Backstories: "The Wrath of Cat Piss Man"
A partial tribute to my best friend, the late Paul Mears, part three of several
(Backstory the First: The reason things have been quiet on the newsletter front lies with the loss of my oldest and dearest friend Paul Mears, who died on July 11. It’s exceedingly hard to describe how hard this hit: we had been friends for nearly 45 years, and just trying to collect a greatest hits of our exploits is both time-consuming and exceedingly painful. This is one of several Backstory installments to help fill in gaps in the main essay, as we almost literally changed history a couple of times, and the final eulogy comes out when it’s damn good and ready.)
(Backstory the Second: Because Paul Mears and I had such a long backstory, we also had a lot of personal references that were practically code. Through the second half of the 1980s, whenever he’d come back to Dallas on leave from the US Navy, I was working nights, so I was the one person in his old circles available and interested in doing anything after about 9:00, especially on a Sunday evening. This continued after he finished his tour of duty and moved back in 1989, and this included his getting caught up on weirdness. For those of you coming in late, I was a professional writer between April 1989 and May 2002, and this led to his getting involved with a lot of, erm, interesting adventures in that time.
This was during the Age of Zines, where bookstore magazine sections were suddenly packed full of small-print, extremely unorthodox, and often highly offensive magazines on any number of subjects, all looking for audiences and contributors, This was also the age of mix tapes, both audio and video, often packed to the gills with material that either violated broadcast laws or foreign copyright. At the beginning, what we know as the internet barely existed, mostly as fan pages put together and accessible by those with access to university networks, but strange and terrible glimmerings kept leaking out. When version 1.0 of the Netscape Navigator web browser came out at the end of 1994, the input only became stranger and terrible, and things just kept piling on until the end of the 19990s. By then, the US zine market had completely collapsed, record labels big and small were already being affected by filesharing services, and a site nobody’s ever heard of called YouTube was starting to make inroads in sharing all of the video anomalies that previously passed through innumerable dubs before getting into our sweaty little hands. Between then, though, Paul and I immersed ourselves in that massive wave of cultural debris, often picking up bits the way milk in the refrigerator picks up the smell of barbecued brisket, fresh onions, and going-bad squid.
At the same time, my writing career, such as it was, ran in fits and jerks, and in those days before wasting time “promoting” oneself on social media, we were wasting time “promoting” my work at science fiction and horror conventions. That meant innumerable pitches from wannabe and never-were magazine publishers, book publishers, and the occasional film distributor wanting work paid for in “exposure” or, worse, “when we’re profitable,” and Paul’s bullshit meter was often on a hair trigger. I couldn’t blame him: there was something about the environment at most conventions that brought out less actual lies and more enthusiastic delusions as far as projects actually happening, much less anyone but the organizer getting paid for finished work.
After a few years, our shorthand became a running joke, and it was something we shared for the rest of Paul’s life. One of his last leaves before he left the Navy coincided with my borrowing a bootleg of the Sex Pistols pseudodocumentary The Great Rock ‘n Roll Swindle from a mutual friend, and something about the absolute end of the title song tickled him so strongly that he’d respond to tales of collapsing conventions and disappearing magazines with “It’s a swindle!” Likewise, the Alex Winter short film Entering Texas was a similar touchstone: decades later, I titled my second book Greasing the Pan because when faced with a pile of enthusiastic gibberish from someone who shouldn’t be trusted with burned-out matches, we’d walk away with my chuckling “He’s just greasing the pan, dear” and Paul responding “It’s special grease!”
The following diatribe was inspired by another one of Paul’s favorite shortcuts. No matter the convention, there is always at least one person there who’s more than a bit off. Worse, they KNOW they’re off, and absolutely refuse to do anything about it: the attitude is that “since I have encyclopedic knowledge of all things Star Trek/Star Wars/gaming/comics, the universe should bend to me and not possibly the other way around.” “Fanboy,” while in common use already, wasn’t a term that made sense to anyone outside of fandom, and it didn’t quite get across the difference between a casual fan who just got really enthusiastic about their interests and the proudly damaged individual willing to crap themselves rather than get out of a line for freebies. When I told Paul the story of the original Cat Piss Man of the Forest Lane Lone Star Comics, he glommed onto the term and never let go. After a few years, I was contributing to an online comics zine titled Savant, and Paul suggested “Why don’t you write about Cat Piss Man?” And so started the legend.
As it stands, Cat Piss Man is now a fixture in fandom, even if the original or his many emulators would never acknowledge it. Much like how hipsters will deny they’re hipsters or that they’ve ever seen a hipster, the person bellowing the loudest “I’ve never seen a Cat Piss Man, and I doubt they even exist” is, without fail, the worst example of the lot. Worse, they’ll point at someone else and go on and on about how THEY’RE a classic example, with careful evasion of their own culpability. Watching that dance and dodge was another favorite activity of Paul’s, because those willing to admit their own fannish shortcomings and try to make themselves better were usually great fans and allies once the stink, metaphorical and literal, blew off them.
In any case, this essay originally appeared in the long-defunct and much-missed comic essay online magazine Savant in 2000, and go thank Matt Fraction for getting that going. It’s been quite the road trip since then.)
It's a distasteful subject, not fit for family reading, but it's time. It's time to relate the origins of everyone's least favorite comic shop fixture, Cat Piss Man.
Back about three-quarters of a decade ago, I was a regular at a local comic shop in Dallas, and was yakking with the staff about the new issue of Fuck Science Fiction (yes, that was a real magazine, and I bawled like a baby went it went under) when I met my first Cat Piss Man. Ever comic shop in every city has at least one, all seemingly grown off this one like cuttings off jade plants. About six foot four he was, weighing in at least 200 kilos if an ounce, and the perfect cliche of the comics aficionado. The lank, greasy hair that wasn't long enough to tie back but also wasn't so short that it took care of itself without combing. The heavily abused Marvel Comics T-shirt, with holes that suggested that cotton polyblend was the only fiber he got in his diet, since most of the rest was covered in a thick layer of Cheetos crumbs. Facial pores that suggested that gnomes sneaked into his bedroom in his parents' house and broke off the tips of No. 2 pencils in them. Beady little eyes behind Buddy Holly birth control glasses. If one's dental apparatus was a city, his mouth obviously took a direct hit with an H-bomb, and the mixture of nose hairs and crusted boogers protruding an inch past his nostrils and down his moustache guaranteed that he breathed through his mouth, producing a charitable impersonation of "The Creature From the Black Latrine". The last of the Olmec had taken to living in cliff dwellings in the shelter between his double chin and his gut, reasonably assured that nothing would disturb their mushroom and cave cricket farms.
However, Cat Piss Man's name was pure olfactory onomatopoeia. The first time I encountered him, he was walking up to the store door when one of the staff said "Oh God, it's Cat Piss Man." I was about ready to ask why he said that when Cat Piss Man stepped inside. Now, Texas heat has a tendency to make everyone exposed to it somewhat less than fresh, but this was the end of December, and his odor literally brought tears to my eyes. This wasn't a minor case of body odor: he literally smelled like a mile-wide overloaded litter box, left out in the Australian outback to cook in the sun, with enough power to kill a silk ficus. This stench wasn't just an affront to God, Satan, and Elvis: this was positively Lovecraftian in scope. I suddenly attained insane insights into the magazine distribution business, and I think a lack of available oxygen had something to do with it. Other customers would simply run the moment they saw him waddling toward the door, and he could clear the entire shop within seconds if the store's air conditioner wasn't on at full blast.
If this wasn't nauseating enough, his behavior was even more horrifying. Since this store didn't carry "adult" comics, he didn't disappear into the back area to wank off (to steal from the Republicans Attack! trading card set from Kitchen Sink, I doubt if he nor anyone else had seen his genitalia since 1984), so he felt compelled to follow people around. Someone would be reading the back copy on an issue of The Comics Journal when he'd come trucking over, not saying anything, and just kinda stare. Every time the customer would move away because Cat Piss Man was melting their Mylar baggies, he'd just follow along, not saying a word, and reposition himself like a corpulent vulture over a dying prospector. And Arioch help us all if the customer was female: Cat Piss Man would sidle over closer, trying to stun her with his natural perfume, and apparently he once tried to feel up one woman who wasn't able to get away fast enough.
The last time I ever saw Cat Piss Man, he was at a science fiction convention in Austin, Texas a few years back, hogging space in front of a dealer's table, doing the same thing. This time, he was dressed semi-formal, in a homemade Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform with a thick layer of human grease clogging the uniform's fabric in a band starting at his armpits and ending at the tops of his hips. He apparently couldn't afford or find a prop communicator pin, so he had one appliqued with Elmer's Glue-All and glitter, and the grease was making the symbol peel free. For some reason, this made his assaults even more terrifying.
Oh, and did I mention that this guy almost never bought anything during his regular visits? Or if he did, he nitpicked everything in an effort to scam as much free stuff as possible?
Okay, so you think it's cruel to make fun of the socially challenged. We've all been there at one point or another in our lives (I cant' read one of Evan Dorkin's Eltingville strips without getting flashbacks of 1985, and when I remember how much I used to be like Bill from the Eltingville Club, I want to borrow a time machine just so I can kick my former self's ass into the next time zone), but this is different. This isn't making fun of someone different from us. This is explaining why so many people stay away from comic shops.
Let's put it another way. If Cat Piss Man were to act like this on the street toward random passersby, he'd probably get arrested or at least given a stern warning by a local cop. If Cat Piss Man were to do this at a restaurant, he'd be thrown out for bothering the customers. If Cat Piss Man were to do this at a nightclub, about eight big burly guys would take him out back and beat the shit out of him. If Cat Piss Man were even to smell like this in the Army, he'd get a good scrubdown with lye soap and wire brushes. (I had Cat Piss Man's brother in my Basic Training platoon in the Army, and we finally had to give him a blanket party a la Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket to convince him that bathing and changing clothes were good things, because every other method simply didn't work.) In a comic shop, though, this isn't only tolerated, its example just acts as encouragement for others. Every time I mention Cat Piss Man to a comic shop owner, no matter where in the country the comic shop is located, s/he laughs and says "Oh yeah: he's in here all of the time." It's not the same guy (sometimes Cat Piss Man is skinny, and sometimes he actually combs his hair), but this new Cat Piss Man is a glob off the original.
I'm willing to concede that Cat Piss Man buys something every once in a while, and that we can't afford to alienate customers in this depressed market. However, even if his Mommy's allowance gave him the opportunity to buy $200 or more in comics and other goodies a week, Cat Piss Man drives off easily twice that many paying customers, who would come back to a comic shop again and again if they weren't subjected to nasal rape every time they walked inside. This also holds true for the "Tragic: This Gathering" players shrieking at the tops of their lungs in the back (that is, except in the comic shops where the owners realized that they lost less money in sales to card game players by closing the gaming areas than they lost from items that "liberated" themselves when the gamers left for the day), or the guy who pesters customers into buying loose action figures out front because the store owner didn't want a box of dog-chewed Spawn figures. And let's not forget the fanatics who threaten violence upon anyone who dares scoff at the idea of an Action Girl/Witchblade crossover event. Comic store owners just don't seem to realize the lesson that the shantytowns out in front of movie theaters for Star Wars: Episode One taught movie theater managers: the last thing most patrons wanted was to be harangued by some dork in a Jedi costume who had been living in it for the last four months, and the fear of even getting close to the Episode One line meant that customers didn't come to see other films, either.
And for those store owners and patrons who don't think that Cat Piss Man and his brothers are a problem, look at it this way. Imagine going into a pet shop in a world where every pet shop had a big, smelly incontinent St. Bernard in the back. The dog doesn't belong to the store: it's just some stray that comes in every day, eats straight out of the bulk dog food bins, drools all over the copies of Reptiles and Tropical Fish Hobbyist up front, rapes the hamsters and dry-humps the legs of every customer that comes in, and doesn't contribute a thing to the operation of the store. If anything, it gets in the way of normal operation, and pet supply proprietors find that their business is directly affected by customer perceptions of the ordeal of trying to get around the St. Bernard shit piled around the front entrance. This world doesn't exist, although I've seen some pet shops that have come close. One of two things happen to pet shops like this: they go out of business, or the owner does an Old Yeller to the mangy beast and burns its carcass in a big bonfire out front.
The latter is what comic shop owners and managers need to do to their resident Cat Piss Man: throw the bums out. Don't joke about the stench or put on gas masks while Cat Piss Man is in the store, because he's spent years ignoring the comments of every other human about his appearance. Simply say "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave until you take a bath and leave the customers alone," and back it up. In the best scenario, he realizes that cleaning himself from time to time is at least as important as wearing pants, and comes back after realizing that his body isn't made from pure sodium and that soap and water don't necessarily burst into flame on contact. Otherwise, he'll throw a temper tantrum and stomp off to another comic shop; the other comic shop gets his pittance, and his old shop gets a whole passel of customers who apologize "I would have come in sooner, but that guy in here was melting the windows..." Either way, the problem is solved, and his old shop may even get a whole new contingent of customers who say "I used to go to that shop across town, but this guy who smells like he sleeps in a cat box came in and took over."
I'm not advocating setting up a dress code for comic shops, although I have to say that a dress code for comic shop managers and employees might not be a bad idea. (C'mon, guys: you don't need suits from Barneys, but have you ever wondered what people think when they see you behind the counter in sandals, ratty jeans, and a Lady Death T-shirt?) What I am advocating is considering the benefits of getting the shop Cat Piss Man to bathe or getting him to leave. And since none of the other customers are going to say anything, he's there until the store staff gets rid of him, and he'll cost you. Oh boy howdy, he'll cost you.
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.