Before reading this, it might be helpful to read Bop Kabala and Communist Jazz and either buy the book or pay subscribe to read the whole thing.
When I sold “Bop Kabala and Communist Jazz”, the editor told me that he hated it at first and then he liked it and then he hated it and then he loved it. Either way, it left an impression. It was my first pro-rate sale. First published in 2011, I have no idea how long it took me to write. I like to revise and rewrite stories many times before I submit them for publication.
Slawomir Mrozek compared old stories to ghosts, ghosts of the person you were when you wrote them. In that context, here are some of the ghosts of Tim Lieder from 2011.
The Writing Style
I used two distinctive writing styles for this story – beat poetry and street preacher. I used the beat style on purpose as “Howl” was the first poem I ever loved and the “Bop Kabala” line was from Allen Ginsberg's classic. Furthermore, the story follows the pattern set down by Kerouac in his novels. Ed K is like Dean Moriarty or Japhy Ryder from On the Road and Dharma Bums respectively. In my limited experience with Kerouac, I always found it strange that Kerouac portrayed himself as a schmuck chasing a much more interesting character around. Kerouac seemed so cool in interviews too.
However, Alan Moore provided the spark that started the story. In the third League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, he threw out almost every pop culture relic he knew. The first two books in the series are genius, but this one begins his long slide into irrelevance as the League books increasingly become Remember the Spartans with references that only Moore gets. There are still great moments like the Pirate Jenny installment or when Harry Potter kills Hogwarts, but mostly he gives us turds like the long stilted passage of purposefully bad imitation beat prose.
The street preacher prose with its hallelujah infused power came organically throughout the plot, starting around the time that I decided that Ed K was a preacher who worked many different places including mega-churches and street corners. By the ending, I have transitioned from beat poetry to street preaching as the emotionalism is very similar.
The Kidnapping
I was reading this story at a science fiction convention. My audience of five included three friends. At a certain point in the story, Ed K and the narrator pick up a hitchhiker named Mary Gunderson. When they refused to let her out of the car, the room got very quiet and very cold. It's a creepy scene and one that turns the story from a formless narratives into a horror story.
When I was a college sophomore, I was going to my friends' rave and a car pulled up alongside me. A man told me that he had marijuana for sale. His girlfriend was in the passenger seat. He kept telling me to get in the car and a combination of youth and racism led me to squash my misgivings and get in the back seat. I was too young to easily say no to commands, even commands from strangers. I was also trying to prove to myself that I wasn't racist. The man was black. I was white. I was thinking that if I said no, it'd be racist. White supremacy sucks. Seriously, had I not grown up in a white suburb with all the subtle racist assumptions, I'd recognize that this guy was bad news regardless of race and walked the fuck away.
When I got in the backseat, he sped down the road without slowing down so I could jump out. Finally he stopped near some factories, opened the back door, slapped me around and took my wallet. Then he ordered me out of the car and sped off. It lasted maybe a minute, but it definitely scared the shit out of me for months.
The Church
At this point, I should note that the narrator is unreliable. These days, it's harder to find reliable narrators. So when he says that he let Mary out in the middle of nowhere and drove to church, he's lying. Mary was inside the church and saw the whole thing. Most likely, the narrator was in the church and saw the whole thing. I glossed over the part where Ed K ordered everyone to stay in their seats as he burned it down because I wasn't secure in my ability to portray Ed K as the kind of preacher who would have that kind of hold over his congregants.
The countryside is full of large non-denominational churches that provide the best entertainment for miles. I had two experiences with mega-churches. When I was in 7th or 8th grade, I went to a Jesus People Church which was mostly standing and singing to rock gospel songs. The pastor's sermon stressed the need for discipline. By the end, the music was playing and the pastor asked anyone who wanted to give their life to Jesus to raise their hands. I raised my hand thinking that everyone was doing it. Next thing I know I'm in front of the church being prayed over. I also had to stay and listen to a “spiritual advisor” tell me that I couldn't go out drinking and partying with friends and then come back to church on Sunday. Since I had no friends to drink or party with at the time, I decided to take my life back.
The second mega church experience was Aunt Sharon's church. I really have no idea why mom wanted to go to Aunt Sharon's church. She went to many churches in her life because her pastors kept supporting pedophiles, but this one was big and had a pastor who wore a kimono and quoted George Carlin's “Place to Put Your Stuff” routine. The pastor also had gnarly crucifixion tattoos when he took off that kimono. In the lobby were pictures. In one picture, a hand was getting nailed to a cross. In the second picture, Jesus held the earth like a basketball. I only wished that I had some good hallucinogens to make the surreal experience that much weirder.
Either way, Ed K speaking at one of these mega-churches that serve as entertainment for people out in the country fit the character. Ed K loves an audience, either as a jazz musician or a preacher. Since I was using a friend's perspective, I didn't have to explain why Ed K decided to burn down his church. I would have had to read more about Jim Jones and Aum Shinrikyo. I like to think that he did it because he wanted to see if he could get away with it. However, Mary accuses Ed K and the narrator of being lovers. Mary might have been more perceptive than anyone wanted to admit. That truth might have pushed Ed K to commit an atrocity.
Youth
Both Ed K and the narrator are young. They aren't teenagers but they are definitely younger than 25. Young people are stupid. More importantly, they are ignorant and 100% certain of their opinions. After a certain age, you need to join a cult or embrace conspiracy theories to feel so smug. When Khymani James was banned from Columbia University for threatening to kill Zionists, I took his youth into account. The Columbia U administrators who first heard him spouting this psychotic bullshit and did nothing to curb it were at fault. Khymani James is young and he's likely to temper that shit in the same way that Vanessa Redgrave advocates for Palestinians and notes that anti-Israel rhetoric has only made their lives miserable. Else, he'll pull a Roseanne Barr and go from anti-Israel to one of those people who can't resist sprinkling Kahane quotes into every conversation.
Ed K and the narrator are assholes who think that they know everything. They are also part of a nostalgia for that time in my life when I loved beat poetry and hung out with drop outs and artists and geniuses who discussed Robert Anton Wilson and Jung while gravitating to Renaissance Festivals and Boiled in Lead concerts. Parties started at midnight. Sometimes they turned into orgies (that everyone talked about for months afterwards). One night a friend read Howl in a monotone and everyone tried to listen politely for at least a few minutes. Another night, that same friend had a bad acid trip and we all made sure they were ok.
My nostalgia for that time is tempered by knowing how these friends broke away from each other. Some went to college. Some drove everyone away. Someone I admired couldn't stop talking shit about everyone to the point that even I couldn't ignore it. People moved away and got different interests. The leftwing politics took on that ever popular circular firing squad formation. Everyone thought that they were smarter than the average American. It got real old. People grew up and wanted better things.
Ed K and the narrator and to a lesser extent, Mary, are destructive individuals who want to die young, because they don't see a future. More accurately, they don't want to come to the point where they have to grow up and become different people. So Ed K burns up his church and the narrator sticks to the story.
Last note. I have no idea what K stands for.
Again, my story was published by Shock Totem so you can buy a copy.
I won’t be able to publish it on Substack for at least a year, so if you want to read my latest story “Discourses on the Seven Headed Monkey”, please buy Spectrum: An Autistic Horror Anthology