Well, so far, my last post...well, at least its out there until the sun ignites and fries everything or until I inadvertently delete the Internet while programming my Comcast TV remote. Beth Massie (in b&w, above, from Beth Gwinn's DARK DREAMERS) posted Abe on her Skeeryvilletown blog, and we are mutual friends of this GW Ferguson. (CapCom also posted on her blog, which I assume will confuse many viewers of the TV show LOST). Yes, the same GW who wrote about me knowing the lyrics to "Do You Think I'm Psycho, Mama?" Well Beth and GW have known each other since grade school, but I didn't meet him until the early 90s. It falls out like this: World Fantasy was going to be held in London in, I think, 1988, and a bunch of us, being basically new at writing and pretty much broke, said screw that. I said I'd watch BBC when Chicago cable finally gets it in the year 2000; I'm a visionary that way. Well, Beth decided to host the first of many Psuedocons on a billion-acre stretch of land with her house, her sister Barb's, a bunch of talking cows, and Beth's bro-in-law Charlie's collection of VW Beetle models (visible from space, actually). Where to start. Any and every writer and/or artist was invited and there was a rotating attendees over the years. Each year we took a phrase to use for the following year, and the second time I visited, as we took our trek to the Kroger's for a bunch of crap to eat while watching USA's Up All Night or MST3K, this quaint little woman in tiny little Waynesboro, Virginia (where quaint little women are really fat Wiccan demon-whores who have collections of everything HP Lovecraft ever wrote hidden in their pantries. No, pantries. I said pantries!)muttered to her husband that the circus must be back in town. I'm sure she just meant it as a jolly jape, just as I'm certain that now that she has likely died that another jolly jape is that she has to smoke a gigantic turd the size of a blunt in purgatory before she can get anyplace else. But the crazy things we did back then! Lip synch. Charades. Marshmallow mumbles! Driving Go-Karts! One year, there was karaoke which the guys gave up on, but the women just kept on singing until dawn. This, THIS PLACE, is where I met Mr. G.W.Ferguson. Most everybody else I knew, Yvonne Navarro was still living in Chicago (that's me carrying her at World Horror in Toronto last year), and there's me, Brian Hodge and Kurt Wimberger in front of one of those VW's I mentioned earlier. Man, the kinds of crap that went on over 72 hours. One year Jeff Osier and Cathy Van Patten up and got themselves married (that's them fretting over a picture book of myself, I think), and the whole ceremony was in this huge cavern of bats of quaint little vampire women who shop at Kroger's in a town called Grottoes and half the people were scared of Dracul's and Am'tyville haints. All fun eventually comes to an end, even after ten years of Beth Cons and ten without, well, there are still plenty of memories, many I haven't mentioned here. But, anyhow, those summer weekends were better than most real cons I've been to, my only real regret is that there wasn't a better pain medication for me back then, and it was the only time I dressed in drag, the year we had to sing wedding songs to Jeff and Cathy, and I sang the Kinky Friedman-written "Throbbing Python Of Love." I'm certain that if our trips to the Shenendoah Valley had continued, next year's Psuedocon's catch-phrase would have been Fishnets For Vigoda.
Actually, that was Willy the Sid's brain my dog was chewing on as a pup, not that ghost thing from the John Agar film mentioned above. Bob asked me if the brain was Photoshop-ed, I had sent him a teal umbra top secret debriefing regarding border collies a week or so ago. I mentioned that to explain the entire story, which would then make it a nice, homey pre-Internet tale, I'd have to give it a proper on my blog. The year was 1990, the city was Nashville. Sidney Williams presented me with his brain, not just any brain, his own, with his thoughts inside. Printed from an old dot-matrix printer and cut in thin strips like ticker tape, one could pull a bit of Sid's thoughts and story ideas out of a small hole near the brain stem. Sid seemed to fixate on a redhead at the supermarket as well as wondering if she would kill him and eat his ribs. Best that he moved on and married Christine. All three of my nieces practiced learning to read from those twelve strips of paper, each with one complete sentence. Over the years, pieces had ripped and been taped back together, and ripped again. Sid's words became blurry after the brain ended up in a swimming pool. Then my dog came along and chewed a hole big enough that he could stick his nose through the brain stem and make it move like a prop in a Three Stooges short. (Note: in the John Agar film, his character had a dog named Thor who was possessed by a good brain to fight the...never mind). The brain collapsed in on itself after that last stunt, and seeing as how my nieces all had since learned to read other things, I tossed out the whole mess. Between my dog and my nieces (who also like to tear body parts and organs asunder), all I'm left to do is keep the heads in my Bobak polish sausage jar. There are only a few I laid out as a sample, you can see that my dog got at the soft tissue of a Hulk Hogan shampoo bottle Snake gave me when he and Bunny were first dating and still lived in Lincoln. Going back to that lobby scene at the Crowne Plaza--setting for "Skull's Rainbow," a story which Sid and I co-wrote and set at the very World Horror Convention we were at, and then sold to Constable Books' NEW CRIMES in the UK--everyone is saying their goodbyes from different directions, some seated and others standing or waiting on a shuttle bus or their luggage. Sid says to me, as an after thought, hey, you got my brain, right? Joan and Beth look at us like we are crazy. I had started to unzip my luggage when Brian said that he had seen it up in the room, and was in the elevator in a flash. Until he returned, the women really thought that there was something else to the story, but there it was, Sid's brain. I gave it a good home for almost sixteen years, and my nieces learned to know what the phrases cannibalism and supermarket stalkers meant...Wayne
Mentioned this to Bob earlier when we were discussing Smiley Face. Some cops stay on a case, some could care less. I brought up something I hadn't thought about in a very long time. Back in 1982, while the Atlanta child murders were going on, there was a great reporter named Rick Soll covering the story for the Sun-Times. This guy was a great writer, wrote in a narrative that was stellar for its time, and yet he just fell "into the erff" and disappeared, the quotation marks being around a phrase cops around here commonly use. I think in cops novels they call it "in the wind." Well, anyways. Over the course of a week's articles, I made note of a pay phone near a mall that figured into two of the murdered boys. The fact was not mentioned, it was something that just was a realization that anyone might have if they had read each article, one kid had used that phone last, another had been seen near a phone in that same mall entrance between the time he disappeared and the time his body was found. Well, picture Wayne at the long ago age of 22 1/2, grabbing some blank paper and typing a letter to the Atlanta Murder Task Force on his manual Smith-Corona Galaxie Twelve, mentioning my "realization" and stating that I no doubt believe the cops already made the connection, but I thought it was worth writing in. A week later, I received a response to "Wayne Saller" thanking me for my letter and that the detectives had indeed followed up on the lead. I recall exactly how the following moments went, like a scene in a film. My father was in the backyard, wearing his t-shirt bandana, trimming hedges. I showed him the letter, he read it, looked up at me and said, quite seriously "You know this means that they have you on their list of suspects, don't you?" Well, Wayne Saller, at least. But the deadpan way my father delivered that line. The bottom photo was taken in Waynesboro VA at Beth Massie's house, during a weekend gathering of writers like Brian Hodge, David Niall Wilson, and Mark Stephen Rainey. The cop was a friend of the family and I thought a funny photo would be of me cuffed on the ground. I'm not really mugging it up with my expression, because the cop lifted me off the ground by lifting the cuffs between my wrists as we posed for three takes. I still intend to use the photo in a memoir or, hell, a simple author photo. The fake mug shot is one of my cut & paste with scissors & tape deals, there used to be a great photo booth in the Woolworth's on State Street. I could make my hair look like that just by moving my hand over my forehead. If I used a comb, that hair would fall out. It was a time of Larry King-brand prescription glasses and strands of hair on my typewriter keyboard...bad eyes, bad hair, what you gonna do?
