Insulation and Kotex Maxipads.

Top of the morning gents,

I was chuckling at a snide remark from my buddy Marto. He was griping that if he got sick from that pile of polio blankets, I was gonna owe him a case of beer and fat bag of buds. Oh, and a blow job. As per the traditional KPD response to such requests, we'd all recite, "I want a meal, not a snack." Or in reference to Rodent Rectum Rachel, "my beaver teeth in my ass need filing down." Human males are so gross. And really fucking funny too. The polio blankets Marto was griping about meant the stacks and bundles of old blue and green wool blankets Cully scored from work and dropped off. Like us pensioners, the old green army blankets were clean, but old.

Me, Brian Higman, Gordon Kelly and Troy Date all moved into a house that we called "the hash house." It was around the corner and a few years before we created Lem's Mortuary and Crack House. The house was an old cinder block house that had zero insulation, built in shitty tracts for low-income families by the Army Corps of Engineers right after WWII. They were so cheap and cold we decided to remedy the problem with an odd assortment of stupid shit.

This stupid shit included a whole bunch of garbage bags packed with styrofoam packing (worm) pellets, dozens of bean bags, a hunnert old wool blankets and a ten foot tall stack of thin mattresses. The Styrofoam packing pellets were at Atlas Van Lines Moving and Storage and the FREE sign was all the encouragement we needed to take all of them. The hunnert bean bags Brian brought home were from the thrift shop he worked at. Nobody bought used leaking bean bags, so we fetched all of them for FREE and brought them to our trashed and drafty abode too.

The blankets and (feminine) mattress pads were hospital surplus so the risks of infection made good comedy. Cully asked me to go with him to his work at Care (less) Medical and clean out the back warehouse of old hospital blankets and mattresses. The mattresses were thinner, shiny vinyl and little more than pads, hence the Kotex Maxi-Pad moniker. They were twin bed sized pads that you'll see on hospital beds when we pull yer tubes and unplug yer machine the moment you stop breathing and your eyes fixate finally staring at what the universe is really about. A giant empty space, cold and lonely.

Marto joked that the Kotex Mattress Pads were big enough to cap an elephant's (Kwethluk) pouch of bleeding monkey nuts. I add the Alaskan village names more recently, so you coppers don't nod off and fall asleep. We lugged out the whole wall of bundled wool blankets that must've dated back to Typhoid Mary or the Lincoln Administration when Honest Abe decided to ship infected blankets to the Indians. Hence America's first use of biological warfare weapons of mass destruction. Sickness and disease killed more native Americans (good Indians) than any amount of liquor, guns, cannons or hang man's hemp rope.

Over a couple weekends, we drove both of Cully's vans to Careless Med, loaded them to the roofs and brought the Maxi-pads and blankets to Gordy's, Higman's, Troy's and my cheap rental house. My brilliant idea was to re-purpose all these free surplus materials to help warm a chilly and drafty house. Mind you, winters in the Mountlake Terrace woods were dark, rainy, damp and occasionally snowy. Heating was originally with electric baseboard heaters, but when ye want to put in a marijuana grow room, ye had to keep yer power meter readings to a minimum, so no grow room halide lamps until a wood stove was installed and all the electric baseboard heaters shut off.

To start with, the attic and walls were empty, just sheet rock was nailed on 2X4 beams, on top of bare concrete walls constructed with cinder blocks with an air gap between. The attic was simply empty troughs between ceiling beams, so we cut open a dozen or more old bean bags, climbed into the attic and poured the tiny Styrofoam beads down the open wall slots. I used a doweling pole to push and pack the wall slots until full. After packing all the exterior walls full of bean bag Styrofoam beads, we dumped out a foot of the Atlas Van Lines Styrofoam packing pellets all over the entire attic. I thought I'd run out of Styrofoam packing worms and bean bag pellets, but we had way more styro-shit then I expected, so we simply poured all the remaining bean bags and packing pellets all over the attic until the depth was more than 2 feet deep and completely hid all the ceiling beams.

You're laughing, but the house immediately warmed up. I ain't kidding, with only a wood stove burning everything on God's green Earth, that house slowly became livable. At this point in our work we textured and painted the ceilings throughout the entire house. We ignored the cracked, smashed sheet rock walls, to repair that shit would've required replacement of all the wall boards and I already had an idea how to cover them shitty walls. The ceiling texture came out real nice. All Marto did was mix latex paint 50/50 with mud (joint compound), then paint the gloppy shit with really thick nap paint rollers, taking care to match the creamy strokes with all the ceilings in the hallways, bedrooms, kitchen and living room. Two coats of this thick paste mud paint did the trick, it looked perfect and covered any cracks, tape marks and stains with a half-inch of super hard colorized paint and mud. Our finished product looked like we were professional artists. Baked and slightly drunk artists.

To make use of the giant stacks of blue and green wool blankets, me and Marto grabbed our staple guns and starting at the far end of the house, we stapled the blankets on all outward (exterior) facing walls ignoring the interior walls between rooms and the hallway. We went crazy stapling right over all the windows, flush with the ceiling and left the extra on the floors. We grabbed our razor knives and cut around the windows, then cut the excess along the floor. After detailed cutting and trimming, we stuffed the surplus wool blanket scraps into the wood stove to burn for heat. Then we fetched all the paneling from my folk's basement, loaded it into Cully's vans, drove it to our "hash house" and stacked it inside. The paneling was purchased by the previous homeowners, stacked 40 pieces high, covered with boxes and dust, so by default, had my name on it.

Marto and I oiled the paneling with Liquid Gold to restore the pretty wood tone and shine back to life. We then measured the height from floor to ceiling and cut the paneling with a fine-tooth circular saw. With these pieces we nailed the paneling over all the outward (exterior) facing walls that were covered with wool blankets. The result was mind blowing. Instead of peeling, patched and beat up sheet rock walls, we now had shiny wood tone paneling for a decorative wall covering with a layer of wool blanket insulation underneath. All that was needed was to replace the trim boards on the floors and around the windows.

Marto looked at me like I was stupid and asked me why I was gonna nail shitty scabby old white painted trim back up. I shrugged and asked what else were we gonna use. He punched my arm and said we needed saw horses and brown "gasoline paint" to match the trim with the paneling. We drove to his house, loaded up the saw horses and grabbed a couple quarts of gloss-brown alkyd trim paint that was roughly the same color as our paneling. We also snagged a gallon of paint thinner, hence Marto's term "gasoline paint" cuz latex paint doesn't work well on wood work and fuming enamel paint sure as shit does.

Of course we grabbed dark brown beer on our supply mish, then laid all the trim pieces on the saw horses and Marto painted them with the brown gasoline paint one-handed. The other hand holding imported dark beers that I recommended after returning home from Europe. At my North Seattle drug dealer party houses, imported beers became the rage from 1979 onward. The flavor and much stronger alcohol content left watery faggy beers like Rainier, Lucky, Hamms, Oly (Olympia) and Budweezer in the dust. Like frosting on a turd, inbred hillbilly retards can indulge in some of the finer things in life. Just look at me.

Still being minors, I used the ID from Gary Los to buy our expensive imported European brews. Gary Los died of a cocaine overdose in the back room and it was fitting I purchased the beer with his driver's license. Whenever I lost my license due to suspensions or revocations or was in an accident, I used the driver's license of my dead friend, 5 years older than I, whose ID photo looked like my twin. Of course you coppers know that I'd sold him the blow and also provided him with a box of diabetic syringes I stole from my dad. You also know that me and Pim carried Gary Los downstairs to his parents' basement sofa, covered him with a blanket creating the appearance that he died there during nap time, after snack time, with cartoons on TV. My first lesson in Crime Scene Masterpiece Theater.

While our trim board paint werk was drying we smoked mucho bowls of weed, jammed tapes of Cully's recent Neuroshima space music and caught a serious dark beer buzz. Finally tuned up nicely, we nailed the trim boards back around the windows and along the floors. The finished product was fucking awesome. The attic and walls were filled with a sound-deadening thermal barrier of Styrofoam and the walls were double-insulated with a single layer of old wool polio blankets and half-inch sheets of paneling. The house was so quiet our ears rang.

The back room was formerly a garage that was converted into a large living room. We called it the jam room cuz Cully's band rehearsed there and also performed there at our monstrous keg parties. This was the intended target for all those Kotex mattress pads. We snagged long screws, slipped on large washers and by leaning the mattress pads against the walls, we screwed them vertically, floor to ceiling, side-by-side, covering all four walls. We even covered the cracked shitty single pane window facing the driveway. That lousy cracked single pane of glass was a serious thermal and noise leaker.

The effect was really fucking weird. Completion of the last room at the hash house rendered it absolutely silent of any noise from traffic and the rest of the house. Remember, besides keyboards and guitars, we had to quiet down a set of drums and that noise was what the neighbors complained to the cops about. The overhead lights were banks of fluorescent tubes and worked good enough, but Cully's band needed access to the electrical outlets and light switches we'd covered. So Marto and I unscrewed the mattress pads over the outlets, cut rectangle holes in them giving us their locations, then we screwed the mattress pads back up. We fetched longer light switch and electrical outlet screws and some cool looking shiny metal face plates and presto, the plug-ins and light switches were easy to see and use. When Scott, Cully, Loren, Troy, and Mike got warmed up and wailed their industrial space grunge, the outside noise escapement was nearly zero. You bet, no more cops to be called by the mean ugly redneck neighbors with noise complaints.

The flooring in our shitty white trash ghetto rental house was scabby threadbare carpet that stunk of leaking pets and sick humans. So we ripped it up and burned it in a bonfire in the backyard at our next keg party. Callahan grabbed all of us and we booked to a Lamont's store that was getting remodeled and the old carpet was stacked in long rolls and you guessed it, had a FREE sign on it. So we loaded Callahan's truck and both Cully's vans with the rolls and headed to our warmer, quieter shitty rental house in the middle of crackerville and hymie-town.

We unrolled the carpets in the front yard and picked out the worn and faded carpets as phase one. We covered all the floors in our slumlord's hacienda with the shittier carpets, face down. Yes you heard me, fiber side down with canvas backing facing up. Then we laid another layer on top, face up. The top layer was the really nice stuff that looked almost brand fucking new. With 2 layers of carpets, the first facing down and the second facing up, we'd effectively turned a hard concrete and asbestos tiled floor into a much more comfortable floor covering. Our white nigger poverty property rehab was coming together.

Under two feet of Styrofoam beads and worms in the attic and over styrofoam packed walls, we had brown paneling nailed and screwed over a layer of wool blankets, trimmed with high gloss brown painted woods, then all the floors were covered with 2 layers of commercial gray carpets resulting in a WOKE moron recycling and re-purposing garbage program that worked like a champ. We used rubber cement to secure the carpets by painting the shit directly on the floor all around the edges and then did the same to secure the upper layer of the better carpet on top.

We were sick, nauseated and twisted from the gallons of rubber cement we brushed on the outer edges of the floor, in each room and hallway and also globbed the stinky rubber cement between the layers of carpets like a glue sniffer sandwich to secure them. The fumes from the buckets of contact rubber cement were a killer by the time we completed our white punk lodging upgrade. Shit even Martha Stewart would've given her "really pretty" gold seal of approval. Of course she would've had to avert her eyes to avoid seeing such an ugly collection of dirty white boys doing the work in such an awful neighborhood filled with parasitic Terracites, named after our poor city of Mountlake Terrace.

The big room with the walls covered with Kotex brand mattress maxi-pads worked remarkably well to contain the noise of Cully's band. What's significant to all you coppers Alaskan was the poor man's house overhaul and the parties we threw at my shitty rental houses were attended by lads you all met up in Kotzebue. Myself, Scotty Wade, Cully, Marto, Brian, Harley and Dale Campbell. You see, this crew of sick orphans was highly mobile and followed the work wherever it led them. Even way North to a neighborhood near you.

Brian you remember from KOTZ 720 AM radio. He and Dan Newberry flew to all the villages and broadcast every single highschool basketball game for years. Cully flew up and attended Dan and Elizabeth (Elizabitch) Newberry's wedding and I suspect Kathy Milligan and Sara Quinn had a thing for my brother too. Cully also flew with me up to Point Hope for a midwinter arctic tour vacation and he did interviews at KOTZ with Brian discussing recording and playing tracks from his Neuroshima albums and explained the technical and logistical challenges doing gigs all over Seattle. Brian didn't ask, and Cully didn't acknowledge jamming at the massive parties at my hash house, then later my crack house and mortuary.

David Caleshman interviewed Scott Wade at KOTZ and let him blast his Jimi Hendrix extended version of the Star Spangled Banner. After I helped haul Scott's equipment into the KOTZ studios, I booked with a smile on my face as my pal and idiot savant guitar prodigy went crazy, unleashing scary good solos and terrifying the native radio station staff shitless. David Caleshman later told me that he'd never seen such fascinating high speed guitar and signal processing work in his life. David ain't dumb. He fancied himself an educated man with a minor in Music History and major in Accounting, eventually convicting Chicky Swanson of embezzlement, stealing the radio station blind and sending Len Anderson to Charter North escaping the ruckus and fallout, finally getting sober.

Scott, Dale, Marto and Harley helped me with houses 711, 676 and 369. What is important to know was that all of these kids (now old men) were children lacking one or both of their parents due to early death or incarceration. If you attended my dysfunctional daily rituals in the hash house and later the mortuary, you'd see an ugly collection of orphans that coalesced around me and Cully, all snug as a bug in a rug, smoking weed, drinking expensive coffee or overpriced beer, joking like diseased coppers working on the house or watching VHS tapes of old porno backwards. Just imagine John Holmes making cool faces, arching his back, stroking his donkey, vacuuming globs of pecker snot offa faces and rectums like a shop vac. I ain't shitting, that cracked us up every time.

One group activity was walking miles through the woods and picking buckets of magic mushrooms. We'd bought a psilocybin handbook with color photos indicating edible and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Fucking A dudes, we exploited that booklet frequently and froze and sold fresh magic mushroom by the ton. Earned moneys we spent on rent, dark beer, expensive coffees and overpriced green bud. Another expenditure we indulged was sheets of super strength, lab fresh, blue dot LSD. All the other acid we traded and bartered, but the blue dot LSD was a real treat. Brian Higman's code name was micro-dot and he had connections with top-shelf LSD that'd blow yer mind. The blue dot had a pleasant uptake bringing chuckles and giggles, an extremely high altitude trip and enjoyable taper-off and come-down.

We'd all gather at the hash house and each of us chewed a dose of the premium LSD, listen to music, drinking dark European beers until we started really tripping. At that moment we took off and hiked the wooded parks or climbed up on the roof an elementary across the highway and watch late night truckers stream by or just look up skyward and engage our chemical star cycles. Recently, LSD and magic mushrooms are used to treat returning veterans suffering PTSD. Well shit, us kids weren't strangers to gun violence, poorly healed injuries and child abuse, so all my hillbilly comrades were as usual, way ahead of our times.

My experiences with gun violence started by getting shot through the leg during my senior year. The bullet went clean through my ankle and I tumbled down a cement stairway outside Edmonds Community College. When I was in the emergency room, the bullet hole was hard to dismiss and the cops grilled me. I'd no answer to their questions and finally got a big cast put on and went home. To this day, I only have suspicions who shot me, namely my hard core gun pals with names all of you know.

The second episode of gun violence happened down the street from the hash house. Frank Empfield had a killer grow room and we were sitting around smoking out, when the door was kicked in. Rodney Beavers and his ugly thugs walked in holding all of us at gun point. I was grabbed and pistol whipped, cutting my ears, temples and lips. After shooting rounds inside the house, Franky caved in and unlocked his grow room, showing him only trays of cuttings. The dried buds were in the attic but Rodney and his asshole buddies took all the cuttings and left. We declined contacting the police due to the illegal nature of their visit and my status as a frequent flier with Detective Beuler at the Mountlake Terrace PD. My injuries healed quicker than my bruised ego and shocked nervous system. Guns scare me.

The most memorable gun crime was the 3 niggers that attempted entry into our crack house and mortuary. One gangsta was climbing in my window so I swung my baseball bat at his ear and jaw. He fell in on his head and shoulders, dead on arrival. The back and front doors were kicked in simultaneously forcing Dale Campbell to break a nigger's neck and Dennis pulled a junker 38 revolver out of the sofa and shot lucky nigger number 3. You boys already know how we burned them and dumped their ashes in my grandpa's nasty outhouse.

A more recent gun experience happened when I was in uniform for the VPSO's up in Kiana. Mike Wilson was way fucked up, yelling in the CB radio and daring anybody to come near and get shot. Of coures, I walked over picking up Mr. Dorsey along the way and we knocked on the door of the Wilson abode. Mike swung the door open and pointed his 30.06 rifle at me and was drooling, spitting curse words at me and stating he was gonna blow me away. I believed him. Dorsey was to the left and grabbed the rifle and pushed Mike back into his house yelling at him like his very own retarded son and sole employee. Which he was.

I phoned the troopers and they arrived minutes later cuz Dial was at the airport, in his airplane, doing BS like cleaning and sorting his emergency equipment. The troopers (Von Clausen, Kozloff and Nay) went wheels up and zoomed over the mouth of the Noatak and touched down in Kiana. The standoff lasted hours resulting in Mike Wilson's arrest and conviction of weapons misconduct violations, alcohol possession in a local option area,felony assault and in general being a fucking pedophile and child gomer extraordinaire. That experience rattled me and earned me stupid insults from Steve Gomez, but kind words from all my current and former bosses at AST and Mat-Su Narcotics.

Back to the hash house renovations, an improvement you'll enjoy was my solution to the flooding rainwater, clogged gutters and the mess the downspouts created. Along both the edges of the roof, both ends and on the front and back, we climbed with a ladder and scooped decades of goopy leaf shit out, then cobbled 4 second-hand downspouts at each end of the roof, both front and back. The rain water still gushed all over the fucking place so me, Scott, Marto, Brian, Troy, Dale, and Harley kyped a couple hunnert feet of 6-inch plastic drain tubing. You know that stuff that's black, slotted and ridged for strength used as culverts.

We dug trenches at each corner where all the flooding occurred, away from the house, into the yards, 3 feet deep and 30 feet out. We poured rocks, bricks metal shit and any shitty scrabble we could find on the bottoms of our trenches, cut four sections of our slotted 6-inch plastic drain pipe and connected the slotted drain pipe to each gutter down spout, then laid it out to the end of our 30 foot trenches. We covered all our slotted drain pipe with a shit load of old 3 tab roofing, sheet metal, plastic sheets and plywood to keep dirt out of our drain field systems. Then covered it all up with dirt and rolled the cut sod back on top.

The next rain storm downpour, all the water from the gutters went out the gutters, down our drains into our slotted black plastic drain pipe that evenly dispersed our flood waters into the rock, brick, scrabble drain system 30 feet out and simply disappeared. The drains never backed up and we fixed the water problem that was previously flooding the four corners of the house. Just imagine a long narrow drain field like a septic system, but for rain water, not yer poop, piss, showers, dishes and laundries.

To list the congenital challenges these bastard party animals overcame, we start with Brian Higman who was in a fatal car accident when he was just a toddler and his mom was killed right in front of him. Marto's parents were hospitalized and jailed for their chronic alcoholism, chronic child abuse and domestic violence, then adopted by his current parents. Harley was a homeless boy at age 14 and started hanging around helping out on jobs doing mud, tape and painting with us at our job sites, earning food, a couch with the dogs and free bong hits.

These skills employed Harley working for me on spot-work at the 3 Kotzebue renovations, then later with Tom Peters, eventually employed full-time at KIC for decades that fed and paid the rents for his family with Francine Harris. Dale was also a homeless kid living in a tent in his sick-ass mom's backyard just like the tragic Slingblade movie, in complete squalor a few blocks from my ghetto rental. He heard the loud music and started hanging around to help fetch firewood, lug heavy building materials, bounce asshole drunken men and women out of my parties and whatever duties assigned at the hash house and the mortuary we moved to just around the corner.

You thought our parties and drugs held these boys together, but no, it was the work. You see, we're all composites of the deeds we've performed. We're all the ingredients to projects we've completed and the finished product is as good or as faulty as our own sorry asses. Like the surplus packing Styrofoam worms, recycled bean bags, polio blankets and sick hospital mattress pads, we're nothing but a hodge-podge pile of our own doing. I'm laughing that none of ye have seen any of my pals in recent decades and likely don't know how old they are. And look.

Brian Higman is a bald old man crowding level 60. Marto is a fit and trim ex-convict displaying the violent alcoholic behavioral genetics from his original parents. A couple years ago, Marto, Troy and Higman attended their 40-year high school reunion together and apparently they caused quite a stir. Higman had lost his cool lion's mane hair-do, Troy, whose dad died before he could remember, grew his hair down to the floor and Marto was fit, buff, punchy and tough from his years in prison yards lifting weights and fighting. The whole room went deathly quiet when those three notoriously talented criminals entered the rented hall. The rumor of their disappearances and deaths was greatly exaggerated and entering the festivities scared those normal dildos shitty. It took raunchy jokes, Marto's crude prison humor and Brian's alcoholic Irish sparkle to defuse the tension and get his aging classmates back to drinking and laughing again. All 3 of 'em told tales of our remodeled party houses and startling stories of Kotzebue.

Big Dumb Dale Campbell is now a broken old codger and rumor has it that he died a few years ago in the dirty industrial city of Everett, Washington, likely in an alley, park bench or prison. Harley Bronson is now a balding old man living in Fairbanks, separated from Francine, hopefully raising his kids that are now adults themselves. I worried he'd abandon them like his own parents did him.

Maybe my horrible influences sculpted them like a finishing school for proper speech, manners and domestic duties. They grew up and learned construction, live music performance set-up and drug dealing skills living in a hash house and later a crack house. Those boys helped me rebuild, maintain house projects and help burn leftover building materials at 2 of my projects in Mountlake Terrace, the 3 more projects in Kotzebue. Who says I don't have a positive influence on a kid's growth and development.

Brian flew up to Kotz a few short years after completion of the hash house renovation, Gordo took work upstate, Troy moved near Canada in Bellingham with me following Higman up to Alaska shortly thereafter. The only repair I did on the hash house since they moved out was to hire Marto and his paint sprayer to blast the exterior with a Hodge-podge mix of left over random color paint. The whole outside of the house was now one color and the landlord was jazzed. He even returned all of the deposit to me.

You'll enjoy this parallel ending to those 3 dead gangsta niggers that tried to break in to Lem's Mortuary and Crack House, rob us and kill everybody on site. They got dead, burned to ashes and dumped down in a soggy poopy outhouse up north in Marysville. Marto emailed me and told me that the hash house we'd insulated, covered the walls with wool blankets and paneling and laid 2 layers of carpet caught fire a couple years ago. The renters were junk and garbage hoarders and somehow the place caught fire. Marto's reason for contacting me was to laugh and tell me that once the fire started, the Styrofoam shit we packed into the empty walls and poured over the entire attic caught fire and accelerated the rapid incineration of our old hash house. The mushroom cloud stunk terribly and was seen for miles.

The internal temperatures of this styro-inferno was so high, it was impossible to put out so the fire crews let it burn itself out and only intervened to water the neighboring structures and cool the hot spots remaining after the funeral pyre for so many parties, acid trips and hard construction work finally died down. Marto told me that after the fire, the only structure standing was a crumbling concrete floor and brittle cinder block walls that tumbled when kicked. Not for a second did I consider the fire hazards of filling the walls and attics with explosive melting Styrofoam fuel-cell fire-balls.

You see, most building materials like concrete, sheet rock and fiberglass insulation resists fire, or are treated with fire-retardant chemicals. Fuck it. The shit I recycled and repurposed worked beautifully until a flame ignited a 4th of July fireworks show and turned the walls, floors and attic into a reverse rocket pointing skywards.

I'm thinking that the bright flare-up, super high temperature and ash residue might've indicated a massive amount of accelerant to the Fire Marshall. Fuck it, I'm far beyond arsonist's culpability and the fire was decades after we all left and my retarded recycling, re-purposing and remodeling mission was never considered to be the cause of the inferno.

History may not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes and none of my drug dealing, home building party animal pals can escape their DNA. Including myself. On numerous occasions involving obvious arson, my grandpa took advantage of something he called "Jewish Lightening." When asked about a warehouse, whorehouse or an entire black community that had burned to the ground, he's say, "Shut the fuck up! That's not till next week."

Here, take my card. Just call 1-800-torch-a-dump.

Karl.