Midnight Pajama Jam

Hey, by now you know that I've been divulging myself with too much stand-up comedy lately. But something has to get you through the darkest months of the year and we all know that holiday cheer just won't cut it. I've stumbled on some pretty good stuff. Midnight Pajama Jam stars two great comedians: H. Jon Benjamin and Jon Glaser based in Manhattan. The first is a performance bit from the Invite Them Up series in the Lower East Side by Jon Glaser that Ryan and I laughed our asses off to the other night. It includes a series of letters from the fourth member of ZZ Top:

Listen to it here! TT Zop all the way to Pussyville!



The second little thing from the guys is a special bit of holiday cheer that includes drug addictions, the holocaust and a mixtape. A bit of light reading to enjoy next to the fire with a warm cup of hot cocoa. (And yes, I am aware that it's incredibly long but I'm going for the record)

Never Forgetting
My personal battle with drug
addiction during the Holocaust

by H. Jon Benjamin (from midnightpajamajam.com)

"I was awoken by fractal light pouring through the portal-shaped window of my family's Strasbourg house. Pushing in. Light. Morning light. Today would not be like any other day. The Gestapo was performing door to door searches and it was only a matter of time before they knocked on 411 Rue de Marachelle Foch, home of M. and Mme. Benjamin, my family. There was a looming tension, like a haze, thick and heavy. My father, despite the rumors, felt sure he could negotiate with them, reach some agreement, appeal to their better judgement...something, anything. They would see our family and surely, they would make an exception. He sat at the kitchen table shuffling through papers, smoking his pipe. Short, rhythmic puffs. Smoke creeped through the air, languishing in ribboned layers up and up and up and the light mixed in with it and together they danced. There was a smell. It lingered always--cherries and cedar wood and tonka beans. My mother sat in her rocking chair, nervously sewing a sweater for baby hubert. Hubert was turning two in the fall. i was nine years old. I sat in my room, shaking. It had been ten hours since my last fix and i needed a boost. i knew it would be risky to go out and score with the gestapo patrolling the street, but i had no control over my impulse to need to feel high. I stiffly walked into my parents bedroom, trying to conceal any outward appearance of detox-ing. My bones felt like rusty metal. My mouth was dry, like i had poured flour in it. Dry mouth. The left side of my head was pulsating with a dull pain which ebbed and abated with every beat of my addict heart. My mouth was dry. My bones ached. Mouth dry. Shaking. I opened their bedroom drawer and tucked behind some papers there was a stack of 20 franc notes my father was saving to bribe the gestapo. I took 100 francs. i needed heroin. i didn't need my family. A knock at the door, heavy and resonant. I dropped the money on the floor and it fell like snowflakes onto the wide pine planks.

I frantically picked it up and stuffed it into my pockets. A thought flashed in my mind. My father needed this money to save us and i was taking it to go score Mexican black tar heroin. That thought quickly passed and i moved with singular purpose, like an automaton, to the back door and quietly left. Quietly pushing the door closed from the outside. Only the slightest sound of the door closing with a puff of air from the inside pushing it's way through, like it was following me out --cherries, tonka beans and cedar.While crossing Parc Monseau on my way to Jasper's house (Jasper dealt heroin), I smoked a little crack to take the edge off. It felt burning cold as it filled my lungs. Then, I cooked some meth and smoked it. It was then I spotted three Gestapo officers smoking cigarettes by the main path in the center of the park and they looked over and i started walking toward them with purposeful strides. That was the rush of the drug. The meth. The crack. Pushing through me. I was half the size of the smallest one of them, but when I had that fire in me, I had a different structure. Everything changed. I moved differently. I saw differently. It was electric and hot and white energy, blinding and baneful. I wanted these guys dead. These fucking Nazis that would take my family away without remorse. They didn't care. I didn't care. It was noon in Parc Monseau in Strasbourg and I was high again and my family was about to be hauled off by the Gestapo. It was driving me toward them. Compelling me. I was just inside my own body watching and listening and the sounds were muffled and everything was clipped, like I was a thousand pieces. I was nine years old and I was high again.

Chapter 2

Fourteen or so hours since my last fix. Last fix was at Redmond's house. He told his mom we were going upstairs to play with his toy trains. Redmond had an amazing set of Carette trains. We sat on his floor. He handed me his belt. I rolled up my sleeve and wrapped his belt around my arm. I pulled it tight with my mouth. Old leather. The taste was familiar. Leather in my mouth. My body anticipating all the sensations, the thunderous calm, the shadows in a empty room.

When I feel the stuff in me, I am alone in a room crouching and watching and I am in my head and I can see me on the outside, the real me, but I can't touch me, but I am not sad or anxious. I just watch and I am relieved that I just can sit and watch. Redmond scored some needles from his mom who worked at the Strasbourg Hospital changing linens for the patients. Sometimes she took him to the hospital with him and he ran around there, while his mom worked. One day he found a medical supply room and pocketed a handful of syringes. Redmond was my heroin mentor. He shot me up my first time at recess, behind the school building in the alley. I was scared and cold and i watched my breath leave my mouth in disappearing clouds and the needle went into my arm and I flinched and Redmond told me to stay still and it felt thick as it popped through the skin on my arm and then a rush of cold in elliptical waves, like a clean snowstorm inside my body and I looked up at Redmond and passed him into the strip of blue sky between the buildings above. I don't know when, but I started to feel sick and dizzy, like I was turned upside down and I felt like I was going to vomit and I did. I vomited up brown fluid with red chunks, then green and yellow kernels, then blue viscousy liquid, then white froth, then thin clear diaphonous fibers, like cotton candy, and I couldn't feel better for what seemed like forever, but Redmond stayed with me and he placed his hand on the back of my neck and I remember his hand. I loved his hand there. Strasbourg was strange and phatasmagorical when the Germans came. I remember feeling both scared and awed by the changes. Their was a dark mood, and yet everywhere, at any time, something unexpected would happen and this had a morose appeal. Especially as a kid where I couldn't completely understand the consequences, i just soaked in the snippets, like looking through a Viewmaster or the feeling of walking through a State Fair, where everything is commotion and wonderous and furious and random energy. German soldiers in symmetrical packs marching briskly. Piles of books burning on sidewalks. Soldiers beating women in front of their husbands in the middle of the street for wearing berets. Glass breaking and men crying and shouting. Snippets. Strange, sublime images. Surreal and real. Intense.

In school, lessons were taught in German and not French and M. Guigot, our fifth grade teacher, was no longer gregarious at one moment and stern the next, but rather sullen all the time. We were made to sing Nazi marching songs and showed bizzare illustrations of Jews. Jews with hats. Jews with waxed moustaches. Jews with lasers shooting from their eyes. Jews with talons on their hands wearing house coats. Jews. Jews. Jews. I began sniffing everyday. First it was heroin, then heroin combined with meth, then meth and heroin combined with sodium hypochlorite (pool cleaner). After a few weeks Redmond and I were high every day together. We were so high, we never even cared about the spot searches and the beatings and the constant harassment at the hands of the Gestapo. Soon, we got into heavier stuff. That's when we started doing 'chemo'. Once a day, we would walk after school through the 'Brown Zone', an area in west Strasbourg completely overrun by the Nazis, and up the hill to the free clinic, where we would use Redmond's mom's pass and some doctored paperwork to get full radiation treatments. 'Chemo' mixed with meth was a total bleached-out high. Raw. Hot. Every sense blown out and destroyed. We couldn't get enough, but soon the end was near. The Nazis were about to call for a city-wide lockdown and that meant no access to smack, meth or chemo. We hadn't had enough and we were willing to take any risk. Our lives meant nothing to them or us.

Chapter 3
When I returned home, my house had been ransacked. Papers strewn everywhere. Mama's rocking chair broken. Plates and glasses smashed in pieces all over. Papa's pipe on the floor in the center of the sitting room, cracked in two, with his tobacco pouch ripped open next to it. Shattered. Everything shattered and quiet and spectral and different. In the center of the house, a smoldering pile of family photos. On the walls, written in spray paint, large and looming, 'Jews are Assholes'. On another wall, 'If You Lived Here, You'd Be A Jew By Now'. On another wall, a rebus. A picture of a glass of juice, then the letter 'R', then an 'G' with a plus sign then a bail of hay.Everything was falling apart.

I was reeling and nothing mattered. I couldn't help looking at my house in ruins and my family gone and not feel anything...like i was encased in ice and everything around me looked fuzzy and melting and unreal and anfractuous and all of it folded into a dream spun by an old wooden spinning wheel that was melting and thoughts crashed in my head of snow falling softly and a doll lying on a cobble stone street and a man with a beard and puffy lips laughing and a hand on a upholstered chair with yellow fingernails pulling at the fabric nervously and the sound it made and the wheel spinning and spinning and the fingernail scratching and the wheel and the hand and the flicker of a streetlight and the echoes of everything i know and knew. I woke up on my living room floor sometime later and I didn't know what time it was. Darkness filled the room. I had befriended a young Nazi soldier named Heinrich days before at Julian's (Jasper's twin brother) house, where we would sit and smoke crack and watch American football and listen to Devendra Banhart. This was a time when everything was in flux in Strasbourg. The buildings were the same, but the city was a foreign place, like a parallel universe. The Nazis controlled everything and people were just left waiting. Waiting to see what would happen next. Waiting. Faces frozen and sad. Vacant glares and slow, anxious steps, waiting for that moment when the Gestapo approached and dragged them away without consequence. Time itself had come undone and the air seemed thick with a muddied dread. I stopped going to school over a week before I found my parents and brother gone. I basically lived at Julian's, which he had transformed into an after-hours club for young Nazis who wanted to get high. But, it was just a matter of time before they would send us away. During the day, we would sit on the corner of Rue Charlotte in front of the dime store and sing doo-wop for change. At night, we would take the change and melt it down and smoke it, along with whatever else we could scrounge. I had developed open sores on my face and arms, most likely from dirty needles and such.

When needles weren't available, we would use anything we could find or rig--mostly old cathode ray tubes (the toxic phosphors inside mixed with the heroin really made your veins cry), hollowed out lemons connected to bike pump needles, pencils, pomegranite seeds, anything we could muster up to push that syrup into our arms, eyes, thighs, arches of our feet, wrists, the soft spots of our skulls, heels, pinkie-tip pads, the smalls of our backs and shins. It was high tide on heroin beach and the waters were filled with Nazi sharks, smelling blood. Over the course of the next week, the Gestapo cut off all suppliers of smack coming into Strasbourg. The turkey was about to get cold. It was 1940. I was turing ten years old in two weeks. It was going to be a birthday to remember.

Chapter 4
Heinrich, sweet, Heinrich
We kissed and kissed some more
You made my mouth dance
Heinrich, oh, Heinrich
Nothing lasts, everything turns
Hope is illusion
Even our kiss...

What was it about this douchebag Nazi that I fell for? His pudgy red cheeks. Doughy. His dead eyes. His placid, sallow face. His thin lips hiding his crooked yellow teeth. Had this fuckhead never been a dentist? Where was he from? Some sad bleak industrial town where men wore sooty tan overalls and beat their wives and worked and worked and drank and gambled and drank and sat in dusty upholstered chairs reading Der Stuemer and blaming everything and everyone and it would be dark and grey except for some days where the blue sky and the shining sun would make it all seem worse. But when he gets high, he sneezes. It's his thing. Always sneezing and I play this game with myself where I try not say 'bless you' and it's hard to do,

because it's second nature to say 'bless you' and I have to strain to not blurt it out and he keeps sneezing and I hold onto this and it builds and I look down and focus and I just want to say 'bless you', but I don't and it builds and I want to scream and again and again and it hurts not to do all I know to do. Another sneeze and I look into his fat face and I brace myself for not knowing. Sometimes, when you peel an orange, there's a another miniature orange inside. Not always, just sometimes. Some oranges that appear to be one orange from the outside are two on the inside. I am two oranges. I took Heinrich to my house and asked him if he could help find my parents and my brother. I knew I shouldn't bring him there, but I was two oranges. We sat and drank smackaccino's, which are espresso with steamed milk with heroin mixed in with it and some powdered PCP on top. It's a jittery high that help you get stuff done. Heinrich made some kick-ass vegetarian chili we sat and made mix tapes and ate and laughed and felt like being high was a gift from God.

Heinrch's Nazi Mix to Jon

Almost Crimes- Broken Social Scene
Jocko Homo-Devo
Kampflied der Nationalsozialisten by Kleo Pleyer
I Turn My Camera On- Spoon
Bomb in the Bee Hive- Guided By Voices
Deutschland Erwache- Anonymous
Whenever You're on My Mind--Marshall Crenshaw
Radio Free Europe-R.E.M.
The German National Anthem--August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben
Slack Motherfucker--Superchunk
Als Wir Nach Frankreich Zogen (As We Drove Into France)
Pet Sounds- The Beach Boys