Backstory Part 2

Hot Blades Harry:

Let me just start off by sayin' that I ain't gonna get all sloppy, mushy and sentimintile on ya here. I just wanna get my story out there and sets the record straight. My real name is Harold Gigante. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, when it was still a great town - it ain't no more. I got kicked out of high school in the ninth grade for fightin' (The dink deserved it. He broke my pencil so I broke his face). So naturally I turned to boxin'. I won 21 of 25 light-weight bouts but by the time I was 17 I had to stop boxing 'cause the Doc told me that my noggin couldn't take any more beat-in's. So here I was, a fighter that couldn't fight. I went through what was left of my prize money pretty fast (hookers and booze wasn't in short supply in those days) so I had to get a job at the local slaughter house where I earned the name "Hot Blades Harry". You see, my job was to slit the pigs throats and drain the blood as it hung on a hook right above my head. You get used to the squealing, besides it stops as soon as you slice the little oinker... it becomes more a gurgle (the thought of that sound still makes me laugh to this day). Most of the people in the place didn't want my job, but I loved it! One day I thought that I could really increase my paycheck if I used two knives instead of just one, and since we got paid per pig, I doubled my pocket change. I got so into my job that one day I was slicin' and dicin' away when my boss comes up to me and taps me on the shoulder. I turned around and sliced his ear off... woops. So they started calling me "hot blades" - and it stuck. It was the best job - killin' them things. Sure, nobody was wantin' to sit by me on the bus because I reeked of dead pig after work and yeah, you never really get the smell of blood out of your nose, but who cares. I was livin' "high on the hog".

Then the stink years happened. These people thought I smelled bad? The worst part of it was that water was gettin' in short supply so everyones was saving up and hoarding. People stopped takin' baths as much and the smell just grew. The markets crashed and we was thrown into a depression like we ain't ever seen before. I lost my job 'cause people stopped buying pork and besides, the pigs were in short supply now that there wasn't much water round to give them. It was all about keepin' yourself alive, not some dumb animal. Thats kinda how I felt about those people that died durin' that time... they was no better than the stupid pigs. Shoulda tried harder you schmucks!

So I headed west to get away from the stink of the big city and I finally found a nice town that smelled a lot better than NYC. I got myself a room at the local boardin' house... it wasn't a bad deal - you got one square and a 1/2 cup of water a day. They didn't have no slaughter houses around so I started pickin' up odd jobs around town. I made just enough to scrape by until the fees came. "No more private toilets." Your only option was to go to a public toilet and pay to pee. At first it wasn't so bad, but then the government started contractin' out our bladders to private corporations and the UGC took over. Along with them came the sleaze bags... the cops were actually working for the UGC now and everyone up there in that little tower was gettin' their palms greased whilz us poor people were barely makin' it day to day. Then people started disappearin' and we started askin' questions. We was told that they violated the law so they were sent to Urinetown as punishment. I have my idea as to what Urinetown really is, but none of us knows for sure. All I knows is that one of these days, themz people is gonna pay for what they are doing to us. Now we're the pigs and they're just waitin' to hook us so they can slit our throats.



And that was Hot Blades Harry. Now you can go back to surfing for porn!

HBH