Anticlimax Leviathan (The First 50 Pages)

The First Edition of Ryan Bartek’s autobiographical memoir “Anticlimax Leviathan” will be released worldwide on November 15th, 2016. 404 page, 6x9 Paperback by Anomie Press, $18.95 with world distro

YEAR ZER0

 

My past now holds the distinction of another man passing by in traffic, face blurred by the whirl of rampant automobiles. Swimming through ludicrous tides of struggle, the mask is disingenuous �" the smooth skin before the scars' indentation…

I glimpse an era of 7 years long passed, grease-streaked in navy blue, red-rimmed eyes choked by monoxide, that name-tag “Ryan”�" smeared in oil & scrubbing the hides of public buses in sub-zero winter, the gaseous, misty diesel stinging the lungs. The transports would pour in all night, having lugged the dregs of Metro Detroit �" a quarter mile of them, parked like 50 foot tombs in subsequent rows…

The crew members avoid the foreman, huddled by soda machines & sports replays; no sign of life from any of them, lest the slam-dunk of orange rubber. These men, so strong & determined �" able to move the world had they the imagination �" all willingly, flaccidly entrapped by a life sentence of this dead end drudgery. Some 23, barely older then I, trumpeting retirement at 55 & 7 days paid vacation. Scrubbing, gassing, filling, wiping: “We’re ‘Made Men,’ don’t you know?” They say in 25 years, I’ll make $4 more an hour…

 

America berates its civilian to accept “The Grid.” As a child I questioned everything; as a teenager incineration. And so as an adult I still refuted everything. I’d no allegiance to The Grid and was a sworn enemy of it. What I wanted was to slip through the cracks as forgotten Lazarus, annihilating myself from the face of the earth. I wanted out of dread civilization & evacuation from the human race.

            Everything told me to flee Michigan; I was never meant to rot there. Yet back then, I never thought I could do it alone �" that I could just book a flight to Europe or Seattle, just show up to San Fran or Hollywood & refuse NO for an answer.

But even with all my street smarts I'd never really been homeless. I never relied on a travel pack or ate from a trash can, never hitchhiked or rode rails. I knew an existence that was paycheck to paycheck, but I never confronted savage rock bottom.

I grasped the ruthlessness of death, but at 21, with adults reiterating you’ll make it to ripe old age, that if you just go to college... Then the -20 degree nightmare no longer exists.

 

So there you have me, in a nutshell, on a Saturday night like all Saturdays of 2002, reserved & ghostlike, retinas generally glued to the floor, soft eyes morphing gray by association, scribbling away in a composition book with soft-belly news flickering & the touch-screen games bleeping gaudy casino sounds. In the break room its cold, always cold, & reeking like stale, withered gasoline…

            Saturdays I’m alone �" the shift completely devoid of management. To prove its impotent nature, I simply upped & left without clocking out. I hit the diner, the comic store, and then actually went to the movie theatre and sat through a feature lengh film �" then afterwards taking my sweet a*s time at the video rental store too! 4 hours later, 8 buses were waiting to be cleaned. A mechanic gave a funny eye: “Hey man, where you go �" been lookin' forever!” Then, lying to him in the coldest, most bullshitting way possible: “Ah man, I’ve had the s***s all night!!”

And just like that, my domination was complete �" even if lacking a victory. See, whatever poor sap adopted this Saturday night shift was only because selected at random. For many, it was a blessing to an overworked brother �" that a black man could clock a 9 hour day & get paid for 2 hours of work. Classic D-Troit luck. And with zero oversight, these shifts party. The mechanics hit the grill & charred poultry drifts the halls; the Spaulding dribbles, twisting the atmosphere from grim UAW to YMCA while the quiet white kid reads Naked Lunch & jams viking metal on his headphones trancily.

Resting in my car at 9pm lunch-break, I was often requested to shoot hoops; I was needled by jovial fists to yuck up the beating of homosexuals or the nuking of the Middle East. There was nothing I had in common aside from food & shelter, nothing I supported in which they believed so dispassionately. To open my mouth would be a cataclysmic shift of alienation. Yet smile quietly I did.

 

It was only a matter of strength before I hit the road. I saw little alternative �" Detroit was cursed; a miserable, violent ghost town that could not be rehabilitated. To wage war against it was futile; to plant seeds for the faraway future was equally absurd. All I could was catapult ripe seedlings into the unknown. The lasting presence I could bequeath to any Detroiters before high-tailing’ outta Dodge was the notion to look to one another, and find our greater power.

I’d a personal vendetta with Detroit’s grimness, and it is from battling this beast that I calculated my methods of willful creation. While I'd little awareness of my capabilities to manifest another world counter to it, I was well-read on all manner of esoteric manifestation, propaganda, psychology…

I was a shadow worker, and I had my designs. Something of a loner, I was still a Freak zealot �" possessed by hardline D.I.Y. Punk Rock Extreme Metal ethos, full of quasi-anarchist ideas without ever quite knowing what that really meant.

I truly believed in the fusion of all subcultures as a united mass against the machine. I was like an ambassador between tribes, drifting through endless scenes. I merged this obsession with my mission �" to exploit Detroit as a tough-as-nails training ground of manifestation, in order to hone my techniques before exporting them abroad…

 

Instead of driving me out, they break all Union rules and drop the “random Saturday shift” on me permanently, mercilessly. It’s not “reverse racism,” it’s simply blue collar terrorism. I can see the dialogue hidden in their eyes, writhing like snakes: “We are lifers in this pyramid scheme, Mr. Suburbanite, and we want to party. We can just smell the future in store for you, the studious freak doing whatever it is you’re doing back there. Whatever you are annotating & researching, we know it’s your ticket far, far away from this terrible place. It is a future which unnerves us, because we do not have the insight to grasp it, nor the imagination.” 

I see them gaze, that flash of arcane coil: “Whatever Ryan’s up to back there,” they say, “is frightening & perplexing. His eyes flash to a plane alien to the earth we know. He isn’t ‘right’ but he certainly is at one with something illegible, vague, deceptively obscene. What happens when he snaps out of that strange funk? What happens when he takes for certain �" as he certainly will �" the reigns of The Union? How will this looming Hoffa implode, and what shall be the consequences?”

“First,” they think aloud, obvious as the prismatic light: “we must annihilate his will to fight. We need not drive him out directly, only wind him down in slow castration. The slow motion drawl of economic manhood will do its bidding �" same as us, same to him. So long as we keep him feeling no personal investment in anything this place is, we have nothing to fear. The python is ours & ours alone, and no one �" let alone this paltry, over-fed white-boy �" will thieve our hard-earned, fang-bared 7 days paid vacation...”

The only saving grace is a man named Wendell, the “loon” of the crew & the brunt of their jokes. Wendell, confused Wendell, the skinny mulatto with his manly man’s mustache and powder blue earmuffs. The guy who wears moon-boots to work and those earmuffs in the summer, who talks to himself in the lunchroom and takes his vacations at Kingswood Asylum. It's only a matter of time until Wendell disappears for good, and that’s when I’ll be singled out. Wendell, sad Wendell, who's looming departure was my great dilemma, my grand crux of uncertainty 7 years long passed…

 

“Ryan,” again & again: that Clark Kent-like front. Of all the bizarre tags I’ve inherited, “Ryan” is the one which none emit save for aloof co-workers and my own mother. That bus-scrubbing, UAW s**t-hole was his world, never mine. “Ryan.” �" just some corny mask saying whatever they wanted to hear so that Mr. Bartek could excuse himself to a dimly lit corridor to scribble volumes of notations leading light-years away from the grasp of their monotony…

            I see myself murdering myself in my prime, a ragged teeth-skin existence in which perhaps a $100 dollars will be left by the end of the month. 5pm-2:30am, Tuesday-Saturday, cleaning used condoms & blood puddles from the floors of transit bison. With every waking moment I plot my escape; with every turned head of the foreman I lunge for my notebook stashed beneath moldy washcloths putrefied by orange cleanser.

            Alone I log my thoughts and desires, evading this mechanical horror �" slowly, methodically crafting my book The Silent Burning.  Countless hours & pots of black coffee typing this unpublishable tome of disjointed hatred, this gargantuan assault on all that stands…

 

At every op I scribe another heavy metal album review, jot questions for underground bands �" men I will never meet �" encased by the same vile curse of work, food, water, housing. Some rocking the basements of Minneapolis, Tampa, Redding, Buffalo, Cleveland �" some exotic as Denmark, Brazil, Gothenburg, Tel Aviv.

Somehow, as a freelance journalist �" my hopeless unemployable fascination �" I can find the key to change it all. Somehow all of us bohemian rat-maze s**t-stains will stumble upon a deisgn to unite as one, raging against the facade sarcophagus. The gears of Moloch sputter in the audacity of cessation…

That is, to say: The Revolution. At the switchboard, I tend the fires. The organs are vital, pumping fluidly �" PIT Magazine internationally, 30,000 quarterly in every niche market. At the home front Real Detroit Weekly �" 75,000 print run, my b*****d agenda free in 1500+ locations. Every youth devouring my columns, churning out the bad ideas with volcanic power NSK, CrimthInc,: Groucho Marxism, O.T.O., Scandinavian Black Metal, MKULTRA, anarchism, athiesm, anti-thiest heresy, 9/11 conspiracys & lizard peoples & all the BDSM joys of the Marquis de Sade. If an idea was dangerous, you could count on me to make it public…

 

70 hours a week of rat-maze convulsions to fund a one-bedroom $525 apartment crawling with ants, water-bugs springing from drains like black gold/Texas tea �" my post-work-work cubicle. $140 a month for the cheapest auto insurance; $150 towards gas and traveling nowhere but a circular radius markedly increasing in it’s obesity. $60 for a land-line phone; $20 for the internet; $20 for CDR's, $30 on flyers, $200 on food, $100 towards music equipment & mail-outs �" a greased machine to produce some force of astray inertia to concieve the portal out of this dead stretch of earth. I was a blind man swinging at a piñata...

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll have $20 for a few comics or a book I’ve no time to read; a Misfits vinyl, a concert ticket, a 6-pack of piss-thin headache beer. Drug tests for that evil job and never a shred of green. One slip up & cornered with legal prosecution �" since the bus gig was a State/Federal conjunction, you had the choice of jail time or to live with a curfew, bed bunk and cell mate at  a “rehab complex” halfway house packed with the lowliest crack-heads, dope addicts, tweakers �" and you had to pay the $5,000 bill.

From the rise of the moon to the birth of the sun, twiddling away on guitar writing songs for a band I can never get off the ground and a style of music which is unmarketable, unclassifiable, unplayable to any musician I snaggle into my half-a*s, incomplete web of destruction: FILTHPIMP, the destroyer. FILTHPIMP, the beast. FILTHPIMP, the unanswered classified…  

 

Yet there was a gooey Oreo filling, a home amidst the cubicle �" Lana, sweet Lana, my folly, my disaster. This world of grim auto-worker plague, this clock-watching cancer-causing hoopla �" it is impossible to register any of it without addressing her. She was at the core, day after day, a fixture as immovable as the furniture itself. Her curly mop of hair, those golden natural streaks, striking curves precise as silhouette; those round vacant eyes, mahogany pupils like pin-prick black holes �" flesh a lightly tanned strain of mixed Latino heritage & striking Italian features…

Two months after meeting her �" after 60 days of vague, phantasmal existence �" she simply moved in. She never asked, and we never even addressed it. One day, from whatever obscurity she existed, she just showed up and never left…

She told me that I was Howard The Duck, that she had a crush on me since age 5, and now that she found me �" after eons of fruitless search �" the adventure would never end. There would be sequels forever, multitudes of them �" some direct to video, some re-released on the big screen by Japanese admirers of the Tokyo public �" all these outcries of film artistry, all of them centered around her getting plugged by myself, the feathery hero Howard J. Duck…

Everyday the same nucleus, this floating nebula of abstraction �" this doll-like beauty with the characteristics of an alien youth. For hours on end re-watching the same films �" Repoman, Body Rock, Warriors of the Lost World. Dancing around making pancakes and singing the Garbage Pail Kids song, trumpeting that yes �" yes �" we really can do anything by working with each other…

 

Lana, who I’d met at the 3rd annual Detroit Electronic Music Festival in pinstripe slacks, wandering with a clipboard of signatures towards the legalization of pot; white dress shirt seductively opened, full figured breasts catching Hancock after Hancock…

Lana, who I never assumed would actually call, who I never remotely thought in my league, who I assumed preppy and of the house/jungle enamored, who I flatly assumed would never worship at the altar of the Marshall stack…

Lana, who showed up the next weekend in her green corvette after a long shift at Kentucky Fried Chicken, who wandered the streets beside me all night �" through parks, alley turns; beneath dull-prism lamp-posts and purple sky. Lana, playing the first-date role of interview courting & cautiously relating snippets of her life …

I had no belief of this going anywhere, assuming this one-night parody would end a few hours later. To kill time, to prove to myself my inevitable coming failure and to not get any hopes up, I put her to the “video rental” test & gritted my teeth.

We entered Blockbuster Video. “Miss Lana,” I said to her as if Christ in a parable, “Wander the aisles, determine the full range �" but only pick one film, any you so desire. And do not choose something to placate me. Pick what’s been burnin’ inside your cranium for months, the one you need to viewlest it drive you mad.”

After 15 minutes of gallivanting through the aisles scanning intently, she came bopping towards me joyfully gripping her prize: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer �" the X rated directors cut. And then shortly thereafter �" with little effort, without any real truth espoused �" we fucked for hours upon hours upon hours...

Later in bed, scratching my head that this actually occurred �" that this bombshell was wandering my apartment naked & draped in a blanket amidst cricket chirps outside the body-fogged window, she came back in gracefully and melded into me. Her sweat-drenched brow on my chest, twirling her golden strands as she slept… I was a grown man, finally, and I was home. I was 21 years old.

Her existence, tight-lipped & fleeting �" showing up in the dead of night to hump & disappear �" never calling, never demanding anything, no burning gut-romance of frenetic encircling. Just this floating ghost-person coming & going as she pleased, this frantic two-month ovary plunging, escalating rapidly as manic trout upstream…

 

Back then, that rocky transition from the teen world into adult life �" the culmination of my views were the aftermath of One Big Fall �" one endless, bottomless plunge that began at 13. The cold spirals which transformed me also launched this period of upstart manhood.

The Old World, a world I have written about so lengthy in the past, which maintains its own scriptures, fables & tomes �" that world died on September 11^th 2001. It was that defining moment �" mountains of cement like forests of asphalt burning asunder �" when all that had come before mounted a grim stallion and galloped into twilight, leaving a trail of maggots & dead flesh…

            The malicious irony composing that event was quite personal. I grew up in East Dearborn, “Little Lebanon” �" the largest Arab population per-square-mile outside the Middle East. The week after 9/11, the FBI raided 30 terror cells in my neighborhood. I spent my teen existence in predominantly Arabic schools where many students supported jihadi extremism, parroting the ugliest views of the Islamic world that all went ignored in the 1990’s. Thus, I had an early education about jihadi extremism, and particularly al Qaeda.

            The tension was heavy �" even if many Muslims were friendly and respectful, many still spit upon us as infidels. “Race riots” erupted, usually sparked by football jocks confronting larger tough guy Arabic guys. There were shootings, stabbings, rumbles; it was a constant situation with fist fights in the halls daily.               

So what if, during the Y2K scare, I actually went to Northern Michigan as a precautionary measure? Just in case Detroit lost it’s mind? Just in case it all unraveled everywhere? And that a huge part of this decision was due to very real & very lucid dreams I had which shook me to the core? About this al Qaeda hitting us with a suitcase nuke or such in NYC, about it snowing ash?

It was one of those rare times where a dream was so powerful to me that I couldn’t ignore it. I learned my lessons not paying attention to them before. So, for good measure �" and a willingness for vacation �" with a rag-tag group we drove to Northern Michigan and waited out the looming national panic or grid melt-down. Yet nothing, of course, happened.

Time drifts by �" after years of self-reassurance that I was a victim of amplified paranoia, one day I awake to jumbo jets crashing into the World Trade Center with a surge of Déjà vu? The same Deja Vu jigsaw dream puzzle of my Y2K obsession? That within an hour of 911 the entire world was then engulfed by my paranoid delusions? And furthermore they ignore Building 7? And that I now was the crazy one? And would be shunned as a conspiracy loon & denied employment, harassed & belittled for refusing 2+2 = 5?  But it all happened, I assure you. And truth be told, I’ve never come back…

 

Lana and I were lying on my bed when my tolerance for politeness shattered with frankness. I shot to my feet, naked & gazing downwards at this likewise nude female specimen. Her eyes aloof & vaguely dazed: “Ok, this is ridiculous. Everything I’ve told you makes no sense �" I make no sense. I’ve never gotten this far with any girl I’ve ever been with, and I am totally unable to understand what happens beyond the chase. Even when we hump I can only think of lion’s f*****g on the Discovery Channel…”

“This isn’t me, this has been some lingering job application, like you’re a boss I have to wow for a job I have no skills to operate. I’m totally out of my gourd; I’ve done [this & this & this & etc] & you should run screaming immediately. I am the Antarctic, I am Greenland, I am the fog of Transylvania et cetera ad infinitum …”

And then Lana, never blinking, repeated the same variegated combo of nothingness from an unbreakable, immovable position of distant hypnosis consumed by b*****d wood patterns, upholstery stains & plywood shambles that’s static existence screamed defects of mortality, the terror of age, the frenetic strife against the clicking of the clock & the black suture of death’s totalitarian embrace…

            We were locked, immediately, in an eternal question mark embrace �" an immovable object & unstoppable force, a coronation of absurd hierarchy. Forever locked in non-embrace, colliding in acid-headed isolationism and incapable of proceeding in any given direction. Just a whirlwind, indissoluble; a genetic symbiosis of North & South Pole freezing to Negative 14 degrees Calvin…

            Had I any sense I would’ve married her on the spot. Had I any inclination of what would become of her, had I the courage to been real, I would have thrown myself at the altar of her needs. I would have made her into the goddess she was that I was unable to see �" glass slippers, champagne rooftops & crystalline souls. I would've painted endless portraits of her stretched fertile across the davenport, listened to everything, counted everything, dramatized everything. I would have bought her steak dinners, zoo passes, frilly lingerie, black licorice & scorpion tanks…

 

But I was young & lustful, anticipating a lifetime of partners. I was horny and into sex, period. And I was still horribly in love with another. Before Lana was Zelda, and before Zelda was Natasha, and before Natasha was Daisy, and before Daisy was Lisa, and before Lisa was Kaitlin, sweet Kaitlin of the dark golden age…

            Kaitlin, the crux of all, the closest thing to a high school sweetheart I could ever claim... I lost her to a maelstrom of LSD, solitude, asylum internments & self-mutilation �" and my own cursed inability to overcome the age of my environment…  

Lisa, sweet Lisa, whom designated me big brother & regarded as guardian. Lisa, whom I promised never to fail. Lisa, who at 18 locked herself in the closet of a crackhouse & hung herself...

            Jezzi the trash-punk, big-breasted, loud-mouthed drunk. After 4 years of hoops we’d become an item. At least for a week or two, I’d say, before she was abducted & raped. A scummy band rehearsal complex, a dark empty room �" drunk, snagged & gagged with duct tape, Cannibal Corpse blasting to drown her screams, thrown back into the hall as if nothing happened. She could never deal with it & left me for Jesus �" Born Again with a bold cap C…

            Natasha, the beauty of Mexican town �" the cutie skater girl, backpack full of spray paint, her fave film Hackers. So adorable, self-conscious & fragile. Her father tried to kill her because I was white. He strangled her, leaving purple fingerprints. He’s taken into custody, mother attempts suicide, children threatened foster care…

She tells them it’s all one big lie, one big misunderstanding, that no charges are to be filed. He'd molested her for years and she chose family over trauma, sent away on an airplane for Texas, taken from me, 5 days before Y2K. 5 days before I nearly put a bullet through my skull that night....

She came back years later & we sloppily reunited, right before Lana. Then I found she was again living with her father �"  still saying grace at dinner, still dancing to salsa at the cantata. Tells me, “Family is family.” Tells me, “I’m his little princess, and he buys me whatever I want.” She had no idea why I stopped calling her... In a month, she shows back up engaged.

            And Zelda, who demands a chapter of her own, a constitution of her making, a republic in her service, a tarot deck magnificently tailored. It was Zelda, above all, who made impossible for me to give myself wholly to Lana. Whereas Lana was the eternal question mark, Zelda was the Harley to my Joker, the Bill to my Ted, the Eva Braun of my fascist imperium… Yet never quite mine.

 

The Lana of yore, the Lana of 2002, unable to admit her bisexuality save for displaced hints, save for a kind-of-sort-of-but-not-really crush on Linnea Quiggly dancing nude atop the age-worn tombstone…

Sex she always wanted, sex she was always prepared for. I never had to ask, only to take. Any moment, any time, just wander in my room and there she was. Walking around the apartment in panties, naked under the covers, fully clothed on my bed for 9 long months lest hypnotized by the image whirlpool of Dawn of the Dead, Terrorvision, Heavens Gate training videos…

But in sex, just laying there, discarded like a toy, always staring off into the corner from the vortex of those eyes, those periscopes rising above the water from another galaxy…

Lana, who would haunt comic book conventions, forcing the Zombie Illuminati to swoon. Lana, escorting John Russo to luncheons; Lana, ignoring the drooling Tom Savini; Lana, singled out by the bespeckled Ted Raimi, always showered in the cell number of horny key grips & third assistant whatevers…

Lana, taking comic con refuge with The Ghoul, that horror-flick late-night airwave champ of 1970’s Detroit TV. Together they would sit plotting the return of his show with Lana as the new side-kick of Froggie the puppet…

Lana,15 times committed to the asylum; Lana, the ex-mob rave scene princess, reborn after 3 years of MDMA & K incubation… Lana, jealous of every girl, jealous of everything, anchoring me to that couch, chain-smoking American spirit foof cigarettes tube-shot from the can… Lana, the slug, complaining of rigor mortis… Lana, whose father was rendered weak-willed Jello in the hands of a domineering ultra-Christian stepmother….

Lana, whose real mother is dying of Aids, strung out, living nomadically from crack-house to junk-pad. She saw the needle, knew it was infected with HIV, and shot it up anyway because she couldn’t handle the junk sickness. Used to shoot up in front of Lana as a kid. leave at crack houses while she worked or hustled…

            Lana, with her half-a*s omelets masquerading as reuben-scrambles with 50 cent packs of pastrami. Dead cow flesh brunt crusty; half-melted cheese in clumps beneath viscous, snotty egg-whites; strands of hair like thin dental floss in lumps of yolk… Lana, digging through my phone book & calling people at random... Glistening bodies in moonlight, animalistic mumbles of “Howard”…  

 

Away from Lana & back to communications with the mysterious “other people” who arranged magazine articles on computers I’d never see, in offices I couldn’t fathom.

Among them were the PR wizards who’d have Metal Gods call my house; I can get almost anyone on the horn. It’s all part of The Revolution, you see. To control the media is to control the flow of information, and once controlled s**t-rock will then be decimated by the Euro metal blitzkrieg. Darkthrone will replace Nickelback.

The underground will understand the interconnection of its worldwide force in the interest of a world beyond the scars. We shall be as Roman Gods upon the earth, forging our own civilization, our own Anti-Empire. We will take into account the gross injustices bestowed upon our ancestors and no matter how imperiled our mission, we will at every cost avenge them... through metal.

 

I might as well have been a skinhead, for I resembled one completely �" an anti-fascist blackshirt. Head cleanly shaved, s**t-kickers polished, nails trimmed, clothing black black black. Always SWAT pants, a mechanic work-coat insulated by Carhart hoodie, steel chain connected to my wallet, extreme metal or punk t-shirt.

            I’d always go back to 13, the slim desires of that sad child. In Middle School, reality was painful �" its teachers were impotent, the adults terrifying; my friends nonexistent (save for the bands I listened to). I always imagined these musicians went off to some glorious land & lived in an empire of freaks. Was this the thing called The Northwest? Was it a fortification in remote Outlands, seething with maniacs living like a metal army in barracks?

I had no real dream other then I could one day be paid to listen to heavy metal and write about it. That somehow, every label would send me everything they released for free because they knew I was a true believer, that I was their shining propagandic star in a galaxy of dull lights. The dream to never again pay for a concert...

            At 20 years of age, I was there full bloom. Whilst all others intrigued by journalism killed themselves with the bottomless debt college, I just snuck in the back door. I spotted an ad for internship & blew up Real Detroit’s phone lines. 2 months later I had my own column metal/punk column �" the first a major Detroit paper had ever seen. Then freelance at PIT Magazine �" 30,000 copies quarterly, an ever-lethal dose to 100+ countries.

Once I name dropped PIT & RDW to underground labels, Ali Baba grappled his impending doom �" the prison cell made entirely of circular plastic. I became a man held hostage by his CD collection, mailbox recieving infinite bubble-wrapped packages.

At Real Detroit I’d rant at editorial meets then be let loose on the vaults of promo discs collecting dust. I took everything I could carry �" if not to jam, then to swindle used record shops for purchasing credit. 8 such stores within a mile of my apartment, all smiling as I snaked in. On and on it went, 30 to 60+ albums a week �" DVD’s, t-shirts, stickers, posters, concert tickets...

All I ever wanted out of life is before me �" showered by endless releases, beleaguered by interview requests, propaganda turrets blasting away in every record store, movie theatre,  restaurant & venue (so why am I not happy?).  Everyone who doubted me, said I’d never amount to anything �" well now I’m The Man, The King, the snake of sundry, the swindler of the swine, the enigma of anatomy, the blaster to bits of all aristocracies (so what’s missing?).

No matter just keep moving no sleep never sleep keep pushing building creating a better world for your people (lest another Lisa) no no no time to think no halt one slip up & bus world forever they got you in their grip boy they got that chain tight ‘round that neck boy keep moving keep hustling keep grinding it to the bone keep trackin' it like a hound don't give up don't give up don't�"-

 

That’s why things went awry when Lana found out she was pregnant. I sent her away before Xmas. The address book was too much. She was calling people at random, magma jealous…

Zelda had been MIA. She’d had me come by at night, weeping the guilt of abortion. The visit before last, I had brought her happy socks, with tiny little smiley faces on them. Lana freaked. She chased me around shaking her finger & I made her leave. She could go back to her parents crib. She wasn’t a throwaway…

Despite the depths to which Lana followed me, nothing she ever was compared to Zelda. With Lana we were just two dead things staring at each other in a vacuum; Zelda was an animated little fiend, made me feel alive & joyful. Even if she was a no-go, it was still the truth. Lana wasn’t the only woman, and I was 21.

I have the ultimate woman in mind, the dream girl of 7 years long passed. She rides a black stallion in the name of Satan, decapitating Christians in the name of punk rock. She will f**k as no woman f***s, cremating men as phantasmal larvae. She will bop-dance to Iron Maiden & devastate society with totalitarian abnormality. Her crotch will be tattooed in slogans of filth & her buttocks shall bear the mark of The Beast. Casually snorting miles of cocaine, her dialogue will sputter the fluency of kilometers & her raging lesbianism will lick their pelvic bones clean. I will fill her belly with mutant sperm & she will s**t cathedrals of pythons... Lana is the Hubble telescope, beaming its last transmissions...

 

“Ryan… I’m late.” Dead pan. Blink. “Over a month.”

Flashes of mechanical intestines sputtering black oil...

 

Lana moves back in; abortion never, adoption ludicrous. Admits she’s whacked on Vicadin all the time �" xanax, perkasets, etc �" the cause of her “rigor mortis.” Tells me she’s going to smoke DXM ‘cause they found out how to separate it from Robitussin. Care free, with my kid in her stomach. Viscous fight ensues. A week later & she’s bleeding. It is Saturday, and our child is dead…

More fights over Zelda’s mention; Lana insane with jealousy. We shout, we curse, I make her leave �" tell her it’s over. Keeps calling, I don’t answer. Week goes by, shows back & barges in. Goes directly to my bedroom & plops on my bed.

            “Just what the f**k do you think you’re doing?” She doesn’t answer. She can’t get it through her head �" it’s over, Kaput. I grab all of her things & toss them in a trash bag as she cries. She won’t leave. “But I’m your girlfriend.” I reach to grab her, but she pushes me away. Back to the corner, like a scared kitten…

            I drag Lana towards the door; she drags her feet sobbing. “But I love you �" Ryan I love you.” I push her out the door, like Darth Vader chucking the emperor down the energy shaft. But there is no blue lightning, just strands of curly blonde hair. She beats on the door sobbing, wanting to come home. On and on it goes. Eventually she hobbles away with the rustle of that trash bag…

 

Drive 8 mile for vodka, get home, dead quiet. Only thing left of hers is a single mitten on the floor. Feel it creeping up... Just lean against that wall, slam that gut-rot… Zelda will be there, and you’re only 21. You’re still young & so is Lana. Do our own things & maybe hook back up when all that bad craziness has settled. If not, you got bigger fish to fry. Everything will pan out… Oh the terrible thing you’ve done…Oh Ryan, how you know it…

 

The Curse of GhostNomad

 

What is never related on Sesame Street, and takes the workhorse aesthetic to discover, is that writing is never the same thing. Its form is essentially baseless, morphing with every guise of utilization. The first line of projectile text ejaculation becomes Point A of an empty crossword puzzle that is not a rectangle of imprisoned cubes but a crooked, illogical arch leading to obscurity.

The writer may begin with definitive ideas of expression, perhaps a glorious finale, all of which constitute the roof and bedrock of a fortress housing characters real or imagined, nouns & verbs building brick by brick the foundations of the whole �" yet the joy of the writer, apart from the coagulation of experience which flows beneath the surface like a river of magma �" is the eruption.

Every man is volatile. Some erupt in violence, some justice. Some frantically explode as painters, architects, while others, unable to grasp this gestation, feel perhaps this magma is really hot load, a spinning center of earth filled with jizzom & screaming expulsion.

The writer, much as the sex addict, much as the composer, erupts just as violently. What spills out is text, organic. If it is not organic it is contrived, and the organic strain which breeds like kudzu and envelops the landscape with text becomes in itself a jungle. The writer thus becomes a voyager of this Amazon, hacking through vast inner foliage of sweltering heat and danger, colossal jungle kilometers to hitch Point B.

That which is revealed amidst the voyage is malleable, the antennae receiving what it may, the shape and form of the impulse a kaleidoscope. It’s initial structure, no matter how sloppy, unedited and raw, is always the most marvelous.

The passion of the writer is the struggle to refine, to manage, to build upon the foundations a vast megalopolis of text. Of colonies, of workers toiling ceaselessly in one’s subconscious - in dreams, in free association reveries the subways erected, the buildings painted, the copper polished, bridges extended, sewers vacated, main street compacted, with the steam whistle of the lunch clock all bellies filled… amidst the waking world the gestation expands with all you inhale; in slumber the concentrations sort naturally as exhalation…     

Somewhere between worlds, in twilight hours, between fact and fiction, blurring them in an agoraphobic delirium �" losing the self to become the self, tuning out the world and embracing the currents of isolation that constitute neither a loner impulse but one that is at one with oneself and therefore never alone in conjunction to the supreme, idiosyncratic wavelength of creation - these are the brutal impulses of artistic expression. Art is truly mans best friend and that blaze of creation your eternal companion, for line, paper and form will never chew your shoes as you sleep.

Whatever is revealed along this campaign of hacking and marching, bogging through swamps and struggling through quick sand, Congo mosquitoes and territorial enraged gorillas, is essentially the analysis of the self.

The Point B arrival, almost always, lacks the potency which rang true upon the revolver fire of the race. One rushes blindly to cross the finish line, having leapt through detours and unseen curves to outmaneuver the pack. Yet in that glorious return the bleachers are emptied, the stopwatch shattered, the balloons sagging as vacant rubber, the other participants a stomping phantasm never arriving, airy and unmade by whomever willed them to be (i.e. yourself).

The marathon had been a farce, the fruits of victory satirical. The great prize of attainment is not the object of competition. For even upon completion of the voyage, one doesn’t turn around. Instead the writer pulls back into the waking world to stare deep into that vast megalopolis; skyscrapers smeared in symbols of blank ink.

Like a green-gown surgeon he slips on the latex, slices the cadaver, plunges into the intestines of his creation. An architect building, building, building. The race has begun anew, the exposition incomprehensible �" more sewers, more taxis, more garbage dumps & opera houses; more ulcer-ridden stomachs and pancreatic cancers, transit stations, airports, hookah tents & bazaars.

And once complete, drawing backwards to meditate upon the shining marvel, the writer �" despite his hubris �" realizes it is but a speck on the sidewalk of a another great castle in the center of a another great world in the epicenter of another universe…

It can go forever. Stylists lose out, amateurs whither as plagued thin herd, prosaic professors postulate prosperity… In my case, it’s mutation until publication �" like sweeping the room, trimming the hair.

Always one last face-lift, one final overdub �" a singular line orphaned and vetting for a foster home, anxious to correlate in a myriad of vacuity. With every “last” self-propagated editorial campaign the manuscript more colossal, bizarre, utterly alien to the originating concept yet eons surpassing its crude formations…

 

It is Thursday, September 17^th 2009, just past 11am in Metro Detroit. As soon as this book is done, I’m running away to Europe and never, ever coming back. Henry Miller made it there on ten bucks, which means I’ll find a way, somehow.

I have to. I am Ryan Bartek �" I am the first GhostNomad. I think there’s a few more now, but that all depends on Dr. Jeremy Sullivan. He’s somewhere in Portland, I think, but he isn’t returning any of my phone calls.

I’m in Michigan; the room is cold and the walls are light blue. Stoner Joe says I’m typing on MC Hammer’s desk. It is shiny and absurd, this art deco piece of interlocking Tetris blocks. You just kind of have to see it…

Stoner Joe’s buddy found it trash-picking, and he's been sitting on it for a year now, just waiting for me to show back up. Somehow I always do. This is technically the third book I’ve written at Joe's house, even though this is his first real house. Before my life on the road, he & I were roommates in a trailer park…

We’re not hicks, by the way. Stoner Joe lives as cheaply as possible with no possessions, because his life revolves around retreating to the wilderness for months on end. Our existences are similar �" bust your a*s, snipe every cent, hit the road for a soul searching odyssey until raggedly broke. The difference is that he goes forest hiking, whereas I urban camp.

I have been homeless for 9 of the past 11 months. I own next to nothing and live out of a duffel bag. My only possessions are some thrift clothes, a half-broken acoustic guitar & decrepit laptop buckling under from viruses…

It took a lot of effort on my behalf to take anarchism seriously, and at some point I simply sacrificed the ghost with flesh intact. I now peer through spectral vision �" inhuman, elemental… The problem with Zen is once you attain it, that’s all you have left. It makes dating tough, because you might as well be some hermit monk in an Appalachian enclave. See, it’s this Dr. Manhattan kick I’m on �" Paris is equivalent to Mars…

            The sheer weight of my madness has infected countless scores along the way. There are hundreds of living books now being scribed, the characters of which populate an organic tapestry germinating gospels & tomes, united in spacial intolerance. In the vacuum of our distance we brace the coming polarization which is predicted to be the coldest winter in modern history, spliced ever so humbly with The Great Neo-Depression �" the apocalyptic “economic recession” which will strangle the rest of our adult primes…

 

Stoner Joe & I, we are living in a haunted house. In the walls are dolls �" Romanian immigrant play dolls likely discarded by gypsy children. They are demonic and number in the half-dozen.

During the homes ongoing renovation, they continued multiplying. Sledge a wall, out pops another; tear up a floor, there lay a nest like Jews beneath the floorboards of Occupied France. Their eyes are red dots like blood splotched paint, their clothing ever ragged. At night I type in MC Hammer's desk, distracted by tiny footsteps & odd noises. In the morning we find the dolls in strange spots without pattern, without reason…

 

The escapist life is what Claudia feeds off, even though she’s committed to Med School. She still speaks as if one day she’ll dive into the vortex I’ve created, but no matter how gorgeous she may be, I cannot commit. In Detroit even the most enticing harpy is no more then a dung beetle singing a discordant Motown tune…

Claudia wandered Africa & South America for years on end, becoming a DIY nurse independent of Peace Corps. She has not been back long, having lived in pure tribalism with the natives of Coastal Africa. She fought malaria, typhoid, syphilis. Now she fights the paranormal…

Claudia has this Constantine thing going on �" she speaks of demonic possession, poltergeist attacks, channeling. Claudia is a medium of omnipotent centrality amidst a world of shadow people ever active. She is like a human ghost. Her eyes are eerily calm �" light blue ovals raging, the jungle perpetually surrounding her the way skyscrapers & concrete ensnare me...

In the mythology which I am entrapped she is The Oracle, but in reality she’s more a transient romance, I guess. Claudia claims we’ve been doing this for a long time now, like this life keeps repeating itself on end. She keeps waiting for me to get stuck here, in Detroit �" says it’s already happened. Says she knew it the second we met �" about how we’d eventually end up in Portland, in Oregon, in the distant future. Whenever Claudia finishes her nursing degree �" and whenever I get rid of “that stupid girl,” the one I don’t know yet...

 

This week in D.C. two million Americans marched against free health care. They held poster boards of Obama with that little Hitler ‘stache scrawled in Sharpie, because he wants to give them free dental. They rage as a vanguard phalanx against the defunct Soviet empire. They actually think that socialism and communism are the same thing.

            I actually kind of wish Obama was a socialist. Not that this would in any way alter, you know, the New World Order and all their little schemes �" but maybe, from a daily life standpoint, it would actually fix things just like they are fixed in Paris, where I’m currently trying to escape. France is where all my problems will just vanish, where I'll just marry the first fool that wants to move to America. Paris is where I will have free health care, and I will spend my days eating Croissants with a funny red beret...

President Obama �" I met him in a bathroom a few years ago. I asked God, whom I don't even believe in, to grant a second miracle. I requested a sign of the future, and there he was �" taking a giant s**t at Seattle Central Library. The first miracle, consequently, was that God bring on the apocalypse. When I woke up the next day, planes were flying into the World Trade Center...

Again, I don’t even believe in God, at least not in any Islamo-Judaeo-Hindu-Buddhist-Xtian sense. I got some thunder for Zeus & a grinding jaw for Loki, but those boys are in league with Odysseus, Sinbad & Nebuchadnezzar…

It all ties into what’s happening now �" it’s all part of the dream. That’s why I’m here right now, doing this, as if I’m the ilk of a St. Benedict. I know the dream is going to happen. I think it might be this Sunday, even though I always think it’s a Sunday and it never happens. I’ve waited & waited to no avail, ever since 2003…

            I have no desire to convince anyone of anything and if anything I wish to convince myself otherwise as well. I want out of my own mind because I have this nasty habit of dreaming jigsaw pieces of everything before it happens in Déjà Vu chunks, often years in advance. Whether or not I follow the signs, I always seem to end up exactly where I’m supposed to no matter how hard I squirm.

This specific Sunday premonition I speak of marks the beginning of my life. It means I can finally wake up, just like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky. It’s scrambled though. I think its two nights together, or its one night and I have all of this going on in the back of my head, like a host of memories...

In the dream I’m standing on the porch of a home which resembles home but is not home at all. It has the semblance of what once was, and I’m ready to move on. There are three girls on my mind �" one pregnant, one far away, the other in prison. I’m confident, looking into the sky; the moon is full & bright. I think I’ve finished a new book, or I’ve inked a deal for a book, something to that effect…

In the background of my head (or what might be going on that night) I’ve been listening to a new president on TV who is definitely not George Bush. It’s a black guy, a dark horse no one saw coming. There is a crisis in America, an escalation in the Middle East �" his message is hope amidst clamor. Iraq has been at war for some time, but now it’s spilled into Iran, or Iran has done something crazy, or its some regional conflagration, like a revolution gone haywire…

Someone calls & tells me something. They call me and I think they are crying. I’m fairly certain I’m waiting on one of those three girls to do so, but it’s none of them at all. It’s someone that I never saw coming. They tell me something & whatever it is makes me extremely happy, or so shell-shocked I can’t stop laughing…

The dream flashes forward a bit. I’m outside like before, somewhere else. A car pulls up, blasting music, or the music is in my head & I’m just thinking about it. I’m not sure who is in the car, but I keep thinking it’s my band (my old band) A.K.A. MABUS. I somehow pulled it off �" a record deal or something of substance, some tour, some momentous thing �" or maybe it’s just someone jamming our album, pulling up to whisk me off to the New World. I’m not exactly sure…

Then I woke up, grabbed a guitar, and wrote that song. I formed my band in response to that vision and made sure they learned the tune note for note. It was never one of our best, but it had that monster riff. The song itself was A.K.A. MABUS, it was like our theme song…

The band is long gone, but what I do know is that I am sitting here at a home that’s not exactly home, waiting on a phone call, and this Sunday is the Obama media blitz. He’s doing an unprecedented 5 television interviews in a row, grasping at straws to get his agenda across. It won’t work though �" I'm pretty sure they are going to kill him over free health care. He won't be sniped over anything real, but over free prostate exams. Assassinated over gibberish...

            The dream in question might have already happened though, and I just didn’t pick up the phone �" October 2007, waiting on my ride to the promised land, ready to shove off to Seattle forever… Somehow I missed the call. That certain someone had flicked the anonymous *67 & while it was ringing I couldn’t detect it cause Stoner Joe barged in s**t-drunk with his raucous laugh & curly Italian ‘fro. He threw a pipe in my face, got me stoned as f**k 'n I fumbled...

 

I’m pretty sure it was Clownbaby, but I didn’t have the guts to call back. I was scared she’d lasso me in then I’d be stuck in Michigan forever, just like I apparently am now. Clownbaby & I were together then, but I still didn’t know who she was. It just kind of happened, and you never fall batshit crazy in love with someone until you’re away from them…

            Clownbaby is the ultimate woman, and thus being so is utterly impossible. She is an elusive human Frankenstein whom still, after all this time, has absolutely no idea who I am. And I, the mad-sick buffoon, ripped out my entrails to The Gods to regain her affection...

Back then, I was presented with a choice. I asked myself, in the end �" as an old man on his deathbed �" what would he really have wanted his younger incarnation to have done? Stick around Detroit for a girl he just met, or just plunder the mythological gold of Freak City Seattle? It wasn’t a question of what I wanted, but what GhostNomad would do…

When you think you’ve reached the point where no savage burn of love can remotely touch the previous scorching �" when you’ve been so beaten to pulp that you’ve rebounded across the galaxy for what seems decades of nothingness �" along comes another. But it’s always for a different reason, something you hadn’t processed...

            Clownbaby was the Omega �" the end-all-be-all, biggest, bloodiest crusher of all. I have written her tomes of text; I have moved mountains, thrown myself bleeding at her altar. I handed her paradise on a golden platelet & enslaved the world for her disposal…

In the end, it had all the military power of a limp, wet noodle. And what am I to her? Some vague, tortured figure consumed in absence, just like all the other feeble men to whom she closed her heart. I am hardly alone in the mighty garbage pile of those slain  in the void of her negated affection...

For this book she will remove my eyeballs, defecate my corpse �" yet for art I will horde the abuse. She has a special spot for me in her Dante-esque levels of domination. She takes great fancy in mutilating Slavic men. But that side, among the endless panels of contorting selves, is but one fraction of an infinite intricacy. She is the craziest, most horrible Femme Fatale of all, and I worship the ground she walks on. She is The Queen, The President, The Ruler, The Best...

 

**6:17 pm, September 17^th, 2009… Stoner Joe shoots squirrels with an air-gun and steam dries apricots… I pace around smoking cigarettes, parlaying the conviction to quit… Down to last 2 & no papers to snipe… Oxymoronic hustles; tortoise paced speeds of extremity…

            Like Claudia, Henry Miller is always right. He did the same thing in Paris, but I make it pimp �" this urban camping of ebb and flow. Seattle is my Paris, even if it’s filled with Americans. In the Labyrinth I am a hobo, ‘though the best dressed vagrant of all.

I got into the habit earlier this year �" a far cry from the stitched up dental-floss jigsaw of my quasi-punk wardrobe. I only wear suits and the slap-dash tailoring is ever self-custom. I am the Armani of Value World, the Dolce/Gabanna of thrift �" the cobbled stone back-alleys my global runways.

Imagine a gaggle of clubbers drunk in high-heels, zinging of Canali. It’s dark, arid, ‘round 1am. Amidst their bar-hopping they stumble past an enclave of shadows. Nestled in the darkness of a store-front is a figure steadily breathing beneath a deflated pyramid of quilts. In a trick of self-gratification the clubber male halts the pack to showcase his saintly empathy, that do-gooder leverage aiming to stuff clam. He slings a wad of bills tacked by golden clip, dramatically counting off ten singles. With a crooked smile his foot nudges the bum. “Hey buddy,” says he, intoxicated females swooning. “Why don’tcha buy yourself a hot meal?”

From beneath the fabric the derelict grumbles: “Piss off you limey f**k! I gotta work in the morning!!” The clubbers hover, unable to process. Annoyed by their cash, the homeless wreck swings off the blankets like erupting volcano. He shoots upright as lightning, revealing himself surrounded by a fortress of Knut Hamsun…

The bum is better dressed then the clubber himself, neatly groomed and in a $500 pin-stripe suit. He resembles a prohibition-era gangster or corporate hot-shot, despite the bright blue mohawk.

The vagrant snags the cash & tosses the wad right back: “Some Grey Goose for the ladies, compliments of the house.” He dives right back into his pile of quilts & moat of plastic trashbags as Scrooge McDuck would his vault of gold coins, immediately falling asleep with capital ZZZZZZZZZ’s…  Junkpile Jabba; Hobo Solo…

 

When I was 20 years old, I read Tropic of Cancer.

Liar.

Okay, chunks of it.

Fraud.

Ok, the first chapter. And then I read a good chunk of Capricorn, and most of The Air Conditioned Nightmare. 9/11 happened shortly thereafter, then my little sister hung herself shortly thereafter, and then all of America was totally engulfed in my paranoid delusion of Islamo-Fascist revolution.

That short-lived Miller period in my 20^th year was the last I remember feeling young, feeling independent. I was a landscaper for Ford Motor Company driving huge dump trucks, working with a crew of Arabs & g-thugs & South African immigrants digging trenches & swinging sledgehammers like a prison chain gang.

Every word Miller had scribed forced me to consider the panoramic essence of the world in which I operated. As in this is the world of the young man, these are the characters surrounding him �" that life itself was a Broadway production & any show-tune possible. I saw all the dynamics; I read the signs. Once the planes hit, I put the Tropics down. I started my own book only 8 have ever read…

There is a difference between inspiration and plagiarism. Henry Miller is less some idol to me then he is a mystic Grandpa. Miller’s great contribution to my stream was supplanting a host of terrible ideas in my head. Mainly, presenting “the whole man”�" to fearlessly recreate oneself as the prophetic clown of anti-dilution.

There is nothing worth saying that he hasn’t already said better and been translated in a dozen alternate languages. In Miller, the entire American desperation unravels with biblical grandeur…

I don’t have influences, only kindred spirits. I found Hunter Thompson when I was 17, and that was already the sort of stuff I was writing. Then Kerouac at 18, Burroughs, Ginsberg. And know what? They were all ripping off Miller anyway. Old Hank is the craw-daddy of outlaw Americana...

 

For Miller Paris was China and France the Asiatic continent & all of its borders the Great Wall. For me Seattle is Paris and Paris is the labyrinth and Washington State is the jungle. Everything fits in the borders of Downtown, which is Alex Proyas’ Dark City. The U-District is Amsterdam and Shoreline is Moscow and Capitol Hill is East Village and Tukwilla is Georgia and Georgetown is Detroit, but I generally stay eons the f**k way from there since I’ll probably run into Sadique, the meanest bartender in Seattle…

Sadique is Clownbaby’s Satanic punk rock clone. Like Clownbaby, she cut off my head too, but I still love her. How can you not? She is Clownzeus... Both of them combined would spark the Clownocalypse, the Clownulation, Clownageddon. Sadique doesn’t know anything about Henry Miller either, and neither of those Clowns have any inclination about Billy Jack. If I have an idol, it’s Billy Jack. And even if Billy Jack isn’t real, Tom Laughlin is…

 

Athena gets Billy Jack because she lives in the Freedom School, basically, in Oklahoma, except its called Fortress Andromeda. It is my home away from home �" this massive three level quasi-mansion with 15 rooms, large infoshop, music venue, art arena, basement kung fu training facility... 

Fortress Andromeda was an abandoned mental institution until Kip the LSD Shaman decided to squat in it. After reworking the electrical grid 20 people now roost in its belly, all upstanding freaks. It is the dandiest anarchist commune I’ve ever stumbled into, and I hope to soon run there despite no chance of a job or food stamps... 

Athena is the only female that lives there; she is the Queen Bee. Like Claudia, Athena is essentially a transient romance. She is my non-physical German Jew anarchist lover, 19 years old with the soul of an ancient. Her body is fused to her spirit, and it wiggles like a fish devoid of H2O. She and I duel each other on acoustic guitars, song after song. I am her personal Charles Manson, since Uncle Charlie never replies to her letters. I tell her not to take it personal though, since he never writes me back either...

Athena has Hepatitis C, a rare blood-fungus condition which is devouring her skin & radiation poisoning as a result of playing with glowing rocks as a child. Her father is a para-legal for redskin tribes and she discovered these Kryptonian nuggets outside an Apache grotto in the New Mexico desert. The US government had knowingly slid them an atomic test site… 

Athena probably won’t hold out long, despite being so young and beautiful. Even if she does make it to her late 30’s, she will definitely need a liver transplant. This is why I want to drag her to Paris, to give her the world �" but she doesn’t want France, she wants Moscow. She has some reverse mail-order bride scheme going on, says it’s a favor to a friend dislocated by Russian tundra…

Athena gets Henry Miller; she acted in a Tropic of Capricorn play in high school, although I do not know if she played June. Her room is covered in hand-written notes tacked to the wall, stacks of books in piles. White gloves & pearl necklaces, circus paraphernalia & big band vinyl…

            Rogue is in Oklahoma but Catwoman is in Detroit and Tank Girl is in Arizona. To Catwoman I am the Joker and to Athena I am Gambit and to Tank Girl I am… the cute punk guy with the blue mohawk she wants to rape with a strap-on…

But I’m not going to Arizona, no matter how ginormous her b***s are. I’ll just get stuck there with Tank Girl & her daughter Pantera, and that “Mayor of Prescott” is a very bad man. I don’t know what that guy is up to, but he wears silk Hawaiian shirts and looks like The Rock with a jerry-curl…

 

Catwoman is of the tribe infesting the Theatre Bizarre, a self-quarantined carnival grotto wedged in a section of Detroit we call “Nam.” It is The Last Stand �" all the forces of old have gravitated in a vaudevillian collective, with a fresh crop of fire-breathers, snake charmers, burlesque dancers, ren fair people, clowns, jugglers, wrestlers… Theatre Bizarre began in 2000 when two guys upstarted a haunted house venture. Now it a living, breathing city �" an entire city block fenced in & running the length of a football field...

In addition to pro-wrestling & cabaret, quasi-rave parties, stolen media festivals & weirdo band showcases, they throw the definitive Halloween party every year in which hundreds fly in from all over the world just to oogle at it's spastic grandeur. The complex is a renegade combo of Paper Street, Rufio’s abode from Hook & the House of 1000 Corpses. It is the visceral reincarnated Siamese twin of Ken Kesey & PT Barnum. I am eternally its clown, for their mascot Zombo is my new personal God, especially after that Amazonian shroom freak-out only two months ago...        

            The screeching whirl of power tools is ever constant as the mob of volunteer workers endlessly toil. Always building, molding, shaping �" stages, gimmicks, fire-cages. You enter through the driveway of two humongous houses and encounter the pirate-like stage complete with the gigantic, looming clown-skull of Zombo, our panoramic Odin.

The stage is surrounded by a banner complex of sideshow paintings �" entrances of wood corridors that lead to bonfire pits, severed rubber limbs, lizard mutants & cryptozoological curiosities. Hanging imprisonment cages, execution gallows, abnormality exhibitions, rusted lobotomy & electro-shock equipment…

 

Catwoman is in Detroit as is Hugo Strange, The Mime & Mad Hatter, but Firebug is in Seattle and Riddler is somewhere in Santa Rosa. Mr Zsasz is in Texas; Scarface, Clayface & Ra’s Al Ghul are still in San Diego, but Anarky is totally anonymous in Ohio. I’m still not sure who Killer Croc is, but I can privy to you that The Scarecrow has been deported to Norway and The Penguin is still running from the FBI.

I thought Clownbaby was my Harley but in reality she’s Poison Ivy, and the real Harley is probably working a street corner in Detroit prostituting herself for heroin. Harley II is dating a 34 year old Mexican guy with kids and the original Harley is now fairly domesticated and more into Prince & Golden Girls then causing any sort of mayhem. But they always think I'm The joker which is the biggest joke of all.

 

Back up a bit, to December 2006. I was a wasted husk of my former self, just drowning in whiskey, chain-smoking, stoned or hopped up on pain pills. Years of chiropractic adjustments had failed to remedy the feeling of constantly being kicked in the spine. I was a walking box of Rice Crispies �" with every twist a snap, crackle & pop…

In the Detroit scene I’d went from media Golden Boy to object of detestation �" from main event Face to the lowest card Jobber. Everyone from the early period were settling down, choosing careers, shitting out kids. My band A.K.A. MABUS didn’t respect me as they once had, for I was the puppet of my own wretched miasma. I had become Pink from The Wall, a slip-shod from shaving my eyebrows...

            But I still wrote for some major magazines �" my last refuge of escape. And one then one night, when all those phantoms hit the lowest fathoms, I simply popped. Instead of putting a gun to my head as a weaker man would, I creatively self-rendered. I comprised a mad press release, hit send, then launched it like 10,000 torpedoes to the worldwide underground media. I declared a new book entitled “The Big Shiny Prison” & explained from that moment onward I was now a character in my own living novel, a road book masquerading as an epic of music journalism.

 For a year straight, I proclaimed, I would travel the United States penetrating every fringe abroad. I would vomit a word salad to rival the absurd lengths of Kerouac and splat it front & center on the shoes of the ringmaster. In one week I quit my band, quit my job, quit my life. I gave everything away & just hit the road...

            That campaign began December 21^st 2006 and ended October 13^th, 2007 �" 293 consecutive days & rampaging through 35 states. When it was complete I barreled out the van, climaxing a 6 week spoken word tour. I collapsed on the soil with the velocity of an anvil. I had traversed every nook and cranny, subjected myself to the tirades of every lunatic. I started out a journalist, and in the end became GhostNomad. It was finally over, and I was finally free…

Laying on the ground, I stared up into the Michigan night with the limbs of dead trees spiraling like veins through the blackness. I was exhausted, trying to catch my breath. My cell phone rang �" Linda was down the street, at some weird bar I’d never heard of. Everything said “Don’t do it.” Screamed: “After all this bullshit you put yourself through, you can finally move on. Seattle is waiting for you like a w***e with spread legs. All you need is two weeks here �" just cut your album & flee. If you hang around Detroit you know exactly what’s going to happen �" you’re gonna fall horribly in love with some terrible woman, and it's just going to ruin everything. If you’re dumb enough to let it happen, then you deserve every last splinter of apocalypse freight-training your way...”

But I went to that bar, yes I did. Despite all the screaming intuition, I swallowed my harangue & sauntered that cold mile. And when I arrived, Linda wasn’t there but someone else was, eyeballing me from across the bar, swinging her head around the post, watching my every move, just laughing to herself as I pace around consciously trying to avoid her beady little clown eyes pulling me in like a tractor beam. She knows I can’t talk to her, she knows I must escape. She doesn’t care. She sees another Slavic man primed for mutilation. For she is Clownbaby, the Ultimate Woman…

 

Poor Kid don’t like who he is, Poor Kid goes crazy, Poor Kid blacksmiths iron-mask. Volatile flight becomes reality, appended persona sustains insoluble life. Years go by. At the edge of the world, Poor Kid finds himself surrounded by ironic victims  reconstructing themselves after his negligent Hyde… 6,000 miles away Poor Girl sits alone, isolated in darkness. Poor Girl don’t like who she is, Poor Girl not one of them; Poor Girl belittled, told ugly & boyish. Poor Girl goes inward, reshaping the soul. In flight of escape Poor Girl turns supra-female, a concentrated powerhouse of Venus. Powerhouse, in blind terror of death, turns black heart conqueror…  Poor Kid washes ashore, having clashed as Odysseus. Collapsing, he stares into the sky & meditates deeply. Poor Kid arises, dusts himself off & hobbles to the nearby tavern. Each step resounds the ticking of Poor Girl’s watch. Sipping a rum & coke alone, she watches the time click by. Waiting, waiting, waiting… Poor Kid wanders inside, Poor Girl is across the way. Both at the peak of their powers, they lock eyes for the first time. Poor Girl is dynamite, Poor Kid the shrapnel. Somewhere astral the deities of both of clash valiantly. One last night before tragi-comedy abounds…

 

***Dr. Jeremy Sullivan is the key to everything. He is my ticket out of here �" an impenetrable rock of confidence, a herald of destiny, the liberator of Hollow Earth, a mastermind of the Vegan Revolution, Dean of the Free Therapy institute of higher vibrational learning...

            Dr. Jeremy Sullivan is the second GhostNomad, of which I am the first. He is hexed to sustain the curse until a suitable candidate arrives. It has to be passed down like the mask of Zorro, or the whip of Indy Jones. It’s a pretty basic formula, and a sad commentary on our times �" I had to perpetuate and embody my own myth, because I couldn’t interpret life under any other circumstance…

            I met Dr. Jeremy Sullivan on my way back to Seattle over a year later, when I was escaping Michigan for the last time, in January 2009. It was the undisputed end of everything �" or so it seemed �" and I was left again with the Greyhound, headed through the familiar 2½ day route back home. Detroit to Chicago, Chicago to Minneapolis. Then Fargo, Bozeman, Butte & Billings. 20 hours of sparse Montana wasteland until Quarterlain Idaho, then another 12 to Moses Lake & Spokane. Six hours later, decimated by fatigue, one reaches downtown Seattle as the rising nova hits the Space Needle as to cast the monolith shadow of a 70 foot sundial…

            Or so it was supposed to go, in theory. The reality is that it took us a whopping 6 and ½ days to reach our destination. That set a new record for me, even having spent 600+ hours on Greyhounds in 2007 and completing an upwards of 40 cross-country trips on those killers. It was brutal beyond description…

            The worst I’d ever sustained previously was Detroit to San Diego, which was normally a 3½ day ride bestial in its own right. I made that voyage 8 times back and forth �" Detroit to St Louis, through Iowa into Denver. Then ten hours south to Amarillo before another 8 to Albuquerque, spearheading Vegas all the way into LA. By the time we hit Los Angeles we missed the bus to San Diego by 5 minutes, and it tacked on another 5 hours of waiting before the Mexican bus to Tijuana �" packed with stereotypes that actually had caged chickens as their carry on luggage �" dumped us off at southern most of SoCal.

After all that, my ride had forgotten to pick me up. I made the last public bus by the skin of my teeth, chasing it for half a mile lugging a computer tower, guitar head, backpack & duffelbag filled with hardcover books…

 

This Seattle return was a different beast altogether though. I had already attempted to flee the prior week. I spent 2 days on the Greyhound before reaching Billings, Montana, where we were informed that due to the freak Northwest snowstorm, all roads into Idaho/Washington had been closed for 11 days. The officials knew this back in Detroit, but central authority kept pumping us through like greed-crazed vultures…

In Billings there were 60 people trapped inside the terminal, having been living there like Katrina refugees. It was -20 degrees outside and snowing heavy. The bulk of displaced were blue-tear ex-cons or Iraq vets on leave for holidays forced to spend Xmas inside the terminal. Everyone was broke, living on donuts & black coffee…

The ticket counter said I would be stuck there for at least 3 days �" if I was lucky. Seattle gets 9 inches of snow a year, and most of it on the tip of Mount Rainier. They were now being bombarded with 34 inches, this freak blizzard that had crawled from Alaska. Half the city was without heat or power, and no one had the faintest idea what to do since the city has no salt trucks or contingency plans.

I was offered a reprint ticket back to Detroit for no charge �" but not another one out. Which meant I’d be trapped in Michigan all over again, dumped off on Christmas morning lacking the fare to get back home. It was so ugly I took the offer …

 

This final escape where I met Dr. Jeremy Sullivan started a week later, on 1.3.09. Despite paying rent in advance, my former Seattle roommates left me homeless. I’d called to let them know I was off the next day and they cowardly admitted giving my room to someone else. They spent all my money on weed, promising to pay me back (which they never did). They said “Well, you have friends here. You can make it happen.”

            I already had my ticket and couldn’t turn it off. As a last resort I contacted a friendly couple that lived in the boonies. I had a place for a month at least, but it was an hour bus ride from downtown Seattle & my old kitchen job that theoretically promised some part-time sympathy hours (the management, of course, would flake out as well).

            The ride began at noon, Saturday the 3^rd. We were only 30 minutes outside Detroit when the brake lines went out; derailed for two hours until a replacement coach could arrive. We made Chicago 6 hours later by the skin of our teeth, with 5 minutes to load. A service announcement boomed through the loudspeaker: “Due to road conditions, the midnight service to Fargo has been postponed until noon tomorrow.” Everyone grumbles, that long snake wraparound of beleaguered poverty.

            I use this as an opportunity to visit a high school chum. To preserve my place in line, I stick a pillow and white bag filled with crumbled McDonalds wrappers in the column. So long as it sits there, that is my just claim. Generally no thieves tamper with the luggage clumps because they always suspect the owner is watching. Thus, no one will complain when I nonchalantly stroll back in line the next morning, since the terminal is always so packed the people assume you’re napping somewhere off in the corner.

            By the time we make it to Minneapolis the following night, I’ve long been eavesdropping on this blow-hard schmuck who keeps having the “I’m a hardcore Vegan, dontcha know?” conversation to any who will listen. He’s been sitting next to a huge black guy the entire ride. They bonded in Chicago and have both been on since Friday. He’s headed to Portland, the black guy to Seattle…

 

An hour outside Minneapolis en route to Fargo, I wake up to the bus rattling like a 747 with a dying engine. The driver was so stoned he forgot to fuel up, and we run out of gas in arctic conditions �" no heat, no salvage freight for an hour, metal casing pounded by raging blizzard. Since the tanker is empty there is no air compression. No air compression means all underhand luggage is now trapped beneath the bus. Which means if I don’t stay with this dead caravan until the bitter end, everything I own will be lost in transport. It’s just what happens; I’ve seen it dozens of times…

            We make it to Fargo by midnight, able to hop on the next bus by the skin of our teeth. I’m waiting it out another 12 hours though. In theory, the tow truck will arrive with the carcass in a few hours. Vegan Guy asks why I’m not coming.  “If you ever want to see your s**t again, just sit here. Trust me. I live on these things.” He and the black guy eyeball each other.

I tell Vegan Guy: “Just take the opportunity and sleep while you can. We’ll all get a full rest and be back on the road by noon. You’ll want this if you’re going all the way Northwest. I know this route like the back of my palm.”

Vegan Guy deadpans, words rattling. Says: “Don’t you mean the back of your hand?” I say: “No, that’s why it was funny.” I start digging through my notes and ignore him for 20 minutes. He’s unsure how to interpret me, just as I like. I jet-snap from my pensive streak: “So what are you all about? What’s you whole schtick?”

Vegan Guy immediately starts ranting about propaganda, skull & bones, Freemasons, the Illuminati. That our leaders were a bizarre, sadistic, inhuman cult worshiping Moloch the Owl God in the redwoods of Northern California. About Hitler as mad genius & how Adolf knew about Hollow Earth and was trying to stop the lizard people from taking over the planet. Vegan Guy explains that there are four races of aliens vying for control of the human race…

He is traveling to Portland to find one of the four mythical openings in Hollow Earth, where the inner-sun is located. His goal is to follow the cavernous realm all the way to the other American portal, which is behind Niagara Falls. He already attempted to make it through the waterfall, but the Coast Guard was encircling it with gunner boats…

 

Next morning, I wake up Vegan Guy. Drag him into the -20 climate to wake & bake as we head to the local diner. I play the part of GhostNomad, marching along, telling him what he needs to know to survive this trip �" all the ins-n-outs & the general blueprint one must be abide at all times…

  We drink black coffee. His name is Jeremy Sullivan. He is not yet a doctor of Free Therapy, nor is he remotely capable of assuming the reigns of GhostNomad. He is still a wobbly bowl of jello, and this is his alpha run. He’s a skinny white guy with the word Vegan tattooed on the back of his neck. He has a shaved head and black goatee. His eyes are crazy; he is a human sponge. Every word you utter he soaks up like a computer, never blinking…

He says the Atlanteans & Plutonians must be stopped at all costs. He is convinced Hollow Earth is real because his grandfather was a Nazi Scientist who defected & worked on the Manhattan Project. Guy worked with Einstein & Oppenheimer. On his deathbed he told Jeremy all his dark secrets, the combination to his hidden safe. Somewhere Jeremy has top secret classified documents stolen from both the National Socialist and US governments. He has photographs of his grandfather standing beside the trans-dimensional beings who helped work on the Philadelphia Experiment…

 

Jeremy was a battle rapper from The Bronx; a street hustler and choirboy for Baptist churches. He calls everyone “brutha” or “sistuh” in that heavy NYC accent. He is the blackest white man I know, apart from myself. There is no trace of the forced whigger thing �" he is a legit product of the urban landscape.

His parents thought he was bat-s**t crazy and had him committed a half-dozen times, moved him to Albuquerque as a teen to curb his behavior. He soon ended right back in the Bronx putting together a hip hop collective. He is brilliantly talented in this respect �" he flows across the galaxy on any impromptu subject, whether or not it rhymes at all. His style is more free-from rant.

Until New Years Eve, Jeremy had been living in Buffalo. He spent 4 turgid years attempting to finish his business degree, dating some girl that had relatives in the local police, the FBI. When he ditched her she struck down hard and made all sorts of trouble. They were denying his paychecks, breaking in his house, tapping his phone; sifting through his emails, following him…

I started laughing. He kept saying, “No man I’m not f*****g crazy �" you don’t understand, you don’t understand.” His eyeballs were like lampposts ablaze. He was totally sincere, totally convinced he was being harassed by the FBI. New Years was the big moment for him. That’s when he decided everything needed to change…

 

The ghost girl had done him in. He was dating a girl from some obscure rural town outside Buffalo no one else had heard of either. She would see him on the weekends, or strange intervals. She would just show up, randomly, knowing where he’d be. She would come to his work at odd times and never had friends with her. She’d just kind of come & go with shifty excuses. It had been going on for months.

            He took concern when she disappeared abnormally long. Her cell number was out & the diner where she was a waitress �" that number was dead. When he called information the listing was correct but the business had collapsed a decade ago. The phone had been disconnected 12 years.

Jeremy and a friend went to the diner and it was long closed �" dusty tables, 2X4’s strewn about, cobwebs in the windows. The town had a total Innsmouth vibe; a veritable ghost town. They went to the address information had given, the listing for the phone number she called home. It had also been abandoned for years. Jeremy’s friend (the only other person to have met her) was totally spooked and refused to speak with him, at least for awhile…

It wasn’t long after �" with the cops having rummaged his apartment and stolen $1,000 �" that Jeremy decided he was either going to shoot himself or simply ghost himself, gunning it for Portland to kick-start the Vegan Revolution.

He threw everything into a bag and told no one he was leaving, embarking on his first Greyound mission with $300 to his name. “Portland or death” was his vocation. He didn’t know anyone in Oregon, had never been homeless �" didn’t have the slightest knowledge of crusties, train-hoppers, squats or street culture. He had done the responsible adult thing until 30 where I now caught him amidst of a suicidal breakdown…

I immediately began training him as a Greyhound warrior �" the education of the underground, Seattle contra Portland, adventures & calamities endured. I convinced him that Seattle was the way to go, if only for a week expedition. I drew him maps, diagrams; revealed bus schedules & hustler nests, pinpointed anarchist cells & vegan abodes...

 

It was noon in Fargo, the next bus to Billings had arrived �" but none of the staff had bothered to call a tow-truck. The freight with our luggage was still aside the freeway. We were told we had to wait yet another 12 hours if we still had the crazy notion of milling around for our belongings. We decided to camp out.

            We got social with the other stragglers. One was a kid from DC headed to Denver for college, and the big black guy was a restaurant mercenary of sorts named Tyreese. He was in his mid 30’s and grew up in Chicago. He spent time in Detroit where he’d apparently met me in the music scene briefly. He spent a stretch in Buffalo too, because he traveled the country with his kitchen organizer/media liaison scheme. He had a gig in Detroit but it soon fell through. His car died and he just kind of got stuck in the vortex of Michigan, just like everyone. He fought like a champ for the past 6 months to make an exit �" “Seattle or death,” no looking back…

By 7pm I’d developed a fever and was incapacitated by one too many painkillers, in no shape to move around. Despite their posted schedule, Greyhound decided to close down for 5 hours until the midnight bus arrived. B******s kicked us out onto the street to walk around in -25 windshield factor. We were doomed.

            As Jeremy, Tyreese, DC kid & I tried to comprehend our misfortune, the middle-aged Fargo chicks we met last night came to our rescue. They took us to a home in the suburbs, feeding as pizza and vodka. They were obnoxious, but we were grateful.

The doting one with the mom hair exploded over Obama �" how anyone who supports the man is a fool, is insane. About how he is a communist, scum, the Antichrist. On her wall was a framed picture of George W. Bush praying with cusped hands, heavenly glow permeating his forehead, eagle soaring boldly over the luminescent cross in the sun.

            I excused myself to the restroom and discovered a multi-task sauna �" hot tub, bubble jets, faucet extensions; a pill-headed nirvana of ameliorate equilibrium…

 

We left the following afternoon; the 3 day mark and still a day & a ½ from Seattle. We made Billings without so much as a hiccup. All the people from the faulty Minneapolis bus are still there, as no bus has gone further west in 3 days. It was perhaps the most joyous misery I’d witnessed, this uplifting reunion akin to prisoners catching up from Gulag to Gulag. When I asked the clerk how long I would have had to stay to make Seattle during my Christmas run: 5 days…

            The next bus departed 2 hours later, and all was well until we neared Spokane. Only 6 hours from home we’d gotten stuck in an ice bank. After an hour of revving forward into reverse to cradle us from peril, we broke free and drove into the mountains, air thick with fog. Tyreese started freaking out after checking the barometer. There were over 60 inches of fresh snow on those mountaintops, and ice happens to melt at 38 degrees. Tyreese has us clocked at 36…

            The driver chances it when he obviously should not. No other cars on the road; none batty enough to attempt it. An echo too loud could disrupt the snow, sending it pummeling down instantaneously through reverberation…

We make it to Spokane 10 minutes before the final switchover �" the final ascent to the promised land. As Tyreese is rubbing his hands, bouncing in joy, we get the announcement: “Due to five simultaneous avalanches, every mountain pass is now closed until further notice. We apologize for any disruption of service.” Which means we literally bested the reaper by 20 minutes �" and we are now trapped here for 2 more days. Which is why Tyreese, the devout Christian, repeatedly vents: “F**K�"�"�"!!”

 

A group of us decide to pitch in on a motel; en route Jeremy speaks Jedi destiny �" that there is a force, a larger purpose, and all you have to do is follow the signs. Everyday he says the signs are there. Doesn’t matter if it’s a receipt on the ground or a street corner chat with an anonymous pedestrian �" he labors to pull the providential message. That’s why he knew, for whatever reason, that PDX was his calling…

But maybe it was all just to meet me. Maybe I am the one he’s supposed to get entangled with and that Seattle really is the answer, since I am the eerie clone of his first real traveling companion. Says I am the replica of a fire-breathing circus performer he’d embarked on a 3 week trip with a long, long time ago in a NYC far, far away. Said he thought I was the guy at first...

Originally I wanted to throw Sullivan through a window for his abhorrent vegan bullshit. He was pushing it hard, letting everyone know I was his sense of identity. But he grew on me. It was as if his entire life was one obscure comedy act, a meta-physical stress comedy coalescing Zardoz & What About Bob. His steel-faith in destiny wormed its way into my perception. Maybe I’d found a successor. Since Sullivan’s life was already dominated by ghosts, it only fit the myth that he become one himself…

 

Noon in Spokane, avalanches still isolating Washington State from the union. Defying corporate, the staff arranges us a reroute through the eastern edge of Oregon into the Northern tip of California, where we will then swing through the dry-lands crawling the I-5 into Portland. From thereon all that will stand in our way is a straight-shot of highway, a 3 hour burst into the Emerald City…

The only issue is that this will take 12 hours. In Spokane we are only 5 hours away from Seattle, and there is a slim chance the roads might clear by evening. I know its poppy-c**k though �" those people are doomed to sit there for 3 more days at least, no matter the cheery estimates…

Jeremy looks to me for the answer, says he’s going wherever I am going There are a handful of others, mainly g-thug black guys looking to my council as well. The majority of the Minneapolis crew are staying put. All eyes on me. “Well,” I tell Jeremy, “You always wanted to see California right?” Tyreese starts the exasperated, over-the-top stressed out bit: “Y’all are f*****g crazy, y’all are… f**k it.”

 

Cali is a sparse whizzing range of yellow flat land, distant mountains puncturing the air. We climb Southern Oregon, zagging through monolith canopies of redwoods that blot out the night sky in severe Plutonian blackness...

Portland; 5 days in. 10pm, Wednesday night �" just a hop, skip & jump from Freak City. Ten minutes to load. As Tyreese is rubbing his hands, bouncing in joy, we get the announcement: “Due to flooding, every road into Washington is now closed until further notice. We apologize for any disruption of service.” Which means we are now trapped here for at least 2 more days, just like the people we left behind in Spokane. Which is why Tyreese, the devout Christian, repeatedly vents the word “F**K!!”

 

Jeremy, Tyreese and I sit there dumbfounded just like the 60 other people now trapped in Portland. There are about 20 of us still on from Chicago. One lady has been on for 9 days, having left Alabama. She smells like a wet dog.

            CNN broadcasts live from Washington where a national emergency has been declared. Chunks of the state are submerged in water, and pockets of Seattle remain without heat or electricity. The I-5 is sunk beneath a half-mile stretch of water, and the state is losing 11 million a day in revenue. Even with FEMA pulling out the stops, we still have a day in limbo.

            Tyreese grumbles himself to sleep while Jeremy and I hit the streets. It’s pouring rain, the night mystical in rich ambiance; dark purple copulates with grey clouds hovering low like aerial fog. The bell tower above the terminal gives the appearance of city epicenter �" the surrounding streets and corridors decorated as China Town with statues of golden dragons, twirling antique lampposts…

            Jeremy is brain-storm ablaze. He’s hatched a plan where instead of traveling the US interviewing musicians, as GhostNomad II he will hit every vegan restaurant, collective, venue, author & fanatic �" he will worm his way into the back door of every meat-denouncing visionary through the sheer power of a tape recorder. His grand vision is a multi-faceted website, a sprawling collective of traveling Greyhound journalists. With the mighty lungs of a propagandist and a PHD in bullshit, he will sail with the fluidity of the Argonaut. He tells me that “Ryan Bartek is my Tyler Durden,” to which I respond: “Don’t start with that s**t �" I’m just some dumb a*****e, get it through your skull.” Doesn’t matter though �" I am what I am and my effect is disastrous…

 

Next morning; 11am. Tyreese jumps up like a soldier. He flips the laminated Salvation Army badge around his neck and says, “let’s go.” Whatever humane services can be pulled from Downtown he is determined to bring to the forefront…

Tyreese spent months on the post-Katrina effort; he is a wool-dyed organizer. Like Jeremy, he has convinced himself that fate has put him here. It is God that set him on this path, and these poor souls of the Greyhound netherworld are his flock in need. Tyreese continues to quote the lines he’s discovered, having been studying the bible this entire ride…

Jeremy and I follow him shelter to shelter, of which there are five in proximity. Salvation Army itself hoes us out despite Tyreese’s connections. It is through the church-bred organization that we get 30 hygiene kits (soap/comb/toothbrushes) and several boxes of those lint-crushed bum blankets. We acquire boxes of donuts & five dozen snack-packs of pretzels and combos…

Back at the terminal we distribute 60 blankets, feed the hungry, and begin signing people up for the homeless shower nearby. The management want to throw us out �" we have a verbal scuffle with security but Tyreese chews them out. They don’t want to f**k with us �" there are too many starving, angry folks here. As is why the staff buckles under, handing out free food vouchers. Everyone gets sandwiches & burritos. Tyreese calls the local news to try and get coverage, food donations, but despite their interest no camera crew ever rolls up.

Jeremy is sitting alone, looking empty-eyed at the g-thug guys who symbolize his past. They never said thank you, they just took �" and swiped more then anyone else. They lied trying to horde extra blankets. Out for themselves, gabbing b*****s & money, how real men act in jail �" fights they’ve won, scams hustled…

Jeremy had been consorting with them since Chicago. He lend them money he didn’t have for sodas & snacks. He smoked them down with the little pot he had, when unbeknown to us they were smuggling an ounce. They wouldn’t let any of us hit on it �" bowl after bowl, all theirs. When Jeremy finally threw them $10 for a dime, they shiested him with a nickel bag & asked for more vending money…

 

Despite our worker-ant accommodations, 6 of the Chicago people decide that enough is enough. Like a scene out of a zombie film, like the Titanic, the leader of their brilliant plan starts hollering “Anyone wants out we’re pitching in on a U-Haul! We’re making it to Seattle even if we gotta drive through a mile flood! There’s a way in!”

The Greyhound staff eyeball each other because they know better �" every road in is tourniquet by flood. If there are rural back-roads, the gravel is packed for miles by knowledgeable hicks or tardy semi-trucks. Still they grasp at straws. The leader pulls up in the rental and a dozen refugees jump in the back, darting off 400 horsepower.

Jeremy and I wander waterfront park smoking grass with a displaced Navy crewman. The river stretching through Portland is 17 inches higher then normal �" 4 inches from spilling over & flooding the town with cholera & dysentery rising from the sewer mains. If this continues we’ll be stranded atop the Greyhound roof until hazmat arrives or a helicopter lands to fly us out.

Back at the depot, live on CNN, everyone watches the fate of the U-Haul refugees. They pull up to the I-5 lake behind the reporter on air �" plan foiled, for all to see. They back up and drove off, no one knowing what ever happened to them…

 

It’s drawing night and I’m down to the last of my painkillers; my spine has been on fire this whole ride. That I haven’t had REM sleep in 6 days, that I’ve kept waking up every two hours since Detroit from a radio announcement, changeover or cigarette break has not helped. I have the shakes, my eyes are red. The pills are raging, the pot we smoked so dank & green…

            Jeremy asks I step outside. Says he’s been talking to a local on acid offering to take him somewhere �" some weird hippie tripping balls. Jeremy asks my opinion and I retort: “What would GhostNomad do?” Jeremy grins and waves goodbye. He is already 5 pages into the book he is now living, leaving his freshest notes in my care…

 

Awake in a surge with blurry recollections atop a pile of damp coats.... Sunny morning, 10am… Jeremy? Arrested, dead? Freaking on acid & grazing like a cow?

I go outside to smoke & he slinks around the corner. Says he trailed the hippie who made no sense but found a pack of crusties. The lead female made him pop a squat. They were in the progress of “taxing their asses” �" squeezing cash out of the squares for polluting “their streets” with banality. To “tax them” is to get money from them, because they must pay thoroughfare of passage since they are not of the street universe, the only world which is real… 

            The unknown thing about crust culture is that for every dime taxed, they in turn give right back to the streets. While they sit outside an establishment panhandling or just going about their day, they are perpetually cleaning the area.

Since they are homeless, its part of the crust-Zen to tidy the outdoors as if they are cleaning their own room or managing a dinky bonsai tree. They give back much more then they take, and for every cent panhandled they sustain the laws of karma…

            When the crust-lady asked Jeremy how he’d ended up there, he name dropped me. Oh, him. Ha! I know him. The scumfuck journalist right? How’s Bartek been doing?” ‘Twas a one of the hardest-line champs of the Frisco tribe I’d rolled with April 2007. Jeremy hung with them at the train yard, cleaning the tracks. They were making a game of it �" how many empty Pabst’s they could fit in a trashcan. They worked like pigeons sniping every crumb…

 

The announcement bursts from the loudspeaker: “We regret to inform you that the I-5 freeway is still submerged beneath water…” Everyone grumbles and stares at the floor defeated.

“HOWEVER, the secondary freeway pass has now been opened… To all passengers headed to Seattle and beyond, we will be rerouting your tickets to go through the Western edge of the state as to head North into Seattle!! Congratulations, you’re all going home!!!”

The terminal explodes in merriment. We are given another round of complimentary lunch tickets, and I opt for charred burritos…

            20 minutes to departure I call Jeremy over: “Look… This trip has really put everything into perspective. When I left Michigan, my faith in destiny was shattered. Like you, I followed the signs and it led to a standstill… I think the moral here is that whether or not the signs are real, reality is what we make. Fate exists if we choose for it to exist… I’ve been on the road for nearly two years now and I want to go home �" I want a job, a girlfriend, a band. I don’t want to see another Greyhound again for a long, long time…”

“You know, in the real world, I’m a total f**k up, but in Greyhound world I’m like a god. Imagine that? After everything, it’s the only thing you’re really good at… So, f**k it �" I officially pass the torch of GhostNomad on to you, buddy boy. I have no idea what’s in store for you, but I have total faith in your abilities. This will be the most intense year of your life. I give this meaningless title to you, good sir �" yours & yours alone. Do you… accept this weird, nonsensical gift �" this odd, joyful curse?”

Jeremy nods,newly alive. As we board I cue the Walkman; the motor roars and Jeremy hits play. Everyone aboard can hear the high-voltage bombast of duel guitar solos. Sullivan is hopping around his seat head-banging, roaring with laughter, Dragonforce giving to us their all: “proud and so glorious/standing before of us our swords will shine bright in the sky/when united we come to the land of the sun/ with the heart of a dragon we ride…”

 

Seattle now, Sunday night at Miss Monster's. I know Clownbaby is going to call. It’s been over two weeks of silence, but I know it’s gonna happen. Jeremy didn’t even say goodbye �" just slunk away like a phantom, hands in pockets & hoodie over head.

I walked to my black gravel composition book & wrote the following �" 911(x2) 1.11.09: “GhostNomad just took off down the street.” The cell phone rings �" it’s Clownbaby…

I step outside, hoping it will mimic the dream I’ve so long chased. I flip open the receiver and say in a slow, creepy crawl drawl: “Hiiiiii Clown bay-beeee…”And do you know what she says to me? Do you know what she says??? 

****Anticlimax Leviathan Out 11-15-16

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Author's Note

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out 11/15/16
all books free @ www.bigshinyprison.com