My Dinner With David
by Chris 'Frobozz' Angelini
cangelin@mnsi.net
Chris's Website
My association with David Gonterman was a brief but tempestuous one,
filled with sturm und drang, signifying very little. In the mid 1990s, on a
lonely little private chatserver which will remain nameless (though I can
state with utter truth that it never went by the name of Fred), several of my
friends and I gathered together to have a spot of fun. Being fans of MST3000,
each and every one of us were rip-raring to do a group MiSTing of something
for our own amusement. This was long before we'd even discovered that there
were hordes of like-minded fans on the Internet and that we were basically
reinventing the wheel; but really, when friends get together to do something
fun, who cares how many other people have done it before you? But I digress.
The fellow hosting our event brought up two tasty crap-filled treats for us
to bash on: a wretched little fiction called Little White Dojo, which is
powerful enough in its crapulence to bring even a Mexican wrestler to his
knees; and the as-yet unknown to us American Kitsune issue #1, which is
strong enough in its evil to tag out said Mexican wrestler and fight for him.
Little did we realise the deep hurting that would follow...
Our MSTing practice went something like this: the host would spam about a
paragraph's worth of text and we'd have roughly ten seconds to shout out
comments, riffs and death rattles. In retrospect, on a scale of 1-10 this
method probably rates a 15 in 'Ways Not To MiSTify Fiction'. But gol' durn
it, it was fun! I was having terrible connectivity that night and only got in
a few riffs overall, something which will become mildly ironic below (and
when I say mild, I mean if you blink, you're likely to miss it. My life is
not an O Henry story so cut me some slack).
After surviving the horrors of LWD, we turned our attention to American
Kitsune #1. Within the first ten minutes, we had two people drop out from
sheer inability to *stand* the prose (sic) which was streaming past their
horrified eyes. Those of us who survived (much like in nuclear war, the
survivors envied the dead) shuddered and decided to put this experience
behind us, although yes, it was plenty of fun while it lasted. My friend
collated the MiSTing and tossed it into a private FTP account, to which we
all had the password.
Note, my friends, a private FTP account. Private. As in the opposite of
public.
What happened next still boggles my mind. We receive email from one of
David's partners in crime (who has since mended his ways) that our MiSTing
has been found on FTP and boy-oh-boy, is Davie mad at us (for those of you
who are fans of 80s comic sketches, this is a lot like telling Eddie Murphy
that Michael Jackson is mad at him). He's had it up to here with us (he has?)
and essentially came off sounding like he was delivering a Cease and Desist
notice. Being fairly savvy about what someone could and couldn't do to harm
you on the Internet, we shrugged our collective shoulders and spent the bulk
of our time searching for the leak in our system. We never found it --
personally, I suspect someone in our group mailed the MiSTing to someone
else, who mailed it to someone else, and so on and so on; and ultimately lied
about having done no such thing -- and so we went on about our merry
business.
But never fear, you lovers of Justice! For we evil MST-3kers had our come-
uppance! Do not mock David Gonterman, for he is dull-witted and quick to
anger. I still remember the fateful night when his retribution struck down
upon me. For you see, he had taken the only step possible to him. David
had... killed us all off in one of his stories.
I believe in parody, invective, satire and other means of commentary. I
believe that applied properly, they can change the world. I can't believe
that a twenty-year-old with a fur fetish can have his Sailor Scouts blast me
into pieces in fiction and then seat himself on the same throne as George
Bernard Shaw. So, this turn of events was little more than quite amusing to
me. Further, at the end of the story that he'd written to kill us off, he
said something along the lines of... and I quote...
Sailor Coyote says: I'm afraid that Forbozz and his cronies
haven't figured out yet, but I'll use their example to set the
moral for this chapter: Do not flame us Native American Spirit
Guides if you don't want them to pull some nasty tricks on you,
like put your sorry butts in the Fanficts that you are trashing,
heh-heh.
Well let's see, that's not quite the lesson that I took away from this
little episode. The lesson that I learned was "if you don't proofread, you're
going to look like a total prat". I don't know who Forbozz is; maybe he's the
evil twin brother of my on-line persona, Frobozz. Davie did give me the best
laugh that I'd had in months, however; I wrote him but he never answered
back. I suppose dead men don't send email, neh?
(Oh, and that irony I told you about? It's that he singled me out as
ringleader when I actually had a very small part in the MiSTing. See, I told
you not to expect much).
After this event I did grab all 11 chapters of American Kitsune and
started to MiSTify them -- but that's about when I discovered Web Site #9 and
the fact that someone had already beaten me to the punch. As I was just doing
my MSTings out of a perverse desire to put them in an FTP archive to see if
our bloodhound would sniff them out, I never got past AK#3.
However, after this, Gonterman always had a special place in my heart.
It's the same part of my heart that I clogged forever when I ate that
Greaseburger and fries at the local DQ. I read everything of his which was
given the ol' SOL treatment and I was rarely disappointed.
It's too bad that he's trying to remove himself from the records. Were
this me, I'd probably try to embrace my past and use it as a humorous
touchstone to 'when I didn't know better'. Trying to erase the past only
makes others work harder to preserve it. Accepting your mistakes and moving
on -- those are the signs of wisdom. It's too bad Sailor Coyote spent too
much time hiding the spellchecker and not enough advising Davie, isn't it?
Peace and love, friends,
Frobozz