CARY COATNEY VS. THE SCHEMES OF THE DIABOLICAL CHUMPMASTER!!!
8:45 PM - Plenty of time for Lixi to get a load of laundry done. But CHUMPMASTER has some kind of prime time hard on of making Lixi's life miserable. I've witnessed first hand of another time when CHUMPMASTER tried to harass her over something really petty as parking her car next to a garbage can in the back alley where they are no signs posted saying that she can't - especially when it isn't even trash pick up day either.
Same thing with the laundry room - there are signs posted anywhere saying when we can or when we can't do our laundry.
But CHUMPMASTER went a raving on and on about how hard it is to be a painter waking up at three thirty in the morning! (and mind this - he's retired and living it up on a pension that provides him with a comfortable living expense that allows him to travel all over the world- it's not like he has to work!!). Well, if he didn't sleep in the living room and on the living couch -maybe he wouldn't be hearing the consistent grind of the automated motors going on for an hour and a half!
I would have sympatheized with his plight - but acting like a hypocrite he is- telling me one thing and going to tell someone else something entirely different as to what they can or can do doesn't jive with me. Calling my best friend and my 'on and off 'companion for the better part of a year - ' A WHORE ' so that the whole apartment complex has to hear her business...just made me lose it.
And I jumped in and told the CHUMPMASTER to back the fuck off.
Leave her alone - goddammit!!
He said it wasn't my business and slammed the door on both of us.
Lexi was grateful that night. She said hardly anyone has ever stood up for her - not even her ex-husband.
That sort of made me blush. Now I'm practically a bonafide hero to her.
The next morning - as I'm walking to work on Burbank Boulevard - the CHUMPMASTER spots me and screeches his tan gay mobile across the sidewalk I'm walking on - barricading my path. He rolls down his window and continues on with his rant from the previous night.
"YOU HAD NO FUCKING RIGHT TO INTERFERE!!"
'Bullshit', I told him.' I wasn't going to allow you to degrade her in that way in front of our other neighbors whether they choose to believe the gossip going around or not. I told him he had no business to tell her what time she could do her laundry. It was a halfway decent hour.
"WELL, he huffs, IF YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT THIS GIRL YOU BETTER TELL HER THAT SHE HAS TO FIND A NEW PLACE TO LIVE, FAST - BECAUSE I'M CALLING IN MY DETECTIVE FRIEND FROM THE VAN NUYS POLICE DEPARTMENT!! IF SHE'S HIDING SOMETHING IN HER GARAGE OR HER HOUSE - THEY'RE GOING TO FIND IT AND TAKE HER AWAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!! I'M SICK OF ALL THESE PEOPLE GOING IN AND OUT AT ALL HOURS OF THE NIGHT AND...
'You know what, CHUMPMASTER? You're making me late for work listening to your fucking broken record rhetoric.' Then I preceeded to walk to the bus stop.
Which sort of brings us up to date.
I made the conscientious decision to trek down to San Diego on Saturday. I just couldn't go through the withdrawl. It was beckoning to me - the inner calling to walk through those hallowed corridors of fine carpeted and air conditioned dealer's room nightmares. I told Lixi - if you're going to have a garage sale: let's do it real early because I really, really, really need to go down to San Diego: the comic book convention is consuming my very soul- I've been doing this for the past twenty-one years and I need to be part of it: Fuck! it's a part of me. I conveyed this on the phone to my www.purplepinupguru.blogspot.com partner, Santos Sparky. He was tempted to go also, but he has a baby to care for. Plus, he's been through the San Diego Convention DTs on occasion. It's just that it takes me a while to ween over the addiction every year. While I was talking to him on the phone. Lixi keeps interrupting my phone conversation to go join her at the pool. I swear, sometimes she's like one of those whiny kids that will try to pull the phone reciever from out of your ear when a distant relative calls you on the phone demanding to talk too. So I handed the phone over to her. I don't what Santos said to her - but I guess he was trying to talk Lixi into driving me down to San Diego.
All of a sudden, Lixi suggests that she accompanies me to the convention. I tell her that I wouldn't want her to bother. I'll be running around like a nerd with his tiny member exposed trying to find people to talk business with. But she insists on going. I then subconsciously blurted out - 'well, you know there's going to other younger porn stars and pin up girls and I wouldn't want you to feel intimidated and...
Lixi interrupts me.
"What the fuck did you say?"
Uh oh.
"Are you saying that I'm not beautiful enough or young enough to accompany you?"
Oh shit. In addition to my shingles - I must have contracted foot up my asssinitis.
"No I'm not saying that -'
But she didn't want to hear it. She ran to her apartment and slammed the screen door shut - cracking the front door just enough to let me hear her cry.
I was beside myself at the pool. I then eventually went inside to check up on her. She was done wiping her eyes. And I was dumbstruck. I never thought in my wildest imagination that I could loosely slip up on the tongue and make her upset by saying something sounding so half-assed.
She said that was a mean thing to say.
And I apologized over and over and over again. Until it fucking ate my guts.
I went to San Diego late the next afternoon. Wasn't in any hurry. It wasn't like I had any money to haul any big booty back. Took the train - and thought about what I said to Lixi all the way down the Northern San Diego County coast. It was good to see my old home of six years of Encinitas from the window of the train- a sleepy beach down that I first lived in when I moved to California. I got down to the convention center at 5 PM. I only had two hours to walk the convention floor and talk to whoever I needed to talk. I wanted to talk with Jeff Amano - a artist who is responsible with overseeing the entire line of comic books from Beckett Publishing. Beckett publishes a lot of price guides for the sports and game card industries. I've known Jeff for about ten years and wanted to ask him if he could paint me a cover for the Deposit Man trade paperback that I want to do.- Well, actually my penciler Larry Nadolsky WANTS to do. But I couldn't find him.
After I got booted out of the convention hall- I went and got dinner and then snaked out the last hundred (even dipping into my cash reserve) out of the ATM and casually strolled over to the Hyatt Hotel - which was supposed to be the highlight of my trip - to drink like the fish with others of my ilk. It turns out that I really couldn't find any of my ilk around. Sure they were scattered here and there- but none really had to the time to renew any acquaintances. I ran into Steven Grant - who's probably the only writing professional who has taken the time to publicily comment on my book and whom I hope to one day use a qoute of his as a cover blurb to the trade paperback. I ran into Bob Shreck, editor of the Batman line of books for DC. He was hobbling on a cane and wasn't getting around too good. Bob was one guy I used to pal around with at all conventions - he's also a big fan of progressive rock and we usually piss off a lot of industry pros by going on talking tangents about Jethro Tull and Yes at various parties. I also spotted Bruce Timm, the main designer of all the wonderful DC related animated shows televised on the Cartoon Network including Justice League Unlimited, Teen Titans, and Batman: The Animated Series, among others, but he was busy with his entourage and we only nodded each other's presence. It doesn't bother me per se - because I bump into Bruce occasionally since our offices are across the street from each other and I see him with other animator stalwarts at the Sherman Oaks Galleria.
So I sat at a bar by myself mostly nursing a few screwdrivers and thinking - hmm- maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to have Lixi with me after all. This woman sits next to me and starts a conversation with me. She's not in the industry - rather, she's a dental consultant. She looks a little older than me and she seems to indicate a interest in having me to come up to her room.
Then I get a call on my cell.
It's Becky.
She tells me that she had just come back from the ER. She was bleeding too much and just had a miscarriage and she has to be scheduled for a DNC - whatever the fuck that is. I look at the lady sitting next to me and bid her a good night. I walk out the bar at 1:30 in the AM not really in the mood for anything. There goes my dash of hope for a nephew to play with. Besides, I have too much Lixi on the brain.
I take the Greyhound back home. Pull into the decrepit Greyhound station at Downtown LA @ 4:30 - looking a little worse for wear. I call Lixi on the cell and tell her that I'm back and that my surrogate sister had lost her unborn baby at two months. She tells me to call her later in the afternoon to talk about it.
I'm home at 7 the next morning. I take my portable DVD player and start blasting Spider-Man cartoons from the sixties out on my porch. Some schmuck yells at me to turn it down. I suspect that it was the CHUMPMASTER.
Later, Lixi listens with a compassionate ear - but is not sympathetic enough to insist that my shitty time in San Diego was probably bad karma for saying that rotten thing to her.
Yeah, I shrug. I tell her that the comic book business is a real cuthroat business- you're only as good as your next project coming out. The Deposit Man has been MIA for a better part of over a year now - I need to get something out by the end of the year or they're going to find me drunk in some dark alley somewhere slumped over a broken mellotron or something. I then tell her about blasting the DVD on the porch and suspect that the CHUMPMASTER was the culprit for yelling at me.
Now not knowing Lixi was drinking Apple Martinis throughout the day gives me one helluva frightening frozen gaze at me. She tenses up and starts heaving in heaps of breaths in and out. She then hyperventilates. She tears from my grip of trying to hug her or calm her down - runs out to a patio table and chairs and starts tearing up plastic chairs in half with incomprehensible strength. All the while yelling:
"WHO THE FUCK DOES HE THINK HE IS?"
Then she runs over - beating Uma Thurman by a mile and rams her entire well chisled body into a massive two hundred pound grille like a rhino overturning a jeep causing a chain reaction which-
TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK in:
DANCING POLE ON A VOLCANO!!
~
Coat
Currently listening : Milliontown By The Frost Release date: By 18 July, 2006
12:34 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment - Edit - Remove
Originally presented on www.myspace.com/purplepinupguru July 27, 2006 Current mood: drained
When we last left our floundering reconciling couple - Lixi and I were embroiled in a heated no hold barred verbal battle with Mr. Ruthless Toothless - aka THE CHUMPMASTER - a very flamboyant bi-sexual bigot and nasty nosy neighbor who's been causing Lixi some very unnecessary grief over her 'proposed living occupation' and other small things in general by constantly yelling at her.. The Chumpmaster had cornered Lixi outside the laundry room at 8:45 PM the week previous and demanded that she shut down all cleaning operations.
8:45 PM - Plenty of time for Lixi to get a load of laundry done. But CHUMPMASTER has some kind of prime time hard on of making Lixi's life miserable. I've witnessed first hand of another time when CHUMPMASTER tried to harass her over something really petty as parking her car next to a garbage can in the back alley where they are no signs posted saying that she can't - especially when it isn't even trash pick up day either.
Same thing with the laundry room - there are signs posted anywhere saying when we can or when we can't do our laundry.
But CHUMPMASTER went a raving on and on about how hard it is to be a painter waking up at three thirty in the morning! (and mind this - he's retired and living it up on a pension that provides him with a comfortable living expense that allows him to travel all over the world- it's not like he has to work!!). Well, if he didn't sleep in the living room and on the living couch -maybe he wouldn't be hearing the consistent grind of the automated motors going on for an hour and a half!
I would have sympatheized with his plight - but acting like a hypocrite he is- telling me one thing and going to tell someone else something entirely different as to what they can or can do doesn't jive with me. Calling my best friend and my 'on and off 'companion for the better part of a year - ' A WHORE ' so that the whole apartment complex has to hear her business...just made me lose it.
And I jumped in and told the CHUMPMASTER to back the fuck off.
Leave her alone - goddammit!!
He said it wasn't my business and slammed the door on both of us.
Lexi was grateful that night. She said hardly anyone has ever stood up for her - not even her ex-husband.
That sort of made me blush. Now I'm practically a bonafide hero to her.
The next morning - as I'm walking to work on Burbank Boulevard - the CHUMPMASTER spots me and screeches his tan gay mobile across the sidewalk I'm walking on - barricading my path. He rolls down his window and continues on with his rant from the previous night.
"YOU HAD NO FUCKING RIGHT TO INTERFERE!!"
'Bullshit', I told him.' I wasn't going to allow you to degrade her in that way in front of our other neighbors whether they choose to believe the gossip going around or not. I told him he had no business to tell her what time she could do her laundry. It was a halfway decent hour.
"WELL, he huffs, IF YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT THIS GIRL YOU BETTER TELL HER THAT SHE HAS TO FIND A NEW PLACE TO LIVE, FAST - BECAUSE I'M CALLING IN MY DETECTIVE FRIEND FROM THE VAN NUYS POLICE DEPARTMENT!! IF SHE'S HIDING SOMETHING IN HER GARAGE OR HER HOUSE - THEY'RE GOING TO FIND IT AND TAKE HER AWAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!! I'M SICK OF ALL THESE PEOPLE GOING IN AND OUT AT ALL HOURS OF THE NIGHT AND...
'You know what, CHUMPMASTER? You're making me late for work listening to your fucking broken record rhetoric.' Then I preceeded to walk to the bus stop.
Which sort of brings us up to date.
I made the conscientious decision to trek down to San Diego on Saturday. I just couldn't go through the withdrawl. It was beckoning to me - the inner calling to walk through those hallowed corridors of fine carpeted and air conditioned dealer's room nightmares. I told Lixi - if you're going to have a garage sale: let's do it real early because I really, really, really need to go down to San Diego: the comic book convention is consuming my very soul- I've been doing this for the past twenty-one years and I need to be part of it: Fuck! it's a part of me. I conveyed this on the phone to my www.purplepinupguru.blogspot.com partner, Santos Sparky. He was tempted to go also, but he has a baby to care for. Plus, he's been through the San Diego Convention DTs on occasion. It's just that it takes me a while to ween over the addiction every year. While I was talking to him on the phone. Lixi keeps interrupting my phone conversation to go join her at the pool. I swear, sometimes she's like one of those whiny kids that will try to pull the phone reciever from out of your ear when a distant relative calls you on the phone demanding to talk too. So I handed the phone over to her. I don't what Santos said to her - but I guess he was trying to talk Lixi into driving me down to San Diego.
All of a sudden, Lixi suggests that she accompanies me to the convention. I tell her that I wouldn't want her to bother. I'll be running around like a nerd with his tiny member exposed trying to find people to talk business with. But she insists on going. I then subconsciously blurted out - 'well, you know there's going to other younger porn stars and pin up girls and I wouldn't want you to feel intimidated and...
Lixi interrupts me.
"What the fuck did you say?"
Uh oh.
"Are you saying that I'm not beautiful enough or young enough to accompany you?"
Oh shit. In addition to my shingles - I must have contracted foot up my asssinitis.
"No I'm not saying that -'
But she didn't want to hear it. She ran to her apartment and slammed the screen door shut - cracking the front door just enough to let me hear her cry.
I was beside myself at the pool. I then eventually went inside to check up on her. She was done wiping her eyes. And I was dumbstruck. I never thought in my wildest imagination that I could loosely slip up on the tongue and make her upset by saying something sounding so half-assed.
She said that was a mean thing to say.
And I apologized over and over and over again. Until it fucking ate my guts.
I went to San Diego late the next afternoon. Wasn't in any hurry. It wasn't like I had any money to haul any big booty back. Took the train - and thought about what I said to Lixi all the way down the Northern San Diego County coast. It was good to see my old home of six years of Encinitas from the window of the train- a sleepy beach down that I first lived in when I moved to California. I got down to the convention center at 5 PM. I only had two hours to walk the convention floor and talk to whoever I needed to talk. I wanted to talk with Jeff Amano - a artist who is responsible with overseeing the entire line of comic books from Beckett Publishing. Beckett publishes a lot of price guides for the sports and game card industries. I've known Jeff for about ten years and wanted to ask him if he could paint me a cover for the Deposit Man trade paperback that I want to do.- Well, actually my penciler Larry Nadolsky WANTS to do. But I couldn't find him.
After I got booted out of the convention hall- I went and got dinner and then snaked out the last hundred (even dipping into my cash reserve) out of the ATM and casually strolled over to the Hyatt Hotel - which was supposed to be the highlight of my trip - to drink like the fish with others of my ilk. It turns out that I really couldn't find any of my ilk around. Sure they were scattered here and there- but none really had to the time to renew any acquaintances. I ran into Steven Grant - who's probably the only writing professional who has taken the time to publicily comment on my book and whom I hope to one day use a qoute of his as a cover blurb to the trade paperback. I ran into Bob Shreck, editor of the Batman line of books for DC. He was hobbling on a cane and wasn't getting around too good. Bob was one guy I used to pal around with at all conventions - he's also a big fan of progressive rock and we usually piss off a lot of industry pros by going on talking tangents about Jethro Tull and Yes at various parties. I also spotted Bruce Timm, the main designer of all the wonderful DC related animated shows televised on the Cartoon Network including Justice League Unlimited, Teen Titans, and Batman: The Animated Series, among others, but he was busy with his entourage and we only nodded each other's presence. It doesn't bother me per se - because I bump into Bruce occasionally since our offices are across the street from each other and I see him with other animator stalwarts at the Sherman Oaks Galleria.
So I sat at a bar by myself mostly nursing a few screwdrivers and thinking - hmm- maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to have Lixi with me after all. This woman sits next to me and starts a conversation with me. She's not in the industry - rather, she's a dental consultant. She looks a little older than me and she seems to indicate a interest in having me to come up to her room.
Then I get a call on my cell.
It's Becky.
She tells me that she had just come back from the ER. She was bleeding too much and just had a miscarriage and she has to be scheduled for a DNC - whatever the fuck that is. I look at the lady sitting next to me and bid her a good night. I walk out the bar at 1:30 in the AM not really in the mood for anything. There goes my dash of hope for a nephew to play with. Besides, I have too much Lixi on the brain.
I take the Greyhound back home. Pull into the decrepit Greyhound station at Downtown LA @ 4:30 - looking a little worse for wear. I call Lixi on the cell and tell her that I'm back and that my surrogate sister had lost her unborn baby at two months. She tells me to call her later in the afternoon to talk about it.
I'm home at 7 the next morning. I take my portable DVD player and start blasting Spider-Man cartoons from the sixties out on my porch. Some schmuck yells at me to turn it down. I suspect that it was the CHUMPMASTER.
Later, Lixi listens with a compassionate ear - but is not sympathetic enough to insist that my shitty time in San Diego was probably bad karma for saying that rotten thing to her.
Yeah, I shrug. I tell her that the comic book business is a real cuthroat business- you're only as good as your next project coming out. The Deposit Man has been MIA for a better part of over a year now - I need to get something out by the end of the year or they're going to find me drunk in some dark alley somewhere slumped over a broken mellotron or something. I then tell her about blasting the DVD on the porch and suspect that the CHUMPMASTER was the culprit for yelling at me.
Now not knowing Lixi was drinking Apple Martinis throughout the day gives me one helluva frightening frozen gaze at me. She tenses up and starts heaving in heaps of breaths in and out. She then hyperventilates. She tears from my grip of trying to hug her or calm her down - runs out to a patio table and chairs and starts tearing up plastic chairs in half with incomprehensible strength. All the while yelling:
"WHO THE FUCK DOES HE THINK HE IS?"
Then she runs over - beating Uma Thurman by a mile and rams her entire well chisled body into a massive two hundred pound grille like a rhino overturning a jeep causing a chain reaction which-
TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK in:
DANCING POLE ON A VOLCANO!!
~
Coat
Currently listening : Milliontown By The Frost Release date: By 18 July, 2006
12:34 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment - Edit - Remove
posted by Coat @ 12:23 PM
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