Attention, Attention

Stand by for an announcement.
Will the following students please report to the principal’s office:
Lawrence Braden, Carla Hayden, Nathan Hayden-Braden,
Caiden Troyden Jaedenden,
Brothfraithe Templeton,
Etchwarth Icthiabroyden Fulchcrath McThiabathroyth Horse,
Windwarth Tunce-Fath Testiculoyth-Proyce aka “El Diablito,”
and Chuckie Devine.

Don’t make us wait.
Don’t make us caterwaul.
Don’t make us wail over this loudspeaker again,
Wail over this loudspeaker, again, that blare
We wince at the thought of it
Of course we’re partial to summoning you,
You’re ready to apologize, to acquiesce, or in some cases to argue
Those weak arguments, like “He made me do it,” and “It wasn’t me.”

But when you verge upon the principal’s office
You must understand that you’re entering the domain of the
Orb of Contentment.
Principal Dennis has created an empyreal Orb of Contentment
That hovers over the mimeograph machine exhibiting an impenetrable light.
It’s a light that would make the most truant of adolescents
Fall prostrate in slack-jawed supplication.
Principal Ronnie Dennis has created a shimmering portal to enlightenment,
And it’s time to make the local newspapers aware.
Get them on the phone. Get Jerry on the phone. Get Carla and Gary on the phone.
Get them on the phone.

Long Distance

The third day of my road trip and I hadn’t yet showered. It relentlessly poured rain, so I’d reeked of sweat, socks, and body odor so much that whenever I’d pull into a sandwich shop after gassing up the Nissan, the clerks would gather in a circle wearing orange HazMat suits, point hoses at me, and spray me with perfumed chemicals. I’d be pushed into a dance, moving against their violent punch, singing when they sprayed me, swallowing a few cups of those toxins each time. I’d race back to the car only to throw up all over its interior for 15 minutes – that kind of heaving, screaming retch that’s practiced only by the dead drunk. So, you see, their attempts to get me to smell better never worked, those assholes. I was continually covered in puked ham sandwich chunks laced with industrial meat packing gel, all of which became fetid in the humidity.

Yet, I’d say those were the glorious days of youth, swerving through lanes with the determined ease of a Canada goose flying north. This was when I was doing nothing but delivering boxes of word-finds and crossword puzzle books to local drugstores. One after another they greeted me, brooms in hand, smiling in their small town aprons smeared with newsprint. And like a vomit-covered seraph, I’d deliver dozens of distractions, share anecdotes, and waltz away with nothing more than a wet pack of cigarettes (my brand was Vantage). I’d jam another cassette into the tape deck, and race down the highway with such brazen fearlessness that I could shuck and eat a bushel of whelks without ever touching the brakes.

In retrospect, that is what defines freedom, like rolling in freshly mown grass on a late afternoon. I delivered crossword puzzles for six years until the whole business was taken over by a craven conglomerate run by a publisher bent on cutting corners and eliminating local drivers. I showered, moved to New York City, and began a new life as the ad man at a surprisingly lucrative poultry slaughterhouse.

Looking for New Opportunities

“Yeah, this message is for Dan Tracey. This is Jerry Baxter over at Glendale Subaru. I just wanted to let you know that we received your goddamn messages and your resume. And there’s a pretty gigantic discrepancy between what you’re claiming is your work history and what your references told me. I took the liberty of calling your boss Kevin Daly over at Van Nuys Nissan. He said you were fired for force-feeding a client two gallons of motor oil in order to get them to sign for a 2007 Xterra. And he also said...let’s see…lemme look at my notes…he said that you picked up each one of the sales team with an industrial crane and dropped them one by one into a leeching pit? You dumped a Caesar salad down your secretary’s pants? And you apparently would refuse your actual salary - said something about ripping up every check you received. I don’t know what the hell that’s about Tracey, but for Christ's sake you’re not wanted here, so thanks for the resume and good luck to you.”

Asleep at the Dredge

If I hear my Dad scream "Phyllis, I'm gonna shave my nuts!" one more time, I'm going to leave this home, this town, this state.
We spend another evening with the TV blaring a pre-code black and white film from the early 30s recorded on VHS in SLP-mode. The toilet is broken so the family and visitors do their business on the floor. The kids clamber inside from the snow without taking off their boots, tracking waste and snow through the house.
I can't live like this. No one likes me, I can't get my feta cheese business off the ground, I've lost all feeling in my extremities. I think it's these filth-ridden conditions. I lay awake at night imagining the Kool-Aid man bursting through the wall, lashing us together, and reading us his book of automatic poetry until our flesh becomes necrotic.

Character Backstory

Brent Kinnecom, THAT was that guy's name! He was that guy who would always approach you at an office party and wrap both of his legs around you like some kind of insect gymnast dragging an ant into its clutches. You'd have to push him into a table full of half-empty wine glasses and paper plates smeared with beige leftovers or cake crumbs, and he'd generally split open his head and wail a high-pitched howl, get hauled off to the emergency room for stitches or to monitor a concussion, and he'd reappear a few days later in the break room at work, acting as if nothing had happened, eating one of those terrible microwave soups in those styrofoam containers, something like bacon and broccoli which would stink up the entire lounge causing everyone to quietly leave, heads cast downward.

Coincidence

"Trip on this shit," Travis began to say, before actually tripping on an extraordinary pile of dog shit.

A skywriter saw this incident, mused, turned up his nose and instantly began composing a sestina in flight, yet when he reached line 38, writer's block commenced, and he was forced to land his aircraft in the center of a local dog park, skidding on precisely 38 piles of dog shit.

Meanwhile, somewhere deep in the San Fernando Valley, Scott Baio threw down a script in disgust, shouting "This is total dog shit!" Then he tripped.

Precisely at that moment, Roy, another skywriter, in the midst of spelling "Scott Baio Eats Dog Shit" over the indisputably clear skies of the San Fernando Valley, thought of his friend Travis, and how he used to say "Trip on this shit" before actually tripping on shit.

Coincidentally, Travis became a skywriter. Scott Baio later hired Roy the skywriter to read a script. Baio, in turn, became a poet and wrote sestinas, the first of which began with "Trip on this shit." Then everyone went to the zoo.

Revisionism

Naming your novel's lead character "Dildette McGlyph," internationally known heiress to a urinal cake manufacturer in Bisbee, Arizona, made most Thomas Pynchon fans feel that he was lapsing into self-parody. That is, until a series of investigative articles in the New Yorker revealed that employees at Pynchon's publishing house were secretly outsourcing all writing under the Pynchon rubric to a series of highly developed wasps.

"I think Tom would just LOVE the idea," crowed a balding man aloud on an empty J train as it hurried under the East River.

"These wasps have no clear concept of my literature," Pynchon later said in a fax to the New York Post. "I have no proof that they understand metaphor, much less even the most generic of cultural references."

Unfortunately, Pynchon's fax merely spawned an entirely new school of Pynchon handwriting theorists, most of whom, it was later revealed in a series of investigative articles in The Atlantic, believed that Pynchon himself was a parasitic queen wasp controlling all media related to the incident. Pynchon's coy about-the-author photo of a yellowjacket on his next novel neither calmed the furor, nor did it cause anyone to chuckle under the age of 62, or anyone living south of 59th Street. In an attempt to put to rest this persistent rumor, Pynchon allowed himself to be filmed that summer eating 17 Peanut Buster Parfaits at a Dairy Queen in Connecticut and then joining the moshpit at a Social Distortion concert, all for an upcoming documentary called "American Badass" which was to be aired on ESPN2. Unfortunately, Pynchon and the entire crew of the film were killed when an errant swarm of approximately four million bald faced hornets attacked them in rural farmland, during the shooting of what would have been the film's final Motocross sequence.

Crepuscular Romance

It was Lothar's opening for his new artisanal hors d'oeuvres shop. I don't know how many linen shirts and seersucker suits I counted. It must be the season. It was unreasonably humid, granted. It felt like I was back in New England on the Friday night yacht club cocktail circuit, pounding Cape Codders and staining my Docksiders with enough spattered oyster liquor so they resembled a Pollack. But I'd left that transient life behind decades ago. If I caught myself drifting into that adolescent reverie, I felt nagged, like the sense of a flea jumping around on your body that you can't catch. No fleas here, though. It was tick season.

The band showed up, but they just mimed, never even playing music or plugging in their instruments - just total silence. Called themselves The Dense. What horseshit. I was annoyed. The only reason I showed up at this opening was to promote my new version of the Montecito Yellow Pages, which was going to be the first phone book that could be injected into a human being's blood stream, and read with a microchip that could be comfortably stapled to your perineum. Dad would call this another one of my "harebrained ideas" but screw him, I'm a goddamn stallion.

"These are actual poached kitten lips," Lothar cooed into the ear of one of his wealthy, Silicon Valley benefactors. "It took hours to remove them." Veined tusks suddenly grew out of his lower molars, piercing both cheeks, as everyone in his immediate range took a few steps back, agog, avoiding the sudden spray. He quickly tried to alleviate their shock. "It'ss jusht...it'shsh..durnt worreh abourt it." This was my cue to gather these startled buffoons with their open wallets and show them the real genius behind a good telephone directory. The strained beauty of its indexing, the velvet nuance of the philately section.

The May Sweeps

"I Never Promised You A Rose Garden" was her favorite song. Predictably she sang it only in her rose garden which she tended like a woman possessed, with burning, scalding hot orange eyes, her body reeking and bestial, while he lay inside on a recliner belching in precise 11/4 meter to that Van Der Graaf Generator tune. Critics called their arrangement "heavenly" and as conceptual artists, with each of their movements generously funded by the Kress Foundation, it couldn't have been more ideal.

That is, until TV's newest detective Ronnie "Poops" McCluggage burst into the room.

"We can either play it my way, or I'll have to get tough," he says, chomping on his unlit cigar, adjusting his visible diaper. He spits: "Which one of you created that installation at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2007? Don't make me ask twice. You know, the one that Rosalind Krauss of the October journal called "...striated...breathing with formative primacy...""

Silence from the couple. "Poops" takes out a grenade.

Poops: I WILL USE THIS.

(LAUGHS)

"Poops" addresses the camera.

Poops: You don't know me. And I don't know you. BUT I DON'T LIKE YOU. And I will BRING YOU TO A FUCKING HALT.

Freeze frame.

Insert graphic: POOPS! He's VERY DANGEROUS!

Announcer: Wednesdays at 9, 8 Central and Mountain.

(LAUGHS)

Pause.

(LAUGHS)

Total Eclipse of the Nuts

Most everything she said was torn from the day’s headlines – but I had no idea what headlines were, having grown up on a media-free planet torn from the pages of a science fiction dime novel called “The Psychodroids.” But the upshot was the same: I had no idea what she was talking about.

This created a rift, but only conversationally. Physically we were often mistaken for a large, greasy soft pretzel, as we practiced our filthy lovemaking in public: apartment steps, empty basketball courts in frozen winter, with candy wrappers locked against chain link, stuck there until spring, or until a wispy gust allowed them to sail into the water supply.

Further proof that quality conversation need not determine the future of a relationship is requested. Anecdotal evidence will not be considered unless submitted by committee. 

Not Nearly

I’m not precisely sure when The Eighties began for me, but it was almost certainly around 1980.

It was when rectal exams were required for even the most mundane daily activities.

It was when Genevieve danced on tabletops for boozy Off-Broadway understudies.

It was near the corner of Houston and Avenue B, wherever that big building with the clock on it still sits (Red Square?).

It was when the Farnsworth Museum was caught dry-humping the Bowdoin College archives in a local scandal that old-timers never quite understood.

It took off like a scallop boat at dawn, covered in paste.

It bordered on lunacy. It bordered on abuse. It bordered on the superhuman.

It ripped open our last box of cereal, hands dug deep into Honeycomb looking for some sort of plastic prize.

It was the last time I went down those steps to the beach and looked out over the bight.

The New Yorker's Fiction Issue

Learning how to tie the full Windsor knot is an important milestone in every young man’s life. But what if you were born without a tie?

Needy children scream wildly as you take each footstep, as you chew every sprouted wheat bun.

Cascading down a sun-dappled banister comes Blaine Crank, also known in the neighborhood as “that kid who levitates every time he re-reads his Mom’s copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.”

“Donald Barthelme is stupid, and you’re a cheap Donald Barthelme.”

He hits me with a tub of bleach and I can’t help but agree before I black out and wake up twenty minutes later, as Blaine feebly attempts to press his limp weenus against my thigh.

“This Donald Barthelme prefers pussy,” I say, and sail out of there like an academic’s dream experiment – determined, lithe, devoid of theory.

Chores

“Mom, it’s Horst’s turn to do the dishes!”

“No fighting, you two.”

But the children had other ideas, and they soon laid waste to the town, burning first their neighborhood, then the entire county, engulfing every living thing in a conflagration that could been seen by satellites.

“This is what we now call the Era of Devastation,” said Dr. Krill, speaking to a room of undergraduates in the year 2098. They’d heard their grandparents speak of those years in hushed tones, with what seemed like pained embarrassment, as if they’d rather reminisce about anything else.

“Dr. Krill? Is that when everyone moved underground?”

“Yes, son. Everyone who had accumulated the proper amount of hot cereal.”

Even the cryptic Dr. Krill, who had taught this class for three decades, would occasionally lapse into twisted reverie, his eyes wide as he stared into the void of their concrete bunker. He would snap back with an uncomfortable burst of shy laughter, run his hands through his matted, ash-colored hair, then shuffle across the room, mouthing a torrent of obscenities that would make even the most hardened criminal blanch.

He had no intention of telling them the actual truth. “I just can’t,” he’d say. “I must describe it in mime.” And then he’d wheel out that palette of stale bagels and begin his inevitable naked writhing.

“Will this be on the exam?”

“Go fuck yourself, Troy!”

Data Speaks for Itself

Recent studies have shown that the more lurid the magazine cover, the more apt college-aged jocks and those with whom they cavort would careen into registers, begging for forgiveness. 9 out of 10 dentists recommended that said jocks and those with whom they cavort be sentenced to the Sorbonne to study with philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, undergoing relentless questioning on the relationship between historic themes of mystical theology and present-day examples of religious out-of-body experiences in suburban Kansas. “They’ll never make it past one semester,” whispered one adjunct to another as a cold wind blew up his boxers, rendering his testicles the size of cashews.

Hold All Applause

With choir practice over, I can finally grab a bite to eat…

This…this will do…this piece of bread…I want this piece of bread….and lemon…good for the voice, lemon….

I won’t fail you…I won’t fail you…please understand me…I won’t fail you.

It is very important for me to let you know that I will not let you down.

I will not let you down.

I will make you feel like you are wanted.

I will make you feel better than you’ve ever felt.

It makes me feel whole to make you feel wanted and loved. I would like to do that again and again.

Is it morning already?

A Night in Corsica

Whenever Rick paused in the middle of a sentence, his friends grew steadily concerned. Not because they were under the impression that he could be experiencing the early onset of dementia, or that he may be suffering a series of minuscule strokes, or that he may have a learning disability that perhaps had remained dormant or unexamined throughout his relatively young life. No, his friends were concerned that whenever Rick paused, they had to, for once - for one excruciating, blisteringly intense moment - they had to acknowledge that someone, somewhere, had managed to tear their attention away from the omnipresent parade of WWF announcers that continually burst their way into this airport men’s room.  Their suits, those microphones – those ticker tape parades! Our youth has vanished! Hoyt! Pamela!!

Concerts

I never went to that Cocteau Twins concert, but I deeply regret it to this day.

In fact, I regret all concerts I did not attend.

This is because I have lived too much within the confines of prescribed behavior.

I have neglected to pay attention to the sheer amount of concerts.

I have never sought out publications that could have guided me toward more concerts.

I have not trusted those who have recommended concerts.

I have not shown emotion during live performance acts.

I have been reticent to display behavior remotely related to abandon.

I have allowed preconceived notions to mollify my judgment.

Log Line

BEGIN MUSIC HUMOR

I started out playing tambourine for a J. Geils cover band, then graduated to playing maracas for a Southside Johnny cover band, took a short detour playing congas for a George Thorogood cover band, and wrapped up my career playing marimba in a Boz Scaggs cover band – until everyone told me to become a road manager for Gnarls Barkley, which made me enough money to buy an apartment in London and work for EMI. Right after that, though, I foolishly invested my life savings in a glossy magazine startup aimed at fans of lactating pornography, and ended up filling water glasses at the restaurant in the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City while spending late nights wishing I could audition for NRBQ.

END MUSIC HUMOR

Acknowledgments

Because this is my first work of nonfiction, one which was written over the course of 5 years, I would be remiss – if not utterly oblivious – if I did not thank the numerous people who have supported me. They allowed me to grow as a writer, and it is my hope that they will not regret it. They, too, are the authors of this book.

Primarily, however, I would like to thank those who did not assist me in any way. These people I actually do not know, nor have I ever met, yet they acted as my mentors, fed me, and treated me as if I were their own son:

Braithewaite Saltonstall, Terry Sacks, Dr. Keith Fulton, Jennie Samms, Ed Foster, Bela Tomar, Marjorie Rubenstein, Colt Finch, Niles Hertmann, Pip Timmons, and Roger Campbell

A writer needs friends. He depends on them, even. None of the following people are my friends, but their honesty, easy-going nature, and dependability got this writer through very difficult (and lean!) years:

Victor Underwood, Sami Mansour, Holly Rockwell, Marston Upton Templeton, Anatole Trucks, Lars Toomey, and Carole Ann Hagopian.

I would also like to thank the following colleagues who did not act as proofreaders. While it is true that they were not given the chance to patiently proofread my manuscripts, and it is equally true that I’ve never heard of these people, I feel as if I owe them a debt of gratitude simply for giving me the confidence to routinely rethink and edit some of my book’s most crucial passages:

Les Cameron Hoyt, Melinda Hayes-Wickham, Orlando Joanes, Lucinda Ng, Hope Wallace, Eames Whizzick, Darshana Coyle, Sandor Forgacs, and Duke Rinkus.

A work such as this could not have been completed without the support of the dedicated staff at various international archives and libraries. Three names worth mentioning are Reece Farnham at Yale University Library, Stacy Jeffords at the University of Illinois, and Cosima Moretti at the Adbus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Although I did not consult nor visit with any of the preceding people (I’m not sure what kind of writer you think I am), without their completely bogus existence, this project would still be in the preliminary stages.

Five years is a long time, and I couldn’t have done it without the good people at Simon & Schuster, who are not my publisher. A special thanks to Franklyn Baird, who was not the editor of my book, nor is he anything other than a fake name. We did it!

Finally, I am blessed with the nonexistence of a loving family, who fill my days with joy. This work of nonfiction is for them.

Gorn Erb (1903-2006)

The nation is mourning one of its premier avant-garde composers, Gorn Erb, who passed away November 1st after complications from a recent stroke. He was 103. Although largely forgotten for decades, new research has shown that Erb’s musical efforts pre-date nearly every important sonic experiment of the 20th century.

Born in Varaklani, Latvia, Erb immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1911, where they settled in the Rockaway section of Brooklyn. According to his unfinished memoirs, the young Erb tired of school almost immediately, eventually stealing away one winter night aboard a freight train. The next few years were spent as a transient, until 1917, when he mysteriously reappears in a Los Angeles photo as an assistant to Jesse Lasky, future boss of Paramount Studios (“I remember nothing from that period,” Erb said.)

His memory notwithstanding, records show that Erb had somehow learned to read and write music exceptionally well, having staged, arranged, and conducted performances of avant-garde works by Schoenberg and Webern in the Los Angeles area as early as 1923. However, in 1925, in a half-page manifesto published in the Hollywood Citizen-News, Erb declared chamber music “dopey” and that “The future of American music lies in the sound of metals….clashing metals.”

Erb’s life changed in 1927 with the premiere of his first major work, Typhus, an hour long composition in which an actual bulldozer plows through the orchestra pit during the second movement. It’s one and only performance caused a small riot. Ira Gershwin, visiting from New York, suffered a slipped disc during the melee, apparently in an attempt to free his companion, Mary Pickford, from under a sheet of dislodged plywood.

Despite the controversy, Erb was now in demand. He traveled to Paris the following year to present his Three Movements for Brass Band and Wire Recorder. Although no accounts of the performance exist, it can be considered the very first electronic music composition, predating by decades similar works by such luminaries as Halim El-Dabh and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Only the concurrent experiments by inventor Léon Theremin in New York City can remotely compare, although Erb himself thought little of his rival, calling him a “tin-eared, small-minded peasant” in a letter to the Times.

Meanwhile, Erb spent the early 1930s in Brazil on a grant, creating a series of microtonally tuned instruments out of coastal detritus. Microtonal compositions performed on homemade folk instruments were thought to have been the brainchild of American “outsider” composer Harry Partch. However, new evidence suggests that Partch may in fact have been influenced by a pictorial account of the Brazilian premiere of Erb’s mammoth work, Slums of the Obsessed, a three-day “pageant” in one lengthy movement which utilized the aforementioned instruments, a “chorus of boat horns,” numerous sopranos whom Erb had shipped to Rio de Janeiro, and, most significantly, a dozen radios. Although reports confirm that the piece was recorded, no copies have surfaced. “Radio is not the future. Radio is the past! Radio is not information. Radio is music! Man, I’m thirsty.” – Gorn Erb, 1932.

The years 1933-1951 were the most prolific of Erb’s career. Subsiding on the generosity of patrons from five continents, Erb produced hundreds of compositions, and oversaw at least eighty performances of his works – most of which prominently featured the shortwave radio. Erb found his instrument in the shortwave, manning several of them from behind a center-stage console during his elaborate stage shows, which took weeks of rehearsal and left musicians exhausted. Most famous of these pieces was Threnody for the Burning Supermarket. Aaron Copland, after witnessing Erb conduct the piece in Mexico City, said, “At one point a singer…it was a tenor, I think…actually tackled Mr. Erb from behind his console. Mr. Erb followed with a roundhouse kick – it was very powerful, I don’t mind telling you. Right to the tenor’s neck. It laid him out cold, and they continued to play while he lay there moaning and bleeding…Despite the interruption, I am quite convinced that shortwave radio is here to stay in important, modern music. It is vital!”

Although he embraced the sounds of technology, Erb himself eschewed the phonograph, preferring instead the essential experience of live music. Few of Erb’s works from this period were captured on record, and those that were released were pressed on 78rpm in extremely limited, hand-painted editions on his own private label, Oscillation Records. As if to voice his negative opinions on mass-marketed music, Erb’s works began to take on an element of theatricality during the 1950s, which distanced himself somewhat from his followers in the press. Causing another storm of debate was the historic New York premiere of Sonata for Woodwinds and Erratically Flying Hatchets. Erb liked to mention that John Cage, in the audience that evening, was so moved by the piece he had to run from the theater. Cage’s diaries do not mention the concert, although an entry for that week does mention a visit to a Greenwich Village hospital for cuts and bruises.

Perhaps sensing the mammoth popularity of youth-oriented rock music that was to blossom, Erb went into semi-retirement in 1960, settling into a cottage in Brattleboro, Vermont. Although he occasionally acted as an anonymous producer (Ligeti’s Atmospheres; The Leaves – Hey Joe), Erb began composing at home using only sound samples from his massive collection of recordings. Editing on magnetic tape, Erb became the father of The Sample, sometimes creating ten minute pieces culled from drum fills on big band 78s, which he would play to visitors. Poet Frank O’Hara remembered one such piece, saying “It was a drone, an undulating groan that went on for hours – later, he told us that it was one note from a Gene Pitney song slowed down fifty times. What a card!” Unfortunately, that piece and hundreds of other tapes were destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1985.

Erb was not a fan of rock music per se, despite his experiments. In 1976, for instance, he caused a ruckus backstage during an Emerson, Lake and Palmer concert in San Antonio for trying to electrocute Keith Emerson after the keyboardist purposefully destroyed a Korg Lambda ES-50.

Gradually, his composing stopped, and Erb seemed to prefer the simple pleasures of his rustic lifestyle. He would lecture occasionally at nearby Bennington College, tend his garden, and write letters. In 1990, music historian and author Nicholas Sloniminsky coaxed Erb out of retirement for a four-day festival of his work in Bremen. Erb was in rare form, taking time to visit Latvia and his home town of Varaklani where he was greeted with a parade. The festival concluded with Erb’s last commissioned work, One Final Opera For You People, conducted by guest conductor John Adams.

Gorn Erb spent the rest of his years in seclusion, although neighbors maintain he was content. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes have been sent to Ron Popeil.