Saturday, April 24, 2010

Starseeded

This is going up temporarily for a friend. If it's accepted for publication, it comes down.

©2010 By Edward R. Morris Jr. All Rights Reserved
                                                              STARSEEDED 
 
                                                             by Edward Morris
 
10/08/1871
 
   On Sunday night, behind the orange-lit front window of Piotrowski’s Drug on DeKoven Street, Louie Cavendish was the only soul left at nine-thirty. Mister Piotrowski was long gone down t’the saloon for a pitcher of beer, and he gave Louie the key to close up, just like Louie was a grown man and everything, and not a bit soft, either!
      The city wrestled and sweltered through Indian Summer. Mister Piotrowski said there was a drought on even now, in October. “Whole city of Chicago’s done to a turn, Lou,” he groused that day. “Everyone’s losin’ their natural minds. Boychik, you may not believe this, but there are times when I truly envy you your unique condition of not havin’ the same kind of mind to lose…”
    The big afternoon rush that Sunday, with every Papa in the whole durned Ward taking his littl’uns out for an ice-cream soda, it seemed like, thinned down around four or so. Louie stayed until ten each and every night to sweep and up clean out the deep-freeze.
     Mister Piotrowski said funny things, sometimes. Often, he said  Lou, I’d Trust You In the Same Room with A Hundred Dollar Bill, and Louie shook his hand the first time he heard that because Mister Piotrowski taught him more about being a man than his Papa ever did, so hearing him say that was like a kind of present. 
   Louie was mostly done now for the night, resting in the front window with his busted brown brogans up on the scrolled cast-iron radiator, having a chaw of tobacco and watching the stars. It was pleasant to merely sit there and spit, letting the day wash and while away. Louie was at total peace just then…
    Until the stars outside and overhead ruptured, exploded and his whole world went sliding sideways out the front window with the rest of him.
    A white glare that wasn’t exactly light crashed into the sky, trailing lazy blue flames. Something went HOOM out in the alley a block away. It sounded like the roof on Pat O’Leary’s barn. Just where he could see when he blinked, the aerolite fell forever, dividing Before from After.  This was no star, he thought, no comet! The Moon Men were here on Earth, like in that funnybook he could read a little of, behind the counter.
    Then big Louie, who’d never hurt anyone, ever, who’d been sterilized by a country doctor before he even knew what that was, who only wanted everyone to like him and not make fun, Louie made the worst mistake of his short young life: He ran outside to see what all the hubbub was about.
   Realization of the enormity of the affair grew in Louie’s strange mind by leaps and bounds when he got there. Half a block of railroad-style frame houses and sheds were already merrily flaming away.
    At the other end of the alley, trapped cows screamed from the smashed wreckage of the O’Learys' barn, parboiling in their stalls where the new, smoking black hill threw off its dull red heat, blocking their escape. People ran hither and yon, barely noticing him, their mad eyes tetched with the flames. DeKoven Street was a white-hot wooden tinderbox with the wind going the wrong way, bowling superheated gusts towards Louie like a Kentucky Derby in Hell. But he heard no sirens.
     There was a huge blaze in a slum tenement on the South Side the night before, he remembered overhearing some men talking about in the store. Maybe the Fire Brigade was still sleeping it off. He ran back to the store as fast as his short legs would carry him, and pulled the firebell anyway. Mum said that was what you were supposed to do.
    He’d never heard a firebell before, not up close. It was so loud he ran back outside while he still had any eardrums left. What a bell that was! It---
     Louie turned back, slowly, a question on his big, simple, honest face (a face that made young women want to pinch his cheeks, and sometimes give him smooches, which made both cheeks turn as red as the pump-engines that hadn’t arrived yet…)  Something was calling to him, from the other end of the alley outside.
     Calling in the flames.
     Me?
     WORSHIP ME.
       It was God, calling out to his humble servant from the burning barn where the fatted calves were even now roasting in sacrificial offering to the Most High. The smoke made Louie’s belly rumble.
      WORSHIP ME.
      The flames parted around the barn door in a clear, bright cylinder. Louie shielded his eyes. 
     “Wait. I can see you, sorta, but I don’t understand what you are-- “
        WORSHIP ME.
      Like Shadrach in the Bible, Louie Cavendish walked into that furnace, and was not consumed.
      Not exactly.
#
2.)
    10/29/1930
     The window of the young psychiatrist’s back office was stuck open and he couldn’t find the pole. In the street, he heard the rough alcoholic talk of the men on the bread-line that stretched around the block to the kitchen of Chicago State Hospital, where they chucked the day-old crusts to willing mouths who would slather every roll with mustard and lard and thank whatever God they brought with them from across the sea. 
     There were thousands worse off than him, but he’d clawed his way up from trash, so he’d been properly grateful, even before Black Friday. Grateful to be out of jail, mostly…(The doctor rolled up his sleeve, pulling the garter taut at his bicep.)
    This office was all they’d been able to afford him for his residence at the State Hospital, but he didn’t mind. His flagship case was going to mean all sorts of future publishing possibilities.    
    He’d heard about the old mongoloid Louie Cavendish from operators on the famous Cook County Car#1  (the one the conductors called the Loony Wagon, since it stopped right out front. The doctor took it to work quite regularly. )
    The moron was amazing, a regular Delphic oracle. Why, a fellow could almost start his own religion around this one, if he was sharp. P.T. Barnum was right about a certain sixty-second birth cycle for the world’s most plentiful organism.
    As he drew the plunger up, pulled the colorless cocaine into the syringe from the spoon, and gently flipped away an air-bubble with one talcum-dry index finger, his mother’s voice echoed in the young resident’s head down the years, lo these many since he was a baby in short pants and they were rebuilding all the different Wards of Chicago after the fire, and she always told him…
    “Warren Schreiber! You finish your homework or you’ll grow up to be nothing but a … lamplighter!”
     On his desk, the spirit-lamp flared a bright blue alcohol flame like there was treasure here, or a ghost was about to speak. Fat chance. Fat chance for anyone.  The whole country was shit-poor and just about ready to go to war or the whole economy would collapse.  Starve the people on enough pork and beans and mustard-and-lard sandwiches and they’d believe anything you fed them. 
    Turning away from the subject with a shudder, the young resident’s thoughts raced on out loud., “Why, no one could have said everything Louie  says under narcoanalysis without being present, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. You are now on your own, my good old son. Truly, truly…"
     Dr. Warren Schreiber found a good vein and took his P.M. injection, sighing a little as the coke hit his system and sparked his heart and way down into his feet. Not too much in baby’s bottle in the PM, but the work demanded a little. This job was anything but lamplighting,
      Oh, no. Warren fancied himself a true American entrepreneur, who parlayed his MD into long years of teaching at Chicago University while passionately turning his hand to writing the new ‘Scientifiction’ in his spare time. One day, one of the novels would get published, and fly far above the two fraudulent patents and that one string of bad checks in Gary, Indiana. He was on top of things. And at any rate, Mother Dear was easy to shove aside.
   The patient now enjoying a post-session barbiturate nap on his big overstuffed couch in the front room, on the other hand, was being torn apart by his own head, and the scary thing was that the more Dr. Schreiber listened to Louie, the more sense he made.
    Mongoloids weren’t even supposed to live this long. This old baby Louie had witnessed the big fire firsthand , the records said, as a young lad in 1871, the same year he was committed.
     According to the carbons of his original “funny-papers,” Louie Cavendish was committed because he thought he was a Man from the Moon, with a gibberish name Dr. Schreiber couldn’t pronounce,. Louie’d been riding that merry-go-round for most of his life, with no brass ring in sight. Dr. Schreiber’s predecessor diagnosed rapidly deteriorating paranoid schizophrenia and massive non-specific delusions. Incurable.
    Sometimes, though, old Louie just acted like himself, and exhibited great despondence (coupled with a kind of Stoic resignation) when told where he was, what year it was, what was on the radio that night, or anything of the kind. That made Warren wonder...
    Wait. How much time had passed? And what…
    Don’t worry, he reassured himself. You got Lou for half a day before that Ward Mother  wants him back with the rest of the brood to slop up supper. Your original thought was: What if … What if all those prophets in the Bible, all those wandering madmen, Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Isaiah… what if they were all…
     “Like Louie,” the doctor muttered to himself, ridiculous little toothbrush mustache going up and down, “But if we frame the hypothesis in reverse, what if neither poor dear Lou, nor any of those wooly old stampeders, way back when were ever truly---“
      “Human?” Louie croaked from the doorway. 
       Schreiber shrieked. The empty syringe shattered on the floor.  The doctor smacked his forehead, chuckling at his own instant assessment of the situation.
    “Somnambulist.That old broody hen puts it in your chart all the time. Didn’t know you vocalized, too.” He puffed up, putting his thumbs in his braces. “Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing today?” he scoffed.
    The wizened, round-headed old apple-doll marionette broke its lips free of their rigid, rotten grin. When Louie’s eyes opened all the way this time, the new green light was suddenly all that Warren Schreiber could see.  When Louie spoke, the voice sounded like the moan of backdraft in a burning house.
      “I AM THAT I AM. I AM LEGION. WORSHIP ME.”
     Dr. Warren Schreiber, lapsed Seventh-Day Adventist, non-practicing sadomasochist and burgeoning drug addict, wet his pants.  Suddenly, the P.M. meds weren’t helping at all…
#
3.)
Kelly, Kitty Dr.Warren Schreiber: Reluctant Apostate
Excerpted in The National Inquirer, May 15, 1955
  … that negative sentiments are implied at the usage of words like "cult" and "sect". From that first series of sessions, Dr. Schreiber chose to begin “transcribing” The Tome of Joyness, and organized his famous ‘Agora’ of pseudoscientific minds in the Chicago area to discuss the material collected from patient LC and others of similar diagnosis, the first “Lamplighters” or prophets in Joyness vernacular,  from 1929-1939.
     The Agora group claims the book is used as a spiritual guide by many different religions with information on other beings’ purpose, history, and message. They believe that the Tome was authored by superhuman radio signal through “Receivers”, semi-epileptic and usually retarded ‘possession victims’ such as Patient LC, who took down the Word in dictation or dictated it to their primary practicioners. They claim much of this data “unpronounceable by human tongues,” just as their true forms are purportedly invisible by human eyes.
   The science fiction writer and professional skeptic Charles Fort interviewed Schreiber in early 1930, and called his writing, "...Incomprehensible pulp twaddle that puts suspenders on its too-big britches and dares to name itself Logos, Philosophy, even Universal Truth? One might only hope to one day naturally experience the worlds which such false prophets visit under the influences of the various pharmaceutical preparations. Back here on Earth, we are confined to the heuristic rigors of plain common sense."
(CONTINUED NEXT PAGE)
#
4.) 03/29/1971
    "Look, Nina!  A shooting star!!! I just---"
    “Shut up! I’m watchin’ the news! Give my head a break for five minutes!”
   “This is CBS Evening News for March 29th, 1971. Walter Cronkite with you this evening. Tonight’s top story is, as you may already be aware, the long-awaited verdict in the gruesome Manson Family killings. We take you to film from Los Angeles County Superior Court...”
     In the other room, Nina pocketed her tinfoil marijuana pipe and sprayed the Lysol again. Outside the windows, visible both from the parlor and their parents’ bedroom, the skies over West Deptford, New Jersey could have come straight out of that great old “War of the Worlds” movie she’d just seen with Sal Portinari again down at the Odeon for the Friday Night Creature Feature last week. 
     The shooting star  she'd just seen was joined by a second, then a third, trailing lazy blue flames.  Four, five fireflies falling into Town, and if one of those fires should happen to catch… Nina Sloan watched, and wondered much.
      She’d stayed in all that hot night, glued to  their big old black-and-white Fifties Philco fisheye bubble TV that always smelled like burning film after they left it on a while. Bobby’d been down at the Y until well into the evening playing fooseball (and good little walking liability for staying the hell outta my hair…) before things got weird. Now he was back, and she was going out of her mind with worry, dope or no dope.
   Bobby picked up on that, of course. He always picked up on things she was thinking at the most inconvenient times. Bobby knew a lot of things without having to ask. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it got him in trouble.
   “What is it with boys and their fires?” Nina muttered, blasting the last little nugget in the pipe to sweet black ash, then pocketing it again. “If I saw something like that, I’d run the other direction…”
    “I write no commandment to you,” Prosecuting Attorney Vincent Bugliosi read chillingly on the TV, into a courtroom mic from a stained composition notebook, “I have not written through you because you do not know the truth, but because you know it more deeply concerning those Pigs in power who would try to deceive you. I have written these things to you because you believe that you may know Eternal Life…”
   The news cut to Cronkite again. 
   “Despite repeated pleas of Manson’s innocence, and a very complicated story from the defense implicating Manson family member Linda Kasabian in a ‘crime of passion’,  after Kasabian testified against the cult leader, Manson and three other ringleaders have received verdicts of Death. ..“
   Bobby was listening in the kitchen doorway. 
    “I didn’t set the fire, Nina, I swear to God, it was lit when me and Dustin got there, right by Scuttlebutt Nine---“
   At that point, Nina lost it.  “---Also known as a private mausoleum, some places, and you idiots use it for a fort. I’m sorry I’m not more with it right now, but this turned out to be a lot worse than you bein’ the little boy who cried wolf, to call attention away from whatever the hell it was you blew up this time---“
    “The body of Ronald Hughes, attorney for Leslie Van Houten, was recently found, badly decomposed, in Ventura County. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi states that he will not be intimidated by…”
    “You saw!” Bobby squeaked. “You saw! There was this great big smoking hole in the ground, and all the trees on that whole side of the graveyard are---“
   Nina clutched her forehead.   “I know, I know, I saw, just shut up and let me think…”
   “Now is the time for Helter Skelter…”
    “But, Nina, when me and Dustin looked in the hole, the rock that came out of the sky, the whatzit, the meteorite, it looked back up! It opened up some kinda tunnel that went all the way down, and it talked to us, it said we were supposta---“
    “ ‘Leave a sign,’ Manson told them, ‘Something witchy.’ “
   “Bobby, you’re talkin’ crazy. Snap out of it. Look, I’m sorry, all right?  Mom’s gonna be back from work in an hour. She just phoned. She said they finally got ahold of Dustin’s Mom, down at the mill. Bobby, you gotta be real strong right now. Bobby…. Dustin’s dead. They said… burns over half his body, but he wasn’t burned right out, they said it was … Radiation, or something. Bobby, what did you just say about---“
    “… Conspiring to send threatening communications through the U.S. Mail, and transmitting death threats by way of interstate commerce. These threats were targeted specifically against elected officials and corporate executives, accusing them of environmental abuse, and other supposed---“
    “When the rock came out of the sky, Nina, we both looked at our watches and they both said 12:12. Dustin’s started going backwards. Mine stopped. It--- OhshitIgottagoIt'scallinme---
      “Bobby, what was that just---“
                                                                                    FLASH.
“Bobby, you get your ass back in this house right now! They said they might need you to identify your friend---“
                                                                                    FLASH.
“Bobby, I’m not playin’! What the hell did you just---“
                                                                                    FLASH.
   "Oh, hi, Mrs. Fuentes. No, I don’t know what just blew up. Did you see which way my brother went? I swear to Christ I’m gonna wallop him when I---"
                                                                                    FLASH.
    Okay, that one came out of the sky. Did you see where it landed? Over in the graveyard, just like the other---
                                                                                    FLASH.
    Bobby, come out, come out, wherever you…
                                                                                      Oh.
                                                                                      My.
                                                                                     God.
     “ I’m sorry, Officer. Yes, I’m his sister. Nina Anne Sloan, we live right up the road. Oh. My. God. Bobby, what happened here? What did you see? What really---“
      Bobby grinned at her with green teeth.
      “Wolf.”
#
5.)
If Found, Please Return to
Nina A. Sloan
1137 Grant St.
West Deptford, NJ
 ------------------------------------
08/11/1992
   Vodka. Better.  Thank God for whoever invented this stuff.
   I only get 1971 in bits and pieces now, like music playing far away when it’s stormy out. I heard “Raw Power” by Iggy and the Stooges on the radio yesterday and cried and cried in the middle of work. I had to tell the boss why.
   She let me go home early, and said when I felt better she might stand me a beer.  (She was a Stooges fan once, too.)
   I hope I get to there pretty soon. I don’t think I could feel much worse.  Anyway, I was telling the Bobby story. The one I never told anyone all the way.
   They had Bobby committed a year after the meteor shower, to that state hospital way out in the Pine Barrens. He was ten. Wasn’t shit-all else we could do by then. No parent could take care of that.
   One reformatory shrink said Bobby was off- the-charts smart, and the other guy said he was a retard.  I don’t care what’s true. None of those people talk to each other. No wonder they let him go in the Eighties, when Reagan got in.
     And even, even  if  Bobby really did get  possessed by an alien, so what? That alien came to Earth just to be a pissant.
    “Bobby?” he asked me flat-out one time, across the glass. “Yes. He was one of the most intensely beautiful beings I've ever experienced. He died when he breathed in the exhaust from my landing. The heart was still beating..."
    You see what I have to carry around inside me?  Last time I saw Bobby was on the street in Bensalem last year, right when there was some rave or another going on outside of town. He got old, tattooed his whole face and grew a beard and stuff. He looked desperate.
       I was pulling in just as he was coming out of the Wawa market with a bag of rolling tobacco and a tallboy of beer in his hand, wearing a yellow cotton blanket made into a kind of cloak with buckles sewn onto it, and leather pants. Bobby looked right into my eyes and didn’t recognize me. I never told Mom. I wish I had.
    Mom’s about had it, anyway. The doctors say each day’s a blessing now. Father Tony’s been in more and more. All I can do is be with Mom right now, and offer the rest up to God.
    But, God, is it wrong for me to be upset that I didn’t kill whatever took Bobby over, when he came back in the house that night? Or that I didn’t run him over with the car that day outside the Wawa? God?  Why do I think these things? I'll go to Confession. Father Tony's heard it all before, but he's so good at getting me to find something else to look at. Thank You for him, too.
I'm thinking about a lot of things he's told me, over the years. Like how we have to not just forgive, but keep forgiving. And then keep forgiving again.
    Maybe I'll have a whole new attitude tomorrow.
 #
---------------------
Anne Andersen
1620 SE Belmont,
Portland, Oregon
(971)***-****
                          
15 MAR 2007
SYNAESTHETIKON
dj: PHIL
FULL MOON PARTY
SOMEWHERE IN THE MOJAVE DESERT
       What a night.  Drive 6.2 miles down Cow Taint Lane. Turn right on the dirt road and reset your odometer. Drive 3.8 miles, bearing left at the wobbly bridge, & turn Up, onto the fire road marked GO BACK. It's kind of hard to see. Drive uphill until you hear the party.  Take a left at the mushroom patch, then let me tell you and then you tell me…
     Just earlier, tended my very first ever ritual fire, woot! The fear helped make me into asbestos. It was one of those giant hot banked  fires that Nomad likes to build just behind what he calls the “sweet spot” of the dancing ground. We marked the perimeter with
                                                          [here a line is smudged out]
and it was getting cold, then the central axis lined up directly with the Pleaides, where Nomad says he’s from, then made triangles on the edges. The dancing was okay, they added to the energy. Nomad said that helped.
     There is a Native Atlantis under Mt. Shasta, and it rang with what we did when we called Down, then Up…As I get more practice it’ll be easier to herd the douchebags away and keep the serious channellers. More people will start to understand what we’re doing.
      Nomad was very pleased with my work. Pixie hucked most of the heavy logs for me and dug most of the pit! She says she has ‘helpers’, who live at a higher magnetic phreq than we can see.  Nomad lit the fire with his eyes. I had the energy to stay with it for twenty-five hours, Phil’s whole set.  Still a little punchy now.   
     Last night tonight. Things may get a bit
                                                           [three pages torn out]
       brain-whomped when the channel opened to Nomad’s
                                                                             [line struck out]
       yet others in most glorious ways. We were all Starseeded. Nomad Starfucker did that for us. He opened our skulls.
       Someone or something was pushing everyone’s buttons intentionally that night. But Nomad made it all better, cast out all the human interference from they who tried to steal me from Nomad and Pixie and go back home with him instead of
                                                           [several blank pages]
     Will have to core out my ex-human Scott Freeh too, now that we’re all back in Babylon-Portland again. Scott is  asking too many questions.Don't know why he still comes around here any more, except to buy weed. But Nomad says he’ll handle it, so it won’t take long. Pixie says she will dose Scott afterward to help cushion the memory-wipe, so he just thinks he tripped really hard. Hopefully that holds. I used to date him, and every time we drink around each other he gets all weird
                                                                          [last page is blank]
#
5.)
03/27/2007
   I remember. Real Life. “Send Me An Angel,”.up too loud on my stereo, rattling the screen door. I remember that day, sitting on the front porch of my bitter little bungalow in Felony Flats, stripped to the waist, smoking a cigarette, enjoying the seventy-degree post-sundown and listening to cheesy 80’s Top 40 on the radio.  
     I missed Anne the most on days like that.. “Scott, our love couldn’t be domesticated at the time, and so must run wild, somewhere, still,” she’d written in a poem I only recently saw online by accident. That afternoon, for some reason I was stuck on ruminating about the day we met. The cherry blossoms were out all through Schrunk Plaza downtown.The sunlight was faded film stock from the early Sixties. It was that kind of day.
      She wore rectangular bronze glasses, and was tiny and freckled and blonde, green eyes giant and glowing,  shoulderblades in that skintight black tanktop that I wanted to reach out and touch...There’s only so much I can’t condense, about that week when my girlfriend was in New York, when Anne came and hung out at our arteriosclerotic little one-bedroom walkup every night for a week and smoked cigarettes and drank iced tea with me and coaxed the greatest poetry I ever wrote from me just so I’d have something to read back.
    That continued, all the way out of that apartment, across town to a shared room over a loud, rowdy pub where the drunks howled ceili until three.She hauled me back to that fold-out cot, pulled me to her and began kissing the corner of my mouth and didn’t stop there. I stopped wondering too late.
    “You don’t make noise,” she breathed in my ear at one point, “I want to hear you…”   I’ll never forget the light in the room that night, the feel and sounds and smell of her, that themselves formed their own slippery, suck-marked continuum of several months, skipping like a stone from Milwaukie to an SRO hotel downtown where residents had to sign in guests and why, why, how did I either forget or misfile all this?
       The horrid thing is that it stops hurting.  The heart still beats, just nowhere near as hard. Anne and I broke up two years ago. There’s still no one like her.
     A week ago, I was finally renting this place, after a deposit that had me back on the Emergency Food train for several weeks, and a move that required calling in every favor I’d ever done since moving out here.
    I had the rosebushes out front trimmed and ready to bloom, the landlords on good speaking terms, the grass mowed, the bills paid, the chance to sit around in the evenings and  read my  own columns while I nursed an RC Cola and silently mourned the days when it would have been an ethyl blend. 
    Then the wind blew and the shit flew and down Seventieth Avenue crept that little white Nissan I thought she sold.
    This never happened outside of the movies. Maybe…
    Maybe nothing. The memory skips a beat. The soul outweighs the mind. What came back from Mojave wasn’t all the way Anne.
    Her honey-gold skin was shiny with white alkali dust from the playa, from the black hair-wrap holding in her dreadlocks, down to the rings on her toes. She smelled like kerosene and beer that day, and she looked so damned good I wanted to go in the bathroom and castrate myself with the nearest available sharp surface after her left arm left my shoulders on the porch and  she dropped the dime,  “Not a chance, Scott. Not a chance.”
      I wondered even then how much of her made it back, my newest ex, who I let slip through my fingers, the alien in my house, the tiny elephant in my room. “Oh, lighten up, ” Anne smirked eventually, leaning in and kissing me on the cheek. “Take the stick out of your ass, we could use the wood. You weren’t in the right place to live with anyone anyway. All you could offer was fancy footwork and empty promises, you know that. You were too hung up on trying to fix the past. Can’t be done.
    My brain and cock and heart were still shouting at each other like the Three Stooges just shared a few twenty-dollar rocks of crack cocaine. I waited for the sting to go away.Anne’s teeth were very bright, her eyes full sore.  “Don’t take everything so personally,” she went on fast, “If I looked at life the way you do all the time, I’d …go insane…”
     (Then what, I ask her now, after such knowledge. What am I supposed to do? Go live in the woods, tattoo my face? But the right words never come in time. That ship has sailed, and left me here on the ground.)
   “Anyway,” I sighed ruefully, back then. ”Tell me more about this gig.”
   “You’ve heard psytrance before,” Anne elaborated, reaching in the Army satchel she used for a purse and producing a pouch of Native rolling tobacco   I seesawed my hand.
“Acid-house with a rrrreal industrial sense of humor, they use every kinda noise overlay they can to…"
      “It’s a language,” Anne overlaid herself, like I hadn’t spoken. I just sat there in my recliner like a douche and watched her pack her ornate glass bowl full of weed, hand it to me, then hand me one earphone of her iPod. The file was down at the bottom of her oldest playlist,  simply titled: PHIL. SPIN 12. THE SHIFT.  I leaned in to listen closer…
    This Phil creature was good. The trance was heavy, commanding, a deep meaty 98-beat-per-minute stew full of a lot of classical music, big Jamaican Nyabinghi drums, 1930’s German jazz, Seventies funk, nutbags on talk radio … Phil took it all up and spun it in his hands,  and wove a sonic  tapestry landscape of meaning that shivered the cities of the West down to the last tin shack…
      And if I had to listen to this stuff for twenty-five hours straight or whatever she was talking about, I’d go crazier than Syd Barrett and never come back...Or maybe not.Anne was still talking,
   “…drugs I’ve never heard of, and Phil gets up in that chair and spins for twenty-five hours straight when the moon gets full, and…”
     I held up one hand. “You said something about…” Part of me had been paying attention to everything she said the whole time, “Er, that is… Who’s the lucky new…”
 I didn’t know what flavor her new partner would be. The question surprised her. She flushed.
     “One of, uh, one of each, actually.  The … male half, used to be a guy from Jersey named Bobby Sloan.”That statement was very not Anne. I reached for a cigarette of my own and fumbled on the coffee table for a lighter, trying to pretend like I could give a shit. But I was all kinds of confused. “Used to be?” I scoffed. “So he’s a transsexual? I always wondered if they were capable of orgasm, can he… she… ze… How do you…"
     But Anne was shaking her head, laughing for a moment and then quickly thinking better of it. She handed me the bowl, and my cigarette took a back seat. I hit it hard, very interested in what she was going to say next. 
    “Scott… I… you're a journalist, can I just…”    I made impatient gestures, feeling slightly sick and knowing that no matter what it was, I hated it. “Tell me the story. Whatever it is. It’s your story.”
     Anne nodded, not really listening. Then her eyes started shining in a way I didn’t like. There was something complicated growing in back there behind them, like algae, or… Ewwe…I squinted, trying to puzzle out a single detail. The air in my bungalow was a nice healthy blue. Roaches were falling off the kitchen counter, fucked-up. 
     “Take this,” I handed Anne back her huge, handblown pipe. And the earbead. The music was getting straight irrational. I had to look away, and talk myself down.“I’m good. More things than Heaven and Earth were meant to hold. One of… each? Anne.”
    Sentences were getting hard to form. The end of the bowl was near. Anne nodded, telling me the rest in whispers.  “I’m letting both other thirds of our new thing, our Trinity, Pixie Stormbringer and Nomad Starfucker, I’m letting them… kinda lay low at my place. They called up a lot of powerful energy at the last event, and a lot of people are still convinced that they didn’t know what to do with it, that they weren’t really… Are you listening?”
      I was. I just couldn’t speak. I nodded my assent. She went on again as if I hadn’t spoken at all. It was like hearing a Grant Morrison comic book come to life, I reflected, except there were no panels, no splash pages. This was serious shit.
      “I’m still trying to get clarity about the Timeshift  that happened down in the desert that night, the transference. Everyone had a bad trip, but it wasn’t just a bad trip. They screwed up what Nomad was trying to bind. They let it out. It drove Justin… the guy who I met after you, sorry, Scott…” I made a noise.
       “Justin went temporarily, and pretty violently, insane. The rest is a long story. If you would have been there---“
      I grimaced. “Bite that off. You wrote the rules. Remember? “
     Anne lowered her voice, “But, see, this is the best part… Pixie and Nomad... are aliens. Both of them are real aliens. Self-admitted. They’re… fire performers, kinda. They build these big geomantic fires that they use to talk to their home, and they use Phil’s events to focus the signal…”
      After that, I'm afraid it got a little weird.
#
    Over the next few hours I will mercifully not reproduce here, I gathered that “Pixie” was the last of many women around the country who supported Nomad Starfucker/Bobby Sloan and let him hide out at their homes when whatever festival was in town.
     I wondered how many child support payments the original human owner of Bobby Sloan’s body owed in how many different states, while the alien ran him around like a tweaker with someone else’s brand-new Mastercard, him with his stable of fire-dancer groupies trailing after him like he was a one-man Grateful Dead.
     Part of the reason why we broke up was that Anne claimed I sometimes got so stressed I just Went Away, and wasn’t there while she was talking to me. I meditated on the weird essence of this new ‘They’, who were now sleeping on the futon where I used to sleep, doing the things I used to do in ways I never could imagine.
   Any way you sliced the whole setup, it rained loony all night. I sat and listened and waited for a thread of clarity to show up. None did. Anne was still spouting Nomad bullshit,
    “Pixie was different, see. She dumped her job, her boyfriend and her identity at Mojave when the alien walked into her head….”
     After a while, just hearing any of it made me want to tune out harder
#
    Nomad could talk a transvestite hooker out of her g-string, I was soon to find. He lived on sleight of wits and  favors, fancy footwork and empty promises, for the simple reason that even he believed himself,  or did such a damn good impersonation that he might as well have done.
  As near as I was able to determine from his own diatribes and the trail he left in his immediate wake, he grifted every rave or music festival he could seven different ways from Sunday morning coming down. He got part of the gate, part of the dealers’ cuts, part of the swag from wallets and whatnot left over after cleanup, everything.
    For it, Nomad did work a hell of a lot of hours on festival strikes and load-ins, in exchange for “anything that isn’t money”, in his slurred words, living in the warped mirror of the carny world where every month is rainy April and every city is dark.“All of you Lamplighters are frustrated and want First Contact to happen right now,” I once read on one of  this creature’s many incoherent blogs, or maybe firsthand preached from on/while high, “There’s always been a time frame, just not yours. This is not Burger King. You cannot have cosmic enlightenment Your Way, Right Away... “
     I remember the way Nomad came on to Anne from the word Go, with arguments against the machine world and the horrors of nuclear experimentation. In Nomad’s America, Geomantic ritualists waited to consign Bourgeois-Crime Offenders to “creative problem-solving tasks connected with the houses of the senses.” …  I read Nomad’s blogs, all right. Every scrap. I Googled the ‘alien’  words he used… and found a heretical offshoot of Seventh-Day Adventism that flourished in Chicago in the Thirties, and exploited a lot of truly sick people. And I read their scriptures, too.      
#
     I remember sitting on Anne’s couch, reading the testimonials at the beginning of this year’s edition of Dr. Warren Schreiber Inc.’s  tissue of horse shit, every fan going, ninety-two degrees outside, dreaming of spilling my heaving guts into the synapses of the Free Press about this asshole, in the bright perspectiverse of Just Off The Clock…
    “Regardless of the question of who wrote this book, or recorded it, or any of its origins, I was deeply moved. Not much moves me. The Joyness Book did. “
     I think I was going to tell Nomad off tonight. I have set out alone to see Anne. Switching to work recording gear. Soon.
     After I see her sweet face, and burn one with her, and pretend like this may not be my last night on Earth---
[last page is missing]
#
[undated earlier entry]
   Nomad stroked his black Don Quixote beard, clearing his throat. His weird, ringing voice always put me to sleep after he ran that mouth of his for too long. One webbed hand sinuously stole the mic again. I looked at the hand.
    “Don’t sweat the petty stuff, you know the rest. And when you wake up one day and just can’t bring yourself to go out into the crazy worland a mundane, trivial job just to pay said bills, well, then, don’t go in to work either. They're just an illusion anyway, you know? The so-called education system on Planet America…”
    “…And you can talk like that, with your trust-fund or whatever it is,” Anne snarked from over on the couch. “You could sit fat off the cow for the rest of your life. I saw your bankbook. And yet you make Pixie strip to pay your rent?” 
     She was sore at him that day for some reason. It had something to do with things I never wanted to know about, ever. “How Thou art fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, Who Didst Rise in the Morning!
     Nomad’s grin was like nothing I have seen before or since.  “The original owner of this body told me that, back when he was in Sunday school---“
    I snorted from the couch. “Did they have Christianity then, or did you –“
    “Negativity,” Nomad was unfazed, merely clucking and wagging one finger as he handed me the big spliff whose fumes he still half-held in. “Funny, though. You’re Scott, didja say?”
     He was sucking down psilocybin tea like it was Pepsi, humming and sewing on a pair of pants he was making for someone or other at the next festival.
     “Of course he’s Scott,” tiny Pixie buzzed from the floor, sorting different grades of black buckskin with a grease pencil in her mouth. “Scott Freeh. Remember how I said that was like one of your stupid jokes, Commander?” 
    She was right at my feet. The microskirt she wore had rucked up in the back to an alarming degree. Her own purple-and-black dreadlocks were tied back close to the base of her skull, and wiggled like tentacles when she looked at Anne, grinning that missing-incisor grin. “Anne, dear, I hacked Social Security this morning. Your benefits went through. I haven’t done that in a while.”
    For some reason, she was rubbing a black burn mark at her right temple when she mentioned that. Or… I squinted, and it was only a shadow.   “…mmmbut due to some unfortunate events,” Pixie buzzed back up to normal speed. I rubbed my eyes.
     “Not like we need to talk about them any more, but … lotta bad trips at Mojave, and the fire called up a  deity far greater than the space, a whole buncha vast bad-past stuff from people who didn’t know how to fight it, just kids, couldn’t handle the heat…”
      There was a lot of cabin fever between all three of the new triad that day, bickering that seemed to put itself on ice when I got in the door, out like the light in a refrigerator until that door shut behind me again. Nomad and Pixie rarely left the place, and Anne rarely could when her pain got bad. 
      “… but they tasted like chicken,” Nomad leered, licking his lips and looking at Anne. She gave him the finger and resumed wrapping up one of her  twenty-bags of a fantastic new strain of weed that always seemed to be in massive supply, of a strength and potency unknown to me. The buds were sticky, and almost literally glowed in the dark.
      Initially, Nomad and Pixie seemed much calmer than the kind of douchebags Anne normally brought home. While I thought both of them were clinically insane, they were nice.
    I had more to deal with, then. Even after I swore off  booze most of the time, late at night when a drink started looking pretty good I often wondered if something else lived in my own head, some hostile alien parasite that magnetized a cloud of Fail all around me, and laughed, and laughed…
      . At first, in the smoky sunlight of Anne’s new Section 8 apartment, it seemed almost verboten to openly discuss the shadow side of self-proclaimed Lamplighters. Any time we did so, Nomad would storm in and slam us with a smile,
    “You’re taking other people’s illusions personally,” he’d simper through his beard, “There’s a great work that must soon begin, you guys, so why live in the past and pass judgement?”
     The only reason I still came around there was to buy weed , and sit and talk to Anne for as long as I could get away with before I felt like an idiot. If that was what it took to keep her in my life as a friend, so be it.
#
   The next time I came over to Anne’s apartment, I was walking by her open back window, just about to call for her to let me in, when:
     I heard Nomad’s token nasal boom, in tones I didn’t associate with him,   “Hogwash! What you see in me are just your uncleared issues, human-symp! This is a very self-centered human genetic flaw, rampant everywhere. You don’t even know you’re not free!”
    Or some such nonsense. Anne’s voice cut back clear and sharp as glass, like the Anne I used to know, “All I said was, ‘you have two weeks to pack your shit.’ This is Public Housing. You can’t have guests, anyway …”
     I stood where I was. At the sound of what I heard next, I could taste the shot of whisky already, taste it, feel its blessed napalm nepenthe washing away the brain cells that held this moment I was seeing now, hearing now, and none could stem the…
    …Tide, tide of tentacles in soft honey quartz Portland twilight falling, falling across the dear sweet face of Anne who went willingly into the embrace of that icthyic Djinn with eyes as green as burning copper, murmuring in a weird, cackly voice I didn’t like…
       “Cloudcuckooland, province of cuckoos and fairies,” I heard Pixie chime in from somewhere else in the room. “Lay back into me, dear youngling. Let us upgrade you.” That murmur was raising a red flag in the class struggle in my pants, about as useful at the time as a rubber crutch.
          “See it, know it, touch it? I want to hear it.” Anne was saying back to someone.     Something unzipped. Something else schlupped. I tried to roll a cigarette and dropped the makings everywhere, looking up as…
      “Oh. It Knows Where I Am. It Wants Out. Oh.MM.”
     The smell was unlike anything ever. So was the light. … I slept on that futon. We could sleep a whole night in each other’s arms without waking up. What are you, motherfuckers, what are you really---
     “Oh. Mmmm. Aaah.  I am… it. It exists. I am ….me. Shall always be. It is I…”
      “Mmm. Aaaah.”
      “It wants out.”
 #
8.)

USER:SCOTT FREEH 07/04/2007
(voice recording) NOTES TOWARD:
OUTDOOR PSYTRANCE PARTY COLUMN
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