Ep. 404: "Sixty-Nine Sweats"
John: Hello?
John: Hello!
John: Hello-o.
John: Good morning.
John: Good morning.
John: How are you?
John: Ooh, ooh.
John: Ooh.
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Merlin: Ooh, is it?
Merlin: Ooh.
Merlin: Oh, wait.
Merlin: I know that.
Merlin: That's from something.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Ooh, is it?
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Telephone, telephone.
Merlin: Hmm, you're close.
John: Ooh, is it?
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Ooh, is it?
Merlin: It's not Animal House.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Give me a hint.
Merlin: Who is it?
Merlin: That's not a hint.
Merlin: That's just saying it again.
Merlin: It's the plumber.
Merlin: It's the plumber.
Merlin: Cheech and Chong?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Who is it?
Merlin: Once again, Chong.
Merlin: It's the plumber.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I've come to fix the sink.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: He's come to fix the sink.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Nothing?
Merlin: Nothing?
Merlin: See, I know.
Merlin: I know it.
Merlin: It's tickling a part of my brain.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: I believe.
John: I believe.
John: Don't quote me on this.
John: But I believe that that is a little bit of a riff from...
John: The Electric Company.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
Merlin: Okay.
John: The Electric Company.
Merlin: I got the power.
John: The Electric Company.
John: That's right.
Merlin: That was so exciting.
Merlin: Rita Moreno, huh?
Merlin: Morgan Freeman.
Merlin: That's where he got his start.
Merlin: Morgan Freeman.
Merlin: Spider-Man.
Merlin: That's where Spider-Man got his start.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: That was the first debut of Spider-Man.
John: Spidey?
John: Yep, yep, yep.
John: I believe that's what it is.
John: I believe that who is it?
John: It's the plumber I've come to fix.
John: The sink is from, that's all the words.
John: I've just done the entire bit for you.
John: Okay, all right.
John: I'll find out more.
John: Might be Sesame Street, but I don't think so.
John: It's a little bit edgier.
John: Electric Company was a little bit edgier.
Merlin: Yes.
John: It was the Wii magazine to – Oh, that's so interesting.
Merlin: You went a different direction.
Merlin: I was going to say like the way that there's like – this also happened with National Geographic magazines.
Merlin: There was World and then, I don't know, other ones, not Omni.
Merlin: But there's also one like where you graduate.
Merlin: They want to give you a pathway, a runway, a tunnel for growth.
Merlin: And I think an electric company, they said, what if Sesame Street but older?
John: What if Sesame Street, but a little older?
John: That's right.
John: What do we do with the kids that are nine years old?
John: They're not going to want to watch somebody learn to count and spell.
Merlin: You age out of the system, and now you're out on the streets.
John: They want to see Spider-Man.
John: They want to see some, you know, or in the case of Wii Magazine, it's like Penthouse has shown a little bit more, if you know what I mean.
John: What are we going to do?
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: I've lost a lot of my whistling.
Merlin: I need your guidance on this because I do remember Penthouse and I do remember Wii, but in my head, I think I have them backwards.
Merlin: So Playboy would show boobies and review stereos and they had the funny cartoons.
Merlin: And then, so like then Penthouse comes along and they're showing you a little bit what's happened to
Merlin: down in the basement.
John: Well, yeah, I think the Playboy had started to move toward, you know, a little bit, a little peekaboo down there, but Penthouse was more, well, I'm talking about like
John: By 68, they were showing you.
John: 68 coming back.
John: They were showing you butts, at least.
Merlin: Oh, they show you butts, but they'll show you a little bit of the foliage, but they're not going to get real deep into the pitcher plant, if you know what I mean.
John: That's the thing.
John: In Penthouse, some of the Comley models were...
John: were not keeping their knees together.
John: Right.
Merlin: And then Larry Flint came along with some Hustler, which was a lot more... Before that, you'd only see your own poop, not big poops other people had taken and sent in a Polaroid of.
Merlin: Oh, dear.
Merlin: But also, so we... Was it less racy or more racy than Penthouse?
John: Well, so we...
John: uh we was supposed to be for sophisticated younger gentlemen so as far as i remember they all reviewed stereos maybe hustler didn't hustle let's leave i want to come back to hustler and i want to get to cherry and variations but for now let's focus on we just for the younger listeners that's uh the french word for yes o u i that's right and we we are for unlawful carnal knowledge is what it was
John: 5150 it's uh we was actually i think i only learned this recently a playboy spinoff playboy oh you're right you know what i had a totally double backwards we was their response to penthouse yes that's what it was they were like look because i think i think somebody at playboy was like look we don't want to get into like a like a um
John: like a beaver X, uh, like beaver.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Like they're going to show.
John: So we got a show.
John: And then pretty soon playboy is like, uh, it's just as bad as the rest.
John: Cause we are reviewing high quality scotch over here.
John: We're talking about what it's like to be a, like a guy that owns a, a Jensen interceptor.
John: And, uh, we don't want to get into that hole.
Merlin: You get a double spread of a guy smoking menthols, listen to his Fisher stereo out on the patio.
Uh,
John: But I think what we was was like a little bit.
John: I don't think they were quite like a cross between Playboy and high times, but they definitely by the late 70s, I remember they had started to kind of.
John: wink and nod at marijuana.
John: Uh, but the, you know, the girls were, were, yeah, they were more fun.
John: They were less, I mean, they were all the, all the great girls.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: They're all fun.
John: Let's let's, there's no, they never had a photo shoot.
Merlin: You don't get in a magazine without being fun.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: Maybe it's possible, John, that I only ever saw one issue of we magazine, but I feel like it had a lot more ladies in pools than the, than the playboy, uh, actual, uh,
John: My friend, Aaron Kinnaman, his mother, I always thought of her as divorced, but when I, but I also have a simultaneous memory of Aaron's mother's husband.
John: I remember Aaron taking me into his parents' bedroom.
John: Although if Aaron's mother was married and Aaron's dad was in the house and
John: I have only the vaguest recollection of him, and he kind of looks like Mark Ruffalo.
John: And I think I remember meeting him, Mark Ruffalo with a mustache.
John: I remember meeting him once, maybe, but it could have been not him.
Merlin: I noticed you're being, perhaps in a not dissimilar way to the way you talk about your baby's mother, your daughter's mother.
Merlin: I noticed here that, like, and this really reflects the age, the times, John, is we don't, you can't say things that you have to disambiguate, as we say on Wikipedia.
Merlin: You know, parentage, marriage, marriage.
Merlin: relationships, we magazine, these are all things that now we have to kind of decouple.
Merlin: And so when somebody says partner, time was, you say somebody's your partner, it meant you were in business together.
Merlin: As they say, entrepreneurs, we.
Merlin: And now, Alan Z, now today, now you got a whole situation.
Merlin: So the guy who lived there was not his paterfamilias,
Merlin: He was his mother's husband.
Merlin: Is that correct?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Some people just seem divorced, and I want to honor that.
Merlin: There are people who just seem like they're always divorced.
Merlin: I feel like she, well, so first of all, she drove a Mustang.
John: a type two, a type two, a type.
John: No, no, no.
John: It wasn't like a, it wasn't a Pinto Mustang.
John: She drove like a 1971 Mustang.
John: So it was like a fastback.
John: Maybe you're like two.
John: Yeah.
John: Um, and, uh,
John: She was younger than my mom.
John: She had... She tried to sell Tupperware.
John: She tried to sell... She did all the pyramid schemes.
John: Oh, she got that side hustle you're saying.
John: She got the side hustle.
John: She had a side hustle.
John: I don't remember what she did for a living, but she played a very prominent role in my life.
John: Aaron's mother, I remember very clearly, and I liked her.
John: Aaron's mother may have been the first adult...
John: that I made laugh that wasn't in my family.
Merlin: I remember sitting in- Does this proceed, just so I can get my chronology straight, I write all this down, this precedes Bob's mom who lived in an NPR bookcase?
Merlin: Oh, this is years before.
John: I'm talking about when I was eight, seven, eight years old.
John: Oh, the formative years, yeah, sure.
John: Yeah, I remember standing in her kitchen when I was eight, probably, and making her laugh in such a way.
John: We were standing around talking, and-
John: I was making her laugh, and she wasn't saying, like, okay, you kids, get back to playing or whatever.
John: I've got work to do.
John: Like, she was, like, hanging out.
John: She sounds like a cool mom.
John: Tell me more.
John: She was.
John: I mean, she smoked, and she – but she was a little – I don't want to say that she drank, but she got a little bit –
John: she, she could come on hinge sometimes, you know, Aaron, she had Aaron and, and Angie and they were, they were a handful, you know, Aaron and Angie both are an example of kids our age who have never been on the internet.
John: As far as I can tell, I look for Aaron periodically and no sign of him, like not even a
Merlin: not all those sites that are like are you looking for it's like he doesn't even show up in the phone book and i don't right sometimes you'll find people who who were on the internet and you can find it sometimes in like archives on you know bulletin boards or usenet or something like that but then there are some people that just they don't have any kind of a digital footprint it's it's very suspicious to me it's weird and part of the problem is i don't um
John: I don't exactly know how to spell his last name.
John: It's one of those last names that could have – every single vowel is interchangeable with another vowel.
John: It's Kinnaman.
John: So it's like K-I-N-N-I-M-I-N.
John: You know, like if you put any vowel in there and it's like –
John: I don't know.
John: You know, like people show up, he'd have to be 53 probably now.
John: Anyway, um, I, his under his parents slash mother's bed, um,
John: Aaron took me in there one time and there was a wee magazine or maybe under her side of the bed.
John: No, it was connected in my, it's connected in my memory to this Mark Ruffalo looking character that, uh, was Aaron's dad.
John: Now Aaron's dad might've been a, like a, like a,
John: like some kind of oil worker who was never home.
John: Long haul trucker.
John: Long haul trucker.
John: If he'd been a long haul trucker, I would have known because my babysitter's, uh, husband, Alice's husband, uh, was a long haul trucker and he kept his rig parked in the front of the, uh, of the house where my sister and I were babysatted.
John: But this, we came out from under the bed and,
John: And we're talking 75 at this point.
John: So when I was seven, maybe.
John: And it was before I'd seen a Playboy.
John: I knew what a Playboy was.
Merlin: I mean, that's almost like Corn Flakes or Kleenex or Frigidaire.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: I forget.
Merlin: There's probably a proper name for that, but it's like magazines with boobs.
Merlin: Something in them.
Merlin: Something in them.
Merlin: Porn.
Merlin: You won't say porn, but an adult in them.
Merlin: It's an adult in them for adult things.
Merlin: Classy.
Merlin: Classy.
John: I realized then that I think that was when
John: I think it was Aaron that said we is French for yes.
John: So I understood that it was foreign and exotic and, you know, there were girls in swimming pools.
John: There were stereos.
John: There were things that I couldn't even imagine.
John: And I associate this moment also with the song fired our guns, but the British kept coming.
Mm-hmm.
John: Battle of New Orleans.
John: I don't know why it must have been playing on someone's transistor radio.
John: A person will imprint on that for shizzle.
John: Yeah.
John: So I have a picture of, I have a mental image of Aaron and myself in his mother's and Mark Ruffalo's bedroom.
Yeah.
John: Pouring over these wheeze while the battle of new Orleans plays in the background.
John: There wasn't as many as there was a while ago.
John: That's right.
John: And, um, and it's all, and it, it all like dovetails with this.
John: It's so much the seventies.
John: So the battle of new Orleans was a 1972 song.
John: Okay.
John: And was it by someone called Johnny something?
John: Yeah.
John: Johnny Horton.
John: Johnny Horton.
Hmm.
John: But I don't think it was that early in my life.
John: I would have been four.
John: And I don't – I didn't meet Aaron.
John: I mean, I think I might have met Aaron that year.
John: Could I be having – could I remember an event from 1972?
John: Because you know how radio was then.
John: It's not like radio now where –
John: the Battle of New Orleans is going to be on the radio, you know, four years later.
John: Like, what was on the radio was on the radio, if you know what I mean.
Merlin: It's an early version of, you know, what's in the show.
Merlin: You're absolutely right.
Merlin: I mean, like, with the exception of perhaps, especially features like an oldies hour, like the idea of, you know, you hear a radio station today, the joke becomes something like, the best of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and beyond.
Merlin: And you're like, well, let's install the songs for 50 years.
Yeah.
Merlin: But you're right.
Merlin: What you hear, especially on AM, which mostly was what radio was when we were youngsters, would be just whatever was on the charts.
John: Yeah.
John: This would have been AM radio of the 70s.
John: It would have been the top 20 or top 40, right?
John: Top 40 radio is what it was.
Merlin: We Magazine, I just sent you some moist ladies on the cover of We Magazine.
Merlin: It appears that we started on what it looks like maybe 1972, I want to say.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I'll ruin my browser history.
John: Here we go.
John: Okay.
John: 72.
John: Hmm.
John: So is it possible that I'm like, that I, that, that I am.
John: The reason that Mark Ruffalo is in Mrs. Kinnaman's bedroom is that.
John: He left the picture in 1972 or three, and I was friends with Aaron.
John: You said he went out for cigarettes and left nothing but a wet wee.
John: Yeah, left the smell of Winston's and a wet wee.
John: And Mrs. Kinnaman dying to laugh.
John: Uh, and her, and maybe that's why she got into selling Tupperware on the side and her side hustle comes out of like, she's looking for new opportunities, but she also needs to put some, we on the table.
John: Well, sure.
Merlin: It's out there.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: These don't buy themselves.
John: Uh, October 72.
John: Yeah.
John: October 72.
John: So I might remember Mr. Kinnaman that faintly because I met him at the very beginning of my relationship with Aaron.
John: We never talked about him again.
John: Uh,
John: Because that was his last, that was his last day.
John: Maybe, maybe he, he, he left Aaron all of his car parts and a couple of wheeze.
John: He didn't have the money or he would have gotten rid of.
John: Exactly.
John: So, so we, I am, I, I definitely imprinted on we.
John: And then many years later, my high school girlfriend's older sister married a guy who was older than we were all.
John: Like she was older.
John: two years older than we were Kelly and Kelly and her name's Peggy and Peggy was two years older than Kelly and I, but Peggy married a guy that was like 10 years older, which at the time was astonishing.
John: Right.
John: Just like, how is this possible?
Merlin: Well, he was 30 and she was 22 or something, you know, my grandparents, my grandparents were 12 or 13 years apart.
John: Yeah.
John: My parents were 14 years apart.
John: Um,
John: But when I was 20 or 22, it was just like, what is happening, Peggy?
John: And he was and is, because they're still married, a great dude, just one of these guys that kind of has done everything already at 30, sort of has a real way about himself.
John: He can hang out with 22-year-olds in a comfortable way, but he also feels like the older brother you always wish you had.
John: Aw.
John: And, um, I could have used a guy in my life.
John: Well, me too.
John: And it was, I was sad that it came when I, it was a little late by the time I was 20.
John: I was like, you know, where were you when I was 15?
John: And I needed somebody to tell me.
John: Yes.
John: Yes.
John: But at one point he, he had a house in, he was living in some little house out in mountain view.
John: And when he and Peggy were getting married, he was like, I got to straighten up, fly right.
John: And we're going to live somewhere else.
John: And he came down out of the attic and he had a cardboard box and he, and it was full of like seventies wheeze.
John: And he was like, do you want these old wheeze?
John: Oh, come on.
John: And I said, do I want those old wheeze?
John: Oh Jesus Christ.
John: So he gave me this box of wheeze and it was, this would have been 1991 or
John: 1991.
John: And these we's were from 75, 76 and they were already, so they had, they had at that point two, they were absolutely valued on two separate valuation scales.
John: One valuation scale was that they were porn and, and porn has its own value.
John: And this was, this was, uh, uh,
John: by 1991 standards, not racy porn at all.
John: It was, it was a free time capsule.
John: That was the other valuation, right?
John: Even in 1991, that much access to not just the, not just 1976 as represented in the ads in time magazine, but 1976 as represented in the ads and articles and style of we, which was,
John: Looking at it as a 21-year-old, it blew my mind, every issue.
Merlin: I poured over them, because aesthetically- I would just look, I have several anecdotes about this that I'll share in a minute, but one thing I would always do, when I was done masturbating privately,
Merlin: is I would just pour over one ad because there was a look, there was the super saturated look of the ads and the way they were printed.
Merlin: And of course, like on an intellectual level, you're like, wow, even when you're young, you think like, this is stuff where people bought ads to reach men who buy magazines to masturbate.
Merlin: And then like, who's your target demo?
Merlin: And I would just look over every square inch.
Merlin: And I'd read that book in high school, that now debunked book called...
Merlin: shoot, what's it called?
Merlin: Vance Packard was the guy's name, but it was the one about like, they put sexual images and pictures of vice cubes and Sprite ads.
Merlin: I think it's seduction.
John: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Here's a woman fucking a dog in the camel or whatever.
John: Yeah, the camel's face is a giant penis.
Merlin: That was later, but yeah, same deal.
Merlin: And it was very, it was very, I think it led to my interest.
John: The naked society, the hidden persuaders.
Merlin: That might be it.
Merlin: And I think it led to, in some ways, to my continuing to masturbate, but also to the notion of like the way I would read way too much into everything.
Merlin: And that kind of led to my major in college, like doing like deconstructions and you know what I mean?
Merlin: And all like semiotic, like,
Merlin: You read something like, um, you know, the, the short story, Sarah scene, and like, there's all the, the signification and what it means.
Merlin: And look at this triangle that's formed by the way your eye travels.
Merlin: And there's a woman in the foreground and a woman in the background and, and, and the cigarette looks like a dick and he's got a Fisher stereo, right?
Merlin: Like you're, you can just look at one of those the same way you would look at like a Mondrian or something, not a Mondrian, but maybe like a, you know, like a Monet, you would like, you transfixed by what's happening in this.
John: Yeah, that was our whole Adbusters trip, too, except then it got less... We were less subtle.
John: By Adbusters times, it was just like... Yeah.
John: It was much more... That's why you start culture jamming.
John: It turns from a noun into a verb.
John: So did you have...
John: Did you have access to 70s porn in the 90s?
John: Gosh, you know, it's funny to call it porn.
Merlin: None dare call it porn.
Merlin: So here's just real quick without too much, hopefully, too much personal detail.
Merlin: But, you know, once you were aware...
Merlin: and interested in whatever was happening with, you know, the other, the, the ladies.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: You started, you started noticing things and maybe that's like, you know, it's like you're a little bit more interested in Catwoman than you'd like to be.
Merlin: Or, or it could also be that, you know, they accidentally say, bring a Victoria's Secret catalog to your house.
Merlin: And then maybe that goes under your bed.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And, but like it became, it was understood that like, like beer is,
Merlin: And naked ladies were the most coveted things in some ways.
Merlin: I can't wait to turn 18 and then 19.
Merlin: 18 for boobs and 19 for beer.
Merlin: But yeah, first of all, this has been covered in other places, like an episode of You Look Nice Today.
Merlin: But there's a phenomenon, what I would just call woods porn.
Merlin: And I don't know why.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
John: Of course, the porn you find in the woods.
Merlin: The porn you find in the woods.
Merlin: Every boy has found porn in the woods.
Merlin: And let's be honest, the kind of woods porn is usually as pretty as they say, you know, on the other side of the pond, pretty rough trade.
Merlin: You get into some pretty crazy stuff.
Merlin: You might ask some empty clowns.
Merlin: There's not going to be as many ads for menthol cigarettes.
Merlin: It's going to be more like, you know, penis extenders and, you know, apologies.
Merlin: But yeah, and you would find it and it would be swollen and stuck together.
Merlin: They'd be swollen three times that day.
Merlin: Big size.
Merlin: But then, okay, cut to the chase.
Merlin: My pal's dad.
Merlin: And now let's fast forward to being 15.
Merlin: And my best pal's dad had a secret stash.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: That's where I believe, so he had some really, you know, I think men go through phases for what they acquire and keep.
Merlin: And he had a lot of 75 to 77 Playboy magazines.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: And it was, it was the Holy grail.
Merlin: It was like, it was fun to hang out and drink Mountain Dew and play D and D and work on the TN 99 foray.
Merlin: But also we knew that at some point we were going to be busting into the, into the cash.
John: You know what I'm saying?
John: Where, where, where was the stash?
John: If you, if you don't mind me asking, if you can say now.
Merlin: Yeah, his parents shared a beautiful, they were in this very old house that used to be owned by movie stars, of all things, in New Porici.
Merlin: Well, technically Porici, but owned by movie stars at a different time.
Merlin: It was a beautiful, big house.
Merlin: And they had a shared bedroom with a giant bed.
Merlin: And I want to say it was in a drawer.
Merlin: I think they were in a dresser drawer underneath some folded clothes.
Merlin: And there weren't a lot of them.
Merlin: But then, thing is, guess what?
Merlin: Your kids, you get nothing to do.
Merlin: Eventually, we used our intuition to realize, huh, if these are here, maybe we should keep looking.
Merlin: And we found a box in the garage teeming with Playboy magazines.
John: Really?
Merlin: I think I might.
Merlin: I mean, it's one of those things where like, you're so scared to get caught at something like that.
Merlin: But I eventually did acquire some of my own.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Merlin: Which I kept, as I said on that episode of You Look Nice Today, which I kept with a nearly full bottle of Jack Daniels in the access panel for our bathtub, which was through my closet.
Merlin: And it was the tiny room where I kept the person I thought I wanted to be.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Well done.
Merlin: Well done.
Merlin: Eventually, I discovered Shannon Tweed, as you do.
Merlin: But no, that was it.
Merlin: And it really messed me up.
Merlin: Not messed me up.
Merlin: I mean, it was amazing.
Merlin: I mean, it's one thing to sit there and look at the Sears catalog.
Merlin: It's another thing.
Merlin: I mean, this is a different time.
Merlin: Give us a break here.
Merlin: But, you know, when you're a boy and you got the hormones,
Merlin: And it's just pictures of girls, and they're smiling, and their boobs are out, and they're wearing cowboy boots.
Merlin: Come on.
John: I'm not made of stone, John.
John: I found two separate caches of woods porn.
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John: And they both...
John: They happened at pivotal moments.
John: The first cache of woods porn I found was I was with a friend.
John: We were playing in the woods, the literal woods, next to the elementary school where I went to school.
John: Not a woods I normally played in.
John: And the friend was like, you want to see something?
John: And I was like, yeah.
John: Sure.
John: He said, there's a tree house.
John: And we went down and what was weird about this was it was right by the elementary school and it didn't, the property didn't seem like it was associated with a, with someone's home.
John: It was like, it was a weird kind of woods in between a school and a neighborhood, but there was a fully fledged tree house, uh, like climb up on a, on a wooden ladder, like proper tree house with windows and everything.
John: It wasn't just a platform.
John: And we climbed up into the treehouse and it was already a cool treehouse.
John: And then he was like, check it out.
John: And he lifted up a piece of plywood because a lot of Woodsborne is under a piece of plywood.
John: And here was... It's not hidden.
John: It's concealed.
John: It's concealed.
John: And here was this like...
John: probably five playboys under a, uh, under this piece of plywood.
John: And they were playboys from the sixties, mid sixties.
Merlin: Oh man.
John: So this is pre pubic hair playboys.
John: Yep.
John: where the girls all had high socks and, uh, pigtails or whatever, or they were, you know, they were busy chewing on a pencil eraser cause they were thinking about math, you know, they were, and it was when it was largely articles and, and ribald comics and all these.
John: And I felt like this was, I, we both sat there and kind of, and studied them.
John: And it felt like this was some kind of sacred temple.
John: Like, you mean these playboys are just here?
John: Like, no one's guarding them?
John: And I think my friend encouraged me to take one, which I felt was.
John: And just to be clear, these are playboys, right?
John: Playboys.
John: Okay.
John: Or like 1965 playboys.
John: Like there was an article about Sean Connery, you know, uh, as James Bond, uh, um, like the new Mustang, that kind of thing.
John: And, uh, and I remember feeling like if I took one, it was kind of defiling the temple, but at the same time,
John: Because I wasn't a stealer.
John: I'd, I'd never shoplifted.
John: I didn't steal.
John: And so I don't break up the collection.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Well, and also like that was during a time when if you were in the woods in a tree house, you assumed that an older boy was watching you or a gang of older boys was watching you.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: As soon as you did something wrong.
John: Yeah.
John: They were going to spring their trap on you.
John: Yes.
John: And what I didn't want to do is, you know, take a playboy and then come down and find a bunch of teenagers there who were like, you failed the test.
John: That's not good.
John: But I did take a playboy and, you know, and it became like, I don't know if I could, I don't know if it's memorized.
John: Oh, because one thing I did was later after I'd had it for a little while, I became worried it was going to be discovered because I think I kept it between the mattress and the box spring.
John: And of course, this is before I had learned to masturbate.
John: I wasn't masturbating to this.
John: This was four years before I masturbated.
John: It was just a thing that I would take out and study.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: I mean, I was aware of what this motion means.
Merlin: Like, uh-huh, that's something that, you know, right, right.
Merlin: But it wasn't until I kind of just discovered it on my own as though I had just basically, I don't know, discovered oxygen.
Merlin: Or at least beryllium.
Merlin: I discovered something that was very important and, let's be honest, elemental.
Merlin: And then you're like, oh, that's what this is for.
Merlin: But even then, it's so shameful.
Merlin: But it's one thing to be, as you're saying here, you're just a student.
Merlin: You're just a curious student.
Merlin: And I'd had exposure to...
Merlin: playboys like in the pile with the newspapers at a guy's house when i was a kid and we would just look at the cartoons and and we would make we would make jokes and laugh it's when you get to the point where you look at porn alongside your friends and you're silent that you know things are getting serious yeah things are going to get serious but i but you know the older youth the older youth saying what are you doing with that like that you could get in trouble you would certainly be what one imagines mocked
John: I made a massive error, an error I think I learned from, which was at a certain point, I felt like the naked pictures in this otherwise seemingly normal magazine, the naked pictures and the comics did not belong in this magazine.
John: The magazine and the naked pictures needed to be separated.
John: And the naked pictures then could be
John: A much smaller number of pages that could be kept over here.
Merlin: Like the way you got your – when you were a youth, you had the World Book Encyclopedias, right?
Merlin: And it goes A to Z. And each year you have – I forget what it's called, but you have an update.
Merlin: Like the year – The yearbook.
Merlin: The yearbook.
Merlin: And it's like the year in 1972.
Merlin: And that's all the things.
Merlin: And you say, well, Uzbekistan is different now and so forth.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You could do that with, you could say like, here's a thin, here's a thin folio with a plain cover that's got some ladies in it.
Merlin: But then over here, you got some cartoons and stuff and that's, and Fisher stereos.
John: Yeah, but it's kind of like if you had an Altoids box and it was full of emeralds and rubies and diamonds and gold nuggets.
John: And you said, I think that the gold nuggets belong in a different, smaller bag.
John: Okay.
John: Because they're worth...
John: They're different from diamonds and rubies and emeralds.
John: They're not a precious stone in that way.
John: They're a different, they're a different thing.
John: They belong over here.
John: And you would go through your Altoids box full of gems and you would just take all the gold out and put it in a separate, smaller little container.
John: So that was the vision I had as a fourth grader that I was going to,
John: that I was going to take the naked pictures and separate them.
John: But the mistake I made was that I took a pair of scissors and I thought, I'm going to cut these pictures out of the magazine, not rip the page.
Merlin: Oh, not like get an exacto and make a slice.
Merlin: You're saying snip, snip, snip.
Merlin: And you're like, you're like, um, you're like the guy in, uh, in polyester where you can make, make your own sort of bespoke scrapbook of ladies.
Yeah.
John: Right.
John: But I started with the first page of Naked Ladies, cut out the four pictures that were on it, and then turned the page and realized that I had cut apart the four pictures that were on the other side.
John: You can't finish your Sean Connery interview now.
John: Well, I had made a huge hash of it because the part of me that wants things to be in a certain order, not only had I ruined...
John: the pictures that were on the other side of the page.
John: But now when I had those pictures that were cut out, if I flipped them over, they were like, there was another picture on the other side, but it was, it was mutilated.
John: I had cut across her face or across her boob or whatever.
John: And just the fact that,
John: The backside of these pictures was a ruined picture meant that I couldn't really fully appreciate the front side of the picture.
John: Classic Roderick.
John: Because it had something wrong with it.
John: It had a fatal flaw.
John: So I learned my lesson.
John: Don't do that.
John: And I think it was only because those Playboys had so few naked pictures relative to the rest of their content.
Mm-hmm.
John: Later on, as we got older, those wheeze you were sending me later.
John: Oh, Merlin's been sending me pictures of wheeze and playboys.
Merlin: Sean Connery, subliminal seduction, dog fucking in an ice cube, la la la.
John: Later on, later on those.
John: Now tell me where the dog fucking is happening in this ice cube.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
Merlin: So what I found, the book, so Vance, I do remember the name Vance Packard.
Merlin: This is to, I had this book in high school.
Merlin: It's called Subliminal Seduction.
Merlin: And what is very likely to be the show art for this episode is a photo of a glass, like a- Two eyes-
Merlin: Kind of an old-fashioned, well, yeah, but the cover of the book is like an old-fashioned-ish glass with some ice cubes in it and lemon.
Merlin: You can probably find it on show notes for this episode, rhetoricontheline.com.
Merlin: And the thing was, this guy's deal was they're putting sexy stuff and pervert stuff inside of images, and then that makes you buy it.
Merlin: So, like, I'm pretty sure there's some dog fucking in some of these.
Merlin: Forgive my saying, I don't mean to get salty here.
John: This is down in the bottom left corner in that ice cube.
John: There is someone on their knees and there's a dog on them.
John: Let me go look.
Merlin: I've got to zoom in on this.
Merlin: Let's see.
John: That's what his image is.
John: But there's also the letter F and some other things.
John: Oh, yeah, you get a lot of that.
Merlin: I mean, this is like real QAnon-level shit in some ways.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, God, what's that great word?
Merlin: I keep forgetting this phrase I learned from Ted Lasso.
Merlin: I think it's called, was it semantic satiation?
Merlin: But it's like where words become meaningless because you say them over and over.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: And, and with this, like the thing is, you know, what'd they say when I was a kid?
Merlin: If you, if you stare in the mirror long enough, you'll see a monkey, right?
Merlin: If you, so you could, if you decide, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to take this, this guy at his word and I'm going to really spend some time.
Merlin: Oh, there's a guy with a boner.
Merlin: I think that's what it is.
Merlin: Do you see the, there's always a guy with a boner.
John: Where is the boner man?
Merlin: I see, okay, I'm going to send this to you.
Merlin: Do you see a little silhouette of a man?
Merlin: Scaramouche, Scaramouche, have you got a big boner?
Merlin: Go look at that.
Merlin: And you got to zoom in a little bit, forgive my asking.
Merlin: The man standing, it looks kind of like, so let's look at this.
Merlin: You've got like a fun late 70s brando in an open shirt with a gut, standing on a lemon peel,
Merlin: And he's got a pretty good hog.
Merlin: He's got a fair amount of length, but he's got a lot of girth.
Merlin: Do you see the Brando on the lemon?
John: He's a fat guy with a boner.
Merlin: Well, he's stout, but I can't make up any more dialogue today.
Merlin: I have to go stand on a lemon.
John: He's riding a lemon.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: He's riding a lemon party.
Merlin: Okay.
John: On the other one you sent me.
Merlin: We should start the show.
John: On the other one, it really looked like, looked to me.
John: The two ice cubes in the glass.
John: Do you remember Catherine O'Hara in Beetlejuice?
John: Do you remember when her sculptures came alive and the one was the minister who was going to marry Beetlejuice and, I'm sorry, I only said it once, and Winona Ryder?
Merlin: Oh, is it not Wayne Shattuck's, though?
Merlin: He's like the expert.
John: No, it was like the minister that maybe was the fireplace.
John: Something kind of came down and was like,
John: I now pronounce you that, you know, there was some weird thing.
John: And I think one of the ice cubes in that picture reminds me of that, the minister from Beetlejuice.
Merlin: I'm going to find out more about this minister from Beetlejuice.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So boneless seduction.
Merlin: Oh, well, this is from an article in psychology today.
Merlin: So boneless seduction gets a second glance, a new respect to bill psychology today.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Tell me about the ice cubes.
Merlin: Are there boners in the ice cubes?
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Command F for cube.
Merlin: He's riding the lemon.
Merlin: He's riding the lemon.
Merlin: He's riding the lemon.
Merlin: And so I guess the notion was, and forgive me, it's been 30 years since I read this mighty tome, but if memory serves, the idea was if we put dog fucking or Brando Boner on a lemon, la la la, we put that out there, you fucking perverts are going to buy a magazine and maybe some stereos.
Merlin: And certainly some Sprite.
Merlin: This could be Sprite or this could be a gin and tonic.
Merlin: Do you put a lemon slice in the gin and tonic?
Merlin: I feel like you probably do.
John: I don't.
Merlin: Quinine.
John: Oh, you know what it is?
John: There are people that believe that a lemon twist in a martini is a different degree of sophistication over an olive.
Merlin: Yeah, it's one of those gif versus gif things.
Merlin: People get real wound up about that.
Merlin: If it's got vodka in, it's not a martini.
Merlin: If Marlon Brando's in your glass, that's weird because he's dead, but the boner survives to this day.
Merlin: But he's got a boner.
Merlin: Why is he riding a lemon?
Merlin: We'll never know.
John: This was the end of the river, all right.
John: My second batch of woods porn though.
Merlin: It's a shame this will never air because this is really good.
John: Was even more formative.
John: Okay.
John: I had been, so I was 15.
John: My dad had, had, uh, allowed me to go teach myself the car, but now practice the car.
John: Now that I knew the car, now I had to pass my mom.
John: I had to get past my mom and my mom had, you know, her standards, my dad's standards are like, can you drive it?
John: My mom's standards are like a lot, they were a lot more meticulous.
John: And my mom ended up actually enrolling me in a driving class that was six months long.
John: I never thought this would happen to me.
Yeah.
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you in part by Holus Bolas Winery.
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Merlin: Our thanks to Holus Bolus for supporting Roderick on the Line and all the great shows.
Merlin: It does sound a little like the beginning of Fat House Forum, whatever that is.
Merlin: Okay, so John, here's the thing.
Merlin: You can learn all the kung fu from Black Belt Magazine.
Merlin: You can get the katah with those Fred Astaire feet on the floor.
Merlin: You learn the katah.
Merlin: Hitting the punching bag man is not like getting jumped in an alley.
Merlin: These are different things.
Merlin: I think your mother understands, tell her I said hi, that when you're driving an automobile, you need a lot more than the ability to start it and not crash for a minute.
John: Right.
John: And she was, uh, in a way, absolutely right.
John: Or, I mean, I am, um, I am very grateful because who, the driving teacher that I had in high school after he taught me to drive, um, it was winter kind of late winter.
John: I was 15 and a half and he said, well, uh,
John: You're scheduled for five more lessons.
John: Why don't we learn some evasive maneuvers?
John: No way.
John: Is he operating off the books?
Merlin: He has not run this by your mom.
Merlin: This is a different class.
Merlin: But it's like the thing where the chauffeurs learn how to do donuts and get you out of situations, that kind of thing?
John: Yeah, this was a class.
John: He also taught the adult class of advanced driving or something.
John: And so what he did was we would go out, uh, we would go out and there was this, there was this one stretch of road that he knew that was kind of in the warehouse district that was just sheet ice all winter.
John: It was completely impassable.
John: And we would haul ass down this road and then he would say, all right, slam on the brakes.
John: And then the car would be out of control and he would say, here's what you do, you know, steer into it.
John: All right, don't touch the brakes like, like this, then that, like go like this.
John: And he would just walk me through it as we were flying down the road.
John: And I'd already been doing some of this work out at the airport in my dad's car.
John: Yeah, when you practiced the car, right?
John: You had a big, big, yeah.
John: Yeah, that was a big, but that was on an air, that was on a runway.
John: Yeah.
John: where the car, the whole point of it was to get the car spinning as crazy as you could.
John: Naturally.
John: This guy, my driving teacher, his whole thing was regain control.
Merlin: And it's very counterintuitive.
Merlin: That's how you end up screwing up when they say, you know, the thing that somebody says to you your whole life, you know, steer into the curve or whatever.
Merlin: Like, it's not clear what that means until you try to do it, and then you're doing it all wrong.
Merlin: This is, by the way, just in passing, what happened with Princess Diana.
Merlin: is that they were going, like the drunk guy driving her, she, and her lover, Dodi Al-Fayed.
Merlin: He got a little bit of air going at least like 60 miles an hour.
Merlin: He got air, and then he tried to recover.
Merlin: He turned the wheel while they were in midair, and that's how they hit the column head on.
John: You don't want to do that.
Merlin: That's one of the things you don't want to do.
Merlin: Don't be drunk if you're driving the princess.
Merlin: Don't be drunk.
Merlin: Don't – you know, really what his – He thought he was off.
Merlin: In fairness, he thought he was off for the day.
Merlin: They called him back at the last minute and said you got to get them from the Ritz in Paris to the airport.
Merlin: You know, it's nobody's fault.
John: Well – Let's be honest.
John: Also, there's a new season of The Crown that just came out.
John: Oh, really?
John: And I'm sure it's all –
John: I'm extremely obsessed with it.
John: I'm extremely obsessed.
John: I know.
John: Like, I'm going to tell you something about television that.
John: Hey, Merlin, guess what?
John: Come on.
John: The crown just came out.
John: I don't even own a TV.
John: You're like, that was 17 hours ago.
John: Are you insane?
John: Hodgman texted me yesterday and he was like, hey.
John: I might be a little late on this, but have you seen Ted Lasso?
John: I was like, it was the first time in my life I was able to text him back and be like, um, actually...
John: I watched the whole thing already.
John: Uh-huh.
John: And I was like, Merlin told me about it.
John: Yeah.
John: Merlin told me about it.
John: Your name got sent back to John Hodgman on a flaming crossbow bolt.
John: Who is Merlin?
John: Shaped like Ted Lasso.
John: Which?
John: Uh, so, but this, but my driving teacher, you know, his, the first thing he said is never touch your brakes.
John: When the car goes out of control, never touch your brakes.
John: If you touch your brakes.
Merlin: This is in the era pre, you know, the brakes we have now, which confused me where you time was you pump the brakes.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: And pump, when you say pump, they mean tap, tapa, tapa, tapa, right?
Merlin: Pump, pump, pump, pump.
Merlin: Now today you do that.
Merlin: It's also good.
Merlin: We go anti-lock brakes.
Merlin: It's tapa, tapa, tapa at like a super high speed for you.
John: Correct?
John: It's doing that on its own.
John: That's right.
John: You don't have to think about it because it's a nanny state we're living in now.
John: Jesus Christ.
John: If you don't put your seatbelt on and it beeps, if your trunk is unlatched, what if you want your trunk unlatched?
John: That's my mask.
John: A mask is a muzzle and I'm a free man.
John: What if you want to sit on a stakeout and open the door and not, and you can't just reach up and unscrew the light bulb anymore.
John: You can't even sit in a car with the key and the ignition without the, without the driving lights on.
Merlin: When my dad died, my mom got some insurance.
Merlin: She bought a 1975 Pontiac Catalina.
Merlin: And the first thing that she did was take it to- That's got the boat tail, right?
Merlin: Pontiac Catalina, 75, it's got the boat tail.
Merlin: They weren't as swoopy.
Merlin: First thing she did was take it into some kind of Samasdat mechanic and had him disconnect the beep-beep seatbelt sound.
Merlin: Oh, really?
Merlin: 75 was the early days for the beep-beep seatbelt sound.
Merlin: She said, that's it.
Merlin: No way.
Merlin: Turn that off.
Merlin: I'm not going to wear a seatbelt and I'm not going to listen to this.
John: we uh oh is that is that the when did the boat tail come oh that was the one with the it's got the it's got the thing in the it's got the back window but it's not it wasn't the catalina i was thinking of something i was thinking of that i'm thinking of an oldsmobile when i think of that look but anyway nanny state oh so yeah what if i want to go flying into a colonnade you know what i'm saying well
John: It used to be as easy as if you're running from the cops and you take a left, you turn the lights off.
John: You just turn the lights off.
John: Your taillights go off as long as you don't touch your brakes.
John: Oh, absolutely.
John: You can disappear into the night, you know?
John: And now you get that extra light.
Merlin: Now you get to remember in the 80s, they added that extra light back in your area where the Kleenex boxes go.
Merlin: So then you got that up there.
Merlin: Back where the kids are supposed to ride when you go on a road trip.
Merlin: Where the kids are supposed to ride.
Merlin: But the nanny state says, no, your children should be wearing a belt.
Merlin: And a belt is really, it's a muzzle for your body.
John: It is.
John: It really is.
John: I feel like nowadays that if you're driving an Audi and you're running from the cops and you turn the lights off and go around a corner, that the Audi will actually send up a flare and flags will pop up that are like, over here, over here.
Merlin: You may not know this.
Merlin: Cops probably have a button that can just stop an Audi now.
Merlin: Right?
John: It's a German car, right?
John: Germans love following orders.
John: Yeah, they can stop the car remotely and they can probably listen to you through your radio.
John: That's how the queen talks to me.
John: Hello!
John: So you're not supposed to touch the brakes, but this was my mom's program.
John: And eventually, when I had secured endorsement from, because by the time I got out of this driving class, I was pretty good at
John: For a 15-year-old.
John: But my mom had a 1972 Dodge Dart Swinger.
John: With a daisy?
John: uh the daisy the daisy dot in the eye john the the car of my friend at whose house we found the playboys he had a dodge dart swinger was his car they had a swinger hand to god daisy he's got a daisy for the eye the swinger is one of the great american cars and the thing is people it was affordable oh it's a great car it had a it had the the indestructible slant six we loved this car and they used to build build cars like a brick shit house you know that
John: And this is right about the time 72 was right about the time they stopped building them like brick shit houses.
Merlin: Because Wee Magazine made America weak.
John: Yeah, everything.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: It turned America into a bunch of masturbators and we stopped making good cars.
Merlin: October of 1972.
Merlin: You're out there in your daisy car jerking it so right to a lady in a pool.
John: And then four years later, malaise.
John: Jimmy Carter.
John: Fucking Jimmy Carter.
John: Losed it.
John: We lose.
John: We lose to everything.
John: We lose.
John: We lose.
Merlin: You have the classic pronunciation problems of a 70s onanist.
John: The Dodge Dart Swinger, I'll tell you what it was not built to do, is drive in Anchorage in the winter.
John: Okay, fair.
John: Because it was already one of those American cars that when you got going a little bit, it kind of just like...
John: Instead of, instead of hunkering down on its wheels, it kind of floated up off of its wheels.
John: It had one of those things where as you're driving fast, you kind of got to keep that steering wheel, stealing steering wheel in motion because, because it's just like the car is just delicately tiptoeing across the ground at 70 miles an hour.
John: Like, and if you did anything sudden, you realize that there was only about a quarter of
John: like a nickel-sized portion of rubber from each individual car touching the road.
John: I see what you're saying.
Merlin: This is what makes motorcycles dangerous, is you don't have too many square inches of rubber on the road.
Merlin: And you're saying, here, this is a very nice car, but it's not made for those kinds of conditions.
John: No, and it had whatever that rack and pinion steering where it's just sort of like, when you turn the steering wheel, one of the wheels moves and the other one kind of follows it.
John: It was just like, whee!
John: And she was super nervous about me driving that car.
John: Cause it did have a, it did have power and I had spun it out with her in it once and buried it up to the door sills in snow.
John: This was before I took the hot rod lessons.
John: And I was cocky because I'd been driving Dad's Audi.
John: And I was like, I got this.
John: And she was like, well, let's see.
Merlin: Audis are pretty stiff, right?
Merlin: My friend had an Audi when I drive.
Merlin: I remember thinking it was pretty stiff.
John: Well, in Dad's Audi, it was a diesel.
John: It was made for the snow.
John: That's where they're from.
John: They use every part of the buffalo.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: That's an old Bavarian proverb.
Merlin: Yep.
John: But so I had spun out this car.
John: I buried it in the snow.
John: She'd been like...
John: you know, like slow shaking her head side to side, like, Nope.
John: And that was partly what precipitated the driving class.
John: Well, when I finally had arrived at a place where my mom would say, okay, you can take the car out.
John: I was, it was now the summer of,
John: long after all of these other highfalutin adventures.
John: And she had finally said, you know, you have a learner's permit and you will be 16 in a month and a half.
John: And I will trust you to take the car briefly out on your own.
John: Now, at this point I'd been driving my dad's car for a year.
John: Uh, and had actually at one point, I don't know if I ever told you, but I, I,
John: my friend Kevin and his girlfriend, Christy, Christy's best friend was Maureen.
John: I was crazy about Maureen.
John: Although I also really didn't like- You love these girls with Irish names.
John: It's, you know, it's a crazy culture.
Merlin: What a great time for names though, because you had 50s names and you had proto-80s names and they were all just sitting alongside each other like ladies with their feet in the pool.
Merlin: Maureen.
John: The neighborhood I lived in was all either Catholic-
John: Doctors.
John: So they were all either Irish or Italian.
John: And then there were the neighborhood right next door.
John: They were all Norwegians who had immigrated directly to America without going through Nebraska or Minnesota.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: They clapped out of the upper Midwest.
John: Yeah, they were like, look, we want to move to America, but we don't want to move.
John: That's how they talk.
John: Yeah, they did that vampire talk that they do.
John: I want to burn your church.
John: Hey, we want to come.
Merlin: Black metal rules, blah, blah.
John: Uh, so I knew a lot of, I knew a lot of girls, you know, named, uh, Norwegian names, you know, a lot of Yenny's and, and.
John: Yeah.
John: And Durf.
John: Kirsten's and Kirsten's and Kristen's, but also Christie's and Maureen's and Ellie's and all these first day.
John: But so Kevin and Christie wanted to double date with me and Maureen.
John: And I was crazy about Maureen.
John: She was, uh, she was very seductive, but she also drove me crazy.
John: She was one of those girls that would, would, she would taunt me.
John: She was like, Oh, you know,
John: Nice milk mustache, John.
John: And it just like, she would just, but her, her, her burns, her cut downs were like not that great, but they were, you felt like there was real malice behind them at the same time.
John: So Marine was just like, I don't know.
John: But like, she also, I don't know.
John: There was just something about her where I just thought, thought she was beautiful.
John: And I had this.
John: And so Christie, she's nagging you is what they call it.
John: Absolutely.
John: It's very attractive to be nagged.
John: She was nagging me and, and it got worse.
John: I'll, I'll, I'll explain why in a minute, but Christy was, Christy was a, a good friend of mine and Christy did the thing.
John: She, she was dating Kevin, my best friend, but she really cultivated me.
John: Because she loved to be friends with her boyfriend.
Merlin: You were like her Eliza Doolittle?
Merlin: Was she grooming you?
Merlin: Well, sorry, we don't say that anymore.
Merlin: Well, she was prepping you for something you didn't know what.
Merlin: She was getting you ship shape and doing some Eliza Doolittle shit on you.
John: Well, she wanted to...
John: She wanted the inside information that I could probably provide about her boyfriend, except we were all 16.
John: There wasn't any inside information.
John: Drama doesn't need to be smart to be drama.
John: There you go.
John: But the other thing was that Kevin was not a dramatic person.
John: Kevin was like a very solid person and Christie was dramatic and she knew that I was also dramatic.
John: Just, you could, you know, just knew I'm dramatic.
John: Sure.
John: And so she could get into intrigues with me where Kevin, it was harder to get into intrigues with him.
John: Like he would do, he would, he would do dangerous stuff, but he was not somebody that was like, he wasn't a gossip.
John: He wasn't a, a, um,
John: He wasn't dramatic, right?
John: He wasn't theatrical.
John: So she had this relationship with me, this side relationship that was, you know, like, oh my God, you're not going to believe what she said.
John: And I'd be like, oh, what, what, what?
John: Tell me.
John: That she couldn't do with him.
John: But so she said, look, Maureen wants to go out on a date with you.
John: And I hear that you can drive.
John: And I was like, because of course I told Kevin, I'd taken Kevin out in the car, out on the airport.
John: So I was like, well, sure.
Merlin: I mean, you know, yeah.
Merlin: And if she wants to go somewhere that has black ice, that's fine.
John: Well, no.
John: I can handle that.
John: I never dated a single girl in Alaska that was impressed at all when I put the car into a four-point spin.
Yeah.
Merlin: They were, they were always like, you know, parallel parking, doing a good K turn.
Merlin: These are all kinds of things that to this day, if somebody nails the parallel parking on the first try, I will absolutely say something.
Merlin: A well executed K turn in a tight alley like area.
Merlin: You know, you're getting a compliment from me.
John: That's right.
John: And I had at this point, this was winter.
John: I was developing some of those more advanced skills.
John: I had not yet become the driver.
John: I would one day be, but because legendary driver,
John: That was also the time when my dad would sometimes say, I have to go to Washington, D.C.
John: I'll be back in a few days.
John: I've checked the odometer.
John: But he never did, of course.
John: He left the keys to the car on the bar.
John: And he was like, I have to go see the senator about a thing.
Counselor.
John: And then he would disappear.
John: You know, he would fly to Washington, D.C.
John: or I don't know, maybe not.
Merlin: Just leaving the Audi unattended and he seems incurious about what happens to the Audi when he's gone?
John: Well, and he didn't even lock his doors, right?
John: I mean, this was the 80s.
John: My mom locked her house at least.
John: My dad never did.
John: And so Christy's like, Maureen wants to go on a date with you.
John: And I was like, I can get the car.
John: Because my dad was in Washington, D.C.
John: So I went and I took the car.
John: And we drove around all night, Kevin and Christie in the backseat kissing and me and Maureen in the front seat, Maureen negging me the entire time.
John: Now looking back, clearly trying to get me to kiss her and me going like, uh, well, you know, want to see what happens when I pull up the emergency brake on the, in the movie theater parking lot.
John: And she's like,
John: uh, you know, like you're such a little monkey.
John: You're such a little boy.
John: And I'm like, what do you mean?
John: Would a little boy be able to do this?
John: She's like, God, you're so annoying.
John: And I'm like, yeah, well, and actually Maureen, you are.
John: That I didn't mention about Maureen.
John: Her father was a lawyer and he had an office downtown.
John: And years later in a, in a much later episode where Maureen was trying to get me to kiss her and I was missing all the signals.
Uh,
John: We actually went down to her dad's office in the middle of the night.
John: What?
John: And we went down into the basement of her dad's law firm, which was – once I got down there, I realized that he was like the head lawyer of a five-person law firm.
John: And down in the basement where they kept all of their law books, there was an entire shelf –
John: that had every issue of Playboy.
John: What the fuck?
John: All the way back to the Marilyn Monroe one.
John: You found the Carpenter's Cup, my friend.
John: It was all of them.
John: Holy shit.
John: And they were organized in those legal, those little organizer boxes.
John: Yes, absolutely.
John: I know what you're talking about.
John: Yes.
John: John.
John: They had the dates written on them.
John: Oh, dates.
John: And we got down into the basement of her father's law firm.
John: There was a big couch there.
John: And she sat on the couch and I stood there in front of this wall of playboys.
John: And it was the, it was one of these moments where I was 17 and I had the girl that I had been pining after for four years at that point, sitting on the couch in the middle of the night,
Merlin: in her father's basement a girl to whom you are attracted who negs you and you're missing she deliberately takes you to her powerful dad's law firm basement where she knows there will be arguably one of the most impressive things that you could show a 17 year old boy
John: Right.
John: And a couch and a couch where you can sit and look at them together.
John: Here I am like the boy or the man, which am I?
John: And I'm just in front of this wall.
John: Time will tell.
John: Jesus.
John: And I'm like, I just want to sit and look at all these playboys completely missing that.
John: And, and then she did a thing that I, at the time I did not understand it all.
John: Now, of course it's going to sound like duh.
John: She was like, I don't, you know, those playboys are dumb.
John: Like come sit here.
John: uh, like, why are you messing with those playboys?
John: Like, don't, yeah, yeah.
John: That's my dad's playboy collection.
John: It's totally gross.
John: And I was like, right.
John: But I mean, he has every issue.
John: Like he has the legendary, this issue or whatever.
John: And she starts to tell me a story about her brother and how her brother was in an accident.
John: And, and she started to cry.
Merlin: Oh boy.
John: And so now I'm sitting on the couch again, half my attention devoted to this wall of playboys and
John: Half of it trying to figure out why she's crying because it didn't seem like the story warranted the crying.
John: And I, at that point in my life, do not know how to comfort someone who is crying, have never, I don't think ever given anyone a hug.
John: And very few people had ever hugged me at this point.
Merlin: John, if this story is accurate, and I have to assume it is, there's a lot of intense things
Merlin: You know, you used to talk about, like, in, like, eighth grade science, they talk about, you know, what is it?
Merlin: Kinetic energy and potential energy.
Merlin: And, like, there's so much potential energy and a fair amount of kinetic energy.
Merlin: This is a very emotionally overwhelming experience, the way I'm hearing this.
Merlin: You're dealing with a lot of different, you know, kind of balls coming at you here.
John: It was extremely confusing.
John: And making it more confusing...
John: When I think back at my life from the time I entered fifth grade until now, prior to fifth grade, I think of myself as just like your average American kid who was cute and smart and knew how to ride a bike and, you know,
John: and had heard the battle of new Orleans on AM radio.
John: Like I was, my parents were divorced, but I had a, uh, I had a bowl haircut.
John: My hair was the color of straw.
John: I believed in, um, I believed in the U S you know, like I, I, I might be a wizard, but I was regular.
Merlin: Yeah, you could pass.
John: When I was in fifth grade, yeah, right, I could pass.
John: Maybe because I was born on Friday the 13th, that meant I was a wizard.
John: But I still, that was not that weird in the 70s.
John: That's what Robert Plant thought.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But in fifth grade.
John: I moved in with my dad.
John: I started drinking tab.
John: Things had changed.
John: You became 60.
John: But there were three periods between the age of
John: of 11 and 30, where I felt like,
John: I came into my own for a brief period.
John: I was, you know, I was.
John: I could come into my own several times a day.
John: But, but not that way.
John: But like, I was, I became, I became briefly beautiful.
John: You know, like I think of myself.
Merlin: Did you become more self-possessed?
Merlin: Like you, you had an idea, you had a mooring to something briefly.
John: Well, but that, but also like, like there were a couple of times where I went through a growth spurt and all of a sudden I looked different and like,
John: and felt different and carried myself differently.
John: And then I kind of settled into that level of, of grownup.
John: And I started to be just a sort of,
John: you know, I started to get disgusting again and then I would grow a little bit more and then it was like, Oh wow.
John: He's what, where did this like young?
John: Okay.
Merlin: So, so that, that Western state, the hurricanes performance on a local access where you have, I don't know, it looked like a haircut was shot out of a t-shirt cannon at you and you're wearing puka, puka shell, a puka shell neck necklace, a choker even.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And a real silly grin.
Merlin: And you're, you're kind of dressed, you're kind of dressed like a golfer's uncle.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Which period would that be, a period like that?
John: That was actually immediately after a period where I was briefly beautiful.
John: Okay.
John: And then the haircut kind of cocked up that whole deal, huh?
John: Well, and just like the hurricanes.
John: Bangs are pretty high, John.
John: It's almost a tonsure.
John: That was right after I first started cutting my own hair.
John: And I didn't realize that what you didn't do was wet your hair, comb it straight down, and then cut across your eyebrows.
John: You don't realize it kind of seizes that back up a little bit.
John: Yeah, I did.
Merlin: You know what they say?
Merlin: You can always cut more.
Merlin: That's what they always say.
John: And that's what I did.
John: Those bangs were really high.
John: But the necklace, my God.
John: The necklace.
John: There were a few.
John: I mean, that was during a period where I was wearing corduroy shorts.
John: bell-bottom jeans, because my girlfriend Megan worked at the store that resold old jeans.
John: She was the jean whisperer.
John: Yeah, and she would find these Levi's white tab bell-bottom cords and sell them to me on a discount, and I was like, these are never going to go out of style.
Merlin: Bo looked great, Michael looked great, Stephanie looked great, and you, I don't even know if you look a scallop, you're more like a, I want to say like a, I don't know, like a clam with a Rickenbacker.
John: Yeah, clam with the Rickenbacker is kind of what I was.
John: But right prior to that, I'd been very beautiful.
John: When I was dating Laurel, I was just a picture of beauty.
John: And then later on, there was a little bit of a period there in the middle of the long winters where I had it all together and then I screwed it up.
John: I cut my hair too short.
Merlin: You look great for a while.
Merlin: Some of those early ones, really in your, was it a magnet, chick magnet, your chick magnet hat era, I think you had a real good look.
Merlin: And you had the jean jean, you had the Canadian tuxedo thing, and you and Ken Stringfellow look like you were lifetime companions because you're both dressed in jean jeans.
John: But then you look at me in the, uh, Fire Island, Alaska music video and it's all gone to shit.
Merlin: I picture you holding my daughter and it looks like a Yeti that like tried to bite into a boulder holding a baby prior to her being born.
Merlin: There was that whole Bruce Valanche period where it was just like, yeah, you're doing, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: You're, you're doing a lot of, uh, what do they call it?
Merlin: Punch up.
John: Yeah.
John: Once you have a beard, Bruce, never shave it again.
John: You're right.
Merlin: He had that same haircut that you had in 1999, but just on a, on a, on a bigger head probably.
John: He did.
John: And it was redder.
John: Okay.
John: So I'm sorry.
John: I've taken you way off this.
John: I apologize.
John: In that moment with Marine, I was maybe the, the, at the peak of my teenage beauty.
John: I was, it was summer.
John: I was, I was lean and I was tan and my hair looked right.
John: And that night I was wearing, wait for it, Kevin Hornings.
John: So at East high school, they had a huge bin of red sweat, like sweatpants and hooded sweatshirts that had numbers on them.
John: Okay.
John: And when you joined a sports team,
John: You went into the locker room and the coach issued you, reached into this pile and issued you a sweatsuit, a red hoodie with number 42 on it and matching sweatpants that on the left leg, at the top of the left leg, it had the matching number.
John: Was this how your number was determined by what the coach pulled out of the sweatpants pile?
John: Well, you only, yeah, I guess so.
John: I mean, you got these sweats, even if you were on the tennis team, like even if you didn't see, okay, it was just, this was your, and I think if you were a football player, you were Matt, your sweats probably matched your number.
John: Yeah.
John: Um, I never was on a competitive sports team in high school, so I never had a pair, but Kevin, Oh God, what did he do?
John: No, no, no.
John: Kevin was, Kevin was a kid.
John: He's, he went, his parents,
John: When he was in third and fourth grade.
John: Okay.
John: No, no, no.
John: When he was in fifth and sixth grade.
John: So when I first met Kevin, he had already heard the police.
John: Oh shit dog.
John: Because he'd lived in England.
John: Like Kevin lived in England in 1978, 79 and 80.
John: So he was, and then his parents moved him to Alaska, which was just like,
John: Okay, so you basically went back in time 10 years and also – You go from London calling to being at the high school where you don't even get Ozzy Osbourne.
John: Yeah, that's exactly right.
John: That's a goddamn shame, John.
Merlin: Jesus.
John: He was more sophisticated than I was.
John: He was also like almost a year older.
John: But so Kevin learned soccer –
John: But he learned soccer in a way that the rest of us who played soccer on the youth team, you know, where we're just like playing for orange slices and pepperoni pizza.
John: You're saying for him, football is life.
John: Well, it was.
John: And so Kevin could already –
John: in seventh grade could you know keep a ball in the air on his knee and go from knee to knee and bounce the ball up and head it to himself do a rainbow kick i bet he could do that real showy stuff like the teppanyaki of football soccer you call it and he did the thing that that some kids do that i never did which is that he would go out in the park and practice
John: Just with the soccer ball.
John: There's a kid in this neighborhood.
John: I drive by him all the time and he's out in his front yard and he's shooting hoops.
John: Good for him.
John: He's always by himself.
John: He's by himself.
John: He's an Asian kid.
John: I don't think he's ever going to make it in the NBA.
John: He's six foot tall.
John: Maybe he can make it in the Asian NBA.
John: He's out there.
John: Not anymore.
John: He's out there shooting hoops like four hours a day.
John: And I don't know whether it's because mom and dad are arguing or whether... I don't know.
John: But he's not smoking pot and playing video games.
John: He's shooting...
John: hoops and kevin was always in the park dribbling that freaking working on his skills
John: He was working on his skills, and that's what he called them.
John: That's what he called them, Marlon.
John: He called them his skills.
Merlin: He called them his skills.
Merlin: He's out there.
Merlin: You know, like some people say practice, some people say rehearsal, right?
Merlin: Are we rehearsing or are we practicing?
Merlin: Like you practice scales, but you rehearse, you know, Stairway to Heaven, right?
Merlin: And in his case, he's out there.
Merlin: He's practicing.
Merlin: He's putting in the woodshed.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
John: You practice scales, but you rehearse skills.
Merlin: I really admire that.
Merlin: Little tool shed where he made us suffer.
John: Sad Satan.
John: Well, and I was all, and he would do that thing where he'd stand there with a soccer ball and he'd just be kind of rolling it with his foot and you're talking to him and he's standing there rolling it with his foot and he would just kind of roll it out there, tempting you to try and take it away from him.
John: And eventually, of course, you're a teenage boy.
John: A guy's moving this soccer ball around right at your feet.
John: You would fall for the temptation and try to take this ball away.
John: He might as well slap you with a Frenchman's glove.
John: It's exactly what he did.
John: He might as well slap me with a herring.
John: Because as soon...
John: He, he finished, you know, he would, he would put that ball out there.
John: And, and as soon as I took the bait, he could see it in my eyes that I was going to try and take the ball and he would always do something with it and I would fall on my face.
John: But Kevin took that soccer playing ability.
John: He was the star of our soccer team and he joined the football team his senior year and, and became the kicker.
John: And we had a, our high school had a championship football team.
John: And so Kevin, his senior year, without ever having played football before, American football.
Merlin: This is, just to be clear here, this is in the early days.
Merlin: Nowadays, you get all kinds of wackadoo sports people doing things in other sports.
Merlin: But back then, the idea used to be you'd have a Horst Muleman.
Merlin: Horst Muleman would come out.
Merlin: One time, he had a field goal in Cincinnati.
Merlin: He got three points from over 40 yards away.
Merlin: And that was a gold standard for years.
Merlin: Then they started bringing in the soccer boys.
Merlin: Those slender, those narrow motherfuckers who've been practicing their skills brought to the game of football with two O's.
John: And our football team was, they were state champions for like four straight years, but they had a hole in their roster in the form of a kicker.
John: And they missed a couple of key field goals the prior year.
Merlin: They always say special teams.
Merlin: Really, every game comes down to who puts more points on the board and also special teams.
Merlin: Right.
John: And Kevin, I think, I think, I'm remembering this correctly.
John: He actually waltzed into the coach's office and proposed this to the coach.
John: Right.
John: He didn't get drafted.
John: He went into the coach's office and said, hey, you missed a bunch of field goals last season.
John: Okay.
John: We're not so different, you and I. I get it.
John: Okay.
John: Want to see a guy that can kick a field goal?
John: Yeah.
John: And so he was on the winning team.
John: He got a letter jacket with state champion football on it.
Merlin: Consequently, red sweats with numbers that are Kevin.
John: That's right.
John: Kevin actually, in the championship football team picture, at the end of the winning game, Kevin is up on their shoulders in the yearbook.
Merlin: They carry him shoulder high.
Merlin: He's like a John Hausman poem.
Merlin: Was he 42?
Merlin: Do you remember?
John: Oh, I know what he was because he went in to the, the bin and I think it was one where the coat, I don't know what happened, but he came out with the sweatshirt and sweat pants.
John: Number 69.
John: Fuck you.
John: No fucking way.
Merlin: They had a 69 that a boy was allowed to choose?
Merlin: Yes.
John: And it said East High 69.
John: And then the matching pants 69.
Merlin: That's like something you'd buy with fake wear and tear at like Anthropologie or like Urban Outfitters.
Merlin: That's unbelievable.
John: And these sweats...
John: These sweats had been made in the mid 70s or 60s.
John: And they were real thick, like real dense when you get real good.
John: They were super, super dense.
John: And they had been.
John: It's almost like felt.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: It was like felt.
John: And every year you would get these sweats issued, but then you had to turn them back in.
John: They didn't belong to you.
John: You turned them back into the coach.
Merlin: So for property, property of East high athletic department, probably.
John: Probably for a decade or more, these sweats had gone out.
John: Some kid had been number 69 and then he gave them back to the school.
John: And Kevin in the, in the crazy, the mania around the football championship at the end of the year, he kept his East 69 sweats.
Merlin: Can you imagine if those poor bastards, they didn't know, if they'd had more exposure, you know, you represent a new wave, you two, like back then, they didn't know from 69.
Merlin: Because you know why?
Merlin: I bet they hadn't looked at Wii Magazine.
Merlin: There's a lot of stuff, they didn't even know to make a joke about that number and say, nice.
Merlin: They just took their sweats back in like a cuck.
John: Took their sweats back, or maybe they were like, oh man, I hate to give my sweats back, but duh.
John: But the thing is, it was senior year, the championship game, and then somehow...
John: You know, football was a fall sport.
John: So he had those 69 sweats his entire senior year.
John: I don't know how, I don't know how he got away with it, but those 69 sweats were so prized by us all.
John: And, and we would, we would steal them from him.
John: And then one of us would have the 69 sweats for a few months.
John: Yes.
John: And then he would say, I need those sweats back.
John: Yeah.
John: But on this night at Maureen Irwin's father's law firm's basement,
John: I was in a moment of 17-year-old beauty and wearing the bottoms of the 69 sweats.
John: Oh, my God, John.
John: I had everything that night.
Merlin: It was all happening for you.
Merlin: Only problem is a sweat like that, as dense as they could be, may not give you a lot of air cover, you know, for the boy down there.
John: Well, but that's, you know, at that moment, like...
John: The problem was I didn't know what to do.
John: I didn't know how to comfort Maureen in her fake crying about some story about her, her brother.
John: I didn't know how to be in a room with her in the middle of the night, uh, in a room full of playboys.
John: I didn't know we, I was driving her around on my Vespa and I ended up, we went to a pancake house.
John: I did not kiss her in the basement.
John: We went to a pancake house where we, uh,
John: Sat across from each other and she just ruthlessly nagged me because at that moment, you know, she had set that she'd orchestrated this whole thing up.
John: Let's go to my dad's office.
John: You know, I'm going to pay attention to you.
John: That's the thing.
John: But nagging me hard.
Merlin: But like, what would you give for three minutes being nagged by Maureen today?
Merlin: The problem is it got hard.
Merlin: She was naked hard at this point, and it wasn't fun anymore.
Merlin: She crossed the line a little bit, crossed the line.
John: Yeah, and it was like 2 o'clock in the morning.
John: It's a very vulnerable time to be nagged.
John: We shouldn't be there.
John: What we should be is we should still be on that couch making love to one another.
John: Yeah.
John: It ended up being a very disastrous night.
John: Oh, but it's certainly memorable.
John: It was, well, in the worst possible way, because Maureen, after this, like, sophomore year of college, we're back in Anchorage, and Kevin and I are talking on the phone, and Kevin's like, oh, guess what?
John: I was like, what?
John: He was like, I hooked up with Maureen Irwin.
John: I was like, you did not.
John: But I had to play it off, like, oh, cool.
John: You took his pants, he took your Maureen.
John: And then...
John: Because Kevin was a much more successful teenage boy than I was.
Merlin: And a year older, it must be said.
Merlin: A year older.
John: And the rest of that summer, he dated Maureen.
John: Ugh, Jesus.
John: And Kevin was somebody that loved, he did not like to go to bars with a bunch of people.
John: He wanted to have a small group of people just hang out together and play pool in one of those bars on the edge of town that nobody goes to.
John: Oh, you can't hide in a situation like that.
John: So he would set up these events where it was
John: himself, his girlfriend, Maureen, me, and like two other people playing pool.
John: And Maureen would sit there leaning on her pool cue, eyeballing me, laser eyeballs and negging me the entire time.
John: And then Kevin would like, after he'd hit,
John: After he'd put the eight ball in the corner pocket, he'd walk by, give her a kiss, and then look at me and say, rack him.
Merlin: It's in the way that you use it.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: You fucked around and found out, I believe, is what happened.
John: I did.
Merlin: God.
Merlin: God damn it.
Merlin: You could have made a fort out of law books.
Merlin: You could have, I mean, there's, oh man, but like it was too much, too fast, too hard to basement.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I mean, like that's a lot for you to have to grok in that moment.
Merlin: And I bet you, I mean, in retrospect, top of mind, why is she fake crying about her brother must've been kind of consuming.
Merlin: And what do I do about this?
John: And I still, you know, and that's the thing.
John: People ask me where the music of the long winters comes from.
John: Yeah.
Yeah.
John: Hmm.
John: It was still trying to unlock what I should have done in the basement of her father's law firm.
John: Like what the hell was I supposed to do there?
John: It's now perfectly clear to me, but it's only perfectly clear because I spent.
John: 12 years writing songs about that moment of confusion and camouflaging that story beneath like a facsimile story about a diamond heist.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: So I'm seeing Michael Schilling's face covered with ice cream while he's tied to the other band members.
Merlin: You're in a chair, but really that's not about spies and diamonds.
Merlin: And the blue diamonds, by the way, I guess are not Viagra, which I always assumed it was, but...
Merlin: Okay, so that's the situation.
Merlin: You're wearing the John Lennon glasses.
Merlin: You stumble a little bit coming out of the subway.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: And so you're working out your moment in the law basement.
John: If you'll notice, there are quite a few Long Winter songs where the theme is a smarter and more wily female character is betraying, abandoning, or otherwise...
John: otherwise like sort of, uh, tossing away the kind of culpable, hopeful, innocent, dumb male character.
John: And the female character is the protagonist of the song.
John: I'm talking about blue diamonds.
John: I'm talking about cinnamon.
John: Yeah.
John: Uh, and the, but the narrator is the dumb Kevin, except in this case, me.
John: the dumb dude who cannot figure out exactly where he should have zigged when he zagged.
Merlin: God, you play it over and over.
Merlin: It's like, it's like your coach making him watch a highlight reel.
Merlin: The time your dick fell out.
Merlin: It's all.
John: And there I am in my 69 sweats sitting on that couch in her father's basement.
John: And she's like, my brother, you know, gotta be on his mouth.
John: Hold me.
Merlin: Do I remember where I saw her last?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: I remember all too well.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yes.
Hmm.
Merlin: You can't redo a lot of that stuff.
Merlin: And now you're stuck with it.
Merlin: You're stuck with it.
Merlin: It's like they say in Ted Lasso.
Merlin: Remember what he says to, not Jamie, but to Sam.
Merlin: He says, what's the happiest animal?
Merlin: He says, a goldfish.
Merlin: They've got a 10-second memory.
Merlin: And then they pull that back together.
Merlin: No spoilers.
Merlin: They say we should be like a goldfish.
Merlin: And I got to tell you, like a lot of shit on that show, it hit me harder than it should have.
Merlin: And I realized I should be a goldfish.
Merlin: I walk around a lot of my life.
Merlin: You knew this from the moment we met.
Merlin: The moment we met, and I worried whether Ken Stringfellow, the vampire man, was hitting on my wife on the Bay Bridge, which I think he was.
Merlin: And then the thing is, though, I walk around feeling like I basically have a little bit of PTSD all the time.
Merlin: And that's because I have not learned how to be a goldfish, John.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: I, well, yeah, and that, that was true about you then and now, but I, you know, it was one of the things that I loved about you when I immediately met you because, you know, yeah, uh, it was, it is a thing that it creates that tension in you that makes you, uh,
John: Um, not interesting, but, but, um, yeah, no, but I mean, it's not the thing about you that makes you interesting.
John: You're interesting.
John: And it's the thing about you that makes you, I don't know.
Merlin: I think, I think the one, one doesn't say losers.
Merlin: The, uh, I think the, uh, the ones who didn't win can sniff each other out a lot of the time.
Merlin: Oh, I see what you're saying.
Merlin: You get big.
Merlin: You get boisterous.
Merlin: You tell a good story.
Merlin: You laugh along.
Merlin: You know, white sauce is not a problem.
Merlin: You get some bits.
John: You win later, maybe.
John: But is it enough?
John: Is it enough?
John: I hope so, John.
John: I really do.
John: The second time I found forest porn.
John: Oh, woods porn.
John: Woods porn.
John: The second time I found woods porn, it was the first time my mom let me take her car.
John: I was unsupervised when I was 15.
John: What were you doing in the woods?
John: And Tony Hine.
John: Okay.
John: I was driving around the neighborhood at two miles an hour because I didn't want to get in trouble.
John: And Tony Hine flagged me down and he said, you've got a car.
John: Come with me.
John: And he took me into the woods.
John: Not in the car.
John: I parked the car.
John: I ran into the woods with Tony Hine.
John: And there was a garbage bag.
John: A hefty garbage bag.
John: Full of the dirtiest porn you ever saw.
Oh, God.
John: I would not want to touch that bag.
John: Somebody took 50 porno mags, put them in a garbage bag and lugged them into the forest and left them there.
Merlin: This is a different kind of woods porn.
Merlin: That sounds to me like somebody's made a choice, you know, maybe for the Lord or similar, or maybe a lady in the house found them.
Merlin: I think a bag that big, that voluminous of porn that dirty is somebody who's trying to turn a corner.
Merlin: They're trying to do a K turn for their life.
John: You see right through it, Merlin.
John: You saw through it instantly.
John: Who would do that?
John: Why not just throw the porn in the garbage bag in the garbage?
John: No.
John: This is symbolic.
John: Yes, there was a symbolic deposit of this porn in the forest.
Merlin: It's like putting the moth in the throat.
Merlin: Or, you know, like you don't want to talk about, you don't want to talk about Moffat.
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Merlin: And then you get to get some help putting a couch in your van, you know, and I think it's very symbolic.
Merlin: So everything's a symbol.
John: And the thing about Tony Hine, crazy middle brother of three brothers, he's A, in this forest by himself for some reason, and B, finds a garbage bag and does not immediately think it's full of body parts or maybe does think it's full of body parts because I wouldn't put that past him.
John: He's a surgeon now.
John: He's a middle child, you say?
John: He's a middle child.
John: Oh, and he's a surgeon, so he's a tryhard.
John: Okay.
Okay.
John: And he's, uh, and he's down, he's actually down, he's part of the Corona response team down in El Paso.
John: Uh, but he, Dr. Hein,
John: I opened this garbage bag, which I never would have done.
John: If I saw a full garbage bag in the woods, I would turn and run.
Merlin: Garbage bags everywhere rarely contain good things because it says it right in the name.
John: Yeah.
John: It's going to be somebody's dead dog or it's going to be somebody's dismembered uncle or whatever.
John: What do they say?
Merlin: He opens it up.
Merlin: With a dead girl or a live boy.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
John: yeah that's no good that's good but did you think he kept any of them like for medical school no well this is the thing he said like it's full of cherries and all this other stuff he was like get your car oh so because this is a garbage bag we could never have carried this bag it weighs 120 pounds my mom's been in the car we lift up the garbage bag the two of us we put it in the trunk on my mom's car
John: You got a hundred pounds of porn.
John: A hundred pounds of porn.
John: A hundred pounds of woods porn.
John: Holy shit.
John: We drive to Tony's house and we sit in, we, we pull up next to the house in a way that we're not visible through the street and we organize them.
John: Yes.
John: Yes.
John: No fucking way.
John: Oh my God.
John: What we decided was two equal piles, equal in every sense, both the same height and also containing all of the different variations.
John: Okay.
John: And I think Tony maybe was a boob guy and I didn't want any of the boob magazines or something like that.
John: We made them into two piles, his pile and my pile.
John: Okay.
John: Then he...
John: carted his pile into his house and it went in there.
John: He has two other brothers.
John: So I have no idea where that stuff went.
John: Did you get to keep the bag?
John: The bag we put in the garbage.
John: We didn't want the bag.
Merlin: How'd you get 50 pounds of porn into your mom's car?
John: So then I had my, I had my porn in the trunk of the car and then I came home, went into the garage, you know, had the remote control, came in, said,
John: Thanks mom.
John: You know, it was fun.
John: Everything's fine.
John: Put the keys in the, in the hander to the keys or whatever, put them in the dish.
John: Yeah.
John: And then knew nobody's going to look in the trunk.
John: Oh my God.
John: Waited until the sun went down, waited until everybody went to bed.
John: I hate this.
John: And then in the, I'm 15 at this point and I'm no dummy.
John: Well.
John: Went and, and then loaded in the porn in the middle of the night.
John: And, uh, and then of course that woods porn, uh,
John: Was the 15 through 18 years old porn.
John: The very, like, well, seminal.
Hmm.
Hmm.