Beardie Takes Manhattan! (part two)

(To read part one of Beardie's exploits in Gotham, go here.)



Wake up, sleepy head! It's time for another day in New York.... Come on, Beardie, stop playing around. We know you're not really sleeping.... Beardie?.... Beardie?!... Beardie, what's wrong? Are you okay?.... Oh my god, he's so cold. I can't find a pulse! He's dead!! Beardie is dead!! No, no, no, no, no!! How did this happen? We never should have let him sleep alone in the park! It's all our fault! We'll never forgive ourselves for.... Wait a minute, Beardie doesn't have a circulatory system, so why would he.... ? No pulse....? Oh come on! Ha ha ha, very funny, Beardie. You're a jackass.


YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE EVERY GOOD REASON TO FEEL TREPIDATIOUS ABOUT FOLLOWING BEARDIE INTO THAT DARK ALLEY. AND IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHY... KEEP ON READIN' AND FIND OUT!


Beardie feels a kinship with New York, because New Yorkers are rude and surly and impatient, and just like Beardie, they've never encountered a problem they didn't think could be fixed with shoving.

While waiting for the subway, a fellow commuter decided that Beardie was infringing on his personal space, so he gave Beardie a shove. He didn't shove me, the sentient being holding Beardie. He shoved Beardie... a doll. And then he told Beardie — again, not me, but Beardie — to fuck off.

If you needed another reason to believe that New York is the greatest city on the planet, this should pretty much do it. God bless Manhattan. Say what you will about the inhabitants of this dirty, congested island, but they don't take guff from old man dolls.



Beardie isn't easily impressed by tourist must-sees like the Statue of Liberty — "If I wanted to crawl up inside a spiky-haired chick with pyromania and no panties," Beardie told us, "I'd go Brooklyn". Instead, he took us to the Strand, one of New York's finest independent bookstores.

Believe it or not, Beardie is a lover of literature. Spend a few hours in the Strand with him and you'll learn all sorts of fun book trivia. Did you realize, for instance, that The Anarchist Cookbook has a whole lot more than just instructions on building homemade explosives? If you know where to look, you can also find a killer recipe for Gazpacho. Also, the paperback edition of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung apparently contains an entire chapter devoted to kittens. Strange but true. If it wasn't for Beardie, we never would have known that Lord Byron once published a collection of poems about truck stop glory holes.

Beardie is like a walking encyclopedia of things that aren't true but really should be.



Beardie always like to check out the "small press" section, just see if they've got any copies of his long out-of-print but still timeless self-published chapbook William Howard Taft Gave Me Mouth Herpes: And Other True Stories and Poems. It's a classic, even if a good third of it was cribbed from Ulysses. (Here's a fun fact: Beardie and James Joyce were both creative writing majors at the same community college, where they once collaborated on a 70,000-word epic poem about a baby unicorn named Sprinkles.)



Beardie decided to read up on Napoleon's life, just to find out if his therapist's been insulting him when he insists that Beardie has a "Napoleon Complex". He enjoyed all the sieging and bloodlust — in high school, Beardie was voted "Mostly Likely to Stage a Coup D'état" — but he was a little concerned about the Big N's less impressive legacy. Beardie is now convinced that his therapist thinks he has a small penis. Either that or he suspects Beardie's schlong was stolen by a Vienna physician and sold to a black-market collector — which, fine, is sorta true, but that was just a college prank gone awry and Beardie eventually bought it back at auction.



Beardie gets a little wistful whenever he watches children ice skating in Central Park. It's partly because it brings up bad memories from his childhood, and how his father forbid him from becoming a professional figure skater — in his prime, Beardie could do a lutz jump that was so precise, he could slice off a cancerous mole deli-thin — and forced him to get into the family venison-jerky business.

Beardie also gets wistful because it just reminds him about that stupid restraining order, requiring him to be no less than 30 meters away from all children under the age of 18 in the state of New York. Make one mistake in a van with the windows blocked out in a school zone and you'll pay for it the rest of your life.



Did you know that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is more commonly referred to as the Met? Beardie didn't. And did you know that the Met and the New York Mets are two entirely different things? It was news to Beardie. And were you aware that if you walk into the Met and demand to know where they're storing the skeleton of Yogi Berra, and when they try to restrain you it just makes you start screaming "Don't touch me or I'll cut you like Kevin Mitchell's cat," you're gonna spend a few hours in the museum's holding cell? I know, weird, right? Beardie was as surprised as you are.



Beardie was unimpressed by Monet. He thought it was supposed to be one of those stereogram magic-eye paintings. "My eyes can't get any more unfocused and I still don't see any goddamn spaceship," Beardie growled. "This is the lamest optical illusion I've ever seen. Don't quit your day job, Claude."



Beardie was really digging this painting until he realized it was a Picasso and not another masterpiece by his old pal John Wayne Gacy.

"When it comes to clown art, there ain't nobody who does it better than my man Pogo," Beardie told us. "This Pablo jagoff should stick to the Cubism and leave the clown-painting to the real artists."



Yes, Beardie agrees, the resemblance is uncanny. Also, take a good whiff of Beardie's forehead. Smell familiar? If we're not mistaken, Beardie has the distinct odor of moldy limestone.



Beardie endured room after room of overhyped trash and grade-school finger-painting before finally stumbling upon something that spoke to him: Rousseau's "Forest in Winter at Sunset".

"It reminds me of a place where German children might get lost and eventually eaten by witches," Beardie remarked. "God how I miss my hometown. I wonder how Mutter is faring against the winter frost."



Beardie wants to make one thing perfectly clear. When he said that he wanted to give this naked male statue a "massage", he didn't mean to imply that he finds him in any way personally attractive, or that he's into black dudes, or that he's hypnotized by his washboard abs, or his taut, rippling forearms, or his serpentine cock, and he certainly has no interest in burying his face between his sinewy buttcheeks and making motorboat sounds.

Beardie just appreciates a good piece of ass... art, art, he meant art, dammit!



What a pleasant surprise! Beardie ran into a pair of his old war buddies, "Shaky" Franklin and Clemson "Dizzy" Pete. They reminisced about their summer at that POW camp, where they played countless games of Russian roulette ("Remember when Dusty shot himself?" Beardie laughed. "Oh man, what a nut that guy was!") and cried themselves to sleep in their mud beds. They talked about which of their old friends were dead, which ones were dying, and who among them could still "get it up". And then, when they'd exhausted all possible topics, they just stared at their feet and said nothing, occasionally punching each other in the shoulder and muttering "Good to see you again, faggot."

Beardie enjoyed the reunion, but was relieved it was short-lived. "That was fucking awkward," he whispered to us when his friends were out of earshot. "They both looked so ashen and sickly. And what the hell was that growing out of Dizzy's back? Looked like a tumor to me."



So ladies, if the butt is round
And you wanna triple-X throw down
Dial 1-900-BEARDIE
And kick them nasty thoughts
Baby got back!

Yeah, that's right, you heard what Beardie was singing. And don't pretend you don't like it, either. What's that sound? Beep-beep-beep-beep. I'm pretty sure that's the sound of you backin' that ass up.

Thank you, Georges Seurat. The art world's consummate ass man.



Beardie ain't no art critic, but he knows what he likes. And nothing makes him smile like the chance to make inappropriate boob jokes.

"What did one saggy boob say to the other saggy boob?" Beardie asked, loud enough for the entire museum to hear. "'If we don't get some support soon, people are going to think we're nuts!' Get it? Nuts! Like testicles! The boobs are starting to look like a ballsack! Get it?"

Yeah, we get it, Beardie. Why does it not surprise us that you're still single?



"Now when I say she has a 'nice rack', you know I'm not talking about lamb, right?"

Yeah, Beardie, we assumed as much. You have noticed that nobody else is laughing at these jokes, right?

"I bet she knows all about Einstein's Theory of Relative Titty."

Could be. Listen, are you about finished? Those security guards over there are glaring at us and one of them has been talking into his wrist. I think it's only a matter of time before-

"If she was an Olympic swimmer, I bet she'd win the gold in the breast stroke."

Okay, fine, carry on.



"The only way to tell if those peaches are ripe is by squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezing them."

Actually, Beardie, I think they're supposed to be apples.

"I have a breasted interest in this painting."

You don't have any idea what you're looking at anymore, do you Beardie?

"You better be careful. Somebody's just set a boobie trap for you!"

Gotcha. We'll be down at the gift shop. Just come find us when you tucker yourself out.



It took all day, but Beardie finally found some art that combined his two favorite things: Catholics and single mothers.



Beardie is getting sick and tired of all the insinuations about his sexuality. First of all, he was just lingering near this particular exhibit because he has a special fondness for ancient Greek sculpture. If he was standing a little too close, it's only because he was admiring the craftsmanship and attention to detail. And for the record, Beardie can't help it that he's short, and the sculpture's penis just so happened to be at eye level. Next time, rather than casting aspersions, why doncha help a brutha out and give Beardie a boost?

He will admit, however, that he might've been whistling at the stone schlong, and maybe even blowing on it. "I was just trying to coax it out of its shell," Beardie said with an impish smile. "Didn't realize all those Greeks had Napoleon dicks. Oh, snap! That's right, bitches, I totally went there!"



After an afternoon of goddamn culture, Beardie relaxed at his favorite pizza joint in Midtown, which also happened to be a popular hangout for C-list celebrities. Nothing puts Beardie in his happy place like eating a slice of New York pie while gazing at a signed photo of Billy Baldwin.

Actually, Beardie never touched his pizza. But he did stare into Baldwin's baby blue eyes for almost an hour, until management finally asked him to leave because he was "freaking out the other customers".

Poor Beardie. Still so misunderstood.



Beardie woke up on his last day in New York feeling a little melancholy. He wasn't ready to end his vacation, but at least he was going home with a head full of memories. Also, a satchel full of cash (Bernie Madoff spent a small fortune on Beardie's dried fruit figurines), Joey Ramone's brain in a jar of formaldehyde (thanks, former CBGB's employee with a lot of gambling debts), and a tapeworm the size of a labradoodle (thanks for nothing, halal food cart on 43rd and Lexington).

Goodbye, New York. Beardie's going to miss your dirty air and your non-English-speaking cab drivers and your Kong-proof skyscrapers. He's going to miss your mole people and your gullible tourists and your Giuliani mistresses on the rebound. ("Oh, don't cry! You'll rust so dreadfully.") And Jew-run media, Beardie thinks he'll miss you most of all.

Beardie Takes Manhattan!

(To read the first two installments of Beardie's continuing adventures, go here and then here.)



Beardie traveled to New York by train, because he won't step foot on a plane anymore. "They're lousy with al-Qaeda operatives," he told us. "Hiding in the bathrooms, peering at you from the complimentary peanuts, bogarting the emergency exit seats. And they're all armed to the teeth with box cutters and shampoo bottles bigger than three ounces."

Beardie feels much more comfortable with trains, because as he understands it, Muslim terrorists are afraid of one thing and one thing only: railroad bandits.

"It was a hot topic at last year's Curmudge-Con," Beardie explained to us. "Trust me, nobody's gonna hijack a train and fly it into the World Trade Center."

Well yeah, sure, but... oh never mind.


BEARDIE'S VAGABOND SHOES ARE LONGIN' TO STRAY. ALSO, HE WANTS YOU TO KEEP ON READIN'!


Hailing a cab in New York ain't easy, especially when you're just eight inches tall, your pants are held up with a rubber band, and you have no visible pockets. Also, it doesn't help when some giggling mongoloid has grabbed you by the ankles and is waving you at oncoming traffic like a scepter, screaming "Beardie needs a ride!! Beardie needs a ride!!"

Seriously, Beardie, how many times do I need to say I'm sorry?



Beardie likes to hang out in Midtown, just in the hopes that a tourist will walk up to him and ask, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" And then he can say, "Practice, practice, practice... blowing the conductor."

Beardie never tires of that timeless chestnut.



One of Beardie's favorite things about visiting New York is harassing the Jew-run media.

"Hey, liberal elite," Beardie yelled at the aristocrat editors up in their ivory tower. "Here's a new headline for you. 'Terrorist-Loving Aborted Fetus Who Doesn't Support the Troops Gets Gay Married in a Glitzy Hollywood Ceremony Paid For With Taxpayer Money!' You can have that one for free!"

They never responded, but Beardie knew they were up there, hiding under their desks and stewing in their granola-crunching, tree-hugging juices, stunned that a civilian could have so easily decoded the liberal agenda.



"Hey, East Village restaurant mascot! You want to make $5 the hard way? I can think of a few places you could stick that thumb."

C'mon, Beardie, let's keep it family-friendly!



Beardie loves New York dining, but he was shocked at how empty many of the restaurants were. And not just the ones run by immergrints — where they try to make you eat monkey brains and Kung Pao poodle — but the good ones, too. It was so bleak that Beardie almost felt a little guilty about slipping a pubic hair into his meal and demanding to get his bill comped.

Not guilty enough not to do it, of course, but just kinda sad and wistful.

"Hey, have you seen the price for a plate of foie gras at Bouley?" Beardie reminded us. "Unless I'm shitting out gold later, I ain't paying."



Although it was only his first day in New York, Beardie was already out of money. (Apparently having "this-is-a-one-time-thing" sex with a male prostitute dressed like a cowboy costs a lot more than it did in 1969.) So Beardie decided to get some extra spending cash the way the locals do; by rolling tourists in the park.

Beardie waited under a bridge for what felt like the entire afternoon, and the most he had to show for his efforts was $16, tickets to a Guys & Dolls matinee, and some guy's index finger. (Yeah, yeah, he knows. Beardie has a problem with his temper.)



Times have changed and Beardie realizes he needs to adapt to survive. The real money isn't in assaulting pedestrians, whose fanny packs are as empty as their 401(k)s. You want to make some real fat cash in 2009, it's all about stalking and robbing television personalities.

Beardie lurked outside the NBC building and waited for Tina Fey to either come to or leave work (he knows celebri-queers keep odd hours). When he saw her, he was gonna grab one of her Emmys and just start running. He figured it'd fetch a hefty price on the black market. If nothing else, he could melt it down to gold coins and use them to buy magic beans.

If she didn't happen to be carrying one of her awards, Beardie had a Plan B. He'd somehow convince her to invite him back to her place for a sleepover, and they'd stay up all night drinking root beer floats and making homemade falafels and getting into hummus and cucumber fights and watching Molly Ringwald movies and drunk-dialing their exes and crying about their fathers.

It wouldn't help his financial mess, but Beardie just needs a girls' night out.



Beardie isn't as sickened as some people by the "Disneyfication" of Times Square. Sure, the porn palaces are gone and there aren't as many trannie hookers on every corner (and those that are still around won't take personal checks anymore). But even though Beardie has fond memories of the neighborhood's sleazy heyday — he shared a Times Square apartment with Al Goldstein during the early 70s — Beardie insists that you can still get a cheap thrill if you know where to look.

Sometimes, Beardie told us, if you ask real nice, a Wisconsin tourist will give you a handjob in the alley behind Planet Hollywood. And best of all, they don't charge you "New York prices".



Because of his greenback shortage, Beardie ended up sleeping in the park on his first night in New York. It wasn't nearly as bad as it sounds. It was definitely cold, and Beardie had to construct a makeshift blanket with whatever he could find in the trash, and at some point he was challenged by a gang of homeless miscreants to "drink a bunch of water and find out who's pee is the clearest" (which Beardie won, of course, leading to his crowning as the new "King of the Central Park Hobos"), and somewhere around 4am he stumbled upon a dead body and decided to cut it open like a Tauntaun and sleep in its guts for warmth but he discovered that the body had already been hollowed out and inhabited by a family of very aggressive and "bitey" squirrels.

So, you know, it wasn't really all that different from a night in any three-star New York hotel.



Beardie's a big fan of the subway. Not only is it cheap and convenient, but it's great for games of make-believe. As the subway speeds through underground tunnels, Beardie likes to look out the window and pretend he's Captain Bill Owens from Fantastic Voyage, spiraling through an artery in his miniaturized submarine as he's chased by angry white blood cells.

Also, when the subways are crowded, Beardie likes to press his genitals against unsuspecting old ladies. "Hey, is that a roll of subway tokens or is Beardie just happy to see you?"



Beardie would've loved to get a few souvenirs, but he's learned the hard way never to touch anything sold by a New York street vendor without first inspecting it with an ultraviolet black light. Most of the t-shirts have more semen and blood stains than the Shroud of Turin.



Beardie was sure to get tickets to see a taping of The Late Show, if only to see his old drinking buddy David "Big Tuna" Letterman again. Funny story, Beardie was indirectly responsible for the gap in Letterman's smile. Because of court orders, Beardie is unable to go into specifics. But let's just say that if you're hanging out with a not-yet-famous talk show host and the two of you have been drinking mojitos all night and you somehow get into a skirmish with some Puerto Ricans and one of them shoots said talk show host in the ass and he won't let you take him to the emergency room because he's violating his parole and doesn't want to involve the cops so you agree to take out the bullet with a rusty pair of pliers in a Hell's Kitchen motel bathroom and you tell him "I'm not gonna lie to you, this is gonna hurt like a motherfucker," and you give him a piece of wood to bite down on because you don't have any anesthesia other than what's left of the mojitos (and some morphine that you're saving for a special occasion), make sure you remind him to bite length-wise not width-wise.



When Beardie needed to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city, he went to the park and gazed dreamily at the duck pond. But it turned ugly when he overheard a few of the ducks squawking, and he swore they were saying "Barack! Barack!" That just set Beardie off.

"I suppose you think the only way to stimulate the economy is with massive government spending?" he asked them. "That is so typical of flightless liberal waterfowl!"

"Barack, Barack," replied the ducks.

"You can't be serious," Beardie yelled back. "The only fiscal policy that can truly boost economic growth is to lower taxes and allow businesses to be self-regulating!"

"Barack, Barack," the ducks retorted.

After a brief tussle in the pond — Beardie took on the duck's leader, who he thought bore more than a passing resemblance to Nancy Pelosi — he was escorted from the park by security.



"Would I like to see Mama Mia tonight? Well gosh oh golly, I sure would, but I already have a prior commitment to fellate Bob Fosse's corpse. Of course I don't want to fucking see Mama fucking Mia! Get the fuck away from me!"



It took some convincing to get Beardie to see Wicked with us. We had to repeatedly assure him that attending a musical based on The Wizard of Oz did not automatically make him a "friend of Dorothy" (though we were curious how he even knew about that euphemism in the first place).

He eventually agreed when we told him that Wicked was actually the story of legalized prostitution in Amsterdam, and a hooker with a heart of gold whose skin turns green because of a nasty (and untreated) case of chlamydia.

"How are they gonna pull this off?" Beardie giggled as we entered the theater. "What even rhymes with chlamydia? Unless they've got a lot of characters named Lydia, they're screwed! They should've gone with Hepatitis C. It's so much easier to write songs about."



Beardie was initially disappointed by the lack of STDs in Wicked. But after the first act, the usually stoic old fogey revealed that even he has a tender side that isn't afraid to cry at musicals.

"Where did they get such wonderful flying monkeys?" Beardie whimpered, a single tear trickling down his yellow cheek.

Awww, Beardie, you big softie!



"All the animals come out at night," Beardie muttered to himself during the cab ride home. "Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."

Don't be alarmed. Beardie may like nothing more than to shave his hair into a mohawk and do something really stupid and violent to impress Jodie Foster, but he's got bigger fish to fry at the moment. Namely, how to get the hell out of this taxi without paying his fare. Hmmm, maybe a handful of pubes will do the trick.

(Yes, there's more. Come back next week for more of Beardie's adventures in New York. And then come back in another two weeks for some actual stories and not just a bunch of blurry photos of an old man doll.)