The Punk Auntie Mame
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
7/12/94
Mamie Van Winkle (born Mamie Henderson in 1962) was a fat and fabulous former punk groupie who became a self-employed manager-promoter, and who later became marginally self-sufficient (not terribly rich) in the mid-1980s inventing a popular novelty product, a hollow dildo from which you could drink beer (an opened longneck bottle and a plastic straw fit snugly inside).
The invention came to her one night with a typical moment of inspiration. In the midst of a typically active play session with her then-boyfriend, she casually remarked that if she could only get beer out of a cock she wouldn’t have to work for money. With the help of her boyfriend’s lawyer daddy, she sold the idea to a porn supply company. The company did a bangup job at developing her concept into a working product. The dildo looked like the perfect dream cock, complete with tender pink folds and a thick firm main shaft. It proved a big hit with the rocker women, as Mamie fully expected, but it was even bigger among teenagers and sorority girls who used it at slumber parties where they pretended to be naughty.
Nowadays, Mamie lived off her Beer Dildo royalties, carefully invested in income stocks. She had enough income left over after her modest living expenses that she could support a so-far unprofitable business managing a succession of metallish punk bands and punkish metal bands. She got along great with promoters and booking agents, because she knew how to manipulate them. She was all woman and one of the boys at the same time; she could be a hard-drinkin’, hard-swearin’ dude or a voluptuous babe, whatever worked best in any particular deal.
She’d never gotten on well with her parents, though. As a teenager, they’d always tried to quash her obsessions with sex and music; they tried desperately to get her interested in more acceptable female obsessions like dieting.
Mamie took no gruff or condescending remarks about the 200 pounds on her 5′ 4″ frame. She admitted to everyone, including her mother, that she lived for three things: Hot music, cold beer, and hard cocks. She had no intentions of giving up any of her three pleasures, including the beer. If some neurotic bulimic skinny woman stared at Mamie in disapproval, Mamie would meet that woman to her face and tell her that yes, she did indeed like to eat good hearty food — but she only wanted to taste it going in one direction, apparently unlike some of the people in the room.
Mamie’s life slowed down only slightly when she became the legal guardian of her 12-year-old neice Jennifer, whose father was in jail for two years for growing pot and whose mother had just declared herself unable to cope with the girl.
Jennifer was a sweet young thing, obviously trained for what her mother thought would be a good life for a girl (be nice, make friends, find a more stable man than Jennifer’s father had been).
Mamie immediately knew that she had to change this girl around to save her life. Mamie knew nice and sweet didn’t cut it in the near-millennial era, when a woman could expect to have to support herself for life in the hostile universe of corporate day jobs. She’d have to make this little girl aware of and hoping for something better than the dreaded fate of wasting her life in the temp pool of some law office. In short, she had to punkify this girl and do so quickly, in case her mom suddenly decided she wanted her back.
Mamie promptly commenced to give Jennifer teen-punk basic training. The 12-year-old got a crash course in the history of the music of immediacy and “No Future” that had been around since five years before she was born. Jennifer was encouraged to express her “real feelings” if said feelings were angry or skeptical She was discouraged from appearing peppy or spunky when those expressions were clearly out of sync with the reality fo the world around her. The only thing Mamie never showed Jennifer was the Beer Dildo; though Mamie did fantasize about how level-headed she’d be if Jennifer accidentally found its hiding place in the dresser.
Mamie got Jennifer an all-black wardrobe, including boots, and encouraged her to wear it around the house until she gradually assumed its particular image of beauty. Jennifer learned the steps toward a proper punk attitude: the precise combination of decadance and righteousness, the importance of fighting for your right to party.
As Jennifer grew more comfortable in the black clothes, she started wearing them in the neighborhood. Finally, the day came for Jennifer to wear black to school. Mamie gave her a full pep talk about standing up for herself and not letting anybody put her down for who she really was. Mamie told Jennifer that if anything happened to her bad in school, to feel free to call her on the pager at any time.
As Mamie went off on her daily rounds of errands and deals, she felt an unfamiliar sense of trepidation. She didn’t know how to deal with it. She’d been so independent, for so long, that the notion of being on the verge of despair over somebody else’s fate quietly scared her. Not that Mamie let it show to anybody, of course.
Mamie made sure to get home to her basement apartment in time. As she waited for Jennifer to come home, she planned the next step in Jennifer’s transformation, a tasteful cotton-candy-pink hair dye. Mamie couldn’t keep her mind on it, though. She found herself uncomfortably afaid for Jennifer’s fate. She smoked her last pack of Marlboros, and then finished off the panic-pack of Kools she’d kept hidden in the top cupboards. She drank a quarter-bottle of Monarch Vodka mixed with Safeway Select lemon-lime. She put on her precious vinyl Fear LP and nodded into punk heaven in earphones. She was well numbed for any result when Jennifer opened the door and entered the room.
