The Wild Dogs of TaiPei

By Nick Spencer

Musician Memphis Davis was left few options after he lost his hand in a car accident. When a grifter named Faith introduces him to Winston, a crime boss in the Tenderloin, Memphis is hired to manage a lucrative, high-stakes drug deal to smuggle heroin from the jungles of the Golden Triangle to the streets of San Francisco. Complicating matters are magic temple dogs, shamans and ghost motorcycle gangs representing good and evil, destined to drag Memphis into their pre-ordained spirit war. From source to port, "The Wild Dogs of TaiPei" is the odyssey of Memphis and Faith's search for love and hope as they fight to reconstruct their identities, challenged in their struggle for love and redemption by the ghosts that inhabit their souls.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Spencer
• Release date: Dec 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311140883

Nick Spencer

Nick Spencer is graphic designer who presently resides in the Washington D.C. metro area. He has travel extensively in Asia where he lived for some time in Shanghai and Taipei. For more information, please visit his website (www.nickspencerdesign.com). He is currently a professor in the Communication Design department at NOVA in Alexandria, Virginia. In addition to his academic and creative pursuits, he is also a musician of solo improvisational piano.

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The Wild Dogs of TaiPei

by Nick Spencer

Smashwords EditionText

Copyright - 2013 Nick Spencer

All Rights Reserved

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are

used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Cover design, Illustrations and Motion Graphic by Nick Spencer

ISBN: 9781311140883

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en_US.

INTRODUCTION

1. MEMPHIS

2. FAITH AND SHEILA

3. THE DEVIL'S CHORD

4. WINSTON'S CRIB

5. BANGKOK

6. ELEPHANTS AND OPIUM

7. THE FAST BOAT

8. AIR OPIUM

9. THE MAGIC DOGS

10. GOLIATH WINS

11. MELVIN ELMORE AND T0 HE PHANTOMS

12. MAX JAMES AND THE CELESTIALS

13. AJAX AND DON COYOTE

14. THE BURRITO KILLERS

15. CLIVE AND THE CELLULOID VOID

16. THE MC GHOST WAR

17. TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN

18. THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING

Every seventeen years, the ghost gangs would duel to see which gang was strongest. The gangs battled all over the planet in all the places humans had gathered to live and die. The ghost wars had raged since the beginning of time without pause. The conflict was global, though the battles themselves were local and cultural, and the ghosts always formed in the after-life as they were before death.

Throughout history, the forms of combat had changed in both the spirit and living worlds, yet the hostile energy and intent had remained the same. The hate and anger that marked the faces of those in conflict looked no different from one century to the next.

The violence had proven itself to be one of the few constants in the universe. But in a world designed as a dynamic polarity, hate was held in place by compassion, its complement in the domain of consciousness. These two forces had always existed together in balance through conflict.

The dueling had its rules. They were ancient rules that were understood, though the memory of their origin had been forgotten. The deadly game was played with two living pawns. Each was chosen to become the respective champion of a ghost army. Arranged by the spirit world, the chosen ones would be manipulated to duel without knowing the real conflict fueling their empirical grudge. The conflict for the two selected combatants in the world of the living was about the things the living always fought and died for, be it power, sex, love or alliances. They were like gladiators battling in an invisible arena. It was a fight to the death for the living contestants. A physical death countered by a spiritual crow-eating feast for the losing ghost army, whose punishment resulted in the loss of their power and their ability to influence the living for better or worse. It was the difference between benevolent and malevolent ghosts, ruling their turf of spiritual energy in different parts of the world: Whether one lived in New York, London, or Shanghai, the wars emerged wherever humans had died and become ghosts locked in Limbo.

For those with second sight, the shifting of this seventeen-year fulcrum captivated them as they watched the balance of energies shift. It was a tsunami of psychic energies that rolled over the expanse of the planet, changing the balance of power in the span of a few days.

Unexpectedly, the peace that most thought would come with death, did not come, as the conflict between armies in life continued into the wasteland of the Ghostworld, beyond the span of their living flesh. For a ghost without power or influence, seventeen years is a long time to wait, even in the eternal present.

1. MEMPHIS

When you're in trouble. Blues is your best friend.

Blues don't ask you where you're going.

Blues don't care where you've been.

-Otis Spann

It happened so fast. One moment, you're in your life, and in a flash you become someone else. The car spins as if hit by a tornado. The blurred lines moving with the sound of distorted wind and noise. The objects of metal, glass and plastic smashing and shattering against unseen surfaces erupting successively and quickly on all sides. For a moment the pieces float almost motionless in space. Then, in an instant, they quickly whirl and ricochet everywhere. When it stops, you check to see if you're still there. Check to see what death is really like, as it is finally revealed to you. Breathless.

On that fateful day, Memphis Davis survived the accident, opened his eyes and found he still wouldn’t know what death was really like. He waved his arms through the smoke from the burning oil and rubber to see a world of shattered glass and twisted metal. Feeling cold, and seeing his blood everywhere, he passed out, doubled over in the front seat of what was left of his Chevy El Camino, vaguely remembering the windshield that sliced at his wrist and sheared off his left hand.

As he regained consciousness in San Francisco General Hospital, he realized a musician's worst fear. Memphis didn't live in fantasy. He knew the situation, and it was bad. He was damaged goods, and his shredding days were over. He was never going to feel the heat of an improvised line again. In his present situation, he was not strong enough to stay above the fray, and with no car, no family, and an end to his current occupation, the future did not glow. He loved being a piano player. After giving up his life as a smuggler, it was the one facet of living that gave him meaning and a place in the world where he had no other skills. Now, that life was gone. Five more lives to go. Hmm, Memphis, the cat. He laughed to himself, and then he cried.

During his two-fisted life, he could move the black and white ivory under his fingers as smoothly as the old Chinese practiced Tai Chi in the park outside his window. It was the black and white logic of the piano that defined the continuum of Memphis’s world. In that life, he would riff alone for hours with only the company of the San Francisco breeze and light coming through the open window. The time would fly, marked only by his hands, as they flowed from one lick to another, defining the fluency of his voice. He always knew that specific physicality that made the phrase sound good, so he could claim beauty as his prize. That bit of sound that held the possibility of something mysterious and hopeful, as that particular sound had never happened before. They were sounds oozing from deep inside of himself, ready to rise at his call to shake and rattle through the keyboard to the world. Through music, he felt strong and powerful enough to kick down the door, defiant of everything without groove. He remembered when his hands could cut through the piano to the sounds he forged for his howl. It was his voice no more.

Memphis loved the key of Ab (a.k.a. the gospel key). He had played that key in churches all over the south as a boy. First, on the piano, and later to the big sound of a Hammond B3. He had his own recipe of stops and combination of sounds to move any house to its feet. He didn't care if they were screaming for Jesus or moaning the Blues.

As a boy, he met Otis Kelly, his first musical mentor. Otis was a libertine and a mystic, the perfect combination for a musician. He was self-taught and only played in the key of F. The key Otis believed to be the keynote of all other pure and soulful sounds. Memphis’s ear changed with the education he received from the elder musician, but he developed his own ideas as he played. Memphis came to believe all keys had a voice, and each had a different personality. Memphis would just sit inside of any sound and go to what was beautiful in it. F was like a wind. Ab was the magnolias blossoming in spring. And G felt like the smell of the tar baking in the humidity on the country roads where he lived as a boy. He could still smell the heat rising off the hot pavement in the summer, heat like a slow Bossa with a New Orleans kick.

The tones connected him to the world. Playing tunes, he could feel the weight of each groove inside himself and the power of the rhythmic tide as it moved through himself, or the band. He loved that about music. It took him to a place where all his actions had real and noticeable consequences for himself and others. A place that instantly revealed to him whether he was on or off. Good or bad, Memphis Davis believed he could always find his pocket in the groove.

Memphis cut his teeth on what Otis knew about music and piano playing. He learned from Otis the idea that music was not about music. Otis showed Memphis that the notes, chords and rhythms that created music were merely the tools to change the way one could think. Otis used the piano to practice his way of life like a preacher used the Bible to talk to God. He used to remind Memphis that there was a song for every day, and that every day was a new song. Otis’s optimistic ideas of self-transformation surprised Memphis, considering Otis was a bipolar, manic-depressant, with a serious cocaine jones. Still, music worked for Otis, and Memphis remembered him as one of the most intelligent and humorous persons he had ever known.

Otis escaped to Florida. A move made necessary to elude the law, his wife and a dependence on Prozac that was numbing his soul into extinction. When first prescribed, Otis was convinced that Prozac was his redemption from coke. Memphis’s final remembrance of Otis was seeing him leaning over with a glass of scotch spilling off to one side, and his bright red beard flashing in the dusty bar lights of a honky-tonk near Baton Rouge, as he shouted over the band, Memphis, It feels just like cocaine. Shortly after his exile, he died at a club gig from a heart-attack. He was still playing piano before he checked out, though no one could recall his last tune.

Memphis sat by the bay window as the cool mists were blowing through the street that morning. He drank his coffee, and watched as the velvet sheets of gray fog parted like smoke from the moving cars cutting their path down the hilly street. He sat waiting for the migraines to visit him like a punctual ghost. He had suffered from them ever since his term in prison: a consequence of his former life. The migraines were both painful and extraordinary. They created fantastic soundscapes insides Memphis's mind that were composed of distorted sounds and noises unlike any he ever heard through his ears. Sometimes, the noise would be like an un-tuned radio, punctuated with the crackling pops of electric shorts. Other times, it was a cyclone of menacing sounds, incessant and unworldly static panning violently from ear to ear. Faint images accompanied the sounds, though the visual vagueness of them made it impossible for him to determine what they were. Eventually, the tapestry of sounds would pass through him like the Doppler effect of a passing train. Silence.

Before losing his hand, he could make music on the piano to hold off the migraines. It was a complex music composed of dense, soft chords and sparse melodies. It was a music that required dexterity to reach the multiple tones of creation. It was not a passive music. He had recorded the piece many times, but the effect of listening was not the same as when he actively improvised it. It was the act of creating it that made it the remedy. For Memphis, nothing else worked the cure like music. Tunes were his mantras and the only prayers worth repeating. Flooding his mind with groove and melody, he had always changed the noise into the pure tones of tempered frequencies that were soft and soothing. Now, he was in a unknown place without any map to navigate through this strange territory one-handed. He didn't know how, but he knew he had to negotiate the pattern of who he was in the present, and sort through his few options. He needed to get to another plateau before his circumstance would turn his blues into his demise.

Being on the outside for so many years, he knew he was no longer civilized enough to rejoin the regular world. He would fail in the straight world of suits, and not being young, certified or pretty enough to compete, they wouldn't want him anyway. Even if he could, he would lose his ability to rave, and wither inside himself by not being himself. Memphis’s sense of time and place was different from the customers he knew from his gigs, where most had real jobs, families and responsibilities. For so long, he had lived by a different set of rules. As a musician, he had become a creature of the night that inhabited a time zone where the stars, neon and streetlights lit the world instead of the sun. Eating when hungry. Sleeping when tired. Indulging his appetites when available. Memphis Davis had always managed to live by his own code. Now he was damaged, and like a trapped tiger he was pacing in a cage and looking for an escape.

2. FAITH AND SHEILA

Guanxi describes the dynamic in personalized networks of business and influence in Chinese society. The western translation is connections and relationships. It is widely recognized that neither of those terms sufficiently describes guanxi.

Memphis remembered the first time he saw Faith in Frank's little street-side market down on Geary Street. It was mid-morning, and the shafts of clean, white light streamed through the cool morning air in straight, pristine lines reaching far into the city from the sky as he walked into the store and saw Faith. Frank noticed Memphis down from the counter.

Hey, Pal. How you doing? Frank asked, trying, but failing, to look inconspicuously toward Memphis’s missing hand. Everyone was pal in Frank’s world.

I'm fine, Frank, answered Memphis.

Frank rattled some change into the cash register and began his usual monologue of unstoppable, light chatter. Do you believe that about Barry Bonds? he continued. Frank was a devoted Giants fan.

Memphis had other things on his mind as he watched Faith walking up the aisle toward them. Interrupting Frank in mid-stream, Memphis whispered, Hey Frank, who's the girl?

She's new, Memphis. Frank leaned in. Faith. She calls herself Faith.

She approached them at the counter and directed herself to Frank. Give me a pack of cowboy killers, Frank, she called out to him. From behind the counter, Frank pulled a pack of Marlboros off the rack and slapped it on the worn linoleum counter.

She looked like a well-groomed poodle. Dressed in a black-leather mini-dress, fishnet stockings, glossy, sharp-toed, red high-heels, strong perfume and a bit too much make-up. The classic whore, all coifed and dressed to tease. Memphis liked her immediately.

Thanks, Frank, and she turned on a dime away from the counter. Without stopping she advanced toward the door only to push into Memphis, knocking him back into a shelf stacked with rows of CoCo Puffs. The boxes became an avalanche upon Memphis’s head as he stumbled. As Faith and Memphis recovered their balance, they looked up at each other and experienced the clarity that accidents can sometimes bring to the moment. Memphis and