Interviews: A Zombie

Turns out, zombies are real. And we have one in captivity.

Mr. Nibbles struggles with a brain addiction and chronic back pain

This is an interview with an actual zombie, who was born, raised, died, and raised in Haiti. On Sherman Avenue’s latest manatee-hunting excursion, we found a zombie, named him Mr. Nibbles, and took him home to be our new pet. This interview was conducted through the bars of his cage (in the bedroom of Sir Edward Twattingworth III), as we fed him centipede brains from Plex and Cheerios from Hinman.

Sherman Ave: Tell us, Mr. Nibbles, how did you become a zombie?

Nibbles: Well, it started out when I went to the Bokor to get some pot.

SA: What’s a Bokor?

Nibbles: Our resident witch doctor. You know how whenever American thugs want to cut a bitch, they cut the bitch? Haitians just go see the Bokor and he curses the bitch. He also deals things.

SA: So what was different when you went to buy from him this time?

Nibbles: Well, I told him that my last trip had been more painful than teaching wildcats to play sports. So he gave me something new to try. Said it came from pufferfish.

SA: What did the pufferfish stuff do?

Nibbles: It knocked me out. I apparently looked pretty dead.

SA: How long did this go on?

Nibbles: Long enough to be buried alive. Can I have some more Cheerios?

SA: Not until you’re done with the interview. What was being dead like?

Nibbles: I wasn’t dead, I was just unresponsive.* When I eventually came to, I felt worse than freshmen sorostitutes on a post-Keg Tuesday morning, and I had a mad case of the munchies. Basically, the Bokor had knocked me out and then given me a dose of datura, which is just your run-of-the-mill potentially toxic hallucinogen.

SA: Can you describe the effects of datura?

Nibbles: Well, it walks a foggy, fucked-up line somewhere between hallucinogen and near-death experience. I’d done it before I was zombified on it. You kinda mumble around tripping massive crusty balls. Side effects are extreme suggestibility, amnesia, diaphragm paralysis, and sometimes aggression. There are Youtube videos of state school Motherfuckers immortalizing each other’s bad decisions on datura. But essentially, you’ve just been roofied by the Bokor.

SA: So in a stereotypical zombie, the drooling, moaning, slurring, limping, and aggression is probably because of the datura.

Nibbles: Exactly. And because zombies are pretty complacent most of the time, they usually get put to work in the field. But I’m sure there are Bokors who get more creative with their zombie slaves.**

SA: Do you identify with the common stereotype of a zombie?

Nibbles: I mean, in some ways. I definitely lost a lot of brains due to asphyxiation while I was buried alive, as a lot of zombies do. I think that oftentimes that disappointment that you’ve just died a little on the inside manifests itself in the aggression caused by the datura. You just want your brains back in whatever way you can, and you end up trying to nom on anyone normal in the area.

A huge part of zombification is the mental adjustment. When you’ve been buried alive and you wake up feeling more fucked up than the lovechild of Tom Cruise and Charlie Sheen, a common question to ask is, “What’s wrong with me?” But the question never comes out right. You end up with something like, “Hn wclch trchk blm nnnnng?” And when the answer from your friends and family is “HOLY FLYING FUCK, I THOUGHT YOU DIED,” at some point you do start believing you’re a zombie. It’s like your crotchety black uncle who’s convinced he’s a Democrat because he’s a minority, despite his right-wing stance on every fucking issue on the platform. It’s like having anorexia and participating in the Stanford prison experiment. There’s this impossibly perfect standard of what a zombie should be, and you have zombies becoming someone else to try to fit into those roles.

SA: So what you’re saying is that you felt pressured by the cultural expectations of zombies.

Nibbles: Yeah. I started hanging around graveyards, I lumbered around slower than the frustrating Motherfucker in the dining hall who’s obliviously in your way when you’re hauling ass to the cookie bar line, I didn’t say anything but “NNNNNGGG” for a year or two. I mean, what kind of a word is “Ng”? The stereotyping and idealization of zombies in the media is a dangerous cultural phenomenon, and it goes unquestioned and unreported. Every time you watch a George Romero film, I beg you to please remember that not every zombie can tear the limbs off of a pair of dumbass lovers trying to make a kamikaze run for their lives. And not every zombie wants to.

SA: Are there any portrayals of zombies in movies that you’d like our readers to watch?

Nibbles: Yeah. There’s a Spanish foreign film*** called Rec, off of which the American piece of shit Quarantine was based. If you’re going to watch a zombie movie, Rec is significantly more heinous. Please honor Latin America with the concession that this movie might be the one thing we don’t do as well. Also, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. Hanna-Barbera gets enough zombie facts right to be legit.

SA: Thank you. Nibbles, I think this concludes our interview. We really appreciate your input on the subject. It’s been a heinous time.

——————————————————————————————————————————
*Like the side door of Annenberg.
**Interactive question for readers: What would YOU do with a zombie slave?
***There are subtitles. Get over it, you’re reading things right now. But apparently they mistranslate the foul language, so whenever you hear the word “mierda” you’ll have to either get off your lazy ass and onto Spanishdictionary.com, or rely on whatever AP Spanish remains accessible behind the stacks of quotable South Park episodes in your brain. See? You knew being bilingual was good for something. You can power trip over your ability to point out inconsistencies in the translation of profanity.

Badasses in History: Rasputin

When someone uses the phrase “historical figure” you can usually make two assumptions. First, that the person is probably complaining about a paper they have to write (complaining makes everything better); and second, that the “historical figure” in question is probably dead.

We only tend to refer to people as “historical figures” if they’ve been dead for at least half a century or so (sorry Amy Winehouse, but you’ll have to wait). Unfortunately, we can’t be so sure about this week’s Historical Badass. You see, our guy has this thing about cheating death.

Looks like an unholy cross between Steve Buscemi and Marilyn Manson

That’s right, I’m talking about Rasputin, the Mad Monk. Before we get into the whole “this-guy-just-won’t-die-he’s-the-devil-save-us-Jesus” bit, it’s time to provide some background.

But first check out his picture.

Yeah, this dude was one crazy motherfucker. Look into those eyes and tell me you don’t see a gateway to nightmares and years of serious trauma therapy. I don’t think we ever get to see a dementor’s eyes, if it even has them. But if it does, that’s what I think they look like.

I think I’m going to need a drink before this article is over, but we’ll keep going for the moment.

*Deep breath*

Alright. Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was born in 1869 in the small town of Pokrovskoye, Siberia. Upon exiting the womb, he reportedly cackled and wrote up a pact with the Devil then and there. His parents, understandably concerned, tried to enroll him in the local preschool, but historical texts tell us the effort stalled slightly when the school was inexplicably sucked into another dimension while little Cthulhu sat nearby baking muffins.

Years went by and the wee lad Grigori prospered, and by prospered, I mean got way scarier. Like the kid in that movie The Omen, or a teenage Tom Riddle, Rasputin seemed destined for a pale complexion and dead, soulless eyes with a presence that made small children cry and grown men shit themselves with terror.

Eventually, Rasputin joined a monastery and “found God”—I don’t know what god he found, but it sure wasn’t a happy one—at which point events elsewhere conspired to bring him into the limelight.

Rasputin modeling how to properly smize

As it turned out, the family members of the Czar Nicholas II often sickened and died at fairly young ages, and the Czar understandably wanted to see if someone could fucking do something about it. Shamans, old ladies with “homeopathic medicine,” and even real doctors tried to find out why and affect a cure, but all failed.

As history informs us, the problem was hemophilia, but since today’s pharmaceutical clusterfuck of drugs was unavailable at the time, there wasn’t much that could be done. Making matters even more interesting, bleeding was a common treatment at the time. Yep. Perhaps the one thing that couldn’t possibly make things worse was being used to treat the Czar’s family.

Here it is expressed as a formula: Bleeding+Hemophilia=Lots of Dead People

Rasputin however, claimed to have the answer. And thanks to his deal with the Devil, he soon became a close confidant for the Czar’s family, especially Czar Nicholas’ wife, Alexandra, who grew to regard Rasputin as her closest adviser after he affected “miraculous” cures. She had so much belief in his powers that she believed God spoke through him.

You can guess how that went over.

His immense influence on the family, and thus on Russia’s ruling policies, was not well regarded by a number of men who thought they could do a far better job of fucking things up than Rasputin, so — doing what all Russian politicians do in a time of upheaval and doubt — they decided to kill the guy they felt was responsible.

Strangely, the animated Rasputin looks slightly more human than the real Rasputin did

Things got started when the former prostitute Khionia Guseva attacked Rapustin as he was exiting a church. She stabbed him and cut open his stomach. Eyewitness accounts tell us that Rasputin looked at the wound, flipped off the sky, then healed up Wolverine-style and went out to lunch at the Russian version of Denny’s.

It was then that Rasputin received a lovely dinner invitation from Prince Felix Yusupov, who totally wasn’t going to try to kill him. For some reason Old Grigori accepted the invitation and arrived wearing a batman cape. Taking him down to the cellar, the nobles fed Rasputin tons of food, all laced with cyanide, better known to us today as a rat poison.

Now, this would kill fucking anybody. Rasputin however, shrugged it off like nothing, all the while telling his favorite knock-knock jokes. They must have been bad ones to, because one guy got so pissed off that he shot Rasputin in the back.

The dude blinked less than even Dick Cheney

Relieved that he was finally dead, the nobles started to go off to their coaches, when one idiot realized he’d forgotten his coat. When he went to grab it, Rasputin leaped off the floor like that possessed chick in The Exorcist. Freaked the fuck out, the bastards shot Grigori three more times.

Was he dead?

Nope. The crazy fucker still kept trying to go after them, so they all grabbed clubs and gave him a prison-style beatdown. They then wrapped his body in a sheet and tossed it in the icy — actually, all rivers in Russia are icy — Neva River.

Days later, when Rasputin’s body was found, full of poison, bullet holes, and clubbing wounds, the mortician determined the cause of his death.

Take a guess about what finally killed this preposterously insane fucknut. No really, I’ll wait.

…

Yep. The cause of death was drowning. He had even broken out of the sheet and tried to swim… with four gunshot wounds and broken bones.

By the way, one of the shots was through his forehead. Yeah.

What. The. Fuck.

To be fair, autopsy reports differ, and several were done on Rasputin with different conclusions, but this is the one I’m going with because, frankly, it’s that badass.

–Josh Kopel