Brain Wreck

CAUTION: For Mature Audiences Only

Those of you who are acquainted with some of my previous posts may remember that I frequently enlist the services of my neighborhood medium/psychic, Madame Tammy Dawn, to conduct scary seances and summon the spirits of the famous and infamous from the ethereal heights or depths of the great beyond to serve as guest bloggers when I am feeling too lazy or hung over or stupid to continue screwing around with this blog stuff. I figure that they can’t be all that busy if they’re dead. What do you do all day if you’re dead? You’d think that they would welcome the chance to do anything, even something as meaningless and nonsensical as writing a blog. However, I have been proven totally wrong about these assumptions. Some of these dead folks can be real jerks.

I was recently invited to Tammy Dawn’s house to watch a John Wayne film festival on TV and help her summon the spirits of Johnny Walker and Jack Daniels from the liquor store. In other words, drinks were on me. So, we settled in with Johnny and Jack and watched somewhere between 14 to 20 hours of John Wayne playing the part of the great John Wayne. After a while, our eyes were red, our internal organs were suffering from sustained torture, and our brains were operating in super slow-mo. That’s about the point where we both decided that it would be a great idea to roust up the spirit of the great John Wayne (aka Marion Morrison) and have him try his hand at being a guest blogger. It wasn’t the best idea we ever had.

Tammy Dawn had no trouble connecting with him, but unfortunately in her advanced state of intoxication, which she further enhanced by drinking two bottles of Romilar cough syrup and smoking a bag of jimsonweed that she swore made it easier for her to cross over into spirit world, Tammy Dawn made the terrible mistake of bringing up Mr. Wayne’s experience with ‘The Sands of Iwo Jima.’ The premier of that movie, which was released in 1949, starred John Wayne as a WWII hero, when in real life he was a draft dodger who sat out the war making movies in Hollywood. Unfortunately for Mr. Wayne, the premier was attended by a whole bunch of WWII veterans who stayed to see him speak after the movie. He was booed off the stage, pelted with everything they could find to throw, and finally escorted from the theater by the police. This is a true story. I am not making this up. This all took place when most people in this country were still able to distinguish fantasy from reality. Unfortunately, that was a long time ago. Now John Wayne, an actor whose real name was Marion Robert Morrison from Winterset, Iowa, is viewed as an iconic American hero. In today’s world, he would, as John Wayne, probably be elected president for life.

The moral of this story is that if you ever summon him up in a seance, do NOT mention ‘The Sands of Iwo Jima.’ I mean, all we asked him for was to relate a humorous story or two about the filming of the movie. He responded by caterwauling streams of curses and threats that would have shocked Roy Rogers to death. By the way, November 5 is Roy Rogers’ (aka Leonard Slye) birthday. I have started an online petition to have Mr. Rogers’ birthday declared a national holiday. But I digress. Anyway, Tammy Dawn pulled it together and said, “Hey, why don’t we just talk about some other film instead? How about, oh, ‘Stagecoach’?” Well, this immediately calmed him down, and after a few more shots on our part, he began to talk about the favorite parts of his breakthrough movie. The transcript of his remarks begins right in the next paragraph, which you are probably looking at right now. If you try to read both paragraphs at the same time, especially after drinking Romilar cough syrup and smoking jimsonweed, John Wayne and his uncle Hobart will appear to you dressed as twin sisters Ina and Olive Garten. They will then perform a dance routine that honors the movie career of Francis the Talking Mule. I do caution against this. It makes JW very angry to be summoned this way. He might fake shoot your ass. Okay, here’s his story. Press start.

John Wayne Speaks

I can’t believe you yahoo drunk-ass pilgrims summoned me up from my nap to tell funny movie stories. If you want funny movie stories, why don’t you go ask one of them sissy pants French actors? They’re always full of it. I’m a man, by God! I am a no-nonsense man. I am THE man’s man as a matter of fact. I don’t do sissy pants things like cleanin’ and cookin’. All I know about cookin’ is how to eat and how to fart. Eatin’ is okay but fartin’ is always better. I say that because over the years I’ve made a lot of money with fartin’.

It all started when I was on location making ‘Stagecoach’ with the great John Ford out there in Monument Valley. See, there was all kinds of little kids running around there on the set and some of them were pretty damn fat, and I said to my friend Stewart Granger, I said something like hey, wouldn’t it be fun just to grab a couple of those little fat kids and squeeze ’em ’til they farted? Well, old Stewart thought it was a pretty damned good idea, so every afternoon we’d go around squeezin’ all the little fat kids and makin’ ’em fart. Pretty soon it got so’s everybody wanted to get in on the action, and everybody was runnin’ around grabbin’ fat kids and squeezin’ off the farts. Anyway, before you know it, everybody started bettin’ on it. You know, basically loudest, longest, ripest and all that malarkey.

In those days they used a lot of Italian actors to play Indians, and I fell in with one of ’em whose wife and kids were on the shoot with him. He had a little boy, maybe about 3 feet tall and about 4 feet around, fattest little bugger you ever saw, and I made a deal with the momma. I gave her 50 bucks a day, which was a lot of money back then, and in return she started feedin’ him the god-awfullest, greasiest mess you ever saw every morning, and she just kept doin’ it all day long. By late afternoon the kid was always chock full of baked beans and sausage and hot peppers and grease and cheap beer. Anyway, when the afternoon bets were all placed, I’d grab the little bastard and give him my manliest squeeze and he’d go off like a howitzer, never failed, and I’d win all the money every day. Long story short, I made more money on that fat kid’s fartin’ abilities than I made on the picture, and the kid and his family followed me around for 9 more years. I heard later that he had become a gastroenterologist. Guess I musta’ stirred up some interest there.

Okay, that’s my funny story. But that’s nothin’ compared to ‘True Grit.’ One day on the set I grabbed Glen Campbell and started squeezin’ him. He was a pretty good actor before that. Not sure what happened. I was plannin’ on makin’ some money from him. Now I’m gonna’ finish my nap, so you two sober up and leave me alone. Besides, if I told you the rest of that story, I’d just have to do what I did to a lot of Pilgrims in my career. I’d have my stunt double beat the Hell out of you while I had a couple of beers in my trailer.