Mamma, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Sword Swallowers (no this has no metaphorical association to prop 8)

My mouth is a low rent ghetto-housing tenement populated by microscopic thugs, jaundiced hoodlums and Cavity Creeps. The Super (superintendant for those of you who didn’t grow up in the inner city) is a slum lord and 3 wisdom teeth will soon be evicted (they are bad substance abusing tenants, replace bags of crack with baggies of powdered sugar, including a brief collegiate phase where I used to steal the crystals from the bottom of the Sour Patch Kid’s bin), maybe not worthy of the attention of David Simon (creator of the Wire), but definitely a troubling neighborhood of the mouth.

Sorry, I’m just bitter, freshly home from the Dentist and the verdict was not pleasant. X-rays and an intense cleaning process, coupled with an intolerable sound, 7-cavities and three impacted wisdom teeth that incite the wrath the Gods from cold beverages. But alas, I’ve digressed before even starting. This is a band mailer about sword swallowing. I was going to try to use metaphor to segue the dental experience to that of a sword swallower and honestly, I don’t know which is more harrowing, and even though they both occur in the mouth, it seemed like a bit of an abrupt leap.

Last week at the Heavy Guilt show we had a surprise during the intermission. All it takes to derail the momentum of an evening is one glanced over email. In this case I missed the all-important message containing the knowledge that there would be an extreme performance during our set break. Now, to set this story up appropriately, I have to describe our singer Erik a little bit. We’ll see what happens to the following text because I recently found out Erik edits these things before they hit the streets. In fact I found out he turned the word “@#*!%*” to “child” in one band mailer, but you may not even be reading this sentence, so I got nothing to loose. Erik is clean. Imagine the opposite of the earlier description of my corroded and left behind post sugar-cane-Katrina mouth. If I was at Erik’s house and I dropped a slice of pizza on the ground and said slice landed cheese first, I would feel comfortable eating it after 10 seconds, in fact, I would feel fine if I dropped the slice before a gig, came back after the gig and happened to be hungry, and if by miracle the pizza was still there, I would also feel comfortable eating it. At the same time, I’m not allowed at Erik’s because I’m the kind of dirt-bag who drops pizza on people’s floors and leaves it there for several hours.

Erik recently purchased a microphone, because a.) as a singer it is important to have your own mic and b.) microphones are perhaps the most filthy, germ ridden places on earth, a war ravaged third world space bombed to attrition by bacteria and hurricane rains of musician spittle (who knows where we’ve been). Alright, time to re-rail my train of thought. Erik’s shiny new safe haven of a microphone made its debut last week. When we took our set break we stepped outside for a breather. We could all see inside as the barroom lights lit up the lone microphone in the glory of its shimmering virgin newness. At this point the set break performance began. The sword swallower/sideshow took the stage. He grabbed Erik’s pristine, unsullied microphone and busted into his routine which began with him flossing his teeth with a condom. WOW!!! The defeated look on Erik’s face was incredible. If there is a band out there called “the Disappointment” please email us, we’ll send you the photo, it can be your album cover, touring poster and bumper sticker.

So, on Erik’s mic, he swallowed 4 swords, yelled deafeningly loud, told some foul tales, the aforementioned condom flossing incident (and after the dental visit, I’m all about flossing, but that’s just a bit much), he stuck 4 spiked rods through his stomach (and yes, we witnessed them pushing against the skin and popping out his backside, G-R-O-S-S, I would have rather watched a Sandra Bullock / Keanu Reeves film) and the coup de grace was when he invited audience members to staple money to various body parts, $5 bought most real estate, but the head shot with a staple gun cost $20. This is an interesting approach, because as the sideshow act went on for about 40-long-minutes, the last ten minutes were particularly infuriating to our band. We paced around the shadows of street lamps and waited for our second and truncated set. I secretly was willing to pay money to staple this guy in the face, “how much for an eye shot” I thought to myself “I know where I can get a nail gun, how much longer will you be on?” By the end of the night he was covered in blood, staples and money.

I bet if you pulled Erik aside earlier in the day and said “What three things won’t touch your new mic tonight?” his answer would have been “I don’t know, but if I had to guess, hmmmm, blood, money and staples.” WRONG!!!! So, to you folks planning on coming down to see the Guilt this weekend, we’ll likely have an iPod crooning between us and the next band, but if you want to staple $100 to my pinky toe, I’m totally fine with that, I’ll have some grocery money left after my copay.



PS. If I ever wind up "accidentally" impaled, please notify the good people at Unsolved mysteries, or the cat who wrote and or directed Zodiac. (and don't let Jamie Foxx play me)