REDNECK SEX '87

Raymond, MS was weird and scary, the kind of place where people thought that electricity was magic and line dancing was a form of foreplay.

Raymond had one traffic light that blinked red in one direction and yellow in the other while the town anthem was performed using a old rusty harmonica. The weekend entertainment of the average citizen of Raymond involved a raucous mixture of arson, sodomy, drunken debauchery, firearms, vehicular destruction, and the use of a wide range of various tobacco products (some not used as wholly intended lending a new meaning to the phrase “just a pinch between the cheeks is all it takes”). It wasn’t uncommon to find the city trash dumpsters on fire, casting an eerie light far in the distance as if beckoning me to return to the ugliest head on collision between the Twilight Zone and Hee-Haw the world had ever known.

Random gunshots from a variety of calibers of weapons would often ring out in the middle of the night, some close by, others far off in the distance as if in reply. Sometimes I actually almost could detect a pattern, like it was some form of dueling banjos or inbred Morse code being played out with shotguns instead of telegraphs. It wasn’t uncommon to leave my apartment, walk to my car, and find fresh, spent brass scattered along the walk way or near the road where I parked. Trust me, I took every POSTED NO TRESPASSING sign that I saw very seriously, especially since most of these signs already had several bullet holes in them. And speaking of bullet holes, I think that a good portion of the tax dollars collected by the town / city / colony of Raymond went to replace traffic signs that were the innocent victims of rednecks doing drive-by deliveries of 12 gauge double barrel impromptu Braille imprinting. If you ever wanted to drive a blind person crazy, all you had to do was send them to Raymond and have them try to read the stop signs around town.

For almost a year, as fate would have it, I called Raymond, MS my home, be that as it may. Living in Raymond, MS will teach you real quick about the fundamentals of Maslowe’s Hierarchy of Needs. When I left Raymond, it was more like the last thirty minutes of the John Carpenter movie “Escape From New York” than it was any actual moving attempt.

So, how did I get into this predicament?

Long, long ago in 1987 I went off to my freshman year of college at Hinds Junior College in Raymond, MS, an event that would inevitably leave indelible scarring on my vast mental psyche. Off campus living space was slim to none, and I had to take what I could find. What I could find was this deficiency apartment that was just one of eight such units converted out of a previously failed family business on the outskirts of Raymond, MS.

Lucky me.

The overseers of the rental property I was cursed to have the sour fortune to find consisted of a man, his very submissive (and strangely mute most of the time) wife who always carried around their rat-faced newborn baby of questionable gender, dressed in antique baby clothes. Oh, there was also a creepy old man who always wore black undertaker-like suits and was referenced to only in passing as ‘dad’ by the husband. They all somehow lived way up on the hill behind the ex-business turned apartment complex and their house (and their mannerisms) were for all practical intents and purposes, very Addams Family-like. Think Ante-bellum mansion, only very run down with rusty scaffolding and plastic sheeting on many areas and levels and it looked down on the apartment complex from a good four hundred or more yards away. One of my neighbors was the top mechanic for the Jaguar dealership in Jackson, and he was an ex-Vietnam vet. We would often joke about the owners of our complex and their mannerisms. One day I referred to the distance between our apartments and THE BIG HOUSE as ‘being in rifle range’. He didn’t laugh but the look on his face not only scared me, it told me that he had at one time or another had the very same thought.

The husband looked just like Raul Julia playing Gomez Addams and would even walk around the property at very odd hours, Hugh Heffner style in a burgundy with gold trim smoking jacket, dark purple silk pajamas, and blue fuzzy slippers. His random walks were usually conducted while casually sipping on a brandy snifter and smoking a long cigarette in a black plastic extension holder that made the whole thing about 2 feet long from lip to tip. Gomez paid for all the electricity and the utilities (part of the rental agreement and why I took the apartment in the first place, kind of interesting for someone else to pay for your power). However, apparently this ‘agreement’ allowed Gomez to enter your apartment whenever you were gone and gave him the right to turn stuff off like the AC, your computer (in the middle of the final dungeon on Ultima V with no way to save and having spent 5 hours getting to that point) and the two ceiling fans if you left them running. He would also invariably leave a rather terse note boldly scolding you for wasting electricity (his money). As such was the SOP of my life, I would invariably return home to either an ice cold apartment in the winter, or a burning hot apartment in the Spring.

I began to refer to Gomez as the Anal Retentive Energy Nazi.

Communication between myself and my landlord was difficult at best as Gomez also left very strict instructions to never, ever telephone THE BIG HOUSE after six in the afternoon or come up there and knock on the door without telephoning in advance first, as presumably that was the time period when they all went to their coffins to sleep. Suited me. I also had a feeling that he kept his wife in a box in the basement and only took her out to sodomize her at his leisure while his elderly father probably wandered aimlessly around the unfinished parts of THE BIG HOUSE with a ball peen hammer in one hand waving it in the air randomly while mumbling things like “The saw is family.”

I’m sure that during Gomez’s many invasions of what I considered my personal space he found my considerable stack of well used pron (carefully hoarded from my earlier teenage years) in the top shelf of my (sorry, his) closet and helped himself to some truly monumental fapping while I was not there. It became a game to me, I would carefully arrange my pron collection in a certain order, sometimes leaving it in a small stack either by the bed or slightly under it with just the tip of one or more magazines protruding in visible sight and then leave for work or to run an errand out of town (there was nothing in Raymond. It redefined the term ‘nothing’, not even a video store to rent flicks from). When I came back, the carefully selected order of pron would invariably be broken and I knew it wasn’t the tiny little pron elves that lived under my bed that were doing the rearranging and shuffling either. Since Gomez was the only one to have a key to my apartment besides myself, it didn’t take a detective to solve the case of the jumbled pron.

I actually played Gomez one day, leaving my apartment and taking a slow drive down the road, just to see if my suspicions were correct. I went about three miles and when I turned around and came back, Gomez was half way down the hill from THE BIG HOUSE heading toward my side of the apartment complex. He saw me pull back in and he ever so carefully adjusted his stride to take him to the big mailbox at the end of the driveway. I find this funny that he would go to the mailbox empty handed as he was a stickler for having the postal carrier drive up to the house to deliver all mail by hand. In other words, he never went to the mailbox, nor did he have any reason to. I guess I was studying him as much as he was studying me. I later heard from my Vietnam veteran super Jaguar mechanic neighbor that Gomez had a telescope on a tripod up in THE BIG HOUSE and watched us through it like we were some kind of experiment of his, under carefully controlled conditions, and that sometimes he would look through the telescope, like the kind you set up on a tripod and watch the stars with, and that he would write stuff down on a legal pad next to him like he was keeping notes on when we left, when we got back, and our schedules. When I asked my neighbor how he knew, he said he had a telescope as well, and watched Gomez, sometimes they saw each other and just stepped away from their telescopes out of mutual voyeuristic respect.

It was spooky and heady stuff, especially to a somewhat jaded 18 year old.

But I digress somewhat in foreshadowing the impending situation.

Now on this particular Friday night, I had left work at nearly 1am in the morning (I guess that would technically be Saturday morning then) and arrived home at nearly 2am. I was dead tired, single, there wasn’t anything such as the Internet way back in 1987 and I couldn’t afford cable on a college student’s income (I had a fast car and all my money went into that). I must reiterate, there was no internet at this point in human evolutionary development, not even AOL.  Dial up BBSes were about it, and I didn't have any locally.

I would often come home late at night to Raymond, MS, to find that some form of mass trailer park grade foreplay was going on and tonight was clearly going to be no exception. From over five miles away, I could see the glow on the horizon that signaled that the locals had once again set the dumpsters on fire at the city trash dump and those big metal containers were blazing with the light of Hell itself. It must have been the annual Fall Right of Inbred Fertility or some other obscure pagan ritual. I shook my head as I drove past the hotly burning dumpsters in my ’79 Pontiac Trans-Am, glass T-tops off, windows down, and a Judas Priest cassette playing on the Kenwood stereo system. The orange, yellow and red flames flickered on my waxed and polished gloss black paint job, caressing the giant three shades of gold tone firebird decal on the hood. It seemed to writhe in the firelight with its own macabre life.

Not a quarter of a mile past the blazing dumpsters, I drove slowly through a mixed bunch of smarmy scoggins just walking along both sides of the road in the tall grass. My guess is it was they who had set the dumpsters on fire and were now returning to the fold, having lit the signal fire that would begin the festivities. The men were drinking a variety of cheap brew, mostly Keystone and Schaeffer or Old Milwaukee, and smoking what I assumed to be cigarettes. Empty bottles were tossed aside either into the woods or out into the road. This apparently generated a large amount of mirth as the men would laugh and dance a little jig in place when the bottles busted into a billion scintillating pieces of glass just like two did not twenty feet in front of my front bumper. I carefully avoided the long golden stream of fetid urine from one CAT cap wearing scoggin who was pissing into the road and apparently trying his first attempt at cursive handwriting. This personal attempt apparently amused him to no end, judging by his expression and the way he was acting.

The haggard and skanky looking women simply followed obediently along behind the male members of the retinue, carrying the torn open cases of beer (you have to give mad props to that white trash pecking order, it gets established in first grade I believe) and keeping the supply flowing. I guess that once the males passed out from drinking that the females would finally be able to have their way with them on the side of the road and thus Nature would take its strange course and the population tables would remain stable. It was hard not to wince when you looked at this group of evolutionary misfits, at the genetic flotsam and jetsam that made Raymond the redneck DNA version of the Sargasso Sea.  Facial hair was present in all examples there and a perm mixed with an overdose of cheap makeup can only go so far to hide that tangle eyed quality that so many women native to that area possessed.

The quad halogen lights played over the motley group and a couple of the less / more inebriated rednecks took a right quick fancy to my car (it was, after all, a black and gold “Bandit” Trans-Am, every rednecks rolling wet dream) and asked to either let them get a ride or to drive it. Now I don’t let anyone drive my car, let alone some redneck hill scoggin sloshed out of his mind on cheap canned horse piss. I politely waved, made small talk (as much as you can do as you idle through a pack of scoggins at 5mph with T-tops off and both windows down) and when I saw an opening, I gave the TA a little gas and with a roar of four hundred and three cubic inches speaking its authority through Heddman headers, true dual exhausts and turbo mufflers, I quickly cleared the pack of stumbling country bumpkins. A beer bottle sailed my way in disgust at my decline of the immediate use of my set of wheels but I was already out of range of any drunk scoggin’s miserable aim. I watched the beer bottle land with a splash in the middle of the road about twenty feet behind me. The contents scattered everywhere, wet red diamonds glistening in the glow of my Pontiac’s tail-lights.

Carefully watching the displaced retinue of aboriginal troglodytes behind me quickly vanish into my rearview mirror, I plotted a course for my apartment, three miles away. I made a giant mental note to park behind my apartment (away from where I normally do in view of the road and driveway) in the dark near the tree line so that if the pack of scoggins did somehow manage to meander their way down as far as my apartment in their drunken pilgrimage, they wouldn’t see my car and therefore wouldn’t try to steal it. Images came to mind of some good old boys hot wiring my TA and then using it to jump stumps or chase cows around a pasture while cutting doughnuts and slinging manure everywhere. Hiding my TA behind the apartment complex, where the darkness and shadows blended with the black paint, also kept the scoggins from getting any bright ideas like using my car as some pagan altar for their strange breeding rituals. Images of tangle-eyed stump trolls getting bent over the fenders and rear spoiler of my car as a prelude to hours upon hours of wild knee slapping, harmonica playing, inbred bumpkin sex chilled my blood. I mean, I had just had the car professionally painted not six months ago, the last thing I wanted on my paint job was greasy ass tracks and claw marks from Lee Press-On Nails ™.

After putting the T-tops back on, hiding the car in the shadows (out of view of even the ever watchful eyes of THE BIG HOUSE) and making sure that the car was locked, I sighed and decided to call it a night and what a strange night it had been so far.

I had Saturday off.

There was no such thing as the Internet, hell, at that time I didn’t even have a first generation Nintendo system (that would come a year later, they were still brand new, rare and terribly expensive). I decided that if I somehow did survive the night that I would just sleep in late tomorrow, do whatever the hell I wanted to the next day and enjoy every minute of it.

I turned the key and opened the door to my apartment, following that simple act up with a complex ritual that involved turning everything electrical on that I could; air conditioning, ceiling fans, lights, stereo, etc. If that Gomez fucker was going to come into my apartment when I was gone and fap to my pron, then I was going to charge him for it and I was going to do that by making those little buzzy dials in the utility box outside spin as fast as I could get them to go.

As the light came on in my living room, my eyes fell upon the one thing I had completely forgotten about in the hell that had been my long day. What I did have that weekend, all to myself, to entertain me was a pretty high end sampling keyboard (the name D20 comes to mind and I think it was a Roland) that a friend had left behind for me to play with and see if I wanted to buy from him. I did not know how much mirth that big black keyboard sitting there on its black tube metal frame stand would bring into my life that very weekend. I promised myself that I would play with the keyboard first thing tomorrow morning, read the manuals, and try my hand and making some scary / spacey music. At that moment in time, I was playing EA’s “WASTELAND” on the Apple IIc (using five and a quarter floppy disks with no hard drive) and listening to Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra over and over and over. It was a perfect match. As I was personally moved and inspired by the music of Tangerine Dream and the setting of the post holocaust, I thought that I would create some pretty original post holocaust type music and make a tape of it. Call it a personal project. I would have started composing right then, but I was dead tired and all I wanted was a cold Pepsi and about eight hours of shut eye followed possibly by eight more hours of shut eye for good measure.

Yes, that would have been nice but such was not to be my fate.

As I have previously stated, everything about Raymond either involved sex, guns, arson, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or monster trucks. Often a surprisingly effective combination of those elements in ways Mother Nature never, ever intended. Enter my next door neighbor, who had a large supply of all those critically essential elements in his possession at any one time and just enough lack of brains to use them in interesting combinations.

The apartment adjacent to mine was rented out to a Troglodyte who worked shifts at a factory forty-five miles away on the other side of Jackson (why he lived in Raymond instead of over there never made sense to me). As I was a college student, my hours were often odd, mixed with a part time job that gave me part time wages at what I considered full time labor (I worked at Sack and Save, a huge grocery store, 30 miles away, the closest part time job I could find at that time).

Well, the hill scoggin next door drove a big ass Ford monster truck with really loud pipes so I knew whenever he came home, I knew it like five miles before he ever arrived. I had just crawled into bed and turned out the lights when I felt the far off tremble of my neighbors monster truck on its final approach vector. It crept closer, slowly, on a level more felt than heard, and then it slowly became a roar of off road tires on paved asphalt, followed by the unmistakable sound of gumbo mudders on loose gravel as the monster truck turned in. The exhaust note blasted out a few times as he worked the clutch and gas in a redneck two step imitation of parallel parking. The truck pulled slowly past my apartment to the one behind, vibrating everything I owned with its exhaust note through the open headers.

Great. I had known this particular hill scoggin for two months now and understood that he was also prone to bringing home various knuckle dragging, slatternly mannered stump trolls for the sole purpose of banging them in any and every orifice he could. His kitchen, I had determined from the sounds and smells that penetrated the thin walls, was right next to my bedroom, and although I had heard the unholy sounds of feverish stump troll sex through the duct work on many occasions before, I was no where near prepared for what was about to audibly assault my senses.

Now, the duct work, I think, was more like a primitive redneck communications system for the entire complex, one that had seemed like a good idea on paper but was never fully implemented in the final design. I imagined that besides its primary purpose of carrying unique and often unimaginable smells from one apartment to another, it also would allow you to shout into one vent and have someone in another office now-turned-apartment answer you back. This form of interspecies communication was greatly assisted in its effectiveness if you used the natural assets of both lungs to full capacity and screamed out your message. This theory of mine was proven on several occasions as apparently a pair of friends (not mine, friends to each other) on the opposite side of the complex often did at all hours of the day and night. I don’t know why they screamed messages at each other from one apartment to another when I could hear all of their conversations normally through the thin walls. The duct work was like an elaborate redneck version of two tin cans and a string tied between them, only larger and more expensive. That is my hypothesis, because the duct work never seemed to work well as an environmental control system, but functioned wonderfully in its other capacities, especially as a way to let mice in seemingly as they pleased.

Apparently, as I had not understood it to be so before tonight, the vent in the roof of my bedroom must have made a gentle U shape over the wall behind my bed and emptied out into the Troglodyte’s kitchen next to me. That or the walls were thinner than onion paper.

I put the noises out of my head and tried to find the ever elusive sleep. Having learned long ago how to sleep in odd situations, overly noisy environments, on the hood of hot rods at late night street meets, and on a variety of surfaces including the floor of a motel room or the front seats of many a muscle car, I closed my eyes and began to have naughty thoughts involving a roll of duct tape, white bobbi-socks, thigh highs, Peter Pan creamy peanut butter, a York peppermint patty (full size, not the tiny little fun size, mind you) and the nice assed little blonde cashier who had started to come on to me at work.

Just as the wonderful gift of sleep (with just the hint of a really good wet dream in the making) began to bless me with its presence, I was rudely awakened by a loud voice apparently coming from next to my head. My first thought was that Gomez had missed my TA in the shadows and thinking that I had gone to my parents for the weekend, he had let himself into my apartment looking for my latest pron and a late night extended fap session. I figured that when he had found out that not only was I actually home, but that I was in bed asleep that he was suddenly caught and was trying to back peddle as quickly as he could.

That was the last straw for me. I was already in a foul mood and now I was determined that I was so going to kick his Raul Julia looking, Hugh Hefner dressing ass out of my apartment, up the hill and all the way back to THE BIG HOUSE. Land lord or not, I was tired of his mooching on my pron. I reached for a crowbar I kept just under the bed for use on uninvited scoggins and sat up in bed, preparing to wail away on whoever I found in my apartment. As my hands closed around the cold metal of the crowbar, I opened my eyes and saw that I was still alone in my bedroom.

WTF?

The voices were still loud, like they were in the room with me and I realized that the scoggin had brought home yet another stump troll to beast fuck. The scoggin and the stump troll sounded like they are unloading groceries in the kitchen because I could hear cabinets being slung open (WHAM), cans being thrown down (BLAM) and paper bags rattling (CRUNCHCRUNCHCRUNCH). I could hear stuff being stocked on the shelf behind my head and somewhere some kind of gas escaping at high velocity. Then I realized that it wasn’t gas escaping, but rather it was the stump troll trying to whistle. God, I prayed, don’t let me recognize the tune it’s producing, it would probably be on my mind for the rest of the weekend.

Mercifully, the stump troll’s ability to make melodic harmony was beyond my ability to identify, and ended up sounding like someone who had just inhaled helium in large quantities and then shoved their face into an electric fan rather than the smooth, melodic beginnings of the Andy Griffith show. I felt pity for the stump troll for this pathetic, mewling swamp creature had no idea of the fate that awaited her at the hands of the Troglodyte.

This whole re-stocking of their mutual food supply went on for about ten minutes with lots of talking and chatting about shift work at the factory, how hard the day was, etc. and I realized that both the Troglodyte and the stump troll apparently worked together. How convenient that must be. I for one had found out the hard way several years before that you never to mixed business with pleasure, it had a nasty tendency to come back and bite you in the soft and tenders.

So the Troglodyte and the stump troll shared a shift at the factory. That’s obviously where they met and what could be more cozy than assembly line love, nope, you just couldn’t beat that with a big stack of Harlequin’s. And then the next thing I know, the Troglodyte and the stump troll are having sex, right there in the kitchen.

Sorry dear readers for that abrupt change in plot, but you have to understand just how abrupt the act was for it was the most horribly seamless thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life (and I have seen a lot, believe me).

Somehow, again, seamlessly, the Troglodyte and the stump troll have gone from stacking enough food supplies to survive a several month long winter hibernation to actually engaging in hard core trailer park beast sex. I sat straight up in bed and had to mentally catch up with what was going on. I stared at the wall behind my bed in utter non-comprehension as the transition from house work to rampant pig sex had gone something like this:

Troglodyte: “Motherfuck that was a long ass shift but at least we got paid!”

Stump Troll: “Tee-hee! Now we have groceries! Tee-hee!”

Troglodyte: “You seen my cigarettes? Where’d that damn girl put them, what bag?”

Stump Troll: “I think they’re over in that bag over there! Check that one, yeah, that’s the one!”

Troglodyte: Unf! Unf! Unf! Unf!

Stump Troll: Oh! God! Yes! Holy Jesus! Yes! Oh! My! God! You’re! Killing! Me! Fuck! Me! Harder!

Troglodyte: Unf. Unf. Uh-huh. Unf. Goddamn. Unf. Uh-huh. Jesus. Huh.

Stump Troll: Fuck! My! Ass! Oh! God! God! My! Ass! God! Mmmmmm! Whine! Whimper! God! Whine! Fuck!

There comes a wide range of very scary, unintelligible beast-like noises that are a cross between a fart and a grunt, low and guttural. These noises are mixed plentifully with the sound of human flesh scraping on a linoleum floor and of sweaty flesh slapping hard against sweaty flesh.

Troglodyte: God. Yes. Uh-huh. God. Jesus. Unf. Unf.

Sound of something wet being slapped or drawn out of an orifice like a plunger.

Stump Troll: Mmmmmppphhh.

Troglodyte: Unnnfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.

Stump Troll: MmmmMMMMMMMMMMMPPPHHH!

Troglodyte: Uuuuhhhhaaahhhh. Unf. Unf. Uuuuuuhhhhaaaaaahhh!

Stump Troll: GOD. YESGODYESGODYES. MYASSGODMYASSYESGODYESGOD.

Troglodyte: Unf. Unf. Unf. Goddamn. Unf. Unf. Unf.

Stump Troll: Mmmmmmmmmpppphhhhh. Squeal.

And the Stump Troll was screaming all this at the top of her lungs, her face must have been pressed against the wall because it sounded like her mouth was only a foot from my ear. The Troglodyte had a monotone voice that today reminds me of Billy Bob Thornton in the movie Swingblade. At that point in my life, there wasn’t much that scared me, but I promise you that I was on the opposite corner of my room, back against the wall, still holding the crowbar and staring wild eyed at the wall near my bed. I was waiting on the moment when the Stump Troll would finally chew her way through the wall and come bounding into my bedroom to devour me as some feral mid-intercourse snack all in order to keep her fetid strength up.

“Holy crap!” I whispered louder than a whisper but quieter than a shout.

“Go ahead and kill the damn bitch and let me get some sleep.” I muttered.

I think I said it loud enough for both of them to hear me.

The Troglodyte and the Stump Troll hit the wall several times, hard (I guess he was trying to get traction on the tile floor) and during the first five minutes of their coupling, they managed to knock my high school diploma off the wall along with a few pictures I had of my car that were framed. I managed a deft, Ninja-like act of running around my room, bare feet on carpet, to catch the frames as they fell and to remove others before they could be knocked off.

The sounds coming from the other side of my bedroom wall were as close as I ever want to come to a sordid combination of Sumo wrestling and bestiality.

Then part of me realized just what I had to play with: the sampling keyboard! I ran over to my study desk and pulled out my trusty tape recorder, hung it by its lanyard from the vent in the ceiling, and keyed on the RECORD button with a fresh 90min tape. I was rewarded for my effort with about fifteen more minutes of Stump Troll sex shouted at the top of their lungs. When they finally began to slow down, they seamlessly merged back into putting up groceries …

Troglodyte: Unf. Unf. Unf. God. Yes. Unf.

Stump Troll: You’re killing me! Don’t stop! Don’t stop! Hmmmmmm. Aiiieeeeee! Oh. God. Yes. Mmmphhh! Ahh! Uuugghh! Uuughh!

Troglodyte: I’m going out for a smoke.

Stump Troll: Okay, I’m about finished here. I’ve got one more bag to put up. Want a beer?

I sat staring at the wall in my bedroom, mouth agape in dismay as the tape recorder with the bright red RECORD light hung from its lanyard some eight feet above me. Arranged carefully around me were my treasured memories and picture frames in a nice stack next to me. I heard the door to their apartment open and I shuddered. I mean, the first image that came to mind was the Troglodyte stepping out naked in the moonlight with rancid Stump Troll love juice coating his equipment, standing there hanging in the wind as he lit up a smoke to enjoy the afterplay. No way was I going to look out my front window.

So, after that bit of festive inbreeding, I just couldn’t get to sleep right away. 

No, I had a mission. 

My course was clear. 

Revenge was in the air.

I spent the next several hours with a headset and the sampling keyboard, isolating tracks from the recording of the rampant Stump Troll sex and burning them to 3.5” diskettes. After about three hours of work and practice, I had what I considered a virtuoso-grade masterpiece. I mapped the keys, identified them carefully with masking tape and a black felt tip marker (UNF, OHGOD, URKILNME, etc.) killed the fifth can of a fresh six pack of Pepsi in less than an hour, and ambled off to bed for what few hours of sleep I could get. I set my alarm for what I considered to be way too damn early and was asleep thirty seconds after my eyelids had closed.

It was a dutiful, military type deep sleep, dreamless and much needed.

Dawn and the alarm found me more refreshed than I would have expected and feeling delightfully naughty. As the layout of the apartments followed no discernible school of engineering logic, my living room just happened to share the same wall with the Troglodyte and Stump Troll’s bedroom. I moved the tubular stand and the keyboard plus my external speakers over to the wall, and with delightful glee, I turned the volume control all the way up.

It was a beautiful Saturday morning. 

I looked outside at the light, blue sky, white fluffly clouds. A cat I fed on a regular basis walked past on the fence outside my apartment window. I turned back to the keyboard, cracked my knuckles, raised my hands in the air, and brought them down.

Beethoven would have been proud of the feral symphony that I had composed.

The demonic sexual sounds coming from my keyboard were samples of the pig sex that had been played out just hours earlier. With each stroke of my hand, I was commanding a masterpiece of redneck debauchery played out at a volume level that I thought seemed about right for what I had listened to last night.

I considered it, at the time, some of my finest work, even though in hindsight, it was quite primitive and with the advanced technology available to me today, I could do much better, but it was 1987, and I was doing the best that I could with what I had.

After about ten minutes of feverish banging on the keyboard, mixing and matching samples in a tempo that Lars Ulrich would be hard pressed to keep up with in his youth, I finished off with the all important down stroke on the key that produced the final sample.

Troglodyte: I’m going out for a smoke.

I stood there for a second, caught my breath, and sighed.

My work was done.

In my mind, I pictured hundreds of people around me standing and clapping. I spread my arms in front of the keyboard and took a bow, nodding thank you to my phantom audience. I powered down the keyboard, grabbed a bowl of Raisin Bran and a cold Pepsi (breakfast of champions to be sure) and sat down to watch what little Saturday morning cartoons you could get without cable or any type of antennae. I mean, other people knew what the Troglodyte did, and I had simply sampled his pig sex orgy and replayed it back for everyone in my own fashion. No one would suspect little old me of having fabricated that ten minute example of audible debauchery and that was the beauty of it all. I smiled at my evilness.

A couple of days later, I found out that Gomez Addams had approached the Troglodyte with a more than stern warning not to disturb the other neighbors with his odd sexual operas and to keep things quiet because if he got one more complaint (and he had gotten a lot that Saturday morning or so I heard), then he was going to evict the scoggin on his ass.

The next time the Troglodyte had sex next door, all I heard was a muffled whimper. I don’t know if it was him or her. Whatever they were doing next door, it wasn’t loud enough to bother me. I was asleep in five minutes and they never woke me up again with their sex operas as long as I lived there, which was just about six more months, give or take.

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