This is the kind of story that’s going to be in the Death of Cool book.

This is the kind of story that’s going to be in the Death of Cool book.

That’s Robert with the curly hair on the left.

I have a place in Costa Rica that’s had various caretakers over the years. My favorite would have to be a surprisingly posh little British man with a nasal-y voice and a huge vocabulary. His name is Robert Dean and though he is best known as lead guitarist for the new romantic band Japan, he also played with everyone from Sinead O’Connor to Gary Numan. I was kind of obsessed with the guy and pored over the Christmas cards he’d get from people like ABC’s Martin Fry. I loved to get drunk with him and hear his amazing tour stories, like when Gary Numan insisted his talentless brother join the band and fake play the saxophone or when Numan got scurvy on tour after exclusively eating McDonald’s plain hamburgers. He also had great yarns about the dude from Dexy’s Midnight Runners whom Robert had to babysit after dude lost his mind and became a sexy transvestite with an unrequited love for Bruce Springsteen. Robert saw the Sonics play when they first started and even went to a Beatles concert when he was 12. I think he fucked Kate Bush too. I could talk to that guy for days.

Anyway, after Japan peaked and played the Budokan, Robert looked down and realized he had become a total cokehead with zero grasp of reality. Not one for half measures, he chucked that entire life into the toilet and moved to Montezuma where he became a world-renowned bird expert overnight. I met him around this time and the first thing I thought as he discussed his $2,000 binoculars like a jaded aristocrat was, “This guy is extreme.”

Bird watchers write down every bird they see and try to outdo each other by discovering rarer and rarer birds. Robert decided he was going to outdo them all by spotting a keel-billed motmot. This required laying motionless in a swamp for 24 hours and staring at the same tree with binoculars. It worked. He called whatever Bird Society you call and after tough questions like, “Are you sure it wasn’t a blue crowned motmot?” Robert Dean was in the history books as one of the few people to see the “electron carinatum” in its (ever decreasing) natural habitat.

There was only one problem: While he was sitting in that festering bog, a fucking insect laid eggs in his motherfucking forehead. The botfly is one of the most disgusting creatures imaginable and it reproduces by sneaking eggs on to a mammal’s skin (usually cattle) until a larva gets strong enough to crawl into a pore and begin gestation. As the egg eats its way in, David Cronenburg eats his heart out. Are you puking yet? The larva then stays under the skin for about a month, eating the fat that surrounds it and getting strong enough to turn into a bug and come out the same chewed-up hole it came in.

When Robert came back and explained to me what the lump on his forehead was, I screamed so loud the jungle exploded with startled birds. I was fucking hysterical. “How are you standing there telling me this?” I yelled incredulously. “If I had a fly fetus in my head, I would carve it out immediately and then have 10,000 showers.” Seriously, can you imagine there was an insect larva under your skin right now? You would scream your face off and then bite it out. Robert however, was unimpressed. “I don’t really notice it,” he shrugged before putting on yet another Prince CD (he was the only guy I ever met who was into late Prince). The few times he acknowledged this unwanted pregnancy was when it would shift to a new spot every few days. He would hold his temple and wince for a second and then happily move on. “Robert!” I’d stammer, “It hurts because it just ate the area it was in and it’s moving over to a new spot. You are being eaten by a parasite, you asshole. Do something!”

I didn’t care if he was enjoying seeing me squirm or he was enjoying feeling it squirm. I had to solve this disgusting problem fast because my girlfriend was coming in a few days and there was no way I was getting laid if my friends were self-farming insects. I sat him down at the local bar and after a few tequilas, broke it down. “Robert,” I told him calmly, “Do you realize, if you let this thing incubate and eventually fly out of your head, YOU WILL BE ITS MOTHER?!” This gave him pause, thank God. “Your only offspring on this earth will be a HAIRY FUCKING FLY!” I cried. While this tiny moment of sanity gripped his infected brain, I got a local farmer to convince him to suffocate the thing by covering the whole area with Vaseline (that’s what they do to their cows). “All right, why not?” Robert conceded like I was suggesting he give Diet Coke a whirl.

This is when things got really gross. Robert went to bed with a big blob of Vaseline on his head and woke up eight hours later with an abortion hanging out of his forehead (I just gagged remembering this). The larva had tried to make a break for it but suffocated halfway out of Robert’s skin. Just when you thought God could not have made this event any more disgusting, the larva presented itself. This was not your average bug teen. It was huge, fluorescent pink and shiny with thick, black, coarse hairs jutting out of its back like a balding, cartoon porcupine parasite. It made me do hollering dry heaves that went, “HwooooACH! Huuuh. Huuuh. Whoooo. WuuuuuACH!” As I stumbled around the room trying to not faint, Robert smiled and gently pulled it out. It made a mischievous little “schlooop” sound that was so gut-wrenchingly nauseating, I ran out to the lawn and vomited on the grass. Then, without looking back, I ran from the house like it was incredibly haunted and didn’t come back until very late that night.

The next morning I got in the shower and was beyond horrified to discover Robert’s miscarriage lying on the floor. I lept out and ran to his room completely naked and soaking wet with my eyes bulging out of my head. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” I yelled. “How could you not BURN that thing?” Robert didn’t understand what I was so freaked out about and answered the question totally literally. “I don’t know,” he said casually, “When I saw it, I looked down and just thought, ‘There you are. You’re there.’” I swear that’s what he said, “There you are. You’re there.”

Soon after this, Robert gave up house-sitting and moved to the nearby town of Monteverde where he could focus on bird watching full time. The last I heard he got into body building and had become gigantic. Like I said, the dude is extreme.

-GAVIN McINNES

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