All I Want is to Take Shrooms and Listen to the Color of Nazi Screams

By John Baltisberger

"I killed my first Nazi at four years old. It wasn't art; I didn't discover the joy of a psychotropic kill until much later. Each moment that led up to it was the crescendo of a future lover screaming from around the bend of time, begging for the tantric orgasm that would define our future." Thus begins the lurid, gore-filled

• Language: English
• Publisher: Planet Bizarro
• Release date: Aug 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781915546425

Book preview

PART I

1984 - 1997

I killed my first Nazi at four years old. It wasn’t art; I didn’t discover the joy of a psychotropic kill until much later. Each moment that led up to it was the crescendo of a future lover screaming from around the bend of time, begging for the tantric orgasm that would define our future.

Every moment since has been a study in the revitalization of a honed point of ecstasy. The butcher’s blade slid along a whetstone, perfecting the slice until even the most anal of rabbi would admit that it was good enough for kosher slaughter. Not every trip ends in bloodshed, but nowhere in my vocabulary are the words to define the pulse-pounding pleasure derived from making the world a better place while it drips around me like the precipitation from a rainbow-hued womb.

When I was born, I could fit in the palm of your hand, but my penis was the size of a man’s thumb. In January of 1984, as the water goat chased Fenrir through a star-studded sky, my mother’s blood ended its infanticidal war against my in-utero occupation. Though there were no casualties in the war, I was ousted from the place in which I had grown far too early, before the leaves fell from the trees and I had fully baked into the child I should have been.

I was born into a world that allowed evil to exist as a comfort for those who had money and power, who siphoned off the good and reconditioned its people to accept pain as currency in its stead. My parents, a Buddhist artist who worked with the visually impaired as a teacher and a caterer who demoed canned yellow tomatoes at her local grocery store, they were as incompatible as a couple as my blood was with my mother’s. But they strove to create something greater than themselves, and in their insanity, they made me.

I spread my arms and screamed a wordless scream that resounded through the hospital and up to heaven.

I am Samael, born in the flesh of a flawed child; I am he who makes the wind whip and the world quake.

And then I slept, my dreams sleeping with me, waiting to be unlocked by mycelium alarm clocks.

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A childhood of back-and-forths, with no pillow forts fixated in my memory, a permanence not allowed in the fixtures of my youth, when youth is torn between parents who should have never come together and finally realize that truth. It didn’t take me long to fall in line with inconsistent rules and reality. To understand that reality itself was inconsistent. Why worry about what an angry father thought when the mother forgave? Why deal with the controlling mother when the father’s house allowed for a freedom that only fathers’ sons were ever given? And when all else failed and they failed to watch a child growing up, I was carted to Sour Lake, to the Pine Woods, to the eastern edge of Texas to stay with grandparents who understood unconditional love better than any human could or would show.

Still carefree was far away, and the pain of life pressed in from an early age, leading me to seek escape wherever I could find it. I looked to books and video games and any egress from truth I could find. I didn’t understand until later that truth was a deeper thing that went deep below the skull and could only be witnessed when unlocked by chemical-induced joy.

I was in third grade when depression hit.

I imagined a world of grays and blacks where I was as unloved as I felt. Where the lowliness and loneliness of being an only child extended through every facet of life. I imagined leaping from the radio tower next to Matthews Elementary and landing on the twisted barbed wire-topped fence that surrounded it. Not an easy or quick death. Momentum ripped by metal and letting intestines drip down chain links to boiling Texas cement. But it somehow seemed easier than a knife and bathtub, and I didn’t know how to tie knots yet.

I was in seventh grade when my dog’s vet convinced me to spend the night with him and his brother. We watched Lost in Space in theaters while they held hands and giggled. I stayed up late, not wanting to join them in the room they offered to share. Postponing what I was afraid would come to pass. Yoshi’s Island keeping me safe … for a time.

I came back from that changed. I stopped dreaming, and I began to understand that escapes needed to be deeper than the surface level that the games and books brought me, that I needed something that would devour me completely.

I wrote poetry, and I took my first trip.

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I remember my first trip through the whole of illusive reality through the holes, like glimpsing the past through cigarette burns in photos of dead relatives. In Austin, drugs aren’t hard to find or attain; a careless word to the right person got you handed the wrong thing. They were more concerned with keeping it weird than they were with safety. More obsessed with image and ritual than with the sanctity of innocence until it was so far lost in the mire of despair that weirdness became your only shield against the world to hide the face that you had lost, what will you had to have a personality.

LSD on sugar cubes.

I don’t drink my tea with sugar. But I didn’t know what else to do. So after my parents went to sleep, I microwaved a cup of water and dropped in some chamomile. Tea bag, one sugar cube. Two sugar cubes.

It smelled like sleep in waves that came battling at my consciousness, but I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want that dark nothing that led to waking in tears knowing that the dreams still came but I could never experience them again.

The tea tasted like wet leaves and earth, but the night tasted like acrid bile swirling in my throat as I avoided sleep, crossing the street to Matthews Elementary, the school I had gone to years past. I climbed the old, rusted pipe pillar to the concrete awning over the little building in the back of the playground and watched the stars spin