Surrealist Party
by Joey Goebel
We got so bored living in Carbunckle, Kentucky.
Sometimes the sensation of a sneeze was the highlight of our
day. Nothing occurred there. Yawning contests and television
festivals. Destination: Wal-Mart.
People crapped. Every once in a while, someone had an idea.
Robert, who insisted that everyone call him Jesus, had an idea
once. He got the idea from the house he had just bought at a
ridiculously low price since no one else wanted it. The workers
had given up before they finished building the house. I guess
they got bored.
The house had a staircase that didn’t go anywhere. It
had doors where there were no rooms. Some of the rooms were
higher than the others. Some of the rooms were only half painted,
and the kitchen had a hole in it. From an architectural and
practical standpoint, the house made no sense.
“You are cordially invited to my surrealist
party. Come dressed as something other than yourself, preferably
something other than this realm of consciousness. Arrive any
time between 7:24 and Madisonville. Leave old vocabulary behind.”
There came Nally dressed as Kelly Ripa with her
face torn off. There came Justin and Julie wearing sheet music
blouses, feeding each other McDonald’s hamburgers. Julie
pushed Justin in a wheelchair because he had trouble walking
in his mermaid fins.
Jesus installed red light bulbs in each room. He made a big
bundle out of the white light bulbs by wrapping them in saran
wrap. He hung this bundle of light bulbs on his front porch.
He wrote “Possums are contagious” in ketchup on
his living room wall. He served cottage cheese, Jell-O pudding
pops, sliced white grapes, clams, wine, Dark Eyes vodka, and
weird drugs, but he hid the weird drugs all over the house.
He placed his guests’ coats in the bathtub. He adhered
a sign on the toilet that read “Work in progress. Do not
flush.” He didn’t play any complete songs, just
a mix tape with bits and pieces of hundreds of highly varied
selections. Within a minute, we heard a snippet of “Linus
and Lucy,” a sampling of one of Jello Biafra’s spoken
word albums, the chorus of the Beatles’ “Carry That
Weight,” a verse of the Welcome Back, Kotter theme, and
a disturbing slowed-down version of Olivia Newton-John’s
“Physical.”
Jesus was dressed as a ballerina. He wound up his long, straight
hair in pink curlers, wore leg braces, and draped a bunch of
wet spaghetti noodles over his groin. He greeted guests by saying
“Body of Christ” or “And they were on a five-inch
and they sucked.”
There came Carmen carrying a pool cue with a peach at the end
of it. She wore a high school band uniform and cool sunglasses.
There came John wearing a sexy salmon-colored robe and fringe-laced
roller-blades. He duct-taped his fingers to his palms so that
only his middle fingers could function. He kept asking everyone
to chew on his middle fingers.
Jill, who was dressed like an amoeba/samurai, became upset when
she felt a large centipede crawling on her face. Jesus had gone
to the pet store and bought a bunch of exotic insects such as
a Goliath beetle, a boll weevil, a hawkmoth, a daddy long-legs,
a dragonfly, a walkingstick, a praying mantis, an earwig, a
scorpion fly, and some other creepy bugs which I was not able
to identify. He let the insects loose shortly before his guests
arrived. Once all the insects died, the party was to conclude.
Jesus had invited one beautiful girl that no one knew. All night
she sat in a corner by herself. She wore an elegant white dress
and her skin was frosty blue. When spoken to, her only reply
was “Talk to me about baseball or strong work ethic.”
I went all out. I wore M.C. Hammer pants and loaded the pockets
with sandwich meats. I didn’t wear a shirt and wrote “Y2K?”
on my chest with lipstick. I tied neckties around both arms
and taped a syringe to my chin. I borrowed a monkey skeleton
and hung it on my back. I begged people not to have sex with
me.
“Who do you want to favor in the electric last year?”
“Regret.”
“You’re correct. But how do you persuade me so?”
“Paris, France.”
“Please don’t make love to me.”
“I’ll pull the lining of my teeth off. An on-going
strip of enamel. I’ll just peel it off completely.”
“Amen.”
“Tooshy. You do it to me every time, Grandma.”
“A fellow has to pass the time.”
There came Jr. dressed as himself. He thought theme parties
were lame. Jesus told him to get the fuck out if he wasn’t
going to dress inappropriately. So Jr. took off his camouflage
T-shirt that said “Turd” on it and wore this shirt
as pants. He wore his pants on his head and went topless, though
he covered his nipples the rest of the evening.
There came Kenny dressed as a tampon with a Hitler mustache.
There came Jamie as a Pink Lady from Grease. She had a kaleidoscope
for one arm and carried a pug named Winston in the other.
Jesus had us write down a brief summary of a dream we had the
previous night. We put the dreams in a coffee pot and then Jason,
who was dressed as a plague-ridden hybrid of Robocop and 21
Jumpstreet-era Johnny Depp, drew sketches based on the dreams.
Each of Jesus’ guests went home with a picture of his
or her dream. I went home with a picture of me driving a car
from the backseat right before violently colliding with a beached
whale.
There came J.T. with a violin strapped to his chin. He wore
only a loin cloth and spoke only with his violin. There came
Barnrat dressed as Salvador Dali. Jesus said, “You’ll
have to do better than that, Barnrat.” Barnrat replied,
“Ah, but wait,” and proceeded to collapse onto all
fours. Barnrat spent the remainder of the evening crawling on
the dirty floor singing Dolly Parton songs in the voice of a
horror-stricken baby girl.
Jesus had just finished teaching us the A-bomb dance when our
parents and grade school teachers began to arrive. Jesus had
told these adults that it was a surprise party, not a surrealist
party. Some of us had found out in advance and told our parents
and grade school teachers not to come. Some of us, such as Mutilated
Kelly Ripa and Salvador Dali Parton, were shocked to see our
moms and dads. Bubonic Robodepp was surprised to see his dad
and his dad’s twin brother. The Loin-Clothed Fiddler was
embarrassed for his seventh-grade math teacher to see him like
that.
The insects were slowly being squashed away. Because
there was no furniture or anything else in most of the rooms,
splattered insect remains were noticeable on the floors and
ceilings. After the parents and teachers had been there for
a while, the Goliath beetle, the dragon-fly, the praying mantis,
and a few cockroach-like specimens were the only insects that
I saw appearing regularly.
“This party is kind of surreal.”
“Surreal you can taste it.”
“That’s a good one.”
“It is a good one when you look at that bad flesh, and
it’s dripping.”
We were playing pin the ewe on the futon when Cal Ripken Jr.
arrived. He wore his Orioles uniform and brandished a baseball
bat, just as he had been told to do. Ripken was in the area
because he was starting a minor league baseball team called
the Evansville Waves in nearby Evansville, Indiana. Taking advantage
of Ripken’s altruistic, good guy persona, Jesus told the
all-time record-holder for consecutive games played that this
was a party to benefit mentally ill twenty-somethings. Jesus
said that the mentally ill twenty-somethings would be in attendance
and that they all had one thing in common: They loved Cal Ripken.
Now that everyone had arrived except for Jaleel White who hadn’t
replied to Jesus’ invitation, the party reached a deliriously
fevered pitch. Everyone entertained everyone. People screamed
happily and strangers were innocently and playfully molesting
one another. Most of the people mingled with ease. Cal Ripken
mostly talked to that beautiful dead girl in the corner, which
made me jealous. Eventually, the praying mantis was the only
living insect.
That night, laughter, dancing, and liberation almost entirely
filled the red air in Jesus’ disaster area of a home.
No one in the history of humanity had ever been in these situations.
Never in the history of human speech had these conversations
occurred. Some of the parents and teachers adapted. Some were
visibly uncomfortable.
My least favorite grade school teacher cursed profusely at the
praying mantis before crushing it with her purse. Jesus witnessed
this and screamed at her, “Why did you do it, Daddy?!
Why did you do it, Daddy?!” Why did you do it Daddy?!”
Then Jesus made all of us leave.
On the way out, I must have gotten on Cal Ripken’s bad
side when I shared with him my thoughts on bunting and teased
him about that gorgeous dead girl he had been talking to. Ripken
maimed me.
....
visit:
www.joeygoebel.com
read The Rise and Fall
of Steven Sylvain from Joey's up and coming novel, Torture
The Artist
Joey Goebel is from
Henderson, KY. He is the author of The Anomolies and sings for
the band The Novembrists. He was also the lead singer of the
former band The Mullets. He has a bachelor's degree in English
from Brescia College in Owensboro, Ky.
