Noise-Porn Bro

A Character Sketch of a Sketch Character

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in…ya know…us.”
~William Shakespeare

The weekend following my foray into Sparks and its successive decadence, I was invited to a Drinking Olympics by my friend Janis Joplin. Earlier that week, the world found out Obama had lost his bid and Chicago would not be hosting the 2016 Winter Games. But come 9:45 Friday night, with five plastic barrels full of beer and a fridge stocked with all kinds of hangover, I discovered the games were in fact still being held on American soil.

As I walk in, I am immediately ostracized because I’m the only one who does not look like a circus act. I quickly learn this is a costume Party. As I keenly shake hands with Aladdin, Cowboy Woody, and other staples from my childhood, I’m told to stick my hand in a Yankees cap and pick my team. I drew a thin piece of pink cardstock from the Sorting Hat and found my way onto ‘It Ain’t Pretty Being Easy’. No, it is not.

But apparently it’s easy being pretty good at drinking games. We were near quadrupling the other teams by the end of the fourth round. Also, they were awarding bonus points at the end of the night for collecting can tabs from every beer we finished and for every shot we took in the kitchen. I took it upon myself to drink for the cause and make my way to the kitchen. There I met a girl who insisted I call her ‘Tuesday’. Though I gave her a hard time for it then, let me disclose my public support for her now: this is a great tactic to having people remember your name at a Party. Save for your name being something like Barack, it is not on the person you meet to remember your name; it is on you to get them to remember. My memory is limited and on-the-outs as it is; it’s imperative that I save it for the important stuff, like IMDB user ratings and lyrics to 90’s one-hit wonders.

Janis Joplin arrived after getting off sentence (or as the bourgeoisie call it, work) and we were soon making a duck out the door, on to the next Party. A farewell was bid to the guy in the BoSox shirt who offered me “cheap but decent” acid and medicinal reefer from California. I dig in my pockets and pull out five silver tabs to hand to the scorekeeper, asking him if it’s a good idea to walk down the street with a sixth in hand. He said no, I cracked it in front of him, tore off the tab, and rejoined my friends. Janis’s friends Jim Morrison and Neal Cassady were visiting from Georgia for the weekend, and being a good hostess, she was determined to show them a good time. But after they barged in the door, raising a case above their heads in a Superman shirt (not, mind you, for the theme), I came to realize they were determined to make it a good time wherever they were. I can fuck with that.

The next pit-stop we make is a rock-climbing Party. Now, as I’ve had to several times since, let me clarify: this was a Party for rock-climbers. They were not climbing rocks that night. Kinda the inverse of the Middle School/Middle School-Themed Party. But enough semantics, more shame. This one was a little more chaotic in the bass-thudding, beer pong-playing sense, and right as I walk in, I spotted my first middle-school girlfriend surrounded by a pride of climberbros. Behind her laid a tub full of Everclear lemonade. I get like a deer near a salt-lick. Shuffling past Jimmy Eat World stockholders and fitted North Faces, I aggressively navigated the throngs. This was a treasure hunt and ex- marked the spot.

After a couple Solo-fuls of Everclear with a margarita chaser, Janis Joplin stole me aside and said Neal Cassady had gone home with a 37-year-old. “Score?” It was a dude, who lived across the street. Apparently Neal and Jim had scorched him so thoroughly in pong, his only way to rationalize the loss was to invite them back for a congratulatory bowlpack. We walked through the open front door to find them chiefing on a stool-high stack of vinyls. All I could gather—given the rollercoaster my sense of balance was riding—was a serial cough and a strained larynx.

“Sup…duuuudes…”

Darkness.

I wake up to a wall full of faces I don’t know. Shit. I’ve gotta stop doing this. My body feels like all moisture has been hand-wrung from it and my stomach feels like it’s been roundhoused by a bull. I reach into my pocket and pull out 5 beer tabs. What the fuck did I give him then?? My ONE Card is gone. I come downstairs to Neal Cassady and Jim Morrison opening the freezer and finding an open bottle of Everclear lemonade which has solidified into a slushie. What. Happened. I haven’t felt this confused since last weekend.

After spending a day in recovery, I met up with Neal and Jim on Franklin to head down to the Party Castro’s for the bash you’ve already read about. They’d taken a couple fakes and ran $70 top-shelf at a Mexican joint down Rosemary. Janis Joplin was still on the clock, so we had to bust into her place intruder-style and retrieve the case we promised to bring. Out the door in five minutes, we began heading up the street toward Cameron, when all the sudden we heard thumpin’ techno emanating from the dude’s ranch we were at last night. Shudders vibrating, all lights on, shadows from the back porch: place looked like a discothèque. We figured there must be a solid 70 to 80 people in there, and quickly concluded why the hell not. We followed the shadow around back until it winds to the patio where a lonesome figure was sipping on blush, pretending to conduct a symphony like they do in cartoons.

Dude:“Oh wha——hey?”
Us: “Hey. We were over here last night.”
Dude: “Go on.”
Us: “Sounds like you’re having a crazy Party in there!”
Dude: “Nope. Just me.”
(pause)
Dude: “You wanna come in and drink that beer?”

As soon I stepped inside, I realized how truly annihilated I was last night; I didn’t remember anything from this house. His entire living room was a makeshift studio, complete with soundboards, synths, and venue-sized speakers. His only piece of furniture, in the traditional sense, was a chewed-up futon opposite his DVD library of Star Wars and porn. And then there were the Legos, enough to build the entire place over again. If this were preschool, he’d be the coolest kid on the block. Though the neighborhood moms may be hesitant to let their prides and joys near a man with such a mammoth collection of cooter vids. This place was half playground, half Buffalo Bill.

He started rummaging around, flipping switches back and forth, messing with knobs, and creating the disharmonic sounds you get plugging guitars into amps. After about eight minutes of distortion and white noise, he turned to a speechless, regretful us.

“Yeah, man, I love me that real gritty ass shit. Word.”

He then began to regale us with his life-story. I felt like there were some holes here and there, and surely some details had been obscured by chronic chemical abuse, but he was such an earnest narrator, I didn’t have the heart to implement reason. Apparently he works for IT, though he hates computers and the internet. The only site he uses is MySpace, to get his DJ set off the ground. He’s never seen a fortune, yet he’s perfectly content with his situation:

“I never had a ‘nice car’…or whatever that is. I always told myself I’d rather just kick it here with my soundboards. Make my music, ya know. Some of these fuckin’ things cost just as much anyway. Like check this out---{holds up an orange mixboard}---look how many motherfuckin’ buttons this thing has! Whaaaaat?? {spins them back and forth rapidly} Hey! Whatcha doin. Whatcha DOIN.”

It was at this point we learned he could not read music, and instead just “felt” his way through his grooves. Trying to impose an abrupt death chair to this conversation, Neal Cassady sifted through his record collection and nearly jumped when he discovered Gustav Holst’s The Planets shoved deep in the mix. Having such an icon of modern classical on vinyl padded this guy’s cred ten-fold in our books, although it didn’t cushion us for what came next:

“Oh yeah, that. Well hey, if you like that…you’ll love this. The other week I was on a…downloading binge. Music, porno, whatever. Heh, heh. Anyway, my Winamp started up…while I was in the middle of this one video…and it just like…started recording, man. The audio and all. But I was like...far out! This kinda works. So I went back…after I finished the video…and dropped a phat beat to it. Duhrhreennrrhee. [sic] Check it out. It’s…one of my best.”

What ensued was one of the strangest musical journeys of my life. Essentially, he had looped the sounds from the porno—chicks moaning, guys shouting “Yeah, baby, yeah!”, various ‘Haarderr!’s, etc.—to an original composition of ambient electronica. His back was turned away from us the entire time, dancing about over his laptop, gleefully pointing out, “Wait! This is the best part,” about six times. Finally the lead vocalist came to an earthshaking climax, to which he accompanied a crescendo of noise and space rock. Neal quietly inched The Planets back into the shelf.

This is, of course, when Janis Joplin called me to say she’s gotten off work. I tried to step outside to avoid the soundtrack of Boogie Nights from filtering into our conversation, but one of the women starts squealing in ecstasy before I could get to the door, and I had to explain that we…hadn’t made it to the Party quite yet.

So congratulations to Noise-Porn Bro, honorary Bolshevik of the week. He lives life the way he wants and couldn’t care less what society thinks about it. He also loves him that gritty ass shit.

- Caesar