MR. SHOW
A popular absurdist-comedy sketch show starring David Cross and Bob Odenkirk that ran on HBO from 1995-1998; as I never had HBO during that period of time, I was only superficially aware of the show’s existence; several years ago, I watched my first episode of “Mr. Show” on DVD, and this was in part thanks to Bono; on May 26, 2005, U2 brought their “Vertigo” tour to the Fleet Center in Boston; I am not a particularly big fan of U2’s output in the past 20 years, and in fact think they creatively peaked when, in February of 1983, they released the excellent album, “War”; after that point—and certainly following the fawning reaction to the release of “The Joshua Tree” in 1987—I think U2 began to believe their own hype and play music for an abstraction known only as “the people,” releasing album after album of nausea-inducing platitudes fit for a Hallmark card, not a band born from the creatively exciting early-80’s post-punk scene; The Edge has been quoted as saying, “Particularly on ‘Boy,’ I can hear a bit of the Banshees and the Buzzcocks and some hint of the Skids”; The Buzzcocks never, to my knowledge, played with Pavarotti; knowing I would be in Boston, a friend of mine offered me a private box at the Fleet Center to see U2; until that moment, I did not realize I had friends who could offer me such things; I did not confess that I am not the world’s biggest U2 fan, but I have two very-good friends who lived in Boston at the time that are, in fact, massive U2 fans; I accepted the private box for the sake of my friends, you see; I was selfless in that way, much like Bono is selfless; my friends—Mandy and Sam—knew the lyrics to every song; the show—a combination of laser lights, sonic riffs, and poverty-relief—was actually fairly exhilarating; I can think of no other band on Earth who could pull off the humanitarian rock-bombasity with as much conviction as U2; Bono is a sincere man, I think; I might have appreciated the arena-rock more if not for my persistent cough, which led me to begin drinking Robitussin DM; Robitussin DM contains Dextromethorphan, also known as DXM, which, when ingested in high enough quantities, produces effects similar to Ketamine and Angel Dust; fans of a cough syrup high have their own vocabulary, which includes terms like “sippin’ tuss,” “robotripping,” “dexxing,” and, for fans of the Texas rap scene (including the deceased DJ Screw and Pimp C), “drank,” “lean,” and “sizzurp”; many advocates of sizzurp—like Lil Wayne—enjoy the mixture of Promethazine VC (with Codeine) and Hi-C or Hawaiian Punch, and they drink it for the opiate effects of the codeine; those that use Robitussin DM are interested in the hallucinogenic qualities of the DXM; it is unknown what is the cough syrup of choice for the rapper, DMX; Robitussin DM is extremely popular because while in small doses it acts as a cough suppressant, in higher doses—500 mg and up—it is a full-blown psychogenic drug, capable of radical dissociation in increasing plateaus of hallucination, though it can also cause horrendous vomiting, diarrhea, and spastic muscle-control, resulting in movement resembling a zombie or Robocop; in high school, I went to shows at an all-ages DIY club called Tite Pockets—which resembled a crack den—where I heard amazing hardcore music and watched scores of robotripping gutter punks leave trails of pink puke in the area just outside the front door; in college, kids ordered European DXM in powder form over the internet and got high in their dorm rooms; I missed out on these school-age experiences; in the middle of the U2 concert, I began to feel delirious, and while—in a show of sober solidarity—the audience held their cell phones in the air (to celebrate the ONE Campaign and Nokia), creating a sea of glowing lights, I giggled at all the blinking robot eyes; after the show, we stopped at a CVS where I bought more Robitussin; we hopped on the Red Line and went to Mandy’s large, 19th century home in Cambridge; we set up camp in the library, where my hallucinations came on stronger and I plucked, from the long shelf of books, a leather-bound, first-draft copy of the screenplay for Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” which included a hand-written note on the title page and was signed, “Love, Terry”; I am still not sure if that actually happened; Mandy and Sam dropped me in a leather recliner, positioned a plastic garbage can next to me, and put on a DVD of “Mr. Show”; I am not sure how many episodes I watched, but I found the show very funny, especially a sketch about a character named Willips Brighton, who resembled Brian Wilson circa 1988 and sang a sunshiny piano ballad called “Mouthful of Sores”; the various lights in Mandy’s library—from the ceiling fixture, two lamps, and the television itself—began to leak from their respective light-sources into the air directly in front of my face and bleed into each other, like a set of watercolors left to melt in the back seat of a station wagon in mid-July; I was fucked up out of my mind, or, as they say where I am from, “tripping balls”; I passed out soon after; in the morning, I woke up covered in quilts and Mandy came into the library with hot coffee and read to me from Charlotte Bronte’s “Villette”; I felt like a small child on Christmas morning; after lunch, I boarded the super-cheap Dragon Coach bus, bound for New York City; I had read quite a bit about the recent “Chinatown bus wars,” but my ride was peaceful, and the elderly Chinese women and college students on the bus seemed unthreatening; I tried to sleep, but I felt groggy, slightly dizzy, as though I had been beaten up and stuffed full of cotton balls; I was happy, though; finally, I slid into sleep, hearing a dreamy fugue of Cantonese gibberish, the piano melody from “Mouthful of Sores,” and Linda Manz’s immortal opening voice-over from “Days of Heaven”: “Me and my brother—it just used to be me and my brother. We used to do things together. We used to have fun. We used to roam the streets. There was people suffering of pain and hunger. Some people their tongues were hanging out of their mouth.”
You caught me completely off guard with the Tite Pockets reference. I had no idea you were connected with Athens.