You ever wanted to read a newsletter, but signing up was just way too hard? I feel that. My email address is just my name with a dot in the middle at an email server everyone uses. Imagine if that got out. (the dot is there because I was 16 when I got it and I thought it made me seem more adult. I could’ve been ‘richardfairgray’ since I’m still the only one of those, but what’s done is done.
Well, here you can find all the newsletters in reverse order, so you can read on and see me devolve.
Or, you can sign up and have it dropped straight in your inbox each Tuesday. Who am I to judge?
Now, onto the Newsletters!
02.28.23
Don’t cry – work.
This has been an intense week. The Kickstarter for Octopus wrapped up (414%, not to brag) and I once again fell into a pit of too much work and tried to dig out of it by taking on another project. In 14 days I leave for New Zealand and I still have to color and letter 104 pages, format and prep 2 books for print and create an entirely new 8 page short. Deep breaths.
Last Thursday I went kind of buck wild on a livestream and called out some really shitty people for really damaging behavior, but then remembered that I hate public beef, so I asked the host to remove the video. At some point I’ll have time for more complex analysis of this and will almost certainly call out those same people, but it will be in a more controlled format than drunk at 11.
Also, I take back what I sai last week. The best compliment is now tied for first by the person who came out because of Octopus and the person who left their husband because of Octopus. So, there’s the bar. Clear it if you can.
This week I want to take a break from revealing stories from my sordid present and instead talk about attitudes toward comics-as-a-job that I keep seeing and that either confuse me or make me mad. It’s no secret that I treat my own comics as a job. No shade on anyone who doesn’t, but for me the comic making is the work, it just happens to be the exact job I want and nobody ever told me it would be easy.
Last week I was at a con and the panel stage was right behind me. The only separation was a curtain, so I got to hear every single thing being said. Not to generalize, but boring straight men need to lower the damn mic a bit.
Obviously, this was a con for more than comics, so I got very good at tuning out the panels on D&D and Wikipedic rundowns of Death Note, but when the comic ones started, I was genuinely paying attention. I like hearing other people talk about comics, especially people who do the kind of comics that I don’t.
An artist, who I think is famous for ______ and other similarly gritty and pose based storytelling was on the mic telling a story about how he got started in comics. He had shown his portfolio to a more established artist and been told it wasn’t good enough. He’d taken the note and tried harder and eventually the older artist told him he was doing okay. The story was more detailed than that, but essentially ‘Young artist tries again and succeeds!’ Coming soon to a wherever near you.
Then he elaborated. He explained the guiding principle behind his career, giving full credit to the artist who advised him. I’m not going to credit either of them because I think it’s the saddest and worst advice I’ve ever heard.
“_______ told me to go to a con and see who has the longest line and copy them. Then you’ll never go hungry.”
Gross.
“Honestly, I’d rather be drawing _______ or _______ and in a far more fun and cartoony style, but there’s less money there.”
This part made me so sad. Someone in one of the most competitive and often thankless fields was admitting that they didn’t even like the part of it that was meant to make it worthwhile.
No shade on anyone for making money and doing what they have to do. But, this was a man on a stage passing on this advice to an audience as if it was a) inspiring and b) not the most soulless and cynical approach to a job that is at least on some level meant to be ‘art.’
I keep writing and deleting paragraphs here, because I don’t want to be critical of someone for making a living however they need to. But, no matter how much I try to sugar coat it, there’s always the underlying truth that there are easier ways to make money than drawing comics. Theoretically there are great heights you can reach through comic work, but I’m pretty sure no one ever made it there by being just like someone else who already was.
The sadness was the one two punch of ‘do a version you don’t like and strive to fit in.’
Until next week.
-Richard Fairgray.
02.21.23
The Best Compliment
Firstly, I want to say a huge WELCOME to new readers who signed up at FanExpo this past weekend. I hope you enjoy this collection of moments from my life. If you bought Octopus, thank you. If you didn’t, and you like this kind of vulnerable and (I hope) funny content, then go back it on Kickstarter, you only have until Friday!
This was my first time tabling at a convention in a year and it felt good to be back to my favorite part of comics. Last year I had found out at the last minute I was doing this particular show and all my stock was in LA. I’d had to flail wildly to find anything to have on the table and by the second day almost all my main titles had sold out. This time I had warning, I had plans and I still ended up selling out of the key stuff just as fast, A good complaint to have.
I’ve said before that I create comics to apologize for existing, and I mean it. In my more upbeat days I think I’m doing it for connection, or as a way of waving a flag that like-minded people will find. So, while it’s nice to have the piles and piles of money that are so readily available to independent creators, it also sucks when you talk to someone and think ‘I know exactly which book on my table will connect with this person and I sold the last one this morning.’
But, conventions aren’t just for sales. My friend Lisa (who makes a lot of sales) jokes that she doesn’t mind if people buy the stuff, she just likes the compliments. I like both, and I especially like it when the compliment is such an extreme endorsement of my books that the sale seems almost impossible given the circumstances.
I’m going to switch out a few details in this story, not to embellish, but to hide identities of people who are not me. This is, once again, a story where I might not be the hero.
I was at a convention just before the first COVID lockdowns, I think it was somewhere in California. I had a small handful of books, but the first Black Sand Beach wasn’t out yet, so mostly it was a table full of Blastosaurus and the ashcan for Octopus chapter 1. This young woman approached the table, she looked to be in her mid twenties. She seemed nervous.
“Hi, umm, sorry, are you from New Zealand?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I thought so. I am too. Can I ask you something weird?”
“Sure.”
“Did you used to be married to ______ _______?”
“Yeah.”
“Right, she was my English teacher.”
She then picked up one of the books and started looking through it. She was reading it, not just flipping, which is usually a sign that no sale will actually happen. People who are comfortable reading in front of you are looking for a reason not to buy the thing in their hand. They want to know what they’re definitely going to miss out on. Occasionally they’ll see a joke that will win them over, or an image that surprises them, but for the most part they are now just an obstacle to other people getting to the table.
But she didn’t seem comfortable. She wanted to talk more.
I tried to bring up some New Zealand themed small talk, and quickly we were both very comfortable reminiscing about specific candy and notable creeps from our hometown. The magician who creeped her out at the bus stop had been at a lot of birthday parties when I was a kid, I assume on purpose.
Then she got on her phone and started scrolling. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t look up, she was just searching. She flipped the screen around to show a photo of a man I knew. A man I’d been sleeping with on and off for about 4 months back in 2011.
It was her dad.
2011 was also the year this young woman had been in my ex-wife’s English class. I had no idea of the connection. Small world.
Apparently a text thread with me was what outed him to his wife and what broke up the whole family. This woman had every reason to hate me.
She bought every title I had on the table and came back later to talk to me about how much she enjoyed them. A compliment against all odds.
Until next time…
Richard Fairgray
02.14.23
It’s that time of week again. Time for another story and over-explanation of something from my life that you absolutely didn’t ask for (except you did, because you signed up and opened this). First, I want to remind you that if you like these top quality stories, then you should be backing my Kickstarter campaign for my comic memoir OCTOPUS.
Now, on with the romance. It’s Valentine’s Day, so I’m going to tell you about a really romantic thing I did once.
This is the story of how I proposed to my first wife.
The other day I was talking with someone about that weird time in the early 2010s when everyone got really into real life activities. Massive water fights and international games of tag were rippling through culture and people who couldn’t organize those things were still doing Flash Mobs. With hindsight it all feels like corporate team building, but in the moment it was a movement and it was hard to not want to take part. For young people reading this, it was like those pop up experiences that are solely designed to make you look good on Social Media, but are actually really boring to be in (look at me in this wild hanging chair or laying dead on the carpet from The Shining! I can’t believe this was only $40!). Eventually the conversation came to treasure hunts, and I remembered that I did one of those. But, right then I couldn’t remember who or what it was for.
Turns out, it was for a proposal.
My first wife had (has, not sure, but I assume) a terrible mother. A woman so clearly in arrested development from her teenage years and taking it out on anyone getting more attention than her. I’ve seen her face when she notices someone else getting favor, I’ve seen her knock over a glass to bring the eyes back to her. I’d also seen, for many years, her jealousy of her daughter.
When her daughter got interested in photography, she bought her a crappy digital camera for her birthday and in turn took her expensive real camera from her. When her daughter had friends over, she would hop in the hot tub with them and insist on telling wild stories about her own youth. Every time her daughter received a gift from the father, she had to be given something better or she would be in a foul mood for weeks. I feel no guilt in saying this publicly because the woman was (is?) a monster who compared gays to animals, so she can eat my entire asshole. The point of this is that the daughter (my eventual wife) had never had a moment that was just about her.
We’d been dating for years. She was my friend in high school and we were the two people who liked comics, so everyone just assumed we should be together. I was furiously protecting a terrible man from being outed (because he was a teacher and would drive me home every day and hang out with me in secret and I never noticed it was weird), so I went along with it. I’d never met a happy adult, so this seemed like par for the course.
Eventually people started asking if we were going to get married, so I went along with that too. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her, she had been my friend for a long time, she also enjoyed comics and that was rare in a country with only 4 comic stores. It felt like being with her would be fine and wouldn’t get in the way of me making my dumb books and fucking any stranger over 60 I could convince to drive to me.
Looking back, I never thought of her as a whole person. I never promised I’d be the hero of these stories.
But, she was my friend, and I hated watching her mother do this to her, so I decided to make an event that was entirely about her.
I arranged a treasure hunt. Clues that would lead all over the city, to her favorite places, to foods she loved, to meet people she missed and cared about.
There was a page of a comic at every location that captured the fictional narrative of the day. She was the main character, teamed up with a man who looked a lot like me going under the alias Lord Arthur Fogworthy. The mystery was surrounding the many missing Batmen (because I had like 30 miniature Batman toys from the animated series) and every location had one hidden somewhere. What she had to find eventually was the missing magic stone that would merge them back into one person.
A comic shop, a boat ride, a fancy restaurant, a corpse of a superhero hidden in her trunk with scrabble tiles in all his wounds to arrange for the next clue. Backwards talking recordings, Kryptonian cyphers. I did it all. Finally, at a park with a pretty good slide, Lord Arthur Fogworthy was revealed as the villain and I ran away as fast as I could (spoiler, that guy was me in disguise). I changed my outfit behind a building and re-emerged as Richard. I took out a toy cow with the words ‘marry me’ scrawled on it (I was 22 and still made Simpsons references out loud) and then handed her the rin. It was a gold ring with a portion of the Bizarro S in silver and white gold. She said yes and I revealed that only an idiot would stop a treasure hunt before finding massive amounts of candy.
Two more clues led to a surprise party that her mother wasn’t invited to and a suitcase full of toys, comics and candy. The end.
At the time, people told me it was so sweet. That it made up for what a dick I was the rest of the time. But, I’ve always made work to apologize for existing.
I told myself that was for her, but the truth is it was for me. It was a last grasp at finding a way to make a thing I wanted to seem fun. I got to be the cleverest one who knew all the answers. I got to outsmart her at every turn. I got the credit when she should have been showing off her ring. She liked Superman. I liked Bizarro.
I did the same thing to her that her mother had been doing her whole life.
Romantic gestures shouldn’t be grandiose. They should be small kindnesses that happen often, not wild swings to make up for the deadzone in between. The marriage was horrible for both of us, but I can only reflect on the things I did wrong, not hold resentment for her part. Being an unapologetic dirtbag also means admitting to the shit you fucked up.
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. Be better than I used to be. Be better than you used to be.
02.09.23
The Mysterious Mystery of the Kitchen Poo.
There are some stories I have held back. The Fuck Fish, The Return of the Sea Captain, and this one. It’s not that I don’t like to tell them, in fact it’s quite the opposite. I just keep them on hand in case I have a really tough week or there’s too much other work on. Well, this week has been both, so this is what you get.
Basic catch up stuff – my Kickstarter is still chugging along. Closing in on 300% and a new add-on is getting announced soon that should really appeal to anyone who reads these.
On Tuesday I went to see Howard Chaykin speak about his comic career. It will shock no one that I enjoy listening to joyfully grumpy old men pontificate. I came away from it feeling motivated to make the best comics of my life, but was confronted by the 32 pages still remaining on a book that I now truly despise.
It’s a strange mix of motivation and devastation. Howard is a master of comic storytelling because he sees the form as an inherent part of the work, not as an apology from a story that wishes it was a film. I’ve been writing something for a while now to figure out how comics are able to control time in a way that no other medium can, so I was feeling very seen. I don’t take shortcuts in comics. I can’t, because as soon as I do I stop drawing them. No duplicated panels, no tattoos or logos dropped in after. I need my pages to look like pages before Iscan them. I like to layout pages for pacing before I start and then at the drawing stage I take that layout and turn it into something new, with only the start and end points mattering. Every page is a moment, it’s not panels, it’s one thing. ANyway, I just want this book to be over, so I’m phoning it in for the first time and it’s making me miserable.
Wednesday morning I woke up at 3am having my first ever panic attack since leaving New Zealand in 2017. One more week and it will be done, but that feels like an eternity right now.
But, on with the story.
THE MYSTERIOUS MYSTERY OF THE KITCHEN POO.
In 2017 I was living my best life. My first marriage was over, I was dating a nice man, my books kept getting nominated for awards and people kept throwing money at me to come and talk about them. I was jumping back and forth between New Zealand, Canada andAmerica every couple of weeks. At the time I referred to it as being ‘technically homeless.’
I stopped using this joke after I became ACTUALLY homeless for about 6 weeks later that year.
So, while jumping between festivals, conventions, dog shows and publishing meetings, I was spending most of my time in LA. While there I was staying in a house in the foothills of Hollywood (specifically, the part I now refer to as Haunted Hill). The house was part home, part recording studio. The walls were all covered in spooky murals that Ryan Gosling had painted when it had been homebase for his old band.
2017 was also the year that we had a code that kept getting us free delivery from McDonald’s. The year that McDonald’s sold 50 McNuggets for $8. So, the house was just filled with those delicious little chunks of chicken(?). We had an entire drawer dedicated to dipping sauces that we didn’t use. We assumed they kept.
January 10th: I arrived, dropped my bags and headed out to a show. Alex (the only person who REALLY lived at this place) was playing, and his girlfriend had asked me to be there so she had someone to hang with. Apparently his other friends all hated her. In hindsight, this doesn’t speak poorly of her. A muscular drunk man in a Nirvana shirt with the sleeves torn off was failing to hit on a girl by telling her how wine was mulled, and that Woody from Toy Story was based on his dad. He didn’t seem to get that that isn’t a brag, especially if you know Woody was an asshole in the original script. From here on out I’ll call him The Cowboy’s Son.
I was exhausted, because I’d flown 13 hours to get there, so I went back to the studio after the show while Alex went out with some friends, including The Cowboy’s Son. When I woke up in the morning, he was sleeping on the floor next to my fold out couch. I stepped over him to get coffee and start my day. I walked into the kitchen and there on the floor was a truly spectacular human shit.
Just enormous. The kind of shit that if you did it yourself you’d seriously consider calling people in to show it off.
I put 2 and 2 together, assumed the drunk junior cowboy had for some reason decided the kitchen floor was the place to go to Dump City. But, he was asleep, seemed angry and muscular, and I had to work in the next room for the morning, so I cleaned it up.
Awake and sober, The Cowboy’s Son seemed like a much better person. Like the kind of person who would never shit on a floor. It turned out his girlfriend had tried to stab him the day before, so he needed a place to crash.
That night we all went to bed at the same time. The next morning I woke up to yet another enormous log laying on the kitchen floor. Once again I was faced with a dilemma. Do I clean it up or leave it for him? Do I wake him up now and get him to sort it out? All options were bad, because waking him up would lose me my morning of work, leaving it there would mean a stink cloud for the day. I cleaned it up.
That afternoon, I brought it up.
It was the cat. That was the company line. That was the only possible answer. Alex insisted that Major Tom (the cat, full name Maureen Thomas) did enormous shits. I knew this already because she liked to push through the broken bathroom door whenever I was in there and shit in front of me like some wonderful shared experience. But I knew the difference between a big cat turd and these monstrosities.
The Cowboy’s Son insisted it wasn’t him. I was almost convinced.
This continued for 4 more days. Every fucking morning I had to start my day by cleaning up a shit. It started to feel normal. Every morning, roll off my couch, step over the snoring beast, open the kitchen door, scoop up the shit and take it to the bathroom. I even moved the paper towel dispenser for convenience.
I talked about it constantly. I told every girl The Cowboy’s Son brought home. Amazingly, people who are totally fine fucking a stranger on an air mattress on the floor next to a sleeping Me aren’t that picky or bothered by shit on the floor.
Then The Drummed arrived. He came in from Arizona where he was working at a pet shop. There were all kinds of stories about divorce and competitive blowjobs for Justin Timberlake that may or may not have been true. But he’d come to town for a one night gig that paid $40, then he never left. The McNugget orders went from 100 to 150 each day and another air mattress was added to the floor.
There was a lot of bad stuff that came later, but in the short term, life was an adventure. Little Rascals cast like Blue Remembered Hills.
The shits continued. Only now, I knew it couldn’t be The Cowboy’s Son. To get to the kitchen, he’d have had to climb over The Drummer, and the air mattresses were wide and crammed. It couldn’t be The Drummer because the shits had been happening for weeks before he arrived.
I brought it up everyday and every day I was told it was the cat. The words ‘bro, you just don’t even know what cat shits look like’ were used.
Then I left for Canada.
Two weeks later I got a call from Alex. The shits had continued in my absence. Apparently everyone was genuinely shocked that I hadn’t been making it all up. Somehow, they were all more comfortable thinking it was the cat, so they hadn’t explored it much further. But then my vindication came.
There’d been screaming from the neighbor’s house. The police had arrived and a man was being taken away in handcuffs. The words Alex heard across the chasm of parallel driveways were simple, clipped, “I told you to stop fucking shitting in my kitchen!”
What I didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that the lock on the backdoor had been broken for months. We never went out there, and it was visibly locked from the inside. We also didn’t know a homeless man had set up a tent in the backyard. We didn’t know he was running an extension cord in through a window on the bottom floor and we didn’t know he was making his very own meth.
But, what we especially didn’t know, and what I truly respect this man for, was that every night he had walked in, looked at us sleeping, looked at us with our warmth and comfort and air mattresses, and taken a dump on our kitchen floor. He didn’t have a house, but he could shit in ours.
Respect.
Apparently Alexhad discovered the door problem a week earlier and the shits had stopped. The man had moved his efforts to the next house over and I guess kitchens were just his thing.
Many months later the same man threatened to stab me, even after I sat in his tent for a day and ate 2 dozen donuts with him. Ah, Hollywood, I’ll never not love you.
01.31.23
I Can’t Help It If I Have A Lot of Feelings.
This past week has been really hard. The parts of Kickstarting Octopus that I thought would be scary were easy as shit, and the swirling impact on my life has been overwhelming. I’m coming out the other side now, but it’s been a rough seven days.
Writing about your own life can be incredibly fun. It’s self-indulgent to the point of ridiculousness and it’s a catharsis as you spill out all the thoughts you’ve had since that you wish you could’ve said then. Writing this newsletter is this for me, because I get to revisit misadventures, most of which I have no regrets about. My friend Lily and I came up with the term ‘Miserable Fun’ back in 2012 – it’s the feeling where no matter how bad something is, you can enjoy it for what a good story it will be later. Since that day I have never not enjoyed myself.
The flip side is that you have to start counting up how many interesting things have really happened to you. You have to keep having those things happen and you have to continually be growing from them or there’s no point. I mentioned a few weeks ago what Eddie said about how you should absolutely be embarrassed of who you were 5 years ago. Most of the time I’m embarrassed of who I was an hour ago. Photographic memory and an eyesight problem that makes facial impressions hard to read combine for a lot of neurotic reexamination of every interaction post mortem.
On Saturday I had a traditional Richard adventure. I went to a Leather Social, reconnected with the man who spat tequila in my mouth at the art fair, went back to his place with him and his husband, explored their homemade sex dungeon, admired the art he’d made with blood from his own penis and had ice creams. But there’s no narrative there, I just had a really nice day. My best friend is looking for a new place to live and it needs a recording studio to be built in, so I was mostly interested in how they’d soundproofed the dungeon.
Last week I was asked to guest judge a fisting competition, but I was too tired, so I jumped on a twitter space, got too drunk and started rambling about James Cameron and 9/11. It took me days to put together what I’d been saying (no, I didn’t have a theory about Cameron causing 9/11, it was me rambling as I remembered the documentary where he saved the robot like a hero).
Every day last week I did between 6 and 8 hours being interviewed about Octopus. Every interview wanted to ask about the painful moments. The suicide attempt, the friendship with <name redacted>, the bit’s that stood out to them. They all asked what the hardest part to write was. I had to keep talking about the Ray chapter, where I’m just in this nice new relationship and I keep pushing him away because I’m terrified I’ll destroy someone as sweet as him. I was drawing that a month into lockdown where Ray and I were married but stuck in separate countries and I was scared he would die of COVID (he didn’t have it, but we were all scared for everybody back then), when I would have given anything to undo the three days at the start where I pretended to be busy and left him alone in his motel.
Every interviewer wants me to be the flailing person I was in the stories from 7 years ago. There’s an expectation for a bottle of wine, a glass of whiskey, a sprawling set of stories across two hours. It’s fine. It’s part of the job, but it was a lot of reliving that I wasn’t prepared for.
Then the one-two punch. I got asked why I’m publishing it now, and I had to talk about Jim. I’m still not over Jim’s death even a little bit. I had years to prepare and I am still not over it. He is still in my ‘frequents’ list on my phone. I still see his face, eating that cupcake and looking exactly like a human Grumpy Cat everytime I turn on my screen, but how many times can I call the Walmart Pharmacy or the Thai restaurant before he gets bumped out? Then his daughter sends me this heartfelt message about how happy Jim would be to know I was still friends with his grandson. And I broke.
The campaign is doing fine. It’s made more money than I thought it would. Everyone is responding really positively to the story and it looks like this career pivot is going to work out. The scary part wasn’t scary at all. I achieved my goal. What a win.
Someone told me newsletters were a great promotional tool. I might be doing this wrong. I never had a LiveJournal, so this was bound to all come out eventually.
01.17.23
Guilty for Not Feeling Guilty.
It’s 1 week until the launch of my Kickstarter for Octopus (sign up to back it when it launches), one of the main avenues for me moving back to America has dried right the fuck up, I might be losing my favorite office and the publisher I halted all work for has finally paid me the money they owed me so now I have to draw the last 75 pages of a book that I used to love. It’s kind of an intense week.
On top of all this, I’ve been spending a lot of time editing my memoir, so I’m deeply invested in the rabbit hole of what a terrible person I used to be. I have an incredible memory and I naturally assume that every single mistake I have ever made has been logged in the brains of everyone who witnessed it. But, to balance that out, I also feel no guilt for things I have done because I either don’t know why they are bad to do, or I feel like I’m a different person now, so the slate is wiped.
When I was 7-years old I got in trouble for saying something mean to another kid. I thought she and I had a running bit where she made fun of me for one thing and I made fun of her for another. Turns out, she thought I hated her and was very upset. I got hauled out of class by the principal (which I think was an overreaction, or perhaps an indictment on how free his time was) and given a very stern talking to. At the end of it all I was told that I had to apologize and spend 3 lunchtimes in the ‘Sin Bin.’ This was a spot outside the staff room where 1 kid at a time had to sit on the cement, in full view of the other kids who were free to play and have fun. Sort of like the stocks, but with the potential to kick off a lifetime of hemorrhoids instead of bad posture. This seemed wholly out of line. I began bargaining, like any obnoxious (they call it precocious now) child would. Then this happened-
“Richard, stop negotiating.”
“I’m not ‘negotiating,’ I’m trying to make a deal!”
He laughed. I didn’t understand. The punishment never happened (six years at that school and I never once actually landed in the Sin Bin because I’m a slippery little shit), and I went back to class. When I got home my mother had heard about it and was telling her friend (in front of me) how funny it was that I didn’t know the word ‘negotiate.’ That’s the bit I have held onto.
Every time a book of mine comes out I think about my primary school principal seeing it in a store and thinking, ‘I wouldn’t trust his writing, he doesn’t even know what negotiating is.’ This haunts me. I haven’t spoken to that man in 30 years, but if I hear of his death I will breathe a sigh of relief.
I don’t feel guilty for what I said to that girl, but I hate the version of myself that said it. I hate knowing that I can say things with one intention, often the intention of connecting with another person on the level they have offered, and that those things can fall flat or hurt somebody. But, hurting them is secondary to me feeling like I got something wrong. I’m meant to be good at words.
The other night, Ray asked me about my first marriage. He and I both have a history of casually fucking around, but my history is a little denser than his. He asked if I ever felt guilty for sleeping with other people and I didn’t have an answer. For me, sex has always felt like an infinite resource. If I have sex with someone else today, it doesn’t mean I can’t with the person I’m dating or married to the next. If someone I’m with does the same then it doesn’t make much of a difference to me. That being said, if someone says they’ll see a movie with me and then watches it on their own, I feel deeply hurt. The shared experience we could have had is gone forever.
I tell myself this and mostly I believe it. But there’s this one nagging thing. Every day when I left my house to have some casual sex with a person from the internet, I would leave my wedding ring at home. And this is the bit that I can’t reconcile, because I don’t know if I was being cinematic, if the ring itself held some symbolism, if the act of removing it separated me from the person who I was when it was on, or if I had just seen enough people do it in stories that i thought it was what I was meant to do.
So, there’s some part of me that either feels guilty for doing it, or feels guilty for not feeling guilty about it. Either way, it ends up being the same feeling. I hate the person I was in my 20s. I’m embarrassed of the person I was in my teens. I feel sorry for the weird kid I was before that. I like myself now, but that will probably change by tomorrow. But, that’s how it should be. My friend Eddie said to me once that we should all be embarrassed of who we were 5 years ago. If we aren’t then we’re not progressing.
Digging through the past and finding every detail can be a dangerous way to stall yourself, but sometimes you find little pieces that you actually like and enough of those can form a throughline. I think I’ve always been a decent person. I’ve been ignorant and inconsiderate and I probably still am, but I have never been intentionally malicious, and that feels like enough of a win.
See you next Tuesday.
-Richard.
01.10.23
Crying At The Sex Club
We’re 10 days into the new year and already my life is in chaos. I finished that big book last year and dove straight into the next one. I’m 1 issue in on the next volume of haunted Hill (this one is going to be amazing) and I have publishers breathing down my neck to catch up because they missed deadlines and payments. On top of this I might be moving back to LA this year, my office might have flooded today, I’m leaving for Australia in 2 months and I haven’t even started getting myself ready for the Kickstarter launch on January 24th. Chaos.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Anyway, enough about present day me, here’s a story about me from last week. Let’s talk about the strange phenomenon of men crying at sex clubs.
My friend has this story he likes to tell about when a music teacher of his died. He went to the funeral and met the teacher’s son, who at the time was working as a DJ at a gay BDSM club. My friend (straight) accompanied this guy to work that night and the two of them sat in the DJ booth drinking whiskey and crying a lot about their shared loss. The way he tells it, people kept walking past the door and giving them weird looks, ostensibly because seeing people cry at a sex club was so out of the ordinary. It isn’t.
I’ve been going to these types of places since I was (let’s say) 18. I’ve been to them all over the world. New Zealand, Australia, England, Hong Kong, a secret one in Dubai, and of course in basically every part of America I’ve visited. I actually almost lived above one once, but the viewing for the apartment was on ‘Piss Thursday’ and, well, once you get used to the smell of melted hog fat you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. I’m not bragging, I just want to point out that my sample size isn’t small. The common thread has always been crying.
It’s a very specific type crying. It’s a quiet, intense weeping with an occasional deep breath as if a wail is about to come, but it never does. Just a shudder and then they hold you closer.
I’m not a monster. If someone approaches me at a place like this and instead of fun they just want to hold someone and let out all that sadness and guilt and fear, I’m not going to push them aside. I have my limits of how much time I’ll give it, but at the very least I will always hug them back.
Sorry that this isn’t funny. I’m doing my best. But the truth is that these men are crying because no matter how progressive a city is, or how far we have come, there are still millions of people living out the sentences handed to them by society of the past. People trapped in marriages and families and situations that they feel like they have no way of escaping without hurting themselves or everyone around them. The shame and fear are still right there at the surface for them. They come to places like this as their only outlet, but when they get there and find someone they want to be with in the anonymous darkness, it’s too much and all they can do is cry.
Recently I was criticized for highlighting the less ‘prideful’ aspects of the queer experience. I was told that focusing on the harder aspects in my storytelling, or reveling in the grimy side of gay sex was damaging. I was told that the representation we need is the uplifting stuff that (and I’m editorializing here) sells more flags and pins and striped shirts. Fuck that. We don’t bury what’s real.
See you next Tuesday.
01.05.23
Backstage Life
You see it all the time in movies about movies or shows about shows (can we please have 40 more?). A lead character, usually shot from the back in a cold open, is rushing about to do everything before the big event. The pace is frantic and the team of people putting it together rush in from each side to introduce character before name (with a single line that everyone hopes will catch). Then, from a shambolic mess, the lead emerges onto a stage or a political podium or whatever the premise demands. I think I’ve always assumed my life would work the same way.
I plan my time down to the minute. If someone is coming to my place at 9 then I will stop working, turn off my lamps, find pants and hide any incriminating bottles and rags at around 8:57. This has an almost 200% failure rate, but I still never learn. There’s this thing in the back of my mind that says ‘it’ll all be fine, just like that Japan poster.’
I’ll explain.
When I was 12 I had to make a poster (technically it was an ‘infographic.’ My school was VERY into those) about Japan. Shit got in the way and at 4pm on the Sunday before it was due I hadn’t started. It was the first panic attack I can remember. But then, laying on the floor in front of the TV, I somehow got it done as Life With Louie played in the background. It felt like magic. It felt like no matter how much there was to do, there was something deep inside me that understood exactly how the passage of time passed and a power would forever be unleashed at every last minute to get shit done on time.
The problem is, it’s mostly worked out. Every book has been finished on time. No matter how stressful it gets, no matter how many times I stare at myself in the mirror above my toilet and whisper ‘you can die when you finish,’ they all get done.
False sense of security.
If I’m only going to be in Hollywood for a short trip I don’t bother finding a place to stay. I have an office in the grimiest place on earth and I’m usually working late enough that it would be dangerous to leave anyway. Last June I was there for 3 days which unexpectedly turned into 7, then 12. Obviously 12 is too long to go without showering, but there are a lot of motels in the area and a lot of elderly tourists who still think you’re meant to leave your room door open when you check out.
Anyway, this isn’t about showering, it’s about laundry. COVID really killed all the laundromats in my area. It was okay for a minute because my friend lived a few blocks away and his washer dryer, fidge, couch, record player, AC units, lamps and recliners were all actually mine. Unfortunately he’d moved and the new person living there had literally no idea that was all my stuff. The new person was a casual acquaintance, but there’s no way I felt good about showing up randomly to let myself in and clean my top quality subscription underwear (I’m not saying which brand until I can monetize this thing).
Anyway, long story longer, I needed to get laundry done. No options within walking distance. Then a friend called asking for help.
He had to clear out his old garage, but he also had a party at his place that night and really needed me to show up at a VERY SPECIFIC TIME to get him to leave. He suggested I meet him at his old place at 5 with my laundry, we’d go straight to his place and I could do my laundry while we set up for his party.
A few things to add. A heat wave, his consistent lateness and I was down to literally my last clean outfit. Not to brag, but it was yellow pants and a yellow tee with a hairy man grabbing his crotch in red with the word ‘PIG’ across it. I usually save this for Senior Discount Day at Slammer, but needs must.
So, I hoist my enormous laundry sack over my shoulder and begin the 10 block walk to the old garage. I look like a fat Jack Skellington who got McDonald’s sponsorship for colors. I arrive at 5 and the garage cleaning is barely beginning. We leave by 7, I’m drenched in sweat and the party has already begun.
I know maybe 3 people.
Everyone there is either a proper adult music person or an ad executive. And I’m doing laundry. Better still, I am sweaty, smelly and have no option to change my clothes until I am done.
The machines ding and beep and I get to grab some clean clothes and head downstairs to the studio to use the second bathroom to take a shower. There are no party guests down there…yet. I scrub and soap and do all that good stuff you get to do as you judge another person’s collection of liquids (in this case it was a whiskey scented body wash for cool boyz). I got out and started the lengthy process of drying a body this hairy.
There’s a key thing I don’t know. The door to this bathroom doesn’t lock, it opens outwards and it doesn’t even latch easily. The party has expanded in my absence and now people fill the studio. The door flies open and a great group of strangers see my dick and balls and everything. The door is hurriedly closed and then proceeds to swing open repeatedly in a way that to the guests makes it really seem like I must be doing it on purpose.
I didn’t make a lot of friends that night.
But here’s the thing, it wasn’t really my fault. I had been working until the last minute and I had a perfect plan. Only one thing had really gone wrong and the rest of it had toppled like dominoes. Damn that Japan poster and the false sense of security it built into me.
I don’t want to be a mess. I don’t want to be the sweaty Santa or the person who always shows up looking tired, but I’m 37 and it seems to be the only way I can do things. This week has been a whole different series of tiny obstacles that could be easily stepped over if I was moving slower, so this is my way of saying I am sorry because there will not be a newsletter this week.
See you next Tuesday.
12.20.22
Pork and Ham: How Storytelling Isn’t Genetic
I want to take a break from revealing delightful stories of dicks I’ve sucked or handjobs from supervillains (saving that one) to talk to you about storytelling and jealousy. I’m a flawed person and I have to work hard not to get jealous when I see people around me with clear advantages I don’t have. Rarely is it to do with money, more often than not it’s about the influences they had growing up.
I grew up in a very dull suburban place. I didn’t meet a published writer until I was 13 and immediately fell into an incredibly unhealthy relationship with him that consumed the better part of 2 decades. My school didn’t have a magazine or a creative writing club and the closest I got to a comic shop was reading and re=reading the one Calvin & Hobbes strip that my grandfather had on his fridge. I’m not going to say it was a complete cultural wasteland, but the opening sequences of independent films ring a bit too true. I wanted a mentor. I wanted someone to challenge me or encourage me and I didn’t have it. Especially at home.
My mother reads a lot, but sometimes it’s the same book over and over and she only realizes at the last chapter that she’s been there before.
My father… Here’s a story about my father telling a story.
This was two Christmases ago (topical!). My father called me to tell me an incredible tale that I will do my very best to recap here.
My sister (the good one, not the terrible one) had ordered a pork roast for Christmas Day. A pork roast enormous enough to feed her and all 7 people who lived with her at the time. It was a big deal because London was going into another lockdown and nobody could get home to have Christmas with their families. There had been a consensus that turkey was bland, ham was overrated and that pork was the way to go.
But then a ham turned up.
The stores were closed. There were no pork roasts available on Instacart and Christmas was going to be ruined. But my sister is smart. She went straight to the internet and found a product that could do the incredible. Do true food alchemy. A product for turning ham back into pork.
She paid for the fastest delivery possible, mixed the powder in with the liquid and dumped the enormous ham into it. The instructions said it would take 48 hours, but by the end there would be uncured meat ready for Santa’s big day.
As the hours passed, the substance started to smell. The enzymes were breaking down the chemicals in the meat and undoing the ungodly change. Tensions were high and the kitchen became unusable from the stink. Eight people in a small house, trapped by snow and disease. The central room of the house, now a shrine to a dead pig that could make or break the Christmas feast. All hope had been put in a mysterious online powder.
Christmas Eve arrived and a present exchange began. My sister had bought her boyfriend a really nice new knife for carving the Christmas dinner.
That’s when it happened. The knife came out of the wrapping and sliced the boyfriend’s hand right through. Blood was pouring everywhere and they had to rush him to the emergency room. They spent the whole night waiting for him to get stitched up, but eventually he was okay.
And that was the end of the fucking story.
I got no more details, so now neither do you.
I’m a writer against all odds.
-Richard.
12.13.2022
Beef Stew
Fair warning: This will be the second week in a row that a double ended dildo is mentioned, however this time it only comes out of something.
I’ve been thinking a lot about photos lately. Recently, a member of an online hate group stumbled across my Grindr profile, realized I was the gay/disabled/immigrant comic boy and started threatening to post all my top quality content to twitter dot com.
Obviously, I am extremely proud of my Grindr content and I’ve openly shared it all myself, but it still got me thinking.
I’m reminded of a story from 2021 about a man named Beef Stew.
I was walking back to my office with a gallon of drinkable water one Wednesday night. I’m going to say it was around 10. It was night time, but not late enough for me to be nervous that someone was leaning on the gate when I got there. The man was frail, short, dressed in bulky clothes that hung on him loosely. His face was thin with a wispy beard. It looked like he’d been crying.
Obviously, my instinct should have been to ignore him, but he was right there on my big iron gate and I’d have to actually go under him to unlock it.
He was panting pretty heavily and seemed to be in pretty bad shape. I asked him if he was okay and he said he just needed a minute. He then asked me for some water, but the bottle was unwieldy and I didn’t want his lips on it, so I offered to take him inside and pour him a glass.
See. I’m not a monster.
Through the gate, across the courtyard, through the second security door and we were in my building. At this point I was the only occupant, which I consider to be Winning at Office.
I ran up the stairs ahead of him to unlock the door and make sure nothing too revealing was on display. By the time I got back he’d just reached the top of the stairs. He was so close to making it up that last one…but his foot caught and he flew forward onto the unforgiving floor. His bag dropped from his arm and vomited its contents. A wallet, some keys, a double ended dildo that bounced around like a football – unpredictably and endlessly – as we both stared.
He pulled himself up in a hurry to conceal the wobbly friend, but he stumbled again. He seemed pretty hurt. He seemed scared. It was just dawning on him that he’d come into a strange building alone with a man he didn’t know. He was about half my size, and now he was injured. He clutched the dildo and tried to find something to pull himself up by.
I kept my distance, I didn’t want to make him any more uncomfortable, but he’d asked for water and the obvious choice of bringing some back down for him had eluded me. He nervously followed me in and sat in my recliner.
I think the purple walls and octopus decals made me seem less threatening. I think the enormous posters of a donut being fingered made me seem like a nice guy. I got him the glass of water and sat on the couch facing him. He was trembling, but I didn’t know if it was from embarrassment, fear or just the shock of it all.
He told me his sad story. He’d been alone and isolated for all of COVID. He hadn’t left his house in 16 months and this night had been his first try. He had his second vaccine and he’d waited to suggested two weeks and now he was ready to be back in the world. He had logged back into Scruff, found a man to play with and hopped in his car.
The car wouldn’t start, so he had hopped on a bus.
The driver missed his stop so he had hopped off late.
He’d walked almost a mile up a slight incline and just as he was passing my gate the man from Scruff had canceled on him for being so late. He was defeated. He’d packed his favorite dildo, put on his bravest face and it had all been for nothing. He didn’t even know how to get home.
He was still in pain from the fall, his knee was really bothering him, but I didn’t have any ice and that’s about as far as my medical knowledge extends. I asked if it was bad and he stood up to check. He checked by dropping his (as mentioned earlier) bulky but loose pants. They dropped to reveal mesh underpants, a bulldog tattoo and a knee with blood pouring out onto my very absorbent chair.
I am a magnet for a specific type of man.
All of this is just context. I found the man a bus timetable, walked him back down the stairs and unlocked all the gates. We made some small talk and he was on his way. In any straightforward world that would have been the end of it.
The next morning I got my first email from him.
“Hi, Richard, I got your name from your poster and looked you up. I really like what I’m seeing. I didn’t realize you were from New Zealand – I visited there for a month in 2016, I’m sorry we didn’t cross paths. Anyway, if you are interested, I’ve included some photos.”
BUTTHOLE AFTER BUTTHOLE AFTER BUTTHOLE.
Now, I don’t want to be accused of not giving credit to an artist. These were shockingly well taken photographs. Butthole selfies with good lighting and clarity. I was almost tempted to respond just to ask how.
The emails continued daily for a week. Every day filled with buttholes, sometimes buttholes filled. Every day more information about his life, his interests and his trip to New Zealand.
“I actually met a nice man in Wellington and stayed with him for about a month on and off. His name was <redacted> and he’d never been fisted before, so I introduced him to a whole lot of stuff.”
I know what you’re wondering. You want to know that name. I’m not going to give you that name, because that’s the name of the man I was dating in 2016. In this one butthole laden missive I had found out that the shittiest of my exes had cheated on me with this stranger AND HAD ALSO BEEN A WILLING BOTTOM THE WHOLE TIME.
But I digress.
On the 8th day I got one last message. I message that I will never forget because the combination of words is so perfectly evocative.
“Richard, I gather you are not interested in a follow up to our date. If you change your mind, I am on all the fisting websites. My name there is Beef Stew.”
Until next time.
-Richard
12.6.22
Mother Always Said to Be Polite
It’s been a long week. We flew to Montreal to have Ray’s knee replaced because of the years-long waiting list to have it done locally. Because of timing and workload and all the usual stuff, I basically didn’t leave the hotel suite for 7 days. To be honest, it brought back a lot of stuff from the two weeks I had to spend in a quarantine hotel in 2020, but at least there I was able to build a blanket fort. Anyway, on with the story.
This happened a few years ago. Pre-COVID times. Those glorious days when I was on top of the world with contracts in hand for 2 ongoing series and a third series that they were paying me to do but insisted they’d get the contract to me ‘soon.’ I was in LA, living above a recording studio, sharing a living room with some no former friends and surviving on McNuggets.
It was around midnight on a Tuesday and I was alone for a change. The other 3 who lived there (one officially) were performing at a speakeasy downtown so I had about 3 hours until they would stumble in with whoever they had picked up that night to fuck on the couch that famously endorsed the pull out method. This was my least favorite thing about living there, not because they’d groan and writhe with me in the room, but because I know for a fact that they’d have been horrified if I had done the same with another man. But, when you have a new group of friends and you live in a new city, you don’t like to look at those things too closely.
I got a hit on Grindr, a bearded man within walking distance whose picture looked like it was cropped from a Brooks Brothers catalog for the elderly. I got the address and headed out the door.
The building turned out to be low income housing for LGBTQ in the center of Hollywood. There were signs taped up warning me not to share needles and to call for help at the first sign of trouble. There was one piece of paper that specifically suggested dialing 9-1-1, but someone had scribbled the number out. I got to the door and was greeted by that ‘after’ photo from a war on drugs campaign. It was the ame man from the Grindr profile, but stuff had not gone well for him.
To be clear, the messages had been as follows: “Hi. Wanna suck me?” and then the dropped pin. So, when this naked figure stood before me in the door (which then never got closed) and asked how I wanted to take my meth, I was at best unprepared.
But see, my mother always said that it was rude not to have sex with someone if you were already at their house. So, I politely turned down the meth but didn’t leave. He then proceeded to inject his own share INTO HIS GODDAMN HEART.
He sort of stumbled and lay down, door still open, naked as the day he was born and weakly pointed at a long double ended dildo that was sitting on the floor. With my mother’s lesson in the back of my head I sighed, picked it up and unenthusiastically plowed it in and out of his willing hole. Eventually he fell asleep, I checked he was breathing and turned to leave. There were, by this time, three people watching from the hallway. I walked home to find 4 people fucking in the dark, so I crept in and lay down on the half inflated mattress that had become mine.
I checked a few times on Grindr to see if that user was still around. As far as I can tell he lived at least until COVID.
Now, back to my Red Bull and Nerds so I can power through on coloring the new book.
Until next week.
-Richard
11.29.22
Three Things That Happened at McDonald’s
I’m writing this from my hotel room in Montreal. Ray is having a knee replaced and I am along for what he calls ‘mortal support.’ I never know with him if he’s being cute or if he misheard it somewhere. He calls a faux pas a ‘fox poo’ and no matter how much I press him won’t admit it’s on purpose. Adorable gaslighting is a thing.
The spots on my brain are still there and they consume most of my downtime. Just wondering and worrying. Imagining the worst. Trying not to google it.
Last week I told the story of the wizard who I turned down, the week before it was the man who wanted to freeze me to death. I’ve talked about Jim and the bleeding from my face at the West Side Club. The theme so far has been ‘here’s a thing that I stumbled into that turned out to be weird.’ Anyway, last week someone responded to tell me they thought I had made a story up. They didn’t believe I’d met the wizard. So, the theme of this week is ‘here’s the shit that happens all the time that you should get better at noticing.’
So, I present to you, a story of three things that all happened at McDonald’s in South Surrey on Thursday November 24th.’
We were on our way home from picking up more prescriptions and we were three hours late for lunch. McDonald’s has become one of the only foods that I can guarantee won’t set off my GI nightmare, so I was heroically about to down 20 McNuggets. Our truck is too unwieldy for most drive-thru lanes, so I went in. There was no one at the counter, only one touch screen to order from and a group of people huddled around it. Talking, not ordering.
I was waiting, trying to make sure they knew that I was waiting, but nothing was getting through. I turned my attention to another conversation. A young woman was talking with her kid, who was maybe 5. She was telling him that since he hadn’t thrown a tantrum he was going to get a sundae. I thought about the three hours I’d been hungry, the traffic, the various mysterious illnesses, the workload, the COVID, the people still conversing around the touch screen and I wondered why I wasn’t throwing a tantrum.
Adults can still throw tantrums. We just don’t. We don’t even get a reward.
There was trouble brewing. This kid hadn’t thrown a tantrum this whole time, but now he had to wait to order and there was a group and a grumpy man in front of him.
This is when it all turned. The three women at the machine left, saying to the man they were with that they would find a table and he could bring over the food. This was all perfectly normal, it’s McDonald’s, you definitely want to sit down for the ambience. The man turned back to the machine and FINALLY STARTED HIS ORDER.
And here’s the thing. He didn’t know what he was getting.
These four fully-grown adult friends had come to McDonald’s and left one person to just bring over a smattering of everything. They were doing this Dim Sum style. I can’t even begin to comprehend how these people function in the world.
He hunted and pecked his way through the menu, selecting individual items, pausing to think if the flavors were complimentary.
Then, a relief came. A cashier appeared and offered to take my order in person. I had rethought my gluttony and settled on a 10 piece McNugget meal. I upsized to large and got an extra side of large fries for Ray.
“Really?”
I was confused. I stared blankly and confirmed.
“You need fries with the meal and another fries?”
I said yes. I paid, I waited and I left. The man never finished ordering, the kid never threw a tantrum and Ray and I sat in the truck and ate the food because someone had blocked us into the parking space.
So, there it is. I got fat-shamed, saw people who eat McDonald’s like an event meal and learned that we all deserve a reward every time we don’t throw a tantrum. I noticed these things and I got to report them to you. It’s not my most interesting story, but it’s all I’ve got right now. So, Brian, maybe if you stopped critiquing newsletters and paid attention to the world, you’d have wizard’s and men who want to freeze you to death, too. Sorry your life is so boring.
11.22.2022
My Greatest Regret.
We all live with regrets. You’ll meet people who claim they don’t – people who pretend to seize the day and never look back, people who spend actual human money on sloganed throw pillows and wall signs – but in truth, we all have them. Most of my regrets are about wasting time on bad relationships, but there’s one that overshadows them all, and that regret is to do with a wizard.
It was right before the first lockdown. COVID was around, but it was still that early part where we all kinda thought it would be like all the other potential pandemics, or those tsunami warnings in New Zealand that got everyone to go to the beach to watch a sort of high tide.
The night before I had jumped in a car with a group of strangers because they’d thought I was their friend Mark (to see that full adventure, go read Haunted Hill 1-6 but swap out Eva for me, and the trampoline park for a cement factory). So, I was tired.
I’d left my office early (around midnight) and was walking home. It’s about a 20 minute walk, but you have to sort of weave East and West through the streets because, heading south in Hollywood, everything stops and starts a bunch. Without getting too in the weeds (or too specific about my address), there’s this one stretch of Las Palmas that has a lot of construction on it. For the six months leading up to this there’d been this shipping container full of building supplies blocking one lane. In the early days, you could just walk along the sidewalk next to it, but over time the trees had reached out to reclaim the stacks of wooden boards, hugging them like dead relatives, so now you had to walk down the middle of the street.
Something weird was going on that night. That particular stretch of the street had a strange smell. Everything smelled like laundry detergent. Not faintly. It was like everywhere, eye-stingingly thick. I was just passing the shipping container when a man stepped out. He was maybe 5’10”, long gray hair and a thick beard. Oh, and just casually, wearing a full wizard costume.
On my first honeymoon we went to Hong Kong. It was terrible for a lot of reasons, but the highlight of the trip for me was Disneyland. If you know anything about Hong Kong Disneyland, you’ll know that it was pretty unimpressive back in 2008. The only actual ride was a version of Space Mountain. Basically, you paid a pile of money to take a bus with Mickey Mouse shaped windows to walk a long and empty area built for crowds that didn’t materialize, so you could be in the same place as some people in costumes. But there was the train. I love a good train. The best thing about the Hong Kong Disney train was that it really didn’t show you the park. It went around behind buildings, usually not high enough to see over them, so you were pretty much just looking at some very clean cement walls. But next to me on the train was a man in a Goofy hat. An old Goofy hat. This man had the biggest grin on his face the whole ride, because at some point he had been to Disneyland and said ‘I want to own a Goofy hat, one with the ears and everything!” And someone else had said “You’ll never wear that again,” and he had proved them wrong.
I have to assume a similar story is true of this wizard. This costume looked expensive, but it also looked very old. It was threadbare on the arms and it didn’t have a hat anymore, the embroidered stars around the bottom were pretty dirty.
The man had stepped out from behind the container that I’d never seen inside – the one I had always assumed was full of wood or hammers or whatever you make buildings with. This enormous container that had sat there long enough to become part of the landscape. This potentially camouflaged portal to another world.
“Hey,” he called out. “You wanna make some money?”
And I stopped, because that’s a really loaded question. I had no idea how I could make this money. Would it be from crime? Would it be from wizard sex? Would it also involve seeing inside the container? Would I see the source of the laundry detergent smell?
And I said, “No.” I was so tired, so I just said, “No.”
I walked home and went to bed and two days later I stopped leaving the house for months. During that first lockdown I thought about the wizard a lot. I wondered where I would be now if I’d gone with him. Maybe I’d have had an incredible adventure. Maybe I would’ve become a ghost ahead of schedule. But I’ll never know.
The container and the smell are gone now. I’ve walked by that spot hundreds of times, even trying to get the timing right to see if I’d bump into him again. No luck.
But I was just so tired.
Here’s the thing about tiredness. It doesn’t go away. I’m more tired now than I was at the beginning of 2020. I sleep less and I work more and the space between adventures seems to grow ever longer.
I found out from my doctor last week that there are 12 spots of concern on an MRI of my brain. I won’t know any more than that until they do another scan in a year. I should have at least asked him how I would make the money.
-Richard Fairgray
PS: I’m sharing the completely uncensored Haunted Hill ‘Cum-Soaked Variant’ today, so if you want to see the best drawing and coloring I’ve ever done, or if you just like a well-detailed dick, then click here. I shouldn’t have to warn you that it’s NSFW.
11.15.22
$750,000 to Freeze to Death
I ran a poll on Twitter and Facebook dot coms to decide which story to tell this week. The choices were THE MYSTERIOUS MYSTERY OF THE KITCHEN POOP or $750,000 TO FREEZE TO DEATH. The one about shitting in the kitchen actually won, but then I realized I have told that story before. Short version is that no one would believe me that the shit was human BUT I WAS VINDICATED! So, this week I’ll be telling the one about freezing to death.
I’ve always wanted to freeze to death. Not in a suicidal way, just in a ‘that’s how I’d want to go out’ way. I love being cold. I love feeling so cold that I’m numb. I love cold hands on the back of my neck. That said, I mostly don’t actually want to die.
Theo and I have this game called ‘Cold Cup of Vomit.’ Sometimes the vomit is swapped out for shit, but usually it’s vomit. The rules are simple –
- Every Friday afternoon at 4pm someone will bring you a coffee mug of human vomit and you have to drink it.
- Whenever you find yourself in a situation that you would normally tell someone what you do for a living you have to start by telling them that at 4pm every Friday afternoon someone brings you a coffee mug of human vomit and you drink it.
- You may maintain any other source of income and pursue any other dreams, so long as every Friday you drink the sick.
- The vomit will have no negative impact on your health, but you do have to keep it down.
- What is the minimum amount you are willing to do this for?
Logistics aside, it’s a very good thought experiment.
Every time I hear someone say they wouldn’t do X for a million dollars, I immediately offer them $7,000 to do that thing immediately. Every single person stops and thinks about it. Real money in front of you, possibly from a person crazy enough to pay it, always changes things.
So, what is the minimum amount you would need to be paid to drink the vomit?
The point of the game isn’t to see how much it would take to make someone do this gross thing. The point is to make us stop and really think about how much doing something unpleasant would be worth in terms of making a difference to our lives at that exact moment.
Money is a gross way to hold power over someone, so how much money would it take for me to let someone hold power over me? We check in on this game about twice a year to see if our answer has changed. Would $300 extra a week make enough of a difference to our lives? Would we need $2,000 per cup? Has the amount increased since the last time we played? Does that mean we are more secure in our lives?
It’s a fun thought experiment. These things don’t really happen in real life.
Years ago I met a man online who is mostly just a hazy memory to me now. We never met in person, but his whole thing was about control. He always wanted to know how much he could make me do over the low resolution webcam on the Silverdaddies chat room. This man is the reason that I know so many uses for a boot lace. This man is the reason I know how to burn myself with wax and not leave a mark.
This man is also how I know I hate parrots. If you’re going to spend a lot of time on webcams then don’t have parrots. Don’t have any animal near your mic that can just overwhelm all other sounds. Just put them in a different room. There’s nothing less sexy than asking someone to repeat an instruction when time and angles are so precarious.
I hadn’t heard from him for years. I assumed he was dead. He was already looking dead when we spoke. Then out of nowhere I got an email. Presented here in ALL CAPS, just like every other conversation with him.
HELLO, RICHARD!!
I HOPE YOU HAVE BEEN WELL. FOR THE MOST PART I CERTAINLY HAVE. I DO NOT SEE YOU ONLINE MUCH THESE DAYS AND I BEGIN TO WONDER IF YOU ARE EVEN STILL ON THIS PLANE. WHAT WITH COIVD (sic) AND ALL, WE HAVE LOTS (sic) A FEW. IF YOU RECEIVE THIS, PLEASE RESPOND.
MYSELF, I DO NOT FEEL I HAVE MUCH MORE RUNWAY IN ME. AGE IS CATCHING UP. TIME NNOW TO DO THE THINGS I HAD ALWAYS WANTED TO DO AND SEE. I RECALL YOU SPEAKING A LOT WITH ME ABOUT HOW MUCH YOU LOVED THE COLD. I HOPE THAT IS STILL THE CASE.
I WOULD LIKE TO OFFER YOU 3⁄4 MILLION DOLLARS TO LET ME SEE HOW COLD I CAN MAKE YOU. YOU WOULD BE AS SAFE AS YOU ALWAYS WERE WITH ME AND I WOULD ONLY TAKE ONE WEEK OF YOUR TIME. I KNOW HOW BUSY YOUARE.
YOURS
-(name redacted)
Spoiler: I said no.
There were a lot of reasons. I knew the money was real and I do actually believe he would have paid it, but I didn’t like what he would have been paying for. I probably won’t get to freeze to death. Hardly any of us get that kind of control, but that was still something I wasn’t willing to sell. This man wanted to pay me a big pile of money to own the end of my story.
It’s never about the money or the cup of vomit or watching someone turn blue while you jerk off. It’s always about the power. He framed it like I’d be giving up a week and taking a controlled risk, but really he wanted me to give up a piece of my own story, that was the part he liked.
Obviously, I’m speaking from a place of privilege. I can afford to say no to offers like that, it’s a privilege to even be in the situation where someone could ask. No shade on anyone who would have accepted. For what it’s worth, I do trust (name redacted) to keep someone alive through whatever had in mind.
I know it’s not a 1:1 with the vomit game, but it was nice to have the stakes shifted like that. It’s rare for someone else to turn around and say ‘no, but actually here is the money if you do it right now.’
Until next time
-Richard Fairgray
11.8.22
Signing Divorce Papers at the Sex Club
As promised, I am back with another story from my life. Since COVID I’ve been living in Canada and I sometimes panic that not enough is happening to me. I work, I sleep, I work again. I had to fly to LA a few weeks ago to rescan some pages that I’d done wrong on my last trip. 9 hours in and I was drinking champagne poured over a stranger’s dick and arranging to be photographed for a portrait show. This newsletter is in part to make sure I don’t end up wallowing in the same 5 exciting moments and pretending that was what made a life.
Anyway, on with the story. For clarity, it was technically a Separation Agreement that I had to sign at the sex club, but I didn’t want to get into the long and drawn out process that is getting divorced in New Zealand.
I’d been in New York for 4 days. This was after the break up with Tony, after living in the hotel with the surfer but before Halloween. If I had to guess, I would say it was late September. My first AirBNB of the trip had been at an address that turned out to not exist and my second was from a special pile of Slim Pickings. On night one the host had burst into my room and thrown wet paper towels at me screaming that someone had tried to flush them. I had been there maybe 10 minutes and did not in fact know where the bathroom was. Every night I was there the glass in the door of the building got broken and every day it got replaced. On the fourth day a man had broken into the lobby and pissed on my leg. If you know me, you know this is a persistent problem in my life.
I had a lunch with the new Children’s Editor at a publisher who shall not be named (not to protect me, but to not give them a single breath of air, after I stopped working with them they have published some…Trumpy stuff). My credit card was wearing out and I needed to top up my Metro Card, but every station I stopped at had a machine that couldn’t read it. On top of this I really needed to buy clean pants. It was unseasonably hot and i was in a nice grey jacket that was quickly starting to get swampy. 60 blocks in, running late, it was time to just buy a whole new outfit – after all, I didn’t want to show up to my publisher and have to explain that the sweat smell was me but the piss smell definitely wasn’t.
I arrive, having abandoned all my old clothes in the trash can out the front of an H&M, I’m dressed like background talent from Community and I have left my glasses in the changing room. Me without glasses is kind of a wild vibe. My instinct is to just open my eyes as wide as possible in the hopes of pulling some extra sight in. This also makes my eyebrows far more expressive.
Lunch goes well.
I get invited to a party that night. It’s the tenth anniversary of the publisher and I hear the words ‘open bar.’ I have four hours to kill so they suggest I stick around the offices and sign some copies of my latest book. I scribble monsters in waist coats for the afternoon and have a sit down with the new editor. I sell her Sweet penny and the Lion, not realizing it will be the last book I ever do with these people.
The party goes well and i drink a lot of cocktails. I do that thing where I meet one person from across the room and she and I become best friends for the night. She tells me she works in the marketing department and that she has a secret thing in the works with Spike lee. She tells me this party is too boring for us and we head out into the night. From there it’s a series of basements and back entrances to clubs where people know who she is and all our drinks and drugs are free.
I end up making out with an elderly couple in the front window of a bar on Christopher Street. This girl has been very insistent that gay cliches are in again and going to the places that became cool afterwards was very tiring. The logic didn’t play for me, but I’m always happy to find the old men.
Here’s a secret about New York and its older gays. They will never take you home. If you have a hotel you can ride the fuck truck all the way to Boneville, but they will never take a visitor to their apartment. I’m not sure if it’s some ingrained shame about apartment sizes and an assumption that someone from out of town wouldn’t get it, or if men that age just all have wives back home. Either way, this wasn’t going to go anywhere.
There was another party in another part of town, but it was almost 1 and my focus was less on running and more on sex. My best friend and I parted ways (I found out later that no one at the first party knew who she was and assumed she came with me) and I headed north in an Uber to a club I’d been to a handful of times before. I was tired and I was drunk and my H&M ensemble was already starting to tear.
The next part of the story is dull and will mostly read like a teenager bragging about how many specific drinks they had on a weekend. Lots of dicks, the usual activities. Full checklist. Certainty about which way is up is low. The important detail is that at some point blood started spraying on the pillow in front of my face and I realized it was coming from my face. The key to the locker where I’d stored my disintegrating outfit had swung up from my wrist band and sliced the skin between my eye and nose.
This felt like the time to take a break.
I stumbled into the locker room and sat on a wooden bench that was not designed for bare skin, especially not bare skin with hair on it. While I dabbed the blood and regained composure I checked my phone. An email had come through from my lawyer, and my separation agreement was ready to DocuSign.
I’d had this magical day. From start to finish I had been rushing from place to place, being celebrated for my work, being offered more, being treated like an oddity, but not like an outsider. It felt like the perfect setting to sign away the last remnants of my former life. I read through the basic parts. The house, the IP, the dog. It all made sense. Then I saw the section for the car. I just started laughing. The kind of laugh where you have to scrunch up your face and you realize the cut by your eye is open again. The kind of laugh that makes you breathe sharply through your nose and the poppers burn makes you want to die. it had just never occurred to me that there’d need to be a section for the $3000 car we’d owned for over a decade. I can’t drive anyway, I wouldn’t have asked for half.
Then I read that the car didn’t exist anymore anyway. My ex had crashed it on the motorway. I remember that wording really clearly because it seemed unnecessary in a document that until now had been so sparing with language. And I thought about how for many years before that if I’d heard my wife had been in a car wreck I would have known what to do. I would have called people and found a way to get there, but now I didn’t even find out about it until months later. It wasn’t a sad realization, it was just a moment of being hit in the face by change that had all happened so fast that there’d never been a second to examine it.
I think I sent her an email to make sure she was okay. I don’t remember whether I heard back.
I have only been back to that club once since then and again it was a whole thing, but it requires context that I don’t have time for this week.
If you enjoyed this peak into my world, then keep an eye on me in all the usual places. Who fucking knows what twitter will be by the end of any day, but I’m there most of the time and making a lot of new books.
-Richard Fairgray
11.01.22
The Unapologetic Dirtbag
Everywhere I turn people are telling me to focus on my mailing list. So, here I am being a very good boy. I’m not going to get bogged down with formatting or sections or trying to turn you all into a funnel (a word that only reminds me of drinking as a teenager). I’m just going to tell you a story, because that’s what I’m best at.
Fair warning, if you only know me as the guy who makes the picture books you read to your kids, maybe buckle up because that’s not what I do anymore.
It was September 29th 2009. I know that for sure because it was my father-in-law’s birthday and I had elected not to go to the family lunch. My wife’s mother had recently said some horrible and bigoted thing (I can’t remember exactly which variety) and I had done some yelling and storming out at a recent breakfast. So, my wife (read that in a Borat voice) was out watching a Japanese chef stack onions into a volcano or train or something and I was home alone. Obviously, I was on silverdaddies dot com looking for a man to “chat” with. Another warning, I’m often not the hero of the story.
This was the day I met one of the most incredible, singular people in my life. Jim Kraft, the unapologetic dirtbag.
For those not familiar with the Silverdaddies website, it stands as a testament to what the internet once promised. Glossy JPEGs of sexy people, Java based chat rooms and a design aesthetic like an unadorned 70s kitchen. Every aspect of it makes you feel welcomed, nostalgic and simultaneously certain that things could be better. But, if lemon party dot org isn’t your sexual cup of tea, then you probably won’t like anything on this site either.
But back to Jim. I’m not going to bore you with details of that first day. It was exactly what you’d expect. Ice cubes and boot laces and an extraordinary amount of poppers, it was the thing that happened afterwards. it was the talking. I’m usually not a fan of talking to a stranger after sex, I’ve learned the hard way that when you only fuck with men over 60 you run the risk that they are holding on to some pretty archaic ideas. best to make them cum and dip right out of there so you don’t have to reckon with the certainty of having had a villain inside you.
But Jim wasn’t a villain. Jim was a sweet old man. His voice is impossible to describe, it had its own echo, like it was coming to you from deep within a cave, but more expressive than that can convey. It was a voice that made you instantly feel cared for. Maybe that’s why I kept the Skype window open (neither of us had paid accounts on Silverdaddies, so we had switched over to Skype).
For the next thirteen years Jim and I had a wonderful and complicated friendship. We even wrote two books together. There are dozens of things I don’t have time to go into right now. He lived in a haunted post office, he owned a string of interchangeable, elderly dogs, he’d uncovered mysteries about Herman Melville, he was a poet and a genius and he was eternally concerned that people weren’t masturbating enough. But, every facet of him was there on the surface and not one single part of it was ever manipulative or cruel. He was unapologetically filthy and unapologetically kind.
Jim died last month. I keep being hit by waves of sadness when I realize I won’t ever hear the delight in his voice when he answered the phone. Very few people say “hello” like it’s actually a question. People say it to let you know they are there and that now the inconvenience of talking can happen. Jim said it as if every phone call could be the start of a new adventure.
When I spoke to Jim, which I didn’t get to do enough this past year, I felt like I could be my unapologetic self. No curation, no concern that a concept would be too challenging, no possibility that he would be shocked. I don’t want to shock people. I want to reveal everything about myself as quickly as possible so the people like me will find me sooner. So, to honor Jim, to learn from his life, I am trying my best to live unapologetically and with kindness. Here’s my favorite picture of Jim.
Until next time
-Richard Fairgray
Proud human garbage, living in the filth of Hollywood and making books about all sorts of things. Blind, gay and grumpy about both.
I've been making comics for a really long time and I've made a lot of them, mostly in New Zealand and mostly out of print and lost on hard drives during the dark ages before cloud storage. What you'll find on this site is a deep dive into the last ten years of my work, with a mix of short and long comics and stories. All up it's about half of what I've had published.
On top of that there's some samples from books that are with other publishers, the complete run of the American edition of BLASTOSAURUS, and my new series HAUNTED HILL.
I have a lot of new books coming, so sign up for the mailing list and keep checking back in.