Lake of Dracula
(Skin Graft)
by Nik Rainey
When I was five, my mother, unable to find a babysitter willing to abide my impish coprophagiac tendencies of the time, took me along to one of the Tupperware parties she and the other polyester-bedecked, housecoat-favoring moms in the neighborhood held once every 28 days or so. Shortly after we arrived at the perpetually-unfinished ranch house and I dutifully made the rounds, making well-rehearsed, adorably precocious statements to each of the assembled matrons and accepting a patronizing coo, an against-the-grain hair tousle, and a capillary-bursting cheek pinch from each as compensation, I was hustled off to the room of the ostensible peer who dwelt there (a junior homonculus with an affinity for self-administered nasal probes), with an admonition to “play nice.” I quickly grew bored with the lad, who responded to my extemporaneous parody of his favorite book (a pallid mock-epic poem involving a character of undetermined species unwilling to sup on verdant eggs and pork) in the style of Ezra Pound, by completely missing the satirically anti-Semitic mode of the juxtaposition and biting the head off of a tiny plasticine military figure he called “Joe.”
So to amuse myself, I regaled him with lengthy yarns about what our dear matriarchs were actually engaged in while we blithely “played.” I must admit, even I was impressed with the conviction of my ad-libbed descriptions of missing neighborhood animals and toddlers turning up in those mysterious dishes they referred to as “leftovers” and the entire mother-cabal sacrificing goats and pizza-delivery boys to some shadowy demi-god of suburbia under the full moon as they led the group in a wild, abandoned chant of “It burps when you seal it! It burps when you seal it!” By the time I gathered up my things and repaired homeward, the poor sprout resembled a trembling, alabaster wraith, and, last I heard of the boy, he had been shunted off to some “special” educational facility where he was required to wear restraints and a special helmet to keep himself from bashing his skull on any available hard surface.
This is what the new Lake of Dracula record brings to mind every time I listen to it. I’m not exactly sure why.
