Another Point of Singularity

DeathBlob 2

An online buddy's funny post about finding a bucket of death behind his grocery store reminds me of tangentially related tale involving entrails and heads. Gather round the campfire kiddies! (cue campfire noises)

It was back in that magical time called the early nineties. The internet was new, podcasting not even a glimmer in my mammie's eye. Instead, those of us with a yen, an itch, a driving desire to express ourselves either had public access radio shows or cable access TV programs. I was involved in both, briefly, creating a radio show called "The Cheese Shop" and a TV show called "Nick Reno's Neighborhood" on FCAC in Fairfax, VA. Nick Reno's neighborhood was all about horror and exploitation flicks from that golden age of cinema, the Seventies. The standard format of the show would be that I, playing the role of Nick Reno, would have on a friend pretending to play the part of a noted cinematologist and we would discuss the work of a certain director or actor, and we might add skits, or various stupid things as inserts ("Ned's World of Smell", "The Fucked Up Christmas Elves", "Being Stabbed Lessons", etc.). There was a pretty vibrant amateur film and TV production community around here at the time, so we never lacked for friends to hang with and make a Nick Reno show.

So, one Sunday we're making a show on the films of the great Lucio Fulci. My friend Bob is there, wearing an outrageous white Italian style suit, his hair slicked back,and we gave him an eyepatch to look seedy (if the budget had allowed it, we would have had him sipping absinthe and smoking Gitanes). I was wearing my Nick Reno outfit (hawaiian shirt, cowboy boots, torn jeans, leather jacket). We were at Drey's place-- then a girlfriend, not long after to be my bride. As we were filming on the back porch, so we could see across the alley into the backyard of the house across the way. My eye kept wandering off from Bob's discussion to a group of three people congregating in the yard involved in some activity.

Now, that house was loaded with a strange crew. As far as we could determine, no adult lived there, but it wasn't Party of Five over there, no way. The police showed up on a regular basis to bust someone for something, usually with a controlled substance involved.

So when I saw them digging a hole in their backyard, and burying a large, oblong object wrapped in plastic garbage bags, well, it caught my eye. So I stopped the show, and had Mark the camera boy film them for a while.. acting the role of excited correspondent..

Did I mention these people didn't own a dog? No, I didn't.

Well, anyhoo, we got lots of great footage of the druggies burying something very suspicious, then we went back and filmed the rest of the show. If I recall correctly, Drey reported it to the cops and since a SWAT team didn't show up to drag them off in chains I guess it resolved itself well enough. We never really figured out what they buried, or why.

I decided to make all that stuff part of the episode. I enlisted a friend, Eric, to play a "noted criminologist" and we found a nice patch of ground to dig a hole in (not in their backyard, but a place close enough to make it look that way in cut shots). The night before, I went out and dug a big hole there myself, cutting the sod to put over it again easily enough.

Then I went out looking for a goat's head. Now, that's not as easy as it might sound. There weren't any farms thereabouts then, and there sure aren't now in these days of urban sprawl. I would have had to have driven about fifty miles to find a farm with a goat on it, and they might have had an issue with me collecting it.

So I called a Lebanese butcher I knew of. He had supplied me with all sorts of offal and tripe for certain zombie scenes in an earlier movie and we had a sort of wordless rapport going. I called him up, and asked. "Hi, got any goat's heads?" the answer was a laconic "Sure, five fifty. Come on over, we open until five".

Who knew it would be that easy?

So I drove over and met the butcher... saying I was the guy interested in the goat's head. He says: "please to wait four minutes right here". He goes back into the locker and I hear: "BWANGGGGGG BWANGGGG BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW" of a chainsaw starting up, and then "THUMP!" Out he comes, with a big old goat's head wrapped in butcher paper, horns and all.

Who knew it would be that easy?

So we took it home and lovingly painted what we imagined were "satanic symbols" all over it (really, being a good Catholic boy, I just knew of the pentagram symbol but I had a wicca friend who naturally helped out a lot). Then we dripped red candle wax all over it and covered it up with a plastic garbage bag similar to the one we had seen the "oblong object" buried in.

We raced back to the excavation scene and reburied the goat's head, staging (if I do say so) one of the finest moments ever to grace this nations' cable access community.. the phoney lab technicians digging, the discovery of the satanic goat's head... the closing shot of the concerned look on the "noted criminologist's" face, as he shakes with a frisson of horror...

It might have been some of my best work.

Your deathblob tale for the day!