Happy Birthday to the "Mouth of the South!"

That's right, it's Jeff G_____'s birthday, April 7th--or as M'Osh and I once tried to rebrand it, Monkey Day. Similar to the way everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day, on Monkey Day™, everyone's name was "Monkey." Like, if you renewed your driver's license, you had to fill in your first name as Monkey. (The concept didn't take.)

I imagine the first day of fifth grade in 1979, when Jeff and I met, occurred the day after Labor Day, as it typically did. That would be September 4th, making our acquaintance (and pretty much immediate friendship) 17,017 days--just over 46 years and seven months.

To commemorate our friendship on his birthday, I'm going to post some of our drawings and writings from an old notebook, from either sixth or seventh grade, or possibly both. I managed to hang on to a few of these books, and the lack of actual schoolwork in them is frankly disgraceful. I was an autodidact from an early age, but I can't deny laziness as a major contributing factor.

I've posted examples of the "artwork" in my old Catholic grade school notebooks before: This birthday salute to M'Osh; and this drawing of my alma mater being targeted by a missile.

I'm going to try to keep this post updated with new content, simply because there are so many pages that made me laugh out loud, but there's no way I can scan and edit them all now. 

I'll begin by introducing the two major characters: Jeff and Mike. Here, I've drawn cheeky Jeff with an pleasant smile, even as he pours a cup of some kind of dark liquid on little Mike's head. Mike was years away from a growth spurt, so while the scale is not accurate, you get the gist. That angelic smile is indicative of how Jeff was able to get away with so much shit, so often. Jeff was not known to wear clown shoes, but I was definitely known to lose interest in whatever I was drawing by the time I got to the feet.

This next full page features our friend Chris as depicted by Mike, always a much better artist than me. His work is in here because we were constantly stealing and defacing each other's books. For reasons lost to me today, Mike portrayed Chris as "Chris the Maniac," with a bloody knife in one hand and--I think--a cellophane sleeve of Wacky Wafers candy in the other. I then added "Jeff the Milkman" (with the same gory font), just because Jeff was very fond of drinking milk. I also drew "Mike the Asshole" at the bottom, to which Jeff later added "who is Paul S____'s best friend." Note the jagged border around his words, meant as a barrier to further adulteration. I cleverly foiled this attempt by inserting a "J" in front of my name, with the clarification that Mike the Asshole was the best friend of "not Paul S____, but J. Paul S____." Damn, I was good.

This next scan is typical of many pages in here, a cacophony of scribbly images and captions that boggle the eye. I'll do my best to explain. At the center, more or less, is Jeff, clutching his "jug o' milk" and a joystick to his Odyssey² video game system. He's wearing a t-shirt for a cruise ship, an article of clothing that passed back and forth between our homes every time one of us slept over the other's house, surreptitiously slipped in with our stuff. I think it was originally mine, a cruising souvenir from my sister. I wore it sometimes, but mostly it existed as a running joke.)

Above him and to the right is Jeff drawn as a classmate of ours, with pointy hair and sweater vest, and even Jeff had to concede that that was pretty funny, adding an arrow and "hee hee hee." The other elements are less explicable, although the tiny four-panel comic of Jeff in a car offering someone a ride (who then jumps on the car, causing Jeff to crash, The End) needs no explanation, except perhaps to a child psychologist.

This looks to me like I drew (in black ink) an E.T. face, to which Jeff added (in blue ink) hair and Mike's name.

There's a lot going on with this next page, little of which I can interpret. At top, Jeff drew the profile face and the figure below it, which then got connected by stick and spit. The other various heads in blue are Mike's, but "Mr. Jeff" is my depiction of him as a circus ringmaster. I'd love to know what the diagram at lower right was meant to show.

Here are various demonic, ghoulish figures doodled by me--including my razor-toothed Pac-Man, who turned up from time to time. The phrase "Gooby Ga" is another recurring detail, the derivation of which is now a mystery to me, and the universe. I've redacted a classmate's name that was added by Jeff. We were abusive little bastards.

More unflattering classmate portraiture (with Mike trying on a very large, bowed hat to his apparent delight), and Mike as "Mosh, Space Cadet," firing his laser rifle. I drew his uniform to the right, which Jeff repurposed as the Invisible Man (with enclosed words, of course).

We all had a fling with a Dungeon's & Dragons-type role-playing game called "The Fantasy Trip." Jeff would concoct the adventures, and we gathered a handful of times to play. Mike, the low man on our social totem pole, was allowed to participate on the condition that his character was a dwarf. I think this next drawing, by me, is meant to show my character (whose name I can't recall at the moment) throwing Mike's character through the flames of a burning hut. This may have been retaliation for his getting my beloved warhorse, Ripper, killed (and thus the earliest depiction of dwarf-tossing I can think of).

I had a hand puppet which I dubbed Howard Schmortz. He was a fuzzy green fella wearing a red-and-white striped shirt with matching pillbox hat, his face framed by a magenta beard. In this rare color drawing (well, mostly colored, until I lost interest or the Magic Marker dried out), I really captured his off-kilter eyes, which look to me now like those of Goya's ravenous Saturn.

More monsters, with a scrawled list of all the Uncle Floyd Show guests I could think of. (The creepy little guy at lower left is Jeff's, and looks familiar, like he's from something.)

This page is my attempt to illustrate--from memory, of course--the infamously spooky stop-motion open to WPIX's Chiller Theatre. It's really not very good. There might be a better one somewhere.

Come back later! There might be more! Or not!
Happy Birthday Jeff!