BOOKISHGAL

Some families bond over the dinner table or by attending church together. My family, ever the unorthodox, while having other bonds as well, seriously bonded over a book.

We had all read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings at various times through the years, of course, my mom being the last one to finally get around to it. And although I’d bought Harvard Lampoon’s parody of that book, Bored of the Rings, in the early 70s, nobody else had really noticed it until my youngest brother found my copy in the mid-80s.

And then. The hilarity sped through the family like a prairie brush fire.

We were all adults by then, and could appreciate some of the more, shall we say, adult elements of the book. There’s just nothing like an older woman and her three kids in their 20s, tittering over a Boggie (i.e. satire hobbit-type creature) named Dildo Bugger, or stories of the fair elf named Nesselrode who put out in the back of a sedan and then was informed that her paramour was married (”oh heaven help the working elf!”). Or - religious though we all were at the time - guffawing at the Gollum knock-off, named Goddam.

To this day, we can all either quote big segments of the book, or instantly recount scenarios from it. And we all have our favourite bits. However, each of us is exceedingly fond of Tim Benzedrine and his meal of mushrooms and coloured candies:

Toke-a-lid! Smoke-a-lid! Pop the mescalino!

Stash the hash! Gonna crash! Make mine methedrino!

Hop a hill! Pop a pill! For Old Tim Benzedrino!

My gosh, I’m giggling again already.

My brother likes to intone, “Even the walls have ears,” and the rest of us know very well that he’s not quoting from some serious tome where someone else might have said that, to caution silence. No, he’s quoting from the scene where Goodgulf the Wizard points to the two giant ear lobes protruding from behind the mantel of a fireplace in the inn.

I myself have been known to burst out, without warning, “Say it now and say it loud, I’m a cow and I’m proud!” You’d have to have read the book in order not to look at me like I ought to be carefully taken away by the men in white coats.

I lived separately by the time my brother found the book, so I missed out on the hours he spent reading it to my mom while they cracked up. But my other brother and I would frequently visit for dinner or to watch hockey games (another story), and then the younger brother would re-read passages and we’d all howl together.

Ah, memories. I wonder what the family-values sociologists would make of it, hm?

Another of my Books-Without-ISBN. One of the best ones.

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