(Recently, Michael Moore called to ask if I would provide a quick afterword to a book he is currently finishing up. I have no clue as to what this book is called nor do I know much of what it's about. All I was told is that it will deal with Survival. Well, if there's one topic I know quite a bit about, it's baseball. Or rocknroll. Or eBay's stringent Deadbeat Bidder policy. But, since we can't always pick which way these favors are floated into us, all that's left is to give it a quick rip & hope like hell no one steps on the foul line...)

You can't be serious. You want me to write an "afterword" for a book dealing with Survival? This makes even less sense than the time you asked me to fast-dance with your wife to some Kool & The Gang rumba at that TV Nation wrap party. It raises too many questions... first and foremost, when are you ever gonna get off your ass and find us another TV gig? I need the dough to... well, survive. And another thing ó what the hell is an "afterword?"

My hunch is that Kathy has probably informed you that I've been conferring of late with the garter snake that's living under my dryer. I'm guessing you find this just off-kilter enough to qualify me as some sort of trenchant no-brow on the topic of survival. Ah, who cares what you think? The real survivor here is the snake... a mid-sized Garter who continues to defy any shred of reptilian logic I might have by sticking it out ó no, no ó thriving in my washroom.

I first met Pete (I call him that because, ah hell, I forget) in my kitchen. I was poking in my refrigerator when I caught a peripheral glance of, what I believed to be, my guitar chord wriggling around the dinette set. Naturally, I assumed this was only another cockeyed visual byproduct of combining bourbon and benzodiazepines for, as we both know, guitar chords very seldom just start prancing about on their own. Closer examination introduced me to Pete. As soon as I turned toward him, he began downshifting into serious side-wind and scrambled through the hall toward the back of the house. I followed him until he disappeared under the dryer. I just stood there for a second admiring his deft jaunt to safety, then I reacted as most ninny homeowners would by observing,"Oh dear CHRIST, there's a goddamn SNAKE in my HOUSE!!!"

Originally, I thought Pete was only staying put because he was frozen with snake-dread and terrified of my feet. However, it's been two weeks now and I have come to believe he's simply indecisive and lazy as shit. Seeing as how I can relate to both of these characteristics, I've found no good reason to prod him out from underneath my dryer. I've given him ample encouragement to return outside ó abandoning the house, leaving the backdoor wide open, washing double loads, blasting garage rock 45s that would've driven Noriega to carve his ears off ó but he appears to be a born squatter.

I've also come to learn who I can tell about Pete. Turns out not everyone swings to the notion that a snake on the loose is a proper houseguest. A while back I had my neighbor over here for a beer and I made casual mention of housing a snake under my dryer. No lie, it was as if I'd told him the Viet Cong were downstairs prepping Sandra Dee for a gang-bang. Carl slammed down his beer and jumped from the table. The bloodlust was immediate and gruesome.

"You grab your rib tongs and I'll dice him with the hoe. The fucker is done for!"

I had to snatch him by the shirttail as he shot for the door. "Relax, man... it's only a common garter snake. He's here as my guest."

Carl gave me that look I'd seen plenty over the years. It was the same look that the nuns had given when I asked if Jesus could see through women's clothes. The same look that my foreman had given me when I asked if I could attach warning labels to the clocks that hung over us in our department. As you know, I don't do well with people. Little wonder the government pays me to stay away from them.

"I have to get going," Carl said, and he's not been back.

A similar reaction occurred the next night. Bridget and Sonya were up here to pay a visit and though something told me it might be a shaky idea to confide such information about Pete to kinfolk only yearning for a quiet vacation, I felt it my duty to at least make them aware of the fact that I had a snake boarding on the premises... just on the off-chance Pete decided to come slithering back to the kitchen for another hasty impersonation of a guitar chord. After all, sisters and daughters are still girls (no matter how many grandspuds and nephews they rain down on me) and girls aren't exactly famous for their tolerance of reptiles.

Upon learning of Pete, the gals decided we should go elsewhere-anywhere and, as often happens up in this jerk-water boondocks, that typically means a trip up to the Leelanau Sands Casino ("Where Mother Nature meets Lady Luck"... or as a few of my Native American buddies refer to it, "Custer's all-night ATM.") I took out my Sands Showroom events calendar and noticed that ó barring some illogical sell-out and/or last-minute rush on pointlessness ó we could still be on hand for the Herman's Hermits concert that night.

As you're only too aware, I prefer to drink heavily when confronting the combo trepidation of rock 'n roll and the Human Race. It's often a loony liaison that turns groggy taxpayers into total frothing cretins who pull weird gaffes like applauding bass solos, igniting cigarette lighters and purchasing roses as sex bribes. And though you might figure that a Herman's Hermits show at this point in the 21st Century would hardly spawn much in the way of hysteria or danger, I knew better. There existed a potential psychological ugliness to it that could far eclipse anything found back at Altamont... for as bad as that deal was, at least Sonny Barger never pranced about with his fuck-finger plunged deep into his dimple cavity while hounding the audience to clap along in wooden rhythm to British beerhall twee like "Leaning On The Lamp Post" and "I'm Henry The Eighth I Am" as Peter "Herman" Noone was apt to do. Look, Mike... it's one thing to have your only daughter and kid sister see you tanked. It's quite another to have them see you become just another demoted Caucasian sap huffin' fumes from the Way-Back Machine and behaving like the geezer you swore you'd never dare evolve into.

I showed the gals to our seats and then went back to fetch two Beam and Cokes. I looked over the crowd. They seemed absurdly old. They seemed so old that most of them would've already been settling into second mortgages and tax shelters back when Herman's Hermits played Flint's Atwood Stadium in '67. Of course, that show still remains a very sore subject with me...

If you recall, The Hermits headlined a bill that afternoon that also featured The Who and The Blues Magoos. It was Keith Moon's 21st birthday and to salute this milestone, The Who ripped off an especially LOUD and brutalizing set that ended up with their customary equipment carnage and hundreds of teenyboppers being treated for full-blown sensory deprivation. Moon later topped off the visit with his notorious limousine-in-the-Holiday-Inn-swimming-pool maneuver and Flint was never really quite the same. Unfortunately, I wasn't party to any of it. Since my Ma figured I was too young to attend a Herman's Hermits concert, I spent most of the day bouncing a tennis ball off the side of the garage and pretending I was dead. Thinking back, I'm not even sure I was pretending.

So, after all these years I'm finally old enough to see Herman's Hermits ó though the lure of it is not what it once was. I take my cocktails back to my seat and rejoin the girls just as the token deejay from the token oldies station begins her token gush about how many millions of records Herman has sold and British Invasion this and Ed Sullivan that, then adding some dumb inquiry as to whether we're all prepared "to relive the wonderful sounds of The Past." This spiel is so mired in squaredom that I feel compelled to lean over and tell Bridget and Sonya ó both of whom knew the lyrics to "Beat On The Brat" before the age of five ó that Lester Bangs once described The Ramones as being the direct result of a Hydrogen Bomb dropped on Herman's Hermits' heads. It just seemed the parental thing to do.

The lights dimmed and Peter Noone came bounding on stage to the happy-go-loopy strains of "I'm Into Something Good." Here's the strange part ó suddenly, so was I! I'm not sure what overtook me ó the booze, the beat, the crisp sound of the Rickenbockers, or maybe just some nostalgia-riddled jolt that escorted me back to the time Mary Jane Farenelli allowed me to maul her bosom in the cry room of St. Luke's Church after altar boy practice ó but I'll be damned if I wasn't plain old giddy in the gourd. The hits just kept on a-comin' and by the time they rounded the bend into the jangle-pop bliss of "She's A Must To Avoid," I was actively ó aw, shit ó participating. My legs were bouncing up and down and I even ditched my drinks so that I could use my hands to... clap!

I looked around the room and the crowd didn't look old anymore. I looked at the cop by the stage and he didn't look cop anymore. I looked up at Peter Noone and he didn't look hidden-from-range-on-a-sunny-afternoon-at-Atwood-Stadium anymore.

It was all so pleasant and silly and jouncy and wholesome. So much so that when Noone attributed The Hermits' spryness and longevity to never having touched a single drug in their lives, I found myself being one of the first to leap up and join in on thunderous applause... never mind the fact that I'd been a pharmaceutical piñata for nigh on two decades and the only reason I was even capable of sitting there now was because I'd been sure to swaddle myself in a long flowing robe of dull narcotics.

Oh, well. Boys will be boys and Hermits will be Hermits and sometimes neither of them quite grow up. And as Peter Noone hopped around the stage in the throes of a silly Watusi conniption, while glee and bedlam abounded at the first tinny chords of "I'm Henry The Eighth I Am," I knew that the two of us were total pros at the art of survival. We were just coming at it from different ways. I did drugs, he skipped them. I got paid to avoid people, he got paid to amuse them. I had Pete under my dryer, he had Mrs. Brown's lovely daughter.

Anyway, speaking of survival, have you talked with Stan lately? If not, perhaps you'd better. He's back to writing these boisterous manifestos about how we're all doomed and swerving towards an uncivilized End like guppies in a urinal. Some of it has the familiar edgy residue of The Unabomber to it... though, to Stan's credit, I doubt Kaczynski had the sense of humor necessary to pull off a line like "When death is all around, the dead are part of the landscape, and we stop listening to them." Hard to argue with that, I suppose.

There's been more than a few signals that Stan's slowly coming apart. For instance, not only did he sell me his kid's amplifier and insist on helping me locate a guitar, he's now becoming more and more insistent that we move my pal Sandra up here from Fayetteville so the three of us can spearhead a punk rock band called Motor Crotch. He even admits to staying up all hours of the night perfecting "farfisa runs" from old Question Mark & The Mysterians records. I need not remind you this is pretty oddball behavior for a 47-year-old school advisor who as recently as eight weeks ago was performing Chopin sonatas in the lounge of Horizon Books.

The clincher came a couple nights back when JD was up here to perform one of his acoustic guitar shows at some coffeehouse over in Lake Leelanau. As you might have guessed, I invented a lame excuse as to why I couldn't attend as both coffee and folk music tend to make me fidgety and suicidal. I agreed to meet JD and Stan up at O'Keefe's Bar after the gig.

Par for the course, I drank and drank some more while Stan held it right on course for his two-beer limit. In fact, even the bartenders up here are so familiar with his pattern that they now have joined the rest of us regulars in referring to him as Two Beer Stan. This really has nothing to do with the fiendish surveillance of the hicktown cops in these parts or Stan's inability to hold his ale. It's simply that, like you, the guy has always been fiercely proud of the fact that he's never once in his life been drunk or, hell, even tipsy. For this alone, I've never trusted either of you.

Well, the craziest thing happened. It was almost last call and we were starting to move for the door when Stan suddenly stops short with that Jack Webb gait of his and turns back to Tonya the barmaid and orders himself a third beer! I shit thee nay, Mike... the whole bar went dead silent and drunk men became sober and the jukebox ground to a halt and huge swarms of barn swallows lit from their perches and streaked in wild patterns above the bay and children woke up screaming for their dead uncles and I looked at JD and he looked at me and we both looked at Stan and he never looked any more pleased with himself. It was almost like Charles Lindbergh landing in Paris and stepping out of the plane to see that he'd diced off the heads of Hitler and Bruno Hauptmann while taxiing in.

It was good, good stuff and I couldn't tell whether or not that extra beer got Stan at all buzzed, but it gave me an added one just to see history being made and our pal finally loosening up. I took it as some kind of sign that the world we know wasn't gonna end after all as Stan had been faithfully predicting. What's better, I don't think he believed it either. We were all gonna make it. All we ever do is survive. It's what's for breakfast.

The next day I looked under my dryer, but Pete had gone away.

— Ben Hamper