A Masshole’s Tale: The Werewolf Of Pelham
One of my favorite trolls as a married feller is we’ll be out driving and we’ll see some guy hanging around in some random place who looks like he’s a literal werewolf by night, like he’s really slovenly and ghetto or he has a super-weird-looking body that’s in the shape of some random Picasso drawing, and I’ll say to Petunia, “If anything ever happens to me, I want you to find that bro and marry him on the spot.” It never gets old, guys, I’m telling you.
Which brings us to the story of “The Werewolf Of Pelham.”
Before I semi-retired, I worked at a small lab chemical sales office with two other dudes for 20 years. Talk about misery, no females around at all, just three dudes acting like numskulls and trying not to throw computer monitors at each other when we were having our male menstrual periods.
But the worst thing was that our office was in Pelham, NH, the Selma Alabama of New England. The average age of the residents is around 90. Neighbors compete with each other to see who can score the biggest Trump sign for their lawn so they can make their property look like Satan’s drive-in. The only place that has decent food at all is Brando’s, a sunny but miserable little joint owned by a Ukranian-or-whatever guy who always asked me “Put the cheese?” when I ordered anything. I never wanted any goddam cheese, but he always asked. Like, no, Person I’ve Known For Ten Years, don’t put any of that science-experiment industrial-waste American cheese crap on my fish sandwich, don’t put it on my pastrami, not the tuna sub for God’s sake, not anything but the steak and cheese. That’s why they call it “steak and cheese,” that’s when you definitely put the fucking cheese. Okay?
There’s no good pizza in Pelham, not at Brando’s or anyplace else. I really hate pizza anyway and can only tolerate it like once per fiscal quarter, but there’s a lot of fiscal quarters in 20 years, so I tried all the pizza places in town and their pizzas all suck. At the popular place that sells slices, I forget its name, the pizza was a wet, sloppy mess that was so gross and slimy and thin-crusted and disgusting I returned the thing to get my money back. It was like tomato soup spilled onto a giant crepe. Man was I mad.
I digress. The town of Pelham sits right in a devil’s triangle of New Hampshire hopelessness, between Salem and Nashua, two of the stupidest cities ever created by humankind. Salem is a giant mall surrounded by drug-financed barrios, and Nashua is a hellhole where if you’re single, don’t even bother going to the bars. If you go to a bar in Nashua to find someone to have sex with, you’ll fail, unless you went to all the same grade schools and whatnot as the locals. If you’re a Masshole like me and you try to pick up someone at a Nashua bar, you may as well be a three-headed alien trying to sell them a whole life policy. You’ll never be accepted, not ever. It’s totally different in Mass, though. If you go to a party in Mass and meet some random person, guy or girl, they’ll invite you to something, maybe even Christmas dinner. They want to be close friends, and right now. I’ve had brand new acquaintances from Mass literally get pissed at me for not wanting to come over and chill and get stoned or whatnot. New Hampshire people, by contrast, are so insular and incestuous and weird; we tried to have an actual normal dinner party once, and half of the small handful of people we invited never showed up, never called, never explained later, never nothin. We were like, “Um, exactly what planet are we on?” The only people we’re actually friends with in NH are people who aren’t originally from NH, savvy?
Jfc look at the time. Anyway, the werewolf.
I started noticing that almost every time I was driving from my office to Brando’s to get my sub WITHOUT GODDAM CHEESE, I’d see this guy walking randomly up or down Bridge Street, the main heavily clotted artery of Pelham, or just sitting there on a rock or a guardrail or whatever. He had all-gray hair and a fluffy but well-kempt beard. You know, like Teen Wolf, but old.
I figured he was an old marine vet who’d been screwed by The Man, that he’d maybe seen too much bad stuff in Da Nang or Baghdad or whatever, and he was only living in stupid idiotic Pelham because there was no plan B, but I never asked him what his deal was when he was loitering around near the gas station while I was getting gas. Why? Because I was afraid that if I pulled over in my truck with Skinny Puppy blasting out of the speakers to ask him exactly who tf he was, he’d yell at me.
Or worse…?
And so I became obsessed with The Werewolf Of Pelham. I wanted to do some sort of YouTube thing or whatnot as an homage, I wasn’t sure what, just… something to immortalize him. I took pics of him and shot some phone-video of him, but the footage always came out grainy, like that famous little soundless film clip of the fake Bigfoot walking around in a Pacific Northwest forest or highway rest stop or wherever they did it.
I saw that dude almost every other day for 20 years. Same blue coat when it was cold, clean tee shirt when it was warm, same werewolf fur on his face. Always standing around or walking, always inspecting Pelham to make sure no one had any silver bullets. I really hope he’s still alive.
—
My second book, My Year In The Online Left, is out. Meantime, if you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my previous book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in those books, but you’ll get it, I promise. My Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com (I’m spending a lot more time there now), my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social (ditto) and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9 (I do visit it daily).
