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Mar. 2nd, 2005
Lenny, Lord of the Hatchback Boom
Mar. 2nd, 2005 02:26 pmHere it be, folks: the latest episode (#32921) of Storytime with Uncle Pegritz--a tale so shocking, so mindnumbing, and so completely pointless that it could theoretically make the freshly-pickled corpse of Hunter S. Thompson leap up from his dirt nap and morph into a gigantic Japanese lizard intent on destroying southwestern Pennsylvania. Well...not really, but c'mon--you know you're champing at the bit for more of that sweet, sweet sarcastic Pegritz goodness, right? Well, then! Open wide, 'cause here comes the train headed for the tunnel:
Lenny. My boy Lenny....Actually, his name is Gerald, I think--but his dad's name is Lynn, so folks started calling him Lynny...but I'll be damned if I ever heard it any way other than "Lenny," so Lenny thou shalt remain, O my brother! Lenny was a good cat: oftimes funny as hell, nice and laid-back, and just amusing to know. Mainly for incidents just like the one which I am now about to relate unto you. There's a whoooooooooole lot that could be said about Lenny, but I think this li'l vignette speaks volumes.
Lenny liked car audio. Well...more than liked--for a while, he was downright obsessed with the fine art of buying up superexpensive, oversized woofers and spiky little squeakin' tweeters and jamming them into cars so that when one fed such a system a Digital Underground CD and cranked up the volume, the BASS was enough to hum the bolts right out of the car's frame. Lenny didn't even have a car at one point, but that didn't stop him from buying up fusion-powered amplifiers, goldplated and double-insulated imported Italian RCA cables, subwoofers engineered from reverse-engineered alien technology recovered from the crash of that Reticulan hot rod at Roswell. Since he didn't have a vehicle to wrap around all this equipment, it sat in the corner of his bedroom like the Ark of the Covenant in that government warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark...a golden pile of sacred audio technology just waiting for a chariot to house its Nazi-melting 500-watts-per-channel POWER.
Needless to say, we all poked fun at Lenny for his car-less collection of car audio materiel, but a man's got to have a hobby, and just as many peopled poked fun at my obsessive collecting of pens or CDs. Eventually, though, Lenny did acquired a car and set about stuffing it with his devices. One day, I found him working on it out front of his grandfather's trailer. His car--a small, dusty red hatchbacked Malibu, sat in the dirt-and-gravel drive that looped in front of his Pap's trailer, its hatch flipped up, doors hanging open, their inner panels wrenched off to reveal a convoluted parenchyma of metal from which various wires and cables dangled like dry veins. In the hatchback sat a gleaming, regal cube of...diamond? A glittery, clear chunk of some rare element in which several large oblongs of dark gray metal were suspended like prehistoric flies trapped in magickal ice. Lenny was bent over the cube, his legs barely touching the ground as he operated within the depths of the trunk beside that glorious chunk of crystal.
"Hey, Lenny," I yelled as I approached. "What the hell is that thing supposed to be?"
"My new subwoofer box!" Lenny crowed as he extricated himself and indicated the box with a flourish. "It's a custom-made clear fiberglass subwoofer crate that I got in Morgantown." Up close, the container honestly did look like the aforementioned Ark of the Covenant sculpted out of pristine glass. The huge speakers inside it hung with their bass-blasting maws pointed downward, wirecrusted dorsal surfaces poking through the box's lid. A deep hollow like a gigantic, 300-gauge piercing hole ran through the box and all manner of cabling spilled out of it and disappeared into the dirty red carpeting of the trunk like so many radioactive nightcrawlers digging themselves into a lawn. The box was specially constructed with a number of interior baffles and sweeping shoulders of handpoured plexiglass that would funnel the monstrous output of two Pioneer 12" subwoofers through the seatback and right into the back of the passenger's skulls for maximum bass-kickin' fidelty. He'd just picked up the box yesterday and had already tested it out on the front porch of Pap's trailer. "Pegritz," Lenny breathed, eyes wide as the subwoofers' mouths with excitement, "Pegritz...it sounds so amazing. I only had it cranked up to, like, eight on the volume dial and the subs were knocking stuff off my grandma's shelves on the other side of the house!"
"You know, Lenny," I reminded him, "if you hit someone with a low enough frequency at a loud enough volume, you'll make their butt-sphincter let go and they'll shit themselves in your car."
"Dude, if my system won't make someone shit themselves, I don't know what will!"
Wellllllll...okay, there, Lenny--if you want your Malibu smelling like mookie, that was okay by me. Lenny didn't mention how much the fiberglass box cost him, and I wasn't pert enough to ask, but I knew it had to be a lot: it was transparent factory-grade fiberglass, custom cut and custom molded. I ciphered up a cost of at least $3000. Where Lenny got the money, I couldn't tell you then, but it wasn't drugs or anything like that. I later found out he just got it from his grandfather, who kept the boy's pockets forever lined with unearned cash. But anyway.
Lenny then proceeded to show me the amplifier that the wormy wires from the subwoofer box plugged into. It lay in the footwell of the back seat right behind the driver's throne, a weird oblong of ridged golden metal that looked a great deal like the heatsinks you'll find riding on the backs of most processors inside computers these days. "Try to pick it up," Lenny told me. It looked like it weighed...oh, ten or twelve pounds--but when I attempted to even work my fingers beneath its body I realized the fucking thing had to weigh more than the gigantic fiberglass monstrosity wedged into the little trunk behind the seats. "500 plus watts of power!" Lenny crowed. He'd gotten the amplifier, a Bose, a year or so before, had bought it slightly used from a friend who'd special-ordered it from some Californian car-audio-specialists' catalogue. Lenny had gotten it for a steal at just under $600.
Next up: the front speakers. Lenny wasn't putting particularly grand speakers into the dash and the doors, just some Pioneers he'd gotten through another catalogue for, like, $50 each--but they were each certified up to 200 watts apiece and he was connecting them to the amplifier with goldplated cords that wouldn't even hint at distortion until they were spurting out greater than 1000 watts through their nerves. The cables cost something around $100 or more all told--oh, and the two subwoofers lodged in that incredible ice-sculpture in the back? $250 a piece and that was a total steal, Pegritz: they market around $500 of so if you get them from a dealer.
Speakers ain't nothin' without a good stereo to feed them the proper jams, though, right? The stereo in question was chucked into the narrow little dash column of the Malibu like a gigantic black plastic bit shoved into a pony's mouth, all teeth knocked out just so the giant chock of knobs and flashing lights and scintillating green LED numbers could fit without splitting the gum-pink plastic of the dash wide open. AM/FM digital tuner,eight--eight!--programmable preset buttons, frontloading CD slot and internal three-disk changer, detachable faceplate (a fairly new security measure in that long-ago year of 1997), and a little remote control that you could clip right to your steering wheel so you'd never have to risk life and limb or exert the effort to shift a hand dashward to skip a track or change a channel. But that wasn't all! Beneath the stereo lay another big black box, this one with a Christmas-tree-colorful display of digital EQ lines, because that's exactly what it was: a digital EQ box that would dynamically equalize the output from the stereo in order to maintain a constant volume for all tracks and CDs before passing the refined, boosted, polished and chromed signal back to the ten-ton amplification power core lying behind the driver's seat. The EQ box also had a number of reverb/FX presets liek CHURCH and STADIUM to let you add a bit of real-world ambience to help you forget you're cruising along in a car and not actually sitting in a stadium the size of the Civic Arena, listening to Guns n' Roses blasted at you from a cannonade of skyscraping speakers. "All told," Lenny said, "the stereo was only $600, and the EQ was $200, so I got really good deals on both of those, as well."
"Impressive." And it was! I thought my stereo at home, a $165 Magnavox surround-sound system that I'd picked up one late night at Wal-Mart, was impressive...but it could barely eke out 200 watts of sound. I was aghast. Flummoxed! Astounded! Completely taken aback by how much Lenny had actually spent on stereo components for this little, beaten-up, third-hand car he'd acquired from a friend of a friend's dad (or something like that: the Malibu's pedigree was so confused not even Lenny could trace its lineage--Joe and I reasonably figured it had probably been stolen). I barely had the cash to keep my useless Hooptie running; this stereo system had cost more than my car was probably even worth.
"So....You wanna hear what it sounds like?"
Of course I did! I couldn't help but be curious to see what nearly $5000 worth of audio gear sounded like when crammed into the legroomless confines of a $2000 Chervy Malibu would sound like! I wondered if I really would shit my pants...and if so, would Lenny truly be proud of the fact that his car stereo opened the floodgates of my bowels all over his passenger-side seat? I sat down with a certain trepidation lurking in my guts, a feeling of heaviness down there that I at once hoped would end up all over Lenny's seats, just so I could laugh at the look his face would earn from it, but also dreaded, because if that happened I'd still have to drive home in my own car with trousers full of bass-frapped dung.
"Here we go," Lenny said, pushing a copy of Digital Underground's Sex Packets into the CD player. "'The Humpty Dance' is just what we need. Brace yourself!"
It hit. The second that a-doo-RAAAYyyy dooOO-RAY bassline kicked in I felt the calcium matrices in my bones began to shudder themselves to pieces as what I can only describe as a tsunami of sheer, unadulterated BASS came crashing into my back, a BASS eruption, tidal waves of BASS on which a faint hint of treble rode like so many tiny shiny pieces of tin surfing on that great world-destroying ocean of BASS being heaved up from the depths of the pitch-black Marianas Trench wherein dead Cthulhu lies dreaming of hiphop might in the strange, $4000 plexiglass architecture of R'Lyeh. Good gods...the BASS, THE BASS! It enveloped my head like an alien migraine trying to force its way into my skull through my ears, evil cephalopdian tentacles of sinewave bassline knotted with palpable tumors of kickdrum pushing at my eardrums and pounding into my viscera, shaking loose my heart from its parenchyma, massaging my intestines with earthquaking vibrations that, for a moment, I thought would inspire a diarrhea of musical terror until I viciously clamped my sphincter shut against the onslaught and braced myself for the fight. The rumble of bass shouting out of those two 12" woofers--which disappeared behind their own blurred outlines--smashed through the little Malibu with the force of an asteroid assault: the plastic in the dash and in the seat and in the doors crackled horribly with sympathetic vibration, and even the metal in the exposed car doors clanged occasionally as some raucous bass frequency rang it. You could just hear the tinkle of hihats and the slap of snares coming from the tweeters in the doors and dash, but Humpty Hump's hilarious vocals were completely swallowed in the BASS revelations of the Great Old Ones. This was the sound of the End of the World. This BASS was the clarion call of Cthulhu's revival, the sound that would crack the thin membrane between the worlds and let Yog-Sothoth and the Other Gods come pouring into our world. A plague of BASS was being born right here, right now, in the guts of this ratty old Chevy Malibu with its superexpensive sound system--I was already infected, and knew I'd feel its viral thrum still echoing like afterschocks through my bones and blood for days to come. BASS, motherfuckers! BASS!
Lenny fiddled with the EQ controls a bit but I couldn't tell any difference: the LED columns on the EQ box were sure going crazy, though, spiking up and down in vicious stabs like they were trying to thrust up right out of their confinement on the screen and stab the CD player that was feeding them such sonic torment. And the CD player wasn't even a quarter of the way toward full volume. "I only have it up to eight!" Lenny shouted through the universe of bass.
"OK, I'm suitably impressed!" I hollered back. "Now shut this damn thing off before I crap myself!"
When silence returned...it felt as though a dark continent had suddenly disappeared from the world, leaving a vast and empty wound in the world that filled slowly with the meager, cowed sounds of birds in the trees and cars slishing back and forth along Gallatin Avenue. For a few moments, I sat breathless, then heaved myself up out of the car into a world that felt wrapped in cotton. My ears felt stuffed with some kind of vaporous felt.
"That's pretty fucking impressive, Lenny."
"Yeah...Yeah, it is. Only one problem."
"What's that?"
Lenny walked around to the back of the Malibu and gently lowered the hatchback. The hatch only closed about two thirds of the way when it encountered the upper surface of the subwoofer crate. "I can't close the back when the subs are in there."
Wait a second here...."You mean...your subwoofer crate is too big for your car."
"Yeah."
"So...what are you going to do with it? Just bungee down the hatchback?"
"Are you kidding! Someone would steal that crate in a second if I left it in the Mall parking lot or something! I'm thinking I'll just have to take it out whenever I go anywhere."
"You're going to take it out when you actually go somewhere in your car."
"Yeah....I'm going to buy a couple of cheaper, smaller subs to mount in the back for when I go somewhere. I'll just leave the crate here at my Pap's place and put it in whenever I want to listen to it."
"You're going to leave your gigantic crate of subwoofer power here at your grandfather's place, and just toss it in the back of your car when...what, you're sitting out here in the driveway?"
"Well...yeah. I guess."
LENNY! My boy Lenny....Only Lenny would spend Four Grand on a car stereo that 1) wouldn't even fit in his car; and 2) was so loud it could literally shake Cthulhu out of bed! In future times, I would see Lenny and his girlfriend Rhonda cruising around Uniontown in that Malibu with its superpowered Justice League car stereo and its rudimentary bass speakers lying in the hatchback like vestigial organs: the "smaller" speakers still could kick out enough rumble that you could feel when Lenny drove past you. I would often come over to visit Lenny or his sister Jamie, who lived right next to Pap's trailer, and there I would see the Malibu sitting in the mud-and-gravel looparound driveway with its hatchback raised and that gleaming icecube of $3000 plexiglass sitting in the back, bass thrumming into the ground, cracking the dried mud beneath the car, while Lenny just sat in the driver's seat and grooved to whatever big-bass thunder he found appealing that day. As soon as he had to go somewhere, though--be it just down the street to Northside Market for a bottle of pop--he'd wrestle that ten-ton fiberglass crate out of the trunk and onto the porch of Pap's trailer, then he'd spend another ten or fifteen minutes reconnecting the cables from the subwoofer box to the smaller subs tucked into the trunk, and then he'd be off, much diminished, carrying around the ghost of that $3000 box in the back of his hatchback Malibu.
This was what started the ongoing joke that Lenny had severe penis envy, and made up for the fact of his small weiner by overcompensating with galaxy-powered car audio systems. Now, I have never seen Lenny's wang, and hopefully never will, but I can honestly say that Lenny was definitely making up for something with his obsession with boomer systems--and what he was making up for was nothing more nor less than living in Uniontown, Fayette County, where you had to make your own fun and fight for your right to party and enjoy life no matter how silly that fight might seem to others. Lenny squeezed meaning into his life just like he squeezed that giant stereo into his Malibu--car audio was his thing, the thing that kept him going day to day, that let him hook life out of the aether and channel it into a BASS monster explosion that declared "I am Lenny! Here me ROAR!" to the entire county. Sure, it was an uneasy fit...and the full power of it only ever emerged when he was sitting in his driveway--but you've got to give the man credit for trying, because he was one of us, one of the group of uneasy outsiders to Fayette County life, a member of the group of friends whose only motto was "Live loud and Fuck Everyone Else!" Lenny may have been out to impress others with his megamaxistereo system, but ultimately he was just trying to impress himself, to prove to himself that there was something he knew well that defined him on his own terms--he was a car audio nut, an expert in big boomin' BASS, just as I was expert in writing and music and Joe was expert in economics.
Months later, I found out Lenny had sold the custom-built, ultraswank plexiglass container and built a new, smaller crate himself out of pressboard, two-penny nails, and some other stuff he found lying around in the toolshed next to his Pap's place. He'd found the blueprints on the internet, gathered up all the supplies and tools himself, and spent a week sawing and shaping, cutting and planing and nailing, until he had a smaller, uglier, oblong coffin to hold his two 12" subwoofers. He'd built all the interior sound baffles himself, and, sure, the crate looked an awful conglomeration of scrap dug out of the corner of a toolshed, but guess what? It sounded just as good as that plexiglass monstrosity that Lenny had sold for just as much as he'd paid for it. "It was cool as hell," he said, "but it didn't fit in my car and, besides, I made this one myself. That's always neater."
And it was, Lenny--it definitely was. Here's to you and your gigantic BASS-powered wang!
Lenny. My boy Lenny....Actually, his name is Gerald, I think--but his dad's name is Lynn, so folks started calling him Lynny...but I'll be damned if I ever heard it any way other than "Lenny," so Lenny thou shalt remain, O my brother! Lenny was a good cat: oftimes funny as hell, nice and laid-back, and just amusing to know. Mainly for incidents just like the one which I am now about to relate unto you. There's a whoooooooooole lot that could be said about Lenny, but I think this li'l vignette speaks volumes.
Lenny liked car audio. Well...more than liked--for a while, he was downright obsessed with the fine art of buying up superexpensive, oversized woofers and spiky little squeakin' tweeters and jamming them into cars so that when one fed such a system a Digital Underground CD and cranked up the volume, the BASS was enough to hum the bolts right out of the car's frame. Lenny didn't even have a car at one point, but that didn't stop him from buying up fusion-powered amplifiers, goldplated and double-insulated imported Italian RCA cables, subwoofers engineered from reverse-engineered alien technology recovered from the crash of that Reticulan hot rod at Roswell. Since he didn't have a vehicle to wrap around all this equipment, it sat in the corner of his bedroom like the Ark of the Covenant in that government warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark...a golden pile of sacred audio technology just waiting for a chariot to house its Nazi-melting 500-watts-per-channel POWER.
Needless to say, we all poked fun at Lenny for his car-less collection of car audio materiel, but a man's got to have a hobby, and just as many peopled poked fun at my obsessive collecting of pens or CDs. Eventually, though, Lenny did acquired a car and set about stuffing it with his devices. One day, I found him working on it out front of his grandfather's trailer. His car--a small, dusty red hatchbacked Malibu, sat in the dirt-and-gravel drive that looped in front of his Pap's trailer, its hatch flipped up, doors hanging open, their inner panels wrenched off to reveal a convoluted parenchyma of metal from which various wires and cables dangled like dry veins. In the hatchback sat a gleaming, regal cube of...diamond? A glittery, clear chunk of some rare element in which several large oblongs of dark gray metal were suspended like prehistoric flies trapped in magickal ice. Lenny was bent over the cube, his legs barely touching the ground as he operated within the depths of the trunk beside that glorious chunk of crystal.
"Hey, Lenny," I yelled as I approached. "What the hell is that thing supposed to be?"
"My new subwoofer box!" Lenny crowed as he extricated himself and indicated the box with a flourish. "It's a custom-made clear fiberglass subwoofer crate that I got in Morgantown." Up close, the container honestly did look like the aforementioned Ark of the Covenant sculpted out of pristine glass. The huge speakers inside it hung with their bass-blasting maws pointed downward, wirecrusted dorsal surfaces poking through the box's lid. A deep hollow like a gigantic, 300-gauge piercing hole ran through the box and all manner of cabling spilled out of it and disappeared into the dirty red carpeting of the trunk like so many radioactive nightcrawlers digging themselves into a lawn. The box was specially constructed with a number of interior baffles and sweeping shoulders of handpoured plexiglass that would funnel the monstrous output of two Pioneer 12" subwoofers through the seatback and right into the back of the passenger's skulls for maximum bass-kickin' fidelty. He'd just picked up the box yesterday and had already tested it out on the front porch of Pap's trailer. "Pegritz," Lenny breathed, eyes wide as the subwoofers' mouths with excitement, "Pegritz...it sounds so amazing. I only had it cranked up to, like, eight on the volume dial and the subs were knocking stuff off my grandma's shelves on the other side of the house!"
"You know, Lenny," I reminded him, "if you hit someone with a low enough frequency at a loud enough volume, you'll make their butt-sphincter let go and they'll shit themselves in your car."
"Dude, if my system won't make someone shit themselves, I don't know what will!"
Wellllllll...okay, there, Lenny--if you want your Malibu smelling like mookie, that was okay by me. Lenny didn't mention how much the fiberglass box cost him, and I wasn't pert enough to ask, but I knew it had to be a lot: it was transparent factory-grade fiberglass, custom cut and custom molded. I ciphered up a cost of at least $3000. Where Lenny got the money, I couldn't tell you then, but it wasn't drugs or anything like that. I later found out he just got it from his grandfather, who kept the boy's pockets forever lined with unearned cash. But anyway.
Lenny then proceeded to show me the amplifier that the wormy wires from the subwoofer box plugged into. It lay in the footwell of the back seat right behind the driver's throne, a weird oblong of ridged golden metal that looked a great deal like the heatsinks you'll find riding on the backs of most processors inside computers these days. "Try to pick it up," Lenny told me. It looked like it weighed...oh, ten or twelve pounds--but when I attempted to even work my fingers beneath its body I realized the fucking thing had to weigh more than the gigantic fiberglass monstrosity wedged into the little trunk behind the seats. "500 plus watts of power!" Lenny crowed. He'd gotten the amplifier, a Bose, a year or so before, had bought it slightly used from a friend who'd special-ordered it from some Californian car-audio-specialists' catalogue. Lenny had gotten it for a steal at just under $600.
Next up: the front speakers. Lenny wasn't putting particularly grand speakers into the dash and the doors, just some Pioneers he'd gotten through another catalogue for, like, $50 each--but they were each certified up to 200 watts apiece and he was connecting them to the amplifier with goldplated cords that wouldn't even hint at distortion until they were spurting out greater than 1000 watts through their nerves. The cables cost something around $100 or more all told--oh, and the two subwoofers lodged in that incredible ice-sculpture in the back? $250 a piece and that was a total steal, Pegritz: they market around $500 of so if you get them from a dealer.
Speakers ain't nothin' without a good stereo to feed them the proper jams, though, right? The stereo in question was chucked into the narrow little dash column of the Malibu like a gigantic black plastic bit shoved into a pony's mouth, all teeth knocked out just so the giant chock of knobs and flashing lights and scintillating green LED numbers could fit without splitting the gum-pink plastic of the dash wide open. AM/FM digital tuner,eight--eight!--programmable preset buttons, frontloading CD slot and internal three-disk changer, detachable faceplate (a fairly new security measure in that long-ago year of 1997), and a little remote control that you could clip right to your steering wheel so you'd never have to risk life and limb or exert the effort to shift a hand dashward to skip a track or change a channel. But that wasn't all! Beneath the stereo lay another big black box, this one with a Christmas-tree-colorful display of digital EQ lines, because that's exactly what it was: a digital EQ box that would dynamically equalize the output from the stereo in order to maintain a constant volume for all tracks and CDs before passing the refined, boosted, polished and chromed signal back to the ten-ton amplification power core lying behind the driver's seat. The EQ box also had a number of reverb/FX presets liek CHURCH and STADIUM to let you add a bit of real-world ambience to help you forget you're cruising along in a car and not actually sitting in a stadium the size of the Civic Arena, listening to Guns n' Roses blasted at you from a cannonade of skyscraping speakers. "All told," Lenny said, "the stereo was only $600, and the EQ was $200, so I got really good deals on both of those, as well."
"Impressive." And it was! I thought my stereo at home, a $165 Magnavox surround-sound system that I'd picked up one late night at Wal-Mart, was impressive...but it could barely eke out 200 watts of sound. I was aghast. Flummoxed! Astounded! Completely taken aback by how much Lenny had actually spent on stereo components for this little, beaten-up, third-hand car he'd acquired from a friend of a friend's dad (or something like that: the Malibu's pedigree was so confused not even Lenny could trace its lineage--Joe and I reasonably figured it had probably been stolen). I barely had the cash to keep my useless Hooptie running; this stereo system had cost more than my car was probably even worth.
"So....You wanna hear what it sounds like?"
Of course I did! I couldn't help but be curious to see what nearly $5000 worth of audio gear sounded like when crammed into the legroomless confines of a $2000 Chervy Malibu would sound like! I wondered if I really would shit my pants...and if so, would Lenny truly be proud of the fact that his car stereo opened the floodgates of my bowels all over his passenger-side seat? I sat down with a certain trepidation lurking in my guts, a feeling of heaviness down there that I at once hoped would end up all over Lenny's seats, just so I could laugh at the look his face would earn from it, but also dreaded, because if that happened I'd still have to drive home in my own car with trousers full of bass-frapped dung.
"Here we go," Lenny said, pushing a copy of Digital Underground's Sex Packets into the CD player. "'The Humpty Dance' is just what we need. Brace yourself!"
It hit. The second that a-doo-RAAAYyyy dooOO-RAY bassline kicked in I felt the calcium matrices in my bones began to shudder themselves to pieces as what I can only describe as a tsunami of sheer, unadulterated BASS came crashing into my back, a BASS eruption, tidal waves of BASS on which a faint hint of treble rode like so many tiny shiny pieces of tin surfing on that great world-destroying ocean of BASS being heaved up from the depths of the pitch-black Marianas Trench wherein dead Cthulhu lies dreaming of hiphop might in the strange, $4000 plexiglass architecture of R'Lyeh. Good gods...the BASS, THE BASS! It enveloped my head like an alien migraine trying to force its way into my skull through my ears, evil cephalopdian tentacles of sinewave bassline knotted with palpable tumors of kickdrum pushing at my eardrums and pounding into my viscera, shaking loose my heart from its parenchyma, massaging my intestines with earthquaking vibrations that, for a moment, I thought would inspire a diarrhea of musical terror until I viciously clamped my sphincter shut against the onslaught and braced myself for the fight. The rumble of bass shouting out of those two 12" woofers--which disappeared behind their own blurred outlines--smashed through the little Malibu with the force of an asteroid assault: the plastic in the dash and in the seat and in the doors crackled horribly with sympathetic vibration, and even the metal in the exposed car doors clanged occasionally as some raucous bass frequency rang it. You could just hear the tinkle of hihats and the slap of snares coming from the tweeters in the doors and dash, but Humpty Hump's hilarious vocals were completely swallowed in the BASS revelations of the Great Old Ones. This was the sound of the End of the World. This BASS was the clarion call of Cthulhu's revival, the sound that would crack the thin membrane between the worlds and let Yog-Sothoth and the Other Gods come pouring into our world. A plague of BASS was being born right here, right now, in the guts of this ratty old Chevy Malibu with its superexpensive sound system--I was already infected, and knew I'd feel its viral thrum still echoing like afterschocks through my bones and blood for days to come. BASS, motherfuckers! BASS!
Lenny fiddled with the EQ controls a bit but I couldn't tell any difference: the LED columns on the EQ box were sure going crazy, though, spiking up and down in vicious stabs like they were trying to thrust up right out of their confinement on the screen and stab the CD player that was feeding them such sonic torment. And the CD player wasn't even a quarter of the way toward full volume. "I only have it up to eight!" Lenny shouted through the universe of bass.
"OK, I'm suitably impressed!" I hollered back. "Now shut this damn thing off before I crap myself!"
When silence returned...it felt as though a dark continent had suddenly disappeared from the world, leaving a vast and empty wound in the world that filled slowly with the meager, cowed sounds of birds in the trees and cars slishing back and forth along Gallatin Avenue. For a few moments, I sat breathless, then heaved myself up out of the car into a world that felt wrapped in cotton. My ears felt stuffed with some kind of vaporous felt.
"That's pretty fucking impressive, Lenny."
"Yeah...Yeah, it is. Only one problem."
"What's that?"
Lenny walked around to the back of the Malibu and gently lowered the hatchback. The hatch only closed about two thirds of the way when it encountered the upper surface of the subwoofer crate. "I can't close the back when the subs are in there."
Wait a second here...."You mean...your subwoofer crate is too big for your car."
"Yeah."
"So...what are you going to do with it? Just bungee down the hatchback?"
"Are you kidding! Someone would steal that crate in a second if I left it in the Mall parking lot or something! I'm thinking I'll just have to take it out whenever I go anywhere."
"You're going to take it out when you actually go somewhere in your car."
"Yeah....I'm going to buy a couple of cheaper, smaller subs to mount in the back for when I go somewhere. I'll just leave the crate here at my Pap's place and put it in whenever I want to listen to it."
"You're going to leave your gigantic crate of subwoofer power here at your grandfather's place, and just toss it in the back of your car when...what, you're sitting out here in the driveway?"
"Well...yeah. I guess."
LENNY! My boy Lenny....Only Lenny would spend Four Grand on a car stereo that 1) wouldn't even fit in his car; and 2) was so loud it could literally shake Cthulhu out of bed! In future times, I would see Lenny and his girlfriend Rhonda cruising around Uniontown in that Malibu with its superpowered Justice League car stereo and its rudimentary bass speakers lying in the hatchback like vestigial organs: the "smaller" speakers still could kick out enough rumble that you could feel when Lenny drove past you. I would often come over to visit Lenny or his sister Jamie, who lived right next to Pap's trailer, and there I would see the Malibu sitting in the mud-and-gravel looparound driveway with its hatchback raised and that gleaming icecube of $3000 plexiglass sitting in the back, bass thrumming into the ground, cracking the dried mud beneath the car, while Lenny just sat in the driver's seat and grooved to whatever big-bass thunder he found appealing that day. As soon as he had to go somewhere, though--be it just down the street to Northside Market for a bottle of pop--he'd wrestle that ten-ton fiberglass crate out of the trunk and onto the porch of Pap's trailer, then he'd spend another ten or fifteen minutes reconnecting the cables from the subwoofer box to the smaller subs tucked into the trunk, and then he'd be off, much diminished, carrying around the ghost of that $3000 box in the back of his hatchback Malibu.
This was what started the ongoing joke that Lenny had severe penis envy, and made up for the fact of his small weiner by overcompensating with galaxy-powered car audio systems. Now, I have never seen Lenny's wang, and hopefully never will, but I can honestly say that Lenny was definitely making up for something with his obsession with boomer systems--and what he was making up for was nothing more nor less than living in Uniontown, Fayette County, where you had to make your own fun and fight for your right to party and enjoy life no matter how silly that fight might seem to others. Lenny squeezed meaning into his life just like he squeezed that giant stereo into his Malibu--car audio was his thing, the thing that kept him going day to day, that let him hook life out of the aether and channel it into a BASS monster explosion that declared "I am Lenny! Here me ROAR!" to the entire county. Sure, it was an uneasy fit...and the full power of it only ever emerged when he was sitting in his driveway--but you've got to give the man credit for trying, because he was one of us, one of the group of uneasy outsiders to Fayette County life, a member of the group of friends whose only motto was "Live loud and Fuck Everyone Else!" Lenny may have been out to impress others with his megamaxistereo system, but ultimately he was just trying to impress himself, to prove to himself that there was something he knew well that defined him on his own terms--he was a car audio nut, an expert in big boomin' BASS, just as I was expert in writing and music and Joe was expert in economics.
Months later, I found out Lenny had sold the custom-built, ultraswank plexiglass container and built a new, smaller crate himself out of pressboard, two-penny nails, and some other stuff he found lying around in the toolshed next to his Pap's place. He'd found the blueprints on the internet, gathered up all the supplies and tools himself, and spent a week sawing and shaping, cutting and planing and nailing, until he had a smaller, uglier, oblong coffin to hold his two 12" subwoofers. He'd built all the interior sound baffles himself, and, sure, the crate looked an awful conglomeration of scrap dug out of the corner of a toolshed, but guess what? It sounded just as good as that plexiglass monstrosity that Lenny had sold for just as much as he'd paid for it. "It was cool as hell," he said, "but it didn't fit in my car and, besides, I made this one myself. That's always neater."
And it was, Lenny--it definitely was. Here's to you and your gigantic BASS-powered wang!
Pegritz.com and RSS Feeds and Stuff
Mar. 2nd, 2005 05:19 pmOK, here's the deal: I'm going to make Pegritz.com into a blog to host my Storytime with Uncle Pegritz series, and I want to syndicate it using RSS. The thing is...I know absolutely nothing about RSS feeds, and the only blog software that I even kind of like is Movable Type. Any other hints, recommendations, or places to look for info?
