perfidy

I am well familiar with the brilliance and technical virtuosity of the guitarist Buckethead. Largely because his fans regularly email me to tell me how brilliant and virtuosoesque that other Buckethead is. I also sit amazed at the apparently stupendous sex appeal of a KFC chicken bucket worn on the head and the effect that it has on impressionable (and no doubt deeply disturbed) young females.

I have learned of another Buckethead, though, and one whose fans will likely never email me. The other day I picked up PJ O'Rourke's Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut at a second hand store in a dirty little Virginia town improbably set amidst some of the most beautiful countryside east of the Mississippi. It was shelved, appropriately enough, in the religion section.

PJ, apparently, had his own encounter with a buckethead almost thirty years ago in Marlette, Michigan:

Now motels are always cheery and attractive places, especially when you're sick, and, let me tell you, this particular motel is a monument to the art form. It's run by some semiretarded no-necked bucket-headed member of an Eastern European ethnic type so dim that they were driven to our shores by shame at the comparitive military success and intellectual brilliance of their Polack neighbors. We'd already had one conversation with this oaf:

"We have reservations for six rooms."

"Ve half only six rooms reserfed."

Right, we have reservations for six."

"Dere is no six of yous."

"The other people are in the cars outside."

In dose car? Dat is more dan six!"

"Look we're not all staying here. Only six of us. The rest are staying at the farm."

"Farm? No farm! Ve half only six rooms reserfed." And so on. His particular commetn to me had been, "Ve give you da room wif stuck storm door." ...

Bolted and chained in one corner was a color television set - by "color" I mean mostly orange - with reception as fuzzy as I was, and I lay there all night, too nauseated to sleep, watching movies like Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and Hercules Unzipped, plus three versions of our national anthem and one of Canada's and four varieties of sermonette (Methodist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic and Total Immersion Baptist Evangelical Church of Christ), and, finally, something called the "Hog-Watch Sun-up Early Rural Feed and Price Pork Report" until I dozed off a little before six, Friday morning. At 6:15, there was a calamitous banging on the door. It was Buckethead, the landlord: "Dis storm door stick, you know!" Then he shoveled snow under my window for an hour.