Is That a Porkchop In Your Pants or Are You Just Happy to... ? Nope, That's Definitely a Pork Chop. Ooooookay Then.

I've spent most of my life in big cities. Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. And for some reason, I've always felt safe. I'm not sure why, because I've lived in some unsavory places. I've rented apartments in neighborhoods that people with college educations tend to avoid - neighborhoods populated by surly hookers who won't take no for an answer and guys with swastikas carved into their necks and elderly women suffering from night terrors and a seething hatred of "negrahs". But I never felt like any of them would ever kick down my door or accost me as I waited for the bus. They were just local color, and if you caught them at their creative peaks, pretty damn entertaining. Spend a leisurely Sunday morning at your local slum diner, munching on a rubbery omelet and listening to a man with an eyepatch explain to his waitress how the mayor is spending our tax dollars to create a doomsday laser, and you suddenly remember why you never bothered to get cable.

The only time I realized I might be living in a less than desirable zip code was when my parents visited. If I had a nickel for every time my mother burst into my apartment and shrieked, "Do you know what that homeless man is doing on your front porch?!", I would be a very rich man. My parents tried to be positive about my ghetto living conditions, but the panic always resurfaced after they'd said their goodbyes and wandered out to find their car, which for some reason (I suspect a self-fulfilling prophecy) they always parked near a burned-out liquor store.

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My father wouldn't step foot outside without placing a key between his middle and index fingers, like it was a shiv and he was heading to the yard to punish a prison snitch. He'd laugh when I offered to get the car for them, saying, "I've lived in worse 'hoods than this. Ever seen a destitute mother sell her baby for crack money? Happens every day in Ypsilanti." But in the tense moments before they left my apartment, I could see the hardness in his face, readying himself for battle.

"Just run for the car as fast as you can," his expression signaled to my mom. "Anybody so much as asks for directions, he's going to get an eye full of cold steel, courtesy of Toyota Corolla."

When you live in the same place for too long, the weird stuff starts to blend into the background. I doubt if a farmer has ever looked out on his back yard and thought, "Holy shit, look at all those fucking cows! How the hell did I end up here? Have I seriously not had a friend in the last decade who I haven't milked?" And by the same logic, you can walk out of your city apartment every day for years and not once think, "Wait a minute! That woman in the burlap sack who hangs out by the subway station, muttering about how she's having Werner Herzog's baby? Does she have facial hair?!"

My inexplicable feelings of personal safety disappeared when I moved out of the city and into more rural areas. I forget which comic said it first, but my fear of small towns can be boiled down to a simple punchline: City people will kill you, but in the country, they'll keep you. You know why that's funny? Because it's true. Even in the most notoriously crime-ridden cities, they only want what's in your wallet. But in a town where all the necks are red and the homes have wheels, they're looking for something that money can't buy. Like that surprised look on your face when you figure out what's going to happen next. They'll chain you to a radiator in their basement until their buddies working the late shift at the Waffle House get back, and then they're gonna polish off a six-pack of Milwaukee's Best before breaking out the power tools.

Maybe I've seen too many movies. Or maybe I've just gone to a rural CostCo at 3am and seen the people with their home-cut rattails and menthol cigarette smiles. Not to be a cultural bigot, but when a dude in a "These Colors Don't Run" sleeveless t-shirt is buying a jar of industrial-size mayonnaise in the middle of the night, my only assumption (perfectly logical, I think) is that he's planning a post-lynching picnic.

I'm not afraid of poor people living in the city, because poor people in the city can be crazy and violent and stoned and irrational, but at least they're not stupid. In San Francisco, a homeless guy once walked up to me and asked, "Who slept for a hundred years: Rumpelstiltskin, Rip Van Winkle or Nebuchadnezzar of Egypt?" (When I answered "Rip Van Winkle," he pointed a wrinkled finger at me, as if he was a winning contestant in a game show for vagrants, and screamed, "I knew it!") But poor people living in small towns, particularly small towns located in the middle or southern half of the country, probably haven't touched a book since they dropped out of grade school to work for their dad's construction company. Their response to a question like "which literary character slept for a hundred years?" will likely be "I don't know. Which one of you faggots wants to get cut?"

But the funny thing about cultural stereotypes is that they're not usually true. Maybe a little bit true, but never to the full extent of my very vivid and paranoid imagination. When I moved to northern Florida last year, I expected the absolute worst. Urban living has led me to believe that any southern town with a population less than 10,000 is overrun with shirtless hillbillies in overalls, waiting to challenge city folk to banjo competitions before repeatedly raping our soft, pink anuses.

As it turns out, that's not so much what goes on down there. I wasn't the Ned Beatty to Florida's homo-curious inbred albino. Which isn't to say this state isn't weird and foreign and scary, it's just not weird and foreign and scary in the ways I expected.

For instance, I never would've guessed there'd be so many ghosts.

I live in St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States. I know this because the locals remind me of it every goddamn day. Heaven forbid I walk ten yards without somebody telling me, "Hey, did you know that grocery store over there was built in 1597 by a Spanish Conquistador?" I didn't, and as much as I want to believe that a guy in heavy armor cut a ribbon with his sword and announced, "I claim this Winn-Dixie franchise for the glory of Spain," I don't so much believe it. I do, however, concede that this town is old as dirt. The proof is in the odor. There's only one word for it: Musty. Have you ever walked into a used bookstore after a rainstorm? That's what every square inch of this city smells like. It's a big pile of water-damaged books that've been left in a dark, humid space.

A lot of people don't care for that smell. But to me, its like sweet perfume. I love the musty book aroma and the cobbled stone streets and the fire-trap homes made of old wood. It seems like someplace a writer would live, where a person can still sit on their front porch with a pipe and glass of cognac and make handwritten notes on a manuscript without feeling like a pretentious ass. I could see myself staying here for a long, long time.

Apparently I'm not the only one. St. Augustine has a lot of full-time residents, and most of them are dead.

When your new neighbors tell you that three out of every five houses on your block are haunted, it's difficult to take them seriously. My first thought was that they were just trying to discourage the Dame and I from buying real estate. (I can sympathize. I'm sure my aversion to wearing pants isn't doing much for their property values.) But then I overheard a piano being played in the house next door - a beautiful sonata that typically begins every night around 2am - and when I thanked the owners for their late night serenading, they admitted that there hasn’t been a piano in their house since the 1800s.

Not long after, the Dame and I were invited to dinner by a friendly middle-aged couple who own a bed & breakfast at the end of our street. At some point during the evening, they casually mentioned, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, that their home is haunted by a ghost who likes to play pranks on them.

"At least once a month, we'll wake up under our bed," the husband told us.

"Excuse me?" I asked. "Under the bed? As in... on the floor?"

"That's right," he said with a giggle. "We'll open our eyes and we're staring up at the bed frame, wondering how the heck we got there. It was kinda spooky the first time it happened, but after awhile we just got used to it."

I don't think I'd ever get used to something like that. If I wake up under my bed and there isn't an empty bottle of scotch in my hands, I'm making a call to my landlord, and trust me, she is not getting her security deposit back.



When I shared these stories with Noria, one of my writing pals from California, her reaction was exactly what my subconscious had been telling me for months. "Isn't this where you're supposed to pack up and leave, or are you waiting for the walls to bleed?"

It's sound advice, and under different conditions, I'd be fleeing the state before the first invisible hand started painting "GET OUT" in viscous fluid. But I like this town a little too much to give up on it so easily. So the Dame and I have made repeated attempts to stir up any poltergeists living in our midst, just to do a head-count. We do this mostly by screaming "What the hell is that?!!!" every time we hear so much as a creak upstairs. So far, nothing.

Since confirming that the Dame and I are living without supernatural squatters, I've felt safe in this town. Safe in ways I've never felt outside of a major metropolitan area. And then I almost saw a man get shot, and my carefully constructed house of cards was almost shattered.

Almost.

I like to take long walks at night. The tourists are gone and the streets are empty and as long as I don't think about the ghosts lurking everywhere, ready to jump out behind ancient buildings and scare the cowardice sauce right out of me, I can actually clear my head and get some thinking done. Just a few nights ago, I wandered into the park, as I usually do, because it's almost always empty after dark and I can do a few loops around the perimeter without once seeing another human being. But on the night in question, I was unlucky enough to stumble onto a crime scene.

Sometimes you don't appreciate just how green you really are until you experience something for the first time. Until last week, I'd never seen a cop pull a gun on somebody. I've seen it in the movies, just not up close and personal. It's a lot more alarming than you'd imagine. When a gun comes out and people with badges are yelling, there's a brief moment of confusion when you're not entirely sure if their aggression is directed towards you. So your first instinct... okay, fine, my first instinct is to drop to the ground, cover my face and whimper. But that's just how I roll.

I soon realized the gun wasn't pointed at me, and I went from weeping man-child to amateur criminologist. The guy being repeatedly told to show his hands - the "perp" as I instantly took to calling him - looked like somebody who wasn't altogether unfamiliar with the Florida legal system. He had long, gray hair, a t-shirt speckled with grease stains, and oversized jeans that obviously contained a good deal of stolen goods. He was holding his pants tightly at the waist, trying to conceal whatever was hidden underneath.

"Put your fucking... hands... up," the cop shouted, gesturing with his gun for emphasis.

"I-I can't," the man told him.

"I'm not going to tell you again," the officer barked. "Raise your hands or I will shoot you."

"I can explain," he said, still clinging to his jeans like he thought they might drop to his ankles if he loosened his grip even slightly.

I can't possibly do justice to what I witnessed next. The cop demanded that he reveal what he was hiding, and so, with considerable consternation, the flustered hick began unloading his pants. As the cop aimed a flashlight at him, it became clear why his lower half was so disproportionately bulbous.

His pants were filled with raw meat.



Not just a little raw meat, mind you. He pulled out loin steaks and link sausages and pork chops and veal shanks and mutton cutlets and bratwursts and a full rib roast. He had stuffed enough meat down his pants to fill several small freezers. Watching him unload his meat cargo reminded me of those circus acts where dozens of clowns walk out of the same tiny car.

"I didn't steal it," he insisted, in that unmistakable southern twang. "I was just... carrying it home."

I don't know why, but I believed him. His story was so utterly stupid and implausible it almost had to be true. The alternative didn't make any sense. What were we to believe? He was a criminal mastermind who'd been robbing slaughterhouses and stashing absurd quantities of raw meat in his drawers? Or that he was an eco-friendly beef enthusiast who told his butcher, "No plastic bags for me, Sam, just load it into my pants?"

When it was all over, I fled back home and recounted every detail for the Dame. I expected her to panic. I thought her face would go ashen and she'd say something like, "That's it, I can't take it anymore. Start loading garbage bags with clothes and food. We're getting the fuck out of this godforsaken southern hellhole right now!"

But she didn't. Instead, she just shrugged and said, "Well, there's no law against carrying meat in your pants."

I was speechless. That was exactly what the cop in the park had said after checking Mr. Meat-Lover's receipts and sending him on his way.

And you know what? They're both right. There isn't a law against carrying meat in your pants in the state of Florida. I know, I checked.

I slept like a baby that night. Somehow, the south didn't seem so frightening anymore. Sure, I live in a town swarming with ghosts who push people under beds and play piano at inappropriate hours, and country folk who find nothing unhygienic about storing raw beef on or near their genitals. But that's the kind of southern weirdness a guy could get used to.

Cinderella's Muffstache, and Other Topics Best Left Undiscussed When Children Are Present

I have nothing against Disney World on general principle. I'm just genetically disposed to hate all theme parks. They remind me of airports, except without the complimentary sodas. There's a lot of waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and then something mildly exciting happens, and then more waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and then your ass starts to hurt. At least when you leave an airport, you have better odds of not being in Orlando.

My biggest complaint with Disney is the lines. The only reason I'm going to stand in line for two hours is for a re-re-release of Empire Strikes Back with a bonus Boba Fett fight sequence and some gratuitous Carrie Fisher nudity. I sure as hell won't do it for a chance to sit in a rusty mine cart submerged in oily water and gaze at animatronic mannequins dressed like drunk pirates.

Actually, no, I take that back. The lines themselves aren't offensive, it's the people inhabiting them. The way they push and shove for position, you'd think getting a closer look at cardboard cutouts of Peter Pan was an antidote for morbid obesity. The pale masses who regularly vacation at Disney are not my people. They don't wear Dead Kennedy t-shirts or ask questions like "Can I get that with a side of broccoli?" (Here's a tip for you: If you're a male and your nipples are lactating, you've had too much nacho cheese.) They come to theme parks with unrealistic expectations of family bliss and priceless memories. But instead, they end up with kinetosis and a few pictures of a talking rat. When they realize that their vacation isn't going to be everything they hoped, they get angry. And when they get angry, they become assholes.

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Spend a full day at Disney, surrounded by a throng of sweaty adults and their ugly, pink-eyed children, all fueled with a sense of entitlement that's grossly out of proportion with reality, and you'll start to see why things like cancer and global warming might actually be good things. I'm sorry if that sounds cruel, but it's entirely true. You need proof that evolution is beautiful and morally correct? Go to Disney and tell me we don't need to thin the herd.

I've resigned myself to being a curmudgeon with severe anti-social tendencies. But then something remarkable happened. A few weeks ago, the Dame and I took a trip to Disney World and we actually had a good time. A great time, even. The park hadn't changed in any discernable way. It's still just an overhyped, slightly cleaner version of a suburban carnival, overrun with obnoxious tourists in fanny packs and their evil, screeching children who make abortion seem like the only logical option. The only difference, at least for our trip, was the company.

This time, we went with four gay men.

It's a universal truth that any human experience, however miserable and heart-breaking, is inherently more enjoyable with gay men. You could be on death row awaiting lethal injection, and if you've got a few gays by your side, you're going to leave with a smile. I don't know why it is, but a gay man is capable of summing up the absurdity of a situation and it always comes out as deliciously droll.

Take a sentence like this:

"Jesus Hernandez Christ, have you ever seen so many people in stretch pants in one confined space? One of them farts and they release enough carbon emissions to melt a glacier. Do they really think that being the first one in this chub-mob to get to the fake castle is worth the shortness of breath and chest pains? They are aware, aren't they, that Princess Diana's corpse isn't stored here? And why won't their slanty-foreheaded children stop with the incessant whining? Give me a pillow and five minutes alone with that kid and I'll take us all out of our misery."

When uttered by a straight guy, a snarky observation like this is likely to inspire eye-rolling and comments like "Stop ruining everybody's fun." But when that very same sentence comes out of a gay man's mouth, it's instantly transformed into witty and wry commentary. You can't help yourself. It's like a muscle reflex. A gay man says something that full of sass and vinegar, and any reasonable person would respond with a whimsical wrist snap and "Oh no you did-unt!"

Our gay theme park posse - all visiting from our former hometown in northern California - helped me appreciate Disney with fresh eyes. I finally understood how you could enjoy this cesspool of tourist gluttony both ironically and unironically. You can experience genuine childhood glee and make scathing remarks about the transparent vapidity of it all, and you can do it simultaneously. Before visiting Disney with four gay men - I always recommend four; less than three and it gets too cliquish and self-referential, more than five and it'll become a parade with cellophane and glitter - I would never have considered going to see a hack production like Nemo the Musical. But now I understand the subtle pleasures of sitting through a god-awful pseudo-musical with fish puppetry, and then getting several daiquiris post-show and creating your own parody versions of the already hack lyrics.

"I lost my daaaaaaaaaaad
And now I'm saaaaaaaaaaad
Oh wait, there's my daaaaaaaaaaad
Now I'm glaaaaaaaaaaad!"

I've gone to Epcot's World Showcase before, and I've eaten at their "international" restaurants. But with four gay men at my side, I've discovered the educational value of chatting up an Italian waitress, who, if bribed with enough cocktails and gay companionship, will tell you intimate details about the social scene at Epcot. Like, for instance, how the German employees drink too much and are thus incapable of showing their appreciation "down there."

There really is no greater way to enjoy Disney than listening to a 22 year-old Italian woman explain, in broken English, her disappointment in discovering that a would-be German lover's "panini" has gone "limpy-limpy". Forget the rides. That alone is worth the price of admission.

But spending too much time in the company of gay men can make you cocky (no pun intended). You start believing that you are a gay man. Not in the literal sense. Not in the "wow, I never noticed it before, but cock sure does look tasty" sense. I mean a smug confidence in your ability to make acerbic zingers without repercussion. A gay man is surrounded by an invisible barrier that protects him from accountability. He can pretty much say whatever he wants, and it'll always come across as delightfully saucy rather than vindictive and mean-spirited. It's been explained to me as The Stonewall Principle, or "Haven't My People Suffered Enough?"

It breaks down to a simple equation:

My Oppression
+
Your Stupidity
=
I Can Say Anything I Want, You Judeo-Christian, Mouth-Breathing Bigot

Heterosexual white men don't share the same unconditional freedom of expression. It doesn't matter how many gay men are surrounding you, a straight dude doesn't have sarcasm carte blanche. You have nothing in common with every other race or creed that's been enslaved, demoralized, deported, dismissed, culturally stigmatized or put into a death camp during the last 200 years. You have to follow the rules of civilized society, even when a minority group is encouraging you to "go there."

I learned this the hard way. I was sitting in a restaurant in the Magic Kingdom, with the Dame and the aforementioned cartel of gay friends. It was noon, the restaurant was full, and we were all drunk and/or ridiculously buzzed on fruity cocktails. Somebody - who can remember who? - wondered aloud about the grooming habits of Disney princesses. More specifically, their pubic region.

In hindsight, none of us can feign ignorance. It was, by all accounts, the perfect storm. Take a vaginal theory about Disney characters, add a dash of tequila and an ounce of homosexuality, and you have a recipe for hilarious disaster. You don't put four intoxicated gay men in the same room and broach the subject of princess booshes and not expect it to evolve into a very crude think tank. You either back away and let nature take its course or, if you're an idiot like I clearly am, you jump into the fray.

It began with a simple hypothesis. Cinderella and Aurora (the "Sleeping Beauty"), being (presumably) natural blondes, probably don't need to do much maintenance on their coochie areas. But what of Snow White, the jet-black brunette with the dwarf fetish? The consensus - with votes counted from four gays, one Dame, and a sole smirking hetero - is that she shaves her vadge at least once a week, and likely much more frequently. According to a man who, to protect his anonymity, will be identified only as Gay #3: "Those poor midget bastards can't possibly be dining at the Y without getting razor burn."



Many bold statements were made that afternoon. We agreed that Jasmine keeps a trim muffstache because Aladdin likes 'em young, and that Mulan's nether-region could be easily confused with Einstein's frizzy fro, and that Belle from Beauty & the Beast keeps a neatly-shorn clam so that it won't chafe during ballroom dancing. These public proclamations, while not unfair or unfounded, were perhaps unwisely timed. Maybe they were best saved for a tavern, or some other adult establishment where the clientele is predominately adult and possessing a sense of humor (even a temporary sense of humor brought on by liquor.) But with enough cocktails (and gayness), it seems perfectly natural to say such things in a restaurant, in the middle of the day, at a Disney restaurant where children have every right to be present.

However, if you're gay enough, the majority of the clientele will turn their heads, or cover their child's ears, or pretend that what you just said isn't nearly as offensive as they initially believed. Because telling you to "please shut the fuck up" is the cultural equivalent of saying, "Go back to the bathhouse, ya fucking queer." And even at Disney, that kind of blatant homophobia just isn't acceptable.

We could've gotten away with murder. But then I had to go and open my big fat mouth.

"Is it just me?" I asked, so loud you'd think I was trying to communicate with trapped miners. "Or does Pocahontas seem like the kind of gal who'd get a Brazilian?"

Maybe I pushed too far. But it's not like I said something completely out of context, apropos of nothing, like "I'd totally fuck Daffy Duck." Which, y'know, isn't completely unjustified. I mean c'mon, you walk around dressed in a sailor suit and no pants, and you're kinda asking for it. But my point is, I hadn't been less tactless than anybody else. And yet, I was the guy getting hassled by a redneck at the next table.

"You got sumthing else to say," a gruff voice snarled behind me, "or do we need to take this outside?"

We all turned - not in an obvious way but with that half-head-tilt when you're looking for the waitress or the nearest bathroom. The not-so-vague threat had come from what appeared to be a human-lemur hybrid. He had the body of a man but the snoot and crewcut of a prosimian. With just a few weeks' growth and some gel, he could've been the lead singer for a synth-heavy new wave cover band. He was sitting with two children, who looked like carbon copies of their father, sans the Navy tattoos and the pasty complexion from a lifetime of Pabst and unfiltered cigarettes.

His face was trembling with fury, the veins throbbing in his neck. And he was looking squarely at me. Not anybody else at my table, all of whom had made equally reprehensible comments about fictional princesses. No, he had singled out me, and his flaring nostrils made me think of a bull preparing to charge. One more display of obscenity - just the whisper of "hirsute beavers" escaping my lips - and I was sure he'd grab me by the hair and pull me outside for a proper throttling.

If I thought it would've helped, there was a lot I could've said in my defense. I'm sure this meathead thought he was protecting his children, but I really hadn't said anything explicitly crude. I hadn't used the "p" word or the "c" word or even the "s" word. I trusted the intelligence of my audience enough not to spell it out for them. And honestly, if his kids knew what a Brazilian was, he had bigger parenting concerns than some loudmouth at a theme park.

But I didn't remind him of this irrefutable evidence. Instead, I just froze, avoided all eye contact with the tricep-flexing mongoloid, and prayed for a miracle. I'm not a fighter. I'm a curl-into-a-fetal-position-and-let-you-kick-my-kidneys-until-you-finally-walk-away-in-disgust kinda guy. "Holy crap," I thought. "I'm about to get my ass beaten at Disney World. I'm going to bleed to death in the happiest place on earth. What a crock!"

Thankfully, it never came to that. Violence was avoided, and not for any cunning on my part. It was courtesy of my four gay friends. I'd like to believe they understood that they'd gotten me into this mess and it was their obligation to get me out. How did they diffuse the tension? With pure tactical brilliance. It could have been ripped from the pages of Sun Tzu's Art of War. Rather than confront our lemur aggressor directly - which, let's be honest, just wasn't gonna happen. I love my gays, but they are not the kind of people who smash a bottle over a table and say, "You got a problem with my friend, then you got a problem me!" - they opted for a more shrewd strategy.

First, they ordered a round of fried mushrooms and martinis, ensuring that we would remain in the restaurant for at least another hour. And then they changed the subject to something less volatile, and perfectly impenetrable. They brought up topics that our harrier was incapable of responding to. As much as he wanted to start a fight, there was no way he could storm over to our table and scream, "Hey! Punk! Are you seriously suggesting that Don't Rain On My Parade is Streisand's best recording? Have you listened to Absent Minded Me recently? It's ridiculously underrated! Faggot!"

The hairy-knuckled lout and his li'l nippers eventually gave up on the idea of delivering swift and brutal justice to my deserving ass. Instead, they retreated to the anonymous masses outside, joining the battle for their fair share of overpriced levity. As for the gays and the Dame and I, we stayed for one more round - the day was a wash, so why not get soused? - and when we noticed that the sun was starting to go down, we set off for one final assignment before leaving the park.

It took our combined efforts, but we finally found an actress dressed like Pocahontas. And then we sent in the least threatening-looking gay to ask the question we were all dying to know:

"Does the carpet match the drapes?"

The answer... was both shocking and illuminating.

No, I'm not telling you. Her grooming habits were shared in confidence. I'm sorry, but some secrets you take to the grave.