Monday, August 03, 2009

Mr. 100,000

***This is a fake biography. It is purely satirical and devoid of truth. Any names, places, events, etc. discussed in the following biography are not real and are purely coincidental to, and have no connection whatsoever to, any names, places, events, etc. that may exist in the real world.***

The air was decidedly crisp in Windsor, Ontario on the morning of April 19, 1978. Jean-Luc Richard Belanger (pronounced "zhaun-luke ree-shard bell-AWN-zhay), a French-Canadian fur trader, along with his wife, Cindy, an amateur private investigator of Scotch-Romanian descent, strolled through downtown Windsor with awe and anticipation. Cindy was nine months pregnant, and Jean-Luc was mustachioed. Both Jean-Luc and Cindy were huge professional wrestling fans, and they had made the pilgrimage from their hometown of Sept-Îles, Quebec to Windsor to see the childhood homes of Killer Kowalski and Abdullah the Butcher. The purposed of their trip was to give birth to their first child in such an historic city.

Their dreams turned into reality, as Cindy went into labor when she and Jean-Luc were having a snowball fight in Dieppe Gardens. There was no time to get to a hospital, so the first thing Jamie Butcher Belanger saw, other than his mom and dad, was downtown Detroit's Renaissance Center. It would not be the last time Jamie and Detroit would cross paths.

After riding the family moose, Spruce, back to Sept-Îles, the Belangers settled into domestic life with their newborn son. Sept-Îles provided both Jean-Luc and Cindy with ample opportunities to advance their careers. Its location in Northeast Quebec meant that beaver and otter pelts were abundant, and Jean-Luc's business thrived. And the city of Sept-Îles had one of the highest violent crime rates in Canada, providing plenty of need for an inexpensive sleuth, which is exactly what Cindy was.

Jean-Luc and Cindy doted on Jamie, and they would stop at nothing to provide their son with all the luxuries that a fur-trading, private investigating salary could buy. Needless to say, Jamie didn't have many toys, and most of them were made out of the bones of dead woodland creatures. Unfortunately for Jean-Luc and Cindy, Jamie had seen a recent "talkie" called the Empire Strikes Back. All he could talk about was "that motherfucking Darth Vader" and how the ice planet Hoth was a lot like Canada.

On January 14, 1982, Jean-Luc and Spruce set out for the farthest stretches of Northern Quebec to go on a beaver hunt that would easily net him the forty Canadian dollars necessary to purchase an AT-AT for Jamie's upcoming fourth birthday. Sadly, it would be the last time Jamie would see Jean-Luc. Spruce returned to Sept-Îles on April 14, 1984, alone.

Jamie took Jean-Luc's absence particularly hard. A rash of fires hit Sept-Îles's Fur Trading District. For a while, it was believed that Jamie could start fires with his mind, much like the child in Stephen King's Firestarter. It turns out that he was actually starting the fires with his hands, gasoline, and a small, but powerful, blowtorch. Making matters worse, Cindy was the one who cracked the case. She was devastated, despite the $75 reward she received from the Sept-Îles Fur Traders' Association.

With the reward money, an embarrassed Cindy decided to leave Sept-Îles, moving herself and Jamie to his birth city, Windsor, where she enrolled Jamie in the Hiram Walker Academy, an expensive private boarding school on Windsor's upper west side. "I was hoping Jamie would turn his anger toward his school work," Cindy told the CBC in a 2004 retrospective about Quebecoise who were mistakenly believed to be firestarters in 1984.

At Hiram Walker, Jamie did just that, achieving nearly perfect marks in his first year. His best subject was reading, and he fell in love with limericks. At the same time he was discovering the joys and wonders of the AABBA structure, Jamie discovered popular music.

In the spring of 1985, one of the boys living on Jamie's floor at Hiram Walker managed to obtain a copy of The Sex Pistols' Nevermind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols album, which had only recently been released in Canada. Hearing punk music for the first time was a revelation for young Jamie. Within days, he had dyed his hair red, shaved his hair into a Mohawk, pierced his nose with a safety pin, and formed a punk band with some of his classmates called The Men from Nantucket, with Jamie as the lead singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter, Rodney "Balls" Balaban on drums, and Guillaume de Guillaume on bass.

Punk mania was sweeping through Canada, and The Men From Nantucket, or TMFN, for short, were just what Canadians were looking for. After some convincing, Hiram Walker's administration agreed to let TMFN play at the school's annual Spring Fête. On June 5, 1985, TMFN played their first gig in front of several hundred classmates. Balls Balaban remembers the day vividly. "We had been practicing for weeks and had written nearly 400 songs in that span, but we were still pretty nervous about playing our stuff live, since it was pretty heady and overtly political. It turns out we were the voice for an entire generation of Windsorites."

The guys rushed to self-produce an EP, Ottawa Calling, which featured the songs "Rocket Richard Can't Fail," "God Save the Prime Minister," "Pretty V-eh-cant," and the title track. On the strength of the EP, TMFN spent the summer of 1985 touring southwestern Ontario, making fans in Waterloo, London, Leamington, North Dumfries, Chatham, Wallaceburg, and everywhere in between.

Soon, all of the major Canadian labels were in a bidding war to sign TMFN. The Canadian division of Ariola Records won the TMFN lottery, singing the boys to a six-record deal for a then-unheard-of $17,000. Jamie, Balls, and Guillaume dropped out of school and, in January 1986, went into the studio to record their debut full-length album, Rocket to Regina.

With that, TMFN were bona fide rock stars, touring Canada for the next several years taking breaks for a few weeks here and there to record a new album. Three of their songs hit No. 1 on the Canadian charts ("Today Your Love, Tomorrow Tim Horton's," "Rock The Montreal Forum," and "The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Took My Baby Away.").

Fame and fortune -- and the concomitant excesses -- took their toll on Jamie. He developed a dangerous addiction to peameal bacon, as well as cocaine and Demerol. "I was freebasing before I even knew what that meant," Jamie once told an uninterested bus driver. However, Jamie's addictions didn't stop with drugs and pork products. He fathered thirteen children with thirteen different women -- one in each of Canada's provinces and territories. "Saskatoon? I spent a month there one night," Jamie laughed during a 2001 CBC retrospective on limerick-themed southwestern Ontario punk bands. "I was ten years old. I had no idea that it was possible for me to get a girl pregnant. Hell, I didn't even know that what I was doing was having sex. I thought sex was when a man and a woman get naked and kiss -- which I was always careful not to do."

Aside from spreading his seed across Canada, things seemed to be going swimmingly for TMFN. They were thrice voted Band of the Year by Canada Music Today, and had throngs of fans at every show for several years. They were on top of the Canadian music world. And then the unthinkable happened.

On February 15, 1990, All Aboot It -- Canada's tabloid -- published a picture of Jamie on a romantic Valentine's Day date at a swanky Toronto movie theater with Canadian teen pop star Robin Sparkles. Eyewitness accounts detail "extensive necking" and "some heavy petting."

Soon rumors began to surface that Jamie and Robin had been secretly seeing each other for several years. If this were true, it would destroy all of Jamie's credibility within the Canadian punk scene. Sadly for Jamie's punk music career, it was true. When confronted with the rumors, Jamie tackled them head-on. "Yeah, it's true," Jamie told All Aboot It. "You know that song 'Let's Go to the Mall'? Well, let's just say 'the mall' may or may not mean 'my pants.' Although, the more that I think about it, it probably doesn't." Added Robin, "It was about going to the mall." However, the song "Sandcastles in the Sand" is rumored to be about a clandestine trip that Jamie and Robin took to Baffin Island. Neither Jamie nor Robin has ever denied that.

Balls and Guillaume had no choice but to turn their back on Jamie and distance themselves from him. The band was immediately dissolved, and Jamie became the subject of ridicule across the country's now-thriving punk scene. Rival punk band The Celibate Knives even recorded a song called "Jamie Belanger's a Hoser." It shot to Number 1 on the Canadian charts and stayed there for nearly one year.

With Jamie's credibility all but destroyed, Cindy decided to do what any good Canadian mother does when her son needs to become anonymous. In April 1990, she moved the two to Northville, Michigan.

When he came to America, he changed his name to Jame Gumb, because he wanted to maintain an air of anonymity, given his successful Canadian punk rock career, tabloid exploits with Robin Sparkles, and "all the crazy bitches I knocked up." The name change would prove unnecessary. Despite the fact that he had several Platinum albums in Canada (the equivalent of over 15,000 records sold), he was virtually unknown across the border in the United States. In a 1996 "Where Are They Now?" interview with Tiger Beat Canada Magazine, Jamie explained, "In Canada, I couldn't walk into a Tim Horton's for a Dutchie or a maple dip without getting accosted by sexually advanced tweens. Then I came to America, and I literally couldn't walk into a Tim Horton's. Worse yet, not a single person recognized me or had heard of the Men from Nantucket. It was a devastating blow to may already fragile ego. But hey, at least I didn't have to pay child support to those cum dumpsters, eh?"

Jame settled into life as a Northville schoolboy -- trips to Northville Downs, walks through Mill Race Historical Village, egging houses in Novi -- until 1991, when he became the incorrect target of an FBI investigation centered on inappropriate coveting. After that, he changed his name back to its original spelling, but started pronouncing his name in the Americanized manner -- "Bell-en-jerr" -- because no one in America could, or cared to, pronounce his name correctly.

It was around this time that he was introduced to raven-haired vixen and pear heiress Amy Bartlett, who was in the same grade as Jamie at Hillside Middle School. Jamie was immediately taken with Amy, and made every effort to hang out with her, as well as every effort to keep his sordid past from her. "When you meet a chick you like, especially an American chick, the last thing you want to do is screw things up by telling her you have thirteen kids," Jamie once explained to a clerk at Jet's Pizza.

Amy, however, was not so enamored with Jamie at first. As she explained in a 2004 article in Indiana Alumni Magazine, "I couldn't understand a fucking word he was saying. 'Soar-y'? Really? And there are only two Os in 'poor.' And don't get me started on the jean shorts. Sweet Christ, the jean shorts! That was all he would wear, even in the winter. I was not impressed."

Over the next several years, as Jamie Americanized his accent and attire, and excelled in the classroom, on the golf course, and on the baseball field, he worked his way into Amy's social circle and fell into Amy's good graces. By their senior year of high school, it looked like everything was pointing in the right direction in Jamie's courtship of Amy. In the Fall of 1995, he had asked Amy to be his date to the Northville High School Homecoming Dance, and she accepted. The theme was "Fuck Novi." Everything seemed to be aligned. Jamie had planned on asking Amy to be his girlfriend at the dance. What he didn't plan on, however, were the two events that night that would prevent him from even asking her.

Jamie showed up in what he thought was a tuxedo: a denim jacket covering a denim shirt, with jeans. Amy was devastated. Nonetheless, she agreed to go to the dance with Jamie.

At the dance, a tall, red-headed classmate named Kyle -- who also wanted to date Amy -- started a false rumor that Alanis Morrissette's smash hit "You Oughta Know" was written about Jamie. Despite Jamie's pleadings with Amy that "everyone in Canada knows it's about Dave Coulier," Amy dumped Jamie on the spot and started going out with Kyle. Worse yet, every other girl in the school stayed away from Jamie because of what he had allegedly done with Morrissette in a theater. It was little solace for Jamie that pretty much every guy in school thought of him as a hero, even if the rumor was false.

For the remainder of his senior year, Jamie retreated into a world of sexual and emotional solitude. He wrote a book entitled "Nothing of a Sexual Nature: My Dreams of Becoming a Eunuch," which every major publisher refused to take on.

For college, knowing that Amy would be up the road in Ypsilanti at Eastern Michigan, Jamie looked beyond the state to continue his education, eventually deciding on Indiana University. "I visited Bloomington and immediately forgot about Amy. Holy shit, that place is Candyland."

At IU, Jamie joined what most experts consider to be the single greatest fraternity class ever assembled: the Sigma class of the Alpha Psi chapter of Pi Kappa Phi. Included among his pledge brothers were pizza entrepreneur Jason "Wee Wee" Whitney, Chris "The Red Cobra" Ball (who literally has the power to look at his wife and impregnate her), real estate mogul Justin (a.k.a. Del) Webb, two-time campus bench press champion Spawn, and "Silent" Yeh (who once fixed a PlayStation simply by turning it upside down).

While Jamie went to IU to get away from Amy, he couldn't keep her out of his head, no matter how many chicks he hooked up with on the intramural softball fields under cover of night. His actions became erratic:
-He began riding bikes. For fun.
-For some reason in 1997, he decided to run for Treasurer of Pi Kappa Phi. And he WON.
-During a Fall 1998 trip to Champaign, Illinois, Jamie slept on a bus.
-For some reason in 1998, he decided to run for President of Pi Kappa Phi. And he WON.
-After playing Blink 182's "Dammit" on the guitar in front of a co-ed who had never heard the song before, Jamie claimed he wrote the song, even though he, in fact, had not.
-At one point in 1999, he screamed to a crowded bar, "I will do anyone in here . . . except for the guys," and then didn't follow through, instead puking out the window of a fellow fraternity brother's moving car.

He had maintained a façade of friendship with Amy throughout his first three years at IU. But then in April 1999, Jamie decided to throw caution to the win, drink a fifth of vodka, and email Amy his true feelings. For months, Amy rebuffed Jamie's daily telephone calls, emails, and telegrams. However, in early August 1999, the unthinkable happened: Amy agreed to go out with Jamie.

As he entered his senior year, Jamie was on top of the world. In addition to beginning his long-awaited relationship with Amy, Jamie lived in what the Indiana Daily Student deemed "The Most Powerful Room on Campus." Among the four roommates, they held the following campus positions: President of Interfraternity Council; President of Pi Kappa Phi; two members (including the President) of the Board of Aeons (a highly elite unit of assassins that reports directly to the Dean of Students); President of Blue Key Honor Fraternity (a highly elite unit of key swallowers that reports directly to the Dean of Students); the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Order of Omega (a highly elite unit of marionette puppeteers that reports directly to the Dean of Students); Secretary of Mortar Board (a highly elite unit of bricklayers that reports directly to the Dean of Students).

Even after Jamie and Amy's union, the debauchery didn't stop. In September 1999, Jamie became a founding member of Cervical Implosion, a fiery British punk band that included two members named after venereal diseases (Chlamydia and The Clap), an unnamed man in a cloth football helmet who simply danced, a keyboardist who shrieked backing vocals, and an unnamed Anglo singer with shoulder-length red hair. Despite having no formal or informal training, Jamie was the group's drummer, although he did not own nor have access to any drums, so he used the guitarist's amp as his drum kit during the group's first -- and what would be their only -- live performance. Among their songs were "Burning Urination," "Abortion Monday," "Should've Used a Hangar, Bitch" (which the lead singer dedicated to his mother), "Sucking Cock" (about an unfortunate trip to jail), and a stirring cover of Everclear's "Santa Monica" sung by a ski-masked German guest singer. At least one scotch glass was broken, along with at least six political careers. Later in the school year, he would urinate both on an automated teller machine and into a southern Michigan lake.

After graduating with a degree in business in May 2000, Jamie got hammered at Kilroy's. That summer, Jamie rode his bike from San Francisco to Washington, DC. After that, I kept thinking to myself, "There's gotta be a better way," Jamie explained in a 2004 interview with Biped Magazine. "I liked the scenery and being in the open air and all that crap, but the peddling was a pain in the ass -- not to mention the sitting. I wanted to design the dumbest, most awkward, least respectable mode of two-wheel transportation in the history of mankind. So I did." The result? The Segway.

In August 2000, Jamie moved to Dayton, Ohio to kill puppies for the Procter & Gamble subsidiary Iams, where he met and later became roommates with future Blue Gate Killas rappers Tron and $2 Dolla. Amy followed Jamie to Dayton a year later and began teaching third graders how to spell, do elementary arithmetic, and not have sex behind a desk when they should have been at recess.

In 2002, Jamie decided that he had not yet accomplished enough in his life, so he ran for an open seat on the Indiana University Board of Trustees. His campaign slogan was "Fuck Old People," or something to that effect. Whatever it was, it worked. At 24, Jamie was the youngest person and first out-of-state resident ever elected to the Board of Trustees.

In 2003, Jamie and Amy got married at a small Christian ceremony, an oddity in the largely pagan Northville. Instead of a limo, the bride and groom rode from their ceremony to the reception on a stretched Segway. The honeymooned for one week each in Easter Island, the Galapagos, and Tierra del Fuego.

With a small fortune built up from his invention of the Segway and dog slaying proficiency, as well as Amy's pear money, Jamie and Amy became avid collectors of Pontiac Fieros, amassing over 50. They also founded a company called Darsh, which made whoopee cushions in the shape of Fieros.

Unfortunately, the Belangers lost much of their fortune by investing in Bernard Madoff's Antique Spoon Fund, which was a diversified fund invested in "a bunch of different old spoons," according to the fund's brochures. "We had to sell most of our Fieros," Jamie told Fiero Aficionado. Darsh soon folded as well, due to a stunning lack of sales predicted only by every single financial advisor.

But not all was lost. Currently, Jamie no longer kills dogs for a living, but still lives in suburban Dayton, where he builds blimps for the Department of Defense. He and Amy have two kids -- Albert Clifford, named after AC Slater, and Gavin Rossdale, named after Gavin Rossdale -- a house, two Fieros, and five refrigerators. "Refrigeration is power. It's as simple as that."

On March 4, 2009, Jamie became the 100,000th visitor to the mildly popular weblog, Give Me Your Handrew. When asked by the New York Times about his most recent milestone, Jamie responded, "I was?"

1 comment:

wee said...

I forgot about the story when Jamie slept on that bus at U of I....that one was hilarious!