Even though I’ve never had anything like that happen to me, I can still believe it could happen; some families are deeply weird in a not-cool-or-kooky way. Sometimes you’d go over to someone’s house and have something happen that, while not a nasty prank like this one, make you want to make up an excuse to leave and not come back. (The best example I can think of is one time in my early teens when I dropped by the house of an friendly acquaintance to see if he was home, and his mom snared me into a fairly lengthy, one-sided conversation that consisted mostly of fairly personal questions on her part; to this day, I’m not sure if she was trying to flirt with me, was just lonely, or simply thought that she had to keep me personally occupied until he came home.)
A couple of other things:
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Julie Doucet is one of those artists who was pretty big in the alternative B&W comics field of the late eighties and early nineties who has sort of drifted away from it; she seems to have given up on comics and is doing mostly collages now. Too bad; I remember one early work of hers that shows her running out of tampons, and being transformed by rage into a giant woman who rampages through the streets, drowning passersby in torrents of menstrual blood, until she can find some tampons in a store. Good times.
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I have had the experience, when I was in high school, of having an Amway distributor delay paying me for mowing his lawn until I sat through his pitch. (I can’t honestly say now whether he outright refused to pay me until I sat through it; he may have simply implied that I’d get more money if I did, and me interpreting that as that he’d tack on a tip, which he didn’t, nor did he ask me to mow his lawn again. It wasn’t as big of a deal as the guy who offered to pay me to let him suck my dick.) By the way, Michael Dougan, a cartoonist who has also worked with Eichhorn, did a short autobiographical story of his own titled “Opportunity Jones” about someone who teased Dougan (who was working at a coffee shop at the time) with a mysterious “business opportunity”; no points for guessing what that really was.
