We were introduced to the saga of Peter and Raymond when we moved next door to them in the fall of 1987. As neighbors, we lived in the same Pepto-Bismol-colored apartment building in San Francisco's Lower Haight. The building was designed like a cheap motel, so that the apartments were sardined alongside one another and separated by thin walls.

Within a week of our arrival, we were exposed to what would become a dependable routine form our next door neighbors: evenings charged with belligerent rants, hateful harangues, drunken soliloquies, death threats, and the sound of wrestling bodies thumping against the wall that separated our apartments. Peter and Raymond fought with a raging abandon and total disregard for everyone in the building. Initially, we were angered by the volume and recurrence of the arguments, but equally we were intimidated by the threatening content. Whenever we got angry enough to go next door, confront them and ask them to keep the noise down, we were forced to give the idea a second thought. Perched in their front window, facing the walkway greeting all who dared pass, was a human skull; what horror would greet us?" However, one can be meek and tolerant for only so long. Unnerved by sleepless nights and Peter's incessant refrain, "Shut Up Little Man" one of us banged on their door, only to receive the first of many murderous death threaths from Ray. "I'm perfectly willing to kill anyone that thinks they're tough. I was a killer before you were born, I'll be a killer after you're dead." Soon thereafter the notion of recording their threats -- in case of the need for criminal proof of an assault -- was born.

The first crudely recorded "session" featured a monologue by Ray muttering to himself about his desire to kill. There was something so nakedly sinister about the recording that we were shocked, mystified. At the same time, it instilled in us a hunger for more. We invested in the technology for crisper recordings (we bought a cheap microphone from Radio Shack) and fell into our own obsessive routine of taping. Eventually, our desire for capturing fresh dialogue led us to employ phone prank tactics (listen to "I Was a Mean Muthafucka in Ma Time" and "Nova Express Survey on Alcoholism"). The material that we successfully taped was deliciously dark and incredibly infectious. Day in, Day out, we rehearsed Raymond and Peter's dialogues; their phraseology and curious logic became our own. After several months of taping, we became Peter and Ray (though we certainly don't condone gay-bashing or senseless murder).

Our recording was not as secretive as one might suspect. Several times during their extended shouting matches we placed a speaker on the walkway outside their door and subjected them to the tyranny of their own taped voices. At some point in the process, we recorded Peter saying, "The neighbors are taping us again," to which Ray responded, "Good. Hey, next door! I want to tell the whole world that Peter ain't nothing but a lyin', thievin', piece of shit." [Well, Ray, these recordings are your chance!] Clearly invasion of privacy is an issue here, but as our friend Seymour Glass once said, "You have to wonder how much right to privacy a person who's screaming at the top of his lungs expects."

It should be noted that neither Pete nor Ray worked. They drank. They watched TV. They fought. They rarely left the house, except to go to O'Looney's convenience store for liquor or to Walgreen's for smokes. There were frequent visits from the San Francisco Police Department, the Fire Department, and Paramedic teams. Sometimes they spent the night in jail, sometimes in the hospital. To make matters more interesting, Tony -- a Southern-bred Vietnam vet and white trash drifter -- moved in and out of their apartment during the time we lived next door. In many ways he was the scariest of the three, recalling a movie extra from Deliverance. Tony provided the catalyst for more fighting, new jealousies, and shifting alliances. We are frequently asked about the exact nature of Raymond and Peter's relationship, but can provide no definitive answer. It remained opaque to us. It is clear, however, that they fought with a penetrating hate that can only be Love.

Peter and Raymond have already assumed legendary status among our friends, families, the police, and the subterranean network of tape traders. This CD will only serve to further propagate the gospel of Pete and Ray, and perhaps will change the face of hatred and self-loathing forever. As a compilation of their best rants, it provides an excellent insight into the themes that constituted their very lives: booze, killing, fisticuffs, thievery, the SFPD, Tony, homosexuality, hospitals, hatred, and corned beef hash.

It is a curious pleasure to have one's private obsession become public domain, as is the case for us concerning these recordings. We are certain that you will find them as darkly comic and compelling as we do.

"Where Are the Police?":
How the Whole Thing Got Started
Shut Up Little Man made the transition from a private obsession to the public realm in the Spring of 1992. I had moved away from the Pepto Bismol Palace in 1989 to work on my Master's degree in Madison, Wisconsin. Three years later, I received a phone call from Seymour Glass, the editor of Bananafish magazine. He said: "Eddie? Eddie Lee Sausage? This is Seymour Glass from Bananafish magazine in San Francisco. I want to talk to you about some famous ex-neighbors of yours." Having been blessed and cursed with a rather rich and nomadic life, a life that had facilitated my living in many different cities (and next door to many different people), I was sort of confused and bewildered. "What famous ex-neighbors?" I asked. Seymour responded: "Peter and Raymond." My face opened to a toothy grin: "How the hell do you know about Pete and Ray?" Seymour went on to explain that he had received a tape of Peter and Raymond from his friends in that great musical ensemble, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. The Thinking Fellers had received a tape from someone in Iowa, who had obtained a tape from someone in New York, who . . . and so on. Seymour said: "Everyone out here is listening to tapes of these guys."

I had seen Bananafish when I lived in the Bay Area and had found it to be one of the most consistently provocative journals to chronicle schizo subterranean culture, and Seymour Glass is one of the few people I have met who is obviously possessed by genius. So, it was an honor to be interviewed by him for Bananafish. A month or two later, Seymour ran our exchange in Bananafish 5. [See Interview #2] Following the printed interview, he transcribed a few pages of dialogue from the tapes. Tedium House, the publisher of Bananfish, also produced 500 copies of each of the six volumes of the original recordings and offered them through their PO Box. They quickly sold out. Seymour assembled several artists, including Dan Clowes, Gary Lieb, Dame Darcy, Christine Shields and Paul Musso, to generate the first edition of the Shut Up Little Man comic book. The comic book also sold out.

"I Hear You Fartin' Certain Tunes":
The Shut Up Little Man CD
Several months later, Johan Kugelberg, a Bananafish fan and an AOR man for Matador Records, called one afternoon to offer Mitchell and I a contract for a Shut Up Little Man CD. Delightedly, we agreed to a contract (both of us receiving a whopping $125) for a first pressing of Shut Up Little Man. I flew out to San Francisco for a long weekend, and in one extended full-on all-night session Mitchell and I selected 36 segments to be featured on the CD.

The Shut Up Little Man CD was released in the Spring of 1993. There was a sudden flurry of articles discussing the recordings in Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Spin, and Playboy (which we read only for the article). The press was fairly consistent and typically superficial, but they all treated the fact that the recordings were darkly comic and deeply unsettling. The Washington Post called the recordings 'hilarious, but profoundly disturbing.' Vanity Fair said that the CD was 'grimly fascinating, full of light-hearted moments ("You fuckin' piece of shit") and tenderness ("I want to kill you").' And, Spin chimed in: 'This epic documentary is as disturbing as it is hilarious.'

The press treated the Shut Up Little Man recordings as an example of what some were calling The Audio Verite craze. The CD came to public attention just as other surreptitious recordings were appearing. Some of these recordings featured celebrity outbursts (e.g. Buddy Rich screaming at his underpaid band, Casey Kassem cursing out the copy editor of his famous Top 40 show, and so forth). Simultaneously, there was a sudden proliferation of Prank Tapes, like the legendary "Red's Tube Bar Tape," the not yet famous "Jerky Boy" tapes, and the Pittsburgh Fightster prank calls. So, as is typical of the press, all of these recordings were lumped together as some sort of movement sweeping the nation. And yet, several of the journalists noted that somehow Shut Up Little Man was different or in its own class, because (1) it was not the nasty private side of public figures (like Rich or Kassem) and (2) not the assumed personalities of pranksters. The Shut Up Little Man recordgins were, of course, real live tapes of down-and-out maniacal inner city drunkards. And, despite the fact that Peter and Raymond's dialogue was repeatedly compared to writers -- Beckett, Bukowski, and Mamet -- part of the unusual appeal and simple power of the recordings was that they were real.

"I Can Kill You Instantly":
The Accelerated Proliferation of Shut Up Little Man
The events surrounding Peter and Raymond and their endless fisticuffs were always weird, but they were about to get weirder. By some strange osmotic process that still confounds and thrills me, the Shut Up Little Man recordings began to seep up into the social sphere like bubbling crude. A friend called from New Orleans; he had met a woman at a party who had given him her phone number. When he called her to ask her out on a date, she had Peter and Raymond on her answering machine. Another friend from Seattle called to tell me that while she was out at a dive bar the previous night, she overheard someone doing Pete and Ray routines. Inspired, she started doing them too. Then, other people in the bar began to do bits of dialogue. Eventually, someone went out to their car and brought in a Shut Up Little Man tape; the bartender played it over the PA System. I went to see John Zorn, one of my favorite jazz composers, performing with his experimental game-playing ensemble, Cobra. The keyboard player had sampled Shut Up Little Man, and thus, throughout the evening -- amidst the saxophone squawks and grinding guitar breaks -- there would be sampled little blasts of: "Shut your fuckin' mouth!" or "I want to kill!" My boss came into work one day, saying: "Last night I was flipping through cable and there was some show on the access channel that had Bert and Ernie puppets acting out Shut Up Little Man dialogue." I began to read the then-latest book by the papa of cyberpunk, William Gibson, entitled Virtual Light. The novel featured a section wherein the main character, Rydell, cruises around the Lower Haight (where Peter and Raymond and Mitchell and I used to live). Rydell sees some wounded character maneuvering down Haight Street, screaming one of Ray's most endearing lines: "If you wanna talk to me, then shut your fuckin' mouth!"

The CD sold out a second pressing. Then, a third pressing. There was a one-act play in Los Angeles. There was a sort of Punch and Judy puppet show based on the Shut Up Little Man recordings in Iowa. Bands were regularly sampling bits of Peter and Raymond and sending us copies of their music (The Swirlies, Thinking Fellers Union, Kurt Tazelaar, Mary's Danish, Dino Dimuro). There was another play in South Carolina. The press also continued: an article in The Onion, The Nose, The Wire, and several other zines. Asked by the NME to pick his favorite CD of the year, techno star Moby chose Shut Up Little Man. Kelly Deal of the Breeders chose Shut Up Little Man as one of her Top 10 for Rolling Stone. A young filmmaker named Tim from the DC area began to call me at odd hours of the day, proclaiming that he was shooting a film based on Peter and Raymond. His reports were always entertaining, mildly disturbing, and appropriately, only after he had drunken a substantial amount of hard liquor.

The Shut Up Little Man gospel was spreading, and as I said, it was getting weird. A radio station, BFM in Auckland, New Zealand, obtained a copy of the CD. The station manager, a kind and witty soul named Graeme Humphries, saw the soap operatic aspect of Peter and Raymond and decided to draw that to the foreground. Therefore, he and his colleagues produced and broadcast a short serial segment of Shut Up Little Man to play daily on the airwaves. Complete with a melodramatic orchestral background (in true soap opera style), the introductory comments would say things such as: "In today's segment of Shut Up Little Man we join Peter and Raymond, as Raymond claims that he can use any weapon there is and Peter marks the vodka." One member of the BFM staff, Robert, made a journey all the way to the Bay Area in search of Peter and Raymond. Ray, the little man, had died, but he did find a receptive Peter and Tony at the old Pepto Bismol Palace ready and willing to be interviewed for the radio show. The resulting recording, "The Peter and Tony Interview," was equally as funny and disturbing as the original tapes. In a way "The Peter and Tony Interview" held a particular fascination, as it was a sort of "backstage" at the Peter and Raymond show.

"Little Man, Look at What You've Done Here":
The Shut Up Little Man Play
One evening I received a call from Gregg Gibbs, a Los Angeles painter and fringe actor. Gibbs, along with his friend Charles Schneider, had done a short performance based on the Shut Up Little Man dialogue at a small café in Los Angeles. He and Schneider had now made an arrangement with the Kim Light Gallery, an established and well-respected art gallery, to put together a full-length play based on the recordings. Gibbs was calling to secure rights to the play and to see how involved Mitchell and I would like to be in the process. I agreed to be a creative consultant and to curate a documentary exhibit to augment the play. I flew out to Los Angeles and began to put together my exhibit in a small gallery adjacent to the main stage. I enlarged photographs of Pete and Ray and the Pepto Bismol Palace; I framed a letter from the landlord warning Peter and Raymond that they would be evicted if they did not stop yelling. I displayed some of the paintings and comics that Shut Up Little Man fans had made and sent to me, and I filled a glass case with cheap vodka that I had purchased at O'Looney's and Kool 100 cigarettes from Walgreen's.

The Shut Up Little Man play was composed essentially of transcribed lines from the recordings, assembled by Gibbs in an order that suggested some sort of dramatic arc. There were no lines in the play that were not on the tapes. The only inventive segment that the 'script' called for came at the climax, a rather gruesome scene wherein one of the boys murders (or dreams that he murders) the other by cutting open his belly. The cast was fairly strong. Gill Gayle, a remarkably intense and (appropriately) diminutive little man, proved to be a very convincing Raymond Huffmann. Gill had played Charles Manson in the cult favorite play, Timothy and Charlie. Liam Stone, a charming older gentleman with a penchant for Quentin Crisp, was to play Peter Haskett. Liam accentuated the bitchy queen side of Peter. Bob Taicher, the producer for Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain and a writer on Santa Sangre, was to be Pete and Ray's sullen Nam vet roommate, Tony.

It is difficult for me to write about the 'director,' Gregg Gibbs, because my Mommy said, 'if you can't say anything nice about someone, don't say anything at all.' And, about the only nice thing I can say about Gibbs is: His rich parents had a nice house, a nice house in which he at thirty-something, still lived. Other than that nice little thing I said about him, he was essentially a poster boy for pure megalomania -- a self-obsessed reefer-puffing egotist, well-versed in the high Hollywood art of flattery and inflated praise (as long as there was something he wanted from you): "Eddie baby, you're a total genius," "Eddie, you have created one of the most important works of the century!" Once or twice his flattery was so excessive, I said: "Um, actually, I just pushed the record button on the tape machine." After watching Gibbs eviscerate a stagehand for bumping into the stage and leaving a two inch mark on its surface, I quietly assembled my exhibit and got out of there as fast as I could, agreeing to return for the opening of the play. I left Los Angeles and flew up to San Francisco to spend two days with Mitchell and to find Peter Haskett, the piece of fuckin' shit.

"What Did You Do During the War?":
A Drunken Interview with Peter Haskett
We never expected the CD to find an audience, much less to sell out a few pressings. But, when it did, we felt obligated to find Peter, to explain to him that he was quickly becoming an underground star, and to give him some money. The record company, therefore, cut us a check in Peter's name; "royalties," shall we say, for his vocal duet with Raymond. We had heard that Peter had moved from the Pepto-Bismol Palace to an even more run-down tenement in that seediest part of San Francisco, the Tenderloin. Mitchell did some sleuthing and found his new address. At the apartment building we were informed by the ferocious building-manager (a Patel, of the famous Bay Area slumlord family) that Peter Haskett did indeed live there, but that he was not home. Therefore, we sat out on the stoop to await Peter's arrival.

We waited and waited for more than two hours. Just as we were about to give up, Mitchell slapped me, pointed down the street, and said: "Holy shit, here he comes!" Peter was wobbling slowly up the hill toward us. He had on a little windbreaker and a pair of sunglasses to shield his booze-saturated eyes. He also had a small plastic bag containing a quart of Gin, a big bottle of discount cream soda, and a baguette sheathed in its grocery wrapper.

As Peter arrived at the entrance of his tenement, Mitchell and I hastily introduced ourselves and explained that several years ago we were his next-door neighbors on Steiner Street. He looked at us as if he was in shock. We informed him that we wanted to talk with him awhile and that we would like to buy him a drink. He stared us up and down for a moment, his eyebrows arching over his shades, and agreed to join us. Just across the street was a little dive bar called The Owl Tree Tavern. We made our way inside and ordered some drinks [Peter: "Uh, Eddie, order me a Vodker"].

We had not seen him face-to-face since 1989, when we had moved out of the Pepto. Time and the tide of endless booze had not been good to Peter. The fueled manic voice on the "Shut Up Little Man" recordings, the voice that pierced so many low-down nights, was now long gone. Instead, his voice intoned in a long slow almost Western drawl. In fact, all and all, Peter was excessively sloppy and slow. There was something mushy about him, like an over-ripe melon. That evening in the Owl Tree Tavern I kept thinking that he would simply turn to ectoplasm before my eyes. It was really quite sad.

Mitchell and I attempted to explain to him what had happened - the entire saga of the Shut Up Little Man phenomenon - over and over. He would stop and interrupt us, repeatedly denying that he and Ray ever fought(!), denying the Raymond would ever threaten anyone(!), and in general just proving himself to be the asshole the recordings always revealed him to be. In fact, it took more than an hour to tell the simple story (six times in all), because he did not believe us. Or at least he pretended not to believe us. I mean, Peter was a very smart man, excuse me lady, and we couldn't tell if he was just being coy, if he was just drunk ("that is not called being drunk"), or if he had really lost his mind.

Of course, Mitchell and I taped the Owl Tree Tavern interview. [See Interview #1]. After the first hour or so of his refusal to believe our story, he began to obsess on sex. Specifically, he wanted to have sex with Mitchell and I, to suck our cocks, to get a hotel room, to show us his pornographic "book of cocks." He made advance after ceaseless advance. Finally, after three hours of drinking and boozy discourse with the man whose ranting gave "Shut Up Little Man" its name, we said farewell to Peter in front of the tavern. Silently, we watched him stumble across the street toward his tenement; automobiles hissed by in the rain.

The following morning Mitchell and I made our way down to Los Angeles with hangovers worthy of. . . well, worthy of Pete or Ray. That very evening was the opening night of the Shut Up Little Man play. It was sold out. There was a line down the block to get in. Gibbs was out of his mind, as usual, but this time because Johnny Depp had stopped by the gallery to buy a "Shut Up Little Man" T-shirt and CD. Mitchell and I had a few drinks, of course, at the opening night reception, and milled about meeting people. Then, the play began. It was very strange to be watching the actors perform Peter's and Raymond's dialogue. Here "Peter" and "Raymond" were fighting in a very pristine upper class venue before a well-scrubbed and receptive audience, peppered with famous film and television stars. It was actually nothing short of surreal, for Mitchell and I had, of course, spent the previous evening in a dive bar with the real Peter, a drunken husk of a sunken man, who absolutely refused to believe that there was a CD or play about him. And yet, here Mitchell and I sat, watching someone portray Peter on stage less than 24 hours later. It was an unsettling cognitive leap.

"Do It or Don't":
The Shut Up Little Man Movie, Take One
There were a lot of film industry folks at the Shut Up Little Man play in Los Angeles, and at least two or three of them wanted to see Shut Up Little Man on the silver screen. So did we. Soon thereafter, we were offered a contract for the development of a feature film. Pete and Ray go to Hollywood! Celluloid pieces of shit and cinematic cocksuckers! Mitchell and I, fundamentally devoted to adventure, were ecstatic about being flown out to Los Angeles to be creative consultants on a film about Peter and Raymond. We were also a little naÔve about the long labyrinthine process that is required to get a film from development to production. The basic idea for the film, according to the developers, was to be that two fresh-faced young men leave behind the comfort and familiarity of the small-town Midwest and move to the big city directly next door to two homicidal booze-swilling maniacs. Two mean-sprited old booze-hounds who were -- both in vociferousness and alcohol intake -- doing their best to outdo Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." In other words, something pretty close to the truth. The developers stated: "We want a sort of Bill and Ted meets Blue Velvet here!" Mitchell and I didn't care about the Bill and Ted part, but we agreed that we wanted something quirky, deeply weird, and deliberately dark; Blue Velvet was at least in the vicinity.

With the hindsight of several years the Shut Up Little Man film development experience was itself like a bad movie. All in all, the principal developers were very kind and graciously accommodating. They treated Mitchell and I well, although at times they seemed to be helpless in their patronizing attitude toward us. We sat through a series of meetings, re-telling the events that surrounded and led to Shut Up Little Man. The developers saw a host of big names playing Peter and Raymond: Tom Waits, Brian Dennehy, Jack Klugman, Dustin Hoffmann, Dennis Hopper. We met with the first screenwriter to feed him ideas and to tell him true-life stories of living next door to Peter and Raymond. He was a nice guy. In fact, he was too nice. He didn't get it. He didn't have the capacity to get it.

"Do It or Don't":
The Shut Up Little Man Movie, Take Two
In the meantime, I moved to Hong Kong to work on a book I was writing on popular resistance and transgression in urban spaces. I received the latest copy of The New Yorker, which featured an illustration and a small capsule review of Gibbs' play, now running in New York City. Then, came a phone call from Mitchell informing me that the film folk wanted us to meet for another conference with the new screen-writer, Larry Gross. So, two days later, I found myself seated at a very well known restaurant in Beverly Hills alongside screenwriter Larry Gross (who wrote 48 Hours amongst many other films), my former roommate Mitchell, and the representatives of our Film Development Company. At the adjacent table was Johnny Depp seated alongside the developers, writers, and directors of the Jerky Boy movie. There was a weird rivalry, which I never understood, between the Shut Up Little Man developers and the Jerky Boy developers. Larry Gross was a great guy and he had some very good ideas, but for some reason the development people didn't like his script. Then, as reported in a March 1994 profile in the Hollywood rag Premiere, Michael Stipe stated that he was considering as his directorial debut the Shut Up Little Man movie.

"Do It or Don't":
The Shut Up Little Man Movie, Take Three
In the fall of 1995 we were asked once again to convene in San Francisco to meet the latest screenwriter, Duane Dell Amico. Duane was working in tandem with the cult movie director, Neil Jimenez, who agreed to sign on as director of the film. Jimenez had essentially prophesied the nihilism and moral jaundice of disaffected youth (which later came to be called "Generation X") in his cult classic, The River's Edge. I for one was relieved and encouraged; I loved Jimenez's work. Duane was definitely the most suave of the screenwriters we had encountered and, like Jimenez, could grasp the essential darkness and elemental hilarity of Peter and Raymond. Together, we walked around the old neighborhood, took pictures of the Pepto Bismol Palace, and shared a lot of stories about Peter and Raymond. Duane and I talked a lot about synchronicity, the process of Chance, and the Surrealist Paul Eluard, a poet we both admired. Mitchell and I were hopeful and confident that things had finally fallen into place. However, there was a disagreement between Jimenez, who wanted to concentrate on and heighten the darkness of the film, and one of the developers, who wanted to aim at a broader audience. It was around this time that Mitchell and I disengaged to a degree from the process and, metaphorically speaking, went to get popcorn.

"I Know How to Use Any Weapon There Is":
The New Shut Up Little Man Comic Book
In the Fall of 1996 a comic illustration arrived in the Shut Up Little Man PO Box. We had received a number of comics, animated cells, and illustrations of Peter and Raymond over the years, but this one was really special. It featured a striking image of Raymond fumbling in the kitchen, screaming "Shut your fuckin' mouth" at Peter. There were a multitude of clever little visual clues that made it evident that the artist was well-versed in Shut Up Little Man lore: a bottle marked "The Vodka," a shopping bag from O'Looney's, Peter's misplaced keys, his 'stolen' billfold, a bottle of The Wine (4 liters, of course), cigarette papers, the stuffed bunny. In general, the illustration had that same unhinged and expansive style that recalled my very favorite comics from the 1970s. I fucking loved it. I wrote back to the artist, M. Flinn, saying: "This is unbelievably good shit! I have been thinking of doing a comic book, would you like to contribute?" M. wrote back saying: "I could spend the rest of my life doing Shut Up Little Man illustrations."

At around the same time an old friend of mine wrote to me saying I should check out Issue #1 of the Fantagraphics' comic Schizo, one of the sickest and most perverse comics I have ever eyeballed, by a guy named Ivan Brunetti. I picked up a copy, read it, and laughed so fuckin' hard my stomach muscles hurt. They still hurt. In one scene God appears in the form of the Aztec Sun and taunts Ivan -- as Peter's once provoked Raymond -- with a series of feminine names: "Okay, Julie. Okay, Alice. What do you think of Mabel?" I wrote to Ivan, telling him of my plan to make a new comic book. Ivan wrote back saying that he actually had a dream that God was taunting him with Peter's lines. [Obviously, this dream God was a temperamental Old Testament God.] Ivan agreed to contribute to the Shut Up Little Man comic book. Rich McMurry, who had also sent me an excellent one-panel comic of Peter and Raymond, declared his willingness to participate, as did another Fantagraphics' artist, Dame Darcy, of Meatcake. Together, M. Flinn and I labored for over two years to assemble the Shut Up Little Man comic book. It was published in October of 1999.

And, the gospel of Peter and Raymond continued to spread. Another play opened in Minnesota, more Shut Up Little Man samples on records, and constant airplay on morning shows like "The Drew and Mike Show" on WRIF in Detroit and the Spud Bros. Show in Boise, ID. The San Francisco Weekly did an eight page cover story on Shut Up Little Man just before Peter died. Ira Glass did a segment on NPR's "This American Life" featuring the recordings. Even though Raymond and Peter had passed away and gone off to the big liquor store in the sky, their arguments carried on and on in plays, puppet shows, on stereos and radios, on webpages and in comic books, and in people's heads, especially when those people had been drinking.

These 'notes toward a history' have gotten as long-winded as one of Peter's drunken tirades after being let out of the jailhouse at 4 AM. Considering that this phenomenon stemmed from a lot of sleepless nights, psychic terror, and a few death threats, it is some strange poetic justice that the wretched excesses and abusive diatribes of two individuals could lead to so many positive things. Fortunately, the Shut Up Little Man recordings have brought a lot of crazy pleasure to a lot of people over time. They have inspired a host of artists to make visual art, theater, film and music. And, thankfully, Mitchell and I have made a lot of friends along the way. It has been overwhelming sometimes and just plain fuckin' weird most of the time. But, it has been fun. Peoples' enthusiasm has verified that Peter and Raymond did not appeal merely to my own or to Mitchell's twisted sense of humor. There seems to be something about the dynamic between Peter and Raymond that taps into some elemental, perhaps archetypal, level in human beings. It has been suggested that their dialogues reflect something about the present state of the human condition. Raymond himself had once proclaimed: "I am the human race!" With all that said, I say unto you, as Peter once said to Raymond in an attempt to get him to shut his dirty little mouth: "Good night, sweet prince!"

Shut Up Little Man Thanks and Toasts:
Many little men and women have made this entire enterprise possible, and to them we say thank you very much and tip our 4 liter jug of wine. First of all, many thanks to that dynamic duo Peter (1928-1996) and Raymond (1931-1992), together forever. Very special thanks goes out to Seymour Glass, Johan Kugelberg, Charles Schneider, Thinking Fellers Union, Poopshovel, RM Johnson, decent human bein' and arteest extraordinaire M. Flinn, Matt Rosenberger, The Wegman Company, Greg McClatchy Film, Duane Dell'Amico, Muhammed O'Looney, Nancy Lee, Dan Clowes, Paul Musso, Michael Shanahan, C. Flinn, Tim Redman, Montana Swisher, Dame Darcy, Ivan Brunetti, Rich McMurry, Kim Thompson (Fantagraphics), Ilse Thompson (Confounded Books), Juliette Torrez (Last Gasp), Mike and Drew and all the other drunks at WRIF in Detroit, the Spud Bros. in Boise, ID, Stephanie Crocker (Versa) for her patience in the web design process, and all those other evangelists who spread the gospel of Peter and Raymond.

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