Brain Damage, the Great Dick, and the Dysfunctional Demon
By Barry Maher
Awhile back, I was speaking on an Asian cruise when I realized I could no longer figure out what the hands of the clock meant. The next day, during a session, I introduced the ship’s captain. Twenty minutes later I picked him out of the audience and asked him what he did for a living. (The uniform did look a tad familiar.) That same day, I gave up trying to understand foreign currency. Even American money was getting tricky. In Viet Nam, I handed a vendor two hundreds and a five for a $7.00 baseball cap. It was a very nice cap.
Back home, the first thing my doctor did was have me draw a clock face at ten to three. The second thing he did was take away my driver’s license. Then he sent me for an immediate MRI. The nurse there wouldn’t comment on the results, but when I asked where the restroom was, she said, “I can’t let you go in there alone.”
I explained that bathroom visitation was a particular expertise of mine.
“Like telling time?” she asked. “You need to talk to your neurosurgeon.”
“I have a neurosurgeon?” Just what I always wanted.
I also had a brain tumor—the size of a basketball. Or maybe the neurosurgeon said “baseball.” I wasn’t tracking too well at that point. Still, I quickly grasped he was planning on carving open my skull with a power saw.
“I don’t really need to tell time,” I said. “Or I can just buy a digital watch.”
Everyone said my neurosurgeon—or, as I thought of him, “Chainsaw Charlie”—was brilliant. My problem was that I’ve spent my life around intelligent people, and I’ve always believed human intelligence was overrated. To me, on a scale of everything there is to know in the universe, the main difference between Einstein and Koko the Wonder Chimp was that Einstein couldn’t pick up bananas with his feet. (As far as I know.)
Still, I went under the knife—or in this case, the power saw. Maybe I had a seizure. The doctors weren’t sure. That might explain what happened. Because I came out of the surgery with Lady Gaga singing non-stop in my head and an unforgettably vivid story, like a memory of something that I’d just witnessed.
Reacting to the intrusion, I suppose my brain could have given me a dream or a story, maybe even Citizen Kane or a nice rom/com or a few episodes of Seinfeld. Instead I got open crypts, bizarre spells, sudden death and the Ralph Lauren version of the Manson Family. “How did my operation go? Well, I’m doing well, but the people in my head—or wherever they were—they went through Hell.”
Lady Gaga went away after a day or so. But the story stayed with me. And when I was able, I spent a couple of years putting it all down, working it out, trying to get it just right. And that became The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon.
And with the cancer in remission, as of September 5th I’ve even lived to see the book published.
Barry Maher’s wickedly funny supernatural thriller, The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon has just been released. You can find out more about Barry at www.barrymaher.com.
© Copyright 2025 Creators Syndicate. Used by permission.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
Barry Maher may be the only horror novelist who’s ever appeared in the pages of Funeral Service Insider. In his misspent youth, his articles were featured in perhaps a hundred different publications and, in order to eat, he held nearly that many different jobs. Sometimes he lived on the beach. Not in a house on the beach. On the beach. With the sand and the seagulls.
After a sentence with a Fortune 100 company, he started speaking professionally. He told stories to audiences across the country and around the world: his client list a Who’s Who of multi-national corporations. You may have seen Barry on The Today Show, CNN, CBS or CNBC, or read his Slightly Off-Kilter syndicated newspaper column.
On the downside, he’s actually been incarcerated twice. Once for not making a left hand turn out of a left hand turn lane, and once for aiding and abetting a loiterer. He’s deeply repentant.
Website: www.barrymaher.com
X: @barrymaher
Bluesky: @barrymaher.bsky.social
LinkedIn: barry-maher-a629212/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/barry.maher.98/
Instagram: barrymaher3
