bart plantenga
Barbie is my role model. She might not do anything,
but she looks good doing it. • Paris Hilton
The guy they call Mír walked by. I saw he had transformed the “O” on his forehead into a peace symbol. As a true “peace symbol” artist, this was maybe his way of promoting world peace – or promoting himself in the name of profiting from peace – you do what you gotta do. Or something like that. Let me explain the “O”.
You walk into your local bar, the place where you know where to hang your gun belt – “don’t worry, there’s no gun.” It’s all ironic. B We’ve sensed for some time now that something’s going amiss, awry; somebody’s tinkering with our gears. When did good beer [not-quite obscene prices], good music [tending toward cliché – Dave Brubeck, Hank Williams, Pixies, Tom Waits], and good conversation, heat in winter and AC in summer suddenly seem like not enough.
How did the bar owner [absentee: lives in Grande Cojones, Florida] suddenly get it into his head to install blinking, clinking attractions? Some say people demanded more diversion from the conversations they were no longer having: TVs, retro chic Donkey Kong, singing beer signs, talking toilet seats, poker machines, trivia challenges, darts, billiards, a Juke-8, a retro-modern Scopitone machine – but this trend beat them all. Officially called “branding” by mags like New York and New York Press and “dotting the i” by adherents, it so sounds like stealth marketing that wants to be ritual or rite of passage. Randy Travis even wrote the song “Doter, Daughter & Dotter” about losing your paycheck and family playing dotting the i.
Some say it was brainchilded by a scrum of barroom denizens in Chumley’s or the Olde Towne or Rudy’s or Downtown Beirut or Nell’s – or the Hipsy Yipsy in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the Willy Nilly in Austin or the Old One Eye in Prague. In any case, it had become insanely popular in bars across America. In some neighborhoods branding was almost impossible to avoid. You simply got sucked in or went home and sulked. And if you were hovering in over at Sally’s bar at just the right angle, dotting the i may remind some of the Russian roulette scenes in The Deer Hunter.
So what is it? “Dotting the i” requires contestants [celebrants, acolytes, dotters] to answer weird trivia questions: What’s the melting point of skin? How many truck tires does Pooh have to pile on top of one another to reach the honey in the tree? How many Yankee baseball caps are sold worldwide annually? Name two famous assassins who shot presidents and then were shot themselves. How many glasses of milk does it take to give you a .02% blood alcohol concentration on a Breathalyzer test, enough to suspend your driver’s license in many states? Did Magic Johnson invent the high-five hand gesture while at Michigan State? What was the name of the prostitute who fled Sam Cooke’s hotel room, taking his clothes with her? Why are yawns infectious? How long can someone survive on water and toe nail clippings? There were a million more where these came from.
The ritual involves mass consumption of whatever beer and whatever harder stuff goes well with beer because if you answer 3 questions in a row incorrectly, you either cough up 50 bucks to the pot or one of the other contestants can take a bottle cap from the bar and press it to the loser’s forehead and then smash it into the forehead with a fierce blow of the fist or it’s hammered into the loser’s forehead with a beer bottle – clinkclink – embedding it in what little meat there is to be found there. But, strangely, people have started to convert perceptions so that losing is now actually winning and the resulting wound has become a badge of courage. After a loser has been dotted he or she may, with the bottle cap still embedded in bloody forehead, do a mock “Hottentot” dance or something they imagined “their man” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins might do before someone removed it, revealing a bleeding, branded “O” in the middle of the forehead.
To some dotters, this created a near-perfect and meaningful triangle between the “O” and the victor’s two eyes. And so for months, people wandered around the East Village, whooping it up with this “O” branded into their foreheads. The “O” eventually scabs over, leaving an indelible scar that may come in handy later in an unadventurous life as one’s fount of personally inscribed mythic tales slips down out of the main text into an illusory footnote to a not-so-exciting running narrative. Dotter days would fluff up many an unexciting bio.
The disinclined writer, Hose Padada, may grumble under his breath from his barstool perch: “What’re these idjits gonna do when the style switches to an X-marks-the-spot. I’m thinkin’ less than zero; I’m thinkin’ Charles Manson, Swastika carved into forehead, creep too.”
“I’m thinkin’ like walkin’, talkin’ Tic-Tac-Toe…”
“Or tik tak DOH; press the cookiecutter into the dough…” He snickers at his own unconscious poetic ejaculation. Whether it’s poetry or sellable is pretty much left up to you as far as he’s concerned.
You may try to chum up to him by asking: “Is it still a poem if no one writes it down?” And he may just turn to give you a look like you’ve got a piece of dog turd between your teeth.
I eventually got tired of going to Sally’s, Bar Nickel Bill, or the Drained Kidney because you had hear rehashes of the significance of the equilateral triangle, the number 3, the deity, the implications of 33 over and over… It was like hanging out with new Baptist church congregants or college football fans going on about legendary fullbacks. Oh no, here comes somebody who’s figured out the mysterious Rolling Rock “33”.
The dotters all had their ideas about how the “O” “mapped” the mind’s eye and could go on and on about New Age Traveler [post-industrial-hippie] festivals of dotters, especially in the area outside Sedona, Arizona where they “learned” that triangles represented vigilant-third-eye angels. Some saw dotting as a corollary to the devil-Masonic, all-seeing eye on top of an Egyptian pyramid as portrayed on the back of a dollar bill. Others pilgrimaged to Sedona’s Dotter Fest [SDF] to experience mass dottings. Dotters brought potato sacks full of SDF-approved bottle caps to sell from makeshift teepees. There were bands that sounded like the Swans, the Cocteau Twins and Merzbow and there were dotter workshops. The more enterprising dotters sold their own hygienic, do-it-yourself, dotter bottle cap and hammer kits from the back of a VW bus – perfect gift for the pagan who has everything. And someone – no, not Robert Anton Wilson – lectured on the significance of SDF as an acronym for “Sans Domicile Fixe” [homeless]. Some were already predicting that branding would eventually surpass tattooing in popularity. In New York, dotters were regularly being interviewed on local public access TV shows; some bled with beer bottle caps clinging to forehead flesh on air. There was a dotter convention in the Armory on Lexington Avenue where the band the Dodgy Dotters were performing until cops under order from NY’s Health Department, concerned with on-site HIV, tetanus, and hepatitis infections, busted the event.
Some dotters began to openly claim they were being unjustly barred from clubs and restaurants; others described situations involving discrimination or intimidation in the workplace. Still others provided lists of “dotter-friendly establishments.” Some just wanted a return to simply drinking beer from the bottle and discussing the Yankees misfortunes.
The world is magic: a week earlier I had been listening to my red radio that could somehow mysteriously tune in WFMU, despite its meager proportions and despite lots of obstructions and concrete high-rises that had prevented mightier audio aficionados with their high-end FM loop antennas from receiving WFMU for years now. Yes, clear as a bell as I listened to Reck or Rick or Wreck interviewing the famous ex-MC of Club 57, ex-dominatrix, print media entrepreneur, and, for a time, Rites & Rituals Anthropology Professor at Masaryk University, Bikini Girl [Volta de Cleyre]. She did not want to discuss the “dotter phenomenon,” but rather Barbie and her early conversion of Barbie into a “makeshift sexual aid.”
On the radio it always stops there, though, just short of where innuendo crosses over into provocation. But here in the Linger Lounge, face to face, fan to crush, we could discuss the dynamic relationship between cocaine and fanaticism, failing body parts and complain about dotters and the introduction of dotter “O” appliqués – all the rage – as we waited for our unexpurgated Barbie stories to kick in.
“It’s now like Halloween 365 days a year around here,” she noted as if we both understood that everything she uttered was instantly quotable. She had had the mighty as S&M clients from Gracy Mansion to Wall Streets and could name names. She could also name 100 seminal Ohio garage bands. Her face was beautiful precisely because of its absorption of domestic pain, of milky-murky cocktails, and the ennui of the entire Midwest [Ohio]. My heart still gets hurled into an empty field like a horseshoe magnet, aorta over auricle, by a splendid face. Strange, this cosmos of beauty and how it still manages to disassemble awareness.
We discussed how she imagined Barbie must’ve felt and how her own “teen juices d’amour” had actually matted Barbie’s golden locks back and how these clandestine secretions gave Barbie’s hair a strange sheen. And how this made Barbie look punk or flapper or attitude-enhanced – or like an ICBM manufactured by Rockwell, maybe in Ohio – and how all of her relationship to the out there, to the abnormal, had made Bikini Girl both the envy and disdain of her classmates who dreamed of mauve boudoirs, dates with members of pop who may or may not play their own instruments, and eventually marrying a career military man and who mistook Barbie’s mysterious sheen for Dippity Doo. Hehehe. In a silent instant our thoughts drifted to insertion.
“On my show you asked listeners to call in with their tales of youthful dabbling in Barbie Voodoo.”
“Indeed I did, Censorama!” She remembered as she sucked the last sips of Delirium Tremens from its classic stemmed snifter glass, which is perfect for heightening the mystique of this ale. Heightening a superior ale is the act that raises us out of ourselves. Did I say that or did she?
I ultimately decided to confess how I had met Barbie (cat. # T34959687) down on Orchard Street. Born in 1959, we were nearly the same age. I remember the breadth of her every skittish step circumscribed by her skirt design and anxiety. It was her first trip to NYC. Well, not her first – she’d often been chauffeured to Mattel HQ on 6th Avenue and had often dined at the Waldorf, to later mingle at the Yale Club. But this had certainly been her first excursion below 14th Street, let alone Houston Street.
She did not understand why we met here. Why I gave her a bracelet of used crack vials and a necklace made of car window crystals. She did not understand my world of gallantry. Her world was filled with award ceremonies, chivalry and runway knights in perma-crease slacks. She did not understand why I thought it important that I’d broken the side window myself and had taken nothing from the vehicle. She did not understand that the GESTURE was the gift. And this was disappointing.
She did not understand why boys and girls along the parade route of her life would stick pins into her. And why others had painted crucifixes where her genitalia ought to have been. And why still other others threw pocketfuls of baby teeth at her feet of indistinguishable digits. She did not understand that the world had become a place where there was ever less to win and ever more to lose.
Barbie discussed her early days of life in Taiwan while she sipped a Blue Lagoon Margarita I’d prepared in her honor, knowing how electric blue complimented her eye shadow. And after 2 BLMs, I coaxed her into my bathtub of cheap, warm beer. OK, I half-hid my eyes as she disrobed.
“It’s therapeutic,” I said as I made motorboat sputters to mock her eternal affections for the trappings of wealth such as large pleasure boats.
“Yea, right,” she retorted, much less naive than adventurous. She climbed in and we floated there for a long time, unburdened of all weight and doubt. I became increasingly drunk on her head – no really. Here’s how: I dipped her big coif of adjustable-length hair into the cheap, warm beer and then sucked every inebriating molecule out of her voluminous head of hair. Over and over. She said it was OK, something she could tolerate. “I’ve been through
worse.”
And this routine came to pass so that I could no longer drink beer in any other manner. This was how I got drunk. And this habit managed to keep me out of many bars where drinking was still done in more conventional ways.
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Beerhead Barbie is a story purloined from the novel BEER MYSTIC.
bart plantenga is the author of novels, Radio Activity Kills, & Ocean GroOve, short story collections Wiggling Wishbone & The Confusion Spandex, novella Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man & memoirs: Paris Scratch & NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor. He’s a founding member of NYC writer group, The Unbearables. His books YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World & Yodel in HiFi & CD Rough Guide to Yodel have created a misunderstanding that he’s the world’s foremost yodel expert. He produces the podcasts: Dig•Scape & iMMERSE! & as a DJ has produced Wreck This Mess in NYC, Paris & Amsterdam since forever. Autonomedia will publish his novel BEER MYSTIC in late 2026.
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