They Threatened Us With Violence: on the road with I Ragazzi Della Prateria & DJ Boraxx

On Saturday night I found myself in the middle of the mountains in some town outside of a town that isn't on the map. I was drinking gin and watching a musical performance. The local football team, dressed in drag, lip-synced to an hour's worth of classic rock tunes like "We Are The Champions" and some other shit. They didn't even know how to pretend to play their instruments. And it seemed like everyone has having way too much fun.
The whole scene was ghastly: teenagers swooned while their parents smiled and videotaped the performance from the wall, burly men clapping along to the song their local football players pretended to sing, and when they concluded with the Italian national anthem, "Inno di Mameli", the crowd held their hand out straight from their chest not unlike the fucking Nazi salute.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
And the encore? Nothing less than screaming the riff of The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army," which for inexplicable reasons has come to be the Italian football war cry, and since the World Cup, simply the Italian war cry.
Then it was time for my friends to play. That's how I landed myself in this throng. My friends i ragazzi della prateria and DJ Boraxx were following the mess of shit football dragqueen lip-syncers.
"If this crowd likes our music," said Boraxx. "I think that will speak badly of us."
And he was right. They didn't like their music. In fact, they hated it.
It's good music, disco/dance/beat sort of tunes, with live, impromptu music-matching visuals. And when they play in Venice or Mogliano Veneto their performance is well-received.
But not this time.
During the first song, a few audience members bum-rushing the stage, requesting "more commercial music," or "music people could actually dance to," and one even asked my friend if he "liked the music you're plaiyng."
They were climbing up the sides of the stage to argue and request. They were coming at us from all sides.
In no time at all the audience turned from crowd to rabble to mob...
The organizer of the concert could be seen speaking with the bouncers in the corner of the auditorium. Football players clad in Italia jerseys stood menacingly just off stage with their arms folded across their chests.
It was time for us to leave.
Violence seemed imminent.
"I'm not even in the band," I said.
My friends glared at me.
"Nevermind," I said. "Tonight, I die with you."
"Just help with the equipment."
"We have to leave... quickly."
The organizer jumped on the stage and approached us. He asked for the keys to our car because "it's probably a bad idea to leave through the front. I can bring your car around back."
"Are we in danger?"
"Yes, a little bit," he said.
So he drove up to the back entrance and we made a beeline from the stage to the car and rolled away with our headlights off.
As we reached town, getting closer to the complimentary hotel room, we joked about how the organizer was probably in more danger than we were because he's the one responsible for the booking.
"They're probably beating the shit out of him right now!"
And we laughed heartily.
"Yeah, he's already dead."
"I just hope he doens't rat us out and tell them what hotel we're in," I said, laughing.
The others weren't laughing.

I heart thunderstorms.

Last night it thunderstormed something awesome. About fucking time.
It's been so damn hot these last couple of weeks, I can feel my brain swelling and sweating.
I sweat in bed. I sweat in the kitchen. I sweat in the shower.
And I know it's been hot most places, some sort of climate change or something or other, but enough already...
Stop using hairspray. Stop driving with the AC on and the windows down. Stop making me sweat.
I remember watching Texan thunderstorms as a child in the garage with my father. We’d open the garage door and sit in lawn chairs just inside, just out of the rain. Those were the days before thunderstorms were needed. Those days, as a child, thunderstorms just happened, like anything else, and they weren’t exactly miraculous. But in a way, they were.
I’d keep time from thunder to lightening to estimate the location of the storm’s center. Three miles away, two miles away, one mile away, and then practically simultaneous thunder and lightening.
These days, I feel like I need a good thunderstorm every once in a while. I think we all do.
Because even if they lack the miraculousness they had during childhood, they still bring a sense of peace and rest with their chaotic and violent ways. With high temperatures like this, the violence of a storm is soothing relative to the static, stifling heat that keeps you from enjoying yourself.
At least during a thunderstorm, you can feel like a kid again.

Back to work!

You know what? I've actually missed work these last couple of days.
Sure, it's fun sitting on your ass all day watching movies and reading, downloading porno and, well... masturbating five times a day. But it gets old after a bit. And your dick starts to hurt.
I can honestly say I'm happy to be back at work today. I've showing off my infectious sores like they're battle wounds. But no one really cares. And I can't blame them.
It's just nice sitting here in the air conditioning. Sure, I'm not exactly "working" as they say. I'm still gonna spend my day the same way I did at home, minus the movies and masturbation, but it's nice to be out of the house, interacting with people, and listening to internet radio.
Also, the fact that it's already Thursday means that the weekend starts tomorrow. And if there's one thing I like about the work-week, it's the weekend.
Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will!
Except on the weekend. On the weekend I do whatever the fuck I damn well please.

Definately NOT mosquito bites.

Here's an update:
My right leg is rotting off. I have to go to the doctor. Over the course of yesterday the pockmarks grew and pussed and actually began to hurt. Mosquito bites... they itch. They get red. They go away.
Remember that whole flesh-eating bacteria scare?
Well, I woke up this morning and my foot ballooned to the size of a watermelon and I couldn't fit into my flipflops. My fucking flipflops!
And so I wobbled and hopped across town to the doctor but of course, it's Italy, and on Wednesdays the doctor sleeps in until the afternoon. So I wobbled back home.
I think I'm gonna go back to sleep now. I'll need all my strength for this afternoon's amputation.

Mosquito bites?

I have these disgusting mosquito bites on my legs. I also have two near my left elbow.
I got these bites at the horse track last week and now they’re all infected-looking and oozing yellow puss.
I’m beginning to think they’re not mosquito bites at all.
Some have caved in on themselves leaving a deep crimson crater in my calf. One scabbed over something awful. And one down by my ankle has bubbled up and over into like what I imagine a whitehead looks like magnified a million times.
“Don’t scratch them,” everyone tells me.
I’m not scratching them! I swear! I don’t know what is going on!
I fear I have some terrible disease.

Booze numbs the pain. Until the morning.

Last night I went to a party in a playground near the soccer stadium. The party had a Brazilian theme, which meant we were to drink caipirinhas and mojitos. And we did. We also drank rum and coke, tequila, grappa, and vodka.
There were maybe forty or thirty of us. Including three Brazilians. And everyone looked beautiful, especially the twenty year-old Italian girls with massive breasts who came from God knows where.
We drank and danced and wrestled. We jumped off the swings, we climbed the cargo nets, we ran around like children caught in frenzy of unabashed life lust.
At some point I took my shirt off.
And soon after I gave some Venetian dude a bloody lip. But you know what? He was asking for it. Sure, I got bruised up a bit in the scuffle but at least I didn’t bleed down my chin onto my pretty-boy white button-up.
That’s when the party started dying down. We were out of booze anyway.
Walking my bicycle back through town with some friends I decided it was time to mount that chariot and take to the cobblestone streets like the half-naked drunkard that I was. But my buddy had no bicycle. “No problem,” I said. “We’ll double up.”
And almost immediately after we started rolling, I was on the ground. I couldn’t breathe. And for some reason I couldn’t see. My friends picked me up, I fell down again, they picked me up again.
As they wiped the blood out of my eyes, I could hear my buddy saying he was fine, didn’t get hurt in the crash.
“You went down like a fucking brick,” said one friend.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” said another.
“I can’t see through all this goddamn blood!” I said. “Jesus, I think I cracked a rib.”
“Let’s walk the rest of the way,” said my buddy.
And somehow I woke up in my bed.
Today, I’ve got a really punk-looking gash through my right eyebrow, and I’m damn sure I cracked a rib. For those of you who haven’t had the misfortune of cracking a rib, let me tell you, it’s some of the most painful shit I’ve ever endured. It hurts to sit up, it hurts to breathe. Coughing, even sneezing, is absolutely excruciating. And there’s nothing you can do for it.
The last time I cracked a rib was in Brooklyn a year or two ago. I had gotten into a little tiff with the bouncer at that bar Supreme Trading. Well, I don’t know who swung first but in the end he just sort of picked me up and threw me across the street. I landed on the curb, and cracked my rib.
For weeks I couldn’t fuck in the missionary position. My girlfriend thought I was just lazy.
“Baby, if it didn’t hurt like a stab wound I’d mount you right now,” I’d say. “But it does, so hop on.”


(photo by: Percy Widget)

Welcome to Wonderful...

Copenhagen!
I’m moving to Copenhagen!
I just visited a friend there. She lives on Istedgrade, halfway between the junkie church and Kebabistan. Really. The kebab place is called Kebabistan! Ha! You can’t miss either of those landmarks. And that’s where you’ll find me for the rest of my life: tiptoeing around used needles and broken bottles.
Because Copenhagen has it all.
Firstly, everyone speaks English. It’s like a game for them, they love that shit. Just throw out some slang and some curse words—i.e. “That’s the biggest pile of bullshit I’ve ever heard.”—and you’ll be the life of the party.
And the women—every friggin last one of them—are blonde and beautiful. As one friend phrased it, Danish girls are very open and outgoing. And by “open and outgoing” she meant alcoholic and slutty.
They take it like champs and give it even harder. For fuck’s sake, they open beer bottles with their teeth with an ease that silently mocks you.
But even if you can’t get laid—and if you can’t get laid in Copenhagen you might as well be a eunuch—there’s hardcore porno on TV every night. Basic cable. And I don’t mean Cinemax dry-humping, I’m talking about raw, dirty double penetration. Every night. In your living room.
But that’s just the beginning. Copenhagen also has Tivoli, the oldest theme park in the world, smack in the middle of the city. Don’t knock it until you try it, my friend. We went straight from the Carlsberg Brewery to Tivoli’s rollercoaster. It was like I died fucking a supermodel and woke up in heaven’s hot tub. Only on a rollercoaster. Drunk.
I heard Michael Jackson wanted to buy Tivoli but the city told him to fuck off. And any city that sticks it to MJ is okay in my book.
One night I went to some artsy hipster party in an abandoned candy factory and it could have been Brooklyn with the hip-hop duo who played and the country cover band. But in Brooklyn kids can dance. The Danish are so unfortunately arrhythmic they could barely clap with the beat. But they looked good nonetheless. And those bastards can drink!
That’s why I’m moving to Copenhagen. Because even though I was the only dark-haired, bearded dude I saw, at least I can dance. And that’s more than those fucking Vikings can say for themselves.
Even if they invented porno.


PS- Everyone in Demark is friends with or cousins of or walked the dog of Lars von Trier. Don’t believe them for a second. They lie. If Denmark had some other claim to fame no one would have to lie about living next to Lars von Douche.


(As previously published at ViceLand.com)

It's not a hangover if you have one every morning. Then it's just normal.

This is one of those cancelled days. Those days after long nights of gambling and drinking. Those days you wake up still drunk, not sure how you made it home last night, and where’s your cell phone? No cigarettes. No money. Nothing in the refrigerator.
You close the shutters and watch a movie you’ve seen half a dozen times and fall asleep in the first twenty minutes only to wake up for the climactic ending.
After shuffling around the house for a few hours you find the strength to get dressed and head out for cigarettes and groceries. It’s five o’clock and the town in still, the quiet before the rush hour storm. You get your cigarettes. And at the supermarket you buy hamburger meat and hamburger buns.
You cook cheeseburgers and drink Fanta.
You watch another movie you’ve seen half a dozen times.
By then it’s almost ten and you think, “Maybe I’ll open a bottle of wine.”
Jesus, how much did you drink last night?

Looking for a Job in the City.

We had been on the boat since 4AM. Our newfound friend, Jonathan was the captain but it wasn’t his boat. “It’s just the boat I use,” he said. “And that’s better than owning a boat. This way I am more free. And happier too.”
As Jonathan rowed us through the canals of Venice we listened to him tell us about how sometimes everything is for him: the wind, and the current. And sometimes everything is against him. “That is when I cry. And sometimes almost die.”
And certainly, after dawn, when the city came back to life, there were moments when Jonathan told us, “You can cry now if you want.”
Drunk on cheap wine and high on hash, I was rowing us through the Grand Canal, under the Rialto Bridge, dodging the massive vaporettos, the garbage boats, fighting the wakes tossed in our path.
And I just couldn’t stop laughing.

(photo: Adam Huggins)

Word o' the day: Pidocchi

I learned a new word the other day. Pidocchi. That’s Italian for lice. A few weeks ago I got stupid drunk at this boat party in Treviso, Italy and after jokingly trying to get this teenage girl to jump in the river with me I found myself naked on the bow surrounded by a throng of onlookers and a gnat-storm of paparazzi. Sure, I jumped in the river, splashed about for the audience, climbed the rocks back onto shore and dressed only to continue the night at some pseudo-discothèque where I stank like river water and some friends told the DJ it was my birthday: “Buon compleanno Americano!”
Anyway, I got home around eight or nine in the morning and slept until eight or nine in the evening when I woke up and took a shower. In the shower I noticed my chest was covered in dirt, little brown flecks of… dirt. Dirt that wouldn’t wash off, dirt that moved when I picked at it.
Bugs! My chest hair was infested!
I spent the evening picking these critters out of my chest hair—not an easy task as they have claws and strong ones at that.
But even then I wasn’t sure it was lice. So I did some research. I googled “bugs in chest hair,” and the first hit was something like “sucka, you got lice.” And my Italian is disgraceful—even after six months I haven’t gotten much further than posso avere—so I once again turned to google for a translation of “lice.”
Pidocchi.
The pharmacy man, a bald, bespectacled guy with tiny, tiny hands, was very kind and gave me “the lotion,” as opposed to “the shampoo” because the lotion was stronger. Then he looked sternly at me and said something of which I understood less than half: something about being careful with it around my penis because this shit is strong. Anyway, that was weeks ago, like I said, and still I got lice. I must have used that can of aerosol foam half a dozen times now, fucking bathed in it, and I’m still picking these fuckers out of my chest hair, my armpit hair, and yes, my pubic hair.
My friend Adam said, “Shave it off, dude. Just shave it all off.”
But if I do that they win. And I can’t lose.
Fuck, even as I write this I can feel those parasitic critters sucking the blood out of my crotch and crawling around in my beard.
For a moment I thought about sleeping in my vacationing roommate’s bed just to see if when he came back he’d tell me that he had lice. Because I don’t think he would. But I didn’t. He’s an asshole, but maliciously giving someone lice seems a bit immoral, even for me.
Lice have a stigma to them, like back in grade school with those screenings and tests, “Today is Lice Day!
I told a few people, some friends, but I tried not to let everyone I worked with know about my parasites. Of course, there’s this one girl, an Italian co-worker I’ve been flirting with and I didn’t really want her to know I had lice, but at a bar not long ago she said she heard I had bugs.
“No no no no… I had bugs.”
“What kind of bugs?”
“Nothing serious,” I said, landing my hand on her waist. “They’re gone now.”
But another Italian co-worker overheard and chimed in with, “Pidocchi.”
The girl was immediately terrified and tripped over herself stepping away.
“But I killed them, I killed them all,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Those bugs are hard to kill.”

And you know what? She’s right goddammit.