The Heretic's Journey: The Saga of Jackie Eighthstreet

By Stephen K. Sharp and Jae Malone

Excerpted from Heresy Magazine, this is the tale of Jackie Eighthstreet's beginnings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257721344

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9781257721344

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Title Page

The Heretic's Journey

The Saga of Jackie Eighthstreet

Stephen K. Sharp

Jae Malone

Jackie Eighthstreet Remembered nothing about his birth. It was the culmination of a heroic journey, a transformation from a fishlike being, awash in an amniocean into homo mamadada. He was born with perfect spiritual knowledge, as are we all-the swirling patterns of light; the high pitched tinkling, the rush and hum of the rhythmic vibration of life. From immersion in the Sea of the Womb to the flow of biochemical nectar, he was like every other. Our ancestors were fish and frog and lizard. Their genes exist as part of our genes. Their embryos eventually became us.

The heroine of this particular suffering and sacrifice was Christine, the mother (as the mother always is in such transmutations). Jackie emerged from her womb enlightened, aware. He lay in the bassinet, eyes wide, toes splayed, fingers moving, listening to the universe. The newborns in the nursery chattered away telepathically, greeting each other as old friends; but the adults were silent, except with their physical voices. They had too much to hide, too much deceit, too many taboo feelings and desires to allow thoughts to be broadcast. Their thoughts, intermingled only within the mind, were not shared between minds. The adult mind was isolated, terrified, and had become habituated to jamming psychic airways. It made a frightful psychic noise. Soon, Jackie Eighthstreet, too, would loose the psychic connection, and his mind would begin conversing only within itself.

It was the Year of the Rat -- the first of the twelve to arrive and pay homage to Buddha. Jackie was the third-born, though only the second to survive the voyage across the veil. Edgar, his father, did not understand god’s perfect reason for taking Mike home so soon, and he was relieved that this one made it through alive. But he was watchful, uncertain, filled with fear. He called it the fear of the Lord.

After his first birthday, Jackie began to notice his father. The internal light had faded. The fissures in Jackie’s brain, originally perfectly attuned to the bright multidimensional universe, had begun to become encrusted with spacetime engrams, and its shiny reflective surface had darkened with thought. Jackie became fascinated with faces. As he looked up into the glaring external light, there appeared a bestubbled visage. Edgar had a horizontal crease in the skin at the center of his forehead, like a mouth whose lips had been sucked into a scar, thought Jackie. A birthmark, said his father. Oh, the Mark of Cain (that poor Neanderthal), concluded Jackie much later. (Yes, Hittites were definitely descended from Adam. The bloodline continued through one of Noah’s daughters-in-law.)

Pop, as Edgar was called, was a Virgo with a Grand Cross (Sun and Mercury opposite Saturn, squared against Mars opposite Jupiter), and his moon was not aspected much at all. Jackie had a heavily-aspected Mercury, as well, but it was a Geminian Mercury. Pop was the more judgmental. He wore judicial black nylon mid-calf stockings on his ugly callused feet, hiding thick yellow misshapen toenails. His big toenail was like a steel channel, and Christine trimmed it with a coping saw. Pop also appeared to have a blister with a black dot at its center on the back of his left thumb. And the lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Edgar, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the lord set marks upon Edgar, on his forehead and his toenails, and on his thumb, lest any finding him should kill him.

Edgar smoked cigars, the leftover ones that didn’t sell well in the pharmacy. His teeth were yellow and gray. These things Jackie Eighthstreet began noticing, and he discussed them with his best friends, Dean Bong, Burner, Ghee Goff Ding, Tooz, and Teenj -- the spirit children of the neighborhood. They taught Jackie music. He’d learned one note as a baby Ahhhhhh . . . This he soon forgot, however.

Jackie Eighthstreet realized early on that his father was not exactly like his mother, that their phenotypes were different. It was more than male versus female. It was more than cigar-breath versus coffee-breath. He realized that he was some sort of a combination. He and his older brother were left-handed, and both parents favored their right hands, although he later discovered that Mom was originally left-handed with a mixed dominance, and her culture forced her to switch to the correct hand. That, perhaps, was the cause of her confused inklings. She was less in touch with herself, although far more creative than Pop.

And it came to pass at age 2 years 10 months that Jackie went to stay briefly with his maternal grandparents in coal country. It was here that he had his first vivid and forever-retained memory. He remembered that Grandma put diapers on him at night, although by that age he had outgrown them, having gained control of his bladder. Jackie thought that odd. He tried to explain that he no longer dribbled, but no one listened. Jackie retained the memory of his state of perplexity his entire life.

More memorable -- what really cemented the engram in his mind -- was a powdery, uriny-smelling, tiny-sneezing entity. Jackie hadn’t remembered any prior discussions about the impending arrival of an additional person, but there it was. Jackie climbed onto a chair and looked. The late morning sun shone over the garage out back (where PawPaw’s tools were, along with his old Plymouth that always smelled like baked vinyl) and through the red polka-dot curtains into the basket on the table. Jackie looked at what turned out to be his brother, nestled blankly among pillows and blankets.

After a week of being diapered, Jackie was happy to see his mother, and he turned and said, "If I wuz a lion, I wouldn’t be afraid of a tiger. I know that much. I’d make friends with ‘im. Jaguars, cheetahs, and bobcats, too. Later, after they took the baby back to Jackettown, the family went to the shrine town of East Boxer to visit Aunt Nellie and Aunt Bessie. Spinster great aunts, they were Nana Immaline’s sisters. Nellie had worked for State Senator Ware and was a real looker and mover in her day. Now, however, they were both aged and musty. They lived in a house that smelled like a toasted attic with dampness within the eaves, a house that smelled like old felt. Both had pink-rouged cheeks over white powdery make-up and short watch-spring hair dyed brunette. An aged white short-haired mongrel dog named Mickey resided with them, his toenails tapping on the hardwood floor. Aunt Nellie was feisty and sucked on her lips as she talked. Now isn’t that something." Aunt Bessie was quieter and seemed to be always staring off into space. She walked with a white cane when she left the house.

Sight and smell are primal senses. At age three, Jackie Eighthstreet began having auditory memories. He knew the sound of his father, Edgar, reading comic books from the drugstore to him at bedtime -- reading using poorly-devised silly voices (not funny cartoon-like voices) and flat phonetically rendered sound effects (BOOM!! was pronounced boom). After the death of infant Michael, Pop’s sense of humor was dulled evermore. Even so, to his credit, he tried. Miserably he tried, and he failed. His heart was broken. His spirit was broken. His mind was simple and fearful.

Late one night, drifting into sleep, Jackie had his first remembered dream. The primary image from that dream, a black-and-white photograph of a dead, leafless sapling at the side of a weedy field by a dirt road stayed with him forever. The barren shrub was no more than two feet high. He always remembered this, and the sound of the cold wind rustling distant trees, whistling in his ears, its tickling pressure on his face. Jackie recognized the tree. It was his toy stuffed bear that had been cursed by a witch. Neither the bear nor the witch appeared in the dream, but Jackie had an unmistakable sense of the tragic transformation. As protection against such wickedness, Jackie devised the family sign. Crossing the middle finger of his left hand behind the index finger, and pulling down on the tip, a space opens between the fingers. He taught the family sign to his mother and his older brother Chesty (who rolled his eyes). Even then he knew not to present something that could be construed as magical to his father.

At age three, Jackie also composed his first song. It consisted of chanting the same phrase over and over, CunkingBunking CunkingBunking CunkingBunking, and it ended with the urgent, suspenseful finality, Dummiah. Jackie determined his favorite color to be Fire-Enj-color. The aspect of color amazed him. When he winked one eye and then the other, he noticed that his left eye seemed to tinge things more greenish, his right eye more Fire-Enj-color.

After his fourth birthday, Jackie Eighthstreet discovered the joys of the drugstore with its instant gratification: comic books, candy, ice cream, hand-drawn sodas at the fountain. He developed a taste for maraschino cherries, with or without whipped cream. He spent hours looking at pages of cartoon panels with animals dressed up and words in balloons over their heads. He also sat in front of the viewscreen watching commercial programs. Once while watching television he saw a cartoon with a pubescent dragon and an older dragon that roared and spit fire as the young dragon mimicked the roar. Whereupon Jackie mimicked the roar, too -- a mimic of a mimic of a fantasy - wondering the whole time if that is how dragons learn to spit fire.

It was a year of discovery. Jackie was left alone a lot, which was perfect for snooping around. For a period of several months during the summer, Pop seemed to be gone a lot at night. He seemed defensive when Mom asked him where he’d been. Jackie could sense tension, but was not really conscious of it. Mom, when she wasn’t minding the store, was busy with the baby Jarvis, so Jackie began his scientific study of the world. One of his conclusions: In the old days, they didn’t have any maps. And if they wanted to eat an animal, they could just point an arrow at them, and kill ‘im and eat ‘im.

Jackie grew in spurts. (By the time he was twenty, he had grown to six foot six.) Each growth spurt, especially at the beginning, was preceded by an awkward, temperamental period. Maybe because of this, or maybe just because she had picked it up from her mother, Christine Eighthstreet told her son, "I’m gonna put a brick on your head."

Every night after dinner Pop read the Bible, and then prayed long and loudly, starting with an introductory passage of praise, followed by greatly detailed thanksgivings, acknowledgments of sins, supplications for forgiveness and needs of others, and several concluding remarks of praise, usually including the slowly expressed phrase forever and ever and ever. Then came the final invoking of the Name, and the Amen. In his heart, Jackie asked god (Santa Claus with more important things on his mind) to forgive his father for going on so. It did seem rather pro forma. To Jackie, his father’s Fear-of-the-Lord was more like Scared-Shitless-of-god. Was he hiding some dark secret? Dummiah.

Jackie snooped. As he explored, he found frightening things in his home. In Immaline’s Victorian parlor, dusty red felt out-of-time upholstery with yellowing cord fringes said don’t sit here; ominous horsehair ferns and African violets with tiny purple blooms and hairy leaves said don’t walk too close; gilt frames housing faded daguerreotypes and brass lamps with Tiffany shades were cold to the touch. There was a half-century-old way-out-of-tune upright piano, with several dead notes and some ivories torn from the wooden keys.

On the wall facing the door of this room was a mirror. At night, when it was dark, Jackie could see light reflected from the hallway in this mirror, and he constantly feared seeing the image of a witch’s face. By far the scariest item in the room was hung above the doorway, thankfully on the inside, so that Jackie couldn’t see it unless he was inside the room. It was a life-size brown papier-mâché face, with a red-and-green turban and wide, staring foreign eyes.

This room was a mere yesterday for Jackie, but implanted into this yesterday from a time of decades ago -- no, centuries ago, perhaps even millennia ago -- was the knowledge that life was One Thing, whole, without other possibilities. He lived the only possible life.

One Easter holiday, when the cousins were over for dinner, Jackie went into the silent drugstore and heard muffled sounds coming from the wooden phone booth in the corner. The door, hinged in the middle, was closed. Suspecting his cousins were inside he knocked on the door. Who’s in there? A laughing voice came out. There’s nobody here but us telephones.

Little Jackie Eighthstreet fell asleep to the screaming lullaby of the nightshift at Spackman’s, the machine shop across the alley. Grinding and screeching and clanking rhythmically, an orchestra of flangers and presses fabricated steel washers or something, leaving huge sheets of metal-like Schweitzer cheese slices and heaps of spiral shavings like glistening rotelli thrown among the weeds in the hill-and-gully lot adjacent to it. John Quincy Spackman, the great Hittite industrialist, amassed a fortune in metal fabrication and treated his workers with respect. But for all Jackie knew, the facility was unmanned. Jackie knew nothing else at night but the occasional flash of sparks and the terrifying cacophony.

He dreamed the second remembered dream, the first of his recurring dreams: He and a neighborhood girl whom he didn’t recognize were playing in a backyard down the alley when there appeared on the horizon above the treed hills to the west the huge head of a gorilla, its black eyes searching, its ominous bulk hiding the sun. Jackie and his friend, breathing like small mammals in the forest (a rat and a chipmunk, perhaps), lay at the foot of a hedge, avoiding the gaze. Then the scene suddenly changed, and Jackie was being chased by this ape, now human-size, up the long spiral stairway to the torch of the Statue of Liberty. Up and up and up the narrow tower . . . around and around . . . never pulling away from his pursuer and wondering what awaited at the top, and . . . and then he awoke, breathing rapidly and biting the tip of his tongue, his heart clambering to escape his chest. Dummiah.

In the summer, every summer, the family spent a week’s vacation at Likebury Park. Jackie learned the stove-burner feel of the heat of the brown beach sand on his soles, the sight of green and white canvas umbrellas stuck in the sand, and the bubbling holes that appeared as the foamy seawater receded after each wave broke. He learned the pull of the under-toe, the sting of saltwater up his nose, and the smell of beach tar and urine in the damp echoing concrete bathhouse under the boardwalk. He was comfortable with the fact that they always ate at the same restaurant (called Michael’s) each evening on every vacation, and he was impressed when Pop gave the manager money up front on the first day and thereafter signed the check after dinner.

In the evenings, the family would walk the boards, buy cotton candy and taffy that stuck unpleasantly to Jackie’s teeth, play skeeball and miniature golf (Jackie always wanted the red ball), and stop in the shops, his special favorite being the one that had a giant mechanical Mr. Peanut doffing his top hat. There was also a pavilion with kiddy rides. Once Jackie rode on the Turtle-Go-Round. He happened to be the only child on the ride this particular time. Four brightly colored turtles gently circled on a uni-rail, going up and down on a series of built-in humps. Jackie imagined himself as the world, an elephant, on a turtle shell. The turtle rode through the universe. Around and around, up and down. Hit with a sudden exhilarated confidence, Jackie stood up and raised his hands over his head. SIT DOWN! his father cried out, jumping and raising his arms. He seemed annoyed at Jackie’s initiative, unnerved by his incipient thrill-seeking. Jackie was disappointed in his father.

At night, Jackie heard a child crying through the screen of the open hotel window-- not the scream of the abused, but the long bawl of the hungry. Jackie was puzzled and concerned by this, but his parents wouldn’t talk to him about it. On the way home to Jackettown, the Eighthstreets stopped in the Hittite town of East Boxer where the shrine of the healing pool was located at Aunt Nellie and Aunt Bessie’s house. Jackie was struck by the dusty, moldy smell, like a garden of dead flowers.

The great aunts, like Immaline, his Nana, ate like birds, and shat in pellets like rodents. Being old, they often forgot to flush, and Jackie hosed the pebbled turds in the toilet with his urine stream, talking into his free hand. "Bomb target. Ah-ooga We-peep we-peep."

Back home in Jackettown, when his mother came to tuck him in bed and kiss him goodnight, Jackie tested her. Which came first, the triangle or the egg? When she replied that she didn’t know, he informed her, Obviously, the triangle. But I can’t explain exactly why. His mother shrugged and began reading to Jackie, who by then was breathing quietly asleep.

After Jackie Eighthstreet passed into his eighth year, Aunt Bessie died, and he picked out All Through the Night on the ancient upright piano. He already could play and score canasta and pinochle. In Sunday School he learned to pray sentence prayers. Bill Goose, who spoke with a lisp and prayed to Jejuth, was the champion of the sentence-prayer. He thanked god for a great list of things, including the Bible, the flag, the President, pastor Sri Hans Evans, trees, grass, birds, the invention of the automobile, and on and on, all very obvious, all very concrete. Once during sentence prayers a child thanked god for breath, and it started Jackie thinking, but there was no follow-up so the thought lay dormant for many years.

One day Jackie made up a joke and told his father. Jesus was walking on water and fell in. Jackie laughed. For some reason, Pop exploded in fear and rage. Jackie wondered why. Dummiah.

Jackie and Jar played together. Jar, being the baby, was even quieter, more shy around people than was Jackie, but when the two were alone, Jar had a temper! Jackie had learned a bit about teasing from Chesty. You witnit! Jackie would say, or Slave! And Jar would take off his shoe and chase Jackie around the room, uninhibited by any sense that things might break. Jackie and Jar did cooperate on some projects, though. They were really quite close. They had an old rectangular cake pan that they melted wax into. It just formed a glob, a mountain of wax. Different colored candles were melted from birthday cakes, from leftover winter cozies, or taper stumps. Many crayons damaged beyond usefulness or excess ones added to the colorfulness.

The waxy cone with the bright bead trails cascading down all sides grew over the years. They kept it on a shelf in the closet, and whenever new candles presented themselves or they had sufficient duplicate or damaged crayons, Jackie and Jar added to the mound. They called it the Waxen Image, though it had no particular religious interpretation. Of course they knew not to let Pop in on their label. Kids are very canny when it comes to knowing when to be quiet, though you can’t keep them from knowing about your inconsistencies. Why don’t you just admit to them in the first place? Dummiah.

One evening, after a Little League baseball game, Jackie’s cousin, Joey, wearing his Dodger uniform, found Jackie alone in his bedroom. He went into the bathroom, got a cup of water, and brought it into the bedroom. Joey was five years older. He easily overpowered Jackie, pulled down Jackie’s pants and sat on his stomach, pinning him to the reedy thatched rug. He poured water onto Jackie’s penis, laughing as the little member hardened, tickling the scrotum to watch it pulsate. Jackie’s struggles and complaints were unheard and futile. Joey left, laughing. Jackie was furious but told no one. (Years later he wondered what Joe, Jr.’s brothers had done to him.)

Moey, the closely-cropped-sandy-haired one, who became the Marine who married a supple, forever-young dancer; and Larry, the one with small eyes and the Mohawk, the Civil War scholar and hunter of Kodiak bears, whose son won the state wrestling championship. Jackie felt as though he had crossed some threshold.

He began to learn to spell and figure things out. Mystery was private and personal and made sense as MY story. Jackie’s mystory was his alone. Whereas history, was public domain -- HIS story.

Jackie had a revelatory experience, an epiphany that he re-experienced throughout his young life with an excitement and a fearfulness: The I-AM-ME experience of awe. My eyes see what no one else does. Though it may be commonplace, my vision is completely mine and mine alone. I am aware of events, but I am separate. My pain is mine alone to feel.

Jackie Eighthstreet was struck with a sense of compassion for his parents. Mommy, I know you love me. But your time is always so short. Too many things to worry about. Too many pressures. And Pop? You let god take care of everything. You even pride yourself on the fact that you don’t know the difference between a screwdriver and a hammer. There was a sense of impatience with the father figure, so lost and helpless; and so, Jackie, empowered by a nonspecific sense of destiny, devised his first system.

He found that if he fell asleep singing hymns like Onward Christian Soldiers, he never had a bad dream that night. One night he sang songs Chesty taught him: Daniel was a dentist; he pulled the lions’ teeth. That night he experienced The Calling. Animal spirits Great Elk to Rat. It was the still small voice,