7 Criminally Underrated Rock Guitarists

Hendrix. Clapton. Van Halen. We get it. Every poll of great guitarists has the same names at or near the top. It’s unlikely that anyone will ever unseat these holiest of holies. So instead of listing the usual suspects, let’s take a moment to celebrate great guitarists who seldom, if ever, show up in lineups of The Usual Suspects: Rock Guitar Edition… and yet, who deserve to.

Because such lists are subjective, the following luminaries are some of my favorites. I know you have your favorites, too. If you’re not familiar with these axe-wielding demigods, though, check ‘em out. And because this list could be endless if we examined folks like Eddie Hazel, Kaki King, and David Maxim Micic, we’re gonna stick to guitarists in whatever passes for rock music these days. For the moment, anyway…

7: Steven Wilson

Most famous for his studio wizardry, Wilson has spent the last few years redefining the guitar as an instrument. Not, perhaps, as radically as Michael Hedges or Robert Fripp did in previous eras, but – like his acclaimed counterpart Tim Henson – from a 21^st-century perspective. Where the archetypal rock guitarist steps out front-and-center, Wilson slides deep into grooves and textures whose richness demands a good set of headphones and the time to listen deeply. Though his work with Porcupine Tree showed that Wilson can shred, his solo work takes an architectural approach to sound. Rather than cramming notes and scales into mind-twisting blurs, Wilson slows down and lets his arsenal of samples, overdubs, effects, and alternate tunings wash over you. The result provides an anxious sort of trance broken by surreal assaults like the solo burn eight minutes into “Personal Shopper” or the otherworldly aria just past the three-minute mark of his aptly named “Count of Unease.” Few artists straddle rock’s classic age and the soft panic of the Covid era with the grace of Wilson’s guitar. That lack of swagger makes him easy to miss. And that’s a damn shame.  

6: Geordie Walker

No solos. No posing. Just “the sound of the earth vomiting” through six strings, a battered hollowbody Gibson ES-295, and the unflappable cool of Kevin “Geordie” Walker. Sadly felled by a stroke just a few months ago, Geordie channeled apocalyptic fire. Although nutter prophet Jaz Coleman provided the genius behind Killing Joke (a fact made obvious by Murder Inc. – the band that resulted when KJ essentially fired Coleman), the band’s soul comes through Walker’s searing guitar tone. His approach – which features unique tunings, original chords, and ghost-notes galore – gave Geordie a tone many emulate but no one can duplicate. Because Walker seldom recorded overdubs, that monster tone grinds the air to powder when the Joke played live. If Mecha-Godzilla eats a sheet-metal factory during a thunderstorm on Doomsday, that sound will echo Geordie Walker’s guitar.

5: Tash Sultana

Though a musician since childhood, Tash Sultana cultivated a freeform flow of rock, blues, reggae, hip-hop, jazz, and whatever else seems interesting while recovering from drug-induced psychosis. Unable to hold a steady job, Tash used technology, imagination, and sheer nerve to construct a one-person-band approach while busking on the streets of Melbourne, Australia. In 2016, a series of bedroom-concert videos brought Tash to international attention, making them (Tash’s pronoun) one of the first stars of the social-media music era. Given the devices and instruments that surround Tash (not to mention a hippie vibe that puts off many “serious” rockists), it’s easy to underestimate the fluidity of Tash’s evocative guitar textures. The emotional heft and improvisational dexterity of Tash’s work, however, puts them light-years beyond rote string-pounders with more speed than soul.

4: Adrian Belew

Despite an epic career that includes work with Frank Zappa, David Bowie, the Talking Heads, an array of solo projects, and arguably the finest iteration of King Crimson, Adrian Belew slips along the margins of Greatest Guitarist polls if he appears on them at all. Maybe it’s balding geek image of his stage persona? Or the quirky yet eerily precise wails he conjures from his guitar? Who knows? Roughly 50 years into his cult-status run as a mad scientist of pan-dimensional guitar fuckery, Belew continues to experiment with the sonic potential of six strings, a few effects, and an otherworldly sense of play.

3: Ani DiFranco

The angular chime of Ani DiFranco’s guitar remains as distinct as the supple rage winding through her lyrics. Tuned as unconventionally as Di Franco’s voice, that acoustic guitar often sounds more like a percussion instrument than like the traditional tool of folk-music “pretty girls.” Even in the quieter moments of her vast catalogue, DiFranco seldom conforms to preconceived notions of what “a girl with a guitar” is supposed to act or sound like. Given her distinct lyrics and self-effacing persona, it’s easy to miss what an incredible guitarist she is. Ani’s not one to showboat; for her, that skill serves the greater purpose of the song. Yet her ferocious playing style underscores Woody Guthrie’s famous axiom This machine kills fascists – and does so with a voice as potent and unmistakable as DiFranco’s own.

2. Miyavi

Why isn’t Miyavi one of the biggest stars on earth? A charisma bomb whose style veers from Motown pop to Princely funk, hyperdrive blues to razorblade metal, visual kei to Japanese hip-hip and a lot more besides, Takamasa Ishihara is the entire package. He honed his athletic performance style through a football career cut short by injury. Adopting the guitar at age 15, he began playing in bands less than two years later. Since then, Miyavi has given musical traditions a laser enema focused through steely fingertips, superhuman precision, and absolute commitment to every note he plays.

1: Sister Rosetta Tharpe

“Oh, these kids and rock and roll – this is just sped-up rhythm and blues. I’ve been doing that forever.” 

Sister Rosetta invented rock ‘n’ roll. Full stop. No questions. The chugging electric guitar style copped by Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry (who referred to his career as “one long Rosetta Tharpe impression”) originated in the electrified gospel of one Rosetta Nubin, soon to assume the name Tharpe and ascend to international stardom. Her clear voice and distorted guitar influenced Clapton, Cash, Keith Richards, Tina Turner, and many, many more. Female, Black, and reputedly bisexual in pre-Civil Rights-era America, however, Sister Rosetta fell out of the spotlight as the rock era advanced. By the late 1970s, just a few years after her death, critics, audiences, and businessmen had whitewashed rock in general and Sister Rosetta in particular. Her legacy, until recently, could be found everywhere in the music and nowhere on the page. Though she lacked the pyrotechnics of her descendants, Sister Rosetta brought swagger to the sacred. Her comparatively short life changed music forever.

Choking on Our Irony

Between 1983 and 1993, I lived in Richmond, VA. During that entire time, despite working part- to full-time on top of going to college (and working multiple jobs at a time after graduation), I had an air conditioner for only a year or so before it broke down.

Aside from that year, my roommates (and after she moved in, my then-wife) and I wedged the windows as far open as we could manage, kept the fans going, and hoped the heat would break.

That was all we could afford to do.

That’s the lot of the working poor, the unemployed, those folks who retired without pensions, or expecting pensions that were whisked away by this merger or that hostile takeover or that plundering executive whose lawyers kept the client out of jail while that client’s victims found themselves with nothing.

The unhoused have it even worse.

That’s bad enough when it’s hot and humid. To this day, I can’t stand heat and humidity because of those long summers sweltering and unable to sleep, knowing that the next shift on my feet at work all day was just a few sleepless hours away.

Now imagine that situation compounded by skies so full of ash that they resemble a videogame view of hell.

Millions of people don’t have to imagine it.

That’s their lives now.

Even if they work full-time. Even if they work multiple jobs. Even if they worked hard their whole lives and then watched some wealthy assholes float off on golden parachutes from the ruins of the company that promised to take care of them if they took care of it.

This isn’t Biden’s fault, though he and his compatriots take money from the people who perpetrate this misery.

It’s not Trump’s fault, though he and his kind certainly make it far worse than it was when I was young.

It’s not even Reagan’s fault, although where we are now is a direct consequence of the things he did 40 years ago.

It’s the fault of a culture that pretends to live in a vacuum of consequences while perpetrating the myth that hard work will make everything better if you just let the rich do whatever the hell they please.

It’s not just happening in America, though the contrast between myth and reality might be starkest here.

It is what Pearl Jam referred to (in a different but related context) as a worldwide suicide.

It’s great when you can haul out the AC and close the windows and order that hepafilter from Amazon to screen out the particulates of a world on fire.

I can do that now.

Millions of people, trillions of living things, don’t have that luxury today.

I can still remember how it felt, and how that changed me.

And no amount of wealth or convenience or flag-waving denial bullshit will keep this situation from changing all of us in ways the world as we know it can never forget.

Bugs Bunny with a Body Count

Guess who’s “controlling the narrative” again?

Donald Trump, the insatiable ego with a growing body count, is literally screaming right now that he’s about to be arrested this Tuesday.

Wake me up if that actually happens.

We’ve had so many false alarms at this point that I feel like I’m living in a dorm where pulling the fire alarm lever is what bored kids do to liven things up.

Who knows? It might actually happen this time. By now, Trump’s committed pretty much every crime we have a name for, and certainly deserves to spend the rest of his infuriatingly long life behind bars.

I’m not holding my breath, though. Right now, it just seems like this week’s grift.

Oh, yeah – he’s begging for money again, too. Shocker.

Money and attention: The only things Donald Trump adores.

He claims there’ll be civil war if he’s arrested. That’s certainly his plan, anyway. If something actually does happen, I’m sure we’ll see a rash of terrorism in his name. Thing is, civil wars demand logistics, diplomatic support, economic foundations, coherent ideology, manufacturing bases, foreign allies, and many other things MAGA claims but does not possess. A bunch of yeehaws with AR-15s can make a short-term mess among unarmed civilians; one detour into downtown Atlanta, though, and they’ll run back to the hills they came from.

Maybe they’ll even convince the cops to treat them like Black people for a change.

Again, I’m not holding my breath for that one.

Trump’s battle cry is this: “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you. I’m just standing in their way. And I will always stand in their way.” This remark, as false as it is, gets to the heart of Trump’s popularity and the Jonestown loyalty his adherents give that man.  

The primordial appeal of Donald Trump is that he appears to exist outside constraint or consequence. Like Bugs Bunny or Tyler Durden, he does what he wants, says what he pleases, and seems to bend reality to his will. Like them, he’s a cartoon who lends vicarious exceptionalism to his fans.

Remember when Nuke was a parody of Rambo, not a former president inciting civil war?

For decades, the archetypal Trump has embodied American exceptionalism. An impish tycoon, he’s an aspirational figure for people frustrated by the limits they feel are imposed unjustly upon their lives.

The fact that this image is bullshit remains immaterial.

Trump doesn’t merely employ memes: Trump IS a meme. He has been one for longer than some of his devotees have been alive. Even when mocked, he seems iconic. His name (another illusion) combines the folksy “Donald” with the winning Trump.

He seems relatable, yet superhuman.

Trump defies both law and order. Laws, by definition, constrain freedoms in the name of the common good. Order, by definition, reduces chaos. Whether or not those things do what they’re supposed to do is, again, immaterial. That’s what the words mean.

Trump exists outside both.

To Trump’s devotees, reality becomes a cartoon. And since Trump is the(ir) hero, whomever opposes him must therefore embody evil. When they say Trump “fights for us,” they mean (consciously or not) that he does the things they can’t while telling him they can do those things too.

Given license by Trump’s cartoonish image and behavior, his fans become cartoons as well. MAGA is a hall of mirrors and magnifying glasses where Americana icons get distorted and magnified beyond all reason.

And so, real life becomes an MCU from hell.

The more that realities of time, age, law and consequences bear down on Trump the man, the more Trump’s devotees rage back against reality itself.

Their vicarious icon defies such limitations, therefore those limitations must be wrong.

The alternative is inconceivable.

Biden and Clinton MUST be evil masterminds. Democrats MUST be pedo-groomer-blood cultists. A Deep State MUST exist, and Trump MUST still be president.

Otherwise, this freedom promised by an iconic trickster must be lies.

Which means Trump’s fans are NOT actually free and great.

No wonder that idea drives them to violence. In MAGA’s American mythology, “freedom” means the ability to live beyond laws and limitations save the ones you’re free to impose on other people whose existence offends your sense of right(s).

The aggrieved MAGA cry “If they can do this to Trump, they can do this to you” sounds an alarm about the end of this illusion. If Trump is subject to law and consequences, then Trump’s America is subject to the same treatment.

And that’s not what “freedom” looks like to them.

The fact that people in the MAGA movement feel justified in imposing every imaginable extremity on their perceived enemies – harassment, militarized cops, mass arrests and executions, civil war – underscores the mythic good vs. evil nature of this apocalyptic cartoon.

Because our media (including some I’ve produced myself) have spent decades priming us for apocalyptic showdowns, this all feels perfectly natural from the inside even when it is, when viewed from other perspectives, breathtakingly irrational.

America, as I’ve written elsewhere, is a myth factory. We produce and consume myths on a scale unmatched in human history.

And Donald Trump is among those myths.

His image remains iconic even by American presidential standards. In that sense, he is still the president.

It’s no wonder his followers dress themselves in costumes and rep cartoon characters like Captain America and the Punisher. Even though those characters would, in media, beat the crap out of MAGA types, MAGA folks identify with such (anti)heroes because their icon is one himself.

Trump the icon gives them permission to be iconic – to act out some grotesque cosplay masquerading as Americana, bottom-feeding from a bottomless trough of myths. Each compounding absurdity succeeds because it is absurdity. Freedom from reality means freedom from constraint.

I say this as the author of a series of books about reality wars: That’s empowerment.

Trump the Icon empowers his followers.

Trump the man, therefore, cannot be bound by constraints of reality or law. If he is, then MAGA is, too.

And such limits are for other people, not them.

That sense of aspirational empowerment helps explain why a man whose personal and political histories feature litanies of bigotry and betrayal still commands loyalty from the same sorts of people whom Trump and MAGA have consistently oppressed: If they’re with him, then they, too, can do anything.

Great Men (a concept that, by definition, excludes female and/or marginalized people) stand beyond laws and orders. They reshape reality in their image by refusing to be bound by it.

That’s what “greatness” means: Big. Massive. Huge.

Words Trump himself employs.

Greatness means you defy limitations you can impose on others.

In that sense, America has always been great.

To recognize limitations on America is to make America NOT “great.”

Therefore, the MAGA movement defies limitations on itself. Including limits of reality and law.

Irrationality is baked into MAGA. That meme and its associated myths are, by definition and origin, counter-rational.

A primordial affront of “social justice” is that it imposes consequences and limitations upon people who feel they should be beyond such things.

That, for decades, has been the rallying cry of so-called “conservatives”: That imposing such limits on them is tyranny.

Limits and consequences are for them to impose on other(ed) people. In the name of freedom, naturally.

Such free! Much libertease!

And yes, I do mean “naturally.” As shown by Trump’s attempt to define civil rights through “natural law,” such people view this as the rightful, natural order of things.

From that perspective, Trump the man must remain immune to constraints of law. Because that man embodies an icon, and that icon represents America.

As any “patriot” of “real America” understands, to oppose that man and his iconic freedom is to oppose America itself.

Because both history and reality adore irony, Trump the man has become an ironic prisoner of Trump the Icon.

It can’t be fun being Trump these days. I’d imagine it’s pretty miserable. Even for an egotist, the weight of living that way must feel unbearable.

Also ironically, a man who endured similar iconic status without being an asshole about it appears to be doing just fine these days. Compounding that irony, Trump rose to political power by attacking that man’s right to become iconic for America.

It’s tempting to read an arc of justice into that situation. Perhaps there even is a greater justice at work here.

To people who cling to Trump’s iconic status, though, because it sustains their own identity, this feels like tyranny – an affront to their nation and themselves.

And so, Trump the Icon – the Bugs Bunny /Tyler Durden mashup of MAGA trickster identity – must remain free from all laws, constraints, and limitations.

To accept otherwise is to acknowledge that it’s all just a big show, and that American myth must bow before a greater reality.

To people who define themselves by American’s greatness meme, this acknowledgement is unacceptable.

And so, our empire – like Trump the man – has become a prisoner of our mythology.

I wish I knew where we go from here.

I’d like our newer, more rational myths to prevail.

Both history and mythology, though, suggests it won’t be that easy.

We live in an age of sound and fury.

What that all signifies, in the long run, is up to us to decide.

Of Names and Identities – Changing and Otherwise

26: Does Your MC Have a Nickname?

“Edgedancer” is named for the MC’s deed-name – a name she’s earned by literally and figuratively “dancing on edges”: social edges, class edges, edges of legality, safety and propriety, edges of tables and walls and roofs and cliffs. She dances with blades, too – both by using swords and knives as props while dancing, and by being a skilled and deadly fighter with blades.

Although she goes by the name Darianna, Edgedancer no longer uses or answers to her birth-name. For many good reasons (some of which get explored in the story), she left that name and identity behind long ago. Whomever she once was, Darianna Edgedancer is who she is now.

In Holy Creatures To and Fro, Silk employs a self-taken name, too. She took her name from a character in her favorite book series, and – like Darianna – no longer sees herself as the person she was as a child. Every member of her pack of homeless teens, the Wolfkin, employs a self-created identity in place of the people their parents had defined for them in their past lives.

Identity is a pervasive element in my work. Most of my stories involve people who reject their birth-names in favor of names they give themselves: Genet, Silk, Echo, Dervish, Chalice, Darianna, Nikita, Porthos, Riplash, Dr. Volcano, Thunderdome, Tucker and Rol, Hyper and Scruffy, Ravenwolf Grigori, Elynne Dragonchild, Ginelli Castrava, Bobbo the Funmaster… Even the ones like Chipper, Keef, Wolfman, Heaven, Riff, Zil, and Dead Man Walker, who receive their nicknames from other people, wear those names as their identities now.

On reflection, I find it funny that the most significant creation of mine who employs her birth-name – Meghan Susan Green – made it distinctive by emphasizing her middle name and her full first name; as Genet says in Red Shoes, only Genet is allowed to call Meghan “Meg” without a fight.

Even then, Meghan has a contentious relationship with four aspects of her fragmented self: Keef, Riff, Lover-of-Shadows, and the Owl – all of whom have agendas and personalities of their own.

(It’s even funnier that two of my creations who kept their birth-names have THE SAME NAME: Kelsey. That’s one reason I cut my story “Special Guest” out of my collection Valhalla with a Twist of Lethe: Because the protagonist has the same distinct name as the antagonist in “Ravenous,” despite them being entirely different characters written almost 20 years apart.)

Some of my stories (notably “Swallowed,” “Johnny Serious,” and “Ravenous”) focus intimately on identity and the shift between the person people once defined you as, and the person you defined yourself to become. Even in ones where the protagonist doesn’t change their name, like “Keystrokes,” the characters struggle over who they want to be. Looking over my work from over 40 years of hindsight, it’s clear that changing identity has always been a primary theme of mine.

As I wrote in my essay “Me and the Gender Blues,” autism, sensory-processing conditions, physical dysphoria, and social and internal perceptions of gender have deeply influenced my view of myself and the experiences of my fictional creations. Long before I knew about any of that stuff, I related more closely with the Werewolf By Night than with the kid I saw in my mirror. Acting, writing and RPGs provided me with tools and stages to explore those feelings; it’s no mystery, then, why so many of the fictional counterparts I create are working through identity crisis themselves, and why so many stories I write about them – even the ones who, like Rachel in Dream Along the Edge, don’t change their names – deal with transformations from an externally imposed identity to a more authentic self-created one.

I’m glad that so many people in my audience can relate to those challenges, too – and can find, in my work, a safer, more empowered place to manifest themselves.

Harlan’s Legacy in Me

“You CAN change the world! You CAN be Zorro!”

Stephen King may have been the author who inspired me to want to write; and James Joyce may have been the one to show me how much you could get away with as long as your audience remains willing to follow you there; and Sherman Alexie and Francesca Lia Block may have revealed potent poetry in simple words; but Harlan Ellison showed me how to shatter this world into a million bloody fragments with love, and that make him perhaps my biggest influence in art.

“A writer must go to bed angry and wake up in the morning angry.”

I may have taken that wisdom to extremes at times; there’s no question, though, that his sentiments galvanize me when all other methods fail.

West and Waters can Fuck Off into the Sun

Antisemitism is a poison of the left as well as of the right. On neither side is it anything other than bigotry, genocide erasure, and potential perpetration of future genocides.

As Sarah Silverman eloquently clarified the other day, it’s entirely possible to oppose the actions of the government of Israel (which I do) without condemning the Jewish people and perpetrating blood-libel bullshit.

(Further discussion of the multisided nature of the Palestinian bloodbath is, right here and now, too complex, divisive, and ultimately distracting from my point.)

It’s also obvious to anyone who’s paying attention that certain real-life Bond villains have literal investments in sowing as much division and chaos as possible right before next month’s elections. If you think there’s no connection between this newest surge of anti-Jewish sewage, Putin’s Ukraine campaign, and the Putin/ Trump/ Dominionist/ Republican Party’s ongoing attempt to destabilize and overthrow the current administration so as to seize full power for the MAGA faction, then I have oceanside property in North Dakota you might be interested in buying for a very reasonable price.

Don’t buy into it.

Though we’re no longer connected by marriage, I married into a Jewish family and have many Jewish friends. I still love my former in-laws, and their safety is vital to me. I have first-hand experience with the love and deep generosity of Jewish people WHEN YOU’RE NOT AN ASSHOLE TRYING TO FUCKING KILL THEM. Though not Jewish in faith or culture, I respect Judaism and despise bigotry of all kinds. I’ve also seen first-hand the insidious and pervasive effects and manifestations of antisemitism. That’s zero-tolerance territory for me, and both West and Waters can fuck right off into the sun, along with their apologists.

As for Ye himself, it’s a goddamned shame that he continues to shit so vigorously on the legacy of his work, and that his crew continues to let him do it. Unlike Kid Rock and Ted Nugent, West was a true visionary whose work holds significant artistic value. His art should speak louder than his mouth, but – as with Whedon, Rowling, Gibson, Weinstein, and so many others – his abhorrent behavior has poisoned my ability to enjoy and respect it as I once did. And I don’t fucking care if he’s mentally ill. That’s no excuse. I know plenty of folks with mental illnesses. It doesn’t make them publicly, repeatedly declare war on Jews, buy right-wing hatesites, or make death-threats against their exes’ new SOs.

For whatever reasons, blaming “TEH JEWZ” for pretty much everything wrong with the world has been a popular tactic of distraction, division, and tyrannical power-grabs since at least the Roman Empire’s heyday and probably before then. When monsters need scapegoats (and yes, I know where that term comes from, which is why I use it here), they howl about an ethnic/ cultural minority that’s prosperous enough to resent yet small enough to stomp into the ground yet again with minimal risk to the monsters in question. Romans, Spanish, Brits, Russians, Nazis, and many others have pulled that chain throughout history. They’re pulling it now, and if that seems like hyperbole than just look at how fashionable it’s become to don Nazi drag and how readily that vile fashion is excused by people who should know better but clearly could not care less.

TL/DR: No. Hell no. Hell fucking no.

Anti-Jewishness is morally wrong, intellectually stupid, and socially counterproductive.

Enough.

Witty and Sarcastic Interview

I’m a hypercreative malcontent who loves using art to inspire people to envision a better world and help to bring one into being. 

Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated with stories, magic, faith, and monsters. Though the terminology didn’t exist until well into my adult life, I’m a queer neurodivergent person with significant sensory-processing conditions. I’ve put those conditions to work in various arts: drawing, writing, photography, music, dance, gaming, filmmaking, acting, modeling, and other types of performance. I’ve worked professionally in the arts since I was 15, have made a living at them for just shy of 30 years, and occasionally teach in the field as well. Polyamorous but happily married to my longtime business partner and creative collaborator Sandra Damiana Swan, I love music, hate shoes, adore cats, and rant often. 

There’s a new interview with me posted on the Witty and Sarcastic Bookclub. Thank you, Jodie!

Come on by and check it out: https://wittyandsarcasticbookclub.home.blog/2022/06/02/fantasy-focus-urban-fantasy-featuring-satyros-phil-brucato/

Spookies Shouldn’t Play with Sharp Things: Part III – Gonna Get You!

The next weekend, I was back at House 2: The Nightmare Continues. I kept my right hand wrapped in plastic to avoid soiling the bandages or reopening the wound, and I cycled between the groom’s spot on the bed and the victim’s spot on the cross. Somehow, I’d convinced Cathi to join the cast as a new Cynthia, a role she and Julia alternated in until the day after Halloween. Having been fired from Pizza Hut – from which I subsequently quit in protest – Cathi had a blast, and we went home with forty bucks a night instead of twenty.

Cathi as Cynthia.

That year, Halloween fell on a Saturday. We’d planned to spend Sunday cleaning the place out and saying our last goodbyes to each other; when people began lining up outside before sundown, however, we decided to give it one more night. Dressing in our tattered, smelly, sweat-and-Karo-rigid gear, we put everything we had into that performance. The final group of guests to come through the door got the entrance locked behind them. At each room, the performers rose up from, or out of, our positions – our coffins, beds, dentist’s chairs, and darkened alcoves – and began following them chanting, “Gonna get you! Gonna get you! Gonna get you!” This spontaneous chase began as stalking and whispering. By the time they reached the exit, with Freddie Kruger and the chainsaw maniac and the whole demented cast and crew behind them, the guests were laughing and screaming and running for that door. Running after them, we circled them, joined hands, and began dancing around them in the parking lot, chanting the Nightmare on Elm Street rhyme, our voices rising on each verse. As we reached the final shrieking NEVER SLEEP AGAIN, we burst out in laughter, cried “Happy Halloween!” released each other’s hands, and bowed. We thanked our final guests, they thanked us, everyone was laughing and crying and hugging (we didn’t hug the guests, though), and as the guests walked back to their cars, all of us waving to each other, the cast and crew filed back inside to begin our final transition back to normalcy. The phone rang one last time, and instead of the customary, “House 2: The Nightmare Continues,” Vampire-Girl answered with, “House 2: The nightmare is over.”

Most of it was, anyway.

As one might expect, I couldn’t work with a stitched-up right hand. By mid-November, though, I was able to score a Christmas gig at Kay-Be Toys in the local mall, where Cathi found work at… cue the Irony Bell… a cutlery store.

A week or so after House 2 closed, we got a furious call from Harlan. Mike, the producer, had ditched out with the money and disappeared. Harlan wasn’t paid, and his name was on all the paperwork, so he got hung out to dry financially. A bunch of people, it turns out, had been paid little or nothing out of the considerable sum House 2 had amassed. Cathi and I wound up being two of the only cast members who’d been paid consistently, probably because Mike hadn’t wanted me thinking about a lawsuit and so told Harlan to cash us out each night. It was a good thing we had been, too, because although Mike told Harlan that he’d paid off my ER visit, the first bills from that night arrived a few weeks later.

At least the motherfucker paid the ambulance fee.

When I got those bills, I panicked and lost my shit. Trying to reach Harlan, I got his answering machine. Enraged when he did not return my calls, I called Julia and got her machine as well. In a moment I regret over thirty years later, I puked lava into the phone – not blaming her or demanding money but unleashing weeks of pain and betrayal and money stress on the party who deserved it least. Her husband called me later and chewed me out for upsetting her. I apologized to them both and never heard from them again. Harlan never called me back either. Jerry and I were no longer on speaking terms, so I couldn’t ask about the friend who’d gotten me involved with the production. I hadn’t learned the last names of anybody involved except for Julia, so I couldn’t sue anyone even if I’d wanted to… and by that time, trust me, I wanted to. Eventually, Cathi and I were able to talk the hospital’s bills down to a manageable level. I paid them off shortly before we split in 1993.

Spookies shouldn’t play with sharp things. Especially if they don’t know who to sue afterward.

My hand healed fine. I still have an interesting scar on the back of it. You can’t see that scar easily, however, because I’m such a furry cuss. No haunt worth that name behaves nearly as recklessly as we did back then, though I’m told there are still plenty of spooky kids with more spirit than sense as far as that’s concerned. When I posted, on impulse, an abbreviated version of this story on Twitter the other day, the damn thing went viral. As of this writing, it’s up past 1400 likes. One popular comment read, “America in three tweets.” That person isn’t wrong.

I still love Halloween but never worked another haunted house.

Life is weird. Especially mine.

At least I can honestly say I haven’t been bored since high school.

Happy Halloween, y’all, and don’t let anyone swing a rusty sickle at your face.

At least THOSE blades were made of plastic.

Spookies Shouldn’t Play with Sharp Things: Part II – The Dying Groom

[See Part I]

We were maybe halfway through October when Harlan asked me if I would be willing to be Cynthia’s dying groom. Of course, I would. Hell, one of my roles in a roommate’s college film involved me wearing prosthetics covered in fake blood and rotting animal guts for over 12 hours straight, so sticking my leg through a mattress under a coating of fake intestines seemed easy by comparison. Besides, I’d spent the previous weekend standing in place for hours while tied to the cross, wearing nothing but Karo blood and shredded jeans, so a night or two of laying on a bed sounded like a huge improvement to me. I got on well with the woman playing Cynthia, too (let’s call her Julia, which was not her name), and we had fun with our respective roles. We’d improvise vitriolic banter as she’d shake her blooded, rusted sickle and scream, “THAT’S WHY I KILLED YOU, YOU OBNOXIOUS FUCK!” In hindsight, we were probably acting out the kinds of domestic conflict we didn’t dare have with our real-life partners. We’d vicariously abuse each other, laugh, and enact neo-spousal murder over and over and over again.

That was the first night.

The cross I wound up tied to both before and after The Incident. The guy here, however, is not me.

On the second night, we were getting close to Halloween. Only a handful of performances remained. The lines outside got longer, and the people in them got more restless from standing outside in the cold. We kicked out every stop and pushed ourselves to new extremities in order to give those people a good time. And so, when a group of guests stopped at the foot of my bed to marvel at the gory mess of my belly and leg, Julia and I took our marital discord to new intensity. “Get out,” I bellowed, “before this crazy bitch kills you too!”

“Come along,” said the Grim Reaper, trying to escort the group out of our room without actually touching anyone. (That’s one line, reckless as we were, that we did not cross.) “This room is dangerous.”

“Wow, cool,” said one guy in the group, leaning in toward my “severed” leg and mangled guts. “How’d they do that?” Another guy in the group was like, “Are those real animal guts?”

“We must leave,” intoned the Reaper.

“Get out!” I screamed at them. “GO!”

Normally, Julia stayed at one end of the room and I stayed at the other. Our contact was all verbal. As the dudes refused to move, however, she ran across the room, leapt up on the bed, screamed “I’LL KILL HIM AGAIN!”

And swung the sickle down toward my face.

The real sickle.

With blunted edges and a rusty point.

“NO!”

I threw my hands up to block her, and the sickle slammed into the back of my right hand.

THUNK.

Ow.

“We must leave this place of death,” the Reaper insisted, breaking that inviolate rule and practically shoving the guests through the black curtain. His voice held a note of panic, and the chastened dudes seemed to realize that we had just entered the realm of That Wasn’t Part of the Act.

“Ohmygod,” Julia whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

“Get Harlan.” I’d smashed my left hand over the wound, pressing it closed. Both hands were, of course, covered in fake blood and real grime.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I’m so sorry.”

“Get. Harlan.” I snarled it out, not wanting to think too much about what the pain pulsing through my hands meant in terms of damage.

The sickle hit me right where a major vein runs up the back of your hand, branching out slightly above the wound. The first blast of pain had been dull; it sharpened, though, by the time the vampire girl had hauled herself out of the too-small coffin, stuck her head in, and whispered, “Oh, shit – are you okay?” Julia had busted through the curtain between our room and the entryway, frantically asking where Harlan was. Although news had apparently been kept from the guests outside, word quickly spread that the guy in Cynthia’s room had just been stabbed for real.

By the time Julia pulled Harlan into the room, Vampire Girl and several of our castmates had gathered around and were trying to help extract me from the bed. With my left hand pressed against my right, afraid to let go and see just how much that vein would bleed, I needed two guys to climb onto the rickety bed, grab my arms, and pull me up. Vampire Girl peeled away the gut-laden belly sheet while Julia kept apologizing. “It’s okay,” I told her. “It was an accident. You didn’t do anything wrong.” With help from my castmates, I drew my half-asleep left leg out of the hole we’d cut in the mattress. One guy whose name and role I never learned hustled me to the one functioning bathroom, Harlan close behind us. “Oh, God,” Harlan whispered. “Please don’t sue us.”

“It was an accident,” I kept repeating. “As long as I don’t get stuck with the doctor bill, that’s all it was as far as I’m concerned.”

Man, was I stupid. Young and stupid and heading into shock.

The bathroom was a unisex ruin. Makeup of all kinds smeared across every available surface. Ratty clothes and towels, stiff with Karo blood, draped over the toilet and the edges of the sink. That sink looked like Jackson Pollock had thrown up in it after a particularly hard night. Smudges blurred the mirror as my castmate turned the light on. After hours in near-darkness, our pupils squinched in that blast of light.

I’m gonna have to look at it, aren’t I?

That was not a pleasant thought.

For some reason, that one functioning bathroom was tiny and cramped. I guess the public restrooms had been gutted or something before we got hold of the place. Nameless Castmate had gotten a bottle of alcohol, and both of us were like, “Yeah, we need to clean this out before we get you to the hospital.” Harlan told us that an ambulance was on its way. “Is that your blood?” the guys asked me, noting my gory presence. “I don’t think so,” I told them. “I’ve been keeping pressure on it since she stabbed me.”

Since she stabbed me.

How surreal.

In the glaring light, I saw the spectre I’d become: Torn-up white T-shirt. Bare feet. Old jeans cut off at the left knee. Flannel shirt open to expose my chest and belly. Every bit of me caked in sticky cold red stuff. Makeup smeared around my eyes to give me a dying sort of look. Messy short hair and the beardless face I’d had back in those days. Barely out of my teens, recently married, with a hole in my hand I didn’t want to look at but knew I needed to see.

Oh, well – let’s do this.

It wasn’t as bad as we’d expected, probably because I’d been pressing my left hand across my right so hard that the throbbing from the wound now pulsed between them both. What we saw, in that bright harsh light, was essentially a dent in the back of my hand, its edges pale blue and starting to bruise. The vein had been squeezed closed on both sides, and a slash of red welled at the center of the dent.

My castmate turned on the water. I stuck my hand under it.

Well, at least I didn’t scream.

In hindsight, I suppose I’d turned off most of my usual functions in order to deal with the realities of my situation. Shock’s useful for that sort of thing, I hear. And so, as I held my hand under cold water, sluicing off as much of the grime and gore as possible without touching that fucking blue dent in my hand, Nameless Castmate opened the bottle of alcohol and said, “This is probably gonna hurt a lot.”

I agreed. “Just do it.”

He was right. It hurt a lot.

Like, a lot a lot.

In my various misadventures, I’ve dislocated my knee twice, broken several bones, had the bottom of a shattered bottle punch through an inch of rubber on my sneaker sole and then slash my hand open when I reflex-grabbed at it. I’ve been burnt by fires and explosions, splashed with hot oil, beaten bloody, knocked across a room by a blow in the face from a Scuba mask, hit on several occasions with baseball bats, and wound up hunched and wailing on a bathroom floor while my guts contracted from a nasty stomach flu. I’ve had hangovers and suicidal depressions. I’ve been in car accidents and motorbike spills. I tore a chunk out of my arm when skidding across gravel-strewn concrete. I’ve had a knife at my throat, fists in my face, splinters in my skin, and two divorces carving bits out of my heart.

The stomach flu is the only thing I recall hurting worse than the moment he poured alcohol on that pale dent in the back of my hand.

Folks talk about things being “breathtaking”? That pain was breathtaking. The only sound I remember making was a low hiss through clenched teeth. I looked away because I didn’t want to see that damn dent in my hand again. It’s funny how you can be surrounded by carnage and torture so long as it’s not real, then feel your chest hollow out the moment you realize that you’ve actually been stabbed and the blood welling up in the wound isn’t made of colorful liquid corn.

Someone produced a clean towel. Harlan checked in to make sure I wasn’t gushing blood and threatening to sue him. Nameless Castmate, Harlan, and Vampire-Girl ushered me through the darkened House 2. Guests had begun to file in again, now with more stringent control from our stalwart Grim Reaper. The show must go on, as the saying goes, and we’d had a line of people freezing their asses off to get the thrills they paid for. By then, I’d asked someone to call Cathi, and Julia – who, for obvious reasons, took the rest of the night off – went to go fetch my wife from our apartment. (We didn’t have a car in those days.) As I neared the entrance and saw the flashing ambulance lights beneath the curtain, I realized something funny:

The crowd outside had been standing next to a real ambulance that had pulled up outside a haunted house attraction. As my escorts led me to the paramedics, I saw people in the crowd draw back from my blood-soaked, ragged form.

I probably would have laughed if I wasn’t so worried about my hand.

The paramedics had obviously been briefed. Given the absurd recklessness of that coke-drenched era, I’m sure this wasn’t the first time a Halloween house resulted in real injuries. They asked me how much of the blood on me was mine. “None of it,” I assured them. “I’ve kept pressure on the wound.”

You’d think I would recall my one and only ambulance ride, but I was fuzzy headed by then. The ensuing few hours blurred into a montage of Look how brave I’m being banter, appalled faces in the ER waiting room when I walked in under my own power while covered in apparent gore, Cathi carefully hugging me at the hospital (with an affectionate, “You idiot”), and the ER personnel plopping me in a cold treatment room for what seemed like hours – still barefoot in torn and Karo-bloodied clothes – when they realized I hadn’t actually fallen into a threshing machine. I got a few shots of morphine or something in my hand, so when the doctor came and stitched it closed, I was disconnected enough to watch him do it.

It didn’t look so bad, really. Just some pale bruised skin, the big vein pinched shut and probably coagulated by that point, and a bloodless gap about an inch long being stitched shut with black thread by a guy who’d done that job a million times before.

X-rays showed the bones to be undamaged. My ligaments remained miraculously unharmed. The sickle had punched straight to the bone, but the dull impact and my left hand had kept me from bleeding out. Eventually, after some sharp words from Cathi, the ER staff got me a blanket to wrap around my shoulders. She’d brought me a change of clothes and helped me into them. By the time Julia, Harlan, and Julia’s husband arrived to invite Cathi and me to dinner, I was so high on painkillers and receding adrenaline that I said Sure. The hospital gave me a soft demi-cast cloth split to keep my wrist straight and my hand immobile, provided more painkillers and instructions on how not to fuck my hand up, and sent us on our way. Once I’d cleaned up, we shared a late, delicious dinner while I assured Julia and Harlan I wasn’t suing anyone as long as I didn’t get stuck paying for the ambulance and hospital visit. Hell, I said, it didn’t even hurt that much!

Not until the painkillers wore off, anyway. Around 4:00 a.m., I was whimpering with pain as my hand pulsed lightning through my arm. I struggled in the dark with the child-proof cap on the meds until Cathi, whom I’d been trying to avoid waking, got up and opened them for me…

[TO BE CONTINUED]

“Vampire-Girl,” aka Amy.

Spookies Shouldn’t Play with Sharp Things: Part I – The Nightmare Begins…

I love Halloween. As a kid, I would sooner stay home and dress the house up with gory dummies and spooky sound effects than go out trick-or-treating with my friends. It’s not surprising, then, that when my friend Jerry – a former college classmate who’d dropped out of our theatre program not long after playing the role in an ambitious yet doomed production of Jesus Christ Superstar – invited me to talk to a friend of his who was setting up a haunted house, I said Oh hell yes.

This would be late September 1987. My now-ex-wife Cathi had moved in with me a few months earlier, following an ugly break with her family, and we both worked at the Pizza Hut Jerry managed at the time. Cathi had taken some pretty serious trauma during the break in question, and she and I were sorting out what happens when two late-teenage types suddenly find themselves stuck together and trying to be adults. The opportunity to go be a kid again – and for money, no less! – appealed to me. And so, by the end of September, I’d joined the team for House 2: The Nightmare Continues, a Halloween attraction set in an abandoned restaurant scheduled for demolition.

That last part should have been a clue about what life had in store for us that month..

Your ‘Umble Author, on the bed in Cynthia’s room

Our director for the project was a short, intense guy who came across like Harlan Ellison’s younger brother. I don’t recall his name, so let’s just call him “Harlan” here. The producer, if I recall correctly, was named Mike, and our cast and crew numbered about 15 people when I joined the troupe. By that time, they’d already begun gutting the building and painting its interior black, blue, and red. Because it was condemned, we had permission to do whatever the hell we wanted to that building; we took full advantage of that license, and we’d trashed the place thoroughly before the attraction even opened. Walls were kicked in. Holes were cut and hacked away. Red “blood” spattered every surface, and black sheets divided the dining areas into “rooms” where different scenes were staged. In later days, this sort of thing would be called a haunt. Back in the 80s, we just called ‘em haunted houses, and the precautions used by any respectable haunt were notoriously absent. We used real knives and real sledgehammers and a real chainsaw with the chain removed. It was crazy, and dangerous, and I loved the hell out of it.

Guests to our haunt were met by a tall Grim Reaper who escorted them through the haunt in groups of two to six people. After encountering a vampire girl in her coffin, they’d be led into Cynthia’s Room: a blood-caked “honeymoon suite” where a mad bride was murdering her husband. Ushered quickly through that room, they’d encounter a long hallway with a mad steelworker swinging a sledgehammer through the walls; a “dentist’s office” where a shrieking mad dentist tortured a shrieking patient; a large room featuring a Goth chick tormenting a mutilated guy strapped to a cross; a hallways where a masked killer ambushed people with a chainsaw; and a Freddy Kruger who’d jump out at the last second and chase the guests out the exit. Along the way, various screamers and spooks would keep the party hopping. Gender-wise, we were split roughly 50/50 between women and men. (This was before nonbinary was a word people used as a gender identity.) We didn’t have any guys who could fit into the coffin, and we preferred to make most of the tormentors women, and most of their victims men, in order to avoid the usual misogynist abuse dynamic. Most of us traded roles throughout the month, if only because the screaming and shrieking did a number on our vocal cords. I found that out in my first two nights as a performer, when a stint as the dentist and a stint as the patient rendered me unable to speak for a day or two and so I wound up on the cross for a few days until my throat recovered. I played Freddie and the chainsaw maniac, too, before alternating to Cynthia’s Room.

And that’s when the real horrors began.

When people entered Cynthia’s room, they’d see a blood-drenched bed occupied by a guy in torn and gory clothes. His belly was ripped open, and one leg had been hacked off at the knee. As this dying groom urged people to “Run before she gets you too,” the wild-haired bride in a crimson-soaked dress leapt out from behind a screen, waving a sickle and threatening to chop them all to bits. The Grim Reaper would hustle the guests out into the long hallway, and the two “married” castmates would catch a breather until the next group came in.

That, anyway, is the way things were supposed to work.

In order to stage the illusion of a disemboweled dude with a dismembered leg, the groom would stick his leg through a hole in the mattress. After he arranged his torn clothes accordingly, someone would place a plastic sheet over his bare chest and belly, then cover that sheet with fake innards and dump a ton of Karo syrup blood all over him. For the next few hours, that performer endured cramps, lost circulation in his leg, and froze half-naked under foam and plastic intestines, covered partially in plastic, and drenched in cold, sticky fake blood.

October’s a cold month in Richmond, VA, with strong winds blowing the summer heat away. House 2 occupied the middle of a parking lot, and so those winds blew across the empty space and cut right through the building’s unheated and destroyed interior. Few of us wore more than a shredded gown, shirt, or pants; most of us were barefoot, and all of our clothing got liberally drenched with red sticky goo. Young idiots like us seem to generate our own heat, thankfully, but we kept from freezing to death mostly through adrenalized activity. The guys on the bed and the cross, however, and the person in the dentist’s chair, were confined to one place, and we inevitably wound up being the coldest ghouls in the place. Thus, those roles got changed out every night or two, so that no one person spent each Friday and Saturday night of the month strapped into place and shivering until after midnight.

If this sounds like disaster waiting to happen, that’s because it was.

Why, then, did we do it?

Partly because it was fun. It really was. And we got paid each night, too, which was more than most starving-artist kids got in Reagan’s America. Harlan would divide up the proceeds from the door, take the biggest cut for expenses and profits, then deal out $20.00 or so to each cast member. It’s not much, granted, but again this was Reagan’s America in “the Capital of the South.” My job at Pizza Hut paid $3.25 an hour, plus tips (if we got any), minus taxes, and so having fun for an evening, covered in gore and scaring the shit out of people, and then pocketing $20.00 tax-free at the end of it seemed like a pretty decent deal.

Beyond that, almost all of us were actors or artists of one kind or another. I doubt any of us, other than Mike and Harlan, were over 25, and at least half of us were teenagers. I’m not entirely certain the building had been rented legally, and I know damned well there was no insurance involved. The number of legal and ethical issues surrounding such an enterprise should be obvious, but for hungry young creative misfits such things rarely matter… until, of course, they do.

Me, I was a seasoned veteran of guerilla film making, art modeling, and improv theatre. I’d spent college falling down hills, being thrown into swimming pools, gagging on rotting animal guts, getting cast nude in plaster, shivering naked on a model stand, pounding myself senseless in dive-bar mosh pits, and having my chest hair burnt off with an improvised explosive device. Gory makeup and cold Karo syrup blood were my natural plumage in those days, so this was just one more adventure to add to my long list of crazy shit. Cathi, bless her heart, wasn’t nearly as much of a ham as I was. She’d stay home and read, safe in a warm bed full of cats, and then help me out of my Karo-stiffened clothing and into a hot shower whenever I’d get home.

Until I roped her into that madness too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself now.

Where was I? Oh, yeah…

[TO BE CONTINUED]