A huge, bleeding welt was ballooning on my upper-left forehead. An incessant ringing, accompanied by a police-like APB radio call, echoed in my head. Any form of speech sputtered forth from my mouth as incoherent babble. The Blonde doused the head wound with alcohol, then tossed some gauze and tape over it. She stripped me naked then re-clothed me in reeking transient grab that smelled like the inside of an elephant’s ass. My mind reeled and popped and spun and received strange radio transmissions. My entire body ached. If it weren’t for the raw pain, I would’ve thought this was all a bad dream.
We went down the stairs and out the back door.
The cold, night rain splashing on my head refreshed my aching frontal lobe. We walked in silence until we arrived at a lakeside park, where she sat me down on a bench.
“See you soon,” she whispered.
And the Blonde was gone.
I tried to think, but thinking at this point was futile.
No recollection of past, a vague conception of present, and didn’t care to endeavor an ounce of thought into the future.
The bottle of liquor she had given me was still in my coat pocket. I twisted off the cap and drank, then curled up on the bench as the rain continued its cool, diligent massage on my confused soul.
I WOKE up on the park bench. It was sunny and early in the morning. Miscellaneous people, out for their morning lakeside stroll, showed an obvious, despotic disdain for my dingy presence as they passed by. To them—and to me, so it seemed—I was a drunken vagrant. The leather boots on my feet looked as though they had been run over by Irwin Rommel’s entire Panzer division back in 1942, were found in the North African desert a half-century later, shipped over to the U.S. then slipped onto my feet. My pants seemed to be fashioned from a dirt/fabric hybrid and smelled of stale piss. The grubby, butterfly-collared shirt I wore appeared as though it had been discarded in 1978. To top it off, I had on a dusty, olive green corduroy jacket and a hat made out of straw. I clutched an empty bottle of vodka in my left hand.
My mouth felt like a long-forgotten septic tank. My head felt as though it was ready to explode at any moment.
I sat there for a while and listened to the birds converse with one another.
A peculiar-looking gentleman made his approach from across the park. He was clad in a black top hat, white button-up shirt, baggy white pants (tucked into black, knee high boots), and a red overcoat. He looked like a classic circus ringleader. Leashed in front of him trotted a medium-sized, stout bulldog, attired in WWII American bomber pilot regalia: jacket, helmet and goggles—all custom-fitted for the beast.
Both the dog and he grinned during their entire approach.
He sat down next to me and exhaled a huge, content sigh. Clearing his throat, he turned to face me. “Froward Moroni’s the name: General and friend of the legion of insane, inane, disdained, unclaimed, un-reigned, untamed, deranged, rearranged, out-of-range, mundane, profane, lame, and not to forget: humane. This here is my second in command, best friend to woman and man, and always willing to make a stand for the good-guy’s band: Mackie—the Lonesome Bulldog!
Moroni gave an exaggerated ovation as the dog looked about and wagged its backside. The dog’s tongue dangled, showering the sidewalk with slobber.
MORONI INVITED me to join him for “The Greatest Cause Humanity, and at least two-thirds of the Milky Way Galaxy, Will Have Ever Known!” He didn’t endeavor into the particulars of that “Cause” at the time, but he did promise “food and entertainment a-plenty; conversation, camaraderie without a … bounty.” He then cursed himself for not finding a better word than “bounty” to fulfill his rhyming scheme.
I followed him to where his motorcycle—with sidecar—was parked. Mackie hopped up into the sidecar. Moroni mounted the cycle and I climbed on behind him. He tossed his top hat in with the dog then fired up the bike.
Off we went.
About 20 minutes later, we pulled into a shanty-camp situated in some isolated hills in the vast wilderness area of Los Angeles’ Griffith Park. Other characters meandered about the camp, cooking, singing, painting, boozing, snoozing, and cavorting. We climbed off the vehicle, Moroni re-donned his hat, and then began introducing me to various members of his clan.
A couple of guys sat at a picnic table playing chess. “This here is Fred Fillono: the finest cinematic artist ever … greater than he there have never been, are, nor will be—never.”
Fillono tipped his brimmed hat in salutation.
Moroni continued. “Ah—and here in our camp we have Marcel the Champ: painter and sculptor for fun … grandmaster of chess who will reign victorious over and then humbly give his thanks to just about anyone….”
The Champ stood up, performed an exaggerated bow and shook my hand.
Moroni pointed at me. “Yes, sure—and you, my good sir, please do not be shy … give us your moniker and what you do, by-the-by….”
Loose shards of memory were attempting to surface in my head. “My name … is Bikaver. I think I’m a writer….”
“Bravo! Just what we need: a scribe, Reality Author, court recorder ye shall be … well, then this shall fit the bill—ahh yes—here is your hallowed pencil.” He brandished a pencil from his coat pocket and handed it to me. On the side were inscribed the letters “F-T-W-C.” He gave me an extravagant wink.
I gave him my thanks.
I WILLINGLY joined this band of transients and ingratiated myself as Moroni had invited. While we were a bevy of transients, we invited various other vagrants who happened to be endowed with any form of creative nature into our little raggedy troupe.
Moroni manned the helm of the ship as its captain and spokesperson—its “top dog.”
Many spiels on the virtues of free thought issued forth from the man: free thinkers—being painters, musicians, philosophers, writers, poets, playwrights, mimes, performance artists, and stunt-men (Moroni’s own words)—were in fact civilization’s only hope for survival. “For it is they….” he would exclaim, “who are least likely to be brainwashed by the corporate-mass-media-manipulation melee…! We are, indeed, on the brink; I am because I think, if I have nary my own thought—then I am naught.”
His “fire-sideways chats” every Saturday night were delivered with the fervor of a fire-and-brimstone preacher or the classic military dictator’s zeal. His dictums covered everything from unknown enemies, varying means of mind-control, false realities, and the systematic duping, doping and dumbing-down of the human race to the fact that our kitchen sinks were spying on us.
We listened respectfully, but didn’t take seriously his wild pronouncements.
He was our ringleader, in charge of the entertainment and festivities. For us, his vast and incessant paranoia—which fueled his fine rants—was part of the show. We detected neither menace nor danger from the man, quite the contrary: upon his initiative and leadership, a viable forum for transient artists to share with one another time, camaraderie, companionship and entertainment had been achieved. We had become a tribe, a family, a roving band of misfit artists. And we would present our works regularly.
Upon the seventeenth of every other month, Fillono projected one of his films via a hand-cranked projector. A common theme that ran throughout his oeuvre of work was that of mind-manipulation via higher powers upon an unknowing protagonist or group of protagonists. Every single one of his movies contained a character called “The Telepathic Ventriloquist,” played by the dashing and youthful actor Lethan O’Leery, whose outright cynicism was eclipsed only by his love of whiskey, which was far eclipsed by his handsome young Paul Newman looks. Why hadn’t Lethan O’Leery gone “mainstream” and become a big screen “heartthrob?” His theory (in his genteel North Carolina accent): “Because I ain’t nobbed the gatekeeper. And I ain’t ever gonna.”
Each eve of Mercury’s “retrograde” cycle, Marcel “The Champ” unveiled a new painting or sculpture. Why Mercury’s retrograde cycle? “Because it happens about three or four times a year, and not always at the
same time. So it is fixed, but not too fixed. That way I have a schedule, but not too tight.”
Did he subscribe to the “astrological” nuances of the cycles? “Eh, I don’t know about all that. Maybe things go haywire, maybe not. The universe is a very large place, maybe the biggest, and perhaps a butterfly flapping its wings in Havana can eventually cause a supernova in the Andromeda galaxy. Who knows? Not me.”
His most notorious painting, “Naked Business Woman Descending Upon an Escalator,” raised quite a few eyebrows, particularly because it looked like a time-lapsed film of a naked woman on an escalator, but all the frames of the film were superimposed atop one another, so you couldn’t really tell what it was. But if you looked closely (perhaps like those pictures where if you stare at it just the right way you might see something) you could see that the woman was in fact flipping off Gill Bates, the billionaire behind the Macrohard software behemoth.
His most controversial sculpture—a tipped-over, portable outhouse with “American Standard (Capsized)” spray painted in gold color on the door—garnered kudos from the underground “low-brow” art crowd, while causing the pompous New York art “establishment” to hold their noses, most likely because he had used a quite uncleaned outhouse for the show.
When not painting or sculpting, he would be found schooling someone in a round of chess and saying, “thank you very much for a pleasant game” after check mate.
Chuck the “Born Again Poet” recited his eclectic rants and guttural takes on reality, the universe, God, freedom, booze, drugs, women, cash, technology, and dog racing; many times decipherable only between his rusty and roaring fits of cigarette induced coughing and powerful and violent bouts of 99-cent-store-wine-provoked projectile vomiting.
The sultry and bosom-heavy Lustra Love-Joy caused uncontrollable “libido-sensitive epileptic seizures” in all of the male and some of the female portion of the audience upon each showing of her ever-evolving, quite suggestive and hyper-erotic performance art she entitled “the OM”(Orgasmic Movements).
This is the way it went for about a year. None of us considered for a moment the highly intelligent Moroni to be dangerous. His speeches had an entrancing manner; the impassioned yet inane dictums mesmerized the group as though a mass hypnosis were occurring. I began to take notice that all of us would inject Moroni’s pronouncements thematically into each of our respective works—as though he were the storm cloud and our artworks the raindrops manifested therefrom.
“I am the planet of ideas, and you are all my satellites.”
“The world is in a state of fever. I am the doctor and you are all my orderlies.”
“People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. I am the top dog. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.”
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. You all are my pages.”
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing you.”
“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cannonball into the pool and cause many ripples. You all are my ripples.”
He encouraged us to go out and sell, display, perform and present our respective forms of art, “because, you see—not even thoughts, anymore, are free.” Our transient troupe trekked to various towns and cities around the region—a traveling low-brow hobo show—presenting, performing, displaying and selling to anyone who had the time and wherewithal to oblige us…. It was a pretty decent set up.
I FILLED up a number of notebooks with material during my twelve-month stint with the “troupe.” In my mind, Moroni was a man whose imagination dwarfed his rationale, but an inspirational force to “we the wretchedly refused.” He motivated us to be more than just bums, which is what we were.
The man had passion. His fervor insinuated itself in us.
We called ourselves “Free Thought and Will Champions.” We had turned into a viable band, surviving off the hospitality and donations from philanthropic hosts and selling to those who had an appreciation for “the lowest of the low arts”—as Moroni mused.
My job as a reporter or recorder: to pen exposés chronicling the goings-on of our group, and record virtually everything Moroni had said.
And write stories.
I sold one fictional story (Fillono and I co-wrote) to an underground literary magazine. We both worked on the screenplay; he turned the screenplay into a film and I into a short story.
The gist of the yarn: The Telepathic Ventriloquist sits up on the stage with his dummy and stares at the audience in stark silence.
Neither he nor the dummy ever move their mouths: through telepathy he prompts his audience into laughter.
The ventriloquist’s act gains more and more notoriety.
In the end, however, the ventriloquist learns he is but a stooge for a company testing out its new mind-control device. The device had been planted within the dummy, which needs a human conduit to allow it to work.
The ventriloquist becomes aware he himself is the conduit through which his audience becomes brainwashed into purchasing a new brand of mouthwash.
The climax of the film occurs when he performs “his” now popular act, and during the performance he breaks character and directly notifies the audience of what is going on. The crowd believes his speech to be a new part of his show, and laughs more so. Finally, aware of his predicament, he smashes the dummy into pieces. The audience boos him and collectively leaves.
The final shot of Fillono’s film is, in my opinion far more expressive than the end of my story. He leaves us with a slow zoom-out of the ventriloquist, sitting under a lone spotlight, into a wide-shot of him gazing into the vast empty venue in desolate silence.
The film was projected in a dozen or so art house theaters and garnered critical acclaim.
My short story netted me $250 from the underground publication Buck Naked Truth.
The last piece I had been working on during my time with Moroni—to the best of my recollection—was called “Undercover Repart: General of Inane to Make Bold Move.” I remember that, because I knew I needed to fix the spelling of “Report,” but I hadn’t been able to get around to it for reasons which will be mentioned later. It was to be Moroni’s tell-all speech in which he was going to give us the unadulterated, unabridged and mind-blowing account of his real identity and the actuality of his intentions.
“Everything is in place … for a declaration of war on them by us—the human race … SCREW YOU ALL!” That is how the repart—I mean report—ends.
I WAS in my stand-up tent, flipping through my report. I didn’t like how the piece ended. As a matter of fact, the work on the whole sucked. I felt as though nothing had really been accomplished, and the entire year had been blown accomplishing that nothingness.
Was I akin to Fillono’s Telepathic Ventriloquist? A mere “yes-man” acting as a bestooged conduit for use by manipulative higher forces?
Probably.
A mind-storm erupted on the scale of a psychic el niño. A diligent revision of my work-in-progress was in order. With this revision I took my own liberties and added my very own thoughts to the piece.
For one, I made the fact quite lucid that Moroni was an insane man. I implemented myself into the piece as a spy, in the guise of a writer who works for some unknown (or undisclosed) agency, sent to investigate and report on the activities of the man known as Moroni.
Secondly, I made myself out to be the hero, saving the planet from Moroni’s underhanded madness.
And lastly, a love interest was introduced. I was, after all, beg-inning to feel lonesome and in need of female contact.
“Ah, Mr. Bikaver … I see and I lurk, you are going about your work.” Moroni staggered into my tent with a bottle of wine in one hand and an attaché in the other. He pushed the bottle into my chest and sat down in a fold-out camping chair across from me. “May I check upon wh-what—may I read your stuff?”
I took a big pull off the wine and handed him the papers. He opened up the attach
é case, brandished a bottle of Schnapps, closed the case, uncapped the Schnapps and got to reading.
For about an hour he read; every now and then he laughed aloud or clapped together his hands, exclaiming “bravo!” and sipping from his bottle.
In the meantime, I polished off the entire bottle of wine; it was smooth, dry and bitter.
He finished reading as he finished the Schnapps. “Exemplary. I couldn’t have penned it better myself. Every word is true, through-and-through and through you!” He leaned back in the chair,examined the empty bottle, then set it on the ground. “You have graduated from the academy of Free Thought and Will Champions—with honors, of course…. However, Mr. Bikaver, after tonight you will no longer be able to spy on me. Our tenure of merriment ends upon this eve, and it will not be a pleasant scene. First, we will be disbanded when a rude raid by an N(aI)IS Black Ops Really-Big-Brothers Attack Squad transpires. What is the N(aI)IS, you wonder? Here is a detailed account of them I have been saving to give to you on this very night. You must re-write it pronto as fictional code within this—your novel-in-progress—then burn the original.” He opened up the attaché case again and slid a dossier across the table. It looked like pages of extensive governmental bureaucratic documents. My stomach was beginning to ache.
“Second, you will be knocked senseless when one of these commandos rams the butt of his rifle to the back of your head. This, of course will have given you partial amnesia, whereupon you will have remembered very little about the past year, but you will have slowly regained your memory of your identity—particularly of who you were prior to the faithful day you met up with me. Of course, you will still have your written works. To you, however, these works will be hazy aide memoirs you had written when you were a confused drunk. If you’ll excuse me, I must now prepare for my finale speech.”
He stood, bowed, winked then trotted toward the door of the tent. He paused and abruptly turned back to face me. “Oh—does ‘A-to-Z-all-ways’ mean anything to you?”
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