Emmet is my neighbor. He’s a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. His owners found him in a gutter in Louisville, Kentucky, a tiny little neglected piglet crying and dying in a pile of wet leaves. They rescued him, nursed him back to health and it looks like he hasn’t missed too many meals since.

Emmet is the physically densest mammal I have ever seen -he feels like he is made out of warm, bristle-covered cannonballs. He loves having the spot between his little piggy shoulder blades scratched.

I only ever see Emmet on misty, overcast mornings – the kind of mornings that really activate New York’s greyness, the ones that give this grey city some serious character and color. It’s like Emmet emerges from the city’s hazy, sleepy dream state. Nobody else is ever around to see him except for me, my girlfriend, and Emmet’s leash-holders.

We always talk about the South, me and Maggie and Emmet’s people. We talk about how great it is, what an amazing, rich and Gothic creepiness the South has and how we are so glad it runs through our blood. And how glad we are that we moved up here, too.

The South is a spectacular place to be from, but not always a good place to be at. Love the culture, hate the crippling willful ignorance, I say.

But enough gabbing. Here’s Emmet:

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One of my best friends from high school is a GED teacher for some really, really bad kids. He recently turned an act of classroom disrespect into a “teachable moment,” schooling the youngster in the art of writing an apology letter.

It’s all about the little victories, people.

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There were two good things about my apartment in Virginia:

The rent was only $175 a month, and Brad the landlord never came over. Ever. Or so we thought. This seemed ideal at the time, as I was using the living room as a painting space in addition to training live chickens to play keyboards in the living room. The less company, the better.

But like so much else in the world, the good and bad parts of that situation were horribly entangled.

We’d moved into the place in a hurry in the dead of an unusually cold winter – which served to keep the smell down.

But along with spring rains came this smell. This creeping, gnarly smell would wind its funky hand into the house and right into our nostrils like filthy phantom fingers picking up a bowling ball. It reeked of sloth and despair – powerful and pungent and musty all at once, like manure without any of the fertility or any potential.

You’d think you’d drowned it out or think it went away, but it was just always there, a brown undercoating that informed colors and flavors and wormed its way into your freaking dreams. Sometimes a homeless teenaged kid would sleep on our back porch under the window. One rainy morning I heard him say “Oh GOD it smells bad out here.” It happened whenever the air was especially humid, right after a rain, or on foggy mornings.

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During the time that I was in Royal Quiet Deluxe (chicken band), I was invited to a large dinner with the Reverend Al Sharpton. Everyone had to go around the table and describe who they were and what they did. I was neither an accomplished member of the community in Norfolk, nor was I African-American. Everyone else at the table was both. I just kinda ran with a description of the band.

It did not go well. At all. In fact, the evening rippled throughout my life for about ten years, causing tremendous embarassment in a comic book store this summer.

Here’s a video of me telling the story on stage at The Moth:

I think I’ve just about milked this chicken band thing for all it’s worth now …

You can see the companion to this story here:

Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band

A story by The Moth’s Jim O’Grady here:

Jim O’Grady on “Respect”

And a story by The Moth’s Juliet here:

Juliet Tells the Tale of ‘Mannequin Dan’

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This story appeared on here a while ago in a slightly different form. I’m working on it to perform at The Moth, but figured it would go okay on here …

The keyboard players in my band were spacier than Sun Ra, more abstract than John Coltrane and brought more sheer, squalid anarchy to the stage than GG Allin and the Sex Pistols combined. When they weren’t playing music they were either feeding, fighting, or shitting on the floor – and they managed to do a lot of that onstage, too. But they didn’t just act like barnyard animals, they were barnyard animals: the keyboard players in my band were two chickens named Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline.

I played percussion on a modified vintage typewriter miked up loud enough to sound like the thunder of an angry God. At that volume, the space bar and shift keys rumbled like a kick drum, and the letter keys snapped like a tight snare. My friend Tim Gordon (the band’s other human being) played the guitar and bass semi-simultaneously, wearing the guitar up by his collarbone and the bass slung low at his hips – he’d loop the bass notes through a pedal and play rhythm guitar against himself while I thumped and cracked the typewriter. Once we hit a stride of sorts, we’d pull a blanket off the top of the cage where Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline sat with two little Casio Keyboards.
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This is the story that I would have told last night at The Moth for the theme “Making Peace.” I don’t think I’ve run it here before. Any constructive criticism is greatly appreciated.

I’d been dating this girl who was confident and cool with beautiful tattoos, so gorgeous she’d make a whole room turn and feel ugly whenever she walked in the door. I’d just lost a pile of weight and was giddy with the sudden attention — giddy enough to miss the warning signs and get my newly narrowed ass dumped in about three weeks. I had no idea why, didn’t see it coming at all.

I lived in tired little termite buffet painted the color of dingy Band-Aids. A small community of grizzled vagrants in electric wheelchairs would commune around a trash fire in the alley behind my house most afternoons, drinking Thunderbird. Sometime around twilight most nights, one guy with a blurry swastika tattooed on his forehead would rev up out into the road, barreling upstream against one-way traffic. I had decorated the interior of the place myself — carpeted the entire house in Astroturf, green for the living room, the stairs, and upstairs hallway, my bedroom in neon blue with a giant American flag for a bedspread. Waking up each morning was like a Lego funeral at sea.

All the furniture in the downstairs was inflatable — a couch and two easy chairs. There was a sculpture on the front porch that I’d made myself out of several deer carcasses and a giant head covered in glowing white war paint.

In hindsight, I may have been dumped for aesthetic reasons.

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As I mentioned here earlier last week, my father’s been diagnosed with cancer. And while the prognosis is pretty good it’s still a scary prospect, at least for those of us that have never dealt with it in any way before. I was pretty freaked out for a few days there while the news settled in. A lot of you left some very kind, supportive comments and sent some very thoughtful e-mails — I just wanted to take a moment here and thank you for all of your thoughts and words.

My sister left a pretty great comment herself, saying

… We just gotta keep in mind our Dad is a BAD ASS!!! He told us he had cancer in one breath and in the next told us “I’m gonna beat this shit”. The cancer is aggressive but so is our family.

My Dad sounds pretty upbeat about it, himself. When I called him to ask how he was doing, nervously, tentatively, tiptoeing around a potentially sensitive topic, he just said

Well, I threw my back out a few days ago, I’m going blind, and I’ve got cancer. Otherwise, I’m feeling pretty good.

He sounds good, actually. He’s just going into treatment confident and upbeat, getting his P.M.A. together and gearing up. I’ve got minor guilt here, as the kid who moved off to the big faraway city while his family suffers, but that’s kinda more my load to tote. I’m going to head down for an extended visit once they figure out a treatment schedule — but for right now, this day, this moment, things don’t sound too bad.

As my girlfriend, who is herself a cancer survivor says

We’re all going to go out sometime. Cancer patients just have more detailed information.

Thanks again for all your thoughts …

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I lay in bed in Brooklyn yesterday afternoon, staring up at the ceiling and watching the sunlight fade from the room. I couldn’t nap, couldn’t rest. A creature had taken up residence in my throat and chest. I imagined it to be black and very hairy, with large leathery wings. It wasn’t quite a bird and wasn’t quite a mammal, just this hairy winged thing, like a shaggy, greasy bat.

It moved around, pacing between my uvula and heart, shuffling and trying to stretch its wings. I imagined what it would feel like when the shaggy bat burst past my lips and lifted off, cutting ragged figure-8s around the paper lamps hanging from my ceiling.

Smithfield Ham is a meat like no other. A close cousin to Italian prosciutto, Smithfield ham is the meat of peanut-fed hogs, salt-cured and hickory smoked for a minimum of six months in the corporate limits of Smithfield, Virginia — home to my grandparents, aunt and uncle. Smithfield ham is drier and more thickly cut than supple, subtle prosciutto. Compared to Smithfield ham, prosciutto is the damp rag used to wipe a hog farmer’s work boots.

In a purely physical sense, Smithfield ham is terrible for you. The only way it could harm your heart more from a medical perspective would be if a surgeon were to slice your chest open and manually pack your arteries with wads of the stuff. From an emotional perspective, it is Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, love and forgiveness and bedtime stories all in one salty, fat-filled bite. Draped over a handmade biscuit with butter, it is also Prozac, Lithium and THC.

The bat flapped tireless, frustrated laps up and down my throat all last night, all this morning, in the cab to La Guardia, on the plane and all the way through the airport. It wouldn’t come out, and it was getting hairier by the hour, so hairy it got heavy when it settled on my chest to tongue its wet wings clean.

I keep waiting for the real grief to happen, but I just feel numb. I feel like I’m made out of balsa wood or something — soft and flexible, but easily shattered. All I want to do is read. I am an Easy Reader of epic proportions on a normal day, but now I am positively EATING words. I finished “Bonfire of the Vanities” on the plane and started right in on Haruki Murakami’s “Dance Dance Dance.” I was able to take a break from reading and joke around with my dad and sister while we shopped for funeral suits this afternoon, but after reading Pop-Pop’s obituary in the local paper, I couldn’t stop. It was all I could do not to wad the newspaper up and stuff it in my mouth — knocked out the front page, local section, comics and started in on the classifieds by the time we pulled up to my aunt and uncle’s house.

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