Call Me Havoc

By Tinnekke Bebout

Jimmy Markham is the son of free spirits who meets a goddess and falls in love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387507924

Book preview

Call Me Havoc

Call me Havoc

My name is James Peter Markham III, but my friends call me Havoc. They say that chaos follows me around like I’m some sort of magnet. They don’t know the half of it. Chaos birthed me and raised me. You see, I’m the son of Eris; the semi-divine son of the Goddess of Chaos herself and an insurance adjuster, namely one James Peter Markham, Jr. This is the story of how they met, and how I came to be.

For my story to make sense, we need to go back to 1959, California, and my granddad, James P. Markham, Sr., aka Jimmy the Jokester. Grandpa Jimmy had two big loves in his life, one was my grandma Louise, and the other was bowling. In 1959, the only one of those loves he was pursuing was bowling.

Every Friday night, after a long day of giving their professors headaches, Grandpa Jimmy and his buds Kerry and Greg would go to the Bowl-a-Rama on Friendly Hills Lane to knock down a few pins, sip some coffee, and discuss the nature of the universe. As luck would have it, on the one Friday my granddad was sick, Eris came and visited Kerry and Greg and sprinkled them with fairy dust and revealed to them the Truth. Kerry and Greg were reborn as popes and disciples of Eris, and very quickly had roped Jimmy into it as well. Soon meetings of the Legion of Dynamic Discord were alternately being hosted at the bowling alley and at my granddad’s dorm room at USC. Time passed and the three friends got called in different directions, Kerry got activated as a marine, Greg graduated from college and went to be part of the early work in computers, and Granddad went north to La Honda and became friends with Ken Kesey.

It was in LaHonda that Jimmy the Jokester met Louise Slugman, daughter of the doughty Horace M. Slugman and his demure and diminutive wife Mildred. Great-grandpa Horace disapproved of my grandpa immediately, which virtually assured that his daughter would fall in love with him. Those two free spirits ran off and joined Ken for part of his famous bus trip across America, taking acid, experimenting with free-love, and having a great time. At some point, my grandparents are rather fuzzy on when, they stopped at a Justice-of-the-Peace in some little podunk and got married. As a result of this fuzziness, my grandparents have had the long-standing tradition of celebrating their anniversary whenever it suits them to do so. They got off the bus before its eventual arrival in New York City, having found a commune of like-minded souls just outside Bloomington, Indiana where they could settle down, relax, smoke weed, and Grandpa could go to grad school.