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Face It, Your Cat Hates You

Anyway, it seems safe to say that Toronto now has a brown-complexioned ass-slapper on its hands. Woe is we.


John Waters at the Toronto Underground Cinema with me and my husband Antonio Ramirez-Ortega.

My friend Pepper called me in a panic the other day to tell me a frightening story. The previous evening she’d been walking alone to an all-night supermarket, when suddenly she became aware that someone was running up behind her. Before she could turn around, whoever it was slapped her on the ass as hard as he could and took off back the same way he came. Now, Pepper is a very hardy person who’s lived through a lot of impossible predicaments—I was her roommate once for several years, for example—so it’s not easy to rustle her feathers. She’s also quite brave. I recall fondly how she would insert herself as a human shield from time to time between myself and various homophobic Mohawks or skinheads after I’d been mincing in the pit at the local hardcore show. But this incident vexed her terribly. Why would someone do such a thing? Is it some sort of fetish? Should it be considered assault, sexual assault, or just bad manners?

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What might have bothered her more than the ass-slap itself, was the fact that, since it happened in Toronto, the people who were on the street at the time vanished into thin air when she looked around for support—a slap in the face to go with the slap on the ass. Since there was no one willing to back up her story, she didn’t bother reporting it to the police. She did, however, get a good look at the perpetrator—a black man in his 20s, tall and well-built, well-groomed, wearing tan pants and trainers. When I told the story to another friend, he said he’d heard that an Indian man (East Indian, that is, not First Nations, the politically correct term for native Canadian Indians that even my First Nations friends are tired of) had been witnessed committing the same crime more than half a dozen times recently. Was it the same man? Again, being Toronto, if it was reported in the papers he would not have been identified as a black man, but rather as a man with a brown complexion, which could have led to a certain politically correct imprecision. Anyway, it seems safe to say that Toronto now has a brown-complexioned ass-slapper on its hands. Woe is we.

Before you get your tits in a racial twirl, let me just point out that white people commit bizarre crimes in Toronto, too. About five years ago some creep was witnessed burying five razor blades in the sand at a children’s playground. Police described him as a man between 40 and 50 years old with graying hair, a thin build, and a full, foot-long white beard, which was pointed at the end. I think that’s the most terrifying description of anyone I’ve ever heard. But somehow I don’t think he was brown-complexioned. Just a hunch.

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I bring the whole thing up because the ass-slapping incident immediately brought to mind John Waters’ immortalization of the real life Nashville Footstomper—some crazy brown-complexioned guy who went around stomping on women’s feet—in his movie, Polyester (in which he was portrayed as white-complexioned). And lo and behold, two days later the Pope of Trash himself appeared at Rue Morgue's Festival of Fear in Toronto. I got the chance to have dinner with John and attend his one-man show at the Underground Cinema, which reminded me how refreshing and elegant his sardonic style of politically incorrect humor has always been, prefiguring the current spate of gross-out Hollywood comedies by decades. But whereas the new political incorrectness seems to be done purely out of a desperate and cynical attempt for more box office revenue, John Waters’ sensibility has always played as a pure, joyful hard-on for trash and exploitation, and for the unnatural natural wonders of the world. (John always appreciated the fact that when I interviewed him and stayed over at his house in Baltimore several years back, I took a picture of one of my turds in his toilet and published it along with the interview in a magazine. It was my tribute to his own championing of “turd terrorism”!)

My turd in John Waters' toilet.

I don’t want to give away too much of John’s material—he tours regularly, after all—but it’s inspiring to see someone go with such gusto after sacred cows like dogs (he claims they hate being suffocated by so much human affection and would prefer to run wild in packs), cats (“face it, your cat hates you”), and gays (his story about an anemic 7-11 employee who was “too gay to stand up” had me in stitches). I’ve always tried to follow John’s mantra “gay is not enough,” but it must be said that only a gay genius like J.W. could call Gandhi a gay greedy bottom and get away with it, or fantasize about a hypothetical meeting between Michael Jackson and Justin Bieber. (He also helpfully suggested that Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator should use the Bieber as bait!)

Of course, being Toronto there had to be a politically correct gay question at the end to put a damper on things. Some guy wanted to know why there aren’t more gay characters in John's movies. That’s kind of like asking Jeffrey Dahmer (who didn’t just slap asses, he ate them!) why he didn’t murder and cannibalize victims of a greater ethnic diversity, not just the brown-complexioned ones. You see, after a certain point, political correctness just doesn’t apply.

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