by Steve Aylett
Lint discovered in his last few years of life that flight from commerce was like a drug—he couldn’t get enough of it. In 1991 he heard that his old story ‘The Jarkman’, which had been optioned eight years before, would be going into production. There was no way he could believe this until he saw it on the big screen but, anyway, he found with a certain light-headedness that he didn’t care about it. The movie was made, of course, starring Johnny Depp as the luckless Jarkman Jones, and it started bringing a new audience to Lint’s books two weeks after he cashed out.
But when told about the production he never bothered to contact the movie people. At the time Lint was an amiable bird of prey in a potato-coloured coat, his head a nova in disguise. Wandering through a generic chain store and forgetting which town he was in, Lint pondered the possibility of teleporting from one location to another by using such identical stores to convince yourself that you’re already there (a spatial version of Jack Finney’s mindset time-travel technique).
Lint had begun to find that his head, though as high-res as ever, could only run six or seven parallel thought strands at a time. ‘It doesn’t limit clarity,’ he told me in 1992. ‘But it makes comparison a longer process. I have to juggle now, because I can’t see everything at once.’ He compensated by selecting initial subjects which were further apart so that the subjects implied in the expanse between them (which Lint could mentally ‘see’) would be greater. ‘It’s like a stretch of colourful gum,’ he explained. ‘And here’s the beauty part—the perilous edge of betrayal is like an electric current.’ Lint seemed to have located a vein and settled there.
This was also the time of a Lint doppelganger appearing in Mexico City during a UFO ‘flap’, dancing jerkily in the street beneath a dozen indistinct silver ‘spheres’. The Lint in Taos denied having danced in Mexico City that year.
His chins were to treble in the coming months.
25
IN PERSON
‘Gigantic pleasure rockets’ · backpackers · ‘Dance to feedback old man’ · Silent is the city which applauds integrity · real pumped · god trying to be funny · acolytes · The truth is never wrong · scorpion globe paperweights · consensus
In New Mexico corners, ghosts of the wrong opinions come to settle down. I visited Taos in 1992 in the hope of interviewing Lint, my copies of I Blame Ferns and Jelly Result having already fallen apart. It was a time when he was working on Clowns and Locusts, The Man Who Gave Birth to His Arse and, many fans believe, a great deal more besides.
In the front yard, weeds vibrate with wind and in among them lies an ornamental idiot. There are little barrel cacti and heliotrope, the only flower whose name sounds like a Victorian flying machine. The door is answered by a striking Native American girl, Lint’s girlfriend Lois Quijas. She invites me in but says Lint is doing what she calls his ‘beard exercises’. As I sit in the drawing-room I hear terrifying screams from elsewhere in the house. Quijas quietly brings tea. I look around at furniture as old as god and a mantel clock made of sponge. Strange carvings. A window shows Veda sails growing in the back garden. A local newspaper had reported that the author carved some ‘gigantic pleasure rockets’ in his yard—actually vimana replicas. Warped by several New Mexico snows, some now resembled effigies of Jeb Bush. Lint had dug in the garden to a depth of seven yards.
Turning to the front window, I was startled to see the world outside inverted, sky below and earth above—the glass pane was a slightly concave lens.
Then Lint filled the room like a buffalo, with a haircut like a Rolodex and a greying beard like a surf explosion. Skin grey as a mushroom. Old people can be scary because you can never tell how much they know. Even a moron who’s never garnered a single notion from a lifetime’s observations can look at you in a sagging, sad way and appear the wisest or most condemnatory sage on the planet. Consider the appalling codger in Dragons of Aggrazar. But just when I was ready to bolt he backed off and showed me a varnished china ornament of a red cow with a fish’s face. ‘Maybe that’ll satisfy you,’ he said in a deeply resonant voice. ‘No? You’re a tough man to please.’ He placed it carefully back on the mantel and waved me out back, showing me the garage where he was carving a huge sculpture of a swordfish. Blond woodcurls littered the floor. He told me the dead oaf in the front yard was his work also. Then he coughed like a grave and we went to sit in a couple of iron chairs in the warm garden. He sat there until body and brain were one, then said he’d read the only story I’d had published anywhere at the time. ‘Your “turbo saint” is taking his largely risk-free existence for granted.’
‘That’s the whole point, Mr Lint.’
‘It’s the point is it. I thought you being smart was the point. Well I’ll let it slide. Because you made an appointment.’ These days Lint was being accosted by disciples galore. Attentive to his legend, kids saw him as a proto-stoner, historic. ‘They show up under backpacks the size of an electric chair to survey the ancient glories of my talent, never guessing that aforesaid talent is still in damn near full working order. They tell me, “Dance to feedback old man.’’ A temporary lion sits just as heavy on m’chest.’ He talked a while about his current intensive writing schedule.
Quijas came out with juice.
‘When I met Lois, I couldn’t take my lights off her. She keeps me in check. Henry Heimlich—imagine being married to that guy! So you’re from England? No room to move and a tax disk on your coffin. Poor kid.’
‘Why did you come back to New Mexico?’
‘Where to go, for peace? Silent is the city that applauds integrity. Out here …’ He trailed off. ‘A shame that the solutions to this world’s problems are so lacking in glamour. There are no explosions or big noises involved. They’re not visually exciting. They’re difficult to cover in short clips and soundbites. They involve a different kind of revenge than the war kind—one that’s quiet and takes a million years. Patience and planning don’t look plucky.’
‘You like the countryside.’
‘Even my bandages are made of cowhide.’
Lint had recently been hired to create a tourist slogan for the town, and came up with ‘Holiday parasites are welcome in a way, aren’t they?’ They had also rejected his proposals for Bastard Awareness Week.
‘People pretend life’s a decision, but there’s no commitment in a dawn, there’s no heart of it—just the momentum of continuing. Best to tell the authorities you’re deceived though, eh? Give them something.’
‘Do you feel at all flattered by people’s admiration for your work?’
‘My own pleasure in it is primary, but of course I care. A fellow may appear hard and inflexible, but every shell holds flesh, that’s what I say.’
I looked up. The sky was dyed in patterns.
‘But I won’t be dragged under by my anchor,’ he said, and drank some orange. It seemed he thought one day the utter certainty of definition would pin him and allow the valuable portions of his meaning to escape—he hoped not to be alive to witness it. ‘Here I am at the end of my life, my cheeks amounting only to a nuisance,’ he smiled.
And the Fantastic Lemon experience?
‘Unfortunately the absorption into cosmic consciousness is the ultimate herding instinct. It’s not for me. My eternity days are over.’ He’d more or less decided the event was him catching the sky giving a discreet yawn. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m real pumped about this dying thing. Who isn’t? I intend to subject myself to the inclemencies of decomposition as if they were giving prizes.’
Lint pointed to the ossuary TV that a fan had given him. ‘They’re not real bones,’ he said. ‘But it’s amazing isn’t it?’ It was the only TV he had and it didn’t receive conventional signals. Lint talked in detail about the ossuary church in Kutna Hora.
Did he have any funeral plans?
‘Well, death’s moved on by the time we start making a fuss of it. No sense in a big send-off.’ He looked at the garden a while. ‘Dying is a sacrament, and an inconvenience.’
> ‘So what’s pain?’
‘Pain is god trying to be funny. That’s how out-of-touch It is.’
Everything was broken up as three fans arrived—two girls and a boy. I saw the prolonged collapse of Lint’s brow surpassing disapproval into some parched lunar realm of blasted condemnation. He stood and went inside, but seemed to undergo some transformation into civility once actually in the company of these fans. The afternoon was spent with the kids, whom he referred to as ‘praxis bandits’, asking questions about Arkwitch, the Caterer and other characters while giggling like tarts. The boy told me in confidence that he’d heard there was some weird contraption in the basement, like the arcane vehicle in Pal’s movie of The Time Machine. One of the girls asked Lint if he would write a fourth Arkwitch book, and he replied that there was a ‘halloween likelihood’ of his writing another. ‘You can scrap that idea.’ The other girl assured me that the old man didn’t mean it and was merely ‘flirting with McCoy’.
I had heard tales from other visitors. Some kids had asked him to demonstrate ‘shallow vanishing’ from Jelly Result, at which he told them to demonstrate ‘deep vanishing’ and get the hell out. One acolyte, Cheryl Daly, has claimed to have seen Lint perform the former etheric manoeuvre: ‘He went, ostensibly to get something out of the fridge, stopped and turned back a little as if to make sure none of us were looking, then stepped in a weird way, sort of carving diagonally out of existence. He was gone for an hour. He was nowhere in the house. Then he walked downstairs and everything carried on. He looked well rested.’ (from Daly’s Brainfucker).
I never saw Lint doing such a trick. Searching for the toilet, I ended up going down some steps and turned on a string-light. I was in a basement workshop full of woodwork and gadgets, and on one table was a large transparent book, probably made of perspex or heavy moulded plastic, lit from below like a Day the Earth Stood Still special effect. It was inscribed in purple with warnings and hopes:
‘The future’s fucked. There are too many masks in the egg.’
‘A recurring dream is a revelation on redial.’
‘All atoms have equal value.’
‘The truth is never wrong.’
I heard some clattering above and got out fairly swiftly, though I wasn’t particularly scared.
Upstairs, Lint was still entertaining. ‘You can oppose in slumber,’ he was saying. ‘Not many people realise it. And learn to enjoy those dreams in which you find yourself naked in public—they can, if you let them, be a right laugh and stop the other people in the dream from acting so boring.’
‘Sleep is a waste of life,’ said the boy.
After a pause Lint gave the opinion the ceremonial snort it demanded.
Late afternoon I had to leave—heading toward Albuquerque where I would view the site of the old Consolation Playhouse. Lint, now sounding tired and boxed in tedium, said ‘If consensus drips in your eyes like a snowman, consider that it might be yours.’
I looked back—he was at the door. His ears were red as strawberries. He seemed to be waiting for the worst.
26
LINT IS DEAD II— RUMOURS, CLUES AND LOST WORKS
Stoked · preferably in velvet · liars invade verdant Eden · sightings · Jellypressure · the subtle game · cults and fan clubs · the future as a statue in a fountain · Lint’s dreamers
On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death. The cause was a massive brain haemorrhage that seemed to replicate the garnet-sizzle birthing of a book described in Clowns and Locusts. Those around Lint confirm that he had been stoked for his death, though he had not visited a doctor and had no external confirmation that anything was wrong with him. A small funeral service occurred three days later, Rouch reading from the Matchbooks passage in which Lint describes heaven as a shambles and god as ‘unkempt’, while nature disassembles his old body: ‘biological traffic expanding through me, tributary life like a root system teasing me apart.’ The starchy Rouch read the piece with quite a bit of gusto and raised some smiles among friends. ‘No sense preaching against personal circumstance. Bullying the funeral procession won’t get them dancing.’
The long coffin was lowered. Rouch takes up the story: ‘I went back to pay my respects at the house and a massive garden sculpture of Jeb Bush fell over sideways, smashing almost every bone in my body. It rather coloured the rest of my visit.’
Still smarting from Lint’s first demise, the media waited a while until assured that he was truly dead and that no personal consequence would proceed from praise. When the floodgates of laudation were officially opened, this and the Jarkman movie raised Lint’s profile far higher than it had ever been. Though some see it as a tragedy that he died before setting out upon the uncharted waters of success, Lint himself defined success as ‘being able to do whatever the hell I want, preferably in velvet.’ The Jarkman hardly fits this description. Depp’s appointment as a sheriff of the old West, with only a hedgehog for a friend, distant from moments actually lived, his duels a sort of hypnotic combat and his final shot a longcoat stance against the movie’s souped-up sky, is a modern spaghetti western punctuated by the occasional gnomic pronouncement, the classic being ‘To be out of step is to be free.’
Certain areas of the press still seemed uncertain as to how to pitch the late author. PLAYWRIGHT SHUNNED LIONS went the headline to the London Times obituary. The Washington Post used the headline AUTHOR CORRODED BY STEAM and called him an ‘ambiloquent neckverser’, whatever that is. Other obituaries bemoaned the wisdom of hindsight, wailing about readers’ vulnerability to Lint and how, in an industry designed to screen out originality, Lint had fallen through the cracks in the system.
Lois Quijas refused to speak to the press about Lint and has maintained this policy to the present day. This has been used by certain fans to shore up the ‘faked death’ conspiracy case. It is known that Lint had considered being buried under the pen-name ‘Isaac Asimov’. The death was sudden and unexpected to readers at large, and Quijas was viewed with Yoko-like suspicion by those who didn’t know her. The ‘hidden message’ crowd brought back trophies such as this line in Fanatique: ‘Love is: never taking it seriously as liars invade verdant Eden’ (the first letters of each word spelling the message ‘Lint is alive’). It all combined to create a bunch of Hendrixal scenarios in which Lint dyed his beard and was transported to a village in Spain.20
Hundreds of Lint sightings are made every year, though these are usually found to be sightings of a store Santa Claus. William West has written of having had contact with a person claiming to be Jeff Lint in 1998. This tale, involving secret meetings in a Washington parking garage and so on, is compelling bullshit. West states that Lint occasionally works as a store Santa Claus, but this seems too much of a come-down for the man who was once Woolworth’s unofficial ‘Monstrous Poet’. Critic Leo Brady believed the theory, however, and supposedly went up to a Santa and sneered ‘Kecksburg looks pretty good right now, doesn’t it?’ The jolly man punched Brady to the ground and began kicking him brutally, even breaking away from store security later on to start in on the dazed, bowed critic again. Some commentators have presented the response as proof that this was indeed Lint. Brady’s nose was displaced so precisely that nature tried to rectify the anomaly by growing another one beside it. This freakery was as nothing compared to the desiccated horror found in Robert Baines’s office when police finally forced an entry in 1996. The empty eyesockets of Lint’s agent had gazed wistfully out upon Manhattan for forty years.
At Lint’s death, word was already out about the autobiographical Arse fragment and the uncompleted Zero Learned From Nero. But the speculation as to ‘lost’ and unpublished works has spun out of control. There are rumours of a dime Western, He Died With His Fins On, and a noir detective novel Buck Twenty (the purported text of which has lately circulated on the Net), a strange book called Pumpkin, a sequel to Jelly Result to be called Jellypressure, and a videogame, Red Death Taxi, in which a crazy plague-ridden
cab driver must career through New York infecting as many passengers as possible. Several movie scripts are said to be floating around, including something called Alba’s Wolves. Lint scholars have also rampaged through Astounding, certain that one of Lint’s stories hides there. Juvenilia is also up for grabs—the original manuscript of Lint’s first ever story, ‘Mister Flabbycheeks Shouts Trash’, sold at auction for $300 (£9).
There is also the matter of the Corediss programme that extends Lint’s theory of nanodissing, the inscription of insults at the molecular level. During Lint’s lifetime it was thought that this was mere postmodern art, that it wouldn’t be felt by anyone without an explanation by the artist, and probably not even then. But it was found that certain molecular reconfigurations accorded with certain physical manifestations. In fact, certain brands or families of insult coincided with certain reactions. Lint supposedly intensified his work (at the theoretical, computer-model level) to the Tachyon Insult and Graviton Barracking, and, via String Theory, worked toward the Unified Insult. Of the various works claimed for Lint since his death, this seems one of the most characteristic, allied as it is to Lint wedge theory and other forms of tagging.
The late-nineties saw the start of an industry of Lint apocrypha, some embarrassing imitations purporting to be Lint and wasting everyone’s time, and a few competent homages (the best being Enkhornish’s Jeff Lint is Boiling Forever in Hell, Alas). But the trend worries the more serious Lint scholars—as Lint himself said, ‘Substitute something down the centuries and it becomes the real thing as far as those bastards are concerned.’
Fans’ beloved theory of faked death and covert works would seem to imply that rather than spending a life rampaging through the English language like a buffalo, Lint was in fact playing a deep and subtle game. But conspiracy is not required to support this. Lint always had an agenda which split diagonally across the standard grooves—in fact he seems to have been unaware that such grooves existed. Lucking onto the circumstance of being seen by most as faded and unsuitable, his later years concealed a neglected and fertile talent cellar hopping with frogs. The urge to add to his oeuvre through fakery seems like the cheapest kind of book-celeb hysteria. ‘But then,’ says Alan Rouch, ‘Jeff would expect people to miss the point.’