2 posts tagged “aldred”

He must be quick now. Time is short and deadlines loom. Aldred hustles away from the train station, finding himself in woods and farmland quicker than he had expected. The dark of the woods is mythic, and Aldred finds himself falling for it, in spite of his carefully maintained veneer of sophistication. Some things are undeniable by the mind of man, at least if that man is Stephen Aldred. Dark branches rear up into the sky, like signifying gods or twirling witches. He twitches at the slightest noise and finds himself thankful for good bladder control, as he is far from a hospitable rest and doesn't have a change of clothes on him. Not that he'd risk being even partially naked out here. Better to be cold and stink of urine than to open one's self up to what ever rape beminded satyr might be lurking out here. He unsuccessfully tries to banish the thought from his mind, but the rest of his journey is punctuated with images of cracked hooves, matted furry legs, horrible black toothed grimaces and barbed and sinister phalli hungry for the innocent gate of his guts. Better to die, smothered by an angry cloud of rabid bats or struck repeatedly by lightning that bears all the marks of being directed specifically at him by an angry god, if one irrelevant outside of this forest.

In short, Aldred considers himself secure in his masculinity, but isn't quick to put it to the test.

As the walk stretches on to an hour or more, Aldred finds that one can become accustomed to mythic terror. While rapine beasties continue to cavort in his head, they have begun to recede back into the realm of archetypal fear, rather than that of immediate physical threat. The terror is more theatrical now, a costume that he has adopted for his walk in the woods, and he is almost disappointed when he first spies the light of civilization in the distance. The rapist satyrs begin to metamorphose into more modern terrors: swaggering and dull eyed youths, perhaps still out for his podex, but only in a grossly material way.

Ah civilization: the place where dreams are forged, along with American currency and Louis Vuitton handbags. Aldred loves and hates it: some of his greatest spiritual pursuits have come out of it (like the parking lot cult), and others...

Aldred casts his mind back to a time when he was adopted by a seemingly primitive tribe as a shaman of sorts. His position was never really clear. Was he a skin scraping hide dresser, expected to mumble a few charms over the tribe's kills? Was he a queen bee sort of mystical figure, dispensing his urine or other fluids in precious little driblets for the pseudo-psychedelic edification of his brothers and sisters? Was he meant to distribute aphoristic wisdom in hermetic couplets (most likely not, as he didn't share a common language with the tribe)?

All he knew for sure was that he had been singled out. Taken in the night from a Motel 6, he awoke in a stinking and smoking hut, blood dripping out of a shallow yet long cut in his right arm into that of a hawk faced man he later considered the chief. For the first few days, maybe weeks, he was left mostly to his own devices, meals (offerings?) showing up at the flap of the hut at regular intervals. Simple fare: fish and nuts mostly, with some rather unappetizing fruit and pemmican sometimes included, he supposed as a treat. Escape was entirely possible, as he didn't appear to be guarded, but the whole thing was too intriguing to run away from.

Once he had settled into the rhythm of things, Aldred began to experiment. First he tried sleeping naked in the middle of the settlement. After waking up cured under a pile of feculent blankets three days running, he decided to change tactics.

Next he tried smoking as much of the local cannabis as he could stand. This was in plentiful supply, but all it made him do was giggle a lot and piss his now well lived in trousers. Playing the holy fool didn't appear to make much of an impression, though the stone faced tribe proved difficult to read during his whole stay.

Fasting followed, and this was perhaps the greatest trial as Aldred loved his food, even when it mostly consisted of badly cooked fish and foul tasting nuts. He felt he was on the right track as the tribe seemed to pay a great deal of attention to him in this period. But in the end the unbrookable needs of his prodigious guts proved too much to deny. They found him after two days, down by the river vomiting the better part of a load of salted fish he had snitched from their communal larder. A few dirty looks and well placed kicks, got the message across: this was far to material behavior and he must start again.

It was around this time that Aldred began to notice that the members of the tribe, male and female, were starting to go armed with crude flint knives. He initially feared an imminent raid from a rival tribe, perhaps looking for the head of a holy man, but when this threat failed to materialize after a few weeks he began to worry in a completely different direction. Perhaps it was time for a heathen sacrifice of some kind, and Aldred was the little lamb to be lead up to the altar. He tried to make himself available to any woman of the tribe in the off chance that he may need to be intact for such a ceremony, but after a very public copulation with the chief's middle daughter the knives failed to go away.

Desperate, Aldred arose late one moonlit night and gathered the tribe, and led them out to a large clearing. By dumb show he got them to arrange themselves in a wide circle, then stood at the center. For a long time he stared up at the sky waiting for inspiration. He supposed there were constellations up there, both ones that should be meaningful to him if he'd ever bothered to pay attention to such things, and strange savage things that his audience knew well. Either way he had nothing to work with there. To buy time he did a little dervish-like dance, swooping and spinning, while sputtering out gibberish that he hope sounded properly shamanic.

He was starting to wonder how long he could keep this up , when he caught a moving light out of the corner of his eye. He thrust one pointing finger towards the sky and shouted

“WHY LOOK EVERYBODY! IT'S THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION! EVERYBODY WAVE AT THE NICE RUSSIANS!”

And to demonstrate he began to wave and grin like a maniac while tracking the moving dot across the enormous sky. He had hit at least partially on something the tribe was looking for as they all turned their eyes skyward and began to wave slow sweeping waves. Aldred had the decency to be offended that they didn't exactly follow his example, but he admired their intense focus, mainly because it allowed him to creep away from the circle and walk quickly away from the settlement and back to civilization. This proved to be only a few miles away and took the form of a nearly abandoned Stuckeys. Aldred never bothered to go back. For all he knows they're still there waving solemnly at the sky, in an empty ritual invented by a well meaning fraud.

Now here he stands again, coming forth from an otherworldly but ultimately meaningless place, back to the defined world of bricks and mortar, commerce and ownership, law and order. He's mostly grateful, whatever sick pleasure he may have gotten from his brief but harrowing time in the woods, and begins to realize how hungry he is. What Aldred needs most of all right now is cheap food and lots of it. Microwaved burritos, off-brand potato chips, “honey roasted” nuts, prepackaged deli sandwiches made god knows how long ago, mayonnaise yellowing and thick...this is his food. Not for Aldred a tall glass of alfalfa juice and a nut cutlet. Nor does he desire a decadent slab of kobe beef spread with caviar and served up with a nice glass of fresh squeezed veal. No, it's Circus Peanuts and Red Vines for Aldred, washed down with strawberry Yoo-Hoo or one of the more alarmingly colored sports drinks that one can't get away from in this modern world.

He needs a convenience store, he needs the convenience that they dole out so generously in three pound bags of duplex cookies and terrible coffee brewed beyond perfection to exquisite disaster, with bold notes of burnt Maxwell House if the place is really upscale. The sweetest grandmother in the world couldn't comfort him more, not even if she threw in a kiss on the forehead that stirs the kind of special oedipal longing that skips a generation.

Oh dear, he's thinking of that special fantasy granny again isn't he? Aldred is only human after all, and at heart all humans are truly unspeakable, Our behavior in large and small groups, alone or in pairs, only serves to demonstrate this. Murder, rape, theft and fraud, all kinds of perversion, even the rather pure and sweet one of wanting a blue rinsed head to linger over one's tousled own, filling your consciousness with the smell of lavender and geriatric sweat and the vintage waft of a really experienced woman, one who's been around the block more times than the block has existed for, one who washed not only your helpless and naked body but that of your father-

Gah, his mind is wandering again. Sustenance, he needed sustenance.

It's the ugliest parking lot anyone has ever seen. Fossilized gum, oil stains, broken glass, old tires...this lot has it all. Connoisseurs come from all over the world to soak up the horrible ambiance. They can be seen on all fours, dirty raincoats hitched up, communing with a cluster of vintage Wrigley's doublemint; or arranging cigarette butts in personally significant mounds. It can't be called a hobby, more of a religious observance. These poor men (and they are almost exclusively male) have lost their spiritual anchors. Adrift, they avoided the shoals of Scientology and the Laguna Desolata of the LDS church. What they have found is squalid and filthy. Their practices are seemingly pointless and unhygienic. Yet their souls have opened up. They have a direct line to something that less actualized beings call god. And they are happy.

For some values of happy.

Aldred is here, not to observe the parking lot with it's nearly obliterated white lines and crumbling concrete slabs. He tried it for a year or two, but came to the eventual conclusion that opening up his soul to this particular enlightenment was not for him. He could feel his personal perception of Universe arranging itself into the grimy network of symbols and meanings that drive the acolytes around him, and he didn't like it one bit. So as he had so many times before, Aldred picked himself up, dusted off his senses and started all over again.

Today he is here to observe the worshipers and learn from them. Why does this work? While he knows personally that there is nothing for him in a blown out radial with destroyed steel belts spilling out, it does genuinely mean something to the man with the broken glasses who appears to be taking a near carnal pleasure from running his fingers over it's peeling surface.

Nearer than near carnal, thinks Aldred, observing the man's protruding trousers.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss it all as prevision, mere or grand, simple or very (very) complicated. The lad leaning up against the abandoned attendant's station, there's nothing earthly in the ecstasy that shines in his eyes. The boy is transfixed, hurtling through an inner cosmos of endlessly patched and repatched blacktop, striped barriers keeping him on the path marked out by a trail of cat's eyes stretching into infinity. He has genuinely found something here, and it is so hard for Aldred to believe that it is all subjective, that this meaning is non-transferable, and that when he thinks all he sees is a filthy parking lot that is because for him a filthy parking lot is all there is to see here. It is no great triumph for the boy and no great failure for Aldred. It is simply the way things are.

Well, perhaps the boy does have a certain force of will, when it comes to credulity. Aldred knows there's no way he found this crapulent path on his own. Some dark night, not so long ago, if the boy's looks are anything to go on, he must have been wasting his youth in another lot like this, when he stumbled upon his first guru. A wizened older man, Aldred imagines, balding and scabby, beating out an arrhythmic tattoo on a dented cast off hubcap. No teeth, but such eyes. The boy was transfixed: this seemingly mad tramp knew something that nobody else the boy had ever met knew. As his shaking old hands scratch and tap, pausing from time to time to lovingly stroke a faded Buick logo, the boy feels eternity opening up. He is Blake in the dreary gardens of Lambeth, having a revelation where none is meant to be had, while the black hand of industry unfolds around him. He is Paul, being caught up not on the road to Damascus, but in the parking lot of Daltrey Circle.

The man never speaks to the boy that night, or indeed ever after, but they are inseparable from that time onwards. At first they stick to the many different parking lots of the relatively small New Jersey town. They move in a complicated circuit depending on the time of day, and the vagaries of cops and skateboarders. Cops and skateboarders are the great heretics of the parking lot brothers: those who park or take money are part of the unspoken theology, they belong and function. But cops bring in outside trouble and conflicting beliefs, and the skateboarders just don't show the proper respect. The boy learns to hate both at first. He then learns to pity them, and at last to love. His first transcendent moment came two years into his period of devotion. A cop told him to

“Move along, son.”

“I will officer. I am,” the boy replied, and the simple truth and rightness of it all burst his heart into a shining ball of pink light. The cops were something holy and unholy simultaneously, for ever after the Qliphoth hovering around the boy's personal tree of life, blasted and instructive shells, as precious as anything that was truly of the parking lot, though they come from Outside.

And now he rests in the holy of holies, the most perfect lot on earth: not to big not to small, in as great disrepair as it can be without being condemned. He sits, floating inside, knowing that it must be paved to be paradise.

That's the narrative Aldred constructs in his head anyway. The truth is probably less sublime, and while the look in the boy's eyes is definitely genuinely spiritual, the crumpled paper bag in his hand and numerous discarded Krylon spray paint cans gives perhaps a more complete picture of the source of all revelation. But perhaps Aldred is being unfair: perhaps the bag only contains a simple sandwich or extra pair of shoes. He daren't ask: while hardly anthropologically scrupulous, Aldred simply doesn't want to know the full shape of this boy's personal practice. He is happier with his construction in this instance, if not in general.

Aldred's observation lasts a few more hours. At one point he is noticed. More than noticed, recognized. A spindly and thick lipped man lopes over to him and points.

“You. I know you. Stephen Aldred. 'The Mayor'.”

Aldred's face is somewhere between a wince and a smile.

“Great Scot, no one has called me that in years, decades maybe.”

“Doesn't make it less true. You. You're Aldred. I know you. The Mayor. Aldred called The Mayor. Why did they call you that? Aldred? Why that?”

“Well,” says Aldred, desperately trying to remember who this wreck is, “I suppose it's because I was the mayor -I mean, a mayor- at one point. It didn't last very long. Malfeasance and backstabbing and corruption and all that makes up the great and horrible storm of politics-”

“It's because you talk like your The Mayor. Aldred. The Mayor. We always said you should grow one of those bicycle bar mustaches-

“Handlebar, I think you'll find.”

“You are The Mayor alright. Bicycle. Handle. Aldred. It's all mustaches in the end.”

Aldred is growing distinctly uncomfortable. “Look my good man, I'm afraid you rather have the advantage of me-”

“Luther. Stark.”

“Luther Stark? I'm afraid I don't-”

“No. Reverse it. Think like a Mayor.”

“I- Oh! 'Stark' Luther! I remember you.” But Aldred is uncertain. “That is, I remember someone named Stark Luther, but you are not him.”

Stark Luther (if it is he) looks defiant.

“A lot can change in a few years they say. A lot can change a man. And a lot of lots can change a man a lot, make a lot of changes in him.”

Whether this is true or not, this Stark Luther is completely different from the man Aldred had once known by that name. The Stark Luther of the late eighties was round and soft, with shoulder length hair and a stutter. This Luther is like something out of Egon Schiele, elongated, all angles and spikes. While his speech is definitely impaired (or perhaps his mentality) there is no trace of a stutter.

“It's impossible,” says Aldred. “Hard living and rigorous spiritual practice can't account for the fact that you're a completely different person.”

“The Mayor still can't see around his bicycle. Still has a handle in his eye. Aldred. The Mayor. The Tourist.”

“Tourists don't stay for three years.”

“Tourist. Stay: not a tourist. Go: tourist. Nothing in between, not even for Mayors.”

Stark Luther looks at the ground, the patched synthetic bedrock of his existence.

“There was nothing inside for you, Aldred. Nothing outside either.”

“I'm rather of that opinion myself.”

“So go. Go like a tourist. You've seen enough. Not gonna see anything new.”

Stark Luther shambles off, still staring at the ground. No, not staring at the ground, but worshiping, walking a devotional path. Aldred wants badly to envy him. He wants to want that certainty and direction. But in his heart it terrifies him. If the man was Stark Luther, the change wrought in him is alchemical. He is literally a new man, if new can apply to such a used looking creature. This loss of personal integrity is a true horror. Aldred knows he wants fulfillment, but he also knows he wants to still be Aldred at the end of his road.

Perhaps this fear of disintegration is what's been holding me back, he thinks. Perhaps I need to disappear.