The interviewer tells him, “I’ll just—I’m turning the camera off, Woof, okay?”
Woof lowers his head and covers his mouth, stifling whimpers.
CUT.
“So as I was saying,” Woof says, his wraparound shades now covering his eyes, “the real innovation we came up with, all ours, and, you know, this one was our baby because no one had quite thought of it yet, and it was a little outlawish: we thought it would be nice to have a real skinny pipe that took superfine screens that would actually stop the bone dust from getting through, first of all, and secondly—and this was the real sweet part—that it would have a bowl and mouthpiece that you could pop or screw them both off the shaft and use the shaft as a snort straw, and each of these pieces of the pipe would have the little burning dog of fire logo on it, but a little bit weirded-like, kinda bendy looking, signifying, you know, good times, high times, can’t quite see straight.
“So they—our dads’ fancy friends, I’m saying—they invested. In Jizzbrain, Burnsy, and me. And we made those suits happy. First the sleeve. Well, not quite the sleeve. Instead of making a sleeve with a protective insert, we just made a protective insert that fit the ugly Graham&Swords sleeve, and that was a little depressing in a way, but, man, we made a lot of fucken money. It was a good product. Still is to this day. Japanese design—dude from Nike. And Guatemalan labor. And we rolled some of the profits into a factory in Texas where we did the little vehicles, which, yeah, didn’t do as well as the insert, but turned some profit. And all this was within, like, what? fourteen months of starting the company. And next up was the baby, the pipe, and it was just about a week or two before it was set to go into production in Mexico—it was all set up, we were just waiting on a special smelter for the, you know, the ore, or whatever—that’s when I get the call from Jizzbrain, and, you know I don’t even know what to say about it. I mean, what’s there intelligent to say about it, really? They were a great band. They’re still pretty good, to this very day. And Burnsy and me had always been deep into metal, and we loved them from their first album, and we weren’t gonna abandon loving them just cause they had a few hits, you know? I mean, some people did abandon them cause of that, but not us. And I think Burnsy went into that mosh pit that night partly because it was full of a bunch of fratboy-type jerks who were turning our beloved subculture—who’d already turned our beloved subculture—into a kind of mainstream, date-rapey, baseball-cap-wearing travesty of bullying, jock-type aggression—rather than the joyful, celebratory-type aggression it once was, I’m saying—and he wanted to reclaim it, you know. Burnsy. Burnsy wanted, that night, to reclaim the pit. I think he went in there full of hope and love. Jizzbrain was there, too, and the way he tells it, him and Burnsy actually cleared outta the pit about thirty seconds into the opening number, but then these football-fan types were stomping some like eccentrically dressed, probably gay kid, and Burnsy went back in to help the kid to his feet, to get him to safety, and that’s when he took a kick to the head, and, you know, by the time Jizzbrain could get there to help him up—they were both, Burnsy and the gay kid—they were comatose, if not already dead. And I don’t blame the band. I don’t blame rock and roll…I don’t know. I don’t know. I just…Shit. Maybe turn that camera off ag—”
CUT.
“So yeah, so. After Jizzbrain calls and he tells me what happened, I…I guess I blacked out. And when I came to, I blacked out more, uh, deliberately you could say. Blacked out for about a month. Six weeks, maybe. A while.
“My dad comes over one morning, then, you know? And he’s with the lawyers, and they say, ‘Look, Woof, you don’t seem much like you want to do this anymore, and Jizzbrain says it’s your call, and Burnsy’s dad is beyond caring about anything but his loss of his son, and this offer—’ I forgot to mention Graham&Swords had been trying to buy us ever since the sleeve insert hit—‘This offer,’ Daddy says, ‘of three hundred million, seventy-five million of that going to you, is gonna be off the table as soon as your pipe goes to market, and it’s set to ship tomorrow. You gotta make a decision.’ Cause see, up til then, you gotta understand, Burnsy&Woof was cool and all, and all the kids knew we were the ones discovered spidge, but it was more kind of legendary than historical at that point, if you know what I mean? The oldster money didn’t have a clue, and Graham&Swords thought—correctly, I suppose—that if we got known for this special spidge pipe we’d developed, if Burnsy&Woof were that outwardly associated to getting high, well, they didn’t think it was worth the cost to their family-friendly, warhead-selling corporate reputation to buy our brand. So this was our last chance to sell up. And me? My daddy was right about me. I was done. I didn’t want to do shit anymore, and here were all those pals of his and of Burnsy’s dad that believed in us, invested in us, and they wanted to cash in. So I said, ‘Yeah. Sell. Let’s sell up.’ And we sold up, and that was that. And you know, the real bummer was they just trashed all those pipes. Well, they melted them back down and made belt buckles or some shit, I don’t know, but they wouldn’t even let me have one, you know? Not a single one. I really thought those pipes were gonna be so great, and for a minute I thought, ‘Shit, I’ll start a new company, make them on my own,’ but it just seemed wrong without Burnsy. So I didn’t. Anyway. Anything I’ve uh—heh heh—left out?”
“Just one thing,” says the interviewer. “Spidge. The word. Where’d that come from?”
“Aw, spidge was just something Burnsy used to say for thingy or stuff or like you know whatchamacallit or whatever. You know, a guy wants some minestrone soup but can’t remember the word minestrone some reason, or he just never knew what it was called and he says, ‘Hey, uh, ladle me out a bowl of some of that whatchamacallit.’ Burnsy’d, he’d’ve said, like, ‘Ladle me out a bowl of that spidge there,’ instead. So I guess it just caught on in the early days at the clubs. Probably Burnsy said something like, ‘You sexy ladies there should smoke some of this new kind of spidge with me and my boy Woof over here,’ and they just, the hypothetical ladies I’m saying, they just thought that’s what the drug was called, and they called it that, and then so did everyone, and it happened, I guess, that cause spidge involves spines, and there’s that whole sp sound at the beginning, I guess people just went with it. But that’s how it was with Burnsy, you know? Easy come easy go. Leave his mark without even realizing his sword was drawn or whatever. Sword? Sword. Sure. Hell am I talking about? You want to meet my horses? I got some beautiful horses other end of the property. We can take ’em out, or even go riding if you want.”
“I’d love to,” says the interviewer. “Umm…”
“But.”
“ ‘But’?” says the interviewer.