like a rock band. Well, when I opened it up it was only half a cassette and these three big, dead beetles, which I guess eat plastic, or maybe not because it’s almost like they ate the plastic and then died. But then this other cassette was in the box, inside a bag of marbles, so I put it inside this case. It’s got “wolf” in the name of the band and on the case there’s a cannon, and what’s more rock and roll than a wolf and a cannon about to shoot?

  EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY

  An old shovel (no, really—an unbelievably old shovel)

 
Grandma Runfola: Oh, it’s an antique, you can’t use it. That handle’s just a giant toothpick at this point.

  TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY

  Volumes 2, 3, and 7 of a twelve-volume Works

  of Thackeray

  Grandma Runfola: I thought I remembered seeing on TV once that he only wrote three books. Oh well. Won’t it be fun hunting down the other books? It’ll be a mystery to solve, like that Hunt for Red October movie!

  TWENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY

  A lantern shaped like an owl

  Grandma Runfola: Do you remember the Frasers? They had the daughter who did gymnastics and the son who went to college and kept hugging other boys and now he’s a swimming coach? Well, they knew these people who were having an estate sale last summer so we all went out there—me and the two Fraser parents, not their kids. So we get there and it turns out the estate sale was the day before, and we’d driven all this way. We couldn’t believe it. So on the way back, driving back home, we see this antique shop, and it’s the most hodgepodge-looking place I think I ever saw. And we had to go in. And I got this lovely hourglass that on the one side it looks like an egg but the other side the glass is square, like a box. And Jeannie—that’s Mrs. Fraser—she bought a flag for a country; I think it was Iceland. And Mr. Fraser didn’t buy anything but he loved all of these old toy soldiers they had, only he said, “I don’t have the space to keep them anywhere.” But he sure loved them. And when we left it was raining and we weren’t too sure about going down the road we were on because it was getting muddy, so we stopped at a Hardee’s and when we were sitting down with our sandwiches I realized I’d left the hourglass back at the store. So we asked the Hardee’s if we could use their phone, since it was a local call, and they were so nice and we called and the man from the shop drove all the way down to the Hardee’s and gave me the hourglass. He was the nicest man and you could tell the people at the Hardee’s knew him and he must be popular, which is no surprise seeing how he treats his customers.