This story falls under: The Vernon
The Carriage Lounge at the Mt. Vernon Inn in Uniontown was The Place To Be back in the late ’90s. Many, many, many adventures of the Werewolves of Uniontown began there, and quite a few of them involve me and various strange women…but of those adventures, most do not involve me actually getting to (or wanting to) physically touch one of those strange women. See, I wasn’t always the 200-kiloGauss chick magnet I am today. At one time, I couldn’t get the honeys to even point out the direction of the nearest exit to me, let alone provide a brotha with a phone number or a little drunken tonsil-hockey. It’s true! No matter how swank the vintage 1970s wing-collar shirts I wore, nor how intense my spasmodic dancefloor antics, not a single dame would ever throw a glance or even a “Fuck you, weirdo!” in my direction. But I was used to such reactions—I’d been earning them since I was old enough to find girls cute rather than gross—and by 1998 had grown positively immune to them. I didn’t go out to hit on the skirts, nor did I go out to drink (my Drunken Years were still well in the future). I went out to enjoy myself with my friends. I went out to boogie like a epileptic moron to the tunes of my favorite local cover bands. I went out to the Vernon in particular because my favorite local bands—Deja Vu first and foremost amongst them—played there every weekend.
One wintery Friday night at the Vernon, in early December of ‘98 I believe, it was business as usual: Joe and Davin and I were there, hangin’ out with some other folks we knew from town and the members of the band (Joe’s halfbrothers Jason and Jeremy, whom I’d both gone to highschool with; Darek Eberhart; and Dave Ray). ‘Twas a thoroughly average evening at the Carriage Lounge. The crowd was precisely one half Uniontown-and-environs rednecks, and one half College Kids on the Make. The gingerale in my cup was flat as day-old piss. The buffalo gals were all winking and wiggling their rumps at the band members, and grumpy old Lloyd-O, Jason/Jeremy/Joe’s pa who ran the soundboard for the band, was—as always—grousing about the boys wanting too much kickdrum in the mix. The lights were down and the small square dancefloor was packed with hustlers and hustlettes, drunken dads and aunts and cousins, all bouncing around to old faves like “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Ride-Around Sally.” It was a good ol’ time and, of course, Joe and Davin and I were often jammed into our own little bubble in that crowd too, flappin’ and flailin’ to the beat, ignorant of all others around us and just having a ball.
We were well-known for our spectacular, gymnastic bootyrockin’ capabilities—especially when the band played such highpowered jams as the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” or the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” Pump up the beat and we were on fire with rock’n’roll, limbs spinning in whirlwinds of energy, sweat spraying, hopping about and jittering like grasshoppers sprung on crystal meth. When the Werewolves of Uniontown were on the dancefloor, wise people gave us room. This avoidance carried over even into more sedate songs. No one ever wanted to dance too close to us for fear of getting bulldozed the second Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” ended and the band launched right into Everclear’s “Everything to Everyone.”
Which is why it was certainly surprising to me that, at some point that one night…I felt a strange, womanly warmth brush my shoulder. I turned to tender my usual “Sorry, lady—I really wasn’t trying to cop a feel” apologia for bumping into somebody while spazzing out to Seven Mary Three’s “Cumbersome.” And, yes, there was some chick looking back at me….But before I could open my mouth to apologize, the girl had wrapped a good portion of her body around mine and was proceeding to freak me like a dog humping a hydrant as the band went right into the Rolling Stones.
Huh?
What the—
I couldn’t react.
I couldn’t move.
Hell, I couldn’t even work my mouth to gasp. A terrifying tetanus of sheer disbelief had crashed into my face with the force of a sledgehammer.
W-W-W-What the hell was happening here?
I could barely get a look at the girl in the swirling, dizzy dancefloor illumination, but she was short, had a little tousel of dishwater-blonde hair, and could wriggle her body like a muscular eel. Thighs sliding slowly up and down mine. Hips flowing waterwise against me. Breasts…breasts j-just—Good GODS, I was a second from fainting. Breathe, Pegritz, breathe! So I closed my eyes and swallowed hard and tried to pace my own body’s clumsy, arthritic twitches and bounces to somehow complement this lithe little beast’s churning moves. My veins were full of steam. I hadn’t a clue what was happening but it was happening for sure, because from behind me I could hear Joe and Davin chanting, “Go, Pegritz! Go, Pegritz!” and the lights and Eberhart’s squealing guitar and Jason’s voice blaring out above all else—
This was real and I had the woodrow to prove it! An actual girl (who, for once, didn’t look like an extra from Swamp Thing or The Toxic Avenger) was putting the moves on ME, of all people—violating every preconception I’d built up for years about myself—and—and—
and it would’ve been heaven, ambrosia on that postage-stamp dancefloor, a hot and sweaty apotheosis…
but for the fact that the girl grinding away at me smelled like a goat.
Yeah, you heard me. She smelled like a goat.
No, she didn’t stink like some filthy, feculent denizen of a mud-fouled barnyard (I said “goat”, not “pig”). She wasn’t rank with sweat or piss or old-lady perfume like some of the halfdressed grannies shaking their sagging behinds elsewhere on the dancefloor. None of that. She just smelled like a goat.
Let me explain. Your common, everyday farm goat (Capra aegagrus hircus) has a very peculiar scent, quite unlike that of any other farm animal. I’ve always found goats to be particularly amusing for some reason, so as a child I was always drawn to the goat barn at the Fayette County Fair, and thereby grew familiar with their strange odor. It’s a dry smell, not fermy and damp and gross like most other farm critters’. In fact, it’s kind of pleasant: rather similar to the smell of sunbaked hay undercut with a hint of fuzzy, dusty musk—warm and brisk and rough, just like a goat’s stubbly fur. You can’t mistake it. And that girl grinding on me at the Carriage Lounge smelled just like that. Even there amid the press of bodies, the multiple funk of perfume and sweaty armpits and clothes, my nose instantly recognized this girl’s scent. It made me want to sneeze right into her hair.
Seriously, people…what the hey?
Whatever. I kept my mouth shut, wiggled my nose to kill the itch, and just rode out the groove until the song ended. Maybe I was just hallucinating, or one of the genetically-damaged hillfolk dancing nearby smelled like goat (a distinct possibility). Maybe—
Then the chick looked up. Oh, my…she was cute, Dear Reader: a sharp little face under that typical Fayette County poof of hair, a sly smile, pretty green eyes (with pupils that were, I noticed, human-round and not bar-shaped, thank god). A foxy little dame. “Haaaaaah there,” she drawled, and her accent was pure Appalachian. This was a girl clearly descended from the benighted Laurel Mountains outside of Uniontown to enjoy herself in the lowland lights of our little excuse for civilization. She barked a short name—Gina or Tina or something with “ees” and “ahs” in it—and started up a roughshod conversation that worked itself out in staccato phrases fired at each other over the band’s next song as we continued to “dance” together—
Verse: “What’s yer name?”
Chorus: “Uhhhh….Pegritz.”
Verse: “You come ’round here often?”
Chorus: “Yeah. Most of the time when Deja Vu’s here. I’ve known those guys for years.”
Guitar solo: too loud to speak. I just let her grind on my leg and tried to hold on.
Final verse: “Awyeah?”
Final chorus: “Yeah—Jason and Jeremy went to highschool with me.”
Eventually, since we were soon more focused on talking to one another than dancing, we muscled our way out of the crowd and spent some time chatting aimlessly by the bar. I was scarcely aware of what I was saying, because I was Captain Clueless and didn’t have the vaguest idea what to say to a girl who actually wanted to talk to me. I did manage to discern, however, that she somehow knew Darek Eberhart and Dave Ray. She’d seen the band play at some sawdust-floored roadhouse up in the mountains a couple of times and had come on down to Uniontown tonight to see them again. She was a college student at some place just over the border in Maryland, studying nursing. She liked classic rock a lot more than country. And, she said, she really didn’t like to drink but liked to down a few beers whenever she went out just to “loosen up.”
She smelled like a satyr (yes, it was definitely her: the earthen odor of goat rose from her like a cloud of fine grit) but otherwise she was such a normal everyday girl…the kind of perfectly modern type you sometimes find hidden like pearls amongst swine in the populations of rural counties. Girls raised in traditional families who have nonetheless managed to free themselves from the shackles of those oldtimey upbringings without losing their downhome natures to the opposite extreme. Around Uniontown, most of the women you’d find out at the bars were either chastity-belted Christian prudes or ravenous cum-sluts. But this girl was just comfortable enough with her body and mind to throw some serious skeeze my way, but not frivolous with them. She seemed perfectly sensible, friendly, and open.
So why the hell would a girl like this be talking to—and dancing with—an idiot like me?
And why did she smell like a fucking goat?! I don’t mind it when goats smell like goats—that’s only natural—but when presumably human women smell like goats, I get a bit weirded out, as no doubt many folks do. She’d told me that she lived at home with her parents on their ancestral farm, soooooooo…maybe she had a lot of brothers and sisters, and there wasn’t any room in the house, so she had to sleep Baby-Jesus-like in the barn with the goats? Nah. She was wearing clean, fashionable clothes, not ratty old farm overalls grubby with hay and goat dung. Was she a female faun of some kind? I mean, her face was a little thin and pointed…vaguely caprine. And I kept glancing at her feet, which were small, wondering crazily how she might’ve jammed her hooves into those little white sneakers….
Needless to say, my selfconsciousness eventually throttled me, as I knew it would. How could it be otherwise? A perfectly attractive, seemingly intelligent—if goat-scented—young woman was talking to me for no reason that I could identify…so why wouldn’t that freak me out? Eventually, I babbled some kind of random excuse to her about needing to take a piss or find somebody and wandered off to let my brain digest the incomprehensible bolus of female attention that had been forced down its gullet. Mental heartburn instantly set in and I found myself meandering aimlessly for the remainder of the night, running into the Mountain Maiden a couple of times and speaking to her, but otherwise just circulating randomly while I let my unconscious grind over and over what little we’d said to one another earlier, trying to squeeze any drop of meaning from even the simplest hello. Was she interested in me? Really? Could she be interested in me? If so, what the FUCK was I supposed to do? Maybe if I asked her to teach me to play the pan-flute…?
At some point, we ended up slowdancing together to an encore of Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight,” and even though the solid warmth of her body in my arms was undeniably real I felt as though I were floating in a weird dream. She nuzzled her head into my shoulder and sighed; her breath was warm and beery, her hair so soft against my chin….My nose tickled miserably with her hircine smell. I probably would’ve had a raging boner from the luscious softness of her body pressed to mine, but the torment in my sinuses thankfully distracted me. We parted slowly. She didn’t want to let me go, she said, but…her friends were over there and…you know? She had to see where they went…where they were going. Sure, sure, I nodded. Go for it, honey. Give me some time to decompress.
“Daaaaaaaamn, Pegritz!” Joe crowed when I found him talking to Lloyd-O by the soundboard. “I think that chick wants some pole for her hole, man. She’s fuckin’ crazy for you!”
“No way,” Davin added. “If she’s skeezin’ on Pegritz, she’s just crazy!”
“Yeah, really,” I mumbled. “Idaknow about all that, guys. She kinda smells like—”
“What’s there to know, dummy!” Joe boomed. “She wants wood for her beaver! Get the hell over there and make a play before she finds some other tiny wang to disappoint her tonight.”
“Y’know…I think I remember that girl,” Lloyd-O drawled with a chuckle. “I think she went home with Darek Eberhart one a them nights when the boys played up at Nemacolin Woodlands. Guess she got a thing for Dereks, huh?”
“Yeah. Well….We’ll see,” I grunted. I saw her talking to a few nondescript folks over by the big circular bar and pondered going over there, but I chickened out. I truly didn’t know what to do. I supposed if she really wanted something with me, she’d find me. Yeah. That was the ticket. Let her do all the work! Coward.
The end of the night came at last. The lights went up, the band began packing up their instruments and sound system—which always took them at least three hours—and people began to stumble drunkenly out to their cars. I didn’t see the girl anywhere and figured she’d left with the folks she’d come with. I was astonished how heavy the disappointment in my gut felt. “Way to go, jagoff,” Joe chided me as he helped his halfbrothers carry equipment out to the Deja Van. “That cooch right now is sliding up and down some pecker other than yours.”
Yeah. Probably. But—
just as I was about to say my round of goodbyes and leave, there she was, suddenly by my side. I smelled goat and, yep, there she was asking me what I was going to do now? She was obviously drunk now, slumping against me bonelessly, definitely loosened up. Wicked thoughts immediately flooded my head. If I really played my cards right….
She lifted her warm, Bud-Light-sticky lips to my ear and said, “Hhhhhey, sugar…I don’ haaave a riiiide home. Y’know?” Her friends had already left but she’d wanted to stick around and talk to the band. “Soooo, could ya, y’know…?”
I didn’t even have to think about it. “Hell, I can give you a ride home. No problem.” That definitely scored some appropriate points…especially since I then learned she lived five minutes from the Maryland border. “That too far for ya?” she asked.
“No. Nah. Just over the hill, really.”
What a lie. Driving her home that night was going to entail an hour-long, maybe even longer, drive through the pitch-black, earlymorning mountains along highways haunted only by latenight truckers and weirdos in filthy pickups, then down Deliverance-esque backroads into the literal middle of nowhere. Despite the potential for payback in the form of a phone number, maybe some making-out, or maybe even a cramped, limb-tangling poke in the coffin-sized backseat of my Cavalier, I instantly regretted my offer. The last thing I wanted to do was make a midnight run into the literal Heart of Darkness. But. Maybe she would make that terrifying journey into the black gullet of the mountains worthwhile…provided her pa didn’t catch us going at it and busted out the shotgun, or she didn’t leave a little pile of stinky doodoo pellets on my carseat. Or she didn’t turn out to be half-goat. I was literally getting nauseous with a bad bolus of lust, self-doubt, and mountain-fear curdling in my belly.
But luckily the girl wanted to hang around for a while and talk to Darek Eberhart and Dave Ray. Joe and Davin left after giving me the usual sarcastic encouragement to go for the gold with the mountain girl, and I hung around, drifting along behind her like a balloon on a tether as she drunkenly babbled with Eberhart and Dave. At this point, my opinion of the young lady began to drop a bit—she was acting like any other drunk early-twentysomething, fawning over the Big Rock Stars Eberhart and Dave Ray. Of course, the Big Rock Stars, who were supposed to be loading their instruments into the band’s van, instead stood around flirting with the girl, gradually earning my ire. This wasn’t new to me, of course. I kept telling myself that this girl had spent the entire night hitting on me, so…who cares if she was now flirting drunkenly with the band members? Besides, hadn’t she mentioned that she’d known them for a while? And, furthermore, hadn’t Lloyd-O indicated that she’d already poked Eberhart? What did any of that matter since, apparently, I was next to ride that particular pony? I shoved aside the kneejerk pangs of jealousy and my growing dislike of the girl’s tipsy swaggering and started helping Jason and Jeremy take the equipment out to the van, figuring that the sooner the band was done loading up the sooner I could squire the chick away to her alpine home. The sooner I got her there, the sooner Whatever Was Going To Happen would happen, and the sooner I would be able to get home. It was already 3:00am and I was dead tired. The thought of rolling home long after dawn was not very appealing, even if I would be rolling home freshly-screwed (God, I hoped).
Finally, though, we found ourselves standing around in the parkinglot outside the Mt. Vernon Inn. The van was loaded and Jason and Jeremy had taken it to Eat n’ Park to grab the usual post-gig breakfast. The parkinglot was virtually empty save for Eberhart, Dave, myself, and the girl. It was now close to four a.m. and I was dreading the drive into the mountains now, because I was beginning to feel logy with weariness—a condition I certainly didn’t want to be enjoying as I tried to find this girl’s house according to her inebriated directions. She was slurring words now, her knees wobbly and her eyes slitted. It was like she was growing drunker rather than sobering up…and a little while ago, she’d apparently puked over the bannister of the Carriage Lounge’s balcony onto the sidewalk. I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t have to face vomit-flavored kisses, but….
It was clear by this point that both Eberhart and Dave were doing their Big Rock Star best to persuade my skeeze to go home with either—or both—of them. Now, this certainly pissed me off…not because they were cockblocking me or attempting to snatch up my apparent catch—I was rapidly losing interest in doing anything with this farmgirl aside from getting her home—but because the girl and the band guys now seemed to share a background of experience that hinted at knowing one another for a long time. It was apparent from the things they said to one another, the sly giggles and unexplained hiccups of humor, the way she snuggled up to them and they pawed at her body. There was a depth of familiarity there.
I found out much later from Jason and Jeremy that the chick was a regular at all the band’s mountain gigs, and both Eberhart and Dave had been “after her” for months. Whatever they’d been after, it seems they’d both gotten it. This wrecked what little remaining interest I still had in the chick: I didn’t even want to kiss the cheek of a girl who’d poked “Trailer Nailer” Dave Ray, for fear of contracting something that might make my lips rot off.
So there I stood, shivering in the pre-dawn cold, more-or-less forgotten, watching the strange dogpile of Dave Ray, Darek Eberhart, and the girl as they traded in-jokes and barely-veiled innuendo. I couldn’t believe it, but I felt a putrid clump of disappointment hanging in my throat. Had I honestly thought that girl wanted Something To Do with me? Just because she was drunkenly flirting with me? Of course, the second the Big Rock Stars were no longer occupied with rockin’ it out, she’d forget about me entirely and thrown herself at them. Well, who wouldn’t? The fact that she’d rapidly proved herself to be little more than Yet Another Drunken Groupie—and that she smelled like a nanny—didn’t enter into it one bit. For once, a girl had actually approached me and seemed to express some kind of interest. But, as always, my interaction with her had led to the expected let-down and I was most likely to blame. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
It was now well after four and we were still standing around in that emptied, ghostly parkinglot. I was antsy for sleep and getting more pissed (and cold) by the minute, wishing the little huddle would just shut up about whatever the hell it was they were talking about so I could give the girl a ride home and just be done with this confusing spectacle. I turned away, gathering up my thoughts so I could finally say, “OK, break it up—let’s get you home,” and when I looked back, she had leaped onto Dave Ray and was humping him.
She’d jumped onto him, knocking him sprawling on the hood of his car. Hips pumping viciously, breasts heaving rabidly behind her sweatshirt–and she was panting, too! She wasn’t just grinding on him like she’d done me on the dancefloor earlier—this was honest-to-the-Jeep-God humping—humping most obvious, as in the best it is. Dave was just gasping “Awyeah! Awyeah!” and holding her astride him, laughing convulsively while the girl gyrated and Eberhart looked on snickering, pointing at the spectacle and giggling at me, “Look at this crazy shit, Pegritz!”
And look I did—but not at the humping. Nothing unusual about two people dryhumping one another on the hood of a car in an abandoned bar parkinglot, right? I’d seen that quite a few times over the years. But what I hadn’t seen—
her tongue—
I…I shit you not—
the girl’s tongue was hanging out of her gaping, chortling mouth, flapping at her collarbone. It was this wet, dog-like…tentacle of pale pink meat that wagged in the icy night air and slopped about on Dave Ray’s face like a big chunk of uncooked steak, leaving gummy, glistening trails—
DEAR GOD, THAT TONGUE!
The girl’s tongue was a foot and a half long. Not Gene-Simmons long. Anteater long.
The night suddenly grew colder and I felt colder than the frost that glazed the windshields of the last three cars in the lot.
That tongue was so long the girl could part her hair with it. And it was thick, too…like a flensed, naked muscle.
Dave Ray was snickering like a little girl as that horrific pseudopod tickled his face, curling in his hair, its narrow point worming into his ears. Darek Eberhart stood by howling with laughter…but even his face looked strange. Stiff, almost, with an expression of mingled lust, self-loathing, and delicious horror—the kind of expression you’d expect to find on the faces of gringo college-boys seeing their first Tijuana donkey show.
All of the muddled, idiotic erotic fantasies that had been churning in my head earlier that night froze solid, like the rest of me; they clumped together into one foul turd of coagulated garbage that fell from my head into my stomache with a great splash of rancid acid. I almost puked.
That tongue.
That goat-stink.
To think that after having just talked with me about random stuff like going to school and music, the fact that she really didn’t like to drink but wasn’t averse to a few beers now and again, that she was at heart kind of shy…this girl had devolved into some kind of tentacle-tongued mountain creature from a fairy tale—
I watched Dave Ray take that horrendous tongue into his mouth as she ground her hips against his. He swallowed several inches of it. She made hideous, liquid grunting noises while that tongue swelled and deflated with a loathesome pulse and the only thing I could think of was: Shub-Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young—a transdimensional monster from a number of old H. P. Lovecraft stories. Black Goat. Of the Woods.
Darek Eberhart was still laughing sickly. I was just sick.
I thought of Lovecraft’s story “The Dunwich Horror,” in which the decandent Whately clan interbreeds with another esoteric god-monster, Yog-Sothoth, to produce the hirsute, betentacled giant Wilbur Whately and his invisible, even-more-betentacled brother. I stood there and, terrified, imagined what kind of gene-poisoned clan of inbred mountain mutations had produced this girl, so outwardly normal-looking, yet…Worst of all, I couldn’t help but imagine what other deformities might lurk beneath her clothing, and knew that, no matter if the girl had crab legs growing from her twat, Dave Ray would gladly poke the hell out of her anyway. He was just that kind of guy. I’d seen some of the women he’d taken home after gigs. In many ways, she was an improvement.
I thought of myself sprawled halfnaked with her in the backseat of my Cavalier, warm flesh thrust against warm flesh…and then, without warning, a burst of glutinous coldness—a jaw unhinging like that of a snake—that gruesome pink tentacles waving in the half-light as I screeched in agony—
No. No way in hell.
So, I turned and left.
Actually, I fled.
I walked over to my car, literally jumped it into, and squealed out of the parkinglot. As I bounced out onto Route 40, I glanced into my rearview mirror and Dave Ray and Darek Eberhart were both standing there watching me go, holding up the girl’s limp, saclike body between them while a trail or spew—or that maybe just that tongue—spilled from her mouth.
I drove home through the waning night with my head feeling like it was stuffed with warm, wet cotton. What the hell had I just witnessed? Were nightgaunts now waiting at my home to snatch me up in their rubbery grasp and fly me off to a meeting with Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos? Was the girl a descendant of Asenath Waite? The night had begun so simply—me, Joe, and Davin going out to see our friends play at the Carriage Lounge. It had grown weird when the goat-scented girl had begun hitting on me, but the weirdness had been a good kind of weirdness. And then the drunkenness, the Big Rock Stars. The tongue….The night had turned into a Lovecraft story—but I’d escaped! With most of my sanity intact.
But…what about Eberhart and Dave?
The next day, Joe called to ask whether I’d gotten any poontang and in a voice still queasy I related what I’d witnessed. His only response was, “Damn, I bet she could suck a mean dick with that!” Later, I told Davin, who laughed and said, “Well, shit, she sounds just like your kind of woman, doesn’t she?”
“Davin,” I explained, “I love horror stories, but I don’t want to fuckin’ live one.”
The next weekend, the band played at the Vernon again and, naturally, we were all there once more. I didn’t ask Darek or Dave how last weekend went with the Thing from the Appalachians, and they never mentioned her to me. I watched them the entire night, keeping my eyes peeled for strange behaviors or mysterious moles, unrecognizable growths, transformations in the shapes of their eyes….I was extremely nervous that she’d show up again—Joe and Davin were hoping she would so they could see the Tonguefor themselves—but she didn’t. None of us ever saw her again.
The terror soon wore off and the story became yet another Tale of the Werewolves of Uniontown. In the long run, it proved no stranger than many of the other happenings we encountered over the years—in fact, it’s one of the more normal ones—but to this day I wonder what spawn of the stars may be drinking and seducing in the little bars and big resorts strung along Route 40 as it slaloms up and down through the Allegheny Mountains. And anytime I dance with a woman these days, I always, always sniff hard to detect even the faintest hint of goat.
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BONUS! Witness the supposed World’s Longest Tongue. Now double that and you might have a better idea of the horror I faced….
