Me, As A Comic

No, I’m not talking about doing comedy — anybody who knows me probably knows that I’d pass out cold on the stage were I ever to attempt that — but rather about, um, me in comic-strip form. This is waaaaay old, at this point, mostly because I could never find the thing anywhere online, so I pretty much dropped it & forgot about it. (More on that in a minute.)

At any rate, back in the spring of 2007 one of the PR folks I’d talked to at Vice Records (he’d sent us CDs to review & was a nice guy all-round) emailed me out of the blue (along with others, I’m assuming) to ask if I had any entertaining/embarrassing drunk stories I was willing to share in the pages of Vice Magazine. I responded that no, I didn’t have any about me, but I had a few I thought were pretty damn funny that I’d witnessed. Not embarrassing to me, really, but potentially embarrassing to others.

He said, “hey, send ’em on,” so I did, fully not expecting to ever hear a word about it again. A month or so later, though, I get another email with a “writer’s agreement” attached — turned out they wanted to use one of my funny-drunk-friends stories for this series sponsored by Colt 45 malt liquor called “Tales of Colt 45”. No money, but eh.

Another week or three goes by, and I get another email, this time with a graphic attached. Yes, ladies & gents, my own little tale spun out in four-color comic-strip form, courtesy of real-live cartoonist/illustrator Rick Altergott. And boy, was/is it fucking bizarre. I chuckled, showed the wife, & figured I’d never, ever see the thing in print. I never heard anything else from the Vice Recs guy, so I shrugged & moved on with life…

Fast-forward a year and a half, and lo and behold, I stumble across a mention of “Tales of Colt 45” on some random blog. Turns out it did go up on the Vice site, for all the world to see. Check it out right here, if you dare — it’s the first story in the “book.” (To get to it, mouse over the top-right corner & click to turn the “page.”) And yes, that’s me, apparently, looking even more like Shaggy than I did in college.

I can’t claim everybody’ll find the story as entertaining as I do, but it cracks me up to read the story and remember the actual incident. Not that I’m faulting Vice or the artist, mind you — the story had to be kept short, so I didn’t go into that much detail — but a couple of points that make things funnier (at least to me):

• This was in high school. We were a bunch of underage kids getting loaded (well, everybody but yours truly, anyway) at my friend Travis‘s house way the fuck out in the country.
• The only neighbors within earshot of the house were a bunch of rednecks, and they didn’t give a crap what we were doing. I only wanted to wrangle the drunk morons back inside because as Sober Guy, I wanted to keep an eye on ’em.
• There was no Colt 45 involved. I remember beer, but it was whatever the GIs on the post were willing to buy us when we approached them outside one of the many local Stop-N-Gos, and I’ve got no clue what kind it was. I mostly remember everybody playing quarters with the bottle of Canadian Mist Travis’s dad had left at the house.
• Eric, the friend who knocked himself cold trying to teach me to do the Electric Slide, is black. Not that that matters for the story, of course, but I find it ridiculously funny that he’s whiter-than-white white in the strip, complete with beatnik turtleneck and Brian Johnson hairdo. (Eric, in the unlikely event that you ever read this, um…sorry?)
• And yes, one of the guys at the party did walk full-tilt into the side of the house, although I don’t think it was Eric. Also, the guy didn’t knock himself unconscious that time; he just staggered back to his feet and said, “Oh — the porch is over there.”
• The party ended up more uncomfortable than funny, in the long run. One guy passed out on the floor and woke to find himself covered head-to-toe in shaving cream, after which he angrily chased the rest of us around the house. Another guy nobody liked puked next to the toilet and then bailed without telling anybody what he’d done. The people who were the most trashed all wanted to drive around the Texas Hill Country roads in the dark, for some reason, and had to continually be coaxed back into the house (one eventually backed his car over a gigantic tree stump and had to abandon the vehicle). And the only girl around was Travis’s even more underaged sister, whom me & one of the other guys tried to keep any of the drunk idiots from groping or otherwise doing something really stupid. Oh, and on the way out to the house, we saw a giant cross burning on a not-too-far-off hilltop, which freaked the shit out of everybody. phew.

Ah, the memories. Enjoy…