how, when guinea pigs have large overbites, can man continue to strive for higher gas mileage?
Blame it on Marc Saluk.
Not that I wouldn't have been weird on my own. When you've got a 160 IQ and you're short for your age and your dad is a theatre gypsy/folkie/sci-fi fan and you've lived in 8 different houses by your tenth birthday...you're not going to turn out to be Joe Normal, except possibly in your teen years as a form of rebellion (the Alex Keaton effect).
No, I was weird before I met Marc and his cadre of messed up friends. But I'd been all alone in my weird little solipsistic fantasy world. I hadn't been aware that you could collaborate. I hadn't realised that you could produce...collateral.
By the time I met Marc, when we were both 9 years old, he and his friends already had their own publishing company. Well, not a real one, but they had an imprint they put on all of their weird poetry, stories and drawings: "Pubsal" (for Publisher: Saluk). Originally, it was Pubsal Ed-Al (Editor [Marc's friend John] Alexander), but they had already shortened it by the time I got involved.
Their main output at that point was a series of cartoon drawings called "Bleep Wars," an ultra-violent war epic depicting the struggle of the Bleeps -- little round fuzzy antennaed creatures based on a popular novelty item of the time -- against the evil Cloud Empire -- based, apparrently, on the Comet Empire of the proto-Anime series "Star Blazers."; and a series of poems largely perpetrated by Marc's friend Gary Peltz.
Seminal works include a poem called "Destruction of the City," a long, strange trip of which only the final stanzas survive:
Where's-a my pizza?
Up-a you nose.
Where's-a my pizza?
Up-a you face!
Destruction
Destruction
The City
Destruction
The end
The end
The living End.
The end.
and the poem that launched a thousand other bad poems, "Wheezer Joe"
I like orange haircuts
But Wheezer Joe doesn't
But Wheezer Joe doesn't know the meaning of life
So what the hell do I care what Wheezer Joe says?
I like electro-magnified small fry
intestin' orficescial people
eating frying pans.
But then I like jelly beans too.*
* the second stanza, lost for over 20 years, was just recently unearthed by Marc Saluk during a marathon spring cleaning session
Well, I knew a good thing when I saw it, and I immediately began contributing my own poetry, drawings and stories to the mix. When a certain critical mass was reached, we decided to collect our works in a single volume, to be called "Sarcastic Echoes."
At the same time, we were experimenting with other media. With the aid of a crappy but obscenely durable Radio Shack cassette deck, we recorded hours of comedy, mostly in "radio show" format. It was comedy improvisation at its worst, but there were flashes of brilliance. Improvised songs by bands with names like "The Melancholies Eat Fruit" and "Men Without Endings to Their Songs;" memorable characters like the "Yeast Swab" (which, in retrospect, owed a great deal to Belushi's Samurai), radio personalities Johnny "the K" and Arno "the Doggie," and Irv Bowman, frontman of the rock group "The Unrelated," responsible for the New-Wave classic "Negate My Feelings on a Paper Plate."
One very early comedy recording, now lost forever in the mists of Northeast Philadelphia, was "Boom Boom Boom, I'm a Frog," featuring the title track and "The Ceiling Caved In," which consisted of Marc and myself alternatingly yelling that phrase, strongly emphasizing the word "Caved" by screaming it at the top of our lungs and throwing objects at the aforementioned very durable Radio Shack cassette recorder.
[interesting footnote: I make reference to that recording in my song "Punchline," which is about mercurial relationships in the theatre, in the verse which goes "You take your chaces/Laughing for a living/The ceiling may cave in/Or the floor may fall away"]
We also recorded ourselves in documentary style, capturing for all eternity such great moments as "The Epic Argument" and a prolonged attempt to recapture a runaway guinea pig.
[more to come]
