Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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The crowd is packed in, smoking cigars, drinking Rainier Beer, drinking Schmidt's and Miller, eating deep-fried bull gonads dipped in ranch dressing. You smell sweat, and when somebody farts, the chocolate pudding doesn't look like pudding anymore.
This is the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival just getting started.
This is some fifteen miles south of Missoula, Montana, where this same weekend drag queens from a dozen states meet to crown their Empress. This is why hundreds of Christians have come into town, to sit on street corners in lawn chairs and point at the drag queens strutting in miniskirts, and at the fifteen thousand leather bikers roaring through town on choppers. The Christians point and shout, "Demon! I can see you, demon! You are not hiding!"
For just this one weekend, the first weekend in September, Missoula is the center of the frigging universe.
At the Rock Creek Lodge, people climb the "Stairway to Heaven," the outdoor stage, all weekend to do, well… you name it.
A stone's throw to the east, trucks go by on Interstate 90, blowing their air horns as the girls onstage hook their legs over the railings and pump their shaved pussies in the air. Half a stone's throw to the west, the Burlington Northern freight trains slow to get a better look and blow their sirens.
"I built the stage with thirteen steps," says festival founder Rod Jackson. "It could always be a gallows."
Except that it's painted red, the stage looks like a gallows.
During the women's wet T-shirt contest, the stage surrounded by bikers and college kids and yuppies and truckers, skinny cowboys and rednecks, a blonde in clunky high heels hooks one leg over the stage railing and squats low on her other leg so the crowd can reach up and finger her.
The crowd chants, "Beaver! Beaver! Beaver!"
A blonde with short hair and a ring through her labia grabs the garden hose from the wet T-shirt organizer. She douches with the hose and squats at the edge of the stage, spraying the crowd.
Two brunettes suck each other's wet breasts and French kiss. Another woman leads a German shepherd up on stage. She leans back, pumping her hips as she holds the dog's mouth between her legs.
A couple in buckskin costumes climb the stage and strip. They copulate in a lot of different positions while the crowd chants, "Fuck her! Fuck her! Fuck her!"
A blond college girl balances with both feet up on the stage railing and slowly lowers her shaved pussy onto the smiling face of the contest organizer, Gary "the Hoser," while the crowd sings "London Bridge Is Falling Down."
In the souvenir shop, naked sunburned people stand in line to buy souvenir T-shirts ($11.95). Men in black Testicle Festival thongs ($5.95) buy hand-carved dildos called "Montana Wood Peckers" ($15.00). On the outdoor stage, under the big Montana sun, with the traffic and trains honking, a wood pecker disappears into a nude woman.
The line of souvenir shoppers edges past a barrel full of walking sticks, each stick a yard long, leathery brown, and sticky to the touch. A good-sized woman waiting to buy a T-shirt says, "Those are dried bull dicks." She says how you can get the penises from butcher shops or slaughterhouses, then stretch and dry them. You finish them like furniture, with a light sanding and many coats of varnish.
A naked man standing behind her in line, his whole body just as brown and leathery as the walking sticks, he asks if the woman has ever actually made one of the sticks.
The good-sized woman blushes and says, "Hell no. I'm too embarrassed to ask the butcher for a bull dick…"
And the leathery man says, "A butcher'd probably think you'd use it on yourself."
And everyone standing in line-the woman included-laughs and laughs.
Every time a woman squats on stage, a forest of arms comes up, each hand holding an orange disposable camera, and the click of shutters is thick as crickets.
A disposable camera costs $15.99 here.
During the "Men's Bare Chest Contest" the crowd chants "Dick and balls! Dick and balls!" as the drunk bikers and cowboys and college kids from Montana State stand in line to strip on stage and swing their parts over the crowd. A Brad Pitt look-alike pumps his erection in the air. A woman reaches between his legs from behind and masturbates him until he turns suddenly, slapping her in the face with his hard-on.
The woman grabs hold and drags him off the stage.
The old men sit on logs, drinking beer and throwing rocks at the fiberglass porta-potties where the women pee. The men pee anywhere.
By now the parking lot is paved with crushed beer cans.
Inside the Rock Creek Lodge, women crawl under a life-sized statue of a bull, to kiss its scrotum for good luck.
On a dirt track running down one edge of the property, motorcycles race in a "Ball Biting" contest. Sitting on the back of each bike, a woman must snap her teeth on a hanging bull testicle and tear off a mouthful as her male driver races over the course.
Away from the main crowd, a trail of men leads back into the field of camp trailers and tents, where two women are getting dressed. The two describe themselves as "just a couple regular girls from White Fish, with regular jobs and everything."
One says, "Did you hear that applause? We won. We definitely won."
A drunk young guy says, "So what do you win?"
And the girl says, "There's no prize or anything, but we're the definite winners."
Where Meat Comes From
It takes a couple hours before you notice what's wrong with everyone.
It's their ears. It's as if you've landed on some planet where almost everybody's ears are mangled and crushed, melted and shrunken. It's not the first thing you notice about people, but after you notice it, it's the only thing you see.