fallon

Say it ain’t so! You don’t know UFO Joe?

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Throughout my life, I have been very fortunate to have come into contact with a ton of really crazy people. I don’t mean crazy like Wow, she has two different socks on, I mean crazy like Oh my God, she just took off her prosthetic leg and is screaming at me to help find her cigarettes!!! Some might call it a curse, but I have always considered it a gift and I am more than willing to share it with you. I have talked about life at the Fat Camp before here and here, but the absolute best part of living there year-round was that there was always an assorted bunch of lunatics running around to keep me entertained. I will give in and admit that I wasn’t sober for more than eighty percent of the time that I lived there, but still – there were some really crazy peeps out there in the woods.

The whole family went out for my aunt’s birthday dinner and it wasn’t long at all before she actually threw me out of the restaurant. We hadn’t even gotten our appetizers served before the Camp Chef, Joe, started to describe his very first alien abduction. I was obviously caught off-guard by this and immediately started hysterical laughing because it was the first time I was hearing any of this. You would think someone would have prepared me for it because they had already heard these stories multiple times. Naturally I thought he was kidding or, more likely, mentally ill. After a menacing glance, my aunt told me that in case I didn’t know it, it’s very rude to laugh in someone’s face and then she kicked me under the table. That kick really hurt which was misleading because she’s a short and stubby little one but those hooker clogs she was wearing really did a number on my ankle.

I tried to stop laughing, but he kept going on…And on…And on. I know that I’m immature, but come on I thought for one split-second that I might have actually been the one abducted and was sitting with the alien pods because they were hanging on his every word. It was right at that moment when the nickname “UFO Joe” was born and solidified. Maybe it was the alcohol or my natural smart-ass nature that made me do it, but when he was done I proceeded (as serious as I could) to tell him about how my friend Fallon was also abducted by aliens (and not the illegal kind by the way) when she was living in Los Angeles. I was explaining how hard it was for her because her husband Jeff and her father Blake didn’t believe her…when my Aunt hauled off and kicked me under the table again. That bitch could really work a clog if you know what I mean.

The Colby’s

Apparently, she could tell that I was talking about Season Two of the underrated classic The Colby’s but UFO Joe was empathizing and saying how hard it must have been for Fallon…Then (catching on) UFO Joe looked at me like I was the crazy one and said “You don’t believe me? You want to see proof?” Before I could even answer like Whitney Houston and say “Hell to the No”, he unbuttoned his shirt and thrust it open to reveal a huge bloody gash where he had ripped open his skin and dug through it with a paper clip. Right there at the table! Waitress, please cancel the Nachos!

As I was trying not to throw up from the site of it, he was going on about how he was positive that they left a tracing probe implanted in his chest and he wasn’t going to stop looking until he found it and removed it. That gash was so deep and disgusting and gooey that it actually looked like there was a vegetable lasagna platter sitting on his chest; it was obviously infected but he was convinced that the aliens had planted the infection as well. I innocently asked if he thought that using a dirty paper clip to bore through layers of human skin while searching for a tracing probe could possibly cause an unrelated infection to the original alien infection that was placed there – but I got the evil eye. My Aunt threw me out before I could get an answer from him, but at least it wasn’t another kick under the table!

Come on Joe, button your shirt back up!

I am not the type to suffer fools gladly and I am also not a mature person in the presence of crazy people. I couldn’t help but laugh as I sat alone on a stool at the bar next door. I did make a few new friends at the bar and then sang karaoke, but it kind of loses a little something when you’re throwing out an Eric Carmen remix with no one there to see it. All by Myself was my signature song, but it was never truer than that night at the bar. This was the first time that I got a dose of UFO Joe and his insanity, but not the last time.

UFO Joe lived at the local bar that we used to go to every day. There was a barn on the side of the bar and he lived in an apartment above it. He had a small porch and a view of cows in a field that always smelled like shit – but he wouldn’t change it for the world. That is until he moved into the house right next to ours at the camp. The camp had almost 250 acres of open space but where do they put the craziest person in three states: fifty feet from where I sleep naturally.


He was crazy, but harmless for the most part. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself. It took them a while, but they finally did convince me that it wasn’t weird to see UFO Joe barbecuing chicken on his outdoor grill while wearing ONLY an apron. I was obviously disgusted by the sight of it, but actually more concerned that there might be a sudden fireball from the barbecue. (Don’t laugh – It actually happened to me; why do you think I won’t barbecue anymore? There was a huge WHOOSH followed by a big ball of flames shooting upwards from the grill, up my body and face, and then up the side of the townhouse and my wife went inside and shut the sliding glass door! Granted I was screaming like a nine year old girl and my arms were flailing around, but I was lit up like a roman candle and not even an “Are you ok?)

It was truly disgusting, but my real concern was that if UFO Joe’s back hair were to spontaneously ignite, he might spread into a literal wildfire and burn the entire camp down. As unbelievable as that thought was, when I told my aunt she said I was crazy. If that doesn’t give you a clear picture of my aunt’s oddball mindset – nothing will. There’s a naked, middle-aged, alien abducted man grilling chicken clad only in a red and white checkered apron steps away from us and I’m the crazy one.

As if UFO Joe being shishka-bare while cooking wasn’t enough, he’d blast his music as loud as his speakers would go and play opera or 70’s Classic Rock all night long. You did kind of get used to the noise after a while and I could never get him to admit it, but after a while, I actually started to think that maybe he was implanted and that through the the music was sending signals back to the mother ship…That’s when I knew that it was time to get out of the woods and leave the Fat Camp for good.

E.T. Phone Joe?

Needless to say, the Fat Camp was a fun place to be if you needed a good laugh and there were always plenty of crazy people around to break up even the darkest days. At least it was never boring…

Warning: The Post below contains Graphic Photos!

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I posted a piece on Associated Content  that I thought I’d share here…Like a gigantic elm, I’m branching out kids – I’m branching out!

Click Here:

You can read all about how handy I am (not!), hear about how I developed Stigmata a few weeks ago, and see how I will take absolutely any opportunity that I can get to namedrop the greatest television show ever made:

Before you snicker or for those of you who were raised by animals that didn’t let you watch Dynasty when you were younger (No judgements, it’s just a statement!) look at the proof:

Exhibit A: Pamela Sue Martin played Fallon! That Nancy Drew certainly made me a Hardy Boy if you know what I mean. As a young teen I had raging hormones, the lithe muscle tone and awkwardness of a newborn giraffe, and a squeaky high-pitched voice. Well, who am I kidding? My voice is still that way. Her seductive eyes and lusty voice really showed me the impact TV can have…She left the show and was replaced by Emma Samms (Who was also hot which seemed to really help me through the transition!) That was dificult, but it taught me about depression and loss, and gave me a new-found appreciation for Heather Locklear. Heather was always on the show, but she really burned brighter when PSM left me…  

This Nancy Drew made me a Hardy Boy if you know what I mean.

 

Exhibit B) The many valuable everyday life lessons that I learned. Seriously, do you know why I don’t light candles? Hello – Season Six Cliff-hanger when crazy Claudia Blaisdel was all torn up about her well running dry (no pun intended – her oil well really did run dry.) In her devastating depression, she filled her hotel room at La Mirage with lit candles and promptly burned that mother to the ground! Also, I learned about the danger of horses – look at what happened when Krystle got dragged by that horse in Season two and lost her baby… And never tell your siblings anything incriminating! Remember when Caress got out of that prison in Caracas and tried to publish a tell-all book about Alexis?  Or Ben coming back after all of those years trying to pin their mother’s death on Blake? Siblings should be blackmailed, not blackmailing you!

Exhibit C) Of the many, many, many lessons that I learned from devouring episodes of Dynasty, the most valuable was this: Life will Screw with you! Picture a 12 year old lad in May of 1985 wishing he had the power to fast forward through the next three months. Not to get back to school and not to get to my birthday quicker; I desperately needed it to be September 25, 1985. I remember it like it was yesterday because that’s when the premiere of Dynasty Season 6 was airing. Typically, you’d watch a show and when you got to the end of the season in May you knew that no matter what happened or what they went through – it would really all be OK in September. They’d work it out and call off the divorce, the baby would get out of the well, he’d still be choking her – but he hadn’t killed her, or like Nelly said it was all just a dream (Don’t even get me started about Dallas. I loved it as much as the next pre-teen boy, but it certainly was no Dynasty!) No, that summer I learned what anticipation and anxiety really were which probably laid the foundation for the neurotic mess that I have become in later years.

When those revolutionaries stormed Prince Michael and Amanda’s wedding that dark night in May, those guns went a blazing and I was screaming louder than Lady Ashley for someone to cover Krystle. I could take something happening to anyone else, but not to her. If Dominique got shot, OK. If it was Steven, I could probably get through it; but not my fragile little, chocolate covered raisin, Krystle. I knew Sammy Jo was safely back at home, Fallon was presumed dead with amnesia in Los Angeles, and in my soul I just knew nothing could happened to Alexis; but Krystle was in the thick of it all. I needed that summer to be over and it just crawled by like a snail in a garden.

To make it worse, Off-screen Joan Collins (who played Alexis) threatened to leave the show over the summer while they were negotiating with her because she wanted more money and and I just couldn’t take it. She was worth every penny she asked for and then some, but if Alexis died, I wasn’t only worried about me. I just didn’t see how Dex could make it through that and what would happen to Colbyco or those South China Sea Oil leases? It was too much for me to process, yet I could talk or think about little else. It really taught me that when someone you love is hurt or in danger, you can’t think of anything else and you’d do absolutely anything for them if you could. That was me in my depression because my beloved Carrington family was covered in blood on the floor of that Moldavian chapel.

It's all coming back...It still hurts to think back on that day...

September finally arrived and there was a distinct spring in my step again, but it was very short lived. My dreams were then pounced upon and life was very cruel to me; even crueler than giving me the genetic makeup of a shorter Dom Deluise. My dear innocent soul was thrashed in an instant – quicker than when that old lady shit on the floor after she tripped over her IV cord in Good Samaritan Hospital. And just like her, I was a real mess and needed a nurse. 

As a young man, I didn’t ask for much. Sure, it would have been nice if I had some friends that weren’t imaginary or stuffed, but I always had the Carringtons to get me through. I could count on them and they could always count on me. At least until September 25, 1985 when a little bitch named Hurricane Gloria came rolling into my life. As the power went out, we were playing Manhunt in the pitch black house and it was great – I didn’t give it a second thought. Who cared that we had no power – it would surely come back on tomorrow, right? Little did I know that we would be without power for days – forcing me to miss the most important day of my life thus far: The season premiere of Dynasty. Do not roll your eyes – we didn’t have TiVo back then! They didn’t repeat those shows! If you missed it, it was gone forever…No Hulu, No ITunes, No renting the season on DVD!       

I was a wreck. I was throwing myself to the floor and screaming and carrying on with that scrunched up, snot dripping, and ugly crying like Halle Berry when she won the Oscar for Monster’s Ball. She might be hot, but she was still a real mess.

She might be hot, but she was still a real mess.

I kept begging and telling my mother that if she really loved me, she would find a way for me to see it but she kept telling me that if I loved her I would get out of her face and stop crying. I kept thinking that she would snap to her senses and get her priorities straight, but it was to no avail. I was left to my fester in my pain like a deer shot in the woods. No one cared and even my sister Marlene wasn’t as fazed by this disaster as she should have been. Obviously, none of them seemed to grasp just how dire the situation was. Needless to say I missed the episode…

(It still hurts to talk about it, so give me a second…)

If that summer seemed like an eternity, imagine how it felt waiting ANOTHER week to see the recap and the follow-up episode. I read in the paper that Krystle was OK (Thank God) but Alexis was missing, and I couldn’t sleep or eat…I needed to know. Finally, next week’s episode came on and we had found out that Alexis was OK too, (Phewww) but I always felt that I let them down just a little bit. Sure, I guess it couldn’t be helped, but I still felt like if the roles were reversed and I had been shot up in a wedding massacre by revolutionaries in a foreign country – Krystle would have found a way to make sure I was OK. Such is the cross I bear.  

As I said earlier, they didn’t rerun the episodes back then and I had tried to forget and move on, but I always thought about it and wondered what if…until one day something happened that made me believe in miracles again: EBAY. By some random act of luck – I found a woman selling complete seasons of Dynasty on EBay and I ordered it immediately and paid extra for expedited shipping. I tried not to get myself too worked up and just play it cool, but when that brown box arrived at my front door, I almost dry humped the UPS guy holding it! I was bouncing around like a little girl with a jump rope. I signed for it as fast as I could, thanked him, and ran inside. I furiously ripped that box open as if there was a bomb inside, put the tape into the VCR, and pressed Play.

Then I heard it: that old familiar theme song came on and my heart started racing…All the emotion came rushing back and I just knew there was good in the world again. I watched through the credits and it felt like I was looking back at an old photo album. When I tell you that I sat back in my papasan chair transfixed and sporadically pausing to explain to my dog Smokey who was who and what he had missed. (He was raised right, but he wasn’t even alive when Dynasty was on so he had an excuse for never having seen it.) As I sat there watching, I was transported back in time and the tears just started rolling down my face. As my wife will tell you, I am not an emotional person and am more prone to sarcasm than actual emotion, but a wave came rushing through me like never before: it was one of the best days of my life.

The downside of getting all the episodes on EBay was that I once again got sucked into their world all over again and was staying up until four AM watching. I had seen all the episodes and remembered like it was yesterday, but there were no commercials and I just couldn’t stop. I found myself calling in sick and staying home to watch…I was like a coke-whore: I needed my fix and I couldn’t get enough. My wife finally had enough with me consumed by it and said “It’s me or Dynasty” and so I stopped watching it to make her happy. Or at least, that’s what I told her. Don’t tell her, but I was already through the last Season and the Reunion Movie by the time she was fed up…

As a side note: I was told that I was too young to be watching Dynasty by my elementary school teacher when she heard me call someone a Bitch and asked where I had heard that bad word. I told her that it obviously wasn’t a curse if they were allowed to say it on Dynasty and you can just picture my mother unamused at that little nugget. If I was too young for it, then Marlene who is three years younger than me, certainly was too. Her and I would sneak into my mother’s bedroom and turn on the TV with the sound so low that you literally had to put your ear and face right up against the screen to hear anything. Every time Krystle and Alexis fought, you felt every slap. It’s no wonder my eyesight is so poor now – but it was worth it. Marlene would be standing in back of me holding a towel up around the back of us to keep the light of the TV from creeping out under the door and into the hallway which might give us away. I would have to repeat most things to her because she couldn’t hear a word standing behind me with the towel. Sometimes with great joy comes sacrifice. Or at least that’s what I told her to get her to hold the towel. Oh the good old days…. 

So go and check out my post and let me know what you think about it – Like the old saying goes “What’s the (Stig) mata with you?”