Doorway

This is a Doorway.

Someone had seen fit to staple wallpaper to the piece of plywood covering the doorway in the closet in my bedroom. It kind of matched, but not really. You'd look at it and know it was a half-assed job, the way the fixture in the room twinkled off the staple backs, set into the paper in no apparent pattern. No one would say who did the patchwork over the door, but it was understood that I was not to pull off the wallpaper and move aside the wood to expose the small door, only three feet high and almost as wide, small enough for a child, but an adult would run the chance of being trapped in the enclosure should they decide to uncover the door and try the latch that held it closed and stepped over the threshold.

They told me to leave it alone, and so I emptied some boxes in the closet so I could make a dummy stack in front of the door, easy to move when I knew I could work in silence, in peace. My progress has allowed me to preserve the visual integrity of the wallpaper, where in reality it came off in one whole piece, adhered by old wads of chewing gum. The board was not nailed to the wood beneath it, and the first time I moved it, I came away with a deep splinter in my left hand, which ran from underneath the webbing of my thumb through the top few layers of skin, and it left a black outline as a reminder.

There is no door knob, but rather a small latching lock mechanism that somewhat resembles the trigger of a revolver, and when you slide your finger in and fire, the door swings inward, into deep murky nothing that I dare not enter. There's something down there, something wholly unpleasant. I don't understand whose bright idea it was to close off the entryway to something malign with a quarter-inch slab of plywood and a big swatch of flaking plaster paper covered with yellow sunflowers. But I've opened it three times, and looked in long enough to hear something moving deep within the passageway. It sounds like it could get hungry, but I don't know what it prefers to eat.

Diana taught me a new game to play. She calls it Bloody Mary. To play the game, you go into a dark room, without windows, with a mirror and a candle. You light the candle and stare into the mirror, and once you're ready, you repeat Her name three times. You will see her reflection, standing behind you, and you must remember not to turn around in fright or surprise, because she can steal your soul from your body and then inhabit it, taking over while you exist in limbo for the rest of eternity. When you see her, you must stay calm, and you can ask her a question, any question at all, and Bloody Mary will tell you the answer. She can see the future, and she can change it too if you want her to. Mary will take care of whatever you want.

I conjured Mary, with the closet door closed tight, the rest of the house fast asleep, and with my back to the covered up door I called her name three times, and in the dark I saw her, the face of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her hair was black and hung past the border of the mirror, and her eyes were tiny explosions, sparkling like a chemical fire. I closed my eyes for a second and I felt something like tendrils easing past my body, as if I had been floating through thick seaweed, and she waited for me, waiting for my question. I knew what I wanted to ask her, but I was too scared. She told me to close my eyes, and when I did I saw her standing next to me, but it felt like she had extended past her own physical boundaries and had somehow swallowed me up in the flutterings of her flowing dress, individual threads pulling away and bringing me closer to her, in the darkness of my closed eye imagination, she showed me the doorway behind us and somehow it had been uncovered, and the entrance seemed alive as she had me try the latch. It opened, and as the door swung inward we were drawn into the opening like the water swirling down a drain, and we slid down through darkness into a long tunnel, the two of us locked into a tighter and tighter embrace as we sunk downward with the slope of the tunnel, like some forgotten vestigial air duct.

Somewhere near the center of the universe the passage ended, in a long empty room whose walls went on forever. Mary untangled me from her tendrils and affixed me with a cold stare. I felt so scared of the thing that was sleeping down at the other end of the room. I couldn't see it, but I could hear its heavy breath, lumbering as if it were having a hard go at the task of breathing in and breathing out. Mary led me by the hand into the dark, and we got closer and closer to the other side of the room, but I couldn't find the beast. Mary shook her head in sad desperation. She told me the truth, and to hear it made my lungs explode in an awful wail and I fell to the floor and beat my tiny fists in the dirt. I didn't mean to turn and look at her, when we were upstairs. I just got a little scared, spooked enough to jump and kick the candle over, and in the act of pulling away Mary caught me falling and pulled me through the doorway. It was the only way out for me, when the carpet caught fire and it spread to the empty boxes, and it quickly turned into a tiny inferno. She said the flames ate me up, and I knew she was telling me the truth. I felt my burnt limbs a whole lifetime ago as they turned to ash inside the closet.

Sometimes I can hear things, at the other end of the passageway, and I will go to the opening and stare in, wondering who's at the other side of the closed door. I wonder if they did anything to close it over, so no one will ever find me here in the bottom. I shriek and make a racket hoping they will hear me but I don't think I'll ever be found. Even Mary went away after a while. I tried to follow her down the passageway but something kept me from getting very far at all, and she disappeared into nothingness. But, she kept me company for a while.

BILL BATCH WHERE ARE YOU???

0129 733 pm

Recently my Mother and I have been discussing an experience that happened to our family in the late Seventies, a story that doesn't seem quite real but sure enough it happened. The other day, on the phone, I asked my Mom about a man named Bill Batch, a person who I never physically met and yet still seemed somehow connected to the fragments of stories I heard my Mother tell about him.

Why are you thinking about him, she asked, and when I thought about it I realized I dreamt about discussing him with some ghost in my subconscious. So, we had a long conversation about what really happened, without the distorting of one's own memories. She said it was around 1978 or 79, at a time when my parents were separated but not yet divorced, with my father living out of the house, with his new girlfriend Glenna, and my Mother in the house in Greenford, OH, a tiny little fleck on the map of Ohio, with five kids and no way to support them. So my Mom learned how to upholster, starting with car and RV interiors, eventually expanding beyond that to reupholstering people's furniture. She was amazing at it, and what else was cool was going into people's houses, just invading their spaces and taking out their furniture--I went with my Mom on pick-ups and I'd bring in the Swatch books and wait patiently while old ladies picked out their favorite fabrics. My Mom was an amazing businesswoman, basically learning from scratch the in's and out's of doing business for yourself, totally DIY.

But, in that line of work, one was prone to meeting strange people. People would cold call my Mom to come and fix their furniture, make it look better than brand new, she ruled at it. So sometimes the paying customers could get strange. She said one time she had a call in Salem, OH to reupholster this guy's couch. She said she and my late brother-in-law Eric went to his house, and although he was a complete stranger, he seemed to know things about my father, things my Mom didn't think someone as random as this man should know about her estranged husband. Later after they got out of there with the couch, Eric told my Mom the man really frightened him, and Eric was not easily frightened. My Mom said there was something almost too powerful about his presence, the way it seemed to intrude into your unconscious mind. They had the couch in the basement in the house in Greenford, and my Mom found a folded up blanket inside of the furniture's frame. She called him, Bill Batch, and told him she found his blanket just in case he was missing it. But he told her to cover her child in it, the one who was in danger. She got off the phone, rattled and not sure what this freaky dude was all about. Eric took the folded up blanket and tried to immolate it in the barrel, but it wouldn't burn. My Mom said he buried it somewhere on the property.

They brought back the reupholstered couch, looking amazing, but I guess Bill seemed somewhat distracted. He paid my mom, and told her of a book he had written. He gave her a copy of it, but she says she doesn't remember what she did with it. But during this meeting, Bill Batch got even weirder. This man seemed to put himself into a trance by tapping his pen on the desk, with his face going blank, his voice altering with his facial expressions, channeling some outside force to the two of them. He was ready to transmit a message to my Mother, and Eric urged her home.

The story doesn't end there. A few days later my Mom came home and found a note from Bill Batch, attached to the body of a headless chicken. In the midst of the dead chicken on her porch she says she doesn't remember much of what the note said, she was super unnerved by the gesture. Why did he leave a blessing like that for her? She didn't know. But a few days after that, maybe a week or more, a cop car drove down into Greenford and came down our drive way. My Mom came out to meet the police. They told her that a man named Bill Batch had been committed to Woodside, the local psychiatric hospital. And he had escaped from the hospital, and he told everyone he had to get to Greenford, because he had a message for Jackie, my Mom. He was still on the loose, the cops told her, so lock up the house and windows and call us if he comes here. They left, and my Mom was left in a delicate state of sheer pants shitting panic. Who was this maniac and what was the message he had to deliver to her?

That's where it seems that Mr. Batch had more than a similarity in his practices of some sort of Caribbean religion, be it Santeria or something else more localized, but within the definitions of these beliefs, one can see this man was being compelled to make contact with my Mother. One of her children seemed to be in danger, and he had information that could potentially redefine our whole lives. But he never got to my Mom. They caught him, and put him away somewhere no one could find him. All alone in solitary confinement, he knew he failed in delivering the message he was commanded to deliver. This is thirty years ago, and I want to know what happened to this man and, most importantly, I need to know what was the message. Why did he have to deliver it? I don't think we were in any danger of this man harming us. In fact, I believe he was responding to some spiritual sentiment sent to protect us.

So, I know he wrote a book. I know he was a patient in Woodside Hospital, more than once no doubt. He lived in Salem, OH. He'd be between 60 and 70 years old, a man with a life's purpose nullified, beyond recognition. He failed the Spirit that spoke to him, and yet somewhere in him the Spirit still dwells, and maybe if I can find Bill Batch and ask him what the fuck happened. I want to know, because I think this experience has a much greater significance in the grander scheme of our day to day existence. I don't buy the insane plea. I think there is divinity in insanity, I have felt it myself in darker times, I know it is there, and I know there is truth within the candleflame, and the reflections it makes are divinely inspired. This man Bill Batch, was he a psychonaut, some kind of wizard? He was a nobody in a sea of faces, of jobs done and forgotten he gets remembered for trying to get involved with us spiritually.

When I find him, I will record his explanation for his actions, and maybe something will flicker again and that energy will answer what we seek.

Butthole Surfers--Creep in the Cellar

THE POLAROID and the story that goes with it

1/1/11 1008 pm

I took a Creative Writing class while I was attending Brookdale Community College. I had taken another of the professor Gene Snyder's classes the previous year, in Literature of the Occult. I went into the class with my wife, who was then just my fiancee, and we went together to class, into Snyder's workshop, not sure of what to expect.

So, it was pretty simple, it seemed. All we had to do was write, a roomful of us, less than 20 including Gene, but I recognized a gentleman from seeing him at my job on a regular basis. His name was Dick Herman, and he was one of my regulars, and he knew me as the smiling servant of the restaurant industry. Inside the cutout room of the new annex he learned a little bit more about me than I think he had reckoned for.

Up to that point in my life, I was writing sporadically, I knew I enjoyed it but it wasn't something I really pursued but the class allowed me a certain measure of focus on the act of creation. I went home after the first or second class, when we had the assignment of writing something, anything, but a lightbulb burst above my head, it heated up so fast. Frantically I created something readable, I had hoped; I never really ever had given others the pleasure of reading what I wrote, unless you were a teacher or something. But in the class, we would be assigned the first drafts of what everyone came up with, and we'd make our way through critiquing each other.

So I wrote something kinda terrible. Maybe a little grammatically awkward (I insisted on writing it in the present tense) but, just kinda awful in a bad way from start to finish. But that wasn't what I set out to do. I just wanted to create a narrative and exploit my characters, just to see what would happen. So I worked at it until I was happy, and due to my name being near the front of the alphabet, I think the third story read and critiqued was mine. I called it 'The Polaroid.' I will copy and paste it following the body of this introduction.

The class reacted somewhat unexpectedly to what I had written. It seemed like I upset a lot of people, students who were moms and shouldn't have been forced to have pornography around their children, filth assigned to them to read. My work was reduced to two words, scrawled across the front of her copy. One of the middle aged middle classed moms who wanted to write flowery romantic fiction. It said 'PURE PORN.'

I didn't set out to write porn, but the class, they fixated on the sex and violence, and the way they were united, the way I wrote it. There were some creepers in that class too, who seemed to enjoy it a little too much. And so they argued throughout most of the time they spent tearing apart my story. Some of them were deeply offended, and I just didn't know what to say.

My friend Dick, the one who I had served breakfast to for like three years, he says I'm like some kind of secret pervert who never lets on how perverted he really is. He interacted differently with me from that point on, that was for certain. And some people dropped the course right after that. I don't know if it was because of me. Maybe they didn't feel creative.

But Gene dug it and he encouraged me to run with it, so I wrote another story in that class, and then went on to begin developing visions of an opus work entitled 'The Leper Meditations,' which I labored on for a few years. Gene invited me to join one of his writing workshops outside of class like but I didn't have the cash or the fearlessness to study with the old guy. I have one of his books in my library, the 'Ogden Enigma,' I think. He wrote some cool stuff, crazy scifi action, and it was in general a pretty great experience for me, and I got an easy A in the class (or was Brookdale still on the check plus or minus grading system?). I began to write more feverishly, producing strange media like fliers and booklets, scissors and glue cut and paste editing. I guess Gene allowed me to use the tools in my arsenal to carve out something ugly for people to look at, like they've done something wrong, and that's what I was trying to capture with my writing in general and this story in particular. So presenting, my first foray into the world of transgressive fiction, 'The Polaroid,' (and I fixed the tense after all). Please be advised that there is some graphic depictions in this piece, so I ask if maybe you shouldn't be reading stuff like this, well, maybe you shouldn't be. Like you Mom, maybe skip this one. I'd hate to have you react negatively to such fiction that I made. Thanks!!

THE POLAROID

The shrill tone of the telephone pulled me from my trance devotion to the TV set in the middle of the living room. I picked the receiver up out of the cradle and pressed it to my ear.

"Hello?"

"Hey Paul, what's up?" Eric's painfully sarcastic tone responded back. Fuck, anyone but him.

"Oh, hey I'm just watchin' some TV with my old man." I glanced over at my father, fully reclined basking in the cathode glare. The mention of his existence didn't stir him. He was as oblivious as ever.

"You're such a fucking pussy, Paul. Fucking Friday night, and you're spending quality time with your daddy. That's sweeter than shit. You ladies resting from doing each other's nails?"

"Look, dude, what do you want? I'm not supposed to be tying up the line right now, he's waiting for a call," Eric could probably tell I was lying, but I was willing to try anything to get out of this conversation. Whenever Eric calls me late in the evening, it usually turns out to be something humiliating, dangerous, or illegal.

"Well, before I let you get back to your Fantasy Island reruns, listen for a second. Meet me behind the Methodist church in the parking lot at midnight, and wear something dark."

"No, I can't," I said.

"Be there, and don't be late. You know better than that, don't you, Paul?" It was a commonly used threat on Eric's part, but it was one that usually worked. He had enough shit on me to get me in serious-ass trouble with a lot of people, even though he had a hand in all of it. If Mayor Hamilton ever found out what we did to his daughter Kayla and their golden retriever Lucky, we'd probably both be in jail right now, with new assholes torn into us courtesy of the Mayor.

What in the hell did Eric want tonight?

He's not what you would call one of my best friends; of course, I really don't have many of those anyway. We grew up together as neighbors, and seeing that we were both total losers, we had to stick together out of necessity to avoid as many ass beatings and tortures as possible from the other kids around town. When we hit puberty, I pretty much stayed the same quiet nobody, whereas he changed. He started hanging out with all the older local heads and fuck-ups (a lot of the same guys who made Eric drink his own piss out of a soda can when he was eight). He picked up all their mannerisms and habits, all the dope and fucking around and being destructive to all those around them. He still occasionally hung around with me, when they weren't around, but I think our quality time together was used for Eric to be as sadistic to me like Rooster and those guys were to him. One good thing about him, though: he turned me on to pot and its many joys. He would usually supply me with weed he had scored from the local schwag dealers here in town. I'd almost always have to beg him for some, though, and getting high with Eric always carried a price. He liked playing subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) head games and fucking with me hard, tricking me into doing things I wouldn't normally do. He has that effect on me.

I sat in my room, occasionally leaning out the window to hotbox a cigarette, listening to old Black Sabbath records I stole off my old man. 11:45 came soon, and I failed to convince myself that I should go meet him at the church. I crept out into the living room to check on my dad. He was as I expected to find him, snoring away, his can of Busch still cradled in his fingers but dribbling out its contents onto the carpet, filling the room with its heady smell. I snuck out the back door and zipped up my black army jacket, and headed for the church.

I could see Eric standing in the misty shadows behind the church, a thin specter lurking there. I saw his nervous face checking to make sure it was me. As I reached him, he handed me a lit joint.

"Here you go, but don't fuckin' slobber all over it, asshole." I put it to my lips and toked deeply, the hot smoke tearing at my throat and lungs. After my fourth or fifth hit, as the J slowly became a blackened roach, I felt like something was terribly wrong, but I'm not quite sure what it was. I felt real high, higher than I've ever been. I wasn't sure if I was making the feeling up in my head. Not sure about anything. Felt real fucking panicked.

"What the fuck is in this shit, Eric?" My heart threw itself repeatedly against my prison cell ribcage. Each beat bounced my body against an unseen wall, I'm not here, but dangling from a long cord in some deep cavern, being jerked to and fro.

I heard from far away, "It's weed, you fuckin' pussy. What the fuck are you talking about?" The sure voice reaffirmed to my rational mind that I was going completely crazy. I looked down into the grass and saw each individual blade wiggle like they were all being pumped alive by electrical current. They all chanted my name over and over, a hypnotic mantra that consumed my consciousness.

A hard shove awakened me from this void. Reality rushes back up into my senses. Eric's stared me in the face angrily. "Jesus Christ, Paul. You never smoked weed laced with embalming fluid before? Fuckin' better than the usual shit I get, don't you think? Rooster took an ounce of this shitty dirtweed and hosed it down with this chemical spray he got from his cousin, said it was fucking embalming fluid. I feel like I'm on real intense acid, don't you, pussy? I thought you were gonna shit your pants just now. That was funny as hell." I felt slightly more in touch now with my mind. At least it was only the fucking pot that made me feel that way.

"All right, you gotta get your head together, man. You better not fuck this up tonight. I ain't getting busted because of a piece of shit like you." He began to pull me along by my coat collar.

"Where are we goin'," I asked him, still unsure of the evening's felony.

"Just doin' a job on this guy here in town. Rooster told me he's gone for the week, went down to Texas to do a run. No alarm, no real close neighbors, no one else in the house. Not even a fucking watchdog. We're in and we're fucking out, as long as you don't trip over your own dick."

"What do you need me for, then?"

"Shit, bitch, you just gotta help me carry out the goddamn loot. Rooster said he's got two motherfuckin' kilos of coke in there. If we score that, Rooster said he's give me a good cut of it. I'll be fuckin' set." Eric beamed, like a normal kid would if he made the honor roll.

"What am I going to get out of it?" Sure as hell want a piece of something, too, considering I'm an accessory to breaking into this dude's house.

He stopped and shot me a pissed-off glare. "Don't you fuckin' worry about what you're gonna get. We'll see what we can find in there. Maybe we'll find some porno magazines you can keep, huh? Just keep your mouth shut right now. I gotta think." His pace quickened; I struggled to keep up with him. He was nervous, anxious, jumpy; his gestures and tone of voice were aggravated. I looked him over, analyzing him as we walked through the back yards and over the fences in the darkness of night. He was usually residing in a more lethargic position, bordering on coma, sadistic on occasion as he felt fit. But tonight he's fucking on, like a light switch. Is it that fucked-up weed, I wonder. Or is it because of what we're about to do?

He stopped right in front of me and I bumped into his back. He pointed to the house that is our destination, just your average suburban stoner crash pad. Looks like it could've been a nice place at one time in its existence. We dodged various obstacles like chunks of dead cars and demolished doghouses as we crept through the unkempt backyard. Not a light is on in the house; the moon glares back at us from every pane. Eric paused on the back porch, glanced around, and put his elbow through the window on the door. The shatter was brief but loud, making me spin my vision to make sure no one noticed the crash in the quiet air. Eric fished his hand through and fumbled with the inside lock, then swung it open.

"Ladies first, bitch," he said, shoving me in. "I forgot to bring you a pair of gloves, so try not to touch anything in here, or else it's your ass." His work-gloved hand pulled a heavy yellow flashlight out of his pocket and flicked it on. Aimed the beam at me. "What are you waiting for, man? Start fuckin' looking. We ain't got all fuckin' night." He wandered upstairs as I headed for the living room.

It was so quiet in there it made my ears ache. I felt tense, fighting the urge growing that told me to run home and forget about this place and Eric. I really didn't want to snoop through this guy's shit, but I especially didn't want to leave my prints on anything. I pulled on a dangling light switch that illuminated the living room. Walked over to look at the dude's record collection that was in the corner, on the side of the speaker cabinet. Taking care to wrap my hands inside my t-shir,t I thumbed through the dusty crate. One album caught my eye, an old King Crimson record that had a painting of some guy's screaming face close-up on the sleeve. I dropped it back into the slot where I found it, and weny to pick out another one when I saw two plastic wrapped bricks nestled in between the crate and the wall, smashed in there out of sight. The son of a bitch probably thought nobody'd find his two fucking kilos of coke back here. I ran out of the room to go tell Eric.

Things got real fucked-up when I found the room he was in, and I looked down and saw some guy crouching in the corner, about to spring upon these intruders. Right before he leaped, I noticed he doesn't have anything in his hands, no knife, no heavy weight or bludgeon, must have thought he was some kind of hardass.

Then I started to scream, cause I was scared out of my fucking mind.

"What the fuck you doing yelling Paul somebody's gonna-" that was all he got out before the guy tackled him like a football player, snapping Eric's head back to smack loudly on the floor. The flashlight he had flew up in the air, spinning its shine everywhere. It landed on the carpet, pointing at them wrestling on the carpet. I picked it up so I could aim it better at them, to view the struggle. They fought like rabid dogs. The man was clearly dominating Eric, landing punches and headbutts onto his face, pressing his weight down on Eric's scrawny frame. The sick motherfucker actually stuck his head down face to face with him and bit down on lip, taking a piece of Eric's bottom one, exposing his clenched teeth before spraying blood upwards into his face. The shower distracted him for a moment as Eric's hands worked their way up and started gouging wildly at the man's eyes, as his left index caught under an eyelid, pulling hard away from his face, scrapes of skin getting caught under the fingernails, both figures bleeding freely. The guy started to scream and yell and began to drive knee after knee into Eric's balls. Eric answered back with a deafening response of his own.

"Fucking Paul, man, help me. HELP ME!" His voice was cracking and pained. I just couldn't seem to tear myself away from viewing this violent ballet that was taking place before me. Of course, I did realize that when this guy was finished with Eric, which looked like soon, he was gonna come after me. I swung the flashlight, hard, into the man's face, catching him in the mouth and on the chin. The impact crumbled his teeth as they broke apart like chalk, tearing into his tongue, which was poking out viewing the spectacle. I tugged the flashlight away as the red provided an overwhelming contrast to the yellow handle. The next blow fell upon his right eye. After that, every subsequent hit blurred together in my mind, a slowly unfolding montage of brutality that I was the star of. I realize he was not moving anymore. I was soaked with his blood.

"Hey motherfucker, say cheese," it was Eric, a flash of light that for a second exposed the mess that I had created there, then the brightness was gone the second it left, submerging the room in darkness again. I was disoriented, like before when I first got high, not sure where I am. Eric found the light switch as finally the light came back. I wished it had stayed dark in there. I was not hallucinating. This was really happening. Eric stood there stupidly cruel, a big black Polaroid camera in his hands. He must have had time to collect himself and find it in the room as I killed the guy. Blood was still running down his chin, but he didn't seem to notice.

"Yeah, I must have never told you that I was sort of an amateur photographer. Shit, I could probably get this published in the paper, maybe even on the six o'clock news." He waved the picture in the air to speed up its development. "Exclusive crime scene photograph, catching killer in action. Fucking excellent."

"You asshole, give me that," I demanded as I lunged for him. He pulled back from me as he shoved me away with his free hand. I looked up and caught a glimpse of it, clearly capturing what I had done. Shit.

"Hey Paul, just think of this as insurance in case you ever try to rat me out, you know, we can go and tell the pigs what you did." He had me by the balls. And I fucking saved his ass by killing that guy. I just wanted to fucking kill him right then, just to shut him up. He noticed my anger and put the picture into his pocket.

"You know what, Paul, this gives me a great idea. You take the camera and fire off some pictures of me and our friend over there. I want to have a memento of the occasion, my best buddy's first kill." He pressed the bulky Polaroid into my hands and walked over to the body. He stood over it, apprehensive to touch it outright. "Jesus fucking Christ, you really fucked this guy up, man. My God, he doesn't even have a face anymore. Did you see what this bitch did to me, Paul? Fucking bit me on the lip like he was trying to kiss me! Fucking piece of shit!" He kicked the corpse for good measure.

I looked around the sparsely furnished room. The only decoration was a series of Polaroid photos thumbtacked up on the wall. All are of some empty-eyed, slack-faced chick strung up in a harness, receiving various forms of discipline by a fat, leather-clad dominatrix with long red hair. The tied-up girl with a ball gag in her mouth looks about how I feel. Eric finally lifted the corpse's head and looked closely into its rearranged face.

"Man, this ain't even the guy who lived here, I don't think, it don't really look like him, but how can you tell after what you did to him, huh? Hey dude, smile," he lifted the head close to his and mugged at the camera. I hesitated, then squeezed off the shot.

Eric contorted himself and his friend into various juvenile poses. I kept snapping the pictures, part out of wanting to oblige him so we could get out of here, part growing interest in the macabre, disturbing scene in front of me. I still didn't want him having that one of me.

"I want that goddamn picture, Eric. I don't want anyone finding it. Asshole, listen to me!" I continued to yell at him, but he didn't seem to notice. He was having fun. He giggled like a Mongoloid as he made the limbs dance with his own, shuffling the body along, doing a crude tango. He became a ventriloquist, pulling the jaw to mimic speech, making low-blow, childish cracks about the man's demise and present condition. I dutifully took the pictures, lining one after another against the wall, facing the series across the room.

"Hey Paul, how many pictures you got left?" He made the body stand on its knees but he still had to support it with a steady hand on the shoulder.

"Uh, I think one more," I was very out of touch right then, bordering on what I felt was pure screaming psychosis, a kind of calm before a raging storm. Anything could have happened, and I would have believed it to be true.

"All right then, dude, get a close-up on this one. This is gonna be the keeper." He began unbuckling his jeans, undoing them with one hand. Eric eased them down his hips, trying to shake them off, getting them down far enough to expose his genitals. He grabbed his half-hard cock, pulled it tight from the bottom to make it stiffer, its head veiny and purple. His hand supporting the body shifted, so he held on by the top of the hair, the weight dangling like a heavy pendulum. Eric moved his dick closer, trying to work its way in to the corpse's mouth, through the fragments of jagged teeth, making tiny splatters of blood down his open jeans. The bloody mouth accomadated him, swallowing the sex organ whole. Eric groaned in pleasure, grinding the corpse's mouth closer in mock porno gyrations. I couldn't take it anymore.

I dropped the camera, staring at him in hysterical disbelief.

"Come on, dickhead, pick up the camera. I want a picture of this."

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" I screamed and raged at him, dizzy and insane from the atmosphere in the room. "Look at what you're doing! You're fucking sick, man, SICK SICK SICK!" His expression changed, but not because of my impassioned presentation. He looked down and found his penis gone, not where he had grown accustomed to seeing it for all his life, there was nothing there, just flat skin and pubic hair and a bloody gap where his dick used to be. He saw the corpse's jaw locked firmly in a spasm, separating Eric's penis from him with a row of clashed tight teeth. Blood pumped up to the injured surface, the wound freeing it to splash out down his thighs and the face before him. He let go and the body fell, as Eric fumbled for it.

"Jesus fucking Jesus NO!" One hand clutched his bleeding crotch as the other hand tried to force its way into the corpse's mouth, looking for his lost cock.

"Oh Paul please fucking help me Paul please!" I knew right then what I had to do to make the situation better.

The flashlight was sticky from the congealing blood all over it. Still, I used it again, with a much more methodical fashion than before. Firm, strong, direct strokes, all upon Eric's crying face, special attention paid to every important area. I really put myself into it the second time around. Eric looked worse than the other guy.

He really deserved it. I was tired of the way he treated me. He wouldn't be able to fuck with me anymore.

I bent over and pulled my picture out of Eric's pocket. It was all bent up and wrinkled and bloody, but I didn't want to leave it here. I scooped up the rest of the shots that I had lined up against the wall. They were coming with me, as was the last one of the series of the S&M photos, as I realize that those were taken in here also. The trussed-up girl, a close-up of her face contorted in a mixture of pain and ecstasy, smeared with sweat and what looked like shit.

One more thing, though.

There was one picture left in the Polaroid.

The two slack bodies fitted nicely together, like adjacent puzzle pieces as I squeezed them into the frame of the picture, embracing in a post-mortem 69. It was actually kind of erotic, seeing them like that. Maybe I'm more like Eric that I realized.

Flash!

The cops would never figure out what happened here. They would never understand. I wiped off the flashlight and the Polaroid, getting rid of any loose fingerprints I might have left, just in case. That guy will be suprised when he comes home from Texas, won't he? They'll probably put him away for this, considering he wouldn't be able to use his going on a drug run as an alibi. Maybe he will, though, I just don't fucking care. I wanted out of there.

Washed my hands, then went and got that coke. I'll need something to do so as to fill the void now that Eric's gone.

I don't know if I'll miss him or not.

(Here's a happy kitten to help cleanse the mental palate.)

Hope that wasn't too bad!!

sincerely

s bowlin

K GRAVE

It was sometime in 2002 that I wanted to create not just a musical act, but more of a performance art piece set to sound, and I enlisted my friends Jay to join me in the endeavor. By that time I had known Jay since my wife and I moved to Kent, OH, and met a recently transplanted himself Jay, on his own up the street from us. It made sense that we would gravitate towards each other.

Up to that point I think Jay was one of the craziest sons of bitches I'd ever had the pleasure of meeting, outside of random mental cases met casually, Jay was very polite and quick to laugh but he could turn into a madman at the drop of a hat. He'd seize you by the lapel and chant rabid accusations, some practically in tongues, and he was grand in gesture and reaction, a magician without a top hat. The first time he came to visit us in our new apartment, he had brought over a box of wine and once that was gone we were instant friends. He was a visionary and a mad prophet escaped from the desert, part child evangelist gone wild, he could eat a whole BBQ chicken in one sitting, leaving only the bones, and he was an artist, an artist who made maniacal paintings and seemed almost feverish at times. He was very magnetic, and he introduced us to those others who had been drawn into Jay's sideshow machinations. I always felt Jay lacked the pulpit from which he could spread his message, and to supply him with one would be a magical thing.



I decided to create something kinda ugly but highly spiritual out of sound, and feature Jay to tear through the tomato fields in bare feet and a tattered tuxedo. I wanted to forge something hypnotic, but more importantly I wanted to extend outwards to the realms of public spectacle, where we could catapult this lumpy projectile straight at people. I asked Jay to record himself, talking or chanting or even reading, but to try and capture his inherent intensity. Once he gave me the data disc I went to cutting up and asking what I had, with sine waves and primitive samples of Tibetan prayer bowls and church bells. I put together the demo 'Demostration 2002' and christened the project K GRAVE, named for the ketamine fugue state of nothingness, a mindstate I wanted to force people into and to exploit Jay's atavistic tendencies.

Jay was up for it, he was up for anything. By that time we were living in NJ, in separate residences after having roommates together for a time. I found the email address of a local booking agent for shows in our area, mostly hardcore matinees but I wanted to pitch to this guy, so I sent him the demo and the leaflet/flier that we had made, with our manifesto of sorts on it. To my surprise, the booker was into the cdr, he called it 'a soundtrack to a horror film' but every booking fell through, as he didn't think we'd fit on any of the bills he was promoting. I fantasized about traumatizing little hardcore kids with our sonic gruel, but he never offered anything else to us, and sadly we never got a chance to perform live, thus depriving the world of the fierce spectacle of K GRAVE. After a few years Jay moved back to Ohio, where he's into the local produce scene. I had intentions of creating a soundboard of Jayspeak but I never got around to it. I wonder if he ever thinks about how glorious it would have all been, to terrify into submission a room full of faces and to allow Jay to channel some higher energy and perhaps for everyone to have a wonderful mystical experience.

Here is a link to download 'Demonstration 2002' plus, two other pieces recorded post-demo, utilizing Jay's vocal torments: Mediafire Link



Here is the original manifesto:

A CALL TO WITNESS——Within endless circles there is an understanding of a certain protocol, a prototype to uphold, a patent to honor. There may be laws so cosmic that they are nearly invisible in our heads, as silent as a thought, signaling commands. Reptilian brain schemes must be dealt with upon an individual basis, and this thorough double-gloved deprogramming will be accompanied by the wails of paranoid schizophrenic street preachers, the clanging of detuned churchbells, and a very sorrowful greek chorus who sing only in sine waves. K GRAVE are the conductors of this almost unholy symphony. K GRAVE are two individuals who push at the sturdy walls of endurance to blaze new pathways out of the head, and into the skull. Using sound loops and scrapes both primal sounding and foreign, various antiquated effect setups, and a stream of tortured consciousness that flows from the body of the honorable Rev. Avatar, a new strange understanding seems almost attainable. K GRAVE has been delivered from a thornbed of ideas, crosscutting tent revivalism with power electronics and primal scream therapy and performance art and sufi brain training exercises and alphawave thoughbending and gnostic scripture lessons and backwoods witchcraft legends and rabid mid-western upbringing, a sonic cocktail that takes god out of the classroom and sticks him right in your third eye chakra. Let it in.