sentences, flatly lying. He ever-so-briefly drops the creation of a “Civilian Marine Corps” and
spends but 3 sentences on this historic decision which basically equals pipeline/construction
crews with automatic weapons. One last ditch attempt to avoid the draft and smuggle F-4’s -- the
last great surge before Senate cuts funding…
For the next 50 minutes Bush rotates gears. He’s flown in symbolic, iconic heads to stand
and bow. One by one he elaborates their hard tales of sacrifice. Some black guy that hopped on a
subway to save a stranger in Don Mclean sentimentality, Little Susie from the grassroots
homeless fund. My friends are being shot to pieces, and he talks about his dog…
BRIAN BOTKILLER, AT YOUR SERVICE
“Someone tried to kill me once. My car broke down 15 miles outside Albuquerque one night, like
3am. I used a phone at a hotel off the highway, and my friend and I decided to walk to town to get
cigarettes. This guy pulls up in this huge truck -- it’s like 8 feet off the ground. He’s yelling at us,
just yelling at us. ’Hey white boy!’ And this is a white guy. He’s like, ‘Where you from?’ and we
say, “We’re not from around here.’”
“I guess he didn’t like that so he revs his engine, spins his truck around, and comes right
at us. We jump over the side-railing and he slams into it missing us by inches. He’s driving right
alongside us as we’re running, there’s no moon that night, its dark as shit, I lose my friend, and
just fall ten feet down a ditch. I smash my head against the side of the ditch and land on my knee,
and I think I passed out for ten seconds. I heard his truck go by, and I realized my left knee was
broken.”
“So this guy is pulling into this field coming back to find us. We ran a half mile back
towards the hotel and I’m running on my broken knee and this guy is trying to run us down. We
get back and we’re banging on the door, we wake up the keeper and he lets us in. The truck pulls
into the parking lot and the dude’s just sitting there, just waiting for us. We call the cops. They
don’t show for who knows how long, and this guys’ just sitting out there.”
“The cop shows up and immediately looks at me. My leg was all destroyed, bleeding all
over the place in a real bad way. He laughs at me. I’m like, ‘what’s so funny?’ He’s like,
‘Nothing, nothing.’ I tell him the story and he tells me, ‘I’ve gone out there and I’ve talked to him.
He said that you guys were trying to mess with his ATV.’ He didn’t even file a report, he didn’t do
anything. So that was awesome. Then I asked him for a ride to my car and he says he can’t do it.
My first solo gig and a broken knee…”
FINAL ROMP AMONG VENUS
“I was walking back to the house and I saw this church that actually had parking meters.
What’s that all about?”
Jeff MacCannon: “Oh yeah, I saw that. It’s fun. I was born in an area of smart people, so
it doesn’t really work out for Christianity. I guess the people that are stupid enough to believe in
it are taxed for it.”
“So make fun of Jesus.”
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“Jesus? (Laughs) He’s really got the Malcolm X sort of vibe going on in a very pacifist,
pussy kind of way. Not in the pacifist kind of pussy way like Gandhi where he actually
accomplished something. I think it’s really funny -- the planks of wood he’s nailed to are more
famous than he is. It doesn’t really make sense because everyone who was born back then was the
son of a god. Every king, every political leader were descended from some deity of a stupid
nature, even stupider than the deities we have now.”
“Are there a lot of Scientologists in Albuquerque?”
“There is a Christian Science reading room down the street from my house. It’s creepy,
that much I know. They try to entice people into their cult with butterflies and paper mache in the
windows. It’s fucking Christian Science, its going to kill you. People with faith don’t deserve
things. They just waste their lives with this promise of playing in some heavenly amusement park
for all eternity. They just sit around and accomplish absolutely fucking nothing. They’re on the
corner of every street, they have billions of dollars, Christian music is the highest grossing music
in America. They don’t actually create anything, the just rip off other things, and then they make
a genre for that. They’re making more money than anyone else, they have all this political pull,
they intentionally don’t change things for their own benefit. Meanwhile there are people of
intelligence and talent who can’t even pay rent.”
“What are the biggest bullshit aspects in any music scene that must go away?”
“I’m sick of people faking a British accent. Especially when they have a stupid stage-
name, some made-up crap that was thought up while looking at a dried rose. I just don’t get it.
They sing one note about something stupid. It’s always a girl, a date, or a month out of the year. I
hate when people are Satanists, atheists, or agnostics and they write songs about angels…”
“Do you see a lot of kids ironically wearing Che Guevara t-shirts they bought from
capitalist establishments?”
“Funny story. I was at a Hot Topic and I saw three kids in a row all wearing a shirt that
said ‘You laugh because I’m different and I laugh because you all look the same.’ They were all
standing in a group…”
Jeff cordially struts to the stage in this ridiculous white pullover with spaceman boots and cosmo-
demonic belt buckle. He’s like some David Bowie astronaut with mascara dripping down his
face. Chris has his Mohawk Murray-globbed in war mode with spiked gauntlets, Ken has this
black leather semi-bondage fishnet thing complete with cowboy hat and fingernails painted silver.
Buddy, the keyboardist, Buddy, the red-haired Gandalf, Buddy the wise and superfluous, has yet
to have removed his shades in the past two weeks.
When Vertigo plays live it all makes sense. Jeff rides his keys like a surfboard and
strangles himself with the microphone chord, insulting everyone and prancing about like a new-
wave premadonna. Most the audience knows the words to the songs. They clap and dance,
knocking back Pabst after Pabst.
Tommy T and Brian Botkiller jump on stage among the MacCannon brothers, instantly
forming the live version of Diverje like mechanical tigers snapping together Voltron. Primed and
ready, Diverje crushes it with the crossover vibe of a Razed In Black vs. Ministry remix.
When Tommy screams those high note pitches sound close to Antichrist-era Manson at
his most frantic and pissed, and Tommy does this weird hopping dance while fake blood splatter
is globed over his face. It’s one of those great moments where the performer sheds all pretensions
of reality and becomes his music. He rolls around on the floor, face beat red, screaming
everything inside of him …
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PART III: THE DENVER NIGHTMARE
(JESUS, THE ANTI-SAVIOR)
JANUARY 28TH-FEBRUARY 4TH 2007
TRAGICOMIC DESTINY
Long from now, when whoever it is digests these words, I sincerely hope they appreciate just how
difficult and exhausting this mission truly is. Currently it is Monday, January 29th, approximately
7:32am, and a few notches above 20 degrees. I am sitting at a place called the Denver Diner,
whose brilliant tour de force of a breakfast special is an $8 omelet. At this rate, I will be cleaned
out financially by the end of the week.
When one deals with a man named Jesus, one would assume some vague sense of savior.
In this case perhaps it is true, yet his girlfriend is rather flakey about guests and has demanded I
wander the city aimlessly until the good Christ is released from work at 5pm, because she
apparently doesn’t trust me alone at the house. He doesn’t feel like making a production over it,
so instead of combating her request, I am left to walk around from 5am until 6pm, freezing my
balls off, my only saving grave the Denver Public Library nine blocks from this diner, which
doesn’t even open until 10am.
Nightmares, jangled nightmares & splinter breakthroughs… 1989, 1993, 2002, 1998
intersecting in one steady stream of venom, like visiting a grave that responds to your inquests…
It is only the mute tombs which I spend no mourning or casual addressing…
As it stands, I’ve emailed over 50 bands in the Denver area and only one has replied.
Having freelanced at PIT Magazine in Colorado Springs for the past 5 years – the rock solid
harbinger of metal in the quad-state area – and having received dozens of emails and demos from
this area over time, I have hit an ironic blank wall. I seriously believed this would be my strongest
foothold outside of Detroit. Even PIT, for which I have long been loyal, has vanished.
Silence, absolute silence, and I’ve wholly stopped trying. It’s like Boba Fett zooming the
Slave 1 to Tattooine but Jabba won’t crack the iron palace and has a hog guard slip a message
with insignificant greetings and another command of whom to exterminate when all Boba really
wants is to drink a brew with the worm and possibly take a hot shower with one of the tadpole
headed strippers. If they blow me off I walk. I won’t be disrespected, and that is my word.
So what do I have to offer? Cephalic Carnage, one of the premier multi-genre extreme
metal bands in Colorado. Although they gave a cell number I haven’t heard back. They open for
Slayer on Wednesday. There’s also a one-man blackened death metal project whose cell message
is quite whacky and drunken. I have a set-in-stone lunch with a Columbine survivor which I’m in
held suspense over, and a female-owned porn company which films escapades starring metal and
punk bands all-out gang-fucking chicks. Truthfully, it’s far more effective than hiring a PR man
where publicity is concerned…
2pm, beyond exhaustion, at the Denver public library, one of the first in the country and the best
in America bar none. Every time I attempt to recharge my batteries by nodding off for 20 minutes
a security guard knocks on the table and threatens to throw me out. There are 7 levels, and I’ve
tried it on 4 already. I tried to pass out on a bench outside, but it is barely 30 degrees, and no
matter where I shelter up a hobo lurches over and harangues me for spare change.
My eyes burn, my pinched nerves scream, but all is forgotten once I reach the
biographies after my 4th cup of coffee. The Mussolini section is staggering. They have the first
printing of his autobiography from 1928, but also his long out-of-print Diary 1915-1917. The
card says no one’s checked it out since 1947. I read his daughter’s memoirs from 1974 in its
entirety with my totalitarian form of literary consumption (no pun intended)…
65
3:30pm and on the verge of total collapse, hallucinating from two months lack of sleep --
psychedelic flashbacks, breathing walls, oceanic carpet patterns mutate into little swastikas from
Salo Republic educational impressions… The front lobby is a labyrinth of deranged granite. On
the street pedestrians ignorantly blaze by like columns of insects, plundering vehicles like steel
bison. Rubber hooves…
I’m not at the end of my rope. I’m buried in a tomb of sulphurous ash miles below the
crust of the earth. I hate this, I have lost all hope. I have forgotten why I’m here. I want to run to
the Greyhound, buy a ticket, leave my clothes and guitar in this awful city. I start digging through
my notebook for the terminal number, eyeballing the payphones in the lobby. Then I see it…
There’s just no way -- it’s a ridiculous hoax perpetrated by an unknown assailant. I rush
to the elevator and zoom to the mysterious 4th floor, the only one I haven’t tried to sleep in. The
elevator clanks open and I drag myself down the long white hall. I emerge into the show room in
foggy slow motion…
The glass case is 40 feet long, glowing with fluorescent light like the runway of an airport
terminal. Inside, stretched out like ancient Egyptian parchment, is the entire 119 foot, 8 inch type-
roll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. The beast that crazy Catholic mystic hammered
out in a nonstop, 3-week, Benzedrine-fueled, mason-jar pissing frenzy after being on the road for
7 years.
Its aura gives off blazing heat, like a Khmer Rouge stronghold 20 minutes post-napalm.
Edges frayed, pieces missing, still intact… It really is true -- he printed the stream-of-conscious
explosion as was, word for word, beginning to end. The most remarkable thing is not even the
fable of the manuscript itself or its eternal repercussions. It’s the fact that there are so few spelling
mistakes…
It all returns to me, the reason why I am here. I’m 18 again, driving those skeleton neighborhoods
of Detroit; a hardboiled, nerve-shot, Ford parts monkey in that big Econoline van. Exploring
every inch of the wicked city, parking in crack hoods between deliveries devouring Kerouac and
Ginsberg in a trance under streetlight, no care to the gangbangers eyeballing me form their
porches…
As each page turns, another bum haggles for change. Another prostitute tries to climb in;
another savage, gun-toting, primitive gaze of street hatred. But they didn’t exist. It was just me &
Jack & the screaming urge to steal the van and hightail it westward. Detroit had been conquered.
It was time to explore the mainland of my Nation foreign as a lost continent…
Yet I never worked up the courage to go it alone, never once a Cassady to stumble after. I
waited too long, waited until my body was broken, my soul was burned, my mind stretched to its
last threads. One adventure too many and a hundred concerts too long… But I’m here now, and
I’m face to face with Jack – and nothing is going to stop this book. Nothing…
JESUS SAVES… OR RATHER SALIVATES
I welcome you all to the remarkable voice of our generation. Jesus the Anti-Savior, legendary
mastermind of PHALLUS, and general architect of misery in Detroit. He sits like Zarathustra,
glowing with heavenly awe beneath his lamplight. Short blonde hair and
goatee, a terrible smile.