The Tom and Adam Report: We Drank Pepsi Blue, Had a DVD Karma Transfer, and One of Us Went to a Strip Club

We walked to the Sunoco on the corner and entered the small room that serves as the buying/selling part of the gas station. As we looked for Pepsi Blue, “that guy” tried to buy motor oil, which he thought would taste better that Pepsi Blue. I think “that guy” has some drug problems, but who am I to judge, right? I’m not Mormon or anything… Well, we found it, and took our glorious purchases to the counter to be bought. Everyone else was living high on the hog and paid with cash, I paid with a credit card. Yeah, I paid for something that was about $1.05 with a credit card! You see, I don’t live in 2002. I live in 2678, when people don’t carry things like “cash.” Paper money and coins are for weaklings. Long live the cashless society!

Anyway, we had our bev’s now. Tom had already partaken of the blue manna with the clear label, but he decided to buy it again to give the event a sense of brotherhood. We’re not really brothers. Tom hated the Blue (that’s what hipsters in white belts call it), but tried it again, because, as I said, we’re tight like brothers. We dug in, hoping for some sort of fruity cola blast. Pepsi Blue hurt. Really. It had quite a kick, one that none of us expected. But, we drank on. Essentially, in my humble opinion, Pepsi Blue tasted like that great old blue Kool-Aid, but Kool-Aid mixed with razor blades. That’s how much it stung. But, like Sly Stallone taught me in many movies about boxing and arm wrestling, you don’t get anywhere without a little pain, so I kept drinking, hoping for the subtlety of the drink to hit me…that hint of cola taste, the smoothness that I was missing, something to make it more redeemable. But, I got nothing. Don’t get me wrong, Pepsi Blue isn’t horrible. It just won’t revolutionize the market like Vanilla Coke will. Don’t mind what Tom said earlier. People who carry cash might like Pepsi Blue, but those of us who need only a Mastercard or Visa drink Vanilla Coke as our favorite new novelty beverage. People that like the new Dr. Pepper still attempt to barter using sheep and goats. Ignore them.

Pepsi Blue? I give it one of those thumbs that points out parallel to the ground…nothing like the amazin’ ice cream from last month…and speaking of that…

Yes, at this fine establishment which shall remain nameless, they do not melt the cheese. Ninety cents buys you a crispy slice of pizza with about a pound of cold, shredded mozzarella cheese on top. When I went there, a girl that I went to high school with was working, and not only did she hook me up with a free slice, but she mentioned that she had started stripping at a sexy strip club downtown, and invited me to check out the show.

Not even 24 hours passed before I arrived at the titty bar, or as I prefer, ‘Breast Club’. Adam decided to pass on the offer, leaving me alone to experience the magic, decadence, and utter scummyness. My high school friend, who went by the stripper name of Chloe - though it was spelled wrong on the sign, as Clhoe - gave me a free lap dance, which was one of the least erotic experiences of my life.

I managed to have a good time, though I continually felt depressed and horrible. It was nice hanging out with Clhoe, even though she became completely drunk by the end of the night and was sort of embarrassing. Of course the pathetic creeps who actually bought into the whole strip club nonsense - believing that the girls actually liked them, and that they were forging real relationships - made me completely misanthropic about the human race. And the experience was so completely nonarousing that I don’t think I’ll be able to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh in any way for at least a week.

However, one stripper asked me if I knew how to crack backs, and I don’t, but I offered to punch her in the back a few times, thinking that maybe it would help. She seemed a little put off by that comment, and coupled with the t-shirt I was wearing (bearing a fetus and the inscription “Pay Toilets”) I maybe seemed a little bit …. Creepy? However, I was certainly a different kind of “creepy” than the usual clientele, and I definitely felt proud. But hey - not only do I know strippers now, I actually have seen them naked!

Now, Tommy Boy prefers to call it dyNASTY, though he was the one begging D.B. and I to try it. We obliged, and arranged to meet a posse of other people there. Some of those people write for fakejazz too, but if they were important, they’d be writing a column like this, right? So we get there, wait a long time for the others to show up, and watch people. Some woman liked Tom’s shoes. We also saw an amazing car with all sorts of things like “We love you guys!!! We’ll miss you!” written on it.Though Thom and Dee Bee thought perhaps they had recently graduated high school and friends had used some sort of non-permanent agent to write these messages on the car, I secretly had a vision of two lonely boys spray painting their chick-mobile with such slogans in order to drum up business while cruising the strip mall parking lot. It worked for me in 11th grade…why not them? You know, supply and demand? Make the public think they want your product? Ever seen QVC? These guys were QVC incarnate. With teenage hormones. I hope, no, I KNOW those guys scored that night.

Anyway, the buffet. The others in our party arrived, and we crossed into the magical land that is Dynasty. You walk in, cross a little bridge, and pass under a fake night’s sky, with fiber optic twinkling stars, no less. We were seated in a room at a long table, and ordered our drinks. I got a Pepsi. I know how to work these buffets. The food selection there was crazy. Some of the food storage facilities were in a boat-like structure. Though I doubted that it would float, I ate of the boat anyway. It had dessert food. I stole the last two sugar cookies, a smart move since they were never replenished. You see, eating at a buffet is like the NFL draft. You take what you want first, because it may not be there when you get back. Wowed by all of the things to eat, I skipped sushi, squid brains, pizza and some sort of “pick up raw food and have it cooked” thing Tom was wild about. I thought it was too much work for a buffet, so I got pre-made chicken and broccoli, low mein, and some other stuff. I had a pile of food on my way back, and ate heartily. The faster you eat, the more you can fit in the stomach at once. The key is not giving it time to realize what you’re shoving in. I went back and got a lot of what I had eaten just before. I also got a few more desserts. You always want to die eating what you like, right? My third trip was dessert only. Pudding, cake, ice cream. Mmmmmmmm.

When it was time to go, I took time to clean my plate. If you left what the management thought was too much food, they charged an extra 20%. I hoped that the woman near us with the mountain of crab legs would get charged the extra 20%, because I didn’t want to think of her stuffing any more of those in her mouth. The pile of discarded leg shell things was already pretty high, and I’m still not sure humans are truly meant to eat crab legs. Tom didn’t finish his food but hid it in his pants, feigning sudden diarrhea. I soon wished I had done the same. We paid for our meals, a cool $15. Never mind that I could have bought a cd, used dvd, four lps at Jerry’s, or 100 whistle pops…I try not to regret these things. The other people went to eat overrated donuts. We decided that we didn’t want any donuts, made at least two wrong turns, and were soon headed home. Tom told us about a nice girl he had met the day before. She had purple hair and an aversion to washing dishes. She sure seemed nice. I hope he’ll introduce us sometime.

This particular Fakejazz Eve was the most magical and powerful one yet. A karmic transformation passed between Adam and I, and even though we decided not to do a Tom and Adam Report this issue, we were so moved by the experience that we felt compelled to create the very document you are reading now.

The roots of this karmaic chaos were seeded just over a week ago, when Adam expressed interest in purchasing a DVD player that would handle non-Region 1 DVD’s. This was prompted by not only the Ali G DVD’s, but the forthcoming release of Peter Greenaway’s early works on DVD form - in the UK. I myself had a Region Free DVD player that I had modified myself by utilizing the many tools available to DVD hackers on the Internet. It was really cool - I disabled macrovision and Region scanning, and I even changed the background graphic to a cool Raymond Pettibon drawing.

Tom and Adam gleefully watch Region 2 European erotica

Anyway, Adam wound up buying a pre-hacked DVD player on ebay for $100 including shipping. Not bad at all. It arrived yesterday, and he called me excitedly to ask if he could borrow some of my region 2 DVD’s to test it out. Now, in the year that I have had multi-region capabilities, I have only taken advantage of it with two DVD’s of Italian erotica that I special-ordered from some weird website. Eventually I plan to buying superior British releases of like, you know, art films or something, but in the meantime I’ve been quite happy with these nice little vulva flicks.

So, back to the story - I grabbed one of these little gems and went over to, um, sample a bit of it, before I lent it to Adam. Strangely, my DVD player wouldn’t open. I kept hitting “Open,” but it wasn’t happening. I dropped the disc and my wad of Kleenex, frantically checking that it was properly plugged in and whatnot. But it was dead. And hot. It was at least 100 degrees to the touch.

It seems that Mrs. Eigen had decided to make a mixtape last week, and she forgot to turn off the DVD player when she was done. We went away for the weekend, and in the super hot Pittsburgh climate, the poor thing just cooked. Or so it seemed. But instead of going to Adam’s last night, I stayed home, mourning over the loss of my DVD player and flogging Mrs. Eigen for her stupidity.

I felt better tonight, so to celebrate Fakejazz Eve, I went over to Adam’s house with the DVD. We put it into his DVD player, and before we knew it there were nubile young Italian women spreading their labias for us. And it was then that I realized that Mrs. Eigen was innocent. The region-free karma of my DVD player had simply transferred to Adam’s DVD player, probably at the moment it arrived on his front porch. Clearly, my DVD player had seen no reason to go on living without it’s region-free ability, so it voluntarily committed suicide. And even though Mrs E was needlessly beaten with a golf club, we felt fulfilled by this transformation.

This passing of region free capabilities brought a wonderful glow to the festivities of Fakejazz Eve, which mostly consisted of buying snacks and fussing with A/V cables. So it is with great reverence that we write this article, certainly our finest yet. We hope the magic of Fakejazz Even and Fakejazz Day can be brought to everyone once per month, and that our writing will be a vehicle for this spirit. As Santa Steed says at the end of the timeless Hollywood classic Miracle in Bala Cynwyd, “I would like to have my shoes cleaned.” Sadly, this classic film is only available on Region 3 DVD.

Boy, life is good.