Wampus had said he was doing okay, but the last time I saw Wampus he was in full-blown Scotch Guard withdrawal, had attached guitar strings to the wall without tuning implementation, and was trying to pluck out the chords, he said, of "the dirge for the death of my bowels."

Luckily, I was able to catch a ride up to Atlanta with my friend Amanita, as I was competing at the state level in the Betty Page Look-a-like competition and Amanita was the only person strong enough to fasten my corset.

I convinced Amanita to drop me off at Matt's house, which he agreed to readily, having already booked a hand job appointment at a Greek sweatshop not four blocks away.

I got out of the car and began the long ascent up the skull-and-hacky-sack paved lane toward Matt's castle-like, monolithic home. As I walked, I thought about Matt's passion for perfection, and how it could be infectious. Contagious.

I wondered if perhaps he hadn't drawn others into his consuming mania, and I was prepared to go in via the swamp, submerging myself entirely in the muck, only to--when my target was sighted--rise slowly from the mud, my face smeared black as Oprah's balls, a bowie knife clutched between my teeth.

Unfortunately, Matt doesn't have a swamp. So I rang the bell instead.

Momentarily I began to hear a series of thuds, as if someone with a club foot was performing a Monty Python "silly-walk" to the door.

My surprise was purely intestinal when a small, hunchbacked creature opened the door. At first I thought how pitiful it must be to be Emmanuel Lewis, but upon closer inspection I reasoned the creature was not the dimunitive star of 'Webster' (and the criminally undervalued sleeper 'The Litt'lest Fluffer') but in fact did not seem to be of this world, or at least of no visibly familiar gene pool.

Possibly it was Swedish.

"Guten Tag", the hideous creature said, "I be Cornelius." In an apparent gesture of welcome, it extended to me a palm full of shit.

I shook my head and greeted Cornelius, trying to peer over it's head into the darkened foyer and the hallway leading toward Matt's "laboratory".

However, it raised the shit-filled hand up into my face, so I quickly backed down, lest I relive the Ted Danson Incident all over again.

"Um...can I see Matt?"

The spritely creature looked me up and down. Licked the air near my penis.

"Your girlfriend is Puerto Rican."

"I don't have a girlfriend," I replied quickly, eager to continue the illusion that I was homosexual, so I could continue getting the money from my dad for my Christian Lifestyle Inversion Therapy.

"Then you eat the tuna at Subway."

That, I couldn't deny. As I grinned sheepishly at the little gnome, it looked me over again, seemed to decide I was ok, and shuffled aside, fastidiously molding the tiny lump of shit into a surprisingly realistic bust of Tony Shalhoub.

I brushed past Matt's apparent assistant, making my way carefully through the darkened hall, listening for the familiar hum of one of Matty's sexual instruments, or at least a dulcet melody from the recording studio, perhaps from his new RagTime/Crunk fusion project.

But no, everything was silent.

Moving quietly through the dark, whispering to myself that everything would be ok, that it was right to get a vasectomy if I was going to have a career in porn...I suddenly smelled something familiar.

A little lilac...some sweat from behind an elephant's knee...the pungent fog of Pauly Shore's career...asparagus...

I tapped my foot against the floor. It made a hollow 'thunk', reminiscent of the last Presidential Address, and I knew what I had to do. Retrieving the blow torch from my fully-equipped, Arnold-In-'Predator' style backpack, I quickly burned a hole into the floor, attached my O2 mask, and jumped into the burning hole. (Flashbacks of Paris...)

To my surprise, I fell a mere three feet or so, stumbled back against the burning edges of the hole I'd created, and burned off my ponytail.

"Noooooooooo!" I cried, and was getting my Hanso sword from my backpack to commit seppuku, when an angelic white myst engulfed me, quelching the flames and cooling me to a degree that was indeed painful, but no more so than having sex in an industrial freezer. Which I reccomend.

When my senses returned to me, and I released my testicles, I raised my eyes to behold a glorious vision:

Matty Boy Anderson, in a lab-coat so brilliantly white it gleamed like a Russian prostitute's asshole, holding a fire extinguisher heroically as if he were Bruce Willis, Bruce Campbell, and Bruce Vilanch all in one man...the Ultimate Action Hero.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" he demanded heroically.

"Uh...I was worried about you. You missed the luncheon."

"The Bulimic Anarchists For Zoroaster luncheon?"

"No, man, the Turkish Anti-Globalization and Pro-Masturbation luncheon."

"Oh, shit. What Zebar there?"

"Yes. And he was disappointed."

Matt smiled dreamily, remembering. "I love Zebar."

"And he loves you...we all love you, Matt...and we're worried about you.

The fans of the website sent me a threatening letter, thinking I'd seduced you and whisked you off to Saskatoon."

Matt laughed at this for a length of time I found insulting.

"Listen," he said. "It just took me a little longer because I keep having to kill these spies Tim Burton keeps sending in here, naming every one of them 'Slugworth', because he doesn't have an original thought in that bean-shaped head of his. Nigga came to my door pretendin' he was Gene Wilder and shit. I put a 'slug-worth' of lead in is bitch ass."

This brief anecdote made me spontaneously orgasm with delight. Such is the power of the storytelling of Matty Boy Anderson. And that was a quickie.

Imagine if it was Labor Day.

Matt reached down, helping me up out of the smoking crater with a latex-gloved hand. (More flashbacks of Paris.)

"Listen, Dread, it's okay that you're worried. But I'm fine. Hell, my sperm count is up by thirty-five percent! And that was before I started doing wind sprints."

I looked into his eyes, and I saw a calmness there I must admit I did not expect. Such a placid tranquility of purpose that he could have very well slipped a wrench up my ass and I wouldn't have noticed, so lost was I in those twilight pools of radiating inner peace. (But Matt would not slip a wrench up someone's ass while they are staring at him in awe. Because Matt is not Ted Danson.)

"Hey, you want to see a clip? It's exclusive--and it's pretty damn good, I think."

My tongue must have been hanging out, because something liquid plopped onto my shoe.

"Yes...", I managed. "Yes...please..."

He took my hand gently and led me into a giant room domed room, something like a planetarium mixed up with one of the sets from "Behind The Green Door." It was gorgeous, moving, a little sexual, and revelatory in a resoundingly Jungian manner, like looking at your father in a darkened doorway and realizing he is both God and the Antichrist, Satan before The Fall and also After, that he should never have walked around the house in a tiny bathrobe all the time--"

Matt's hand on my shoulder stopped me from speaking. I hadn't realized I was. Also somehow I'd taken off my pants.

"Look over here," he said, and I followed the arc of the gently glowing latex glove until I was looking at an enormous white screen, like something out of one of Jackson Pollock's dreams, or what the inside of George W. Bush's mind must look like...

"Here she goes," he said, and clicked a button on an enormous phallic-shaped remote he was holding between his legs. On second thought, the movie came up before he hit the button...

But I couldn't investigate further, as my eyes were penetrated by a billion rays of light composing a tableau so transcendently beautiful, so soul-searingly epic, so overwhelmingly rapturous that I was sure, at that moment, that there were billions of tiny, nascent life forms, down there in my ball sac, all simultaneously screaming "Wheeeeeeeeee!"

And so transfixed was I by that first image that I barely noticed that the image was moving.

By the time it was done, my eyes, cheeks, lips, and Dockers were wet, and I was standing with the most tenuous of grips on my balance, gently rocking on my heels, as the the world of the mundane, gradually, with much resistance, coalesced around me.

"Matt...", I attempted, drool spilling out of my mouth, splashing on the carpet in a moist muted chorus of a biologically involuntary 'hurrah'...

"Matt..."

He smiled at me, the letters in his platinum grill spelling "NAMBLA"--for 'Not A Matt Bitches Laugh At'--and I felt, finally, a great flood of relief, flowing through my veins like the embalming fluid I used to shoot up from ages twelve through fourteen with my syphilitic Jujitsu instructor, who was only syphilitic because someone told him arctic seals couldn't give it to you.

"It's okay," he said. "I know it's good. But I had to take some time to make it that way. Besides, those deadlines were only to generate hype, like when Urkel used to pop up from time to time on 'Step By Step'. I mean, if they wanted it then, think about how much they'll want it when it's out?"

He tapped his head in a 'think about it' gesture, and I quickly found myself thinking about the girl who played the teenage daughter on 'Step By Step', and that I thought, but wasn't sure, that it might have been the girl from 'My Two Dads', when she was older, but the one thing I remembered is that she was all kinds of fine and had some Tig Ole Bitties...

Matt gently removed my hand from the back of my pants and turned me toward the door, which somehow I'd been cajoled toward while thinking about ingenius marketing strategies and Paul Reiser's lackluster early work.

"So you know what to do, Dread. Tell the people what you saw, and if you can't remember because of the two roofies I gave you and the eighteen vodka tonics you drank, then tell them how it made you feel. That's the important part, anyway."

He smiled at me, the Wheel-Of-Fortune-style letters in his grill flipping over to spell, with gleaming platinum sincerity, "GOOD NIGHT, DUDE. STAY UP. DON'T LET THE MAN GET YOU DOWN. WORD IS BOND. BE POSITIVE. HOES UP, TRICKS DOWN, BITCH. YEAAYYY-YUH."

And with that, he was gone, and I was standing on the porch, sucking on an olive, trying to remember what it was I'd seen...and I couldn't.

But what I could remember is how it made me feel.

More, much more dainty and fresh than just "like a natural woman". More satisfying, cathartically, than if Dr. Phil was mauled and then raped by a mad grizzly on live television. And more physically satiating than a six-month tantric three-way sex session with the resurrected, spiritually perfected incarnations of Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe.

Transcendent, revelatory, spiritually embiggening...and FUNNY.

Funnier than the entire oevre of kicks-in-the-groin compiled by America's Funniest Home Videos. Funnier than any Redd Foxx routine not involving a brick. Funnier than Dane Cook dying. Funnier, even, than the outlandish idea that Tom Cruise actually stuck his penis in a girl.

I mean this shit is FUNNY.

And that is what I was thinking, primarily, as I met Amanita at the bottom of the drive, his 87' VW Rabbit emitting a lovely blue smoke into the humid Atlanta air.

"Would you like some baklava?" Amanita asked as I crawled into the car.

"No thank you," I said, a new, post-post-coital calm rippling peacefully across my full, dyed-green beard and pancake Kabuki make-up.

"I feel real good. I feel... I feel..."

And though there really was no one word--at least not a one-syllable one, which is all Amanita knows--to describe the feeling that enveloped me, I could identify one emotion, at least.

"I feel thankful."

And so we drove away, Amanita trying to figure out what that last word meant, and as I began to put on my 'Betty' garters I realized that, for the first time in my sixty-eight years of existence, I truly...wanted for nothing.

Besides, if I'd wanted the baklava I'd have had to eat it out of his pants.

--Detective Paul Reubens