Freak Scene gets literary this week with an excerpt from Max G. Morton's Indestructible Wolves of the Apocalypse Junkyard. Send it to your niece for Christmas!
This week the fine people at the Heartworm Press lent us an excerpt from the recently published memoirs of Max G. Morton entitled Indestructible Wolves of the Apocalypse Junkyard. Over the course of seven stories, Morton takes us down a sordid path of teenage angst, drug abuse, petty crime and devious women. Rich self-hating girls, stoned skinheads, haunted houses, Void LP’s and even a Smiths concert all play some kind of role in Morton’s grandiose pulp account of New York as it used to be, back in the 80s. This excerpt recalls a doomed love affair enhanced by LSD tabs with Gumby smoking a joint printed on them. The book in its entirety can be obtained through the Heartworm Press and features some rather formidable art and design by Mark McCoy. Enjoy this lapse into literary terrain.
Suddenly, after a few minutes of having my eyes wide shut and asking the powers that be to get me off of my roller coaster ride and to cast myself via conjuration to Mary, there was a knock on my window. I panicked, knocked over one of my candles and caught my carpet on fire. I attacked the flames with a big gulp and quick jig that led me to the window currently named anxiety. I looked out the metallic silver blinds and my heart was a spastic blur as I tried to figure out who it was. I suddenly remembered Alley had given me a fistful of valium to eat if I had trouble sleeping. It was exactly the remedy that I would need to face the fisher of souls in the lower worlds. I swore my mind was playing tricks on me. My medicated brain took me down a rapidly spiraling path of self-created hell, thinking maybe that it was my real father at the window, waiting to kill me.
For about a minute in Earth time, I went stark raving mad. I went higher into space and light and the blazing sky. My mind could get a tad bit out there if I didn't watch it, and this was one of those moments.
Life was testing me in the fear department, but to be fair, it wouldn't have been the first time that my father had shown up unwanted at the worst time imaginable. The black smoke from the rug woke my mother up. I yelled something that made zero sense about home made incense to assure her that everything was fine and to go back to sleep. I stumbled outside and next thing I knew I was twenty minutes away from the knock at my window, on a fishing pier by the ocean, staring at stingrays. Phantoms filled the air and I had paranoid thoughts that my house was still on fire. No one was around on the beach that night, except Mary and me. I had a conversation with her about a bomb hitting our ever-so fucked up town and leaving us as the only survivors. Two young destroyers that didn't concern themselves with society or appearances, because they lived out their entire lives within the constraints of their own minds, just hanging out after the collapse of civilization. The whole world could have disintegrated for all we cared.
The sky began pouring rain and we went back to her car, totally soaked. I was just trying to make sense of the night. Was it that love thing that was so popular in the movies? There were so many things that
I wanted to say but I was dead silent trying to get a grip on my reality and all those sea creatures that we had just seen. The scenery on the ride home was much different. I traveled through the menswear department located in a 1970's Midwestern mall. Lost in the glitzy shimmer of all the mannequin's Everlast boxing shorts I found myself traveling through a world ofshrunken heads and mammoth fossils atop a colonial bed. Eaten by the monster of love and sealed in a planetarium with a romantic iced light show for two. We wrote our names in the star fields and found out
the secret of the cardboard rocket. Swinging from the branches of the Gumbo Limbo trees straight into the electric ballroom of the Contemporary hotel we emerged as conjoined wonder twins. Our bound had a perfect balance of sleaze and ruby red romance. Half of the time, she would talk about the future days of our never ending date, and the other half of her personality was all about mixing my blood in hers. That was a sign of true love, right? It was a sensory overload for my young, turned-on mind, and she had me spellbound. I thought I had the same effect on her, somehow she was bound to call me even if I had just spent the past however many minutes alone in my front yard spacing the fuck out. No one was at the door and I had completely lost my mind. I was in comedown blues mode, blistered and bruised, staring at the phone, waiting for something to happen. I didn't feel like myself, and no, it wasn't the acid, nor was it the fact that I knew that the best date of my life was a total hallucination. Only a dreamer could recognize another dreamer, so technically she had to have felt something. Even if it was just a minor tremor, my heart felt freaked out and the feeling had to have crossed over into her heart just a little. Crushed, I was suddenly in a situation that demanded more than "What's This Shit Called Love", and it was around then that I secretly fell in love with The Smiths. I always hated all the kids in school that liked that new romantic crap. The heartache scene seemed so yawnsville. I thought it was so meaningless, I just couldn't relate to anyone that wasn't fueled by suburban rage. A girl I knew named Autumn dragged me to see The Smiths play. It was a horrifying experience for me trying to be a teen in my tough guy days. I threatened to dismember a fellow classmate at the show if he ever breathed a word to anyone about seeing me there. Autumn may had been going through a silly phase that would lead her to an even sillier phase that would crown her Beer Can Island's soiled prom queen, but at least Autumn was not just living in my head. Mary and I never actually spoke to one another ever again. Honestly I am not even sure if we ever
officially spoke in the first place. She attempted suicide shortly after, but that didn't go so well. After a few weeks in the hospital she was sent to her
father's house in Malibu with a few nasty scars that I would have found hot. A young anti-socialite cut down in her prime. Out there she apparently became several things: a neo-Nazi, a Deadhead, and a vampire, before
jumping off of a building. Unfortunately, she was very successful that time. The score was Hearts: 0, War Machines: 23.
-STEVE LOWENTHAL
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