Books

Yasunari Kawabata and What Can You Do With a Sleeping Girl (and why would you do it?)

Because I don’t sleep for the USA Olympic Insomnia  team and am thinking about going pro, I find myself falling down rabbit holes online at 4:23 a.m. You know how it is. Lately I’ve been lucking out and find myself falling down smaller, less tunneling holes.  The rise of what I like to call “weird shit” YouTube channels are a great source for short-term rabbit holes and one of my favorites is Nick Crowley’s channel. He’s covered some of the more time-intensive Baby’s First Late-Night Google Search topics like Dyatlov Pass, Elisa Lam, and Black Eyed Children, but he also branches out into lesser known weirdness.

For extra nightmare fuel, she’s clutching a humanoid-shaped object covered in blood. You’re welcome.

He earned a permanent place in my heart when he was among the first to share the debunk of the extremely messed-up Seattle Zombie Woman story. I’d long suspected it had something to do with medical current events, but I wasn’t sure because it was, frankly, so well done that I couldn’t immediately rule out that she was a gravely wounded woman who had suffered all kinds of abuse, be it at the hands of a maniac in a torture chamber or a maniac in a medical lab.

I wandered a bit into his back catalog a few months ago and caught his two videos on MrSleepyPeople (first video, second video).  The topic weighed on me for a lot longer than I would have expected. Both videos show the actions specifically of the man who was behind the now banned MrSleepyPeople YouTube channel and, in general, others in that bizarre community. As one so often experiences in these sort of “watch me do something taboo behind the scenes” videos, Nick demonstrated an escalation of grossness within the community.

MrSleepyPeople had a catalog of videos that showed he liked to lick – thoroughly lick – the eyeballs and tear ducts of sleeping women. All of the women he featured in his videos were passed out asleep with their similarly unconscious boyfriends next to them. MrSleepyPeople would pry open the females’ eyes, touch their eyeballs and then begin to lick them. It beggared belief that just alcohol intoxication could render the girls so out of it that they did not react when light and wet pressure were applied to their eyeballs, but I suspect other sedatives were at play. Nick also explained that it’s possible, especially if it occurs during certain stages of sleep, to engage in such intrusive behavior without the victim waking. A couple of times the women stirred a bit when he touched their faces and he quickly retreated, but for the most part he was able to lick the eyes of a variety of women without them reacting.

It seems likely from repetition of backgrounds and a certain amount of context that these women knew MrSleepyPeople in some manner, as he had access to their sleeping spaces, as if they became intoxicated in his home and stayed there overnight. There was never any sign he broke into homes to perform his fetish. I wondered too if these women had given him permission to do it. Perhaps they didn’t care what he did to their eyes when they were sleeping. I also wondered if there was a quid pro quo element, trading access to their sleeping eyes for money, drugs, or just a place to crash for a while. I guess it’s possible that these women had given him permission but it seems unlikely because the creepy subterfuge was very much an element of the fun for MrSleepyEyes, as much of it took place in the dark, with other unconscious people. Permission would have spoiled the fun for him.

It’s equally unlikely that these women were actors. Pretend to be asleep knowing someone plans to pry open your eye and lick it for a prolonged period of time and see how long it is before your voluntary neural control shifts into automatic neural control. You can control when you blink, to a point, but the instinct to force the eye shut when lids are pried open or an object is lowered onto the eye is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to control without a lot of conditioning. I doubt these women were subject to such lengthy pre-video conditioning. There was an unexpectedly robust comment section on these videos, and his watchers urged him to do other things to the women, like play with the unconscious women’s feet, or to put his fingers in their mouths or up their noses.

As I mentioned already, the videos take a disturbing thing and make it worse.  Nick later found videos featuring children as victims. He even found the channels of men who attempted to do similarly invasive things to unconscious, homeless men. Reminiscent of those requesting that MrSleepyPeople play with the feet of his sleeping female victims, many videos of homeless men centered around their feet, and it never seemed as if those men had given their consent to be subject of fetish media. So if it wasn’t bad enough that probably drugged young women, asleep in beds, often next to their boyfriends, were victimized, even more vulnerable people, like children and the homeless, were also subjects of this subculture’s focus.

So, with all of that said, I come now to the portion of this discussion wherein I ask: What the absolute fuck and why, oh my god, why?

Because he is presumably saner than me, Nick doesn’t spend a lot of time asking why MrSleepyPeople wants to lick the eyes or noses of unaware victims. That may be because the overall tone of his videos is this fetish is on par with a sex crime. I too believe that to be the case because a fetish act is being performed on people who are too drugged or young to be able to give meaningful consent.

But even though my own first impulse was that MrSleepyPeople’s actions fit the legal definition of assault, I had a hard time expressing why something so gross but mostly harmless in terms of physical damage made me feel so angry and disgusted. Within what constitutes assault, there are levels of harm done to the victim. Unless you are arguing on Twitter, people generally agree that a slap in the face is far less traumatizing than gang rape. Similarly, non-consensual eyeball-licking seems a lesser crime to inflict on people than, say, stabbing them in the eye.  It’s also hard to codify the level of harm that a person experiences when another person does something to them while they are sleeping that will not cause them physical harm when they wake and about which they will have no memory. This isn’t the same degree of bodily violation that a drugged woman may experience when raped.  And if MrSleepyPeople’s victims were identified, it’s unlikely the victim would be dragged through the mud in the usual assignations of blame in rape because this is an act so far beyond the experience of sexual assault that the traditional shame scripts can’t apply. What sort of mental gymnastics would even the most hidebound rape apologist have to master to be able to say that a woman passing out right next to her boyfriend was just asking to have her eyelids pried apart and her eyeball licked? The shame will stay with the licker, not the licked.

So after saying all of that, licking the eyeballs of the unconscious doesn’t seem like it should have the same nauseating gravitas as genital rape to me, but it does, and I can’t really pin down why until I understand the motivation behind this act.

Hashing this out with Mr OTC, he too was unable to explain exactly where lines cross. He said he’d have similar retributive reactions if he walked in on a woman whose eyeball was being licked while she was unconscious as he would if walked in on the same woman being sexually assaulted while unconscious. Mileage varies but we two who have seen a lot feel this crosses a line that we can’t explain and feel we’d be moved to violence should we walk in on anyone licking the eyeballs of someone who appeared to be unconscious.

As unlikely as it seems, eyeball licking is indeed a “thing” that is called “oculolinctus” but keep in mind that this Latin neologism was seemingly coined in 2013. There was a brief moral panic about oculolinctus that is reminiscent of the “rainbow” parties suburban moms were panicking over in the early aughts. Dismissed as a hoax, publications like Business Insider and The Guardian reported that the oculolinctus craze taking over the youth in Japan had led to outbreaks of pink eye. Whether or not that story is just another moral panic, licking a person’s eyeball can give them more than just pink eye – herpes and chlamydia are possibilities depending on the health of the licker. Corneal abrasions are also on the table, especially if the victim is wearing contact lenses. It was clear a couple of MrSleepyPeople’s victims were wearing contacts when he licked their eyes.

Based on absolutely no scientific research or proper studies, I’ve reached the conclusion that Christopher Walken has inspired many people to develop unusual kinks.

Dazed Digital was able to speak to oculolinctus fetishists and one, Rose, said she saw Christopher Walken interacting with a dead person’s eye in the film The Prophecy and she found it extremely compelling sexually.

She could not explain what it was specifically that caused her to link her sexuality to licking eyeballs, but for her the fantasy switch is also tripped when she sees fluid being drained out of an eye during a crime show. Rose likes to lick eyeballs and to be licked in return, and doesn’t indicate that sex, gender or orientation matter at all when she engages in oculolinctus.

She describes it as “full body sexual excitement, with electricity pulsing through your body.” Before adding: “It’s not the explosion of orgasm but the tense building of pleasure. It’s pretty wild.”

Fair enough. I suspect for some sensation can be enough to embrace eyelicking. Sensation can be motivation, and it’s important to note that Rose appears to be an ethical oculolinctus practitioner. The article only spoke to one male eye fetishist and he had a sort of spiritual motivation to lick eyeballs.

When asked to pinpoint his infatuation, he says: “Something to do with their beauty, mystery, intrigue, being the ‘window to one’s soul’. Have you ever really taken the time to stare into someone’s eye? To just think about nothing else and look deeply into their eyeballs? You would be shocked at what that does to you, and to them. It can be a life-changing experience. How could you not be interested in something that powerful?”

When I first began to think about the motives of eyelicking, the notion of trying to probe the organs that are so often called “the window to the soul” was something that I considered early on. In the context of a consensual exchange, this isn’t that alarming. Most weird things when considered from a completely consensual point of view aren’t alarming though, it must be said. The victims in the MrSleepyPerson videos were unconscious and there was no romantic or even sexual connection between two people. Had their pupils not reacted to the light that MrSleepyPeople focused on them as he pried their eyes open, they could very well have been dead for all the feedback they gave the man licking their eyes. When we die, our souls leave our body, and when we sleep, our souls nap along with us and that mental absence is shown in our unanimated eyes. MrSleepyPeople definitely was not coming at this from a romantic “windows of the soul” perspective.

As I mused over motivations, I initially tried to draw links between MrSleepyPeople and Bataille’s Story of the Eye, but the content, though extreme and often invoking eyes, did little to help me. Beyond just the outrageousness of MrSleepyPeople’s eye licking and the demented duo in Bataille’s book urinating in a dead girl’s eyes, there wasn’t much to the book to apply to the videos.

But Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties did offer some answers. I revisited my discussion of the book from over a decade ago and found some possible answers to my questions.

Kawabata’s novella is an examination of an older man named Eguchi, whose life had been defined with fraught relationships with women – his wife, his mistress, and his daughter, notably. He visited prostitutes in his youth, and at age 67, he decided to frequent a different sort of brothel, one wherein the beautiful young women were drugged to sleep every night so that old men could lay next to them in bed. The men were not permitted to have sex with these girls. Indeed, most of the men who visited  the House of the Sleeping Beauties were impotent. However, even the madam of this house of mildly-ill repute knew that there is more than one thing a man can do with a sleeping girl:

He was not to do anything in bad taste, the woman of the inn warned Eguchi. He was not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort.

Eguchi sees himself quite differently from all the other old men who patronize the sleeping girls. Those old men are impotent, but Eguchi says he is not, and “lies” to the madam and says he cannot sustain an erection. Though we are left to wonder how much Eguchi is lying to himself, the madam seems to have him pegged. She runs an entire establishment that caters to the desperate need some old men have to be in the chaste presence of a warm, female body, and she tells him later that only men she can “trust” are permitted to lay with her girls. She doesn’t bother to warn him again against having sex with the girls because she can tell the only way he can disgrace these girls with distasteful acts is to use his finger.

Which harks back to the commenters on MrSleepyPeople asking him to stick his fingers in the mouths of his victims. And of course Eguchi disobeys the madam and sticks his finger in the mouth of one of the sleeping girls the first chance he gets. He immediately disobeys the rules and one realizes that if he’d been able to violate the girls sexually, he would have done so if the rules meant so little to him. But then again, the appeal of these beautiful, young, sleeping girls is that the men get to avoid the physicality of sex while engaging in a caricature of conquest. Eguchi associates sex with attachment and he loathes women, even his daughter to an extent. He may have wanted easy sex when he was younger but his aversion to what he considered messy relationships made it impossible for him to create the sorts of attachments that one needs to be able to lay naked next to someone in bed in the absence of sexual contact.  He romanticizes the notion of being with women but believes all women are erratic, overemotional, and finds fecundity repulsive. He just wants the end of seduction – laying next to an attractive sleeping partner. Even if he was still virile, the actual union of two bodies in love is an impossibility for him because he is too misogynistic to find any pleasure in women before and beyond orgasm. So he has to rent sleeping girls.

Eguchi sleeps with six girls over the course of five visits – that’s right, he has a sleepy girl three-way – and the girls are always drugged and in bed when he arrives. He too is eventually drugged but he gets to spend time with these girls while they are unconscious and at his mercy. He poses their bodies, presses his flesh against theirs, pokes around on their faces. One girl is very young and beautiful and as he strokes her hand, he knows “she would not open her eyes.” That is the only part of these girls unavailable to him. Stroking their hair, making value judgments about their characters based on genetic traits they could not control, moving their legs and arms, peering into their ears, and throughout it all, he wondered if the drugs would wear off too soon and their eyes would open. The potential of this was tantalizing to him.

Did he want them to open their eyes? Did he hope they remained closed? If their eyes opened, they would see him, a frail, miserable old man so lonely he had to sleep next to unconscious girls in order to regain some implication of lost virility and emotional connection. He would see himself reflected in their eyes and from their eyes he expected harsh judgment. He makes an active attempt to open one of the girl’s eyes, but he only does it because he knows he cannot wake her. He wouldn’t have tried had he not been certain she could not wake, and he does it because he is annoyed that these unconscious girls deny him the thing he wants the most: to be admired or feared by women.

Eguchi lies to himself something fierce so one is unsure if he understood why exactly he was so unhappy that the girls could not reflect his own image back to him. But the reader senses he did realize what a worm he was, because his first impulse was to pat himself on the back for being so honorable not to sexually defile the girl when he supposedly could, assigning honor to his physical inability to do what he really wanted. But then again, Eguchi also hoped the girl would open her eyes and feel afraid because she could at long last be confronted by the reality of all the old men who paid to simply sleep in her presence. If she opened her eyes, she would be humiliated if she saw him again on the street, or so he thought.

Then we are presented with the following:

But old Eguchi was not yet used to keeping company with a girl who said nothing, a girl who did not open her eyes, who gave him no recognition. Empty longing had not left him. He wanted to see the eyes of this witchlike girl. He wanted to hear her voice.

But when he hears her voice, she rejects him. She does not wake, but she talks in her sleep and tells him to stop, don’t, go away, and he is so angered he wants to slap her but eventually he realizes the dream is about her mother and he feels unspeakably sad. She wasn’t reacting to him manipulating her body. She was a child dreaming of her mother. He imprinted nothing on her. She was beyond his reach. His depravity could not touch her.

Of course there are miles of cultural differences between an elderly Japanese character from a novella published in the 1960s and a YouTuber licking eyes in the 2020s but there are some interesting similarities. The most obvious is that they did what they did to drugged women. They could only be emboldened when in the presence of women who could not resist a single thing they wanted to do.

A second similarity is their reaction to girls opening their eyes. MrSleepyPeople and Eguchi were both startled by the prospect of their sleeping girls opening their eyes organically or waking. MrSleepyPeople had to pry his victim’s eyes open and Eguchi wanted one of his girls to open her eyes but had either genuinely been able to control their nervous systems enough to open their eyes and see them, the gig would be up. MrSleepyPeople would be exposed as a very strange pervert who posts what amounts to non-con fetish porn and Eguchi would be exposed as a miserable misogynistic man forced to pay for the slim comfort that comes from sleeping next to an unconscious girl.

A third is perhaps the most important similarity and is speculative with both men: impotence. Of course we have no idea if MrSleepyPeople is impotent and Eguchi swore he wasn’t but the terrible fact remains that men generally do far more terrible things to sleeping girls. MrSleepyPeople licks eyeballs, Eguchi pokes his finger in mouths. Why? Probably because neither can do much more.

Initially MrSleepyPeople reminded me of a man I read about decades ago when I first entered the realm of true crime. There was a serial killer in Texas who removed the eyes of his victims, some with surgical precision (but then they always say killers carve up victims with surgical precision when often the crime scene looks like the killer used a barbecue fork and a PlaySkool saw). Charles Albright died in 2020 after over 30 years of imprisonment and his name is well-known among those who like to collect serial killer memorabilia. He made paintings and drawings of bloody eyes and women with bloody, empty eye orbits when in prison and it’s remarkably hard to find any representations online these days, though you can find a rose he painted for sale on a serial killer memorabilia site. His crime reminds one of the primitive belief that the last thing a person sees, especially if it is violent, is stored in the human eye, provoking killers to carve out eyes to cover their murderous tracks. Charles Albright was absolutely frightening and he certainly didn’t remove human eyes due to strange superstitions. He took them because his victims were stand-ins for his mother, an overbearing, abusive, cruel woman who went with him on dates so he couldn’t even kiss girls goodnight. She micromanaged his life in such emasculating ways that the only way he could symbolically escape her gaze was to kill and remove the eyes of women, over and over again.

That doesn’t seem like MrSleepyPeople, but there may be some small behavioral link between him and Charles Albright. Perhaps MrSleepyPeople has felt so emasculated in his life that the only way he can express himself is through women who cannot fight back, and he is symbolically rubbing their noses in their powerlessness by licking the organs that would ordinarily permit them to perceive the assaults he committed. But that admittedly seems like a stretch.

After researching this story, I still feel like eyeball licking is akin to sexual assault, but I think now the reason behind my reaction, and that of Mr OTC, is related more to the grubby nastiness of the motivations behind non-consensual eyelicking (and mouth poking and nose licking). The person who engages in non-consensual eyelicking surely knows the eyes are considered the window to the soul and licking the eyes of an unconscious person is a flagrant assault on their dignity and personhood. But those like MrSleepyPeople are also terrified of being seen, of being reflected back to themselves in the eyes of their victims. And it’s hard not to see the motivations behind this fetish to be rooted in physical and personal impotence. The former is easy enough to understand but the latter needs some explanation. By personal impotence, I mean these are people who can only satisfy themselves furtively, in the dark, with people who do not consent to such behavior. They have no personal power or worth socially to be able to meet people in the light of day, and since they seem to see people only as sources for their fetishes, they’d have little to offer them in the way of conversation or companionship after the first few hours of a small houseparty wind down. They are also so lacking in power that they make recordings of non-consensual criminal activity so that they can keep the memory of their sole connection to a woman that they then sell to similarly weak, unscrupulous people.

This level of lurking, hiding in the dark, racing back into the dark when eyes open, reminds me of finding a mess of grubs under a rock, or nests of silverfish or roaches discovered in a dark corner of an abandoned house.

Just put the rock back and walk away quietly.

None of these creatures can kill you but your first response at seeing them is often an instant revulsion that causes you to slam the rock back down or to begin stomping as hard as you can. Evidently eyelicking is also known as “worming” and I think that ties in neatly with the sort of wriggling, wet, slithering disgust I am trying to describe.

It’s amazing how this managed to stay underground long enough for Nick Crowley to have collected so much information across so many channels. But I think its longevity as a “hidden in plain sight” fetish began to decline when it became more aggressive and included children as victims because originally it was just a bunch of roachy dudes scurrying around under cover of darkness. These soft, craven men who engaged in this behavior passed unseen because they were able to hide quickly when the lights came on. Most of them are gone off YouTube after Nick’s videos, but you can get the gist of it all through Nick’s two documentaries.

I think I understand the motivations of these men a bit better now, though if you’ve had the time to watch these videos and think about them, let me know if you understand the impulse to lick eyes. Why eyes? Is it the concept of eyes being the window to the human soul, so the licker can bask in that soul, or show contempt for it? Is it just some issue in the sexual hard-wiring that happens by accident, like the girl who became transfixed with eyes due to a horror movie, that happens with so many people who develop fetishes for things like high heels or specific body types or hair colors? It would be interesting to know what you think so share away.

Lazy Eyes by James Nulick

Book: Lazy Eyes

Author: James Nulick

Type of Book: Fiction, literary fiction, experimental fiction, transgressive fiction, short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it straddles very fine lines that separate literary fiction from experimental fiction from transgressive fiction from outright strangeness.

Availability: Published in 2022 by ExPat Press, you can get a copy here.

Disclaimers: You will find my name in the “thanks” section in this collection, and I have edited works for James in the past. I also like James and consider him a friend and the readers of this discussion may have to decide for themselves if I like James so much because his writing is amazing or if I am fondly disposed toward his work because he’s so likeable. Safest bet is that it is probably both but as usual I will make my case.

Comments: James Nulick is one of the most under-rated writers working. There are a handful of names I frequently say this about, including Ann Sterzinger and Hank Kirton, and it never fails to baffle me that each one of them isn’t far better known. Each book James writes should be the book that makes his name, so to speak, and this short story collection is no different.

I think one of the reasons that James has yet to achieve the renown he deserves is because it is very hard to pin down his style. Part autobiographic, part utter fiction, his work combines a direct, often visceral confessional tone that he mixes with magical realism. His unflinching look at the worst people can do is balanced with his keen insight into why bad people are unexpectedly good, and why good people so often fail morally. He marries that unyielding yet sympathetic gaze with otherworldly examinations of life and death that are so fantastic that they are akin to fairy tales or alternative takes on religion. His work is complex yet accessible, dark and hopeful, discrete and irreal, and in a literary world where people need writers and their works summed up in a couple of sentences, it can be hard for the genuinely innovative and interesting to reach the audience their talent is due.

Lazy Eyes seems to me to be a continuation of James’s 2021 novel, The Moon Down to Earth. Moon is a remarkable work in which James took the stories of three very unlikely people – an Hispanic super-morbidly obese, bed-bound woman, a white elderly widower, and a young mixed race aspiring musician – and showed the cosmic threads that wove them into a common human tapestry. The invisible strings that connect all the characters can be small things, like common cultural touchstones, to larger issues of coping with loss and abuse. James honors their individual natures while also showing an almost Jungian commonality that removes barriers of sex, gender, race, and age from the inner lives of extremely different people.

In Lazy Eyes, James picks up the central theme of unlikely connections and takes it a step further. No longer bound to the physical, human-dominated world, James created a universe wherein the line between animal and human experience is erased, one where death isn’t the end of personal growth and achievement, and one in which we create our own haunted lives. Cats dream of ascendance, the dead don’t die, and mannequins become sons in James’s strange but instinctively familiar world. Graphic and emotional, visceral and ethereal, relentless and sympathetic, the way James writes is so sui generis that it can only be called Nulickian.

It’s somewhat difficult to discuss these stories the way I prefer. I don’t want to spoil them, of course. There’s also a challenge that comes when one is presented with a series of stories that handle concepts of ceaseless transformation. It’s altogether more difficult when those stories need to be read together in order to understand James’ conceptual world-building. And then you need to bear in mind that I guarantee you there will be one or two elements from these stories that will haunt you or will intrigue you as you try to understand the numerology (and possibly angelology as I believe there are hierarchies among the spirits in these stories) that James salts throughout. I personally found myself ferreting out the meanings behind the numbers nine and fifty-seven, and want to talk about it in depth but am exercising rare restraint. I also never want to see a stick of beef jerky ever again. If you read this collection – and I think you should – please let me know the plot points, meaningful details or strange cosmic filaments that remained with you long after reading.

Since I am trying very hard not to spoil these stories, I am going to limit myself to the pieces that spoke to me the most. There isn’t a clunker among the ten stories in this collection, covering varied topics like alien (species) invasion, dark and fatal magic, or the difficulties of coming of age when one is different or anxious to be different. The stories that stuck with me the most were those that demonstrated the most world-building, verging almost into slipstream as James takes the mundane and makes it fantastic while never leaving behind the very specific, emotional literary effort that defines his style.

My favorite story in the collection is “Doe,” a heartbreaking look at how the dead never really go away, not even when they are nameless, not even when an argument can be made that they never really lived. Having no name and being literally dead on arrival, however, do not mean that the dead don’t stop growing after death. There is a balance in life and death, in body and soul, summed up in the best line in the story:

God is, if anything, symmetrical.

What is remarkable in this particular story is how grounded in reality it is – sadly it is very much a story that can be said to be ripped from the headlines over and over again – while also dabbling in ideas of what it means to be haunted, of why the dead may be both unwilling and unable to lie down. “Doe” makes no distinction between crushing guilt and spiritual revenge, and in fact I wonder if the point of this piece was to give a new insight into human conscience and what is behind our inability to shed the negative emotions we carry after we’ve done terrible things. We may create our own psychological prisons but we may not be the jailer who holds the key to freedom. This story also challenged my sense of what I supposed was my own moral stance regarding life and death, forcing me to consider the idea that simply not being does not mean not existing and wondering who, if anyone, has the right to make decisions regarding life and death when conscious existence may continue forever. This story reminded me a lot of Stewart O’Nan’s The Night Country, a book about dying young and how those left behind can be haunted in vastly different ways.

“The Black Doberman” would be hard for me to discuss even if I were not resolute regarding spoilers in this discussion. Because it disturbed me, I reread it a few times to try and define the uneasiness I felt. This is the story from which the title is derived, as the titular Doberman is named Lazy Eyes. This story is a gut punching combination of Bret Easton Ellis-style empty materialism, post-feminist yearning for traditional domestic titles, and a subtle sort of Freaky Friday role-switching as a character eliminates a rival in her romantic relationship only to take on the moral and social worth of her defeated foe. Best line in the story:

My entire life has been an unattended funeral.

The female character in this story is despicable while also being very pathetic, which then made her even more despicable because the god in my own symmetrical heart wants those who feel pain to be kind, strong, and brave. There is an intelligence that comes from personal misery that allows people to see how others feel the same way, yet this character refused to see the link between herself and that which she hated. There was a similar disconnect at play in “Doe” and it feels very much as if the unattended funeral is the end result of not seeing the tendrils of connection. Being deliberately cut off from the ebb and flow of life and how it affects conscious experience is itself a lonely death in the world James created.

“Dark Web” surprised me with how much more I took away from it after a second read. I suspect most of the stories in this collection will offer up more and more with additional reads. Anil and Ridhi are a couple working at home during the Covid shutdowns that closed many offices. Each stake their claim in the house – Anil becomes a chronic masturbator in the basement as he toggles back and forth between Pornhub and work, and Ridhi works in the kitchen in between her forays onto Reddit. James took a basic story, that of the couple who grows apart when forced to be very close, and subtly embroidered the theme of connection into it. When something genuinely strange happens that disrupts the tiresome routine that Anil is frantically trying to break free from in unseemly ways (like masturbating in public near other joggers while walking his dog), the loss of routine and real intimacy ensures that Anil finds himself just as haunted as those who suffered genuine deaths in this collection.

Beyond that, James draws attention to certain bestial elements of Anil’s viewpoint that closely mirror other, very different minds in this collection. Specifically, he imagines his wife’s ass and thighs, but refers to them, tellingly, as “hind quarters.” Anil is not diminishing his wife, nor is he a closet zoophile. Rather, James is showing the ways that the bestial and the humane can become intertwined because, in the magical world in Lazy Eyes, the animals think as humans do, and their thoughts, betrayals, and desires are very similar to those of humans. Anil is protective of his dog, lamenting planting trees that could poison her so he keeps her safe, creating a close connection with his dog. Not so much with his wife and when it may be too late, he merges the protective love he has for his dog with the protective love he wished he had had for his wife.

This, by the way, is an excellent example of what happens when you dig around in these stories a few times. I can’t think of a book with similar characterization and handling of plot wherein subtle phrases and descriptions reveal a yarn-like skein of connection. It’s genius.

“Strange Captive” broke my heart. It ended on a very hopeful note, but it’s still a rough story. The dark revelation of this story is that you read it in one of two ways, depending on that which horrifies you the most. This isn’t a wishy-washy piece, speaking of dark things without the courage to describe them accurately from the mind of the captive, but rather another example of the commonality between experiences that is the backbone of this collection. The hell of it is, even though the events in the story are specific and defined, I still ended the piece wondering what it was I had really read. The final paragraph and exacting details do not equivocate but my own personal horrors made it less clear.

“The Beautiful Sister” is a surprisingly unpleasant look at a teen girl who strikes out at her older sister in an absolutely calculating way. She’s seeking redress for years of what she considers abuse and dismissal and I was surprised at how much her anger shocked me. Was the revenge she sought so terrible if an adult and her boyfriend did not shrink away from helping her? This is a connection I may not understand, having been raised an only child. Perhaps the tension between siblings can result in such reactions. We have plenty of examples of it, with this story standing as a sort of witchy Cain and Abel update, but my experiences lack that specific tendril attachment. With that in mind, it might be interesting to read this book to see what you don’t connect with as much as what you do.

I won’t mention too much about “Spiders” because I genuinely cannot think of a way to discuss the story without completely spoiling it, but I want to mention that I read this story not long after reading articles about how it is that octopuses give human beings the best way to examine alien minds that we can find while confined to this planet. I had also recently seen the 2015 film Evolution, a minimalist horror story demonstrating the way humans could one day find themselves exploited for the benefit of a completely different, though somewhat visibly familiar species. Both media examples colored how I reacted to this story.

In fact, it was interesting how many of these stories, very unique in world-building and theory-creation, I read on the heels of or alongside media that traveled similar paths. The 2021 film Lamb comes to mind, as well as lower-rent movies on Shudder about angry teen girls who avail themselves of darker magic that seems a bridge too far considering the slights that caused them to lash out. I find coincidences like that meaningful though I seldom can pin down the meaning. Interesting nonetheless.

It’s a very rare short story collection when more than half of the stories are each worth the price of admission, as I like to put it. This collection is definitely worth reading and I highly recommend it.

Elaine by Ben Arzate

Book: Elaine

Author: Ben Arzate

Type of Book: Fiction, novel

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because I descended into the depths of a rabbit hole as I tried to puzzle out what this book meant.

Availability: Published in 2020 by Atlatl Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments: On the surface, Elaine appears to be a relatively straight-forward read. It’s a fun little book, creepy and frustrating with forays into the incestuous and the priapic. Good times!

But say you’re a woman who has recently been thinking of immigrating to Finland* because you are certain the legislature, the governor, the climate and the slowly crumbling infrastructure in Texas are all teaming up in some god-forsaken superhero quad that will destroy the world in general and you in the specific. If you are such a woman, you might find yourself a bit… uneasy. In fact, I’d finished reading a book about the charming custom of kalsarikanni, translated as “pantsdrunk,” right before picking up Elaine. The Finns take relaxation and drunkenness very seriously, it seems, but mostly I mention this because it seems a bit weird that once I had finished a book about Finnish relaxation, I immediately picked up a book, written by an American, that was populated by Finnish-Americans, most of them named Elaine.

Synopsis: Chris is dating a woman named Agnes, who grew up in a town in Michigan called Elaine. Agnes’s mother just died and Chris is joining her in her hometown as funeral plans are finalized. The roads to Elaine are closed, and the only way he can get there is by train. Every woman he meets is named Elaine, and none of them seem aware that every other woman is named Elaine, too. Agnes functionally disappears for the duration of the novel, leaving Chris in the company of her father in a town that is isolated, empty and unnerving. Chris is disturbed by bizarre, sexual dreams that initially focus on his sister, growing to include Agnes and other women he encounters in Elaine. No one is where they should be, Chris cannot find Agnes, her father eventually disappears as well, the town seems like a ghost town and the train in and out of Elaine stops running. Terrible things happen to Chris at the hands of the Elaines in Elaine, he finds disturbing connections between Agnes and the Elaines that are increasingly menacing and sexually overwhelming, and all of this is punctuated by a creepy, incestuous TV preacher who encourages father on daughter incest. Later Chris finds photos of Agnes with an Elaine who behaved sexually provocatively around him, and it seems very likely that the overall atmosphere of sexual degeneracy in the town caused Chris’ dreams that began on the train into Elaine. Was Agnes a victim of the Elaines herself? Maybe – the ending makes me believe perhaps she was. But all of this doesn’t really help me answer the question of what the absolute hell was going on in Elaine?

It’s a quick and fun read, but my inability to answer the above question plagued me. I didn’t descend directly down into the fear, paranoiacally assuming that the book was cosmically trying to tell me that my desire to go to Finland was a bad idea, Ben peppering the text with clues that would convince me to stay put. But Elaine did raise a lot of questions that I cannot answer. Well, I can’t answer them yet. I finally asked Ben some very generic questions, just outright demanding to know if there was subtext. Ben said there is, that he intends to follow this up with a story that will answer some questions. He didn’t give me any specifics, thankfully, but that confirmation that my instincts are on the mark, that there is something going on and the text gives clues caused me to descend yet again into the rabbit hole and worry all kinds of names and details to see if I could connect the dots.  I haven’t connected them yet but give me time.

Some rabbit hole samples:

“Elaine” is a French form of the Greek name, “Helen.” Helen literally means “shaft of light” or “rays of sun.” That might lead one to believe that there is some greater truth in Elaine, a symbolic revelation that occurs when in Elaine, or a beacon that leads people to Elaine so they can experience some form of enlightenment.

But the link to Helen also makes me wonder if all those Elaines wandering around the city of Elaine were the mid-western equivalents of Helens of Troy, possessing such intoxicating beauty that men would engage in all kinds of heroics to possess them. Most of the Elaines were young and very sexually attractive, and seemed more akin to sirens than a beauty so profound wars were fought over her, but the point is certainly worth mulling over.

A young couple goes missing early on in the book. A cat finds their bodies and the cat’s owner isn’t the least bit alarmed when her cat comes back home covered in viscera – in fact, the cat’s first instinct was to eat the couple’s exposed organs, which is weird behavior for cats. I know we all hear the stories about a cat lady dying and her starving cats eating her body, but cats have to be pretty hungry to do such a thing, and the cat, named Prami, is a pet who is presumably fed by its owner. But the cat is its own rabbit hole. “Prami” is a Finnish name that means “the sea” and a variant of this name is “Pontus.” Pontus was a son of Gaia, ruling the oceans before replaced by the Olympian god Poseidon. We also see the name in “Pontius Pilate,” the man who ordered the death of Jesus Christ. There’s so much there but I have no idea how to pull it together, and it’s made all the more maddening that I am doing this with a cat’s name but what would you have me do? Not worry all these details?

The couple who went missing in Elaine were young, and Elaine is an easy town to disappear into, as Chris will himself experience a bit later. Elaine appears to be a ghost town almost, but there are always people around the corner, in a store, scurrying around unseen until they enact some form of violence or create confusion for Chris. The town also has issues with power supply and cellular phone connectivity so one cannot seek help very easily. The couple who disappeared immediately rang a bell for me. In 2005, a young couple became lost in the Nebraska winter. They were on meth, and became so hopelessly turned around in the snow at night that they could not give accurate information to 911 operators, and their cell phone pinged from one tower to the next, making it impossible to narrow down where they were. The couple eventually left their car and died of hypothermia, but this case has some interesting traction because, much like the Elisa Lam case, many have a hard time believing that psychosis is a thing that happens, be it via mental illness or drug consumption. The couple reported seeing people in the trees, dressed in robes, convinced that they were being stalked and were about to be murdered. Some believe the couple were indeed being stalked by a cult of some sort, and were specifically driven out of their car into the snow in an attempt to kill the couple via hypothermia, based on the female’s account of blacks and Mexicans in cult garb moving cars around to confuse them. There is something very dark and cult-like in Elaine, something that obviously killed the young people whose innards ended up as cat snacks. And cell phones wouldn’t have saved the dead couple in Elaine either.

Does this mean anything? Probably not. But maybe?

Last point I niggled around with was Pastor Toivo, the repulsive televangelist whose giddiness describing biblical incest was unnerving. Later the pastor revealed he himself had been having sex with his daughter, named Elaine of course, and had sired children with her. Agnes’s father doesn’t have much of a reaction to any of this and says that he knows Pastor Toivo and that he can introduce Chris to him. Agnes’ father, Karl, says Toivo isn’t that much of a kook once you get to know him. If Ben revealed Toivo’s last name, I missed it, but “Toivo” means “hope” in Finnish. Pastor Toivo was the final nail in the coffin for me, so to speak, where Elaine was concerned. A lot of what is happening in Elaine can be explained away as just a young man experiencing sexual dreams under stress, a sad daughter acting strangely after her mother’s death, a small town that seems strange to outsiders, an overzealous police force with a Barney Fife level of incompetence combined with a demented blood lust. But Pastor Toivo? What father is okay with a man who uses the Bible to justify raping his daughter and having children with her? Who can look at such behavior and call it kooky? There’s something very wrong in Elaine and even the common folk there don’t seem to recognize it.

There’s more in this book to analyze, from the sexual behavior of the Elaines to a cloying figurine with an upsetting spiritual message. But you can also ignore all of my digging around and just enjoy the strangeness and upsetting nature of the book, which is often softened a bit by some of the ridiculous things that happen to Chris. Ben’s style is one I enjoy – he paints a picture without excruciating scene setting. He uses caricatures of specific behavior to paint ambiguous looks at surprisingly complex characters. It’s an enjoyable book that doesn’t require the sort of poking I do to enjoy it. But, if like me, you have a love of Finland combined with a lot of knowledge about weird stuff that resonates with you as you read, this book may become a bit more than a story of a young man in love being swallowed up by a weird town full of malignant people.

I recommend this book and really need for Ben to explain what Elaine is. I’m very likely on the wrong path, not seeing what Ben is hoping to convey in Elaine, but even if I am completely lost, it was still an enjoyable trip. This is a book that invokes a sort of creepy, insular pagan behavior that causes outsiders to call out for a cleansing fire, though who should burn isn’t entirely clear. Have a read and let me know how you feel at the end.

 

*Invariably, when I mention my desire to live somewhere in Scandinavia, people helpfully mention that it is cold there. It’s evidently very hard for people to believe a native Texan would want to go to some place so cold, and I guess they figure I must not know that Finland is a bit nippy at times and want to save me from making a terrible mistake. To me, the weather in Finland seems delightful because the only time they really seem like they are sweltering is when they specifically recreate in their saunas the conditions I find on my back porch nine months out of the year. Though as I type this I am sort of remembering how awful the February snow storm was, but I suspect Finland doesn’t have the same grid issues we have in Texas and I would have access to heat when the snow begins to fall in Helsinki. Even so, I would consider such cold to be a feature, not a bug.

Oddtober 2020: Sinful Cinema Series vol. 5 by Doug Brunell

Book:  The Amazing Mr. X from the Sinful Cinema Series

Author: Doug Brunell

Type of Book: Non-fiction, cinema studies, film criticism

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Less odd than disheartening – this book illustrates how it is that being very good at what you do is no assurance you will ever become famous or even well-respected in your craft.

Availability: Published by in 2020 by Chaotic Words, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Doug Brunell has become a staple of my “Oddtober” adventures.  I’ve read a little of his fiction (I read Black Devil Spine and my main criticism was that I wish he’d just let loose a bit more and wallowed in the depravity because he was soooo close to pulling off the most difficult feat a horror writer can achieve – pornographic violence that doesn’t pander) but am mostly familiar with his looks at weird, fringe and/or under-known films.  I hope he keeps updating his Sinful Cinema series until either I or this site dies because I think his work has become the OTC version of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. You gotta watch Linus out there in the pumpkin patch and you gotta have a Sinful Cinema volume or it just doesn’t feel like Halloween.

I am in a strange place with The Amazing Mr. X because I want to engage in my usual, endless examination, and this film isn’t outrageous like some of the films Brunell has explored. I have had no qualms about spoiling the plots of those films because the plot and characterization took a backseat to the shlock, sleaziness or overall hokeyness.  Few watch Crypt of the Living Dead or The Abductors for plot complexity or interesting characterization and god help those who find such titles and hope that at least the acting is decent.  But Brunell has a gift for seeing the intent behind bad or outrageous films, showing his readers unexpected ways to look at the plots, character arcs that would have been missed among all the stilted delivery and random boob shots, and his biographies of those involved in the films show the crazy ways Hollywood is connected, from the winding paths between sexploitation and Disney franchises to how the name of a small boat that takes a researcher to a vampire-infested, in-bred island can demonstrate the uneasy interactions between rational science and pagan tradition.  Without Brunell, the average film fan might not have ever understood all of these connections and ideas that permeate even the crappiest low budget horror film, and his extraordinary love of the subject redeems films I would have ignored had I known about them.

That is not the case with The Amazing Mr. X. I can see watching this just because.  In fact, I sort of want to watch it with Mr. OTC to see what he thinks of it.  As Brunell notes in his examination, this film has a lot of things that hamper it, mainly the title, which leads one to believe that this is going to be some sort of character-driven science fiction film.  It’s not.  Brunell says it’s a noir film disguised as a horror film and he’s right.  Every actor hits their mark, the plot is a masterful series of misdirections that never seem forced or false, and all the important characters have unexpected redemption arcs that make sense and are not insulting, forcing a schmaltzy and happy ending.

So I don’t want to spoil this film.  I think you need to watch it, decide what you think is happening, and then read Brunell’s book.  This film is fairly easy to get hold of.  I watched it on Amazon Prime for free but the film is also all over YouTube.

Quick synopsis: The extremely wealthy Christine was widowed when her husband Paul died in a car crash. She feels his presence still and is having trouble moving on. Her somewhat annoying but adorable younger sister, Janet, wants her to accept an engagement ring from her new suitor, Martin, a likeable guy, but on the night when Martin proposes, Christine meets Alexis, a clairvoyant and spiritualist (who has a big squawking crow as his familiar, a bird whose role in this film was not clear to me until Brunell explained the ending), who knows all about Paul and Martin.  His unexpected knowledge weighs on her until she consults Alexis for help and becomes a regular client of his as she uses his psychic powers to try to reconnect with Paul.  Paul’s memory is causing Christine to become unhinged and Janet and Martin become suspicious of Alexis. They hire a private investigator, who is a former magician who knows all the tricks of psychic con men (a sort of James Randi figure, may he rest in peace), to look into the psychic and, sure enough, he has a file on Alexis.  To make sure Alexis is the man he thinks he is, the investigator and Martin send Janet in as bait to get his fingerprints but Alexis is two steps ahead of them because he is, indeed, a con man. That may seem like a spoiler but it isn’t because the viewer knows Alexis is a fraud the moment she sees him.  But in the end, Christine really is in danger, Paul is the source of this danger, and by the time everyone figures out what is going on, Christine is more or less a second thought as far more interesting characters shape the end.

This film is an interesting history piece.  Filmed in 1948, it comes at a sort of crossroads in cultural reactions and social movements.  Young widows filled with grief at the untimely deaths of their young husbands were not uncommon after WWII, so this movie had a sort of anchor in Christine. But spiritualism was dying off, men like Alexis raising more suspicion than praise, so much so that the film’s title was changed from The Spiritualist. But Christine (and Janet) are wealthy, presumably through their family, leaving them prey to con men, while also showing that they didn’t need anyone to take care of them.  Moreover, Alexis, played by Turhan Bey (who was known as the “Turkish Delight” and once dated Lana Turner but couldn’t marry her because his mama didn’t approve), was shoved into a role that was losing potency.  The trope of women swooning over suave sheik types of men was drawing to an end.  Yet in spite of these issues, from the terrible title to the tired tropes to the lack of a “big name,” the film works.  Brunell speculates that if one big name had been cast, this film would today be far better known than it is.

One of the benefits of reading Brunell’s books after watching these films is that they encourage me to watch carefully, almost training me in film analysis.  I missed the subtext behind the ending, and there were other bits and pieces I didn’t pick up on.  But it’s interesting what I did see before I read Brunell, things I would have missed ordinarily.  For example:

–I didn’t entirely connect the dots but I felt a sort of discordance at first because it seemed like Christine, who was played by the lovely Lynn Bari, was the protagonist of the film.  Why was the film called The Amazing Mr. X if Christine is the lead character?  Well, she isn’t.  Alexis is, and that misdirection is intentional and part of why this film is so clever.

–Janet, who is at least ten years younger than Christine, has a chipmunk voice, appears ditzy and silly, and Alexis is able to ingratiate himself to her by insinuating that she is actually the more mature, more grounded of the sisters. Even Christine scoffs at this but Alexis is not wrong. Janet may be silly but she is not plagued by ghosts of dead husbands with questionable motives, she offers unwavering moral support, and is capable of saving lives when the chips are down.  Christine, who has a sort of Joan Crawford, 1940s remote elegance that often is linked to feminine intelligence, is easily fooled, ridiculously unable to act in her own best interests, and at the end the least interesting character in the film.

–I wondered why I liked the bad guy – Alexis – so much when he was a con man.  Because I’m supposed to.  Again, the director laid out a path I was walking on before I knew I was even walking.

And I picked up on these things because I was anticipating Brunell’s book and what it would show me.  It’s a fun sort of mental exercise, a puzzle that connects my experience to the ideas of someone very well-versed in film while showing me the puzzle pieces that I missed.  For example, Brunell’s discussion of the lighting in the film was fascinating and far outside my wheelhouse.

And though the cast and crew biographies are not as salacious as those in the other volumes of Sinful Cinema I’ve read, they are still very interesting.  For example, one of them was blacklisted by McCarthy.  One was utterly beloved by all who knew him. One actress lost her acting contracts when she refused to divorce her husband at the demand of a studio executive. And all of them, very good at their craft, never achieved the fame they deserved.  Seriously, this was a tight cast.  The weakest link was the detective and even he had decent acting chops.  If you dislike Christine, it’s because Lynn Bari’s performance was deliberate in its attempt to create that emotion.  If you begin to enjoy the Gidget-like Janet, well-done because she’s a character who only seems like a caricature of a chatty blonde until you juxtapose her with the more “competent” female character and realize she’s pretty cool.  (And though you aren’t wholly expected to want to root on Alexis as he cons Christine, if you do find yourself feeling ambiguous about him, you’re in good company because I didn’t want Christine to come to harm, but if Alexis got a few bucks out of her, c’est le vie.)

Brunell’s other four volumes in the Sinful Cinema series focus on more outrageous or fringe fare and initially I wondered if I was watching the correct film because I didn’t find myself falling into the sort of MST3K mindset one uses when watching a film that is notably terrible in some manner.  This is a well-crafted, though certainly flawed film, with an interesting script, good actors, and mystery elements that are always honest, never resorting to uneven characterization or left-turn plot twists.  Yet in its own way its as much an outlier as Crypt of the Living Dead because the cast and crew themselves remained outliers in an acting community that never gave them their well-earned dues, the film itself got lost among other noir films that didn’t mislabel themselves via terrible titles, and this film seems… cursed in a way, including a leading lady who died in a notorious fashion before the film began production, and terrible timing.

I really enjoyed Brunell’s tour through The Amazing Mr. X. It was particularly enjoyable seeing his keen eye take on a film that isn’t mostly boobs, poor acting, terrible casting, and inexplicable plot elements.  It’s great to see unexpected weirdness in more mainstream and conventional fare.  Highly recommended.

Happy Halloween!

Well, I had intended to follow up yesterday’s entry about the WKCR radio broadcast hijack with some new information I found about the names uttered in the chant in the audio clip.  I have, predictably, fallen down a rabbit hole.  Like I think maybe I’ve solved the link between the names but need some more time, or I’ve hit the bottom of an empty rabbit warren and need to dig my way out, probably filled with shame at my hubris.  We’ll see.  Once I know which way it’s going, I’ll post about it.

And that’s kind of a lame way to end Oddtober 2019.  But hey, I’ve written about a lot of weird crap over the years and I seldom do revisiting compilations so I feel like maybe I’ll just link to some of my lesser seen odd/creepy/horrific entries and get back to listening to a weird audio recording that reminds me I have tinnitus every time that bell rings.

But anyway, read away and enjoy your day!

Murder/Serial Killers

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths

Thirteen Girls

The Postcard Killer: The True Story of J. Frank Hickey

The Paranormal

Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us

How People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It

Aliens

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens

The Cryptoterrestrials

Horror or Unsettling Fiction

House of Leaves

Drujika, Contessa of Blood

The Cannibal’s Guide to Ethical Living

Ruthless: An Extreme Shock Horror Collection

Necrophilia Variations

Dust

Horror Films

Only Lovers Left Alive

The Bunny Game

Places and Personal Stories

Ben Thompson’s Grave

Slave Cemeteries

The Liberty Hill Witch Grave

Baby Head Cemetery

The Mom Ghost

The Abductors, #1 in the Sinful Cinema Series by Doug Brunell

Book: The Abductors: Sinful Series 1

Author: Doug Brunell

Type of Book: Non-fiction, cinema review, film history

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because the film is a huge, steaming pile of horse shit but Brunell’s love and enthusiasm for this type of grindhouse/sexploitation genre actually made me second guess my initial reaction.

Availability: Published by Chaotic Words in 2016, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Jesus Allah fuck, this is a terrible film.  I’m not going to say you in particular would hate this film because a lot of you have weird tastes or you wouldn’t be reading here in the first place. Also, if you mute it so that you are not subjected to appalling dialogue delivered by people who probably would have been better used in outright porn, there are some interesting things going on. For example:

–If you are tired of seeing buoyant, surgically enhanced breasts, the natural boobs in this film may be just what the doctor ordered.  Additionally, people tired of the PAWG trope will delight in the mostly flat, often saggy butts found on the women (and men) in The Abductors.

–How do you feel about pubic hair?  Fans of the bush will love this movie.

–Do you have strong opinions about hairy chests on men lacking even the 1970s Burt Reynolds version of muscles, who look hilarious when they get handcuffed to trees?  You are in luck.

–Do you harbor unresolved and unsettling feelings about helicopters, especially when you see them flying low over trees or landing on lakes so small you sense that they received a fine for even trying to land, let alone trying in the dead of night? Take this film to your therapist.  It could be key in your recovery.

–Have people told you that if the Olympics had a “cringe” category, your grimaces could bring home a gold medal?  Do you need practice covering up second-hand embarrassment so that you can endure your Uncle Jack’s casual sexism as he gets drunk at Christmas dinner?  Consider this film your training camp.

So it’s clear that this is a bad, bad film.  And that’s okay.  Without bad films we wouldn’t have had Mystery Science Theater 3000. The bad film has its charms, and Doug Brunell has such a keen eye and sympathetic take on the genres that bring us terrible films that if you read his books after you watch the films he discusses, you can genuinely find yourself wondering if maybe you got it all completely wrong.  To be completely frank, you probably won’t find much in Brunell’s writing that redeems this film, nor does he serve as an apologist for bad cinema (he refers to this film as being part of a “sleaze saga”). Rather, he accepts films as they are, discusses the times that spawn such films and the career arcs of the people involved. He recognizes the film’s many (many, many) flaws, but he also has such a great knowledge of genre, the specific cinematic tropes at work when older schlock was released, and the various ways filmmakers attempted to subvert those tropes, that the background he gives as he discusses the movies is the price of admission for the Sinful Cinema series.

And to be blunt, there is charm to schlock. For interior designers, it’s the Memphis Group.  For bibliophiles, it’s the “so bad it’s good” that writers like Richard Laymon and VC Andrews bring to the table. What would bad music discussions be without The Shaggs and Jandek?  When you read Brunell’s take on schlock films, you see the charm.  Whether or not the charm works on you is subjective.  But when you read Brunell’s work, objectively you see how one bad movie’s reach can extend into cinema you’d never expect from a sexploitation film.  Brunell sees how it is that the worst can be a link to the best, or maybe just a link to something that isn’t quite as bad. His knowledge and love of the topic are infectious, so much so that I actually sat through the whole of The Abductors so I would be assured I could follow his book about the film.

Quick synopsis: This film is the second in the “Ginger” trilogy but if Doug Brunell doesn’t write a book about the other two films I’ll be damned if I watch them.  So the plot is simple: White slavers are kidnapping women to sell to men who can blow $100k in 1970s money on cheerleaders taken hostage and “trained” to be excellent companions for really old men who wear Sansabelt slacks and live in a split-level home with orange shag carpet. After a convertible with three witless cheerleaders is run off the road, the three women kidnapped, a private investigator calls in Ginger, a woman who may be a spy, may be a detective, but never wears a bra, to help him.

(Honest to god, the first time we see her in street clothes, she is wearing a cropped denim vest with no buttons or zipper and no top underneath.  Later when she tries to seduce a bad man who unties her bizarre top that looks like the old Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders’ tie uniform but as imagined by Fredrick’s of Hollywood and made by a hippie who learned to crochet in rehab, she takes forever to retie it and when she does, she ties it with her boobs outside of the fabric.  She spends a lot of time topless or naked. Oh, and I remember this most clearly: the credits say “Chantilly Place” provided Cheri Caffaro, the lady who played Ginger, with all her “knits.”)

Together Jason, the private eye, and Ginger manage to track down the slavers by recruiting a pretty private eye and having her swallow a pill of some sort that allows them to track her for up to 25 miles. But before this happens, Ginger gets involved with a pudgy dude who looks like Steve Majors but isn’t (the scene where he dances with Ginger in what appears to be the courtyard of a rest home for geriatric hotel band members is cringe-gold – she’s actually got maracas). Pretty private eye gets kidnapped by slavers, Ginger watches her be relocated on a helicopter on pontoons, and is so upset she befouls a white shag carpet with like-Steve-Majors-but-isn’t and dun-dun-DUN, afterward he takes her hostage because SPOILER ALERT: he’s the head slaver.

Predictable stuff happens – all the men involved are dumb and will spill any number of beans if you show them boobs or grab their dick. Sex is had atop a pool table. An enormous henchman who “trains” the girls gets kicked in the crotch by a girl and then kicks her in the crotch in response (his name is weird and I cannot recall it now but Mr. OTC and I called him “Jablowme”). A woman gets gut punched, sexual torture is implied, but it all ends well when Ginger escapes and gets all the information she needs out of like-Steve-Majors-but-isn’t by, and I shit you not, restraining him in a shower, spraying him with water from the shower head and soaping him up.  He is utterly undone by the water spray, begging her not to spray his chest anymore.  Brunel actually manages to discuss this scene in a thoughtful manner that never would have occurred to me.

The three kidnapped girls end up really liking the men who bought them and stay with them. Ginger and Jason are nearly shot by a banker’s desk guns, but good prevails, the end.

The biggest problem with the film is that no one can act. Ginger speaks only in double entendres and they are delivered with a flat, smirking dullness. The men are all dumb or speak in gangster-ese. Every man seems like he’s dressed like a leisure-suit Harlequin, all the women have their nipples exposed at all times, and what is represented as the height of luxurious domestic decadence would need to be fumigated to qualify as a modern Motel 6.  The abducted girls only speak when they are introduced to the used car salesmen who purchased them, asking them innocent questions over dinner, wondering how they will be able to explain to the neighbors that they are sex slaves.  But the plot, oh the stupid plot, and the acting, tend to make all the excellent cheese turn into something that is merely cheesy.

Most notable is how difficult it will be for modern audiences to stomach this film.

This 90 minute film is sometimes a chore to watch. Bad acting, inexplicable costume and hair changes in the middle of a driving scene, and the idea that all women need is either a skilled lover or to be raped in order to “break” them all work to erode the average viewer’s patience, tolerance and sanity. Watching young women’s breasts be groped and twisted as they are told they are about to be tested for their sexual skills is something rarely seen in current non-pornographic, semi-mainstream or mainstream films, though it was a bit more common place in the daring ’70s.

But applying current mores to an old film should only be done when one is comparing the changes, not condemning that which is outdated for being outdated.  Brunell doesn’t do that and his refusal to condemn these films for their lack of PC content is refreshing.  He actually reproduces a couple of lines from an Amazon review that remarks that this film is an affront to all that is politically correct.  But placing the film in the context of the time when it was made, Brunell points out that while the film is sexist, even as it tries to make Ginger into a badass investigator/spy who can kick ass and suck cock and always solve the case, it is notably lacking in the casual racism that was part and parcel of the sexploitation and grindhouse film industry.

And because he has watched all three Ginger films, Brunell can sincerely explain how this film is an improvement upon the first, that Ginger has a character arc that was as important to the filmmaker as showing her boobs in every scene.  I think that’s important to know, that underneath it all, goals were set and achieved and that some people may have actually improved their acting chops. This was someone’s artistic vision – they were trying very hard to make a good movie.

The best part of Brunell’s examinations of these films is his look at the people in the films and where they ended up.  He has an interview with Jeramie Rain, who played “Jane,” one of the three abducted cheerleaders (she’s the one with the short dark hair, which naturally means she’s the one who was best suited to be a dominatrix, hilariously beating the bed next to her new owner with a double-coiled black whip). Rain is very notable for her role in The Last House on the Left, the Wes Craven film that fucked me up so badly that I will never forget Mari’s near-pre-Raphaelite death scene, her hair spreading out into the water as she dies.  Rain plays Sadie, the psychopathic moll who delights in the violence her male friends inflict on the girls they abduct.  Rain has some interesting stories about the film.

Brunell also notes that future porn actor Harry Reems, from Deep Throat, has a role in this film of the “blink and you’ll miss it variety.” Best of all, he shows the direct line from the director of this sleazy and unintentionally hilarious film to a lucrative Disney franchise. The cast info at the end of Brunell’s books never fail to surface some WTF details that show how small the entertainment world really is.

So what I am trying to say here is that this is a terrible film and you should only watch it in conjunction with Brunell’s Sinful Cinema series.  The worst film has to offer is often swallowed easier when you have someone who is knowledgeable in the genre, both sympathetic to and willing to discuss with humor the film’s many flaws, and able to write about it all in books that inevitably are better than the films that Brunell examines.  I highly recommend you check out Brunell’s work.

And yeah, this is more Odd than October, but maybe if you watch The Abductors, you’ll find the perfect Halloween costume.  Seventies banker, hot pants cheerleader, plaid-suited sex lord, or maybe you can just walk around naked like Ginger did. All you’ll need is a platinum wig!

The Devil Called Collect by J. Stephen Conn

Book: The Devil Called Collect: The Exorcism of Jessica Leek

Author: J. Stephen Conn

Type of Book: Non-fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it’s the sweetest, sincerest book about exorcism ever written.

Availability: Self-published in 2008 using iUniverse, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I bought this book off Amazon knowing nothing about it other than the title.  You have to admit this is an excellent title.  Isn’t that just like the Devil to call collect? And after that he leaves the toilet seat up and drinks milk straight from the carton. Of course I thought this strangely anti-climactic title masked a turgid and purple story of a young priest and an old priest milking pea soup out of some beleaguered victim of demonic possession. But that isn’t the case.  This is the least melodramatic, matter-of-fact, strangely sweet exorcism tale I’ve encountered, and I’ve encountered quite a few.  And because this book presents such a benign and relatively uneventful exorcism, I actually believe these events occurred as Rev. Conn presents them.

I mean, I think most of us understand that these sorts of cases are embellished, and if you are a heathen non-believer like me, you think such cases are embellished because there is no Satan or various demons to possess us.  There’s just mental illness and hucksters and between the two we get some amazing stories. I love those amazing stories, too.  Give me a book in the vein of the many cases Ed and Lorraine Warren pimped over the years and I’ll probably consume it in one sitting.  I love the late Warrens, but they never met a haunting or possession that they couldn’t tart up in some manner. Horror writer Ray Garton talked about what it was like to write the book, A Dark Place, about the Snedeker family’s haunting.  The story he wrote was later adapted into the film A Haunting in Connecticut, and he doesn’t mince words explaining that the Snedeker adults and the Warrens engaged in a long-con fraud.

But we know that, don’t we? I mean, some of us do.  And that most stories of hauntings and possessions are false doesn’t really deter my enjoyment of such stories unless I know that something extraordinarily awful occurred in the commission of the fraud, or if a family that was enduring something they genuinely could not explain were manipulated by exorcists or paranormal investigators.  While the Warrens were definitely manipulators to a degree, their roles in cases were generally that of conspirators or comforting shoulders to cry upon. You either made some money with them or you gave them the wretched doll you insist was trying to kill you and they kept it behind glass, relieving you psychologically until they launched a tiresome movie franchise around that evil toy.

That is not what is happening in this book.  I know nothing about J. Stephen Conn, but that he writes such a plain and earnest story about an exorcism of a young woman scores some serious points in his favor, where truth is concerned.  I believe that Rev. Conn believed everything “Jessica Leek” told him, and that he believes he helped save her from spiritual torture.  That the story doesn’t hold much water doesn’t really matter where my opinion of him stands because even if I don’t believe Jessica Leek and can poke holes in her story from miles and decades away, he did believe her.  He did his best to help and he never once reverted to movie cliches or deeply Catholic exorcism tropes.

Even though there was a backbone of cinematic exorcist movies and books at the time this story occurred, there is a refreshing innocence and a genuine desire to help found in all the religious folk in this book.  The story begins in Georgia in 1980, and the clergy involved are Methodists. It was easier for these clergy to imbue fewer “liar liar pants on fire” motives to Jessica than I would have, had I been an adult at the time. I hope I don’t sound like I am patronizing Rev. Conn and his associates.  To the contrary, honest people believe other people are honest, and good people tend to expect good behavior from others.  Feel free to do the moral math on why I am such a skeptic.  Even though this book was written 27 years after the events took place, Rev. Conn used notes he and his wife took at the time and even with decades of distance, the book he wrote was still informed by the young family man who just wanted to deliver a young woman from evil.

Not so short summary: In March, 1980, a young woman whom Rev. Conn calls “Jessica Leek” makes a collect call to him at around 2:00 a.m., early on Wednesday morning.  He accepts the charges and Jessica, in a soft voice, asks if he can help her.  She tells him she is in Atlanta, that she’d been hitch-hiking but had been left on the side of the road, and someone had given her his number as someone who could help.  But Rev. Conn was in Augusta, 145 miles away.  He advises her to call a church in Atlanta. But she can’t do that, she says, because she is:

…a witch of the fifth degree.  I’m about to be initiated into the sixth degree of our Order and all of a sudden I’m scared. Strange things are going on and I’m afraid something bad might happen to me.

Rev. Conn actually apologizes to the reader for seeming like he was trying to foist this hitch-hiking witch off on the church in Atlanta, then tells Jessica again she needed to contact the church closer to her.  She plaintively asks him if he will help her, why can’t he help her?  He explains that he’s not sure if he can, that the only person who can is Jesus Christ.  Upon hearing that name, Jessica begins to speak in a demonic voice, that says:

No, no, you can’t have her.  Just hang up the phone.  You can’t have her.  She is mine.

Of course, he doesn’t think she could possibly have produced the demonic voice, and that proves, in a way, that she’s really far more troubled than he expected, that this isn’t just a drunk girl worried about being stuck on the road for the rest of the night.  Rev. Conn asks who is speaking, wondering if she has a boyfriend there with her, but the demon in Jessica says, to effect, that they are legion.

Uh oh.

Continue Reading “The Devil Called Collect by J. Stephen Conn”

Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy by Doris Sanford

Book: Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse

Author: Doris Sanford, illustrated by Graci Evans.

Type of Book: Children’s book, illustrated, utter fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, it’s no My Friend, The Enemy: Surviving Prison Camp, but it has its moments.  Also, discussing the background of this book takes up much more intellectual space than the book itself.

Availability: Published in 1990 by A Corner of the Heart, it’s out of print, but if you have money to burn and enjoy that sickening feeling you get when you realize you have a relic of an entirely different form of child abuse than the book professes to tackle, you can still get a used copy on Amazon.  However, the book is so reviled that Amazon will not permit me to link to it directly.

Comments: The late 1980s and early 1990s were a weird time. All over rural and suburban America, white people became very afraid of Satan, and sometimes even “real” Satanists participated in the freak show of Satanic Panic.  Some of us listened as Bob Larson, huckster and self-taught exorcist, attempted to exorcise demons out of Trey Azagthoth, from the death metal band Morbid Angel.  Glen Benton, front man of Deicide, spent a lot of time taunting Bob, and frankly that time could have been better spent injecting heroin straight into his balls, but, like I said, it was a weird time.  Geraldo, Sally Jesse Raphael and Oprah had the pre-cursors of soccer moms convinced that Satanist wolves infiltrated every corner of the planet – but mostly white, middle-class pre-schools, it seems – in order to pass as sheep, ready to savage their children.

It was a very dark time, my sarcasm aside. Families were destroyed because poorly trained and dogma-afflicted therapists and hysterical, mostly fundamentalist Christian, parents believed children could not be led into making up salacious details about abuse that never happened.  They believed children when those children, after hours and hours and sometimes days and days of leading and suggestive comments, told impossible stories about abuse that they claimed was heaped upon them at day care centers. The McMartin pre-school case is one of the best examples of the Satanic Panic run amok.

A mother, whom members of the community later admitted was utterly unstable and had a history of making false accusations, was convinced that Raymond Buckey, son of the owner of the McMartin day care center, had sodomized her son.  She went to the police during a time when law enforcement was willing to believe such claims without much in the way of evidence, and during the investigation letters were sent to parents of children who attended the day care, asking them to check with their children to make sure Raymond hadn’t, you know, raped them repeatedly.  Predictably, parents became hysterical and some of the most poorly trained therapists ever to worry about men in hoods in the woods pressured McMartin attendees until they remembered any number of absolutely impossible situations, involving every McMartin employee, as well as random strangers unlucky enough to be lumped into the group of suspects.

McMartin kids, under the questioning of a therapist who really needed there to be a terrible scandal and shaped one that fit neatly with her bizarre beliefs, insisted that sometimes they were flushed down toilets into tunnels under the school and used in Satanic orgies.  They claimed they saw lions and horses killed, as well as rabbits being frequently killed in front of them to make them compliant.  They claimed they watched as babies were sacrificed at the local Episcopal church. They claimed Raymond Buckey could fly, that they were filmed naked and their abuse was taped as a game the adults called “naked movie star.” Nary a photo or film clip was ever found. It never really seemed to register with the therapists involved that something was wrong with all these weird stories, not even when kids could not identify Raymond, their supposed rapist who flew and killed rabbits, but did identify Chuck Norris as one of the men who harmed them. No one felt a bit unsettled when the kids spoke of being taken from abuse locations in hot air balloons, or that the kids were taken to cemeteries during the day and forced to dig up corpses, which their day care instructors began to stab repeatedly, hacking the bodies up before forcing the kids to rebury them. Even more bizarre physical evidence was used to prove the accusations of kids who had no physical signs that they had been abused, let alone repeatedly raped, cut, or beaten.  The now utterly debunked “wink” anus test was used on little kids, and as a result those little kids ended up being sexually abused by the people set on saving them from abuse.

That’s a problem that comes up a lot in Satanic Panic cases – if the kids weren’t victimized by those accused of abuse, the accusers put the kids through such nightmarish questioning and physical examinations that they were definitely victimized.  Some of the McMartin kids have grown into adults who believe the system failed them, permitting the people who sacrificed endless numbers of babies to Satan while raping them and their friends to eventually go free.  They feel traumatized and victimized and their lives have been ruined.  While a lot of people look at this kiddie book as a real life example of Liartown’s fine book parodies…

The world is a terrible place and we know this because only two of these books are fake.

…it’s only funny if you don’t know the truth behind it.

As I type this, I know people who really are into Dave McGowan’s Programmed to Kill, the belief that Bush the Elder led a pedophile cult that preyed on kids involved in the Franklin Scandal, and every minute detail from the whole of the recent Pizzagate weirdness are going to come call me a black propagandist, insinuate I get paid by the Podesta brothers to write such articles or accuse me of being a pedophile.  Same as it ever was.  Every such commenter reads a refutation of their hobby horse and feels it is an apologia for child abuse as a whole when it’s really just other people questioning their intellectual fitness. It makes me glad this book is out of print. Perhaps it’s best they waste their time leaving me silly comments because otherwise they might actually engage in real life advocacy and no one, especially children, needs that.

Now to the book.

Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy is a direct response to the McMartin pre-school case. It even brings up the game “naked movie star.” (The key, or should I say “Kee,” therapist involved with the McMartin case, took a slightly bawdy rope skipping chant and turned it into a tacit admission of kiddie porn involvement – “What you say is what you are, you’re a naked movie star!” Our weird chant when I was a kid was a vulgar variation of the song “Tah rah rah boom dee-ay.” We all had them but, again, it shows a lot about the mentality of the professional adult who immediately believes such silly rhymes mean kids are being gang raped.)

The story is pretty basic – little girl gets Satanically abused at her day care, she tells her parents, who work hard to help her recover, and assure her that God was really sad she was abused.

The illustrations in the book are drawn by Graci Evans and they do a decent job of revealing some McMartin realness.

Pay close attention. Note the pregnant woman with the tiny cups on a tray. She’s probably gonna sacrifice her baby to The One with Horns and those cups held sedatives for the kids. Also note Allison’s drawing – a rabbit with bloody ears.
Okay, so some of the children are naked and that noose is really small. Children whose parents bought this book unironically deserve reparations.

I’m unsure what to think about Doris Sanford.  I can’t really find much information about her, aside from basic obituary-level information – she appears to have died in 2018.  She began her foray into self-help books for kids by discussing the impact of parental depression on kids, and how hard it is for kids to process death, both helpful and useful books.  Even her books about sexual abuse at home seem charmingly helpful in comparison to Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy. But over time her titles became more… upsetting.  How many kids were out there who survived death camps and also had access to American book stores?  The kids in Rwanda weren’t gonna see Doris’ book about death camps, nor were kids who suffered in the Balkans. But she wrote a book about it. And she wrote this book, and no matter what alarmists tell you, Satanic Ritual Abuse is rare and hardly has an audience large enough to support a book helping the children who survive it.

Was Doris a True Believer in Satanic Panic?  Was she jadedly making a buck off the backs of people who were clearly already willing to torture their kids?  I have no idea. Worse, her book may well have been the lesser of several other evils.  I remember a woman on my street when I was a kid who would give out Jack Chick tracts and a dime to each kid on Halloween.  My mom made me go to her door each year that I trick-or-treated because she wanted to see what lunacy I’d walk back with. I lack the will to look up the exact title, but I remember one year I got a tract about how some kid died and when he went to heaven God showed him every terrible thing he’d done on some sort of celestial slide show projector, and I began to worry if my mom was trying to tell me God had a rap sheet on me a mile long and I needed to get my shit together.  Really, she just wanted to see what crazy crap the woman was giving out that year. But I remember being very upset that God had basically set up surveillance on me and was collecting evidence of every sass back, every lie, every thing a child does because she’s a child, in order to shame me when I died.  At least Doris’ books had decent production values.

So I guess what I am saying is that people love witch hunts and that will never not be true, and every generation has their own unique way of terrifying kids with images of Satan.

But this book, all kidding aside, is an excellent relic of the time that spawned it.  And for all I know it was a legitimate and sincere attempt to address what at the time seemed like a terrible societal ill.  But the utter perversity of the accusations, the beliefs people had about well-organized cabals preying upon the most privileged and well-protected children in human history, shows a sort of sickness within that even now people don’t like to address. What do you do if your mother is certain you were sodomized in a tunnel by an American icon like Chuck Norris, who most definitely did not have large chunks of time he could be away from film and TV sets to hang around in subterranean lairs to rape toddlers?  How do you cope with the rectal exams you were forced to endure because adults really believed you were taken away in hot air balloons to be raped in the Episcopal church? What does that say about the secret fantasies and moral bruises of those who believed such unbelievable, foul, bloody and sexually perverse things?

I have an answer of sorts in a film I will discuss tomorrow, an animated film inspired by this specific book. See you then.

Leaves from the Smorgasbord by Hank Kirton

Book: Leaves from the Smorgasbord

Author: Hank Kirton

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, flash fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because the collection begins with this disclaimer:

Most of these stories were written while I was either going through chemotherapy or locked in rehab. That might help explain things. Or not.

Availability: Published by Crumbling Asphalt in 2017, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Oh god, that disclaimer tore my heart into several pieces. And filtering these stories through that disclaimer ground those pieces up into a sort of heart hamburger. I don’t know Hank Kirton very well. I know him in that vague way many of us know each other – he read my site, I read his books, sometimes I see him on Twitter, I wouldn’t recognize him in real life though he might recognize me if I haven’t changed my hair in a while. But even though I don’t know him, I still know him because there are too many times his words have stepped off the page and recognized me and I waved back. Those words know me because Kirton and I share similarly strange cultural references. They know me because Hank Kirton writes in a way that gives shape to some of my thoughts, creating cultural links between unlikely ideas. There is a confluence of ideas, concepts, and milestones that happens when I read Kirton’s short fiction.

I still think of his story “Jelly” every time I hear Ulver’s “Nowhere Catastrophe.” Had Kirton heard that song before writing “Jelly”? Did it somehow influence him? It makes me wonder because the two pieces merge so seamlessly, a story and a song about human transformation into music, the written and musical notes at the end of a transfiguration.  Because he is able to tap veins so similar to my own, I think of Hank Kirton, the Writer, several times a month. Which is awful because as I consider him in his role as the Writer, I had no idea he was suffering as Hank Kirton, the Human Being. I know now. I have the physical representation of his time in hell right here in front of me, waiting for me to finally discuss it. I keep putting it off because this year is the decade anniversary of my own time in hell, a different sort of hell than Kirton’s but similar enough to show me that, again, I know Kirton, in the most miraculous and miserable ways possible.

Leaves from the Smorgasbord is a collection of 32 stories but is only 181 pages long. Kirton is a master of flash fiction, but routinely nails longer stories, too. This collection begins with “Hello,” a story about a desperate fifteen-year-old girl reaching out for help as she experiences a bad acid trip. She randomly dials a number in the middle of the night, and reaches Don, a 47-year-old Asian man who is sufficiently alarmed and kind enough to stay on the line with the frightened teen until she feels settled and safe. Then the rug gets abruptly pulled out from under the reader with a nasty slap in the face. When I finished this piece I recalled Johnny Truant’s story of salvation in House of Leaves that turned out to be a lie that any astute reader understood was a lie. I missed the lie and had a warm feeling of relief, that Johnny, strung out and without tether, was finally going to be okay. At the end of that lie and “Hello,” I felt the same sense of “how the fuck can I, an adult in Current Year, still buy into and feel comforted by treacly examples of human beings at their best?” But I do. And it still feels bad when my faith in mankind is tested and mankind fails. But this story is also pretty much a fantastic way to begin a short story collection written by a man who was undergoing chemo or detox as he wrote it. Goddamn it.

This story was strange for me because it was short, consisted solely of dialogue, yet I felt like I knew Don at the end.  I had the sense that even though there was no way I could really make such an assertion, Don was the sort of man who, even after being set up for cruelty, would not hang up the phone should another person call in the middle of the night, needing someone to talk to. I don’t think Don was ultimately bothered much – he was probably just relieved to learn no one was really in any sort of trouble. Don is sort of a placid lake onto which tiresome stones were skipped but ultimately his surface would smooth out once more. Don is a stable mooring to which the other stories are secured, keeping the reader from drifting out into a miserable sea of bad, baffling and surreal behavior.

Hank hits way too close to home for me with “Blimpo Saves.” It’s 1971 and Neal, a stoner up way too early on a Sunday morning, eating a bowl of Frankenberry cereal, is watching a Christian cartoon wherein a blobby clicking atrocity brings the love of Jesus to the children unlucky enough to be awake and watching television before the sun comes up on the Sabbath. Neal becomes increasingly disturbed by Blimpo. The kids in the cartoon translate Blimpo’s weird clicks but Neal senses that there is some sort of unholy Morse code behind the clicks, and Blimpy triggers a paranoia I’m so completely familiar with.

Blimpo says, “Click-click clickety click.  Click click click!” and Neal shivers as if he’s just heard his own epitaph.  The kids translate: “You don’t have to be scared of God’s love. It will protect you.” They say this to a frightened cartoon puffin named Paul.

Then Neal wonders if the kids translating Blimpo are actually Satanic minions, a reasonable conclusion to reach.

Neal begins to resent Blimpo for giving him The Fear. He decides Blimpo is a misguided messenger for Christian deliverance.  Those clicks of his are jive, he tells himself, mere jive, but this notion offers no consolation. He wants to change the channel but is afraid to move. He feels hypnotized by Blimpo’s clicks, his swollen ping-pong eyes.

Neal’s feelings about Blimpo closely mirror my own about Jon Konrath’s fine lunacy. But I also know what he means about Blimpo, a gross Christian pablum panderer that I sense may be based on the eerie and unwholesome JOT.

Did you ever see a JOT cartoon before you had the vocabulary and life experience to explain why watching it felt so very, very wrong? God, that thing was absolutely horrible, but at least Jot could speak.  And actually, now that I think about it, clicking would have been better than that chirping voice that shows that the Uncanny Valley can have an audio component.

When I was a kid, there was a locally-produced show in Dallas that came on before church called The Children’s Hour. The host, a well-intentioned man, I am sure, entertained children in a Christian manner, showing Christian cartoons and offering commentary. Puppets were involved. I am unsure what the goals of that show were but I suspect that they didn’t mean to plant seeds that bloomed into atheism. But what sort of lessons did they hope to convey, showing JOT, this minimalist biblical burden on children who don’t need to ponder the moral relativity of not getting dirty when they can’t even really speak properly yet? JOT was twitchy, man, with those hands (dirty or clean) that disappeared when he wasn’t moving.  Where was his nose?  Why didn’t his mother notice her small son had hands caked in mud, spit in a tissue and wipe him down before sending him off to Sunday school? Better yet, why didn’t the dumb creature just go back inside and wash his hands quickly before it was time for church?  If he could open the door and get out into the yard, he could have gone back in and quickly washed his hands. But then they’d have had to teach us how dawdling made Jesus cry so there was really no way out of being taught a largely irrelevant moral lesson about how being a small child capable only of the thoughts of a small child was probably an affront to God. The only truth I could find was that devout children as portrayed in cheaply-made cartoons were very stupid.

Continue Reading “Leaves from the Smorgasbord by Hank Kirton”

The Birdman of Leavenworth, a Death Row Proto-Kevorkian

I’m currently working on a new book (new, as in I have an OLD book and you should probably go buy a copy because my publisher deserves money for enduring my head-casery) and as I research I keep finding interesting alleys off the main street of my reading.  So many little snippets that likely won’t have a place in the larger story but are entertaining enough that I want to share them.

My upcoming book will be a look at personal manifestos and their role in shaping particular parts of contemporary culture as well as serving as at times unintentional autobiographies of the people who wrote them.  Less Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and more Elliot Rodger’s My Twisted World.  Some of the manifestos I am analyzing are quasi-political, like Valerie Solanas’ The SCUM Manifesto or Anders Behring Breivik’s 2083, but most of them are  analyses of the self that also stand as a statement or declaration of social or political aims.  One such manifesto is Carl Panzram’s autobiography, wherein he discusses how he came to be shaped into a multipurpose psychopath and why he felt entitled to engage in the mayhem that saw him imprisoned multiple times and ultimately executed.  As I researched Carl Panzram, I came across Panzram: A Journal of Murder by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long, editors, and an unexpected look at how the politics of the death penalty played out among the condemned.

Before he was The Birdman of Alcatraz, Robert Stroud was The Birdman of Leavenworth (which actually makes more sense as a moniker since he was never permitted to keep birds at Alcatraz).

Seriously, if there’s a bird with Stroud, he was at Leavenworth. Don’t challenge me on this, I’m ready.

The movie about him, starring Burt Lancaster, was before my time and I probably should watch it in due time, but from what I can tell it portrays Stroud in a very sympathetic manner (as does a more recent film about Panzram that stars James Woods).

Yep, that’s the wiener sidekick from House M.D. standing behind Woods/Panzram in the film Killer: A Journal of Murder.

But bear in mind, if Carl Panzram, dream date of late-child murderer Ian Brady, was a one-man-mayhem-machine, Robert Stroud, had he stayed out of prison longer, would have been his peer.  Though he spent decades nursing birds and researching cures for avian diseases at Leavenworth, Stroud was also a pimp and a murderer, and once imprisoned he was the instigator of many fights and eventually killed a prison guard.  That murder landed him on death row at Leavenworth, but his sentence was commuted and he spent 1918 through 1942 in solitary confinement at Leavenworth (which sounds much different than what prisoners experience in solitary in the USA today).  It was in solitary confinement in Leavenworth that Stroud “met” Carl Panzram.

Oh, and in case you were wondering how Stroud ended up in Alcatraz, the Birdman was caught using the equipment a benevolent prison warden gave him for his birds to make alcohol and sell within the prison.  Upon discovery of this side hustle, he was transferred to Alcatraz.

There are so many mug shots of Carl Panzram, under varying names, that it was hard to pick just one. I selected this one because I like that little curl of hair sticking up over his forehead. It’s easy to imagine him as a kid with hair like this, which is sort of awful now that I think about it.

Carl Panzram was a life-long criminal and an utter psychopath whose crimes ranged from audacious financial exploits on oil rigs in Africa to child rape to murder.  A victim of the harsh practices in reform schools and even harsher practices in prison, all attempts to rehabilitate him made him even worse.  He’d been in several prisons before ending up in Leavenworth, often under false names.  Panzram in prison was a man who just wanted to be left alone.  It’s hard to be left alone in prison and Panzram, in Leavenworth, became a pot waiting to boil over.  He reached his limit and started a prison riot when he killed the foreman in the prison laundry.  That earned him the death penalty and he was kept in solitary during his trial and the time during which he was awaiting execution, in the same solitary block as Robert Stroud.

(There’s a funny story about the end of the riot, too.  Or at least it was funny to me.  Panzram beat the prison laundry foreman to death with a pipe and rampaged through the prison with it in his hand.  When he reached a wing that a guard, Red Ballard, locked down anticipating his arrival, Panzram shouted at him to open the door. Ballard, terrified and shaken, said, “I will never let you in with that in your hand.” As if he forgot he was holding it, Panzram tossed the iron bar away and declared that this must be his lucky day.  Ballard called for assistance and, presumably, opened the door.)

During the trial, Panzram was clear that he wanted to be executed.  Many anti-death penalty groups tried to intervene on his behalf and in response Panzram essentially told them to take their do-gooder notions and go fuck themselves.  He was set on execution, not only because he was tired of the misery of prison life, but also in the spirit of telling the state and the penal system that since they created this monster, they needed to kill it.  A sort of slow-motion suicide by cop.

This attitude alarmed Robert Stroud to the point that he intervened. Or at least he tried.  Despite both men being in solitary confinement, there is ample evidence that Stroud and Panzram managed to effect some sort of communication, and that communication focused on one aim: Stroud wanted Panzram to kill himself.

Unsure if that is the actual gallows where Panzram was executed but I found this pic on a site called The Temple of Ghoul and with a name like that I have to think that if anyone has the actual photo, that site does. (http://templeofghoul.blogspot.com/2013/02/carl-panzram-spirit-of-hatred-and.html)

Stroud found himself on Leavenworth’s death row for the same offense as Panzram, for killing a prison employee, but his sentence was commuted to life.  Stroud to the end felt that Panzram’s yearning for execution was a bluff, that he would, like any reasonable man, want to cheat the executioner, even if it meant dying by his own hand.  But Stroud also felt very strongly that the death penalty – either through the state of Kansas or through the federal government – should never be performed on Leavenworth soil.  He even went so far as to give money to a campaign to prevent another solitary inmate from facing the death penalty for murdering a fellow Leavenworth prisoner.  There had been no executions at Leavenworth and Stroud, as well as many other death penalty abolitionists, did not want a death penalty precedent set.  From his isolation cell, Stroud could see the gallows being constructed and it fired his resolve that Panzram should be encouraged to kill himself to avoid being the man who brought the death penalty to Leavenworth.

Interestingly, Stroud managed to get information to Panzram regarding ways to end his life, and Panzram, afraid his death sentence might not be carried out, made a genuine suicide attempt.  From Panzram, A Journal of Murder (228):

Stroud began long disquisitions to the guard Red Ballard, to the orderlies and to Ono Manuel [another inmate] in a clear, loud voice, hoping that the information would reach Panzram.  He talked about how simple and painless it would be to end it all: press two fingers into the groin until the throb of the femoral artery can be felt, work the fingers back and forth until the artery is brought against the skin, and cut it with a long thumbnail or a chip of a razor blade.  Death would come in minutes.  This artery, Stroud explained in loud tones, is the only one which can be easily reached, yet cannot be tied off.  He also spoke of making a paper quill, opening a large vein anywhere, inserting the quill and blowing a bubble or two into the vein.  Or, he added, simple tap water would do it.

Ballard said nothing.  He closed the wooden door to Panzram’s cell and cautioned Stroud to lower his voice.

Red Ballard kept a very close watch on Panzram but he could not prevent the suicide attempt Panzram made on June 20, 1929 (the one year anniversary of beating the laundry foreman to death).  He had hidden a plate of beans he let go bad, making them poisonous.  He ate those beans and then opened a six-inch gash in his leg using a sharpened button.  Had he just slashed his leg he might have succeeded because it was the sound of him vomiting up the tainted beans that alerted the night guard that there was a problem in his cell.

Once the execution date was firmly set and no appeals were made, Stroud was still convinced that Panzram was bluffing, that he really did not want to die at the hands of the state and that he had simply been too incompetent to carry out his prior suicide attempt.  Since Panzram feared that the state might consider him too mentally unwell to execute, which was the impetus behind the attempt, there may have been some truth to the notion that he was inept with fear. Stroud may have been correct on that front because if there had ever been a man who knew how to kill, it was Panzram.  Still, a failed suicide involving bad beans and a button might help the case that Panzram was too mentally ill to execute and surely Panzram knew this.  It seems very likely that Panzram engaged in overkill with his methods of choice rather than failing due to incompetence. As the execution drew closer, Stroud upped his game and Panzram, in the end, showed his genuine intent.

Two weeks before the execution, Stroud saw his opportunity.  He wrote his earlier instructions on a slip of paper, broke a new Gillette blade in two and wrapped the paper around the top halves of the broken blade. Having found an old tube of watercolor gray, he painted the package the same color as the concrete floor.  He then persuaded a new short-term prisoner, who had been made an orderly in the isolation section, to throw the tiny packet into Panzram’s cell the first time the guard, Red Ballard, turned his head.  The orderly agreed […].

The packet was dropped into Panzram’s cell without incident […]. 238-239)

Stroud had some hope that Panzram would use the blades and take his own life because Panzram held onto the blades until two days before his execution, and then turned them over to guard Red Ballard (who really needed to be paid far more than he was for dealing with all he endured during his tenure at Leavenworth).

“Where did you get these?” Ballard demanded.

“None of your damned business,” said Panzram. (239)

Stroud may have been onto something because why else would Panzram have held onto the blades for around ten days, turning them in so close to the execution.  Was he wavering until the end, perhaps mulling over how he wanted to die?  Did the packet with the blades sit unseen on his prison floor for a while, so well camouflaged by Stroud’s watercolor? More likely he wanted insurance in the event the state decided on a last minute pardon and commuted his sentence, one that carried a better chance at success than rotten beans and a shaved-down button. It’s hard to say why Panzram kept the blades for so long, but in the end the state did execute him. He had the option of slashing his wrists or neck or groin but went to the gallows instead.

And of course, the statement Panzram is most famous for occurred on the gallows.  He sneered at his executioner, saying, “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard.  I could kill a dozen men while you’re screwing around.”

He probably could have, too.  But he didn’t.  Nor did he kill himself.

I admittedly knew very little about Robert Stroud, Birdman of Alcatraz, before I read about Panzram, and what I knew was very fluffy, redemption-oriented sort of quasi-knowledge.  While I could have guessed a man like him would be anti-death penalty, I certainly didn’t anticipate him being so keen on enabling a suicide he considered more ethical in the macro and having more dignity in the micro, nor did I expect him to be so knowledgeable on methods of suicide.  Child of the media that I am, I now have visions of Burt Lancaster encouraging James Woods to commit suicide.

The things you learn when learning about other things…