See You Next Tabernacle

Fetish sheiks and oil freaks made for cheeks of beet red hues amongst the church pews.

Terror at the Tickle Party

Timid ticklers panicked as Paul pickled pigs' feet and Peter choked the parakeet.

Are There Vampires in America?

My latest spookfest "Are There Vampires in America?" is this week's featured story on Schlock!

Bugaboo Bongo Babylon

Masticating maniacs and ovulating lumberjacks violated my venereal velocity with Venezuelan voraciousness, pounding Caracas bongos under the influence of Bacchus or the aphrodisiacs of the Angolan Kongos.

The Dosing Man

Dreary, hallucinogenic days of Tangiers, that haunted and horrid Moroccan locale which dwells below strata of euphoric nightmares. This was shortly after the Marrakesh Affair, an event that no doubt hastened my harrowing visit from the Dosing Man.

This was my third encounter with the Dosing Man, an entity also known in various anecdotal accounts as the Grinning Man. I remember first seeing that uniquely demonic face projecting a sort of child-like innocence nearly mongoloid in its absolution, and yet this façade concealed something quite dreadful. Some manner of unholy chicanery allowed this bluff which would fool all but the most naïve or devious - the only sort that truly perceive deception.

I am not naïve but I do possess deviousness in spades. My cruel cunning alerted me to the curt nature of his veneer – the cut of his jib sent out a violent vibe that offended every psychic component of my consciousness.

A regular sized man with a stupidly grinning mouth and persistently arched eyebrows inhabiting a region just south of a precipitous gulf of pale and unruffled skin. This unnaturally smooth dermatological expanse interrupted abruptly by a shock of red hair so bright and colorful as to offend ones' eyes and insult the visual spectrum.

On the eve of my third encounter I had arranged a discreet meeting with an ex-Stasi collaborator that had witnessed a UFO crash in the Sachsen region of East Germany. We were to meet in an abandoned warehouse on a pier on the outskirts of Tangiers. This meeting never occurred.

I made the mistake of visiting a depraved expat dive in a notorious district of Tangiers populated exclusively by the vilest and most corrupt aspects of both East and West. I had been guzzling spoiled but potent Algerian wine whenever I spotted the Dosing Man. My bleary and dazed eyes, already beginning to dilate from an intrusive and foreign substance, locked with the inhuman pupils of the grim phantom of uninvited bad trips. His smile, obnoxious in its contrived chastity, vanished quickly into a gallery of shadows provided by a moonless Tangiers night.

I had been chatting with a bloated member of the Turkish consulate whenever I heard the high pitched wailing of a diminutive figure floating lazily on a Lilliputian rowboat in my drink, a sharecropping anthropomorphic cricket that sung shrill folk songs about life in the oppressive 4th dimension. Its tiny, black spindly legs struggling futilely with paddles on a miniscule boat in the midst of an imposing maelstrom.

I was startled by my Turkish cohort and brought back to a swirling reality of menacing lights and long extinct guttural languages. I experienced a particularly paranoid vibration from my toes to my scalp, the beginning of a hellish freak-out that ended four days later.

A mostly benevolent Finnish arms dealer found me raving in the streets and talked me down from one of the darkest trips I had ever experienced, excepting of course my previous encounters with the Dosing Man.

I hobbled back to my hotel the following evening mostly sane but still hearing the Devil’s whispering blasphemous sweet psychic nothings . To this day I still occasionally experience technicolor night terrors from this third episode with the Dosing Man.

My East German UFO witness had long vanished, no doubt spirited to one of many gulags on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, their story banished into oblivion.

The Spangles

Syphilitic sycophants suckle on the Spangles, cellophane tangles as the acid drop dangles.