Norwegian Surgeons
by Lars Paul Linden
illustration by Jef Taylor
By the age of seven he thought he had smashed them all. He had clapped a conch shell over his twin sister’s head. He had busted oboes over his knee. He had stolen a harp and thrown it off the roof of Symphony Hall. He had split violas, decorated cellos with thumbtacks, and stuck $250 flutes in the asses of cows. His uncle laughed at him and said “No, idiot. A guitar. If you want to rock, you have to smash more guitars.”
By the age of eight, he was smashing guitars. His first band was called Dirty Word. When his uncle discovered the band name, he changed it to Uncle’s Dirty Word, and kept the new name a secret around his uncle. Seventeen guitars were smashed at the first Uncle’s Dirty Word show. By the time the band broke up and reformed as Teenage Enema, he had smashed 700 guitars, most of them donated, all but the first, stolen.
The band name was changed because his uncle had given him unsolicited advice.
“Try finesse.”
The last Uncle’s Dirty Word show was sold out and ended with the crowd, drenched in sweat, being escorted across town to pee on his uncle’s strawberry patch. The band played the encore on banjos and harmonicas, then smashed the instruments to fight charity.
People called Teenage Enema an “experimental” band because it was easier than trying to come up with a name for a style of music predicted not to pan out. Sales of the first Teenage Enema 7″ were dismal because the sledgehammerer had taken his instrument to the metal masters and the entire pressing caused needles to skip. The meat grinderer and the can openerer quit the band over it. The local rock press said it all with headlines like “ELECTRIC TOASTERER FAILS TO POP UP.”
No one knew that the last Teenage Enema show was going to be the last Teenage Enema show until the chainsawer took a few fingers off the drummer, and then some front row fans got it in the mohawks.
By the time he was nine, he had memorized his uncle’s lecture and could recite it as if he was singing the national anthem at a sporting event. And, as far as exercise went, he had learned that if he raked his uncle’s leaves or mowed his uncle’s lawn, his uncle would buy him beer. His uncle would give him a fifty for a quarter keg and send him to the market, muttering “Thinkers Not Thugs! Punk-this and Punk-that! When your career is in a tailspin, always start playing folk songs about the Great American Riddle. I forget and you too might one day forget.”
It was at this time that he discovered volume. With an ear resonator and a radiation pellet in his stereo’s power unit, he could provide his closest neighbor with 121 decibels of boosted guitar crunch. With a wheelchair beneath him, he could withstand screeching noises in the 4,000 Hertz range. His uncle would come into his room to tell him to turn down the music, but instead start telling him about this great job opening as a money manager for doctors who perform circumcisions. It was all a joke, even with the Fire Department there. Or, at least until the stereo hit a beat frequency, blew out both his uncle’s televisions, and shattered all the shot glasses in the house. An elderly neighbor was taken to the hospital for a brain scan. The paramedics joked “Drain that cyst, brother!”
By the time he was in the double digit age category, he could only watch music. But watching was good enough. He hid in the town’s various underground saloons, remembering that his uncle had warned him about burn-out. He was eventually arrested in one of these hangouts by university police for downing stolen laboratory doses of phosphorus-32. The police were helpful in pinpointing sites in the brain that they may have been responsive to certain types of heavy rock music. They fined him five dollars and sent him on his way with a bladder substitute in one hand and a beer substitute in the other.
He somehow made it to open mic night at the Flimflam on Warsaw Street and ripped out a short set of Norwegian Surgeons covers with the house band. Afterwards, he somehow made it to the hospital, where, after a five hour wait, a visiting surgeon from Norway operated on his smashed skull with a vengeance.
