Real Stuff: Death of a Junkie

I think the problem in Het wasn’t so much “If I’d been an %!@hole in that situation” as it was “If I’d been an $@!hole telling that story.”

Which still COULD be a layer below who he really was, if he was writing the story to portray the storyteller as despicable. But it’s not the acts within the story that make him much of a jerk (meeting up with a girl, having hot sex with her, going to a bar, getting harassed, kicking ass and going home), it’s the very seeing of events in that way and the seeming belief that by telling that story they’re making a bold social statement, that is.

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Thanks for explaining the concept of autobiography, fiction and literature to me. I had never heard of them before.

Being a woman has obviously left me out of game with regards to the appreciation of such manly narration. Oddly, I do have appreciation for other comics written by men, complete with the twisted self loathing, perceptions of others, etc. I can tell Robert Crumb from Chris Ware from Gary Panter from Charles Burns from Seth from Derf from Chester Brown from Harvey Pekar, for example, and have observed that they way they tell their stories is very different from each other.

So your problem with Eichhorn, if you’ll forgive the leap, is that he portrays his fictional self as too much of a macho douchebag, thus making the whole thing creepy rather than entertaining? (Or if you don’t forgive the leap, tell me where I’m astray.)

Hey, it’s all a matter of taste. I can certainly accept people disliking this for that reason, or any other.

I happen to enjoy it both because of and in spite of that factor. I find the stories creepy, but not in a way that fills me with loathing for the author.

In your earlier post you summed it up as

Sorry, scratch that; I should have said another poster summed it up similarly:

I agree with that take, but the question is how many layers separate Eichhorn from the clueless straight bigot. If I understand you correctly, you’d say zero layers, or maybe one. The real Eichhorn is the clueless straight bigot having the fantasy, or if not he’d have to be a clueless bigot to get to that point with his fictional alter ego. Right?

I don’t know the guy. It’s possible. But based on the stories I’ve read here I’m not so sure there isn’t another layer. As I read it, the cluelessness and bigotry are concocted parts of the alter ego.

@orangedesperado

I didn’t say you did; I asked why you apparently thought it was supposed to be funny.

My problem with his comics is that the world is far too full of the stories of white macho douchebag dudes, both in low art and high art, that uphold the status quo of a certain species of assholery.

The only thing I have found challenging about his storytelling is why it is given space in BoingBoing.

Here’s my train of thought on the issue: I hypothesize that the real Denny Eichhorn wants his Real Stuff stories to have verisimilitude, to seem like something that could have happened, so he would want to make the details as realistic as he can manage, even if the specific events are invented. If that’s correct, then the real Denny Eichhorn actually believes that gay bars have two separate bars and a solid line down the middle of the dance floor to keep the gay men on one side and the lesbians on the other. (Because obviously gay men and lesbians have nothing in common and only pretend solidarity to outsiders.) The real Denny Eichhorn thinks that gay folks will line up to curse and hiss and spit like jeering goblins at intruding straights. And the real Denny Eichhorn thinks that “het” is a convincing slur, because he hasn’t talked to enough actual gay people to know about “breeder” and figured no one who mattered would call him on it.

It’s possible that I’m wrong, and real!Eichhorn is a perfectly nice and well-informed guy who knowingly had writer!Eichhorn create a shallow and poorly-researched caricature of a gay bar for fictional!Eichhorn to run around in, camouflaging his actual self under not one but two layers of assholes. But I have a hard time getting that past Occam’s Razor.

Well, there’s a cure for that, and it’s being just a little bit skeptical.

Also, a lot of people seem to think that “Het” is supposed to be indicative of LGBT culture today; I wonder how many people realize that many of the events in the Real Stuff stories took place forty or more years ago. Eichhorn isn’t a young man any more; Wikipedia has him born in 1945. You could take that as a reason for him having some outdated attitudes, or you could consider that LGBT culture may have been much more separatist and exclusionary at that point in time.

You do make a pretty convincing case, but I’m not entirely with you here.

While all the stories have a veneer of verisimilitude, especially in the early panels, they all tend to have something completely over-the-top about them. I mean, I don’t believe it’s very likely at all that any heroin addict is really so far gone that he’ll seriously follow up on a joking recommendation to mainline Mr. Clean.

The bouncer in the falsely-promised-cunnilingus story… an over-the-top case of naiveté, especially at the end when he thinks he has the slightest hope of using his “rain check” – is anyone really that stupid?

And so on. Those are the two that come to mind, but I’d be surprised if a re-read of the others didn’t reveal some kind of grand absurdity in the final panels almost every time.

So, no, a badly researched (or ridiculously imagined) gay bar, slurs and fight don’t prove to me that the actual man is as bad as the one portrayed in the cartoons.

Or maybe he is, and he bared the truth about his dirty rotten soul when he wrote these ~20 years ago, even if some of the events are exaggerated or made up. In which case I can understand the hate, but personally have some grudging admiration.

Or maybe, as suggested by Rob Beschizza in the comments to the bouncer story, we’re looking at satire for which the targets and context are mostly forgotten. If so, that would tend to make it tough to figure out what’s going on.

To better understand Dennis Eichhorn, and his writing style, I recommend re-reading his story “What is gonzo?” and if that doesn’t help, look up the word gonzo in the dictionary.

Assuming you’re the Pat Moriarty: hey there! Love your stuff. Also, do you know what happened to frequent Eichhorn collaborator Michael Dougan?

The Pat Moriarity with 2 i’s. Thanks
Dougan? I assume he’s still drawing but I think he’s more of an illustrator these days. I also went many years without drawing comics myself, but have done some recently for Mineshaft Magazine, including a new collaboration with Eichhorn in issue 24, but I think it may be sold out already.

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I found the comic interesting.

However, the discussion here is what is most interesting. Regardless of what one might feel about the comic itself or the author and his intent, you gotta admit it started one heck of a fantastic and vibrant conversation.

Makes it obvious to me that this comic is appropriate for BoingBoing. Y’all ate it right up, even the ones complaining. :wink:

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dumb question, and my google/wiki/urbandictionary fu seems to be failing me: what, in this context, is “flagged”? I understand it resulted in his blood being mixed with cleaning solution in the syringe, but why? what is the purpose?

I figured someone would mention that sooner or later.

driving trollies has always been a great way to get comment/forum traffic. I’d have liked to think that BoingBoing was above doing that on purpose, though.

I think there’s a difference between knowingly posting controversial material and trolling.

To me trolling is all about narcissism – drawing satisfaction from attention and from getting people worked up. I really doubt that’s what’s going on with the BB editors as a group, though it wouldn’t surprise me if Eichhorn enjoys stirring the pot, assuming he reads the comments.

A group of bloggers allowing a regular feature that they know some readers hate is not quite the same as trolling IMO. Here’s hoping some editor will eventually explain the process that led to these posts that divide readers so much more sharply than most other material here. And I’d like to think that if any of the editors are as appalled as certain readers, they’d have spoken out by now.

This may or may not be off topic, but I see a lot of talk about the story Denny wrote called “Het”. Well, Denny writes what he calls a FLOG (a newsletter he sends out about football). Recently he went off topic and spoke about BoingBoing and HET. When he’s the term “we” I still think he’s referring to himself…Here’s what he had to say.

“We’ve been getting a lot of enjoyment from the comments that readers are posting on Boing Boing’s website following the reissuing of some of our comic stories from old issues of Real Stuff. Some of the readers really hate our fucking guts! They read things into our work that no one has before, and accuse us of all sorts of things.

One story that really has them riled up is “Het!” It’s a story about a love affair we had in Santa Cruz, and a subsequent fight at a nightclub. For some reason, some readers found it completely untenable. So, for the first time, we’d like to elaborate on an already-published cartoon story, hoping we can provide some background information that will better explain what happened.

We were working at Capitola Joe’s Restaurant, where beer and wine were served, and there was nightly entertainment. Santa Cruz, in 1976, was the epicenter of California’s feminist/lesbian subculture. It was as big for gay women as San Francisco was for gay men. A substantial portion of the faculty at the University of California in Santa Cruz was lesbian. Many women moved to Santa Cruz to participate in the feminine emancipation that was going on. Some went to college, others lived and worked in the community.

At Capitola Joe’s, the two women who ran the kitchen were a lesbian couple. They referred to themselves and their friends as “dykes”, “lezzies”, and “queers.” Heterosexual men and women were called “straights” or “hets”. The term “breeders” hadn’t been coined yet; at least we didn’t hear it until several years later. But we heard “het” on a daily basis.

There were always at least a few gay women frequenting Capitola Joe’s. On weekday nights, we usually had a folksinger or single performer; they were almost always women, and usually gay. The audience would generally be about half gay women for such acts. One night a week would be “Women’s Night,” and both the band and the audience would be almost entirely women. On weekends, we sometimes had gay female rock bands.

There was a big restaurant/bar/nightclub in Santa Cruz called The Catalyst. Many gay women worked there, and their rock shows often featured acts that drew a gay female audience. You could not be in the restaurant or nightclub business in Santa Cruz without being accommodating towards gay women.

Gay women were out, and empowered. But gay men were not as visible, and were often closeted. There were three large nightclubs for gay women, but only one known gathering spot for gay men. Generally speaking, if you were a young gay man looking for some action, you’d go a hundred miles north to San Francisco.

In the story “Het!”, we relate that we went to a women’s festival “in search of female companionship.” This was true; we were always looking. But we already knew quite a few people at the festival; many of the performers and crowd members were familiar faces from Capitola Joe’s. There were gay, straight, and bi-sexual women at the festival. Even though there weren’t any men, we didn’t feel out of place. We were used to being around this crowd.

A secondary reason for being there was to scout out new musical talent for our restaurant. We’d had business relationships with some of the musicians, and exchanged pleasantries with them. We laid down to listen to the music and work on our suntan, but at the outskirts of the crowd, away from the center of the action.

We met Karyl, who was in a band that performed at the festival, and who wasn’t as stand-offish as her bandmates. She was bi-sexual, having been married once before, and was friendly to us. We hit it off, and had a love affair that meant a lot to us at the time. But she still was affectionate to the women in her life, and sometimes had sex with them.

One night, we decided to go dancing. Karyl picked the spot: The Trapdoor, a big nightclub in a warehouse. Before, we mentioned that there was one place for gay men to openly gather. The Trapdoor, which was operated by two lesbian women, had made it known that gay men were welcome at their club, and quite a few men had begun frequenting it. The Trapdoor was the only place in Santa Cruz where they could openly cruise and dance. One half of the large dance floor was for women, and one half for men. Everyone honored that unique arrangement.

When we got to the club, we were the only male-female couple in the place. Maybe we should have left, but Karyl didn’t want to. We danced in the middle of the room, and attracted the attention of a floor manager who provoked a confrontation with us. We went outside and fought in the mud. Karyl got into a scrap with her drunken ex-girlfriend. At several times, we were sneeringly called “Hets!”

And who can blame those those people for not wanting us around? They had to endure a lot of abuse from hets, and to see us together, in their safe place, was infuriating. If we had it to do over again, we wouldn’t have gone dancing at The Trapdoor in Santa Cruz in 1976!” Best, Denny

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We had a moderator say “This is despicable, and I’m ashamed to be associated with Boing Boing right now.” I believe he quit not long after. No editors yet that I’m aware of, though.

[quote=“pierrebalian, post:15, topic:10027”]
Boo Hoo. I would have grabbed my weed and got the fuck out of there too. It’s not like he knew the guy.
[/quote]Spoken like a true sociopath.

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In retrospect, yes, this story is undoubtedly made up. Junkies/potheads do not dump bodies like mafiosi.

Yes, I saw that discussion and also knew he’d resigned. Are you sure there’s a connection?