Thu, 19 May 2005

angel of mercy: an introduction
Angel of Mercy began in late 1990, right around the time I first started staying up late on school nights to pound out stories. The vast majority of these early stories found their way into the hands of a friend, who encouraged me to keep writing, thus leading to these questionable first attempts at low-rent zine production. The first two episodes were never actually sent anywhere; I made up copies and messed around and was just too much of a wuss to let them out into the world. After I got to Iowa City, however, there were so many people doing the same basic thing I was doing that I felt nicely anonymous. Primarily these consisted of short stories mixed with photocopied images and hand-written scrawls, averaging about eight pages each. I’d make five bucks worth of photocopies at kinko’s and leave some in my dorm lobby (Quadrangle, then Burge, then Currier), at the ped mall, wherever. I didn’t put my name on them, but left my po box, and got a few interesting replies. Later, I got more into swapping copies with other people, which brought me into distant circles with a few genuinely cool people; no less an authority than Kerry Thornley (who traded me for copies of his “Out of Order” sheets) said Angel of Mercy was “not horrible”. Alas, in 1993 I was forced to leave Iowa City, at which point Angel of Mercy (and all writing of any sort) stopped for a good long time.

This archive here contains bits and pieces from that time. A lot of it simply isn’t that good; zipping around on questionable chemicals and youthful folly, much of the text material is the sort of self-satisfied cleverness that doesn’t really hold up on close examination. Once in a while, however, I did okay for myself. Many of the stories are the roots of the characters and places I still use in stories, so it’s a miniature history lesson for people interested in who I was and what sorts of things I was doing, then.

As to why it’s called Angel of Mercy, it’s a personal thing and not worth a story.

Special thanks to Jenna, who dealt with the bulk of this material first-hand; all the roomates I kept up until all hours of the night; the upper floor of Great Mid, where I did most of my layout work; and my friends of that time, wherever they may be today.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/angelofmercy] #

mister victor inc.
[I kinda got off track during the spring semester, and only published two issues. This was the issue where I started writing additional stories in marker over the photocopied pages. The three or so people who actually read AOM were not at all down with that.]

My father used to work for Victor Incorporated, a company who specialized in complete horizontal and vertical hold on the television antenna market. The market took serious slides in the eighties, with the influx of cable and satellite dishes, and as such in ‘88 Victor Incorporated’s owner (whose name, I assume, as either Something Victor or Victor Something but I’m not sure) took a policy of microdownsizing, applying the concept before it had become a Forbes buzzword.

“People of Victor Incorporated, it is my job to bring sad tidings; there will be layoffs, there will be firings, there will be pressure put on certain individuals to leave, until we’re down to our optimum manpower level, our fighting weight, so to speak. From now on our Pacific Rim consultancy division will be Randy. The Acquisitions department will be Shawn. The Payroll and Expenditures department will be either Martin or William, I’ll let you know later this week…yes?”

“I’m the entire Acquisitions department? Which now employs 437 people?”

“You can always quit, you know.”

“No, no sir, just curious. Carry on.”

Victor Incorporated continued on with their bare-bones staff for two weeks, at which point the owner jumped to his death from the clock tower in town, down on campus. Immediately after the funeral my father decided it would be a good time to retire, and has been happily unemployed ever since. Once he told me that at the owner’s funeral, while he and the Inventory department (James) and the South American Distribution department (Sheila) sat on the front porch of the funeral home and snuck shots of Glenfiddich, a friend of the owner told us he had heard a story that the owner had walked to that tower every noon for one hundred and thirty-seven days, each of which he found the stairway to the top of the clock tower closed. Then, one day, it was open. My father tells me not to overthink this whole Girl With Beautiful Hair thing.

“Later on, you’ll get older, and it’s weird how now I actually spend time being with women, perfectly attractive women, and I don’t even feel this immediate pull to schlepp them, I mean, I’m still attracted and all, it’s not a, you know, it’s not like there’s any problems, but that immediacy, that necessity, that’s all gone now. I mean, I’m actually friends with women now, and it’s really interesting.”

“Well, Dad, I mean, I’m friends with women now. A lot, actually.”

And he gives me that look like “And you’re my son, right?”

…

She was talking, but I was thinking about my father, and so she said “Blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah OB-GYN.”

“I hate that. I mean, I really hate that. Obstetrician-Gynecologist. You don’t abbreviate any other doctor’s names. You don’t call an endocrinologist an EC. you don’t call a cardiologist a CO. You don’t call an Ear, Nose And Throat Specialist an ENTS. You can say the words, already, I mean-“

“Just stop it already. Just let it go.”

And that was the end of that.

…

Back in my stupider days I had thought that the best way to keep in The Girl With Beautiful Hair’s good graces was o become the apple of her parent’s eyes, which shows how just plain wrong I generally was. With her father this was simple; he called me up one night and asked me to help him bust one of his employees, one Raymond Oates III, out of prison. Raymond, whom I knew from his position at E1 Duce Burrito, apparently also did some construction work out at The New Mall on the far side of town, and apparently got in this big hassle with a couple OSHA people who were asking “leading, loaded questions” to the illegals, and so Raymond up and knocked ‘em the hell out. So her dad and I and a few people from work climbed in his pickup and headed over to the new prison, conveniently located downtown next to the pawn shops and the furniture stores. I’ve always half-believed there’s a hidden system of justice guided by laws mere mortals cannot understand, a secret court accessible by those who know certain code-words, certain ciphers. The truth of this was demonstrated to me that night, with the police chief meeting us in the parking lot in order to discuss siege agreements.

“Chief Knutson, it’s like this. You let my man out or we’ll tear up all the road around the prison, we’ll build a playground from your parking lot, we’ll put some hideous art sculpture on the helipad.”

“Yeah, well, you do THAT and we’ll get all loaded and shoot up your precious new mall, we’ll get all your licenses revoked, we’ll impound all this equipment.”

“You know there’s only one way we’re gonna solve this.”

“DUEL!”

“DUEL!”

and then half an hour later we were out in some field, getting ready to do it up gladiator-style, bulldozer vs. cop car in a fight to the finish. The only person on the construction side still sober enough to get up in the cab was me, and I was going up against one of the cop’s rookie guys, which made me think for a minute this entire thing was an elaborately-staged hazing ritual, but before I could get anywhere with that the shots were fired, the flares lit the sky, and we were off. The key to aggressive bulldozer driving is not to chase the guy, to wait him out, until he can’t take it and tries to ram from the back, at which point you just back over him. For the life of me I’m not sure what exactly the cops had in mind, tactically, when they chose the car as their chariot of choice, maybe figuring I’d give up before it actually came to blows. Who knows. Anyway, even though I now get pulled over every time my tail lights go out, I definitely had an in with The Girl With Curious Hair’s father. My own father, after hearing of my exploits, was quite impressed as well. I made a mental note to run over more cop cars in the future and realized I had probably blown my chances with her mother; destruction of state property generally sent her into fits. I haven’t seen either of them in a while. Who knows.
(12:15.05.19.2005) [/else/angelofmercy/04killers] #

julietta
[Here’s a chunk from issue 3, December 1991, which I finished and distributed just before going home for winter break from my first year of college. I was still basically writing about high school stuff and overly tweaked out on cleverness, but it was a fun time.]

I awoke to find Mr. Peptide swatting me across my head with his pointer in an effort to awaken me with maximum embarrassment as to make me an example and as my head rose from the table a small corner of the book I had just bought, I Was A Telekinetic Affectionato Of Semiautomatic Weapons With The Ability For Full Automatic With Minor Adjustments And Stock Laser Scopes For The Now-Corrupted American Junta Of Nineteen Seventy-three, which he found to be, if I may be so bold as to quote, “completely and utterly offensive and not at all in keeping with the iron fisted neo-fascist doctrine on which my Civil Obedience and Citizen’s Responsibility class is now and forever will be based, you fucking infidel,” and quickly grabbed the book, swatting me over the head with it instead of the pointer which resulted in minor neurochemical imbalances which I was able to use after class as a bribe chip to gain me complete access to Teacher’s Lounge A, including hot tub and sauna access as well as free full-body massage and privately trained and imported concubines and first-run movies in the brand new bowling alley-rifle range, the experiences there gained would come to massive amounts of benefit in the upcoming future. A few days later, today, I left the web of comfortable euphoria which I had erected in Josef’s basement and once again found myself asleep in Mr. Peptide’s class but awoke far before he was able to discover my narcoleptic tendencies and once again swat me with whatever vorhandensein was on today’s agenda, an agenda I tried to second-guess as Mr. Peptide stood over me with blood in his eyes screaming “YOU TOOK MY LOUNGE RIGHTS FROM ME YOU SON OF A BITCH YOU WILL PAY IN INCOMPREHENSIBLE SUFFERING,” (or perhaps I was projecting my own fears into the eyes forever in the shadow of Hess and Goebbels and pseudo-Freudian dominance needs) causing me to look down and notice something about him I had never picked up on before-this man creased his pants so tightly that you could literally lose a few finger putting them on in the morning. Call me unbelievably ballsy but my scientifically-directed head, which some think holds the brain of Albert Einstein, stolen from the Smithsonian and put into the skull of some backwoods fuck-up like, oh, I guess it’s too absurd to finish, but I could not resist experimentally throwing my textbook directly at that gleaming crease which whispered songs of dismemberment and watched in amazement and horror as the nine-hundred and fifty-two page book was cleaved into perfect halves without the least bit of effort. Other kids in the class picked up on this and threw objects of their own at the magic pants-bricks, dirt, chairs, rulers, a large diamond discovered and hidden by slaves who worked in mines in the Amazon who transported it to the States via a hired enemy of the country who was to buy the slaves’ freedom (what the fuck kinda paradox is that?) but instead went on the run and sold the diamond for a bag~f jelly beans and a Desert Storm T-Shirt after repeated cranial bludgeonings, the buyer giving the diamond to his daughter for her ninth birthday~ seven years ago. All objects were perfectly halved. Shit! This motherfuckin’ mark’s up for a bad case of Mutiny Of The PS 982 Civil Obedience and Consumer Responsibility class we all agree as we stripped him down (yeesh! the things revolution calls for!) and flung him through the stained-glass picture of Piaget over his desk, listening to him squeal out the extasis of being dominated by children, the same children who assisted me, the proverbial Magellan of the magic pants, prepare for The Big Showdown at the sacrifice of about seven fingers and an unknown amount of blood. Raiding Teacher’s Lounge A, I equipped my teen gang with a veritable arsenal of high-tech weaponry, using my new-bought book as a guide to maximum round capacity and trajectory accuracy, running through a target area filled with yearbook photos taped onto targets no larger than we. All who dared attack us got a taste of the magic pants and a few rounds in assorted areas, and we hijacked a bus, taking it on a two-month blitzkrieg of violence and mayhem Mr. Peptide would have shivered at the thought of, I invariably manifested my destiny, becoming both the Son Of Heaven and the Godfather of Washburn, Iowa.

“Uh, yes, that’s wonderful Matt. But I still think even though you’ve become an Enemy Of The School you should still go. The last thing you need is more heat. Besides, I’ll meet up with you at lunch and we’ll go out for delicacies, okay?”

I know Ophelia’s right, but I feel weird about going back. I don’t really want to. Dreamed about white, the color of light, the fate of every creature exists both in the intelligence and in reality. I’m just beginning. The faint voice said centuries and centuries have found the wrong image, as if from the center of a storm - no. I have to stay awake. Otherwise it’ll be bad. Get in trouble. Crucified until dead. Hung from the ceiling. Small opaque bundles of assorted breakfast cereals turn with the winding wind, the secret closed, saying the rhyme you taught me when I was just a child in your arms, I was always a child in your arms, you haven’t forgotten. Circumvent the revolutions of the sky with these daydreams, these dark days of dead majyk and waiting for communion, snow-blind eyes blooming from information and newfound senses, fingers intertwined, proving grounds, delirium. Portraits hang over the hole in the floor where the beads fell, I’ll have to save those someday. We glumly miserably count out the five minutes it takes to make rice. What a beatific way to spend an evening. Carpathian. Heralded. Titanium frames and my months in diatribe with the frozen Christ. When a false god betrayed us and we all fell to black. These are birthing pains. The vision liquefies. A bleak fragility made of scattered shards of what glistened like lies across the white of the sheets in the summerwintering sun. These promises are not made in ignorance. I understood before I entered. A simple proximity making me better than I am. And her hair catches and cradles the light of the moon gently within the silken revolution my fingers dare not enter, gathering strength, breathing through. Brown pictures turn to dust in memory. Silhouettes in the window say blessings for our little passions. I’m so tired. I am so tired. I know my loss this way. The word scared my memories, part of my spirit fell asleep. Passionately dedicated to what sounds like light. If you fool yourself anymore I will kill you. they scatter by a new wind, dying down, picking up, across the over and always. Everything human now except for humanity. Benediction via history, a judgment of extinction and sublimated fear. The piece of truth gets lost among the others, it’s a dream you’re having trouble holding down, praying for an end, oblivious to truth you cannot digest. It’s you.

But whatever became of Julietta?
(12:15.05.19.2005) [/else/angelofmercy/03aphasia] #

monitors
[First issue. November 1990. Seventeen years old. Burroughs and Kerouac, The Pixies and The Cure and Slayer and serious caffeine abuse. Printed up copies on the school photocopier while my friends did shit for the newspaper. Left copies around West High, up on the hill, at the library slipped into books. That spring I took a couple trips to Iowa City and left copies all over campus. Nothing but text (even the cover) which made it kinda a hard sell. Title a tribute to Chrome, which I thought I was super-cool to be into Chrome at the time. What a rube, what a maroon.]

So now it’s gone, followed every planned path, left without whimper or murmur or sigh, off to places never identified or explored where everything’s had its novelty rubbed away, a reinvented memory set for nostalgia taking the place of surrogate originals. We are left with shapes in the dust and guesses at their names. But we are professionals, and this is all we need. The Davis Ranch had become famous, over the years, for a sort of experimental rodeo; being within shouting distance from the disposal mines, the animals were born with hundreds of distinct genetic abnormalities. Most of these were fatal, but the occasional animal stayed alive long enough to allow odd variants on rodeo classics, two cowboys chase a two headed calf, bulls whose horns sprouted from the skull and shoulders like tendrils. The birthing problems seen in the livestock were soon apparent in the human population, and flush with stillbirths and crib deaths, the population around the ranch became increasingly promiscuous, so that adult life was a series of pregnancies and funerals, until the riders who lived long enough to be strapped to the saddle mirroed the oddities of the beasts they rode, the grandstands lined with children on homemade respirators and hairless parents sucking down thumbsized pills with cheap beer.

It gets easier to believe once you’ve put a few years behind you. Sold used prom dresses in high school parking lots to pigment-deficient freshmen. Downright lewd. Drew chalk outlines around me every time I tried to sleep. No faith, no persistence, these people. That hyperfocus you get on each potential smell when there’s a new girl around. All I remember her saying was “I can’t handle this”, all she ever said. The blood that stains her teeth. Someone to take it out on. She thought it was forever. “A different kind of friends”, she said. If she saw me now, she’d stare at her feet and weep. She made me feel invincible, back when I was invincible, when the only thing that could touch me was her. Building cameras nailed into the walls to catch the traces, the remains. It’s all nostalgia with me. Hold to the ground and tell yourself secrets. Everybody always loved you. Washed right out of her mind as soon as I left her sight. I want my fucking shit back.

I planted magnets in your mouth so the angels could never find your grave.

Diving for spare change the sailors toss off the bridge, ducking between cars, callouses on the fingertips to master the grasp. It’s been nearly ten years since someone else cut your hair. There’s a mason jar with string wrapped around the mouth in which you keep all the things you can’t identify but you know you’ll one day need. You find your way home at night by following the church bells. Your palsied hands tremble and all your change falls from the St. Marks Bridge. Someday you’ll keep what’s yours.

There’s a ballroom on the moon where all the drinks are cheap and all the dancers make excellent use of the diminished gravity. There’s someone there, sitting at the bar, who’s been having dreams with you as the star, all action and hints at romantic intrigues, and this person wakevs every morning waiting to sleep, chewing up diphenhydramine and walking to the bar to wait out the waking hours. Tonight you’ll bump backs in the midst of a waltz, and swap partners, and then all the truth will come out of his chest.

She paid her third grade class in sugarsticky candy to call you and tell you to come home, knowing you were always a sucker for the grand gesture.
(12:15.05.19.2005) [/else/angelofmercy/01monitors] #