The End

This is the end, my only friend…"
Jim Morrison
"I didn't leave the Beatles, the Beatles left the Beatles."
Paul McCartney
"I'm happy just to dance with you."
John Lennon

It was the end of the sixties. That's the first thing. One felt the change like cold in a filling. There were deaths. Music hung in the air, vibrated, questioned the practitioners like a disavowed child. What was going on had already gone on.

And in Memphis the river, it is said, churned out a rainbow of tempestuous imagery for a whole day in late December. It flowed crimson and periwinkle and myrtle and smoke and cornflower and stone, a versicolor dream. Before returning the next day to its dun constancy, isochroous, stable. Some said it was an oil slick but others knew. Others could smell magic as easily as oaths were forgotten.

Camel J. Eros, poet, sat in his study studying out the window which sat above his Olivetti like a drive-in movie screen. He could see the giant oak in his front yard, a tree he called Yggdrasil, the Bo-tree. He could see how it had carpeted the lawn with little tree embryos, nut-brown, the color of an ale consumed exclusively by English Renaissance poets. The color of mutation, the color of The River.

His love, Allen, curled on the carpet working the New York Times crossword puzzle, as naked as a peeled apple, distracting him with the dead man's curve of her backside and where it parted for the damp earth where Camel was often, very often, re-born. So, distracted by love and seasonal transition, Camel was having trouble on his ultimate work, his ode to the dying decade, his summation of the alchemy and the music and the energy of The Movement. He had to get it all in. It was vital.

Meanwhile, down the street, around the corner, in a clapboard house, circa 1920, Camel's good friend, Three Hushpuppy Brown, was just putting the finishing touches on a Feijoada, a dish he learned to make while in Brazil, where he had gone in search of the elusive high-octane marijuana plant, the one which filled dreams with nymphs and fauns and true belief. Three Hushpuppy Brown heard it, too.

It sounded like a rumble under the streets. It was a rumble under the streets. Camel and Three Hushpuppy both stood stock still in their respective homes, a fear rippling in their veins like tiny lizards, a fear that death had come calling. Allen was oblivious, though she felt the vibrations of the detonation in her light brown body hair. Allen was pondering "ball playing brother of Yankee Clipper."

Death is a blackness, a minus sign. Somehow Camel never thought it would visit his immediate circle, yet as soon as he heard the explosion he saw death's face in his mind's eye, and the face grinned at Camel and winked. "So shall I come for you all," it said.

There was a knock on the door.

Camel walked toward the door like a vaticide toward the gallows. He opened the door. On his stoop stooped Three Hushpuppy Brown. Tears rolled down Brown's brown cheeks. The two friends embraced.

Three Hushpuppy entered and Camel went to the kitchen to prepare his compatriot an herbal tea. Hushpuppy stood in the den admiring the nurgling and naked Allen's body, prone on a pile of long-playing records, her concentration that of a child. There was Dylan's puckish face peering from underneath Allen's pubic bush from the cover of Highway 61 Revisited. There was Love's Love under her gentle left ankle. Bless it's Pointed Little Head beneath her right elbow, propped so hand could cradle cheek, pencil in mouth as her lovely face squinched in its struggle with clue after clue.

"Allen," Hushpuppy finally said.

Allen looked up dreamily.

"Oh, hello Hushpuppy," she said. "What was Joe Dimaggio's ball playing brother's name?"

Hushpuppy choked back another sob. "Dom," he said.

"Oh, thanks," Allen said, "I had Don and it just wasn't working," rolling back to her puzzle, back to her search for all the answers.

Camel handed Hushpuppy the warm cup of tea and as his friend sipped it the two men looked into each other's faces. A sad understanding was there. Maybe a glimmer of hope. Maybe the bomb-or more probably bombs--went off with no one around, perhaps the reverberation of a heavy truck triggered. Maybe Johnny was miles away. But their insight told them the truth. It told them they must venture down into the sewers in search of what remained of their compatriot's laboratory, and possibly the remains of its owner and progenitor, Johnny Niagara.

Johnny Niagara had built an explosives lab underneath Harbert Street in Midtown Memphis. This was when The Movement was at its peak, a few years earlier. The explosives were being manufactured to plant in ROTC buildings on every school campus in the Memphis area that sported one. The lab was notorious; it was famous in the South, Johnny Niagara's underground petard workshop. In the past few years, as the decade wound down, the lab lay in disuse, except that Johnny still loved to spend time down there, "tinkering with destructive forces," he called it. Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, incendiary devices. The works. Johnny was the scientist anarchist, a beautiful man, a man who did not dance around the issues, a good man to have beside you on the front lines and Camel and Three Hushpuppy had inhaled enough teargas with Johnny to consider him as close to a radical god as Memphis generated.
*
The two men, dressed in boots and rain slickers over ratty sweaters, headed toward their destination with the nausea of raw recruits parading into battle for the first time. They walked northward toward Harbert Street and together they formed an odd site for the couples and children who resided in the houses in this gentle old neighborhood. They marched with a purpose. Like Hobbits they carried walking sticks. Their floppy caps covered the crown of what was Jesus-like hair. Some old women sniffed in disgust. Others were taken with their majesty, their dignity, sensing perhaps that their mission was a holy one, a mission of death-in-life, of reclamation.

On Harbert it was but the work of a moment to remove a sewer grate and the two friends stood and stared into the blackness beneath them as if it were the very void itself and they were reminded that Nietzsche warned that the void could stare back. Three Hushpuppy took Camel's hand and helped him down into the hole. Camel stood below and grasped Hushpuppy around the waist as the black sitar-player jumped into the dark, also. Ahead was a musty dim, and the men immediately could smell burned sulfur.

"Oh, Jesus," Camel said.

Three Hushpuppy let another tear course down his orbiculate cheek.

Back in Three Hushpuppy Brown's utility room were spare gas masks they had stolen and utilized only once, in a particularly confrontational march in Overton Park about five years before. They wished now they had thought to grab them.

The men pushed ahead. They entered the cloud of smoke like the damned stepping off the escalator into hell. Waving their arms and sticks about in an attempt to clear the air they now took small steps, shuffling forward until Camel's hip came into contact with Johnny Niagara's work table. Some broken glass tilted to the damp concrete and its breaking broke their hearts also.

Let's not prolong this painful interlude: they found Johnny's extirpated body, a mass of cloth, bone, blood and torn flesh, a few yards from the table. Their worst nightmares became reality: Johnny had been "tinkering" when the explosion occurred. It must have set off a chain reaction, igniting every still usable explosive in the cockeyed lab. It blew Johnny a good twenty feet from his workspace. It blew him into pieces. It blew him, foul wind, into Gehenna.

And stretching out beyond Johnny's smoking corpse was a phlegethon of ignited gasoline, a line of fire leading from their fallen hero like a path into the nether regions. Camel and Hushpuppy collapsed simultaneously next to the body and wept the tears of the eternally foolish, the tears humans must shed in their confusion, in their vain attempts to understand the jesuitical universe.

Johnny was gone. As gone as yesterday. As gone as the angelic harmony of "Tomorrow Never Knows." Gone gone.

And now the two remaining must pick up their friend and hoist him to the surface, bring him back like Orpheus returning from Hades with Eurydice, a broken Eurydice, a wasted bit of legerdemain. Together they must return and carry on. As always, as always.

Three Hushpuppy began to hum "Onward Christian Soldiers," but was interrupted by his friend's more appropriate appropriation of snatches of the BeeGees' "New York Mining Disaster." Dirges, they sang. Sang as they carried the body of their friend through the streets of Midtown Memphis, to lay it on the altar of scattered album covers in the den of Camel's home. And there it lay until the following Sunday when family came to claim it and have it buried on hallowed ground, after a long, disquieting service of empty words and worn-out theism.

*

A pall fell over Camel and Three Hushpuppy and their peers. A cloud like an upended tombstone seemed to follow the remaining cognizant members of the gemeinschaft. What the deaths of heroes would later do to the entire nation the death of Johnny Niagara did to the microcosmic coterie in Memphis, Tennessee.

All the birds were black. Electricity itself slowed down.

Rain fell for days and when it let up the ground was like an old sponge. Toads and frogs sat in the muck eyeing the humans with distaste. The humans stepped lightly.

Everyone's dog bit someone.

The Bitter Lemon grew too bitter, hopeless.

Food lost its taste, drink its buzz, dope its enchantment.

Even music, blessed klezmer, seemed recondite. Hard-core philharmonic junkies turned their stereos up, higher and higher as Sly said, and still the sound seemed muted, like Miles playing with his back to the audience.

Allen, heavenly huldre, would sidle up next to Camel when they were alone, a Camel slumped over his typewriter like a bad drinker. Her sinuous, catlike body, almost always unclothed or clad only in a pair of Camel's boxer shorts, which is why the house was kept at a serious 76 degrees, rubbed up against Camel with love and balm and hopefulness unslaughtered. Camel could raise a hand and place it on her perfect hip, rub his feminine fingers down her thigh, even place his hand over her mound and feel its earthy warmth, but he could not be roused.

He could not be roused. Allen tried with hand, mouth, underarm, cunt and pornographic whisperings. Camel would smile a sad smile, a Richard Brautigan smile, but his member was as loose as the fens of Holland. Stand it would not.
All over the city the scene was repeated. Those who had been involved with Johnny Niagara were grieving for him deep in their bodies and their sexuality dissipated, like the mutational dew. Camel, Three Hushpuppy, Carla Binnage, Sweetness, College Herpes, Sid, Stix, Buddy Gardner, Lee, Skippy Quetzylcoatl, Dick Delisi, Gimmer, Semolina, Jimmy C., and oh, Iris, sweet Iris, Johnny's last and truest love. No drug highs, no fucking, no happiness here, friends.

And it was Allen who came up with the idea that would soothe the damaged psyches of the damaged Movement. Allen, beautiful Allen, came up with a plan as graceful and simple and right as a November chrysanthemum.

Suddenly, in the mailboxes of all those among the cognoscenti, sprouting like fungi, were small lavender envelopes enclosing small lavender cards. Many of those who found them stood at the curbs or on their front porches and held the card up to the feeble sunlight, concentrating so hard on the words there, hoping for some sort of sortilege.

And this is what the cards said:

The Party of Special Things to Do
All Invited, All Come
Sometime at the end of December
At the end of this Fizgig Decade
Around dusk till around a few days later
Bring Your Own Hallucinogen
Music by the Gods
Camel and Allen's

It was quite an invitation. A cautious feeling of expectancy sparkled inside the hearts of those so called. Camel could only marvel at his paramour's preparations, festooning their modest digs as the decade wound down, hanging crepe yet celebrating, smiling and stretching here and there like a sprite bouncing around their apartment.

And as the house began to resemble the inside of a tourbillion, or an over-frosted cake, Camel had to smile. And Allen, hearing that smile, turned toward her man, from the corner over the stereo where she was hanging a Phi Zappa Krappa poster, her naked backside stretched upward like a ladder to the stars. She tumbled back into Camel's arms and Camel put his mouth over hers and held her like she was the last earthly item he would ever grasp.

There on the floor, with the ceilings above them a picture of swag and grace, Allen and Camel fucked like teenagers, Allen arching her back in a howl of orgasm moments before Camel drove upward, humping in release and fulminate glory, spraying his loving seed into his love, his only love, and blasting a fully-prepared egg into babyhood, a boy-child who would be born nine months later in a back bedroom of this same house under the loving guidance of a midwife named Margie, and who would be called Odysseus Alexander Eros.

It was the beginning of the end of the end.

*
The crowds came, they flowed like wine.

Someone stood on a small rise and said something about the meek, something about The Earth.

They came with signs, with pitchforks and torches. Faces and limbs and backpacks and fiddles and tambourines and flowers and bass drums and flags of many colors descended on Midtown, a Bruegel, a crowd scene from the last movie made about the last ceilidh.

So many musicians squeezed into Camel's modest living room with their magical instruments that there was no room for walking around much less dancing. The dancing was done on the lawn.

But there in that living room bands were born and died and reborn. Johnny Singer sang. Someone said Lennon sat in for a while. Someone said Jimi was there. All nine muses attended and tapped their godly feet in time. Creole Myers, back from his rest cure. Oftimes it sounded as if each member were playing a different song, yet it all cohered. The noise was the noise of angels disrobing, as sweet a sound as humans can muster.

Somewhere in the cacophony Sweetness let her gentle contralto drift skyward, ad-libbing, scatting on love and peace and everyday people. Couples fell in love because it was the end and, as we learned earlier in the year, there's always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area. Every bed, every chair, every stray blanket or coat, held a copulating dyad, lovers for the night or for the decade or for all times. Lovers, nonetheless and love, being back, spawned more love.

The music filled the neighborhood, the neighboring neighborhood, the downtown area. Someone in Raleigh reported hearing "Mr. Tambourine Man" about 3 a.m. No one complained. Everyone was aware that the clouds were parting.

Out on the lawn the dancers undulated, swung and rabbitted. Kachinas, Ropedancers, Saltant Celebrants from all over Memphis and the Midsouth. It was the St. Vitus Dance, it was the Dance of the Valkyries. It was the dance of rain on an alley cat, the dance of flowers dehiscing, the dance of life, death and the next Bardo. It was tarantism, mystical and healing, frantic and yet peaceful.

Sometime around dawn Camel stood, hands loosely on the hips of his love, swaying to the beat of what was perhaps "Tomorrow Never Knows." Perhaps it was "Eve of Destruction," or "I Ain't Gonna Eat Out my Heart Anymore." It was hard to tell. But it was then, as the sun came up over Peabody Elementary, that Camel flashed on the end of his epic poem. It was then that all the words were clear to him, carved with an ice-pick on a glacier. Suddenly his face was beatific, the face of the anointed.

Allen stood back to take in her lover in full. A smile, like the first cut in a melon, spread slowly across her face.

"You have it now," she said.

"I do," Camel said.

"Good," Allen said. And maybe she felt the stirrings of life deep inside her then; perhaps she felt her one perfect egg turn over in its sleep, dreaming of a tow-headed boy, running toward the sunrise, running on short, perfect legs toward Tomorrow.

"I love you," Camel said.

They swayed together, held tight.

"Good again," Allen said. "It's going to be all right," she said.

"Yes," Camel said.

In the crowd he picked out the faces of his friends, Hushpuppy, Sweetness, College, Brautigan, Pigpen, Dr. Ann O'Dyne, looking owlish like James Joyce in drag, so many others, so many gentle coves. And off to the side Johnny Niagara stood, smiling Merlin's smile, as he watched the revelry he helped initiate, the Party of Special Things to Do.

"Roll on Mighty Mississippi," Camel said.

"If you say so, dear."

"Death is dying a well-deserved death," Camel Eros said.

The sun squeezed between black branches and burst into flames above the crowd, a Catherine Wheel to light the way. And everyone danced on. They danced on, forever.

Biography

I have published prose and/or poetry in Turnrow,
Yellow Silk, Pindeldyboz, Mars Hill Review, Pikeville
Review, Center, Small Press Review, Jabberwock Review,
Rattle, Orchid, Quick Fiction, Timber Creek Review,
Green Egg, Poetry Motel, Raintown Review, Potomac
Review, Poetry Super Highway, Big Muddy, Slant,
Wilmington Blues, Drought, Parnassus Literary Review,
Wavelength, Lilliput Review, Pearl, Aurorean, Lucid
Moon, Heeltap, Sunny Outside, Fish Drum, Into the
Teeth of the Wind, Mid-American Poetry Review,
Independence Boulevard, Midday Moon, Now Here Nowhere,
Dust, Cherotic Revolutionary, Cotyledon, Buckle &,
Iodine, Snakeskin (England), Flashpoint, Skanky
Possum, Drexel Online, Freewheelin' (England),
Pitchfork, Anthology, Poet Lore, Spillway, The Pegasus
Review, Reverb, Kimera, Thema, Kumquat Meringue,
Lonzie's Fried Chicken, Both Sides Now, Razor Wire,
Gin Bender, Blue Unicorn, Black Dirt, The Spirit that
Moves Us, Wind, Red Rock Review, Art Times, Concrete
Wolf, Memphis Magazine, Rhino, Visions International,
others. I have a chapbook of poems, Piecework, from
the Wing and a Wheel Press. I have work in the
anthologies Full Court: A Literary Anthology of
Basketball (Breakaway Books), My Heart's First Steps
(Adams), Pocket Parenting Poetry Guide (Pudding
Press), Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure
(New World Press) and Smashing Icons (Curious Rooms).

One of my short stories was chosen for the 2002
edition of New Stories from the South: The Year's
Best, edited by Shannon Ravenel.
My novel in dialogue, Talk, has been released by
Livingston Press and garnered praise from Lee Smith,
Frederic Barthelme, John Grisham and Robert Olen
Butler, among others.