The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

It seems like I should give a little bit about the history of Annabelle Mountain. The people who lived here first were the _____ Indians, of course. But since I’m no story teller I’ll tell you only what I know. It got its name from a man who’d lost everything ultimately in a bad business dealing during the Civil War, Henry Mills. There was no real sense of who he was by anybody around here. He didn’t seem to have any heroic qualities that I can tell, but he did once own half of the county. The story goes that his wife Mary and his daughter Annabelle lived on a hill not nearly so far up as we did and one day Annabelle, only about five or six, not much older if at all older than Minnie, walked outside one night and ended up lying on top of boulder dead. Nobody knows how she got out or why she went. After that the man supposedly spent all of his time looking for reasons that weren’t there until it made his wife go crazy and he had to put her in a sanitarium. It was about then that he lost all his land, mostly in poker games and some say died a drunk sitting at a bar in Millsville that he used to be part owner of. As far as history goes that’s all I know about Annabelle Mountain.

I like to think there is something of Annabelle’s spirit still on the mountain and when I think about how Teardrop made it up the hill I tend to think that maybe Annabelle helped him out a little bit, was there with a helping hand, was a night wind that blew warm for just that second that would allow Teardrop to stop shivering, was a rough patch of rock instead of slick mossy one that allowed Teardrop to gain that next step that he eventually did or else he never would have made it home. So I thank that little girl for the blessing of Teardrop’s return and I like to think that if someday Minnie takes a walk she’ll be there for her too.
We’re lucky, we can afford to keep Minnie at home with us. Sometimes I think it unfair that the biggest screw ups in life sometimes become the richest. While I was shooting my portion of rock and roll earnings into my veins, Helen Capowitz was stuffing hers into the same bank that her parents The Capowitz’s of Stony Brook, Long Island did business through. Moxy bought the house on Annabelle Mountain. I haven’t felt like working for over ten years. It sort of boggles my mind and makes me feel like a loser. Mmmmm. But I’ve got Albert’s rock opera on my lap right now and every time I see it I think about the music that I used to play. It’s funny, but the music in my head is coming back to me, but it’s not pressing me, not killing me like it used to, not making me need to understand it, to decipher it so that I need to go out and have a shot so I can just get it all first hand. First hand heaven which eventually became my first hand hell. How can I hate the world anymore or rant at it when the author is my brother and all that I had foisted on him was a need for more love since not only did his father leave, but so did his brother. I made Albert an only child.
Let me quote directly from the play. This is Trevor Rees-Jones, the only one in the car to survive the wreck: “I think Diana would want us to love. Love. Love everybody. Everybody. Love Everybody. Love. Everybody love. Love. Can’t we just do that now, at least, for her? We must to make it through the storm…”

A friend of mine who I knew a long time ago in L.A. who was of the Bahai faith told me that all you need is one scripture to last you through a lifetime. That thing that Albert wrote seemed to me to be a scripture. It was enough to last me a lifetime since I’d spent a lifetime already not doing it. So I took it on. It’s not easy. Albert expects a lot from me and I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes. I’m no classical musician, I’m just a rocker, but that’s what he really wants. He wants a rocker with heart, but even more, a rocker with soul because he wants to play the role of Trevor Rees-Jones himself and at the end of the play when Diana is dead and Dodi is dead and Henri is on top of his flying saucer all whacked out like I was on dope, he wants to sit there in a wheelchair in the mayhem of lights and lasers and smoke and God personified and cry like a baby. I think just the thought is admirable enough for me to say yes to the play.
We’ve decided we’re going to self-educate Minnie, at least for a few years. Moxy takes her into town and she’s decided to join the local Methodist church so Minnie will have little friends. Moxy doesn’t care if Minnie becomes Methodist or Jewish or Muslim or Gay. Moxy already knows the kind of person that Minnie will become and that is simply this: a woman with heart and soul, the kind of person Albert wants to compose the music for his play and the kind of person that he’s forcing me to become by doing it. I never thought I’d be working for my brother though. Yet I owe it to him. I think I’ve already said that.

Then you know your eyes are closed and you wonder whether you are asleep, whether Jed is dead, and whether Diana was right for bringing Henri off of the flying saucer, if maybe she just should have let him go since the guilt of killing her was way too much for him to handle.  And night falls, eyelids slope down.  We die or we don’t or we sleep only.  Which?
(Albert’s dream, uncovered by his soul at 4:22 a.m., Tennessee time):
The Angel Gabriel falls from the sky, his wings flat, dirty, beaten, and torn.  He’s fallen from a window fourteen tenement floors above.  Copper water flushes through his open mouth as he lies in a city gutter.  He doesn’t drown.  Instead of accepting death, he turns over and breaks off a wing accidently.  His leg kicks at the curb once, then twice, then three times, until the cement cracks, and his eyes are flashed open, and he stands.  He thrashes about trying to capture his broken wing, twirls madly, raging at the demons that fear him now more than he ever did them.  He stops and looks up.  He cannot fly so he begins to climb the building.  He climbs the fourteen floors to the room from which he fell.  He pulls himself up and lands in water.  He floats and sighs out in relief.  The water continues to rise as he floats and he wonders if he has fallen asleep again.  It rises and rises and then reaches the tip of the sill and begins to fall out of the window.  He inches closer and closer to the window sill, watching it pull him towards it as he floats half-asleep, the lip of the water smooth as the lip of a woman, yet not so beguiling, plainer, worthy of far less fear or care.
He goes over the sill again.  Albert is there. He reaches for him, almost jumping out of the window to hold him.  He’s got him by the broken wing.  But Gabriel is heavy because Gabriel has become Jed and Jed doesn’t want to stop this time.  The floating was too nice.  But Albert holds him, crying, screaming in pain at the weight at the end of his arms, arms too weak to hold anything anymore, but arms not about to let go.
Then, after a few moments of this agony, their eyes meet.  Albert watches as Jed’s eye unwinds, his pre-birth, killer stare unraveling before his brother’s sight.  Jed never was the angel Gabriel.  Gabriel had momentarily become the man known as Jed.  Jed was dead then, having given up the knot in his eye, the only thing that had kept him connected to life. Gabriel, mended, flew away, his wings causing wind as he departed.

this is a short story of desperation

a guy is born. Later he dies. It doesn’t matter to him because the way he feels he could care less. That’s the way of life. Death. Simple. Not that he wanted it, to die, no, he wanted to live, but it felt better to him to consider being alone in a warm grave for the rest of his life, or death, whatever it became. He couldn’t consider which was real. Life or death. The christians say that death is more like life than life is more like life. They call life death and call death new life. It’s odd. This is what all the presidents tell us and Billy Graham and the senate when they say a christian prayer. Death is better than life, so don’t have too much fun I guess. I guess that’s what it means. Look forward to death after which you will have fun. What is fun then? I guess fun is being warm in a grave for the rest of your life or death, whichever it is like I said. So I guess I’m pretty straight on target, middle of the road for my views. I’ve never been much of a non conformist. Most christians would call me dour though. I guess I’m dour then. Isn’t that what they want us to be? Makes you think if maybe there isn’t money involved in this ludicrous argument. Fuck it. I believe in God, but I’m not going to freak out about it. The entire system of our christian faith is wrong. We don’t worship Christ anymore but the devil. We watch television and go to church on Sunday. I’m not criticizing the television except its the most flagrant advertising scheme ever put out in front of the world and called by some “art.” it’s not art. It’s shit and an addictive behavior. The networks are enablers. Some will say that there are some good programs on television and its up to you to choose the ones you watch wisely. Well, they don’t live at my house where my dad sits around and drinks beer and farts his life away all the while watching Jerry Springer. We’ve become a potential case for the Jerry Springer show just by watching Jerry Springer what seems about four times a day. Is that possible? It sure seems like we see it four times a day. Fuck Jerry Springer and my dad. Fuck em all.

My mother’s cool though. She gave me four hundred dollars to get me by last month. She’s cool. Gotta buy weed and shit, but she don’t know about that and she thinks it all goes to my rent. I don’t say my mom is stupid, but she does give me a lot of money when I don’t really deserve it because I admit it that I’m a fuck up to some degree just like my old man is. I get stoned too much and I eat out a lot and I’m getting fat like my dad. I don’t work and that sucks, but I don’t give a shit. It’s what I want to do. When I get stoned it feels alright. I know, it’s an artificial high, but what else am I going to do? I got a dog that doesn’t stop barking. Barks at everything. It’s winter, got bronchitis. What the fuck else is new? Why not just get stoned and wait for better days to come in the mail. And they will. Sent out a rock musical and hope it will catch on. Created the tunes at home stoned of course. Everything stoned. Nothing held back and that’s my claim to literature like henry miller did, but, well, you can’t say better. Henry Miller wrote exactly what was on his mind. No messing around. Good writer. I try and look for ways to claim that the shit that I write is a short story or something so maybe I can sell it and get some money so I don’t die of starvation or consumption or stupidity or something or just die of being plain just stoned, scared and uncared for like most people do, I think. (to be cont.)

Even my stove doesn’t fuckin work. The mind is a terrible thing to attempt to use. I was going to say waste. No need to say waste. The mind is a waste of time anyway. You don’t need to press it for it to be a stupid fucking waste of time. All us writers are writing for money now. There is no such thing as literature anymore except for those who have been lucky enough to make money writing. They can write literature. The rest of us have to turn on our fucking stoves to get heat in our houses because the heat doesn’t work. Many of us want to die. Myself included. I’ve reconciled to the fact that nothing I ever say on paper will matter to anybody, ever. My childish belief in immortality through the written word is dead. I failed to do everything in life that would make me a success because I thought I had a higher ideal. I didn’t.
So it’s as though I’ve got nothing left to lose. The stove finally kicked on and it’s cooking my left ear. My right ear is about frozen off. I look at a magazine called Poets and Writers for yuppies who want to make a lot of money from their writing. I’m looking at the face of a poet named Ai. Everybody has such names in this magazine. They all try to be literary when they’re getting literarily screwed too. The greatest of them get their faces placed inside because they won a contest or something. Then there are interviews inside too with the Ai’s of the world. These Ai’s supposedly have some sort of ability to tap into the world’s unconscious psyche and reveal it to the rest of us piglets.  Ai’s making money. I respect her.
In college they tell you all about these great writers. They never tell you about the shit writers, the ones who failed. The many who killed themselves AND never wrote a word the rest of the shitheads considered valuable. They’re brushed aside as the crazies. The winners don’t know that they know how to play the system which includes having the ability to lick stamp after fucking stamp against all odds. The rest of us see it as a waste of immortality. Time’s little joke on us we figure is to make us give up our supposed art for the sake of office supplies. The Buddhists wouldn’t complain about this. But I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a writer who doesn’t write most of the time, who gave up, who was looking for something in the written word that he couldn’t find in the reality of this world where words don’t mean shit, who didn’t know that he was just hiding by writing, hoping by writing, praying by writing and ultimately dying by writing. His soul is dead now because he thought he could make a living out of writing. Now that he’s realized this impossibility he’s awoken to the fact that he has no way to make a living. No woman wants to be by his side because of his insanity and commitment to the higher arts which had no commitment to him, only loathing that he would attempt to aspire there. And all of the other brothers and sisters say hallelujah the foolish boy has gone home. He’s not trying to knock on the door of heaven anymore. Everybody knows he’s not pretty enough. As they step up to the door, head held high, finger outstretched poised to press a doorbell a million miles up hanging there like the Man hanging on the moon. Good luck.

So to quit is to begin. This is the lesson. To let it all go is to allow it all to come again, but in a different form. Ai sits there knowing something that I never will. She looks at me as if my thoughts of the end can be combated no matter how hard I try against that look in her eye. She says to me that I may be wise in some regards, but her poetry can handle even my wisdom and if she has her way then I’m not going to die, but rise, but rise, but rise.
And the writer in me says keep writing to find out the answer to this predicament which has no name and only begs more exposition simply so the lights don’t go out completely. Ai’s eyes will die someday and what will then keep me alive? I don’t know. I think it’s the next word, but nobody reads my words anyway and everybody says i’m not supposed to just write for the hell of it.
Just thought that maybe I’d call this a diary. Who cares what this is called? It doesn’t matter. I thought if I called it a diary then maybe I could hone it later and sell it.

Depressed today more than usual.  Didn’t drink becuase I ran out of whisky.  Sitting here in the middle of nowhere.  Tell me there’s a little town called Carpinteria up here somewhere. Say you can trade with the Indians .  Where there’s Indians theres usually whiskey. Hoping  things will change for the better here real soon.  Thinking a lot about Mary.
Its funny how love is.  When you don’t got the one that you love anymore you wonder why love couldn’t have been strong enough to keep you together.  What kind of evil forces are there out there that can tear two people together who have taken the time to look into each others souls for the benefit of each.  What kind of God is it that would make these two people split apart from each other forever? What kind of evil in the world is there, floating around up there, making sure that two people with two good eyes, two good ears, two beating hearts, don’t survive.  Love is a special thing.  It is a rarity, really.  There is no reason to make believe that love, if had, isn’t the greatest thing on earth.  But truly it’s not the strongest.
Things that are more powerful than love: the sun, the wind, inner desires unspoken, music, caring too much about yourself, blindness, heartlessness, coldness.  I guess there’s a million things that are beating down the door of love so that love finally just gives up and lets it all in.  I think blindness is the worst.  It’s when you lose sight of the beauty of love that you start being blinded and when you’re blinded you can’t see to feel somebody. It’s not that we lose the ability to feel, but that we lose sight of the person to which we would pin our feelings upon.  We’re so used to being alone with our own crazy selves I guess.
But, anyway, I can’t hold on forever to those pink and polka dot dreams of the past.  When something or somebody is gone you can’t sit around hoping that they’ll come back or it will drive you crazy forever.  If you got life in you I guess there is a chance that God might send somebody new to you to make up for what he’d taken away.  It’s just when you’re in the state that I am in right now it don’t seem so much that it’s possible.  I guess I ain’t letting Mary go just yet.  She’s still too big inside of me. I guess she always will be if I let her be, for right now I’m letting her be. It ain’t as though I really have a choice.
I sit here on this rock and see the ocean, the mighty Pacific, and the landscape above me, the green hills, green mountains further behind me.  Just come to these hills, finally made it and it’s like I’m entering a tropical island.  I just keep to the water and everything is alright.  There’s a road here too so sometimes I see a few people, but mostly its just me on this Pacific coast road to nowhere.  Hear a lot about gold being found up north. Guess i’ll go as far as San Francisco and then figure out whether or not I want to try and pan some of the stuff myself.  For now I don’t care much.  I do these odd jobs and they just about kill my back.  But there ain’t a lot of cities up along these roads anymore.

Minnie Priestess is an enigma. She tells people that’s her name. Her mother looks away slyly and I accept it. She asked me once why her last name was Priestess and I told her because everything along the way got a little screwy and we sort of lost that something that keeps our names what they originally were. I didn’t put it that way. I think I said “You’re last name isn’t Priestess. It’s Jones.” But she just looked away, accepting that her last name was Jones while also accepting that her last name was Priestess. You have to go to the personality of her mother if you are to understand.

II When Henri Paul is taken up on the UFO he’s just killed Princess Diana. He’s rocking up there, he’s got sunglasses on and he’s playing the keyboards, lasers are everywhere, smoke, moog synthesizers, the whole bit. He goes into this song that talks about how Princess Diana didn’t really die, but was also taken up on a UFO. He’s sort of a message bringer. But then, when Diana appears on stage again, all dead, but born again, so to speak, as if there were a place called heaven, Henri sees her, and falls to his knees in shame for having killed her. Jed’s little place inside, the place it seemed his killer eyes were trying to see, is what I thought about when I was thinking about Princess Diana. It was what I was talking about when I said that Jed lived for that little melody deep inside his head. Henri represents the bullshit inside of Jed’s life. But in the play, Diana calls Henri down from off the UFO and he comes. Like a baby, he climbs off the flying saucer and joins Diana in the other world. She rescues him from hell. I kind of think of myself as Jed’s Diana. I’ve got $1,600 in the bank. A bus ticket to New York is $200 round-trip. The American Youth Hostel costs $20 a night. I’m no good with math, but I think that would give me at least a few months in New York. Everything points to New York, especially the submerged GTO. I’ve called everybody who knew Jed and none of them have seen or heard about him for years, but all of them said that he liked New York. The only problem is I can’t seem to make myself go. I almost went a few months ago, but then I thought that maybe Jed didn’t want to be found. I don’t know why I thought that. I have no idea. But I listened to it and heeded it and saved more money. Now it seems that he does. How I know this I can’t say. It seems there is never a good time to do something. We all wait for the perfect time before we step forward. A few days ago I mailed a check to Greyhound, not wanting to go to the bus depot myself. If I could float through New York invisibly that’s what I would do. I would float through New York, and when I found Jed I wouldn’t even touch him, but would be able to look at him there, and being so invisible and him so exposed, I could reach into him and fix him, and then he would see me and I wouldn’t be invisible anymore to him. Then maybe he would come home again. But the way I’ve got to do it is the other way, physically, my face just another face walking New York streets, then his face meeting mine, our eyes joining and then, well, that’s the scary part and why I haven’t gone yet. We would need time to process each other and we’d be embarrassed. If he saw me and is as lost as I’m sure he is, as I know he is, then I would have to give him something to believe in me by, as he worked to remember what it is he is supposed to do with me. Or maybe I could be all he needs at first sight. But no, not with heroin. I’ve racked my brain trying to figure out how to coax a bonafide heroin addict out of his shell. I don’t think I’m enough. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take all my rock operas with me and when I see him I’m going to say that I came looking for him because all these rock operas need to be performed and he’s the only one who can do it. I’m going to hold them up. Then if he says no I’ll just look at him and plead a little bit about how important it is because it would be worthwhile, especially the tribute to Princess Diana. Or maybe I’d make up some lie like mama was sick and couldn’t afford medical care or something. Then I’d take Jed by the hand, just like he used to take me, and I’d buy him dinner and put him in a hotel room, and then we’d go down to a clinic and get one of those new drugs that keeps people off heroin. I’d tell Jed all about my writing, about how, and this is true, the Millsville Community College produced one of my rock operas, and we’d walk out of that cesspool together. Maybe then I would have paid him back a little bit of the debt that I owe him for having been the best big brother anybody could ever or has ever had. My mama cried when I told her that I’m going to New York. I’m leaving tomorrow morning at seven. She busted down and just cried. I don’t understand it. It seems she would be happy, but not my mama. She cried and said she failed and all that shit. It’s not true. My mama was a single mama. She did the best she could. She didn’t beat us or anything, but she was hard on Jed for doing drugs. That’s because she was scared and there was no man around the house to take him and shake him a little bit like he needed. I think Jed actually made her despair over being a woman. If she were a man she could have kicked Jed’s ass, been tougher than Jed, and kept him home and in line, and not dead as she truly believed he was. She didn’t believe like me because she didn’t read or anything like that. I like poetry and plays and good music and that stuff makes you believe in the impossible. She just doesn’t want to believe that she could have driven her son to this place, but somehow she can’t help thinking she did. But it was the heroin and my daddy’s dying. I keep trying to tell her that, as though asking her to believe that Jed wasn’t dead was the same as asking her to believe that she hadn’t driven him to drugs, to demise, hell, or whatever it was that mothers believe is the worst thing that can happen to their child when their child disappears forever off the face of the earth as hers did. I screamed: He’s not dead, Ma! But she never believed me. “Why doesn’t he call then?” she whines later after a period of sullen desperation. “Why doesn’t he call then?” Christ, I think, because Jed’s Jed. I’ve got one day left to plan this out. The rest is going to be up to the fates. Actually, I don’t know how to plan anything out. I know all about New York City, uptown, downtown, Hells Kitchen, The Hudson, Joisey, blah, blah, blah…I wish they had maps to crack houses like they do the homes of Hollywood stars, but they don’t. Jed’s a musician, will always be a musician, so I’ll start there. I’ll just ask around. I don’t know why I didn’t do this earlier. I’m stupid, I guess. Jed’s alive, he’s just jamming with his druggie friends in New York City. It’s 10:32 at night right now. I should be in bed. I leave in the morning. I’m looking at the stars on the ceiling right now. I just turned out the light. I put these plastic glow in the dark stars on my ceiling. They’re orange and green, but when the light is off they look like real stars. It’s cool. What is this music in my head now? I know. Just sleepy. The heavenly spheres are visiting me here in Tennessee. Hell, I’m not asleep yet. Music takes you into sleep, but I can’t hear music before I sleep because I’ll never get to sleep. I got too much in my head already all the time, whether its words or melody or even memory. Memory is like music too when you’re about to fall asleep. It’s a big mythological pool with faces and happenings and none of it has any order, except for when you actually fall asleep. Then the images line up however they will. In the morning you have the memory of the night’s images and start the day all over thinking about them somehow. Then, come that night, you’re back to the same place again with memory all jumbled up in your head. Your pantheon of images is either good or mischievous depending on how your day went. All the thoughts mesh together like some whirlpool of stars and they lift up off your body as you fall asleep. Your processes and you are taken away like Henri Paul on his flying saucer was, a little bit in fear and desperation, but also in hope that you will survive on the other side of reality. And so you sing like Henri Paul sang. You sing a crazy song like Henri Paul had to sing. You sing to yourself just before you fall asleep. You sing to yourself after. You sing like Jed sings when he is about to stick a needle in his arm. You sing to ward off the devil on the other side of the universe where you are about to be taken, because you lost something a long time before, because you simply lost it, and that’s all.

10
What can I say about living with The Lady? Isabella Brown is one of those people who doesn’t demand from you. They talk about Mother Earth, well, I would call her Mother Air. She floated. She was a witch deep down I think. She held you in her grip, in her sex, in her drugs, in her ability to make you believe that hers was the only real world. And she was right, at least when you are a true believer in heroin. It’s like you are placed inside of a bubble far away from the real world and in this bubble is everything spiritual, but it is all fake. If we weren’t high we couldn’t even talk to each other. I don’t have any idea what we would say. She didn’t ever let the world touch her,. She must have had it so hard her whole life, been fucked up on drugs for so long that, for The Lady, there was no more world. It all happened in the mind. It was like she was plugged in, tuned in, as they say, to everything that was mysterious. She was a liquid, flowing substance, a soothing crutch. I lived with her. I slept with her. I was her man so to speak. But during it all there was a reluctance. Everything about our relationship was a lie and that was okay as long as we stayed on our magic carpet ride. Heroin takes you to different places, different stages. You can go so far into yourself that you don’t need anybody. But when those moments of the day arrive where you start thinking for yourself and the world, you realize, is shit, it was a good thing to have her warm, black skin next to mine, to look into her eyes and believe that love still existed on this planet. You just had to tell yourself that what you were feeling proved the existence of love. You didn’t need to beileve that it was love between you and The Lady for love it wasn’t.

The Lady was a magnet. She had everything you needed. By getting into herion in the first place you are telling yourself that you don’t need the shit parts of life anymore. Once you plunge that needle into your arm you are taken someplace that no life experiences can ever touch. You feel, you see, but in a way that doesn’t feel or see. It is a magical existence. This magic provides you with a feeling of power and well-being and the further that you go into it the more you realize that there is no way to trace your steps back out. There is no reason to, especially if you are in the state of mind that I was. When you want to die you’ll accept heaven without having to lose your body for as long as you can. Whenever I wanted to die was whenever I realized that I had forsaken Moxy. Jed

11
I was very confused by which area I should go into. Then I found myself being more and more involved with people who were rejected by society, with, I’d say, drug addicts, alcoholism, battered this, battered that-and I found an affinity there. Lady Di – BBC Interview – 1995

Some think that Teardrop went up the backside near Rattler’s Creek.  Most figure he fell into it and probably rolled around for awhile until climbing out.  There are a lot of sheer cliff faces on Anna Belle Mountain. I hate to think about what he went through. He was skinny as hell. Had been gone almost a month since chewing his way to freedom. Minnie was about one back then. Now she’s five. Teardrop and Minnie became friends when Minnie was two. Minnie doesn’t remember it and then when Teardrop died Minnie watched as we put him in the ground and she didn’t much act like anything was wrong, but she stared a lot, so much that I thought to myself that maybe we shouldn’t be showing this little girl so much at such a young age, but Moxy didn’t think so. Moxy said we should show that little girl so much that it hurts to have to listen to her. And I have to say it worked. It sometimes hurts to have to listen to Minnie Priestess. That’s what we all call her. She truly is smaller version of her mother. I made it clear, though, that Minnie’s full name was put on her birth certificate: Minnie Mary Jones. After all I’d done to my mother I felt I had to include her name in there somewhere.

But Minnie is funny. She’s the queen of Millsville kindergarten prep without a doubt. Her best friend is named Mimi. They met, of course, due to this name sound similarity. Mimi was taller than Minnie, and Minnie seemed to like this, maybe because it made her feel better that she wasn’t the one that everybody would stare at. Probably not. I never could figure out the minds of children. You can’t apply psychology to them in the same way. But in figuring out my life over the last few years it sure has helped to have some of those, what I now term, Minnieisms. What was it yesterday. We were at my mama’s house where Albert lives in the back still with his hamster and computer and Minnie was talking to her uncle about life. They tend to do this a lot. Later, when we’re riding home, Minnie’s sitting in her chair in the back looking straight ahead the way she does at the road and she says that Uncle Albert said that life is like a hamster cage. I think about it and figure that Albert would know working around all that lettuce all day long and figure I gotta tell my daughter something positive so I say, nah, only sometimes is it like a hamster’s cage. But she doesn’t buy it like she doesn’t buy a good 90 percent of the things I say. She needs her Minnieisms like a teddy bear. So she says “Well, if life is like a hamster’s cage then I guess I just have to make it the most comfortable Hamster’s cage I can!” And she’s right. She’s absolutely right.
But, anyway, it seems that my genius daughter is smarter than most, very eloquent and yet just five. Perhaps its a curse. Perhaps its a blessing. I tend to think its the latter. She gets it from her mom. Moxy, the most beautiful Jewish Princess I ever could have imagined, being the country boy that I am,  never took shit from anyone. I think I’m right about this. Moxy Priestess never took shit from a single living soul.

In Denver, we played the University, about 7,000 seats, packed.  Some guy jumps up on stage and I can’t get to her quick enough, but it doesn’t matter.  I’m nuts back then.  I would have ripped a guys liver out with the end of my guitar and I’ll bet I could have too, but I didn’t. Moxy used to wear these seven inch, black stiletto heels on stage.  She took one of them and pierced the guy’s groin with it, literally. I liked to think that I was the reason that Moxy Priestess made it to the cover of Rolling Stone, but it was news of little Helen Capowitz of Fort Lee, New Jersey, that drew the American people to the band.  I was the maestro and she was the style.  She was the attitude. She was Moxy Priestess. I can’t not call her Moxy now.  She just is.  Sometimes when she wants me to, I’ll call her Helen but that’s usually when we’re alone in bed and Minnie’s asleep and maybe she’s feeling a little tired and misses her dad or mom. Then I’d sing a little bit for her even though I can’t sing much and sound somewhat like a baboon. And she’d smile at me and when she really loves me she’ll look shy and say “More diamonds please” like the good little Jewish Princess that she is and I’d give em to her. I’d give her all the diamonds that she’d need and we’d go to sleep.

Of all of us I think Albert is a lot like Teardrop. There is no doubt about it. Teardrop came looking for me and so did Albert. I figured by moving up here to Anna Belle Mountain my family would know for sure that they’d found me. I didn’t want to do any more of my shit on them. I was too cool for too long. Now I’m done. I’ll be forty soon. Albert liked Teardrop but he was a little bit afraid of him since he nipped at him once while he was feeding him a carrot. Albert looked like Minnie looking at an existential problem when he looked at Teardrop. He just stood there and stared and sometimes shook his head thinking about what that mule did. Before Teardrop made his lonely trek through nothingville Albert never looked past him or at least never gave him much more attention then he’d give the chickens when he’d come over, Petals under his arms, a tape recorder in his pocket with which he’d been humming tunes that filled his head like the tunes used to fill mine but don’t anymore. I always laughed when I saw Albert, but when he opened up Petals I looked at it with love. Some would say I am a professional musician. A professional musician is somebody who can see intent within the conception of a song, I believe. Since I gave to Albert his intent, so to speak, by playing for him as a kid, I now had to finish what I started. Perhaps God brought Albert to me so that I could write Petals. I don’t know if the script is any good by the standards of Broadway, but after looking at what Albert wanted me to look at, by listening to him finally instead of him listening to me, I was able to see that my brother had a first rate idea, but all it needed to come into something was great music and I didn’t feel it anymore, but I couldn’t say no.
So we worked on Petals and worked on Petals until we couldn’t work anymore. That’s where we are now. Albert is at mama’s biting his lip, thinking about his song he’s writing called I Think I’m Dead, Galaxy Glue. I wrote a few catchy tunes, tried my hand at how I thought opera might like to sound if the genre belonged to rock and roll. Listened to the band Radiohead which influenced Albert’s creative process back before I’d even said yes to the project. It took me awhile. I had a lot of healing to do just by being back and then to throw my world into that of a woman who died at the hand of a drunk guy driving a car and then Albert putting Henri on a UFO and all. It seemed like a bunch of junk. But it took a lot of time to see what Albert was seeing. What was Albert looking at when he looked at Teardrop, not the mule, but the hero? What was Teardrop looking at when he looked up the mountain, not the hill, but the home. And I started thinking about all of these people who were looking up to me as though I could provide them with something that I was in no way, shape, fashion or form providing to anybody but myself through the use of a goddamned needle! So I said okay, Albert. I took Petals and read it cover to cover all in one night. Cover to cover and when I was done I’d felt a lot of love. I’d felt a lot of joy. I felt like everything would be alright and if somebody like my brother Albert, the same one who listened to me, the only one who it seems ever listened to my music in a way I needed it to be listened to, if he wanted me to help him, for me to listen to him, I could never say no. So now, I guess, I’m going to make Albert famous. We’re kind of like the Judds.

My mama has been a saint through all of this. When I was seventeen I stuck a needle in my arm up in my room, but I only put in half. I waited a little bit and then walked downstairs and put in the other half in front of my mama who was cutting onions. I walked outside and knew that I would never again be allowed to walk into the house. My guitar was in my GTO so everything was cool. I never went back, not that is until recently after Albert came and found me. Albert told me about what happened to mama over those years. He said he tried to keep it cool for her. He would play her some of my ballads that I wrote and Moxy sang and would say to her that everything was cool, that it was impossible for a drug addict to write such beautiful music. He learned his art by lying to my mother. My mama got old while I was gone. I never thought of my mama as old, but she’s old. My daddy died when we were kids. I know now that after daddy died I lost something somewhere inside. They didn’t mess with shrinks where I come from so we all just bucked up and took our shots when it was our turn. Daddy was a pipefitter and mama was a secretary with some college under her belt. I don’t like to remember how he died.

Albert does though. He says to me, Jed, when that man killed daddy did you want to kill that man? And he’s got a similar line in his rock opera where Diana asks Dodi why he wanted to kill Fargo, a thief who broke into their hotel room, and yet Fargo didn’t want to harm a single soul. And then I feel like Fargo and I start saying to myself that maybe I can play the role of Fargo in Petals so I secretly keep that in mind and it starts to brew inside of me so when I see Albert I don’t tell him that I’m secretly enthused about his rock opera Petals. I’ve been sitting on my ass for ten years putting shit in my veins! I’m a musician and I’m here today because I’m a musician. If Albert hadn’t have noticed I was a musician when I played for him when we were kids I wouldn’t be here. I’d be dead. I’d be dead. I’d never have made it even so far as Nashville most likely. But Albert’s eyes were in my head staring at me playing my guitar like I was a conduit to the spheres, the holy spheres. And it was all just rock and roll, but I liked it. I thought of slicing my wrist every day of my senior year. Instead I just made money selling dope to the kids, getting laid. You don’t care about shyness when you’re as stoned as I was in high school. I got two girls pregnant. Two abortions never talked about in Millsville, at least not in the public arena. One of those girls moved out of the area. The other one is still there. Moxy knows all about her and she’s like, you ought to take her to lunch someday, let her know that you still care. And after she says that little Minnie speaks up whose taking a bath. She says, “Mama, my duckie just barked at my doggie!” And we look at each other and I remember how Trevor Rees in Albert’s play pleads to everybody, bandages all over his body, he says “Love Everybody! Love! Love!” And Moxy gets this without ever having read the play and she’s not a whit jealous. So I go find the girl who I got pregnant. At first she’s scared. Of course, she’s not married and this puts a scare in me because I think she might think I want her back. But we talked over coffee at Denny’s for three hours and it was a good thing to do. A good thing. And that night when me and Moxy and Minnie were curled up in front of our fireplace talking about the happenings of the day I told her that this girl, Elizabeth is doing just fine, and she kissed me on the forehead while Minnie played and I knew, like Trevor, that it is possible to love, to really love, and to get the job done.

Let me tell you something about Jed. When Jed was seventeen. He walked into the house and went up to my mother, who was cutting tomatoes for some spaghetti, and said, “Hey, Mom, look” and he squirted some of that shit into his vein and turned and walked out the door.  Pretty ballsy.  I was there, about seven years old.  My mama didn’t miss a beat, just kept cutting tomatoes and throwing them in the pot.  I remember that day well.  He ripped out of there in his gray, never to be painted GTO.  That’s pretty heavy shit, stuff that shouldn’t be done, but I don’t hate Jed for it.  You don’t hate someone who might be dead.  You just don’t.
My mama turned on me and screamed “Get out!”  So I did.  I went outside and sat on a rock by our gate.  Our dog, Snoopy, came up to me and I petted him as the sun burned on bright and loud, but cold-like, since there was such hatred in the air.  The next time that I saw Jed was on a late night rock show three years later.  It was the first time The Priestess had made TV, Rock Train or some shit like that, I think it was.   There was Jed.  Skinnier than before wearing what would later become his signature white cowboy hat with his brown bangs falling down over his eyes, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his arms skinny like a fem from all the dope.  He was just rocking.  Like I said, Jed could rock.
Before he left he’d play his guitar in his room for hours, just smoking weed and blowing it out the window.  He ran the sound through his little pignose amp.  Sometimes he’d let me come in and once he even gave me a puff, and I got really stoned and a little scared, and didn’t want to do it again.  But mostly it was really cool.  I’d just listen and my mind would start wandering from the music.  I’d wonder what it was exactly that I was listening to, what the meaning was to all the noise he made, why one sound mattered over any other, and even though I wondered, the way that Jed did it made the answers apparent.  It was music.  I have no doubt to this day that my brother was a musical genius.  Who cares that he bought his first Strat from selling plastic bags of Jamaican weed to high school kids.
Jed kept the class of ’78 properly stoned at Millsville High.  After he left school there was a marked decline in drug use and the principal received a plaque of recognition by the Millsville County Sheriff’s Department in its ongoing efforts to curb drug use among the young.  Principal Preuss had even been interviewed on television on the ways he had found to get young people to just say no.  Nobody ever interviewed Jed about the myriad methods he had used for getting kids to just say yes.
Jed dated a lot of girls in high school.  He was a charmer.  Every girl he dated, it didn’t matter who she was, a cheerleader, a girl with glasses in the Chess Club, that tall girl on exchange from Sweden, they all fell for Jed, and in so doing each acquired some degree of drug habit from the experience.  He got his GTO through a cocaine deal.  That car is long gone.  It’s the only clue we’ve got about what happened to Jed.  You want to know what happened to it?  They found it stuck to the bottom of the Hudson River, about eighty miles up from New York City.  See, I’m not crazy.  I know where Jed is.  There’s method to my madness.

There are some people who say he died in that crash.  I don’t think so.  There would be a body.  If you don’t have a body you don’t have a death do you?  I choose to believe that we don’t have a death here.  Jed, for all his craziness, didn’t want to die, but you never know about the kinds of places that heroin takes you.  Maybe it changes your mind on the subject of dying so that it sounds good to you.  I guess it made Kurt Cobain want to die, but then again, he probably just wanted to die anyway.  I’ve wanted to die before, but I never took heroin so I’m still alive.      Christ, I’m too young to have to think about this shit, but I can’t help it.  That’s why I write musicals.  Jed’s going to perform one of my rock operas some day.  After just knowing he’s okay, and that’s the main reason I’m going to go find him, he’s going to perform my rock tribute to Princess Diana: Petals.
Everybody in Millsville knows I had or have a famous brother.  He’s the only one from Millsville to ever make it big besides our state legislator and that doesn’t mean shit.  His name is ingrained in the town like a bittersweet history, a remembrance of a man with no statues forthcoming.  People don’t hold it against me that Jed fucked his life up, but they do sometimes ask me if anybody’s heard from him.  I tell them that if I do it will probably be on CNN entertainment report first so they should just go the hell home and turn on the tube and wait.  I get sick of the way they don’t really mean it, like they really believe he’s dead, but they’re humoring me or something, because I’m the only one in the world who believes he’s alive. Sometimes I just tell them that, yeah, he’s alive in Chicago or New York or he’s doing recording work in L.A. and he’s changed his name to Skipper Lee.  I don’t know why I chose Skipper Lee, it just sounds really stupid, and that’s how I want people to feel who ask stupid questions that infer that my brother Jed is dead.  I don’t need it, you see.  Jed’s in New York somewhere.  He crawled out of that car and started walking.  That’s what Jed would do.
He was a determined guy, quiet actually.  If he hadn’t gotten so screwed up on drugs I think he would probably be an engineer or something today, plotting city streets or designing computer highways or something.  He could sit for hours just concentrating on one thing.  That’s why he was such a great guitarist.  He was kind, too.  He always took care of me, was never mean or ashamed of being seen with me in public.  Sometimes we’d go to the roller skating rink, and as he stood over in the corner smoking and talking to girls and his other stoner friends, I’d notice him keeping an eye out for me as I stumbled around the blue roller rink with my little buddy Steven whose mom, amazingly, didn’t have a problem letting him ride in Jed’s car.  I never worried that he would get stoned and leave me behind.  He always went outside and disappeared with his friends for awhile, but I knew he’d come back.
He was tough too, Jed.  He once beat the shit out of a guy about a foot taller than himself for pushing me over on purpose.  He’d been standing over there with some skinny little girl when he saw.  I didn’t even know what happened to me.  This guy was skating really fast and instead of going around me he just ploughed over me, pushing me down with his arms. I could feel his hands on my back first and then just a surreal acceleration as my head met the blue floor and I went dark for a minute and then woke up to stars and then just plain dizziness with a pretty teenage girl with her hand on my shoulder.  I could smell her perfume.  She smelled sweet and when I looked up at her she was looking away across the rink at something and I thought she was beautiful, but what she was looking at was Jed, about to beat the shit out of the guy who did it to me.
The guy didn’t know who Jed was, but I knew, and saw very clearly, like an animal knows the smell of impending violence in the air.  Jed had skated over and stopped within the guy’s personal space.  They talked a little bit.  Jed was fucked up.  He lit a cigarette like only Jed could and then offered one to the guy who simply said no.  When Jed took that first deep puff his eyes squinted and his left shoulder lowered down like a cobra about to strike.  His right eye was whole and wide open, but the left squinted as if to tell the guy that everything was cool, that it was cool to push his little brother down, and everything was going to be alright, because everything was cool.

Jed flicked the cigarette and the cherry, literally, got stuck on the guy’s lash.  When he bent backwards, trying to get away from the heat and surprise of the lit cigarette there dangling a centimeter from his eyeball, Jed, as if finally shucking the world off of his shoulder, swooped down like a Mr. Universe in a winning pose and then said fuck it, and came up with all his might, an uppercut that sent the other kid to the floor, out like a light, the winner, of course, my brother Jedediah Jones.
Jed came over to me, but he didn’t see me that much.  He had that far away look in his eyes that I’d seen, I’d noticed before.  That look couldn’t touch me, but only himself.  It was the kind of look that Richard Ramirez, that famous serial killer had, the one who tattooed a satanic symbol on his palm and smiled when he showed it to the cameras in the courtroom in, I think it was, L.A.  He touched me on the chest and then looked away.  He knew he’d be in trouble if he stayed, so we had to go.  I followed him out.  Steven was right there beside me all scared-like.      Jed’s eyes.  The crazy look.  The look that I even saw a little bit when Jed played his guitar in his room.  A look that told the world that Jed had a little bit more pain inside of himself than anybody would ever be able to find out about, a pain that distilled downward into every cell of his body, making his arms even more stringy later, his hair thinner, his face tighter and whiter.  Some would say that my brother was a little bit evil, but what I always thought inside myself, but never wanted to admit, was that I secretly believed Jed’s problem was that his heart was dying slowly.
When Princess Diana died, I wrote a rock opera. I sent Henri Paul, the drunk who killed her, whisking away on a flying saucer.  I figured Jed could do the music to that pretty well.  I don’t play any music myself.  Don’t know how.  I tried to be a singer with some friends for awhile, but they all thought I was a wimp because I like melodic singing, and not just shit like Metallica I appreciate stuff like Barry Manilow does and opera singers and Eddie Vedder, people who can follow the most elemental note, keeping it fresh like a flower, caring for it in the same way you would a flower, not chopping it up in the name of variation or cool. That’s what those asshole guitar players around here do, those guys who couldn’t hold a candle to Jed, the ones who play the pizza parlors in town on Saturday nights and I’m sure would call Mozart an asshole to his face if they could, because Amadeus had never jammed an Allman brother’s song.
These old fucks ought to go the way they came.  They don’t remember Jed. If they did, they’d be able to do magic with their fingers instead of just make noise.  As you can tell, besides having a low paying job and not giving a shit about corporate demands, I have little patience with idiots as well.  You see, all the shit inside of Jed came out of his desire for someone to play for him the music that I heard sitting there listening to him as a kid.  It was like he couldn’t hear it as well as I could because he was the one playing.  It was like Jed was always on the outside trying to get a glimpse of the inside, and there I was looking inside like a freeloader who doesn’t have to pay for anything and never will.

Jed paid.  Even though Jed rocked like he did, he paid, because he truly attempted to hear the music in his head. It was his hunger, but it was so far down there that it strained him too hard.  Because he had to reach so far down it came out too loud for the world. The world thought he was a madman, but then it heard him and knew he was doing something real, and all he was really doing was listening to a tiny brook lost somewhere deep inside. But it was there, provable to doubters, which I guess included himself, if only he could reconstruct it. I think the doubters included himself because he was trying to hear the very voice of God Himself. I do believe that. I do believe that was where Jed was going to.
Because of this, I believe my brother Jed was a musical genius.  He could have easily  made it solo.  He had a smooth voice that he didn’t show off, and didn’t really need, because of the power in his guitar, but he got to taking heroin, and that’s all she wrote.  His ballads were beautiful and unnoticed by those who claim they know music, people with such long sticks up their asses Mozart probably wouldn’t have even spoke to them. A couple of times I played them for my mom when she got depressed over him.  Back then, when Jed was making it bigtime, I was just teeny-bopper, I’d say to her, look, Jed is really cool now.  I’d say that he’s really peaceful.  Just listen to this, Mom, I’d say.  He’s not all strung out and lost in the rock and roll scene.  He’s taking time to get to know who he is.  These songs can’t be written by a drug addict, mama.
It was all bullshit.  My mama listened to me though.  I’d tell her these big old stories about what Jed was doing, acting as though I knew, simply because I was of the age of rock and roll and she wasn’t, not really.  She was into fifties stuff and that’s not real rock and roll.  I’d tell her that when Jed was on the road they stayed in nice hotels and Jed writes these ballads and gets interviewed by magazines. And I’d tell her that when you’re a rock star everybody is watching you so you can’t show up in public all stoned and shit, and that Jed had to fall in line and be clean cause Nancy Reagan had already been spouting off to just say no.  I’d tell her that even Jed cared about what people thought of him.  I’d tell her how Jed had always looked out for me and how he didn’t want me to do dope, although he let me smoke pot once.  Even my mom smokes pot sometimes.
So I’d do what I could to make my mom feel at ease.  Sometimes I’d tape videos of Jed when he played on TV and play them for her and she would watch him and say things like “he’s skinny” or “I hope he’s not still doing that stuff.”  Just Mom hopes, worries, prayers and despairs.  They were little prickly things that punctured our lives every day after Jed left.  You’ve got to give it to my mom, though.  She put up with a lot of shit from Jed, especially that last bit with the needle.  She’s always tried to do what she can.
I don’t blame her for what happened to Jed.  It’s Jed’s own fault, or maybe my dad’s, who was murdered when we were kids.  But I do wonder why Jed did what he did.  I wonder where he got that look, that killer look that he apparently put to full use on himself.  Everybody knows that Jed very well may be dead.  I don’t believe it at all, but most everybody else does.  Once again, I say, where’s the body?  Nobody knows.  He’s alive somewhere.  New York.