NEWSLETTER

My Mom The Cokehead
When I was eight years old my mom started getting into coke big time. She went from a little-town shitty job to a big-city executive job for a huge company and I guess it was too much for her. In less than two years, she got divorced from my father and started fucking around like there was no tomorrow. She met this guy from Norway and they got married. Both were doing tons of coke every day. My mom got fired from her job because she stole a lot of money. The Norwegian never had a job to begin with, so we ran out of money and they started selling everything: First the jewelry, then fancy clothes and furniture. Eventually, they basically sold everything we had, so we were living with two sets of clothes each and a bed. We ate nothing but potatoes for months.

Then the electricity was cut so we were living in this flat that looked to me like a medieval castle (at least that’s what I thought in order to maintain some semblance of sanity). One day I came back from school and I realized something was different. The house was full of candles and smelled really weird. My mom and her husband took me into the master room and told me how they’d figured out what was happening in our lives. Cocained out of their fucking minds, they explained that they were Jesus Christ and St. Michael reincarnated and everything was a test from God to see if we were able to understand the sublime life that was waiting for us after this hard period. They then told me to keep it a secret because the CIA was on our backs. According to Jesus, aka my mother’s husband, there was this big plot wherein the US sent the CIA to kill Jesus (him) because he knew about all sorts of national secrets and conspiracies. Apparently, they had installed cameras and microphones all around the house and secret agents were following us all the time. Their solution was that we had to stay confined in that room waiting for the miracle to happen—basically until some magic stuff came to rescue us.

All presenter photos by Patrick O’Dell. Styling by Sara McCormack. Isabel: Saks Fifth Avenue dress, Toujour Toi earrings, vintage pin.

I decided straight away that I was moving to my father’s, but they wouldn’t let me out of the room. After some verbal violence, Jesus and my mother realized that I had been working for the CIA since the beginning, so they kind of let me leave on the condition that I would never see them again. I still keep it this way and, besides the occasional panic attack, I’m doing pretty well.

TELIS LANKERG


Glasgow Brothers
About 40 years ago I went out drinking in Glasgow with some friends. When I got home my older brother Allan was there smoking and watching TV. He was 22 and I was, I guess, 21 at the time and, though he was a year older than me, he was much smaller. I was always fighting his battles for him.

For whatever reason I started niggling Allan and calling him a poof and doing whatever I could to get a rise out of him. The more I annoyed him the angrier he got until finally he threatened to hit me. I laughed and said, “On you go. Take a swing.” He stood back and swung as hard as he could and bashed me right in the face. I was quite drunk so it really didn’t hurt. After I got up, I laughed again and told him, “That was pathetic.” Then I taunted him some more and added, “Come on, you can do better than that.” He did. This time he ran at me and used the entire force of his albeit slight build to knock me over. I got up rolling my eyes in disgust. I was getting a little bit sore at this point, but not enough apparently, and so I told Allan I hadn’t even noticed his last attack. He punched me again, this time right on the tip of my nose. I don’t remember it breaking or much else from that night, but my sisters told me it went on for at least twenty minutes.

The next morning I woke up with my face stuck to the pillow. He had pulverized me—at my insistence really. My entire face was a bloody mess of pulp and hardened scabs. I had two black eyes that were almost completely swollen shut. My ears were encrusted with blood and my mouth didn’t even look like a mouth. It was more of a swollen hole. Evidently Allan was not the wimp I thought he was.

That afternoon I had a date with a girl I’d been seeing (who is now the mother of my two grown boys) and I had no idea how I was going to conceal the damage. I tried sunglasses and a hat, but it didn’t do much. She was mortified when she saw me and wanted to end the relationship right then until I explained that a gang had attacked me. It worked.

Later I told Allan I was going to murder him in retaliation. I didn’t actually intend to do anything, I just wanted to worry him. It was a cruel sort of mental torture but I felt he had taken advantage of me. I was an asshole. I guess I still am.

JIMMY ROAN


Corpse Prank
My great grandmother on my mom’s side grew up in the late 19th century in Columbia, Missouri, where the University of Missouri is. When she was around 16 or 17, there was a slightly older guy named Robert she was courting or whatever they called it who had come into town alone a few years earlier and become the apprentice of the local undertaker.

It’d been legal for anatomy schools to perform dissections on human bodies since the 1850s, but corpses had to come from people who specifically willed themselves to science or who were indigents with no next of kin. While this might have satisfied demand at, say, NYU, keep in mind that Missouri in the 1890s was still basically the frontier, which meant there wasn’t exactly a steady glut of tramp stiffs for med students to practice on. So, every so often right before a burial, Robert’s boss would get a coded note from one of the professors at the medical school expressing his “sincerest sympathy” for the bereaved, hint hint hint.

After the funeral, they’d lower the coffin and start filling in the grave like normal, but as soon as night fell they’d clear out what they’d put back in, pop the corpse out of its box, slide it into a long burlap sack, then deposit it right outside the cemetery fence at the top of a hill right above the road to the college. Then one of the school custodians, an old black guy called Ol’ Tom or something similarly patronising, would ride up in a cart, drop a little bag with the payment by the fence, then haul the body down the hill and back to the school.

One night after setting up a body and heading home (and probably drinking a shitload), Robert decided to be hilarious. He snuck over to my great grandma’s, woke her up, then brought her and another buddy of his over to the drop spot under promise of the funniest prank they’d ever see. His buddy helped him get the corpse out of the bag and hid it away behind some shrubs or whatever, then helped him get all sacked up and laid out proper.

When Tom came up to get the body, Robert held his breath and stayed as still as possible until he’d picked him up and started walking back to the cart. At that point he started thrashing around and saying something corny like, “Put me down easy, Tom,” or “Don’t go rattlin’ my bones” (accounts vary).

Scared absolutely shitless, Tom flung Robert—in sack—down the hill, breaking both his legs. Robert died a week later from the injuries, and Tom somehow got pinned for the entire operation and sent to jail. Oh, those gay 90s.

TED BURTON


CONTINUED:
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