Lint

by Steve Aylett

  But a more compelling reason for turning strong light onto Garrison is that Lint himself was present that day in Dealey Plaza, sitting with the umbrella-phobic Cuban Jose Alvarez on the verge of the knoll. Lint had a black umbrella with him and at the time of the assassination was apparently telling Alvarez about Erik Satie and the composer’s collection of over a hundred umbrellas, mostly unused and left in their wrapping. When his friend did not rise to the bait, Lint took up his umbrella and began pumping it open and closed, sniggering like a bastard. Losing patience with his taunts, Alvarez left Lint sitting on the curb. Lint’s view of the fatal shot was obscured by his fooling with the umbrella and he only gradually noticed that something was amiss. Some conspiracy theorists misread the account (which Lint leaves until late in the book) to mean that Lint was telling Alvarez about the gunman Lucien Sarti, who fired the headshot from a few yards away at the picket fence—Lint must therefore have been in on the conspiracy. In fact Lint does seem to be one of the few people in the plaza who was not overly surprised at the assassination, but this was more through historical knowledge than complicity. Lint was a quick-enough study to realise he was not a target.

  It was almost a decade later that Lint himself came under attack. ‘He was what these days would be called a free runner,’ says Caul Pin today. ‘Attempting to cross whole cities by leaping from rooftop to rooftop. It was his only exercise. Of course he was living in suburban LA where there were quite a few open spaces, and he had to really exercise his imagination to get a fair shake at it.’ Lint would leap from actual buildings onto those he projected with his mind’s eye. ‘Naturally he went straight through the latter and smashed himself up pretty badly, several times. And on each occasion he sent a detailed account of the incident to positive thinker Norman Vincent Peale, claiming to be baffled by the outcome.’

  It was upon returning home after one of these mishaps that Lint was pounced upon by one-time Baffling Stories editor Paul Steinhauser, who lay in wait in the house and stabbed him twice with a Boker carving knife, screaming with such incoherence that Lint had to ask him sixteen times to repeat what he was saying. Lint was wounded in the side and back, and as he lay bleeding, the gaunt and bearded Steinhauser accused him of ‘turning me into the Belly Guy’. Lint confessed that he hadn’t a clue what Steinhauser was going on about and the ex-editor shrieked anew, grabbing up the page proofs of Rigor Mortis and hurling them in the air before throwing himself at Lint amid the paper snow.

  ‘He said he would doom my torso to silence, which I thought was a great phrase at the time,’ writes Lint in Arse. ‘Movement in a household of death serves who, I wonder. Anyway, he stabbed me one more time, in the leg, and we both started getting bored because it was the same thing three times. And in my case, I had the pain on top of that. He went to a mirror, surveyed the elemental frenzy of his reflection, said “Forty months every year, that’s my motto”, then presumably thought he’d better go and have a shave. That was the end of it. I don’t hold it against him. Narrowed to revenge, life points only one way, but at least it may wind up being of interest to more than one person.’

  But Lint was more effected by the incident than he thought. After a hospital stay he returned home and more or less stopped going out. ‘Dawn seemed carnivorous,’ he said later.

  The packaging of Rigor Mortis inevitably yielded to sensationalism. The cover blurb screamed: ‘Earl Warren laughed if he saw a dog or a cat. This was the only time he ever moved his mouth. SHOULD HE HAVE BEEN PUT IN CHARGE OF THE KENNEDY COMMISSION?’ In fact Warren often moved his lips when reading and, in defiance of advice, when standing near the gears of a combine.

  Reader reaction was predictably useless. ‘Did he write the book or grow it in the trunk of a half-car in the yard?’ asked Anthony Tangeman of The New Yorker, which Lint had once described as ‘the ecclesiastical newspaper of death-excellence’.

  One reader, his blood boiling, pulled at his own ear so hard that it sprang back into place with a noise like a whipcrack—he was dictating into a tape recorder at the time and an audio sample of the event13 has become one of the most frequently downloaded files on the Web, along with the exploding whale and Limbaugh stating a verified fact.

  ‘Tens of thousands of dissolving motives make up the sunset,’ Lint wrote in his journal, but his own motivation was to return with a bang.

  16

  THE ‘FANTASTIC LEMON’ EXPERIENCE

  The Hours of Betty Carbon · Lint wedges · C.H. Hinton · infinite intrusion · The Stupid Conversation · unlikely at best · a new category of sight · going underground

  By 1973 Lint found himself in a strange position. In the literary world he was the head of a movement; was credited as the first author to steal Michael Moorcock’s ‘Multiverse’ idea; had coined the conspiracy term ‘dupe fatigue’ in Rigor Mortis; and according to an (albeit incorrect) analysis by Stanley Spence of the Philadelphia Inquirer, had ‘made the people thereby so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule.’ Yet but for the occasional visit from a cleaner (‘the spiders are blossoming under her care’) he was subject to the irreplaceable zap of loneliness in his Fullerton home.

  Lint was working on the never-completed The Hours of Betty Carbon in a house full of burnt dust, credit and worry. Caul Pin visited him at this time and found Lint bitter and agitated. Lint was saying: ‘It seems these bastards are bored with the flood of original ideas I—’ and broke off, strangling the air before him as though confronted with a highway patrolman. He complained of having a migraine that was ‘an emptiness of flashing hell’.

  Though able-bodied, Lint became obsessed with placing ramps everywhere. Caul Pin again: ‘Jeff Lint was dedicated to putting ramps in front of everything, God knows why. But years later, many disabled people took him up as a sort of campaigning saint because they thought it was to do with access. While in fact I think he probably just liked approaching things on the slant.’ Lint spoke later about the beauty of the wedge and claimed that he had been ‘placing clues’ about the town that could be ‘mentally collected and assembled together like Hinton cubes’. Charles Howard Hinton, whose work formed the backbone of Edwin Abbott’s earnings in the late nineteenth century, had publicised the memorising of a cubic yard of one-inch cubes. Having memorised a block of space, it was then possible to place any object (mentally shrunk down if necessary) inside this space and feel exactly where it began, where it ended, what space it occupied and what space it did not. You were then seeing in 3-D—the way a 4-D creature would see. It seems that Lint was attempting something similar with his Lint wedges. By memorising each wedge-shaped piece of space and assembling them into a mental sphere in which samples of space from throughout the city were present, people could carry a ‘facet-map’ in their head. An urban legend has grown up since that cab drivers began to use the system and became so entranced with the contoured revoluting gem in their minds that a sort of cult was spawned, and cabbies who drove into walls and through freeway barriers into whistling air were considered martyrs to the crystalline city.14 This wedge experiment would lead Lint sideways into mindmap programming in the blood vessel-busting 1988 book The Phosphorus Tarot of Matchbooks.

  But on May 15, 1973, this and other mental experiments seems to have culminated in what was either a florid breakdown, a religious experience, a charming anecdote or a cosmic intervention for Lint. At this time he had been eating a lemon every day because, he said, he could no longer imagine the experience. He was distracted from his work on Betty Carbon one afternoon by the feeling of peculiar eternities—years in a minute he was staring at the blank page and when he finally turned to look at the room, an alien totem pole carved from angel skin coral and klieg marble had taken up residence. Around it hurtled feedback angels and battering photons, minds endless and dense irradiating the room. Cathedric creatures, entities in knots and tesseract nations defied the scale of the house with gem infinities. From the great beyond flapped a thousand demons on
wings of cancer, dropping quicksilver bombshells.

  For five days Lint lived amid the cognita inferna of proliferating dimensions. Gnostic knobs on the wall seemed like controls, which Lint manipulated without effect. Just to get to the kitchen he found he had to shoulder his way through blown-glass saints and the morphing emergence of fourth-dimensional limbs as ‘air cherries’ that stretched and dwindled with only apparent randomness. Fifteen unseen creatures collided above his bed one night, smashing their brittle heads and crashing to the floor. Lint walked through fathoms of obsidian bedroom to find the light switch, hitting it to turn and see a plump animus struggling on the carpet, its semi-formed face resembling that of Cameo Herzog. When Lint encouraged it to drink from a saucer of milk, the creature exploded into a hail of choking black dust.

  ‘Of course, Betty Carbon was kicked in the pants,’ Lint explained in the autobiographical The Man Who Gave Birth to His Arse. ‘What I wrote then was a surrender to the bathysphere part of the human mind. Despite platitude universes beyond the door, I dwelt in squalls of unimaginable intensity. I was in the fully-fledged moment. Happy and volatile, I roared through the labyrinth of bad gems.’ Betty Carbon had been intended as a follow-up to the forgettable Sadly Disappointed15 but now, his mind a boiling chaos of supposition, Lint began work on The Stupid Conversation, in which the early character Lucius Arlen appears in regenerated form as Felix Arkwitch, charismatic bad boy of an occult assassin bureau, The Guild of Perfect Interruption. Able to shapeshift and given to appearing to his victims with flaming hair and ‘an erased face like a devilled egg’, Arkwitch was the only character Lint was to return to with regularity, and this terrifying hero built up a following more sustained than that of the superficially similar Jack Marsden. While Marsden seemed to be walking around with a head full of gunpowder, Felix Arkwitch is the chemical interior of his own reasoning, set in motion across diagonal category landscapes with his eyes on the endlessness above. He walks invisible by ‘belonging to his own labyrinth’. Jagged and tragic, he responds to threats by taking them inward and setting them to work. An inch of future divides him from apocalypse. ‘Wandering in the realm of souls leads you back to the world striped with the zing of golden death.’ Arkwitch is a white deathbed snake.

  ‘Nothing ends enlightenment so quickly as a visit from the Jehovah’s Witnesses,’ said Lint later. ‘There they were with the mummified voice of a survival god. The universe leaks bastards all over the place—I suppose it’s natural some should get in here. When I looked back, the portal was curled up, shrivelling like a time-lapse flower, and gone. A good ride while it lasted.’

  Marshall Hurk (who had bailed Lint out after the Nevada martial arts show debacle), remembers Lint showing up with a hectic look in his eyes: ‘The door rammed open and Lint hung in, laughing blood. He was undulating in the doorway like a dinghy trying to dock in high winds. I swear he was paler than an ambulance.’ A nest of static crowned his head as he explained his visions. ‘He stated that “grace was scrambling over the walls”, which seems unlikely at best.’

  ‘Better men than you have been undone by this sort of soupy revelation,’ Hurk declared finally. ‘I diagnose excess of heaven. Cinders in the skull.’

  ‘Our mild conversation was interrupted by the crashing entrance of a falling seraphim,’ Lint recalled later, but Hurk remembered nothing of the kind.

  In the visionary afterglow, Lint was still speculating on visual blips in the wallflow. ‘Fields seemed bizarrely flavored, succulent fire exploding in confusion, shapes reshuffling and making creepy lacunae in the sky.’

  Lint would be kicking the tires of the experience for years, and even used it retroactively to explain his unremembered transport to the West Coast in 1960. He was blessed with occasional flashbacks. ‘Twice a year things become jewelled, foreign with new windows.’

  But in Arse Lint described the experience primarily as one of regeneration. ‘I’d become distracted by image and career,’ said Lint, ‘something I’d never thought would happen. There’s an old Persian saying, “A flea won’t be chained to an oar.” Don’t make yourself conspicuous.’ Lint returned to his inner work, quietly producing a number of books throughout the seventies that would find their way onto the shelves up to ten years later. ‘I’ll have plenty of time to be fashionable after I’m dead.’

  Lint never could explain to anyone what was so ‘fantastic’ about the lemon.

  17

  “LINT IS DEAD”

  Felix Arkwitch · where an amateur can grin · dog attack · crown of gears · eye trumpet · into the minus? · how about another one · unscrambling

  After the Fantastic Lemon event came a year of black amazement, a season from the back of the head. Growing in identity, need exhausted, Lint lived in privacy and bathed in scorchers, producing and enjoying his time. But something in the air, and grapevine reports of the knife attack, resulted in a surge of bizarre rumours that Lint was dead and that the Lint from 1973 onward—or perhaps from 1965 when Herzog and Dean Rodence apparently ran him down with a truck—was not Lint but an imposter. Maybe a death-faked and surgically-altered Cameo Herzog was attempting to hijack Lint’s success or change his style by the most drastic method. Some pointed to Lint’s pursuit of TV and comic projects as proof of a personality transplant. This ignores both his earlier work on Catty and the Major and the characteristic strangeness of the later misfires—certainly Herzog, who once described the sea as ‘immoderate’, could not have produced these. But rumours of Alan Rouch’s participation in Sadly Disappointed further confused the issue.

  There was also a problem with the first edition of Rigor Mortis. The biographical notes on the back cover—with the by now inevitable photo of Lint kissing a tortoise—stated that Lint had died in 1972. The media, poised to praise him after his death, sprang in with lamentations that he had been tragically neglected by commercial enterprise and that it was baffling that his artistic genius had not been more appreciated. Their bitter embarrassment upon learning that he was still alive and open to their patronage drove a bigger wedge than ever between the media and Lint—they had no recourse but to pretend he did not exist at all. ‘So in terms of money, publicity and ease of progress,’ Lint observed, ‘all remains the same.’

  But to his increasing fan base it was an engraved invitation to rampage across his works, pulling, as Lint put it, ‘inedible tubers of wild interpretation from my territory’. The toughest of these tubers was the now recurring character of Felix Arkwitch, who appears in The Stupid Conversation (1974), Fanatique (1979) and The Phosphorus Tarot of Matchbooks (1988). This heaven-and-hell-frequenting antihero, who appears as a black ghost like an old suit, an arsenic-green mantisman or an urbane sculpture of gesturing ice, was theorized by many to be Lint’s literary ghost uploaded into some creepy device and still producing after his demise.

  There were, some readers said, many hints in the text that Lint was no longer around. Felix says at one point ‘Fancy going to the idiosyncratic nightmare of the pub?’—supposedly a standard Masonic remark upon the death of a brother. The entire first chapter of Fanatique was put through a cipher programme to produce the phrase: ‘I whisper abaat nuffin.’ One fan pointed out that the word ‘dead’ occurred thirty-eight times in Matchbooks. Others have countered that ‘sniggering’ occurred more often than that, and that the two conditions were not compatible. Aurora Hurlburt wrote an article called ‘Jeff Lint: Dead and Sniggering’ which refuted this view. Published in Jellysump Zine, it imparts great significance to the fact that Arkwitch escapes to the place ‘Where an amateur can grin without attracting comment, where mudslides matter, where fingers tense and finally relax.’ Where else is this but the grave?

  In 1969 Lint posed for a series of pictures that came to be known as the Savage Set. It shows Lint being attacked by a large dog in a field. The photos, taken by Jack Barnett to accompany a magazine article on the author, have attracted the attention of Lint theorists due to the fact that in later shots, a wound is clearly
visible on his neck—a wound that was not visible in the early shots. The conclusion drawn was that Lint had been replaced by a doppelganger halfway through the session. ‘The pictures were taken in a park down the road,’ Lint explained in an interview. ‘A dog attacked me, and the photographer decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take a picture of the onslaught. The shots were pretty good—you can see the fear and panic in my eyes. And that’s how I got the scar on my neck.’

  Other pictures of Lint show him frowning (apparently confused as to why he is being photographed)—many fans have remarked that the frown pattern on Lint’s forehead resembles a crab, the symbol of reincarnation in Sumerian culture. Lint’s forehead did resemble a crab when he frowned, but in Sumerian culture the crab symbolises creativity. A photo appearing in Rolling Stone shows Rouch, Herzog, Terry Southern, Lint, Peter Van Metre and Marshall Hurk in Fugazzi’s in 1953. Lint’s sloping stance, actually the result of being struck several times by all five men just before the photo was taken, was identified as the ritualistic ‘mourning slump’ adopted by the ancient Iscarii when a comrade fell in battle. Furthermore, if you place a mirror horizontally across the photograph, the six men look as though they are waist-deep in water.

  Even the seemingly innocuous Lint: a Collection bore a bunch of clues. ‘A Collection’ was seen as an allusion to ‘arse collection’, British slang for a coroner’s visit. The stories within include the suggestive ‘Imitation Panic’ (‘Have you worshipped the wrong core, brother?’), ‘I Would Have Spoken If There Was a Bounty’ (‘Who is the stranger pushing your cheeks inward so that your mouth purses like that of a fish? It is I! It is always I!’) and ‘Soup in the Manger’, in which a government department is set to work overlapping patterns of public complaint to design wallpaper—the result is ‘halloween rubbish; faded crimes’. It was repeatedly rumoured that Lint’s gonzo article ‘Mashed Drug Mutants’ had a subtext that was nothing to do with drugs, but Lint denied this. And the artwork has not escaped interpretation. Each of the twenty-eight stars on the cover represent one of Lint’s mistakes, compounded by the large central picture of his face.