"The Preface" to The Fire: A Story That Raged To Be Told

By Gregory

When Rachel's great-uncle John died, he bequeathed to her his farm and his illegibly scribbled memoirs. After spending a decade "translating" them into a readable document, she titled it, The Fire, and decided to self-publish it as an eBook.
She titled it The Fire, because his writing of it was provoked by him witnessing the beginning of a fire in the mall that was the "downtown" of her hometown. John had stopped at it, one Saturday morning, on his way to a visit her and her children in the city twenty miles away.
The fire had started in the drug store, but it seemed inconsequential and he assumed, on leaving for the city, that the arriving firemen would quickly extinguish it. On his return five hours later, he discovered that that "inconsequential fire" had razed the mall.
As John sat in his truck and stared at the smoke-billowing pit,, vivid visions of his long-ago life on a western ranch filled his mind. Visions of when his abusive actions had caused the deaths of his wife and son. His remorse still haunted him.
The devastation of that "inconsequential fire," provoked caustic memories centering around an "inconsequential ailment" that had led to his wife's sudden death. Followed by the death of his estranged teenage son, whose grief over his mother's death caused him to commit suicide.
On returning to his farm house, John felt compelled to begin writing the story of his life, starting with his abusive childhood on a nearby farm and leading to—and beyond—the events on that ranch. It took him sixteen years to complete his memoirs.
Twenty two years after John finished writing The Fire, Rachel was ready to publish it, but she wanted to write a preface to it, describing her uncle and explaining the important role he had played in her life. Her intention was to write mostly about him, but as her life had been so bound up with his, and as his death caused her to have a psychotic breakdown, the preface became as much the story of her life as his.
Because of that breakdown, Rachel has had to spend the last 22 years in a medicated state that dulls her feelings so much she can't write the preface. So she goes off her "meds" in order to feel alive enough write it. But without those meds, she enters a manic state that that induces her to write, not a short preface concerning John, but an absurdly long and chaotic story that is mostly about her own life.
Born into a Catholic family and sexually abused by her father from the age of nine, by the time Rachel met John in 1969, when he had returned to the area after a fifty-year hiatus, she was a self-destructive "hippie chick" just back from Woodstock with only three things on her mind: sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll.
Rachel quickly developed a rapport with John that snapped her out of her self-destructive tailspin and allowed her to lead a relatively normal life until he died twenty six years later. John, during the years Rachel knew him, was a shaman, an autodidact, and an iconoclastic "philosopher" who compulsively thought about a lot of "far out" ideas that he shared with her when she visited him.
Having been raped by priest when he was an altar boy, John had a profound hatred for the Catholic Church and many of his most iconoclastic ideas revolved around that institution. Rachel, in having been abused for years by her "good Catholic father"—abuse her "good Catholic mother" knew about but did not stop—hated that institution as much as John, and shared his ideas about it. John also had a lot of shamanic ideas, which Rachel most definitely did not share, but put up with listening to so she could spend time in his charismatic company.
When off her "meds," Rachel is a rough and raging woman who puts no "brakes" on the crude aspects of her writing, so this "Preface" to The Fire, is a rough, crude, brutally honest and raging story, and any reader of it should expect a rough and jarring—but thought-provoking!—ride.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gregory
• Release date: Dec 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463584767

Gregory

Gregory is, foremost, a mystic and a shaman, and only secondarily a writer. In becoming a mystic and a shaman he has, in the parlance of Carlos Castaneda's shaman/teacher, Don Juan, he has lost his shields, has lost his normal human defences against the psychic, telepathic, and emotional emanations—positive and negative—of those with whom he interacts. Because of this, he lives in solitude and accordingly must remain anonymous. * * * * * Since the Internet has become, quite literally, an incomprehensibly vast and complex Indra's Web, not only of billions of computers and exabytes of electronic information, but an equally vast and complex Indra's Web of psychic, telepathic and emotional information, not all of it positive and healthy, and against which he lacks the shields to protect himself, Gregory spends very little time enmeshed in that Web and is not entangled in any social media sub-webs. * * * * * The Muse and Man Press logo installed here in lieu of a picture of Gregory, represents a vision manifested 40 years ago to Gregory by his Muse, the wise and knowledgeable, non-physical Being who inspires all his written works. It is a stylised representation of a large bird enfolding within its wings a smaller bird. Symbolically, on a basic level, this represents that non-physical Being embracing Gregory's spirit-being and inspiring his writing, while on a more expansive level, it represents a family of such Beings embracing Humanity and inspiring its spiritual evolution. The visionary inspiration for it was given in conjunction with the refrain from John Denver's song, The Wings That Fly Us Home: And the spirit fills the darkness of the heavens. It fills the endless yearning of the soul. It lives within a star too far to dream of. It lives within each part and is the whole: It's the fire and the wings that fly us home . . .

Book preview

Chapter One

Call me Rachel.

Yeah, I know—that opening line has already been famously used. But hell, I'm not a novelist—or even a wannabe—and this isn't a novel, and who can't but love that succinct, three-word-doorway into Melville's magnificent and magical imagination uttered by that ancient mariner, Ishmael, as he begins his tale of his mythical sea voyage aboard that doomed whaling ship captained by that deranged Ahab in his OCD quest to wreak revenge on that now mythical Great White Whale of Fate that was only in a position to injure Ahab because Ahab had intentionally put himself in its path in an attempt to kill it!

And as that mealy-mouthed old saw goes, imitation is the sincerest (laziest?) form of flattery, though unlike that genius Melville, who put those famous three words in the fictional Ishmael's mouth—and a hell of a lot of subsequent ones that went into his telling that whale of a classic tale everybody loves to make reference to, but few have actually bothered to read—I may not have written the poetic memoir, The Fire, which this turgid piece was supposed to have been a short preface to, (yeah, I know—that statement won't make sense unless I tell you that when, just an hour ago, I reached page one hundred of this preface that was supposed to be, at most, ten pages, I scrolled back to this page to re-write this beginning) but I sure have written—am writing!—this bloated goiter of a story that has way too much of my own grotesque and pathetic life in it.

And to give you an idea where this cancerous goiter of a Preface is going, I should tell you here that once I realized it was no longer just a normal, short preface but the long, unintended story, not just of Uncle John and my life with him, but of my pathetic and wretched life in details I did not start out intending to reveal, I wanted to title it, My Father's Handy Little Ho—An Unexpected Story That Raged To Be Told, but decided that title was too much all about me and my problems caused by my father using me, while I was a young girl, as his handy little ho, when this work is supposed to be about so much more.

In fact, this Preface is supposed to be all about that aforementioned, The Fire, which was written by my great-uncle John, who will never be considered a Melville-type genius novelist because the tale he so laboriously and traumatically relates in The Fire is not a work of imaginative fiction, but just a badly remembered—and worse rendered—memoir. Though now that I think about it, I suspect there is enough outright, ego-enhancing fancy in it to qualify it being at least part fiction, not that the same thing can't be said about all the memoirs ever written by anybody, however factual these writers might have intend them to be. Or, like Uncle John himself once said, Old memory is like a lollipop a child has dropped in the dirt—when he picks it up, he discovers it is covered in a lot of crap he doesn't exactly want on it . . . and can't get off.

So though I did not write The Fire, I am one hundred percent responsible for editing it into something that resembles a readable artifact. Alas, as the reading of this unintended story of my life will demonstrate—most particularly my life as it Callisto-revolved around the Jupiter of my uncle John—that I have, in my typically imagination-deficient manner titled, The Preface to The Fire: An Unexpected Story That Raged To Be Told, that point may certainly be debatable.

Though of course, in my editing of those memoirs and turning them into The Fire, I was infinitely more than just one of those nefarious, publishing necessities—I call them $tyle-Nazis—who have Editor printed on their office doors in large and intimidating gilt letters and whose exalted job it is to turn the crude ore of some wannabe writer's treasured and hard-mined creation into refined, publishable gold.

I mean, face it—every wannabe Stephen King, David Baldacci or J. K. Rowling, (there are no more Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, or Faulkners—can you just imagine the power-gloating field day a modern day $tyle-Nazi could have with his absolutely original and unorthodox prose style?—nor any more Prousts, Joyces, Conrads, Tolstoys, Dostoevskys or Turgenevs!) at the end of their Herculean labors on their precious manuscript believes they've written a publishing gold mine, but they are suckling, babes-in-the-cradle if they think any reputable publishing house is going to spend its money publishing their unknown creative opus exactly as they wrote it.

And no matter how good the writing is, it is going to have no saleable name behind it, and it is going to be too raw and very likely way too original to suit the prescribed, hallowed, and guaranteed money-making needs of any publishing house, and if by chance it does show a modicum of the potential necessary to become a publishing gold mine, then the publisher will accept it, but only on the condition it gets Procrusteanly refined into acceptable $hape by one of its mighty Editors, aka, $tyle-Nazis.

And if you are already a published AUTHOR, you too-well know that incredibly powerful cadre of literary Gestapo who, while goose-stepping to the conservative values and avaricious profit-margins of their publishing houses, have executed all the style and originality out of modern writing in order, foremost to mine as much money as possible out of it while first making it very easy for an attention-deficient, reading-averse public to read, disregarding as they do so, the fact that they are then making it minimally worth reading for that smallest, and thus most irrelevant, demographic of the reading public—those who value and demand originality and true style in what they read.

And to use a phrase monstrously over-used by just about every boring pup of a professor to chase the stick of tenure, (or any long-tenured old dog who lets his graduate students do all his work while he sits in the sun of his reputation and chews on that precious stick . . . and humps his prettier, female students with another stick) in other words they have excised almost all the art, originality and genius out of writing and reduced it to a generally bland, predictable and disposable cream-of-wheat exercise in journeyman wordsmanship. Well, to keep the metaphor copacetic, since no one but a bored toddler writes with cream of wheat, I won't call it cream-of-wheat writing, but Bic-writing, since Bic pens are the cheap, bland equivalent of a bowl of cream of wheat, and, for the most part, readers value modern, cream-of-wheat writing about as much as does anyone a Bic pen they see on a sidewalk or in a gutter. Actually, this quote by James Hillman I came across one day pretty much sums it up better than can I,

The deepest evil in the totalitarian system is precisely that which makes it work: its programmed, single-minded monotonous efficiency; bureaucratic formalism, the dulling daily service, standard, boring, letter-perfect, generalities, uniform. No thought and no responsiveness. . . . Forms without anima becomes formalism . . . forms without luster, without the presence of body.

I mean, think of it: if any modern $tyle-Nazi were to find the manuscript to Moby Dick cluttering up their in-box, they'd either deep-six the thing faster than a suckered-to-taste-it toddler will spit out a spoonful of Jamaican jerk, or like a U.S. Army barber in 1967 working over a hapless hippie-draftee's cherished locks, buzz-cut it down to the bland, 8000-word short story they would be certain that is all it rightfully is. And in keeping with that metaphor, they'd then ship it off to an early death in the Vietnam jungle that awaits all short stories which are not part of an assiduously promoted army of them sent to attack the reading shore by an already famous General Westmoreland of a novelist.

So, you should by now be asking: what the hell does all that preceding scriptorial diarrhea have to do with me, Rachel, being the editor of my uncle John's The Fire? Well, let me try to explain that in one certain sense, though I am the editor of The Fire, I am in no way fulfilling that role as a righteous, committed, goose-stepping $tyle-Nazi for any Third Reich of a reputable publishing house, but more just the caretaker and translator of it. Well, I say translator but I do so facetiously, for though John scribbled it out in English—with a whole lot of real cheap pens, a few of which might have been Bics—it was still scribble, and as any school teacher too damn well knows, scribble can be as similarly impossible to read as any Arabic script to someone who doesn't know the language.

Aw shit!—all this is just too complicated and confusing for my manic mind right now . . . and finding a decent point of departure is like untangling a clump of burrs in a long-haired dog's ruff . . . so . . . I'll try and get things sorted out by cutting the clump off and starting over . . . with . . . with . . ..

The writer of the memoirs that I turned into The Fire, was, as I have already said, my great-uncle John, a very private person who, as you will discover if you ever read The Fire, scribbled out his memoirs for reasons more occult than rational, and for damned sure did not write them for publication. But write them he did! And since they begin with revelations that are tantamount to an open sewer of the excremental and salacious events of his early family life, events that can only besmirch the memory of that extraordinarily large family, and though he and all his siblings are now deceased, they did leave behind a plethora of descendants, many of whom still live in this area and have reputations (such as they are) that I am certain they wish to keep sacrosanct (such as they perceive them to be), so just as John himself, in writing his memoirs, kept all references to here out of them, I will not negate his efforts by leaving clues to that here by revealing my last name. (Of course, nowadays, with that damn Internet being what it is, a person practically has to live on That Planet Formerly Known as Pluto, to remain anonymous or retain any privacy!)

So you are stuck with knowing me as just Rachel—though for most people around here I am never known as just Rachel, but am best known as Crazy Rachel. Mmmmm . . . perhaps even that is revealing too much because if you lived around here you'd in all likelihood instantly know exactly who I am. Not that that really matters for it is very unlikely that the you who is one of the very few who is reading this will be living anywhere near this intellectual- and social-doldrums that is here anyway. So knowing me as Crazy Rachel is no different than as just Rachel. (Given that one of my all-time-favorite rock albums is Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, you could say that the lunatic in my head is most appropriately writing this from the dark side of the moon, so it is likely best—if you haven't already noticed—that if you are going to continue reading, prepare yourself for a whacky ride!)

And though I won't tell you where here is, I will, in the safety of my anonymity, tell you why I am known as Crazy Rachel, and I will do that because I feel that it was in my playing out of my fated?. . . destined? . . . cursed? . . . role of Crazy Rachel that I was put in the position to end up as the caretaker of my Uncle John's memoirs, which, after a labor that would have energetically beggared Heracles (Hercules if you only know him by his Roman name), I turned into the work that I have titled, The Fire. And no, the handle, Crazy Rachel that people around here know me by is no mere joking or affectionate sobriquet—I really am crazy! A bona-fide fucking loon!

Or so the noggin-mechanics (and most people who end up getting to know me just a little bit more than they quickly realize they want to) like to appropriately say. According to the erudite jargon of those esteemed brain-techs, I suffer from bi-polarity with a strong propensity for paranoia and occasional psychotic breaks, and, as long as I am on my meds—you'd not believe the bubble packs of pills I have to pack into my capacious gut three times a day—I can generally pass myself off—to strangers, though only for a short period of time!—as someone who is as sane as the next person. (That nasty American liar-extraordinaire, racist, bigot-magnet, supreme narcissist and self-proclaimed King of the Fascist Kingdom of America, Mad King Donald—and all ISIS jihadists—excepted!)

Unfortunately, much as all those pills—led by the stalwart old Thorazine, (for some reason most of the newer drugs either don't work for me or fuck me up so bad I can't use them) pretty colored as they are, keep me more or less functional and predictable in this questionably sane and ever boring old world, they do so at the minor cost of a host of irritating physical side effects—dry mouth, constipation and weight-gain being the worst of them for me—but as well, at the life-bankrupting cost of emotionally and intuitively disconnecting me from it. And worse, disconnecting me from my essential self! After awhile on those damn pills I end up feeling like a light bulb screwed into a dead duck's ass instead of a live electrical socket. (That's definitely not my simile! I must duly attribute it to Sprocket, a fellow—and infinitely more imaginative—loon whom I long ago met in our local, Worldview Readjustment Center, aka, the loony bin!)

Those old highs and lows—and of course the paranoia and the schizophrenic delusions—that cause so many problems and which my daily rainbow-cocktail of meds either cancel or level out, can really can make a person feel alive, so I go off that chemical rainbow at irregular intervals just so I can feel like I am a living human being—and me!—instead of a dope-addled zombie. And much as those infernal pills make me feel like an addled ghost that is passing through life like a whale-fart through a fishnet, they also make me feel about as creative as that that proverbial room full of monkeys trying to randomly type out the works of Shakespeare.

To be sure, that is a condition that I can live with as long as all I want out of a day is to get from dawn to dusk with predictable and acceptable enough behavior to keep me from being wrapped up in a white jacket that sure ain't no mink stole, and forthwith shipped off to the Head-Shop for a tune-up or a complete head-motor rebuild, but which, as the saying goes, sucks a big one! when it comes to feeling alive and creative enough for the writing something like this Preface—regardless that it was originally conceived to be no more than ten pages long.

I'm sure you've heard the stories of writers (both wannabes and famous ones) who experience bouts of writer's-block that leave them staring for hours at the infamous blank sheets of paper in their typewriters, utterly unable to tap one decent creative sentence onto them. (Flaubert used to say that a lot, but the bar he set for what constituted a decent sentence was high enough to give the moon a prostate exam! Oh, I forgot—Luna is a she and doesn't need one!) Well, when it came time to write this Preface, that is the way I was with my Microsoft-generated, Word-page on my computer screen, which was not only making me uber-paranoid in the way it kept blank-faced and tongue-sticking-out staring back at me, but in the way, how after a while, it actually seemed to be not-so-silently laughing at me.

So in the interest of getting something—any damn thing!—written, I went, as the saying goes, off my meds. (Or, as Sprocket used to so imaginatively call it, off the Meds-Rez.) Truly a dangerous business for a loonar like me with serious consequences, to be sure, but what choice did I have—and considering I thought it would only be for a few days!—feeling as I did that Uncle John's memoir needed a Preface to clue any prospective readers in about just who the man was and how those memoirs came into existence, and a blank, mocking computer screen just wasn't going to cut it! (Especially if I followed through with my paranoia-powered urge to pick the thing up and fling it out the window!)

So it's been a week since I last opened one of those pill-bubbles and sloshed its rainbow assortment of chemicals into my hardly insignificant gut, and now I can finally look at this Word-page and hear these words in my head which are finding their way, first through my fingers, then onto the keyboard, then into the computer, then into a self-published eBook, and hopefully someday, if the net result (no pun intended) is even just a little bit remotely rational and readable (no guarantees), into a handful of pairs of eyes and half as many of the brains operating them.

But be forewarned—and as my hip friends from those great and now utterly misunderstood Sixties used to say—"This is gonna be a fuckin' trip, Man!" And like all those tripping hippies well knew, you dropped your precious tab(s) in a world that was intolerably boring for all of its drear stability, predictability and straightness, and got cannon-shot into another world that was—for good or bad—anything but any of those. Likewise will it be with this Preface. I more or less know what I want to say in it, but I have no idea if I will be able to say that what I want to say, or have much—or any!—control over how I say it.

So, now that the meds-brakes have been disconnected—or as Sprocket would say, "Rachie, you naughty girl: you've gone walkabout from the Meds-Rez!"—the big, V-8 powered muscle-car in my skull has been turbo-charged with unrestrained mania, and with the lead-footed, manic, and now maniacally fearless Crazy Rachel at the wheel, buckle your seatbelts, brace your hands against the dash, and let's see where this hot pink Cor-azy-vette takes us!

So now that my Cor-azy-vette is finally rumbling, rolling and racing to the Promised Land down Springsteen's . . . rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert. . .of these words, I will finally begin my attempt at writing an interesting, informative and readable Preface for The Fire, thinking, as I do, that perhaps instead of the starting out this thing plagiarizing Melville's intro to Moby Dick, I should be giving the rare few of you who are going to be reading Uncle John's anything-but-modern memoir, the quaint, Victorian, and considerably more serious Dear Reader salutation.

And oh yeah, Dear Reader, much as I could have left my name out of this and saved you the reading of six or seven pages of explanation about it, I gave it to you because, if you get past this crazy road trip of The Preface and feel induced by it to purchase, The Fire, Uncle John's long, strange, weird, violent, abominable (at times), emotionally and sexually honest (I presume, but cannot know), and sexually explicit (that I can vouch for one hundred percent!) and in the end, utterly tragic poetic memoir, which he cheap-pen-scribbled into existence, you will discover that I am awarded a brief mentioned in the Prologue. I am the (unnamed) great-niece he is on his way to see when he encounters the initial, seemingly innocuous stage of the fire that ends up destroying the mall that served as my hometown’s downtown, and which set aflame, first the tinder, and then the dry forest, of his long-suppressed memories of a life no sane person would want to do an initial living of, let alone a keen re-living of, in an extensive memoir. (When off the Meds-Rez I love reading the volumes of Greek tragedies that John bequeathed to me, and truly Sophocles, in Oedipus at Colonus, sums up that notion most succinctly when he has Ismene say, when asked by her father to tell the tale of her trek out of Thebes to meet him,

I do not want to suffer

twice over, in the doing and telling both.

I am also mentioned one or two other times in relation to heath problems he experienced during the writing of it, but no more than that because it is all written about the tumultuous life he lived before he came into mine. In truth, all of the really important stuff in his life happened long before I was even born, which, for the most part, is a really good thing since nothing good ever seemed to happen to most of the important people who so lucklessly were fated to be part of John's life during those years that he wrote about in his memoir.

So though I was but a late entrant into John's long, ninety-six-year life, I am a very important one, being blessed/cursed as I was to be the memory-keeper of his scribbled recording of those tumultuous and tragic—and thus interesting and important—years. Though I guess I should be saying memoirs-keeper, for that is what I ended up as, though not just a keeper of them, but a bringer-to-the-world of them. Without me, The Fire could not exist. Hell!—even that title is my doing!

Hilariously ironic it is that given the many hundreds of hours he spent scribbling it into its infernal existence, he never bothered to give that damn thing a title, thus forcing me to dig deep into the thimble of my imagination and with great difficulty drag out the dull, dust-mote of the title, The Fire, doing so because the whole thing, like many forest fires, got started with what appears to be a small and innocuous flame—or glowing cigarette coal—that finds the just-right conditions to grow into a major conflagration.

But Jesus!—what the hell am I saying? Of course John never gave it a title! Who on Earth gives a title to their memoirs when they are not writing them for publication. John was no Admiral Winston Churchill with a fleet of battleships of history-changing deeds just waiting to sail full-speed out of the sea of his memory, into the port of an instantly publishable book, and then into the minds of an adoring public.

John was the quintessential Able Seaman Nobody who, under the aegis of an inspirational and very forceful—and inconceivable to my rational mind, Muse—scribbled his memoirs into existence as a record—though more like a purgative—of what he considered the most important events of his dark, tragic and historically insignificant life. In truth, he describes the process himself with a metaphor most apt to his rough, Arcadian life: that of a dying wolf vomiting up a chunk of poisoned meat it has eaten, not to make a big deal out of the vomiting process, but just to get its painful—and lethal!—presence out of its gut.

And stunned and perplexed I was, on first encountering it—no less than I am sure you will , Dear Reader, if you chose to read it—by it being written in poetic form, for Uncle John, as I knew him, could no more have thought of himself as a Homer or a Virgil than could the now-aging but still-robust Arnold Schwarzenegger, think of himself as a Woody Allen! So much so, that when I first met Uncle John he fit to a T, the plain/plains-speech Laconian anti-orators Robert Pirsig orated so eloquently about in his famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, ironically, a favorite book of John's not for its dissertations on Zen and the motorcycle maintenance tips—two subjects, which he used to laughing say, were as scarce in it as snake shoes and rabbit condoms—but for its story of a man who thinks himself into a rational thought-blender of insanity and, after a few high voltage shock treatments in a mental institution, walks out of the joint a fundamentally different man.

Though I must, on thinking of it, add here that I did notice that as John grew older, much as one would have naturally expected his speech to get even more laconic, in truth it got more and more complex and metaphoric, both attributes of which surprised and perplexed me—especially the metaphors, many of which were not only startlingly original, and for him, uncharacteristically imaginative, but brilliantly apt. (Though of course, since he did develop a passion for Ancient Greek literature, and not just the three genius-giant tragedians of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, but—and probably most-so—Homer and his two enduring classics, it is no surprise he discovered the world of metaphor, which was to those great Greek writers, like spin to modern politicians. . . . and of course, like lies to Mad King Donald . . . and to bi-polar "loonars" like me who, when they are off their meds and being asked if they have gone off them!)

While on that subject, I remember several of John's comments on The Iliad, the first one being that the story is only very shallowly about a war between the Greeks and Trojans while infinitely more deeply, it was about the cruel, ruthless and arbitrary shenanigans of a bunch of bored-stupid gods whose favorite form of amusement was inciting human beings to needlessly slaughter each other . . . and with that same bunch of psychopathic demons seeming to manifest their presence, power, cruelty and ruthlessness thousands of years later during the two World Wars, particularly the first, which seemed to have no purpose beyond a needless and catastrophic slaughter.

And his second comment went something like: "And on the shallow level, that ancient war was beyond humanly absurd, fought as it was, by the two of the dumbest warring factions ever to take up arms: the Greeks for traveling all that way and wasting ten years of their probably-never-very-long lives to besiege Troy over a wayward wench; and the Trojans for believing that after those ten bloody years of trying to sack their city, but failing, the Greek decamped, but not before taking the time and great trouble to most expertly build, and leave for them, the gift of a giant wooden horse to commemorate their great failure! . . . And little different with the Odyssey, for if you remove the results of Poseidon's curses and the helping efforts of Athena, that story would have been as short as it was dull and pointless."

Though now that I really think about that, Euripides has the luckless Cassandra saying pretty much the same thing—about going to war for over a silly slut!—in The Trojan Women, so maybe a bit of unconscious plagiarism there, which was excusable since he wasn't publishing, and quite appropriate, for if nothing else, John was always as brutally iconoclastic—about pretty much everything!—as had been Euripides!

But let's keep this Cor-azy-vette a-rumbling and a-rollin'!. . . As I worked my way through John's memoirs and came face-to-face with a constant display of metaphors and true poetry that I could no more connect with the Uncle John when I first met him than one could connect the famous statue of Marcus Aurelius on Capitoline Hill with a fresh pile of horseshit that pranksters had dumped under its bronze arse, (that's just the type of crude but effective metaphor John, in his extreme old age, regularly came up with, and which has—a little bit!—rubbed off on me!) and it wasn't until reading Frank McLynn's 1996 biography of Carl Jung (purchased at a flea market for a well-spent nickel) when he sketched Jung's theory of the two basic personalities that make us up: the Number One personality, called by Jung the schoolboy which is our basic social, conditioned, coping, survivor-of-the-exigencies-of-childhood personality; and the Number Two, the bigger, wiser personality which lives in the ages.

It would seem that John's Number Two personality was a wise and ancient poet/philosopher who was literally smoked out of the shadows by the mall fire he witnessed, and which then took over the latter years of his life and induced him to write about the folly and tragedy created over the early years of it by his Number One personality. (Or, maybe it's really no more complicated than, as Flip Wilson liked to so humorously say about our compulsively performed and always instantly regrettable misdeeds, The devil made me do it!)

Chapter Two

But before I get too far into this thing, which I can see is already taking on a life of its own (and which I can equally sense, Poor Reader, isn't always totally coherent!) and propelling me into the turbine vortex of a serious enough manic—edging on psychotic—episode to eventually induce one of the cashiers at the grocery or liquor store—I always think I'm acting normal, but they sure know I'm not!—to very soon call my son and have him pay a visit and get me back on the Meds-Rez. It's all because, as I think I explained a few pages back, I can't feel like I am alive when I am on my meds, and I can't control my dark, chaotic impulses when I'm off them, which is what forced my daughter, Terry, in order to preserve her sanity, to long ago buy the machete of a plane ticket to Australia and use it to permanently hack me out of her life.

The last thing she said to me before that life-saving (for her) flight was, "Mom, I do try to love you, but it's practically impossible! Even when you are on your medications, sometimes you're okay and lovable and then suddenly you can be like a scorpion with your tail raised so you can sting me with your paranoid fits for just about every damn little thing I do. Hell, if you are in one of your 'moods' and if I have a menstrual pain while talking to you and it makes me grimace, you take it as a slight, go all goddamn scorpion-defensive on me, and sting me with your paranoid attacks. I've had all of that crazy, paranoid shit that I can take for one goddamn lifetime!"

I've never seen a better metaphor to describe my automatic—especially when off the Meds-Rez, but not only—paranoid, defensive, and always attacking moods like that of being a stinging scorpion, and I can sure understand why that poor young woman fled so far away from me—and my scorpion attacks! (Fuck, I would too—if I fuckin' could!) So it falls on my son Jonathan's strong but wearying shoulders—who is wise enough to also have moved out of my sphere of influence, but not as far away as Australia!—whom, I am sure I have subjected him to as many scorpion-stings as Terry, but he has somehow been able to cope with/deflect them—or just see them as a symptom of my illness and not them personally. Which of course, would require the patience and compassion of a true saint!

Though on his last visit, which was instigated by his need to get me back on the Meds-Rez after a too-long walkabout from it landed me in the hospital, I got the sense that both his patience and compassion were wearing real thin, like an over-driven tire, and that a blow-out on his part was a lot closer than I would like it to be.

And as a total non sequitur to that last sentence, I wish to declare that I’ve always found Prefaces to be so overly pompous and intentionally, impressively erudite that usually they are as appetizing to the mind as that bowl of eyeball soup—or chilled monkey brains!—to that uber-annoying Willie Scott character in the Indiana Jones' movie, Temple of Doom, so it is my intention to make this as candy-floss light as I manically feel inclined to on the assumption too few are going to read it for it to matter!

With the added proviso that I believe Prefaces, for the most part, to be as unnecessary as those grotesque tail-fins on late-fifties cars. (My father almost bankrupted our frail, household budget one day by strolling into the local dealership to scope out the price of a Chevrolet sedan and drove out an hour later in a brand spankin' new, '59 Coupe de Ville, and I still shudder when I remember the ludicrous, Buck Roger's sight of that bright red monstrosity and his ridiculous adolescent pride in it. . . . And I shudder even more violently as I remember other, nastier things, that happened to me—under the aegis of his hands and prick!—on its expensive leather seats. Fuck!—I promised myself I wasn't going to talk about that incestuous, pedophilic shit—and now I've gone and unintentionally scooped the stinking stuff out of the Porta Potty of my fucked up life and smeared it all over this poor fuckin' Preface!)

And though, Dear (Poor?) Reader, I get several incidental mentions in the whole vast narrative, I must here re-assert (please bear with me on this as the more manic I get, the more addled, egotistical and repetitive I become, thus feeling compelled to make sure I get, not only my due, but a double dose of it) that I am not only responsible for its utterly unimaginative title (as John used to smiling say about such things, Like every craftsman knows, you can't do first-rate work with second-rate tools.), but I am, as I am sure I've said a few times already, as instrumental in the whole thing existing in a readable—more or less—format as he was in scribbling it out.

Vrooom! Vrooom! Red-lined in second gear and we are on our way in this Cor-azy-vette!—My relationship with Uncle John was, for me, a delightful, not-near-long-enough, too often strange, sometimes turbulent and always complicated one that Fate—or Destiny, or Chance, or spirits, or whatever-the-hell always seems to be so mysteriously fiddling and fucking about with our lives—seemed to have willed into existence for both of us.

For me, to save me from my wild, depressed, rebellious, schizophrenic, drug-addled, sex-addicted, self-destructive self, and for John, who was the most emotionally balanced and self-contained human being I've ever met, to do little more than eventually provide him with a memory-keeper, a caretaker and incompetent $tyle-Nazi ( this Preface, if it is ever going to be even remotely readable, is itself sure going to need a ruthless Himmler of a $tyle-Nazi to send three quarters of its words to the gas chambers—but that ain't gonna happen!) for his long and tumultuous poetic narrative about the tumultuous and tragic years of his life—however historically insignificant they were!—that he lived prior to his appearance in my life, and which I am supposed to be putting before your eyes but which is being supplanted by this manic, self-indulgent ego-fest of a too-fucking-much-about-ME Preface.

Putting before your eyes and hopefully, into your minds. Though probably, most importantly, your likely utterly somnambulant, technology-anesthetized souls, which surely will wake up—even if just for an eye-blink—under the onslaught of it. That is, of course, if you ever slog your way through this crazy—literally!—Preface, and go on to purchase and read The Fire, and in doing so, allow it to wake you up, for if it is nothing else, it is a Gnostic tale and as every true Gnostic knows, real gnosis does not come easy, nor, on arriving, make life any easier to live—or tolerate the absurdities of! (Hey, if you want to watch a popular, modern Gnostic tale, watch that Jason Bourne trilogy with that uber-hunk Matt Damon as star, which, if it is not a classic tale of a struggle out of the debilitating and suffocating darkness of a terrible and murderous not-knowing to a necessary—and sometimes compassionate—knowing, or Gnosis, it is nothing at all!)

So shifting into third gear and letting my manic engine of this Cor-azy-vette drop down a few thousand rpm's: I first met John when I was a acid-addled, hash-hobbled, bubble-brained, orgasm-obsessed, daddy-diddled and severely suicidal co-ed and wild, hippie-chick back in August of 1969. And though that was a damn long time ago, I know it was August of ’69 because I was less than a week back into the dull-as-a-philosophy-lecture summer vacation-hell of my huge, stifling clan-family and small town life after a week south of what John always strangely called the Medicine Line, attending the muddy but magical heaven of that Glorious-Three-Days-Of-Peace-And-Music-And-Love-And-Lust-And-Drugs-And-Enough-Debauchery-To-Make-Nero-Blush Woodstock, when he made his official return to our neck of the woods (literally, since never more than the pitch of a pinecone away is the vast, dark, dense, bug-swarming and ever-intimidating Boreal forest) after being out of the area and incommunicado with the Clan for over fifty years. (For me, then having lived almost a mere score of years which, at the time, had made me feel so old, those fifty years represented, as I then would have said in my cool, hippie argot, "Like…for...fuckin'...ever, Man!") Needless to say, his return was, for my grandmother—my Mimi—and all my aging great-aunts and great-uncles, both a shock and an unwanted blast-into-the-past irritation, mostly because when he was yet ridiculously young—as you will discover him scribbling in his poetic narrative:

When,

But a handful of weeks shy of my fourteenth birthday,

I was frog-marched by Fate into the slavering maw

Of an insatiable monster of an army so

Desperate for the cannon-fodder to feed its

Gluttonous appetite for human blood, souls and misery

That it was as blind as a graveyard-angel

To the fresh-off-the-farm, peach-fuzzed

Sight of me….

John had run away from the family farm (as his tale will tell, it was more a moral and emotional abattoir than a farm) to fight in the Great War, (he often liked to call it what a Brit friend had called it during the event, quoting his words and mimicking his accent: "The BASS!—not a bloody fish, not a bloody beer, and certainly not a bloody war—just a Bloody Awful Stupid Slaughter!) had survived it, had returned home for a very brief visit and, like the first time, had disappeared in the middle of a snowy winter night without saying goodbye to anyone, and was never seen or heard from again for fifty years. ( I still remember how far out it seemed to my nineteen-year-old mind that at that time I'd I felt my almost-twenty years of life to have been a long and admirable achievement while he could vanish for fifty of them and think it no big deal!)

It had become generally assumed—by most, though not my Mimi, who with her psychic canniness always knew he was alive—that like their oldest sister Lisette, who’d left the farm but months after John had done his first runner, and had entered a distant nunnery where she died nursing the sick in the Spanish Flu epidemic, that he too had died in some untoward manner, perhaps even in that terrible, global plague that had swept around the world and killed a good deal more human beings than did the war that had just preceded it.

Though about that plague John once had said, "At least that flu killed its victims infinitely more humanely and without malice than had that war, and while doing so it at least had the decency to leave the corpses in states of wholeness that could be grieved over and then buried, and not in states of instant and utter vanishment, grotesque dismemberment, or just heaps and blobs of bloody, unrecognizable gore—and those who luckily managed to survive it, did so without having multiple body parts mangled, missing, or seared, and with souls so horrifically terror-tortured, shell-shocked, and gore-galled that no number of subsequent years could heal them!" (John actually said lifetimes could heal them, but I refuse to believe in that tooth fairy's tale about reincarnation, so I substituted years.)

In truth, long before John had made his unexpected, golden jubilee return, and before (after too many years of daddy-diddling, ) I’d dived headfirst and eyes-wide-open in the counter-culture carnival (carnalival?) of sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, tarot cards, sex, drugs, patchouli oil, rock'n'roll, sex, drugs, yoga (friends, not me!), incense, Zen Buddhism (friends, not me!) sex, drugs, Kabbalah, (friends, not me!) homemade and tie-dyed clothes, I-Ching (friends, not me!) sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, and fluid, inguinal communal living—did I mention sex and drugs yet?—I’d developed a sort of relationship with him.

Well, not with him directly, obviously, but with the myth that I’d built up about him in my imagination from the scraps of comments my Mimi and the older of my great many aging aunts and uncles parents had sotto voce let slip about him. All told, there had been eighteen in that family—that number, Dear Modern Readers of the Pill Age, is not a misprint or an exaggeration!—so the younger ones, many born after John had fled the farm, had, like me, never set eyes on him.

For some reason I felt sure that he’d left the second time because he could not feel any connection with the drab, small-minded and smaller-souled bunch of semi-ghosts that had been his siblings, had changed his name and gone on to travel the world and do many great and wonderful things. After all, any boy who can run off to the Great War at the age that he did, fight in it and survive must surely be a most extraordinary person. (Boy, was I ever wrong about what sent him fleeing the farm the second time, but that grim tale I'll leave to John to relate in all its debauched incestuousness.)

Unfortunately, my first meeting with my great uncle John, at my Mimi’s place that hot, windless, sopping dishrag of a tropical imitation of an August afternoon, was as strange and discombobulating as it had been unexpected. About noon that day I was awakened from my post-Woodstock exhaustion and my hash-addled dreams by my wonder-struck mother who, much against my standing orders, charged into my black-painted, psychedelic-postered sepulcher that I used as both a lair and a bedroom, zapped open the heavy black curtains to an acid-bath—vitriolic, not lysergic!—of eye-raping sunshine, and, far outside the comfort zone of her usual cow-placid character, fog-horned into my still sleep-sensitive ears that her long-lost Uncle John had returned from the dead!

Ha!—he'd actually been living in the area for almost two years and it was only through an offhand comment by the local bank manager to one of my great uncles that there was a John with the same name as him living on a nearby farm and he wondered if he was a relative, and after hearing that puzzling comment, the uncle told my Mimi who immediately paid a visit to that farm and to her chagrin and delight, discovered that the John _____, who was living there, was indeed a relative—her long-lost-and-thought-dead older brother. And after, I am sure, giving him a sharp and shrill piece of her mind that would have sheared the head off a normal man, she shanghaied him into attending that fateful Clanboree at her place to belatedly celebrate both the astounding fact of his living existence and the equally astounding fact of his return to the area.

(Clanboree is the name I invented to describe the too-frequent, always boring and borderline—though not always totally borderline!—incestuous clan get-togethers held at my various aunts and uncles residences—though mostly at Mimi's—and is an amalgam of the words clan and jamboree, and I back-then hated those events as much as I now hate my equally too-frequent bouts of raging, bleeding hemorrhoids!)

So, after a good number of minutes of trying to get my hash-addled brain to process what my usually cow-placid mother was raving about, I figured out that she was informing me that my mythical Uncle John was not only not dead, but had returned to live in the area, and that he was spending the afternoon at Mimi’s rural house visiting with The Family, and that I might want to make an exception to my aversion to attending such events, get out of bed before three, and show up—wearing something decently big enough to at least partly cover my derriere!—in order to meet him. (The Family was my mother's name for that monstrous conglomeration of relatives that all still lived within fart-sniffing distance of each other even after all those years, but my name for it was The Goddamn Fucking Clan—The Clan, for short!)

She stressed the word exception because about a couple of years earlier I’d shown up at one of those Clanborees tripping on some stronger-than-expected acid and that event had turned into one of the worst trips of my life. In truth, it was literally a tour of hell that I'd have to have been Hieronymus Bosch to have painted an accurate picture of, for even as a little girl I’d never been comfortable in the dark and life-sucking vibe that seemed to hover around that aging clan of anything-but-great, great- uncles and aunts, those too-numerous-to-keep-track-of brothers and sisters of Mimi’s, when they got together.

All the brothers—excluding Uncle Matthew, who, as a bishop in a distant diocese, was quite above, and unavailable to attend most of those familial scrums—coming across as wouldn’t-say-shit-with-their-mouths-full-of-it holes in the room married to—if they got married at all—loud, aggressive, brainless, gravel-voiced and barbed-tongued viragos who couldn't breathe air unless it was at least eighty percent cigarette smoke, and believed the soap operas they lived to watch were either high art or the Sixties version of reality TV. And then there were the sisters, all now wilted, shrinking-violets—if you can imagine three hundred pound violets!—married to controlling, heavy-drinking bullies who were all eighteen-wheelers full of bullshit and bluster driven by thimble-sized brains.

In all truth, never was Tolstoy’s famous first line to Anna Karenina, All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (I just love great first lines!) Though I don't know how a man that smart and insightful of human nature could come up with the misguided notion there were any happy families anywhere! And never was that line ever more appropriate than when applied to my dark and unique-in-its-own-banal-way clan-family, though I never quite understood the genesis and true nature of that clan's profound, endemic and generally caustic unhappiness until encountering John’s poetic memoir that all too vividly—way too fucking vividly!—brought alive—way too fucking alive!—for me the violent, malicious and psychopathic paterfamilias of that family, and the dark, incestuous, degenerate, debauched, demented, violent and grossly hypocritical home he created for his hapless, lifelong-barefoot-and-pregnant-and-chained-to-the-stove wife, and the pathetic rabbit-colony of even more hapless—and usually barefoot and too-often pregnant (by him!)—children. (Believe me, Dear Brave Reader, The Fire is not an Anne of Green Gables read!)

Though here I must digress (Ha, what a joke—so far all this has been is a blooming canola field of bright yellow digressions, so what's one more big yellow plant!) and say that my decidedly lively, imaginative, very fey and never-weighing-more-than-a-hundred-pounds Mimi produced, from the loins of my Grand- pére Pierre (whom I never met because he got flattened by ten-ton slab of granite during a mine cave-in when I was an infant,) as her third of four daughters, her polar-opposite in my mother, a plain-faced, squat, robust—4x4!—tank of a woman with a placid personality, a keen intelligence, and absolutely no imagination, taking after, my Mimi often proudly told me, both physically and personality-wise, my long-dead Grand-pére Pierre, who, to make the most of her keen intelligence and magnificently deficient imagination, became a nurse. She first worked in the hospital in the city twenty miles away from her hometown, then, after marrying that man unfortunately known as my father, and after she tired of the high cost of living in that city, and also convincing that man to move back to her hometown twenty miles away where housing was cheap, quit that hospital job when she obtained what to her was a better one—less pay but less stress and no long drive to work and back every day—in the small clinic that had opened our small town.

And just in case you give a desiccated pile of mouse turds, it was at that hospital in the city that she met her future husband when he was there daily and assiduously—and tearfully—visiting his dying mother.(Alligator tears, I am sure!) He was almost ten years older than her and they had as much in common as moon rocks and cheese mold. Actually, I am sure all they had in common was they were both French-Canadian Catholics!—but Fate being the perverse and fickle thing it often is, they ended up hitting it off and getting married. Alas, that man she chose as her husband—and cursed me with being my father—just happened to be a teacher in the third-rate high school of the small city ten miles east of here—her hometown. And what she saw in him—besides that he was a French-Canadian (more or less) Catholic like her (more or less)—is beyond me, because he was a manipulative, manic-depressive, passive-aggressive, dipsomaniacal weasel who had he lived in England at the time of Dickens’s writing of David Copperfield, would have been the model for Uriah Heep. And I am sure he was a teacher at that pathetic excuse for a school—populated as it was by disinterested boys who were the sons of miners, mill workers, smelter workers, lumberjacks and truck drivers, and only there killing time till they grew old enough to get jobs with the major mining company as miners, or mill workers, or smelter workers, or with other companies as lumberjacks or truck drivers; and by disinterested, crotch-steaming daughters of the stay-at-home-wives of miners . . . etc., veritable cohorts of French-Canadian Arabella Donns straight out of Thomas Hardy's Jude, only there until they could attract—or entrap—and marry a miner, . . . etc. and become stay-at-home-wives—because it was the only job he could get after he’d washed out of his attempt to become a Jesuit priest. (Fuck!—I practically get physically sick as I write about that limited, claustrophobic—suffocating!—world that's way too much like something out of most of Hardy's rustic novels!)

Now for those who care (LOL), but don't know, it would seem it is as hard to become a Jesuit priest as it is an astronaut, with more stages to the process than possessed by a moon rocket. As far as I've been able to glean about that asshole of a failed-priest, he was in what the Jesuit Army calls the Regency stage—fuck, you'd think those assholes were training to become kings, not fuckin' priests!—when he either chose to leave the program or was given the sandal! I suspect the latter. So though he was no longer, Mr. or Br. ______, S.J.,—Society of Jesus—he became Mr.______, S.J.—Supreme Jerk! Or Supreme Jack-ass, take your pick!

When the newly minted, likely sandal-kicked, Mr. _______, S.J.—Supreme Jerk/Jack-ass—departed from Field Marshal de Loyola's Jesuit Army, he was possessed with grandiose dream of becoming a great novelist, but too soon discovered that his manic-depressive disposition and his weak character never allowed him to properly finish anything he started writing, which is we he defaulted into becoming a third-rate teacher at that third-rate high school in that very small, very boring, very French-Canadian city at the center of a large valley—created, the geologists say, by a massive meteor-strike a few billion years ago!—at the center of large nickel mining district, a high school, as I've already said, where mediocrity in its teachers was not only an asset, but a pre-requisite—but at least that job provided an infinitely bigger paycheck than all the writing he couldn't finish, so, on top of being a failed priest, a failed writer, and owner of a Cadillac he couldn't afford, he added to his CV, indifferent teacher—and even more indifferent husband and father—that oppressive list of non-accomplishments inducing—driving?—him to refine his personality-numbing, day-long bibulation, darken even more his depressive phases, distance him even further from his wife and children, and send—drive!—him to sneak off and assuage his existential angst, scriptorial inadequacies and sexual frustrations—my mother being the staunch Catholic that she still is possessing, I am sure, a dutiful, once-a-week, missionary-position-with-the-lights-off attitude towards sex—on his eldest, but still not very damned old, daughter, who just happened to be...moi! (Christ!—what a stupidly long, convoluted and utterly unreadable fucking sentence! Who do I fucking think I am—Henry fucking James...on acid!)(Call me Henrietta—LOL!)

But back to that earlier—not the John-attending!—decisive, acid-stoned Clanboree. Up until that day I been able to tune-out that vibe and endure those Clanborees by spending time with my cousins, both female and male, in their bedrooms (usually doing things we sure didn’t want our parents to know about!), but this day, stoned immaculate as I was—as the great rock-star poet, Jim Morrison, would have described it—there was no tuning it out. Within minutes of walking through the door I’d felt like I was being psychically water-boarded in an overflowing Porta-Potty. The gathering felt like it had more demons and hungry-ghosts—which I don't believe in!—attending it than relatives, with all of those seeming to look more like giant gargoyles than anything remotely human.

It would appear this particular Clanboree had been called to celebrate—in a kind of left-handed way—the elevation of their most illustrious brother, Father Matthew, to his much-coveted bishopric. I suppose the bad vibe was caused by the fact that many of my aunts and uncles had feelings toward this legendary and ambitious brother that were either out rightly hostile or decidedly ambivalent, something I’d not found surprising, for when I’d first met him years before—when I was about ten I think—I'd found him way too similar to, and every bit as creepy to be around, as my father. (I came across him in a corner of the living room talking to my eight-year-old cousin, Luke, with a tone of voice, a look on his face, and a glint in his eyes way too similar to the ones always possessing my father when deep in the demonic thrall of his incestuous, pedophilic lusts, and I didn't hesitate to grab poor little deer-in-the-headlights Luke and drag him off somewhere considerably safer, engendering from that good priest a look that would have melted the spikes holding Christ to the cross!)

Needless to say, with the vibe that was there that day, coupled with the news that that unctuous, lecherous and sinister priest was now going to be an fuckin' bishop, and while my mother, who was more Catholic than the fuckin' Pope, was waxing eloquent about what a great man, and Catholic, and priest, and proud asset to the Family Uncle Matthew has proven himself to be, and as her saintly panegyric of that lecherous devil droned on, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a vision of him as an enormous, dog-collared crow with gleaming red eyes hopping about on a vast, neon-green lawn studded with giant, leering dandelions and gobbling up, with his giant, black, and prick-shaped beak, writhing, screaming worms that all looked like terrified little altar boys, and in the argot of the day, I freaked! And then I shrieked and forthwith fled. And never again did I have even the fleetingest of desires to stick my head in the business end of the Porta-Potty of another Clanboree, stoned or straight.

But now, with that news about my great-uncle John's return, that my mother had cow-barged into my bedroom to bellow into my poor ears, how could I not go meet the mythical Prodigal Brother, Clanboree or no Clanboree? So strong was the desire to meet my long-lost mythical hero that I broke my rule about preserving my sanity and staying away from another gathering of gargoyles, and much as I was wise enough to not smoke or drop anything, I still had a severe enough hash-hangover to push things a little bit more sideways than I would have liked.

Thinking straight enough not to want to go to—and get trapped at!—that questionably sane event with my mother and younger sister, Joanna, I sweet-talked (more like pussy-persuaded, as I liked to call it in those days) one of my many boyfriends, a rich-parented American draft-dodger who'd spent a year studying art at the only art college that would have him, given his very limited talent for art (he did a few nude-and-naughty charcoal sketches of me, but even to my untrained eye, they were shit) had a self-painted, Day-Glo purple VW van covered with huge white peace signs and zillions of small, psychedelic flowers interspersed with multi-colored, balls-attached, phalluses, to drive me there. (It was just the three of us at home that day, my older brother Daniel having not only left home, but the area, and my father, blessedly, was, spending his summer in Montreal, supposedly for the inspiration to get some writing done on the Fitzgeraldean novel he’d been yakking about writing for as long as I could remember, though more likely he was there just to get away from my mother's constant criticisms, drink flagons of cheap wine, and of course, to de rigueur get regularly sucked, fucked and ass-licked by what I am sure was no shortage of very under-aged, big-city putains—though better them than me!)

Groucho's proverbial Shagginwaggen had a great 8-track stereo and a back-space lined, floor and walls, with a half dozen mattresses covered with psychedelic tapestries, and he wanted me to join him in dropping a Hofmann (his name for LSD, after its discoverer—for those not-in-the-know) share a stogy of a joint with him, and give those mattresses a work-out, but I said I'd have save all that for after the event in order to stay sane during it—and so I could make a quick and timely escape from it should things get too freaky. As I knew they certainly would!

In those crazy, delightful, free-love days—it wasn’t free as it always came with a cost, save I was hardly uptight about paying it—I collected boyfriends as casually as I smoked joints, collected hash pipes, took my birth control pills, or dispensed blow-jobs, so I have no idea what his name was. (In deference to his big, black, pussy-tickling and thigh-abrading mustache, which I do remember, and my love of the Marx brothers, I will call him Groucho! And should probably add that he called me Wild Thing, from that great Troggs' song of that name, and whenever I'd climb into his van and greet him with a kiss to his instantly-swelling crotch, he'd softly sing—he had a great voice and was an accomplished singer—a slightly modified first verse of that song,

Wild thing, you make my hard sing

You make everything turgid, Wild Thing

Wild Thing, I think I lust you

But I wanna know for sure

Come on and suck me right

I lust you.

And though I cringe at the memory of it, whenever he called me Wild Thing, it had the effect of making me feel proud of my Wild Thing identity and reputation and never failed to turn up the gas in my groin, wet my lips—upper and nether!—and make me want to live up to that moniker.

Chapter Three

It didn’t take more than a few seconds to pick Uncle John out of the yammering throng of relatives in my Mimi’s living room, for he was not only the tallest and straightest man there—with a set of shoulders like an NFL