Demons Presents a Chapter of Bart Platenga's Beer Mystic

2011-03-24T21:43:00.000-07:00

As part of this project - Beer Mystic Spins Round the Earth we present....

Beer Mystic: A Novel of Inebriation & Light

bart plantenga

Furman Pivo believes he [plus beer] may be the cause of a rash of streetlight outages. This sense of empowerment transforms him into the Beer Mystic. He has a mission and a mandate. Or does he? In any case, 1987 NYC will never be the same and the rest is history or myth or delusion.

Beer Mystic Invitation: Participate in a unique literary adventure that will take you on the longest, rowdiest literary pub crawl ever. Follow the Beer Mystic's story around the world through a global network of host magazines [next excerpt at end of chapter / cover by David Sandlin].

<< Beer Mystic #30: Brews & Books

31 Me and Kelly [ask him again if his real name is Adam Horowitz and he responds “Ja, mucker!”] tromped uptown to crash the “Downtown Goes Uptown” Neo-Dada-Hip-Flux-Schlock-o-Pod Art Show. We wore shades and English black boots with bulky but functional buckles and codpieces singing “If I can’t get drunk / I don’t wanna live.” We looked like ex-members of the Velvet Underground singing Flipper. We looked like lifers because we had ironically absorbed our squalor and wore it like a chest of medals. Kelly carried his guitar. Like bait on his rusty hook. He could play it alright and did most days busking around Midtown.

The issue of when you can call yourself a New Yorker has been a gray area with a slippery sliding scale for some time. Move into a pad in the fashionable downtown area, go to Tish & Snooky’s Manic Panic to get properly outfitted and hang out for a month at a dive called Fuck You [formerly What the Fuck] and pretty soon – within 6 months – you get your license to complain about bridge-and-tunnel interlopers and tourists. Kelly was from Queens and was about as New York as you could ever hope or fear. This means never partaking of New York’s many attractions. This means being 30 and proud of the fact you’ve never been up the Empire State Building. He steadfastly denied being a New Yorker – except when he was somewhere else. A New Yorker can hate New York, somebody’s who’s never lived there cannot. This is a universal law of nature.
Those are them who can afford to just pick a neighborhood like others pick a tint of wall paint and move in with professional movers wearing hip outfits with a reserved spot in a parking garage. These are the types who become some of the most vehement anti-interloper settlers. They had the most to prove and probably the most to lose if too many more people just like them moved in and began noticing their matching two-car-garage eyes and disproportionate enthusiasms for the green market in Union Square and pleasure boating and straw picnic baskets [never mind the intellectual superiority of wooden toys for their kids].

So, the beauty of impermanence [the neither here-nor-thereness lends your persona mystique], the constant anxiety of housing uncertainty, the constant flux of new unfamiliar faces, although charming for a week or two, quickly emerges as mentally exhausting routine unless you can chant or drink or work or talk or draw or fuck your way out of these worries. By becoming totally post-punk [punk but not punk, hippie with sneer replacing whine, hopeful even idealistic but in a nihilistic stylee winkwink], by imitating one’s surroundings by dressing exactly like one’s environment – let’s say stylish denouement – one could ironically and simultaneously be and not be a product of one’s immediate surroundings. You laugh but are not quite laughing, you play guitar but not too well because not too well [even if affected] is more real than too well; you sneer in a good-natured way, you drink to modest excess, you inject but not all the way, you write but then erase, OR you see lights that fall victim to your presence – your vibe literally puts them out – and you make some big story up about why it happens and why it needs to happen… And so, here we were.

Three corpulent cops [who could only have garnered any swagger at all out of life from the patronizing perks accorded their uniforms] approached and barked “DUMP DUH BEE-AHS!”
“Why? They’re in paper bags.”

“No fuggin’ lip from you, faggut.” And their pronunciation seemed uncannily similar to that of gangster goons they’d seen in movies. It makes you suddenly realize that there are only a few degrees – think a pizza slice – of separation between cops and criminals, that one is merely the failed obverse of the other.

“And we don’ wan’ yooz gettin’ stoopid on us.”

“Stoopider than yooz?” Kelly was a master negotiator. He had manned the barricades and had tasted the nightsticks – and had lost points of I.Q. this way. I courageously gave them the finger from inside my coat, and stared at them in a fearless way.
“Hey, FAGguts! Dump duh BEE-AH!”
“Or we dump what’s left uh yuh brains on duh sidewalk.”
We dumped the beers, mere malt-liquor decoys for our better clandestine stash deep inside holes in our pockets with tattered passages down to the bottoms of our coats. As noted I was – we both were – brave, as I may have mentioned, in a discreet, concealing sort of way. And along our way we copped attitude, knowing attitude to be an ambient form of spirituality. This purposeful grim-edged attitude brimmed with pose – so in opposition to fashion, the entire package became a sort of higher fashion.

Kelly, skinny guy: “They’re just worried about getting’ their pensions at 40 so they can become bored vicious people.”
“They’re also concerned about losing control of us like Popes in the 14th century got worried when monks began brewin’ brew for everybody including the peasants...”

“Yea, givin’ the rabble and goatherds too good a glimpse of ecstasy.”

“Heresy, the Pope calls it.”

“Disorderly conduct’s what the pigs call it.”

At the opening we fell into our Verlaine-Rimbaud snarl of political dissipation. Snippy and Snipey: everybody there was a fake but us. Ben would’ve been proud.

“See that guy with the Asian chick?”

“Yea.”

“She’s slight and tight.” Drummer in the Noh-wave [Japanese no wave] band, Yosoyososhii, which means distant. Or to us, simply Yoso, which was also the name of their first album on red vinyl, 99 Records.

“I’m no gynecologist but so what...”

“It means he’s got a... small pud.” I thought suddenly about Rita. No, we weren’t teenagers, we were astute and hardened social critics.

“Oh.” Esteem thus works its own thermodynamics. “I’m no gyno, I’m no gyno…” Was there a Ramones-Devo-like song about to burst forth?

From the bustle emerged a bubbly woman with blazing red ponytail wearing an aluminum-foil coat. She wondered if it was true that the eyes of guys who have too much sex become ultra-sensitive to light.

“Definitely!”

“In fact, I live in a cave.” Kelly was glad that you could now be proud of what you once had to be ashamed of. Kelly was more than willing to talk about how he had lived in a funeral home, in a closet, which reeked of embalming fluid, and in a basement with rats, dreaming with a hammer in his hand – images of Elsa. Kelly let me try on his pilsner-tinted sunglasses. Gave everything an amber tint.

“This is what utopia would look like. Dju see how she winked at me?”

“Sorry to bust your beer head man, but I’m pretty sure it was me she was winkin’ at,” Kelly corrected. Kelly had spent years outwitting society by being its main satirist but all from inside the confines of his closet. Andy Kaufman with a chainsaw. He had spent days and years becoming Johnny Cash and then years more becoming Elvis, a Jewish Elvis [He and his band Jewrusalem set out for Vegas on a Saturday morning and broke down two hours later somewhere outside High Point, New Jersey, where their van broke down and they realized they were headed more north than west.]

He sang songs [his rhyming personal ads in search of the perfect lady partner] in D instead of G, and dropped his voice an octave. “I wore black [underwear]. I drank whiskey before the sun went down. Maybe you’ve become Johnny Cash too. Maybe this is happening all over the world. People are waking up and becoming Johnny Cash.”

“Or Elvis.”

“We are not alone. Maybe there are support groups for people like us, meetings where strangers get together and introduce themselves by saying ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.’ And everyone in the room heartily bellows back ‘Hello Johnny!’ And then ‘Johnny’ – that’s me – tells complete strangers personal and intimate details of his private life. And girls line up for autographs and ask to sleep with me immediately.”

“Talent goes in one wound and out another.”

“Listen. I know what you mean. Jesus was a Jew! A typical exchange might go something like ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.’ [‘Hello Johnny!’]. ‘I fell into a burning ring of fire.’ If the universe is truly infinite, then somewhere, there is a planet where this is taking place. I call that a good reason to shoot all space aliens as soon as they land in your backyard. I spent a few hours today becoming Johnny Cash.”

We hit the gratis libations like two-fisted frugalcratic imbibers, like characters erased from the margins of a Dickens novel. It’s important to know what, if anything, they’re serving at an opening [opulence factor] before trekking off somewhere. And Kelly knew like no one else. It was Kelly, after all, that turned me and Jude onto the frugal furtive pleasures of gratis indulgence. And this I was learning. He actually “lived” off Soho and East Village art openings for a year or two, shoveling grilled and baked morsels into a section of his rucksack especially designed to facilitate this. Keeps a shirt – only one – clean and neatly ironed on a hanger for the fancier ones. Has a pair of jeans full of paint to fit in.
“Hey, you ain’t him, are you?” I recognized him as D.A. Levy, fringe culture writer for the East Village Eye. “If you are, then I wanna interview you.”

“Uh, I could be. If you want. If yer here to punch me I ain’t him...”

“No, no, I like blackouts.”

“I got nothin’ on me.”

“No, it’s yer... outages.”

“I’m instructed not to speak to reporters. Word is and has been that the liberal media is crawling with spooks, with agents and the like.”

“Paranoia is what they use to neutralize us. I like what I hear. The energy feeds me. And I used to be a man of light.”

“How’d you know I was or think that I’m that somebody?”
“You just smelled right to my sixth sense, man.” He gave me his card. “Gimme a call.”

“Yer phone’s not bugged?”

I heard someone over my shoulder talking about white supremacist groups like White Jersey and just at that moment I was scarfing down some flaky-dough spinach and feta finger food thing and quaffing my beer when I saw someone had incorporated tee shirt packaging into a collage that said “100% cotton White Jersey.” The concerned person went on to recommend that members of these groups be dropped in the heart of Bed-Stuy or East L.A. then film them trying to get out. “Like rats in a maze. You show this on TV I’d start watchin’.”

I spotted the hyper-voluptuous and incredibly well-preserved Madame Lock, Siglund, Sig, my second NYC “love affair” – “domin-ART-rix” is how she put it – was combing the hordes for new blood. The more we averted one another’s anxiety-hidden-behind-impertinence stares the more we saw what it was that irritated us about one another. Still beautiful at 49, she was one of those rare women who’s so universal that she’s easily mistaken for a native of any one of 100 countries. She is a celebrity as the many TV monitors here acknowledge. People film her, people ask her about art. She’s quoted in Art Forum. And you can see she is royalty by the slight shit-grin bows everyone offers her. She’s famous for no one knows what exactly but nobody wants to take a chance of revealing they do not know why. She is simply famous [and thus powerful] because everyone has forgotten that she was once not famous.

Beer Mystic Excerpt 31A: Onomatpoee

bart plantenga is also the author of Wiggling Wishbone and Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man both published by Autonomedia. His book YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World received worldwide attention. He is currently [not] working on a new novel, Paris Sex Tete, which lies around like an apathetic, half-clad, dissheveled paramour while his new book on yodeling Yodel in HiFi, will no doubt be a bread-winner of epiglottal proportions.

His life has been defined by women, undignified employment [not unlike 98% of the rest of the world’s population], migration, lack of money and writing. His writing focuses on inequity, unempowerment, insatiable desire, the unentitled, the under-regarded, ignored and ineffable, which has led to a life of luxurious suffering and indellible indifference to profit.

His radio show Wreck This Mess has been on the air since 1986, first on WFMU [NY], then Radio Libertaire [Paris], and finally Radio 100 and now Radio Patapoe [Amsterdam], the world’s most untamed and oldest pirate radio station. He lives in Amsterdam.

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Click to make bigger:

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Having trouble reading the comic on You Tube? GET THE BOX!!!

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Use pause button if you are a slow reader.

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Stay tuned for more...

DEMONS

Demons Presents a Chapter of Bart Platenga's Beer Mystic

Demons and More at Big Funny Opening

Danno Does Demons

Citizen Participation in Hell

Get the Latest Demon Comic

"Fork It Over"

Danno Vs Godzilla

"Outsourced From Hell"

Demon Cartoon - "The Rupture"

Faithmole -

The Birth of Demon Comics Blog