Actually, that was Willy the Sid's brain my dog was chewing on as a pup, not that ghost thing from the John Agar film mentioned above. Bob asked me if the brain was Photoshop-ed, I had sent him a teal umbra top secret debriefing regarding border collies a week or so ago. I mentioned that to explain the entire story, which would then make it a nice, homey pre-Internet tale, I'd have to give it a proper on my blog. The year was 1990, the city was Nashville. Sidney Williams presented me with his brain, not just any brain, his own, with his thoughts inside. Printed from an old dot-matrix printer and cut in thin strips like ticker tape, one could pull a bit of Sid's thoughts and story ideas out of a small hole near the brain stem. Sid seemed to fixate on a redhead at the supermarket as well as wondering if she would kill him and eat his ribs. Best that he moved on and married Christine. All three of my nieces practiced learning to read from those twelve strips of paper, each with one complete sentence. Over the years, pieces had ripped and been taped back together, and ripped again. Sid's words became blurry after the brain ended up in a swimming pool. Then my dog came along and chewed a hole big enough that he could stick his nose through the brain stem and make it move like a prop in a Three Stooges short. (Note: in the John Agar film, his character had a dog named Thor who was possessed by a good brain to fight the...never mind). The brain collapsed in on itself after that last stunt, and seeing as how my nieces all had since learned to read other things, I tossed out the whole mess. Between my dog and my nieces (who also like to tear body parts and organs asunder), all I'm left to do is keep the heads in my Bobak polish sausage jar. There are only a few I laid out as a sample, you can see that my dog got at the soft tissue of a Hulk Hogan shampoo bottle Snake gave me when he and Bunny were first dating and still lived in Lincoln. Going back to that lobby scene at the Crowne Plaza--setting for "Skull's Rainbow," a story which Sid and I co-wrote and set at the very World Horror Convention we were at, and then sold to Constable Books' NEW CRIMES in the UK--everyone is saying their goodbyes from different directions, some seated and others standing or waiting on a shuttle bus or their luggage. Sid says to me, as an after thought, hey, you got my brain, right? Joan and Beth look at us like we are crazy. I had started to unzip my luggage when Brian said that he had seen it up in the room, and was in the elevator in a flash. Until he returned, the women really thought that there was something else to the story, but there it was, Sid's brain. I gave it a good home for almost sixteen years, and my nieces learned to know what the phrases cannibalism and supermarket stalkers meant...Wayne
