Felix Crumple: The Voice of Desire

By Leslie Smith Dow

Happy Birthday! Born in an undisclosed South American mountain village, Felix Crumple was misnamed by the indigenous midwife who, upon presenting the newborn child to his mother, murmured, erroneously, "felix crumple"--instead of "feliz cumpleanos"--Happy Birthday. From that moment on, young Felix was marked as special, and his continual brushes with the supernatural also mark his adventures into the realm of very original love. His voice is magnificent, and women literally fall at his feel, mesmerized. But that is only part of his strange and original power. The songs he sings are truly the embodiment of desire...and when he meets someone whose passions match his repressed longings, the result is explosive romantic fantasy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leslie Smith Dow
• Release date: Mar 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370728466

Leslie Smith Dow

As a rock 'n' roll journalist for several years, I interviewed and reviewed acts like Alice Cooper, Iron Maiden, BB King, James Cotton, Supertramp, Axl Rose, Tragically Hip, Ria Mae, and many more. Somehow, the weirdness of writing concert reviews at 3 a.m. in an empty newsroom just never left me. That experience, combined with growing up in a very insular but sinful small town, and the strange events that occur during frequent travelling has left me permanently warped. My only outlet is the Badass Bingo gang, who figure prominently in the Badass Hippie Tales series. They have really got a hold on me! Check out Ricki Wilson's Indie Spotlight: http://rickiwilson.com/4/post/2017/03/indie-spotlight-on-badass-hippie-tales-by-leslie-smith-dow-lesliesmithdow.html I am the author of several print and e-books including the award-winning historical biographies Adele Hugo: La Miserable and Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond the King and I. Adele Hugo: La Miserable has recently been re-released as an e-book, with a new Afterword detailing the fascinating mystery of a painting which could link Adele and the founder of French Impressionist painting, Edouard Monet. Read Elissa Barnard's review of the re-issued e-edition of Adele Hugo in www.localxpress.ca at https://www.localxpress.ca/local-arts-and-life/adele-hugo-still-haunts-author-443323. See details of the new Afterword, featuring the mystery of Adele and French painter Edouard Manet at https://gooselane.com/collections/e-books/products/adele-hugo. I am also a beekeeper, farmer and owner of Red House Honey, which produces all-natural raw, kosher honey on the shores of the St. Lawrence River. AWARDS/JURIES: I received the Canadian Authors' Association Air Canada Award for Most Promising Canadian Author under 30 and the Dartmouth Writers’ Award for Non-Fiction. I was a finalist for the Ontario Trillium Award, the Ottawa Citizen and Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton writing awards. I have received grants for my writing from the Canada Council, the City of Ottawa and the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton and I have been part of selection juries for writing grants and the on-line poetry magazine, ByWords.

Book preview

FELIX CRUMPLE

The Voice of Desire

by Leslie Smith Dow

Cover art: O Pelhourino, Bahia. Original Photograph by Leslie Smith Dow

©Leslie Smith Dow, 2015. All rights reserved.

Felix I

La primera parte

The important thing is not the truth but rather an accurate depiction of reality.

—F.C.

I. Desiderata

Do people marry because they have found happiness, or in the hope that they will find happiness? And what does the one really have to do with the other? With five marriages between them, my parents could scarcely be said to have solved this conundrum. But in those hot, sweaty nights in a certain high Andean town, the heady atmosphere which existed around them may have been indicative of more ardently tangible feelings than mere oxygen deprivation.

My mother was fully 15 years younger than my father. Indeed, in those days, he could just as easily have fathered her himself at some brothel or other, which the sons of the economic aristocracy were tacitly encouraged to patronize, as a release — for their passions, or merely, for their body fluids —so that their exuberance did not spill over onto the streets, causing general unrest, the need for clandestine reparations between The Families, and seclusion of swelling daughters in nunneries far from the capital.

Nonetheless, the best of intentions may be thwarted, as I am proof.

Although my mother was married before she met my father at the tender age of 16, she had remained a virgin. Yet she was a mother very shortly after they wed, strange circumstances which I assure you will soon be disambiguated.

Jose the Hapless, as he soon became widely known, had the great privilege of being my mother’s first and until that time, only, suitor. They courted in the usual, formal way. Visits in the parlour, walks along the Esplanade supervised by maiden aunts. A lavish wedding soon followed his proposal, attended by the crema of society, including El Presidente himself, whose benevolently lecherous gaze roved over my mother’s delicate frame, elaborate up-do of red ringlets, and pointedly stared into her green eyes, which were only rendered more dazzling by the emeralds in her diadem.

That night, the bride and groom repaired not to a swank hotel but to the groom’s ancestral home, appropriately dismal and forbidding, some distance from the capital. It was a cold night on the wuthering heights of the altiplano and the fires had been lit, for there was no such thing as central heating in those days. A hot cup of bitter coco had been prepared for the couple before they retired to their nuptial champed, and they stood huddled in the kitchen with their steaming mugs. Old Maria had just gone out for more firewood when Jose, filled with impetuous desire but frozen to the core, pulled out his manhood to warm it (and possibly stoke his burgeoning ardour). His frozen fingers fumbled, and his post prized possession drooped on to the radiant stove top.

His screams brought Old Maria from the woodpile with an alacrity never before seen. Her wide black eyes stared unbelievingly as the acrid smell of burnt flesh filled her kitchen. Then, without betraying a whisper of further emotion, she sat Jose, soon to forever bear his ignominious moniker, on a stool. From deep within a dank cabinet, she withdrew an ancient jar of liniment (containing a recipe of her own making) and without the slightest shame began smearing it on his seared penis.

So began and ended Jose’s conquest of my mother. Forthwith, he proved utterly unable to urge his member to any sort of performance. My mother was devastated. Grandmama was more circumspect. Divorce was the only obvious solution, easily obtained from His Holiness in such a case as this. And so ended my mother’s first marriage.

II. Feliz cumpleaños

Her second marriage began, it could be said, on the courthouse steps as the decree nisi was finalized. My father, a cavalry officer, had business there, and as was the custom, galloped his stallion to the door, vaulted out of the saddle, handed to reins to some convenient nearby urchin, and sprinted up the steps two at a time.

They collided with the force of a comet striking the earth. My mother was knocked nearly senseless. There was blood everywhere, but this turned out to be only a nosebleed, rather than the axe murder it portended. My father, ever the man of action, swept the wounded lady up in his arms, put her sidesaddle across his horse and vaulted expertly into the saddle behind her. They jogged the short distance to his quarters. He stopped the bleeding (with his tongue, my mother later said in an unguarded moment) and one thing naturally led to another.

Afterwards, he learned her name was Flor. He was a Redmayne. Not exactly what she had hoped for, but, she could be sure, highly functioning. My birth was no surprise but I came very early, and missed coinciding by a mere two minutes with my mother’s own birthday. Felix crumple, intoned the Quechua-speaking midwife of the small garrison town to which my mother and father had been posted, as she presented the gift of myself to my mother. As my father was absent on one of his eternal campaigns, it fell to my mother to name me. And Felix Crumple I became.

III. La Pica Roja

You will of course decry those naturally vicious children who torment their compatriots on the basis of their ill-bestowed names. You may even sympathize with me