Pocket and Jules felt too old; the night had gone on too long in this dreadful, half-finished venue. We all felt depleted as high-schoolers moaned in bizarre unison which at points reached harmonic barber-pole effects of a constantly-seeming ascention in pitch… Thousands of sticks of incense were burning, but the bashed-out window and the cold Michigan air was sucking it out in a vortex. Usually at a venue – at shows like this, with performers in masks and with their backs faced away from the audience, a very seductive affect of performance I must admit – at shows like this, there’s always enough body-heat dispersion from the almost religious mass of effectively zombified teenagers and young adults in sunglasses and with military haircuts and twins both wearing a picture of Tupac Shakur in front of a Californian Confederate Flag, which makes me think of a Civil War book I read, in which one major aspect of the “big split” as I like to call it, one particularly broad and rife-with-implications facet of a war that most certainly never ended, was Western Expansion and which side got to dictate the cultural and economic future of the country not just as shipshod vestiges of sad colonialists and old money slavers but to be a fully defined nation, with an equal distribution of resources and riches waiting to be found below the grass and the sand and the ocean and I am lost in this reverie of what life could have been like during this time by a 7-foot tall shirtless man putting on a tuxedo and sweating profusely; orange snot was pouring out of his crooked nose, and he kept trying to start a sentence until he just pretended to be overly focused on the seemingly impossible task of buttoning a tuxedo and walked away, and as I looked over at Pocket and Jules and shrugged, the kind of shrug that indicates that the party is over, for the third time this week even, and that this decrepit man was probably the “omen” as we call it, — as I shrugged, I felt my heart palpitate and my adrenaline spike as a hand grabbed my shoulder, which was very sensitive due to a rotator cuff industry and dozens of dislocations– and another man tapping the opposite shoulder.
I turned around, noticing as I turned my head that the hole in the window had suddenly been patched, and that a small group of young college-aged girls wearing all-black cheerleader outfits were still lighting sticks of incense. I turned my head to see what appeared to be the “band” that had just played. Two young men, in their mid-20s – they looked like they could have been brothers, or cousins. Handsome, yet gaunt and itchy-seeming.
“We really like your writing.”
I froze up, and Pocket and Jules turned their heads away – or at least that’s how I remember it, although I hadn’t turned my head to look at them when the event itself happened.
“Thank you” is what I said first, and then I stammered a bit while they looked at each other, and one of them, the young man standing on the right, leaned in with his hand out, which I shook immediately and with my trademark firmness, He was equally as firm, but clearly wasn’t always as firm as I was, so I was definitely firmer, although I felt as though a wave of relief came over me as the other young man stretched out his hand as well, and had a much similar firmness to his handshake as his musical partner and collaborator.
“Where did you read my writing?”
I know I said that, I stammered it out and couldn’t navigate the directness of the question but shaking their hands loosened my nerves and I asked them where they had read my writing; I had only done liner notes, with my name almost barely legible and usually uncredited by request. I had written a book, which I had watermarked and only given to four people, all of whom agreed that it needed work but was quite ambitious and had moments of true terror and madness. I had written in several zines under a psuedonym; it wouldn’t be hard to connect the dots just from the liner notes, which were usually long diatribes about death and consciousness and near-death-experiences and religious prophecies and tales of statues that bled, men turned to wood, dreams of an orchestra bleeding into wooden chairs as a SWAT Team bleeds into the darkness of the very back of the first flood of the auditorium, dreams of men falling into mirrors and long, seemingly endless dreams of a town of little people who would taunt you in your sleep and were protected by a supra-natural military unit hiding in an Appalachian village and ritually dissecting them in an underground cave, weaving them together and creating an elaborate musical instrument using their dying bodies all connected and meshed into a giant circle of moaning dying little men, their vocal chords and hands and mouths and eyes all lost in this disgusting yet seemingly neccesary act, and I can never tell the ending of this story because the dream refuses to continue – I don’t wake up, but I am petrified inside the dream and nothing is happening, and eventually I realize I am dreaming, and that I’ve been here before, as a spectator, watching a film really, the same film every night for so long, and the little men are what I draw, and I’ve drawn thousands of variations of what the blurred apparitional little men sort-of look like, and Pocket and Jules both say I am a very good illustrator and artist, yet I can only draw these little men as cartoon dwarves buzzing with motion, but they are something else; they aren’t even little, or smaller than any of us. It was that they distorted the lensing around them, the gravity– I don’t know. But once I started becoming more lucid, I started getting much closer to them, and sure enough this was the sweet spot, standing right up at them and staring at them in the eyes deeply and watching them float as they do, which I seem to have forgotten – these little men, they float for money in this town which I have never named… I became fixated on the little men dream and it re-occured over eighty times over the course of three years. This is what I talk about in my writing.
Everything can be traced back to my fixation on the little men in the town of military specialists and scientists and snipers protecting them as they floated around asking for coins and treasures and prizes and smiles and laughter, which they– the tourists, the military plants, the Mayor, who I wrote a twelve page short story for a zine about. The Mayor was everywhere, the Mayor is here, the Mayor is alive and well. He knows everybody’s name. This is what I write about, in my spare time, for friends in bands and friends that have zines who simply ask me to write something for them, which is apparently an overly intimidating act these days… I digress; I return to the party, where the young man from the band that just played who was standing on the right, he replied:
“We’ve watched all your tapes. And the writing – all the writing you’ve given out privately – it’s all out there, man.”
I didn’t know what to say. What tapes? What writing? Scraps that are liteerally put away in a locked safe with a small camera inside which can only be turned off with my fingerprint? I wantedt to know more.
“Which tape was your favorite?”
They both laughed. The room was so thick with burning incense that we were al coughing, and one of them pointed at the cardboard affixed to the hole in the wall, which was being beaten away with what looked like a witches broomstick by a muscular old man wearing a leather jacket. Standing next ti him was the man in the tuxedo with the orange drug-ooze poured out with great abundance still, his sleeves orange with oozy wet drug-dust snot carelessly wiped upon what appeared to be actually nice and seemingly fitted by a tailer.
“Favorite? It all blends togetrer man – isn’tthat like the point?”
“Yah, like… every tape is labelled by date…and you like, always pick up on where the last one left off, even if it’s been months. Really interesting approach.”
I felt instantly paranoid, and flumoxed and hurt and so confused and betrayed by what sounded like surreptitious recordings of me by someone close to me, someone who sees what I do and listens to the things I say and I think of Pocket and Jules and Oran and Chief Little, all of whom went to high school with me.
“Do you want to come to our house and leave this venue and record a tape with us? We can show you our collection too, umm… If you’re into that.”
Pocket and Jules are gone. I know it. I turn around, and I see an echoe of them leaving the venue through the front (most took the long-broken fire exit and walked around the venue, uts back walls totally filled with tiny images and pictographic materials of all kinds and stickers that are cut and re-purposed to fill the gaps in the tapestry, the unified collage currently being tested by the brisk punishment of the vividly whooshing and windy lakeside village air.
“Yes, I think I’ll go to your house. What is your band called?”
“Shadowmirror… but we also go by Mindhead and Brown Electricity Sparking Order. Those are the three psuedonyms we go by…”
“Mindhead… you pressed an LP, years ago, called just Mindhead, and with two tracks: Mind, which was 28 minutes long and Head, which was 84 minutes long. I wrote the liner notes for you two; I now realze something.”
“Yeh. What’s that?”
“I realize so clearly and suddenly that this is just a dream.”
They both laughed. The one on the right showed me his teeth, which were all missing or just rotten yellow-to-black gradiented stubs. He pulls out a handful of teeth from his pocket.
“You’re not dreaming. Trust us. We know how your dreams go. Don’t you ever listen to your tapes, man? You talk about the all the time…”
“Yeah like, just check out our place and we have a recorder and some tapes we could use and we just…”
“You ready?
I had absolutely no fear or paranoia anymore. The smoke in the room was clearing. We took the fire exit way out and I climbed into a car full of gear and empty cigarette packs and a mountain of lottery ticets – bunk scratch offs- with tic-tac boxes clumsily holding them all together. Their drum kit, which I couldn’t tell was even used or not – I couldn’t see the band, because of all the incense and terrible acoustics and tremendous rhythmic walls of penetrative sound bringing near everyone in the crowd except for Pocket, Jules and I.
I wondered where I had heard of this band. Mindhead did not ring a bell, and as a connosier for noise-metal-drone at the time when I was still gullible and impulsive with my creativity on my own way – the way in which these bands create rituals. I entered the young men’s car, and the Michigan air was still whistling with an iced, steady deep-deep-stab as we shivered in the car and I saw that pyramidal cigarette arrangement and the drum set that wasn’t even used — I’m certain of this, so certain. But that isn’t what the tapes that were produced at the band’s bunker – the band called Shadowmirror, which I just remebered and then a deluge of wind passing through me the person on the tapes, talking — me. That isn’t what I said. But I must have. Because now the tapes are everywhere, and it’s because I agreed to go to that house that night.
to be continued
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