Give me an O

My recent experiments with Googling Christopher Walken (chosen for no particular reason) led me to an article by Chris Evangelista called "The Quarantine Stream: 'Communion' Is One Of The Weirdest Alien Movies You'll Ever Watch." (Walken plays Strieber in the 1989 film version of Communion.) Here's an excerpt.

And we get to see the aliens here, and boy, some of them are not what you expect. There are two types of aliens that Streiber encounters. There's a species that looks like the more familiar "grey" aliens – skinny, long-limbed creatures with almond-shaped heads and big black eyes. Only these aliens are not grey, they're pink. Also, they seem to be made of rubber? Or latex? In any case, they flail around like they don't have bones, and flap their hands as if they're dancing. Then there is a group of squat, round aliens with huge heads. At first, they're expressionless. But late in the movie, these aliens – which are nicknamed "Little Blue Doctors" –  suddenly have rounded lips that appear as if they're constantly puckering up for a kiss. I don't know if this is intentional, or just a case of the film not having a big enough budget to make aliens with more expressive faces. In any case, it's weird as f***, and looking at those big puckered alien lips kind of made me want to die.

Yes, it was intentional, not a budget issue, and reflects a dialogue between Whitley Strieber and his young son Andrew in Communion. Andrew is relating some of his dreams, which his father suspects are actually distorted memories of real close encounters.

"I was in the middle of the air when I switched to this dream where I was in the hospital in the future where they were trying to cure some kind of disease. I'm not sure what it was. And I was taken out of my bed and onto a cot and out on the porch."

"Who took you out of your bed and onto the cot?"

"Some kind of doctor."

"What did he look like?"

"Oh, he was a very short and fat man with glasses that came out pointed upward like that. [Gestures as if eyes have a pronounced slant.] And he always has a big fake smile on him. [Smiles from ear to ear with his mouth closed.] He kind of kept it there except when he was asleep."

"How did you know he was asleep?"

"Well, he had -- well, that's because he worked in the night and slept in the day."

"What did his eyes look like?"

"He was wearing regular glasses. His eyes were a kind of greenish-blue color. Dark. The only two faces he had was this. [Again demonstrates smile.] And then a small one when he was sleeping. [Makes an O.]"

"Mouth open?"

"Yeah."

"When his mouth was opened, it was round?"

"Yeah. Puckered. Big puckered."

Evangelista seems not to have read Communion, so his use of the exact phrase that appears there, 
"big puckered," is interesting. (The word puckered does not occur in the Communion script.)

Today I was reading the 1989 "Satanic panic" book The Edge of Evil by Jerry Johnston. It includes a tapescript of an interview with a possessed teenager called Ann, and of her subsequent exorcism. Here is Ann discussing her depression, which began at the age of 8 or 9 when she "spoke in tongues."

"I was depressed even before. Yeah, I guess it started about the time I started speaking in tongues . . .  it's still there. And sometimes I can feel this screaming inside of me. And sometimes sort of like baby talk is coming out. It's different from the tongues."

"Garbled, sort of?"

"Yeah. It's not the same all the time. There's variation in it. Well, the tongues is I guess more or less the same. But then as well as the tongues, I get feeling really funny sometimes. It starts right here, just like the tongues, and my mouth goes tense and it starts to go funny."

A Mrs. Sibble from the girls' home adds, "It goes sort of round, too. The other night when you spoke in tongues it almost sort of went round, like a fish's mouth."

"Yeah, it does that. Ooh, it's awful. . . ."

The exorcism itself follows, performed by Archie Huewright.

"Now. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, tell me your name."

"My name is Greyer," the girlish voice sings. "Greyer had a little pony once --"

"All right. I rebuke you in the name of Christ. Do you have associates?"

"Two of them. Grayer, and G-R-A-Y-E-R-E; give me an O, give me an E --"

"Three of you," Archie says.

Three demons called Greyer, Grayer, and Grayere. The entities Strieber writes about are typically called "Grays" despite the fact that (as Evangelista notes) they aren't actually described as being that color. After spelling out the name of one of its demonic associates, Greyer says, "give me an O, give me an E," even though none of the three names has an O in it.

Swearing like Strieber

Note: This post contains lots of swearing and lots of Whitley Strieber. If that offends you, you might want to read something else instead.

Well, fuckaroo!

Those who see the film version of Communion first and then read the book will no doubt be disappointed to discover that, unlike Christopher Walken, Whitley Strieber never actually refers to his alien visitors as "little blue fuckers about that big." (Nor does he ever say "Oy vey, what a day, what a schmear!" Walken's a legit New Yorker; Strieber, a Texas transplant.) However, his books, at least the fictional ones, do contain plenty of cussin' -- and, like everything else Strieber does, it's just a tad idiosyncratic.

⁂

Sonembitch

My God, Rollo, Rollie boy, hey, you are one sinister sonembitch.

-- a story anthologized in Murder in the Family, 2002

Bats. In your belfry, squeaking like sonembitches 

-- 2012: The War for Souls, 2007

Tough sonembitches.

-- Ibid. 

I've never liked executions. Some poor dumb sonembitch, every damn time.

-- Hybrids, 2011

He's a smart sonembitch.

-- The Wild, 2015

Seemingly endless variants of son of a bitch exist, but this one seems to be unique to Strieber.

• son of a bitch (14,200,000 Google hits)
• sonofabitch (549,000 hits)
• sumbitch (261,000 hits)
• somebitch (31,100 hits)
• sumabitch (31,000 hits)
• sombitch (20,500 hits)
• sonabitch (18,800 hits)
• summabitch (11,000 hits)
• sonbitch (8,520 hits)
• somabitch (2,860 hits)
• sonobitch (2,360 hits)
• sonamabitch (1,940 hits)
• sonembitch (68 hits) -- all from Strieber

The standard plural, of course, is sons of bitches, but often enough sonofabitch is treated as a single word and pluralized accordingly.

• sons of bitches (1,870,000 hits)
• sons of a bitch (656,000 hits)
• sumbitches (209,000 hits) -- apparently a kind of cookie, not a swear
• sonsabitches (122,000 hits)
• sons of a bitches (64,100 hits)
• son of a bitches (52,000 hits)
• sonofabitches (13,500 hits)
• sombitches (10,100 hits) -- half cookies, half swears
• summabitches (5,320 hits)
• somebitches (4,560 hits) -- also cookies
• sonabitches (1,990 hits)
• sonbitches (793 hits)
• sumabitches (789 hits)
• somabitches (273 hits)
• sonamabitches (182 hits)
• sonobitches (54 hits)
• sonembitches (14 hits) -- all from Strieber

⁂

God-for-damned

"It'd ruin somebody's day, for sure."

 

"The God-for-damned enemy's day"

-- 2012: The War for Souls, 2007

It's much harder to confirm via Google that this is a unique Strieberism, since lots of irrelevant hits come up ("the love of God for damned souls," "a god for damned near everything," etc.), but I've certainly never come across it anywhere else.

I assume this has something to do with the German word for "goddamned," which is gottverdammt, not far at all from God-for-damned. (Keep in mind that German v is pronounced /f/.) Although Strieber's people have apparently been in Texas for several generations, the surname is obviously German, and perhaps this German-influenced way of swearing has been handed down as a sort of family heirloom.

⁂

Fuckaroo

Hideous stuff [absinthe], but it did pack a pop. He got it out now, unscrewed the bottle, and chug-a-lugged.

 

Fuckaroo.

 

He went down to dinner, and ate in silence.

-- 2012: The War for Souls, 2007 

"This man isn't dead! This man is breathing!"

. . . "Fuckaroo, he's right."

-- Ibid. 

The word fuckaroo is not unique to Strieber, but as far as I can tell, everyone else uses it as a noun -- meaning, variously, a fuck-up ("a real fuckaroo"), bullshit ("doesn't give a shit about trivial fuckaroo"), or a fuck ("the best fuckaroo I've had so far"). A Google Books search also turns up a Nicholson Baker novel that includes the line "I surveyed the scene for a moment and said, 'Fuckaroo banzai'" -- whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. Only Strieber (and possibly Baker?) uses it as an exclamation.