Alright, you sad, sorry fucks. You be wantin’ a tale? Shut yer fuckin’ traps and I’ll spin ya one. This here’s something from when the hills were still wild and angry, a tale from the thick kiss of the nightclub and warm, silken nights, from when the sunburnt face of Napa still held that glimmer of dark crazy beauty, when it was more than just fat whitetrash and cold, slick yuppies with dead eyes.

            Now what was Napa, yer askin’, and I’m a tellin’ ya that it was never much of a city – just a town really, lurking at the base of the valley, bloated on the sticky-sweet smell of the swamp to the south, gorged gluttonous on the blood of grapevines chained to the north. But it was full back then, full of the blazing lust and decay of the sweet punks smoldering like forgotten incense in a back-alley gutter. I was just a boy back then, but man enough to run with the Clan. Man enough to drink down that burning black summer, the summer they conquered the Darkness there.

            The Clan? The Clan was us; criminal children, baby rats and addicts, throwaways and runaways of the midnight streets. The beauty of us was a little gutterpunk, the Squeak - her head shaved bare as a cue-ball with enough safety pins stuck through her skin to set off a metal detector. She was lipstick and lockpicks, plush toys and crank, and she was the Squeak ‘cause when her delicate little nose touched down on a line or three she’d titter off like an over-wound clockwork mouse - skinny arms and legs everywhere at once.

            She was good friends with Gunther, and Gunther was the most brutal ogre my eyes ever set sight upon. He dropped the scale at about 250, and this was on an 18 year old who wasn’t more than five foot six. Those who were set on grumblin’ him found that weight to be hard, thick muscle, muscle that broken more jaws than a riot cop’s nightstick. He wore an enormous leather biker jacket with enough stainless steel spikes on it to make De Sade drool. Most of the time he was about as gracious as a dump truck, but he treated Squeak like a little punk goddess, as if her skin were black lingerie and her lips were laced with heroin.

            Now tumble into this mix the Tadpole, all trembling lust and poetry. Half lounge lizard and half goth, a vampire Cassanova, his blond curls were dyed a patchy black to accentuate the fishbelly white of his face. And such a face! T’was an ever-changing maze of cosmetic hieroglyphs; black mascara, curled eyelashes – lipstick the color of rotting roses. He was a creature of grand designs, and his goals of conquest were invariably sexual. He’d find the sweetest young nymph in any crowd, roll his eyes all over her to massage his hunger, and then drown her in sweet nothings until she realized what he was. But once hunting, unlike your sad lustful little princes of today, the Tadpole wouldn’t be daunted by a failure to find feminity. “All sex is good sex,” he’d grin, and even we men of the Clan would fear his lust then.

Twitch:

            The fingers pause, shivering. And what of him? To box himself into a paragraph, as if a life could fit into three sentences – introduction, summary, conclusion.

            Memory strikes.

            Magellan sits back, a long sip of coffee closing his eyes. “A writer!” he says. “Fuck, to be a writer! To be a gardener of life, delicately trimming the overgrown weeds and branches of personality! I envy you that power, Odd.”

            In writing these words, he feels more like a butcher.

            He sneers at his hands. This is their story, not his. They fly away from him, scurrying away from him and down into memory.

Writing:

            Of course, there were others – Space, Meesh, Angel – who ran with us on other nights, but I’ll be droppin’ you straight to the heart of the tale, and since the Clan is the tale, I’ll be givin’ you Magellan, for he was the heart of the Clan.

            Now don’t be twisting your ears the wrong way around my words ‘ere. He was no leader, and many’s the time when Gunther would be the one to brawl us out of a tumble that Mag had led us into, searchin’ for a spark of life. But Magellan was one of those folks who float about a foot or two over the crap that the rest of us live in, and if this weren’t a world of white trash microwaves and babbling mallrats, he could have had fey blood in him. When I say he floated, I mean that he just wasn’t touched by the hungry graspings of the daytime world – he just walked right through them, like they didn’t exist, like he didn’t see the reason for them.

Of course, they didn’t see the reason for him, either.

            He spent the sunlight asleep; his long, raggedy body curled up like a kitten with warm milk in the tum. But when the first tinglings of twilight began to seen through the summer afternoon, his arms and legs would suddenly jerk, and he’d burst up in an explosion of hungry conversation and intense, graceful movement. Money seemed to simply flow through him, inheritances, loans, disability, pouring into an endless mess of ever more twisted hallucinogens. ‘Shrooms were his night candy, tossed in a cannabis salad peppered with acid and sprinkled with the leaves and roots of plants wild and strange. Most nights his brain was bare as a baby’s ass.

            But there was never a soul who knew more about picking the locks on the doors of perception. This was the man who took us hunting wild mushrooms in the hidden pastures of the Carnaeros hills, and how to watch for the bluing of the stem when you break them with a fingernail. This was the man who took us to the Train Bridge and taught us how to scale the two steel towers that cast their cruel red light through the thick air for miles out across the burbling swamp. This was the man who taught us how to ride the roof of a car at sixty miles an hour, and to laugh and scream at the fear and howling joy of being indestructibly young. This was the man who taught us how to delight in being children again, past fatherly fists and screeching mothers, past the failing grades and football rapes, past what the daylight thought we were.

            He seduced easily and completely, with none of the fearful desperation that marked the Tadpole. Though he wasn’t much of a man to look at, all thin and scraggly, when he looked a woman straight in the eye and said, without any needing or wanting “I love you,” she couldn’t help but shudder at the truth of it. And the truth of it was somehow, he loved us all, for naught but what we were, and we clustered around his great heart like beggars around a back-alley campfire.
 

Memory:

            Seduction. I didn’t understand it until later, afterwards, when the Tadpole and I got drunk. His movements were smooth, direct. Brutal. His purpose paralyzed me, the strangeness of a male face next to mine, the scent of hot, heavy musk. But it was his hunger that turned my face towards his, and when his mouth met mine, jaws opening like a feeding snake, I suddenly understood what it meant to be feminine, the object of desire, the object of rape. I knew what he wanted me to be, and in those arms, on those lips, I could not help but become it.

             I wasn’t what he needed. His façade suddenly broke, his passion wild and uncontrolled, and I stopped him, calmed him, held him as he began to sob.

            “Goddamn motherfucker, goddamn Mag, fucking asshole, fucking chicken, how the fuck could he fucking leave?”                       

Writing:

            And we all loved him; the Squeak because he could hug her and hold her forever without ever lusting, Gunther because he could pour out his ugly, brutish soul to him without ever hearing a single judgement; the Tadpole because he knew that if only he’d kiss those bearded lips, he’d find the end to all his hungry searching. I loved him because of all the children who danced in that graveyard of fists and needles, he was the one searching for life - not running from it.

            This is what brought him to Napa, with its crazy little spirals of addiction and decay, because, somewhere, under all of the black, crumbling screaming, he could hear a song. A song of life, a song of the soul of the valley, as if the wind and the hills were romancing the stars down from the sky. Each night, as the sun lit the hills with its funeral pyre, we’d huddle around him as he stroke his beard, watching the twilight tumble away.

            “Where’s the song tonight?”

            “What do you hear, Mag?”

            “Is it loud tonight?”

            “Is it clear?

            “Is it for us?”

            And some nights he would sigh, and sit back, and say “It’s a soft and gentle waltz tonight, fit for cannabis and wine, drinking, talking, and making love.”

            And other nights he would growl and clench his fists and mutter “The stones be rumbling a rhythm black, full of pain and rage. Pour me the tequila and find me a club, it’s a night for breaking daylight things.”

            And sometimes, when the wind brought the scent of the swamp rolling up the south he’d cackle “The wind is jittery, hungry, wild. Coffee and speed, papers and pens. It’s a night to paint Death’s delicate portrait, and to walk the razor wire!”

            But this night, Midsummer’s Night, he was silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, it was with a sudden rasp, as if he had stood there thinking for so long that his throat had dried to dust.

            “Tonight is the night that we face the Dark.” And without a single mutter more of explanation, he turned and strode on his long, bony legs to Ugmelia.