BlogThis!
MidWest East
Digital Noise Control Proboards
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Noisecontrol PublishingSocializing at the local casino while drinking free bottled water and considering my options on a 30 dollar weekly budget, I encounter Lance Diamond who at first I think is a Magician and I ask him if he's ever been to 4 jokers magic shop. He says no, but then he says he has a friend who might have been. Then, I tell him my sister is a clown and gets all her paint there, lying through my teeth. I ask him if he has plans for vegas and he says of course. But then, he's been in the business for years and his tux is well pressed. I offer him a copy of my CD at some point on line in the future, and he considers, and wanders off into the Roulette lane somewhere. I reflect on my minglings with the Department of Justice document on better telecommunications for everyone. I consider my options here in the falls, and find, that I may just have a career in this stuff, after all, my father does know quite a bit about coin op vending machines, having fixed a few Pac Man and Tempest games in the past at the now non-existant Time Out in the now non-existant Rainbow Center Shopping mall that looms heavy over the Native American Turtle.
Then its over to the Jones house for coffee and chicken marsallas, and a look at the women who all flash him in his apartment. He's got an inside track on Direct TV and Cinemax soft core to boot. I had that years ago, and I reflex on the sedate evenings on the couch with my girlfriend watching the trash. Anyway, Dr. Jones and I head to Buffalo to see an ex-car salesman turned carpenter, and he goes over some of the finer points of sylogistic linguistics and how to fix my left speaker out portable Memorex CD player, something about jerry rigging it with a matchtick. Carpentry is the profession of a true artist, and in biblical times held quite a bit of significance, so I envy his force of personality, to leave a hard edged career and pursue something so ethereal. I invite him to visit me in the new apartment. $900.00 for rent isn't bad, and the air is clean, they keep the smoking lounge out front and its easy to get just about anywhere. Even Tom's Diner. The perfume on the hookers there never ceases to amaze me. We talk about the smoking ban's gradual reversal under Republican Marshall Law and I have a brief virtual conversation with the President who connects me to believe it or not the Pope. I am amazed to see that Kodachrome is doing well on the charts again, at least the adult contemporaries, and I haven't seen Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in 11 years, which makes my Prozac a happy candidate for evaluation later this month. My psychiatrist has been feeling okay lately. He got a new truck in an auction on E-Bay and he says that his kids are treating him good. But then I probably shouldn't be telling you that, its confidential and all. I pulled out the rubber stamp for him in my FOCUS group and let him talk to anyone he wants. They'll never cut that connection to www.washingtontimes.com that I made in the Mission one sunny afternoon in November. In fact, believe it or not, they even have an RSS feed. I think my father's been reading too because it popped right up on the Menu Bar. I know he's been feeding the two Betas in the tank well while I've been gone and the Playstation never goes underused. I think I'm going to buy San Andreas next year, for now I'll have to settle for Spy Hunter. The car actually becomes a boat. And whoa is it aquatic, like Ludacris running the Jet Ski races in 2 Fast 2 Furious. I smelled a Rat on the reservation when I stopped to swap matchbooks with the Cherokee people, and say hello to an old friend who said to be on the lookout for a red cadillac with three passengers that had pulled an armed robbery down the road. The cops were on full alert. It was interesting driving with my enterage last night and I was well blinged in the hood at Ferry and 19th when we stopped for Gas at 2 am. Dr. Jones sat happily in silence while the Bass Kicked from an Explorer with rotating rims.
In any case, I'm in WGB now and the swivel chair is swiveling and I'm off for morning coffee, a shower, and a shave, and some leftovers right along with toast, and you guessed it, an Empire State apple.

; ¶ 3:45 AM (0) comments
Friday, May 07, 2004
Black Operations Noisecontrol Publishing - Black Operations was a 47 page poem regarding that particular time in my life. Here's a link to it: Black Operations Original Rev. by Christopher J. Bradley.
I have also published it in a couple of different places. If you are interested in a paranoid spy thriller, please click and enjoy. I was in quite a state of mind when I completed it back in 97, and the gift of the internet was new to me, so it is some of my most interwoven stuff. Don't lose your mind over it though, it's only poetry!

Here's the entire text for revision at a later date:

Black Operations By Christopher J. Bradley
completed for WWW on October 25, 2001

Month One

There was a war in Nineteen Ninety Six.
The month was January.
It was the first year,
That I ran for President.

The first year I ran for president refers to my conscious decision to become involved in politics, to engage myself, and my peers, as Aristotle would have put it, as a political animal. In 1996, I had just recently gone bankrupt. The lawyer that helped me with it was a Democrat, and I chose to pursue work as a Democrat, and in my mind, had more power beholden to one than I actually did. I believed that it was within my power to be assistive in the prevention of deceit against the then strongly criticised President Bill Clinton, after all, he has committed no crime other than infidelity, which we tend to see more often than not, after all, look at shows like Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer, where people are so devoid of tact, that it is hardly comprehendable that one man could disrupt the morality of an amoral culture industry. In any case, Bill Clinton happened to be giving the State of The Union address on one night that I was in Buffalo, and had many standing to disapprove of my manners, and I ended up taking a ride with the owner of the cafe.

Cracker

I had known it was coming,
Because Jinx D. Cooley,
Had dropped me the line,
After a ride with a crack addict.

We drove in my Dodge Shadow,
All over Buffalo,
And that was Nineteen Ninety Five,
He wouldn't get out of the car.

We didn't know who he was,
When he ended up in the car,
We had walked away from an addict,
He had been with us, and Jinx had invited him.

We found out when he told us,
That his wife had kicked him,
Out of his house,
He was ex-army, and hi-strung.

Jinx puked on the East Side,
In the house where he visited his brother,
While his "friend" who we'd also let in,
Watched me ouside the house.

I thought he had a gun.
The simple fact, was that he was bigger,
And he was black.
A Black Operative.

He made us drive a long way,
And we stopped at many businesses,
That were closing,
In the darkness of three past midnight.

It was a Wednesday in the summer,
And I didn't have to work that day.
I was the Iron Cow,
And they liked my sweatshirt.

The told Jinx to marry me,
And she said she couldn't,
Because of her "friends"
That was before I slammed his finger in the trunk.

The last stop had been Kentucky Fried Chicken,
Where another of his "friends"
Had left a bag of garbage with fresh food in it,
After loading the back, I smashed his finger.

I learned that he wasn't violent,
Toward me at that instant.
He yelled a lot,
And then got in the car again.

We dropped him at his wife's,
And his "friend" carried their fourty-ounce,
And Jinx and I,
Had sex in the basement that night.

She explained to me about the "friends"
And in Nineteen Ninety Five,
I thought that she was crazy.
The "friends" protected her, she said.

She told me that she wanted,
To teach me how to survive,
On the street without a car.
I told her that I already knew.

All of this happened before Boston.
I went to Boston.
I took an Irish "friend"
He picked our appartment.

This is where things get a little weird. About that time, I had a very brief relationship with a girl named Sue. Sue called herself Jinx as a poet. She made and lost friends quickly and was convinced that I needed a lesson regarding life on the street. Apparently so, based on everything that happened regarding the interest in political motivation and the problems with my finances. She was convinced that I was headed for trouble and she was probably right, however, she caused a bit for me that night that I never want to repeat. She put some very dangerous people in the back of my car, and I was terrified for my life that they might attack us, or harm us in some way. It's a good thing, for both of us, that we survived the incedent, and as you can see, it was the beginning of the collapse of the whole tower of babel, that is about to be shed for you henceforth.


Boston

We met an MIT Graduate,
She was a scientist,
Who told us about apartments,
In a coffee shop.

The Irishman sorted through the list,
And picked our residence,
Correctly the first time.
The old man we lived with, was a schematic artist.

The old man, was a "friend"
He knew the owners of a bar,
And we went there exactly one time,
And played scrabble, and learned linguistics.

I used my computer knowledge,
Of Operating System 2,
And Microsoft technology,
And Voicemail and Facscimile.

I obtained a job,
And used the bus,
Subway, and Taxi,
All for work.

The Irishman was frugal,
He despised the money problem,
And didn't like the nighttime,
In a city that closed at two.

He chose our landlord,
For a loss,
And set us up,
To have to leave.

At this point, is where I cut out, and Medford Village Currents takes up. My work there is substantial and significant to the cause and timing. As I made it my first priority to write it into this Blog, you have probably already read the unabridged version and probably do not need to read it. However, if you have not, I encourage you to read further, and enjoy the story of a Slack well spent in New England.



Billy "The Buffalo" Graham

In nineteen ninety five,
The winds of war swept Buffalo,
And Bill Gates,
Owned the year.

I worked for him for a while,
On his supposed project,
And when it apparently fell through,
I went to school. And met the literalists.

At first I was disturbed,
When I saw Billy Graham,
Say that a powerful force,
Had driven the man across the Falls on a tightrope.

Billy Graham was convinced,
That it was time for us to walk the tightrope again.
Billy Graham had let me know,
In a simple three minutes, that the tightrope was mine.

Billy Graham was the savior,
Of the supposed right,

And the left, well, they aren't really "friends."
Be aware of your behaviors he said.

I won't tell you how he knew about Niagara,
And I won't tell you what sorts would alert him,
That we were here, And alive,
And waiting to be brought to Jesus.

I was learning how to write,
And Jinx was on my mind a lot,
While I went to school,
But how is it that you can write about Jinx?

I will never remember it more clearly, that night, I was trapped at home, with no transportation, and I stood menacingly staring at the television while I listened to Billy Graham's sermon about the Tightrope walk across the Niagara Gorge. Who was he to come here to legislate morality? I thought. In any case, the opportunity presented itself in the form of a friend, and I ended up leaving Billy to preach his Jesus spiel to my father, who rested asleep on the couch.

Jinx D. Cooley

Jinx was a little edgy,
For a "friend," of Seventeen years,
She was into bikers, And seventies punks,
I'd just met her the second time before the Cracker.

She was the Irishman's fault,
Both times we saw each other,
He had been out of sight,
In the background, Somewhere close.

A once a year sex freak,
She spent our time in the basement,
Both times in June.
And she showed me her copper bound knife.

Jinx was going to Florida,
She'd done it the year before,
With her boyfriend,
A biker without a bike.

She was still seeing him,
But she had needed to see me,
Before she left the second time,
Because she missed me.

She said she'd had an abortion,
And she didn't know whose it was,
But that she hoped it wasn't John's,
And that maybe it was, well maybe not, mine.

I will assume his name,
Was John Smith,
But there was never any reason,
For concern about him, He was a nice guy.

I dropped her off that summer,
On a long road,
In Sanborn,
The same place she'd called me from.

When I think of Sue, What I can remember most is the imagery of weaponry, against the fact that she potentially had aborted what could or could not have been my child. It hurt me deeply, and I've written many scattered thoughts on the subject throughout the course of my proper introduction to write. It's made me feel better to get it out in the air, but it also disorients me to know that I had no control over her whatsoever. She was such a wild and free spirit, that she overwhelmed me at times, though the times were short, and it is amazing to think that I will not be there for her for those other significant times in her life, as times pass. And she will not be there for me or mine.

The New Scriptures

As I said, I was learning to write.
I was the jungle-man,
And described the Twenty Third Chapter,
Of The Book Of Revelation.

I managed not to Damn my soul,
By not claiming my words were truth.
And as you can see,
Nothing has been added to the Book of Life.

And the war started in heavens,
In "The Prophecy",
And there was no room,
For a second demon, in the conclusion.

Eric Stoltz was Simon, at Gabriel's right,
In a war between Gabriel and Michael,
Over whether humans should,
Bathe in the glory of God.

I saw the film after the war,
And I knew that it was history,
Otherwise, the story would never,
Never, have been told in proper form.

This refers to an Epic poem I wrote in my first chapbook, The World Before Latin, which has become chapter One of American Mohawk. In essence, I was trying to stake my claims in that poem, The Fire of Dawn, against my beliefs, that Good Always triumphs over Evil, as presented in the film The Prophecy. While the film was not biblically correct, it was frightening to me, and I took some monickers from it and put them into words. The thought that anyone sane would attempt to enhance the true prophecy told in Revelation is ludacris at best. It is about the hardest acid trip on paper that anyone could hope to take and remain competent. And I didn't. I pretty much lost it, which is why you are reading me rather than your homework right now.


John Travolta, My Uncle

The man, from Washington,
He was my Uncle,
And he rode into Washington,
In a Jeep from the Navy.

I knew that I'd seen him before,
When he was hip in the seventies,
And he danced in a nightclub,
And wore bell-bottoms in Florida.

He complained about his ex-wife,
And checks up on his kid,
At least once a month.
His ex-wife is a Catherine.

We stepped into a Tops,
And talked about Grandma's House,
And all of the fixing it needed.
He was my hero, because he saved her.

My uncle took several positions in the Navy. His most advanced position was for firing advanced guns from a ship. He's really a smart guy, and he is kind of a party animal too. He spends time in Vegas, as if here weren't enough of a party, and he comes over for Holidays to see us. He's about the coolest uncle anyone could have. He helped to get my Grandmother out of her house before she got sick from living subsistantly. She was insistent on a number of things, never wanting to leave the family house alone.


Grandma

Grandma was an Alzheimer's case.
I sat with her all night in November,
When she called on the phone,
And her voice shook with the jitter of Coke.

Grandma only drank Coca-Cola,
She only wore big-wool coats,
And managed her life,
From the telephone, And a taxi-cab.

Grandma was a Black Operative,
And she knew all the people,
On the street in the Falls,
And the Banks.

She was always looking out for me,
And introducing me to the older ones,
And keeping me out of trouble,
By tucking a one dollar bill into my hand.

She said to keep them in the bed,
Hide them under the mattress,
Because, that way the crooks would
Never take it away.

Now she's in a good place,
Where they bring her decent food,
And she talks to people,
Rather than bank tellers.

I had a crisis personally over visiting my grandmother one night. She was frightenened because she'd left the back door open and thought there was someone in the house with her. While someone may have been there, earlier in the day and robbed what little she had, there was no one in the house when I got there. I read her some bible readings from the books of Matthew and Mark, and she sat calmly for me, but when I called my parents, they treated me like a heretic and thought I was trying to steal from her myself. This made me angry and frightened of my parents true intents for her. I saw her about a year later in the nursing home and she was a shell of her former self, barely remembering any of us.


Jumbo Pop

We talked about connections,
At the grocery store,
And how the mob closed,
The bar I used to work for.

And my uncle,
He picked up a pack of Jumbo Pop,
And bought me a Wall Street Journal,
Because he said that reading was great to be into.

I was in a Big Green coat that day,
And he knew I was more than green,
In fact, The Jumbo Pop was in a blue package,
And he paid for it with a fifty.

The assistant manager was notified,
And he checked the bill,
While I noticed my sister had a "friend"
Working at another register.

While we drove back,
For Thanksgiving dinner,
I kept thinking, he's going to save Grandma,
And fix up her house.

My uncle did more than that,
He took me to an Al Pacino film,
Before he left for Washington,
And I told him, About my theory on Oklahoma City.

I remember that Thanksgiving like it was Yesterday. The table was being set, when my Mom asked us to go out to the store for a few things. We bought some Soda and some Pop Corn and My Uncle, seeing that I was eyeing the cover of the Wall St. Journal, bought me a copy of that too. We have something in common my Uncle and I. To a degree we've both been the bad seeds of our family, running out our luck dime by dime. But he had true compassion for my grandmother while she was still living, and for that I will never forget him. He helped to get her into a home, and secure the loose ends that revolved around her rather erratic lifestyle, and he visited her, more than any of us, keeping her warm and loved right up to the end.


The American Irish Republican Army

A fat blond chess player,
Alcoholic, and Scotch whiskey drinker,
This other Irishman, Called Black Fourty Seven,
Who had a Long Shoreman's card,

Told me at the cafe'
Within a day after the bomb,
That I ought to know who I was speaking with,
When I made comments about the military.

It would seem fitting,
That we would discover,
That McNicols was from Sanborn.
I thought better than to re-approach the idea there.

They hassled me all summer,
He and a "friend" In ninety-five,
While I drank coffee,
About my car, How they needed to borrow it.

And they kept trying to bet me a nickel,
On a game of pinball,
And they weren't talking about Mary Jane, or her sisters,
And they wouldn't agree on the term of "five-cents."

The two of them were interesting that summer,
Before Jinx had come back,
And before Boston,
Because they got me cheap beer, and places to crash.

These are the people I was terrified of, whether they existed at all, or whether it was just some figment of my imagination to this day remains to be seen. Ed may have just been screwing around with me, but I don't take threats lightly. I was concerned for my life when I heard him speak. I didn't let on at first, but these secretly were the people I suspected were involved somehow in revolutionary activities. My mind has squared now having been far away from them for a long time, and I am clear to the point that they were just some 20 somethings looking to jostle a mark in a bar. After all, we were drunk, and had money in our wallets.


Quitting Sony

On the way to Boston,
I dropped off my headset,
And a printed letter,
To each department head.

I was quitting Sony,
And telling Michael Eisner to find another sucker to screw.
Disney Interactive designed the worst software on earth,
In Nineteen Ninety Four.

My job had been to fix it,
For a hundredth of what it had been worth.
I liked the people I talked to.
Michael Eisner had fucked the company.

There is no way,
To get ahead,
On fourteen hours of work per week,
And Michael Eisner, I handed you the bucket of brains you wasted.

I made sure my own weren't in there,
And I know that Takahashi was smart enough,
To know that we were smart enough,
To take the dive, Moving to the Atlantic.

Next Time I'll be looking for Ed Asner,
And Fred Astaire, And someone young,
Like Val Kilmer,
Who knows the Score.

This was big-time, lashing back at the corporate whip like a lion, trained with one, following the commands of that master was complex. The products that we fixed, the Disney software and the Sony hardware, was very complex and we all knew we deserved more than we were getting. But the thing I found out while working there, was that we weren't ever expected to fix the problems that the customers were calling with. We were a stop gap, a public relations fix. And I'll tell you, there's no amount of public relations that can stop a whining 2 year old, or an angry "In the know" executive. Good-bye Sony, hello Boston.


Black Fourty Seven

Black Fourty Seven drove me home,
In my car,
I was too drunk to walk,
And the party was at his place.

He wanted to make sure I didn't kill anyone,
While driving the Eisenhower thruway,
And the party was atomic,
With The Jesus And Mary Chain.

We drank more there,
With Chaos,
A ripped nightclub security,
And Lady Japan and her Chip.

I went to lay down after a round,
On Black Fourty Seven's bed,
And soon made my way,
To the bathroom.

The toilet had slimy rounded edges,
And when I looked up after,
At the shower,
I could tell that the place was no paradise.

Black Fourty Seven got a bottle of Jack,
That I delivered to his brother,
Another Clive Barker,
The next afternoon.

If I recall, to skip back a beat, chronologically this was placed here backwards. I was working for Sony at the time this happened so It seems a little off balance, but then isn't everything when you are really really drunk?


Chip

Chip sucked his thumb a lot,
He was the "friend" after the car,
His front tooth was chipped,
And he was a Cafe' clerk.

Chip said he owed a black man money,
And he wanted the Shadow,
To make Three Thousand,
In two days.

I had to start inking out the line.
The car didn't belong to me,
It was my dad's,
And he's ex-Navy.

It had been rumoured that Chip was a coke-head. He actually somewhere in the back of his small brain thought that I might actually let him borrow my car to make a delivery or rob a bank or something. I had to say, "Talk to the hand" and leave him wondering. My answer was an affirmative "NO."

Dad

I made my dad out for them,
He was a dick,
and he didn't like people,
and I was lucky he liked me.

He was actually his Brother,
The man from Washington,
Except a little more reserved.
He almost went to Viet Nam, on a boat.

He said the chances were lower,
Of getting shot, On a boat.
And since he didn't go,
He must have been right.

There are three others total,
Including Uncle Jumbo Pop,
One is an Army historian,
The other retired Airforce.

My Dad is very stable,
And I remembered when I lied to Chip,
That he was a teacher,
For Naval Fire School.

I wish I'd never said anything regarding my Dad as I have in these passages. He's one of the few good honest hardworking men that I know. I don't know why I had to frame it that way, but at the time I had mixed feelings about him. Things weren't right for me. I was coming out of a drug and alcohol haze and wasn't making much sense to be quite honest, which is what we are about to get to. Hold in suspense if you will.

Ellis Island

During the summer,
The green statue on Ellis Island,
Waves the torch,
Above the harbor.

She was copper once,
A gift from the French,
And now Iacocca,
Has repaired her.

I bought my dad his first Iacocca,
The book about the Chrysler turn around,
And I think he read the second one,
When I left it in the bathroom.

We talked in the snow,
In December,
Just before the war,
About Ellis Island, And the Olympic Games.

Shoveling snow with dad was something I used to like to do. Now I get muscle pain just from sitting too long in one position. I think next year I am going to make an effort to get out there with him and shovel some. Just for the sake of sharing the burden a little bit. My feet have been colder in the Spring..

Swatches

In Boston, I was on the subway,
I was reading Windows Ninety Five For Dummies.
As we headed downtown at seven in the morning,
Two Japanese Stepped onto my car.

I looked up at a Gucci watch,
They were getting off at Harvard,
I knew they had a briefcase full of job offers.
The ride was to an interview.

I got off at City Hall,
And walked across the cement patio,
To the steps to South Market,
And waited to see a woman.

She was from Buffalo,
And she set me up with a job,
After a typing test,
And fifteen minutes of talk.

On the ride back,
I saw the poster,
Of a watch, on a fence link-chain,
An Official Sponsor of the Olympic Games.

When I got back to Niagara,
I bought two,
And an extra battery,
From a nice older jewelry saleswoman.

I tried to sell one,
A week later,
To Black Fourty Seven's friend,
But Chip wanted it too cheap.

One was silver, and grey-faced,
And another, Black, and silver cut.
You can see the gears inside,
The six-point star, and hear it ticking.

I had one with copper cuttings,
At the beginning of Chicago,
It was purchased in a Mall,
In Toledo, Because I'd left the Timex.

This is where things really hit the fan. How many people do you know that go to the mall and buy things on credit to turn around and sell them in the street? Think twice, not many since the advent of e-bay. The shell was beginning to crack, layer upon layer of nerves were jangling...

Chicago

I left Chicago the year I arrived,
In December, while snow grew,
from the sidewalk.
It took time, to pack the car.

I could have stayed,
My fiancé drew me back,
I couldn't not know my future wife,
But her Mother wrecked her when I'd gone.

My part of Chicago was cold,
The buildings were all Albany grey,
And the floors all black tiled,
Squeeked with wet sneakers, all season.

I was a fraternal freshman,
And our house, the largest, was amazing.
We had water wars,
And beach volleyball.

We were rocking scientists,
Listening to the Killer-B,
And making Nirvanah,
Smell like teen spirit.

We had three rectangled floors,
And a basement.
We had a Halloween party,
And learned to practice safe sex.

We were Dr. Seuss fraternity,
With one named Larry,
Who Re-Wrote the classic,
And called it "Drunk-Man I Am."

And Drunk Man I was,
With a mouthful of Whiskey Sour,
In a motorcycler's room,
Every other night.

We carried each other to tests a lot,
I remember crossing the busy street,
At eight forty five,
And getting a seventy, in Calculus.

The first time I shaved my head,
I was sober.
I was an Industrial Musician,
Convening with the likes of Jourgenson.

I went to Wax Trax once with a Plastic Man.
His art was Plexiglass, And tissue paper,
And he and Morrison,
Spent time On The Other Side.

My designer roomate,
Had suspended my bed from the ceiling,
With a single concrete screw,
And a thin wood bar.

It came crashing down,
The day after her visit.
His weak design, almost killed us both,
When the wood sunk into his designer mattress.

I finished my time there,
In a private room,
In a cubby hole under the raised floor,
And dreamed of her at night.

I don't know why I threw this flashback in here. Probably because all of my regrets were centering on me at once. If I could have this scenario to do over again, things would have been different. My fiance' and I were madly in love at the time Chicago occurred, or at least I thought we were, and there was nothing changing us more, than the music.


Larry

Larry is an Italian Architect now.
He made it out,
And continued through graduate school.
They made him an officer, of the house.

Larry and I talked about Celtic Prose,
And he explained why he hated his real name,
And taught me about Archetypes,
And Greek Jesters in his Literature.

Larry and I went to Medusa's,
An art club, With music and noise,
And Front 242, from Germany,
Fueled the open theater.

I'll not forget the pictures of Medusa the model on the wall of the club. There were a couple of things going on that night, one of which was a performance art group called two beats ahead. They both went to a school a couple blocks away. I never ended up meeting them again. Getting a phone set up in Chicago had been more work than it was worth.


Plastic Man

The Plastic Man is a music collector.
He had gone to art school.
He insisted that the next big band,
Was called Smashing Pumpkins.

I didn't believe him.
I told him that I didn't like Haloween,
And I explained the story Clearly,
About the suggested murder of a turtle.

He ordered lots of compact disks, as Benjamin Franklin
From Columbia House,
And BMG, and every other club.
They delivered them regularly to the non-existant fourth floor.

Dan was the plastic man. He was among the hippest of the members of the fraternity, and also, the most deserving of the term dangerous. He was into old Hendrix, Stones, and Led Zeppelin. If you know what that means, he was into everything that went with them too. At that point in my life, I thought myself not ready just yet to dive off of the cliff.


Standard Love Story

She pulled me inside her,
Naked, on her sister's bed.
In her mother's room,
And under the shower curtain.

Those were our first times,
On the first day,
That her mother left for Ohio.
There was a twist.

We'd been playing for a month,
And I hadn't expected her,
To let me hug her chest to chest,
Watching cartoons.

The summer before Chicago,
We knew I would be leaving,
But we had to know our Prom meant something,
Two hundred dollars worth of gold and diamond.

My living room floor was quite healthy,
A light blue rug, and a nice comforter,
And of course, the television,
We never slept, there was no reason for her leaving.

And then it crashed when I came back,
And I wasn't a smart boy anymore,
With a shaved head, and plans for Buffalo,
Another idiot concert freak.

Thank you dear Mother-In-Law,
I've learned that sex can be better,
And you knew all along, That she was a Burger King girl,
Because you made her.

Final words. This says it, although this regret has lasted with me until this very day, you can't unmake a persons ultimate allegiance.


Onyx Pickups

The Onyx Pickups started showing up in December.
They appeared first on Television,
Launching through mid-air.
And next I saw them following me.

Dodge was moving them,
Faster than lightning,
Propelling them over snowy hills,
Coated with micro-fine-print lease rates.

I determined, through a series of assumptions,
And past envisionments created by film,
That they were driven,
By Agents of the Government.

The Onyx Pickups weren't inexpensive.
It could only benefit the economy,
To effectively protect,
The Nation's Future Leader.

I watched them fall into line one night,
Driving down Main Street,
Pulling out from different perpendicular streets,
Ahead of me, And behind me.

I was giving them a test run,
By wearing my sunglasses,
To pick up a copy of the Journal,
At the Supermarket.

The agents in the trucks spoke without words.
They didn't need cell-phones.
They didn't need CB's.
They would listen for Alice In Chains on FM radio.

The idea wasn't very complex.
They had been watching me, since Chicago.
All they had to do, to find out my station,
Was flip to the ones that didn't static out, on their custom tuners.

Whenever I put my sunglasses on,
Alice and Chains would play.
And if I put on my readers,
The Onyx Pickups would be gone within minutes.

In this way I tested them,
A couple of times over vacation,
Only at night.
Sometimes Police Cars joined them.


Agents of the Government

There are several types of agents,
Agents of the Government,
In my realm of perception.
Some you see, Others, Just exist.

You easily spot the secret service,
They jog with the President,
In red, white, and blue,
With thin light grey lenses.

Others have darker sunglasses,
And they wear black suits,
And run alongside his limousine,
And look hyper-pro, in the sunlight.

Others just show their eyes,
Wiggling them up and down fast in their sockets,
They're Mercs,
And they instantly assess, miles of terrain.

The Mercs deserve a special note,
They do a sweep on request,
Of a building entered, by the important.
Many have grey hair, but look younger than twenty.

The "friends" do not get mention here.
They are non-existant.
Try to pin a "friend" down,
And a "friend" will vanish, to even the air.

Each of these has a secret horror to cope with.
Each of these has an undefinable cost,
And Each of these Agents of the Government,
Has sculpted talent for service.
In all of it's gruesome form.


The Warlord

The Warlord was huge,
She was an old Communist,
Driving in a big dusty,
A black Buick Skylark, Limited Edition.

I met with her council,
On the bridge once, Sitting in a circle,
And they had Old General's Eyes,
And wore heavy coats.

I told them I'd be running for president,
But I didn't tell them when.
They looked at me in the green coat,
And thought to themselves.

We went to Rite Aid one afternoon,
A new building on Military,
And the new signs inside,
Reminded me of an airport terminal.

The Warlord showed me her cafe',
And I had a Diablo Omlette.
We paid the Sweetheart Waitress,
And I smiled at her, and arranged her marriage.


The Sweetheart Waitress

This girl knew what the profession was about.
She smiled at me three times,
And I knew that she was Catholic,
A red guard, with a hard philosophy.

She had medium long black hair,
And brown eyes, that looked down her nose,
She wore no glasses,
And I could see her bra.

It showed lightly through the white shirt,
At the pancake house,
I knew that it was her style,
Not some strange accident.

That was the first time she smiled.
On the second,
She leaned over to hand me my eggs.
She knew that The Warlord was watching us.

We were flirting like teenagers,
Something we wouldn't have done,
If The Warlord hadn't been there.
And she kept my coffee hot.

It was a war-torn smile she had,
When she came back for refills,
With the sweat of the kitchen on her brow,
And she asked, "Don't we know each other?",
without saying a word.


The English Church

I went with the Warlord,
To the Big English Church,
To start the Holy War,
On Christmas.

I'd been to three churches that day,
At each, There'd been a different note played,
Of the same Ancient hymn,
That we heard on the Pipes, that evening.

The stain glassed windows,
Showed their colors only in shades of grey,
And their shapes were no longer biblical,
I pictured the crusades, in their fuzzy night-time look.

There was an Operative there,
In a long Red Jacket,
With black lips,
And purple under her eyes.

She looked degenerate,
And I was sad to say I knew her.
She was one of the people who harassed Grandma,
Because I heard her talk about her once.


Red Jacket

The red coat, or Jacket,
Was worn by a blond woman,
She was twenty,
And gruesome.

I could picture her lying nude,
On a bed of Pointsettias,
Spreading to get anyone,
To drink their juice.

She was an unregistered lethal weapon,
Of X culture,
Armed with bayonets for fingernails,
And poison lipstick.

I met her with a younger one,
Who was far from thin,
And there had been,
Mary Jane in the ashtray.

There wasn't any reason to talk,
After I'd heard the story about the cat-lady,
That crazy old grandmother,
And her boyfriend, The Hipster.

Now she's a Black Widow,
Everyone knows it,
And maybe she'll quit the free agency,
And start understanding the messages,
Start getting with the program.


The Hipster

The hipster had a big white ghetto sled,
He dropped Grandma off once,
A while ago.
I was busy working problems.

I told him thank you,
And she gave him five dollars,
And he smiled at me through his long hair,
And lit up a cigarette.

When he pulled out of the driveway,
I remembered him in a Tesla shirt,
One of the rockers at High School,
And how I'd never known him,
To do anything in particular.


Happy New Year

Tigger threw a new year's party,
With red candles,
And Blue and White Dresses,
At his cottage, under the escarpment.

We ate shrimp, with sauce,
And vegetables,
And Played Taboo,
And a lot of people showed.

Nickel, Lucy, Babbage, Stacey,
And The Forester,
And Nikita and Case,
Ghandi's Daugther and her cousin.

Lucy and Tigger get it on.
They like Stacy, Babbage, and The Forester.
They all gave each other Christmas presents,
At the last Party.

They did me the favor,
Of picking up some wine with no kick,
Because I'd straightened out,
And I was proud of it.

I told them about the postcard,
From Mr. Ohio,
And they said they'd gotten them too,
And we talked about Henry Rollins.

After the others left,
Lucy and Tigger got me a nice blanket,
And I wrapped myself into the folding couch,
Before the fire of the television.

When I woke up,
There were Bannanas In Pajamas,
Playing on the beach,
With Teddy Bears.


Mr. Ohio

Mr. Ohio is a "friend,"
He has a brother also,
But I'll get to him,
soon enough.

The postcard arrived,
Mail-marked from Costa Rica,
On the same day,
That Kennedy rescued a Hispanic.

She pulled him out of the fields,
Of a work commune,
And put him on the back,
Of her moped.

Mr. Ohio is a Kung Fu expert,
He ripped the card off of a cereal box,
And mailed it back to the U.S.
To me, And I got the message.

Mr. Ohio was coming back.
And "Yeeeeeeeeahhhh Boyee"
He was coming back.
We were going to party, Mr. Ohio and I.


Tick

The night after the biker war,
Tick walked into the cafe',
And asked to borrow the table,
That I'd been sitting at.

It was post-Christmas.
He set down his helmet,
And pulled his black Jacket back,
To reach into the inner pocket.

His face was all scarred up,
And his leather was coated with old punk,
The torn T-shirt near the pocket,
Had the skull of The Exploited spiking out.

I caught his night glow Timex,
Just like Uncle Jumbo Pop's,
And I knew why he was there,
With a chemical liquid, in a balloon.

He making sure it had held,
It hadn't broken under his arm.
He was saving it for the set up scene,
Where at least sixty death certificates,
Would be issued.

"They were all my friends, and they died."
; ¶ 8:47 PM
Friday, April 23, 2004
Buffalo Parallels Noisecontrol Publishing - At the same time I was doing all of this rave stuff in Toronto, I was attending school and work. I met people in different ways in different phrases of being. The first person I met to tie me into the Buffalo scene that I didn't solicit on my own was Matt. Matt was an artist at an Artists and Models rave that knew the people that ran the rave, as I did, because I sold Smart Drinks there. That night I was covered by the Buffalo News. If you've been following the story, you already knew that.

Matt told me about Bob who was opening a coffee shop on Allen St. The coffee shop hadn't opened when I walked in the door and made my pitch. The first day coincided with a Grateful Dead concert in Orchard Park. There was a girl present helping the day before opening named Gina X. The night before opening was the first Atlantis Rave in Toronto. Thinking I could make a quick score, I invited Gina X to go to the Atlantis Rave with me and participate in the whole Dead show parking lot riot we were about to start with the Smart Drinks.

The Atlantis rave was awesome. It was held at the Ontario Science Center, and I don't think I've ever had more fun riding escalators in my entire life than I had that summer. Of course I had some help from some Blotter. But that's beside the point, the damage is done now and there's no need to further regret it. I saw God come in with the sunrise that morning while standing in the mayhem of 2000 freaking ravers while Apotheosis carried the laser waves over the crowd.

I remember being shown a record album called the little green men, by the guy who wrote the music, and later in another trip to Toronto, I sought it out and bought it. It was very scientific sounding, as he had sold it to me.

The morning after the Rave, I ended up dropping Gina off at her apartment, having gained nothing for taking her there, as I was for the most part lost in my own mind. And I went over to the Topic Coffee House on opening day in Allen Town.

Bob and several of his helpers were there. I remember a guy named John who was volunteering to go to the dead show, and I was mentally spent, but I agreed to go as well. It was a long drive and I was lucky to find Bob and Paul out in the parking lot. It was a huge grass field outside the stadium with cars parked in no particular pattern. We were near the center of it. Bob mixed way too much drink to be sold in advance, and I warned him it might go to waste, but he proceeded any way. I broiled in the August sun for 5 hours before giving up and letting his other helpers take over, as there was no point in staying, he didn't make his money back on the purchase.

However, he did purchase a lot more smart drink from me for use in the Cafe'. I didn't expect this, but over the course of that season we did a few hundred dollars business with Bob. And I became a regular at the cafe'. Over time I would meet Martin, Carl, Larry, Ra, Ed, Deb, Chris, Linda, and Fred. These were the people Scott and I would know best during the 93-95 years. Carl was an old man with a cane and a Cadillac and a knack for having young girls sit on his lap. I don't know why, they just always made this Don Juan seem like some kind of rich old Santa Claus.

Martin was a depressed Barista with some serious leather problems. He liked to play 2112 by Rush Over and Over and Over again. I know the words almost by heart to this day. "You can't get Freedom for Free"....

Larry was a black chessmaster, who used to play keyboards, wore a hearing aid, and was mean with the Nun Chucks. I have many Larry stories, but they don't all neatly fit into a framework so I will save them for elaboration later. He looked like Michael Jackson without the teeth, and he always had a great smile. He was also something of a family man, always concerned about taking care of his son, who lived with his mother on the other side of town. The funniest story was the first time I went to his apartment and saw that he had a chess board set up in a kids swimming pool with goldfish in it in his living room. If anyone worshipped the game it was Larry. We used to call him the Chess Terminator and together among those of us who played chess with him, developed the idea for a magazine with a Chess Mate of the month. A chess magazine with a pinup girl fold out.

Ra spent time with Carl. Ra looked mean, but spoke softly. He never got angry with me, but I surveyed from conversations with him that he was an ex. Not much more to say, than you need to stand your ground when you meet people and not go too far into unmarked territory. He played a lot of chess and even dragged Carl to a houseparty that I helped to put flyers out for.

Ed was an Irish chess player who proudly wore a Black 47 T-shirt and was a huge fan of The Jesus and Mary Chain, who Scott also liked. He collected a lot of their rare b-sides, singles, and imports. Many nights Ed would drag us across the street to the Old Pink Flamingo to have beer and play pinball. There was a pinball machine called the Twilight Zone that was extremely popular. One night I got too drunk to drive home while with Ed. Sick drunk. I ended up passing out on his couch during a party that continued in his apartment. To this day I am grateful that he invited me back and didn't let me drive back home.

Deb was passed between Chris and Ed for a bit and they got into a fight over her, with one of them going down a flight of stairs. I can't recall which one it was. I do know that Chris used to like to suck his thumb, and had a chipped tooth. Chris ended up getting Linda for a time, until much later when he moved to Rochester.

Linda was a Japanese student teacher with promising characteristics. She used to sit with us and smoke menthol cigarettes. Something that she and I definitely agreed on. We talked about my study of Japanese in high school and every once in a while, she would teach me a new word.

Fred was an older Jewish guy who came in to play Chess with a guy named Tom and a few others. We ended up playing scrabble a few times with him and it caught and held on. Scrabble was a lot of fun and became a great alternative to Chess, at least on my record, as many of them were much better Chess players than I.
Over time Fred has actually gotten me out of more than a few scrapes.

One of Fred's roomates for a time was a guy named Jeff who hand made bags with cloth from thrift stores. He got pretty good at it, and uses it as a means to pay for the high life. He had an open heart surgery where they replaced his heart with an artificial one. He could outlast some of us. He's got the perfect ticker.

For now this is all I have. The next movement is in the pages of Black Operations. Part II of American Mohawk. Here's the link: http://www.americanmohawk.blogspot.com
; ¶ 2:14 PM
Thursday, April 22, 2004
Steve's Follow Up Noisecontrol Publishing - Steve got a call from that girl from the Delerium rave later, asking if he'd be interested in a threesome with she and her bisexual friend. He had to say no to the encounter and as far as I know, that's the last he ever heard of her. He moved about a month later, and I didn't end up seeing him much later. I ran into him at one Rave in Hamilton where Aquaviva and Hawtin were present, but the affair was a small scale event and I don't imagine much positive came from it. I was high and I really couldn't make much sense of anything at that point.
; ¶ 6:21 PM
Delerium Noisecontrol Publishing - The Delerium Rave was something to behold. I took St

Chris, I don't know if you've realized it yet, but if you post a 30 page long word document in its entirety, no one will actually bother to read it. You'd be better off with a brief synopsis (one where you can fit all of it on the screen at once) with a link to the full text for those who are interested.

even though you're well behaved and articulate or whatever, you're still a troll.

Me or him?

heh....him, dood....you a star.

I thought I might have come off a little harsh.

I'm still trying to figure out why he posted that stream of consciousness at all. i mean, sheesh.

Be kind, gents. Look who's talking...

Makes me realise we need a "WGB for Dummies" in the announcements thread.

CB often does this. Posting anecdotes or writing in the news thread - stuff that only relates to himself, as if him hanging round a casino is up there in newsworthiness with the Tsunami or Iraq.

Then there's the classic Nov 4th threads - again just his personal blog entries - where ol' Chris feels the need to take one of his replies in one of his threads and start a new topic about with the exact same post.

I'd have welcomed this post in "random"

So, your complaint is what, lithos? That the posts are trivial or irrelevant?

You do realise this is the internet, don't you?

too long, boring, and time consuming. i don't even post this much on my blog. you're overdoing it, chris, and losing an audience quickly. i agree with lith.

I'm perfectly well-acquainted with CB's patterns. He's been on the board much longer than you have, lithos, and I've been observing him for much longer than you have.

I ask merely that you consider a bit of his content for a moment and then ask yourself which course of action does less harm: Ridiculing him, or just leaving him alone?

Delerium Noisecontrol Publishing - The Delerium Rave was something to behold. I took Steve (the British Raver) and Pat to the party to help me set up and serve Smart Drinks. What we did not know about the party until we had arrived, was that it was being held in the Latvian embassy in Toronto. There were Latvians walking around in full dress uniform looking for beer. They didn't realize that the point of the party was drugs. So, since we had some beer, not much, we shared when the occassional full uniformed Latvians came up to the bar.

Steve made a score with a young nearly naked female wearing nothing but nipple tassles and men's briefs. She and he found a good place, underneath the smart bar. They were under there for a long time, and I almost caught them in the act, but they had pretty much finished, by the time I was cogent enough to check.

Pat went and danced off to the music, he really enjoyed the happy hardcore and jungle. And unfortunately, one of the ravers we saw had to be carried out of the party puking from an overdose.

All in all, it was a riot.

Keep kicking those drum rolls.
; ¶ 2:35 PM
Pleasure Force - Moby Cybersonic and The Prodigy Noisecontrol Publishing - I have to step back a little bit here, because I've missed telling part of the relationship with Shelby. In trying to get back into her good graces, I bought her a ticket to another rave to be held at a club called the Government - Then in transition from the name RPM. RPM was huge and the lines outside were always huge. We had tickets, but I knew we would be held up due to Shelby's chronic ID problem, so I went to the bus for Ritchie Hawtin - Friend of Sean Rose, and asked him if we could get stage passes to get her in. He smiled and handed them to us with no recourse on the condition that we bring them to him once inside. I said sure and we were off. Ritchie was a shaved headed raver that looked a lot like the lead singer from Linkin Park. Some tell tales of him building his own Helicopter. He is the only member of his band Cybersonik and his music is grinding aural extasty. If there is any way to describe it. In any case, that night we saw the Prodigy do Charlie and dance about the stage in a very foreign and british sort of way. We saw Moby, again, for the second time in Toronto. And we saw Cybersonik. It was very cool, and I can't thank Ritchie enough for getting us past security. It is evidence of his coolness with the younger set.
; ¶ 2:10 PM
Detroit Again Noisecontrol Publishing At some point in there I went to Detroit again, to keep a promise to a Girl named Tanya who called me from Toronto. I don't know why I did it, maybe just because I was foolish. I ended up meeting her whole family, and though I desperately needed sleep after the drive, I was not afforded any when I got there. I ended up meeting with two record people when I got there. One named Karl and the other named Herdist. One was from Definitive and the other from Transmat. I was glad that they were about and I ended up going to a club where Karl was spinning that night with Herdist and as it turned our Sean Rose, the original smart drink vendor. We almost were shot from a vehicle while going back to the parking lot. I kept walking and was ok. Detroit really is a tough city. Industry had been a blast though. It was an interesting form of the high life, and not much at all like going to the Pleasure Dome. I wanted to dance, but somehow it just didn't feel right in that atmosphere. It was too professional. Not much of an underground scene. The people there were dressed in Prep attire. It wasn't very urban I guess, even though the music was excellent.
; ¶ 2:00 PM
Going it Alone - Moby Noisecontrol Publishing - A few weeks after my business at the Pleasure Dome fell apart and a few weeks after losing Shelby, I decided I should celebrate my newfound independence. I decided to go to a Rave on Young Street alone. This Rave was at the site of the first concert other than Depeche Mode that I had gone to without prior preparation. It was at the "Concert Hall" an old Masonic temple on Yonge St. Moby was going to play.

As soon as I got there, I found my drugs through a guy I knew only by his reggae hairstyle, In a poem later, I've called him the Dreadlock Bambaclaat as I have no liking for him now. At the time however, he was my pusher.

I tripped and the colors became wavelike. I found myself lost in the crowd, seeing all of the vibrance that acid brings on in the human traffic of the club. I kept needing water. I knew now why I'd been so popular as a vendor. When Moby played Go, I was in the balcony watching him from afar, but tuning directly into what he had to offer. At the time I didn't know much about his lineage. I just knew he was one of the coolest performers alive.

At the end of the party, I remember meeting some people from Detroit, and asking them if I could borrow money to go to the after party party. They said no, if you can't pay, you can't play. That was about the time I began to realize what I was up against.
; ¶ 1:22 PM
February - Acen - Toronto Noisecontrol Publishing - In February, I met Steve and things started to get Hectic. Steve was British and had been watching me at the Pleasure Dome. I didn't realize what he was looking out for until he mentioned my Labcoat. We had a beer and I told him about what I'd been doing all along in Toronto. He said he'd like to go up one of these times, so I said I'd consider it. He was unable to go immediately, and I was going the next night, so he skipped this one and he was lucky.

I went with Shelby in the Storm of the Century, to a Pleasure Force party on the West side of Toronto. Acen was playing. I got lost in the music and mayhem of the moment and accidentally left her smoking pot in a vapo rub tent set up near the entrance. She'd been tripping on acid as well and got scared. So frightened in fact that she got sick.

I knew nothing the better, and had been losing myself dancing to Acen, and this pretty much terminated our relationship when I met her later in the morning. She thought I was irresponsible and prone to overdosing. For all I know I was.

I drove her home with no mercy from her remarks the entire way, in the bitter cold of a blizzard, and we watched the sun come up. It was a cold mean sun, and the winter seemed to have no end.
; ¶ 1:07 PM
Pleasure Force Noisecontrol Publishing - About 2 weeks went by, and I started having Shelby take care of my affairs at the Pleasure Dome night club here in the US. The Pleasure Dome was huge housing about 2500 to 3000 people every Friday and Saturday. I was only however, taking in about $150 - $200.00 per night here in the states. The trend never really caught on.

We had a huge sign up in the rafters that was strung by tensile wire, and it looked really impressive.

Meanwhile, I started getting involved with "The Rise" a nightclub/after hours establishment on Richmond St. I would set up a little bar in there and take in about $350 per night. The rub was the payout of 30%. It was an outrageously bad deal for me, and I never fully equated profit and loss from it because most of my spending was on credit cards and I never took into account the cost of gas or other expenses.

In addition, I came to learn later that Shelby had been in the till at the Pleasure Dome and not paying them out the correct percentage. I couldn't control something that I never saw.

I took her to one last Pleasure Force Rave where an image of the Joker was moved from wall to wall. It was particularly disturbing on Acid. So much so that I misoriented and lost myself and Shelby a number of times during the night and gave up a free demo CD from an Acid house producer.

You win some, you lose some.

February was coming fast...
; ¶ 12:56 PM
Windsor Hotel Noisecontrol Publishing - We stopped on our way back from the Rave at the nearest Hotel to the Ambassador Bridge on the Windsor side, and Shelby and I took in for a good morning's rest. Not being one to kiss and tell, I will say only this. The bathtub was perfect for two.

Dave woke us up early in the afternoon for lunch with the Stickman records people in the hotel restaurant. We moved along quickly and before we knew it, we were dropping Dave off in Toronto again. We got to meet Dave's girlfriend who was distributing magazines on the street in Toronto.

; ¶ 12:47 PM
Detroit Noisecontrol Publishing - A week following the trip to Toronto, Shelby and I decided to go to Detroit for a real rave, as they had started so many years back - The late 80's presumably. Dave was back in Town from Calgary and he wanted to go too, so we stopped in Toronto to pick him up along the way. He was barely 19. We stopped at a famous record shop in Detroit called Record Time where Mike Huckaby and Ritchie Rich Hawtin were known for having worked or spun records in. The shop was in Gratiot Michigan, not far from the Ambassador bridge. The store at a glance was rather plain looking, but at a second glance, had T-shirts selling labels like Hardwax and Panic. These were 2 of the harder labels that were in the bins in the shop. They also had +8 merchandise, Ritchie's label. I bought several +8 records and some assorted white labels, and Dave bought many more. I also bought one of the Hardwax T-shirts and a Panic hat. I still have the Panic hat lying on my bedroom floor. We also bought tickets for the rave that night near the Fox building.

The Rave was in an old bowling alley where the lanes were converted into a dancefloor. I really wanted to get high, but I was advised against it several times by my friends who scattered themselves around and about the alley. We had had to bribe the security guards to get Shelby past the door, because she hadn't brought ID. (Not a smart thing to do when in a foreign country). Anyway we got her in and it cost me an extra $5. per ticket.

I remember the Transmat tracks zinging in and out of my ears when their DJ's took the stage, and I remember walking around and looking at all of the T-shirts and hats. It was really a pretty big event, and in comparison with Toronto a very black event. In Canada, most ravers had been white or asian, but in this scenario, most were black or hispanic. I felt kind of edgy and out of place most of the night, but then I realized where the soul of the music originated. White people did not start this craze after all.
; ¶ 12:20 PM
More Toronto Continued... Noisecontrol Publishing - So once Shelby and I were established we had something going. At the Chemistry party we made contacts to set up 2 raves for New Years Eve. Chemistry 8 and a gay rave in the Sears building. That was an escapade if ever there was one. I remember driving 5 people in my Shadow covered in bags of Ice from one site to the other, to set up and deliver our stuff to the makeshift bars we set up. Shelby was in charge of the gay rave, and I drove back and forth between the two, where I had this Skater kid Rich set up the Chemistry bar. Things went smoothly as no one was high, and at the end of the night I wound up with $2000.00 US. It was nice, almost enough to buy turntables with. They gay rave co-ordinator, whose name if I recall correctly was Eric, was extremely enamored with us and bought 200.00 worth of smart drink powder and one of my blenders to make his own at home. (I knew he wanted the recipes to do his own vending). Against my better judgement I sold him on it, and we were off...

; ¶ 12:13 PM
Monday, April 19, 2004
Toronto Continued Noisecontrol Publishing - After Chemistry 7 I was ready to take on the world. As I mentioned before, immediately following this, I met Shelby, who I took many times to Swiss Chalet where we had her favorite roasted Chicken. We had a lot of fun together. She was very appealing to the eye. And as I mention in one poem regarding her, she loved to wear stretch pants. I liked those a lot. I don't think I have to remind gentlemen why.

I remember shopping with Shelby at Spencers in the Summit Park Mall. The mall was still healthy and vibrant then, and there were people of all ages roaming the stores. We bought some novelty items and buttons and things like that, and she shoplifted. It wasn't to be helped, she had her own way of things. I guess what I could say is that you can't put too much candy in front of her. But that was her personality, very wild and care free.

More to come in the next installment.
; ¶ 3:10 AM
Friday, April 16, 2004

Chemistry Seven Noisecontrol Publishing -

Chemistry 7
Dedicated to
Rich, Tanya, Scott, Smiley, Mark, Dante, and Alx
by Christopher Bradley
4/14/00 12:28:48 AM

December twenty third, nineteen ninety two,
The end of my first year home from Chicago,
First go at the Biz for myself,
I had only an inkling of what I was in for.

Scott and I drove up to Tanya's early in the day,
She lived a few streets down behind Yonge and Bay,
In a large Red Brick apartment,
With narrow staircases.
Scott and I met some of her roomates,
And then went for a walk to get Pizza and Change.
It was a long walk across to Yonge on foot.
And we encountered some interesting places along the way.

Somehow weeks later I would find a highly liberal magazine,
Dedicated to Angry Dykes,
In the trunk of the Shadow,
I think we had thought it was amusing during our walk.
We found a small Italian Restaurant,
Had a slice or two and a soda,
And then resumed until we found the Arcade.
It was almost straight ahead when we got to Yonge.

The vendor sold us neatly wrapped Loonies,
and a bundle of red twos.
We walked back,
Barely aware of our own conversation.
I was still in amazement at my luck,
Sean had gone to Europe,
and I was stuck with an exclusive party.
It was as if the world had fallen into my lap.

We snagged Tanya and had her walk us to the subway,
and we met Rich the skater,
David's friend,
Soon to be the only sober one among us.

We packed Tanya's boyfriend into the car with all of us,
and stopped at a Mini-Mart to buy all of their Ice.
The bags melted slowly all around my backseat passengers.
And then we were on our way East, to the hidden warehouse.

The structure was longer than I had imagined,
but had a low ceiling.
We walked along a Handicapped access ramp at about 9:20.
And dragged the water and Ice behind us.

I dropped my bags in the entranceway when I saw it,
It was more than just a test image,
It was the Lawnmower Man,
He was twisting hexagonal cubes, attempting to escape cyber confinement.
The projectors were replicating him on every available wall,
Tiny camera looking things,
Attached to girders in the ceiling,
The speakers were vibrating the room, without any music playing.

I saw Alx and asked where we were to go,
He showed us to a small room,
Where I thought we would never be seen,
There was a blacklight bulb in the ceiling.
We grabbed a board with a Jack O Lantern painted on it,
And made a makeshift table with a rough metal frame,
and Drew Posters on Neon Red and Green Poster Board,
And hung them on the sweaty, thin, grey, wooden walls.

I organized the change in the cashbox,
Opened the powders,
Mixed some test drinks,
And then it was time to find a fix.
We found our paper, and shared it,
One hit of the Dreamscape was enough,
And we were sizzling when the first bass beat rolled.
Rich would help us keep our heads together, and we barely knew him.

Tanya was going to get what she wanted,
I promised her a trip home to Detroit,
I was thinking about shopping for Records and stopping off at Karl's,
We could never predict that she'd be riding home with a broken nose.
Tanya was the candy girl,
I sent her into the masses with Smarties at midnight,
To hand them out with paper flyers,
Printed out on my 520 and photocopied at OfficeMax.

Mental Jackhammer was having its first run,
with customers winding their way into our little party room,
Following the flashes of the Strobe Light against the wall,
And lining up for Fast Blast and Brain Boost.
Scott was a confused Mixer,
While Rich sorted the Cups,
And I counted the change.
Everything was going smoothly.
We were addressed by the Master's of Ceremony,
And motioned into acts of dancing,
Working the table,
to the selections of Dr. No, Mark Oliver, and Alx.

I didn't know the title at the time,
But it was the first time I would hear,
The Future Sound of London's Papua New Guinea,
Wailing through the warm air,
Washing chills through the crowd.
I walked among them,
Seeing women in silver sequined suits,
Smiling and laughing as if in orbit,
Feeling like my black canvas converse,
were the soft cushions of moon boots.

There was a game to play,
I looked on at the fried teens,
with their heads in round helmets,
standing on magnetic plates,
trying to kill the virtual pterodactyl,
that swooped down from its perch,
to lift them into the air,
and drop their cartoon bodies,
to the perfectly flat pavement,
where they shattered and began again.
I was told it was driven by a high end Amiga.

In the catacombic rooms at the back,
bodies writhed against the cold floor,
Some of them cross legged,
Waving their heads entranced,
To the gentle electronic buzzings,
Infiltrating their minds.

A Jester in a Riot sock looped through the crowd,
Grinning,
Knowing that a good part of this madness,
was his doing.

Coming around and through the back,
I encountered Smiley and his Italian friend.
They had bought drinks,
And they wanted to let me know that they loved us.
I told them that I loved them too,
And walked them around to the bar,
Stealing two cups from Scott,
and sharing them with Smiley and his friend.
Smiley offered me some Vicks to put under my nose,
and I accepted,
The vapors stirred the paisley spirals,
Out of my tricking Axons,
and They vanished,
and the line became convulsive.

There were hands reaching for the bar,
And before I knew it,
We had run out of twos.
I told Tanya to get in front of the door,
And let no one enter.

That was a sight,
I wrangled in my mind for a solution to the problem of the twos,
And looked to Scott for help,
But he was lost in the cups with the Braun Blender,
And I noticed that people were frantically trying to push past Tanya,
Her petite body was being pushed back,
And her arms were stretched from the door.

As they washed in and she rushed back to the bar,
I noticed the Loonies,
And Scott and Rich laughed,
as the Ice melted in the colored plastic goblets.
We had the means to make change,
for the moment at least.

At 3:30 the celebrities came calling,
Mark Oliver and his Zebra clad girl,
Dropped twenty for two drinks,
And gave us some African Gum,
That minted our mouths,
Until almost the end.

Rich talked Tanya into filling cups with Ice,
Even when there were twenty full,
And she ran to get a big bucket,
from the water bar,
When ours was finally liquid in bags,
In the dust on the concrete.

And then Dante was there,
With a bald head and a centaur's Goatee,
Looking like an incarnation of the devil himself,
And he handed me a business card,
And another twenty,
And said we should all come to New York,
And work at one of his parties.

It seemed so far away,
But his face was domestic at least,
A reminder that we were Americans,
Toiling on foreign soil.

At some point in there,
Tanya's boyfriend danced carelessly,
And his fist cracked cartilage,
Her nose was bleeding,
The best we could do,
Is give her some ice.

Dante's friend came to visit us later,
He bought drinks too,
He was a black man,
With short Jamaican dreads,
With a muscular build,
Sporting bright yellow overalls,
He was the last of the out of towners,
that we saw that night.

Scott had gotten himself up there somewhere,
To a place I dared not voyage,
Because some tall kid had given him,
Something special for free.

The sun was starting to shine through the windows,
And the inside of my eyelids kept flashing,
Even after we turned off the strobe,
And I watched the dancers continue to lock their joints on the floor,
Even after the music receded.

It was time to count up the various colored bills,
Give Alx two hundred for our wonderful space,
Gather up the powders and lights,
And meet back at Tanyas.

That morning in her living room,
I thought I saw the floating letters,
For the name of a new Rave promotions team,
In a painting of a red Mars Scape on the wall behind her.

I couldn't help thinking that her nose was partly my responsibility,
But I can't choose the friends of strangers,
And I couldn't do anything but drive them home again,
And sit and watch her swelling nostrils.

My eyes twisted the letters into the word Phoicos.
And I made the pronouncement,
That one day we would have a party,
And one day, not so far off into the future,

We did.

; ¶ 4:13 AM
Toronto Noisecontrol Publishing - There's so much more to be said about Toronto, it's hard to explain or sort it out all at once. The linkage goes all the way back to 1990 and my radio work.

In 1990 on a whim, I walked into a local AM radio station and asked for a job. Amazingly enough, I got it. Things went well for a while, and I was introduced around to the staff. I met Howard Simon - The Sports Guy, Gary Macknamara - The Station Manager, Brian Babyak - The Board Operator, and Scott Ansel - The Intern. Things went well there, and Scott and I hit it off, particularly due to musical tastes and preferences. One day we walked in wearing the same concert t-shirt. It was eerie and somehow telling.

One night when we were there still observing, Marie Bonacci, one of the other Board Ops, told me that she used to know Don Berns who was at CFNY in Toronto. We called his show and requested some music. I can't recall the exact request. He not only played the music, he announced our names. I was thrilled.

When I came home from Chicago in 1992, I worked concert security at University at Buffalo for a big show with the Violent Femmes, Barenaked Ladies, and Fishbone. None were extremely popular at the time. Don Berns was there in the flesh handing out Rave flyers for Nitrous 012. It was going to be the first rave I attended in Toronto, and not the last. It was kind of secretive and sketchy. He didn't push it hard. He just offered the ticket. All it had on it was a dalmation and a phone number.

On the night of the event, I believe it was May, I walked down Jarvis St. and into a parking ramp behind Maple Leaf Gardens. The parking ramp was converted into a dance party kind of atmosphere, and synthesized music was playing. This was the first dose of what was to come, all synthesized, all night long. There were no weak vocals to slow the pace down. It was frenetic.

At the rave, I received a flyer for a second event called Nitrous 013. I made the determination that I would be there or be damned. As things would have it, the entire course of my life changed with that consternating decision. On the night of that party, I broke up with my Fiance over her decision not to attend Nitrous 013 with me. It was better for her in the long run. It's something I had to do for myself to learn. I took Scott with me, and we had a blast. We ate oranges that were being passed around by a skateboarder who brought a sack of them, while in a textile buffered quiet or "chill out" room. The event was at the same location at the first, so we assumed this would be the regular venue for the events. Little did we know what they had planned.

The next Nitrous Rave was held in a cornfield, and we were litteraly marching through the mud in our combat boots. We had a full complement this time, of friends that had gone to a club called the factory with us. This was a true European style rave and we had plenty of food and drink while enjoying Moby's first single Go and several tracks by Acen and Aphex Twin who were new, but recognizable to us out of the speakers. The DJ's played Rotterdam Termination Source Poing, and Mayday. There were projected images on the tarps from 16 millimeter projectors. It was really something. Unfortunately due to sound ordinances, the rave was shut down prematurely by the local authorities, and a march back through the mud led us to where we started.

There are some side notes to this story. I had purchased a pair of tickets to a Morrissey Concert to be held in Toronto prior to Nitrous 014. I was promised a t-shirt and a CD from the rave promoters, if I would help to distribute flyers outside the concert. So, that's what I did. And on the night of the rave, I helped to direct the traffic coming into the Jolly Roger to the rave site. I was actually instrumental in the mechanics of the operation. So I missed a good portion of the actual music and festivities. My friends enjoyed it thoroughly though.
I had made my first connections in the rave "scene" as it were.

I kept going to the Factory on weekends while I was failing out of school. I wore very flashy clothing, a neon green labcoat and a purple top hat that my brother had once used for a penguin costume; batman was big that year. The flash attracted some attention from a guy from Detroit who told me his brother was trying to start a business venture in Toronto. He wanted me to introduce him to the promotions people from Nitrous if I knew who they were. I told him I would do it if he would teach me his business. He agreed, and I introduced him to DJ Iain who happened to be at the Factory that night.

They talked some things over and I kind of did my usual dancing and having fun type stuff, I still drank beer at that point. I probably turned some people's heads. Dave, the oranges guy would show up and wear an Altern8 safety mask. Who would know that so many years later SARS would hit Toronto and make them not only fashionable, but a necessity. Scary.

Anyway, the first rave they were scheduled to touch down on in Toronto was Chemistry 6. I was enlisted to make a sign. So I made a sign with Anarchy and Peace symbols on it that said Smart Drinks. I did pretty good with the spray paint and plastic. It was tough. I also made some signs on large sheets of card stock in neon advertising the prices of the drinks.

Chemistry 6 was gone. They made 2000.00 and I was wandering around the place in a crazy haloween monster costume and my labcoat. It was one of those blow up monsters that you wore like a hat. My job was mainly to refill the water and mix a few drinks. After the first few, it was the easiest gig in town. They made a commitment that night to work Chemistry 7 and future endeavors and we were off to the races.

The next major event that they hooked up with was called Pleasure Force. I actually have video tape of this. This is where things really started to go downhill for me. There were 2 acts - Dj Phantasy and Ruffige Crew (Goldie's original outfit). While I was working at the bar, I traded a jug of water for a hit of acid. It was my first, and it was a life altering experience. The laser beams coming from the dancefloor turned into blue and yellow waves, and everything in the world became humourous. The problem was, that making sense of it all became difficult. It was like moving in a dream state. You never fully recover from that first hit. I still remember the girl's outfit that was with him. She was wearing a leather checkerboard dress with fishnet stockings.

A couple weeks later, at a party in a friend's basement, I met my girlfriend for this tour of duty. Her name was Shelby, and she was just the sort of flashy attachment I needed to go with my street cred. She was young, 17 to my 19, and she was attractive. She had long blonde hair and a cute nose. I remember giving her a foot massage, and walking to my car nearly off my feet after the whole experience. Sometime, if you want the whole story, ask me about it. I may or may not tell you.

And less than a week later, the Dam broke. It was December and Sean, the guy from Detroit, had been invited to do a party in Europe. And he left his Toronto commitment to me. He told me exactly what to do, and we ended up making like 1700.00 in one night. I got to take the bulk of it home, after paying off Alx and friends.

There is much more to be said about Chemistry 7. I'll let this starter poem do some of the walking.




; ¶ 2:49 AM

Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Wizz - Revisions to come - The Toronto Conclusion to Atlantis Noisecontrol Publishing

Wizz
by Christopher J. Bradley
(c)2003

They look more like dead things now than humans. Long drawn white
faces, dripping cold sweat, attatched to thin bony structures in the
windy edge of violet morning. I step down Mercer toward John, my
backward blue craftzman hat, red fishnet vest, skyblu phats -
visually screaming raver - back to the ramp, and my vehicle. I'm
feeling a bit fried.
A bunch of them are throwing a bright pink superball against the
building across from The Oz waiting to be told that money is a
valuable thing at the door. I've already been there. It wasn't worth
the wait. After-parties used to excite me, so I don't blame them, I
pray for them.

Image :

Attache' case demon, razorback blond, vibes vest, eyes that tear
through the rims of graphite ray-bans, people are meant to be like
him, and people are meant to die.

Mother is at home, shuffling baby and other family units to church.
The mortgage is up. Father is working late-night shift at the bridge
commission, drinking free coffee, reading porno in the booth, waiting
for the next of five cars he will see tonight. His shift is about to
end. Seven A.M.

She attatches wasted blackened eyesockets to me, and I feel the chill
of the wind. Her hair wisps, thin figure on concrete, white denim
jacket over nylon long-johns, white jeans, white cheeks. Step toward
John. She moves. Step left, on John, toward Queen. "Hey!"
Turn right, look. Hands turned down, wrists out, extended, an
unnoticed tear on the cheek, "Were you at the party?"
"Yes." Step closer.
"Do you know how to get to Underground Parking?", shivering.
"Which one?" skeptecism, there are billions of ramps in the city. I
know the streets, Christ... She's fucked!
"What?" fear shaking the weak frame.
"Which Underground Parking Do You Mean?", trying not to smile, the
spine tingler of purple window sky making the ground sizzle. Smiling
makes them freak sometimes, you look like, to them, I could tell she
was one, even more evil than they will ever look to you. I have been
there.
"The green one," she said, "No....Yes," to a lost expression. Still
trying not to smile. "The one with the green sign." She stands,
stares at me, expecting something. The lamp-posts are so much
different here than back home. They have long extended arms, to bring
the light into the street, away from the center of the street. The
lights just went out. Still at the corner of John and Mercer, that's
right.
"Forget it. You're too fucked to help me." She was freaking.

Image :

Grey overalls on a heavy guy. Two-thousand seething ravers freaking
in the light of hydraulic girders. Grey overalls unzipped. Returning
from the bathroom with a jug of water. Grey overalls off. He dances
naked, at the edge. No-one notices. If they did, they'd put him on
stage. Maybe. It's New Year's eve, time to celebrate.

Forty billion electrons in my brain murdering themselves. I feel
happy. I like feeling happy. And she is walking South on John,
stomping away, afraid.
"Wait, I'll help you..." I must have been high...
"Forget it...Don't..." like I was going to rape her or something. "I
can't handle this..." turns reverse to forward.
I run up to her, she's standing still, "You really should start
staying away from the streets now, especially the yellow lines.
People don't realize we are who we are, they'll just drive through
us." She starts walking. South again. A parking ramp hides the
position of the tower. In front of us, neon window sign, Italo-
American. Funny because I am in Canada. Trying not to laugh. "I'll
stick around and help you find it, it's rough coming down sometimes."
"I can't come down," afraid... "I don't want to anyway. I need to
find Underground Parking." Freaking, upper lip twitching, anger and
raw fear. Left on Front. There are people ahead of us. A street
vendor from another planet, setting up shop for...wait...
"Where is it in relation to the tower?" I ask, clever, we might find
it by tracking it.
"What...Oh...The tower...where the rave was?" Lost.
"Yeah, that Tower." I smile, unable to control it. Good thing she's
walking ahead of me.
"Hey, maybe you should slow down...so we can..."
"I can't." harsh. Tooth grinding.
"...someone where to find this place. Is your car there?"
"No. My friend's car." Almost to the vendor, SkyDome steps are to the
right. The tower looms above us, the laser still crawling up and down
it's three way spine. Tingles at the back of my head, in the back of
my head, inside the back of my head.

Image :
Tattered Elmo doll sagging from low slung knapsack. Backward FUCT
cap, twists to me, eyebrows thick, wide iris' clicking on me. "You
wanted hits?"
"Two." Blue ten trades for two bits of blotter, perforated.
"Tell me how they are." Clicks on me, twists. Gone. Elmo bounces.

"So where did you come from?" Smiling? ...Yes.
"Port Hope" back still to me. Up the steps, Up the steps, platform,
guard-rail, Up the steps, platform.
"Can you call someone?" genuine attempt at turning no-hope into hope,
but then again...
"I have no money...I know, I know..."
"Calling card?" Up steps, massive platform, Gate 23.
"It's in the car, all in the car."
"Hmmm..How far is Port Hope?" lead in to stupidity, but habit brings
it to me.
"4 Hours."
"Which Way"
"Away From Hamilton"
East, great, what a trip that could be, forget it, find the ramp.
"Don't worry, I won't desert you, I've done this before." And spent
three quarters of everything on it, but habit brings it. "Maybe it's
on the other side of this dome, it's a long way but..."
"No, I know where it is. You're no help." Her feet go left, mine,
toward gate 11, suddenly she's 40 feet away. Down the steps, and I
turn and try to follow, toward the tower again, but now we're high,
and to the right, and haven't gotten there yet, to the lot.
"You have no I.D., or money, or Calling Card?"
"No. I left them in the car."
"Why?" evil glare from tight pupils.
"They left me. They were supposed to come out of the bathroom, I went
in, and they were gone." Tower doors, no one's here. The vest shows
in the glass of the doors. A sign in the doorway :

"Persons Participating In Actions Not Ordained By The
Establishment Hosting This Event Will Not Be Tolerated.
Violators Will Be Removed And Charged. Rave On!!!"

Yeah. Albert got nailed to the cross last night with 150 E's. Albert
wasn't with the Force.

Image :

The Rise. Three-Eighteen Richmond St. West. Salvador Dali' leers off
black and white concrete bricks, clockwork flower tipped mustache
floating in space. The line is down the steps of Action Print, out
the door, onto the pavement. They can't wait to get in, to escape.
Long haired Mike at the door, XL Jacket, grey and white emblem
meaning something to some, nothing to a no-one. He takes the eight
dollars from each of them. Down the hall to the right, get some
water. Drink some juice, it'll make your trip kick into high gear.
Jason lives here.

The sign pouts Q-Zar and Tour Of The Universe in hot-pink and purple
on backlit black. It's triangular and we step down past it to a hot-
dog vendor. Speaking english is a paid chore that he will suffer
with, once he gets his umbrella up and starts cooking rolled pork on
the blackened grill, framed by stainless steel.
"Where can I find a parking lot with a green sign?" I ask, smiling.
"What?" she keeps walking, while he tries to translate into whatever
language it is he speaks.
"Where can I find a parking lot with a green sign?" I ask again,
smiling, a tear welling at the crack of my eye.
"No, Know." Thanks pal. You have a good day now.
"Bye."
I follow her past the Baja Beach Club on pavement. Suits are exiting
from glass doors two businesses down. I didn't get their names, I'll
never need their names, who the fuck do they think they are anyway?
They are starting work. Don't stare at me man, or I'll smile at you.

"So what's up, where are you going? Are you sure it's out here, we're
away from the tower now, you said it was near the tower."
"I think I remember now, it was off the street, it's right down... I
remember this corner, but I don't see it." She turns to look at me,
and smiles while turning, it's off of York, she sees the green sign
over a hole in the building behind her. "Underground Parking, I told
you it was green."
"Well, there it is then, do you think I could get a lift back to my
car?" Cold fingernails bite my arm, then the vest, come on. Left
across Front, past the cars, they are very close, but we are walking
quickly. Into the hole, it feels like a funhouse on slanted concrete,
we're digging in. "Shouldn't we take the stairs?" A car might hit us
if we walk the ramp, but why worry, they didn't catch us on Front.
"It's right over here, see it?"
"No, what color is it?"
"Red"
As if I'd need her to tell me that once we'd found it. I really hope
this is the right lot, or we're here for a long time.
Step between two rows of Beamers, Nissans, and Saturns. She still has
the vest. The back wall, the red car, two figures in it, I hear
breakbeat bouncing off the walls, echoing into the fringes of my
vision, not loud though, we're coming down, all 2,000 of us. They see
us, the passenger door opens.
"Where did you go?"
"I was looking for you, you left me in, outside, near the batroom,
why didn't you wait for me?!" tears start again. Where's John? He
went back to look for you. The driver's seat dude leans to show me
his face. They bitch.

"Hey what's up? You were groovin' up there." Yeah, and you were
puking up there. What a burnout, he's finished man. I kept
smiling. "So what are you on man?"
"One really hard hit."
"Acid?"
"Yeah, how 'bout you? Purple window sky or some weird thing."
"4 Hits, 2 E's and a little crystal. Hey, you look soaked, where are
you going?"
"Hardcore man." It takes a genius. Keep smiling!
"I was just helping her find the lot, I could use a lift back to my
Shadow."
"Your car?"
"Yeah."
"Sure man, we just hafta wait for John, he went to look for her."
"Cool."
"Turn the tunes up man, I need to get warmed up, I'll sit out here,
so I don't soak your car." The feeling of granular cement paste
pushes through my phats and my legs bend at the knee pushing them up
beyond the tops of beaten purple and green Converse All-Stars. She
has a seat next to me, no one talks, we just relax to the beat. The
concrete is getting colder. I think I'm about to crash, I can feel
it, an hour is passing. The tape clicks off.
Check the watch. 9:30 A.M. The bronze gears twist for me if I keep
them electrically fed. Feeding time is once every half year.
"I think I better get going."
"Don't you need a ride?"
"I'll be O.K. I'm used to walking, it's a long way, but it could take
longer if I wait, and I'm paranoid about the towtrucks."
"You parked on the street?"
"Past Pizza Pizza off Queen by the Rise."
"I'm sorry. Hang on. I'll walk you out."
"O.k. See ya later man, make sure you chill a bit before you drive
O.k.?"
"Don't worry, I'm already down. Have a good trip back." I'm having a
good trip here, yeah, he puked it all up, what happens next time when
his heart flips?
Up the stairs, out the door, on Front, large pavement curve on the
corner of the building.
"You know what happened tonight, John deals right?" her mouth curves
down, hands behind her back, leaning over. "You know the scene,
you're in it, but I know it better, I've been here since the first
Nitrous. You know Nitrous. Be Careful. Don't come back here, and if
you do, make sure you know your way home."
"I will."


"I don't have your name, I don't need it, if we meet again, buy a
drink from me, if not, be careful, be nice to them until they get you
home, and watch that dude's driving." She wants to follow me home. I
know it, she stands there waiting for me to ask, but I can't help
her. She has to just, not do this. I look her in the eye, smile and
turn, toward John. Then I turn back, she steps down the stairs, looks
up at me from the door to the dungeon, I turn on John.

Cross the street halfway up, the sleet piling down on polyester
red and cotton blue and silver. The craftzman is going to rust, I
just know it. Blond hair. Could have had it, maybe. Which is nicer?
To smile and help and then use, or to just use, and cast away? Why
waste the time and help? The Shadow is waiting for me. Hopefully.


; ¶ 6:51 PM
Atlantis Vertigo - Revisions to Come Noisecontrol Publishing

Atlantis Vertigo
by Christopher Bradley
Dedicated to Don, Chris (Dogwhistle), Ian, Jason, Bowie, Scott, Shauna,
Every Poet Whose Challenge Arises With The Changing Time,
and The Crystal Princess.
4/14/00 12:51:26 AM

They announced it in August,
In the Metro West Convention Center,
Under the Pulsing of a Revolving E,
On two screens, on the outsides of a Green Argon Laser.

The city was going to rise,
To the top of the spire,
At the epicenter of the Emerald field,
Near the intersection of Spadina and Front.

Moments after the announcement,
The club kids were moving through the crowd,
With the multicolored slicks,
Dated October 23.

The 23s were signifigant,
It was as if they had stepped out of the Stars to me,
December, the date I had started making money,
October, the day I would get out.

I had it in the back of my mind,
It would be my last trip to eternity,
And it would be fabulous,
And there would be nothing to alter the course of events.
It would be the end of a Trilogy,
The end of an Era,
The conclusion of a compacted year,
Of absolute entrenchment in potential jeopardy.

I called Berns and asked for a discount ticket on the day of the show,
He put me on the guest list,
The guest list to the city in the clouds,
A circular flywheel in space.
I was hoping to see Stormtroopers,
one last time,
Before the rhythm ebbed,
and my heart would start to grow old.

I was 19 and my affair with Canada was about to end.

Canada was a blond woman in black stretch pants,
Her long curling hair was drifting away into Ontario,
It had brushed my chest with sunglassed vision,
more than once, in an eternal sea of hot chocolate,
in the back seat of the Shadow, behind Tim Hortons,
and in a roadside motel in Windsor, on travels to Detroit.



Canada was moving in with other people,
People with herbal remedies for glaucomatic presidents,
Whose armed forces moved quickly with Uzis and Axes,
While the frost drifted lower toward the edge of America.
I met her in her small apartments,
And watched her slowly siphon away my liquid assets,
Forgiving her wiles,
knowing that at some point,
the copious entanglements would come to a conclusion.

In any case, the Tower was there for the climbing,
And if there is a Tower to climb,
Then there is the reason for climbing it,
Because it is there.

October 23rd arrived,
And the Gardiner Expressway rushed by in the late afternoon,
Minolta, EDS, Ford, and Scotiabank,
Greeted me in their green bush form.

I slid over the bump at 100 kilometers,
And noted the presence of an emergency telephone,
As the sidewalk to the right passed,
And then it was there, Spadina Exit.

I passed the closed Dome of the stadium,
Remembering the Blue Jays game,
I had taken the Pleasuredome barmaid to,
Maybe three weeks earlier.
We had watched them play Chicago,
and visited The Olive Garden along the strip.
She'd told me she had a Marine boyfriend,
and I'd ignored that fact,
And kept the conversation going,
All the way back to the Rainbow Center.

I parked in back of Queen Street,
Down past the Pizza Pizza,
at the intersection opposite Speakers Corner,
The place where I had danced,
On Much Music,
Broadcast to the Northern World.

It was a cool but comfortable evening,
The lamp posts began to cast glowing photons on the pavement,
And I passed the intersection of John and Mercer,
Remembering the place that was there before it changed to Oz.
An industrialized nightclub that was called The Factory,
where I took my friends,
and I met the Roses,
While dancing in a Neon green Labcoat,
purchased from South Pacific Surplus,
Before I graduated with honors.



The Factory was the origin of rave in Toronto,
When Ian spun Messiah and Apotheosis,
With the launch into bounce mode,
With Rotterdam Termination Source - Poing.
Back before he changed stations,
Sheppard twisted disks there,
And set the metropolis on fire,
With his Techno Trip Compact Discs.

Nothing could stop Oz from being beautiful,
except for the winged monkeys,
who decended on the child-like munchkins,
who were only trying to follow the Yellow Brick Road.

I continued to wonder,
as I flowed into the soccer garbed massive,
at the base of the citadel,
Who is the Great and Powerful Oz,
and why does he project such a frightening spectre?
Could I rub my purple and green sneakers together,
and Find my ticket back to Kansas?
Or would I have to seek out Dorothy,
The Crystal Princess,
And ride on the heels of her ruby slippers,
transforming from the Tin Man,
back into a simple farmer?

There was no music at Dusk,
But there was a sharp green light,
Gliding around the cylindrical structure,
beckoning into the fog.

After my contemplations,
and greetings to groove riders and strangers of all sorts,
I signed the third page,
Was waved through security,
And stepped through the door.
I'd already found my Purple Window Sky,
and I was grinning knowing they would never discover,
What was already in my spine.

I was alone in the ebb of humans,
More alone than I had ever been,
Ecstatic that there was no chain to hold me to earth,
Ready to take the Tour of the Universe,
A close substitute,
for the Millennium Falcon.

I was to be the closest to the Moon that I had ever been,
The Black Raybans shielding my dilated Pupils covered the fact that I would never fly,
Never pilot a shuttle, like the one I commanded in Seventh Grade,
The one I commanded into implosion, and fiery death in Alabama.
The Speedball Surface Cleaner in nineteen eighty eight
had made certain I would never pass an eye exam without lenses.


The elevator stood before us as we anxiously waited,
The boy in the orange Fresh Jive shirt with the long hair,
And the girl with the twist tied pigtails,
sucking on the clear magenta pacifier attached to a whistle strap around her neck,
The people in Addidas stripes and painters caps,
And shirts with the Atlantis logo stenciled in black on rainbow tye dye.
The soft electric sound of the bell sounded,
And we climbed into an empty cell,
Standing in noiseless anticipation,
during the smooth sensual voyage to the pinnacle of Architectural wonder.

When I was in sixth grade,
I had been up there briefly,
Looking down and hoping to see from the observation deck,
The massive shopping center, called Eaton,
On Yonge and Dundas,
where I had shopped with Robin and Isaac and Casey and Shannon and DeEtte.
I opened fortune cookies in Chinatown,
and bought Sunglasses with straps, and a Bryan Adams tape
to listen to on my generic walk-man,
in the Train on the way back to my side of Niagara Falls.

What my eyes showed me when the door opened was entirely different from that time.
It took my ears a fraction of a second to recognize the audio,
But it was somehow different than what I had heard when I first came home from Chicago.
The track phased the Shamen's voices through space,
between multi-dimensionally arranged speaker housings,
And before I knew what I was up to,
I had asked three people who was spinning,
The answer had been Ian.

I circled around the outside of the centered ring
and found the Tall Dark haired Jockey standing with one hand at a headset at his ear.
The circles on the Mark II plates were slowing and quickening as his fingers manipulated the vinyl,
I watched him slide the pitch bar up toward the +8 marker,
He organized the flow into a white label.
When he was done, he turned and smiled,
He knew that I wanted to know what he'd been up to,
He handed me the slip cover for the single,
And I looked at the circuited design,
Wishing that I knew where on earth he'd discovered it.
I let the cover rest on his crate, and walked into the crowd.

People were dancing against Virtual Reality Projected on the walls,
In the gaps where the souvenir stands would have been on any given day,
I tried to find space to let my arms fly and my feet shuffle,
But I was beyond excitement,
And the doughnut ring of the Cement Nail was becoming smaller,
as the elevators brought the teeming humanity into the sky.
I decided to drop back to earth and take the Tour.



The Tour of the Universe was a Computer Generated flight,
through a quadrant of the Galaxy that I had never before seen,
Girders of space stations and Planets and Constellations whizzed past,
Burning jets of color into my perspiring retinas.
The seat I had strapped into tilted with the whole thirty member audience,
And my blood poured into my feet,
while my head stumbled on visual sketches of Android controlled vessels.
I was lost in the Cosmos for five minutes,
in a physical man machine interface,
Wishing that I could never stop coming to the end of Gravity's Rainbow.

In the middle of it all,
I remembered Tron and The Black Hole,
and Blade Runner, and The Terminator,
and had a thought to pray that one of Gibson's novels would make it to film.
I had a vision that I might someday try to put the whole kaleidoscope of HallucinoGen-X into print.

And it was quickly forgotten,
as the Falcon swiftly landed,
and it's razored talons, gripped the earth,
Ripping up the ground,
And needling my tear gassed brain,
Like "Good Bye Blue Skies,"
Just before the lights came back up.

As I left the Pod and carefully set my feet on each stair,
I looked ahead to the tilted floor of the ramp,
And set myself into careful motion,
Swaying with the chosen thirty.
Some said that the end was near,
I could see that the beginning was near,
And that there would be no turning back,
from the bath of liquid sunshine,
of the silicon age.

At the base of the tower,
In the House Cage,
The Detroit people were playing Dimensional Holophonic Sound,
"The House of God,"
A dance fell into my step as I moved toward the elevator,
And at the entrance I spotted Jason.

He was wearing his graphite lenses,
and smoothing back his blond hair,
The girl who'd sold me John Player Specials on the Mountain wasn't with him,
He was alone, and headed for the T-Shirt vendors.
I banged his knuckles with mine and told him about the Shamen mix,
and that I'd just come back from the Tour.
I kept walking at the elevator,
and he kept straight on to the vendors,
and then I was in the frictionless tunnel again.



At the top things had changed,
People were sitting on the rug with their backs to the glass,
And there was a little bit more space to dance,
I stood for a bit and just took in the sound,
piercing harmonic frequencies at enormous decibels in hyper-clarity,
Bass guitar samples that made the high ground shake,
Frenetic loops of syncopated swing Jazz drums,
Sputtered hiccups of Triangle and Sawtooth wave modulating in burst pulses.

I was inside a lightning bolt of Audio,
watching the frantic motion of hip cracking thigh twists and knife handed jabs at the air.
People wearing Sun-In and Electric Kool Aid in their hair passed,
as the Chinese Dragons of firecracking Wavesample barraged the pulse of my heart.
I nearly cried at the beauty of the smiles on their lips and the smiles on their linen,
A warm tear ran down my right cheek as I smiled back and I swallowed it.
The salt hit me and I realized that it was time to drink.

Liquid Adrenaline was there.
I had never directly competed with them,
So I let them fix me a drink.
Banannas, Wild Cherry Drink Mix, Orange Juice, and L-Phenylalanine.
I gave them the extra two dollars for the choline, because I wanted to see the walls breathe.
I took a sip of the wet chipped cherry ice concoction and walked to the steps ringing the outer rim.
The Liquid Adrenaline people were smiling too.

That's when I lost track of time.
I slowly set myself down on the steps
and pulled a Benson and Hedges Special King Light Menthol cigarette from my sky blue pocket.
The flame flickered on my Bic disposable after I struck the flint.
I pulled my Sunglasses down slightly
so that I could watch myself start the correct end of the cylinder smoke.
I watched the ice swirl in the cup and had another sip.
And I started to realize,
That I was beginning to forget.

I was forgetting the sand volley ball pit of my first day away at school,
Forgetting paint ball in the forests of Illinois,
Forgetting fraternity football in the Rain of October,
Forgetting the Grain Alcohol behind the bar in the basement at the Pledge Halloween Party,

Forgetting Two girls who wanted to buy me a Pizza while I was trying to write a song,
Forgetting Cool Vaughn the Air Force ROTC and our Fortran 77 class,
Forgetting Business English and Being Carried to Calculus to earn a C while drunk,
Forgetting Being Thrown into the Pool after a game of Risk in the living room of the house,

Forgetting breaking my roomate's custom designed bed,
Forgetting having the telephone line installed in our Dorm Room,
Forgetting the picture of the Ace of Spades that Aiston kept hidden under the floorboards of his deck.

Forgetting Brian's Japanese American Girlfriend
who wound up in bed with another brother after too much liquor.

I was forgetting that this had all started in WJJL on Main Street,
Where Scott and I Listened to The Announcements of the First Parties on CFNY.

I was forgetting the computer engineering class at University at Buffalo,
Forgetting the Physics I took in high school,
Forgetting how I ran for class President and lost to Eugene Williams,
Forgetting Quickbasic and the Electronic Data Systems Co-Operative,


Forgetting my crush on Emily when she sang Bette Middler for our graduation,
Forgetting the Electronic Music Workshop, and the people who taught me to compose,
Forgetting sitting on Karen's back porch with Rob plotting our final Yawp at class day
Forgetting Sitting on the Rock above the Whirlpool with Robin S after Lunch at Emperor of China,

Forgetting Selecting the Engagement band at Zales in Summit Park Mall.
Forgetting the Two Proms I attended with the same girl,
Forgetting that same girl as I left her on Regent Avenue far behind the Shadow to dive into Nitrous 013,

Forgetting my Mother and my Father who labored day and night so that I could attend private schools,
Forgetting Ike, Chris, and the Boys Club kids on Portage and Niagara who taught me how to use the Apple,
Forgetting how to play Axis and Allies which I discovered in Huntsville,
Forgetting the Role Playing Games and the people I collected and left for my own peace of mind,

Forgetting the summer Bicycle Camp which took me through Genesee county and Batavia,
Forgetting taking Jennifer out alone on a Sunfish on Silver Lake during the Regatta.
Forgetting a picnic lunch with Tammy who taught me to write poetry to go with my music,
Forgetting spending an afternoon in a wavepool with Mesha.

Forgetting learning to speak Japanese with Charlene and then taking her to a Fugazi concert at Buff State.
Forgetting the red haired girl that helped me obtain Depeche Mode 101 on video tape.
Forgetting watching my first PG-13 Movie with a long haired Jennifer
and seeing Charlie take Tom Cruise's Breath away.

Forgetting Bowling at Bowl O Drome on Pine Avenue with Paula and my Brother and Sister.
Forgetting Valentines Day at The Red Coach Inn with Michelle.
Forgetting Programming Color Macros for C-NET on the Commodore 64.
Forgetting Rides out to Glenn's houses in Lockport and Wilson to learn about PC's.

Forgetting the thrown Chestnut incident on Lewiston Road near Deveaux manor.
Forgetting being kicked in the head by Rob in Hyde Park at a picnic in the Fall.

Forgetting my Math teacher who died of Cancer.
Forgetting my grandmother, whose estate bought me the Ensoniq Sampler.
Forgetting my Grandfather, who lived just long enough for Joshua to be born.
Forgetting my Aunts and Uncles and their families,

Forgetting that I should have taken pride in my work and not kept it behind the closed wooden door of my
tiny goblin green bedroom.

In an instant after that final thought, she was there,
My Crystal Princess.
She had long brown hair and Ruby Slippers,
All I can call her now is Dorothy,
I never knew her real name.



I left my half finished cup to rest on the tight fibers of the carpet when she asked me if I was Ok,
and if I wanted to dance.
She put my hands on her shoulders and started slow.
While in motion I looked at my chrome swatch and realized that I had been motionless for an hour.
I also noticed that I was still holding the cigarette butt.
I let the paper fall.

I watched her chest heave with the music and followed their downward motion to her feet,
They rested beneath the edge of her long cotton shirt,
Beyond the rustling cut strings of torn blue jean,
And they were clicking together,
I didn't have to count,
They had hit many more than three times.

I saw her face, and she smiled at me,
and I smiled back,
her eyes were narrow,
and I could feel that we were both sweating,
like the clouds fogging the windows from the outside.
Sweat that comes from just under the surface to make the skin of the face glow.
It was all over both of us.
I ran my fingers through my hair and it spiked up,
And I saw many figures of her dancing inside her platinum aura.
She was here to take me home.

In that instant I realized that what I thought was forgetting,
Was remembering.
I had somewhere to go.
The end of my time in the Tower in the Emerald Patch was here.
I kissed her sweaty lips and we walked past each other.

I made for the elevator at the center of the tower and walked past a spinning Disco Ball.
There were Gel Lights on the floor in the coridor flashing patterns that flashed
like Fourth of July Fireworks against the wall.
America was coming back.

I remembered standing in the Niagara Falls Convention and Civic Center with my Aunt when I was Five,
and pouring Pepsi in my eye to put out an ash that had fallen into it.

I remembered choking on a lifesaver at the Auto Vue drive in, while watching Luke Skywalker fire his Photon Torpedo into the Death Star.

I remembered dashing up sloping sidewalks in Winter to drop rolled newspapers into mailboxes.
I remembered that I earned my component Stereo system steaming Eggs for Breakfast at McDonalds.
I remembered that the Wicked Witch was dead.
I remembered that it was always safe to come home.

And then I was in the elevator, and there was the musty smell of already smoked marijuana,
And I put my sunglasses on and struck my lighter to another Menthol,
And the smell vanished as the doors opened,
And I was vibrating on a tiled floor,



And I caught the back of Jason's head,
and then I thought better of annoying him with my discovery,
after all where exactly does his concern for my travel come into play?
He told me once that I'd meet up with him in Hollywood.

And I thought, Maybe it's better that the continuing party in Oz costs only $2.00.
I will go for a little while,
And let the Medicine run its course.
And find a clean bottle of Evian to run through my veins.

And then I think,
The House of God was there through it all,
There is something of a Soul lurking out there,
and Maybe it is worth the cost of a careful ride home.

But only after a brief visit to Rochester,
And a long float across a field full of people in England
who've been around thirty years longer than I.
In a white balloon painted with love,
While the Sun Machine,
was coming down.

Mental Jackhammer Smart Drinks - The WNY Underworld Noisecontrol Publishing


The Mental Jackhammer Story



(An Article From The Buffalo News)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



This article appeared in the Buffalo News May 23, 1993. This is
the longest newspaper article ever written about anything that I've ever
been involved in, with the exception of an article that I wrote for the
opinion page of the Niagara Gazette last year that was about drive by eggings
in my neighborhood. At the time that this was written, I requested that
my name be printed as Chris Alan because I didn't want any attachments
to my real name to the business to be made. Now I realize that in terms
of business none of it really matters anyway, you'll know from my autobiography
that it is clear that I did not succeed with it.



A friend of mine found this article on the Internet on a site called
Hyperreal which is devoted to rave culture. We printed a copy out in 1996,
and now we have it here for you on the web. Sometimes it takes time to
bring things back from the bleeding edge into reality, so here you have
it. The greatest criticism of my life between the years of 1992 and 1993,
from a writer who ran away to Washington D.C. Maybe in a few years, he'll
have a chance to write about me again.



January 1, 1998

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



MAKE IT AN OJ WITH A TWIST OF AMINO, PLEASE



BELLY UP TO THE BAR FOR A SMART DRINK











LEANING SELF-consciously against a smart bar gives
one an



excellent vantage point to watch a dance party and think about
why



Buffalo is not a cyberpunk city.



It was in just such a pose that Chris Alan and many
of his



customers recently took in the orgiastic tribalism of the Artists



and Models Affair. The thumping techno music. The neo-1960s



fashions. The incredible new perfume that suddenly all rave women



are wearing.



But what is a smart bar? Go ask Alan.



A smart bar, Alan explains, is where you buy smart
drinks.



Smart drinks are fruity concoctions with a hint of grit. The grit



is amino acid powder, a smart drink's main ingredient, which is



mixed with orange juice and cranberry juice. These legal,



non-alcoholic energy cocktails are supposed to activate your brain



and metabolism, make you want to participate in physical activity



all night long.



Alan calls his bar the Mental Jackhammer Smart Bar.
"You can work out for four hours and not sleep; your mind will still be
hyped," he says of Fast Blast, one of four available smart drinks. The
other three drinks are Smart Start, Brain Boost and Memory Fuel.



"I've gotten really weird dreams as a result of Memory Fuel," Alan
says. After chugging an ice-cold Smart Start, one does feel a definite
tingle, as if something were caressing the inside of one's skin.



"Smart drinks are just as much a part of the atmosphere
as sound and lights are," says Tony Billoni, producer of the Artists and
Models Affair. "But I don't fool myself: If I didn't have a



real bar at Artists and Models, we'd be a bunch of artists sitting
around and looking at each other. This is a town that likes its (alcoholic)
drinks."



So it's an uphill battle for Alan, who is the chief
distributor of smart drinks in the region.



Alan seems perfect for this work. He's 20, a former
computer hacker from Niagara Falls who writes techno music with his friend
named DJ X-O-Tec on a sampler at home. He once ran a computer bulletin
board named after a character in "Neuromancer," William Gibson's seminal
cyberpunk novel. Selling smart drinks, Alan hopes, will help him pay for
college. But he still has to work weekdays at Burger King.



Smart-drink suppliers like Alan have become minor
underground heroes in other regions, fueling all-night raves in cities
like Toronto and quenching the thirst of thousands of kids. The craze



has spread so wide and so deep that even the editor of the New
Republic recently named his two favorite flavors -- Fast Blast and Memory
Fuel. In some places, smart drinks are already on their way to becoming
passe.



Meanwhile, Alan has been able to introduce smart drinks
in only two local clubs -- the Pleasuredome in Niagara Falls and the Edge
in Buffalo. After several month of sales, he is just approaching the break-even
point on his $4,000 investment in ingredients and other expenses.



He should be doing better, shouldn't he? That's what
Alan and his customers are contemplating as they continue to lean self-consciously
against the Mental Jackhammer Smart Bar.



Then, under the influence of two consecutive Smart Starts, a theory
begins to emerge. It is communicated wordlessly, because the techno uproar
has made verbal communication impossible.



The theory is this: Smart drinks are more than just
a fad that came late to Buffalo and had trouble catching on. Smart drinks
are supposed to be the beverage of the cyberpunk generation.



Cyberpunk: An interlocking matrix of buzzwords and trends
gives cyberpunk a modicum of meaning. Smart drinks, smart drugs, 13th Gen,
rave (dance) parties, techno (machine) music, virtual reality,



computer hacking, electronic intimacy, etc. Think of the new television
series "Wild Palms" as cyberpunk for grown-ups.



When one of these fads fails, the whole trendy matrix collapses.
This is what has happened in Buffalo. The raves are small and infrequent.
The DJs need to catch up with what's happening in



Toronto and Europe. The designer drugs are impossible to find.
Computer bulletin boards cost too much by Buffalo standards. Techno has
been unplugged while alternative, classic rock and reggae reign in local
clubs. And so on. In short, Buffalo reality is never virtual.



The other night a man who said he was a go-go dancer from



Guelph, Ont., ordered his first smart drink at the Pleasuredome.



"I've tried those little pills," he said. "I wanted
to see if



smart drinks would work."



One wishes Chris Alan the best of luck earning his college



tuition. But one can't help thinking maybe it's a good thing that



Buffalo is not the kind of city where smart drinks would catch
on



quickly.



@Art: JAMES P. McCOY/Buffalo News Chris Alan concocts smart

drinks at the Artists and Models Affair. {color}

Byline: DAVID MONTGOMERY - News Staff Reporter

05/23/93

BUFFALO NEWS (BFNW)

Edition: FINAL

Section: LIFESTYLES

Page: E1

(Copyright 1993)

Medford Village Currents - Revision 1 Noisecontrol Publishing

Medford Village Currents (The New England Slack)
By Christopher J. Bradley
4/21/2003 7:19:08 PM (On the Eve Of The Completion Of The Boston
Marathon)
©2003

1 scene
[a supermarket parking lot]

In a black Ford LTD
It is windy and hot
A summer afternoon in July
It breezes in pulses.

We stopped after long travels through the winding roads from New York to Massachuessettes and when we finally got to Boston, Scott and I had the hardest time finding a parking space, and when we finally did, we almost passed out in the car in the parking lot because the weather was so hot. I had left work without plans to ever return to Niagara Falls, so it was ultimately important that we find housing as soon as possible. Our journey would lead us into the true unknown. After glancing around the marketplace for a good few minutes, we made up our minds to get to it.

2 scene
[someday café]

The goat dances on caffeine fumes
We speak to a cellist
She has long delicate arms
An MIT student with short blond hair
And a laptop also talks with us.
I would like to go home with either.
Scott finds the apartment folder.
He reads that a flute player is subletting.

The cellist was a magnificent specimen. I really hated to leave her there alone, when she was so wonderful to share coffee with, but we really needed to make headway, so we called the subletter as soon as possible, and he came right over and met us. He was a stout man with a beard, he looked kind of like a Jerry Garcia type, so we saw no fear in discussing the rental with him. He looked like a peaceful and wise individual. The truth was, that he was just too lazy and stubborn to shave, but we wouldn't find that out until later.

3 scene
[the steps of the pink house]

We meet the Jerry Garcia knockoff,
He is heavy, but willing to join us,
For a discussion of rental arrangements,
Over beer.

We went with him to a bar downn near MIT and enjoyed his company while we watched young men drink stouts dressed in shorts and polo shirts in the true New England style. It was something I'd never witnessed before, and I think it was distinctive of the region. I've never seen people drink yards in Western New York, or even when I was in Chicago.

4 scene
[the kendall square stop on the T]

It is six thirty,
Well after the rush,
The subway is clean,
It pulls away,
Leaving us to climb the stairs.

This was my first experience riding the subway in Boston. It was remarkably clean and organized in comparison with Chicago's El. The routes all come out from Central Station in flower petal organization so the odds of getting on the wrong train are remarkably slim. You are more likely to get lost in a city like New York or Chicago because there are so many more paralleling routes splintering off.

5 scene
[the brewery with the overhead pipes]

Vested shorted ivy leaguers,
Are pulling from Yards,
We are in full swing,
With our humble pints,
Jefferson Airplane wails,

And the bar stool spins a little,
Keeping us able to walk,
Back into the night.

Again, this is the bar where I saw the young men drinking Yards. I wish I had that kind of stamina. It is almost a chore to drink what I had let alone a Yard. We got to know Wayne a little bit and he informed us that we had at least one mattress to share when we got there, which was fine because Scott wasn't picky. He slept on the floor that whole month

6 scene
[davis square]

Ten Thirty P.M.
She is singing folk with an acoustic guitar box,
Open on the cement floor,
She has a little amplifier,
And a folding chair,
We ride the escalators,
And I make a note to tip her,
If I see her again.
Her voice echoes off the tiled wall.

That folk singer in the subway was a first for me. I'd seen some of it in Chicago's Downtown Station, but not in quite the Granola way that she was dressed. It was impossible to make out the lyrics over the human traffic, but it was beautifully articulated. Her voice went up and down like her hands on the guitar.

7 scene
[we move into the pink house]

It takes several trips from,
The LTD to the doorsteps,
Where we notice ants have invaded,
We have more homemade beer,
Around a dimly lit table,
The scrabble board is our centerpiece,
Late into the night.

Moving in was similar to moving in in college, but it was some how different. It was like abandoning all things before to embrace something new, a chance to truly plant my feet on ground where I could stand alone and make the best of things as well as they could be. My vision of the world was getting larger, and it made me feel larger than like in a sense. Being at home I had worked at a small company in the seperate city of Buffalo, and I'd worked my way into the community there, having made myself a regular at a coffee house called the Topic. That one never wore off and I would be recognized for years in the clubs and local haunts of that neighborhood. You could almost say, I almost made friends with the prostitutes, tax collectors, and other vermin of the streets. But somehow I stayed with my head held just high enough to stay above water, at least until I moved. Things were about to change for both the better and the worse. There's more to be said for both. Much more.

8 scene
[baybank]

We are getting cash advances,
And haggling with the tellers,
The sun is bright,
The wind is still whooshing,
There is a woman with a wind-burned face,
Power strolling up the street.

Baybank was the major bank in the neighborhood we moved into in Medford. It was just across the street from the Someday Cafe' and it seemed the most likely place to have secure transactions taken care of in. The tellers were courteous and understanding of our situation. Very different from those who will put up a next window sign here in New York.

9 scene
[the bakery]

We are taking out pizza,
In paper bags,
This is Scott's discovery,
And what a discovery! Eureka!
The oil, basil, and garlic,
Ferment among my taste-buds,
Sending wild sensations through my nostrils,
Of times dating back to the early eighties,
With grandmother at the malls.

There's nothing better than a slice of bakery Pizza. Scott came up with the idea before I did. Bakery pizza far outstrips pizza shop pizza when you want to have a nice leisurly morning in the summer sun. It's the kind of thing that can make a broken day something to live for again. I strongly advise Sunday Morning bakery pizza too. I think they put a little something extra into it. My grandmother used to buy us Pizza of every kind when I was a kid, so as far as pizza has been I've been spoiled in life, but not to the extent that I couldn't go for a slice at this very moment. It's almost lunch time. MMMmmm...

10 scene
[dunkin donuts]

We are here to buy the Globe,
It was a short drive from the pink house,
And I know tomorrow I will walk.
We take the paper this afternoon,
And walk a block not sure how we know its' North,
To look in on a baseball diamond,
Where an all-star game is playing out,
Senior League kids game,
They are all wearing their own teams' jerseys,
The coffee is just right,
Iced cappuccino melting against the bricks.

Iced Cappucino on a hot summer day is always a bonus. But even better, is getting to watch an all stars teen baseball game. That's what America is about. And to top it off, it's an outdoor activity, so we could smoke all we wanted, and just kind of converse about the move and our strategies for the first week. Things were going to get interesting. I knew that Scott wasn't necessarily as committed as he seemed about the move, but I thought he could discover a way to make a go of it.

11 scene
[purity market]

We are looking for groceries,
And now it is night,
The beautiful women are clubbing it in their clubs,
Or serving their coffee's,
Tea Time has long since passed,
And the Tea is still blowing past us.

We buy Spaghetti Sauce, Pasta, and Vegetables,
Meat and Bread, A Half Gallon of Milk.
There is a half Hispanic girl at the check out,
We think, Purity, and wittingly try to impress her.
She is not impressed.
She would be even less impressed,
If we told her, that all we had between us,
Was a single mattress and two small rooms,
And a VCR, that played the only tape jammed into it,
A tape about getting jammed.

It is a long walk out to the parking lot,
Reflecting on her long dark hair,
Remembering a girl that looked like her when I was 15,
Who was a fantastic poetess,
In the glare of a television playing a vampire movie,
"Death by Stereo!" was the most important phrase for us,
And rather than have her show me the world,
I swept up glass,
And lost her in the pieces.
Until the engine started again,
And we were making our way back,
To the pink house.

Yes, she was hispanic, but she had the dark hair and the dark eyes of my ex-girlfriend from high school. Tammy was a VCR vamp and she did wonderful things for making me the man I am today. That's all I'll say on that subject for this journal, but I will say that I wouldn't have minded getting to know the Purity girl better. There was something intensely sexual in her smile, that to this day, I have difficulty describing. She flirted back with us too. I had to bite my toungue to resist saying something more than stupid. Neither Scott or I had the resources at that moment for a date.


12 scene
[music and cigarettes]

The smoke traveled heavily,
In thick wafers of air candy,
Over the scrabble board,
While Dark Side of The Moon,
Played out over Wayne's stereo,
And we learned that he was a technical writer,
And checked answers against his lexiconal dictionary.

We played a lot of Scrabble when we were in Boston. Wayne had one of the professional big plastic tray boards and it was very entertaining to drown away our sorrows while listening to Pink Floyd sing Money and The Wall. We had some monumental matches in that pink house, that we still talk about to this day. The memories flood back the minute Scott mentions scrabble when we hang out today. He is currently working as a waiter in a local restaurant. I actually had my heart set on going out for drinks with him for my birthday tonight, but neither one of us has a car, like we both did back then.

13 scene
[massachusetts ave]
We took the long walk,
Through Sommerville and Cambridge,
To visit Harvard Square,
After stopping for coffee at a Starbucks,
The first I'd ever spent time in.

On our way to Harvard Square, our first week there, we stopped in at a cafe called Starbucks. It was the first I'd ever seen, and it looked inviting. The coffee was very strong and it kept us in good spirits even though we walked miles that day, not really knowing much about the stops on the Red Line yet. And it was good excercise anyway. Neither one of us had been extremely active in the city up to that point. And it was good to get to know our surroundings a little bit before venturing out into the larger metro areas. We had our hearts set on Harvard Square for the legendary chess battles that go on there.

14 scene
[the au bon pain]

I walked into the store with the yellow awning,
And bought two Iced Cappuccino's,
They came with far too much whipped cream,
And cost nearly four dollars each,
Expensive for 1995,

I came out to the Square,
To find Scott playing chess with David.
David was a Harvard student from over seas,
His clothing marked him an almost Boston Native,
But there was something more trim about his silk.
I spoke to him about how often he visited the square,
As Scott took a new partner,
Likely a park resident,
An older character in a wool coat,
And watched in awe as they battled,

Like Titans in the most famed,
Gladitorial arena of the chess sphere.
To this day I cannot recall the victor,
But the struggle, piece by piece,
Move by Move,
On the surface of granite,
Took on Epic consequence,
And I knew I would one day return.

The Au Bon Pain was expensive, being the only real vendor in the immediate vicinity of the square. I think the drinks cost almost $4.50 each, but they were yummy and it was still extremely hot in the late afternoon sun. David seemed like a very gifted individual and I wished I could have gotten to know him better. But he carried himself so well, that I was intimidated by him. He seemed extroardinarily well read and mannered, unlike so many of the people I would meet on the street in Buffalo. He was gentlemanly. And that's saying a lot as far as complements go. I can't say I've met anyone quite as reserved to date. My friend Andy is similar, but not in anyway a bad way. He keeps to himself because it protects him from the offense of others.

14 scene
[the snap café']

David had told us of a Bohemian café,
Something more local than the Au Bon Pain,
A place with flavor, and style.
When we got there it was garage noir,
Black tables,
Thin, light metal chairs,
It was uncomfortable,
And non-smoking,
And we spent too much for single cups,

Further,
They required the purchase of a coffee every fifteen minutes.
It was like something I would have expected in Manhattan,
Snap,
Something you don't want to have to agree with,
People were wearing berets,
And they probably didn't know the first thing about Kerouac,
Not that I did at the time either,
But I wasn't pretentious enough to believe they would have paid a dime
more,
For coffee in Styrofoam.

The coffee shop David recommended was the worst knock off beatnick toilet of noir, I think I've ever experienced. They served coffee in styrofoam cups, as the verse already mentioned, but better than that, they charged far too much for it. That's a no no if you want your customers to return. We did not. It was off the map for us. Not only was it off the map. It was off the map. It was actually hard to get to, you had to walk kind of down a back alley to get there. It is quite possible, that it was not intended to be a real coffee house at all. But they had weak tables and chairs, and some really snooty patrons that I am glad we did not talk to. I can go bohemian, but I can't go bad caffeine.

15 scene
[the harvard book store]

We went in and took a look around,
It was crowded,
People pushed and shoved their way to the register,
Trying desperately to take home a piece of the Boston,
That they couldn't have.
I remember looking at the Sweat-Shirts in the window,
And burning with envy at the emblazoned logo,
That I couldn't afford to wear,
It was cool that night,
And we were making our way to the pub we'd seen earlier.

It is always about image isn't it? I would have killed for one of those sweatshirts. But I didn't get one. To this day I am jealous of anyone who wears one in my presence because I know they have received the full tour. Or at least had relatives that did. It's not about money, it's more about status. I would have loved to have gone to Harvard or MIT for college, but I never did look into the requirements. I just assumed a technical college would have a more progressive education as far as computers were concerned. Truth be told, I was probably right, but then in retrospect I should have commited myself more to it. I just never ended up putting in the necessary work to get my bachelors. Perhaps I will get it next year.

16 scene
[the arrow pub]

Coming in made me feel like taking a coat off,
Funny that I wasn't wearing one,
Scott was wearing a jacket and shoes,
Almost about right,
We were humans in a boiler room of pool and darts,
A place where talking to each other made more sense,
I could tell the women there were older and somehow immune to my
thinking.
It was still corrupted from the memories of the Purity girl and
remembrances of Tammy,
And my fantasy video women.
So we sat and talked and watched the small television screens,
There was a Red Sox game playing out,
At that point having been blanked about baseball,
My skill in attention to it had died,
But there was always another pint,
Something to drown the missing parts of me,
That are only now merging into one.
The gates are closed,
But the Arrow Pub is open.

The Arrow Pub was great, but it wasn't really much of a place for lively conversation. Scott was very intent on drinking and I was trying to get over how daunting taking on the Big City for work would be. I never really thought I'd be able to step out and Mack a job up. Within 2 days of having a car, I had an interview. Within 3 days, I had a job. But that's more for a little later on. The point was, I was beginning to realize what an acid cripple I'd become through all the drug use in 92 and 93 and I was certainly not in any way going to embark on any of those sorts of pursuits on this trip. My entire focus was settling down and learning to live on my own, and I had not much time for thinking about sports or recreation, when that is something that I think I sorely needed in my life. Leisure activities bring out the better sides of people and if I could only have seen that then, I think I would have been a much happier person at that time. Geez. It almost sounds as though I need that Psychiatrist.

17 scene
[the international house of pancakes]

We waited in line for almost an hour for a seat,
And the meter ran out on the car,
The food was ok,
Coffee, and pancakes,
But it wasn't worth the twenty dollar fine,
That I had to mail in,
That fateful evening,
The lessons about taking a car downtown,
Can be endless,
And aren't easily taken with a grain of salt.

Don't you hate it when you get a parking ticket, or a tow or some other useless fine for something that should during most reasonable times be free. In Western New York, the meters are not charged at night, so I never would have suspected in the slightest that they were going to ticket my car. So much for a crazy night at the Pancake house. It ended up in the long run easier to take the subway whenever I went anywhere downtown and use the subway for the outer townships.

18 scene
[haymarket square]

The shops lining the inside of the square,
Serve food of all types,
I have been told by others,
That there is excellent Souvlaki there,
And I know for a fact,
That they have excellent sausage.
We walked through and it was like a mini-mall.

There were Equadorian pipe players in the cool wind,
Of a summer night in front of the Square,
That I watched,
As I finished my dinner,
And tipped change into a felt hat.

The nights in Haymarket Square were something to remember. There was always something new to see. A new sight sound or smell. A feeling of unbridled tension in the air. The people sifted among each other like mammalians and the wind funnelled down the aisle as we strolled carelessly. I remember buying a coffee mug to bring back to my father and mother in the gift shop there. Some memorabilia of a trip well spent in terms of cultural acclimitization. There were things to read about the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson and Franklin and especially the Boston Tea Party which wasn't held far from there. Scott and I enjoyed beverages as we walked and took in the sights sounds and emotions of the moment.

19 scene
[abbott staffing]

The girl from Buffalo,
Helped me set up and take a typing test,
On a small personal computer in the back,
She determined I wasn't a quick typist,
But found me a mailroom job for 8.35 an hour anyway,
And I started work the next Monday.

It was convenient that abbott staffing was downtown in Haymarket Square, because I already knew the subway route there, having only a few days prior visited. It was a quick stop off in Federal Plaza and a short walk down some steps and then into an office complex paralleling the market. The girl that assisted was from Buffalo and I think she passed me on the typing test simply because she admired me for trying to relocate as she had. It's always a struggle and I could see that she was struggling as well, possibly only being a temp herself. It showed in her eyes. She helped me land the job though where several other places that interviewed me wouldn't give me the time of day, even for computer help desk problems. Hats off for secretaries. It's a good thing they get days of their own.

20 scene
[advent International]

I took the elevator to the 18th floor on Federal St.
And found the front desk secretary.
She had the keys to the mail room ready for me,
And handed me a voucher for a cab that had already been called,
It was my job to pick up the mail at the dock.
I took the elevator back down to the cab,
And glided through the streets,
Like a fish being driven,
And the mail was in a crate,
Ready to deliver.
The driver was patient with me,
And I gave him a five dollar tip.

I took the elevator and the envelopes up,
And entered the mailroom,
Where I was taught the sorting technique,
By the front desk second in command,
They instructed me on how to weigh postage,
And stamp on the mail machine,
And how to file the faxes in the log book,
And after a few days,
I thought I might have figured it out,
To the point where I was washing dishes,
And taking the payments for one of the Vice President's cars,
To the garage across the park,
And stopping on the way,
For Au Bon Pain'

I ended up taking a cab at one point with a voucher to pick up the mail for Advent down on the docks. The post office was not nearly as professional looking as I would have expected. It seemed almost illegal the way they were shoving the mail back and forth. But then who am I to say. I'm not an expert in that area. My friend Mike is though. He's working for the post office now and I'll bet you he could even tell you what a first class stamp costs. That aside, the work in the office was about as professional as you could get. I had to wear a tie and sort the mail and deliver it to the secretaries and log the faxes and sort them in with the mail. It was rather complex actually, I had to remember my alphabet, something I hadn't put much thought to since kindergarten, but somehow it still seemed daunting at times with the rapidity I was required to move the packages and packets. In the early morning virtually every member of the office got a copy of the Wall St. Journal, but on the odd one that didn't get one, you had to skip over because each one was exactly addressed. And the mail machine for weighing outgoing packages was a real nuisance. I had to keep getting the front desk secretary for help with it. They even had me doing dishes for them after one of their meetings. I enjoyed working for them, but I know in my heart, that I earned every penny of the $8.59 an hour they were paying me.

21 scene
[central station]

In the big central rotunda,
Ticket counters line the edges,
Interspersed with McDonalds,
Burger King,
And other Quick Food establishments,
The people flow like rodents,
Quick and furious,
Through the tunnels,
I made a deal,
And I'm there to buy a ticket,
Buffalo Bound,
One Way Greyhound.

People moved like animals in Central Station. They walked in every which direction in the big open dome and confused you. You had to be careful to step ahead to avoid pin ball like collisions. In actuality, they were more like fish than animals, veering in schools toward their appropriate trains. All I needed was a bus ticket at Greyhound. I don't even think I stopped at McDonalds for lunch because the place was so horrendously full of people. I think though that part of what contributed to the collision factor was that I was in the station at noon, the busiest time of day. Perhaps if I had come later, there would not have been such a controversial scene.

scene 22
[sitting on the bus]

I watch through the windows,
Motion begins,
With the driver's announcement,
That we should remain seated,
While the vehicle is in motion,
New England's trees become a blur,
And my thoughts dream,
Back to the Purity waitress,
And my Grandmother's Pizza,
And the sweatshirts in the bookstore window,
I begin to realize all that I will bring back to Medford.

I will bring back the computer,
And the shadow,
And the Juno keyboard,
And most of my compact disc library,
Then there are all the trees again.

And then I think of the people I will have to bring back,
My Mother,
My Father,
My Brothers,
My Sister,
And I try to listen to the radio,
But it is useless,
I have to pay attention to the stops,
Here and there along the way.

And the trees are powerful and strong,
Against the vivid light of day,
And then we are suddenly in the midst of Oak Street.
And the motion Vibrates in my temples,
And the transport comes to a temporary end.

The summer was full of the evening reds and oranges of maple trees and oaks as the trip proceeded. I found myself lost in all of the nature at the edges of the highway, and I remember focusing on my own belief in myself that if I did not at least succeed, I would come back some day. Maybe to make it the place of my retiremennt. But then the more I see here, the less I think there is a need for any particular retirement. When you learn to make yourself literate, you are literate for life. Your words and spirit flow through the people that receive them as if it was God himself speaking through you, just as he speaks through the waving of the trees. That can only happen of course if you've made a conscious effort to come to terms with that philosophic and religious position as I did about a year ago. No one says I am perfect. No one said Paul was infallible as they so kindly pointed out on television last night. But when thinking of enjoying nature, now I will always have to thank the Holy Spirit for making the beauty of nature come to light.

23 scene
[loading the car]

Rarely do I see,
Actual tears in my Mother's eyes,
She stood on the porch,
As I loaded the computer, keyboard, and discs,
And a wide assortment of clothing,
Into the Shadow.

I made sure to check on the camera,
I had bought at the CVS in Boston,
In my backpack,
I kissed her,
And rolled from the gravel,

Wordlessly.

Mom didn't realize what I had to do. I had to be the stable party in a situation that could have turned out worse for both Scott and I. He might never have found that Someday Cafe' without me, and he may have ended up stranded over night with no way home. So all in all our decision to stay could only be predicated on his responsibility to me to find work so that we both could maintain a successful housing arrangement. Wayne, being the tough nut that he was ended up doubling the rent and deciding he wanted us there less. More to come on that. The point was, I went partly to look out for Scott. The other part was my curiousity of whether or not there was anything there for me.

24 scene
[black maple cruise]

The road wrangled up beneath me,
And as I traveled,
I spoke in silent thought,
To my life Icon,
The maple I climbed in my yard,
God in all his splendor,
Assured its rest there,
For my hands as a child,
For my legs as a teen,
For my shade as an adult,
To be my companion during desperate moments of hope.

And the rubber was firm against the blacktop,
And the Black Cherry Shadow angled forward,
Into the rising sun,
That blistered the eyes like a burning fire,
The day wore on and the birds and the pheasantry,
Scattered into the woodlands,
At the edge of the Interstate.

And the car was like the inside of a cranked up toaster oven,
And in the moments that I stopped for soda,
I reflected on the stiffness in my aching legs.

When the toll cards were finally paid,
I knew I was back,
In the place I belonged,
The Pink House in Medford.

Travel is fun. The open road is a thing to be marveled at. When you get behind the wheel of your first car, you feel a twinge in your backbone that screams all the way up your spine Freedom! At last, you have the same opportunity and possibility that is granted the privilaged middle class in America to live the wild and transient life that is a ramble forward with no looking back. In so many ways I was not looking back. Hindsight is twenty twenty though. I was looking forward with my eyes on the brass ring of success and had things worked out differently, I might not be the writer I am today. I would have missed all of those debates with Scott over why Sartre was only going to make him more depressed. What I didn't realize at the time was that there is some enlightenment to be had by opening ones eyes to philosophy. Even Kerouac and his boys knew that. They were all over the road with the wheel spinning and they came up historically smelling like roses. Even if they were occassionally taken advantage of by the dogs. The open road, a metaphor for everything good and soul searching in the four corners of America, a place to hang your hat low over your eyes under a starry night while watching the trucks pull down. A mountainous cavern of bliss when crossed through and above. For the road is not flat. It moves up and down and it twists and it turns until you can relentlessly say you've gained experience that no other single individual can share. The open road is a vestige of American life, ever since Henry Ford developed the Model T in every color you wanted it as long as it was black. The open road was meant for you and me friends. I strongly urge you to take it up sometime, and feel that throttle in your loins, for there is no other place to go, under these stars, but a rave on the moon.

25 scene
[the beer mart]

I walked into the dark store,
And smelled the odor of old dry Beer,
Like the smell of,
The back room bottling department at Tops at home.

It suddenly came to mind,
That a good German beer,
Might be preferred,
By my housemates.

With the help of the shop keeper,
I settled on a nice twelve pack,
Of Grolsh bottles,
It cost roughly fifteen dollars,
And was a menace to carry,
So I loaded them into the front seat,
The green bottles rattled as I drove.

The grolsh was supposed to be a bribe to get the two of them to help me move my car full of stuff into the tiny house. It didn't work, neither were impressed with the Grolsh as they'd been drinking the moonshine homemade stuff. I was really disappointed with them but I didn't let on and carefully carried my keyboard, stereo, and computer into the house and set up for business. I knew by then that Scott's aparent lethargy was not going to pay off in Spades, but I kept quiet and went about the business of work and self establishment and I showed them how to fax documents later that evening on the computer. Scott liked to play a game of chess I had obtained from our friend Larry the Terminator in Buffalo. It was called Fritz. And it's accuracy and acuity were maddening. It was such a tough game that I wouldn't play it, but Scott spent ages staring at it like a mantis and eventually beat the thing. Once.

26 scene
[scrabble in the evening]

When I arrived they were playing,
Duelists locked in fiery Battle,
The smoke wafting in the rafters,
The clean face facing the beard.

He was the Bunzee man,
Furiously laying letters,
In a desperate attempt,
To forego the inevitable gloom of defeat.

I offered them Grolsh,
But they concentrated on the home brew,
So I cracked one open,
And watched the fates collide.

I played a couple of games of Scrabble that evening. We listened to Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel and a couple of the many CD's I'd brought from home. Wayne was not fond of my collection so they didn't get played much around the house. He hated anything with electronics or hip hop beats. And that was all I really had. We had a few seven letter words as I recall. Scott remembers that I placed the word Bunions for several points. He also challenged it and lost crippling his score for that round, but it is possible I think that he may have won the game. I never paid too much attention to who won or lost. It was the playing of the game that was most intriguing to me. It was a real chore to tabulate final scores anyway, and even though I've accomplished the task of completing Calculusi III I've never particularly cared for adding and subtracting if it's not absolutely necessary. I guess I was lucky when I was a cashier at the computer store in Buffalo that the machines automated all of that. Wouldn't it be a joke if someone got a couple thousand dollars worth of discounts. Hmmm....

27 scene
[computer city saugus]

The bus dropped off,
On the side of the four lane highway,
Opposite the mall,
And I had to walk,
Across a long gated catwalk,
To finally achieve the retailer,
Where I went in and requested,
A full-time sales application.

I was dressed well,
But I was sweating in the summer afternoon,
The store was virtually empty.

The customer service clerk,
Took the completed application,
And told me to call back in a day or so.

I missed the last bus leaving the mall,
As it closed at four P.M.
So I ended up taking a Taxi,
Sharing it with a Puerto Rican woman,
And her baby,
For ten dollars flat.

Before I had the car, I took this ridiculous bus trip out to the Retail Computer City out in Saugus. The trip never paid off because they never called me back. Even though I'd had years of prior experience in Sales and Customer Service at the one in Buffalo, they flat out thew my application in the garbage because they thought it ill willed to move out to Boston without a plan. I could have told them to shove it down their pants, but I don't think they would have liked that. And to top it off I had to share a cab to get back to the subway. I didn't mind sharing though. The puerto rican lady and her child were beautiful people and they were dropped off before I could even figure out how far we'd traveled and tried to estimate the costs. It ended up costing me 10 bucks I didn't want to spend, but for that and a smile, I got back home where I needed to be. I'll never work for another retail store again. They treat you like hamburger to a degree that can be compared only with Burger King. Where I once was nearly fried alive by a gargantuan freak. More on that in stories of the weird. A blog I intend to create when I'm done rambling about these amazing experiences that people can only hope to have in their lifetimes.

28 scene
[circuit city mystic avenue]

I filled out an application,
One sunny afternoon,
Thinking I had a shoe in,
Because of my tech background.

The manager interviewed me on the spot,
But at the end of the interview,
He asked the tough question,
"Have you ever had problems with drugs or alcohol."
I told him the sorrowful truth,
And I was not hired,
To sell Televisions or Camcorders.

The truth is, I've done everything you can possibly do wrong in your life. I drink, I gamble, I smoke, I have a history of drug addiction and psychhiatric melodrama. I've never been arested but I've been in the back of a police car more than once. I've nearly dropped my grandfather's casket, that was a good one. And to put it out point blank, I'm still here. People still love me for who I am. And if I don't have myself, I have my two dogs. At least I know they are good for ripping open the trash and eating the chicken bones only to puke them up the next day. But really, does it take that much talent to sell a TV or a camcorder when you've already got computer skills and mad verbosity like I do? NO. Give me a break. I'm not a part of the mob and I don't drop in on the backs of brinks trucks. I know better. There is a fine line between what you can do legally and what you can't and while I've been dancing on it for years, I've never made that little step that you have to make to cross it. As far as I'm concerned I'm a disabled veteran. I could have predicted the war that happened this year back in 1996. They called me crazy for it and ran me out of town. But you know what, as I said once, and I will say three times in this message. I am still here. I am still here. And no low life middle management scum is ever going to make me feel like a child again.

29 scene
[the gillete agency]

I drove for miles and miles from Medford,
To a temp agency in Waltham,
Where I met a very upscale agent,
To discuss a potential opportunity for work with Gilette,
As a technical services representative.

It was an in-house operation,
On their internal computer network,
I was shown several diagrams,
And engineering schematics.

But I could not understand them,
Their illiteral detail,
Was not something I had ever seen before,
And so the trip,
Was an expense of fuel,
And yet another dashed hope.

This on the other hand is another story entirely. The lady I discussed this job with on the phone said that she had an opening for a skilled individual and there was a miscommunication. I thought she was looking for computer help desk help and it turned out ultimately that she was looking for an engineer. She showed me floor plans of an intricate network and I was unable to interpret the signs. That doesn't mean I might not, with the appropriate training been able to handle situations on the network, but it turns out, that I've learnet more about networking and coding on my own and through the agencies I've worked for locally than I ever would have had I taken a job with too steep a learning curve in Boston. So much for Gillette. If you see me on the street today you'll say. Yep. He was right. I've given up on shaving. It's highly overrated. Why bother if no one sees what you're good for on the inside track. Look at all this fun and excitement. We're in the new Vegas Land baby and there's bound to be something to entertain. Hell if my words don't come on down and spin the wheel with me sometime. I'll give you the lucky numbers out of my fortune cookie.

30 scene
[the last days of the green tomato]

Scott cooked the vegetables up right,
He made a stir fry without the pasta,
While I surfed the Y's and Z's of the dictionary,
And that's when I discovered Yohimbe.

I did a song and dance,
It was the African mint root I had chewed,
In the midst of the Chemistry mayhem,
Of December 1993,
A courtesy gift from Mark Oliver,
The DJ that I gave a couple of extra Smart Drinks,
For his Twenty Dollars Canadian.

I was riding the back of the Zebra,
Through the breathing walls of acid and dry ice fume,
And it was seven letters.

So we made the rule,
That if anyone ever scored with Yohimbe,
Or even got it in their rack,
They became an automatic Scrabble victor.

Those vegetables tasted amazing,
On the earth-ware dishes in the pink house,
And the tomatoes,
Even the green ones,
Were ripe, and full of garlic salted juice.

The last days of the green tomato are right. Our time in Boston was running out. We ended up having a running gag about the Yohhimbe root in our scrabble games because I think I actually tried some in Toronto once. I don't know exactly. I think that I was so fried on Acid that I may have actually missed the point of the whole thing. I was told by the guy that gave it to me that it was an African Root that had Stimulating abilities if you know what I mean. I was stimulated all around that night if you know what I mean. I was so lost in the magic that I couldn't count the change for the customers and had panic attacks when we ran out of 2 dollar bills. Which don't even exist in any real shape or form in this country. Incedentally this was all related to a dead head type smart drink business I ran across the border called Mental Jackhammer. It was all under the table and I made enough money to bankrupt myself. I found that my girlfriend had a little bit of a medicinal problem herself and was in the till and that had to end. It did and badly. And to this day, I wish I'd stood clear.


31 scat
[the mac world nomad spoilers arrive]

August had come,
Rent was due again,
And the Mac World Nomads knocked,
They startled the hell out of us.

He hadn't told us they were coming,
Regardless of his reasons,
They were not welcome in my living space,
And they made themselves at home,
Unrolling their sleeping bags on the living room floor.

I had one beer with them,
Then I went to try to sleep,
But I deceived them.
I read all night,
At 5 A.M. I woke Scott in his room,
We packed the LTD and the Shadow,
And at daybreak,
Before their ratcheting eyes opened,
We were on the road,

Home.

This is where the story ends. Scott and I rapidly packed up our things and headed off in seperate cars to get back to Niagara Falls as quickly and evasively as possible. From what I understand he never did pay his share of the rent but that was not important as I had paid a mammoth phone bill for long distance Scott had used and Wayne had said he'd be commited to sharing it. The wonders of brotherhood and loyalty never cease. In any case I lost only about a thousand dollars on the adventure as I earned a weeks pay and Scott only lost about three hundred. By nineties standards that was a lot of money, but when I compare it to what you can sink into a bad slot machine, its really not that much. Don't ask Don't tell. The moral of the story is, if the landlord has fleas, don't let him drink in the kitchen. And there's more, be careful if you stand to close, you might start itching yourself. We had a ball that summer and there was no more fun to be had at that point and I dynamically fell back into school and work pursuits having spent some more time reading a computer publication on the train back and forth to work. Ah the marvels of public transportation. I only wish I could have stolen that Japanese guy's rolex while he was standing next to me. Oh well. You can't win 'em all, but you can cyberpunk out your next door neighbor with a burned CD of their nocturnal habits. Wait a minute. I'm sinking into Psychosis. Somebody get the stretcher. Tie me down. I'm having abnormal thoughts about abnormal women. The end is near. Beware Cinco De Mayo 2005. Because I'm raining down on this earth with a vengeance.

Epilogue
[the tennis match]

Early on Sunday morning, one week after we arrived, I dressed as best I
could, and walked to the Methodist church between Davis Square and the
Pink House. I patiently signed my name into the guest book and sat down
to listen to the sermon. The minister was an African American woman, and
the service held was for both Unitarian and Methodist parishioners. I
listened carefully as she talked about Agape and the unification of
spiritual and philosophical forces bringing peoples lives together. At
the time I don't think I really saw the impact of how this would impact
me, but in retrospect, I can see that it was important. It is not just
important to me, but to anyone who has a friend or relative, and that
covers just about everyone in the world. Or at least you would hope it
does. I meditated and prayed on it for a moment, and asked God to help
me find the reason why I was here. I thought mostly about finding a way
to support myself and become part of a community other than the one I
had dealt with back home,
Not realizing, that no matter where you go, you can never really leave
home. Either home comes with you, or it finds you, or it Spirits you
away. Because today, home is the Earth, Earth is where you come from,
and Earth is where you will stay. Even the cosmonauts that lost their
lives in space return to the earth as ash. Yet visions like theirs are
eternal because they are made eternal through the motions of the papers
that sift through the air of the seaside, on you guessed it, Earth.

I asked around at church to see if I could enlist in any help finding
work in Boston, and I was nudged aside by most people, except for one
kind old woman who began asking others on my behalf. Many of them
suggested reading the help wanted ads, or looking to temporary agencies,
or the unemployment office. It appears that most good God fearing people
are not the ones that have the power to instantly employ just anyone.
They work for people too and have careers to uphold and must keep to a
smart degree guarded from strangers or drifters who might upset their
ability to care for their own. This is understandable. So I took their
suggestions and worked at it a while but that all came later. The
important lesson is that drifting is something that you have to be
careful about, because even your own affiliations may not recognize you
when you journey to distant lands.

I will take you to the beginning of the tennis match. I spent a long
time walking back up the hill thinking about the sermon and the old
woman's charitable speaking, and the coffee and cookies at church, and I
was not particularly in wonderful spirits for sharing my thoughts of the
people I had encountered because I did believe that they genuinely could
have helped me if they had wanted to. And perhaps in a way they did.
When I channeled my energy and wisdom into relaying a message of
hopefulness in the last quarter mile, I found Scott waiting for me at
the door, with two rackets in hand. He told me to go and put on some
other clothes and come and play tennis. At first I wanted to decline
because I saw this as an energy sapping activity. After all, I had just
walked four blocks up hill and had a mission to talk to him about
motivation and overcoming obstacles. I thought he was just as depressed
as I made him out to be, and I thought that he had been reading things
that were necessarily prescriptions for depression. He was always
walking around with a book written by Jean Paul Sarte' or Albert Camus.
It isn't until now that I realize that philosophy, reason, and
metaphysics are all connected. In a spiritual sense, he must have been
working toward his own awakening of being. Just quietly, and in
considerately. And so I changed, thinking that it wasn't going to do me
much good. After all, how can you give a sermon, if you are choking your
way after a green ball?

I played as well as I could, but I knew that I would never defeat him,
at a game he had grown up playing. So I struck the ball when I could,
and the energy flipped out of my hands and over the net into his court.
Every once in a while I would score a point, but it wasn't often that I
would achieve love on my side of the score sheet. So I conceded that if
victory had to be his on this count, it would define it that he was
champion. But he was never overly smug about his game play. He simply
wanted me to remember that we played the game and had an opportunity to
enjoy an almost resort like living. Our house wasn't even a block from
the court, and there was no charge to play. And the baseball games were
gratis, being a community sport, if we wanted to watch. So there was
something going on. But I couldn't exactly see it at the time. Now I
think that I can say it without fear and without enmity from anyone. The
truth is, that agape and spirituality apply to everyone, and that these
mergences of common experience are not coincidence, but a part of the
nature of God working through nature. There can be love of a spiritual
kind among men, without the necessity of abomination or contact. And so
I say clearly, that in the tennis match of life, I found Love for Scott,
as a brother, and fellow human, and look toward him as a good man to
obtain knowledge from, or share knowledge with, or even possibly find
wisdom through.

Some might call this comradeship, I cannot attest specifically to this,
because I believe that communism is steeped in hatreds too old to be
viewed as plausible for a leading existence in modern social action. I
will call it only what it is. Love. Comradeship implies leadership in a
cause. And there is no cause, greater than that of the Son of God who
died for our sins, also named aptly, Love. I find brotherhood through
his suffering, and know that I too suffer, and that everyone who has
lived a day since Rome began to burn has suffered. And today, we are
still in the fires of that fallen Empire. We are also however in the
light of God, and through Love, as I would share with my Father, or My
Brothers, or my Sister, or my Mother, or any of my Aunts, Uncles, or
Cousins, we may all

Chicagoland Noisecontrol Publishing

My first semester of college, I lived in Chicago in a fraternity house on the campus of Illinois Institute of Technology. I have to say that in many ways it was an unparalleled experience. I had an opportunity to share quarters with fifty young guys that were all in about the same mode of maturity, and I had a chance to meet many nice young women and play games and socialize on weekends and watch a big screen tv and play Sonic the Hedgehog and slam dance in the living room. Nirvana was new and Smells Like Teen Spirit was playing on MTV virtually every 20 minutes. Beavis and Butthead were still a novelty, and a Radio station called B96 the Killer B was kicking out the jams.

The colorful culture of chicago's ghettos was something to be admired. We had mexican burritos from a true mexican greasy spoon restaurant one night when driving to a U2 CD release party for Achtung Baby at a record store down town. I remember hearing Jane's Addiction Coming Down The Mountain in the back seat of a compact car, crammed in with three other guys. I was small then, so it didn't matter much, but it was still really uncomfortable.

I remember shaving the left side of my head and walking around with half a mohawk and combat boots, when we went to the alternative club called Medusas downtown. We didn't much know where we were going, we just followed the older brothers as pledges, and they made sure we made it home in one piece. The music was amazing at Medusa's. It was my first taste of Chicago Industrial House for real, and they had Vid-Screens with Music Videos on one floor. There were also a set of Performance artists called two beats ahead who had Mushroom Cloud video footage while they did their performance. I wonder if they are still doing their thing.

During Rush week we had played splat ball, laser tag, beach volley ball. And we had gone to Second City comedy club where we saw some anti-war comedy sketches. The water front was beautiful when we drove by it that summer, with sail boats, and small water craft and it looked like people could have skated by on roller skates on the well kept up concrete ringing the park.

Chicago had a lot of Statues. I remember staring at one of them for a long time and trying to figure out exactly what it was supposed to be. It defied description. But it was there, and I guess that's what counts for its part.

Michael Jordan was in his prime when I was in Chicago and we heard a lot about him. I didn't know much about basketball players then, but I know now, having looked into it and purchased his book, that his main focus was defense, and in that category he ended up surpassing nearly every player to ever play the game. And he then moved into focus on improving his offense and broke some records there as well. Jordan has an IMAX DVD if you are interested in that sort of thing. I also bought that. The footage of the 98 season is incredible.

From our house you could see Cominsky Park, and you could hear the trains go by at night. The basement had a pool table and a foose ball table and a closet where the traditional materials were locked up. There was also a bar, where we would end up serving drinks for parties, or spray down the floor in a water war. We caused some serious havoc with the under sink hose one night and ended up mopping for hours.

I was introduced to Whisky Sours and Beer in the Sigma Phi Epsilon tradition. You drink Beer with the brothers downstairs, or you go up in the rooms and relax and watch old episodes of The Rifleman while sipping whisky sours and strumming a guitar that you don't know how to play. I felt like those two mexican birds at times. I love Speedy Gonzoles. I grew up with him.

One night I went shopping for records with a friend named Dan whose main interest was making Art out of plexiglass and craypaper. He said he was selling these statuettes for like 800 dollars a pop in his circles. It was unbelieveable to me. He was good at stealing CD's from Columbia house by having them delivered to a non-existant fifth floor. Strangely enough he actually bought a couple when we were in the Wax Trax shop. I spent some amazing time there chatting with a clerk with noserings and dread locks, and bought Consolidated, Front Line Assembly, and Meat Beat Manifesto discs. Coming back we wandered through some T-Shirt tourist rock shop type places, and I bought a NIN t-shirt. One of the original black puffy ones. They don't last too well in the washer.

That semester, I slept in the top bunk and it ended up collapsing because I put too much weight at one end climbing. I almost killed my roomate who was sleeping under it, and I thought never again will I experience this. I ended up sleeping in a new room, that was occupied by vomiting drunks from time to time. It didn't matter because my bed was in a little cubby hole there, but it was quite an inconvenience to my studies. I didn't do well and I ended up getting sick.

That December I came home, but I will never forget the experience or put forth the possibility that it could have been better. It was life, and it was vibrant, and it was a short freedom from home living, that I couldn't have asked for better of. Chicago is a beautiful city with Beautiful people and a great technical base. I just wish I'd paid more attention in class.

Memoir of a French Canadian Adventure
Christopher Bradley
September 10, 1998
(c)1998
Creative Non-Fiction
Dr. David


About five years ago, my friend Pat called me on the phone during the summer and suggested that we go up to Montreal. I had never been to the city and I knew that the Jazz Festival was going on up there because a woman that I had met in Toronto a couple of weeks earlier had told me about it during a car ride to Hamilton for a Rave.

I wish I could remember her name. She had a purple felt hat and we had gone to breakfast one morning after I had met her at the underground nightclub that I was working in called The Rise. After breakfast I took her back to her apartment and she offered to give me a massage. I was nervous because she was about 31 and I was only 22. I laid down on her bed and fell asleep. I never got the massage because I hadn't told her whether I would have liked it. When I woke up she was in the shower. She came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel and I got to watch her change into her clothes. She was very attractive. I came home to pick up more equipment to set up my Smart Drink bar at the rave and brought her with me. I got wrapped up with my friends and associates in the record business that were there and she left the Rave with someone she had met in college. I never saw her again.

Pat and I took the ten hour drive in my Dodge Shadow and talked for a long time. I told him the story about how I had met the woman and that she had made me walk all over a certain part of Toronto to buy some clothing that she was having held for her at some small shops. I also told him about her story about her two children who she was not allowed to see. She didn't explain exactly why she wasn't allowed to see them. She had showed me a picture of them hanging on her apartment's hallway door on the way out. It had a lipstick heart painted around their faces on the white sheet that she had affixed the photograph to. We talked about a lot of other things and I know that birds came into the conversation at least a few times because Pat is a bird watcher and he has been obsessed with them since he was very young. We probably also talked about the Delirium rave that I had invited him to work at with me earlier that summer where Steve had had sex under the table with a very young girl.

Steve had been a year younger than me and I had met him at a bar that I worked at for a while. He was British and he had played soccer when he was living London. One time he showed me his trophies that he had packed into a shelf behind the head of his bed in his small room at his friend's house. Steve started out being a great friend that was interested in the same type of electronic music that I was but eventually he ended up having a drug problem and I stopped visiting him in Canada as I stopped being involved directly in the nightclub business up there. He did do one positive thing before the last time I met him and that was to move in with his brother who was to a great degree more responsible than he himself was. I am sure that he has straightened out a little bit since then but I am not sure how I could ever get into contact with him.

Entering Montreal was interesting. There was a long stretch of well lit road and then a long tunnel leading toward downtown. The tunnel was crowded with traffic and it took us a long time to get up to cruising speed. Once we got into the city the traffic was very difficult to move around in. I remember being stuck on a long upward sloping street called St. Danille for almost two hours because the area of the city being used for the festival was all blocked off. Pat and I were looking for the hostel that he had called about so that we would have somewhere to sleep for the night. We didn't bring a lot of money to spend on a hotel. I think I brought a total of ninety dollars with me. Back then I had credit cards that I could use if I needed gas or something important came up. It turned out that the hostel was filled and there were no more places to sleep there for the night. We decided that we would try to find a safe place to park and sleep in the car.

It was unusual but we ended up finding a place to park that was only a few city blocks away from the festival that didn't cost us anything. We put the two front seats back and fell asleep in the warm car at about 2AM. When we woke up it was daylight on Saturday. The car's temperature inside seemed like it was one hundred and fifty degrees. It was about ten o'clock. We decided to get French Bread for breakfast. We put the seats up and started up the car and took a drive through the upper hills of Montreal. It seemed as if the city was arranged a lot like Athens with the rows of houses and buildings along the edges and flat parts of the hill that Montreal was on. We didn't find a bakery in the upper part of Montreal so we went back into the city expecting terrible traffic. It turned out not to be so bad and we ended up finding a small shop where we bought two large loaves of bread and a dozen croissants. We ate them plain as we drove back to the place where we had parked the night before.

I had brought a razor and some shaving cream with me. We decided to do something vile to McDonalds because neither one of us were pleased with how many of them were taking up the main street we were parked near. Both of us walked into the bathroom and shaved and left our whiskers in the sink. We also took one of their giant toilet paper rolls to use for tissue and napkins . It just barely fit in my back pack. On the way out I bought a thirty nine cent ice cream cone. The price was in Canadian so the deal was excellent. I had a few of those ice cream cones that weekend.

Pat and I walked up and down the main thoroughfare for a long time that day. We looked at all of the big churches and the girls walking up and down the street. We actually talked to a couple of them in front of one of the tall gothic looking churches. They spoke reasonably good English but Pat talked to them a lot more quickly in French. During his first few years at college he was a French major and had even become president of the French club. I had him ask the two girls that we were talking to, who were dressed in black with black boots, if there were any parties going on that weekend. One of them said that we could always check at the record store a couple of blocks down.

We took the girl's advice and walked up toward the store. It was only about 1 o'clock in the afternoon. We asked if there was a Disc Jockey that worked there that knew of any full scale rave events happening that weekend. He ended up selling us a couple of tickets to a rave in a Warehouse that wasn't too far from the center of the city. The flyer that the directions was printed on was in French so I had to have Pat translate it when we finally went there later that night.

We saw a lot of things between three o'clock that afternoon and the time that we went to that rave. We walked back past the churches that we had seen on the way out of the city's center. We looked at some more of the girls and marveled at the way they held themselves and their fashion sense. There was something different about the people there. They walked upright and there was a kind of rhythm to their walk but their noses were not held in the air. The clerks at McDonald's were bilingual. We bought some McBurritos for lunch.

After lunch we walked down into the area of the festival itself. There were so many people around that it was hard to fix on any one particular style or fashion. It seems that people of all types are interested in Jazz. Before proceeding to the stage, Pat and I sat on the steps of a building with a big fountain in its main plaza. It might have been a large government building or an art gallery. We watched the people flow in and out of the plaza and back and forth onto the street.

There was a mime making twisted balloons for children not far away. She was pretty with long blond hair and a black beret. Her hands seemed to dance through the plastic as she folded and turned it into the shapes of animals and birds.

After a while of sitting in the open in the warm sun we decided that we should walk up to the stage and also look for some shade. There were advertisements for Labatt Blue beer all around the outside of the stage. The circular lights along the metal pipes that ran along the top of the stage shone down upon the performers in bright colors leaving dots of red, blue, and yellow on the wooden planks that they moved around on.

We had arrived as the first players were finishing their set. We stood in the buzz and chatter of the crowd among bikers, and lawyers, and youth in all manner of dress. It only took a few minutes for the next band to arrive and tune their instruments, swinging their guitars over their shoulders and wetting their mouthpieces.

The announcement of the act was made in French. The black vocalist introduced himself as Freddie James and the band proceeded. The music was loud and clear and the ground seemed to vibrate with each blast of the saxophone. We stayed for Freddie's entire set and then decided that shade was really a necessity.

We walked to the back of the festival area and discovered ourselves at the edge of a small park just far enough away from the music to be relaxing. I sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette. I remember thinking at that point that someday I would have to have a way of remembering this event. I hardly ever carry a camera and at the time I hadn't taken any pictures myself in a few years.

Glancing over at Pat, I saw that his eyes were following the small birds and squirrels in the park. Some of the birds were sparrows. I felt it better at the time not to ask him about the types of birds because it would lead into a long conversation about Central American wildlife. I had heard his stories many times since March when he had come home from Costa Rica. The stories we would have to tell about this experience were enough for me to concentrate on.

After about an hour we returned to the stage and listened to a couple more bands. I had a few more cigarettes. The air had cooled a little bit and there was a nice breeze. I could smell water mixing with the Nitrogen and Oxygen floating around me.

At about six o'clock we decided to get some more French Bread. We walked toward St. Danille and started looking for a bakery. After walking past many unreadable signs on shops that were obviously shoe, clothing, and electronics stores, we found what we were looking for.

A heavyset woman with dark hair and a white apron came to the counter and addressed us in French. Pat spoke for us again. This bakery sold smaller loaves and we bought an entire bag full of them. We each ate one right away as we walked, and the bread tasted like it had been baked with a small amount of butter. The flavor was sensational.

We walked a long way down St. Danille down past the festival for a way to look into the windows of fancy restaurants, jewelry stores, and pawn shops. We crossed from one side of the street to the other and walked back up to the alley behind the festival. There were vendors set up selling caramel apples and cotton candy and glowing necklaces and toys. There were a few people playing with floating sticks in the street.

A unicyclist rode out toward us through a maze of arms and torsos juggling five balls and wearing a top hat. He flipped his cycle in one direction and then the other and somehow stopped on a pin's head worth of ground. He took his hat off and bowed to us as we stood there dazzled, while still retaining his balance. He only paused for a second and then sifted back into the crowd.

Pat and I walked back toward the stage and listened for a few minutes and then decided that it was time to go to the Rave. We walked through the people pressing in and out of the square and walked back past the fountained plaza. We walked past the McDonalds where we'd had lunch. The streets were flowing with a new crowd of people. They were people that had worked during the day and were out for a night of fun and excess. There were probably a few night security guards and waitresses walking among us. We found the Shadow and started for the south edge of the city.

When we arrived at the warehouse there were large groups of people sitting on the grassy incline at the side of the building. People were mingling with each other, no doubt gossiping and selling drugs to each other. They were all dressed in bright flashy vests, t-shirts, and hats. Some of the girls wore long paisley dresses with pigtails and grins. Some of the people had pacifiers in their mouths, others were sharing their containers of Vicks vapo-rub.

We waited in line for almost an hour to be frisked and admitted to the party. But when we entered, the building seemed empty of people, because it was so spacious. A few people wandered across the smooth cemented floor in different directions trying to assess their environment. Once the crowds arrived there wouldn't be much time to explore. The house was organized in a circular fashion with a large room with curtains draped around in the center. The music was not a direct assault. When we arrived it had been at a low level, but we could tell that the sound system was extremely large because the music flowed through the entire structure.

I suggested to Pat that we walk through the room in the center to see what was going on in there. We walked through a streamered entrance way and into a room with paintings hanging on the wall. Some of them had foil wrapped across certain sections of the work for effect. They sent shards of light speckling across the floor and ceiling when they reflected the glow of the upright lamps in the corners of the area. A woman with short black hair was still hanging the paintings.

We walked through another set of streamers. There was a man in a white robe kneeling over a freshly spread white bed sheet that rested on a mattress carefully laying out a mannequin's parts. He had a head, two hands, and two feet. I asked Pat to ask him what he was doing. He detected my English and told us that he could speak it. He told us that he was doing performance art and that we should stop by and see him sometime later that night. He told us a quick story that about his life in Toronto and his decision to move to Montreal. I don't remember all of the details of that story.

We walked out of the back of the room through a third set of streamers and found ourselves in the back of the building, which would have been near where we parked the Shadow. We walked down the hallway and to our left we saw the frame of a car painted in graffiti housed in a metal frame. Behind the car was a black curtain.

We turned a corner and kept walking and eventually made it back to the most expansive space which was intended to be the dance floor. There were many more people in the building by now and it was starting to look like a concert size event. The music was getting louder and a few people were dancing here and there.

The music sounded like techno but did not sound like any techno that I had heard before. The sounds being used were very long and full of echo. They sounded like they were modulated analog waveforms that had been digitally processed. Going into the details of exactly what that means is not necessary if one isn't interested in electronics or high tech audio isn't absolutely necessary. The music sounded bouncy, cheerful, and it enstaticked the air with bass and a blurry fuzzing noise.

I sat down on a platform made of thin wood and had a cigarette. Pat stood and talked to me and we both knew that what was about to happen would be mind boggling. People were lining up against the walls of the room, meshing with one another in the center of the arena, and drinking from bottles of water. The ones that had started dancing were bouncing to the up tempo music, their small backpacks jostling right along with them. Everyone had some different type of sneaker or shoe on. A few of the unwise were wearing sandals against the cold hard floor.

After about a half an hour I stood up and suggested to Pat that we take a walk all the way around the building again to make sure we could orient ourselves. He agreed and this time we walked straight toward the back of the building instead of going in through the intricate set of rooms. When we got to the end of the hall, we saw to our left a set of movie theater seats. They were all set up in rows in front of a hanging white screen with a sixteen millimeter projector at their center. There were a couple of unlabeled film canisters under the projector which was situated on top of a rolling table. I made a deal with Pat that if we ended up getting separated inside the warehouse to meet back at the movie chairs.

We walked through the hallway past the car again and moved toward the entrance and even though the music had gotten louder again, we could hear the people talking outside loudly through the wall. There must have been a huge line still waiting to enter. We walked back into the main hall and started dancing. I stopped for a moment to make sure my keys were safely in the depths of the pockets of my cutoff hunter green Dockers. I threw a flyer that I had been handed outside the rave onto the floor. In retrospect, I should have kept it.

I could feel my feet vibrating against the floor as I danced. Whenever I danced at raves, it took me a few minutes of moving to get up the courage to start moving my hands and expressing myself by raising them over my head. On this occasion, my feelings were the same. I was feeling fine after about three minutes.

Pat seemed to immediately start cutting at the air with the edges of his fingers. He actually seems to do high speed Kung Fu moves when he dances. He started with Kung Fu sometime around 1985 when he won some free lessons in a little league baseball raffle. He has loved doing Kung Fu ever since. His hands and fists stabbed at the air and his feet rattled quickly against the floor to the pulses between the beats.

Hands and feet seem to make the most pronounced gestures when people are dancing at raves but if you pay attention, you start to see people's shoulders popping forward and back. Their hips and knees are similar, but at times they all seem to be moving in opposing directions. The motions of the dancers are like the motions of jointed metal pendulums but are far from mechanical. Human beings have soft edges and curves that make them fine works of physical artistry.

After about a half an hour we went back to the platform and I sat down again, this time Indian style, toward the center of the platform. Pat sat down with me. We were both smiling. I took my Panic hat off and wiped my forehead with it. We hadn't brought any water in with us and it was obvious that we would need it. My t-shirt was soaked. I was wearing a Buffalo News cartoonists shirt that I had purchased during the Allentown art Festival in 1992. I decided to go and see if I could find a stand that was selling water. Pat said that he would stay where he was.

Before I got a chance to leave, they turned the music up for the fourth time. An announcement came across the speaker system in French. Pat listened to it carefully the second time it was repeated and grabbed me by the arm. I couldn't hear him so I just followed him. Once we were clear of the platform we turned around and faced it. A spotlight was shining down at the center of it from the rafters.

A man stood at the center of the light. He was dressed in a brown leather vest and pants. The master of ceremonies kept speaking loudly in French in what ended up sounding like an Introduction because there was a name involved. I stood and watched him address the crowd with a wave and waited for him to perform.

Suddenly, a set of leather straps fell from the ceiling in front of him. He took the straps, and placed loops in the straps around each wrist. Pat and I talked for a minute and decided that he was an acrobat of some kind. We looked on as he slowly began twisting his arms into the straps. When his arms were even with his shoulders, he lifted his feet off of the ground until they were pointing outward, even with his hips. He had lifted his body entirely from the ground.

After holding that position for a minute, he slowly wound the straps further up his forearm and drifted his body backward until the tips of his toes were toward the ceiling and he was hanging upside down. All that I could think of was the pain of the straps cutting into his arms. His whole body was muscular though, so he must have conditioned his arms well to handle the strain. He hung this way for close to another minute and then twisted his arms again and flipped his whole body upward with another set of loops around his elbows.

The acrobat slowly worked his way all the way to the ceiling flipping his entire body over and over again. The ceiling was high, and the straps were very long. When he left the ceiling, he flipped very quickly down to half the distance from the floor and then stopped abruptly. He pushed his legs into the air and began to swing forward and backward over the dance area. There were people still dancing that weren't even fully aware that his performance was happening or didn't care to watch. I was fascinated.

He came down to the floor after a few minutes of swinging and pulled his hands out of the straps. His arms were red and cut in a pattern like the ones you see on a barber's pole. He bowed and returned from the bow with a flushed face. With his act alone, my admission price had been well spent.

I told Pat that I was going to find the water and I started walking. I followed the same route through the building that we had taken to find the movie seats. The seats were still empty and the projector was still off. I ambulated past the car again and caught a pair of eyes on me. I stopped and looked around quickly and then looked directly at the person who had been watching me. He was wearing a dark patterned Hawaiian flower shirt with a string tie and a pair of black cowboy boots. He had skin the color of a light colored Greek Olive. He was smoking whatever it is that people roll in rolling papers and leaning against the car.

I turned back to the crowded pathway and let myself drift toward the corner where I turned and started back toward the entrance. I weaved my way around the corner and followed the hall. As I got closer to the main entrance I saw a small light past the black clad security personnel. Apparently the reason we saw everyone carrying water in the first place was that they had purchased it on their way in. I waited in line for about ten minutes and bought four plastic bottles of water for eight dollars Canadian. I put one of them into the pocket that wasn't holding the keys and started back toward the platform.

It took me a few seconds to spot Pat, because he was only about five and a half feet tall. Once I stepped up on the platform though, I could see him. He was doing all of his Kung Fu moves and dancing quickly to the pounding drums. I opened a bottle of water and sat down for a rest. After a few minutes Pat came to join me and I gave him two of the containers. I drank about half of mine and then smoked some more.

Pat stuck a bottle in his pocket and finished the one he had opened. I put the half full bottle in the pocket with my keys and started dancing. I must have looked a little funny with two huge lumps sticking out just below my hips. Once I got my hands moving I felt comfortable again and this time we danced for almost an hour and a half. The audio never stopped and the transition from one record into the next was pure fluid.

We stepped back up onto the platform when the announcer started talking to introduce the next interesting event. I could feel the strain in my calves and the blisters that were starting to form at the edges of my feet from dancing for so long.

My sneakers were black twenty dollar canvas Converse All Stars. They were commonly called Chuck Taylor's because they had Chuck Taylor's signature on the circular imprint on the sides. I think he was a famous basketball player. The sneakers didn't have the best support, but I liked them because they fit my wide feet well.

When I was done thinking about my feet I saw the crowd of people on the dance floor move aside for a large rolling vehicle to pull into the center of the arena. It looked like an oversized covered wagon without the cover. There were several shirtless men standing on the wagon in different places twirling batons that had balls of fire on the ends. The wagon had been lead by a man with long hair and a wireframe skirt with a loincloth underneath. The wagon had been driven by a woman with long red hair in a black leather outfit.

Pat and I laughed at the spectacle for several minutes and grinningly watched as they proceeded. When the music started they threw their spinning batons in the air and caught them. They all managed to catch them several times. Two of them lifted one of the men up and he performed the same feat. While they were holding him up, all of them ate one end of the fire, and then the other. After they withdrew the sticks from their mouths, the wagon slowly turned and then went back down the hallway toward the movie seats.

While we were still watching the wagon a guy dressed in a banana suit started walking in our direction. He even had yellow face paint on. The suit was about two feet taller than the top of his head and shaped exactly like a huge banana. He was moving at a moderate pace through the crowd. We thought that the suit was funny enough and we were laughing and wanted to go to talk to him. Before we got a chance to move though, he turned in the other direction. The effect was ridiculous. There was a big ovular hole cut in the suit and his bare rump was hanging out of the back. The hole was not an accident. It was by design. Pat and I laughed so hard that we were bent over and nearly fell off of the platform. I have been fated to repeat the story until I move on to the next world.

When we regained our senses, I decided to sit down and Pat decided to dance. I finished my first bottle of water and started on the second. I smoked two or three more cigarettes before I decided to do anything else. Pat came back toward the end of my third and I stood up.

As I was getting to my feet a girl in a grey shirt and a black skirt approached me and said something in French. She was attractive with brown hair and a slender face. I didn't know how to respond so I had Pat do the speaking again and he replied to her "No." She turned around and stepped back into the crowd. I thought he might have said something other than just no so I asked him what he said. He said that she had asked me if I had any grass. I guess that was my first lesson in French drug terminology.

Pat went back to dance again and I smoked another cigarette and kind of moved my shoulders a little bit to the wavy aural bombardment and watched all of the people swarm through the passageways at the entrances to what was now a giant dance hall. People were still flooding in in groups of two or three.

While looking toward the door I misplaced Pat. He was somewhere among the seventeen hundred people milling around what had become a much smaller room. I started thinking about how out of control the party was getting and what might happen if police were to raid it. How would I speak to them if I were questioned in French.

All around me, even on the platform people were dancing. I saw an empty water bottle being thrown around in the crowd on the floor. There were actually many of them being hurled into the air to drop on the unsuspecting. I began to notice the shrill tones of the whistles that people had been blowing to augment the music.

I moved carefully among people who were jammed together in clusters and found my way to the hallway. The passage was half blocked by the wagon which was left against the wall and it took me a while to get to the movie seats. Pat wasn't there. There was a movie playing and a few people were in the seats. I did a double take when I looked back and realized that the movie was playing in reverse. It was taking place in Egypt and there were men wearing expedition hats wandering through the desert.

I turned toward the car and started walking. The guy with the Hawaiian shirt seemed to have never left his perch on the hood of the spray painted hood. He was watching me again. Turning away I saw three Japanese girls, two with black bell bottoms and one with a tight business skirt. It seemed like too much to take in all at one time. Things weren't registering and I was starting to get a little frightened.

I walked as quickly as I could and turned at the end of the hall and followed the next walkway down to the first entrance with the streamers. I walked through them. This room was packed with people sitting on the floor and lying down and there were a lot more of the foil covered artworks hanging all over the walls and there were free standing statues in the corners. The statues looked like they were made out of white rock but I never got a chance to closely examine them because I was dedicating my time to finding Pat.

I walked into the next room. The craypaper tried to stick to my shirt but I brushed it off. The mattress with the mannequin was blood red. I saw the man in the robes kneeling toward the sheets with a knife in his hand. He had some kind of vegetable that he was cutting. When I looked closer at the mattress I saw rows and rows of what looked like fish gills. They were actually beets. He had been cutting up beets and using them to dye the image of a human form into the mattress. He was about half done. There were people all around in this room too. Some of them were intently watching him.

I walked over and around the bodies on the floor and out through the back of the room, pushing the streamers aside and quickly past the car so that I didn't have to look at the string tie character again. I was folded into the traffic in the hallway easily. As I reached the movie seats I saw Pat sitting on the edge. I was extremely relieved. I asked him if he minded sitting and watching the film with me. He said ok. The crowd in the makeshift theater had cleared out considerably and there were plenty of places to sit.

I asked the projectionist if he was planning on showing the film again after he rewound it. He said yes. There were a few moments of peacefulness in those seats. The people were still rushing around the corner but I wasn't amidst them. I was comfortable looking at them like an observer who might watch salmon swimming upstream.

The film started out and was actually rather humourous. Out of the darkness a mummy started blazing on fire. It slowly went out as two of the guys in the expedition gear pulled torches away from it and started running in reverse quickly followed by the mummy. The mummy had been running from them when they discovered that fire would work against it. As the movie proceeded from finish to start we realized that they had attempted to destroy the mummy in several different ways. Subtitles in French were playing in the wrong order so even Pat couldn't follow the plot. It was funny watching the bullets fly out of the mummy and back into the guns of the attackers as the mummy retreated from them rather than attacking them. We ended up leaving before the film was over.

I took Pat to see the beet work and when we got there the man in the robes was almost down to the knees of the imaginary person. There were still people on the floor and the music was still at full volume. It was close to five AM.

We walked back out past the car again and toward a room that Pat had told me he had seen. The door was closed. We pushed the door opened and were greeted by a loud trumpet. There were window frames all around the inside of the room propped up at strange angles. The first word that we heard the vocalist for the little band scream was "Shhooooooooooolaine." One of the members of the band was making broken window sound effects with an old sampling keyboard and another was halfheartedly strumming a guitar at random intervals. This room was full. He belted out "Shoooooooooooolaine" more than a few times.

What they were playing almost sounded like a kind of Jazz or Blues but I think that the people that attended the festival we had attended earlier in the day would be thankful that this band had not made it to the Labatt stage. They sung some things in French after that and kept playing around with the sampled sound effects. We watched them for about thirty minutes. They did not improve. But they did marvel us with their unique style and "vision."

When we closed the door on "Shoooooooooooolaine," we pretty much closed the door on the rave. There wasn't much more we could see that would surprise us. We had seen everything in the warehouse that there was to see, and we had concluded our adventure. But with every adventure there is a travel back to the place where everything starts.

On our way home, we stopped at a Tim Horton's to buy a few donuts and a couple of cups of coffee. We talked about the night, and we talked about everything we'd seen. If we hadn't had ten hours to burn it into our memories, I don't think I would be able to write about it so clearly today.

When we left Quebec and entered the United States we told the border guards that we had gone to the Montreal Jazz Festival. This was true, but the final and total truth is that we had experienced much more. We had seen the night of the city, and we had found our way home. And I had stayed clean at my first major musical event since Vertigo.