Being a Serial in Four Parts
For some time after that, I heard nothing from my friend. Electronic messages were unanswered and voice mailed greetings were left unreturned. I found myself possessed by a vague implacable fear, such that I could no longer allay by any means. The services of Abe were no longer to be had. It seemed, his somewhat uncouth wife revealed to me in a gummatous accent, that he had fallen very ill. He had drifted out of and into consciousness and had run a high fever for several days. It occurred to me that this was, no doubt, a ploy to avoid repaying the moneys I had given him w/ the agreed-upon-services, but I refrained from pressing the matter, as the relief I felt at the discontinuation of his occasional company would be compensation enough.
It was April 30th, the night of the dread Roodmas of witches, at which time, it is whispered, hellish rituals are enacted and congress with certain dark intelligences is achieved, when stark, utter horror burst over me and weighted my spirit with a black, clutching panic from which it can never again shake free. I found myself alone at home, nursing a pint of Russian spirits and studying the obscene works of Russ Meyers. I found myself so relaxed by the vodka and so immersed in the unwholesomely suggestive images and stupendously stupid story of the Meyer films that I remained unaware of my telephone’s ringing until the call was repeated for the sixth time—the caller, a bartender at the Empty Bottle saloon, having counted despite the boisterousness of her alcoholic, beer-goggling clientele. She was calling concerning an inebriate who’d stumbled out of the men’s room with delirious ravings and screamed to me for protection. It was my friend, and he had been just able to recall his own name and the number of my cellular telephone set.
The Empty Bottle is close to what used to be some of the most ominous post-industrial territory, that has now been loathsomely transformed by re-gentrification into a even more monstrous landscape of yuppie abominations, and it took three quarters of an hour of feverish across jolting through weird and ominous vistas to get there on the el. I found my friend at an unstable and sticky table where the bartender had reluctantly allowed him to sit until I arrived, vacillating between frenzy and apathy. He knew me at once, and began pouring out a meaningless, half-incoherent torrent of words in my direction.
"Steve, shit! The pit of China Blue! The six thousand EPs... the abomination of abominations: Spiritualized! I never would let you make me a mix-tape, and then I found myself there – Lord take me to the other side! - The shape rose up from the stage and there were five hundred that howled - The Uncombed Thing bleated 'Kember! Kember' - that was Sonic Boom's secret name – They’re coming back once more: a reunion tour! A minute before I was locked in the bathroom, reading The New Yorker on the toilet (because, like, who can stand to read that pompous piece of shit at any other time?) and then I was there where he had gone with my body - in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the droning begins and the security guy guards the door - I saw an uncircumcised penis - it changed shape - I can't stand it - I'll kill him if he ever sends me there again - I'll kill that entity -him, it - I'll kill it! "
It took me an hour and several bottles of Huber Bock to quiet him, but he subsided at last, and I set out with him for his apartment. His fury of hysteria was spent, and he was inclined to be silent, though he began muttering darkly to himself when the train passed the when the train passed through Lincoln Square, as if the sight of the neighborhood aroused unpleasant visions within him, but then he always did that.
As the elevated train proceeded through the twilight, however, the muttering grew ever more distinct, and as I listened I caught a stream of utterly insane drivel about Spacemen 3, and in particular about Sonic Boom. The extent to which he had preyed on my friend's nerves was plain, for he had woven a whole set of morbid hallucinations around the reclusive madman. Sonic Boom was getting hold of him, and my friend knew that some day he would never let go. Even now the Englishman probably let him go only when he had to, because he couldn't hold on long at a time.
Sonic Boom constantly took his body and went to nameless places for nameless rock shows, leaving my friend in Sonic Boom’s own fishy pale body and locking him in the bedroom of my friend’s apartment—but sometimes he couldn't hold on, and he would find himself suddenly in his own body again in some far-off, horrible, and perhaps unknown place. Sometimes Sonic Boom get hold of him again and sometimes he couldn't. Often he was left stranded somewhere, disoriented, as I had found him—and really, really high—time and again he had to find his way home from frightful performance venues.
Then the thing happened. My friend’s voice was rising to a thin girly scream as he whined, when suddenly it was snapped off with an almost mechanical click. The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognizably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion—as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were adjusting themselves to monstrous chemical alterations, radically bad posture, and unpleasant changes in general personality.
Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion—such a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage and abnormality–that my grasp of the handrail grew feeble and uncertain. I had faltered only a moment, but in that time, my companion had seized an ambiguously vacated seat and forced me to change places with a disoriented bum.
In the lights of Wicker Park I saw his firmly set mouth, and shivered at the blaze of his eyes. Abe was right - he did look damnably like some Saxon scion when in these moods. I did not wonder that the moods were disliked by Abe—there was certainly something unnatural in them, and I felt the sinister element all the more because of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This man, for all my lifelong knowledge of my friend, was a stranger—an intrusion of some sort from the mid-Atlantic abyss.
Then he spoke, and his voice seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was mush-mouthed but firmer, and more decisive than I had ever known it to be; while its accent and pronunciation were altogether changed. There was, I thought, a trace of very profound and very genuine indolence in the timbre—not the flashy, meaninglessly druggy pseudo-shiftlessness of the callow Anglo-"slacker," which my friend had been affecting, but something assured, basic, pervasive, and potentially high. I was dumbfounded by this self-possession coming so soon after the bout of terrified maundering.
"I hope you'll forget my attack back there, Forceman," he was saying. "You know how fried my nerves are, and I guess you can excuse such things. I'm enormously grateful, of course, for this help home.
"And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying about Sonic Boom—and about Spacemen 3 in general. Those records are full of bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets worn out it cooks up all sorts of imaginary concrete applications. (Or would that be concrete imaginary applications? Seems to be a bit o’ a oxymoron, it does. Hurm har har.) I shall take a rest from now on—you probably won't see me for some time, and you needn't blame yourself for it.
I do not recall how I responded, for the stupefying alienage of my seatmate commandeered all of my awareness. With every moment my feeling of elusive cosmic horror increased, till at length I was in a virtual delirium of longing for the end of the ride.
My friend left the train turnstile with a brisk repetition of his thanks, and I headed home alone with a curious feeling of relief. It had been a horrible ride—all the more horrible because I could not quite tell why it was horrible—horrifically enough—and I did not regret my friend's forecast of a long absence from my company.
Some weeks passed, and again I found myself consumed by occupational activities. A difficult theft investigation was carried off satisfactorily, while a seemingly routine missing person case slipped away into frustration. I couldn’t help but wonder if this last engagement had been a victim of a growing distraction on my part. Although there was no discernable reason to do so, I found myself preoccupied by a growing sense of faint, infinitely deep horror which I could not explain.
Despite his silence, my friend’s presence haunted my thoughts. The image of him as I had last seen him, in that strangely Saxon energized state would not be pried from my mind’s eye. It was almost without surprise then that his electronic message was received by me. I shall quote it in full, as I feel that last weird communiqué is far too important to be abbreviated in any way:
Steven Forceman, Private Investigator
55 E Washington Avenue
Suite 69
Chicago, Illinois 60602
My ol’ mate Steve Forceman, P.I.,
Yull be happy to know that I’m awn th’ mend. Astoundin’ what uh bit o’ tea and crumpets’ll do for yeh, roit? (And heroin, natchrilly. Ho ho ho—I do say, that’s jolly good).
Anyway, yuh sod. Way yeh been lurtly? Doin’ a bunk? Getting ‘bout ready to tell yeh to shagg oaf.
Seein’ as I’m feelin’ like I’m back in my lorries, how ‘bout you come by then? Still nout quite up to snuff, (‘tho I woont say no to a good snort. Hyow hurm hug huh, jolly good, what,) or I’d come to yo flat. We cood listen to Spacemen 3 ahnd maybe smoke a bowl and like that. I wuzz completely wrong about Spacemen 3, by the way. The wager’s awf, ez fah ez I can see et. You can keep yo Feender.
Mattah o’ fact, I’ve gaught some things to tell you about Spacemen 3 that will explain my recent nervousness—arising as it did, from a glimpse of enlightenment—one that I have only now digested, leading to vistas of cosmic wonder that I cannot express, but hope to reveal to you as they have been revealed to me.
By listening to the music Spacemen 3, I’ve discovered certain energies in it. As I know you have read the some of the most truly blasphemous esoteric literature like the mad rock critic Lester Bangs’s unspeakable “A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise,” I suspect you are capable of grasping certain concepts that are vastly outside the radius of our common knowledge and belief, ideas for instance, relating to the precepts of hypnomonotony.
Have you ever considered what bizarre pharmaceutical concepts guided the recording and mixing of An Evening of Sitar Music, what alien amplifiers Sonic Boom and Jason Pierce used on the version of “Losing Touch with My Mind” that appears on Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to? I’ve found it Steve! I’ve found all of it.
So let’s hang out then, mate. Whatta bout tomorrow night, say 8 or so? Lemme know if the time’s bad. Otherwise, I’ll see you then.
Oh and one last thing, could you bring all yo Spacemen 3 bootlegs with you? Et wuzz real good uh you to leave them out uf th’ wager…
The admixture of emotions I experienced on reading this correspondence is difficult to describe. To mention awe and foreboding would fall hopelessly short of the true feelings I experienced. There was, of course, a vague sense of vast wonder, as an intellect such as my own, ever in seek of the esoteric truths to be found in annoying music, was powerfully drawn to the visions—or rather the squeals and drones and mumbling—that my friend promised—so potent that they had led to his recent mental breakdown and subsequent aberrant behavior.
Only then was I able to see that the frenzied behavior exhibited by my friend at the Empty Bottle, while peculiarly nervous in nature, had been the only time when he had seemed “normal” to me for some time, perhaps since we had undertaken our newly dismissed wager. In my other dealings with him, for reasons lurking behind his new awkwardly embarrassing “accent,” he’d filled me not just with perplexity, but with a subtly vague sense of morbid alienage and a dim if potent feeling of lurking dread.
But what fears should my friend’s difference stir in me? The passion for the unknown that drives me flared up to meet his, and I sensed I was being touched by the infection of the psychedelic barrier-breaking. Shaking, like Sonic Boom, so that the dull gray limits of time and space and narcotic law were sloughed off- taking it to the ineffable Other Side—of course such a thing was worth almost any hazard!
