LIBRARY artefact #028
(Here, from the fabled MorrisonCon event in 2012, comes the overture to ‘The Con’, an epic, site-specific spoken word performance piece I created with Gerard Way and James Dewees for the opening night of the event.
(The idea was to embody the spirit of Vegas in words and, after an intense period of research, I chose to interpret that spirit as a dynamic clash between Howard Hughes, who saw in Vegas an opportunity to build a sophisticated empire of style and sophistication, and Liberace who stood for camp, trash, and artifice.
(Turning this conceptual conflict into a magical battle between Rationalism and Decadence, I created a third figure to be the hero of the story; Walter Lee – representing a “good” alias of Liberace as well as recalling William Burroughs alter ego William Lee. We can imagine the protagonist as an archetypal Burroughs lead-
(‘The Con’ was performed in full at the Hard Rock Café Las Vegas on September 28th 2012, with live improvised music by Gerard Way and James Dewees.
(The dashes between words in the following were put into the text to remind me when to breathe!)
GALLERY artefact #026
1. WALTER LEE STEPS IN
"Here's hoping now that someone's died
You'll drown in grief - a proper tide
Ignoring what you feel inside -
That mum and dad and Jesus lied"
WALTER Lee’s wasted an entire morning composing bleak and enigmatic verse for sympathy greetings cards and failed to score an award winner.
Rakish Walter Lee, who - opiated to the tits in a 3-piece suit and tie like a dime store DeQuincey - taps out Day-Glo gobbledy-grams on his Hermes Rocket portable typewriter at a truck stop diner on Yellow Brick Route 66, part way to the Black Pyramid - and - “destiny“.
For Walter Lee - defrocked G-man, full-time gentleman junkie - luck has finally run out - but a writer has to make a living somehow - so he only hopes the detour via Boulder City 1959 is worth the gas.
“Slow news day, Mr. Lee,” the agency contact observes.
The headline on its flat-folded Desert Dispatch reads ‘THOUSANDS DEAD - APOCALYPSE CONFIRMED”.
“Slow news beats bad news any day,” Walter Lee peers down his WASPy nose, tips his glass and salutes - with the dregs of a vodka and Coke - his contact - sat opposite for 15 minutes now. Patient. Forgettable. Half-man, half-mantis. A smile, a song and a taste for eroto-cannibalistic predation.
Walter Lee tears the sheet from the roller, peels back the carbon layer and crowns a stack of glossy paper.
Surprised by this prompt execution of the deadline, the contact confirms his own appearance on page 1, paragraph 4, with a wry grin. “You forgot to mention my gills,’ he says, sniffing at the concluding words before locking the manuscript in a faux white-tiger skin valise. “Most people do.”
In payment, from behind his thumb like a card trick he produces a LIQUID PAPER dropper that glows through his bones.
“Just in case something needs rubbed out,” he says.
“I use Eaton’s Corrasable Bond,” completes the call and response. “Corrects right onto the paper.”
The stranger bends low across the table to conclude the business, eyeballs shifting like pendulums. He hisses.
“It only works ONCE, I hear. Beware the side effects of Ultimate Correcting Fluid, Mr. Lee. And may God have mercy on your soul.”
“God wouldn’t touch my soul with rubber gloves, friend,’ Lee assures him. When writing can’t pay the bills, a boy’s gotta go where the work is. Contract killings in the afterlife. Bardo wet jobs. Aetheric assassinations done dirt cheap. It’s only words, after all.
In the parking lot, behind the diner, Walter Lee accepts his mission, loads the spike from the Liquid Paper dropper, and thumbs the plunger to the root. Intravenous organic super-solvent sure can teach a man a thing or two about storytelling his ass into and out of trouble.
Big smile. The Fear recedes like the hair beneath his hat. Walter Lee’s snug as a Ken doll behind the wheel of the salmon-pink and black trimmed 1959 Chrysler Imperial hardtop. The passenger seat is reserved for his faithful typewriter, his familiar, snug in its case like a friendly modernist snail in a shell.
The mission is deceptively simple: Walter Lee has exactly twenty minutes to kill the winner of the impending battle between Good and Evil.
“Welcome to FABULOUS LAS fucking VEGAS,” he groans - the very last place on Earth a man with no luck at all would want to wind up.
And there, ahead - at the end of the highway into town, is the stop sign for human consciousness. Evolution’s terminus. Sulking in the afternoon’s oily light, a jet-black pyramid seems to float as if in a trough of shallow piss across the horizon.
Make some space in your heads for a 400-foot tall space jellyfish! An incontinent Elder God wandering in its pyjamas half a mile from the trauma ward. Its name is 5-cell. 4-simplex. In the eternal morning before the Fall, it was Pentachoron. Hyperpyramid. One of eleven Rebel Platonic Supersolids who got just a little bit too big for their vertices.
The Cyclops stare, the Sauron eye of fire, extinguished in the Fall. Shell-shocked, hallucinating, polyhedral casualty of some old War in Heaven or other - crashed to earth through the rotten math that holds up the sky - through the worm-eaten joists and mouldy rafters of cosmology - all the way from the icy mesopause of higher mathematical topography to Nevada desert dirt and scorpion shit - its golden sections chained, its occult ratios enslaved to the black magician’s will - mind-controlled by Muzak, neon, flesh, and bucks.
Swallowing light, the blowhole of the pyramid emits a waste beam of 42.3 billion raw candlepower - a lux ejecta brighter than a supernova of sunflowers. It spreads an extended black mycelium of wire and cable ten miles underground in every direction to sense its prey.
If it had lips, it would lick them.
Nothing’s ever easy.
A Cadillac Eldorado races by - an inksplatter of petrol fumes, a Steadman scribble of bug-eyed bubbled bad craziness, an exhaust of ether and adrenochrome. Concentric circles. Batmen over Barstow. Time, like the highway, runs one way, into the pyramid‘s impacted tarry vortex, a Jules Verne maelstrom grinding centuries, not water in its restless mouths.
Walter Lee lifts his hands from the wheel and the car keeps rolling, like a ball down an incline that just gets steeper by the minute. He’s sweating cold liquid smack and he hopes the addicts can‘t smell him from here.
Losing his nerve like freezing plasma draining through the soles of his feet, Walter Lee turns to flee - but the wide world STRETCHES to resist escape. The distant blue horizon is three inches from his nose now - the city warped into wide-angle on the inner skin of a soap bubble. The trap is tripped.
The pyramid opens four miles of white-hot delirious strip-lit throat - all its sides are closing into place around him, all at the same time.
He’s Jonah in the whale and his only hope now is to become a poison - to kill this thing by osmosis, crawl live and naked from its ass if need be, triumphant - waving a flag, dancing the fucking can-can.
Job done.
Until then, bravado counts for fuck all. First blood goes to the black magician.
oh. OH. i can't believe we completely forgot about this event. it's been years since we heard pieces of it that couldnt all be made out- the very first pull of our marionette strings.