by Steve Aylett
Literary groupie Cheryl Daly claimed to have slept with Lint and that he wore a black armband around his cock, a symbol of mourning in some cultures and a device to increase size in others. Other fans who have met Lint, especially later in his life, have claimed to have witnessed bizarre physical/metaphysical events that suggest that Lint could navigate between the worlds like Felix Arkwitch. Tom Hull relates a conversation he had with Lint in Santa Fe in 1987, at the end of which ‘His features shot into squares, receding at speed. Funny way to leave it.’
Another theory in circulation was that Lint had been replaced by an alien in the sixties and this alien had come to believe its own cover story—the Fantastic Lemon transmissions were homeworld attempts to re-establish contact. Thus the attention lavished by fans on the plot of his contribution to the short-lived Incredibly Bitter Stories, ‘Lipstick & Shells’, in which aliens overtake Earth insidiously by infinitesimal drilling into our colours, changing them incrementally from within. ‘Our definitions will be changed from the core,’ writes Lint, ‘beginning with “anarchy” and “schizophrenia”.’ Dating from 1961, the story is said by some fans to be evidence of the alien Lint’s screen memory going on the blink. ‘The Test of Crowns’ has undergone similar scrutiny, containing as it does a crown full of gears that meddle with the mind, prodding it toward the appropriate. The crown happens to have been built by technicians working in the vanguard of execution, effectively inflicting the slowest death possible upon the state head.
In the realm of music, Lint seemed to offer further clues. While much of Lint’s sixties work could be seen as a literary analogue of pop psychedelia, he had drawn closer to mainstream flower culture in the late 60s with his collaboration on a strange, downbeat concept album The Energy Draining Church Bazaar. This psychedelic epic was recorded with The Unofficial Smile Group (later called Unsmile in its prog rock incarnation), part of the San Francisco scene but in 1969 already going to seed. Lint re-energised them for their last burst of authentic glory. In the style of album covers of the day, Draining’s cover is a seething mass of Technicolor images—these swirl around the figure of a younger Lint, wearing a crown and holding what appears to be a smashed marrow, but which many have seen as a parsnip, traditional wake food in some cultures. Rare copies of Draining bear an alternative cover on which Lint is shown to have a ‘living trumpet’ (according to J-Lint Zine) growing from his right eye. This trumpet (or flower) has been called anything from ‘the lily of death’ to ‘everyone’s gumbo’. Or was it a reference to Cameo Herzog’s Empty Trumpet series? On the back cover, Lint stands off to the side of the four Smile members, a burning papier mache sculpture of the devil taped to his arse. Directly beneath him is a caption that reads: ‘Power remains in negative for an extremely long time.’
The album tells the story of ‘the Pocket Man’ (Lint himself?), who has dodged the ‘talent vaccine’ given everyone in a future of registered thought and tear inspection. But his genius prevents him from participating and he grows lonely. At this point the album diverges into a dozen different strands, with songs like ‘Hydrogen Sheriff’ and ‘The Number Nineteen is Made of Wax’ containing Lint’s most opaque lyrics. ‘Stand back if you hear a gearshift in an egg,’ he warns. ‘Or no-one will see you ‘til the middle of Feb.’ In ‘The Pangolin and the Anteater Have a Fight’ (nominated without any real hope as a new official theme song for San Francisco in 1984), a vision of the Pocket Man descends gigantically upon the grey world, flanked by quantum foam dolphins. Gold dust for conspiracy theorists was a final coda that remembers the Pocket Man fondly, ‘Dead or Not, He Was Wearing Shades’, and concludes by urging us to ‘Breathe between accusations at least.’ This final track contains the repeated refrain ‘Everything is pleasing to a hyena.’ Was this a reference to mass hysteria, fashion, the excitability of crowds? Who is the Hyena? Fans had endless fun with these questions.
Lint scholars sympathetic to the ‘Lint is dead’ notion have frantically dissected the lyrics of the penultimate track ‘The Delaware Christ’. The words prove most compelling, however, when reversed—fans of Lint and of Unofficial Smile wore out multiple copies of Draining by dragging the vinyl backwards, and the claim is that the band went to town with hidden messages. Reversing the lyric ‘You’re ready but strict, baby/This isn’t that kind of revolution,’ over-attentive listeners have found the message ‘Legend anniversary, kill the driver! Ho! Ho!’ Others hear the statement ‘He’s angry and he’s sorry. He’s the driver. Herzog!’ (An allusion to the hit-and-run of 1965?) In ‘Ignore Tesla’, the invention of operative atoms and pioneer voltage is simultaneously exploited and scoffed at by the mainstream—this apparently impossible stance achieved by similar principles to those invented by Tesla himself. Somewhere in the lyric ‘Craft some ritual of industry/To check their progress’ lurks the reversed message ‘You follow me as custard follows a blade’s passing.’ As usual, perceptions differ—other listeners hear the words ‘Youth only trusts me at my passing’ or even ‘Scoot over my knee, misses, for tonight’s pasting.’ During the fade-out on ‘Four Hundred Dead in Voting Experiment’, Lint (or perhaps the Smile band’s Don ‘Corny’ Rensin) can be heard to mumble ‘Into the minus numbers’—a reference to the time elapsed since Lint’s demise? (For more on Draining and other Lint music connections see chapter 20.)
For reasons that are still unclear, Doubleday also became briefly convinced in the sixties that Lint was dead, and had planned a series of snazzy reprints of early work until Lint himself stumbled into their offices. In fact it seems the world was aching for Lint to be out of the picture. It almost got its wish when Hector Gramajo painted a portrait of him in 1970. But the rumour is that if the painting is held at a particular angle it does indeed resemble Lint, puffing into a sadly compliant badger as though into a set of bagpipes. This is supposedly a message urging us to ‘badger’ the publishers to confess that Lint has been replaced by a ringer. The painting is called ‘Jeff Lint in Smoke’, another hint at accident and obfuscation. Even Lint’s ‘Giraffe’ subway poem (beginning ‘I am not the giraffe you think I am’) was seen to imply that he was other than he appeared.
But why would an imposter drop constant hints that he is so? Lint fan Daniel Guyal suggested that Lint’s spirit was occasionally possessing his fraudulent replacement, causing the fraud to blunder and give himself away: ‘Even a cursory glance at the Felix Arkwitch books gives us repeated descriptions of Felix “unscrambling” from the parallel realms in which he travels concealed. Similarly, the books can be unscrambled.’ Guyal was an extreme example of obsessive cipher disorder in regard to the Lint myth. His harmless fanzine work in the early eighties (with the photocopied and stapled Too Pleased To Apologize) gave way to stalking and marathon decipherment sessions of such an intensity that he became almost blind. In 1992 he pushed his face into the pages of Fanatique and could not be withdrawn from them. The book had to be surgically cut away, but so much of Guyal’s face and skull was missing, it was surmised that he had actually pushed it through into the book’s realm—he died within days.
18
GRAPHIC EQUALIZER: THE CATERER
Against advice · fogbound motivations · Hoston Pete · diatribe · Mouse World · everything is weird · ‘I won’t prevent it.’
‘I button myself against advice and leave the house,’ smirks Jack Marsden, emerging into primary yellow sunshine. He was a singular character for Lint who, at a loose end for money in the mid-seventies, was hired by the fledgling comics company Pearl to come up with a launch title. Finding fewer compromises here than in his brief foray into Hollywood in the late sixties, Lint seems to have taken to the comics scene with the total absorption he gave his best books. His main contribution to the short-lived Pearl Comics was the baffling action strip The Caterer. Illustrator Brandon Sienkel worked with Lint in those heady days: ‘The Caterer was a strange one—he didn’t have any special powers, he was this blond grinning college kid as far as I could make out. He sometimes pulled a gun. Ther
e just didn’t seem to be [any rhyme or reason] … the character would fly into a rage about things. But it was strangely hypnotic, I must say. We had fan mail.’ One such missive, printed in the ‘Your Yell!’ letters page of issue 4, reads: ‘Dear Caterer, I love your adventures and want to be like you. How can I be the Caterer? I said to my friends your words “Don’t trouble me” and they beat me up on Monday. But I think this is all part of becoming the Caterer.’ The sign-off at the end reveals the letter to have been from a wide-eyed Martin Amis. All the more disturbing is that he would have been twenty-six at the time.
Much debate has grown up about the meaning of The Caterer and any of the nine issues will fetch up to $70 (£2) on eBay. A rare Caterer poster (which portrays Jack Marsden biting the head off a rattlesnake) fetched $100 on RedAuction. Jane Less of VintageGlobe confirms the specialist interest around the title: ‘It’s a rarity because the company was around for such a short time, the title itself is considered the only true Jeff Lint comic, and finally because it’s just so strange.’ Fans debate its motifs and catchphrases, and the Caterer’s fogbound motivations. ‘I believe Marsden represents Lint’s own creative urge, bursting out at odd moments and killing everybody,’ says Chris Diana, president of Against Advice: The Caterer Fanclub. ‘The Caterer is often seen standing at a grave, but we never see the inscription and Marsden has his usual grin on his face. I agree with many readers that this is the grave of Fatty Arbuckle, comedian of the silent era.’
Tracing the Caterer’s motives is a parlour game for Lint fans. Anyone with a moustache enrages the Caterer, provoking him to ‘punch that demon from your face and save you from it’, an enterprise which often leaves the victim’s entire head a bloody mass. He is twice seen to be strangely disarmed by the sight of a spacehopper, standing motionless for fifteen panels (some readers regard the spacehopper as the Caterer’s ‘kryptonite’). His general outlook is one of childish glee at some untold knowledge. ‘Age is not for acrobats,’ he smirks at a pompous tailor, before grabbing up a chair and smashing him to the floor. There is speculation that Hoston Pete, a strange piratical character who only visits Jack Marsden in his basement, is a representation of Lint himself. ‘There is a resemblance,’ says Sienkel enigmatically. Many readers believe that Hoston Pete is only visible to Marsden and is a schizophrenic ‘voice’ that impels the Caterer to misdeeds. If he is Lint, then this is the author manifesting to direct his characters (shades of Morrison’s Animal Man). However, in issue 8 the spectral sidekick meets his end when our hero finally notices his moustache.
Several dissertations have been published deconstructing the long, complicated rant in issue 6 about how goats have the skeletal system of chickens (the most incisive being ‘That’s no scarecrow, it’s a crucifix in a hat! True phantoms in The Caterer’ by Alaine Carraze). The tirade, conducted over five dense pages after Marsden interrupts a school swimming meet, has been interpreted as everything from a critique of Jimmy Carter’s then-undisclosed connection to the Trilateral Commission, to a warning about genetic tampering, to homosexual panic (which would jibe with the moustache attacks). Certainly the Caterer’s friends are bewildered (or understanding) enough to stand listening to this drivel. But when he tries to leave by riding on an unwilling dog, the cops arrive on the scene and Marsden goes into one of his frenzies. All credit is due to Pearl Comics for depicting the relatively static scene of the diatribe on the cover, rather than the explosive gun battle that follows.
The final (and perhaps least characteristic) issue has the Caterer leaving his small-town setting, visiting a thinly disguised version of Disneyland and simply going berserk. A certain amount of subtlety is lost in this issue and it is still disputed as to whether Pearl Comics was already crashing (and Lint was therefore going out in a blaze) or Lint had gone on some psychological bender that provoked the company’s downfall. Sienkel claims that the
title was going great guns until the Caterer’s ‘Mouse World’ adventure. ‘The Caterer just rolls up in that strange sedan he was always riding around in, and the minute he gets out he just starts shooting the hell out of everyone. There’s hardly even any dialogue, I think at one point he says “Don’t come any closer” or something, but that’s it. He’s shooting a guy in a duck costume when he says it.’ This apocalyptic issue caused parents to complain and shocked newsvendors to cancel, but it was the threat of legal action from the Disney Company that troubled Pearl executives. It could not be denied that some of the spree victims resembled copyrighted Disney characters (in particular the mouse Satanic Radar Ears) and, with the middling-to-poor sales of other Pearl titles Fantastic Belt, Rocket Trouble and The Mauve Enforcer, Pearl filed for bankruptcy in May 1976.
To kids who read it at the time, it is still a badge of honour. ‘Other kids were reading Spiderman or Daredevil, but you knew you were the coolest if you read The Caterer. It was like a secret club.’ It has been said that issue 9 was an influence on Deathlok the Demolisher, a title which scared the living shit out of kids during the seventies.
Lint said very little about The Caterer, having perhaps been soured on the comic scene by the bland graphic adaptation of Nose Furnace in the eighties. ‘I don’t remember much about The Caterer,’ he said in an interview in 1991. ‘I recall he had issues. Nine, I think. Then they called it all off. God bless him though, why not?’
The Caterer has left a strange cultural legacy. Fans still swap dialogue (‘Will you come to my party?’/‘I won’t prevent it.’) and the character rears his sneering head in the likeliest places, as in the various versions of the song The Caterer/Das Katerer which litter recent Fall albums. Rumours of movie adaptations come and go (one putatively directed by Tim Burton and starring Brad Pitt), but it’s doubtful that the Hollywood system could accommodate it, any more than they could use Lint’s own scripts without massive dilution.
As fan club president Chris Diana says, ‘The Caterer would be sick on today’s comics, and on the movies, and on you.’
19
THE WORLD—IT’S NOT BIG AND IT’S NOT CLEVER
Blast of truth · drab Tangier · psychonauts · Elsa Carnesky · painted Zulu coconuts · a Hindu cigarette · domestic epic anode · Where are the clams? · colour nodes · London Fanatique · nous sommes assis sur un volcan · dust devil
While some have seen the seventies as a time when Lint was spinning his wheels—Plame Tenet claiming in Starplunge magazine that Lint’s career was ‘like a pram pushed down stairs’—he was steadily working on the three Arkwitch books, major works that took time to write. This was a departure from his pulp works and he was meanwhile paying his way with scams, The Caterer, periodic avoidance of human beings and very occasional bits of hack journalism. Lint was in fact terrible at ‘people’ journalism, on one occasion asking a chubby guru of the day if he wasn’t just an ‘angelic cushion’. At this the holy man snapped ‘I detect no reverence in your yelling!’ Lint had stated the question quite calmly, and concluded that it had been received like a ‘blast of truth’. The article, written for Rolling Stone, was titled BLAST OF TRUTH UNSETTLES OLD CODGER, and was never printed. He also interviewed Truman Capote, whom he described as ‘a giant mouse’, and had a stint as a sportswriter on the LA Times, which he scuppered with his first sentence: ‘Baseball is: you help a dog, it seems to smile.’ Still processing the quiet lessons of the Fantastic Lemon, Lint erased his trace from the radar for the bulk of the decade, and travelled.
Lint hadn’t travelled much. He visited Tangier in 1967 expecting exoticism and intrigue, but rather than people trying to escape, he found only people trying to be noticed. They tried to out-shock one another ‘like trashcan mouths arranged face-to-face—not a very energizing circuit’. George Greaves urged him to dress up in drag and Lint, baffled, explained that he had no manuscript to deliver. Bored almost to blindness by the boasting of the dull Rupert Croft-Cooke, Lint kicked him out of a window onto a shop overhang canvas, which split very slowly under Croft-Cooke’s weight as he cursed Lint’s name. ‘H
e was like a slowly submerging ship’s captain,’ said Lint later, ‘but complaining bitterly.’ Lint had hoped to find people confident enough to be invisible. Too late he realised they were probably there somewhere, moving around at a deeper focus. But in all, Tangier had deteriorated since the days of Burroughs and Gysin.
Lint was to meet Burroughs again in London in 1971. Visiting his Duke Street flat, Lint tilled through some of Burroughs’ fold-in fragments and sat down to do one of his own, folding half a page of published Burroughs into something lying around—to his delight he ended up with a piece of great sense. Lint had hazarded upon one of the strips that Burroughs’s text had originally come from, reuniting two parts of some severred Shakespeare. Burroughs, realizing the facts, drawled to a final snap ‘You terminal fool, it’s supposed to be gibberish!’
Lint decided his journeyings should be more exotic, at least involving ‘Leaves and tribal peeking, you know.’ He started out with a few chancy esoteric perils in the Colombian jungle. Lint recorded his observations in letters to Rouch. ‘Jungle adventure tends to inconvenience monkeys—they are stared at, cooed over, and shot. No wonder they shriek when observed.’ Not that anyone really needed a reason. Lint had elected to try yage, a drug brewed up for him by the brujo Magal Seam near Puerto Limon. There was another psychonaut there at the same time, a twenty-seven-year-old artist named Elsa Carnesky. She told Lint she had become blocked when attempting to portray ‘an Anglican Bishop with a terrified expression’, and decided to solve the problem by locating an Anglican bishop and very observantly rushing at him with a raised dagger. The ensuing trouble left her disillusioned with the art establishment and she had set out on a mission to locate a totally new and unseen colour. She discovered that such colours were always present but that human consciousness screened them out because they did not fit existing definitions. Lint was reminded of his own alien-colour-invasion tale ‘Lipstick & Shells’ and his hunting for nameless colours as a child. He and Carnesky drank the brew and looked out at the tatty jungle.