The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

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.

My brother rocked. I mean, my brother rocked like nobody else’s brother rocked.  When he was 22, he filled Wembley.  That’s when he was with Moxy Priestess.  Kids now don’t remember Moxy Priestess all that much, but everybody around here knows that at least they were famous. Stadium rock famous.  I grew up with that music with Jed around.  Zeppelin, Rush, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, April Wine, Blackfoot. All that shit.  But Jed was the best.  I don’t care. I’ll say it.  Van Halen opened for him in ’79  for God’s sake.
The Priestess played for four years and that’s all.  Jed was lead guitar and sometimes he sang backup if they needed him to, but they didn’t ask him much because, like I said, Jed rocked on the guitar and they didn’t want to interrupt him.  He was easily as good as Stevie Vai, comparable to Eddie.  Jed worshiped guys like Clapton and Page.  He got to play with Page, eventually, and I saw him on a T.V. show talking about it and he sounded excited like a little kid, and you didn’t get that much from Jed, because he was all grown up by that time, sticking the needle into his arm everyday.
The last we heard from Jed was March 11, 1990. He was high on dope.  I remember it was March because everybody was putting up green all over town in the businesses, and when my mom screamed over the phone at Jed that he was banished from the house, she used that very word “banished,” I noticed that my mom had on a green pin of a shamrock, and I thought to myself how that word didn’t sound very happy like a shamrock was supposed to be.  My mom never talked about Jed after that.  All she ever said about that phone call was that he was on drugs and she left it at that.  But over the years of not hearing from Jed, I could tell she hurt inside.  I noticed this more and more as I got older.
I don’t know what happened to Jed.  I imagine he became one of those people you see in those tragic futuristic movies with oil on their faces huddled together over some street grate spewing off steam, or sitting in sewage tunnels waiting to die unless they get another hit of crack or smack soon.  Simply put, we lost him, he fell off the earth just like Lady Diana.
Now, I work at the same market that Jed used to.  I remember that short story we had to read in high school by John Updike about a kid who quits working at the market after the manager kicks these girls out of the store for wearing bikinis.  Not a chance for me.  I need the money.  I’ve got something to do. I’ve got a plan.

Like I said, everybody in my town of Millsville, a name not quite thought out but typical of the mind set of the people in my town: bland, boring, given by people who couldn’t even think to just call the damned town Mills, everybody at least knows Jed was famous.  But who are we?  Millsville, Tennessee.  Population 14,782 according to the sign leading into town that was last changed as far as I can remember never.  I think we’re over 20 now easy.  People grow up and move away.  Our town is getting bigger.  Nobody cares anymore, really, that Jed was famous.  I mean, where do old rockers go?  Probably hell.  It doesn’t matter.  It takes a lot to be remembered as a rocker because music changes so much, even rock, and people don’t want to give away their age by claiming an allegiance to an old band.  Suddenly it’s like you’ve got to love Rage Against the Machine or Garbage or, you know, new bands, to be cool, but even these bands are going down.  There are very few supergroups.  Rockers generally end up playing Vegas eventually.  Ludicrously, they do everything they can from actually greasing back their balding heads and putting on lavender suede suits.  Elvis wasn’t stupid.  He knew he was going down so he went all the way while he was alive so nobody could ever say he would have ended up a schlep.  He chose to be a schlep first and say fuck’em.
Anyway, like I said, I don’t know what happened to Jed.  I’ve got no real problems here in Millsville.  Got a job, got no brother, but that’s no problem unless I think about it.  I try not to. But when I do, I wonder about the nature of problems in general, I mean, is a problem a problem when there is no proof that the subject of the problem is even alive?  Yeah, it is.  It’s the same old thing as the MIA’s in Vietnam.  Jed’s MIA and that’s a problem.
The market’s a problem only because it sucks.  You check through people and ask them if they need plastic or paper.  You give out so much plastic and paper that you wonder how long it can last.  This shit’s got to run out eventually I figure, but I give it away anyway.  “Paper or plastic, ma’am?”  “Paper, please.”  But wouldn’t you rather save a tree today? But I don’t ever say it.  Hell no she wouldn’t.  “Paper, please.”
Why don’t they just get smaller garbage cans and put the plastic in their cans?  Come to think of it, why don’t they just shove the garbage cans, the plastic, and the paper bags right on up their too well-to-do asses and give us all a break?  In case you can’t tell, I make $5.75 per hour.  Sometimes I take home old chicken from the deli at night and have even been known to throw in a polish sausage on the sly under the eyes of co-conspirators.
It’s an awkward feeling that I possess when I take a little bit of food from my protectors, but thinking about it now, and relating it in this way as I am, I feel that if management could listen, only listen to my thoughts, I would have only this choice morsel of wisdom to relate: Fuck You.
I’m a member of the club of losers in this world.  I, for one, a newly conscious member of my station in life, holding this knowledge close, have obtained by it a certain freedom that will allow me to detach myself from the masters of the world if their veritable and, according to themselves, non-existent thumbs ever proceed to descend from on high.
I am a master dodger, an artist truly, a playwright, musicals.  I write musicals.  I never told you this, but I do.  So I am not unarmed, you see.
Well, so far you know this: I live in Millsville and I write musicals.  My brother Jed is dead or so we think, everybody but me. But that’s the standard line.  No body has been found.  My life is a joke with nobody left to laugh at it, and I am much too young to feel this way.  I have been improperly received, conceived, and laughed at by the world who doesn’t generally take kindly to people with mouths like mine.  I shoot my wad through a pen, and at the end of it all is a splatter of hope that maybe, just maybe, Jed isn’t dead. But even then, that is something of a shot idea.  Beat.  That is, without hope.  I just can’t stop wondering what happened to my brother.
My friends laugh at me, but I’ve decided that I’m going to look for Jed.  I’ve got a few hunches as to where he might be. I figure he’s in New York because Jed always gravitated toward the big time and New York has got the big time everything.  So he’s in New York, I figure.  They got the best crack houses there.

Chapter 1

I can’t say my family didn’t love me, they did. But it was too much of a love that it impinged on what I thought should be my basic freedoms in this world, namely the right to say whatever the fuck I want. That’s not something most people take kindly to anymore. They want you to have that feedom, but if you exercise it, just don’t do it around them. They’ ve got that right, too. Only problem is that there are so many of them out there, and I’ve got such a big mouth even though most people think I’m pretty shy, that we never get along. It’s sad. It’s like Teardrop.
Teardrop was my mule. Died of old age about three years ago happy, but not always, because I did something really stupid. I lost him in a poker game because I thought that’s what somebody with a mule does. I was stoned and had been fighting with Moxy because she felt like a cowboy and is really this Jewish girl from New Jersey. Down in town, I was playing cards with Jay and Frank. I rode Teardrop into town just for a hoot. Teardrop was a strong mule, but we did walk a lot of the way. The guys thought he was a cool little mule and so did I. He was happy. I kept carrots for him and sugar cubes and apple cores. He dug ’em all. But then Jay gets out a jay and we smoke it up and suddenly, I think to myself how Teardrop is my best friend and then, instead of knowing it, believing it, I think of it in betting terms, and I’m just about out of money… when this guy says, “Throw in Teardrop.”

Throw in Teardrop. An amazing conception ultimately, but I didn’t know it then. Back then, when I was still smoking and drinking a little because I was weaning myself off heroin, I didn’t know better. I didn’t know, either, that a mule could hold the secret not only to muledom, but pretty much to whatever secret anybody would ever feel worthy of holding. You remember that story by Christ, I think it was, he said that he who does good unto the least of these, pointing around at the old and sick does unto me. And that’s what Teardrop was. He was truly the least of these and when I lost after that quick nod of my head, when this guy Jay thought it would be cool to own a mule named Teardrop, I recognized the least of these in my mule and didn’t want to see him go. You know what I mean? You’ve got to know what I mean.
Anyway, I lost Teardrop that day, and he went to live with Jay down in the town. Jay fixed lawnmowers in his lawnmower shop. He lived in the back by his lawnmowers and that’s where Teardrop went to live because it turns out Jay used to have a horse that he kept in a pen back there, but he didn’t have a horse no more, didn’t want one because a horse is for a kid to ride, and, well, his wife left him as was only right since, after all, Jay liked to do a lot of smoking, drinking and gambling. So his vices weren’t all bad. They got him Teardrop anyway, unless you want to consider my side of the story, that is, it took Teardrop from me. But that mule is dead now anyhow.

I got myself a little girl. Yeah, I know, what’s a jerk like me doing with a little girl. I haven’t even been near the mountains for years. Not hardly. Always lived in a town. I moved here a few years ago from New Jersey where me and Moxy had lived for a long time, too long a time. I grew up down the hill in Millsville. Moxy is Helen. She’s my wife. I was on heroin for over ten years and she took care of me. A few years ago I’m sitting around detoxing finally after so long doing smack and my brother Albert comes to Fort Lee where I had been living with Moxy. Minnie wasn’t around yet. That’s my daughter. She’s five going on forty. And Albert comes to Fort Lee looking for me. Albert is one of a kind. I remember when he was a kid I was over talking to this sweet little girl I was hot for at the skating rink, I always took my brother on Friday nights, who else was going to do it? And I look up and I see Albert, had to be about seven, skating around the roller rink with his little friend Stevie and then this monster comes up behind him, about my age, and rolls over my little brother and doesn’t even stop. Just laughs. So I skate over there past my brother whose being taken care of and have a little chat with our friend the gorilla. He disagreed as well that hurting my brother was a good idea. Albert, he looked up to me back then so much he finally rescued me.
Sitting in a Dunkin Donuts while me and Moxy sit in her car outside and me wondering if I should go the hell in because by then I was too ashamed to think about what I’d done to my family, my brother, and my mama back in Tennessee. Well, I go in, finally, but only after Albert comes out. I can’t go in. He starts crying, happy as all hell to see me, and we go back in to sit down. The girl from Dunkin Donuts comes around and tells me that he’s a good boy, that he’s a good boy like she loves him or something and then next thing I know he pops me in the eye real hard and I literally black out. Moxy picks me up and Albert is gone.

So since then I got my brother back. Me and Moxy drove to Millsville, waiting a few days to let Albert get back which turned out to be by bus. Albert was still a little cold to me, but I could see the same Albert there staring at me while I hugged my mama and I myself began to cry. He was bouncing some papers on his leg as we all sat there drinking coffee at the kitchen table. Then he hands me the papers. It says “Petals. A Rock Scenario.” Turns out all those marijuana jam sessions that I had in my room when I truly hated the world and everybody in it was a sort of schooling for my little brother who would sit in on the sessions and listen. Albert turned out to be somebody who wrote rock operas and sitting there with Petals on his lap, him looking so nervous, I thought to myself that whatever it is in his hand that he wants me to see I’ll see, and whatever it is that this little man who listened to me wants me to do, I’ll do. So he gives me the rock opera “Petals. A Rock Scenario” and it’s about the death of Princess Diana. This kid took the whole story of the death of Princess Diana and turned it into a musical, a rock musical, but he had no music. He came looking for me, looking all the hell over New York City, thinking I was a busted up heroin junkie living in the gutter. He walked in to Harlem crack houses and talked to people who I knew. That’s says you go pretty far to get what you want. He knows Slit, for god’s sake, a guy I plied with money, but who was the biggest liar I’d ever met except about his quality of heroin. Slit had some of the best. He was of course connected to The Lady. The Lady was no lady to say the least. She was as mean as they come. A certifiable nymphomaniac. Did me a couple of times till I got to know better. I know that’s a strange thing for a man to say, but it’s true. Albert met her. Once again, for someone who would talk to The Lady to find me, you gotta hand it to him. So I took on Petals.
But that doesn’t mean that my life ends. I am in the process of straightening things out and if I occasionally lose a mule due to the stupidity of a marijuana high then I will die knowing that I, like everybody else under God’s blue sky, is a complete and utter idiot, and that pain comes. Pain comes, but it doesn’t burden us more than we can handle. We always make it because there are people like Albert out there guided by some sort of angel and if we think we’re the angels, we’re wrong. The angels are the angels and they know who they are. They’re out there.

But the point here is this. Jay didn’t keep that mule for long. Teardrop loved me I hate to say and I don’t live all that close to town, in fact, when me and Moxy moved back home she knew we’d have to live on Anna Belle Mountain. So we did, and within the year we had a dozen chickens, a pig, a cow and a mule. The following year we had Minnie. A little baby, Minnie. A girl. We had Albert and my mama down there in town not far from where Jay still lives and my mule did only briefly. We had the supermarket, me, I had the supermarket back. I used to work there. Then Albert got a job and he’s still there. He’s funny. He complains about his job like he’s a columnist for the New Yorker. His literary work hero is John Updike for writing a story about an asshole manager kicking out a couple of babes who wanted to buy something in their bikinis. He’s assistant produce manager now. He hates it still. He’ll never accept it. He’s written four rock operas, but none like this tribute that I’m doing the music for about the Princess Diana. I don’t know. At first I thought my brother had gone a little bit crazy or a little bit queer for wanting to write about a princess, but then I looked at the play. My brother is a first rate writer. His only problem is that he hasn’t been discovered. My mama, she paints pictures, and he had her paint a picture of Princess Diana with folded hands and angels and burning orange sunsets behind her like she’s beautiful but very much dead. Maybe this whole concept of accepting death isn’t popular for a very good reason.
But I’m not quitting on my brother because my brother never quit on me. I never would have gone home or if I had it would have been several years later. I’d become a bit of a coward hiding out there in Fort Lee. Our band had been over for years because the heroin became a better ride. Helen never took that stuff and she stood by me all those years. Actually, we separated for awhile. She couldn’t take it. That’s when I went to New York. Albert was right anyway about where I might go if I was a down and out junkie. I headed straight to New York City. It’s also where Moxy found me. I’d go downtown sometimes even though I lived up in the 200s. Walked right by me. Our eyes met on the street and we just hugged. I was saving my hit for later and had just taken some other things, a few lines, a few bowls. Pretty stoned, but I was still looking for a drink. I’m not an alcoholic though. What I mean was I was looking for a place to sit down and have a drink so I could listen to some good music. I’m a rock guitarist.

Moxy Priestess is a band that I believe was every bit as good as anything the 1970s produced. In 1978 we opened for Rush in Ontario, Canada. I was written up in the newspapers as being Jimmy Page-like. I eventually played with Jimmy three years later, just after Zeppelin broke up. I was 18 in 1978. At 21, I hadn’t talked to my family for four years. Albert was about eight when I left the house at 17 to run away to Nashville where I was kicked out of so many clubs it stopped being funny because back then they didn’t mess with rock and roll at all like they do now. I am a country boy who doesn’t do country. Mel Tillis never graced my eight track if you know what I mean. My dad played a lot of Dylan. Nah, Jimmy Page. With Jimmy I was born. Then came Jimi and that sealed it. Name them then, the ones that you would think my heroes were, and I couldn’t think of nothing but playing as good as these guys or playing with these guys someday, and I did: Clapton, Lifeson, Morse, Beck, Van Halen, the list goes on and on.
Yeah. So this mule, Teardrop, he chews his way out of the weakest part of the fence and he starts walking. Anna Belle Mountain is a little over ten miles away and we live on the top of it up a dirt road that travels beside a sheer fall. If you’re stoned and willing to allow the beast to actually carry you at times, as mules can, then you can make it into Millsville in two three hours. That’s what I did. Took a bongload and went to town. Where I live, well, it’s not the best place to live if you’re afraid of heights or you can’t afford a four wheel drive. We’re about five miles up. Somehow though, Teardrop gets to the mountain unseen, but he doesn’t know anything about roads, Teardrop, he doesn’t think like we do. He just knows that on top of a mountain somewhere is me and Moxy and the baby Minnie, that’s all.

Some days I’ll just think about it. When he finally came into the yard he was bleeding profusely on all four of his legs. He had a gash in his side a foot long. He was wet and caked with mud. There was nothing about him that wasn’t wrong. Even his eyes looked hollow and jelly-like, like he’d seen too many ghosts. Teardrop never took the road, but later we found tracks. He went right up the back side of the mountain and didn’t once stop going up. Nobody knows exactly what happened to him, but I can imagine and I do sometimes and I miss him. He died a few years ago real peacefully. Me and Moxy and Minnie and Albert and even my mama dug a big whole for him and put him right on the side of the mountain that he climbed up so valiantly to get home again, to get to us.