Freakshow Magazine Online!

  (Authors Note: This is a true story. The names have NOT been changed to protect the innocent, because no one in this story was innocent)… It’s fascinating what happens when you think you are about to die… The first time it happened to me (What?...Look- I have a past so checkered you could lay it on a kitchen table and serve Christmas dinner on it) was in September of 1980. I was with a band called Anthem, the first all-original band I put together, the first time I produced music in a recording studio; four extremely crazy, angry guys playing really loud and really fast. We had just released our first album and were playing at the album release party. The bass player, the singer, and I were 20 years old. The drummer, Mark, was 17 and still in high school. Three of us were fairly experienced in the Grand Art Of Partying (just say no, kids!) but the drummer couldn’t hold his own yet. Still, when sober, he played like The Who’s great drummer, Keith Moon. He was fantastic. We ha

(The story so far: Marge suspects she is pregnant with Kevin's baby, while Murphy is planning a coup and toppling Herb from his position at Moonbat & Stein. Meanwhile, Angie is in jail for...wait, that's a different story. THIS story involves my father, after recovering from a heart attack, decides to take my brother and myself on a fishing expedition into the Canadian wilds. This decision, already fraught with problems, starting with having to fly to the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from anyone else, in a Buddy Holly Memorial Death-Plane, gets instantly worse when my father forgets to take our food off the airplane. We rejoin the three drunken idiots desperately trying to catch something...ANYTHING...to eat.) By day three, the situation had turned grim. The company that ran the fishing “expeditions” had three canoes for their clients to use. We put the first one into the water and it immediately sank. In the second canoe, some enterprising wasps had built an impres

When my Father presented his plan to fly to the middle of nowhere in Canada for a fishing trip, my brother Mike and I knew that is would be a disaster: hilarious when the story would be told years from the event if we survived, but a disaster nonetheless. Mike and I were in our late twenties, and my Father was in his fifties, already carrying a lot of weight even for his 6’1” frame, and he just recovered from his first heart attack. The experience of going through a major life changing scare like a heart attack inspired him to want to have a “Men Only “week with his two sons. “Well, I tell you this,” said my brother as he blew the smoke from the last drag of his cigarette before flicking the butt in the yard as we stood on the back porch, discussing our misgivings about the trip we reluctantly agreed to. “If the old man dies on this trip” he said as he looked at me and grinned,  ”YOU’LL have to dig the hole!” I wasn’t happy about that. By this point, Dad was tipping the scales at