By Mrs. Chuck Torso

reetings and salutations from an undisclosed, lonely stretch of highway out here on one of God's mid-Atlantic roadways. My name is Mrs. Chuck Torso, lifelong shitkicker and housewife, daredevil with an award-winning recipe for pineapple-upside-down cake, newly self-appointed scribe for Perpetual Toxins, white woman on the run, and all around good time gal.

I've got myself a lot of time to write these weekly articles for your viewing pleasure. Ya' see, my husband Chuck is an incendiary writer, arsonist, bully, and fearsomely iconic disturber of the peace. Chuck's not a bad guy; he just thinks that the imagination is a crutch for lesser men not willing to "bravely destroy what others have so painstakingly created." I think Chuck likes that quote because it mentions the word "pain". I knew it wouldn't be easy loving a psychotic sadist, oh but if you saw the poems he writes me; just darling. Anywho, if Chuck plans on writing about 'making love' to a drunk in a bar with a broken pool stick up his you-know-where, well then, good ol' Chuck's gonna do the deed to learn how to write about it. My husband may have many faults, and many crimes against humanity lobbed at him, but no one can say he doesn't give it his all! Really, can any woman ask for more?

I guess that's why I'm writing about what I know too. I know this camper van and our life on the run, raising two, high-spirited teenagers, and of course, bandaging up bullet wounds.

You must be thinking that my life is nothing but depression and oppression, but it's there that you couldn't be further from the truth. Last month, amid a break from writing a particularly tricky piece of prologue for his new novel, Chuck stole me a DVD player and a huge assortment of discs to watch. Between you, me and the walls, once I scrubbed off the blood stains and filed off any serial numbers, that baby was hooked up and ready to entertain me!

Now my family will be the first ones to tell you that I don't know nuthin' about nuthin', but that ain't true. I do know I'm in love with all these extra features on the DVDs! Sometimes they're called bonus features or special features, but really, that's like me using the same meat three nights in a row for dinner and calling 'em meatloaf, beef patties, and Mom's surprise. But in defense of extra features, my meatloaf, however delicious, never fills me in on CGI secrets or Hollywood gossip. With all this extra stuff, you're not only entertained, you're educated!

Chuck, who's been writing since back before I-don't-know-when, keeps telling me that writing oughta have a theme, a subject, a point. Otherwise the writer and readers get lost, and it's something akin to food shopping drunk without the grocery list. It's funny at first, but you just end up parked in some stranger's driveway, hittin' yourself with beef jerky and a case of cocktail onions.

So if the ladies who run this magazine will allow me, my focus for this piece of writing will be on one thing I know, one thing I've learned recently. That is: people in the movies have it better than me!

I'm not saying in every movie that people have more money than we do, or a better marriage, but unless it's an action film or crime "thriller", I don't see any housewives with a junior college education and calf muscles as firm as any co-ed driving a getaway camper van that they also live in and try to entertain in, thank you very much, bless your heart. I too would like a backyard or new furniture, or furniture that doesn't come out of the walls.

I've seen some gritty movies with Nicole Kidman and Chloe Sevigny, for example, but did they ever stash their husband's loot, sew their grown daughter's spangly bra for work, deal with making a sensible and nutritious dinner, and meet their 16-year-old lunatic son's new boyfriend while both were high on fumes and the camper was low on gas? And everybody cried watching Dogville and The Hours. Please. Look at my carpeting. That'll bring tears to your eyes.

I don't mean to cuss, but shit, even some of the people in these "art" films have it better than me. In Larry Clark's films, like Bully and Kids, at least the teenagers leave the parents alone for some peace 'n' quiet! And except for one trailer that got torched in Pink Flamingos, John Waters lets his circus freak characters live in houses without wheels. David Lynch and Francois Orzon both have strange sex and violence abound in their movies, but never once did I hear an actor say "Go through the road block, baby! It's our only way! Kids, reload those shotguns!"

And I've grown to love the fims of Woody Allen, Abel Ferrara, and Spike Lee, but did I get to see any of Manhattan or Brooklyn when we barreled through New York last month at 110 mph? Outrunning my husband's latest crimes is putting a damper on my sight-seeing excursions.

Moving on. Cindy graduated high school and is knee deep into her career as a "pleasure specialist" (her words, not mine). She keeps recommending a film called Showgirls. Anything to understand my baby, although I'm perplexed as to why she keeps saying I'll have to buy dog chow for the viewing. Thank God she's beautiful, otherwise life might be hard for her.

Now Wolf, my baby boy, all of 6 feet, 8 inches at 16-years-old, is the meanest and scariest kid no matter where we are. We only found last year that he's gay when he set fire to a rugby pitch after one of the star players refused Wolf's advances. The authorities still can't locate the boy, but I'm not really in the mood to talk about that. I suppose I'm glad Wolf and Chuck are so close and that the boy's really taken after his father. Wolf's poems are going to published in a very prestigious literary review soon, and he also knocked over his first liquor store without getting shot! And I do really like his new boyfriend, Gunner, but do they have to celebrate Satan through sex magick in the back of the camper? The walls are paper thin. The boys tell me I should check out three films to understand them: Fight Club, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Guys Gone Wild: Dude, Where's My Pants?. Anything to understand my baby.

One film that didn't make me feel like the characters had it better than I did was that Blair Witch Project. If you're a fan of '80s sitcoms, please be advised that this has nothing to do with The Facts of Life. No, it's about three, ignorant, young people who live in stationary, non-mobile homes who decide to leave these homes to walk around in the forest and upset a witch or hillbillies, and they don't even have the good sense to buy enough cigarettes for their inevitable woodland doom! As much as I complain about my husband Chuck, I know he'd never send me out into the deep, dark woods without my camper van fully loaded and my DVD remote close at hand!

0 5 . 2 9 . 0 6

Perpetual Toxins © 2006-2007 - All Rights Reserved