Wake Up and Smell The Beer. Jon Longhi

the basement and infecting our songs. 666 had stood there since 1910. It seemed like hundreds of bands must have played in that basement, the wood walls and stone foundation soaking up all those vibrations. So many crazy experiences must have ta ken place in that basement the room was supercharged like a karma battery. And every time we played in there, we fed off that energy.

      One night I developed a weird theory about synchronicity and tonality. It was based on certain things observed in various chemical states while we played music. Sometimes during our jams we'd hit a certain note or harmony which had been played in that place years before and suddenly we'd be back in that time. Our band would be united with those long gone musicians by bathing in the same vibration. Like two identical tuning forks touched together, and all life would be frozen in a perfect crystalline moment. As if that harmony existed independently, outside of the turning of clocks, a sound like a single unbroken thread weaving through the wrinkles of past, present, and future. And through the genius of accident, our experiments with musical instruments had stumbled upon an audio form of time travel. I often thought about the frenzied jams and improvisations that must have occurred there during the '60s. LSD, hippies, and feedback were written into the history of the house. It wasn't ghosts but old songs that haunted 666. Old gray melodies faint as brain-damaged memories, still struggling to fill the silence. Playing music was communing with the supernatural world. Part seance, part exorcism. A three-chord ritual, rock and roll is just a form of chanting. Every time we played, it was in homage to our house gods, those songs in the walls, and it gave us great joy to add our voices to the chorus of spirits.

      Once Sam Silent went to a barbecue that got pretty way out. The people there looked normal enough, but once they started talking it turned out their thoughts were in outer space. Literally. They believed in UFOs. We're not talking about your garden variety “there may be something out there” skeptic. No, these people were true believers. Sam first thought things were strange when someone said, “Well, this country hasn't been the same since 1947.”

      “Yeah, the Roswell Crash changed everything,” Sam joked.

      “It certainly did,” the guy replied without batting an eyelid. “The discoveries from Roswell led to all of modern science right down to the Thighmaster.”

      And it just got worse from there. Sam kept trying to make little UFO jokes to lighten the mood. He was certain they were kidding. But the people would just stare at him stony faced, as if he'd uttered some blasphemous sacrilege. They didn't think extraterrestrials were a joking matter.

      Everyone at the party believed aliens visited the planet on a regular basis. That they manipulated the world's governments in strange interstellar conspiracies. One woman claimed to have sold her earth baby to UFO aliens. “They made me an offer I couldn't refuse,” she said. There was a tattoo of a third eye on her forehead. All the people there were convinced that aliens were mating with human women and had been for centuries. A woman named Unix claimed to have given birth to an alien love child. There was a tattoo of a flying saucer on her upper arm and another of ET on her cleavage so it looked like the creature was peeping up out of her blouse. “He was a great lover,” she said. “But he had to go back to Alpha Centauri. It's a shame that he's light years away and can't see his son.” In fact, many people at the party agreed that having sex with aliens was not necessarily a bad thing. It could even be pleasurable. All this led up to one person saying, “As long as they lubricate the probe, I don't mind.”

      4

      Last Laugh Distribution, an alternative book and magazine distributor, had been in business since the '60s, and I worked there as a phone salesman. This madhouse was owned and run by an old hippie named Thor Tinker who bore more than a passing resemblance to the mythical thunder god. He was kind of an uneven cross between Father Time and Mr. Natural, with moods that could go from gentleness to fury faster than a Trans Am goes from zero to sixty. On the whole, though, he was a pretty nice guy. I liked my job even though it drove me insane. Lots of pressure, and I ate stress like beat cops down donuts. Some days when the phones were really ringing I might as well have been a broker on Wall Street. I started working at Last Laugh when I was twenty-five. After two weeks there, I said to myself, “If I keep this job, I'll be dead of a heart attack by the time I'm thirty.” Well, I was still working there and I had just turned thirty-two.

      Sam Silent was this really cool poet/slacker/intellectual guy I hung out with. I met him through the local SF writing scene (we called it Poetryland) and back when he was at a real low point financially I got him a job at Last Laugh. He also worked as a phone salesman. A strange job for someone whose last name was Silent. Sam was a natural conversationalist. Tremendous sense of humor. A mind like an encyclopedia of dirty jokes. He had a story for every occasion. Sam was 24 and enjoying life as one in their early twenties should. It was his constant banter and steady stream of weird jokes emanating from the desk behind me that kept the boredom and stress from driving me to tantrums.

      One day I was taking a break. On the job, I was a high pressure hard sell, a compulsive personality who drank massive amounts of coffee and yakked my fool head off to clients all day. Into the receiver I spewed a nonstop stream of consciousness monologue that described some of the most perverse rags the world of publishing had to offer. Last Laugh sold a motley assortment of underground comics, literature, pulp fiction, punk rock magazines, drug manuals, and kinky sex journals. What paid the bills was the porno we moved, or as we liked to refer to it, the smut. In a lot of this smut stuff the only thing people were wearing was the staples. In a perverse way, I was proud of being a smut peddler and thought nothing of wearing the First Amendment like a fig leaf. I figured that was what it was there for.

      The company didn't have anything as traditional as a receptionist so it was also my job to answer the phone. I picked up the receiver hundreds of times each shift saying, “Hello, Last Laugh.” I said it so often that when I was home I would answer my own phone, “Hello, Last Laugh.” Sometimes I just said, “Laugh.” Whenever Thor yelled at me though, the greeting became “House of Mud” or “Solvent Tank.” When I was in a really bad mood I would answer the phone by saying, “This is Hell and I'm just the janitor.”

      My desk was piled high with dog-eared pulp novels, stacks of comic books, skin mags, rubber fetish catalogs like Latex Priest Quarterly, smut comics with titles like Insect Sex, Buns and Hotdogs and Horny Anus, and body piercing manuals including Holey Hole and Full Metal Genitalia. There were also tomes of great literature from Homer to Burroughs in the mess, classics mixed in with the trash, Pulitzer Prize winners, and true science exposés like Incredibly Strange Genitals and The Man Who Was Born Without A Head. There seemed to be a magazine for almost every subculture and mania, we even had a title called Cannibal Monthly. Fourfoot-high stacks of these and other books surrounded me on the desk like castle walls I could duck down and hide behind. Outside of this printed perimeter the mail order girls swarmed, cute new wave chicks Thor had hired to cop cheap feels from.

      And skulking through that chaos of activity was Crate, the man who mailed out dope books. Crate was his legal name. He had it changed from Sidney Francis. Just Crate. No first or last name. Just Crate. When he first told me I didn't believe him, until Crate showed me his driver's license. Sure enough, there it was printed in the holographic plastic of the state, just Crate.

      He was an evil little man who mailed out books on how to grow marijuana, necessary information during the Drug War years. It wasn't that he was evil in his soul, Crate just hated everybody. His coworkers got on his nerves and would send him into such a state that he'd freak out screaming and break their coffee cups or hide their radios in a locked drawer. After these outbursts, Crate would suddenly change his hours to strange nocturnal shifts like 2 in the morning to 10 a.m. It's like his senses were hyper-aware, every little thing got on Crate's nerves. Left alone in a white room with a single housefly he'd either kill himself or punch through the walls. The room would darken when he entered, conversations would stop. Crate carried his bad attitude around with him like a perpetual case of B.O.

      Thor told people that Crate's problems had started when a car hit him and a six-inch chunk of bone got knocked out of his leg. He still walked with a terrible limp. When he got hit, Crate went into a coma and woke up months later with his mind wiped clean