Cam the Man

Episode IX:

Exhausted from another epic recording session, Sphere and Benny are still too wound up to call it a night. Sphere skips around the studio with his sax, chanting nursery rhymes and prompting incoherent shouts of dismay from adult members of the Korean clan who live downstairs. Benny's Korean is admittedly rusty, but he's pretty sure he hasn't heard the words for "indie rock" or "turn it up." He throws his snifter of Johnnie blue against the wall and, as the glass shards firework onto the carpet, announces his intentions to paint the town red.

Neither Benny nor Sphere are entirely sure where the phrase "paint the town red" comes from, but best guesses are that the "red" refers either to the spilled blood on the wild frontier or to the color of lights in shady parts of Detroit. Alternatively, there may have been an 1880s American slang word "paint," meaning drink, as in, "I'm a-gonna paint me some of these here 40s." Likely this usage comes from the flushing of the face and nose (more noticeable among Koreans) that occurs with imbibing of drinks of an adult nature.

Ultimately the origins may have been irrelevant, since before you could read the last paragraph twice Sphere and Benny are chugging dark Mexican beer in a dark Michigan bar and meeting Iranians. One Iranian, specifically, named Cam ("as in camcorder") who opens, Kasparov-esque, by hailing Sphere as a fellow Iranian. Sphere vows that he is not, but rather half-Indian, half-Italian, which leads both he and Benny simultaneously to the same lame joke: perhaps they average out to somewhere near Iran. Cam thinks this hilarious and laughs high-pitched as if he is choking on helium.

Cam assures Benny and Sphere that, despite approaching them at a bar and laughing like a girl, he is not gay. To prove the point, he points out a nearby table of three girls and does the math. "Three of us and three of them- coincidence?" How could it be? Cam himself cannot approach these non-coincidental girls, however, because he says, he is not as attractive as Benny or Sphere. "You guys are the good-looking ones!" he fawns, before adding, "I'm not gay!"

When a female friend of Sphere's stops in to pick up a brush and help out with the painting, Cam is quick to offer the sage wisdom he has developed over his years in the statistics department. "Tell her you are 18 inches!" he proclaims, giggling and reaching out for Sphere's crotch. "You are so huge!" Then, recoiling, worried: "I'm not gay...." Later, after wandering off to have long, intimate conversations with the manliest woman in the room, Cam returns to ask if he can tell our heros something lewd. He does, and it is remarkably lewder than they expect. It is an amazingly misogynistic comment that does nothing to make Benny nor Sphere increase their estimation of Cam's desire to sleep with women.

Finally wound down, Benny and Sphere bid Cam farewell and begin the long hammering of lids onto the paint cans of frivolity, the washing of obstinate gin from the tattered brushes of another long evening. Tomorrow is another day, a day in which they will once again begin their treacherous ascent of Mt. Indie Rock armed only with their battered instruments, e-Bayed recording gear, and the advice of the mysterious Sherpa BK. Who knows what three-chord anthems lurk in the heart of men?