THUNDER, PERFECT MIND I saw changing faces as Darkness enveloped me, the gray clouds threatening an immanent downpour. Sheet lightning pulsed in the east. In the depths of a cavern where I stumbled over stalagmites was a Mirror. Day lived w/in its fluorescent depths. A Serpent was sitting beside the Mirror, holding a piece of fruit: "I am the Lizard King, I can do any- thing...you will become yourself omnipotent if you eat the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge!" the Snake enjoined, so I cracked it open. Its flesh was orange; I scooped a tawny piece of fruit-meat into my mouth, like some invisible melon. I tasted sweet and sour. At night I was watching the dark side of the moon. I looked in the Mirror and my clothes dissolved into motley. I was God; God is a Clown: A new Genesis had begun--back at the Hotel Gonzo supper was ready, but I would have to miss that Communion--I was not hungry; the Knowledge was filling and the Serpent was a she-bop, a siren whose offer was my need. Her chest was perfectly smooth: the true Androgyne. Her vorkling was female superior. My hands felt the scales of her chest until Day took me. Then She vanished into darkness and distance like metaphysics vanishing into a material reality that was cold night-sin. I'll paint rainbows all over your blackness. THE RETURN OF THE BOZO KING Then I saw a picaresque figure at the end of a long, dark tunnel: Bongo Fury. I climbed behind Bongo onto the seat of the Invisible Hog, an advanced cybernetic attack motorcycle. With enough armament to sink a battleship and the brains of Harley Davison, the great science fiction author, on a micro-chip. Like some screaming banshee demon out of the pits of hell. A vapor trail in the emptiness. But I wasn't certain if Harley Davison had any brains. No matter how many Hugo Awards he'd won. I gripped tightly onto Bongo as he gunned as much speed as he could out of the Invisible Hog. We were approaching a sharp mountain turn; Gravity clutched at me as Fury rounded it--somehow. The Police car was not so lucky. They skidded, desperately swerved at the last instant, broke through the retaining fence, and bounced down the mountainside. In a tremendous cascade of tongues of living flame the car exploded, the burning Hulk in dread conflict with the Savage Id--would Luther ever be brought to justice? Would his Kryptonite ever be shielded by lead so the Savage Id could escape the rusted chains of his arch-enemy's prison moon? All this and more will be answered in the next issue of Slime-thing Comics. CONTINUED NEXT MONTH... Flame belched from the turbos as the mighty Hog disrupted the quiet of the endless hills, the mountain country which we flew along like the dirty boulevards of Phoenix fading into prairie where farmhouses were rare. This was cattle country; you needed a lot of acreage to sustain a large herd so the farms out here spread through infinite space where archons dwelt. A ride down Dawn's Highway had me at the Great Falls airport, stop-over in Salt Lake City. Dawn's Highway will take you all the way to the City of Night if you really want to go that far. Blue mountains rose to the west behind an immense phallic smokestack that belched smog into the womb of the atmosphere. The Missouri river thundered over the wide cataracts which had given the city of Great Falls its name. The Butterfly Boys split for the Corner Bar (there really is such a place) while I waited in the Great Falls Airport, high upon a hill, in my brilliant disguise as a redneck. If only my cowboy hat would hide my mohawk--the Police were looking for a cyber-punk and not the Lone Ranger. HAS THIS OLD SAINT IN THE FOREST HEARD NONE OF THIS? An old saint came down from the Invisible pine forest into the rarity of the airport, himself trapped like me by the immense crystal hyperspheres of my mind. He laughed a little when he saw me, cried out, "You once carried your fire into the mountains, would you now carry your ashes into the valleys? Don't you fear to be punished as an arsonist? "Lead, Materialism has been the paradigm in the sciences since the 19th Century; because of this Christianity is a dying cult no matter how much appeal it may yet have for the proletariat; it teaches a literal resurrection while for the Gnostic resurrection was only a symbol....Christianity teaches God as Father while the Gnostic God was Mother: I am the whore and the holy One. I am the wife and the virgin. I am She whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a hus- band....Heaven is a place on Earth." I left the Neuromancer in a great hurry: We had been just barely in time to catch the last great American steel eagle so I had no chance to answer the Saint's accusations. Monster bats careened above the mountains to the east as the machine rose, weeping blood.... THE GODS OF WAR WON'T CAPITULATE AND ANIMAL LIFE IS LOW ON THE TOTEM POLE So I had to phone Sophie Rosencruetz from the Salt Lake City Municipal airport to tell her where I was. I want a bicycle. Everybody's playing Happy Freuds! After I had escaped from the Bobo Boat I had missed her so much; in the world of cowboy junkies it was good to meet a fellow New Wave artist--so I drape my new black leather jacket protectively over my bag by the payphone. The jacket given to me personally by Morlock, snatched from some unimaginable Universe by Roxy Horror. The edges crawl like an animated van Gogh. My ears are still intact but my mind is split--I have to be careful not to let my writing become too dissociated; it is nothing if not the history of an illness--the entire staff of Interview magazine suffers from this same chronic impression of me. That's why they rejected Beyond God and Sisyphus, the story of what happens the day Sisyphus pushes his boulder to the top of the hill and it stays there: I write fantasy and they prefer "realism". Whatever that is. But the only way to write realistically about a mental illness is to write a fantasy.... My writing, like Andy's painting, has suffered from death inside. The role of the Museum of Modern Art in this matter is less than exemplary: They showed no interest in Andy in his long, long period of dying (1968-1989). And then they go after him con brio as soon as they (erroneously) think he is dead. The bakemeats are barely frozen-cold when MOMA announces a full-scale Andy retrospective! Andy always liked me because of my pop art insanity: It has long been my delusion that I am a comic book murk monster, a Lizard-thing with the head of a praying mantis. So I slither casually up to the telephone shelf, my segmented eyes focussed on the jacket--this black leather jacket Andy gave me was (is) my favorite garment of all time. Okay? At this point I was showing minimal signs of catatonic schizophrenia. Just then Sophie picked up the phone: "Lead?" "I feel free. I am alone in a world schiz-krieged by VADIS. She is a cyborg whose brain is being controlled by the Demiurge. Certainly as I look about at the androgynes, whores, mothers, milling aimlessly about the airport while my shiny animal-skin jacket hibernates like a dry ice Queen I think that this world must've been made by an insane God, and will you think I'm an exacerbator when you find out about VADIS? I certainly drove her to exacerbation!" Sophie said, "Are you descoobied? You're either com- pletely stoned or you belong back here with the rest of us psychokillers!" "I've been taking my glaucoma medication again. I'm a U-boat Captain; I'm always torpedoed. I will give you blue-silver sunlight." I replied. "But you'd probably do even better if you laid off the atomic reactor. Nuclear submarines drop depth charges into entification at the neural level. But what can I do for you? Besides tell you to take your medication, not the stupid submarines. You were always after me to take my haldol so I'm doing the same for you...I'm taking it now, okay? You get to a psychiatrist before you..." I interrupted her, saying, "Oh, screw it! Do you think if we met sometime after you're out of the hospital we could go out on a date? I've been crazy about you ever since I met you...." I did not mention that I had made sinister plans for hot nasties in a hot tub with Norea. Excuse me while I kiss the sky. "I think my sister might be more your type. Why can't we go on as three? Norea and I have shared lovers in the past; date-swapping--we'd tell them we were the Other and dress in each other's clothes; God is the Wholly Other....Sure I want to vorkle! But I don't want to get involved. I'm into casual sex." "I really don't think I could have sex with you without getting involved," I said. "It would put our relationship on a whole new level of meaning. Do you realize that in the Middle Ages the mystics used to talk about Spiritual Semen? They talk about Mary getting pregnant from the Spirit...you realize this is impossible: Who ever heard of a woman becoming pregnant from another woman?" Giggling, Sophie said, "No, I didn't know that. That's what I like about you; you know so much about mysticism. Tra-la for the Mystery Cults. Guess what: After I get out of here I'm going to get my band back together and play in motels; we're going to call ourselves Cowboys On Acid because we're a Montana band but we don't play country music--I'm into synthe-pop myself...." "I love you as a fellow New Wave artist," I said while smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. "Andy was always into the New Wave. Uncle Tim has been hanging around with David Gilmore, Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox, and the great David Byrne...I can probably get you autographs...!" Sophie said with the tone of perfume of an excellent style, "Yeah, listen...I can't talk much longer; I'm being restricted on my phone time...oh, here's Big Nurse; I gotta go." CLICK! I look up from the phone booth, feeling rejected in spite of the ambiguous (androgynous?) tone of the conversation when I discover with awesome dread that the black leather jacket, symbol of my freedom from autopsy pathologists and sexual busy-bodies of all genders, has vanished like Night into an early morning Madonna--I catch a glimpse of the thief's escape route: Escalator be 10 feet away. E-Z X-it. Bye, bye black bird. Nab. Grab. Dust goes. Goodbye, clothes. # End of file Press RIGHT ARROW (#6 key) of the numeric keypad to load the next file.