"During my last two years as an undergraduate I was an alcoholic, I think, killing a fifth of County Fair Bourbon a day. My twenty-first birthday, which I know about only second-hand because I was blacked out throughout the escapade, has become a legend with the Jet Set around D.C., a place through which I cut a swath like the time Sherman played Georgia. Speaking of the Jet Set, my prep school background did give me an opportunity of being 'in' with these people while still being 'out' in reality—like being a Roman citizen and a Christian, too. I wasted at the cotillion while inbred DuPont seedlings talked of F. Scott and the good life. I became inward, melancholic, misanthropic.
"After being suspended for a semester for swiping a library book (some shit by Kierkegaard I never read), and working a strange holy gig as a social worker during the interim, I came back and finished a B.A. because what else was there to do? During my last semester I tried my hands and feet at poetry and won the Academy of American Poets Award, my creditors making short work of the prize money. Knowing I would last about a week at Med School I said well what now. Iowa they said. So in Iowa I lived in a $4/month sackcloth-panelled cave on a cliff overlooking the Iowa River with no plumbing no running water (except me off the back porch) and a Warm Morning No. 530 for heat. After two years of peace, more-or-less, in the woods, my melancholia tempered by bucolia. I got an M.F.A. in Poetry, equipping me to do exactly nothing. Worked construction for awhile as I am wont to do, and was ready to sail for the Far East (the Lord Jim trip) after getting my Z Card for the Merchant Marine, when I met Lady Kathryn, the Poet. She said stay so I did. That was two years ago. Under the Harrow. I have been a vegetable since then but am rapidly rehabilitating. Am presently sojourning in Bozeman, Montana with Lady K. and son Galway Django Ari Kamal Krishna—where I am poet-in-residence at Montana State University, hating (nearly) every minute of it, longing for the good life of wild irresponsibility. Re: the future—took a stab at filmmaking, but after two brilliant though abortive attempts I gave up the ghost, realizing that my ambition was not to make but to be in movies—as the star of Spaghetti Westerns. The character will be a hybrid of Paladin, Peter Sellers and Lon, Jr. all rolled into the form of a quart-size Haystacks Calhoun. If I can't do this, I'll have to write, I guess. But shit, Alan Ladd was short.
"Have published poems in thirty-five-or so magazines and anthologies of varying repute, and my first collection of poetry titled The Easy Wreckage came out in April of '71. Illustrated a book of Gary Snyder's poetry, Three Worlds, Three Realms, Six Roads (Griffin Press, Marlboro, Vt.), and am now working on drawings for a concoction of W. S. Merwin. Have just gotten my head above the uterine waters of speculative fiction, but, being a Cancer, have always been fatally attracted to said.
"My lucky number is 38, I am left-handed, and my favorite color is green. I have a distinguished scar on my forehead where I was bricked by vigilantes."
Publications
(Poetry)
"Garden Song," The Defender (Iowa City), vol. 15, no. 2, p. 12, 10/4/68
"My Father: A Preface," The Defender, vol. 15, no. 10, p. 19, 12/16/68
"The Way It Was At Queen Jane Of Iowa's Wedding As Sung To The Tune Rendel Moulbauer's Codliverolive Phantalia," Ghost Dance (E. Lansing), vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 6–7, Winter 1968
"Boot Camp Nocturne, Nineteen Sixty-Eight," TriQuarterly (Evanston), no. 15, pp. 175–176, Spring 1969
"Naughty Petey," Saltlick (Quincy, Ill.), vol. 1, no. 2, p. 7,6/69
"Georgian Reception," Suction (Hayward, Calif.), vol. 1, no. 2, 10/69
"Langdon's Lament," "Custody," Doones (Bowling Green), vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 30–31, 10/69
"there are two of us where there is only one," New Voices in the Wind (anthology), ed. Jeanne Hollyfield, Young Publications, Appalachia, Va., p. 255, 11/69
"March Letter to Chuna," Doones, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 24–25, 1/70
"Opening Day," Trace (Hollywood), no. 71, p. 296, Spring 1970
"My Brother's Garden," "A Winter Espousal," Red Clay Reader (Charlotte, N.C.), no. 7, p. 83, Spring 1970
"Confession in October," Jeopardy (Bellingham), vol. 6, p. 103, 4/70
"Derailment," South Florida Poetry Journal (Tampa), nos. 4/5, pp. 197–198, Spring 1970
"Sabbatical Syllabus," "In Orion's Chamber," "The Installment Plan," "In the Year of Steel Vegetation," Wisconsin Review (Oshkosh), vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 24–25, Fall 1970
"Estranged From," "Anti-Elegy for Father and Son," "Over Small Beers," Quetzal (Abilene, Texas), vol. 1, no. 2, Spring 1970
"1968," Gum (Iowa City), vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 25–6, 3/70
"Blues Project," (broadside), Seamark Press, Iowa City, 4/70
"Falling Into Place," "Matins: :Iowa River," "For Baum, The Departed/In Red Moustache and Fedora," The Back Door (Poquoson, Va.), vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 19–23, 7/70
"Last Will and Testament," I LOVE YOU ALL DAY/IT IS THAT SIMPLE—Modern Poems on Love and Marriage (anthology), eds. Philip Dacey and Gerald Knoll, Abbey Press, St. Meinrad, Ind., p. III, 9/70
"A Sketch in Bird's Wing," Dance of the Muses (anthology), ed. Jeanne Hollyfield, Young Publications, Appalachia, Va., 11/70
"On a Scaffold North Bank/Stinking Water, Nebraska 1872," Hearse (Eureka, Calif.), no. 13, 12/70
"Old Skin Cantata," "The Installment Plan," (reprint), "In the Year of Steel Vegetation," (reprint), Bones (N.Y.C.), Spring 1971
"Boot Camp Nocturne," (reprint), "Falling Into Place," (reprint), Apropos (Bozeman), 11/70
"Amish Summer," december (Western Springs, III), Spring 1971
The Easy Wreckage (collection), illustrated by Donna Violetti, Seamark Press, Iowa City, 1/71
(Short Stories)
"Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home," Again, Dangerous Visions (anthology), Doubleday, ed. Harlan Ellison, 1972
"His Loneliness, The Winner," The Iowa Review, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1971
"The Legend of Wick Higgins," Larger Than Life (anthology), Scribner's, ed. Richard Gehman, Summer 1972
(Illustrations)
Three Worlds, Three Realms, Six Roads, a sequence of poems by Gary Snyder, Griffin Press, Marlboro, Vt, Spring 1968
CHUCK BERRY, WON'T YOU PLEASE COME HOME
Ken McCullough
June morning 5 A.M. Orpheus comes wimping boing sprong onto the bed—me still drunk pissing Li Po fashion out the back window onto the feeding bullheads. Sweet Kate the possum and the false dawn. Behind him Morpheus ("Fatso") mudcaked carpstink and justplainfat. The usual—Orpheus luxurious sensual and stupid, Morpheus fat and guilty. But like the man said: "This day was to change my life"—Orpheus has this big gray tick on his ear twice the size of an M&M. Usually I'd ease the fuckers out and grind them into the floor, but I held back, watching. The Tick. He fell off and was crawling just as my chick Nancy came back from working the grave shift at the paraplegic ward of U. Hospital.
"Hey, Nano, what do we do with that, baby?"
"Feed it, ya douchebag, or it'll die!"
If ever there was a witch's tit, she was it. She always got me off my ass, tho. I'd been finished school a year and on the lam until she picked me up and decided to straighten out my head. Got me a job as a panhandler and everything. Thanks, Nan. Well, this tick. Late to work myself. Threw him into my patching kit and split to work on my ten-geared Raleigh. On the way, thot "Lightbulb! The Stiff, in Serology." Almost creaming the Chairman of Otolaryngology I bashed into the cycle rack, grabbed the container and jugged into the Lab. "Stiff . . .I need some blood."
The Stiff—6'2", 113 Ibs, olivedrab skin and eyes as big and bad as oysters. The Stiff reaches slow like a robot turns with a test tube, slips it to me and sort of winks. Now what. Methinks "He needs skin thruwhich to drink this shit." So into the lab of my sometime chick, Large Marge. Pour the blood into evaporating dish, grab a surgical glove and stretch. Tight over the dish. The tick was getting kind of wrinkling-looking so I thot he might be getting ready to o.d. But I set him over the reservoir. And sat. After ten minutes I noticed he was pumping, ever
soslightly, the way a cat nurses. And now he was back to his turgid self. "Wow, success!" I put him in an empty aquarium at the back of the lab and went to work really flying. He had enough to last him til lunch at least.
At lunchtime I checked on him. Unk! Bigger and better. I called home, my head wackoed with the possibilities . . .how big could he go, would The Stiff keep supplying . . .Johnny Carson, Scientific America . . . and strange bad fantasy flashes of Them, The Beginning of the End, The Tick Who Sucked-Off Brooklyn, Tomorrow the World!
Now it may sound weird that I'd go for a thing like this but it was nothing new to me. I started as a prepster. The first thing I got into was raising a herd of jumping spiders—that busted out one day in Bio Lab. "Bugeye" reaching and swatting and nothing there. Everyone reaching and swatting. Ten demerits. Then the wasps. They get so hard-up for grins around an all-male boarding school that when the other dudes saw me flying a wasp with a piece of thread around his thorax it became the thing to do. People nodding to each other in the hall, their wasps on leashes tugging them gently along. Wasps in guys' rooms at desklamp hitching-posts. After several accidents the school nurse ratted on me to "Cretin" the Headmaster. More demerits. In college, tho, I had privacy. Had a single in the dorm where I worked and finally got to the point where I successfully swapped left rear legs on two mice and the legs worked—on one of them. So I knew what I was doing; what I was up against.
After a few days of just freaking and watching the bugger I checked in the Med Library and found out what I suspected—that judging by his coloration he had only three more months before he'd croak of old age, and that he could only grow so big before he either exploded or o.d.'d from a coronary or something. Ticks have what they call chitinous exoskeletons—no bones on the inside, just a shell of sorts holding them in, like crabs have, for instance. There is a law which states that an animal with an exoskeleton can have a surface area equal to no more than the cube of his volume. So this tick, Dermacentor reticulates, a male, I named him Chuck Berry, could grow as big as a small dog, but he wouldn't be able to get around at all at that size. Like Haystacks Calhoun times three, frothing at the hypostome.
Nano and I started staying in alot, and keeping the dogs outside. The Stiff kept the blood coming. Quiet evenings at home—I'd get out the slide rule and work out the dose of whatever Nano and I were dropping or shooting and slip it to him. It was really a strange trip trying to pick up vibes from a beast like that, a real Charley Gordon gig, but he was ours to turn on with and we dug him.
After about a month it got to the point where there was a real rapport between us and Chuckbear. We'd sit with him between us on a stool—him as big as a pincushion now—and that feeling at the back of our necks would spread, grow into a diaphanous caul that hugged our heads, our arms, our chests . . .our fingers just touching, hovering over the beast, and something seemed to lock our elbows, our wrists, the joints of our fingers, and our eyes—as his body started to quaver—drifting, drifting—something out of him, felt it leaving him—felt it wisping in through the sutures of our skulls—spinning into the gunk of our brains and arching both our bodies off the floor. Something oppressive, but then my sight left me and I could feel only my body spiraling upwards through clouds of woolen light. And it still leaving him, but now soughing back . . .and leaving again: systole—diastole—systole . . .
There was no fear. I felt the rapport. And it was the time when I stood with a candle looking at the shadows on my face in the mirror, drunk, squinting my eyes and trying inside behind the eyes to change the features into some shrieking lupine monster and had to force myself to stop because it was not far away, because it started and was happening.
Now, my inner earbones jangled in a wind which knifed from out of nowhere. The air was filled with odors, heavy swamp odors, and huge shadows that made no sense at all. I fuzzed my vision but he brushed against my hand forcing a ringing through all my organs. It would go on—the ebb and flood—the shadows of the trees—the lakes of boiling muck—the thunder-wracks and the wails—the earth shifting—the rain—the crawling—the cacophony of wings in the lightning—the beaks splitting the eyes—and it was all happening. Swam in itchy waves of lava and my skin kept growing, growing and I spoke in words that I had never heard before. No eye games. No touching. It was like rapping with someone or something that had been around when there were still birds the size of DC-3's in the sky and like way hack in what there was of that brain was something he knew and would somehow pass between him and us. With Chuck Berry we were into something . . .precivilized—something we could lay on the world that would maybe straighten out some of the ugly machine shit that was coming down. No more bullshit—no more preachers teachers Indian chiefs—just cats sitting around vibrating with their eyes closed. And whatta gas to be tight with such a deep spiritual cat as Chuck Berry. Of course, he'd need bodyguards and a vet of his own. There'd be a fund to keep him going—hell with that—we'd start a clinic run off of subscriptions, with him in center ring. Man! it would be the New Religion—it would be quiet for once. And we'd be the ones back there calling the shots—or so we'd hope. (Trails of puckered white bodies in the gutters—break out the 6o-foot bloodhounds, bring in the jr. birdmen with their napalm.) But shit, when you're messing in such heavy stuff you gotta take the chance of getting wiped out by what you done done.
Problems—The Stiff decided to take a job at the V.A. hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. What a bummer! Not only that but I realized that in grooving on Chuckbear I'd forgotten we only had a red cunt-hair more than a month, by the book, before he croaked. We had to get the stud mated with something else big and keep working up. Nano, you hunk of vision! In she walks with The Stiff and says "Screw it, man . . .I've clued The Stiff in, and we need a vacation anyway." The Stiff floats over to Chuckbear. "Draw out some bread and let's head south." So we did. The four of us (Orph and Morph with the landlord). The Stiff with his blackened egg yolks bathing in the essence of Chuck Berry.
My Uncle Clifton had this place over in Mississippi just north of Varda-man about 50 miles from Tuscaloosa. He was senile—the tobacco oozing out the corners of his mouth, and his dog Twister bringing him the paper he couldn't or just never bothered to even look down at. Copping the place at the back of the property was nothing. The biggest cop of all—that I must've known all along—was Uncle C's pack of big beautiful tick-infested coon hounds.
Every three days I'd make a run to Tuscaloosa and The Stiff would lay some more blood on me and a few fresh gloves. The Stiff would come on weekends—he'd always bring a bag of the latest goodies from Pharmacy to keep Chuckbear fat and happy. The cat would just sit with his index finger on Chuckbear's back and nod. The Stiff had a pretty fierce smack habit. Well, one day he ups and says the only thing I can ever remember him saying. Looks at me and nods one eye and says "Like a rainbow pussy for a coffin." Everyone grooving.
But I just couldn't find a mate for Chuckbear—big enough, or even anything he seemed to go for much, and I'd make the rounds of all the hounds twice a day. Spring—it was breeding season OK, and he seemed to be fairly horny, but he wrecked anything he mounted. We had a stable of about ten prime bitches we were fattening for him but we were running out of time. And then that motherfucking shiteating scrawny snailbrain Stiff goes and blows the whole scene.
Nan and me get back from the County Fair one Saturday just about sundown, and there they are in the bedroom like Dracula and his gay bride; Chuckbear, his stinking bulk bloated to the size of a gray flattened watermelon, with his mouth clapped to The Stiff's arm. I knew that was it for him. I kicked that cocksucking Stiff right in the head.
Chuck Berry died about two hours later. It could have been nothing but that bad blood running in The Stiff's veins that did it. I took him and the other ten one by one out to the funeral pyre I'd thrown together about a mile from the house, doused the lot of them with gasoline and made a trail of gas away from the scene, lit the stuff and ran like hell before the explosions started. I won't g
o into that. Man, when I got back to the house I just bawled my ass off. Yeah, over a tick.
We hung around for about a week, moping. I just sort of looked at the cows, listened to the sounds and thot about how short the whole thing was and whether anything had really happened at all. But things have been so much deeper for me since Chuck Berry. For Nano too. I heard from somebody, I don't remember who, that they put The Stiff away. He did nothing but sit around and laugh a low wheezing laugh. Never said another word.
Again, Dangerous Visions Page 72