Coccyx Cousins

By Barry F. Schnell

Two men of different ages are of the same hypnotic coccyx bent. Mouths fall agape wherever they hone their craft in public. They could bring a town to its knees in a matter of waist swiveling minutes or a sturdy woman to her knees with a vampish snarl of the lip. Together they made a city where lives collectively live to grotesque excess look like an amateur. They were Brothers in Pelvis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503590328

Barry F. Schnell

In his first posthumous work, Barry F. Schnell explores the depths of the feline psyche as it has never been extrapolated before. Barry F. Schnells final weeks along the beaches of Pitcairn Island were described by locals as being filled with arguments with palm trees, air quotes, and gluttonous excess. After cramming his manuscript into an emptied, dominated Jeroboam of pink champagne, Schnell grasped a wooden fork and walked into the ocean descending on a school of pufferfish never to be seen erect again.

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Copyright © 2015 by Barry F. Schnell.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015912132

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5035-9034-2

   Softcover   978-1-5035-9033-5

   eBook   978-1-5035-9032-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/05/2015

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Contents

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You will find numerous typographical and grammatical errors throughout this sacred work.

Let’s just clarify for the record that my editor is a vindictive drunk and leave it at that.

For all the gang back at the mental hospital.

1

In the now.

I’m dead.

It wasn’t always this way. But I feel all right–primarily because I don’t really feel anything.

I can’t say for sure where I am right now. I can’t even explain it in a context you’d understand. Sometimes it’s paradise. Other times, I’m still rambling around the hell that was earth. I don’t even seem to have control over when I’m going to be where. I’m starting to believe there’s some purpose behind it, but I never catch on too quick. You can ask any of my three (four?) still-earthly ex-wives.

Of course, if it’s anything like life, in hindsight there’s no purpose to it at all, either.

In my time, I did okay. I wasn’t a saint, exactly. I had my share of friends and a piss thimble of success every now and again. It’s poor health that did me in. And if you ask me, it was premature. At fifty-eight they dropped me in the dirt. That was fourteen years longer than my old man got, and about the same age of his old man’s one pair of underpants.

From what I witnessed down there, or over there, or wherever it is living folks now dwell, there’s two ways a person can be done in: the mind goes, but the body pumps along, or the body goes, but the mind keeps churning. My demise was definitely the latter. Bad genes, high blood sugars, and cancers—they ravaged my eventual portly frame. But my mind never wavered the whole time, never missed a beat. In a brain capacity, I was as sharp at the very end as I was when, at nineteen, I first smooth talked my first tribute groupie into a shagging on the tour bus (which was actually my 1974 Ford LTD). And if anyone were to ask me, it’s worse to have the body go before the mind. Every pain resonates. Every needle implies a new adventure into the medical unknown. You hear the footsteps of your own mortality sprinting into the dark alley.

Those last three years were worse than any man should endure, and my mind never clocked out. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. The last place I ever liked to go when I was able bodied, for any reason, was a hospital. I hate hospitals. Between the reluctance of the doctors to verbally commit to anything and the incompetence of most of the support staff, it’s the pinnacle of unpleasantness. And it was in a hospital where I had to ride out my final days—helpless to do anything about it.

But the upside of my legacy was definitely J.G. He’s now going through a different kind of pain altogether. His ongoing grief and relentless earthly pounding is more emotional and spiritual. For the time being, he’s still got his health. Though it’s been going on thirty years when we first connected that night down in Memphis when he was just turning nineteen himself. J.G. came to be the son I never had, and after three or four marriages, you’d think one of them women would’ve paused from the eating and the cussing and the shopping long enough to give me a child. That never came to be.

I wish I could help him out, as I’m aware of his struggles when I morph out of where I’m at now and end up undetected amongst the mortals. Somebody else is pulling the strings. I don’t know who it is. Mostly I’m just there to bear witness to what J.G. is going through. There’s got to be a reason for it. I do sense that he can sometimes feel my presence there in the room or nearby. J.G. will even talk to me though he can’t see me. I’ll answer him, even though he can’t hear me. It’s a better level of communication that I had in any of my marriages, too.

J.G. was with me in those final hours before I left the earthly realm for this one. After all those years, living in only two different towns, going to the same two churches, working on the fringes of the entertainment industry, being on stage forty-eight weekends per year, you’d think that more people would’ve stopped by the hospital when word got out that I’d be signing off once and for good.

Aside from the church ministers, the Lollipoppers, Mr. Ferneau, and J.G., nobody ever came to the hospital or the nursing home I was bouncing in between those final thirty-six months. None of the ex-wives happened by, as far as I’m concerned. Aside from that soulless quadrant marital collective, I never had any real beefs with anyone in my day. At least, none that I would rank to the degree that all my friends and co-workers would use as justification for not coming to see a dying man just to give him a good thought or a parting smile.

Initially, broadcasting was my livelihood. That’s kind of putting a gravitas spin on it. I was a radio deejay. I played rock n’ roll records on the radio, told people what time it was, and read the weather forecast. I was actually lucky to subsist in that type of gig as I never, not once, had to go to another town to land a job the way so many people have to do just to put food on the table. It’s a rotten business, through and through. I wasn’t even that good at it. They say it’s better to be lucky than good. I was neither. I just hooked on with a bloke who believed in me, Mr. Hymie Nosh Ferneau. He let me stay on at W-PLVIS-FM my whole working life.

I never got rich like an Arab oil baron. I met a few celebrities, the caliber of which really eroded over time. That erosion went hand in hand with the definition of the word talent. Used to be a talented performer could sing, dance, dabble in comedy, and command a silver screen without dropping his pants. Now, before lip-synching some thoughtlessly contrived tripe over a drum machine, expletive fueled double takes and off camera flatulence are the bread and butter of today’s talent. I feel sorry for folks coming up now who have to fork over their hard earned monies to pay into an audience for such talent.

The real magic trick over time simply became getting the ticket buying public to lower the bar when it came to arriving at the definition of the word talent; so I guess the fast talker who came up with that descending ethos is who should get all of the kudos. Most give credit to P.T. Barnum. Who knows for sure? That would require more deep thinking, a process to which I’m inherently averse. Bottom line: keen folks know talent when they see it. There are just fewer keen folks than there ought to be. I wasn’t much of rainmaker in the corporate realm in many respects, but I was keen on talent.

I’m about to be pulled away. I can feel it. Sometimes I feel it a few minutes before it happens. And then, there I am beside, behind, or floating about J.G. as he tries to unwind out of some kind of pickle. The pickles are becoming more frequent and tenacious. I came to understand that J.G. was simple, like myself. Many folks have no issues working themselves out of the crap storms that life can dust up day to day. For people like J.G. and me, we lacked the knack to overcome mild adversities—which often grew into bigger problems.

J.G., though, he had the bones—the raw talent—back in the day. I was keen on him the first time I saw him perform his uniquely derivative craft. He made a person think he was seeing something for the first time, even though the person may have seen it a hundred times already. Hell, J.G. could still fill a room big enough to make a decent living. Society’s plunge into worship of the hipsters churning inside the growing talentless chasm was J.G.’s undoing, partially. The rest was on him when his head got to big for his double-jointed neck.

I knew I didn’t have long. I tried to give J.G. a few pointers in my last days—things to guide him or maybe keep his spirits up. I was reiterating the same points when he came up on that final day.

You can use the boys, I said. They like you. They’ll make you look and sound good, not that you need any help. Things will get back on track. It’ll be good for everybody.

I was referring to The Lollipoppers, my own back up trio when I was still able bodied enough to get on stage and perform. In Memphis, I started out as a part-time Elvis Presley tribute artist (it’s more than just being an ‘impersonator;’ it’s more authentic, as far as imitation goes, I like to think). Pretty much every weekend the Lollipoppers and I would play shows at different venues around town until Wife Three-or-Four and me split for the glitz out west.

I dunno, J.G. said. "They’re your boys. They’ve still got your timing down after so long. Plus, you know we kind of don’t see eye-to-eye on playlist matters anymore. There’s a lot of water under the bridge, and I think the bridge was burned to boot."

"Just re-learn some of the classics. You don’t have to do them all. Just work five or six into your set. That’s what people want to hear. Mix it up."

Stubborn he could be from time to time, and J.G. didn’t outwardly take my advice. I could tell by the way he looked at his gnarly chewed thumbnail and spit toward the spare IV pole that was down by my amputated left foot. I have to believe his initial reluctance to take help from others helped contribute to his current turmoil. Not taking my advice, even though it was literally a few minutes away from my last breath, wasn’t the whole reason, I know.

After that brief exchange, we just looked at each other for a few minutes. I was physically unable to speak any more. J.G. just didn’t want to. He wasn’t teary-eyed or anything like that. His mind had just gone blank. Brooding was his off-stage forte. He often confessed of being completely free of thought during too many spans throughout the day.

I closed my eyes for the last time and felt myself ascend above the room somehow. J.G. stood looking down at me for damn near twenty minutes. Then he started a conversation between him and me, with him voicing both parts. He argued back and forth about working with and without the Lollipoppers again. That went on for another ten minutes.

And then he finally went to go summon the nurse.

They never asked J.G. to leave the room, even after pulling the sheet up over my face. As he was probably the person closest to me at the end, they let him stay. My earthly body was wheeled out of the room, though I remained there as a spiritual entity looking down at J.G. After many minutes, when it occurred to him there was nothing left to be done, nothing left to be said, he raised his hands up over his head, gestured ever so subtly wiggling his fingers in the direction of the door, and strutted out just like The King would do while the band was finishing up I Can’t Help Falling In Love and seguing into the horns and drum laden number that closed every one of his shows—the strut off music. Just outside the door I heard J.G. shout out.

Bellvis has left the building.

Then he chucked his hip against the fire exit door and left the hospital soon engulfed in a whaling alarm.

Bellvis. That was my stage name when I did the Elvis tribute artist shows. The performances never got in the way of my day job, and I could use my day job on the radio to promote my shows with Mr. Ferneau’s complete blessing, as he was another huge Elvis fan. Elvis was the crap in my day – in the overwhelming popularity sense of the word, I mean.

By birth I was legally coined Harvey Dredric Bell. Mutating ‘Elvis’ into ‘Bellvis’ seemed like a no-brainer for a tribute artist moniker, though it didn’t come to me that quickly—or at all without aid. The first year or so I went by Harvey ‘Elvis’ Bell. Then it was Elvis Dredric Bell. A few more years I thought ‘Harvey D. Bell as Elvis,’ was a winner. But it was J.G., in fact, who said that bit the very first time he came to one of our county fair shows, Why don’t you just go by ‘Bellvis’?

J.G. would hang outside the radio station sometimes. He wasn’t there every night, but he seemed to be there way too often for a guy his age in a town with plenty of other things to do. He was always alone. Mostly, he stood still. When his legs tired, he’d park his butt on the concrete sidewalk and sit with his arms wrapped around his knees bent up to below his chin just gazing into the radio station. I don’t think he owned but three or four different shirts—red, blue, yellow, and green—and two pairs of dungarees. He was scrawny with a head full of thick, dark brown hair. He probably could’ve stood to wash his face a little more, and I suspected the teeth behind the usual dour puss matched his demeanor: tentative and without much bite.

The day he gave me the ‘Bellvis’ suggestion at the Don’t Be Cruel Ribfest and Battle of the Bands in Mercy Park, he didn’t say much else. After the Lollipoppers and me finished our set we started packing up our gear. J.G., that time in his long sleeve, red button down shirt, just strolled by and blurted it out. Then he kept walking off in the direction opposite whatever way everybody else was headed back towards the beer and pig smoking tents.

That was J.G.’s first keen moment. And the fact he hit me with such a keen suggestion, and the fact that I’m now popping in and out of his life in some type of impotent guardian angel, can’t be reckoned. There’s got to be a connection. Even as a post-mortal I can’t connect the dots. Maybe, by serving as witness to watch how J.G.’s life is unfolding, I’m to perhaps realize that my own experience—disease riddled and all—wasn’t that bad. It’s all about me, right?

The Friday night after that, which would have been late September back in ’85, J.G. showed up at the radio station again about midway through my shift. That’s when we got to talk shop and what not. There weren’t too many layers to either of our onions.

2

Back in the day.

It was another hot damn September afternoon in Memphis when I saw that scrawny, geeky pimple of a kid gawking at me through what Mr. Ferneau called The Showcase Studio out on Olcott Street. Basically anytime, day or night, whoever slithered past the window on the sidewalk outside could just stand there and watch who was ever broadcasting that time of day inside the radio station. As a deejay, I hated it. I felt like a caged baboon without the freedom to fling my poop to disperse the crowd. I didn’t mind when folks watched me there up on stage doing my Elvis tribute act. In fact, I probably got off on the power of it all just as much as The King himself did. But radio was my day job. No man should have to be under a microscope on his day job. People on the radio don’t want to be seen—shouldn’t be seen.

Locals always liked the ability to peek in as they felt it allowed them to bond on another level with the regionally famous voices they heard on radio for a radius of up to thirty-five miles on a clear day. As the public en masse degenerated to what I would now call a ‘Hope and Change mentality,’ they’d get more collectively vile and disgusting outside the Showcase Studio window glass. After twelve years of hard lobbying, I was finally able to convince Mr. Ferneau to allow me to put a curtain up over the main window when I did my 4:00 to 7:00 PM afternoon drive shift every weekday and draw it closed if I ever felt like it. And during those months before eventually leaving town, I always felt like it. But I’m getting ahead of things.

The scrawny pimple masquerading as a young adult, that naturally turned out to be J.G., wasn’t doing anything overly objectionable outside the Showcase studio. I of course recognized him on account of him bestowing me with the new ‘Bellvis’ moniker that I was blurting out in heavy rotation on the air each time I got the chance.

J.G. was watching me spin platters and had a kind of reverence to his gaze. After a steady diet of people under thirty strolling past, giving me the finger, or pressing their dirty, bare behinds against the Showcase window glass, and spitting all sorts of organics and non-organics, one grows tired of the general public. That’s how I knew the pimple kid was different. He had a respectful gaze. Clearly, he had a good upbringing.

I happened to be in the middle of the Hunka Hunka Burnin’ Drive Home hour, which was always 5:00 to 6:00 PM, where we played nothing but songs from The King. Mr. Ferneau pretty much let the on-air talent play whatever they so desired throughout the day (as long as it was recorded before 1999 and at least seventy-five percent enunciated), but there was no deviation on the Hunka Hunka Burnin’ Drive Home hour—that would be, and had been since 1959, only Elvis Presley music.

The pimple kid, J.G., was even uncharacteristically bopping in place on this afternoon, though contrary to the beat, beneath the outside studio speaker affixed above the Showcase studio window on the street. The song playing was Hound Dog, but he had more of a I Got Stung sway to his form. His methodic, though intense, exertion got his armpits and cheeks to work up a really good sweat. I’d been going through my second divorce and longing for some pleasant company, so I invited him to come inside the studio for a spell to cool off. Typical protocol was to not just bring people in off the street into the studio. J.G. struck me as harmless in all kinds of ways.

After initial pleasantries, when he identified himself as Jesse Garon Borkavich, he sat on a stool opposite me. I mashed up one mid-50’s Top 20 smash into another and kept the microphone off while we spoke. I asked him if I should call him ‘Jesse,’ ‘Jess,’ or ‘B-vich,’ and he quietly responded that just ‘J.G.’ was fine.

He was in his long sleeve, blue button down shirt, the cleaner pair of dungarees, and a pair of blue jogging shoes with white diagonal stripes that went out of vogue some ten years before. J.G. looked around the studio not with a curiosity but with a confidence like he was finally where he belonged—on the inside looking out.

We both knew the significance of his birth name, so I didn’t bring it up. Clearly, hardcore fans of The King must have raised the boy.

After twenty minutes of jibber-jab, I held up my finger to my lips pantomiming for J.G. to stay quiet. I probably didn’t have to. As I drummed my fingers on potentiometer number four on the control board, and cross-faded If I Can Dream into Yellow Rose of Texas, I