The Rundown

It's always heartbreaking when somebody you care about goes missing. Like your kid gets eaten by gypsies or your husband falls off a boat or some shit, I don't know, all that Lifetime movie of the week noise probably blows hard. But hard as that may eat it, what really pokes a stink finger into the plum pie is when a band you're really into disappears with no explanation, without even the courtesy to go down in a spectacular plane wreck that's easy to remember when you're wondering about when their next album is going to be coming out.

Now that the story's been appropriately set-up and all, I can slap the beef on the bun: my friend Jake bet me ten bucks last week that I couldn't bring Guns N' Roses out of hiding to make another album. It was a tall order, sure, since the band is likely trapped in a series of cages somewhere, decorating the home of some Panamanian drug lord by now. But ten bucks is ten bucks, and more importantly, there was the Bricks pride on the line. The last time that happened, I ended up getting busted at customs with a mouth full of endangered condor eggs and a recipe book for omelettes in my back pocket. So you just know I wasn't going to just let this slide over some hair band that got lost on their way to a string of career-ending drug overdoses.

Before I even start to tell the story, let me make it clear that I'm not some desperate, obsessed GNR fan who was willing to risk it all because I can't sleep at night wondering what could have come after The Spaghetti Incident. That's Jake to a tee, but he's got allergies that prevent him from going on any kind of band-reuniting adventure. Me? Would I piss on the band if I found them on fire? Probably. If I had to go. But I wouldn't stand there chugging apple juice just to make it happen. I thought the band was fine, and I'll admit that "Welcome to the Jungle" single-handedly made the few hockey games I've been to tolerable. But Omar Bricks prefers a bit less cock in his rock, and regardless, these last few years I've been leaning toward less-predictable musical enjoyments, like bootleg tapes of shootouts at jazz clubs or insane people playing the Autoharp. Hey, like they say, whatever floats your boat, and I'm courteous enough not to point out the fact that your boat's floating in shit.

Once the bet was made, I headed straight out the door of Jake's house, which I think weirded him out a little since we were supposed to hang out. But Omar Bricks wastes no time when it comes to winning bets. If Slash or Duff or that blonde drummer dude were tied up in the trunk of a car at that very moment as it crept across the Mexican border under the cover of night, then every second could count. Plus, Jake's kind of a dork and it was a good excuse to get out of spending the rest of the night drinking lukewarm beer and playing Cock Rock Trivial Pursuit. When that's the alternative, every second really does count.

I started my search at the most likely place: the morgue. You know you need an appointment at that place? No shit, you can't just walk in and start opening drawers like they do in the movies. Fuck that bullshit. I decided you only really need an appointment if you're too fat to wriggle in through the window in the bathroom. I guess that's a disincentive to keep out the necrophiliacs, since I don't think anybody could fit through that little window with a hard-on.

In case you were ever wondering, you can see some shit at the morgue. You ever seen that movie Stand by Me? Well fuck that, this place is like the McDonalds of dead bodies. They've got them lying all over the place. And you don't have to walk half a day or bond with any little kids to make it happen, which is a bonus.

Lesson learned on this whole adventure: I pulled a boner by trying to go the legal route the first time around, signing in and all that, and completely ruined what would have been an awesome recreation of the Nuremberg trials using cadavers dressed in outfits from the janitor's closet. Even though I'd gone to the car for a ballcap disguise before wriggling through the shithouse window (brilliant, since everyone knows Omar Bricks never wears ballcaps), the jig was up pretty quick when the security guards came in and found all those dead bodies sitting at desks in the back office and Heil-Hitlering and all that, since they recognized me from the scene at the check-in desk and it didn't matter how still I stood or if my cadaver impression was like vintage Pacino.

I did finally escape after hiding in a drawer for about an hour until the coast was clear, which was about five minutes too long since those things don't vent farts very well at all. And my flight from the pseudo-law came at a high cost: I'm pretty sure I left my prized "Nagasaki" baseball cap in that corpse drawer. I've thought about going back to check the lost and found, but I figure they're just waiting to throw a net over the first guy who shows up at the morgue asking about a lost and found. Pretty much any reasoning you'd have would be net-worthy, I'm thinking.

The other day I ran into Jake and he asked me how the hunt for GNR was going. What a dick.

Bricks out.

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