- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
The Secret Yankee
A Starke, Florida, strip club, the Melon Patch, where lap dances are free for amputees, was raided last Saturday in the middle of Sexy George Pickett’s weekly standing-room-only performance. Sexy George Pickett had for years tempted Starke crowds with his Battle of Gettysburg–themed striptease, in which club patrons were invited to whip his ass with their belts and shoelaces during the gradual retreat of his Confederate uniform, which retreat culminated in the removal of his plastic George Pickett mask, revealing a different face beneath the mask each week. Federal investigators chased Sexy George Pickett, who is now known to locals as “The Secret Yankee,” through the club, sustaining belt and shoelace whippings of their own, out the back door, across the garbage-strewn loading zone, and into a drainage ditch behind the property, where they “tackled the shit out of him” and served him his final unmasking, revealing him to be Fred Murnane, the owner of a funeral home in Atlanta, Georgia, more than four hours northwest of Starke.
It seems that Murnane, previously a longtime Ohio resident, had a passion for flaying the faces from bodies scheduled for cremation, soaking the faces in a proprietary embalming mixture, curing the faces, and turning them into what Melon Patch regulars have praised as “incredibly lifelike masks.” In concurrent raids of his home and business, federal agents discovered some twelve-hundred such masks. In addition to abuse-of-corpse charges, Murnane faces charges related to possession and distribution of methamphetamine, video evidence of his sexual encounters with numerous farm animals, money laundering, and identity theft.
The Melon Patch, which was forced to close its doors during the post-raid investigation, and which sustained “damages costing close to the six-figure range,” was found to be entirely clean and legitimate from a legal perspective. Its owner has reported an outpouring of financial and moral support from the community and expects to reopen next week. Is such a thing possible? Yes, it is. All things are possible with the support of one’s community.
CHARLIE STERCHI lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. His fiction appears or is forthcoming in Subtropics, Forever Magazine, The Panacea Review, and elsewhere.