last bucket in numbville

I was 17 years old and a senior in high school. My god parents (Fred and Cheryl Mithouer) were to be given a training session in Hong Kong for new innovative ways of practicing massage. They had a son named Seth who had just recently been barmitzvahed. He was chubby, short and had braces. I was skinny, tall, and unproudly adorned a face consumed of acne. My parents and Seth’s decided it would be great for Seth and I to travel around China with a guide for some months to then meet Fred and Cheryl in Hong Kong to end our trip. This trip by our hippy parents was to be our coming of age experience.

Seth and I first arrived in Beijing to meet with our guide Mr. Zang (which translates to excellent in Mandarin but in reality he embodied the antithesis of the word—Just like people named Joy are so seldom joyful). We had Zang who didn’t speak English buy us pre paid tickets on shitty trains, shitty camels, and shitty buses taking us all over the “for the love of god don’t go there” backwoods parts of China. 4 days into our trip Seth and I got a note under our door saying in broken English “my wife dislikes you- I leaving now– happy holiday.” This chubby kid barely at 13 and I of 17 were stuck in the middle of Nowhere Fucksville China without a clue and no guide. We didn’t speak a dick of Chinese nor were our metabolic and digestive systems prepared for China’s bacteria and other air /food born nasties.

Hotel Experience:
After a long day of site seeing of all the absolute wrong stuff to see in Xian (mutant freak show in a converted buddhist temple and being followed by an old lady trying to sell us half eaten pomegranates), Seth and I discovered a KFC. An amazing fucking sent from god KFC. You see Seth and I’s trip thus far had consisted of a diet of wrong, parts of animals that even the most famished Hyenas would leave behind, sauces that made trash water leaking from a glad bag seem savory. This KFC was as close to god as we could have ever find, a taste of the ferociously missed familiarity of home and a taste of nutrition (as scary as that sounds). Seth and I bought buckets and buckets of chicken -- 6 in total. We planned out how we were to savor our coveted booty. We were to scarf one bucket and then save the rest to travel with, hopefully providing us with enough rations for week —just enough to make it Hong Kong where it knowingly possessed the holy trinity of food—McDonalds, Burger King, and Pizza Hut. We got to our hotel and immediately stuffed our faces. Cramping and digesting we noticed that we were not alone in our disgusting hotel room. We had cockroaches. These cockroaches came in numbers, big numbers, numbers higher than I could count and they were super freakishly large at that. The cockroaches reached in sizes that of a Pringles chip. Seth and I panicked at the site of these creatures all around us like lions circling two sick and really slow pigs. I grabbed my bug spray and doused them. My attempt at chemical warfare came to no avail. Seth and I luckily had lighters so that we could smoke opium with (helped pass the time) -- and we took our drug lighters and combined them with bug spray forming mini blow torches unleashing a fiery hell upon the cockroaches. With some flame plus the sole of a boot the numbers began to diminish. Roaches then took upon a new strategy of escape by crawling underneath our wallpaper like a mouse under a rug—little bumps fleeing from death. We got em—We got them all! Relieved and hours later Seth and I retired still holding onto our joy of obtaining week’s full of beautiful KFC future and victory of slaying our enemies. Morning came and we felt refreshed and wonderfully constipated from our KFC (our entire China trip up until KFC consisted of vomiting up and having diarrhea from Chinese cuisine -- thus constipation was a welcomed friend.) We looked around to see if our enemies the cockroaches were still dead and gone --A sigh and relief to find they were no more in the room. For most KFC for dinner and then cold KFC for breakfast would seem like suicide but to us it was a beautiful option. Seth grabbed one of our buckets to start our breakfast feast—in a chubby braces whistling shriek Seth dropped the bucket. As it fell to the floor in slow motion I heart crushed then turned to horror as dozen of cockroaches spilled onto the stained carpet. The cockroaches had devoured the entire remains of our chicken bucket. No bones no sweet grease residue just the writhing and chirping cockroaches. In shock we watched them all scurry away from the bucket into the walls, into their evil dens. I said to Seth, “Let's not freak. They got to one bucket but we still have four more buckets and the odds of them all getting through 4 buckets surely must be impossible." We then grabbed a bucket, dropped it in horror and then moved to the next. Each time we found nothing left but the enemy inside our buckets. As each bucket’s examination came, we found ourselves going through all the typical stages of emotion when dealing with the loss of a loved one. Our emotional train finally stopped on the last bucket in numbville. I only now at the age of 31 can speak of our horror. And when memorial day comes around I can't help but think of our fallen hero KFC on that fateful day.


One more hotel story for the road.

I was 6 yrs old, my sister 3. We were staying at a motel. Our parents were in another room so they could hump. I found a gun under my bed. My sister and I played with it. I then accidentally murdered my sister. The end


Ok the first story is true. The second story is not—but could be a great made for tv movie on the Lifetime network.

-Drew Beam of Brooklyn, NY
www.drewbeam.com