I told him the tree spoke to me personally and that I had no choice but to do as I was told. I peeled away the bark with my bare hands and out stepped Drew, naked and unashamed.
'Naked in the woods? I was in the woods naked like that? Then what?'
I told Drew I couldn't quite remember what happened next; it was right on the tip of my mind where I couldn't quite grasp it.
Drew said, 'I want to know what I was doing naked in the woods is what I want to know.'
I said, 'Are you naked now?'
'Now?' Drew, apparently uncertain, took a moment before saying, 'No. I got my underwear on.'
I suggested that if he put the telephone receiver into the pouch of his briefs it might trigger something that would help me recall the rest of my dream.
I heard the phone muffle. When I yelled, 'Did you put the phone where I told you to?' I heard a tiny, far-off voice say, 'Yes, I sure did. It's there now.'
'Jump up and down,' I yelled. 'Jump.'
I heard shifting sounds as Drew's end of the telephone jounced around in his briefs. I heard him yell, 'Are you remembering yet?' And then, in the distance, I heard a woman's voice screaming, 'Drew Pierson, what in the name of God are you doing with that telephone? Other people have to put their mouth on that thing too, you know. You should be strung up for doing a thing like that, Goddamn you.' I heard Drew say that he was doing it in order to help someone remember a dream. Then I heard the words 'moron,' 'shit for brains,' and the inevitable 'fag.' As in 'Some fag put you up to this, didn't he? Goddamn you.'
Then Drew must have taken the receiver out of his briefs be-cause suddenly I could hear him loud and clear and what I heard washomophobia at its worst. 'Fag! Fag! I'll kick your ass good and hard the next time I see you. Goddamn you to hell.' The words still echo in my mind.
I urge all my readers to BOYCOTT DAVE'S KWIK STOP. I urge you to phone Drew Pierson anytime day or night and tell him you dreamt you were sitting on his face. Drew Pierson's home (ophobic) telephone number is 787-5008. Call him and raise your voice againsthomophobia!
So that, in a nutshell, was my morning. I pulled myself together and subjected myself to the dailyhomophobia convention that passes as my job. Once there, I was scolded by my devious andhomophobic department head for accidentally shredding some sort of disputed contract. Later that afternoon I was con-fronted, once again, by that casserole-wielding mastodon, Melinda Delvecchio, who grew tearful when informed that I would sooner dine on carpet remnants than another of her foil-covered ethnic slurs.
On my way home from the office I made the mistake of stopping at the Food Carnival, where I had no choice but to park in one of the so-called 'handicapped' spaces. Once inside the store I had a tiff with thehomophobic butcher over the dictionary definition of the wordcutlet. I was completely ignored by thehomophobic chimpanzee they've hired to run the produce department and I don't even want to talk about the cashier. After collecting my groceries I returned to the parking lot, where I encountered ahomophobe in a wheelchair, relentlessly bashing my car again and again with the foot pedals of his little chariot. Regular readers ofGlen Homophobia Newsletter know that I, Glen, am not a violent man. Far from it. But in this case I had no choice but to make an exception. My dailyhomophobia quota had been exceeded and I, Glen, struck back with brute physical force.
Did it look good? No, it did not.
But I urge you, reader, to understand. Understand my position as it is your own.
Understand and subscribe, subscribe.
Don's Story
THANK you very, very much. I really just don't believe this is happening. I mean, this is what, the third time I've been up here tonight: Best Actor, Best Director, and now Best Picture. How am I going to carry all these awards home? In a truck? Ha ha.
Let me take a moment here because, like I said, I really didn't think this was going to happen. I've spent a great deal of timewishing it would happen but to have it actually take place is, ha ha, just a little overwhelming.
As I mentioned earlier this evening, while receiving my Academy Award for best actor I arrived here in Los Angeles, California, almost a year ago with no experience whatsoever. I'd never acted or directed or produced a thing in my life. I was just a guy from Cumberland County, North Carolina a man with a dream.
'What's going on here?' you're probably asking yourselves.
'Here this Don, this dreamer, never acted a day in his life and yet there he is sweeping the Academy Awards. How did he do it? What's so special about him?'
Well, that's what my movie,Don's Story, is all about. It's all right there: from my dropping out of high school at age seventeen to my packing for Hollywood at age thirty-six. I imagine it's what's not in the movie that probably interests you right now.
'How did he do it? This nobody, this dreamer.'
Well, like I said, I left Cumberland almost a year ago on a Greyhound bus with a small bag of potato chips, eight dollars, and a dream. I stretched out and took two seats until somewhere outside Gatlinburg, when I was forced to surrender one of them to a woman by the name of Mrs. Patricia Toni. Mrs. Toni was headed to Encino, California.
'What's in Encino?' I asked, trying to be a good neighbor.
It turned out that Mrs. Toni's daughter was in Encino, in a hospital suffering from exhaustion. I don't know much about exhaustion, but I imagine it must be very tiring, so I said, 'Oh, that's terrible.' And she unfolded her newspaper and said, 'You're darn right it's terrible.'
At every stop along the way Mrs. Toni would buy the local newspaper and discuss the stories about crime and murder.
'Listen here where it says this man walked into a gas station and shot four people. Didn't even get gas or rob the place Just opened fire and killed four people. That's a low deed in my opinion. I think that's really terrible. If I was on that jury I'd convict him so fast it would make his head spin. I wouldn't waste time eating up the taxpayers' money. I'd just fire up the gas chamber and move on to the next case. The son of a bitch. It says here where he shot a five-year-old boy right through the neck. Bullet went in one side and out the other. I think that's terrible, don't you?'
Well, I didn't know the gunman. For all I know he might have had a pretty good reason to do what he did, but to make things easier I agreed and said I thought it was terrible.
'You're darn right it's terrible. Right through the neck. The neck is a very sensitive area. Everyone knows that. This is just terrible. I thought it was terrible the other day when that crack-pot in Little Rock stabbed his mother's collie to death. Stabbed it seventeen times, a beautiful collie named Moxie. The mother cried and cried. Seventeen times he stabbed that dog. Once or twice would have done the job, but he did it seventeen times and I think that's terrible. Don't you?'
Crimes happen all across this country and Mrs. Toni made note of them day and night all the way to Reno, where she slept through our stop and missed her opportunity to buy a fresh newspaper. At this point, after having spent almost three days together, she finally asked me my name and where I was going and why, and I told her that my name was Don and that I was going to the Los Angeles area to make a name for myself in the motion picture industry, and she looked at me and said, 'You've got to be kidding You?' Then she turned to the man across the aisle and pointed at me and said, 'This one thinks he's going to be some kind of a movie star.' And she put her hands on her stomach and bent over laughing and I just sort of. . punched her. I jabbed her real quick with the bathroom key I'd gotten at the last station. I just sort of. . poked her with it just real. . quick and, ha ha, she made just the biggest stink about it. She made the bus driver pull over and she lifted her sweater and showed everybody the little mark on her side just a little nick, and she was pointing at me and saying, 'I think this is terrible. I mean it. Here I get on this bus to visit my daughter who is clinically exhausted and I'm practically stabbed to death in broad daylight. This is the sort of thing that makes the papers as far as I'm concerned. 'Woman Stabbed on Bus.' This is terrible.'
So the bus driver threw me off onto the dusty highway. No refund or anything, just tossed me out. By this
