Chuckleheads in the Inferno

Hello, seekers!

My dad used to pull out the greatest word from time to time. Whenever he was observing some assholish behavior, or even the genial-type stupidity on display at virtually every moment of every last living day, he would refer to the offender as a "chucklehead."

A chucklehead was generally the type of person I would later come to call an "asshole," but my dad is a gentle soul and preferred to call them chuckleheads.

I always liked this coinage, and someday I should ask him where he got it. It obviously has its roots in "knucklehead," but it seems gentler somehow, as if the person who is a chucklehead is a stoopnagle but not really in a horrible, bloatedly offensive way.

I also liked it because it reminded me of Chuckles, those horrid candies I would not now eat on a bet but loved as a kid even though I was never much of one for candy and that sort of thing. Do you know what Chuckles are? I think they still make them. They're little rectangles that come in a clear pack, and they have the dubious distinction of being little patties of colored sugar dusted with even more sugar. I became diabetic in my 40s, and eating one of them now would probably be the equivalent of stuffing a puffball mushroom in my mouth and waiting for the toxins to suck the life right out of me.

Chuckles were also notable because they were brightly colored, and the color was supposed to indicate the flavor of the particular Chuckle, but I am certain that was a ruse. Those damned things didn't taste any different from each other, no matter how much the package tried to persuade you that one was grape and one was orange and one was cherry and one was whatnot.

The flavor stuff was nonsense. I just associated the color of the Chuckle as being the actual flavor, like the red one tasted like red and the purple one tasted like purple, and tasting colors was a valuable skill for a child because it prepared me for what used to happen to me at Grateful Dead concerts.

So anyway, back to the point. I thought of my dad's "chuckleheads" comment when I passed an interesting event on the way home from work at 1:30 a.m. the other day.

There is a commercial strip near the town in which I live. This street has the usual collection of crummy little strip malls that no one goes to because you could never possibly get in and out of them, a few bars, a few diners, an off-track betting place and a number of other businesses, like one of those Sprint stores where when you go in you wonder how in God's name they ever produce enough suckers to make their nut.

So on this stretch of road there's also a strip club. It looks oddly out of place amid mattress outlets and whatnot, but there it sits, and next to it is a hellhole called Smokers' Paradise, where I would imagine they sell about 1,200 different brands of cigarettes. So since these places are about 20 yards apart I am guessing the town planners got exasperated and decided to put all the disreputable businesses in one little spot, maybe in hopes they get wiped out by a falling satellite or something.

I don't care much for strip clubs at my age, and if you need to know I think it is because I long ago adopted the theory that if you have seen two you have seen them all, so I can't quite fathom why someone would go in there and sit among a bunch of other men and watch such a display. I went in a few in my youth and it was always a bad experience. The first time I went in one, I was drunk in New Orleans and wound up getting a little grabby, if you catch my drift, and wound up getting tossed facefirst out of the place. So if nothing else, it was an instructional experience, but it sort of gave me a Pavlovian bad reaction to such places.

I did go in a couple in Philadelphia with friends a few years later, and the experiences there weren't exactly stellar, either. The places always had a vague piss smell, which puzzled me, because I cannot understand who would sit there and piss their pants in public. Maybe it had something to do with something else, but I never did put my finger on it, and in fact never wanted to.

So between the piss and the chuckleheads and the memory of a face full of New Orleans pavement, the concept of paying $50 or so to look at women undressing really never did much for me. This is in no way an attempt to convince you that I am not a chucklehead in many, many other ways, mind you. It's just that it isn't my thing.

Anyway, I passed the little strip club on the way home the other night, and it was a wild scene. There were four or five cop cars there, and there was a goddamned fight spilling out into the parking lot. It was hilarious. Did you ever see Blazing Saddles? Remember the part where Taggart and Hedley Lamarr and the Waco Kid and all those guys got into that ridiculous fight on the Warner Bros. studio lot? Well, that's what it looked like. And it was just great. All these chuckleheads, and every damned one of them pulling and pushing and yelling and shouting at the cops. It was like a testosterone frenzy in some kind of monkey colony.

I guess it wound up not being that big a deal, because I checked it out with the cops the next day. Somehow the cops got all these chuckleheads under control, so I guess they all went back into the club, which no doubt smells like piss, sweat and misguided pheremones, and had themselves a jolly old time handing all their money over in exchange for looking at women's chests.

I think these guys are called chuckleheads. I'll have to ask Dad what he thinks.