See, Parker is taking a moral stand, and he's doing it as a favor to all of those parents who have just loaded up their cars with the belongings of their children and headed off to Lawrence. Those hundreds (if not thousands) of parents who mistakenly interpreted the endless miles of prairie surrounding Lawrence as some sort of buffer that would protect their children from the evils of the world (sorority "date dashes" excluded); who drove through Lawrence and ate lunch on Massachusetts Street and longed to have it all over again; who saw the town as a kind of harmless, liberal bohemia where even the temptations of college life --the endless number of bars, the finite desire to study --are somewhat charming; who could not imagine that one night, their eighteen-year-olds might be looking for something to do and find themselves in an unrefined bar called the Bottleneck -- those parents could not conceive of the things their babies might see. The man whose butt cheeks hang out of his leather pants. The woman whose breasts are knotted up in rope. The 6-foot-tall bald woman struggling like holy hell to attach a gag mask to her face and then, in the face of defeat, lifting her already short rubber shirt to get some ventilation in her crotch.
And that's just the audience. Elsewhere in the club, a phone booth-size structure punctured with holes stands in the corner. People surround the booth and stick their hands through the holes, presumably to grope the person inside, because it's called the Groping Booth.
Near the booth, a butt cheek-exposed man called Gunner operates a massage table he calls the Sensation Station, decked out with different ropes and straps and devices for spanking. A loud smacking sound echoes from the table, followed by another and another, in a series of well-timed strikes of a paddle on the backside of a sprawled-out young woman. The smacking becomes a syncopated beat over the moody music originating from the DJ booth. It draws a handful of people to the dance floor in a listless shuffle, all shoulders and swaying.
Then the show begins. This time it takes on an itinerant-preacher theme, with the "Rev. Fred Felch" addressing his audience of fetishists, goths and underage college kids from a pulpit in a stereotypical Southern inflection.
"Welcome, brothers and sisters, welcome to another fetish night, brought to you by Contra Naturam. Once again, our traveling revival has come to you in the hopes of helping you, if only for one night, to throw off the chains and put on the rope.... I'd say we'll endeavor to do this without restraint, but, oh no, brothers and sisters, restraints will be incorporated. We come to you in this secret place not only to perform for your pleasure but to GIVE you pleasure, pleasure that has been denied you for so long.... Yes, folks, we come to SAVE you! We come to FREE you! We come to untie the rope that the new order has bound you with, take those gags from your succulent, sensual lips and LET you be FREE!"
It is all enough to get Ray Parker's blood up, and the Overland Park man will start spewing his own sermons a few weeks later in the Lawrence Journal-World.
A few years ago, Parker wouldn't have had such great material to work with. Such events simply didn't happen around here, except in private; in which case, they took place in homes that probably weren't any different from his, where the spring project was a basement dungeon as opposed to, say, a new deck. By day, the participants lived what Parker might call normal lives. They wore normal clothes, short-sleeved polos and such. They paid taxes. By night, they parked their cars, ate their dinners and changed into something more constricting. They exchanged the TV remote for a paddle and channeled pleasureful pain. Then in the morning, they put on their normal clothes and headed out for a day of work, and people like Parker were none the wiser.
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Wow, I also knew Jericho in St.Louis. Haven Coffeehouse to be exact. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get to find out exactly how much fun he could've been. BTW he love The Princess Bride.
Wow, I also knew Jericho in St.Louis. Haven Coffeehouse to be exact. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get to find out exactly how much fun he could've been. BTW he love The Princess Bride.
I knew Jericho, whose real name is JURGEN, in St. Louis, Mo (the Delmar Loop, specifically) back in the early nineties. He was a very insecure guy who claimed to have never gotten over the fact that he was given up for adoption by a birth mother he had not found at that time, and had no relationship with his adoptive parents--Dr. Van de Velde was a respected physician in Florida. I have actually talked with Dr. Van de Velde and learned that Jurgen had a very privileged childhood and was still in contact with the family maid. All I can say is POOR LITTLE RICH BOY! It's sad that he still hasn't gotten done anything productive with his life and he's still clamoring for attention.
I knew Jericho, whose real name is JURGEN, in St. Louis, Mo (the Delmar Loop, specifically) back in the early nineties. He was a very insecure guy who claimed to have never gotten over the fact that he was given up for adoption by a birth mother he had not found at that time, and had no relationship with his adoptive parents--Dr. Van de Velde was a respected physician in Florida. I have actually talked with Dr. Van de Velde and learned that Jurgen had a very privileged childhood and was still in contact with the family maid. All I can say is POOR LITTLE RICH BOY! It's sad that he still hasn't gotten done anything productive with his life and he's still clamoring for attention.
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