The excitement surrounding Facebook friend Keith Kevinson’s announcement that the newest edition of his edgy Every Reason ‘zine (#3) is now in distribution (including among its selections a piece by your humble host), has jarred my rapidly deteriorating memory and sent me off into the depths of the closet for another dusty session of boxing backwards.
This time around, the quest has been aimed at finding copies of the last ‘zine in which my work appeared—a Xerox ‘zine named Redrum after the famous mirror image from Stephen King’s classic gothic novel, The Shining—particularly as seen in the flick of the same name. Not only was Redrum the last ‘zine in which my work appeared, but it is virtually the only publication in which my work has previously appeared.
Redrum was a publication dedicated to the dissemination of the pornography of sex, violence, violent sex, murder, mayhem, dismemberment, crude humor and feelthy peectures. At that time (circa 1984), I enjoyed a very local reputation as a “writer.” Because of this largely unearned rep, Redrum’s editor-in-chief, a medical center laboratory bottle-washer, underground filmmaker, rock guitarist, and Lower Eastside minor celeb, improbably named Tommy Turner, called on me to submit some literary porn of my own composition to help launch his publishing empire.
Largely because I was aching to fuck the socks off his girlfriend, the even more improbably named blonde nymphet-on-smack, Amy Turner (no relation), I obliged. I wrote the piece and turned it over to Tommy in an East 70th Street eatery/saloon called Nimrod—a dive in which a motley crew of artists, drug addicts, show biz aspirants, sexual outlaws of all conceivable genders, local neighborhood resident retirees, high-class call girls, and medical center personnel, boozed, hooked up, and in various often unseemly ways amused each other until the wee hours of nearly every morning the calendar had to offer.
Tommy, as it turns out, happened to show my story, “Undead in Gotham,” to downtown legend, Lydia Lunch. Tommy came and told me that Ms. Lunch wanted the piece for an anthology of outrageous writing that she was compiling. But loyalty prevailed and I foolishly insisted that Tommy keep the piece for Redrum, since for Redrum it had been written. The rest is history. Or not.
As my story is both pornographic and obscene, I will not publish it here. Having provided fair warning, I will provide a link which will take you there, if you really want to go. I will, however, be so bold as to publish here the poem, along with the accompanying graphic that I provided to Tommy as a component of the piece. You can get some idea from the ugliness of the drawing, just how hideous is the text:
Here then, for those of you with a stomach for such things, is a link to “Undead in Gotham.”
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