When I was an undergraduate, I listened to a fair amount of punk. Like a lot of folks in that crowd, I listened to The Dead Kennedys. They have a solid catalog, but a relatively small one. So, I started poking around to see what else Jello Biafra had done, and I stumbled upon the band Lard. I listened to their first CD (I’m honestly not sure if they have more than one) a few times. The title song has the line, “Did you ever hear about that guy in New York whose dick fell off in the bath after he shot it full of coke? It’s okay to run out of butter in Zambia, just smear squished caterpillars on your toast” (or something like that). I laughed when I heard it, but apparently a guy really tried to do that. I haven’t listened to the song in over a decade, but the line came back into my head recently for some reason, and I knew that I had to write about it, so that’s what this is.



Zeke Jarvis is a Professor of English at Eureka College. His work has appeared in Bitter Oleander, 2 Bridges Review, and Moon City Review. His books include So Anyway…, In A Family Way, The Three of Them, and Antisocial Norms.