Lets have this Weird Rock Fact III for week even though it's more of a theory than a fact, and - as far as I know - not one espoused by anybody except me. field tested and documented heavily between the year 2005 and this writing, the theory concerns two bands, two mid-tempo, guitar driven singles, and a weird effect of random happenstance.
I'm putting forth the idea (and incedentaly, the 21-22 year old me, the one that lived through this particular epoch, would find this idea to be taint-scum awful) that the band Stone Temple Pilots have proven to be - by a wide margin - the most important rock band to do business between the years 1989 and 1995. Further, I am of the opinion that the decision to choose the song "Plush" as the first single and video from the Pilot's (near perfect) debut record Core, is the sole reason why the above theory might seem preposterous to some. Easy to dismiss as some weird, grunge-era, radio coke-math at the time, I have to assume that when the people who made that call look back, and think about what could have been, that "Plush" looms large as the crossroads.
Don't get me wrong, STP were, and sort of still are, a big deal to a lot of people. What I'm saying, was they could have been bigger by half, and ended up the undisputed champions of rock's third, and still most recent, resurgance as a mass-market entity (!).
Nirvana - of course - holds that title, now, and probably forevermore. Even still, most of the 90's bands that seemed important in any historical context flamed out very shortly after becoming great. Jane's Addiction, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins (!) None of what people were relying on in the early 90's really panned out long-term, at least not the way folks had expected them to. (Reading the inside cover of Ritual De Lo Habitual, it's still cosmicaly difficult to believe that the psychopathic wraith that screeded out " To The Mesquito" went on to pen the opening credit jingle for "Entourage"). Meanwhile, I guarantee that most of the people reading this know the word to at least five STP tunes. They were a Zeppelin with the cred of an Aerosmith, or - if you're really old - A Big Bill Broonzy with the rep of a Dave Clark Five.
The subject is probably due another 1000 or so words, but fuck it. I made my point. Stone Temple mothefucking Pilots: better than you think they are, even if you think they're pretty fucking good.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Friday, September 9, 2011
Vocation
Doug had been solo at the desk for two hours before he got his first call.
Rrrrrriiiiinnnnng…
Doug: Student Support. ‘S Doug. I can help…
Karl Po: Hello.
(Doug hears an Asian man in that “hello”, and the call’s from the Cornell exchange. Doug sees potential.)
Doug: (After a lengthy pause) Hello. You called the student support hotline. Are you having trouble.
Karl Po: (After another, longer pause) I’m having trouble.
D: OK amigo, I can help you there.
K. P: Thanks. I mean, thanks for taking…The time, I mean. Um. Thanks.
D: No worries dude, now just take me through this whole dance contest. Bring me right up to speed.
(Karl Po was only a few minutes into his story when Doug put aside all doubt. A live one. Right there at 11:34 on a rainy Tuesday.)
***
An hour and a half later, Doug was finishing up with Karl Po.:
Jeez Karl it doesn’t sound to me like you have much of a choice. I mean, your wife and your own brother, not to mention his 17 year-old kid! And the kid’s girlfriend. we must never forget she fucked your brother’s kid , and your brother’s kid’s girlfriend at the same time. And at different times. Horrible. Then there’s the humiliating fall from grace at your job, not to mention in your neighborhood. Your agonizing Rheumatitis, severe nasal allergy pain, and weeping sore condition. Throw that in with the 25 pounds that you can’t lose despite fasting, exercise, dark magic, and the use of “supplements”. I gotta tell ’ya man: I’m just not seeing that there’s much here that makes your life worth, well, anything.
Doug let the word linger before taking up again. Technically, the list of troubles was the last part of the protocol, but Doug was detail-oriented. It was his custom to run down a series of confirmations in closing, just to make sure he and the subject were same-paged regarding sequence and timing. He was steering the train of conversation in just that direction, when suddenly the whole fucking thing jumped the tracks. After yet another nine months-pregnant pause, Po intoned:
It’s so strange. This isn’t quite the way I expected this to go.
Doug was appalled at his own carelessness almost as much as with the tremendous balls of Karl Po. Po - he realized now - was never planning to show up tomorrow. Not on time, not anytime. He decided he’d need to change a few things about the approach. Nothing extreme, he promised himself, jotting some quick notes in the tiny book that he used to record his ideas as he birthed them. Even though he knew KP wasn’t all in, and might never be, Doug decided to play out the string, if nothing else but to stay in practice for the next real opportunity:
Well, Mr. Po…Karl…you know I like to think we’re here to help, no matter what our assessment and interpretation of the word becomes after speaking with a particular caller. If what we hear dictates one course of action over another, then aren’t we obligated to express that opinion? If not then what are we doing here anyway?
***
K: (After another twenty-eight minutes of taffy-pulling, followed by forty five seconds of silence) I’ll be breaking everybody’s heart. My mother…
D: (shuffling papers around his desk) Well, Karl, I think we’re done here. I have other callers, you seem determined, maybe revisit this at the later date?
K: You sound almost disappointed
D: It’s nothing. Don’t worry about me.
K: So you are disappointed. I knew it. I should have you arrested. I fucking call for help because I think I’m thinking about killing myself and here you are fucking encouraging me! You fucking asshole! Evil, devious motherfucker! ASSHOLE!
D: Well now Mr. Po I don’t see where that kind of language…
K: FUCK YOU! (click)
***
Afterwards Doug replayed the events in his mind. Over and over he combed the footage, like a football coach studying game-film, leaning in, looking for advantage, searching for gaps in the defense. Was it his delivery? Po had seemed comfortable speaking with him…The pitch itself? Doug’d been using it for five years and six months without issue. Was he, himself offensive in some way? He was wearing Polo khakis and a powder blue button down. Not the most imaginative threads but not overtly objectionable. His armpits and breath were heavenly. His entire being - in fact - a veritable olfactory feast. Everything seemed in order, but something was very, obviously, wrong. Doug felt defeated. Leaning as far back as they Aeron would take him, he launched a melancholy ghost of himself through one of the thousand holes in the drop-ceiling. He imagined himself a microscopic thing, Even smaller: A thing that would appear microscopic when compared to things that were actually microscopic to begin with. The sad little piece of Doug tumbled up into the ceiling holes, went bouncing through unseen cracks in support beams, and finally moved into open air, airborne for the gusting thermals.
***
Christian Choo was going to be late. He was nineteen years old., uprooting from Japan for an ivy-laced engineering ride, but failing all but one of his courses in this, his third full semester of school. Christian had married just a few months before coming to Cornell, after fathering a child with a high school girlfriend. The girl - Tiya was her name - had since been put on Psychiatric lockdown on the advice of the family doctor. The child was being raised by her family while she “healed”. The prospect of returning home to Tokyo with an academic dismissal form to present to an unemployable wife who might be bi-polar, became the trigger-event to a phone conversation with Doug.
He woke up late, almost 4:00, and considering all that had happened, he thought that was about right. Excessive sleep, tardiness, and general sloth had been his constant companions for almost two years. That they would conspire to thwart his punctuality regarding the last appointment he’d ever make wasn’t especially surprising. Still, he felt he should hustle. If the guy left, and he decided to go ahead anyway, then he’d be leaving an un-kept promise, which - he felt - was probably frowned upon in any kind of decent afterlife. He was puzzling over this, still wrapped in sheets and horizontal on the bed, when his cell phone started up, bouncing and vibrating on the bedside fake wood table. Nine rings went buy. No movement / complete silence from the bed. He was reaching for the thing again to see who it was when it blew up again. This time, the man was close enough to see the caller ID. Just one letter, capitalized and final: “D”
Hello! (he sounded more upbeat than he’d intended, and made a mental note to tone it down for the rest of the conversation.) Oh hey. Yep. Yeah. Yeah not bad, not as rested as I’d like but, I guess I don’t have to worry about that much longer. OK. Yeah, I spoke with her again last night and it’s like I told you. There might even be more than one. Yeah, totally. Just like you said. Right, no the kid is probably not mine, and then you weigh that in with the VD she gave both me and the kid. Oh yeah, he’s been since like, age 10. No. No exaggerating. It’s sealed. He’s a disaster. Already I know he does coke like every night. I think he actually was arrested with coke. Oh now I’m getting worked up and I really didn’t want that today. Yeah. Right make it 4:00, the top of Six-Mile like I showed you. OK. And listen man, I know his is probably the last time for us before I, um, before…
(loooooong pause)
…Anyway I just wanted to thank you for all your help and support. Without you, I might have never realized the truth. God knows how many years of agony and misery you’ve saved me. I had a little token of my appreciation sent down today. Use it in good health my friend, and when you use it, think of me. OK. Goodbye.
***
Tokyo could be a cold place in the fall. Mai Choo figured that most people didn’t know that, most Americans anyway. She watched them daily, trundling by the hundreds past her info desk at the Tokyo Airport. They’d take a look outside at the snow and the weather, realizing with inevitable certainty that whatever light linen, single-layer, small pocket-animal laden ensemble they’d selected for travel day wasn’t going to make the nut. They’d move off then, searching anywhere and everywhere for English-language signs, or symbols that might indicate warm garments for sale. Mai Choo could never afford to watch for long, her duties as interim chief were too demanding. But everyday she’d give the warmer clothing phenomenon a few minutes, usually during her daily, early am multitasking session while reading the papers, having breakfast, and streamlining her day’s appointments in a tiny leather-bound notebook.
She’d been just getting around to this daily observance when there came a knock at her office door. An underling opened the door a crack and stuck his head in the space between. He said:
Mrs. Choo. A package. Next day air from Cornell.
Instantly Mai Choo’s head went into Migraine overdrive. Her son. Her beloved. Her baby. Her miserable, lazy, dishonorable bastard. They’d sent him to America with such high hopes, and reaped only disaster, and misery for the sending. Mai felt a lot of things for her boy, but what she mostly felt was embarrassed. Choo was once an important name in the place where she lived. And the episodes with the boy and his “wife” had changed all that.
Come in, I’ll take it.
***
Mai moved back behind her desk with the show-box sized package, and dismissed the worker-bee. She waited almost ten whole minutes before opening it, another ten minutes staring at it, and then eighteen more minutes fiddling aimlessly with it, before finally sticking it into her laptop and pressing “play”.
The opener was a landscape shot, handheld (on film-class 8mm she noted) as the camera-person walked slowly in what appeared to the bottom of a natural canyon. The camera showed her a small but rapid stream wending, and diving down steep chutes. Then it turned upwards and Mai could just make out high grey rocks reaching up into a white-out sky. She felt vertigo just watching. The rocks were at least 200 feet above the camera.
“The rocks are at least 200 feet above where I’m standing Mrs Choo. We’re at the bottom of an enormous, natural canyon in Ithaca, New York, not so far from where your son attends college at Cornell.”
She’d blanched before at the thought of her stupid, irresponsible son. Now her stomach began roiling and pitching again. The DVD, the high rocks, the unexpected package. All very wrong-feeling.
“My name’s Doug Mrs. Choo…
Mai Choo didn’t hear the rest. She was too busy watching.
***
It really was a nice day. Chris Choo smiled to himself at the irony. Of all people, of all DAYS, to notice and appreciate nice weather. Just another sign, among thousands, that he’d never quite fit in this world. How could he have been so blind? Wasted so very many years? He thanked God - as he did every day, at least a few times - that he’d the good fortune to cross paths with Doug, . He thanked God, yet again, for the ten blue valiums that Doug himself had given him just yesterday morning. He’d buried them all in one go just before the climb, and felt now as if his entire person had been filled to overflowing with cool, soothing clay. The time - he knew - was right.
The last steps of his life stretched before him, taking the form of a insubstantial-looking footbridge about 150 feet long and strung out over a tremendous chasm. He stood, regarding the void in the dull heat of a September morning in upstate New York. The last bridge, the last view, the last steps. The sunlight glinting and sparkling off random reflective particles imbedded in the footbridge. The last sunlight, the last particles, the last steel cross-piece on the last footbridge. He started walking, and each step brought more of what he could only guess was relief.
When he got to what he guessed was the center of the thing, he wasted no time. Classes would end before noon and then somebody would see him, and scream to him, and make him come back over the fence. He couldn’t repay Doug with anything substantial, but he could at least repay him with punctuality. He steeled himself, moving with alacrity, grabbing for support at a green-painted cable, swinging one leg over and then the other. Now both legs cranked straight with hands grasping the cable in reverse behind his back. The last uncomfortable position. The last gaze into a 200 foot void. He looked up, found the 11:00 sun, and let go.
***
She didn’t see where her son actually “jumped”. One minute he stood suspended, holding the cable-fencing behind him and starting down with a blank expression. Then he wasn’t. The angle was close enough that the camera couldn’t catch the entire event without following her son’s descent, and so “Doug” had done just that. Mai watched as Chris fell one hundred and fifty feet, bounced off a great protrusion of evil-looking dark grey bedrock, and exploded into five or six different pieces in a sqishy burst of red, purple, and white. “Doug” had tried to follow these as well but Choo’s remains had become too diffuse to fit in-frame. Eventually he stopped the filming as three of the chunks of Chris Choo bounced and oozed onto the canyon floor. The last thing Mai saw before blank screen, was what looked like a piece of torso leaving a splotchy, snail-trail of gore behind a slow-roll toward the rushes.
***
Doug: Student Support this is Doug, I can help…Mr Po! Nice to hear from you. How’ve you been. Ah sorry to hear that, I…What’s that? Tomorrow? Uh let me check…Tomorrow is just fine sir. I’ll see you then.
Rrrrrriiiiinnnnng…
Doug: Student Support. ‘S Doug. I can help…
Karl Po: Hello.
(Doug hears an Asian man in that “hello”, and the call’s from the Cornell exchange. Doug sees potential.)
Doug: (After a lengthy pause) Hello. You called the student support hotline. Are you having trouble.
Karl Po: (After another, longer pause) I’m having trouble.
D: OK amigo, I can help you there.
K. P: Thanks. I mean, thanks for taking…The time, I mean. Um. Thanks.
D: No worries dude, now just take me through this whole dance contest. Bring me right up to speed.
(Karl Po was only a few minutes into his story when Doug put aside all doubt. A live one. Right there at 11:34 on a rainy Tuesday.)
***
An hour and a half later, Doug was finishing up with Karl Po.:
Jeez Karl it doesn’t sound to me like you have much of a choice. I mean, your wife and your own brother, not to mention his 17 year-old kid! And the kid’s girlfriend. we must never forget she fucked your brother’s kid , and your brother’s kid’s girlfriend at the same time. And at different times. Horrible. Then there’s the humiliating fall from grace at your job, not to mention in your neighborhood. Your agonizing Rheumatitis, severe nasal allergy pain, and weeping sore condition. Throw that in with the 25 pounds that you can’t lose despite fasting, exercise, dark magic, and the use of “supplements”. I gotta tell ’ya man: I’m just not seeing that there’s much here that makes your life worth, well, anything.
Doug let the word linger before taking up again. Technically, the list of troubles was the last part of the protocol, but Doug was detail-oriented. It was his custom to run down a series of confirmations in closing, just to make sure he and the subject were same-paged regarding sequence and timing. He was steering the train of conversation in just that direction, when suddenly the whole fucking thing jumped the tracks. After yet another nine months-pregnant pause, Po intoned:
It’s so strange. This isn’t quite the way I expected this to go.
Doug was appalled at his own carelessness almost as much as with the tremendous balls of Karl Po. Po - he realized now - was never planning to show up tomorrow. Not on time, not anytime. He decided he’d need to change a few things about the approach. Nothing extreme, he promised himself, jotting some quick notes in the tiny book that he used to record his ideas as he birthed them. Even though he knew KP wasn’t all in, and might never be, Doug decided to play out the string, if nothing else but to stay in practice for the next real opportunity:
Well, Mr. Po…Karl…you know I like to think we’re here to help, no matter what our assessment and interpretation of the word becomes after speaking with a particular caller. If what we hear dictates one course of action over another, then aren’t we obligated to express that opinion? If not then what are we doing here anyway?
***
K: (After another twenty-eight minutes of taffy-pulling, followed by forty five seconds of silence) I’ll be breaking everybody’s heart. My mother…
D: (shuffling papers around his desk) Well, Karl, I think we’re done here. I have other callers, you seem determined, maybe revisit this at the later date?
K: You sound almost disappointed
D: It’s nothing. Don’t worry about me.
K: So you are disappointed. I knew it. I should have you arrested. I fucking call for help because I think I’m thinking about killing myself and here you are fucking encouraging me! You fucking asshole! Evil, devious motherfucker! ASSHOLE!
D: Well now Mr. Po I don’t see where that kind of language…
K: FUCK YOU! (click)
***
Afterwards Doug replayed the events in his mind. Over and over he combed the footage, like a football coach studying game-film, leaning in, looking for advantage, searching for gaps in the defense. Was it his delivery? Po had seemed comfortable speaking with him…The pitch itself? Doug’d been using it for five years and six months without issue. Was he, himself offensive in some way? He was wearing Polo khakis and a powder blue button down. Not the most imaginative threads but not overtly objectionable. His armpits and breath were heavenly. His entire being - in fact - a veritable olfactory feast. Everything seemed in order, but something was very, obviously, wrong. Doug felt defeated. Leaning as far back as they Aeron would take him, he launched a melancholy ghost of himself through one of the thousand holes in the drop-ceiling. He imagined himself a microscopic thing, Even smaller: A thing that would appear microscopic when compared to things that were actually microscopic to begin with. The sad little piece of Doug tumbled up into the ceiling holes, went bouncing through unseen cracks in support beams, and finally moved into open air, airborne for the gusting thermals.
***
Christian Choo was going to be late. He was nineteen years old., uprooting from Japan for an ivy-laced engineering ride, but failing all but one of his courses in this, his third full semester of school. Christian had married just a few months before coming to Cornell, after fathering a child with a high school girlfriend. The girl - Tiya was her name - had since been put on Psychiatric lockdown on the advice of the family doctor. The child was being raised by her family while she “healed”. The prospect of returning home to Tokyo with an academic dismissal form to present to an unemployable wife who might be bi-polar, became the trigger-event to a phone conversation with Doug.
He woke up late, almost 4:00, and considering all that had happened, he thought that was about right. Excessive sleep, tardiness, and general sloth had been his constant companions for almost two years. That they would conspire to thwart his punctuality regarding the last appointment he’d ever make wasn’t especially surprising. Still, he felt he should hustle. If the guy left, and he decided to go ahead anyway, then he’d be leaving an un-kept promise, which - he felt - was probably frowned upon in any kind of decent afterlife. He was puzzling over this, still wrapped in sheets and horizontal on the bed, when his cell phone started up, bouncing and vibrating on the bedside fake wood table. Nine rings went buy. No movement / complete silence from the bed. He was reaching for the thing again to see who it was when it blew up again. This time, the man was close enough to see the caller ID. Just one letter, capitalized and final: “D”
Hello! (he sounded more upbeat than he’d intended, and made a mental note to tone it down for the rest of the conversation.) Oh hey. Yep. Yeah. Yeah not bad, not as rested as I’d like but, I guess I don’t have to worry about that much longer. OK. Yeah, I spoke with her again last night and it’s like I told you. There might even be more than one. Yeah, totally. Just like you said. Right, no the kid is probably not mine, and then you weigh that in with the VD she gave both me and the kid. Oh yeah, he’s been since like, age 10. No. No exaggerating. It’s sealed. He’s a disaster. Already I know he does coke like every night. I think he actually was arrested with coke. Oh now I’m getting worked up and I really didn’t want that today. Yeah. Right make it 4:00, the top of Six-Mile like I showed you. OK. And listen man, I know his is probably the last time for us before I, um, before…
(loooooong pause)
…Anyway I just wanted to thank you for all your help and support. Without you, I might have never realized the truth. God knows how many years of agony and misery you’ve saved me. I had a little token of my appreciation sent down today. Use it in good health my friend, and when you use it, think of me. OK. Goodbye.
***
Tokyo could be a cold place in the fall. Mai Choo figured that most people didn’t know that, most Americans anyway. She watched them daily, trundling by the hundreds past her info desk at the Tokyo Airport. They’d take a look outside at the snow and the weather, realizing with inevitable certainty that whatever light linen, single-layer, small pocket-animal laden ensemble they’d selected for travel day wasn’t going to make the nut. They’d move off then, searching anywhere and everywhere for English-language signs, or symbols that might indicate warm garments for sale. Mai Choo could never afford to watch for long, her duties as interim chief were too demanding. But everyday she’d give the warmer clothing phenomenon a few minutes, usually during her daily, early am multitasking session while reading the papers, having breakfast, and streamlining her day’s appointments in a tiny leather-bound notebook.
She’d been just getting around to this daily observance when there came a knock at her office door. An underling opened the door a crack and stuck his head in the space between. He said:
Mrs. Choo. A package. Next day air from Cornell.
Instantly Mai Choo’s head went into Migraine overdrive. Her son. Her beloved. Her baby. Her miserable, lazy, dishonorable bastard. They’d sent him to America with such high hopes, and reaped only disaster, and misery for the sending. Mai felt a lot of things for her boy, but what she mostly felt was embarrassed. Choo was once an important name in the place where she lived. And the episodes with the boy and his “wife” had changed all that.
Come in, I’ll take it.
***
Mai moved back behind her desk with the show-box sized package, and dismissed the worker-bee. She waited almost ten whole minutes before opening it, another ten minutes staring at it, and then eighteen more minutes fiddling aimlessly with it, before finally sticking it into her laptop and pressing “play”.
The opener was a landscape shot, handheld (on film-class 8mm she noted) as the camera-person walked slowly in what appeared to the bottom of a natural canyon. The camera showed her a small but rapid stream wending, and diving down steep chutes. Then it turned upwards and Mai could just make out high grey rocks reaching up into a white-out sky. She felt vertigo just watching. The rocks were at least 200 feet above the camera.
“The rocks are at least 200 feet above where I’m standing Mrs Choo. We’re at the bottom of an enormous, natural canyon in Ithaca, New York, not so far from where your son attends college at Cornell.”
She’d blanched before at the thought of her stupid, irresponsible son. Now her stomach began roiling and pitching again. The DVD, the high rocks, the unexpected package. All very wrong-feeling.
“My name’s Doug Mrs. Choo…
Mai Choo didn’t hear the rest. She was too busy watching.
***
It really was a nice day. Chris Choo smiled to himself at the irony. Of all people, of all DAYS, to notice and appreciate nice weather. Just another sign, among thousands, that he’d never quite fit in this world. How could he have been so blind? Wasted so very many years? He thanked God - as he did every day, at least a few times - that he’d the good fortune to cross paths with Doug, . He thanked God, yet again, for the ten blue valiums that Doug himself had given him just yesterday morning. He’d buried them all in one go just before the climb, and felt now as if his entire person had been filled to overflowing with cool, soothing clay. The time - he knew - was right.
The last steps of his life stretched before him, taking the form of a insubstantial-looking footbridge about 150 feet long and strung out over a tremendous chasm. He stood, regarding the void in the dull heat of a September morning in upstate New York. The last bridge, the last view, the last steps. The sunlight glinting and sparkling off random reflective particles imbedded in the footbridge. The last sunlight, the last particles, the last steel cross-piece on the last footbridge. He started walking, and each step brought more of what he could only guess was relief.
When he got to what he guessed was the center of the thing, he wasted no time. Classes would end before noon and then somebody would see him, and scream to him, and make him come back over the fence. He couldn’t repay Doug with anything substantial, but he could at least repay him with punctuality. He steeled himself, moving with alacrity, grabbing for support at a green-painted cable, swinging one leg over and then the other. Now both legs cranked straight with hands grasping the cable in reverse behind his back. The last uncomfortable position. The last gaze into a 200 foot void. He looked up, found the 11:00 sun, and let go.
***
She didn’t see where her son actually “jumped”. One minute he stood suspended, holding the cable-fencing behind him and starting down with a blank expression. Then he wasn’t. The angle was close enough that the camera couldn’t catch the entire event without following her son’s descent, and so “Doug” had done just that. Mai watched as Chris fell one hundred and fifty feet, bounced off a great protrusion of evil-looking dark grey bedrock, and exploded into five or six different pieces in a sqishy burst of red, purple, and white. “Doug” had tried to follow these as well but Choo’s remains had become too diffuse to fit in-frame. Eventually he stopped the filming as three of the chunks of Chris Choo bounced and oozed onto the canyon floor. The last thing Mai saw before blank screen, was what looked like a piece of torso leaving a splotchy, snail-trail of gore behind a slow-roll toward the rushes.
***
Doug: Student Support this is Doug, I can help…Mr Po! Nice to hear from you. How’ve you been. Ah sorry to hear that, I…What’s that? Tomorrow? Uh let me check…Tomorrow is just fine sir. I’ll see you then.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Plate Techtonics
(Faaaaaaaaaart)
A weird, almost chemical smell, and a flurry of hacks, coughs, sniffing, scraping, and breathy, belabored groans. Finally, the ignition of a cigarette, a migration from dead center of a California King canopy to an oak night table, and a pouring of honey-colored liquid. “Rebel Yell” brand, from Kentucky. He mutters, a scarred, oddly melodic tenor whisper:
Whiskey,jack. Wonda’fool…
…To nobody in particular, and bolts the contents of the glass down the gullet in one go. Keith Richards, awake and alive yet again. Sitting upright now, sheet-wrapped sheik-like at the bedside, with his feet (still fully matador-booted, he notes with some interest) touching the shag. The low, melodic whisper once again:
But where sweetheart, where?
This time another voice: hyper, booming, shot through with Texas-ness and gaspy between the words. The voice of a redneck doing something.
Hef’s house you limey (gasp) faggot. You (gasp) fell asleep ten minutes ago (gasp)…
Then yet another voice, laughing, speaking French. This voice also doing…Keef, The bed-sheik, turned and twisted, looking for the source. There was a door behind him, to the rear of the bed. The bathroom, he knew. It was all starting to pile back in for him. This was Hef’s, he’d been here with Bobby, and - who? - Freddie? Mick? Mick had been here, he was sure of it. He remembered setting something on fire…The booming voice again:
(Augh, augh oh….Aughhhhhhuuh.) Ok. ’Scuse me baby…
Now a woman, naked save for a pair of black, steel-toed Tony llamas, emerges from the door. She’s physically astounding, and Keef watches her cross the room until another woman - equally astounding and naked - walks from the same door. They are bothering around something over by a day bed in the corner. The girls whisper in French and giggle, searching through bags and clothes. Keef watches their asses bouncing about. Smoking and drinking at 9:30am. Again, the Tenor whisper:
What to do children, what to do…
In answer: Texas, loud and hollow from Hef’s awesome bathroom:
Nothin’ doin’ KR. Rudge says we’re headin fer desert. He says “now“. Mick sent the car. Time to turn and burn captain Queeg.
Bobby walked out from the naked French girl door birthday suited. The awful vision, coupled with the tiring news conspiring to ruin things for Keef. He felt muddled. There was a car here already? What had they been burning?
Bobby was towering over him now, hosting a wilting Texas hard-on while lighting a gigantic Texas joint. He puffed and sucked at it heartily while settling in to regard the naked women for a bit. The girls still babbling and bouncing and sifting through their shit. After a few minutes he hands the splif to K.R. and they both sit watching the French girl’s butts. That’s as far as they get before Rudge himself comes exploding in. He’s carrying a walkie/Talkie and broadcasting static. He pauses for a few seconds and registers: The girls, the Saxophone player, the Principal. Then he intercepts the waning joint en route from Keef to Bobby.
I’ll take this. You two cover up and go outside now. I’ll finish up here.
On the way out, KR muttering:
Monteville? Ashemont? Merrymont….Where…?
Bobby is walking while putting pants on and staring - still - at the naked French girls. He intones with enthusiam:
Altamont, you disgusting man. Altamont National Motor Speedway. Like Woodstock!
Then a stage whisper, smiling into KR’s face and motioning with eyes only:
I fucked those girls just right now in the bathroom while you were sleepin’.
***
Fucking Altamont. Dude, are you sure?
But even asking the question Smokey knew it was true. They’d double and triple checked since leaving for the desert. He’d actually seen Fitch and some other guys at a breakfast counter in the Haight, and they confirmed it. Golden Gate said “no” at the last second, had the towns muni workers rip the stage down. The Dead had worked some weird, Bay-Area magic and moved the whole affair 40 miles East into the desert. Altamont National, an underused motor track out between Livermoore and Tracey, would now be the scene of The Scene.
Smoke had retained his spot in the enormous Cadillac, and none of those guys - the Armour’s and the spellbinding, honey-smelling girl Toni - had ever heard of the place, much less been out there. Smoke was probably, he realized, one of the only people headed to the track that had actually been there before. In the bad old days, before his parents split and moved back east, his dad had been an auto racing enthusiast. The Bay Area born Smokey had spent many a scorching Sunday tracing the same trip they were on now, riding out before the sun came up and coming back late in the evening so his dad could geek out with the rest of the motor heads. He’d learned to hate a lot of things on those trips: The desert, crowds of people who liked cars, his father…The sudden change of plans playing hell with his forced optimism. Burning in the desert, would motherfuckers really want speed, even speed as singular and rare as his?
***
The breezes that massaged the Western Desert near the holy lands were odd in May. By turns harsh, mellow, non-existent and multi-directional, travelers through the region were always at a loss when putting together a successful blend of weights and weaves. To light and the trades from the Meditteranian will go through you like a thousand knives, lashing dust and sand before them. To heavy and the you’re likely becalmed, left to swelter in a fabric oven of your own devise. Thant’s why, in Tam Rhitta’s part of the dessert, he built down instead of up. The desert cannot devour you if you allready live already deep within it’s belly. Tam borrowed the plans from secrets and rumors passed through his family’s bloodlines since - some said - the dawn of time itself. He left his glass castle under the dunes only twice a year: In the spring, for a week, to oversee a thousand - odd acres in a week long sewing, prayer, and feasting, and in the autumn, again for a week, to paint his wives with honey and watch them run through his fields. These days he left the actual harvest to paid employees, but since Tam’s wives were so closely involved, he felt he should at least portray the image of paying attention to the process. Even as any man woman or child within 3000 air miles in any direction would rather claw his own eyes out than fuck with Tam Rhitta‘s money (or his wives for that matter). Besides, it was a harvest, and that meant the massive ingestion of a new year’s blessing. It was a time to be among the people.
Tam Rhitta’s harvest had happened almost a full month before Altamont became the agreed-upon sight to hole a free concert by the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. That was enough time for Tam’s army of 80 wives to trample his Khef fields for almost a whole week, leaving no plant untouched by their honey-blessed nakedness. It was enough time for Tam’s arm of 80 harvesters to gently massage the resin-caked bodys of his wives until they gave of their otherworldly yield. And, yes, enough time was left for a rather large shipment of the resultant temple-ball hash to be shipped over to a few lucky souls stateside, a good many of whom resided within a 4-block radius of Haight Street, city of San Francisco, State of California.
One of these lucky souls was Smokey Denniker’s good old buddy Splurgeon “Fitch” Fitcher, who Smoke had finally managed to rendevous with at that same Stones / Dead bill out in the desert. Good thing for both. Smokey had been at Altamont only a few hours before he’d ingested way to much of the grade A+ rocket fuel speed he was supposed to be selling. He couldn’t stop chewing on his bottom lip even though it was all swollen and red. Conversely, Fitch had been to heavy into the Temple-Ball and kept passing out and falling and hurting his face. Thus, a fortuitous meeting gained an extra onion-layer of benefit for both parties. They sat like conquerors in the front seat of a gigantic, powder-blue Cadillac ElDorado chasing sizeable blasts of the Temple with even bigger schnoz-fulls of raw-diesel methadrine, bitching about things that seemed trivial in the face of such a monster buzz in the late-summer desert. They’d been doing just that when a familiar man wearing velvet pants, of which one leg was purple, and the other huntsman’s green, appeared standing on the endless blue prairie of the El-D’s hood. Smokey’s first thought was that the dudes boots looked expensive.
***
Smokey: I heard a trick once. Try this next time you’re around a mirror: Look directly into the reflection for a bit, a few seconds. Then look at your right eye with your left eye. Now try the other way, your left eye looking at your right. Go back and forth like that a few times and you’ll see it. They aren’t moving. I mean, they are - your eyes have to move to be able to see from thing to thing right? But your brain edits that action out for some reason. Like an editor see? Taking out the things that don’t mean anything. But why? And who decides what to see and what not?
Keef: You know that’s interesting. I never knew that. It makes me want to find a mirror…(Yina’sintrisin…Nino dat. Micksmwun fin mira…)
Smokey: Another one - Have you ever done something you didn’t want to do? Not talking about like major life things, getting married or quitting a job or whatever, just small things: I shouldn’t go out tonight cause I don’t have cash and rent is coming. Twenty four drunken hours later…You know, that type of thing. It’s easy to chalk it up o risk/reward and what not, but that’s to easy. In most of those situations you ask the person later and it’s “I don’t know what I was thinking”. Like given the chance they wouldn’t do it again. So what part of us does that? It’s scary if you get to deep thinking about it. Do we really have any choices at all?
Keef: My whole life is a running example of that. Fascinating. (Ma ‘olaffs runnin’xampltha…s’fscinate)
***
Hearing the story come tumbling out of his mouth, Smoke was thinking later that maybe it was just somebody fucking with him for no reason. The scene was basically that in a nutshell these days, and you couldn’t play out here without being exposed to such foolishness. On the other hand, the dude had taken him behind some invisible security perimeter and handed him six thousand dollars in wrapped hundreds in exchange for a sizeable hunk of meth and a fist-sized blob of the Temple-Ball. Jokers from the Hashbury were unlikely to be riding so high, and even less likely to avail others of it if they were. The whole thing was fucked up. Now here’s Smoke, newly free from worry, newly flush with drugs and money, and feeling more weirded out and paranoid than he’d been since running out here in the first. Fucked up.
To make matters stranger, Altamont was doing a big flip right in front of his face. When they’d first arrived yesterday evening, everything out here was feeling easy…The freaks had the regular hippie farmer’s market set up going, but since the show was being put on for free, the use of money had been all but completely abolished on the grounds and motherfuckers were just giving shit away. Knitted clothing, drug paraphernalia, vinyl…All of it either on the bubble or traded for some other type lf good. Smoke had never seen the like. He himself had scored a heavy poncho and a carved-driftwood pipe for Fitch’s Temple Balls.
But that was last night and today, all that flower power bullshit was gone on a chill desert wind. Today Altamont was pushing a new, dark energy, twice as crowded and shot-up with a cruel, threatening atmosphere. Smokey had seen a least three fights on his way to the Port-a-john set up. One dude - being tended too by a fat old hippie lady - had gotten his nose exploded. A dark red mask hid his features as he lay sleeping on the sand.
Then there were the angels. Smokey had hardly seen any bikes on his arrival at the scene, and with Big Bear going down, he felt certain they’d stay away. As Friday Evening turned to Saturday morning though, he began see different. Colors and denim were more apparent to him on the crowd and in the lots. He Didn’t see any bikes, not yet, but there were already 100,000 freaks on the Altamont property, and that meant there could be lines of gleaming choppers parked in many places that Smoke wasn’t. Then at around 11:00, just around the official “doors” time for the show, he heard it.
The noise was far off still, maybe a few miles, but unmistakable in it’s volume and complexity. People were looking at the sky, smoke saw, watching for signs of rain to go with the sound effects. Smoke quivered involuntarily sitting, once again, behind the wheel of the Armour El-D. The thunder rolling through the valley was man made, he knew. The sound of quick violence and blood-thirst. The sound of a hundred - odd Harley Davidsons chopped into noisy chrome clouds and moving fast. The Hell’s Angels were heading to Altamont.
Smoke had Vulture’s money, and there were at hundred other chapters besides the LA colors, and the Big Bear run was presumably going on even now. Smoke should have found comfort in any of those home truths. New factors had cropped up though, and he was having trouble weighing them all in his poor, speed and hash-addled mind. Since his newfound windfall, he’d been thinking about ducking Vulch on a more permanent basis. Six g’s could set a guy up in Laurel Canyon, or Malibu, at least for the summer. If he showed up from an unforeseen jaunt with all of Vulch’s cash and maybe a thousand more, would the smelly old soldier even give a shit? Motherfucker was a biker on top of all of it. There was a good chance every day he woke up would be his last on earth. Jail, violence, traffic accident…The world of the outlaw biker was a risky one.
Now, hearing the awful sound and feeling the air-vibrations getting closer, Smoke decided he’d better smarten up. He grabbed the bag of cash and counted it, and then he tried to wake up Keef II. The dude was a dedicated sleeper, he knew, and it would take some doing. He was just finishing up the last thousand when a familiar voice say:
All these whiteys out in the desert, and yet there’s one who stands taller and more ivory than the rest. Smokey Denniker, give me the hundred dollars you owe me.
Smokey didn’t owe Merry Hunter any fucking money. Despite this, the guy always chose to greet him by mentioning some owed sum. A black thing - he guessed - but it was fucking irritating nonetheless. That the fucking dude was wearing a lime green seer sucker two piece with a pink shirt and loafers in a hundred + degrees was also annoying. Smoke started looking for a way out, but Hunter had him dead to rights in the Caddy. Smoke watched the rear view filling with green and pink, and then turned ready to take his medicine from the brother. Meredith had seen something more intriguing by then. He opened the back door without verbal interruption.
Whassis. What you got a…Hey Smoke. Smokey! You got a Rolling Stone back here you know dat. HaHa! Which stone you, sir? You suppos-a-bee. Wyman right? Naw, naw Watts right? Cha-leh!
Leave it Merry he’s catchin z’s before the show…
Smokey, you been smoking; that shit again, that shit…Uh Uh…No no. He catchin z’s durin’ the fuggin show. GP gone on stage now baby. We gotta move. What you got some weed? You got that shit you had?
He was talking about the meth. Smoke was puzzled. Had he mentioned that to fucking hunter? Why?
Uh…Well I had some. Jus a few left though. Show drugs…
Hunter - ever persistent:
Nah, Nah. Merry drugs you mean. We can trade up too. Lookee:
He held up a tums-sized white pill, glowing like the whitest thing ever. Smoke had been trying to act cool, but this was a bit much. He took the pill from the green-clad black man and marveled at it up close. It said, in tiny arching letters around the rim:
SANDOZ
And on the back, same lettering, smaller and stamped straight across:
LSD-25
And for the second time that day, Smoke was forced by fate into a choice with apocalyptic consequences.
Merry was already walking to the front passenger door.
Power blue. No No No. Smokey this car yours, this car got to be WHITE.
***
Well now he was fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, he guessed as Hunter, the nice-smelling girl, and himself were walking across the million-acre beige parking lots at Altamont Speedway. In the distance there was music playing, probably the Burritos. And though Smoke loved GP and loved the Burrito’s thing, he had his brain-full just trying to keep track of the music blaring in melty stereo inside his own head. Shit was loud. The Stones, echoes from yesterday, blending in with jibber from the moving crowd, and jabber from those still seated around campsites, cars, and other seated people. All of it twisting, braiding, and separating in his mind like strands in a massive weaving. He tried to pay attention to events outside his braincase, but there was so much going on, he worried over missing some.
A weird, almost chemical smell, and a flurry of hacks, coughs, sniffing, scraping, and breathy, belabored groans. Finally, the ignition of a cigarette, a migration from dead center of a California King canopy to an oak night table, and a pouring of honey-colored liquid. “Rebel Yell” brand, from Kentucky. He mutters, a scarred, oddly melodic tenor whisper:
Whiskey,jack. Wonda’fool…
…To nobody in particular, and bolts the contents of the glass down the gullet in one go. Keith Richards, awake and alive yet again. Sitting upright now, sheet-wrapped sheik-like at the bedside, with his feet (still fully matador-booted, he notes with some interest) touching the shag. The low, melodic whisper once again:
But where sweetheart, where?
This time another voice: hyper, booming, shot through with Texas-ness and gaspy between the words. The voice of a redneck doing something.
Hef’s house you limey (gasp) faggot. You (gasp) fell asleep ten minutes ago (gasp)…
Then yet another voice, laughing, speaking French. This voice also doing…Keef, The bed-sheik, turned and twisted, looking for the source. There was a door behind him, to the rear of the bed. The bathroom, he knew. It was all starting to pile back in for him. This was Hef’s, he’d been here with Bobby, and - who? - Freddie? Mick? Mick had been here, he was sure of it. He remembered setting something on fire…The booming voice again:
(Augh, augh oh….Aughhhhhhuuh.) Ok. ’Scuse me baby…
Now a woman, naked save for a pair of black, steel-toed Tony llamas, emerges from the door. She’s physically astounding, and Keef watches her cross the room until another woman - equally astounding and naked - walks from the same door. They are bothering around something over by a day bed in the corner. The girls whisper in French and giggle, searching through bags and clothes. Keef watches their asses bouncing about. Smoking and drinking at 9:30am. Again, the Tenor whisper:
What to do children, what to do…
In answer: Texas, loud and hollow from Hef’s awesome bathroom:
Nothin’ doin’ KR. Rudge says we’re headin fer desert. He says “now“. Mick sent the car. Time to turn and burn captain Queeg.
Bobby walked out from the naked French girl door birthday suited. The awful vision, coupled with the tiring news conspiring to ruin things for Keef. He felt muddled. There was a car here already? What had they been burning?
Bobby was towering over him now, hosting a wilting Texas hard-on while lighting a gigantic Texas joint. He puffed and sucked at it heartily while settling in to regard the naked women for a bit. The girls still babbling and bouncing and sifting through their shit. After a few minutes he hands the splif to K.R. and they both sit watching the French girl’s butts. That’s as far as they get before Rudge himself comes exploding in. He’s carrying a walkie/Talkie and broadcasting static. He pauses for a few seconds and registers: The girls, the Saxophone player, the Principal. Then he intercepts the waning joint en route from Keef to Bobby.
I’ll take this. You two cover up and go outside now. I’ll finish up here.
On the way out, KR muttering:
Monteville? Ashemont? Merrymont….Where…?
Bobby is walking while putting pants on and staring - still - at the naked French girls. He intones with enthusiam:
Altamont, you disgusting man. Altamont National Motor Speedway. Like Woodstock!
Then a stage whisper, smiling into KR’s face and motioning with eyes only:
I fucked those girls just right now in the bathroom while you were sleepin’.
***
Fucking Altamont. Dude, are you sure?
But even asking the question Smokey knew it was true. They’d double and triple checked since leaving for the desert. He’d actually seen Fitch and some other guys at a breakfast counter in the Haight, and they confirmed it. Golden Gate said “no” at the last second, had the towns muni workers rip the stage down. The Dead had worked some weird, Bay-Area magic and moved the whole affair 40 miles East into the desert. Altamont National, an underused motor track out between Livermoore and Tracey, would now be the scene of The Scene.
Smoke had retained his spot in the enormous Cadillac, and none of those guys - the Armour’s and the spellbinding, honey-smelling girl Toni - had ever heard of the place, much less been out there. Smoke was probably, he realized, one of the only people headed to the track that had actually been there before. In the bad old days, before his parents split and moved back east, his dad had been an auto racing enthusiast. The Bay Area born Smokey had spent many a scorching Sunday tracing the same trip they were on now, riding out before the sun came up and coming back late in the evening so his dad could geek out with the rest of the motor heads. He’d learned to hate a lot of things on those trips: The desert, crowds of people who liked cars, his father…The sudden change of plans playing hell with his forced optimism. Burning in the desert, would motherfuckers really want speed, even speed as singular and rare as his?
***
The breezes that massaged the Western Desert near the holy lands were odd in May. By turns harsh, mellow, non-existent and multi-directional, travelers through the region were always at a loss when putting together a successful blend of weights and weaves. To light and the trades from the Meditteranian will go through you like a thousand knives, lashing dust and sand before them. To heavy and the you’re likely becalmed, left to swelter in a fabric oven of your own devise. Thant’s why, in Tam Rhitta’s part of the dessert, he built down instead of up. The desert cannot devour you if you allready live already deep within it’s belly. Tam borrowed the plans from secrets and rumors passed through his family’s bloodlines since - some said - the dawn of time itself. He left his glass castle under the dunes only twice a year: In the spring, for a week, to oversee a thousand - odd acres in a week long sewing, prayer, and feasting, and in the autumn, again for a week, to paint his wives with honey and watch them run through his fields. These days he left the actual harvest to paid employees, but since Tam’s wives were so closely involved, he felt he should at least portray the image of paying attention to the process. Even as any man woman or child within 3000 air miles in any direction would rather claw his own eyes out than fuck with Tam Rhitta‘s money (or his wives for that matter). Besides, it was a harvest, and that meant the massive ingestion of a new year’s blessing. It was a time to be among the people.
Tam Rhitta’s harvest had happened almost a full month before Altamont became the agreed-upon sight to hole a free concert by the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. That was enough time for Tam’s army of 80 wives to trample his Khef fields for almost a whole week, leaving no plant untouched by their honey-blessed nakedness. It was enough time for Tam’s arm of 80 harvesters to gently massage the resin-caked bodys of his wives until they gave of their otherworldly yield. And, yes, enough time was left for a rather large shipment of the resultant temple-ball hash to be shipped over to a few lucky souls stateside, a good many of whom resided within a 4-block radius of Haight Street, city of San Francisco, State of California.
One of these lucky souls was Smokey Denniker’s good old buddy Splurgeon “Fitch” Fitcher, who Smoke had finally managed to rendevous with at that same Stones / Dead bill out in the desert. Good thing for both. Smokey had been at Altamont only a few hours before he’d ingested way to much of the grade A+ rocket fuel speed he was supposed to be selling. He couldn’t stop chewing on his bottom lip even though it was all swollen and red. Conversely, Fitch had been to heavy into the Temple-Ball and kept passing out and falling and hurting his face. Thus, a fortuitous meeting gained an extra onion-layer of benefit for both parties. They sat like conquerors in the front seat of a gigantic, powder-blue Cadillac ElDorado chasing sizeable blasts of the Temple with even bigger schnoz-fulls of raw-diesel methadrine, bitching about things that seemed trivial in the face of such a monster buzz in the late-summer desert. They’d been doing just that when a familiar man wearing velvet pants, of which one leg was purple, and the other huntsman’s green, appeared standing on the endless blue prairie of the El-D’s hood. Smokey’s first thought was that the dudes boots looked expensive.
***
Smokey: I heard a trick once. Try this next time you’re around a mirror: Look directly into the reflection for a bit, a few seconds. Then look at your right eye with your left eye. Now try the other way, your left eye looking at your right. Go back and forth like that a few times and you’ll see it. They aren’t moving. I mean, they are - your eyes have to move to be able to see from thing to thing right? But your brain edits that action out for some reason. Like an editor see? Taking out the things that don’t mean anything. But why? And who decides what to see and what not?
Keef: You know that’s interesting. I never knew that. It makes me want to find a mirror…(Yina’sintrisin…Nino dat. Micksmwun fin mira…)
Smokey: Another one - Have you ever done something you didn’t want to do? Not talking about like major life things, getting married or quitting a job or whatever, just small things: I shouldn’t go out tonight cause I don’t have cash and rent is coming. Twenty four drunken hours later…You know, that type of thing. It’s easy to chalk it up o risk/reward and what not, but that’s to easy. In most of those situations you ask the person later and it’s “I don’t know what I was thinking”. Like given the chance they wouldn’t do it again. So what part of us does that? It’s scary if you get to deep thinking about it. Do we really have any choices at all?
Keef: My whole life is a running example of that. Fascinating. (Ma ‘olaffs runnin’xampltha…s’fscinate)
***
Hearing the story come tumbling out of his mouth, Smoke was thinking later that maybe it was just somebody fucking with him for no reason. The scene was basically that in a nutshell these days, and you couldn’t play out here without being exposed to such foolishness. On the other hand, the dude had taken him behind some invisible security perimeter and handed him six thousand dollars in wrapped hundreds in exchange for a sizeable hunk of meth and a fist-sized blob of the Temple-Ball. Jokers from the Hashbury were unlikely to be riding so high, and even less likely to avail others of it if they were. The whole thing was fucked up. Now here’s Smoke, newly free from worry, newly flush with drugs and money, and feeling more weirded out and paranoid than he’d been since running out here in the first. Fucked up.
To make matters stranger, Altamont was doing a big flip right in front of his face. When they’d first arrived yesterday evening, everything out here was feeling easy…The freaks had the regular hippie farmer’s market set up going, but since the show was being put on for free, the use of money had been all but completely abolished on the grounds and motherfuckers were just giving shit away. Knitted clothing, drug paraphernalia, vinyl…All of it either on the bubble or traded for some other type lf good. Smoke had never seen the like. He himself had scored a heavy poncho and a carved-driftwood pipe for Fitch’s Temple Balls.
But that was last night and today, all that flower power bullshit was gone on a chill desert wind. Today Altamont was pushing a new, dark energy, twice as crowded and shot-up with a cruel, threatening atmosphere. Smokey had seen a least three fights on his way to the Port-a-john set up. One dude - being tended too by a fat old hippie lady - had gotten his nose exploded. A dark red mask hid his features as he lay sleeping on the sand.
Then there were the angels. Smokey had hardly seen any bikes on his arrival at the scene, and with Big Bear going down, he felt certain they’d stay away. As Friday Evening turned to Saturday morning though, he began see different. Colors and denim were more apparent to him on the crowd and in the lots. He Didn’t see any bikes, not yet, but there were already 100,000 freaks on the Altamont property, and that meant there could be lines of gleaming choppers parked in many places that Smoke wasn’t. Then at around 11:00, just around the official “doors” time for the show, he heard it.
The noise was far off still, maybe a few miles, but unmistakable in it’s volume and complexity. People were looking at the sky, smoke saw, watching for signs of rain to go with the sound effects. Smoke quivered involuntarily sitting, once again, behind the wheel of the Armour El-D. The thunder rolling through the valley was man made, he knew. The sound of quick violence and blood-thirst. The sound of a hundred - odd Harley Davidsons chopped into noisy chrome clouds and moving fast. The Hell’s Angels were heading to Altamont.
Smoke had Vulture’s money, and there were at hundred other chapters besides the LA colors, and the Big Bear run was presumably going on even now. Smoke should have found comfort in any of those home truths. New factors had cropped up though, and he was having trouble weighing them all in his poor, speed and hash-addled mind. Since his newfound windfall, he’d been thinking about ducking Vulch on a more permanent basis. Six g’s could set a guy up in Laurel Canyon, or Malibu, at least for the summer. If he showed up from an unforeseen jaunt with all of Vulch’s cash and maybe a thousand more, would the smelly old soldier even give a shit? Motherfucker was a biker on top of all of it. There was a good chance every day he woke up would be his last on earth. Jail, violence, traffic accident…The world of the outlaw biker was a risky one.
Now, hearing the awful sound and feeling the air-vibrations getting closer, Smoke decided he’d better smarten up. He grabbed the bag of cash and counted it, and then he tried to wake up Keef II. The dude was a dedicated sleeper, he knew, and it would take some doing. He was just finishing up the last thousand when a familiar voice say:
All these whiteys out in the desert, and yet there’s one who stands taller and more ivory than the rest. Smokey Denniker, give me the hundred dollars you owe me.
Smokey didn’t owe Merry Hunter any fucking money. Despite this, the guy always chose to greet him by mentioning some owed sum. A black thing - he guessed - but it was fucking irritating nonetheless. That the fucking dude was wearing a lime green seer sucker two piece with a pink shirt and loafers in a hundred + degrees was also annoying. Smoke started looking for a way out, but Hunter had him dead to rights in the Caddy. Smoke watched the rear view filling with green and pink, and then turned ready to take his medicine from the brother. Meredith had seen something more intriguing by then. He opened the back door without verbal interruption.
Whassis. What you got a…Hey Smoke. Smokey! You got a Rolling Stone back here you know dat. HaHa! Which stone you, sir? You suppos-a-bee. Wyman right? Naw, naw Watts right? Cha-leh!
Leave it Merry he’s catchin z’s before the show…
Smokey, you been smoking; that shit again, that shit…Uh Uh…No no. He catchin z’s durin’ the fuggin show. GP gone on stage now baby. We gotta move. What you got some weed? You got that shit you had?
He was talking about the meth. Smoke was puzzled. Had he mentioned that to fucking hunter? Why?
Uh…Well I had some. Jus a few left though. Show drugs…
Hunter - ever persistent:
Nah, Nah. Merry drugs you mean. We can trade up too. Lookee:
He held up a tums-sized white pill, glowing like the whitest thing ever. Smoke had been trying to act cool, but this was a bit much. He took the pill from the green-clad black man and marveled at it up close. It said, in tiny arching letters around the rim:
SANDOZ
And on the back, same lettering, smaller and stamped straight across:
LSD-25
And for the second time that day, Smoke was forced by fate into a choice with apocalyptic consequences.
Merry was already walking to the front passenger door.
Power blue. No No No. Smokey this car yours, this car got to be WHITE.
***
Well now he was fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, he guessed as Hunter, the nice-smelling girl, and himself were walking across the million-acre beige parking lots at Altamont Speedway. In the distance there was music playing, probably the Burritos. And though Smoke loved GP and loved the Burrito’s thing, he had his brain-full just trying to keep track of the music blaring in melty stereo inside his own head. Shit was loud. The Stones, echoes from yesterday, blending in with jibber from the moving crowd, and jabber from those still seated around campsites, cars, and other seated people. All of it twisting, braiding, and separating in his mind like strands in a massive weaving. He tried to pay attention to events outside his braincase, but there was so much going on, he worried over missing some.
Excision
Chris Skelt
Little, Brown and Co.
1345 Avenue of the Americas
NYC, NY 10019
Hey Chris,
So here's the section I was talking about last Friday. just to remind you, Keef wants it out, and I want it in. His argument is not without merit: he can't prove any of it, and all the principles are dead (except for his, uh, twin? Double? I'm not sure the correct term). Anyway it's nothing that would effect deadline, and it's not like the shit is boring without it. It’s just that the story is so weird and unlikely, a freakish, surreal example of what 1st world culture can become in synchronous moments. That's just me waxing romantic though. Call me a romantic ;)
Anway, check it out and let me know. Either way, you'll have the pages - all 547 of them (!) - on your computer on by Friday.
OK,
G
The end of the 1960s was, like, almost baby, almost. That year, and even in '67 and '68, there were things going on in this country that were very positive, very hopeful. The world had really - it seemed - had enough of the system. Enough of wars. Enough of other people making decisions for them. Which is not, i might add, an uncommon sentiment down through the ages, but usually unsuccessful right?. It's easy to complain about things, but very difficult to put a plan into action, or even to make a plan at all. At the end of the 1960's in America, it seemed like everybody had a plan. You can see nothing much came of it, but like I say: almost.
For me, that was when it was the most fun. The Stones were quite a different band in those days. Brian was still, supposedly, in charge. I mean, nobody was really in charge, but the main character was clearly Brian. He'd been beautiful, and was no longer but nobody really caught on until after he was gone. Mick and I were still sort of mucking about, not writing, and if we did, not writing as a team. None of that started until later. The songs, the ones we didn't steal I mean, were a more collaborative thing then. I'm not sure if that was a good thing as far as the product goes, but it seemed to leave us all having a much better time.
Put it this way, I spent the 1970's basically living from court date to court date and trying to staty out of jail and feed my habit. Compare that to the 60's. In the 1960's I fucked a different woman after every set, smoking weed by the bushel and, really, just being adored by everybody. Which sounds better to you: Paranoid and on the lamb vs stoned for free and banging everything in range?
***
This guy, I remember his name because he only had one name. George. It was John himself who made introductions. That's what really got me. Of all of us, Lennon was so protective of his privacy, and so weary of being taken. That whole Liverpool, working class thing of keeping it all under wraps you know? That was very much John, even right up until the end. But here he was, telling me he wanted me to meet this man, this Doctor. "Doctor George" he called him: "A miracle worker old man, I'm gonna’ bring him 'round this weekend."
And he did. And we - the three of us, John and me, and this Doctor - sat around yakking for most of the night. He loved acid, did the good doctor, and so did John, and I was thinking that this was a drug-maker. I just assumed that's what we were leading up to. I was wrong.
The real heart of it was that this Doctor - and he was very young also, or at least very young looking - had invented a machine called a Quantum Computer. Now: "What's that Keef?". "Well I've no idea sweetheart, but it sounds expensive. How much do you need?" you know? Feeling around my pockets...
But the didn't want money. This guy wanted ME. He wanted Keith Richard’s body, right? The computer, he claimed, was ahead of it's time by hundreds of years, and could conceivably perform tasks long thought to be impossible. Time travel - for instance - was mentioned. Teleportation, mind-reading, and (this was the main reason he'd come to me) cloning.
Lennon and Doctor George explained to me that the quantum computer was some accident of his research. He hadn't been looking for it, and didn't know quite what to do with it now that he'd found it. John heard from him and immediately thought (and this can sort of illustrate where John's mind was at the time) "I'll make a copy of me to do all the things I hate doing, mainly: Being John Lennon“. Photo shoots, press junkets, tours...All of it he'd put in the hands of this double that our mad doctor could make. A fake Lennon. They were about to do it, and then John thought of me. We hated most of the same things, he and I, and he realized that I might be able to make use of this new technology as well.
Well it took a bit of time and some trial and error but we ended up getting the thing sorted. A few months later, just in time for Altamont actually, I met...Me. And from there things got a little crazy for a while…Crazier than usual, even for the Rolling Stones.
Little, Brown and Co.
1345 Avenue of the Americas
NYC, NY 10019
Hey Chris,
So here's the section I was talking about last Friday. just to remind you, Keef wants it out, and I want it in. His argument is not without merit: he can't prove any of it, and all the principles are dead (except for his, uh, twin? Double? I'm not sure the correct term). Anyway it's nothing that would effect deadline, and it's not like the shit is boring without it. It’s just that the story is so weird and unlikely, a freakish, surreal example of what 1st world culture can become in synchronous moments. That's just me waxing romantic though. Call me a romantic ;)
Anway, check it out and let me know. Either way, you'll have the pages - all 547 of them (!) - on your computer on by Friday.
OK,
G
The end of the 1960s was, like, almost baby, almost. That year, and even in '67 and '68, there were things going on in this country that were very positive, very hopeful. The world had really - it seemed - had enough of the system. Enough of wars. Enough of other people making decisions for them. Which is not, i might add, an uncommon sentiment down through the ages, but usually unsuccessful right?. It's easy to complain about things, but very difficult to put a plan into action, or even to make a plan at all. At the end of the 1960's in America, it seemed like everybody had a plan. You can see nothing much came of it, but like I say: almost.
For me, that was when it was the most fun. The Stones were quite a different band in those days. Brian was still, supposedly, in charge. I mean, nobody was really in charge, but the main character was clearly Brian. He'd been beautiful, and was no longer but nobody really caught on until after he was gone. Mick and I were still sort of mucking about, not writing, and if we did, not writing as a team. None of that started until later. The songs, the ones we didn't steal I mean, were a more collaborative thing then. I'm not sure if that was a good thing as far as the product goes, but it seemed to leave us all having a much better time.
Put it this way, I spent the 1970's basically living from court date to court date and trying to staty out of jail and feed my habit. Compare that to the 60's. In the 1960's I fucked a different woman after every set, smoking weed by the bushel and, really, just being adored by everybody. Which sounds better to you: Paranoid and on the lamb vs stoned for free and banging everything in range?
***
This guy, I remember his name because he only had one name. George. It was John himself who made introductions. That's what really got me. Of all of us, Lennon was so protective of his privacy, and so weary of being taken. That whole Liverpool, working class thing of keeping it all under wraps you know? That was very much John, even right up until the end. But here he was, telling me he wanted me to meet this man, this Doctor. "Doctor George" he called him: "A miracle worker old man, I'm gonna’ bring him 'round this weekend."
And he did. And we - the three of us, John and me, and this Doctor - sat around yakking for most of the night. He loved acid, did the good doctor, and so did John, and I was thinking that this was a drug-maker. I just assumed that's what we were leading up to. I was wrong.
The real heart of it was that this Doctor - and he was very young also, or at least very young looking - had invented a machine called a Quantum Computer. Now: "What's that Keef?". "Well I've no idea sweetheart, but it sounds expensive. How much do you need?" you know? Feeling around my pockets...
But the didn't want money. This guy wanted ME. He wanted Keith Richard’s body, right? The computer, he claimed, was ahead of it's time by hundreds of years, and could conceivably perform tasks long thought to be impossible. Time travel - for instance - was mentioned. Teleportation, mind-reading, and (this was the main reason he'd come to me) cloning.
Lennon and Doctor George explained to me that the quantum computer was some accident of his research. He hadn't been looking for it, and didn't know quite what to do with it now that he'd found it. John heard from him and immediately thought (and this can sort of illustrate where John's mind was at the time) "I'll make a copy of me to do all the things I hate doing, mainly: Being John Lennon“. Photo shoots, press junkets, tours...All of it he'd put in the hands of this double that our mad doctor could make. A fake Lennon. They were about to do it, and then John thought of me. We hated most of the same things, he and I, and he realized that I might be able to make use of this new technology as well.
Well it took a bit of time and some trial and error but we ended up getting the thing sorted. A few months later, just in time for Altamont actually, I met...Me. And from there things got a little crazy for a while…Crazier than usual, even for the Rolling Stones.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Speedway
~Gonna’ find my way to heaven cause I did my time in hell…I wasn’t lookin’ to good but I was feelin’ real well…
Bill Frivol
The Nation
C/O Zentz Publishing Inc.
118 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY
10029
Dear Bill:
Here’s what we’ve got so far on the Denniker piece. Not a fucking bone-anza to be sure, but Mr. Denniker is game, and every session brings new treats. Take this very raw, very first round and be assured: the thing’s got LEGS. I’ll send you another batch by weeks end and then work through the weekend to get number three crushed into diamonds. If The Nation is still 10-timing then I think Summer 2, Fall 1, Fall 2 would be the way to run. A holiday extravaganza capped off with Keef, Altamont, and time travel…Beats Hell’s Angels by a nipple or two, no?
Best,
GC
PS: The harvest in Eugene started early and we’re a rager already in late August. Come out and go unconscious with us won’t you? I’ll leave the lights on…
Smokey Denniker started feeling better as the suburbs of the Golden State gave way to the Livermore desert. After spending most of a day beating his psyche senseless with worry, He’d finally ripped through his reserves and was, for a while, content to watch the sand turn purple as the horizon crawled past. Passenger number four, he was, and comfy. Right rear in a spanking Cadillac, gleaming and clean. They picked him up halfway down the 405 towards San Fran. The girl driving was a dry honey blonde with a deep rasp of a voice. She proffered no greeting. The brown-haired guy next to her didn’t turn around either. The girl in the back bench, brown all over and amazing, spoke from rolling while holding the door:
You tryna get to San Francisco?
and looking right into Smoke’s eyes. He jumped in, the Caddy never actually coming to a full stop.
They were from the valley, elated at the biggest rock and roll party yet thrown falling the same weekend as their parents 40th wedding anniversary. Left to their own devices for a week, the Armour kids had set out for San Francisco on a rumor: The Dead would play there in Golden Gate, The Stones too, Sunday next. Lynn Armour’s brother Nicolas was, she proclaimed, too young - at 15 - too be left alone. Besides, he knew where dad Roger Armour kept the car keys to the virgin-new powder blue, 1970 Cadillac Eldorado Convertible he’d recently bought, CASH, with the money from his bonus. Lynn Armour thought that was ironic, since her dad had earned the bonus by selling more Cadillacs than anyone else at the dealership where he worked. The amazing one, Toni, smelled of honey and had bare feet. She’d spoken since the lift was offered, but mostly just to agree:
Laurel Canyon is awesome:
Totally awesome. I love it there
I saw Bullit, with Steve Mqueen? I loved it:
Me too, Steve Mqueen. I love him!
I’m like cooking. I work at a restaurant now as a line cook. It’s hard, but I love it:
Wow. You’re a cook. That’s SO great…
And so on and so on, deeper into the desert, the conversation reducing to occasional discussions of local geography between long silences. They went on like that through a dusky sky’s incremental evolution through purple, grey, and then flat black. At 10:17pm it was absolute lightlessness as far as the eye could see in any direction. Nicolas - slumped over in the passenger seat - had switched driving duties by then with his sister. When the tape we were listening to came to Sympathy For the Devil, Lynn opened all the windows and turned the Delco stereo up past it’s comfort zone. She killed the headlights, and it was just the kids and the music, undulating easy Cadillac sine-waves down the cooling tarmac. Speed and direction indistinguishable for the void enveloping their progress.
Dude…
Spake Smoke, almost asleep on a front-lawn sized leather bench.
This car…
But nobody said anything back and he let it lie.
***
He must’ve dozed a bit, because he was having weird waking dreams in which Vulture and three bikers he didn’t recognize were looking him over and castigating him. They were talking in words he didn’t understand, occasionally laughing out loud, but mostly just standing there looking big and mean. Despite the fact he couldn’t make out words, Smokey knew full well what they were discussing ways of doing away with his corpse after they’d hacked him up. Laughing about how his poor self would look butchered and then left to rot in some Tenderloin-District dumpster.
They were telling him cats would eat his eyes…
One of them, a six foot-something fat dude with a baseball bat, said it out loud. Again, the giggling and dicking-around noises. Poking at his person and licking chops.
After that, the dream dissolved into the ether and another, more realistic one took it’s place. This time it was just him and Vulch, sitting atop a gigantic cliff. He could see clouds going by below them, and vertigo gripped him like vice. The Vulture stroking his weird silver and black billy-goat, saying: “A week kid. A whole sexy seven days… Don’t make me come looking for ‘ya!” and then he shoved Smoke off the rock, screaming into air too thin to hold him up.
***
Authors note: At some point during my driving shift, I remember telling the girl about the thing with Vulture and the speed. Maybe I’m making that up. Even so, weather or not I told her doesn’t change the story that much. Since I’m who lived it, I always have me telling the girl, and her sympathizing with me. When I get to the part about having to get into the stash with my own head,, she makes a concerned face like: “oooh. Terrible.” Then I tell her about the math, how it doesn’t work. About how, no matter how much cash he made at the shows this weekend, Vulture was going to kill him. Sometimes, after saying the part about Vulture, I imagine her getting on the phone to some unnamed but fabulously wealthy relative, and asking him, no demanding him - in the name of fairness, and justice - to wire her three g’s. None of that crazy shit happened, but I’m almost certain I mentioned the problem.
***
(sniiiiiif) Wow. Fuck. Thanks. Fuckin…Wow. Wow!
(sniiiiiiiiiiif) Good right? Good right?
It was. That was the thing. If it wasn’t so fucking spellbindingly superior, he probably never gets involved. He wasn’t really with speedy kinds of drugs, except - of course - as a utility towards avoiding the need to sleep for extended periods. He was an opiate man. Everybody knew that. But the substance he ingested with Fitch three nights ago was no kind of speed he’d ever felt. Fitch had brought it over on a Sunday, and they’d each had a little taste before halftime. After the taste, the game, the food, and the television were abandoned in short order, ceding the activities list to more immediate and productive endevours. They - he and Fitch - cleaned the house, did the floors, organized every closet, filed every file, scrubbed for mold, and vacuumed in places that had never been vacuumed. They took everything out of the refrigerator and freezer, defrosted, scrubbed out the long-frozen orifice’s with light bleach, replaced the food in neater, easy to understand groupings, and did away with anything out of date. They cleaned, washed, waxed, and detailed the interiors of Smoke’s car, and both his roomate’s cars, and the cars of four more people who happened to drive by during the hour of car-washing. Fitch and he solicited each of those while running - from a standing, car-scrubbing start - alongside of the cars as they trundled through the neighborhood. They’d found a stray kitten, assisted it in giving birth, and then run off, taken delivery off, and hung around the neighborhood, 300 “Free to Good Homes” flyers. They’d recovered a stolen purse, and wrote up a business plan for their own motorcycle dealership.
Then Fitch went home and Smoke fell asleep for 14 hours. The first thing he did upon waking the next day (wonder of wonders): call his old buddy Fitch…
***
He let you have the rest? All of it?
Fitch was clearly in disbelief, but he was acting out an exaggeration of surprise anyhow. The drug: How they sing! Smoke replied:
All of it. He’s running up to Big Bear this weekend and didn’t want to be road bound with this big white evidence grenade in his saddlebags. He comes back Friday night, so I got a week. After I pay him we can get moving to San Fran all worry free. I got four big fat Owlseys ready to slide onboard the very moment I get the cash to vulture. Now I just gotta sell ‘er up. The sooner I find some trade, the sooner I can relax. I want to be heading to Golden Gate in something rented. Rented and van-like.
Smokey staring off into space while speaking, aggressively trying to believe the lies he was telling his friend. He could see the potential rented van in his mind’s eye. It was purple with a 12-color gel coat depicting a wizard riding a griffin. In one hand the Wizard was holding a guitar. In the other, a newborn baby, naked and smoking a tremendous joint.
***
But circumstances conspired against poor Smokey, and things didn’t work out as planned. Suddenly, with everybody gearing up for the San Fran run’s three-plus hour arrest-gauntlet, nobody wanted to carry weight. Not when good, clean, strong Owlsey was shure to be in abundance. Speed, even pure, raw, nasty, euphoria-inducing speed like his wasn’t of any use. Nothing - it is well known - will stymie a good LSD rip like a leaner of great speed.
Vulture had given him three ounces and one week. After three whole days he’d sold none of the speed. After five days, he’d sold only six grams. Of course by the end of five days, he’d had to dip into the stash with increased prejudice, not having the cash to buy drugs of his own. By the time Vulture got hit the road for Big Bear (around 3am Tuesday), The rumors had been substantiated: The Stones and the Dead would play for free in Golden Gate park on Saturday.
For Smoke, it was a decidedly mixed blessing. On the one hand, he would be taking a huge risk by ducking Vulture. The festival was a one day event, but he was supposed to meet with the stinky biker they day before. Going to the show now meant jumping on the road earlier, Thursday am if he could, avoiding Vulture in a blatant, sort of suicidal way.
On the other side, being in attendance in Golden Gate would pay dividends far beyond mere music: There would be girls there, and free love was still alive and fucking in the city on the bay. Also, and perhaps most important, the concert would provide him the greatest chance of making at least most of the money for vulture. “Dude: they say there’s gonna’ be half a million people in Golden Gate on Sunday. You only have to move two ounces of tweek. The crowd is gonna’ be especially receptive to what you’ve got happening. Trust me, we could bring 3 pounds of this shit to San Fran and it would be gone by midnight on Friday”.
Fog. Ever the optimist. Even with all his friend’s reassurances, Smokey was getting no sleep. He stuck his thumb out early just as the Armour kids were getting on the road from the San Fernando valley.
***
Fuckin falling asleep…
It was only the third time hearing Nicolas Armour’s voice. The kid was a rock for the entire three hours but now his shit was flagging. For the last 70 or so miles, Smoke had witnessed roughly 35 instances of Nicolas loosing consciousness, and then jumping to alertness a few seconds later. A few times he actually began a move toward the front seat, ready to shove the kid aside and brake like hell in the case of contingency. The girls were both asleep. Smoke had an idea. He said:
I think I can help with that.
A few bumps of the bleach-white speed and Nicolas talked plenty: His parents wanted Lynn to go to college but she was stupid, and hadn‘t even applied anywhere. They’d lost a brother, an infant, two years ago and the Anniversary trip was the first time they’d been away since little Campbell Armour had died in his crib. His father, Andrew Armour, was the top salesman at Valley Cadillac, and this was the eighth (!) caddy they’d owned in as many years. Nicolas was a songwriter and hated when people called him “Nick”. Lynn was dating a black kid, mostly - Nicolas thought - to make her parents angry. If he could make it work, Nicolas planned on following the Grateful Dead up the coast and into the Pacific northwest. Jerry Garcia and Keith Richards were his favorite guitarists.
***
They hit San Fran early in he morning on Friday. Smokey had planned to hook up with Fitch and Stu Later that night, swallow the white lightning, and spend Saturday night, and all day Sunday in Golden Gate making back Vultures cash. Being almost a full day early though, he felt certain his friends would be hard to find, so he asked Nicolas if he could hang until they could be reached by phone. The younger Armour sibling was magnanimous:
Dude, if you keep me in that crazy tweek for the weekend, you can hang out all you want.
He motioned to his sister…
I’ll even let you fuck my sister. You and the Niggers can party it up, turn her out. She loves that shit!
Smoke laughed in the sort of uncomfortable way he employed when sudden, un-hinted-at racism made itself apparent. He said:
Whoa whoa…allright.
Lynn stirred from sleeping in the back seat:
Fuck you Nicolas. You’d love to fuck a black guy, faggot…
And she turned over and trundled off once again into dreamland. She’s been snoring and dreaming away most of the trip with her head in the great-smelling Toni’s lap. Toni was sleeping as well, but still smelling and looking amazing. Nicolas pulled the Caddy up to a towering walk up on the edge of the Haight. Smokey saw a throng of people out on the oversize porch. They had cups in their hands. Laughter and the smell of cheap Mexican dope filled the air. Nicolas jumped out, but turned and ducked back in to caution Smokey:
This is my buddy’s place, totally cool. But wait here with them and lemme’ see what’s what. San Fran is full of cops and they don’t trust anybody.
Smoke nodded and settled back into the sprawling front bench. His poor stressed mind fell, immediately, back into the problem of Vulture and the Money. There was plenty of time, and yet…Something about the whole thing felt weird. The ride, the bigoted Nicolas, the shows…Somehow none of it seemed to work for him. He decided that he wouldn’t eat the Owlsey until the speed was sold and the cash safe. Nicolas came shooting out of the house and down the steps just as Smoke was looking around, up and down the block, for a pay phone. He ran up to Smokey’s side and made a roll-down-the-window motion with one hand. He was already talking as the glass lowered between them:
Change of plans dude. You ever heard of a place called Aremont? No, wait…Ellsmont? Out in the desert…The dude said two hours.
Smoke put it together even as the Nicolas was telling him. Cut him off:
The desert. Not Altamont? Altamont Speedway? No fuggin way…:
No that wasn’t it…
***
1986 miles away to the East, Smokey’s father Matthew was awakened by weird noises in his house. He heard his daughter Elsie cry out once, and then again, then his son - sleeping in the same room as the girl - got in the act. He yelled:
“Daddy! Daddy”
And then something Matt didn’t understand. His wife, Anne, stirred and mumbled next to him:
What’s that Matt?
He was about to answer when the door to his bedroom was kicked open with a loud “crack”.Light flooded in. Matt - seeing with sleep-mottled eyes - could make out his son, then his daughter, both being dragged/led by rough grips around their upper arms. He saw the invaders behind them. Each holding a black, double barrel street sweeper in one hand and one of his children’s arms in the other. They were dressed in dark clothing, and wearing masks. Flesh-colored masks. One of them said:
The FUCK out of bed you two…
Matt fumbled for his eyeglasses on the night table. His son, wriggling in the grip of the masked intruder, was saying:
Daddy help me! It hurts Dad!!!
His wife began to scream, loudly and without pausing for breath. The sound was piercing and for a few seconds - wife screaming, kids in danger, masked robbers threatening - he thought he might be passing out. He steadied himself though, and found the spectacles. His wife was screaming still, unintelligibly and constantly, so the masked man holding his son had to shout:
The wife shuts the fuck UP! Or I’m blowing your kid’s fucking face right fucking NOW I swear to FUCKIN’ Christ!!!
(Aughhhh, Aughhhhhh, Matt! Augghhhhh)
Shut her up!
(Aughhhhh, Augghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, my babies, Maaaaaaaaaaaaa…)
The Fuck Up!
(AughhhhNoooooooooo)
Shut the fuck…
(Daaaaaaddy!)
BOOM!!
It was easily the loudest sound any of them had ever heard. The bed was coated instantly with the remains of his three year old son’s head. It looked like a vat of black and red porridge had been spilled onto the comforter. He was deaf. His wife had lost consciousness, and she slumped in the muck next to him. The invader let his son’s headless corpse slough to the floor. And then, for a few minutes, Matthew Denniker did pass out. The darkness beckoned and he followed, hoping somewhere deep inside that all this was some terrible nightmare, and that he’d wake back in the world, with everyone safe.
Bill Frivol
The Nation
C/O Zentz Publishing Inc.
118 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY
10029
Dear Bill:
Here’s what we’ve got so far on the Denniker piece. Not a fucking bone-anza to be sure, but Mr. Denniker is game, and every session brings new treats. Take this very raw, very first round and be assured: the thing’s got LEGS. I’ll send you another batch by weeks end and then work through the weekend to get number three crushed into diamonds. If The Nation is still 10-timing then I think Summer 2, Fall 1, Fall 2 would be the way to run. A holiday extravaganza capped off with Keef, Altamont, and time travel…Beats Hell’s Angels by a nipple or two, no?
Best,
GC
PS: The harvest in Eugene started early and we’re a rager already in late August. Come out and go unconscious with us won’t you? I’ll leave the lights on…
Smokey Denniker started feeling better as the suburbs of the Golden State gave way to the Livermore desert. After spending most of a day beating his psyche senseless with worry, He’d finally ripped through his reserves and was, for a while, content to watch the sand turn purple as the horizon crawled past. Passenger number four, he was, and comfy. Right rear in a spanking Cadillac, gleaming and clean. They picked him up halfway down the 405 towards San Fran. The girl driving was a dry honey blonde with a deep rasp of a voice. She proffered no greeting. The brown-haired guy next to her didn’t turn around either. The girl in the back bench, brown all over and amazing, spoke from rolling while holding the door:
You tryna get to San Francisco?
and looking right into Smoke’s eyes. He jumped in, the Caddy never actually coming to a full stop.
They were from the valley, elated at the biggest rock and roll party yet thrown falling the same weekend as their parents 40th wedding anniversary. Left to their own devices for a week, the Armour kids had set out for San Francisco on a rumor: The Dead would play there in Golden Gate, The Stones too, Sunday next. Lynn Armour’s brother Nicolas was, she proclaimed, too young - at 15 - too be left alone. Besides, he knew where dad Roger Armour kept the car keys to the virgin-new powder blue, 1970 Cadillac Eldorado Convertible he’d recently bought, CASH, with the money from his bonus. Lynn Armour thought that was ironic, since her dad had earned the bonus by selling more Cadillacs than anyone else at the dealership where he worked. The amazing one, Toni, smelled of honey and had bare feet. She’d spoken since the lift was offered, but mostly just to agree:
Laurel Canyon is awesome:
Totally awesome. I love it there
I saw Bullit, with Steve Mqueen? I loved it:
Me too, Steve Mqueen. I love him!
I’m like cooking. I work at a restaurant now as a line cook. It’s hard, but I love it:
Wow. You’re a cook. That’s SO great…
And so on and so on, deeper into the desert, the conversation reducing to occasional discussions of local geography between long silences. They went on like that through a dusky sky’s incremental evolution through purple, grey, and then flat black. At 10:17pm it was absolute lightlessness as far as the eye could see in any direction. Nicolas - slumped over in the passenger seat - had switched driving duties by then with his sister. When the tape we were listening to came to Sympathy For the Devil, Lynn opened all the windows and turned the Delco stereo up past it’s comfort zone. She killed the headlights, and it was just the kids and the music, undulating easy Cadillac sine-waves down the cooling tarmac. Speed and direction indistinguishable for the void enveloping their progress.
Dude…
Spake Smoke, almost asleep on a front-lawn sized leather bench.
This car…
But nobody said anything back and he let it lie.
***
He must’ve dozed a bit, because he was having weird waking dreams in which Vulture and three bikers he didn’t recognize were looking him over and castigating him. They were talking in words he didn’t understand, occasionally laughing out loud, but mostly just standing there looking big and mean. Despite the fact he couldn’t make out words, Smokey knew full well what they were discussing ways of doing away with his corpse after they’d hacked him up. Laughing about how his poor self would look butchered and then left to rot in some Tenderloin-District dumpster.
They were telling him cats would eat his eyes…
One of them, a six foot-something fat dude with a baseball bat, said it out loud. Again, the giggling and dicking-around noises. Poking at his person and licking chops.
After that, the dream dissolved into the ether and another, more realistic one took it’s place. This time it was just him and Vulch, sitting atop a gigantic cliff. He could see clouds going by below them, and vertigo gripped him like vice. The Vulture stroking his weird silver and black billy-goat, saying: “A week kid. A whole sexy seven days… Don’t make me come looking for ‘ya!” and then he shoved Smoke off the rock, screaming into air too thin to hold him up.
***
Authors note: At some point during my driving shift, I remember telling the girl about the thing with Vulture and the speed. Maybe I’m making that up. Even so, weather or not I told her doesn’t change the story that much. Since I’m who lived it, I always have me telling the girl, and her sympathizing with me. When I get to the part about having to get into the stash with my own head,, she makes a concerned face like: “oooh. Terrible.” Then I tell her about the math, how it doesn’t work. About how, no matter how much cash he made at the shows this weekend, Vulture was going to kill him. Sometimes, after saying the part about Vulture, I imagine her getting on the phone to some unnamed but fabulously wealthy relative, and asking him, no demanding him - in the name of fairness, and justice - to wire her three g’s. None of that crazy shit happened, but I’m almost certain I mentioned the problem.
***
(sniiiiiif) Wow. Fuck. Thanks. Fuckin…Wow. Wow!
(sniiiiiiiiiiif) Good right? Good right?
It was. That was the thing. If it wasn’t so fucking spellbindingly superior, he probably never gets involved. He wasn’t really with speedy kinds of drugs, except - of course - as a utility towards avoiding the need to sleep for extended periods. He was an opiate man. Everybody knew that. But the substance he ingested with Fitch three nights ago was no kind of speed he’d ever felt. Fitch had brought it over on a Sunday, and they’d each had a little taste before halftime. After the taste, the game, the food, and the television were abandoned in short order, ceding the activities list to more immediate and productive endevours. They - he and Fitch - cleaned the house, did the floors, organized every closet, filed every file, scrubbed for mold, and vacuumed in places that had never been vacuumed. They took everything out of the refrigerator and freezer, defrosted, scrubbed out the long-frozen orifice’s with light bleach, replaced the food in neater, easy to understand groupings, and did away with anything out of date. They cleaned, washed, waxed, and detailed the interiors of Smoke’s car, and both his roomate’s cars, and the cars of four more people who happened to drive by during the hour of car-washing. Fitch and he solicited each of those while running - from a standing, car-scrubbing start - alongside of the cars as they trundled through the neighborhood. They’d found a stray kitten, assisted it in giving birth, and then run off, taken delivery off, and hung around the neighborhood, 300 “Free to Good Homes” flyers. They’d recovered a stolen purse, and wrote up a business plan for their own motorcycle dealership.
Then Fitch went home and Smoke fell asleep for 14 hours. The first thing he did upon waking the next day (wonder of wonders): call his old buddy Fitch…
***
He let you have the rest? All of it?
Fitch was clearly in disbelief, but he was acting out an exaggeration of surprise anyhow. The drug: How they sing! Smoke replied:
All of it. He’s running up to Big Bear this weekend and didn’t want to be road bound with this big white evidence grenade in his saddlebags. He comes back Friday night, so I got a week. After I pay him we can get moving to San Fran all worry free. I got four big fat Owlseys ready to slide onboard the very moment I get the cash to vulture. Now I just gotta sell ‘er up. The sooner I find some trade, the sooner I can relax. I want to be heading to Golden Gate in something rented. Rented and van-like.
Smokey staring off into space while speaking, aggressively trying to believe the lies he was telling his friend. He could see the potential rented van in his mind’s eye. It was purple with a 12-color gel coat depicting a wizard riding a griffin. In one hand the Wizard was holding a guitar. In the other, a newborn baby, naked and smoking a tremendous joint.
***
But circumstances conspired against poor Smokey, and things didn’t work out as planned. Suddenly, with everybody gearing up for the San Fran run’s three-plus hour arrest-gauntlet, nobody wanted to carry weight. Not when good, clean, strong Owlsey was shure to be in abundance. Speed, even pure, raw, nasty, euphoria-inducing speed like his wasn’t of any use. Nothing - it is well known - will stymie a good LSD rip like a leaner of great speed.
Vulture had given him three ounces and one week. After three whole days he’d sold none of the speed. After five days, he’d sold only six grams. Of course by the end of five days, he’d had to dip into the stash with increased prejudice, not having the cash to buy drugs of his own. By the time Vulture got hit the road for Big Bear (around 3am Tuesday), The rumors had been substantiated: The Stones and the Dead would play for free in Golden Gate park on Saturday.
For Smoke, it was a decidedly mixed blessing. On the one hand, he would be taking a huge risk by ducking Vulture. The festival was a one day event, but he was supposed to meet with the stinky biker they day before. Going to the show now meant jumping on the road earlier, Thursday am if he could, avoiding Vulture in a blatant, sort of suicidal way.
On the other side, being in attendance in Golden Gate would pay dividends far beyond mere music: There would be girls there, and free love was still alive and fucking in the city on the bay. Also, and perhaps most important, the concert would provide him the greatest chance of making at least most of the money for vulture. “Dude: they say there’s gonna’ be half a million people in Golden Gate on Sunday. You only have to move two ounces of tweek. The crowd is gonna’ be especially receptive to what you’ve got happening. Trust me, we could bring 3 pounds of this shit to San Fran and it would be gone by midnight on Friday”.
Fog. Ever the optimist. Even with all his friend’s reassurances, Smokey was getting no sleep. He stuck his thumb out early just as the Armour kids were getting on the road from the San Fernando valley.
***
Fuckin falling asleep…
It was only the third time hearing Nicolas Armour’s voice. The kid was a rock for the entire three hours but now his shit was flagging. For the last 70 or so miles, Smoke had witnessed roughly 35 instances of Nicolas loosing consciousness, and then jumping to alertness a few seconds later. A few times he actually began a move toward the front seat, ready to shove the kid aside and brake like hell in the case of contingency. The girls were both asleep. Smoke had an idea. He said:
I think I can help with that.
A few bumps of the bleach-white speed and Nicolas talked plenty: His parents wanted Lynn to go to college but she was stupid, and hadn‘t even applied anywhere. They’d lost a brother, an infant, two years ago and the Anniversary trip was the first time they’d been away since little Campbell Armour had died in his crib. His father, Andrew Armour, was the top salesman at Valley Cadillac, and this was the eighth (!) caddy they’d owned in as many years. Nicolas was a songwriter and hated when people called him “Nick”. Lynn was dating a black kid, mostly - Nicolas thought - to make her parents angry. If he could make it work, Nicolas planned on following the Grateful Dead up the coast and into the Pacific northwest. Jerry Garcia and Keith Richards were his favorite guitarists.
***
They hit San Fran early in he morning on Friday. Smokey had planned to hook up with Fitch and Stu Later that night, swallow the white lightning, and spend Saturday night, and all day Sunday in Golden Gate making back Vultures cash. Being almost a full day early though, he felt certain his friends would be hard to find, so he asked Nicolas if he could hang until they could be reached by phone. The younger Armour sibling was magnanimous:
Dude, if you keep me in that crazy tweek for the weekend, you can hang out all you want.
He motioned to his sister…
I’ll even let you fuck my sister. You and the Niggers can party it up, turn her out. She loves that shit!
Smoke laughed in the sort of uncomfortable way he employed when sudden, un-hinted-at racism made itself apparent. He said:
Whoa whoa…allright.
Lynn stirred from sleeping in the back seat:
Fuck you Nicolas. You’d love to fuck a black guy, faggot…
And she turned over and trundled off once again into dreamland. She’s been snoring and dreaming away most of the trip with her head in the great-smelling Toni’s lap. Toni was sleeping as well, but still smelling and looking amazing. Nicolas pulled the Caddy up to a towering walk up on the edge of the Haight. Smokey saw a throng of people out on the oversize porch. They had cups in their hands. Laughter and the smell of cheap Mexican dope filled the air. Nicolas jumped out, but turned and ducked back in to caution Smokey:
This is my buddy’s place, totally cool. But wait here with them and lemme’ see what’s what. San Fran is full of cops and they don’t trust anybody.
Smoke nodded and settled back into the sprawling front bench. His poor stressed mind fell, immediately, back into the problem of Vulture and the Money. There was plenty of time, and yet…Something about the whole thing felt weird. The ride, the bigoted Nicolas, the shows…Somehow none of it seemed to work for him. He decided that he wouldn’t eat the Owlsey until the speed was sold and the cash safe. Nicolas came shooting out of the house and down the steps just as Smoke was looking around, up and down the block, for a pay phone. He ran up to Smokey’s side and made a roll-down-the-window motion with one hand. He was already talking as the glass lowered between them:
Change of plans dude. You ever heard of a place called Aremont? No, wait…Ellsmont? Out in the desert…The dude said two hours.
Smoke put it together even as the Nicolas was telling him. Cut him off:
The desert. Not Altamont? Altamont Speedway? No fuggin way…:
No that wasn’t it…
***
1986 miles away to the East, Smokey’s father Matthew was awakened by weird noises in his house. He heard his daughter Elsie cry out once, and then again, then his son - sleeping in the same room as the girl - got in the act. He yelled:
“Daddy! Daddy”
And then something Matt didn’t understand. His wife, Anne, stirred and mumbled next to him:
What’s that Matt?
He was about to answer when the door to his bedroom was kicked open with a loud “crack”.Light flooded in. Matt - seeing with sleep-mottled eyes - could make out his son, then his daughter, both being dragged/led by rough grips around their upper arms. He saw the invaders behind them. Each holding a black, double barrel street sweeper in one hand and one of his children’s arms in the other. They were dressed in dark clothing, and wearing masks. Flesh-colored masks. One of them said:
The FUCK out of bed you two…
Matt fumbled for his eyeglasses on the night table. His son, wriggling in the grip of the masked intruder, was saying:
Daddy help me! It hurts Dad!!!
His wife began to scream, loudly and without pausing for breath. The sound was piercing and for a few seconds - wife screaming, kids in danger, masked robbers threatening - he thought he might be passing out. He steadied himself though, and found the spectacles. His wife was screaming still, unintelligibly and constantly, so the masked man holding his son had to shout:
The wife shuts the fuck UP! Or I’m blowing your kid’s fucking face right fucking NOW I swear to FUCKIN’ Christ!!!
(Aughhhh, Aughhhhhh, Matt! Augghhhhh)
Shut her up!
(Aughhhhh, Augghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, my babies, Maaaaaaaaaaaaa…)
The Fuck Up!
(AughhhhNoooooooooo)
Shut the fuck…
(Daaaaaaddy!)
BOOM!!
It was easily the loudest sound any of them had ever heard. The bed was coated instantly with the remains of his three year old son’s head. It looked like a vat of black and red porridge had been spilled onto the comforter. He was deaf. His wife had lost consciousness, and she slumped in the muck next to him. The invader let his son’s headless corpse slough to the floor. And then, for a few minutes, Matthew Denniker did pass out. The darkness beckoned and he followed, hoping somewhere deep inside that all this was some terrible nightmare, and that he’d wake back in the world, with everyone safe.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
The Process
Paul: (sharp exhale through clenched teeth) OK, so this is what I got so far. Keep in mind, it’s the early goings. I’m not married to the concept. Ideas welcome, as always, ‘specially from you Captain Simmons.
Gene: OK, lay it on me soldier. I have a boner already.
Paul: Me too, destroyer, me too. Ok so…
Peter: Wait wait…
Paul and Gene and Ace (in perfect three-part blending): What is it PC?
Peter: I have a boner too. No…Wait…Ok, yeah. Definitely. Like a petrified banana down there.
Paul (after silently mouthing the words “petrified banana” into the piece of white paper he‘s holding): Ok. Here it is. Ok, wow. Kinda’ nervous here. Sweaty. Ok here it is.
Gene: Just say it amigo, everybody here loves you brother.
Paul: Thanks Dr. Love. Here it is: (Standing and clearing his throat, then singing in a fragile, reedy tenor):
Lick it up. Lick it up. Whoa-ohh-oh.. Lick it up. LICK it up, Whoah ohh oh.
(Total silence for 29 seconds)
Gene: Go on…
Paul: (confused) Whaddaya mean?….No. That’s it. that’s all I got so far. You like?
Peter: Uhhhh….
Gene: (takes a beat to collect his thoughts) OK. Well, first off, Paul, I think it’s great. Fucking awesome, Ok? Of course, we’ll have to sharpen it up a bit maybee-uh…
(Paul‘s face goes instant from hopeful/expectant to resigned/melancholy)
Gene:… figure out a bridge or ah….But whatever, no, it’s great. Fucking ambrosia. I mean it.
(Paul’s face now ecstatic and ebullient, he does a little clap and jump)
Peter: Am-what?
Gene: We love it. I love it. Let’s hear it again shall we? Can I get it once more?
Peter: I love it. I think it gave me wood! No wait…
Ace: I had wood yesterday.
Paul (singing a bit louder this time, gesticulating with the hand not holding the lyrics and imitating chord voicing with the word “DUM“ ) :
LICK IT UP - dum dum dum dum - LICK IT UP - dum dum dum dum dum - OHHHH OH OH!…
Weeeeeee! I’m so excited (more jumping and clapping).
Gene: you know what? I think I got it. Don’t get me wrong brother cause your words are tight and compelling as usual. I only offer suggestions, nothing we can’t veto.
Peter and Ace: Veto?
Paul: Yeah dummies, “veto”, it means “wine” in Italian.
Peter: Fuck you, does not!
Paul (hits Peter in the arm with a closed fist while speaking) : Does too taint-master! My cousins name is Vino, and it’s ‘cause my Aunty Helen likes wine.
Gene: Yes. Paul‘s right. But that’s not the point, not now. Get ready with those chords one more time maestro…(now Gene gets up, cracks knuckles, makes odd throat clearing noises before singing. in rich baritone):
LICK IT UP…
Paul: Dum Dum Dum Dum
Gene: LICK IT UP
Paul, Ace (and Peter after the first two “Dums”): Dum Dum Dum Dum Dum
Gene (louder, and with great gesture) : OH OHH OH - IT”S ONLY RIGHT NOW!!!
(All rise and high five around the room. Paul and Ace are now doing the jump/clap together.)
Paul: AMAZING. Truly inspired, as usual, god of thunder. It rocks, it’s fucking KISS, it’s TOTALLY fucking Kiss.
Ace: Genius dude. You’re like Churchill.
Gene: Right? Right? Let’s get a few takes today for some beds and we’ll spend tomorrow orgy-ing with groupies, and posting the SHIT out of our new, Paul Stanley penned masterpiece: LICK IT UP!
Paul: IT’S ONLY RIGHT NOW! You get it? See? It’s only right? Now?
Gene (thrusting out a heavily blinged hand): Brothers: Hands in! “lick it up” on three:
Gene, Paul, and Ace: ONE TWO THREE, LICK IT UP!!
Peter: Awesome…Lick what up?
(more jumping, clapping, and high fiving)
Gene: OK, lay it on me soldier. I have a boner already.
Paul: Me too, destroyer, me too. Ok so…
Peter: Wait wait…
Paul and Gene and Ace (in perfect three-part blending): What is it PC?
Peter: I have a boner too. No…Wait…Ok, yeah. Definitely. Like a petrified banana down there.
Paul (after silently mouthing the words “petrified banana” into the piece of white paper he‘s holding): Ok. Here it is. Ok, wow. Kinda’ nervous here. Sweaty. Ok here it is.
Gene: Just say it amigo, everybody here loves you brother.
Paul: Thanks Dr. Love. Here it is: (Standing and clearing his throat, then singing in a fragile, reedy tenor):
Lick it up. Lick it up. Whoa-ohh-oh.. Lick it up. LICK it up, Whoah ohh oh.
(Total silence for 29 seconds)
Gene: Go on…
Paul: (confused) Whaddaya mean?….No. That’s it. that’s all I got so far. You like?
Peter: Uhhhh….
Gene: (takes a beat to collect his thoughts) OK. Well, first off, Paul, I think it’s great. Fucking awesome, Ok? Of course, we’ll have to sharpen it up a bit maybee-uh…
(Paul‘s face goes instant from hopeful/expectant to resigned/melancholy)
Gene:… figure out a bridge or ah….But whatever, no, it’s great. Fucking ambrosia. I mean it.
(Paul’s face now ecstatic and ebullient, he does a little clap and jump)
Peter: Am-what?
Gene: We love it. I love it. Let’s hear it again shall we? Can I get it once more?
Peter: I love it. I think it gave me wood! No wait…
Ace: I had wood yesterday.
Paul (singing a bit louder this time, gesticulating with the hand not holding the lyrics and imitating chord voicing with the word “DUM“ ) :
LICK IT UP - dum dum dum dum - LICK IT UP - dum dum dum dum dum - OHHHH OH OH!…
Weeeeeee! I’m so excited (more jumping and clapping).
Gene: you know what? I think I got it. Don’t get me wrong brother cause your words are tight and compelling as usual. I only offer suggestions, nothing we can’t veto.
Peter and Ace: Veto?
Paul: Yeah dummies, “veto”, it means “wine” in Italian.
Peter: Fuck you, does not!
Paul (hits Peter in the arm with a closed fist while speaking) : Does too taint-master! My cousins name is Vino, and it’s ‘cause my Aunty Helen likes wine.
Gene: Yes. Paul‘s right. But that’s not the point, not now. Get ready with those chords one more time maestro…(now Gene gets up, cracks knuckles, makes odd throat clearing noises before singing. in rich baritone):
LICK IT UP…
Paul: Dum Dum Dum Dum
Gene: LICK IT UP
Paul, Ace (and Peter after the first two “Dums”): Dum Dum Dum Dum Dum
Gene (louder, and with great gesture) : OH OHH OH - IT”S ONLY RIGHT NOW!!!
(All rise and high five around the room. Paul and Ace are now doing the jump/clap together.)
Paul: AMAZING. Truly inspired, as usual, god of thunder. It rocks, it’s fucking KISS, it’s TOTALLY fucking Kiss.
Ace: Genius dude. You’re like Churchill.
Gene: Right? Right? Let’s get a few takes today for some beds and we’ll spend tomorrow orgy-ing with groupies, and posting the SHIT out of our new, Paul Stanley penned masterpiece: LICK IT UP!
Paul: IT’S ONLY RIGHT NOW! You get it? See? It’s only right? Now?
Gene (thrusting out a heavily blinged hand): Brothers: Hands in! “lick it up” on three:
Gene, Paul, and Ace: ONE TWO THREE, LICK IT UP!!
Peter: Awesome…Lick what up?
(more jumping, clapping, and high fiving)
DSL on the internetz...
Green Cat (I Am Nothing), 2008
Digital Print
Slow week here at DSL w/ both principles on late summer hiatus. So we thought we'd lay out all of our links here in one easy to use post. Hopefully, if you haven't already, you'll join us on Facebook, Twitter and check out our deviantArt page.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dogshitland/164861500234651
http://twitter.com/#!/dogshitland
http://dogshitland.deviantart.com/
Slow week here at DSL w/ both principles on late summer hiatus. So we thought we'd lay out all of our links here in one easy to use post. Hopefully, if you haven't already, you'll join us on Facebook, Twitter and check out our deviantArt page.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dogshitland/164861500234651
http://twitter.com/#!/dogshitland
http://dogshitland.deviantart.com/
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
dogshitart
Praise Him
Goddamn her. GodDAMN this motherfucker. Twenty-five people in the clan, ten of them women of age. The others - seven healthy men, one older couple, and six toddlers - are running like clockwork. The killing floor, the offerings, the fucking worship (praise him), all of it smooth and hassle-free, and now his own flesh and blood, his brother, and Walt's ridiculous wife: making noise and agitating. Nine fucking waiters. At least nine banquets. A simple math for simple people, and always - like our words tell them -“We move on…”. And now this.
Jack Hartley was sitting watch on his valley and running down his appointments and worries in his mind while he sharpened the bone-hilt dagger his mother had given him almost twenty-three years ago.
It was bad luck (and, unfortunately, all too common) for a waiter to have second thoughts and dread feelings about the Price. As clan leader, Jack dealt with anxious, terrified waiters on a monthly, sometimes weekly basis. It was a twenty-four hour, heart-and-soul gig simply to keep them focused on bare survival without his own family playing the treasonous malcontents. Jess had made a hideous example for the others, especially - he feared - the new family. They heard Jessa’s proclamations and threats from dawn to dusk almost from the moment they’d arrived three weeks ago. The mother, Meegan her name was, had been hardening her stare at him almost from the moment she’d stopped thanking him for saving her family’s lives. He’d expected them to spirit off in the night for days now, to flee their strange new family and seek a more immediate safety somewhere lower in the valley. Once they arrived there - he knew - they were as good as dead. Would that blood be on his hands? His brother’s?
***
I didn’t knock. They were at the table praying when I came. Walt was leading, and Jessa and the girls were staring at him with faces twisted, like he’d just asked them to factor out pi or some shit. I was mad enough to interrupt, praise HIS name. Manstock couldn’t be allowed to live a minute passed three years and Jessa knew that. We were four fucking hours away. Risking fucking damnation. Praise HIS name. I was yelling, but the girls looked at me and they were already crying so I quieted down pretty quick. I says:
Jessa, Walter…I understand the reservations. I know where you are - both of you. But we are too damn close here. There’s too much at stake.
That was it. That was all I got out and Jessa was all over me like a mountain lion:
The Choice. Everybody gets a choice Jack you said it yourself.
She’s talking now about the choice. The option. Four hours left and it’s the bloody choice HE made. Praise HIS name.
Fuck the Choice, Sister.
I says to her. I says:
His choice, praise HIM, so we never have to make it. Never. Now come. I’ll go with you. Rhea already dressed theirs, so we’ll be alone in there.
Now Walt pipes up, and it’s another hour of: “Well that’s not the way I’m reading this Jack….It’s an interpretation Jack…The choice Jack“.
He’s waving the book around the whole time he’s raving and yelling.
Meanwhile it’s getting colder, and my people need to live through a winter. The world is moving on and I’m treading old, rotten ground. I swear If they weren’t family I’d have marched them out to the pyre and we’d all have feasted, unexpected. Praise HIS fucking name.
Well after a few more minutes of this, Walt’s quiets down. He says to me, (and looking back on it now, I guess I should have known right then): “OK then Jack, I guess you’ve made the choice for us. Now we’re going to have to live with it.” Then Jessa says “You too, Jack. You’re going to have to live with it as well”
Yes, looking back, the things that they said just then were foreboding, but rushing like I was, I didn’t see. Just like I didn’t see the weird looks I’d been getting around the camp, or the way the children had stopped eating blessed meat for the last two weeks. When I’m under the gun I tend (or tended) towards myopia. I was an average student at best, so I have to concentrate right?
Now we got minutes. Fucking minutes. I grabbed the instruments and blessed it. Walt spoke, I spoke. We were down there ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Praise HIM.
***
They were in the pen at 11:40. And by the time they checked and readied there were like, five minutes left. Jessa woke the stock, a giant male, fat and wide and clean. He’d been on a valium and ethyl drip for three weeks and hadn’t had a non-alcoholic drink in two years. His skin was the color of the smooth cement floor. He was hairless, and his eyes were only colored quarter-spheres on the upper part of his face, like an abbreviation of eyes. Panting and snoring when we went in, he didn’t scream until the very end and even then not very loud or very long. Jack's killing stroke was to the neck, and he only needed one swing. The doomed manstock's eyes and mouth blinked and twitched for what seemed like hours, by the time they'd stilled, Jack was halfway done dressing the meat for banquet.
A giant yield, and tasty although they did not know it then. Jenna caught Jack just as he has finished fetching water from the cisterns to wash the killing floor. He’d dumped only the first of six buckets when Jessa pounced:
I’m out.
Jack didn’t speak.
Hello!? I said I’m gone, you heartless fuck. It’s atrocity! You know it…
Jack - dumping water and brushing with an ancient mop - said nothing.
Not answering me won’t make this any less true. Walter and I are heading south, looking for others. I need your word you won’t send Lu out after us, won’t send anybody after us. The kids, Jack. I can’t…We can’t do this anymore. Elyse and Michael are asking questions. Last week he snuck out of the house and we…
She sobbed then, and sniffled. The lake of tears that had been pooling in her eyes since he first saw her in the kitchen finally outgrew it’s banks. The flood tide rolled and rolled as she pressed on:
They were at the door of the pen :
Jack. Michael said he knew he had a brother down there. He wanted to see his brother. This is wrong.
He’d dumped the last bucket and finished up. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t listen to the things she was saying, and he felt that if she continued, he might have to cuff her around a bit. It was late, and he knew that somewhere the new family was wide awake, hearing all of this. He moved towards the bulkhead steps with a stack of empty buckets. Jess gave him three steps before wounded and crying she turned frustrated and enraged:
Fine. Fine you ignorant fuck, listen up: We’re out. Don’t look for us. Don’t ask after us. If you send riders I’ll kill them. If you hurt anyone of my people I’ll kill you, Jack. That’s it. That’s all the warning you’ll get.
She left the pen before him.
***
She’d talked about it forever. Since before, before. When it was just the three of us she used to threaten to leave. “And go where?” he’d answer. Usually the idea wasn’t broached again until her next shift, at which time she’d become enamored of her impending child, and the cycle would begin again. It was amazing to me how hypocritical! When the plates were served she was only too happy to reap the nutritional benefits of the “atrocities.” On top of that, thankless and unappreciative. I broke the rules for her. More than once. Tell me: if your ex-wife shacked up with your brother after fucking him in secret for a half-decade, would you be inclined to turn the cheek and offer your hand in friendship? Right. Not many would. Not only did I not exile them, I allowed them to have a child together and keep it. Every time Jessa looks on Reni’s face she should fall to her knees and praise me right along with HIM.
Instead she just wants more. By this time she’d served the tribe three times and had two more kids of her own. You’d think there would be some hardening there, a resignation to fate. But no. She protested each time and skipped the meals until another waiter had served. It was embarrassing. For the last two years she and Walt had threatened almost every month, hell every fuckin’ WEEK, to leave us. Walt’s even taken to the streets, preaching the Choice, preaching a new way, preaching AGAINST me. It was sickening. I guess this time I’d just had enough.
Jack Hartley was sitting watch on his valley and running down his appointments and worries in his mind while he sharpened the bone-hilt dagger his mother had given him almost twenty-three years ago.
It was bad luck (and, unfortunately, all too common) for a waiter to have second thoughts and dread feelings about the Price. As clan leader, Jack dealt with anxious, terrified waiters on a monthly, sometimes weekly basis. It was a twenty-four hour, heart-and-soul gig simply to keep them focused on bare survival without his own family playing the treasonous malcontents. Jess had made a hideous example for the others, especially - he feared - the new family. They heard Jessa’s proclamations and threats from dawn to dusk almost from the moment they’d arrived three weeks ago. The mother, Meegan her name was, had been hardening her stare at him almost from the moment she’d stopped thanking him for saving her family’s lives. He’d expected them to spirit off in the night for days now, to flee their strange new family and seek a more immediate safety somewhere lower in the valley. Once they arrived there - he knew - they were as good as dead. Would that blood be on his hands? His brother’s?
***
I didn’t knock. They were at the table praying when I came. Walt was leading, and Jessa and the girls were staring at him with faces twisted, like he’d just asked them to factor out pi or some shit. I was mad enough to interrupt, praise HIS name. Manstock couldn’t be allowed to live a minute passed three years and Jessa knew that. We were four fucking hours away. Risking fucking damnation. Praise HIS name. I was yelling, but the girls looked at me and they were already crying so I quieted down pretty quick. I says:
Jessa, Walter…I understand the reservations. I know where you are - both of you. But we are too damn close here. There’s too much at stake.
That was it. That was all I got out and Jessa was all over me like a mountain lion:
The Choice. Everybody gets a choice Jack you said it yourself.
She’s talking now about the choice. The option. Four hours left and it’s the bloody choice HE made. Praise HIS name.
Fuck the Choice, Sister.
I says to her. I says:
His choice, praise HIM, so we never have to make it. Never. Now come. I’ll go with you. Rhea already dressed theirs, so we’ll be alone in there.
Now Walt pipes up, and it’s another hour of: “Well that’s not the way I’m reading this Jack….It’s an interpretation Jack…The choice Jack“.
He’s waving the book around the whole time he’s raving and yelling.
Meanwhile it’s getting colder, and my people need to live through a winter. The world is moving on and I’m treading old, rotten ground. I swear If they weren’t family I’d have marched them out to the pyre and we’d all have feasted, unexpected. Praise HIS fucking name.
Well after a few more minutes of this, Walt’s quiets down. He says to me, (and looking back on it now, I guess I should have known right then): “OK then Jack, I guess you’ve made the choice for us. Now we’re going to have to live with it.” Then Jessa says “You too, Jack. You’re going to have to live with it as well”
Yes, looking back, the things that they said just then were foreboding, but rushing like I was, I didn’t see. Just like I didn’t see the weird looks I’d been getting around the camp, or the way the children had stopped eating blessed meat for the last two weeks. When I’m under the gun I tend (or tended) towards myopia. I was an average student at best, so I have to concentrate right?
Now we got minutes. Fucking minutes. I grabbed the instruments and blessed it. Walt spoke, I spoke. We were down there ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Praise HIM.
***
They were in the pen at 11:40. And by the time they checked and readied there were like, five minutes left. Jessa woke the stock, a giant male, fat and wide and clean. He’d been on a valium and ethyl drip for three weeks and hadn’t had a non-alcoholic drink in two years. His skin was the color of the smooth cement floor. He was hairless, and his eyes were only colored quarter-spheres on the upper part of his face, like an abbreviation of eyes. Panting and snoring when we went in, he didn’t scream until the very end and even then not very loud or very long. Jack's killing stroke was to the neck, and he only needed one swing. The doomed manstock's eyes and mouth blinked and twitched for what seemed like hours, by the time they'd stilled, Jack was halfway done dressing the meat for banquet.
A giant yield, and tasty although they did not know it then. Jenna caught Jack just as he has finished fetching water from the cisterns to wash the killing floor. He’d dumped only the first of six buckets when Jessa pounced:
I’m out.
Jack didn’t speak.
Hello!? I said I’m gone, you heartless fuck. It’s atrocity! You know it…
Jack - dumping water and brushing with an ancient mop - said nothing.
Not answering me won’t make this any less true. Walter and I are heading south, looking for others. I need your word you won’t send Lu out after us, won’t send anybody after us. The kids, Jack. I can’t…We can’t do this anymore. Elyse and Michael are asking questions. Last week he snuck out of the house and we…
She sobbed then, and sniffled. The lake of tears that had been pooling in her eyes since he first saw her in the kitchen finally outgrew it’s banks. The flood tide rolled and rolled as she pressed on:
They were at the door of the pen :
Jack. Michael said he knew he had a brother down there. He wanted to see his brother. This is wrong.
He’d dumped the last bucket and finished up. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t listen to the things she was saying, and he felt that if she continued, he might have to cuff her around a bit. It was late, and he knew that somewhere the new family was wide awake, hearing all of this. He moved towards the bulkhead steps with a stack of empty buckets. Jess gave him three steps before wounded and crying she turned frustrated and enraged:
Fine. Fine you ignorant fuck, listen up: We’re out. Don’t look for us. Don’t ask after us. If you send riders I’ll kill them. If you hurt anyone of my people I’ll kill you, Jack. That’s it. That’s all the warning you’ll get.
She left the pen before him.
***
She’d talked about it forever. Since before, before. When it was just the three of us she used to threaten to leave. “And go where?” he’d answer. Usually the idea wasn’t broached again until her next shift, at which time she’d become enamored of her impending child, and the cycle would begin again. It was amazing to me how hypocritical! When the plates were served she was only too happy to reap the nutritional benefits of the “atrocities.” On top of that, thankless and unappreciative. I broke the rules for her. More than once. Tell me: if your ex-wife shacked up with your brother after fucking him in secret for a half-decade, would you be inclined to turn the cheek and offer your hand in friendship? Right. Not many would. Not only did I not exile them, I allowed them to have a child together and keep it. Every time Jessa looks on Reni’s face she should fall to her knees and praise me right along with HIM.
Instead she just wants more. By this time she’d served the tribe three times and had two more kids of her own. You’d think there would be some hardening there, a resignation to fate. But no. She protested each time and skipped the meals until another waiter had served. It was embarrassing. For the last two years she and Walt had threatened almost every month, hell every fuckin’ WEEK, to leave us. Walt’s even taken to the streets, preaching the Choice, preaching a new way, preaching AGAINST me. It was sickening. I guess this time I’d just had enough.
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