Assless Chaps: The World’s Most Dangerous Band
A documentary crew. A cursed song. A reunion nobody should have scheduled.
The first thing Dylan Mercer said when Darla opened the door was, “You have no idea how much this means to me.”
Darla looked at him, looked at the camera bag hanging off his shoulder, looked at the boom pole tube knocking against his leg, and said, “That’s already one sentence too many.”
He laughed because he thought she was kidding.
She wasn’t.
Darla lived in a second-floor apartment over a tax prep place in Norwood. On her door she had a brass number nine hanging crooked and a faded NO SOLICITING sign with a cigarette burn through the O. Dylan, twenty-nine and carrying enough gear to mistake preparation for authority, stood there smiling like he’d found buried treasure.
“You’re Darla Vane,” he said.
“You found the right apartment.”
“I just want to say up front, I’m not here to sensationalize anything.”
Darla laughed once. It came out dry and ugly.
“That bag says otherwise.”
He was younger than she’d expected. Clean face. Good teeth. Black T-shirt under a denim jacket that probably cost more than her car payment. He had earnest eyes. That was the worst part. If he’d come off slick, she could’ve shut the door faster. Earnest people were harder. They believed their own bullshit.
“My name’s Dylan Mercer,” he said. “I’m making a documentary about Assless Chaps.”
“Then make it from outside.”
He shifted his weight, still smiling, still not getting it.
“Working title is Assless Chaps: The World’s Most Dangerous Band.”
She stared at him for a second.
“That’s not bad,” she said. “Hate that.”
He perked up like he’d been complimented.
“I grew up hearing about you guys.”
“That should have stayed a rumor.”
He tried again. “I think there’s a real story here. Not just the accidents. The band, the scene, the whole regional myth of it. The way people remember things. The way media shapes memory.”
Darla had been about to tell him to get lost, but there was something in the way he said “accidents.” Too careful. Too rehearsed.
She folded her arms.
“How many of them have you talked to?”
“Rex,” he said. “And Milo. I’m seeing Pudge next week.”
“Of course Rex said yes.”
“He was actually really generous with his time.”
“Rex once signed a girl’s cast while her boyfriend was still balls deep in her.”
Dylan grinned. “That’s the kind of detail I’m talking about.”
“That’s the kind of detail that gets people killed.”
The smile slipped a little. First crack in the shell.
Good.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“No.”
“Can I ask you one question?”
“You already did.”
He took a breath. Tried to reset.
“Why did the band stop touring?”
Darla looked past him toward the stairwell window. Outside, late October rain turned the parking lot black. There was a white van idling under the lamp, his probably. Kids in hoodies were cutting behind the building on the way to the bus stop.
She could have shut the door.
Instead she said, “Because every time we played ‘Pilgrimfuker,’ somebody died.”
That landed.
He didn’t laugh. Didn’t do the little polite wince people did when they heard the title and weren’t sure how much irony to apply. He just watched her.
“You don’t mean that literally,” he said.
Darla looked him dead in the eyes.
“I mean one man lost the top half of his head in Dayton and his wife spent twenty minutes screaming at a folded-up raffle table because nobody could find anything left to point at.”
That did it.
The kid went pale around the mouth.
Good again.
She shut the door.
Three weeks later, Darla saw herself on YouTube.
Not her exactly. A photograph.
Black-and-white. 1999 maybe. She was twenty-three, cigarette in her mouth, bass hanging low, eyeliner smeared from sweat. Behind her, Rex had one boot up on a monitor and his shirt open like he was about to deliver bad news to a church. Across the screen in big white letters:
ASSLESS CHAPS: THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS BAND
TRAILER
Darla stood in her kitchen holding a fork over the sink and watched thirty-eight seconds of her old life crawl back out of the ground.
Quick cuts. Flyers. VHS fuzz. A local news anchor saying, “...another tragedy tonight involving the controversial punk act...” A cop outside a burned-out club. Crowd footage. A clip of Rex, older now, talking too close to the lens.
Then Dylan’s voice.
Some bands are remembered for what they played. Others for what happened while they played it. Assless Chaps had one hit, a song called “Pilgrimfuker,” and a live reputation so violent they became urban legend across the country. Accidents, coincidence, mass hysteria, or something worse...
Darla shut it off.
Too late.
Under the video, the comments were already breeding.
My cousin was at the Toledo show. Speaker stack crushed a dude flat.
Fake.
No way this is the same band with that Thanksgiving song lol
PLAY PILGRIMFUKER YOU COWARDS
If Mercer gets them back together I’m there
Legend says six dead. My dad says nine
One of the best songs ever written: First I fucked a pilgrim cause the turkey moved too fast
Darla read that last one and felt her stomach go cold.
It had always started like this. Not with blood. With appetite.
She called Rex.
He answered on the fifth ring, breathless.
“What.”
“Tell me you didn’t agree to a reunion.”
A pause.
Then, “Who said reunion?”
“You did, just now.”
“Darla, calm down.”
“No.”
“We’re talking about options.”
“We don’t have options.”
“There’s real money in this.”
“There was real money in Dayton too.”
Rex sighed loud into the phone, one of his favorite tricks. “That was twenty-six years ago.”
“So was your hairline.”
“Cute.”
“Did you say yes?”
“No.”
“Did you almost say yes?”
He didn’t answer.
Which was answer enough.
She hung up.
Dylan’s producer was a woman named Suzy who looked tired in a permanent way.
Darla met her by accident at a bar in Covington, though maybe it wasn’t an accident. Dylan had texted twice. Darla ignored him twice. Then Suzy showed up while Darla was halfway into a burger and a draft beer and said, “Can I sit down for thirty seconds and tell you why I think this is a terrible idea?”
Darla pointed at the seat across from her.
Suzy sat.
“Thank you,” she said. “Dylan listens to me about camera batteries and release forms. He does not listen to me about people.”
“That makes him a filmmaker.”
Suzy nodded. “He thinks if he gets everyone in the same room, the truth will sort itself out.”
“That’s adorable.”
“He also thinks there’s a chance the whole thing is exaggerated.”
Darla chewed, swallowed, wiped her mouth.
“Is that what he thinks today?”
“It changes based on who he interviewed last.”
“Who’s he got now?”
“Rex was first. Then Milo. Pudge tomorrow. Two old promoters, a club owner in Dayton, a guy with a scar on his neck who claims a monitor exploded in Lexington. Three fans who can still sing the whole song and are way too happy about it. And there’s more.”
“Of course there’s more.”
Suzy folded her hands around a ginger ale she clearly did not want.
“He found police reports.”
Darla said nothing.
“He found insurance claims. Coroner summaries. Local TV archives. Most of them got written off as structural failures or freak crowd incidents.”
“Because that’s what they looked like.”
Suzy watched her. “And what did they feel like?”
Darla picked up the burger again.
“Like playing a room that had decided it was hungry.”
That sat there between them.
At the bar, somebody was feeding dollars into a jukebox. Springsteen came on low and sad. Rain clattered against the front windows.
Suzy said, “Dylan wants to ask you one question on camera.”
“No.”
“He keeps saying you’re the missing piece.”
“I’m the piece that left.”
“He’s getting pressure.”
“From who.”
Suzy gave her a look.
Darla laughed. “Some idiot wants the reunion.”
“More than one. There’s a promoter in Columbus. A festival in Louisville. Some streaming thing for the documentary launch. They all think the same thing.”
“That they’ll be the ones where nothing happens.”
“Basically.”
Darla took a drink of beer. Warm now.
“Tell Dylan,” she said, “that if he really wants the truth, he should stop digging.”
Suzy leaned in a little.
“What if digging is the story?”
Darla looked at her.
“That’s cute too.”
The first death happened in Dayton.
At least that was the first one people counted.
There had been other things before that. A stagehand in Akron took a loose can light to the hip and spent a year walking crooked. A guy in Bloomington lost three fingers when his hand somehow got under a road case wheel that should have been locked. A girl in Lexington got knocked out cold by a mic stand that had been duct taped to the floor. Bad luck. Shit venues. Punk shows. Everybody moved on.
Then Dayton.
The club was called the Red Lantern but nobody called it that. Everybody called it the Sweatbox because the air-conditioning had died in 1994 and the owner replaced it with industrial fans that mostly just shoved heat around. Assless Chaps were headlining because “Pilgrimfuker” had gotten local radio play and college kids were coming out to yell the chorus and throw beer at each other.
Rex loved every second of it.
Darla remembered that room in sharp little pieces.
Cables sticky under her boots.
The sound guy shirtless for reasons nobody wanted explained.
Milo bitching about his tone.
Pudge chewing ice from a plastic cup.
Rex pacing behind the stage with his jaw tight, shirt off, chest shaved in a lightning bolt pattern because he thought it was funny.
Then the crowd.
Already loud before the first chord. Already sweaty. Already wanting the wrong thing.
They opened with “Lungbutter.” Nobody cared.
Then “Municipal Divorce.”
Then “Court Ordered Behavior.”
Each time the noise dipped between songs, the chant came back, bigger.
Pilgrimfuker.
Pilgrimfuker.
Pilgrimfuker.
Rex played with it for a while. That was his instinct. Always to tease the room, stretch it, make them beg.
Bad move.
By the time they kicked into the song, the place was pushing forward hard enough to bend the rail.
The opening line hit.
The whole room shouted it back.
Darla felt something under her boots. Not supernatural. Not a ghostly rumble or any of that storybook crap. More like the building had changed its mind about holding still.
Second chorus, a guy in a Browns jersey near the front grabbed his own head like he’d heard a shot.
Then his face came apart.
Not all of it. Not clean. That would have almost looked merciful. It went in stages, quick and wet and wrong. Eye first. Nose flattening sideways. Then the top of the skull lifting like something underneath had pressed too hard.
The crowd took a second too long to understand.
Some people laughed.
Then the blood hit.
Rex stopped singing mid-word.
Pudge kept drumming.
The papers called it a medical event complicated by crowd panic.
The venue blamed undiagnosed trauma.
The band put out a statement written by a friend of Milo’s in public relations.
It happened again in Toledo eight months later.
Then Lexington.
Then Covington.
After the sixth, venues quit pretending it was coincidence and started using phrases like “liability concerns.” Insurance adjusters started asking if the band had pyrotechnics, concealed pressurized elements, stage combat, occult affiliations.
Rex framed that last letter and hung it in his apartment.
That was Rex.
By November the trailer had gone wider than Dylan expected.
He called Darla from a number she didn’t know and she picked up because she was driving and stupid.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“We really don’t.”
“There’s an offer.”
“No.”
“You don’t know what it is.”
“Yes I do.”
“Darla, just hear me out.”
She was on Montgomery Road in gray afternoon traffic, windshield wipers dragging across mist.
“Every time one of you says ‘hear me out,’ some dipshit’s head explodes,” she said.
He pushed through anyway.
“St. Timothy’s Hall in Columbus. Controlled environment. Small crowd. Invitation only. Structural engineer onsite. EMTs. Full insurance. No standing-room pit. Seated audience.”
She barked a laugh.
“You got folding chairs for Pilgrimfuker.”
“It’s not a concert in the normal sense. It’s a filmed capstone event. More like a closed set. We talk to you all beforehand, then one performance, then audience reaction.”
“No.”
“We can prove it.”
“There’s nothing to prove.”
“That the myth isn’t real.”
Darla gripped the wheel harder.
“You think the people in Dayton would feel better if you proved that on camera.”
Silence for half a breath.
Then: “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then say what you mean, Dylan.”
He tried. She almost admired that.
“I mean if this has been hanging over your lives for twenty years, don’t you want it settled?”
“It is settled.”
“By fear.”
“By bodies.”
The line went quiet except for his breathing.
Finally he said, softer, “I listened to the bootleg from Toledo.”
Darla didn’t answer.
“You can hear the room change,” he said.
She shut her eyes at a red light.
“There you go,” she said. “You found your story. Now leave it alone.”
He said, “What changes it?”
The light turned green.
She drove.
“It isn’t the band,” she said. “It never was.”
Then she hung up.
Dylan got the reunion anyway.
Not from Darla. Not from sense. From appetite.
By the time December rolled around, the documentary had a distributor. A real one. Nothing huge, but real enough to print posters and book a screening run and call things a cultural event with a straight face. The reunion got sold as part of the final shoot. One night only. Closed audience. The surviving members of Assless Chaps together for the first time in twenty-one years.
Suzy called Darla two days before.
“I tried,” she said.
“Didn’t take.”
“No.”
“Who said yes?”
“Rex immediately. Milo after Rex. Pudge because he said somebody ought to be there to keep count.”
“Of course he did.”
“And if you don’t come, they’re getting a session bassist.”
Darla pulled the phone away and stared at it.
“A what.”
“Twenty-four-year-old from Columbus. Good player. No idea what she’s stepping into.”
Darla sat down on the edge of her bed.
Outside, somebody was revving a dirt bike in the alley. Her radiator hissed twice then went quiet.
Suzy said, “I know you don’t owe any of them anything.”
“No.”
“But if you’re the only one who actually understands this...”
Darla closed her eyes.
That was how they always got you.
She said, “Text me the address.”
St. Timothy’s Hall used to be a church gym.
You could tell from the floor.
Still had faded basketball lines under the rental stage. Metal folding chairs in neat rows. Cinderblock walls painted beige sometime during the Ford administration. Christmas lights draped around the doors to make it feel less like a place where children had once run suicides under a crucifix.
Dylan had dressed the place up with black curtains and uplighting. There were cameras on tripods, cameras on shoulder rigs, one little slider on a folding table for artsy movement shots. A craft-service spread in the back with hummus nobody was touching. EMTs by the side exit. A man in a hard hat looking up at the ceiling truss every ten minutes like prayer might become a profession.
Darla came in through the side and found Rex in makeup.
He turned in the chair when he saw her, grinning like a corpse that still thought it could get laid.
“You came.”
“Don’t make me regret it.”
“Too late.”
He looked worse than TV had prepared her for. Skin like old deli meat. Hair dyed the sort of black that only exists in bottles. Shirt unbuttoned too low. Around his neck hung the little silver pilgrim hat charm he’d started wearing after the song hit. He touched it when he was nervous. He was touching it now.
Milo was tuning a guitar in the corner, still built out of elbows and complaints.
Pudge sat at the kit eating trail mix from a pharmacy bottle.
He nodded at Darla.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
That almost undid her.
Because Pudge looked the same. Older, sure. More gray in the beard. Heavier around the middle. But the same eyes. Same calm. Like he’d stepped out to smoke in 2004 and only just come back.
Dylan crossed the floor toward them carrying a headset and a clipboard. Of course he had a clipboard. When he saw Darla his whole face lit up.
There it was again. Treasure.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t.”
He stopped a few feet away, gauging the room.
“We’re keeping it tight,” he said. “No alcohol in the audience. Seventy-five attendees, all waivered. Seated. Security at the back. If anyone feels unsafe at any point, we stop.”
Rex laughed loud enough to turn heads.
“Listen to that. We got a safe word now.”
Dylan ignored him. Mostly.
“We’ll do interviews first. Then maybe one or two songs. We don’t have to do ‘Pilgrimfuker’ if the room feels wrong.”
Milo looked up from his guitar.
“The room always feels wrong.”
Darla said, “How’d you pick the audience?”
Dylan brightened a little, happy to answer.
“Mix of fans, press, local music people, some documentary backers, some contest winners.”
“Contest winners.”
Suzy, passing behind him with a coil of cable, muttered, “I fought that too.”
Darla looked out into the rows.
Young faces. Old punks. A few people in old-ass band shirts that had survived two decades and several wash cycles out of spite. One guy in a blazer. One woman with a notebook on her lap like she planned to review this. A woman in the third row already had her shirt halfway up while her friend filmed on a phone. Some asshole in homemade chaps kept slapping his own bare ass every time somebody said the band’s name. Up front, another idiot had stuffed a tube sock down the front of his jeans and drawn a turkey face on the end of it. He kept thrusting at the stage like he thought he was part of the show. Three men near the front were grinning too hard.
She looked back at Dylan.
“How many of them know the words.”
He hesitated.
Then, because he wasn’t stupid, he did not answer.
The interview happened onstage under a single soft light. Dylan asked thoughtful little questions in his careful filmmaker voice while the cameras watched.
How did the band form?
What did the local scene mean then?
Did success change the chemistry?
How did the legend affect your lives?
Rex lied like a professional.
Milo corrected details nobody cared about.
Pudge answered in one sentence whenever possible.
Darla kept it short.
Then Dylan asked the dumb one.
“Do you believe the song itself was dangerous?”
Nobody moved.
Somewhere at the back of the room a folding chair squealed against the floor.
Rex leaned toward the mic. “I think people came to our shows looking to be part of something. Sometimes they got more than they paid for.”
Dylan turned to Darla. “What about you?”
She could feel the room listening.
“That song was dumb,” she said. “Still is.”
A few nervous laughs.
She kept going.
“It was filthy and catchy and just smart enough to get under people’s skin. Rex wrote the first line on a bar napkin in Newport because a guy in a tri-corner hat threw up in the women’s room. The rest got built out of bad judgment and a drumbeat.”
Rex raised a finger. “To be fair, it’s a great drumbeat.”
Pudge shrugged.
Darla looked at Dylan.
“But it only ever got dangerous live.”
“Why live?”
“Because recordings don’t want anything.”
That landed harder than she expected.
She saw it in the faces out front. That slight hush. That little forward lean.
Dylan saw it too.
The little idiot got excited.
“So the audience matters.”
Darla stared at him.
“There it is,” she said. “You hear one sentence and you want to build a myth out of it.”
He opened his mouth.
She cut him off.
“The audience doesn’t matter. Hunger matters. A room full of people who want the same ugly thing at the same time. That’s what matters. That’s what changes the air.”
Nobody laughed.
Good.
Dylan said, quieter now, “And tonight?”
Darla looked out at the rows of faces and had the brief sharp feeling of stepping off a curb you thought was still there.
“Tonight,” she said, “you sold tickets to train wreck.”
They started with “Municipal Divorce.”
The crowd clapped politely.
Polite was bad. Polite meant holding something back.
Then “Lungbutter.” Same deal. Smiles. Phones up. A few people filming. One guy in the front row already whispering to his friend between songs, both of them grinning too hard.
Darla kept watching the room.
That was the job.
Not the bass. Not tonight.
She watched shoulders. Mouths. Eyes. The way people sat forward when they were waiting for a thing they thought would make them special just for being there.
After the second song, somebody called it.
Just one voice at first.
“Pilgrimfuker.”
A few laughs.
Then again, louder.
“Pilgrimfuker.”
Rex looked at Dylan offstage.
Dylan looked back, uncertain.
There it was. The moment a grown man realizes control was a rumor.
Milo leaned toward Darla without turning his head. “We can walk.”
Rex tapped the mic.
The chant got louder.
Pilgrimfuker.
Pilgrimfuker.
Pilgrimfuker.
Seated audience my ass. Half of them were up already.
Darla looked for Suzy. Found her by camera three, jaw tight, hand over her headset.
That was when she saw the shirtless guy near the back wall.
He’d been hidden behind the standing crowd before. Mid-thirties maybe. Soft in the middle. Black jeans. No shoes. A crooked pentagram carved into his chest like he’d done it in a bathroom mirror with a box cutter. The lines didn’t even meet right. Sweat had turned the dried blood pink. He had both hands raised and his eyes shut like this was church.
Pudge rolled one stick between his fingers.
“You feel it,” he said.
Darla felt the skin pull tight across the back of her neck.
Overhead, one of the Christmas-light strands blinked twice and went out.
Rex stepped to the mic.
“We’re not here to be your little internet ghost story.”
Boos.
A laugh from the back.
Then a voice, a woman this time, clear as a bell: “Play the fucking song.”
The room liked that.
Darla heard it then. Not a sound exactly. More a pressure. Like the hall had become aware of itself.
Dylan came onto the side of the stage, headset hanging crooked.
“We can stop,” he said.
Rex turned to him and smiled.
It was the same smile he’d worn in Dayton. In Toledo. In every bad room right before the first chord. The look of a man mistaking attention for love.
“We do one verse,” he said.
“No,” Darla said.
“One verse,” Rex repeated.
“Absolutely not.”
“To shut them up.”
Pudge said, “That has never shut them up.”
Milo, for once, said nothing.
The chant was rolling now. People stomping with it. Folding chairs rattling. Somebody near the back already filming straight up at the stage, face lit by phone screen and appetite.
Dylan said, “Rex.”
Rex looked out at the audience.
Then back at the band.
“Count it, Pudge.”
Darla reached for the cable on her bass.
Too late.
Pudge gave four soft clicks on the sticks.
And because he was Pudge, because rhythm was older in him than caution, his hands followed.
The riff kicked in.
The room stood up all at once.
That was the first bad thing.
Not the song. Not yet.
The standing.
Seventy-five bodies deciding together.
Rex grinned into the mic and hit the opening line.
The audience screamed it back.
The man in the front row lost three teeth at once. They hit the floor like dice.
The back wall lights blew.
Glass popped out of one of the sconces and sliced a man on the cheek in the second row. He laughed and kept shouting.
Darla stopped playing.
Milo faltered, kept going.
Pudge didn’t.
Pudge never stopped first.
Second line.
Second response.
Overhead, the rented truss gave a dry metal crack.
Dylan looked up.
Suzy shouted, “Cut power. Cut power now.”
Nothing happened.
Because of course it didn’t.
A woman near the aisle coughed into her hand and stared at the tooth in her palm.
Then two more hit the floor.
Panic started to move around the edges of the room.
But panic wasn’t enough. Not yet.
Rex drove into the chorus.
The audience came with him.
That was when the camera crane broke loose.
Not all the way. One arm first. Swinging sideways, fast and quiet. It hit the guy in the blazer behind the front row and knocked him into the seats hard enough to fold his neck at a wrong angle. The mounted camera spun free, wire yanking, and smashed into a woman’s temple. She dropped without even getting her hands up.
Screaming now.
Real screaming.
Darla ripped her bass cable out.
The amp popped and died.
Milo stopped too.
Pudge, blessed bastard, hit one last snare and let the sticks fall from his hands.
Rex was still singing.
Not because he didn’t know.
Because he did.
He knew this was the closest thing to transcendence he’d ever feel again.
Darla crossed the stage in three steps and slammed the mic out of his hand.
Feedback shrieked.
The audience kept the chorus going without him.
No band now. No instruments. Just the room.
Pilgrimfuker.
Pilgrimfuker.
Pilgrimfuker.
One of the EMTs tried to push through the aisle. A ceiling speaker dropped straight down and took him across the shoulder, spinning him into a row of chairs.
Dylan stood frozen by the camera rig, mouth open, headset dangling.
Darla grabbed his jacket and yanked him down just as a stage can came loose and smashed where his head had been.
That woke him.
He stumbled, went to his knees, hands over his skull.
Suzy was dragging a bleeding cameraman toward the side door.
“Move!” she screamed. “Everybody out, now!”
But out was hard. People bunch. People jam.
In the crush at the rear exit, somebody fell and three others went over them.
Darla could hear Pudge shouting now, deep steady voice, trying to count people through the side.
Rex stood in the wreckage looking out at the audience like a man watching the sea come in.
Then the main speaker stack shifted.
One inch.
Two.
Milo saw it first and yelled.
Rex turned too late.
The stack came over slow at first, then with all the old brutal weight in it.
It caught him shoulder to hip and drove him off the stage into the first three rows. Metal chairs buckled under him with little gunshot pops. The crowd noise changed. New sound. Wet and close.
Then silence hit the room in patches.
Not all at once. That would have been too kind.
Just enough people realizing.
Just enough people no longer singing.
The pressure went out of the place like air from a punctured lung.
Darla stood there shaking, one hand still locked in Dylan’s jacket.
The Christmas lights blinked back on.
Later they would call it a structural failure complicated by crowd surge.
They always had language.
Nine dead if you counted Rex.
Seven if you only counted audience.
Two more in critical for a while after that.
Suzy lived.
Pudge lived.
Milo broke his wrist and lost three teeth and lived.
Dylan Mercer spent a night in observation with a concussion.
The documentary did not die.
That would have been decent.
It came out nine months later with title cards, legal disclaimers, grief language, black screens between sections. Careful music. Sensitive editing. Reviewers called it harrowing, lurid, essential, exploitative, brilliant. Somebody in Brooklyn wrote that it “examined the porous line between performance and collective violence in postindustrial American myth.”
Darla threw her phone across the room when Suzy sent that one.
The song got pulled from the major streamers for about six weeks.
Then bootlegs went up.
Then covers.
Then reaction videos.
Then kids on short-form apps lip-syncing the opening line in pilgrim hats from party stores.
Darla quit reading comments after the second compilation clip of “funniest cursed songs you shouldn’t play at Thanksgiving.”
Pudge moved to Arizona.
Milo sued three people and lost.
Dylan did one interview where he looked straight into the camera and said, “I don’t think art causes violence. I think it reveals what people bring to it.”
Darla watched that in a laundromat and laughed so hard she scared a woman folding towels.
Then one Thursday in November, the week before Thanksgiving, she was in Kroger buying coffee and cat food when she heard it.
A little boy. Maybe eight.
Aisle seven.
Singing under his breath while his mother compared stuffing mix.
Not even singing right. Just mumbling it in pieces the way kids do when they’ve picked up something they should not know.
“First I fucked a pilgrim...”
Darla stopped pushing the cart.
The fluorescent lights hummed overhead.
At the far endcap, a seasonal display of canned yams gave a little shiver.
One can rolled free and hit the tile.
Then another.
Darla looked up.
At the mother.
At the boy.
At the stacked cardboard turkey cutout smiling over a pyramid of cranberry sauce.
The cutout tipped forward.
Metal shelving behind it let out a long ugly groan.
Darla dropped the cart and started running.
Pilgrimfuker
by Assless Chaps
From the album, Holidays at Knifepoint
[Verse 1]
First I fucked a pilgrim
Cause the turkey moved too fast
Buckle hit the headboard
And the bedroom window cracked
Gravy on the table
Stuffing on the floor
Grandma started pounding
On the goddamn bedroom door
[Chorus]
Pilgrimfuker
Pilgrimfuker
Black hat, badder luck
Pilgrimfuker
Pilgrimfuker
Strike a match
Time to fuck
[Verse 2]
Bonnet on the lamp shade
Bloomers on the chair
She said, “Keep your boots on, boy,
I like the smell in there”
Cranberries and moonshine
Chicken grease and sweat
She said, “You ain’t done with me
Till the sheets are soaking wet”
[Chorus]
[Verse 3]
Caught behind the woodshed
With her bloomers at her knees
Preacher saw my bare ass
Flapping in the breeze
Daddy grabbed the musket
Mama grabbed the switch
I was balls-deep in trouble
She was loving every inch
[Chorus]
[Bridge]
Pass the beans
Pass the gin
Pass that pilgrim back again
Pass the pie
Pass the shame
Everybody’s gone insane
[Verse 4]
Turkey on the table
Bonnet on the lamp
Everybody screaming
Like the devil’s at the camp
Mayflower done went sideways
Right there in the yard
I came like bad decisions
Mean and fast and hard
[Chorus]