Mystery Author – Episode 5

This is that game I play where I type up a chapter or two from a famous novel (or other source) and you don’t find out who it is until the end. I think some people are going to know who this one is from the very first paragraph. I just have a feeling.

*

“Not much has been written about the Ibogaine Effect as a serious factor in the presidential campaign, but toward the end of the Wisconsin primary race -about a week before the vote- word leaked out that some of Muskie’s top advisers had called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with “some kind of strange drug” that nobody in the press corps had ever heard of.

It had been common knowledge for many weeks that Humphrey was using an exotic brand of speed know as “Wallot”…and it had been long whispered that Muskie was into something very heavy, but it was hard to take the talk seriously until I heard about the appearance of a mysterious Brazilian doctor. That was the key.

I immediately recognized the Ibogaine Effect – from Muskie’s tearful breakdown on the flatbed truck in New Hampshire, the delusions and altered thinking that characterized his campaign in Florida; and finally, the condition of “total rage” that gripped him in Wisconsin.

There was no doubt about it: the Man from Maine had turned to massive doses of ibogaine as a last resort. The only remaining question was “when did he start?” But nobody could answer this one, and I was not able to press the candidate himself for an answer because I was permanently barred from the Muskie campaign after that incident on the Sunshine Special in Florida… and that scene makes far more sense now than it did at the time.

Muskie has always taken pride in his ability to deal with hecklers; he has often challenged them, calling them up to the stage in front of big crowds and then forcing the poor bastards to debate him in a blaze of TV lights.

But there was none of that in Florida.  When the Boohoo began grabbing at his legs and screaming for more gin, Big Ed went all to pieces… which gave rise to speculation, among reporters familiar with his campaign style in ’68 and ’70, that Muskie was not himself.

It was noticed, among other things, that he had developed a tendency to roll his eyes wildly during TV interviews, that his thought-patterns had become strangely fragmented, and that not even his closest advisors could predict when he might suddenly spiral off into babbling rages, or neo-comatose funks.  In retrospect, however, it is easy to see why Muskie fell apart on that caboose platform in the Miami train station. There he was – far gone in a bad ibogaine frenzy – suddenly shoved out in a rainstorm to face a sullen crowd and some kind of snarling lunatic going for his legs while he tried to explain why he was “the only Democrat who can beat Nixon”.

It is entirely conceivable – given the known effects of ibogaine – that Muskie’s brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw Gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs.

We can only speculate on this, because those in a position to know have flatly refused to comment on rumors concerning the senator’s disastrous experiments with ibogaine.  I tried to find the Brazilian doctor on election night in Milwaukee, but by the time the polls closed he was long gone.  One of the hired bimbos in Muskie’s Holiday Inn headquarters said a man with fresh welts on his head had been dragged out the side door and put on a bus to Chicago, but we were never able to confirm this.

Humphrey’s addiction to Wallow has not stirred any controversy, so far. He has always campaigned like a rat in heat, and the only difference now is that he is able to do it eighteen hours a day instead of ten. The main change in his public style, since ’68, is that he no longer seems aware that his gibberish is not taken seriously by anyone except Labor Leaders and middle-class Blacks.  At least half the reporters assigned to the Humphrey campaign are convinced he’s senile.  When he ran for president four years ago, he was a hack and a fool, but at least he was consistent.

Now he talks like an eighty-year-old woman who just discovered speed. He will call a press conference to announce that if elected he will “have our boys out of Vietnam within ninety days”-then rush across town, weeping and jabbering the whole way, to appear on a network TV show and make a fist-shaking emotional appeal for every good American to stand behind the president and “applaud” his recent decision to resume heavy bombing in North Vietnam.

*

McGovern’s solid victory in Wisconsin was dismissed, by most of the press wizards, as further evidence that the Democratic Party has been taken over by “extremists”:  George McGovern on the Left and George Wallace on the Right, with a sudden dangerous vacuum in what is referred to on editorial pages as “the vital Center”.

The root of the problem, of course, is that most of the big-time Opinion Makers decided a long time ago – along with all those Democratic senators, congressmen, governors, mayors, and other party pros- that the candidate of the “vital Center” in ’72 would be none other than that fireball statesman from Maine, Ed Muskie. By the summer of ’71 the party bosses had convinced themselves that Ed Muskie was the “only Democrat with a chance of beating Nixon”.

This was bullshit, of course.  Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine.  Big Ed was an adequate senator – or at least he’d seemed like one until he started trying to explain his “mistake” on the war in Vietnam- but it was stone madness from the start to ever think about exposing him to the kind of bloodthirsty thugs that Nixon and John Mitchell would sic on him.  They would have him screeching on his knees by sundown on Labor Day. 

If I were running a campaign against Muskie, I would arrange for some anonymous creep to buy time on national TV and announce that twenty-two years ago he and Ed spent a summer working as male prostitutes at a Peg House somewhere in the North Woods.  Nothing else would be necessary.

*

Total candor with the press – or anyone else, for that matter- is not one of the traits most presidential candidates find entirely desirable in their key staff people. Skilled professional liars are as much in demand in politics as they are in the advertising business…and the main function of any candidate’s press secretary is to make sure the press gets nothing but upbeat news. There is no point, after all, in calling a press conference to announce that nobody on the staff will be paid this month because three or four of your largest financial backers just called to say they are pulling out and abandoning all hope of victory. When something like this happens, you quickly lock all the doors and send your press secretary out to start whispering, off the record, that your opponent’s California campaign coordinator just called to ask for a job.

This kind of devious bullshit is standard procedure in most campaigns.  Everybody is presumed to understand it- even the reporters who can’t keep a straight face while they’re jotting it all down for page one of the early edition: “Sen. Mace Denies Pull Out Rumors; Predicts Total Victory in All States”

The best example of this kind of coverage has been the stuff coming out of the Muskie camp. In recent weeks the truth has been so painful that some journalists have gone out of their way to give the poor bastards a break and not flay them in print any more than absolutely necessary.

One of the only humorous moments in the Florida primary campaign, for instance, came when one of Muskie’s state campaign managers, Chris Hart, showed up at a meeting with representatives of the other candidates to explain why Big Ed was refusing to take part in a TV debate.  “My instructions,” he said, “are that the senator should never again be put in a situation where he has to think quickly.”

By nightfall of that day every journalist in Miami was laughing at Hart’s blunder, but nobody published it; and none of the TV reporters ever mentioned it on the air.  I didn’t even use it myself, for some reason, although I heard about it in Washington while I was packing to go back to Florida.

I remember thinking that I should call Hart and ask him if he actually said a thing like that, but when I got there, I didn’t feel up to it. Muskie was obviously in deep trouble, and Hart had been pretty decent to me when I’d showed up at headquarters to sign up for that awful trip on the Sunshine Special… So I figured what the hell?  Let it rest. Looking back on it, I think it must have been so obvious that the Muskie campaign was doomed that nobody felt mean enough to torment the survivors over something that no longer seemed important.

*

One of my clearest memories of the Nebraska primary is getting off the elevator on the wrong floor in the Omaha Hilton and hearing a sudden burst of song from a room down one of the hallways…. Twenty to thirty young voices in ragged harmony, kicking out the jams as they swing into the final, hair-raising chorus of “The Hound and The Whore.”  I had heard it before, in other hallways of other hotels along the campaign trail- but never this late at night, and never at this level of howling intensity:

O the Hound chased the Whore across

the mountains

Boom! Boom! Boom!

O the Hound chased the Whore into the sea….

Boom! Boom! Boom!

A very frightening song under any circumstances- but especially frightening if you happen to be a politician running or very high stakes and you know the people singing that song are not on your side.

I have never been in that situation myself, but I imagine it is something like camping out in the North Woods and suddenly coming awake in your tent around midnight to the horrible snarling and screaming sounds of a werewolf killing your guard dog somewhere out in the trees beyond the campfire.

*

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.  

Big influence on me. Usually I say more but I’m feeling quiet today.

Advertisement

Introducing… Holly (who surprised me with her fiction talent!)

I enjoy promoting other fantastic bloggers. I’ve actually promoted Holly once before in the past, but this is before I learned that she is a talented fiction writer! She used to simply journal. I promoted her in the past because her online diary was (and still is) hilarious at times.

She still journals, but now she treats followers to her storytelling talent between journal posts. Below I’ve pasted the first part of one story. It’s a dark little number about a killer named Ralph.

For the full series, visit this link: https://therightingprompt.wordpress.com/category/ralph/

*tip – you have to start at the bottom of the post and scroll up to read the entire series. That’s just how her blog is.

Okay, here’s that sample:

Ralph – by Holly

Claire searched frantically through the house looking for her husband. She finally found him, not dead, “thank God”, she thought, but wrapped like a mummy in plastic. She didn’t know how he was still breathing, but he was. And panicking. She tore at the plastic covering his face with her fingers. It was so thick and stretchy she couldn’t breach it. She knew she was running out of time, but she had to leave him again. “I’m coming back!”, she yelled at him. He stopped squirming for a moment, shocked perhaps? She couldn’t see his face clearly to be sure. A strained squeal leaked from his wrappings, but she had no time to waste reassuring him.

She leapt up and looked around. She was in a bedroom, fully furnished. Rushing to the dresser, she violently snatched drawers open, praying for a tool of some sort. “Fuck!” she yelled when she found the first two empty. She opened a third, again finding nothing. She wrenched the open drawer up and down in the dresser until it broke, hoping for a sliver of wood that she could use to free Carl. Having no luck, she smashed the drawer against the dresser until she did. It had been only seconds, less than a minute, she was sure, but Carl had grown still.

She rushed to his side. “I’m here, I’ve got you, just hang on.”

She pulled the plastic taut and away from Carl’s face then stabbed at it with the drawer fragment. The point broke and the splintered wood dug into her hand, but she kept at it. She was chanting “no, no, no” under her breath like a mantra. Finally, she was able to make a hole large enough to get a few fingers into, and she used all her strength to make it large enough to allow Carl to breathe. But he didn’t breathe. He didn’t move. She threw her tool down and started pressing on his chest, trying desperately to revive him. Nothing. Her mantra grew louder and more agonized.

She kept at it, blind with grief until suddenly Carl jolted, drawing a screaming breath.

She laughed though her tears, wild with excitement and relief.  Carl was still trapped, but he was alive. “I’ve got you! Hold on. I’ve got you.” Claire said as she moved back to the hole to start tearing again, exposing the rest of Carl’s face. Then, Claire’s head was gone. Her torso slowly tilted forward, falling onto Carl’s wrapped chest, the blood pouring forth from his wife’s neck filling his nose and mouth, silencing his screams.

“That’s better.” Said Ralph. He walked to the bed and wiped his machete clean on the crisp white duvet. The contrast was stark, almost artful. He thought it added some much-needed flair to this boring ass room.

*

What a hell of a beginning, huh? It gets so much better than this.

She also has a touching story “Lucy and Luther” which is equal parts adorable and disturbing. Holly’s talent for mixing horror with cuteness is mind-boggling. I don’t know how she does it, but it’s pretty awesome.

https://therightingprompt.wordpress.com/category/series/lucy-and-luther/

You can find even more fiction if you visit Holly’s external site and click on “short stories”.

-ZP

If you liked this, you might also enjoy: https://zerospace05.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/introducinggrace-st-clair/

I have no idea why WP no longer embeds, but it’s groovy anyway I guess.

Mystery Author! Episode 3

It’s been a while since I’ve done Mystery Author.   In this feature, I type up a chapter (or more) from a famous book or other source for your reading pleasure.  The fun part is you don’t find out who the author is until the end.  This one is incredibly special.  Consequently, it’s much longer than any other Mystery Author episode.

This author’s writing has an excessive amount of ellipses… (now I know where I picked up this habit from!).  I was tempted to edit them out, but I’m leaving them in.  The writing still flows just fine.

*

“To this day I still don’t know the exact reasons why my mom was committed to a mental hospital…all anyone ever said to me about it was that she had taken “too many diet pills” while trying to lose some weight and flipped out…I wasn’t around when whatever happened ‘happened’…she was held for over 2 months, until she dramatically escaped by jumping a fence and running away (no doctors ever came to get her and take her back)… no one ever told me at the time what was happening, or explained why my mother was gone.

I recently found some of my mom’s writings from when she was in the hospital…there were some diary entries, and much to my surprise, a few poems. Finding her writings on the eve of publishing my own poetry book was an funny, unexpected discovery… all this hit me kinda strange, because I had never viewed her as an artist type…my dad was the talented one, and he carried the mysterious persona that goes with someone who has a gift…my mom was straightforward to a fault, but didn’t strike me as a failed dreamer…but looking now, I think life was all too much for her, and any outward spark that she had in her died along the way and was buried deep down below…I now understand where both of those faces in me come from, the restless magician and the sad, longing soul.

*

My father reappears one fine afternoon out of the blue, and without explanation, takes me to live with him…I have had no clue as to where he was, what he was doing, or that he had gotten re-married, so it was all a big shock to me…after living in almost near bliss with my great-grandmother and grandfather for a year, he yanks me out without ceremony, giving me little time to pack or honorably say goodbye to them.

As we drive, he gives me a very basic ‘here’s how it’s going to be’ speech (because he is uncomfortable with any damage he might have caused me, and sees the very act of mentioning it as a sign that he is guilty)…he never really puts into context why he disappeared, made no contact with me in that time, or what had happened to my mom…it was as if someone just shows up one day and changes the channel on your life, and you are supposed to play the same character you were playing on the other show, exactly as if it was the same reality you had been living in all along.

*
It is still light out when we pull up to the trailer park, and all the snow on the ground gives each motorhome the gentle appearance that they are quaint country cabins…walking in, I notice right away that everything seems much colder…I meet my father’s second wife, my step-mother, for the first time…she is small, around 5 feet tall just like my mother, but more petite…however, where my mother’s features are soft and dark, her features are angular and straight…she speaks in a clipped, overly affected tone, which on the surface one without a keen ear would easily mistake for graciousness, but secretly underneath hums the lower bell of controlled chaos…my welcome from her is neither welcoming or dismissive, but I can see straight away she is not happy I am here…I am also re-introduced to my brother, who is grown now into a cherubic, golden-locked boy of 3…last I saw him he was still a toddling babe, but now moves through the space with the confidence of an only child, for it is his…I am shown the lay of the land, and directed as to where to find my bed, which is the bunk that straddles the top of the driving cab…and that is it, life moves on.

*

My dad leaves almost every evening to play gigs, leaving me to sit in silence with these 2 hostile strangers…my step-mother is a totally different person when my father is not around, speaking in a cold monotone and exhibiting little patience for any questions I might have…the entire message is clear—’we don’t want you here, but we have no choice’…my brother sees me as his competition for my father’s affections, because he has grown so used to him all to himself…(this sadly sets up a self-defeating competition between us that would last for 20+ years)…but my sibling does not concern himself over my relationship to our step-mother, because he is her only son now, and she his only mother…he calls her mom, a sound I find strange…my father informs me that I must call her mom as well, even though the thought repulses me…if I try to retreat to my bunk to find solace, I am told by my step-mother that I am not allowed to be up there unless I am going to bed…naps are not allowed, so I sit uncomfortably in the booth seats that also serve as an ad-hoc breakfast table and try to keep busy…there are no toys or books of my own, so I go out and play in the snow a lot.

*

Day by day, I begin to detach slowly from the past, as the memory of living with my mother and my grandparents fades into the distance, and a dawning reality grows that this situation I am now in is not to be temporary like the others…I wish I could go somewhere, but I couldn’t tell you where…anywhere but here, I suppose…the entire time we are in Cicero, I do not see my mom or her relatives at all…and as is the custom, I am not allowed to speak of her.

As time has passed, my role in the family has settles in…I act essentially as an independent entity (think unwanted adopted child and you will get the picture)…my father lavishes praise on my brother, and my step-mother treats him as her own…I am tolerated, but it is made clear I must earn my position in the family, particularly by my step-mother…I must sweep the floors while my brother plays…I must clean up for the family after dinner because food is expensive…every move I make, everything I do is given an assigned value against what I am costing the family…my father is distant, unable to deal with his prior abandoning of me…unable to deal with his own guilt, he treats me more like a buddy…it breaks my heart when he sends my brother hand drawn pictures from exotic locales and doesn’t even mention me in his letters…I feel invisible, but I cannot hide enough…everything I do is to not be seen, although there is nothing I want more in the world to be seen…school will soon will start, and I look forward to going every day to relieve living in this pressure cooker…I share a room with my brother, and spend a lot of time up there reading my new favorite book, “The Jungle Book”, by Rudyard Kipling…I want to close the door, but I am not allowed to by my step-mother (no explanation is given)…but when I read, I escape into a world without step-mothers and absent fathers and fairy tale mommies.

*

I am often given bathroom duty, being expected to clean the toilet and the shower to a military level of cleanliness…I must get my step-mother to come in when I am done cleaning so that she may inspect the work herself, standing there awkwardly as she looks closely at the areas around the toilet, sink, and bath…if I have missed anything, she tells me I must clean for another long period of time (like another half-hour), and not to bother calling her until I am positive the area is perfect.

Because the bathroom itself has already been cleaned once, I spend a few minutes re-cleaning the area, and then just sit and wait the appropriate time in silence before calling her back…the first time that she comes into my room screaming in the middle of the night (my father isn’t home normally until 5am) involves something that has displeased her about the bathroom’s lack of cleanliness, and she drags me out of bed by my hair all the way to the bathroom down the hall…she shoves my face into the base of the toilet, so close that I can smell the odd mixture of cleaning solvents and urine, asking me if I feel that this area is clean…not knowing how to answer, she insists that the toilet is filthy, and makes me clean it all again in the middle of the night.

Her frequent night attacks, which involve being woken up suddenly with her standing over me screaming at the top of her lungs also include beatings and the occasional shove down the stairs…being thrown down the stairs usually involves something to do with cleaning up the kitchen…the terror of all of this gives me a terminal case of insomnia, and makes me a very light sleeper (I still suffer with insomnia at times, but it has gotten a bit better—it was very terrible for almost 25 years or so)…when my father comes home, I lay in bed awake listening to her prepare him food…I dread these sounds, the sounds of pots and pans and cooking, because it means I will have to do the cleaning up later.

*

I start wetting the bed almost every night…the first few times, my step-mother takes the wet sheets off wordlessly…after the first few incidents, she starts to get very angry…if my father is aware there is a problem, he doesn’t show it…my bed wetting seems to send her into overdrive, and she compounds the problem by telling me that something is wrong with me, that if I was normal like all the other boys and girls I wouldn’t be having this problem…I am terrified of her, so I start trying to hide the evidence as it were if I have wet the bed…I get away with this a few times, but she takes to checking the bed every morning, often before I get up…if she finds that I have wet the bed, she makes me stay in it for hours, as punishment for what I have done…I just lay underneath the wet covers and ask God to please kill her for me because I hate her so much…this is the time that the real violence of my life begins, becoming intertwined with all that I do and all that I am.

*

On a particular cool night, I am making my usual trek to the liquor store to buy my step-mother cigarettes…she has given me a $20 bill, which to my 7 year old mind is a tremendous amount of money…the moon is full, and as always when it is, I feel the call of the wild in my bones…the clean air fills my head, and for the first time in my life I consider running away…of course, there is nowhere to go, no one to see…I imagine I can live for a little while on the 20 bucks, but of course will have no way to get any more money once it runs out…I figure the best place to live would be under an overpass bridge, but I will have to figure out where to get some blankets…I walk particularly slow, weighing each aspect of my decision with each step I take…the situation at home is so utterly toxic to my nerves that I cannot possibly stand another night…it is a rare moment where I only think of myself, leaving my younger brother and anyone else I love completely out of the question…there is no one to be seen on my walk thru the back alley behind the stores, it’s just me and the possibility of leaving for good…I come to figure that I will probably be caught, and will only get beat worse when I do…I have come to be used to the beatings, they are fairly regular now, it is just the waiting for the beatings that drives me insane…the pregnant pause between the release of the impacted energy thru violence and the long sweep of the tide out, till all is still…then, a faint rumble as it heads back into my direction, and the numb roar that comes up thru the floor, until fists meets temple, and the cycle is complete.

*

I have learned the fine art now of judging what is expected of me when I am being beat…it takes a keen ear to detect if the desired result is one of the following: submission, capitulation, confession, or negation…sometimes when I am being beaten down, the desired result appears to be tears, a bleating “no more, no more”, until the monster is satisfied…in stark opposition, sometimes the desired result appears to be to stop me crying, until a numb pall falls over the scene…as she beats me, she repeats over and over again “stop crying, stop crying you piece of shit”, and the formula reads that once you do the beating will stop…I learn the fine art of giving her whatever she desires, if only to feel that I am the one ultimately in control…

On a visit to my maternal grandmothers, I am up in my aunt’s apartment, sitting on my haunches in the corner, staring at a curio case full of porcelain figures…I think calmly through the things that plague me, which at this age are that I hate cigarette smoke, and I don’t like anyone to see me cry…I make two decisions in that moment I remain faithful to till this day…one, I will never smoke cigarettes, such is my hatred of the smell (I have still never smoked a cigarette in my life)…and two, that I will never cry for any reason (I would estimate that I have cried just 6 or 7 times in my entire life since that moment, the circumstances usually so overwhelming that I cannot override the feeling.

So when I am beat now, if the desire seems to be to make me cry, I learn a sort of fake sob, dramatized to heighten the necessary effect…she doesn’t seem to notice the difference between the fake version and the real deal, so this passes muster and therefore I never need to cry at all…

My father spends most evenings getting stoned and watching TV…this becomes our time together, the most effective way to be in his presence is to learn to enjoy what he enjoys…for my father has little interest in what I am interested in…any attempt to get him to watch a baseball game perhaps results in a waving of the hand and a dismissal of the game as “boring”…fortunately for me, my dad likes to watch things like “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “The Midnight Special”, which was a program that featured live music from new bands…this was in many ways my first exposure to international rock music not covered by our local radio.

*

I am standing in the kitchen, talking to my father…about the past, about the future, about whatever is going on with us…my father is sweet person, who means well, that is until you do or say something that crosses one of his many emotional boundaries and then it’s everybody for themselves…living with my dad the way I do, in the wake of having returned home from Florida a complete and utter failure, has finally settled into a peaceful routine that feels equitable…I am not reliant on him beyond the roof over my head, and he doesn’t ask much from me beyond us getting along and me doing the dishes regularly…the place is such a dump that the concept of ‘clean’ is a kind of surreal subjective notion that involves the appearance of frugal, stark order, but everywhere you look are signs of creeping oblivion.

Having left us to live and essentially fend for ourselves with our step-mother around 8-11 years ago (it depends on who’s counting), I am finally feeling secure enough in my relationship with my dad to open up about some of the things that happened at home when he wasn’t around…I have come to rely more on my real mother to be the filter of all that has happened, for she is more consistent and doesn’t end up laying the blame at my feet…her position is one of good friend or confidant…she listens, points out who she believes was at fault (usually my father, but she hates my step-mother too), and reminds me that those things are over with now, etc.…if there is any fault in my mother’s position about the past, it is that she has never fully come to grips with the fact that she abandoned us as well…in her eyes, she has never fully ‘left’, but consistently been in our lives the whole time…which is true to a fault…my father, on the other hand, cannot deal with the damage of his own decisions, generally taking a “well if it hurt you, it hurt me even worse” position, which renders any talk or argument about the past dead on arrival…so this is something new, to try to reach out to him in this way, to find some empathy in his heart and heal some of the still raw wounds.

We are talking about whatever when it suddenly takes a sharp left and we go into talking about the very real abuses of my past…as is his custom, my father talks about how he was abused as well…I counter by offering up some abuses that he was not aware of, and he gets quiet as my emotions rise…I am not blaming him, rather I am just letting him into a space that I have never asked him to come into before…feeling overly confident, I don’t hold back, because there is no longer anything to hold back for…I am off and running now, going into detail and over the cliff as I am prone to do…he is calmly leaning in the doorway to the middle room…the front door is open, and the sun is coming through…it is a beautiful day, and this is a moment that I have waited for a very long time, because I finally have a pathway from my heart to my father’s ear…

He stops me, and repeats something that I have heard from my grandmother many times (his mother—in other contexts), a basic soliloquy about how life is tough and the only way you can survive is to forget about these things and move on…it is a fairly sophisticated nullifying argument, a means to an end that once served a whole generation though world war and nuclear terror, and he robots it back to me almost verbatim…I tell him he doesn’t realize what he is saying, which is if you essentially bury it, IT will go away…which is not true, because one only needs to look at the drug abuse in his life, the chaos surrounding him, and the trail of tears in his wake to realize that this has not been an effective strategy…I don’t want to bury it, I want to dig the bodies up and properly and honorably bury them with dignity…this is not a call for sympathy, this is a call to action, because I do not want to die, or live in the shadow of symbolic death, which for me is to live but not really be alive…

I lose my cool with my father for the first time in my life, and drop the mask that I have learned to wear, which is the one of the dutiful son, who endures and protects him from reality even if the walls are falling down around my ears…my voice rises, and I chastise him for looking the other way…I tell him in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t there, that he doesn’t know what happened, he has no clue what was asked of me…and he is only now making it worse by telling me his version of events, which gives major credence to what he went though at the time, and no credit to the sacrifices of his children…it is a moment that all children must inevitably go though, the moment when the parental edifice comes toppling down…they can no longer save you, for you are on your own, and maybe you always have been…my father is stunned, for he has never seen this kind of emotion from me…he is used to me being emotional, but I have always refused to break down in front of him…the emotions wash over me, and I cannot control my mixture of rage, anguish, betrayal, and sadness…I break down in tears and leave him standing there, cursing that I bothered to tell him anything at all.

*

My real name is William Patrick Corgan, and I was born at Columbus Hospital (just across from beautiful Lincoln Park which straddles Lake Michigan) in Chicago at 5:41 pm on March 17, 1967…most know me as Billy Corgan, but “he” didn’t arrive until age 18…my father was Billy, and I was known to the family as “little” Bill.

I am the architect of the “Billy Corgan” that you know and love, or hate, or don’t give 2 cares about.

I created him, and at times have loved him, feared him, and despised him more than you could possibly dream up…it is the author of this being that wants to tell you this story…depending on how you look at it, it is the brutal truth or a sad sob story…a tale of glory and failure or the fictional scrapings of a madman and has-been…the author is ok with however you take it, because it happened TO ME…the closets are thrown open, and the sweet mist of a life blown by come spilling out…there are dead bodies and old pictures and pornographic gasps and ghosts so shy they are the ghosts of ghosts…but all the voices are here, and they want to talk to you…in fact, there is a fight as to who goes first! But it’s all the same, cause in my mind all is happening at all times…backwards and forwards, we can survey what has happened and what is yet to come, and have a laugh and a cry…but in the end, it is my wish that there will be no more secrets worth keeping, and no more fear worth running from…all that should remain is the clear heart and a vibrant joy, and of course, music.

*

Normally I would only do two chapters at most.  Because typically I type from a kindle.  The length of this thing is explained by the fact that you can find the entries above right here. (And much more, it was challenging not to paste all his friggin’ posts from the 1992-1993 tags, trust me).

It’s not enough that he became the most talented and prolific songwriter of the 1990’s, he also just had to be a pretty good blogger too.

*

“Quiet, I am sleeping, in here we need a little hope

For years I’ve been sleeping, helpless, couldn’t tell a soul

Be ashamed of the mess you’ve made
My eyes never forget, you see, behind me

Silent metal mercies castrate boys to the bone

Jesus, are you listening? Up there to anyone at all?

We are the fossils, the relics of our time
We mutilate the meanings, so they’re easy to deny

Be ashamed of the mess you’ve made
My eyes never forget, you see behind me

Quiet, I am sleeping
Quiet, I am sleeping

Quiet, I don’t trust you
Shut up, shut up, I can’t hear you now
Be ashamed of the mess you’ve made
My eyes never forget, you see behind me

Behind me, the grace of falling snow
Cover up everything you know
Come save me from the awful sound of nothing.”

-Quiet, The Smashing Pumpkins

*

If you liked this, you might enjoy the (much shorter) Mystery Author 1.

Introducing…Grace St. Clair

I follow some fabulous writers, and I enjoy promoting them so that people who enjoy my blog can get to know other writers I follow.

Today is all about Grace.  

Now, that link is Grace’s current blog… but today I want to talk about her old blog on Blogger.  It has some jewels.

If you want something good to read on a rainy day, Grace’s old Blog is definitely worth your time. 

I’m on my second reading of it, because I’ve mentioned that I struggle with eating, and Grace’s blog is riveting enough that it draws my attention in and I can sometimes read her blog instead of doing “Blog N Eat”.

How does one describe Grace?  She’s complex.  At times she’s reflective (bordering on philosophical), other times she’s sarcastic and humorous.  Above all, Grace writes some of the best poetry I’ve seen. 

Below I’ve highlighted some passages from Blogger that I enjoy:

“If you live any amount of time in a place you pick up the local lingo. I’ve lived a lot of different places but certainly never lost my native lingo and have often found myself trying to explain what I’m tawkin’ about.
Our local mini-mart is owned by Hindu people, country unknown, and when I bought my lottery ticket the other day the gentleman said, “Don’t forget us when you win”. I said, “From your lips to God’s ears”. He looked at me funny.”

“It’s an odd feeling – phantom hair.
Fluffing hair that isn’t there,
I have no feelings of despair.
It will return, I have no doubt.
Until it does, I’ll do without.”

“My ‘conversations’ with the cats:
Are you crazy?
Must you be everywhere I am?
What have you got now?
Do you want the cheese or not?
Move your fat butt.
Leave her A-lone!
Do that one more time and I swear I’m gonna kill you.

Didn’t I just tell you to get down? Am I not speaking English?
Get OFF!”

“I’ve never quite understood what they mean when they say “Live each day as if it is your last” I would like to spend the last day of my life stuffing my face with jelly donuts and having hot jungle monkey sex.  The last day of my life will probably be spent in a hospital bed, pooping in a diaper and gasping for breath.  Truth to tell I’d rather not spend each day doing either of those things…enticing as the first may seem.”

“When I say hanging out – I mean kids would gather at the candy store, take up all the stools at the counter, order a coke and basically act like fools. Which teenagers do. Periodically there would be a brou-ha-ha and all the kids would get thrown out and possibly banned for a few days. In which case they would migrate to the other candy store – but this was not always a good solution because Jack and Ruby always knew which kids they had thrown out – so if you got banned from Jack’s, Ruby would know and he wouldn’t let you in, in which case your social life was screwed until you apologized.”

[That whole 2012 post is one of my favorites, with the Americana reference to candy stores where teens hung out in 1950’s NYC]

“We are music. The first sounds we hear are music – the beating of our mother’s heart; of our own. The low notes – we hear them first. Warm, dark, comforting. Rhythm – babies love the rhythm – rock them and they are soothed; swing them gently back and forth; our earliest memories, our first memories, are musical – rhythm and melody. The beat of the heart, the melody of the movement of the fluid we float in…our first memories. We share these memories, tho different rhythms and different melodies, and sing out to each other – hear me, hear my music.”

“I was walking home from work this afternoon and I was stopped dead in my tracks by the graceful antics of two small butterflies – they flew close to the ground – wing to wing; swooping and gliding; then chasing each other with the smaller one getting under the wing of the larger one so they looked as if they were one; they tumbled through the air, tossing themselves about and then they parted and flew off in opposite directions.
And I stood there with a foolish smile on my face while traffic rushed around me and and the lunch time diners gave me strange looks as I stood stock still watching this incredible gift.”

“We piled out of the theatre, hopped up, excited, totally jazzed. As we made our way down the street, without forethought or planning, we began to dance, snapping our fingers and singing – “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, From your first cigarette to your last dying day”

We jostled around and reformed to sing – “Gee Officer Krupke, what are we to do? Gee, Officer Krupke, Krup You!”

We settled, and walked and then someone started to sing – “Could be, Who knows? There’s something due any day I will know right away Soon as it shows…” 15 sweet, beautiful teenage voices joined in. One of the boys ran ahead, leapt onto a light pole, ala Gene Kelly in ‘Singing in the Rain”, one arm wrapped around the pole, the other flung up and out …and we sang – “It may come cannon-ballin’ down from the sky, Gleam in its eye, Bright as a rose. Who knows?”

“I hear music in my head, that no one else can hear.
The drummer keeps a steady beat;
the guitarist throws a riff
While the sax man blows it long and low –
it finally hits my feet.

A shuffle, then a bump, a swing,
as hips go side to side
And then the trumpet sidles in and I begin to glide.”

https://www.just-tawkin.com/2008/

And now I am done… for real… today, as this was like post number 3.

My Viking Fantasy (Ruined…)

Have you ever listened to a song for years only to realize one day that you’re wrong about the meaning behind the lyrics?

For me, it can totally ruin the song.

“Achilles Last Stand” by Led Zeppelin was my battle song.

I thought it was about Vikings sailing into battle.

I would really get into it.

I was a warrior woman on that Viking boat. I stood near the bow with a sword in my hand and copper cuffs on each wrist. My eyes narrowed, the ocean sprayed my face, the boat bobbed up and down over waves… and I experienced the greatest endorphin rush of my life.

Sexy bearded men stood all around me, and they all had great legs.

We were Vikings, and we were going to win.

I also looked this good and had that same french manicure.

Everything about this song screams battle song – the pulsating bass, the drums, even the title. The last stand.

At some point, I read an article which revealed the song’s true origin. The title of the song was inspired by a car wreck. Robert Plant busted his foot in a car wreck, and the title is a clever play on that incident.  Awww, how cute.

The actual content of the song is about vacationing in Morocco.

Or something.

Whatever the case may be, I can no longer hear this song without thinking about Plant’s damned foot.

All I can see is Plant’s foot wrapped in bandages while a bunch of long-hairs with sunglasses relax around an outdoor pool.  This is decidedly less glamorous than my fantasy.  But I can’t go back!  The damage is done.

Bastards.

This also happened when I read the lyrics to “Rhinoceros” by The Smashing Pumpkins. There’s a lyric which I always thought was “Open your eyes to these monster lies”.

OPEN YOUR EYES TO THESE MONSTER LIES.

Just look at that lyric!  The power!  As it turns out, the “monster” part is wrong.  For me, that was the most important part.

Monster is defined as “huge” in this context.  There are HUGE lies all around us.

Open your friggin’ eyes, people!  These lies surrounding us are monstrous! This “monster” element made the lyric incredibly powerful.  It added to the depth of the overall sound.

The actual lyric is, “Open your eyes to these must I lie”.

What?! What the hell does that even mean? Some lyric websites say “mustard lies”, which is far worse. It’s almost offensive. “Monster Lies” is much better.  It improves the whole character of the lyric.

It’s amazing how people can interpret song meanings and lyrics.  I recently looked up the lyrics to “Soot and Stars”, another Pumpkin song.  To me, this song is about loss and transition. It’s poetic and sorrowful.

What do other people think this song means?

This is the first comment about “Soot and Stars” at songmeanings.com:

“This song is obviously about Star Wars. It describes the feelings of Darth Vader after all has happened and is said and done”.

I laughed out loud for about 10 seconds when I read that.  I would have choked if I was eating.  I am fairly certain that the guy was being satirical.  But, it proves the point – people can interpret songs and other works in surprisingly diverse ways.

It actually wouldn’t surprise me if someone really believed, with all his heart, that these lyrics are about Star Wars.  Yes, that man contemplating his career and life choices is Darth Vader.

“Pssssh. Duhhh, how can you not tell?  That’s what makes it so poetic and sorrowful.”

Because I can totally judge Star Wars fans about their fantasy life.

***

If you liked this, you might also like Revenge of The Tire Witch

About ZeroSpace

Mystery Author! Episode 2

This is the second installment where I have typed up something delicious by a famous author for your reading pleasure. As a reminder, we play this game: You don’t know who wrote it until the end. Rule: Don’t cheat by scrolling all the way down first (unless you’re a douchebag who likes to ruin good & wholesome fun!)

“WHY had they pretended to kill him when he was born? Keeping him awake for days, banging his head against a closed cervix; twisting the cord around his throat and throttling him; chomping through his mother’s abdomen with cold shears; clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side; dragging him out of his home and hitting him; shining lights in his eyes and doing experiments; taking him away from his mother while she lay on the table, half-dead.

Maybe the idea was to destroy his nostalgia for the old world. First the confinement to make him hungry for space, then pretending to kill him so that he would be grateful for the space when he got it, even this loud desert, with only the bandages of his mother’s arms to wrap around him, never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around him, being everything.

The curtains were breathing light into their hospital room. Swelling from the hot afternoon, and then flopping back against the French windows, easing the glare outside.

Someone opened the door and the curtains leapt up and rippled their edges; loose paper rustled, the room whitened, and the shudder of the roadworks grew a little louder. Then the door clunked and the curtains sighed and the room dimmed.

‘Oh, no, not more flowers,’ said his mother. He could see everything through the transparent walls of his fish-tank cot. He was looked over by the sticky eye of a splayed lily. Sometimes the breeze blew the peppery smell of freesias over him and he wanted to sneeze it away. On his mother’s nightgown spots of blood mingled with streaks of dark orange pollen.

‘It’s so nice of people…’ She was laughing from weakness and frustration. ‘I mean, is there any room in the bath?’

‘Not really, you’ve got the roses in there already and the other things.’

‘Oh, God, I can’t bear it. Hundreds of flowers have been cut down and squeezed into these white vases, just to make us happy’. She couldn’t stop laughing. There were tears running down her face. ‘They should have been left where they were, in a garden somewhere.’

The nurse looked at the chart.

‘It’s time for you to take your Voltarol,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to control the pain before it takes over.’

Then the nurse looked at Robert and he locked on to her blue eyes in the heaving dimness.

‘He’s very alert. He’s really checking me out.’

‘He is going to be all right, isn’t he?’ said his mother, suddenly terrified.

Suddenly Robert was terrified too. They were not together in the way they used to be, but they still had their helplessness in common.

They had been washed up on a wild shore. Too tired to crawl up the beach, they could only loll in the roar and the dazzle of being there. He had to face facts, though: they had been separated. He understood now that his mother had already been on the outside. For her this wild shore was a new role, for him it was a new world.

The strange thing was that he felt as if he had been there before. He had known there was an outside all along. He used to think it was a muffled watery world out there and that he lived at the heart of things. Now the walls had tumbled down and he could see what a muddle he had been in. How could he avoid getting in a new muddle in this hammeringly bright place? How could he kick and spin like he used to in this heavy atmosphere where the air stung his skin?

Yesterday he had thought he was dying. Perhaps he was right and this was what happened. Everything was open to question, except the fact that he was separated from his mother.

Now that he realized there was a difference between them, he loved his mother with a new sharpness. He used to be close to her. Now he longed to be close to her. The first taste of longing was the saddest thing in the world.

‘Oh, dear, what’s wrong?’ said the nurse. ‘Are we hungry, or do we just want a cuddle?’

The nurse lifted him out of the fish-tank cot, over the crevasse that separated it from the bed and delivered him into his mother’s bruised arms.

‘Try giving him a little time on the breast and then try to get some rest. You’ve both been through a lot in the last couple of days.’

He was an inconsolable wreck. He couldn’t live with so much doubt and so much intensity. He vomited colostrum over his mother and then in the hazy moment of emptiness that followed, he caught sight of the curtains bulging with light. They held his attention. That’s how it worked here. They fascinated you with things to make you forget about the separation.

Still, he didn’t want to exaggerate his decline. Things had been getting cramped in the old world. Towards the end he was desperate to get out, but he had imagined himself expanding back into the boundless ocean of his youth, not exiled in this harsh land. Perhaps he could revisit the ocean in his dreams, if it weren’t for the veil of violence that hung between him and the past.

He was drifting into the syrupy borders of sleep, not knowing whether it would take him into the floating world or back to the butchery of the birth room.

‘Poor Baba, he was probably having a bad dream,’ said his mother, stroking him. His crying started to break up and fade. She kissed him on the forehead and he realized that although they didn’t share a body any more, they still had the same thoughts and feelings. He shuddered with relief and stared at the curtains, watching the light flow.”

*

This would be from The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St Aubyn. This passage is from Mother’s Milk, a later book within the novel. St Aubyn’s ability to imagine the perspective of a newborn infant, and to articulate that perspective using adult language and insight is nothing less than stunning.

I haven’t seen the HBO series yet, but I feel like this passage is a great example of why books rule over TV and film. How could you possibly capture something like this on film without losing the essence of it? It doesn’t seem possible.

My favorite line from the above is:

Perhaps he could revisit the ocean in his dreams, if it weren’t for the veil of violence that hung between him and the past.

I also wanted to include the entire book from Patrick’s drug addled youth, but I cannot handle typing that much.

Check out the first installment of this series, Episode 1, right here: https://zerospace05.wordpress.com/2020/08/09/mystery-author-episode-1/

As a bonus, I’m including a passage from the same guy from episode 1 up there. But you have to check out episode 1 to find out who the hell it is.

I was going to do a separate blog entry. But I should probably put this where the people who like reading books are likely to hang out. Plus I don’t want to plug the same guy in a third post.

The passage below – damn – you all wish you could write this well. And so do I.

“At nine o’clock in the morning of every working day, Mr. Jack was hurled downtown to his office in a shining projectile of machinery, driven by a chauffeur who was a literal embodiment of New York in one of its most familiar aspects.

As the driver prowled above his wheel, his dark and sallow face twisted bitterly by the sneer of his thin mouth, his dark eyes shining with an unnatural luster like those of a man who is under the stimulation of a power drug, he seemed to be – and was – a creature which this furious city had created for its special uses. His tallowy flesh seemed to have been compacted, like that of millions of other men who wore grey hats and had faces of the same lifeless hue, out of a common city-substance – the universal grey stuff of pavements, buildings, towers, tunnels, and bridges.

In his veins there seemed to flow and throb, instead of blood, the crackling electric current by which the whole city moved. It was legible in every act and gesture the man made. As his sinister figure prowled above the wheel, his eyes darting left and right, his hands guiding the powerful machine with skill and precision, grazing, cutting, flanking, shifting, insinuating, sneaking, and shooting the great car through all but impossible channels with murderous recklessness, it was evident that the unwholesome chemistry that raced in him was consonant with the great energy that was pulsing through all the arteries of the city.

The unnatural and unwholesome energy of his driver evoked in his master’s mind an image of the world he lived in that was theatrical and phantasmal.

Instead of seeing himself as one man going to his work like countless others in the practical and homely light of day, he saw himself and his driver as two cunning and powerful men pitted triumphantly against the world; and the monstrous architecture of the city, the phantasmagoric chaos of its traffic, the web of the streets swarming with people, became for him nothing more than a tremendous backdrop for his own activities.

All of this – the sense of menace, conflict, cunning, power, stealth, and victory, and above all else, the sense of privilege – added to Mr. Jack’s pleasure, and even gave him a heady joy as he rode downtown to work.”

HOT DAMN! I love that whole thing about the chauffer and his everything being made of the grey city stuffs of buildings. This is my favorite passage ever. If someone wants to find where this is at, go look at episode 1 and then go order all the books by this author and just read it all.

Now I have to stop typing on a screen that emits blue light and read the kindle paperwhite that doesn’t emit blue light so that I have some chance of falling asleep by midnight.

As you can see, I have delightful shit to read for several hours.

Thanks for reading.