Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie

Now I want to tell you a story about Stephen King, (he’s the famous author), Stanley Kubrick the film director, my father Edmund Francis Donnelly, and me.I’m a huge Stephen King fan. When I was in 9th grade a kid named Tom Lassiter came up to me and said, “Have you read anything by Stephen King?”I hadn’t. Tom was a great guy. By that evening I had a copy of Twilight Zone magazine in my hands. Tom lent me his copy. And in that issue there was a story by a guy named Stephen King. The story was called, “The Raft”. I really liked it. I really did. I’ve always been a big reader, but there was something brilliant in what Stephen King had to say; at least for me. If that crazy bitch in “Misery” hadn’t said it first I swear I ‘d be telling you: “I’m his number one fan.” “It”. “Fire Starter”. “Christine”. “The Dead Zone”. I’ve read them all. But the one I like best is called “The Stand”. They made a T.V. movie out of it, but I didn’t think it was so great.Now what’s really weird about “The Stand” is I can’t stop reading it. I read it in my freshman year of high school, and every so often I just come back to it and read it again. There are two versions of “The Stand”. The original version, which I think of as the short version, and a kind of author’s cut, or long version. I’ve read the original version so many times I’ve lost count. I’ve read the long version so many times I’ve lost count. And every time I read it when I’m done I say to my self, “There, I’ll never read it again.” But I do. I just get a hankering to read “The Stand” and wham I dive right in. I like the beginning of the original version best. When Stu Redman can see the car coming as he is sitting at the gas station. In the long version you get the guy leaving the military base, kinda grabbing his wife and kid and fleeing just before the base goes into lock down mode. It’s cool, but I like the original version better. Now what does all this have to do with you and your dad and Stanley Kubrick you must be wondering right? Stick with me, because now it’s going to get really odd. I swear. I told you how messed up I was over the terrorist attacks right? Well that was the most fucked up thing that happened to me in 2001. The best thing that happened to me that year was getting a DVD player. They had already been around a while, but I had to wait for the prices to come down. I was working two jobs, paying the bills, but I hardly hand money for stuff.I bought a Toshiba at Wal-Mart. I paid just over one hundred dollars. I hate to admit it but I hooked it up to my T.V. sans surround sound. Blasphemy! I know. But it just wasn’t in the budget. I bought the movie “Fight Club” with it. Hey you gotta have something to look at right? Talk about a quantum leap. How could we all have been watching movies on VHS for all these years? Holy crap. The picture! It was beautiful. It really was. I was totally blown away. Then I rented Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove: or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” I liked the ending when old Slim Pickens rides the bomb straight down to Armageddon,And then they play the song “We’ll Meet Again” sung by Vera Lynn. That’s a montage, almost a music video really, you see all these nuclear explosions. They’re scary as hell, but some how beautiful. Any way I beat off right there in my living room looking at the ending of Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove: or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” I was just about horny all the time, because I had fallen in love with someone I worked with, and I knew that for some reason my Irish Catholic parents had bugged my apartment, my phone, my car, and my computer. And when I say they bugged my apartment I mean they set up web cams so that everything I did was beamed to …somewhere. I gave them something to think about let me tell you. Yeah, I jerked off, masturbated to the ending of Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove: or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” You still don’t get it do you? Well in the book “The Stand” by Stephen King, there’s this character that’s a fire bug. You know. A pyromaniac. In the book he’s called The TrashCan Man, because when he was a kid and he started setting fires he started off lighting them in trash cans. He’s the guy that burned up old lady Semple’s pension check. Stay with me please. Now a week or two goes by and I wake up in a strange place. I’m in the back seat of my own car. I had been out drinking at a bar and I just couldn’t make it home. I was trashed.So I do the right thing and I just pull over and sleep it off in my car. When I wake up I am hung over like you wouldn’t believe. I gotta stretch so I get out of the car, and oh crap guess what? I lock the damn keys in it. Tell me you’ve never done this? It happens. I’ve got on a pair of pants and shoes but I’m not wearing a shirt and I feel kinda ridiculous. My cell phone, if I even have one is also locked in the car. I go find a pay phone, not easy because by this time they are already kind of a dying breed; and I call my parents. I don’t have anyone else to call. I really don’t. I didn’t call a tow truck, which is what I wanted to do because the pay phone I found didn’t have a yellow book. No book at all. I had nothing to write with and some of Kubrick’s nuclear bombs are going off in my head! I have a huge hang over. What I want my parents to do is just call a tow tuck for me, but one of them insists on coming out to where the car is. So here comes Edmund Francis Donnelly. He’s got AAA, and they can get the car unlocked in a jiffy, and it won’t cost either of us a dime! But now I am stuck waiting for the AAA guy, and my head is pounding and I’m standing there feeling ridiculous, because I have shaved my entire upper body, well except my eye brows, and I’m standing there with the guy who was big on telling me: “Eat your vegetables! It’ll put hair on your chest!” But he doesn’t seem to notice or care about my smooth appearance. What’s on his mind is masturbation and nuclear bombs. I swear I am not making this up. He says to me, “Hey Kenneth, you know who you remind me of? That guy in the Stephen King book “The Stand”. The TrashCan Man.” Now who would say a thing like that? To me? I’ve never lit a fire. Okay well once way back in like 1976 and it was an accident. It really was. But I have never been a big fire guy. Hell I never even chase the fire trucks and some people do. They like to watch stuff burn. But here’s my dear old dad Edmund Francis Donnelly and what has he got to say to me. “Hey Kenneth, you know who you remind me of? That guy in the Stephen King book “The Stand”. The TrashCan Man.” The only reason he would say something so stupid is because I jerked off to the ending of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strange Love: or : How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” And even though I was alone in my apartment at 810 1st Ave. NW Apt. 1 Largo, FL 33770 when I did it my old man knew about it. How did he know about it. Because he was minding my business when he should have been minding his own. Did I tell you that I went to my family and I said I thought I was being harassed. Stalked. Bugged. This was before the masturbatory nuclear incident I mean.My dad. He prints out about 11 pages from the internet under the heading Paranoid Schizophrenia. And he gives them to me. But he betrayed himself that day as we were waiting for AAA. I mean really why on gods green earth would anyone look at another living human being and say, “You remind my of that guy in “The Stand”-The TrashCan Man” After that I kinda felt like The TrashCan Man-like I wanted to explode! But I stayed cool. What else could I do? Anyway the AAA guy got there. He sure looked at me and my dad funny. He couldn’t figure out what we were doing there in the first place. I had parked in front of a trophy store. You know, a place where they make the little statues that they hand out at little league games, and bowling leagues and whatever. I didn’t have the nerve to tell the guy apparently I was shit faced drunk and just stopped by to pick up my trophy. But it crossed my mind. You know who probably never got any trophies? Mike Murphy, the insurance adjuster at Mercury where I worked. If there’s anything on Earth Mike Murphy liked more than sports…it was food. Now there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a good meal. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying preparing a meal. Except he was heading for fat country, and he hated me because I tried to stay fit and would watch what I ate. I was drinking Slim Fast. I would eat Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain bars. I was big on apples. PB&J. Yeah, I would diet all week and then pretty much just eat whatever the hell I wanted on the weekends, when I could really enjoy a meal. Remember I was working two jobs and didn’t exactly have a whole bunch of time except on the weekends any way.