I cried a lot today. Its odd to not cry on the phone or at a gathering. How grim is fate that not twelve hours after I talk Yvonne up to the crowd that she emails me terrible news. Harry Fassl died on Sunday morning, and when I talked to his gal Diana I didn't cry, I got the news with more detail, then I emailed Sean. And cried. And emailed Yvonne back. And cried. So its a new experience to have tears dripping onto the R and the I keys and me filling the garbage with tissues. I effing hate tissues, they are no good. Christ, the stories involving Harry, me, Brian Jeff, Cathy, Diana, Von,Kathleen, Rodger, Andrew and from there Sean, Jessica, Erik, and the gang from MINN-CON up north. Hemlockman himself, a commenter on this blog, did work with Harry. He illustrated many of my stories. The best memories of my life are either at Yvonne's house in Hanover Park or Harry and Diana's in Oak Park and you can pick virtually any weekend during the summers of 1993 through 1996. I can add Beth Massie's get-togethers in Virginia a close third, but I'm chained to Chicago, and the collar counties are as far as I'm allowed to venture. And Harry was by Beth's, so he met Dave, he already knew Mark, Barb and Charlie, Lee, and so on. Mind you, every single name mentioned here means something in the publishing world. (Well, Barb's husband Charlie, he just has the biggest collection of Volkswagens in the galaxy).
Harry and I had fun with words. He always used the line from OUTBREAK when Morgan Freeman says to Dustin Hoffman "Get in the plane, Billy." He used it if I was jabbering too much and dinner was ready. I cut out a panel from a comic that simply said "Ed is by the turbines." That became a catch-phrase for years. For every time I signed my name Weird Alien Sausage, he would sign his HEFaLump or the oddly exotic Ted DeVeaux. And he did great photography. Don't go by the shot above, go to the link to his site. (I really just thought of this now, its still there, its not going away).
The year we went to Beth's, it was me, Harry, Andrew, Jeff, and Von. USAir to Pittsburgh then some propeller plane to the Shenandoah Valley airport. Somehow we miss the boarding call. They hold up the plane for us, even though we are like fifty feet away from it on the other side of the window, and we board and then wait for clearance. Meanwhile, back at the other airport, Beth and pretty much everybody in Staunton and the surrounding towns are told over the intercom that the propeller plane will be late by an hour because five hippies from Chicago hopped up on the joy juice made them late.
Christ, so many stories. Such a legacy of hard work and friendship. Watching crappy horror movies like THE HIDEOUS SUN DEMON and then staying up even later watching FOREVER KNIGHT, God help us all. Or SPACE PRECINCT. And then there was sumo wrestling for a time. Watching it, I mean.
From what I understand, Harry's ashes will be strewn (?) across Lake Michigan on the Winter Solstice. He died during a full moon in October, something I would like for myself also. I used to joke, talk about seeing the Grim Reaper in the doorway and telling everyone "Hey, there's my ride!" But writing this down and reminiscing with Andrew just reminds me that I'm on the tail end now, coasting as far as it will take me. For the good times, and absent friends. Get in the plane, Billy.
Bye, Harry. Your pal, Wayne
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.
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?
